Comic Book Artist #18

COSMIC COMICS OF THE ’70s

No.18 Feb. 2002

$6.95

Warlock, Thanos, Captain Marvel, Dr. Strange TM & © 2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

In The U.S.

STARLIN • ENGLEHART • WEISS • MILGROM • LEIALOHA • BRUNNER

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

At

However, this is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere thanks. Your support allows us to keep producing magazines like this one.

If instead you downloaded it for free from some other website or torrent, please know that it was absolutely 100% DONE WITHOUT OUR CONSENT. Our website is the only source to legitimately download any TwoMorrows publications. If you found this at another site, it was an ILLEGAL POSTING OF OUR COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, and your download is illegal as well. If that’s the case, here’s what I hope you’ll do: GO AHEAD AND READ THIS DIGITAL ISSUE, AND SEE WHAT YOU THINK. If you enjoy it enough to keep it, please DO THE RIGHT THING and go to our site and purchase a legal download of this issue, or purchase the print edition at our website (which entitles you to the Digital Edition for free) or at your local comic book shop.

Otherwise, please delete it from your computer, since it hasn’t been paid for.

And please DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, support our company by paying for the material we produce. We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this hard work.

All of our editors and authors, and comic shop owners, rely on income from this publication to continue producing more like it. Every sale we lose to an illegal download hurts, and jeopardizes our future. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so helps ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download.

And please don’t post this copyrighted material anywhere, or share it with anyone else.

Remember: TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

www.twomorrows.com TM

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

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

And don’t be put off by the lengthy page count as you’ll find yourself rocketing through each volume, breathlessly anticipating the next episode. Otomo (the artist/writer who parlayed the great success of his series into a film directing career) is an exquisite storyteller and one exceptional artist. His detailed cityscapes simply astound.

I hear that Akira was made into perhaps the best anime feature film ever made so no doubt my reintroduction to that Japanese art form is imminent! But, ye ghads! The final volume won’t be out until Spring! What’s a reader to do?

Akira Vols. 1-5 are available from your local comics shop and bookstore, or order direct by calling Dark Horse at 1-800-862-0052 or visit on the Web at www.darkhorse.com.

BIG JOHN

BUSCEMA December 10, 2001 took another comic book great from us as John Buscema, acclaimed Marvel artist of Conan and The Avengers (among many other titles) passed away from a lengthy illness.

CBA only just called Big John in November, when it was agreed that a “Buscema and the Barbarians” theme would be featured in our June, 2002 issue.

Instead #21 will feature a lengthy John Buscema

Remembrance section, replete with testimonials from friends and peers of the extraordinary artist (including Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and many other Marvel Bullpenners), a huge art section and a gallery of photographs. Tom Palmer has kindly agreed to paint a portrait of John for the cover.

Our thanks to Tom and the many contributors who are sharing their art treasures, such as Mike Arnold’s commission piece by John at left, who are helping to make this a significant tribute.

Our sincere and deepest condolences to the Buscema family for their loss.

The Power of CBA #16 Retraction

©2002 MASH•ROOM Co. Ltd.

AKIRA

In regards to a statement made by Howard Chaykin in his Comic Book Artist #16 interview—”I happened to see a number of paperback originals [Jeff Rovin had] written using character names and springboards I’d submitted for The Scorpion back in the earlier days”— information has surfaced that, in fact, Rovin wrote two novels in the Hollywood Detective series, which was set in the 1930s. “That series was offered to me,” Rovin told CBA, “with

detailed plots, by the publisher, Manor Books.

That is why the copyright is in their name, not my own. All stories, characters, etc., were theirs.

Manor’s idea was to emulate the milieu of the motion picture Chinatown. In fact, I had to fight to keep them from using a house name (E.C. Meade) since I badly wanted novel credentials.”

Howard Chaykin retracts his comments and CBA regrets the error and we offer our apologies to Mr. Rovin for any mischaracterization.

THE PASSING OF YET ANOTHER GREAT COMIC ARTIST

SCHAFFENBERGER

DAN DECARLO TRIBUTE COMING IN #19, APR. ’02 We hoped to include Terry Austin’s tribute to the memory of the Archie Comics artist in this issue, but due to space constraints we will be postponing it until next time. Our apologies to the DeCarlo family and Terry.

Probably the very first comic book art I began to recognize as unique was the work of Kurt Schaffenberger on his trademark title, Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old but I do recall my mom tossing a few comics back to us kids when our family (two girls and four boys, plus mom and sometimes dad) went on extended trips in our white Ford Falcon station wagon (christened “Tiger Joe”) in the mid-’60s. Lois Lane was especially anticipated.

Sadly, Kurt passed away in January, and I, for one, will sincerely miss the man because his work meant an awful lot to me—from his Captain Marvel tales to his Grit comics to his Supergirl and Superboy stories, the artist’s eminently playful and joy-filled work always expressed an exuberance and ©2002 DC emanated pleasant feelings.

Comics.

Looking through old issues of Lois Lane (according to ’60s DC exec Irwin Donenfeld, the best-selling comic book title of that decade) has me yearning for the slightly mischievous, always attractive fantasy world of Kurt’s making, where the “girl” reporter eternally competed with an endless line of women (all with names with the initials L.L.) for the Man of Steel’s romantic attention.

Goodbye, Kurt. You’ll never be forgotten.

Conan ©2002 Conan Properties, Inc.

I guess I always heard some buzz about the Japanese comic book series Akira over the years but after the initial manga craze of the late 1980s in this country, I shied away from most comics material and anime from the East. My loss.

Courtesy of review copies supplied by publisher Dark Horse (thank you, Shawna), I had the great pleasure of reading the first five volumes (of six, I believe) of Katsuhiro Otomo’s epic saga of NeoTokyo, circa 2030 A.D., an exhilarating adventure that never lets up for its 1,000+ pages. Cataclysmic, relentless, exceptionally violent, cosmic, surprising, and just plain awesome. I’ve rarely been startled in reading a comic book story—the last time was From Hell, I believe—but Akira succeeded in shaking me up time and time again.

M A R V E L ’ S

C O S M I C

C O M I C S

O F

T H E

’ 7 0 s !

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

TWOMORROWS

NUMBER EIGHTEEN

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

MARCH 2002

JOHN & PAM MORROW Associate Editors CHRIS KNOWLES DAVID A. ROACH CHRISTOPHER IRVING GEORGE KHOURY Contributing Editors ROY THOMAS JOHN MORROW Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Cover Art JIM STARLIN, pencils/colors ALLEN MILGROM & ALAN WEISS, inks Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD Logo Designer/Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King Issue Theme Song SAIL AWAY David Gray

C

O

N

T

E

N

T

S

THE FRONT PAGE Last minute bits about the community of comic book artists, writers, and editors ..............................................1 EDITOR’S RANT: CRISIS ON EARTH-REAL Peter Kuper’s World War 3 Illustrated and Joe Sacco’s Palestine are lauded for dealing with reality ....................4 IN MEMORIUM: JOHN BUSCEMA, 1927-2002 Jon B. Cooke revisits a 1997 interview he conducted with the late artist as we salute Big John ........................5 CBA COMMUNIQUES: ATLAS ROCKS! ATLAS SUCKS! The diverse opinions of our readers regarding Atlas/Seaboard and other pressing matters of state......................6 MARGINALIA: THE BEST ARTIST YOU DON’T KNOW Our esteemed Welsh friend looks at the all but forgotten work of master comic strip artist David Wright..........9 FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE: @!!?* Mar-Vell, Kree Warrior or Cosmic Dude? Our Man Hembeck is on the good Captain’s case! ............................13 MARVEL’S COSMIC COMICS OF THE 1970s CBA ROUNDTABLE: THE COSMIC CODE AUTHORITY SPEAKS A discussion with Jim Starlin, Alan Weiss and Allen Milgrom about those spaced-out Marvel comics! ..............14 STEVE ENGLEHART INTERVIEW: MARVEL’S THIRD WAVE The writer on his start in the biz and the rise of a new consciousness at the 1970s House of Ideas....................30 STEVE LEIALOHA INTERVIEW: LEIALOHA’S COSMIC DAYS The renowned artist on his debut in the field, working on Warlock, and on getting cosmic in San Francisco ....44 FRANK BRUNNER MINI-INTERVIEW: SORCERY SUPREME A short talk with the artist on his ’70s collaboration with Steve Englehart on Doctor Strange ............................54 LOST & FOUND: THE LOST WARLOCK #16 Selected panels from Alan Weiss’s exquisite pencil work on the missing Adam Warlock inventory book............56 Opposite page: Advertising art by Jim Starlin for The Death of Captain Marvel graphic novel. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Above: Panel detail (sans word balloons) from The Avengers Annual #7 (1977) Words and pencils by Jim Starlin, inks by Joe Rubinstein. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Both images courtesy of Jim Woodall.

N E X T

I S S U E

—

I T ’ S

A

H A R V E Y

C O M I C S

Visit CBA on our Web site at:

www.twomorrows.com Contributors Jim Starlin • Florence Steinberg Allen Milgrom • Alan Weiss Marie Severin • Steve Englehart Steve Leialoha • Frank Brunner Pauline Weiss • Linda Fite Herb Trimpe • John Romita, Sr. Barry Windsor-Smith • Stan Lee Dennis O’Neil • Steve Skeates Marie Steinberg • Roy Thomas Trina Robbins • Les Daniels Fred Hembeck • Michelle Nolan John R. Cochran • Alex Toth Terry Austin • Christopher Irving Jim Woodall • Mark Cannon In memory of legendary comic artists

John Buscema Kurt Schaffenberger and the genius animator

Chuck Jones and to our gal everyday “queen of the comics”

Flo Steinberg and our pals

Al & Pauline Weiss

H O U S E

P A R T Y !

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published 10 times a year 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. ©2002 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Cover acknowledgements: Captain Marvel, Adam Warlock, Doctor Strange, Thanos ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Editor’s Rant

Crisis on Earth-Real Kuper and Sacco’s reality books take comics to the next level

Below: Batman comes to DC’s rescue—again—with the hot-selling limited series The Dark Knight Strikes Again

by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. ©2002 DC Comics.

Inset right: Peter Kuper’s cover art for World War 3 Illustrated #32.

Courtesy of & ©2002 Peter Kuper.

Inset below: Detail of a Joe Sacco caricature (of the artist himself) from Palestine. ©2002 the artist.

CHANGE IS GOOD! To keep sales of Comic Book Artist moving forward, we’ve decided to initiate a revamp of the mag commencing with our June issue.

As we successfully experimented with last issue’s Arthur Adams celebration, CBA #20 will initiate every-other-issue (or so) looks at contemporary—and worthy— artists as well as initiating a number of new features. The Big Change occurs in June with a celebration of the art of the extraordinary Adam Hughes and we’ll be presenting significantly more material in our new gallery section. We’ll also debut the “Day in a Life” feature with a look at superstar artist Alex Ross. Plus we will be reviewing current books of note as well as presenting excerpts from innovative new projects. But don’t think we’ll be abandoning our historical retrospectives as the July issue showcases “The Legend of Gold Key Comics,” behind a new Bruce Timm cover painting! Every other issue will most likely continue to spotlight the themes CBA is renowned for. So please stick around, and we encourage your comments on these developments.

4

In my first post-Sept. 11th rant (CBA #15), I implored cartoonists to seize the moment and use the art form to examine not only the horrific events themselves but also explore the roots of this conflict we’re currently engulfed in, with the implied hope that peace will be the natural end result. Sure, that may be tremendously naive and personally I’m hardly in a conciliatory state of mind after the metropolis I love so much— my New York City—was so brutally attacked, but seeking an end to war must surely be the only sane route for humanity to embark.

So it was extremely gratifying to suddenly and very unexpectedly receive from cartoonist Peter Kuper, World War Three Illustrated #32, which deals entirely with the events of early September in New York City. The intention of editors Kuper, Seth Tobocman, and Jordan Worley are clearly stated on the table of contents: “We published the first issue of World War Three Illustrated in 1980. It contained images of New York City in ruins. Nuclear war seemed imminent.

As conditions got worse under Reagan, war became a metaphor for our daily lives.

“Today, in 2001, we are experiencing real war on our doorstep here in Manhattan. We see war and the city with new eyes. This 32nd issue… contains the diverse reactions of [27 or so] New York artists, writers and cartoonists to the Sept. 11th disaster.

This issue grows out of our personal experience. From seeing, hearing, smelling and living with this insane event. We are not trying to prove a point. We are asking questions. Trying to make sense out the incomprehensible. Looking for our humanity in the rubble.”

Assuredly many of the pieces in this special issue are political in nature with a number espousing a tired, worn-out radicalism (quite a few—including Spain, perhaps the most high-profile contributor in this issue—resurrecting the left wing’s easiest target of the past, Ronnie Reagan), often (surprise!) blaming America for the rise of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaida organization. But quite a few entries are poignant and extremely personal, shelving shopworn rhetoric and instead revealing the angst-filled, tormenting results of those terrible acts caused by audacious Islamic extremists, with perhaps the best being Kuper’s own entry, “War of the Worlds,” baring witness to the tragedy, expressing his mortifying fears and even revealing the innocent obliviousness of the artist’s young daughter.

But, don’t get me wrong: Some of the more overt political pieces, whatever their ideological slant, contain fascinating insight into the nature of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan over the decades, the relationship between the West and oil-producing nations, and even the manufacture of anthrax-filled bombs by this country over the past 60 years or so. This may not make for great comics necessarily, but it is a prime example of using the medium to effectively communicate divergent points of view, even if that information is often best filtered out of horsesh*t propaganda. (Nicole Schulman’s “Deconstruction,” more an illustrated essay than a comic book story proper, is especially distasteful. To quote… “But I don’t feel hatred toward the men who did this… our leaders created a monster ages ago… the people of the [U.S.] and Afghanistan have paid the ultimate price for the sins of

their leaders…” Oh, please! Me, I’m all in favor of defending Nicole’s right for free speech, however absurd—by use of arms if necessary— but the barbaric slaughter at the WTC is hardly this country’s fault.

Yeesh! When is the increasingly irrelevant American Left gonna stop this destructive, apologetic self-loathing?)

My petty criticisms aside, I commend the WW3 editors for their herculean efforts in getting such a special issue out in such a short amount of time. Somehow, this magazine feels more hefty, more significant than the two 9/11 volumes co-produced by Dark Horse and DC Comics, possibly because of the minority (if oft hysterical) viewpoints.

The diversity of opinion, even as we face threat from abroad, is what makes this country such a swell place to live, right? Because my political leanings have decidedly moderated over the years (this from a guy willing to take up arms for the Sandinistas back in ’84, dude!) doesn’t mean I look for other points of view to be squelched. I’ll leave that to the extremists in both wings. Kuper: You and your compadres done good, and God bless the First Amendment, dig?

For all the press the increasingly horrific events in the Middle East is currently receiving in the U.S., I tend to think most Americans just don’t want to think about the Israeli/Palestinian situation. It’s oh-so-messy and downright complicated, right? Israel seems so much like America but the Palestinians look like the underdogs… it’s hardly black-&-white to most of us and, well, it hurts our head to think about… but before you flick on a rerun of That ’70s Show for relief, I suggest you give Joe Sacco’s extraordinary book Palestine a look for an informed point of view. I’ve allotted too little space here to properly review Sacco’s collection of his journalistic/autobiographical comic series from the 1990s, but suffice to say it is as timely as ever, giving us a minority—and biased— viewpoint of a complex regional problem with global implications.

Fantagraphics has also just thoughtfully released Sacco’s latest work of comics journalism, Safe Area Gorazde, the cartoonist’s account of his experiences in Eastern Bosnia war (1992-95).

—Jon B. Cooke, Editorman World War 3 Illustrated #32 ($3.50 + $2 s&h) WW3, P.O. Box 20777, Tompkins Square Station, New York, NY 10009.

Palestine (ISBN#1-56097432-X, $24.95 postpaid) and Safe Area Gorazde (ISBN #1-56097470-2, $19.95 ppd.) are available from Fantagraphics Books, 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115. Call 1-800-657-1100 or visit www.fantagraphics.com COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

In Memorium

John Buscema, 1927-2002 The comics world loses another legendary artist to the ages The first comic I ever saw blew my mind; it was Superman.

By 14 or 15 I stopped reading comics. That was back around 193941. I was never really interested in the stories, but I was always interested in the drawings. The three artists I followed were Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, and Burne Hogarth. I wanted to be a painter.

But who could make a living at that?

Funny, I never got anything [in comics] making the rounds, until I read a wanted ad in The New York Times, Timely was looking for cartoonists. That’s the first time I met Stan Lee. He was a very energetic guy, very personable guy. At the time I thought he was a genius, because I knew nothing about comics. He gave me a staff job, my first job in comics. I worked in a large room with a group of artists: Carl Burgos, Syd Shores, Danny DeCarlo, Gene Colan were there. Bill Everett worked there too, but he wasn’t on staff. We worked on the 14th floor of the Empire State Building. They had half the floor, and there were several rooms. I started in 1948 with crime comics, and I graduated into westerns. We bounced around to whatever was popular at the time.

In 1957, comics were in a bad situation. I couldn’t buy a job in those days. I’d worked for Marvel, I worked for Western Printing; I don’t know how many different outfits. They all folded; it was like a domino effect.

I always had in the back of my mind that I was going to get out of comics. And after 48 years, I got out. I never really was happy with comics. I think if I were paid enough that I could turn out a page every two or three days, maybe I would’ve been happy. But I always pushed, turning out as many pages as I could in a day. I had no interest in comics. The only interest I had was how much I can earn, and how fast I can make it. At one time I averaged three to four pages a day. I knew artists who were always having a financial problem; it’s a common thing in this business. You’ve got to have that discipline to get up in the morning, and turn out “X” amount of pages a day.

Back in 1965 or 1966, I got a call from Marvel. They wanted me to go back. I’ll be honest with you, I was afraid. But it was appealing to me because I wouldn’t have to commute. I could work at home. It was a tremendous effort for me to make that decision.

I would not have been able to survive in comics if not for Jack Kirby. When Stan called me back in 1966, I had one hell of a time trying to get back in the groove. You can do illustration, you can do layouts, but that doesn’t mean you can do comics. It’s a whole different ball game. Stan gave me a book to do; I think it was the Hulk. I did a pretty bad job—Stan thought I should study Jack’s art and books so he gave me a pile of Kirby’s comics. Well, everybody was given Jack Kirby books! It was the first time I’d seen his work. I started working from them, and that’s what saved me.

What did I learn from Jack Kirby? The layouts, for cryin’ out loud! I copied! Every time I needed a panel, I’d look up at one of his panels and just rearrange it. If you look at some of the early stuff I did—y’know where Kirby had the explosions with a bunch of guys flying all over the place? I’d swipe them cold! Stan was happy. The editors were happy, so I was happy.

What I was wary of was, how long was this going to last? But Stan was very convincing. He said, “John, things are different today.

We’re making a big comeback. Things are picking up, we’re making tremendous strides.”

At the beginning I’d go in and discuss the story, and we would throw ideas back and forth. When Stan became more confident in my ability to do stories, he’d call me up, or I’d call him up and say, “Stan, I’m ready for a plot. What have you got in mind?” The last time I March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

worked with Stan was on Silver Surfer. After that I started working with Roy Thomas. I worked with a lot of different writers.

On Silver Surfer #4, we worked on the plot, Stan and I. I was very, very excited about doing the book. I thought, “This is one job I’m going to get away from the Kirby layouts. I’m going to try something different.” Which I did. I think it had a different look about it from the previous stuff I’d been doing. People were congratulating me on this particular issue. Stan tore the book to pieces! He started with the first page: “Well, okay, not bad.” On and on and on. Every second page he ripped to shreds. “This is not good, this should be done this way...” I walked out of that damn office of his; I didn’t know which way was up or down. I was completely demoralized. I walked into John Romita’s office; John looked at me and saw that I was very upset. I said, “John, how the hell do you do comics?”

Maybe seven or eight years had gone by; I get a call from Stan one morning. We usually exchanged pleasantries—Stan said something; I think he called me an SOB or something—and I said, “What’s up, Stan? What’d I do wrong?” He said, “John, do you remember that book we worked on, the Silver Surfer and Thor book?” I remembered it very well. “John, that was the greatest thing you’ve ever done, the greatest comic ever done, the greatest thing you and I ever turned out!” Well, I thought he was pulling my leg, and I didn’t say a word. Stan says, “Johnny, you still there?” I said, “Stan, are you kidding? Are you serious?” He said, “No John, really, seriously.” Well, I tried to refresh his memory. He said, “I don’t remember ever saying anything like that. I don’t remember ever telling you that; the book is beautiful, how could I possibly…?”

Well, I tell this to many, many people. How many guys have been destroyed by an editor: Some editor who just happened to get up on the wrong side of the bed, and does this to some guy who’s put everything into his job?

The book was published. But what happened was, in those days, for some reason the Silver Surfer just didn’t click. The number one issue sold well, but each succeeding issue lost sales. It just went down, which was probably what was bothering Stan. Many years later, Stan told me at lunch one day, “John, I just didn’t know what the hell to do with the damn thing. I didn’t know what direction we were going.”

YE ED’S NOTE: On January 10, 2002, the great, longtime Marvel artist John Buscema succumbed to stomach cancer after a long bout with the disease. Comic Book Artist extends our deepest sympathies to the Buscema family for their—and our—profound loss.

What follow is an autobiographical essay by John cobbled together from a November 18, 1997 interview conducted by Jon B. Cooke for The Jack Kirby Collector.

BUSCEMA TRIBUTE For our June issue, Comic Book Artist will devote a section to a remembrance of the life and work of John Buscema. If any of his friends, peers, and/or fans have testimonials, anecdotes, drawings or appreciations they would like to share for the issue, please notify us immediately and make sure we receive your submission by May 1.

5

CBA Communiques

Atlas Sucks! Atlas Rocks!

Readers’ divergent opinions regarding Seaboard Periodicals Chris Gage via the Internet I picked up CBA #16 and it looks like another winner. I especially like the Colón cover. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but I love the oddball companies of the ’70s and your survey issues are always a delight, so I am sure I’ll love this one as much as all the others. By the way, don’t sell yourself short; Michael Chabon was right on! Your writing style is not only intelligent, clear and concise (as befits a journalistic mag like CBA), but also has a special quality about it that a) vividly conveys your love for the medium you write about, and b) really makes the reader feel like you are talking right to him, as if you were sitting on the porch having a beer and just shooting the breeze; like they know you and the people you write about personally. It’s the same kind of quality Stan Lee used in his early lettercols and Bullpen Bulletins pages that made readers feel like such an integral part of the “Marvel Family” in the early days of that company. It’s also used well by Stephen King, to make the reader feel comfortable and like they really know his settings and characters, before he lowers the boom with the scary stuff! And it’s a rare skill, so wield it with pride!

[Thanks, Chris, and congrats on your recent wedding!—Ye Ed.]

Above: An Australian contributor (Shane Foley? Mark Cannon?) sent this cover image depicting a Down Under edition of the ’70s Atlas Comics’ hero-monster. Morlock ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals.

Bruce Timm Hollywood, U.S.A. The Atlas/Seaboard CBA was the most enjoyable ish in a long time. Fascinating! I still treasure the memory of seeing Destructor #1 on the stands without warning, “What is this? A new comic company with new Ditko/Wood art? A whole line of new comics that I can collect from day one?!

O’ frabjous day!” The excitement lasted a few months. Some books I liked more than others, most left me scratching my head, but I got ‘em all, though, and have the complete run (even the Vickis!) Don’t let anyone give you crap about devoting an entire ish to such an “Eh, who cares?” subject. The off-trail company coverage issues (like the terrific Charlton and Warren issues) have been some of the best CBAs so far. Looking forward to the Red Circle story. Why not cover the Dell/Gold Key heroes, too? (Speaking of which, Ernie Colón is dead wrong regarding his Doctor Solar issues!

They rule!)

[Yeah, well, we think Timm rules! Actually, CBA will be devoting an issue to Gold Key and we’ve asked Bruce to do a cover painting of Magnus, Robot Fighter for that one, coming this Summer.—Y.E.] Ruben Azcona via the Internet I consider this magazine a treasure, as I have always seemed to love reading about the creator’s lives even more so than comics themselves. On a negative note though, I just want to throw in my vote for the side that thinks you’re wasting too many issues that focus entirely on “defunct” publishers. Yes, in this day and age of political correctness, everybody on a message board like [the Comic Art List]

6

will blast me for publically saying this, but the fact of the matter is that the “Big Two” are, and and always have been, the best. Now, while I always read every issue regardless of content, I have to admit that overall, I and the general populace couldn’t care less about Atlas comics. Let’s face it, the comics pretty much suck, and that has been proven over the years by the lack of people searching for back issues of the company. I don’t mean to pick on Atlas by the way, I’m just using them as one of the many examples. I mean, how many readers do you honestly think care to spend eight or nine bucks for an issue of CBA jam-packed with articles and interviews about Harvey comics??? I realize that this magazine is also a personal thing for you, and that gives you the right to do issues about topics that interest you personally, but I just think you should stick to issues on artists, characters, etc., from Marvel and DC. around 80% of the time. In other words, lessen the non-Big Two content to a ratio of around one out of every five issues.

That being said, the overall list of upcoming issues looks good, but one trap I find every publisher falls into whenever deciding to do a specific era like ’70s Marvel for instance, is to always do the obvious, which is the whole Starlin/outer space/cosmic saga. There were so many other great moments and creators to do stories and interviews with! But don’t misunderstand, I’m still going to love the issue!

I want you to know that it is a big plus that you’ve decided to mix up the content a bit and stop the trend of having each issue focus entirely on one topic. Your recent issue with Stevens, Wagner, Rivoche and the Hernandez Bros. is an excellent example! Let me put it this way, I always adored Stevens’ covers during the ’80s, Mage was a fun independent for someone not that big on independents, I never cared to even read Mister X but I always loved the covers and posters, and finally, my only exposure to Love and Rockets was reading the first black-&-white issue which I consider to be the worst comic I’ve ever read in my entire life. But you know what? Thanks to open mindedness, and as I mentioned above, I read every single page and once again proved to myself that interviews with creators can still be interesting even when they are creators of books I don’t care about!

I thoroughly enjoyed the entire issue!

Now, for fear that you may never get this far in my letter, I want to get to a couple of suggestions. One issue which I think deserves to become reality, and which is long overdue, is one which would focus on the Filipino Invasion! I mean, my God, these guys are some of the best inkers ever. And haven’t you and every other collector out there ever asked yourselves, how the heck did such a tiny impoverished country produce such an immense wealth of great comic artists?

Starting with the best of them, the late, great Alfredo Alcala, and going on down the great list in no particular order is Ernie Chan, Rudy Nebres, Nestor Redondo, Tony DeZuniga, Pablo Marcos, Danny Bulanadi, Rafael Kayanan, Gerry Talaoc (though I personally despised his inks), Gerry Alanguilan, etc.

These guys have always been underrated and there has always been a sort of “comic industry racism” for some reason. For instance, whenever a great American artist dies, we’re bound to get several tribute interviews, articles, remembrances, etc. But whenever a nonAmerican artist dies, the news rarely garners more than the usual tiny blurb or at most fraction of a page mention. (I’m referring to the comic news media in general by the way, not to you.)

The point is, as much as I always love it, there have been several comic fanzines who’ve done interviews and articles on guys like Starlin, Byrne, Perez, etc. In fact, they’ve been done to death.

Whereas in my 20-odd years in the hobby, I can’t recall any article or interview with any of the Filipino artists other than a one-pager on Alcala in Hulk! magazine from over 20 years ago. I’m not saying they have to get the attention of the acknowledged greats like the Starlins and Millers, but rather just planting the seed in your mind to let you COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18 Feb. 2002

know that you could really produce something truly ground-breaking with this idea. With a lot of deep digging and hard work, you could get in-depth interviews with most of these guys (while they still live) and since they always worked closely together and know each other, several of them are bound to have tons of great things to say about the deceased ones like Alcala. With an entire issue devoted to as many of these guys as possible, you would instantly gain attention and pride by basically being the first publisher/magazine to show the comic world an in-depth look into the lives and careers of these always overshadowed greats.

Whereas every other similar mag like Comics Interview, The Comics Journal, Amazing Heroes, etc. never so much as wrote perhaps a tiny obituary or gave one of these guys a one-line mention, you could show these artists just how much fans, and the industry in general, appreciate them in one fell swoop!

Jon, you know how I said that I wasn’t a big fan of devoting entire issues of CBA to defunct companies that no one really cares about anyway? Well you might ask yourself, “Why do you buy those issues then?” and my answer, aside from the fact that it’s because I really support what you’re doing, is because I’ve always been a fan of what goes on behind the scenes of comic books. I think the single greatest achievement by Stan Lee was the Bullpen Bulletins Page.

Through that simple device, readers were given glimpses into the lives of all the creators whose names we kept seeing in the credits, and it made us all feel like we were part of the “Marvel Family.”

So while I may get upset when I see an issue of CBA devoted to an entire company who I don’t care about, the reason I still buy it is because I think it’s still important to have a documented and published synopsis of the history of these publishers. As long as it’s just once and as in-depth as possible, so that we always have a “reference book” on the company that any fans can look to for info, and so that it doesn’t need to be revisited again for all the non-fans.

This is what I’m suggesting with the idea of the Filipino Invasion.

Nothing has ever been done on these guys, and one entire in-depth issue of CBA would be the first true attempt at showing we actually loved and cared about these guys, as opposed to giving them brief, one-line mentions throughout their careers.

Anyway, I think you’d be surprised at how many art fans love the works of these guys and one thing is definite: You wouldn’t have trouble getting art samples from any of these guys, as they are not hard to find.

I hope you haven’t fallen asleep, and just ask that you think about it. Hopefully (and especially if you’re a fan of any of these guys), the idea will fester in the back of your mind for a long time until you one day also come to realize as I did that an entire, in-depth look at the “Filipino Invasion” has been long overdue.

[I agree, Ruben, that the Filipino school is a very necessary subject to cover and, with the able help of Mañuel Auad, we’re compiling that “Invasion of the Filipinos” issue as this is being written, but as to devoting 80% of CBA’s themes to just the Big Two? Nah, there’s just too much cool history to cover regarding the neglected companies to resist, but rest assured we will not neglect DC and Marvel.—Y.E.] Kurt Mitchell Tacoma, Washington If anyone doubts TwoMorrows’ commitment to customer service, send ’em to me. Barely a week has gone by since I renewed my subscription to Comic Book Artist and I’ve already received and read issue #16. Now that’s what I call turnaround!

Before commenting on your coverage of Atlas/Seaboard, I’d like to respond to your “Editor’s Rant” column. Jon, you have nothing to apologize for. Your dedication to all aspects of comic book history is what keeps me coming back to CBA month after month. With all due respect to the talents responsible for the Kree-Skrull War and the Fourth World titles, these works are not the Alpha and Omega of comics history many fans seem to take them as. Your ventures into the more obscure corners of that history, your “monuments to mediocrity” as you dubbed them, are vital to understanding both the medium and the culture that spawned it. I think we can learn as much about the art form and its audience from Fightin’ Five and Morlock 2001 as we can from The Spirit or Watchmen, perhaps even more. So go right on doing what you’re doing. Future generations of comics aficionados will thank you.

I remember vividly the handful of Atlas comics that found their way into my hands in ’74, specifically the first issues of The Brute, Ironjaw and Targitt. Though never a big part of organized fandom, I knew who Martin Goodman was and what a successful Atlas could March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

mean to the industry. The books themselves were a disappointment.

They struck me as wrong somehow. My attitude, then as now, was that if I wanted a Marvel comic book, I would buy a Marvel comic book. It wouldn’t be until years after the line’s demise that I would stumble across the jewels amidst the dross: Goodwin and Ditko’s The Destructor, Fleisher and Colón’s The Grim Ghost, Chaykin’s The Scorpion. And now, thanks to CBA #16, I have a few other goodies to track down, especially Thrilling Adventure Stories #2. Toth, Severin, Simonson and Heath? I’m so there!

It is a shame that the Goodmans are gone. As thorough as your coverage was, the story of Atlas/Seaboard felt incomplete without those two much-maligned gentlemen’s perspective. We can speculate to our hearts’ content about “Vengeance Inc.” and tax write-offs and sinecures for talentless offspring but we’ll never know for sure why Atlas was born, why its short life was so troubled and why it ultimately died. Nonetheless, you did an extraordinary job of reporting the many different sides of this complex, almost tragic chapter in comic book history.

While all of the interviews were interesting, your talk with Ernie Colón was the indisputable highlight of the issue. If every comics practitioner had even a tenth of Ernie’s versatility and work ethic, the industry wouldn’t be in its current sorry state. The man drew Richie Rich for 25 years and proud of it! Any man who says “I think ants and bees, the more there are, the more intelligent they are. Human beings, the more there are, the less intelligent they are” is a man I want to know. Sometimes, I think you have the best job in the world.

Above: Sal Amendola’s original cover art for The Phoenix #2 was adapted very closely by Dick Giordano, the final cover artist. Sal tells us, “My intent was to make it look like [the character] was overpowered but fighting valiantly.

Dick leaned him forward to give much greater power to his punch (thus he needed to move the nowoverlapped little background figure; see him [located under the alien giving our hero a halfNelson]?)” Courtesy of and art ©2002 Sal Amendola. Phoenix ©1975 Seaboard Periodicals.

7

Jack Curtin Oaks, Pennsylvania I received quite a shock when I opened my copy of Comic Book Artist #16 last evening. Two of them, in fact. The first came on page 19, where the front cover of the “Friday” section of the November 8, 1974 Philadelphia Daily News was reproduced. Look closely and you’ll see that the author of that piece and this correspondent are, well, the exact same person. I was doing a freelance book column for the News in those days and convinced them to let me do this cover feature so long as I did a lot of the editorial work as well, such as working with Jeff Rovin to get art and other supporting illustrative materials. I also did a later feature for them on classic comic strips.

And now, about that second shock: At the top of page 110 are pictured the covers to three issues of Swank magazine. The first of those contains my first ever national magazine article. I had approached Swank about doing a profile on Harlan Ellison and sent them a story I’d sold to a Philadelphia magazine as a sample of my writing. They bought the Ellison concept (the story appeared two issues after this one) and said if I wanted to rewrite the Philly story with a national perspective (it was about a local sports agent), they’d buy that, too. Which they did and it saw print first.

What are the odds that the covers of publications carrying these two stories I wrote in the early ’70s would both turn up as spot illustrations in the same issue of another magazine nearly 30 years later? I keep wondering now if the universe is trying to tell me something….

Above: Initial comments indicate that our Arthur Adams/potpourri issue was very well received by readers. We promise that future issues will feature more extensive art galleries. In the spirit of this cosmic issue, here’s Arthur’s version of Thanos. Courtesy of the artist and John Fanucchi. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

8

Perhaps the only aspect of the issue that left me cold was Nicholas Caputo’s overview of The Destructor. Not that it wasn’t both informative and well written but I could have read this article anywhere. I read CBA for its patented blend of interviews, rare photos and original art (though having said that, I’m still waiting on the edge of my seat for more of Robert Beerbohm’s insights into the birth of the direct sales market).

I’m looking forward to the upcoming Arthur Adams and Gray Morrow issue and but I’m especially anticipating the Harvey issue. I don’t think there’s an American kid of our generation who didn’t at one time or another read Casper, Richie Rich, Little Dot or Hot Stuff.

They are a true cultural touchstone and it’s about time these wonderful books got the attention they deserve.

It always seems pointless somehow to close by telling you to keep up the good work. After 17 issues, I’m convinced you don’t know how to turn out anything but good work. Thanks for another great trip through comics history.

P.S. Maybe it’s just sour grapes on my part since I applied unsuccessfully for the proofreader position but there seemed to be a noticeable decrease in quality control this issue. There seemed to be more misspellings, more grammatical errors and more broken or incomplete sentences. Most noticeable were the mismatched illustration and caption on page 116. Given the move to monthly publication and the transition between proofreaders, such glitches were probably inevitable. I’m confident this is just a temporary aberration but if you have to cut back on frequency to maintain the standards you’ve established to date, do it. Believe me, your readership will support you. I can’t speak for anyone else but in any contest between quality and quantity, I’ll take quality every time.

[Thanks for noticing that, indeed, I do have the best job in the world!

We’ll try to catch all typos, K.M.—Y.E.]

Matt Wieringo via the Internet I was so thrilled to find your issue on the history of Atlas Comics on the stands. I had been hoping for a while that you would devote an issue to the subject. The only issue I’ve anticipated more is one devoted to Harvey Comics. As I thumbed through your Atlas issue, I mentioned this to Marsha, the owner of Nostalgia Plus in Richmond, Virginia, where I buy your magazine. No sooner had I said it, when my eyes fell on your blurb for next issue, announcing your coverage of Harvey Comics. Marsha had to restrain me from jumping up and down, as I was almost knocking over some valuable inventory.

Your interview with Ernie Colón was a revelation. His work on Richie Rich and Casper contributed to some of my fondest childhood memories. I remember seeing The Grim Ghost when I was a little kid and wondering why it looked so familiar. My brother (who could spot and recognize a particular artist’s work from a single panel) had to point out to me that it was drawn by the “Richie Rich guy.” I could finally put a name to the art. I was frustrated by the fact that Harvey never included credits in their books and knowing that my favorite books were drawn by some fellow named Ernie Colón (though we mispronounced it “KOH-LUNN”) was somehow very satisfying. He comes across in your interview with him as such a humble, delightful person, which only adds to my fondness for his work. In my opinion, he was to Harvey what Kirby and Ditko were to Marvel or what Barks was to the Ducks. I only hope that some day the folks who own the rights to all that great Harvey material will realize what a treasure trove they have and reprint it all in archive editions similar to what Marvel and DC are doing with their classic books.

Anyway, this e-mail is going out a little later than intended. I went on-line as soon as I finished the Atlas issue, elated, intending to thank you for this (and the next) issue. My home page, “Ain’t It Cool News” popped up and changed everything. On it, in bold letters, was the announcement of the passing of John Buscema. I had heard of his illness several months earlier, but had hoped for the best. He and his brother Sal were sort of heroes of mine when I was growing up. His loss, along with the losses of Gil Kane and Jack Kirby have hit me rather hard, considering I never knew any of them, except through their work. After reading of his death, I wasn’t in any mood to write.

The reality of the mortality of my childhood idols is finally setting in now, and I’d like to thank you for doing this wonderful work you’ve been doing. It may sound morbid to some, but the truth is that these wonderful artists aren’t going to live forever and you’ve done an admirable job of recording so much of the history of this great medium. With the state of the industry what it is, I can’t imagine that your work is terribly lucrative. That makes me appreciate what you’ve done all the more.

Thanks again and keep up the great work. I simply cannot wait for the Harvey issue. (I’ve scoured the Internet in search of information about them. Their web site is particularly frustrating. My hat is off to you for getting enough material to do an entire issue on them.)

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Marginalia

The Best Artist You Don’t Know Revealing the work of unknown artist genius David Wright

With the comic strip now in its second century as an art form, thanks to countless collections, magazines, encyclopedias and histories, we have a pretty clear picture of the medium’s high points.

Surely even the most blinkered fan will at least have heard of Little Nemo, Flash Gordon, Krazy Kat, Terry and the Pirates, or Peanuts, and if not, at least the material is out there to put him right. But imagine for a moment the possibility that there might have been a strip that somehow slipped through the net, that was never collected, and whose sole appearance in a history book was some thirty years ago. Incredibly, that is the fate that has befallen the sublime British newspaper strip Carol Day and its creator David Wright. Carol Day ran for over ten years, from 1956 to 1967, in The Daily Mail, garnered a fanatical following, appeared in 22 countries, and then quietly disappeared as if it never had existed.

country’s morale. Unlike Vargas, Wright preferred to use a brush rather than an airbrush and his illustrations were notably more “painterly” and less slick than his contemporaries. He was lucky to have an excellent model in his young wife Esmé (though in later life she was known to be somewhat ambivalent about having posed for him) and his girls have distinctively gamine yet sultry looks to them.

Like Vargas, Wright’s girls were seductive but rarely nude and he clothed them in all manner of fancifully see-through concoctions. But as the war ended and the country settled into years of rationing and austerity, there was a notable turning away from frivolity and, by the late ’40s, Wright’s pin-ups had disappeared from The Sketch.

Following this, he initially accepted pin-up assignments from the digest-sized Men Only magazine but gradually he moved into advertising to supplement his income. One of his principal clients was the drink giant Schweppes for whom he painted, inevitably, suave and seductive young ladies but he was soon to abandon

David Wright was born in 1912 into something of an artistic dynasty. Both parents were artists and the family, somewhat fancifully, was thought to be descended from the legendary 18th century painter Joseph Wright of Derby. As with so many boys growing up in the 1920s and ’30s, Wright was fascinated by America, particularly its cars, movies and jazz, all of which must have seemed impossibly glamorous and sophisticated compared to drab old England. With little interest in formal education, Wright left school at a young age and started work in a London art studio where he followed in his mother’s footsteps by specializing in fashion illustration.

When war broke out, Wright’s lack of formal education, and fascination with cars, meant he was elected to the role of a driving instructor rather than the heroic R.A.F. pilot he had wanted to be.

With time on his hands, he approached the Rogers Art Agency with his portfolio, hoping to secure a few assignments to draw cars or airplanes. However, Rogers was more interested in his fashion artwork and could see how his talent for drawing women might be turned into something altogether more profitable, and so, David Wright, pin-up artist, was born. His first pin-up appeared as a loose insert in 1941 in The Sketch magazine and it created an immediate sensation.

During the war, Wright was in many ways Britain’s equivalent of America’s Alberto Vargas and his pin-ups adorned barrack rooms and bedroom walls up and down the country. In fact, it has been suggested that the Army kept him in Britain, out of active combat, because they realized how important his pin-ups were to the

pin-ups for a rather unexpected new direction. While Britain had produced vast numbers of comics before the war, it was not until the early ’50s that adventure strips began to emerge in any number, and an explosion of new titles hit the stands. Wright’s agents, Rogers, were among the main suppliers of talent to the major publishing house and it seemed likely they appalled him with the notion of drawing comic strips. With little or no adventure strip tradition in the country, the publishers were desperate to recruit talent (which explains the vast number of Spanish and Italian artists who started their careers in Britain) and often recruited established illustrators like T. Heath Robinson, Septimus Scott and H.M. Brock, despite their lack of experience with the medium. Like them, Wright was free to try his luck and a new comic artist was born.

Wright’s first strip, starring Kit Carson, appeared in Cowboy Picture Library #56 (July 1952), and was well-drawn, if a bit rough around the edges. But it was to be another year before he tried his hand again. “Judy” debuted in March 1953 in the weekly magazine Titbits (which, despite its title, was a slightly down-market family publication) and was a half-page strip written by Peter Meriton.

Wright painted his final Men Only pin-up in 1954 and the slack was taken up with a second comic strip, “Jo,” written by John Dormer, in The Empire News. Both strips were transparent excuses to draw leggy girls in exotic locales, but were none the worse for that. Their restrictive formats meant that he had little room to explore storytelling techniques or innovative compositions but they revealed a

by David A. Roach

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

Above: David Wright’s Carol Day is a forgotten treasure of comic strip art. Courtesy of David A. Roach. ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

9

Above: Another Carol Day strip by David Wright, which appeared daily in London’s Daily Mail newspaper. Courtesy of David A. Roach. ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

Below: Yet another example of David Wright’s artistry. From DAR’s personal collection.

Courtesy of David A. Roach. ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

10

consummate drawing ability and a loose and lively approach to rendering. In late 1956, Titbits began reprinting lavishly painted black-&-white strips by the Italian artist Walter Molino and early the very next year Wright quit “Judy” for a new serial, “Danger Treads Softly,” which was also painted. “Danger Treads Softly” was ostensibly a thriller though since the strip’s heroine was a fashion model, its emphasis was very much on cheesecake, yet again.

Visually however it was gorgeous with an impressionistic softness quite reminiscent of Gene Colan’s wash work for Warren a decade later. Wright returned to “Judy” in June 1957, but he quickly abandoned this, since by this point he had already entered the big leagues. He had become a newspaper strip artist.

Carol Day premiered in the Sept. 10, 1956 edition of The Daily Mail, one of the country’s biggest papers, and it’s safe to say Britain had never seen its like before. British newspapers had been running comic strips for decades by this point but the serious strip had very much been in the minority. Early features like Jack Monk’s Buck Ryan (which first appeared in 1937) and Steven Dowling’s Garth (from ’43), were extraordinarily crude and it wasn’t until The Mail began running Alex Raymond’s masterful Rip Kirby that British artists grasped quite what the medium was capable of. Another important development was the emergence of strips like Norman Pett’s Jane and Arthur Ferrier’s Film Fannie in the ’30s, which were little more than vehicles for pretty girls, often naked pretty girls (a tradition that still prevails in some British tabloids).

Meanwhile, in the States, throughout the ’50s and ’60s, a new kind of comic strip was emerging. Firstly, with Stan Drake’s The Heart of Juliet Jones, and subsequently with Leonard Starr’s On Stage and Alex Kotsky’s Apartment 3-G. These were very well drawn, dramatic, sophisticated soap opera features, and Carol Day was in many ways Britain’s response to this. Carol herself was a fashion model (with a wealthy uncle) who was endlessly searching for love but never quite finding the perfect man. Within this framework, Wright, with scripts from Peter Meriton, was able to explore all manner of subjects and locales, from high society to the darkest slums, and even the supernatural. What elevated the feature from the ordinary to the spectacular was Wright’s art which was truly extraordinary. By this

point, he had mastered the medium and continuity and composition were now assured and inventive while his rendering was utterly unique.

