Comic Book Artist #16 by TwoMorrows Publishing

THE ATLAS/SEABOARD STORY ™

No.16 Dec. 2001

$6.95 In The U.S.

COLÓN ROVIN CHAYKIN MITCHELL AMENDOLA KUPPERBERG HAMA MEYERS

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

www.twomorrows.com TM

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

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

THE GOLDEN AGE OF CHABON PULLS LEG, ILLUSTRATION (MAGS)! CBA EDITOR DUBIOUS! You’d hardly believe that the hey day of great magazine illustration is now history, considering the recent debut of a superb pair of new periodicals devoted to the neglected art form, a medium intrinsically related—and very influential— to comic book art. First up is CBA contributor Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.’s exceptional threetimes-a-year, full-color magazine, The

Next up is editor/publisher/designer Dan Zimmer’s exquisite Illustration quarterly, which focuses on the Golden Age of illustration as well as paperback book cover painting and advertising art of the midand latter 20th century. Great reproduction throughout!

Vadeboncoeur Collection of ImageS, a gorgeous oversize celebration devoted to the great illustrators of the 1880-1920 era. With already two issues out, CBA heartily recommends this extraordinary compilation of wonderful work. Kudos to Jim for this lovely effort!

THE PASSING OF A MASTER OF COMIC BOOK ART

Gray Morrow The Vadeboncoeur Collection of ImageS, is available through Bud Plant Comic Art or directly from Jim at ImageS, Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., 3809 Laguna Ave., Palo Alto CA 94306-2629. $50 for three issues ($60 int’l). Receive one year of Illustration Magazine for $28 (or sample for $7) by sending check to Illustration Magazine, 540 Wooddell Court, Kirkwood, MO 63122.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning “fanboy-done-good” novelist, Michael Chabon, stopped by the besieged TwoMorrows booth in San Diego during the writer’s impressive (and muy enthusiastic) guest appearance at the 2001 International Comic-Con, and we were thrilled to find that our medium’s “Wonderboy” is a TwoMorrows fan! Not only did the author compliment The Jack Kirby Collector editor (and our esteemed publisher) John Morrow on our growing line of magazines, but he told Ye Ed—that’s me, Jon B.—that he enjoyed my writing style! Now, we know that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (currently a trade paperback in all bookstores) contains some of the most exquisite prose in contemporary fiction, and that Chabon has garnered the attention of such diverse mags as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, but who would’ve figured the much-celebrated scribe would so callously and heartlessly raise the hopes (and swelleth the head) of this once-humble editor. Shame on you, Michael (and many thanks!).

That is, we’re asking the artists and writers of Harvey Comics for interviews to be featured in our upcoming March issue devoted to those fun comics starring such characters as Richie Rich, Spyman, The Black Cat, and (yes!) Bee-Man! The great Joe Simon headlines the ish, as TwoMorrows gets “Simonized” for the month of March in 2002! Be there!

What follows is a press release from the Insight Studios Group: We are deeply saddened to confirm that Gray Morrow (born Dwight Graydon Morrow, 1934) passed away at his home in central Pennsylvania during the day on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2001. Although he had suffered from health problems the last few years, his death was unexpected. “Gray was both a participant in and a witness to comics history," said Insight Studios Group's Mark Wheatley, who edited Gray Morrow Visionary, published last summer. "He was a master illustrator who had the respect and friendship of his peers. His wealth of talent, which enabled him to build an astonishingly deep catalog of work in different areas of illustration, serves as a fitting legacy for his diverse career. He was also a great friend to me, the rest of Insight Studios Group, and to many other professionals and fans." Morrow most recently appeared at the Baltimore Comic-Con on Oct. 28, 2001 where he was greeted by many of his fans. He spent the day sketching and autographing his many published comic books, magazines and books. A number of his original paintings were displayed at the convention including an unpublished painting of Vampirella he had created for his own amusement. Comicon.com's Splash reported: "Morrow

was part of the generation that broke into comics in the 1950s, and he mastered a distinctive 'fantastic realist' style that was tailor-made to science-fiction and horror. Morrow worked for almost every comic publisher in the United States during his long career, and was probably best known for his lush wash work on the Warren horror books, Creepy and Eerie. He was also a regular cover artist at Warren. In the late 1970s, Morrow turned in what many say is his greatest work, on The Illustrated Roger Zelazny. He was a regular contributor to science-fiction magazines such as If and Galaxy." Gray Morrow’s cover paintings for paperback books, as well as his many posters for motion pictures established him as a popular illustrator outside of the comic book field. He also had a career in animation, with the fondly remembered Spider-Man series to his credit. "Working with Gray on Visionary was a dream come true for me," Wheatley said. "On behalf of everyone at Insight Studios, our heart-felt thoughts and prayers go out to his family, friends, and our fellows fans. And I like to think that Gray is somewhere, out there, gathering research for his next amazing painting, because I know wherever he is, he's got a pencil or a paint brush in his hand and his faithful horse near by, ready to ride."

GRAY MORROW TRIBUTE COMING IN CBA #17, JAN. 2002 With the welcome assistance of Mark Wheatley, Alan Kupperberg, and many of Gray’s friends and devotees, Comic Book Artist is honored to feature a special tribute section in our next issue, featuring remembrances, photos, art, and testimonials in honor of the kind and sensitive artist, who will be terribly missed.

V E N G E A N C E,

NUMBER 16

I N C .: T H E

A T L A S / S E A B O A R D

S T O R Y !

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

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

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

DECEMBER 2001

DEPARTMENTS: THE FRONT PAGE: LAST MINUTE BITS ON THE COMMUNITY OF COMIC BOOK ARTISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS Remembering Gray Morrow, the Golden Age of Illustration magazines, and Michael Chabon praises CBA! ......1 EDITOR’S RANT: MY MONUMENTS TO MEDIOCRITY On the mission of Comic Book Artist and the study of perhaps less-than-stellar funnybooks ..............................4 COCHRAN’S CORNER: CHECKIN’ IN WITH MICHAEL T. Columnist John Cochran chats with Mr. Monster’s maker, Michael T. Gilbert ....................................................5 CBA COMMENTARY: ALEX TOTH—’BEFORE I FORGET’ The master artist discusses his work for the shortlived comic book publisher Atlas/Seaboard ............................6

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published 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: The Grim Ghost ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

VENGEANCE, INC.: THE ATLAS/SEABOARD STORY! FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE: @!!?* In the year 2001, Our Man Fred examines the man-plant borne of pod, the “hero” that was… Morlock! ........13 GOODMAN’S SECOND ACT: VENGEANCE, INCORPORATED A short history of Atlas Comics/Seaboard Periodicals; was it a publishing house built as an act of revenge? ....14 OBJECT OF REVENGE: MAKING THEIRS MARVEL Roy Thomas on the attitude of the original “House of Ideas” on the gambit of Martin Goodman ....................20 JEFF ROVIN INTERVIEW: THE RISE & FALL OF ROVIN’S EMPIRE The former Atlas/Seaboard Editor-in-Chief on his tumultuous tenure at the comics company ............................24 ERNIE COLÓN INTERVIEW: THE QUINTESSENTIAL CARTOONIST From Richie Rich to his graphic novel masterworks, the artist discusses his long career in comics ......................44 STEVE MITCHELL INTERVIEW: WHEN ATLAS SHRUGGED Atlas/Seaboard’s first production manager, Steve Mitchell, on the ups and downs of Goodman’s comics ..........54 LARRY HAMA INTERVIEW: YEAR OF THE WULF The artist/writer/editor on his first big break—Wulf the Barbarian—and on the value of friendship ..................64 HOWARD CHAYKIN INTERVIEW: STING OF THE SCORPION One of our favorite raconteurs on his first great creation and the many incarnations of Moro Frost ..................74 SAL AMENDOLA INTERVIEW: THE FLIGHT OF PHOENIX The bittersweet saga of the artist’s experience in the House of Martin Goodman ..............................................78 JIM CRAIG INTERVIEW: IN THE HOUSE OF GOODMAN The artist on his short but prolific Atlas/Seaboard days ......................................................................................88 CREATOR ROUNDTABLE: THE ATLAS/SEABOARD EXPERIENCE Wrightson, Heath, Simonson, Milgrom, Austin, Weiss, and Staton discuss their work at Atlas/Seaboard ..........92 THE DARK AVENGER/ARTISTS AS MODELS: A LITTLE HELP FROM THEIR FRIENDS A picture essay on Pat Broderick’s “The Dark Avenger” and a Terry Austin-directed photo shoot! ..................100 RIC MEYERS INTERVIEW: THE ATLAS AGE OF COMICS The Atlas/Seaboard assistant editor remembers the promise and perhaps the truth behind the collapse ..........102 ALAN KUPPERBERG INTERVIEW: IN THE NEW HOUSE OF IDEAS Working for editor-in-chief Larry Lieber as production manager in the twilight days of Atlas/Seaboard ..........108 A CLOSER LOOK: ONE BRIEF, SHINING MOMENT Nicholas Caputo’s essay on the Ditko, Goodwin & Wood gem among the rough, The Destructor ....................118 COMICS CHRONOLOGY: THE ATLAS/SEABOARD CHECKLIST A complete listing of the entire Atlas Comics and Seaboard Periodical line-up, all 72 issues! ..........................120 ENDGAME: DAK ON THE DEMISE Atlas/Seaboard’s last assistant editor David Anthony Kraft on the final days of the Great Experiment ............127 Opposite page: Howard Chaykin’s cover art to The Scorpion #1, perhaps the best title in the Atlas/Seaboard line. From the original art, courtesy of Steve Morger. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals. Below: Detail of a dynamic panel from another fine A/S book, Wulf the Barbarian #2, penciled by Larry Hama with Klaus Janson inks. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals. Please send all letters of comment, articles and artwork 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

Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Cover Art ERNIE COLÓN, front ALAN KUPPERBERG, back Cover Color ERNIE COLÓN, front TOM ZIUKO, back Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD Logo Designer/Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King Issue Theme Song THE SPACE BETWEEN The Dave Matthews Band Visit CBA on our Website at:

www.twomorrows.com Contributors Jeff Rovin • Ernie Colón Sal Amendola • Larry Hama Steve Mitchell • Ric Meyers Howard Chaykin • Al Milgrom Alan Kupperberg • Pablo Marcos Alan Weiss • Bernie Wrightson Terry Austin • Gary Friedrich Frank Springer • Alex Toth Walter Simonson • Russ Jones Anonymous • Jim Craig Roy Thomas • Steve Skeates Arlen Schumer • John Castaglia Marcus Wai • Andrew Steven Steve Morger • Peter Wallace Mark Burbey • Bill Schelly Steve Cohen • Thomas Drucis John Hitchcock • Mark Arnold Tom Field • David Anthony Kraft Bob Wiacek • Lee Nail Daniel Tesmoingt Dedicated to the memory & art of

Gray Morrow and in celebration of the marriage of

Steve Cohen & Susan Read N

December 2001

—

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

! 3

Editor’s Rant

My Monuments to Mediocrity The valiant but too often failed efforts of Atlas/Seaboard My friend Arlen Schumer, originator of this magazine’s name and our logo designer (as well as an important comics 1 4 2 historian and nifty illustrator), often likes to bust my chops because, well, he’s a pal and 7 3 pals like to do that to one 6 another. It’s a guy thing, I 9 guess. Anyway, over time, Arlen has teased me, express8 ing his “heartfelt” amazement 5 10 at how detailed these surveys 14 11 15 are of often-lesser quality 12 comic publishers. “I am constantly astounded by your 13 16 17 ability to look at the comics schlock produced in past decades and turn it into com18 pelling history. I mean, c’mon, 20 Jon! Two issues devoted to Charlton comics?” he would 19 21 extol in mock astonishment. 22 “You are creating monuments 23 to mediocrity, Mr. Cooke, and I, for one, appreciate it.” But 24 Arlen insists that he is sincere in 27 26 his sentiments on enjoying all 25 issues of Comic Book Artist, regardless of the theme, so I Above: Alan Kupperberg drew up accept his—err—”compliments,” even if he is truly pulling my leg. But Arlen’s observations do prompt me to often ponder the this nifty key to help courageous readers identify all the Atlas/ mission of CBA and the validity of our purpose. The genesis of this Seaboard characters our man Alan magazine involves not only a passion for the comics of my youth— drew for our nifty back cover! The periodicals of widely diverse quality—but the conviction that too often first person to name them all, by aspects of comics history have been ignored or erroneously stated. sending us a postcard to the CBA Longtime readers may see the origination of CBA borne out of my editorial office in Rhode Island, desire to see a Jack Kirby Collector for the “other guys,” but, in all will receive their choice of any honesty, my anger also plays a significant role. TwoMorrows book! Don’t delay, I missed the first edition of Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs’ The post it today! Many thanks to the Comic Book Heroes on its 1985 release, but I do vividly recall picking current artist of Little Orphan up the 1997 second edition with great anticipation. I was only just Annie—the Incomparable hitting my stride as The Jack Kirby Collector’s associate editor so Jones Kupperberg—for his wonderful & Jacobs’ lucid assessment of Kirby’s Fourth World tenure (“an entire contribution! Art ©2001 Alan chapter!”) made the book a must-have and I gratefully accepted it Kupperberg. Characters ©1975 from my brother Andrew as a Christmas gift. Overall, the tome is an Seaboard Periodicals, Inc. admirable survey of the comics from the mid-1950s to the ’90s, chock full of insider bits, chatter and gossip, but it is startlingly rife with errors (a fact author Jones acknowledged in a letter to The Comic Buyer’s Guide a few years back, which included a lengthy laundry list of mistakes found along with a vow to correct them in any future edition). Sly innuendo, self-aggrandizement and just plain lousy reporting marred my enjoyment to such a degree, that I vowed that if I were to do a history, I would do be committed to do it better. I also eagerly anticipated the Atlas/Seaboard issue of Gary Carter’s Comic Book Marketplace (#77, April 2000) and was delighted especially with the complete Atlas color cover portfolio within (a reference piece I have found invaluable in prepping this issue). Now, I had heard tales about the shortlived company—specifically from a tell-all memoir by Atlas editor Jeff Rovin in a 1987 issue of The Comics 4

Journal—that Atlas head honcho Martin Goodman, the former publisher of Marvel Comics, had perhaps created this “New House of Ideas” as an act of revenge against Marvel for its dismissal of son Charles “Chip” Goodman, violating a prior agreement between Goodman and Marvel to keep Chip on board. That explained the obvious character rip-offs and appropriation of the “house look” of Stan Lee’s outfit, in my eyes anyway, and perhaps gave insight into the unfathomable and self-destructive business decisions that led the line to fold inside of a year. So, needless to say, I hoped CBM #77 would give us the dope on the “real” story behind Atlas/Seaboard. Alas, it was just an admirable survey of the 72 comic books and b-&-w magazines published by the ill-fated publisher, with no acknowledgement of Rovin’s exposé, and not a single contributor or Atlas staffer was interviewed, many of whom are readily available and willing to talk. So, I thought, there really is room for a magazine willing to examine neglected eras of comic history, one willing to seek out the living participants and hopefully give insight into the true history of the American comic book industry, a business that may have well produced many a land-fill worth of cruddy books as well as the innumerable and sincere efforts of artists, writers and editors deserving of attention and celebration. The often-valiant labors of Jeff Rovin, Larry Lieber, Howard Chaykin, Sal Amendola, Larry Hama, Ernie Colón, Steve Ditko, Pat Boyette, Mike Fleisher, and the many other contributors to Atlas Comics/Seaboard Periodicals, are perhaps a mixed bag of varying quality in the final analysis but there are gems among the rough— The Scorpion #1-2, The Grim Ghost #1-3, Wulf the Barbarian #1-2, Phoenix #1-2, Thrilling Adventure Stories #2, among others—and the story of the company’s brief lifespan is a compelling—if ultimately bittersweet—one, worthy of telling. So hats off to them and I hope you enjoy this retrospective, a monument studded with diamonds. This issue constitutes the first official monthly issue of CBA! Well, actually, we’ll be publishing ten times a year (giving Ye Ed time off for the Christmas holiday and the Summer convention seasons) and I hope you will enjoy the new, improved CBA to come! We’ll be doing less blanket coverage of themes (or, at least, such carpet bombing will be extended over multiple issues) and more single artist retrospectives (as with “The Art of Arthur Adams” celebration next time, though the ish will also contains tons of other material. We will also be getting even more eclectic in our approach, for instance covering Harvey and Archie Comics in near-future issues as well as surveys of Blacks in comics, religious funny books, and the British Invasion, delightful oddities which I hope you’ll stick around for. And if you have ideas for themes and subjects worth covering, please don’t hesitate to contact us as we’re always in the market for new ideas. Special thanks this issue to my favoritest recent interview subject, Mr. Ernie Colón, for his superb cover—penciled, inked and colored by the artist!—and especially for his candid and engaging conversation. From his beginnings as the premiere Richie Rich artist to his work as a superb graphic novelist, Ernie has been deserving of celebration and acknowledgement for far too long and it is my great pleasure to showcase his incredible talents and intelligent discourse in these pages. So, make it E.C. for me, see? Also a tip of the CBA hat to our buddy Alan Kupperberg, not only for his interview herein, but also for the unsolicited back cover art he contributed just for the heck of it! Can astute readers identify all the Atlas/Seaboard characters depicted by A.K.? First one who correctly names all the heroes gets to choose a special gift from TwoMorrows! Enjoy the Atlas/Seaboard story, folks! —Jon B. Cooke, editor COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

Cochran’s Corner

Checkin’ in with Michael T. John Cochran chats with M.T. Gilbert, Mr. Monster’s maker Since monsters are a dime a dozen, it’s a good thing Doctor Strongfort Stearn is still in there pitching, and thanks to Michael Gilbert, Doc’s pitching arm is still in top-notch shape. The news, however, is not all good. Despite the fact that Doc is still knocking them deader than they’ve ever been, Nelvana, the Canadian animation outfit, failed to exercise its option on the man known as Mr. Monster earlier this year. The good news—as any regular TwoMorrows aficionado already knows—is that a second volume of Mr. Monster: His Books of Forbidden Knowledge (officially “Volume Zero”) has been published and is available via a house ad within. Gilbert, who just finished a two-page contribution to a 9-11 relief book, adds that Mr. Monster also has a cameo in a piece he did for the upcoming book Terminal Diner. “Mr. Monster tells the story of a man searching for a square egg,” much like the one he read about as a kid in that ancient Donald Duck comic book story “Lost in the Andes,” Gilbert explains. The man’s name, by the way, is John Egge. Gilbert, who also does work for an overseas publisher of Disney comics, says that most of the comic book reading he does these days is in book form. He mentions Drawn & Quarterly, which has been reprinting those beautiful old Frank King Gasoline Alley Sundays. He also sings the praises of the new Frank Frazetta tome, Testament, and the DC Archives. The creator who breathed new life into Mr. Monster, an obscure comic book character from the late ’40s, says he has been devouring the Plastic Man Archives and just finished the new book Jack Cole and Plastic Man by art spiegelman and Chip Kidd, reviewed by yours truly last go-round. Of Cole’s suicide, Gilbert says, “You couldn’t imagine being a more successful cartoonist at that time,” adding that Cole killed himself at the height of his career. Cole had graduated from four-color to nudity, joining Hugh Hefner’s stable of cartoonists, when he shot himself. Gilbert also waxes rhapsodic about the new Reed Crandall Blackhawks Archive. “I think it’s terrific that DC is doing the Archives,” he says as he expresses the hope that Marvel also will tap into its own. Sure, there was the two-volume Marvel anthology reprint The Golden Age of Marvel Comics and the reprint of Marvel Mystery Comics #1, “But how about a 300-page collection of Steve Ditko’s mystery stories?” he asks. Or an anthology of Bill Everett’s Sub-Mariner from the ’50s when it was really “polished.” Subby was a “marvelously bloodthirsty” creation, Gilbert December 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

adds. “You could see Everett’s anger coming out in the action,” he says. Allow me to add that it would also be nice to see the old Wonder Woman comic strip collected. And how about the Dragnet strip, which was surprisingly well drawn for most of its three-year run? One wonders why a publication like the Missing Years doesn’t pick it up. Ditto Win Mortimer’s run on Superman. Gilbert also said he'd like to see Ramona Fradon's Aquaman gathered between covers and I'd second that, and add Dick Briefer's Frankenstein. And since we’re on the subject, I must express my chagrin at the astronomical cost of a subscription to one of the Spec Productions strip reprint titles, including Alley Oop, Buck Rogers and Kerry Drake. 80 smackeroos for a subscription strikes me as awfully stiff.

Below: Ye Ed’s favoritest Stan Lee & Steve Ditko mystery story collaboration has got to be “The Terror of Tim Boo Ba,” a quintessential Lee/Ditko tour de force from Amazing Fantasy #9. Pristine b-&-w repros from the original Marvel negatives from the entire run of AF do exist, making a collection of these classic tales, as MTG advocates, not only possible, but downright essential! (hinthint!) Courtesy of John Morrow. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Alex Toth

‘Before I Forget’

The master artist remembers his Atlas/Seaboard work 6

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

Page 6: The Toth written-and-drawn tale “The Vanguard” appeared in Sal Quartuccio’s Hot Stuf’ #4 (1977), though it was originally the Atlas/Seaboard-assigned (and ultimately rejected) revamp of The Scorpion. Here is the splash panel. ©2001 Alex Toth. Page 7, top: Alex’s unused cover depicting his version of The Scorpion, intended to grace #3. The Scorpion ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals. Page 7, bottom: Dynamic page from the Ric Meyers-scripted “A Job Well Done,” from Thrilling Adventure Tales #2. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals. This page, top: Splash page from the Goodwin/Toth collaboration, “Chennault Must Die!,” the Savage Combat Tales #2 story featuring the one and only appearance of Warhawk. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals. Bottom: Panels from The Vanguard story. ©2001 Alex Toth. 8

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 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

4-issue Subscriptions • PRINT: $36 US with FREE Digital Editions • DIGITAL: $15.80 ($45 First Class US • $50 Canada • $65 First Class International • $95 Priority International) Subscriptions include the double-size Summer Special

TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

THE ORIGINAL GOES DIGITAL!

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

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

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

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

#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

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

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

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

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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!

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

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

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

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

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

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

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

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

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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!

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

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A COMICS HISTORY GAME-CHANGER!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES THE

1960-64 Volume NOW SHIPPING! 1980s Volume ships in MARCH!

This ambitious new series of FULLCOLOR HARDCOVERS documents every decade of comic books from the 1940s to today! Each colossal volume presents a year-by-year account of the comic book industry’s most significant publications, most notable creators, and most impactful trends.

This ongoing project enlists TwoMorrows’ top authors, as they provide exhaustively researched details on all the major events along the comics history timeline! Editor KEITH DALLAS (The Flash Companion) spearheads the series and writes his own volume on the 1980s. Also in the works are two volumes on the 1940s by ROY THOMAS, the 1950s by BILL SCHELLY, two volumes on the 1960s by JOHN WELLS, a 1970s volume by JIM BEARD, and more volumes documenting the 1990s and 2000s. Taken together, the series forms the first cohesive, linear overview of the entire landscape of comics history, sure to be an invaluable resource for ANY comic book enthusiast! JOHN WELLS leads off with the first of two volumes on the 1960s, covering all the pivotal moments and behind-the-scenes details of comics in the JFK and Beatles era! You’ll get a year-by-year account of the most significant publications, notable creators, and impactful trends, including: DC Comics’ rebirth of GREEN LANTERN, HAWKMAN, and others, and the launch of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and multiple earths! STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY’s transformation of superhero comics with the debut of FANTASTIC FOUR, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, X-MEN, AVENGERS, and other iconic characters! Plus BATMAN gets a “new look”, the BLUE BEETLE is revamped at Charlton Comics, and CREEPY #1 brings horror back to comics, just as Harvey’s “kid” comics are booming!

NOW SHIPPING! The Best of FROM THE TOMB Compiles the finest features from the preeminent magazine on horror comics history, along with never-seen material! (192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $27.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.95 ISBN: 9781605490434 • Diamond Order Code: AUG121322

The co-founder of Filmation Studios tells all about leading the last American animation company through thirty years of innovation and fun! (288-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95 • (Digital Edition) $9.95 ISBN: 9781605490441 • Diamond Order Code: JUL121245

MATT BAKER: The Art of Glamour The fabled master of glamour art finally gets his due! (192-page HARDCOVER with 96 COLOR pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 9781605490328 • Diamond Order Code: JUN121310

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Goodman’s Second Act

Vengeance, Incorporated A history of the short-lived comics publisher, Atlas/Seaboard Editor’s Note

by Jon B. Cooke

Even though we’ve given you 16 more pages than advertised, we were unfortunate in not getting interviews with Larry Lieber, David Anthony Kraft, and Gary Friedrich. Larry and DAK declined as they were reticent to discuss days they’d rather not recall, plus lousy timing and faulty equipment cursed any for-print interview with Groovy Gary, who had wonderful things to say about Larry’s tenure as editorin-chief and scathing criticism of much of the Atlas line as initially conceived. Sorry about that, G.F., and our best to Larry and DAK.

Martin Goodman was pissed. The founder of Marvel Comics, recently retired from magazine publishing and fat with cash from the 1970 sale of the “House of Ideas” to Cadence Industries for millions of dollars, wanted to exact revenge from the new owners for their reneging on a promise to keep Martin’s ne’er-do-well son, Charles “Chip” Goodman, installed as Marvel’s editorial director. The comic book mogul’s solution? Go head-to-head with the publisher of Spider-Man, et al., and initiate all-out war in the comic book marketplace—raiding the Big Two’s talent pool; luring creators with promises of higher page rates, return of original artwork, and (gasp!) sharing character ownership; and even appropriating the “look and feel” of Stan Lee’s line of top-selling super-hero books (going as far as reviving the pre-Marvel name of Martin’s former imprint, Atlas Comics)— and the spoils of battle in the comic world would go to the victor, assuredly one, he doubtlessly hoped, with the surname Goodman.

Above: Les Daniels received this picture of Martin Goodman (For L.D.’s book, Marvel, Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics) from the publisher’s son, Charles “Chip” Goodman, who himself went on to the lofty profession as publisher of Seaboard Periodicals. This rare pic is from the earliest days of Marvel—then Timely—Comics, judging from the Captain America Comics #11 cover proof in Martin’s hands.

In the late Summer of 1974, the comics press eagerly anticipated the arrival of the upstart Atlas/Seaboard (a moniker settled on by comic book historians to distinguish it from the 1950s line of Martin Goodman, though officially it was Seaboard Periodicals, parent company of the new Atlas Comics). Inside Comics #3 (Fall 1974) speculated, “Seaboard seems to be off on the right foot and, if their plans succeed, we may be in store for a real treat.” Jim Steranko’s Mediascene #11 (Jan.-Feb. 1975) crowed, “Seaboard Periodicals has unleashed a tidal wave of events on the stunned comics industry. Quicker than you can say, ‘Jack the giant killer,’ the new publishing company… is establishing itself as a leading contender in the race for comics supremacy.” The Comic Reader #109 (Aug. 1974) gushed,

“[Martin] Goodman will undoubtedly use his contacts with distributors to Seaboard’s advantage, so this looks like a comics group that will make it, and big… We know that the line-up will be exciting as well as surprising….” Such was the hyperbole generated throughout the industry concerning the arrival of Seaboard Periodicals in 1974. Even the mainstream press caught the fever. “The forthcoming Atlas line,” wrote Philadelphia Daily News correspondent Jim Curtin (in the November 8, 1974 “Friday” section), “could herald a third Golden Age [the “Marvel Age” representing the second Golden Age according to Curtin’s thesis]. Other, smaller comics publishers have tried to challenge the Big Two (notably the Charlton line), but they have never had the expertise (and incentive) represented by Atlas. The new company might well be the Marvel of the 1970s.” Yet by mid-1975, after only ten months, 65 color comics, six b-&-w comic mags and five text periodicals, Atlas/Seaboard would be no more. The efforts of such comic luminaries as Neal Adams, Alex Toth, Steve Ditko, John Severin, Russ Heath, Wally Wood, and Mike Sekowsky (among many others) would be for naught. Only the recently-acquired Swank, a third-rate Playboy wannabe skin mag, would remain of the once-ambitious empire of Martin Goodman. What happened? How could one of the most successful comic book publishers in history, one who infused his new outfit with hundreds of thousands of dollars, attracting some of the best talent in the field with progressive, even revolutionary incentives, and—yes—with pristine contacts in the biz, fail so miserably? The state of the comics world before the arrival of Atlas/ Seaboard was tumultuous, to say the least. A dynasty was thrashed, revolt was in the air, and even the business’ moral watchdog was under attack. In response to a rapidly declining readership (a steady loss that had begun 25 years before—and would continue 25 years hence), publishers desperately sought new formats for their comics— digests, treasury editions, 100-page “super spectaculars,” black-&white magazines, king-size, giant-size, “bigger and better,” you name it!—to ferment excitement with the bored kids. But the writing was on the wall, and usurpation was in the air. One of Martin’s outrageously successful business moves during the last years of his tenure at Marvel was to trick the industry’s top company, DC Comics (then called National Periodical Publications), into committing an ultimately disastrous page-count and pricing change for the publisher of Superman, resulting in what then DC editorial director (soon to be publisher) Carmine Infantino characterized as a “slaughter” committed by Marvel upon his company. In an audaciously daring move, the House of Ideas raised the page count of its regular titles 75% from 32 to 48 pages, accompanied by a 75% price hike from 15¢ to 25¢ on its October and November 1971 cover-dated books. Immediately DC followed suit, though significantly increasing their page count 100%, from 32 to 64 pages. But within a month, in a move that sent shockwaves through the industry, Goodman immediately dropped page count back to 32 pages yet only reducing the price per book to 20¢, still a 25% price increase from two months prior. The results of Martin’s gambit? Marvel was able to give wholesalers a 50% discount off the cover price of their line, as compared to DC’s mere 40% price break. And whose titles would the retailers be more likely to push, do you think? Plus, what kid could resist getting five snappy, all-new Marvels for a buck, compared to four DCs, padded with moldy, old reprints? Also, as DC had to lock into ordering huge quantities of paper—a full year’s supply—the publisher was trapped at the 25¢, 64-page format for an entire year. (Historian COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

Carl Gafford has surmised that the Wage and Price Controls of President Richard Nixon’s Administration may have also played a factor in the DC debacle, a proposition CBA intends to examine with Gaff in the future.) Those 12 months were all the time DC’s competitor needed to come out on top and, for the first time in their decades-old rivalry, Marvel surpassed DC in sales, only rarely looking back in the quarter-century passed since that fateful year. The DC supremacy on the comics racks ended in 1972 after an astonishing 35-year reign, a dynasty suddenly in disarray, scrambling to get back on top, while Martin Goodman sat very prettily indeed, ensconced in his new role as the King of Comics in this New Marvel Age. But his role as Mogul Supreme would prove somewhat shortlived, as Martin took the money and walked (after serving as a consultant during an extended transitional period, leaving in early 1974), selling Marvel Comics—and the highly profitable sister company, Magazine Management, as well—though, on his departure, he elicited a promise from new owner Cadence to retain Martin’s son Chip as editorial director of the comics line. But in an apparent power move by Martin’s nephew-by-marriage, the legendary Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee, Chip had his executive washroom key confiscated and the boss’ son was unceremoniously booted from the company, onto the pavement of Madison Avenue and out of a job. Perhaps Martin felt betrayed and began to plot the destruction of his former company and a return to greatness for the Goodmans. Mediascene reported, “Obviously angered by the bizarre treatment accorded his son, Martin Goodman re-entered the comics field with an operation that has come to be referred to as ‘Vengeance, Inc.’ With his previous contacts, a sound financial status, an infallible business sense sharpened by a lifetime in publishing, and a reputation for fair play, Goodman’s position looks implacable.” Rancor and turbulence also prevailed among the creative rank December 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

and file of the comics business in those days. While the Academy of Comic Book Arts (ACBA) was established to be a kind of funnybook Motion Picture Academy—a self-congratulatory organization focused on banquets and awards—it quickly served as a soapbox for the Angry Young Men in the industry, primarily Neal Adams, Archie Goodwin, and their ilk of educated, informed and gutsy artists and writers, self-confident and filled with a strong sense of self-worth, attitudes sadly absent from the field for decades. If the shameless ill treatment of such as the poverty-stricken team of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman (the character that turned the industry into an undeniable success) by the very publisher they put on top would inform the ’70s workers, it was, “We’d better look out for what’s ours.” It was time to demand equity and respect from the publishers. (Jeff Rovin recalled, “I can’t tell you how many times Martin would listen to some of the things Neal Adams was saying and mutter, ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’”) Topping the creators’ agenda was a demand for publishers to return original artwork to artists as only reproduction rights of the pages had been sold to the companies (since the latter paid no sales tax on the material). Also, griping increased about the lack of health benefits and pensions, absence of any royalty or creator-ownership policies (as had been typical in book publishing for decades), and— the perennial complaint—low page rates. Though the phrase “workfor-hire” had yet to become commonplace, that condition permeated the entire industry. The only exceptions to these unsavory working conditions were in the penny-ante world of underground comix and with such unprofitable hybrids as witzend, Wally Wood’s creatorowned magazine. In the age of unprecedented political activism in the United States, the rights of the actual producers of comic book fantasies had finally come to the attention of the business. The erosion of the dreaded Comic Code Authority’s influence

on the business was welcomed by many creators who hoped to open up the venue of mainstream comics to more adult approaches. The popularity of Zap Comix and other undergrounds, as well as the prevalence of the medium in places such as National Lampoon, proved that young adults could—and would— buy comics so long as the books spoke to them. Jim Warren’s circumvention of the Code—by producing a line of black-&-whites (called “magazines,” as distinguished from the four-color periodicals deemed “comic books”) chipped away at the moral watchdog’s power, and the revisions initiated by Stan Lee’s infusion of drug themes into Amazing Spider-Man (sans the ubiquitous Code cover stamp) proved it was the publishers who were starting to call the shots, not the once-omnipotent censors. The conservatism of the Wertham-Eisenhower era was over; a new, decadent, permissive sensibility had taken hold. Death, decay, and despair permeated the content of comics; gone were the happy-go-lucky days of Batmania and the high-camp heroes. Now super-heroes gained relevance by embracing trendy causes and their sidekicks became self-indulged drug addicts. The Code, once a force feared and obeyed, had become simply irrelevant by the 1970s. It was into this strange, alien environment that the fledgling Atlas/Seaboard was born: An industry in flux, a society in transition, and the status quo in disarray. Jeff Rovin, editor of the majority of comic titles in the beginning, wrote in The Comics Journal #114 (Feb. 1987), “Seaboard opened its doors on June 24, 1974, undertaking an ambitious publishing program that included not only a dozen color comics, but a line of black-&-white horror comics, confession magazines, a monster magazine, puzzle magazines, a game-show book, and an innovative Gothic story title [Gothic Romances].” As the comic line’s editors, Martin hired Rovin, a former DC and Warren staffer (who got the job through an ad in The New York Times), and Marvel writer/artist Larry Lieber, a man Rovin said, “Martin Goodman had long-wanted to transplant from out of the shadow of Larry’s brother, Stan Lee.” Initial reports stated that the company was set to produce eight color comic titles, and, according to The Comic Reader, “a number of the books are established characters—in fact, one book is planned as a 100page 60¢er with reprints from a former comics group.” (Apparently this was a reference to Tower Comics’ 1960s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents which Rovin sought— unsuccessfully—to license.) The number of books would eventually grow to 23 color titles, all told. The Atlas Comics line was populated with artists and writers attracted by the innovative approach the publisher was taking. “Goodman’s David and Goliath strategy is insidiously simple and outrageous— possibly even considered dirty tactics by the competition—such as higher page rates, artwork returned to the artist, rights to the creation of an original character, and a certain amount of professional courtesy,” noted Mediascene. Some creators were offered the highest pages rates in the history of the business. Such “dirty tactics” would motivate policy changes with at least one publisher. Carmine Infantino issued a memo on August 13, 1974 (a mere two months after the opening of the Atlas/Seaboard office) in an obvious attempt to counter the appeal of Goodman’s largess and stem the flow of defections. After mentioning a new program of bonus checks, rate increases, return of artwork, and reprint fees, the memo stipulates that the added benefits apply “only to artists, colorists, and writers who are currently working for us and who submit their work exclusively to us… effective with issues scheduled to go on sale during October, 1974,” the month before readers would see the release of the first wave of Atlas Comics. Soon, Marvel would also return original artwork, indicating a shift in the status quo due to the Atlas influence. The threat of talent raids against the Big Two was also real enough. Some contributors recall Howard Chaykin standing in front of Marvel’s 625 Madison Avenue digs, directing artists to literally go around the corner to the 717 Fifth Avenue home of Atlas Comics. Mediascene reported, “Despite denials by both Marvel and [DC], Seaboard’s entrance into the comic arena is having a staggering effect on the business. Audacious ‘raids’ in the competition’s bullpens have resulted in Seaboard’s rapidly assembling a staff of more defectors joining their ranks on almost a daily basis.” As for the Atlas line’s content, Rovin initially sought recognizable, licensed characters (such as the aforementioned Tower super-hero group) and the editor pursued pulp characters The Avenger and The Spider; movie creature Godzilla and his Toho monster brethren; TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker; and the Charlton Heston film, The Omega Man. Martin Goodman deemed all the licenses to be too expensive and suggested a Timely-worn tradition to swipe. The Spider became The Scorpion, Kolchak COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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became The Cougar, and The Omega Man became Planet of Vampires. Why pay when you can steal? Larry Lieber told Roy Thomas in Alter Ego Vol. 3, #2, “When I went there, Martin put out two kinds of books… color comics and… black-&-white comics like Warren and Marvel. Now, I knew nothing about black-&-white comics, right? My only experience was in the color comics. And Jeff Rovin came from Warren, and he knew nothing about color comics. And Martin unfortunately put Jeff in charge of all the color comics, and put me in charge of the black-&white books.… It was an unfortunate thing, and basically what happened was that Jeff’s books didn’t turn out so well.” Sadly, nor did Larry’s books or any Atlas/Seaboard title. Whatever their fate, Rovin was looking to produce unconventional books and stretch the limits of the Comics Code. He wrote, “My own ambition from the start was to do characters that were a bit outré and experimental… somewhat more hardbitten and schizophrenic than the average super-hero.” To that end, controversial writer Michael Fleisher, who had gained notoriety for his ultra-violent “Spectre” series in Adventure Comics, was brought on board by Rovin to create and script a number of books, many permeated with death and despair with the “heroes” acting very villainously. The Brute (a Hulk knock-off dictated by Martin) kills a teenage boy; Morlock 2001 consumes a little blind girl; The Tarantula becomes a human-spider who eats people; The Grim Ghost labors for Satan himself, sending victims to Hell; and Ironjaw hacks at foes and disabuses women on an Earth of the far-flung future. Not that such dark storytelling was the exclusive purview of Atlas or Fleisher, as weird wars, weird mysteries, weird worlds, weird Westerns, and even weird humor comics were selling like hotcakes over at the competition. But the “universe” of Michael Fleisher was an especially black one, and one that consistently caused problems between Atlas and the Comics Code Authority. “…The Code and I fought over literally every magazine Atlas published, starting with the very first, Ironjaw #1… and I didn’t win a single dispute with the Code.” In fact, Code Administrator Len Darvin complained to Martin that (according to Rovin’s notes of July 1974), “‘[If] this bastard [Rovin] tries tactics like this, I’ll bury him.’ If not, he’ll talk to MG and have me kicked out.” Other Rovin titles had less ominous tones and some were downright fun. The best include Howard Chaykin’s The Scorpion, Larry Hama’s Wulf the Barbarian, and Rovin and Sal Amendola’s Phoenix (and even Hama and Pat Broderick’s Planet of Vampires, bloody as it was, held an exciting premise). Targitt, Tiger-Man and The Cougar rounded out Rovin’s even dozen color books (in addition to four b-&-w titles). For his part, Larry Lieber focused on the color comics anthology titles—Westerns, crime, war, horror, humor, with a single superhero title being an exception. The Destructor, arguably the most handsome title of the entire bunch, was a book with impeccable credentials, sporting an Archie Goodwin script, Steve Ditko pencils, and Wally Wood inks. During the shared tenure with Rovin, Lieber would edit seven titles. The black-&-white mags helmed by Rovin were a mixed bag of the excellent and the banal, with the notable Thrilling Adventure Stories #2 topping the heap, featuring an extraordinary berth of tales with art by Toth, Severin, Heath, Walter Simonson, and Jack Sparling. (No evidence exists, despite Larry’s statement above, that he worked on the black-&-white titles as all are credited to fellow editor Rovin.) Despite this innovative start, Atlas/Seaboard was soon besieged from within. Martin increasingly insisted that the comics line resemble Marvel’s in content and design, and some of Rovin’s contributors were, according to the editor, shot down by the publisher, among them complaints that two of the line’s artistic stand-outs, Chaykin and Ernie Colón, were ill-suited for their respective books. Martin would especially interfere with cover designs and executions. “As it turned out,” Rovin wrote, “Covers proved to be the bloodiest battleground at Atlas.” The bell tolled for Rovin when, the editor later wrote, “Martin became more and more disgruntled as he read more and more of my comics. And what he decided, without having received a single sales report, was that they didn’t look and read enough like Marvel Comics. December 2001

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“‘That’s right,’ I remember telling him with a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. ‘Why should they look like Marvels?’ “‘Because Marvels sell.’ “‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘but that’s because the characters have had 10 years to establish themselves, not to mention the newsstand clout Marvel has developed—’ “‘Look,’ he snapped, ‘I don’t want to argue about this. Just do it.’ To which Martin established a hefty warchest and told Larry and me to go out and hire away as many Marvel people as we could. Larry seemed disappointed, but I was frankly appalled….” Whatever promise Atlas held for the industry quickly evaporated before a rash of internal second-guessing and executive caveats that may have doomed the still-infant company. But what may have sealed the fate of the fledgling outfit was the presence of one man, Charles “Chip” Goodman, the son of Martin. When Chip served as an executive at Marvel, editor/ writer and Stan Lee’s right-hand man, Roy Thomas, became acquainted with him. “I don’t think that he knew a lot about comics, but he tried hard,” Roy said in Comic Book Artist #2 (Summer 1998). “One of the problems was just being Martin Goodman’s son. I don’t think that Martin respected Chip very much—he put Chip in charge but would treat him with less than benign contempt in front of other people. Martin was a little cruel sometimes.” In fact, the complex relationship between father and son was explored in a very public forum, Playboy magazine, albeit in the form of fiction. Atlas contributor Gary Friedrich also worked for the “Men’s Sweat Division” of Magazine Management, a division of Goodman’s first publishing concern which boasted such luminous staffers as Godfather author Mario Puzo and humorist Bruce Jay Friedman. Gary told CBA #13 (May 2001), “Ivan Prashker wrote [a story called]… ‘The Boss’s Son’ and it was about Martin and Chip. He sold it to Playboy.” A reliable source indeed confirmed that Prashker (who reportedly wrote the story because he was annoyed at Chip, an incompetent executive in the source’s opinion) was indeed writing about the Goodmans. The story appeared in the February 1970 edition of Playboy, and Thomas remembers it as “a thinly disguised version of Magazine Management. There was a Martin Goodman character who had two sons (which was apparently a true situation), one who dutifully stayed there and tried to help run

Above: The only photograph of Charles “Chip” Goodman was this 1975 candid shot taken by Alan Kupperberg showing Chip in conversation with the Seaboard Periodicals secretary. Courtesy of Alan Kupperberg.

Below: Announced but never appearing, Steve Ditko was scheduled to write and draw a super-hero strip called “Wrecage.” Below is Ditko’s rendition featured in Mediascene #11. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

the company but was abused constantly and called an idiot; the other just turned his back on the father and that was the son that the father worshiped and tried to get back.” An excerpt from “The Boss’s Son”: “‘You want to play and get away with it, you pay, you pay,’ Louis said. ‘What the hell makes you think you’re so different you don’t have to pay?’ “What made him think he was different? A good question. “Looking for it, Dave spotted the photograph of his brother, Leo, on his father’s desk. Leo was a physicist who lived on the West Coast, or as far away as he could get from Louis, yet the old man loved and respected Leo more than anyone else in the world. “‘All right, so I can’t figure out everything in advance,’ Dave said after a while. ‘All right, so I don’t have a big brain like Leo.’ “‘Leo? Leo?’ Louis repeated. And it was obvious that he resented Dave’s even daring to compare himself with his older brother. “Stung by his father’s tone, Dave couldn’t contain himself. ‘What the hell does Leo ever do for you? Does he write you? Call

you? Does he know you’re living, for God’s sake?’ “‘And what do you do for me?’ Louis asked with a sigh. “‘I at least try to please you; only, the harder I try, the more you seem to resent me.’ “The old man winced, and Dave felt good knowing he’d struck a sore spot.” The short story writer worked for Magazine Management when the story was sold to Playboy. Prashker was away on vacation in Europe when the issue hit the stands and he dreaded the reception by Martin Goodman upon his return to New York, as word prevailed in the office that the tale was indeed about the Goodmans. What was the publisher’s actual reaction to Prashker? The author was rewarded with his own editorship of a magazine as Martin was apparently more impressed that one of his staffers was published in the premier men’s magazine than with any insult made to his son.

Atlas/Seaboard staffers almost universally complain that Chip was an incompetent publisher, out of his league as the official head of Seaboard Periodicals. Even back in his Marvel days, people would wonder at his acumen. “The most idiosyncratic situation we ran into in the early ’70s was… when [Chip] was briefly in charge of the company,” Roy Thomas told CBA. “It was a Western cover and Chip sent back word that he wanted all the bad guys in the story inside and on the cover to be wearing animal masks. We asked why and he said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’ll sell better.’” “Increasingly, [Martin] would throw it on the desk with greater disgust than the last time, and finally, Chip would get involved,” Jeff Rovin said, “and however gruff Martin was, at least he had the background, he’d earned the right to be gruff. Chip was a real lightweight in that sense, and I just couldn’t take it from him. He would be dismissive of work, but have no suggestions on what to do better. It was so frustrating that at one point, Ric [Meyers], my assistant, went into the bathroom and cut off all his hair, he was just so frustrated. I felt that was really a defining moment, because my God, look what’s happening to us!” In short order, because of Martin’s demand to “Marvelize” the entire color comics line and the increasingly nonsensical interference of Chip, Jeff Rovin resigned his position as Atlas/Seaboard editor-inchief in January 1975, after Martin demanded that the editorial department hire only Marvel writers and artists. Rovin effectively dropped the entire 20+ titles onto Larry Lieber’s desk. Larry told Comic Book Marketplace #73 (Nov. 1999), “When Jeff left, they gave me the color comics, but it was too late and Martin lost too much money… Rovin got the best artists he could who were available who weren’t working for Marvel or DC, so the comics all had a different look, and he paid [the artists] all very big salaries… then when he left, I had to reduce the rates, which wasn’t an easy task…” In following Martin’s orders to “Marvelize” the line, Larry relied on an old Marvel staffer to help out, writer Gary Friedrich, who told CBA, “Larry called me up and said, ‘Help.’ 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 enterprise. I didn’t succeed at it but I made a hell of a lot of money at it for a year or so. 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. 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.” The Seaboard ship began sinking fast and panic set in. Radical midstream changes took place not only with the Atlas/Seaboard staff, but also in the books themselves: Morlock 2001 was renamed Morlock and the Midnight Men, Phoenix became almost a generic Marvel hero named The Protector, The Scorpion was ripped from the 1930s milieu and made a skin-tight costumed contemporary hero (drawn in faux Kirby style), jettisoning any of Chaykin’s charming approach. Readers were baffled at the changes and left in droves as they quickly grew disinterested due to an increasingly erratic publication schedule. Former Atlas/Seaboard assistant editor David Anthony Kraft told the fanzine Deadspawn #1 (July 1975) that the books were “reputedly selling as low as 13%… which is of course far below the 25-30% necessary for bare survival in [1975]’s comics market.” Even the editor questioned the quality of the titles. Lieber told CBM, “I don’t know that I ever felt the product was that good. They were different in a sense, but they weren’t around that long.” The end appeared inevitable to editor Larry Lieber, only he didn’t know exactly when the publisher would close its doors. “Near the end,” Larry told Alter Ego, “Atlas was maybe going to go out of business, and I got called on jury duty. At that time, I used to sometimes get anxiety attacks, and I used to take Valium to prevent the attack. So when I had to go down to the jury, I called up the company and I said, ‘Are we still in business?’ And the secretary said, ‘I don’t know; Chip hasn’t made up his mind yet,’ or ‘Mr. Goodman COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Right: Letterer Shelly Leferman briefly worked as Atlas/Seaboard’s production manager, according to David Anthony Kraft, onetime A/S assistant editor. May 12, 1975 photo courtesy of and by Alan Kupperberg. Note the rack of Atlas Comics behind Shel.

hasn’t made up his mind yet; just keep in touch with us and you’ll find out.’ “So here I’m going—it’s like a Woody Allen thing—I’m going on jury duty, I’m nervous to begin with, and I’m trying to keep calm, and during a break on the jury I call up and the secretary says, ‘Tomorrow morning, before you go on jury duty, or after, will you stop up and see Chip?’ Now, I get off the phone; she hasn’t told me what it’s about, but I figure, ‘I bet this means they’re going out of business.’ So I start getting very nervous, and I go back in the jury box, and a policeman is testifying, and as he starts talking, I’m so panicky about going out of business that I think I’m going to scream. I just remember being there, thinking, ‘I don’t want to scream and cause a mistrial.’ And sure enough, I was right. When I went back there to see Chip, he said Atlas was going out of business.” Larry was treated well in the end. “They gave me very nice severance pay,” he told CBM, but some others were not so fortunate, as sadly, a rash of art thefts added insult to injury. Superlative comic stories by Walter Simonson, Terry Austin and Russ Heath, as well as covers by Neal Adams were only a few of the reported missing works. Artist Terry Austin said, “Walt and I walked to the Atlas/Seaboard offices and asked for our artwork back. My recollection is that the receptionist denied that the company had ever published comics.” What went wrong? In his final analysis, Jeff Rovin wrote, “Whatever aesthetic contributions may have died aborning, Atlas did manage to accomplish one thing above all. It has come to stand as the text-book example of how not to run a comics company.” But not everyone subscribes to the “revenge against Marvel” theory. Gary Friedrich told CBA, “I never really felt that [Martin] 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.” However brief its existence, Atlas/Seaboard did have a lasting impact on the industry. “Miraculously, Martin and I did manage to come together on two matters of some significance,” Jeff Rovin wrote. “One was an ownership/profit sharing contract for artists and writers on any character(s) they created, and the other was the return of all artwork. Neither of these were being practiced at the time (though Warren did return some artwork to freelancers), and Martin grudgingly agreed to do so when he realized that that kind of arrangement, coupled with high page rates (we were then paying record sums to most contributors) was a means of getting talent to work for us. Today, a whole bunch of comics companies claim to have been the first to initiate concessions of this kind, but the fact of the matter is that Atlas got the ball rolling long before…. We may have screwed up when it came to implementing parts of the program (for example, a lot of artwork was stolen before we could return it, and none of the characters remained in print long enough for anyone to benefit), but at least we pointed the way in terms of creators’ rights….” Though by no means an man adored by his employees, not everyone has a harsh opinion of Martin Goodman. Some who worked for him back in the Magazine Management days called him grouchy but fair—and sometimes quite kind. “Martin Goodman treated me better than anyone I ever December 2001

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worked for,” Gary Friedrich explained. “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… I worked [at Magazine Management on staff]. 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.” In the following pages you will dwell deeper into the strange and sad story of Atlas/ Seaboard, a company that desperately failed to live up to its promise, but one not without its share of bright spots. CBA has spoken with many of the players but Larry Lieber and Gary Friedrich are represented only in this article (hence the extensive quoting), and we certainly did miss other important contributors (such a Russ Jones, Gerry Conway, Frank Thorne, Neal Adams, and— of course—Steve Ditko, among others) due to space constraints. But the two most important people in the short history of the company are sadly gone, their stories untold. Martin Goodman retired to Florida after this last publishing foray, reportedly passing away in the late 1980s. Chip Goodman continued as publisher of Swank magazine for some years, working in the publishing field until his untimely death approximately seven years ago. He was reportedly only “about” 55. For all the hope given to Atlas/Seaboard upon its birth, the company was very quickly forgotten after its demise. Without exception, none of the characters have ever been revived, a sad legacy indeed. But some of us remember….

Below: Misspelling notwithstanding, the impending line of Atlas Comics makes the press as evidenced by this “Friday” section of the Philadelphia Daily News, November 8, 1974. Dig the Allen Milgrom illo! Courtesy of the invaluable John Castaglia, who shipped this rarity to CBA at the last possible minute. ©1974 Philadelphia Daily News.

Target of Revenge

Making Theirs Marvel Roy Thomas on Marvel’s reaction to the “New House of Ideas” Below: Let us never forget that, for better or worse, it was through the efforts of Roy Thomas, in retaining for Marvel the comic book licensing rights to Robert E. Howard’s Conan, that the barbarian craze swept comicdom by the mid1970s. One of Atlas/Seaboard’s entries into that genre was the oddly compelling Ironjaw, created by Michael Fleisher and drawn by the ever-capable Pablo Marcos. Courtesy of the artist, here’s Pablo’s cover art to Ironjaw #4. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Roy Thomas is not only one of the best writers ever to grace a comic book page, but a hell of an editor, too. He served as Marvel’s editorin-chief during an especially fertile period in the early ’70s (of which we interviewed Roy about in CBA #2 and #13) and he is able to give us an intimate view of the goings-on in the comics industry of 25+ years ago. While still involved in comics as well as film, Roy currently is CBA associate editor and full-editor of his on-going (now eighttimes-a-year) mag, Alter Ego, also published by TwoMorrows. Roy was interviewed via phone in early October 2001.

CBA: Did Martin Goodman offer you a job as editor at Atlas? Roy: I don’t know if he did personally, but Chip and I went out to dinner at least once. CBA: Did Chip make you an offer? Roy: Yeah. This was not at the very beginning of the company; this was after it had been going a little while. That was one aspect that made the offer even less attractive. CBA: You might have had to replace somebody? Roy: I’m not exactly certain, at this stage. It might’ve been if Larry Lieber was the editor from the beginning. Maybe this was when Jeff Rovin left. I just don’t recall. I just know it was an early stage. I have this feeling Jeff was still going to be there, because while I’d never had a problem with Jeff, I just felt that, he being rather territorial— and I can be territorial myself—it was going to be a bad situation to step into. Plus, despite what Chip told me at that dinner—that Martin was absolutely determined to make Atlas last at least two years—but, how long did it last? A little over a year? First of all, there wasn’t that much job security. It was one thing for Larry to leave Marvel, because, as Stan’s brother, he could leave on decent terms. But if I left, it would’ve really been bad. So I just didn’t see it as being a particularly great career move at that stage, so I thanked Chip, and that was about it. CBA: Jeff seemed to recall that perhaps the money offered wasn’t good enough, and you might have wanted a contract. Roy: I don’t know if I would’ve gone any way, but when I was feeling them out, I wanted a guarantee, and the idea of two years… I remember talking it over with my first wife, and we thought about the possibilities. The salary was one thing, but I don’t recall specifics being discussed at that stage. The salary offered couldn’t have been much more than $30,000. I would have wanted a guarantee to be employed for several years from Martin personally. If the company would’ve gone under—which probably would’ve happened—and whether I would’ve been able to collect that, who knows? I don’t think they ever came across with any monetary offer, but that was my bottom line,. The two-year aspect didn’t really interest me very much. Now, five years, I might’ve taken a flyer, because fans would forget, and DC and other companies were around and so forth, so I might’ve considered it then. We didn’t get that far, I just know that was going to be my deal. CBA: DC apparently took greater exception to the existence of Atlas than did the publisher Atlas tried to copy, Marvel Comics. Roy: Hard to believe! CBA: If a consumer were to grab a comic off the stands really quick, they COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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could very easily mistaken an Atlas comic for a Marvel. Did it bother you that Atlas swiped not only content, but the look? Roy: Yeah, sure. Not only was Stan annoyed in particular, but all of us were! Stan was very upset about Messr the whole look of the Atlas line, that they were trying to Seabo s. Martin 305 E look like Marvel. Of course, they were getting artists 717 5 ard Public and Charl Apt. . 86th St es Go and writers from both companies, but they were still New Y th Avenue ations odman New Y 18K-West . ork, o N.Y. trying to look more like a Marvel comic than a DC, S ept. rk, N.Y. 10022 Dear 10028 7, 19 which made sense, as Marvel had become the industry Sirs: 74 leader at that point. They were using bodies from As pr least omised, I both am as it stand writing t companies—and from Warren—and trying to hit all Since s now y o u fel -- wi o inform to of bases, but Marvel harder than others. Stan could y t th re gards ou of the reaso fer the k , understa understand his own brother, Larry, going to make d to wo for t ns too comind of con ndably, t rking ecision I h for S his own way out from Stan’s shadow, but Stan Lee was e he next t plicated tract I what Seaboa eaboa ave made- at rd. to yo ntirely hahree years to go int as lookin rd was st wasn’t that way about anybody else. I was g for ursel o, I ill t . I w ppy a p , v h r o o b e a e o u o s a v f l u n e e n d t authorized, and I did tell a number of people, from rred to t and to Jef the situ be hypoc signed a d for variew a comp Don McGregor being one of them, “Listen, if of my Marvel entake a chan f Rovin, ation; as ritical if contract ous other any crous main req irely. Ho ce with a at least I’ve ment I preten with Marv you’re going to go over to Atlas and work for Marve refusing uirements wever, no new comp 49% of me ioned bef ded that el them because the rates are higher, just be area l will ma t sign it for a con t only di any, where would reaore both I assured there’s no safety line you can come most in a year ke it poss , since I tract (so d Marvel m I would lly have other b i e o t a back to Marvel on, necessarily.” It’s not like compa r two, so ble for me ll but wr hat I wou et virtuale away l m n o ly al d e i t t t e e o S h h s t i a . i m ill ng th v we’d say we weren’t ever going to hire them at wo ove entiret), but wo e felt lu l in th , I must a u dir l l k y d e i d n o d, if back, but we weren’t going to go out of our be im illeg comics possi ut of the g for yo ble w N at Ma al relatioindustry n u are int e way! In fact, given a choice between two w Y orkin g for ork might rvel in t ns betwee ow with r erested, people—although I didn’t say this—Stan has n both decihe coming n Marvel egards to that certa would’ve probably (and I couldn’t have if yo o obligat de to abr weeks. Un and DC ma unethical in matter blamed him) opted for, or wanted me to strai u still w ions to me ogate the der those y make me and pote s brewing i ght c n omic- shed it. whatever, contract- circumsta persona no tially opt for, somebody that hadn’t gone over Again nces, Right book - and n g I wou , w , M n o t l a o r h w d rvel rata w, ho k exc ank y hile I hop there. When Archie Goodwin was working then and I w e o o e e p u f b v t y e e v c o r f e o u rea à là f , my or Ma ry mu u at Atlas, it was “Archie who?” at Marvel contr ree to wo rse Seabo rvel out. Infantino,lize that ch for ev r a u ard k c n t t f i o allow l 197 back then. I was authorized to tell him chang Best of l to raise I was bar erything s for r you, 7. uck w over e the g a t n i h o n e i i i that if he tried stealing any more of our t n n yea a rs. I face of t th Seaboar nte at Ma g in good hese past he co since people (which was making a strong mics d, which wrvel, howe faith, an few weeks, rely in d ve i wish statement, but that’s using the vernacuI cou dustry mo th or with r it may not simpl and r y ld ha ve af e than an out me wilhave worke lar of the time), Archie wasn’t going to ythin forde d l pro g d b ab th to be work for Marvel again later on. He a par at’s happely t of was the only person who was singled it al ned l. out. It was a moment of pique in Yours truly , Stan’s case, and it was kind of ignored. I don’t think I ever told it to Archie, and if I did, not very seriRoy T homas ously, because I knew it would die down. I guess Archie got identified with calling a couple of people later on, and for some reason, that became more personal with Stan, because Archie had worked there at Marvel, than it was with, say, Larry or Jeff Rovin. CBA: That policy seems patently unfair. Most contributors are freelancers, and they should be able to go wherever they want. To have any kind of retribution coming from Marvel seemed ludicrous. Obviously, there was anger about it, right? that if somebody was freelancing for Marvel, Stan would Roy: It wasn’t anger, it’s not retribution… ask them to work pretty exclusively for Marvel—even if they didn’t CBA: Well, if Archie was threatened that he was not going to be have anything in writing—and in return we’d bend over backwards Above: Courtesy of Jeff Rovin and able to work at Marvel… to see that they always had work. One time I had to give the beginwith the permission of the letter Roy: The Archie incident was a little bit of anger, to some extent. ning of a plot to Sal Buscema on a Sunday evening over the phone writer, here’s a recreated facsimile But again, it’s not retribution; it’s simply saying, “We’re not going to of the Roy Thomas missive in which with Steve Englehart, who didn’t get one to him earlier because the then-Marvel editor-in-chief hire you back.” In other words, it wasn’t like anybody was saying, Steve felt Marvel didn’t have any legal obligation to Sal. But we felt, respectfully declines an editorial “We’re going to do anything bad to you, and set you outside, we “Gee, Sal’s going to lose a couple of days of work and money.” position at Atlas/Seaboard. As simply won’t hire you back,” and any company, I think, has a CBA: So you made up for it in a non-official way. far as the cited “illegal relations perfectly reasonable right to say they’re not going to hire you back Roy: Yeah. Marvel had guarantees for quite a few years, from the between Marvel and DC,” we’ll if you go work for the competition. I don’t see that as being unfair late ’50s and all the way through the ’70s when I was there, and I have to quiz our fellow editor at all. think it went on for some period beyond that. I don’t know when it about that in a future ish! CBA: I would think it would be unfair unless there’s a guarantee petered out or if Stan said the same thing to Marv and other people of work to support the freelancer. Jim Warren wanted Tom Sutton to afterwards. I know it was a very strong feeling from the late ’60s sign a exclusivity agreement, stating that Tom couldn’t work for anythrough at least the period when I was there. That’s why when I one else, and Tom said, “Well, you better guarantee me a living!” took Captain Marvel from Don Heck to give it to Gil Kane, Don Roy: That’s basically what Stan always tried to do, in a very inforimmediately received another assignment, because we felt we owed mal way. We had an unofficial policy going for quite a few years, t him, even though Don was officially a freelancer. We did that December 2001

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This page: Two blatant attempts by Atlas Comics to swipe Marvel’s thunder: Both the revised Scorpion (above, in a cover art detail by Jim Craig from #3) and the Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko/Wally Wood character, The Destructor (right inset, in a panel detail from #2) were assuredly trying to duplicate the success of the Amazing SpiderMan, the latter even using Spidey’s co-creator/first artist, Steve Ditko. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

whenever humanly possible. Very few people lost many days of work, and whenever possible, no days of work, if we told them we wanted them to work exclusively for us. But Stan didn’t say that to everybody. CBA: There was a period when there were exclusive DC artists, and exclusive Marvel artists, and that’s how they existed. Roy: I think DC did the same kind of thing, more or less. CBA: Did you take specific exception to the swipes? Jeff Rovin said he was given a dictum by Martin Goodman to swipe the Hulk, and so they came out with the Brute. Roy: Except for a little bit of anger against Archie, Stan reserved most of his feelings for Martin Goodman, though not for Chip so much. There had been a lot of bad blood between Stan and Martin, and of course, that only got worse especially after Stan took control of the company and Chip was forced out a year or so after Martin left. CBA: While Martin was at Marvel, was he a hands-on guy, going went over the artwork on any given day? Jeff Rovin said that every morning, he’d have a meeting with Martin to show all the finished artwork. Roy: No, Martin didn’t do that at Marvel, with Stan, except he did approve the covers. He’d reject some, send back complaints about Gene Colan or Jack Kirby’s covers. I think that one we used on Alter Ego #6 may have been rejected by Goodman. There was another with faces on the front of the cover, and it was so vague I couldn’t even argue when he sent back a note saying, “I don’t know what the hell this is!” I don’t think he paid too much attention to the insides of the comics, he might’ve caught a glance at it once in a while, but we didn’t have meetings with Martin, and neither did Stan at that point. Of course, he trusted Stan more than he was likely to trust anybody else, because he’d never trusted Chip in the first place that much, so why was he going to trust Jeff Rovin or Larry? None of them had a track record like Stan did. CBA: That’s an obvious part of the equation that was missing from Atlas/Seaboard’s appropriation of Marvel: You’re missing Stan Lee! Roy: You didn’t even have me there, let alone Stan! CBA: A rumor is that one of the reasons Martin Goodman started Atlas Comics was as an act of revenge against Marvel. Roy: People say that’s not true, but I don’t think there was any doubt that it was at least partly an act of revenge. CBA: Were you cognizant that Martin was angry about Marvel? Roy: I didn’t talk to him personally, and Chip was never really going to admit that, but I mean, all you have to do is look at what happened. I don’t remember all the details, except that there was evidently a deal that John Romita talked about in an interview for Alter Ego #9, that there was some sort of deal where Chip was supposed to take over for at least a couple of years or more, some sort of guarantee when Martin stepped down a few years after Perfect Film bought the company. They got rid of Chip much more quickly than that, and all I know that happened—because I was not cognizant of it at the time, or privy to it—was Stan using attorneys and things that could go between himself and Martin, I found out later—not from Stan so much, as by other means, through Gil Kane and other people who had some of the same lawyers at one time or another—that he had gone to them, and Stan basically indicated he

could handle the company better than Chip. He wasn’t necessarily aiming at Chip as such, but I think there might’ve been some bad blood between the two of them. John Romita mentioned the fact that Chip never even opened the package of comic strip Spider-Man work he had sitting on his desk for months and months, strips he was supposed to sell. CBA: Did you feel Chip was incompetent? Roy: I don’t know, I never thought about it much. He did some strange things. He may have been sort of mentally competent, but he wasn’t a really hands-on type person. I don’t think there was too much interference. Once in a while, he would do a crazy thing… well, my favorite story is the time he suddenly decided that on one of the reprint Westerns in the early ’70s, Kid Colt or whatever, all of the bad guys on the cover had to have animal masks! [laughter] We couldn’t get any kind of sane explanation… well, maybe it had to do with the gorillas-on-the-DC-covers idea, [laughter] so maybe it wasn’t as nutty as it sounds! It was just this one cover we had to do that on. [laughter] But generally speaking, I think it was just more of a case of Stan didn’t like the idea of reporting to Chip, because he felt like Chip didn’t have any particular expertise. I don’t know to what extent Chip was incompetent, I didn’t really have enough dealings with him. My relationship with him was always fairly good, but I never felt like he knew very much. He was always trying to please his father, and never really could anyway. If he couldn’t please his father, why would he please Stan? You ought to dig up that story published in Playboy that was allegedly about Martin and Chip. That was evidently pretty close to the truth, and the guy who wrote it was still working for Goodman, and when he saw Martin in the hall, he thought his boss was going to kill him! But Martin just said, “Nice

story!” or something like that! [laughter] CBA: Was it any surprise when Atlas closed for good? Roy: No, I think that we sort of felt it was just a matter of time, because the company didn’t produce that good of material. We were happy it closed when it did. I mean, I wasn’t happy for people who were making as much money as that, but on the other hand, you always say that you want to have competition, but it’s always nice if the competition isn’t too good. Not that we felt it was good, but there was a lot of it at Atlas. DC hadn’t given us a lot of competition in recent years, up through the early ’70s, it was fairly easy—despite some good material coming out—commercially, for Marvel to pass them up, they just kept going, and they did it. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 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!

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ALTER EGO #109

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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 #113

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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

Rise & Fall of Rovin’s Empire A candid conversation with Atlas/Seaboard editor Jeff Rovin Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson I first encountered Jeff Rovin’s name when he served as an assistant editor at DC Comics in the early ’70s, and finally met the man himself within moments of also meeting Jim Warren for the first time in 1998. Since his stint as (co-?) editor-in-chief at Atlas Comics for a brief period in the ’70s, Jeff has done relatively little work in the comics field, but he is a highly successful writer, renowned for genre encyclopedias (e.g., The Encyclopedia of Superheroes), and his Op-Center series scribed for Tom Clancy. Jeff was interviewed by phone on Oct. 4 & 11, 2001, and he copyedited the final transcript.

