Comic Book Artist #13 by TwoMorrows Publishing

COLAN • WOLFMAN • FRIEDRICH • TRIMPE • MARCOS • PERLIN • THOMAS • HEATH

No.13 May 2001

$6.95

Tom b Marv of Dra cu el C hara la TM cters Art , Inc ©20 . 01 G and e Tom n Palm e Cola n er.

In The U.S.

THE MARVEL HORRORSHOW!

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

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

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

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

EISNER AWARDS SNUB MAGS!

All Bets are Off!

OPUS 2

OPULENT

Quite literally at presstime—one hour before Ye Ed is to put this issue in FedEx—we received the latest Barry Windsor-Smith masterpiece, Opus 2, following up the extraordinary first volume of BWS’s part memoir, part art book, part philosophical treatise released in 1999. (Thanks, Eric!) Well, let’s quote the dustjacket copy: “The amazing story of a young artist caught up in a cosmic riptide of Time and Consciousness continues here, in part two of his startling autobiography called Time Rise.” Obviously not having been able to read it, we can only state that the book looks breathtakingly beautiful. We’ll try and give the tome a proper looking at next time but suffice to add that we’re delighted BWS’s interview in CBA #2 is excerpted in Opus 2 and just ecstatic to play a role, however minor, in Barry’s journey as an artist.

Coming in September, Comic Book Artist #15 celebrates Love and Rocketeers, where we’ll be stringing together a bunch of cool artists who came of age in the 1980s, including Dave Stevens, Los Bros. Hernandez (Mario, Jaime, and Gilbert), Sandy Plunkett, Dean Motter, and Matt Wagner! Theme? We ain’t go no theme other than the silly title! Look for a “new” Dave Stevens/Los Bros. cover (well,

CHABON SCORES! We just received the news as this issue is going to press, but we want to extend our many congrats to the very deserving Michael Chabon, recipient of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for his comics-related novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay! This heart-felt tome recalls with genuine affection the legendary era of the 1940s comic book studio system, intertwining the true history of our art form with the author’s fully-realized, resonate characters—some thinly-veiled versions of the field’s real-life veterans. If you haven’t read it, bolt to your nearest bookstore, and escape to Chabon’s world of wonder!

An Evening Out with Eisner T.H.U.N.D.E.R. IS COMING!

the Hernandez siblings will be contributing a new half, while the Stevens side is an unpublished Pacific Presents cover… kewl, eh?) look for it at Summer’s end! Plus, don’t neglect the unforgettable Love and Rockets comic book by Jaime, Gilbert, and Mario is back! Published by Fantagraphics, the first issue of Vol. 2, with “Maggie” and “Julio’s Day” is available with #2 due any day!

in 2000, never mind the continuing excellent quality of John’s The Jack Kirby Collector! And, hey, now that the category has been deleted for 2001, there’s no chance to shut Jon up about winning last year’s award for CBA! Whether this is the Golden Age of Comics Histories or not, we sure like to think there were tons of exceptional comicsrelated mags out there, from the lamented Comic Book Marketplace to our pals over at The Journal to the revived Rocket’s Blast/Comicollector, not to mention the aforementioned TwoMorrows rags. (And, while we’re at it, we think the fact Roy’s extraordinary All-Star Companion wasn’t nominated as “Best ComicsRelated Book” is a shame.) Well, there’s always next year… now just how does one go about infiltrating the nominating committee anyway? —Editor, Best Comics-Related Periodical 2000

The folks slaving away at TwoMorrows were—to put it mildly—pretty darned disappointed to have our office pool kiboshed now that this year’s Eisner Award nominating committee has decided to omit the “Best Comics-Related Periodical” category from the ballots this year. While we’re gratified to receive nominations for Streetwise and the first CBA Collection—and pleased as punch to see our pal Sergio Aragonés get the nod for his Streetwise story, “The Gorilla Suit”— it sure perplexes us to be so overwhelmingly ignored by the folks in San Diego. Comments heard such as “Well, each year tends to be just another competition between The Comic Buyer’s Guide and The Comics Journal anyway,” leave us baffled. Of course, we like to think we’re putting out decent stuff—Roy’s Alter Ego is getting better every issue and Brian’s Comicology got off to a slam-bang start

LOVE AND ROCKETEERS!

Ye Ed was delighted to attend a recent National Cartoonists Society dinner in Westport, Connecticut, honoring that ol’ sage of sequential art himself, Will Eisner! The affair was hosted by Brian Walker and, as a guest of favorite chum (and CBA logo designer/name originator) Arlen Schumer, Ye Ed spent a gracious evening badgering Will with endless questions, and being able to share another meal with a fave comic book guy, Dick Giordano. (Here’s our photog of Will and Dick together!) It was cool also to spend time with Gil Fox, Jud Hurd, Jerry Ordway and his lovely wife, and Bob Smith. Thanks, Brian Walker, for your generous hospitality!

NUMBER 13

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

TWOMORROWS JOHN & PAM MORROW Associate Editors CHRIS KNOWLES DAVID A. ROACH Contributing Editors ROY THOMAS JOHN MORROW

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

MAY 2001

DEPARTMENTS: THE FRONT PAGE: LAST MINUTE BITS ON THE COMMUNITY OF COMIC BOOK ARTISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS What, no Eisner Award category for the TwoMorrows mags??? At least the Harvey Awards remembers! ..........1 EDITOR’S RANT: THE SINISTER SEVENTIES The revamping of the Comics Code and subsequent deluge of terror comics from Marvel ..................................4 COCHRAN’S CORNER: RETURN OF THE “USED TO” MAN J.R. Cochran, newspaperman and lover of comics, debuts his CBA column by talking with Alan Kupperberg ....5 CBA COMMUNIQUES: LETTERS FROM OUR READERS Scads of Toth commentary and corrections plus responses to our second (and final) Charlton issue....................6 THE BACK PAGE: PRIMETIME FOR THE BROTHERS COOKE Where Ye Ed discusses his younger brother’s 40th birthday and their shared dream ........................................110

Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Cover Art GENE COLAN, pencils TOM PALMER, inks Cover Color TOM ZIUKO Production JON B. COOKE GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS 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: $9 postpaid ($11 Canada, $12 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $36 US, $66 Canada, $72 elsewhere. All characters © their respective owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © their respective authors. ©2001 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Cover acknowledgement: Tomb of Dracula ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD Logo Designer/Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King Issue Theme Song EXCITABLE BOY Warren Zevon Visit CBA on our Website at: www.twomorrows.com /comicbookartist/

THE MARVEL HORRORSHOW FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE: @!!?* Our Man Fred makes amends with “The Man Who Lived Twice,” Brother Voodoo! ........................................13 SPOTLIGHT ON MARVEL: SHADOWS AND THE DARKNESS David A. Roach examines the short-lived but memorable horror anthology books from the House of Ideas ....14 ROY THOMAS INTERVIEW: SON OF STAN’S YEARS OF HORROR Marvel’s Editor-In-Chief on the Great Horror Revival at Marvel Comics during the Swingin’ Seventies! ..........18 MARV WOLFMAN INTERVIEW: WOLFMAN BY DAY The celebrated scribe of Tomb of Dracula on the title’s longevity and finding his own voice ............................30 GENE COLAN INTERVIEW: THE COLAN MYSTIQUE Tom Field talks to the extraordinary artist on his experience working for Marvel in the ’70s ............................48 TOM PALMER SIDEBAR: GIVING FORM TO SHADOWS The premier Gene Colan inker on the joy of delineating The Dean’s miraculous pencils ..................................55 HERB TRIMPE INTERVIEW: THE INCREDIBLE HERB A fun chat with the Hulk artist on the glory years of the Marvel bullpen and life in the ’70s............................58 RUSS HEATH PORTFOLIO: SON OF SATAN #8 Wow! Didja ever see the artist’s unbelievable job on this obscure mid-’70s Marvel comic? In glorious b-&-w! ......69 GARY FRIEDRICH INTERVIEW: GROOVY GARY AND THE MARVEL YEARS A surprisingly frank and bittersweet talk with longtime Marvel scribe on his bullpen experiences ....................74 DON PERLIN INTERVIEW: PERLIN’S WISDOM The Werewolf by Night artist on his comics career—stretching back to the late ’40s and up to today ..............88 TONY ISABELLA INTERVIEW: TONY’S TERRORS (AND TIGRA, TOO!) Jon B. Knutson quizzes the writer/editor on his first professional comics job and the Marvel horror line ........96 PABLO MARCOS INTERVIEW: PABLO’S AMAZING JOURNEY From his Peruvian upbringing to current work, the superb artist discusses his life (plus great art!) ..................104

Contributors Gene Colan • Tom Palmer Marv Wolfman • Roy Thomas Herb Trimpe • Gary Friedrich Russ Heath • Tony Isabella Don Perlin • Pablo Marcos Marie Severin • Frank Springer Flo Steinberg • Steve Sherman Albert Moy • Tom Horvitz David A. Roach • Tom Field Tom Ziuko • Jon B. Knutson Fred Hembeck • Brian K. Morris Anonymous • John R. Cochran Alan Kupperberg • Alex Toth Cat Yronwode • Sam Gafford John R. Borkowski • J.D. King Greg Huneryager • F. San Millan Warren Sattler • Roger Stern Allan Rosenberg • Jerry K. Boyd Bill Morrison • Bongo Entertainment David “Hambone” Hamilton Steve Morger • Bob Layton/CPL Steve Cohen • Rob Pollak Andy Ihnatko • Russ Maheras Gisella Marcos • Myriam Marcos John Yon • Richard Howell Chris Gage

Opposite page top: Courtesy of an anonymous contributor, this Mike Ploog art depicts four of Marvel’s greatest horror characters from the 1970s: Dracula, Werewolf by Night, the Monster of Frankenstein, and Man-Thing. All characters ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Opposite bottom and this page: Selected panels from Russ Heath’s glorious Son of Satan #8 artwork. Starting on page 69, we have a four-page portfolio from this superb job, sans word balloons! Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 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

Dedicated to

Barbara Knutson Get well quick, girl! And to my baby bro

Andrew D. Cooke on the occasion of his 40th birthday! Happy-happy joy-joy! N E X T May 2001

I S S U E

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T O W E R

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Editor’s Rant

The Sinister Seventies Revamping the Code and Marvel’s roulette of terror in the ’70s This editor came of age with Marvel Comics during a very transitional time in the company’s history. In 1971 the House of Ideas—a comics publisher struggling to come up with new ones—was facing life without Jack Kirby (Marvel’s premiere architect who departed for the apparently more hospitable climes of DC Comics some months before) and an increasingly disinterested readership, perhaps bored with Stan Lee’s hipster heroes. The nonsuper-hero genres were dropping like flies—romance, Western, teen humor, and the Harvey knock-offs were starting to breathe their last—and, with Marvel’s market share just shy of knocking off rival DC’s circulation dominance, something had to be done.

Two events in 1971 precipitated Marvel’s position as industry leader. Stan Lee, editor-in-chief and the line’s chief writer, took on the regulating Comics Code Authority, decrying the organization’s out-oftouch banning of drug references in comics and thus publishing three consecutive issues of Amazing SpiderMan (featuring an anti-drug polemic) without the sacred Code approval. This immediately led to a liberalization of the Code, originally established in the mid-1950s as an industry response to Wertham & Co.’s anti-comics hysteria, and staples of pre-Code funnybooks—vampires, werewolves, mummies, Frankenstein monsters, icky swamp creatures, and other malevolent monsters—were reintroduced in the four-color format, now set free by the CCA’s liberalization. Marvel’s longtime publisher, Martin Goodman, hit upon an ingenious ploy in that year which resulted in the company’s ascension to the rank of “Number One” in the field. Raising page counts from 32 to 48 and issue prices from 15¢ to 25¢, Marvel forced DC to follow suit, and Goodman just as quickly dropped book sizes back to 32 pages but only half-way with the price-increase, slapping on a 20¢ price tag

for each title. Apparently reluctant to follow Marvel’s lead yet again, DC languished with the higher price tag (albeit on books containing many an exquisite reprint), waiting nearly a year to adhere to Marvel’s revised price and size change. But in the meantime Marvel took the lead at the newsstand, selling more comics—five to the dollar to DC’s four—and giving retailers a higher take per book. Goodman’s clever— and devious—ploy clinched the top spot. The company has since rarely looked back and, for better or worse, Marvel would dominate the field for decades to come. But I didn’t care much about that business stuff when I finally— and quite reluctantly—decided to give Marvel a try back in the day. DC’s books just seemed so much more, well, neat and orderly than the apparent anarchy and chaos of the Marvel line, but prepubescent rebellion simmering, this reader was ready for the line’s “Phase Two.” Sure, I had picked up a few titles prior to my transformation into fullfledged FOOMer; I distinctly recall snatching up Tower of Shadows #1 (mesmerized by Steranko’s exquisite lead story) and Captain America #108 (the Kirby cover featuring my bestest hero jumping through a 1941 newspaper remains a favorite), but it was the “new wave” of horror that really grabbed me. Mike Ploog’s Werewolf, Ghost Rider, Man-Thing, and (especially) Monster of Frankenstein; Gene Colan’s Dracula and (yes!) Brother Voodoo; Herb Trimpe’s Son of Satan; Neal Adams’ origin of Dracula and penciled Man-Thing story; Val Mayerik’s Living Mummy; Pablo Marcos’s Zombie… the list does go on and on. But best of all were the short-lived but extraordinary “adaptation titles” under Roy Thomas’ reign as Marvel’s de facto (and soon official) editor-in-chief. A handful of titles, published over a painfully short timespan, just blew this young comics reader away. Worlds Unknown #1 with superb artwork by Ralph Reese and Gil Kane; Journey Into Mystery #2’s adaptation of Robert Bloch’s “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” scribed by Ron Goulart and exquisitely rendered by Gil and Ralph (this time as a team) with uncredited Neal Adams inks. And, most notably, the title Supernatural Thrillers exploded with a rarelyused innovation—outside of Classics Illustrated, of course—full-length comics adaptations of classic science-fiction and horror stories. The debut issue adapted Ted Sturgeon’s “It!,” poignantly scripted by Roy, and drawn by Marie Severin and Frank Giacoia (behind a nifty Steranko cover). But by far the best of the mag’s too-short run was #3’s “Valley of the Worm,” based on the Robert E. Howard story, written by Roy and Gerry Conway, and drawn by Gil Kane and Ernie Chua (Chan). It is, simply put, a comic book to die for and not to be missed (and, I should add, quite affordable in the back-issue bins). So, anyway, I dug the Marvel foray into horror and we hope this issue points out some of the best of that era. As always, we’ve missed covering some we had hoped to include—John Costanza, Ralph Reese; more art by Russ Heath, Neal Adams, and Mike Ploog; commentary by Jim Shooter on the demise of Tomb of Dracula which we just couldn’t squeeze in this ish—and we beg forgiveness from readers and contributors. We’ll probably be visiting ’70s Marvel only one more time in the near future—with looks at the achievements of John Buscema, his brother Sal, George Tuska, Don Heck, George Pérez, Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Ross Andru, Mike Esposito, and some others. But before that “Heavy Hitters” focus, look for our Tower Comics retrospective next issue, and the “Love & Rocketeers” special (spotlighting Dave Stevens, Los Bros. Hernandez, and others) in September. Don’t forget the bevy of other TwoMorrows projects coming your way this summer: The Warren Companion, Mr. Monster’s Book of Forbidden Knowledge Vol. 0, the debut issue of my first bona fide comic magazine—Prime8™—and much more! Thanks! —Jon B. Cooke COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

Cochran’s Corner

Return of the “Used To” Man Inaugurating ex-Warren editor J.R. Cochran’s column by John R. Cochran A word about me before we begin. I am the “used to” man, for want of a better choice of words. I used to write a column about all things comic for the Daily News in New York, until it was unceremoniously killed off after 10 months. I also used to write a column for the Menomonee Falls Gazette and back in the mid-’90s, for Comics Source. In addition, I used to be editorial director of Warren Publishing, and years later I wrote for Gladstone and Grave Tales. The more discerning among you may notice that most of the publications I’ve written for are no more. Not only that but I’ve also worked for a slew of newspapers that are no more, including the Philadelphia Bulletin. I suppose you could call me the kiss of death, but the evidence is only circumstantial. Certainly the Daily News is still around even if the column I used to write isn’t. It was called Word Balloons, in homage to Don & Maggie Thompson. Outside of an occasional appearance, I no longer labor in the field of comic books anymore although I continue to read them, an embarrassment at my advanced age. More often than not, I am disappointed by those comic books I read, but that’s the stuff of another column. Suffice it to say that I am reminded of something Alan Kupperberg, the new artist of Little Orphan Annie, told me the other day. “I don’t know why they had to put themselves on fancy paper,” he said. “They’re still mostly garbage.” I talked to Kupperberg as part of my debut column in Comic Book Artist. The battle-hardened veteran of the comic book wars who has worked on everything from The Incredible Hulk to Beavis and Butthead, had a few things to say about the state of comic books (“almost nonexistent”) and I thought you might want to hear them. Kupperberg thinks the “best days are over” but he cautions that people tend to look fondly on what they loved when they were 12 years old, and bemoan the current incarnation. When he was 12 he says he “was a big fan of Superman.” He was taken with the art if Curt Swan because “his people looked like people and not cartoons.” Kupperberg adds that he was also “kind of a Marvel zombie.” Neal Adams and Jim Steranko are two of the all-time comic book greats in Kupperberg’s book. “Probably the person I admired the most when I was growing up was Neal Adams,” Alan said. “If he wasn’t a commercial success, he was the artist’s artist. I’ve got to say that by the time I was on the threshold of becoming a professional artist, it was Steranko and Adams… They were the only new artists to come into comics.” Kupperberg says the secret behind the success of the comic book was “the price, the package and the thrills. It was all cheap thrills and it hung together that way.” Speaking of cheap thrills, let me close with a lament for the late Win Mortimer. When I was 12, I thought his covers for DC were the cat’s pajamas. Unfortunately, I never really grew up, except chronologically, and I still think he did some great covers. That said, the reason for the lament is that as a collector, which is probably what I really am, I have been looking for copies of Mortimer’s Superman dailies for longer than I care to remember. I’ve tried such likely sources as DC and the Super Museum of Metropolis, Ill. Both came up empty. DC’s librarian explained that he didn’t have a run of the strip, only Mortimer’s work for the comic book line. Jim Hambrick, who runs the Super Museum and Gift Shop, which boasts that it is stuffed with over 20,000 items, initially suggested he had copies of the run and was game to help. When months passed and I didn’t hear from him, I tried him back and he said hard May 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

to get a hold of and also mistaken about the Mortimers. I even tried Danny Fuchs, who hands out business cards that picture Supes and bill Fuchs as “America’s Foremost Superman Collector.” Zilch. Hey, I’m willing to shell out for Xerox copies. I don’t need original tearsheets. Yeah, I loved Wayne Boring but thankfully I’ve got a run of his work, thanks to the aforesaid and much mourned Menomonee Falls Gazette. Thanks to DC and the also much mourned Kitchen Sink, I’ve also got a run of the first years. What I don’t have and have yet to glom my grubby hands on is a run of Win Mortimer’s Superman. If you’re reading this and you actually have a run of same, try to remember what Supes said in Superman’s Christmas Adventure of 1940: “I hope all you readers will remember to be generous to those less fortunate than yourselves.”

Above: Here’s a sneaky way to both plug our upcoming National Lampoon CBA Special and to reveal the “cover” to Alan K.’s NatLamp contribution, which is discussed in Don Perlin’s interview herein. The periodical featured a plethora of comics material, drawn by a diverse range of talent including Gahan Wilson, Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson , Vaughn Bodé, Barry Windsor-Smith,Ralph Reese, and many more. Courtesy of Alan Kupperberg ©2001 the respective copyright holder. 5

CBA Communiques

Charlton Comments & More on Toth Plus CBA context, corrections, controversy, and checklists Right inset and following three pages: Alex Toth contributed these wonderful spot illustrations depicting kids in the throes of loving comics to embellish Eisner expert and former co-publisher of Eclipse Comics Cat Yronwode’s “Fit To Print” columns in the 1980s. Courtesy of Cat. ©2001 Alex Toth.

Below: As indicated on the repro of the original cover art of Star Spangled War Stories #144, Alex Toth was intended to be the artist of an Enemy Ace story. As a last minute replacement, Neal Adams penciled the published version with inks by editor Joe Kubert. Courtesy of Tom Horvitz. ©2001 DC Comics.

Cat Yronwode Forestville, California Thanks for a fine issue—1/2 Toth and 1/2 Mayer—what a treat! Here’s a tiny correction to the Jim Vadeboncoeur Toth Index: Bop, listed as “miscellaneous,” was published by Kitchen Sink (for which he already had a category, although Bop was not in it). I should know—I edited Bop and completely fulfilled a life’s dream by getting Alex to draw something for me! Not a big correction, but I figured Jim would want to know. [Thanks, Cat, for the note and the file o’ cool stuff sent, including the most excellent Toth illos (all reproduced here) which originally accompanied your “Fit to Print” column, circa 1980. The former co-publisher of Eclipse Comics is always welcome in these pages.—JBC] James Romberger New York, New York Your Alex Toth issue of Comic Book Artist and his continuing columns, “Before I Forget,” are important documents. It’s great that Mr. Toth is willing to share his thoughts with us, especially in technical areas. In his column in the Warren issue, for instance, he gave out valuable advice in the use of transparent markers. I hope his contributions are going to continue in future issues. It would be good if you could show more reproductions of the artists he speaks of, I don’t know how many times he’s referred to Bert Christman but I’ve yet to see an example of the man’s art. Some Toth questions: In his interview in The Comics Journal, Rick Veitch refers to Heavy Metal’s graphic novel version of the Spielberg film 1941 which Alex Toth apparently was the first artist on and had partially completed before abandoning. The final version was done by Veitch and Steve

Bissette. Does anyone know if any of Toth’s pages survived? I recall reading somewhere reference to an issue of “Enemy Ace” that Toth drew, but was rejected by DC and then perhaps Toth destroyed it? Ring any bells? In Manuel Auad’s first Toth book, Toth mentions a third “Torpedo” installment he had mostly finished. Does this artwork exist? In trying to track down Toth’s work I’ve been looking for Charlton Bullseye #5, there is a comic of this title and numbering but it contains no Toth. Is this a fanzine about Charlton? Does anyone know why Toth did the inking on four stories in the Warren magazines in the early ’80s, over the likes of Carmine lnfantino and Leo Summers? Did he need the work or was he trying to learn something? His only solo work there at that time was the very unusual “Reaper” and his magnum opus, “Bravo for Adventure.” Strangely enough, Toth’s other work for this period includes several stories for DC for which he only provided the pencils, and these seem to be his last work on comic stories, alas. [Well, James, I can help with a few of your questions. Yes, Alex will be continuing his column in the pages of CBA (thank you, Alex!). I just spoke to onetime Heavy Metal art director John Workman regarding the 1941 adaptation and he said, “Toth was the original artist chosen for the book, but I don’t think he ever set pencil to paper on the project. I immediately thought of Toth for the book because it was so similar to his Dell movie adaptations and just perfect for his style. The idea was to give Alex total freedom on the book. Julie Simmons [HM editor] spoke with Alex and he said that, yeah, he would do it (though, strangely, he didn’t want to do the coloring). Then one day out of the blue, we received a letter from Toth that said he wanted out of the project. He walked away from the whole thing but we never knew why.” I’ve heard confirmation that Alex did indeed draw an “Enemy Ace” story (intended for Star Spangled War Stories #144) but the original art has been lost. There were two editions of Charlton Bullseye: First, a magazine-size Charlton fanzine produced by Bob Layton’s CPL/Gang Productions in the mid-’70s (where Toth’s Question story appeared in the fifth—and final—issue), and second, a bona fide Charlton comic book anthology series lasting 10 issues in the early ’80s. I will ask Alex about your final Warren-related question. Hope this helps.—JBC] Richard Kyle Long Beach, California CBA #11, what an outstanding issue, for me your best yet—and the Sheldon Mayer interviews are maybe the best, most revealing interviews I’ve ever read. I was always a fan of the first “Scribbly” series, and because of that I was interested in Mayer’s career from the beginning, following him when he was editor and when he was a cartoonist, always wanting the best for him. The initial—was it five?—issues of Scribbly were wonderful, too. (Mayer, it seems, was an uncommonly good photographer as well. The photo on 15-B is classic.) But reading those interviews—amazing. Starting from scratch, with me knowing nothing about Mayer except “Scribbly” and a few issues of Sugar and Spike, his children built a full, complete picture of a man COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

in a way I’ve never seen before. Both of them seemed to have a complete, realistic view of their father, an extraordinary mix of objectivity and subjectivity, Merrily from a very female point-of-view, Lanney from an equally male one. I’m sure Bill Alger had a great deal to do with it, choosing the questions to ask, following up, organizing all the material, and he’s to be praised for such an exceptional job, but still, at the bottom, it is Merrily and Lanney. Sheldon Mayer may have had sides to him that drove his kids up the wall—but he is at least half responsible for two remarkable people. The Toth section is exceptional, too. I’m familiar with much of the content, naturally—including Toth at war with Hogarth/Kirby visuals. If only Toth and Kirby could have given a joint interview, each advocating his own approach; Hemingway and Dumas arguing which storytelling method is best. More of Toth’s “Deep Dimension” story for Crime and Punishment #66 would have been good. Wonderful work. And a complete Granny McGo from Hot Rod Cartoons would have hit the spot, too—the Grannys are among the best things Toth ever drew, one of them particularly (the name, alas, escapes me). DC should long ago have packaged Sugar and Spike as children’s hardcovers—full, old-fashioned, two-dimensional color, unfiddled with, no new redrawn clothing styles, no rewritten slang, simply the original comics stories in hardcover. Raggedy Ann and Andy and Mary Poppins sell to far different generations. Why not Sugar and Spike in mainstream hardcovers for kids? Our economic system is based on the idea of reward for one’s efforts. No reward, no effort. Little reward, little effort. Great reward, great effort. According to Toth, Mayer started him off at $30 a page. That’s more than $300 a page in today’s money, more than $3,600 for a 12-page story. Is that the going rate for newcomers these days? It apparently paid off. According to Lanney, Sheldon Mayer took a cut from his editorial job at $50,000 a year to work at home for $15,000—the equivalent of going from more than a half-million dollars to more than a $150,000 in today’s money. When was the last time somebody at DC in a comparable editorial position made more than a half-million a year? You get what you pay for. Great issue! John Backderf Via the Internet Now… I can see devoting one issue of my subscription to Charlton… but two???? It was your usual thorough job… but why? Especially Charlton’s ’70s titles. You can sum up ’70s Charltons rather quickly: E-Man, Rog-2000 and a few back-up features by guys who went on to do good work someplace else. The rest of the line was crap. Even compared to the worst titles put out by DC and Marvel (and those were plenty bad) it was still crap. You had to be pretty damn desperate to waste comix money on Yang or Midnight Tales. I enjoy delving into the colorful aspects of comic book history, and Charlton certainly fits the bill there, but to devote this much space to what was generally schlock… it just seems wrong for a publication devoted to the best of comic book art. What’s next? A three-issue extravaganza on Atlas/Seaboard? I once commented to you that your examination of Marvel of the mid-’70s made the period seem better than it really was… that what I recalled from that time was 232 team-up titles badly drawn by Sal Buscema. You responded by stating you had no interest in dwelling on mediocre comics, only exceptional ones. I’m having a little trouble marrying that statement to this issue. But, of course, I still love CBA. Jay Willson Scottsdale, Arizona Before I start, let me congratulate you on the marvelous job you did in covering Charlton comics in both the latest issue of CBA (#12), as well as the previous issue (#9). I think that you have managed to do exactly what you intended to do, which is to acknowledge the moments of comics glory that came from a comic book company that was otherwise known for it’s rather hackneyed approach to creating comics. As a young reader, there were two phases where Charlton comics really caught my interest: 1), when I realized during back-issue searches that there had been this terrific Action Hero line in the mid-’60s, at which point I bought up every book from that time that I could find; and 2), when I ran across new books on the newsstand from the “Nick Cuti era,” namely E-Man, Yang, Newton’s Phantom, May 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

and others. Thanks for bringing back such wonderful memories, and helping me to get to know those who were responsible for creating them. In regards to the latest issue, #12, I wanted to add some comments and additional notes to some of the information presented inside, namely regarding one person who I had the pleasure of knowing personally during this time frame, Don Newton. In Don’s case, I met Don originally in 1975, when I was 16, during a visit that I had made to Dan Adkins’ apartment during Dan’s brief stint as a resident of Arizona (he now resides in Pennsylvania, and has for over 20 years, to my knowledge). After this first meeting, I began to attend what was later termed by John Clark (exeditor of Gladstone comics, and possibly Don’s best friend) as the Sunday “Fan Dinners.” These dinners happened every Sunday night like clockwork, and always consisted of the same activities: Going to Don’s latest home (which changed a lot, as Don moved around quite often), piling in one of the cars (usually Don’s), and driving to a Mexican food restaurant, upon where Don would always order the same thing, a quesadilla (cheese crisp) and a small dinner salad. Once we’d eaten, we’d all go back to Don’s place and marvel at his latest artwork, which after he began penciling full time, was usually at least seven to ten pages of material. During the early days of his Charlton work, Don was unable to make a full-time living as an artist, and with Charlton’s poor page rate, he could only afford to do the artwork as a side job. This used to just amaze me, as I had visions of being a comics artist as well, but Don was doing this work (The Phantom and his Baron Weirwulf mystery pages, etc.) after working a full day as a junior high school art teacher (he had previously been a substitute English teacher). Mind you, he accomplished this phenomenal task also while raising his son, who at that time would have been about five or six, and was often a handful. Don was a terrific guy, although not easy to get to know. It took me years before I felt that I was his friend, although he was always incredibly generous with me. He kept a lot of information about himself to himself, and lead a life that included a number of different “selves,” namely as the father of his son; as a son himself (his mother lived near or next to him most of his life); the comic book artist; and the single man. I saw him as the first three, but he would disappear every Friday and Saturday night to singles’ dances to deal with the last “personality,” and would often stay the night with someone that he picked up at one of the dances. He had a difficult time being close to people, and even though he was married twice (once in the early ’70s to the woman with whom he fathered his son, and once in the early ’80s, to a woman whom he had known earlier in his life, although their marriage only lasted a month), he never had a steady girlfriend of any sort. He was a very patterned person who liked complete control of his life, and resisted any changes to that life that were brought on by someone else. Regarding Don’s influences, he was a bodybuilder in his late teens, and continued in that quest through to the end of his life. He was always in good shape, and had a large upper body due to the weight training. Much of

Above: In a note to Ye Ed inquiring as to the status of the CBA ish devoted to ’70s Charlton Comics, artist Warren Sattler drew himself asking where was the darned issue. Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Warren Sattler. Below: Another Alex Toth cartoon, this one showing the birth of a comic book artist. ©2001 Alex Toth.

Don’s superior knowledge of the figure came from studying bodybuilder magazines, and he always had some lying around his house as reference. He had a strong art background, having done a lot of oil and acrylic painting in college, and any sidework that he did during the Charlton years was likely to be a painting that was requested by a fan, or contracted to him by an outside company (such as Bruce Hamilton, who had Don provide artwork to a number of Bruce’s many diverse periodicals over the years). In the article in your magazine, David Roach did a nice job of summing up Don’s career, but I thought that I would add or correct some details that I know of from first-hand exposure to them: • David Roach’s acknowledgement of Frazetta’s influence in Don’s work would be incorrect. Don did not care for Frazetta’s isolated figure layouts and his over-exaggerated woman. As David mentions, Don’s women were often zoftig in nature, but that influence comes more from his classic art training, and his love for the old Quality characters such as Phantom Lady. Don was also very influenced by painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, and even had two incredible Rubens copies that he had painted on the wall of his apartments/condominiums.

• Because Don had spent so much time rendering the figure in life drawing, etc., he opted more for realistic lighting and costuming, which lent itself to some of his super-hero work, and detracted from others. In his later years at DC, he had learned to smooth out his pencil artwork and had taken on a more heroic imagery in his work, leaving the wrinkled sleeves and faces of his earlier RBCC artwork in the past. • While doing The Phantom for Charlton, witzend editor Bill Pearson, a previous Arizona resident, became the assistant editor in replacement of Nick Cuti at Charlton (Cuti was Pearson’s friend, and had suggested him for the job). Bill did a great job of working more to Don’s strengths in The Phantom scripts, which is evident by the quality of the stories in the last few that included references to classic films (Casablanca), historical settings, and new villains (the Raven, who was originally called “Dr. Nevar,” believe it or not). Bill also snuck back whatever original art that he could to Don, which Don appreciated a great deal. I know that both gentlemen were very disappointed when Charlton decided to turn the book into a reprint title, as they felt that they were just hitting their stride on the book.

Alex Toth: Comic Art Index Corrections F. San Millan’s revised listings for the CBA #11 Toth Art Checklist #

STORY TITLE (WITH INKING CREDITS)

PAGES

DARK HORSE MADMAN BUBBLE GUM CARDS Card #1 (of 50) DC GREEN LANTERN 1963 ANNUAL 1 Too Many Suspects (rep. GL #37, 1949) SECRET HEARTS 6 Dreamer’s Return SGT. ROCK SPECIAL 8 White Devil… Yellow Devil (rep. SSWS #164)

174 Apologist Accepted 200 Dear Sparky…

9/95 12/97

ROY ROGERS (newspaper strip) ghosting for Mike Arens, 12/19/60-1/12/61

COMICS REVUE 30 Tribute to Milton Caniff (letter)

1988

STEVE BENTLEY 11 strips in 1964 in Hollywood Reporter (and Variety?)

THE FILM JOURNAL V2 #2 Cover montage (Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde)

1978

1998

FEM FANTASTIQUE 3 Black Canary (reprinted in Pretty Girl Sketchbook)

1978

8/50

GRAPHIC STORY WORLD V2 #3 Keynote Speech: Alex Toth, 5th Annual NY Comic Conv 9/72

6/90

JOE KUBERT: THE WAR YEARS (Al Dellinges) Toth on Kubert (text and doodle) Where Were You Dec. 7, 1941?

1990

M.L.F. COMMUNIQUÉ 2 Loosy Mouse (cartoonist jam, not signed)

1979

DATE

1994

12 8 8

DELL/WESTERN/GOLD KEY GENE AUTRY AND CHAMPION 113 Buffalo Hunters (text illo) ROY ROGERS 1 Photo cover reprint of Roy Rogers #125) VOYAGE TO THE DEEP 3 The Never-Ending Hunt (Toth pencils, ? inks)

1967 1

10/63

ZORRO 9 (I have copy w/o central papers so exit the Toth’s Bandidos) EASTERN/FAMOUS FUNNIES FAMOUS FUNNIES 141 Gasoline Cowboy (two signed text illos) 177 (I don’t have issue—was listed in a dealer’s catalog) 179 Avenging Brakie (two signed text illos)

5/49

KITCHEN SINK STEVE CANYON 16 Looking into Panels (letter)

6/86

BOP 1 Taps (+ script)

4/46

1982

9/90 12/90

1991 1992 1993

SSAM (Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine) V1:1 Casebook: Signs of Alcoholism 1978 V1:12 Coast to Coast (text illos) 1979 V?:? Casebook: Crime Prevention V?:? Casebook: National Security V?:? Casebook: Standards of Conduct V?:? Casebook: The Diamond Scam V?:? The Collectors (text illo) V?:? Future Cars: They’ll Tell You Where to Get Off (text illos) 7/82 2 2 2

7/66 8/66 9/66 1995 SPR/97

RUMORS GIRLS’ ROMANCE (DC) 120

1966

SECRET HEARTS (DC) 114

1966

SUPER FRIENDS (DC) 1 Text header 2 Text header 3 Text header WORLD’S FINEST COMICS (DC) 54 (listed in CBA #11) AMABOLIS INSANIA (Kurt Metz) 1 (listed in Underground Price Guide) DOUBTS BLACK DIAMOND ROMANCE (Lev Gleason) 49 Cover GIRLS’ LOVE STORIES (DC) 92 MYSTERY IN SPACE (DC) 6 Never saw this so… 40 Never saw this so… SECRET HEARTS (DC) 22 (Also reprinted in Heart Throbs #131 with touch up) 3-D ROMANCE nn Cover NO TOTH! HEROIC COMICS (Eastern/Famous Funnies) 29 30

MISCELLANEOUS WESTERN ROUND-UP (Dell) CASEY RUGGLES (newspaper strip) 19 Aquila episode (ghosting for W. Tufts) 5/15/50 to 7/18/50 20 10 10

CASEY RUGGLES (Western Wind Prod.) Aquila strips reprint

MISCELLANEOUS BOOKS, MAGAZINES & FANZINES ANUBIUM Bookworm (Nick Cuti script, first printing) 6 10/84 CARTOONISTS PROFILE 13 entry 15 entry

6 7

TOON MAGAZINE (Black Bear) V1:8 Jonny Quest (eight model sheets) V3:1 Alex Toth Interviewed (rep. The Anvil #1)

STANDARD UNSEEN 13 cover

THE COMICS JOURNAL 167 Jack Kirby Tribute

THE NEW NICKEL LIBRARY (E. Fromm) 20 Dragnet 23 Arsenic and Old Lace Ducks?! Y’Wanna Celebrate Ducks?! Happy 75, Jack (Manta-like plane w/searchlight)

TEEN V10:7 The Thrilling Adventures of Superteen V10:8 The Thrilling Adventures of Superteen V11:9 The Thrilling Adventures of Superteen

MAGAZINE VILLAGE TRUE CRIME V2:1 V2:9 (second reprint of above)

UNITED FEATURES SYNDICATE SPARKLER COMICS 100 touching up and missing panels 101 touching up and missing panels

MONSTERS ATTACK! (Globe) 4 Bookworm (script by Nick Cuti) 5 A Job Well Done (rep. TA #2)

TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE Ghosting for Russ Manning’s fourth European album Script by Mike Royer, first 11 pg. pencils by Toth Published in Italy as Pellucidar, il paese al centro della terra (info from Comic Feature #28’s Tribute to Russ Manning)

4/94

1979

THE HOT WHEELS KIDS Sunday format, Mattel ads. Publication unknown JON FURY (Tokyo Quartermaster Depot Diary) Toth and Fury Jon Fury in Japan The New Adventures of Jon Fury 1st Jan. 1956 Jon Fury

1 15 17 1 11

QUEEN OF THE WEST, DALE EVANS (Dell) 17 TARZAN JUNGLE ANNUAL (Dell) 6

1955 1955 1955 1956 1956

SUGARFOOT (Dell) 1209

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

• Unlike most artists who like to do everything themselves, Don hated the process of inking. This was a man who loved drawing, but was also focused on making a living, and inking was less pay and less fun to him. I was even called upon to co-ink some pieces of artwork that were sent to him for inks only, as it took him so long to get around to doing them. He just hated the process. Much of his greatest frustration in comics was the choice of inker on his work, but he still stayed with the pencils only and never looked back. During his DC years, Don produced (and had a contract for) 30 pages a month, much of which he drew sitting with his knees up in a chair, with a small drawing board and no reference. He had an amazing memory for detail. • Dan Adkin’s inking work over Don was all done after Dan left Phoenix. Don actually helped Dan out on a few jobs, namely the Deadly Hands job (which Don did nothing more than ink a few backgrounds) and The Defenders job, which Adkins got him in on as a penciler, and a small amount of inking. Their later collaboration on Batman, Return of the New Gods, etc. was a result of Dan going into the DC offices and requesting the work from Julie Schwartz, Paul Levitz and others, and Don promoting the idea from Arizona. As David mentions, Don’s two favorite inkers were Joe Rubinstein (who did a marvelous job on a single New Gods story, that Don just loved, as well as a cover for The Comic Reader that Don did of Captain America) and Dan Adkins (who was always very faithful to Don’s work). Don also liked Kurt Schaffenberger’s inks on his Captain Marvel/Shazam! work quite a bit, although he was shocked when Schaffenberger was handed the job, as Don imagined that Schaffenberger would change all of the faces to look like his own work. Don also liked Dave Hunt, John Celardo and especially Alfredo Alcala on his art, but disliked Dan Green (who inked his Avengers issues), Bob Layton (who he later grew to like, but didn’t at first), Augie Scotto (?) and Frank Chiaramonte. Don used to live in fear of getting Vince Colletta as inker, which finally happened for a Hawkman backup in World’s Finest years later. This job was notorious to Don because Colletta erased an entire background of machinery from two panels just so that he wouldn’t have to ink it. • The Marvel Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction cover that was painted by Don was assigned to him by Dan Adkins, who was the art director of Marvel’s black-&-white line at the time. Don really wanted to pencil comics, so he didn’t seek out the color paintings, but they often came to him via requests from fans and the like. This assignment was also welcomed by Don because it was after Charlton, but before steady work at DC. Once, during a visit to Phoenix by inker Terry Austin, I introduced the two through a friend of Terry’s that I knew as well. At that time, Don requested an “inking sample” from Terry, which Terry created for him and sent to Don upon his return home. Don was so pleased with what Terry sent him that he painted Terry a nice painting in return. He had Terry’s “sample” (it was a comic strip that showed the different types of techniques that Terry used) hanging on the wall of his studio area until he died. • Don tried to get work at Marvel, but in his early career, they would only give him inking work, which he hated. He did the work, just to remain “known” in comics, but after DC started to give him work, he never returned to such an assignment. Jim Shooter tried during his entire tenure at Marvel to get Don over to Marvel to do penciling work for them, but during the only time that Don agreed to part DC for Marvel (the Avengers Annual, etc.), Marvel still didn’t send him regular work, and he grew frustrated and returned to DC, where the work was on-time, regular and was something that he could count on. He liked the DC characters better anyway, as his favorite characters had always been Captain Marvel (Shazam!), The Batman, the Justice Society characters and all of the Quality heroes. Don would have killed to do the “Justice Society” or Freedom Fighters book, because of his love for those characters. • I would wholeheartedly agree with David’s perception that inkers often sucked the “life” out of Don’s pencils, but to be honest, Don couldn’t even ink his pencils to perfection. His pencils were so nice, they should have been printed as is, had the printing been capable of such in those days. His work was similar to that of Gene Colan’s, in that there was so much skill in the drawing, that all an inker could do was wade in and try to grab onto the artwork and ride it to completion. Don could spot shadows better than any artist I have ever seen as well. • Don became ill in 1983, and began to lose quite a bit of weight. I was only able to see him about once a month at that time, and every time that I did, he looked more frail and less like his strong self. He was very frustrated with his illness, which seemed to attack his May 2001 COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

immunity system, and began in the throat area, making it more and more difficult for him to eat, hence the weight loss. He wanted to see people less and less, and became withdrawn, as he was very concerned about his looks and the illness only worked against those feelings. In 1984, Don had a minor heart attack due to his bad health, fell to the floor and was transported to the hospital by his mother who lived next door. He was in the hospital for only two days, and passed away after that, with little explanation from the doctors. I have often wondered if his illness was AIDS-related, as it so completely wore him down to nothing, and could have possibly been transmitted to him via his rather carefree lifestyle. The doctors that treated him during this time seemed completely unable to help him get better. He left a son, Tony, who currently works as a tattoo artist in Scottsdale, Arizona, and his mother, Hazel, who passed away a few years ago from natural causes. Upon Don’s death, editor/writer Roy Thomas had one completely drawn issue of Don’s last assignment at DC, Infinity, Inc., and five pages of the next story that Don was drawing up until his heart attack. Roy knew of Don’s love for Joe Rubinstein’s inks on his work, so he arranged to have Joe ink his last story in tribute to Don. He also rewrote and rearranged the order of the pages so that Don’s last work was a complete story, and not the five pages that were hurriedly drawn during Don’s last days. In one final tribute, Roy arranged it so that John Clark, Don’s oldest friend, was able to letter the book, even though he had never done a previous job for DC. I always thought that showed an amazing amount of respect from Mr. Thomas, and one that he probably would never be known for, considering the mountains of previous accomplishments that he has achieved in his career. One of my greatest memories of being with Don was at the San Diego Comic Book convention in the late ’70s, where I was walking through the dealers room with Don. Just off to the side of us I noticed three gentlemen huddled together, who I recognized to be Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, and Mark Evanier. They were pointing at Don and whispering something to the effect of, “That’s Don Newton!” and came over to introduce themselves. They were very excited about meeting him at last (considering that he lived in Arizona and rarely met other professionals) and all presented questions to him about his work, and continued to talk to him for most of an hour. I still remember his face upon saying good-bye to the three of them, as he wore the smile of a man who had accomplished something that he always had aspired to being: he had become a respected comics professional. [Thanks for the great letter, Jay. Again, I appreciate all the Newton art you shared with CBA. For those interested in Don Newton’s artwork, be sure to visit www.donnewton.com, a Website hosted by Barry Keller. And speaking of Adkins, be sure to check out his interview on Tower Comics next ish, all behind a brand spankin’ new Daniel Adkins THUNDER Agents cover!—JBC]

Above: We couldn’t fit this Don Newton sketch in last issue but here’s the artist character design for a never-realized Phantom villain—The Red Spectre, head of an international terrorist cabal called SCAR—being developed by Don and writer Roger Stern. Courtesy of Roger, and ©2001 the estate of Don Newton.

Below: A fourth drawing by Alex Toth contributed to Cat Yronwode. Courtesy of Cat and ©2001 Alex Toth. Due to space constraints, we couldn’t fit in Alex’s “Before I Forget” column this issue but, rest assured, it will return for CBA #14, our Tower Comics celebration.

C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERNS VIEWS WITH KIRBY and EDITIO BLE A IL his contemporaries, AVA NLY FEATURE ARTICLES, FOR O $3.95 RARE AND UNSEEN $1.95— KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS from the 1960s-80s (from photocopies preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES).

DIGITAL

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #31

KIRBY COLLECTOR #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #33

FIRST TABLOID-SIZE ISSUE! MARK EVANIER’s new column, interviews with KURT BUSIEK and JOSÉ LADRONN, NEAL ADAMS on Kirby, Giant-Man overview, Kirby’s best 2-page spreads, 2000 Kirby Tribute Panel (MARK EVANIER, GENE COLAN, MARIE SEVERIN, ROY THOMAS, and TRACY & JEREMY KIRBY), huge Kirby pencils! Wraparound KIRBY/ADAMS cover!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

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“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” MIKE ROYER interview on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE GALLERY tracing the evolution of Jack’s style, new column on OBSCURE KIRBY WORK, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s TECHNIQUE AND INFLUENCES, comparing STAN LEE’s writing to JACK’s, and more! Two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #40

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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

Spotlight: Marvel

Shadows & the Darkness The horror… the horror: It all started in Towers and Chambers EDITOR'S NOTE: Though he wrote it as an on-topic installment of his “Marginalia” column, we think David A. Roach’s wonderful survey of Marvel’s color comics horror anthology titles is a perfect context piece to kick-start our ’70s celebration. Our esteemed coeditor of the forthcoming Warren Companion is concerned little mention is made of Marvel’s continuing horror series stars, so bear in mind we’ll be covering Dracula, Frankenstein, Werewolf, etc. more comprehensively later in this ish.

Above: Courtesy of penciler Marie Severin, here’s an exquisite Severin/Bill Everett cover to the controversial Tower of Shadows #4, featuring Jack Kirby’s muchchanged story “The Monster.” To find out more about this tale, check out The Jack Kirby Collector #13, also found in The Collected Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 3. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 14

by David A. Roach 1968 was a truly momentous year for both Marvel and DC. Marvel had finally emerged from the shackles of its oppressive distribution arrangement with main rival DC Comics and the Marvel line began to expand and dominate the marketplace. DC was in the early stages of Carmine Infantino’s revolutionary leadership with old favorites like The Atom, Hawkman, and Doom Patrol being cancelled, and a new group of artist/editors—Joe Orlando, Joe Kubert, Dick Giordano, and Mike Sekowsky taking over from the company’s elder statesmen. However, few observers at the time would have imagined that the year’s most significant development would be Orlando’s revamping of the moribund House of Mystery comic, replacing “Dial H For Hero”’s Robby Reed with an EC-inspired horror title. The first few Orlando House of Mysterys mix reprints with passable new strips, but soon the likes of Neal Adams, Alex Toth, Bernie Wrightson, Carl Wessler, and Jack Oleck transform the title into a massive seller. Barely more that a year later, DC could boast of five regular horror books: Murray Boltinoff’s revitalized Unexpected, Dick Giordano’s House of Secrets and Witching Hour, and Orlando’s Phantom Stranger and House of Mystery. Inevitably someone at Marvel noticed all this activity and, just as eight years earlier when The Justice League of America prompted them to reenter the super-hero field, so too in 1969 did the House of Ideas decide to launch their own mystery comics. Tower of Shadows premiered in September 1969 and was followed in October by another bi-monthly title, Chamber of Darkness. Marvel had finally entered the modern age of horror. Tower of Shadows #1 boasts contributions from some of Marvel’s heaviest hitters: Stan Lee, John Buscema. John Romita, and Don Heck as well as EC veteran Johnny Craig, but the best of the issue’s three stories is “At the Stroke of Midnight” by the Great Maverick himself, James Steranko. The story itself hardly breaks new ground—a cantankerous couple murder the husband’s uncle to inherit his fortune and then meet a horrible fate in his festering mansion— but the manner of its telling is truly breathtaking and something very special. Steranko had already made a name for himself as a trailblazing innovator and here he tried every trick in the book—Krigsteinesque multi-paneled pages, color holds, vertiginous angles, black-&white panels, chiaroscuro, and some of the best draftsmanship of his career. The second issue features a typically beautiful Neal Adams

strip, “One Hungers,” while the first few issues of Chamber of Darkness are also home to the best of the Marvel regulars, but even at this early stage, there are signs that Marvel was not quite sure what do do with these comics. Initially each book features the by now standard cadaverous narrator—The Old Digger in TOS and Headstone P. Gravely in COD, dead ringers respectively for House of Mystery’s Cain and Warren’s Uncle Creepy—but they are soon edged out by the innovation of having each strip’s creators narrate the story, presumably on the basis that the likes of Tom Sutton and Sal Buscema are scarier than any mere literary concoction. More significantly, the established stars are replaced with a mixture of young, occasionally raw, talent and some of comics’ more temperamental veterans. While the likes of Len Wein, Allyn Brodsky, and Steve Skeates are all given early scripting opportunities, there are also rare chances for artists to write their own material, a situation seized upon by Wally Wood. His four stories in TOS #5-8 are all terrific fun, allowing him to wallow in his favorite Tolkien-meets-Prince Valiant subject matter. None of them are intellectually challenging but, boy, are they pretty! TOS #5’s “Flight into Fear” is probably the pick of the bunch. Over in Chamber of Darkness, the increasingly unhappy Jack Kirby is given a pair of rare scripting opportunities though at least one, “The Monster” in #4, was altered considerably before publication. Neither strip is exactly revolutionary but at least John Verpoorten’s bold inking is pleasingly true to Kirby’s pencils. Verpoorten appears in six issues of the horror comics, just edging out neophyte penciler Barry Smith as the lines’ most prolific contributor. Smith’s five stories come just before his emergence into stardom with Conan and his Kirby fixation is still very much to the fore. His work in the ’60s is characterized by all manner of visual tricks in the Steranko mold, and some rather indifferent, if energetic figure work. Smith is always at the mercy of his inkers and while Dan Adkins does a beautiful job on TOS #5’s “Demon That Devoured Hollywood,” Vince Colletta positively murders the Brit’s art two issues later. Smith’s most attractive, and by far his most important, strip is the collaboration with Roy Thomas in COD #4, “The Sword and the Sorcerers,” inked by the artist himself. It’s story of a pulp writer confronted—and killed—by his barbarian creation, Starr the Slayer, is cleverly told and attractively rendered but its true importance is as a dry run for Conan the Barbarian. Starr is Conan in all but name, right down to his horned helmet and his appearance here unwittingly foreshadows the course of Marvel’s success for the next decade. Where they would try a succession of horror books and fail, the barbarian comics would meet with immense acclaim and inspire a mini-industry of imitators. We will hear about barbarians again before this story is all told. One of DC’s rising stars—and horror stalwart—Bernie Wrightson makes a late appearance in Marvel’s horror books, contributing four great covers to TOS and COD combined and a decent strip to COD #7. His cover to the ninth issue of Tower of Shadows is a particular treat for students of fashion featuring as it does a selfportrait of Wrightson sporting a very fetching pair of checkered shorts and Indian-style moccasins. Nice! The next issue stars another Wrightson contribution but it is not a horror strip and the comic is no longer called Tower of Shadows. Significantly it is an example of the lack of confidence and direction which would plague Marvel throughout its horror line. As early as TOS #6, reprints are beginning to appear and by the final issue of COD, barely six months later, the new Material shrank to a derisory six pages. With its tenth issue, Tower of Shadows is renamed Creatures on COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

the Loose and Chamber of Darkness becomes Monsters on the Prowl. Bernie Wrightson’s strip in the first Creature is no horror tale, but was instead the first comics adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s legendary King Kull. Despite Wrightson’s art being poorly printed, the resulting fan acclaim soon led to a Kull title. Meanwhile, seemingly unnoticed, Monsters and Creatures continue to run new strips, albeit behind the Kirby and Ditko reprints. All told, nine new horror stories are printed over the course of the ensuing year and a half, strips that are almost certainly inventory tales from TOS and COD. Amongst many nice surprises is a typically beautiful Ralph Reese chiller, an unlikely collaboration between Jack (First Kingdom) Katz and Barry Smith and one of Reed Crandall’s final art jobs. A Stan Lee/Manfred Sommer monsterfest in Monsters on the Prowl #12 is decidedly out of left field since Sommer was a Spanish artist of some renown not recognized for his horror work. Unfortunately the strip is not up to his usual high standard, unlike probably the most interesting of the inventory stories. Len Wein’s “Underground Gambit” in Creatures #11 is a hidden gem revolving around superstar underground cartoonist Roger Krass, famed for his counterculture strip, Peter of the People. But Krass has a secret: He’s really a “square” who loathes his hippy admirers. “Gibbering fools—they wouldn’t recognize real art if it came up and bit them on the leg!” One day Krass is discovered by suave talent scout Herbert T. Brimstone (hmmm) who promises the artist a lucrative contract if he will only sign up to Brimstone’s new syndicate. Which he does, of course! His hippy friends are appalled at his sudden transformation into a suit-wearing, short-haired young executive—”I don’t believe it! Roger’s sold out to the Establishment!” Unfortunately—and don’t say you didn’t see it coming!—Brimstone turns out to be the devil and Krass finds out just what it is like to be a true “underground” artist. The moral of the story appears to be don’t sell out to The Man or you will end up in Hell, a sentiment we can all relate to, right, kids? Herb Trimpe’s art is perfect throughout, from Krass’s Crumbesque comic strip to his bouffant wig and peace sign medallion. No one draws hippies quite like Herb. Sadly, once the inventory material runs out (with a final rogue strip by Rich Buckler cropping up in Where Monsters Dwell #15) Monsters on the Prowl becomes an all-reprint book (not before running another Kull strip, though this time as a preview of the newly-revived Kull book). For its part, Creatures on the Loose #16 stars another sword-&-sorcery strip, the underrated Roy Thomas/Gil Kane “Gullivar Jones” feature. This runs for a few more issues before being replaced by a further barbarian, Lin Carter’s “Thongor of Lost Lemuria.” Creatures on the Loose bucks the trend though. While Marvel seemingly lacks the will to compete head-to-head with DC’s anthology books, they are happy to flood the market with reprints. From Where Monsters Dwell to Tomb of Darkness, the publisher brings out ten fully reprint titles which plunders their ’50s mystery archives and the early-’60s Kirby and Ditko monster strips. Unperturbed by this, DC’s horror line grows and grows, with new titles Ghosts and Weird War Tales soon joined by Swamp Thing, Weird Mystery Tales, Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion, and Secrets of Sinister House. Horror sold and at DC seemingly anything could be given the mystery makeover, from weird Westerns and weird adventure to Gothic romance and even weird humor (the immortal Plop!). In 1972, Marvel finally hits paydirt. Marvel Spotlight, a horror version of DC’s Showcase, brings us “Werewolf by Night,” “Ghost Rider,” and “The Son of Satan” while Tomb of Dracula, “Man-Thing” (taking over the previously all-reprint Fear book) and The Monster of Frankenstein all find an enthusiastic audience. These strips are essentially variations on Marvel’s patented “super-heroes with problems” approach (“monsters with issues,” if you will) which makes the monsters the stars and introduces strong continuity, ensuring reader loyalty. Still, the continuing presence of DC’s books must have been a constant challenge which Marvel, and Editor-In-Chief Roy Thomas in particular, simply can’t ignore, so between October 1972 and May ’73, four new anthology books hit the racks. Realizing that the old titles had sometimes lacked direction, Thomas decides to build a new line around adaptations of classic horror and science-fiction stories. The first issue of the revived Journey Into Mystery sets the pattern of things to come with a powerful Roy Thomas/Gil Kane adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Dig Me No Grave,” backed-up with contributions from Ralph Reese, Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, and Steve Skeates. Next month’s premiere, Chamber of Chills #1, is perhaps not quite so impressive although subsequent issues make up for that with some lovely Frank Brunner strips. One month later, yet another new book is released: Supernatural Thrillers, which is to feature book-length adaptations of varying quality. The first issue’s retelling of Ted Sturgeon’s “It!” by Thomas, Marie Severin, and Frank Giacoia is certainly strong but diluted somewhat by its similarity to Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, The Heap, et al. The last of the four books to appear is clearly a labor of love for Thomas: Worlds Unknown, which adapts classic s-f stories and is something of a dry run for the more highly regarded Unknown May 2001

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Steranko: Master Storyteller A personal look at Marvel’s greatest horror story, “At the Stroke of Midnight” Even my first glance at Jim Steranko’s “At the Stroke of Midnight” from Tower of Shadows #1 told me there was something more going on here than casual comic book fare. This horror tale, which is rather tame by the EC Comics standards of explicit gore, is a chilling nightmare; a Gothic noir tale of terror filled with dread, draped in paranoia thick enough to make H.P. Lovecraft proud. Consisting of 90 panels in only a seven-page tale, this graphic tour de force broke new ground upon its publication in 1969, shredding comic book conventions and proving Steranko was as much a student of film as sequential art, building on the visual techniques of the world’s greatest cinematographers. It is, simply put, breathtaking in execution. Even today, it resonates with mood and atmospherics rarely matched in our field. It’s a simple story of retribution from beyond the grave and, if you’ve never seen it, find a copy right away; it needs to be experienced to be fully understood and appreciated. As Steranko’s “My Heart Broke in Hollywood” (in Our Love Story #5) is the finest Marvel love story ever produced, so too is this Tower of Shadows story the best weird story to be published by the House of Ideas—perhaps the greatest horror tale printed by any publisher, rivaled only by Bernie Krigstein’s “Master Race” for innovative technique. (Interestingly, the romance and Tower stories were the last two Steranko produced for Marvel in this period, a sad testament to how out of touch the company— and perhaps the entire industry—was in advancing the art form. Not to take anything away from Steranko’s superb super-hero comics of the period, but this is the work I’ll remember most when another 30 years has passed.) According to the 1998 Vanguard Productions book Steranko: Graphic Prince of Darkness, the story was originally titled “The Lurking Fear at Shadow House”, but the name was changed by Marvel’s editor. Steranko also submitted an extraordinarily bold and innovative cover for that first issue (printed on the gatefold cover of the Vanguard book), but it was rejected by Stan Lee. (I urge readers to seek out Steranko’s original cover and comments on “Shadow House”; write to: Vanguard Productions, 59-A Philhower Road, Lebanon, NJ 08833.) For me personally, this story (and to a lesser extent Steranko’s impressive work on Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #3) served as a limitless well of inspiration for my early attempts at a future in art. The year I discovered both books (1979), my high school literary magazine was littered with my swipes of Steranko’s work, feebly aping his moody lighting technique. Despite the crude rendering, “my” illos got rave reviews; I guess even my lack of skill couldn’t hide the brilliance of the source material. If not for the encouragement I got from that experience, I may never have ventured into an advertising/graphic design career, and in turn might never have started publishing comics magazines. I guess you could say Steranko’s work—particularly “At the Stroke of Midnight”—is at least indirectly responsible for the magazine you’re holding. As I learned in high school, a strong foundation is important, and I started with the best. -John Morrow, publisher Above inset: Courtesy of Albert Moy, the splash page of Steranko’s masterpiece, “At the Stroke of Midnight,” from Tower of Shadows #1. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 15

EDITOR'S NOTE: Ye ed and my associate editor David A. Roach compiled a killer checklist detailing the contents of Marvel’s ill-fated horror and science-fiction anthology color comics but lack of space forced the index out of this ish. Perhaps we’ll include it as a look at the competition in our tentatively planned 2002 Roach & Cooke extravaganza focusing on the DC “Daring & Different” titles of 1968-76, the era of Carmine Infantino’s leadership. First, a question: Do readers really care for checklists of these relatively obscure titles?