His drawing had the relaxed, intuitive grasp of body language of a Raymond or a Drake but he used his brush and pen in the painterly style of much earlier illustrators such as Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg. Wright barely penciled his strips, merely drawing enough so that he could see where the figures and settings should go. Once that was established, he swept in with great swathes of black brush strokes, delineating features, forms and shadows. Finally he would ass layer upon layer of dense pen strokes, oppressively dark cross-hatching for the backgrounds and delicate, sketchy, explorative lines for faces, folds and foliage. He avoided outlines if he possibly could, preferring to play tones and surfaces off each other in an energetic collision of shadow, texture and light.

Carol Day has been interpreted as a slightly sinister, macabre feature largely because of its oppressively cross-hatched dark artwork and Wright himself was apparently a rather somber, almost melancholy figure. While he adored art and was almost incapable of doing anything less than his best work, he harbored a strong sense that comics were somehow beneath him. Despite his obvious understanding of the highly complex mechanisms of comics, his opinion of them was low. This was most clearly demonstrated by his fascination with Fredric Wertham’s notorious anti-comic book tract, Seduction of the Innocent. One of his three sons, Nicky Wright, was infatuated with American comic books (in fact, in later life, he became a noted contributor to Comic Book Marketplace), particularly ECs, and had amassed a sizeable collection. After reading Wertham’s dire warnings of impending juvenile delinquency, Wright took the offending titles out into his back garden and set fire to them! That an artist of Wright’s talents and obvious intelligence could fail to see any kinship with EC’s stars is almost beyond belief but clearly he did not.

His ambivalence towards comics extended to his contacts with his fellow artists, which were almost nonexistent with the sole exception of a close friendship with Tony Weare, the artist of Matt Marriott (who, years later, would also draw an episode of “V for Vendetta”). However, while he rarely looked at other strips, he was

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

an avid reader of magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post, Life and Collier’s, and would clip and file vast numbers of photos for future reference and would admire the artwork from the likes of Rockwell, Briggs and Cornwell. So, with the exception of Alex Raymond and Al Williamson, both of whom he rated highly, Wright’s development as a comics artist was, so to speak, hermetically sealed in total isolation. With little outside influence, he developed an entirely personal way of drawing comic strips, particularly in his line work.

The isolation extended to his home life as well. Wright’s sole break from the endless stints at the drawing board was to observe moths in his sizeable garden which he would happily do for hours. In fact, such was his expertise that a new species of moth was named after him once and it is perhaps true to say that he felt more a part of zoological circles than artistic ones. One of the contemporary criticisms of Carol Day was that it appeared somewhat old fashioned which, bearing in mind Wright’s somewhat secluded existence is perhaps not entirely surprising. Wright was intensely aware of politics and world affairs but had little interest in current trends or fads, and indeed even the strip’s line work itself harkened back to an earlier age. Ironically though, it is these very same anachronistic qualities that give the feature such a timeless quality now. Carol Day inhabits a nebulous, post-War England that never was, filled with crumbling manses, flowing gowns and vintage cars (all exquisitely rendered, of course).

Another unusual aspect of the strip was the extraordinary amount of work that went into each story. The Daily Mail would

Unfortunately, under Innes, the strip lasted only a few months before it was replaced by Tiffany Jones, which had been recently made homeless after The Daily Sketch (The Mail’s sister paper) went under. Tiffany Jones, by Jenny Butterworth and Pat Tourret, was resolutely contemporary and reflected the frivolity and optimism of swinging London. It was everything Carol Day was not but ironically it has aged rather more badly than Wright’s “old fashioned” strip.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Carol Day is how, since its cancellation, it has almost disappeared completely, with no collections or serializations anywhere in the world or, at least, none that I’m aware of. Yet at its height, the strip was immensely popular as was made all too clear when Carol lost her much-valued virginity.

Though far from being a libertarian, Wright was something of a free thinker where sex was concerned and was frustrated by the conservative mores of The Daily Mail. So it was that Carol consummated her affair, with a married man no less, between panels, in the most discrete manner possible; in one shot they were embracing with the sun setting behind them, in the next they were reading the papers over breakfast. As the hundreds of letters of protest from a nation of maiden aunts, spinsters and octogenarians flooded in, Wright and the paper, possibly for the first time, grasped just how popular the strip was and quite how many people cared deeply about the character (and, more to the point, how highly they prized her chastity!).

A quarter of a century later, that readership has either forgotten or died out and, with the exception of an occasional mention from celebrity fans such as Brian Bolland and David Lloyd, it is as if the strip never happened. Patrick Wright for his part returned to comics

periodically hire models and shoot literally hundreds of photos of them in all sorts of poses which would then be sent down to Wright as reference. The artist would then use them as characters in the latest story although Carol and her uncle were always entirely the products of his imagination. He enjoyed using friends and celebrities as models as well; Tony Weave became a regular member of the cast and Burl Ives and the British heavyweight boxer Henry Cooper also appeared in the feature.

After Peter Meriton left the strip, Wright’s brother-in-law, Raymond Little took over the writing in what was to prove a rather tempestuous collaboration. Wright and Little would face each other across the room, Wright chain-smoking and listening to jazz, Little hammering away at the typewriter. By all accounts, Wright had strong views on how the strip should be written and did not always agree with where Little was taking it, so the opportunity for conflict was always present. After Little’s sudden death in the ’60s, Wright’s agent, Jack Wall, put in a (very) short tenure as his replacement before Wright decided he could do the job better on his own.

But bad health was to plague Wright and in 1967, another of his sons, Patrick, was drafted in on pencils (though, since Wright was so forceful in his inking, few noticed the difference). Tragically, Wright died in May of that year, leaving barely three weeks’ worth of strips left to run. He was only 53, a tragically young age and with surely many years of beautiful artistry ahead of him. Patrick had planned to continue the strip himself but at his father’s funeral the agency told him that Kenneth Innes, his father’s replacement on “Judy” some 10 years earlier, was to be the new artist.

in the mid-’70s, drawing for Commando and 2000 A.D. before becoming a successful cartoonist. His brother Nicky became a successful photographer, mixing with the music business glitterati of ’60s London like the Rolling Stones, before moving to the States. He never lost his love of the medium and a book of his writings on Golden Age comics was recently published (posthumously, sadly).

But there is an interesting coda to this story that might just mean that Carol Day—and David Wright—won’t be forgotten after all.

The artwork still exists. All of it. Sometime after Wright’s death, the entire run of Carol Day was lent out to the University of Kent at Canterbury. But now the family intends to take it back. That is over 3,000 originals of some of the most gorgeous comic strip artwork ever drawn. Over the years, sadly, some pages have been sold, primarily in two lots it is believed; one box of about 100 strips surfaced in a London comic shop in the early ’80s where they were mostly bought by other artists, and more recently at an auction house where a number of originals were sold but the current whereabouts are unknown. However, the vast majority of the strip is still intact and it is hoped that somehow a publisher can be found so that the feature finally gets the recognition it deserves. Noted collector Terry Parker is in the process of putting together a book of Wright’s wartime pin-ups so perhaps now, some three decades after his death, David Wright’s talents can finally be recognized.

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

Above: Carol Day by David Wright. Courtesy of David A. Roach. ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

[With thanks to Patrick Wright and Terry Parker for their help with biographical details.—D.A.R.] 11

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

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

13

©2002 Fred Hembeck. Captain Marvel ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Be sure to see Fred’s weekly strip in The Comic Buyers’ Guide.

CBA Roundtable

The Cosmic Code Talking with Jim Starlin, Alan Weiss and Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson The following roundtable discussion took place after an exceptional Italian dinner at Casa di Meglio on West 48th Street in New York City on Dec. 6, 2001. Many thanks to the artists who attended the feast, and to Alan’s effervescent wife, the ever-helpful Pauline (who assisted by facilitating the meal and copyediting the transcript) and kudos to this editor’s brother, Andrew D. Cooke, who took photos. While Alan remains silent for a portion of the interview, rest assured the renowned conversationalist does come into the discussion. We join our group of cosmic sojourners as coffee is just being served…

Comic Book Artist: [to Allen Milgrom and Jim Starlin] You’re both from the Detroit area. Did you two know each other in high school?

Jim Starlin: We met in junior high.

We were probably 13 or 14.

CBA: Did you grow up in the city of Detroit?

Jim & Allen Milgrom: [simultaneously] Suburbs.

Jim: He was in Huntington Woods, and I was in a place called Berkeley. We went to Berkeley High School together.

CBA: Were you guys close at all?

Allen: Yeah, as long as I didn’t approach him in public! [laughter] Jim: I used to hang with a different crowd than Allen.

Allen: We’d get together and talk about stuff. And I’d run up to him at school and say [excitedly], “Jim, have you seen the latest Fantastic Four?” and he’d go…

Jim: “Not now, not now!” [laughs] Allen: I used to creep Jim out. But he’d follow me home. All my friends knew I was into comics, and they didn’t care, but his friends would’ve been… I don’t know… mortified. Jim was ashamed to admit to others that he liked, read, and drew comics.

CBA: He hung out with a rough crowd?

Allen: They were like the greasers, and I was more like a frat boy, as they called them in those days. Jim used to do drawings of naked chicks and stuff, obscene drawings, and all his friends would go, “Oh, that’s good, Jim! Draw me one of those!” But at the same time, he 14

used to do 20-page Hulk stories, just for practice. I’ve got some of those pages somewhere around, too. If the price is right, Jim, I won’t show them. [laughter] CBA: People use the phrase “The Detroit Mafia” to describe the unusually high number of comics people who came from Michigan in the early 1970s. Was that an accurate description?

Jim: Anybody who came to New York from that general vicinity, they just assumed we had been all living in the same house in Detroit.

Allen: Jim and I were from that area. We met Rich Buckler and Mike Vosburg. Somehow, we did meet Terry Austin, just before we moved East. He was actually from the city, somewhere around Five Mile.

Jim: There were a couple of other guys. Greg Theakston. And that other guy, a friend of Greg’s, who was a painter? Carl Lundgren. He was from that vicinity, too.

Alan Weiss: Mike Nasser was also from there.

Jim: Weren’t Arvell Jones and Keith Pollard from Detroit?

Allen: That’s right.

Jim: Well, the truth of the matter is, Detroit is such a cultural wasteland that the only art anyone got there was from the comic book spinner rack at the drug store. [laughter] Everybody ran off! Well, there was the Detroit Art Museum, the Institute of Arts.

Allen: That’s not true!

Jim: Which you can’t draw in. I remember going in there with some charcoals, and they thought I was a terrorist! They wouldn’t let me draw anything in there! They were afraid I was going to deface the art! [laughter]. We weren’t terrorists. We didn’t have any colors or anything like that.

CBA: Was it mostly Marvels you guys read?

Allen: Marvels, DCs. When I started reading them, there was nothing but DCs. Jim: That’s right.

Allen: There was just Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and later on The Fly from Archie Comics, and then they came along. The [Adventures of the] Fly #1 was one of the single greatest comics I’ve ever read. Man, I liked that book! There wasn’t much in the early days.

CBA: What year did you guys graduate?

Jim: 1968, I think it was, because I was in the service in ’69.

Allen: But we were in the same grade. I graduated in ’67, though Jim may have graduated in 1968.

Jim: I’ll take Allen’s word for it as he took a lot less drugs. [laughter] Allen: It’d be hard to take more! But no, we graduated in ’67. Jim went into the service, I went to the University of Michigan.

CBA: [to Jim] When did you start contributing to fanzines?

Jim: Well, Allen turned me on to fanzines.

Allen: Really? I don’t remember that.

Jim: Otherwise I would not have had any outlets whatsoever.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Authority Speaks!

Al Milgrom on those trippy ’70s Marvel Comics Allen did his first fanzine work somewhere during high school, then I did a series of contributions to them when I was in the service. Didn’t we do one for Star-Studded Comics back when I was in high school?

CBA: Was that for Buddy Saunders?

Allen: Yeah, the Texas Trio.

Jim: We did “The Defender” and “Doctor Weird,” and then when I got into the service, I did a few more “Doctor Weirds,” and two issues of this thing called The Eagle. The third issue got blown up.

CBA: “Got blown up”?

Jim: I was drawing it in Camaron Bay, when I was in Vietnam…

CBA: Oh, it wasn’t enlarged; it was literally blown up!

Jim: It was blown up. I used to ink my work inside the beer locker, because when you laid the brush down in that humid weather, the ink would go pssssshhhh. One day I went off on a flight, and when I got back, all the Marines were going crazy because somebody snuck on the base and blew up the beer locker. They’re all running around going, “Beer! Beer!” and I’m going, “Drawings! Drawings!” [laughter]

CBA: You had your priorities.

Jim: Yeah, it was all gone. I found little bits and pieces of it here and there.

CBA: Did you get drafted?

Jim: No, no, I joined.

Allen: Well, there’s a story behind that, too, as I recall.

Jim: Yeah, well, I had a little run-in with the law.

Allen: You were given options. They said, “You could either join the service, or we may have to put you in…”

Jim: “The hoosegow.”

CBA: You Motown juvenile delinquent, you! Which branch?

Jim: The Navy.

CBA: How long was your hitch?

Jim: I was in for a little over three years. I got out early.

CBA: Were you in Southeast Asia for the entire time?

Jim: For the last part of it. I was stationed in Sicily for the

This spread: Melange of cosmic heroes (and villain) taken from various Jim Starlin Marvel comics. Clockwise from bottom left: Pip, Captain Marvel, Warlock, and Thanos. Above: CBA hosted a dinner of “cosmic proportions” for Marvel stalwarts (from left) Alan Weiss, Jim Starlin, and Allen Milgrom (Alan is much nicer than he appears here!).

Photo by Andrew D. Cooke. Characters ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

15

Below: Doctor Weird #1, Fall 1970, featured crude but promising work by fledgling artist Jim Starlin. Courtesy of Mike Pascale.

Doctor Weird ©2002 Gary Carlson & Edward DeGeorge.

Below: While Jim insists the character has no cosmic dimension, Doctor Weird sure looks like a precursor for Starlin’s hero, Drax the Destroyer. The good doctor appeared in a series of ’60s amateur fanzine comics in the published by The Texas Trio, including two issues of his own title, drawn

by Jim Starlin. Art ©2002 Jim Starlin. Doctor Weird ©2002 Gary Carlson & Edward DeGeorge.

16

first 18 months, which was really kind of nice. I lived off-base, and we flew around and took pictures from the air. They made maps from our pictures… Sicily hadn’t had any new maps since the 1940s. So I thought, “Gee, this Navy thing’s kind of cool!” Then they shipped me to Southeast Asia and that changed my mind.

Allen: It was in Sicily that you had that little helicopter crash, right?

Jim: Yeah, the chopper just fell. It wasn’t like anybody was shooting at us.

CBA: Was it lousy maintenance or age?

Jim: No, it was because of a lieutenant j.g. [junior grade] There was this thing called an auto-rotation.

If your engine goes bad, you’d disconnect the prop from the engine, and the prop’s supposed to slow you down, to take you down gradually.

Allen: So you don’t crash.

Jim: Right. We had to practice disengaging.

You were supposed to re-engage before you hit the ground, but this guy didn’t do it, so we hit the ground and blew out all our hydraulics, and just spun around until we turned everything off.

CBA: Did you think you’d bought it?

Jim: The other guy in the cab filled a bag while we were in the midst of this, and he gave it to the lieutenant j.g. as a chili dinner afterwards. [laughter] Then he walked off!

CBA: Just desserts! How would you characterize your experience in Vietnam? Were you in the thick of it?

Jim: No, no, I just took pictures. Aerial photography, stuff like that.

CBA: When were you discharged?

Jim: 1971, I think. I came to New York in ’72.

CBA: Were you looking into cosmic concepts when you did “Doctor Weird”?

Jim: Doctor Weird was not very cosmic. He was just a rip-off of Doctor Strange with a little more of a super-hero element to him. But Doctor Weird was just the only thing going at the time. Very stupid name.

Alan: Like Mr. Justice from the old Archie Comics, MLJ. CBA: So you guys didn’t see any depth within that character worth exploiting.

Jim: No. Alan: I drew a couple of “Doctor Weird” stories myself.

Jim: That was the most interesting project I worked on in my fan days. It was exciting to be able to hook into these fanzines that would publish your stuff. But we weren’t ready for professional work yet.

Allen: I remember sending away for an issue of Alter-Ego, but I don’t remember how I knew about it.

Alan: It was Roy [Thomas]’s letter in the Justice League [of America].

Allen: That’s probably where I found out about fanzines. I sent them 75¢ and when it arrived it had been ripped up in the mail, so all I got was the cover, the wraparound inside and outside of the cover, which had Ronn Foss’ drawing of The Eclipse, this blind guy who could see in the dark, and it looked pretty cool. I said, “I’ve got to see more of these,” so I started seeking them out.

CBA: A lot of them came out of Detroit, if I recall.

Allen: Mike Vosburg did “Masquerader.”

CBA: There was Jerry Bails, who was before Roy. And All In Color for a Dime was one of the very first, but Roy’s Alter-Ego was the first one I saw.

Allen: Same here. Then I might’ve gotten a subscription to the Rocket’s Blast/ComiCollector, which Biljo White used to do. In those days, they used to have mimeographed fanzines.

Alan: Oh, I did ’em myself! I did a character called The Crusader, and some others… covers and spot illustrations. We used templates to get a texture or a tone by rubbing on them. I’d do the drawing and the lettering same size on a stencil. It was insane! [laughter] For nothing!

Jim: I remember going off and buying all these little pieces of textured glass so I could rub it on them.

Allen: Yeah, to get Zip-A-Tone type effects.

Jim: I just used whatever they had at the hardware store.

Alan: Oh, I went to the art store and got the actual plastic sheets.

It was nuts! You’d press real hard and you’d end up with a big callus.

CBA: Was working on fanzine strips while serving overseas one way to keep in touch with the people back home?

Jim: Yes. While I was in the service I started doing my own Hulk strips and sent them in to Marvel.

Allen: Who were you dealing with?

Jim: I was just sending them “in care of Marvel.” There was nobody designated to handle submissions at that point.

CBA: Did Linda Fite or someone write a letter back to you?

Jim: I think it probably was Linda who was writing me back.

Allen: They didn’t have an art director at that point. Marie Severin sort of doubled as the art director as much as anybody, didn’t she?

Jim: I just remember one of the high points of that time was somebody said they showed my samples to Herb Trimpe and he liked them. I thought that was really cool.

Allen: Didn’t you come to New York one time and look up Steve Ditko?

Jim: This was early on, when he was still drawing Spider-Man. I was in New York visiting the World’s Fair in 1964. I just opened the New York City phone book and looked people up. I was trying to contact Carmine, Kirby, Ditko, maybe Kubert, and couldn’t get any of them… except I did get a hold of Carmine, who lied and told me that he wasn’t him. Years later, when I met Carmine, I realized that this was the same guy I remember talking to back in ’64! [laughter] And I visited Ditko in his studio. I guess I hit him at the right moment. He was a little annoyed the first couple times I called, but finally I said, “I’m down at the end of the street,” and he said, “Okay, come on up.” And it was really informative. I think he was working on “When Falls the Meteor” [Amazing Spider-Man #36].

Allen: Didn’t he take some tracing paper and show you how he copied drapery out of photos and stuff like that?

Jim: He had an entire sketchbook of just drapery, and notebooks full of nothing but arms, every different kind. I was fascinated by this.

Allen: I remember you came back and said he had a little diagram of where the plot line was going for that whole Doctor Octopus story.

Remember he was using an alias, the “Master Planner”? Y’know, I actually paid a visit to the Marvel offices when I was still in college because Martin Goodman is a relative of mine. Yes, it’s a little known fact. My grandparents were also named Goodman, and when I was a kid, they used to say, “You know, you have a cousin who owns a comic book company and works in the Empire State Building.” I later learned Marvel’s offices used to be there.

CBA: [to Jim] Ditko was a big influence on you, right?

Jim: Yeah, he and Kirby were the biggest, I think. Gil Kane, Carmine, and Kubert were also influences.

CBA: Were you guys impressed with Stan and Jack’s Galactus trilogy [Fantastic Four #48-50]?

Allen: Oh, yeah, we ate that stuff up!

Jim: We loved Kirby before we knew it was Kirby, before he was getting credit. Challengers of the Unknown! I remember being very impressed with that book.

CBA: Did you recognize that Kirby and Lee were reaching out to higher concepts? Galactus was virtually God, the Silver Surfer could be either defined as the Wandering Jew or Lucifer, the fallen angel.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Did you recognize it at the time, that this was different stuff, reaching for a deeper meaning?

Allen: Well, it was good stuff. I was reading DC comics up to the time I was 12 or 13, when I was starting to outgrow them. A lot of them became an effort to read, they weren’t that exciting. A friend gave me the first issue of Fantastic Four, and he said, “Here, this is the worst comic I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Alan: But it said it was “The World’s Greatest Comic” on it!

Allen: I read it and I hated it! They weren’t wearing costumes; they were breaking a lot of public property, which really upset me…

Jim: They yelled at each other!

Allen: Yeah, they were mean-tempered and ugly. By the third issue, they got costumes, which made it a little more interesting, but it still looked like a monster magazine. But by #6, my brain just exploded out of my skull! That issue just had so many dynamics! The power of the storytelling was great, and it just kept getting better and better from there! So by the time they got to the Galactus stuff, I was already a raving fanatic for it.

Jim: I think the stage was set with Thor, when they started getting into these long eons of time, the Tree of Life, all the real mythological elements. Stan and Jack were climbing the tree themselves, in a way, looking for bigger and bigger concepts. By the time they brought in Wyatt Wingfoot and started doing these long, attenuated and multilayered storylines in the Fantastic Four, they had to keep topping themselves. In some respects, it was the tail wagging the dog, but in the best of possible ways, because they were constantly saying, “We’ve got to go one better.”

Allen: What you say is true, but one of the things that Lee and Kirby did that I thought was so great was, once they got done with one of these cosmic efforts, they’d throw in some little human drama to alter the tone. You know, “This Man, This Monster,” [FF #51], or they’d fight Paste-Pot Pete or something, lowering the bar so they didn’t have to constantly top themselves every month, and they would start a new story cycle. I think a lot of the guys who followed them made their mistake there. They kept trying to go higher and higher, and it reaches a point where you can’t go any higher.

Jim: Stan had the sense to make it so that every once in a while the FF would just… have a softball game. I loved that so much!

Alan: Right in the middle of all those cosmic sagas!

Allen: [to Alan] There was nothing like having Vinnie Colletta run over your face on second base! [laughter] Oh, he was a pip.

Alan: It was third base, and he broke my glasses! And I still pitched the rest of the game. [to Jon] Jim’s saying that it mirrored the way the Marvel staff and freelancers played softball and volleyball games in Central Park. It was so smart. Where someone else might’ve had quick comedy relief, Stan gave you human relief. He’d bring it back down to ground level and give you a chance to catch your breath. So it wasn’t just all-cosmic or all-angst all the time. If you don’t have a break, you can’t appreciate it. When they get into the business, everyone wants to try and top what it was that influenced them when they were coming up. Unfortunately, in many respects, that turns into a negative. “Well, I’ll have my guy be worse! He’ll be nastier! He’ll be more violent!” Unless there’s the humanistic build-up to it, it won’t have meaning. It becomes gratuitous.

CBA: It reached a crescendo with Galactus and the Silver Surfer, and then all of a sudden, in some ways, the comics got introspective.

You had this Silver Surfer going around, having these angst-filled monologues… Warlock was questioning his own sanity, and it got so deep he was fighting Magus, who ultimately was himself. During the Fantastic Four heyday, the American counter-culture was burgeoning, March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

and the youth started questioning the basic values America had always believed in.

Allen: Marvel was trying to expand in the early ’70s, when all the new guys started getting into the business. Warlock was essentially a new character, and they didn’t know what to do with Captain Marvel… first he was a Kree soldier in that ugly green-&-white costume.

We had different points of view, different attitudes, and different things we wanted to convey, and it was a time of turmoil in the world. So when we were given these characters, we went off on some tangents. Plus, we were probably the first generation that got into comics because we wanted to do comic books. It wasn’t, “I can’t make it in illustration, I can’t get a newspaper strip, this is a stepping stone.” We were really aiming to have a career in comics, period. For us, that was the pinnacle! What do you want to do a newspaper strip for?

Jim: We were also some of the first new professionals to come into the business in 30 years, with the exception of Neal [Adams],

Above: Though Jim told Ye Ed a few years ago that he thought Bill DuBay drew the above Hulkified cover (repro’d small in CBA #2), the artwork (courtesy of John Yon) clearly is signed by Jim. So there. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Inset left: Allen Milgrom was not only a friend of Jim Starlin during their youth in the Detroit area, but was probably Jim’s first fan as well! As proof, the artist/editor shared Jim’s amateur work with CBA, including these cover pencils for a Hulk tale submitted to Marvel in the early 1970s. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

APOLOGIA While three accomplished comic book artists participated in this discussion, we are predominately featuring the art of Jim Starlin. We offer our apologies to Alan & Allen for the unfair emphasis and hope they understand our motive.

17

Above: Jim Starlin contributed the art for the cover of FOOM #9, an issue devoted to Marvel’s cosmic heroes. ©2002 Marvel Characters.

Inset left: The initial appearance of seminal Marvel villain Thanos took place in Iron Man #55, drawn

by Jim Starlin and Mike Esposito. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Created only to obliterate Thanos, Drax the Destroyer continues to traverse the Marvel Universe. Panel detail from Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

18

Steranko, Roy, and Denny [O’Neil]. Before that, it was a closed shop. But in terms of that time period, just like everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, I was just as crazy as the rest of them. Each one of those stories was me taking that stuff that had gone before and trying to put my own personal slant on it. Mar-Vell was a warrior who decided he was going to become a god, and that’s where his trip was. But Warlock was already a god from the Gil Kane run, so I had to take the god and make him back into the man.

And a suicidal paranoid-schizophrenic man seemed to be the most interesting one to write about at that point. [laughter] CBA: How cheerful!

Jim: Everybody’s out to get him, including himself, and he kills himself at the end. Twice! [laughter] Alan: I always loved your happy endings!

Allen: Jim definitely had a grimmer outlook on most of the mainstream Marvel characters in his stuff.

Jim: Well, what’s kind of interesting, bringing these characters back now for the Infinity Abyss, is working with all this really strange history gone before. At one point, the new Captain Marvel sees Warlock and goes, “Ah, I thought he was dead!” and Moondragon says, “Yeah, he can’t seem to get it right.” [laughter] It’s a lot of fun to pull off these things. At another point, his soulgem steals the soul of one of the Thanos dopplegangers, and he’s really upset, because he’s got Thanos inside of him now, but then he says, “No, I’ll be okay… Thanos’ nihilistic tendencies are beginning to commingle and assimilate with my own suicidal tendencies.” If I can get that one through, I can get anything through. [laughter] CBA: In 1964 or ’65, Ditko’s abilities were at their zenith with “Doctor Strange” and Kirby was coming into his own with the cosmic concepts of Galactus and the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four with Stan Lee. That started an almost non-stop deluge of truly fun and often substantive comics, reaching out sometimes to explore the metaphysical. These comics were dealing with real concepts, at times, taking the readership along for the ride. This continued up until the demise of Jim’s Warlock. Afterwards, the books became boring and more corporate, very calculated, and the fun seemed to be gone from the books. In a lot of ways, Marvel’s cosmic titles really reached a pinnacle for mainstream comics.

Jim: There were various reasons why all of them went, most of them pretty mundane. Warlock was going to continue after I left, but the paper shortage at that point killed it. Warlock, “Killraven,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and a number of other books, including “The Black Panther,” were cancelled just because they couldn’t get the paper for them.

CBA: Those were also the weakest sellers, I assume.

Allen: Yeah. There were paper shortages every couple of years. I think it was a reason for the paper mills to jack up the price. Who knows? Maybe they were just publishing a lot of stuff in those days. At one point we were doing all the stuff that was getting a lot of fan attention, but they were really not necessarily the best-selling books.

CBA: [to Allen] How did you get into Marvel?

Allen: After I graduated from college with an art degree, Starlin was already doing a little bit of work, and living in a place on Staten Island. [to Jim] I don’t remember what you did initially, some layouts for John Romita, as I recall?

Jim: Well, basically I was doing all the cover layouts for other artists to finish. Frank Giacoia was the actual art director, but for some reason he didn’t do layouts. So they hired me, and I did cover sketches for John Buscema and everybody else. I remember laying out the first Defenders cover that Valkyrie appeared on [#4], and having a helluva time with that horse! [laughter] Sal Buscema did a real nice job finishing that.

Allen: Anyway, I wanted to get into comics after I graduated, and Jim had already made some headway. Jim said to me, “Hey, things

are really hopping here, and lots of new guys are getting work. Mike Friedrich is moving out to California, so there’s room.” So, I put together a portfolio and drove East with Mike Vosburg. I got to Jim’s place and said, “Hi guys, I’m the new roommate!” and Jim said, “Shhh! I haven’t told them yet! Act like you don’t know me!” [laughter] Peggy Buckler, Bill DuBay, Starlin, and Steve Skeates were living there, and I moved in.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Jim: It worked out.

CBA: [to Jim] Marvel was obviously so impressed with your work when you first showed up, that they made you a de facto art director?

Jim: Yeah. After I quit, they hired John Romita. [laughs] CBA: Why did you quit?

Jim: Well, I wanted to draw my own comics. Up until that point, I’d been doing some fill-ins. I remember a love story with Tom the Truck Driver, Dick the Dude, and Wendy the Waitress, which was inked by Jack Abel.

Alan: [laughs] “Dick the Dude!”

Jim: Then there was a horror thing, and then I got some fill-in stuff on “The Beast” [in Amazing Adventures]. I finally quit the staff position when I got some Iron Man fill-ins [#55, 56].

CBA: Were you looking at Iron Man as a regular gig, or did you know it was just going to be a temporary thing?

Jim: Well, I thought it was going to be a regular assignment. I did the first one, which introduced Thanos [Iron Man #55], with Mike Friedrich, and then I did the next issue with Steve Gerber. We wrote this really silly Iron Man story, and Stan said, “This is terrible,” and he fired us both, right off the book! [laughter] But Roy immediately gave us something else to do.

CBA: You were immediately hired back.

Jim: Yes. Roy suggested, “Why don’t you do Captain Marvel?”

CBA: You didn’t lobby for Captain Marvel?

Jim: Wayne Boring was drawing the book, Marv Wolfman was writing it, and they were going to cancel it. So Roy just said, “See what you can do with it,” and it worked out. Then Mike and I had a falling out on this one [holding issue #28], because I wanted to write it.

CBA: The issue you scripted a chapter in?

Jim: Yes. Roy said, “Well, tell you what: Why don’t you write one of these chapters, and if I like it, we’ll give Mike another book.” Poor Mike!

He had five books at that point, so I didn’t think anything much about it. Roy liked the chapter, so they gave the title to me to write, and the next month, all of Mike’s books got cancelled. Every single one! He had “Ka-Zar” at the time. They all immediately went down the tube, and he was out of business at Marvel.

Alan: “Ka-Zar,” I remember that. Peak philosophy.

Allen: Pink philosophy?

Alan: Around that time, Jim told me about this sequence Mike had written for “Ka-Zar.” Now, here’s Starlin, he’s a military guy, he knows something about aircraft… and he talks really fast when he’s excited. [starts gesticulating wildly and talking fast] “He’s got Ka-Zar grabbing the landing gear of this jet while it’s taking off and he hangs on to it for the whole trip and the landing gear never retracts and the plane’s traveling at peak philosophy and then Ka-Zar jumps off and rolls as the plane’s landing and Ka-Zar, you know, he’s not super or anything, he’s just a regular guy and he’s half naked but he hits the ground and there’s not a scratch on him…” I started laughing and said, “Jim! ‘Peak philosophy’! What’s that?

Faster than the speed of God?” [laughter] One of my very favorite Starlin malaprops.

CBA: Did you guys recognize what Roy Thomas and Gil Kane were doing to revamp Captain Marvel was pretty hip?

Jim: It seemed like I kept following those two! [laughter] I would’ve had a hard time if I didn’t have that opportunity, if I didn’t have their March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

back issues to look at.

CBA: Were you inspired by Gil Kane?

Jim: Oh, tremendously. In fact, if you go through my first issue of “Warlock” [Strange Tales #178], there are some very direct Gil Kane riffs and swipes just so I could get a feel for the character.

CBA: Were you comfortable writing?

Jim: Yeah.

CBA: Even dialoguing? On occasion, you would have Steve Englehart come in to assist on Captain Marvel.

Jim: In the beginning, I was a little hesitant about it. That’s why I had him finish off Captain Marvel. After that, it was a piece of cake.

CBA: Very quickly after coming to Marvel, you became an auteur,

Above: Ye Ed felt Kirby’s Fourth World was reborn—sorta—when Jim Starlin hit his stride in Captain Marvel. Cover art for #27 by Jim and Pablo Marcos.

Courtesy of Jim Woodall. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 19

Above: From warmonger to peacenik, the good captain goes through his “metamorphosis” in #29, drawn by Jim Starlin and Allen Milgrom. Courtesy of A.M. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

20

a writer-artist, which was pretty unusual at both companies, except for…

Alan: Steranko.

CBA: …and, at DC, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert and a few others. You were really in a rare position, especially being so new to comics.

Jim: But there was none of that auteur stuff, it was just a bunch of kids living together on Staten Island, having fun.

Allen: It was living out a childhood fantasy. [to Jim] Should I tell them about the dirty sock technique?

Jim: Yeah, sure.

Allen: Aside from being a little less than confident about his early dialogue, Jim does real tight pencils, always has done real tight pencils. Any competent inker could take them and make a finished thing out of them easily. Even when he was 18, 19 years old, it was very solid-looking stuff.

Alan: But if something wouldn’t quite work out on the drawing…

Allen: …he’d take a sock and smear it over the page. [laughter] Alan: The reason he gave me for doing that was so they wouldn’t think he bashed them out so fast. He wanted it to look like there was a lot of work on it, so he’s smear it a little bit, so it’d look like he smudged it.

Allen: That wasn’t the excuse I heard.

Alan: What was the truth?

Jim: If something wasn’t quite right, it would get smeared, so…

Allen: “The inker will fix it!” That’s what I remember! [laughter] “I can’t get this to turn out right, I’ll make it vaguer so the inker can fix it!”

Alan: Pass the buck!

Allen: Years later, John Buscema told us that was the way to go! [laughter] “Don’t worry about every little detail; the inker will fix it!”

Allen: He was a real pro, he had a whole towel! [laughter] CBA: [to Allen] After you got to Staten Island, how long was it before you started getting work?

Allen: When I first got to town, I took samples around. When I went up to Marvel, and they said, “Oh, yeah, you’ve got some good stuff going on there, but you’re not ready yet.”

So I went up to DC and showed the samples to Joe Orlando, and he was pretty impressed by them, and he brought me in to show Carmine.

Many of them were me inking Jim from our earlier days back in high school. [to Jim] You did some Defenders samples that I inked, you remember those? A giant brick hand coming out of a floor, grabbing Sub-Mariner? Carmine said, “This stuff is great! You guys make a great team, can we get both of you over here together?” I said, “Well, Jim’s doing Iron Man. I think he’s pretty happy doing that.” The next thing out of Carmine’s mouth was, “It’s okay, he’s going to burn out over there, they’re giving him too much work too fast.” One minute he wants us working at DC, the next minute, “He’s a burn-out!” [laughter] Jim: Carmine was kind of erratic that way.

Allen: Then Carmine called in Murphy Anderson. Though he was a freelancer, Murphy used to work at the office, not at home. He used to share an office with Gerda Gutell, the proofreader at DC. When he worked at home, his wife was always bugging him to go run errands for her, so he used to come in from New Jersey every day, in a suit and a tie. He’d open up his attaché case and it was full of Curt Swan Superman pages. He’d bring his own art supplies, an ink bottle and some brushes and pens.

Alan: And a lap board.

Allen: That’s when I started using a lap board. That saved my back, I think. He liked my samples, and he was looking for a background guy, after some hemming and hawing, and a temporary detour to Rich Buckler’s house, I went to work for Murphy for about a year, doing backgrounds. Buckler was doing “Ka-Zar” [in Astonishing Tales] and “Man-Thing” [in Fear]…

Jim: I would help Rich out at times.

Allen: You helped him out on a “Man-Thing.” I knew Rich from back in Detroit, so when we reconnected when I got to New York, he said, “Well, why don’t you come out to my place, I can use an assistant.” He’d do these breakdowns, I’d tighten them up, and he’d turn them in as his own work. I really wasn’t competent enough at that time to really make the leap, but Rich was always looking for a COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

way to increase his output. I basically moved into his house somewhere out on Long Island, and he said, “The great thing about being a freelancer is, you can work anywhere.” So one day he packed up his wife, me, and a nephew visiting from somewhere, and we went to the beach. We’re sitting there in the sand with lapboards, and then he realizes, “Oh, I left the lunch bag at the house,” and so he gets up and leaves, goes all the way back to the house. I was with him a week and we got maybe three pages done. [laughter] I couldn’t see how I was helping the output situation there. Around that time, Roy got in touch with me and said, “Buckler’s supposed to be doing an issue of ‘Man-Thing,’ but we can’t reach him, his phone has been disconnected.” His phone was always being disconnected. Somehow, according to Roy, Jim and I suddenly were Buckler’s best friends. Roy said, “You’re from Detroit, he’s from Detroit”… you know, Detroit Mafia… “you guys have to tell him if he doesn’t have this job in on Monday, he’s off the book.”

So we got on Jim’s motorcycle from Staten Island, and I don’t even know what bridges we took to get to that part of Long Island… I think we had a narrow miss on the road, too, when we hit backed-up traffic and we had to skid off to the side and up an embankment. I’d never ridden on a motorcycle before, so it was scaring the hell out of me!

Jim: It was probably just a regular exit, you know?

Allen: Nooo… exits don’t have grass on them, Jim! [laughter] You don’t remember that?

Jim: No. Allen: He’s lived through many scrapes, but I haven’t. I’m just Mr. Suburban-White-Bread Guy. Anyway, we get to Rich’s house and tell him what Roy said. Jim says, “I’ll do some layouts, and you do some layouts, and Milgrom will tighten up some stuff. We’ll get it done.” Jim’s very quick at layouts, and he bashed the story out really quick… I don’t even think it was a full issue. We got the thing done, and as we’re leaving, Rich said, “How can I repay you guys?” Jim said, “Eh, forget it. You’ll do me a favor sometime when I’m on a deadline.” Right. I said, “Just pay me my five bucks a page for finishing these up,” which was our arrangement at the time, and I added, “By the way, I’m going to go work as Murphy Anderson’s background guy.” Rich said, “But I could teach you so much more than he can!” [laughs] I said, “I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ve been here two weeks and we’ve done six pages. I don’t think I can live off that.” So I went to work for Murphy, and it was very nice. I used to work up at the office next to him, and he’d work on pages, hand them over, and I’d work on them. And there was a constant stream of artists dropping off stuff. That year that I worked for him, one of the big gathering spots was DC’s coffee room, remember?

Alan: Oh, absolutely. That’s where I met Walt Simonson.

Allen: I met Walt there, too. He came in when I was working up there, and he was showing “Star Slammers,” a project he’d done as his thesis at the Rhode Island School of Design, as his samples. I was just freaking out over it. I’d started working as a background guy, but Walt started getting work right off the bat. Archie Goodwin liked his stuff a lot, and so did Carmine, who said “Make sure he leaves with a couple of scripts.”

CBA: Did you work on the “Swanderson” Superman?

Allen: Yeah, Superman, Action Comics, then some inking on Detective Comics, too, over Bob Brown. Some Dick Dillin, and March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

sometimes back-up stories over Don Heck.

Alan: Murphy sometimes inked Gil Kane.

Allen: I never got near a Gil Kane page, which was probably a good thing, because I never would’ve been able to deal with his pencils at that time.

Murphy was very instructive and very patient, helpful, and a sweetheart of a guy. I used to sit next to him while we worked and listen to his awful puns. “Tarzan Stripes Forever,” do you remember that one?

CBA: [to Jim] Did you ever do any breakdown stuff for Murphy or Curt Swan?

Jim: No, just a few Romita Spider-Mans. He actually credited me on one of them.

Above: The original cover art for Captain Marvel #29 includes the face as originally drawn by Jim Starlin and inked by Allen Milgrom. The Bullpen saw fit to change the Kree Warrior’s face on the published version, as evidenced by the Romita version (inset). Courtesy of Jim Woodall. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 21

22

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

CBA: They were thumbnails, weren’t they? Did he follow them?

Jim: Occasionally. The one he gave me credit for was because he was so late. I actually did those layouts on the pages.

Allen: I laid out some of the dailies for John when he was doing the Spider-Man daily strip in the later ’70s. I’d do these fairly tight breakdowns, and later on, when I saw the finished strip, they never looked like what I gave him. I said, “John, I feel like I’m taking money under false pretenses!” He said, “Oh, no, because sometimes it just eliminates one possibility I might’ve tried.” So I just said, “Okay, whatever.” I did a few weeks for him.

CBA: [to Alan] When did you first meet these guys?

Alan: [to Jim] I remember we met each other at Marvel… it must have been one of the first times you came up to the office. But you and I first got together at one of the parties at your place on Staten Island.

You, Mary Skrenes, Steve Englehart and I found ourselves to be quite simpatico.

Jim: Wally Wood was passed out on my bed that whole night.

Alan: There was a lot of stuff going on that night.

CBA: [laughs] Wally Wood passed out on the bed!

Allen: [singing to the tune of “Hooray for Hollywood”] Hooray for Wally Wood, you’ll see him inking in your neighborhood! [laughter] Alan: Wally spent the night a few times at various parties. I remember one day early on, when I was living in Hell’s Kitchen, in the same building as Heather Devitt, who later became Jim’s girlfriend.

Englehart and I decided to see how long we could play chess psychedelic, and Starlin happened to drop by that day to get his motorcycle. We had this little chunk left, and we said, “Well, don’t know what we’re going to do, but you’re welcome to join us.”

What an incredible day that was! That was one of those marathons! Everybody used to say, “Don’t get psychedelic in the city! You’ve got to be out in nature!” But Englehart’s theory was in the right state of mind, the city will perform for you. Which it did!

We never had the first problem.

Jim: That was a special weekend because it was the first time that they showed Monty Python in this country.

Alan: And Now For Something Completely Different.

Jim: It was a compilation of the TV shows, which they showed at this little art theater downtown.

Alan: And there was that party that night, I think it was at Kupperberg’s place. We had to try to find our way down to Brooklyn. Do you remember going to that mom-and-pop drugstore fountain and having them line up nine egg creams for the three of us? I think this was the same night we were talking about old movies, and we thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if Lauren Bacall showed up?” and we somehow convinced Heather to meet up with us at South Ferry, wearing a big hat.

Allen: I remember the name, but I don’t remember her at all.

Alan: Oh, she’s a beautiful, dark-haired gal.

Jim named “Heather Delight” in Warlock after her.

Jim: Heather and I ran around that party in Brooklyn with a pumpkin, claiming it was our child. [laughter] We tried to describe the Monty Python movie to Neal Adams. It must have sounded like we were describing nine different movies. “There are these singing mounties, and then 16 tons drop on them, then there’s this cartoon kind of thing, and there were Hell’s Grannies, then they blow this guy up, then there’s this whole nudgenudge, wink-wink argument, this whole thing with a dead parrot, and then these guys are beating on mice to get them to make musical notes.” [sings] Three blind mice! Three blind mice! Nobody had ever seen this stuff before, and the movie poster wasn’t photographic, it March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

was just those line drawings. Neal thought we were making it all up.

Alan: Seeing the first Monty Python movie at that point was a true religio-comedic experience. [laughter] Jim: I remember I was laughing so hard at one point I pulled the entire armrest off. It just broke, it came off in the middle of the movie.

CBA: You guys became simpatico?

Alan: Yeah, there was something about our friendship. I could explain it in ways I wouldn’t want you to print… [laughter] When I

Opposite page: The original cover art for Captain Marvel #34 (slightly altered upon final publication), Starlin’s last, depicts the event which would eventually lead to the title character’s demise seven years later in The Death of Captain Marvel. Courtesy of Jim Woodall. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

first got to town, there were a bunch of guys who were getting into comics at the same time, but socially they weren’t the sort of people I would naturally run around with, like I did in college. Starlin, Englehart, Frank Brunner… they were more like it. There was more of a social awareness about these guys. Howard Chaykin, too—he was a guerrilla theatre-type contemporary dead end kid. We were all certainly aware of the politics, in touch with the social movements of the time, and how consciousness played into them. Ultimately, these

Above: After Jim Starlin quit the series, cohorts Steve Englehart (writer) and Allen Milgrom (artist) picked up the creative chores for Captain Marvel. Here, courtesy of penciler Milgrom, is the cover art for #43, spectacularly inked by none other than Bernie Wrightson! ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 23

Above: For the character’s resurrection in Strange Tales #178, an unnamed alien narrator explains just who Adam Warlock is in an irreverent four-page prologue.

Courtesy of Jim Woodall. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Center inset: Starlin’s concept drawing for Warlock nemesis Magus. Courtesy of Al Milgrom.

Art ©2002 Jim Starlin. Magus ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Opposite: Detail of Strange Tales #179 splash page by Jim Starlin. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 24

relationships laid the groundwork for what became cosmic comics.