Below: Recent picture of Jeff Rovin, onetime editor in chief at Atlas Comics. Courtesy of Jeff.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you from? Jeff Rovin: I was born in Brooklyn, in 1951. CBA: Were you attracted to comics at a young age? Jeff: Oh, sure. It was a wonderful time to grow up, in terms of the explosion of Silver Age characters… you had Zorro and The Adventures of Superman on TV and when your parents weren’t looking, you could immerse yourself in this stuff. CBA: Did you want to be a writer or an artist at a young age? Jeff: I always wanted to be a writer, and always wrote. I should also add it was a terrific time to read science-fiction, with the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels coming back into print, the Doc Savage novels being published by Bantam, and a lot of great science-fiction writers doing some of their best stuff. CBA: Did you read those paperback reprints of pulp material? Jeff: Oh, sure! CBA: When did you realize these things were from the ‘30s and the ‘40s, from an older culture? Jeff: When an uncle of mine saw the cover of a Doc Savage book I was reading and said, “That’s not what Doc Savage looks like!” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Doc Savage has wavy hair, not a plastered-down bronze widow’s peak.” He told me how he used to read the magazines as a kid, and I was flabbergasted. Of course, I read Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes and realized comic books went back that far as they did. Still, it was a revelation about Doc. CBA: So the wave of nostalgia hit at a prime time for you, when you were 14 or 15 years old? Jeff: Well, it was not nostalgia for me, [laughter] but it was nostalgia for a lot of people, and it was great to discover that. Of course, G-8 and His Battle Aces came a little bit later, and The Spider, and The

Avenger… it was just a flood of material. World-class material, because a lot of those guys knew how to write. CBA: And a lot of those guys didn’t. Jeff: Yeah… [laughs] touché! But they knew how to tell a story. You can fault their grammar, fault their characterizations, but they kept the pages turning. CBA: I remember getting into the Doc Savages as a kid, and then probably giving it up after about the eighth book, because there was just so much repetition in the descriptive passages. Jeff: I suppose those would be so easy to write today, because you could cut and paste huge paragraphs of text! [laughter] Back then, they had to type it all over. CBA: After a period of time, did you become more discriminating, looking for, perhaps, more literate fare? Jeff: If you call discriminating going from Doc Savage to The Avenger and The Shadow! [laughter] Of course, I looked for more sophisticated storytelling as my tastes changed. That was when I discovered Ray Bradbury, Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and writers of that nature. CBA: You were guided more to the contemporary science-fiction? Jeff: Correct, and it was kind of fun to notice that Gardner Fox had written some space operas, because there was a name I recognized from comics, and I’d say, “He’s also writing novels,” and pick up his books and see ads for Lin Carter and L. Sprague DeCamp and other authors. So you’d get a wide variety of styles and subject matter. CBA: Did you do creative writing in grade school? Jeff: I went to public school, made it all the way through high school, tried a couple of months of college here and there until the money ran out and the interest waned, got into comic books. There really wasn’t much of an airlock between reading and doing them. CBA: What was your first professional sale? Jeff: That was to Skywald comics, in late 1971. I was writing a column called “The Psycho-Analyst,” analyzing Psycho magazine [laughter] and doing odd jobs, proofreading, that sort of thing. CBA: What was Sol Brodsky [co-founder of Skywald] like? Jeff: Sol was very enthusiastic about what he was doing. He was in kind of a difficult situation because Herschel and Israel Waldman, the publishers, were pretty much calling the shots in terms of frequency and eventually whether the magazines would continue. Their main business was coloring books. But Sol loved those magazines and really wanted them to work. He was excited to be working with guys like Jerry Siegel and Bill Everett, and newcomers like [editor/writer] Al Hewetson, Augustine Funnell, and Pablo Marcos. CBA: Were [Skywald art directors] Mike Esposito and Ross Andru around the offices when you were there? Jeff: No, I was there maybe two or three afternoons a week. The only one I bumped into regularly up there was Bill Everett, who was extraordinary. CBA: Did you know of his illustrious past? Jeff: By then I did, sure, and I was not smart enough to get him to draw Sub-Mariner for me. Pablo Marcos was up there. Jeff Jones, of course, was doing covers for them, Boris Vallejo… there were a lot of interesting people. CBA: Do you recall a tentatively planned book called ScienceFiction Odyssey? Jeff: Yes, that was a magazine Jeff Jones had done a cover for, and I think Al Hewetson finally used it on Psycho or Scream, one of those. I remember we’d started to collect material for it and never did it for one reason or another. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

CBA: Yeah, Gardner Fox and Jack Katz did a story for that title. Jeff: That’s right! But Jerry Siegel was really the one, of course, I wish I’d gotten to work with a little bit. He had done a script or two, and just holding them was sort of exciting! [laughter] I didn’t keep them, unfortunately, but holding them was fun! CBA: How did you get the job at Skywald? Jeff: I’d gone up there to interview Sol for a research paper for the week or so I was at New York University, and he offered me work as an editorial assistant. CBA: For that term paper, were you just focusing on Skywald, or did you also go over to Warren? Jeff: I went over to Warren. It was going to be about comic books in the early 1970s, mainstream comics as opposed to the undergrounds—which of course were exploding at the time—and I never finished it, because once Sol offered me the job, I said, “Okay.” CBA: Did you go to any other publishers? Jeff: I talked to Carmine Infantino, and at Marvel I talked to Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas. But again, my memories of that time are pretty much centered on Skywald because they gave me a job, and that made a big impression. CBA: How long did you last at Skywald? Jeff: Until October of 1972, because I really wanted to work in color comics. I think by that time Sol had discontinued his color line, and I went up to DC and couldn’t get in to see Carmine, so I sat in the lobby until Carmine came out. That was from about ten in the morning until about five or six in the afternoon. I assumed he would come out for lunch, but he didn’t, he sent out to Friar Tuck’s for a salad, so I missed him. But he told me to go see Dorothy Woolfolk, who was still there, and I went to see her. She was editing romance comics, and as it happened, her editorial assistant was leaving to get married so I took her place. CBA: Who was her editorial assistant? Jeff: Deborah Anderson. She was doing letters pages, proofreading, that type of thing, advice to the lovelorn, so I just took over all those jobs. CBA: What was Dorothy like? Jeff: She was about as animated as a person can be— always moving, speaking, acting… often, not in that order. She was very much a feminist, and wanted Lois Lane and the love comics to reflect that, and it was just a great learning experience, because I hadn’t been working with anyone—well, [laughs] I hadn’t worked with anyone except Sol, but it was fun working with someone who was that dynamic. CBA: Alan Kupperberg and Alan Weiss said she clicked with the younger generation. Jeff: Oh, yeah, she clicked, she just loved them, she loved us and the ideas, and I’m just sorry I didn’t get to know her better, because I got shuffled off to Joe Orlando, Joe Kubert, Bob Kanigher…. CBA: How long did you last with her? Jeff: It was maybe two months, and then Joe Orlando asked me to come over and help handle the horror comics and Swamp Thing, and who could resist that? Then Joe Kubert decided he didn’t want to come in every day, his assistant Marv Wolfman was leaving, and so he needed somebody to fill in, so I kind of rotated, mostly between the two Joes. CBA: Kubert was only coming in a couple of days a week? Jeff: Yes. He was deadline-challenged by the war books and Tarzan titles. That, of course, was the pinnacle of that era—working with Joe Kubert, learning about his storytelling and insights into comics. Then I spent a little bit of time with Bob Kanigher, who as I recall replaced Dorothy and did Wonder Woman, which he insisted on referring to as “WW,” even though I pointed out saying the initials had more syllables. [laughter] We just didn’t get along that well. Bob didn’t get along with too many people, although he got along well with Joe, December 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

even though Joe Kubert rewrote him extensively. But Joe used to do—and I have them here somewhere—these wonderful thumbnails for all of his artists. Even in those crude little pieces, the drama was so clear. CBA: Joe Kubert certainly has a reputation as a very heavy-handed editor, of extensively rewriting almost everybody’s stuff; whatever came across his desk, he really worked on. Jeff: I don’t know that I’d describe it as heavy-handed, I’d describe it as heavy, because his editing usually—in my experience—improved what he was working on. CBA: I think Bob Kanigher is one of the best writers comics ever had. Jeff: I really appreciated him more when we weren’t working together. At DC, Carmine asked me to edit reprint titles, including Legion of Super-Heroes (which, I believe, was the first time they had their own title), Doom Patrol, Metal Men, and I had to go back and look at the material Kanigher wrote, and I had to cut the page number down because there were more ads and fewer story pages.

Above: The night after Jeff Rovin had his initial meeting with Martin Goodman over the editorial position at Atlas/Seaboard, Jeff typed up a bunch of concepts for possible comics to present to the publisher. Here’s the first page of his effort. Courtesy of Jeff Rovin.

It was actually heartbreaking to take those pages out, and difficult to have it still make sense! But you really saw how tightly scripted some of his stories were. Bob also was a heavy-handed editor, [laughs] and I mean that in the way you meant it! He used to take scripts from George Kashdan, and people of some repute, and massacre them. CBA: I first came across your name in those short-lived DC reprint books. Did you do any writing for the company? Jeff: I co-wrote a horror story for Dark Mansions of Forbidden Love, but I don’t think I did any others. I co-wrote that with a guy named Michael Pulalski. He had sent in scripts; Joe Orlando thought the idea was good, but wasn’t crazy about the script, so he asked me if I wanted to rewrite it, so I said okay. I got co-authorship credit on that. CBA: Did you get an idea why there were suddenly an enormous number of reprint books at DC? It didn’t seem to make any sense from a reader’s point of view, as so much of the material was dated and unappealing. Jeff: Not from a reader’s point of view perhaps, but it did two things: One, it preserved rack space for DC, which was important because Marvel was expanding at the time. Also, it gave DC an income on very low-cost titles. They were not making a lot of money on the highly-publicized books like Green Lantern, “Sgt. Rock,” Shazam!, so Carmine decided to do these reprint books. CBA: At one point Marvel publisher Martin Goodman made his entire line of comics giant-sized, bringing them up to 64 pages for

25¢ apiece, and DC immediately followed suit, but then the next month Martin dropped down to 20¢ for 32 pages, but DC remained at the giant-size for about a year. That was the time Marvel started overtaking DC in sales. Jeff: Yeah, and it was also a time when it looked like Jim Warren’s format might end up dominating comic books. DC was in really bad shape at that point, and I don’t know how much of that impacted Carmine’s tenure there, but clearly they were hurting, and sales at Warren, conversely, were growing exponentially at that time. CBA: What was the atmosphere like at DC while you were there? Jeff: There was really a lot of energy from the young Turks. That was the time Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, Mike Kaluta, Dan Green, Steve Mitchell, and a lot of the new generation of creators were coming in, and Carmine had created a kind of a lounge in the back where everybody could go hang out and get in trouble away from Murray Boltinoff, who was a little suspicious of some of us. There really was this generational explosion going on, as there was in the rest of society at the time. That was the outstanding thing I remember. CBA: And yet, Carmine really brought these young guys on board. He was the one who really brought in a new generation of creators. Jeff: Carmine nurtured them, Joe Orlando nurtured, Julie Schwartz nurtured, Dorothy nurtured… and to an extent, Joe Kubert as well—that’s one of the reasons he started his school—but still, there were the old guard at the production department…. CBA: Sol Harrison, Jack Adler. Jeff: …there was Gerda Gatell… oh, I’ve forgotten some of the other people’s names. But it was a fun time, it was definitely a fun time. CBA: Do you think Dorothy got her due from the company itself, or was she short-shrifted? Jeff: Dorothy had editorial freedom. Whether she got respect from her peers, I can’t say. She probably didn’t care about that very much, because she just enjoyed what she was doing, and she enjoyed talking to Steve Mitchell or myself, or even Ethan Mordden, who was another one of the assistants who went on to be an author of some note. I just don’t think she cared, but I will say she liked sparring with Carmine. She really took some kind of pleasure in that, but she was also very protective of her properties. I remember the first thing I did for her was put together this Wonder Woman book with Gloria Steinem, and Dorothy really wanted to be sure it was the best and most representative Wonder Woman material there was, and she would fight for things like that. So maybe her integrity got in the way some times. CBA: This is the Wonder Woman reprint hardcover, with a Gloria Steinem introduction, and Dorothy chose the stories? Jeff: Dorothy and I went over them—library copies—and as I recall, we sent over the ones Dorothy thought were best. Gloria didn’t do much, so to speak. CBA: I did notice a preponderance of bondage stories in that volume. [laughter] Jeff: You’re talking about a woman who had a magic rope that tied people up, Jon. CBA: Did you see Gloria in the office at all? Jeff: Maybe once or twice. I just don’t remember, because she was all around town at that time, and I don’t remember if it was there or at some other functions. CBA: After Mike Sekowsky’s tenure on the book, Dorothy was editor of Wonder Woman for a very short period of time, right before the transition back to the Golden Age character. Was Sekowsky there when you were there, or was he already out? Jeff: No, he wasn’t there. I didn’t meet him until the Atlas days. CBA: You were editing the reprint books, none of which lasted very long. Jeff: Well, they lasted beyond my stay there. I know Allan Asherman continued them another issue or so. CBA: Where did you go? Jeff: I started an ad agency with a friend and decided I didn’t like advertising, although the agency endured for 20 years. I went up to COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

see Jim Warren, and he hired me. At first, I was just doing Captain Company copywriting and picking products to sell through Captain Company. I think my title was marketing director, but then I began doing editorial work as well, and at one point, I suppose I became assistant editor—I don’t even remember what the title was—of Creepy or Eerie, one of those. CBA: How long were you there? Jeff: That would’ve been from early ’73 to mid-’74, when Atlas started. CBA: I apologize for not interviewing you for the Warren book, but I don’t recall seeing your credit line very much. Jeff: Well, I wrote stories and I was on the masthead of virtually every issue from The Spirit #1 onward. CBA: Than I’m blind. [laughs] Did you have a good time over at Warren? Jeff: I loved it. Jim was—and is—amazing, as you know. Bill DuBay was creative, one of the hardest workers I ever knew. Everyone up there was just pretty terrific and really motivated, because they were doing great material, Jim was a terrific leader, and that was a lot of fun. CBA: Did you go through the legendary “Summer Push”? Jeff: Yes, but I don’t remember the agony of that so much as trying to do the Moonraker one-shot in two weeks, from concept to newsstand. CBA: That was obviously later, right? Jeff: Yes. I don’t remember a Summer Push so much as a Constant Push, you know? I remember Jim tearing up mechanicals from Famous Monsters #108, and the entire staff quitting on a Friday. CBA: [laughs] The entire comics staff? Jeff: Bill DuBay, Sherry Berne, myself, Michelle Brand… I don’t remember if Bill Maholley left. But Jim was just… [laughs] It started because one of the page numbers had been pasted down crooked and it really pissed him off, and he started going through the magazine, tearing it apart, and he was really upset with it, because that particular issue was going to be going against the first issue, as I recall, of Monsters of the Movies from Marvel, and he wanted it to be absolutely perfect and it wasn’t. So we all quit on Friday and he went looking for a new staff over the weekend. I guess Bill DuBay made overtures that we should come back, and we did. [laughs] CBA: Jim is definitely a very interesting guy. He’s got a reputation in the business, and a lot of people love him, and a lot of people hate him. Jeff: Yeah, they do. Jon, I think anybody in a position of publisher/editor-in-chief—whether it was Jim Warren or Jim Shooter or myself or Carmine—is going to generate those kind of feelings among people. CBA: Jim is certainly, perhaps, unique in that group. He has a way of teasing, a way of testing people’s limits, and, as Weezie Simonson says, a inclination to “push” people’s “buttons.” I perceive it as half a put-on, that he can be blustery, can look a lot bigger than he is, and be scary, but he’s testing a person’s limits; but I also perceive something… very humane about the guy, but he can bust balls really bad! Jeff: I’ll go further. I loved the man, without qualification, but I will say that back, then—I don’t know if you knew him back then—but he was a sadist. [laughs] There’s just no getting around it. [laughter] He heaped cruelty upon artwork, upon stories, and certainly upon mechanicals of FM #108, [laughter] but he did it in such a way that you never took it personally—or at least, you shouldn’t have. I’ve studied martial arts for a long time, and my sensei does the same thing, he will tear you apart, but it’s only so that when you’re out in the street, you don’t get your ass kicked. I won’t say that Jim’s motivation was the same, but the end result was the same. You didn’t take him personally, and you got better, or at least you did things the way he wanted them done. You certainly couldn’t argue with the quality of the product he was putting out, and he did give guys like Bill DuBay an awful lot of leeway, and Bill brought his own sense of style and professionalism to the magazines, that improved upon what Jim did. So, it was really a kind of Golden Age for that type of magazine. CBA: Certainly, there was a renaissance that took place at Warren, with DuBay spreading his wings and Louise taking the mantle for a December 2001

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time. Did it feel like a special time? Jeff: Yes, because Warren was the best, and if you were there, then de facto, you at least had a chance to be one of the best. I wouldn’t say any of the stories I did for him were any better than mediocre, but stories that other people did for him—like Bernie Wrightson or Rich Corben—were certainly incredible, and even guys like Ken Kelly, when Bill DuBay would art direct him, produced some of their best work. Bill gave people like Leo Summers the opportunity to come in and experiment, and a lot of the Spanish artists. It really was a special time. Even to the point of hiring commercial artists like Ted Coconis to try to do things. He approached—and this was my idea, and probably a silly one—Charles Schulz at one point, because I wanted him to do a Halloween cover, but he politely declined. [laughter] But, then of course, you were surrounded by the Jack Davis Creepy cover from #1, Frazetta artwork on the wall—not the posters, the originals! It was overwhelming. CBA: How did you first hear about Atlas/Seaboard needing somebody? Jeff: There was an ad in The New York Times. It didn’t say for what or whom, it just said it was for comic books, so I answered that. CBA: It was looking for specifically a comic book editor? Jeff: Yeah. I think it said editor and writer, but in any case, I answered it, and got a call from Martin Goodman, which I have to tell you, is quite a way to end the day! [laughter]

Above: A whole bunch of cops take on Atlas/Seaboard’s answer to Marvel’s Incredible Hulk, The Brute, on this, the cover of the blue monster’s first issue as drawn by Dick Giordano. Courtesy of Terry Austin. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals.

Below: Dick Giordano made some modifications to Allen Milgrom’s layouts for this, the cover art to Morlock 2001 #1. Compare this with Allen’s unused version on page 96. Courtesy of Bob Wiacek. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

CBA: Were you called at home, or at work? Jeff: He called me at home. I didn’t leave my office number. CBA: Yeah! [laughs] You obviously wrote that you had experience working at Warren. Jeff: Yeah, I ran down everything I’d done, so Martin called me up and asked me to come to lunch, and I did, and he asked me to come to another lunch, which Chip, his son, attended, and that was it. CBA: What was Martin like? Jeff: Martin was gruff, a bottom-line guy. CBA: How old was he at the time? Jeff: Certainly in his late sixties, early seventies, I suspect. He was an angry man, too; he was angry at what happened to Chip up at Marvel. CBA: I know you didn’t work for Marvel between entering the field and the time you answered the ad, but were you surprised it was Martin Goodman, and did you realize his reputation, who he was? Jeff: I knew who he was, but I didn’t realize what he was doing. CBA: Did you think it had something to do with Marvel Comics? Jeff: No, I’d known he sold the company. CBA: How did you know that? Jeff: Well, it had happened maybe six months to a year before. CBA: So it was just scuttlebutt around the industry? Jeff: Right. A figure of that magnitude doesn’t leave the business unnoticed. At the time, there were various industry meetings of creators, and occasionally publishers and editors were invited, like Neal Adams was very much at the forefront of, you know, creators’ rights and getting a stipend for Siegel and Shuster… there was a lot of righteous indignation growing in the industry about rights, so we would have these meetings in various halls, or at offices, or up at Continuity, Neal’s studio, and people would talk and find out what was going on in the industry. It was a very grapevine-y time.

CBA: It was actually one of the few times in which comics professionals—outside of conventions—had sociable events to attend. Jeff: It was still a small community, and everybody knew everybody, [laughs] yet nobody knew what Martin had in mind when he started Atlas Comics. I remember he’d talked to Roy Thomas—I don’t know why they didn’t come to any kind of agreement, but in our first meeting, Martin said that he had already extended an offer to Larry Lieber to edit some titles, and I’d known Larry’s artwork, of course, but that sounded fine to me. As I said, by the end of the second lunch, they’d offered me the job; they were ready to go. CBA: You were aware that Larry had an older brother, Stan Lee. Jeff: One of the things Martin said was he wanted to get Larry a chance to step out from behind the shadow of Stan Lee. Which again, seemed to me a good idea. CBA: Had Larry helmed books, perhaps secondary books, back in the day? Did he have editorial experience? Jeff: I don’t think so. CBA: I know he wrote some Westerns, and he also wrote some super-hero stories for “Thor” and “Iron Man” for a period of time. Jeff: I’m not really sure what was going through Martin’s mind, because I was 22, Larry had not a lot of experience, and there wasn’t really a clear vision of what Martin wanted to do. He didn’t express what he saw the new company as being, [laughter] and so, I wasn’t surprised that Larry was there, because I don’t think we had a mandate to do anything! CBA: Did you think he wanted to re-create Marvel Comics? Jeff: Not at first. That came later. That was, unfortunately, when I think was the start of the end of Atlas. I really think that at the time we started, he was just plain angry. He wanted to get something onto the newsstands fast, wanted to put money into it, wanted it to look good, just wanted to eat up rack space, and he wanted to punish Cadence Industries for mistreating Chip—I don’t know what the details of Chip Goodman’s contract with Cadence were…. CBA: Can you outline what had happened? Jeff: Martin sold Marvel and its related companies to Cadence Industries. It was my understanding that Chip was supposed to remain in some high managerial position, but he was either minimized, or demoted, or fired, I’m not really sure what happened. I wasn’t privileged to that information. Whatever it was, it pissed Martin off enough that he wanted to strike back, and very quickly. CBA: So, it would seem by appearances that the creation of Atlas/Seaboard/Seaboard Periodicals was an act of revenge. Jeff: Oh, absolutely. As a matter of fact, people used to refer to the arrow in the “A” as an “up yours” in the logo. [laughter] CBA: And Steve Mitchell designed it… did Steve know he was doing that? Jeff: I don’t know, I think it was John Costanza who designed it. Steve came on a little bit later, after we started to get things rolling. CBA: Steve takes credit for it. Jeff: Well, Steve can have credit. [laughter] CBA: He didn’t get much else out of the company, I think! [laughs] Jeff: Yeah, it’s quite possible, although he was the first person to use the word “sh*t” in a comic book. I think he got that out of the company. [laughter] CBA: Did you start realizing what you were getting yourself into? Jeff: Well, Martin was like any of my grumpy old uncles, so it didn’t intimidate me that much, and he was, at the start, a kind of a fun thing, because he only wanted to do five color comics, and maybe two black-&-whites. For some reason, he wanted Larry to do the black-&-whites and me to do the color, and I pointed out to him that maybe we should do it the other way around, because I had more experience in the b-&-w's than Larry did. Then I suggested it might be good to do a monster magazine, Movie Monster magazine, because those are relatively low-cost things to do. It wasn’t original, but it made sense. So, we COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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ended up doing the b-&-w's, and we started developing some color comics, and Martin very quickly decided—even before they’d come out—that five wasn’t going to be enough, and he wanted to really flood the racks and do about 20. I’m pretty sure that’s when Steve Mitchell came on, right in the beginning when that decision was made, because I know he had another art director up there named John Chilly, and John was doing a lot of Martin’s other magazines, puzzle books, confession magazines, Gothic romances—or they wanted to do Gothic romances, they couldn’t really put that together. And then they bought Swank, and that became their primary interest, but that was later. Very quickly, it went from this kind of gentlemanly small boutique shop with trying to compete head-on with Marvel and DC, which meant you couldn’t just develop new talent, you had to raid the stables for other talent. CBA: When it was the boutique, at that stage, what concepts were you working on and thinking of? Jeff: Well, the first ones were The Scorpion, Ironjaw, Wulf the Barbarian, Phoenix, Tiger-Man, and The Grim Ghost. All of them came about for different reasons. Tiger-Man came about because Joe Orlando had sent Ernie Colón up to see us, and Ernie and I hit it off right away, just started playing around with ideas, and…. CBA: Why would Joe Orlando send Ernie your way? Jeff: Because Joe couldn’t use him. Perhaps his roster was full. It might also be Ernie was perceived as a Harvey type of artist, and Joe felt he could do action-adventure, which he’d proven up at Skywald—where I’d never actually met him, but I’d seen his work. CBA: He did a bunch of Warren stuff. Jeff: Yeah, he may have, but I wasn’t aware of it then. Then you had guys like Larry Hama. I don’t remember if we suggested to him that he do a Conan type of thing, or he suggested it to us, but you know, that had a very distinctive look, and Howard Chaykin and The Scorpion, where there was bondage for sure. Mike Sekowsky, because we wanted to do something with a great Silver Age guy, and he was crusty and cantankerous and fun. We just kind of put together this eclectic bunch of comic books. Larry did The Destructor with Steve Ditko and Wally Wood. CBA: …and Archie Goodwin. In a way, there’s a perception that these are different books, but there was also that these were knockoff books. I think a lot of fans immediately looked at The Brute, and said, “Oh, look: That’s the Hulk.” Jeff: The Brute was the first book of Martin’s “new wave” of books and not part of the original group. Martin specifically told me he wanted to knock off the Hulk, and that was really the best we could do, in terms of not being a direct rip-off. That sounds like a clumsy defense, [laughter] but we were told, “Do a comic book like The Hulk.” Okay, how do we do that without plainly stealing the damn thing? And that was indeed the start of the “Marvelization” of Atlas, it was one of the first things I had a problem with, with Martin and Chip, because he really wanted me to raid the Marvel Bullpen. Not only didn’t I want to do that—because it wasn’t the right thing to do—but we were looking for our own identity, and imitating Marvel wasn’t going to get us there. However successful or not they were, magazines like The Grim Ghost and “The Tarantula,” even Morlock and some of the other wacky ones, had their own personalities. CBA: I know you didn’t edit the book, but did you look at The Destructor and think, “That’s an awful lot like Spider-Man.” Jeff: No, I stayed completely away from Larry’s books. CBA: But just the perception, did you look at that? Because certainly, as a reader, we looked at that and said, “Wow, it’s even drawn by Steve Ditko,” you know? [laughs] Jeff: You’re right, I can’t dispute that! But you know, Sgt. Stryker was Sgt. Fury, and [Western Action] was the Marvel Western. Lomax was supposed to be Kojak, but he had hair, and it just didn’t make sense. [laughter] Over on my side of the office, when we got hold of Howard Nostrand, and asked him what he wanted to do, he wanted to do some kind of spy thing, and Ric Meyers came up with Targitt, and had a great time. Neal Adams had sent Howard up there… CBA: Neal started off as an assistant for Howard Nostrand. Jeff: Correct. Howard was a tough guy to work with, but he did some great Will Eisner-esque stuff, and it was just… We were really excited about a lot of it. Ric Meyers wrote a story for Alex Toth to illustrate, “A Job Well Done,” and I thought it was one of the best December 2001

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things he’d ever done, and I was fortunate enough to have him illustrate it. That kind of stuff really makes you happy. The things that didn’t make us happy were the deadline problems; those were immediate stumbling blocks between me and Howard Chaykin and Larry Hama. There was a lot of miscommunication, because of the numbers of books we were doing. I had Ric Meyers coming into the office a couple of days a week, but we were doing about 20 titles plus the black-&-whites, plus helping out with Gothic Romance. It was just too much, and that’s where I said before, “You can’t be in this position and not piss people off.” Well, that’s when it started to happen. [laughs] CBA: You edited 12 color and three black-&-white titles. Jeff: There were other ones, by the way, that were on the drawing board that never got produced, for one reason or another. Steve Ditko had done a thing called “Wrecage,” which was, I think, one of the best things he ever did. It was spelled with no “k.” [laughter] I don’t remember really what it was about; it was a bunch of guys in costumes who were breaking things. He had penciled this job, and it came in, and the lettering, the balloons were in the middle of the panels instead of butting up on the edges, and he was so angry about that, he just threw the pages down and said, “You’ve taken the heart out of it,” and walked out. We never saw him again. That was one book that, even though we had done the script, done the pencils, worked every detail out, it never got done. Along with… CBA: Ditko was angry because the balloons were in the center of the panel? Jeff: Right, instead of butting up against the panel borders, which is how he apparently liked them, but neglected to say. CBA: Did you look at that like as an idiosyncratic response? Jeff: Well, if I had known, I would’ve put it up against the panel! [laughter] I felt bad, because we didn’t know, and if he had told me and I didn’t hear it, or failed

Above: Photo of Pat Broderick at his Continuity Associates drawing table in 1975 from the artist’s discarded photo reference file, salvaged by contributor Terry Austin.

Below: Apparently this is Larry Lieber’s Kirbyesque character design for the planned (but never fully realized) character Whiplash, a Western hero conceived by Jeff Rovin when he first joined the company. From The Comic Reader #110, courtesy of Mike Friedrich. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Above: Perhaps the most unconventional moment in Atlas Comics’ short history was when a hero— albeit in monster persona—literally absorbs a small blind girl, reducing the poor thing to a puddle of fluid. Here, courtesy of the artist Allen Milgrom (aided by nice Jack Abel inks), is the page of that nefarious incident (concocted by scribe Mike Fleisher) from Morlock 2001 #2. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

to communicate it to the letterer, it was unfortunate, but there you go! Again, we had other titles we wanted to do, like The Avenger, and we actually did a lot of work on it, and negotiated with Condé Nast, only to find somebody else [DC] stepped in and took it away from us. We had been negotiating to do Godzilla. Put a lot of work in on that. So, there were a lot of comics we developed and spent a lot of time on that never got done. CBA: If we can, if you don’t mind, go through a few of these titles, and just perhaps give in a nutshell what the thinking was behind it. Jeff: I’ll tell you what, Jon, who really cares? I’ve got to ask you that. I mean…. CBA: Was the idea behind Ironjaw, “Barbarians are hot, let’s do a new barbarian.” Jeff: Yeah. I have to say, in defense of Ironjaw, we really had wanted to push the Comics Code, certainly push the boundaries of what they would permit, and that was the first title we did, and from the very start we had problems with them. One of the things we really wanted to do with “Tarantula,” Tiger-Man and Ironjaw was make them a lot more violent, kind of what Wolverine ended up being. So, the idea that it was going to be like Conan is not quite what we had in mind; we just wanted it to be really rough, sexual, primitive barbarian kind of thing, but boy, the Code ripped us apart! The Code administrator, Len Darvin, actually went to Martin and

complained that I was a pain in the ass, [laughter] that he should replace me, blah, blah, blah. CBA: Whoa! [laughs] Jeff: Yeah, he was not pulling punches, because we had really harsh words over Ironjaw. There was one panel were a woman’s back was facing the reader, and she clearly had clothes on, and he made us put them on, even though we were just seeing her naked back. We gave her a skirt but no top. He was livid. CBA: A lot of the books had pretty edgy writing for the time, replete with a lot of “damns” and “hells” in the dialogue. Believe it or not, when I was a kid, “hell” and “damn” were considered swear words, and here they were in a comic book with the Comics Code Approval stamp on it! Jeff: You know, I guess we got the stamp because we took so much stuff out they forgot the other stuff was in there. [laughter] This was a time of movies like Death Wish, and I think there was a kind of rampant impotent rage, whatever you want to call it, that we carried out of the ’60s and into the ’70s, and I think that was trying to come out in the comics, and also we had seen so much being done in the undergrounds, in the Star*Reach comics, in the Warren titles, that it seemed absolutely ludicrous to be handcuffed by the Comics Code! Particularly when the things we were doing were not so rough. Certainly not compared to these other things. CBA: Well, with the cynicism that permeated American culture at the time, you had probably the premiere cynical mainstream comics writer, Mike Fleischer, working for you. How did you choose him? Jeff: Mike was one of the first people who came to talk to us, and that was a very bold move at the time, because we were pariahs. There was an implicit blacklist of people who came to work for us. We were paying more per page than other companies, and particularly DC rightly figured that people would defect, and they wanted to hold on to their people. Michael was offended by that notion, since he was a freelancer, and came up partly because he had great ideas, and partly because it was an act of defiance just to do it! I really respected that. CBA: Did you like the writing? There seemed to be certainly a strong element of misogyny in Ironjaw, [laughs] he tended to treat horses better than women. Jeff: Well, there’s some of that in Robert E. Howard, too. Certainly Howard was writing at a different time, and maybe we should have been more sensitive, perhaps, but… CBA: Michael took a lot of critical hits in the early to mid-’70s, especially with “The Spectre,” about being extremely violent. Jeff: Well, people didn’t have to read it. Michael was expressing whatever he wanted to express, and he did that in the novel Chasing Hairy, and it was okay by me. I wasn’t there to censor him, but to give him a platform to tell his stories, and we liked the stories he was doing, and they all had a different voice, really; The Grim Ghost and Tarantula were different from one another. CBA: You used him a lot. Jeff: Yeah, we used him a lot, but he was happy to do it, and he was always surprising, which was fun. CBA: I read an article you wrote for The Comics Journal [“How Not to Run a Comic Book Company,” TCJ #114, Feb. 1987] about the rise and fall of Atlas, and one of the interesting things you brought up was your desire to get licensed, recognizable properties and adapt them into comic book form. You tried to get The Avenger, but DC came in and scooped it up. Was The Scorpion part of that thinking? Was there a pitch to Howard to say, “We want a pulp character?” Jeff: Actually, I left that up to Howard, and I don’t think that we contributed anything except the title on that initial concept—I do intend to go back and check that—no, I think that was pretty much all his idea. CBA: Looking at the book, Planet of the Vampires, immediately when I was a kid, I thought of [the Charlton Heston film] The Omega Man. Jeff: Well, yeah, we had tried to get the rights to [science-fiction vampire novel] I Am Legend by Richard Matheson but we couldn’t. CBA: What would you have named that book? I Am Legend? Jeff: That’s a good question, we never got that far! CBA: Would it have been an adaptation of The Omega Man? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Jeff: It probably would’ve been closer to The Omega Man. I think the main thing was who we would end up getting the rights from, whether it would’ve been Matheson or whether it would’ve been Warner Brothers, who we were talking to. If it had been Warner Brothers, clearly The Omega Man was the better-known title at the time. So, we probably would’ve gone with that. By the way, you mentioned The Scorpion, that was again one of the early battles I had with Martin; he felt the drawings were too small, and he couldn’t tell what was going on, and I wasn’t going to go back to Howard and say, “Gee, Howard, could you draw bigger?” It’s amazing, the things that come up that you don’t expect when you’re just trying to do…. CBA: A dozen books, plus three black-&-white titles. [laughs] Jeff: When you’re just trying to give people some creative freedom, and at the same time, keep the publisher happy, [laughs] it’s really tough! Especially, by the way, when you’re a dumb kid! CBA: And you were young! Jeff: Yeah. CBA: Were you surprised when you were hired? Were you cheap, or well-paid? Jeff: I was getting, I think, $20,000 or $22,000 a year at the time. That was good. I had to edit and write I don’t remember how many stories a month for that, but no, that was a great salary! That was [laughs] when we were doing five books, but I still made the same money when we doubled that. CBA: Goodman used the comics as catalogs for his merchandising department, and you had experience with Captain Company. Jeff: Well, that was actually my idea, because I had been Captain Company’s marketing director, and it seemed obvious that if you were going to publish these magazines, you’d use them as catalogs. Jim Warren invented that concept in comic books, and I saw how much money he made, and it just seemed like a good idea for us, plus I was able to take free toys! CBA: Archie Goodwin, one of the great editors in comics history, could’ve been available at that time… I wonder why he wasn’t approached. Jeff: A lot of these guys wanted a lot more money than I was getting, and I think that was the problem they’d had with Roy Thomas, he wanted a larger salary than I got, and a contract that was a number of years—I didn’t have a contract—and so…. CBA: So you were attractive in that way. Jeff: Yeah, and I could, in theory, get the material onto the newsstands, and that’s all that Martin cared about at first. CBA: Ernie Colón had endless nice things to say about you— Jeff: Ernie’s senile. [laughter] CBA: He called you a wunderkind, repeatedly. You were pretty young, and dealing with a lot of creators who were certainly older than you. Did you possess something that made you right for the job? Did you have a self-confidence, for instance? Was Brooklyn instilled in you? You were a cocky kid, right? Jeff: I was a cocky kid, but a lot of that came from working for my uncle in Times Square—it was actually on 45th Street, between Broadway and Sixth—he had a costume store across from the Peppermint Lounge, and it was from the time I was about 13 to when I was 18, I was there an awful lot, largely because I got to fit G-strings and pasties on to go-go dancers, [laughter] among other things. But, that was a very, very aggressive business, dealing with Broadway people… Laurence Tish and Loews, because we did the costumes for his ushers. Jackie Gleason because he shipped the costumes to Miami for The Jackie Gleason Show, and at the same time my uncle was a civilian cop, because that was a fun thing to do, and he had a gun permit! [laughter] So, he’d go around in a squad car at night, and his partner was a guy named Johnny Kuhl (pronounced “cool”). [laughter] Best name in the history of the world. CBA: In Times Square? [laughs] Jeff: Exactly, and these guys, they would protect the prostitutes from their pimps, they would mingle with the mobsters. It was The Untouchables, The Naked City and Batman all rolled into one, and I just reveled in it! But I saw the kind of grit they needed for their respective businesses, and in the streets, and it was inspirational. I just carried that same mindset into the comic books, plus there was the love of the material! Unfortunately, I think I had the creative December 2001

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chops at the time, but I did not have the managerial skills necessary at the time at all. CBA: Howard Chaykin said that he came into the office after the second issue of The Scorpion, and saw evidence that Alex Toth was working on the book. Jeff: Well, Alex Toth was working on a concept for The Scorpion in case we had to change it. There were two things that were happening: One was Howard and I had a massive miscommunication about the deadlines, and he got incredibly burned-out. The second thing that happened was, Martin was more and more vocal about hating the book, and put me into a real tough spot, because Howard created the character, and we came up with the title, so what do you do? What do you do if you want to change a book? Legally, we would’ve had the right to continue it in his vein, but morally, I didn’t think we did, so yeah, I was prepared to go in another direction, which in fact we ended up doing. Am I sorry about it? Yeah, Howard was doing great stuff. Would I have done it differently now? Sure, I probably would’ve quit along with him. But that’s not the way it went. Figure, if you quit, everything goes to hell, everything that you fought for, all the people you do get along with—and I got along great with Jack Sparling, John Albano, Michael Fleischer, with a lot of the people. You didn’t want to lose that. Sal Amendola. We were all having great success, creative success. CBA: Another person who had a bittersweet experience was Sal, and he told me his heart went out of the book he was doing—The Phoenix—to a degree, and he felt that you had to accept the dictums that were coming down from Martin Goodman, that you were just squarely stuck in the middle of these arbitrary decisions. Jeff: Well, here’s how arbitrary it was: Disaster movies were big, so Martin decided the cover of The Phoenix #1 that I had worked on with Dick Giordano that we all liked would be much better if we had a city falling down around him, which was not the way the cover was designed, and it was not what we wanted to do, but Dick, being a professional, went ahead and put in buildings falling down. [laughter]

Above: We’ve misplaced the caption to this unbought Playboy cartoon submission by Leo Summers. Courtesy of Jeff Rovin. Below: DC war artist Ric Estrada contributed the horror strip “Devilina” to the sametitled black-&-white title. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Above: The genesis of Planet of Vampires was originally Jeff Rovin’s plan to adapt the 1971 Charlton Heston science-fiction vampire flick, The Omega Man (which, in turn, was based on Richard Matheson’s novel, I am Legend) in a comic title, but apparently publisher Martin Goodman deemed the license too costly. When in doubt, swipe! Pat Broderick’s nifty POV #1 cover with Neal Adams inks. Below: Rosalind Cash and Chuck in a still from The Omega Man. For a period in the late ’60s/early ’70s, Heston was the King of Science-Fiction flicks. Courtesy of Andrew D. Cooke. ©1971 Warner Brothers Pictures.

CBA: Sal sent me his thumbnails for the first two issues of The Phoenix, and I noticed the only difference I could ascertain from the final work and the thumbnails was that the capital city of Iceland, Reykjavik, was changed from a more rural-looking, smaller city, to a metropolis with skyscrapers. Was it changed to justify the cover? Jeff: Yep! [laughter] Never mind what the city really looks like. Let’s make it look like Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. Yes, there were dicta coming down from Martin, and some of them I had to carry through, partly because there were also some victories. For example, Pablo Marcos needed a downpayment for his house, so I got him an advance for $3,000. Walter Simonson was really sick at one point, and we had to advance him the money and carry the story as done when in fact it was not done, but there was a lot of good we tried to do to counterbalance the bad, and I’m not going to defend the bad, because it was bad! I’m sorry people got hurt. Again, when you’re 22 or 23, and trying to manage all these temperaments, and with a personality as strong as Martin, with an anger as strong as Martin’s, with a checkbook controlled by Martin—it’s awfully difficult. CBA: Did you see him on a daily basis? Jeff: Yes, except for the hour or two when he took a nap in the office. CBA: Did you have a daily meeting with him, or did you just see him in the course of the day, with weekly or monthly meetings?

Jeff: No, he wanted to see everything that came in. CBA: Every day? Jeff: Every day. He didn’t want to see the scripts or the pencils, he wanted to see the finished artwork before we sent it out. Increasingly, he would throw it on the desk with greater disgust than the last time, and finally, Chip would get involved, and however gruff Martin was, at least he had the background, he’d earned the right to be gruff. Chip was a real lightweight in that sense, and I just couldn’t take it from him. He would be dismissive of work, but have no suggestions on what to do better. It was so frustrating that at one point, Ric, my assistant, went into the bathroom and cut off all his hair, he was just so frustrated. [laughter] I felt that was really a defining moment, because my God, look what’s happening to us! CBA: He’s pulling out his hair, so to speak! Jeff: Yeah, literally! [laughter] Howard Nostrand came in one day so upset about something that… I don’t know whether he threatened to beat Ric up, or actually threw him against a wall, but I mean… tempers were high. Those are only the ones that spring to mind, I’m sure there were others. Mike Sekowsky lettering the word “sh*t” on an airplane wing, which we didn’t notice in the artwork, and even Martin missed that one. CBA: Did Mike Sekowsky, as far as you can tell, have an unhappy experience at Atlas? Jeff: He had an unhappy experience everywhere. CBA: Were you unhappy with his work at all, that you could see? For instance, I’ve got this real mystery, I’ve got this story that’s in pencil form that was originally made for 8 1/2 x 11, and this will probably be stretching your memory, but it was called “Speed Demon,” and it was a race car Formula One story that Sekowsky did, and I’m convinced that it’s a rejected Atlas/Seaboard story, and that Ernie Colón jumped in—and Ernie can’t remember doing this— but he did a story called “Speed Demon”… Jeff: Yeah, where a guy disintegrates in the end. CBA: [laughs] Right. But it’s the same kind of thing: A demon, the devil’s in it, and it’s like… do you recall at all? Jeff: No, the title is not familiar. But then, there were so many things coming in, God, I mean… Eliot Maggin came in with stuff, I remember Alan Weiss wanted to do a comic called Red Blooded and actually showed us some sketches for it. All I remember was Martin Goodman said, “No way,” and I had to tell Alan, “No way,” and… [laughs] that was that! What was I going to say beyond that? Mike Grell actually came up as well, but I don’t remember what we talked about. CBA: Did you ever have a heart-to-heart in the intervening years since then with Stan Lee at all, and talk about Martin? Jeff: We did briefly, but Stan wasn’t going to say anything bad about him, and I’m not sure Stan would have any reason to say anything bad about him. CBA: I just mean to say was Martin doing the same thing over at Marvel, looking through all the art every day… was he any different over there? Jeff: Of course, Marvel was a much larger operation, and I doubt Martin would have the time to do that. CBA: It seemed to be a lot less arbitrary situation at Marvel. You can see a logic, a discernable linear progression put into projects. Perhaps the situation at Atlas/Seaboard was due to that anger. Jeff: Yeah, and that’s the key. Martin was spending an awful lot of his own money on this! On higher page rates, for instance. The whole idea that I had for the company to give some percentage of participation to creators, he just wasn’t happy about that. So we really started out on a bad foot, because no sooner had I come aboard than I presented him with this concept of giving royalties on ancillary rights to people. This was a time when nobody was even getting reprint money. So, he was immediately suspicious and on guard, but I said, “Look, if we’re going to get good people, this is what we have to do.” These are the fights that, as Jim Shooter has often said, nobody hears about. This was a very real problem, this was a time when you didn’t miss deadlines, because news dealers didn’t like that. CBA: You guys were distributed by Kable, who was a second- or third-string distributor, historically. What was your COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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feeling about being distributed by Kable? Jeff: Well, the comics were showing up where I shopped. CBA: You saw them? Jeff: My world was New York, so I knew nothing. [laughs] CBA: Because the rest of the world did not see a lot of them! Jeff: They may not have got them, but who knows the reasons for that? I just don’t know. Getting back to Martin and our struggles, we had Tippy Teen reprints in Vicki. Very early, I said, “We’re doing Tippy Teen, can’t we please do the other Tower comics as well? They had some great super-hero stuff,” and he said, “Well, we’ll look into it, okay, go ahead.” So we put a lot of time and effort looking into doing reprints of NoMan and Dynamo and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and all that, and that came to nothing, because he just decided he didn’t want to do them! CBA: Do you recall if it would’ve cost much? Jeff: It wouldn’t have cost anything, or else he wouldn’t have been doing Tippy Teen! [laughter] Of all the titles to pick from that, Tippy Teen was arguably the worst! It was inconceivable to me! I understand what he was reaching for, to try to get that teen audience, but when the guy you hired to produce your super-hero comics says to you, “These are some of the best that were done in this time, let’s bring them back,” and he says, “Nah, I don’t wanna!” it’s very debilitating. CBA: [laughs] What was Chip’s position at Atlas/Seaboard? [Jeff sighs.] Was he officially the publisher? Jeff: Martin got really angry at me because we listed he and Chip as co-publishers in the first issue of a black-&-white magazine, and he made me take his name off immediately. I suspect that had to do with some kind of contractual arrangement with Cadence, not to put out a competitive product in a certain amount of time. But Chip was nominally the publisher, though he showed no interest in the comic books, apart from just not liking them. It’s very difficult for people to understand that he would come in to the office, spend a lot of time December 2001

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on the phone, a lot of time planning to buy Swank magazine, and just kind of being dismissive about all the comics. I don’t even know if he wanted to do them at all. CBA: The comics? Jeff: Yeah. The puzzle books made sense to him, because they were cheap and delivered quick revenue, the confession magazines the same, comics were expensive. CBA: [laughs] I think it was Steve Mitchell who said, “If you think comic fans are rabid, you won’t believe the crossword puzzle people, when they would call up the office and demand when the next issue’s coming out!” [laughs] Jeff: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. CBA: So we ain’t nothing! Jeff: Yeah, yeah. And there weren’t enough people to even handle these things! That’s why when the decision to publish Gothic Romance came, Steve and I ended up getting all the artwork for that from comic book artists—Neal Adams, Russ Heath, Howard Chaykin—so there were some triumphs, but for every triumph, there was a Scorpion situation, and then there was. How do you delicately go to Larry Hama and nudge him to finish Wulf when his mother is dying? I mean, it was an impossible situation! CBA: Obviously it soured for you pretty quickly. You were hired in June of 1974? Jeff: I was hired at the end of June. I quit once in the Fall because these guys just didn’t know what they were doing, and they were stopping us from doing our jobs. Chip persuaded me to stay, and I just quit in January of ’75 for good, because it was… I didn’t even give them notice, I just walked out. CBA: Steve Mitchell mentioned something to me, he recalls you writing a letter. Was that the Fall resignation? Jeff: Yes. CBA: So Steve went with you, and was basically dismissed at that time, or he quit?

Above: Two attempts by Russ Heath at a Tiger-Man cover. At left, courtesy of Terry Austin, looks to be the first try and, above (salvaged from the trash at Continuity Associates by Bob Wiacek) is apparently the second attempt. Neither were published. Bob tells CBA that Russ rendered billows of smoke for this assignment, only to trim it out for use in another Heath masterwork. Always a recycler, that Russ! Art ©2001 Russ Heath. Tiger-Man ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Above: Okay, so it’s hard to tell in this black-&-white reproduction, but Jeff Rovin and Steve Mitchell’s original color scheme (seen above) for the blurb type on this Greg Theakston-painted Movie Monsters #2 cover is far more legible than the nearly invisible modifications demanded by Atlas/Seaboard publisher Charles “Chip” Goodman, revisions that were costly and unnecessary as Jeff and Steve attest in their respective interviews. They both cited this incident as a prime example of Chip’s ineptitude. Courtesy of Jeff Rovin. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc. Below: The Comic Reader #111 reported that this was a sketch of The Grim Ghost by Ernie Colón, but we know the host of Weird Tales of the Macabre when we see him! ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Jeff: Yes. CBA: And you wrote a letter saying, “It’s either me or it’s Chip”? Jeff: Right. At first, Chip agreed to stay out of it. He said, “We want you to stay, you’re doing a great job,” and that lasted a day, because that was when Larry started going after the Marvel people, under orders from Martin, and… oh, I forget some of the titles we did then, that Dracula thing…. CBA: Son of Dracula, Hands of the Dragon…. Jeff: Right, and I… Steve and I were still trying to do nifty stuff with The Cougar and Frank Thorne did the cover, and we just… were still trying to do different kinds of books, but it became increasingly impossible. Particularly when they’d change titles like The Phoenix or even The Grim Ghost from what we were doing to Marvel style before the sales had even come in on the first issues! So they didn’t even know if they were successful, and we were being told to change them. [laughs] It took three issues at the time—and it probably still does—to find out if it’s selling. CBA: The first issue of The Cougar was dedicated to Dan Curtis, and Steve recalls being enamored with Kolchak, The Night Stalker. Was that the genesis of that book? Jeff: Actually, it was the idea of, “What would have happened if Burt Lancaster had become a super-hero?” was the genesis of it, but Steve was very much a Dan Curtis fan, and took it in that direction. Steve and I were huge Burt Lancaster fans. As a matter of fact, the name of Tiger-Man’s alter ego was Lancaster Hill, which was inspired by Hecht, Hill, Lancaster, which was Burt Lancaster’s production company. CBA: Did you hit it off with Pat Boyette, for instance? Jeff: Oh, I loved Pat Boyette! Pat was great! He was a gentleman, he did terrific stuff, he was happy to be doing color and black-&white, it was different looking, it was weird… it was Weird Suspense… it was just a thrill to get each new package from him, and just talking to him. He was a very stabilizing influence when we were all going crazy. CBA: That voice? Jeff: Yeah, that voice, his whole, “Don’t let it bother you, either.” [laughter] Very encouraging, but unfortunately, it burned off quickly. CBA: You also received some of the best work from probably the artist I most discovered through Atlas/Seaboard: Ernie Colón. Jeff: Ernie is one of the best in the business. Always was, always will be, and if these bozos that run the companies would give him some work, he would absolutely shine. CBA: He’s one versatile artist. He apparently can do anything! Jeff: He can do everything and do it brilliantly, that’s what’s so extraordinary. I don’t understand why he’s not working. CBA: They gave him a shot once, I guess, and…. Jeff: Well, he did Damage Control, Amethyst, and many other books. Look at some of the independent work he’s done, it’s all very personal. It’s always thought-provoking, and the style and panache that he brought into each title that he did was exceptional. [laughs] The problem we had with Ernie was not with Ernie! He did the lettering on the first Tiger-Man, and Martin hated the lettering! So, thereafter in his mind, he hated Ernie and his work! [laughter] We tried to explain, “All right, we experimented with something, it didn’t work out, we won’t do it again!” Obviously, lettering was one of our biggest problems up there! [laughs] CBA: Thrilling Adventure Tales. I would say the second issue is one

of the best comic books that came out of the entire industry through the ’70s. Jeff: Thanks! CBA: Was that one of your swan songs, perhaps, before leaving? Jeff: It was. Let’s see, I fought with Neal on that one! [laughter] CBA: With the cover? Jeff: Yeah, because you couldn’t see the head of the wolf on the right because the boulder was the same color, so he had to white out the boulder and wasn’t happy about that. No, we had a great time putting it together! I think of all the books, Thrilling Adventure Stories was the labor of love we weren’t going to let anybody mess with. CBA: You had a fantastic story by Alex Toth in there, you’ve got a great Russ Heath story, you had John Severin in there…. Jeff: Yeah! CBA: Just a hell of an issue. And Jack Sparling! Jeff: Yep! I think Jack appreciated being in there. CBA: But no second part to “Lawrence of Arabia” by you and Frank Thorne, unfortunately. Jeff: Well, Martin made me stop that one immediately because he was a big supporter of Israel, and so he felt this was somehow promoting a kind of pan-Arabism, and I was just trying to tell a kind of historical adventure story, and maybe I was naive about that. Being Jewish, I probably should’ve been more sensitive to his concerns, but again, I just could not believe he came down on me for that one, and… that one, he really yelled about. By the way, I think that second issue may have contained an editorial [“Robbery!”] by that uncle I’d mentioned earlier, about the police in New York. It was a two-pager, as I recall. CBA: [laughs] You were even getting your family in there, eh? Jeff: He was really indignant about some anti-police issue where the criminal had gotten away with something, and he asked if he could write about it, and I said, “Sure!” We could be serious, too. CBA: I wanted to talk about some personalities, people I know very little about. Who’s Gabriel Levy? Jeff: He was a writer who walked in off the street and had some good ideas. We needed writers, so he was hired to give him a try. CBA: Who was he? Could you describe him? Jeff: [laughs] You know, I don’t even remember much about him. He was a pleasant, maybe 20, 22-year-old comic book fan, but very intelligent. I don’t remember much else about him. CBA: Perhaps Atlas/Seaboard was his singular foray into comics. Jeff: Yes, it seems so. I haven’t encountered his name since. CBA: Did you deal with Pat Broderick at all? Jeff: Pat came in, as I recall, with a very dramatic sketchbook, and he may have been recommended by Neal—I don’t remember. Indeed, I used him subsequently to do some illustrations for a book I’d written, he was just really extraordinarily talented. CBA: Was “The Dark Avenger” his creation? Jeff: You know, it was probably John Albano’s idea, then. John, who had written up at DC, was just an idea machine and he was constantly throwing out ideas. It was actually probably very much something he’d thought of. CBA: Was John your cohort at DC? You guys seemed to be junior editors at the same time. Jeff: John was actually about 15 years older than I was. As I recall, he worked with Joe Orlando. He was just so affable and I was always touched by the fact that he came up to deliver a job, a script, the day that I quit, and he just picked it up off the desk and went with me, there was no question about him staying. I believe he went down to Florida after that, and continued to write, but again, I lost track of him. We did briefly correspond for a while. CBA: Was Atlas/Seaboard your last foray as an editor in comics? Jeff: Yeah. I did a lot of consulting for Warren afterwards, and wrote some stories for Harvey and one or two for Archie when they brought back Super Duck—that was maybe 10 or 12 years ago—and I wrote New Kids on the Block for Sid Jacobson, just as an excuse to work with Ernie again. Ernie really liked working with Sid; I think they’d started together at Harvey and then at Marvel. CBA: Did you have a lot of dealings with Pablo Marcos? Jeff: Yeah, Pablo was terrific. He was just so eager to do whatever was necessary. Again, I worked with him subsequently on some of COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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the book projects, because I just enjoyed his work. CBA: Very nice guy. Jeff: Yeah, just terrific. CBA: Terry Austin he said that The Dark Avenger was supposed to be the Atlas/Seaboard answer to Batman. Do you remember that? Jeff: I don’t remember it as a conscious approach, whether it was perceived as that I can’t say. You know, with the exception of The Brute, we really didn’t target, as I recall, other comic book companies. It was not our desire to create counterparts to them. We were looking at a much larger, more ambitious literary reach, if you will— which obviously was beyond us, but we reached for it, nonetheless. CBA: Did you ever meet Steve Ditko? Jeff: Yeah, he came in quite often, and of course the most memorable meeting was when he tore up his “Wrecage” pages. CBA: He did quite a bit for you at Atlas, considering. Jeff: Yeah. CBA: Were you close with Michael Fleischer? Jeff: Again, it was a professional relationship, but he… he was just so wonderfully intense it was fun to have him around. Very outspoken, which was refreshing. Everybody was trying not to offend Marvel or DC, and he didn’t care, he just wanted to do the work. CBA: Do you know what’s become of him? Jeff: No, the last correspondence I have from him was about six months after I left, when he indicated he was contemplating suing Atlas/Seaboard, but I don’t remember why or what became of that. CBA: He did become a litigious guy after that. Jeff: He was very pissed, I guess. CBA: Did you specifically look out for Dick Giordano to do the covers of the first issues? He seemed to do pretty much all the covers for all the first issues, except for a few Neal Adams had a hand in. Jeff: He did, and I didn’t seek him out. I had gone up to Continuity, which was Neal and Dick’s studio, and again, it was a question of who was available to do covers, who could do them well, and there was Dick. I was certainly pleased and excited to have him. CBA: Did you have much dealings with Al Milgrom? Jeff: Yeah, he did Morlock 2001 with Michael. As I recall, Michael and Al pretty much worked that one out on their own, and Alan was again, very enthusiastic. At some point, I also got him some advertising work, because he was fast, he was reliable, and he was good. [laughs] Those were the criteria at the time! CBA: On the third issue of Morlock 2001, the art was by Steve Ditko with Bernie Wrightson inks. Do you remember that? Jeff: That was right about the time I was leaving, so I don’t have any memories of that at all. I know that Martin and Chip decided we had to change the approach and it was called The Midnight Men at that point. We did whatever was necessary to make some sort of continuity, but that was impossible. Actually, one thing I wanted to mention, you can stick it somewhere else as an example of Martin and Chip’s incessant meddling, was the cover of Wulf the Barbarian #2, where they insisted on taking this beautiful cover and cutting in this female demon leering through a crack in the wall, which I believe was drawn by Jack Abel. CBA: Yeah, it’s pretty glaring! [laughs] Jeff: That was something that I fought very angrily, and it was just overruled, they were going to do it anyway. CBA: Back to Morlock, you have no memory of Bernie getting the assignment to ink Steve Ditko? Bernie was one of the top artists at the time, it seems kind of an odd kind of pairing. Jeff: Well, you know, odd pairings were good, those were the kinds that we were really looking at, and I wish we could’ve done more of them, because there was… Odd pairings, and odd subjects from people; we had a story that was never published that Walt Simonson did, “Gorgo versus Rodan,” that he actually drew and finished, and it was just wonderful, which was when we thought we had the rights to those characters, and it didn’t happen. But yeah, those kind of quirky pairings were something which worked out well. CBA: Walter remembers other chapters being done with the book. He said this was planned to be a three-chapter black-&-white book. Jeff: The monster thing. I just remember having this feeling that giant monsters were going to be a big thing again. It seemed a logical place to go with all the disaster movies, so we wanted to kind December 2001

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of get ahead of that in comic books, but again, I don’t remember. There were so many things that were on the drawing board or actually prepared, like Bill DuBay’s Wonderworld, and we kicked around the idea for a humor magazine. I never got to execute a lot of them at the time of my tenure. CBA: Did you suggest to Goodman to go out and get these licenses, or did you do the legwork yourself? Jeff: Oh, I did all of them by myself, and I had told Martin that one of the disadvantages we faced was that we had no linchpin titles that we built the other ones around, so it would probably be a good idea to spend a little bit of money and get them that had a following already. That’s when I went to Condé Nast and to Toho and Warner Brothers (to get The Omega Man) and even some cheesier horror titles, like Planet of the Vampires and things like that. But for one reason or another, we didn’t get those. CBA: You could’ve made deals had you had the money? Jeff: I think had we had the resources for those titles…. There was some confusion about The Omega Man because of the fact it was based on the Matheson novel, it was not clear who would be licensing that, so that held it up for quite a while… for quite a fatal while, it turned out! [laughs] The Toho stuff went elsewhere, Planet of the Vampires we never found out who we needed to go to for that—not that it would’ve been a real brand name to capitalize on, it just would’ve been a fun, wacky concept I felt might be promotable, might be quirky enough to appeal to some underground venues, that sort of thing. CBA: Were you involved in developing Planet of Vampires? Jeff: Yes, though I don’t remember to what degree. We liked the title, but of course, you can’t trademark a title, but we didn’t want to lose the concept, so we just took it in a kind of Omega Man direc-

Above: Editor Jeff Rovin mocked-up this Jeff Jones painting stat as the cover for Weird Tales of the Macabre #2 but Atlas publisher Martin Goodman shot it down and, according to Jeff, insisted that Jones never be used again for the covers of the black-&-white magazine line. Courtesy of Jeff Rovin. Art ©2001 Jeff Jones.

Above: And how could we forget Atlas’ arachnid resident of Weird Suspense, The Tarantula, by Mike Fleisher and the incomparable Pat Boyette? The strip was truly horrific (especially if giant spiders tend to creep you out) and was ably drawn for three issues by the Texan artist, quite a run for an Atlas Comics title. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

tion, and inverted it. It could’ve been a lot stronger book without the Comics Code, but they were, again, our nemesis. We had a much larger tapestry in mind than we got to realize. CBA: Did you know Jim Craig at all? Jeff: The Scorpion artist? Yeah, and again, I don’t remember where he came from, but he had kind of a Kirby-esque style that seemed to satisfy Martin’s desire to make Marvel-like books. I don’t remember whether he came in off the street or was sent over. CBA: There was another property I believe you were interested in getting: Kolchak, the Night Stalker? Jeff: We were doing Movie Monsters, and that was a favorite of Steve’s and we did inquiries about that, but again, it was not something that… I think that was one where it was a case of we weren’t able to afford it. CBA: Because it was an ongoing show at the time? Jeff: Correct. Licensing fees for recognizable properties like that were almost—and still are—heavily inflated. CBA: But it morphed into something? Jeff: Oh, The Cougar! Well, again, that was Steve and my desire to do a homage to Burt Lancaster and mix it up with Kolchak a little bit. Again, we talk about these weird juxtapositions not only in artists, writers and inkers, but also in terms of concepts. It’s very fashionable in Hollywood now to say, “Well, it’s Die Hard

on a boat.” Back then, it was “Superman Meets Kolchak,” if you will… for the purposes of shorthand, we would think of things that way. CBA: [laughs] What was the thinking behind Targitt? Jeff: That grew out of our meetings with Howard Nostrand, and what he wanted to do, and Ric Meyer’s fascination with James Bond and Our Man Flint. Nostrand was very turned on by the idea of doing kind of a secret agent who had a lot of Will Eisner’s The Spirit in him, the kind of sarcasm, understatement, overstatement… just very dynamic storytelling, and Ric really rose to the occasion, I think, certainly in the first one. I remember the splash page with the airplane blowing up, when it came in I was just astonished by it. The Comics Code gave us problems with a panel of somebody getting blown away, [laughter] but we managed to keep that in. It was just something Howard really wanted to do, so he and Ric really went to town on that. CBA: When I pick up the book now, I think, “Gee, I wonder if this was really made for Howard.” Jeff: The one thing we were trying to do initially, before the “Make Ours Marvel” edict came down from Martin, was to get people to do what they enjoyed doing. Certainly Howard did that with The Scorpion, and Larry did that with Wulf the Barbarian, Pat Boyette with “The Tarantula”… we had a lot of fun those first couple of months. CBA: Targitt was a police/spy strip, and then the next issue, he’s in a skin-tight super-hero costume. Jeff: Exactly, he became Manstalker, because Martin was convinced a non-costumed super-hero wouldn’t sell. These were decisions made before sales reports had come in on the first issues. CBA: There’s no way they could’ve had any indication, right? Jeff: Not at all. CBA: The first issue wasn’t even on sale yet at the time you assigned him for the second book. Jeff: It may have been on sale, but it wasn’t off sale! [laughs] Not being off sale, you wouldn’t even have been close to having sales reports, there weren’t even spot checks! There was no feedback whatsoever. You can argue that Martin’s gut had not felt it before, but I maintain it failed in this instance. CBA: Howard Nostrand just needed to be jump-started with Ric’s layouts? Was that the key? Jeff: No, I think he needed to be jump-started by beating Ric up! [laughter] Howard was happy to be working, and actually lived across the street from me in Manhattan at the time and would stumble over unshaven and with pages and whatnot… he was really into it, and I know his heart was broken when it changed, as well. That was sad for him. CBA: Was he in good condition at the time? Jeff: Tough to say. I really didn’t see much of him in his private life, but he’d probably seen better days. I’m not sure what I mean by that, but there was something very sad and melancholy and a little bit off-center about him. I know his wife was a doll, but I couldn’t say with any authority if anything was wrong. CBA: Did you have many dealings with Wally Wood? Jeff: Not too many. He was another one that didn’t do very much for Atlas. CBA: You obviously had really established yourself in a career as an author, you’ve written numerous books. Did you see in the ’70s that perhaps a career in comics wasn’t for you, that you saw the downside of the business? Jeff: The downside was that we were in an era where the artist was really becoming the dominant force in the medium, and for a writer, that did not have much appeal, so I quit Atlas and started writing fiction, which I found that much more satisfying. It’s not to say I didn’t enjoy comics; working with Leo Summers, Pat Boyette, John Severin, Frank Thorne, and people of that caliber was an absolute delight. But it was changing into the era that led to the dominance of Frank Miller, John Byrne—all of whom I admire enormously—but it was changing for a writer, not necessarily for the best. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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CBA: During the ’70s, when you were in social situations, did you say you worked for comics? Jeff: Oh, sure! I was not taken as seriously as when I said, “Well, I’m writing this novel or that novel,” even though the novels were probably crappier than some of the comics. [laughter] If you’re asking whether the medium had yet attained any prestige, the answer is no. One could probably get away with saying, “I write for Mad,” or National Lampoon, but not for color comics. No, nobody ran up and put a bouquet of roses in my arms. [laughter] CBA: Did you attend the July 4th Seuling con in ‘74 as a representative of Atlas? Jeff: Yes, that was actually the first one I’d gone to, and I actually kept the office opened, made sure I was there as well, jumping back and forth, if anybody wanted to stop by. That was kind of our official coming-out party—not that we had a party! [laughs] I was there, announcing we were in business, and also scoping out the situation. That was the time when Siegel and Shuster were having their struggles with DC, and I remember having some very heated discussions with Sol Harrison, the production chief at DC. So, it was actually a little bit more interesting time if you were just starting a comic book company, because there were all these issues about retaining some kind of control over your property if you were a creator. CBA: Did you attend the ACBA meetings? Jeff: I went to one or two. CBA: So you were interested in those issues coming out, as an editor? Jeff: Oh, sure, because I knew they were going to have to be dealt with at some point. It was virtually impossible to get any kind of serious concessions from publishers. I did, as I mentioned, have a document I drew up that, unfortunately, I only got to get out one or two copies, that allowed royalties from ancillary sales of the character to people like Howard that they either created or co-created, and that was certainly if not the first, one of the first examples of that, and then shortly after that, Carmine started paying royalties for reprints and retuning artwork, and so forth. He issued a memo not long after we went into business in effect. CBA: Do you feel that was a reaction to…? Jeff: Oh, certainly, that was a reaction to the fear of losing artists and writers to us, because at the end of the memo—which I have here somewhere—said this will only fly for artists and writers who work exclusively for DC. [laughter] I’m actually going to get you the precise wording of that piece. That was actually a smart thing for Carmine to do, obviously. CBA: Not exactly fair to be requesting that of freelancers. Jeff: Yeah, but in an era of vast unfairness, it was relatively fair. CBA: I got into a debate with Roy Thomas last week talking about Atlas/Seaboard, and Marvel at the time was concerned about losing creators to them. I said it sounded hypocritical to be asking freelancers to stay loyal to a company unless they’re going to guarantee a living wage, basically giving you a contract. Roy said, “Well, that’s pretty much what we did, we kept our artists busy, and when George Tuska, for instance, needed a job, we’d find a job for him.” Jeff: On this DC memo from August 13, 1974, Carmine’s words were, “The above applies only to artists, colorists and writers who are currently working for us and submit their work exclusively to us.” CBA: Which was, what? About five guys, right? Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Murphy Anderson… Jeff: Actually, I talked to Curt about working for us. CBA: Did you talk up the company at the convention? Jeff: No, I went in a very low-key capacity. Most people didn’t know who I was anyway, and I just wanted to introduce myself to people that I hoped would come up to see us and possibly work for us. CBA: Did you lock in anyone then, or get anyone to come over? Jeff: The first person I locked in was Howard Chaykin, right in the elevator at Warren Publishing Company, shortly after I accepted the offer to go work for Seaboard. CBA: [laughs] Network where you can, right? Jeff: Exactly! Well, it worked for comic book artists. Now that I think of it, Roy was in contract negotiations with Marvel at the time, and he got what I recall was a satisfactory contract, which was one December 2001

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reason he didn’t work for Seaboard. I think Martin wanted him to edit and write, but again, Marvel came through with an offer. CBA: It’s funny that the negative reaction came from DC, when Atlas/Seaboard was really swiping Marvel, who seemed almost nonchalant. Jeff: That wasn’t our mandate at the beginning, and also I worked at DC, so I knew the editors and writers and artists and Carmine, so it was likely those would be the people I would be talking to. CBA: The first covers of the Atlas/Seaboard books were actually striking, as there was very little verbiage on the covers, just images! The Brute might’ve had a tiny little box with copy on it. Jeff: We wanted to have very little copy, and again, I don’t want to take credit for that, because I honestly don’t remember whether it was Steve or me who came up with that, but I remember when Neal’s Ironjaw cover came in, we just didn’t want to screw it up! [laughter] So we said, “You don’t need anything more than this picture,” and we felt that way about The Scorpion, we felt that way about Wulf, those first few covers, and certainly about Ernie’s Grim Ghost cover… it just didn’t seem to be any reason to crap them up! CBA: [laughs] What was Leo Summers like? He established a reputation for himself in science-fiction illustration, didn’t he? Jeff: He did a lot of work for Analog. He did some movie work, as well, some posters. I remember he had done some of the advertising art for El Cid, which was quite impressive. That was actually the first I’d ever seen of his work when I was a kid. He was just so pleasant

Above: Beautiful Frank Thorne cover art for Tales of Evil #2 starring that muck-monster of Atlas Comics, Bog Beast! Don’t forget to check out the forthcoming TwoMorrows’ book Swampmen, which will feature a thorough look at Boggie and the many other creatures from the bayou that have stalked comics since The Heap first appeared in the 1940s. Note the changes made to the cover as published, including the monster’s redrawn face, obliteration of background characters, and changed woman and policemen figures. Courtesy of John Hitchcock. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Above: The Atlas Comics initial logo design as featured in The Comic Reader #111, though it was later modified to less of an “Up Yours, Marvel!” approach. Courtesy of Mike Friedrich. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Below: Kable News, the distributor of Atlas/Seaboard, sent this memo to clients, trumpeting the arrival of the new comics and magazine line in 1974. Courtesy of Jeff Rovin.

and so easy-going. He loved comics, I guess he’d done Bomba for DC. He’d always yearned to get back into it, and when he did those first jobs for Warren, I know Jim didn’t like them very much, but Bill DuBay did, and I did, and again, he was one of the first people I snagged for the black-&-whites when Atlas started up. He had just a wonderful wash style. I saw those originals, he got that kind of pebbled paper that gave it even more texture, very large artwork. I wish I knew where some of those originals were, too, because they were just spectacular. The reduced versions didn’t just quite capture it. Again, he did some art for a book I did years later, and unfortunately, he died not too long after that. He was just terrific. CBA: It’s beautiful stuff. So little is known about him. Was he American? Jeff: Yeah, he was just this kind of elfish guy, like the character actor, Cecil Kellaway. He had that very cheerful aura about him. CBA: And then a dinosaur ate him! [laughter] Jeff: [Quoting Kellaway in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms] “The most astonishing thing about it is…!” [laughter] That was Leo! A little bit younger and undigested, but that was him. He always needed money. Actually, I’d taken him up to see Michelle Uri later, a cartoon editor at Playboy, because that was a style I thought would work for them, but he never did anything. CBA: Was Gothic Romance your idea? Jeff: No, that was another editor’s idea. CBA: Cybil St. John was a real name? Jeff: No. It was a pseudonym of a friend of Chip’s. She was not a good editor, either, and she just took it upon herself to get the artists, and of course, for guys like Howard and Russ who wanted to do illustrations, it was a perfect venue. I think they did some exceptional work for them. CBA: Who is Harold Shull, who was listed as an illustrator on that title? Jeff: He came to us through somebody. He was actually a painter, as I recall, who was trying to make a go of it professionally, he was holding down another job, and I may have actually met him first at Skywald, I don’t remember. I don’t know what happened to him afterwards. CBA: Do you remember George Tourjussen?

Jeff: He was a huge, Viking-like guy, a real artiste, the kind of guy you’d see in a garret in a village in the 1950s. He had this ultrarealistic style, and he was able to paint Mylar like nobody I’ve ever encountered before or since. His originals were enormous, they were the size of doors! [laughter] Steve and I were just blown away by it. He did renderings of vintage automobiles, of spaceships, airplanes… he was great with machines, so naturally, we figured, “Hey, we’ll put him on people!” [laughter] But again, it was that weird thing of let’s cast against type and see what they do. His Phantom of the Opera cover from Movie Monsters we got a little carried away with, because it didn’t really look like the Phantom to start with, so we figured let’s change it to something else. His Devilina, again, we just loved the way he did the work. CBA: That’s a wild, wild cover! Jeff: That was…? CBA: Is there any story behind the change of title from the originally-advertised Tales of the Sorceress to Devilina? Jeff: It was originally, but I don’t remember at what point we changed it, but I think we took a look at Vampirella’s sales figures and decided we should really be shooting for those instead of just another horror anthology, so that was what we did. CBA: While you were working at Atlas/Seaboard, did you bump into Jim Warren at all? Jeff: You bet! [laughs] CBA: What did Jim have to say? Jeff: [laughs] He was working tables at a convention, I walked over to his table, he looked up at me and said, “There’s the door, keep walking!” [laughter] So, he was not too happy to have any competition, and I absolutely don’t blame him, any more than I blame us for doing it. Afterwards, I went back and apologized for… not so much for taking the format he pioneered, but taking Captain Company and using that. He was very generous, he said, “We crushed you, we vanquished you, and now you come crawling back.” CBA: [laughs] That’s Jim for you! Jeff: It was. CBA: Obviously, you were taking him head-on with Movie Monsters. Jeff: That’s true, but again, it was our intention to do a somewhat more adult title than Famous Monsters was at that time. We were aspiring to be more Castle of Frankenstein than Famous Monsters, and we were never as well art-directed. Steve wasn’t really doing that, so it’s not a knock against him or John Chilly, who had done puzzle magazines; he didn’t really have a flair for this. Then actually, we had somewhat of an improvement; we brought in Sol Harrison’s son, Marty, who came up with some nifty designs, but by then, it was too late. By the way, hiring Marty—aside from the fact that he was good—was to try to reconcile some of this tension between us and DC. CBA: When you guys didn’t copy templates, really interesting things could happen. Thrilling Adventures Tales was a deviation from the norm; I don’t think there was any other comic like it coming out at the time. Jeff: No, we figured if we could bring the quality of Blazing Combat to the adventure field, we’d really have something. That was all we wanted to do. The original thinking behind that title was to make it a showcase title for the characters, which is how Tiger-Man got his own book. We were going to use him to launch other characters, like Kromag, a caveman guy we did. But it was going to be a testing ground for both writers and concepts. Not so much artists, because I felt the black-&-white artists were different from the color artists in the way they approached the medium. I wasn’t sure there’d be much crossover there. CBA: It’s interesting that black-&-whites were going wild at that time, Marvel was doing a great number of titles, Warren was doing his own titles, and Skywald was still going on. Jim Warren had the Spanish school, DC was exploiting the Filipino artists in their color books. You didn’t really go for those guys too much, did you? Jeff: We did actually go for them, but we were offered the second tier from Selectiones Illustrados, which was understandable, because Warren made them more money, and so we had a couple of stories by guys from Spain. CBA: Was Romero from there? He did some “Bog Beast” stories, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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but that was for Larry. But for you he did do that unpublished Rodan story. Jeff: Right, Bog Beast was one, and the other caveat about Selectiones Illustrados was that in some cases, we had to buy finished stories that had already been published in Europe and I’d translate them over to new stories. We did one or two of those, something like that. I don’t remember exactly. Then, of course, we had an extraordinary find in Leo Duranona, who Sergio Aragonés had brought up to the office. When Sergio recommended somebody, you paid attention. Leo did some really good stuff. December 2001

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CBA: What was the situation with Larry Hama? There was some pressure from Goodman? Jeff: Martin didn’t like Larry or his style, because he thought it was too small, like Howard’s Scorpion, the pictures were too small. With Larry, as I recall, from the second issue of Wulf, his mother was dying, so he had to get the help of everyone over at Continuity to finish that issue, and the fallout from the Goodmans was unquestionably the worst experience I had up there, because here was a guy who was concerned about his mother, and I’ve got Martin ringing me up, “Where’s the book, where’s the book, where’s the book?”