Worlds of Science Fiction b-&-w magazine which emerges a few years later. However history begins to repeat itself and barely had the books started up when the dreaded reprints and pesky barbarians take over. After only five issues of Journey Into Mystery and four Chamber of Chills, the titles become all-reprint and after six solidly sf oriented issues Worlds Unknown becomes the two-issue home of George Tuska’s perma-grinning Sinbad the Sailor. Supernatural Thrillers’ first year is something of a mixed bag with Ron Goulart contributing a couple of solid scripts (as he would do also in JIM and COC) but with little to get excited about artistically with one very notable exception. Gil Kane had acquired the rights to the Robert E. Howard short story “The Valley of the Worm” and in #3 he and Roy Thomas create 21 pages of the most exciting comics of the 1970s. Greatly enhanced by Ernie Chua’s gritty inks, Kane’s art positively flies off the page while Thomas’s scripting manages to be both poignant and explosive, showing yet again that Marvel knew how to produce sword-&-sorcery strips supremely well. Sadly, the story’s hero—Niord—dies at the end which stymied any possible sequel (though Richard Corben produced his own superb version a few years later) but another Supernatural strip—”The Living Mummy”—would return. From #7 on, “The Mummy” (primarily by Tony Isabella and Val Mayerik) replaces the

adaptations, again showing that Marvel was happier with recurring characters than anthology books. Mayerik is a regular presence throughout the four titles as are his studio colleagues P. Craig Russell and Dan Adkins, and it is interesting to see how Thomas is happy to use a relatively small talent base on his new projects. Dan Adkins nurtures Russell and Mayerik’s talents and frequently the mentor supplies plots, layouts, and inks to their early efforts here and Russell’s strips in particular show a considerable—if raw—potential. Thomas for his part brings in Ron Goulart, George Alec Effinger, and John Jakes from the s-f field and also runs several strips from his Golden Age hero, Gardner Fox. As before, he is happy to mix art by newcomers (such as the previously mentioned Brunner, Russell, Starlin, and Mayerik—as well as Howard Chaykin in COC #4) with less fashionable veterans like Winslow Mortimer, Syd Shores, Sam Kweskin, Paul Reinman, Dick Ayers and even DC’s king of romance, Jay Scott Pike. While it’s undeniable that he runs his strongest material first, there is something of interest in most issues and there are many hidden gems waiting to be unearthed here. In Journey Into Mystery #4, Ron Goulart’s retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Haunter of the Dark” manages to convey a palpable sense of dread aided by some typically atmospheric Gene Colan/Dan Adkins artwork. By contrast, Gerry Conway’s adaptation of Frederic Brown’s “Arena” in Worlds Unknown #4 plays up the action and, with muscular artwork from John Buscema and Dick Giordano, more closely resembles Marvel’s super-hero books. As a rule though, the best issues are those featuring Gil Kane or Ralph Reese—or preferably both! The first Worlds Unknown manages this with stunning Reese art on Fred Pohl’s “The Day After the Day the Martians Came!” (adapted by Gerry Conway) and lyrical Kane drawings for Ed Hamilton’s “He That Hath Wings,” which the artist also scripted. Kane and Reese team-up on Ron Goulart’s smartly hip version of Robert Bloch’s “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” which is probably this period’s best adaptation (and some additional inks from Neal Adams do no harm at all either), for JIM #2. This second experiment lasts little more than a year, barely enough time to nurture any sort of market presence. Perhaps Marvel felt that they could establish themselves in the magazine arena instead, consequently as the adaptation books died, they are replaced almost overnight by a black-&-white horror line. Dracula Lives!, Vampire Tales, and the rest deserve an article to themselves but suffice to say that their mixture of established horror characters and punchy, well-crafted back-ups are often exciting, well drawn and challenging, but they too were disappointingly short-lived. 1975 was both a highwater mark for horror and also the beginning of the end. DC’s horror books are seemingly going strong with yet another new title—Secrets of Haunted House—joining their ranks. Charlton increases their mystery line to seven regular titles, now including Beyond the Grave, Monster Hunters, and Scary Tales. Marvel’s color and b-&-w books look like successes, Warren’s books are stronger than ever. Atlas’s fledgling empire is enthusiastically embracing horror in both color and b-&-w formats. And even Gold Key hangs in there with Boris Karloff, Twilight Zone, Grimm’s Ghost Stories, and the recent entry, The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor. But things are about to change. By the end of the year, Marvel’s horror b-&-ws are dead and buried, and the company chooses to concentrate on its action/superhero and (of course) barbarian magazines. DC begins cancelling old favorites like Swamp Thing, Phantom Stranger and even House of Secrets. Their new batch of horror characters, vigorously promoted in house ads throughout ’75 are almost all barbarians (remember Claw the Unconquered, Stalker, and Beowulf?) and only serve to underscore the genre’s slow decline. Atlas never makes it to ’76 and Charlton shuts down production of new material later that year, but in the midst of it all Marvel decides to give the genre one last go. In 1974, Marvel initiated a line of Giant-Size comics with somewhat generic titles like Giant-Size Super-Heroes and Giant-Size Creatures. Giant-Size Chillers #1 features a lengthy “Curse of Dracula” story by the usual team of Wolfman and Colan which introduces the sultry Lilith, the daughter of Dracula. Almost immediately, these cumbersome titles are abandoned and from their second issues on, Creatures becomes Giant-Size Werewolf and Chillers becomes Giant-Size Dracula. The Chillers name is clearly too good to lose COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Above: Gil Kane/Tom Palmer cover art for the revived Journey Into Mystery (#3). Note the use of the original logo which was redesigned for the published version. Courtesy of Tom Palmer. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

however, and the next year it is revived for Marvel’s last attempt at a DC-style horror book. The second Giant-Size Chillers #1 opens in startling fashion with “The Graveside Gorgon” which looks for all the world like it somehow strayed over from House of Mystery, with its Carl Wessler script and Alfredo Alcala art. All that is missing is Cain’s leering face on the splash page. Elsewhere the comic is a ragtag mixture of the bland and the bizarre with several strips apparently being refugees from the b-&-w line. Since these bite the dust after this issue appears, it would seem to be a unique case of using up inventory material before their parent comic had been cancelled. Amongst the strange bedfellows here are Spanish artists Marti Ripoll and Adolpho Buylla, the (surely) pseudonymous writer Ralph Alphonso, the unknown Mike Lombo and a very young Dave Gibbons making one of his first professional appearances anywhere. It also, inevitably, has a few reprints. The following issue mixes reprints (which included some lovely Bill Everett art) with three startlingly dull new strips, and by its third—and last—appearance, the comic is all-reprint, save for a lovely new Wrightson cover. So dies Marvel’s horror experiment. Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf By Night and, most successfully, Ghost Rider continue on for the rest of the decade and in sporadic revivals ever since. The success of the Blade film proves there might still be life yet in Marvel’s horror stars but their anthology books have languished in undeserved obscurity for over 25 years. When House of Mystery and Warren’s entire magazine empire give up the ghost in 1983, the grand tradition of horror comics that had thrived since ACG’s Adventures Into the Unknown way back in 1948 finally came to an end. DC’s Vertigo line may well have revived horror for a new generation of fans but it has little in common with the likes of Tales from the Crypt, Witching Hour, or Tower of Shadows. It is strange to reflect that with all its success in the ’70s, the decade where it finally supplanted DC as America’s best-selling comics house, Marvel could never make a success of the era’s dominant genre. However while financially their anthologies were a failure, creatively they were usually entertaining and occasionally inspired. May 2001

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5 6

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CBA Interview

Son of Stan: Roy’s Years of Horror Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief discusses the ’70s macabre mags

EDITOR'S NOTE:

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

While an in-depth discussion on the Marvel black-&-white horror line was completed during this interview, because of space considerations we’ve had to excise all of that discussion. CBA hopes to include Roy’s insightful comments on that aspect of Marvel’s history in a planned future issue devoted to the non-Warren b-&-w mags. Our apologies to R.T.

As a consulting editor for CBA, our next interview subject is heavily relied upon by us for deep background on many aspects of 1970s comics. It should go without saying to comics fans of Marvel’s “Second Wave,” that Roy Thomas served as Stan Lee’s immediate successor as the company’s Editor-In-Chief for a short, but eminently memorable tenure, helming the celebrated horror revival, never mind initiating the barbarian frenzy of that decade. It was Ye Ed’s pleasure to interview the talented writer/editor by telephone on March 8, 2001. Roy copyedited the final transcript.

CBA: Marvel had traditionally been a catch-up company in that they would follow an innovative leader, whether it was the crime or romance genre, whatever genre that was currently successful... Roy: Even Fantastic Four was follow-the-leader. CBA: I guess it was, but it became an anomaly unto itself. Roy: It wasn’t intended that way, that’s not what Martin Goodman had in mind! [laughs] It was follow-the-leader, another super-hero book. It was only Stan and Jack Kirby together who made it something more. CBA: And then Marvel conquered the comics universe in the ’60s. They were finally leading the pack! Roy: By the late ’60s, early ’70s, yeah… I think it was in ’72 that Marvel finally passed DC in total sales, but they were gaining all the way through. In that two weeks I spent at DC in ’65, they were having meetings about the heat from Marvel, and I was startled, because I hadn’t realized how much they felt the competition from Marvel, which of course they’d see Marvel’s sales figures since they distributed Marvel. CBA: What was the concept behind the Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness books? Roy: DC was having some luck with House of Mystery and House of Secrets. After all, Marvel at one time had basically had a lock on the horror market… not in terms of quality, but in terms of quantity. [laughs] They had tremendous sales during the early ’50s, so it was a natural to try to get back into the genre again. The only problem was that, after the first issue or two, with our being too busy to pay a lot of attention to them, they didn’t have the focus Joe Orlando could give to the DC books by concentrating on a handful of titles. Stan would concentrate on the books for the first issue or two, but then they were supposed to run themselves. He wasn’t going to be in on every plot conference, and I had too many things to do to go over every little story, so we just tried to hire a bunch of people to do good stories. But they didn’t ever have any unity. Carmine Infantino says that Joe Orlando was the “secret weapon” in DC’s mystery comics, and maybe to some extent that’s true. Even though we had Archie Goodwin working there part of the time, we really didn’t have anybody that really concentrated on that editorially. Archie was a freelance writer, and I was concerned with other things, and couldn’t do all of it, nor could Stan. CBA: You started off incredibly, right out of the gate, with Tower of Shadows, having a superb story by Steranko. How was that

assigned to him? Did he come up with the story? Roy: I don’t recall, but I would imagine that Stan went to Steranko as somebody who could do that kind of thing. Maybe Steranko had talked to him about it, I really don’t know. Didn’t Steranko do a cover, but we weren’t able to use it, it wasn’t clear enough for Goodman? CBA: Yeah, right. It was an amazing cover. Roy: But it was a problem, because sometimes you had two or three different people running the company. Stan and Goodman were increasingly on different wavelengths as the time came near the end of their relationship. CBA: With Stan focusing on those first two issues of Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness, he was getting the best artists in the industry to contribute, right? Steranko, Neal Adams, Wally Wood all did stories, even a young Barry Smith. Roy: And Vinnie Colletta inked Barry’s stories! Barry had all these weird faces in trees in one story, and Vinnie just went, “It’s a tree!” and inked it like that! [laughter] That wasn’t one of our better pairings. CBA: Who determined the stories have the actual writers and artists introduce the stories? Roy: Probably Stan. I think he wanted to give the book some personality, so he said, “Well, we’ll have the writers do some, and the artists do some.” Of course, the writer ended up writing the artist’s words, but I don’t think there were any artists who wanted to bother with the writing. I would write Barry, and if he wanted to change something, that would’ve been fine. Those introductions were a nice touch which evaporated after a few issues. Stan wanted to start off with these host characters… like the “Gravedigger” that Steranko came up with. That seemed like it was copying not just DC, but EC and everything else that had gone before, so Stan was looking for something different. I think that’s why he came up with the idea of having the artists and writers introduce the stories. It was kind of cute for the little length of time it lasted—not very long, I think. CBA: The titles obviously became reprint books... Roy: From the very beginning I don’t think sales were that great, and I don’t believe there was the commitment to stick around and do it, because they were so much trouble compared to the super-hero books, having three different sets of writers and artists every issue, as opposed to one. We weren’t really geared for it, because we didn’t have a big editorial staff, like DC. Stan and I were editing everything, and the writers were editing what they did, and we had a few assistant editors that didn’t really have any authority… that was about it. We didn’t have the right kind of a set-up at the time to make a hit of those books. I think the black-&-whites did a little better later, simply because people like Marv and others could come in and be editors, concentrating on a handful of books. CBA: So Chamber and Tower were pretty much children of neglect? Roy: I think so. CBA: Who was Mimi Gold? Roy: Mimi Gold was a young woman who worked at Marvel—I don’t remember how she got a job—but she came in, worked as a general assistant around the place. The thing I remember most about her, besides that she was a fun person, was that she took it upon herself to spend a lot of time working on getting Barry Smith back into the States after he was forcibly deported. The two of them went together for a while. In fact, I remember when my wife Jeanie and I went to Britain in the summer of 1970, we spent a lot of time with COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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the two of them, because she had gone over ahead. They were together for a little while after Barry came back, but then they went their separate ways. CBA: Who was Allyn Brodsky? Roy: I forget how I met him, but I remember I had him come to my apartment once. He’d written a letter, and he was—no relation to Sol—a nice personable young man in his twenties who was knowledgeable about horror. Although I’d seen the name before, he’s the person who really turned me on to H.P. Lovecraft. He became an assistant editor. A lot of the writers had a left-leaning feel to their writing, but Allyn was more conservative, and that made for a little balance. He turned out not to be the greatest proofreader in the world, but he did some writing for the company for a while. I saw him for the last time at Christy Marx’s house, maybe 15 years ago. I wish I knew where he was now! He’s the guy who ended up doing most of the rewriting on the “Casablanca” story [in Sgt. Fury #72, as related in Roy’s article “Play It Again, Stan!” in Alter Ego V.3, #6] and I’d like to talk to him about it and see what he can remember that the rest of us have forgotten, because he spent a whole weekend with that monster! Allyn Brodsky, where are you?!? [laughter] He was out in the L.A. area, last I heard. CBA: Was there talk in the office about liberalizing the Code? Roy: Oh, yes, Stan was always wanting to do that, because he felt increasingly constrained by the Code. The drug thing was part of it, I think that’s what brought some of it to a head, but I think it was always constraining. Not that Stan wanted to go wild and return to the horror days of the ’50s—he practically had nightmares about being kept off PXs in those days!—but combine the Wertham scare May 2001

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with that American News debacle in ’57, and it was a bad decade. He just wanted to liberalize the Code so we could make our own choices, as opposed to having somebody tell us, “You can’t say this, you can’t do that.” CBA: Did you sit in on any of those Code meetings? Roy: No, they were closed meetings. Stan had to go, though he didn’t like to, just like Carmine didn’t. I had dinner once or twice once in a while with Len Darvin, the head of the Code, with whom I was quite friendly. I remember when I was married in ’68, he took my bride Jeanie and me out to dinner. We didn’t always agree on the censorship stuff, but he was a nice guy. He’d been a lawyer and then drifted into being the head of the Code when Mrs. Guy Percy Trulock quit. CBA: When did Len become head of the Code? Roy: I think it was late ’65, early ’66, a few months after I got there. Mrs. Trulock was offered a subscription to any issue of Marvel she wanted when she left, and she chose Thor, because she liked the language. [laughter] There had been that judge in the ’50s, then there was Mrs. Trulock, and then Darvin for many years. Len and I would fight on the phone, but I didn’t deal with him too often. I remember having a few weird conversations about changes in Conan, but it was usually pretty civilized. I think I respected him more than some of the other old-line people did, and I think he sensed that I didn’t have the ingrown hostility toward him. You’d think, being younger, maybe I would have, but I didn’t. I was brought up with respect for my elders, and I didn’t automatically think that, just because he was working for the Code, he had to be an idiot. CBA: Were you champing at the bit for liberalization of the Code?

Above: The whole blamed Marvel bullpen pose for a Rolling Stone camera in 1971, the same year horror returned to the comics house. Can you name all the inmates? Give it a go and we’ll give you a Yo-Prize if you’re correct! Photo by D.E. Leach. ©1971 Straight Arrow Publications.

Left inset: Our Man Stan, chief architect of the horror revival at Marvel. This pic is from an unidentified British fanzine which featured a Stan Lee interview in the ’70s. Courtesy of Jerry K. Boyd. ©2001 the respective copyright holder.

Above: Future Nexus creator & scribe Mike Baron freelanced for the legendary rock’n’roll magazine Creem, contributing an article on the Marvel bullpen for this, the April 1973 issue, complete with John Romita cover art. Spider-Man ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Boy Howdy ©1973 Creem Magazine.

HORROR HOST QUIZ ANSWERS 1.) Gene Colan. 2.) Don Heck. 3.) Tom Palmer. 4.) Bernie Wrightson. 5.) Tom Sutton. 6.) Sal Buscema. 7.) Bill Everett & Dan Adkins. 8.) Barry WindsorSmith. 9.) Syd Shores. 10.) Stan Lee.

Below: Roy Thomas, who shared co-hosting credit with Tom Palmer on their adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” in Tower of Shadows #9. From the original art courtesy of the artist, Tom Palmer. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Roy: Oh, I suppose I was, to some extent. We’d always had this thing in fandom about doing comics for adults. It’s just that at that time, our idea of comics for adults meant super-heroes who occasionally got laid! [laughter] I don’t think we were thinking in terms of what the field has turned to in recent years. CBA: How did the news come to you that the Code was being liberalized? Did you feel it in the wind? Roy: Well, it was in the wind that there was pressure on to do it. All of a sudden Stan told us they were making these changes in the Code, and we could do certain things now, including using vampires and werewolves… There really wasn’t too much other than that, really, because we weren’t looking for too much. We just wanted to cover different subject matters, and not have something automatically a no-no. But the Code change happened to coincide with Stan going off to write a film with Alain Renais. He suddenly wanted a vampire in Amazing Spider-Man #101, so it was up to Gil and me to create Morbius. Otherwise Stan would’ve made up a similar but different character. CBA: I’ve got some Xeroxes of original art by Gene Colan of the first issue of Tomb of Dracula, and it looks to me oriented to be 81/2” x 11”. It’s weird to look at the whole issue as printed, and it’s obvious that the art was extended vertically and horizontally to adapt to the comic-size page… Roy: What year did that come out in? CBA: 1972. Roy: I seem to recall that I plotted that issue from a few sentences verbally from Stan, and finishing it on New Year’s Eve, and then joined Jeanie at a party at John Verpoorten’s after I dropped it in the mail. I didn’t take any real credit on it, so I never get any residuals. [laughter] I gave it to Gerry Conway to dialogue. CBA: It came out in April ’72. Roy: Okay, so it must’ve been late ’71 I worked on that. Or maybe it was another book. I don’t remember anything about it being originally planned as a black-&-white. How does that compare to the date of Savage Tales #1? That would be interesting, maybe Stan was going to do both at one time! Let’s see, I know 1971 was the cover date, I’m just looking at when. It may have been that, Stan was going to do both a Savage Tales and a b-&-w Dracula book, then decided… I don’t know, it could even be that Savage Tales was originally slated to come out first, and then for various reasons Goodman decided to wait. Remember, Goodman and his son, Chip, were still making those decisions at that time. Chip, in that last year or less before Stan took over, was the official publisher as Martin withdrew from the business more. I don’t know if Goodman was even in the office then, because I never saw him very much anyway. His office was way at the other end of the hall. CBA: Prior to Dracula Lives! #1, you just can’t recall if Stan wanted to do a Dracula black-&-white book? Roy: No, except that I’m sure that the idea appealed to him. Whether he actually planned that to be one, I really don’t know. If Gene drew at that kind of proportions, he wouldn’t have done that unless it was supposed to be black-&-white, it’s hard for me to imagine he got it confused. So maybe Tomb of Dracula was intended to be black-&-white at one stage. CBA: Do you recall Gene’s desire to ink that book?

Roy: Sure. Gene had a promise from Stan to ink it, because Gene said he really wanted to. I remember being in the room with Stan and somebody else—probably Sol Brodsky, or Verpoorten—and the thing was, Stan was on the phone with Gene, and Gene was obviously pushing to ink this book, and Stan was saying—I don’t remember the exact words, it became sort of famous, it was really only a paraphrase, so I don’t want to be unfair to Stan—but basically Stan was saying that if Gene was going to keep reminding him of this, he wasn’t going to be able to tell him anything anymore. [laughs] Stan had felt that circumstances had changed. Maybe he decided Gene was too valuable to spend time inking. I just don’t recall. I just know that Gene pushed very hard, and they finally compromised. Gene inked the first issue, but he never inked any others. I think he just wanted to ink that first one, that’s all he cared about. Probably, you know, and I don’t think Stan would have wanted him to go on inking, because Gene was too valuable as a penciler, and he felt he’d rather just have Gene pencil. CBA: That could be the one instance where Gene inked his own work at Marvel? Roy: There weren’t many! I think he may have done a black-&white thing later. Of course, in the early days, he inked his own pencils, but not at that time. Nor do I know anything about the idea that Bill Everett was going to be the original Dracula artist. But it’s probably true, if Gene remembers it; he’d have more reason to remember it than I would. Gene would’ve been much more dependable than Bill anyway. Although Bill had been a great horror artist in the ’50s, I don’t think by the early ’70s his penciling would’ve had that appeal anymore. It was a different market, and I don’t think Bill’s pencils were quite up to that anymore. CBA: Was it your idea to do Tomb of Dracula? Roy: No, it was Stan’s. He was the one pushing on this. Gil and I, of course, had wanted to introduce Dracula into Spider-Man #101 earlier, but Stan said, no he wanted a super-villain vampire, so we made up Morbius, whom we made not a real vampire. CBA: In Stan’s mind, he might’ve had plans for Dracula, possibly to introduce him in his own series? Roy: Possibly so, but I think it’s more he wanted a new character, didn’t want to use Dracula at that time. Still, Dracula was kind of a natural. Then, when that was a hit, he wanted to do more like it. CBA: Do you know why it was called Tomb of Dracula? Why not just Dracula? Roy: I suspect it had a lot to do with Crypt of Terror, Vault of Horror, at EC. Also, Stan probably had in the back of his mind that you can’t trademark “Dracula” as easily. He’s a public domain character. But Tomb of Dracula or Dracula Lives!, you could have those titles trademarked. CBA: It was your concept that eventually became Werewolf by Night? Roy: I had this idea for something called “I, Werewolf.” I wanted it narrated in first person, and Stan loved it. It sort of combined SpiderMan with I Was a Teenage Werewolf. My wife Jeanie and I plotted the first issue one day when we got bored with a car show at Columbus Center in New York City, but I didn’t like to write that stuff, so I’d always give assignments like that to Gerry, as I did with Tomb of Dracula and the first Man-Thing story, which I plotted with a few suggestions from Stan. Stan liked everything but the title “I, Werewolf.” He wanted to call it Werewolf by Night, and since all I cared about was the concept, not the name, that was fine by me. It was still narrated in the first person. I told Gerry to do it that way, and it worked out very well. Almost everything else after the first issue, the Darkhold and various things, was pretty much Gerry’s, I think. CBA: Son of Satan, where did that come from? Roy: That was supposed to be “Mark of Satan.” If Tomb of Dracula was such a big hit, Satan would be bigger! [laughter] Stan called me into the office one day, and said he wanted to do a book called Mark of Satan, but this time, the hero/villain was going to be Satan himself. I went to a parochial Lutheran school, but I’m not religious, but I thought this was going to get us in trouble, and who needs it? I didn’t even like the idea. So I went off and thought about it for a little bit, and I came back and said, “I think we’re asking for trouble with Mark of Satan, but what if you made it Son of Satan? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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You could still have Satan as a character, but he’s not the hero.” It’s a little different from Dracula, where the heroes were the human beings fighting the vampire. Stan loved it, and it was only a little later I realized that name and basic concept had been a fanzine comic by a friend of mine, Biljo White, back in the early ’60s! He wound up looking even looking a lot like Biljo’s character, by sheer coincidence, because I don’t think Herb Trimpe and Gary Friedrich, who did the actual story, ever saw him and I don’t think I described it much. The branded chest, a trident, and so forth… I think it just came out looking almost identical. I explained it to Biljo, and he understood, but it was really weird, because if you look at his old fanzine, it’s almost the same character! CBA: How did Ghost Rider morph from a Western to a horror character? Roy: I had made up a character as a villain in Daredevil—a very lackluster character—called Stunt-Master. I took the name from Simon & Kirby’s Stuntman, but I made him a motorcyclist. Anyway, when Gary Friedrich started writing Daredevil, he said, “Instead of Stunt-Master, I’d like to make the villain a really weird motorcycle-riding character called Ghost Rider.” He didn’t describe him. I said, “Yeah, Gary, there’s only one thing wrong with it,” and he kind of looked at me weird, because we were old friends from Missouri, and I said, “That’s too good an idea to be just a villain in Daredevil. He should start out right away in his own book.” When Gary wasn’t there the day we were going to design it, Mike Ploog, who was going to be the artist, and I designed the character. I had this idea for the skull-head, something like Elvis’ 1968 Special jumpsuit, and so forth, and Ploog put the fire on the head, just because he thought it looked nice. Gary liked it, so they went off and did it. Then of course, you had to change the Western Ghost Rider into Night Rider, and Phantom Rider, [laughs] and Bill Black has the Haunted Horseman… Ghost Rider has had more names than Elizabeth Taylor’s spouses! CBA: Why put Morbius in his own color and black-&-white series? Roy: We were trying to expand, so why not? I don’t think there was too much profound thought; we just thought he was a good character, and ought to be in a color comic as well as the b-&-ws. After all, he came out of Amazing Spider-Man. CBA: What other horror characters have I overlooked? Roy: The Living Mummy! Stan wanted a mummy character, and we couldn’t just call him “The Mummy,” so we came up with “The May 2001

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Living Mummy.” Somehow, we made him black, which was unusual. I don’t know whether that was Steve Gerber or me or whoever. But by that stage, we just had so many we weren’t paying much attention, and were just sort of throwing them out. The ones that sank, sank, and the ones that swam, swam. We also had the Golem, which Len Wein wrote, and the only distinction that had was—it was okay, but it didn’t sell very well—according to Gerry Conway, checking sales records in 1976, was it actually outsold the early issues of Strange Tales featuring “Warlock” by Jim Starlin that succeeded the Golem series, even though of course Warlock has made more of a mark over the years. We were just trying to do a little bit of everything. So since we had a werewolf, we did Man-Wolf. Stan just wanted a character called Man-Wolf. It was that whole Marvel-flooding-the-market thing! If you’ve got Dracula, you can have Morbius. If you’ve got Werewolf, you can have Man-Wolf. We didn’t have a

Above: Neal Adams thumbnail of Robert E. Howard characters. Art ©2001 Neal Adams. Characters ©2001 Robert E. Howard Estate. Below: Gotta love that voodoo they do so well! Ye ed just couldn’t resist asking Bongo for the art to this fake Odd Tales house ad— poking fun at Marvel’s ’70s character Brother Voodoo—after seeing it in an advance copy of Radioactive Man #222 (Vol. 2, #2) written by CBA pal Batton Lash. Man, do these guys know their comics or wot? Courtesy of Bill Morrison. ©2001 Bongo Entertainment, Inc.

Above: Perhaps the highpoint of the legendary string of Gil Kane/Roy Thomas collaborations was their adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s short story “The Valley of the Worm,” featured in Supernatural Thrillers #3. Though partially dialogued by Gerry Conway, it was the quintessential Kane/Thomas production, also featuring spot-on inks by Ernie Chua (Chan). The closing line, “Death came to me in the Valley of the Worm,” still sends chills down Ye Ed’s spine. Characters ©2001 the Estate of Robert E. Howard. Adaptation ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

concept for Man-Wolf, and Gerry and John Romita were trying to come up with something. My only contribution was to say, “Hey, make it J. Jonah Jameson’s son! He was an astronaut, and he went up in space, and he found a moon rock, and it turns him into a wolf!” Just like Morbius was a science-fictional vampire, we could make Man-Wolf a science-fiction werewolf. CBA: Brother Voodoo. Roy: There was an old comic company, Superior, which had these tall titles that took up a third to a half a cover. One of them was Voodoo, and I had made up a character years ago, who was more of the Phantom type, called Dr. Voodoo, and I’d used that big “Voodoo” logo and I had a little “Dr.” up in the corner (like the Dr. Strange logo I helped design later). I said, “Let’s do a character who’s into voodoo, and tied to Jamaica in some way.” I don’t know if I saw him being black—he’d almost have to be—but I just don’t recall offhand much about it, except the name Dr. Voodoo. Stan didn’t like that, but he suggested, “It’s Brother Voodoo!” I said, “Okay, it’s Brother Voodoo.” [laughs] Len did a good job with the Jamaican accent. He’s always kidded me because later, when I had this vague idea for a Wolverine character, I told him I wanted to see how he’d handle a Canadian accent! [laughter] I guess everybody said “Eh” at the end of sentences… and “aboot.” [laughter] CBA: Was Marvel just flooding the market, or were these books actually selling that you could ascertain? Roy: Well, a lot of them did! The ones that didn’t sell didn’t last very long, obviously. We did flood the market, but remember, this was that period, too, which Carmine talks about—and he thought on a management a higher level than I did—where Marvel suddenly decided to put out a whole bunch of books, and DC would have to match it. Then there was a paper shortage in ’73, so everybody put out fewer books… It was just constantly playing around with stuff, trying to get market share… it was really survival of the fittest. There

were only these two companies, really, doing that kind of comic, competing with each other. Archie and Harvey weren’t really competing with anybody, and nobody else really competed with Marvel except Warren with the black-&-whites. I think Marvel and DC were a little like two groggy fighters out there, punch-drunk, [laughter] who’ve been at it too long, and they’re just slugging away, and the fight doesn’t have any meaning. The audience has gone home. Actually, there was something of an audience. Lots of stuff came out in the ’70s because of this approach. But, because either a concept was good, or the individual creators were good, a lot of stuff came out that was really good! A lot of original super-heroes that Stan had created a decade earlier were getting a little long in the tooth, but in the meantime, you’d have Master of Kung Fu, Conan, McGregor and Russell’s “Killraven” (which never sold really well, but it was an interesting book that caught a certain audience), and Tomb of Dracula under Marv, and several other books that really did have a flavor, and which I think hold up compared to the better books before and after. I don’t know if Sturgeon’s Law—90% of everything is crap—is true, but in general, sure, most of the stuff isn’t going to be terribly good, but if you’ve got a whole mess of books, and a handful are good, well, that’s not too bad. And a lot of them did sell reasonably well, but a lot of them were just out there, and if they didn’t make it, we just dropped them and tried something else. CBA: But you did personally focus on at least one horror strip that I recall. You wrote a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel in Dracula Lives! Roy: Yeah, I wanted to do that, and Dick Giordano loved the idea, and we continued it for a long time. Only because eventually the book died did we stop. We completed about 100 pages, spread over most issues of Dracula Lives!, and I think the last one might’ve been in something else. We got about halfway through Stoker’s novel. Dick and I had been looking for years to reprint the first part and finCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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ish our adaptation—we even talked to Marvel just a few years ago, and they showed some interest, but nothing ever came of it. The work would’ve been probably the most faithful adaptation of Dracula ever done in comics. Whether somebody wants that or not, I don’t know. I enjoyed working on Bram Stoker’s Dracula—the so-called movie adaptation—in the early-’90s for Topps, but it really wasn’t Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I think Dick’s and mine was a nice, faithful adaptation, and I’m real proud of working on it with him. CBA: Did you enjoy working with Dick? Roy: Oh, yeah. For Marvel’s tastes, Dick is a relatively quiet artist, he draws more realistically, he’s not primarily an action artist, but a good artist who makes everything look real and if you get the right subject matter—and certainly, Dracula was that—he definitely will shine. Some of the books that fit him just right, like Dracula, or the Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt that Dann and I did with him, I really enjoyed. For certain projects, he’d just bring something to the table that very few people could have. CBA: Were there books you would’ve liked to have done of horror material? You profess you’ve never really had an interest in horror material, right? Roy: I enjoy it a little more now in some ways than I used to, like when I did the adaptation of Carmilla, the pre-Dracula story for Spain a year or so ago, and I’m supposed to do more of those. But in the early-’50s, when I was 10, 12 years old, I just had a feeling horror comics would give me nightmares. I remember seeing what turned out to be the first issue of Eerie—it had a lead story about a man-eating tiger, drawn by Bob Fujitake—and I also recall a particular scene in another horror comic of some Huckleberry Finn-type kid walking down the road at night, and he meets a vampire, there’s a feeding, and the boy is found dead… I haven’t seen that comic again in 50 years, but I remember it! I also remember these EC stories that I would sneak-read at the stands for a few seconds. Years later, when I met Len Brown, who had a complete EC collection, I’d ask him, “What about the story where this happened, or what about that one?” and he’d say, “Did you have those?” I said, “No, I saw them at the stands one day, glanced through it, and just remember the story!” [laughter] They made a real impression on me! I have an uncle who had a few of EC’s science-fiction titles, but even they were a little too horrific for me, until they got to Incredible Science Fiction. But as far as horror stories I would’ve liked to have done, there weren’t many. I liked doing the Dracula adaptation, that was a lot of fun, but I didn’t have any desire to do a lot of original horror stories. I wouldn’t have minded adapting Frankenstein or one of the great classic tales, but I felt, “Eh, there’s enough of that other stuff, I don’t need to add to it.” CBA: Were you proud of Gary and Mike’s version of Monster of Frankenstein? Roy: Oh, yeah. It was handled that way on my instructions. I wanted to adapt the novel in the first few issues, and then go on from there, and I think they did a great job with it. I wanted to do it myself, but you can’t do everything. CBA: [laughs] So you gave it over to Gary. Roy: Yeah. I don’t know if I ever came close to doing it, but I certainly wanted to. CBA: Did you pick Mike Ploog for the job? Roy: Probably. Mike kept doing all the hairy creatures, Man-Thing, Werewolf… [laughter] maybe because he was this big, burly guy with a beard, I don’t know! [laughter] Mike and I were originally supposed to do a Western together, called “Tin Star,” which he made up, about a Western guy with amnesia, and all he had to go by for his identity was a marshal’s silver star he found in his pocket—with a bullet hole in it. And from there, you could take it anywhere! [laughs] I think we spent about 15 minutes working on that before Stan said, “You ain’t gonna work on no Western!” [laughs] and he shoved Mike off to something else. CBA: How did Tomb of Dracula initially do? It obviously went through a number of writers. Roy: It sold okay, but we couldn’t get good writing. Gerry worked out fine, but he was just too busy to keep it, I guess. We went through Gardner Fox, who just wasn’t a Marvel-type writer, as important and as great as he was in his own way. He was near the end of his career, and wasn’t that interested, anyway. Archie, of May 2001

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course, would’ve worked out okay, but he probably wasn’t too interested in remaining. CBA: So Tomb of Dracula was just a bone thrown to Marv? Roy: Marv was a logical choice. He’d been writing horror comics, knew how to write them. It’s not that Archie and Gerry couldn’t have been, too. Even Gardner had some good moments, and part of what Gardner did was—I was trying to get a Lovecraft aura infused into the book, so to some extent, maybe I led him astray. But the third or fourth time with a writer, you get lucky; sometimes it just takes a little while, before sooner or later, someone comes along, and something clicks. Like Jim Starlin on Captain Marvel and so forth. Something really clicks. Other times, combinations of artist and writer and character look like they’ll go like a house afire, but don’t work out that well. CBA: So it clicked with Tomb of Dracula? Roy: Yeah. Not that Tomb of Dracula was always the greatest seller in the world, but it was steady. I think it went up and down, and had its moments. It was a good, solid seller at the very least, and in addition to that, I wasn’t the editor for too long before I left, and I never read the damn thing! [laughs] I’d glance at it. I knew what Marv was doing with Gene, and I remember Blade and the various characters, but I never paid much attention to the thing because I’d discovered I wasn’t really interested in being editor-in-chief anyway. The book looked good, it was selling, and Marv was doing a good job, so why pay attention? I’d go off and pay attention to some book that wasn’t

Above: Originally intended for the unrealized Savage Tales #2—yes, there eventually was a ST #2 but, well, it’s a long story—Neal Adams drew an exquisite “Man-Thing” story to be printed entirely from his pencils. While somewhat marred by redrawn faces by John Romita—What, Neal can’t draw beautiful women??? What was the thinking there?—the Len Weinscribed tale did finally see print, of all places, in Astonishing Tales #12, bracketed by a Ka-Zar story. Courtesy of Albert Moy. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Frank Robbins & Frank Springer’s nifty splash to the illfated monster team appearance in Marvel Premiere #28. Below: Say, wasn’t the revitalized Beast series a monster comic? Well, Ye Ed sure thinks so, being a huge fan of the Englehart/Ploog/Sutton series! ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

doing that well. CBA: Were you aware of the level of consistency that book maintained? Roy: In a general sense. I’d look at it, it always looked good. I could see that Marv always had this mature approach. Even though I didn’t necessarily read it myself that carefully, whatever I read I always liked. CBA: It was a consistently good-looking book, with a mature point of view. Marv had a level of autonomy with it. Roy: The writers at Marvel, generally speaking, served as sort of unpaid editors anyway, to a certain extent, starting with me! That didn’t mean there wasn’t always somebody over you; Stan was over me, and I was over them. But as long as things were going okay, and you didn’t press your luck, a writer could get away with a lot. You didn’t get any money for being a de facto editor, but what you did get was this certain amount of freedom which you weren’t going to get at a lot of other companies, and people knew it. I didn’t automatically exclude artists from this, but it would’ve had to be an artist who was also a writer. Maybe some artist could’ve convinced me, or two guys…. Sometimes they’d come in together, like Starlin and Englehart on “Master of Kung Fu,” and they worked it out between themselves! [laughs] Sort of the Franklin D. Roosevelt school of comic book editing. CBA: So your policy was delegation? Roy: My feeling was, I knew I didn’t have the power Stan had had as editor-in-chief, because he was right there, and

I wasn’t looking for that. I wasn’t threatened by anybody, and who’s going to have a better rapport with Stan than I did? It was very good, most of the time, so I didn’t feel that insecure. Therefore, I didn’t worry about somebody coming along who was too good, as far as I was concerned. Sometimes, earlier, certain people like Steranko would annoy me—not Steranko himself—but the fact that Stan would let him do things that he wouldn’t let the rest of us do, some of the fancy Eisneresque titles that Bill Everett and I had wanted to do earlier but Stan nixed. Steranko just went ahead and did it, because he was a writer and a penciler. I felt secure enough in my own situation that I just wanted to get the best writers I could. Maybe if I’d got somebody too good, I would’ve worried. But these guys were all good, and I wanted them to be good! CBA: Was it your idea to do “The Legion of Monsters” in Marvel Premiere? Roy: I think that’s after my time. It’s the kind of thing I would’ve done, [laughs] but I didn’t. CBA: Did you hire Tony Isabella? Roy: Yes. I knew Tony partly through fan things. We’d been in touch, and I had threatened to sue him once over a story he was repeating—something about me and kickbacks, which I knew was a bunch of crap—and somebody had groused off to him, and he published it, and I threatened to sue him, so he withdrew it. So, a couple of months later, he was kind of startled by me when I suddenly called and offered him a job! [laughter] What happened was, Stan was always hiring these guys out of college, Steve Skeates was one, and Steve was a good writer, but he and Stan weren’t on the same wavelength. This time, Stan hired somebody to write just a lot of copy for him, different things, press releases, whatever—Tony would remember. This other guy didn’t work out, so I told Stan, “I know somebody who could do this.” So I called Tony, and that was it! CBA: So Tony was hired for a specific job? Roy: Of course, the idea was always that he’d do some writing for the comics, too. That job kind of vanished very quickly, and Tony just became another writer and editor up there. [laughs] And when I called up Tony, he probably thought he was going to get another lawsuit threat! [laughter] But we’ve been buddies ever since. CBA: Gothic Thrillers—which became Supernatural Thrillers—what was the idea for that? Roy: DC had that gothic mansion thing, so I guess we avoided using that word at the last minute. Anyway, it became Supernatural Thrillers, and it gave me an excuse to do the real “It!” in #1. Like Marvel’s other mystery books, after a few issues it disintegrated, and we ended up with this modern-day Headless Horseman running around fighting cars. [laughter] On one of those books, Winslow Mortimer drew Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Winslow had been a fine artist drawing those Superman and Batman covers of World’s Finest and so forth, but somehow or another, his work was just too mild for the horror books, and Stan gave me a lot of grief about the Mortimer job. We had some great Steranko covers, I got Steranko to do covers whenever possible on that, and the jungle girl books and other comics. CBA: Do you remember the production on “It”? Was that Frank Giacoia? Roy: Yeah, he inked it over Marie. I bought the rights to do the story. Gerry Conway got me Ted’s phone number, because Gerry was a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, I had him and Jeanie, my first wife, sitting in the living room while I went into the bedroom, where the phone was, and I said, “I’ve got to call Sturgeon and ask if we can adapt his story.” We had a flat rate of $150 we could pay. It’s one thing to talk to Glenn Lord about Robert E. Howard; it’s another thing to call Theodore Sturgeon. I hadn’t read that much by him, but I knew who he was, and I loved this story. So, 15 minutes later, I come out of the bedroom to get a drink of water, and Gerry says, “What did he say?” I said, “I don’t know, I haven’t got up the nerve to call him yet!” I’d sat there for 15 minutes, I couldn’t call him! [laughter] But finally I went back in, I called him, and of course, he was totally friendly, and by the time the conversation was over, he’d given me full permission to do it, we’d worked out all the details, and he asked if I could send him the $150 right away, because he needed it for an alimony payment. [laughter] We laughed about it at San Diego cons later. But everybody was just COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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great, except for Arthur C. Clarke, and we didn’t try Bradbury again, since we knew that wouldn’t work. We couldn’t get Asimov or Heinlein either, but we could get an awful lot of people! Through Forry Ackerman, we got A.E. Van Vogt, and I had Don and Maggie Thompson adapt a story of his I liked, and some of those “Space Beagle” stories I felt influenced Star Trek. A lot of people… Larry Niven, different people… were very happy to see their work adapted, because I gave them a new audience that might then go and buy their books, just as a lot of people have told me they came to Conan through the comics. I love comics, but I always considered them, even now, a lower form of literature than some others, and so, I felt even doing pulp stories and science-fiction elevates comics to some extent. CBA: One I recall very fondly is “Valley of the Worm.” Roy: Yeah, that was nice. I was going through my separation with my wife at the time so Gerry had to come in and bail me out by dialoguing the last half, which I was real sorry about, in retrospect, simply because it’s a favorite story of mine. Gil and I had both loved that story. Gil, of course, was a Robert E. Howard fan long before I was, I bought all his Gnome Press hardbounds. And while it’s not true Gil was the one who talked me into doing Conan—that was a thing I came up with on my own—but he was really a cheerleader for it in the early days. I’d always talked to him about the stuff, and he was always full of enthusiasm about Robert E. Howard and that kind of literature. Of course, at one time, if we could’ve afforded it, he would’ve been the original Conan comics artist, after John Buscema couldn’t do it. CBA: When it gets down to an assessment of those days, a lot of the titles, like Monster of Frankenstein, Supernatural Thrillers and books like that, had a great start-up, but they just withered due to neglect. Was it an enormous volume of work? Roy: Yeah, I don’t know, maybe if I—and later Marv and Len—if we’d kept on top of everything—but it was just such an awful lot of work, and so some of it just kind of got away from us. The best of the stuff did well, and the rest of it just kind of sank. CBA: So, did you enjoy the Marvel foray into horror? Roy: Oh, yeah. It wasn’t my kind of thing, really. But we did the best we could. CBA: Those books felt as if your influence was in them. Roy: Even if I didn’t talk to people much, they knew what I wanted, and they sort of knew what Stan wanted, because they’d been reading the Marvel books for years. They’d read Stan’s stuff, they’d read my stuff, they’d read the people who were coming along after us, they knew the kind of thing we wanted, and they combined that with things they learned at other companies. Just like I combined Stan Lee with Gardner Fox and other people, they combined what they liked about Marvel with Joe Orlando and EC and so forth. That was fine with me, because the company had gotten too big at that stage, and branched out too much, to have everything reading like Stan Lee had written it, or at least co-written it. It was time to kind of branch out a little bit. We wanted to keep some of that Marvel May 2001

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magic, and at the same time, there had to be room for other art styles and other writing styles. This was even true with Stan, too, because Gene Colan, for example, was certainly not a Jack Kirbyinfluenced artist. Somebody simply had to prove he was able to amalgamate enough of what Stan & Jack had to sell the book, and if he did that, he was home free. CBA: Did you look at the revival of Journey Into Mystery as a kind of Tower of Shadows or Chamber of Darkness done right? Roy: Well, it was supposed to be! It was done right for a few issues, again… [laughter] I wanted to get the rights to stories by Robert E. Howard, and we got Robert Bloch and Harlan. But unfortunately, Harlan got upset because he didn’t like the job Syd Shores did on one story of his, and that was the end of that! [laughs] The thing was, we couldn’t give everything personal attention, but once in a while, things worked out well. I think the stories that Gil and Frank Brunner drew were nice. CBA: “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” was a great job. Roy: Yeah, Ron Goulart was a neighbor of Gil Kane’s, so Gil brought him in, he wrote some comics, and I think he and Gil worked very closely on that story. Gil had a lot of influence on it because they talked it over and over, just like Gil and I did on everything we did together, and that was a particularly good story. It varied from the written story, I discovered later, to a certain extent. For example, my favorite line in it, that starts it out, it was something like, “I met him again where the girl had died,” I figure that’s either pure Goulart or Goulart with Gil Kane influence, I don’t think it’s in Bloch’s story! Of course, really, I wanted them to adhere to the original stories, but on the other hand, if I didn’t read the story, it read great to me. [laughter] I got to adapt the story from which The Day The Earth Stood Still was based, which was a big thrill for me, even though I took the main character and turned him into a man and a woman, so they’d have each other to talk to. CBA: So, where did

Above: A few titles we’ve neglected this issue but chock full of Marvel horror nonetheless. Dig the Gil Kane/Bernie Wrightson Dead of Night collaboration! ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: One of the more endearing—and bizarre—horror series of the ’70s was Len Wein & Gene Colan’s Brother Voodoo. Often maligned, Ye Ed remembers it being a swell read. Here’s a detail of Gene and Dan Adkins’ splash page to the debut of “The Man Who Lived Twice” in Strange Tales #169.©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

the idea of “Killdozer” come in? [laughs] Roy: That’s Theodore Sturgeon. It was just one of his better-known stories. They made a TV movie out of it, too, so it wasn’t just me. CBA: But the TV movie was the reason you guys did it, right? Roy: Oh, no, no! I think our story even came first. CBA: Yeah, but it was tied in, wasn’t it? Roy: Well, maybe it was. CBA: It sounded like a follow-up to Duel, Spielberg’s successful TV movie. Roy: Maybe it was. But Sturgeon’s story was way earlier. Did Gerry write that? CBA: Yeah, I think so. Roy: Gerry knew a lot about science-fiction, which is why he ended up doing Haunt of Horror, which had a lot of science-fiction in it. I leaned on Gerry a lot because I love science-fiction, but I didn’t really follow it. I was a charter member of the Science Fiction Book Club back in the ’50s, but Gerry was actually writing it professionally and followed it more than Marv or Len or the other guys. Gerry and I got to be good friends, despite the disparate ages of about 12 years. He was an influence on me, and I was an influence on him, and it was a nice symbiotic relationship. CBA: There just seemed to be a streak of silliness to “Killdozer”… When I was a kid, I looked at that stuff and said, “Come on! I want

‘Valley of the Worm!’ I want more of that!” Roy: Remember, Jack Kirby had already done a story that was a swipe of “Killdozer” with Stan, so this was actually the second Killdozer-influenced story at Marvel! CBA: [laughs] What was the first one, back in Tales of Suspense? Roy: One of those magazines. I think it’s the same kind of thing, a steam shovel coming to life or something. You look at it now, and you realize it’s a swipe from “Killdozer,” several years earlier. [laughter] Ten years earlier. But we’d done “It,” so we figured we’d do another Theodore Sturgeon horror story. But of course, some things don’t work as well as others. CBA: Well, it’s all in good fun, anyway. Roy: And it was just one issue. That’s the whole thing with the horror and s-f titles: If you don’t have a continuing character, you’re coming up with a whole new “movie” every month. It’s easier to do a series: You know where Daredevil was, you pick him up and do something else with him. But Supernatural Thrillers, you’ve got “It,” you’ve got “Killdozer,” you’ve got this, you’ve got that, every month’s a different adventure, or maybe three new adventures, or four new adventures, depending on how many stories there are in a book. It was a heckuva lot to keep track of, and I wasn’t that interested in keeping track of it, frankly! [laughter] CBA: Worlds Unknown—not the black-&-white, but the color comic—was the same idea as Supernatural Thrillers? Roy: Right. Do one story an issue, and get good people do it, and Gil Kane wanted to adapt Edmund Hamilton’s story “He That Hath Wings,” so I turned him loose on that, and I did some things, and Gerry did some things… there are some nice books in there. Later, when it died, it seemed like a more natural thing for a black-&-white. Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction didn’t last that long—only about a half-dozen issues—and we put a lot of inventory into a special final issue later, but there were some nice moments in it. The only trouble is, Marvel can’t reprint any of it, because nobody knows where the little contracts we had people sign are, so nobody could ever be sure if we could reprint any of the stories! Those are always wonderful stories from that period, like “It” and so forth, and they couldn’t be reprinted even if there was a market for it, because they wouldn’t know if they had the rights! CBA: Did you like Ralph Reese’s work? Roy: Oh, yeah. He came just sort of wandering in. He was another one of Wally Wood’s assistants, and he’d done work for Topps. I don’t think he ever really liked working at Marvel that much, but he liked doing that kind of story. I remember being there with Stan and him together, and Stan talking to Ralph about being a “Marvel man,” and this and that, and Ralph’s just looking at him like Stan’s crazy, because they were on totally different planes; it was as if they were talking in two different languages, and I’m sort of there between them, realizing that no communication is going on! [laughter] Ralph did nice work. It’s just that he was not ever really going to be part of the Marvel team, and I knew that right away. Stan was hoping to persuade him, but Ralph wasn’t going to do that. He came on, he did some nice stories, and that’s all we wanted. CBA: Yeah, he did “Roaches”... Roy: Yeah, and he did that story, “The Day After the Day the Martians Landed.” We got the rights to do a lot of Hugo and Nebula winners, and that was nice. I wanted to call the book “Nebula,” but that would have been probably too much. CBA: [laughs] Yeah, too nebulous. Roy: I loved doing Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. I really loved putting that together. By the time it ended, I was moving out to California. I think if I’d been in New York, I might’ve been able to salvage it, but you know, you leave a job, and it’s a “King Lear syndrome.” If you’re the king, and you give away your kingdom to two or three people, you’ve got to expect it to keep getting whittled away. They’re going to keep taking away your retinue of men and the number of horses until you’re finally just some crazy, lonely old loon crying out there in the wilderness. [laughter] I never quite got that far, or maybe I did, but that’s basically what happens to people when they start releasing the reins of power. You feel like you can let go and still keep a certain amount of power, but it never quite works that way. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

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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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!

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#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!

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#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!

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#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!

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#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!

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#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!

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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!

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CBA Interview

Wolfman by Day Marv on Tomb of Dracula and the Marvel b-&-w mags EDITOR'S NOTE: Marv Wolfman and Ye Ed agreed that the pending litigation between the writer and Marvel Comics over the ownership of the Wolfman-created character Blade (featured in a recent Wesley Snipes film) would not be a topic for this interview. CBA suggests those interested to follow The Comics Journal’s news editor Michael “Scoop” Dean’s fine reporting on the case in that mag.

Below: Recent studio portrait of Marv Wolfman. Courtesy of Marv.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Marv Wolfman has been—especially since his astounding 60+ issue run on Tomb of Dracula—considered one of the best writers in the comics field. Marv has also had acclaimed tenures on The New Teen Titans, Superman, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and numerous other titles. This interview was conducted via phone during two sessions—on the 19th and 26th of January, 2001. The writer copyedited the transcript. Comic Book Artist: Last time we’d left off—in your CBA #5 interview—you’d taken on a teacher’s position after leaving DC? Marv Wolfman: Yes and no. I was doing some writing for DC, but that was sporadic and freelance. Meanwhile, I had been studying art as a major, and education as a minor to become a teacher, so I was teaching while writing for Skywald, and just one or two things for DC, but not really a lot. CBA: What did you do at Skywald? Marv: Lots of horror stories. CBA: Who were you dealing with? Marv: Sol Brodsky, the “Sky” of Skywald. CBA: What did you think of the books, generally? Marv: Not as good as the Warren books. The paper was cheaper, the books were a lot cheaper. However, I wrote the type of stories I wanted, and when I wasn’t doing the standard stories, I did a fairly strong demon-type series with Rich Buckler about gods and devils. CBA: Rich mentioned that to me. It was quite an ambitious…. Marv: It would’ve been even bigger if we had continued. Also I did a pretty dreadful thing with Ernie Colón called “The Love Witch,” and many other stories as well. CBA: Did you work fullscript at the time, or was it “Marvelstyle”? Marv: It was all fullscript. CBA: With Rich, did you coplot these things? Marv: No. I believe I submitted the script to Sol and Rich was assigned, but it’s possible Rich and I came in together. I don’t have the memory of that.