Part of it was trying to re-create what it was that got you so excited about the comic books in the first place—what, for us, were peak experiences. The other was bringing in personal experience, and trying to put these together in a synthesis, something new, rather than retread. So, it seemed to be the best thing to do—take the stuff that we loved, the super-heroes, and integrate these other concepts, and come up with an adventure story, still taking the reader for a ride.

But there was always a little more element of surprise than just the standard happy ending. It all had to do with the opening up of possibilities, and applying those possibilities to yourself. Because after all, at some level it was kind super-heroic to even have gotten into comics professionally! Did you ever dream you’d be able to actually go and do it?

Jim: No. Allen: They used to tell me, “What, you’re going to go to New York where all the competition is?” Of course, you’d tell your parents you wanted to be a cartoonist, and they’d say, “Please, just shoot me right here,” because they had no frame of reference for it, they didn’t know anybody who was a cartoonist, they didn’t know if you could make a living at it, none of that stuff. And besides, living where we all lived—which is to say, New York—all the cartoonists we knew of lived in New York! Coming to New York City was a great thing, meeting all

these kindred spirits from all over the country.

Jim: You had to be here.

Allen: And we all grew up reading and loving the same stuff.

You’re living the dream! You get here and get to do it, and it’s great, and you’re hanging around with all these guys who love doing it, and there was a huge influx of imagination.

CBA: [to Alan] CBA interviewed you for the first CBA Collection…

Alan: Is that the one nobody saw?

CBA: Well, it’s still available! One of a number of wonderful stories you told was about you, Englehart, Starlin and Brunner roaming the streets of New York in the wee hours of the morning, coming up with story ideas that would end up in Master of Kung Fu, for instance. You guys actually worked and played together, so to speak.

Alan: And everything was inspiration. Sure, we always talked about concepts roaming around the city. Remember the time Englehart was looking at the four statues down at South Ferry?

Jim: Those Daniel Chester French statues, right? In front of the Customs House.

Alan: Representing the continents. We were talking about doing this Defenders issue, and he’s getting more and more grandiose by the moment, and he’s saying, “We’ll have the hordes of Asia, we’ll have the slaves from Africa, we’ll have the wheel of progress, and then Sub-Mariner’s guys start marching up out of the water…” I’m looking at him quietly, and finally, he stops, and says, “What? What?

What is it?” I said, “Easy for you to say!” [laughter] Steve’s since told me every time he works with a new artist, he tells that story as a way of acknowledging that he understands that saying it is easier than drawing it. Steve started as an artist, so he knows what it is to stare at a blank page and to make the stuff show up some way or the other.

CBA: Did you guys hit it off particularly with Steve because he also had that artistic sensibility?

Jim: Yeah. Steve wanted to be an artist. He started out at Continuity assisting Neal Adams.

Alan: That’s right. He did a job or two for Warren, I recall. I think he did some stuff for Marvel. Didn’t he do a romance?

Jim: He might’ve. I remember he did a job for Warren that Neal inked.

Alan: But it was by being a proofreader that he got the writing gig. We were all definitely on the same page, and it worked very, very well.

We experienced some hilarious stuff together, and there were really some fun times.

CBA: Was Steve Gerber a kindred spirit?

Alan: Well, we didn’t see him as much, but I’d certainly say he was a kindred spirit. I mean, he had a very wry sense of humor, but I don’t know if he was as social. Was he as rowdy? [laughs] Jim: Well, Steve was suffering from narcolepsy then.

Alan: Narcolepsy? I never knew that.

Jim: Yeah, he was sitting in the cubicle next to me, and you’d hear him hit the floor.

Allen: Wow, here I thought he was just quiet! [laughter] Alan: Or just shy!

Jim: I remember we all had a conversation about God during one of these wanderings around the city, and out of that came the Sise-neg story in “Doctor Strange,” and the Captain Marvel with Thanos turning into a god. They were both out of that same evening.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Allen: I’ve got to re-read these things, I don’t remember this! I remember one time Steve Gerber and I were sitting in someone’s apartment, [to Alan] and you, me, Alan Kupperberg, and Englehart were there.

Somebody said, “Steve! Al!” and the whole room turned! [laughter] Jim: The Steves and the Als! Alan: We were the All-Alan Squad.

Allen: Steve Gerber and I were doing “Guardians of the Galaxy” [in Marvel Presents], and at one point, I was drawing something, and I said, “Steve, where is this going? How does this story end?” He goes, “I have no idea! I’ll figure it out! Eventually, a few issues down the line, it’ll come to me.” [laughs] He used to be a very seat-of-the pants writer.

Most of us would have it worked out a little more in advance than that, but that was one of the things about the Marvel Method, it led to those run-on stories. You could go, “Okay, I’ve got some sub-plots, I’ve got the main plot.

I can figure out the ending later. What’s the rush?”

CBA: Were the two Steves different from the other writers, generally speaking?

Jim: Yeah, they were further out than most.

Alan: Other writers were more sedate, comparatively.

Allen: Gerber and Englehart, they had more far-out ideas, and they’d want to use these ideas on the characters they loved, rather than sort of trying to…

Jim: Duplicate the Lee and Kirby stuff?

Allen: Like Jim said, when some guys get in the business, they just want to do their version of what Stan and Jack did, or what Stan and Steve did. Not because they’re lazy, but bringing Galactus back again seemed cool to them. It’s a fannish thing. Steve and Steve brought in very different viewpoints.

CBA: It seems like what the Steves did was use characters to tell a story, while other writers just wanted to tell stories about the characters.

Often, fans-turned-writers come in and say, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do Captain America,” and, for them, that’s the end result. But Englehart came in, for instance, and said, “I really want to explore Watergate, the essence of God,” and other more heady stuff rather than, say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Dr. Doom beat up the Hulk.”

Jim: He wanted to take in stuff that was happening in the outside world, and use that reality as a springboard.

Alan: With the two Steves, you’re talking about a whole other level of intelligence and ability to synthesize.

That’s what Jim was saying: “Let’s slam it together and see what we get!” And most likely, it’ll be something original.

Allen: Like Englehart taking Captain America and having him give up the costume. “I can’t work for this government this way anymore, it’s not the America I want to represent,” and then doing the whole Nomad storyline.

CBA: There’s a difference between “clever” and “smart.” A lot of fannish writers are clever, and they do nice little twists. But there’s also smart writing, where the story’s the thing, it’s not just the character. [to Jim] It’s the story for you, as you obviously killed a lot of characters.

Alan: Every chance he got.

Jim: Stan gave the characters he created 1960s TV personalities, instead of letting them be cardboard hero cut-outs like Superman and Batman were under Mort Weisinger. In the ’70s, we came in and gave them Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test personalities—trying to put super-heroes into a very different kind of head space.

Alan: A part of that was that we were looking for those same answers as the characters. We were just coming through the anti-war movement, coming through exploration of consciousness…

Jim: Discovering Carlos Casteneda.

Alan: Boy, Steve was really on to Watergate, he couldn’t write it fast enough, couldn’t get those books out fast enough before events overtook him, but he really had that one nailed. [laughs] And he had the right character to work with at the time, too—Captain America, Mister Flag himself!

CBA: [to Jim] You even reached into the very concepts of life and death and important aspects of sanity, dopplegangers—”We have met the enemy, and he is us”—you were bringing in a lot of psychology, politics and religion, too. What motivated you? Was it just because you were interested and you wanted to explore it yourself?

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

25

Above: The exquisite teaming of penciler Jim Starlin and inker Alan Weiss was never better showcased than on their cover collaborations featuring Adam Warlock. This particular issue contained a thinlyveiled parable on the pratfalls of working for Marvel Comics, featuring caricatures of such Marvel alumni as Stan Lee, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, and Roy Thomas (who, according to writer/artist Starlin, didn’t seem to appreciate the satirical jabs).

Courtesy of Jim Woodall. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 26

Jim: It was because I attended a parochial grade school. [laughter] CBA: You’re Catholic?

Jim: Yeah. You know, it’s no coincidence that the word “catholic” means “universal church” [the name of Magus’s organization in Warlock]. Basically, it’s just me working out stuff. Writing The Death of Captain Marvel was working out my own father’s death. They paid me to do gestalt therapy on myself.

CBA: Did you feel you had total freedom when you were at Marvel, or was there a lot of interference?

Jim: At Marvel or DC, you never have total freedom. But they gave you a lot of freedom. Much more than they would right now. They let me go as far as I could with Captain Marvel. But then, with Warlock, they had a new editor every week. During that time, I had Roy, Len [Wein], Marv, Gerry Conway. Archie might have been the last one.

Allen: He was after Gerry, I believe. When Gerry got the job over

Archie, I remember Archie was pretty annoyed at the time, but Gerry lasted…

Jim: Two weeks. Just long enough.

Allen: It was longer than that.

CBA: It’s legend that Gerry had the shortest reign as editor-in-chief at Marvel.

Jim: I didn’t make it to Archie. I quit with Gerry.

Alan: You and Englehart quit at the same time, didn’t you?

Jim: Yeah, over Gerry.

Allen: Which was funny, because I think Gerry was there maybe, literally, four to six weeks. I remember doing a whole bunch of cover sketches for him—he liked my cover sketches—so there was a brief period when I did a whole mess of cover sketches for Kirby—which is like, please, what does Kirby need cover sketches for?

But it was a big thrill for me, because I’d do the sketches, and then Jack would draw them, and I inked a bunch of those covers. That was a big treat for me, because he’s my all-time favorite. I wish I’d done a better job, because if I knew then what I know now… I was slavishly trying to trace his pencils, which is the wrong way to go.

Alan: [to Jim] You know, I remember having a conversation with you when you were contemplating moving from Captain Marvel over to “Warlock.” I was saying, “Look, Jim, no matter what you do with Captain Marvel, it ain’t gonna be the Captain Marvel that everybody knows! If you go with the other guy, he’s got a lightning bolt on his chest anyway, how can you lose?” [laughs] Allen: So he immediately got rid of it! [laughter] Alan: Yeah, of course!

CBA: There were some heavy concepts in Warlock!

Obviously, he was Counter-Earth’s Jesus Christ, and was even crucified in The Incredible Hulk.

Alan: Jim had that other giant guy crucified between four moons or planets…

Allen: That was Chronos.

Alan: Right. He had a real crucifixion fetish. [laughter] I remember Englehart being really tickled by that concept. Each guy was setting the bar a bit higher for the other to jump.

CBA: How far back do these concepts go?

Jim: After I got out of the service, I took a shrink class off the VA, during my abortive college career. Thanos and Eros came out of that.

CBA: How much was Kirby’s Fourth World an influence?

Jim: I had some drawings of Metron, as I recall, in my portfolio, and when we did Thanos in Iron Man, Roy told me to beef the character up. And then, when we did him longer, he said, “Let’s show DC how to do Darkseid.”

CBA: [laughs] Roy said that?

Jim: Yeah. DC couldn’t get the New Gods to sell at that point. This was after Jack was doing them, and somebody else was reviving them. That’s about the extent of the Darkseid influence: Thanos was big and ugly like Darkseid. I’ve always figured there was enough of a difference between the characters.

CBA: The concepts of the characters may have been different, but physically there was a resemblance.

Jim: He kept getting bigger. He’s a normal-sized guy in that first Iron Man. We kept inflating him as we went along, until we got to Darkseid-size! [laughs] I loved the New Gods comic, but the only character I liked was Orion, I didn’t care much for the other ones— Forever People and Mister Miracle—who just left me cold.

Allen: I liked them all pretty well.

CBA: But the basic premise: Darkseid was the son of Highfather; Thanos was the son of Mentor…

Jim: The soap opera stuff didn’t interest me as much as the real sense of grandeur and scope.

CBA: I don’t know if it’s true or not, but there’s a story that Jack Kirby proposed to Stan Lee to do the New Gods at Marvel, but Stan COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

shot him down. Jack wanted to kill off Thor and all of Asgard, and introduce the New Gods. Stan said, “Are you crazy? We’ve got a hit character here, and you want to kill him off!” But Jack’s idea was, “We’ll kill off a hit character and make another hit character!” It didn’t bother him, and it certainly would’ve shaken things up. The whole Fourth World has a real mystique about it, perhaps because this huge saga was cut off in the middle of the telling and never resolved. In a way, they’re almost made greater by the fact that they were cut off in their prime—you can only imagine how great it would’ve been. By the time it got to “The Forever People GuestStarring Deadman,” it was too late. [laughs] Jim, in your tenure on both Captain Marvel and Warlock, you were able to reach a climax to the sagas, and we all had the satisfaction of knowing, “Well, Thanos dies,” or the character changes in some way. But, after you left Marvel, not too many other people carried the ball. You created this great cosmic vision for others to follow, but few seized the initiative.

Jim: Well, sometimes it’s also just a matter of luck. I’ve done a number of series that have gone nowhere, too. My run on the New Gods didn’t set anything on fire.

CBA: How many issues of that did you do?

Jim: About three or four, something like that.

Alan: How many Captain Marvels were there?

Jim: Not as many as you’d think. Ten issues. Milgrom and I are doing more together now, as a team, than we’ve done previously in our entire careers.

CBA: I’m probably promulgating this myth, but a lot of people always associate you guys [Jim and Allen] together with Captain Marvel, they will always associate you two guys [Jim and Alan] together with Warlock, to some degree.

Alan: But I was just assisting on Jim’s books. I just did a thing here and there, no full runs or anything. Not even full issues.

CBA: Alan, you were the veneer on the covers of the books.

Alan: That’s like the slime on top of the pot, right?

Allen: No, it’s shinier than that. [laughter] Alan: I did do shiny! Well, I really enjoyed it. [thumbing through the issues on the table] Looking at them now, especially after not seeing them for a number of years… not bad for a couple of kids, right? We were about 24, 25 years old at the time.

Allen: Whenever fans say, “Oh, I loved it when you were inking Starlin on Captain Marvel,” I remind them that I did two-and-a-half issues.

Jim: Is that right?

Allen: Yeah, I split an issue with Dan Green, for whatever reason. I think I inked you on one issue of Warlock, some Master of Kung Fus, and a couple of other things here and there, but I never did ink a lot of your stuff over the years. Because of the impact his stuff made at the time, a lot of people remember it very well, and they remember my name being associated with Jim’s. Riding his coattails, as always.

CBA: Who was Gemini [credited on a number of Starlin/Milgrom covers]?

Allen: That was “Jim and I”—Gemini—no mystery.

Jim: Allen created that.

CBA: [to Jim] Did you flesh out stories with people, talk them out, and did people add to the concepts?

Jim: We talked about the stories before we did them, but I don’t remember sitting down with Steve or anybody and saying, “Well, should I do this in this issue?” A lot of us were hanging out in New York, and later in Berkeley, and there would be just constant bullsh*tting about stories. But the nuts-and-bolts stuff, I’d sit down by myself and figure it out.

Alan: Absolutely. Jim didn’t need any help, but we’d all discuss ideas all the time, sure. There was a nice inner

competition. Frank Brunner and Englehart and I were in the same house in Marin County [California] for a couple of months, and I was helping Frank on Doctor Strange. All the best Marvel books at the time were by our guys! There’s Starlin’s Captain Marvel, there’s Englehart and Brunner’s Doctor Strange, there’s Englehart’s Captain America, there’s Englehart’s Defenders. Englehart and I did a Captain America together, then we did a black-&-white “Master of Kung Fu.” Most of the fun, thankfully, was the great talking-out of those ideas. Englehart would look and say, “Jesus, look at this! Here’s Adams doing The Avengers!

Look what Starlin did, crucifying this guy in space!” I remember that one specifically, because he read it and said, “What a concept! I’ve got to do something that good! I’ve got to do something that high!” When Englehart did his run on Doctor Strange… was it Sise-neg, the guy March 2002

Above: On the margin of the original cover art (contributed by Jim Woodall) was a note to editor Len Wein from artist Jim Starlin (double-negative notwithstanding): “Len, this one don’t need no copy if colored right. Jim.” Alas, the creator’s suggested went unheeded on the printed version as seen here. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Inset left: Though not discussed in this interview, the title for this CBA section was derived from the mischievous reworking of the Comics Code Authority stamp on the cover of Strange Tales #179 by prankster Jim Starlin. Undetected by staffers, the alteration appeared on hundreds of thousands of printed covers across the land in 1975.

Courtesy of Jim Woodall. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

27

Above: Full-page battle sequence from Avengers Annual #7. Art by Jim Starlin & Joe Rubinstein.

Below: The Starlin & Milgrom team continue to collaborate, here featuring an old friend of theirs. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

28

who went back through time and gathered up all the magic? Steve and I were looking into magic at the time, its history, through the Knights Templars. The psychological archetypes of the Tarot and Western ceremonial magic, the connections to the Eastern religions, Atlantis, all that stuff. We were interested in Robert Anton Wilson’s work, The Illuminatus Trilogy, reading Isaac Bonowits’ book on Real Magic, Blavatsky and the Golden Dawn. Steve was really into Aleister Crowley for awhile. We branched off into somewhat different directions, but it was all from the same basic sources. What Steve did with it was so brilliant—with the guy going back in time to gather more and more magical energy until he finds himself owning it all.

Now he’s god, and there’s nothing left to do! There’s nobody to brag to! [laughter] What an object lesson for all the publishers and editors in the field! [laughter] CBA: What was the clown issue [Strange Tales #181] about?

Jim: The clown issue is about that axiom by Ted Sturgeon: 90% of everything is garbage.

CBA: You said in previous interviews that you were talking about your situation at Marvel in that issue?

Jim: Well, the name of the main clown is an anagram for Stan Lee. At one point, I wanted to take reference photos of everybody up there, and they agreed to do it. I never got around to taking them, but I really tried to do likenesses. Strangely enough, Roy Thomas was

the only one who got offended by it, and I thought I treated Roy as the only person in the story with any kind of respect! [laughter] CBA: The rest didn’t get it?

Jim: No! Len and Marv just thought it was great. “Oh, cool! We’re in a comic!” [laughter] CBA: Why did you quit Warlock?

Jim: I began to get a lot of interference on it. I think the final straw was I got a lot real stupid suggestions. Gerry Conway, during his two weeks’ reign, gave both Englehart and me lists of things where he thought our books should go, and we both quit over it.

Allen: Part of the charm was that both Jim and Steve started on books that were about to die, so nobody was watching, so they could take them as far as they wanted, do whatever they wanted… until they started selling! And then they started to mess with them.

Alan: That was really true.

Jim: You’d never have the freedom now that you had back then.

CBA: [to Alan] How did you end up doing Warlock #16?

Alan: Well, Jim and I always wanted to do more work together, and since during those years I’d do inventory issues, we decided to set up this Warlock filler. I don’t know if we knew what issue it would be at the time. We sat down one afternoon, and—in the ideal way to work—I asked, “What do you want to write?” and he asked, “What do you want to draw?” Exactly like Englehart and I had done on Captain America. I said, “I’d like to get a crack at doing some Hobbit-like creatures.” So that turned into these Hobbit-like miners on a planet who worked for these cosmic entrepreneurs who looked like stalks of asparagus.

Jim: Oh, asparagus? I thought they were supposed to look like broccoli! Excuse me! [laughter] Don’t you know broccoli when you see it?

Alan: Well, not when it’s wearing a cape! [laughs] Starlin, Brunner and I shared a basement studio at the time called Studio Zero, in Oakland. Warlock #16 was penciled during that brief period when we were all working together. There was a very amiable, easy-going atmosphere. It was just fun—and that was the idea! [to Jim] Do you remember Dark Fantasy? You were going to edit a black-&-white book for Marvel that was more adult-oriented, with creator-owned characters, out of California? You asked me to create a character for it, and I came up with Hotspur and the Darklings. I remember that clearly. Of course, it never happened. This was about the same period when we—the California Contingent—went to talk to Rolling Stone about doing a comics insert.

CBA: Jim was a part of that?

Alan: Sure. Jim, Englehart, Mike Friedrich, Brunner, and myself.

We went up to their offices, which at the time were in San Francisco, thinking they actually wanted to get new concepts from the new guys. Unfortunately, all they really wanted was glitter rock superheroes.

Jim: All our ideas were anti-corporate, and they said, “You can’t do this, because we’re corporate ourselves!” [laughter] Alan: So, that also went nowhere. We had so many run-ins with what we called “hippie entrepreneurs” who were going to start up a company next week. There must’ve been a dozen of them, and Englehart would say, “Well, I think that company just disappeared up that guy’s nose!” [laughter] In fact, finally, it got to the point where Englehart said, “You know, I’ll believe this company when it’s up my nose!” [laughter] CBA: What happened to Warlock #16?

Alan: Well, I had the pencils with me when I came back to New York from my hegira in California, and came back to stay with Allen, as a matter of fact.

Jim: That was when we drove across the country together from Oakland to Detroit, but I came back to New York alone a week after you did.

Alan: That’s right, at the end of 1976, driving a U-Haul towing your Volkswagen. I flew into New York from Detroit, and I had a bunch of stuff in a portfolio that didn’t get taken out of the cab. So I lost those original pencils.

CBA: But you lucked out in a small way by having, at least, Xeroxes of the pages.

Alan: Yeah, I believe it was Steve Leialoha who had the photocopies of it. We’ve tried to get the story published a couple of times COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

since then. We were going to finish it for Milgrom when he was editor on Fanfare, but the book got cancelled. More recently, maybe five years ago, we talked with Craig Anderson about publishing it in Warlock, but I had other commitments that kept me from getting to it right away, and again, the book was cancelled—and Craig was out of Marvel—before I could free up.

CBA: [to Jim] In The Death of Captain Marvel, you revealed that the character got infected with cancer in #34 of the regular title. Did you choose to ignore the whole continuity between that last issue of yours and the graphic novel? Did you feel that you when you stopped doing the book, he stopped, too?

Jim: No, there’s some mention of the continuity after my run. I actually worked on some of the stuff with Allen [who took over art chores on the title after Starlin departed], and I enjoyed Englehart’s writing on it. I didn’t care for the Doug Moench run too much, but I incorporated some of the characters from that run into the storyline, too.

Allen: Jim’s never been one of these guys who comes in and dismisses the continuity that went before.

Jim: But I’m doing it now.

Allen: Now, yes. [laughter] He never used to be like that. There are guys who will come in, and they don’t like what somebody did, and therefore, they’ll dismiss it completely. I’m not mentioning any names.

CBA: Drat! [laughter] One more thing about Warlock, Jim: did you lobby that you wanted to finish the storyline, even though the book got cancelled? Did you say, “Give me some annuals, I’ll do the Marvel Two-In-One Annual?”

Jim: No. I worked in animation for a while, and did some work for Warren. I ran into Archie Goodwin at a party, he said come back and do some stuff. They just handed me the Two-In-One Annual, and told me it wasn’t due until the next summer. So I did that, and they said, “Oh, geez, you did such a nice job on that; how’d you like to do The Avengers Annual, too?” It wasn’t planned. They just knew that was the story, that was how Warlock was going to end.

CBA: Did you tell Archie you were going to kill Thanos?

Jim: Archie was editing all those books, so I didn’t want to bother him with these things. [laughter] And he was much happier that way.

One of the beautiful things about Archie was he was no control freak.

Allen: No, he respected creative people, and he was great at cajoling talent without stepping on toes or bruising egos.

Alan: He was the best kind of editor. He knew how to help a story, but he didn’t have to step on you, he’d just make suggestions, and they always sounded like the right idea. He was a tremendous man.

Jim: From the first time we worked together, to all the years together on Dreadstar, it worked out just fine. Archie and I got into a groove, and that worked for all those years.

CBA: Is there a lesson there—that a good editor is one who just leaves somebody alone?

Jim: Well, there are people you can’t leave alone, but if you leave certain other people alone, they do their best stuff. The very best editors know the difference.

Alan: Archie knew stories, and he knew the value of his people. He didn’t have to interject his own ego to prove that he deserved his job, by messing with something that was fine to begin with.

Allen: Right, no “I’m the editor, therefore I must make my imprint on this, if it’s only to change a balloon or dialogue.”

CBA: [to Jim] Tell us about Thanos and the Infinity Abyss.

Jim: It’s a six-issue mini-series, and the first and last issues will be double-sized. Thanos, Captain Marvel, Dr. Strange, Gamora, Moondragon, and of course Pip are all back, with March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

Spider-Man thrown in for sales. And Warlock’s back from the dead, in a new version. Allen’s inking, and he’s doing the best stuff he ever did.

Christie Scheele’s doing a fantastic job on the color, and Heroic Age is giving me the best separations I’ve ever had in comics.

CBA: What’s it about?

Jim: Well, it’s based on the idea that everybody fouls up at some point. And when you’re Thanos and you foul up, you foul up big!

He’s made a mistake and the whole universe is in danger.

CBA: How is it, working on these characters now, 25 years later?

Jim: Well, I’m having a great time on it… but inspiration comes in different ways now. I came up with this story sitting alone on my boat, for the most part.

CBA: Looking back on that period now, was it fun?

Jim: Yeah, for the most part it was pretty fun. Some frustration, because you never get to do completely what you wanted to do, but I probably had more fun doing those comics than just about anything else I’ve ever done in this business. This was the early stuff, this was when we had muses. I may be more proud of things like The Death of Captain Marvel, which was done nearly a decade afterwards. But those early issues, at the beginning, coming to New York, breaking in, and joining the Marvel clubhouse with these guys—they were some of the most fun times I ever had in my life.

Above: Jim Starlin’s The Death of Captain Marvel, the very first Marvel graphic novel, was an immediate success upon publication in 1982, requiring several reprintings. Below: The ultimate fate of an adorer of death as Thanos is turned to stone in the denouement of the Warlock saga in Marvel Two-In-One Annual #2.

Art by Jim Starlin and Joe Rubinstein.©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

29

CBA Interview

Marvel’s Third Wave Steve Englehart on the new consciousness in the ’70s Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Steve Englehart is widely considered to be one of the greatest writing talents to emerge from the Marvel Bullpen in the 1970s. As did his fellow noted scribes Steve Gerber and Don McGregor, the writer made an immediate impact with fans of the House of Ideas, introducing some innovative concepts, probably ahead of their time, including the first multi-issue crossover with his Avengers/Defenders “war.” The writer was interviewed by phone on Dec. 16, 2001, and he copyedited the final transcript.

Above: Okay, okay, we know Stylin’ Steve Englehart didn’t write the debut story featuring the revamped Beast in Amazing Adventures #11 (from which penciler Gil Kane & inker Bill Everett’s superb cover is detailed above), but the series was Steve’s first regular assignments. Anyway, Ye Ed thinks this is one of the best comic-book images of the 1970s and it’s his mag, so… ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 30

CBA: It seems to be that every two decades or so, America fixates on the world 20 years prior. In the ’60s, people were into ’40s pop culture; in the ’70s, we were obsessed with the ’50s with Happy Days, etc.

Steve: I’m not sure I understand what you mean. I see the 1960s as a unique time, a kind of super-heroic decade. The leaders we respected, like President John Kennedy, had a real “can do” attitude.

If you read, say, John B. McDonald’s Travis McGee or other private detective novels of that era—what I was reading in the ’60s—these guys had all been in World War II, which had only ended 15-20 years prior, and there still were virile hero-type characters. They were very competent guys who took care of themselves and others, so it was

natural for them to become private detectives or salvage experts, like Travis McGee. They would go out and fight the bad guys.

Then Kennedy came along and said, “We’re going to the moon,” and America was on top, the best was in front of us, the New Frontier. That’s one reason that I think that Marvel Comics, Doc Savage, the Batman TV show, all of that kind of heroic material popped up because it was very much of the time. Now, this is all different from the nostalgia crazes. People weren’t nostalgic for the ’40s when they got into comics in the ’60s. But it certainly is true, to follow your point, that everything goes through a cycle where it’s new, it’s hip, it’s happening, and then it gets refined, and it’s really cool, and just by nature of having the next thing come along, it becomes old-fashioned and out of date. But then you look back a couple of cycles, and you recall the ’30s or I Love Lucy from the ’50s, which may be old-fashioned, but some of that stuff was good. So, it gets resurrected, and people are always re-discovering things after they’ve written them off, and that’s how you gradually build up Western civilization.

CBA: [laughs] The 1960s were obviously a tumultuous period, a time of change, and there also seemed a wistful, nostalgic desire to embrace again the standards we had all once agreed on, as a people. As opposed to today, Baby Boomers all basically grew up with the exact same pop culture, whether they grew up in Maine or Hawaii.

Steve: It was the ’50s culture, so it was conformist in a sense, in that everybody did have a television, but what they got out of it was different in many cases. One aspect was a belief that the ’50s were just too f*ckin’ conformist, you know? Then comes the rebels, as early as the mid-’50s, Marlon Brando and James Dean, and that flowered. And by the ’60s, there were larger-than-life people, from the Beatles, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John and Bobby Kennedy… it was a time when people were really stepping up onto whatever stage they were on, and they were intent on making a difference.

CBA: And a lot of them being slapped down.

Steve: Right. Most of those guys I mentioned ended up getting shot to death. Again, the times were very much like a comic book, in a sense. One theory underlying comics is, you’re walking down the street minding your own business, and a super-villain jumps out.

That happens to super-heroes every month, you know? [laughter] It wasn’t always super-villains but a lot of larger-thanlife people jumped out on the stage in that decade. And I think it inspired those of us growing up then to want to be larger-than-life ourselves. People were getting shot, on the streets and in the war, and the Cold War loomed large... but we knew that was growing pains as the world got better. And it did, till after Watergate. Then people decided to pull back, and they’ve basically been pulled back ever since. We’re about due for some heroes again.

CBA: Was there much anti-war sentiment as you were attending college [in Connecticut]?

Steve: Sure. It wasn’t a hotbed, it wasn’t Berkeley, but I think it shared the general attitude of most schools. I couldn’t tell you now when the mood shifted, but it seems to me that by ’65 opinions were changing. Walter Cronkite went on the air, telling America he was against the Vietnam War, or at least not projecting an “Everything’s Great!” approach.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

February 2002

CBA: Did you keep your eye on the situation in Vietnam?

Steve: Yeah, because I’m interested in reality. There was the draft, of course, but you could be exempted for being in college. Obviously, as I went through my college career and got closer to graduating, it became more personal. From 1965 to ’69, it became very clear that this was a bullsh*t war, so all this sentiment was building up. We were fighting a war, people were going to war and coming back, so there’s that super-heroic vibe yet again at the time—heroes and villains—and it was an explosive thing.

CBA: Certainly much of ’60s society chose to ignore Vietnam. It was happening half a world away—though some American boys were dying—but many just went ahead with their daily business, and it wasn’t until the early ’70s when a mass ground-swelling of dissatisfaction with the situation in Southeast Asia took place.

Steve: When I graduated in ’69, I was accepted at Michigan Law School, and I called up my draft board, and said, “Do you suppose I’ll be able to get in a semester?” and they said, “You’ve got about three weeks. You’re not even going to get through the summer.” So, I did in fact go into the Army in the Summer of ’69, but at that point my political belief was, “I really don’t want to do this, because I think it’s bullsh*t, but I’m not going to run off to Canada, I’m not that kind of guy.” But when I really started hanging out with people who had been to Vietnam, and really got a first-hand view of what Vietnam was all about, I applied for discharge as a Conscientious Objector, in 1970, and in fact I was granted it. I got out after 16 months in the service with an honorable discharge. But when I went in, I didn’t hold such strong views. I had what I think was probably a very typical American boy’s opinion: “This sucks, but when you have to go, you have to go.” So it was while I was in the Army that I came to understand, “Well, this sucks, and there’s really no good reason to go.”

CBA: When did you get out?

Steve: October, 1970.

CBA: Obviously after Kent State and the widening of the war into Cambodia.

Steve: Yeah, Kent State happened during that time, and that was definitely a factor in my political consciousness.

CBA: Was it viewed by your generation that, “They’re killing their young… they’re killing us”?

Steve: Yes. I definitely identified with the students who were killed.

What did they get shot for? The situation was clearly beyond control at this point. The people who were pushing the war, I think, knew they were on the losing side of history, and that leads people to extreme acts. But at the same time, there’s no good reason you should be shooting college students in Ohio! The students weren’t rioting, they weren’t doing anything other than protesting and going to class! Protesting at that time was a very common thing, a wellknown concept.

CBA: Was it relatively rare to get out as a Conscientious Objector?

Was it a testament to your writing ability? Did you have to write an essay for it?

Steve: When I applied for C.O. status in the Summer of 1970, the rules said you had to base your reasons on religious grounds, and I have always believed there is a conscious unity to the universe—I believe there is an overall plan—but I do not believe there’s an old guy with a white beard running things. I’m not an atheist; I just believe in a more cosmic point. But at the time, I was going to have to argue it on Judeo-Christian grounds. Halfway through the process, not due to me, but due to the general way things were going, the Army changed it to ethical, rather than religious grounds. So I was able to argue it from a moral standpoint rather than what the Bible tells me. But it was difficult and unusual.

Usually, people who wanted to do this, did it before they went in, and they never went at all.

To be in the Army and to try and get out was difficult, yes. I had to convince a chaplain, a shrink and an “officer knowledgeable in matters pertaining to Conscientious Objection”—of which there are none [laughter]—that I was sincere. The chaplain decided I was, the shrink decided I was, but the officer that I went in front of was a WAC major. I thought, “I couldn’t do any worse,” March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

because to be a WAC, you would have had to enlist. And to be a major, you would’ve had to have re-enlisted a couple of times, you know? [laughter] So I had to convince somebody who really believed in the military side of things.

But I was able to convince her. Fortunately, I’m verbal by nature, I can talk on my feet, plus I did believe in what I was saying. I was able to put my objections across.

The coda to that story is that she did recommend that I get out (and even then, the recommendations were sent off to the Pentagon for the final decision, and just like any other bureaucracy, there was a possibility I could’ve convinced the chaplain, the shrink, and the WAC, and the Pentagon could still say no, but they said yes), and I immediately went to New York to start working in comics. After a couple of months, I went back to visit friends of mine who were still in the Army, and I asked about the WAC major. They said, “Oh, she asked for discharge and got out.” I believe I talked her into it! [laughter] CBA: Are you a self-possessed person? Any acting background?

Can you project yourself in front of an audience fairly well?

Steve: Oh, yes. I have no acting background—other than acting in a sixth grade student play—but I am self-possessed. I’ve never had a problem getting up in front of an audience. When I did get into comics, I started going to conventions, and they’d bring me out on stage and say, “Here is the guy writing Captain America,” and it never really bothered me. I’m just talking to people… whether I’m talking to you on the phone, or to an audience, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference… I’m just talking. How hard is that?

CBA: It’s interesting that, as a teenager, you got out of comics, but you obviously got back into them again while you were in college.

People who remain in comics throughout their adolescence and early adulthood—not to stereotype them—but a lot of them are nowhere near self-possessed, shall we say, and they’re not very good in front of a crowd. A lot of creative types are excessively shy, you know?

Steve: It’s true, and I do think there is a connection. Being selfpossessed and having

Above: Around the time when the writer was hitting his stride as a scripter at Marvel Comics in the mid-1970s, this pic of a daring Steve Englehart was snapped.

Steve told us to dig the funky glass frames! Courtesy of the scribe.

Below: Steve Englehart’s first professional writing assignment, “The Terror of the Pterodactyl,” saw print in Monsters on the Prowl #15. Here’s a detail from one of artist Syd Shore’s panels. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

31

Above: Taking his cue, inspiration and assignments from Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart became the Rascally One’s able successor as the preeminent Marvel super-hero team scripter in the 1970s. Almost right off the bat, the writer pursued innovative approaches as he pioneered the ambitious multiissue crossover with the Avengers/ Defenders epic, as he scribed both titles. Cover detail from penciler Gil Kane and inker Frank Giacoia’s cover art of Giant-Size Defenders #1. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Inset center: Perhaps Steve will be best remembered for his spectacular run writing Captain America during the Watergate scandal, a particularly contentious era in American history, one that took down a U.S. President. Here is a detail from John Romita Sr.’s cover art for Captain America #171, featuring Cap’s longtime partner, The Falcon. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 32

no trouble talking to people has led me to go to editors and tell them they had their head up their ass. It’s lead to some of the more controversial parts of my career. I’ve never known whether I wrote Captain America well because I already thought like Cap, or whether writing Cap as my first real big-time series helped shape my consciousness, but there’s a side of me that always sort of says, “This is the way things ought to be… here’s the right, here’s the wrong.” I mean, I’m perfectly willing to admit there are areas of gray—I’m not Steve Ditko—but if I can see what’s right or wrong, and people are doing what I consider wrong, I’ve never had much of a problem getting up in front of a crowd and saying so, whether it was in print or whatever. And that’s led to hard feelings, and this and that. Looking back on it now, I go, yeah, I was never as politique as I should’ve been.

CBA: You’ve made some strong declarative statements about certain publishers, and certain people who work for publishers, and you left comics pretty loudly, if you catch my drift. But a few years later, you came back, working for those same certain publishers who still employed those same certain people. So, obviously, you had to be a bit politique.

Steve: I see a situation, and if I’m so moved, I point it out. Then it either gets fixed or it doesn’t. In any event, life goes on. The other side of this is that I do have some talent at this job: I can sell comics and make people money. The third side is: I like doing comics! The reason I would leave comics every once in a while is because I wanted to do something else. It was like going to college in Connecticut; I wanted to find new worlds, I didn’t want to stay in the same world.

The first time I left comics, I said, “I’m leaving forever,” because I figured, “Okay, I’ve done that, and I’m going on.” What I did find over time is, I like comics. I like the process, and I always have. I like being able to write and publish different characters. I just think everything about comics is cool, except for the business part on occasion.

So, yeah, I would go away—and usually would leave because things became intolerable, and then for many years, I would then say,

“Things are intolerable, and here’s why.” And it would piss people off! Time would pass, I’d say, “Gee, I’d really like to do this again,” and somebody somewhere would say, “Well, we’d like you to do this, either because we generally like you overall, even though you pissed off one of our editors, or we just wholeheartedly think you can make the money for us,” or whatever. I mean, it’s a combination of all those things.

CBA: When you were in college, what was it about comics that got you interested again?

Steve: In the Spring of ’66, at the end of my freshman year, I really hadn’t looked at comics in years, but this guy was running around the dorms, saying, “Look at this comic!

This comic is really cool!” and it was Amazing Spider-Man #35, somewhere in there, right at the end of the Ditko run, and there was a panel in which the super-villain was raving about what he was going to do, and—I don’t know if it was a footnote or just a caption—but it was by Stan Lee, saying, “You guessed it, this guy is a full-time nut!” That’s what set me off! I said, “That’s cool! This is an approach to comics which transcends Superboy not fighting the commies because he ‘doesn’t do that sort of thing.’” This Marvel comic had some relationship back to the real world, even though it had super-villains by Ditko and all that stuff. But obviously Stan was living in the real world, because he could step back and say that this guy’s crazy! [laughter] So, it was April of ’66, when somebody shoved a SpiderMan in front of me, and I got off on it. I went down to the local diner/newsstand which existed in Middletown in those days and the clerks were very sloppy about taking care of at least their comic books, so I was able to find a threemonth run of most Marvel comics at that time. In fact, this was right in the middle of the Silver Surfer/ Galactus Fantastic Four trilogy, arguably the all-time high point for the title. All in all, it was a good time to ask, “What’s all this about?”

And also, because I was able to get several months of issues, I was able to get into the soap opera aspects of Marvel comics. The characters developed over time in the stories, and it was Gene Colan’s Sub-Mariner, and Kirby and Colletta’s Thor, and it was cool stuff. So I got the full dose.

I went back to Indianapolis that Summer and discovered that the distributor that supplied the drugstores with comic books only distributed the top five Marvel books—Daredevil, X-Men and books like that weren’t being sent to retailers —so I called him up, and said, “I’d like to see those titles. Can you send them out my way?” He said, “We can if there’s a market for them.” So I did my part for Marvel way back when to increase their sales. [laughter] And that was, again, Doc Savage time, and all that stuff. That Summer of ’66…

The Prisoner was on TV at the time, and it was super-hero heaven, total immersion, the whole thing. That’s when it started, the Spring of ’66, and there’s a pretty straight line between then and now.

CBA: You got into collecting the books?

Steve: I got into collecting. There were little used thing stores down in the seedier parts of Indianapolis, and they’d have a bin of comics, and I was able to find Spider-Man #1 for a nickel, [laughter] because it was only a couple of years after the stuff had come out!

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Nobody knew it was valuable yet, and these books were sitting around in old bins. So that summer, I spent a lot of time haunting those stores, filling in old Avengers and Spider-Mans, whatever. As Marvel started in 1961, I was only five years behind the curve by this time, so I was able to fill in a lot of that stuff fairly cheaply and fairly quickly. I was immersing myself in this.

CBA: What did you go to college for?

Steve: I got my degree in psychology. I was interested in why people were the way they were. About halfway through college, I realized psychology doesn’t have an answer for that! [laughs] Psychology is a number of theories—Freudian, Jungian, Skinnerian—every theory works within the limits of that theory! But people are more complex than theories. There are aspects that are important to one theory that aren’t important to the other. It’s when you start going, “But I thought there was an Answer,” and you realize there isn’t a single answer! I look back on it now and realize it was all part and parcel of wanting to be a writer, because then I could explore characters, and everything that I saw about people I was able to turn around and make use of. I was just interested in why people are the way they are, and there’s no end to that.

CBA: Who inspired you, artistically, when you were going to be a comic book artist?

Steve: Neal Adams. There’s been artists who inspired me all along; there’s always been people who caught my eye, and fed not only my interest in comics, but also my interest in art in comics. But at the time, at that particular time—for want of a better word [laughs]—it was Neal Adams. I was seeing “Deadman,” and that strip was doing stuff that nobody had ever done before, as far as I know. I still think that’s true. The famous page where all the panels make a Deadman head is one and there’s another where Deadman falls and hits the ground, and you turn the page, and you’re looking at his face from only three inches away, and it’s a perfectly rendered face! I looked at that and said, “Holy sh*t!” I talked about getting into the FF during the Galactus/Silver Surfer thing, and there was a time then, in the ’60s, when it was me running around with Kirby/Sinnott artwork and saying, “This! This is as good as it gets!

This stuff right here, this is fabulous comic book stuff, and it’s inked so well… If you don’t think comics are any good, take a look at this!” But by the late ’60s, it was Neal Adams who made me think, “Jesus, look at what this guy can do!” I did in fact go to work with Neal eventually, primarily because I went up to him and said, “I really like the work you’re doing!”

Neal was kind enough to say, “Sure, let’s figure something out.”

CBA: Where did you bump into him?

Steve: At DC, my early home.

When I went to work for Marvel in the early ’70s, it was still a Bullpen, and there were still only a dozen people in the whole place. So fans would come by, and I was low man on the totem pole then, and I would go out March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

and sit with them for a little bit, but I couldn’t give them a lot of time, as we were all working our asses off. But DC was a corporation, and they had lots of people, and they were much more open in those days. Neal, as it turned out—even though he lived in the Bronx—if he was in midtown, and he was working on stuff, and he wanted to stay at DC until midnight and work on the equipment there, that was fine, there was no problem with that. I’d go in and could stand around, just as somebody who was known to them, I could go in and look over Jack Adler’s shoulder while he colored stuff, or hang out with various people I knew, and so there weren’t really a whole lot of obstacles to this. So one day, when I did decide that this is what I wanted to do, I just went up to Neal, and said, “I’d really like to work with you. Here are my samples.” He said, “These aren’t very good, but maybe I can teach you something.” So it was just the “right place, right time” kind of thing.

Neal is a well-known radical, and I was certainly spending a lot of time with this guy, who had strong opinions about the war, and when I did apply for C.O. status, and had that hearing before that WAC major, Neal came down to Maryland and testified on my behalf.

Neal is, of course, very well spoken and extremely self-possessed, so he made a good character witness.

CBA: That’s quite an effort for Neal to make!

Steve: Well, Neal’s like that, you know?

CBA: Did you two ever collaborate? With you as a writer?

Steve: No. By the time I was starting to write, he was doing less and less in the industry. What he did do at Marvel, he did with Roy Thomas. When Roy was in charge of Marvel, he thought he should be working with the most important artists, and that’s not anything that you can really argue with. Because, after all, he was the editorin-chief. So Roy would get to work with John Buscema, Barry Windsor-Smith, Neal Adams, and so forth, and I’d get stuck with newcomers like George Pérez… [laughter] So I never felt bad about working with the new guys who were coming in, because a lot of

Above: The Avengers was a lively title during writer Steve Englehart’s tenure, why with a Vietnamese former prostitute marrying a ghost and becoming the Celestial Madonna, The Scarlet Witch marrying The Vision, an android who finds out his body is that of the original Human Torch, and many other wacky goings-on. Here is a detail from the cover of The Avengers #122 by penciler Gil Kane and inker John Romita Sr. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

33

Left: Attending a Halloween party at Steve Englehart’s California abode in 1974 are (from left) Jim Starlin, letter Tom Orzechowski (with a strange emblem depicting some strange, weedlike substance about his waist!), Heather (?), and Steve. Lower Left: Top is Steve Leialoha; below, Frank Brunner, in fuzzy pix from the same shindig. Courtesy of Steve Englehart.

them had enthusiasm. But Neal didn’t do that much in the same places I was working. He was already getting out of comics, starting Continuity, when I was at Marvel, so we never really had a chance to collaborate.

CBA: Obviously you reached a point where you said, “An art career is not for me.”

Steve: Well, I knew I wasn’t getting as far as I wanted to go. I was ambitious in the sense that I wanted to do stuff. That’s still true. If I like doing it, I want to do it. I was not ambitious to be the editor-in-chief. I was ambitious in the sense that I didn’t want to be regarded as a failure, and didn’t want to be thrown out of the industry. I’ve told this story a million times: In those days, if you wanted to do comics, you had to be available to the publishers in New York. At least, you could live in Connecticut—Dick Giordano was already doing that, so I knew it was possible—so you had to be in that area, and again, it was a very nice time. As soon as you got into this industry, you immediately had 300 friends.