Above: Clockwise from top left: Jeff with Adam West when they worked on Back to the Batcave; Jeff with Charlton Heston and Jeff’s cousin Steve; Jeff in his NYC apartment, 1974; Jeff with Harryhausen model; Jeff at Warren; Jeff at the Skywald office, 1972; Jeff with stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen. All courtesy of Jeff Rovin. 39

Above: Afraid that boss Martin Goodman might reject this gorgeous Ernie Colón Grim Ghost #2 cover, editor Jeff Rovin snuck it through production, behind the publisher’s back. The original is currently framed under glass on Jeff’s wall. ©1975 Seaboard, Periodicals, Inc. Below: We’re unsure if this contract was ever used, but Atlas/Seaboard was one of the first comics publishers to even suggest a royalty/shared ownership plan with freelancers. Courtesy of Jeff Rovin.

You don’t want to take it away from him under those circumstances, so we just held off Martin as long as possible. CBA: Did Mike Grell come over to…? Jeff: He came over at some point, and it may actually have been with Warlord, I don’t remember. He had some concept, but I just don’t remember what happened. CBA: Savage Earth, perhaps? Jeff: It may have been, yeah, that certainly sounds very familiar. If I had the notebook handy, I could probably go back and check. If I’d done my homework, I would’ve had that out. I’ll see if I can dig that out quickly. CBA: Did Mike cause you some heat over at DC? Jeff: You know, I’ve heard t hat, and I don’t remember who caused who heat, and I don’t remember what the circumstances were about it, but yeah, there was some problem. I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was. CBA: I guess you wrote it in your article for The Comics Journal, it was that he went over and just opened up his mouth… Jeff: Oh, right! He talked about having come up to Atlas! That was the first time we had any idea that somebody might’ve done this for leverage. Now, I don’t know whether it was true or not, but that was the way it came back to us, and it did not make us look very good. Oh, here’s the notebook! Boy, I haven’t looked at this in 25 years. [laughter] It has all the people that we contacted… I see we called Jim Aparo… I shouldn’t be wasting your time with this… CBA: “Wasting time”? This is history, dude! Jeff: We promised Howard $105 a page to do art, letter, color and script. We went after Nick Carter. [laughs] What else have we got here? The first entry, 6/24, “Scorpion as a contemporary hero.” Oh, I guess not. We had other ideas… Whip-Master, Black Arrow [laughter] Oh, god, these names, the other names for Tippy Teen, we were considering Amy’s World, Jackie’s World, Barbara! [laughs] I guess that was after Steve’s girlfriend, later wife. Oh, man, so many different names in here, it’s embarrassing. I’m glad you can’t look over my shoulders at this! Even some early logo designs here. Here we have other names for Devilina. Let’s see… Russ Heath, when he was living in Westport… Steve Englehart we contacted… CBA: You just threw a very wide net. Jeff: Yeah, we did. Bill Mantlo, John Warner, Jack Sparling, Steve Skeates… these were all people we talked to, I guess, because I have telephone numbers here. Mary Skrenes, who we unfortunately screwed somehow that I don’t remember. I think we had started working with her on something. CBA: [Quoting from Rovin’s

TCJ article] Mary “was one of the first writers who came on board with outlines that neither Martin or Chip liked, they paid her a hefty 25 bucks, they told me not to work with her. Like a jerk, I agreed,” and you made a public apology to her. Jeff: Yeah, now I remember. I felt terrible, because she was good. Oh, yeah, here’s learning how to spell “Reykjavik,” which was a useful exercise. The cover layout for…. [laughs] There are some very silly things in here. Oh, here’s the… God, the initial logo for Planet of the Vampires, which I see was originally called Vampire Planet, that was clever. [laughter] Oh, yeah, here we had who to contact at Dan Curtis. Oh, right! We also went after Hammer Films, we wanted to do some of their monsters, I see here the Mummy as a continuing character. We wanted to do kung fu. CBA: When you say “we,” is that an editorial “we” or is that you and Steve? Jeff: It was really the triumvirate of me, Steve and Ric Meyers, we were very tight until things started to unravel, but in the early days, we were all just so focused on the same things. Oh my God, I had… [laughs] I actually had set up the team for The Omega Man, it was going to be Archie Goodwin, Pat Broderick, and Dan Adkins. We had one project called The Goblin, I don’t know where that was… Hellhawk was something Steve was working on. I don’t remember what that was, probably a war title. Here are some of the artists we went after from Selectiones Illustrados. CBA: So there was no anti-European or Filipino prejudice with you guys. Jeff: Not at all. Boy, we went farther on The Omega Man than I remembered! I had it listed here with the initial bunch of titles, we had Wulf the Barbarian, Omega Man, Scorpion, Morlock, Phoenix, Ironjaw and The Cougar. That was, according to this, going to be the initial lineup. Notes to Martin, let’s see what we’ve got here. “We are negotiating for characters from Condé Nast, we are negotiating for Godzilla, we are negotiating the Spanish artists.” Oh! [laughs] I was really being arrogant here. “I will not allow Marvel artists to work here.” I can just imagine saying that to him, I obviously did not deliver that message! [laughter] Here were some of the artists and writers I told him we needed to get: Tom Sutton, Walt Simonson, Mike Kaluta, Mike Ploog, Jack Sparling, Leo Summers, Ernie Colón… writers Archie Goodwin, Marty Pasko. Thrilling Adventure Stories, I thought we needed the following as anchors for the first issue: The Avenger, Spider, and G-8 and His Battle Aces. CBA: A real pulp lineup there! Jeff: Yeah, well, as I said, those were just coming back into print. $42 for pencils to Pat Broderick, boy you don’t see more of those! CBA: How do you recall your severance at Atlas/Seaboard? Jeff: Oh, it was just horrible. By the time I’d left, I was not even speaking to Chip, it was just absolute hostility, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. CBA: It must’ve been extremely difficult to take all the work. Could you easily tolerate that kind of stress, or were you glad it was over? Jeff: We withstood it, because we believed in what we were doing, and it’s not a knock against David Kraft, who came on afterwards, because I’m certain he faced a lot of the same things, but they had so deflated the dream that it was worse pain staying than it was walking away, and I think the dominant feeling I had at the time was I wish I’d been smarter, I wish I had done things differently, that I had spelled out our goal and set some sort of a multi-year plan with budgets, etc. But they wanted to get started so quickly that it was virtually impossible. When I sent the first resignation letter in November, it was from that point on just terrible. They convinced me to come back not because they thought I was doing a good job, but because they didn’t have anybody else to pump out the stuff. CBA: Even from November on, you just knew? Jeff: Oh, yeah, it was clear then. Somewhere around here, I have that resignation memo. I won’t even go into the other stupid things they did, but they did them. CBA: Were they just stupid, petty, vindictive…? Jeff: No, they were just aesthetically vapid! Even if you’re going to imitate Marvel, do a good job of it! They were just lashing out, they weren’t doing comic books, they just wanted to try to eat away at Marvel’s sales, and Marvel responded with reprints that just filled up COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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the newsstands, and you just couldn’t compete with that in a frontal assault, so you just do better comics. That was always our better… I shouldn’t say better, just different stuff, give readers a choice. The same way that Western/Gold Key comics were different than Marvel and DC, we could’ve been as well. But from November on, that was just not possible. CBA: You saw the writing on the wall, did you have a date in mind? Jeff: No, I think a few days after I buried a T-square in the wall, I realized it was time to go. CBA: Out of rage? Jeff: Just out of frustration that these guys were being dismissive of some of the top people in the industry, without even giving reasons in many cases. One of the last things I remember that pissed me off was when Chip threw a cover on my desk, shook his head, and walked out, meaning “We’re not publishing this.” I don’t even remember what cover it was. But I remember that was one of the things I mentioned in my resignation letter as being unacceptable. CBA: Were you privy at all to the sales figures? Jeff: No, I was gone before we had them! [laughter] I started in June, I ended in January… the first books came out in November or so, there just wasn’t time to have gotten the sales figures, and I remember Ernie telling me… Ernie apparently saw them and found out that the first books had sold really well, but that was no consolation at that time. CBA: Do you have any memory of what kind of percentage of sales it was? Jeff: No. CBA: Did you look back? Jeff: In what sense? CBA: When you left, did you… was there any lessons to be learned from your experience at Atlas/Seaboard? Jeff: Yeah, and unfortunately, as I said at the very beginning, it’s the same lessons that Jim Shooter and Jim Warren and other people have learned, that you can’t please the publishing end and the creative end all the time [laughs] and… you know, particularly in that era. I really shouldn’t lump Jim Warren in, because he was the publisher, and he had a lot more control over what he was doing, but it’s really Bill DuBay who was in that position, it’s just a horrendous place to be, because you become really friendly with the artists and the writers, and you’re still the guy who has to say, “They want me to stick a female demon on this beautiful cover,” or “They want you to add buildings falling down where they don’t belong.” A certain level of trust and camaraderie had been built up, and it just got crushed and smashed very quickly, and that was the bitterest result of that. Howard is still pissed off a quarter of a century later, which is unfortunate, but there you go! It was that level of frustration that we were feeling. CBA: Did you feel that because of the decisions you had to hand down that came from Goodman, did you feel like it damaged your reputation in comics? Jeff: Well, yeah. I certainly, if I wanted to go back and work in comics, it would’ve been difficult. Except again, with people like Toth and Walt Simonson, with whom I got along just fine, or Pablo or Leo or people I used subsequently on other projects. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what I wanted to do, so it worked out okay. But again, it’s unfortunate because you do bump into a lot of people who’ve moved on from comics, and they remember those days not fondly, and it’s not a legacy you want to necessarily have. CBA: Did you feel you were persona non grata to a lot of people? Jeff: I suppose so, but I do take some comfort from the fact that Carmine and I had dinner not too long ago, and just had a great old time reminiscing, and there again, Carmine was pilloried by a lot of people for decisions he reportedly made about Jack Kirby and so on and so forth, another example of a no-win situation! When at John Byrne’s parties, I bump into people like Walt and Weezie, and we get along fine, and I’m real happy about that. And Paul Levitz is still a good friend. And Ernie, of course. There are a lot of friendships that have endured and are unshakable. But the ones that tanked are the really sad ones. CBA: Did it sour you permanently on comics? You did some Harvey work—New Kids on the Block—and things like that. December 2001

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Jeff: No, it didn’t sour me at all, it just… I was lucky enough to do a lot better in non-fiction and now in fiction. No, if the right thing or the right idea came along, certainly I’d go back and do it. I’d work with Ernie again on anything in a minute. Or John Byrne, or Walter, or any of these folks, without hesitation. Those are the people you make time in your schedule to work with, but I haven’t thought of anything so far. CBA: If you could do it all over again, would you do anything different? Jeff: Plenty. CBA: Would you do it again? Jeff: Yeah, but probably not at 20, or whatever, 22, 23, whatever it was. Of course, you seize the opportunities when they come. As I said, I would’ve spelled out much more clearly to Martin and Chip what our thinking was to make sure they were on the same page, because at that point they probably would’ve said yes. I think they were as surprised to see what came out of our office as anyone, and they were the ones who got scared. They were also scared at the amount of money that was going out, I’ll be honest about that. CBA: Was it a hemorrhaging of cash? Jeff: Initially it certainly was, because we were paying the highest rates in the business, and we were publishing a lot of magazines and buying a lot of inventory, because we wanted to show artists who had taken a chance on us that we were going to be there to give

Above: Jeff Rovin’s ambitious telling of the life of T.E. Lawrence was snuffed after the first episode when publisher Martin Goodman nixed the series as promoting pan-Arabism, a very sensitive subject considering the violent mid-’70s situation in the Middle East. Regardless, artist Frank Thorne contributed an admirable job for chapter one, which appeared in Thrilling Adventure Stories #1. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Above: The February 1987 issue of The Comics Journal (#114) featured the startling exposé of Atlas/ Seaboard by that company’s former editor-in-chief, Jeff Rovin. This eye-opening account was the first thorough look at the company, serving as the basis for many questions used in this interview. Article ©2001 Jeff Rovin. Layout ©1987 The Comics Journal.

them the work, and we were buying it faster than we could use it in some cases. CBA: Were you involved in buying that backlog of that character in the back pages of The Barbarians? Jeff: European title. Yes, I bought to cut costs, it would be a good idea, as long as the material was viable, but again, that was right at the tail end of my tenure. CBA: I seem to recall, was it Alan Kupperberg going on there and just seeing tons of that inventory that just never saw print, except one story. That’s a lot of stuff. Jeff: Yeah, John’s covers, just some incredible stuff that I just don’t know what happened to it, and I’m sorry it never got published. Although Bill DuBay bought one of Jeff Jones’s covers, I thought he was gratified by that. CBA: What was the project Bill had? Jeff: It was called “Wonderworld,” and it was going to be, as I recall, a Victorian-modern-day-crackpot-inventor-with-kids-travelingthrough-time-and-space-type story. All of that’s hyphenated, by the way! [laughter] But again, it was something he did the cover for, which was just jaw-droppingly good. CBA: That’s as far as it got? Jeff: That plus a plot or two, but I don’t think we ever went to script on that. CBA: Was this a real kids’ book? Jeff: It was going to be… well, the obvious equivalent today would be Harry Potter, it was going to be aimed at a younger audience, but not necessarily Disney young or Looney Tunes young, but younger than the rest of the books. It seemed to me there was an untapped audience there we could try and reach, who were maybe not interested in Mad, and were looking for something that had some kind of humor and adventure. CBA: You’ve done some encyclopedias of action heroes, and you obviously have a great knowledge of that pulp stuff. Was it like being in your own playpen there, were you trying to live out some of your fantasies? Jeff: You know, I think that we were all in such awe of Walter

Gibson and Lester Dent, these guys who produced this material, that we wanted to be like them, and we were aware of Siegel and Shuster, we just had a lot of admiration for that generation of storytellers and the medium they invented. The medium, not just in a physical sense, but in a cultural sense of comic books, pulp heroes, the whole super-hero genre, and we really wanted to acknowledge them in some way, and I think by mixing the old with the new, Thrilling Adventure Stories probably would’ve been that. CBA: Do you see your fiction writing to this day, as being reminiscent, somehow related to the pulp writers? Jeff: Oh, absolutely. For the last seven years or so, I’ve been writing (and getting royalties from) this best-selling series called Op-Center, which comes out under the Tom Clancy banner, which I’m finally getting cover credit for, and the more I’ve been writing, the more I’m aware of how much it really is a modern-day Doc Savage, where you’ve got a team of crisis managers, each of whom has an individual, distinctive personality, and I even see now who the Ham character is, [laughter] who the Renny character is, and you have to push yourself off of that treadmill or it’s going to seem very stereotypical. But I know in my own thinking that comes out a lot, and what fascinates me is that—and this is really significant, and I think it really speaks to the value we all recognize in the original material— the more that I concentrate on the characters and their interplay, the kind of banter that Monk and Ham always had, the better the novels sell, and I can only account for that in that kind of Doc Savage framework, that people like that inside look at these bigger-than-life teams! CBA: I remember reading the Doc Savages, and what I would really look forward to wasn’t so much revealing who the bad guy was, but it was the comedic interplay between the characters. Jeff: Yeah, because you felt like you were just hanging with them, and were getting a glimpse into this life on the 86th floor of what was obviously the Empire State Building, with the diffracted glass windows, and so forth. We liked reading about the wonderful things Doc could do, just as in Op-Center, we like reading about the wonderful machinery we have to conduct these covert operations, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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but it’s really the same thing, only bigger, in a way. CBA: You’ve had a career as an author, writing even joke books. Jeff: I’ve written joke books, How to Win at Nintendo books, just all kinds of fun things, and I’m really lucky to have some great movie sales on some of my own fiction—Vespers to Barry Sonnenfeld, Fatalis to Sly Stallone, St. War to Dean Cain. But it all comes back to we’re still writing the kind of things that fascinated us when we were five-years-old, I think it’s just a different medium than this great 80-Page Giant! [laughter] But the excitement is still the same, and I hope that people who work in comics and TV, Howard on Mutant X, or Steve Mitchell on his movie projects, and everybody else is still having the same thrill, because that’s why we started doing this stuff! CBA: You still have that thrill? Jeff: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s a thrill not only to be working on this material that we love, and reaching an audience and earning decent livings, but it’s kind of fun to look back over the path that brought us to these places, I think everybody does that with their lives, and if you don’t like what it is, you change it; and if you do, you keep going. In our case, I think our instincts were pretty good. So, when you ask if I would’ve changed anything, I would’ve changed the things about how I ran Atlas or got run over by Atlas—or tried to run Atlas, or thought I was running Atlas—but in the aftermath, no. It’s funny, when I first started writing novels, I was writing for a company called Manor Books. I was with another young writer who started there at the same time, Nelson DeMille, we were both writing the same crappy novels, I was writing about this Hollywood detective in the ’30s, and he was writing about some New York City cop, and he was just so focused on doing this stuff better, I didn’t have that same fire that he had, because I was still kind of winded from the disillusionment of Atlas, but look at where that intensity brought him, best-sellers all over the place, just huge successes. That was fun to watch. CBA: Would there be anything you’d recall that was the high point of working at Atlas? Jeff: I have one specific highlight and then I have a general highlight. The specific highlight was getting a note from Alex Toth saying that Ric Meyers’ story was one of the best ones he’d ever been given, and he couldn’t wait to do it. And then when he sent it in, he included a note that said, “I hope I’ve done this story justice.” He said that us sending him the script at that time lifted him out of the worst depression of his life, and that’s the kind of thing that just makes up for so much bad stuff. I saved that letter, it’s around here somewhere. But in general, I think working with Ernie, getting to know him, because that’s a friendship that has endured. We had some rocky moments right after that, but I think that was part of the aftershocks of everything that went wrong with Seaboard. CBA: Do you think Ernie Colón is adequately appreciated within the comics field? Jeff: Not even close, no. He’s a treasure that… should be treasured! [laughs] He’s so versatile, and so good, and so reliable, and so creative and resourceful, that it’s astonishing to me that he’s not overloaded with deadlines! He sends me these things he comes up with in his spare time called “doodle movies” that are just… He’ll blush when I use the world brilliant, and he will probably tear up the originals, as he does with most of his stuff, but they were brilliant, and he is brilliant. Again, I just wish that somebody would give him a showcase that would frame his talent; it’s extraordinary. CBA: I’m motivated partially to do this issue because I want to try and give Ernie his due. I’ve never seen any interviews with Ernie, though I’ve always liked his work. Jeff: I’m very perversely pleased that the first thing that was stolen from the offices was his cover from Thrilling Adventure Stories #1. [laughs] Obviously Ernie did something right. I’ve got Ernie’s Grim Ghost cover from the second issue here; that was my favorite because he walked in apologetic one day and said, “You know, I had this idea last night, and I just put it together.” CBA: That’s like the best cover Atlas had! [laughs] Jeff: It’s really exceptional, and so we came up with a story to go around it. That was a hard sell, too, because we didn’t want to crap it up with text, it was just so narrative in its natural form. But working with Ernie was a highlight, working with Leo was a highlight, letting them do the stuff they loved to do, and even to a lesser December 2001

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extent, Walt and Archie, letting them run wild. I remember Walt was really happy with his Gorgo/Rodan story. Those moments of joy, getting that great job from John Severin, letting Pat Boyette just go wild on some of the black-&-whites, and even trying to work with Steve Ditko, despite the disappointments. Yeah, there were a lot of good memories, I just wish we could’ve somehow avoided the bad ones. CBA: It was a company that was created pretty much as an act of revenge. Jeff: Yeah, it was. CBA: Did anything good come from that? Jeff: From the motive, or from the acts that we had the company, the fact that we had the company? Yeah, I think whatever changes in mainstream publishing regarding creators rights started there. Warren, when I went back to work freelance for him, started to return covers to guys like Ken Kelley, and I believe some art to Rich Corben. Carmine issued his memorandum. You really started to see the beginnings of some changes there, and I know that was happening in the undergrounds, and Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach comics had the same thing, but this was really the first time the mainstream thing was happening. Even though we never got to actually give royalties, because we weren’t around long enough, we were the first ones to even come up with a document, as a matter of course, not tailored to a specific artist or writer. I know Sol Harrison told me once that if Siegel and Shuster had behaved the way Bob Kane did, they would’ve been adequately compensated. So there were specific examples of people who were paid for work they were no longer doing, but…. This really, I think, started this accelerated expectation among creators that these things could happen, and royalties and ownership were possible to some degree. CBA: Do you think it was that drive for revenge that took the company down? Trying to be just like Marvel, trying to damage Marvel. It made you walk, and “Make Ours Marvel” seemed to blanderize the entire line. Jeff: It did. If we had been allowed to just run with a couple of titles for a couple of years, build up some grass-roots support, not spend a ton of money, but enough… we would’ve built up viable characters, the Goodmans would’ve made a lot of money in licensing everything from beach towels to model kits to movies to whatever was topical at the time, because we had the creative resources to come up with top of the line material. Not me, necessarily, but certainly Steve Mitchell had an enormously cinematic mind, and Ric Meyers had wonky ideas, and people who were coming in, like Mike Fleischer, had some wonderfully bizarre and devilish concepts. If they had done the slow and steady thing instead of the carpet bombing, we would’ve absolutely succeeded, but I’m saying that from a creative point of view. The realities of the marketplace, where you had to fight for rack space, and needed a sh*tload of titles to do that, may have been different. That being the case, I would’ve preferred that we reprint T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, that we buy other defunct titles and reprint them, as opposed to churning out imitation Marvel titles in hopes of eroding their support, because that wasn’t going to happen.

Above: Jeff Rovin has written a lot of books—and we do mean a lot— and we suggest readers to search the Internet for a proper bibliography, but suffice to say that besides ghostwriting the best-selling Tom Clancy Op-Center series, Rovin has also scribed numerous pop culture reference books. Here’s the Vincent Di Fate cover art to Jeff’s 1994 tome Adventure Heroes: Legendary Characters from Odysseus to James Bond. Related to comics, he has also written Encyclopedia of Monsters, Encyclopedia of Superheroes, Encyclopedia of Supervillains, The Superhero Movie and TV Quiz Book, and he co-wrote Back to the Batcave with Adam West, who portrayed the Caped Crusader from the notorious 1960s TV show. Cover art ©1994 Vincent Di Fate. 43

CBA Interview

Colón of the Comics Chatting with the talented (and ubiquitous) funnybook artist Inset right: Besides his “straight” comics work, Ernie Colón is probably best recalled as the quintessential Richie Rich artist, a character who just might be, as E.C. says, the most successful comic book character in history, spawning more than 50 separate titles at Harvey Comics. As the artist mentions in this interview, Ernie was instrumental with the introduction of adventure stories into the titles, inspired by Hergé’s Tintin comics albums. Courtesy of Peter Wallace. ©2001 Harvey Features, Inc.

Below: Ernie Colón in the 1950s, a “Brooklyn punk” says the artist. Courtesy of Ernie Colón.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Ernie Colón certainly must be one of the most versatile—and under-appreciated—comic book artists in the business, able to adapt his stylings from his legendary Richie Rich mode to a quasi-comical National Lampoon approach to dynamic super-heroic adventure to all-out dramatic and effective illustration. He is also one of the most candid, insightful conversationalists CBA has ever had the enormous pleasure to spend time with. The artist was interviewed by phone on September 26, 2001 and he copyedited the transcript. Ladies and gents, from his start at Harvey Comics to his current work as a multimedia artist, we give you: Ernie Colón. Comic Book Artist: How do you pronounce your last name? Ernie Colón: Cologne [Ka-loan], with an accent over the second “o.” CBA: Ernie, you are an amazingly prolific artist who has been seen in wildly diverse publications. You’ve worked on everything from kids’ humor to adult fantasy work. You’ve been in magazines as varied as Penthouse Comix and Richie Rich! [laughter] You’re probably the most diverse comic book artist in the business. Ernie: Wow! I don’t know about that, but I’ll take your word for it. [laughter] CBA: As far as I know, there’s very little known about you in the public record. Ernie: Yeah, that’s true. CBA: So, if you’d like to tell us where you’re from originally, let’s start there. Ernie: I was born in Puerto Rico. I left there when I was 10 years of age, in 1940. CBA: Did you have an interest in comics as a youngster? Ernie: Always, yes. I started drawing, as far back as I can remember, at six years of age. My kindergarten books, school books were always full of double-wing airplanes from World War I. Yeah, I drew all the time, that’s all I wanted to do, I wanted to become an artist, a comic book artist. CBA: Did you have specific favorite strips? Ernie: Yeah, I had the usual heroes, and at this stage in my life I began to think of them as more of a burden, which is interesting. I’m 70 years old now, so I’ve got a whole different perspective on things. My heroes were, of course, Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles. Later on…

you name the really great ones, and I was a fan of theirs. Those guys were just absolute craftsmen. I really was fanatic about them and I loved their work. Now, I really think it’s a burden to emphasize art over storytelling. I have the feeling that drawing for many of the greats was more important than the story. But for me, at this stage in my life, the story has become much more important than the drawing! I don’t want to draw that finely, or that well… not that I was ever equal to those guys; I consider myself on a lower plane than them, but their influence was such that I tried to pattern myself, model myself and my drawings after their craftsmanship, and I was never happy with it, because my abilities never reached that high plateau. Again, I just want to tell the story, I’ve been experimenting lately with what I call “doodlemovies,” which is doodling on the page without the aid of rulers and T-squares or triangles or anything like that, I just draw panel lines freehand, and I start drawing a story. Sometimes I don’t even know where it’s going. [laughter] CBA: You’re talking freestyle! Ernie: Yeah, with ballpoint pen, and however it comes out, that’s the way it is, and I don’t worry about whether the gun in a guy’s hand is a Luger, where every screw, every notch is exactly the way it is in a real Luger, because that’s not really the story; the story is the guy’s got a gun in his hand; it doesn’t really matter what kind of a gun it is, it’s a weapon. So, taking it from that angle and just doodling it along and telling a story has been a great discovery for me, something brand-new, and I’m really enjoying it. CBA: You are a triple-threat, right? You pencil, ink, write, and letter… do you color, too? Ernie: Yes, I do everything—not as well as the best [laughter]—in each field. CBA: Your work is awfully good stuff. Did you do your own strips or comic books as a child? Ernie: Oh, yeah, sure. I used to hunt for those notebooks that have those funny black-&-white pattern on them, the ones that didn’t have blue lines on them. When I was a kid, they were very hard to find. But yeah, I’d hunt them down and make a comic book out of them. CBA: Was this super-heroes? Ernie: No, I never liked super-heroes, something which I also made plain when I was working at Marvel and DC, and I don’t think that was well-received. [laughs] I really like adventure stories, that’s why Terry and the Pirates was my absolute, top-notch favorite, because it had to do with adventure, not some silly guy running around in his underwear. I didn’t like it, and the more they developed the super-hero into what I call the “snarling brute era,” Wolverine and his ilk, they became even less attractive to me. In fact, when I was a kid, the only super-hero I liked was Captain Marvel, because the strip had a sense of humor. And when DC got it, they turned him into a snarling brute! CBA: [laughs] Can’t win, I guess. Ernie: They were riding the crest of a wave, and as usual, they really believed it was never going to end. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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CBA: Mainstream comics seems to have just about eliminated all the other genres besides super-heroes, even though historically the best-selling comic books—ones that really reached a mass market and had an impact—were always anthology comics, like horror, crime, romance, satire, containing perhaps elements that really pertained to people in real life to some degree, [laughs] and it’s as if today they’ve totally disregarded that, and niched their audience to such a small degree. Ernie: They didn’t try to bring comics to kids, so to speak, by giving them comics they could start with, to hook them into that reading habit, into accepting and buying comic books… and when the mainstream publishers did make an attempt, they did it really half-heartedly, because they just didn’t like kids’ comics. When I went into Marvel and DC, they used to call what I did “bigfoot,” which I really resented, because at that time, when many of the titles were struggling to put out, I don’t know, 100,000 in sales, Richie Rich was selling millions of comics! They had this contempt for so-called “bigfoot,” and I thought it was quite misplaced. CBA: Did you have formal art training as a child? Ernie: No, I’m afraid I was self-taught. It always sounds great when you say it, and not so good when you have to go through it; at some points, it’s very, very difficult. It’s like reinventing the wheel; it doesn’t work for you. CBA: When you moved from Puerto Rico, where did you go? Ernie: We lived in the South Bronx. CBA: Did you seek out professionals in New York City as a teenager? Ernie: I tried, but I was unsuccessful. In fact, I was taking a walk one day, and it was just unbelievable, I came upon this building, I’m passing by it and I did a double-take, and there was a guy on the ground floor drawing Sheena of the Jungle. To this day, I still don’t know who that guy was, [laughs] but I was so completely taken aback that all I could do was press my nose against the window, and he made an obscene gesture on Sheena’s body [laughter] to amuse me! I didn’t know what to do, so I just walked away in a trance, thinking I was so close to an actual cartoonist, but I couldn’t communicate with him! CBA: So you found the actual Fiction House! Ernie: Yeah, I ran across it by accident! [laughter] CBA: As a teenager, did you say, “I want to be a comic book artist as a career”? Ernie: All the way. When I finally left high school—with I can only charitably call an inadequate portfolio—that was when Wertham had put out his book and closed up quite a few shops, and no one was in any mood to hire a young, untried cartoonist. So I went right back to the factory where I worked, doing messenger boy work and all that stuff. I didn’t get a job in cartooning until I was 24 years old, which was at Harvey. CBA: How did that come about? Ernie: Actually, they advertised for a letterer, and I went anyway, and my lettering then was a little worse than it is now, [laughs] in fact, a lot worse. And they had Joe Rosen working there, he’s a master! So, Leon looked at it, and said, “You’re no letterer,” so I said “Okay,” and I started to leave, and Vickie Harvey—who I had known very briefly a few years before—ran over to Alfred Harvey and said, “I know that guy, don’t let him go! He’s a good artist.” So he took me back. I did paste-ups for a year while I practiced Richie and all those characters, and in a few years I went freelance. CBA: Who was Vickie? Ernie: Vickie was [publisher] Alfred Harvey’s wife. CBA: You had met her socially? Ernie: Yeah, she had been dating a friend of mine years before, so I had known her for a while, and she had seen my work, and she even liked it. She actually saved me from walking out altogether. CBA: Where was Harvey located? Ernie: At that time, they were at 1860 Broadway, just up the street from the Gulf-Western Building. That building, of course, was razed to the ground a few years ago. CBA: Can you describe the offices? Were they big, did they have a studio? Ernie: I think they were on the 12th floor, overlooking Broadway. They looked very much like… something like a newspaper office, December 2001

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because there were always papers around and everything like that, and they had an art department, and secretaries, that kind of thing. In the art department, you had the art director, two paste-up guys, and the ever-present Joe Rosen, who never said anything unless he was directly spoken to, and even then, he would only answer briefly. CBA: [laughs] His brother Sam Rosen was over at Marvel? Ernie: Yeah. I think I may have met him once or twice, about the only guy I knew at Marvel. CBA: What year did you go into Harvey? Ernie: Oh, good Lordy, if we had to do the math…. Well, I was 24, I’m 70 now, so…. CBA: Did you see Joe Simon around the office? Ernie: I saw Joe. He and Alfred Harvey were close friends. Joe had a great sense of humor, and was a great character. I was able to talk to him about Boy Commandos, which I read when I was a kid. He was one of those people who had been around forever, but didn’t look it. I couldn’t believe when I met him that he was the guy who had done Boy Commandos, he was just a young-looking guy. I was an adult at that point. CBA: Joe’s done everything! Ernie: [laughs] Yeah. CBA: So he was just showing up socially, or…?

Above: We sure wish we could’ve located the original art to the above graphic tour de force by Ernie Colón, but we could only scan the cover of The Grim Ghost #1 for repro’ here. Unfortunately, Ernie retains none of his Atlas Comics work—or Harvey art, for that matter—so we have to rely on the printed work for examples of Ernie’s superb artistry for those two companies. We are featuring a plethora of E.C.’s work for other clients though, though the black-&white reproductions hardly do his exquisite color pieces the proper justice. We will be covering the artist again in our forthcoming Harvey issue so if any of you kind readers have Colón originals from his illustrious career, please contact us soon! ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc. 45

Above: Proving that Ye Ed snagged just about everything as a teenager, here’s a repro of his copy of Richie Rich Vault of Mystery #2 bought off the stands in 1975, a title that featured Ernie Colón-drawn tales of our favorite poor little rich boy. ©1975 Harvey Features Syndicate.

Below: On concept sketches for an undetermined science-fiction/ fantasy project, artist Ernie Colón draws a gag cartoon of Richie Rich, personalized for an art director. Art courtesy of and ©2001 Ernie Colón. Richie Rich ©2001 Harvey Features.

Ernie: He was working there. CBA: Were you involved in those adventure titles that Joe edited there for a short period of time? Thrill-O-Rama, Spyman…. Ernie: Oh, no, I didn’t do any of that stuff. I was there for a solid 25 years doing Casper, Richie Rich, Little Dot, Lotta… I don’t know who else… mostly Casper and Richie. CBA: Were you the first artist on Richie Rich? Ernie: No, though I finally did meet someone who was like a mentor to me, it was Warren Kremer, the first artist—at least at Harvey—and I came in second to him, both chronologically and in skill. Nobody could do Casper like him. Oddly enough, Casper was the toughest character to draw. He looked simple, but he was very difficult to draw. CBA: Did you talk to Warren at any length? Ernie: Yeah, I still see him occasionally. Once I year I go to his house and have lunch with some of the guys from Harvey. He had a stroke ten, 12 years ago that paralyzed his drawing side, a crummy way to wind up. CBA: When I was really young, I was very much into Richie Rich. That is probably when I first recognized your style, then in more mature stuff when I was older. I thought, “This guy looks like the Richie Rich guy!” [laughter] Did you enjoy working on the Harvey material? Ernie: I did for the most part, and certainly in retrospect. I realize more now than I did then, because I meet so many people who, when they find out what I’ve done, react so warmly that I feel at that time I kind of underestimated what we were doing. Although we used to get enormous amounts of fan mail—which was never answered, by the way—we’d get sacks of it from all over the world. Actual shopping bags full. CBA: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that Richie Rich went through a period of time of really being involved in adventures, chapter after chapter, and Cadbury became a major character, for instance. They were chapter stories, really. Ernie: Some of that was my influence, I do want to take a little credit for that, because these guys were so good at what they did. I found, first of all, that some of the stories became repetitive, and I remember the very story that did it. A number of stories had to do with how much money he had—big piggy bank, big bank vaults, cash floating out of his pocket—everything was amounts, and I really got tired of that. I remember getting a one-page story in which Richie and his father heard a roar, and went to see what was going on, and one of the vaults had broken like a dam, and there was a river of money coming from it. I walked into [editor] Sid Jacobson’s office, and I said, “That’s it! We can’t go any further than this, we have to do something else.” I was a huge

fan—and still am—of Hergé’s Tintin, and I absolutely adored those books; still do, I have every one of them. They’re the only comic books I own. But I came into Sid’s office and said, “Look, we have to try to do something along these lines! Now, he can travel in his own private jet plane, and that shows his wealth, but he’s got to be doing something with that wealth!” And that was a turning point, when we really started doing different things with that. CBA: Who were the writers you dealt with? Ernie: Lenny Herman was the funniest. You’re trying my memory now. Paul S. Newman was very prolific, he contributed a whole bunch of stories. CBA: Newman was statistically, I think, the most prolific writer of comics of all time. They call him the “King of Comics.” Me, I thought Jack Kirby was the king, but, hey…. [laughter] Ernie: Well, you know, so many guys have different records. CBA: So, you settled in with Harvey. Did you do any freelance work besides Harvey? Ernie: What happened was that at one point, I asked for a raise. I’d been there for about 16 years or so, and they refused, so I told them, “I’m leaving.” And I did, I went into multimedia, and I was out for a year. At the end of the year, they called me up; the sales of Richie and Casper were just through the roof, especially Richie, and they just needed people desperately. They had begun hiring a couple of people whom I won’t name who were a little less than mediocre. They asked me back, and I said, “Well, what about my raise?” They said, “Well, we’ll double your page rate.” I said, “What?!?” No, I didn’t say, “What?” I said, “Okay!” [laughter] All I had asked for was five dollars a page more, instead they doubled it. So that was terrific for me. Later on, when people heard how long I’d been there, they’d say, “How in the world could you stay on for 25 years?” Well, let’s put it this way: I made more money there than I made anywhere else. CBA: But you started branching out in 1970 to other publishers. Was that when you left Harvey for a period of time? Ernie: Well, I left Harvey once for that year, and then later on, when I did leave, it was for good, and I’d just had it. What I did was, I wrote John Romita a letter with a drawing of Casper on his knees [laughter] begging John to give me a job! [laughter] He responded to it immediately, it was great. I went in there and I started working with Jim Shooter. CBA: Was that when they had the Star Comics? Ernie: No, no, this was way before then. In fact, he put me on John Carter, Warlord of Mars, which I did in pencil, and I would put the pages through a copy machine—this is pre-computer—and darkened the pencil lines, and everybody thought I had inked. CBA: Did you work on Wham-O Giant Book of Comics? Ernie: Gee, I don’t know. CBA: You know, that huge, three foot high by two foot wide, a one-shot that Wally Wood worked on with Howard Nostrand? Ernie: You know, it sounds familiar, but I don’t know if I contributed to it or not. CBA: There was a story called “Menace of the Kayldes.” In a database, you’re listed as a possible artist on it, and it was roughly 1965, 1966, and the first non-Harvey work I could find of you—that I could recognize—was Doctor Solar for Gold Key. Ernie: That was horrible. Horrible! [laughs] It was the worst! CBA: I can recognize it immediately as your work, anyway! Ernie: Right, unfortunately. CBA: Was that your first work outside Harvey, the first straight adventure stuff? Ernie: It may have been, I think you’re right. Yeah, because the Marvel stuff was better than that. That was really just awful. [laughs] CBA: Did you do any more work for Gold Key? Ernie: No, very little… Doctor Solar, that was it. CBA: From there, did you go over to Warren to do the Creepy and Eerie material? Ernie: You’re better at this than I am, I can’t remember at all. [laughter] Yeah, Warren was great, that was a really enjoyable period. Jim encouraged experimentation, and I love to experiment. He was great. CBA: Was that the first time you wrote your own stuff, or did you write at Harvey? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Ernie: Oh, I’d written quite a few stories at Harvey. CBA: And you also did the lettering? Ernie: No, at Harvey the lettering was done by Joe Rosen, every bit of it. He was amazing. But I did write a lot of stories, and sometimes I inked them, though very rarely. CBA: Did you create any characters in the Harvey milieu? Ernie: What I did was emphasize some characters, but the one who created the characters was Lenny Herman, who created Irona, I think, Dollar the Dog, Chef Pierre, and he also did the wonderful bunch of stories with the rivalry between Chef Pierre and the damn dog that kept stealing his food. [laughter] He was wonderful, really great. CBA: Tintin was your inspiration for the adventure stories. You got a chance to write your own stories at Warren, too, right? Ernie: Yeah, I wrote just about every story I did there, except for maybe a couple of them. CBA: Did you enjoy stretching your legs in perhaps a more mature medium? Ernie: Oh, yes, definitely. Most of all, I liked the experimentation, to be able to…. Again, this is pre-computer. The computer and I were destined for each other. I started out with an electronic catalog that was selling something called an “Elf,” it’s a computer you built yourself. I think the thing had 24k on it. [laughter] 24k! That’s like powering a flashlight! [laughter] I remember sending away for this thing and building it. But then, when the real computer came along, I couldn’t wait to do a lot of stuff. Of course, I had a narrow view of it, I couldn’t imagine it would go as far as it has gone, with Photoshop and Flash and all these things. CBA: But you’ve been on top of the technology as it comes out ever since? Ernie: Oh, yeah. I’m on Photoshop 6. I stopped with Flash 4, because it just wasn’t making me any money. They came out with Flash 5 now, I just haven’t bothered with it. Yeah, I was doing Web animation, but again, there’s a lot of people into it, most of them are much better at it than I am, technically speaking, and there’s no money in it. CBA: You also did work for Skywald? Ernie: Yeah, that’s right. I’ll tell you, I’m drawing a blank on that one. One of the things that’s amazing years later is I found out I drew a story by Marv Wolfman at Skywald, and I don’t remember it at all. [laughter] CBA: Not many people remember much from Skywald, I guess! [laughs] Ernie: I guess not! I’ve drawn a complete blank. I can’t picture their offices, where they were, who worked there, nothing! CBA: [laughs] There’s Israel Waldman and Sol Brodsky, and that’s it. [laughs] Ernie: Yeah! CBA: You had quite a run of stories at Warren. There was a period of time, after Archie Goodwin left, that the horror magazines, perhaps, contained a lot of substandard work, but there were some bright spots in some bad years for Warren. There was Tom Sutton, Pat Boyette, and you. Ernie: I’m glad you think so. CBA: I don’t think too many people would’ve recognized your style in Creepy and said, “Oh, that’s the Richie Rich guy,” except for weird guys like me! [laughter] Ernie: Aren’t we all? Especially in this business? CBA: You seem to have worked for everybody! You worked for Sal Quartuccio, you even worked for Heavy Metal, you worked for DC Comics…. Ernie: I did some stuff for the National Lampoon, but that was just a couple of stories. CBA: That’s right! You drew that excellent Mad satire, “Citizen Gaines.” Did you work for NatLamp’s art director Michael Gross? Ernie: Yeah, I met him, and he was terrific, and we did a couple of stories and had a good time. For some reason, we never did anything again. I like to float around a lot. CBA: Did you keep your eye on everything? Were you still an avid reader of comics? Ernie: No. In fact, I was never an avid reader of comics. When I was a kid, there were certain comics I liked, my December 2001

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all-time favorite was Crime Does Not Pay, which had my favorite artist at the time, George Tuska, was in that title. CBA: He did beautiful stuff for that comic! Ernie: Beautiful, beautiful stuff. I made my money when I was 11 or 12 shining shoes. I’d take some of my money and buy Crime Does Not Pay, and maybe two other comics. Now, segue from there to when I became an editor at DC. In walks this tall guy who looked like a Samuel Beckett. He comes in with white hair, tall, handsome looking guy, and it’s George Tuska. And I got so tongue-tied, I couldn’t tell him the story! He was asking me for work! [laughter] I couldn’t even… George Tuska! Oh, God…. CBA: You only read comics when you were 12 years old, and that’s it? Ernie: Yeah, I read Crime Does Not Pay, Captain Marvel, a few others. But as I said, I never enjoyed Superman. I thought Batman was ludicrous, even when I was a kid. Just kept thinking, “Some

Above: Maybe the funniest satire of the comics industry appeared in National Lampoon #19 (Oct. 1971), “Citizen Gaines,” written by John Bono and drawn by Ernie Colón. The tale also obviously pokes fun at Orson Welles’ classic motion picture. ©1971 Twenty First Century Communications, Inc. Below: Ernie was also a significant contributor to Warren’s b-&-w horror line in the late ’60s. This detail is from Creepy #27 (June 1969). ©2001 Warren Publishing, Inc

guy’s down in New York City in that outfit, what would the cops think of it?” CBA: Did you read prose fiction? Ernie: Oh, yeah, big book reader. Still am. It could be biography, history… good fiction. I devoured books from the time I was a kid, and I still do. CBA: Do you have any favorite authors currently? Ernie: Currently? It’s really more on the level of the favorite book of the month, let’s say. Right now I’m going through Little Dorritt again. I finished David Copperfield a few months ago. I read a book called Cassada, he’d done something called The Hunters, he’s a contemporary writer. Very strange, interesting writer. Oh, and The Ghosts of Manila, which was a very moving book. Founding Brothers, that professor who faked his war record, Ellis. The language in that is absolutely beautiful. Above: Nicely designed page by Ernie Colón from Tiger-Man #1 showcasing the character’s violent nature. Words by Michael Fleisher. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

CBA: Are you into movies? Ernie: Let me see how I can answer that. In The Fugitive, with Harrison Ford, the part when the bus crashes, he first hears the train whistle and realizes it’s coming his way. From that moment, until the train crashes through everything and comes to a shuddering stop, how many cuts do you think there were? CBA: Ah… a dozen, maybe? Ernie: I counted them. There were 52. [laughter] That’s how stupid about movies I am, okay? CBA: [laughs] Do you have favorite directors? Ernie: Yeah, but it’s more like the favorite director of a particular picture. CBA: Where were you living during the early ’70s? Were you in New York City? Ernie: I was in Manhattan. Once I got out of the South Bronx and South Brooklyn, I went into Manhattan and stayed there until just

five years ago. I never thought I would leave. CBA: You had a studio set up at home? Ernie: Always worked at home, excepting for my editor job at DC, which lasted for one year, two weeks and three days. CBA: [laughs] What year was that, roughly? Ernie: Oh, I don’t know, 16, 17 years ago. CBA: What books did you work on? Ernie: Oh, I was editor on Green Lantern, Flash, Wonder Woman, Blackhawk, and Arion, Lord of Atlantis (which was a disaster, a horrible book). CBA: There was a DC book that came out in the early ’80s that I think is extremely underrated and just a wonderful book: Amethyst. Ernie: Thank you! Thanks. That was a wonderful period, I loved that whole series. You know, the 12-issue series was successful, it wasn’t dynamite, though it was successful, but they wouldn’t do any more. I understand later—I got it word of mouth—that they brought it back, never mentioned it to the writer who created it, or to me, and then killed it off! It was, I understand, a really mediocre… but that’s DC, they’re a wonderful group of people. I have to send you some sketches for a book I’d planned for years, never completed it, and one day I will, called Death of a Really Bad Inker. [laughter] It’s cartoon form, and all the editors are pigs… [laughter] a mystery story. The pig who gets murdered is the head editor at a comic book company called XX, for double-cross. [laughter] So, I’ll send you some of those sketches; you’ll get a kick out of it. CBA: You know, I really wanted an excuse to feature you in the magazine, and I know you didn’t do a great deal of work—because the company didn’t last that long—for Atlas/Seaboard, but if we could discuss that a little bit. Do you recall working for Atlas/Seaboard? Ernie: Absolutely, yes. That was a very enjoyable experience. That’s where I met Jeff Rovin, and he was 21 years old. He was the chief editor up there. He was an absolute wunderkind, and I described him that way in the past, and he was a genuine wunderkind. 21 years old, wise beyond his years, completely immersed in pop culture—which he still is—in comics, movies, he knew everything, everything! He was very generous, and I just loved the guy instantly, and have been very good friends with him ever since. CBA: Was Jeff the right guy for the job? Ernie: Absolutely. He had the kind of gift, the kind of talent that sometimes will come with flaws. He didn’t have that. The only flaw he had [laughs] was that he was so damn smart that very often, when you started to say something, he knew where you were going, and he’d get impatient, because he knew what the end of the sentence was going to be, or the end of the thought! In terms of his judgment, of storytelling, I have to say it was a very mature and very developed storytelling. CBA: Do you recall how you first heard about the company? Ernie: Jeff Rovin called me, and he knew me by reputation. I don’t quite know why, but he did, and he called me, and asked me to come in. To show you his generosity, he asked me what my rate was, and I told him, and I had pegged it higher than what I had been paid

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up to that point, and he said, “Oh, no, can’t do it… you’re too good for that,” and he added $40 to it, per page! It was big money, that was a big raise! I have to trust my memory, which is not too trustworthy, but I think I was quoting him $65, big bucks in those days. He said, “No, no, you’re worth more than that,” and he gave me more. CBA: Was the plan for you to be pretty much of a house artist? Ernie: No, that was not the case. Don’t forget that he had guys like Neal Adams contributing, and a couple of other guys who were much more fan favorites than I was. CBA: But you did the house ads and a good number of covers. Ernie: I think it was because I was around, in the office when they’d have a banner they wanted done, they said, “Here, do this, just get it done quickly.” CBA: Did you do weekly rounds of the publishers when you were living in Manhattan? Ernie: No, as a matter of fact, one of things that happened to me over the years is, I have never called anybody, except for that letter I wrote to John Romita, but even then, the response was immediate. I was kind of spoiled over the years, because I used to turn work away. I’d get calls from Jeff Rovin or whoever, and the work was always there. A little later on in years, when that wasn’t the case, it was difficult for me, because I didn’t know how to market myself. CBA: Because you were pre-sold beforehand? [laughs] Ernie: Because it was kind of easy, and I don’t think I was spoiled, I was just comfortable, and didn’t develop the skills necessary to market myself. CBA: You had an enormously diverse portfolio yourself! You did straight stuff, humorous stuff, children’s comics…. Ernie: But I never was able to make it work for me, in terms of when things started to get a little tougher, a little narrower, there was much more competition, new kids came in with different styles, and I didn’t know how to sell myself, I didn’t know how to do that. I still don’t. CBA: Did you go back to Harvey, but still maintain a pretty healthy freelance career with other publishers? Ernie: No, once I left Harvey, that was it, I didn’t go back. Once I went to Marvel, I never went back to Harvey. What happened was, after the Harvey brothers went bankrupt, litigation just drove it into the ground and many dollars went into legal fees as they sued each other and they were beyond help…. CBA: You think you learned a lesson there about family-run businesses? That they can be difficult sometimes? Ernie: Yeah. When I was a kid people used to say, “Don’t work for big business, work for family.” [laughter] In fact, that’s what Alfred Harvey used to do: He’d put his arm around you and say you’re family, and that, “You’ll never have to worry about anything, there’d be a pension for you, we’ll take care of you.” And of course, at the end, there was nothing there for anybody, they spent all the money in legal fees. In fact, they were tried for malfeasance, whatever. I have the court record—and they were found guilty, and they were sent home because they were too feeble to go to jail. Yeah. In a family business, the family took it all. [laughs] CBA: The history of comics is amazing. Publishers of essentially children’s literature have a real dark history behind them, whether it’s the distribution end… but it’s mostly the publishers screwing the freelancers. Like Siegel and Shuster, the quintessential story about creators getting screwed by this multi-million-dollar corporation, DC Comics, which was built on this creation Siegel and Shuster produced. Ernie: I have a theory about that: The first part of that theory, very simply, is that artists are unique in that they want to work. Most people don’t want to work. Most people don’t want to work in the post office, or in a factory… who wants to do that crap? But artists want to work, and I think that puts them at a disadvantage in dealing with the people who hire them, because the people who hire them know the jerk wants to do this! [laughter] So…. CBA: It’s a dysfunctional situation from the word go, then. Ernie: From the word go! Yes! This jerk wants to work! And the second part of that is, because they want to work, they don’t pay attention to the market value of what they do, so most of them—not all of them, one or two guys were very good businessmen, but the December 2001

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rest were terrible at business! They didn’t know how to add! [laughter] I include myself in that! So, of course they’re taken advantage of. It would’ve been right for me, whenever Alfred put his arm around me and said, “We’ll take care of you,” to say, “Would you please put that in writing for me?” And then, I might’ve come away with something. But instead, I spent 25 years there, other guys spent 30 and 35 years, and we all got nothing. CBA: Did you have any illusions? Did you believe what Alfred said when he put his arm around you? Ernie: Oh, yeah, sure. I don’t think I got beyond my naive stage until about 45. I really was a naive person, I did accept certain things at face value. I only reacted when it turned out that wasn’t the case… sometimes violently, but…. [laughter] CBA: Were you involved at all with ACBA, the Academy for Comic Book Arts? Ernie: No. I went to one of their meetings, they talked a lot, and talked about Blue Cross/Blue Shield benefits, and I just walked out. I wasn’t a joiner, I guess. I never could be in a group of people… groups, I find either very boring and/or very threatening. I don’t like the group dynamic. I think that ants and bees, the more there are, the more intelligent they are. Human beings, the more there are, the less intelligent

Above: Ernie posing for a Warren Creepy story. Can you identify the tale? Courtesy of Ernie Colón. Below: Ernie tried out for the Judge Dredd assignment with this presentation piece but, alas, he didn’t get the job. Art courtesy of and ©2001 Ernie Colón. Judge Dredd ©2001 the respective copyright holder.

they are. CBA: [laughs] You’re a thinker, Ernie! [laughter] Ernie: I don’t know about that, but I really believe that. I can talk to one person easily, anybody! I can talk to a construction worker, an artist, a doctor… but get a bunch of them together, you can’t trust them! CBA: Did you not go to a second ACBA meeting because of that, or because they weren’t offering what you were looking for? Ernie: No, I failed to listen to them. I just can’t deal with groups. CBA: Did you have any interest in pursuing creator’s rights? Did you give thoughts to your contributions to Harvey? Ernie: No, I felt I belonged to a generation of idiots [laughter] who signed away all their rights with the work-for-hire checks they cashed, endorsing checks that where stamped on the back that said, “You’re an imbecile, we own everything, you own nothing, please sign here.” And I’m not even being funny; I really think I do belong to a generation of jerks, and the one person who tried to wake everybody up on this was Neal Adams. To a great degree, he succeeded; not so much because of these meetings and all this crap, but because he was such a firebrand at the time, he was threatening to the publishers! I really believe that you need the avant garde, you

need the radical, you need them, because they define the outer limits you don’t want to get to. You decide, “Well, hell, we don’t want to do that, but let’s go a little further here.” Somewhere in the middle, see? And that’s what Neal did, he showed them that… you know, if they didn’t, he was going to burn their f*cking buildings down, because he was capable of it! And they said, “Well, we don’t want the buildings burnt down, so let’s give him some recognition. Let’s give them back their lousy pages which we really didn’t want in the first place!” CBA: [laughs] Did you want them? Ernie: No, whatever they gave me in pages back, I gave them away. I don’t have a single page that I ever did. I gave them all away over the years. CBA: Was there any market for your art? Ernie: I don’t really know how to answer that; I’ve been to very few conventions, and I’ve found that—for me, I’m not talking about anybody else—I think that anybody who goes to these conventions, I hope they’re doing well, and God bless, and they sit there and do sketches for $10 or $5 apiece, that’s fine. I can’t do that, I never could. I’ve sat at a table with Gil Kane, I’ve always wanted to sit next to Gil Kane, because I’ve always liked the guy, and we had a good time and signed some books. But I was never a big fan favorite anyway, so it’s not like I was in demand. It was okay if I showed up, but if I didn’t, nobody would miss me. In fact, I was thinking at one point, seriously, of signing my work “Many Others.” [laughter] Very often, they would say, “We have a guest list here: ‘Gil Kane, Neal Adams, and many others’!” [laughter] I thought, “Oh, sh*t, that’s me!” CBA: Did you engage in conversation with Gil? Ernie: Oh, yeah. In fact, when I was at DC, we used to meet at this Indian restaurant just downstairs from the building on Thursdays, and we’d have a few drinks and bullsh*t. Of course, he did nothing but talk, because he was that way. He was a very engaging thinker and talker, so it was okay with me. He never used anybody’s name, as I’m sure you know. He always addressed you as “My boy.” CBA: I loved Gil. He was a great conversationalist. Well, monologist, I guess is a better term! Ernie: Exactly! [laughter] It was usually approximately the same thing, but he always told it a different way. CBA: There was a streak of humility in him that I enjoyed enormously. He would pontificate, but wouldn’t overstate his contributions or delve into self-justification. Ernie: Right, there was a certain amount of self-deprecation there. CBA: He’s strongly missed. Talking about family dysfunction, Atlas/Seaboard was a family business. Martin and Chip Goodman were father and son. Do you remember Martin? Ernie: No. I remember Chip a little bit. Martin kind of—in my life—breezed in and breezed out. I remember encountering Chip a few more times. I never really got to sit down and talk with either one of them. I know that the orders he was giving were contrary to any common sense, in terms of knowing what a book was doing. For example, he would cancel a book before he knew what the sales figures were, and then the sales figures would come in and they were great! And then they wouldn’t know what to do, because the book has been cancelled! In those days, you had to wait two months or more before you know what the sales would be. CBA: Typically, 90 days. Ernie: Yeah, so by the time it came in, everybody looked at each other and said, “Sh*t, I knew this damn book would do well, and it did. Now what are we going to do?” He was, in a sense, sabotaging everybody’s efforts. That part of it was demoralizing. CBA: Had you gone to Marvel and seen Stan to look for work? Ernie: At Marvel it was during Jim Shooter’s tenure. I only met Stan once, he was looking at my work, and he turned to Jim and said, “Give this guy work,” which I thought was really nice. But that was the only contact I ever had with him. CBA: So, in the early ’70s you didn’t go over to Marvel prior to Atlas/Seaboard? Did you have any insight into the creation of the company? It’s been said that Atlas/Seaboard was a company that was created as an act of revenge against Marvel, because they fired Chip Goodman after giving a promise to Martin, before Martin stepped down, that Chip would be there for life. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Ernie: That was the story I heard, whether it’s actual fact or not, I can’t say. But that’s exactly the story I heard. CBA: Was there any lesson to be learned from that, if true? It lasted 12 months max, they seemed to throw a lot of money into the company, and they attracted an enormously qualified group of talents, and yet it was gone. Ernie: The lesson is what I call “The King Solomon Lesson.” There was a guy in my neighborhood in Brooklyn who had a notions store called “King Solomon’s.” He was the rudest, ugliest, dirtiest, most miserable son of a bitch I’d ever known in that neighborhood. People would walk in there, and he would abuse them. He sat on a high stool, and he’d say things like, “Are you going to buy that?!? Because if you’re not going to buy that, just put it back, okay? Do me a favor, leave the store!” And the guy made out famously! Made money! So much money, he expanded the store. And that syndrome…. CBA: Because he intimidated the people into buying? Ernie: No, because it took me a long time to understand that I wasn’t justifying my own lack of moneymaking ability to say that it doesn’t take much intelligence to make money! [laughter] Or, spend it foolishly, or not to know what the hell you’re doing, and we see this all the time! We see businessmen who make a lot of money and then show they have little or no common sense about certain things and lose it all, or make a company go under, and all the rest of it. So the lesson learned is that people with money are sometimes very stupid or do very stupid things. [laughter] They were no exceptions. CBA: Were you involved in the creation of The Grim Ghost and Tiger-Man, the two books that you worked on? Ernie: No, the concepts were given to me, and I created the look in both cases. CBA: So, Michael Fleischer created The Grim Ghost? Ernie: Is that so? I don’t remember who created them, unfortunately. CBA: He wrote The Grim Ghost. You seem to, especially that first issue, it was some of the best work you’d done to date, I thought. Were you enthusiastic about it? Ernie: Oh, yes, I was, and I was experimenting with working with pen and ink, rather than the usual brush. It was fun for me. CBA: What I really wanted to ask you was, you have a really fine line. I very rarely ask artists what kind of tools they use, but there seemed to be a very fine line you were using. Ernie: It looked pretty dangerous. [laughs] CBA: Because the reproduction was so poor? Ernie: The color would bleed outside of it. Actually, they did a great job on it, I thought, in the production. As I recall, I just used a Crow Quill pen. CBA: Did you have any enthusiasm for the work you did at Atlas? Ernie: You mean on The Grim Ghost and so forth? Sure! Yeah, I enjoyed the characters. I didn’t like Tiger-Man that much, but I liked The Grim Ghost. CBA: You had done some writing yourself. You actually wrote a story for Weird Tales of the Macabre, “Speed Demon.” Ernie: Oh, my God… I can’t remember that. CBA: You can’t remember that? Formula One racing? Ernie: [laughing] Really? CBA: Yeah, racing with the devil. [laughs] Ernie: Oh. CBA: I don’t know if you can answer this, but I was looking at that story, and it suddenly surprised me, because I had seen an extremely similar story that was done by Mike Sekowsky, also called “Speed Demon,” that was not finished, uninked pencils. Is there any chance you might remember you had to come in and cover for Mike? Ernie: Oh, boy… geez… I can’t remember at all. CBA: Would you be called on occasion to do that? Were you fast? Ernie: Oh, yeah. I was very fast. CBA: How many pages could you do a day? Ernie: Oh, it depends, of course… if the writer sits down and in 10 seconds, says, “The action takes place in a football stadium,” you’re screwed for two days! [laughter] CBA: But if he says it’s in a closet, you’re there, buddy! [laughter] Ernie: Yeah, exactly. It’s hard to say. With the Harveys, I could do December 2001

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three to five pages a day, for example. CBA: Pencils and inks? Ernie: No, just pencils. The pencils, of course, were very tight. With a regular kind of story, I could do two pages a day, I suppose. I did a five-page story for Jim Warren overnight once, pencils, inks and letters, but it turned out horribly, and to this day I wince whenever anybody says something about the first issue of Vampirella, that’s what my story was in. CBA: In Vampirella #1? Ernie: Oh, God, yeah, horrible. It was overnight, I went in the next day absolutely dead, and it was lousy, it turned out lousy. CBA: Did you have friendships with other cartoonists or comic book artists? Ernie: Not too many. I’m really not a crowd person, I’ve known a few guys, enjoyed their company when I knew them. Howie Post, I think, is one of the most engaging and lovely guys I’ve met. And yet, somehow, when we see each other, we enjoy each other all the more, and then we say, “Oh, God, we can’t do this, let so much time go by. We’ve got to call each other!” “Right, right!” Two years later… [laughter] Five years later… So, I’m not sure what the dynamic is of that. But yeah, I’m pretty much of a loner. CBA: What were your feelings about Jeff suddenly being dismissed or quitting? Ernie: Oh, it was terrible. All the decisions they made up there were terrible. Jeff was doing a great job. I mean, this 21-year-old kid was doing a job that many

Above: Exquisite pencil work by Ernie Colón, a master of many genres, including science-fiction. Courtesy and ©2001 the artist. Below: The b-&-w repro hardly does Ernie’s wonderful color work justice but here’s hoping you get some sense of his palette. Courtesy of and ©2001 Ernie Colón.

Above: One of Ernie’s finest assignments in the 1980s was for the DC title Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. This is a detail from her entry in Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, Vol. 1. ©1984 DC Comics.

Editor’s Note Ernie Colón was generous to share an enormous pile of artwork with Comic Book Artist for this Atlas/Seaboard retrospective but, alas, we’ve only enough room to show but a fraction. But, fear not, Colón fans! In our March 2002 issue, we’ll revisit the great artist to discuss his Harvey Comics contributions in depth! Look for it! (And thanks, E.C.!)

people at Marvel—then and later—were incapable of doing, this is how skillful this guy was. They just kept making these terrible decisions, and when they dismissed him, that showed just how dumb those people were, that they didn’t understand what they had! The odd thing about it was, they understood it well enough to hire him in the first place! He was a kid and they put him in charge, which was great! And then they dismissed him when he was doing such a great job? I just didn’t understand any of it. CBA: According to Steve, Jeff wrote a letter that said basically, “It’s me or it’s Chip,” and it was delivered to Martin. Ernie: If Chip were my son, I’m sure I would’ve made a different decision. CBA: Atlas/Seaboard held some promise that was delivered to some degree by your contributions on The Grim Ghost, for example, as well as Howard Chaykin’s The Scorpion. Some of it was rather wonky, but by the third issues of most titles, the entire line took a nosedive and was just as quickly cancelled. Did you continue to work for Atlas/Seaboard as the ship was sinking? Ernie: No, I was either gone by then, or went when Jeff went. CBA: From there, do you have any memory of where you went to? Ernie: Oh, boy. CBA: This is a few years later, probably 10 years later, but you did a graphic novel called Ax. Ernie: That was the second one, the first one was called The Medusa Chain—I did that for DC—and then I did Ax for Marvel, which is the weirdest damn writing I ever did. I started with some strange premise and let the story take off on its own. Which was nice, because it kept surprising me, but at the end, there was no resolution, and everyone always says the same thing about it: “Where were you going with this?” I don’t know! [laughter] If they had let me do a sequel, maybe I could’ve pulled it all together. CBA: Those two books weren’t related? Ernie: No, The Medusa Chain I did at DC, a science-fiction graphic novel, and the other one I did at Marvel. CBA: Did you enjoy doing science-fiction? Ernie: I enjoy drawing science-fiction, yes. I don’t enjoy reading it. There are some pieces I’ve enjoyed, but I’m not a science-fiction fan. But I do love to draw it. CBA: You also had a long stint working on Arak, Son of Thunder. Ernie: Yeah, with Roy Thomas. That was fun. Well, excepting for the inking. I did these very careful pencils, very tight pencils, and Tony DeZuniga’s inking completely obliterated my pencils as he did his own thing. It was, “The more brush strokes, the better.” I would put an old man in a sequence, and he would make it a young man! [laughter] He just decided he was going to draw it his own f*cking thing over my pencils. So, from that standpoint, it was not a good

experience. I enjoyed drawing it, but then my drawings didn’t appear. CBA: Did you generally ink your own stuff at Harvey? Ernie: No, there were several inkers there. I didn’t like most of the inkers there. Again, it’s not just my work. Warren Kremer’s absolutely superb pencils were just gorgeous, They were inhuman, they were so clean. He had the skills of an architect. He’d do a set of stairs, like Richie would go up the stairs, and I’d always go from an angle where it would be all straight lines, so I wouldn’t have to draw the perspective on the stairs, [laughs] and he would draw the perspective on it. The guy was just an amazing craftsman. CBA: Did you like your own inking? Ernie: It depended. There were still times when I would do things I’d be comfortable with what I’d done; other times I’d say, “My God, I’d better not use toothpicks to put in the ink anymore, because it doesn’t work.” Helen Casson, by the way, was an excellent inker. A really fine inker. CBA: Harvey comics have not been properly indexed as few seem to be able to identify the artists and certainly none of the writers. Ernie: We weren’t allowed to sign our work. CBA: The company made it, right? [laughs] The “author” was Harvey. So, you went over to Marvel. What was your favorite experience in comics? Ernie: My favorite, all-time experience? Oh, my gosh. Well, I don’t know. I guess doing my own graphic novel, but it was a mixed bag, because I indulged my daydreams, and thought that would mean a million other people would join me in that daydream, and they didn’t. So the good news was, I did my own daydream. The bad news was, nobody joined me in it. [laughter] It’s kind of a mixed bag. I think comics for me has always been a mixed thing. People talk about love/hate relationships, this is more like a love/disappointment relationship, in that whatever I did, there was always something in it that made it less than the best experience it could have been. It may have been, many times, my own attitude and my own feelings, but I think basically what happened was, to this day, just like every cartoonist who ever lived is envious of movies, because that’s what they want to do. A comic book is a movie, and movies become more and more like comics. I mean that in the better sense, rather than the idiocy that was committed by studios that bought a lease on things like Captain America and did things so bad that they weren’t even released. But even mainstream movies have become very much like comic books, in the best sense of the word. They copied a lot of our stuff through the years. So there’s always been a relationship between comics and movies, and they have not welcomed us as individual cartoonists. In fact, when they make movies based on certain comic characters, very often—more often than not—they don’t even ask anybody’s advice from the comics, they just do whatever they want to do with it, whether it’s Richie Rich on TV, and they decide, “Oh, I don’t like that costume, let’s give him long pants, let’s comb his hair different.” They never asked us, “What do you think of that?” They just handled the character any which way they wanted. So, I’m going a long way in saying that I, personally—and I think this is true of most cartoonists—are very envious of movies, of their ability to do certain things, and angry because we don’t have easy entry into this wonderful storytelling. CBA: Did you ever feel you had an intimate relationship with your readers at times? Looking at and enjoying your work, especially back in the early ’70s, when I first discovered it and said, “Wow, this guy can do realistic stuff, but it’s cartoony at the same time! It’s quintessential, almost perfect comics!” Ernie: Ha! CBA: It still had that “comic element” to it, but it still was dramatic, and it still flowed, and you were a good storyteller. Was there any gratification, was there any feedback from fans? Ernie: Oh, yes, and yeah, there has been a relationship. Not one where you suddenly become drinking buddies, but to this day, I still get e-mail and mail asking me for a drawing or something like that. The reactions I’ve gotten, when I tell people what I’ve done, is a very warm reaction when I mention Casper or other stuff. Fans certainly know more about me than I can remember! I can’t remember most of this stuff. Yeah, that’s very gratifying. A lot of fun. CBA: Well, I hope you take some measure in that. Maybe you COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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didn’t make a movie, but damn, you did damn good comics! It almost gets foggy for me, getting into the ’80s, because you were doing everything from Bullwinkle and Rocky to… you were all over the map! You did science-fiction… Ernie: Mighty Mouse, I did science-fiction for Penthouse Comix. George Caragonne was in charge, before he committed suicide. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, I was doing all of those things. Sometimes I’d go right from Mighty Mouse to science-fiction. CBA: How do you know that all these people are looking for work? Did they always come calling you? Ernie: Yeah. There again, Penthouse Comics called me. George was another one who was very generous with money, but his generosity was on the order of pathological! [laughter] I walked in there and asked for something like $100 a page, and he gave me $800. [laughter] CBA: Did you want to be an editor? Ernie: No, Jenette Kahn offered me the job. I never dreamed of being an editor. CBA: What do you think she saw in you? Ernie: I have no idea. Still don’t. My mother, when she heard I was going to be an editor, she bought me three suits. [laughter] They’re the only three suits I’ve ever owned in my life. CBA: That’s fine. Was there any gratification in being an editor? Ernie: Oh, in the beginning it was great. I was wearing a three-piece suit, I even had a vest on, Jon! I mean, I had arrived! CBA: This was your first office job? Ernie: Yeah! [laughter] I’d never worked in an office before! I mean, I started out like a house on fire, you know? But everything I did, they didn’t like. Everything! Every time I did something, they just objected to it. For example, I wouldn’t correct the spelling on fan letters or clean them up. If I got a fan letter that said I was an idiot, I’d put it in! Sometimes I’d call the guys. One guy wrote me a real nasty one, I think he was in Ohio someplace, [laughter] and he couldn’t believe I was calling him. “This is who?!?” “This is Ernie Colón, at DC. You sent me a lousy letter. How come? What did I do?” “Oh, my God, I can’t believe you called me!” This kind of stuff. But that’s the part I enjoyed, and when they wanted me to correct the spelling, I said, “No. When people write a letter, they’re expressing themselves, and they have to take full responsibility for their expression, which is not only the content, but how they say things.” They didn’t go for that at all, and we had big arguments over that, and over my calls. “Why are you calling these people?” “Because I want to talk to them! They’re our fans, the guy wrote me a letter!” And then, the two crowning glories. One was being put in charge of the portfolios that they advertised in their comics. They advertised for kids to send in their portfolios, and they put me in charge. Then, they wouldn’t let me grade the portfolios and write letters to the kids, which I thought, “Why not? What am I in charge of, then?” “Well, put them in my office,” Dick Giordano said, “Let me take care of it.” Okay, now I’m getting letters from mothers, three or four months later. “My kid sent you a portfolio!” I’m getting all of this! I walked into Dick’s office and said, “You’re keeping the portfolios in your office, you won’t let me do anything. You’re not doing anything, and I’m getting bad letters! People are thinking I’m keeping their stuff!” “Look, Ernie, you’re getting to be a pain in the ass.” That’s when I thought, “I’m a pain in the ass?” I won’t even tell you what I said. CBA: So that was the end of your day job? Ernie: That was almost the end. The real end came when I talked Alex Toth into doing a story, and he’s a curmudgeon! You don’t mess with this guy! I talked to him, and completely convinced him he should be working for me, and this guy, Robin Snyder, who was my assistant, wrote a story that was just terrific, and I sent it to Alex, and he loved it. Didn’t change a thing. Drew this eight-page story of Green Lantern… it was a miracle. This guy is superb! Trevor Von Eeden walked in, I had those pages on my desk, and he looked at me and said, “Ernie, I’m begging you on my knees, let me make a copy of these.” I said, “Go ahead, do it.” Everybody would walk in and look at this and say, “My God, this is wonderful stuff!” Len Wein, without consulting me, without asking Alex Toth’s permission, decides he doesn’t like the continuity of this story, and literally takes a scissors to it, cuts it apart, and joins it together the way he wanted December 2001

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to see it, including excising some panels he didn’t like! That’s when I became pretty nearly homicidal. You know, I never spoke to Alex Toth again, because I was too ashamed. This was years ago, and I never talked to him again. I was too embarrassed to tell him it wasn’t my fault, because it sounded too lame. That’s when Dick called me into his office and said, “You know, you’ve been here a year, I think the trial period is over.” I said, “You’re telling me?” [laughter] “Just stick around, we’ll find somebody to replace you.” I said, “Fine.” I stayed two weeks and three days. The moment they had somebody, I walked out. And haven’t looked back since then, they never gave me another piece of work. Horror stories! CBA: Are you enjoying your life right now? Ernie: Yeah, I am. I’m doing real estate. There’s no work for me out there, I do occasional Archie pages, and I enjoy doing Archie, very nice work. It’s almost like back at Harvey. I occasionally get to do some advertising work, doing Harvey characters, because now there’s another company that bought it, and it’s changed hands about three times. Each time it’s changed hands, I get another phone call, and I do another bunch of character sheets or whatever. So, that connection is still there, a very tiny connection. CBA: Do you draw for pleasure? Ernie: Those “doodlemovies,” which I like to do. Of course, I experiment on the computer constantly, and I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff, computer paintings and things like that I just haven’t done anything with at all, I haven’t tried to market at all.