CBA: I read a quote in Les Daniels’ history of Marvel that you don’t like horror. Is that so? Marv: No, I liked horror, I published a horror fanzine called Stories of Suspense. What I was not a big fan of was horror movies. I have a very graphic mind, and they actually terrified me. It took a long time, many years, before I could see a horror film. CBA: You mean even the Universal pictures? Marv: Oh, no, I’m not talking silly monster films, I’m talking about more intense horror films. CBA: The ones that were coming to the fore in the ’60s. Marv: Yeah. By the way, what did Rich say about the angels and demons story? I don’t remember the situation much at all. I assumed I wrote it full-script, because I was writing everything full script. Did he remember otherwise? CBA: No, he remembered it as being ambitious and said he was disappointed that you guys didn’t finally resolve the story. Marv: I was a big fan of… [laughs] it sounds pretentious, but of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and wanted to do a comic version—not of that story, but of the type of material or storyline that it dealt with, only in my own way. A dream project of mine would be to do a comic book version of Paradise Lost. CBA: Are you saying that you’d like to return to it some day? Marv: Very much, I just don’t think anyone would be interested. [laughter] CBA: Have to be a labor of love! Marv: Exactly. For me and the artist. CBA: Did you seek out Skywald specifically as a market? Why not Warren, for instance? Marv: I think Sol Brodsky may have asked me to work for them, because I had done some of the mystery books at Marvel, Tower of Shadows, Chamber of Darkness…. CBA: Doug Moench told me after only having a few stories published by Warren, Sol called him up and asked if he wanted to come over and be an assistant editor at Skywald, move from Chicago to New York on virtue of just a couple of stories. Doug was slightly taken aback by that, was startled, to be asked to write Hell-Rider, of all things. Marv: That would’ve been the way Sol operated. CBA: You were an editor at Warren for about six months? Marv: Warren thinks I was there shorter, I believe I was there slightly longer. I think I was there not quite a year, but eight months or so. The only reason my memory is such that I remember Roy asking me to come to Marvel twice. I had turned him down once after I had been at Warren for several months, because I was happy at Warren, and then he asked me several months later to come again to Marvel, and at this point, I was ready to, or interested, and it took about a month or two after that to actually get there. So, I think I was there about eight months. CBA: What was your experience at Warren? How would you characterize it? Marv: Pretty good. I liked Jim, always have. He let me alone, I was just about to do some interesting stuff with the books, and when I left, they never got done, although I had set them up to try to break the formula, which was five or six unrelated horror stories, unrelated. I was going to be doing, and had commissioned, for instance, an allvampire issue, and an all-werewolf issue, telling the stories of the vampire from the very first vampire to the very last one. That’s the one I was originally going to put Blade into. CBA: Not only themes, but concepts? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Marv: And all the authors I contacted—I’m sure Doug was one of them—had a time period that they were going to do a story in, and most of the stories were done before I left, or as I left, but they were never published in order. My feeling was that I knew Marvel was coming into the field, and Marvel’s strength was series, and I felt that the anthology, although very strong, did not compel you to return issue to issue. I was trying to come up with concepts that would make you want to read the entire book and make you look forward to something a little bit different. The books had already been around for ten years or so, so you try to do different things, and that was one of them. [At this point, the talk veers off to an in-depth discussion of Marv’s eight-month or so stint as an editor for Warren Publications, which will appear in the upcoming TwoMorrows’ book, The Warren Companion.] CBA: Marvel was offering you better money than what Warren was giving you? Marv: Oh, tremendously. CBA: Who called you? Marv: Roy. I had known Roy for years, through the fan circles and also professionally. He’s the one who brought me into Tower of Shadows, Captain Marvel, and whatever else I did at Marvel, Kid Colt Outlaw, or some book like that. Roy had asked me because they needed somebody, and I turned it down, and then a couple of months later, he asked again at the Rutland Halloween Parade, that’s why I know exactly when this happened. After Halloween, we’d all taken a large bus back from Rutland to New York—we had taken the bus up, as well—and Roy asked me on the way back, so it had to be November 2 when he asked me. I said I’d think about it, thought about it for a week or a little bit more than that, called him back, but Roy was going through some personal situations, and we didn’t even connect for another week or two after that. Once we worked out the details, I gave a month’s notice to Jim. CBA: Was this just before they came into the black-&-white horror line? Marv: Before. I knew I was coming in to essentially be the editor of them. Although I was listed as assistant editor, I knew I’d be the editor in name very quickly after that. CBA: So that was part of the deal going over. Was Jim cognizant of the fact that you were going over to work on the black-&-whites? Marv: Yeah. CBA: Did Jim give you a strong reaction? Marv: He was not pleased with that, but financially, I couldn’t afford to stay. I had to move to New York, as I was living on Long Island, from where I’d been a teacher. It was a two-hour commute each way, so I had to move into the city. It was suddenly much more expensive to move. It was okay to commute at the salary Jim was paying me for three days a week. But suddenly, that three-days-a-week salary could not pay for everything I needed, and he couldn’t increase it financially for five days a week, so I really had to go over to Marvel. Otherwise, I enjoyed working up there, and there was a lot of freedom. CBA: Did you have favorite contributors you were working with at Warren? Marv: Well, the best ones I took with me to Marvel. In some ways, Doug Moench was a favorite. You could call Doug, and he’d do a story on almost anything, and it will come in instantly. He was fast, he was good. Marty Pasko, I believe did some. I really don’t remember too many more. CBA: Did you bring Don McGregor over? Marv: I believe Roy brought him over. CBA: All of a sudden, Marvel decided that they’re going to go into Jim Warren’s playground with the black-&-white horror books. Marv: Well, I think you have to go back a little bit to remember that they had done Savage Tales #1 a couple of years before that. Marvel wanted to get into the b-&-w field, and I think that’s because Jim proved it was successful. But Marvel primarily did it on their terms, which was for the most part lead series, characters. The books didn’t have unrelated mystery stories. Warren was far closer to EC, but Marvel always put characters into their horror books. CBA: Roy tells the anecdote that one morning, Stan walked in and said, “We’re going to do two black-&-white horror books,” and the next morning he said, “We’re going to do three,” and then four, and Roy was suddenly dumped with this enormous load of books to do, and he obviously hired you to come in…. Marv: …and dumped it on me! [laughter] CBA: Was that daunting? What was your first day at work like? Marv: Well, I started before the books got started, so my first day of work was proofreading color comics. There was a lot of work before everything started moving, and it started fairly slowly. So, I don’t have a memory of the day the horror books started, I just remember slowly moving over to them. Dracula Lives! and Tales of the Zombie, Monsters Unleashed and Vampire Tales all started at once, and the requirement was that there be a certain number of original pages, a certain number of reprints, and some text pages. Within a few months after that, then the books started to have all original material, and we introduced other books as well: Deadly Hands of Kung Fu and all the others. That’s when things started going insane. At one point, I noticed I was handling the entire line by myself—except for Conan, of course, which Roy handled—and counted the number of original pages in each issue, because I wasn’t paying a lot of attention as I was working so hard, and discovered that I was producing, by myself as an editor, more pages than the entire color line! [laughMay 2001

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Above: The splash page to Ye Ed’s favorite Marvel b-&-w story. By Marv Wolfman and Neal Adams from Dracula Lives! #2. Why hasn’t this story ever been reprinted? Below: Bob Foster’s hilarious “History of Moosekind” feature ran in a zillion issues of Crazy. Appropriately, here’s Bob’s version of “The Moose of Darkness.” ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ter] All original pages! We were having 50-some-odd pages an issue, and at that point the comics had 17. So, I realized that was why I was tired all the time. We managed to bring in an assistant at that point. But for several months, I was producing the line by myself, including Crazy magazine, which was 52 pages of all-new material where I was not allowed to use any Marvel staffers. That had to be done outside of Marvel. I could use some of the artists and some of the writers, but nobody on staff. It had to have its own department, it had to be completely separate from everything else. I don’t know why. CBA: No idea why? Marv: I had no idea why I couldn’t use anybody else. It was a different production department, done outside Marvel completely. It took a while before they let me use any artists outside of Marie Severin, who drew comedy so wonderfully. That’s why if you look, virtually all the artists in Crazy were people you may never have heard of, or from other fields. I realized at some point—and I’m not quite sure how—that editorial cartoonists, who are brilliant artists, have nothing to do three-quarters of the day, until the editorial decision is made as to what they need to draw for the next day’s paper. Then, suddenly, it’s a flurry of action, so these people are usually sitting around for a long, long time. I actually had Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists doing stories for me, because it was extra money for them, and they got to draw—which they loved—and they had plenty of time to do it. Among them were Dick Wright and Vance

Rodewalt. CBA: You know, the book felt kind of Marvel, but it wasn’t kind of Marvel. Didn’t you introduce that moose character? Marv: Myron? I’d found Bob Foster through a small comic he did called Myron Moose. [laughter] I fell in love with it, and called him. He was shocked that anyone had ever seen the thing. I asked him if he’d do more moose stuff for us, and I think I came up with the idea of “History of Moosekind.” [laughter] I could be wrong, but I think I did. He was going to put Myron in it, but I said, “No, don’t put Myron in, I want an original.” So, Bob did that incredible job, and brought in a lot of Disney artists as well with him. CBA: That series really was a history that was developed, issue after issue, and it was densely-packed, just hilarious satire! Marv: It was incredible satire, and the reason it worked was that Bob used real history as the basis, and altered it into this moose thing. Bob was one of those artists and writers who… I don’t quite know why, but I just look at his stuff and break out laughing, [laughter] it was just so ludicrous and funny and satiric and smart that it was surprising. I had never seen anything like that. I desperately wanted to do a comedy magazine that was different from Cracked, which is what Stan wanted. He didn’t want Mad, because as he said, we couldn’t afford to do Mad; he wanted Cracked. I kept saying, “You know, you don’t have to pay a lot for cleverness, you just have to find the right talent.” Where I could, I found the people who could do it. CBA: Was it difficult to maintain the schedule of doing all these books? Marv: Crazy was the hardest, because that one I did by myself. We also had a very low budget, so I had to keep figuring out ways to save money. One of the ways was, I had my ex-wife take a photo of an old radio—one photo—and I would write three or four pages using this radio, each page was self-contained, six panels on the page, nothing changed, just that same radio, and you’d have to read the copy… it was a radio show! [laughter] And it would be continued three or four times per issue, every issue. Because as editor, I didn’t pay myself, and we only paid once for the photo. I managed to get four pages free, which I could then use to pay the artists and writers on the rest of the book a little bit more, to slowly get the rates up to the Marvel level. CBA: Marvel was in the same building as National Lampoon. Did you ever encounter freelancers working for them, and were able to get them to work for you? Marv: No. The strange thing was, one of the pieces I wrote, and in fact won a Shazam! award for, was originally intended for the Lampoon. CBA: What was that? Marv: That was “Kaspar the Dead Baby.” [laughter] Before the Lampoon started, I submitted an idea called “The Dead Baby, the Witch and the Very Fat Duck.” They were interested in it. I was gonna come back but never did. The rest is history, [laughter] and that story got done in Crazy. CBA: Did you ever go downstairs to visit the National Lampoon offices? Marv: Just that one time. CBA: I think it was Marie who told me it was amazing how much fun it was at Marvel, and then you go over to the National Lampoon, and it would be so quiet, so reserved… [laughs] Marv: Marie, of course, worked at that building longer than I had. Within a few months of my coming to Marvel, we shifted buildings, so I just never did visit National Lampoon much. CBA: You were able to do a lot of fumetti, which was also popular in Lampoon. Marv: That was also to keep the prices down. I love fumettis. I did them again at Disney Adventures magazine. I love them from the days of Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine that I had read as a kid, and wanted to do them in Crazy. We did a number of them, originals such as the one you keep printing Dick Giordano’s photo from, [laughter] which is one of my favorites. CBA: Did you take the pictures? Marv: No, my ex-wife did. We then got a deal with Art Buchwald, and we adapted some of his columns into photo stories, and we also worked with Jean Shepherd. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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CBA: You had a presence before the camera, do you think? Did you like hamming it up? Marv: The only one I think I did was this thing with my brain in it or something. [laughter] But no, I actually don’t like being on camera. CBA: No? [laughs] There was a lot of fun in that, just trying to name the Marvel freelancers or staffers that appeared. Marv: Well, some of them would be hard to find. One of the things I loved doing from the very first issue, “The Great American Success Story,” starring Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, was to find the right people for it… Neal had this young, angelic look, and Dick could put on this “hustler” look, and they were just perfect for the parts. [laughter] Of course, Dick’s nothing like that, but he could get that look when he wanted to. CBA: With the horror books, did you have free rein? Did you determine who the lead characters were going to be, or did you have any limitations? Marv: Those were established before I got started. Dracula was obviously the star of Dracula Lives! Morbius in Vampire Tales, Simon Garth in Tales of the Zombie, and Man-Thing I think was supposed to be the star of Monsters Unleashed. But I don’t remember that one much at all, as it was my least favorite. CBA: What black-&-whites did you write? Marv: For the most part, Dracula Lives! and Vampire Tales. I know I did stories in Monsters Unleashed, I think I may have done some things in Tales of the Zombie, but I can’t be sure. CBA: Was that just an exhausting schedule? Were you giving the horror stories the same attention you gave to the Crazy work? Marv: No. At Crazy, I wrote during staff time. Again, that was to keep down the budget. Some stories I did get paid for, but the majority of the work I did for Crazy was on staff. CBA: Was your week mapped out for you? Did you say, “I’m going to devote Wednesday to Crazy,” for instance? Marv: No, I was and remain fairly organized. I went through a period where all that fell apart, but in my early days I was pretty organized about what I did, and you’re practicing triage the entire time, working on a schedule where you’re essentially dealing with hundreds of pages that are in several different continents, [laughter] and dealing with dozens of freelancers. At 50 pages an issue, you’re eating up a lot of material, so you’re dealing with current stories and future stories, and future stories beyond that, because you need to make cerMay 2001

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tain that six months from now you have stories coming in, and they have to be paced out correctly. One of the ways to do it—the only way to do it—is you keep track of everything, and figure out what you’re doing, but you also have to understand that some artists may not come through, the mails may fail, something will cause a disaster, for whatever reason, and you have to have excess material there to prevent any damage from seriously hurting you. That’s the way I dealt with it, so we were in a constant state of triage, where your plans weren’t always achieved, which is why we did not have many continued stories in the books. CBA: Because you just never know from issue to issue? Marv: We knew pretty well, but couldn’t be sure. When you’re dealing with, literally, 500 to 600 pages per month, most of which are going out of the country, you couldn’t be sure which artists there were going to get their work out on time, and who wouldn’t. This was the first experiment using a lot of these people, I could not foresee how some of them would work. I mean, very quickly, you learned Alfredo Alcala could do 80 pages a month if you wanted him to, and just as quickly, you’d learn that one of the other artists could only do five. You have to adjust constantly down the line as you learn. Now, it may be worthwhile to wait for those five pages, but you have to plan for them. So, you may only give this person a very special story that isn’t due for eight months, telling them of course it’s due in four months so you’d get it in seven months! [laughs] But it’s keeping track of all that. We never ran into any problems, we never had a single late book, we were dealing with a lot of pages, we were also dealing with text pages, text stories, and different approaches to different material. For Deadly Hands of Kung Fu I had come up with the idea of a magazine within a magazine, where you could actually remove the text section, which had articles on martial arts, or factual type of material. It was a juggling nightmare, but somehow, youth and adrenaline succeeded. CBA: Was there any pleasure in it? Marv: Oh, yeah, I loved it. CBA: Did you reach burn-out level? Marv: Oh, every day! [laughter] CBA: But you just persevered? Marv: And the writing was the only thing, going home and writing was the only thing that sort of rekindled it, because I loved writing. The schedule was crazier than it should’ve been, and got worse. Once I got an assistant, it started to get worse and worse, because they added more books. We had Planet of the Apes, and a lot of the books that we’d start that would be killed or not come out, and at one point, I remember Tony Isabella sleeping there every night, under

Bottom left inset: Marv reveals that he originally intended to submit his Caspar satire to National Lampoon but instead used it in Crazy #8, drawn by Marie Severin. Below: Detail of the Kelly Freas cover of Crazy #9. The painter contributed covers to the first five years (or so) of Mad magazine. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Marv reveals that the “Howard the Duck” back-ups in Giant-Size Man-Thing (love that title!) #4 and 5 were originally intended to appear in Marvel’s b-&-w horror mags. Here’s Frank Brunner’s rendition of Hellcow, the vampiric bovine, from G-S M-T #5. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

his desk, and he wasn’t one of my assistants, but was on a different black-&-white book, and at one point I seem to recall saying to him, “Tony, if you kill yourself doing this, they’ll just believe it means you can hit that mark every time! Maybe we should allow the books to get a little bit more troubled, so we can prove we need another person.” We were in desperate need of assistants. As I said, we were producing the entire black-&-white line, which exceeded the color line, with a third of the staff of the color books. CBA: Could you complain, or describe the situation directly to Roy? Marv: Roy was gone by that point. Roy was only there for a few months after I arrived. Stan was in and out, and truly, Stan was not the person in charge. Stan was the editorial person in charge. It was the people from Cadence, and if they could’ve soaked another ounce of blood from you, they would. These were not the easiest or most understanding people to deal with. CBA: Did you sit back and just say, “Gosh, we’re just flooding the market here!” Did it feel like you were consistently producing quality work, or did it feel like it was just such a maddening schedule that you didn’t even know what you were getting out? Marv: Neither. I was very aware that not everything we were doing was great. I worked really hard on the series, and I’m very proud of the majority of the work we did on the series. I spent a lot of time on that stuff. I had good writers on those. The back-up mystery stories were hit and miss. But we had a certain number of pages we had to produce per issue, and you did the best you could. Again, I wasn’t a large staff, and the materials had to be there. It wasn’t like we had a choice. It’s not like today where you can simply not publish for six months because artist A didn’t feel like getting out of bed today. We had five

or six books a month, and sometimes more than that. It was very hard. But there’s an adrenaline that occurs when you’re producing this much. You’re not completely aware of the stress on you, and therefore, I could enjoy the work. I knew we weren’t doing the best all the time, but I could honestly say we had great series, and we had a number of really good horror stories. We’d also try people who didn’t work out. You’d give somebody a try who looked like they were promising, a new writer, a new artist, and some of the writers worked, and some of them didn’t. But you didn’t have the luxury of not publishing the stories that didn’t make the grade. You were just constantly trying to find more people who would be good. CBA: Can you recall the particular series that you’re most proud of? Marv: As always, the Dracula material, even the stuff I didn’t write. CBA: You wrote, I would say, certainly one of the best black-&white horror stories ever done, the origin of Dracula story in Dracula Lives! #2. Marv: Thank you! I wrote a lot of the Dracula black-&-whites. CBA: That was an editorial caveat that came to you to use Dracula in different time periods, right? Marv: I don’t remember, but that’s what I was going to do after the color Tomb of Dracula book died. The Dracula Lives! book, I felt, was really good. When Gerber did the Zombie, I thought he did some really interesting stuff. I was very pleased with some of the Man-Thing material. “Howard the Duck” as a series was originally done for me. The Gerber black-&-white stories essentially got printed in color in Giant-Size Man-Thing, “The Horrible Hell-Cow,” and the other one. That’s why they’re horror stories, they were done originally for Monsters Unleashed. Roy hated Howard the Duck, and I really liked it. In fact, I designed the Howard the Duck logo, which is “Superman” Howard, [laughs] and The Duck comes from Donald Duck, to play up the dichotomy of what the character was. But yeah, those first two stories were intended for Monsters Unleashed, and that’s why they’re horror-oriented. They were just going to be put in the middle of the books, so nobody would notice up at Marvel. CBA: And then the finished work came in, and a different decision was made? Marv: Well, what happened was, I think at this point Roy had left—although I could be wrong, I’m pretty sure he was—and they were going to do the Giant-Size Man-Thing book, and I believe I was asked if those could be there. I didn’t have a problem with that. CBA: So they must’ve had to be reformatted, because the stories you had were 81/2” x 11” basically, right? The final printed size? Marv: Yeah, they were different-sized artwork, but it wouldn’t have had to be changed a lot. CBA: Do you recall working with Neal on the Dracula Lives! story? Marv: On Dracula? Yeah. I also remember assigning Neal to “Howard the Duck” stories, too! [laughs] Which he didn’t get done, so I took it away from him and gave it to Frank Brunner. CBA: How far did Neal get on the Duck stories? Thumbnails? Marv: I don’t recall at this point seeing anything by Neal. After several months, I just couldn’t wait. On the other hand, the Dracula origin story he got in, as far as I remember, on time without any problems. CBA: Did you work Marvel style with that? Marv: I don’t recall. CBA: Just as a reader, I remember it being just astonishing to look at, and it was, I think, certainly some of Neal’s best work. Were you disappointed by the Syd Shores material that followed it up? Marv: You know, I don’t even remember it. CBA: It just seemed like this potentially great story arc suddenly dropped flat. Marv: Sometimes there are artists, like Neal, who were so good that if you don’t have them, you just don’t want to continue. I don’t remember the Syd Shores stuff. CBA: Obviously, during all this time, with this huge work schedule that you had, you also started writing some color comics? Marv: Well, primarily the one I did was Tomb of Dracula. Occasionally I would do some other ones here and there. If you asked me on a month to month basis at this point, I wouldn’t remember, I’d have to go check them, so I couldn’t tell you what I wrote while I was editing. Primarily Tomb of Dracula, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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and some others. You’d probably be able to tell me a lot better, and I’d go, “Oh, yeah, I did that.” CBA: With Tomb of Dracula, I think it can sometimes surprise people to know that Gerry Conway actually originally started as scripter. Marv: Tomb of Dracula #1 and 2 were written by Gerry Conway, #3 and 4 by Archie Goodwin, #5 and 6 by Gardner Fox, and #7-70 were written by me. CBA: It went uphill from there! [laughs] Marv: It’s hard to imagine going uphill from Archie and some of the stuff that Gerry wrote… those guys are the ones who certainly set up the look; I came in and handled it in a completely different fashion, I found my own voice on it. CBA: I wasn’t trying to denigrate the work for the other guys, but it seemed to me that you made a name for yourself on that book. Marv: I didn’t have any reputation of real standing up to that point. I had been doing “John Carter of Mars” at DC, and that got some good notice. I’d done “Johnny Double” [in Showcase #78]. I’d done some Teen Titans work, and a bunch of mystery stories, but it was all pretty anonymous. CBA: Did you take on the assignment for Tomb of Dracula with enthusiasm? Marv: No, not in the slightest. I didn’t want to do it. As I said, except for having read it as a kid, I wasn’t a Dracula fan, because I didn’t see the movies. I’d read the book, and seen a lot of vampire films, but I wasn’t a big Dracula fan. Then, I re-read the novel and did fall in love with it again. I’d liked it as a kid, which is why I like vampire stories, and had done them previously for Warren and at Skywald, as well as my own fanzine. CBA: What was it about the mystique of the vampire that attracted you? Marv: What interested me, was it wasn’t about the villain. It was about the fight of good and evil, and it was actually told—or needed to be told—through the point of view of the heroes, the good guys. So, they are not the stars of the book, therefore could live, could die, could change, could be scarred, could be altered, could feel utter frustration. It was a place to do stories that I had never seen done in comics before. There had been no horror series prior to this that I was aware of. EC, which is considered the best of all the horror comics, were all six- and eight-page horror stories, individual stories, with no continuity between any of the four stories per issue or from issue to issue. They were whatever Al Feldstein and company wanted to come up with. There was no template for how to do a horror series, and the thing that interested me in writing Tomb of Dracula was creating, for the first time, for myself, my own view of what that template should be. You know, you go in to write a Marvel super-hero, like Spider-Man, you know two things: 1) It’s gonna be written like Stan Lee, and 2) You’re not gonna do it as well. [laughter] Stan created a look and feel to the dialogue to Spider-Man that is unique. You know you can’t write Fantastic Four as good as Stan and Jack did, in any way, shape or form. You know what the template for a Marvel super-hero is, because Stan did it so well. There was nothing like that in horror and therefore I was able to invest whatever somehow came out of me, and find my own voice—which I never did in the superhero field to that point. CBA: So, obviously, you say initially you weren’t necessarily attracted to doing Dracula…. Marv: Not as a series. Remember, it had gone through three other writers. Because of that, I didn’t think it would sell all that well. At the same point, nobody was gonna pay attention to it, so when I got into it, I started to write what I wanted to write. It almost didn’t matter what I did since I assumed it was going to be cancelled, but at least, for the first time, I’d be able to write something where I was coming with the approach to writing it, as opposed to trying to mimic somebody else’s style. CBA: As a young reader, I perceived that the super-hero books you wrote weren’t your strongest material. But you seemed to find your voice seemingly very quickly on Tomb of Dracula. As I always say, TOD was the most consistently high-quality book that was coming out at Marvel for such a long period. Like you said, from #7 to 70, and you also worked with a guy who really went to town with the title, Gene Colan. Marv: I had worked with Gene on the Tower of Shadows story, May 2001

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and I had been a fan of Gene’s from his Warren days as Adam Austin. He drew great faces, realistic-looking pictures. By the way, I should say Roy must’ve seen something in me, I don’t know what, based on my early work, but Dracula was the right fit, and working on that book taught me what I was doing. I learned my entire craft pretty much writing that book. CBA: So, was it that freedom, that you had the feeling that, “Well, nobody’s looking at it, it might go tomorrow”? Was there a freedom to that, where you could start stretching your legs and saying, “Well, I’ll do what I want to do”? Marv: Yes, there was that. I think it’s very important that I didn’t have preconceived notion of how Dracula should be written, and consequently, I was able to dig something out of myself. I wasn’t really trying to write Al Feldstein, to write Archie Goodwin, to write Stan Lee. I was trying to write, for the first time, me. As a fan, I had certain ideas of the way comics should be, and this was my first time on a book I didn’t want to work on, in a genre that I didn’t think would survive, that I was allowed to write the type of stories I really wanted to write. CBA: Did you immediately hit your stride with it, or did it take some time? Marv: It took, I think, three stories to hit what I wanted to do, it

Above: CBA offers profuse thanks to Tomb of Dracula inker Tom Palmer for his multiple contributions in this issue. While the master inker declined a careerspanning interview, Tom graciously agreed to a short chat about his experience inking Gene Colan herein. Courtesy of Tom, here’s the cover art to the Gil Kane/Tom Palmer rendered Tomb of Dracula #23, sans cover blurbs. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Center background image: Blade, Marv’s innovative vampire-hunting character, falls to his apparent doom in this detail from the Gene Colan/Tom Palmer Tomb of Dracula #42 cover. Courtesy of Tom Palmer. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

was the one in the fishing village—I believe that may have been #9, inked very badly by Vince Colletta—that I hit my stride. With that issue, I caught the style, the approach and the attitude that I wanted. Right after that came Blade, and then came a three-parter with the death of Edith Harker. With those three stories, the book was what I wanted it to be. CBA: I think you pulled the reader in, emotionally, really caring about these supporting characters in the book. The title was a villain, the title was a bad guy. Marv: Right, but the more you knew about a character like Dracula, the less effective he is. If you had access to his thought processes, what type of person he was, if he was like the Silver Surfer, just talking about every deep emotion within him, he’d become a very boring character who lacked mystery. The thing I realized very quickly with Dracula is he should never have thought balloons. You should only judge him based on what he does, because he was a liar! He was a consummate liar. On the other hand, to make him work, he also had to have a high degree of intelligence, and a lot of charm. So, you’re playing with a character that spoke one way, and yet acted a different way. You had to look at what was going on to judge what was happening, but because you never really understood what he was thinking at any time, I was hoping you would not get bored with the character. That he’d always remain the mystery that would make

you want to learn more about him. CBA: Did you continue that “no thought balloons” throughout the entire series? Marv: I believe so. CBA: He’s a character who carries a lot of baggage. I think it would be hard for a lot of writers not to go in with pre-conceived notions of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee…. Marv: Well, it takes someone who never saw the movies! CBA: [laughs] There you go! You never saw any of the movies? Marv: I saw some later. I think I saw one Dracula film on television, I’d seen a ton of other vampire films, but I hadn’t seen Dracula, so the only real knowledge of Dracula that I had was from the novel. As I said, I was not a big fan of film, and blood, at that point, really disturbed me on film. I still remember as a kid running out of a film my sister took me to. It was the first horror or monster film I’d ever seen, and scared the hell out of me! CBA: Do you remember what it was? Marv: The Blob. [laughter] CBA: Where’s the blood in that? [laughs] Marv: It scared me, and I would not go see horror films! CBA: Sensitive guy! Marv: As late as seeing The Exorcist…. CBA: Well, there’s a movie to get scared over! Marv: …I had to walk out of it the first time I saw it, and Len Wein gave me half a tranquilizer to calm me down, because I was sick. CBA: That’s a highly disturbing movie. Marv: Yes, it is. The spinal tap was the scene that put me over. I mean, as late as The Exorcist, I still wouldn’t go to see horror films. That one I had to go to see, because I had decided, as editor of the horror books, that we had to have a symposium on The Exorcist, with all the writers getting together and talking about what made it work. I knew it was going to be a huge film. We went, I believe, on opening day, and it really affected me. CBA: It’s interesting about The Exorcist, in that I share with you the most compelling aspect was the modern science they put in. Marv: That’s what made it real. CBA: Yeah, and much less mythological, and just… everyday. That’s probably a major part of the success of the film, is that it made it a contemporary thing. That was the phenomenon that struck all modes of popular culture at that moment, and it was especially evident in Marvel comics for a period of time. You maintained a real gothic feel within Dracula itself. Marv: I was a big fan of the written word, so I’d read Poe, I’d read so many of the different horror stories…. CBA: Did you read Lovecraft? Marv: I read some Lovecraft, but not much. I wasn’t a big fan of his. Of course, I came to him later and you have to read him as a kid. But I had read an awful lot of horror stories. I read Shirley Jackson…. CBA: Oh, right, The Lottery. Marv: Things of that sort, where they were all very emotional, and very people-oriented. The big monster stuff I was never a fan of all that much, and that’s the reason I’ve written very few monster books. Dracula was about a person. I had trouble writing Werewolf by Night, because I couldn’t get into the Werewolf, the monster part of the character. I only wrote one or two Man-Things for the same reason; I could never get into a mindless character. In fact, the last time I wrote Man-Thing, which was about three or four years ago, I literally have him do nothing. He stands in one place for the entire story, [laughter] and it’s everybody’s reaction to seeing this monster that the story is about. CBA: The characters? Marv: Yeah. I don’t like writing monster stuff, and every time I’ve had to do it, primarily in animation, I think I do it badly. CBA: At the time, also, there was the books In Search of Frankenstein and In Search of Dracula, trying to uncover the real history behind these myths. Did that affect you—In Search of Dracula, the true story behind Vlad Tepes, the Impaler? Marv: I had read enough of Stoker, and about Stoker, to realize that he had based Dracula somewhat on Vlad Tepes. So, when all of that research started to come out, it helped flesh out the early history of the character, while keeping in mind it was still a horror comic, and not a historical treatise. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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CBA: Was Dracula real to you? Marv: You’re kidding? [laughs] CBA: I mean as a historical figure mired in a fictional guise. Do you recall first reading In Search of Dracula? Marv: If you’re talking about the character I created around him, he has to be a real character, he has to have flesh and blood and dimension, and he has to have the things that make him the great character that he is, that make him a great man so he could be corrupted. If he wasn’t, why are you following this book? CBA: Right, why do you care? Marv: Even though it’s about Quincy Harker, and Rachel, and Frank, and Taj and Saint the Dog, and Blade and all of the other ones, it still has to come down to that, the book is about his effect on them, and if he’s not a character who has three dimensions, or as close to three dimensions as I can make him, and make him real, then he’s not going to work. You have to believe the evil before you believe the good in a case like this. So, I believe that. But, as far as if you’re asking me did I ever think a character like this was real, “No.” [laughs] CBA: I just meant that getting back to that Exorcist kind of thing, in that he was a real, historical figure who did truly horrific things that just blow the Bram Stoker novel out of the water as far as scaring the hell out of you! Marv: If I made Dracula as bad before he became a vampire as Vlad Tepes was—who, by the way, I’ll get to in a second, was not that bad—then there’d be no sympathy for what he had been, therefore no interest in what he was at that point. You had to believe that this was a great man who had been destroyed, and that even he knows he’s been destroyed, that is what kept the character interesting, both to me as a writer and I think, based on the letters I remember getting, to the readers. He wasn’t evil per se, he wasn’t comicbook evil, just saying bad words or things of that sort. He was a very tragic character. Now, you go back to Vlad Tepes, the real one, he committed unspeakably bad and horrific acts, yet he was considered a hero to his people. So, even in the real version of the character, he was a character who had all these good traits. He was zealous in defending his people, and was willing to go far beyond the realm of normalcy [laughs] to deal with his enemies. But his people still thought of him as a hero. CBA: How did you work with Gene? Marv: I would send Gene a plot, and my plots were six to eight pages, single-spaced, broken down page by page, the plots were very detailed, as you can imagine—six to eight pages for a 17-page story—and they described everything that was in there, and sample dialogue. That’s still the way I plot. CBA: Besides the obvious visuals, did Gene contribute story-wise to the series? Marv: Not really. Every so often Gene would say, “Can we do a story with a dog?” [laughter] For some reason, he wanted to keep doing dogs. CBA: Well, he loves dogs. Marv: So every so often, I’d have Saint do a little bit more than normal. But Gene wasn’t really into the plotting. What he did was, he could take a story, a plot, and make it look just so good, it was unbelievable. You’d get it back, and I knew every word these characters were saying. CBA: Did you get that feeling he was immensely enjoying the work when you looked through the pages? Marv: Oh, yeah. This was a book Gene auditioned for. He pushed for this, he was not the assigned artist to it. CBA: Do you know who was? Marv: I believe Bill Everett was. I wasn’t there, I’m basing it on what I’ve read Gene say. Bill would’ve been completely wrong. I understand why Stan would’ve picked him, Dracula’s a flat-head guy with big ears! [laughter] Arched eyebrows and all of that sort of stuff. But Gene was perfect. Gene chose Jack Palance as the look for Dracula, which was before Jack Palance played Dracula, by several years. CBA: There was a nobility to the character, and he wasn’t based on a stereotype, visually, and it melded very well with your story, which was not stereotypical vampire fare. Marv: Again, not being a big fan of that accounts for an awful lot. May 2001

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I didn’t have preconceived notions of what had been done, and since it didn’t matter if you see a movie like Blacula, or The Omega Man, The Last Man on Earth, or any of the other vampire movies that have been out there, that’s not Dracula. I never had that sense of what a Dracula story should be. I think that’s the best way for most people, I think the people who, throughout comics and probably literature who bring in their own heart to the project they’re working on tend to do a better job than just doing the assignment. CBA: And the team also grew… Tom Palmer came on, and I believe John Costanza lettered…. Marv: John lettered virtually every issue, he would actually call in advance to say he’s going on vacation and if I could please get an issue in early, because he didn’t want to miss Dracula. He’d rather

miss a different book than Dracula. It certainly wasn’t that I was writing sparse copy so he could make money on it, I tended to write an awful lot on that title, but he obviously must’ve liked the book. CBA: Was that a part of your drive to maintain this consistency that was going on? Marv: I was adamant about maintaining the consistency of the book, I felt that was one of its strong points, and I spent an awful lot of time schmoozing with everybody to keep the book consistent when the company wanted to break apart the team, because they wanted to put them on this book or that book, or whatever. I really did fight tooth and nail to keep the team together. CBA: When did you start getting indications that sales were good? Was it a bi-monthly book when you first started? Marv: But very quickly it went monthly. The mail suddenly jumped within an issue or two of my taking over. There had been barely any mail on it previously, and suddenly we started getting a slew of mail, very positive, very literate mail, and that made me work a little bit harder, because I realized people were looking at this. Because we were not a super-hero title, we never got the sense that we were a

Above: Unfinished Tomb of Dracula #45 cover giving us a rare look at Gene Colan’s pencils and partial inks by Tom Palmer. The image was modified on the published version to enlarge Drac’s head and punch-up the foreground action. Courtesy of Tom Palmer. Art ©2001 Gene Colan & Tom Palmer. Characters ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

number one book or anything, and I think that helped keep egos down. [laughs] There was no sense that we were outselling Amazing Spider-Man, or being a special title. We were just Tomb of Dracula, but we had our own audience, and it didn’t vary from issue to issue. Once we got the audience, we kept them right to the end. CBA: I would assume many of them were like me, they were quite disappointed when it did end! Marv: Well, it ended primarily because Gene finally did get tired. I had managed to keep him long after he was tired. Realizing that Gene was getting tired of it, I got the book six or eight issues ahead, and let him take off six or seven months. At the end of six or seven months, he asked would it be okay to come back to the book, not realizing that we had not missed an issue. [laughter] CBA: How do you get ahead? How did you accelerate things? Marv: How do you think I kept all those black-&-white books going, story after story after story? [laughter] That’s part of understanding the process of scheduling and keeping track of your material, and keeping organized. CBA: Yeah, but you’ve got the same team, so it’s always the same team. Was it subtle exertions, moving up deadlines, and…? Marv: It was everything. It was anything I could come up with to slowly make books work. I mean, the closest we came to an almostdisaster was when we scheduled that all-Blade issue of Dracula in there, and because it was the same people working on it, nobody knew that we had missed the deadline, because that was part of the time Gene had taken off. That book saved us, because that was an inventory for Marvel Spotlight or some other title. When we finally got to the point that we were so late that we were going to miss an issue, I said, “Let’s schedule it,” and I did a quick rewrite on one or two pages, and tied it into the continuity. At that time, Gene worked with a lot of other writers who were not quite as fast as I was. They would be late and I would always have a Dracula plot for him, so if he had a week here and there where the other writer screwed up, he’d spend that week drawing as many Dracula pages as he could. Over a number of months, I got way ahead, simply because other people kept falling behind. CBA: How organized were you with writing the book? How did you go about keeping the subplots in mind, and your particular story

arcs and stuff? Did you have a notebook, or index cards? Marv: It was all written down. At one point, I was three years ahead of schedule on what was going to happen in each issue. That’s not necessarily to say I had the stories worked out; I had the continuities worked out, what was happening with every character, issue by issue by issue, and then I’d come up with that particular issue’s story later. CBA: So, you had special notebooks devoted for Dracula, that you’d always have on hand? Marv: It was just typed out and put into a book. My handwriting is unreadable. CBA: Yeah? Even to yourself? Marv: Oh, yeah. [laughter] CBA: About the concept of Blade, you said you had that character in mind even during the Warren days? Marv: Well, the first thoughts of doing another black character came after the Teen Titans Joshua story that Len Wein and I wrote [“The Titans Fit the Battle of Jericho,” the unpublished 1968 TT story discussed in CBA #1]. That black character never made it, and I was determined to do one. I had been writing vampire stories over at Skywald, and then I was going to do the all-vampire issue at Warren. It was for that issue that I came up with the character of Blade. I never got to write the story, but I had made half a page of notes on who the character was, etc., etc. CBA: And the original template was the same? That his mother was attacked by a vampire during childbirth? Marv: Yes, it was his origin, what he was after, the villain, stuff like that. I could not tell you I’d worked out an in-depth story, but the character notes and the development was for an eight- to ten-page story as to who this character was. Just never did it. CBA: Was it tied into the “blaxploitation” trend going on in American culture at the time? Marv: It would have been impossible for it not to have been. I don’t remember all the different things that were influencing it. I wanted to do a black character when Len and I tried to do it with Joshua. I wanted to do something more streetwise at a time when comics didn’t do that. Even by the time Blade did come out he was not like any other character at Marvel. There were no street characters at that point; they were all fantasy-oriented, and Blade was pretty dark compared to anything that was coming out. That really is a leftover from the down-and-dirty, gritty type of Warren stories that were being done. CBA: The gimmick that was the coolest about Blade—at least to me, when I was a kid—were those daggers that were made out of wood! Where did that idea come out of? Marv: It was a logical extrapolation. What does a character on the street use? Knives. What kills a vampire? Stakes. What’s a stake? Wood! They sort of look like knives, you follow it through. [laughs] It sounds logical when you put it that way, but the thinking process at the time took a little bit longer… but not much longer, because I knew that character pretty well like in a second, he’s one of those that just came. CBA: This might have been touched upon in some of the Dracula Lives! books—magazines outside of the Code—but were you interested in delving into the nature of addiction? Drugs were obviously a major concern in America at the time. I always wondered what if Dracula bit somebody who was a heroin addict? Marv: I believe somebody wrote a story like that, I don’t think it was me. I knew nothing about drugs, never took any, never had any inclination. Comic books were my drug of choice. [laughter] I was getting off on fantasy, I didn’t need anything else to escape. The concept, though, of addiction is certainly more than just drugs. It’s about the inability to avoid. The ability, or—I’m not phrasing this right—the desire for one thing, and one thing only at the expense of everything else. Certainly Dracula’s insane need for blood is far greater than even ours for food, because we have a wide variety. But Dracula’s limitation was that vestigial thing that tipped him over, the thought of the monster inside that takes over the intelligence, and playing back and forth on the two, and keeping them in… I don’t want to say in check, because I needed them at different times to take control, was the thing that was both the hardest and the most gratifying to do in the book, and when he had to do something COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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because the animal took over, that made it really interesting to play against this supposed veneer of sophistication he had otherwise. CBA: A loss of control in the man with ultimate control? Marv: I finally got it right when I did Curse of Dracula at Dark Horse. In the second issue, you see Dracula, this gentleman, this handsome, elegant man. He’s being served by utter trash vampires. He sees himself as above them, but by the end of the issue, he’s exactly what they are. And that is what makes him the villain; he lets the monster within take control. The hero does not succumb. CBA: Do you approach all of your writing projects the same or each on an individual basis? Marv: Every project is different. They begin pretty much the same, but the way I then proceed is completely different. The first thing I try to do is figure out what the character angle is. That’s the thing that interests me the most. I used to say that when I did superheroes, you’ve seen every fight scene ever if you’ve ever read, like, two issues of a comic book. There really isn’t much different outside of maybe an original bit of choreography, but fight scenes themselves are pretty boring. Some people talk about action being the death of story. When movies or television or books go to the action sequence, the story ends. It picks up again when the action is over. So, the only thing that I think you can make people care about, and is of interest to me, is the character side of story. What are the characters doing? What do they care about? What makes the situation crucial to them? Then, once you’ve figured out what are the motivating factors, and what’s important to the character about the story, then you start working the story around them. The best way of handling that is to, again, figure out each element of what the character is doing, and how to milk it for the most emotion. You also need to understand the theme of the story. The plot tells a story, but the story exists to tell something deeper than a simple plot. Theme is what the story is really about. CBA: So, it’s character before plot, for you? Marv: Character and plot should be integrated. The idea is to try to figure out what the story is based on the character, and then the best stories, the best plots I’ve done, the story is so integral to the character that they are one and the same. But that’s not easy to do when you’re doing three or four books a month, 12 books a year on each title, trying to get them done at incredible speeds, because you only have a few days to write these things. It’s not like even a television show, you may have a month to do it. There may be 24 shows in a year, but there’s a staff of 50 people, so no one person—except for David Kelley and Aaron Sorkin—writes more than a few stories in a year. So, the best stories, when you come up with them, should totally and always come out of the character. The more gimmicky stories come out of plot. The definition I used to give is the difference between, let’s say, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four had some of the most brilliant comic book concepts I’d ever seen Jack Kirby and Stan Lee come up with, but it was pretty much a plot-driven book. The book worked as long as you could come up with great, new concepts for it. And it died when you couldn’t come up with new concepts. Spider-Man was an internal book, as opposed to an external book like Fantastic Four, in that it is all about him. So, the individual plots didn’t matter as much—well, I shouldn’t say didn’t matter—the plots were about him, so the story wasn’t as brilliantly original, but it didn’t matter, because you were far more concerned with the internal of the character, about Peter Parker, about Spider-Man, about Aunt May, about characters, than you were about who he was fighting that month. The trick is, if you can get external and internal plots to work together. Dracula was very, very much an internal book, but it was a bizarre book because it was internal, about a lot of characters, but not the title character. And at the same point, everything was about the title character. It was a very, very tricky book to do, probably the most difficult one I’ve ever done, because you couldn’t get too involved with the character, and yet you had to. You couldn’t know too much about him, otherwise you’d lose the mystery of the lead character, but at the same point, you had to care about someone who was, essentially, a mass murderer! There are a lot of fine lines that had to be tread on that one. CBA: Did you find it frustrating, or was it a challenging aspect of it? And did you recognize it from the start? May 2001

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Marv: I did, because as I mentioned to you before, what I did was create a two-to-three-year storyline about the characters. Not about the plot! Sometimes I wouldn’t know the actual plot until the issue— that is, what he was fighting. I realized you had to care about the characters alone, and that’s all I really concerned myself with. I think there were some creative plots in there, but essentially, it was the manipulation of all the different characters, how they moved in and out of the story, and finally, what the greater story was actually about. CBA: So they’d go through a distinct change, they’d go through a process that would be different from when they entered, that they’d come out as different people? I mean, can you give me a “for instance” of a change in one of the characters? Marv: I can with almost all the characters, but I don’t want to take that much time. Let’s start off with Dracula himself. In the early issues of the book, when I took it over, he was just killing people. Essentially, getting blood. He slowly changed over the course of the story to different types of—I don’t want to say bigger schemes, because that’s just plot-driven—what he started to get involved with was the concept of Good and Evil. When he made the deconsecrated church his headquarters, that was a statement, because this is the worst place in the world for a vampire to be in! Granted, it was deconsecrated, but at the same point, he elected to pick a church. He

Above: Tom Palmer vaguely recalls this wordless page as a salvage job inked off of thermal photocopies after pages of Gene Colan’s pencils were reputedly stolen from the Marvel offices. Does anyone recognize this sequence? Another page from this job appears on page 42. Characters ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Portrait of the real Prince of Darkness, Romanian tyrant Vlad III Dracula, by Octavian Ion Penda (based on a 16th century German manuscript). The name Dracula translates as either “son of the dragon” or “son of the devil.” Background image: 15th century portrait from Ambras Castle in Austria. Below: Vlad eating his breakfast beside the bodies of his impaled victims in a 16th century woodcut. All images from Vlad III Dracula: The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula, edited by Kurt W. Treptow (2000, The Center for Romanian Studies). ©2001 the respective copyright holder.

elected to find something that had the archenemy of vampirism—because vampirism is a reversal of Christianity—that picture of Christ was always on the wall. So, even though he would rail against this painting that’s on the wall, that showed him his helplessness, and he would argue that he was far more powerful, he knew he wasn’t! And slowly, over the course of the stories, he gets involved with a woman, he actually falls in love, he fathers a son—who turns out to be sort of an angel—he saves some kids, he is actually willing to grab the cross in order to fight other vampires, even though it’s burning his hand. He allowed himself to die at the end of his story with Quincy because he finally understood what he had become and he knew he could not live with that. CBA: Was that a consequence of the sequential nature of comics? Superman’s got to live at the end, for instance, and he’s got to survive, because he’s got to go on to the next issue. Did Dracula ever return to square one? Marv: Over the course of the stories, until I really got a firm grasp of where I was going, and the story I wanted to tell, and the ultimate redemption of the soul in many ways with the character, the stories did have him come back to square one. But, once I understood what I was doing, I knew that I wasn’t doing the typical Marvel storylines, where there was the illusion of growth—and I think that’s a term that Roy was the first to mention to me. I don’t know if he coined it, or someone else did, but the other Marvel characters—Spider-Man and all the others—had the illusion of growth. Nothing actually ever changed in those books. In Tomb of Dracula, I think it’s the first time that I’m aware of in comics that things actually changed on a monthto-month basis. We began with Quincy Harker and his family, and within a very short time, his daughter dies. That affects him and changes his personality. After Rachel Van Helsing gets the scar that’s on her until the very last issue, she becomes a very cold and bitter person. Frank Drake starts as happy-go-lucky, and starts getting deeper and deeper into the darkness that overwhelms him. I don’t think you could put yourself in a situation where you are fighting this kind of evil without having it take you over to some degree. I think it would take a greater person than any of the ones we saw in that book. They’re all heavily flawed, and consequently, you could watch as the effect of Dracula brought them closer and closer to his circle, while they brought him slightly, very slightly the other way. They fared far worse than he did in almost every way possible. CBA: Was that the unique nature of the book, in that you had a clean slate other than archetypal vampire character? Marv: I don’t know completely what it was, because none of the other horror books at the time were doing anything like that. I mean, not even the welldone ones like Man-Thing under Gerber. He was doing different

types of stories. But this was what interested me, this was the type of story that I cared about telling, and I really did think of it very much in novel form, that each chapter was a chapter of a bigger novel with an ending, rather than an issue of a comic book. There’s one story in there, about a year or two from the ending, which is Harold H. Harold’s novel. If you read it carefully, it actually will tell you the rest of the series. Oh, I did a “Bizarro” version of it [laughter] to foreshadow where we were going to go. It’s not direct, it’s not precise, you’d have to read into it, you’d have to know where I was heading, but it is there. Because it wasn’t a standard Marvel comic, the book obeyed different rules, adhered a little bit closer to the rules of literature. Nobody was doing novels then, it was all one-, two-, three-, four-, five-part stories, but then it would really go back to the starting point. CBA: You had a continuing, underlying shifting of themes that were going on within the book. Maybe that’s just part of the appeal. I was wondering, did you intellectualize this a lot? You were working under horrendous pressures, with your staff position and things like that, did you really sit down and say, “I’m really gonna think this puppy out, because I’m enjoying this”? Marv: On Tomb of Dracula I did, and it was the only one I did. Spider-Man I’d work out eight months ahead—again, only pretty much where the character was going, but not to the same level, because Spider-Man would pretty much always come back to basics. On Fantastic Four there was a formula—I hate to say there was, but there really was a formula to the Marvel super-hero stuff, and you can be really good. As much as I wanted to do Fantastic Four, and not want to do Spider-Man, I think I did them better the other way around, I think I did a far better Spider-Man than I did a Fantastic Four, which I was never happy with, except for one issue. CBA: What was it? Marv: #200. CBA: What was the problem? Marv: To be honest, I wanted to do what Jack and Stan did about being original, about being bigger than life, by bringing concepts that I’d never seen before, but I couldn’t do it as well. Spider-Man, because it’s earth-bound, I could play with the characters, and manipulate them. I could not think as big as Jack. I could not come up with anything of that size. CBA: So, really, did you recognize that your strength is in characterization, and not necessarily in the mechanics of plot? Marv: Well, no. [laughs] I think most people would consider me a plot-driven writer, although I think of myself as a character-driven and story-oriented. In Fantastic Four’s case, I could not come up with anything as good as Fantastic Four from #20 to 70, and I recognized that and asked off the book long before I planned to leave Marvel. Whereas I was very happy with the work I did on Spider-Man, and I didn’t want to write Spider-Man. I didn’t think I could get that sense of humor that Stan had put in. There’s a very flippant tone to it, and I had never written anything like that. I was one of the writers up there who had a reputation that I couldn’t do super-heroes. I was the comedy guy and the horror guy. It really wasn’t until Spider-Man that I felt that I caught what super-heroes should be about. CBA: It’s funny that you say other people characterize you as a plot guy, I’ve always considered you as a character guy. I think that was one of the strengths, for instance, of the consistently excellent series that you did in the ’80s, of The New Teen Titans, that you really got into the characters. Marv: No, I see myself as that, I see myself as a character guy that can come up with good stories, but I’m not… I never, for instance, liked my Fantastic Four’s because I could not plot those type of stories that Stan and Jack did, I did not like my Batman because that was a completely plot-driven book. Again, I think there were a couple of Batman’s that I liked, but very, very few. CBA: Is that because you couldn’t make the character go through any transition? Marv: He defied what works within my writing. First of all, in many ways, the best stuff I do is by myself. That is, nobody else is touching the characters, and I can manipulate the characters pretty much the way I like to. So, with the Teen Titans, or with Dracula, or even Spider-Man, because I was pretty much the only writer, I could make them run the hoops the way I wanted to. When you get into COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Batman, and I’m one of three or four writers on it, it just didn’t come together for me. Also, they weren’t character-driven at all, they were 100% plot-driven, and I didn’t like writing that type of Batman story, and yet I couldn’t write any other way. It wasn’t a book I really wanted, I wanted Superman, and that one I loved working on. Always did. Still do. CBA: Let’s shift over to your stint as Editor-in-Chief. Was the atmosphere in the bullpen getting somewhat chaotic, for instance, when Roy decided to quit? Marv: That would be hard for me to know, because I was on the black-&-white books, and although it was just down the hall, I didn’t have to deal with the color books. Len Wein was dealing with the color books. Len and I have been best friends ever since we were 13 and 11, and we broke into comics within a few months of each other, and were running Marvel pretty much simultaneously. Roy picked Len to replace him on the color books, and I had already been on the b-&-w books, which really ran fairly smoothly. I mean, there was no problem there, because I’d been running them previously, and I just continued to do them the way they were. So, I’m not sure of the problems Len may have had, if any. CBA: But his reign as Editor-in-Chief was short-lived, right? Marv: I forget how long he was there, six or eight months, something like that. Yeah, he was there for a fairly short time, primarily for health reasons. DC was also offering him some books, but primarily health concerns. CBA: Was it the overwhelming to deal with 50-something titles? Marv: Len was having some health problems. I think that sort of strain was not the thing that he enjoyed doing the most. Len’s a dynamite editor on a few books. I think it takes a completely different personality to do 50 books. They kept increasing the load, increasing the load, increasing the load, and the people who were in charge at Marvel were just making it harder and harder and harder on Len and me—this was under Cadence—and at one point, they totally ignored both of us when they did the first Superman/SpiderMan book, went around us, actually, and I think Len just really hated that, because he’s responsible for what was coming out at Marvel, but those guys were just willing to circumvent him, for some reason, instead of using what they had. Len could probably fill you in, because even though we were absolutely the closest of friends, it’s been a long time since those days, and I don’t remember his side all that clearly. CBA: Well, you guys were pretty busy! Marv: It’s hard enough to remember my side fairly clearly! [laughter] CBA: So, Len resigned, and was that Gerry who came in at that point? Marv: No, I was brought in at that point. I shifted over to the color line. CBA: Did they call you down? Marv: I don’t remember, exactly. I assume I knew, I’m sure Len told me, or may have been talking about it for awhile, I just don’t remember. CBA: When you came on, were you trepidatious about it? Did you think it was manageable? Marv: I came on at a fairly bad point. The “Dreaded Deadline Doom” was all pervasive. Books were shipping late, books were shipping with reprints on a regular basis, and had been going on for a long time, long before Len. CBA: Do you know how come that happened? Was that just a mere fact of arithmetic, it was just too overwhelming to be able to handle all the creative people? Marv: I think it was a major shift between the days of Stan, Roy, and everyone else. Roy pretty much followed Stan’s procedure. Roy was a great editor, and I loved working with him. The problem was that Roy and company and Stan never had all that many books, comparatively. They had lots of titles, but they had a manageable amount, and Cadence wanted more, more, more, more, because the president of the company also owned a distributing company, so he would get money for every page of Marvel he distributed overseas. So he wanted more money, and more material, so we had to keep producing more and more and more to allow for distribution. I think the policies that Stan and Roy had could not function under the realiMay 2001

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ty that had overtaken Marvel, they just were policies for a kinder, gentler Marvel, and nobody knew how to deal with all of that stuff, how to re-think the company that had been doing this for 20 or 30 years with one type of policy, and then suddenly had to shift to something else, because it was no longer working. I came from DC, who did things differently. I started implementing a lot of changes on the black-&-white books, because again, I had an awful lot of pages to produce by myself and very quickly. So I went to full scripts instead of plots on almost every story we had, because I could not let that extra couple of days slow us down! We were also dealing with the Filipino artists, and artists overseas in different places, and I had to give them full scripts, because I knew they couldn’t do the work from plots. They could barely read the language in many cases. First I’d have the people come in with plot synopses, to make sure the stories were going to work, and we’d go over that, and that was something that had not been in effect at Marvel. Then, I had them do it in full scripts. When I took over the color line, I had to figure out how to get rid of the “Dreaded Deadline Doom,” and the reprints. I’ve always said—I think 100 times in interviews—that at least for the year or so I was there, we never had a reprint book go out, or missed a shipping date. CBA: That was obviously an enormous problem. What was that, fundamentally? Was that a lack of control with the creative people? Marv: I think it was nobody knew how to set up the structures correctly. It’s not that you can’t deal with the creative staff, you have to deal with a different type of situation, you have to know how to set up a structure like it’s a real company, and you had to realize you needed to get the books out. As a fan, I despised it when there were new covers on reprint books. I felt it was unfair for what we were charging the fans at that time to get a reprint that wasn’t

Above: As mentioned in the caption on page 39, here’s another oddly-formatted page inker (and contributor) Tom Palmer says was a salvage job inked off of thermal photocopies after pages of Gene Colan’s pencils were reputedly stolen from the Marvel offices. Characters ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

announced. These were always last-minute decisions. So I moved to solve the problem. If there was time, we could’ve done it even better, but I was very satisfied that we were able to do it at all. Once we were on time, then we could work on getting them even better. CBA: Were you working under a constant anxiety during that year? Did you feel like, “This is not the same Marvel I came in at?” Marv: No, it wasn’t the same, because of the new owners. CBA: It was not the same old Marvel. Marv: It was not, on that level. It was in the editorial bullpen, when we would get together and just start having fun, or talking about stuff, talking comics and shop and all of that type of stuff, then it was the Marvel I knew. Then it was the stuff we loved. But the new owners just made it impossible because they were interested only in getting more pages, not in doing a better job which I felt would translate into better sales. We wanted to get better comics, and I think we had a lot very good writers at the time, and we were able to keep them—all of them, which I was very happy about. We were able to turn it around, so we got the books out on time. Yes, there was a lot of stress, an awful lot of stress, and eventually, that and the fact that I had separated, and the fact that it was not as much fun because my job turned to business rather than creative, is what finally prompted me to leave. CBA: Were the stresses of the job profoundly affecting your per-

sonal life? Marv: No. They were probably the thing that was saving it. [laughter] But they were still incredible stresses, so I was able to put myself totally into my work, and sometimes when personal stuff isn’t working out well, it’s good to have something else to look for that’s controllable to some degree. Work is controllable, no matter how bad the situation is. So, no, it didn’t have any effect as far as I can see, if only that I concentrated more on it and worked harder on it. CBA: Historically, you look at Marvel comics, and you see Stan Lee, Editor-in-Chief, and then Roy comes in as Assistant Editor, and then he becomes Editor-in-Chief, and there seemed to be this thing that was happening, this hierarchy that was developing. Did you see yourself in a lineage there? That perhaps you could lead the company one day? Or was that utter fantasy? Marv: I never thought of it that way, because Roy was only a few years older than I am, and I never assumed he would leave. I mean, why would he? If he had decided to move to California, and ran into some problems I was not aware of at the time—which Roy himself as stated, I think in Comic Book Artist or in Alter Ego—I don’t think he ever would’ve left. So, no, my going there… there was no room for growth, it was just a really good place to be. I had all the black-&white books, that was more than enough. CBA: Did you consider yourself a DC fan or a Marvel fan when you came over to Marvel? Marv: It’s completely interchangeable in many ways. I grew up with DC Comics, I started reading comics about 1951, or whenever the Superman TV show first came out—I think that was ’51, maybe early ’52—so there were no Marvel Comics for eight years. The characters I read at DC are part of my childhood, and there’s nothing better. You think of Superman, Batman, Blackhawk, Adam Strange, The Flash, any of those… they’re the icons, no matter what, and they were the icons back in 1938, too. There’s something very pure about the characters in some fashion I can’t even define. Marvel was the upstart company, but Marvel came in with a type of story that just blew me away, because although the DC stuff was very plot-driven— in fact, all plot-driven, with the exception of John Broome, who was very strong on character as well—Marvel just threw that all out. It suddenly opened up my eyes, so I absolutely loved what Stan and Jack and Steve Ditko were doing. As far as I was concerned, Fantastic Four was the best super-hero comic ever done. I didn’t think the best heroes, Superman still was, but Fantastic Four was the best comic I’d ever seen in the super-hero genre. It had more imagination, showed what the super-hero could be, showed what was missing in comics since the day I started reading them, and then later learned since the day comics began. When “Spider-Man” came in, I was really angry, because I was a big fan of Amazing Adult Fantasy, and I didn’t want another super-hero around. But within two or three issues, he just took me in places I had never seen in comics, and Ditko’s artwork— which was very bizarre for a super-hero—had such power to it that when you finally did get to that world-famous “Master Planner” story, where he picks up the wreckage to save Aunt May, you felt you had seen something that was unbelievable. And at the same time Stan was doing the “Master Planner” in Spider-Man, he was doing Galactus in Fantastic Four, doing the most incredible stories in Thor. So, it’s like they matured to such a degree so quickly. At the same point, DC was bringing in “Deadman” and that just knocked me down, because I had not seen a comic done that straight before, a super-hero. And they were doing Bat Lash, and they were doing a whole bunch of other things that just blew me away in another direction. So, I was never a fan of one over the other, but each one had their own strengths, and each one was suddenly coming in with some of the best material ever done. But if you want to narrow it, I preferred DC’s characters and Marvel’s books. CBA: The thing in thinking about your career, and thinking about from whence you came—you know, where you and Len came from, and Mark Hanerfeld—that you were almost custom-made, perfect creative types to be entering DC when you did, back in ’68, when they had a totally new editorial regime, and that both of you, all these young writers coming in as enthusiastic as you were, almost willing to do anything because you loved comics so much—and it almost seemed like a betrayal of that, that suddenly DC wasn’t the place for you, but Marvel was. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Marv: Well, first, I started as a writer at DC. Then, I became Joe Kubert’s assistant. CBA: With a lot of highs and lows between there! Marv: With few highs and… many lows, actually, because I wasn’t a very good writer in the beginning. It took me years to develop any ability to do what I was doing. CBA: Did anyone take you under their wing? Marv: One of the things I regret the most is I never had a mentor. Nobody ever talked to me about how to write. CBA: So do you think it could’ve been because it was such a transitional time that the old guys were out—John Broome quit, and Gardner Fox was fired…. Marv: No, Len somehow got Julie as a mentor, and that fit perfectly with the type of stuff Len writes well, really does well, and he was absolutely ready to go up to his very best stuff, which to me was Phantom Stranger, Swamp Thing, JLA, and stuff, but Phantom Stranger, definitely. Roy, of course, had Stan. I sort of came in there, and whether it was personality, or the fact that I didn’t live in Manhattan—didn’t live in the city, even, I lived all the way out on Long Island—or probably my personality, or whatever, no one really took me under their wing to teach me the ropes. The closest I came to that was Joe Kubert as the editor, but even there, he worked at home, and I only saw him one day a week. CBA: You were basically covering for him while he was in Dover, right? Marv: Right. He was the staff person, I’d call him, I’d proofread, I’d go over stuff. If he had to have a meeting with a writer, he’d come in, but he’d always try to do that one day a week, or if necessary, two days a week. CBA: Correct me if I’m wrong, but he was somewhat of a stern task-master, too, right? Marv: I loved working with Joe. Joe’s very stern, very strict about what he likes and what he doesn’t, and there is nobody who admires Joe more. I used to look at his artwork and drool over his linework, over his layouts and his approach. The power of his work, every line. I once watched him ink a cover… he couldn’t find a pen to ink with, so he went in and took a lettering pen—these are pens with thick nubs at the very end of it, and somehow he got that Joe Kubert line out of it. I had been a Joe Kubert fan forever, because I collected all the war comics, and I think I still have them all, and when he did “Hawkman,” it just blew me away. There’s nothing wrong with being strict or stern. He knew what he wanted; it wasn’t always easy, but, God, I learned a lot under him as an editor. CBA: You were looking for a mentor…. Marv: I needed it as a writer, I really did need it as a writer. CBA: There’s a nurturing aspect to teaching, a particular aspect of instructing that is a part of the process. Marv: I learned editing through Joe by watching him, and he never instructed, but I was able to learn both the things that I totally admired about what he did, and also one or two things I didn’t like as much, and if I had to rate my experience on a one to ten with Joe, I’d say it was a nine, because he is so dynamite, he trusted, he gave me freedom, and no matter how hard it may have been, Joe Kubert was and is one of the few certified geniuses of comics, as far as I’m concerned. CBA: If a kid decides he wants to be a comic book artist, historically, he’s been able to go to the School of Visual Arts… he’s got outlets, places to go. But for writers, that really isn’t so, is it? At least, for those specifically who want to get into writing comics. Marv: Well, back then, not that many. I came in through fanzines, and I did tons of them, fortunately getting at least 50% of the crap out of the way before no one ever saw the stuff, [laughter] the other 50% of the crap is very evident. CBA: And we’re putting it all there, Marv! [laughter] Marv: Thank God my name isn’t on most of it, that’s all I can say. But yeah, there hasn’t been a place to learn, and I think there’s less today then there was then, because there are fewer people who’ve actually done it. CBA: I had a very interesting interview with Gary Friedrich, and he said that, unequivocally, Marvel was the nicest and most fun place that he’s ever worked at in his life. He just said there was a certain joy, a joie de vive, about being there. The happiness between May 2001

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the people. I mean, what they had to do, it was a lot of work to do it, but it was the community of people there that really were supportive. You had Marie and Herb Trimpe, and all sorts of people who were able to be supportive for one another—under whatever kind of pressures that were on them. Did it feel special to you? Marv: It was a lot of fun. It was starting to get more regimented. When I first came to Marvel as a writer, Marvel was essentially in a three-room building. So everybody could get involved. Once I was there as an editor, we had our own offices, and I think that actually hurt in many ways. The Bullpen did not physically exist anymore. But, we were all insane and young, and it was the beginning of a different type of comics, and therefore, we were able to have an awful lot of fun. Also, nobody expected to make money, so we were all helping each other quite a bit, without any problem. I think these days it’s a little bit different… everyone’s looking out for themselves more. It takes a really good editor to bring everyone together to have that same feeling of camaraderie that came naturally before. CBA: Do you feel a connection with people that you worked with back then in the books? Marv: A good number of them, yeah. A good number of them I’m still very close to. I don’t see them as much, and I’m not very good at corresponding, but when we see each other, whether it’s the DC guys—because it was a lot of fun there, tremendous amounts of fun there, even though it was more corporate—or the Marvel guys, we still are friendly. CBA: I’ll admit that I’m obsessed about the late ’60s and early ’70s with Marvel and DC. I get the feeling Marvel was a really fun place to work, but there was just no room, and they had their own problems. Concerning DC, I get a totally mixed feeling—it depends on whom I talk to. Tom Sutton said, you couldn’t run in the hallways at DC, because the principal would come out and start yelling at you, or something like that. He felt oppressed there, and went over to Marvel, where it felt like total freedom. Marv: You’re absolutely right, however let me take the devil’s