There was no animosity to speak of. I Below: During one of their late night wasn’t Manhattan sojourns, Starlin, Englehart, et. al, threatening imagined a kung-fu fight on a construction site, to anywhich was manifested in Special Marvel body, so I Edition #17. ©2002 Marvel wasn’t on Characters, Inc. anybody’s enemy list.

Everybody would introduce you to everybody else, somebody’d throw a party, and everybody would come. So I’d go to parties, and Wally Wood, Roy Thomas, Alan Weiss… everyone would be at the party. If you were in comics, you were part of the club, so I got to know a lot of people, including Gary Friedrich. Gary and I would sometimes go drinking in New York, and one day, a stewardess was murdered in the apartment above his, and his wife—who was a very cute woman from New York—said, “I don’t want to be here, it’s freaking me out that this woman who lived upstairs got killed. You’re from Missouri, Gary, let’s go back to your place for the Summer.”

34

So Gary called up and said, “I’m going to Missouri for six weeks. Would you like to sit in for me at my job at Marvel?” He was an assistant or associate editor, below Roy, doing proofreading, whatever needed to be done—basically, the lowest guy on the totem pole who was actually in the office. If you were in the office, it was your basic office scut job. That’s the way a lot of comics worked in those days: You’d be on staff somewhere doing whatever it was you were doing to pull down the $115 a week or whatever you were getting paid, but you were also doing freelance, and of course Gary was doing Sgt. Fury, Nick Fury, and Captain Savage. He wasn’t offering me any of the freelance work, but I could have the office job if I wanted it, and I almost said no, because I lived two hours outside New York, and the idea of a commute was ridiculous. But then I thought about it, and again, being self-possessed—for want of a better word—I went in, talked to Roy, and I said, “Well, I’ll take this job, but I’m only coming in four days a week.” [laughter] I mean, who the f*ck was I? But it was all right, so I only went in Monday through Thursday. I’d have to get up at five in the morning to catch the train by seven to be in by nine, and then I’d work until five, then hop on a train and get home around seven or eight, and basically go to sleep and get up and come back again. But at the end of six weeks, Gary decided he was going to stay in Missouri… I’ve often said I was the first guy to leave the New York area when I came to California, but it’s occurring to me that Gary might’ve been the first guy to do that when he decided to stay in Missouri.

In any event, the job was still mine, so I was on staff, earning my $115 a week or whatever it was, and they were trying to throw freelance my way to supplement my pay, but again, it was just doing backgrounds. I penciled a couple of romance stories, one was inked

by Johnny Romita (and it looks just like Johnny Romita) and one was inked by Jack Abel (and it looks just like Jack Abel). I didn’t have a strong personal style, other than the layouts, which I think were kind of interesting in some of the cases. I was co-writing some romance stories—usually not for credit—doing stuff like that, but nothing big.

Then, Al Hewetson had plotted a monster story Gary was supposed to dialogue, and since he was having such a good time lazing out in Missouri—and it was only six or eight pages—Gary said, “I don’t want to do this,” so he sent it back, they looked around, and said, “Well, Englehart over there, we’d like to give him some work, and he really can’t draw… maybe he could script this totally obscure monster story.” [laughter] And I did, and I put something into it. I’d never, to that point, thought about being a writer. It was called “Terror of the Pterodactyl.” Spelled that way, with the “Pt,” with all the credits reading “By Pstan Lee,” all that…

CBA: [laughs] I saw that!

Steve: You know all this already?

CBA: I was recently indexing Monsters on the Prowl, and remember coming across that story [in #15].

Steve: The credits read “Pstan Lee, Psyd Shores, Psteve Englehart… “ [laughter] I don’t know why I was clever, but I was!

They said, “Well, this isn’t so bad, this is kind of an interesting thing here,” and I couldn’t tell you whether it was exactly the next thing, but fairly shortly, they said, “Gerry Conway just wrote the first episode of this series and he just wanted to kick it out, it’s a bimonthly thing about a failed character called the Beast,”—the X-Men had already faded to obscurity by this point—”So why don’t you try writing it?” I wrote it, and started to get good fan reaction, and Marvel being Marvel, being a small Bullpen and so forth, “The Beast” kind of worked, so they said, “Well, how about Captain America and The Avengers?” [laughter] Then The Defenders, then The Incredible Hulk, and then Luke Cage… it was just that it turned out I could write! As I said, I’d always written, but I’d never thought that’s what I was going to do, but we all found out I could write.

CBA: Did you clue into the Stan Lee/Roy Thomas approach?

Steve: The whole reason I was there was because I’d fallen in love with what Stan was doing in 1966, and through the later ’60s, with what Roy was doing. I always say that Stan invented it—and/or Jack, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

you can argue that all day, but at the end of the day, it was still Stan who gave all those people characters and gave it the tone that they had—and then Roy and Denny were hired. I always find it interesting that the month before Roy and Denny started at Marvel, Stan wrote 13 separate issues, ranging from FF to Millie the Model. I can’t imagine writing 13 issues of anything in a month! So, it was time to hire people, and he hired Roy and Denny. Denny drifted toward DC and Charlton, but Roy took what Stan had done and made it more literary, gave it a little more gravitas. I love Roy for taking it to a deeper level, and then Gerber, Starlin, Brunner, Weiss, Milgrom and all of us sort of came in as the “Third Wave” on stuff when we finally go there. We were the college audience this stuff had always been allegedly done for, and so we brought a real contemporary feel to the books, and brought—in some cases—drugs to it, and brought whatever was going on in the ’70s. So, I was totally steeped in what Marvel was doing, I’d read it, collected it, and wanted to be there. So yeah, Stan and Roy had been the people that I was following, and it turned out I could work in that arena and establish my own voice.

CBA: You probably did the first truly ambitious Marvel crossover, continuing month after month, in the Summer of ’72, you wrote the Avengers and Defenders crossovers.

Steve: Yeah, Roy said later it was the first bi-weekly comic. The thing about Marvel in those days was, every day and every way, things got better. If there was a book that really wasn’t going anywhere—the example I always think of is “Agent of SHIELD,” it was bumbling around, nothing was happening, and then this guy Jim Steranko took it over, and that was… you just knew that was going to happen! If a series started to stagnate, somebody would come in and really kick it in the ass. So, Marvel was cooking on all cylinders, and the idea was just to get better and better and better. We did not see a high point where we’d hit and have to drop down; we didn’t see an end to it, so that was the mind set. Marvel had done Summer annuals for years during the ’60s and it was always cool to get the double-sized comics for a quarter, featuring an extra-long story about Daredevil, the FF or whatever, and then there might be a back-up story about the Silver Surfer or Peter Parker’s parents. Marvel gave readers some extra treat and that was just fun! Now in ’72, Marvel wasn’t going to do annuals for some reason, so I said, “Well, there ought to be something special for the Summer, and I’m writing these two books,” and I came up with this crossover idea! I went to Roy and said, “Here’s what I want to do,” and he said, “Well, if you screw it up, and The Avengers ships late and comes out after The Defenders that’s supposed to come out after it, that’s going to cause us problems.” I said, “I will not let that happen,” and he said, “Okay, go for it!” That’s the entire editorial conference we had over this! So, I went out and did it!

CBA: Do you think one of the benefits of the day was an editorial benign neglect. That is, Roy was just too over-worked that he hired the best people at the time and he just let them run with their respective books?

Steve: That’s exactly the way it was. When I was hired and was given “The Beast,” Roy said, “I do not have time to edit, so we’re hiring you to write this book. If you can turn it in on time and can make it sell, you can keep doing it. If you can’t, then we’ll fire you and get somebody else.” That was the entire editorial directive then. [laughter] So it was very much: “We’re throwing you into the deep end of the pool, and if you can swim, then you can swim your brains out, and if you can’t, you’ll drown.” It turns out I liked that, and to this day, it’s shaped my approach to writing comics. It’s my job to make the story work. I don’t think it’s the editor’s job to fix it afterwards. In fact, I was trained not to have an editor, that it’s nobody’s responsibility but mine to make this stuff work. Today we’ve got editors, assistant editors, line editors, group editors, continuity editors and all these positions which I find hard to deal with at times, because there’s too many cooks in there messing around with the broth. I do figure, if the book succeeds or fails, it ought to be my responsibility. But in any event, the book should do what it’s been doing because I’ve put in whatever amount of work is necessary to make it do that. So yeah, it was benign neglect, but it was very much because it was a Bullpen, and there was no way Roy could operate the way editors operate today, where everything would go past him, and he would change things and give direction and all that… no!

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

CBA: Was the only directive that you couldn’t use the Silver Surfer? Stan always had a special consideration for the Silver Surfer.

Were there any other things you could not do?

Steve: I don’t think so.

CBA: So that was it? And you were even able to use him in the Defenders/Avengers storyline!

Steve: Marvel was a good place to be; that’s the bottom line.

When Gerber and I went to work for Malibu in the ’90s, we went around saying, “This is exactly the way Marvel used to be!” We’d forgotten, lost track of how cool it was to work in a place where they just said, “These are your books, go do them,” which is what Malibu did, as well. People were not looking to defend their turf, not looking to put other people down… It was an office, so there must’ve been office politics, but nothing negative to any great degree. So when he retired from regularly writing comics, Stan said, “The Surfer is my baby, and I don’t want anybody to use him.” Everybody said, “Sure, Stan, because… you’re Stan!” He could ask one favor out from the company! Then Roy had the Surfer guest-star in The Hulk or Sub-Mariner or both, when they had that first grouping that would eventually become The Defenders, and he was able to get Stan to go for that. But then when he started the regular Defenders series, Stan did not want the Surfer to be part of the group, so Doctor Strange was brought in. But the Surfer fit in with that group well, so… I mean, who the f*ck was I at that point? The Defenders was pretty early on in my career, but I was able to say, “Stan, I know you don’t want me to use this guy, but he’d work out real well in this story, and I only want to use him for a couple of issues, but I think it’d be cool,”

Above: Unused cover art by “Gemini,” a name inker Allen Milgrom coined when he teamed with penciler Jim Starlin (Gemini…

“Jim and I”; get it?). Intended for the first issue of Shang Chi’s own title, Master of Kung Fu #17.

Apparently the powers-that-be felt Ernie (Chua) Chan’s minimal revise was somehow more appropriate.

Courtesy of Al Milgrom. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

35

Above: Alan Weiss’s incredible talent for capturing nuance in character is evident in this great page from Captain America #164, written by Steve Englehart and featuring foxy Nightshade, one of Marvel’s more provocative (and immature) villainesses.

Courtesy of the artist. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Right: Courtesy of a contributor (whose name we misplaced), a 1974 sketch of the Sentinel of Liberty by Alan Weiss.

Art ©2002 the artist. Cap ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 36

and Stan said, “Okay! You can’t have him forever, but you can do that.” Again, Marvel was a good place to be. Everybody was moving towards a better future, and there was no reason to f*ck it up! They trusted me. We trusted each other.

CBA: You did some ambitious things like that crossover, and also in The Avengers with that enormously complex time travel story that was tied into the Giant-Size Avengers quarterlies.

Steve: Again, there were no complaints (though there probably were a couple), and the readership was right there with us. We’d say, “We’re going to take you places you’ve never been before,” and they’d come along for the ride!

Nothing that I did in the ’70s, as far as I can remember, was ever rejected by the readers as being too complicated or too weird. Readers said, “Let’s do more of it! How weird can you get?

How far can you go?” [laughter] On another level, Doctor Strange was

another example of that reader support. I tried to make the book different, that’s always been my thing, because I’m interested in each of the individual characters. I try to see what makes each person different, so every book was different. I’d say, “I’m going to take these Avengers farther than they’d ever gone before,” and as it turns out it was complex, and I was telling the origins of Mantis and the Vision, going back and forth in time, had sentient plants, and all this kind of stuff. But you know, at the end of the day, people say that’s the best Avengers ever! I mean, Kurt Busiek started his run on The Avengers saying, “I want to do stuff that’s as cool as that!” [laughter] That’s a serious compliment. I’m just saying that my Avengers, people really liked it! Perhaps today, if they were handed all 17 issues that made up the origin of Mantis and read them, they might go, “Yikes!

This is complex!”

CBA: What was your thinking behind Mantis? Why was she introduced, and what were you reaching out for? Did you plan for her to be the Celestial Madonna when you started?

Steve: Oh, not at all. She was introduced to be a slut. I’ve always been a big fan of sex, [laughter] and I would see these grown-up super-hero guys fight super-villains, then they’d meet a woman, they’d blush and stammer! [laughter] They were like big teenage boys, which always seemed dumb to me, because I was accepting them as grown-up men, so why didn’t they act like grown-up men?

In any event, I thought, “All right, The Avengers has got a bunch of grown-up men here, and what if we brought in some real man-trap, and just had her start stirring things up, sowing dissension?” She was going to come on to all the Avengers, and pretty soon they’d butt heads over her and all this rivalry would emerge. This was what I thought I was gonna go, but she was a prime example of a character who wrote herself. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this while reintroducing Mantis in the current series I’m writing, Celestial Quest, because now I’m working in a different era, with a different structure, and it’s limited to eight issues, so some things that I took for granted for years, I’m suddenly starting to see them in a new context. But when you’re doing a monthly script, and it’s not supposed to come to an end in eight issues, so things can take on lives of their own, they do! She was introduced initially because she was this hooker who slept with the Swordsman. You’re doing a story, and it comes to a point where something’s got to happen, we’ll let her do it, and then that becomes part of her reality. So the next month, you come back, and you say, “Okay, I’m going to make her a slut,” but last month, she went in this other direction, and I really have to follow up on that, and pretty soon it continues to expand! It goes on, and goes on, and pretty soon, you’re going, “I can’t get back to the slut part!” [laughter] She’s going off in this other direction.

I always likened it to tossing balls up in the air. You’re going along, doing a story, and you get to a place where you need something to happen, so you do it, and you wouldn’t really know how it was going to pay off—but you’d know it was supposed to— and that the time would come but you’d do something because it seems cool at the time. And then, you come around next month, it’s time to pop the next one in, and you go, “All right, that ball went up in the air, the wind’s blowing from the west, so it would come down over here, so what does that do to my story?” I never really plotted out months in advance. I’d get ideas about where I was going to go, and it would be a four-month run on the Vision, two months on Mantis, and I could see what I’d be doing for the next six months with Thor, and I’d throw them all in a story and make something out of it, and then they’d start playing off each other… by the end, because it was a cosmic time, and I was doing Doctor Strange and all this kind of stuff, somehow, she just turned herself into the Celestial Madonna and married a tree! [laughter] And in order to marry the tree, you had to know the history of the universe, you know?

CBA: That’s the way it is! [laughs] Steve: That’s about not drowning in the pool! If you start that kind of stuff and can’t finish it, pretty soon you’re going to be an ex-comic book writer. But it turned out I was able to juggle all those balls, and when they’d come down four months later, I could catch them and do something with them. So, Mantis started out as a slut, ended up as the Celestial Madonna, and it all took place because things would happen, and that’s the direction she went in. That’s what I find now, doing the eight-part thing, I can’t do that, because if I throw a ball up COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

in the air and figure I can just catch it in four months, no, I can’t do that, because in eight months, I’ve got to bring it to a close, I’ve got to be thinking how each one of these arcs are going to play out… it’s a totally different mind set.

CBA: Were you less loose with Captain America? Did you have a definitive plan for him?

Steve: No. They were all done pretty much the same. Again, I’d start it off with that four-part thing about Cap in the ’50s, and I did Yellow Claw arcs, Serpent Squad arcs… I was doing a super-hero book, up until Watergate. Since Stan stopped writing the series, it was taking place during the Vietnam War, and here was this guy wearing a flag on his chest, and everybody was embarrassed! They’d go, “I can’t do a pro-America guy in this climate, so I don’t know what to do with him!” Whereas I said, “Okay, he is pro-American. I’m anti-Vietnam war, but I’m not anti-America, I can understand where this guy’s coming from, but I can particularly understand he’s from the ’40s, so we’ve got that mindset you see in John Wayne movies, yet he’s living in the ’70s. I had Steve Rogers dealing with the various situations, rather than Captain America, this weirdo with a flag on his chest. When Watergate came, it became very clear to me that Captain America would have some thoughts about this, and this is the exact antithesis of that old Superboy comics thing, it’s like… there’s no way I’m going to do a comic in which Captain America kind of breezes through the impeachment of an American president, going, “I’m fighting the Yellow Claw, what do I care?” [laughter] That’d be something else entirely! So I set out to say, “Okay, let’s see what Captain America would say about this.” There’s only a threemonth lag time between writing stuff and it appearing on the stands, but three months is a long time in the middle of Watergate, so I couldn’t base it on anything that was actually happening, but I could go for the feel of it, and I could go to what he would do about that.

So at that point, he became more political, but when I got done with that, at the end of the Nomad saga, he came back because of the Red Skull. I never lost track of the fact that it was a super-hero book, but he was Captain America, not Daredevil, not Batman… he had a particular agenda that these guys didn’t have to worry about, and it would’ve been silly—in my view—to try to pretend that he didn’t. So in terms of structure, no. I would work out arcs, “Okay, the next two or three issues, it’s going to be a Yellow Claw story,” but even at that, there’d be the one-armed Conscientious Objector (I wonder where that idea came from! [Note from Steve: I have two arms!]) and there would be his girlfriend from the 1940s, his girlfriend from the ’70s, Nick Fury… there were all these other people who were part and parcel of his world, and I chose to play with them, as well.

CBA: What was your favorite strip you worked on in the ’70s at Marvel?

Steve: It’s the same way I feel about when people ask me, “What character did you always want to do?” I didn’t have a particular favorite, because I liked all of them. I figured that I’ve got to sit alone in a room and entertain myself while I’m doing this stuff. If I’m not entertaining myself, I’m certainly not entertaining you, and so, every book I got into, that’s one reason I tried to find what was unique about each character, because I could enjoy doing each character for his own sake. If I was one of those guys who wrote sort of a generic male super-hero, and applied that to Captain America, Batman, Daredevil and Green Lantern, that would not interest me, I’d get bored very quickly doing that. So, I can look at every strip I did—with a few exceptions, like Skull the Slayer [laughs]—and say, “I really liked that strip because…” I was about to say Doctor Strange because I was able to go such weird places with that book, but I don’t know that I liked Strange any better than I liked The Avengers, Master of Kung Fu or The Hulk with Herb Trimpe. They were not generic at all, so each one of them had its own charms. But having said that, my favorite strip of anything in the ’70s was “Batman,” just because I’d always loved the character, and the idea of getting a chance to do him, to throw everything that I loved about him into it in a limited amount of time. Then, you know, it went on to become the first Batman movie, so I eventually saw it on the big screen. But you ended your question by saying, “…at Marvel.”

CBA: [laughs] Because I knew you’d say “Batman” if I didn’t specify! In the ’60s, the counter-culture really started, and many of them—some who were into the psychedelic aspects of the ’60s— March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

embraced Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s “Doctor Strange.” Flo Steinberg and Roy told me that the Bullpen would get letters from people saying, “What are you smoking over there?” and the word was that Steve Ditko took umbrage at being associated with the hippies. But there really was an otherworldly, cosmic element to the character that fit perfectly into those mind-expanding times. He was basically a non-violent character dealing with these other realms, astral projection, all sorts of really trippy things happening. With your advent on the strip with Frank Brunner in Marvel Premiere, from the very start, the strip was initiating a new cosmic approach.

Did you remember the character well from the ’60s?

Steve: Oh, absolutely. To me, the later Ditko on both “Doctor Strange” and Spider-Man was getting very interesting, because Ditko was plotting it. Stan didn’t always understand what Steve was doing, and I don’t know if Steve always understood what he was doing (there’s that famous Spider-Man #30 that’s got a cat burglar, and a guy who’s called The Cat, and they’re not the same guy, although they appear to be… [laughter] That was an issue that was sort of notorious for not making any sense if you actually think about it!) Doctor Strange was cool, very different, and lived in a Ditko world,

Above: The climax of the ambitious Avengers/Defenders extravaganza nears as evident by this Bob Brown and Mike Esposito splash page. Words by Steve Englehart.

Courtesy of Richard Howell. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Left: Rare example of a convention sketch by Bob Brown. Art ©2002 the estate of Bob Brown. Vision ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 37

Above: Steve Englehart scripted the “blaxploitation” super-hero title for a time. Frequent CBA contributor Joel Thingvall was apparently in contact with the late artist Billy Graham regarding the purchase of his original cover art from Hero for Hire #5, as evident by the signed annotation to this apparently unused Luke Cage cover sketch from 1974. Courtesy of Joel. Art ©2002 the estate of Billy Graham. Luke Cage ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

38

which was a great thing. I loved the world that Ditko lives in when he does this stuff. But, that was a character that you had to have a particular mind-set for, and it could’ve been purely a Steve Ditko mind-set, or it could’ve been a drug mind-set, and I can see how they can be confused, though knowing Steve, I realize how he wouldn’t like that connection. In the early days, Strange was an interesting guy, but he didn’t do a whole lot, and they kicked it into Marvel gear, and then did that whole thing about running around the world being chased by Baron Mordo, and it was an ongoing Doctor Strange serial, and after Ditko left, interesting things happened, but it didn’t move beyond that, particularly. Everybody was sort of trying to emulate Ditko—you could do worse, but it wasn’t progressing.

And then there was that period when they thought Doctor Strange and the Sub-Mariner should both wear costumes, and it sort of went away… and when they did bring it back, the first issue of Marvel Premiere was a Barry Smith/Stan Lee job, I think it might’ve been the last thing Stan actually wrote when he was still writing regularly. If you look at that book, you can see Smith telling a very complex story in his art, and Stan, with one foot out the door, writing very superficial dialogue [laughter]. Looking at that, I thought, “Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that could be done with Doctor Strange here,” but they gave it to Gardner Fox, and though Fox is a writer I admire for all the stuff he did in the ’60s at DC, he was not a Marvel writer, he was doing—as Frank Brunner said later—the monster of the

month club. I mean, Doctor Strange would fight a monster, and the following month, he’d fight a monster, they weren’t doing the Marvel continuity, there wasn’t a whole lot of characterization, so when I got that book, Frank and I were of the same age, young and creative in New York in the ’70s, so we were sharing a lot of experiences.

We just got together and said, “Why not make the guy really the magician? He’s the Sorcerer Supreme, and we’re not, but we could try to emulate it, we can try to figure out what that would be.”

So, I always make the point that the Englehart/Brunner stuff was Englehart/Brunner; we did those books together. When Frank left, I became the sole guy in charge; although Gene Colan did fabulous artwork, he wasn’t involved in the plotting. When it was Frank and me, we’d get together. He lived in New York, I still lived in Connecticut, but every couple of months, one of us would go to the other guy’s house—we would alternate—and we’d just hang out and spend an evening. I would have ideas on what I wanted to do in the book, and Frank would have ideas on what he wanted to do in the book, and we’d sit there and mesh them, and end up with something that’s greater than the sum of its parts by the time we got done.

That’s what the book was, we were just trying to think how cosmic can we get? It’s like Captain America: If you want to do a generic guy with a flag on his chest, that’s one thing; if you want to do Steve Rogers, that’s another… and it’s the same thing over and over again.

It’s like, “Okay, he’s a magician in a comic book,” or, “He’s the Sorcerer Supreme, Stephen Strange, who has this background, who goes to different dimensions, and does things that are important,” and it was taking it seriously—seriously in the sense that let’s believe in this guy, he’s the Sorcerer Supreme, so what’s the Sorcerer Supreme going to do that’s different from what Mr. Fantastic is going to do?

CBA: You obviously started off ambitiously by killing the Ancient One! You changed a fundamental part of the formula!

Steve: We were kicking it into gear, and that’s the same kind of thing I was talking about before. You do that because it makes a good story, and as it plays out, you find balls coming down because of that, and then there are things that happen because of that. It was, “Okay, he’s been the disciple of the Ancient One for a long time, let’s not make him a disciple any longer, let’s let him move on.”

I’m always in favor of people moving forward, that’s another thing…

Peter Sanderson later saw that one of the themes in my work is the rising and advancing of the spirit, which is of course what “ShangChi” meant. I named the character Shang-Chi because I looked in the I Ching and found a couple of hexagrams, put them together, and it sounded good, but it also meant the rising and advancing of the spirit, and Peter Sanderson pointed out that all my work is like that, so of course I would name somebody that if I had a chance to do it.

Doctor Strange has been in this position for quite a while, so let’s move him forward and see what happens. So yeah, we killed the Ancient One, met God, met Death, met Earth, met Charlie Manson, went to hell, did this, did that… it’s like, “Let’s go play with cosmic concepts!”

CBA: Were there mind-altering situations that aided you guys in experiencing epiphanies?

Steve: Yes, there were. As I said, we were young and creative in New York. We were in our twenties, getting paid to do fantasy, and it was the ’70s… So yes, and it’s not even really a secret, but there were definitely times when we would get together for dinner, then usually smoke a joint and we’d start talking about Doctor Strange! That’s how we did that book.

CBA: Alan Weiss was telling me some hilarious and enlightening stories about going to Rutland, roaming the streets of lower Manhattan…

Steve: Yep, we did all that. Alan went to Rutland before I did, but we did roam lower Manhattan, I remember that night.

CBA: What was that like?

Steve: It was great! You know, part of it was being the right age at the right time. It was the four of us—Weiss, Starlin, Milgrom and I— maybe it was midnight in midtown, and we said, “Let’s go down to the end of the island!” So we walked the streets, and at three in the morning, we found a construction site, and that’s where Starlin and I worked out Master of Kung Fu #17, where they have a big fight in a construction site. We’re looking at it, and we’re going, “Yeah, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Shang-Chi can do this, and then that would happen!” We passed what turned out to be the AT&T Longline Building, a totally windowless monolith, where they had telephone cables that ran to Europe, which was built to withstand an atomic explosion, to make sure nobody could destroy the cables and cut off communication to Europe. There were guys working in the street, city construction workers fixing the sewer or something, and they were all bent over this manhole with a blowtorch, doing whatever they were doing, but they were throwing three-story tall shadows on the AT&T windowless monolith building, and that’s why we made Fu Manchu’s HQ the AT&T building, [laughter] because we’re looking at these three-story tall shadows, thinking Dick Sprang! I don’t choose to live in New York—as I said, I got out of there after four weeks, went to Connecticut and later to California, and I like California very much— but I really like the ambiance of the city, particularly the farther south you go on Manhattan. Since I lived there, a lot of that area has been revamped and new neighborhoods have been created, and it’s probably not the same, but in the ’70s, you’d go south of Houston Street, and get to the warehouse district, it always felt very much like the world of The Spirit to me down there, or the ’40s Batman.

CBA: Well, Marvel’s universe was set in New York, right? Bleeker Street was where Doctor Strange lived, and midtown was where the Baxter Building was…

Steve: Again, I want to make the point that all of us—even Al, who only did work at Marvel sporadically—we were close, and we would wander New York, and we were all thinking about comics. Not all the time, not in all cases, but you’d wander around, and you’d see something, and go, “Well, I’ve got to put that in my book next month.” So we were inspired by everything, and if our minds were expanded, we were inspired by even more stuff! Probably, if we’d been in Cleveland, we’d have the same thing, [laughter] because we weren’t necessarily getting it from what we were looking it, from where our mind was going, but… Yeah, we were definitely young in a time when drugs were part of the social scene.

CBA: And you were on top of the comics world, so to speak.

Steve: Yes. We were getting paid to write fantasy, and we were enjoying ourselves.

CBA: And you guys were friends. Was Frank Brunner a part of that crew?

Steve: Sometimes. Frank was married to Jan, and the rest of us weren’t married, and that did make a difference, but quite often, Frank and Jan were involved in all this. Jan was not a wet blanket by any means, but there were times when it was just the guys. They also lived around 212th Street, Starlin lived in Hell’s Kitchen, and I don’t remember where Weiss lived but somewhere in midtown. So quite often, we’d be in midtown, Marvel was in midtown, and I’d come and go through Grand Central so, by proximity, it was mostly the four of us. But again, we all had 300 friends, and if other people were around, we didn’t tell them to go home because we were going to go off by ourselves.

CBA: Did Gerber hang out with you guys?

Steve: No, not really. Steve was not into the chemical scene.

Steve’s a more down-to-earth guy, and sort of bent in and of himself. [laughter] He’s Gerber!

CBA: Gerber’s a drug in and of himself!

Steve: I can remember walking through the Village one night with Steve when I said, “Steve, basically you’re cynical.” He said, “I’m not cynical, I’m realistic!” And that was an epiphany for me: People who are cynical think they’re being realistic, or realistic people come across as cynical to others. One way or the other! But Steve had his own approach to things, it wasn’t like he disapproved of anything we did, and we didn’t disapprove of him; it was another thing where we weren’t necessarily operating in the same circles, but Steve and I are good friends, writers together, and we shared that. He took over The Defenders from me, plotted a couple of Captain Americas while I was moving out to the West Coast. There’s no question of his being an outsider, but Alan, Jim, Allen and I shared something Steve wasn’t into, and that’s fine, but that just means we didn’t hang as much.

CBA: Who was the woman in “The Beast” that starred you and friends going to Rutland?

Steve: Glynis Wein.

CBA: I thought it was Mary Skrenes.

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

Steve: Well, I had Len and Glynis, because they were married at the time. I don’t remember putting Mary in there, but she could’ve been. Mary actually lived in Starlin’s building, or nearby, and she was quite often along on those tours. Mary was a good person to hang around with. She dated Starlin, and I think she dated Weiss here and there, and everybody was friends.

CBA: Do you look back on those days fondly?

Steve: Oh, yeah, absolutely! Not only because there’s a lot to be fond of, but again, much of that world is gone now. Comics are not done that way anymore. Marvel was at a particular place, the world was at a particular place, and we were right on top of it. And now none of that stuff is the same. If it was cool, you have to look back to

see it, because it’s different. I’m sure there are guys doing comics now who are young, in their twenties in New York City and are getting paid to write fantasy, are having their own version of it, but it was different in the ’70s.

CBA: It seems there was an intimate community then. I could feel it even as a 13-year-old going to conventions back in 1972.

Steve: For years, after I moved out to California, people would say, “I want to draw comics, how do I get in?” and I’d say, “The first thing you do is find somebody in New York where you can go sleep on his couch, and then you go into the office, show them your stuff, and be prepared to wait a couple of months, but probably no more than that, because there’s always going to be somebody who misses

Above: One of his mid-’70s highlights at Marvel was Steve Englehart’s collaboration with artist Frank Brunner on their unforgettable Doctor Strange story arcs in Marvel Premiere and Doc’s own revived title. Here’s a Brunner commission featuring Stephen and the magician’s faithful paramour, Clea. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2002 Frank Brunner. Characters ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 39

Below: Scribe Steve Englehart obviously had a ball playing with Marvel Universe continuity as he even introduced 1880s’ Marvel Western heroes Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt Outlaw, Two-Gun Kid and Ghost Rider into his Avengers storyline. Just for laffs, here’s a great Gil Kane cover art detail from a mid-’70s issue of The Rawhide Kid, just one of a superlative series of gorgeous Western covers enthusiastically rendered by the late artist.

Is Ye Ed alone in believing Gil was absolutely the finest Marvel cover artist during that time? ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

40

a deadline, and they’ll need somebody to fill in, and if you’re around they’ll go, ‘Okay, let’s try… you!’” That was how you did it! But then First Comics opened up in Chicago, and Pacific Comics opened up in San Diego, Eclipse opened up in California, and things changed. Gary Friedrich might’ve been the first guy to try to do it from outside New York, but he basically sort of stopped doing comics, or cut way down.

When I moved to California, this was pre-FedEx, and pre-fax, and I had to mail everything Special Delivery, but I knew it could be done, and I really liked California, so if I wasn’t the first, I was the one who went the farthest, or I was one of the early guys, at least, to try to do it from elsewhere. But now, of course, most people do it from elsewhere, people live where they want to live, and they work for companies that are scattered all over the country, if not the world. But in those days, yeah, you had to go to New York, so you got accepted into the group, lived in the same reality—because it was Marvel, if you’re working for Marvel, you’re writing about New York, even while you were living in New York, so that reinforced it even more— so yeah, it was a social unity.

CBA: Did you particularly hit it off with Jim Starlin?

Steve: Yeah! Jim and I were tight. Again, it was me, Starlin and Weiss, and we tried to get together when we could. Jim was doing his own thing—writing and drawing—but…

CBA: But you helped him out?

Steve: Well, yeah. Again, because we were buddies. He came to me when he was doing Captain Marvel. Mike Friedrich had been writing that book Marvel when Jim started on it, and Jim had very strong ideas about what he wanted to do, so he started to write it, and then he came to me, and said, “I don’t feel that I’m doing this as well as I can do it, so I’d like you to dialogue it… would you write the book for me? I want to step back, stop having to write it, and see what it looks like, so I can learn to be a better writer.” That was primarily because I was the writer in the group, of those of us who hung out, I worked with Jim, Alan, Allen and Frank, who were all artists. Because we were buddies, Jim asked, “Can you do that?” I’ve always had great respect for Jim for, well, for a number of reasons. But though he was highly respected for Captain Marvel, Thanos and all those characters he was doing, he wanted to improve himself, and it shows what kind of a guy he is. But that’s how I got Captain

Marvel, and we did co-create Master of Kung Fu....

CBA: You took over Captain Marvel after Jim left the book, and you held on to it for quite a while, right?

Steve: Well, I did, yes. When I took over The Avengers from Roy, my feeling was, “This is a really good book!” I was never intimidated by that stuff, it was always like, “Okay, now I have to make sure it stays a really good book.” It’s part and parcel of the whole thing, being thrown in the deep end, I’ve never shied away from that stuff.

Later, I particularly wanted to take over Daredevil right after Frank Miller left, because I thought it’d be a cool challenge. But I got caught up in bureaucratic stuff, and only got to do one issue. So, Starlin had created something very special with Captain Marvel, and I was flattered that he asked me to take it over. I approved of what he was doing by trying to make himself a better writer in the process.

And then, Al Milgrom became the artist, and again, he was part of the group, we were pals, but that was a problem, because by that time, I had moved to California, and because Al and I were friends, we tried to do it the way Brunner and I had done Doctor Strange, which was by both plotting this book. The problem was, we were living 3,000 miles apart, not 45 minutes apart, and again, it’s one thing to drop over to Frank’s house, have dinner, smoke a joint, and figure out something while we’re sitting there. It’s another thing to get on the phone once every two months… I don’t think we ever smoked any joints before we got on the phone [laughter], or at least, I didn’t. And after two months, try to work everything out on a long distance phone call, which could run two or three hours, but even at that, you’re not sitting in the same room, haven’t interacted at all in the two months since the last call. It’s not like you’re physically interacting—so I became sort of unhappy with Captain Marvel, just because the structure of it, trying to replicate an approach that couldn’t be replicated because of the logistics in our collaboration. I’m not saying overwhelming numbers, but lots of people will come up to me and say they really liked Captain America or “Batman,” but there’s a significant number who will come up and say they liked Captain Marvel, and that’s one where I always kind of think, “Well, I’m glad, but after a while, it felt like it was getting very tenuous, to me.” Again, that has nothing to do with Al or drugs or anything else; it has more to do with 3,000 miles.

CBA: Why the move to California?

Steve: I really liked the region. In ’72, I got invited to my cousin’s wedding—her family had moved to Malibu from Indiana about five years earlier—so I figured, “I’m going to California where I’ve never been, and I’ll probably never go again, so I’ll fly first class for a long trip like this.” So, I paid the money, flew first class, got to LAX, went outside, got my rent-a-car, and drove onto the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but it’s a very spectacular drive. I thought, “Whoa! Is this what California looks like?” (Of course, not all California looks like that, but I didn’t know.)

So I went and had a fabulous time in Malibu, which is a great place to have a good time, and the following year, April of ’73, I was dating a girl who had a sister who lived in San Francisco, and my birthday was coming up in April, and I said, “I’ve got some money here, so why don’t we fly out to San Francisco and see your sister?” So we went and I really liked that city, and I said, “I’m going to have to move out here sometime!” It was a ridiculous concept, because you had to live in New York if you’re going to do comics, but I said, “At some point, I’d really like to live out here.” It’s such a beautiful city, and the weather’s so nice, and you’ve got the mountains, you’ve got the forest, you’ve got all this stuff! And then I went back to Connecticut, and very quickly, I broke up with the girl! So I looked around and said, “Well, there’s really nothing holding me here, maybe I could do that!” So I moved out to the Bay Area, and really liked it, and then not too long afterwards, Weiss, Starlin and Brunner moved out (though all of them eventually moved back east). I’m the only one who stayed, but I like it here.

CBA: Were you guys all in the same general area?

Steve: When I moved out, Frank, Jan and I got a house together in Marin County, where the Grateful Dead sound crew had previously lived, and I had, in fact, gotten another girlfriend by the time I decided to move to California, so the four of us lived in this place. I think we had a 15-month lease, something like that.

During that time, Weiss and Starlin came out, Tom Orzechowski COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

came out, so all those guys crashed at our place for a while until they found their own places. When the lease was up, Starlin and Orzechowski and I got another place in the Bay Area, and the Brunners went off and got their own house. We were settling in, in our own way. And San Francisco had the underground comix scene, we were the overground guys, and there’d never been any overground guys there before, because you had to live in New York! So that was a nice meeting of the minds. I mean, I got to hang with a lot of the guys who were doing the underground stuff, Gilbert Shelton and Ron Turner. We were working in totally different fields, but at the same time, it’s like meeting Dick Giordano—if you meet the guys who were doing The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, you tend to incorporate that into your brain. You can’t do The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers for Marvel, but you can incorporate that into you brain, expanding what you think comics can be.

CBA: There was a guy who actually did work through the mails before you, Mike Friedrich. When he started the ground-level scene with Star*Reach, did you work on that stuff?

Steve: Yeah. I worked with Mike Vosburg on a strip called “Skywalker,” oddly enough, before there was Star Wars. It was Mike’s concept and art; I just dialogued it. I can’t remember if I did anything else.

CBA: Were you friends with Friedrich?

Steve: Yes, and still am. As a matter of fact, we both still live here in the Bay Area. He had written stuff for DC and Marvel, but he was always basically a California guy. He had come and crashed on people’s couches in New York—he might’ve had an apartment for a while—but he went back to California, and he was one of the first people I knew here who was a comic book person. I had known him briefly, here and there, in New York, but hadn’t known him as well as I did until I got out here.

CBA: Did you look at Star*Reach as a viable option?

Steve: Depends on what you mean by “viable.” There wasn’t a whole lot of money in it. There wasn’t anything I was going to give up Marvel to do, but I was happy to be asked to work on those books, and the attempt to connect the two worlds of mainstream and undergrounds was a great thing, I thought, and was happy to be part of it.

CBA: Mike helped you out with an issue of Doctor Strange?

Steve: That was when I was moving out West. Weiss and I were spending the Summer in Vegas, and I just couldn’t get the time to dialogue that book, but Mike did for me. He also dialogued a couple of issues of Captain America at another point, and then later, when he was doing Iron Man, he wanted to come up with a big war of the super-villains, and I pitched in on that in terms of how some of that stuff might’ve worked. We’ve collaborated in sort of minor ways a number of times.

CBA: Was there at all any resistance at the office to you introducing God into Doctor Strange?

Steve: No, not at all.

CBA: Was there any negative response to that at all?

Steve: Well, Brunner’s told this story of when we wondered if there would be a response to it, and so I wrote a letter, purportedly from a minister, to Stan, saying this is a great thing that Marvel has done, introducing God into comics, and when I was flying back to Indianapolis at Christmas time, I mailed it from the Dallas airport, so it wouldn’t come from California, and as I recall, Stan was favorably impressed by this letter. [laughter] But nobody had spoken to me sharply about the appearance of the Almighty before that. A question I get asked a lot is, “What about introducing the President into the Captain America?” That was one situation where, again, maybe they’re going to be upset about this, so I didn’t make it Nixon specifically, I kept the identity off-camera, and that was self-censorship. But again, the editorial policy at Marvel was not to get in your way. Both with God and Nixon, there were places I thought maybe I’m going too far, and I might want to do something to cover my ass, but more likely, they really weren’t going to give me a hard time.

Nobody ever gave me a hard time.

CBA: Was it intimidating at all to try and top yourself? You dealt with God, Death, the President of the United States in comic books… what next?

Steve: Oh, yeah, every month in every book! I was always trying March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

to move forward.

The reason I left Captain America was, after four years, I’d done everything I could think of to do with him, and I did not want to get to a place where I was just doing it because it was my job.

Every one of those things I was doing, I wanted to do it, and if I got to a point where I didn’t want to do it, then I stopped doing it.

CBA: Marvel was really a writers’ company in a lot of ways during the 1970s.

DC was the “good art” publisher with not necessarily the greatest stories, but Marvel seemed focused on the writing… Sal Buscema is a capable artist, but I don’t necessarily think readers go, “Oh, it’s a new Sal Buscema book coming out!” in the same way they would respond to a new Mike Kaluta book on the stands. But with Steve Englehart teamed with Sal Buscema, I really looked forward to the books every month, and even if you returned to, say, the Serpent Squad time and time again, it was always entertaining. It is one thing to try and describe the Kang/time-travel storyline you weaved in The Avengers, but it’s almost as if you had to be there to understand how much fun you were obviously having.

Steve: We were writing for the people who were there, in a sense.

We weren’t necessarily writing it for posterity. I was trying to give you what you wanted as a reader… what I wanted and what you wanted, what we shared a want for. I mean, it’s somewhat surprising that so much of my stuff entered posterity, one way or another, that people still refer to it and have fond memories of it.

CBA: It still holds up. I was just re-reading Frank and your run on Doctor Strange, and it still holds solidly, because you’re dealing with real issues of God and death.

Steve: People reading this might dismiss me as just, “Oh, he did drugs!” But that doesn’t seem to have impaired the final product at all.

We went out there and found interesting things to express, and then we did them. We weren’t just sitting around turning out some arty magazine on an irregular basis. We were professionals of that era, and yeah, I think it stands up, because it was structurally sound, and it did have something to say. If it was just generic stuff, people might look back on it with nostalgia, because that’s what they were reading when they first started reading comics, but I think some of it had something particular to say, and so you could get into that at any time. You

Above: Often, artist Allen Milgrom was downright inspired during his stint on Captain Marvel in the mid-’70s. Above is the wonderful Milgrom cover art of the debut issue of his run as penciler, #36.

Courtesy of the artist. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Al Milgrom convention sketch of Mar-Vell from 1975. Art ©2002 Al Milgrom. Capt. Marvel ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

41

Above: She love Avengers long time! Steve Englehart introduced Mantis into The Avengers continuity to let loose her feminine wiles on the male members of the team to create dissension and sexual frustration among the ranks. But apparently the former Vietnamese prostitute took on a life of her own as she eventually evolved into a being known as the Celestial Madonna. Somehow Scorpio Rose and Madame Xanadu also fit into the equation but it’s a looonnngg story! Dave Cockrum art detail from Giant-Size Avengers #2. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 42

don’t have to have been there, necessarily.

CBA: You were certainly successful with having a fan-favorite artist, a Frank Brunner, working with you on Doctor Strange.

Steve: You were right: It was a writers’ medium in the 1970s. Sometime in the ’80s, that started to change, and in the ’90s it took a total change with Image and all that, so now it’s an artist driven medium. People might go, “Well, Sal Buscema’s not Jim Lee…”. But in those days, it was writerdriven, and they might say, “Steve Englehart is no Stan Lee,” or whatever, but the books were Steve Englehart books, and the artist was the guy who conveyed the story. I love working with Sal Buscema because he conveyed a story wonderfully, and yeah, he’s not Jim Lee, but I’d work with Sal anytime, anywhere. You can’t get editors to look upon the stuff the same way these days, though. It was all about the story then, all about going places in your mind in a sense, and you’re still going there in your mind via the visuals, but it became a place where you’d see things you’d never seen before, whereas in the ’60s and ’70s, you’d see characters, you’d live with characters you hadn’t lived with before.

CBA: In very short order, Frank and your Doctor Strange was reprinted as a Treasury Edition. Because comics are a visual medium, do you look back and say, “Gee, I wish I did work with Neal Adams and Barry Windsor-Smith”?

Steve: Well, yes. I wasn’t blessed with what fits the criterion now—but it’s also true that Marvel didn’t reprint much of anything for years! At the moment, they’re about to reprint the Celestial Madonna epic, the Avengers/Defenders crossover, and a chunk of Captain America (though they’ve never told me what chunk! I assume it’s the Nomad stuff, but I don’t know). And it’s like, “Cool!” Until recently, it was pretty much impossible to get Marvel to reprint anything, other than stuff editors had written. [laughs] But yeah, if I’d done everything with Barry Smith, I’m sure I would’ve been back in print earlier… but Avengers/Defenders, that’s Bob Brown and Sal Buscema, and they’re reprinting it because it worked, not because it had fabulous artists—although again, I like both those guys.

CBA: Did you use the Marvel Method with Bob and Sal? Steve: Yes, I did.

CBA: So, you gave them very loose plots?