Above: We don’t know what this color “Zombi” piece was for but it sure rocks! Courtesy of and ©2001 Ernie Colón. Below: At a recent National Cartoonists’ Society meeting, Ernie Colón (right) posed for a photo with friend Tony Tallarico (yep! The Tony Tallarico!). Courtesy of Ernie Colón

CBA Interview

When Atlas Shrugged Atlas/Seaboard production guy Steve Mitchell speaks Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Comic Book Artist first interviewed artist (and occasional writer) back in #7 where he discussed his entré into the field at DC Comics in the early 1970s and his subsequently bittersweet experience freelancing during those formative years, most prominently for Marvel. The New York-raised artist was interviewed on September 25, 2001 via telephone and he copyedited the final transcript.

Below: Okay, maybe you’ve already seen this Jack Adler photo of Steve Mitchell (taken in the early 1970s) in CBA #5 but it’s the only pic we’ve got of Big Steve!

Comic Book Artist: The last time we left you [in CBA #7], you were working at Continuity? Steve Mitchell: I was working at DC Comics, and Jeff Rovin had asked me if I wanted to come over and work for this new upstart company, which I believe was called Seaboard, I believe that was the overall title, like Magazine Management was for Marvel. They were looking for, essentially, a production manager. I was working for Jack Adler at DC Comics as the production manager’s assistant—not to be confused with the assistant production manager [laughter]—and while I liked working at DC, and I liked working for Jack, there was an opportunity for me to spread my wings, and the money was slightly better, and I guess I was… I guess I had a bad case of “young Turk disease” or something like that, and I figured, “Well, here’s a chance for me to go make my mark on the world.” So, after having had an interview with Chip Goodman, I said, “Sure, why not? Let’s do it.” And that’s how I got my job over there as the production manager of Atlas Comics. CBA: Now, DC Comics was obviously in business since the early ’30s, and you had a situation there with an old, established company, and yet this new upstart outfit had started. Was it for the money? Steve: I was around 20 or 21 at the time, maybe 22, and when you’re young, you don’t think about the future, you don’t think

about longevity, you just think about what sounds good to you. I knew that if I stayed at DC, I probably would’ve had a very solid job, but I don’t know that I would’ve gone anywhere much past what I was doing… I mean, maybe I would’ve gotten a title, maybe I would’ve gotten more salary, but Jack Adler wasn’t going anywhere, Sol Harrison wasn’t going anywhere—because at the time… what year are we talking about? 1974? Around ‘74, Sol was the production manager, and Jack was the assistant production manager… I don’t remember the hierarchy, but nobody was going to go anywhere. So for me, I looked at it as—at the time—not a dead-end job, but a job where there wasn’t going to be a lot of forward movement. Martin and Chip Goodman had the Goodman money, and the Marvel/Magazine Management experience behind them, I figured these guys knew their way around, and if they were going to start a company, they weren’t amateurs, but seasoned professionals—well, Marty Goodman was a seasoned professional, I don’t know if I can say that about Chip—but they knew the magazine/comic book business. More to the point, it was just an opportunity for me to work with a guy I was chummy with, and maybe try something new and interesting. That, to me, was the real pull. The money was better, but not profoundly better. It was a chance to do something that might be new or different or cutting edge, all of those dopey, self-delusional things that you think about when you’re young and full of beans. CBA: Did you have any experience with Martin Goodman? Had you meet him previously? Steve: I met Marty Goodman probably after I was hired, and in the amount of time that I worked there, Marty was almost a ghost! He would come in every day, would make a lunch appointment with some old crony of his, and then come back from lunch and sometimes snooze on the Chesterfield couch in his office. He would occasionally pay attention to business, but it was primarily Chip’s company, and I heard it said—I don’t know if this is true—that Marty started the company just so he could have a place to go to the office and get away from his wife. [laughter] Granted, I don’t know who said that; I can’t attribute that to anybody, but that’s what I heard. I liked Marty. He was a crusty, old-fashioned New York magazine publisher, but he seemed to be a pretty nice guy CBA: What were your impressions of his son, Chip? Steve: Well, I was not a big fan of Chip’s, and I don’t think Chip was a fan of mine. There was somebody else Chip would’ve rather had in my job, and he couldn’t get them away from Marvel, and so Jeff Rovin and I knew each other—I met Jeff when he was working for Dorothy Woolfolk at DC, back at the 909 Third Avenue office— and Jeff and I had a lot in common, and we were both a couple of young Turks, and full of our own self-confidence and arrogance, and that’s why Jeff pushed for me, but Chip never really wanted me. Chip and I never really connected. I have to say I was never overly impressed with Chip’s intelligence or insights, and I don’t think he was terribly articulate about what he wanted. Chip really wanted to be a men’s magazine publisher, and they bought Swank—which at the time was a medium-sized men’s magazine—and so Chip, when he wasn’t busy paying attention to Swank business, would occasionally pay attention to Atlas/Seaboard business. I, personally, was not very impressed with Chip as a comic book guy. I mean, he might’ve been a good magazine business guy, but in terms of comics, I don’t think he really cared, personally, and because he was the boss, he was allowed to have opinions that I don’t always agree with. In general, that’s how I feel about Chip. CBA: How old was Chip, roughly, when you were there? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Steve: Chip didn’t have a whole lot of hair, having lost it fairly early on in the game, so he looked a little older than maybe he actually was. If I was in my early 20s, my guess was Chip was somewhere in his late thirties or early forties. I couldn’t really tell. CBA: Were you aware of a story, “The Boss’ Son,” in Playboy, written by Ivan Prashker, which was allegedly based on Chip? Steve: No, I wasn’t. CBA: It was written by a guy who was a heavy contributor to Martin Goodman’s “sweat” magazines, and he sold it to Playboy. It was reportedly a satirical jab at Chip, casting him as an ineffectual, womanizing businessman. Steve: I wasn’t aware of the story, but let me put it to you this way: Chip was the kind of guy that would probably inspire death threats. Like I said, the old man was a tough but fair, old-fashioned New York magazine publisher, and there seem to be a handful of those guys, guys who had companies and published “sweat” mags, movie and TV fanbook-type mags, horoscope mags, crossword puzzle mags. To use somebody else’s term— but I won’t necessarily disagree with it—Chip was the “retarded son” who was going to inherit the business. Now, Chip was not retarded, but like I said, I don’t think Chip was as bright as he thought he was, and he was only really interested in being the publisher of Swank. One other thing, as a complete sidebar: We published crossword magazines, and we actually had—believe it or not—it’s one thing to have comic book fans, but we actually had people calling us up over there wondering when the next issue of Fill-In-The-Blank Crosswords was coming out. [laughter] They couldn’t wait for those new crosswords, [laughter] which I always felt was a bit bizarre, actually. CBA: Did you do production on the crossword puzzle magazines? Steve: No, I didn’t do production on any of the magazines, the only stuff I did was the comics and the comics-related magazines like Weird Tales of the Macabre, Thrilling Adventure Stories, and Movie Monsters, which was our version of Famous Monsters. But ultimately, I had to do comics production, so we had guys who would come in to freelance art direct those magazines. I just couldn’t, I didn’t have the time, considering I was responsible for a line of comics. By the way, for the record, the Atlas “A” was my design. I came up with that design, with the Atlas symbol and the sans serif text—I don’t remember what the typeface was for the Atlas comics—but I came up with the rough and Gaspar Saladino did the final execution. CBA: Did you rely on your contacts for freelancers at DC in your new job? Steve: Both Jeff and I knew a lot of the people that we ultimately used from our other jobs; me from my experience at DC, and Jeff from his experience with Warren. We had that sort of mini-Captain Company, Warren’s merchandising outfit, which Jeff created at Atlas because of his Warren experience. There was an awful lot of money to be made, and I would say that ultimately we didn’t do nearly as a good a job as Captain Company would do, but I guess the Goodmans did make some money from it, enough to keep them alive and kicking for about a year. I took some heat from Jack Adler because I tried stealing some of his people. When we needed logos, I went right to Gaspar Saladino, because to me, he was the best logo artist in the business. I think Gaspar was also the best letterer in the industry at the time, certainly the go-to guy when you needed a logo. One thing the Goodmans had going for them was that they had a lot of money to spend—or seemingly had a lot of money to spend—because the rates we had over there were very good, and I guess either Chip or Marty realized that if they were going to get competitive talent from Marvel or DC, they would have to pay better than the competition. And then, of course, pay as quickly as Marvel and DC, I thought. We paid once a week. If you had your vouchers in by Wednesday, you had a December 2001

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check by Friday. CBA: There was a rumor that the company was created as an act of revenge against Marvel, because allegedly there was a promise that was made when Martin Goodman sold the company, Chip would be kept on as president of Marvel Comics, but was let go. Steve: I heard something about that. I couldn’t swear to it in court, it’s one of those things where that sounds like it made sense, and I believe it to be true, but I don’t know if it’s officially true. CBA: Visually, the look and feel of Atlas Comics was very similar to Marvel Comics. You had a similar banner across the top, and it was conceivable somebody could grab it off the newsstand and mistake it for a Marvel comic. Was there an edict that came down to make them look like Marvel comics? Steve: No, there wasn’t. It’s an interesting schizophrenic irony to it, because you had Jeff, who had a DC/Warren upbringing, and then of course there was Larry Lieber, Stan Lee’s brother (that’s how Larry would introduce himself, he’d say, “Hi, I’m Larry Lieber, Stan Lee’s brother… ” the world’s longest name) [laughter]—Larry was as

Above: Another fine Frank Thorne cover (sans logo and blurbs), this one for The Cougar #1, a book created and written by Steve Mitchell, a comic inspired by the famed TV movie, The Night Stalker. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Below: It looks like Larry Lieber contributed the illustrations of the top characters of Atlas Comics for this merchandise house ad. Publisher Martin Goodman was intrigued by the success of Jim Warren’s Captain Company and hope to replicate that with the “Atlas Fantasy Shop.” ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Marvel as it gets! Now, when I created the Atlas “A” and the banner, I did it just because that felt “right” to me. I had no edict of “Make it look more like Marvel,” although I’m sure the Goodmans were more comfortable with that. It’s interesting, Larry did most of those covers, and let’s face it, if you look at a Larry Lieber drawing it says to me— as it says to anybody who knows Marvel—Marvel Comics. So it definitely had a Marvel look. Whereas Jeff, even Jeff’s covers looked Marvel-ish, but a lot of the guys that we got to do Jeff’s books were not really Marvel guys. In fact, it’s an interesting combination of Marvel, DC, and guys from the newspaper business! CBA: Howard Nostrand comes to mind. Steve: Howard Nostrand in particular, but Al McWilliams did some stuff. So it was an interesting bouillabaisse of guys. CBA: Leo Summers was a science-fiction illustrator. Steve: Right, Leo Summers was an extension of Jeff’s time at Marvel, because Leo did quite a bit of stuff for them. In fact, there was this woman—I can’t remember her name, she was very, very sweet—who did a lot of lettering on the black-&-white books who Jeff knew…. CBA: Annette? Steve: You mean Annette Kawecki? It wasn’t Annette, it was an Asian woman, I can’t remember her name—and of course, the readers will hate this [laughter]—but Jeff knew her from Warren, and

she did a lot of newspaper strip lettering. So, we were getting people from all over the place. CBA: Did you feel like, “Whoa!” There were only two major players as far as adventure comics goes in the field at the time, and there’s a lot of energy coming out of both companies at the time, and boing! I was a reader as a kid, and I remember hearing about this and going, “Whoa! This sounds exciting!” Did it feel exciting, like you were starting a new house? Steve: The simple answer to that is, “Kind of, yes,” but the more realistic answer is… it was still work and still a job. It was a small office. It was me, Jeff, Larry Lieber, sort of the office manager and receptionist, Ann Ellen Glasser, we had Chip, we had Marty, and then you had an office for the sales guy, whose name was Harvey something. It was essentially a small office! It was a Fifth Avenue address, but the office was not a whole lot bigger than the Marvel offices that used to be on Madison Avenue around 59th Street, which was a pretty small office. Then they moved to 57th and Madison, and those offices were huge. We were excited about the work, especially when work was starting to come in. I’m sure you went back and looked at a lot of the books, you noticed that Michael Fleischer wrote an awful lot of the books, because Jeff felt good about working with Michael. I don’t really remember who wrote most of Larry’s stuff, I think Larry wrote some of it. CBA: Archie Goodman wrote some. Steve: Archie was working with Ditko and Woody on The Destructor, and Archie packaged that book. I thought that was a fun comic book, by the way. When the artwork was starting to come in, there was a lot of nice work being done! Whenever you see good work being done by talented professionals that’s fresh, yeah, you’d go, “Wow! What a great job!” That’s the two phrases you’d hear a lot in the comic book business in the ’70s, “great job” or “great stuff.” [laughter] We saw a lot of great stuff coming through that door, and by guys we were fans of. I never knew who Howard Nostrand was, and I learned pretty soon. Howard was a bigger-thanlife personality, but I didn’t really know his work—he was primarily a newspaper strip artist—and I liked the way Howard drew. I mean, I thought he had a very appealing style, and I thought that it was interesting work. Ernie Colón, from Warren, was a guy who Jeff brought over, and Ernie did some very exciting stuff! Ernie is probably one of the ten most under-appreciated guys who’ve ever been in the comic book business. CBA: Talk about eclectic genres he worked in! Steve: Ernie was one of those guys who was always trying to keep it fresh for himself, so some jobs were better than others, but they were always—I think—infused with a very specific energy that I can only describe as Ernie. The thing I like about Ernie’s stuff is that nobody’s stuff even remotely looked like it; it was uniquely his stuff. I’ve seen doodles and stuff that Ernie has done in his spare time which is so much better than his published work! Ernie was—and probably still is—an incredible draftsman, and I found it very attractive, energetic, appealing… it was fun comics! CBA: Did you help bring any of the young talent on board? Howard Chaykin, for instance? Steve: I knew Howard… I can’t take credit for bringing anybody but some of the production people on board. Alan Kupperberg eventually worked for us, helping me do day-to-day production, and then eventually a guy named John Chilly (spelled, he would always say, “like the weather”) who was essentially the one-man production department for Dell Comics, and John came on board, and he art directed some of the magazines. The one guy I did bring on board was Sol Harrison’s son, Marty Harrison, who was a designer, a magazine art director. He freelance art directed the first couple of magazines we put out, and then I don’t remember specifics of why Marty stopped, but John Chilly then became our in-house guy. I thought Marty was a very, very talented art director, so we would give him an issue of Movie Monsters and we’d give him Xeroxes of the stills we were going to publish, and he pretty much would give us a completely art-directed magazine in a very reasonable amount of time. I thought it was very exciting. I remember when Marty brought in the first book he’d art directed, Jeff and I were grinning like a couple of idiots. We were like, “Wow! We’re creating new magazines! This is cool!” It was a tremendous amount of fun in COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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the beginning, and then politics, inter-office politics started to take a little of the fun out of it. But again, when the first jobs were starting to come in, it was some very, very good work by some very talented people, and we were excited about it. CBA: I think Thrilling Adventure Stories #2 was perhaps one of the best comics magazines that came out in the ’70s. You had Alex Toth, Russ Heath, a Neal Adams cover, a wonderful job by Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson… . Steve: Oh, yeah, there’s a job in there that I wrote, that Johnny Severin drew, called “Town Tamer.” I had done a little writing, comics writing, and then Jeff knew I’d done that, so he said, “Do you want to write a story for John Severin? I’d like to see a World War II story where the hero wears a Western gun-belt and carries an old Peacemaker Colt.” Largely because of my own enthusiasm and full of beans, I said, “I’m getting John Severin to draw something from his two best genres, keeping it in the same story, making it a World War II story, but making it like a Western!” So I wrote a story I thought was pretty good. Jeff had a pass at it—I didn’t quite agree with some of the stuff he did to rewrite it—the story went to Severin, and he did an excellent job, which should come as no surprise. It certainly didn’t come as a surprise to me, because I’m a John Severin fan, but if anybody knows John Severin’s work, he always does a great job. And he did a very, very nice job on this job. Simonson’s samurai job was pretty much the best job we ever saw when we were up there. I mean, everybody was knocked out by it. I don’t know that Chip or Marty looked at that stuff, but everybody else who looked at comics looked at that and went, “Wow, this is a great job!” I mean, it was proportionately speaking, for Simonson at the time, it was like the equivalent of “Thunderjet” or “The Monument” was for Toth. It was a job that, if you’re a Walt Simonson fan, you would never forget and you’d always probably think of it as one of the best jobs he ever did. That was a good day, when artwork would come in like that and we’d see it, we were all very excited and very proud to be a part of what was going on. CBA: Do you recall a Godzilla pastiche that Walter did that never saw print? Steve: Was it supposed to be for Seaboard? CBA: Yeah, and along with a lot of other art, it disappeared. Steve: A lot of art disappeared, and I don’t know…. What happened was, it disappeared after I was gone. Why didn’t that job get published? CBA: I think because the company folded. Steve: I cannot remember. It’s one of those things, Jon, where I sort of remember the job, but don’t remember it. I know Walt was a huge fan of Godzilla. It sounds like one of those things where Jeff might’ve said, “Go ahead and do it,” and it didn’t get published because there was a rights problem, perhaps, or maybe Jeff gave the assignment out before he got canned. CBA: All I know is Walt considered it one of the best jobs he’s ever done, and he never saw it again. Steve: I don’t know what happened to that job. Walt did some amazing work for us. Any time Walt would work with Archie Goodwin was a good day. The work they did together was amazing. You know something? Any time any artist drew a story written by Archie Goodwin, it was a good day. CBA: Atlas had a great start-up. You had Howard Chaykin doing The Scorpion, you had Ditko, Wood and Goodwin doing The Destructor, Sal Amendola did a nice job on The Phoenix… really good stuff! Steve: Sal came in, and I thought he did some very interesting work. Sal Amendola is the very best comic book artist that couldn’t handle the comic book business. Sal was incredibly talented, I love the way he drew—I actually inked a couple of stories of his for DC somewhere later in my career—but Sal, for some reason, had very strong ideas of how comics should be done, what comics should be about, and the only reason Sal did not do more work was because Sal had more clashes with hierarchy with how business was done, or the theories of how business was done; but when it came to drawing and doing the work, I always thought Sal was amazing. I found Sal’s stuff exciting and very appealing. I wish he’d done more comics. Now he’s teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Sal was very talented, and maybe too dedicated, if that makes any sense. December 2001

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CBA: He seems very sensitive. Steve: [Pause] Yeah, Sal was sensitive about the nature of the business, but not the work. This is my opinion. Sal really had more of a problem with the nature of the business than actually the business of doing the work. Very talented guy. CBA: You had Larry Hama doing Wulf the Barbarian. Steve: Which I always felt was a great book, I thought again, very appealing, very energetic, and different. CBA: It didn’t last long. Steve: No, well, not a whole helluva lot of our books did last long. Did any of our books go past four issues? CBA: Just a few: Ironjaw, Phoenix, Vicki. Steve: Wasn’t Vicki one of the first books we published? CBA: It was all-reprint, wasn’t it? Steve: Yeah. Of course, there was that other book I created, The Cougar, which has an interesting story to go with that. At the time, I was a huge fan of The Night Stalker, and I don’t remember whether at the time… was it the movie or the TV series? It didn’t make any difference, but I loved the concept of the horror and fantasy and action. One of the things the first Night Stalker movie had was all those great chases and fights! You want to see how good fights are staged? Watch The Night Stalker again, it’s some great stuff. So I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a hero who investigates the macabre, but who was really talented when it came to the action stuff?” For some reason, I said, “Well, why not have the protagonist

Above: Atlas Comics took advantage of the fan press during its brief existence. Here is Neal Adams’ cover art to Ironjaw #1 gracing The Comic Reader #111. Courtesy of Mike Friedrich. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Above: The superb Pablo Marcos horror story, “The Lost Tomb of Nefertiri,” appeared in Devilina #1. The tale was written by Gabriel Levy. Pablo shared the original art (which was without lettering) with CBA. Thanks, P.M.! Above is the splash page illustration. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

be a stuntman, a guy who is very physically adept, but not a superhero?” So I wrote the first issue, and Jeff had said, “I want to give it to Dan Adkins.” I like Dan’s work, but I heard at the time Dan had a very hard time with deadlines. I said to Jeff, “You know, Jeff, I just don’t think Dan will be able to do a bi-monthly book.” Jeff, God bless him for having faith, said, “I think Dan can do it, I’d like Dan to do it, so we’re going to give it to Dan.” So I said, “Okay.” Dan had done some work I’d really liked, I didn’t know how much work he’d done on the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, but I knew he’d done some work for Warren I was very impressed with. So, the script went out to Dan, and halfway through the issue, Dan said, “I can’t draw this anymore,” or came up with an excuse why he couldn’t finish the job. So, we had ten pages, I believe, of Dan Adkins’ pencil work, and then we had to get those pages inked, and then we had to find somebody who could pencil or pencil and ink the back ten pages. I believe it was my idea, and I said, “Why don’t we get Frank Springer to do it?” I was a huge fan of “The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist” and his National Lampoon stuff. Frank, on a good day, could just draw like crazy. I always found his approach to inking very appealing, and he had a very dominant inking style. I figured if he used that inking style over Dan’s pencils, and penciled the back ten pages, the book would have some consistency. Now, Dan’s layouts and Frank’s layouts are different, but Frank’s inks over Dan’s pencils made… not for a seamless blend, but a decent blend. Somewhere along the line, they decided they wanted to give the character a super-hero costume, which I know I was really steamed about. I wanted to have a real-world adventure hero, not a super-hero adventure hero. I figured, given all the other books we were publishing, why not? Jeff had made the decision, and I don’t know whether it was based on need or caprice, to have another costumed super-hero. Marty Goodman—and this could be my memory playing tricks on me—was wondering why there weren’t more superheroes, because we had a very eclectic blend! Our line was more like Charlton than it was Marvel. We also had action heroes, but not always super-heroes: The Brute, Tarantula, Lomax, our version of Sgt.

Fury and His Howling Commandos—I can’t even remember the name of that. What was interesting about that line of books is that they were a synthesis of a number of different approaches that were already being done, and a number of new ideas. Wasn’t Tiger-Man one of our books as well? That was one of Ernie Colón’s books, I thought that was a fun book. CBA: You had The Grim Ghost, a great title that Colón drew. Steve: Yeah. Ernie started to be a real workhorse for us, and then what I think happened was Ernie and Jeff didn’t always see eye-to-eye on some things. Ernie was a very emotional guy and he would get worked up about some stuff sometimes. I know he and Jeff had a couple of blow-outs. It was not about anything other than Jeff had ideas on how something should look, and I guess Ernie had other ideas. CBA: How old was Jeff, roughly, when he ascended? Mid-twenties? Steve: Jeff was somewhere between 22 and 24 at the time. We were all in our early twenties. I mean, we were young Turks in our minds, if nothing else. Larry, of course, was somewhat older. CBA: Some freelancers who contributed to Atlas Comics are very vocal in their displeasure with working with Jeff. Was it tough to work with Jeff? Steve: Jeff and I had a honeymoon period, and then—because I’d had more pragmatic experience doing comic books working at DC, I would say, “Gee, Jeff, I don’t think we could do this that way.” And Jeff, for better or for worse, had ideas on how he wanted to do things, and sometimes he might’ve been right, and sometimes he might’ve been wrong. I think the one time I remember particularly where he went a little too far was, Greg Theakston had painted a cover for Movie Monsters #1, the Cyclops from Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. I thought it was a nice painting, and I believe on that painting, and to a lesser degree on the second painting Greg did for us of Dr. Zaius… Jeff really wanted some niggling corrections. I mean, I recall Greg was doing some of the corrections in the office, it was on the Cyclops painting, and I was scratching my head, going, “Is this really necessary?” I don’t know whether or not Jeff felt that these— for lack of a better word—niggling corrections were necessary… it might’ve been one of those things where he wasn’t satisfied with that painting, and he figured he could maybe art direct it into a better painting (that’s only supposition on my part). I remember I thought that Greg’s painting for the second issue, of Dr. Zaius, was a spectacularly good painting. I thought it was… it was a good example of likeness, and just really nice painting. I know that Jeff, like most of us, grew up looking at Basil Gogos's paintings on Famous Monsters, and I don’t think that Greg was the same type of painter Basil was. Basil was more spontaneous, and Greg was a more traditional oil painter. This is not to say that Greg was a bad painter, I liked Greg’s painting quite a bit. I mean, there was never a question to me as to whether he’d be our guy, I thought he was a great choice, I believe he was Jeff’s choice, and he worked very hard on those paintings. Greg— probably rightly so—was a little sore that Jeff wanted him to “make corrections,” to actually edit his painting. A sidebar on Movie Monsters #2: Chip and I knocked heads on that one. If you remember the painting, it was basically Dr. Zaius was all done in warm yellow, orange tones, and so being a student of contrast, I wanted to go with cool tone type, I basically wanted to use a navy blue and a forest green. One was the outline of the logo, and inside the logo was the other. Then, we had floating body copy of the movies that were covered in the issue. We didn’t really do a whole big “In This Issue!” sales pitch, as I remember we just listed the titles of the movies. So, I got this very warm painting, and there was no outlines around this lettering—again, done by Gaspar, I believe—and so I had dark blue, dark green, or the reverse of that, and the type was easy to read. I remember taking the… it was a proof we got from Nashville Electrographics, which I think was the color separator, and I felt it looked pretty solid. I’m not going to say it couldn’t have been better, but if you were looking at the thing on the newsstand, everything read clearly. Well, Chip looked at it while he was taking a drag on a cigarette—Chip smoked like a fiend—and he said words I’ll never forget. He said, “You know, I just don’t get a feeling from this.” Well, my next question was, “‘Feeling’? What kind of feeling?” “I don’t get a feeling from this.” That’s why, earlier, I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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said I felt like Chip was rather inarticulate when he had to discuss the work. This was one of those days, I guess, when he didn’t have any Swank business, so… [laughter] he didn’t want to look at this month’s centerfold, or this month’s Swank girl, or whatever it was, so he decided he was going to kibitz, or interfere, on this cover. So, we had, again, the dark blue, navy blue, and then we had this 100% red to substitute for the green, because I guess green was a color Marvel never used on any of their magazine covers, so he thought it was invalid, figuring anything that’s red will get more of a feeling for it. [laughter] So, we got the proofs back, and you could barely see the type that was in red, because that outline-free type in 100% red against an orange, warm-colored background on the painting. You could read it, but you had to look at it to read it, where it didn’t have the clarity I was shooting for when I picked those colors! So, we had a big, big brouhaha over that, and it would’ve cost too much money to change it back to what I originally wanted. I don’t know that I said anything as stupid or politically unsavvy as, “I told you so,” but Chip blamed me for that not looking good, and held it against me, because I was right and he was wrong. He wasn’t going to admit he was wrong! I guess he never got that feeling he was looking for. [laughter] It was slowly the beginning of the end for me up there, because ultimately, that whole thing came down, and Chip looked stupid because of it. CBA: What happened with you and the company? Steve: I don’t really remember the specifics—but it shook out as there was a little bit of a mutiny with Jeff and ultimately, me. Politically, I was allied to Jeff. Larry and I got along; Larry is one of the nicest, sweetest, most amiable guys on the planet, I like Larry quite a bit, even though I felt his ideas were Marvel-warmed-overtype of ideas. I don’t think there’s anything remotely cutting edge about Larry, but Larry was a very nice guy, he was willing to use guys who weren’t Marvel guys. Again, The Destructor was his book, and it was one of the best books we put out. But again, I was allied to Jeff. Chip had started to pay more attention to the comics stuff, and I don’t think he liked the line. I don’t think he liked Jeff’s stuff in particular. I don’t know if it was personal with him and Jeff, but Jeff always felt he knew how to do this better than Chip did, and I think he was right, and that Chip—and to some degree, Marty—wanted an incarnation of Marvel comics. Once the books were starting to get done, they didn’t get Marvel comics, what they got were Atlas comics! I actually believe we had a pretty interesting line of books, done by a very interesting group of artists and writers, but it wasn’t Marvel comics. Of course, Larry was very comfortable working the Marvel zone, but it got to the point, I guess, where the gauntlet had been thrown, and Jeff and I had gone and complained to Marty one day about how Chip was essentially more of a problem for the comics part of the business than an ally or an asset or help. What Jeff did was, he went into his office and typed out a letter—

the famous letter—that basically said, “Why Chip Goodman is a bad comic book publisher, by Jeff Rovin.” [laughter] Jeff was the fastest typist I’ve ever seen… and a good writer, too! He wrote a very articulate, extraordinary scathing, mutinous statement, pertaining to the son of Goodman! Basically, and in no uncertain terms, he pretty much told Marty, “What you have here is a great opportunity for a terrific company, but if you let Chip continue to operate the way he’s been operating, it’s all going to go to hell in a handbasket.” I’m sure Jeff was far more profane than “hell in a handbasket.” [laughter] Jeff—for better or for worse—had no fear. Jeff wanted to do it his way, he was hired to do it his way, and again, my feeling was with Chip, they wanted Marvel Comics, because that’s what they understood, and that’s what they understood would sell. Of course, in a couple of places in that letter, I’m sure it said, “Steve and I feel…” [laughter] So basically what happened was, Jeff and I both got canned, because of this mutinous uprising that occurred. Now, I’m sure there are other specifics pertaining to the mutinous uprising I’m not remembering, but in general, I would say Chip was an impediment to the way we were trying to do books, and…. CBA: It came as no surprise, I would assume, that you were canned? Steve: Pretty much. I mean, from the beginning, I don’t think Chip ever really wanted me up there. So, since I had been allied with Jeff, and then John Chilly went up there—and John had comics experience—I guess Chip probably said, “Well, we’ll get rid of both of these snot-nosed young punks.” [laughter] To some degree, the phrase “snot-nosed young punks” does apply, because we were very young, but we felt—not unlike other guys who were in their 20s and in comics— that we were going to create the new comics, that we were going to wind up trying to take comics into new territory. In my defense—and in defense of all snotnosed young punks everywhere, at least back in the ’70s—my feeling was, we didn’t want to push the old guys out of the business, we wanted to do a lot of the stuff with the old guys, and next to them. I don’t know who hired Jack Abel, it

Above: Okay, so who’s ever seen a copy of this rarity? Gothic Romances was a late attempt by Atlas/Seaboard to capitalize on the genre, though the title lasted a single issue. Notable comics artists such as Howard Chaykin, Leo Summers, Russ Heath and (at left) Neal Adams contributed illustrations which accompanied the text stories. Courtesy of David A. Roach. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

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Above: Another Ernie Colón house ad, here trumpeting the Seaboard black-&-white line. DC publisher Carmine Infantino took great exception to the use of the phrase “The Atlas Line of Superstars,” (because of its similarity to the DC tagline “The Line of DC SuperStars”) and he insisted that the ad be pulled from future issues, and Atlas publisher Martin Goodman relented. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

might’ve been me, it might’ve been me suggesting Jack Abel, because I worked with Jack at Continuity, but yeah, I wanted to work with Jack Abel, I wanted him to work with us, I wanted to work with all the guys I admire and respect! What we were trying to do was do some slightly new, slightly different types of comics with guys who all had track records. We were not hiring untried people, we were hiring guys whose work we admired, both old and young. Al McWilliams, the guy’s been around forever, I’ve always liked his work. Howard Nostrand, a guy I didn’t know, but again, the guy had been doing a lot of work for a lot of years, and I liked his work as well. Ditko, of course. Woody. Then there were guys like Sal and Chaykin and Larry Hama… there was room for everybody at Atlas, and the only… [laughs] the only young punks with attitude were me and Jeff. [laughter] I was more politic because I wasn’t the guy in charge. I tried to work as well with Larry and Chip and everybody as I could. I’ll say this about Chip: Chip really didn’t give much of a sh*t about comics, and ultimately, it came out that he just needed to have something to have an opinion about, so some days he concentrated on the comics. He made a lot of bad decisions. And then, when I started to see some of the Atlas comics that came out after Jeff and I were gone, it’s very interesting to see how it was really, really being pulled towards a very Marvel style. CBA: So that character revamping came after you guys left? Steve: Oh, yeah. For example, the second issue of The Cougar had the origin of The Cougar, and it was completely re-figured out, the guy had a costume and Rich Buckler, if he didn’t draw the book, he did the cover. As I recall, Larry inherited all the comics. I don’t know if the company was making money. My understanding was they had enough money to not make a penny in profit for a year. That was what I had heard; whether that was true or not, I don’t know. I don’t really think they lasted a whole lot longer than a year, or maybe a year-and-a-half at most! One other thing: Jeff had an assistant named Ric Meyers, who was also doing a lot of work on the magazine stuff, and our version of Captain Company, and he was really a victim in that. It happened on a Friday, as a matter of fact, so let’s just call it “Black Friday.” [laughter] It was at least Black Friday for us. What year that was, what date that was, I don’t know, maybe

Jeff remembers. CBA: Was it the same day the letter was submitted? Steve: My memory says it was the same day. Jeff submitted the letter, and they said, “We can’t keep you guys around if this is the way you feel.” CBA: You guys were aware that was a very strong possibility? Steve: That it was a suicide mission? CBA: Judging from the tone of the letter as you characterized it. Steve: It was a powerful and an articulate letter, a somewhat blasphemous letter… I guess I was too stupid to realize they had no other place to go but to fire us. CBA: Chip was, after all, the publisher’s son! [laughter] Who was Martin going to choose? Steve: In point of fact, Chip was publisher, or executive publisher, or publisher emeritus, or chairman of the board. These guys were not used to having anybody tell them they were wrong, and certainly, Jeff told them how wrong things were under Chip’s tenure. Jeff, to his credit, was saying, “We’re doing great books here, we’re doing great work, we have great passion for the books, and the work and the company, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to do the work we want to do with the political heaviness” that existed up there. CBA: So, did you have any options open when that letter was submitted? Were you going to land on your feet? Steve: I don’t think I landed on my feet, I landed sideways. That part of my life, professionally, after that was a little bit of a blur to me. I found work, one way or the other. I was probably doing inking assistant work, or background work. To tell you the truth, I cannot remember where I went directly after that. I know I was “unemployed” after that. Eventually I did go back to DC on staff, but not right away. Jack Adler had a moment where he might’ve quietly said to himself—and eventually, to me—an “I told you so.” But I liked Jack, Jack liked me, DC liked me, and ultimately I wound up back there. I had three terms at DC: Two as Jack’s assistant, and then eventually, I came back again in the late ’70s where I was a board guy. But that last time around, I started getting some inking work back there, and eventually I went freelance. The time between my return to DC and the time I left Atlas was an interesting blur for me. I’m sure I was doing something and wasn’t walking around the city of Manhattan doing nothing, but I don’t quite remember exactly what it was I was doing. CBA: Was there any opinion, editorially, about having Kable as the distributor? Steve: Yeah, we all felt Kable was not the world’s greatest distributor. Kable was third tier distributor. We got better distribution than some of the Tower books seem to have gotten when I was a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents fan. I had to really hunt for some of those books, and our books were getting out there, but we all knew Kable was not a great distributor. I don’t know why Atlas ultimately closed shop—maybe the books weren’t selling, although comics were selling in general those days. I don’t want to be in the business where I’m going to blame somebody for the demise of the company, but I would say the fact that we had a weak distributor didn’t help keep the company alive. CBA: You had a lot of compatriots who were working in the comics business, too. Were you cognizant of any prevailing attitude COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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towards Atlas? Steve: I think this line was attributed to Neal Adams, who may have said Atlas was “too much money, too little sense,” which was the way Atlas was being looked at by some guys in the business. I know DC and Marvel probably didn’t like the fact that we could afford to hire some people away from them. I know I took some crap from Adler either post-Atlas or in a phone call from Adler about using Gaspar Saladino, because DC felt Gaspar was their property. To my knowledge, Gaspar had no contract., but there weren’t any contracts in those days, just these unwritten associations and relationships. CBA: There were distinctly DC artists, and distinctly Marvel artists, and you guys got the cream of the independent guys, and certainly a premiere artist, Ernie Colón. Steve: We were getting guys from all over the place, and if the company was perceived to have some degree of freshness, it was because of the assortment of talent. If you took the company as a whole and at the people who worked for us, we got people from all over the place! It was a very interesting assortment of guys. Some of those books were really good, even by today’s standards. Some of those books would be considered fun. CBA: By today’s standards, they’re great books! [laughter] Steve: Well, the big problem with comics today—and I’ll go on the record and say this—is fun. What I liked about most of the books we did is, they were fun books. Some of them were dopier than sh*t. [laughter] I mean, Tiger-Man?!? The Brute?!? Those are nutty ideas! But, they were fun nutty ideas, and that’s what comics used to be about, they were about fun. By the way, I will take credit for the cover design on The Brute #1. Dick Giordano did that one, and it was basically The Brute in the middle of a New York type street surrounded by a bunch of cops, and I don’t remember exactly how I said it, I said, “This guy’s in the middle of a street,” I was talking to Dick Giordano, who was my mentor and practically my lifelong friend—certainly through my adult life—and I said, “Dick, this is what I want, I want a sh*tload of cops surrounding him.” Dick gave me the sh*tload amount as determined by the cover rate at the time. [laughter] I imagined more cops than he drew, but the cops that he drew were great, and it was a fun cover. I don’t think the book was as much fun as the cover was, but that happened a lot in comics. CBA: Were there lessons you learned from Atlas, from your experiences working there? Steve: The first lesson I learned was, don’t be so quick to tell people what you think, especially when they’re giving you a paycheck every week. As far as comics were concerned, it’s not so much a lesson as something I walked away from there with, that if you have real enthusiasm and real energy, and you have people with real talent, good work happens. For the most part, I would say that just about everybody who worked for Atlas was doing it because they thought they might have a chance to do something new, a little bit fresh and fun. Any artist—whether it’s a comic book artist, or a painter, or a filmmaker, or a musician—when they have an opportunity to maybe do something a little bit new, they will have fun doing it. They may experience a slightly different or newer joy of creativity. That’s really a very attractive thing. The reason I went over to Atlas was not money—they didn’t pay me that much more than I was getting at DC—but I thought it would be an opportunity to be part of something new and different and maybe a little bit more fun! That’s why I went. Yeah, I was getting more responsibility, yeah at the time it was an ego thing for me, but I was young and stupid, like I’ve probably said about 12 times already. But we were doing what we believed to be new, fresh, fun, different stuff. That’s exciting. Maybe one or two guys were just looking at it as work, but a lot of guys were bringing extra levels of creative energy and interest and enthusiasm for the work. Let’s face it, at the time, guys like Howard Chaykin and Walter Simonson and even guys like Archie, they were bringing tremendous creative energy to bear, and it reflected in a lot of the work! Then we found guys who hadn’t done work in comics, like Nostrand, who brought an awful lot of energy to the work, and it was new, it was different! We did different comics… whether they were good comics or bad comics, that’s for the consumer to think, but our comics were interesting and different, and you always have to keep trying to do that. December 2001

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CBA: How did you feel when Atlas/Seaboard closed shop? Were you ambivalent? Steve: No, I wasn’t ambivalent if it meant that Chip Goodman suffered in any way, I was probably happy. When all is said and done, I didn’t like Chip, and I thought Chip was a bad publisher. So, when the company closed, he got what he deserved. But I was sorry to see it go, because I was part of its creation, in what little tiny ways I contributed, it was a company that I was there from the get-go,

and it went under. I was sorry to see that. Again, if I was being young and stupid and bitter and petulant, I would say, “Well, okay, they got what they deserved, heh, heh, heh.” But I was sorry to see it go. I’m sorry to see anybody close their doors in comics, because for me as a consumer, comics were always at their best when there were the most companies at work. Everybody tried a little bit harder to be creative and tried to do better work. Look at the work Tower was doing, and Charlton, Gold Key, Dell and even King! There was a time when there was an awful lot of comic book companies around, and the work was better because of it. There was a much bigger menu of comics for the consumer, so any time a company would go under, I would always think the menu would get smaller and there weren’t as many good dishes to have. CBA: I received an observation from a reader that said Atlas/Seaboard was like the last of the old style companies that tried to make it. The life of Atlas/Seaboard, as short as it was, was really

just prior to the creation of the direct sales market. It was the last real traditional, mainstream newsstand push by a new company in the old style. I mean the business end. Obviously, when they totally changed The Phoenix into Jim Craig’s super-hero, these were business decisions, certainly not creative decisions. Steve: Those were decisions based on the fact that we had to make it look more like Marvel. CBA: Because Marvel was the leader at the time? Steve: Probably. But more to the point, Marvel is what Marty Goodman knew. Marvel is what Chip knew. You have to remember something: In pop culture, people have always tried to emulate winners. I was having lunch with a friend of mine, and he was saying how much so many TV shows look like The X-Files. Well, there’s a reason for that, because The X-Files is groundbreaking and successful. More importantly, to me, is the successful part. It’s hard to be new and different, because you’re assuming the audience will

discover you and appreciate that. Now, Marty and Chip Goodman did not have a lot of money sitting in their bank accounts because they tried to break new ground. They tread the ground they knew would make them money, and when the Marvelization of Atlas occurred, it was because you had three guys who only knew Marvel Comics: Chip Goodman, Marty Goodman, and Larry Lieber. Larry was probably given a mandate after we left to pull the line more towards the Marvel look. Who knows, even Kable News might’ve said, “You know, fellows, if it was more like Marvel Comics, we might sell more books.” CBA: Historically, Timely and then Atlas Comics in the ’50s, followed the trends. They didn’t set trends, they copied them. Martin Goodman’s modus operandi was to flood the market with re-treads! If it was romance comics, then Boom! There’d be a million romance copies. If it was Archie comics, Boom! They’d do a million Millie the Models. They just flooded the stands with rip-offs. And with Mad, they did Crazy and a whole bunch of Mad rip-offs. Even the genesis of Marvel Comics as we know it today was Martin Goodman telling Stan, “Well, let’s copy Justice League of America, so you come up with a group,” and he came up with Fantastic Four with Jack Kirby. That seemed to be part of the equation that Atlas, perhaps, was missing. While it was trying to be Marvel, really, perhaps the heart and soul of Marvel was Stan Lee, and they didn’t have a Stan Lee! Steve: Well, I completely agree with that. I’m sure Stan’s mandate was the same mandate that Marty gave to Jeff and Larry, which was, “Create us a sh*tload of comic books.” The fact that Stan was a genius, along with his artists, they created a sh*tload of good comic books! [laughter] Well, we created a sh*tload of comics that were varyingly good. Some were better than others, but we had a mandate to create an instant line of comics! Well, you go out and try to create an instant line of comics! Not that easy! Also, it was back in the days when the comic books meant more than just super-heroes, we had to create a war book and a Western book. We had to create a full-course meal worth of comic books. Marvel put out a lot of comic books in different genres, that’s what we had to do. We had to create, essentially, Marvel Comics and Warren Publishing simultaneously. They were paying us to do that. They didn’t know how to do that, that’s why they hired us. The books that Jeff generated in terms of ideas, and the ideas that were brought to us by certain writers or writer-artists, we did a pretty nice job! There were interesting books there. Again, as far as Marvel is concerned, the Goodmans had Stan Lee, who I’ve always felt was like—Stan and Jack and Ditko and a couple of the other guys—they were the atomic energy of comics. They had so much creative power that they went out and they probably gave Marty Goodman more than he was entitled to, when they were probably given the mandate, “Go out and create a sh*tload of these super-hero comic books. These super-hero comic books seem to be selling, go out and create a bunch of that stuff.” The Goodmans don’t know anything about comic books, they never did and they never would! They only knew what sold and what didn’t, and they were lucky enough to have guys like Stan and all the other guys Stan worked with to create a line of comics that was maybe better than they were entitled to. CBA: How did Jeff Rovin and Larry Lieber get on? Steve: There were fireworks between the two of them. Jeff was, in the heat of the debate, very unkind to Larry. Larry was an incredibly nice, warm, sweet force for good on the planet, and Jeff’s big problem with Larry—and this is a supposition—is that Larry represented old-school Marvel Comics, and that not all of Larry’s books were old-school Marvel Comics. Larry did some interesting books! But Larry knew how to do it that way, and Jeff wanted to do it a COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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different way. CBA: Was it split down the middle? What were yours and Jeff’s books, and what were Larry’s books? Steve: Well, it wasn’t me and Jeff’s books, I mean, in terms of the production department, they were all my books. It was split down the middle, Jeff may have had one or two more books than Larry did. If we published a dozen books, or 13 or 14 books, then Jeff may have had eight and Larry had six or five, something like that. Jeff was responsible for all the black-&-white stuff, too. It was a huge bite! Nowadays, you try to get any editor to do that many books, they’d never be able to handle it! CBA: Did they get you guys cheap? Steve: No! Jeff was being paid very well. I was being paid decently. I’m sure Larry was being paid reasonably well, because Larry was family. Back in the old days, if you were going to do comics, you had to work hard at it, and that meant as an editor. Look at all the old DC editors who used to edit somewhere between five and eight books a month. That’s a lot of stuff! Are there any editors today that edit that many books? I don’t think so. The thing is, comics were not a sweatshop business, they were a volume business, and to make any a living in comics, regardless of what you did, you had to put out a volume of pages and books. Writers, pencilers, inkers, letterers, colorists and editors had to do a lot of work to make a good living. If you were an editor, and were going to make a living as an editor, it meant you could edit quite a few books a month. That was back in the days when editors had a lot more impact on the books than they do today. Today, most editors are traffic managers and story consultants, but in the days when I was working on staff, every editor that I observed took a very hands-on approach in terms of the plotting of the script—I mean, Julie Schwartz is legendary for that—the overall art direction and look of a book, and they paid very close attention to things like coloring! Some editors trust the people they work with, and that made their day easy. Some editors sweated all the details. A guy like Murray Boltinoff—who I have a huge amount of respect for, one of the most underrated editors in the business—Murray worked with guys whose work he believed in and trusted, so that made his job a little bit easier. Then, there were guys like Joe Orlando, who I don’t think I’ve ever seen another editor sweat every detail of a book like he did. A Joe Orlando book meant the Orlando sensibility was stamped on that book. All editors had to do that in those days, and now. Jeff was stamping his imprint on his books, and Larry put his imprint on his books. You look at the line, and you can tell which books were Jeff’s, and which books were Larry’s. There’s no value judgment attached to that. The Lieber sensibility was at work on some of books, the Rovin sensibility was at work on other books. And that’s a good thing! CBA: Did you ever get a feeling what kind of sell-through the books had, what kind of sales over returns? Steve: The impression I got was the comics were not setting the world on fire. That goes back to that Kable thing. You and I know that newsstand distributors, if they had a chance of selling a magazine rather than a comic book, they would rather push a magazine, because the price tag was higher. One of the reasons why we created our own little mail order business was to find ways to have the magazines generate even more revenue. Probably coming out of the gate, the books probably weren’t selling that well. I remember going to comic book conventions a long time ago, and seeing boxes of Atlas books super-cheap, somebody obviously went to a warehouse and bought up the old books, or maybe a number of dealers had bought up the old books, and they were just blowing them out! Where do you get those books to blow out like that, if not from somebody’s warehouse, which meant those books probably didn’t see the light of day? CBA: I don’t think any of the titles ever reached a “hot” status. Every time I would see a copy of The Scorpion by Howard Chaykin, I could pick it up cheap, and I would because it’s a good book. Even Thrilling Adventure Stories #2 doesn’t have a high price tag. Steve: There are great examples of really good work by a lot of different people mixed generously through those books. I even liked that nutty Tarantula book [Weird Suspense Tales] that Pat Boyette did! [laughter] I always thought Pat Boyette had a very unique “voice” as an artist. Pat was an acquired taste, but I had acquired December 2001

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that from his Charlton books, and I thought he did some nice work for us. I don’t know if that book was any good, but I remember when the artwork came in on that book I said, “This is really neat stuff!” CBA: Yeah, he gave it his all. Steve: That’s what I’m saying, a lot of the guys who did work for us were maybe a little bit more excited about the work because it was for a new company. Like I said, I don’t believe anybody was just cranking the work out for the paycheck. The only guy whose work was not on a slightly higher level was Mike Sekowsky’s work. We got work from Sekowsky which—I’ve always been a fan of his work, but it was—I don’t know that we always got what we paid for; we were paying him for pencils, and it looked like we were getting breakdowns. That’s the way he penciled. I don’t know if this job was ever used, but we let him ink a job for Weird Tales of the Macabre. It was one of those instances where I said to Jeff, “I don’t know if Sekowsky really knows how to ink this stuff.” But Jeff, to his credit, said, “Well, if he would like to do it, I’d like to see what it’s going to look like.” We had to ink that job, in terms of being able to print it. The job came in, it looked terrible, I tried cleaning it up a bit, but I don’t know that we ever used it. CBA: It’s funny, I’m interested in an unused cover for Ironjaw #1 that was Sekowsky pencils and Jack Abel inks, and there’s editorial notations all over it about it not being basically good enough for the cover. Steve: Well, that was probably Jeff. CBA: It basically said it wasn’t dramatic enough. Steve: That was probably the case! But that’s what editors used to do in the old days. CBA: It’s funny that it reached that…. Steve: How many Neal Adams covers have you seen, unused Neal Adams covers that by today’s standards, you’d say, “What’s wrong with that? That’s great!” CBA: Usually you see it at the pencil stage. I’ll talk to Jeff about it, what was the… was good stuff inked before it was approved? It was just odd that would happen, but it’s definitely Jack Abel inks. Steve: I don’t know why that happened that way, but again, Jeff felt that it was his job to say yea or nay to some of that stuff. I don’t really remember that. We never really had any problem with Jack, we always liked working with Jack as I recall. I think the only artist… Howard Nostrand one Friday got into it with Jeff, and that wasn’t real pretty. [laughs] Ernie and Jeff had a little bit of a to-do over some stuff, but as far as I know, Ernie and Jeff are still friends. It was, again, creative guys having their opinion on how to do stuff. CBA: How long did you work there? Steve: Man, I don’t think I was there more than eight months. CBA: Were you at Atlas for Christmas 1974? Steve: I was there around Christmastime. We had a highly unremarkable and mediocre Christmas up there. I don’t really recall much of it, which means it was pretty unremarkable. I do recall so many of the DC Christmas parties, which were legendary at the time. One thing they used to do at DC, which they don’t do—oh, man, they haven’t done it in years—they always had a great Christmas party, and DC used to always give out bonuses. They did away with the bonuses quite a few years ago, and then they haven’t had a Christmas party in some time. So, as a DC guy, Christmas was always a little bit special over there! At Atlas, [laughs] I remember it being not so special. I’m glad I had the experience working over there, it’s probably almost a little bit more fun to look back on then it was at the time. I mean, there were days when it was just work, and there were days when the politics in the office weren’t uncomfortable, but you know, if I was to sit down and look at the line today, I would probably still be pretty proud of a number of the books they put out. That’s good, I like feeling that way.

Above: Don Newton drew this joke sketch—depicting how Dan Adkins should draw The Cougar— for his newly-arrived friend as Dan penciled the first ten pages of the first issue. Dan told Ye Ed that he quit the Cougar job because he didn’t care for “the guys in charge over there; too much arrogance.” Courtesy of Jay Willson. Art ©2001 the Estate of Don Newton.

CBA Interview

Year of the Wulf Artist/writer/editor Larry Hama on his first big break Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson While most comic fans think of Larry Hama as a writer of countless of G.I. Joe, Punisher and Wolverine stories, he actually began his comics career as an artist, working as an assistant to Wally Wood and later as a freelancer for Continuity Associates, the legendary Neal Adams-Dick Giordano comics art agency. The writer/artist/ editor was interviewed by phone on October 29, 2001 and Larry copyedited the final transcript.

Above: Mediascene #11 contained a feature on the then-new Atlas Comics line and included repros of a series of covers that sported different logos than those finally used. Above is the initial Wulf #1 design, art by Larry Hama, logo presumably by Gaspar Saladino. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Inset center: For the glory of Wulfgar! Larry Hama poses for a Polaroid in the front room of Continuity Associates for Wulf the Barbarian #1 drawing reference. Depicts Stavro Dar Kovin in panel five, page five, as seen. Courtesy of Larry Hama. Wulf ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc. 64

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from? Larry Hama: Born in New York City, grew up in Queens. Been here all my life. CBA: Were you into comics at a young age? Larry: Yes. At that time, comics were an aspect of most kids’ lives in my neighborhood. We all read comics and, being kids with little or no money, comics were used for bartering, trading. Comics were a kid’s capital. [laughter] You’d load up the wagon with comics, go down the block, and trade with other kids. CBA: Were you old enough to read ECs? Larry: No. ECs were just sort of ahead of me. The first comics I remember having and owning were probably Walt Disney comics, mostly the Duck stuff. CBA: Did you like the Carl Barks material? Larry: I loved the Barks stuff! I vividly remember Barks stories I read as a kid, they were totally a major influence on me. CBA: Right after EC was a kind of lackluster period for comics, there wasn’t a lot that was going on. Larry: No, but there was a lot of them, a wide variety, and you could go to the corner candy store, there’d be two rotating racks full of comics—comics for everybody! Probably half the comics at the time were aimed at girls! There were Archie comics, Harvey comics, Little Lulu comics, and all my girl cousins—and every girl I knew—had a stack of comics as well, but they were very different from the type of comics boys owned. [laughter] The girls always had Little Lulu, Walt Disney and Harvey stuff. CBA: Romance comics? Larry: Very few girls I knew had romance comics. I think those sold to an older crowd. So, there was a wide variety, and there were comics that even as a kid struck me as being kind of odd. [laughs] I always thought the Charlton comics were weird. Even the paper seemed weird, you know? [laughter] There was something alien about them. But the stuff that really sticks with me as far as remembering actual stories and plots, and being able to picture entire scenes in my head, is the Barks stuff. Although, I was very much into the entire DC line at the time. This was when there was a huge slew of Superman titles: Superman, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Superboy, Action Comics, World’s Finest. All that stuff. Tons of it! Mr. Mxyzptlk, stories about the stupid dog and the horse with a cape. [laughter]

CBA: What was that horse’s name? Larry: It was Superhorse. There was Superdog Krypto… and there were all these sidebar things, like the bottled city and all that stuff There was an alternate world of Smallville that seemed to be taking place in the ‘30s and ‘40s. [laughter] CBA: Every few years it would move up a decade. Larry: I could never sort of figure out the time discrepancy in comics as a kid. Was it really taking place in our time, and how come Clark Kent always wore suits that looked like they were made in 1943? [laughter] CBA: Because in 1965, the folks at DC were walking around in suits that were made in 1943! [laughter] Larry: And Clark was always wearing snap-brim fedoras, too. Lois Lane would wear those little suits with the little hat. All that stuff. CBA: Starched blouse. Larry: Yeah, starched little blouse with a Peter Pan collar. CBA: So you obviously got into the Mort Weisinger universe? Larry: Oh, yeah. That’s it. Even then, I could sort of tell the difference in the art stuff. There was certain stuff I liked, I just didn’t know why I liked it. Such as, “Adam Strange” as drawn by Carmine Infantino, the early ‘60s Blackhawk stuff, Challengers of the Unknown by Jack Kirby! I couldn’t figure out why I liked it! [laughs] But I just knew I did. CBA: Did you get into the Atlas monster books? Larry: No, I didn’t even really know they existed until I was starting high school, or right before, when all that stuff really started to happen, though I liked that really weird Ditko mystery stuff. There was one story that really gave me nightmares, this guy went into another dimenCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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sion and there were all these weird sort of gnome-like warriors that had no legs, just these round bottoms that floated in the air—I don’t remember anything at all about the story, but that image sort of stuck with me. When Stan and Steve used to do these little eightpage stories, they were pretty simplistic, but they always had the same sort of twist ending, and Ditko’s art was always so distinctive. CBA: It’s funny how Marvel comics was almost the antithesis of what was going on at DC at the time. DC was a very orderly universe, and it just seems to me the Atlas comics were plain bizarre, with an otherworldly feel. You would be compelled by Kirby, but you didn’t know why! Larry: I know why now. Jack’s stuff is, more than dynamic, but emblematic… his stories are really iconographic, and they really hit certain strangely primal cores. He’s tapping into whatever the cavemen were tapping into when they were painting on cave walls in France 100,000 years ago. If you look at those French cave drawings, look at cave paintings from Spain and from the Urals or something, they are separated by thousands and

thousands of years and thousands and thousands of miles, and yet they’re remarkably similar, and it makes you realize there wasn’t a school of cave painting. [laughter] There’s a methodology for putting into two dimensions, in graphic form, representations of what you see in a three-dimensional world, that is probably weirdly hot-wired into us, and we’re not aware of how pervasive that is, and when somebody really sort of captures the roots of that, like Kirby or Picasso, you know? [laughs] It reaches across all sorts of boundaries. CBA: Certainly your average caveman had a pretty violent life, and Kirby had a brutal upbringing as a child in a ghetto of New York. I can’t speak for Picasso, but you look at Guernica, see the rage— Larry: It may relate to violence in that the primal stuff is rooted in that, but I think it really is just getting at something that is imprinted in us, rather than a learned appreciation. That’s the point. CBA: Did you start drawing as a child? Larry: Yeah, I drew as a kid a lot, just to entertain myself. I remember just drawing ships and tanks and airplanes and battles, the usual boy stuff. I would get bored drawing things like trees, but mechanical stuff interested me a lot, and I guess also dynamic figures. I was never really good at that. I could sit and figure out perspective on planes and things like that, try to figure out how to do a complex thing like an airplane— but, boy, drawing a human figure in dynamic action from many angles is still extremely difficult! [laughter] CBA: Did you do your own comics? Larry: The earliest I can remember drawing my own comics was about the fifth grade. CBA: Did you do knock-off characters, were they superheroes? Larry: I remember getting packages from relatives in Japan with these really sick Japanese comics—early manga—printed on paper that was like one grade above December 2001

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toilet tissue. [laughter] They were monochrome, not even black-&white! Some of the pages would be in purple ink! [laughs] Some of the pages would be in green ink! CBA: Were they samurai comics? Larry: They were giant robot comics, super-heroes, some of them were samurai, cartoon as well as quasi-realistic. Some of it was violent samurai comics with heads being cut off, done in this Crusader Rabbit type style! Sort of like Astro Boy with ultra-violence going on! [laughter] A very strange combination. Also, they had their own, totally alien repertory of signals and effects. There were all these things in American comics that we learned— like a dotted line around a balloon means somebody’s whispering, and wavy lines coming from somebody means they smell!—but Japanese comics are completely different, like Hindi (I have no idea what the original “sakan” was transcripted from!) movies, I have no idea what these things meant! These strangeshaped puffs of smoke would—never figured out half the stuff! A lot of it, if you’ve ever seen “Doctor Slump” comics, or—what’s it called—it’s a popular one, the kid with the tail— Dragonball. It’s a bizarre thing out of another culture. CBA: But it works! [laughs] Larry: It works, but we have no idea what it’s about. CBA: Your ethnic background—are you half-Japanese, full Japanese? Larry: Ethnically? I’m completely Japanese. I’m third generation, and I grew up in an American suburb, thinking of myself as an American. My mom was born in Sacramento! [laughs] She said things like, “Gee whiz!” [laughter] She actually said things like, “Golly!” [laughter] “Swell!” The weird thing was, when I was a kid, she would use the word “homeboy.” I mean, that’s how old that term is! We tend to think of it as a very current, in-the-hood coinage, but apparently it came from California in the 1930s! She would say, “Oh, he’s a Sacramento homeboy.” [laughter] She never said, “homey”; it was “homeboy.” CBA: The vast majority of comic readers put them aside when they hit a certain age. Did you continue to enjoy comics after puberty? Larry: Well, I put them aside to a degree, but I still own comics that I bought when I was 12 or 13. [laughs] Mystery in Space, “Sgt. Rock,” some of the early Marvel stuff, the early Fantastic Four, things like that. CBA: Did you stop buying comics at a certain point? Larry: Yeah, I think I stopped buying comics sometime during high school, but I would, as a regular thing, sometimes stuff would show up, and I’d go, “Okay, it’s worth picking up.” CBA: Were they increasingly Marvels that were worth picking up? Larry: Once the stuff like Fantastic Four, X-Men, Spider-Man and “Doctor Strange” came out, I lost complete interest in the DC line,

Above: Note the original name for the character on this concept sketch by Larry Hama. Courtesy and ©2001 the artist. Below: For a period in the 1970s , Larry was a Broadway actor. Here’s a head-shot of the artist from that era.

because Kirby and Ditko were it! [laughs] CBA: As a teenager, did you consider a career in art? Larry: Yeah, because that’s what I was going for. I went to the High School of Art and Design in New York. A lot of people in the comic book business went through that school. Steve Mitchell went there, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Gil Kane, Jack Abel, even a bunch of fairly current guys, Joe Jusko, Joe Rubinstein…. CBA: Does the school have a different name now? Larry: Before it was called SIA, the School of Industrial Arts. Ask Gil Kane or Jack Abel what school they went to, they’d tell you SIA. A lot of guys went to both SIA and the School of Visual Arts, SVA! Jack Abel, for instance, came back from World War II and went to SVA on the GI bill, like a lot of guys. Jack used to sit behind Marie Severin at the SVA (though nobody from that generation ever called it the School of Visual Arts; even Wally Wood called it the “Hogarth School”; [laughter] Burne Hogarth). CBA: Yeah, with Burne running around, yelling at everybody. Larry: Well, you know, he invented it! [laughs] CBA: Were you specifically going to become a comic book artist? Is that what you wanted to do? Larry: No, I wanted to be a painter and starve in a garret. [laughter] Really! That was my main reason for applying and taking the test. Then, on my first day of school, I met this African-American kid named John Smith. [laughter] He walked up to me in the cafeteria and said, “Hi, I’m John Smith. Do you like comics?” I said, “Not particularly!” [laughter] He opened his portfolio and started taking out all these comics, and he had his own drawings and he was really good. Really good! Phenomenally good. He had a style sort of like Alex Raymond almost, very classical, very realistic. He loved Williamson, guys like that, and he said, “Well, would you like to meet a real comic book artist?” I said, “Well, sure, why not?” [laughs] So we got on the subway and went up to the West Side, up past the Museum of Natural History, and we went to Larry Ivie’s apartment. This was before [Larry’s magazine] Monsters and Heroes. He was then the art director on Castle of Frankenstein, and he had all this stuff! [laughter] Handbound volumes of all these classic comics, a Prince Valiant original hanging on his wall, a Frazetta hanging on his wall, and it was incredible! He had all the Reed Crandall Blackhawks! It was the first time I got to sit and read all that stuff. It was through Larry Ivie that I eventually met people like Wally Wood, who lived three blocks away. It was sort of like a comic artist’s community in that neck of the woods. CBA: I was just transcribing an essay by Larry that he’s done for this issue, in which he writes

that you introduced him to Ralph Reese. Larry: Right. Ralph ended up living there for about a year or so. The reason I introduced him to Ralph is that Ralph had broken out of the Spofford Youth Detention Facility. [laughs] CBA: He was on the run? Larry: He was on the run and needed a place to hide out! [laughter] That’s how Ralph became a comic book artist. CBA: He needed a refuge! Larry: I think Larry Ivie sort of pawned him off on Woody [Wally Wood], and they really hit it off. Ralph became his wayward son or something. CBA: [laughs] Were Ralph and Woody alike at all? People will talk about Ralph in a fashion similar to them talking about Woody. Larry: Well, yeah! There was a tendency toward excess, [laughs] but there was also some sort of intellectual camaraderie, both very smart people, and both very interested in all sorts of very similar things, like psychiatry. [laughter] Fantasy literature, science-fiction, cool-looking machines, Army surplus stores…. [laughter] CBA: Did you admire Ralph’s abilities? Larry: Oh, yeah. I met Ralph at Art Design! I was in the same class with Ralph and Frank Brunner. I thought it was a great environment. Our teacher was Bernie Krigstein, who was my illustration teacher for two years, a tremendous influence on me. He said really simple stuff in the class that just hit me right between the eyes. Most everything I remember is him going around, looking at something I was doing, and saying, “How long have you been working on that drawing?” I’d answer, “Well, I’ve been working on it for two or three days.” He says, “Well, it’s kind of a sucky drawing.” [laughter] I don’t know if he used that word, but that was the intent. So I said, “Well, yeah.” He said, “It’s not going to get much better, the more you work on it., but I’ll tell you something, in order to do one really good drawing, you’ve got to do about 100,000 really sucky ones first. If I were you, I’d think about getting those 100,000 really sucky ones out of the way as fast as I could!” [laughter] CBA: And that sticks with you to this day! [laughs] Larry: Oh, I’ve repeated it a thousand times! I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people just belaboring a real piece of crap for a week! CBA: Trying to make it better. Larry: Just trying to make it better! Well, just throw it away and start another one! [laughter] Or speed up and learn by your mistakes! You don’t learn by imprinting your mistakes as part of your methodology. CBA: Was Larry Ivie’s place like a haven to go to, was it a fanboy’s library? An awful lot of people hung out there. Larry: Yeah, you’d go over there and he’d have three drawing tables. There was always somebody sitting there drawing, it was great. Not only that, but while he was drawing, people would drop by; it was like—Roy Krenkel would drop by on his way from stealing books at Rizzoli’s! [laughter] He’d breeze in like this white-haired tornado, just talk up a storm, and Larry’s just sort of like standing there, leaning and not saying anything, and after 40 minutes of intense Krenkel-ness, [laughter] “Well! Gotta go!” Whoosh! Out he would disappear! CBA: Did it feel like you were just dropped into this previously unknown culture that had been existing only a couple of miles away? Larry: It was sort of like stepping into the Time Tunnel, too, because it was very much slightly in the past all the time. Well, not just slightly, a lot— CBA: Steeped in the EC Comics era, you mean? Larry: Not just that, but everything about it, like stepping into Larry Ivie’s apartment was stepping into 1952! [laughter] When I read Jack Finney’s Time and Time Again, when he uses the Dakota apartments (where John Lennon lived) as a time machine, the first thing that flashed in my mind was Larry’s apartment. To me, it was like some sort of time machine, you could go back to a weirdly simpler time. Sometimes you’d see echoes of it in other people’s work. It’s bizarre. CBA: It was a character unto itself? Larry: Yeah, I’ve seen it pop up sometimes in Bernie Wrightson’s stuff. Larry Ivie’s was the place I first met Jeff and Weezie Jones. Lots COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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of bizarre people passed through his place. CBA: As far as you know, do you know who started First Fridays? Larry: I always thought that Roy Thomas actually started them, then they sort of fell off for a while, and then Jeff Jones picked them up. Jeff had this apartment on the Upper West Side, and I think it was at a First Friday at Jeff’s where I first met Neal Adams. Somebody had taken slides of the actual printed pages of Little Nemo Sundays, come over to Jeff’s with a slide projector, and showed us slides of these beautiful pages really big, and we just sat for maybe two hours, watching. It was terrific. Guys like Vaughn Bodé would drop over there, Roy Krenkel would always go. That was where I think I first met Bernie Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, Alan Weiss, Howard Chaykin… Frank Brunner took up First Fridays for a while, before Neal Adams did. Then after Neal—by the mid-’70s—they sort of weirdly evolved into poker games at Jenette Kahn’s place! [laughter] CBA: When were you introduced to Woody? Larry: I first met Woody in the mid-’60s, but in the early ’70s I needed a job, and Ralph put me onto Woody. I was living in Brooklyn at the time and Woody was living one subway stop away. I started working for Woody, lettering Cannon and Sally Forth, and then I started alternating writing the strips. I would write a Cannon while he was writing a Sally Forth, then he’d write a Sally Forth while I was writing a Cannon. That’s when I taught myself to write sparsely, because I had to letter it! [laughter] You know, the other part of my job was to look up swipes. I’d look up Alex Raymond heads from Rip Kirby or The Heart of Juliet Jones (which I’d never seen in English for years, because the pages of Juliet Jones Woody had were all from some bizarre reprint digest in Spanish, [in broad Spanish accent] “El Coro December 2001