Above: For a long period, it was Gil Kane—not Gene Colan—who was tapped to execute pencils on the Tomb of Dracula covers (as well as a kajillion other Marvel covers, natch!). And Tom Palmer, who contributed the above Kane/Palmer cover art to GiantSize Dracula #3, inked just about every one. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Detail of Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum’s luscious splash page to John Carter, Warlord of Mars #1, a labor of love for all involved, especially Burroughs aficionado Marv Wolfman who wrote a good portion of the Marvel series. John Carter ©2001 ERB, Inc. Art ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

advocate on this and say at Marvel, that chaotic situation led to the “Dreaded Deadline Doom,” led to people thinking they didn’t have to worry about what would make a good book sometimes, that also lent to the most weird experimentation in the world, both good and bad. DC never had that problem of missing a shipment, they always got the books out, but what happened there was, it got more and more corporate, and I think the books got boring, because nobody was writing from the heart. They were writing from the head. CBA: Right, they were writing for the paycheck. Marv: Of course you were working for the money (though, if you were young, you might not) but you were writing from the head, writing stories that were puzzles that had to be worked out. You weren’t writing something where your emotions spilled out, something which was vital to you to write. You may put as much effort into an impersonal story—and sometimes you put more effort in—than you do on a personal one, because it was more difficult. It was harder to think in terms of specific plotting DC was doing at that point, but then there were books like Bat Lash, or Anthro (my all-time favorite comics), or “Deadman,” that defied the stultified field that was at DC for a while. CBA: There was just an explosion of innovative work. It seems the books all had great start-ups, but were just as quickly squashed. The Kirby books, the “Deadman,” Bat Lash, they all came to abrupt endings, and it seems to me that DC was very good at green-lighting, but very abrupt at stopping. You’d walk away, shake your head, and think, “Why wasn’t ‘Deadman’ resolved?” It’s such a great series, and would have made a great graphic novel collection, but it never happened! DC seemed so reactive. Marv: Back then, they weren’t thinking in those terms. You have to always remember the time period. But I agree with you 100%, and I remember having long talks up there when I was assistant editor, where I would try to explain to an editor why Marvel was as good as it was, but he couldn’t get it. That was one of the frustrations, because he saw all of the great artwork at DC, and saw the traditional plotting, but I’m telling him, “You care about what happens to the Thing!” Which was so strange to this editor, because of all the books at DC, the war books by Kanigher were all emotional. Kanigher wasn’t a strong plotter, but he was a great emotional writer, and maybe that’s why this editor missed the appeal of Marvel in many ways, because it was so different, too. Stan was so unstructured, whereas DC was structured. DC honestly did not get what was going on at Marvel. I’d recommend that people look at the Marvel stuff, and I’d keep saying, “This stuff is really good!” But nobody would really listen. In fact, they’d get angry that I wasn’t “playing ball,” which is silly! You can’t be close-minded! I loved both companies but for different reasons. I think a lot of the talent there up at DC lived through a very different time of comics… war versus post-war. CBA: Perhaps there’s an arrogance of being number one for such a long period of time? When Marvel overtook DC in sales, was it taken note of in the Marvel offices? Marv: Yes, it was. We knew. CBA: What was it attributed to? What did you think, anyway? Marv: There were so many things. Two of the things that, as a fan, I loved about Marvel—besides the stories—were Stan’s letter columns and his Bullpen page. They honestly made you feel like you were part of something, and people underplay the importance of what Stan did as an editor. You can either like his work as a writer— and those people who don’t like it, I’d say, are looking in retrospect, they weren’t there at the time period, or if they were, they’re looking

back and saying, “Oh, this is so bad,” or something like that, based on today’s standards—but when Stan was writing those Bullpen pages, and the letter columns, there was nothing like that ever done before. Because he has an effusive personality, and honestly is just the way he comes across in writing, Stan really made you feel part of something, and when you feel part of something, as opposed to just being the reader, you’re going to gravitate there. Then, when the stories and characters are actually far more interesting and far more original, where you could not predict what was going to happen, there was no doubt Marvel was going to take over. That doesn’t put down the other type of storytelling, because I’ve always said that my writing is a mixture of John Broome and Stan Lee. I mean, it has both sides to it, so it’s DC and Marvel, and that’s why I’ve felt so comfortable at both places. But I easily understood why, at that particular point, Marvel was able to overtake DC in sales, and frankly, they would’ve overtaken them years before if Marvel was in charge of their own distribution. CBA: Do you think the changes that were taking place at DC in the late ’60s and early ’70s simply were not enough? Too little, too late? Marv: No, I don’t think they were too little, too late; I think they would’ve been fine had whatever circumstances allowed them to continue. I think the marketplace was changing, a lot of things were changing, changes DC could not answer. They could not do superheroes as well as Marvel did, were doing these other incredible comics far better than Marvel ever could have, because there is a generic “Marvel Comic.” There is not a generic “DC Comic.” That’s Marvel’s strength, and also their weakness. If you don’t like the Marvel approach, you’ll probably not like any Marvel comic book. If you don’t like the approach Editor A does at DC, you can go to Editor B. CBA: DC was diverse. Marv: They were a publishing company as opposed to publishing Marvel comics. I think that’s why I like both, because I love the Marvel approach, therefore could love both of the Marvel comics, depending who was doing them month to month. On the other hand, I could love what Murray Boltinoff was doing on Doom Patrol, could love what was being done on Anthro, love the romance comics for a completely different reason, and I could hate X-books as well! CBA: Tomb of Dracula is perhaps a hybrid of both the DC and Marvel styles. DC books—especially the war titles or Julie Schwartz’s line, had a consistent quality. (As an aside, I think that Bob Kanigher is one of the best writers that’s ever been in comics, because he really felt them!) Marv: Bob, when he was hitting it with all cylinders going, was probably the best writer DC ever head. He had a style that let you get past the weirdness of some of his stories. Except on Wonder Woman, [laughter] which I didn’t like. I loved Metal Men, on the other hand. Of course, that was quirky, silly, and fun, and I loved Sea Devils, but Bob wrote from the heart. Everything Bob wrote, you could feel his guts coming out on the page, and as I said, I have a full collection of the war books, because I love Bob’s stuff. He was the main writer up at DC who wrote from the heart. My biggest influence at DC was John Broome, though. I’ve been a fan of his long before I knew which stories he wrote, which only later did I find out. It turned out that all of my favorites were written by him for Julie. CBA: Just to get back to my observation: Your book was almost like a DC book in the middle of the Marvel Universe, so to speak, in that around you, there were creative teams that were coming and going and going and coming at Marvel, very little consistency in the books, but your book, it was almost an island of calm in all of this chaos at Marvel! Marv: Well, there were only two books like that, at Marvel: Tomb of Dracula and Conan. Roy and I were indisputably in charge of our respective books. Nobody touched us. Nobody tampered with us, or tried to break up the creative teams, because we sat on those books with a ferocity that I don’t think anybody else did. You don’t see many crossovers, because I wouldn’t let them, and things like that. I just simply would not allow those characters to be used elsewhere. CBA: They were both islands of continuity unto themselves, they had their own internal continuity without having any relationship to COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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the outside. You and Roy became the writer/editor of your respective books? Marv: Well, I certainly was the writer/editor from the second story on, whether or not I had the title. CBA: The de facto editor? Marv: Right. Once I got the title, I was hell on wheels, [laughs] nobody was going to interrupt that book. It was the one book I wrote 100% for me. Tomb of Dracula was my view as to how comics should be—as opposed to writing Spider-Man. I felt I was a ghost writer on Spider-Man, but I was me on Dracula. CBA: Can a title have a single person serve as both writer and editor of a book and also be successful? Marv: Well, you liked Tomb of Dracula, I hope you liked Conan, you said you like the Bob Kanigher books over at DC… there’s Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein… [laughter] Alan Moore (whether he’s named as editor or not). [laughter] If you’re not just turning out stories—and actually have a real vision of what makes a book unique—you have to be the person in charge, because if you’re not, it’s going to be diluted. Look at Teen Titans. That is the best example, good and bad, of that situation. I had some really good editors follow me. Dynamite editors! I had some bad ones, as well, but the book was never the same once I stopped editing it. To me, it fell apart completely, and that’s even with great editors, because I had a unique vision with Teen Titans. I had no problem working with any editors on “Superman,” on Batman, on every other book I wrote. I never had a problem working with them, but occasionally there’s a book that is you, and the first time you bring in another voice, it’s no longer you, and whatever fragile little insanity that you feel like doing at the very last second because you’ve changed your mind 180 degrees, you can’t do, because someone else won’t let you. Now, if that other person will keep you closer to what the company wants, you may not come up with something insane that fails horribly, there are 100 reasons why editors are great, and as I said, I worked wonderfully with them on all the other titles. But on Tomb of Dracula and Teen Titans, those are the two books that I did that were coming out of my heart. It never happened on Dracula that I worked with anyone else, but once it did happen on Teen Titans, it was never the same book. CBA: I did notice on the last issue, TOD #70, there is a consulting editor listed, Jim Shooter. Marv: The most that Shooter did was take it from three-part story and insist that I had to cut it to a double-sized annual. He was the Editor-In-Chief, and insisted on that, since he couldn’t be listed as editor on my book. So, he had to be listed as “consulting,” but he didn’t do anything. The most they did was this three part ending, and it would’ve ended in #72. CBA: Was that a true story in the text page of #70? Marv: What did it say? CBA: It said Shooter had made an error, that the book had to be consolidated into that one issue. He wrote the title was planned to go to #72, and Jim reportedly ran upstairs to the comptroller’s office to try to stop it, but was apparently too late. I guess they just pushed a couple of buttons, and the book was cancelled, and it May 2001

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could not be retrieved, so the decision was made that #70 was an annual. Marv: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I don’t remember if Jim really went up there to try and change it or not, I can’t tell you that right now, I just have no memory of it. A lot of my thoughts about Jim have been tainted over the years by a lot of things, so I’d rather not say that he did right or wrong, because I don’t remember at this point. I do remember that I had to cut it, and hated cutting it. It was really worked out very tightly, and these were the last three issues, and I had to cut out 14 pages of it. CBA: Marvel eliminated the job title of writer/editor? Marv: I was told that I was welcome to stay—and in fact, I was even asked if I’d want to edit the Epic line—but I would no longer be writer/editor of my own titles if I went beyond my contract, which was ending in December of ’79. I said I would not do that, would not work at Marvel unless I was the writer/editor, because when we went to the black-&-white Dracula, where I was supposed to be editor as well, at the last moment they gave it to Rick Marshall, and he took the inker off the book—after Tom had worked on the series for seven or eight years—and gave it to someone else, and didn’t bother telling me. When I confronted him, he said, “We didn’t think you’d care.” There wasn’t a single person at Marvel who did not know that I was fanatic—beyond reason! [laughter]—on Tomb of Dracula. Yes, there was a consistency there, as you said, and that’s because I kept it consistent. And I fought like hell to keep it consistent. When I realized that were I not writer/editor of my material, everything would go that way, that decisions would be made that (as far as I was concerned) would destroy the book. I realized there was no place for me at Marvel, and started to ask around at DC. I left Marvel and went to DC. I had less interest at DC in writing and editing because I was coming into a new situation, rather than having my book screwed up at Marvel. CBA: Did Dracula continue into an oversized magazine after the color book was cancelled? Marv: Yes, I wrote three issues, Gene drew them, the second one Steve Ditko did in black-&-white wash. I was hoping it would be as good as Steve’s Warren material, which I thought was brilliant, but the wash was not as good. The drawing was great, his storytelling is flawless, I loved working over his work, but his rendering using the blacks didn’t work as well, and it looked faded. But his drawing was so good I didn’t care, and his storytelling, as I say, was just wonderful. CBA: Did you collaborate with him on it? Marv: I did it plot-style, but my plots were incredibly detailed. CBA: So, did you have any conversation back and forth? Marv: Oh, yeah! I had worked with Steve before. We did Machine Man together, so he and I had talked a number of times. CBA: How was Steve to work with? Marv: I like working with Steve. He’s really good. I love his work, and he’s easy to work with. He has ideas, does a good job! I had no complaints whatsoever, really liked him personally, and liked his drawing. We just never talked politics. CBA: Why was Machine Man revived after Jack Kirby quit?

Inset right: From one of Marv’s numerous 1960s fanzines, here’s his super-hero creation Nova preparing for action. ©2001 Marv Wolfman. Below: Nova was later developed as a bona fide Marvel character. Here’s John Romita’s revised design from an issue of FOOM. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Marv: It wasn’t revived, I came on as writer in the next issue. This wasn’t like killing the book and bringing it back, I just did the very next issue. CBA: Was this right when Steve decided to return to Marvel? Marv: Yes. CBA: Were you surprised to hear that? Marv: I think Stan must’ve told me, I don’t recall it at all. I was thrilled, because I love Ditko’s work. CBA: Another outstanding book that came out at the time was John Carter, Warlord of Mars. Marv: Thank you. CBA: That seemed to be a lot of fun. Did Alex Niño originally do the first story? Marv: I’ve written John Carter for three companies. [laughter] I wrote it at DC for Weird Worlds and in the back of Tarzan. I wrote it for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., for which Alex Niño did the story. And then, before it came out, it was shifted over to Marvel, and I was the writer at Marvel. So, Alex was supposed to continue to do John Carter, it didn’t work out, for whatever reason, I don’t recall. Gil wanted the assignment—and Gil was a far better choice— and I wanted to work with Gil. I thought he was a better choice for it, too. I love Alex’s work, but it did not work as well on a traditional pulp character like John Carter. He’s much better… I’d love to have worked with him, for instance, on Dr. Strange, whereas Gil’s more straight-forward heroic approach was absolutely perfect for John Carter. CBA: Was it that Gil said, “Hey, I’d like to do it,” and then you said, “Whoops! Let’s just stop Alex”? Marv: No, I had nothing to do with the choice. Roy was in charge of that. CBA: Obviously a decision was made after seeing Alex’s pages. Marv: Roy will probably have far better memories of it, because I was out in California at a convention when the decision was made, and so I found out that Alex was not going to be continuing it, and Gil would be the artist. Now, I don’t think Alex was ever really the artist of record, but I think he was going to it because he was still drawing the story at Burroughs, Inc. when they were going to get into comics. I don’t know if Marvel ever actually hired Alex. Only Roy could tell you that. CBA: Did you have fun on that strip? Marv: I loved it; I’m a big John Carter fan. I loved the Burroughs material. I live on property that Burroughs used to write on. The back of my house is on a hill, and my neighbors remember Burroughs writing there. He had a pagoda, and if I could ever afford it, I’d love to put an office up there myself, because it overlooks the entire San Fernando Valley. CBA: And for the record, the city you live in is…? Marv: Tarzana! [laughter] I live essentially around the corner from Danton Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ grandson. Jane Burroughs, his daughter, used to have the house directly below mine. Different people live there now, of course. I’m a big Burroughs fan, a huge fan, I just couldn’t read enough of it as a kid, and I loved writing the ERB comics. CBA: It lasted a while! Marv: Yeah. I wrote it for a little over a year and a half on the monthly book. I think I wrote about 18-20 issues, something like that, I don’t remember exactly, and then Chris took over. Roy wanted to write John Carter. He knew I really wanted to write it, but he

also wanted to write Tarzan, so he had to make a decision, and decided—because he could’ve written either one—to let me do John Carter, because he knew I was as fanatic about John Carter as he was about, say, Conan. So, he gave up something he would’ve liked to have done, which I appreciated greatly, in order to let me write it. CBA: What do you account for the longevity of the book? Fulfilling the contract with ERB? Marv: I have no idea, because Chris wrote it for a while longer, and then they finally let it die. I don’t know if it died because it stopped selling or they decided they didn’t want to continue the contract because it couldn’t make enough money paying Burroughs, as well as trying to make money on it. So, I don’t know the reason that it finally died. As far as why it sold at all, I think both what Roy was doing with John Buscema on Tarzan and what Gil and I were doing—especially with Dave Cockrum’s inks, and later with Rudy Nebres over Gil—I think we were doing good-looking books. I know Gil did not want Rudy’s work, because he felt that his pencils were overwhelmed, but I put Rudy on there because I felt it gave it a power that Gil’s pencils at that particular time were starting to lack. CBA: It kind of gave it a retro-veneer that was perfect. It really worked. Another heart-felt book that you inaugurated was The Man Called Nova. Marv: That’s one of my faves of all time. I mean, I created Nova for my fanzine, back in the early-’60s. Len Wein and I actually created him. Len designed the costume originally, and I created the character, and we did several stories in the fanzines. I really wanted to continue it, and did. Just a million ideas were coming to me, an endless number of villains… it was my big fun super-hero book. Again, nobody thought I could write super-heroes—this was before I got Spider-Man—and this was going to be my fun book, and there are still people who still feel I didn’t write them afterwards. I know Shooter hated it with a passion. But I loved writing Nova, and I loved coming up with all the weird villains. CBA: It was a very simplistic book. Marv: That’s what it was supposed to be. It was for beginning Marvel readers, in my mind. If you notice, it’s a very DC book. It really is. It’s the most DC-oriented comic I did at Marvel. CBA: Did you think it also hearkened back to the early SpiderMan? Marv: Not really. I know I put that blurb on there, but that’s because Stan put it on Daredevil, so I figured I’d do that on Nova. It never was supposed to be, but that was a little sales gimmick, “In the tradition of Spider-Man!” [laughter] No, I was doing completely different type of book. CBA: But it was akin to the simplicity of the early Ditko-Lee Spider-Man stories. Marv: Well, if you put it that way, yeah. It was a reaction to my doing Dracula, because I was writing Dracula at the same time, because I wrote that title from the day I started at Marvel to the day I left Marvel, so everything I did is bracketed by Dracula in some fashion. But I had been writing all these dark stories, and really wanted to write something that was pure fun, that wasn’t trying to be deep, that would never get deep, that would be just a good rollicking fun comic for the younger Marvel readers. CBA: Did you consider you were giving something very personal away to Marvel—your creation—something that you had emotional investment, you were just giving it to them? Marv: I never thought I was giving it away. I never would’ve done that, because I already had copyrights on him. You can go to the Library of Congress, and you’ll see those fanzines were copyrighted. I didn’t think I was giving it away, I’ve been told otherwise since. [laughs] The less said on that, the better. Dick Giordano did a cover featuring Nova for my fanzine. It’s a beautiful cover. I had a lot of professionals do the covers for me. Jack did work in it, and Neal Adams… stuff like that. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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CBA: What was your best experience working at Marvel during the ’70s? Marv: Well, I loved working on-staff, I really did, and I loved the characters! I had no problem, as I said, working with the editors or anybody else, it was just on Tomb of Dracula I ever had any problems working with other people at the end. It seems to me you can have a book like that that has to be yours, and Tomb of Dracula was one, but on all the other titles, I worked with other people, so there was never a problem. I think writing Tomb of Dracula was definitely one of the highlights for me, working with Stan, working with Roy (although I didn’t work with Roy all that much), I loved the whole bullpen at the time, and I loved the characters! There are a lot I’d like to write today, there are a lot I wouldn’t. I would not want back on Fantastic Four, say, but I’d love to do more Spider-Man. Marvel has some great characters, and they have a lot of characters I’d never want to touch, because they’re not in my style. I liked working up there, it was a good atmosphere, Stan really ran it nicely, and it was very friendly until the end of ’79. CBA: Why did you resign as Editor-in-Chief? Marv: It was about five different things all at once, and I’ll probably give you a different number when I actually count them out. One, I was getting a separation at the time, so emotionally I was not very there. Two, I hated working with the people from Cadence, just despised it. Three, it became more business. I was getting more and more involved with rates and structures and all of this, and had less and less time to work out stories and direction. I was fighting the Cadence people constantly to try and not have covers done in one color or whatever stupid idea they came up with that month to save money. It became no fun, because as hard as it was, it was always fun. You were working on these characters who were wonderful, and were trying to make them better, and were trying to keep them up to what Stan did, and Jack and Steve in the early-’60s, and yet bringing them forward into a new generation. I loved all of that, but when it became about rates, I just wasn’t interested anymore. I was in my late 20s, I guess (as I said, I was going through a separation), and it was not a good emotional time, and the work was no longer any fun, and I was far more interested in writing than fighting with those guys from Cadence. If those guys weren’t there, I’d probably would have stayed. CBA: Your best friend preceded you in the job. In retrospect, did you see a short tenure for yourself from the word “go”? Marv: No, I really didn’t. Len and I discussed this, and I never thought that was the best position for him. If I was the Editor-inChief, I wish Len had been around to be in charge of—this sounds so awful, but please understand—Len is great at going around and spotting all these mistakes that everybody makes, in terms of how stories should be done. He is phenomenal with spotting the little things here and there that need to be fixed. The guy who you send around and goes, “Uh-uh! Don’t do that!” That’s the official title I’d have on his card, “Uh-oh! Don’t Do That Guy.” [laughter] Because there’s no one better in the entire business who can come up with some really good ideas. I mean, he was very responsible for so much of what happened later at DC in terms of Camelot 3000 and even Watchmen on the “Uh-oh, don’t do that” type of thing, that made those books work in so many ways. But being in charge of a company was not, at that point in his career, the thing I thought he was best at. He may have felt differently, people see each other differently. So no, I didn’t expect that mine would be short-lived because of what happened to Len. As I said, I think his health problems really made it more difficult for him. CBA: Who came after you? Marv: What happened was, several months before I decided to leave, I contacted Roy and asked him if he’d be interested in coming back. He said he would, but he was going out to California for a vacation first, and he called me then at the last minute and said

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he’d decided to stay out in California, and he had arranged for Gerry Conway to take over. So, Gerry took over after me, and then I think he stayed a month or two, and then I believe it was Archie Goodwin, and he stayed for a couple of years, and then Jim Shooter. CBA: If you could do it all over again—your time at Marvel in the ’70s—would you? Marv: I didn’t do enough, I wish I had stuck it out. I wish that I was able to get past my personal problems, because of my separation, and the Cadence people, because I think we were just getting to the point that we got the books on time, the staff was relatively happy because they saw I honored the promises I made in order to get the books on time. Part of it was I created a title called Marvel Fill-In Comics, and had very specific fill-ins done every single month, with the promise to the original writers of the book that no fill-ins would ever be used unless they were late. So, the onus was on them to get the books on time, or a fill-in would be used, and nobody wanted a fill-in used, they’d rather have a reprint. So, the writers who got their books in on time never had a fill-in used, and what I tried to do was, all fill-ins had multiple purposes, so they were mostly teamups, so they could be used in two or three different books, depending upon who was in it. So, for instance, the Hulk may be meeting with Iron Man, and so it could go into either Hulk or Iron Man, or possibly The Avengers, if you needed to! They weren’t always the best stories, but using that method, we were able to get the books on time, which to me was more important than anything. I didn’t ever want to see a reprint, an unadvertised reprint and an unplanned reprint. CBA: Do you think the periodic nature of comics worked against quality? Marv: People ask that all the time, we’ve had a long discussion of how much you liked Tomb of Dracula, we were doing that monthly. Conan, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four…. CBA: Yeah, but some guys like Gene can do it, and there’s no doubt about it, but there’s some guys—like Neal Adams, for instance—who need to take more time. Marv: Fine, so what you do with someone like Neal—and this is what I did on the black-&-white books, and it’s what I did later at DC, and what I always do—when you have an artist who is dynamite, you give them an assignment that’s not on-schedule. That’s not due a certain day! You don’t alter the system, you work the situation to fit the person, so you get the best talent. Neal Adams is gonna turn out a book, say it takes him six months to do it. He’s very fast, by the way; Neal’s one of the fastest artists in the business, but he’s also incredibly busy, so I don’t want to say that Neal was slow. CBA: Right, right, he’s enormously obligated. Marv: Yeah, he was doing all of his Continuity work, and that had to take precedence, so all those people who said Neal’s slow, they’re wrong. But in order to get it, you have to plan that this book, this story, will not see print for six or eight months, and if you do that, you’re never disappointed, you don’t have to have a fight with the artist, and you get a brilliant piece of work at the end of it. No, I don’t think the periodic nature of comics hurts it, I think you have to understand it, and then program your books to fit it.

Below: Ever the kidder, Marie caricatured all the Marvel editors for the regular “round-up” feature in FOOM magazine. Here’s editor Wolfman as Marv, wolfman, fullyerect count, crazy man, and, um, semi-flaccid count. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

CBA Interview

The Colan Mystique His name is Eugene, and the talk is about Tomb of Dracula Conducted by Tom Field Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson This interview, conducted in Gene Colan’s Vermont home on February 18, 2001, focuses strictly on the artist’s career at Marvel in the 1970s. Gene’s wife, Adrienne, makes some very welcome comments throughout our talk. For more on Colan’s early years and his beginnings at Marvel in the 1960s, please refer to the highly informative and entertaining interview conducted by Roy Thomas in Alter Ego #6. —Tom Field

Below: The Dean with his beloved canines, basking in the rays at his Vermont home. Ye ed has the pleasure of doing a drive-by at Gene’s abode this past February. Thanks for the hospitality, Mr. Colan! Courtesy of the artist.

Comic Book Artist: About the time 1970 hits, you’re drawing Daredevil, Captain America, maybe the occasional Sub-Mariner and some of the mystery/romance stories in the anthologies. You’ve been at Marvel for nearly five years, and your career is going along smoothly. Then all of a sudden Jack Kirby leaves Marvel and goes to DC. What do you remember about that time? Was there a bit of a shake-up? Gene Colan: No, I wasn’t aware of it. I was in my own world. [All I thought about was] what am I going to do, and how am I going to do it. CBA: Now, you had a good working relationship with Stan Lee. But even before Jack left, Stan started to pull back from scripting. Suddenly, you weren’t working with Stan exclusively; you were working with Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and other writers. How did your working relationships change? Gene: I tried to give the writers whatever they had written down. If there was something I wasn’t sure of, I’d give them a call, try to get them to tell me what they were looking for, and I would try very hard to give them what they had written on the page. I much preferred to work with Stan, because he left everything up to me! When I worked with Stan, he’d give me a sentence or two, and he’d say, “Now, turn that into an 18page story.” So I had to break it down. I never wrote it out. John Romita would, very meticulously, I think, do little thumbnail sketches, and try to get the thing to pace right. I

would do it all in my head, and sometimes I’d get into trouble that way. CBA: Now, when you started working with fuller plots, did that affect your enjoyment of the material you were working on? Gene: The [newer] writers wanted a lot of control, I thought. They tried to tell the artist—depending on the writer, some of them were a little more controlling than others—how to go about setting up a scene, what the composition would be. I resented it. I’m the artist, he’s the writer! “You write the story. I’ll do the work—I’ll do the visuals—but stop telling me what to do!” CBA: Did you express yourself to them, or suffer in silence? Gene: Usually suffered in silence. CBA: So, let’s talk about Tomb of Dracula. How did you hear that Marvel was going to do this project? Gene: I must’ve heard about it from one of the editors up there at the time, or Stan himself, and I know I had a talk with Stan about it. I said, “Stan, I’d literally beg for this.” He asked, “Why?” And I said, “Because I know it’s something I’d love to do.” CBA: What was it that appealed to you? Gene: The atmospheric backgrounds that would be necessary to render the evil, the scariness of it all…. CBA: At that point, you didn’t know who was going to write it? Gene: I had no idea who was going to write it, but Stan had the control, and I wanted to be the artist on the project. They had other monster books at the time—they were giving tests to several of them—and I asked Stan [for Dracula], and he said, “Okay, fine,” and I let it go. I figured he said all right, so I can get it—all right! But then he changed his mind without me knowing it, and who was going to get it but Bill Everett? I called Stan up and said, “Stan, that’s not what you told me!” He said, “Well, Bill had it long before I told you that you could do it, and I promised it to him.” I knew he was double-talking me—I just knew it—so I sat down right away, and I worked out a whole page of Dracula’s character study, and all different poses in a montage. I wish I had that page today. Adrienne Colan: I hate to be a buttinsky, but… what happened was, Gene was devastated, but took it as, “That’s it,” because Stan was so final about it. But this was around the time the first Godfather movie came out, and there was this big story going around the industry how Marlon Brando saw himself as the Godfather, but the studios didn’t. And Brando being Brando, you wouldn’t think he’d go in and put himself through auditioning, but they said he stuffed cotton in his cheeks and came in [to the studio] as the Godfather, and he got the part, in spite of the fact that the industry didn’t see him in that role at all. So, I suggested to Gene to do a montage, because I knew Gene had this vision [of Dracula], and he was like loaded for bear! He didn’t want to! He thought, “Why should I? I’m not getting paid!” I said, “Listen, it’s good enough for Brando! What th’?…” Gene: That’s how it happened. I sent [the tryout] to Stan, and the next day he called and said, “You got it!” That was it! CBA: At that point, did you know if you were going to be drawing a comic book, or was it thought it might be a black-&-white magazine? Gene: It was a comic book—one of the monster books they were adding to the list. CBA: Now, you told me earlier how traumatized you were as a kid by seeing the original Frankenstein movie. That inspired your lifelong fascination with horror. Why not go after Marvel’s Frankenstein comic book instead? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Gene: It wasn’t offered! They never mentioned it. Just Dracula. CBA: Would you have been interested? Gene: Oh, sure! I would’ve done that, too. CBA: Would you have been more interested than in Tomb of Dracula? Gene: No, I think Dracula had the edge. First of all, I had a particular actor in mind [for Dracula] that had never played the part, and that was Jack Palance. I figured, “Oh, if there’s anyone who can play that role, it would’ve been him!” CBA: What did you see Jack Palance in that made you think that? Gene: Well, I had seen him do Jekyll and Hyde for television, and right there and then I knew that Jack Palance would do the perfect Dracula. He had that cadaverous look, a serpentine look on his face…. And he did play that role, eventually, on television. So, I took him on as a character, and [when drawing Dracula] I’d sit before the television screen with the Polaroid camera, and whenever there’d be a still image of him on the screen, I’d photograph it in different positions, so I could use him. That’s how [the Palance look] came about. Dracula never turned out really looking like him—somewhat like him. Maybe I didn’t catch the actual essence of him in the beginning… but I think as the years went by—and that’s when you really begin to develop a character; you get much, much better at it—it began to evolve into Jack Palance. CBA: Now, to take on Tomb of Dracula you had to give up Daredevil, the book with which you were most associated. Was that a tough choice for you? Gene: No, I had been doing that for a very long time, and I was running out of ideas. The idea was to choreograph his acrobatics, and it was getting too much the same all the time. CBA: Was there any fear that you were giving up the security of a super-hero for the risk of a horror title? May 2001

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Gene: No, I didn’t care about that. Actually, I learned later that all the other horror books they were turning out failed. The only one that did hang on, and stayed on, that they wanted to stay on, was the Dracula series. And once I knew that, that it was a hot item, and that I was doing something right, that was reward enough to continue with it. CBA: So, the assignment is yours. Do you recall how the first story came to you? Did the writer, Gerry Conway, give you a long plot or script? Gene: I remember talking about [the story]. It was just a written script, like I’d been doing, and I followed it. CBA: Do you have any memories about how you approached that first story? Gene: Well, I inked the first one. After that, I just don’t remember. Just so many adventures came along. CBA: Why did you ink that one issue? At that point, you hadn’t really inked any of your work at Marvel. Gene: No, but I wanted to try it out. I thought, “Who knows, maybe I’ll stay with it, maybe I won’t.” But it was too much pressure to get the work out, and I’m slow. CBA: You’re never really comfortable inking, are you? Gene: No. It took me a while to get into it. It was bad enough to just get it down right in pencil, let alone then go on and ink it. CBA: Now, when you first created Dracula, he had a goatee. You kept it for two issues, and then it was gone. What happened? Gene: I must’ve forgotten about it. CBA: You forgot it for 68 issues?! Gene: Yeah, must’ve been! I just left the little mustache; that’s it. I didn’t like the goatee. It was something I didn’t think he looked good in. Too typical. CBA: How about the inkers on Dracula? You did that first one

Above: CBA contributor Greg Huneryager writes: “It was small size, on one [board]. It corresponds exactly to a spread—I believe in Tomb of Dracula #29— with the same placement of balloons so I just assumed it was a misplaced piece and Palmer inked using xeroxes. Its size is due to Marvel's short-lived policy of having the artists do a two-page spread on [one board] and only pay them for that one page [though it was enlarged to a double-page spread for printing] but when I showed it to Marv Wolfman last year in San Diego, he said this spread exists in pencil form because Palmer hated how the art looked when printed the same size so he would lightbox and blow up these spreads to their standard size. Another oblique mystery solved!” Thanks, Greg! Art ©2001 Gene Colan. Tomb of Dracula ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Another Dracula mystery: Ye ed was marvelling at this rare Gene Colan pencil & ink job when the nagging realization dawned that the page—splash to the very first issue of Tomb of Dracula— was oriented for magazine-size (81/2” x 11”) printing, and not formatted for publication in a color comic book. A quick inspection of the printed piece revealed that, indeed, the entire issue was art corrected—extended borders, etc.—to fit comics orientation. This seems to indicate to us that the first TOD story was intended for use in a b-&-w Marvel mag (of which none existed at the time). Unfortunately neither Gene Colan nor Roy Thomas recall the situation. Hey, does Gerry Conway or Stan Lee remember? Drop us an E-mail, willya? Courtesy of Gene Colan. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

yourself, then all of a sudden, you got Vinnie Colletta… Gene: I didn’t like his interpretation of my work. He messed it up. CBA: Did he look for a simple way out? Gene: Oh, it was strictly speed. That was his value to the company. They could give him a job, and he could probably turn it out overnight. I didn’t want that. I tried, I worked real hard on my art, why should somebody come over and wreck it up? So, I never really had a good inker, not until Tom [Palmer] came along. Well, I liked Frank Giacoia. I don’t know if he ever did Dracula. CBA: He didn’t do Dracula. Do you remember Ernie Chan? He did an issue or two. Jack Abel did a couple. Gene: Yes, I knew Jack Abel. He did a lot of “Iron Man” with me. He had a very slick line, which was okay on “Iron Man,” of course. Iron Man was made of iron, so you want it to look like metal. But when it came to stone and dark corners and garbage, [laughs] he wasn’t the man for that. CBA: Tom Palmer’s the inker that gets associated with you and Tomb of Dracula. Your thoughts on Tom Palmer? Gene: I liked Tom’s work very much. It was weighty, and he put in all the stuff that I liked—kind of like a Caniff. My work is not easy to follow, and he must’ve had a helluva time with it. Tom is an illustrator himself; he’s done a lot of advertising art. So, he was very well-suited to it. Now, there’s one thing that Tom used a lot of, and that’s BenDay, that craft-tint that he’d paste on, which I hated. That was his thing, and I didn’t understand why he did it. He thought it made the page look great, so.... CBA: Did you have a personal relationship with Tom?

Gene: No. I saw him once or twice in my whole career. CBA: As you became comfortable working with him, and as you stayed together all those years, did the collaboration change your style at all? Gene: No, I just drew as usual. [The drawing] started with me, and as far as I’m concerned, it ended with me. I was just hopeful that the finished product would look close to what I did. CBA: So, early writers: You worked with Conway for two issues, Archie Goodwin came in, kind of fiddled around with it for two issues—he introduced the Rachel Van Helsing character and the Indian character, Taj. Gardner Fox came in for his own two issues, messed around with it some. What did you bring to Dracula in those early issues? Gene: Dracula was always in the shadows, dark shadows, eerie settings, atmospheric stuff—cemeteries, night, bats, corners of places. I was always looking for something that would have a fine shadow in it, which I was good at, to add weight to the story. CBA: Did you want the book set in Transylvania? Gene: Yeah, I liked that. Eventually, Dracula wound up in Boston. In fact, Adrienne and I took a trip to Boston because we didn’t have enough information on it. We drove out there, and I took some pictures, just to get the feeling of Boston streets. CBA: You didn’t do this for Transylvania, though! Gene: [laughter] No, but I would’ve done it. CBA: So Marv Wolfman comes on the book with #7, and he’s the fourth writer in seven issues. How did your relationship with Marv develop? He must’ve come to you saying, “What the hell are we doing here?” [laughs] Gene: I accepted the changes very well. They could’ve had any one on they wanted—it didn’t matter to me. Whatever was written there on the page, I’d give it my best, even if I didn’t like it. Adrienne: The one thing Gene did appreciate with Marv was that from the very beginning, it was very apparent that Marv cared as much about the writing of it as Gene cared about the art of it, and in that way, that was their most powerful bond. CBA: One of the things that Marv did early on was introduce Blade, the Vampire Slayer. What was your role in the creation of Blade? Gene: The visuals. Marv told me Blade was a black man, and we talked about how he should dress, and how he should look (very heroic looking). That was my input. Marv might’ve said “Put boots on him,” I don’t now. The bandolier of blades—that was Marv’s idea. But, I dressed him up. I put the leather jacket on him, and so on. CBA: Did you base the character visually on anybody? Gene: A composite of black actors. (ex-NFL running back) Jim Brown was one of them. CBA: Did you have a sense that he was going to be a popular character? Gene: Oh, I knew it was good, this character. Blacks were not portrayed in comics up to that time, not really. So I wanted to be one of the first to portray blacks in comics. There were black people in this world, they buy comic books, why shouldn’t we make them feel good? Why shouldn’t I have the opportunity to be one of the first to draw them? I enjoyed it! CBA: So, creative and financial interests aside, is there some satisfaction in seeing Wesley Snipes up there on the screen as your character, Blade? Gene: I don’t picture him as Blade. But Wesley Snipes did a damn good job. Yeah, it made me feel good, sure. Especially when my name appeared up there! CBA: So, as Tomb of Dracula started to hit its stride, how did you and Marv work together? Gene: He gave me a written plot, but he also discussed it with me over the phone, or I called him… I don’t know which it was… but we did speak over the phone about it. CBA: Issue to issue, or would you talk longer term, like what you would do in a series of issues? Gene: I would ask him questions about the plot he’d written out, just to make sure I understood what he was looking for, what I should play up. I tended to ask questions, rather than to have him assume that I got the idea. I didn’t want to take it all up for credit myself, because I always felt that the writer was getting somewhere, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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was getting to a point, and I wanted to get to that same point. CBA: How did you feel about Marv’s approach to the character over time? Gene: I didn’t feel Dracula was evil enough. I think that he was above-ground more than he should’ve been, and there should’ve been more action trying to eliminate him. CBA: That’s interesting, because in the early stories, Dracula’s very much the villain, and the idea is you’ve got this band of vampire hunters hunting him down. Marv seemed to turn that around, and say, “You know, you can’t base the entire series on a villain; we’ve got to find people who are more villainous than Dracula.” He almost made him a little more heroic. Now you’re saying you’d like to have seen Dracula a little more evil. Gene: Much more evil. When I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula, that was the good Dracula. They concentrated in the film on how to get rid of him, and it was almost impossible to do. Also, there was magic in the film that never appeared in the [comic book], because I didn’t have that kind of idea. Like, if Dracula wanted, he could’ve turned into a snake. He could ooze out of a room, turn into mist to get through a doorway or something. Or he could flatten himself out. That would’ve been great to show in the comic book. Marv also put in Harold H. Harold—that was a good character! But he would dominate the Dracula book to the point where it wasn’t Dracula! And although I enjoyed drawing him—it was a comical break from the seriousness of it, and Dracula came in at the end or the middle a little bit—you didn’t see much of Dracula. CBA: Well, that was the risk, because on that book you did have an ensemble cast. You always had Quincy, and Frank Drake, and Rachel, and all these characters challenging you to pace it. Gene: Marv was very easy-going; he relied a lot on me. He didn’t give me any trouble, and I didn’t give him any trouble! CBA: How did your own visual approach to the character change over time? Gene: I tried to make the character look more real, visually. I tried to show what an evil character he was. You know, the movie Night Stalker came out—it was nothing to do with Dracula, but it was about vampires—and I liked the feeling of throwing the viewer off balance into thinking this is a present-day situation where a guy thinks he’s a vampire. I loved that part, because it set you off-balance, I never expected him to really be a vampire, maybe 300 years old! I loved that. I did some things in Dracula on my own that weren’t in the script, and then I would call up Marv and say, “What do you think of this?” For instance, Dracula would be floating along the floor, you’d see his face, but the rest of him would be like a snake, floating, and I thought it was a good idea. I kind of needed permission to go ahead and go off-field a little bit. CBA: But you must’ve felt comfortable trying. Apparently the relationship there was good. Gene: It was very good; it was easy to talk to Marv. He never said no to anything, really. I don’t ever remember him rejecting anything. CBA: Was there a difference between Marv the writer and Marv when he eventually became Marvel’s editor-in-chief, your boss? Gene: No. Marv was always Marv. I got along with him easily. CBA: Now you didn’t draw any of the early covers of Dracula…. Gene: I never did many of the covers in any books. I guess I just wasn’t cover crazy. I don’t know, they didn’t ask me to [draw covers] much… I usually had to ask to do the covers. CBA: That seems to be one change that Marv made when he became editor, though. You were suddenly doing the covers of Tomb of Dracula. Gene: I’m glad I had the opportunity to do it, but I probably treated the covers like I would’ve the inside of the book, like one of the panels where it should be different, a little more outstanding. CBA: The other editors—before we get to Shooter, we’ve got Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Marv, Archie Goodwin—did they have any sort of influence on what you were doing on Dracula? Gene: They pretty much left us alone, as I remember CBA: Meanwhile, all the monster books were dying on the vine. What was it about Dracula, do you think, that made the book survive? Gene: Maybe the subject matter. I mean, Dracula… some of the May 2001

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stories that have been told around that mythical figure… the public seems to never get enough of it. So, I guess that’s maybe the reason. It could be the stories themselves, or the artwork, or the [readers’] ability to buy a book once a month, where that character would continue on and on and on. CBA: As you were drawing that, you’d been doing super-heroes for years before that. How did it feel, being in the vampire business? Gene: Very good. Super-heroes usually don’t deal with the frightening, as a rule. Instead, it’s the villain versus the good guy, all the time. But the occult, the mystery of the unknown, probably from early on frightened the bejeebers out of me. When I saw Frankenstein, oh my god, I was totally traumatized, and ever since I’ve been intrigued with horror things. CBA: You gravitated towards things that scared you? Gene: Yeah, I did. One day as a kid, I wanted to see one of the Frankenstein movies—it could’ve been Son of Frankenstein—and I stood outside the movie theater. This was for a Saturday matinee, and I could’ve taken myself in for a quarter to see it, but I couldn’t get the nerve to go in! I just couldn’t! I would be in a dark theater by myself, so I couldn’t do it! CBA: Was there any feeling that you were missing anything while you were doing Dracula? You weren’t doing Daredevil or any of the better-selling super-hero titles.

Above: A goateed Drac by Gene Colan & Vince Colletta. From Tomb of Dracula #2. Courtesy of Tom Field. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: A playful vampire image by Gene. Courtesy of David Hamilton. ©2001 Gene Colan.

Above: Interviewer Tom Field speculates the above splash page, done by Gene for the otherwise allreprint 1993 Wedding of Dracula one-shot, may be the only other instance of Colan pencils and inks (after TOD #1) during his later Marvel tenure. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: The Count Goes Las Vegas in another David “Hambone” Hamilton-contributed Colan cartoon. ©2001 G. Colan.

Gene: No, I was thoroughly enjoying it. [Super-heroes] was something I’d left behind. I was after something new, and I knew [Dracula] was a winner, so I put everything I had into it. CBA: I know upstairs in your studio you’ve got all sorts of CDs with war noises and things to get you in the mood for your jobs. What did you do for Tomb of Dracula to get in the mood? Gene: I played very eerie music. Mostly movie soundtracks,or I take out some of the classics; I play Tchaikovsky… Sound effects, any kind of sound effects, mostly storms. All I’d have to do is play thunder and lightning sound effects, and it would take me right up to it. CBA: Did you go anywhere, visually, to pick up bits for Dracula? Gene: Well, if I needed a cemetery thing, I’d either take it out of a book, or I’d go to a local cemetery for tombstones. One time I went away to New England, where I felt was a good place for a couple of cemeteries. I’d take my camera with film and photograph [the cemeteries]. CBA: When did you start to get sick of Dracula? Gene: When Shooter came. He wanted to change everything. He didn’t like my interpretation of Dracula, he thought my drawings were off.

I knew—I could smell trouble before it began. I knew [Shooter’s] type; I knew it because of other bad experiences with editors, so I knew I was heading for a rough time. CBA: But Dracula had been successful, and nobody had messed with you previously. Gene: Shooter wanted to take total control of it, and I didn’t agree with him about anything. He went through everything with a finetoothed comb, wanting to change everything. He came on the scene and nobody knew anything about him—where did he get his experience? What did he know? He was a control freak. CBA: Were pages coming back to you for corrections at that point? Gene: Lots. CBA: And you hadn’t been doing corrections before? Gene: No, no. It was a nightmare; I didn’t want to deal with it. CBA: After years of drawing Dracula, were you also getting sick of the character? Gene: There were moments, yes. There was a time when I was getting a little tired of it, which was even before Shooter came. I told Marv, “Listen, Marv, I’ve had enough, I really don’t want to do it.” He said, “Thanks, Gene.” And he said, “If you’re not going to draw it, I’m leaving, too.” He didn’t want to write if I wasn’t going to draw it. CBA: Was there a sense that you wanted to do a “last hurrah” on that book, before you both took off? Gene: Yeah, we talked about that. CBA: And you did it. You and Marv and Tom wrapped up the comic book with a pretty good storyline, ending with the doublesized 70th issue, back in 1979. You did go out with a bang. But then several months later, Marvel came out with a black-&-white Tomb of Dracula magazine that Marv wrote at first, and you drew. Why did you come back to it? Why not say, “Okay, I’ve done it. Enough.” Gene: I tried to get off it, but I don’t think I had anything else in the offing then. CBA: Hadn’t you done what you wanted to do with the character? Gene: I really thought it was redundant at that point to go back, over and over. I even told Marv, “Let’s see if we can revise it, and create something for ourselves.” CBA: You came back to Dracula a few times. You did the magazine, and you also came back and did the miniseries with Marv around 1991 or so—that series that Al Williamson inked. How did you feel about that? Gene: I didn’t draw it good. I just did it because it was there, and I was offered it. So, I couldn’t afford to turn it down. CBA: It didn’t seem to gel quite as well with you and Marv. Gene: No, whatever we had to say about Dracula had been said. There was no new storyline. It was just a continuation of where we left off. CBA: How did you feel about yours and Marv’s 1998 Dark Horse miniseries, Curse of Dracula, that was an entirely different Dracula character? Gene: It was Tomb of Dracula, written in the same way. Not too great. CBA: Looking back now, years later, how do you regard the Dracula experience in your career? Gene: Just one of the jobs that lasted the longest. CBA: It wasn’t anything more than that? Gene: Honestly, no. CBA: What was the pace like in the ’70s for you? You were drawing pretty much all the time, the equivalent of about two books a month. Gene: Every day the goal was doing two pages. CBA: You couldn’t have had any time for outside activities. Gene: It was terrible, if you think about it. It was a terrible price to pay, and looking back on it, I wish I could’ve slowed down along the way, lived a life around the same time I drew these [comics]. It wasn’t a nine to five job! If I had been as fast as John Buscema or Mike Sekowsky—they could do a story in a day! CBA: Let’s talk about some of the other characters you drew at Marvel in the 1970s. What did Captain America mean to you? That’s a character that seems to represent a lot of your ideals. Gene: Captain America is the kind of man, like a Gary Cooper COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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type, where you wish you could be like him, wish you knew him. That’s how I looked at him, like someone I would’ve liked, or would have liked to have had the principles he stood for. I wanted to be like him. CBA: Your version of Doctor Strange was very different from Steve Ditko’s. What influenced you? Gene: I enjoyed those [stories] very much. During the ’70s, he was not a mean character, but I took him to various places. [The comic] had atmosphere, lots of atmosphere. It was just a night character. CBA: What did you bring to that series? Gene: Pretty much what I was doing for Dracula. Same kind of mystery. I also was hooked on amphetamines when I did Doctor Strange. That’s what kept me going, because of the hours that I kept, I had to stay in good health to meet the deadlines. CBA: But you couldn’t have been getting personal fulfillment out of that. Gene: Yes, I did. CBA: You’re working like hell, having to take chemicals to keep awake! Where’s the satisfaction? Gene: It’s in the art. I’d think of what I’ve got on my board, and what I thought should be different, and somehow when I got to it the next morning, it’d be—for me—straightened out. I’m still drawn to the art, trying to give it the very best I can, and to do things in a different way. Just the opportunity. The more freedom I’m given on a project, the better it turns out. CBA: Do you have memories of the writers you worked with on Doctor Strange? Gene: It didn’t much matter to me, to tell you the truth, who wrote any of them. For me, it was a plot to draw. CBA: What about the inkers? Gene: The inkers I never had control of. My problem ended once [the pages] left my room, and they received it. I did the best I could; the rest was up to them. CBA: Did you get sick of Doctor Strange at a point? Gene: Sure, because it kept going to the same place. I was looking for ways to make it fresh—that’s when I started to change the appearance of his room. I’d say, “Gee, that would be good to warp the room, make it look smaller than it is, or bigger than it is, like a fish lens on a camera, where everything would be elongated.” I’d thought of elongating some of the characters themselves, just to give myself a boost, and give me something different to do. CBA: Howard the Duck. How did you ever get that assignment? Gene: I was given a chance at it, and I loved it. I wish I had stayed on Howard the Duck forever. I loved the thing! When Steve Gerber was writing it, it was its best. He was terrific. CBA: What appealed to you about the book? Gene: Howard! He was such a simple character to draw, and it amazed me we could get away with it, because it was just like Donald Duck, right there! In fact, [Marvel] did get in trouble with Disney, and we had to change some of it! CBA: Right, you had to put pants on him! Gene: Yeah! At first, I said, “How can you claim this is your own? Howard the Duck, this is Donald Duck here!” Didn’t matter he smoked a cigar, had a little hat on, that was enough! But if no one else questioned it, why should I? I enjoyed it, because Howard was the easiest thing to do, and it was such a chance to make things funny and lighten up a little bit. I enjoyed humor, and Steve was so funny. I’d just sit there and laugh my head off just reading the script, and I’d call him and say so. CBA: What did Gerber give you to work with? Gene: He just wrote a funny script! CBA: And you didn’t mind that it was a full script? Gene: No! It was entertaining to read the script! CBA: And you would read it? Because typically, when you get a story, you just want to go one page at a time; you don’t read ahead. Gene: No, and not even with his. But whatever he had on every May 2001

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page was funny, it was just hilarious. Sometimes I would read ahead, a little bit, not much, just to see what else would happen. I had a good rapport with Steve. We didn’t make it, though, with the [Howard the Duck] syndicated strip, because things weren’t coming in on time. I couldn’t keep up the pace between regular comic work and Howard, and so the whole damn thing fell apart. Adrienne: And, we were flat broke, to the point where we had to sell the only car we had and borrow my parents’ car. What a mess! CBA: Now, you’d given up some comic book stuff to do the syndicated strip? Gene: Sure. Stan, he pumped me up, he said, “Oh, you’ll retire on what you make on [the syndicated strip]. Just keep going.” Oh, God Almighty. Adrienne: I remember when the call from Stan came, and we were all in the kitchen, including the kids, and Gene picked up the phone, said it’s Stan, and he said, “How would you like to make $100,000 a year?” And we just thought, “Oh, my God, our ship has come in!” and we started jumping around the kitchen. Seven months later, we’re borrowing my parents’ car… CBA: You did some crazy stuff for the comic books. One of the earliest issues, you had Howard fighting a gingerbread cookie. [laughter] He ran for president, you put

Above: Ye ed still says that after Tom Palmer and The Dean himself, Gene never had a better inker than Steve Leialoha. Here’s a beautiful page from Howard the Duck #6. Courtesy of Richard Howell. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Center inset: One of Adrienne & Gene Colan’s Christmas cards, this one featuring a rather different night rider! Courtesy of Roy Thomas. ©2001 Gene Colan. Opposite page: Because numerous pages intended for Tomb of Dracula #71-72 were discarded as the story arc had to be truncated into #70, there exists a number of unpublished TOD pages. Wanna share? One contributor (whose name was—yikes!—lost) sent us this very low-res image. ©2001 Gene Colan.

him in a mental institution. [laughter] Gene: Well, that’s Steve! CBA: What did you do for inspiration to draw Howard in a mental institution? Gene: Whatever came to mind! [laughter] CBA: Eventually, both Dracula and Howard became black-&-white magazines, and you drew those for a while. But then they ended, and you seemed kind of aimless, like the editors didn’t know where to put you. You did Daredevil again for a few issues, but didn’t stay. Was that your choice? Gene: I think I just left on my own, really. I just drifted to other things. CBA: You did a memorable Savage Sword of Conan issue. Care to comment on following John Buscema on that? Gene: I thought that Buscema was so far above and beyond anyone else in that period. What could I add to it that he hasn’t already done? CBA: You ended up drawing the Hulk magazine. How was that? Gene: I didn’t like that character. He was ugly as sin, big and clumsy, didn’t look good on the page, and I couldn’t relate to him. He was more like a big dumb Lenny (from Of Mice and Men) than anything else, and I couldn’t deal with him. CBA: They had you do some movie adaptations, Meteor, Jaws 2...

Gene: Yeah, I enjoyed those. I did. I was thinking it might lead to something else, but it never did. CBA: Well, that’s it—everything seems to be a little bit here, a little bit there… no one seemed to know what to do with you. Gene: That’s it, right! CBA: Finally, you ended up on The Avengers with Shooter writing it. What were you thinking when you took that assignment? Gene: Nothing but trouble, and I had plenty of trouble. There were too many characters involved—you couldn’t concentrate on any one of them—they were all important. Depending on how the writer wrote it up, if the writer focused on particular character, then I would play it up—whoever he felt was most important to the group. CBA: But you happened to come in at a time when they had like 20 characters in the book. Gene: And not only that, it was overkill; it was too much work involved. I usually had to show them all together in one room… how can you move on with the thing? Give me one or two people, I work fine. But if you start throwing in a thousand characters, it’s too much! CBA: So, you started the ’70s doing Daredevil and Captain America—life is pretty good. By the end of the ’70s, there’s no more Dracula, there’s no more Howard the Duck, Marvel sort of doesn’t know where to put you… sounds like nothing was much fun. Gene: I guess not. It sounds like an actor’s career. Adrienne: It was a very insecure time financially, very frightening. Gene: Life changes, and things get different. Marvel got started with new talent in the business, new artists, new styles of drawing… everything changed. I think once the comic book became an expensive item, no longer an affordable one, then it really changed. I mean, yes, the size of the book was bigger, the color was fabulous, the paper was very, very good, quality paper… but you have to pay for that! What happened to the same books that used to be giving so many people pleasure, and were cheap to produce? CBA: What would you say was the last straw for you? Gene: The last straw at Marvel? Shooter. When Shooter came in as editor-in-chief, I knew I didn’t have a future [at Marvel]. I couldn’t get along with him; he was harassing the life out of me. I couldn’t make a living! He frightened me, he really did. He upset me so bad I couldn’t function. CBA: Shooter publicly had some criticisms of your art style, your storytelling. What was he saying to you privately? Gene: That I had poor storytelling abilities, everything! My first hint of what Shooter was going to be like in my life was when we had to drive up to Connecticut together for a radio broadcast talking about comics or Howard the Duck or something. Shooter drove me up there, and he never had a word to say to me. I knew right there and then that there was something very wrong, very strange. I tried to make conversation, but he’d just answer briefly. He had something on his mind, there was something wrong, something terribly wrong. But he was not friendly, not outgoing. Adrienne: Gene came home that afternoon upset, and… that day, things changed in our house in terms of Gene’s sense of security and everything. It’s not like [Shooter] called him names. But he would correct his work in ways that Gene could not understand what he wanted. I remember once he wanted somebody flying around the room, or something, and then he said, “No! What you drew defies the laws of gravity!” CBA: Did you ever express your reservations to Stan? Gene: Yeah, one afternoon, to the extent that I told Stan, “Don’t put [Marvel] in Shooter’s hands. It’s going to be a bad time with COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Shooter.” The only other thing I had to say was, “I just can’t work with Shooter; I’m leaving if Shooter takes over.” But all Stan wanted to do was get out [of New York]. Adrienne: When Stan was still there, Gene and Jim already were not doing well together, and it came to loggerheads once. Stan interceded, and Jim backed off. But Stan made a call to the house, and said, “Okay, it’s smoothed out, but you’re going to have to get along.” Do you remember? He said, “That’s the way it’s going to be no matter where you go, Gene.” Gene: “There’s going to be Jim Shooters everywhere in your life,” he said. But as far as I’m concerned, I’ve dealt with all the Jim Shooters I’m going to see! After the experience with Jim Shooter, I didn’t have another experience like that. CBA: So, ultimately you quit Marvel and moved over to DC. Was there a specific incident that pushed you to leave? Adrienne: Well, no, there was no specific [incident]; it had been something like two years of that kind of harassment, and I was just really concerned that this affected Gene’s health. I felt that my presence and the children’s presence in his life was, at this point, the only reason he was putting himself through staying, and I felt guilty for that, sad, and obliged to kind of open that up for discussion. So I asked him one afternoon why he was staying and putting himself through this. “Is it about the money, the house, the kids, the whole suburban/married/kids kind of thing?” It’s very rare when Gene stops what he’s drawing, to even turn around in his chair. But he put his pencil down and turned around and said,

“Yes.” I said, “I’m going to go into the next room, and I’m going to type out your resignation for you.” And it was a big moment, it was a really big moment. Before we mailed [the resignation], I had the thought to do one last thing before we closed the door on this—to just give it all the benefit of the doubt and to see if… well, to just make sure it was not Gene’s imagination. He was working on some… we remember it somehow as a 32-page story, and it was in the house, mailed back, and we knew why it was mailed back. Gene hadn’t even opened it, because he knew it had to be [pages] marked up with corrections. So, we opened it up, and sure enough, there were 32 pages worth of corrections. It wasn’t every panel on every page, but every page had corrections. I said to Gene, “Do me a favor… go through the 32 pages, take about six that you’ll sit down with. On those six, if there are three panels on each that [Shooter] asks you to correct, correct one.” I’ll give you an example: there was a plane taking off in panel one, and Shooter says, ‘Oh, it’s not taking off from the right angle.’ Gene went to erase the whole thing. I said, “Don’t do that. Make the smoke coming out at a different angle.” He said “Okay.” Now, I knew he was going to quit when he said “okay,” because there were no shortcuts for him! So, that’s the way we handled it, those six out of 32 pages got May 2001

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Giving Form to the Shadows Tom Palmer and the joy of inking Gene Colan I started working with Gene Colan very early in my comic book career. Inking Gene on Doctor Strange was the second job I did for Marvel; the first job I had was penciling the previous issue, inked by Dan Adkins. I really didn’t know what I wanted to be at that point—whether a penciler or an inker—as I had just come out of art school and was doing advertising art, working in an ad studio. I had no clue. The Marvel assignments were extra work to make some money. But I remember putting a lot of work into inking Gene’s pencils and I think that first job holds up pretty well, to my surprise. I felt I had to prove myself to the guys at Marvel and they were very pleased with the job, so I was asked to stay on. I worked with Gene on maybe ten issues of Doctor Strange, but my longest tenure was on Tomb of Dracula. I enjoyed working on Gene’s pencils very much; his style was more illustrative than many other comic book artists and it was more of a challenge. It wasn’t a “comic book” style; it was something else. Gene penciled very softly, in a halftone-like method, so I had to decide if a given line was shadow, black, gray, or light, and I inked using crosshatching, bold line, ZipA-Tone—which I used a lot of with Gene—to give form to his pencils. I guess I’ve inked nearly a thousand pages of Gene’s pencils. The only work I was doing at Marvel for a period of time (when I was doing a lot of advertising work) was inking Gene on Tomb of Dracula. It was once a month and always a pleasure. It was good to get away from the deadline doom of advertising and sit back and enjoy working on Gene’s pencils. I think we were able to work together so long because I understood Gene’s pencils, or at least saw them differently. It wasn’t just a matter of inking—I don’t think I was ever really challenged by just inking—it was I was able to bring something of myself to the work and enjoy the assignment. And with Gene, I always had to bring something to it; I couldn’t just ink what I had in front of me. And, as far as I know, he enjoyed what I did. If you look at Gene’s raw pencils, it’s almost as if they’re pencil renderings, and I had to decide what his intention was. If I had any luck, it was because I was able to put detail into his shadows and gave form to the picture, embellishing the pencils. With other artists, I would just follow a line and that was it. I was able to work with top pros in the field—Neal Adams, John Buscema, and Gene Colan—and it was a joy working with all of them, even if each experience was different. As with Gene, I was able to bring something of myself to the work when approaching Neal’s work. John Buscema was a comp artist in advertising prior to his comic book work and he would pencil minimal layouts and, again, I had to bring something to it, but John did put in everything you needed for the picture. All I had to do was build on top of his layout, layer it with tons of detail, but the basics were always there. John is a terrific draftsman, as was Neal and Gene. Gene uses soft pencils and has a quiet rendering in the shadows. His details on faces was soft shading; not a hard line shadow. But I think that if you could follow his line as best you could with ink and your own technique, you could bring out what Gene put down. I’m very proud of the work on Tomb of Dracula. I think when you have that long a run on a book with the same team— Wolfman, Colan, Costanza, and me—you can really hone your skills. And we really got to know each other’s approaches to the work. The title held a very high standard all the way through. I don’t think I ever turned down a job offered to me that Gene had penciled; I have always enjoyed working with him. As a matter of fact, I’m working with Gene on a couple of small jobs now—one for DC, and one for Marvel. I never even think twice about whether or not to work on Gene’s stuff. It’s always fun to be able to go home again.—Tom Palmer 55

Above: And what better way to end our Drac Pack celebration than with Marv, Gene, Tom and John’s poignant final three pages of their extraordinary Tomb of Dracula run? Now, that was a series, kiddo! These appeared in TOD #70. Courtesy of John Yon. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

corrected, and maybe a third of each correction on each panel. He did it as just a token gesture, just to see if [Shooter] had been doing this to Gene all these two years just for the love of it. And I said, “Now, this is the important part, Gene… when you’re ready to mail it back, give [Shooter] a call and very pleasantly—don’t be upset like you have acted all these two years—call him, act like, ‘Fine, okay, it’s on its way back, I’m putting it in the mail today!’ Be cheerful, pleasant, no problem, okay?” So he did. He put in a call to Jim to set him up to expect the job to be corrected. [Later] he gets a call from Jim. “That’s more like it!” CBA: Tell me about the end. You had a final meeting with Shooter and then-Marvel VP Mike Hobson. Gene: I called [Hobson] and said, “I’m leaving.” He says, “Before you do that, why don’t we have a meeting with Shooter, and let’s talk this thing over and work it out.” So I went into the city. I owed Marvel some money on an advance payment, so I came over with a check prepared to pay them off and leave, and the vice-president

tried to talk me into staying at least another six months, and I said, “No.” Shooter was in the same room, and I said, “That man’s not gonna change. He is what he is. Whether it’s six days, six months or six years, it’s not going to be any different, so I’m not going to put up with it for another minute. If you want to have me work here without being ruled by Mr. Shooter, and being told what to do by Mr. Shooter, I’ll work here. I’ll continue. But for as long as he’s going to be breathing down my neck, telling me what to do all the time, and criticizing everything I do the way he does it, no.” And I left the building, walking by some of the artists and editors and other writers… and everybody went like this [thumbs up]. CBA: And so you left Marvel after 15 years. Any characters there you wish you’d drawn, but never had the opportunity to do? Gene: No. I can’t think of any. CBA: That leads to the question: what do you want to be remembered for, for your work at Marvel? Gene: [laughs] Just being good at whatever I did, pretty much. I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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guess Dracula is probably what I’m known for—it was the longest run I’ve ever had. I don’t know if I’d want to go out being remembered just for that. Just giving pleasure for whatever I do, not singling out any one. CBA: What do you remember fondly about your time at Marvel? Gene: The beginning with Stan, when we were allowed such unprecedented freedom… that’s what I remember. I’d talk with Stan about a plot over the phone, and I’d tape record his whole idea—it’d just be a few sentences. “This is what I want in the beginning, the middle, and what I want in the end… the rest is up to you.” I had all the characters work for me, what they looked like was up to me— except those that were already established. But whatever I did, I could do. The one time Stan tells about at conventions, because it’s laughable, is when I drew a whole page of a hand opening up a door. I did it to expedite matters, [laughs] so I could get through with it, but he didn’t like it, he thought I was.... Adrienne: Remember, he called, he says, “What are you doing?” May 2001

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Gene: “What are you doing—a hand opening up a door? Where’s the interest in that?” Adrienne: But Stan loves to tell that story at conventions, and we’ve been there to witness him on panels, telling that story. He always says, “However, if there’s anyone who can draw a hand opening up a door, and capture your attention for a whole page, [it’s Gene],” which is very sweet of him to say. And that’s kind of… that’s what made that time very sweet for Gene, because Stan was wonderful to Gene in that way. There was no fear; he didn’t use that kind of tactic, even when Gene was constantly destroying the pacing of plot. Only on occasion would Stan call and say, “Gene!” It was kind of like that, like a brother begging another brother, “Please! Please!” but not with the idea like his job was at stake, or, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” COLAN FANS: Be sure to check out Alter Ego #6 for Roy Thomas’ interview with The Dean on his earlier Marvel experiences!