Steve: Well, I don’t know how loose, because I would try to make sure whatever story I had in mind would be conveyed. It wasn’t an Alan Moore kind of plot, where it takes three pages for each panel, or whatever. My theory on that has always been to give as much information as is needed. I don’t write the full script in the guise of a plot; it’s a plot, not a full script. But if there are things that need to be there, I make sure they’re in there. That goes back to my being responsible for the book in the end, I don’t want to half-think through a story, and let the artist run with it and have to solve all the problems at that point. I want to think it through completely, and if I have thought it through completely, I’ll give that information to the artist. But that said, I’m always happiest when the artist can take what I have given him and add more to it. It is a hybrid medium, so I’d rather the artist and I both be cooking on all cylinders. You don’t always get that, but….

CBA: Did you write anything out for Brunner?

Steve: Sure. When we’d work it out, we’d usually figure out what was going to happen, and then I’d go away and write it down. I didn’t have to do it in very great detail, because we’d already talked about it. Yeah, we “got cosmic,” but I still went back and made sure I didn’t lose it in all the haze. It’s my responsibility to make sure when this thing comes out, it’s as good as we thought it was going to be.

Whatever I’m supposed to do in that process, I did. Whatever Frank was supposed to do, he did.

CBA: Gil Kane had long complained that the onus was placed upon the artist at Marvel, who had to take a big part of a writer’s role. Specifically Gil would complain that Stan Lee would only give him—the artist—a couple of paragraphs for the plot of an entire issue and Gil had to flesh out what he had gotten. Did you have

feelings about that?

Steve: I wanted to be friends with the artist and wanted him to do the best job he could, so I was doing everything to facilitate that.

When I took over both Captain America and The Avengers, they said, “We’ve got this job in the drawer here, it was going to be a fill-in, but it’s been sitting there for a while, it’s a Captain America story, but put it in either Captain America or The Avengers,” and I eventually put it into The Avengers in #106 or 107, something like that. It was a fully-drawn issue by George Tuska, and I got Stan’s plot along with it, and Stan’s plot was three-quarters of a page. It basically said, “Captain America and Bucky fight these guys, and then they go over here and fight these guys, and then they go off and fight these guys.” It really didn’t have a whole lot more information than that!

But that was Stan, who was coming towards the end of his writing career, doing a fill-in job that could well have been the low-water mark, in terms of what he provided. We’ve all been through the whole Stan and Jack thing….

CBA: According to Gene Colan and Gil, that was pretty much Stan’s modus operandi. As writer, Stan would give them maybe three paragraphs, generally one page for 20 or so pages.

Steve: The Marvel Method probably came out of Stan’s collaborating with Jack, who wanted to take a more active role, and they defined the new approach, and then other artists walking in the door were expected to do as much as Kirby.

CBA: Well, it made it easier for Stan, but it didn’t necessarily make it any easier for the artist.

Steve: Well, Stan was writing 13 books a month at one point, so he must’ve been doing it at about that level.

CBA: Not to make too fine a point on it, Stan was dialoguing 13 books, but nonetheless, it’s nowhere near the level of writing fullscript for 13 separate titles.

Steve: Gil’s background was to get full scripts from Gardner Fox and John Broome, and everybody comes from whatever background they come from. My plots generally run probably somewhere between five and ten pages, because I do break it down page by page, because I need to pace it for myself. Because I do have an artist’s mentality—if not an artist’s hand—everything that I write, I can see how it could be drawn. I can look at text on a page, and think, “Okay, I would need four panels to do this right, so I’m only putting four panels on this page.” That kind of thing. I can see how it could be drawn, and I think that’s one of my strengths over the years, in that I don’t ask artists to do stuff that can’t be done, or would be silly, or any of that kind of stuff. But I think I pretty much tell the story in the plot, I just don’t do the dialogue and I don’t write the specific words. I did not do plots like Gil’s complaining about; I didn’t hand people three paragraphs and say, “Well, I’ll just dialogue whatever you do.”

CBA: When Marvel started returning artwork, there was this curious policy for a time where the writer would get a portion of the art….

Steve: Absolutely!

CBA: What was the thinking behind that? Why should the writer receive a portion of the pages?

Steve: I thought we should then, and I think so now! The genesis of that thinking was, it was a writer-driven company, and while the time involved for a writer was less than the time involved for a penciler or an inker, the writer was still a part of the process of creating that page. It was Roy Thomas who developed the idea, which was that the writer gets 10% of the pages, and the other 90% is split equally between penciler and inker, who would decide who gets what. So they pick out the 10%—which on a 17-page book came out to two pages—and it was usually the pages with the most dialogue and the least art, you know, [laughter] but that was okay.

Of course, this was before people were selling artwork at $200 a pop!

But the policy wasn’t a monetary thing; it was just, “Well, we all worked on this book, so we should split it up!” It’s artwork, yeah, but it is also artwork with lettering on it that has words that I wrote, and the artwork is based on a story I told him to draw, so I think I should get some of it! 10% seemed about right to me. Eventually, when the artwork started to be sold at conventions, the artists started saying, “We want it all,” and that’s when it changed. But I did manage to get some nice old Don Heck Avengers pages and some Frank Brunner COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Doctor Strange pages, and I think I deserve them. I’d like to have two pages out of every book I’ve written!

CBA: There must’ve been some debate over that policy.

Steve: Well, I was in California, so I wasn’t really a part of it. As I recall, after a while, they said, “It’s changing; the writer doesn’t get anything anymore.” I had agitated to get the policy, and while I thought it was a good policy, I didn’t agitate against the change.

CBA: I heard that one artist carved out all of the word balloons and sent them to the writer! [laughs] Steve: It’s too bad. A writer goes to conventions, gets some free meals and a hotel room, and the artist gets to go make a thousand bucks selling his artwork! [laughter] It’s too bad it works out that way, but again, I gave up being an artist a long time ago, so if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.

CBA: Why did you leave Marvel?

Steve: In the ’70s? This is a well-known story, I think: I came in when Stan was still editor, although it was right at the end of that period. Then, Roy became editor. The story I heard was, Roy didn’t like dealing with the people upstairs, he liked doing comics, and didn’t like the political business side of things. So he left, and then I guess it was Len next, then Marv became editor-in-chief, but neither one of them stuck around for that long. And then Gerry Conway took over, and the first thing Gerry did was say, “I’m the editor-inchief, so I get to do whatever I want to do. I want to write The Avengers and The Defenders,” and he called up Gerber and myself and said, “I have the power to take these books, so I’m taking them!” I said, “I’ve been writing The Avengers for four years, and I don’t think this is fair,” and we got into a good shouting match.

CBA: Did you guys have a relationship before that?

Steve: Yeah, we were social friends. Gerry used to have parties out at his place in Queens and, quite often, if people didn’t want to go walk to the subway and go home at three in the morning, they would sleep on Gerry’s couch until dawn, go get some breakfast and then go home. We were part of that whole social aspect of comics, and I considered Gerry a friend, not close but certainly I thought of him as a good guy, and there was no problem hanging around with him when we’d get together. But maybe power went to his head. He was younger than the rest of us by a couple of years, and he just decided he was taking those books!

CBA: But he was only in the position for a month, tops.

Steve: Because we blew up! It’s very much been my experience with comic companies that when you get to situations like that, and you say, “Look, it’s him or me,” they pretty much always say, “Well, then, it’s you. We’re not going to be pushed into anything.” And I’ve seen this so many times over the years! So then, you leave, a week or so later, he gets fired! It’s like, they’re not going to do it because you had an ultimatum, but they hear you that it’s not working! So, Gerry got bounced pretty quickly because he was acting like that. But in the meantime, Gerber and I had left, and I think Starlin also.

CBA: The door was not open for you to come back?

Steve: Oh, it might’ve been, but I didn’t want to go back!

CBA: Was it a matter of pride?

Steve: It’s that Captain America right-and-wrong attitude. I said, “This is wrong, and you should solve it.” They said, “We’re not going to.” So I said, “Screw it!” and I called up Jenette Kahn, who had just been made publisher of DC (which was more moribund at the time— everybody who was worth anything at DC had gone… that’s probably a blanket statement, but it was like there weren’t a whole lot of famous people left at DC) and I said, “I’m at liberty; you got anything for me?” She went away, called me back and said, “Well, you know, we don’t really have three books that are like Doctor Strange.” I said, “Well, I do many other things besides Doctor Strange!” [laughter] Eventually, it worked out to where she asked me to come over and revamp the Justice League, because they’d stagnated, and she wanted them to be as cool as the Marvel characters, and I said, “Okay, I’ll do the Justice League characters, but I particularly want to do Batman.” So, I didn’t look back, really. I mean, I never expected to leave Marvel and go to DC, but once I went, I didn’t have any March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

interest in going back.

CBA: Was it because you were in California, that you didn’t consider yourself for the editor-in-chief position?

Steve: Yeah. I was not in New York. I was Roy’s assistant editor, I’d worked my way up from bottom of the totem pole to middle of the totem pole, I guess, by the time I decided to become a freelancer and give up coming into the office. If I had been in New York, I probably would’ve followed Roy—although it might’ve been Marv, he’d also been around for a long time, and Len had been with him.

But I was in California, and I was enjoying being a freelancer. The idea of moving back to New York... again, Roy had explained why he didn’t like having the job, and it didn’t sound like it would be worth moving to New York. You know, over the years since then, I’ve said, “Well, if I had done that, my life would’ve taken a very different turn, and I would’ve been an editor-in-chief, and that would’ve gotten me this job or that job,” and all that. But that would’ve meant being a different person, and that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

CBA: You had some interesting marketing ideas, such as the Avengers/Defenders crossover, and Nomad, where Captain America didn’t even appear in his own book for several months. These were some interesting ideas, perhaps ahead of their time, and I was wondering if, in some alternative universe, you had become Marvel editor-in-chief, if you would’ve pursued similar approaches.

Steve: I think so, because I can think of cool things to do, and if I can do them, I’ll do them. I’ve also thought if I had been an editor-inchief, I would’ve been exactly like Roy and Stan in that regard. I mean, I would’ve tried to hire the best people, and then leave them alone. That’s what I think is the most effective editorial position: To hire people who can do the job and let them do it, and not get in their way.

Above: Yeah, we’re again taking liberties as Roy Thomas actually wrote the story behind this cover art of Captain America #215, yet another retrospective of the life of our star-spangled hero, but we couldn’t resist showcasing this awesome illustration by penciler Gil Kane and inker Joe Sinnott. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MORE ENGLEHART Though Ye Ed had to significantly edit this interview for space considerations, we’ll be featuring all outtakes as well as an in-depth discussion of Steve’s ’70s DC work, especially the Batman epics with Marshall Rogers in the forthcoming Comic Book Artist Collection Vol. 2, coming in May. We’ll also chat with Marshall as well as include other new material in that tome.

43

CBA Interview

The Cosmic Awareness of Stephen Leialoha The artist on his intro to the field, Warlock and a certain Duck Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

Below: Here’s a recent Howard the Duck illo by Steve Leialoha produced for a March 2002 Kansas City comic convention where the artist and writer Steve Gerber are guests. Courtesy of Steve Leialoha.

Art ©2002 the artist. Howard ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

44

Could Steve Leialoha be the mellowest guy in comics? Partnered with cartoonist-author-feminist-you name it Trina Robbins, Steve is the quintessential, laid-back, San Francisco hippie cartoonist who exudes calmness, and he’s one fine artist to boot. Known primarily as an inker, he came of age during Marvel’s cosmic heyday in the mid’70s, a refreshing new talent blasting on the scene. This interview took place in December 2001 and it was copyedited by the artist.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from?

Steve Leialoha: I was born and raised in San Francisco, although my father is Hawaiian, from Hawaii.

CBA: What does your name mean?

Steve: Well, it has any number of meanings but it’s made of two Hawaiian words: “lei” and “aloha”; “lei” being flower, and “aloha,” our handy, all-purpose sort of greeting, meaning “love,” and can also be “goodbye.” It’s kind of like “Shalom.” “Leialoha” is also a nickname, a term of endearment.

CBA: Did you grow up in the city?

Steve: Yep. Born in San Francisco and still here, although I moved to the suburbs when I was a kid.

CBA: You were born in 1952?

Steve: Yes. CBA: Did you start drawing at a young age?

Steve: My mother told me I did. Apparently, I was always drawing, even before I can remember scribbling and doing stuff. I remember putting a mural on the front room wall of our house when I was a little kid, which my parents didn’t particularly appreciate at the time. [laughs] I was probably like two or three.

So yeah, I was always drawing.

CBA: Did you clue into comic strips at all?

Steve: I was your basic reader of comics. When I was six or seven, I started to read comics. My father would give me old, used comics. I was reading but I didn’t really become aware of comics, per se, until I was 12 when I became a fan of comics.

Up to that point, I read them and enjoyed them but it wasn’t from a particularly critical point of view. So I read comics but nothing that stuck out in my mind.

CBA: What were you drawing?

Steve: I would just draw anything that was around. It wasn’t cartooning. In the third grade I drew a buffalo I was particularly proud of. Stuff like that. I can remember drawing a house and that led to my first encounter with an art critic. Someone told me the perspective was wrong, although I knew it wasn’t wrong. [laughter] CBA: What comics got you hooked?

Steve: Probably around 1961 or ’62, I became a big fan of DC artists Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson. In retrospect, it was all of Julie Schwartz’s comics that interested me, although after awhile I wasn’t quite so particular. I just wanted to read all the comics that came out. I was a big fan of Wayne Boring’s Superman, for example. Not that I knew any of their names early on, but I was able to figure out certain styles. I remember I didn’t care for Joe Kubert initially, although I love his stuff now. When I was a kid, I liked the clean… well…

CBA: Not the organic Kubert look?

Steve: Exactly. I tended to gravitate towards that more slick style of inking: Bernie Sachs, Frank Giacoia, Murphy Anderson and, eventually, Joe Sinnott.

CBA: Did you have friends who were like-minded?

Steve: A couple. There were three or four of us in our little neighborhood. By that point, I was living in Pacifica, a little community south of San Francisco. These days, it’s all one great metropolitan, sprawling mass of houses, but then it was the next little community down. One of my collecting pals was [inker] Al Gordon who lived around the corner. I probably met him somewhere around 1961 or ’62, when we were both little kids. We used to reinforce each other’s comics collecting mania by the time I started actively collecting. When I was in high school, I didn’t really have access to older stuff, but suddenly, there are all these EC reprints with Frazetta covers, all the Burroughs books, and a whole range of old material was in print again. It was a good time to be a young comics fan because there was also so much stuff that started up in that point.

CBA: San Francisco is renowned for its used book shops. Did you haunt those?

Steve: Well, it was a little tricky to get into San Francisco. So every couple of weeks, me and Al would go into the city and check out some of the used bookstores. The old used comics were 5¢ apiece. In particular, I remember finding a couple of mint copies of Jack Kirby/Wally Wood issues of Challengers of the Unknown, which I still have, as well as just old comics in general. After awhile, we were able to get a fair sense of the history of comics.

CBA: Were you into other genre material, like Doc Savage?

Steve: Oh, yes. All of that stuff. It started with Andre Norton science-fiction novels, and eventually I discovered Ray Bradbury and all the classics. That’s when they started reprinting Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, and so on. I was your basic sf/fantasy fan.

CBA: You later had a brush with Ray Bradbury?

Steve: Yes. I was one of the contributors to the Bradbury Comic Chronicles, which was a lot of fun, adapting his short stories. I drew the adaptation to “October Country,” the one where the little kid is the only human in a family of werewolves and vampires. He’s feeling left out because everyone is special, except for him. [chuckles] It’s a cute little story. Early on, during the Star*Reach days, Mike Friedrich sent out copies of the books and Bradbury wrote me a letter of encouragement, which was very nice. This was probably in the mid-’70s. I know he’s the kind of guy who, when he sees stuff he likes and he lets people know. That meant a lot at the time, and it still does. It was certainly nice of him.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

February 2002

CBA: When you were in Pacifica, you were able to go into San Francisco frequently?

Steve: Fairly frequently. It’s only minutes away by car but when you have to rely on public transportation—which was pretty pathetic in those days; a Greyhound bus—it took an hour to get into the city.

CBA: Did you have enough freedom to go to town by yourself?

Steve: Oh yeah. I grew up in the city and knew San Francisco so my parents didn’t mind me just going off and wandering around. I wasn’t the type to get into trouble.

CBA: The city is renowned for its Bohemian culture. It’s called the Paris of the West, right?

Steve: After a while, I also became a music junkie so I would go into San Francisco as often as possible, by the time I was 15, to see as many of the bands as I could. I did manage to see most of them at one time or another.

CBA: You were coming of age during the Summer of Love in 1967, right?

Steve: As they called it. Although, who knew at the time? [laughs] I remember when I first heard about the Hippies, Haight-Ashbury, and all that stuff, I really only had the vaguest idea of what they were talking about because when you were really there, it didn’t quite seem as that big a deal. Of course, in retrospect, growing up in San Francisco, it was only until I got out of the city that I realized it was a bit different than the rest of the country, at least in those days.

CBA: How would you characterize it?

Steve: Well, like you said, the Bohemian lifestyle. More tolerant of radical arts, and stuff like that.

CBA: And in retrospect, did you absorb any of that attitude?

Steve: I think so. Well, I’m still not sure how, exactly, but my politics are considerably farther to the Left than a lot of people, but not as much as some. [laughs] I always thought of myself as a Conservative in San Francisco. I always remembered U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein being referred to as a “flaming Liberal,” but people here think of her as a middle-of-the-road Conservative. [laughter] CBA: Depends on what wing you’re standing in, I guess.

Steve: So, as often as possible, I went to see The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and anyone else that was playing.

CBA: Did you clue into the underground comix emerging at the time? Rick Griffin was doing posters, right?

Steve: I was a huge Rick Griffin fan from the very beginning. I remember his posters beginning to show up. What I like about the so-called hippie thing, was that you got all these psychedelic posters. [laughs] Thursday and Sunday were free poster nights at the Fillmore West, so I usually tried to go then. I have a huge stack of Rick Griffin stuff, dating back to ’67, maybe ’66.

CBA: Did you ever meet Rick?

Steve: I did get to know him. He was a pretty nice guy who had his own interesting take on Christianity. I always thought of it as the Church of the Surfing Jesus. [laughs] CBA: Was he really the blonde Adonis type? I just always imagined him as this golden surfer dude.

Steve: Well, he certainly was in those days. Later on, he seemed more like a biker kind of guy. I remember at one point, he moved to San Francisco from southern California and we found out about it as we were crossing the street. This motorcycle roars up and the guy takes off a helmet and, hey, it was Rick! He was a really nice guy.

CBA: Oh, he knew you?

Steve: Yes. Actually, the first place I ever met him was at a Katy Keene convention in Santa Barbara. [laughs] You know, that was pretty weird because I don’t think either of us actually planned to be there. [laughs] Well, I was with Trina and she’s a fan of Katy Keene. Bill Woggon is a really nice guy and Rick’s then-wife was a Katy Keene fan as well. So he was there, that’s where I met him. We got to chatting about the old days. I told him I did comics and he thought that was interesting and I told him I was a big fan of all of his poster work, and so on and so forth. You know how these things go.

CBA: So you were able to give him his props?

Steve: Exactly, and I got to hang out with him a little bit.

CBA: Did you have any chance to hang out with any other underground cartoonists?

Steve: I wasn’t really a big fan of underground comix, per se, March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

but over the years I did meet a lot of them. Of course, a lot of them lived in the Bay Area and you end up at parties and these people would just show up. For example, S. Clay Wilson is a neighbor of ours who lives a block away, so we see him all the time. He’s a nice guy, believe it or not….

CBA: What was it about the undergrounds that didn’t interest you? Was this a remnant of your attraction to the slick artwork of Julie Schwartz’s books?

Steve: I think so. Even as a kid, I gravitated towards the polished stuff and science-fiction stories. Although as an adult, I have a much wider interest than I did as a kid. You start off being very set in your ways, but as you get older, you learn to relax a bit.

CBA: Obviously, cartooning was in vastly different places during your youth. There was Topps trading cards, Mad magazine, CARtoons….

Steve: Early on, I was a big fan of Mad magazine, which I started reading in 1960. So I got to recognize work by Wally Wood and Jack Davis. Later, I did get to meet Wally Wood. One of the things I like best about being a professional cartoonist (or artist, however you want to phrase it) was being able to meet all the other artists.

CBA: That’s why I love my job. [laughs] Steve: You get to talk to everyone about all the stuff that you want to talk about.

CBA: When I first saw your work, I was really impressed by it, from the word go.

Steve: Well, that’s nice of you. I also think of it as I got

Above: The artist Steve Leialoha in an outtake from the Eclipse Comics artists trading card photo session by Mark Leialoha.

Courtesy of Steve.

Below: Panel detail (with slight computer manipulation) of penciler Jim Starlin and inker Steve Leialoha’s Adam Warlock from Warlock #12. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

45

Right inset: Detail of a panel from Warlock #13. Jim Starlin, pencils; Steve Leialoha, inks. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Contributor Steve Leialoha tells us these are, “My very first inked panels for Marvel. ([Penciler Jim] Starlin was going through a Piranesi phase.) This is the only Warlock page I still have…”

From Warlock #11. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

46

lucky. I mean, I started working with Starlin, and our styles fit together though I was a rank beginner. He was a really tight penciler.

So it was fairly easy for me to learn simply by tracing. As we worked on Warlock, Jim would do looser and looser pencils ’til by the time he left the book—of course he left mid-book— CBA: Literally in the middle of the book?

Steve: Yeah. [laughs] So half the pages were little squiggles and balloon shapes. You know: character goes here, background here. [laughs] He planned on doing it himself and then he got into an argument with the management at Marvel and said, “I don’t want to finish it.

You finish it.” So I completed the job for him. He’d already inked the first couple of pages, maybe a third of it penciled, and a third of it was really loose. Anyway, it was a great learning experience for me. I mean, it was gradual enough that I could figure out how to ink over layouts and work on my own drawing.

CBA: Did you get involved with comics fandom in the ’70s?

Steve: A little bit. In ’67, there was an issue of Castle of Frankenstein that had an article on fandom in it. It listed a bunch of fanzines and I think I sent off for a couple. One of them was the first issue of witzend, which wasn’t really a fanzine. I did a comic strip for a fanzine put out by Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, and that was in ’67. That was my first printed comic book story and it sort of got the ball rolling for me. I also did some work for another fanzine in Georgia, the same ’zine where I first saw Jeff Jones’ fan work right before he turned professional. But I didn’t really do a whole lot of fan-type stuff.

CBA: You weren’t big on corresponding?

Steve: Exactly. [laughs] I was not very good at mail.

CBA: Was there a convention culture out there at all?

Steve: No, there was nothing at all. There was a science-fiction convention but I didn’t know about it in ’68. I missed that. It was a Worldcon in Oakland or Berkeley. The very first convention I went to was the San Diego Con in ’71.

CBA: That’s quite a trip! You were 19?

Steve: I guess I was, yes. I remember taking a plane. It was $12 for the ticket.

CBA: Dude! [laughs] I think it’s that price again!

Steve: It was at San Diego State University. I remember they had just built the school and turned the dorms into a temporary hotel for attendees. 200 attendees showed up, but it’s what got me all excited because suddenly, the thought entered my mind that I might possibly do this as a living. It was great to see Jack Kirby’s original work.

CBA: You had become a big fan of Marvel?

Steve: By ’71, I was a total comic book junkie and a huge fan of all of those guys.

CBA: Did you even follow Jack Kirby when he went over to DC? Steve: Oh, at that time, I was buying all the comics.

CBA: So you weren’t necessarily discriminatory?

Was it only superhero comics?

Steve: I bought them all. [laughs] After a while, I couldn’t afford to buy them all and certain Charlton titles began to slide by the wayside.

CBA: But you would buy House of Secrets and the DC mystery books?

Steve: Oh, yes. All of them.

CBA: Would you buy the war books?

Steve: All the war stuff. By that time, I was a huge fan of Kubert, Russ Heath, and the whole thing. The war books weren’t my favorites but as long as it was comics, I was happy. Then going to that convention, seeing Jack Kirby’s own personal work. I saw the first stuff that Royer had inked and it was Jack Kirby’s Gods pieces. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them but they’re really big. I’ve always wished that they’d put out full-size reproductions of those because they’re just really nice. Anyway, I saw that and it was like, “Wow! Look what you can do in comics!” Not that I did….

CBA: I recall meeting Jack in ’72 and finding that he was a really nice guy.

Steve: Oh, yes. Around 1970, I sent samples up to DC, hoping to get work (though, in retrospect, I was nowhere near ready). I got a very nice, polite letter back from Carmine Infantino and he told me I should send copies of my work to Jack Kirby, who, Carmine said, was putting together his own books out in California and was looking for people. I don’t think it was actually the case, but…

CBA: There was actually the intention at some point of starting a “DC Comics West,” with Jack as boss.

Steve: That may have been the idea. Carmine didn’t spell it out but I think that is what they were thinking of at that point. I don’t remember if In the Days of the Mob or Spirit World had come out yet or not.

CBA: They were released pretty early in the game.

Steve: Anyway, Carmine said I should send samples to Jack, which I did, and Jack responded with a very nice letter of encouragement, telling me he wasn’t going to be doing whatever it was Carmine said he was going to do. Then Jack gave me a few tips which were extremely helpful. He was always that way. And, as he would always say, “Someday, kid, you’ll be drawing better than me.” [laughs] No one really believed him, but it was nice of him to say.

CBA: Did you go to school for art?

Steve: I went to a local junior college, the College of San COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Mateo, which had an okay art department but they had a life drawing teacher who was really good. He was a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Art and taught in the classical method—the skeletal structure, musculature, and all of that—so that was pretty much the extent of my formal training.

CBA: When did you decide that you wanted to become a comic book artist?

Steve: That’s kind of a nebulous thing. It’s built up as time went on.

CBA: You just saw it more and more as a possibility over time that you could actually do this?

Steve: Yes. In those days, the line was that you had to be in New York to do comics. So I didn’t seriously think about doing comics, except just for fun. There was no thought as to making a living doing it, or anything. But at a certain point, I had to get a job and I thought, “Well, why not try it?” I started showing samples around at some of the local conventions here. At this point, we’re talking ’74.

Of course, the companies had loosened up considerably about the notion of working with people who didn’t live in New York, the main example of that being Jack Kirby in Sherman Oaks, of course.

CBA: Did you think about going to Western Publishing at all?

Steve: I wasn’t really aware of them. Also, I had the distinct impression that they all lived in New York, which wasn’t the case, but that’s what it seemed like at the time, except for the funny animal books. I enjoyed reading them but I knew I wasn’t going to be drawing them. So in ’74, there was a whole—I don’t know if it was an exodus, but a lot of comics people suddenly were living, actually, all in one house in Moraga [laughs]. There was Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, and Tom Orzechowski. Alan Weiss and Frank Brunner were in Oakland.

CBA: Tom was from the East?

Steve: Tom is from Detroit, along with Starlin, Milgrom, and a host of others.

CBA: How did you hook up with these guys?

Steve: At a local Berkeley convention. Howard Chaykin lived here for a short time and then he went back to New York. Frank Brunner and Mike Friedrich also came here.

CBA: Mike was a native San Franciscan, right?

Steve: Yes, he was from this area, and had been living in New York, and had just moved back. So that was a lot of guys and I showed my work around. Alan Weiss asked me if I wanted to help out inking some of his stuff. At that point, he was doing Tarzan for some Swedish publisher, some really nice work, though I never saw it printed—I’m assuming it did. Maybe Mark Evanier wrote it. It was one of those weird European comics that just never see the light of day over here, particularly Tarzan and all that Disney stuff. So up to that point, I really hadn’t done a whole lot of comics. The fanzine story for Marv Wolfman and I think I did—oh, Mark Evanier had put together a group. I’d met him in San Diego Con in ’71. In ’72, I did a story that he wrote and John Pound inked.

CBA: John Pound is from out West?

Steve: Yeah, he was part of the San Diego group.

CBA: Oh right, he was one of the Five-String Mob, right?

Steve: We were all so impressed that Jack Kirby put them into his comic book. [laughs] CBA: Did you know Barry Alfonso?

Steve: I met all of them in passing.

CBA: How about Dave Stevens?

Steve: Yeah. I’m not sure exactly when I met Dave, somewhere in the early ’70s. Scott Shaw!, in particular, was always extremely funny. [laughs] His Oddball Comics are great, but what really makes it is just the way he describes them.

CBA: At least in my experience, you have a laid-back, easygoing style. You’re almost quintessentially Californian in being mellow and cool. Did you have that persona then?

Steve: I think so.

CBA: Because a lot of us Eastern guys are more excitable… like Howard— Steve: —We don’t necessarily need to name names! [laughs] CBA: Fast talking and quick moving guys.

Steve: But I always got along fine with New Yorkers. I mean, my mother was from Boston and lived in New York. Then she came out March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

West. Also, half of San Francisco consists of ex-New Yorkers. But it’s definitely much more laid back here than New York. I always liked New York but whenever I go there, I just get so wired. [laughs] It’s a great place to get work, and get excited about doing work, but I like to leave town in order to actually do the work. [laughs] CBA: When was the first time you came East?

Above: Steve Leialoha’s whimsical Steve: After I got approach is evident in his inks hired at Marvel in ’75, over Jim Starlin in this panel starting on “Warlock.” detail of Eros from Well, I visited there Warlock #12. when I was a kid. I think the first time I was actually in New York, that I can remember was in ’57, ’56.

CBA: Did you guys fly or did you drive?

Steve: I remember we flew once or twice, which was certainly quite the occasion in those days.

CBA: Was it a propeller plane?

Steve: Yes. I remember flying east

Above: Steve Leialoha’s inks over Gene Colan pencils on the cover of Howard the Duck #5.

Courtesy of Steve. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

47

Above: Steve Leialoha’s cover art for The Comic Reader, commenting on the tug of war between writer Steve Gerber and Marvel Comics over ownership of Howard the Duck. Courtesy of the artist. Characters ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

48

on one of those Tri-Star Constellations, with the three-rudder tail? I always liked those. I was always a big airplane fan as well.

CBA: And you drove the other time?

Steve: I took a bus. I remember that seemingly took forever, but a good way to see the country.

CBA: I guess! With a sore behind.

Steve: Yeah, I can remember being five years old and my mother pointing out the Empire State Building as we went by in a cab and from that angle, all the buildings look kind of the same so I couldn’t see what the big fuss was.

CBA: You couldn’t see the monkey on top. So you met these guys because you encountered them at the Berkeley Con? Steve: Exactly. I showed them my work and Alan Weiss wanted some inking help on the stuff he was doing. Then Starlin asked me if I wanted to ink “Warlock.” That’s really what got the ball rolling.

CBA: He asked you?

Steve: Yeah. Well, Marvel was awfully loose in those days. In retrospect, it’s just astounding. I mean, there’s no comparison, really, to the way things are run today. Starlin just wanted to do the whole book out West and send the completed thing in to Marvel and just have them print it. The editor didn’t quite see it that way. [laughs]

CBA: Tom Orz was out there?

Steve: When Jim started doing Warlock, he was penciling, inking, and coloring, and Tom would do the lettering. I think they were all living in the same house, so it was literally all done in-house. After awhile, when “Warlock” got its own book, Jim wanted to get somebody else to ink it. And I remember it was between me and the other new guy, Terry Austin. But Jim went with me because I lived within commuting distance and it worked out. He asked me if I could ink, and I said, “Sure.” I ran out and bought some pens and a brush and started to figure out how to ink. [laughs] Like I said, it was a good learning experience.

CBA: Did you guys party a lot?

Steve: Not really. Occasionally, but not a lot. Despite rumors you may have heard, there wasn’t that much partying. Except in the case of Alan Weiss who lived in a house with stewardesses and God knows what went on there. [laughs] I used to wonder why he did so little work and then I saw where he lived. [laughs] “Ah, that explains it!”

CBA: Stewardesses!

Steve: Yeah, Alan Weiss and the stewardesses.

CBA: Some of the guys told me that for story conferences, someone would often light up a joint.

Steve: Far be it from me to tell on anyone, but despite the stereotype, I’ve never much been into drugs. I always liked rock ’n’ roll, and all the rest, [laughs] but never much been into drugs. Whenever I get stoned, I lose all interest in drawing. Even if I were interested in drawing, once you sober up, it looks like you were stoned when you were doing it. [laughs] It’s not conducive to doing your best work.

CBA: Maybe in conceiving storylines?

Steve: True. For coming up with ideas, it’s not too bad. But as an inker, it’s not a particularly good idea. [laughs] CBA: Was it really intimidating, the first time you sat down with Jim Starlin’s tight pencils? Was it petrifying?

Steve: It was a bit intimidating, although he’d given me some photocopies of a few of his pages just to try out, so I eased myself into it.

CBA: So you just built up your confidence.

Steve: Yeah. Al Milgrom used to say that with Starlin’s pencils, all you have to do is pour ink in the upper corner and it would just settle into the grooves. Such a heavy inker. [chuckles] So I knew, going into it, that it was all there on the page. Worst case scenario, I just had to be really slow and careful. I do remember the first page taking, like, six or seven hours to ink, just because I wanted to be absolutely sure I didn’t make any mistakes.

Fortunately, I got a lot faster.

CBA: Quickly?

Steve: Relatively so.

CBA: What would be your working method?

Steve: At that point in time, I inked everything with a Hunt Crowquill 102. It wasn’t until later that I learned to use a brush after being inspired by seeing some of the real brush masters doing their thing, particularly Alex Niño and Neal Adams. So when I got into the comics, some of the local young guys who got their start at the same time were Carl Potts, Frank Cirocco (if you remember him) and Brent Anderson. In fact, I remember meeting Brent in ’74 at a comic book store signing with Jim Starlin, Alan Weiss and all those guys, which is also where I discovered Moebius comics and started getting into all the French comics.

CBA: Was it Métal Hurlant?

Steve: Yeah, I came across the first issue of Métal Hurlant and a few of the Lieutenant Blueberry albums. Also, this big book called Gir, which showed his work in his various styles.

CBA: Did it feel like you were entering comics at an exciting time?

Steve: It was for me. After having gotten out of college, you know, the idea began to shape to take the possibility of doing comics a little more seriously. In particular, Jack’s Fourth World comics got me all excited. I remember Starlin saying that New Gods #7 got him all excited about doing comics. I think it had that effect on a lot of people. It’s like, “Wow, look what you can do in a comic book!” So yeah, it was a real exciting time.

CBA: All of these new artists were showing up.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Steve: The French stuff started being imported so it was literally a worldwide thing, and there were all these interesting new artists.

CBA: Wrightson Kaluta, Barry Smith were all coming into their own. A real artistic sensibility was emerging in mainstream comics.

Steve: That’s true. A lot of people don’t realize it but there were no new comic book artists coming into the business until Neal Adams dropped in, then Steranko, and suddenly, all the young guys.

Then the idea popped into our heads that there was room for even newer guys. So yeah, I followed all of their work from the very beginning as well.

CBA: You seem to have a lush inking style. Were you inspired by the Filipinos?

Steve: Yes. I didn’t literally sit down and try to ink like anyone in particular, although in my mind, I sort of gravitated towards the Murphy Anderson look, and I knew they all used the brush. When I started, I was just using a pen because I didn’t know how to use a brush. In fact, I had met Alex Niño in ’74, something like that, and I remember asking him how you ink with a brush. He said, “Well, you just pick it up and after ten years, you know how to use it.” [laughs] I remember thinking, “That’s not a lot of help.” Then, after having picked up a brush and using it for about ten years, I realized that it’s really the only way you can explain it. I mean, you can’t tell somebody how to use a brush.

You just have to start using it and either you figure it out or you don’t. But being able to actually watch Alex Niño inking with a brush was helpful and eventually meeting a lot of the other guys: Nestor Redondo and watching Alfredo Alcala ink. There are a lot of guys who started out at the same time that I did, like Potts and Cirocco and they all went off to New York and got work, working in Neal Adams’ studio. When I started working for Marvel in ’75, inking Warlock, I figured that I should go to New York and meet the people I’m working for, which is always a good idea, let them know you’re an actual person. So in ’75, I went to visit New York and I stayed with Carl Potts in Queens. So I hung around Neal’s studio and watching him ink with a brush was a revelation and it all sort of grew from there. Also, my first visit up to Marvel, I met, among others, John Romita and—I remember I’d met John Romita and Joe Kubert at a convention in San Francisco—well, Oakland, actually—at the Claremont in ’75.

CBA: Funny you mention them both in the same breath. [chuckles] I’m doing an issue called “Fathers and Sons” and one side’s the Kuberts and one side’s the Romitas. [laughs] Steve: There you go. As I continued working professionally, my influences broaden out considerably and one of them was John Romita just because he had a really nice brush approach. My first lessons in trying to figure out how to use a brush were people like Caniff, Walt Kelly, and Will Eisner. I learned how to do folds by copying some Romita stuff, and so on. So anyway, I went up to Marvel in ’75 having already met Romita, which helped. I met Frank Giacoia.

Watching him ink was—you know, just to see how other professionals work was, once I got out of high school, was all the schooling I needed.

CBA: What was the impact of the Filipinos? A lot of fans generalize about the Filipino artists, saying they all look alike.

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

Steve: They do, because the artists all showed up at once and there’s no way to distinguish them.

CBA: Especially the Redondo school of all learning from each other, all learning from Nestor.

Steve: Some of them were actual siblings. You know, brothers who also inked and they all worked together in the same studio.

CBA: Can you describe the impact of Alex Niño on the scene, what it was like?

Steve: Well, I found his style really appealing, as well I did with all of those guys like Nestor Redondo. Part of it was because, in the Philippines, all the comics were in black-&-white. They had a much more complete style of illustration, much more so than the Americans were, who are working for color. So their work seemed to stand out more in an illustrative sense.

Nestor Redondo would do all that fancy lighting and just amazing stuff. I managed to pick up a page from the first American DC job he did where he was trying to show them what he could do, and it’s really some of the nicest drawing and inking I’ve ever seen, just beautiful work. It’s difficult to put it into words other that it was very inspiring. Suddenly, there were other influences coming into American comics. Up until 1970, it was more or less the same artists since the 1950s. Suddenly, there was a whole mess of new guys who were really, really good. I remember the first time I saw their work. I assumed that they were all really young because we’d never heard of them and I was pretty relieved to find out that they were all, to my mind, considerably older than I am. It was a relief to discover that they were already in their thirties and had been professional artists for 15 years already. It was an incentive to work harder.

CBA: When Niño came on the scene, it was a revelation. His work was virtually psychedelic.

A totally new kind of approach that was just fantastic.

Steve: His stuff was pretty out there.

CBA: Yeah, the other Filipinos looked downright conservative compared to him! I just don’t think Niño—or the other guys, for that matter—are appreciated enough.

Steve: Alex has been doing a lot of animation work.

CBA: You can see his work in Mulan, for instance. But hey, it ain’t comics, babe. [laughter]

Inset left: Steve Leialoha was a frequent contributor to fellow Bay area resident Mike Friedrich’s Quack! “groundlevel” comic book.

Here’s the artist’s lush cover art for #4. ©2002 Steve Leialoha.

Below: Contents page illustration

by Steve Leialoha for Quack! #4. ©2002 the artist.

49

Above: Star Wars splash page penciled by Howard Chaykin and inked by Steve Leialoha before Dave Cockrum touched it up a bit for the final printing. Courtesy of Steve. ©2002 Lucasfilm, Ltd.

50

Steve: I always thought he was the best renderers of jungles around. [laughs] CBA: Did you ever see him work?

Steve: Yeah, I got to watch him work. He moved to San Francisco in ’74. They all came over because this was where the money was.

That’s why Carmine and Joe Orlando went over to the Philippines to hire them all because even if they paid the artists twice what they would usually get in the Philippines, it was still a third of what they were paying the Americans. As soon as the Filipino artists discovered that they could make much more if they were actually here… you know, Alfredo was the first, I think they said a typical page rate in the Philippines was like ten dollars a page for pencils, inks, and letters; a complete art job.

CBA: And just beautifully rendered!

Steve: This was in the mid-’70s. I remember Alfredo telling me that he would get $85 a page for the exact same work. So suddenly, he was making eight-and-a-half times his usual page rate so he started doing tons of work. Eventually, quite a few of them came over, which is nice. I got to meet them all.

CBA: Did you feel like one of the minority in appreciation of Filipino artists? A lot of them just seemed to be lumped together by fans who also denigrate them, dismissing the work. I just look at the draftsmanship and it’s just so superb!

Steve: Part of my attitude is due to the way I discovered Filipino artwork for the first time. It might have been ’72, at a horror convention in Los Angeles. (Once I discovered conventions, I went to as many of them as I could.) Somebody put up a display of artwork from the Philippines and I think that’s also where Carmine caught wind of their work. There was all this absolutely incredible artwork on the walls. So the stuff that they started doing in the comics, while I

did like it, I knew that it was nowhere near what they were capable of doing. I mean, there had been a whole wall of full-color stuff from Alex Niño, just fabulous work, and full-color paintings by Nestor Redondo and Alfredo Alcala. I’m not sure how many others but just a ton of this stuff so we were all just pretty much floored by it, and intimidated.

CBA: So as you were influenced by these Filipinos and on the advent of a professional career— Steve: I was easing into it. At that point in time, I was making some money by doing stuff for the art shows of the various conventions and selling artwork. I still wasn’t really good enough to work in professional comics, although I did do the occasional job.

High Adventure was one which Denis Kitchen published my first pro work. Mark Evanier was the ringleader on that one. This was the ’72 story which I penciled, Mark wrote and John Pound inked.

CBA: Was it any good?

Steve: Uhh… it was okay. [laughs] It was a decent enough start. So I was doing little stuff like that and selling artwork at the conventions, slowly working my way into becoming a professional.

Also, at a certain point, it occurred to me that if I were to try to get a job doing anything else, then I’d be bored silly. So I figured I might as well at least try and see if I could make a go of it, doing something I really liked. That’s when I met the Berkeley guys and that worked out so I’ve been lucky in that regard.

CBA: Have you always lived out West?

Steve: I’ve spent a little bit of time in New York, and L.A. is technically the West, but I’ve been mostly in San Francisco.

CBA: So was that the end of Warlock when Jim just threw it at you?

Steve: Yes. That was #15. The credits just say “Art by Jim Starlin” because, ahh, I figured why change it? But he did all of the first page and as you go through it, it gets less and less his artwork and more mine. I think I worked into the last page the “Bye, Jim,” at which point, he went off to L.A. and started working for Ralph Bakshi on [the animated movie] Lord of the Rings.

CBA: Did you embrace the work, because there was a fantasy element to it and you obviously have a very soft, nice, quite whimsical style?

Steve: Well, I didn’t really know what my style was at that point in time.

CBA: But you seemed to adapt well.

Steve: I also considered myself really lucky in that my favorite book in comics at that point in time was Warlock, my favorite title done by one of the so-called “young guys.” So I consider myself to be really lucky to be able to ink that book. I was a huge fan of Michael Moorcock, of which Warlock was hugely inspired by, at least Starlin’s version of it.

CBA: Did you dig the cosmic aspects of Marvel Comics?

Steve: Oh, sure. I loved that stuff! All of that material. I was a huge fan of all of my favorites. In ’62, I started buying by artists.

Though I bought all the books, I had my separate Gil Kane stack, separate Carmine Infantino stack, separate Jack Kirby stack. Down through the years, I ended up picking up everything that they did. I was a total science-fiction/comics fan.

CBA: So you were appreciative of Jim Starlin before you met him.

Steve: Oh, yeah. I knew his work.

CBA: So you must have been delighted to be inking Warlock at that point because that was the cosmic book that was coming out.

Steve: Really. “Approved by the Cosmic Code Authority.” [laughs] I believe that was Tom’s contribution. I mean, it was almost like a club. It was just this weird Marvel West. It wasn’t, literally, but it did seem like that. Englehart was doing Doctor Strange with Frank Brunner, who also thought to himself, “Let’s do Howard the Duck completely out here as well.” I had inked two issues of Warlock when Frank asked me if I’d ink Howard the Duck. So suddenly, I was working on the only two books I really had any interest in working on up at Marvel. [chuckles] CBA: Where do you go from there, Steve? [laughs] Steve: From there to Star Wars! [laughs] It was pretty heady stuff.

CBA: Were you making an impact?

Steve: I don’t know. It was hard to tell. I already knew that the letters page just printed letters from people saying what the editors COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

wanted them to say, so it was a little hard to tell. But the editors liked my work.

CBA: And your peers liked your work?

Steve: Yeah. Starlin gave me a few pointers after I did a few things that weren’t quite as good as they could have been, part of that learning curve.

CBA: Was he good to work with?

Steve: Oh, extremely good to work with.

CBA: Why? Steve: Well, Jim wanted it to look good but he wasn’t insistent on it being a slavish copy of whatever he did.

CBA: So he liked the accent that you put on it?

Steve: Yeah. He also appreciated that I could do finished artwork when he just did layouts, for example, which helped me a lot because eventually, I ended up doing finished art on pencilers like John and Sal Buscema, and so on, which was a lot of fun.

CBA: During this time too, wasn’t Star*Reach coming to the fore?

Steve: Yes. So there was always something going on. Somebody was going to do a comic in New York (Sal Quartuccio, maybe?) but it wasn’t to be. So there was suddenly a couple of unpublished stories by good artists; specifically Walter Simonson, Howard Chaykin, and Jim Starlin, that didn’t have a home. So that’s what prompted Mike Friedrich to do Star*Reach, or at the very least, being able to start the new title with a decent lineup. That was just starting at the end of ’74, and that was in the wind as well. So as I was doing work for Marvel, I could also do the more personal stuff for Star*Reach, which eventually started Quack! once the duck thing started happening.

CBA: And you were on the ground floor of that duck thing and it really took off. Obviously, Quack! was inspired by the success of Howard the Duck?