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del Juliet Jones!” I just remember, “God, this Spanish guy Stan Drake can really draw!” [laughter] CBA: When did you graduate from school? Larry: 1967. CBA: Were you in the service? Larry: Oh, yeah. Got drafted in 1969. I had a two year state of grace after high school. The first thing that happened when I got out of high school was I went to Pratt, where I had a full scholarship. I think I went for one day and said, “To hell with this.” Then I got a job drawing shoes at a place called the William Becker Studio. I drew shoes for Sears-Roebuck, Montgomery Ward’s and J.C. Penney catalogues. I drew them on photo paper with a 9H pencil. They would airbrush them, and do the whole schmegeggie with them. CBA: Was there any satisfaction in that? Larry: Some. There was this old guy in front of me, Ray, who had been drawing the shoes for 30, 40 years and every time he finished drawing a shoe, he’d hold it up, smile, turn around to me and say, “Yep! Tighter than the skin on a pig’s ass!” Every shoe! [laughter] CBA: That’s how he made it through the 30 years! Larry: If you’re doing something like that, you’ve got to love it! So I was in a room with three other guys, and all we did was shoes. Remember: This was for the Sears, Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney catalogs, so you’re talking lots of pages a year. The guys in the next room, all they did was retouch in all the stitches on brassieres and girdles. [laughs] That’s all they did, all day! There was this one guy who’d been there for 30 or 40 years, just doing stitches of brassieres and girdles, and when they’d retouch these black-&white photographs, by the time they got finished they looked like

Above: Larry Hama’s thumbnails to the first two pages of Wulf the Barbarian #1. Interestingly, on the back of this sheet was a message from Walter Simonson noting a samurai comic Walter borrowed from Larry. Could this have been for reference for Walter’s great samurai strip in the Atlas/Seaboard mag Thrilling Adventure Stories #2? Courtesy of Larry. Right and inset: Concept sketches of Wulf’s weapons and jewelry. Comments include “Runes on sword,” and “Wolf’s head crest on spear.” Courtesy of and ©2001 Larry Hama. 67

Above: Pencil rough for panel five, page 17 (Wulf the Barbarian #1) by Larry Hama. Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Larry Hama. Below: Pencil concept drawing for evil sorcerer Mordek Mal Moriak by Larry. Courtesy of & ©2001 Larry Hama. Wulf ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

drawings, right? But these guys still got off on it! This guy would come in, holding this photo he was working on, he’d hold it up and go, “You know, you can almost see a pubic hair!” [laughter] Well, you know, it gives you hope! [laughter] CBA: The resilience of the human spirit. From there? Larry: I worked for them for almost two years, then I got drafted. That’s a whole other story, it doesn’t have a lot to do with comics, especially at this time, nothing I pretty much like to talk about. Suffice to say, I came away from it very different in some ways, but also strangely unchanged. That’s how I fell in with Woody. Again, he was doing Cannon and Sally Forth for the Overseas Weekly, a military paper I remembered reading myself! I said, “I know what these people want.” [laughter] So, that was a pretty good fit for us. CBA: Was that immediately upon returning? Larry: No, I sort of farted around for maybe half a year. It’s hard to really remember what happened, that time period. I came back in ‘71, and— CBA: You left in ‘70? Larry: No, I left in 1968, ‘69, and came back in ‘71 or ‘72. Things were in flux and I thought doing actual comics just seemed not a reachable goal, because you couldn’t get in the door to show your stuff to anybody! Marvel and DC were closed shops, pretty much, until Neal started opening stuff up. CBA: Obviously, a lot of people went to visit Neal at DC in his Art-O-Graph room he shared with Murphy Anderson. That room is famous for guys hanging out. Did you? Larry: Not at DC, but I ended up working at Continuity for years. In fact, I had what was tantamount to the siege perilous for many years. I sat literally at Neal’s right side, at the table next to him, which is a table not many people wanted! [laughter] Because you were always under his eye! A lot of people just can’t take it. What I mean by “it” is, for instance, I’d be sitting there drawing something, he’d be standing there with a cup of coffee looking over my shoulder. After 15 minutes of which, he’d turn, go to the Art-O-Graph room with the coffee and say, “I guess you don’t know the 32 planes of the nose yet.” [laughter] I guess a lot of people would let that get under their skin, but I found if I turned around and said, “Well, I don’t know the 32 planes,” he’d come back and show them to me! I really thought of it as, “Gee, he’s constructive.” This is like getting your graduate degree, because here I have access to this knowledge, why not take advantage of it? Certainly, his criticism was no worse than Woody’s, who’d look at your stuff and say, “Boy, that really sucks!” Or he would say, if you’re taking too long on something, “Well, is it art yet?!?” [laughter] You know, for all Woody’s meticulousness, he had a sign hanging on the wall

of his studio that said something like, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” [laughter] He was always the one for trying to save time, save work. Here’s the classic example of the perfect panel, and he’s showing me a drawing of the planet Earth with a balloon coming from someplace in North America! [laughter] CBA: Simple, easy, and effective! Larry: Right! On Tuesday, he’d look through the paper and clip out all the auto ads, because in the newspaper, they were already reduced to halftones, and he’d gang-paste all these car ads onto one sheet of paper and get a stat made, and then he’d say, “Well, it’s a free panel!” He’d cut a car out, paste it up, and quickly put in somebody’s head, or slap a balloon on it! [laughs] It was a free panel! Leonard Starr would do a cityscape in Mary Perkins On Stage that was obviously just a high-contrast photo. So, Woody would clip them right out and slap them down! [laughter] Actually, in his defense, it was actually true that it’s better storytelling if you free yourself that way, because otherwise you get these jam-packed panels constantly, and your eye just gets bored! But at the same time, he’d put that motto on the wall and then spend hours doodling on some background! He couldn’t follow his own advice. CBA: Obviously he was renowned for his meticulousness and spending enormous amounts of time on certain jobs. I wonder if the quick, efficient jobs was a result of saying, “Well, I got paid just as much for what I did in ten minutes than I did what took four hours.” Larry: I think it’s a matter of you like what you do, and you do what you like. He was into it! He’d always gripe, “I’m doing all these fleur-de-lis on this armor,” but it looks great! It’s worth it! CBA: One thing that bugs me about comics history is often people’s lives are reduced down to a paragraph. In pretty quick fashion, I did some research on you, and for instance, there was a passage in Mike Richardson’s Between The Panels—. Larry: Oh, I’m never mentioned in any histories of comics! Nobody’s interested in the stuff that I did! CBA: But you obviously had some great success…. Larry: I’ve sold millions and millions of copies, but it’s not cool to have done G.I. Joe for 14 years, even if millions of people have read the stuff. CBA: But there was this huge super-hero trend that was taking place at the time, and yet you were successful selling, of all things, war comics. Anyway, there’s a phrase, a quote from that book by Kaluta that says, “Fresh back from ‘Nam and still in sunglasses, we were all thinking, ‘Get over it, dude!’ Never dreaming that he’d take it and make millions off of G.I. Joe and The ‘Nam. We were scared of him when we first saw him. Boy, did he look scary!” Larry: [laughs] I never heard that before. Well, we used to work on looking scary! CBA: In The Comic-Book Heroes by Gerald Jones & Jacobs, they wrote in reference to the mid-’80s, “A new machismo started showing up, even on the Marvel staff, in the persons of conservative young assistant editors with a young of the manly toys that older comics fans, the ones who hadn’t come of age with the Punisher and Wolverine, rarely shared. Larry Hama was a rock musician, gun collector, fan of war stories, who wanted to get a venue for Vietnam stories going at Marvel. They were ‘80s guys… part of the generation that helped put Reagan in the White House, and then made fun of everything he said. And in that, they were much closer to the mainstream than comic fans usually are.” Are these quotes are accurate at all? Larry: Well, to a degree. When I was starting to get involved with Conan, The ‘Nam and stuff like that, I realized, “There are all these guys doing all these comics about punching guys in the face who’ve never punched a guy in the face!” [laughs] It was the incredible extension of this fantasy that had no reality to it, whatsoever. I started to read a sci-fi novel a few years back (by an extremely popular author who does cyber-punk)—where the character was a tough guy, and I was thinking, “What kind of tough guy is this? I’ve never heard a tough guy talk like this!” Then I saw a photo of the author on the back cover, and I went, “Okay, that’s why.” [laughter] The guy looked like an accountant. And worse, an accountant who took himself very seriously. Val Mayerik is a black belt in karate; Ed Davis was an ex-Ranger; Jay Scott Pike, the guy Neal based Green COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Arrow on, was a comic book artist and an ex-Marine officer who got up every morning and ran five miles; Jim Starlin was a Navy vet; Sam Glanzman served on a destroyer in WW II. These were some real hard guys, stand-up guys, guys whose perceptions of violence weren’t completely from TV and movies. Gray Morrow, Chuck Dixon, Mike Golden, Jim Sherman, even Neal Adams… Physical guys with some sense of honor. Then, there were all these guys who sort of looked like the Pillsbury dough boy or something, that you wouldn’t want to have back you up in a tight situation. CBA: The vast majority! [laughs] Larry: I didn’t understand where they were coming from. A lot of the guys I knew, that I grew up with, came right off the streets, that was how I hear speech! I think I have a fairly good ear for that type of dialogue, because I’ve actually heard and used it within its actual context. Which is a lot different from trying to imagine it. If you’ve got to deal with something coming up to you on the street and getting into your face, you’ve got to tell the guy, “Look, you’re f*cking with the wrong Chinaman.” [laughter] And they back off! It’s because you’ve been working on your act! That’s what being on the street, that’s what half of it is! CBA: You’ve got to have an act to get by. Larry: You’ve got to walk the walk and talk the talk! CBA: Or they’ll come and eat you alive! Larry: And you’ve got to have the body language, because they know! “What are you lookin’ at, man?” [laughter] CBA: You obviously were in the company of a lot of pudgy, nerdy people, but certainly also some real guys, like Neal and Woody. Larry: Woody was an ex-paratrooper, a tough little guy! Neal’s a pretty tough guy in his own way, and a real stand-up guy. To me, a friend is somebody you can call up at three o’clock in the morning and say, “You’ve got to come over and help me bury the body,” and they show up! Everybody else is an acquaintance. [laughter] CBA: How long did you work at Continuity? Larry: I worked there from 1972 or ’73 to ’76. Then I went off to do a Broadway show for a year. CBA: You were an actor? Larry: Yeah, I was an actor in a Steven Sondheim musical. CBA: Did you pursue theater with frequency in the early ’70s? Larry: No. I played guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band, did stuff like that. We had an all-cartoonists’ band, actually, called The K-Otics. Bobby London of Dirty Duck was in it, Gary Hallgren of Air Pirates, Nelson Yomtov, who was the licensing guy at Marvel, he was our drummer. Mark Bright played bass. Brick Mason, who was an intern way back when at Continuity and now storyboards all of M. Knight Shyamalan’s movies did vocals and played harmonica and trumpet. Our lead guitarist Jim Olbrys was the brother of a girl who used to rep Neal Adams for commercial work. [laughs] CBA: Bobby and Gary were on the East Coast? I assumed they’re West Coast guys. Larry: No, I went to junior high school with Bobby in Queens! We grew up in New York, then he went out to California for a time, then came back, and he went out there again. Gary’s originally from the Seattle area, now he lives in New York on Long Island. I got into acting because I got in an elevator and some woman turned to me and asked me if I was an actor, and I said I wasn’t, and she asked if I wanted to be. [laughs] So I said, “Why?” She said she was producing a play off-Broadway, and would I come and read. So I ended up being a harpooner in the South Street Seaport production of Moby Dick! [laughs] I thought, “Well, this is sort of fun.” CBA: That lasted a couple of years? Larry: No, it was an off-Broadway run. Then somebody asked me to audition for this Sondheim musical, directed by Hal Prince, and they’d gotten my name from somebody. I said, “What is this?” and they said, “It’s a musical-comedy.” I said, “I neither sing nor dance!” [laughter] And they said, “Well, come anyway, and bring a song!” So, I brought my guitar and Pignose amp and plugged it in and gave them two verses and a chorus of “Just Like a Woman” by Bob Dylan, at which point the musical director looked at me and said, “Well, do one more verse, and this time, don’t imitate Dylan while you’re singing.” And I said, “I’m not imitating him!” [laughter] At which point he said, “Can you read music?” I said, “I can sight-read for alto saxophone, that’s about it.” He looked kind of exasperated December 2001

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at that point, but apparently, both Prince and Sondheim liked my reading and they called me up the next day to come over and sign a contract. CBA: What was the show? Larry: Pacific Overtures, book by John Weidman, about Commodore Perry opening Japan. CBA: How do you recall first hearing about Atlas/Seaboard? Larry: I was working for Marvel at the time, doing Iron Fist or something. I wasn’t very happy about it. I wanted to do something else other than martial arts stuff. They kept saying, “Well, that’s what you do!” I’d say, “Well, that’s what I do because this is the only job I’ve got!” [laughter] It was like what happened to me later, I’d try to get other work after doing a very successful comic at Marvel, I couldn’t get any other work, because they’d say, “You just do that war stuff.” So, I was sort of unhappy at Marvel and was bringing in some pages to Marvel, and Howard Chaykin was standing outside of Marvel’s door, downstairs on Madison Avenue, directing artists as they came in the door to go across the street over to the Atlas/Seaboard office! [laughs] He’d say, “Look, why don’t you go across the street, they’ll double your rate!” [laughter] We’d say, “What? You’re kidding!” He’d say, “No, no, they’ll double your rate!” [laughs] So, how could I beat that? I went over there and signed up right away, CBA: Who did you meet with? Larry: Jeff Rovin, right off the bat. I think there were like four people in the office! There was Jeff, Larry Lieber, Steve Mitchell, and Ric Meyers. That was it! Maybe a secretary. CBA: What did you talk about when you got there? Larry: Gee, I don’t know! I can’t really remember how it all happened. It seemed like a whirlwind. I just remembered Jeff being very self-assured, and seeming to know exactly what he wanted. CBA: What did he want from you?

Above: Larry Hama pencil sketch of his Atlas Comics creation, Wulf the Barbarian. Courtesy of and ©2001 Larry Hama. Wulf ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc. Below: Pencil sketch of evil minion by Larry Hama. Courtesy of and ©2001 the artist.

Top: Val Eads (standing) and Mike Eads posing for Wulf #2 panels. Middle: Ralph Reese poses (left) and Larry Hama’s headshot (1977). All courtesy of L.H. 70

Above: Paul Kirchner (left) and Pat Broderick posing in Continuity’s back room. Left: Clay model of BelShugthra idol in Wulf #2. All courtesy of Larry Hama.

Larry: He wanted something like Conan, but not quite. [laughs] I had in my mind something like—well, there are aspects of Conan I really like. CBA: What did you like about Conan? Larry: The way Conan was at the time, as a comic. I think Kaluta said the thing about the Marvel Conan was that Barry Smith got the world right, and John Buscema got Conan right. [laughs] In simplistic terms, that’s pretty close to me. I sort of thought like, “Yeah, I want to do something that’s like barbarians, but there’s all these things I really like I want it to be more like.” I wanted it to be more like Prince Valiant, but also have Lord of the Rings aspects to it. I’m familiar with the Conan stuff from when I was a kid, because they had the hardbound Gnome Press Conan editions in my local public library, and I remember reading them there and taking the books out. I must’ve been 11 years old or something, but I remember opening that first book and noting the typography, because the first line of the first story on the first page was in 36-point type! It was just huge, and it said across the top of the page “The King of Vendya lay Dying…” I couldn’t tell you the name of the story, but I remember that line. [laughter] From then on, I was hooked! They also had a hardcover edition of Fritz Lieber’s Two Sought Adventure, featuring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. So, there was all this stuff I read, and The Lord of the Rings, a lot of that Norse stuff, the Elder Edda and things—I wanted to sort of put this all together, along with the sense I used to get out of watching samurai movies as a kid, because that was a cultural thing out of childhood. There was the Buddhist church that for fund-raising, instead of having bingo on Friday night, they would show movies every other week. The minister of the church was also a distributor. [laughter] Ed Summers was actually trying to research the history of all this, and he said, “This guy, Reverend Yoshikami, actually became a film distributor over this stuff!” [laughter] He brought in some of the first films. I went, “What?!?” They had two 35mm projectors up there, and this motorized screen that would come down and cover the altar, [laughs] and I remember downstairs they would put up a refreshment stand, and they’d sell plates of sushi and stuff. I’d sit up there and shove vinegared rice in my face while watching—it was always a double feature, one samurai film and one modern drama (or a musical-comedy or comedy), and I would never stay for the second feature. The kids got in free, so we’d sit in the first row and just watch. CBA: Did the samurai films show blood and guts? Larry: There wasn’t a lot of blood and guts because it was this very stylized fighting, it was like Zato Ichi, the blind swordsman, Tange-Sazen, the one-eyed, one-armed swordsman. They all had some strange physical disability! There was one mystic swordsman who was an albino! [laughter] It was really terrific! He had this mystic style called “the full moon” where he would slowly move his sword around in a circle, and as he was moving, he’d recite this weird mantra that said, “No man has ever lived to see the full rotation of the full moon,” and then he’d mow down 20 guys. [laughter] Just really terrific. CBA: You brought an aspect of that to your mentor character in Wulf. Larry: Yeah, it’s a strange distillation of all these diverse elements. What Robert E. Howard did, basically, was just combined it all. That’s what Tolkien did, obviously! It’s what Lucas did. You take the best parts of all the stuff that you like! [laughter] It’s very hard, because you’ve got to have the glue to hold it together. CBA: Were you enthusiastic about creating Wulf’s world? Larry: Oh, yeah, I have file folders just full of little sketches and drawings I did, trying to imagine out what the world was. CBA: There was an aspect of Prince Valiant in the first issue. When the characters were flying over the world on the top of a dragon, and you showed landmarks of the world, like Screaming Demon Canyon, which would conceivably have appeared in later issues. Larry: It was an easy way to introduce people to the world. The tough part was, I actually had to draw it! [laughter] We really were getting into using photo reference at the time. I even had a darkroom at Continuity! We’d just get all our friends together to pose for reference and go, “All right, you’re this person and you’re that person,” and just act it out! And I found that other artists made the best models, because they knew a neat way to hold their body that would make good drawings. So, I’d use Kaluta, Ralph Reese, Neal Adams, and all those guys. CBA: Did you know Klaus Janson? Larry: Oh, yeah! CBA: Was he at Continuity at all? Larry: Oh, yeah! We got to know Klaus because he was Dick Giordano’s assistant, that’s how he started. He was a neighborhood kid from the area in Connecticut where Dick lived, Stratford. That’s how he got into the business. We thought of him as a kid! [laughter] And he was! But he was good! CBA: Did you seek him out to work with him? He certainly had a very slick style. Larry: It was either that, or Neal sicked him on me. Really, I thought he had a really expressive line. It was very different for me, because up until that point most of my stuff had been inked by Ralph, with a very sort of tight, anal-retentive line. As a penciler, I was extremely lucky in that the first four people I had ink my work were Ralph Reese, Wally Wood, Dick Giordano and Neal Adams! Not a bad starting lineup! It’s been downhill ever since! [laughter] CBA: Was Wulf the first thing you wrote in comics? Larry: No, I’d been writing Sally Forth and Cannon for Woody, but writing a weekly serial and writing a 22-page story are whole different disciplines. Writing for comics is a very learned discipline. I think I really learned how to do it by writing G.I. Joe. I tried to make stories have endings in 22 pages, but still keep the momentum of an overall narrative going. That has to be planned out, even if my methodology for doing the individual stories seemed very haphazard. I’ve said it before that I never knew how any story would end until I got to the end, because I would look around at other writing, and I’d pick up a comic, and by page three I knew how it was going to end, because everything was so telegraphed. I finally figured out it was because of the methodology of the writing. People go, “Okay, this is Writing 101: You write outlines, so you know what the ending is, and everything is working towards that ending.” But the hardest thing in COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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writing effectively is to make it all come to that end seamlessly, and not have everybody know when the freight train’s coming! [laughs] That’s the hardest thing, and since I found it so intrinsically difficult, I found the easiest way for me to solve the problem was for me to surprise myself, which is hard in its own way, because half the time you end up it seeming very contrived. If you can work it so it doesn’t seem contrived, then you’re succeeding. CBA: But Wulf was your first regular comic book writing? Larry: To write, yes. CBA: When you were sitting with Jeff Rovin at the first meeting, saying, “Yeah, I can take this and write a concept,” was he looking for an artist or an artist/writer? Larry: He was looking for an artist with a writer attached. Now I remember there was some sort of bad blood involving someone who was initially supposed to write the book. But I don’t know what it was, as this is going back a ways. I ended up writing it by default. CBA: The writer perhaps had a falling-out? Larry: Well, I had a falling-out with the writer, probably. I just didn’t like what it was. CBA: Obviously, you seized the initiative. Did you create the name and everything about him? Larry: Right. CBA: Did anyone mention anything about the possibility of sharing in royalties? Larry: At that time? No, there was nothing. CBA: Having any kind of partial creator-ownership? Larry: No. We were happy to get the rate we got. I think my first rate at Marvel was $23 a page for pencils, and the first raise I got at Marvel was a two dollar raise, to knock me up to 25 bucks! [laughs] CBA: And Atlas was significantly better than that? Larry: Atlas doubled my rate to fifty bucks a page; I couldn’t complain about that! I mean, for Christ’s sake. I think Charlton was paying $14 a page for everything! CBA: Three bucks a page for writing! [laughter] Larry: Yeah, something astoundingly ridiculous. CBA: With the second issue, your last issue, there’s an enormous list of names whom you give special thanks to: Neal Adams, Ralph Reese, Ed Davis, Wally Wood, Bob McLeod, Pat Broderick, Vincent Alcazar… I mean, [laughs] everyone who was working at Continuity at the time! Even Jack Abel, Paul Pearson— Larry: It was like a small community, like the Amish raising a barn. If somebody got into trouble, you called everybody and said, “Hey, come on over and help out!” We did it for Woody, when he got into trouble on a deadline, got six or seven guys and just knocked out the Sally and Cannon. CBA: Were you a Crusty Bunker? Larry: Yeah, I was a Crusty Bunker. A lot of people were Crusty Bunkers! But the thing was, my mom was dying of cancer, that deadline for the second issue was happening right when she was on her last days. I was having a hard time making that deadline. People pitched in and helped me. CBA: Was that all penciling help? Larry: Some of it was penciling help, some of it was—it was “everything” help. But it’s all my layout, design and storytelling. I’d pretty much done a lot of it. Most of it was finishing-up stuff. We did this stuff a lot! That’s basically what the Crusty Bunkers ended up doing. That sense of community just doesn’t exist anymore. CBA: Except for the studio system of the ‘40s and EC Comics, there’s very little social aspect to the community of comic artists. Generally, the artists worked alone, in their basements, plugging away, page after page. That’s what they did! They weren’t necessarily that sociable. But there were these aspects like First Fridays, Continuity, ACBA. There was a thriving interactive community! Larry: For years and years, the only people I knew were comic book people! [laughter] We did everything together! There was this whole volleyball thing people got involved in, just played volleyball two or three times a week. Al Milgrom got us to convince DC to sponsor a publisher’s volleyball league. But we couldn’t get enough DC guys who were brave enough to put on a pair of gym shorts. So, Milgrom put together this DC team that was 90% Marvel people! Jim Shooter was on the team! [laughter] We would’ve gotten away with it if we hadn’t won the league championship! [laughter] It’s a December 2001

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great promotional thing, like we’ll have this dinner and give out the award, then they realized almost nobody on the team actually worked for DC! [laughter] Except for me and Milgrom! Someplace there’s got to be a picture, because our team shirt was, we had a blue T-shirt with a Superman logo on it. Jim Shooter had to wear one while he was playing! Pretty funny. Yeah, there was a tremendous amount of hanging out, especially at Continuity, where people who worked at Continuity worked there 24/7! The place was running around the clock! CBA: Do you recall that deadline for Wulf #2? It must’ve been horrendous for you, right? Larry: Yeah, I think so. I really appreciate everybody helping like that, because there was this tremendous sense of community and family, and people just didn’t think anything of it, they just dropped what they were doing and came to help out. CBA: What did you think of Goodman insisting that the deadline be met? What kind of pressure was there on you? Larry: No, they weren’t threatening. The pressure is from within: Hey, you said you were going to meet this deadline, so you do it. To me, being cavalier with a deadline was not right! CBA: But obviously, you had a family crisis situation that was happening and you were not being cavalier about it. Larry: It’s not a matter of being cavalier; it doesn’t matter! If you say you’re going to do something, you’re obligated to do it. Everybody’s got an excuse. [laughs] CBA: But you were off the book by #3. All of a sudden, my feeling as a reader, as a kid, was, “But this is Larry Hama’s book,” but it was drawn by Leo Summers. I thought, “What happened? Where’s Larry?” Larry: What did happen? I just decided to cool out for a while. I went to California and hung out on a beach. Then I came back and all this acting stuff started! Coming back from California, getting this Broadway gig, and me telling Neal, “Well, I guess I’m going to go off and do this show for a while!” And Neal saying, “Come back anytime you want!” [laughs] CBA: You had another gig at Atlas, which was writing Planet of Vampires. What was that about? Larry: Pat Broderick was a good old boy from Florida, came up to New York to make it in comics, working at Continuity. Bob McLeod was from the same town, I think. As an aside, a lot of people got into comics because their best friend… I guess people coming over from some shtetl in Russia,

Above: Before Larry Lieber’s intrusive alteration made it on Hama’s cover of Wulf the Barbarian #2, apparently a stat of the original cover made it in the hands of The Comic Reader #114, as seen here. Courtesy of Mike Friedrich. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Below: Needless to say, we will ask Larry for an interview once we get to work on our “Shooter’s Gallery: Marvel in the ’80s” issue, to discuss his phenomenal success with G.I. Joe and The Punisher in those flush years. Recent head-shot of the artist/writer/editor, courtesy of Larry Hama.

going, “Hey! The water’s good over here!” so 50 people from Bialystock got on the steamer and came over! [laughs] There was something like that happened in comics, you get this clump of guys all from the same town who went to high school together, all showing up. Like Jim Starlin and the whole Detroit “Mafia” that showed up all in one clump! Pat and Bob were the Florida boys. CBA: Did Pat pull you in on the project, as far as you know? Larry: Again, I can’t remember. I think he had this sort of vague idea, he sort of had it plotted, but I guess he had trouble dialoguing and putting it all together. CBA: So as far as you recall, that was the plan, for him to initially write and draw it? Larry: I can’t really remember. Maybe there was somebody else who was supposed to do it who dropped out or whatever. I ended up coming into the project late. CBA: So did you basically dialogue it? Larry: I think I dialogued that first issue. CBA: Did you realize how the concept came about, and what it was a knock-off of? Larry: I had no idea! [laughter] CBA: Originally, there was a science-fiction novel, I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson, about post-apocalyptic, nuclear holocaust vampires, and in 1971, after Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston did a movie called The Omega Man, and that’s the property Jeff Rovin wanted to adapt for comics, but Martin was too cheap to get the license. So they just decided to steal it! [laughs] And do Planet of Vampires! Larry: I had no idea of that, I just said, “Wow, this idea is no sillier than any other series I’ve worked on.” Certainly no sillier than Iron Fist! CBA: Did you think about the company at all? Obviously here was the previous publisher of Marvel Comics starting this company in direct competition with the company he created. Larry: I was totally unaware of all that. I had no idea of the history, I had no idea who Martin Goodman was. CBA: Did you care? Larry: Nope! All I knew was, it was across the street and he was paying fifty bucks a page! [laughter] I said, “Well, that sounds good to me!” CBA: I have to admit, there’s something refreshing in talking to you, Larry. There’s a bitterness that comes from a lot of comic book artists about life in general, about whether they’re fully appreciated, and certainly the publishing companies have got histories of really getting the most out of the freelancers that work for them. Do you have any regrets? Larry: No, I had a lot of fun! Somewhere along the line, I made some pretty decent bucks doing this stuff. The main thing was, I got up every morning and I did stuff I liked to do, and God knows, most people go through their whole lives not being able to say that. You have to know what your blessings are, and otherwise bitterness just takes you over! It took me a long time to learn that bitterness and anger and all that stuff doesn’t get anyone anywhere. It’s just a total waste of time! Total waste of vital energies that you could be utilizing having a good time! In a time like this, when you look at what’s happening to the world, I mean, you just want to say, “Hey, all that stuff you’ve been putting off, stop putting it off!” [laughter] It’s a finite world, and you’re very finite! We’re all very finite! At the end, hey, the scoreboard is, “Hey, did I have a good time, and do I feel good about myself?” If you’ve amassed a lot of bucks and you didn’t have a good time and you don’t feel good about yourself,

how does that scoreboard look? Envy and bitterness are real natural human emotions, but there’s no point in letting it get to you and bogging you down. If you feel like indulging in it for a good ten seconds and say, “Okay, that’s enough of that,” that’s cool but let’s do something else now! [laughs] CBA: Was there satisfaction in doing Wulf the Barbarian? The assignment was the first that brought you some notice, right? Larry: Well, to some degree. It got a lot of weird hate mail. People like certain things in their barbarian comics and I wasn’t delivering it. That’s to be expected! It’s also, I think, people that write letters to comics don’t necessarily voice the opinions of the majority of the people who read them. CBA: Do you think the books that you produced were for general readers and not necessarily the fans? Certain books—Conan, the DC war books, G.I. Joe, The Punisher—seemed to be popular with a non-comics fan, male readership that is maybe gone now. Larry: I never wrote for the critics. I never wrote to try to please other writers with serious glandular conditions. [laughter] CBA: I look at the longevity of Savage Sword of Conan, which lasted almost 21 years, much longer than the other Marvel black-&whites. My surmise is it sold to post-adolescent guys who weren’t fans, guys who bought Sgt. Rock…. Larry: Nope! [laughter] CBA: You’d know! Larry: Most of the letters we got for Savage Sword of Conan came from military bases or prisons! [laughs] CBA: These were a captive audience for you! Larry: That’s where our audience was! And bikers! The type of people who have barbarians airbrushed on the sides of their vans. CBA: Relatively speaking for comics, that’s a big demographic. Larry: A demographic the comic book industry has abandoned altogether, along with girls. CBA: They get rid of guys and girls, now they just have the little boys in their thirties market! Larry: 35-year-old guys reading comics! When I used to have a signing for G.I. Joe comics, there’d be a line around the block, and I’d spend eight hours signing these comics. Everybody that came up was a 10- or 11-year-old boy with a big stack of comics. I don’t think 10- or 11-year-old boys buy comics anymore, because nobody’s doing a comic they’re interested in. I wasn’t trying to write a comic for 11-year-old boys, I wrote the G.I. Joe comics to entertain myself! I guess I have the mentality of a 11-year-old! [laughter] CBA: Hey, there’s worse things in life! [laughs] Larry: I wasn’t trying to please the intellectual crowd. That was the furthest thing from my mind. I’ve gone to some of these comics conventions and met some of these writers who’d tell me, “I’m purposely trying to write like Thomas Pynchon.” [laughter] What?!? What for? I was never able to get through any of his books! [laughs] Even though I could understand the structure of the man’s writing, and his ability to write technically—he’s very good—but he didn’t write about any characters or situations that I cared about or liked or was interested in! I mean, give me a break! It’s art for art’s sake! I just don’t believe in art with a capital “A.” I don’t believe in “artist” as a job description. I think the word “poet” is an appellation that you cannot apply to yourself. You can’t say, “I’m a poet. I’m a writer.” [laughter] CBA: It’s for others to bequeath unto you? Larry: Yes. I never thought of myself as a writer, I thought of myself as a penciler with a typewriter! [laughter] I wasn’t interested in doing stories about gruesome people sitting around in rooms talking. There’s a lot of comic book writers that seem to be interested in that. The reason I started writing was I felt like some of the scripts I got were really bad! [laughter] I would go, “If I was writing something, I’d try to see the picture first, and try to tell the story in the pictures.” That’s what I try to do, I try to picture the whole thing as a silent movie, and then add what little words need to be added. That’s why I never use captions, except as first-person dialogue. To me, writing captions in a comic book is as silly as having a narrator in a movie describing what’s going on. If you can’t tell what’s going by looking at the picture, then the comic book is not successful! COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 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!

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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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“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!

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“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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“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!

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“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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CBA Interview

Sting of the Scorpion Howard Chaykin’s bittersweet Atlas Comics experience Below: Unpublished cover by Howard Chaykin to The Scorpion #2, which sported an Ernie Colón piece as published. The above is one of at least two versions by Howard that we know of. Courtesy of Terry Austin. Art ©2001 Howard Chaykin. The Scorpion ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson One of the foremost designers in the history of comics, Howard Chaykin is also a helluva storyteller, having received numerous accolades for his fondly recalled American Flagg series of the 1980s. CBA extensively interviewed the artist/writer in our eighth issue so we just jump right into 1974, the year of his big break with The Scorpion. Howard is now producer of the TV show Mutant X and he still dabbles in comics, most recently as creator/writer of American Century. Interviewed in Sept. 2001, he copyedited the transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Do you recall when you first heard about Atlas/Seaboard? Howard Chaykin: Honestly, I don’t. Their office was diagonally across from Marvel, which used to be on 575 Madison Avenue, and I don’t remember what first brought me there. It’s been a long time. CBA: Do you remember whether promises were made about some creator ownership of properties and the possibility of royalties? Howard: No. I don’t recall any of that. What they were doing was paying more money. There was no talk of royalties or creative ownership in my memory. CBA: Do you recall if it was a significant amount? Howard: In retrospect, the primary impact that Atlas had on the comic book business was to raise rates considerably. CBA: Was there any thought about Martin Goodman, who created Marvel Comics, was going in direct competition…. Howard: Martin Goodman “created” comics the way Victor Fox “created” his line. They were businessmen, they created by fiat. The word “created” is used very loosely in the comic book business, and I’m loathe to support the idea that the money guys created anything other than opportunity. CBA: Was there any thought on why Goodman was doing that? Howard: We also basically assumed Martin was doing it to piss in the soup, because he felt left out of the loop and didn’t get the attention he felt he probably deserved at Marvel, and he wanted to show he could do it again. CBA: Did you hear anything about the rumor he started Atlas as an act of revenge against Marvel? Howard: Absolutely. I seem to recall he was pissed off at Stan for getting all the attention. CBA: Did you ever meet Chip Goodman? What was he like? Howard: He was kind of invisible, and he didn’t have much of a personality. Chip just struck me as a void, there wasn’t much going on there. What little dealings I had with him—he was mostly there to edit Swank, and I think he was there to meet chicks. [laughter] I dealt more with his art director, whose name I don’t recall. The office was rife with story, they had good people who worked there, we had a good time being there, but it was a burp in my career. CBA: Except for perhaps “Iron Wolf,” The Scorpion seemed to be one of the first real “Chaykin projects.” Howard: I was called in to write by Jeff Rovin, the editor in chief at Atlas. They wanted to do a book called The Scorpion. I think what they wanted was The Shadow, and what I came back with was sort of more a combination of The Shadow, Justice, Incorporated and Doc Savage. A lot of the signature stuff that ultimately evolved into what I did for a living for the next 20 years or so did show up in that book. CBA: So The Scorpion was the first initiation of this archetypical character that’s had various incarnations, as Dominic Fortune, Cody Starbuck, Monark Starstalker, etc.? Howard: I’d say that’s true. CBA: What happened with the book? Howard: The company was built on rage and hostility, and they lied like a rug. Halfway through the second issue I found out that Rovin had told Alex Toth I was off the book, and Alex had carté blanche to come in and completely recreate and redo the book. The job that Alex did was ultimately published years later as “The Vanguard.” I was fired from the book, or I quit—I don’t remember which. Ultimately, Larry Lieber took over the book and turned it into an imitation of Spider-Man, which is what Larry does for a living. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

CBA: Immediately after you left, the book was contemporized. Howard: And let’s face it, we're talking about not much of an idea. CBA: I’ve talked to some people who worked in the office who say that perhaps Jeff Rovin was getting a bad rap, because he was taking the heat for the arbitrary decisions Chip and Martin were making. It’s a fact that Jeff quit, resigned, was fired, whatever, because of his problems with the company, being squeezed in the middle. Howard: I don’t know anything about that, but I do know some years after the fact, I happened to see a number of paperback originals he’d written using character names and springboards I’d submitted for The Scorpion back in the earlier days. So, I tend to have my doubts about his ethical standards. CBA: Did you submit a lot of conceptual material for The Scorpion? Howard: I continue to have a career both in television and comic books because I’m a good mechanic in terms of story. I can throw you concepts bam! bam! bam! bam! and that’s what I did. I submitted a year’s worth of material on The Scorpion. CBA: What happened with the second issue? You had thanks to about eight or nine people. Howard: On the second issue—I’m hoping I don’t leave anybody out here—Simonson, Kaluta, Wrightson, Ed Davis… I think that’s it. CBA: Who’s Ed Davis? Howard: Ed Davis could’ve been the greatest. Ed walked into Continuity in the early 1970s with a huge portfolio filled with sketchbooks. He was a Vietnam vet, he’d just gotten out of the service, and every sketchbook was a different theme. Science-fiction, Westerns, war sketches, porn. The guy was the single greatest natural draftsman I’d ever seen in my life—an amazingly talented guy. CBA: He was like a blip on the comics radar, so to speak. He did really nice work that I recall, but boom! he was gone. Howard: He had personal problems. He did a couple of jobs for Heavy Metal in its earliest inception, and worked on The Six Million Dollar Man and Space: 1999 when Continuity was packaging that stuff, he did a job or two for Warren, but then he disappeared. I have not seen Ed in well over 20 years. I have no idea whether he’s alive or dead. CBA: You also thanked Annette Kawecki in the second issue. She was primarily a letterer? Howard: Yes. Annette was an absolutely fantastic letterer. I think she became a doctor. CBA: What was she like? Howard: Awfully cute, and very smart. Sharp, very snide, and incredibly sexy, but someone I could never connect with. CBA: Do you recall a second cover you did, a cover that wasn’t accepted for The Scorpion #2? Howard: I don’t remember. I have no idea why they got Ernie Colón to do the second cover. CBA: In Inside Comics, the magazine, you went public with your situation at Seaboard. Howard: When was this? CBA: It was around the same time. Howard: You’re talking 26 years ago. CBA: 1975. I was thinking what the hell’s going on? How come Howard’s gone? The Scorpion is the best book Atlas/Seaboard came out with, and all of a sudden, it’s just gone! Howard: I walked across the street to Marvel, I said, “Hey, would you guys like to do a version of this?” So I did “Dominic Fortune” for them, got a major bump in my rates at both DC and Marvel, and everything was fine. CBA: Was The Scorpion your first real writing assignment? Howard: I think so. CBA: It really launched your career into another level? Howard: Yeah. CBA: Can you think of the other characters that evolved from The Scorpion? America Flagg, for instance? Howard: Well, you go from The Scorpion to Dominic Fortune, a little bit to Cody Starbuck but I always thought that Reuben Flagg came out of a way to conflate James Garner and Henry Fonda. CBA: There was Monark Starstalker? Howard: Monark Starstalker, the blind bounty hunter. I had a December 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

good time in the ’70s! Who knew? It was still a blur! CBA: What did Simonson, Wrightson and Kaluta do on The Scorpion #2? Howard: Penciling and inking, working over layouts. CBA: Do you recall the event, was it a crazy weekend? Howard: Right, we had a great time. CBA: Any way to paraphrase? Howard: Okay, we were all working in my apartment in Queens, Wrightson was living downstairs, Simonson was living across the hall. Kaluta was out. We were doing a marathon, I think Simonson at that time was coming back in town a couple of days. It was Halloween, and I was invited to a party. Wrightson and I decided to take a break, because we’d started a day before Michael. Again, this is all memory of many years ago, so bear with me on this. We had a half bottle of one of those gallon jugs of vodka, which were very popular in those days. It was about a third full. We tried an experiment: We added water and brought it up to two-thirds full, and it still got everybody who went to this party drunk off their ass. (There’s nothing nicer than the power of suggestion.) We left the party in about an hour, and we were in Queens, in Kew Garden Hills, Union Turnpike, and I stuck out my thumb to hitchhike back to my place. And this white, late-model Cadillac pulls up, and there are two women in the car—not much younger than we were—a little blonde behind the wheel, and a

Above: Many thanks to #1 Chaykin fan Tim Barnes for his last-minute delivery of a bunch of Scorpionrelated images. Here’s a pencil sketch of the character. Scorpion ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc. Art ©2001 Howard Chaykin.

brunette in the passenger seat. The brunette scrambled into the back seat, [laughter] Wrightson gets into the back seat, I get into the front seat, and we proceed to go on a joy ride into Manhattan, having a great time. We get back, we bring them back to my place, Wrightson goes off to his apartment with the brunette, I stay with the blonde. I ended up dating the blonde for about a month-anda-half. CBA: And this is in-between inking and working on the story? Howard: It was her dad’s car, she sold misses’ and petites, she was a salesgirl. Cute little blonde! I’m not sure if Wrightson got anywhere, but I certainly did! CBA: [laughs] Was it typical of the ‘70s in a sense? Was it a good time? You guys were all pretty close, Simonson lived across the hallway, it was just very close-knit. I used to go to the Seuling cons and saw you guys interact very closely. Howard: I’m still close with Walter, we talk pretty regularly. I don’t see Wrightson anymore, I run into him now and then. He lives out on the West Coast now. It was me, Walter, Milgrom, Starlin, Wrightson, Kaluta, just a whole pack, and we ended up going to conventions together; when we were at cons we tended to eat together, we tended to hang out together. When I left my first wife, she started dating Bernie, they broke up, then she ended up marrying Starlin! It gets all around! CBA: Close-knit group! Howard: We were buds! The fact is, the only guys in the pack who came from New York City were me, Ralph Reese, Larry Hama and Frank Brunner. And these other guys were from East Bumf*ck, Iowa and some sh*t. They had no idea what they were doing, they moved to New York City, they all lived in town, it was the first big city they lived in. Walter was a bit more cosmopolitan, he’d been around. He was also a little bit older than the rest of us. We all hung out! CBA: Were you friends with Larry Hama? Howard: Hama? We knew each other, I wouldn’t call him a friend, per se—but there was a period where we both had really long hair and in bad photographs were frequently mistaken for each other. CBA: Did you get together with any other compatriots, throwing out ideas for books for Atlas? Howard: No. In those days, you did jam sessions to carry your ass, but a lot of us just worked alone. One of the reasons we had get-togethers, called “First Fridays” in those days, was we tended to work alone, and it was an opportunity to get out of the house for a bit of a social gathering, and also a bit of a salon to share your work, show what you were doing, and talk about what you were planning.

CBA: It’s interesting in that, except for the studio system in the ‘40s, generally speaking, the ‘70s—with First Fridays and the antics that you guys had—there really has not been much to talk about the social history of comic book artists, outside of conventions. Generally, making comics is a solitary thing. Joe Schmo sat in his garage for 40 years doing this stuff, he doesn’t have any tales to tell! Howard: Let’s face it, comic book guys are either asocial creeps who have no idea how to get along with other people, or they’re assholes whose idea of sociability is getting loaded and having a big party! That’s just the flip side. Comics guys aren’t really social animals. CBA: There’s something that Ernie Colón also said that’s interesting, in that comic book artists are a type of people who want to do what they do, and generally speaking, most people don’t want to work! You go out there in the world and most people just want to be in front of the TV. Comic book artists are naturally exploited. Howard: Most of us. This is an amazing vocation or avocation. CBA: There seemed to be great promise with Atlas/Seaboard, at least initially, for the first couple of months, and then boom! It just turned into total sh*t. What was your point of view on that; did you just turn your back on it? Howard: Yeah, I just walked away. I thought the people involved were sh*theels, and I’d rather deal with sh*theels that I knew. CBA: How did you find out that Toth was working on the book? Howard: I came into the office and saw the pages. These were not good guys, let’s face it! [laughs] Comic books have a longstanding history of creeps, assholes and sh*theels. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay gets it right for the most part. These days, now you have artists who’ve become exploitative. If I’m bitter, it’s only about the money, because it’s not about anybody’s abilities. CBA: You still work in the field. Howard: I maintain my relationship with comic books because who knows what’s coming up? I did my first piece of artwork this year since American Century—a cover for Radioactive Man. It’s in Craftint, a Howard Chaykin take on Matt Groening’s Radioactive Man. I make my living as a television producer, but I’ve often described my job as being an itinerant who drives a BMW. I’m a migrant worker, every job I’ve had could be my last job. Right now, I’m running Mutant X. We’re shooting episode 11 as we speak, I’m working on episode 22 on my desk in front of me. Who knows where I’ll be working next year? CBA: It’s related to the Marvel universe? Howard: It’s outside their universe, but it’s a Marvel show. It’s an action-adventure show—The A-Team meets Mission: Impossible with super-powers.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

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DRAW! #7

MIKE WIERINGO interview, BENDIS and OEMING on how they create “Powers”, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw great hands”, “The illusion of depth in design” by PAUL RIVOCHE, art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, and more!

Interview & demo with BILL WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO interview, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw the human figure in light and shadow,” Photoshop tutorial by CELIA CALLE, inking tips by MIKE MANLEY, reviews of the best art supplies, links, and more!

Interview/demo by DAN BRERETON, ZACH TRENHOLM on caricaturing, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” demo by ALBERTO RUIZ, “The Power of Sketching” by BRET BLEVINS, “Designing with light and shadow” by PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of art supplies, links, and more!

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DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

Interview & demo by MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” by ALBERTO RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure” by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS SECTION, International Spotlight on JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, and more!

WRITE NOW #8 crossover! MIKE MANLEY & DANNY FINGEROTH create a comic from script to print, BANCROFT & CORLEY on bringing characters to life, Adobe Illustrator with ALBERTO RUIZ, Noel Sickles’ work examined, PvP’s SCOTT KURTZ, art supply reviews, and more!

RON GARNEY interview & demo, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and others discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ on Adobe Illustrator, interview with MARK McKENNA, links, and more!

STEVE RUDE on comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On Life”, Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER on merging traditional and digital art, MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, and more! New BAKER cover!

Demo of painting methods by ALEX HORLEY, interview and demo by COLLEEN COOVER, a look behindthe-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more!

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DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

In-depth interviews and demos with DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, and more!

Covers major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with BILL REINHOLD, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, and more!

In-depth interview with HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on HOW TO USE REFERENCE and WORKING FROM PHOTOS (by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY), and more!

Interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates his series, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

Interview & demo by R.M. GUERA, Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE demo and interview, DANNY FINGEROTH’s new feature on writer/artists with R. SIKORYAK, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on penciling & more!

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DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, Rough Stuff’s BOB McLEOD gives a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, Write Now’s DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights writer/artist AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the best art supplies and tool technology, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, plus Web links, book reviews, and more!

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop about his gritty, designinspired work with editor MIKE MANLEY, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews “Billy Dogma” writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL, plus more of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, FRANK MILLER interview, plus MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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CBA Interview

The Flight of Phoenix Sal Amendola’s ups and downs working for Atlas Comics Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

In the short three-plus year life of Comic Book Artist, Sal Amendola has been an enthusiastic supporter and insightful contributor since issue #1. Most, perhaps, remember Sal’s artwork from early-1970s DC Comics, most prominently Detective Comics #439’s memorable Batman story, “Night of the Stalker,” a seminal tale inspired by Neal Adams and also plotted by Sal. Many may also recall the artist’s three-issue run on Phoenix, one of the better Atlas comics of their short run. Sal was interviewed via phone in September 2001 and he copyedited the final transcript. Comic Book Artist: Where are you from originally? Sal Amendola: I was born in Italy. CBA: When did you come over to the States? Sal: In 1948, three months after I was born. I’m practically totally American but I still can’t be president. CBA: Did you get into comics at an early age? Sal: At eleven years old I decided that that was what I wanted to do. CBA: Do you recall the first time you picked up a comic book? Were they always around? Sal: No, I can’t recall the first time. My mother used to take my sister, brother and I to a park here in Brooklyn and, to keep us quiet I guess, she’d buy comic books for each of us. So it was pretty much since infancy. My first memory, though, is of a Lone Ranger comic book, and the guy who used to draw that, Tom Gill, became one of my teachers. He was one of the cruelest teachers I ever had, but he’s my buddy now. CBA: What kind of comics were you into? Sal: Back in those early days, it was Westerns. Then I discovered super-hero comics, the “Superman Family” of comic books. By the mid-’60s, I was interested in everything that came out. Literally everything. And not just comic books. CBA: You obviously were too young for the ECs? Sal: Yes,

yes. I was not conscious of EC at all. Although, of course, I have seen them since. Those stories were great. The artists were fantastic. CBA: So you were into the DC comics? Sal: Yeah, DC and Dell. CBA: What made you decide to become a comic book artist? Sal: The drawings. There was something about the artwork that just got to me. But I always had a feeling to be an artist since I was very young. I don’t know where that came from, because my parents—nobody in my family—wrote or did artwork. But I was always drawing in the blank pages of my parents’ textbooks—even on the walls. As I think back, I don’t recall ever having been punished for that. I just vaguely remember my parents being worried that I’d fall and accidentally stab myself with the pencil. CBA: Did you do your own comics? Sal: Yeah, I did. Very crude but, yes, I was always trying to draw. CBA: Did you have your own knock-off characters? Sal: Uh-huh. Thinking back now. Not too sure I want to remember that! [laughs] Gee! “The Acro-Boys,” Jump & Leap. Ugh! [shudders] Crime-fighting acrobatic brothers. Inspired by Batman and Robin. Another character, super-hero by day, artist by night. His name was “Arthur Istowistowsky.” “Art Ist” for short. [shudders again] CBA: Through high school, were you drawing all the time? Were you known as an artist in school? Sal: Yes, I was. CBA: Did you draw for the high school yearbook, for instance? Sal: Yeah, in high school I did do some of that stuff but because, y’know, there’s that elitism and prejudice—when they understood my interest was comic books, they had this sniffy-nose attitude about what I was doing. Everything I did looked like a cartoon as far as they were concerned. You know what, though? Back then, everything I did probably did “look cartoony.” I did have one or two things printed in The Erasmian, my high school publication. Some posters I’d done hung in the classrooms. CBA: So you spent your entire youth in Brooklyn? Sal: Yeah. CBA: Have you lived there all your life? Sal: Just about. I lived in Connecticut for a couple of years. I lived in many parts of Brooklyn either with my family or by myself, so, yeah, mostly in Brooklyn. CBA: Did you go to Manhattan regularly? Sal: Once I started art school, I went to Manhattan as much as possible. I’d like to live there. CBA: Did you go to art school after high school? Sal: Yes. Starting in the Summer of 1966, between graduating from high school and starting art school, I went to the Brooklyn Museum art school, and then right to the School of Visual Arts. CBA: You always had your eye on the School of Visual Arts? Were you aware of how many comic artists had graduated from there? Sal: No, I wasn’t aware of that. But, somehow, in talking with the teachers at high school, they somehow made me aware that I should go to SVA. CBA: You’re teaching there right now, right? Sal: Yeah, since 1974. CBA: You graduated from high school in what year? Sal: 1965. CBA: Were you involved at all in fanzines? Sal: No. CBA: Did you know that they existed? Sal: Yes, I did. Around 1966 more or less, I realized that these COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

things existed and I just sort of wondered why I never got hold of them. I felt like I was an outsider. CBA: Did you become a regular reader of fanzines after that? Sal: No, I didn’t. I didn’t get hold of them until after I became a professional, then all of a sudden they were there. I went to my first convention where, I believe, I met Jerry Bails. I later met Roy Thomas. Those are the names that I remember associating with fanzines. CBA: There was a legendary tour of DC Comics. Did you ever take it? Sal: No. I used to give them though. I used to get stuck with that job when I was there as a pro. It’s not fun taking people around. I started getting repetitive, saying the same things over and over again and busting into writer-conferences with Julie Schwartz and “Whomever,” feeling really uncomfortable. They—editors, creators, staff—all knew it was part of the job but I really felt uncomfortable— like I was intruding. Also, I wanted to be an artist, you know? I just wanted to draw. Write stories. CBA: Who was your favorite artist? Sal: Everybody has had an influence on me. From the late ’50s to this day, Leonard Starr, was number one with me, absolutely no question, for his story strip, Mary Perkins On Stage. Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino. Joe Kubert was and remains a more profound influence on me than I’ll ever fully grasp. Truly a genius. Alex Raymond… but I loved pretty much everybody. One way or another, they all had an influence on me. CBA: How did you become a professional comic book artist? Sal: Through the School of Visual Arts. Creig Flessel was one of my teachers. Creig was mostly known for doing a strip called David Crane. Mr. Flessel replaced Win Mortimer on it. Back in the ’50s, Creig did do some Superboy stories and Superman covers and a lot of advertising art for Johnstone & Cushing [an ad agency specializing in comic-strip advertising art] and a lot of covers and artwork for Boys’ Life magazine. He also did “The Sandman,” back in the late ’30s or so. CBA: Did you remember any other prominent teachers? You said that Tom Gill was an instructor there? Sal: Yeah, Tom was head of the Illustration and Cartooning department there and was one of my Children’s Book Illustration teachers. Burne Hogarth was also there. I had him for Art History, and then for Anatomy, and then Cartooning. Bill Charmatz. Howie Schneider. While they were not teachers while I was a student, The School was lucky enough to have Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, Gene Colan, Joe Orlando, Tom Palmer, Angelo Torres, Klaus Janson, Walt Simonson…. CBA: What did you think of Burne? Sal: Really dynamic. He was a tornado. “Dynamic” is an understatement. I use that word because that’s how he titled his books! [laughs] He really was dynamic. He stomped around, was literally in your face, almost nose to nose with you. He’d be in the middle of teaching something and then suddenly I’d find him right in my face, on one occasion, asking, “What’s your favorite color?” I hesitated for a second and said, “Yellow.” He said, “Too late, too late. It’s not yellow.” Then he’d go off and ask someone else. I said, “No, it really is.” He replied, “No, you’re lying. It’s red. Everyone says it’s red.” (I didn’t want to argue with him but I am actually prejudiced against red—because it seemed that everyone, particularly Marvel, was throwing red all over the place. Superman-cape red all over the place like kids couldn’t see any other color. So I resented red for that reason. I remember at Marvel when I did do that, in any coloring I did— whenever anyone put that kind of red on something, I’d put shading film over it to mute it so it wouldn’t be that glaring. “Radiation color” I call it. So Burne Hogarth was something. There were two types of people there: Those who loved him and those who hated him. I don’t think there were many people in between. CBA: Where did you stand? Sal: I pretty much stayed on the positive end. I really liked him but he was tough. He could make you feel very inadequate all the time. CBA: Was he a contrarian? Sal: Yeah. And he would just make all these references that would throw everyone. He would make references to art history or current events. It would all tie into whatever point he was making but, especially then, because I didn’t know what he was referring to, I just shut down. I didn’t know what to say. I went silent. December 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

CBA: Humbled before the master! Sal: Yes, definitely. The last time I saw him was several years ago, with the National Cartoonists Society, in Arizona. He had gone there to receive an award and he was exactly the same! He started making all these references and I thought I knew stuff by then but my eyes blinked and my mind went blank and my mouth slacked open and I felt extremely inadequate. But he was great. He took me to breakfast and tried to convince me that I could do a young adult book all on my own. I was working on one at the time, in fact, but I never really believed I’d accomplish it. November 2000 I completed the first manuscript. A modern-day Hardy Boys-like fantasy/adventure story that’s really about bullying and child abuse. Gray Morrow agreed to illustrate this first one. Now I’m trying to find an agent who’ll pay attention to the manuscript and sell it for me. CBA: Did you overall get a realistic assessment or feeling that you were being prepared for life as a professional comic book artist? Sal: Yeah, I thought so. I thought I was being very professionally well educated. I still think so. There were those elitist type of teachers who thought that there was only one right way—one real art—and comic books was not anywhere near it, but, for the most part, I was very well educated. CBA: Often Neal Adams will say that in his generation, just prior to the influx of new talent that came in, in the late ’60s and

Above: Concept drawings by Sal Amendola for the Atlas title, Phoenix, written by Jeff Rovin. Note the suggestion that the hero wear goggles. Courtesy of the artist. Phoenix ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

especially the early ’70s, that there really weren’t new people coming into comics for a good ten years from about 1955 to ’65. Were you cognizant of the extreme ups and downs the comics business suffered? Sal: You mean, for instance, that there were periods were it looked like comics was dead? Yes, I was somewhat aware of it. Not specific details but I was aware of it. CBA: Was it an innate love for it that made you stick with it? Sal: Yes. I didn’t think it was really going to die. I didn’t have that feeling when I was younger. I thought it was going to be there forever. CBA: Did you feel like you were part of a new generation that was coming into comics? Sal: Yeah, and we were. CBA: Did you have notable classmates? Sal: Very few of them became famous and none of them in comics. Thinking back, the most famous was a guy named Bob Pook. He worked in television graphics. He did stuff most notably for David Letterman and Saturday Night Live at NBC so he did quite well. I haven’t heard from him in about ten years but he did quite well for that whole period since we graduated until I last heard from him. The others—I can’t think of anyone who got into comics and stuck it out. CBA: When did you graduate? Sal: 1969. CBA: What did you do after that? Sal: We’re back to Creig Flessel. Like almost everyone who was a student about to graduate from college, I was in terror. I couldn’t figure out what I was going to do. I thought I was a failure. I felt like I needed just one more year to get myself together. Creig had more faith in me than I had in myself and insisted that I go meet Gil Kane and show him my work. He gave me Gil’s number. I called him and Gil said, “Yeah, come in next Wednesday and show me your stuff but call first before you come.” So I called him on Wednesday and he said, “My boy, I’m sorry, I’m very busy right now. Can you make it the day after tomorrow?” That went on for weeks. Mr. Flessel asked me if I had seen Gil and I told him the situation. He finally got mad and said, “Forget about him. Go see Murphy Anderson up at DC. Murphy’s a real warm guy and he’ll see you,” and Murphy did. Murphy was about to say, “Nice work, kid, keep in touch,” when in walks Dick

Giordano. He started looking at my stuff and gave me scripts with the understanding that I would not be paid for them and that I would not see them in print but they would be samples. So I did three of them and he brought them in to Carmine and there I was. I started penciling for DC. I think that the first thing I did was a one or two-page filler for The Witching Hour. This was in 1969. CBA: That was really the beginning of a real change at DC where they had chosen artists to work as editors. Sal: Yeah. There was Giordano, Orlando, and I guess Kubert was already there. CBA: Were you draft bait? Sal: Oh, yeah! They tried real hard to get me. The instant I graduated from SVA, I got my draft notice. I went down and my blood pressure was high so they said to come back in six months. So I did but my blood pressure was still high so they said to come back in another six months. Then, the third time, they were suspicious that I was taking drugs or something to keep my blood pressure high (not this good little Catholic boy!). They ordered me to St. Alban’s Medical Center in Queens, New York, to stay for about four days and they repeatedly tested me and a whole bunch of other potential recruits. At the end of the four days they just said, “Goodbye. Go home, we can’t use you.” (As if I would be disappointed!) There were three guys who were there who wanted to get drafted and the other guys and I spent our time trying to get these three to change their minds. Whether they got in or not, I don’t know. CBA: Were you anti-war? Sal: By 1967 I was. Yes, absolutely. I started paying more and more attention to the war in Vietnam. I grew up with this idea that the United States couldn’t possibly do anything if it wasn’t for the most noble of reasons. I guess the whole thing of the ’60s made me understand more and more that the United States could be guilty of objectionable things. We weren’t in the war for noble reasons or a just cause and I began to realize it. To this day, I still don’t understand what the objective of the war was but it was not really to liberate people or stop Communism. So, definitely by ’67, I was an objector. I should mention that I was Giordano’s assistant editor by that time, and he insisted that I call him every day while I was at St. Alban’s. That contact was very helpful for my morale. What I also remember was spending much of the time reading Steve Skeates and Jim Aparo’s Aquaman stories. CBA: When you started at DC, did you perceive a generation gap between those of Carmine’s generation and you new guys? Or did you all get along? Sal: I got along with pretty much everyone. Almost. Both Carmine’s generation and mine. Carmine’s generation were all heroes of mine so I was not likely to not get along with them. I felt a comradeship with the younger guys who were coming in—Wrightson, Kaluta, Wolfman, Wein, Weiss, Conway… Simonson came in a bit later—so I was fine for a while. But when Giordano left, I got stuck in the production department and attitudes really started to change. I started to get panicky and then Marvel offered me a position there and I took it even though I didn’t really want to. CBA: Well, this is the point where we should tell the readers to go out and buy Streetwise and read your story in there. [laughs] Certainly that is a true aspect of your experience in working in DC’s production department? Sal: Yes. The thing that finally sent me over the edge is when Dick left and I was made assistant to the assistant production manager, Jack Adler. He took me aside and told me that from now on I was one of them and not one of the freeCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

December 2001

lancers. I was no longer allowed to talk or have coffee with the “hired help.” I just suddenly felt that I was a prisoner and literally felt panicky. How could I not talk to Neal, to Bill Draut, Cary Bates, Elliott Maggin, or to whomever? There was a separation of “us” and “them” and that really got to me. So when the offer came from Marvel, I went, though I really didn’t want to. I didn’t have that strong emotional bond with Marvel that I had with DC. It was very painful. CBA: Did you learn a lot at DC? Sal: Yes. They reinforced so much of what I had already learned at SVA. CBA: Was there was a practical, specific background to comics production that you were able to bring over to Marvel? Sal: Oh, yes. In theory, at least. Sol Harrison in particular, and DC, generally, were extremely “anal” about everything. Everything had to be done “by the book.” At Marvel—as long as you got the job done, they didn’t care how you did it. If you used chewing gum to do a paste-up—as long as it stuck, “good enough!” That was one of the things that got people upset with me at Marvel. Stan called me in after I had been there a couple-or-so weeks and said that one of the reasons I was brought over from DC was that I could use what I learned there at Marvel and I should feel free to do so. I took it too seriously and I guess I came off as obnoxious. [haughty] “Well, at DC, we didn’t do it that way.” Once someone was cutting the makereadys and she was doing it in an inefficient, slow way and I said, “Why don’t you do it this way? Fold it like this and then cut it here and here. This was the way we did it at DC.” [laughter] I don’t think she appreciated that very much. I don’t blame her. I should have just left her alone. What was I, 22 or so? You think you know everything at that age. The worst thing that happened was at an Academy of Comic Book Arts awards dinner, when I was required to be at the Marvel table. But every time someone from DC won something, I was up on my feet cheering. One guy, [Marvel production staffer] Tony Mortellaro, screeched, “What the hell is with this guy? Look at him!” He just got so pissed off and I guess the rest of them did, too. I guess all of those things combined… Gary Friedrich came to me and said, “Hey, I just got word: You’re going to get canned.” My attitude was, “Oh? Okay.” I called up John Verpoorten and asked, “John, do you need to talk to me?” He said, “Yeah. Why don’t you come on in?” I went in and he just shrugged his shoulders. Again, I said, “Okay.” I mean, it was a little more involved than that but that was basically what happened. So I happened to run into Carmine and he said, not knowing that Marvel had just fired me, “Why don’t you come back to DC where you belong?” I said, “Okay, Carmine.” This all happened on the same day. The Sprittergoodies were looking after me. CBA: When did you first leave DC? Sal: It was around 1971, maybe ’72. Whatever year, it was not all that long after Dick left. CBA: Then you went back to DC roughly a year later? Sal: A year or two later. I don’t really remember. Yeah, a year sounds about right. CBA: Did you have an agenda when you first went over to DC? Was there anything that you really wanted to do? Sal: Yes. I really wanted to do Batman and I really wanted to do Adam Strange, but then I wanted to do everything. CBA: Did you want to revive Adam Strange? Sal: I did but I never got a chance to. That’s one of my sad little regrets that I never got to do Adam Strange. I had fantasies of Cary Bates being the new Gardner Fox, and I being the new Carmine and Bernie Sachs/Murphy Anderson. CBA: Did you have an Adam Strange story in you, all figured out? December 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

Sal: Yes. Back then, I had it all figured out but I don’t remember it now. I think that if I look in my basement I may find the preliminary notes; but if it’s still down there, it’s probably decomposing. CBA: You gave CBA #3 a nice anecdote in the form of a letter about “Night of the Stalker” [Detective Comics #439]. So you obviously had a Batman story that you were able to realize. Sal: Yep. Wrote the story (I’d titled it “Deja Vu”). Penciled it and inked the backgrounds. Steve Englehart wrote the dialogue. Dick inked the main figures. Archie accepted the job after Julie Schwartz rejected it. CBA: Do you still get people commenting on that story? Sal: Yes. I look back on that now and see how primitive it was. The artwork, I mean. At least my part of it. Apparently it’s referred to as a classic and I’m very happy about that. So something about it came through and it had some impact, something about it affected people so that they’re still coming up and talking to me about it. CBA: Did you work on Weird Worlds? Sal: Yeah, I did “John Carter of Mars” for four issues. CBA: Did you have any other continuing series that you did? Sal: Not that I can think of, no. CBA: Who was editing Weird Worlds at the time? Sal: Denny O’Neil, who was a good editor. He left us alone a lot

Above: Self-caricature of Sal Amendola done in recent years. Courtesy of and ©2001 the artist. Inset left: Sal produced a booklet featuring his thumbnail pages of Phoenix #1 and 2 which the artist kindly shared with CBA. Here’s the first page representing #1, page one. ©2001 Sal Amendola. 81

but there was a point where I wasn’t living up to the visual storytelling. There was a point when Denny got specific and said, “Make this a close-up. Make this a four panel long shot sequence,” or whatever. That sort of got me back on track. CBA: Denny was giving art direction? Sal: For me, yes. He was able to tell me I wasn’t getting enough sense of space or whatever—enough variation in layouts. CBA: I was going over your thumbnails of your first two issues of Phoenix and you seemed to have a real interesting rhythm in the storytelling. Not that I know how to draw comics but you seemed to have a real variety of close-ups, long shots and midrange shots. Sal: That’s to Dick’s credit, too, and Archie Goodwin, as well. All three—Archie, Denny and Dick—had a real impact on my layouts. Archie told me that I had too many small tombstones on the contents page I did for an issue of Detective Comics, and the layout

looked flat. He said that I should put in some things in the foreground to give it depth. I said that there were just too many things already there and I couldn’t put anything more in the foreground, but then I remembered my art student days regarding the overlapping of shapes and forms, so I just did that. So his prompting gave it a better sense of dimension. Then there was another time when Giordano said, basically, what one should do, is have on each page, a close-up, a long shot, an up shot, a down shot, and a straight-on, to keep the sense of movement and space, but to be careful not to make people dizzy or nauseous. So I had Dick, Archie and Denny in mind when I was laying out Phoenix. CBA: How did you first hear about Atlas/Seaboard? Sal: It was news all around the business at that time. Everybody knew about it. CBA: Was there a lot of anticipation? Sal: I think so. Supposedly there would be this great creative freedom. There would be royalties if we created something, and part of the copyright would be ours. Basically none of that stuff happened. Then the company died anyway. CBA: Well, we have to spend a little more time on it than that! [laughter] So it was explicit to you that there would be some creator ownership of the characters? Sal: Yes, it was. There was nothing in writing, absolutely nothing. It was all verbal. CBA: Would there be returning of original art? Was that a concern at the time? Sal: Yes. Don’t pay me—but I have to have my artwork back— and I want credit or blame for what I did! And that was the only company that consistently gave me my art back. CBA: What was the genesis of Phoenix? Sal: I knew Jeff Rovin and I went up to the Atlas/Seaboard offices. Jeff intended to give Phoenix to Walt Simonson to draw and I said, “Gee, I’d really like to do this.” He said okay and Walt didn’t have a problem with it so I started drawing that title. My idea was that this would not be a typical super-hero. He was not going to wear a costume, wasn’t going to fly. Gradually, as we went along, all those concepts fell by the wayside. It’s just that it seemed that as each of the ideas that I’d envisioned weren’t coming about, I’d be given more money. CBA: What was Rovin’s original concept that he was going to give to Simonson? Sal: From the very beginning, what I understood, was that this was about three astronauts orbiting Earth when their space station is damaged and they have to abandon it. Their space capsule is also damaged and they crash land in the Arctic. Two of the astronauts die but the survivor is picked up by aliens who had a base up there in the Arctic. We were eventually to learn that agencies of the American government knew about the aliens; that these agencies had caused the accident in space and calculated for the space capsule to land near the alien base. There, they hoped, the astronauts would spy on the creatures and come back to give our government agencies information on what the aliens were up to. I met a scientist in Washington, D.C., a couple of decades ago who told me that, in fact, our astronauts were thought of as, quote, “Throw-away people,” end quote. Phoenix brought the cynical view of these great heroes to a heavy-duty extreme. Jeff’s idea, when it came down to it, was that he wanted the Phoenix character to be the Second Coming. I was not too pleased with that idea so we pretty much just compromised between the two ideas. I think it should have been one or the other and you should go with that. Being in between just didn’t seem to work well. CBA: So you were looking for a pre-X-Files type of COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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thing and he wanted more of a cosmic/Warlock type of approach? Sal: Yes. At the end of the second issue, there was a panel of Phoenix flying up into the sky and I took a crucifix that I had and used the Jesus figure as a model. So I had Phoenix flying as if he were Christ on the cross. I think I used the speed lines to create the negative shape of the cross. CBA: There was a sneaking in of a lot of religious allegory? Sal: Yeah, I sneaked some of that in as kind of a joke to Jeff, in my layouts. Then Jeff would say, “Hey, that’s pretty good! Let’s put that in there.” CBA: Did you get along well with Jeff? Sal: Yeah, I liked him a lot, and got along with him fine. It was just these creative differences that made me unhappy. I was just disappointed about how I would go in with the story all penciled and the layouts and then I’d get the scripts and the words didn’t match what I thought I was drawing. To me, I thought the changes were glaring, but Jeff made them work with the pictures so no one else noticed, but I knew what was supposed to have been in there from the beginning. CBA: Did you pour your heart and soul into the book? Sal: The first two issues, yeah. The third one was not even a complete issue and I said that I was going to quit. I was two weeks late with the last book, or something like that. Every bit of it to me was like, think of your own cliche, it was like pulling teeth without anaesthetic. It was really horrible. I think I was so in despair that I literally got physically sick. I got the flu or something. I might have gotten it anyway but I think that my resistance was so low that the stress of the assignment just made me physically sick. CBA: Would you characterize yourself as a very sensitive person? Sal: Oh, I guess so! CBA: You seem to take things to heart where some professionals might just shrug it off and walk away. Sal: Or be forceful enough or strong enough to either get their way or make it very clear that they were not happy and deal with it then. I don’t know. For the most part, I just kind of gave in. CBA: Can you specifically tell us what your contributions to Phoenix were conceptually? Did you feel that you co-created Phoenix? Sal: Yes, I did. I feel that it was a creation of both of us. CBA: What specifically did you contribute? You made me some Xeroxes of some of the conceptual art that you did that were quite interesting. You had this whole armature, exo-skeleton device. Was that your concept? Sal: The drawings, yes, but the concept was Jeff’s. I thought we weren’t going to be doing a costume on this guy but then Jeff said we were. He tried to make it logical by saying it was his astronaut’s uniform and I said, “Okay, that’s logical, it’s his astronaut suit.” Then when he escapes from the alien base he took some of their stuff and put it over his suit and I thought that was kind of logical, too. But when Jeff wanted an emblem, I got freaked and said I really didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want another circle or whatever on this guy’s chest. Then he gave me another logical reason for that, telling me that his concept was the Second Coming so do something like a star and then as the issues go on, evolve the star so that it becomes a pointy crucifix. So I said okay. It seemed logical but I wasn’t happy with doing all that stuff. I really didn’t want to do just another typical super-hero. I wanted to do something deeper. I guess from Jeff’s point of view, it was pretty deep too. You don’t do something that involves Jesus Christ coming back without it being profound but it just didn’t suit me. It wasn’t a good choice. CBA: You said you’re Catholic? Sal: Yeah, I was born into Catholicism but I’m—another cliché— ”very spiritual but not very religious.” CBA: Did you take any offense to the Phoenix Second Coming concept? Sal: “Offense,” by no means, I didn’t, but I was very concerned that other people might. I’m not into censorship. I think people should be able to say and do what they want and if they don’t want to do it or read it, they don’t have to but they shouldn’t interfere with other people’s choices. Jeff and I did compromise a lot between each other and that might have been a problem right there. It should December 2001