EDITOR'S NOTE: In fairness to Jim Shooter, whom Gene Colan discusses at some length in the preceding interview, Tom Field contacted the former Marvel editor-in-chief to ask his take on the topics covered. A short interview was conducted, transcribed, and approved, and Ye Ed had every intention of including that talk in these pages. Alas, this issue proved to be another mag bursting at the seams and we found ourselves out of room. We hope to include Jim’s comments in the next issue of CBA and thank him—and Tom Field—for their patience.

CBA Interview

The Incredible Herb Trimpe (rhymes with “blimpie”) on his Marvel bullpen days Inset background image: Son of Satan and Phantom Eagle notwithstanding, most informed readers know that Herb Trimpe’s trademark character is good ol’ Greenskin. Detail of back cover Trimpe illustration from The Rampaging Hulk Marvel Treasury Edition. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: From left to right, it’s Amelia Trimpe and her parents, Linda Fite and Herb, in a recent photo. Courtesy of Herb Trimpe.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Herb Trimpe, along with Flo Steinberg and Marie Severin, is easily one of my favorite people in comics. Because, like those two delightful women who shared time with Herb in the ’60s Marvel Bullpen, he is simply a very real person. No pretense, checked ego, self-defacing about his own work, and—overall—a solid grasp on the realities of the comics industry. This interview—revealing a perhaps too-opinionated interviewer—was conducted by telephone on January 28, 2001, and was copy-edited by Herb. Comic Book Artist: I was looking through a comic book index and came across reference to Alex and Mike Trimpe. Are they related? Herb: Alex is my son, Mike is my brother. CBA: Your brother helped you with an “Ant-Man” strip in Marvel Feature? Herb: Yes, he inked it. He inked a couple of books for me, actually. CBA: That Marvel Feature was a nice job! Herb: He was a good inker! I know! He actually tried to get work a few years ago, but I think I had already left comics, and he was having a tough time down in Charlottesville, Virginia. He’s a graphic artist, and was having a helluva time getting work. He tried comics again, but they weren’t interested at all, but he is a pretty solid inker! CBA: Yeah! That’s one of my favorite jobs that you did. Herb: I loved that “Ant-Man” stuff. I like the whole idea of it. I could draw that now, I think. CBA: It was a beautiful homage to Kirby’s Marvel work, I thought, from the splash page with his hand outstretched.... Herb: Yep, I remember that, yep. CBA: I’m just surprised it was your brother! That was a real nice job, it’s just too bad they didn’t hire him more! Herb: My son Alec did some really good layouts for me on RoboCop and Fantastic Four Unlimited. CBA: What does he do now? Herb: He works for a temp agency in Kingston, New York, and he’s a musician. He writes all his stuff, and him and my daughter have a band called Badger. They’re looking for a bass player right now to try to flesh things out. My daughter Sarah plays violin, and he’s working on the keyboards and MPC2000, though he plays just about anything: Guitar, keyboard, he was all-state trombone in high school. They’re trying, they’re going for it. [laughter] They have a

different sound, it’s not exactly mainstream. (Check it out: www.mp3.com/badger) CBA: Your career, at least your personality.... Herb: Checkered career! CBA: Checkered career, is bookended by two major articles that appeared in major magazines. First there was the Rolling Stone article that featured your Hulk drawing as a cover in 1972. And, just last year, the New York Times Education supplement had a memoir by you on leaving comics and starting a new career as educator at age 60. Do you know what became of one-time Marvel secretary Robin Green who wrote the Rolling Stone article? Herb: I guess I do... do you? CBA: Yeah. Herb: You do! In fact, it’s really, really, weird... that’s an amazing story! I’ve a friend, Alan, I hung around with—he actually graduated in my brother’s class in high school, but I met him via aviation, we both had airplanes—and we got to talking one day, just about a year ago, and somehow, the name Robin Green came up. He, through another friend, became acquainted with her, and I said, “I know Robin Green!” and we went through the whole thing. He said she worked for Marvel, and I said, “Yeah, I know her quite well.” But I didn’t know she was involved in The Sopranos TV show and other television stuff. I had no idea because we don’t have cable any more. [For the record, Robin Green, who succeeded Flo Steinberg as Marvel’s secretary in the late ’60s, wrote a revealing article for Rolling Stone on the Bullpen (which showcased Herb Trimpe, among others), and is now a producer and writer for the award-winning HBO TV series, The Sopranos.—JBC] CBA: So you haven’t seen The Sopranos? Herb: No, I haven’t seen it. CBA: I don’t get HBO, but they just came out with the first season on video, and I saw the episodes she wrote, and they are some of the best television I’ve ever seen in my life! Just extraordinary writing. Herb: I’m just amazed, and then I saw a picture of her in Newsweek or something, it was a group shot of the whole cast and the writers and all that, she was standing in the back row. I wrote her a note—I got her address from my friend Alan up there—and she wrote back and said they’re in New York on occasion, and we ought to come down and get together sometime. Yeah, it was very, very interesting, the whole thing. [laughs] CBA: So she was a secretary at Marvel Comics? Herb: Yeah, like Stan’s gal Friday. She was a bullpen assistant, and she replaced Flo. She didn’t work there that long, maybe six months to a year, maybe not even that. We got along very well. She was really great. Tall, skinny... I don’t know how she looks now. CBA: Where are you from, originally? Herb: Peekskill, New York. CBA: I lived there for a time, when I was 11. Herb: You’re kidding! No kidding! My mother still lives there. CBA: Furnace Brook Drive. Herb: Yeah, I know where that is, exactly. I used to have romantic interludes up that way. I remember it as a sixth grader. CBA: That’s where I smoked my first cigarette. [laughter] Were you interested in comic books as a kid? Herb: Yes, especially comic strips. Comic strips were the thing. I didn’t buy too many comic books. I had a couple of cousins and I would go to their houses, one of whom lived near the junior high school in Peekskill. I used to eat lunch there, and my cousin and I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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would just pore over these comics while we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drank milk. CBA: This was in the ’50s? Herb: Yeah. CBA: What strips were you particularly into? Herb: I loved Plastic Man, and I loved the Fawcett stuff, Captain Marvel. That was great, and of course, Superman, who has always been my favorite hero. CBA: Did you start drawing early? Herb: I was really terrible. [laughs] Some might say I didn’t improve much, but if you could see my yearbooks, I did a lot of art in my yearbooks, it is gawd-awful. [laughter] There are kids in high school now [where Herb teaches] who can draw so well, it’s beyond belief. I was terrible, even by high school standards. [laughter] I liked to draw machinery, liked airplanes, so I drew airplanes and stuff like that. CBA: Did you get into aviation young? Herb: Well, I built models. I still do, to some degree. One of my great escapisms, even now, is in another whole area of interest: I built tons of models. Every time I get a chance, I’m building models. Some I built from scratch, some not. Just all kinds. Mostly, over the years, the continuing thread of model-building has been miniatures. I’ve got armies of armies. [laughter] I’ve got armies from all periods. My nephew and I and a couple of local guys, occasionally when we get around to it, we do tabletop gaming. I tell you: I know video games are big, but if you really want to get sick to your stomach, do tabletop gaming. It is very, very intense, even if you try to keep it light and break out the beer and stuff like that, it is so personal it’s beyond all belief! CBA: It’s war, dammit! War! [laughs] Herb: It really is terrible. [laughter] You really have to be in the right frame of mind, you really do. CBA: Have you had a chance to pass time with George Evans? Herb: I talked to him once a long time ago, but I haven’t since, no. I know he’s an incredible aviation buff. His aviation stuff for EC was great. Alex Toth is the best in terms of aviation stuff. Of course, Toth is good with everything. They both handled aerial stuff, I thought, differently, but very effectively. They made it really cool. CBA: Do you have a particular affection for biplanes? Herb: Yeah, always, I think. CBA: What was it about them? Herb: Well, I didn’t know what it was until I actually got one. It’s like the difference between riding a motorcycle and riding in a car, that’s the difference. It’s seat-of-the-pants, you’re in the open. I’ve had people in an enclosed airplane who get airsick, but they don’t get airsick in open cockpit, it’s that kind of thing. CBA: The exhilaration? Herb: It just feels right, you know what I mean? Even in a light plane, when I’ve gone with other people, my stomach gets queasy just from flying straight level, but there’s something about an open cockpit... you feel a lot more secure, even though you’re in the open, because you’re surrounded by wings and wires and struts and stuff, it’s a real contraption kind of experience, you know? It feels very, very right. I just can’t explain it any other way. You just don’t consider other kinds of airplanes once you’re involved with biplanes! CBA: Did you own one? Herb: Oh, yeah, we had a blue and yellow Stearman, a PT-17, built by Boeing, and it was one of about three or four primary trainers used during the Second World War. Prospective pilots got their first 60 hours or so in it. Another thing about a biplane is, it’s a very good educational tool in terms of technique. It’s amazing, because you can feel it. If you’re flying and the airplane is slipping—which means directionally, it’s not set up correctly—you feel it, the wind hits you in the side of the face. It’s really a seat-of-the-pants kind of thing, like I say. It’s the perfect educational tool for teaching someone to fly. It’s really a good way to do it. It explains by action or inaction the basic principles of aerodynamics in a fairly safe and forgiving environment, you know? CBA: Did you become an accomplished flyer? Herb: Yeah, I was okay. The thing is, safety is everything, but just about anybody can learn to fly. Unlike a car, an airplane will fly by itself, it’s made to fly by itself, hence, model airplanes. Rather than flying around randomly, the pilot directs the airplane in places the May 2001

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pilot wants to go. In a large sense, you’re just kind of there, riding along, and you adjust things when you want to change the direction or where the conditions of the flight change to some degree or another. But yeah, it’s great, and I did some basic aerobatics—loops and rolls and stuff like that—oh, yeah, that is a tremendous amount of fun. CBA: Did you ever simulate dogfights? Herb: Yeah, a couple of times a couple of us got to fooling around down at the airport. Suddenly, somebody’s behind you, and you try to shake them... and then you get behind them, and they’d try to shake you! CBA: Was it a rush? Do you think you got a feel of what it was like in World War I? Herb: Yeah! Also, I’ve been chased by sports biplanes that had twice the performance, and when you get an airplane, one airplane that out-performs the other, it’s so evident it’s beyond belief! [laughter] We had a lot of fun, and then of course, we’d go to the fly-ins where pilots would gather. They’d have a Piper Cub fly-in, and people would bring their Cubs in, and they’d have breakfast, and these little contests. Everybody gets together and plays around, you do things like toilet paper cutting, where you throw a roll of toilet paper out and you try to cut it with the prop. Or, releasing balloons from the ground, and then you try to pop them with the propeller. [laughter] It’s hard, very hard! And flour-bombing, five-pound bags of flour on a target, that kind of stuff. CBA: You mean dropping them from your hand? Herb: Oh, yeah! [laughter] I want to tell you something from the air: It is hard as hell to hit something! It really is very difficult. And spot landings, you know, they have a chalk line across the runway, and the idea is to put the wheels right on it... all those kinds of things.You can have a lot of fun doing it. CBA: As a kid making models, were you still interested in comic books when you were entering adolescence? Herb: Yeah. I think one of the first things I did as a 12-year-old, I made up a baseball comic strip. I can’t remember what the name was, but I remember I drew it in pencil and colored pencils, and when I left Marvel, I actually tried to develop it as a strip. I worked on it for about six months and tried to interest the syndicates.

Above: Herb and his beloved bi-plane, a PT-17 Stearman. Courtesy of Herb Trimpe. Below: As a wedding present for Herb Trimpe, Marvel production manager (and friend and former schoolmate) John Verpoorten hired beloved cartoonist Jack Davis to draw this caricature of Herb as the Phantom Eagle. Courtesy of Herb. Art ©2001 Jack Davis.

Above: A Marvel oddity: the 16th issue of Marvel Super-Heroes featured the decidedly nonsuperheroic WWI costumed pilot The Phantom Eagle. Created by Gary Friedrich and Herb Trimpe, the series lasted for, umm, one issue. What was the inspiration? Enemy Ace? Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel? The bloody Red Baron? ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Both Herb and Ye Ed agree that heaven is a very small Hulk. Here Dr. Banner engages Dr. (AntMan) Pym in a panel detail from The Incredible Hulk #154 as drawn by Herb and inked by John Severin. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Tribune Media actually held it for three months, and I got a letter that said they were sort of interested, and they were going to show it around to some of the other people, their bosses. So, they kicked it around a while, and I finally got a nice letter saying, “We can’t use this now, but don’t give up.” This was my first attempt, and I was told by people who had tried to syndicate, that I was extremely fortunate to have somebody actually even look at that thing. CBA: What was the subject? Herb: It was baseball! It was called Chicken Scratch, and it was a minor-league team called “The Clarksville Chickens,” or something like that. It was pretty weird, there were some one-line gags. CBA: Was it episodic or was it a gag strip? Herb: Both. It had a kind of a thread, but it deviated into one-line gags sometimes involving events that would occur on the baseball field. CBA: When you were facing graduation from high school, was it your plan to get into an art career? Herb: Yeah, that was it. I had it all set up to go to the School of Visual Arts in New York, which was at that time called C&I, Cartooning and Illustrator School, and I was attracted to it because it concentrated in the area of cartooning, and in the first year I went—the Fall of 1957—it became the School of Visual Arts, and they had expanded quite a bit into the area of the fine arts, painting,

drawing, illustration, stuff like that. The cartooning aspect was made not only secondary, but tertiary. The first class I had, we were down in the basement of the building, right next to the compressors for the airbrush department! [laughter] So it was noisy, dank, and dark. [laughs] CBA: Do you think that was a reflection of the industry at the time? Herb: Yeah, I do! We’re talking Wertham here, we’re talking that whole business, yeah, that was probably it. I was in there with John Verpoorten. He was in the class before me, but I got to hang out with him. Stu Schwartzberg, who still works at Marvel in the photocopy department, was there, and another guy who actually went into animation. That was Bill Peckmann. It was a little depressing, because we were all comics fans, in terms of just wanting to draw this stuff, and now it wasn’t deemed classy enough. Cartooning and illustration was not fine arts… the cartooning they practically threw out the window! CBA: Was it a vocational school? Herb: At the time. It’s accredited like a college now, but then it wasn’t. It was a trade school, more or less. CBA: That’s weird to change the drift of the school to fine arts and illustration, because illustration was virtually dead, and fine arts... like one could get a job in fine arts? Herb: You know what, though? I think it saved their asses, I really do, because it started to draw college-minded people instead of... just looking at basic illustration techniques as a way to make some money, they started doing art history courses and all that kind of stuff. CBA: How long was the program? Herb: Three years. CBA: Were there any renowned instructors that you had? Herb: There were, I don’t know if anybody would know who they were. Burne Hogarth was one of the founders. In fact, as opposed to the Savannah College of Art and Design, every instructor in the place was a successful artist in and around the New York City area. Phil Hayes and Bob Parker were the best known illustrators working there at the time. Some older guys there really went back into the ’30s and ’40s. I think at that point Tom Gill was the only one that was in the cartooning department. CBA: The Lone Ranger artist? Herb: Yeah, and I went to work for him for a year after I got out of school, doing backgrounds and stuff. CBA: He’s still around! I met him at Gil Kane’s memorial. Herb: Yeah, he is! In fact, I’ve just been in touch with him, he lives down just below Peekskill. We had a great conversation, and one of these Saturdays when I get loose, I’m going to visit him. CBA: Yeah, he’s a lively guy. Herb: Oh, yeah, he always has been. He was teaching when I went to school there, and I would frequently go out to his studio and we would finish up jobs, The Lone Ranger, Black Beauty, Bonanza he did. He did all that Gold Key stuff. CBA: What did you do for him? Herb: Primarily inked backgrounds, for starters. It never quite got to the point where I did any figures, although I did some drawings. They did movie adaptations, and I worked on that to some degree. CBA: Was that your first professional experience? Herb: Yep, it was. Oh, it was great! I had fun. I was making anywhere from $60 to $90 a week, which wasn’t bad in those days! CBA: So this is right after SVA? Herb: Yep, and I spent a year there. In the meantime, while at SVA and the year I worked for him, the draft was bearing down in those days. CBA: Vietnam? Herb: Well, Vietnam wasn’t quite in the picture. It was the Cold War thing, and Vietnam was coming up, Kennedy was facing the Berlin Wall Crisis, Bay of Pigs... so I was facing the draft, and my number was coming up. So at one point, me and all my friends enlisted. Some went in the Army, I went in the Air Force. It’s part of my philosophy of buying high and selling low. [laughter] Instead of two years in the draft, I went four years in the Air Force. [laughter] As it turns out, I went through basic training and weather school for six months in the Air Force, and the next three and a half years, I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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spent with the Army. [laughter] I never saw an Air Force base the whole time, [laughter] the first place I went was Fort Benning, and we supplied the Air Force detachment there, supplied weather for all the Army aviation helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft that they had at Benning. Then the last year, when the 11th Air Assault Battalion, which was experimental at Benning, became the First Air Cavalry Division, they got sent to Vietnam and we went with them in support. They were the first ones, really, to use helicopters to deploy troops on a large scale. CBA: With Hueys? Herb: Right. CBA: Did you enlist in 1962, and get out in ’66? Herb: Yep! CBA: Were you able to use your art abilities at all on the job? Herb: The Army had an MOS for illustrator, they actually had a job title for illustrator, but the Air Force didn’t. It sort of went from base to base. Each base had some sort of a department that did art and things like that for base publications, publicity and all this kind of stuff, but since I never saw an Air Force base, that kind of was the end of that. So I never got to do that. Yep, if I’d gone in the Army, I could’ve been an illustrator probably. Who knows? CBA: [laughs] You really made the wrong trip there! So, did you go over to Vietnam? Herb: Yep, was there for a year. We were up in the Central Highlands, up at An Khe with the First Air Cav Division. They cut out a big base in the boonies, and we were there for support. When they went out on an operation, they’d always take a weather team. In the landing zones, you’d go in, set up your little anemometer, and all this other sh*t. CBA: Was it a nerve-wracking job? Herb: No, not really. We got mortared on occasion, but…. CBA: Did you see much action? Herb: No! We heard a lot of noise, the base got attacked a couple times, that kind of thing. We weren’t humping the hills like the infantry was, you know? CBA: Did you see the effects of the war? Herb: Yeah, yeah. CBA: How did you feel about the war when you left? Herb: You know what? I was there early, this was during the first big build-up that Johnson created. CBA: After Gulf of Tonkin? Herb: Yep, after he became President as a “dove.” He ran against Barry Goldwater, remember, who was branded the “hawk,” and the first thing Johnson did was send three Divisions to Vietnam when he got in. But at that time, you know, they actually had hopes of winning. It was just before the Tet Offensive, when suddenly, our asses got kicked from here to the other end of the peninsula. CBA: Fighting in downtown Saigon, yeah. Herb: They actually thought that using very methodical, surgical military techniques, with all this high-tech power that we had, we could somehow beat these guys running around in the black pajamas with AK-47s in the jungle, you know? CBA: Did you get the feeling the war was futile? Or was the turnaround during the Tet Offensive? Herb: Nobody wanted to be there, [laughs] but we didn’t discuss it much. Actually the guys in the Air Force were considered to be a little bit more educated than your average draftee, so there were a lot of enlisted people who had already been through college, or were in college and dropped out or something like that, but everybody was just thinking about themselves, “Get me the f*ck outta here!” [laughs] CBA: Your hitch in Vietnam was up and you came home. Where did you come home to? San Francisco? Herb: You come through California, and that’s where I got discharged. I was at the base for three days, doing really chicken sh*t stuff—brush detail and things like that until they processed your papers. It’s funny, the consensus about the military is it’s a sheltered life, and everything is done for you. It’s exactly the opposite in reality. When I was in Vietnam up in the Central Highlands, I had to constantly stay on top of my departure date, and we had to teletype headquarters in Guam to make sure they were cutting our papers. If May 2001

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you let them be responsible for it, you’d never get out! [laughter] CBA: Are there still guys over there, you think, waiting for their papers? [laughter] Herb: You had to take care of yourself, because if you didn’t, nobody else would. It’s a good experience for kids, because you have to be self-sufficient in terms of knowing what you’re supposed to do, when you’re supposed to do it, and making sure the groundwork is done so you can do it! CBA: So what were your options when you were discharged in the world of employment? Herb: Well, John Verpoorten was working at Marvel, and I was in touch with the guys at home right away. He said, “Why don’t you bring up some samples to Marvel?” CBA: This was ’67? Herb: October or November ’66. John Verpoorten was in the Marvel production department then. CBA: Was he work-

Above: Damn! Herb’s Marvel Feature Ant-Man stories were good! ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Left to right are the results of Herb and Linda’s collaborations: Sarah, Alex and Amelia Trimpe. Photo by AmyMarie Rivera. Check out the siblings' band, Badger, at <www.mp3.com/ badger>. Pic courtesy of Herb.

Above: Bob Layton & Co.’s fanzine Contemporary Pictorial Literature occasionally featured special centerfold guest stars. Here’s Herb Trimpe’s submission. Courtesy of Bob & CPL/Gang Productions. Below: One of Herb’s favorite stories was the Harlan Ellisonplotted and Roy Thomas-scripted story featuring Jarella in The Incredible Hulk #140. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ing the stat camera? Herb: No, he was doing drawing and paste-ups, setting the books up. Sol Brodsky hired me. He’s the one I took my work to. John said, “Give Sol a call and come on in, bring your stuff.” I said, “I don’t have any stuff, the last stuff I did was in art school!” So Sol said, “Bring it in, just bring it in,” so I did. I had some pretty good inking, so they gave me some Western stuff to do, Kid Colt or something else. CBA: Immediately? Herb: Yeah, pretty much. CBA: Was Dick Ayers or Werner Roth the penciler you inked? Herb: Yeah, Werner Roth was one. I think I did some Dick Ayers. I mostly did Werner Roth. He was a really beautiful penciler, I thought. It was clean stuff, and easy to ink, you know? CBA: Did you ever meet him? Herb: No, I never did. I don’t think I did. I think Joe Maneely had just died a year or two earlier when I went in there, and he was still one of the talked about guys in the office, in terms of his great facility with the comic book medium. CBA: Actually, Joe died in 1958, and they were still talking about him in 1966? Wow! Herb: Yeah, he was like Marie Severin, because they did the same kind of stuff, sort of that EC look, real adventure, highly researched, accurate stuff? The Black Knight stuff is great! Marie said his pencils were almost non-existent, they were like rough, lightly-done layouts, with no features on the faces... it was just like ovals and sticks and stuff, and he inked from that. He drew when he inked. That’s when he did the work, in the inking! CBA: What was Sol Brodsky like? Herb: I liked Sol. Sol was okay. He was the last of a breed, I can tell you. Like from the publishing world, you know what I mean? He knew comics, but he could’ve worked in any publishing position that needed to put books together and get them to a printer on time. He was a cando kind of guy. He knew when something was screwed up, and he would say so, you know what I mean? He’d say, “This needs to be fixed.” He represented the kind of quality in publications that you just don’t see anymore, except maybe in The New York Times, where they really care if something’s spelled right or not. I tell you, Jon, that bullpen in those years? That was the best job in the world. I mean, it was tremendous, I’m not kidding you. It was just so much fun. CBA: What made it so? Herb: It was the people. It was the Marvel Comics universe realizing itself during those years, you know? And egos were not in play, they really weren’t. There were people

who had really been around the block a couple of times, you know, and they weren’t fools. They really weren’t vying for some sort of “top dog” position in terms of creativity. It was just a fun thing, and it was varied. There were some great people in there: Marie, John. Oh, it was just very fun. It was small, there weren’t that many people. Tony Mortellero, who was one of the production people, was just a lot of fun. Now, in those days, John Romita was working there every day, too. He didn’t work freelance at home, he was in the bullpen. He was drawing Spider-Man, but he was in the bullpen, in the same way I began drawing The Hulk working in the bullpen. The first couple of books I did right on staff until one day, I complained to Stan about concentration, and he said, “Well, why don’t you just go home and work?” So I did. I just started to take days off, go home, come in a day or so a week and hang around and work there. It was just total freedom! [laughs] It was just unbelievable. And we knew it! It wasn’t one of those deals where you look back in 20 years, and say, “Gee, wasn’t that great?” We knew it was great at the time. CBA: One of my favorite anecdotes about the Marvel bullpen in 1968 was Barry Windsor-Smith telling me that he remembers chills going up and down his spine when, spontaneously, the whole bullpen would start singing “Hey Jude.” Herb: Oh, my God, I remember that! CBA: Yeah, he just remembers standing there, and everyone just joining in. Herb: I couldn’t wait to get to work, you know what I mean? Unlike now at the high school. [laughter] I pray for snow days now. CBA: You can argue that ten years later at Marvel, there was a lot of jockeying for position, with Stan pretty much out the door in California, Roy had resigned, not wanting to deal with it anymore, and there was a rotating, revolving door for editors and stuff like that. But back in the late ’60s, do you think it was recognition that this was Stan’s ballgame, Stan built this company to what it was? Herb: I think there’s no doubt. But Jack Kirby also. Jack was “it,” you know what I mean? CBA: Did you see him a lot? Herb: He came in occasionally, yeah, I met him. I met him on a number of occasions. He came in on a couple of occasions and he’d work, do some things that needed changes, and chomp on his cigar, and we’d watch him! One time he penciled a cover, I don’t know if it was for Thor or Fantastic Four or what it was, but he just knocked this thing out in about an hour, and we were all in the bullpen, and we’d get up and watch him and talk, and it was great. CBA: Did you revere him at the time? Herb: Yeah! Oh, Kirby... you know, when I went there—and I’m sure when everybody else went there—that was Stan’s basic role model, he recognized that everybody drew differently, but in terms of the storytelling, “Look at Jack, take a look at this, this is what I want.” That was basically it. Everybody was judged by the standard of Jack Kirby, I think. CBA: Would it would be off the mark to say you would seem to be heavily influenced by Jack? Herb: I was. I wanted to draw like Jack Davis. If I’m left to my own devices, I tend to draw kind of cartoony, like that kind of thing, a lot of wrinkles. Jack Davis was my idol up to the point where I started working at Marvel. But that really went out the window when I began to draw there, it was just not a thing they wanted to see. [laughs] So, I had to do all this kind of bogus re-inventing. It was not... I didn’t really care one way or the other, I didn’t have a real style anyway. CBA: Were you specifically instructed to draw like Jack? Herb: No, not in so many words. CBA: But you were instructed to follow the storytelling techniques? Herb: If you want to know how to tell a story, look at Jack’s work. So, you look at Jack’s work—which you do anyway, it’s all great— and you know, there are stories with his original artwork that everyone’s dazzled over. And you wanted to do it! It was cool, so everybody wanted to draw cool! Well, I did. You can see it everywhere. Buscema, he had his own style, but you can see from panel to panel, it’s the Jack influence in the layouts and the storytelling, it’s really self-evident, I think. CBA: So the first work you did was in Westerns, do you remember COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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what strips they were? Herb: I think it was Kid Colt, that might’ve been the first one, but I did a little bit of all of them, the inking. Rawhide Kid and Two-Gun Kid, those kind of things, and it was fine. CBA: Was it pretty early on in the game when “The Phantom Eagle” came up? Herb: Yeah, that was Gary Friedrich’s idea completely. He knew I liked airplanes, and said, “I want to ask Stan if we can do a story,” so he wrote that story and I drew it. CBA: Did you hope it could be a regular title? Would you have liked to do regular aviation stuff? Herb: I don’t think we had high hopes for that at the time. I don’t think we did, no. CBA: You didn’t have any particular affection for that character, necessarily? Herb: Not really. I didn’t like the way it came out. I didn’t like the story, really. CBA: Did you like your inking? Herb: Yeah, I liked my inking. CBA: It wasn’t very often, but you did really nice inking on Jack’s work. You did a Silver Surfer [#18], as I recall... Herb: I was a good inker. I didn’t like my penciling much. Especially the way I was drawing comics. If I were left to my own devices, I could stand it, but I probably would’ve been happier as an inker rather than a penciler, to tell you the truth. I enjoyed the inking, and I could draw well enough that I could enhance, I think, to some degree the penciling that might’ve been weak, but I don’t know. It was just the pressure and the schedules or something, I don’t know what it was. My favorite penciling was when I was doing three books a month: Godzilla, Defenders, and Shogun Warriors. I was doing all of those books at the same time, and Dan Green was doing a lot of the inking. I liked those pencils, they were very stylistic and tight. CBA: These were monthly books? Herb: I think two of them were. CBA: How many pages a week could you do? Herb: I was doing three pages a day. CBA: 15 pages a week? Herb: Yep. CBA: Could you keep up that kind of schedule from beginning to end? Herb: No. I’ve done work quickly when they needed it, and it was really hacky and not paid proper attention to. But that stuff I was paying attention to, like I said, it was very stylized. I actually have some Xerox copies of pencils from that era. I don’t mind them at all. I didn’t draw beautiful like Romita or Buscema or like some of those other guys could draw, even Tuska or guys like that. CBA: But you had energy. Herb: Yeah, there was an energy to it. I’m amazed, I get phone calls or letters, or if I’m out and about, people will say that the Hulk was very important in their life—the ones I did. So, I’m kind of surprised, but very touched by that, because a lot of it was during a time where I really hated what I was doing! [laughs] And yet, I have people tell me all the time, that’s the definitive Hulk, and then I look at some of those pages and go, “I don’t get it.” [laughter] CBA: I can understand what you’re saying, but I think there’s also a great deal of charm to the work. I look at the covers that you did for the Western comics, and there’s kind of a real raw power that comes out of it. You actually went through a period of... it was like an explosion of energy you had, coming out in your work. It was very cartoony, but very dynamic, too. Herb: It was interesting. CBA: Well, it could be stiff sometimes. I agree that, for me, Trimpe’s work was The Hulk. Herb: Well, I appreciate it, Jon, and I’m always amazed when people say things like that. CBA: Your name is pronounced Trimpe, rhymes with “shrimpy”? Herb: Yes. CBA: What’s it derived from? Herb: Dutch. Northern German, Dutch. The way I understand it is, people came from Holland into Germany, and both sides of the family—one side was from the Hanover area, and another was from some small town somewhere in central Germany... Germany, of all people! [laughter] I have no desire to reach my roots. I don’t know why people want, actually, to get back to their roots. I could care less! Some people really hang on to their “national heritage,” some particularly more than others. Anyway, I don’t get it, I don’t May 2001

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Above: On the reverse of a “Killraven” page drawn by Herb, contributor Tom Field discovered these preliminary character designs for the notorious Marvel horror “hero” Son of Satan. Art ©2001 Herb Trimpe. Son of Satan ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Onetime Jack Kirby assistant Steve Sherman visited the Marvel offices in the early 1970s where he photographed Marie Severin’s editorial comment on the King’s departure from the company. Jack’s cigar taped to paper emblazoned with the phrase “I quit!” Courtesy of Steve (now a Hollywood puppeteer).

care, I don’t care about beer gardens and... [laughter] I don’t give a sh*t! The only things I really like are Focke Wulfs and ME-109s and stuff like that... [laughs] BMWs... these are all good products. CBA: [laughs] Sure. Was The Hulk pretty much the first regular book that you had? Herb: Yes, I did it for eight years. CBA: Eight years? How many issues is that, almost 100 issues? Wow! [laughs] Herb: Yeah, that would be... 12 times 8, right? Almost 100. CBA: Did you first start off inking Giacoia’s pencils, or was it the other way around? Herb: The first book, I did some drawings for the first one, #109, or something, it might’ve been the KaZar story. I think I might’ve inked some of Marie’s stuff, and then it was #108, 109 or something, and I did layouts, and Stan kind of threw them in the trash and got Frank in, and Frank did the layouts, and then I tightened those pencils. He said, “This is the way I want it,” so Frank did the layouts, I tightened the pencils. That was one issue. CBA: What was Frank like? Herb: Frank was great! He was one of the guys! CBA: What was the plan to have him in the office? Was it to give him an art director’s position? Herb: I don’t think so, he was just a spectacular freelance inker, he was considered spectacular at this time. He’d come in the office... I don’t know if Stan called him in, or if he happened to be there one day, I don’t know how it worked out. Anyway, he gave him this story for him to roughly do the breakdowns so I could see how the action went, and then I was on my own after that, pretty much. CBA: Did you see Bill Everett with any frequency in the office? Herb: I loved Bill Everett! He was just a sweet guy, he was terrific, and his Sub-Mariner, you talk about style and grace, I mean, geez! I loved that stuff! It’s so funky and... oh, geez! CBA: Beautiful, beautiful stuff. Vinnie Colletta, did you see him there? Herb: Yeah, Vinnie was there always, and he was a very fun guy. He and John Verpoorten, they used to go out to lunches and stuff, I never hung around with them too much. They were high-rolling, they liked to talk about the high-roller stuff. [laughs] Vinnie was great, a very colorful character, very flamboyant in that kind of Italian way. CBA: The “paisan”? Herb: Yeah, the paisan with the great shocks of white hair. CBA: You did the Hulk for eight years. While in the office, you were also doing production stuff? Herb: Yep. CBA: So, was a lot of that corrections? Herb: Primarily corrections. CBA: For a period of time there, about three or four years, Stan seemed to make an enormous amount of corrections... or was that true always? Herb: He went through every single book, and he made corrections! I didn’t find them to be overly burdening, everything was pretty much within reason, as far as I was concerned. It’s not like he went through a book and kind of just threw it out and had massive changes on every page, it wasn’t like that.

It was little things here and there... nine times out of ten, it was absolutely right on. He had a way he wanted the thing to look. I think mostly he was correcting for readability and clarity. So there wouldn’t be points of confusion, not only in the words, but in the visuals, also. If there was any doubt about the visuals, in terms of confusing pictures, he just made it so it was easier to see. That’s what he was interested in, mostly. CBA: Were you interested in working on super-hero stuff? Herb: Originally, no. CBA: You wanted to do genre stuff? Herb: I wanted to do adventure stuff... planes, cowboys, knights, that kind of thing. EC stuff, you know? All that stuff, crime.... CBA: Westerns, horror? Herb: Yeah. That’s a totally different way to look at comics, the way they did them at EC and the way Marvel did comics, it’s just entirely different. I was sort of brought up on that. I mean, I did like the super-heroes, but before Marvel, back in the ’50s, I don’t think the word super-hero was in the vocabulary at that point, but there were super-heroes as we know them: Batman, Superman, Captain Marvel. CBA: You got the “Ant-Man” strip. Herb: Yeah, I don’t know how many I did of those. CBA: Probably about five of them. I think you really shined on those. Herb: I liked it, I like working small. I like the “micro-world.” CBA: [laughs] In your New York Times thing, you even shrink yourself, you’ve been “down-sized.” [laughs] Herb: That’s right! CBA: Very often, you had some extraordinary inkers on the Hulk work you did. When John Severin came on, was that a pleasure? Herb: That was great; John was good. I met John, talked to him on a number of occasions. He was a gentleman and a scholar. He’s another one of these non-egos, a mega-guy, totally! I don’t think people have a concept of who they were. I don’t know what it was. They were professionals in one branch of the world of commercial art. Comics are a branch of commercial art. They weren’t into ego, it wasn’t the fanboy thing, it wasn’t like that at all. CBA: They were professionals? Herb: It was just a high level of professionalism, but also liking comics for what they were, without that other part I can’t quite describe, but has to do with huge egos. CBA: A proprietary attitude about characters? Herb: Yes, that kind of thing. CBA: So in essence, you were Old School? Herb: In fact, yeah. I was from another generation, but yeah, that’s what I knew, what I was exposed to, those are the kinds of people I worked with. You could see it change while I was there; Barry Smith came in about the same time, Jim Steranko… guys who were probably on the cutting edge, who had a personal charisma. They were the beginning of the huge turnover that occurred in the late ’70s. Creator as star. They put Kirby on a pedestal, but…. CBA: Perhaps he never wanted to be placed there. Herb: No, and I always had the feeling toward the end of his career, he was being changed by the way people were thinking about him. I know he got into a few battles that were ego-generated on all sides, and it just didn’t seem to fit the Jack Kirby that I knew when I first started working there. CBA: You didn’t sense bitterness in him? Herb: I wasn’t close enough to sense bitterness, though I’m sure there was at some level. I saw him as a very humble individual. CBA: I’ve been studying Kirby for maybe too long, and I get the sense that, yes, on the surface that he was quite humble, very generous, and a sweet person, but perhaps he had internal anger that he was able to channel into his work. Herb: When do you think that started? When he first left Marvel in the early ’70s? CBA: I think it goes all the way back to his upbringing in the slums of the Lower East Side. Herb: I don’t know that Jack Kirby at all, though I can believe it. CBA: His was able to harness his rage and manifest it through his artwork, just beautiful, honest, explosive, violent, fantastic stuff. Do you recall when Jack quit? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Herb: Yes, I do. Marie actually found a cigar butt that he left behind, had it taped and labeled to the wall, made kind of a plaque out of it, a memorial. I’ve got a whole bunch of original drawings that Marie made and hung on the wall of me.... [laughter] Everybody was the focus of a gag. CBA: But she really focused on you! [laughs] Herb: I think she did get me more than anybody else. Romita was a very close second, I think. She did a lot of those cartoons, they were great! [laughs] CBA: The bullpen just seems like such a fun place at the time. Herb: Like I say, we knew it at the time, but as you go through life and have other encounters, nothing comes close. No other situation is quite as unique, free-wheeling. When you start talking to people about it, I have to admit, any given individual who was there at the time will probably make it sound even better than it was, [laughter] but it was good, that’s all I can say. CBA: I think one of the personalities that made it a real nice place was John Verpoorten. What was he like? Herb: John was moody. [laughter] Yeah, he could be incredibly moody. He was a fun guy, and we had a lot of fun. He came in with a tremendous love for EC. He personally had correspondence, knew Jack Davis, and got Jack to draw a wedding present for us when Linda [Fite] and I got married. I have it on the wall, it’s me in the Phantom Eagle outfit. [laughter] John was also the quintessential Beatles fan. I remember, he and Gary Friedrich (known as Grooves at the time) would just wait with bated breath to go down to Sam Goody’s when the newest Beatles album came out. John would send Gary or someone else down to get it, and then they’d just pore over this thing for days and days! [laughs] CBA: It’s testament, too, to John’s personality that he created a virtual SVA “Mafia” at the bullpen, wouldn’t you say? Herb: Yeah, yeah, you could say that. [laughs] It’s true. CBA: What was Stu Schwartzberg like? Herb: He was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, as funny as Harvey Kurtzman, though he didn’t quite have Harvey’s ambition. He had the ideas. Stu and Marie are the two most professionally funny people I’ve ever met in my entire life. [laughter] Quick, Schwartzberg was quick! He had the mind of a stand-up comic, you know? In the Jewish Borscht Belt/Catskill tradition, he’s very funny, quick. He could get the needle in before anybody else could, and get it in better! [laughter] He was very, very excellent in that regard. He still has a great sense of humor. CBA: Did you hit it off with Barry Smith when he arrived at Marvel? Herb: Yeah! Barry and his friend, Steve Parkhouse, were actually holed up in Linda’s apartment. She and Pam Ford—her roommate at the time from Sweet Briar—were renting an apartment down on East 27th Street, not too far from where Marvel is now, actually. Barry and Steve were “Sad Sacks,” looking for work, didn’t have any place to go, didn’t have any money, and the women let them sleep on the floor for several weeks, maybe even a couple of months. That’s kind of how I got connected with Barry. CBA: Have you been friends with him ever since? Herb: Oh, yeah, we’re in contact constantly. We have a Friday night ritual: Once a month we go out and eat. Sometimes Linda goes. Alex Bialy, Barry’s assistant goes. Up in Kingston, you know? Friday night’s my night. During the week, I can’t go out at night. CBA: Because they’re school nights! [laughter] Herb: Right, so Friday, I hit the weekend like a sailor on shore leave! [laughter] I’m ready to go, man! I told Barry, “You know, these Fridays are very important,” so he’s been very conscientious about making sure we keep those dates, because he knows I like to do it, it’s important. He’s supportive, very supportive. CBA: Barry is a very sweet person. He’s very supportive of me and CBA. I understand his steadfastness about not compromising, because that is the essence of who Barry is! When I read the credits on the 1984 Machine Man mini-series, I thought, “Well, there’s a surprise! I’d never hook those two guys up on the same project!” What was up with that work? Herb: All I know is, I penciled and he inked it. CBA: I believe you told me a couple of years ago that he was a little rusty getting back into comics, and he just needed a jump start and asked you to do layouts? May 2001

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Herb: I don’t even remember that. I think everybody knew it wasn’t going to go very far. It was a good exercise. CBA: How did you meet Linda? Herb: She got a job out at Marvel out of college. She was in the production department. She might’ve been a proofreader. I do remember her working at the drawing board. Maybe did paste-ups and mechanicals, stuff like that. CBA: Did you guys hit it off? Herb: Oh, yeah, we got along extremely good from the very beginning. We were like Frick & Frack. [laughter] It’s like you meet somebody and you feel you knew them before. It was very familiar. CBA: So you started going out immediately? Herb: Pretty much, yeah. CBA: When did you get married? Herb: That would be about 1972. CBA: Did you have a comic-book industry wedding? Herb: No, no, we actually got married at her mom and dad’s house in Nashville. John Verpoorten and my friend Bill Peckmann (who is also a Visual Arts grad) came down, and we had a pretty good time in Nashville. CBA: Linda wrote for Marvel?

Above: Lest we forget, Herb also drew the adventures of another Marvel monster hero in the ’70s— Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Here’s the cover art to Godzilla #13, courtesy of Chris Gage. Godzilla ©2001 Toho Productions. Art ©2001 Marvel Characters.

Above: As so expertly described by CBA associate editor & columnist David A. Roach in his article this issue, writer Len Wein and artist Herb Trimpe had a field day satirizing the then-hot underground comix scene in their short story “The Underground Gambit” in Creatures on the Loose #11. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Herb: Yeah, she wrote a couple of issues of The Cat. CBA: When did you stop working exclusively in the bullpen? Herb: I worked there about six months, then I started working from home, though I was in the office all the time. I was living on East 89th Street, and then Linda and I moved into her apartment on East 27th. That was good. CBA: Do you recall other memorable jobs? Herb: I did the Rolling Stone cover, then I had three illustrations published in New York magazine—some sort of take-off on television news broadcasters, with caricatures of Walter Cronkite, Eric Severeid, and other individuals. Then I did a thing on Gloria Steinem for Esquire. CBA: So were you getting the jobs Marie used to get? She got those types of jobs in the mid- to late-’60s. Herb: I don’t know if there was a connection there or not, I really don’t remember. CBA: But it was through Marvel, right? Herb: Yeah, it was because I was drawing comics. Sometimes somebody would call the office and say, “We’d like to have a comic artist do a feature,” and they’d just get somebody who was available. But I think on those three, I was called directly, probably at home. It’s how one builds on the other, it might’ve been the Rolling Stone cover. Like all the assignments that followed this recent New

York Times thing, tons and tons of personal contacts and other articles. After the NYT, my NBC Weekend Today Show appearance followed that, and there must’ve been ten articles that followed, various intermediary and local stuff. CBA: That’s cool to have the limelight shined on you, not because of comics per se, but because of you. Herb: That’s right, it was much better. It was validating in a way I actually hadn’t thought about before: You were found interesting or recognized based on something outside your comic book connections, interesting as an individual.... CBA: Did you get a lot of attention by the Rolling Stone piece? Herb: Like I said, that actually led to a couple jobs. The guy I got the Esquire job from was intrigued by comics, and he really liked the Hulk stuff. I got a call from the Playboy art director after that New York Times article just a year ago, and they were reviving “Little Annie Fanny,” and wanted to know if I wanted to do it. I said, “I’ll think about it, and I’ll call you back,” because I had to tell the story, I couldn’t let it die that quickly! “Public school art teacher takes on ‘Little Annie Fanny’”? I don’t think so! The art director said, “You’d be working directly with Hugh,” because it was his idea to bring it back. I didn’t think it was a good idea. Barry went nuts! He said, “Are you crazy? The parties you’d get invited to! The babes!” [laughs] I said, “Barry, let’s put things in perspective! I can’t do that!” CBA: You also did a strip called “Son of Satan.” Herb: Yeah! [laughs] CBA: Well, there’s a concept! [laughs] Herb: It is, it is, isn’t it? It’s almost a precursor of some of the stuff they’re doing now, but the timing wasn’t right and the development wasn’t there. CBA: Did you draw the first appearance of Wolverine? Herb: Yeah! You know that! Everybody knows that! [laughs] John Romita did the character design. CBA: Obviously, the NYT article came out over a year ago. You’ve had a career in comics that’s stretches almost 30 years… Herb: If you count Tom Gill, it’s 35 years. CBA: If you want! [laughter] Do you feel ambivalent about the whole experience? Herb: No, not at all. You know, there’s certain curious circumstances that make you say, “What the f*ck were they thinking about?” [laughter] I feel extremely fortunate that I got out as cleanly as I did, actually. And frankly, I didn’t want to be at a ripe old age to the point where I could barely get up off the chair and still have to make a living drawing comics. I’ll say one thing, this teaching stuff, the energy levels are exhilarating. I don’t sit around and think about mortality, [laughter] like you tend to do as you get older, and you’ve got too much time on your hands. When I’m in school, I’m a different person. Sometimes the kids say, “Mr. Trimpe, you’ve got gray hairs, you’re old!” I say, “That’s right, I’m probably the oldest guy in this building except for Jack,” one of the maintenance guys, and I say, “How old do you think I am?” and they say, “Oh, I don’t know... 40?” I say, “Well, I’m not quite that old,” [laughter] “but that’s a good guess.” One day, one of the kids says to me, “Are you married?” [laughter] You know, kids are always amazed to find that teachers are married and have kids. I say, “Yeah, I’m married,” and they say, “What’s your wife’s name?” and I say, “Which one?” [laughter] and they say, “How many wives have you had?” And I start counting on my fingers, and I go, “Nine?” [laughter] And they go, “Oh, my God, ‘nine’!” Those young kids, they’ll believe anything you say! I love that kind of stuff, the play back and forth with these kids. CBA: I drew a lot as a kid, but I didn’t pursue the life of a comic book artist because it seems such a solitary life. Herb: It is. CBA: You’re sitting in your studio, getting work done, and the only connection to the outside world is when the phone rings. I wonder if people focus on the EC and Marvel bullpens and the studio system of the 1940s, is because, well, you don’t get many stories of artists getting together, and in the bullpens these people working you admire so much, are interacting with each other! Herb: That’s right! CBA: And that’s what makes it magical: These very talented people are together! COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Herb: Yes! CBA: Did you miss that? Herb: I don’t miss it. I don’t miss it at all. After the days when it was fun, it changed, and there’s no going back, and what came to be was less desirable. In a way, it was a gradual process, as the business and the focus changed, and management and the corporate influence became more and more evident. Suddenly, you’re sitting around saying, “I don’t know if I like this anymore!” I think it has a lot to do with the realization that you don’t fit anymore, basically. [laughs] I still like comics. Barry worked very hard, if you see some of his first drawings, it was very, very different from what he does now. He draws extremely well now, because he worked at it. He drew from models, had anatomy books, developed his craft in a conscientious and focused manner, there was a will to his way. I never did that. I liked to play around, just shoot from the hip—if it doesn’t look right, wait until next time. [laughs] It’s like baseball, there’s always another time at bat, you know? I’ll tell you the truth: I never liked drawing that much. [laughs] I never considered myself an artist in that sense. I had a reputation for being a good storyteller, and I think storytelling is above the art—art basically promotes storytelling—and I’d rather tell stories. Once I was out of work, I stopped drawing. I love to write stories. I think I’m pretty good, and don’t care if anybody knows it. I’ve written a dozen short stories probably during the time I was in school, plus a couple of novelette-sized things. I go at it with a vengeance. I staple copies together, and make little covers, [laughter] and send them to my brother in Virginia, and he reads them with his wife, my nephews and niece read them, Linda proofreads them, and I give them to my own kids, and that’s as far as it goes! I enjoy it immensely. When I have some spare time, I’ll sit down and work on one of them. CBA: You continue to have creative urges, but they just manifest in different ways? Herb: Yeah. If it’s not writing, it’s in the model-building. CBA: You know, I spoke to a comics professional and he was very reluctant to do an interview, because he didn’t want to be perceived as an old-timer. He’s a guy who’s been around for 30 years.... Herb: It’s a survival thing. I understand that right away. CBA: He doesn’t want to be attached to an old era, the Silver Age. He wants to be considered contemporary. Herb: Good for him. I think if he wants to stay in this ridiculous business, doing these ridiculous [laughs] kinds of things, I think that’s absolutely right. It’s the business. If you were a Hollywood actor, and you’re getting a facelift, you’re coloring your hair, it’s the same thing. Jon, that is a fact of life! It’s a fact of life in the corporate world. I mean, they say if you’re over 45, forget about it! CBA: In comics, all is built on the work which was done before. At Marvel, it’s Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko that really created the thing. For the current people working at this company not to recognize the achievements of those who laid the foundation, it’s pathetic! Herb: One of my theories: Comic books will never be a valid form of artistic expression or recognized as such because it devours its tradition. It has no regard whatsoever for the individuals who came before. You take any other field that’s recognized as a serious line of endeavor, and they all recognize and venerate the people who created the business, industry, entertainment, it doesn’t really matter! Did they shuffle aside the Lawrence Oliviers or the Cary Grants or the Marlene Dietrichs? No! CBA: They give them lifetime achievement awards! Herb: These people are venerated heroes! In the world of aviation, do they take the Wylie Posts and the Charles Lindberghs and the bush pilots, the Wiens that built the airline industry in Alaska during the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, do they shuffle those aside? No! These people are the cornerstone and the benchmark for what came after! Comics don’t do that. Thank god that Jack Kirby is still held as an icon, a kind of a mark that people need to look to in terms of a sign of excellence in the business, you know? But he’s really about the only one, symbolic for everyone else who’s been shunted aside. It’s criminal, in my opinion, it’s just horrible! We devour our old! CBA: Why is that? Herb: I hate to venture to say, but it might have something to do with the true validity of the medium, which is weak. They’re trying to May 2001

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hold it together with personalities, individuals and egos. Maybe something to do with our times, a lack of self-esteem. CBA: Perhaps you hit the nail on the head right there. It had to do with the ascension of the fan to power instead of the professional. Fans who became Marvel editors, who gave lip-service to Jack Kirby being the “King,” reportedly often humiliated him behind his back in the office, writing disparaging remarks on Xeroxes of his work and tacking them up in their cubicles. Herb: You’re exactly right, and right about Jack, because even though he’s held in a very high position by the people in the business, you’re right, those in power really worked, in a way, to minimize his impact. CBA: Was it petty jealousy? Herb: Absolutely. CBA: If you think about it, that mentality really exists in the corporate world now, always backbiting and backstabbing. Did you recognize that unprofessional-acting people were attaining positions of power within comics? Herb: Absolutely, no question about it. CBA: Did it turn you off? Herb: Yeah, frankly! [laughs] I mean, at the time, I probably didn’t give it all that much thought, but I think it’s obviously contributed to the atmosphere in a negative way. Comics were mostly experiential. All I knew was what I was experiencing, but I wasn’t thinking too much about causation. You might term it “operating behind the performance curve.” [laughter] CBA: Did all the fun go out of it? Herb: Oh, yeah. The last ten years were pretty much of a drag,

Above: Herb’s bona fide underground contribution came in two stories in Flo Steinberg’s Big Apple Comix. Here’s a portion of the Trimpe written and penciled Lotsa Yox strip, inked by noneother than Wally Wood! ©2001 Herb Trimpe. Courtesy of Flo.

Above: Fanciful airplane sketch by perennial aviator Herb Trimpe. Though he spends his days as a full-time educator in upstate New York, Happy Herb still keeps his toes wet by drawing every now and then. Courtesy of and ©2001 Herb Trimpe.

Inset right: The freelance life of a comic book artist long in his past, the artist poses for us in his Hudson Valley home. Courtesy of Herb Trimpe

Below: This transforming gargantuan-into-graduate illo appeared in Herb’s noteworthy New York Times Education Life (January 9, 2000) article which featured a memoir of his transition from comic book artist to grade school art teacher. For a look at his full-page strip, check out Streetwise. Art ©2001 H. Trimpe

and the last five were horrible. Marvel was just a horrible place to be. Not that people weren’t civil when I actually got hold of them, but in my particular case, it’s partially my fault. I was never on the inside of the loop, and I really didn’t desire to be. I didn’t chase down those things that would enhance my career as a comic book artist. There was a whole period in the ’70s and ’80s I never went to a convention. I didn’t want to go. The last convention I went to, up until recently, was the day Alex was born. I was at the New York Convention at the Commodore, back in ’74, and I just shunned those things, and my attitude was—maybe a little arrogant—I had a life, and I didn’t want to make my life the world of comics. I drew the things, got the paycheck, did the job, but there were other things I wanted to do. I wanted to become involved with our local school district, wanted to talk to people who weren’t always talking about comic books. CBA: A consummate professional, leaving it “at the office.” Herb: I really desired to keep it that way. The business itself, the fanboy attitude, the dominant pressures of the corporate entity that was now moving into place, I just didn’t really identify with that at all. I couldn’t get excited about things, [laughs] the way some of the people on the inner circle would get. Just gimme the work, gimme the script or the plot, and let me go about my business. CBA: In 1972, I was in Central Park with my younger brother—we must’ve been in the city to go to one of the Seuling conventions— and we’re standing there talking, and all of a sudden, this jogger comes by, I look at him, and go, “Oh my God, it’s Herb Trimpe!” You went running by us, and we yell out, “Hey, Herb!” and you just turn around and wave at us, and keep on going.... Herb: You saw me jogging in Central Park?!? [laughter] You are kidding me, Jon! Yeah, I jogged in Central Park all the time. That was me! [laughter] CBA: When I spoke to you at a Ramapo comics show, it was the first time I met you since then, and you exuded just a regular guy feeling, like Al Williamson. You didn’t stand there, puffed up, and go, “Yes, I guess I’ll sign your comic.” You’d actually open up the comic and go, “You know, this really was sh*t!” [laughter] “Well, I liked it!” and you’d sign it but connect with me. It was nice. It was wonderful—and bittersweet—when that New York Times article came out, and you’re discussing the current state of the industry, but it was your ascension, being true to yourself, being a regular guy and changing. You basically said, “I’m not gonna be treated like this any more; I’m going out and make my own way.” I think that’s what’s very gratifying about the Herb Trimpe story. Herb: I don’t know how I did it, because when I first went back to school, I really wasn’t sure where I was heading with it. CBA: Did you have a favorite writer at Marvel? Herb: I liked Roy… I liked them all, and had no problem with any of the writers. Each one had a different style, each one had their own energy. Roy was great because of his knowledge, he knew everything about everything in terms of comics. They’re all great! Gary was totally fun, [laughs] for reasons I really shouldn’t say publically. He was great. I remember he, I, and Al Kurzrok were on a bowling team, [laughs] one or two nights a week. Boy, was that a riot! [laughter] CBA: Did you work from full script at all? Herb: Never. Just from the plot. CBA: Always Marvel-style? Did you like working that way? Herb: Yeah! I think Stan’s system of working from plots, rather than fully-prepared scripts was one of the main reasons that Marvel became what they became when it was in its prime! That was basically Stan’s idea. The notion was that the vision is not the writer’s, it’s the artist’s, and that

full scripts were restrictive, in terms of how the artist would see a thing. It’s funny, because as Stan withdrew from Marvel, his influence receded. The plots became more complicated and more involved until the writers were again trying to project the vision and have the artist follow their lead. Stan’s idea was the story follows the artists’ lead, because the artist is the visual person, and we’re talking about primarily a visual medium here. CBA: Did you have any particular stories that you recall best? Herb: Not really. I liked the “Jarella” stuff in The Hulk, because I really like that small stuff. When I worked with Stan, the plot was basically a verbal discussion, and I would take notes, so I’d come out with a paragraph of what the story was about, and I’d work from that. Then, it evolved into more detailed plots, and towards the end, I was actually getting plots for stories that were longer than the stories themselves! [laughter] They still weren’t scripts, they were tenpage plots! [laughs] That’s a lot of writing, a lot more words than actually appear in the stories. But as far as an individual stories go, I liked “Ant-Man,” the “Jarella” stuff in The Hulk… all The Hulk stuff was fun, really. CBA: I recall this wonderful Hulk story arc Archie Goodwin wrote when the Hulk shrunk down into this Nazi world, it was just so bizarre! [laughs] Herb: Yeah, that was quite good. CBA: Since this is a Marvel horror issue, I think I’d like to touch upon a couple of horror books, [laughs] and Godzilla, I guess, was arguably horror. Was there anything in particular about Godzilla that you liked? Herb: Nah, [laughter] it was work. CBA: I’m not getting copy from Trimpe on this! [laughs] Herb: That was basically it, it was work. CBA: What made it that you were cooking at the time? When you were doing those three books, it was just flowing very easily? Herb: Oh, yes, it was going very well. I actually like that period a whole lot. It was kind of fun. No doubt about it. CBA: Were you involved in the development of “Son of Satan” at all? Herb: Yeah, to some degree. Who wrote that? CBA: Gary. Herb: Yeah, that’s right. You couldn’t work with somebody that was easier to work with. Oh, my God, I mean... it was like falling off a log, it was just totally [laughter] great. Gary was not from the Old School, he was a young guy! But he just had a great “f*ck it!” attitude.