Steve: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Frank also wanted to do his own duck.

The notion of ownership was making itself felt at that point in time.

The publishers were working to revise copyright laws, and it was only a couple of years until the Siegel and Shuster controversy happened. I was up at Continuity visiting when all of that came down. It was nice to have a ringside seat to that. When Neal was on the Tom Snyder [Tomorrow] show with Siegel and Shuster. So the idea of doing your own work and keeping the copyright began to seem more and more important.

CBA: Was Neal’s advocacy something to admire?

Steve: Oh, yes. Regardless of whatever wacky road Neal is travelling down, [chuckles] I will always hold him in high regard for doing the right thing when he had the clout to be enough to instigate all of this stuff. There was the write-up in Time magazine, and getting the creators of Superman on national television, and all of that kind of stuff just to pressure DC into doing the right thing. It was largely because of Neal.

CBA: I reread Starlin’s run and they really hold up rather well.

Steve: Yeah, he was on a roll. I remember he told me he could lay out a book in three days and I was just amazed. I’m still amazed. A while later, he changed his style so that he could no longer work quite so fast—well, we all have our ideas what looks good in a book but he’d just knock out a really fine piece of work in a week.

CBA: Was it gratifying? Did you feel it was work of substance at the time, that at least it had content?

Steve: Exactly. Well, it was “Detroit Cosmic,” as Alan Weiss called it. Alan was always coming up with the most interesting things.

Sub-Mariner in a tuxedo. [chuckles] The Joker wants to copyright all the fish. I think that was the way he put it. So yeah, Alan was always coming up with brilliant ideas, which reminds me of the legendary lost 16th issue of Warlock. That book ended with #15 but there was a 16th issue written by Starlin, drawn by Weiss. But unfortunately, it was left in a taxicab and never seen again.

CBA: Well, thank God we’ve got Xeroxes of it!

Steve: Yes, fortunately. Tom Orz had a set of them. For the longest time, Tom lived downstairs from me, which was really nice because he got so much great work to letter. Whenever I saw something of interest, I could run off to our local photocopy place and make copies of it. Over the years, I’ve managed to acquire some nice photocopies.

CBA: [coyly] Oh, really?

Steve: [happily] Why, yes.

CBA: [equally happily] We’ll have to talk! Alan Weiss told me that March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

perhaps among the group, Tom Orzechowski was not necessarily typical. Did you see him as that way, as perhaps a bit more conservative, pragmatic…?

Steve: That’s funny. They all, of course, had their own personalities. Tom and Alan shared an apartment in New York for a while. I think Alan might still be there. I know New York people.

When they get an apartment, they never leave. [laughs] I’d be hard-pressed to call Tom the conservative one. Although, strictly speaking, if you wanted to call Tom the conservative one, that says a lot for the rest of the bunch. [laughs] CBA: Perhaps I’m mischaracterizing. But it’s interesting that Tom also came to the fore around the same time as you, and he had a noticeable, distinctive lettering style that I think that he used on Star Wars.

Steve: He started in Detroit, as a young comics fan, lettering for other young comics fans like Terry Austin and Starlin. When Starlin and Milgrom became professionals, Tom went along with them.

CBA: Did you hit it off with Mike Friedrich?

Steve: Yeah. I always got along well with Mike. I didn’t really do as much as I would have liked, but publishers seem to come and go.

It’s not easy to run your own comic book company.

CBA: Of course, that was during that transitionary time when direct sales was just about to begin.

Steve: It was before Pacific and Eclipse started up.

Below: Steve Leialoha pencils and inks for a page from Spiderwoman #28. Courtesy of the artist. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

51

Above: Marvel Team-Up #84 cover art by Steve Leialoha, taken from the original art (courtesy of the artist) before slight alterations were made to Shang Chi’s face in the printed version. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

52

CBA: I think a real important time. I saw an issue of Gates of Eden and there was a wonderful autobiographical story you did in there.

Steve: Ah, yes. The Altamont concert. I actually got to see The Beatles in 1964. I didn’t get to see them play but I did get to see them. I was always, like I said, a music junkie. So when they announced Altamont, I had to go. And I did and it was certainly one of the most exciting concerts, for better or for worse.

CBA: Was it terrifying?

Steve: It was a little scary. I wouldn’t say terrifying.

CBA: I don’t know how oppressive the Hell’s Angels were.

Steve: They were annoying, disconcerting. I was near [where a man was stabbed to death by a member of Hell’s Angels, who were hired by the Rolling Stones as security] but it sort of reminds me of, many years later, the bridge walk of the 50th anniversary of [the erection of] the Golden Gate Bridge. They closed it off to traffic and many of us went down to walk across it because we knew we’d never be able to do that again. At one point, I was in the middle of the bridge along with a couple hundred thousand other people and there’s so many people on the bridge that ordinarily, the bridge has a small arc to it, higher in the middle. And with all of those people, the bridge flattened out.

It’s completely flat and that was very nerve wracking. [laughs] I had the same sense of trepidation, standing on the shaking Golden Gate bridge as it was flattened out as I did standing in a crowd with Hell’s Angels and their pool cues and the Rolling Stones are up on stage. It was pretty exciting but at the same time, you have no idea what’s going to happen and you hope the worst doesn’t.

CBA: How did you get the Star Wars gig?

Steve: Again, just one of those odd moments. I was at Continuity and Howard Chaykin was there and we were at the elevator. At some point, he was talking to somebody about how they had changed the deadline on him for Star Wars and he didn’t have time to ink it. I mean, he had wanted to ink the whole thing himself but because they had changed the deadline, he wouldn’t be able to. I just said, “I’ll ink it, if you like.” He said, “Okay,” because who knew? [laughs] So that’s what got that ball rolling. Then, when I got home, I phoned the 20th Century Fox Publicity Department and just happened to get hooked up with the right guy, who was Charlie Lippincott, the person who started movie merchandising as we know it today. [laughs] Although it wasn’t intentional. I mean, the whole thing was pretty amazing, the way it ended up. But anyway, that got me invited to a screening of the rough cut of Star Wars. Howard had all the reference but at that point, I had seen nothing. I knew absolutely nothing about the movie, except—actually, that previous summer, they had been at the San Diego Con, doing the initial promotion for Star Wars. Chaykin had

done a poster and stuff like that. When I was in high school, a friend of mine was a movie fanatic and he eventually became a professional in the movie biz. But he got a job working at Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope, so I would go down to visit him and check out the movie making scene. And that’s where George Lucas was filming THX-1138 so I was familiar with his work and was a big fan. By the time Star Wars rolled around, I knew who he was. I knew about the project so when Howard mentioned it, I thought, “Wow, I’ll do that.”

And it worked out.

CBA: And you stuck with it beyond Howard, right?

Steve: Well, I inked issues two, three, four, and five. The last issue was a “Many Hands” job due to deadline pressure. Eventually, I did a couple of other issues later on in the run but that was pretty much the extent of my contribution.

CBA: I’m in awe of your inking of Gene Colan because he just seems to be an extremely tough guy to ink and your work appears so faithful to his pencils.

Steve: I love inking his work.

CBA: But Gene lived on the East Coast, right?

Steve: Oh, yes. By the ’70s, everybody was working through the mail. I was lucky in getting started working with Starlin and Brunner who were, for me, local. But as soon as Frank got off of Howard, and the next artist was John Buscema. Up at Marvel, their thought was, “Well, at least we can keep the same inker.” Again, that was kind of a sink-or-swim thing, suddenly faced with John Buscema layouts which was really a lot of fun. Then Gene came on and he was notoriously hard to ink. But again, it worked out so by that point, they were fairly comfortable about sending stuff through the mail.

CBA: What would you do? Would you send it through the U.S. Postal Service?

Steve: Yeah, I’d just send it Special Delivery, always seemed to work, never lost anything in the days before Federal Express.

CBA: Did you enjoy working on Howard the Duck?

Steve: Oh, that was a lot of fun. It was so wacky to begin with.

Frank Brunner would get a lot of help, if he was bored with a job. He would get some of his friends to help out with the layouts. Starlin, for instance, laid out a fair amount of Howard the Duck #2. I think Alan Weiss worked on at least two issues.

CBA: Did you help out with pencils at all?

Steve: Yeah, I helped Frank out on a Conan job but not on Howard. I was just the inker on that title, but then it was such a weird book anyway. Frank quit, but I stayed on as inker, and then they got John Buscema. I guess they figured I inked that okay and then Gene Colan came on. They always said that he was difficult to ink so I guess they figured they’d see what I could do. That worked out okay, so I ended up inking like ten or eleven issues that Gene drew. I went up to #13, at which point I went out and worked on Star Wars. But I’ve always really liked Gene’s work.

CBA: Did you find him difficult to ink?

Steve: No. I’ve always liked playing around with tonal sort of stuff.

It also helped that Steve Englehart was doing Doctor Strange with Gene, so I got an opportunity to check out the pencils and then compare it to the inked ones Tom Palmer had done. I’ve always thought Palmer did a fantastic job over Gene’s stuff so that was my crash course in how to interpret Gene Colan’s pencils. I always tried to do some of Doctor Strange, but Palmer got that assignment.

CBA: As much as I do enjoy Tom’s inks on Gene’s stuff, above all you were the one to retain the essence, the texture of Colan’s pencils.

Steve: All through the years, I’ve inked the occasional Gene Colan job. He’s doing pretty much all commissioned stuff these days and occasionally, somebody wants it inked and I’ve done three or four of those. That’s a lot of fun, trying to figure out how to interpret these various levels of gray. Anyway, it’s a challenge and it’s fun, especially if it works. [laughs] CBA: Compared to inking Jim Starlin, would you spend more time on Gene’s pencils?

Steve: It’s hard to say. They each have their own time-consuming characteristics. [laughs] When I first started on “Warlock,” Starlin was penciling really heavy and very tightly, so I remember it took me about six hours to ink my first page. Of course, I didn’t want to make any mistakes and I was taking it really carefully. Eventually, I did get a COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

bit faster, but at first, it went pretty slow. Starlin actually had more detail than Colan at that point. Actually, Gene’s stuff is pretty interesting because I have a feeling he sets himself a limit on the number of faces he’s going to do on any given page because he does all that swirly, gray-tone stuff. He can get away with it. But Gene’s stuff isn’t really as time-consuming as you might think. It’s hard to explain without actually showing you.

Speaking of Gene’s stuff, there’s a story behind the inks on Howard the Duck #11. A lot of my friends from the Bay Area ended up in New York and working at Continuity for Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. Russ Heath was up there at that time. I was visiting New York and just picked up the penciled pages of Howard the Duck #11 and Neal took a look and asked if he could ink some. So he ended up inking about five pages of all the main figures and the various ducks.

And so #11 has all sorts of guest inkers probably few people ever realized.

CBA: I think Neal Adams completists will be surprised to hear that! [chuckles] Steve: Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

CBA: Did Mike Friedrich call you about doing work for Quack!?

Steve: I can’t remember exactly what the first thing I did for Star*Reach was, but I did some inking and penciling. I remember inking a Gene Day “Elric” story. I inked Dave Sim on a Quack! cover later, as well as a Frank Brunner cover, as well as writing and drawing some of my own material.

CBA: Do you have any affinity for funny animal material?

Steve: I’ve always really liked that genre. Walt Kelly is one of my favorite comic artists. There’s so little opportunity to do that sort of thing. I remember, in the 1980s, when Marvel was starting up their Star line, I suggested doing something along those lines and they just flat-out told me, “Aww, that stuff never sells.” I thought it was amusing because no one had done that kind of stuff in, what, 30 years? But then again, nothing they did sold either, so…. [laughs] CBA: What did you do for Quack!?

Steve: I inked a Frank Brunner story for the first issue and then I started drawing some of my own stories of various funny animal types. Everybody was hopping onto the duck bandwagon with the success of Howard the Duck, though I don’t know how well it was selling—by the standards of 1975, I mean—because these days, anything considered lousy sales in ’75, they’d kill for today! [laughter] I remember if a book was selling less that 125,000, you were in imminent danger of cancellation.

CBA: Can you recall the strips and characters you created for Quack!?

Steve: There was Newton the Rabbit… it’s been a while since I’ve looked at those. I forget the names. Actually, I continued to do some of those for other publishers. Eclipse, when they did their magazine, I had a story in the second issue starring my rabbit character. Those are really just labors of love because, I mean, there’s just not much of a market for funny animals.

CBA: All in all, did you do a lot of work for DC? Steve: Early on, 99% of my stuff was for Marvel. By the early to mid-’80s, I started doing some work for DC. Mainly, it had to do with all the editors I’d been working with at Marvel somehow ended up at DC. My work on Marvel’s Secret Wars II got me fairly decent royalty checks, so I took some time off. By the time I was ready to get back to work, I ended up doing work at DC. I can’t remember exactly what, maybe a little bit of inking. I remember doing a Justice League over Keith Giffen layouts which was really interesting, and stuff like that.

CBA: Was there any difference working for the two companies?

Steve: DC’s always been much more by the book, if they have a book. [laughs] In retrospect, the whole Marvel experience was mind-boggling, that despite the craziness, people got work and books came out. When I started on “Warlock,” Starlin wanted to do the whole book out on the West Coast and just present it to Marvel, as a completed book, written, penciled, inked, lettered, and colored, just in time to get to press. I think, at that point, Marv Wolfman was the March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

editor and I didn’t even submit any samples because many years earlier, I had done some fanzine stuff for Marv, so he sort of knew who I was. I guess they figured, worse case scenario, they’ll get someone else for the second issue. That’s the way it was. I mean, it wasn’t like things are these days. I’m currently inking a new Vertigo series. I had to do a few pages of samples, which I don’t mind doing, but it’s just in a different style. It makes sense to do sample pages to see what it looks like, but 25 years ago, things were considerably more carefree.

CBA: How would you assess your early years in comics?

Steve: I made it a point to get to Marvel in New York. Living in San Francisco, I would just communicate over the phone. So I made it a point to go East to meet people at Marvel so they would have a face to go with the voice on the other end of the line.

The first time I went to Marvel, I walked into the Bullpen and I saw a guy sitting there, inking an issue of Captain America. I said, “Hello, I’m a new inker here at Marvel,” and he looks up and says, “Oh, nice to meet you. I’m Jack Kirby.” And everyone has a big chuckle at that, because I knew he wasn’t Jack Kirby and he knew that I knew he wasn’t Jack Kirby. I could tell just by the inking that it was Frank Giacoia! [laughs] So they were a nice bunch of guys. I remember, in particular, meeting John Romita, who is one of the

nicest guys in comics. Yeah, it was very different. John Verpoorten was up there at that time. It was very exciting for the young fanturned-pro. Also getting to see Jack Kirby pencil, Giacoia inking, stuff like that. Wow. CBA: Did you have an affinity for the pages you were working on, specifically the Jim Starlin material?

Steve: As I said, my favorite book at that point in time was “Warlock,” so suddenly being asked to ink it… I couldn’t have picked a better introduction to the field. Also, on a technical level for me, it worked out well because Jim’s penciling at that point was really, really tight. So, being careful, it was simple enough to do a good inking job.

Also ending up working on Howard the Duck was just fortuitous, as it was with my next job on Star Wars. I really just lucked out, being in the right place at the right time.

CBA: Are you satisfied when you look back at your work?

Steve: Oh, when I look back at the work now, it makes me cringe. [laughs] Oh, if I could go back and do it again, it would look so much better! But, you know…

CBA: You can’t do that. [laughs] Steve: No, but it was fun doing the job to begin with, so that helps.

Above: Steve Leialoha contributed his autobiographical story to Gates of Eden which was about his attending the devastating Rolling Stones Altamont Speedway concert in 1969 where a black concert goer was killed by a Hell’s Angel (who were employed as bodyguards for the musical performers). Some consider the event the antithesis of the “three days of peace and music” at Woodstock in that same year. ©2002 Steve Leialoha.

53

CBA Mini-Interview

Brunner’s Supreme Sorcery The artist on his unforgettable 1970s stint on Doctor Strange Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Frank Brunner, artist extraordinaire of Doctor Strange and Howard the Duck in the 1970s, asked to participate in this issue via an e-mail interview and we gladly obliged. While he was interviewed at length in CBA #6 about his work for the House of Ideas, we agreed that Frank’s presence is essential in any issue devoted to Marvel’s cosmic comics of the 1970s and we thank him for contacting us to correct the unfortunate oversight.

Below: Artist Frank Brunner obviously felt affinity for Doctor Strange as he featured the magician in his sample pages submitted to Marvel to get work.

This page eventually saw print in the 1972 New York [Seuling] Comic Art Con souvenir book. Art ©2002 Frank Brunner. Dr. Strange ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

54

Comic Book Artist: Frank, we’ve covered your career at Marvel in the 1970s to some degree in Comic Book Artist #6, but I want to specifically focus on your achievements with Doctor Strange, if we could. Do you recall your initial impression of the introduction of the Master of the Mystic Arts in Strange Tales?

Frank Brunner: Yes, I bought the very first Doctor Strange appearance in Strange Tales #110, and his stories quickly became my favorite part of the book, way better than the “Human Torch” series that was the so-called lead feature. The tales and sheer otherworldliness of the character always had a special appeal for me, and it really showcased Steve Ditko’s imagination, in a lot of ways, more so than even his Spider-Man! CBA: Was Ditko a strong influence on your artistic approach?

Frank: It was and it wasn’t. Certainly I was influenced by the worlds and trappings he created, but I didn’t want to merely copy or duplicate what Steve had done, and most importantly, a new humanism and realistic way of drawing was becoming popular in the comics community, but Ditko’s approach was a hallmark and a guidepost to multidimensional thinking.

CBA: Were you enthusiastic about Ditko’s epic multi-part serial when Stephen was pursued around the world by Baron Mordo’s minions? Was that an influence on you at all?

Frank: Yes, that was a very cool storyline. In fact, Steve Englehart and I sort of reversed the chase in the Sise-Neg story arc with Strange pursuing Mordo back through time and space!

CBA: Did you feel the character was neglected in the early 1970s between the cancellation of his title and reintroduction in Marvel Premiere?

Frank: Absolutely.

There was almost nothing more I wanted to do at Marvel than to get the good doctor back into his own book again. In fact, one of the first sample pages I did for submission was of Doctor Strange (in the Colan/Thomas black mask costume). That was about 1969 or ’70… I forget. But it turned up on eBay about a year ago!

CBA: Any opinions on Barry Smith’s approach to the character in Marvel Premiere #3?

Frank: It was nicely done, but I felt that Doc’s physical appearance could have been a bit more imposing… dramatic!

CBA: Did you lobby to do the character in Marvel Premiere?

Frank: I must have because when Smith could no longer do the book, then-ye editor Roy Thomas called and asked if I’d like to do the book with Archie Goodwin… “WOULD I, WOULD I?” I must have mumbled or shouted! Unfortunately, that was the only story I did with Archie, as he exited Marvel right after Marvel Premiere #4.

CBA: Your work during the early ‘70s was pretty much all over the place. Did the artistic freedom of underground comix appeal to you at all and did you work in that field to any degree?

Frank: I wanted to work in the underground because of the freedom they seemed to have, but two things happened: Kim Dietch and the rest of the New York underground scene went to San Francisco… and I was starting to get work in the mass market overground. So I decided to try and work within the System, and eat away at the edges of the Comics Code Authority whenever possible.

In those days, the Code had real power!

CBA: Obviously, mind-expanding drugs were a big part of the nation’s counterculture during those days, and an influence on comic books to a degree. Were you interested in psychological selfexploration through your work? Were hallucinogenics a part of your experience?

Frank: Yes! I should probably just leave it at that, but I’ll say this much: Doing all those drugs definitely had an influence on what kind of mind-expanding stories I and a few others wanted to commit to paper. In my case, the experiences gave me the courage—or stupidity!—to actually think that I could! Important observation: Drawing on LSD does not work… but it can give a person some wild ideas!

CBA: Please tell us how you got the Doctor Strange assignment.

Frank: As I mentioned before, Smith was unable to continue but he had started a story, completing about four or five pages in his usual style, and the rest mostly was in a blue-pencil rough stage or had vague layouts. The book was late and Roy asked if I could finish it, pencils and inks, in about two weeks. This was a frightening schedule, but I couldn’t refuse (and that’s why the last few pages look so rushed). Roy then said it could be my book from now on, but the next script wasn’t by Archie, and that book was late, too. Anyway, I was pretty burned out from the previous issue’s rush, so I declined.

But Roy kept at me and I penciled MP #6. Then we decided Gardner Fox’s scripts were not where the character should be going, especially if these tryouts were intended to get Doc back in his own title!

CBA: What did you specifically think of Fox’s approach?

Frank: I worked with Archie on that one issue, and then from a full script by Mr. Fox, which had no input from me. I didn’t like that specific script or the general storyline.

CBA: How long had you known Steve Englehart?

Frank: I had only just met Englehart during my two-issue hiatus between MP #6 and 9. I think it was either at the office or a party, and when I started talking about our ideas for a Doctor Strange series (probably over a joint), I realized that Steve’s thoughts and mine seemed to mesh really well. So, later we’d hang out occasionally for COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

February 2002

the express purpose of getting stoned and talking comics, something we couldn’t very well do at the office! Anyway, when Roy asked me what writer I would like to work with—if I were to pick up the series again—I immediately said Englehart, of course! From that point, Steve and I both agreed that Doc was going Cosmic!

CBA: Alan Weiss, as well as Milgrom, Starlin, and Englehart, recall that you all would pal around together quite frequently. Alan has spoken of nocturnal explorations throughout Manhattan which would inspire stories for you guys. Can you recall some of these adventures?

Frank: Exploring Manhattan was always fun in the day. At night, we’d go around probably because we were stoned and a bit lost, but we did discover some really great architecture, dark alleys, decrepit docks, and even an abandoned subway station… which became Silver Dagger’s hideout!

CBA: The collaboration of Englehart and Brunner started off with a bang in Marvel Premiere, announcing it was a relaunch and would be a cosmic series. What were you hoping to achieve?

Frank: It was going to be cosmic, and not just because the characters might be in outer space! We were not just going to tackle relevancy in the “now,” issue-of-the-week sense, but look at what is eternally relevant, the Big Questions of existence, and how we perceive this illusion we call reality!

CBA: Englehart said your collaborations were very involved and rather intense, different perhaps from his other assignments (Captain America, The Avengers, etc.) in that on Doctor Strange, writer and artist worked very closely as a team. How do you recall the collaboration?

Frank: We were almost symbiotic, concerning what was going to happen to Doc in his voyage with us. I’d get a plot idea and Steve would pick it up, then I’d throw in some neat ideas to draw, then he’d bring up a relationship thing between the characters. Before we knew it, we had a fouror five-issue story arc. On rare occasions, Steve would get hung-up on how to explain something within the context of the Marvel Universe, but I didn’t worry about that kind of stuff.

CBA: Can you specifically detail your contributions to the strip?

Frank: I’ll just give you a fer instance: The Silver Dagger stories. We needed an origin for him and I was thinking about the Necronomicon and that there supposedly was an authentic copy in the Vatican library. Now this is a book on black magic, bound in human skin, that ole Dagger would have read. So I said, “Let’s make him a renegade Cardinal in Rome!” Besides stuff like that, I penciled the book and drew the covers.

CBA: Here’s some watershed moments in your tenure on the strip, so please elaborate if you can: The genesis of Sise-Neg (no pun intended)?

Frank: Sise-Neg came about while I was watching one of my favorite flicks, Camelot. I thought about Merlin living backwards through time and I considered that if a scientist from the far future could travel back to the dawn of time, then—as the only being in existence—he becomes God and, theoretically, he could create the cosmos in his own image!

CBA: The death of the Ancient One? Frank: I was reading a book by Carlos Castaneda (I forget which one, perhaps Tales of Power) and the author is discussing death and the concept of not just dying, but becoming part of everything, becoming “One with the Universe.” Steve and I had already decided that Shuma Gorath could be none other than the ancient evil side that resides in all men. In the Ancient One’s case, because he’s so good and cosmic, he has a real humdinger of an evil side! Doc’s mentor would perish in the struggle, though not just die, but he’d become part of everything! Then Doc would become the new Sorcerer Supreme!

CBA: The Silver Dagger saga?

Frank: Silver Dagger came about as the protagonist in our March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

exploration of death and unreality and how Doc could overcome both but only with the love of his life, his mate Clea, who became his last chance for life and redemption!

CBA: Why did you leave Doctor Strange?

Frank: The book was doing well enough to go monthly and, to tell you the truth, I felt we were out of storylines by that point. I felt that I had done everything that I could do. We’d taken him from being just a magician to becoming the Sorcerer Supreme; killed his mentor and had Doc take his place; met God and faced Death, and even fought a renegade Cardinal! I didn’t have another idea! At that time, I saw this talking duck character in a Man-Thing comic book and I realized that that was what I wanted to do! After all the seriousness, I wanted to do something funny. So I did.

UNABASHED PLUG DEPT.: Vanguard Productions is releasing Eyes of Light: The Fantasy Drawings of Frank Brunner, a 112-page hardcover book with an introduction by Elric creator and renowned sciencefiction author Michael Moorcock. Designed by Dean Motter. Regular hardcover, $27.95; Deluxe edition, $39.95. Contact Vanguard at vanguardpub@att.net or call 908-832-0060.

Those interested in contacting the artist for commissions, please contact Frank by writing: 312 Kildare Court, Myrtle Beach SC 29588 or e-mail fbrunner@sccoast.net Visit the Frank Brunner Web site at www.geocities.com/8915

Above: Frank Brunner depicts Stephen Strange and Clea in a drawing produced for his portfolio book, The Brunner Mystique.

Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2002 Frank Brunner. Strange & Clea ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

55

Lost & Found

The Lost Warlock #16 A collage of panels from the artist’s superb (missing) pencils

Though the uninked and somewhat unfinished penciled pages of a Warlock inventory issue were lost when artist Alan Weiss inadvertently left them in a New York City taxi cab in the mid-’70s, some smart fellow—probably letterer Tom Orzechowski—made photocopies of what would have doubtless become the last issue of Warlock. Courtesy of Jim Woodall, we present a liberal sampling of images from the 18 or so pages. In some case, some liberties were taken with computer manipulation for the sake of clarity. Art ©2002 Alan Weiss. Warlock ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

56

THE ORIGINAL GOES DIGITAL!

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

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

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

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

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 • ISBN: 9781893905429

#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more!

Plus ADAMS thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen NICK CARDY pages from a controversial Teen Titans story, unpublished TOTH covers, and more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

#12: CHARLTON PART 2

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

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

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

Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes

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

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983!

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

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

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

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

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

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

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

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

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

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

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

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

HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

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

New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

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

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

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

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

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

Previously available only to CBA subscribers!

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

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

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $3.95

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

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

PRINTED IN CANADA

LOU SCHEIMER: Creating the Filmation Generation

All characters TM & ©2013 their respective owners.

1960-64 VOLUME: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 9781605490458 • Diamond Order Code: JUL121245

FA B U LO U S

FLO STEINBERG &

NUMBER EIGHTEEN

THE 1960s

MADCAP MARVEL

BULLPEN!

CELEBRATING THE LIVES & WORK OF THE GREAT CARTOONISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS (AND GAL FRIDAYS!)

MARCH 2002

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

TWOMORROWS JOHN & PAM MORROW Associate Editors CHRIS KNOWLES DAVID A. ROACH CHRISTOPHER IRVING GEORGE KHOURY Contributing Editors ROY THOMAS JOHN MORROW Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Cover Art & Color Guide MARIE SEVERIN Cover Color TOM ZIUKO Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD Logo Designer/Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King Flip-side Theme Song IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY U2

Contributors Fabulous Florence Steinberg Marie Severin • Stan Lee Herb Trimpe • Linda Fite Barry Windsor-Smith • Les Daniels Trina Robbins • John Romita, Sr. Dennis O’Neil • Steve Skeates Marie Steinberg • Roy Thomas Jim Warren • Arlen Schumer Aaron Sultan • David Schwartz Andrew D. Cooke • Patty Willett

C

O

N

T

E

N

T

S

QUESTION OF CONTENT: THE 2002 COMIC BOOK ARTIST READERS SURVEY Please fill out our Q&A form to better help improve our humble magazine, and you could win a prize! ..........1-B MICHELLE’S MEANDERINGS: THE MARVELOUS EPOCH OF LOVE Ms. Nolan checks out the Marvel romance comics that flourished when Fabulous Flo was young ....................4-B SPECIAL FABULOUS FLO STEINBERG CELEBRATION SMILEY & CO.: ALL IN THE MARVEL FAMILY Voices of the real MMMS in this transcript of Stan, Flo, and the Bullpen’s “Voice of Marvel” recording..........6-B FLO STEINBERG INTERVIEW: ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS Our favorite Florence on her half-decade tenure at the House of Idea between 1963-68 ................................8-B CBA ROUNDTABLE: GOING WITH THE FLO Flo, Herb Trimpe, Linda Fite, and Barry Windsor-Smith break bread and yak about Marvel’s good ol’ days....19-B PEER APPROVAL: THE FAB ONE’S MARVEL DAZE Smilin’ Stan, Mirthful Marie, Jazzy John, Stylin’ Steve, Rascally Roy, Declarative Denny, Happy Herb, Loveable Linda, Terrific Trina, Leapin’ Les, and Marvey Marie S. yak about Steinberg the Stunning! ..............22-B Left: Courtesy of Aaron Sultan, a MMMS pin. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Opposite: The lady in question in a December 1964 photo taken in the Marvel Bullpen. Hey! Face front, Flo fan! Keep ye eyes off her slip, y’hear? Courtesy of Fab Flo. H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y , F A B F L O S T E I N B E R G !

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published 10 times a year 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. ©2002 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Cover acknowledgements: Art ©2002 Marie Severin. Florence Steinberg ©2002 Mom & Pop Steinberg. Stan Lee ©2002 Joanie Lee. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Michelle’s Meanderings

A Marvelous Epoch of Love The romance comics of “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg’s era

by Michelle Nolan

Above: The Atlas/Timely/Marvel love comic book, My Own Romance #11, featuring this pathetic nightlife scenario. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

4-B

Many of the most bizarre romance comics in the early era of that long-running genre came from the seemingly overly stimulated folks at Marvel Comics.

Girls growing up in those days of slightly more than 50 years ago, such as Marvel office goddess-to-be Flo Steinberg, had their choice of dozens of romance comics every month.

Marvel’s little love epics, however, more often than not were just a little different.

Sometimes, in fact, a whole lot different. In fact, these minimelodramas—most of them edited by Stan Lee—presaged the style of the 1960s super-hero titles that made both Lee and his Girl Friday Flo household names.

At least in households with a comic book reader.

Chances are that most members of the legion of Marvel fans established over the past 40 years—the Marvel Zombies, if you insist—have had little or no idea that their beloved company once was the king (queen?) of romance comics.

Notwithstanding an earlier one-shot title involving Mary Worth reprints and several longrunning comics marketed to girls, the first true romance title was Simon & Kirby’s Young Romance for Crestwood (Prize) in 1947.

True to his reputation for following the scent of any pulp paper that could produce profits, Timely (Marvel) Comics publisher Martin Goodman was one of the first impresarios to leap into the romance market.

My Romance #1 (Aug. 1949) was Goodman’s first venture into the field. The title became My Own Romance with #3 (Jan. 1949) and was one of the few Marvel/Atlas titles to be published continuously throughout the 1950s, running 76 issues until a title change to the more contemporary sounding Teen-Age Romance with #77 in 1960. Teen-Age Romance expired with #96 in 1962 (the title, not the concept!).

Goodman’s leap of faith in romance comics became a precipitous plunge early in 1950, when all but five of his 33 (!) love titles vanished from the overcrowded newsstands, victims of the heart-breaking “love glut” of 1950.

Even so, Marvel’s early flirtation with romance was far from just a two-year fling. In fact, believe it or not, by the end of 1959—when only six companies produced as many as 96 issues during the entire year!—Marvel had published no less than 445 romance comics over a dozen years!

No one else was even close, although eventually DC and Charlton were to finish with far more love comics than Marvel by the

time the original form of the genre vanished in the mid-1970s.

While turning out a few romance titles every year following Marvel’s breakup with so many of its multitude of love titles in 1950, the company consistently produced some of the prettiest art in the field. Gone, though, was Marvel’s outlandish soap-opera style so much in evidence on the newsstands of 1949 and 1950.

That sheer, unadulterated funk is what makes such longforgotten titles as Faithful, Cupid, and Loveland well worth chasing down in the cheapie boxes at comic book conventions. Well, they used to be bargain bins; in recent years, romance comics have proven to be increasingly popular collectibles.

Including the two issues of My Romance in 1948, Marvel published 85 romance comics through issues dated April, 1950. Every one of them is truly a tribute to the often outlandish aspects of the genre.

To put an even finer point on it, Goodman’s lieutenants of lowlevel literacy actually flooded the stands with no less than 80 romance comics involving those 33 different titles in the 12-month period from May 1949 through April 1950. The mind and heart both boggle!

Almost all of those first 85 Marvel romance comics had photo covers, including a few with featured movie stars. But, unlike much of Goodman’s photo-cover competition—which invariably used stills of movie stars, starlets and a variety of unknown but lovely lovers— most of Marvel’s early romance comics were usually posed. And very obviously posed, to say the least.

And what poses! Distraught, distressed and even often indisposed lovers were caught in as many melodramatic situations as one could imagine!

Take the first issue of Love Tales (#36, May 1949). The photo cover, purportedly a scene from “Dangerous Love,” portrays a show girl of sorts standing beside an entrance labeled “stage door,” with her ample charms and toothy smile displayed to best advantage. On the left, a demure young thing in a modest off-white blazer and skirt confronts her handsome, well-dressed boyfriend, who looks suitably well-off financially, if not in the love department.

Accompanying this heart-rending scene is the following caption (no room for bubbles on this cover): “May: You must give him up!

You can’t love him the way I do! Peaches: G’wan home girlie, your mama’s looking for you! Glenn: “May—stop! I love her! I don’t care what anyone says—I love her!”

Peaches?

Fittingly, this is the issue that replaced the discontinued Human Torch on Marvel’s publishing schedule, including the Torch’s numbering! It took Marvel’s bookkeepers a while to catch up to that fact, though—Human Torch is still listed in a house ad as being published!

Not to mention that none of the inside stories is entitled “Dangerous Love.” That story, however, soon showed up in Romances of Molly Manton #2 (Dec. 1949), once again as the cover feature and once again with a menage a trois cover. It just goes to show that no good title ever went unused at Marvel!

Love Tales #42 (July 1950) featured a story that reveals Lee’s love of alliteration: “The Miracle of Millie Malloy!” Using a woman’s full name in a story title, no doubt to enhance the drama, was common in these early Marvels, in a fashion very much unlike other companies.

There was “The Love of Lalal!“ in Molly Manton’s Romances #1 (Sept. 1949) which for some reason became “Romances of...” with #2). Only one name was required for this South Seas siren. Then there was “Cora Dodds Amazing Decision!” No, she didn’t decide to change her name! There was “The Heartbreak of Jennifer Gray!” in COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Love Classics #1 (Nov. 1949). This was a 30-page story, one of the longest in comics history up to that time. There was “Was Lydia Parker Guilty?” in Love Romances #8 (Sept. 1949).

Then there was “The Heartbreak of Janice Tildon!“ in Love Secrets #1 (Oct. 1949), quickly followed on the newsstands by “The Strange Secret of Janet Tilden!” in Young Hearts #1 (Nov. 1949). Janice Tildon, meet Janet Tilden.

There was “The Heartbreak of Ellen Chase!” in True Life Tales #8 (actually #1, Oct. 1949). Hmmmmm… two “Heartbreaks” on the stands in the same month! Better introduce those two women so they can compare notes. That is, heartbroken Ellen Chase will have to wait until heartbroken Janice Tildon has met strange Janet Tilden!

One of the great epics in all of romance comics history was published in Love Classics #2 (Feb. 1950), which featured one of the finest of all photo covers… a stunning study of Virginia Mayo in her role as a gun moll in the never-to-be-forgotten Warner Brothers’ film White Heat with a truly over-the-top performance by Jimmy (“Top of the World, Ma!”) Cagney. In this second and final issue of Love Classics was a true classic, indeed, of comic book funk—a 30-page epic entitled “I Turned Into a Small-Town Flirt!’ The word balloons in this story were so packed with verbiage that much of the art was little more than talking heads. All in all, there were easily more than 5,000 words in this sob story!

Mayo also appeared on the cover of the only issue of Real Experiences (#25, Jan. 1950), looking suitably worried enough to illustrate a story entitled “I Paid the Price for Being Too Careless with Love!” Talk about suggestive! This cover was taken from a pose on a still for Red Light from United Artists, an early vehicle for television Perry Mason-to-be Raymond Burr.

Every now and then, Marvel would come up with a cover that didn't even come close to matching the only story title. One of the best such examples was Romance Tales #8 (Jan. 1950), which featured the story “Jilted!” yet displayed a cover of a smiling woman applying fresh lipstick after leaving the obvious trace of a smooch on the cheek of a fellow with a bleep-eating grin and an arm around her.

One of the weirdest covers ever to appear on any romance comic was the photo-cover for Loveland #1 (Nov. 1949), which shows a woman sitting so close to a man in a convertible that she has to be at least partially on his lap, with a distraught woman in the back seat clutching a tear-stained handkerchief. The title was one Marvel used at least a half-dozen times: “I Was the Other Woman!”

This is one of the few times that Lee (or somebody) missed the alliteration boat. It should have been entitled, “I Was a Belittled Back-Seat Babe!”

Speaking of weird covers, there was this utterly astounding scene portrayed on the cover of My Own Romance #11 (Mar. 1950): A man with nothing less than the leer of the worst kind of wolf, offering to light the cigarette of a stunningly made-up tart at the next table while an innocent looking ingenue looks on at the man’s table. On both tables are cocktails complete with cherries! The cover blurb was “I didn’t care how many hearts I broke, lives I ruined… so long as my mirror told me that… I Was Whistle-Bait!”

Can you imagine what the Comics Code Authority would have done with this cover five years later?

One can only imagine what the good Doctor Fredric Wertham must have thought if he saw this one!

As the 1950s wore on, Marvel quickly stopped using its theme of names in story titles and went to much more orthodox labeling. Much of the zest went out of the process, however.

Take True Secrets. This title devolved from such zippy titles as “What Was The Horrible Secret of Harriet Arnold?” in #8 (Aug. 1951) and “The Girl from Hooligan’s Alley!” in #9 (Sept. 1951) to mundane titles such as “To Have and To Hold!” in #16 (Spr. 1952), “Love Comes to Linda!” and “My Man!” in #30 (June 1955), and “The Man I Love!’ in #32 (Sept. 1955).

By the way, only two months later, True Secrets repeated “The Man I Love!” as a cover-featured title in #34 (Nov. 1955). A different man, we presume!

Helping to atone for these positively generic story March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

titles in post-Code Atlas comics was a nice range of spiffy art by the likes of Jay Scott Pike (an underrated craftsman), Ann Brewster, Vince Colletta, John Tartaglione, Paul Reinman, Al Hartley, Bill Everett and others.

What these comics lacked in bizarre story elements they made up for in a beautiful, faithfully rendered parade of ’50s fashions.

Alex Toth did a splendid four-page tale entitled “More Than a Wife” in My Love Story #7 (April 1957).

In one of his last love stories for comics, the inimitable Toth used a variety of poses and panels in a story that you can’t help wishing was 40 pages instead of four.

Every now and then, Marvel came up with an EC-type story.

One of the best examples was in My Own Romance #21 (March 1952), in a tale entitled “The Cruelest Words I Ever Heard!”

These words were also on the cover… “See ya around, baby!” Our heroine, a bespectacled student journalist named Cynthia, gets that response from a campus football hero until finally shedding her glasses. The athlete realizes too late that he finds her attractive, after all, but she ends this tale in the arms of another man while telling the big lug, “See ya around, Johnny! See ya around!”

All too few romance stories were told with such amusing panache.

Above: Lovely Alex Toth splash page from the Atlas comic, My Love Story #7. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Two photo covers for Atlas romances. By the way,Ye Ed’s mom posed for confession magazine covers as a young model in NYC in the late ’40s/early ’50s! ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

5-B

Smiley & Co.

All in the Marvel Family Stan the Man, Fab Flo and the Bullpen’s goofy fan club record

Above and opposite page: Marie Severin’s sleeve art for both the Voices of Marvel and Scream Along with Marvel records which came with the Merry Marvel Marching Society membership kits.

All courtesy of Tim Townsend. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

6-B

Stan Lee: Okay, out there in Marvel land! Face front! This is Stan Lee speaking! You’ve probably never heard a record like this before, because no one would be nutty enough to make one with a bunch of off-beat artists, so anything is liable to happen.

Jack Kirby: Hey, who made you a disc jockey, Lee? Stan: Well, well! Jolly Jack Kirby! Say a few words to the fans.

Jack: Okay. “A few words.”

Stan: Look, pal: I’ll take care of the humor around here.

Jack: You? You’ve been using the same gags over and over for years!

Stan: Well, you can’t accuse me of being fickle, can you? By the way, Jack, the readers have been complaining about Sue’s hairdo again.

Jack: What am I supposed to do? Be a hairdresser? Next time I’ll draw her bald-headed.

Stan: Boy, I’m glad we caught you when you were in a good mood!

Flo Steinberg: Oh, Stan? Do you have a few minutes?

Stan: For our fabulous gal Friday? Sure, say hello to the fans, Flo Steinberg.

Flo: Hello, fans! It’s very nice to meet you. As Marvel’s corresponding secretary, I feel as though I know most of you from your letters.

By the way, Sol Brodsky wants to say a few words.

Stan: Sol Brodsky? Who’s he?

Flo: Stan! The fans know you have a bad memory by all the mistakes you make, but this is ridiculous. He’s been your associate for years!

Stan: Really? We ought to start paying him one of these days!

Sol Brodsky: I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.

And how come I don’t get my name plastered all over the mags like you do?

Stan: Because I can’t spell it, that’s why.

Sol: Well, as long as you got a good reason.

Stan: Hey, what’s all that commotion out there, Sol? Sol: Why, it’s shy Steve Ditko. He heard you’re making a record and he’s got mike fright! Whoops! There he goes!

Stan: Out the window again? You know, I’m beginning to think he is Spider-Man. Artie Simek: You mean he isn’t?

Stan: Who said that?

Artie: Just that lovable old letterer, me.

Flo: It’s adorable Artie Simek. What brought you here?

Artie: The subway.

Stan: Oh well, ask a bonehead question, Flo. Flo: Stan, Sam Rosen is on the phone.

Artie: The letterer? My competitor?

Stan: Just for fun, Artie, you talk to him!

Artie: Hi, Sam. This is Artie. How’s it going, pal?

Sam Rosen: Just great, Artie. I sure admire your lettering.

Artie: I admire yours, too, Sam. I think you’re tops.

Sam: Thanks. Well, nice talking to you.

Artie: The pleasure was all mine. [hangs up phone] I never could stand that guy.

Stan: Well, that’s our Artie. Just imagine what Sam is saying about him now. Well, let’s see who else we can get on this record.

Sol: How about Chic Stone?

Stan: Okay. Hi, Chic! How’s tricks?

Chic Stone: Fine, Stan. I’m reading the latest story. It’s great.

What a thriller!

Stan: Now that’s what we like to hear, Chic! Which one of our comics is it?

Chic: Who’s reading a comic? This is a novel about James Bond. I can’t wait to finish it.

Stan: We’re going to miss Chic around here.

Flo: Oh, look who just came in, Kid Daredevil himself, Wally Wood!

Wally Wood: Is that a tape recorder, Flo? You know I’m afraid to talk into these machines [talks faster and faster] l-can-never-think-ofanything-to-say-l’m-not-a-big-talker-l-shut-up-like-a-clam-l-getstruck-dumb-my-mind-goes-blank-and….

Stan: Okay, okay, forget it! Boy! I’d hate to hear you when you feel like talking.

Flo: Stan, Dick Ayers is on the phone.

Stan: Let’s surprise him. [picks up phone] Hi, Dick. We have a recorder playing and you’re talking to millions of people right now.

Dick Ayers: You some kind of nut or something? I just want to tell you I want a raise!

Stan: Dick, don’t you understand? People are listening! You’re talking to the whole world!

Dick: I always knew you’d crack some day, Lee! Just my luck, it had to happen when I had to ask you for some more dough! Well, I’m going back to Sgt. Fury. Good bye!

Flo: Another phone call for you, Stan.

Stan: Oh, not any more! I’m getting an ear ache!

Flo: But it’s Don Heck!

Stan: The idol of the “Iron Man” fans? The ace of The Avengers? [phone picked up] Hi, Don! What’s doing?

Don Heck: Stan, I was just wondering. Wasn’t I supposed to COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

draw “Iron Man” last week?

Stan: Sure, why do you ask?

Don: So how come you mailed me a Patsy Walker script?

Stan: Yipe! Did I do that? That’s awful!

Don: Oh well, don’t worry, I’ll send it back to you.

Stan: That’s not why I’m worried, I must have sent your script to Al Hartley! I can just imagine Iron Man looking like Patsy Walker this issue. Okay, talk to you later, Don. [hangs up phone] Stan Goldberg: Don’t worry about it, Stan. Don’t you remember that AI Hartley used to draw adventure strips? It may not be too bad.

Stan: Well, well. Look who’s here. Stan G., our demon colorer.

I’ve been meaning to talk to you, Stan. When are you going to remember it’s the Hulk who has green skin, not Captain America!

Stan G.: Gee whiz! A guy can’t remember everything.