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have been stronger one way or the other. When you start trying to balance on a tightrope, you tend to fall off if you’re not really good at it. CBA: It’s interesting that, for instance, I look at that third issue and wonder if your heart was really in it. Sal: No, no, it wasn’t. CBA: When I consider how you drew people who were supposed to be Nepalese and yet

they looked Southeast Asian. They wore grass hats and everything, certainly not Himalayan attire. It didn’t seem that you were using a lot of reference material. Sal: No, I’m embarrassed to even think of that issue at all. I don’t even have it. I threw away the artwork and the comic book and I haven’t seen it since. It was really just a horrendous last issue for me. I couldn’t wait to get done and get it behind me. CBA: I looked at the thumbnails and you drew the city in Iceland, Reykjavik, realistically in that there were more small buildings and homes being destroyed, for instance, but when I saw the finished book, there were skyscrapers and tall buildings exploding and all that. Were there other occasions where your artwork was changed? Sal: Yes. If you looked, you could see where Jeff’s little notations were for changes. I did do a lot of reference for that. I looked up what Reykjavik looked like. I originally had a whole different idea that turned out to be inaccurate and then I found out that it was actually a whole modern town. I also looked up in science books things like the space capsule and astronomy. Even with my research, Jeff caught an error or two. Like I had the space capsule reentering the atmosphere “pointy-end” first. Jeff reminded me that the heat shield was on the other end. I looked up a lot of that stuff and made it as realistic as I could and then, very quickly, things just sort of went…. To my mind it became just another comic book super-hero, and then, I thought I had more time on the job than I did. Jeff told me, “No, no, the deadline is like now!” Then I started to work quickly. I can tell where that happened just by looking at the artwork and things just weren’t so great. CBA: Was the third issue an actual 20-page script? Sal: I don’t remember how long the script was but it was no longer a full issue. It also had a back-up story drawn by Pat Broderick. CBA: “The Dark Avenger.” Sal: Was that it? I hardly remember that issue. Isn’t that funny? I really wanted to block it all out! [laughter] CBA: I’m sorry to bring it up! Sal: That’s okay! Jeff was not the editor by that time and I forget the name of the young man who replaced him. CBA: Larry Lieber took over the entire line; perhaps you’re thinking of assistant editors Ric Meyers or David Anthony Kraft? Sal: You know, Ric Meyers sounds right. I’m embarrassed to say that I just can’t remember for sure, but I remember his girlfriend’s name was Bridget, if that narrows it down? But anyway, I didn’t fully suspect until later that a lot of the

Below: Before—and after—his freelancing stint at Atlas Comics, Sal would call DC publisher Carmine Infantino his employer. In homage to his boss, Sal drew “Rouge Enfant” as the NASA chief in Phoenix #1 and 2. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

This page: Sal Amendola tells us that Jeff Rovin intended Phoenix to be a comic book interpretation—of a sort—of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. In evidence, here’s some panels from Phoenix #2 and 3 featuring the hero performing a miracle (albeit one first performed by Moses), encountering the Devil, bound to a cross, and ascending in messianistic fashion. Note that this wasn’t the first time super-hero comics looked to retell the New Testament as Roy Thomas and Gil Kane’s Warlock was the Marvel version of the Greatest Story Ever Told. All art by Sal Amendola and words by Gabe Levy. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Comics as Allegory

changes Jeff was asking me to make probably didn’t come from him, but from publisher Martin Goodman. Jeff was over-saturated and I think he just couldn’t dictate Goodman’s demands to people anymore. CBA: Did you ever actually come down and visit the offices? Sal: Yes. It was a little place, nice little airy offices. It wasn’t very big, as I recall. The only office I didn’t get into was Goodman’s. CBA: Did you ever meet Goodman? Sal: Yes, a couple or so times. Once at Marvel. At Atlas, he walked by once and Jeff held up some of my pages for Martin to take a look at and he sort of tight-lipped nodded and just walked away. He never spoke. CBA: What did he look like? Sal: Ah, tall—but then, compared to me everyone looks tall! Except maybe you! [laughter] I guess he was in his sixties at the time but I’m not sure. CBA: Did you meet Chip at all? Sal: Not formally, but he was there. I don’t remember too much about him. He seemed like a young affable guy but we never spoke. I do believe he had been up there. CBA: Did you hear any scuttlebutt about the company? Martin Goodman previously owned Marvel Comics so why was he creating another comic company? Sal: I heard a bunch of things but I don’t know what was true or not. One of the things I heard was that Chip wanted to do some kind of magazines and this would lead into that. Another thing I heard was that Martin was going to put Marvel in its place. He’s not Marvel’s publisher anymore but he’s going to start another company and put Marvel out of business. I don’t know if any of that was true. But the company was only around for what, 18 months? CBA: I guess nobody really had their hearts in it that much? Both Chip and Martin are deceased so it’s hard to get any kind of confirmation on this, but the rumor was that Atlas Comics, in one sense, was created as an act of revenge. Because perhaps Martin had gotten a promise from Cadence that with him selling out his shares of the company, that Chip would be installed as president of the company. That apparently did not happen so he created Atlas for his son, Chip, to take on Marvel. Did Chip have a reputation? I’ve spoken to some people who’ve indicated that he may not have been that bright. Sal: I don’t know if he was or not. I know that rumors said that he really didn’t care about comics. He didn’t have his heart in it at all. He just wanted to do these other slick magazines which was all he cared about doing and this wasn’t a long enough bridge toward that goal or whatever. CBA: When you went to visit Atlas, who else was working there? Sal: Larry Lieber. Howard Chaykin…. CBA: Howard was there? Sal: Yeah. I don’t remember if he was up there but he was doing stuff for them at that time. Howard was the opposite of me. When he disagreed, he let it be known. He was a tough old bastard. (He’s younger than I am so I don’t know if that’s an appropriate sentence for him.) But he stood his ground, he did. Who else? Mike Sekowsky.... CBA: What was Mike like? Sal: To me he was always kind of indifferent. We spoke and said hello but there was no real warmth. Joe Giella knew him well, and told me stories of what a great big lovable bear of a human being Sekowsky was. To me, I’d always perceived a kind of anger about him, but I could never figure that out. Beyond that, I really couldn’t tell you. I did a lot of background work on his stuff for Dick Giordano but they were just horrible—my inking, I mean. I was too inexperienced. I still get that indescribable thrill when I look at the first couple of years of his Justice League of America. Bizarre proportions and all! But I think he was at his best on “Star Hawkins and Ilda” for Mystery in Space, and his DC romance stories. CBA: Back at DC, did you get the sense that Mike was on the outs there? Sal: Yeah, I did get that sense. Those were curious days. I read CBA and Alter Ego a lot and I think, “Oh yeah, I remember that, I went through that, well, now that incident makes more sense…” at the same time, I start to doubt that I’m remembering certain things COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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about those times correctly. So I really don’t know if I can say what the forces were other than somebody there—Carmine or someone in the production department like Sol or Jack—or whoever had decided that Sekowsky wasn’t doing well or his books weren’t and he began to become disfavored so he ended up at Marvel and at Atlas. CBA: You’ve obviously spent a lot of time on Phoenix. You sent me some Xeroxes of the character design, etc. Did you design the costume completely? There were obviously a lot of changes. Sal: Yeah, a lot of them. For example, when Jeff told me to combine the astronaut uniform with the costumes from the creatures. I had designed the creatures as being very tall and with very expansive chests so when you took a vest from them and put it on Phoenix, it was very baggy. To me, it was very quirky. I liked that. But when Jeff saw it, he said, “No, make it skin tight.” We had a few little discussions about that too. “No, no, these are advanced creatures, one size fits all.” So again I just went, “Okay,” and went and did it. He tried very hard to be logical. I need a very strong sense of logic in my work. Julie, for example, once did a JLA story where Superman turned a villainous diamond creature into coal. Snapper Carr said that he knew Superman could turn coal to diamond by rubbing it, but asked how he could do the reverse. Superman answered, “I just rubbed him the wrong way!” [laughter] It was a good joke but it didn’t really make any sense. I wanted an explanation, even if it was pseudo-science. Jeff understood that need in me, so every time he had me do something that didn’t make sense or wasn’t logical, he would try to give me rational reasons for it. Another example of that is when Jeff told me to give Phoenix an emblem and I said that I thought we weren’t going to do that. Jeff explained that by saying the Phoenix takes the astronaut emblem off the side of the uniform and puts it on his chest. Then I argued that it was stitched on so how does he take it off the astronaut suit and put it on his new outfit, and Jeff said, “Velcro.” At the time, I didn’t know what Velcro was (I led a very sheltered life). Jeff explained Velcro and, again, I did this kind of meek “okay” and went and did it. Then he started with the logic of “Start with a star pattern and then make it become like a crucifix.” There was logic again, in terms of his “Jesus concept,” so I just said okay and went and did it. There were other things that did not seem logical to me: When the astronaut escaped from the aliens in the first book and went back to tell his wife that he’d survived and then they had a night of intimacy. The next morning he woke up and took off again to save the world, and she very quickly said, “Yeah, okay. I understand.” To me, I thought that after her thinking he was dead and her two friends having lost their husbands, she’s going to insist that he stay, but all she says is “Yeah, okay. I understand.” To me that just seemed too abrupt. I wanted her more anguished and him saying, “No, no, I’ve got this power, I’ve got this responsibility, I’ve got no choice.” And she would let him go very reluctantly. Jeff said that she was the wife of an astronaut and understood his sense of duty, so could be that stoic. CBA: Did you two meet with any frequency? Sal: It seemed like a couple of times a week and I was doing other stuff up there, too, like coloring covers. I did something for one of the other magazines, the black-&-white line. CBA: Drawing adventure stories? Sal: I don’t even remember what it was. I had to draw something. I don’t remember if I really finished or if he ever used it or what but I had to draw something—oh, yeah!—with a Loch Ness monster. No, I don’t think that ever got used. I did a bad job on it anyway. CBA: Was Jeff Rovin the right guy for the job? Sal: He could have been, I think. Really, if it weren’t for Martin Goodman, Jeff would have done well. CBA: After Jeff left—and it got heavily Marvelized, so to speak— you almost couldn’t tell the difference between them and a Marvel book. Conceptually, the Brute was a knock-off of the Hulk, Destructor was a swipe of Spider-Man. Was there any high concept line thrown to you about Phoenix? Sal: No, just what I said before in describing what I thought the series was to have been. CBA: Certainly the look of the line was very much Marvel. Sal: It did seem that way to me, too. But you know, when you asked me before who I revered the most in comics, I told you December 2001

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Carmine and Gil. Well, I had the Flash and Green Lantern in mind when I was doing Phoenix. But whatever Phoenix was meant to be or ended up being, I was just not a “Marvel guy.” CBA: Did you ever see the fourth issue? It was drawn by Ric Estrada and written by Gary Friedrich. Sal: No kidding. I don’t remember it. CBA: All of a sudden they Marvelized the whole book, changing the character to a superhero called The Protector. He and his wife were being accused of destroying cities, adding that tragic pathos Marvel used so well. Sal: I don’t remember any of that. No, now that you mention it, I do sort of remember the splash page with Phoenix trying to “friction himself to death” as he flew—sort of a self-flagellation—or sort of throwing himself on his sword for having been such a failure. Whole new costume and all. CBA: Did you choose the color scheme of Phoenix’s costume? It’s a lighter, non-comic book kind of coloring. Sal: Again, that’s my thing—to try to not be obvious, or predictable. I wanted to be different. My whole orientation as an artist is that you try to break new ground, and you don’t try to imitate anybody. I have paid homage in my work to Gil Kane and Carmine Infantino in the past, but I wanted to do something different, including the colors, so I made the costume a pale blue for the astronaut suit and made it brown for the alien part of the costume. That was another thing that I’ve assumed Goodman didn’t like. If you look through the original issue you’ll see two pages where the brown is suddenly changed to Superman-cape-red. I’m guessing that that was Goodman’s idea, to see what it would look like. I am sure that Martin Goodman believed that red was the only color that people who read comic books could see. He wanted that in there, he did it, and then it went back to being the brown color and he didn’t make any changes after that. CBA: At the time you were working on Phoenix and you met Jeff perhaps twice a week, you were also freelancing? Sal: Yeah. I may still have been doing Archie Comics, too, at the time. CBA: What were you doing at Archie? Sal: Mostly penciling. I wrote a couple of stories but I mostly penciled. CBA: Did you adapt easily to it? Sal: Yeah, I loved it. I was surprised how much I loved it. It was the most consistently enjoyable time I had in comics. They let me do stuff that DC and Marvel never did. I put stuff in backgrounds and so forth and I actually looked forward to seeing them in print. CBA: For instance? Sal: Oh, like Reggie’s got a hot new sports car, he screeches around a corner and just misses running down a cop… and the cop writes out a ticket while Reggie is hitting on a couple of girls, totally oblivious to the cop giving him a ticket. I don’t know how I could explain it to you on the phone, but I learned how to draw eyeballs so that you knew where the character was looking, and at Archie I had a chance to do that, to show Reggie looking at Veronica’s chest, for example. He did this to Betty once, and you could see in the last panel of one page he was explaining something to Betty and he had one arm around her shoulder and the other hand was gesturing like he was explaining and the next panel you would see Betty’s hand held up, those little “radiation” marks emanating from her hand and—you would see Reggie holding his face with similar “radiation” marks coming from there. The guys in the production department at Archie noticed this stuff and they appreciated it and didn’t tell me to take it

Above: Fuzzy shot of Sal Amendola circa 1969. Courtesy of Sal. Below: Typical of the last gasp of Atlas Comics, Phoenix was totally revamped with the final issue (#4) with the title character transformed into a garishly costumed super-hero called The Protector. Scribed by Gary Friedrich and drawn by Ric Estrada and Frank Giacoia. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Above: Perhaps the most recent contribution Sal Amendola has made to comics is his autobiographical story, “My Heroes Have Always Been Super!” which appeared in the TwoMorrows’ book Streetwise. Here’s the splash page. ©2001 Sal Amendola.

out. They understood that what happened was that Reggie grabbed Betty where he wasn’t supposed to, and Betty—being one of the last living virgins in Riverdale—didn’t appreciate it and slapped him. But Reggie didn’t care. He’s too busy being this vain, narcissistic person and so wasn’t wounded. He just continued being his vain, narcissistic self. CBA: Did you write your own stuff? Sal: I wrote one story and I re-wrote another one with [Archie editor/art director] Victor Gorelick. I called him up and said, “I don’t get the punchline on this story.” He asked me to read it to him. He said, “I don’t get it either.” I said, “Suppose I change it to this?” He said, “If you do that, you have to change this, too.” The next thing I knew I’d rewritten the entire story. I inked that one as well. They only let me ink two stories. The first one I was so nervous and so scared I did a sh*tty job on it but they liked it. The next one, I was confident and I did a good job. They never gave me another ink job. But overall, Archie was the best and most consistent period for me. CBA: Was the money good? Sal: No. $25 a page penciling. That’s $24 plus $1 for them to own everything, artwork and all. We had to sign a contract for each job. Actually, it was more than I was getting at DC. CBA: They bought the artwork for $1? Sal: The artwork and all the rights, everything. 10 years later or so, somebody from Archie asked me to go back and I did. They gave me $50 per page: $49 plus $1 for the artwork and everything. My father was dying at the time and I really didn’t have my mind in it so I only did three stories for them and then I had to send a script back and I

never went back. It’s too bad because Archie Comics was the most fun I ever had. CBA: What did you think of the whole Atlas line? Sal: At first I was really excited and I liked a lot of it, but very quickly I didn’t. It just very quickly deteriorated in my mind. What you said—just another Marvel Comics. CBA: Were you at all involved with getting Dick Giordano to do the covers of a number of first issues? Sal: I did the first two covers of Phoenix but they weren’t dynamic enough I guess, and Dick just traced them over and re-inked them. That’s how that happened, I think. CBA: Did you get Dick over to Atlas comics? Sal: I think I did but I’m not sure. At least I wanted him to ink my covers. CBA: I wonder if the thinking was that they wanted to get Neal Adams to do the covers so they got the next best thing with Dick Giordano. Were you paid well at Atlas? Sal: Yeah, especially every time they did something negative to me like take lettering away from me. In effect, I was being paid extra for not doing work. Whenever a change came up from Jeff—”Your lettering sucks, we’re having someone redo it. But you’re still going to be paid for lettering.” ”The guy’s going to have a costume with an emblem, and he’s going to fly like Superman… but, hey! You’re doing good work, so we’re giving you more money.” So, yeah, they paid well and they gave us back the artwork… that was it though… after that there wasn’t a whole lot. CBA: They would give you an increase of, say, $5 a page? Sal: I don’t remember and I am one of the worst people in the world as far as money concerns go. CBA: You don’t remember whether the increases were bonuses? Sal: No, they weren’t bonuses. It was like, “You’re doing good work and we’re giving you more money.” CBA: You didn’t write any of the dialogue in Phoenix? Sal: No. But I would write notes with my layouts. When Phoenix runs on the surface of the Hudson River, and parts the waters, I wrote, “Holy Moses!” Jeff said, “Oh, that’s good! ‘Holy Moses,’ he’s running on water!” or something like that. But they were Jeff’s dialogue, Jeff’s words. CBA: Do you still have the original art for these issues? Sal: No, I gave that to the guy I patterned Phoenix after. He was a classmate at SVA, a guy named Ed Tyler, who was the greatgreat-great-etc. grandson of U.S. President John Tyler. Ed was to me my image of what a typical astronaut would look like so I gave the character the name Ed Tyler and I gave the real Ed the original artwork. So wherever he is out in Huntington, Long Island, or wherever he is these days I don’t know if he still has the artwork, but I gave them to him. CBA: There’s a full page of Phoenix punching out the aliens in your concept drawings. What was that for? Sal: That was when I was first doing sketches for Jeff in his office and so I just quickly did these things to get into it a little or…. CBA: One of your concept drawings had a mask on Phoenix. Was that what you originally wanted? Sal: Oversized extraterrestrial goggles. Yeah. I figured if he’s going to fly, and have superior vision and whatever, one of the things he steals from the aliens is the goggles. But Jeff said, “No, get rid of the goggles.” CBA: He wanted the character bare-faced? Sal: Yes. I wanted him to fly using some alien flying machine. Maybe he stole a little flyer from the aliens and that’s how he got around, but Jeff said, “No, that reminds me of Super Chicken. He should fly on his own.” Again, he fed me the logic: The alien part of the costume—the transistors or whatever—gave him the ability to fly. So I said okay. There were a lot of “okays” from me and, I’m sure, from him, too. My impression of Jeff was that he was a good guy and wanted to do the best possible job he could and wanted people to be happy but it was just other forces that made things uncongenial. CBA: Do you think he took a bad rap? Sal: My impression was that he did, yeah. With me, he was as open and honest as he could be. CBA: Did Jeff take heat that should have been directed towards COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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the Goodmans? Sal: Yeah. Old man Goodman. I don’t think Junior cared one way or the other. I think Chip was willing to let whatever happen, happen. But Old Man Goodman had his ideas and that was it. I’ll tell you another thing: During my last days there, after Jeff had left, I was bringing in my stuff which Larry brought into Goodman’s office. I don’t remember what it was about specifically but Larry went in to stick up for me about something in the story, and, through the wall that separated their offices, I could hear Goodman’s voice shouting, “You sound like you’re on their side!” Then I had my little panic attack. Larry came back and apologized, saying, “We’re doing this and we’re doing that.” Then I left and just went back to Continuity with Dick and Neal and just went to pieces yelling, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! He’s got it down to an us-versus-them thing!” Dick and Neal were trying to calm me down. I was already quitting anyway so who cared? Jeff used to go into Martin’s office and come back to me saying, “No, he’s got a costume and he’s got this and he does that.” So I think a lot of that came from Goodman. CBA: How would you assess your time at Atlas, overall? Sal: It was a good experience. If nobody dies, I think it ends up being something good. I don’t think anybody died from this. CBA: Do you like being remembered for Phoenix? Sal: Ah, not particularly. When it comes right down to it, no. CBA: What would you like to be remembered for? Sal: Batman and Archie. For the good new talent I tried to get into the business when I was DC Talent Coordinator, like Dennis Yee, Tom and Mary Bierbaum; the good “old” talent I got to do work for DC, like Gray Morrow, Al Williamson; for helping Julie Schwartz put together the people for Superman # 400, like Jim Steranko and Bernie Wrightson; and for my teaching. CBA: You spent some time working at Continuity? Sal: Lots. I think a lot of my generation did. Whatever else can be said of them in any context, without Dick and Neal, a lot of us would not have done anything. Those two guys were a big help to a lot of us. CBA: What did you do after Continuity? Sal: Mostly teaching. CBA: You had graduated how many years earlier? Sal: Before teaching? Five years. I graduated in 1969 and started teaching in ’74. CBA: What were you teaching? Sal: A Cartooning night class. The guy who was the head of the day department at the time, Marshall Arisman, called and asked me to teach anatomy and perspective. I didn’t feel confident enough in anatomy but I did teach perspective. I really got into it. I really loved teaching. CBA: Is the pay significant? Can you make a living out of it? Sal: I don’t have a lot of expenses. My biggest expenses are books and tapes, so I do all right. This past year someone did a standard comparison of pay scales, and it turns out that I’m being underpaid by about half, but I always thought I was being well paid. CBA: You said you went back to DC after that? Sal: Yup. I was the talent coordinator and an editor for three years. I left in bad circumstances. Then some years later, Orlando had one of his editors ask me to do a Batman children’s book, digest-size. I was not too happy with that because they had me give Batman fat muscles and that wasn’t the way I saw the character. I wasn’t happy with that. CBA: You did say there was some satisfaction in being talent coordinator? Sal: Some. But for the most part, no. It was a horrible three years. CBA: You felt it was political? Sal: I guess so. CBA: Not a happy experience? Sal: No. Not a lot. The last straw was when they forced me to take work away from someone I’d gotten permission from two executives to give work to. Dick called me in to tell me that I had to take it away from him. I told him that it was his decision and he could take it away from the guy. (I need to make clear, it wasn’t actually Dick’s decision. He was just obeying orders he couldn’t contravene, and expected me to do the same.) It was the one and only time that we weren’t December 2001

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friends. Dick said, “You gave him the job, you have to take it away from him.” So I called this guy and he was so good about it that when I hung up the phone, I literally broke down and cried. The guy told me, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve had this type of thing happen to me so many times over the last 30 years. We’ll sit down to lunch together, have a drink and laugh about it.” If he were nasty about it, it would have been easier, but he was so good about it that I just hung up the phone and cried. I’d had to take work away from people before and it was never a happy situation but this was absolutely unjust. Dick said, “This is how the business works. Understand it or turn in your notice.” I thought about it for a couple weeks and then turned in my notice. I left at the end of that year. CBA: Was that the last comic experience you had except for the Orlando special projects? Sal: No. I did those few Archie comics stories again, then Streetwise, of course (I didn’t have the time I needed on the job, and I think the last few pages showed it, but it was one of the most fun, most satisfying assignments I’d ever been offered. Thank you!). CBA: [laughs] Umm… you’re welcome, I guess. Do you still love comics? Sal: Yeah. I love what they were… what they always could be. I don’t love what they’ve become. When I was a kid, I thought they took us readers for low-intellect, eight-year-old fools. I think that the stories they wrote reflected that. But I loved the art. That’s what kept me coming back to comics. I also have always liked the idea of comics—the ideals that were a part of comics. Superman with his truth and justice, Green Lantern reciting his oath—The Lone Ranger and Tonto. God! The Lone Ranger! Well, obviously, that kind of stuff had a profound effect on me. I think the world should be like that and I think that kids should be brought up with that sense of ethics—respect for each other—for ourselves, when it comes right down to it! And then, something pernicious began happening, starting with my generation. Before, when a character was not selling well, they’d reduce or completely take away the character’s powers, hoping that that contrivance would increase suspense and get readership up. My generation started killing characters off. And they did it with such delight! When Weisinger “killed” Lightning Lad, I felt grief. But when my contemporaries started “serial killing” characters all over the place, the effect of it on the readership was a trivialization. The next step toward getting our adrenaline going was, just how brutally could characters be killed off. Also, to me, the relentlessness of it suggested a repressed contempt for the creators who came before us, and the characters they’d created. Then, we had the total hedonism of the ’80s and ’90s! So we went from hypocritical super-simplistic with a simple-minded-eight-year-old mentality, to harsh, cruel, cynical, no-story, bad-drawing point of view. But I think that not all has been lost. I think that in the last couple or so years, in terms of content, art and craft, things have been getting better again.

CBA Interview

In the House of Goodman Canadian artist Jim Craig on his early days in comics Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Perhaps best known for his three issues as penciler of “3-D Man” for Marvel Premiere (#35-37), Jim Craig began his career as assistant to Mike Ploog, venturing on to become a prolific artist for Atlas Comics in their waning days, and working for Marvel in the mid1970s, notably on Master of Kung Fu. Since those halcyon days, Jim has had a long and successful career as an animation storyboard artist and director, and still dabbles in the comics biz. The artist was interviewed on November 6, 2001 and he copyedited the transcript.

Above: Circa 1970s newspaper picture of Jim Craig and fans. Taken from a Xerox. Note the “3-D Man” splash page! Courtesy of Jim Craig.

Comic Book Artist: Jim, where are you from originally? Jim Craig: Just outside of Toronto, in Mississauga, Ontario. It would be like what Brooklyn is to New York City, that kind of thing. CBA: Did you get interested in comics at a young age? Jim: Yeah, I would say at probably seven or eight. I remember having to stay home one day from school, sick or something, and my mother bought me a Marvel Tales, #2 or 3, which I thought was really neat after I read it, and I started buying them in the stores. The way Marvel seemed to operate, the stories were like soap operas, so I had to get the next one to find out what happened, and I got hooked! I became a collector. I was a bit ahead of my time, because I even put them in plastic bags long before plastic bags were invented for these things. Then I found out there was a second-hand shop in downtown Toronto—where my parents really didn’t want me to go there on my own at such a young age but then let me go eventually—and I started picking up comics fairly inexpensively. I went every Saturday morning, and waited outside until the guy opened, because if you weren’t there in the first 10 minutes, you missed all of that good stuff. There must’ve been a handful of us in the city that would be called true collectors. CBA: Did you draw your own comics as a kid? Jim: That’s a good question. I took art class, and the standard thing was to draw pots and pans—still lifes—and after a couple of years of that, they’d bring out the same old crap on a shelf, and they’d say, “Okay, draw this.” Of course, no art teacher ever taught art; they taught art history, but not how to draw. One time, when I was in grade 10, I said, “All right, I’ve had enough of this,” and I just drew a comic book story. I had a progressive teacher, and she said, “Sure, that’ll be your project for the whole term.” So I did a 20-page story in black-&-white on letter-size sheets, and lettered it myself, handed

it in, and I got 100%! CBA: What was it about? Jim: It was called “The Galactic Student,” and it was about a guy who came from another planet to Earth and was misunderstood. One of the TV shows I watched back then was Then Came Bronson, and of course, I liked the Silver Surfer, so it was a combination of the two. He was a regular guy who rode a motorcycle, and he seemed to be good like the Silver Surfer, so…. CBA: [laughs] Then Came Bronson… Jim: Yeah. You remember that? CBA: It was about a guy traveling around on a motorcycle. Jim: Yeah, that was a great show; I loved it, too. So, the next year, the teacher asked, “What are you going to do this year?” I had the same teacher. I said, “How can I top 100%?” She said, “Well, you can try! Why don’t you do what you did last year, but continue the story, because I’m really interested to see what happens.” So I did a sequel in color, and got 110%! That ate into my lousy art history mark, so I still did well in art…. [laughter] Then I debated whether should I go to college or go on to what we called Grade 13, which was pre-college. I went up to visit the college, and to make a long story short, I decided to go. I took an illustration course, and again, found out they were trying to train you to be a paste-up artist (an obsolete art right now). The college did that because they had to guarantee jobs for people when they finished the course, or a reasonable percentage had to have a job when they went out. So they didn’t really teach art, and that bothered me. They had a cartooning course, just an elective, and it was the one class I could take. Well, I transferred over, and got to do what I wanted, basically, and learned what I wanted. All my teachers were editorial cartoonists—there were no comic book companies in Canada—and they said, “You’ll never make it as a comic book artist, you should become an editorial cartoonist, yadda, yadda, yadda.” Anyway, we had guests, and I met Mike Ploog and Bernie Wrightson (who was doing Swamp Thing at the time). Anyway, Ploog called me up one day after I graduated, and asked me to come down and help him out on Planet of the Apes. This was 1974, I believe. I worked on several issues—but on one, I think it was number four, I wrote my last name on a highway sign and my age, which was 20. [laughter] CBA: Were these the renowned penciled stories that Mike did? Jim: Yeah. I think the last couple of issues were inked by Vince Colletta, or somebody like that. I think the stuff I did got inked, because he did his own pencils for those books, which looked beautiful. They looked a lot better than the way they were reproduced. CBA: What was Mike like? Jim: He was the type of guy you’d find in a bar fight. [laughter] A biker-type guy, he was really cool. I like him a lot, he’s a pretty tough nut. He was friendly, got along with everybody, but you didn’t want to cross him. I recall he was really pissed off at a writer or an editor at Marvel when he was drawing Man-Thing, and he decided to quit. In his last issue, in the last panel, he drew himself walking away saying, “I quit.” Of course, they changed that panel in the final printing, and they rewrote it with the hero character walking away and saying something profound. [laughter] It was pretty funny. CBA: Where was Mike living at the time? Jim: In Denville, New Jersey. CBA: So you moved from the Toronto area to New Jersey? Jim: Yeah, I lived in his house for a while, then got a place of my own after two months. I ended up staying down there for about a year, and then got to the point where his wife was either sick of me COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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or something, [laughs] and he said, “I think it’s time you went to Marvel and tried it on your own,” so I started going every week to Marvel. The only way I could get in was for the receptionist to hit the magic little button to get you through the doors. They had a tendency to send janitors out to the waiting room to check your artwork out and get rid of people. It was pretty wild! [laughter] So I got in by saying, “Hey, I’ve got a pile of stuff from Mike Ploog here he wanted delivered,” [laughter] so they let me in to hand it to Marv Wolfman, and I said, “Hey, I do stuff, too!” and I’d show him. CBA: What was Orb? Jim: That was before I went down to the States. Orb was a magazine I contributed to in which I did a character called The Northern Light—because of which my work is in the National Archives of Canada and the National Library as one of the six or seven Canadian super-heroes—whom I didn’t create, but recreated. Meaning it was the kind of character that really wasn’t going anywhere, and again, I asked if I could play with the character a bit, change him, make him a little more macho, and they said, “Sure,” and then it took off after I changed it. But in Canada, numbers are different, we didn’t then have the audience to buy the stuff. CBA: Did you have any specific influences in your style? Jim: A lot. In fact, when people say “style,” I’m probably the last guy to admit that I have a style, although I have a lot of people say that Jim Craig, they can tell my style—I guess I can, too, because I know I did it [laughs]—I would say anywhere from Wrightson, Ploog, Adams… I used to mimic Ploog very well… John Buscema was a big influence, I loved his stuff. Even John Romita, not drawing but more in storytelling, I guess. CBA: Would you say Kirby? Jim: Oh, yeah, Kirby. Definitely, I think that’s part of the way I learned to draw, I’d draw a rock or something, or look at a comic to see how they drew a rock, and I’d close the comic and try drawing it myself, then I’d open the comic and see how they drew it and correct myself. It was kind of a neat way to learn, doing it by memory. You start picking up styles, whether your remember it or not. There’s little bits where I can tell my Wrightson’s coming through, I can tell my Buscema’s coming through, I can tell… it depends on the situation. CBA: What was your reception at Marvel? Jim: They kept saying, “Next week, maybe there’s this. Next week, maybe there’s that.” That went on for a long time. They finally gave me some ads to do, so again, I think my first ad was in one of their black-&-white kung fu books. I also did an ad in their black-&-white Planet of the Apes—this is after Ploog—and they kept saying, “Next week, there might be some inking, there might be some of this, there might be some of that,” and I got to the point where I just said, “Guys, I’ve got five dollars in my pocket, and that might get me back up north, maybe. I’ve got a hole in my shoes, it’s November, it’s raining, just give me a yes or a no, no more maybes.” In the beginning, they don’t want to hurt your feelings, and you don’t want your feelings hurt, but after a while, you get pretty tough and say, “Yes or no? Are you going to give me a job or not? If you’re not, I’m going home.” At that point, I’d had enough of them. And they said, “Well, maybe next week,” again, and I said, “Fine, I’m going across the street to Atlas. I know Marvel inside and out, I know your stuff, I know your characters, and I only wanted to work for you guys, but I’ll go across the street.” So I went across the street and did the same thing, put my foot up on the guy’s desk, said, “I’ve got a hole in my shoes and five bucks in my pocket, don’t give me any crap, just tell me if you want to use me or not!” and they gave me two books. CBA: [laughs] Was it Larry you dealt with? Jim: Larry Lieber and Jeff Rovin, I believe. I started with Jeff, but spent most of my time with Larry Lieber. He used to give me Jack Kirby lessons for hours. CBA: What was Atlas like? Jim: It was neat to go into their office, because they also did Swank magazine, so it was cool to go by all the light boxes and see all the slides of their pin-up girls. It was an odd office, as opposed to Marvel. Marvel looked like a very artsy place inside, a lot of drawing boards and guys working away. Atlas looked more like an accountant’s office, or a normal business office, small, clean, you know, on the 18th floor of some building. It was literally across the December 2001

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street from Marvel, when Marvel was on Madison Avenue. It was around the corner. It was a strange place where everybody wore suits. It was different, I guess, from Marvel, where everybody was having trouble keeping their pants up and stuff like that. CBA: [laughs] Did you get to meet Martin Goodman? Jim: Oh, yeah. Martin Goodman, older fella. He didn’t have too much to say, he seemed to be a very business-type guy. He was pleasant, but so was Stan Lee. (I met Stan Lee a year later, and he said, “Yeah, you do good work.” I don’t think he’d ever seen my stuff, it was just the standard stock answer, whatever he had to say! [laughter]) Yeah, I met him, but I dealt mostly with Chip Goodman. Because I was on a visa, I needed some kind of permit to stay in the States longer. I wasn’t doing anything illegal, but to stay there you should have a work permit, and the Goodmans looked into it for me as a favor, and Chip’s answer was, “Marry one of our Swank models.” [laughter] Of course, being 20 years old, I was pretty stupid back then, I could kick myself now… “No, I don’t want to get married!” [laughter] CBA: Well, you’d get a honeymoon out of the deal, anyway! Were you given full-script assignments right off the bat? Jim: Yep. I think Scorpion #3 was the first one.

Below: In the mid-1980s, Jim was a Country-Western songwriter/ performer. Here’s a detail of the cover portrait on his single “Forget About It Romance.” Courtesy of Jim Craig.

CBA: Did you have any opinion of books they published? Jim: Yeah, it’s hard for me to recall 27 years ago. I was somewhat impressed, but while the glitter was good and the ideas were neat, I felt the stories or the content wasn’t really fleshed out enough yet. I’m one to talk, because I come in and take over Scorpion, which I actually liked the way he was originally, but they wanted to change the Scorpion into Spider-Man, basically. I even said to Howard Chaykin, who I met briefly walking into Seaboard, I said, “Hey, Howard, they want me to change Scorpion, man, I’ve got to warn ya, you’re not going to like it,” because I knew Chaykin was sort of an anti-super-hero guy. He said, “Ah, I don’t care. Doesn’t matter to me. Do whatever.” I said, “No, I’m really warning you, you’re probably not going to like this, and I don’t want to hear about it if you don’t, don’t come after me, this is what they want, okay?” “No, no, no, don’t worry about it!” After he saw it, I saw him, and he did want to kill me! [laughter] CBA: Did you hear anything about Alex Toth planning to revamp the character? The story is that Howard came into the Atlas offices to deliver the second issue, and looked down and saw concept drawings that were done by Alex Toth, and he obviously stormed out because he knew he was losing the book. Jim: No, I never saw or heard about that. I probably came in after, when they decided to do a full-blown Spider-Man rip-off. CBA: Was it explicit? Did they say, “We’re going to do a knock-off of Spider-Man”? Jim: At the time, I wasn’t allowed to admit that at all, but yeah, that was basically it, “We want Spider-Man.” I guess the books weren’t selling or something, and they wanted to start doing the Pepsi version of Coke, you know, they wanted to have the same kind of characters as Marvel. CBA: Was Hands of the Dragon a direct rip-off of Shang-Chi? Jim: I don’t think so. It may have been, from their concept, but it wasn’t told to me to be that at all. Basically, Bruce Lee probably came into a conversation we were having—and, remember, in New York at the time, you walked down the streets, there were Bruce Lee movies playing all over the place, and that song, “Everybody Is Kung Fu Fighting,” was on the radio… Kung fu became really hot stuff at the time, so everybody just wanted to get on the bandwagon. CBA: Did Jim Mooney help out with that one issue of Hands of the Dragon? The splash page looks completely done by him. Jim: He might’ve been the inker on it, but the pencils were all mine. When Jim went over my stuff, he made it look like it was all Jim Mooney. One of my problems—and one of the many reasons I faded out of comics, period—was because I would start out with good inkers, but as it went on, I was promised good inkers, but they usually gave me guys who did it over the weekend (especially on Kung Fu at Marvel), who just destroyed my stuff! The work looked better in pencils. Now, I liked Mooney, who was a good inker, so that wasn’t a problem. CBA: Were you alternating issues of MOKF with Paul Gulacy? Jim: Gulacy had left the book. I was a victim on this one, I didn’t realize it at the time. Gulacy, obviously, had a strong following, and any artist who followed him, well, you might as well commit suicide rather than be the guy taking over the book! He was already three

months late when I got the book, so I could never catch up. I was alternating with was the other fellow, Mike Zeck, and I rarely had two issues in a row. It was very tough, because I could never catch up and because Doug Moench would write 50-page scripts for a 17-page story; the average Marvel scripts wouldn’t be more than 25, 26 pages. CBA: A page per page, so to speak? Jim: Yeah, just like movies, a minute per page in film scripts. Well, it depends… one line could be a page-and-a-half. Regarding “3-D Man,” Roy Thomas wrote his scripts on postcards, basically. It was, [mimicking Roy’s breathless voice] “The first five pages have to do this, the next five have to do that, throw in a little bit of this, whatever you want to do here, and send it in. Thanks, bye!” [laughter] CBA: When you went into Atlas, did it seem like a sinking ship? Jim: Well, it was still a new company. I was too new in the business to know. I do recall that it was small, just a couple of editors, and then it went down to one editor. [laughter] Larry Lieber, who wanted to be his brother, Stan Lee, and he was a great guy, really nice, but I don’t know if he was the right man for the job! [laughs] CBA: Why? Jim: He just seemed to be too obsessed with one guy, Jack Kirby, and Kirby was all he wanted to talk about! We spent hours in his office talking Kirby, so how was the work getting done? He was fascinated with how one could draw like Kirby. Larry actually taught me a lot on how to observe, because at the time, I really didn’t want to be like Kirby, I wanted to be more like Neal Adams. But Larry taught me things, like less is more on female characters, don’t do all the details, don’t do this, don’t do that. Here’s where you’ve got to do this, here’s where you’ve got to do that. He pointed out things for me to look at, to observe, and points to keep in mind. He’s a very good teacher that way. Larry should’ve been a teacher, because he seemed to have the patience for it. He wanted to bring me along, that was the nicest feeling; I got treated really well in New York, as far as I’m concerned. On the other hand, I had guys like Adams tell me to go back to Canada and learn how to draw! But once I made it, Adams was cool. Adams was trying to filter out the guys who weren’t serious by insulting them to death. CBA: I take it you visited Neal? Did you go to him out of respect? Jim: Neal was my hero. It was like going up to Clint Eastwood and saying, “I love your movies” and the guy kicks you in the nuts! It was like finding out God doesn’t love you, you know what I mean? [laughs] It was weird, just weird! Neal said, “You don’t know how to draw, go back to Canada, and don’t come back until you can.”It was really a strange, strange situation. He just basically put me down, and even had all his cronies start picking on me, too. “So you’re a big guy from Canada, coming down here to take over, eh?” I was like, “Just leave me alone! I just want to get into the business! I’m not trying to prove anything!” Neal even told Gray Morrow not to give me work, because Gray was almost about to hire me for something, as Mike Ploog had introduced us. CBA: The Red Circle line? Jim: Yeah, and Adams told him not to hire me! I got a little pissed off about that one, because if I didn’t need any help in the other direction, so I just couldn’t wait to do it, I was pissed! I mean, everything went wrong that day! When I went to the elevator at Continuity to leave and pushed the button—a girl was beside me— and the elevator door wouldn’t open! Adams comes along and says, “You still here?” I said, “Yeah, your elevator doesn’t work.” He pushes the button, and the door opens! [laughs] I said, “Geez, I tried it six or seven times and wouldn’t open; it opens for you, isn’t that nice?” So I walk in, and he sticks his face in as the door is closing, and he says, “Some people are just made of mud.” When the door closed, I almost started pounding the door, wanting to get him at that point, he had me so pissed! There was a girl cringing in the elevator, thinking I’m going to kill somebody! [laughter] Anyway, a year later, I was heading down Madison Avenue, walking over to Marvel—because I was working for them at that point—and Neal bumped into me and said, “Hey, aren’t you the guy from Canada?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How come you don’t come by and see me?” I said, “Because I don’t need your verbal abuse.” He said, “You asked me what I thought!” I said, “You know what? You’re right, I did ask you what you thought, and you did tell me, so I guess I can’t COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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hold that against you.” He said, “Come up and have a tea with me!” And up I went, and he was the nicest guy to me after that. I figured he just wanted to make sure I could do it. I couldn’t draw for a week after he initially criticized me, the year before! I had to get up off my seat and say, “I’m going to make it! I’m going to do it!” In a way, he brought out the best and the worst in me, one way or the other. He made me want to do it. CBA: Did you work up at Continuity at all? Jim: No, I didn’t even want to. I was basically doing my own thing at that point. I moved back to Canada. Once I got in at Atlas, I could work anywhere I wanted, so I moved out of New Jersey, went back to Canada, and worked from home, basically. Then Atlas folded eight months later, so it was short career there. I had half of Hand of the Dragon #2 done, and they phoned and said it’s time to quit. CBA: Was “3-D Man” [in Marvel Premiere] a trial run for a book? I was surprised there were three issues. Jim: Yep. It was originally going to actually be in 3-D, for starters. I think they had high hopes for it even before I started drawing the book. I know Roy was talking about it being in 3-D. That’s why we did that kind of weird green and red effect, as I’d draw on different pieces of vellum. CBA: You had to do that to the entire book? Jim: No, just when he jumped into the kid’s glasses. Incidentally, I called Marvel about four years ago and said I’d like to revamp 3-D Man, bring him up to the ’90s, as he’s been in the kid’s glasses all these years; the kid became an alcoholic, and he’s in an alley one day and gets the crap beat out of him, and he somehow has the glasses with him in an old backpack, puts them on, and 3-D Man jumps out, saving the day, and it continues on from there. CBA: Was “3-D Man” the most notice you’ve received in comics? Jim: I don’t know. I didn’t think anybody noticed, to be honest! [laughter] I used to see “3-D Man” in comics bins for 35¢ for years, so I thought it was a dud, basically. I’m surprised I’m known for that at all. I don’t know what I’m known for. I also did an annual, What If? #1, and I’ve done other things, but I guess “3-D Man” is probably one that people talk about, because it was three issues in a row, and it seemed to go somewhere and then stop. You’ll notice they never really used the character again, though I think I saw him drawn by another artist in an Avengers book. I think in a What If?, “What if the Avengers had Formed in the 1950s,” I think 3-D Man was part of it. I think that’s the only time, you might know better, that 3-D Man was ever done. [Transcriber’s note: The What If? issue guest-starred the Human Robot, Venus, Gorilla-Man, and Marvel Boy. 3-D Man was also featured in an issue of The Incredible Hulk—a title that for awhile seemed to be devoted to wrapping up storylines. 3-D Man was recently used in Avengers Forever, the maxi-series written by Kurt Busiek. There’s also some connection between the 3-D Man and current Avenger Triathlon, but that has yet to be fully revealed in the book.—JBK.] CBA: I’m not much on the characters, except maybe the real-life characters in comics! After “3-D Man,” did you continue to pursue comics work? Jim: Here’s what happened: If you back up to the Marvel story I related about going in every week, and them saying no dice, it was an hour-and-a-half bus ride from where Mike Ploog lived, so when I went in, it was pretty important to me, it was a full day trip for me to go in and deal with these people, and for them to have nothing to say, but with a promise for the following week, that’s why I got kind of edgy, I think! “Don’t tell me anything if you don’t mean it,” I basically said. Maybe this is a good business practice, but I realize now that they just didn’t want to take a chance on me. Marv Wolfman said, “I know you can draw well, but can you tell a story?” I used to volunteer to do somebody else’s script. I said, “Give me ten pages of somebody else’s script, and I’ll do it!” Marv said, “Yeah, but that wouldn’t be fair to you.” I said, “What’s not fair is you’re giving me nothing here! I’ll do it free of charge, and the other guy can continue doing what he’s doing, it won’t even influence him. I’ll just bring it in for you to see.” No, they felt that wasn’t fair to me, so they wouldn’t do anything. They gave me the odd ad and stuff like that, but that’s when I finally went across to Atlas. Once I got there, then Marvel started calling me. Once somebody else took a chance December 2001

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with me, and Marvel saw my first book, they said, “All right.” Roy Thomas called me right out of the blue at my home and asked, “How would you like to draw What If? #1?” CBA: So what happened in the later ’70s? The work just dried up and they stopped calling? Jim: That’s a good question. Today we have couriers abundantly— FedEx, Airborne, UPS—but back then they depended totally on the mail system, and Canada had mail strike after mail strike after mail strike happen in the late ’70s, and my stuff was getting held up in stations, so it was beginning to be very difficult to work for Marvel. An animation company called Nelvana was starting to get big up here, so I went down there to see if I could get any work, and they ended up quite interested in me. That was real money, compared to making $40 a page for Marvel (who, after two years, gave me a raise of two bucks per page). CBA: Were the rates better at Atlas? Jim: I don’t recall what the rates were, but I think they were better. They wanted to get top guns from Marvel if they could. They wanted to basically be Marvel all over again. CBA: Was it a good experience to work for Atlas? Jim: It was a good experience. The problem was I always felt like I was working for the number two company, as opposed to the number one company. I knew they were just trying to be a copy of something else, they were doing the Marvel thing without being Marvel. I constantly heard about Martin Goodman starting Marvel comics years ago, and basically he was doing it all over again. That’s what I was hearing a lot. “We’re going to be as big as Marvel, we’re going to take it over.” Not in a vengeful way, except for the obvious blatant, “We’re going to equal Marvel, we’re going to do it, did you know he owned the company, “ comments like that. “He did it once, he can do it again.” I don’t remember spiteful words being used in the office, because they didn’t wanted to have legal problems, so they didn’t want to talk about it too much, especially to a young guy like me. CBA: Did you think of going over to DC at all? Jim: No, I didn’t know their characters well enough, although I have done Weird War Tales and a few things, Ghosts. I only saw two printed out of the five or six I did. They bought them for inventory, put them in a drawer and print them whenever. I never knew when they’d be published. CBA: Since your comic book heyday, you’ve had a distinguished and long career as a storyboard artist, right? Jim: Yes. I just finished directing 26 episodes of Mythic Warriors, which is an animated series for CBS based on real mythology. Other than storyboarding, I did six years of a magazine called Junior Jays (which I created) for the Toronto Blue Jays, which was a comic-type digest magazine for kids. I did go back to Marvel several years ago, working for the custom comics, so I did premium comics for Pizza Hut. I did a Vengeance comic of the Ghost Rider Toy Biz series, Drake’s Cakes… they’d all be regular stories, printed the size of a postage stamp. CBA: [laughs] Were they better rates for doing special projects? Jim: Yes, it’d be double rate, because they had no royalties or anything like that to go on for sales. I did a Hulk book, that was for UNICEF, and they sold them through the books at $5 a pop. I did one, Trial of Venom, with Daredevil and Spider-Man, also for UNICEF along with several Spider-Man comics for Canadian school kids.

Above: Jim Craig shares the art chores on this cover of Marvel Premiere #35 with no one less than the co-creator of the Marvel Age of Comics, Jack “The King” Kirby himself. Repros of Jim’s interior art appear in the background of the foreground art by Jack (and inker Frank Giacoia?). “3-D Man” is a fondly-recalled super-hero mini-series set in the 1950s and written by Roy Thomas. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Capsule Interviews

The Atlas/Seaboard Experience Contributors on the promise—and reality—of Atlas Comics EDITOR’S NOTE: The following reminiscences were culled from both phone interviews and written comments from the following contributors (and one almostcontributor!) to Atlas/Seaboard, all solicited in the Fall of 2001. Our thanks for their participation and our apologies to the many fine former-Atlas folks we neglected.

Below: Penciler Alan Weiss has mixed feelings about the inking job the late Jack Abel did on Alan’s single contribution to Atlas Comics, The Brute #3. Jack was a dear friend and supporter of many Young Turks of comics of the ’70s. Here are three panels of the blue beast preparing a feast. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals.

Alan Weiss artist/writer Atlas was going to do a creator-owned line, and I sold them on one of my characters, but the company folded first. I got a lot of work done—plots for about six issues, one issue laid out. This would’ve been 1974. While they were putting together the contracts for a creator-owned line, in the meantime, they asked did I want to do something else for them? I said sure, because they were going to give me an issue of that barbarian Conan rip-off guy, Ironjaw. For some reason, that got changed into an issue of The Brute (#3), so I penciled that issue. Frankly, there isn’t a whole lot more, but I was really excited about doing a creator-owned character. My concept was called Drastic Action Comics starring Skuff Ruffin, the Universal Sidekick. (Shooter had loved this idea, because I pitched this later to Marvel, too! I’ve sold it three, four times but it never gets to the finished stage.) This is a deal where I figured if this is the one that sells and this is the character I do, I want to do something I wouldn’t get sick of after two issues. So, I wanted something that could go from genre to genre, issue by issue, and so the set-up of the so-called character was that this guy’s a professional comic book character, except that he’s short and cute, so he always gets cast as a sidekick. So, every issue, he’s in a different comic book every adventure. He lives in the Village, wakes up and gets this phone call, for instance, that says, “We’ve got this science-fiction strip, come on down,” so he gets up, a little hungover. He’s about 33, but he looks 10 years younger. His name is Raymond Ruffin, but they call him Skuff, because it’s Skuff, it’s rough, he’s abrasive… he’s like Jimmy Cagney, except he’s got dark hair. He shaves before he goes down there, but by the end of the adventure, he’s usually got stubble on him. He has to sign this release form, just like if you were a stuntman, and then he goes to the weapons department, and to the costume department. The guy who runs the costume department

is named “Threads Edison,” and he says, “Here’s your barbarian suit,” or “Here’s your super-hero outfit,” or whatever he needs, various weapons. Then he goes into a room called the “splash room,” where the splash page is in this pool, but it’s reversed, so he dives into the pool, literally, and then you turn the page, and there’s the splash page, and he’s inside the adventure, So, that was the character I was going to do, and I was really excited about it. I had developed it because Jim Starlin, Frank Brunner, Steve Englehart and I were all talking about doing creatorowned stuff, that’s one of the reasons we were in California. We almost did these characters for Rolling Stone magazine, they were going to do a comic strip insert, but that fell through. Ultimately, they just wanted to do glitter rock band super-hero guys, and we weren’t too interested in that, and they never did it anyway. That’s why I had this guy ready and notched up by the time that Atlas came around. Jeff Rovin loved it, he said, “Let’s do it,” and I was just waiting for the contract when The Brute came along, and I figured, “Okay, I can have fun with that, it’s like drawing the Hulk with more hair,” and Jack Abel inked it. So if you’ll remember my Jack Abel page in Streetwise, there’s that one panel that shows the cover of The Brute, which is not the actual cover of the issue we did! That’s the only issue I did of any Atlas comic, and Kupperberg set it up for me because we were friends and he wanted to get as many of the guys he thought were good, especially of the new guys. We were still relatively new in ’74, so that was Chaykin, Mitchell, a whole bunch of us. Ernie Colón did a lot of work for Atlas, and of course they had those great covers. Neal did a bunch of covers, and Russ Heath did some nice artwork. CBA: Did you like the job that Jack Abel did? Alan: No. [laughs] I’ll tell ya what, though, as I look at it now, I don’t feel as strongly as I did back then. It’s a nice comic book, it’s okay, there were subtleties lost, to say the least. I love Jack, did then, do now. But especially back then, I wanted to show off my stuff, and I didn’t think that inking did that to its best advantage. The inking kind of flattened things and angularized things, and gee, I probably have Xeroxes of the pencils still from there. For instance, the female character was my girlfriend at the time, and I drew her kind of realistically, but Jack sort of homogenized it, like he did everything. No, at the time I was pretty freaked out, but you know, looking at it now, I think, “Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s a good, solidlooking comic book, and it stands up with the rest of the Atlas books.” I said, “Well, you know, it’s only one book, and it’s 100 years ago now, so what difference does it make?” The main thing about it was that I got to work with Jack. I don’t know if the word ever filtered back to Jack on how much I disliked it at the time, but when I came back to New York, there didn’t seem to be any sour grapes. As a matter of fact, I got closer to Jack than ever during that period around 1976 to ‘80, when he was up at Continuity.

Walter Simonson

artist/writer I first heard about Atlas/Seaboard around 1974. They ran for about a year. I remember the first time I heard about them, I think everybody else knew about them once the company got under way. They were in New York, I was living in the city at the time, so I’m sure when the word got out, I heard about it immediately. CBA: Sal Amendola did a comic book called Phoenix, and he said that you were the first artist to be considered for the job. Do you recall that being so? 92

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Walter: No, I don’t at all! [laughs] CBA: Did you know Jeff Rovin at all? Walter: Yeah, I knew Jeff before he became the editor over there. CBA: Atlas/Seaboard was the first real challenge in the ’70s to the Big Two, DC and Marvel. Do you recall your feelings, or the feelings of your peers about the company? Was there heavy anticipation? Walter: Most of the guys who were like me, the young guys in the business, had no problem working for Atlas/Seaboard. A lot of older guys who were already established (guys probably younger than I am today) were not interested in leaving their companies to go work for a new, untested company. Atlas was offering essentially what amounted to double rates. This was in the days when there were no royalties. My rate instantly doubled when I did any work for Atlas, so I was certainly happy to go work for them. No problem. Archie Goodwin did a couple of stories for them. With Ditko, he created The Destructor, so I was close to some of the guys who were going there to work anyway, and of course, Howard Chaykin went over to do The Scorpion. CBA: Were you living across the hallway from Howard at the time? Walter: That’s probably right. This was ‘74 and we had a jam penciling job to help Howard out of a deadline problem. I remember Mike Kaluta, Howard and myself all sitting in this one room apartment, cranking out drawings for a bit for an issue of The Scorpion. It was probably #2. CBA: Bernie was there, too? Walter: Yes, he lived downstairs. CBA: Howard said it was quite a jam fest. Walter: It was! Well, that kind of stuff was always fun, back when we were all young and full of piss and vinegar. CBA: Howard said you were the wise old man of the group. December 2001

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Walter: [laughs] Well, I was probably the old man of the group, because I’d gone to college twice, a shade older than most of my peers in comics by three or four years, But I hesitate to append the word “wise.” [laughter] I was pretty green. Howard was much more tempered than I was back in those days. CBA: [Incredulous] He was? He called you guys the “Mild Bunch.” Walter: That’s probably right. Alan Milgrom and I were roommates at the time, Howard was on the same floor of that building—in Regal Park, Queens—and Bernie was two floors below us. CBA: Did you guys jam together a lot to get jobs out? Walter: Not a whole lot, but whenever it was necessary. Most of us were able to keep up our end of the deadlines, but there were occasional times when one or the others would step in and do the work and help somebody out of a jam. So it did happen from time to time. It might’ve only been a panel here or a panel there. For The Scorpion, I remember drawing a cat on a wharf. I’m sure there were other panels—I could probably identify all of them now—but I remember having to draw that cat, and trying to figure out what a cat would look like in the absence of any reference on hand! [laughter] CBA: Did you do any inking on that job, too? Walter: I don’t think so. I don’t remember doing any inking at this point. CBA: Things collapsed pretty quickly for Howard with The Scorpion. He said that he walked into the office and saw concept drawings by Alex Toth, though Howard had yet to hear that he was going to be replaced on the book. Do you recall Howard’s state of mind, living across the hall from him? Walter: I really don’t. I remember Howard in general being pretty cranky about what happened with The Scorpion, but I don’t

Above: Let it never be left unsaid that Walter Simonson is a mensch for all seasons! Not only has the “nicest guy in the comics biz” been extremely supportive of CBA and all of Ye Ed’s projects, but he also goes the extra mile when it comes to unearthing rare and unknown stuff! You’re our fave dude in the industry, W.S.! At the last minute, the artist/writer dug up the stats for this lost rarity, the unpublished “Gorgo vs. Rodan” story intended for an Atlas/ Seaboard black-&-white title that was never realized. Walter tells us he recalls solo stories of the prehistoric two antagonists completed by other artists, all apparently written by Gabriel Levy. Does anyone know what happened to Gabe, whose comicsscripting career appears to have lasted as long as his single client, Atlas Comics? Courtesy of and ©2001 Walter Simonson.

Above: The legendary team of Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson certainly went to town in this samurai tale, “The Temple of the Spider,” which appeared in Thrilling Adventure Stories #2. The epic even included (yuk!) gargantuan arachnids! ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

remember any details now. Howard probably remembers far more about that than I do! [laughter] It was his book. CBA: Did you have many dealings with Jeff Rovin? Walter: Well, I did two things for Jeff. I did a samurai story that Archie Goodwin wrote called “The Temple of the Spider.” It appeared in Thrilling Adventure Stories #2, which as far as I know was the last Atlas/Seaboard comic to actually make it into print and get any kind of distribution. That one I actually got the artwork back on. I don’t know if comics were giving art back much quite at that time, but I think it was before they were doing it in general. CBA: Jeff says they were the first company to really do it, at least consistently. Walter: Actually, Gold Key/Western would do it, but they didn’t announce it as public policy. If you asked for it, they would give it back to you. That was through ’72, when I did some work for them. They didn’t really make a big deal out of it. It was just quietly done. I think that samurai job is one of the best jobs I ever did. Archie did a beautiful job of writing it. That turned up in a comic with a Neal Adams cover, it had stories by John Severin, Alex Toth, Russ Heath job, and even a Jack Sparling job. That was actually quite a good comic book! I’ve got to say, in that company, they were phenomenal artists and storytellers, all of them. I’m not embarrassed by that story in that book, not at all. That was some of the best work I’ve done, so

I was pretty pleased. Archie just wrote a beautiful job. CBA: Jeff wrote in The Comics Journal that he tried to get licensed characters. One of the characters he tried to get—but the company just ended up being too cheap about it—was Godzilla. Do you recall that at all? Walter: I don’t know what Jeff was trying to do, license-wise, though it certainly wouldn’t surprise me. The second job I did was for one of the black-&-white magazines, was one of a series of stories that featured “look-alike” characters of the Japanese monsters. I don’t know whether that meant Jeff was unable to secure the rights, or they were still negotiating and it hadn’t happened yet, but there were three chapters that I remember. I don’t recall who wrote them; it might’ve been Gabriel Levy. CBA: Did you know him? Walter: Never met him personally. He wrote several things for Seaboard, and I don’t know if he wrote anything for anybody else. I think he wrote the story that I did. Anyway, mine was the third chapter. In the first two, there was a Rodan look-alike solo story and a Godzilla look-alike solo story. The third chapter, the one I drew, they were both hauled to Washington, DC, broke loose, and got into a big fight. I believe the Godzilla story was by Howard Nostrand, and the second, “Rodan” one was by Romero, who did Modesty Blaise for years. What was funny about it was, none of us had any collaborative reference, so I think Howard drew the Godzilla pretty much as a straight tyrannosaurus rex, and Romero drew the flying creature about the size of a fighter jet… it may have even had a tail, I can’t remember. By the time I was drawing mine, I didn’t have any of their reference, I just knew it was Rodan and Godzilla, so I ended up drawing more one like Gorgo, a big tyrannodon, and the other a straight pterodactyl. None of the creatures in any of the stories looked much like the other creatures. I don’t know if any of these stories were ever published, but I know mine didn’t. One of the last things Jeff did before he left the company was to very kindly make a set of full-size stats of that job I had done, since the artwork was coming back to the artists. I picked those up in the office either the day or the day after he was gone. Shortly thereafter, the company folded, and the artwork never came back. I don’t know what actually happened to the originals, but I managed to get— thanks to Jeff—a complete set of full-size stats of that job, so I have a record of it. Presumably the series was going to go on and have more giant monsters battling each other. CBA: How would you characterize your work on that? Walter: Actually, I liked that job. I tried some storytelling stuff I hadn’t done before, very simple stuff. It was a very linear job, there wasn’t a lot of black in it—it was for a black-&-white book—there were no tones, I was really using shapes, trying to get the shapes of the creatures… I drew the giant Godzilla character to make him look more like a guy in a suit, so when his arms would bend, I’d put these folds and creases in the elbows, stuff like that. [laughter] It was a very goofy job and I treated it that way. I didn’t make fun of the characters. I had a good time with it, did some stuff where I had a little insert, a little square detail in the panel, and the next panel would be a blow-up of that insert, stuff like that. It was an okay job, I got to trash a little bit of Washington, D.C. I grew up in that area, so it was fun to wreck all those buildings at the time. CBA: You seemed to approach your Atlas/Seaboard jobs with quite a bit of enthusiasm. Why was that? Walter: What was not to be enthusiastic about? I was getting paid double rates. I loved samurai films and I was looking forward to drawing a bunch of guys fighting with swords. Larry Hama loaned me a whole bunch of reference, black-&-white stills from various movies. I like The Seven Samurai a great deal, and there’s an actor who plays the head samurai, Shimura, and I actually used him as the lead character in my story, something you probably couldn’t do now without being sued! [laughter] He’s not the fastest or the meanest guy, but he’s older and still alive, which means he’s one of the smartest guys. [laughter] Working with Archie was a treat, and this was not long after “Manhunter.” There’s nobody I’ve ever worked with better than Archie. Archie wrote a story based on some stuff out of Lokadia Herns’ stories about goblin spiders, shape-shifting monsters from Japanese folk and fairy tales, and I kind of helped out on it. It was all Archie’s elegantly written story. It was just great. That COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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was really a treat. And drawing giant monsters knocking over buildings and running around town, there weren’t many people, it was mostly large monsters walking among small buildings. Hey, it’s just fun to draw! CBA: Did you hear that Martin Goodman was re-entering the field perhaps out of revenge against Marvel? Walter: I think I heard something about tax write-offs. [laughter] I don’t know if I heard anything about revenge. There was some rumbling about the company being used as a tax write-off maybe, for other debts, but that’s more than I know, really.

Terry Austin

artist I had only been in New York City for a short time (and working at Dick Giordano and Neal Adams’ Continuity Associates for an even shorter time) when, upon viewing my samples, Howard Chaykin suggested that Larry Hama take me along to Atlas Comics. Upon meeting Jeff Rovin and Ric Meyers (armed with the sample comic stories I had done in college: One sword-&-sorcery, one sci-fi, and one Batman), I was hailed as the “new Walt Simonson.” This puzzled me as the old one wasn’t anywhere near being used up yet. This led to my long professional association with their company—two jobs. I don’t recall the circumstances, but my first Atlas assignment was inking Pat Broderick’s pencils on a character they described as “Our Batman.” You might recall Batman as an obsessed, brooding millionaire. Their version seemed to be a misunderstood teenager who is picked on by his brother. The parallels should be obvious. They were having trouble settling on a name, as Pat did character sketches. One day he was “The Golden Bat,” the next, “The Golden Avenger.” Finally, someone must have remembered that whole dark creature of the night riff, and The Dark Avenger was born! Pat’s method of working was to take photos for reference (a common practice for many of the Continuity boys at the time) using the studio camera. On such occasion, we would all be pressed into service (as the accompanying photos should attest.) I became the evil brother in the strip, a role I’m looking forward to reprising when Hollywood eventually gets around to their big budget Dark Avenger movie. One fateful day, I was inking at my desk when a panicked phone call was received from the Atlas editorial offices. It seemed that Pat had suddenly up and moved to Florida, leaving one-and-ahalf pages of the job unfinished. Could I pencil it as well as ink it? “Of course,” I confidently replied. “Just send over the script.” They wailed, “We don’t have it! Pat had the only copy! Just make something up.” After briefly considering killing the title character in his first appearance, I emptied all the wastepaper baskets at Continuity and unearthed the last page of script among Pat’s cast-off junk. Deciding to pencil using Pat’s methodology, I grabbed Bob Wiacek and the studio camera (which I had no idea how to focus, as the blurriness of my photos will prove), and set to work. I recruited Jack Abel from the office next to ours for a role in my little drama, after judiciously deciding not to tell him he was playing the mother of Bob and I. Joe Rubinstein alternately took pictures I was in and filled in for me as I snapped the shutter. The results speak for themselves (in a kind of drunken slur). My second Atlas assignment was to pencil and ink a sciencefiction story for their intended b-&-w s-f magazine. I don’t remember who wrote the plot, nor do I remember what it was about. I do remember spending Thanksgiving Day sitting in the stairwell at Continuity, waiting for someone to show up and unlock the place so that I could work on the job, which was due the next day. (“Sure, we’ll be in tomorrow,” Neal had assured me the previous day.) I also remember deciding that since I had put expressions on the characters’ faces, I pretty much had to figure out what they were saying (my first experience working from a plot), so I boldly called the editor and asked him to script the job as well. He accepted and I unwittingly screwed the poor writer out of his rightful job and a bit of coin to boot. (My belated apologies to this forgotten scribe; I plead the ignorance of youth.) Shortly after toning the job with grey ink washes and turning it in, Atlas was no more. Xerox machines were a rarity in those days so December 2001

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I don’t have any copies of the job, nor did the magazine ever come out. A short time later, Walt Simonson and I walked to the Atlas/Seaboard offices and asked for our artwork back. My recollection is that the receptionist denied that the company had ever published comics. Dejectedly, the new Walt Simonson, and the old one, left the building, never to return.

Steve Skeates

writer If there was an intrinsic strangeness to the scripts that graced the Atlas output (not to mention a certain quirkiness to the artwork, the editing, and let us not give short shift to all those highly derivative yet majorly weird so-called “protagonists”)—and I do indeed think there was—I dare say (believe it or not) that the main culprit was the carpeting there in the anteroom at the Atlas offices. That wall-to-wall floor-covering would, with seeming evil intent, instantly interact with the unhealthy actuality that many a scripter back in the mid-Seventies possessed (for reasons too sad and silly and hardly worth delving into) an overly romanticized attitude toward the traditional drunken writer (Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, et al.)—writers we all tried our damnedest to emulate—that carpeting thus producing what I can only describe as “temporary insanity.” To be more specific, for anyone suffering the sort of throbbing hangover so many of us so often fell prey to during the daylight hours back in those crazy days, the colorful circular design on that carpet far too easily made for that entire room endlessly spinning like a veritable top—faster and faster, with mainly our stomachs keeping pace—so that by the time any of us were finally allowed to enter the inner sanctum for that ever-popular main event known as a plot conference, we were to a man utterly whacked out, suddenly residing within an alternate universe where surrealism reigned supreme. Certainly this helps explain my one major contribution to what Atlas had to offer (even though I didn’t even plot the darn thing; that was the artist’s doing; I merely put in the words), the third issue of Wulf the Barbarian with its opening enigmatic quote from William Shakespeare (which basically has nothing whatsoever to do with the story it’s introducing), its rat-men, its spy-birds, its fierce fighting kardoos, as well as a major player named Modeo doh Tyrak and lines like “Eat cold steel, slime-dwellers!”and “Come back here, you foul-livered sons of toothless jackals!” More recently—just last year at the Mid-Ohio Con, as a matter of fact—the love of my life, reading for the first time the aforementioned particularly outlandish adventure of that strangely blonde barbarian, unable to contain her laughter (especially delighted by those bizarrely huge “spy-birds”) literally fell off the 25-foot-wide bed in our hotel suite. Then, regaining her composure, she wondered aloud why Atlas had so quickly gone belly up. I couldn’t help but suggest that it was because they had accepted far too many scripts like the one she had just

Above: As we learn elsewhere in this issue, the contributors to Atlas/Seaboard who also spent significant time at the Neal Adams & Dick Giordano art agency, Continuity Associates, would often help each other out by posing for model reference Polaroid shots. Here’s Terry Austin posing as Wulf and Pat Broderick as Master Stavro—and Larry Hama & Klaus Janson’s finished panel from Wulf #1. Photo courtesy of Larry Hama. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Inset right: We ascertain this to be a hand-colored Allen Milgrom Morlock 2001 concept drawing, which appeared on the cover of the “Friday” section of the Philadelphia Daily News, November 8, 1974. Courtesy of John Castaglia. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Below: Allen Milgrom’s original cover art for Morlock 2001 #1, which was rejected and revised by Dick Giordano for final publication. Note the positioning of the damsel in comparison to printed version. Courtesy of the artist. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

perused. But now that I give it some thought (my ego perhaps getting the best of me), I’m no longer quite so sure that that was even a partial cause of that company’s demise.