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Son of Satan Portfolio

by Russ Heath Though most avid Heath collectors know full well that Russ contributed mightily to Marvel in its earlier 1950s incarnation as Atlas Comics—on innumerable Western, war, and horror tales—it may come as a surprise to afficionados that the artist spent some quality time at 575 Madison Avenue in the 1970s. Dracula Lives #13 includes a lush and gorgeously rendered portfolio of vampire portraits; KaZar #12 contains a full-length tale; and Savage Tales #10 and 11 both are graced with the Heath touch. But his ’70s tour de force at Marvel was Russ’s Son of Satan #8 job, “…Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son,” as written by Bill Mantlo. Sans word balloons and captions, here are six pages of that superb—if forgotten—story. Courtesy of the artist. Son of Satan ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. May 2001

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May 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ‘zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more!

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Celebrates the 50th anniversary of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and the birth of Marvel Comics! New, never-beforepublished STAN LEE interview, art and artifacts by KIRBY, DITKO, SINNOTT, AYERS, THOMAS, and secrets behind the Marvel Mythos! Also: JIM AMASH interviews 1940s Timely editor AL SULMAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and a new cover by FRENZ and SINNOTT!

See comic art and script BEFORE and AFTER the Comics Code changes, with art by SIMON & KIRBY, DITKO, BUSCEMA, SINNOTT, GOULD, COLE, STERANKO, KRIGSTEIN, O’NEIL, GLANZMAN, ORLANDO, WILLIAMSON, HEATH, and others! Plus: FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, JIM AMASH interviews Timely/Atlas artist CAL MASSEY, and a new cover by JOSH MEDORS!

DICK GIORDANO through the 1960s—from freelance years and Charlton “Action-Heroes” to his first stint at DC! Art by DITKO, APARO, BOYETTE, MORISI, McLAUGHLIN, GIL KANE, and others, Dick’s final convention panel with STEVE SKEATES and ROY THOMAS, JIM AMASH interviews Charlton artist TONY TALLARICO, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and ROY ALD, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, & DITKO/GIORDANO cover!

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ALTER EGO #109

ALTER EGO #110

ALTER EGO #111

Big BATMAN issue, with an unused Golden Age cover by DICK SPRANG! Interviews SPRANG and JIM MOONEY, with rare and unseen Batman art by BOB KANE, JERRY ROBINSON, WIN MORTIMER, SHELLY MOLDOFF, CHARLES PARIS, and others! Part II of the TONY TALLARICO interview by JIM AMASH! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

1970s Bullpenner WARREN REECE talks about Marvel Comics and working with EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, STAN LEE, MARIE SEVERIN, ADAMS, FRIEDRICH, ROY THOMAS, and others, with rare art! DEWEY CASSELL spotlights Golden Age artist MIKE PEPPE, with art by TOTH, TUSKA, SEKOWSKY, TALLARICO Part 3, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, cover by EVERETT & BURGOS, and more!

Spectre/Hour-Man creator BERNARD BAILY, ‘40s super-groups that might have been, art by ORDWAY, INFANTINO, KUBERT, HASEN, ROBINSON, and BURNLEY, conclusion of the TONY TALLARICO interview by JIM AMASH, MIKE PEPPE interview by DEWEY CASSELL, BILL SCHELLY on “50 Years of Fandom” at San Diego 2011, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, PÉREZ cover, and more!

SHAZAM!/FAWCETT issue! The 1940s “CAPTAIN MARVEL” RADIO SHOW, interview with radio’s “Billy Batson” BURT BOYAR, P.C. HAMERLINCK and C.C. BECK on the origin of Captain Marvel, ROY THOMAS and JERRY BINGHAM on their Secret Origins “Shazam!”, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, LEONARD STARR interview, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

GOLDEN AGE NEDOR super-heroes are spotlighted, with MIKE NOLAN’s Nedor Index, and art by MORT MESKIN, JERRY ROBINSON, GEORGE TUSKA, RUBEN MOIRERA, ALEX SHOMBURG, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and part II of JIM AMASH’s interview with Golden Age artist LEONARD STARR! Cover by SHANE FOLEY!

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ALTER EGO #112

ALTER EGO #113

ALTER EGO #114

ALTER EGO #115

ALTER EGO #116

SUPERMAN issue! PAUL CASSIDY (early Superman artist), Italian Nembo Kid, and ARLEN SCHUMER’s look at the MORT WEISINGER era, plus an interview with son HANK WEISINGER! Art by SHUSTER, BORING, ANDERSON, PLASTINO, and others! LEONARD STARR interview Part III—FCA—Mr. Monster—more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and a MURPHY ANDERSON/ARLEN SCHUMER cover!

MARV WOLFMAN talks to RICHARD ARNDT about his first decade in comics on Tomb of Dracula, Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, John Carter, Daredevil, Nova, Batman, etc., behind a GENE COLAN cover! Art by COLAN, ANDERSON, CARDY, BORING, MOONEY, and more! Plus: the conclusion of our LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about FF #1, history of the MMMS, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art by KIRBY, AVISON, SHORES, ROMITA, SEVERIN, TUSKA, ALLEN BELLMAN, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by BELLMAN and MITCH BREITWEISER!

3-D COMICS OF THE 1950S! In-depth feature by RAY (3-D) ZONE, actual red and green 1950s 3-D art (includes free glasses!) by SIMON & KIRBY, KUBERT, MESKIN, POWELL, MAURER, NOSTRAND, SWAN, BORING, SCHWARTZ, MOONEY, SHORES, TUSKA and many others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover by JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY!

JOE KUBERT TRIBUTE! Four Kubert interviews, art by RUSS HEATH, NEAL ADAMS, MURPHY ANDERSON, MICHAEL KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, and others, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY’s Comic Fandom Archive, FCA’s Captain Video conclusion by GEORGE EVANS that inspired Avengers foe Ultron, cover by KUBERT, with a portrait by DANIEL JAMES COX!

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CBA Interview

Groovy Gary & the Marvel Years Friedrich on the highs & lows working at the House of Ideas Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Below: Perhaps writer Gary Friedrich’s high point at Marvel was his collaboration with artist Mike Ploog on their adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous novel for The Monster of Frankenstein comic book. Courtesy of anonymous, here’s a Ploog pencil page from #6. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Gary Friedrich‘s writing credit appeared in hundreds of Marvel comics from the mid-’60s to late-’70s, from Sgt. Fury to Captain Britain, but very little is known about the man, who perhaps most notably scribed an exquisite adaptation of Frankenstein in the company’s glory days of horror. But, with the help of Roy Thomas, we tracked Gary down who graciously gave us a startlingly honest and informative interview via telephone on January 25, 2001. The subject also copyedited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you from, Gary? Gary Friedrich: I’m originally from Jackson, Missouri, same as Roy Thomas. CBA: And what year were you born? Gary: 1943. CBA: Did you meet Roy at a young age? Gary: I met Roy when I went to work at a movie theater in Jackson when I was in seventh grade. I was 13 or something like that. Roy is about four years older than me. CBA: You met him at the movie theater? Gary: Yeah, he was already working there when I started. We popped corn, drew soda, ushered and that kind of stuff. CBA: Did you guys enjoy movies together? Gary: Oh, yeah. Roy and I had a number of things in common, primarily movies and popular music. Then he got me turned on to comics again. I had read them when I was a kid but slacked off for four or five years. The super-hero revival at DC was just getting underway and Roy got me back into the comics. CBA: As a young kid, were you an avid comic reader? Gary: Yeah, I loved comics. Anything and everything. You name it, I loved it. I liked all the super-hero stuff: Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel, in particular. I liked the funny stuff too. I really loved The Fox and the Crow. CBA: Were you disappointed when Captain Marvel was cancelled? Gary: To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. Probably around that time, I was beginning to stop reading the comics and so I didn’t really notice that much. There was to be a period there of a few years where I didn’t read any comics. CBA: Did you miss the ECs when they were coming out? Gary: Not entirely. But I didn’t really get to read a lot of ECs until after they’d stopped publishing and I got to New York and began reading some issues Roy was picking up. Len Brown had a lot of them and I read those with him. CBA: Were you exposed to Mad comics at all? Gary: Yeah, absolutely. I loved them. CBA: Roy got you back into comics? Gary: Yeah. There was a drugstore up the street from the theater and he’d take a break, go up to the drug store, pick up some comics and bring them back. He’d read one and pass it on to me. Roy was kind of my idol, you know. He was four years older and anything he did was good for me. So he was going to read comics? Well, I read comics, too. But I quickly found that I really enjoyed them again. CBA: Do you recall when Roy started Alter-Ego with Jerry Bails? Gary: Oh, sure. I was involved in doing some legwork on a few of the early issues Roy did in Jackson, running stuff to the printer and stuff like that. I recruited the second Joy Holiday—Pauline Copeman—for him. [Joy Holiday was a costumed mascot for the fanzine The Comicollector.] Pauline was a friend of mine when Roy and Linda had broken up and he needed a new girl to portray Joy Holiday so I talked Pauline into doing it for him. CBA: Did you start getting interested in writing, too? Gary: I was interested in writing. Of course, I was still in high school when this was going on. When Roy started Alter-Ego, he was in college and I was nearing the end of high school, and then Roy pretty much turned me on to writing and I was writing a lot of stuff in high school. I edited the school newspaper and got in trouble for writing a pro-comic book editorial when I was a senior. We had this old maid English teacher who was just outrageously straight-laced COMIC BOOK ARTIST 12

March 2001

and conservative and Roy had been her prize pupil. When she stirred up all this trouble about this editorial, I went to her and we were having a rather heated discussion. At some point, I pulled a copy of a Justice League of America Roy had a letter in and I asked her if she remembered Roy Thomas. And she said, “Well, certainly. He was one of my best students,” yadda-yadda-yadda. Then I flipped open the letter with his name on it and her face—! [laughs] It shut her up for a little bit. CBA: [laughs] Did Roy have a good reputation in high school? Gary: Oh, very much so. Much more so than me. I was kind of a hell raiser, but Roy had a nice, well-earned reputation. CBA: Did you have an interest in drawing at all? Gary: No. No artistic ability whatsoever. CBA: Did Roy became a school teacher while you were still in high school? Gary: Yes. He taught in Sullivan, Missouri, up near St. Louis for a year or two and then he taught in Arnold where, strangely enough, I live now, for a couple of years before he came to New York. CBA: Did Roy have aspirations to become a comics writer? Gary: Yeah, very much so. He was so wrapped up in the comics, it became difficult to get him to talk about anything else. [laughs] I’d get aggravated with him from time to time. I’d try to turn on the radio and listen to some music and he’s gonna turn it off and start off on talking about the next Green Lantern! [laughs] He had the bug a lot worse than I did. CBA: [laughs] So were you equally into Elvis and ’50s rock ’n’ roll as he was? Gary: Oh, absolutely, especially Elvis. We also liked Swing music a lot, were both huge Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald fans and we became Bobby Darin fans when Bobby’s Swing stuff came out. CBA: You were also an avid record collector? Gary: Absolutely. CBA: Did you start getting contact with comics fans throughout the country? Gary: No, I never really bought into the fandom thing. I wasn’t nearly as interested as Roy. I enjoyed reading the comics and that was about as far as it went. I was glad to help Roy out if there were any little things I could do and in terms of running errands, that’s the most I ever did with Alter Ego. I was always happy to do that as a friend but I wasn’t really interested. CBA: So the thrill of seeing your name in print—kind of an egotistical thing—never necessarily bit you? Gary: Well, I had the same thing with doing the school newspaper. I liked seeing my name in print. You bet. [laughs] Still do. CBA: [laughs] Do you remember when Roy got the call from DC Comics? Gary: Yeah. I guess that he was still in Arnold or maybe wrapping up what would be his last year of teaching up there at the time. He got the call and there was no question about him going. I, of course, hated to see him leave. CBA: Did you consider, at the time, that, “Hey, if he establishes himself in New York, maybe that’s my chance”? Gary: You know, I don’t think I really did, but within a few months, that changed. At that time I was the youngest newspaper editor in the state of Missouri. Just through circumstance, I’d gotten a job in early ’64 as a reporter for the local newspaper in Jackson. As circumstances warranted, the editor quit and went back to Kansas City, the owner was in an accident and there was nobody there to run the damn paper. [laughs] And I’m there, 21 years old and don’t know squat but I wound up running this newspaper for about a year. The previous summer, Roy and a girlfriend had gone to Mexico and he’d written a series of stories for my newspaper about their trip to Mexico. [laughs] He and another friend of ours from Jackson got in trouble with the school board for some politically-slanted letters they had written to my newspaper about the 1964 Presidential Election. I got into a kind of mudslinging act with the son of a local merchant. The merchant apparently called the school board in Arnold and he sent some clippings along. Roy and Bud got called in and told to cease and desist the political letter writing campaign. [laughs] Roy and I had a lot of fun. CBA: [laughs] I never saw Roy as a rabble-rouser, exactly. Gary: Well, he wasn’t much. Just in this particular case, this kid May 2001

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was such a despicable little ass and Roy and Bud just couldn’t resist ripping him to shreds. CBA: [laughs] Was the kid a supporter of Barry Goldwater? Gary: Absolutely. [laughs] It was fun while it lasted. CBA: Did you go to college for Journalism? Gary: No. CBA: Did you go to college? Gary: No. I got out of high school and worked in a music store in Cape Girardeau for about three years. CBA: You garnered enough clippings from your high school newspaper, to make an impression on the editor? Gary: Well, I got tired of the music store and went looking for a job. This new guy from Kansas City had bought out the two weekly papers in Jackson and turned them into a single twice-weekly newspaper with the idea that he’d eventually turn it into a daily. I just stopped by there on the off-chance that he’d need some help, and I was just in the right place at the right time. The editor was a young man from Kansas City named Tom Stites who’s gone on to quite a career working for all the major newspapers in the country. He taught me enough to be able to run that newspaper when he left. I got my education from him. CBA: Was it a good experience? Gary: Oh, it was wonderful, yeah. CBA: Did you enjoy it? Gary: Yeah, for the most part. There were bad things. Number one, I was working about 80 hours a week for $50, [laughs] and that wasn’t good. I finally got a raise to about $75, I think, but basically, I wrote, edited, and laid out the entire newspaper. I was the whole editorial staff without any help. It was driving me crazy. CBA: Did you even compose the type? Gary: Well, in those days, we were still hot type. We still had Linotype machines. CBA: You didn’t have to operate that, did you? Gary: No, no. [laughs] I never even

Above: Courtesy of Roy Thomas, the splash page to The Sentinels' first adventure (in Charlton’s Thunderbolt #54), drawn by Sam Grainger and written by Gary Friedrich. ©2001 the respective copyright holder. Left: Just about the only photo we could find of Gary, this from Psycho #12. Courtesy of Pablo Marcos.

Above: Compare the Gary Friedrich caricature by Dick Ayers & John Severin above (from the inside front cover of Sgt. Fury Annual #4) with the Marie Severin-altered version appearing in the book’s interior (repro’d in Alter Ego #6). Gary scripted the “war comic for people who hate war comics” for many issues, also writing Capt. Savage and the ’70s version of Combat Kelly. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Gary and Dick Ayers once again appear within a Sgt. Fury comic, albeit four years later. Again penciled by Dick (though this time embellished by Mike Esposito). Yeesh, the squares just couldn’t get over the Groovy One’s hairstyle, eh? ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

tried. I watched those guys and they just amaze me. We got along well because they were all drunks and I was a budding drunk. So the Linotype operators and I were the best of friends. [laughs] CBA: You were a pretty typical newsman, huh? Gary: Oh, yeah. [laughs] Well, being able to drink on the job was part of the attraction. [laughs] I would never again during the rest of my drinking career take another job where I couldn’t drink on the job. [laughs] It was no good at all. CBA: [laughs] So your options started dwindling after a while? Gary: I found ways to drink on the job at Marvel. [laughs] CBA: Mike Ploog very fondly recalls having some good, wild partying times with you. Gary: Oh, yeah. I haven’t talked to Mike for years but we were pretty good buddies. I think the world of Mike. CBA: When you were in the thick of this, working 80 hours a week and just working your butt off at the paper, did you say, “Yes, this is the life for me”? Gary: You know, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. [laughs] To tell you the truth, I was too busy to think. I’d gotten married to this real young girl about a year before, we had a son, and I didn’t have time for her and the child. I didn’t have time for anything because I was working all the damn time. So the marriage didn’t last for very long, and even that wasn’t a major problem for a while because I was so damn busy and I was either working, drunk, or both most of the time. The newspaper was my whole life. I didn’t have time to think about the future or anything else. It was, “How the hell are we going to get this issue out?” And we did. CBA: It came out twice a week, and it lasted two years?

Gary: No, I started that job in February of ’64 and the newspaper finally went under in probably August or September of ’65. My running the thing only lasted a year or so. CBA: That year was on the cusp of some seriously volatile times for America. Did you cover national news at all? Gary: No, we had wire service, but I was personally involved writing editorials from time to time. CBA: Was Civil Rights an issue in Missouri at the time? Gary: It was an issue in Missouri but not really much in Jackson. Jackson is about ten miles north of the line that divides the area in Missouri where the original problems were and weren’t. We were on the side where there wasn’t a problem. They had a handful of black families in town and they were just part of the town. There weren’t any problems. You go down south ten miles and there was all kinds of trouble. It was just one of those weird geographical deals. CBA: What did you do after the newspaper folded? Gary: I went to work in a factory in Cape Girardeau and I didn’t like that, I’ll tell you. I was putting the heating element in waffle irons. [laughter] I had a union contract and you were only allowed to make, like, 36 waffle irons a shift. [laughter] It took about a minuteand-a-half to put the heating element in the waffle iron. So you had about 30 minutes of work and you had to stretch it out over eight hours. God, it was awful, and it paid, I don’t know, $2 an hour, or something. Those were the days. CBA: [laughs] The day took forever, huh? Gary: Yeah. Roy called in November and said, “Why don’t you come to New York?” I said, “I’m on my way.” [laughs] CBA: What did he offer, precisely? Gary: He called my house and he talked to my dad. I wasn’t home and Dad told me he called and was interested in me coming to New York and maybe trying to get into the comics business. My dad told me he’d float me the bus fare if I wanted to go. I called Roy back and he said, “You know, I can’t promise you anything.” By this time, of course, he’d moved over to Marvel and said that he couldn’t promise anything but thought there would be some work to be found if I were to come up for a while. So, hell, the next day I packed my stuff, got on a Greyhound, and was on my way. CBA: Did you separate from your wife by that time? Gary: Yeah, we’d separated several months prior to that. CBA: Was this your first time in the city? Gary: Got into the Port Authority bus terminal down there and it wasn’t wonderful then. It’s much worse now. [laughter] Roy took me up 42nd Street and we took a walk around Times Square. [laughter] And then we got on the subway and rode down to the East Village where he was living in a small apartment with Dave Kaler, who’d very kindly said it would be alright if I came up and stayed with them for a while. So we stayed with Dave for a few weeks and then we got our infamous apartment on COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Bleeker Street down in the Village. CBA: What made it infamous? Gary: It was infamous just because it was wild and crazy. That’s where Bill Everett came and moved in with us for a while, which was a story unto itself and where eventually, the landlord who was about three-fourths nuts, threatened to kill Roy because we’d turned him into the city because of some kind of service that they weren’t providing. I don’t remember if we were having trouble with the heat or the hot water or what the hell the deal was, [laughter] but they wouldn’t fix it. And Roy and I went home for Christmas and he went back to New York before I did and he called from New York, saying, “The landlord’s pounding on the door threatening to kill me. What the hell am I going to do, yadda, yadda, yadda?” I’m a thousand miles away. It was serious. [laughter] CBA: Looks like he survived, huh? [laughs] Gary: Yeah, we survived. We wound up having to get out of there, but it was wild and crazy. The Village was really a neat place to be at that time. CBA: It must have been quite an eye-opener. Gary: Oh, I’d never seen anything like it. It was wild. It was absolutely wild. CBA: Did you go to the clubs? Gary: Oh yeah, I went to the clubs, I went to concerts. I went and saw Chuck Berry not long after I hit town, which was a real kick. We went to the theater that was to become the Fillmore East, it wasn’t called that yet but they were starting to have some rock concerts, like Chuck Berry. I thought it was great. CBA: So you soaked in the Bohemian culture? Gary: Oh, absolutely. I began to let my hair and beard grow and become a regular New York hippie. [laughter] CBA: What was your first professional comics experience? Gary: Well, when I got to New York, there wasn’t any work available at Marvel or DC. I think Denny had left Marvel, or maybe he was still there, I don’t remember. But first, Denny was in the job I was taking. Another guy named Ron something-or-other, and I can’t remember his last name, off-hand. But he was there briefly before I got the job. CBA: Where, at Marvel? Gary: Yeah. In the meantime, I got a job in a record store over at Queens. And I worked there for four or five weeks until Christmas and then hopped a bus back to Jackson for Christmas. I’m very sentimental about Christmas. Roy and I both always went home because they had two events we would always attend. There was Christmas and we always went back to Jackson for what they called Homecomers which is a deal where people come home in August every year and they have a carnival in the streets downtown and all that. It isn’t that much of a deal today but it was a big deal then and we always went home for those two things. When I came back from that Christmas trip, I didn’t want to work in the record store, didn’t like travelling the subway, it was just a pain in the ass; I wasn’t making any money. Roy had talked directly to Dick Giordano and Dick was looking for some freelance writers for Charlton work. So I got on the phone to Dick and hopped a train up to Derby. And Dick was looking primarily for somebody to write some romance comics for him. Hell, I needed to make some money [laughter] so I could probably write romance comics. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem. And I did. I did it with a great, good sense of humor. I wrote things like “Tears in My Malted” [laughter] and “Too Fat to Frug” was another one. I did a female feature—this is hilarious—and the splash panel was supposed to be of the heroine climbing the Arch in St. Louis with the villain up above her. The Arch had only been completed for a couple years at that time, and I envisioned them with ropes hanging off the Arch, or whatever. [laughs] Well, the artist drew the two characters with their arms and legs wrapped around the Arch, shinnying up. [laughter] And hell, Dick didn’t know! It was published that way. I thought I’d freaked out. It was really funny, but I did much of that and we wound up doing “The Sentinels” back-up in Thunderbolt with Sam Grainger. CBA: Did you work closely with him on that? Gary: My recollection is that I don’t think I ever met Sam. I think I talked to him on the phone. CBA: Was he in Texas or something? May 2001

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Gary: Yeah, I think so. I believe I just wrote a complete script. That’s the way it was at Charlton at that time, the way I always preferred to work. CBA: Full-script? Gary: Yep. I didn’t like the Marvel Method. CBA: So did you learn the rudimentary scripting from Roy? Did he give you a tutorial on it? Gary: I took a look at some of Roy’s scripts to get an idea what the form was and just went from there. Of course, Roy wasn’t telling the artists what to draw like I had to do. But I talked to Dick about it and I think Dick may have shown me some scripts that he had there. CBA: That was interesting to see “The Sentinels” in that it was probably the most Marvel-like of the strips that were in the Action Hero Line at the time. You really had a Stan Lee-like tone. Gary: Yeah, well, that’s what influenced me. When Stan’s stuff started coming out, I immediately lost interest in the DC material. There was just no comparison between the two for me. I liked characterization and Stan, of course, was the master at that. And once Marvel, with real characters in the comics, hit the stands I wasn’t interested in the DC books any more. And Stan was, of course, the

Above: Ye ed confesses he doesn’t even know if Gary scripted the issue of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD Frank Springer drew this nifty cover of, but the writer does admit to killing the superspy in #15! Note the cover as published was altered, changing Fury’s expression. By the way, Frank contributed the above #11 cover and he will be prominently featured in CBA’s upcoming National Lampoon special due later this year. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: The writer fondly recalls his collaboration with friend and artist John Verpoorten on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band satire in Not Brand Echh #12. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Okay, okay, so Ye Ed knows this smashing Gil Kane cover doesn’t contain the original Friedrich-scripted Ghost Rider stories, but reprints. Still, ain’t that art glorious? ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

major influence. Then Roy when he started writing for them. CBA: So did you just cut “The Sentinels” from whole cloth? Was it a completely original idea? Gary: “The Sentinels”? I don’t remember very well. My memory of the comic-writing years is severely hazed with alcohol, [laughs] and it’s not very good. I don’t remember much about “The Sentinels” at all other than it was an idea that Roy had and, of course, he couldn’t take any credit for it because he was working for Marvel. He kind of kicked it over to me and we talked about it and, of course, Roy helped me with it. CBA: How extensively did he help you with it? Did he make suggestions? Gary: Yeah. Basically, what Roy and I were doing was we just brainstormed together. We just kicked stuff back and forth. CBA: Over meals or something? Gary: Or whatever. We were just sitting around the apartment. At that time, Roy had discovered Bob Dylan and I guess this was right around the time Dylan went electric, but Roy was playing a lot of the early acoustic stuff and I had never heard Bob Dylan before and I hated it. Roy would play this stuff and it would drive me crazy. [laughter] I’d do anything to get Dylan off, anything. Talk about comics, you name it. [laughter] Bill Everett came along and Bill hated Dylan even more than I did! I don’t know if Bill ever became a Dylan fan. I, of course, did, [laughter] though I admit it took a while. CBA: You weren’t into folk music at all? Gary: Not particularly. I liked Peter, Paul and Mary. I’d enjoyed some of the humorous stuff but I wasn’t a real folk fan. But I mean, Dylan was something really different and I’m a Frank Sinatra fan. [laughs] And here’s Roy who’s a Sinatra fan too, listening to this guy who can’t sing a lick. [laughter] It took a year or so before I got into

Dylan. [laughter] So I’d shut off Dylan and start talking about comics, and, of course, you could always get Roy’s mind off of anything if you want to talk about comics. CBA: Were you getting more involved in comics, more interested in the Golden Age kind of stuff and the backstory of comics? Gary: No. CBA: Was it just the contemporary field? Gary: I am not a fan. CBA: No? Gary: I’ve never been a real comics fan. I went through the period, as a teenager, when DC’s revival was starting and Stan started, when I really enjoyed reading them, but that’s as far as it really went. By the time I began to write them for money, I wasn’t a fan at all. I wasn’t reading anything but the Marvel stuff and began to read less and less of that as time went on. CBA: Was it a passive attitude about it or did you actually start not liking it? Gary: No, it was just passive. I don’t know how much you understand about alcoholism and I don’t mean to prattle on and on about it but it was a big part of my life at the time. It was the most important part. For the alcoholic, drinking is the most important thing. CBA: So the career was an enabling aspect? Gary: Comic books and everything else took a back seat to drinking. Drinking and having fun were what were important. That’s why Bill Everett and I hit it off so famously. Now Roy told me that this artist that created the Sub-Mariner in the ’40s was going to come stay with us for a while, and I thought, “Aw, sh*t! [laughs] We’ll have some old fart hanging around this tiny little apartment. It’s just going to be awful.” I came in on a Sunday night—I’d just been somewhere—and Bill had arrived. Roy introduced me and we sat up talking a bit and I said, “Bill, would you like a beer?” And his eyes lit up in the way that only an alcoholic’s eyes do when they’re offered a drink, and I knew it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. [laughs] Bill and I did a lot of fun drinking together, and some not so fun, but we became famous friends and Bill showed me the way out although I didn’t get sober until after he died. Oh God, how he tried to get me in AA. [laughs] Bill really had the fire and he really wanted to save me, God bless him. We had a party at John Verpoorten’s one night. Bill had been sober for a good while and we’re standing there, talking to Bill and I’m drinking. He’s drinking a Coke and I’m drinking a rum and Coke. Somewhere in the conversation, he accidentally picked up my drink and took a sip, and those eyes just lit up. [laughs] He said, “Oh, sh*t. I gotta get out of here.” I said, “What did you do, pick up my drink?” He said, “Yeah, I need to get to a meeting,” and away he went. I just thought that was the strangest, craziest damn thing I’d ever seen. CBA: So were you in denial at that stage? Gary: Absolutely. Of course, Bill understood and I didn’t yet. He showed me the way, showed me what could be done. Whenever I was ready, why—because of Bill—I knew where to go. CBA: When was the moment of clarity for you? Gary: The moment of clarity for me was on Christmas Eve in 1978. I was still just barely writing comics, doing some freelance stuff for Larry Lieber—Captain Britain, primarily for the British comics—and I was barely able to work. I was really in bad shape and I’d been out on the road with a friend of mine who was a truck driver, also a drunk, and he kind of took me in. I was in too bad a shape to work for a living. And I rode around the country in a truck with him for most of 1978. I was down to about 110 pounds, shook like one of those hula dancers that you stick on the dashboard of a car, and I came home to Jackson for Christmas. I had a daughter who has cerebral palsy and she was, I think, around four at that time and I hadn’t seen her for several months. I came into my mom’s house. My girl was on the floor. She wasn’t able to walk yet and she came crawling across the floor and raised up and I got on the floor. She put her hands around my neck. [pause] She said, “Daddy, I love you,” and I had that moment of clarity. For the first time, I realized what I was and what I was doing and that I didn’t want to do it any more. CBA: So you were about 35? Gary: Yeah. I drank for another week after that and on New Year’s night in 1979, I went down to my brother’s basement and my brother told me I wouldn’t be welcome there any more after that night. I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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thought I was going to keep drinking. I didn’t have any place to go and no job, my truck-driving buddy had shut me down and I did a funny thing for an atheist like me. I got on my knees and I said, “God, help,” and I haven’t had a desire to drink alcohol since. It just went away. He took it away and that’s how it’s been. CBA: Does it totally impair your memory of those times? Gary: Not totally, no. My memories are more of people and things that I did with people than of comics. You know, you ask me if I remember a particular issue of Sgt. Fury, I may. But then again, I may not. [laughs] CBA: So you freelanced for Charlton for a while? Gary: I did the romance stuff and it seems as if there were a few Blue Beetles that I did and, of course, I did “The Sentinels.” CBA: Did you work closely with Ditko on those Blue Beetle stories? Did you meet him? Gary: No, I didn’t meet Ditko. I think I may have shaken Steve’s hand a time or two at Marvel later on but I never said more than “Hi, how you doing?” to Steve. He was not a social guy. CBA: Did you dialogue those books or did you write them fully scripted? Gary: I dialogued the Blue Beetle stuff that Ditko did. He sent me very rough outlines. Jeez, I just hated working on them, because I couldn’t see what the hell was there. It was just literal chicken scratching. I was given the same thing later on with John Severin on a couple of issues of Sgt. Fury that he penciled. I’d just get stuff, there was nothing there. [laughs] So I’d just write some dialogue and hope he’d draw something that would fit it. [laughs] And if he didn’t, in Ditko’s case, it was Dick’s problem. [laughs] CBA: So with Ditko—at least, at Charlton—it was Marvel Style? Gary: Yeah, but that was my first experience in writing dialogue on art that was done and, geez, I didn’t like it and I never really got over it. I never did like writing that way. CBA: And yet the vast majority of your work was that way, right? Gary: Oh, yeah. I’m an alcoholic. I like to be in control. [laughter] CBA: After the Charlton freelancing, you got a staff position at Marvel? Gary: I worked for Len Brown over at Topps for a while. CBA: Oh, yeah? Was Woody Gelman there? Gary: Yeah, Woody was there. Len and I both worked for Woody. CBA: What did you do? Gary: Whatever they needed done. I did proofreading, just general gofer. Art Spiegelman was there on a part-time basis as well. He was just a kid. I think he was still in high school. I wrote some cards for them. I did a series of Superman in the jungle which was not one of Woody’s better ideas, [laughter] but I got paid for them so what the hell. [laughter] I was over there for, I don’t know, maybe six months or something, and then the job opened up at Marvel. That was in September of ’66. CBA: Do you recall your first meeting with Stan? Gary: I may have gone up to the office and seen him a time or two. You know, when I went up to visit Roy, but I don’t think I met him until I went in to interview and he’d given me the infamous Stan Lee Writer’s Test. I got a good story about that, too: I met Stan and he seemed pretty much what I’d pictured him to be. Have you ever met Stan? CBA: Yeah. Gary: Okay. Well, you know how Stan is and that’s pretty much how I pictured him. Stan is Stan. He’s very friendly, very outgoing. We had a nice chat and he explained how he wanted the Writer’s Test done. Now I don’t know, it was like three or four pages of Spider-Man artwork with the dialogue whited-out. I took it home and did it overnight, much to Roy’s chagrin. Roy would agonize for hours over a word and I’d knock out four or five pages an hour. The quality differed, obviously… [laughter] but I was in it for money and Roy was doing it for love and I know that it irritated Roy that I wrote stuff as fast as I did. I’d go home and knock out this test and somewhere in that I had Spider-Man say, “Hang loose, Herbie!” Now, I don’t claim that I made up the saying “hang loose” but I was the first person that put it on paper for Stan Lee to see. [laughter] When Stan went over my test, he just absolutely flipped out over “hang loose.” I think that’s what got me the job. Years later, there were some fans or somebody in the office and May 2001

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I’m in the office (and I think Roy was in there too at the time), and Stan was talking about how he liked to make up his own language for Marveldom and liked to make up sayings that were unique to Marvel like “hang loose.” [laughter] I just about fell out of my chair because I remembered that. Like an idiot, I tried to convince Stan that he didn’t invent the phrase “hang loose,” but I couldn’t convince him. I’m sure he’ll go to his grave believing he’s the first human being to say “hang loose.” [laughter] CBA: You’re just doing your bit for the Merry Marvel Marching Society, huh? Gary: Oh, absolutely. He loved that line, I think, more than anything else I did. Roy, of course, pulling for me was what got me the job. CBA: Who was in the office? Was Marie Severin there at the time? Gary: Marie was there and Johnny Romita, Sol Brodsky and Flo. Ah, who else was in the office? Gee, not many. It was a very small staff there at the beginning. CBA: So was it an exclusive arrangement? Did you do any freelancing for anybody else? Gary: No, I don’t remember it ever being stated but Roy made it perfectly clear to me, “No, you don’t work for anybody else.” So that was the end of

Above: Before there was the motorcyclin’ anti-hero Ghost Rider, there also the motorcyclin’ antihero Hell-Rider! And both were created by Groovy Gary Friedrich! (Though Hell-Rider lasted a mere two issues while Johnny Blaze has had a significant impact over the last 25+ years.) ©2001 Skywald Publications.

Below: Heeerrree’s Johnny! The revamped Ghost Rider made his debut in Marvel Spotlight #5 courtesy of write Gary Friedrich and artist Mike Ploog. Here’s a detail of Mike’s cover art to that issue. Courtesy of anonymous. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Charlton although Dick and I remained friends. CBA: Even though Roy was secretly feeding you story ideas for “The Sentinels” over at Charlton? Gary: Oh look, Roy would have been fired if Stan had known about it. I have no doubt about it. CBA: That was during the time that Marvel really influenced a real resurgence of super-hero comics at the time. Did you perceive Stan as being very sensitive about the competition? You know, Tower Comics came up looking very Marvelesque, Charlton was coming out with Ditko stuff. Gary: Stan’s way of handling the competition was to ignore it. If he read any of it, I was never aware of it. He certainly never left any of it lying around, he never talked about it unless somebody else brought it up and then he’d brush it off and change the subject back to Marvel as quickly as possible. His way of handing the competition was to ignore it and it was apparently the right way to handle it. He was definitely very successful. CBA: Were you privy at all to when Ditko left? Were you there? Gary: No, I’m sure that happened before I came. And I was never a big Ditko fan, anyway. I liked Romita a lot better. [chuckles] You know, I’m just weird that way. I like

what I like. CBA: Well, it sold a lot better. Gary: I thought Romita was the best thing that ever happened to the book. CBA: Did you see Jack Kirby, with any frequency, in the office? Gary: No, Jack didn’t come in very often. Jack’s another guy that I never got to know. Jack came in, said hi to everybody, and went in to Stan’s office. When he came out, he left and that was the end of that. I never spent any time with Jack at all but I had the impression that he was a very nice man. Of course, that’s what everybody says about him and I’m sure that he was. CBA: Did you sit in on any plot sessions that Stan had with any other artists? Did you see how he worked? Gary: Oh, yeah. I don’t think anybody sat in when he and Jack were working. I mean, Roy may have, I don’t remember, but I don’t remember seeing anybody else do that, but we’d sit in with other people. CBA: Stan had a reputation for being very exuberant, jumping on tables and acting out stories. Gary: Oh yeah, he was just completely wild. I can see him right now, perched on the edge of an end table, posing as The Vulture. [laughter] You know, that’s one of my favorite memories of Stan: [imitates Stan] “This is what I want him to look like.” He’s showing Romita how to draw The Vulture, you know. It was hysterical. CBA: If you were doing a Rawhide Kid or Spider-Man, one of their top-selling books, did it all pay the same? Gary: Yeah, about ten bucks a page. CBA: Did you have any aspirations to work on any of the headlining books? Gary: Well, sure. I wanted to write Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Never did get to write Fantastic Four. I did get to write some Spider-Man near the end. I did a Daredevil/Spider-Man team-up. I think Colan drew it but I can’t remember for sure. But that was shortly before John Verpoorten died in ’77. CBA: Did you do any work for Tower Comics? Gary: Before I went to Marvel, I talked to the guy at Tower. CBA: Samm Schwartz? Gary: That who he was? Yeah. I can’t remember off the top of my head. It seems to me like I might have done something for them. I wrote a couple of paperback books for them a little later on. CBA: For Harry Shorten? Gary: Yeah. Len Brown and I did some musical anthologies. We did an Encyclopedia of Rock ’n’ Roll and an Encyclopedia of Country & Western and a rock ’n’ roll quiz book which I think the title of was So You Think You Know Rock ’n’ Roll. I also did a porno for them. CBA: [laughs] What was your pseudonym? Gary: I don’t remember, I truly don’t. [laughter] CBA: Whatever pays the bills, huh? Gary: I remember it because later on, I took the porn book and cleaned it up and sold it to another publisher. [laughter] CBA: Recycling, that’s the way to do it. Gary: There it is and it makes it easy. [laughter] If I wrote anything, I don’t remember what I wrote for Tower, if I wrote any. I remember going over and talking to Samm but I don’t remember for anything. Len Brown was still over at work for him then. CBA: Is that probably where you got the connection, from Topps? Gary: Yeah, and Len sent me over to see Samm. I don’t remember if I wrote anything for him or not. CBA: What were your duties over at Marvel when you first came on staff? Gary: Oh, primarily, proofreading, go out in the lobby and talk to the kids when they came in, all the dirty work. [laughter] Gofer, you know. I managed to keep pretty busy. They expected you to do some writing on staff and, of course, like everybody else, they started me out with Millie the Model. So I’d write a few pages on staff and then you could write the rest at home and get paid for them on freelance, but it was mostly proofing. CBA: Was it boring? Gary: There was something very special to me about that Marvel family, from the mid- to late-’60s. And I don’t know that there’s been any other place as special to work; there certainly hasn’t been for me because everybody in the Bullpen was just so close. It was COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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such a good bunch of people. If there was a bad apple in the bunch, it was me. I mean, this was such a wonderful, kind, loving, fun group of people. They were just the absolute best. I can’t think of the words to describe how wonderful it was to work there. CBA: There seemed such a mix of really sweet personalities, right? You had Marie and Flo— Gary: Yeah, it was. Morrie Kuramoto was another person who was there when I came there and Morrie was there until he died. Morrie just did art corrections, but he was one of the sweetest guys you ever met in a million years. Everybody there was just incredible. Sol Brodsky was just… I grew up with a conservative, Republican German grandfather. I always suspected he was a closet Nazi. [laughter] He had nothing good to say about Jewish people. I never knew any Jewish people until I went to New York. You know, all I knew was what my grandfather had told me, which I was smart enough to not necessarily believe. But I didn’t know what to expect. Of course, the first Jewish person I ever had any contact with, to speak of, was Len Brown. Len is one of the most wonderful human beings that ever lived and, of course, he and I became great buddies. Then I went to work down at Marvel and here’s Sol. He was a second father to me, just one of the best human beings that ever walked on the face of the Earth and he had a tough job. He had a way of getting on you without getting on you. If you were late on something, he could just make you feel lower than a snake’s belly without ever raising his voice. [laughter] He’d make you feel so damn guilty that you’d go home and stay up all night and finish whatever the hell it was you were late on and get it back to him the first thing the next morning. [laughter] He was just the best guy in the world and Stan was a good guy, too. Stan played the father away from my father role for me too on many occasions. I love Stan to death. He and Sol were just the best people, and so was everybody else. Marie was just one of the funniest human beings that ever lived. She was so kind and so caring and John Romita’s the same way. Like I said, if there was a bad apple in the bunch, it was me. But other than that, just a great bunch of people and they kept on coming. You know, it seemed like everybody—so Sol just had a knack of who to hire. I think Sol, for the most part, talked to them first and then he’d tell Stan what he thought and Stan would pretty much go along with what Sol thought. Sol really knew people. CBA: He hired Herb Trimpe, right? Gary: Yeah. Well, you had this School of Visual Arts crew in there. He had Verpoorten and then Trimpe and Al Kurzrok and Stu Schwartzberg. These four guys were all high school buddies. Verpoorten came over first, I believe, and then he brought Trimpe along and Schwartzberg came in and took over the stat room. I don’t know if you ever met Stu Schwartzberg or not, but he’s one of the funniest human beings that ever lived. He’s just hysterical, he’s a funny guy. As far as I know, he’s still at Marvel. I haven’t talked to him for years. Aw, geez, funny guy, sick sense of humor, my Lord. [laughter] Very funny guy and Kurzrok’s a terrific guy. He finally gave up on the comics business and went back to school and he’s a psychologist down in Florida now. CBA: Did you know Tony Mortellaro? Gary: Yeah. Great guy. Like me, Tony drank a little bit. [laughs] I don’t think to the extent that I did but I don’t think anybody drank to the extent that I did except for maybe Bill, [laughter] but Tony was a great guy. If anybody had anything bad to say about Tony to me, shut up. I don’t want to hear it. I got great memories of the guy and just as soon keep it that way. He was a good guy. There was always a lot of humor and banter and stuff going on in the office. It was really a fun place to work. I can’t tell you how much fun it was. CBA: It was a nine-to-five gig? Gary: Yeah. CBA: Did you socialize with people in the office after hours, besides Bill and Roy? Did you go to First Fridays? Gary: There would be occasions when there’d be a get-together for drinks or maybe dinner after work. Mostly Stan and Sol would take the staff down to some restaurant, Sun Luck East, on a Friday, once every couple of months. We’d go down there, eat a Chinese meal and we’d have a lot of fun. If Stan weren’t available, Sol would take us all down there anyway. But I don’t remember too much after work at first. That began to change after Verpoorten came on board May 2001

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and John began to get to know some of the people at work. John and Vinnie Colletta hooked up and started talking. Then Vinnie started inviting us over to Friar Tuck’s, a bar across the street from DC, and we started hanging out over there with some of the DC people. We used to meet Carmine there with some regularity after work, about once a month or so. Some of the other guys from DC would come down, and we’d drink and let ourselves go. I met Frank Giacoia like that and Frank drank a little, too. [laughs] Frank and I became very good friends. There were some wild times at Friar Tuck’s. I think Jenette may have even come over there once or twice, I don’t know, to mingle with the poor or whatever. [laughter] CBA: Did you hang out with Wally Wood at all? Gary: I met and talked with Wally at parties a few times. He and Flo were friends and Flo introduced me to Wally and we’d see each other at parties and talk and I really enjoyed it. I thought he was a hell of a guy. I loved his artwork, too. CBA: You were writing Millie the Model and did you get the Sgt. Fury gig pretty early?

Above: Gawd, wasn’t the Friedrich/Ploog Frankenstein book just slammin’? Here’s Mike’s cover art to the first issue. Courtesy of anonymous. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Opposite page, top: Ploog’s original art to Frankenstein #3, courtesy of anonymous. Opposite page, bottom: One of Gary’s best friends while at Marvel was production manager John Verpoorten, a man well loved by many oldtime bullpenners. It’s worth noting that John was also an accomplished inker, often extremely faithful to the pencils. And is it a coincidence that the three major collaborators on Frankenstein—Friedrich, Ploog, and Verpoorten—also intensely partied together? This doctored pic appeared in a Crazy #? TV Guide parody. Jumbo John, indeed! ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 82

Gary: I don’t remember exactly at what point but it wasn’t long. I did Millie and then they began to farm out some Westerns to me because Larry was terminally behind. [laughs] He just couldn’t keep them caught up so when he’d get behind on a Western, they’d farm that out to me. It wasn’t too long before Roy’d had enough of Sgt. Fury and Stan was ready to give up another book. They gave Roy XMen, or something else, and I got Sgt. Fury. Now the difference between Stan and Roy and me was that I liked Fury. I’m a character guy. I’m like Stephen King. I love it where King said he didn’t plot his books out. He just came up with some characters and started writing, to see where the characters would take him. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t like Marvel’s way of doing a plot and having the writer dialogue the artwork. They took that away from me. I’m a characterdriven guy and I liked Fury and I came to like the other characters, too. I could do that and I always liked writing Sgt. Fury. It’d get old from time to time after a while. And sometimes a plot for a month would be like pulling teeth. Hell, we’d fought every battle. What are we going to do now? [laughter] But I loved the characters and I liked writing Fury. I had a good time with it. I would never particularly want to give it up. CBA: So you were getting a reputation as doing war books, right? Gary: Yeah. CBA: And that didn’t bother you at all?

Gary: No. No, whatever. I mean, you know, I’d still like to be a star and write super-heroes but I figured the chance would come. In my scenario, one day Stan would step down and Roy would take over and I’d be number two and that would be good enough for me. It didn’t work out that way but that’s what I had planned in the early days and it could have worked out that way. It just turned out that Roy didn’t want it and, of course, I drank myself out of my opportunities. CBA: Did you create Captain Savage? Gary: Yeah. I guess Fury was doing well enough that they wanted to do another one and it seems to me that Stan came up with the name and said, “Here, go for it.” [laughter] I wasn’t that crazy about that. I mean, I was willing to do that but at that time I was working for the bucks and that was it. And whatever they wanted me to do, why, as long as they paid me for it I was willing to do it. But I never got into Captain Savage and I’m sure it showed. CBA: But so it lasted a little while, right about a dozen issues or something like that. You were also doing Western comics? Gary: Yeah. Like I said, whatever Larry couldn’t do, they’d give to me. CBA: Did you initiate the relaunch of Ghost Rider as the Western character? Gary: Roy and I together. Roy and I brainstormed and had ideas. When Roy got on something, he thought he could sell it to Stan, he’d go after him and sometimes it’d take a while and other times, Stan would okay it right on. It took forever to get Stan to do Conan and I don’t remember how long it took to get him to do Ghost Rider, but we had some legal investigations done and finally came to the conclusion that we could legally do it and so we did. That was fun for a little bit. CBA: Did you look at the old Ghost Rider comics? Gary: You know, it seems to me that Roy got his hands on some and I did, yeah. I didn’t have any myself or I’d have remembered the character. And I don’t remember if it was my idea or Roy’s that we revive him. It was probably Roy’s. CBA: Did you have any enthusiasm for the strip? Gary: Yeah, initially. I would still rather have done something in the super-heroes. Why, Ghost Rider was, like, a step in that direction. I knew from the beginning, in the back of my mind, the idea that someday, we’d do a super-hero called Ghost Rider because I didn’t really expect the Western to be a hit that would last very long. Western comics made a buck and that was it, and I knew it wasn’t going to last forever. CBA: Did you co-plot with Dick Ayers at all? Gary: Not for the most part. I’d just type up a plot and send it off to him. CBA: Was it during your time there that John Severin came on as the inker? Gary: Oh, yeah. John penciled a couple of issues and then he fell back to just inking. I don’t remember what happened that Severin penciled an issue or two. I don’t know if they put Dick on something else or Dick was sick for a little bit and couldn’t work or what the hell happened. But after just a couple of issues, why Dick came back and Severin inked and it worked out pretty well for the most part. It sure made the book look great. Severin is a great talent. John didn’t much care for my anti-war stance [chuckles] and he’d come in and grumble about it every once in a while. CBA: Dennis O’Neil said that because he was anti-war, he would never do a war book. Today, he disagrees with that attitude. Back then, Vietnam was going on, there was a true anti-war movement going on in the country, and you were depicted in a Sgt. Fury Annual as being somewhat of a hippie (by Marie Severin, of course). Did you have any qualms about working on a book that glorified war? Gary: Well, no. For the most part, we tried to make it do the opposite. I looked at it as a fantasy. Stan explained all comics and the word that he comes back to again and again was “fantasy.” You have to remember that we’re dealing with fantasy here. We take real people and put them into fantasy situations. That’s the way it was with Sgt. Fury. You know, the bulletproof soldiers. Sgt. Fury was a super-hero book. Anyway, when you get right down to it, it was a super-hero book and I tried to make it as anti-war as I could. And I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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think a lot of times, I succeeded pretty well. CBA: Well, you got John Severin mad. That’s a sign. [laughter] Gary: But, you know, John and I never had words over it. John would come in and grumble at me. He hated the issue I did, “The Deserter,” I think was one of the series where I had the guy put before the firing squad and killed at the end. And Severin came in, just ranting and raving, “It only happened one time in history and that was in World War One.” “John, it’s fantasy. [laughter] It isn’t real.” But he carried on. John would blow it off a little bit and walk off, it would be forgotten and that would be the end of it. CBA: In the later ’60s, a relevance streak went through comic books, draining away the fantasy and putting a more human realistic element in. Did that have any interest to you? Gary: Yeah. Of course, we all hated the Comics Code. I don’t know that Stan hated them that much but Stan wasn’t bothered. Stan was a writing machine and he just ground them out, you know. They were good but he didn’t really worry about the Code other than we complied to it at all times. The rest of us absolutely despised it. And the hell of it was the guy who ran it, Len Darvin, was a nice guy. Jeez, I think he had a tough job and I think he realized the absurdity of it, but he had a job to do and he did it. We just had to live with it, but I loved the relevant stuff. I thought it was great. CBA: Did you have trouble with the Code, yourself? Do you recall stories? Gary: I don’t recall having any major problems with the Code. Most of the problems had to do with artwork and sex and violence, primarily sex. Now, there was some magic link for cleavage and if the line was longer than that, the page came back. [laughter] CBA: So you just threw a little Sno-Pake on it. Gary: The boobs can only be so big. [laughter] You had to really watch it. CBA: I think it’s true of comics today but it’s the opposite; they have to be so big. [laughter] What was John Verpoorten like? Gary: John Verpoorten was the most wonderful human being I ever met. I was blessed with two of the best friends any man ever had in Verpoorten and Roy Thomas, and they were very different. John was kind and warm and friendly and very funny and had a mean sense of humor. He was a Don Rickles fan. [laughter] He lived it, and I was his foil. CBA: You were his hockey puck? [laughs] Gary: He was so big I couldn’t do much about it, [laughter] but he was so kind to me during the latter years of my drinking, he took care of me and my family purely out of the goodness of his heart. I was living down in Missouri. My wife and I had trouble and I packed my bags and crashed with John for two or three months, hang around the office, kissed the editor’s ass and make some money, [laughs] and go back home and run short on money and John would send me some bucks. He was really something. He was a big brother. CBA: How did you hear about when he passed away? Gary: He’d been sick. I was in New York, this was in December of ’77, and he’d been sick. He thought he had the flu. Now John was supposed to be taking blood pressure medication. Jesus, I think he weighed around 350 and he was about six feet six inches tall. Was supposed to be taking high blood pressure medicine and didn’t take it, was supposed to be on a diet, wouldn’t follow it. For Thanksgiving that year, I cooked a 20-pound turkey and dressing and vegetables and a couple of pies and all kinds of sh*t, and had dinner ready about noon. And at eight o’clock that night, it was all gone [laughter] and I didn’t eat that much of it. CBA: What, no sandwiches? [laughs] Gary: There was nothing left. [laughter] Flo came over that night and might have eaten a plate full, you know, and I ate a plate full and John ate the rest. [laughter] I never saw anybody eat like him. We’d go out and get a couple of steaks and by the time the steaks got there, I was three or four martinis deep and I didn’t give a damn about eating. I’d eat one or two bites of the steak and John would eat the rest. He’d eat for both of us. [laughter] And that’s just the way he was. John had an eating disorder, I’m sure, but at any rate, he had the flu or something and he hadn’t been taking his medication and he was really sick. You couldn’t get him to stay home. I mean, John went to work two hours early and worked two or three hours late every day. And on a Friday, this was a week before May 2001

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Christmas, I was going back to Missouri for the holiday like I always did, and he said he was feeling a little better. We’d exchanged gifts the night before and I got up the next morning, gave him a hug and “See you after Christmas.” I flew to Missouri and on Monday, I got a call from Lenny Grow who was John’s assistant. Lenny called me and said, “Have you heard from John?” And it hit me right then. I knew because when John wasn’t at work at nine o’clock in the morning, something’s wrong. “We haven’t heard from him. We can’t get an answer at his apartment.” I tried to call and couldn’t get anybody. Finally, [chuckles] in all of their masculine splendor, the staff at Marvel sent little Mary MacPheron down to the apartment to check on him. I guess Lenny had a key and Mary went in and found him dead. She was pretty cool. She handled it well. She called the police and called me in Missouri and told me, “Gary, I’m in John’s apartment and he’s dead.” He had apparently awakened in the night sometime over the weekend and hemorrhaged in his bed. There was a lot of blood in the bed. And he came downstairs, sat down in his chair and died. CBA: How old was he? Gary: 37, I believe. He was a very, very young man. CBA: Did Marvel change when he passed away? Gary: Well, it was really the end of me having anything to do with Marvel. I would think it would have had to. After John died, I guess, Danny Crespi took over. I didn’t go around Marvel after John died. Maybe one time in the summer of ’78 when I was on that last drunk and riding around the country. Yeah, I did go back there one time, but I just wanted to talk to Larry and I was still writing Captain Britain. I really didn’t get much of a feel for what was going on then. I came back to New York to visit in ’83, the last time I was up there, and Danny was still doing the job then. Though it was much bigger, the feeling that I got was still that it was, you know, it was a pretty

Above: While it may have lacked the passion of Ploog’s version, John Buscema did a pretty neat job on Gary’s Frankenstein series. Here’s the splash page from #8, courtesy of anonymous. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Opposite page: Another dubious Friedrich creation was Son of Satan, as drawn in his first two appearances (in Marvel Spotlight #12 & 13) by Happy Herb Trimpe. Here’s a cover repro and primo panel from Damien’s debut issue. Latter courtesy of Herb Trimpe. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 84

nice deal. Danny had the type of personality, I think, that would have made it pretty much like it was under John. Danny was a nice guy too but the job ate him up. It killed him. CBA: Was Captain Britain your last comic book work? Gary: Yeah, until I did that Kirby thing for Topps back along—what was it, ’93 or ’94?—somewhere around in there. CBA: Did Len and Roy get you involved in that? Gary: Yeah, pretty much Roy. Jim Salicrup wouldn’t give me any work. Len refused to step up, refused to step on this guy’s shoes, and I admire him for that, you know. I’m not mad at Len about it. I sure could have used the work but that was all I ever got out of Topps, that one-shot deal. I made some nice money out of that compared to what I used to make. [laughs] But that was it. CBA: Do you recall trying to develop some Western strips? “HalfBreed,” was that yours? Gary: I did a thing, it was a rip-off of the TV show Alias Smith and Jones called The Gunhawks and tried to throw some humor into it. I had fun with that. I did a Gunhawks-type thing for Larry Lieber over at Atlas, too. CBA: You did work on Nick Fury. Gary: SHIELD? Yeah. I killed Nick Fury. [laughter] And, of course, Stan forgot and brought him back. [laughter] We went in and we spent some period of time convincing Stan that it was time to kill Fury. We finally convinced him to let us do it. A year, year-and-a-half later, or whatever, he’s plotting a story with Roy and Stan says, “I know, we’ll bring in Nick Fury.” [laughs] Roy said, “You can’t do that, Stan.” He says, “Why not?” “We killed him.” Stan says, “What

do you mean ‘we killed him’?” He didn’t remember. [laughter] And within 30 seconds, “Well, find some way to bring him back.” [laughter] So I guess Fury’s still alive and roaming around out there somewhere. It was my intention for him to stay dead, I’ll tell you that! [laughter] I figured I’d written more of him than anyone else, I should have the right to kill him. [laughs] CBA: Did you stay with Sgt. Fury until the end of the series? Gary: No, I don’t know. I have no idea who’d taken over after I stopped writing it. I really don’t remember but it did kept going for a while, and then it switched to reprints. CBA: Right. You made it to the 100th issue, right? Gary: Uh, probably, yeah. CBA: There was a real change in the Comics Code that took place in ’71, ’72. Do you recall the liberalization, allowing horror characters and drug references? Gary: Yeah. I don’t remember it being that big a deal. I remember whenever we started to do our, to get into our horror mode, with the Werewolf and Dracula comics and Frankenstein and that stuff. I seem to vaguely remember that some pressure had been put on the Code, or whatever, to get them to allow a little bit more violent or horror-type stuff. And that’s really about all I remember. I don’t recall if we had any trouble with them or not. CBA: Well, they made the changes and then Marvel came out with this huge slew of horror titles and you wrote a good, healthy number of them. Gary: I wrote the first several issues of the Frankenstein series which I always considered my best work. I really enjoyed that and, of course, I liked working with Mike Ploog. CBA: Were you looking to do a straight adaptation of Shelley’s novel? Gary: Yeah, yeah. I went out and picked up a copy of the novel and read it and wanted to do it as straight as I possibly could, and that’s what we did. Of course, we worked off a plot and Mike drew it and I worked off the artwork. I was living out in Missouri when I wrote that. CBA: That’s a beautiful job. So they would mail you the art? Gary: Actually, I think they mailed photostats. CBA: Then you did “Ghost Rider.” How did the idea come up for that? Gary: Well, there’s some disagreement between Roy, Mike and I over that. [laughter] I threatened on more than one occasion that if Marvel gets in the position where they are gonna make a movie or make a lot of money off of it, I’m gonna sue them, [laughter] and I probably will. Roy’s recollections of the birth of the Ghost Rider and mine vary somewhat. It was my idea. It was always my idea from the first time we talked about it, it turned out to be a guy with a flaming skull and rode a motorcycle. Ploog seems to think the flaming skull was his idea. But, to tell you the truth, it was my idea. CBA: What was it built off of, the Hell’s Angels of the time? Gary: Yeah. The whole motorcycle gang genre was hot. At that time I befriended one of the guys in Magazine Management’s men’s magazines department. As a matter of fact, I worked over there on one of the men’s magazines for about a year, I don’t know, it must have been maybe ’70. I’d quit Marvel and wound up short of money and I’d met David George in a bar, naturally, and he was the editor of For Men Only magazine. He was looking for an assistant so I hired on as David’s assistant on For Men Only lasting about a year. They did cycle stories every issue. There was an audience out there for “Cycle Bastard Stories,” which was what they called them. CBA: Cycle Bastard Stories? Gary: “What’s the Cycle Bastard Story going to be this month?” [laughter] Very formulaic, these men’s magazines. CBA: Did you deal with any memorable writers over there? Gary: I met Mario Puzo. The Godfather was published in one of the men’s magazines before it was published as a book. Mario worked over there for a while, so did Bruce J. Friedman. I don’t remember meeting Friedman but I met Mario a couple of times. He used to come in and have drinks with the boys from time to time. CBA: Did you ever hear about an article that Puzo wrote; it was called “The Boss’s Son”? Gary: Puzo didn’t write that. Ivan Prashker wrote it. CBA: And what was it? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Gary: The title was, indeed, “The Boss’s Son” and it was about Martin and Chip. [laughs] He sold it to Playboy. Ivan was my boss at the time while I was working for the men’s magazine. David and I published that magazine in the Coral Bar downstairs and David finally lost his job and Ivan took over as editor of that magazine and I worked for Ivan for a few months. It was during that time that Ivan wrote and sold that story to Playboy. CBA: Was it an accurate depiction of Martin and Chip’s relationship? Gary: I remember it as being fairly vague. But I don’t remember real well. I remember the story and there was lots of talk about it. The scuttlebutt was than neither Martin nor Chip ever said a word about it. CBA: Did you deal with Martin at all? Gary: One time. I got fired from the men’s magazines. Martin hired a guy to oversee the men’s magazines who was gay which didn’t make a lot of sense. [laughter] CBA: That’s a real men’s magazine. [laughter] Gary: The magazines weren’t doing well and Martin hired this guy who was just a real swishy guy. Of course, none of us in the magazines liked him, and he was always screwing around with us, giving us a hard way to go and he didn’t know anything about these magazines. I began to get pissed off about it and I sent a series of memos to Martin about him which finally got me fired. Several months later, they needed somebody to come over to Marvel and handle the mail and do some other stuff because the secretary who was, by then, probably, I don’t know, Holly— Flo had been gone for a while—who had gotten wrapped up in production stuff and didn’t have time to take care of the ship. I was looking for a job and said I’d come in and do it if Stan could get me past Martin. And what I had to do was write a letter to Martin Goodman, telling him that I was sorry, that I’d been under a lot of pressure and that I was seeing a psychiatrist—which was a damn lie [laughter]—and I was doing better. Stan had suggested this because he knew that Martin approved of psychiatry. Martin had invited me and I had to go down into this office and talk to him, telling him about my problems, admit that maybe I drank a little bit too much, that was some big secret, [laughter] and this, that, and the other. He was very nice and he stuck his hand out and said, “Glad to have you back, kid.” [laughter] CBA: “Go get ’em, tiger.” Gary: And that was it. But you know, Martin Goodman treated me better than anyone I ever worked for. He was generous, he was liberal, he wasn’t tight about your hours as long as you got your work done, gave fabulous bonuses for the two years that he owned the company that I worked there. The third year, Perfect Film and Chemical bought him out and that was the end of the bonuses, but he was very good to his employees. Later on, when he started the Atlas/Seaboard group, for reasons known only to he and Chip. Larry called me up and said, “Help.” [laughter] Well, I flew up to New York and Chip and Martin took me out and wined me and dined me and offered me a bunch of money to save the comics enterMay 2001