Anyway, I had to tell you what MMMS meant last week. And you’re the guy who made it up!

Stan: But when I forget something, it’s different.

Stan G.: Yeah, it’s worse.

Sol: Stan, this is the most confused record I’ve ever heard!

Stan: Great, Sol! Just what we want. If it were anything else, it wouldn’t be the nutty Marvel Bullpen!

Flo: Gosh, we don’t have time for George Bell and Vince Colletta and Larry Lieber and Bob Powell….

Sol: That’s great. Now if we ever form another club, we’ll have something new to offer… voices that haven’t been heard yet.

Stan: ’Nuff said, Sol! Now let’s all get back to work in the Bullpen. And as for you, Marvelous Merry Marchers: Welcome from all of us to all of you. If you want to know how glad we are to have you with us, just you listen. Okay, let ’em hear it, gang!

The Marvel Bullpen: Wah-Hooo!

You Belong! You Belong! You Belong!

We dunno of what historical value the following lyrics have—if any—in the cause of comics history but we sure had a blast trying to decipher ’em courtesy of copies made of the original Merry Marvel Marching Society vinyl records by David Schwartz, an old pal of CBA, who also contributed the record transcribed above. Also many thanks to the actual lyricist of these classic ditties, none other than Stan “The Man” Lee himself, who graciously clarified and corrected our transcribing attempts via e-mail. Thanks also to super-hero song afficionado Arlen (“Metamorpho! Meta-mor-pho!”)

Schumer and Mr. Schwartz for their welcome help.

—Ye Editor

The Marvel Super-Heroes He’s the sulky, over-bulky, kinda-hulky super-hero.

A two-fisted and electrically-transisted super-hero.

An exotically neurotic and aquatic super-hero.

The Marvel super-heroes have arrived!

Super-powered from the forehead to the toes Watch them change their very shape before your nose See a cane-striking super-hero change to Viking super-hero A hum-dinging, real swinging, shield-flinging super-hero They’re the latest, they’re the greatest, ultimatest super-heroes The Marvel super-heroes have arrived!

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

The Merry Marvel Marching Society Stand a little straighter, walk a little prouder Be an innovator, laugh a little louder Grow forever greater, we can show you how’ta And where will you be then?

You’ll belong, you’ll belong, you’ll belong You’ll belong to the Merry Marvel Marching Society!

March along, march along, march along To the song of the Merry Marvel Marching Society!

If you growl, if you groan with a dour, sour outlook If you howl, if you moan, you will get a sauerkraut look Keep it trim and in step, with the vim and the pep of the Merry Marvel Marching Society Be an early riser, strive to be ambitious Speak a little wiser, try to be judicious Be a good adviser, never ever vicious And where will you be then?

Face front!

Lift your head!

You’re on the winning team! ’Nuff Said!

You belong, you belong, you belong You belong to the Merry Marvel Marching Society!

March along, march along, march along To the song of the Merry Marvel Marching Society!

If you growl, if you groan, and you’re only batting zero Do not howl, do not moan, you can be a super-hero Marching right along, to the fighting song of the Merry Marvel Marching Society!

7-B

CBA Interview

Absolutely Fabulous Reminiscing with America’s favorite comic book sweetheart Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris & Sam Gafford

Below: Pic of Flo Steinberg taken in the Marvel offices, February ’64. for use in the Bullpen photo gallery in Marvel Tales #1. Courtesy of Roy Thomas.

Center inset: In a going-away card, Stan Lee immortalized Flo as the world’s little sunbeam in a rare sketch by Smiley. ©2002 Stan Lee.

TO FLO S.: Flo, you just gotta forgive me for this terrible betrayal. I led you to believe—for months!—that this special tribute section of Comic Book Artist was merely a general 1960s Marvel Bullpen retrospective, when in fact, it’s all about you, sweetie-pie! We had hoped to get this out in time for Valentine’s Day but thank heaven your birthday is in March so that’ll do quite nicely. Mutual pal Herb Trimpe tells me you don’t like surprises, but don’t kill me for producing this blatantly sentimental and affectionate love letter to one of my favorite people not only in comics, but in the entire universe. We love ya, F.S.!—Y.E.

8-B

As Ye Editor realized in the course of compiling this special issue, Florence Rae Steinberg just might be the most influential “civilian” in the history of comics—that is (excepting her one-shot stint as an underground comix mogul in the mid-’70s), someone who is neither an artist, writer, editor, or publisher. The Fab One was interviewed via telephone on Dec. 5, 2001, and she copy-edited the transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Let’s start with The World According To Flo. You’re from Boston?

Flo Steinberg: I am. I grew up in Boston, in Dorchester and Mattapan.

CBA: I used to work in off Neponset Circle in Dorchester! I lived in Hyde Park.

Flo: No! CBA: Yeah!

Flo: I know Neponset Circle very well. I went to movies at the Neponset Drive-In. CBA: Where you grew up: Was it a mixed neighborhood or mostly Irish?

Flo: When I grew up in Boston in the 1940s and ’50s, there were lots of different kinds of people, each in their own neighborhoods.

My area’s main street was Blue Hill Avenue, mainly a Jewish neighborhood. Everybody got along, it seemed. It wasn’t very ethnically mixed, and it all seemed placid on the surface.

CBA: Did you stick to your neighborhood or did you venture downtown much?

Flo: In high school, we got out a little bit. The groups mixed and everyone got along very well. I went to Roxbury Memorial High School for Girls. At that time, you could go to gender-separate schools and it was wonderful.

CBA: Was that a private school?

Flo: No, Boston Public, to which I owe a solid, well-rounded education. In those days, you really got a good basic education in English, Spelling, Grammar, stuff like that. That’s where I got the skills I use today. I grew up there and it was great. I’m still in touch with some high school friends.

CBA: Were you active in high school?

Flo: I was! I was President of the Student Council, Jon. CBA: Whoa! [laughs] Cool.

Flo: Someday, I’ll show you my high school yearbook. It’s a riot.

CBA: Were you popular in school?

Flo: I guess. I had friends and we all belonged to clubs then. There were some community centers around and everybody belonged to

either a girls’ clubs or a boys’ clubs. We all had jackets. The main reason for the clubs was getting jackets. [laughs] At socials, the boys would stand on one side in their jackets and the girls in theirs would be on the opposite side of the room.

CBA: Did you do any travelling or did you pretty much stick to Boston?

Flo: We mainly stayed in the city. During Summers and vacations, I worked. We were just working class families. When it came time to choose a college, I went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

CBA: Wasn’t Amherst quite a long trip for you?

Flo: It was. Actually, I had the choice of going to a school in Boston or going away. The idea of going away was so exciting, all the way out to the western part of the state! I mean, who’d ever been there? [laughter] CBA: Did you have siblings?

Flo: I had one sister, Ruthie, who was about five years older than me. My parents, my sister and I—that nuclear unit—had a very extended family of my mother’s sisters and cousins. We would get together once a week in my mother’s ancestral homeland of Chelsea. [laughs] I have many happy memories of Chelsea with my aunts, uncles, cousins and grandfather.

Everyone got along fine. My cousin, Carol (Shore) taught at Chelsea High School for 35plus years and just retired.

So I’ve a lot of connections to Chelsea. [laughs] And then college at UMass opened up great stuff for me.

CBA: What did you take at UMass?

Flo: Well, just Liberal Arts. I was a History major and had a general college education. I graduated in 1960.

CBA: That was the beginning of a transitional time for young people in this country.

Flo: Extremely. Civil Rights was becoming important.

CBA: You had Cosmopolitan with Helen Gurley Brown….

Flo: That wasn’t quite the ’60s.

CBA: But wasn’t there some sense of emancipation for young, single women?

Flo: Well, yes. Maybe not in college because it was still the Eisenhower Years. The Sit-In movements were starting in the South, which we heard about but, unfortunately, I didn’t have much of a social conscience at the time. Things like the Peace Corps and VISTA didn’t happen until after John Kennedy was elected in ’60. That was the first year I voted in a Presidential election! Very exciting.

CBA: Were you at all attracted to the irreverent comedy of Mort Sahl and the more beatnik attitudes going on at the time?

Flo: I didn’t even know about them, at least in college. You know, I just didn’t realize what was going on. There was a coffeehouse that served cappuccino in Amherst!

CBA: Whoa! [laughs] Was your college experience somewhat conformist? Were you in a sorority?

Flo: Yes, it was pretty traditional in the 1950s. I belonged to Sigma Delta Tau sorority. We had people from all over Massachusetts. The COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

student body wasn’t as internationally diverse then. And being in the country, you could hear cows and stuff. It was thrilling!

CBA: Even today, there’s a Bohemian atmosphere in Amherst.

Were there elements of that at the time?

Flo: I don’t remember that. It may have been going on but I really wasn’t a part of it. My experience was more traditional. You wore your little Shetland sweaters, went to classes and did social things, like charity events, building parade floats for homecoming, and things like that. Really, the Kennedy years changed things for me. I became a little more socially aware and it was great. I was political to some degree when I grew up in Boston—Ward 14—at the time. It was the most heavily-Democratic ward in the nation after Cook County, Chicago. Eisenhower came to Ward 14, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy. Ward politics were important then.

CBA: You had a Democratic family?

Flo: Oh, yes. Everybody was that I knew. I didn’t meet a Republican until college!

CBA: Did you ever see JFK? Flo: I did. When he was running for Congress. On Blue Hill Avenue, there was a huge delicatessen, a focal point for the neighborhood, called the G&G, where all the politicians would come to visit and meet voters.

CBA: What did you think of Kennedy?

Flo: We loved him! We loved all the Kennedys. [laughs] CBA: He was a true favored son of the city, right?

Flo: He was. A rich son of the city. [laughs] The Kennedys had big bucks and everything. The whole family was like Irish royalty. I lived back in Boston for a couple of years after college, in the early ’60s, and my roommate and I worked for Ted Kennedy’s first U.S. Senatorial campaign. That was quite a good experience. After I came to New York in ’63, I worked in a minor way for Bobby Kennedy’s New York Senatorial campaign the next year.

CBA: Did you know people connected with the Kennedys?

Flo: Mostly through the Democratic club. Actually, I was mostly stuffing envelopes!

CBA: Did you get a chance to meet Bobby?

Flo: No, not personally. I met Ted Kennedy when he was thanking volunteers for helping out. I never actually shook Bobby’s hand. He was at meetings when I was in the office, but I never got the full brunt of those baby blues. [laughs] CBA: My mother used to be a model for the Ford Agency back in the ’50s; she recalls walking through the U.S. Capitol building, and who gave her the onceover with the up-and-down with the eyes but none other than Jack Kennedy.

Flo: Oh, he was a connoisseur. [laughs] It was a magical time.

CBA: Was there an invincibility in the air?

Flo: It was as if all things were possible. We were bravely marching toward the future. Of course, a lot of that probably had to do with being so young. Things were good and there was hope. President Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis well, so we felt pretty safe.

It really was a time of magic.

CBA: You were ready to take the challenge of going out on your own upon graduating UMass?

Flo: Yes. I lived for two years in Boston, working for the New England Telephone Company. It was my first job. I enjoyed college very much and loved the experience, but it was time to go to work which was what people did. Liberal Arts degrees didn’t really prepare me for anything practical in the real world, so I got a job with the phone company as a service representative where I would answer customer calls. I got to meet a whole new bunch of people and bought my first car. It was very exciting.

CBA: Did you look at it as a short-term job? Did you look at New York City as a Mecca?

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

Right: Pictures of Flo as a child. Top is her sitting on the hood of her father’s Boston taxi cab. Next is Flo with a pup. Bottom is Flo and her older sister, Ruthie.

All courtesy of Flo.

Flo: I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I never look too much towards the future. It seems safer, you know, as long as the present is okay.

I lived in my first apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton and that was fun.

After a couple of years, there was nowhere really to go in that job, and my roommate, Bobbie (Shwom) Niss, was getting married so I thought, “Oh well, why not try New York?” Some friends were driving down and I caught a ride with them. I stayed at a YWCA in the city for a few months; I got a room and two meals a day. It was great.

CBA: What did your parents think about you striking out on your own?

Flo: Well, they were surprised because most people in our family stayed around Boston, got married and had a family but my mother was always supportive. It was something she might have wanted to do as a girl but just couldn’t because of circumstances.

CBA: Did you get a sense of independence from your mother?

Flo: I did. As a young woman in Chelsea, in the 1920s, she had her own business as a public stenographer, with a sign up and everything. People would come in, dictate letters and she would type them up.

CBA: She had her own career?

Flo: A little one, yes, and she always worked in offices. She was pretty cool, and so was my father. He was a taxi driver.

CBA: In downtown or all over?

Flo: All over. My sister and I had the nightly job of rolling all the pennies, nickels, and other change into rolls. [laughs] It’s funny. I haven’t thought of this stuff in a long time!

CBA: Did you ever travel around with your father when he was on the job?

Flo: Sometimes, because the cab was also the family car. I was probably the only kid that got a cab ride up to Amherst, halfway across the state. [laughs] CBA: After you arrived in New York in 1963…?

Flo: I lived for a few months at the Y and went job hunting. At that time, a job search went through employment agencies. You went to agencies, registered and they sent you out on interviews. You would pay them something like a week’s salary if you got a job. So I went on job interviews in my little black dress and pearls, maybe even white gloves! That’s the way you did it then. After a couple of interviews, I was sent to this publishing company called Magazine Management. There I met a fellow by the name of Stan Lee who was looking for what they called then a “gal Friday.” I don’t know if there were any “guy Fridays.” [laughter] CBA: Only for Robinson Crusoe.

Flo: I always thought gal Friday meant a woman who couldn’t take

Below: In case you might’ve missed it, our wonderful cover by Marie Severin is a pastiche of Jack Kirby & Joe Sinnott’s legendary cover of Fantastic Four #51, containing many a Marvelite’s favorite all-time FF tale, “This Man, This Monster.” Many thanks to the Mirthful One. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

9-B

Inset right: Cunning co-ed Florence Steinberg on the UMass campus in Amherst, circa 1959.

Courtesy of Flo.

Below: Lovely 13-year-old Flo Steinberg in a portrait while she attended grade school in Boston, Mass. Courtesy of Flo.

10-B

shorthand. [laughs] Anyway, Stan had a one-man office on a huge floor of other offices, which housed the many parts of the magazine division. This was at 655 Madison Avenue. Magazine Management published Marvel Comics as well as a lot of men’s magazines, movie magazines, crossword puzzle books, romance magazines, confession magazines, detective magazines. So many people who worked there went on to become famous; in the men’s magazines, writers Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman, George Fox, John Bowers, and more. Each department took turns, one day a week, covering the switchboard which actually had those plugs to connect the calls, like Judy Holliday. [laughter] I had to cover that one day a week, too, when the regular operator took her lunch break. But you just didn’t think anything of it. Under Martin Goodman’s benevolent gaze, we all functioned.

CBA: Did you read comics as a kid?

Flo: I did, but mostly Little Lulu and Archie. I always liked Wonder Woman and The Marvel Family. My cousin Bobbie (Wine) and I used to read comics and share them. But we weren’t collectors or people who wrote in letters.

CBA: Not like us crazy folk, like this guy who keeps annoying you! [laughter] When you went in to interview at Marvel, did you consider comics as a sort of alien world? Were you surprised to consider that people actually made the books?

Flo: No, I thought of it as publishing. I thought of it as words on paper.

CBA: Did you see it as, “We’re producing reading material for children”?

Flo: I guess, but I didn’t really think about it. It was a product like any other.

CBA: There was no stigma you felt going in to comics?

That they were a bit tawdry because of the Wertham situation in the 1950s?

Flo: No. I was amused by it. I always respected comics and liked them. In fact, when Stan Goldberg was busy, Stan would let me fill in the names for the fashion pages in Millie the Model and Patsy & Hedy.

“A beautiful blue, bubbly dress by Jane Smith!” Kids would send in their little fashion designs and I’d write their names down and what they drew, and an address, or a code, or something. I used to write my cousins’ names in and they’d get such a kick out of it! [laughs] You know, my cousins often say today, “I wish we had those copies of Millie now. Who knew?” [laughs] CBA: I worked on an issue of CBA with Trina Robbins and she loaned me a copy of her 1980s Marvel title, Misty,

and on the cover, there was a credit that read, “Designed by Florence Steinberg of New York, New York.” [laughter] Flo: I did design that dress and mailed it in.

CBA: Of course, Trina is a good friend of yours.

Flo: Exactly! So I got the cover! [laughs] It’s who you know! I mailed in that one and she transformed it. There is a wonderful bond that the two of us share.

CBA: So your interview with Stan was in March of 1963?

Flo: Yes. I seem to do big things in the month of March. Not lately, but in the past.

CBA: What was Stan like when you went into the office?

Flo: Wonderful, very pleasant, very nice, and open. He told me he was looking for someone to help him in the office and be his assistant. At the time, Marvel was not putting out so many books and a lot of them were bimonthly. Many were Fin Fang Foom-type of books. They were so much fun! Stan would sit on a high stool and type away madly on his typewriter. When artists came up, he would talk with them and they would have story conferences.

Later, they’d come back with the pencils and he would write in the dialogue. Next, it was lettered and inked, and sent out to be colored. We would then get it out to the Comics Code for approval, make changes if required, and then be put on schedule for the printer. It was very important to get the books out on time. You know, that should always be a priority. I’m not getting personal here. [laughter] CBA: Did you ship the jobs off to World Color Press every week or was it every month?

Flo: I seem to remember it was once a month, but I’m not sure.

CBA: You’d have to pack up a bunch of books and send them off at once to Sparta?

Flo: As I remember, we packed up the original artwork with the color guides that Stan Goldberg did. Eddie, a messenger, came from Chemical Color Plate Corporation; he would pick up the jobs and deliver them to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the engravers were located. A wonderful fellow, Alan Garvin, handled our work there. I used to talk to him all the time.

CBA: Would Eddie wait around until Stan Goldberg appeared with the color guides?

Flo: The jobs would be waiting at the front of the office in a pouch.

CBA: They would make the engraved plates for the printers there?

Flo: Yes, Chemical Color would do the color separations and produce the plates. Then they would ship them out to Sparta, Illinois for printing.

CBA: I always assumed the engraved plates would go back to you guys and you would then ship them to Illinois.

Flo: The color proofs would be delivered to us.

CBA: So Chemical would prepare the proofs for you. Were covers the most important proofs?

Flo: Oh, sure! They had to get the covers out first to be printed.

All the technical work was done in Bridgeport.

CBA: And every comics company used them, right?

Flo: As far as I know; I’m not sure.

CBA: It’s weird that there was such a monopoly with both the engraving and printing of comics.

Flo: Chemical Color invited some of us from the office to their plant up in Bridgeport—it was a P.R. thing—and I went for the day. It was just wonderful. There was a huge room with, God, it seemed like hundreds of women doing color seps by hand.

CBA: Did it resemble an assembly line? Did it seem like, “Oy, this is not a job to have!”?

Flo: No, they looked relatively content. I only saw a little bit of the operation.They also had those huge presses. Anyway, back at the COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

office, the make-readys—printed color signatures—would come in from World Color and Stan had to go over them to make sure they looked okay. They were untrimmed color pages printed on newsprint.

CBA: Would you have to turn the proofs around immediately, call World Color and say, yeah, these are okay, and go ahead with the press run?

Flo: It didn’t seem to be such a huge deal. I mean, the turnaround time wasn’t crazy. It seemed simply a routine. Stan was very wise about the scheduling. When the freelancers said they were going to have their job in on time, they did. There were very few instances when people didn’t get their work in.

CBA: In the ’70s, freelancers had this constant problem with deadlines. Of course, by then Marvel was putting out 50 titles as compared to, let’s say, 17 or 18 that Marvel was putting out in the ’60s.

Flo: Also by the ’70s, the artists had become the stars, rather than their work preeminent; less craftsmen and more the artístes. Back then the work as published was the important thing. That’s why we never saved the artwork: No one ever wanted it or asked for it back.

When the guys would go around for jobs, they would show the printed comic book as their finished work. That was what was in their portfolio, not their original artwork.

CBA: Back in the early to mid-’60s, the artwork was twice-up, right? Those Bristol boards took up a lot of room to store, I would assume.

Flo: The pages were very big, and there was only so much storage space. Each issue’s original art was shelved, and then, at some point, there was no more room. Once the books were printed, everything got tossed.

CBA: [pained] Ouch!

Flo: I bet that hurt. [laughs] It’s a big ouch, I know.

CBA: Just considering the value of that art, you know. They’d be worth millions today.

Flo: When I was there, nobody asked for it, though I’m not absolutely sure. People such as Jim Steranko and Barry Windsor-Smith, of course, later asked for their originals, but when I was there on staff, from 1963 to ’68, whether rightly or wrongly, people very rarely asked for their artwork back. If they wanted it, I’m sure Stan would have given it to them. But it usually just got tossed. I wish I felt guilty, but [laughs] I was doing my job.

CBA: When you first interviewed with Stan, was he specific about responsibilities, or was it a general description, “Just help me out on the phone”?

Flo: I don’t really remember the conversation but I was told the things I would be doing: answering the phone, attending to the tiny bit of fan mail, dealing with the freelancers to some degree. The mail at the time wasn’t overwhelming. I think Millie and Patsy got more fan mail at that time than the super-hero books. I was also trafficking the jobs, calling whoever Stan wanted me to call, like artists, letterers or colorists, and finding out when they were going to get their work in; then I would pack up the books for the Comics Code. Everything was delivered by messenger services back then.

CBA: You were a vivacious young lady and some of these freelancers were lecherous old men— Flo: [laughs] No, they actually weren’t old. They were maybe only ten to 15 years older than I was. The age difference wasn’t much and they were all very vital guys. They worked mostly at home so it was fun for them to get into the city and chat a little bit. They would come in, like once a week, whatever, to chitchat and bring in or pick up stuff.

CBA: Are there any freelancers that you particularly remember?

Flo: Oh, sure. Well, most of them.

CBA: I mean to say, freelancers you hit it off with. Fellows who would banter back and forth with you.

Flo: Most of them were like that. Jack was wonderful. Dick Ayers, March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

This page: Proof that Flo was wellloved by Marvel fans. Top is a fan letter from an Army private. Above is the Stamford University Marvel Club group portrait. Right is a picture of Dave Kaler and Flo cuttin’ the cake at an early NYC comic con. Below is detail from a fan’s love letter to Flo. All courtesy of Flo.

11-B

This page: More memorabilia from Flo’s Bullpen days. Above is a young fan posing with Flo in the Marvel reception area. Left is Flo’s desk, circa ’66. Bottom is Flo in the Marvel office in 1965. Below is Jack Kirby promo drawing. Hulk ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

12-B

Don Heck, Chic Stone—a wonderful, witty fellow, who was very bright and clever. They would mostly go to lunch with each other, and sometimes, I would join them for a sandwich or something.

CBA: Do you remember Christopher Rule?

Flo: I do. I met him but I didn’t know him well. I don’t remember what he did, but I have a fuzzy image of him in my memory.

CBA: Do you remember George Klein?

Flo: Yes. But I knew better the people I worked with all the time.

Like Sol Brodsky who would come in and set up at an extra little drawing board where he would do the paste-ups and mechanicals for the ads.

CBA: When you started working there, was Sol a freelancer or was he on staff?

Flo: He was a freelancer.

CBA: So it was just you and Stan on staff?

Flo: Yes, two little offices, separated by a partition. We were right next to the men’s magazine division. Sometimes, the guys would be talking in there and we could hear them. They talked sort of naughty, you know, [laughter] and their conversations would come drifting over.

CBA: You mentioned to me about doing some modeling for the confession magazines?

Flo: Oh, yes. That was what they used to do for the movie magazines. I’ve got a copy somewhere in the closet. They would pose you to match photos of movie stars. Let’s say there was an article like, “Girl Wins Contest To Go Meet Stars.” I would be photographed standing and holding a glass just so. Then they’d superimpose my picture onto a photo of Paul Newman holding a glass, and we’d appear to be toasting each other. [laughs] That was for Screen Stars or Screen Illustrated, something like that.

CBA: Were you frequently dealing with the Magazine Management side?

Flo: Well, everybody saw each other all of the time, walking in the halls.

CBA: You said in an interview that the people in the magazine department would laugh at you guys in Marvel Comics?

Flo: It was an affectionate thing. They really couldn’t figure out what we were doing and then, when things were doing well, they couldn’t figure out our success either! When the whole company moved to 625 Madison, Stan finally had his own office. There was a big space with windows where I was, and Sol Brodsky (now on staff) had his own desk. Then we started the first real Bullpen—and I’m sorry if I’m leaving anyone out—Marie Severin, Morrie Kuramoto, etc.

CBA: What did Morrie do?

Flo: Oh, Morrie did everything: corrections, the letters pages. He was a general production guy. At lunchtime, he would do these beautiful watercolors of nature themes and lovely still lifes. When he was finished, he would throw them in the wastebasket! I would run and pull them out of the garbage, because they were so beautiful.

CBA: He was Japanese?

Flo: Japanese-American. He was in World War II with, I think, the 442nd. His wonderful daughter, Sheri, who would come and spend the summers with Morrie. She grew up, lives in Hawaii now, married a fellow there (the artist Russell Sunabe) and has two kids. Swell people.

CBA: You stay in touch with a lot of these guys?

Flo: Yes, mostly by phone. Marvel was my first job in the city so that’s where I made my lifelong friends. John Verpoorten eventually came on board somewhere in there.

CBA: Probably about 1967? Herb Trimpe came on before you left.

Do you recall him being there?

Flo: Yes. Herb came in when we had just moved to 635 Madison.

There was constant traffic back and forth between the two offices.

Herb came on and then somewhere along the line, I became so overwhelmed with the fan mail and the Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club that Stan started. There was just so much work! I needed some extra help and had gotten this wonderful letter from a college girl in Virginia by the name of Linda Fite. She came up and was hired to help me out, though she eventually went on to do writing and production work.

CBA: And Linda is still your friend today?

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Flo: Linda and her husband, Herb Trimpe, are my best friends.

They’re just wonderful, and I also love their kids. My friendship with them is one of the best things I got out of working at Marvel.

CBA: Obviously, the popularity of Marvel comics was just growing exponentially. Did it, all of a sudden, start snowballing, that there was so much work to do, and did the success seem to come out of nowhere?

Flo: It slowly grew. We started getting letters from older readers like college kids and guys in the service. When the super-heroes came out, I think the first real outside media attention was from the Wall Street Journal which did an article on the Marvel phenomenon. That was quite exciting, this was all quite new! Then people like the French film director Alain Resnais came to see Stan, as well as Federico Fellini. There were also college fan clubs all over the country who would send us their group photos.

CBA: Do you remember the Esquire magazine coverage in 1965?

Marie and Jack Kirby did a bunch of drawings and it was about the influence of Marvel Comics on college campuses. It was big publicity for a relatively small company.

Flo: Right! I don’t remember the exact time that came out. Pretty soon after I left, Robin Green replaced me.

CBA: Did you know her well?

Flo: Yes! She was great. She has gone on to be so successful, winning an Emmy for her work on The Sopranos. I ran into her when I was living out in San Francisco in the early ’70s. We were walking down the street in Berkeley and we bumped into each other, both so cute in our mini-skirts. [laughter] CBA: Did that accidental meeting lead to the Rolling Stone article?

Flo: No, no. The article had been before. She wrote that while still in New York. I remember I was so embarrassed by the article! I couldn’t show it to my family. [laughs] I said some naughty words!

But it was fun. I mean, we all looked so beautiful in those pictures, so young, and Robin was a very good interviewer. Around that time, a friend of Herb’s named John Riley, a grad student at NYU, did a wonderful little film on Herb, called We Love You, Herb Trimpe! They interviewed me, Linda and Herb. It was about The Hulk, and included a lot of Herb’s graphics. It was just great! Recently, Herb was on a segment of the Today show about his teaching career. Oh, we look so beautiful in that movie! [laughs] CBA: A lot of people obviously look with great affection upon those early years at Marvel Comics.

Flo: Well, I’m very grateful for my time there, though in a way, I don’t really understand it. I understand the attention the comics get, but I’m baffled about the affection fans have for the Bullpen. But I am so grateful for my job there because if it hadn’t been for those five great years, I wouldn’t have had my wonderful friends and this life I lead. About eight or nine years ago, when I was between jobs, I was able to come back to work at Marvel, and that job is supporting me to this very day.

CBA: Not only were those ’60s Marvel books cutting edge, but they were also exciting to witness as they just got better and better in a short period of time. Kirby and Ditko were producing some of the best work ever in super-hero comics.

Flo: Oh yes, they were great.

CBA: But it was Stan who really developed this familial atmosphere where we felt intimate with Jolly Jack (whether or not March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

he was really jolly) and with Sturdy Steve and Fabulous Flo. Regardless if it was accurate or not, Stan created this wonderful sense of family where fans felt they belonged.

Flo: It was a mythos. Stan gave everybody credit in the books by putting in their names, and he was genuinely sincere. He was such a wonderful boss and so thoughtful and kind. You know, he’s just an excellent person and I feel fortunate to have been there working with him.

CBA: How did you feel about becoming this personality in the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins? Was it gratifying?

Flo: It was amusing. [laughs] It was all Stan’s doing, and it was real sweet and fun and everything. But it didn’t give me a puffed head or anything like that! I didn’t start thinking I was more than I was.

CBA: Here I am, interviewing you for a magazine over 30 years later.

You were neither an artist or a writer….

Flo: Exactly! That’s why I don’t understand this attention. [laughs] CBA: Well, you were important to a lot of people’s lives. You were also a witness to the early years of something that a lot of people hold to be significant.

You mentioned in an interview that you were surprised when years later, at conventions, for instance, that these young men would come up to you and say, “Hi, how are you doing?

Remember me?”

Flo: Yes. Well, Stan always liked the letters and the early fanzines to be acknowledged and that was my job. You know, sending out the little postcards. And Stan, brilliant again, conceived of No-Prizes and sending them out. That made people happy. Or kids would send a little drawing.

CBA: What was a No-Prize?

Flo: Actually, that’s what it was.

It was an empty envelope. [laughter] Printed on it was, “Enclosed is your No-Prize.”

There was nothing in it. It was just brilliant! And then came the early fanzines. I can’t remember all the names and what was in them, but they were writing about Marvel. So naturally, we’d write back and thank them.

CBA: You were invited to one of Dave Kaler’s first comic conventions and I’ve seen a photo of you and him cutting a cake.

You were obviously a guest.

Flo: Yes, everyone was very nice. There was one even before the David Kaler con. It took place around Union Square and Steve Ditko came. This was before air conditioning; it was like 100º and ice was melting all over the place! [laughs] CBA: Did they specifically invite you?

Flo: No, they invited Stan, but

Above: Merry Marvel Marching Society pin received with membership kit. Courtesy of Aaron Sultan. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Inset left: Devoted MMMS member Scott Stewart proudly continues to carry his #6301 membership card to this day! Courtesy of Scott.

Below: Merry Marvel Marcher Aaron Sultan cleverly had many Marvel Bullpenners sign an authentic MMMS memo sheet. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

13-B

he couldn’t go. He was so busy writing and this was a new phenomenon, the fan convention. So I went to hold up the Marvel flag. Then David had his convention at the Broadway Central Hotel, which eventually fell down! Jim Warren was at that one.

CBA: Was that the first time you met your future boss?

Flo: I’m not sure. Certainly one of the first. Who else was there? Woody Gelman, I remember, attended. He was great.

CBA: Do you remember Gil Kane?

Flo: Oh, sure! Boy, no one could talk like Gil. [laughs] He was so amazingly verbal!

CBA: Did you have fanboys hanging all over you?

Flo: Not really.

CBA: Do you think they were too scared of you, being afraid of women?

Flo: I don’t know. Maybe I was older.

I was in my twenties. In those days, you wore heels and dresses, you had your hair done.

CBA: Yeah, but one looks at pictures of you and sees that, by Top: When news of Flo’s departure from Marvel reached fans, some wrote farewell letters to the beloved “gal Friday.” This one even included a poem. Left: Flo in her hippy-dippy days, San Francisco 1972. Courtesy of Flo. 14-B

any measure, you were adorable.

Flo: Oh, thank you, Jon. CBA: But it’s a fact, Flo. I’m not even trying to compliment you.

Flo: But at the very beginning, the conventions weren’t that popular. Maybe people thought they were just one-shot things.

CBA: Part of a fad?

Flo: Yes, people didn’t realize that they would go on and on, become a part of life.

CBA: Did you look at the popularity of Marvel comics as if were a fad? That it was popular for a time and then it would cool off?

Flo: I didn’t really think about it. At the time, things were good, business was booming, and Stan was happy.

CBA: When business was getting better, were you getting commensurate raises?

Flo: Oh, I don’t think so. [laughs] Martin ran a pretty tight ship.

CBA: What was Martin like?

Flo: Oh, he was great. I liked him. He was a very dapper fellow with his little porkpie hat. Martin and Stan would have wonderful conversations together but mostly he stayed in his big office.

CBA: Would you go to his office?

Flo: No, not often. Once I was rushing to answer the phone, slipped and banged my head against a desk, and became sort of woozy. There was some State law that there had to be a couch where people could lie down if they weren’t feeling well, but we didn’t have one in the Bullpen. Everyone was running around and Martin said, “Well, get her in my office.” So I went and laid on Martin Goodman’s very voluptuous leather couch, while he conducted business. [laughs] He was a very gracious man, just lovely. He and his wife were so very, very stylish, and quite classy, I thought.

CBA: Martin wasn’t an intimidating presence in the office?

Flo: No, no, because I rarely had anything to do with him other than casual conversation and stuff like that.

CBA: Were you aware that Stan and he were related?

Flo: Yes, through Martin’s wife, but that made no difference. People made such a fuss about it, but if Stan wasn’t competent, Martin would have bounced him out. Stan more than proved himself. It’s not even debatable anymore and I don’t know why people always bring it up.

CBA: Is it distressing at all that people pick on Stan? Less so these days, but ten years ago, some people were picking at the relationship between Stan and Jack. There was an article in The Village Voice that really seemed to drive a wedge between Jack and Stan.

Flo: Yes, there was a lot of that. Sometimes people would call me up and want to know what the “real” story was and I’d say, “I never saw any animosity. I really didn’t. There were none of these bad feelings then.” And of course, they would immediately lose interest. [laughs] CBA: You were in the Bullpen when Steve Ditko quit, right?

Flo: Yes. Again, I don’t remember it. I wasn’t privy to whatever their personal conversations were. But Steve is a wonderful guy. He’d come up to the office, he’d chat with Sol and me, while all of this was going on. People then didn’t toot their own horn much to the media because who would listen?

CBA: Well, it wasn’t an issue until 15 years ago.

Flo: Right. People had a sense of what was dignified to say in public and what wasn’t.

CBA: Was it a question of being loyal to Stan, the man who gave them work?

Flo: I’m not sure. Overall, Steve Ditko was great. I never saw him angry and I’ve seen him in the last few years. He’d done work for Marvel while George Roussos was still there; Steve would come over, talk to George and me. Wonderful, nice chats. I sure wish him well.

CBA: Did you guys have functions like Christmas parties?

Flo: Maybe they had something in the Magazine Management office, but I don’t remember any Christmas parties where, say, the freelancers would come, or things like that.

CBA: Did you have to run the pages over to the Code?

Flo: There were messenger services for that. We’d call a messenger COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

service to take the book over. They got the artwork and then maybe they’d send it off to Chemical Color, unless there were requested changes.

CBA: Do you remember if the pages would come back from the Code with notations?

Flo: Yes. They would send back the page with a memo, like “bust too big” or “too much blood.” [laughs] I don’t remember it being a big deal, though. Things were just fixed.

CBA: So Sol or Marie would just jump right on the corrections?

Flo: Whatever had to be done. They were fixed usually by a little cutting and pasting. I don’t remember word balloons being changed much.

CBA: Do you remember dealing with artists about meeting deadlines?

Flo: There was very little of that then because part of being a professional was getting your work in on time. But occasionally, I guess. Then, there was inventory Stan could have used if he wanted to put in an inventory story. Although I don’t remember, in my time, that happening very much.

CBA: I can’t recall a single instance of that happening during the mid-’60s.

Flo: Yes, because people got their work in on time, maybe a day or two difference, if that. Again, it was just part of being a responsible professional.

CBA: There were instances, certainly, in the Golden Age, of mandates coming down from the publisher to get a book done: “This looks like a hot trend and we’ll jump on it. We need to get a book done in a very short amount of time.” Do you recall, at all, people having to come in and do rush jobs and “hurry up and get this thing done”?

Flo: I really don’t remember because we were already doing what March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

was trendy, the super-heroes. Stan had a wonderful group of artists who could work and turn things around overnight. If he needed pencilers, inkers, there was a huge group of people to call on, and I guess if they let him down one time, he wouldn’t use them again. But I don’t remember that happening. Once Bill Everett came in and said his kid’s hamsters ate the work. [laughs] Or somebody left their art on the subway or once Don Heck wasn’t reachable. He was out on Fire Island and there were no phones in Summer homes so we called the cops out there. We were worried because if someone didn’t get their work in on time and we couldn’t get in touch with them, we assumed something terrible had happened.

CBA: Deadlines were very important then, weren’t they?

Flo: Well, they were the most important aspect because if you didn’t meet the deadline, then Martin had to pay extra fees. There was always this wonderful image of the trains pulling up to World Color. They had their own little train track, and if the trains pulled up and the books weren’t there, the trains pulled away empty and this was not good.

CBA: Did you have any inkling of the previous problems Marvel had in the ’50s? At one time, Marvel was the most prolific comic publisher in the business during those years, surpassing all the companies with the sheer volume of different titles, if not in sales. Then American News Distribution totally

Above and below: The Fab One solidified her place in Marvel’s early history when she was prominently profiled in a 1971 Rolling Stone article three years after her departure. ©2002 Straight Arrow.

Hulk ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

15-B

Above: An astounding array of artists contributed to the Steinberg-helmed underground, Big Apple Comix. Below: A strange furry mammal-like creature with a distinctive high-pitched voice from New York, 1989. Courtesy of Flo.

16-B

collapsed and Stan had to fire everybody on staff. Marie, Joe Maneely, Bill Everett and others were all gone, and it was just Stan left to rebuild the company.

Flo: I heard about it but didn’t really research it or anything.

CBA: So you didn’t have any indication that Stan was starting over again?

Flo: No. CBA: What was Bill Everett like?

Flo: Great! He was a wonderful fellow, a lovely personality. He worked at home in Massachusetts, and would come into the city.

CBA: Did you ever meet his daughter Wendy?

Flo: Oh yes. She stayed one night with me when she came down to visit. I think Bill was sick. Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich knew Bill better because he bunked with them for a while. Bill was just a great guy and a wonderful raconteur.

Really, everyone was very nice to me.

CBA: Did you occasionally hang out with Marie in the ’60s?

Flo: Oh, Marie and I were very good friends, yes. We’d go to lunch all the time or visit each other. I love Marie. Actually, we’ve sort of lost touch because she’s living way out on Long Island now. Marie did wonderful caricatures of the people in the Bullpen. They were so funny and she always had a good take on what was going on; she is a fantastic artist and a great, smart, witty person.

CBA: Do you recall when you first met Wally Wood?

Flo: Uh-huh. He came up to the office. I guess he was working on Daredevil. Wally was a chain-smoker and Stan didn’t like people smoking in his office. (I smoked at my desk—everybody smoked at their desk—but Stan was ahead of his time.) When Woody was there, I would go in and say to him, “Sorry!” I would have to take Woody’s cigarette away from him, which he didn’t like!

But what could I do? [laughs] It was my job!

CBA: Did you two hit it off?

Flo: Sure, Woody was real special, as we all know. I helped him out on witzend, doing paperwork, lists and stuff like that. It was fun. Witzend was ahead of its time.

CBA: Did you proofread the Marvel comics at all?

Was that a part of your duties back then?

Flo: In those days, you didn’t need a proofreader because the editor knew how to spell! Stan grew up in the 1930s and ’40s and went through the New York Public School system, which was the best at that time. They taught people how to spell!

CBA: So you didn’t have to proofread any of the books?

Flo: No. There was no proofreader because Stan read and corrected everything. Some things might have got through but in those days, all editors could spell. [laughs] CBA: Did you read the comics as published with any frequency?

Flo: Sure, I read them all because I had to answer questions from the fans like, “Why did this happen in Fantastic Four #44?”

CBA: You wrote the answers in the letter columns?

Flo: Oh no. I would answer their questions through the mail. For the letters pages, I had all these little folders, and if

they were pretty good letters (which most of them were), I would put them in different folders, like FF #44. When it was time to compose the letters page, I would give the folder to Stan and sometimes, I would mark things of interest; he would read them and pick out which ones would be in the letter column. I would type them up, give them to him and he would type the answers. Then Sol would get them typeset at a typesetting house.

CBA: But you mentioned before, you had a favorite title, didn’t you?

Flo: I loved Sgt. Fury.

CBA: What was it about Sgt. Fury that you liked?

Flo: I don’t know. All the repartee, the easy camaraderie. You know, good/bad. World War II was easy; good side/bad side. But I liked all of the books. Thor was always wonderful. Stan always did that terrific Thor-speak.

CBA: The “thee”s and “thou”s.

Flo: All the legends and myths, it was very educational. I liked them all. There was not a character I didn’t like.

CBA: Would you occasionally get some letters from kooks?

Flo: Oh, sometimes. Once, I remember—and I’m not sure of the year—we got a letter to Sgt. Fury from out of somewhere, maybe Texas, saying that we were Communist pinkos because… [ponders] why were we Communist pinkos?

CBA: These were the days of the John Birch Society, right?

Flo: Right. There were different races and ethnic groups in Sgt. Fury.

There was a Jewish guy, a black guy, an Italian guy, etc. The crank said we were Communist Pinko Jews, and he was going to come to New York and take care of us. Everybody panicked. We were all running around wondering what to do! We called the FBI. In those days, you could just call and they would respond. An FBI agent came to the office, he was really nice. He looked at the letter and said, “Well, how many people have handled this letter?” We said, “Oh, about 50.” [laughs] Everybody had handled it! So he took the letter— after we gave him a bunch of comics—and after that, no one in the Bullpen wanted to go out to the front area where people would come into the office. [laughs] It was silly. We were laughing but, of course, I was the one who had to go greet anyone who came in out front. It was usually the fans or a special messenger or an appointment of Stan’s. The fans would come up sometimes but we didn’t have tours.

There was work to be done. So all they got to see was me saying, “Sorry.” [laughs] CBA: There was something that Robin Green mentioned that was interesting. It’s been ingrained into comics folklore that kids of varying ages would come up to the offices, after seeing the address in the comics, wanting to meet the actual super-heroes or Stan Lee. Flo: Exactly. Oh, the little ones were the dearest. I would just go out and say, “I’m sorry. Spider-Man is out on a job. He heard about a robbery.” With the little ones, you could just say that the superheroes were out fighting crime and evil. But the older kids, they wanted to meet Stan and thought all the artists worked there. I said, “They don’t. They work at home. It’s just a little office. Nobody’s here. You can’t come in.” I’m not absolutely sure, but I seem to remember Len Wein and Marv Wolfman coming up when they were in junior high or high school, trying to get through the door, and my having to trip them so they couldn’t get through!

CBA: “Oops! Sorry about that, boys!” [laughs] Flo: They tried to make a run in, but I could be remembering it wrong. [laughs] CBA: What were they hoping to accomplish?

Flo: Just to see the Bullpen, I guess. To see the wonderful Marvel offices, which in reality were just people sitting around doing their job.

CBA: Were you surprised at the amount of drive some of these people had?

Flo: Well, I admired it. We hoped they could channel it into a positive direction. [laughs] CBA: Some must have seemed rude, though.

Flo: Well, they didn’t mean to be and I was always quite firm. It wasn’t like they were going to get by me.

CBA: So Flo can be tough?

Flo: Sure. Actually, I don’t know why everyone thinks I’m so nice.

I’m not really so nice. I remember these people when they were so COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

much younger. They were all good kids. Then Roy Thomas came on staff.

CBA: Was Roy the first real fan-turned-professional you can recall, who had a true enthusiasm for the material rather than just having a professional approach, but something beyond, a love?

Flo: Yes, I’m pretty sure. I guess he had worked at DC for a short time and then came up to visit Stan, who sure needed the help. And we were all friendly. At that time, Gary Friedrich also came to New York, as well as Denny O’Neil. When Denny came, he just happened to show up in New York on Yom Kippur. In the ’60s, so much of New York closed down on Jewish holidays. I remember Marvel was closed.

But poor Denny couldn’t get ahold of anybody. He called the offices, they were closed. [laughs] He didn’t know what was happening and he called me at home. He was just so bewildered! “What was going on?” [laughs] CBA: Do you remember Steve Skeates?

Flo: Oh, sure! I saw him at a convention not so long ago, just for a minute. He’s such a funny guy and so witty. I always liked talking to Steve.

CBA: There was a rotating door for a short time for the assistant editor position, right? Steve came in, Denny came in, but they didn’t last very long. And Roy was finally able to fill the position.

Flo: Oh, okay. [laughs] CBA: I’m telling you? [laughs] Flo: There’s so much I don’t remember! I loved those days. It was a wonderful time and these were my friends. But ultimately, it was my job. I remember once, Denny was wearing a “Legalize Pot” button and Stan made Denny take it off.

CBA: Geez! I would think that there must have been some proto-hippies who looked at “Doctor Strange” and must have thought all you guys were smoking pot. [laughs] Flo: Exactly. We got letters like that and we didn’t know what they were talking about. We were real straight. We read the books and couldn’t fathom any reason why people would think that we were doing drugs. Doctor Strange is so wonderful. I do miss him because he doesn’t show up in the books too much these days.