Allen Milgrom

artist/editor It was fairly early in my career, after I worked for Murphy Anderson and got some inking assignments at Marvel, then pencil and ink jobs here and there. Rumors were going around—you know how the comics industry is—and there was plenty of gossip. The buzz in 1974 was that Martin Goodman—who had sold Marvel—was now thinking about getting back into publishing comics, but nobody knew any of the particulars right away. I recall it was a fairly boom time, with Marvel coming out with more and more titles, DC doing more titles. There was more work available then than there had been for quite some time in the business. Not only were both companies doing a full slate of color books, but Marvel added those black-&whites, which amounted to huge page-counts. When they actually started up, they were offering relatively high pages rates. I was just getting penciling work up at Marvel, managing to get a fill-in issue of this or that. When Atlas went into production, they actually offered higher rates right off the bat than most people were getting. CBA: Some say the rates were twice as high. Allen: I don’t think mine was that much higher, but it might’ve been five or ten bucks a page more which, considering the rates at the time, would’ve been a considerable upgrade. Roy Thomas at one point mentioned something about loyalty, saying, “Gee, if you’re doing stuff for Marvel, shouldn’t you be loyal?” I said, “I think I am being loyal by working

at lower rates for the company.” He took that fairly well, but there was some pressure not to do work for anybody else. And, honestly, you figured Marvel had a pretty good chance of continuing to do well, and you weren’t sure about Atlas, as they were an unknown quantity. Of course, a lot of the stuff they came out with right off the bat was very odd stuff. I happen to like Michael Fleisher personally, and I like his very unique and off-the-wall work, but at the same time, it’s not the kind of stuff you’d think would be immediately palatable for mainstream comic readers, especially at the time, when the readers as a whole were a lot younger than they generally are today. Everything he was doing was either scary or downbeat. I worked on Morlock 2001, and here’s this plant creature who can look like a man, who can turn into a plant, which certainly we have enough Heaps and Swamp Things, so there was some tradition behind the character, but in the first issue, didn’t he consume a little blind girl or something like that? I mean, I’m drawing it, and I’m going, “Eeow!” [laughter] I guess the character couldn’t help himself, because he turned into that big, ugly monster thing, but still, you go, “Gee, is this the kind of character you want to root for?” It’s even worse than when Frankenstein threw the little girl in the river and drowned her accidentally. At least you knew he got the idea from the flowers; this character was just hungry! [laughter] CBA: Were you involved in the creation of the character at all? Allen: Just the visuals on him. I think it was given to me full script. Michael, having worked at DC at the time, was a full-script guy, so I don’t think I had a whole lot to do with it, except just coming up with the visual presentation. I think I only did two issues and part of the reason for that was I had only recently started doing penciling work, and I was doing Captain Marvel at the time, which was a bi-monthly, but between Morlock 2001 and some of the inking I was doing, it was too much for me to handle. And frankly, to a certain extent, [laughs] it just seemed so unsavory. I really liked the super-hero, but I wasn’t ready for an anti-hero who was so anti that he was eating blind girls. [laughter] So it was COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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odd stuff. Michael did a lot of odd things. Didn’t he also write The Brute? CBA: Yeah. Why, by #3, was the book was titled Morlock and the Midnight Men, changing very quickly, almost desperately? Allen: I’m sure they got very bad early sales. I don’t remember discussing any of this with Jeff. I quit the book because of the pressure of trying to do too much work at the time. I kind of snapped and just looked at it and said, “I think I’ve got a better chance sticking with Marvel on Captain Marvel than doing this character.” It’s not that I didn’t enjoy doing it, with my good buddy, Jack Abel, inking it. The first issue had a really nice inking job by Jack, probably better than my pencils deserved. After I got off, who took over? CBA: Steve Ditko with Bernie Wrightson inks, of all things. Allen: Steve took over right away? That was interesting. There were only three issues? I thought it ran on a little bit. CBA: Nothing went on a little bit! [laughs] You also did “The Comanche Kid” in Western Action? Allen: I inked over Jack Abel’s pencils. Jack had inked a number of my things—Jack and I were good buddies—and he had inked not only Morlock, but also some stuff I’d done at Marvel. He was just a real good, slick, solid inker. I don’t think I’d ever have a chance to ink him, and so when I offered it, he jumped on the assignment. I made an attempt to do a grittier Western, what I thought would be appropriate for the time, thinking at least John Severin, although it certainly didn’t look like John Severin inking. [laughter] If you don’t draw as well as John Severin, it’s hard to ink as well as John Severin. CBA: Did you recall doing both covers of Morlock 2001? Allen: I remember the first one, I’m sure I did a cover, and that was replaced with a Dick Giordano cover, but I actually drew a cover they didn’t use, and then Dick redid it. Maybe they didn’t like my drawing, or they didn’t like the way the girl looked…. CBA: There’s something in the posturing of the main character that looks like you. Otherwise, it looks totally Giordano. Allen: I vaguely recollect that I did the cover, and while they didn’t tell me ahead of time or anything, the next thing I knew when it came out, it had a Dick Giordano cover, but clearly using my layouts. Maybe I initially inked the cover myself and it wasn’t slick enough | for them. CBA: You did other stuff for Atlas? Allen: I inked two issues of Ditko’s stuff, The Destructor and Tiger-Man. I think Tiger-Man was another one of those emergency rush jobs. CBA: A lot of people must think of you for emergency rush jobs a lot! [laughter] Including myself! [Allen inked seven pages of Ye Ed’s comic, Prime8, virtually overnight to meet a deadline. Thanks, AM!] Allen: Well, I’m really reliable, and unfortunately people remember me for the rush jobs more than the ones where I’ve actually been able to take the time to do a good job! CBA: How was Steve to ink? Allen: Steve’s very easy. His stuff is very solid, very well-composed. The storytelling is clear, it’s got that very art deco, clean graphic quality to it, and within the framework of his layouts, you can do as much or as little as you want. If you ink exactly what’s there, it’ll still be a solid comic book. You know, the funny thing about the issue Bernie Wrightson inked [Morlock #3], and this is one of those times when you think he’s going to completely make it over into an amazing thing and, though he did a real nice job on it, it still looked as if Steve could have inked it. I think Bernie was using a new pen he discovered, and he did a very crisp job, but it looked like Steve Ditko. You can look at it and say, “Hey, there’s some nice stuff going on here,” but it’s not radically removed from what the pencils are. If you’re expecting more, look at, for instance, Steve Leialoha, who’s somebody who took Ditko and did more with him. He would give it the Ditko look, but he’d also add a little bit of that nice brush rendering Steve was so adept at. CBA: Do you remember Mike Fleisher? What was he like? Allen: Michael and I were actually fairly friendly. He lived in our neighborhood, up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Simonson lived. Mike was a real nice guy. He was an assistant to Joe Orlando. He was doing a research project up at DC, the super-hero encyclopedias, and he fell into a position of working as Joe Orlando’s December 2001

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assistant. Joe was a great creative guy, but not the world’s most organized guy, so he always had guys who worked as assistants who would keep him on the right track, help him get the stuff done that he needed to get done. In fact, Michael is responsible for getting me my first penciling job at DC, because he knew I was trying to break in as a penciler, and he asked Joe to give me something. “Hey, he could be the next Bernie Wrightson!” and I kind of paled, because you don’t like to be compared to Bernie because there’s no way you can live up to it. Anyway, Mike managed to tweak Joe into giving me a job which I did for one of the Weird books Joe was editing—Weird Mystery Tales, I think.

Joe Staton

artist Jeff Rovin called me out of the blue one day and said he wanted me to draw a new book for Atlas. I told him I was pretty busy at the time, but he really talked up the line and how great I would be on an action book called The Cougar. I told him it sounded good but that I would have to work out some scheduling to be able to fit it in. (To some degree, that meant could I get by with even less sleep.) He said he'd check in with me in a week and when he did, I told him I could do the book and thought it would be fun. He said he'd have a script out to me pretty soon. In a week or so nothing showed up and I called him. He said there'd been some sort of delay but that the script would go out the next day. No script ever came and after that he wouldn't take my calls. I eventually saw The Cougar on the stands drawn by somebody else. I don't recall who actually did draw the book, but it wasn't me. This episode naturally put Jeff Rovin very high on my all-time list of professional and responsible editors. I tell people that sometimes I don't know I'm off a book until I see it on the stands drawn by somebody else. They think I'm kidding.

Bernie Wrightson

artist CBA: Do you recall the inking job you did on Morlock 2001 #3 over Steve Ditko’s pencils? Bernie Wrightson: Oh, I recall it, though I don’t have a whole lot to say, except that I needed the money, and it was an inking job, and it was Steve Ditko! I thought, “Oh, cool!” When I got the job, and there were a lot of circles and ovals with X’s where the blacks were supposed to go. It was very, very simple. I wasn’t expecting that and I pretty much inked it as indicated. CBA: It seems like you were extremely faithful to Steve’s pencils. I’d seen jobs you’ve done on the pencils of Carmine Infantino, Neal Adams, Mike Kaluta, and one can see a strong element of your presence. One can look at it and say, “Yeah, Bernie had something to do with it.” But the Ditko job…. Bernie: I work with what they give me, and the more they give me, the more I put into it. This was perhaps the most minimal job I’ve ever done! [laughter] If you look at something like the issue of Sub-Mariner I did over Sal Buscema’s pencils, you’d never know I inked it because everything was there, and I just followed every line

Above: Repro’ of Bill DuBay’s aborted Atlas Comics title. “I wrote and drew the first issue of Wonderworld,” Bill said, “a title that featured the adventures of a young hero not unlike Jonny Quest—in a far more fun and whimsical style. Jim [Warren] didn’t like the idea that I was working for a rival company while still heading up his magazines, so after one issue, I was out. Probably just as well. Seaboard closed its doors shortly thereafter.” Courtesy of Mike Friedrich. ©1974 Seaboard Periodicals. Below: Arriving simultaneously with Joe Staton’s e-mail anecdote was this self-portrait, drawn in early 1976 for a French comics fan. Courtesy of Daniel Tesmoingt. ©2001 Joe Staton.

faithfully. His drawing style was so unlike mine, I just didn’t really know what else to do with it, as opposed to somebody like Neal Adams. I felt like Neal was close enough to my sensibilities that I had a little bit more confidence with inking, so I think a lot more of my lines came through in Neal’s stuff. CBA: Were you looking to ink Steve Ditko? Bernie: No, that’s all they had. CBA: This was in-between assignments for Warren? Bernie: Yeah, basically. I was just looking for something to do. I imagined nobody at the time had anything that I was terribly interested in. But I needed the money to pay the rent, so, I basically took it on just for the money! CBA: [laughs] Fair enough! Bernie: They were pretty upset with what I did. They expected it would look like my stuff, and I tried to explain to them I’m not going to do that. I do remember that they were paying pretty low rates for inking, across the board to anybody. I told them, “If you wanted it to look like me, I would have to go and pencil. I can’t just jump in and ink the stuff and make it look like mine, delineate all the forms and the muscles and shadows on faces and stuff.” CBA: The work just didn’t call for that, right? Bernie: Well, no, I didn’t think so. It was a super-hero job, I don’t really do super-heroes, but anyway, I said, “I can’t just jump in and ink it that way, I would have to re-pencil it, and if I re-penciled it, it would cost you a lot more!” They got real upset at that. CBA: Do you recall who it was, who you were dealing with there? Bernie: It might’ve been Larry Lieber, I don’t really remember, although my impression was that I was talking with a couple of older guys. Older than me. Corporate types. I do remember taking the job on for the money, even though it wasn’t a lot. Looking at it, I thought, “This isn’t going to take too long.” CBA: Do you recall at all helping out Howard Chaykin on The Scorpion #2? He was really under the gun for that job, so Walter Simonson helped out with it. Howard had a funny story to tell about inking that job. Around Halloween of ’74, you two were out in the streets of New York, he decided to thumb for a ride, and two girls in a white Cadillac pulled by, you two got in, and you guys had a good time. Do you remember that at all? Were you living downstairs from Howard? Bernie: Yeah, we were living in the same building as Simonson and Al Milgrom, who were sharing a place, and Howard was down the hall from them, and I was downstairs. My memory is that Howard and I went to this party at some friends of Howard’s out in Queens. We might’ve gotten a ride out there, but when we left, our ride wasn’t there, we were going to get a cab back to the apartment when these two girls were leaving the party at the same time said they’d give us a lift. We went back to the apartment, and maybe Howard had a good time, but I don’t remember that I did! [laughter]

CBA: It was typical of you guys to really help each other out? Bernie: Oh, yeah. No, I helped Howard on a couple of things. There was that Scorpion job, I inked a thing or two of his at Warren. I remember something about vampires on a Zeppelin in the ’30s. [laughter] I remember inking it like J.C. Coll or Franklin Booth, spending a lot of time on it, putting in a lot of work. The Scorpion job I don’t remember that well, because I don’t think I did a whole lot on it, but just about everybody at the time had a hand in that. Kaluta and Simonson did some work on it. It was one of those times when Howard was just refusing to refuse any work at the time, taking on all this stuff, and he was just busy all the time. The schedule on that issue got screwed up, it was late, so we all had to jam on it. There was a lot of that going around at that time. CBA: Did you do any penciling on that job? Bernie: I probably didn’t. Walter and Howard kind of shared similar sensibilities with that stuff, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Walter had a hand in penciling. I don’t remember that I did. I’m sure it was sandwiched in with a lot of stuff I was doing, so it was one of those things where I got a couple of pages, and they were in and out within a day. CBA: Do you remember Ed Davis at all? Bernie: Yeah! I remember he had a really nice, slick drawing style. It was a lot like Neal. I don’t remember him hanging around for too long, but he was a really nice guy, and I remember he was a really snappy dresser. I don’t know why that sticks in my mind, but he always just really looked great. CBA: Do you have any idea what became of him? Bernie: No, I was going to ask you! CBA: I’ve heard a rumor he actually became a soldier of fortune. Bernie: I wouldn’t put it past him! My memory of him was as kind of a swashbuckling kind of guy. CBA: Do you know Larry Hama? Bernie: Oh, sure. Larry was great! He’s one of the smartest, funniest people that I ever ran into in comics. I always liked Larry, I always liked hanging around him, he was always a lot of fun. I remember he had this apartment in a gable of some big building in New York, and it was the kind of situation… I don’t know if he was squatting there, or what the deal was exactly, but I remember going up to visit him one time, and you had to kind of go through this plywood partition in a wall to get into his place. [laughter] It wasn’t even a doorway, but like this little archway, into this space that was under the eaves of this great big building! [laughter] God, it was great.

Frank Springer

artist CBA: Do you have any memory of Atlas/Seaboard? Frank Springer: Larry Lieber contacted me at that time, he was the associate art director at the time, sort of the Stan Lee of Atlas, I think. He didn’t last very long, as I recall. CBA: Did you know Larry? Frank: Oh, yeah, I know him quite well. He’s a member of the National Cartoonists’ Society, and he currently does the newspaper syndicated strip Spider-Man. I don’t think I’d met him before the 1970s, before I did a couple of jobs for Atlas. I just did some inking for them, but I might’ve penciled and inked a story. CBA: There’s an issue of The Cougar that you inked, and then you came in and saved the book, because Dan Adkins didn’t finish it, and you penciled and inked the last ten pages. Do you recall that? Frank: Vaguely. [laughs] I might’ve done a couple of other jobs for them. At that time, I was busy with a number of things, so I would’ve only done a little bit for them, as I remember. CBA: Do you recall the page rates being very good? Frank: They were around what I was getting other places. CBA: In the ’70s, you weren’t doing a lot of mainstream comic book work, were you? Frank: No, but I was doing some. In that period, I did Rex Morgan, M.D. for a short time. I also did my own strip for a little while. I was doing a soccer column three days a week. I was doing political cartoons. I was assisting Leonard Starr with On Stage. I lived on Long Island. I would go into New York once a week, when I was working with Leonard, and either pick up stuff or go to his studio COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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and stay there all day. CBA: You had a rigorous career, right? You were all over the place! Frank: Well, I’ll tell you, my philosophy was—I had five children, you know?—so I had to keep busy, and my thought always was to not sink everything into one kind of an account, in case it disappeared. Of course, accounts disappear! So, I did everything that came along, everything that I could handle. CBA: You were doing advertising work, a lot of National Lampoon…. Frank: That’s right, I did that mostly in the ’70s, when Michael O’Donoghue was there. He first got me over there, actually. CBA: You went back to the mid-’60s with Michael, right? Frank: Probably early ’65. Could’ve been late ’64, really, which was a long time ago now! [laughter] We did a few things for Evergreen Review before we’d even met, and then he came up with Phoebe Zeitgeist, and of course, we did that for some time. We didn’t make much money at it, but it was probably the only hardcover book I was involved in. CBA: Evergreen was an eclectic place to be, and Phoebe was a trendy strip. Do you think that gave you entrée to other jobs with particularly hip art directors? Frank: Yeah. [laughs] Well, actually, DC called me because of that. Prior to that, I did some stuff for Dell, the first comic book stuff I’d ever done. CBA: Your Ghost Tales work at Dell was nice stuff. Frank: That’s absolute crap! I tell ya, I had a lot of fun and loved those movie adaptations. I really enjoyed them. When Phoebe started coming out, DC called me, and I went in there, and then when I did some stuff for DC, then Marvel called me, so I was… you know, all over the place at that time. CBA: The other Atlas job you did was inking Mike Ploog on “Luke Malone” in Police Action. Frank: I’ve forgotten an awful lot of stuff. It was just all in that period of time, and I never really got connected with any particular character or any particular house. CBA: Was that a good thing? Frank: I think it was for me, because it forced me to do some stuff for some other magazines, and some illustration, and I just didn’t want to get nailed into one thing. Frankly, I didn’t like the comic book stuff very much. I always thought the stories were so stupid! [laughter] On several occasions I told them so, and of course, they didn’t like that. But I grew up reading the newspaper strips, Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon and Terry, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, all of those. When I got into the comic books, I thought, “Boy, this is why these guys are in comic books, the dialogue’s just… dumb! With some exceptions. Roy Thomas wrote some good stuff for Marvel, so I don’t want to paint the whole thing black. CBA: You’re obviously active in the National Cartoonists Society. When it comes down to the epitaph, so to speak, would you want to be known as a syndicated artist, or as a comic book artist? Frank: Well, I was really a comic book guy. [laughs] Somebody said when I was president [of NCS], “You’re the first comic book guy who’s been president.” I said, “Well, Jerry Robinson was president, and he was, at least at first, a comic book guy… “ But I don’t know, I always thought the epitaph would be, “Well, he could draw with a pencil.” [laughter]

CBA: That was the prison camp story you did? Russ: That was a different story from the one that was destroyed. I had some of the prison camp stuff here. It was a shame that it was lost, because it came closest to being like a Warren story, in black-&-white and all that. I remember there was some pretty gory stuff in it, just because there could be. [laughter] I remember one guy firing out of a basement window at a German or something, the guy comes up alongside the window and drives a dagger into the guy’s hand and gets him to the ground. CBA: You also did a beautiful job, “Tough Cop,” [Thrilling Adventure Stories #2] about a guy in a wheelchair? Russ: Yeah, I remember that. I recall Neal Adams raising his eyebrow at one of the panels of that story. I had a guy being shot, falling down the front steps and he sees the gun firing that kills him. I said, “Come on, Neal! It’s comics! The guy is being shot and can still see, upside down, the blaze from the gun when he’s already flipped over in a somersault with a hole showing in his back!” Neal said, “Fine!” [laughter] CBA: Did you work for Atlas because the rates were good? Russ: I don’t recall. I assume one of the reasons I don’t recall is because it was nothing unusual, so in other words, I’d guess it would be normal rates. CBA: Were you looking to take on a regular gig for them? Did you want to do Planet of Vampires? Russ: Whoever was buying and in business was whoever I worked for. I just got the stuff to take home, do it and get my check! [laughter] I never was much involved in worrying about it. As long as the checks were good, I didn’t hear a lot of scuttlebutt about the organization.

Russ Heath

artist/writer CBA: Jeff Rovin recalls calling you up when you were living in Westport [Connecticut] to offer you work at Atlas. Russ: That could very well be. If that’s the way he recalls it, I probably was. I remember that I did a pile of covers for Atlas. During the time I was there, I worked for Continuity a lot, pretty steady. At Atlas, it was a real short period of time. I did about three or four stories before they went belly-up. I remember I’d done a war story in black-&-white. Without the censorship thing, I was able to put a lot of stuff from the Warren stories, facets of that, into it, and it was in tone, and apparently it got destroyed or somebody took it home. December 2001

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The Dark Avenger

For a measly—if enthusiastically rendered— eight-page story, contributor Terry Austin sure does have a lot of material regarding “The Dark Avenger” story in Phoenix #3. As written by John Albano and drawn by Pat Broderick, the character was intended to be the Atlas/Seaboard version of Batman, Austin tells us. Terry not only inked the story, but because Pat made a hasty retreat to Florida before finishing the story, he also had to pencil much of page seven and all of eight. Top: Pat’s thumbnails to pages two and five. Art ©2001 Pat Broderick. Left: Joe Rubinstein pours rats on Terry Austin while Rich Basile and unknown look on, as the Continuity guys pose for splash page reference. The Dark Avenger ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals.

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Above: Inker Bob Wiacek poses for panel one of page eight. Bob was one of several inkers on Ye Ed’s first comic book, Prime8! Courtesy of Terry Austin.

Above: Did Jack Abel know he was posing as The Dark Avenger’s mom? Here’s the legend and Bob Wiacek modeling for panel two of page eight. Courtesy of Terry Austin.

Artists as Models

Above: Jack Abel (standing) and Terry Austin posing for page eight, panel five. Courtesy of Terry.

December 2001

Because Pat Broderick skedaddled to Florida before finishing the Atlas/Seaboard Phoenix #3 back-up story introducing The Dark Avenger, inker Terry Austin had to jump in at the last minute to pencil most of page seven and all of eight. As was the norm for regular Continuity Associate freelancers and staffers, everyone would pitch in to help model for the Polaroid camera to help the artists get proper reference. On this page, all courtesy of Terry, is the original page eight as penciled and inked by Terry, and the (albeit fuzzy) reference photos used, featuring Jack Abel, Bob Wiacek, and Terry. Comic Book Artist tried to locate Pat Broderick to interview him in this issue, but alas, all phone numbers received proved to be old. If you know of his whereabouts, please contact Ye Ed! The Dark Avenger ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals.

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Above: Undoubtedly Terry recently added the halo and wings on the late Jack Abel in this reference shot for page eight, panel three. That’s Bob Wiacek standing and Terry Austin (who shared this photo with us) sitting in the chair.

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CBA Interview

The Atlas Age of Comics Atlas/Seaboard assistant editor Ric Meyers remembers Conducted & transcribed by Chris Irving

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Richard Meyers may not be too familiar a name with comic fans, but as an expert in martial arts movies, author of three paperback adventures of The Destroyer and of numerous pop culture reference books, his credentials in the world of the fantastic are secure. Ric served as Atlas’s assistant editor and notably collaborated with Alex Toth on “A Job Well Done.” The writer was interviewed via phone on August 3, 2001 and Ric copyedited the final transcript.

Chris Irving: Could you tell me about your childhood? Where did you grow up? Ric Meyers: I grew up in Fairfield, and then in Orange, Connecticut. When I was growing up in Fairfield, I distinctly remember going to the pharmacy around the corner from my house and picking up the latest Superman comics. I also remember my disappointment in the comics of that time, which was the late ’50s. It was a lot of the Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane stuff, and a lot of Red Kryptonite and “What if?” stories. I remember feeling the way that I imagine Stan Lee had felt, which was “This is bad.” I was enjoying the Archie comics, and that was about all I had to go on. I was also reading all the paperback versions of the Doc Savage and The Shadow stories that were coming out, and I was wishing that comics were more like that. When I got to Orange, Connecticut, I would take my bicycle down Racebrook Road and go to the Racebrook Pharmacy. Suddenly, there were these new comic books which my friends in Orange would show me, like Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. Chris: How old were you? Ric: I don’t know. My attitude was always that I was born a child, I’ll die a child, and I’m eliminating the middleman. [laughter] I was born in 1953, so whenever those came out is how old I was. Chris: You must have been about ten. Ric: I might have been. I was riding my bicycle and not in my car to get to them. I remember having the first 30 to 50 issues of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and I remember distinctly going to college and having my mother throw them out. “Congratulations, dear, you’ve just gotten rid of your retirement.” She also threw out my collection of first edition mystery and sciencefiction novels as well. That’s a problem with moms, sometimes. It was a real tragedy. Chris: What about your high school years? Were you reading comics then? Ric: Mostly, I was reading books. I was a voracious reader. I’d read mysteries and science-fiction. I cleaned out the school library, and read an average of five books a week. I remember having large piles of books by my bed, and I would put them in order of mystery, science-fiction, mystery, science-fiction—I would alternate. I was also very lucky to be reading during the Golden Age of the paperback series. There were great science-fiction writers putting out great works, not only foundations of the industry (such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov), but in the mystery genre, all the series were coming out at that time: Johnny McDonald’s Travis McGee, and The Executioner and Destroyer series. I pretty much eschewed Executioner and stayed with The Destroyer. That was ironic, because the first novels I wrote were for The Destroyer series when I got out of college. Chris: You ghost wrote for them, right? Ric: Yeah, I was the first ghost writer. Chris: Did you have any particular favorites, aside from some that you mentioned? Ric: In the mysteries I really loved John D. McDonald, I thought he was a terrific writer, and I also enjoyed Dashiell Hammett. For science-fiction writers, it was Arthur Clarke. I read so much, I read everybody, though I stopped reading science-fiction with Samuel R. Delany’s Dahlgren. I figured that, once you read Dahlgren, that was as far as you could go. I stayed with mysteries and got into non-fiction and general books. I still read, I would say, approximately a book a week, if not two books a week. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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I had dear friends with whom I’d trade off books—both mystery friends and science-fiction friends. We’d talk about what was new, get involved with whatever was coming out, and we just ate up everything. Between the bunch of us, we would pretty much read everything there was to read in the genres. Chris: Were you writing back in high school? Ric: I was going to high school at about the time when we were able to take advantage of what our older brothers were doing in college. They were fighting against the Vietnam War, and we took advantage of that by fighting against grammar and bad ziti in the cafeteria. The students and teachers went eye-to-eye with each other, and the teachers blinked. The educational system started to break down at that point. I took advantage of that. I would write fiction rather than non-fiction for my reports. I asked the teachers if I could put all the information in the form of a story. They said “Yes,” so in both my English classes and History classes, I’d be writing short stories rather than dry reports. Chris: Then you went off to college at Bridgeport? Ric: No, I actually went to Emerson College first, then Boston University, and then University of Bridgeport. I was looking for some educational system at that time that satisfied me. Emerson, at that time, had a first level program that was way too loose, and was mental masturbation. It was a “Whatever you do is brilliant,” kind of education. I didn’t want that in college; I actually wanted to learn something, so I transferred to Boston University. That was not too strict, but it was too dry, patterned, and ritualized. I felt like Goldilocks: One was too hot, one was too cold, but unfortunately I never found one that was just right. I went to Emerson and Boston University for theater courses, and was finding no satisfaction with either. I wound up going to the University of Bridgeport (prior to its being bought by the Moonies) for cinema. I found one terrific course on cinema, which was being taught by the technical columnist for American Cinematographer magazine—the one who talked about all the equipment of cinema. He did a wonderful course, and I learned more there than I probably did in my previous three years of college. Chris: From there you eventually landed your Atlas job? Ric: Yeah, I was writing comic book ideas at that point and was a great lover of comics. At one point, I had to appear in several roles in a production of The Three Penny Opera at the school. I was going to come in as the royal messenger at the very end on a gigantic swan. Unfortunately, since they could only build the gigantic swan out of papier maché, I had to stand on a little piece of wood while they built the swan around me. During that period, I would tell the stage crew stories to keep them entertained while they were building around me. One of them happened to be related to Jeff Rovin, I think it was his younger brother. At the end of the process, he said “You’ve got a lot of great stories, you should talk to my brother who’s starting up a comic company in New York.” I thought that was great, so we made connections and I went in to see Jeff. I sat in the Atlas/ Seaboard offices in the Steubens Glass Building, which is where Columbia Pictures was, on about Fifth Avenue. I was there between five to nine hours, waiting for Jeff. I had heard Jeff on the phone talking about all sorts of nonsense. He finally came out and apologized, and we both went to the men’s room. While we were standing in the stalls, I said “Look, you need a peon. A good 90% of the stuff you were talking about on the phone was a waste of time. You need a peon, and I might just be that peon.” What happened was that I gave him all the ideas for comic books that I had been writing in my room at the University. He would keep calling me back every week, and I would come in, sit in the office and watch how everything worked. Apparently, as I found out later, one of the ideas I had for a comic book was close to an idea he had for a comic book, so he liked it right away. Finally, on my birthday which, coincidentally is today— Chris: Happy birthday! Ric: This was about twenty-six years ago from today, that you are interviewing me, when he introduces me to the new art director, Steve Mitchell. He went “Ric, this is Steve Mitchell, our new art director; Steve, this is Ric Meyers, our new assistant editor.” This was the first I’d heard of it. Believe it or not, that’s how I got the job. December 2001

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Chris: How would you describe the Atlas/Seaboard offices? Ric: Like I said, they were in a wonderful building, the Steubens Glass Building. Again, it was the same building that Columbia Pictures and people like Otto Preminger had offices. When I first walked in there, I was thrilled. It was in a great location. Every time I walked into the building I felt really great and really special. This was the same building where the best French restaurant in the city was housed. I forgot what floor [the office] was, but you’d go up the elevator, go to the door and go in. From there on, it was very nice but rudimentary. You walked into the waiting room, where there’d be a receptionist. You went in through the doors behind the receptionist. It was a nice corner suite. Chip Goodman had his office right in front of you, Martin Goodman had his office on the opposite side on the corner, of course with the really great view. Jeff was in the opposite office, a much smaller office with no window. I hung out at a little desk in that office. In the whole area between those offices was the art director. Across the hall, and between Chip and Martin was Larry Lieber’s office. Larry, I think, is the brother of Stan Lee, and he had his line of books and Jeff covered his line of books. Chris: Exactly what did you do as the assistant editor? Ric: Basically I was under Jeff’s wing and stayed in Jeff’s office. He got me going and I did a lot of writing on the four magazines Seaboard put out: There was a variation of Famous Monsters, a movie monsters magazine. Jeff was also under the tutelage of James Warren both before and after. There were a lot of similarities in the magazines’ output. I got to write for them, and he taught me a lot about how comics were edited, and all those little details that an editor and assistant editor had to do. I was basically in a training

Above: Hey! It’s Ray Harryhausen again, only this time posing with Ric Meyers (right) in the mid1970s, while working on The World of Fantasy Films, which Ric says was, “the book Jeff Rovin was kind enough to let me write.” Courtesy of Ric Meyers.

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Above: Alex Toth was quite taken by the script to “A Job Well Done,” asking Jeff Rovin to give the mysterious scripter—Ric Meyers—a pat on the back. Both Jeff and Ric were so flattered by the compliments that they still hold onto the master’s missives about the tale. Courtesy of Ric. Below: Detail from the final page of “A Job Well Done.” Words by Meyers, art by Toth. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

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position. I proofed things, looked over art, cut out Zip-A-Tone, I did anything I was told to do, and I was happy to do it because it was fascinating. Chris: How would you describe Jeff Rovin? Ric: Jeff reminded me a lot of David Letterman, he really did. He had a dry sense of humor and was very nice, very supportive, very hardworking, very ambitious, and very imaginative. He was very good in terms of giving me responsibility: I also wound up being the liaison between Atlas and the comics studios, like Neal Adams’ comic studio, and Kaluta and Wrightson’s studio with Jeff Jones. I spent a lot of time going back and forth between the offices and going over problems (which multiplied as time went on). It was fun to be the diplomat, and I’m pretty pleased to say that all the relationships I made there are still pretty strong considering the hell we all went through at the end. A lot of friendships were made and destroyed by what went on at that company. I’m very pleased to say that a lot of my friendships were maintained. In fact, I was very gratified that I just saw Neal Adams at the latest San Diego Comic-Con, and he reacted to me as he would an old friend, which was very gratifying. Chris: What type of problems plagued Atlas/Seaboard? Ric: For years I’ve been trying to understand what went on there, and why what happened did happen. My theory was really brought into focus last year, when The Producers premiered on Broadway. It suddenly occurred to me that, as far as I can tell, based on the behavior of Charles and Martin Goodman at the company, that this was a Producers-type of situation. I’ll quote Howard Rodman, the guy who created Harry O., who once told me, “I don’t know if it’s true, I just know I believe it.” That’s the only valid explanation I have that I can come up with for what happened (that this was a tax write-off for them). The reason they hired Jeff and let Jeff hire me and Steve is that they

thought we would fail. This is a complete guess on my part, based on nothing other than their behavior, but I think they wanted it to fail. I think they just wanted a gigantic tax write-off. Everything they did seemed to point to that, because they gave Jeff carté blanche to create this line of comics. Larry did his own line of comics. I was down on Larry when he did a dead-on, flat-out rip-off of Dirty Harry, “Sam Lomax: NYPD.” The opening was a flat-out rip-off of the opening of Dirty Harry, including the hot dog eating. I was eventually writing Dirty Harry novels for Warner Brothers and knew a lot about Dirty Harry. I even wrote the bible for the books. I said to him “You can’t do this, this is ridiculous. It’s one thing to rip-off a movie nobody’s ever seen, but everybody’s seen Dirty Harry. This isn’t an homage, this is a rip-off.” I had impassioned meetings with everyone to not do things that would make us look ridiculous in the marketplace. I was sort of patted on the head and told “There, there, good boy, go away.” Another reason I thought it was a write-off was because they gave us so much money to throw away. We gave the best rates in the business to everybody. That attracted the best people in the business, including the up-and-comer revolutionaries like Larry Hama and Howard Chaykin. Jeff Jones was doing magnificent paintings for us, and it was a thrill to come to the office and rip open a piece from the studio. Mike Kaluta had done, years ahead of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a story that was like the Warner Brothers cartoon family in a Sam Peckinpah world. Again, this is just my theory, but the publishers reacted to this as if it were dangerous, not that it was wonderful. What happened was that all the things they told Jeff he had total freedom in, they would force him to change at the last minute. We did Planet of the Vampires, and the whole idea was that we’d never have a vampire on the cover. It was a science-fiction tale, and we wouldn’t have guys with capes and teeth. Jeff maintained up, down, backwards and forwards, that Charles and Martin swore to him that would never happen. With a week before the thing went to press, they said “You have to put a Dracula on the cover.” That actually happened. Of course, Charles and Martin didn’t have to go to the artists and say “Put Dracula on the cover.” We had to go do that. The artists just freaked out, because here was a great opportunity to show people what they could do. Howard Chaykin doing The Scorpion, and Larry Hama was doing Wulf the Barbarian (taking these pretty rudimentary concepts and running with them, doing pretty wonderful work, but it was always countered at the last second by the publishers). Another problem was that we didn’t understand why it was happening. Jeff, of course, was doing this really great work and getting these great talents to do their best. But rather than getting a “Thumbs up,” or “Good job,” from [the Goodmans], he got a “You’ve got to change it.” And they had to change it in the worst, most pedantic, ridiculous, most stupid way possible, and always at the last second. They didn’t come to us when the cover came in: They waited three weeks and then say “Gotta change it, and you’ve got to change it into something awful.” Jeff put his fist through the wall and nearly broke his hand, he was so frustrated. I knew the stress was getting to me. I still can’t explain why I did this: I walked into the bathroom with a pair of scissors and cut off all my hair. I remember thinking to myself “Oh, I’ll just trim it, I don’t like the way these bangs look,” and I came out and everyone was looking at me as if I’d gone nuts. In reality, I probably had, because the stress was so great. It became like watching an accident after a while, because you knew it was coming. Here you had this beautiful piece of work from Jeff Jones, Mike Kaluta, Neal Adams and all these other great talents, but you knew after a while that they were going to just smugly sneer at it, and make you change it at the last second. It was like waiting for the Sword of Damocles to go right through your skull. Again, we were too young and too inexperienced to know why they were doing this to us. Chris: How old were you guys? Ric: I was very young. This was 1974, so I had just turned 20 and had been in college. I’m not sure how old Jeff was, but we were all around the same age. We were all young and ambitious, and happy with this new company that had so much money behind it. We were really going to beat the world. Then we were turned around and COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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were being told to do ridiculous things. It’s one thing to be told to do things the market needs, but I can’t speak for everybody, but I found that the decisions being made were incredibly arbitrary. It had no basis, like if we said “black” they’d say “white,” and if we said “white,” they’d say “black.” There was no way to win in that kind of situation. I remember when Jeff finally said he had to go and there was no way he could stay anymore, I arranged to meet Charles at the Russian Tea Room. I came in and he offered me food. I was all worked up and couldn’t eat. I said “Let’s save the company!” His reaction was, “You want dessert?” At that point, I just threw up my hands. Jeff had moved along, he was doing books, and he got me involved with doing non-fiction books. I wound up writing fiction as well, and went to work on The Destroyer series with Warren Murphy and Dick Sapir. Eventually, we just had to move on. I think it was less than a year that we were there, but it seemed forever, and was so sad. Chris: In retrospect, how do you view the Atlas books? Ric: I find the whole thing a tragedy. We could’ve been a contender. There isn’t anything in the Atlas experience that couldn’t be described by that famous scene in On the Waterfront, between Brando and Rod Steiger: “You could’ve looked out for me, Charlie.” Also, it was killing the goose that laid the golden egg. But that’s true of business, in general. One of my favorite incidents that happened was with The Brute, which was one of the most obvious Marvel rip-offs, quite painful to everybody. I believe it was in one issue where the artist hid the word sh*t on the side of an airplane: 5H17. Of course, if you look at the way he painted it on the side of the plane, it was S-H-I-T, so it was pretty obvious how he felt. I couldn’t disagree with him, but here was a lot of stuff with a lot of opportunity. Jeff was willing to do these rip-offs in order to give all these terrific artists a chance to excel, but by the third issues, the fix was in. Pat Broderick, Chaykin, and everybody was just ground up. The only thing I can think of was The Producers. Chris: Do you think it was just the quality of the Atlas material that made it fail? Ric: I think it was a double-barreled situation. The quality of the stuff before the public saw it was pretty good, it was 75% really good and 25% rip-off, but the public never got to see that. It was a combination of the fact of what it was forced to become. So it wasn’t so much the quality of the work as what we were being forced to put out. It was half a business decision, and half the problem of who was at the head of the boat. We had built a beautiful reservoir, but at the head of the reservoir was someone who gave us these big barrels of radioactive waste and told us to pour them in. At that point it wasn’t a matter of how the reservoir was: Everything coming out of it was polluted. Chris: How would you describe Martin and Charles Goodman? Ric: Nobody ever saw Martin much. He was in his office, and we didn’t have much interaction with him. I may have said hello to him December 2001

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once or twice but, then again, he was sort of just there. It was Charles who we worked with mostly, and he was very affable. I didn’t talk to him much, that was Jeff’s situation. I was sent to take care of artists and work with artists and writers; I was not asked to talk with the publisher. It was fun for a while, but of course they were also doing Swank magazine. We would see interesting models coming in every once in a while, and there was some really fun stuff in the offices for us to read. It was after Jeff left that I dealt with Charles directly. Charles was very nice, but talking to him rolled right off his back. He didn’t seem to hear. He was very nice and pleasant to me, but he never seemed to do anything I asked, or consider ever letting me do anything. I didn’t last with Larry Lieber long, just because of that whole Dirty Harry incident was indicative of our entire relationship. He was going to do what he wanted to, no matter how much of an “homage” it was. I had no effect there, and was just taking up space. Of course, I was tearing out my hair literally. As soon as I knew there was nothing to do… there are just so many times you can pound your head on the wall before you either crack your head or just stop doing it. That’s almost literally what Jeff did. He left, I believe, with a small ulcer. It got pretty bad. Chris: What about Marvel, how do you feel they took to “The New House of Ideas”? Ric: Aside from our problems in the offices, we had problems in the newsstands, in that it was very hard getting space on the newsstands for this stuff to come out. But again, it was all very moot because what was coming out was so lousy that, even if the newsstand had been wide open it wouldn’t have made any difference. There’s nothing Marvel could have done to the company that wasn’t already being done to it by the Goodmans. Whatever Marvel could’ve done to retaliate was null and void, because the reservoir was poisoned. CBA: Can you discuss your collaboration with Alex Toth on “A Job Well Done” [Thrilling Adventure Stories #2]? Ric: Well, I'm not sure you could actually call it a collaboration. I was busy with this and that, writing articles for the movie monster magazine, but was eager to try more ambitious comic book stuff. I had a few short stories I wanted to adapt to the comic format because I always felt it was the most challenging. Not only do comics chew up so many ideas an issue, but, when done right, they use five forms of storytelling: The image, top

Inset left: It’s Will Eisner! No… it’s Jack Davis! Nah… it’s Howard Nostrand!!! You betchum, Red Ryder! Howard’s cartoony yet dramatic stylings—and Kurtzman-like sound effects to boot!—were a refreshing change from the all-too realistic, sometimes downright grotesque, comic book art coming to fore by the mid-1970s. Here’s a page executed by Nostrand for Targitt #3. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

Below: Atlas Comics are noted for their abrupt transitions in numerous titles but perhaps the smoothest change occurred in Targitt when the book morphed from a detective series into a costumed-hero strip in the course of #1 and 2. In retaining the core team of Meyers and Nostrand through the three-issue run, the title stayed true to its brutal yet humorous tone. Here’s a detail from Nostrand’s splash in #3. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

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Above: Trio of book covers of paperbacks scribed by Ric Meyers. Top is one (dedicated to Larry Hama!) of Ric’s three Remo Williams adventures. Middle is his Dirty Harry contribution. Bottom is his Hulk novel. Destroyer ©1977 Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy. Dirty Harry ©1982 Warner Books. Hulk ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 106

caption, word balloon, thought balloon, and bottom caption. You can have a character doing one thing, saying another, thinking a third, and then having a God-voice commenting on it all twice a panel. So cool. So I had these two Twilight Zoney stories: One about a psychic who tells a man he’s going to be killed by the most dangerous weapon in the world (so the man eliminates every classic sort of gun, knife, etc., from his life, only to be killed by a car) and this other about a new product that plays to humanity's seeming need to kill itself slowly: A beverage which guarantees to kill you after 25 drinks (ironically I was to pitch them again when I went to work for nine months on CBS' new, mid-’80s version of The Twilight Zone as "Special Media Consultant"—a title Harlan Ellison invented for me). Neither was focused enough so "A Job Well Done" poured out of my fingers like one of those channeling trances. I gave it to Jeff and pretty much forgot about it until one day he handed me Alex's postcard. I was thrilled, of course, which made the on-going collapse of Atlas around us all the more bitter. I coulda been a contenda, Charlie. Ironically I was to see "A Job Well Done" reprinted years later (1990) in a quickie Globe Communications rag called Monsters Attack, edited by Lou Silverstone and Jerry De Fuccio. And since Alex didn't know where to find me, it wasn't until I contacted Globe, who put me in touch with Alex, that I got paid. But I did get paid, and thanked Alex for his kind words and great art. I only wish I hadn't been so burned by the Atlas experience not to pursue comic writing more diligently. CBA: Howard Chaykin says he visited the office one day only to find that Alex Toth was assigned to The Scorpion. Do you recall the incident? Ric: I don't recall that situation at all. As I said, I was so burned out by Atlas that I didn't even look at a comic until, ironically once more, someone suggested I check out what Howard was doing with American Flagg. I always admired Howard's work and recalled getting along with him pretty well (even when we'd run into each other years later on 42nd Street). All I know for sure was that all the artists were devastated, to one degree or another, with all the Goodman bull that was going down in the second half of our tenure at Seaboard. If Toth was revamping it at that time, it tells me that Jeff was doing the best he could, and, in a real but painful way, showing how much he thought of Howard's work—by replacing one great with another. I can pretty much assure you, however, it wasn't by choice… it was an order from above, from the reservoir poisoners. CBA: Larry Hama suffered the loss of his mother to cancer during the deadline for Wulf the Barbarian #2. Larry had the whole Continuity staff helping out to get the job in on time. Jeff says the Goodmans would not let up on the deadline. Hama never worked at A/S again. Do you recall the tension? Ric: Oh yes. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, but I didn't know why everybody was pitching in. Given that Larry was the one who introduced me to sushi, tofu, Chinatown, and Japanese chambara cinema (Zatoichi, Babycart, etc.) while his girlfriend at the time, Linda Sampson, introduced me to Hong Kong kung fu cinema, I have a lot to be grateful to him for. I had no idea his mother was dying. I just knew that the Goodmans were demanding illogical changes in the issue and everyone was scrambling to do them. But that was absolutely nothing new. CBA: Any thoughts on the major revampings of characters midstream? Well, I have to admit I took advantage of that with Targitt. I didn't mind doing it as a blond Dirty Harry, since I loved that character and went on to do the series bible and write six Dirty Harry novels for Warner Books, but I wanted to do a super-hero, damn it, and the Goodmans' "you-say-black, we-say-white" rollercoaster was my ticket to ride. It's too bad I didn't have the collaboration with Alex

Toth that I had with Howard Nostrand, who drew Targitt. I remember visiting Howard—who reminded me a lot of Warren Murphy, my boss on the Destroyer books—at his apartment and working on the stories. Howard liked his liquids, however, and while he was a pleasant drunk, it got weird once, when he wanted to see how close to my shoe he could throw a boning knife. He assured me that he was an expert… and then threw the knife into my shoe, the blade between my toes. Being so young and stupid, I can't help feeling that I thought, "Wow… he really is an expert!" I believe he paid for new shoes, but I can't remember. I do remember he was very apologetic, though. And I still have fond memories of our reintroduction of Targitt, now The Manstalker—especially his first appearance in costume. Too bad, it was all too bad the fix was in and the public was kept from seeing us all really start to shine. Chris: What did you do after Atlas? You mentioned writing books? Ric: Jeff introduced me to some small companies, and he also threw some books my way, which was incredibly nice of him. The Great Science-Fiction Films and The World of Fantasy Films were sequels to books Jeff had done. He tossed those books to me and said “You do them.” He was incredibly nice, and made me aware of this small company called Drake, where I wound up writing the first three books of my non-fiction career. I also lucked out by meeting Warren Murphy, who hired me as the first ghost writer for The Destroyer series. I wrote the first three books in The Destroyer series not written by Murphy or Sapir. Chris: Did you find yourself taking a different approach when you were writing The Destroyer? Ric: The original authors were great. They did the first 24 books, and some after I did mine. They did the ones between mine (I did 25, 27, and 29). They were satires, as well as legitimate male actionadventure books. They were brilliant; they were both conservative and liberal. They were also very funny and heartfelt as well. What I brought to them—which at first Warren was reluctant to allow (but he came around)—was the influence from comic books and sciencefiction that I had. My first story was a science-fiction story about a television that could visualize your fantasies. Although they had a robot named Mr. Gordon earlier in the series, mine was the first really fanciful science-fiction tale of that kind. Of course, I introduced the Chinese vegetarian vampires in my last full Destroyer novel. I was bringing in those influences and the things that influenced me. It was pretty much the end of the Golden Age of The Destroyer, even though they’re still being published and making a lot of money. They’re way beyond a hundred books. When I did #29, they did #30, which was probably their ultimate Destroyer, called “Mugger Blood,” I believe. That was pretty much it, and the rest has been pale plagiarism, at least in my estimation. Chris: All with different ghost authors? Ric: Lots, there are sites on the web that go into the different ones. Chris: What about some of the other books you’ve worked on? Ric: I’m fairly well known in several different genres for several different reasons. One of my blessings and curses is that I don’t stick to one genre; I do a couple of books in one genre and move on. This is something I’ve gained from my father. My father would never spend more than seven years at a job. He’d just keep moving on. Whatever I got interested in, I would write about. I loved sciencefiction, so I wrote two science-fiction novels, Doomstar and Return to Doomstar, for Questar Books, a division of Warners. I was interested in horror, so I wrote three horror novels; I was interested in mystery, so I wrote three mystery-oriented thrillers. I have loved television detectives so I wrote two books on that subject; science-fiction films, one book; fantasy films, one book; exploitation films, another book; and martial arts movies, which was another book. I wrote the second novel based on a Marvel character (The Incredible Hulk: Cry of the Beast). I wrote science-fiction for Warners (Doomstar) and horror for Dell (Fear Itself). My latest non-fiction book came out this year (Great Martial Arts Movies). My latest novel was five years ago (Murder in Halruua), but I’m working on a new one now. I do movie columns for Asian Cult Cinema and Inside Kung Fu. I still do the occasional job for comics. Given my expertise in the martial arts world, I co-created and did the original writing on the aborted Jackie Chan COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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comic for Image and Topps. I contributed to the 50th anniversary issue of Detective Comics because I struck up a friendship with Denny O’Neil, whom I still greatly admire. To my mind, in a certain period of comics history, he was the only real writer working. Even so, there are still great writers. I am working with Kurt Busiek right now as a consultant. Whatever I was interested in is what I worked on. Chris: What is your current project that you’re working on? Ric: There’s so many at this point. I was way ahead of the curve on kung fu films, and now I’m sort of an expert on kung fu films. I was on Bravo a couple weeks ago, I’ll be on Encore in a couple of months. I was doing consultation on the new Jackie Chan movie for three months at the beginning of the year. I’m working on another martial arts-oriented project, which I can’t talk about at this time. I’ve got columns in Inside Kung Fu and Asian Cult Cinema; Yolk Magazine (a magazine for Asian-Americans) has just asked me to write for them. As the industry dies in Hong Kong, I’m spending a lot of time serving as sort of the American interpreter. That’s fun, and that’s very gratifying. Chris: In working on these different projects with a variety of different personalities, do you ever feel that harrowing Atlas experience brought something to the table that you can use with what you do now? Ric: Yes and no. The old phrase is “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” comes to mind. I’ve had other experiences where the situation was ruined by politics, ego, and personality. I was staff writer for the Greenwich Workshop for six years in the early ’90s. That was a magnificent company when I started working there; it was America’s leading publisher of limited edition fine art. I worked with some of the greatest artists in the country and the world. Because of a variety of problems, it was brought to its knees. It reminded me of the Atlas days, where people would make decisions that were clearly wrong for reasons that were seemingly beyond explanation. You would ask repeatedly why a person was going down a road that was seemingly destructive, and not get a valid answer, or get an answer that was translated as “Because I said so.”

Again, that’s what I call showBISSness. B.I.S.S. stands for “Because I Said So.” It’s an ego issue, and it’s a terrible shame. Chris: Do you keep in touch with any of the old Atlas/ Seaboard guys? Ric: I occasionally see Jeff, though I haven’t in some time, and I occasionally see Steve Mitchell at conventions. Nobody’s still close. I haven’t seen the Goodmans in some time, although I would like to go up to Chip sometime and ask “Is it right? Was this whole thing a tax write-off from the beginning? Explain to me why you made the decisions you did.” From a historian’s standpoint, I would like to know what was going through their minds. Then again, there’s nothing that they can say outside of “Yes, you’re right,” that I’d accept. I still greatly respect Jeff; he was always very good and kind to me, and I appreciate and admire it. The thing that really broke my heart was finding out later that, after we all left, was that somebody threw out the art. They found some of Jeff Jones’s paintings in the garbage. They just threw them out. I am so lucky I bumped into the guy who found it in the garbage, and we were able to return it to Jeff. But who knows how much great work was simply tossed into the dumpster when Atlas’ doors closed? I think that, in a nutshell, tells you where the Goodmans’ hearts lay.

Above: Ric Meyers is now an authority on Hong Kong martial arts films. Here he is with action star Jet Li in a recent photo. Courtesy of Ric Meyers.

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CBA Interview

In the New House of Ideas Alan Kupperberg on the waning days of Atlas/Seaboard Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K.Morris Alan Kupperberg is renowned, perhaps, for his rendition of Obnoxio the Clown, the host of Crazy magazine, but we shan’t forget the artist’s great work on many a National Lampoon comic book satire. Ye Ed’s favorite Kupperberg work remains the outstanding—and hilarious—contribution Alan made to Streetwise. And, leapin’ lizards! Kupp currently draws the Little Orphan Annie syndicated newspaper strip, written by Jay Marder. The artist was interviewed by phone on October 1, 2001, and he copyedited the transcript.

Above: Merely two panels from Alan Kupperberg’s hilarious contribution to Streetwise, albeit the pair concerning his Atlas Comics gig in 1975. To view the other 88 priceless panels, check out the still-available autobio comics collection, amigo! ©2001 Alan Kupperberg

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Comic Book Artist: Where are you from? Alan Kupperberg: I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953. CBA: Were you introduced to comics at a young age? Alan: Yeah, at a pretty young age. I remember my mother’s younger brother, David, used to read DC comics and Mad magazine and he had a whole stack of them on the bottom of the metal closet in his bedroom. He lived in the apartment building next door to ours. So I used to go through his stack and really found myself liking them. CBA: Were there particular titles you were attracted to? Alan: Well, I really liked Superman an awful lot. I don’t remember watching the Superman show when I was a kid. I was a little bit older before I found George Reeves on TV and it kinda came as a surprise to me. I didn’t really know it existed. CBA: Did you start drawing at a young age? Alan: Yeah, they have photographs of me in my high chair, holding up a blackboard on which I’ve drawn the Man in the Moon. [chuckles] So yeah, I’ve always considered myself a third-generation artist as my grandmother was an artist and my father was a fine photographer. Classic ashcan school stuff. CBA: Was he a professional photographer? Alan: No, an amateur but he won a lot of awards. He had a real good eye for composition and storytelling. He met my mother at a meeting of the Lincoln Terrace Camera Club in Brooklyn. He used to drag me around to all the museums, starting at a very early age. So I

always felt as though I’d grown up in the Brooklyn Museum. [laughs] He helped teach me to begin to “see.” CBA: Did you keep an eye on the newspaper strips? Alan: Not an awful lot. I wasn’t a big fan of the newspaper strips. I don’t know why. I don’t even recall if we took a daily newspaper when I was young. So I certainly didn’t follow any adventure strips, or anything like that. I really loved Popeye cartoons when they debuted on television and then I discovered there were Popeye comic books to latch onto. Then I realized Popeye was just one amongst many titles in that big stack in the corner candy store. They kept them in a random stack on the back table of the store. CBA: Did you become a collector off the bat? Alan: I don’t think it occurred to me to collect until I ran into Marvel comics, maybe five years later, because their oldest title, Fantastic Four, when I started buying it, was #29 or 30, or something like that. I realized it was not like collecting Superman comics where if you really get the bug, you had to go back to the issues that came out in 1938 or ’39 and that was not doable back in those days. CBA: Did you get on board with Marvel, pretty much at the beginning? Alan: Well, the first month or two that my pals were showing them to me, I lived in Canarsie then, and my good friend, Scott Simonofsky would give me… probably Spider-Man. And I really thought Steve Ditko’s artwork was real ugly. [laughs] The coloring and the printing was really awful at Marvel in those days. I just didn’t get it. I was really turned off by it and it took me a month or two. And then I saw Amazing Spider-Man #14, Spider-Man fights the Hulk, and that grabbed me. CBA: Were you previously interested in the Mort Weisinger-style comics of DC? Then, obviously, Marvel started a revolution. Alan: Absolutely, although I still stuck with DC books too, and all that. You know, I sort of grudgingly read Batman because he costarred in World’s Finest with Superman. But it took me a while before I started in with The Flash and Green Lantern. I’m ten years old and those were a bit more sophisticated, obviously, and it took me a while to grow into that. But, eventually, I did; probably more for the artwork than the stories. I was enjoying The Flash art by Infantino more than Gardner Fox and John Broome’s writing. At that point, I guess they were more sophisticated than I was ready for. I really dug Mort Weisinger’s routine, and it was routine because it was all a formula. CBA: Simplicity. Alan: I’m very comfortable in a rut. [laughs] CBA: Did you aspire to be a professional artist at a young age? Alan: Absolutely. When I slept, I used to dream about meeting Stan Lee and in my dream, he looked like Mort Weisinger, although I didn’t know what either one of them looked like at that point, but who can explain dreams? [laughs] But I just hoped I’d live long enough to draw The Fantastic Four. You know, I hoped I wouldn’t get hit by a bus before my dream could be realized. CBA: And did you do your own comics at all? Alan: Yes. I have a big, fat manila envelope full of the stuff that I did in school, sitting in the back of the room, instead of paying attention to the teacher. I must have done ten issues of The Hulk for myself. Most kids were reading comic books behind the math text book. I was drawing them. CBA: Oh, really? Did you do your own knock-off characters or just steal them outright? Alan: It all depends. I don’t remember what month it was but when I decided to do The Hulk, I just picked it up wherever Stan and Ditko COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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left it off that month, and I just took it off in my own direction. [laughs] I thought it was more interesting to have Bruce Banner be the Hulk, as Banner, just this super-strong guy, and I gave him a suit very much like Dynamo. So that was my Hulk. [laughs] I also did a lot of issues of Iron Man and I still have them. They’re all in #2 pencil on lined, loose-leaf paper. CBA: Did you go to art school? Alan: I went to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. CBA: Did you frequent Manhattan as a kid? Alan: As you probably well know from my Streetwise story, I started going up to National (DC Comics) around 1967 or ’68, at 575 Lexington Avenue. That was just the most thrilling experience. Neal Adams would sit in the production department at a spare desk and do covers and I could watch him. When I first started going up there, Carmine Infantino was just the cover editor. So he’d just sit in this tiny windowless room, with all the DC covers pinned up around him and do these scribbles which were his cover layouts, that he’d hand over to Adams and all. In those days, Neal was just starting his spectacular cover run at National, and his stuff just killed me. Just a whole new sensibility in mainstream comics. CBA: Did you take the tours? Alan: Yeah, that’s where I was on Thursdays at 2:00 or 2:30. CBA: Did Mark Hanerfeld conduct them? Alan: At first, it was a DC production room guy, Walter Hurlecheck. He would show us around and then Mark Hanerfeld starting doing it and Walter went back to the photostat room. CBA: So did you go up every week? Alan: Sometimes. We all went up every week. It was always the same crowd, every week. Me, Hanerfeld, Marvin Wolfman and Len Wein. A couple of other guys. [laughs] CBA: Were you skipping school? Alan: Absolutely, I was skipping school! I went to Meyer Levin Junior High School in Brooklyn (Meyer Levin was a bombardier in World War Two). I’d cut out every Thursday afternoon. You bet. [laughs] CBA: Did your parents find out? Alan: I don’t think so, but on the other hand, I wasn’t hiding that I went to DC Comics because I’d probably gush about the quality time I was spending with E. Nelson Bridwell. [laughs] And I was, too! [in Bugs Bunny voice] CBA: So I guess you didn’t get in trouble? Alan: No, I was in trouble all the time. [laughs] I was a rotten kid. You know, this particular trouble wouldn’t stand out from any of the others that I got in. [laughs] CBA: Did taking frequent tours through that professional environment give you aspirations to work there? Alan: Oh, sure, and that is actually what happened eventually. An editor, maybe it was Kashdan or Jack Miller, gave me old scripts that had been already illustrated, so I got to draw my version of those stories. They gave me one script—I think it was by Dave Wood— that eventually turned up in Star Spangled War Stories, called “The Phantom Flyer,” illustrated by my later-to-be dear friend, Jack Abel. So I’ve got my version that I did from that script before it ever appeared in print. CBA: They gave you discarded scripts? Alan: Yeah, they were through with it because Jack had illustrated it and turned it in with the art. I did not see Jack’s version then, I saw it when it appeared in print. CBA: When did you start professionally? Alan: Not counting The Canarsie Kid, a gag panel appearing weekly in the Canarsie Courier in 1967, when I was 13? Well, I went on to the High School of Art and Design, which was around the corner from DC at 909 Third Avenue. You know, I watched them move the furniture into 909 and I remember the smell of wet paint when they moved in there. I was around the corner and really started doing some serious school cutting at that point. I just kind of moved in. I’m probably exaggerating but I felt as though I’d moved in to the reception area at DC, just to ambush people. I spent an awful amount of time out there trying to get sketches from the artists passing through. I don’t recall anyone saying no, so I’ve got a nice Silver Age sketch collection. CBA: Did DC take you on as an intern? December 2001

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Alan: There was no such animal back then. Steve Mitchell and I graduated from high school, and he went to work at DC as production assistant during that Summer of 1971. He then started college in August or September and I took his place. They sat me at the last desk in the room, right behind Jean Simek Izzo. CBA: Did you contribute to fanzines at all? Alan: I did a couple of covers for The Comic Reader, I think it was, or Etcetera for Paul Levitz. CBA: Did you attend the first comics conventions? Alan: I probably went in ’70 or so to my first convention, a Phil Seuling convention. CBA: What was the atmosphere like at DC? That was a very interesting time for the company. Alan: Yes, Carmine Infantino was in charge and I worked under Jack Adler. Before I went on staff, I’d been getting freelance production work, like cleaning up the art on the Golden Age reprints. My first real comics paycheck was for cleaning up the Robin origin story for Crown’s Batman hardcover reprint. I also did a lot of modernizing and extending romance reprint art. We had to change the proportion on the reprints because National stopped using running heads in their books. Then when I first went on staff I started as a miscellaneous $100-a-week guy. That was the legend on my check, “$100 miscellaneous.” And that was the time of President Nixon’s wage and price freeze. So Sol Harrison was delighted to have me locked in at a hundred bucks a week. But I still did plenty of freelance work as well. On staff, I was doing art and lettering corrections and pasting up stuff. They had two regular correction guys who worked in the production department there, Morris Waldinger and Joe Letterese, and they were both mainly letterers, and they also did the corrections on the books. They had quite a

Above: Atlas/Seaboard production manager Alan Kupperberg at his desk, circa May 1975. Note the racked Swank magazines behind Kupp. The closed door on the right is the office of publisher Martin Goodman. Courtesy of Alan Kupperberg. Above: When Paul Kupperberg teamed with Paul Levitz to helm Etcetera and the revived Comic Reader, he often relied on his brother Alan for cover illustrations. Courtesy of Paul K., here’s #87 depicting the Marvel Family’s return to comics. Characters ©2001 DC Comics.

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Above: Three tastefully discrete (at least when it comes to the still-inexistence skin mag) covers for Swank magazine, a poor man’s Playboy, purchased by the Goodmans in the 1970s, probably the family’s most successful post-Marvel business venture. All covers from 1975, the first year of Chip’s ownership. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

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racket for themselves because they’d take a book out of the art drawer in the morning and they’d spend all morning fixing it up, doing whatever they had to do to it. When I got in there, I’d do three books before lunch. And these guys had nothing to do, so I don’t think they were very happy with me. [laughs] Because when you think about it, how many books did DC have? 40, 50 books, and not all of them monthly, and two production guys that they do two books a day each. [laughs] You know, there’s not that much work to go around. In those days, Glynis Oliver Wein was in the production department doing cover paste-ups. This was before she started coloring because Jack Adler was the color maven and he taught her and I thought she was an incredibly apt pupil. He also taught me coloring. CBA: Sal Amendola told me—and it’s evident in his Streetwise story—that there was a soul-killing aspect to the DC production department. Sal admitted he was a very sensitive guy, but it really affected him. Alan: Well, Sal had all the sensitivity that I didn’t have. And that’s lots! [laughs] CBA: You could take it? Alan: Take it? I was deaf, dumb, and blind. I mean, technically, I picked up everything, workwise. But as a person, I didn’t have a clue back then. So just like at home, I’d get in trouble all the time. [laughs] CBA: You weren’t attuned to the office politics taking place at the time? Alan: Oh, I was attuned to it but I didn’t realize that I had powers and responsibilities as a human being. [laughs] Things that I did to hurt people, it just never occurred to me that I could hurt people, and I was hurting them right and left. But I didn’t know it. I couldn’t understand why people were pissed off at me. [laughs] The point is, people have always accused me of being fairly bright, but they didn’t realize that my smarts weren’t across the board. There were some things I was not smart about, like people. People assumed that I knew better, but I didn’t. [chuckles] So I’d get in trouble. They figured out I was smart, if I could remember every line of dialogue from every movie or comic I’d ever read, why couldn’t I understand certain things, that life was not a movie or a comic book, and things could hurt people? I was intelligent, but I wasn’t smart. I was clever, but I wasn’t cagey. CBA: Did you socialize with other comic book folk? Alan: Yeah, sure. All the time. One of the things Sol Harrison and Jack Adler always tried to drum into me was, “Keep away from the artists. Don’t hang out with the artists. Don’t bother them! They’ll mess you up!” [laughs] I think they were worried, mainly, about Neal Adams. [laughs] But sure, I hung out in Neal’s room all day. At least that’s how it seems in my imagination. Neal and Murphy Anderson would be sitting in there, doing incredible stuff. The coffee room at National was also an incredible stew of new talents and stiff shirts interacting. Kaluta and Wrightson and Englehart and Aragonés. And guys like Nick Cardy and Win Mortimer and Frank Robbins. Sol Harrison put together a life drawing class in the coffee room after hours. DC paid for nude models. So I’m in life drawing class with Kaluta, Neal Adams and Joe Kubert and Sal Amendola, Giordano and Howard Chaykin, etc. And Chaykin is making racy comments in front of the nude female model, and Kubert’s neck is getting redder, because he’s a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, and Chaykin is a Jewish wise-guy from Brooklyn. I’m glad I never got Kubert mad. That man was as solid as a brick building.