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prise. I didn’t succeed at it but I made a hell of a lot of money at it for a year or so. [laughter] I just freelanced. I wrote all their titles. I just said, “Larry, until you find some other writers, I’ll write them all,” and I did. We weren’t real rich in excellent artists, which probably caused the failure as much as anything, though we kind of got it turned around and put out a line of books that wasn’t too bad. Martin just saw the numbers. After a year or so of losing money, Martin was not the type of guy to continue to throw good money after bad. CBA: Did you get the impression that Atlas/Seaboard was created as an act of vengeance against Marvel? Gary: Well, that’s how the story went. Again, my feeling was that Martin was too smart for that and I never really felt that he did it for that reason. I think he did it to make money and that he thought with Larry in charge and paying good rates that he could do it. Now, he probably wouldn’t have minded if it would have taken a bite out of Marvel’s profits, but I don’t think it was done out of revenge. I think Martin was too smart for that. CBA: But would you characterize it as too much, too fast? Gary: Yeah, probably. Certainly in light of the staff he had available. They started out with nobody. I mean, they had Michael Fleisher, for God’s sake. For all intents, by the time I got there, it was too late. I think the damage had already been done, that these kids had already bought these titles and seen how awful they were and they weren’t going to buy any more. CBA: Well, they just didn’t seem to have much continuity with the titles. The Cougar character, Tiger-Man, would change completely. Gary: Yeah, you just didn’t know what was going on. CBA: The Phoenix suddenly became Morlock 2001 and things like that. Gary: Once Larry came on board, and then he hired me, we tried to settle things down and get them going in the right direction but I think the damage had already been done. It was too late. Boy, I sure hated to see them go. I made a lot of money there for a year or so. CBA: It was interesting that you also worked for another comics house, not a competitor of Marvel at the time actually, but Sol was involved with them. Gary: Yeah, I left Marvel in the Summer of ’68 and went to California for the Summer. I had to be out there for the Summer of Love. [laughter] You know, just nuts. I got this great job and in typical fashion, my buddy from Missouri says, “I’m going to go to California for the Summer. You want to go along?” “Yep.” [laughter] So I figure I might not want to stay out there so I’m going to get somebody to take my place at Marvel for the Summer, if I can pull this off with Stan and Sol’s permission; who won’t be a threat to me, and if I need to come back, I’ll be able to come back and get my job back. I’d 85

Below: One more time! Yet another Marie Severin caricature of Gary from Tower of Shadows #3’s “Midnight in the Wax Museum” (though the story was actually drawn, curiously enough, by George Tuska). ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

recently met Steve Englehart and Steve and I hit it off and so I thought we were pretty good buddies. I introduced him to Roy who talked to him some. For some reason or another, Roy and Stan didn’t really want to hire him but I thought he was my man and I eventually convinced them to hire Steve while I went to California. [chuckles] And in about two or three month’s time, Steve had not only solidified himself in my job to the point where I’d never get it back, he’d also taken all my damn freelance work away from me. [laughter] And let me tell you, as an alcoholic, I know how to hate people. [laughter] And I hated Steve Englehart. He may have been the last person on my list of people to forgive but I finally let go of my resentment. Some other things happened too that really pissed me off, but I really screwed up when I got Steve the position because he came in there and did a bang-up job and took my job away from me and I deserved it, you know. But I didn’t see it that way for a long time and I’m trying to remember. I freelanced for a while. At some point, during that period of freelancing, I think, at the point where I went to work at the men’s magazines, Sol left and started Skywald. And he called me and wanted me to do some work for them, which I did. We did Hell-Rider and also did some stories for Up Your Nose and Out Your Ear which was going to be the next Mad, which didn’t quite work out. [laughter] CBA: “Up Your Nose And Out Your Ear”? [laughs] Gary: Skywald was doomed from the start for lack of artistic talent. CBA: Was Hell-Rider your concept? Gary: Yeah. Sol and I talked and he liked Ghost Rider and he said he thought he’d like to try something along that line. Going with that, I came up with Hell-Rider. CBA: What did you think of the premise? Gary: Ross Andru and Mike Esposito drew it. Ross was a nice guy. I liked Ross. I didn’t think their artwork was very good and by that time, everything I did was for a buck and I just hacked it. I can barely see the cover of the first one and that’s about all I remember about it. I think I knew from the word go, when Sol told me that Mike was going to be the artistic director and draw a lot of the stuff, I think I knew it was doomed. I felt bad because Sol was a good guy and, Jesus, he really wanted this to work. This was Sol’s big chance and it didn’t work out. CBA: Did you write any of the horror books, Psycho and Nightmare? Gary: I may have. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. CBA: You don’t remember Al Hewetson? Gary: Yeah, I remember Al. Faintly, I can see his face. I don’t remember him well. I remember us being pretty good buddies for a while, as a matter of fact. I can remember drinking with him. CBA: You’re right. He said he socialized with you. Gary: Yeah, but that’s about all I remember. It seems like I should remember more of it. That’s the old alcohol and the brain cells, you know. [laughs] CBA: So you went back to Marvel and were doing freelance for them after that, right? Gary: Yeah. I went to the men’s magazines for a year or so and then I went back to Marvel. I guess it would have been Fall of ’70, or something like that. I took a job answering the mail which, geez, I just hated. I wound up doing less and less of that and more and more proofreading and stuff. CBA: Why did you hate opening letters? Gary: It was just boring. Same old, same old, you know. 90% of the letters you get are not usable. The idea was you were supposed to answer each and every one. It was just a secretarial job and [laughs] I didn’t like that. It interfered with my drinking. [laughter] By that time, what I’d do is I’d get up in the morning and have a couple of drinks, walk downtown—I lived up on East 71st Street—and

stop at the Coral Bar and have a couple, go into work and at ten o’clock, volunteer to go down and get coffee for everybody. [laughs] I’d go over to Coral and have a couple more while they put the order together at the deli. I’d go back up and at lunch, I’d go out for a couple hours and I’d also keep a bottle of vodka in my desk drawer and I had a mug from the Playboy Club which was painted brown. Funny, I’ll tell you, you couldn’t see what was inside it unless you got over the top and looked down. And I’d drink vodka and Coke out of that mug at the office all day. During that summer, I went up to the beach and got a horrible sunburn. I mean, to the point where I couldn’t move. My ankles were sunburned and they were swollen. I couldn’t put shoes or socks on. I finally came back to work after two or three days but I couldn’t wear shoes and socks. I had my pants rolled up to just under my knees. I’m limping around the office with these swollen, sunburned ankles, barefoot, and Marie Severin drew a cartoon of me shuffling down the hall with my pants rolled up and my red sunburned, throbbing ankles and this Playboy mug with beer suds pouring out the top [laughter], yelling, “G*ddamn it, Stan. I’m a’comin’.” [laughter] And I don’t know what happened to it. I saved it and I can’t find the damn thing. I hope I do one of these days. That’s kind of how it was my last shift, you know. Why they put up with me, I haven’t the faintest idea. CBA: They liked you? Gary: Must have [laughter] because I was such a drunken ass and just, generally, useless. I’m sure it was probably the happiest day of their lives when I left after this gal upstairs from us on West 71st Street was raped and murdered in August of ’71. Scared the hell out of my wife. It made a good excuse to do what I wanted to do. I wanted to move back to Missouri to be with my old drinking buddies. So I quit Marvel, we packed up our stuff, and moved back to Missouri and continued to freelance from there from ’71 on. CBA: That’s when you really did the bulk of the horror work from Marvel. Gary: Yeah, uh-hmm. CBA: Do you recall developing “Son of Satan”? Gary: Yeah, faintly. Again, by this point, I wasn’t real interested, just out to make a buck. You know, just grind it out. It seems to me like it was my idea, although it may not have been, that’s kind of foggy. It seems to me it was my idea and it was an idea to kind of go along with Ghost Rider. Stan gave me another book to write, that was the main thing. Hell, I was just looking for more work. CBA: What a concept. [laughs] I mean “Son of Satan”? Gary: I remember it but I don’t remember it. [laughter] I remember doing a “Son of Satan” and that’s about as far as it goes. Sounds like a really weird idea. [laughter] Why Stan approved it is an absolute mystery to me. I wrote a few Incredible Hulks also, I did with Marie. Did a Hulk Annual with Marie. CBA: Do you recall that? Gary: Only faintly. CBA: She recalls that you wrote something like three sentences for a plot and gave it to her and she had to flesh out a forty-page story, or something like that. Gary: Well, I’d be the last person in the world to say anything against Marie. Oh, I doubt it was that bad but it may be close. [laughter] Because I hated plotting. Oh, I just hated it. I liked to sit down and start a story and see where it goes. You can’t do that when you have to plot. CBA: So when you plotted, you really didn’t know where the story was really going to go, did you? Gary: I had no idea. I’d just sit down and start writing and see what would happen. CBA: You never did work for DC? Gary: You know, I was over there and talked to them on numerous occasions but nothing ever happened. The closest that anything ever happened was in ’83 when I went up there and talked to Dick. It was Roy’s idea. Again, he was spinning off some ideas elsewhere that he couldn’t get done at Marvel: a funny-animal super-hero book. Roy had talked to Dick about it and I had told Dick I’d be willing. “So why don’t you come up to New York?” So my girlfriend and I flew up to New York and stayed a few days and I talked to Dick and we were going to do it and Stan Goldberg was going to draw it. I got COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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back to Missouri and started to work on it. I got a call from Dick. The thing was on hold indefinitely because Stan G.’s daughter had been murdered, and that was the end of it. I don’t know what happened to Stan G. after that or anything else but the funny-animal superhero book never got off the ground. CBA: That’s as close as you got to DC. Gary: Yeah, that was as close. I talked to Denny here in St. Louis, I don’t know, four or five years ago, he was down here signing autographs at a store. So I went in there and talked to him. I told him I was looking for work and he said, “Send me some ideas.” So I sent him some ideas and he sloughed them off on one of the girl editors and I never heard from him again. I decided, to hell with it. I made a real concentrated effort in ’93 and ’94 to get back into the business and I just couldn’t find anybody who was interested. CBA: Did you develop “Red Wolf”? Gary: Well, you know, that sounds familiar. That’s about as far as it goes, you know. [laughs] CBA: Took place in the 1880s, he was an Indian-type superhero character, had a dog named Lobo. Gary: Yeah, yeah. Sounds vaguely familiar but that’s all. CBA: [laughs] Not the detail man, right? Gary: I do not remember that. CBA: Did you enjoy your time at Marvel? Gary: Yeah, as much as any alcoholic enjoys anything. You know, like I said, I resented anything that got in the way of my drinking and, of course, working nine-to-five gets in the way of your drinking. Oh, I tried to circumvent that as much as possible but for the most part, and as much as I was capable of enjoying anything as sick as I was; yeah, it was far and away the best job I ever had. It was the best period of my life because the people were all so good. I could go on and on about the people forever but I’d mostly be saying the same thing about them all. They were all just so good. John and Virginia Romita… I mean, I could be talking about these people forever. They were so interesting and nice and funny. John was a big sports fan and I am too so John and I always talked about sports. I was a Cardinals fan and he was a Mets fan and we’d go around and round about baseball all the time and it was just great. CBA: Do you stay in contact with any of the old crew? Gary: Just Flo, and Roy, of course. Flo and I talk several times a year. She’s still down at Marvel, proofreading these days. CBA: I know. She’s still so sweet. Gary: Oh, she’s a doll. She’s the best. “Fabulous Flo” was the right moniker for her. She is, indeed, a fabulous lady. CBA: What are you doing these days? Gary: I’m a courier. I drive all over the metro St. Louis area making pick-ups and deliveries. CBA: Are you pursuing any creative endeavors? Gary: [chuckles] Not really. To the extent that I’m not much of one to do any writing unless I know I’m going to get paid for it. You know, you call me up and give me an assignment, tell me what you’re going to pay me and I’ll do it. But I never enjoyed writing enough to sit down and do it for the hell of it. I’m just not geared that way. Now, Roy can do that. CBA: What Marvel work are you proudest of? Gary: Probably the Frankenstein series. I always considered that May 2001

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my best work and I like to remember the take-off on the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover that John and I did in Brand Ecch, which I really liked. I got a kick out of that. I thought that was good. CBA: Are you an authority on Rock ’n’ Roll? Gary: Well, I don’t know if “authority” is the right word. I knew quite a lot about it. I began to slack off in the late-’60s and from then on, I don’t know nearly as much about it as I do before then. But from mid-’50s to late-’60s, yeah, “authority” would probably do it. [laughs] I know quite a bit. CBA: Now, you say you don’t have a passion for comics but did you have a passion for music? Gary: Yeah, as I played music. I wasn’t very good but I played. Roy and I were in a band together. We started out as The Galaxies. This would have been when Roy was going to college in the early-’60s. I played drums and Roy was the singer. For most of that period, we were The Galaxies. I think there may have been a couple of other incarnations, under different names, but mostly it was The Galaxies. And we played the skating rink in Jackson and various, assorted bars and honky tonks around southeast Missouri. That’s as far as it ever went. CBA: Was it Chuck Berry-kind of music? Gary: Yeah, we did ’50s Rock ’n’ Roll. Now, after I got to New York, before I went to work for Marvel, Roy and I wrote a Spider-Man song and we sang it for Len Brown and he really liked it. It was kind of a—I don’t know if you remember The Coasters or not but it was a Coasters-type of song. Len agreed that he would be our promoter and he’d take us in and pay for a demo of it. So he picked up a couple of gals, we went to some studio over in Brooklyn and we cut a demo of the Spider-Man song which Len took to some record companies. We eventually played it for Stan who said it was great, ya-ha, whoopee and never mentioned it again. [laughAbove: ter] So Roy and I Before bidstill have copies of ding comics that record, I’m adieu, Gary sure, lying around somewhere. But I guess worked for editor that was the last of our great musical Larry Lieber on efforts though I continued to play Marvel’s British weekly music down in Missouri back until Captain Britain. Here’s a detail of Larry’s cover art the time I quit drinkfor #24. ©2001 Marvel ing in ’79.

Left inset: The late-’70s found Gary increasingly moving away from comics though he did have a couple of memorable books. Here’s the cover to the promising ManMonster strip, ably drawn by Rich Buckler but lasting only that single issue of Tales of Evil. Cover by Buckler.©2001 the respective copyright holder. (By the way, is there any interest out there in an issue devoted to Atlas/Seaboard, joined with looks at Gray Morrow’s Red Circle ’70s books, and Skywald’s shortlived color comics? Ye ed is seriously contemplating it so whaddaya think, kind reader?)

Characters, Inc. 87

CBA Interview

Perlin’s Wisdom Don Perlin on his fifty years as a comic book artist Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Who knew that Don Perlin’s career reached back to the late-’40s when he arrived like a bolt from the blue at Marvel in the early 1970s? Well, the artist’s work in comics stretches a ways back and we’re delighted to include this interview with Don in this special Marvel horror issue. Don was interviewed by phone on January 18, 2001, and he copyedited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Where and when were you born, Don? Don Perlin: Hoo-hoo! [laughs] New York, in 1929. August 27, 1929. CBA: You were at the perfect age for growing up with comic books. Were you introduced to them at a young age? Don: I loved comics when I was a kid. Ever since I can remember, I used to read comic books. CBA: Were you interested in the newspaper strips? Don: Oh, yes. All the time. That was one of the things that I loved. Among my favorites were Milt Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. I enjoyed Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan. CBA: The good adventure stuff. Don: Yeah. I liked to read the funny stuff, too, and I can draw “bigfoot.” I’ve done some Scooby Doo, panel gags, and I’ve gone from one end of the spectrum to the other. But I like the adventure stuff the most. CBA: Did you start drawing at a young age? Don: Oh, yes. I did my first mural when I was six years old. I was supposed to go into Kindergarten and came down with scarlet fever. In those days, the city Board of Health would come down and quarantine you. I was in my bedroom for 30 days. I couldn’t do anything and I drew pictures on the walls with crayons. I don’t remember what I drew, but I do recall the day the guy came and took the quarantine off. I had my favorite food that day: Frankfurters—still my favorite to this day. [laughs] CBA: Was it a nice neighborhood? Don: It was a rural part of Brooklyn that wasn’t built up much at that point. It was

called Canarsie and it was famous for two things they always talked about in the movies at that time: Mosquitoes and the garbage dump. During World War II, we used to go into the dump with a wagon— you know, one of those little red Radio Flyers—and a BB gun to shoot the rats. We would pick up all the metal and the rubber we could find for scrap drives. It was recycled into weapons for the war. CBA: Were you a collector of comic books? Don: Well, not a collector in today’s sense. Kids used to trade them. You know, you’d read it, then somebody else would read theirs and you’d trade comics and re-read them until they fell apart. CBA: Did you have favorite characters? Don: My favorite was Batman. I always liked the wisecracks Batman and Robin used to make between each other when they were fighting with the bad guys. CBA: Were you known in grade school as an artist? Don: I had this fifth grade teacher that would give out Christmas presents to all the kids in her class. At Christmas, she bought all the girls little handkerchiefs and all the boys some kind of nickel yo-yo, or something. She gave me a book on how to draw cartoons which was different than everybody else got. CBA: Did you use the book and learn from it? Don: I can still remember the book. Yeah, I learned from that book. CBA: When you were a kid, what were your aspirations? What did you want to do when you grew up? Don: I wanted to be a cartoonist. CBA: Who were your cartoonist idols? Don: Burne Hogarth was my idol. When I was in high school, about 14 years old, and Hogarth had put an ad in some of the high school papers, announcing that he was going to hold a class on Saturday morning for people interested in cartooning. A friend of mine showed me the ad and I presented it to my dad. He called Hogarth and enrolled me in the class. We went to Hogarth’s apartment, which was on Central Park West. He looked at my work and said, “Fine.” He took me in the class and eventually I met Al Williamson there (who was also a student), who was I guess about a year or two my junior. We became friends so after class I’d go over to Al’s house. He, at that point, lived in Manhattan which was nearer the school. Hogarth always represented class, to me, in his person and in his art. He was my favorite. He was the one I met when I was young. I hadn’t met any of the others until later on in life. CBA: He had a reputation for being highly critical. Was he tough? Don: Well, I don’t know whether he was tough. He would sit down and spend time working with you. I remember one time I was working on a comic strip panel and there was a picture, a difficult angle of these two guys shaking hands. Hogarth sat down and he wouldn’t get up until he had it worked out well. He was a stickler. He was a COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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good artist and wanted you to achieve as much as you could. A tremendous lecturer, he was very interesting. When he started doing lectures in school, he used overhead projectors. He would draw and you could watch it on the screen. The room was jam-packed. CBA: Had he left the Tarzan strip at that point? Don: He was doing Tarzan when he told us he was going to quit and do Drago, a strip about a gaucho. CBA: How long did you stay? Don: Oh, a couple of years. When the school started expanding and I could no longer afford to go, I had to drop out. CBA: It was a four-year program? Don: There was no program. The school was actually Hogarth. He had rented a loft and worked with you on an individual basis. He had about anywhere from six to eight students. Then he got hooked up with something called the Stevenson School. When that happened, I dropped out and didn’t go back until later when it became the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. CBA: How much time would Burne individually spend with you? Don: Well, you’d get there at nine, from nine to twelve, and he’d spend a little bit of time with each person. Then, maybe, he would stop and show everybody something. He’d bring in the Sunday originals he did on a weekly basis, he’d bring in these Tarzan pages and, you know, they were quite a sight to see. CBA: Was anyone, that you know of, assisting Burne at the time on a strip? Don: When I went to C&I, Ross Andru was there at that time and I think he may have worked on Burne’s material. It may have been somebody else again, I don’t know. CBA: Did you meet Ross? Don: Yes, I knew Ross then. He worked with Mike Esposito. I knew Mike. We renewed our friendship when I was working up at Marvel. He inked a couple of things I did. CBA: What kind of guy was Ross? Don: Ross was a nice guy, a quiet, intelligent fellow. CBA: He’s kind of a mystery, you know? He was apparently the shy one and Esposito the outgoing one. At the time, was there a choice for you between being a syndicated cartoonist and a comic book artist? Did you want to be a syndicated cartoonist? Don: I went to comic books because, at that point, it seemed more practical. It would be easier to get into. CBA: Not as hard to sell as a syndicated strip, you mean? Don: Yes. There were many different publishers at that time. Some were kind of shady like Fox Features Syndicate. They did a lot of crime comics, didn’t pay well, and didn’t pay on time. Eventually, they went bankrupt and a lot of the cartoonists were caught holding the bag; they lost some money on that. I remember they had some editors who would take a dollar a page kickback. CBA: Did you have to suffer through that? Don: Well, I didn’t suffer too much because I was a pain in the ass. [laughs] I would do a job and they’d say, “You get paid in 60 days.” When 60 days came around, they expected me to start yelling for my money, I started yelling before that, like when 30 days came. So when 60 came, I usually got paid. That saved me. I lost about $150 on the deal when Fox went bankrupt, though there were some who lost a couple of thousand dollars. CBA: [laughs] Did it look like a crooked business to you? Don: What, the whole comic book business? No, no. Just this Fox company. I met a lot of nice, decent people in there. Some peculiar folk, but nice, decent people. CBA: Do you recall when you first started working there? Don: The first job I ever had was at Fox. It was some crime story. I penciled it and got Pete Morisi to ink it. I knew Pete because he was going to the same school and we both had the same instructor, a really great guy named Lee Ames. He worked for Charlie Biro and Bob Wood, and he did book illustrations. Lee put Pete and I in touch. CBA: Pete was moonlighting at the time or was this before he joined the New York City police force? Don: It was way before he joined the force. CBA: Did you hang out with any frequency with Al Williamson? Don: That’s when we were younger. When I left the school, I didn’t see him again for a while. CBA: What other cartoonists did you encounter while at Fox? May 2001

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Don: I met Jack Abel there. In the early-’50s. I had this rented studio, a one-room thing down near Cooper Union. It was an old building, built in the Civil War and the room cost me $35 a month, which I couldn’t afford. So I took in a couple of guys, Pete Morisi and Sy Barry. CBA: Sy Barry? Dan Barry’s brother? Don: Yes, and he had an assistant. (I don’t remember his name, though his first name was Sam.) Then I rented a space to a guy by the name of Al Gordon. We kept that place until 1953. In that year, I was drafted. I went into the Army and they gave up the studio. CBA: After Fox went bankrupt, what work did you do? Don: I got a job with Jerry Iger, working on staff. He had been a partner of Will Eisner, they split, and Iger had his own staff. We produced material for Fiction House. He hired me to erase pages, fill in blacks, draw the lines around panels, you know…. CBA: Who was running the studio at the time? Was Jerry there all the time? Don: Jerry had the studio upstairs in this two-story building. I think it was up on 53rd Street. He had a partner, a woman named Ruth Roche, and he had one of the more experienced guys act as manager.

Below: Don in the Army, 1954. Courtesy of the artist.

One penciler, a guy named Paul Webb, did the pirate stories for Fiction House. Iger also had a letterer, the inkers, and me. CBA: You cleaned up the pages? Don: Yeah, and after about four or five months, they fired me because I couldn’t draw straight lines around the panels. So I penciled up some samples and started going around. I said, “What the heck,” and went over to Iger’s studio and I showed them my penciled samples. Iger hired me as a penciler. CBA: He hired you back? Don: He hired me as a freelance penciler. I think it was at $8 a page. CBA: What was your rate at Fox? Don: Fox paid $25 dollars a page for pencils and inks. For Iger, I did work for Fiction House. They came out with Western comics. I also did “Kaanga” stories in Jungle Comics. Eventually, Iger came and told me things were slowing down and he didn’t have any penciling to give me, but he wanted to keep me, so I could come to work as an inker on staff. I went up there and the first day we had an argument, and I walked out. CBA: It wasn’t meant to be, huh? Don: No, it wasn’t meant to be. He was a tough guy, and had his idiosyncrasies. You could probably get a whole book’s worth of stories about him. CBA: Did you go to Timely to look for work? Don: Yes, I went every place. The first guy who gave me a job was a fellow by the name of Tex Blaisdell. I don’t remember the company;

it’s non-existent now. He was the editor-in-chief and they put out a digest-sized magazine with little, racy comics in it. To give them a little bit of class, they included a true sports story in each issue. Since I was a kid there, I was about 18 or 19 years old, he wouldn’t give me any of the girly stuff. Tex gave me this thing to draw about a baseball player who was, at that time, an old-timer, Wee Willie Keeler. The company folded. After that I hooked up with this letterer, Abe Simon, who lettered for a whole load of comic book companies. He wanted to be an inker, so I did some samples, he inked them, and we started getting work. We became a team, and did most of our work for Harvey Comics. CBA: What were the titles? Don: Weird Tales, or something. It was all horror and war stories. CBA: Did you work on Black Cat? Don: We didn’t do any of those characters. We mainly did horror stories and war stories. CBA: Were they particularly gruesome horror stories, do you recall? Don: Well, I don’t think so. It didn’t bother me. I could look at my drawing and it didn’t bother me because I thought it was funny, most of the time. People were telling me I had to be careful because my style was a little too cartoony. I remember we did one story about a guy who fell into this pit of ants. [laughter] The ants ate him and so we got a shot of his skull with ants crawling in! We were working, doing a lot of books. We also did a couple of jobs for Standard Comics, St. Johns Publishing, Timely, and a new publisher called Hardy. We went along for a year or two like that. About ’52, Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist, came along and blasted comic books as a major cause of juvenile delinquency. And we all know what followed. CBA: Were you in the service during the Korean conflict? Don: I had been called down a couple times during the Korean War and had been rejected. I was drafted in 1953. Just prior to that, when the bottom fell out of comics, I was called up to Timely and they wanted me to ink my own stuff. They said they could give me some work if I inked my own pencils. CBA: Were you dealing with Stan up there? Don: Yeah. CBA: What was he like? Don: What was he like? Well, I couldn’t really tell because at that point, I very seldom saw him. I’d come up there and a fellow named Bob Brown would take my work in to Stan Lee and come out. He’d tell you no or hand you a script. CBA: Right, Stan was busy. Don: Yes. At that point, I didn’t know exactly what he was like but every once in a while, I got to see him and he turned out to be a nice guy. During the same period, I worked for Will Eisner. His studio was turning out P.S. magazine for the Army and The Spirit insert for Sunday newspapers. Jerry Grandenetti was penciling with some guy named Hollingsworth inking it. Jules Feiffer was writing it. From what I understand, Feiffer was in the Army and he was stationed at Governor’s Island. He’d come in on a weekend and write the stuff. I walked into Eisner at the time that Jerry Grandenetti had left and they were looking for somebody to pencil the Sunday supplement. CBA: Did you hold Eisner in esteem at the time? Don: Yes, and I still do. I walked in there and he offered me seven pages a week at $100 a week. I guess it was less than $20 a page, but I figured I’d be sitting at the master’s feet, and I could learn. I never saw him again after the day he hired me. CBA: [laughs] These are in the last days of The Spirit? Don: Well, I don’t know. I think some people did it after me. It was in ’53. I don’t know when it ended. CBA: Not too much longer than that. Don: Well, at the end of ’52 or ’53, sometime around that era, I did three weeks worth of work and they didn’t seem too happy about it so they let me go. I did a job for Biro & Wood and little jobs I can’t recall because business was bad. CBA: Did you deal with Bob Wood? Don: Yeah, Wood and Biro were there at that point. But then, in the middle of May 1953, I got called down to the draft board again and this time they took me. And while I was in Basic Training, the Korean War ended and they sent me to a Signal Corps outfit in Massachusetts, a place called Fort Devons. I spent my two years up COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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there. That was very uneventful. I came out in 1955. It wasn’t too good. While I was in the Army, in the beginning, Stan was sending me stories. I did about two or three jobs. He told me that things were getting bad. I had a job and he had to give the work to other people. When I was discharged, I got a couple jobs from Stan. I delivered one job, came home, and got a call from his secretary. Stan had loved the job and he said it was the best thing I ever did for him. I said, “Great. Can I get another one?” She said, “We’ll be in touch.” I didn’t hear from him for about 11 years. CBA: [laughs] When you were in the service, were you able to use your artistic skills there? Don: Yes. I was assigned as a Battalion Draftsman. I did everything. We did maps, charts, signs, desk plates. I even painted an insignia on an airplane rudder. CBA: Was it a good tour of duty? Don: It couldn’t have been better. I was with Headquarters Detachment, so I didn’t have to pull guard duty, I didn’t have to pull KP or anything like that. I lived in Brooklyn and got a chance to go home a whole lot on weekends. The guys would be driving down to the city and for five bucks, you’d go down with them. They’d drop you off at the George Washington Bridge and then Sunday night, around midnight, they’d meet you under the bridge, pick you up, and take you back with them. It nearly ended my career. CBA: How was that nearly the end of your career? Don: We were going back in the middle of the night. I was sitting next to the driver, and there were three guys in back. It was snowing, and the three guys in the back fell asleep. I started dozing and, for some reason, I woke up and the car swerved on the road. The driver had fallen asleep! We were going under an underpass and were going to hit the wall. I yanked the wheel and we skidded across the road onto a little embankment and the car stopped dead. Everybody woke up and nobody went to sleep the rest of the trip. [laughter] I was young so it was just another adventure. CBA: What happened after you came out of the service? Don: I couldn’t get any cartooning work. I tried to do a whole lot of things, and wound up going back to the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (they had changed their name to the School of Visual Arts by that time) and studied technical illustrating. That involved taking blueprints of machinery and converting them into what was called “isometric drawings” or “perspective drawings.” All sort of 3-D views of machinery. I spent five years doing that, working for two different technical illustrating houses. I did a book for Gilbertson—Classic Comics—which was a Jules Verne adaptation, Robur The Conqueror. Every once in a while I’d get a job from Charlton comics. CBA: Did you know Pat Masulli over there? Don: I knew Pat, yeah. Pat was something else, again! Before Pat became editor up there, he would ask Pete Morisi and I if we wanted work. He had a studio where they colored comics and he was able to get work from different places. The only thing is he’d come in with seven or eight page stories that had to be penciled and inked the next day. [laughs] I said, “We can’t do it.” He said, “I don’t care what it looks like, you know.” [laughs] So Pete and I sat down and we knocked out these stories. We were laughing at the way they were coming out, you know. We wouldn’t put our name on it. We used to say we were doing it, “To eat, man.” Pat would run in, take the job, and he was happy as a lark with it. CBA: After that one job for Gilbertson, what did you do? Don: I went to work as a tech illustrator and doing stories for Charlton; race car stories, war stories, and weird stories. I’d get the assignments from Masulli when he was up there or from Tony Tallarico who was agenting for them. The bottom fell out of the tech illustrating business. The firm that I was working for had closed down and I started looking for something else, trying to get some comics work. I found a job working in an art studio out on Long Island that was doing packaging for toys. So my comics work fit in after hours. I would dummy up packages. It was an interesting job; a challenge. At that time, I had a wife and three kids, too. CBA: When did you get married? Don: When I was in the Army, in ’53. CBA: So you had three young kids by this time. We’re talking the early- to mid-’60s? March 2001

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Don: Early-’60s, 1964 or ’65. I worked designing boxes for seven or eight years, all the while working for Charlton. The box manufacturer didn’t have enough work to keep me busy all day, so he paid me a weekly salary and I could do whatever I wanted to do on my own as long as I put his work on priority. At that point, I worked on Charlton material. CBA: You were working on Joe Gill scripts? Don: Yes. Most of the stuff was Joe Gill. I think he wrote everything. The guy wrote like crazy! CBA: Did you go up to Derby or

Above: Don also worked for Charlton comics. Splash page from The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves #13. Below: Panel detail from Don’s story in Strange Suspense Stories #7. ©2001 the respective copyright holder.

Above: Nicely done splash page by Perlin & Bob Layton to Ghost Rider #31. Below: Detail from Ghost Rider #41 by Don. Courtesy of the artist.

did you do it by mail? Don: We went up one time with the family up to Derby when Sal Gentile was the editor. He wanted me to come up there and be assistant editor. So the whole family went up to see the place. CBA: What did you think of Charlton Press? Don: It was interesting to see, but they were a cheap outfit and wouldn’t pay to help move my family from Brooklyn to Connecticut. They wouldn’t pay me any more money than I was making at the paper box company and they wouldn’t give me any perks that would make it worthwhile. Here I’d be uprooting, taking kids out of school, bringing them to a new neighborhood, and everything else, and for what reason? Because I like to work on comics? So I turned that job down. CBA: Were you dealing with John Santangelo? Don: No, I spoke to Sal Gentile and turned down the job. They hired George Wildman. Then Sal left and George became editor and George offered me the same job. CBA: Any perks this time? Don: No, it was the same thing. Nick Cuti took the job. Meanwhile, I was working here and that’s when I met this fellow, Bert Fitzgerald, who was doing comic books on black history. The series was called Golden Legacy. He would get a company like Coca-Cola to sponsor the book and the books would be distributed in black neighborhoods as giveaways

where Coca-Cola was purchased. They’d take historic figures from black history, and do comic books about them. I did one on Martin Luther King, and one on Thurgood Marshall. I also did one on the Civil War hero Robert Small, a slave that ran away, stole a riverboat, brought it up North where the Union armed the boat and made him captain, sent him back down on a mission into the Confederacy. It was an interesting story. Burt mentioned there were no black cowboys in the movies. But in history, there were lots of black cowboys. So I said, “How about doing a book on black cowboys?” He said, “Fine.” I wound up writing, penciling, inking and lettering it and even wound up coloring it. CBA: Was it one of your first writing jobs? Don: Yes. There was a period at Charlton when Joe Gill had a heart attack and (I don’t remember if it was George or Sal that asked guys to fill in) and I wrote three love stories, and penciled and inked them until Joe could get back to writing. CBA: I assume you got paid for the writing too, right? Don: Yeah, I got a couple of bucks a page. CBA: Did you like it? Don: Yes, I liked it. Occasionally I have been involved in plotting and received credit in those books. About this time I attended an ACBA [Academy of Comic Book Arts] meeting and met Neal Adams. He took me up to DC to see Joe Orlando. Joe looked at my stuff and sent me over to National Lampoon. There I wound up doing this comic book insert called “Tales of the South,” written by Michael O’Donoghue. He wrote it a page at a time, I drew it a page at a time. [laughs] They gave me a couple of different, small jobs after that, every once in a while. Years later, they offered me another comic book story, “The Kennedy They Couldn’t Kill.” I’m conservative in my political opinions, and I said, “I don’t mind rapping the Kennedys,” so I took the thing and got back home, and it wasn’t about any of the Kennedy politicians. It was about the retarded sister. I agonized over doing this thing because they paid three times more than the usual comic book page rate. I sat there and tried to lay the thing out and just couldn’t do it. I called them up and suggested changes. They said, “Bring it back,” and they wouldn’t even listen or talk to me. They had me leave it with the receptionist and I never heard from them again. I understand Alan Kupperberg wound up doing it. I was never sorry I didn’t do it. Before the Kennedy fiasco at National Lampoon, I had started doing assignments for Joe Orlando. CBA: Mystery stories? Don: Yes, mystery stories for DC. At the time, Joe introduced me to DC editor Murray Boltinoff, who I did lots of mystery stories for, between 1972-73. I was still working for the paper box company at the same time. Then the company went out of business. I was looking for work and was going to have to take a job on staff at Aurora Model Company out in Long Island. On the Sunday prior to starting at Aurora, I got a call from Roy Thomas and he said that he’d seen some of the stuff that I did for DC. Marvel had a couple of books open and I could have one of them. They were Werewolf by Night and “Morbius, the Living Vampire.” I decided to take the Werewolf book because it was a monthly and “Morbius” was a bi-monthly. So I started working for Marvel right there. CBA: Good choice as “Morbius” didn’t last that long. Don: I didn’t like it. It was a vampire with a super-suit and I liked the Werewolf thing. CBA: You had no interest in doing super-heroes? Don: I wanted to do super-heroes, but they kept me away from them. I started with Werewolf by Night, and I was doing that until they cancelled it, after about three years. CBA: You were working with Doug Moench on that? Don: Yes. Doug and I wound up doing the majority of the work on that series. CBA: How did you guys work? I was speaking to Doug the other night and he said that he would supply pretty detailed plots. Is that how you remember it? Don: Oh yeah, he would supply detailed plots for a lot of ninepanel pages. He was very good to work with and he was always open to suggestions. We spoke about many things and we got along well. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

CBA: Were you able to do some writing yourself, so to speak, at least with plotting? Don: Well, if you look at some of the books, I got co-plotting credit. I would come up with suggestions and he would say, “We can do it,” or “We can’t do it,” or “Let’s do it this way,” or “Let’s do it that way.” I enjoyed working with him because I had a little more input than just drawing pictures. CBA: Was he in Pennsylvania at the time or New York? Don: He started off in New York then moved out to Pennsylvania. CBA: You’d deal with him on the phone? Don: Most of the time. Every time I worked with writers, I would deal with them on the phone. I established a rapport with most of the writers I worked with. CBA: Three years on Werewolf by Night is a nice stretch. Don: I started it in 1973. I worked on it from #17 to 43, when it ended. When I got Ghost Rider, it was only a bi-monthly, but they let me do one a month. If we were ahead, it wouldn’t hurt. After about six months, sales improved so they went monthly. I was also inking Captain America over Sal Buscema’s breakdowns. I did that for about a year and then he quit and I started to do the penciling when they decided to give to book to John Byrne and Roger Stern. Jim Shooter called and said, “Look, they came up with this great stuff, they want to do it.” But Shooter also said, “I promised you the book. If you want it, you keep it.” I’m not all that dumb. If he wanted to say no to these guys, he wouldn’t have called me, right? So I said okay and then they wound up giving me The Defenders. CBA: Right, for quite a run. Don: Well, I started doing The Defenders with Joe Sinnott. I was penciling and inking Ghost Rider. With Sinnott on The Defenders, I was doing breakdowns because he liked to ink breakdowns. When he left, I started penciling the stuff and they kept going from one inker to another. When an inker would pass by their cubbyholes, they’d say, “Here, you take three pages. Here, you take three pages,” and that’s where they got M. Hands, you know. (Inker: Many Hands.) CBA: Did you do much writing at Marvel? Don: I received co-plotting credit on a few Werewolf by Nights and a few Defenders. I wrote one Ghost Rider. I plotted the whole thing, drew it, and then DeMatteis did the dialogue. CBA: Would you have hoped to do more writing? Don: I was happy doing what I was doing. Writing slowed me down a lot. CBA: You occasionally did ink jobs? Don: Well, I started at Marvel as an inker. The first job I did was inking some Doctor Strange stories and then I was supposed to be inking Werewolf when I started doing that. I inked an issue penciled by Gil Kane. I also inked a Gil Kane Inhumans story and then also inked something over George Pérez. I also inked Don Heck and John Byrne. Then I did Super-Villain Team-Up with Bob Hall, and Iron Man over George Tuska. CBA: Who did you enjoy inking the most? Don: I inked a couple of jobs by Fred Kida on Captain America. He was a very slick penciler and inking him went really fast. CBA: Were there some loose pencilers who would be a pain? Don: Well, if they gave me loose pencilers, they’d pay me more money. When they gave you breakdowns, they paid you more money to finish them. CBA: Do you recall what your rates were when you started? Don: Yeah, I was getting $23 a page to ink from Marvel. That was a big mistake. Roy Thomas and John Verpoorten asked me how much I wanted, I was working for Charlton and I was getting $25 a page at Charlton, pencils and inks. I didn’t know what the going rates were. I’m thinking I was getting $25 pencils and inks, what can I ask these guys for just inks? So I told them, “$23.” They looked at each other and I knew I said the wrong thing. [laughs] And they jumped on it too. May 2001

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CBA: [laughs] “No, no, Don! You said $23!” They locked you in. Was that for a long period of time? Don: Oh, I got raises too. Then Roy Thomas left and they were going crazy there for a while, trying to get someone to replace Thomas. CBA: What were those days like? Was it just anarchy? Don: I kept getting work. Nobody really bothered me. I just kept doing what I was doing. CBA: Were you going in the office much? Don: I’d go to the office about once a week or once every two weeks, whenever. I tried to bring it to them on payday. CBA: Did you deal with John Verpoorten? Don: Yes, he was a good guy. CBA: After he passed away, who took over? Who did you deal with afterwards? Don: Let’s see. Jim Shooter was editor-in-chief at that time. I dealt directly with Jim and also with my editors. CBA: Did you have a positive

Above: Don told Ye Ed that he and Doug Moench (his writing partner on a kajillion Werewolf stories) tried to recently rekindle the “werewolf fire” at Marvel and he produced this presentation art. Alas, the idea was a no-go. Courtesy of Don Perlin. ©2001 the artist.

working relationship with Jim? Don: Yeah, we worked very well together. I was doing Werewolf and they had to cancel it. They didn’t have a steady feature to give me, but they were keeping me busy with odds and ends. I penciled an issue of Logan’s Run that Klaus Janson inked, but it was never published. I never saw any of it. Then Shooter called me up about Ghost Rider. He was going to write it and he wanted me to pencil. We did that for a while and it went from a bi-monthly to a monthly and we started getting other writers. I convinced him to let me ink it, as well. After that, I penciled and inked Ghost Rider and penciled The Defenders. I would take on whatever extra work I could get then, in addition to my regular assignments. CBA: Did you like the work? Don: I loved to draw. I would work from six, seven o’clock in the morning until three, four at night. I could go down in my sweatsuit or underwear, sit in my studio in the basement and just work. Nobody bothered me, I’d play the radio, drink coffee, take No-Doz pills. (Ha-ha!) CBA: [chuckles] Get it done. Don: Yeah, I liked it. I enjoyed it, you know. It was something that was a lot of fun to me. If it wasn’t, I couldn’t have done it. CBA: What were your favorite books at Marvel to work on?

Don: My favorite book at Marvel, I guess, was Werewolf by Night. Actually, my favorite was always the one I was working on at the time. CBA: Did you help develop Moon Knight? Don: Well, actually, Moon Knight was developed by Doug and I for Werewolf. I designed the first costume. Marvel wanted us to come up with a new costumed hero, to help sales of the title. Moon Knight was eventually featured in two issues of Marvel Spotlight. Then we never heard about the character again. Down the line, they revived him, but I never had a hand on it again. Never got anything out of it. Unfortunately, Moon Knight was created before the royalty system was established. CBA: Did you ever see any royalties? Don: Yeah, I did pretty well on The Transformers which did well. That did pay well. I made a big mistake at one point: They were looking for somebody to do The Avengers and offered me the book. But I was already doing The Defenders, which was a team book and I didn’t want to do another team book. This was a lot of work with all those super guys. So they asked me to do just the current issue, which was #212, and at that point, they instigated the royalty system. They gave The Avengers to someone else and that title made great royalties. That one issue I did made more royalties than I made on any other book. I’ve done a lot of “duh!” things like that. I also turned down the G.I. Joe series (though I did a back-up story in the first issue and the entire second issue). CBA: Did you hang out with any other cartoonists at all? Don: Not really. For a while I was friendly with the Morisis. More or less, I was out of the business until 1973, but doing other things. No, I didn’t socialize with anyone in the business at that point. CBA: So you just attended that first ACBA meeting? Don: I went to a number of them. ACBA was interesting. It might have been good but they didn’t know what they wanted. Some wanted a guild, some wanted just to socialize with comic book people (more like the National Cartoonists Society) and others wanted a union. CBA: What were your feelings on that? Don: Me, I didn’t see it as a union. I just wanted to get to know people. You can get to know people and become friends and network. That’s the way to do it. I don’t think you can have a union for this kind of business. CBA: Why? Because of the power of the publishers? Don: Well, no, because you’ve got people who were so-called super-stars and making good rates and you had other people making lesser rates, who were beginning or weren’t as talented and how would a union work? Would everyone stop working for the comic books? Would Kirby stop working or Neal Adams stop working or Carmine Infantino or any other big name stop working because Joe Newcomer was coming in and he couldn’t get more than $20 a page and we said he should get $50? You know what I mean? CBA: Did you see the influx of Filipino artists, for instance, as a threat? Don: Never thought about it as a threat. It was just other people coming into the business and some of them were excellent artists. Alfredo Alcala was great. I mean, most of them were. I met Alcala and Ernie Chan, and they were friends of mine. Ernie was a very nice guy. CBA: At the time that ACBA started, there were rumblings of starting a guild, and all of a sudden there was an influx of Filipino artists. Carmine said they got them in because there were threats of a union. Don: Yeah, but Carmine was involved in starting up ACBA. CBA: [laughs] Yeah, right, of ACBA. Don: I don’t know. You see, they appeared on the scene, they fell into place, and that was it. They were good so when somebody that can do the job in the industry comes in, they belong in. CBA: So you worked well into the ’80s at Marvel. Don: When did Shooter leave? ’86 or ’87? I started working up there on staff as managing art director three weeks before he left. John Romita was Art Director and they hired me and he became executive art director. CBA: What were your duties? Don: They had this apprentice program called Romita’s Raiders. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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They would hire three guys who wanted to be cartoonists who were fairly good but not quite up to snuff yet. Marvel hired them for a year, paid them minimum wage, with no benefits whatsoever, to do all the changes and corrections on the artwork and I supervised and trained them. I stayed about three years and went through about nine guys. Each one became a pro. Rodney Ramos, Don Hudson, and Chris Ivy are some of the names I recall. CBA: Did you see them grow creatively? Don: It was pretty nice, you know. Everybody kept giving me credit and I didn’t do anything great for these guys. Shooter left and I was known up at Marvel as “Shooter’s Man.” He hired me. Tom DeFalco and Mike Hobson, the publisher, called me in the offices and they said if I wanted to go because Shooter went, fine, but they wanted to keep me on. So I stayed there for another three years until Shooter started up Valiant. When he started, I went over there. CBA: You felt loyalty to Jim? Don: Well, Jim had done a lot of things for me at Marvel. Actually this supervisory job became a nine-to-five thing, and I wasn’t doing much drawing. I would go to the editors and beg them for a book. One of the editors let me write and drew a Conan, #222, but I wasn’t doing enough drawing. Over at Valiant, I could design characters, draw again, and be their creative director. Marvel was getting stagnating so I left and went to Valiant. Shooter had problems over there and they parted company. There again, I remained and that’s where we made our first big hit with Bloodshot. The first issue sold 850,000 copies. CBA: How would you assess your experience at Marvel? Don: My years spent with Marvel Comics were the foundation and major portion of my career in comics. Not a moment of which I did not enjoy. I’m sorry to see the state of the industry today and regret that many young artists and fans will miss out on the fun we had. CBA: Can you give us a brief outline of your post-Marvel career? Don: I spent over eight years with Valiant Comics—later to become Acclaim—during which I did some of my best work. I drew Solar, a book in which I had the honor of Stan Drake inking my work. I penciled Bloodshot, Timewalker, and a very different book called Bad Eggs—a Bob Layton concept. I also edited a number of books—and, like that bunny, I’m still going—doing a Phantom book for a European publisher. I’m also now in the process of preparing a comic strip to be handled by Plain Label Press, a newly-formed syndicate. From a six-year-old’s wall mural to werewolves to flaming skulls to Scooby Doo to a newspaper strip… it can only happen in comics!

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May 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

CBA Interview

Tony’s Terrors (and Tigra, Too!) The writer/editor’s tenure in the Haunted House of Ideas EDITOR'S NOTE: Ye ed profusely apologizes to interviewer Jon B. Knutson and subject Tony Isabella for the severe editing done to their interview but space constraints dictated the cuts.

Below: An issue of Haunt of Horror, edited by Tony Isabella, contained this photograph of the writer/editor with exotic dancer Angelique Trouvere, then darling of New York cons. Tony says, “She made these incredible costumes and had the attitude and body to wear them. She’s wearing a Satana costume here. Great costume. Strikingly beautiful woman.” Courtesy of Tony. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Conducted by Jon B. Knutson I first encountered Tony’s writing in his heyday at Marvel in the ’70s. I particularly remembered his story in Giant-Size Creatures #1, featuring the Werewolf by Night and transforming Greer Nelson, a.k.a. The Cat, into Tigra the Were-Woman. Little did I know then that over 20 years later, thanks to several e-mail exchanges, that I’d be interviewing him on his career at Marvel and elsewhere! “The World’s Longest Tony Isabella Interview” was originally conducted via telephone, but when I got ready to transcribe the five (!) tapes from the two-day phone call, I discovered my tape recorder didn’t get anything! Tony was gracious beyond belief when he agreed to redo the interview via e-mail. Some portions of this have previously seen print in The Comics Buyers’ Guide, in Tony’s column there, as well as on his Web page, Tony’s Online Tips! <www.wfcomics.com/tony>. Parts two and three will be appearing in Alter Ego and Comicology. —JBK Jon B. Knutson: Let’s begin with the first question that seems to come up in all CBA interviews: Where were you born? Tony Isabella: In Cleveland, Ohio, on December 22, 1951. Jon: Do you remember how old you were when you first saw and read a comic book, and do you recall what it might have been? Tony: I learned to read from comic books when I was four. My mother used to bring home three-for-a-quarter bags of IW reprints, mostly of the funny animal variety. The earliest comics I can remember would be an issue of Fighting American, which I probably got from an uncle, an issue of IW’s Red Mask featuring the Presto Kid, and an issue of Superman or Action Comics. Unfortunately, I can’t pin it down more exactly than that. Jon: What were some of your favorite comics as a kid? Tony: Superman. Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, which was probably the first comics I bought for myself. Batman. Challengers of the Unknown. Cosmo the Merry Martian. I bought lots of DC Comics as a kid, mostly those with giant and not-too-scary monsters on the covers. I really got into the Marvel super-heroes around 1963 or so. Jon: What else did you read, aside from comics? Tony: The Hardy Boys. Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr series. And all of the science fiction I could get my hands on. I had an argument with an elementary school librarian who didn’t want me to take out a book called Under The Harvest Moon. I thought it had to be a science-fiction book; I mean, it had “moon” in the title, right? But it was actually a romance novel. I still shudder when I think of reading that

one. Jon: What were some of the other things you enjoyed as a kid? For example, I know you’re a big fan of Japanese monster movies, like Godzilla. Did that start when you were a kid? Tony: I think the first giant monster movie I saw was Gorgo. Our church used to show movies on Saturday afternoons. Then I saw King Kong vs. Godzilla on a big screen and I was hooked. After that, I never missed a chance to see a giant monster film at the movie theater or on TV. I was fortunate in that the local TV stations ran a lot of them and ran them often. I was also into baseball. I collected baseball cards and played in the Little League. I still love the game, but I’d rather watch my kids play than watch the Cleveland Indians. I just can’t get past the cruel caricature that is Chief Wahoo anymore. Jon: When you were a kid, did you create your own comic characters, and create homemade comics with them? Tony: Of course, especially after I met Terry Fairbanks and Mike Hudak at Frank’s Model Shop. Frank’s was about a 30-minute bike ride from my house, but he had a pretty good selection of old comic books in addition to the model stuff. I couldn’t draw, so I ended up writing all the scripts for our own bimonthly comic book: Marvel Madhouse. My creations include Light Wave, a Russian super-hero, and Johnny Bravo, a non-super-powered adventurer. We even teamed-up our heroes in something called “The M.A.R.V.E.L. Squad.” I forget what the name stood for. We used to send Marvel Madhouse to Stan Lee and get these friendly letters back from Flo Steinberg, Roy Thomas, and even Stan himself. That was an enormous thrill for us. Jon: When did you first think about a career working in comic books? Were you thinking about writing then, or drawing, or both? Tony: The day I read Fantastic Four Annual #1, perhaps the greatest comic book ever published. Although I’d seen the occasional credits here and there in my comics reading, this was when it hit me that people got paid for making comic books… and I knew that I wanted to be one of them someday. Having no artistic ability to speak of, my interest was always in writing comics. Jon: Did you have an interest in writing something other than comics? Tony: Yes, but my passion was for writing comic books. If I couldn’t make the grade as a comic book writer, I figured I would settle for being a world-famous reporter or science-fiction novelist. And, if those didn’t work out, I could write for television. I definitely had some unique priorities going for me. Jon: I understand you did some fanzine work before you started working for comics. In an interview I transcribed, someone mentioned a Creeper story you worked on with someone that’s never seen print, for example. Do you recall which fanzines you worked on, and what kind of stuff you did for them? Tony: I wrote for every fanzine that would have me: Concussion, Fantastic Fanzine, Yancy Street Gazette, Minotaur, and dozens more. I wrote opinion and review columns, prose fiction, comic-book scripts, and weird little comedy pieces starring myself and other contributors to Concussion. I even won an award as best fan writer of 1971 or so, the year before I broke into comics professionally. As for the Creeper story, that came about because I really loved the character and wanted his adventures to continue after his book was cancelled. So I wrote DC publisher Carmine Infantino and asked if I could publish a Creeper fan magazine featuring new stories of the character. Much to my surprise, he said yes. I wrote a 26-page story COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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that picked up after the last issue of the actual Beware The Creeper comic book. It was supposed to be drawn by a fan artist by the name of Klaus Janson—I wonder if he ever amounted to anything—but he never turned in even a single page of artwork. As this was about the same time I was working my way out of college and starting to work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I was too busy to pursue the project further. There was supposed to be a second series in the magazine as well. It was called “The Yank in London” and was basically the story of a young writer—not unlike myself—having great adventures with a beautiful Brit who was not unlike Emma Peel. Dave Cockrum— there was a lot of talent in the fanzines of the late 1960s—was going to be the artist, but I never even started writing the first script. If memory serves me correctly, I was involved in my first serious romance about that time, which sort of negated the need for me to get “lucky” in my fiction. Jon: What’s your educational background? Were you originally progressing towards a different career than comics? Tony: I was a National Honors Society student at St. Edward High School in Lakewood, Ohio, and then went to John Carroll University for a little under a year. The latter wasn’t a good fit. I didn’t care for the Jesuits, the jocks, the ROTC, or what laughingly passed for the campus radicals. I did have some fun writing for the college newspaper and radio station… and I did have a brief but wonderful affair with one of my teachers… but college was just not where I wanted to be. I’d intended to major in Journalism anyway, so when I left college, I applied for a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I was hired as a copy boy and figured I’d work my way up. Well, that didn’t work out either. Even though I did do some writing for the newspaper, sometimes ghosting articles for “real” reporters, I never got more than a copy boy’s paycheck. To my mind, I was under-appreciated and underpaid. Between that and my growing realization that the Plain Dealer was a pretty crappy newspaper—it did pretty much whatever the local robber barons and politicians commanded of it—I was more than ready to make a new plan. Jon: How did you break in to comics? Tony: I’d been corresponding with some of my favorite comics and editors of the time: Murray Boltinoff, Steve Englehart, Dick Giordano, and Roy Thomas. When the Plain Dealer went on strike and our picket lines was subsequently attacked by mounted policemen—sent to the scene by the publisher’s good friend, then-Mayor Ralph Perk— I was knocked to the ground in the ensuing panic. When I saw a hoof come down on the ground less than a foot from my face, I figured it was time to end my Plain Dealer career. I phoned Roy that night and asked him if there were any jobs open at Marvel. Stan Lee and Sol Brodsky needed an assistant editor to work on Marvel’s new British weeklies. The qualifications for the job were meager: They needed someone who could proofread and write well enough to do letters pages and other editorial material… and who knew the characters and the stories. Jon: When did you move from Ohio to New York? Tony: October of 1972. May 2001

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Jon: What was Marvel like when you started? Who did you deal with on a regular basis, and what were they like? Tony: Marvel’s offices were only about a third of the floor they were on when I started working there. There was a reception area, behind which was Nancy Murphy and the film/photostats library. There was a semi-large production room wherein worked John Verpoorten, John Romita, Mike Esposito, Frank Giacoia, Morrie Kuramoto, Tony Mortelarro, Dave Hunt, Marie Severin, and probably some folks I’ve forgotten were there. Across the hall from that was a very small office wherein lurked Marv Wolfman and Don McGregor. (I did some time in that office as well.) Behind them was Stu Schwartzberg and his stat machine. Also across from Marv and Don were the offices of Roy Thomas and Stan Lee. Stan had the large corner office; I think Carla Joseph, his secretary, was in there, too. She married Gerry Conway a year or two later. There was a bean counter who had an office around the corner from Stan, but I can’t remember his name. Martin Goodman and the men’s magazines were on another floor. At the end of all this was an office shared by Sol Brodsky, George Roussos, Pablo Marcos, sometimes Rich Buckler, sometimes another production worker, and myself. Thinking back on it, it’s amazing how many comic books and magazines came out of offices that were less than half the size of my present house. I dealt with Stan (on the British book covers and Monster Madness), Sol and Pablo (on the British books and black-&-white magazines), Roy (on the magazines and some comics stuff), and the production department (on all of the above). Jon: According to the text piece in Astonishing Tales #22, you began at Marvel assisting Sol Brodsky on Marvel’s British weeklies around Halloween 1972. What exactly did you do with those books? Tony: I forget what my title was, but I designed the covers with whoever was doing the covers at various times (Jim Starlin, Rich Buckler, Dick Ayers, and