CBA: You were part of an influx of new, young talent that came into DC at the time. Alan: Well, I wouldn’t call what I had back then “talent.” [laughs] CBA: Well, a new generation, anyway. Certainly, Howard Chaykin and his friends came in and a number of other guys. Did you hit it off with any of these guys? Alan: Well, Howard Chaykin, for one, of course. I don’t know what I was to him, but he was my best friend. We were the Gruesome Twosome for a lot of years. [chuckles] I became his little clone. He taught me composition. CBA: How long did you last at DC? Alan: Well, I eventually, after several weeks, got to be Jack Adler’s assistant. I was the assistant to the assistant production manager, which meant that I checked all the black line artwork engraving, among a lot of other stuff like logging and filing. I did in-house photography, I did the color drop outs, the “bleaching” for reprints that National didn’t have negatives for. I worked the dark room. CBA: Did you ever meet or deal with Gaspar Saladino? Alan: Oh yes, I love Gaspar who is a great guy. Total professional. Best display lettering in the business. Funny story: Steve Mitchell and I were always doing unpublished fanzines and stuff like that, now that you remind me. We’d get a lot of artwork together, pencil and ink it. We did one Western we meant to call “The Plains Rider,” but I lettered “The Plain Rider,” no “s”. So true, too. But we were going to put out one ’zine called Anthology. I did the logo and showed it to Gaspar for a critique. He’s looking at it and he says, “Well, it’s okay. Maybe, check this width on this letter, etc. But you didn’t really get any spirit into it, Alan.” And I said, “The spirit of what?” He said, “You know, about digging in the earth, finding bones and stuff.” And I’m going, “I don’t understand.” [laughs] “No, no, no, this is Anthology, not Anthropology. It’s a selection of stories.” I always thought Gaspar was ne plus ultra. He was the best letterer and also did most of the logos for Atlas. He was the greatest. I was also crazy about John Costanza’s lettering. And Sam Rosen is great, too. Best balloons. CBA: Did you study those guys? You obviously had a career as a letterer, too. Alan: Yeah, I studied them an awful lot, as well as learning color from Jack Adler. To this day, when I color the Little Orphan Annie Sunday strips, I’m thinking of Jack. I got to meet lots of nice people at DC. Where else would I have met Paul Reinman? He was coloring for Jack Adler. Paul was a very lovely German gentleman. I loved that MLJ [Archie] crap. [laughs] That Jerry Siegel stuff? Wow, was that bad? But awesome. And I still have every one of them. CBA: What happened at DC? Alan: Eventually I screwed up enough where they had to fire me at DC and I went freelance. I probably went over to Neal Adams next. He and Dick Giordano had one room, I think, at that point, in what eventually became Continuity Associates. Steve Mitchell and I were over there, the two grunts who sat there and watched the phone and the office when Neal opened up his business. CBA: Who let you go? Alan: Sol Harrison and Jack Adler. Actually, what happened… [chuckles] oh, well. I think I had pissed off Joe Orlando and that wasn’t a good thing to do. I was a little snot and Joe decided he had no patience with it. More or less the straw that broke the camel’s back. While it was a tragedy to me at the time, years later Joe didn’t seem to remember that stuff. To this day, Jack Adler scolds me for blowing the chance to become the King of the Production Department. CBA: You then went over to Continuity? Alan: Yeah, and just picked up scraps, lettering and coloring and stuff like that. For instance, Neal Adams called up John Verpoorten— John knew who I was and probably wouldn’t have gone for it—but Neal Adams says, “I got a kid here who can letter. I’ll send him over. Give him a job.” So I show up. You know, John Verpoorten says okay to Neal Adams. And I show up and John Verpoorten goes, [growls] “Okay, here.” CBA: You had a reputation over at the competition? Alan: Oh, sure. [laughs] Oh, I messed up everywhere, an equal opportunity offender. I eventually wooed my way in everywhere. [laughs] The way I got established at Marvel, eventually, was when they were doing the British reprints, very early on in 1973, I started COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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doing the Zip-A-Tones on those books. CBA: Was that Larry Lieber’s gig? Alan: No, everything was handled through Sol Brodsky at that point. This was the department they gave him after he returned to Marvel after his Skywald adventure with Israel Waldman. I don’t think Larry got involved with the British books until after Atlas. That’s what he did after Atlas, when he got back to Marvel. And then I did splash pages for Larry for the artificially divided stories that needed new splash pages. A cover or two for the Planet Of The Apes reprints. So I did stuff like that. CBA: Did you pencil, ink, and letter, the whole nine yards? Alan: Well, we’re skipping ahead in the chronology. That British stuff was after Atlas. CBA: That was later? Okay, then let’s back up. Alan: We’re still way before Atlas, depending on how detailed you want to get. So, being up in this one room with Neal, there were five desks jammed into that tiny room. When all the desks were full, it was Giordano, Adams, me, Steve Mitchell, and sometimes Joe Rubinstein, who was 14 years old. One day the phone rings, Neal answers it and it’s Jack Abel calling from Wally Wood’s Wood studio in Valley Stream; where at the time, worked Woody, Jack, and Syd Shores. Jack had received a black-&-white assignment from a guy named D.J. Arneson, who was publishing an alleged humor magazine by the name of Grin. It ran for three issues. The job was a movie parody of The Godfather, called “The Godmother.” So Jack was looking for somebody to pencil the thing because he either didn’t want to, or whatever. He probably got bigger money offers for drawing something else. Most likely, he didn’t want to cope with drawing likenesses. So Neal sent me over. It was a little bit like a shady transaction, you know? I met Jack in his car by the subway station in Forest Hills, in front of the movie theater. “Hullo, didja bring da stuff?” And Jack looked at “da stuff,” whatever samples I had and said okay, and do I know someone who can letter it? I said, “Oh, I can letter it.” So I’m doing this stuff for him later at the Wood Studio and I guess Woody took a look at what I was doing and said, “How would you like to help me on Sally Forth and Cannon? Can you letter it?” So I lettered it and then he asked, “Can you ink backgrounds?” and, yes, I could ink backgrounds. I could use the “swipe-o-graph.” Eventually, within three weeks, I was writing it with him. You know, if Woody saw you could do it for him, he’d go for it. So Woody was real impressed with the first page. (I think I was penciling before lettering because he had pages left from Gaspar that had been lettered but hadn’t been penciled.) I just pulled out my T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and copied some stuff and he was very impressed so he took me on. So there I was with a giant. CBA: You became Woody’s assistant of the day, so to speak. Alan: Yeah, I was probably the last assistant he had there because I found him an apartment in Brooklyn after he broke up with his wife and he dissolved the studio. CBA: What was Woody like? Alan: I think when I first met him that week, he was coming off a bender and his hands were shaking and I could show you the page I’m talking about on Sally. He just kept trying to ink that one line on the top of her leg, on her shin, and he kept electric erasing it out. He couldn’t get it, man. He was shaking that day. Though he was not drinking and thus steady of hand most of the time we worked together. CBA: How long was that? Alan: I’d have to count the number of Sally and Cannon pages and tell you. It seemed like forever but it probably wasn’t that long. At least a couple months and maybe even a year, altogether. CBA: So were you commuting down to Valley Stream? Alan: I lived in Brooklyn so I’d take the Long Island Railroad back and forth. And it was not an unpleasant commute because I’d be going opposite traffic. CBA: It was about an hour away? Alan: It couldn’t have been much more than half an hour. I had been going to Valley Stream most of my life because Green Acres was the big shopping center. There was a big shopping center in Valley Stream so I’d go in there with my parents. CBA: And where from there? Alan: Let’s see, after I alienated Woody…. [laughs] CBA: Oh, Woody fired you too? December 2001

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Alan: Uhh, yeah, probably. [laughs] I don’t remember, specifically, but it’s probably a good bet. But at that point, when Woody left his wife Marilyn, I got him an apartment in the building next door to mine. A building Gray Morrow had lived in. So that was quite a storied block in Brooklyn on Woodruff Avenue. Gray Morrow and Woody lived there, and I, to say the least. And for some reason, Larry Hama and Ralph Reese kind of came back and started helping him out at that point, but I think Woody was falling apart. I’d given some party in my apartment—maybe a birthday party for Howard Chaykin—and Woody got real plastered and kept me up talking, trying to talk to me all night. I just wanted to go to sleep and now I wish I had a recording of that conversation. CBA: What did you guys talk about? Alan: Oh, I have no idea. He was drunk. He wasn’t making any sense. So, post-Woody, I probably started picking up some freelance work doing those Zip-A-Tones for Sol Brodsky, which probably led to some lettering. CBA: You have a solid comics production background, right? Alan: Oh, absolutely. CBA: What was there to know? Is the coloring of comics unique to comics and it doesn’t really translate to anything else? Alan: Well, it doesn’t even translate to Little Orphan Annie because I can look at a color in a letterpress comic book and tell you the comic book code for it, or at least in the old days. (I know absolutely nothing about modern computer production techniques for coloring.) But in the old days, I could look at a color and tell you what it was. You know, R2B2 through Y3, whatever it was. CBA: What were the four colors that they had? Alan: Well, they had red, yellow, and blue, and black. Black was only the solid line art, unless the artist put in a Zip-A-Tone, in which

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Above: Okay, so maybe we used this Frank Thorne drawing— depicting his strip, “Son of Dracula,” in Fright—in last issue’s letter column but who can resist the master’s wonderful linework! From The Comic Reader #118. Courtesy of Mike Friedrich. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

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case he would determine the value he wanted. Because there was no |separate black tone in that color process. CBA: I’ve seen Marie Severin color guides, and they say “Y20,” for instance. Does that means 20% yellow? Alan: Y2B2 would be a light, pale green. 20% yellow, 20% blue. Or B3 for 50% blue and just B for 100% blue. Those were the three values we had on each color. So I was there, as a matter of fact, at DC Comics in the production department when Neal Adams came in and said to Sol Harrison, “Why can’t we get a better flesh color at National? Look, Marvel is adding a 20% yellow to the 20% red for a nicer flesh color. Y2R2.” Sol Harrison says, “No, no, we don’t buy 20% yellow from Chemical Color. We only buy 50% and 100% yellow. [laughs] We’re not paying them for that.” Neal says, “Call them up and ask them.” It turns out that National just never used it, but Chemical Color said, “Sure. If you just mark the color guides for it, we’ll give it to you.” So then the flesh colors changed at DC Comics. But that was the situation at DC: The first answer was always, “No, you can’t do it.” CBA: That was the advantage, obviously, of having somebody who had experience from outside of comics. Alan: Neal was a sh*t stirrer and that was what he did best. CBA: He also understood contemporary production techniques, right? Alan: Well, yeah. He wanted to use some of his pencils as black line artwork instead of inking them. I think this was the time someone stole Neal’s briefcase from between his feet when he fell asleep on the subway home to the Bronx late one night. So he lost a bunch of penciled pages and time. You know the Green Arrow story, “What Can One Man Do?” I shot the stats for him, late at night in the photostat room. I worked on it until I got something that you could reproduce from and then I pasted it all together for him with high contrast photos that I also did for him. So I was working on some heavy stuff late at night for Neal, gratis. I worked on the Kree-Skrull War, filling in blacks, part of a jam, with Adams, Weiss, a lotta guys. You know the famous story about the sixth finger on Rick Jones? I remember us all standing around, laughing at it, laughing at the originals. [laughs] So, this was at DC Comics, we were making Marvel history on The Avengers. [laughs] CBA: Did you play Gorilla with Neal? Alan: Oh, yes. I was there that night. Absolutely, Gorilla Night. That panel in Streetwise that I put in of Neal holding Len Wein over his head is only a slight exaggeration. [laughs] It was the most fun I had ever had up to that point in my life. I mean, all that stuff. To watch Alan Weiss do that stuff on the top of the dam, from that Batman versus the Reaper Halloween story [“Night of the Reaper,” Batman #237]? I was there on top of that dam watching Neal and Denny’s story animate itself. [laughs] CBA: Did you like Neal? Alan: I loved Neal, sure. All the young guys were crazy about Neal

because he was the most incredible thing around. I don’t think Neal ever liked me much because I didn’t fall for a lot of the crap. I don’t know, I just think he thinks I was a snot. Which I was. I don’t know if he realizes I was one of the people who thought he was a real manipulator, from day one. In other words, I think he was doing it all for himself. I mean, it’s nice that he helped out a lot of people, me included. That’s good, but he was doing it for himself, in my opinion. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you admit it…. CBA: Are we near Atlas yet? [laughs] Alan: Yeah, I guess we are because Steve Mitchell was there as production assistant, or whatever he was. CBA: Do you recall hearing about Atlas/Seaboard? Alan: I remember everyone being very excited before I had anything to do with it when they announced very good rates. I recall a whole bunch of people in a cab, probably Marv, Len, Steve Englehart, I and who else, I don’t know. We were very excited that this was a new opportunity for some people who obviously knew how to produce comic books (which wasn’t necessarily true—Stan knew how to make comic books, not the Goodmans). CBA: Did you hear anything about, at least verbally, of creator ownership or co-ownership, and more freedom over at Atlas? Alan: I seem to remember them bat that around a little bit but, obviously, nothing ever came of it. That stuff, unfortunately for the purposes of our conversation, took place before I was involved so I don’t know about that. CBA: So were you cognizant of Steve Mitchell’s experience while he was working at Atlas? Alan: Yeah, he’s doubtlessly the one who gave me the freelance lettering and coloring to do for them. So, yeah. He couldn’t letter or color. As a matter of fact, I was wondering who did the bulk of the coloring for them. Larry Lieber might have a lot of these answers. You haven’t spoken to Larry yet? CBA: Through third parties, Larry has said he’d prefer not to discuss his Atlas experience. Apparently it was an unhappy time for him. Alan: Yeah. Well, Jeff Rovin did not have a lot on the ball as far as I was concerned. I think they chose him because he had reorganized Captain Company for Jim Warren, right? I think he’d been on all the Captain Company stuff, and Martin Goodman really thought he could sell a lot of merchandise through these comics. He was really hoping this would help put it over. CBA: He was going to use the Warren template? Alan: Yes. That was at least part of his planning because the offices, when I first came on board, were full of Spider-Man model kits, all those model kits that they advertised. CBA: All the Aurora super-hero models, right. [laughs] Alan: The place was full of merchandise until they cleared it out to another location. I thought it was ironic that he was really depending on Spider-Man to support his books, if only in the form of a model kit. CBA: Do you think that Atlas/Seaboard was created as an act of revenge against Marvel because Marvel booted Chip, Martin’s son, out of the company after giving promises to Martin that his son would remain as President? Alan: I may have heard that, years later. I don’t remember when I heard that but I obviously heard that as at least a rumor. CBA: Did you guys think about this? How come the former publisher of Marvel Comics is starting up a company that would stand in competition with his former company? Alan: Well, it didn’t seem like any mystery. He was hoping to make a lot of money. And I guess he wouldn’t have minded teaching Marvel a lesson on how to sell comics. CBA: You were doing some lettering and coloring for Steve Mitchell? Alan: Yeah, and I don’t remember why he left, unless he was loyal to Rovin and split when Jeff did. Or maybe he was purged. CBA: Did you go to the company? Did you visit? Alan: Oh, yeah, Steve and I had lunch all the time at the Burger Ranch on Madison Avenue. Waiting for Steve to pick up a lunch check is like watching a fly walk up a drape. Steve and I went to the old Copacabana nightclub to see Don Rickles. What a ball. You’re a hockey puck, Steve. CBA: What was the Atlas office like? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Alan: There was the bullpen, with the receptionist in there too, looking through a little window into a small waiting room. There were three offices with windows, radiating off the bullpen, facing the outside of the building that were, from left to right: Chip Goodman’s office, a two-desk freelancer’s office in which I worked freelance sometimes. Karen Flashner, the editor of True Confessions magazine, did occasional work in there too. Then there was Martin’s office on the right. Across from that was, I think, two other, windowless offices. From left to right was Jeff Rovin, and then Larry Lieber. That’s what it was, six rooms, plus the storage room with the Xerox machine in it. So it was like six or seven rooms there. CBA: Like the small Marvel offices of the late ‘60s, pretty small? Alan: Yeah, comparable, but that Marvel office was more like a railroad flat and Atlas was laid out like a hub. But we didn’t have a photostat machine, like Marvel had. We used to send everything out to Findley Stats. CBA: Did you know Jeff Rovin? Alan: Sure, I knew Jeff. I don’t remember an awful lot, I just thought all his efforts were off the mark. CBA: From talking to the other freelancers who were contributing to the company? Alan: No, just my own opinion about his books. At the time, I just felt they were just a little bit off. He didn’t really have the knack. You know, these books were not magic. That’s what was missing, magic. They never really did attract the right top talent, at least to any good effect. CBA: Did you think that they were trying to emulate Marvel Comics? Alan: I don’t think Jeff wanted to, though I don’t know what Jeff’s intentions were. I don’t think I came on board, on staff, until after he was gone. Jeff had some good artists working for him. Russ Heath, Ernie Colón, Jack Sparling, Mike Sekowsky, Al McWilliams, Ditko, Woody, Pat Boyette, the titanic John Severin—really splendid folks. And one of my favorite people of all—Howie Nostrand! God, what a guy. First artist I ever met that was always perfumed with booze, no matter what time of day. I was fascinated by him, and a little scared, too. I think I had a few drinks with him. I always thought of him as the poor man’s Will Eisner-by-way-of-Jack Davis. But he was a slick artist. He ought to be remembered more. And of course, Martin Goodman really thought, justifiably, that Chaykin’s book would be the breakout of the bunch. CBA: Yeah, The Scorpion seemed to be an interesting book and even Sal’s The Phoenix. But the rest of them… for instance, if you look on the surface, The Brute was a knock-off of The Hulk and The Destructor was a Spider-Man copy. It seemed to be obvious that they were working off a Marvel template, so to speak. Alan: Yeah, they tried. Larry was able, naturally, to get a lot closer to it than Rovin. By the time Rovin left there seemed to be quite a rebellion brewing among some freelancers. There might have been some feeling that Jeff was high hatting them—perhaps being arbitrary, rather than professional. When Archie Goodwin says, “Please do it my way,” one is more apt to say “yes sir,” than when Rovin did. And Archie is writing The Destructor for him. CBA: Steve Mitchell said that there was so much interference from the Goodmans, that apparently Chip didn’t know comics from anything. To Jeff and Steve’s point of view, it was mindless interference. How did you hear about there was a position open? Was it Steve’s position that you filled? Alan: Yeah, I guess so. I don’t even know exactly what he was called at that point. CBA: Production manager. You had a credit in the indicia of the books as production manager. Alan: There was another guy who worked there named John Chilly. Nice Irish guy, very mellow, had been in magazine production forever. The bullpen was two desks in the middle of the office there, and Steve was with his back to the front door there. And the guy facing the other way was John Chilly, whose name is on the credits of some of these black-&-white magazines as production. He was a nice guy. I really enjoyed him. Shelly Leferman was also a great deal of fun to be with. I liked him, even though he wasn’t above spoofing me, some. He’d point to the “Hawkman” story in Jules Feiffer’s book on comics. The story is signed Shelly. Leferman claimed he’s that Shelly. I was December 2001

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green enough about comics history to not be 100% sure he was having me on. CBA: How did you hear that there was a position open over at Atlas? Alan: At Atlas, I think Chip was aware that I could do all these things a lot better even than Steve Mitchell. The only time they could use him, besides trafficking with the colorists, engravers and printer was with pasting up. I could do that, of course, as could anyone who could hold up a T-square. As a matter of fact, Sol Harrison used to yell at me, “Use a T-square.” I used to eyeball everything and was generally right-on, but you’re still supposed to use a T-square.

[chuckles] So I could do art corrections, lettering and coloring. So I was a good buy for them. CBA: Your job was to get the comics ready to be sent out to World Color Press in Sparta? Alan: Yeah. John Chilly did a lot of the paste-up, at first. Then he seems to have disappeared. In other words, everything that DC’s 1971 eight-person production department did, I did by myself at Atlas. CBA: Except for making stats, right? Alan: That would have been a ninth person. I used to run the stat machine often at DC Comics, but Atlas didn’t have one. Wayne Seelal

Above: While Russ Heath contributed to the color line of Atlas/Seaboard rather late in the company’s history, he was quite prolific. Here’s a page from his work on Planet of Vampires #3. Courtesy of Tim Barnes. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

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was the main stat guy at National when I was there. So we sent our stat work out at Atlas. I used to make some of these textured prints for Neal. I did a lot of work for Neal in the darkroom. I remember when I first started working for DC. In order to let the artists and production people know what was necessary for the production and engraving, they organized a bus trip up to Chemical Color in Bridgeport. That was fascinating to watch them sit there, these women, fat Italian women with big, fat arms, sitting in long rows at tables, just opaque-ing out with red paint on acetates, doing these hand-color separations. The smell of the engraving chemicals and metal plates, everything. It was very interesting.

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CBA: Would you package the material at Atlas for the color separators and later the printer? Alan: I used to deal with Chemical Color, who did the color separations and engraving in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I also used to deal with the printer, World Color Press in Sparta, Illinois. Every day at about three o’clock, a guy named Eddie, who I’d known since day one at DC in ’71, who worked for Chemical, would show up and pick up a package for Chemical. I think Chemical also had an office or a drop-off point on 42nd Street, Third Avenue. In the morning and in the afternoon, Eddie would pick up and deliver the stuff for Chemical. He would just make the rounds of the different comics companies and drive back and forth to Connecticut every day in a paneled station wagon.

CBA: And what about World Color? Alan: I remember I’d speak to Eddie Whitbread, I think. I don’t remember if Eddie was with Chemical or Sparta, but I’d talk to them. I’d get these proofs of the comics on newsprint, a kind of crudely cut-up blackline of the book and you’d go over that for what they used to call “fly sh*t,” little specks all over the place. You’d circle them with a red pen so they’d clean up the black plate, rout out the specks, and then later, that would get approved. Later on, we’d get makereadys, which were just unbound, untrimmed books, without a cover. CBA: They still had the crop marks on them, they weren’t trimmed? Alan: Yeah, more or less. But just in the black line form. We called those flats. There were four pages on a flat. I guess the equivalent in publishing would be signatures. I’ve still got a ton of silver prints, which were the first contact prints that were made by Chemical Color from the black plate negatives. They’d provide two sets of silvers to the companies on which to make color schemes. DC used one for the colorist, and I took the extra set home after publication instead of trashing them. So I always had a lot of Fourth World in black-&-white, some great Severin, Toth, you betcha. Marvel seldom colored on silver prints because they were always working closer to deadline than National. I’ve held onto them silvers so long, they’ve turned brown. CBA: Did they offer you good money to come on board? Alan: I can look in my account book but I doubt it was good money. I used to be able to turn it out so I’d make it on volume. CBA: Were you able to freelance at the same time as working? Alan: I did plenty of freelance. Lots of coloring and lots of lettering for Atlas. I did all the mastheads for all the letter pages. CBA: You came on board for the third issues, right? Did you choose the letters? Alan: No, that was editorial’s job. I did all the art direction on those text pages, such as it was. CBA: Did you come up with the names of the letter columns? Alan: Larry and I might have talked it over. Either Larry came up with it all himself or we talked it over. Maybe I gave him a list of suggestions. You know, it’s not that hard: “Dark Dispatches,” “Send it To Stryker.” CBA: Do you recall when you first went in for your interview? Alan: I don’t even know if it was anything formal. I had probably been doing some freelance in the office there. Perhaps a meeting with Chip, to settle things. CBA: So they were aware of your abilities? Alan: Yes, and I was always agitating for art jobs, so I was actually given my first book pencil assignment there for The Cougar #3. Somewhere, I still have the pages that I started doing the layouts on. But, of course, there was never a Cougar #3. I very, very quickly ran up against my limitations with the job and was well aware that I was having a great deal of trouble making good pictures. I hadn’t learned composition or storytelling yet and that can sometimes get you past bad drawing. Or dazzling drawing trumping bad storytelling. But I didn’t have either. So, they’re very tentative, faint scribbles on a page. CBA: Did it feel like a sinking ship when you came on board? Alan: Probably. I never thought there was a great promise to the company once it was up and running, because there were very limited people running the thing. Larry Lieber does what he does very well but he’s not a ground breaker. He’s not a creative genius. And he doesn’t pretend to be. He’s just very good at what he does, because he’s sincere and he works very hard. To sell a whole line of comic books, you’ve gotta have something special. There’s got to be a magic spark somewhere and Jeff Rovin certainly wasn’t it. Let’s face it, he had set all these titles in motion that Larry wound up responsible for later. In other words, Larry didn’t create The Brute and Jeff’s other books. CBA: There was a 180-degree change in the content of many of the books. Morlock 2001 suddenly became Morlock and the Midnight Men, and Phoenix became The Protector. I mean, they just seemed to be discarding things left and right. Alan: That was great. Panic had set in with upper management in Chip and Martin. And Martin wanted to change Phoenix to Phoenix, the Man from Mars. So I said to Martin, “You know, NASA just sent a spaceship up there and they say there’s no Man from Mars. Maybe we shouldn’t call it that.” [laughs] They just proved there’s never been COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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life there. [laughs] So I made up a list and he chose “The Protector” from that. So that title’s my creation. I lettered the logo, too. CBA: Did you recall Larry calling in Gary Friedrich to pinch-hit? Alan: No, I don’t remember him calling because I guess Gary was back home by that point at wherever it was he was living, because I don’t remember Gary in New York at that time at all. I loved Gary. I used to see him all the time in the late ‘60s at Marvel Comics. He’d come in from lunch, squiffed, and I’ve got an interview I did with him and he’s drunk as a skunk on the tape and it’s funny. [laughs] He’s really talking about E. Nelson Bridwell, who apparently spilled a drink on him and really, really pissed him off. Gary was always one of the Good People in the business and treated this kid with respect. I’d love to hear from Gary. CBA: How long were you at Atlas? Alan: Until they folded. CBA: That was pretty quick? Alan: Yes, it couldn’t have been more than a month or two, altogether, because… they were bi-monthly issues, so it could have been three or four months, then. CBA: What was Larry like? Alan: I love Larry. I had lunch with him a couple of months ago at the Society of Illustrators and it was great to see him again. He took one look at me and… see, I told you about those days, how I was?… he says, “Ah, every time I see you, I get like the Inspector from the Clouseau movies.” [laughs] He says, “You give me a twitch every time I see you. I turn into Herbert Lom every time you’re around.” [laughs] But Larry knows his business. I don’t know how to put it because nothing I say about Larry is intended as an insult, because I respect and admire him. But work is agony for Larry. Comic book drawing is agony for him. He suffers and I don’t think it’s a natural part of him. He goes through hell to draw, so you have to give him a lot of credit. I don’t know why someone would choose that in life. To Stan Lee, I assume life is just like rolling off a log, and for Larry, life is difficult. CBA: Did you hear an edict to make the Atlas comics like Marvel Comics? Was that implied or was that explicit? Alan: Well, it was seen as Marvel was the winner. In other words, nobody was saying, “Let’s strike out and break new ground and be magnificent.” They were saying, “Follow the winner.” CBA: But they missed something, perhaps, in the equation. Atlas may have had his brother, but they didn’t have Stan Lee, right? Alan: Obviously, yes, and they obviously failed with that tactic. CBA: Did you have any intimate conversations with Larry at all, like, “Where are these books going?” or, “This ain’t too cool”? Alan: Not really, not about the books. I think he was annoyed, for instance, when he would give me the corrections to do. Now, I’m always the guy who’s always trying to figure out the easiest, most effective way to do it. So I’d say, “Well, if you ask me to do it this way, Larry, then it’s a lot of work, bum-bum-bum-bum. But we could also do it this way and it will work out just great.” So if it made sense, then he’d say okay, but I don’t think he needed that, for him, extra step. “So why isn’t this guy just doing what I asked him to do instead of bringing this back to me? I already made up my mind.” So I don’t think he needed that. CBA: And how far along were you with the fourth issues of the titles? Alan: I don’t remember fourth issues, except for the ones that were published, being drawn. My memory might not be accurate on that, but I don’t remember them being drawn. I don’t even remember scripts being commissioned for a lot of them. Again, this is just my memory and I was not in editorial, per se, though I assisted Larry in whatever way he requested. CBA: But you were working on the third issue of The Cougar, for instance. Alan: I was. Well, there you go, you see? I just contradicted myself. Yes, I was working on the third issue of The Cougar. CBA: Do you remember who wrote that? Alan: No, though it might have been Gary Friedrich. And I don’t remember collecting a dime on it, either. I don’t even remember expecting to. I didn’t expect things to fold because on most issues, if you notice on the third issues of books, subtly, the Atlas logo had changed because I had rejigged all December 2001

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the things I had to do for the cover paste-ups, to make it easier for myself. I guess I didn’t expect it to fold. CBA: Did you see other covers, other stuff that was unpublished? Alan: I don’t recall any unused artwork, I don’t recall too much stuff that wasn’t printed. It was probably tons of that, what was it, “Andrax” that they picked up from Europe? I remember tons of that stuff in the office, photostats from Europe. He had a lot of stuff in the office as photostats that he picked up from Europe and I relettered all that. And the Tippy Teen stuff from Tower that we did as Vicki. I “modernized” all those reprints. CBA: Did you have any interest in any of the material that was coming out, did you think any of it was cool? Alan: Conceptually, I was not crazy about the books. I thought the genre books that they were doing were far more interesting than the super-hero stuff. “Lomax” and “Luke Malone,” “Sgt. Hawk,” “Kid Cody” and “The Comanche Kid” in Western Action. Jack Abel and Milgrom cared about that work, and there’s a Doug Wildey story. Milgrom and Jack Abel were hot to work together and that was an interesting story. Milgrom tried to be John Severin on that job. No cigar. I’m assuming that Morlock was Milgrom’s first pencil work. CBA: Did you meet Michael Fleisher? Alan: I knew Mike Fleisher from DC Comics in 1971 when he was working in their library, compiling the Superman encyclopedia. So I knew him before he’d written his first comic book story. That’s how he got a break, because he was hanging around the office. He was a very strange cat, man. CBA: What did you think of the stories he wrote? Alan: I was aghast that the Spectre was cutting people in half with a pair of scissors. The Spectre don’t sciss. The only worthwhile Spectre stories I ever read were the wacky ones Neal Adams wrote and drew for Julie Schwartz. CBA: Especially in Ironjaw, there was a real misogynistic, anti-woman aspect to the stories. They were brutal books. Alan: I haven’t read them, not since then. And I should remember as, I think I lettered almost every issue of Ironjaw. CBA: Did you deal with the Comics Code at all? Alan: Oh, sure. I did everything to do with trafficking the lettering, the coloring, the art to the code and on to the engraver and the printer. CBA: Were there any problems with the Code? Alan: Don’t recall any. Obviously, they let us say “hell” and “damn it” and stuff. “Damn it” in “Son of Dracula.” I knew Leonard Darvin, the

Above: A house ad in The Cougar #2 included this Pablo Marcos cover for the unpublished Weird Suspense #4. How much other unused Atlas Comics art is out there? Below: Rich Buckler’s rendition of Man-Monster, from Tales of Evil #3. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals, Inc.

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administrator, since my National days. I think they had just liberalized the code for the first time since it was adopted in the ’50s, and Rovin took heavy-handed advantage of that, in my opinion. CBA: In Ironjaw, there were a number of double entendres that were going on about sexual intercourse. Alan: I don’t remember. Atlas seemed to be pretty good for the gratuitous female from-the-rear nude shot. [chuckles] I noticed a few places where bras were painted on, especially. I was going through Planet of the Vampires and I noticed a couple places where they painted clothes on Russ Heath’s naked women in there. CBA: Did you get any creators into Atlas? Alan: Yes, I brought Alan Weiss in to do The Brute. That’s one of my favorite books because I brought in Weiss and put Jack Abel on it to ink. I liked it just fine. I was just looking at it before and I have no problem. Chaykin and I did think Alan’s Brute was a little prancey. I think we started calling him “The Fruit Brute.” [laughs] Larry Lieber did not like that pencil job at all, not at all. [laughs] I had big fights with Larry over that. CBA: He didn’t want to run it? Alan: Oh, I don’t know that he had a choice but he did not like Alan Weiss’ women. He said, “Look at her, she’s not pretty.” And I said, “Larry, in my opinion, she’s a drawing of a real woman.” He said, “Yeah, but she’s not pretty. This is comics.” CBA: [laughs] “Give me a Vinnie Colletta girl.” Alan: Yeah, we didn’t use Vinnie. And of course, Jack Kirby was always the true touchstone to Larry. Vinnie might have been art directing up at DC at that point, I don’t know. Again, I don’t remember who was coloring, besides me, and I certainly did not do the majority of the color work there. But I called Tatjana Wood, at one point, to see if she’d be interested. And shortly thereafter, I got a very angry call from Jack Adler, saying, [excitedly] “You know damn well she’s my girl. She works for me.” Because she said to me, “No, thank you, I’ve got an exclusive deal with DC.” I said, “Well, okay, thanks very much. I think you’re the greatest and if anything changes, give us a call.” So Jack called, very ticked off that I was trolling in his shoals. CBA: Steve Mitchell received a similar call about Gaspar Saladino.

Alan: Oh, yeah? But Gaspar, apparently, was very free to do it. Because he did all the logos at Atlas, and lettered Cougar #1, among other things. Good old L.P. Gregory. That’s Gaspar. You see the lettering credit in old Marvel comics that says “L.P. Gregory,” that’s a pseudonym for Gaspar. I think one early “Hulk” story in Tales to Astonish is by Scott Edwards and L.P. Gregory. Sometimes people fail to point out that Scott Edwards was Gil Kane. A real early DC shift at Marvel. Shelley Leferman was, of course, one of the main letterers at Atlas. CBA: What was Chip like? Was he around with any frequency? Alan: Sure, he was there almost all the time. You know, I think he mostly wanted to see the books when they were finished and I think he worried more about Swank, the men’s skin magazine they purchased. Somebody packaged Swank for him, I’m fairly certain. But he’d go over the nude photos and stuff like that with a fine tooth comb. ’Cause Chip was a horn dog. But Swank production was done outside of the Atlas office. CBA: Was Swank bought when Atlas/Seaboard started? Alan: I don’t know if he started it or if he picked it up somewhere. I had color artwork appear in there that I did years later for Paul Laikin, probably after Chip was gone. After Chip sold it, probably, I did illustrations for it. Oops. Nope, that was in Genesis magazine. CBA: What did you think about Chip? Alan: If the thing had no sparks, so obviously, no one in charge really knew what they were doing, beginning with Chip. Hey, look, I know I felt if that if I was in charge, it would be a great company. I didn’t doubt it. I’m sure I thought I knew better. CBA: [laughs] Besides you, who would have been good in that job? Do you think Archie Goodwin would have been? Alan: Honestly, I don’t have any idea. I mean, you can point to Archie as doing some great things but he never went anyplace and started something. Not that I’m saying anything is wrong with that. I’m just saying that he always came into an existing situation and did great work there. I don’t know if he had what it’d take to come in on the ground floor and create magnificence. CBA: Did the axe fall immediately? Alan: I don’t recall but it must have. We must have been informed at some point that as of Monday, this ain’t here any more. But I don’t remember being traumatized at all. CBA: You don’t even recall if the books were put on hiatus or were they just outright cancelled immediately? Alan: I don’t recall. CBA: Because it seemed to be quite expensive in the sense that Second Class permits cost a lot of money and there was a lot of logistics there, where they just threw it away, just forget it, we’re not going to do it any more. Alan: Well, I assume they kept the magazines going, True Confessions and Swank, but I don’t know. CBA: Was there any word around the office about Kable’s effectiveness as a distributor? Alan: I don’t remember that either because I’ve still got multiple sets but they all came from the office. I don’t remember if I saw them on the newsstands effectively, or not. CBA: Did you regret leaving Atlas at all? Alan: I probably made okay money, so I guess I missed that. It’s always nice to be part of something, so you have the best hopes for it. CBA: Where did you go from there? Did you stick with Larry? Alan: No, I don’t think Larry was crazy about me. We had dinner a couple times back then and we’d have a few belts and he’d start telling me about life with Stan Lee as a kid, you know, his family and all that. That was very interesting. Larry’s a nice man. Sincere. CBA: Was he a lot younger than Stan? Alan: I think he’s nine years younger, so he didn’t particularly grow up with Stan. CBA: You worked with Larry again, working on the black-&-whites for Marvel U.K., right? Alan: You know, that wasn’t intimate contact. Then, of course, Larry and I worked together in the early ’80s on The Hulk syndicated comic strip for a long time. CBA: He was writing and you were drawing? Alan: It kind of bounced around there. I think just before I first started, Rich Buckler was penciling it for him and it came and went. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Sometimes, Stan was scripting the thing, and sometimes Larry was, and in the end, I was. CBA: And you’re drawing on a syndicated strip right now, Little Orphan Annie. Alan: Yeah. CBA: How is the syndicated life? Is it tough? Alan: No. It’s a grind, but as far as work goes, it’s as much fun as I’ve ever had. I’m left alone, I get my script, and I really enjoy working with my partner who’s the writer, Jay Maeder. At first, he asked if he could see the pencils and I said, “Oh no, I never would have taken this assignment if that was part of the deal.” [laughs] And I don’t even know if that was clear with anybody at the syndicate. No, anybody can second guess you and there are as many opinions as there are people, but I know what I’m doing and what I do is just as good as anybody else’s arbitrary idea. Any outright mistakes I make, I’ll certainly admit to and rush to redraw, but everything else is just taste. CBA: Did you have a varied career after Atlas? What were the high points? Alan: Oh, the high points? Well, there’s the wonderful Obnoxio the Clown vs. the X-Men #1. I don’t know if that’s a high point. Script, pencils, inks, lettering and color. Or to quote Peter David, “Untouched by human hands.” (Peter, take a long look in a mirror and consider the possible power of words to hurt.) All the work I did for Marvel was a great deal of fun. The more control I had over it, the more fun I had. CBA: You worked at Marvel during the Shooter era? Alan: Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, when Shooter left, I was one of the people they wouldn’t look at any more. It’s funny because, again, I don’t think I was Jim Shooter’s favorite person but I was certainly looked at as one of his gang by the following administrations. CBA: And so that was it? Alan: Yeah, pretty much. CBA: That was freelancing for Marvel when you were there? Alan: Oh, yeah. Always freelancing. I mean, one year I actually qualified for medical. Then when Marvel tapered off, in the immortal words of my new best friend, the great Irwin Hasen, I went “into

advertising.” CBA: Did you ever benefit from Marvel’s royalty program? Alan: That just kicked in just before I left and I got a couple of nice little checks there when I was doing Spider-Man. There was one month there where I was doing all three Spider-Man books. So, yeah, that was more fun. But I’ll tell you, I always had the worst inkers in the world. Not always, but I had so many inkers that I didn’t care for at Marvel. But a couple of good ones, like Jim Fern on Spider-Man. That was nice. Jim Fern does good work. CBA: Do you prefer inking your own work? Alan: Depending on what it’s for, but yes. You know, unless I know who’s going to ink it. A lot of people will complain about Vinnie Colletta but I was so unhappy about the inking I was receiving on my run on Thor that I begged for Vinnie and I was pleased that I finally got him on the last issue that I did. CBA: Did you like working on super-hero books? Alan: Yeah. That might not be what I’m best suited for, but it’s always what I aimed to do. CBA: What was the highlight of your comic book career? Alan: [pause] My comic book career… [long pause] I don’t know. CBA: Was it the people or the work? Alan: Well, it was all of it because it was something I considered magic and I managed to weasel my way into it. I’m kidding. But, I mean, there I was. It’s what I wanted to do and how many people, think of the entire world, get to live out their dream? Not only have I walked with giants, but in the end, I’ve been granted the same magic powers they had—I get to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and create an entire world every day—and it’s the best time I can think of having.

Above: While he suggested a caption that reads, “Photo of artist Alan Kupperberg, all grown up,” we think Kupp looks younger now than he did in 1975 when he worked as production manager for Seaboard Periodicals! Courtesy of Alan Kupperberg.

The Storyteller’s Story Official Selection in over 25 film festivals worldwide “The best comics bio I’ve ever seen… It’s wonderful, well done.” Brian Michael Bendis “An essential doc for comics fans, ‘Portrait’ will also enlighten the curious.” John DeFore, Austin American-Statesman “Entertaining and insightful. A great film about a visionary artist!” Jeffrey Katzenberg Arguably the most influential person in American comics, Will Eisner, as artist, entrepreneur, innovator, and visual storyteller, enjoyed a career that encompassed comic books from their early beginnings in the 1930s to their development as graphic novels in the 1990s. During his sixty-year-plus career, Eisner introduced the now-traditional mode of comic book production; championed mature, sophisticated storytelling; was an early advocate for using the medium as a tool for education; pioneered the now-popular graphic novel, and served as inspiration for generations of artists. Without a doubt, Will Eisner was the godfather of the American comic book. The award-winning full-length feature film documentary includes interviews with Eisner and many of the foremost creative talents in the U.S., including Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Chabon, Jules Feiffer, Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Stan Lee, Gil Kane, and others.

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A Closer Look

One Brief, Shining Moment Ditko, The Destructor and the comics of Atlas/Seaboard by Nicolas Caputo

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In 1975, Steve Ditko returned to the world of super-heroes for what appeared to be a moment of glory. Joined by two familiar, respected veterans: Archie Goodwin (who had scripted several fantasy/horror tales illustrated by Ditko for Warren magazines in the 1960s, considered by many to be some of Ditko’s most stunning, inventive work in black-&-white) and Wally Wood (a friend of Ditko’s who was the first person to allow him possession of his creations in his self-published fanzine witzend. Wood inked Ditko’s pencils on a number of stories for Tower comics and—also in 1975—Stalker for DC Comics), they combined their respective talents on a character for

a company that, though new, drew its roots from the earliest days of comic books. Martin Goodman, longtime publisher of Timely/Atlas/Marvel comics, with son Chip, instituted a new line of comics, with a familiar name and many familiar faces. The opening page presented the red-&-blue costumed figure of The Destructor charging out at the reader, echoing the promise of another character Ditko brought to life over a decade earlier. Mainstream fans held high hopes that the essence of that character, one who had been damaged by regurgitations of past tales, over-saturation and neglect, could be resurrected in another form. With Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko once again at the helm, there was a chance to breathe life into a genre that was sorely wanting at times. Sadly, the promise of such a moment would never reach its apex. While The Destructor was the first character that Ditko drew for Atlas, it may not necessarily have been the first project developed by him. In Jim Steranko’s Mediascene # 11, the news section features a preview of the then upcoming Atlas line. Along with illustrations of Ironjaw, Wulf, the Grim Ghost, Phoenix and Morlock 2001 there is a drawing of a character called Wrecage by Ditko. This leads to speculation that this character was either an entirely different idea by Ditko (one that he may have plotted or written) or that the character was retooled by Archie Goodwin and became The Destructor. Since there is no mention of The Destructor at the time, it’s very possible that Wrecage (later revised as Recage and published in Robin Snyder’s Ditko Package in 1988) was an early Ditko concept that the editors rejected (it would not have been the first time. The editors apparently vetoed a number of stories after they were initially approved, including one by Alex Toth). The Destructor # 1 (cover dated February 1975) was titled “Birth of a Hero,” and contained a number of elements familiar to comics in general and Ditko in particular. Teenager Jay Hunter did not start off as a typical Peter Parker clone, though; he was a cocky punk who assisting the Mob in petty jobs. His father, Dr. Simon Hunter, was a dedicated scientist who spent his life trying to improve the human race. Inventing a serum to heighten man’s natural abilities, he becomes a casualty of his son’s Mob connections when they see him as a threat. The thugs shoot both father and son and leave them for dead. With his final breath, Dr. Hunter administers the serum to his son in hopes that it will somehow save his life. Clichéd though it was, it set up the premise for the series, as a guilt-ridden Jay Hunter dons the costume his father designed and seeks revenge on the Mob. There were a number of interesting elements involved, not the least being Ditko’s once again working on a teenage character that needed to grow and mature (the last such attempt was with brothers Don and Hank Hall, in the short-lived The Hawk and the Dove series for DC in 1968). Archie Goodwin, one of the better wordsmiths at the time, was able to produce strong dialogue and plot, as well as the ability to work to an artist’s strengths. The great Wally Wood, a spectacular penciler in his own right, was also one of the genre’s greatest inkers, enhancing Ditko’s art (as he had with everyone from Jack Kirby to Gil Kane) with vivid and detailed line work. The similarities to Spider-Man were obvious: The teenaged hero, the crime milieu (the Slaymaster was similar in style and appearance to the earlier Crime Master), the death of a loved one—but the series had the opportunity to be edgier, as well. The Destructor (in retrospect an uninspired sobriquet) was more brutal, à la Ditko’s self-published creations, and the villains were more likely to die than return each issue. The character of Jay Hunter also had the potential for growth. Unhindered by years of history and sanitization, The COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

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Destructor had opportunities that Spider-Man (who had long since become Marvel’s corporate symbol) did not. The second issue continued under the same team, introducing a possible romantic entanglement for Jay with Angela, the Mob boss’s unsuspecting daughter. In his costumed identity Jay became embroiled in a Mob war with an impressive villain named Deathgrip whose weapon was an electrically charged glove (this character seems inspired by Peter Lorre’s Dr. Gogol, from the 1935 movie Mad Love, down to his bald head, sunglasses and steel hands. Not surprising, since Ditko frequently used movie stills of actors for reference). By the third issue, changes were underway, not all for the better. Wally Wood was noticeably missing, replaced by an uncredited Frank Giacoia. While Giacoia was a fine inker in his own right, he did not possess the magical chemistry that Wood brought to Ditko’s pencils. The Destructor’s costume was slightly altered: The solid blue was changed into a dark blue/black shade, with white highlights on the wrist and ankles. It was a cosmetic (perhaps an editorial) change that did nothing to enhance the character’s look. The Huntress, a female version of Kraven the Hunter, was derivative and uninspired. An interesting sub-plot involving Angela’s discovery of her father’s criminal life held promise, only to reach an abrupt dead end. The final issue would stray even further astray from the original premise. With issue # 4, Ditko was the last man standing from the original team. Gerry Conway stepped in to assume the writing chores from Archie Goodwin. Conway was probably brought on due to his association with Spider-Man, a strip he had worked on for a number of years. Replacing Frank Giacoia was relative newcomer Al Milgrom, a fan of Steve’s work, whose heavy use of blacks complimented Ditko’s pencils. John Duffy, who had lettered a few of Ditko’s early Spider-Man stories, brought his own simple, distinctive style to the table (he worked on other Atlas comics as well, before once again fading into obscurity). Ditko reportedly worked from a Conway plot (as he may have under Archie Goodwin as well), and the strip took an abrupt 180-degree turn. The Mob war was thrown aside as The Destructor plunged into a science-fiction themed story. The Outcasts are three typical Ditko weirdos (the Eye, Sister Siren and Kronus), who live in an underground society cut off from the outside world. After a nuclear explosion occurs, Jay is affected and receives mysterious new powers. We are left off with The Destructor reluctantly joining the Outcasts against the U.S. Army in a cliffhanger ending, although all is not as it seems. The Outcasts were apparently designed to be the true villains, using Jay to assist them in their deeds. There is an interesting panel showing the Outcasts facing the reader, laughing at Jay behind his back as he naively joins them. The story was to be continued in the next issue. But there was to be no next issue. While the existence of an unpublished fifth issue is a possibility, there is no evidence to confirm it (The Comic Reader # 121, August 1975, announced that “Atlas comics had suspended publication indefinitely” and that the issue was set to be released, along with a number of other titles, but they never appeared). Were they completed? Does the original art exist? Will they ever see the light of day? What direction would the strip have taken? Perhaps, like the first Incredible Hulk series, where Lee, Kirby, and a guy named Ditko took the series in every possible direction, it would have taken more time to turn the strip into something worthwhile. While Conway’s science-fiction oriented story was interesting, could it have sustained the character? (Moving away from a Spider-Man styled series December 2001

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doesn’t necessarily guarantee a better strip). While Ditko drew the strip, it looks like he did not contribute to the plotting, as he had with Lee on Spider-Man and “Dr. Strange.” He may have had some leeway on the storytelling, but it appears that Conway and Goodwin controlled the direction of the strip. The importance of characterization, sub-plots and supporting characters would have made the strip ripe with possibilities, involving the readers from issue to issue. In the grand scheme of things, though, The Destructor was probably just another short-lived assignment for Ditko. Ditko’s tenure for Atlas Comics was short-lived, but prolific. Aside from The Destructor, he worked on two other Atlas characters: Tiger-Man, again with Gerry Conway and inkers Frank Giacoia and Al Milgrom, performing serviceable work on a fairly unremarkable, derivative character. The villains were less than spectacular as well. Morlock 2001 #3 was a fill-in job (written by Gary Friedrich) that starred yet another character in transition. After a scant three issues, it was re-titled (on the cover, if not the indicia) Morlock 2001 and the Midnight Men, and is noteworthy due to the presence of Bernie Wrightson, rightfully considered one of the field’s premiere horror artists. He made a rare appearance as an inker, and the finished product was impressive. The promise of The Destructor was probably more imagined than real. We all want our favorite artists to go home again, to tread familiar ground, but, perhaps like The Beatles, who choose not to reunite, Steve Ditko is also aware that he could never live up to his fan’s expectations. The Destructor was as close to Spider-Man as he would go. With a quiet desperation, many fans felt that Atlas had a chance to become the industry’s savior; a newcomer with all the old, familiar faces lined up, ready to give those guys at DC and Marvel a run for their money. Unfortunately, the realities of business, coupled with poor management and bad timing wiped out the company that (we thought) could’ve been a contender.

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Hero Index

Atlas/Seaboard Checklist The complete index to Martin Goodman’s 1970s comics line

What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Note: Jeff Rovin, editor. 2 April 1975 Cover: Dick Giordano with Larry Lieber “Attack of the Reptile Men” THE BARBARIANS Mike Fleisher/Mike Sekowsky & Pablo Marcos20 1 June 1975 Cover: Rich Buckler 1/2 Ironjaw: “The Mountain Of Mutants” Gary Friedrich/Pablo Marcos10 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Notes: Jeff Rovin’s last issue as editor. Alan Kupperberg, letterer. Andrax: “Andrax” Jorge Bernet/Jorge Bernet 9 “The Barbarians featuring Ironjaw” (text) David Anthony Kraft 1 3 July 1975 Cover: Pablo Marcos Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. “Andrax” is a reprint of a German “Live or Let Die” Gary Friedrich/Alan Weiss & Jack Abel19 comic book from the early 1970s and is copyrighted to “Rolf What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Kauka” (the publisher) and “Bardon” (the art studio). Shelly Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Alan Kupperberg, letterer and colorist. Leferman credited as letterer on Ironjaw. Uncredited penciling assists by Frank Brunner and Jim Starlin. Three month lapse since previous issue. BLAZING BATTLE TALES 1 July 1975 Cover: Frank Thorne THE COUGAR Sgt. Hawk: “The One-Armed Beast” 1 April 1975 Cover: Frank Thorne John Albano/Pat Broderick & Jack Sparling12 “Vampires and Cougars Don't Mix” “The Sky Demon” John Albano/Al McWilliams 6 Steve Mitchell/Dan Adkins & Frank Springer20 1/2 “Bronze Star Winner Pvt. William Swanson” What’s Happening with Atlas (text) John Albano/John Severin 2 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Adkins pencils initial 10 pages with Note: Larry Lieber, editor. Springer inks; Springer pencils & inks remainder. Issue dedicated to Dan Curtis, TV and film producer. THE BRUTE 1 February 1975 Cover: Dick Giordano 2 July 1975 Cover: Rich Buckler & Al Milgrom “Night of the Brute” “A Walk With the Werewolf” Gary Friedrich/Frank Springer 18 Mike Fleisher/Mike Sekowsky & Pablo Marcos20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Compiled by David R. McLallen & Jon B. Cooke

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Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Sharon Iborn, letterer. Three month lapse since previous issue. DEMON HUNTER 1 September 1975 Cover: Rich Buckler “The Harvester of Eyes” David Anthony Kraft/Rich Buckler18 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Note: Larry Lieber, editor. Shelly Leferman, letterer. Rich Buckler credited with concept and plot. Dedicated to Buck Dharma and the boys. DESTRUCTOR 1 February 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber & Wally Wood “The Birth of a Hero” Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko & Wally Wood20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Note: Larry Lieber, editor. 2 April 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber “Deathgrip!” Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko & Wally Wood20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Note: Alan Kupperberg, letterer. 3 June 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber “In the Hands of the Huntress” Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko19 Destructor Dispatches (letter column) 1 4

August 1975

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Cover: Larry Lieber

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“Doomsday Minus One” Gerry Conway/Steve Ditko & Al Milgrom18 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Destructor Dispatches (letter column) 1 Note: John Duffy, letterer. FRIGHT 1 June 1975 Cover: Frank Thorne Son of Dracula: “And Unto Dracula Was Born a Son” Gary Friedrich/Frank Thorne18 “Welcome to My Nightmare” (text) David Anthony Kraft 1 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Text piece note there were three versions of cover drawn by Thorne. THE GRIM GHOST 1 January 1975 Cover: Ernie Colón “Enter the Grim Ghost” Mike Fleisher/Ernie Colón20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Features 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Colón. 2 March 1975 Cover: Ernie Colón “The Grim Ghost Returns…” Mike Fleisher/Ernie Colón20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 3 July 1975 Cover: Russ Heath “He is… The Grim Ghost” Tony Isabella/Ernie Colón19 Ghost Cards (letter column) 1 Note: Four month lapse since previous issue. Jeff Rovin, editor. 1 Features 1 /2 pages of house ads drawn by Colón. THE HANDS OF THE DRAGON 1 June 1975 Cover: Jim Craig “The Hands of the Dragon”Ed Fedory/Jim Craig& Jim Mooney18 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Mooney not credited. IRONJAW 1 January 1975 Cover: Neal Adams “The Saga of Ironjaw” Mike Fleisher/Mike Sekowsky & Jack Abel19 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 “The World of Ironjaw” (text) 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Alan Kupperberg, letterer. Text features

December 2001

detail of rejected Ironjaw #1 cover. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. 2 March 1975 Cover: Neal Adams “Ironjaw the King” Mike Fleisher/Pablo Marcos20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Note: Alan Kupperberg, letterer. 3 May 1975 Cover: Pablo Marcos “The Wolf-Cowled Head-Hunters of Amun-Rak” Mike Fleisher/Pablo Marcos19 Ironjawing (letter column) 1 Note: Alan Kupperberg, letterer. 4 July 1975 Cover: Pablo Marcos “And Who Will Forge a Jaw of Iron?” Gary Friedrich/Pablo Marcos18 Ironjawing (letter column) 1 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Note: Larry Lieber, editor. Shelly Leferman, letterer. MORLOCK 2001 1 February 1975 Cover: Al Milgrom & Dick Giordano “The Coming of Morlock” Mike Fleisher/Al Milgrom & Jack Abel20 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. 2 April 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber “Morlock Must Be Destroyed” Mike Fleisher/Al Milgrom & Jack Abel20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Note: Alan Kupperberg, letterer. 3 July 1975 Cover: Rich Buckler “Then Came the Midnight Man” Gary Friedrich/Steve Ditko & Bernie Wrightson18 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Future Shocks! (letter column) 1 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. John Duffy, letterer. Titled “Morlock 2001 and the Midnight Men” on cover only. Three month lapse since previous issue.

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PHOENIX 1 January 1975 Cover: Sal Amendola & Dick Giordano “From the Ashes” Jeff Rovin/Sal Amendola20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Includes 1 /2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. 2 March 1975 Cover: Sal Amendola & Dick Giordano “…And the Sea Ran Red” Gabriel Levy/Sal Amendola20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Notes: Though uncredited, Jeff Rovin plotted this issue. 3 June 1975 Cover: Frank Thorne “The Day of the Devil” Gabriel Levy/Sal Amendola11 The Dark Avenger: “The Rat Pack” John Albano/Pat Broderick & Terry Austin 8 From the Ashes (letter column) 1 4 October 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber “A Man For All Centuries” Gary Friedrich/Ric Estrada & Frank Giacoia18 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Shelly Leferman, letterer. Titled “Phoenix… The Protector” on cover only. Four month lapse from previous issue. PLANET OF VAMPIRES 1 February 1975 Cover: Pat Broderick & Neal Adams “The Long Road Home” Larry Hama/Pat Broderick & Frank McLaughlin20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. 2 April 1975 Cover: Dick Giordano “Quest For Blood” John Albano/Pat Broderick & Frank McLaughlin20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Note: Alan Kupperberg, letterer. 3 July 1975 “The Blood Plague”

Cover: Russ Heath with Larry Lieber John Albano/Russ Heath16

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RSVP (letter column) 1 “Revenge of the Vampires” (next issue promo) Larry Lieber & Al Milgrom 2 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Alan Kupperberg, letterer. Three month lapse since previous issue. POLICE ACTION 1 February 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber Lomax, NYPD: “Sam Lomax, NYPD” Jack Younger (Russ Jones)/Mike Sekowsky & Al McWilliams10 Luke Malone, Manhunter: “Requiem For a Champ” Mike Ploog/Mike Ploog & Frank Springer10 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón.

2 April 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber Sgt. Stryker's Death Squad: “Hellride!” Archie Goodwin/Al McWilliams12 Warhawk: “Chennault Must Die!!” Archie Goodwin/Alex Toth 8 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 3 July 1975 Cover: Rich Buckler Sgt. Stryker's Death Squad: “Kill Rommel” Archie Goodwin/Al McWilliams12 “Dead Man's Ridge” ?/Jack Sparling? 7 Send It to Stryker (letters column) 1 SCORPION 1 February 1975 Cover: Howard Chaykin “The Death's Gemini Commission” Howard Chaykin/Howard Chaykin20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Annette Kawecki, letterer. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón.

2 April 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber Lomax, NYPD: “…Taxi 2147 Is Missing” Gary Friedrich/Mike Sekowsky & Al McWilliams10 Luke Malone, Manhunter: “Whatever Happened To Luke Malone?” Cover: Ernie Colón Gary Friedrich/Mike Ploog & Frank Springer10 2 May 1975 1/2 “The Devil Doll Commission” What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Howard Chaykin/Howard Chaykin20 Note: Lomax lettered by Alan Kupperberg. 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 3 June 1975 Cover: Frank Thorne Notes: Assisted by Annette Kawecki, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Lomax, NYPD: “…One Hot Dog With Murder, Please” Kaluta, Walt Simonson, Ed Davis. Gary Friedrich/Mike Sekowsky & Al McWilliams10 Cover: Jim Craig Police Blotter (letter column) 1 3 July 1975 “Night of the Golden Fuhrer” Gabriel Levy/Jim Craig19 Luke Malone, Manhunter: “…Rock and Robbery” 1 Gary Friedrich/Mike Ploog & Frank Springer 9 The Scorpion’s Lair (letter column) Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Character is totally revamped from Note: Alan Kupperberg, letterer. ‘30s adventurer to ’70s costumed super-hero. SAVAGE COMBAT TALES TALES OF EVIL 1 February 1975 Cover: Al McWilliams 1 February 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber Sgt. Stryker's Death Squad: “Reborn In Battle” Russ Jones/Jerry Grandenetti 8 Archie Goodwin/Al McWilliams12 “Spawn of the Devil” Russ Jones/Mike Sekowsky 7 “Bounty” Archie Goodwin/Jack Sparling 8 “A Matter of Breeding” Jack Younger (Russ Jones)/Jerry Grandenetti 5 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 “Stake Out” What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. drawn by Ernie Colón.

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2 April 1975 Cover: Frank Thorne The Bog Beast: “The Fifty Dollar Body” John Albano/Jack Sparling 8 “The Last Train” Russ Jones/Jerry Grandenetti 3 “Requiem For a Werewolf” Marvin Channing/Tom Sutton 9 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Note: Alan Kupperberg, letterer on Bog Beast. 3 July 1975 Cover: Rich Buckler Man-Monster: “Man-Monster” Gary Friedrich/Rich Buckler & Mike Vosburg12 The Bog Beast Gabriel Levy/Romero 8 Note: Man-Monster plotted by Tony Isabella and Rich Buckler. TARGITT 1 March 1975 Cover: Dick Giordano “Boston Tea Party” Ric Meyers/Ric Meyers & Howard Nostrand20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. John Duffy, letterer. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. 2 June 1975 Cover: Frank Thorne “A Crude Awakening” Gabriel Levy/Ric Meyers & Howard Nostrand20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Notes: Title changes to “John Targitt… Man-Stalker” on cover only. Character becomes costumed hero. 3 July 1975 Cover: Rich Buckler “John Targitt… Man-Stalker” Gerry Conway/Ric Meyers & Howard Nostrand18 Letters on Targitt (letter column) 1 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Alan Kupperberg, letterer. TIGER-MAN 1 April 1975 Cover: Ernie Colón “Tiger-Man” Gabriel Levy/Ernie Colón20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Mechanical Leroy lettering. 2

June 1975

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Cover: Frank Thorne

December 2001

“Stalker in a Concrete Jungle” Note: Larry Lieber, editor.

Gerry Conway/Steve Ditko19

3 September 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber “Hell Is Spelled… Hypnos!” Gerry Conway/Steve Ditko & Al Milgrom18 Letters to Tiger-Man (letters column) 1 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 VICKI 1 February 1975 Cover: Stan Goldberg “A Stretch In Time” 6 “3rd Finger Right Hand” 6 “A Snitch In Time” 7 “Color Me Black & White” (pin-up) 1 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 “Half-Baked Notion” 8 “Sure Cure” 6 “Nothing But the Truth” 6 “Salesmanship” 6 “Alp Wanted!” 6 Notes: First two issues are 64-page 50¢ size. There are few credits given (We’ll see if our pal Terry Austin can tackle proper credits in the future—keep an eye out in CBA letter cols). All stories are reprints of Tower Comics’ Tippy Teen, though many characters are slightly redrawn with more contemporary clothing and hair-styles. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. 2 April 1975 “Super Blooper” What’s Happening with Atlas (text) “Who's Afraid of the Monkey” “Hearts & Flowers” “Weight's Cookin'?” “Casual Casualty” “Kiss and Tell” “It's A Smell World” “Speed Trapped” “Negative Results” Art: Doug Crane

December 2001

Cover: Stan Goldberg 7 1/2 7 7 3 ?/Doug Crane 4 6 ?/Doug Crane 6 7 ?/Doug Crane 8

3 June 1975 “Company Loves Misery” “Lamping Along Together” “Let’s Get in Shape for Summer!” (text) “Weanie Meanie” “Vicki Fun Page!” (pin-up)

Cover: Stan Goldberg 5 ?/Doug Crane 7 1 7 1

4 August 1975 “Tennis the Menace” 6 “Foul Weather Friends” 7 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 “Love Is Blind-Folded” 5 WEIRD SUSPENSE 1 February 1975 Cover: Dick Giordano The Tarantula: “Curse of the Tarantula” Mike Fleisher/Pat Boyette20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Includes 1 /2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón.

Kupperberg. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. WULF THE BARBARIAN 1 February 1975 Cover: Larry Hama & Klaus Janson “Wulf the Barbarian” Larry Hama/Larry Hama & Klaus Janson20 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Cathi Ann Thomas, letterer. Includes 1 1 /2 pages of house ads drawn by Ernie Colón. 2 April 1975Cover: Larry Hama & Klaus Janson w/Larry Lieber “The Beast of Famine”Larry Hama/Larry Hama & Klaus Janson20 1/2 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) Notes: This issue features “special thanks” to art assistants Neal Adams, Ralph Reese, Ed Davis, Wally Wood, Bob McLeod, Pat Broderick, Vincente Alcazar, Paul Kirchner and Jack Abel. Cover alteration by Lieber. 3 July 1975 Cover: Jim Craig “The Colossus of the Iron Citadel” Steve Skeates/Leo Summers17 “The World of Wulf the Barbarian” (map) uncredited 1 Letters to Wulf (letter column) 1 Note: Larry Lieber, editor.

2 April 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber The Tarantula: “The Revenge of the Spider Witch” 4 September 1975 Cover: Jim Craig Mike Fleisher/Pat Boyette20 “Death-Night in the Darkling Forest” 1 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) /2 Mike Friedrich/Jim Craig & ”Atlas Bullpen”18 Drakenroost (letter column) 1 3 July 1975 Cover: Rich Buckler What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 The Tarantula: “Mind Over Matter = Murder” Gary Friedrich/Pat Boyette with Rich Buckler19 Mail Web (letter column) 1 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Rich Buckler draws splash page only. DEVILINA 1 January 1975 Cover: Pulojar WESTERN ACTION Jeff Rovin 1 1 February 1975 Cover: Larry Lieber The Devil’s Dungeon (text editorial) Devilina: “Satan's Domain” Ric Estrada/Ric Estrada11 Kid Cody, Gunfighter: “Birth of a Badman!” Gabe Levy/Pablo Marcos 8 Larry Lieber/Doug Wildey10 “The Lost Tomb of Nefertiri” “Lay of the Sea” Gabe Levy/Leo Duranona 8 The Comanche Kid: “Vengeance Trail” Michael Cahlin/Ralph Reese 2 Steve Skeates/Jack Abel & Al Milgrom10 “Midnight Muse” John Albano/Jack Sparling 8 What’s Happening with Atlas (text) 1 “Merchants of Evil” “Filmdom’s Vampire Lovers” (text article) Gary Gerani 6 Notes: Larry Lieber, editor. Lettering on Comanche Kid by Alan

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Seaboard Periodicals

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“William Shakespeare's The Tempest” Martin Pasko/Leo Summers 8 Devilina pin-up Ric Estrada 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor-in-chief. Martin Goodman & Charles Goodman, publishers. Richard Meyers, assistant editor. Steve Mitchell, production. Includes 21/2 pages of house ads illustrated by Ernie Colón. 2 May 1975 Cover: George Torjussen Devilina: “Curse of the Ra Scarab” Ric Estrada/Ric Estrada12 “Vendetta” John Albano/Frank Thorne 8 “The Devil's Procuress” John Albano?/Jack Sparling 8 “Flesh Gordon: The Perils of Flesh” (text article) Carl Macek 6 “The Prophesy” Suso/Suso 8 “Night Creature” John Albano?/Leo Summers 8 GOTHIC ROMANCES 1 December 1974 Cover: 1 “As Midnight Becomes Morning” Caroline Weaver/Howard Chaykin 2 “The Devil's Chapel” Vanessa Swynford/Leo Summers 2 “The Black Unicorn” Ruth MacLeod/Ernie Colon 2 “The Cruel Cliffs of Malaspina” Nancy Maguire/Harold Shull 2 “Asylum” Marianne Ashley/Neal Adams 2 “Mommy Save Me From the Night Monsters” Anne Cardwell/Russ Heath 2 “The House Where Time Stood Still” Ruby Jean Jensen/Harold Shull 2 Notes: Cybil St. John, editor. Text magazine with illustrations. MOVIE MONSTERS 1 December 1974 Cover painting: Greg Theakston 2 February 1975 Cover painting: Greg Theakston 3 April 1975 Cover painting: George Torjussen 4 August 1975 Cover painting: George Torjussen Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor. Famous Monsters-style text magazine with photos; contain no comics material. Note three month lapse between #3 and 4. THRILLING ADVENTURE STORIES 1 February 1975 Cover painting: Ernie Colón

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Tiger-Man: “Tiger-Man and the Flesh Peddlers” John Albano/Ernie Colón10 “The Sting of Death” John Albano/Leo Summers 8 The Kromag Saga: “Kromag the Killer” Jack Sparling & Gabe Levy/Jack Sparling 9 “Films of Alistair MacLean (text article) Ric Meyers 7 “Lawrence of Arabia” Jeff Rovin/Frank Thorne 8 “Doc Savage” (text article) 3 “Escape from Nine By One” Russ Heath/Russ Heath 8 Devilina pin-up Ric Estrada 1 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor-in-chief. Charles Goodman, publisher. Richard Meyers, assistant editor. Martin Harrison, art director. Steve Mitchell, production manager. Includes a two-page house ad illustrated by Ernie Colón.

Meyers, assistant editor. Steve Mitchell, production manager. Includes 11/2 pages of house ads illustrated by Ernie Colón. 2 March 1975 Cover: Boris Vallejo Macabre Mails (letter column) 2 Bog Beast: “The Bog Beast” Gabriel Levy/Badia Romero 9 “Dr. Mercurio's Diary” Al Moniz/Xirinius 8 “Carrion of the Gods” Pat Boyette/Pat Boyette 8 “The Films of Edgar Allan Poe” (text article) Karl “Off” Macek 8 “Who Toys With Terror” George Kashdan/John Severin 7 “The Staff of Death” Leo Summers/Leo Summers 8 Note: Charles Goodman, publisher. SPECIAL THANKS TO: Lee Nail, John Morrow, Thomas Drucis, and the ever-helpful David A. Roach for the loan of material and reference assistance.

2 August 1975 Cover painting: Neal Adams “Robbery!” (text article) Bernard Michaelson 2 “The Temple of the Spider” Archie Goodwin/Walter Simonson11 The Kromag Saga: “The Valley of the Dinosaurs” Gabe Levy/Jack Sparling 8 “Tough Cop” John Albano/Russ Heath 8 “The Towering Inferno” (text article) Carl Macek 6 ”Town Tamer” Steve Mitchell/John Severin 8 “A Job Well Done” Ric Meyers/Alex Toth 7 Notes: John L. Chilly, production. Steve Mitchell, art director. WEIRD TALES OF THE MACABRE 1 January 1975 Cover: Jeff Jones “Macabre Mails” (text editorial) Jeff Rovin 1 “The Demon Is Dying” Pat Boyette/Pat Boyette 8 Devilina pin-up Ric Estrada 1 “Time Lapse” Gus Funnell/Leo Duranona 7 “The Many Horrors of Dan Curtis” (text article) Gary Gerani 7 “A Second Life” Ramon Torrents/Ramon Torrents 8 “The Cheese Is for the Rats” Villanova/Villanova 8 “Tour de Force” Martin Pasko/Leo Summers 8 “Speed Demon” Ernie Colón/Ernie Colón 8 Notes: Jeff Rovin, editor-in-chief. Martin Goodman & Charles Goodman, publishers. Martin Harrison, art director. Richard

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December 2001

CBA NEEDS YOUR HARVEYS! With the impending Comic Book Artist devoted to Harvey Comics planned for March 2002, Ye Ed and his middle son Josh have gone bonkers in their quest for Harveys! On a recent comic shop visit to the wonderful Kelly’s Comics of Warwick, Rhode Island, the pair stumbled across copies of Hot Stuff, The Little Devil, and we’ve fallen madly in love with the great kiddie comics of Alfred Harvey & Company! We’re looking for lots of reading-condition Harveys, including Richie Rich, Little Audrey, Casper, Sad Sack, Little Dot, Stumbo, Little Lotta, Baby Huey, Wendy, Spooky, Harvey Hits—and especially Hot Stuff and Devil Kids!—and all related titles. Now we don’t have big bucks to spend, but if you’ve got a pile you wouldn’t mind getting rid of, give Jon and Josh a call at (401) 783-1669, fax (401) 783-1287, e-mail jonbcooke@aol.com, or mail Jon B. Cooke, Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204. With your help, we vow to make CBA #19 the most comprehensive look at Harvey Comics to date! Thanks and we hope to hear from you! Hot Stuff and Casper ©2001 Harvey Entertainment, Inc

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December 2001

Endgame

D.A.K. at the Demise David Anthony Kraft on the last days of Atlas Comics by David Anthony Kraft Although he declined our request for an interview, former Atlas/Seaboard assistant editor Dave Kraft suggested we reprint his article on the fall of Atlas from Deadspawn #1 (July 1975) with his kind permission. The writer (renowned not only for his comics scripting but also his astonishing 150-issue run of his lauded Comics Interview) originally scribed this as a letter to the editor of the slick fanzine. Thanks to Roy Thomas and Bill Schelly for help, and to Mark Burbey for photocopying the article. ©2001 Dave Kraft.

Above: While created by Rich Buckler, Dave Kraft would script the one-&-only issue of DemonHunter. D.A.K. would bring the character—after a fashion—to Marvel as Demon-Slayer. ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals. Below: Cover of Deadspawn #1. Courtesy of Mark Burbey.

December 2001

As you may be aware, I worked on staff as associate editor of Marvel for 11 months, before joining Seaboard/Atlas Comics on March 3 of this year [1975]. Along with Larry Lieber, who had recently been appointed editor-in-chief of the entire line, and Alan Kupperberg and Shelly Leferman, I was part of the “new regime” expected to salvage Atlas from its deplorable initial venture into the comics field. We proceeded to make some major renovations in close coordination with Charles (“Chip”) Goodman, the publisher, to the end that he scheduled an informal cocktail party at the office on April 25 as an opportunity for Atlas freelancers and staffers to mingle and celebrate. A few days before the party, Martin Goodman—Chip’s father, multi-millionaire and chief financier of Atlas/Seaboard—returned from an extended stay in Florida. Prior to his return, Chip had been very cooperative and enthusiastic and gung-ho, even going so far as to give us the okay on starting a couple new titles. However, Chip’s attitudes changed immediately upon Mr. Goodman’s return, and presently he became erratic and unpredictable as publisher. I |interpreted this as indication that there was some family squabbling going on, presumably pressure from the senior Goodman. The week after the big Atlas Bullpen get-together, I finally reached a decision about my workload, New York City, etc., and with Summer upcoming, I gave notice that I’d be leaving staff in two weeks (though still freelance writing for them). My scripting schedule included four books: Demon-Hunter, Man-Monster, Hands of the Dragon, and The Barbarians. Then, abruptly, titles began to get “suspended.” Some of the very worst, initially, and I was not displeased by the decision to stop publication of “The Tarantula” [Weird Suspense], The Brute and like books. The reason given for the purge was an attempt to improve the line. But as the week wore on, more and more titles got axed, up to and including new and as-yet-unpublished efforts such as Demon-

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 16

Hunter, which was already in suspension before the first issue ever hit the newsstands. Finally, Larry asked me if I’d mind leaving staff a week ahead of my scheduled departure. I agreed to this, assuming that Shelly Leferman—who was to replace my position as Larry’s right-hand man, and whom I had spent some time with in an effort to familiarize him with my job—would now be secure in his position with Atlas. Imagine my surprise when, on stopping by the office the following Monday, I found that he’d been dismissed. The reason given was that it had nothing to do with his work, but rather owed to the fact that somewhat more than half the Atlas line had been suspended, and therefore they didn’t feel they needed the personnel. That left only Alan Kupperberg and Larry Lieber effectively laboring on the office chores for the comics, and naturally Larry was very distressed at having to shoulder such a burden without any editorial help whatsoever. During that week, titles continued to be dropped, and some two weeks later, I went in to find that—in a weird display of office politics—Kupperberg had been released as production manager and Leferman hired back in his place. Just before I left New York City in late May, I stopped by to speak with Larry and Shelly, and they had a list of approximately eight or ten titles presently in production—meaning already written and being illustrated, inked or colored—which they were to complete. But after that, nil. The entire line had been suspended, but the Goodmans were tight-lipped and it was anyone’s guess—including Larry’s—whether or not they intended to resume publication as they had hinted. That’s pretty much the entire story, as I witnessed it. As for who it affects—everyone who worked for Atlas, of course. From Larry on down through the writers, artists, colorists, letterers and staff people. All of whom must now make the rounds of the other companies, or suffer a collapse of income. Some of the better or more well known freelancers were already working at several companies, and won’t be seriously harmed by the suspension. However, there are others who, lured by the higher rates and cozier atmosphere of Atlas, where considered “traitors” by whichever companies they’d formerly worked for, and who will now be at the mercy of those very editors who felt miffed by their “betrayal.” But again, that was one of the risks inherent in casting one’s lot with a new fledgling company, so it shouldn’t have come totally unexpected. I guess what made the suspension the surprise that it was is that, just prior to the shut-down, Chip had expressed renewed enthusiasm in the line as it was being reconstituted and improved by Larry, myself and the various freelancers, even to the extent of investing in much needed expensive additional office equipment, and approving those aforementioned new comic titles. He felt the books were looking professional and improving at a satisfying rate to the point where the Atlas line would be severely competitive—and hopefully, eventually, superior—to Marvel and National [DC]. Apparently, Martin didn’t agree. I never actually saw sales figures on any of the books, but according to Marv Wolfman, with whom I spoke just before departing New York, some of the titles were reputedly selling as low as 13%… which is of course far below the 25-30% necessary for bare survival in today’s comics market. About my working for Atlas, presumably if they resume publication I’ll be doing some writing for them, but of course Larry couldn’t make any commitments on a line which might be utterly dead. I still have some material coming out from them, however—if they publish those books which were in production, which I’m told they will. 127

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35

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!

KIRBY’S LEAST-KNOWN WORK! MARK EVANIER on the Fourth World, unfinished THE HORDE novel, long-lost KIRBY INTERVIEW from France, update to the KIRBY CHECKLIST, pencil gallery of Kirby’s leastknown work (including THE PRISONER, BLACK HOLE, IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB, TRUE DIVORCE CASES), westerns, and more! KIRBY/LADRONN cover!

FANTASTIC FOUR ISSUE! Gallery of FF pencils at tabloid size, MARK EVANIER on the FF Cartoon series, interviews with STAN LEE and ERIK LARSEN, JOE SINNOTT salute, the HUMAN TORCH in STRANGE TALES, origins of Kirby Krackle, interviews with nearly EVERY WRITER AND ARTIST who worked on the FF after Kirby, & more! KIRBY/LARSEN and KIRBY/TIMM covers!

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

KIRBY COLLECTOR #37

KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

FIGHTING AMERICANS! MARK EVANIER on 1960s Marvel inkers, SHIELD, Losers, and Green Arrow overviews, INFANTINO interview on Simon & Kirby, KIRBY interview, Captain America PENCIL ART GALLERY, PHILIPPE DRUILLET interview, JOE SIMON and ALEX TOTH speak, unseen BIG GAME HUNTER and YOUNG ABE LINCOLN Kirby concepts! KIRBY and KIRBY/TOTH covers!

GREAT ESCAPES! MISTER MIRACLE pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER, MARSHALL ROGERS & MICHAEL CHABON interviews, comparing Kirby and Houdini’s backgrounds, analysis of “Himon,” 2001 Kirby Tribute Panel (WILL EISNER, JOHN BUSCEMA, JOHN ROMITA, MIKE ROYER, & JOHNNY CARSON) & more! KIRBY/MARSHALL ROGERS and KIRBY/STEVE RUDE covers!

THOR ISSUE! Never-seen KIRBY interview, JOE SINNOTT and JOHN ROMITA JR. on their Thor work, MARK EVANIER, extensive THOR and TALES OF ASGARD coverage, a look at the “real” Norse gods, 40 pages of KIRBY THOR PENCILS, including a Kirby Art Gallery at TABLOID SIZE, with pin-ups, covers, and more! KIRBY covers inked by MIKE ROYER and TREVOR VON EEDEN!

“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!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” PART 2: JOE SINNOTT on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE PENCIL GALLERY, list of the art in the KIRBY ARCHIVES, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s technique and influences, SPEND A DAY WITH KIRBY (with JACK DAVIS, GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., and RUDE) and more! Two UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #39

KIRBY COLLECTOR #40

KIRBY COLLECTOR #41

KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

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

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

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

KIRBY CHECKLIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

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

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

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

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

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

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

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

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

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

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

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

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

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

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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!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Now shipping!

(164-page FULL-COLOR mag) $17.95 (Digital Edition) $6.95 • Ships July 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships May 2013

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!

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships June 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships June 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships July 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships August 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Oct. 2013

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!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships July 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships June 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships July 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships August 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Sept. 2013

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!

(192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $27.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-051-9 • (Digital Edition) $8.95 • Ships July 2013

(120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Editions) $4.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-050-2 Ships May 2013

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)

Media Mail

1st Class Canada 1st Class Priority US Intl. Intl.

Digital Only

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$50

$68

$65

$72

$150

$15.80

BACK ISSUE! (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

DRAW! (4 issues)

$30

$40

$43

$54

$78

$11.80

ALTER EGO (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

COMIC BOOK CREATOR (4 issues w/Special)

$36

$45

$50

$65

$95

$15.80

BRICKJOURNAL (6 issues)

$57

$72

$75

$86

$128

$23.70

For the latest news from TwoMorrows Publishing, log on to www.twomorrows.com/tnt To get e-mail updates of what’s new from TwoMorrows, sign up for our mailing list! http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/twomorrows

PRINTED IN CHINA

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!

THE ATLAS LINE OF SUPERSTARS!