Above: The Mirthful One’s at it again! Here’s a Marie Severin cartoon depicting Titanic Tony amongst his Marvel editor peers from an issue of a b-&-w mag. Courtesy of Tony Isabella. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Apparently Tony’s creation, Tigra the Were-Woman has quite a loyal following! This Will Meugniot drawing—purportedly drawn when the artist was assigned to Tigra’s shortlived Marvel Chillers series—is courtesy of Tigra fanatic Andy Ihnatko. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Centerspread: “A Man… a woman… and the rampaging hordes of Hydra!” Splash page detail from the very first Tigra story in Giant-Size Creatures #1. Art by Don Perlin and Vince Colletta. Courtesy of Tony Isabella. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 98

others) and wrote the cover copy… I edited the reprints, which involved breaking them into 5-8-page chapters and writing new splash pages as needed… I wrote the letters pages, puzzle pages, and other fan pages… I proofread everything that went into the books… with Sol, I supervised lettering corrections and the like and the Zip-A-Tone artists hired to jazz up the black&-white reprints… I had long and largely incomprehensible phone conversations with the British office, who seemed to think that if we had even one communist villain in the reprints, World War III would break out immediately. At one point, just to get relief from those Brit wussies, I created an entire and entirely evil country called Moldavia or some such. Their symbol was a lightning bolt in a circle. It must have been a pretty big country since some of its people looked like Russians and some looked Chinese. The other thing I used to have to do with alarming regularity was speed up the production of the British weeklies to accommodate the new printers of said weeklies. And there were always new printers. The press would break down and the British office would find a new printer in Sweden or something and our deadlines would be moved up a month. It was hectic, but oddly satisfying. Digression: Whenever a new British weekly launched, they gave away some sort of cheap doodad with it. When we launched SpiderMan Comics Weekly, that doodad was a Spider-Man mask which would have certainly suffocated any child that put it on. The only reason we weren’t responsible for the deaths of thousands of British kids were that the masks were too small and too badly made for them to actually get them over their heads without destroying them. Jon: I understand you also were an assistant editor. Steve Gerber said that position is really a glorified proofreading job. Is that true? What books did you work on in that capacity? Tony: It was hard to keep track of my titles. I was an assistant editor on some stuff, an associate editor on other stuff, and, eventually, editor of some black-&-white magazines and FOOM. I did a lot of proofreading, but I also did cover copy and design when Roy was out of the office, as well as some rewriting when it was called for. There were certain writers whose scripts needed a lot of work. More often than I would have liked, I was “asked” to punch up their scripting. I generally didn’t work on the top color comics on a regular basis because those were being done by writers whose work usually didn’t need much—if any—fixing. I worked on comics written by out-of-town writers and lots of reprint titles. I enjoyed working on the reprints more, except when I had to cut pages out of stories to fit the page count of the book. After a while, I worked mostly on the mags I was editing (FOOM, the British stuff, my black-&-white magazines) and the comics I was writing. I would still pitch in on the other stuff when there was a deadline problem or something, but, by that time, we had moved to another floor and larger quarters. I had my own “office.” It was actually just a big cubicle I shared with Chris Claremont (my assistant) and Michelle Wolfman, who was Marv’s first wife. Michelle didn’t work with me per se—I forget what

her job was at Marvel—but her desk had been in some storage area or something and I let her move in with Chris and me. She was Aunt Harriet to our Bruce and Dick. Jon: The first genre you wrote for at Marvel, which I’m sure will surprise a number of people, were on the horror comics, and that’s the main focus of this part of the interview. Was this something you wanted to do, or was it just sort of assigned to you? Tony: Although super-hero comics are probably my favorite comics genre, I have always wanted to write all kinds of comics. I started with horror comics at Marvel because that’s where there were openings at the time. I would have been equally thrilled to write Sgt. Fury or Rawhide Kid or Millie The Model. Jon: Okay, the first published work of yours that I could find out about was Dracula Lives! #2. Was that the first work you did, or was something else done before that, but published later? Tony: I’m not sure of the exact sequence of events, but my first script for Marvel was “Haunt and Run” in Chamber of Chills #5. I may have written some earlier text pieces for the b&-w magazines, but “Haunt” was my first comics story for Marvel. Jon: The basic premise behind Dracula Lives! was the Lord of the Vampires through the ages, and your stories were all set in the past. Did you know that Jack Kirby had submitted an idea to DC very much like this? Do you know who came up with the concept at Marvel? Tony: I hadn’t heard about Jack submitting a similar idea to DC, but it doesn’t strike me as unusual that someone at Marvel would come up with it as well. Horror comics were doing well and the Comics Code restrictions on vampires had been lifted. Dracula was not only the best known vampire, he was also in the public domain. The Dracula Lives! magazine was already in the works when I started at Marvel. It sounds like something Roy Thomas would have come up with. It could also have been Stan Lee… or even the two of them bouncing ideas for magazines back and forth. Jon: You did quite a bit on Marvel’s Dracula books… although not as much as Marv Wolfman. The first issue with your work had an 11-page story, which you scripted over a Steve Gerber plot, “The COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Terror that Stalked Castle Dracula.” Was this standard policy at Marvel, to have new writers script over someone else’s plot? Tony: Marvel didn’t have a lot of “standard” policies in those days. I don’t recall why Steve didn’t script the story himself, only that the job was offered to me and I jumped at it. The “Haunt and Run” story hadn’t worked out to anyone’s satisfaction and I was grateful for the second chance. Ironically, this second chance came about because—between writing “Haunt and Run” and “Terror”—I had ghosted a Vampirella story for Len Wein. Realizing from the Vampi script that I was a much better writer than “Haunt” showed, Marv Wolfman convinced Roy to give me another shot. I’m sure Roy would have eventually given me another chance sooner or later, but, thanks to Marv, it was sooner. Everyone was happy with my work on “Terror,” so I started getting more assignments. It was an important story for me. Jon: You did an issue of Creatures on the Loose, scripting a “Thongor” story over a George Alec Effinger plot based on one of the Lin Carter stories. Were you a fan of the Carter books? Tony: I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but, yes, I did script most of a Thongor story over a George Alec Effinger plot. Roy Thomas did the first few pages, then asked me to finish it for him. I did it because that’s the kind of thing you do for a guy who gave you your first comics job. I hated the Thongor books. They were pale imitations of Robert E. Howard’s Conan books except without a great character like Conan and without a great writer like Howard. If you carefully read the pages I scripted— which I don’t recommend—you’ll see that Thongor does a lot of whining. I was projecting my own pain at having to work on such a miserable character. Unfortunately, Marv Wolfman and Don McGregor—my comrades in comics proofreading—used my having written “Thongor” as their excuse to stick me with every issue thereafter. It got a little better when Steve Gerber took over the strip near the end because I could get away with spending less time on an issue. Jon: The next title you wrote for is Tales of the Zombie. What was the character’s premise? Tony: The original Simon Garth story—“Zombie!”—was written and drawn by the legendary Bill Everett for one of Atlas/Marvel’s 1950s horror comics. I think it was Menace. Roy Thomas had either read the story as a kid or discovered it as an older comics fan, but he made it the basis for the lead in Tales of the Zombie. That magazine had a different premise than Dracula Lives! Each issue would have a 20-page-plus story featuring Simon Garth and a handful of shorter non-series stories involving voodoo and other zombies. We got a lot May 2001

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of mileage out of what seemed on the surface to be a fairly limited premise. Jon: Was everyone at Marvel expected to write stories for these, or was it just a select group? Tony: No one was expected to write for them. However, even the writers with regular assignments could squeeze the shorter tales into their schedule… or enjoy the change-of-pace they offered… or use that extra paycheck they represented. Jon: Your first story in Tales of the Zombie was in issue #2, called “Voodoo Unto Others.” That’s a great title. Tony: “Voodoo Unto Others” was one of several stories I pitched to Gold Key comics for their mystery books before the Marvel magazines got rolling. The editor—I think it was Wally Green—had told me that he wanted stories aimed at pre-teen boys. So I came up with some stories featuring pre-teen boys. I thought they were exactly what he was looking for, but he didn’t like any of them. He never did explain why, so I didn’t pursue working for Gold Key any further. Within a short time, I was writing for Marvel and, at some point, a script was needed for Win Mortimer, a long-time comics artist and a really sweet guy. I pitched “Voodoo Unto Others” to Roy and knew I had a sale when he chuckled at the title. I wrote the story in one night… full script… and we gave it to Win, who did a really nice job on it. He even went out of his way to complement me on my story. Unfortunately, I never got another chance to work with him, though he did draw Spidey Super Stories for a while. Jon: Tales of the Zombie #5 contained your “Voodoo War.” Tony: “Voodoo War” was started by Syd Shores, who died after drawing the first two pages. Dick Ayers finished the story and did a fine job, but I dropped the ball on the script. In fact, after the story had been lettered, I pulled it back, rewrote it, and paid the letterer to re-letter most of it. In retrospect, it’s an okay story, but I could and should have done better. Jon: I understand there was a gag pulled by Marie Severin on you when you were working on Tales of the Zombie? Tony: Every editor has his own, let’s call them, “quirks.” One of mine was that I didn’t like the “injury to the eye motif,” as it has been so charmingly dubbed in the Overstreet Guide. Somehow, one such scene slipped through my editorial defenses. It was in a Simon Garth story, a fill-in by Doug Moench and Alfredo Alcala. The scene, lifted from an old horror movie, had an elderly woman looking through the eyes of a painting from an hidden passage within the wall. Someone stabs two swords through the eyes of the painting and into the woman’s eyes. The artwork showed the swords going into her eyes. I asked Marie Severin to redraw the panel so it showed an extreme close-up of the woman just before the swords enter the frame. As the next panel showed the swords sticking out of the painting from the other side of the wall, which I thought allowed the readers to imagine the injury rather than see it. Even beyond my distaste for “injury to the eye,” I’ve long believed it’s more effective to let one’s readers/viewers use their imaginations rather than to push their faces right into the gore. Marie made the correction as I corrected, doing a marvelous job of duplicating Alcala’s style. However, ever the office imp, she then drew another panel and lightly pasted it over her correction. It showed the swords coming out of the woman’s eye sockets with her eyeballs on them. When I saw it, I laughed so hard that I fell out of my chair. In some offices, the sight of an editor rolling on the floor

Below: The hero of a short-lived Astonishing Tales series in his pre-”It!” days as just plain ol’ Colossus. Herb Trimpe’s cover art (detailed from Monsters on the Prowl #17) depicting the Kirby/Ayers reprint therein. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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clutching his sides might be alarming, but it wasn’t all that unusual for the Marvel Bullpen of the 1970s. To know Marie Severin is to love her. Jon: Did you enjoy working on Zombie stories? Tony: Yes. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to come up with new twists on the voodoo and zombie themes which, by dint of the mag’s title, were our stock in trade. Jon: Can you give us any anecdotes about working on Monsters Unleashed? Tony: I started by writing text pieces for the magazine and, by #2, I was listed as a member of the magazine’s “staff” with just about every writer-type who worked in the offices and a couple who didn’t. I did some proofreading here and there, wrote some house ads, and may have written some of the copy for the photos that introduced each story. By #4, I’m all over the place, which befit my new title as “Contributing Editor.” I wrote an 11-page “Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars” story that was drawn by Dave Cockrum. It was called “Web of Hate” and it’s one of my early favorites. At the time, one of the editors—not Roy—gave me a dressing-down because he felt I hadn’t given Dave a detailed enough plot. That’s when I started doing virtual panel-by-panel plots for the artists. With #7, I was now the editor of the magazine and it immediately became the best-selling magazine in the history of the comics industry… or not. Roy Thomas still worked on covers with me, but I was responsible for everything else… including using the inventory that had been purchased by Roy and Marv. There was a lot of that lying around. In that issue, I wrote “The Burning Man” for the inside front cover. It was drawn by Ernie Chua. And this is where I have to digress to tell you a sad-but-true story: I inherited a pile of scripts that had been submitted by a comics writer who had solid credits in the field going back for decades. He’d written for EC, DC, and Timely. Unfortunately, none of these scripts were very good and the person who should have rejected them hadn’t gotten around to it. Instead, he dodged the writer’s calls until he could pass the buck to me. I “bought” one of the scripts because I thought we owed it to this writer for this shameful treatment. I talked to him on the phone at length to explain what I was looking for and encouraged him to try again. Like I said, this man had solid credentials in comics. I really wanted to buy stories from him. The first thing he submitted was a proposal for a series based on “The Burning Man,” which he called… the Human Torch. The saddest thing about this was that he had written the Human Torch in the 1940s. The next saddest thing was that this was the best idea he had for me. I never was able to use him. In the next issue, #8, I got screwed over by Rich Buckler on what was supposed to be my second “Gullivar Jones” tale. He was supposed to pencil it and, instead, handed it over to a very inexperienced George Peréz, who

was his assistant at the time. Worse, in laying out the story, he had changed my plot into a thing of incomprehensibility. I hated it more than I can express, but, having advertised the story in the previous issue, I felt I had to run it. Adding to my problem was that the feature was way behind schedule. I didn’t have the time or desire to script the story by this time, so I asked Doug Moench to do it. He scripted it overnight, which was not unusual for him. Even with Doug coming to my rescue, the story still had to be inked in a matter of days. The only inker who would take the job was my friend Duffy Vohland. He was every bit as inexperienced as George, but he did the best he could on an absurd deadline. He was a much better inker than this job would indicate. Monsters Unleashed #9 was my last official issue as editor of the magazine. When Roy stepped down as editor-in-chief, the place stopped being fun for me. Even so, I thought it was a pretty good issue to go out on. Monsters Unleashed—and the rest of the monster mags—were slumping in sales. My planned remedy for this was to go all-series with MU. The next issue ad promised comics stories of Tigra the Were-Woman, the Frankenstein Monster, the Scarecrow… and a “War of the Worlds” prose story. Alas, it was not meant to be. Jon: Let’s look at your four-issue run on Astonishing Tales with “It! The Living Colossus.” Is there an interesting story behind the series? Tony: Supernatural Thrillers #1 featured a great Roy Thomas/ Marie Severin adaptation of Theodore Sturgeon’s “It!,” the swamp monster story to which Solomon Grundy, the Heap, the Man-Thing, and Swamp Thing all owe their inspiration. Jim Steranko did an equally great cover for the issue and it was a big seller. Came the word from on high that Marvel should do a regular “It!” series. However, since Marvel was already publishing a Man-Thing series in the pages of Adventures Into Fear, no one thought we should do yet another swamp monster mag. Roy and I started looking for something else we could call “It!” Looking over the sales figures for recent issues of Marvel’s giant monster reprint books, we discovered the issues which reprinted the “Colossus” stories by Jack Kirby sold much better than other issues which had been published around the same time. We decided to make the Colossus our new “It!” and launch the new series in Astonishing Tales. Jon: What kind of help did Marv Wolfman and Don McGregor provide you? Tony: As I recall, they mostly provided mocking derision. Seriously, we were usually supportive of what each other was doing, sort of the comics equivalent of “enabling.” Jon: What did you add to the original Colossus stories for your own four-issue run? Tony: My first proposal for the series was much different from what would actually appear, in that, the special effects man and the actress from the original stories had been married for a while and had two kids: a girl, 12, and a boy 10. It was my intention that any one of them could project their consciousness into the Colossus statue and bring it to life. Roy didn’t care for that concept, so we went with some triedand-true Marvel concepts: the handicapped hero and the woman he loves from afar. It wasn’t blindingly original, but it was a good basis for the series. After that, it was mostly a question of filling in the supporting roles: the best friend, the boss, and the vicious co-worker. Being a big fan of the Godzilla movies, I also added other prehero Marvel monsters to the mix. I eventually wanted to write a Marvel Universe version of Destroy All Monsters. Jon: Dick Ayers drew all four of your “It!” stories. What was he like to work with? Tony: It was a honor working with Dick Ayers, one of the original “Big Four” artists of the Marvel Universe. However, I don’t think Dick was at his best here. He wasn’t being treated very well by Marvel and it was showing in the work. He was being passed over for young artists who, quite frankly, weren’t that much better than him, if they were better than him at all. All the same, I was and am a big fan of Dick’s art—and love him and his wife Lindy madly—and would relish the chance to work with him again. I wrote full scripts for the “It!” series. Dick was doing the full art and the lettering on the stories, so it made sense for me to do it that way. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Jon: Whose idea was it to mix old Atlas monster stories with new material in “It!”? Tony: This was my idea. We were only budgeted for 15 pages of new story per issue. By using the reprinted panels, I could expand the page count of the “It!” stories while including back story which would otherwise have eaten up some of those new pages. My aim was to give the readers as much “new” material as possible. I didn’t get paid for writing the “reprint” pages and the Marvel production department did whatever art corrections, lettering, and paste-ups were required on the pages. In retrospect, I made a lot of extra work for them, but they never complained. Like me, they all wanted to give the readers the best comics they possible could within the limitations of the day. Jon: In #23 you bring back Fin Fang Foom, probably the greatest of the Marvel giant monsters. Was there a great demand to revive him? Tony: I really wanted to bring Fin Fang Foom back. Does that count as a “great demand?” Jon: Was the battle between Fin Fang Foom and It! your tribute to King Kong vs. Godzilla? Tony: Homage-wise, it was about half all those Godzilla movies where he teams up with Mothra and Rodan to save the Earth and half a goof on Marvel Team-Up. I called it Monster Team-Up and I kind of recall that Roy and I had maybe a two-minute conversation about actually doing a book with that title… teaming up different Marvel monster characters in each issue… before we realized what a monumentally stupid idea that was. Jon: If you’d been able to continue with “It!,” what would you have done? Are you still interested in writing the character? Tony: Next up would have been a threeissue story pitting the Colossus against one of the Asgardian storm giants and featuring some sort of guest appearance by Thor. This might have been something Larry and I came up with together… he because he wanted to draw Thor and the storm giant, me because I wanted to see if I could write Thor to Roy’s satisfaction. I’m not clear on the details. That would have been followed by a bout with Goom and Googam, the father-and-son alien invaders who had appeared in a couple of the pre-hero Marvels. In typical Marvel alliteration, I would have called them… the Family of Fear! And, of course, I would be interested in writing the character again. You never forget your first. Jon: You seemed to explore religious concepts in your tenure on Ghost Rider. Did you take any heat for this? Tony: Not really. From the issue I started writing Ghost Rider, the mail was overwhelmingly favorable and became more so as I included more Christian concepts and images into the stories. The first serious objection came from Jim Shooter, who, sadly, was able to derail a two-year storyline in its final chapter. Jon: In the storyline, you introduced a character called “The Friend.” Was this a thinly-veiled Jesus Christ? Tony: Depends. In my mind, yes. In Shooter’s, he was a figment of the devil’s imagination, a demon sent to torment Johnny Blaze in spite of all the canonical evidence to the contrary. You know, it’s been over 20 years, but I’m still bitter about Shooter wrecking one of the best extended stories I ever wrote. Jon: There’s an interesting letter in #7 from Neal Meyer, saying that the only person who could stand between Johnny Blaze and the

HELP! CAN YOU GUESS THE STARTLING IDENTITIES OF

THE ET-LAZZ MONSTERS?

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Devil is Jesus Christ. Did this letter serve as an inspiration for “The Friend,” or was that already plotted out before this letter? Tony: The inspiration came from Steve Gerber. I had been wondering out loud how I could save Johnny from Satan and Steve halfjoked that I should have God save him. Being a Roman Catholic and having a couple of close friends who were kind of born-again Christians, I opted to go with Jesus Christ. The story was almost certainly conceived before I read Neal Meyer’s letter, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I ran his letter because it foreshadowed what I’d already planned to do. That would’ve been just like me. Jon: When you submitted the story, was it clear to Roy Thomas who “The Friend” was? Did he have a problem with this? Tony: It was clear to Roy Thomas, who approved it and had no problem with it. It was clear to Len Wein, who approved it and had no problem with it. It was clear to Marv Wolfman, who approved it and had no problem with it. Three editors, three approvals. Jon: Issue #10 was a reprint of the first Ghost Rider story. Do you remember why the fill-in was needed? Tony: All too well. Sal Buscema had done very tight layouts from my plot for “The Desolation Run” (which ended up appearing in Ghost Rider #11). I had scripted the issue and it had been lettered.

Above: In homage to Tony Isabella & Dick Ayers’ enthusiastic “It, The Living Colossus” series in Astonishing Tales, we thought you might like to play contributor Russ Maheras’ Atlas monster guessing game. Now, to those who have already seen the answers seven years ago in a CAPA-APA: Be fair and be excused! The first one to correctly identify all the characters from Marvel’s monster days, will have his or her pick of upcoming TwoMorrows goodies! We’ll announce the winner next issue. So hurry up and be quick, Fin Fang FOOMers! Send ’em to editor Jon B. Cooke, Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204. Courtesy of Russ. Characters ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Above and right inset: Before becoming renowned comics creators for their Elfquest series, Richard & Wendy Pini were, well, renowned comic book fans! Here’s John Romita’s character sketches for their comic-book appearance in Ghost Rider. Courtesy of Tony Isabella. Art ©2001 John Romita.

Below: As a gentle ribbing to Hulk writer Len Wein, Tony asked Marie Severin to draw the greenskin goliath, pondering, “Alas, poor Johnny! I knew him well…” This appeared in a Ghost Rider letter column. Courtesy of Tony. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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That’s where the problems stated. The finisher was supposed to be Bill Draut, a terrific artist who had worked with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby on Black Magic and many other classic comics. Most recently, he had been drawing stories for Joe Orlando’s mystery titles over at DC. For some reason, Draut wasn’t getting work or enough work from DC. He came to Marvel and we all thought his style would work well on Ghost Rider. What I didn’t know was that Draut was going through some serious personal problems. I won’t speculate on the nature of these problems, but, whatever they were, we never received even a single page of finished artwork from him. Worse, he didn’t return any of the penciled and lettered pages either. Out of desperation, I grabbed the biggest assistant editor I could find—Scott Edelman—and took a taxi to where Draut lived. Where he lived was some sort of enormous welfare hotel in Hell’s Kitchen. The cab driver refused to wait for us. He said he would circle the block for ten minutes and then he was out of there. I was usually too stupid to let stuff like that scare me, but, this time, it did. When Draut refused to answer his door, we returned to Marvel empty-handed. I figured a reprint issue was a small price to pay for my and Scott’s lives. If memory serves me correctly, Mike Esposito, Frank Giacoia, and John Tartaglione had to ink the issue from Xeroxes of Sal’s layouts and on vellum overlays. The lettering had to be redone and pasted down onto the overlays. What a nightmare. We never heard from Draut, but the post office eventually returned one of the two packages of layouts he had been sent. He had never picked them up. Naturally, the package arrived weeks after we had sent Ghost Rider #11 to the printer. Jon: Len Wein followed Roy as the book’s editor. Were there differences between his editing style and Roy’s? Tony: My good friend Len was way too anal retentive. I love the guy, but he’d get these strange ideas in his head. Like claiming Luke Cage didn’t have super-strength, or that the Gentleman Ghost shouldn’t be portrayed as supernatural in origin even though the character’s creator Robert Kanigher had established that himself. The only problem I ever had with Len on Ghost Rider was more comical than anything else. He was upset that I had Ghost Rider defeat the Hulk in “The Desolation Run.” Len was writing The Hulk title at that time. To appease him, I asked Marie Severin to draw a cartoon of the Hulk holding Ghost Rider’s flaming skull and ran it in the Ghost Rider letters page a few issues later. Just the same, I was really proud of that Ghost Rider/Hulk battle and how my guy beat Len’s guy. Jon: Later, Marv Wolfman becomes editor. How would you compare his editorial style to Len Wein’s? Tony: Less anal retentive. Of course, between supervising the line and writing several books himself, Marv didn’t have a lot of spare time to get too involved with the nuts and bolts of each title. But, to give him the credit usually claimed by Jim Shooter, it was Marv who really initiated the fill-in issues that, while not as preferable as stories by the regular creative teams, were still preferable to the reprints which had been appearing. Jon: You have two special guest-stars in an issue of Ghost Rider: Wendy and Richard Pini. Were you friends with the Pinis, who were still a ways away from creating Elfquest at the time? Tony: Yes. We’d all “met” as members of CAPA-Alpha, the first and still best of the comics apas. We all loved Wendy and hated Richard for beating our time with her. Eventually, we grew to love Richard as well.

They were thrilled about joining Ghost Rider’s supporting cast and, contrary to my usual practice when I write friends into my stories, I didn’t kill them horribly. However, they have had to live their entire lives knowing that they are copyrighted characters owned by Marvel and subject to the whims of insane editors and writers. It probably would have been kinder if I had killed them. Jon: Why did you leave the book? Tony: I left because I had accepted a job as an editor and writer at DC, but, even if that hadn’t been the case, I would have left anyway after Jim Shooter got through butchering what was supposed to be the culmination of a two-year storyline. Shooter changed my story after it had been completely penciled, scripted, lettered, and inked because he personally had a problem with my use of the Friend/Jesus character. This despite my ongoing story having been approved and supported by Roy Thomas, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman… editors and writers whose achievements in comics easily surpass Shooter’s… and despite the overwhelming approval of the readers at the newsstand and in the letters we received. Decades after the fact, I’m still angered by the sheer arrogance of the man and have come to believe that the comics industry is all the better for his absence from it. In Shooter’s version of my story, the “Friend” turns out to be some demon in disguise, which, of course, made no sense to anyone who’d read the previous issues featuring the character. In my version, Johnny found salvation by accepting Jesus Christ and reclaimed the soul he had given to Satan. I wrote the scene as more poetic than religious, but the end result was that Johnny was now free to begin a new life… and that’s exactly what I had in mind for him. Had I continued on Ghost Rider, you wouldn’t have seen either Jesus or Satan in the book again. Johnny would have led his new life according to Christian principles, but without the heavy religious overtones I’d brought into the book specifically to bring Johnny to this point. He would have continued his dual careers: working as a Hollywood stuntman and helping people as the Ghost Rider. He and Roxanne would have married and had as normal a life—kids and all—as possible in a super-hero comic book. I’d always pictured Johnny as a motorized cowboy and this new direction would have transformed him from Kid Colt Outlaw to the Lone Ranger. Jon: You wrote Giant-Size Creatures #1, with Werewolf by Night and featuring the origin of Tigra the Were-Woman. What prompted you to change the Cat into Tigra? Tony: I had liked the short-lived Claws of the Cat comic book and thought it a shame it had never reached its full potential. I hoped that turning Greer Nelson into Tigra would give her a second chance at stardom. She hasn’t made it to that level, but, at least, she has continued to be a fairly popular supporting character in the Marvel Universe. The change obviously did her good. Jon: You later did three issues of Marvel Chillers, featuring Tigra stories. Were you hoping for a regular series? Tony: It was supposed to be a regular series, but that was a chaotic time at Marvel. New titles were being scheduled with the first issues already behind schedule when they were assigned. The comics market was less healthy than it had been in recent years, which made it more difficult than usual to launch new titles. In any case, I’d already decided to leave Marvel for DC, so, had Tigra continued, it would have been with a new writer. Jon: Since your last Tigra story, she’s been in the West Coast COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Avengers, and then on the Avengers animated series. She’s even become an action figure. Did you see any money from any of this? Tony: Nope. They didn’t even send me an action figure or copies of any of the comics. Jon: How do you feel about the way Tigra’s been portrayed since you last wrote her? Tony: My feelings on her portrayals range from disappointed to incensed. On the disappointed end of the scale, there are those writers who can’t seem to get beyond the “sex kitten” angle. Midway, we have the writers who make her a victim or treat her as less capable than her fellow Avengers. On the incensed end of the scale, we have Jim Shooter’s portrayal of her as a cowardly slut. Jon: In the letter col of Marvel Chillers #5, you dedicated your Tigra stories to Barbara Kepke, “a Tigress to warm the heart of any Tiger.” Is she now Sainted Wife Barbara? How did you two meet? Tony: You are correct, sir. We met at the wedding of her Aunt Nora and my boyhood chum Terry Fairbanks. Nora wanted to fix me up with one of Barb’s cousins and sort of badgered me into asking this other cousin out. I was never so happy to get turned down for a date in my life because that left me free to ask Barb out. Jon: What was your take on “The Living Mummy”? Tony: I wanted “The Living Mummy” series to be Marvel’s Swamp Thing, back when Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson were doing the original comic book series. Their book was a nice mix of adventure, horror, and human interest. Impetuous youngster that I was, and, in light of the amazing art Val Mayerik was doing on the series, I thought we could match that quality. Sadly, at the time, my intended goal was considerably beyond my abilities. Still, I gave it my best and would be eager to try again… if I had the right artist and editor backing my play. Jon: Was Legion of Monsters intended to be a one-shot, or were there more issues planned? Tony: The Legion Of Monsters was another of my “limbo editor” projects. Although we gave the impression it would be a regularlypublished mag, it was a one-shot to test the market. The creative concept was to do here what I had wanted to do with Monsters Unleashed: an all-series title. The practical concept was to burn off some more of the b-&-w inventory. The Neal Adams cover had Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and a new character—the Manphibian—who looked like the first cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. With lightning crashing down in the background and all but Dracula wading in a swampy stream, I thought Neal did a great job of it. I have this vague memory of asking Neal to keep Dracula out of the water because vampires can’t cross running water… and of his rolling his eyes in disbelief at my absurd attention to detail. Jon: Do you recall whose idea it was to put Len Wein and yourself as introductory characters in Giant-Size Chillers #3? Tony: I edited that book during the time when I was a sort of “rogue editor” for Marvel Comics, working out of one of the back rooms. The issue was to be all-reprint, but I thought I could generate some good sales by reprinting more recent “horror” stories by popular artists and writers. I went to my own files of Chamber of Darkness and Tower of Shadows, which Marvel launched in 1969 and which were, to my mind, woefully under-appreciated by the readers of the day. These were the issues before the titles became, respectively, Monsters on the Prowl and Creatures on the Loose. An added bonus was that Marvel would most likely have b-&-w proofs of these stories at easy access, thus simplifying the production department’s work. Most—maybe all—of the stories I choose for the book were “hosted” by various creators. It was a cute twist on the CryptKeeper/Old Witch school of horror comics hosting. I twisted an arm or two and got the okay to have Marie Severin draw an opening sequence of poor Tony slaving away in the Marvel dungeons. I thought it was funny and of a piece with the story intros, but editor Len thought I was stroking my ego at Marvel’s expense until I included him in the fun. Then it was okay. Jon: How would you characterize your tenure on the horror/monster books? Did you enjoy your time on those titles? Would you ever consider becoming an editor again? Tony: I think I edited some terrific comics magazines and some May 2001

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good ones and, unfortunately, a few mediocre ones. I never achieved what I always wanted, which was to hire people so good that I never had to do any actual work on these titles. I had my share of professional differences with guys like Len Wein and Marv Wolfman—I’ve tried to be fair and honest in discussing those differences—but I wouldn’t want anyone to think I don’t love those guys. I mean, I wouldn’t take a bullet for them, but there are any number of current comics editors and executives I would gladly push in front of a bullet for them. What are pals for? The experience gave me an opportunity to work with many terrific writers and artists, some of them just starting their careers and some of them concluding them. Those are memories, both personal and professional, that I’ll always treasure. Did I enjoy my time as an editor? Yes. Would I do it again? I cringe whenever I’m asked this question on account of I know I’m gonna say… yes, I would. I’d want to do it from my home and I want to be free of the editorial group-think so prevalent in today’s comics, but, yeah, I’d be willing to give it another go for the right publisher.

Above: Tigra revealed! From her debut in Giant-Size Creatures #1, a full-page shot of the were-woman right after her first transformation. Art by Don Perlin & Vince Colletta, words by Tony Isabella. Courtesy of Tony. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

[In part two of this interview, in Alter Ego, Tony discusses his time on Luke Cage, Power Man; The Champions; Daredevil; leaving Marvel; and more! Be there… it’ll be good!—JBK] 103

CBA Interview

Pablo’s Amazing Journey From Peru to Florida, “Zombie” artist Pablo Marcos speaks Inset right: Drawing by 15-year-old Pablo Marcos (1952), courtesy of the artist Opposite page inset: Pablo and his wife Myriam in the mountains of Columbia (1990). Courtesy of Pablo. Opposite page right: Perhaps Pablo’s most fondly-recalled work is his series (with writer Steve Gerber) in Tales of the Zombie. Courtesy of the artist, here is a detail from one of his pages. Steve Gerber, at the very last minute, generously contributed the testimonial. Art ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Two Pablos and a baby named Pablo make three Pablo Marcoses! A picture of, from left: The artist, grandson, and son taken in New York in 2000 photo. Courtesy of Pablo, Sr.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Translated by Gisella Marcos A few years back, my esteemed publisher attended MegaCon in Florida and was approached by a humble, sweet-natured artist by the name of Pablo Marcos, the selfsame contributor to Marvel’s Great Age of Horror. Well, needless to say, after John gave me the contact info, I was determined to find a way to fit the unforgettable delineator of Simon Garth—a.k.a. The Zombie—in Steve Gerber’s unforgettable stories in Tales of The Zombie, and we are delighted to include the following interview. The South American-born artist— whose command of English is much better than he admits—asked to do a written Q&A (which was translated from Spanish by Pablo’s daughter Gisella, and slightly edited by myself). Pablo—with the help of wife Myriam—also sent us a huge pile of artwork, much of it original, and we apologize for only being able to include a tiny fraction here (but look for Pablo’s work in our upcoming Atlas/Seaboard, Heavy Metal, and Warren celebrations!). CBA profusely thanks Pablo, Myriam, Gisella, and last-second contributor Steve Gerber. Comic Book Artist: When and where were you born? Pablo Marcos: I was born in Peru on March 31, 1937 in the small town of Laran in the province of Chincha Alta, 180 kilometers from the capital of Lima. When I was five-years-old, my family—my father Pablo Marcos and my mother Maria Ortega—moved to Lima. At that time, there were only four children: Gloria, Berta, myself and Manuel. A couple of years later my brothers Alfredo and Oswaldo were born. My father worked as a gasoline truck driver and also a cab driver. We were very poor and after World War II all the countries had been economically affected and Peru was no exception. CBA: Did you develop an early interest in art? When did you start drawing? Pablo: I went to public school until high school, Bartolome Herrera. There were lots of classmates with artistic talent around me at this school. I recall during this time there was a famous mural artist who painted the yards of the school for years. These were al fresco

paintings of Inca designs. During this time, I met a teacher who gave classes in comic book art named Juan Rivera Saavedra. He was very involved in comics and magazines. Through him, I began to meet other Peruvian artists. Here’s a story about my schooling I must tell: I had classes such as anatomy, zoology, botany, and geography. The teachers in those classes knew that I liked to draw and they would request that my regular teachers “loan” my services to them, and I would draw posters for their classes. Since there were 14 classes in all, I would draw, for example, the digestive system in many different ways and would learn about anatomy because I did so many sketches. The same was true with maps and animals. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this helped me a great deal as I later drew much of this from memory. CBA: Were you attracted to comics strips or comic books at a young age? Favorite titles and characters? Pablo: My friend and a teacher, Juan Rivera, would give me comics as I liked them so much. Most of these were from Argentina, Chile, Italy, and some from the United States. The comics from Argentina were such as El Tony, Misterix and Rico Tipo. The most popular from Chile was El Peneca. I admired the work of Alberto Breccia very much as well as Hugo Pratt, Jose Luis Salinas and from Chile, Arturo Del Castillo. Another comic I liked was Corrieri del Picolo from Italy. Comics from the U.S. that I liked were Donald Duck, and the newspaper strip Mandrake. Another great character was Tarzan by Hogarth. Others I recall were Jose Luis Salinas’ Cisco Kid, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X-9, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, Harold Foster’s Prince Valiant, Vincent T. Hamlin’s Alley Oop, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Fred Harmon’s Red Ryder, Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, and Joe Shuster’s Superman. CBA: What artists had the strongest impression in your youth? Pablo: Arturo del Castillo, Alberto Breccia and Burne Hogarth, especially, were the artists that made the biggest impression on my youth. CBA: Did you have formal art training? Pablo: Unfortunately, art school was too expensive and I was not lucky enough to attend any formal schooling. CBA: What was the state of the comics industry in your native country? Pablo: During that time in Peru, there were comics circulating from local artists such as Hernan Bartra, Juan Osorio and Javier Flores Del Aguila. Their styles were totally local. Similarly, there was a magazine which was very popular called Tacu-Tacu. This publication joined the work of a lot of artists which were cartoonists and caricaturists. In general, comic book production was very small. Most of what was COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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there came from overseas. CBA: How did you come to be involved in drawing comic art? Pablo: When I was still in school, at the age of 13, a friend of mine, Juan Rivera, introduced me to well known Peruvian caricaturist Julio Fairle, and Julio told me he had not been able to find a substitute caricaturist as he was going on a month’s vacation. He looked at my caricature work and told me that my style was very different and if I would attempt to imitate his approach. I did a couple of pieces and he liked what he saw. So I worked at that magazine company for a month. When he returned, he said that no one had noticed the change in style. We stayed friends and about a month later he showed up at my home and told me there was a newspaper that was just opening up. I arrived at the office and the director took me on as a political caricaturist. I stayed there for a couple of years while finishing my schooling and then I went on to the university majoring in economics. In my parents’ opinion, economics was a more lucrative profession and being an artist was not. At that time, I was already married to Norma Martinez and we had my oldest daughter, Judith. I graduated and worked for a political magazine named Rochabus, and after that I worked for another political magazine called Zomba Conuto. In 1960, a newspaper came out called Expreso. The editor of the paper—who had been my best man at my wedding—called me to work on the paper. I did some comic work and also some serious illustrations such as police events, airplane accidents, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. In December of 1963, my daughter, Gisella was born. It was during this time that they named the new evening paper edition of Expreso called Extrcl. It was there where I did the first comic strip of James Bond, Agent 007, based on Ian Fleming’s spy character. I also did a daily strip called Benito Puma (a local police adventure). I was never able to work as an economist as I was making good money as an artist. I was making in a month what I would as an economist in an entire year. I worked on those two strips for three years. After that, I began working on the weekly supplement of Expreso called Estampa. I was now working as an illustrator exclusively and no longer as a cartoonist or caricaturist. During this time I had an experience which resulted in something very difficult to erase from my memory. The Peruvian court had sentenced a rapist to death by firing squad in a jail located on a small island. Carlos Sanchez, the editor at the time, asked me to go with him to cover the event as there were no cameras allowed. I went with him and a couple of other reporters. It was 2:00 A.M. and I was asked to wait in a room until we were called to witness the execution. This was the first time that I would see a human being die. There were six soldiers and only one of the guns had a bullet which killed the convict. After the rapist was executed, I felt a dryness in my throat and wanted desperately to get out of the jail and off the island and forget what I had just seen, but I was never able to. From there I went directly to the paper and drew what I had just witnessed. During this time I covered significant world events such as the Seven-Day War, the capture and death of the famous guerrilla leader Che Guevara, and two big earthquakes; one in Peru and the other in Italy. I also did a lot of illustrations of our national sport, soccer. My third daughter, Norma, was born on December 29,1966. In 1967, I traveled to Mexico on vacation and took some samples of my work and, with Marino Sagastegul, I went to the Editorial Novoro. May 2001

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There I met the director and they offered me a job as an artist. I returned to Peru and quit my job which I had for several years. My son, Pablo, was born on December 19, 1967, and in 1968 I returned to Mexico alone and began working at Novoro on the series Legends of America. I subsequently created a series called Hata Yoga which I continued doing until November 1970. My wife, Norma and my four children joined me in Mexico in 1968. CBA: Can you describe your experiences working in American comics? Pablo: In 1970, I arrived in New Jersey and my situation was not very good. I did not speak English, had no job, and had a wife and four children. I knew New York was only an hour away so I began doing some illustrations to present to any company who would see them. In the meantime, my wife took on a job in a clothing factory. She said all she wanted to do was make sure there was enough money for food. I finished a project and took it to the editor of Warren, Billy Graham. He gave me an assignment and I went home and proudly told my wife to quit her job because I had gotten work. She told me that until she saw the cash, she was not quitting. The job I was given was due in one month and I finished it in one week. I do not recall if this was ever published. That day the editor told me to go to a company called Skywald which was publishing a couple of black-&-white comic magazines. At Skywald, I met Israel Waldman, the owner of the company and an incredible human being. To my fortune, he spoke Spanish. The director of the company was Sol Brodsky. I worked with him for a long time. Even when I later went to work at DC and Marvel, I never stopped contributing to Skywald. When Mr. Waldman died a few years later, the company changed. Sol Brodsky changed jobs and went back his position at Marvel Comics. He asked me if I wanted to go work with him. I asked Mr. Waldman and his response was: “Go. Skywald is your home. You can come back and work with me whenever you want.” I began working at Marvel steadily and Sol Brodsky wanted to help me with my immigration status. He also introduced me to a great Peruvian artist, Boris Vallejo. Boris has since guided me professionally, and overall helped me with the language. He has been one of the people who has always unselfishly given me a hand. In the early-1970s I worked as Sol Brodsky’s assistant. He along with Stan Lee produced some weekly comics for the British market in which Norma and I did the color and Zip-A-Tone work. I did some covers and illustrations for such comics as Captain Britain, Planet of the Apes, Hulk, Dracula, etc. Since I went to Marvel every day, I met a lot of the artists and writers. CBA: Did you work for the overseas market while also freelancing in the U.S.? Pablo: I worked for Italy in 1980 on a comic book called Lanclostory: Tremila Dollari Per Ebenezer Cross Western Story. In 1982, I worked for an editorial magazine, Ejea, in which I created a series called Dragon. I did the first five series and I had to stop doing it as it was 32 pages weekly and I could not concentrate on my work for the U.S. That series lasted for 15 years.

Horror isn't just about supernatural entities and extreme violence. It has a sensual component. Absent that component, the terror of the unknown and the harm done to characters' bodies and minds are about as emotionally affecting as a video game. Pablo's work on series like Tales of the Zombie exemplifies this principle. The characters, even the Zombie himself, are unmistakably human. Their faces are real. Their bodies are real. Their sexuality is real. Their vulnerabilities are real. For that reason, when horror invades their lives, it becomes more than just an extravaganza of splattered blood and special effects. The terror becomes almost palpable, a part of the reader's life as well as the characters'. —STEVE GERBER April 11, 2001

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CBA: Who did you deal with at Marvel Comics? Pablo: I worked as a steady employee at Marvel only for a few months and then I freelanced. I knew Roy Thomas. I remember on one occasion Roy came up to me and said “Pablo, please don’t call me ‘Mr. Thomas.’ Just call me ‘Roy.’” This is a cultural aspect of my character—when you are speaking to an editor or director of a company you always address them as “Mister.” But from that point on I always call him Roy and he calls me Pablo. Roy has always been very polite and respectful. He is always very cautious not to offend an artist’s artistic susceptibility. CBA: Perhaps your most fondly recalled Marvel work was in Tales of the Zombie. Did you enjoy that strip and did you deal with writer Steve Gerber directly? Pablo: I enjoyed very much working on “The Zombie,” especially working with Steve Gerber. He always had exact reasons when criticizing my work, and I liked that, as “The Zombie” was one of my preferred series. I also worked for Atlas/Seaboard, drawing The Brute and Iron Jaw. CBA: What was your favorite work at Marvel in the 1970s? Pablo: Without a doubt, The Zombie was my favorite character in the ’70s. Working with Steve Gerber was great and I learned quite a bit from his suggestions and comments. CBA: What work did you do for DC Comics? Did you deal with Joe Orlando, at all? Pablo: At the same time that I was working for Marvel I was contributing to DC, but only as an inker. I worked with Joe Orlando on several projects. As a matter of fact, I did a color cover of Batman for the paperback Joe edited. Since he is an excellent illustrator, all of his advice and suggestions were always well received and appreciated, and I’m grateful for having worked with him. CBA: Did you enjoy working on Conan? Memories? Pablo: In the ’80s I illustrated some of the adventures of Conan and Kull. Roy gave me the opportunity to ink some of John Buscema’s pencils, and for several months I drew the daily Conan the Barbarian newspaper strip. Doing muscular adventures is really my May 2001

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preferred theme, and if it involves a scenario taking place in the past, for me that is the perfect mix. On November 6, 1985, my wife Norma died at the young age of 42. It’s very important to mention that Marvel and DC knew of the great troubles I was facing in life and what I was going through. They knew that more than ever I needed money to move forward. Norma was in intensive care for almost two months and during that time they delivered work to me at New York University Medical Center. I only accepted inking assignments as in my state of mind I could not concentrate on penciling. A couple of years went by before this difficult time was past me. I was left alone to care for my four children and raise them while they were still in school. I think that the work from Marvel and DC helped me greatly. I worked harder than ever and was only inking. During this time, in a miraculous way, a woman appeared in our lives who was to become my future wife, Myriam Giraldo. She was a young, beautiful lady 17 years younger than I, and she was also an artist. This was in late 1988. That year I created Suko the Eternal Samurai. He was a Japanese time traveler, very muscular and incredibly intelligent. I showed it to a couple of editors, but no one really paid much attention to it. On December 10, 1987, I married Myriam. Boris Vallejo and his family came to my wedding. In 1987, I also began drawing the regular series Star Trek: The Next Generation for DC. CBA: How many pages can you pencil in a week? Inks? Pablo: Inking is much faster and easier to do as everything has been resolved by the penciling. Easily, I can ink one book a week. I can pencil three to four pages per week. CBA: Did you ever want to write comics? Pablo: I would like to write comic stories, but I never seem to have the time to do it. Time is apparently an

Above: How’s that for a double-page spread! Pablo’s great work from Monsters Unleashed #1. Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Another notable Marcos-drawn character was Morbius, The Living Vampire. This portrait appeared in an issue of Vampire Tales. Courtesy of Pablo Marcos. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Below: Marcos: The Next Generation! Pablo’s grandchildren, from left to right: Anthony, Christopher, Michael, Nicholas, America, and Linda. Photo from 1999 and courtesy of Pablo Marcos.

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exclusive privilege writers have. But I have written some strips. For Heavy Metal I wrote and drew “Norka.” I feel a sense of freedom with this character and don’t put any limitations on my imagination. As I draw, new characters and themes come to life. These illustrations are easy for me to do and are very satisfying. In 1993, I created Ramses. I presented a proposal to DC, but after several months, they told me they were not going to print it. CBA: Can you recall your page rates at Marvel and DC? Other companies? Pablo: The following year Myriam and I decided to relocate to Mexico City where we opened Dynamic Comics, a comic book store. I still continued doing work for Marvel and DC. For the Mexican market, I created a series called “K-Chon-Da” which was

published in ten series of ten pages each. It was in Mexico where I did my last adventure for comics in the U.S.: a 35-page Conan story (which I’m not sure if it was published or not). My rate in 1994 was $450 per page. At present, Sports Illustrated pays me $1750 per page, CBA: When did you start hiring assistants? Pablo: In the ’70s, I had a lot of work and some of my friends for one reason or another did not, so I gave them penciling work. That’s why I created the name Pablo Marcos Studios since I did not always do the complete illustration. The young adult books in The Great Illustrated Classic series—many featuring Pablo Marcos Studios illustrations—was published by Waldman Publishing. CBA: Did any friends, acquaintances or family from Peru come and work in the U.S. comics industry? Pablo: One very good Peruvian friend, Gonzalo Mayo, who worked for Warren and Valiant. CBA: Did you go to comic book conventions? Pablo: I no longer go to conventions. Two years ago, I went to Megacon in Orlando, Florida, my first con in years. I ran into George Peréz, Don McGregor, and others. I was invited to the con by Frank Frazetta Magazine for which I did one series of my own character named “OM.” CBA: Did you get back your original art from the companies? Pablo: I have all of the original artwork from all the publishers I have ever done work for with the exception of Waldman who never returned any of my originals. CBA: Did you produce printed portfolios during the heyday of the mid-1970s? Pablo: I believe I have done some illustrations which were intended for a portfolio, but I do not recall who I did this for. CBA: Did you ever come on staff at any comic book companies? Pablo: I only worked for Marvel for a couple of months on a permanent basis and never did it since. CBA: Can you describe your family and if any of them are artistically inclined? Pablo: I am married, have four children, and seven grandchildren. They include: Judith who is not married; Gisella who is married to Carmine and has two children, Anthony and Michael; Norma who is married to Nick and has two children, Nicholas and Christopher; Pablo who is married to America and has three children: America, Linda, and Pablo. All of my children have an interest and inclination towards the arts but I think this is just a result of seeing me draw all the time. Linda, my son’s youngest daughter, is the one who has a solid artistic inclination. She is currently nine years old. In Peru, my brother Alfredo is a successful cartoonist and political caricaturist. CBA: Can you please describe other memorable work? Pablo: Since 1997, I have been working for Soccer Jr. magazine doing biographies of great soccer players. I am currently working on a general history of the World Cup. There have been a total of 17 World Cup tournaments and the next one will be in Japan/Korea in 2002. Since around the same time I have been contributing to Sports Illustrated for Kids. In Mexico during 1994, I created with Myriam a weekly comic strip which is based on astrology which is distributed in some Latin American countries, called Horroroscope. Aside from the art work, Myriam and I enjoy bicycling where we live in Clearwater, Florida. There is a lot of access to the beaches and biking is really a fantastic activity. CBA: Do you hope for a regular color comic assignment again? Pablo: I would like to work with Myriam in color, but doing our own creations. We would both enjoy working in color—which Myriam is very good at—and I would enjoy doing heroic material. I thoroughly enjoy the company and constant love I get from Myriam. I also am blessed to have the love of my children and grandchildren. Comic books have given me a lot and I would like to give something back to my readers, but where? At present, there are very few places where one real comic book lover can go. A good clean comic book without trendy styles pushed on it. This has done nothing else but destroyed the industry and has left the world of comic book artists long forgotten. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

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

Go to www.twomorrows.com for other issues, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

BACK ISSUE #54

BACK ISSUE #55

DIEDGITIIOTANSL BL AVAILA

BACK ISSUE #51

BACK ISSUE #52

BACK ISSUE #53

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “AllInterview Issue”! Part 2 of an exclusive STEVE ENGLEHART interview (continued from ALTER EGO #103)! “Pro2Pro” interviews between SIMONSON & LARSEN, MOENCH & WEIN, and comics letterers KLEIN & CHIANG. Plus JOHN OSTRANDER, MICHAEL USLAN, and longtime DC color artist ADRIENNE ROY! Cover by Englehart collaborator MARSHALL ROGERS!

Bronze Age Mystery Comics! Interviews with BERNIE WRIGHTSON, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GERRY TALAOC, DC mystery writer LORE SHOBERG, MARK EVANIER and DAN SPIEGLE discuss Scooby-Doo, Charlton chiller anthologies, Black Orchid, Madame Xanadu art and commentary by TONY DeZUNIGA, MIKE KALUTA, VAL MAYERIK, DAVID MICHELINIE, MATT WAGNER, and a rare cover painting by WRIGHTSON!

“Gods!” Takes an in-depth look at WALTER SIMONSON’s Thor, the Thunder God in the Bronze Age, “Pro2Pro” interview with TOM DeFALCO and RON FRENZ, Hercules: Prince of Power, Moondragon, Three Ways to End the New Gods Saga, exclusive interview with fantasy writer MICHAEL MOORCOCK, art and commentary by GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, BOB LAYTON, and more, with a swingin’ Thor cover by SIMONSON!

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BACK ISSUE #56

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“Liberated Ladies” eyeing female characters that broke barriers in the Bronze Age: Big Barda, Valkyrie, Ms. Marvel, Phoenix, Savage She-Hulk, and the sword-wielding Starfire. Plus a “Pro2Pro” interview with JILL THOMPSON, GAIL SIMONE, and BARBARA KESEL, art and commentary by JOHN BYRNE, GEORGE PEREZ, JACK KIRBY, MIKE VOSBURG, and more, with a new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

“Licensed Comics”! Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Man from Atlantis, DC’s Edgar Rice Burroughs backups (John Carter, Pellucidar, Carson of Venus), Marvel’s Warlord of Mars, and an interview with CAROL SERLING, wife of ROD SERLING. With art and commentary from ANDERSON, BYRNE, CLAREMONT, DORMAN, DUURSEMA, KALUTA, MILLER, OSTRANDER, and more. Cover by BRIAN KOSCHACK.

“Avengers Assemble!” Writer ROGER STERN’S acclaimed 1980s Avengers run, West Coast Avengers, early Avengers toys, and histories of Hawkeye, Mockingbird, and Wonder Man, with art and commentary from JOHN and SAL BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, BRETT BREEDING, TOM DeFALCO, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB HALL, AL MILGROM, TOM MORGAN, TOM PALMER, JOE SINNOTT, and more. PÉREZ cover!

JENETTE KAHN interviewed by ROBERT GREENBERGER, DC’s Dollar Comics and unrealized kids’ line (featuring an aborted Sugar and Spike revival), the Wonder Woman Foundation, and the early days of the Vertigo imprint. Exploring the talents of ROSS ANDRU, KAREN BERGER, STEVE BISSETTE, JIM ENGEL, GARTH ENNIS, NEIL GAIMAN, SHELLY MAYER, ALAN MOORE, GRANT MORRISON, and more!

“JLA in the Bronze Age”! The “Satellite Years” of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, with BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, PÉREZ, and WEIN, salute to DICK DILLIN, the Justice League “Detroit” team, with CONWAY, PATTON, McDONNELL, plus CONWAY and GEOFF JOHNS go “Pro2Pro” on writing the JLA, unofficial JLA/Avengers crossovers, and Marvel’s JLA, the Squadron Supreme. Cover by McDONNELL and BILL WRAY!

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BACK ISSUE #59

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“Toon Comics!” History of Space Ghost in comics, Comico’s Jonny Quest and Star Blazers, Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera line and Dennis the Menace, behind the scenes at Marvel Productions, Ltd., and a look at the unpublished Plastic Man comic strip. Art/comments by EVANIER, FOGLIO, HEMPEL and WHEATLEY, MARRS, RUDE, TOTH, WILDEY, and more. All-new painted Space Ghost cover by STEVE RUDE!

“Halloween Heroes and Villains”! JEPH LOEB and TIM SALE’s chiller Batman: The Long Halloween, the Scarecrow (both the DC and Marvel versions), Solomon Grundy, Man-Wolf, Lord Pumpkin, Rutland, Vermont’s Halloween parades, and… the Korvac Saga’s Dead Avengers! With commentary from and/or art by CONWAY, GIL KANE, LOPRESTI, MOENCH, PÉREZ, DAVE WENZEL, and more. Cover by TIM SALE!

“Tabloids and Treasuries,” spotlighting every all-new tabloid from the 1970s. Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, The Bible, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, The Wizard of Oz, even the PAUL DINI/ALEX ROSS World’s Greatest Super-Heroes editions! Commentary and art by ADAMS, GARCIA-LOPEZ, GRELL, KIRBY, KUBERT, MAYER, ROMITA SR., TOTH, and more. Wraparound cover by ALEX ROSS!

“Superman in the Bronze Age”! JULIUS SCHWARTZ, CURT SWAN, Superman Family, World of Krypton miniseries, and ALAN MOORE’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, art & comments by ADAMS, ANDERSON, CARDY, CHAYKIN, PAUL KUPPERBERG, OKSNER, O’NEIL, PASKO, ROZAKIS, SAVIUK, and more. Cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ and SCOTT WILLIAMS! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

“British Invasion” issue! History of Marvel UK, Beatles in comics, DC’s ‘80s British talent pool, V for Vendetta, Excalibur, Marshal Law, Doctor Who, “Pro2Pro” interview with PETER MILLIGAN & BRENDAN McCARTHY, plus BERGER, BOLLAND, DAVIS, GIBBONS, STAN LEE, LLOYD, MOORE, DEZ SKINN, and others. Fold-out triptych cover by RON WILSON and DAVE HUNT of Marvel UK’s rare 1970s “Quadra-Poster”!

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Shameless Self-Promotion, Swarmy Sucking-up and Plugs Galore!

ANDREW D. COOKE TURNS THE BIG FOUR-O

PrimeTime for the Brothers Cooke! Happy birthday, Andy! The clock keeps on tickin’… my baby brother just turned 40, so the verdict is in: Neither of us are kids any more! But as creative as Andy and I have been—him focusing on a career in the motion picture biz while I’ve zeroed-in on graphic design—we know we’re just getting started. And we should know as we’ve been collaborating a long time. So if you’ve been wondering about those strange Prime8™ ads found in these pages—and now all over the other TwoMorrows pubs—please note, kind reader, that it’s fundamentally a concept that may just give my brother and I the excuse to work together professionally. Prime8 is the culmination of our years reading, studying, absorbing those comics we love so much, and it’s our answer to the pessimistic, anti-heroic, villain-worship too prevalent in today’s books. But we wish readers will see our comic book as less reactionary and more a loving tribute to those stories of hope, achievement, and sacrifice so well told by our

comic book artist heroes Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, and Steve Ditko. Above all, we hope you check out the debut issue of Prime8: Creation, the first real TwoMorrows comic book. Drawn with panache by our friend (and CBA associate editor) Chris Knowles and inked by noted Canadian artist George Freeman, the comic is drenched in retro glory, sporting a new Neal Adams cover and pin-ups by Barry Windsor-Smith, Sergio Aragonés, Bruce Timm, and Walter Simonson. So help us aging farts and give P8 a try! Buy early and buy often! I confess the coolest aspect of doing Prime8 isn’t the creation of Kirby-inspired concepts with Kane-like heroics. It really is the spending of so much time with my best friend and creative partner, Andrew David Cooke, whether by ’net, fax, or phone! Here’s to you, ADC! Whether we grab that brass ring or not, bro, it’s the trying that’s important! I love you, Andy! Primetime is now!

Announcing the Winner of the CBA #12 Cover Quiz! 2

And the winnah of our mystery-ladened CBA #12 cover quiz is BRIAN HAGUE of Denver, Colorado, who correctly identified all of the Charlton characters delineated by Jammin’ Joe Staton last ish. Way to go, Bri! Kudos to our other stalwart readers who gave it the ol’ college try. Okay, Brian, whaddaya want: The CBA Special Edition, CBA Collection Vol. 1, or the upcoming Warren Companion?

1 E-MAN, a.k.a. Alec Tronn 2 NOVA, a.k.a. Nova Kane neé Katrinka Colchnzski

3 TEDDY Q. (or was the “Q” a First Comics innovation? 8

Hmmm…)

4 BARON WEIRWULF of Haunted Library 10 5 WINNIE THE WITCH of Ghostly Haunts 6 MORTIMER TISHEN of Beyond the Grave

11 12

7 COL. WHITE-SHROUD of Monster Hunters 8 COUNTESS R.H. BLUDD of Scary Tales 9 PROFESSOR COFFIN & ARCHANE of Midnight Tales 13 10 DEE MON of Creepy Things 11 IMPY of Haunted 14 12 MR. BONES of Ghost Manor 13 MR. I. M. DEDD of Ghostly Tales 14 DR. MILO TEMPUS GRAVES of The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves 110

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

C o l l e c t o r

DIGITAL

Go online for #1-30 as Digital Editions, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

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

VOLUME 2

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VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

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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

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NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

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CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

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

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KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

ALTER EGO #118

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #1 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2

BRICKJOURNAL #24

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 throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembering LES DANIELS, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and 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 #119

ALTER EGO #120

ALTER EGO #121

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!

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!

GOLDEN AGE JUSTICE SOCIETY ISSUE! Features on JOHN B. WENTWORTH (Johnny Thunder), LEN SANSONE (The Atom), and BERNARD SACHS (All-Star Comics inker), art by CARMINE INFANTINO, PAUL REINMAN, MART NODELL, STAN ASCHMEIER, BEN FLINTON, and H.G. PETER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY to a vintage All-Star image by IRWIN HASEN!

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DRAW! #25

BACK ISSUE #65

BACK ISSUE #66

BACK ISSUE #67

BACK ISSUE #68

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.

“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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Ambitious new series documenting each decade of comic book history!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1960-64 & The 1980s

JOHN WELLS covers comics in the 1960-64 JFK and Beatles era: DC’s new GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE and multiple earths! LEE and KIRBY at Marvel on FF, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, and X-MEN! BATMAN’s “new look”, Charlton’s BLUE BEETLE, CREEPY #1 & more!

MODERN MASTERS: CLIFF CHIANG

Spotlights the career of CLIFF CHIANG (artist of DC’s New 52 breakout hit WONDER WOMAN series) through a career-spanning interview, and loads of both iconic and rarely seen artwork from Cliff’s personal files. There’s also an in-depth look into the artist’s work process, and an extensive gallery of commissioned pieces, many in full-color. By CHRIS ARRANT and ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON.

1960-64: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 • Out now! 1980s: (288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $41.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5 • Out now!

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THE STAR*REACH COMPANION

Complete history of the influential 1970s independent comic, featuring work by and interviews with DAVE STEVENS, FRANK BRUNNER, HOWARD CHAYKIN, STEVE LEIALOHA, WALTER SIMONSON, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, KEN STEACY, JOHN WORKMAN, MIKE VOSBURG, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, DAVE SIM, MICHAEL GILBERT, and many others, plus full stories from STAR*REACH and its sister magazine IMAGINE. Cover by CHAYKIN! MATURE READERS ONLY.

KEITH DALLAS documents comics’ 1980s Reagan years: Rise and fall of JIM SHOOTER, FRANK MILLER as comic book superstar, DC’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, MOORE and GAIMAN’s British invasion, ECLIPSE, PACIFIC, FIRST, COMICO, DARK HORSE and more!

DAN SPIEGLE: A LIFE IN COMIC ART

PLUGGED IN!

COMICS PROS IN THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY

Documents his 60-year career on DELL and GOLD KEY’S licensed TV and Movie adaptions (LOST IN SPACE, KORAK, MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER, MIGHTY SAMPSON), at DC COMICS (BATMAN, UNKNOWN SOLDIER, TOMAHAWK, JONAH HEX, TEEN TITANS, BLACKHAWK), his CROSSFIRE series for ECLIPSE, DARK HORSE’S INDIANA JONES series and more, with rare artwork, personal photos, and private commission drawings. Written by JOHN COATES.

Offers invaluable tips for anyone entering the Video Game field, or with a fascination for both comics and gaming. KEITH VERONESE interviews artists and writers who work in video games full-time: JIMMY PALMIOTTI, CHRIS BACHALO, MIKE DEODATO, RICK REMENDER, TRENT KANIUGA, and others. Whether you’re a noob or experienced gamer or comics fan, be sure to get PLUGGED IN!

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $6.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-048-9 • Ships May 2013

(104-page trade paperback) $14.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-049-6 • Ships May 2013

(128-page trade paperback with COLOR) $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-047-2 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Now shipping!

SUBSCRIBE! • Digital Editions: 3.95 each, or save with a digital subscription (digital editions are included FREE with a print subscription)! • Back Issue, Draw, Alter Ego & Comic Book Collector are now all full-color! • Lower international shipping rates! $

2013 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: (with FREE Digital Editions)

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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$50

$68

$65

$72

$150

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BACK ISSUE! (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

DRAW! (4 issues)

$30

$40

$43

$54

$78

$11.80

ALTER EGO (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

COMIC BOOK CREATOR (4 issues w/Special)

$36

$45

$50

$65

$95

$15.80

BRICKJOURNAL (6 issues)

$57

$72

$75

$86

$128

$23.70

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THE BEST OF ALTER EGO, VOL. 2

This sequel to ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE presents more vintage features from the first super-hero fanzine, begun by JERRY BAILS & ROY THOMAS. Editors ROY THOMAS and BILL SCHELLY reveal undiscovered gems from all 11 original issues published from 1961-78, including features on Hawkman, the Spectre, Blackhawk, the JLA, All Winners Squad, the Heap, an unsold “Tor” newspaper strip by JOE KUBERT, and more!