CBA: So there weren’t any bongs going around at Marvel? [laughs] Flo: Oh, no. Not at all.

CBA: Do you remember the Merry Marvel Marching Society?

Flo: Sure, that was a major event.

CBA: Who thought of that?

Flo: Stan, who wrote the script for the little MMMS record. I remember making copies of it, circling each person’s lines and sending them out.

CBA: Did you have to organize everyone to show up at the studio?

Flo: Yes. We all met at a recording studio somewhere.

CBA: Only Steve Ditko said no?

Flo: Steve chose not to join in. It wasn’t a command performance.

We were even able, through technology, to get some guys at home on the recording by talking to them on the phone, which I thought was magic. The wonder of technology! [laughs] Sam Rosen was home and so was Dick Ayers.

CBA: Sam never came into the office, right?

Flo: No, his brother, Joe Rosen, who lettered for Harvey, would make the rounds and bring in the work. I met Sam occasionally but he mostly worked from home. There was a third brother, too, though I don’t know if he was also a letterer. Artie Simek would come in; he was a wonderful guy, very talented. He did sports cartoons for a local paper and could actually play the comb. He would put some wax paper on a comb and turn it into a musical instrument. [laughs] CBA: Like Marie, you’re obviously a little playful and pranksterish, and Herb is a friendly, jovial guy. Was it just a fun atmosphere to be in? Were you all genuinely happy?

Flo: Yes, it was happy but there was a lot of work to do and that was the first priority. People did their work.

CBA: But the fun served to relieve stress?

Flo: Yes, for me. Except when the mail would pile up, I would get nervous. But I don’t remember any harshness or meanness from anyone. Everybody liked each other. When I was at Marvel, pivotal things happened. There was the first big blackout in November, 1965.

I remember sitting there around five o’clock watching all the lights go out. Sol and I looked up the street and we saw the lights blink out, March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

one building at a time, all the way up Madison Avenue. I lived in the city so I could just walk home but most everyone else had further to go. It was really a big deal.

CBA: Yeah. I was only six but I clearly remember the Big Blackout when we lived in Westchester. Roy was just mentioning to me about being stuck in the subway for an hour and a half that night.

Flo: Also, in 1963, I was at work when we heard that John Kennedy had been assassinated, and for me—and my generation—that was a very pivotal moment. I remember it was the first time Magazine Management all got together—the entire company—and we listened to the radio. It was such a horrendous and heavy day.

CBA: Something very similar, but far more devastating, just happened in the city you call home. You’ve been living in New York for a number of years.

Flo: Oh, yes, since the ’60s. I’m a naturalized New Yorker! [laughs] CBA: You even produced an underground comic book, which we discussed in your Warren interview, called Big Apple Comix, in ode to the city. What is your mood after the September 11th attacks? As a New Yorker—not only as an American—did you take it personally?

Flo: Sure, I did. I’m still angry. A lot of my friends called up from all over to see how I was and to ask if I was scared. I said, “No, I’m really angry!” And I still am, you know. I never thought I’d be in this position but I do support what our country is doing, though I’m sorry innocents are killed. It’s something we should have done a long time ago, when previous acts of terrorism took place against Americans. Now, at least, we’re finally doing it.

While I didn’t vote for Bush, I support what the country is doing now. I’ve come full-circle. [laughs] CBA: Back in the late ’60s and the early ’70s, it was a different climate for your generation.

Flo: Vietnam was on everybody’s mind and while I was against the war, I didn’t go marching that much. I went to a big anti-war gathering where they announced that a number of American soldiers had been killed and people actually applauded. I just walked out and never went back. I certainly wanted the war to be over but that applause just creeped me out.

CBA: You started hanging around with some underground comix people?

Flo: Oh, yes! That was pivotal for me, too. Trina Robbins came up to the office one day to interview Stan for the L.A. Free Press, which was the equivalent of New York’s Village Voice or East Village Other. We met and somehow we began to hang out together. She lived down in the East Village. We became friends and it has been a serendipitous friendship for me. We’re still friends. I got to know those EVO people, the underground, Kim Deitch, for instance. Artie Spiegelman, Spain, et al.

CBA: Was Justin Green in New York?

Flo: I don’t remember Justin from here. I remember him

Above: With a view not likely to be seen again anytime soon, Flo poses atop the south tower of the World Trade Center in an undated picture overlooking Manhattan, her adopted town. Courtesy of Flo.

Below: Why’s it’s the Fab One! We thought we recognized the Boston accent! Flo took a temporary job during the holiday season in 1989, working in a teddy bear suit at a toy store. Courtesy of Flo.

17-B

Above: Yep! Not only did Flo make it into the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins with regularity in the 1960s, Jack Kirby actually made her a bonafide super-heroine in his What If? #11 story, which also featured Stan Lee, Sol Brodsky, and Jack himself as a surrogate FF. Art by Jack Kirby & Joe Sinnott. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

18-B

from San Francisco. They were such a nice bunch of people; when they moved out to California, I visited and I liked it. After leaving Marvel, I got a “real” job at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization where I learned to really copyedit.

CBA: Did you go to First Fridays?

Flo: Sometimes. People like Mike Kaluta, Jeff Jones, Bill Pearson, and, I think, Larry Ivie would go. They must have overlapped, I don’t really remember. Louise [Simonson] and Archie Goodwin and Anne T. Murphy. It was nice but I don’t think I went regularly. Jenette Kahn had some at her house. Oh, she had a beautiful home! I thought, “Oh my goodness. People can live so nicely in New York.” [laughs] But mostly my best friends then were John Verpoorten, Linda and Herb. Before videos, John had a collection of movie reels that he would show on a projector. We would go out with Stu Schwartzberg, Dan Crespi, Morrie, Gary. John lived just a few blocks from me so we hung out a lot.

CBA: And even after you left Marvel?

Flo: Yes. They stayed my friends because at the Petroleum Institute, while it was a wonderful job, I didn’t really make long-lasting friends.

When API moved to Washington, they asked me to go but I didn’t.

There I was, jobless in New York. I said, “Well, let’s try California.”

So I went out to San Francisco for a year or two, actually lived in

Oregon for a while, but that wasn’t for me, I guess. Then I moved full-time to San Francisco, all that hippie-dippie stuff. [laughs] CBA: Why did you leave Marvel?

Flo: I was just tired. The last years were so long because the fan mail was overwhelming. Bags of it would come in, and all the letters had to be acknowledged.

CBA: Did you actually come in on weekends?

Flo: Sometimes, especially when the MMMS started with just those little ads in the books: “Send your buck!” Bags and bags of mail would come in and we would have to open them up, and—this was before computers—we had to write down everybody’s name and make labels for each one, and pull out all these hundreds of dollar bills. We were throwing them at each other there were so many! [laughs] The dollar bills were all over the place. It was amazing. I never had anything to do with the merchandising after that, but the first MMMS was handled in the office. People were also calling a lot too, and that took a lot of time because they wanted to talk! Ralph Macchio once told me he called up and I was very nice to him. I told him, “If I’d known it was going to be you, Ralph, I wouldn’t have been so nice!” [laughter] CBA: Interestingly enough, you’re back at Marvel now?

Flo: Isn’t it weird? It’s a circle. Every once in a while, I say to the cosmos, “Thank you, Stan!” Because I’m not a very skilled person, I’m not a computer person. There isn’t a lot I can do in the modern job market.

CBA: What do you do at Marvel?

Flo: I proofread. That’s all I do and everyone is very nice and pleasant to me.

CBA: Does it feel like a change is taking place at Marvel?

Flo: Well, it’s different. Not better or worse, just different.

Business has changed. (“Nothing endures but change”—Heraclitus.)

It’s not individual little companies anymore. Things have moved in alternative directions. That’s just the way things are today. Dwelling on how it used to be doesn’t solve anything. We all have our good memories and friendships and people who have died and the only way we can hold onto them is by thinking about them. But I’ve just learned to accept the given that’s “now.” I’m paying my bills because of Marvel. They’re very decent to me and I’m doing the best that I can. I’m a lucky one. [Au contraire, Ms. Steinberg. We’re the lucky ones!—Y.E.] CBA: What was the high point working for ’60s Marvel?

Flo: The whole thing was the high point! There were great people and it was a lot of fun. I found a special niche and it worked. I’ve been lucky in life in finding jobs and having good friends. It changed my life and makes me think that, “Hey, today is good and don’t worry too much about tomorrow.” I mean, that’s where I am. I try not to hold grudges, try not to get upset about things I have no control over, but that doesn’t always work! [laughs] CBA: Do you still enjoy comics?

Flo: Sure! I just don’t buy many!

CBA: You used to share an office with George Roussos?

Flo: I did! And with Jack Abel before that! So I had Jack, Mr. Liberal, and George, Mr. Conservative, chewing my ear off and they were both wonderful! I miss them both very much. But I would often say, “Put a sock in it!” to both of them!

CBA: Do you see any of the old Bullpenners in the office?

Flo: Well, I don’t see people as they come in. I see Tom Palmer once in a while. I’ve bumped into Klaus Janson, who I knew from when I did Big Apple Comix. The mailing address for Big Apple was Continuity Associates, Neal’s address. That was a wonderful time.

Continuity on 48th Street with Neal, Jack Abel, Larry Hama, Klaus, Terry Austin, Mike Hinge, and many other talented people!

CBA: A lot of those guys contributed to Big Apple.

Flo: Yes, like Neal, Larry and Ralph. That was a great time and I took advantage of it. Those guys worked for peanuts!

CBA: [laughs] Well, that was a great comic!

Flo: Oh, thank you!

Thanks to Jeff Perrone for his enduring wisdom and counsel.—F.S. For an interview with Flo regarding her tenure at Warren Publications in the 1970s, please check out The Warren Companion, published by TwoMorrows and edited by David A. Roach & Jon B. Cooke.—Y.E. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

CBA Interview

Going with the Flo Herb Trimpe, Linda Fite & Barry Windsor-Smith talk with Florence Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris What follows are excerpts from a November 10, 2001 dinner party held by CBA in a New York City West Village Italian restaurant in honor of Flo Steinberg. We started out talking to the Fab One and were quickly joined by her old friends and co-workers Herb Trimpe, Linda Fite, and Barry Windsor-Smith. You will no doubt find some of the same anecdotes in other interviews in this section, but we hope this gives you a good sense of the jovial atmosphere experienced at this delightful get-together also attended by Ye Ed, his brother Andrew D. Cooke, and Andy’s lovely fiancé Patty Willett.

Comic Book Artist: Can you describe the Bullpen, Flo? Flo Steinberg: It was 655 Madison and 16th Street. It was a huge room with partitions and each [magazine] group had their own little partition. We were right next to the men’s mags. The partitions didn’t go to the ceiling. I mean, you could hear everybody. Stan had a little office and I had a little office. The freelancers would come in and drop off stuff. If they needed any production work, like the house ads, Sol Brodsky would come in and do them. All of the lettering was mostly done by Artie Simek or Sam Rosen. Stan Goldberg did all the coloring in the beginning.

CBA: Did he do any cartooning at the time?

Flo: He was drawing Millie the Model, as I recall. The freelancers all worked at home so they would come into the office and go have lunch.

CBA: Did you ever go to lunch with any of the guys?

Flo: Not much, you know. It’s hard for people to realize now but everyone really liked everybody but it was a job and you didn’t immediately become intimate friends. No, mostly it was just the guys who would go out for lunch.

CBA: Oh, really? The guys wouldn’t flirt with you at all?

Flo: Oh, a little but it was frowned on then. Nobody dated in the office. I mean, a little flirting took place at work—even today—so everyone would always flirt a little. But then, I dated someone in the men’s mags and it was a big secret. It was just considered bad form. [chuckles] It was so funny. Once I went out to lunch with Chic Stone, just as friends. This was a festive lunch, and I had a couple of martinis —a real mixed drink—and I came back to work and was sort of wobbling around… so Stan was really annoyed with Chic over that. [laughs; Herb, Linda and Barry enter the restaurant] CBA: [After they settle in, to Herb] When did you first meet Flo? Flo: [with mock pride] See, it’s all about me!

CBA: It is about you.

Herb Trimpe: [to Flo] I must have talked to you on the phone because I got set up with Sol Brodsky. Sol was the first person I showed my work to. So it must have gone through you.

Flo: Or John Verpoorten. Was he there then?

Herb: Yeah, I knew him already, but John wasn’t taking phone calls. He wasn’t in the production… I don’t know what he was.

Was he the head guy in the production department?

Flo: Not then.

Herb: I have no idea. I can’t really remember. But it was 1966.

Barry Windsor-Smith: ’66? I didn’t know you were there two years before me.

Herb: October of 1966, I got freelance work. Then they hired me in Spring of ’67 to work in the office, in the production department. [to CBA] You know all this. We went over the dates. [laughs] March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

CBA: I just assumed it was just before you.

Barry: I thought it was a year before me. I came in the Summer of ’68.

Herb: It was a year from the time I started working in the office. I started out inking Westerns.

CBA: Was inking “The Hulk” over Marie’s pencils your first regular gig?

Herb: I don’t remember. I guess I did ink a couple of her stories.

CBA: Then you got switched, right? You penciled and she inked you?

Barry: [to Herb, referring to Jon] Does he know more than you do? That’s what worries me about him. I had lunch with him once.

That was appalling. [laughter] Like, he knew everything! Makes you feel really creepy, you know? [laughs] Oh, geez.

Flo: [to Barry] I haven’t seen you in a long time. You look fantastic.

Herb: This is going to be a very long dinner. [laughs] Flo: You look so good to me.

Barry: Oh, you lying, lying thing. [laughs] Do I look well?

Flo: I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.

Barry: Actually, Flo, you do look very good.

Herb: Flo looks very healthy….

CBA: Barry, you used to live in the city, right?

Barry: Yeah, I lived here for 11 years, all over places around here: Midtown, Upper West Side—I was there for seven years or something like that—and I do miss this place. [to Herb and Linda] To hear you say, “We come here all the time.” Well, don’t rub it in! [laughs] Up in Kingston, we’ve got Burger King! [laughs] We’ve got one decent restaurant so you have to forgive it for everything.

Herb: [laughs, then referring to Jon] Did you know, Linda, that he was born in Kingston, New York?

Linda Fite: [disbelieving] No! [laughs] CBA: [to Barry] And you’ve been in Kingston for a bit now, right?

Barry: I’ve lived on Front Row Street, which runs center of town, off the brook. Lovely little planet, there.

Linda: We hang out there all the time in the Summer.

Barry: I just moved to a big house in Kingston.

But the restaurants haven’t improved and there was no Burger King in Woodstock. [laughs] They’re so prissy in Woodstock. They want everything to remain au naturel. There is nothing au naturel in bleeding Woodstock.

Below: Two of Flo Steinberg’s best friends—and former Marvel Bullpenners themselves!—the husband-&-wife team of Linda Fite and Herb Trimpe. Linda has long been a journalist for a New York newspaper and Herb currently volunteers at the site of the World Trade Center. 1970s picture courtesy of Linda and Herb.

19-B

Below: Flo tells us she went through a “black-&-white” decorating phase in the late 1960s, as evidenced by this pic taken in her New York City apartment.

Courtesy of the Fab One.

20-B

Herb: It’s a scary town.

Barry: I was told that Woodstock would be a lot better if they had a McDonald’s. [laughs] I always said that and so I moved to Kingston.

Linda: And now you got a McDonald’s, right?…

Herb: [to Flo] You actually do look great, as a matter of fact.

Flo: I do? Thank you, I’ve been smiling all day so I hope my face won’t crack! [laughs, then to Jon] So you talked to Ivan Prashker [a Magazine Management writer and editor]? Please say “hi” for me. They were such nice people in the other office.

CBA: Ivan specifically said, “I remember Flo. She was really cute.”

Flo: They used to make fun of us! Mario Puzo would look in and would see us all working on his way to the office and he would say, “Work faster, little elves. Christmas is coming.” [laughs] CBA: The magazine side of Goodman’s company had incredible talent, obviously.

Flo: And they were all indebted to Marvel, I mean they started with Martin Goodman. He would put up with them and they were writing their books and Bruce [Jay Friedman] was writing plays. It was Bruce and Ivan and a fellow named John Bowers who wrote some books.

CBA: But they also wrote crap, right?

Flo: Oh, yes! They would sit down and write, “I was a World War Two pilot downed on an island of Amazon women.” [laughs] And they’d be writing this in the office or in their Bronx apartments. There were an awful lot of Amazon women and an awful lot of downed pilots. [laughter] But they worked so hard and I think that Martin didn’t appreciate them. So every once in a while, someone would go, “Tools down!” and everyone would put their writing utensils down and they would just sit there, all morning, you know, to prove a point, that they deserve a raise and respect. And Martin would go by and laugh. He thought it was a riot. He didn’t care. If they don’t want the job, someone else would. See then, people had jobs because they had to support themselves. It wasn’t just to fulfill their egos. You worked to support yourself and you did your creative stuff on the side. They were wonderful fellows.

CBA: Did you guys know Stan was related to Goodman?

Flo: Yeah. Stan was the nephew of Martin’s wife. You people are so silly. They’d say, “Oh, changed his name; Lieber, Lee.” I’d say, “What difference does it make? It’s America. We can call ourselves any name we want.” But it was such a big deal in the fan press.

CBA: [to Herb] Do you remember Magazine Management?

Herb: Yeah. I remember they came around and took pictures of people in the office to use as murderers, thieves and ax killers.

Flo: Oh, yeah! I was once with Paul Newman! That’s right! They would get pictures of stars and then they’d take a picture of you in a pose that matched the picture, which they would then superimpose together. I was in a romance mag, “Young Girl Wins Contest To Meet Movie Stars.” I had to pose in a certain way so it looked like I was talking with Paul Newman. [laughs] And walking into the office like “Here’s Tillie Billie at Her Wedding.” Why use models when you could use the people in the office?

Herb: It was a riot. And then there was that story about Martin Goodman extending me the personal loan within the first few months I was there. I thought that was very generous.

Flo: At the time, Martin believed in people going to shrinks, which was unusual. So he would let—mostly the men’s magazine guys—

employees out early in the afternoon to go to their psychiatrists. He encouraged this.

Herb: Why did he do it?

Flo: I think he was friends with someone who would have some psychiatric institute, Dr. Martin Ackerman.

CBA: Martin had a friendly nature at times?

Herb: He did.

Flo: Paternalistic, which is what a lot of bosses were in those days.

A lot of them were nice people and very kind. Sometimes, they made demands and you worked really hard to please them.

Herb: As far as a corporate philosophy goes, in a way, it was a much healthier relationship than today. I think it was better for the employees in the long run. Though I’m sure there were bad guys who treated their employees like dirt.

Flo: Unfortunately, there’s no going back either. Martin made all the decisions. Martin Goodman or Jim Warren were the only ones who made all the decisions. Whoever signs your checks gets to call the game.

CBA: Were you scared of Martin?

Flo: He was an unknown. He was the Big Boss. But I remember I slipped and hurt my tail once and had to lie down because someone told Martin it was a rule—the State demanded that there was to be a couch in the office where people could lie down if they were sick. So he said, “Well, bring her in here.” They wheeled me down to Martin’s office, which was nice, and I laid on Martin Goodman’s couch. It was funny. He always just seemed amused by everything.

Herb: And then, there was his son.

Flo: Yeah, two sons. Charles—Chip—went into his father’s business.

People made fun of Chip, but he was always nice to me. I felt bad for him because everybody dumped on him just for being the boss’s son.

CBA: It’s been said that Stan would have you do menial tasks like pick up laundry, things like that. Is that true?

Flo: No, not really, Jon. In those days, secretaries ran errands. I sometimes got him things or ordered his lunch, but that’s what people did to help out, but it wasn’t my job. That was a normal thing. I mean, if he bought something that was the wrong size, I’d go and get the right one on company time. It wasn’t like I had to use my own personal time. Sometimes I’d pick up his sandwich. If it were up to me, I’d do that for people at work now. He did not demean me in any way and I didn’t mind doing any of it because it was my job to help out. So I just wish people would put a sock in it….

CBA: So Linda, when were you at Marvel?

Linda: Flo is the reason I went to Marvel.

CBA: Get out. Six Degrees of Florence Steinberg. [laughs] Linda: I became, like, a comics fan in college, so when it came time to graduate, I wrote a letter to Marvel saying, “Hire me, I’m really cool.” I made a horrible, corny comment in the letter, like, “I know there are no heifers in a Bullpen but I can type!” [laughs] Then I get this phone call in my dorm from Flo Steinberg with that distinctive voice. I almost sh*t a brick. I was so thrilled, as if Central Casting called me for a movie. [imitating Flo] “If you move to New York, come by and see us. We’d like to meet and talk to you.” I had several other leads but I wanted to work for Marvel because it was, like, cool.

CBA: Did you guys socialize with Flo much?

Linda: Yeah. Flo is the godmother of our son. We’ve been friends with Flo for life, from then on. Flo came to visit us when we lived in England for a year. When Alex, our first child was a year-and-a-half, almost two. You know, Herb’s working freelance, I’m working freelance, let’s go to England and we’ll live there. I had a friend from college who’s working for Paul McCartney. So we went over and rented a house in Cornwall—Land’s End, the southwest—and we ended up staying a year, working overseas. Even Barry came over to see us.

CBA: Why did you come back to the States? Were you homesick?

Linda: A little homesick, I got pregnant with my second child and wanted to have her at home.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

CBA: Barry, when did you meet Flo? Barry: Who? CBA: Ms. Steinberg.

Barry: Just this evening. She seems very nice. She was telling me about her work in the early ’60s and ’70s. Evidently, she works for the comic books, or something like that. Actually, I’m only here because I heard there was a party for Flo. Herb: Flo who?

Flo: Thank you, thank you, thank you to all my fans.

Linda: Barry is the godfather of our one of our children.

CBA: You came over to the States with Steve Parkhouse?

Barry: Yes, in the Summer of 1968. I met Flo in the Marvel offices, in July or August of ’68. [to Flo] You’d quit already and I already knew about Fabulous Flo, of course, because Stan always mentioned you in the Bullpen Bulletins.

Flo: I owe it all to Stan that I’m making a living now.

Barry: You may recall, 20 years later, you turned up at my house unexpectedly. My sister was there and I said, “This is Fab Flo.” My sister went [excitedly] “Oh my God! No! It’s Fabulous Flo.” She wasn’t even a comics reader, so she was really impressed. Anyway, so Flo walks in the Bullpen back in ’68 because the door was usually kept open in the Summer. It’s a tiny office, like a fairly large apartment, a very, very small space, and we used to keep the door open because there was no air conditioning. In fact, if Stu Schwartzberg were here, he’d explain just how little air there was in that place because he was back in the shadows with the stat machine. There were no windows, no air conditioning, and only a fan to circulate the air. So I’m sitting there and this really pretty woman walks in. I’m thinking this is Shirley MacLaine. [to Flo] See, you had the eyes, and everything. So I’m going, “Whoa! Who’s this babe?” And Sol Brodsky comes marching down the hallway… I forget who he was talking to—maybe Morrie Kuramoto—and he said, “Morrie, keep that damn door closed. You never know who’s going to walk in!”

Flo: [laughs] Really?

Barry: Of course, he was joking and then he grabbed you and said, “Hey, Flo. How you doing?” It was a great time. You never did know who’s going to walk in. And you were so sweet about it.

CBA: [to Flo] So you were just visiting?

Barry: Yeah, Flo just walked in out of the blue because she was working somewhere else by that time.

Flo: I visited because Marvel was my first job where I made friends who are still friends to this day.

CBA: You were certainly a minor celebrity amongst Stan’s fans.

Flo: It’s all due to Stan. Thank you, Stan.

CBA: I talked to Stu Schwartzberg. Both he and Marie Severin couldn’t make it tonight because of previous engagements.

Barry: How on Earth is Stu doing?

CBA: He sounded fine.

Flo: Stu worked at Marvel up until last year, in the repro section.

Barry: What? Stu has been with Marvel all this time? No way!

Flo: He was in the repro section after stat machines went out of style. He and three or four guys worked in another office where they pulled the repros and the negatives of the books.

Barry: I thought Stu had left Marvel years ago. I didn’t realize he was there all this time.

Flo: He was there, like, forever.

CBA: Was Stu a funny guy?

Flo: He was a very funny guy.

Barry: That’s why he’s so fondly remembered, because the stat man isn’t necessarily some guy you try to get to come to the office.

He was a very witty fellow.

Flo: He wrote for Cracked a lot.

Barry: And Not Brand Echh.

CBA: And Crazy. He a cartoonist, too. He contributed to Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine, back in the day.

Barry: He was a funny guy.

Flo: A witty fellow, personally.

Barry: Yes, he was great. He was a good bloke everybody enjoyed.

CBA: [to Barry] When you were there, who was also there?

Barry: It was a very small group: Sol Brodsky, John Verpoorten, Stu. Morrie Kuramoto did lettering. Tony Mortellaro was there. It was a tiny little band of people. The Bullpen was, basically, four people: March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

Herb, John Romita, Tony Mortellaro, and [to Linda] you. Marie was on the other side of the hallway.

Flo: No, I remember that in 1965 she was in the main room.

Barry: Well, maybe she had two desks because I remember all the time her being next to Morrie across the hall. It’s funny: different people used that desk, including Frank Giacoia. The only private area was Stan’s office. It was bigger than anything else there.

Flo: It had a couch and a coffee table.

Barry: You could get a couch, coffee table and desk in, and that was it.

CBA: Did you have to be on guard when Stan was around?

Flo: You knew he was the boss. There was always a respect and yeah, we goofed, we had so much fun. But Stan didn’t come out of his office much. It was so crazy in the Bullpen, and he had to keep working at that typewriter.

Barry: When Stan did come out, he would race around. He was a lot of fun.

Herb: He still is the fastest guy on two legs!

Barry: Very fast! He would go out of the office—foom—gone!

Linda: Then he might call in one of the artists and they’d go in and the door would shut. He never came out and told anyone how to behave. We were just wild.

Flo: Stan trusted you to do your job. He really respected you. It wasn’t like Us/Them. It was the best example I’ve ever had of a team. You really felt like you were on a team.

Barry: [to Flo] Remember when Stan stopped using the elevator in ’68? He used to go walk downstairs because he would get hunted by fans in the elevator. Remember pointing that out to me?

Flo: Yeah.

Herb: That was Stan.

CBA: Stan obviously likes attention. Did he avoid fans because it was a waste of his time?

Flo: Well, he was going somewhere, and he’s not very patient. It’s not that he disliked them but he had a very busy social life.

Barry: The fans were rabid.

Flo: Rabid dogs.

CBA: Did you enjoy the fact he made a personality out of you, that is to say you were a celebrity of sorts in comics?

Flo: At the time, it was funny. I was on the Merry Marvel Marching Society record. He needed help in putting on that record, so I was helping. Who else is going to type up the script? [laughs] No, he did the typing on that, I’m kidding. No, it was fun and amusing, but it had really become a big deal way after I left.

CBA: Maybe because the kids grew a little bit older and were able to tell you what you meant to them? You were the Face of Marvel Comics to a lot of comic book fans.

Flo: Well, I was the one who would have to come out when they came up and ask them to leave. It was so much fun. We worked really hard.

Linda: But it was so much fun.

Flo: And we all played together, didn’t we? We played nicely together. We’d go out to lunch together. We really got along.

Below: Much-seen early 1970s photo of a svelte Barry WindsorSmith taken in the Marvel Bullpen by inker (and glamour photographer) Vinnie Colletta.

21-B

Peer Approval

The Fab One’s Marvel Daze That old Marvel Bullpen gang talks about their “gal everyday” Interviews conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris & Sam Gafford

Stan Lee

Below: At comic conventions, Flo is still being treated as a Marvel celebrity, most recently as a guest of the New York City show, The National. Here’s a glamourous pic of her at the 1974 New York Comic Art Convention, where she was a guest on the “Women in Comics” panel. Courtesy of Flo.

writer/editor-in-chief/art director To Flo: I think I’m a prophet.

Everything I write seems to come to pass.

I nicknamed Jack Kirby “King” Kirby, and now the whole comic book world thinks of him as the King.

I nicknamed Herb Trimpe, “Happy” Herbie, and all of a sudden he became the Bullpen’s smilin’ sunbeam.

I nicknamed that skinny little John Buscema “Big John,” and immediately after that he became a two-hundred pound weightlifter.

And of course, my greatest feat: I nicknamed a nice, sweet, unassuming, little girl “Fabulous Flo,” and immediately thereafter she became so fabulous that she developed her own loyal coterie of fervent fans all around the world, especially right in the Marvel Bullpen—fans that have insisted, nay demanded that we give her this spectacular surprise testimonial.

So, here’s to the most loyal, lovable, laudable, legendary assistant a guy could ever have— as well as the most faithful, fanciful, fearless, funky, fabulous female a guy could know.

I could say lots more of course, but hey, I’ve got a jealous wife!

Here’s to you, Flo— we all love ya!

Excelsior!

Marie Severin Marvel artist/colorist/cover editor/art editor/art director Comic Book Artist: When did you join up with Marvel?

Marie Severin: I know I was there in 1964.

CBA: So you joined up about a year after Flo? Marie: I don’t know if she joined up two years before me but she was there when I arrived. I know I came in ’64.

CBA: Flo started in March of 1963. Do you remember if Sol Brodsky was in the office?

Marie: Prior to the Marvel job, I had been over at the Federal 22-B

Reserve Bank, doing a film strip for them. This was after Stan’s company nearly went ka-blooey in ’57, you know? I was there for a couple of years and then this film strip company hired me away from the Federal Reserve. Then business got bad so I went back to comics and I went first to Harvey Comics, who did Casper, the Friendly Ghost. I thought I would probably fit in there, but I was interviewed by this guy who was, well, not all there and he was not even interested. So I figured I would just hook up with Stan again because I had been there before.

CBA: You just interviewed once over at Harvey?

Marie: Yeah. If I had been interviewed by [Harvey editor, later Star/Marvel editor] Sid Jacobson (who I didn’t even know at the time), I’m sure he would have hired me and the whole commute would have been different! But I went over to Stan and he hired me on the spot because he knew I could do production work! [laughs] He never looked at my portfolio! So I figured, what the hell, I’ll do some stuff here for a while while I’m looking for something steady. I had met Sol years ago when I first worked for Stan and after I left Mad [EC Comics]. When the Comics Code came through, we all lost our jobs. Stan just had a skeleton staff. Anyway, I went in there in 1964, Stan hired me and I came in when Sol needed me and then he hired me full-time. It was Stan, Flo, Sol and me. Morrie Kuramoto would come in periodically, as did Artie Simek. And, of course, there were the regular freelancers who would come in. The first time I met Kirby was around then.

CBA: Would Morrie come in to just do corrections or would he letter whole stories in the Bullpen?

Marie: Oh, he’d letter whole stories, but he wasn’t on staff at the time. There was another guy at the time, who had the same name as a famous ball player, who also did production at the time. I just can’t remember his name. Then, a couple of months later, John Romita came in.

CBA: Johnny came in a few months after you?

Marie: He came in 1965. I don’t even know what month it was.

Later, John Verpoorten came in and he brought in Herb Trimpe and Stu Schwartzberg and they came on staff and meanwhile the comic business was booming. In between all that I would meet different people like Stan Goldberg (whom I hadn’t seen in about a thousand years).

CBA: Was Stan G. over at Archie before working at Marvel?

Marie: I’m not sure. He was drawing Patsy & Hedy and those types of books. Then Marvel dropped the girlie books but he wasn’t upset about that because he was getting a lot of work elsewhere. But he was also doing a lot of coloring which he always did.

CBA: So you would do the coloring? Would you work with Dr. Martin dyes?

Marie: Oh, yeah! I never worked with anything else in the comics.

When they started doing these poster things I would use the poster colors and stuff, but I never went into acrylics or oils. I would touch up some of those jobs as they came in if it was requested but I always preferred that the artist touch up his or her own work. They have the materials and they have their own technique. It meant changing somebody’s artwork and I would be upset if anyone did that to mine, you know? Unless it was something minor like a frown instead of a smile on a character but sometimes they wanted whole figures or backgrounds and I didn’t like doing that. But color-wise, for the inside of the comics and the covers, I always used Dr. Martin’s.

CBA: You colored straight onto the silverprints?

Marie: Yeah, and then they were starting to use Xeroxes. I said it COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

would be a heck of a lot faster instead of bothering the guys in the photostat room for me to just use Xerox copies on good paper. That’s when we started that, and it really made everything a heck of a lot faster because everyone was using the photostat machine for blowups and all kinds of tricky stuff. Then Stu (who ran the photostat camera) was loaded down with the comic work because everyone was doing changes and the company was growing. So we colored on the Xeroxes which I think everyone does now. It made it so much faster.

CBA: Were you using a brush?

Marie: Oh, yeah. I always use a brush.

CBA: You never went with Magic Markers?

Marie: No. I know they do that now. It would work pretty well except that with Magic Markers, I don’t think you can make corrections all that easily. I’m so used to a brush that I can fly through pages.

CBA: Is this second nature to you? Can you look at a page and say, “This is 40% yellow”?

Marie: Sometimes, but I’m not sure about some of the dot variations. At this point, with the coloring being done by computer, I don’t know what the color breaks are! [laughs] In the old days, the colors didn’t come out that bright because the paper was cheaper but you sort of knew what was going on. Now it has to have decent papers because they’re using the finest screens. It’s a technical thing. I think they have a wonderful range of colors but I don’t think they have to use them all. It’s nice but you’re not reproducing postage stamps with all this fancy art.

CBA: Sometimes the simplicity of comics gets lost amongst all that complexity of production?

Marie: Yeah. I think it’s okay if some of the books are really heavy duty artwork, you know what I mean? Like some of the books that are experiments using actual paintings, that’s fine. But the regular run-of-the-mill comic books should just be a little fancier than it was in the old days but it’s a waste of time to have too many blendings because the eye will be more interested in reading the story.

In the ’80s, they had books with so many blendings and special effects that your eye gets confused and doesn’t know which panel to go to to read the story!

CBA: It interfered with the storytelling?

Marie: I think so, yeah.

CBA: Was there such a thing as a typical daily routine at Marvel?

Marie: It would depend on the deadlines. Because we’re dealing with humans, you never know when the jobs would be coming in or if they get lost in the mail or a character can’t be used because someone else is using it! The routine was not really routine.

You might do something in the morning that usually comes in the afternoon. A lot of times the routine of how to produce a comic remains the same but the timing of what came in would change. Because I had worked in comics so long I could do corrections in artwork and lettering—I could design pages—I was all around which was why I was so valuable to them because I knew so much about the production. I could do so many things.

CBA: Would particular artists be very late with stuff. I know you had artists like Kirby whom I’m sure was always on time with his assignments.

Marie: He was no problem.

CBA: Did you anticipate that, “Well, Wally Wood’s inking this job, so we need to build that into the deadline.”

Marie: I didn’t make up the schedule. I didn’t assign artwork. Sol did that and they knew which guys to tell a lie to whether they would be late or not. Flo would March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

know more about that than I because she probably wrote a lot of that up for Sol. They would lie to some of the artists telling them that they needed the stuff before they really did. They still do that!

CBA: [laughs] Well, they’re artists, right? When a job would come in, would it immediately go and have silver prints made?

Marie: I would think that they would be looked at first. In the beginning, Stan would look over everything.

Then they started having editors look at it, sure. They might say, “Well, let’s make stats of it so it’s ready to go,” but then they might want to make changes or corrections. They didn’t like to have it colored and then have to have a sequence redrawn, particularly if it’s late.

They would if something was very late, and they’d tell someone to color it, then just change a panel if they had to but they didn’t like to do that. That was rare because usually there was pretty tight control on stuff.

CBA: So you would make the color guides and they were sent to Bridgeport?

Marie: In the early days, yes. They went to Bridgeport well into the ’80s, I believe.

CBA: You had a courier show up every day?

Marie: They used to send a courier every day. The Chemical Color pick-up was at a certain time and then it started getting FedEx’d and all that, then it was a whole different routine by the mid-’80s or so.

CBA: Virtually all of the same comics publishers, except Charlton and Western/Gold Key, used the same printer, World Color out in Sparta, Illinois. The covers of Marvel comics in the mid-’60s had a distinct vibrancy… it’s not fair to to characterize them as muddy but there was a lot of gray covers, brown covers, purple cover… covers using a lot of colors that were unique to Marvel.

Marie: Well, I colored a lot of covers but I think George Roussos did too. Also, there was a change later on with the mattes they used. I think that they went from metal and rubber to plastic. I wasn’t involved in the technical stuff that they did. I only wanted to do my original color and then we’d get color proofs of them. I didn’t color all of them but we did want to have a little more mood to them than was normal so it wasn’t all red, yellow or blue. I like the little gray when you’re doing an adventure strip. It makes the

Above: But where’s the cash?

Bossman Stan Lee treats Flo with a homemade holiday card composed especially for her during their Bullpen days. Courtesy of Flo.

Center inset: Stan the Swinger during the First Age of Marvel.

Note he is grasping a copy of Fantastic Four #46.

YE ED’S NOTE: While this section is primarily a discussion of “That Gal… That Sweetheart,” Florence Steinberg, there’s quite a bit of conversation surrounding the way it was in the ’60s Marvel Bullpen. One interview in particular, with the vivacious and delightful Linda Fite pretty much covers her entire comics career as we may not be visiting the lovely wife of Herb Trimpe—and accomplished scribe in her own right, I must add—for the mag any time soon. As well as the aforementioned interviews, some entries are testimonials—like our first entry from Stan the Man —were written expressly for this issue and some of those are by folks who didn’t necessarily work in the House of Ideas but we knew it would be fun to include ’em anyway. We’ve tried to list the Bullpenners in a chronological fashion adhering to when they joined Marvel, though we may be a tad off here and there. The job titles refer only to their positions during that swingin’ decade.

Thanks to all who helped.—Y.E.

23-B

Inset right: Marie Severin in a pic taken in the Marvel Bullpen.

From FOOM #16. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Ye Ed will never stop gushing about one of the most beautifully produced comic series, Kull the Conqueror, penciled by Marie Severin and inked by her brother John. Time for a quality reprint, ya think? Here is the king by M & J from the back cover of FOOM #13. ©2002 R. E. Howard Estate.

24-B

primary colors stand out, especially in the street scenes.

CBA: Those covers did have more mood to them than those of the other publishers.

Marie: I think we had more artists that followed through on the covers. I was one of them, actually, and there was a time when I guess I did pretty much all the cover coloring, unless the artist wanted to try it themselves. But they trusted me pretty much. George did about 90% of the covers towards the end of the late ’80s. Very rarely did I… I always liked to color my own and I was doing very little interior coloring at the time.

CBA: Did you color all of your Kull the Conquerors?

Marie: Yes. Anything I drew I always requested to color.

CBA: It’s funny how we comic fans focus on certain aspects of history. The comic artists who work at home—the vast majority of them—tend to be pretty solitary people, you know? I interviewed John Buscema and he didn’t really have a lot to say because, well, he drew in his studio every day for 30 years straight.

Marie: The same thing happened with Ramona Fradon. At least John socialized to a degree when he was younger because he worked in a studio.

CBA: Artists have solitary lives but you were involved in two Bullpens that were just legendary and people love to talk about both eras all the time. You worked with Bill, Harvey and Al at EC….

Marie: It was a wonderful training ground, you know?

CBA: Was it fun to be at EC? I’m sure you were working hard.

Marie: Oh, yeah, it was fun! And you did work hard because you were learning the whole time. But you had a certain pride in doing all these things. I had no idea it would be this jazzy, cool type thing. “Wow! You work in comics!” I had a job and thought, “Well, this is more fun than working at a bank and once in a while you get to draw something.” I also liked working with the guys. I could

never be in the secretarial pool with all women.

CBA: And you obviously worked for Marvel. Was that fun?

Marie: Oh, yeah. Nothing is ever perfect, you know? There’s always certain side things like, “I’d like to hit that guy with a brick!” [laughs] But you get over it. There was never any strong hard feelings. Half the time they didn’t know what was going on anyway. You just enjoyed the work. The guys were really fun to be with and I really loved teasing them. Oh, I loved it!

CBA: [laughs] And you loved teasing with the pen, right?

Marie: Oh, yes!

CBA: Would you typically in the week bang out about five cartoons just for laughs?

Marie: Oh, I couldn’t tell you. It was so long ago.

CBA: Whenever it moved you?

Marie: Yeah. If something happened and I really had to be vengeful or ridiculous… yeah, it was a release.

CBA: Was everyone fair game?

Marie: Yeah. Oh, the ones you did of Stan you didn’t show! [laughter] CBA: Those did not survive, eh?

Marie: I don’t think so.

CBA: Was Stan a taskmaster?

Marie: No, he was okay. I liked working for Stan. Anytime I asked him for a raise, I usually got it! I didn’t overdo it and, if it had come to big bucks, I don’t know how he would have reacted. I wasn’t into the big bucks. I was satisfied. I may have been stupid but I was satisfied.

CBA: Were you looking for advancement within the company?

You were de facto art director for a while there.

Marie: Well, that was the goofiest thing. Stan always justified himself with Martin Goodman because he listed himself as the editor and art director. And he was! He made all the decisions art-wise and with the stories. He might ask Kirby or Romita what they thought about stuff but most of the time Stan just made the decisions. When the company got big, big, big, he would leave it up to the editors unless something was so bad that he would notice it and say something about it. A title to me didn’t mean a damn thing. Stan was the boss.

Once Stan left and it was a battle between these guys to grab the power and that’s what it was all about, the power. They all wanted to do their own thing and be little Stan Lees. That wasn’t my corner of the business, you know? I created things and that was it.

CBA: There seems to have been a professional attitude, as much as there could be, in both Bullpens. The guys would show up kind of formal, then when the ’70s came along, it seemed like a lot of that went out the window. Was it maybe the influence of the fans?

Marie: Yeah. That was part of it but typically, and I’ve told this story many times, I went in to ask Stan something and he said, “Marie, do you know that I just went into a meeting and I was the only one wearing shoes?” [laughter] Stan used to come in and he was always pretty casual but he always wore a shirt and tie in the ’50s and early ’60s. Stan was a sharp dresser, always dressed up nicely. Very debonair. All of a sudden these other guys would come in in these wild outfits so he got a little looser but he never really got into wearing shorts in the office.

CBA: Or going without shoes? [laughter] Marie: Well, he was so skinny anyway!

CBA: What was Flo like when you first met her?

Marie: Very sweet and very busy.

CBA: Did she have that pixyish look that you can see in the old pictures?

Marie: Yeah. Did she ever tell you that she was a teddy bear for one of the stores?

CBA: She just sent me pictures today! It was for FAO Schwartz? [laughter] Marie: Yes, I think so! I was looking for those and thinking that I had to find them for the magazine! She told me, “Guess what I am!

I’m a teddy bear! It’s so hot in there!” [laughs] That was so cute! I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

said, “You of all people!” She was so funny!

CBA: Yeah, she sent me the pictures and I’m looking at the first picture with the head on, thinking, “What is this?” Then I see the next one and it’s Flo out from under the mask!

Marie: Oh, that’s funny! I know! She used to come to me and say, “Marie, what am I going to do about Stan? He gives me 10¢ to tip the delivery boy for lunch so the rest has to come out of my pocket and I can’t afford this!” Isn’t that funny? She is so nice!

CBA: She tells it like it is though!

Marie: One time she goes, “Oh, Marie, guess what? The other day he wanted me to sew a button on a pair of pants for him and then the other day I had to go and change his swimsuit!”

CBA: She became an important personality for the company.

Marie: Well, she has such a distinctive voice! She’s no dope but she’s got that high-pitched voice! You couldn’t put anything over on her (not that I would!). But sometimes she would just get stepped on a bit. I know I think the stupidest thing Marvel ever did was not give her a raise when she asked for it because she would have been such an asset to have around later because she’s so honest and decisive.

CBA: There were obviously 10,000 fans out there who had crushes on her!

Marie: I know! They were so stupid to let her go! I don’t know if Sol or I were in on what was going on when she left but we had a party for her and I was thinking, “What the hell is the problem with these people? She’s a personality. She knows what she’s doing. She handles the fans right. She’s loyal to the company. Why the hell won’t they give her a decent raise? Dummies.”

CBA: Did you hang out with her?

Marie: We often had lunch together. We were pretty busy. We went to the movies a couple of times. But you know I lived all the way in Brooklyn so it wasn’t that easy. I still had to get home at night.

CBA: You took the subway every night?

Marie: Oh, yeah. Sometimes I’d stay at Flo’s, come to think of it.

We were buddies at the office. We had a lot of giggles together.

CBA: Did you know Robin Green?

Marie: Robin? Wasn’t she the one who writes for The Sopranos?

CBA: Executive producer of that show! She has hit the big time.

Marie: I used to call her “Legs” because she had these long legs!

She was a nice girl. She came back to the office when she was writing for Rolling Stone and she wrote that article about the Bullpen.

CBA: That was fun. [laughs] Flo was a little embarrassed about it.

Marie: I forgot what was even in it.

CBA: They talked about how she would ambush fans who were trying to get past her into the Bullpen.

Marie: Well, she would do that. [laughs] Oh, what we thought of some of those pushy fans! Oh, my!

CBA: She would trip them at the door!

Marie: Well, they were such weasels! Polite up to a point and then they were sneaky. They were like, “I’m going to cut off Stan’s tie and sell it!” [laughs] That’s what you felt like. “I smelled the Bullpen. I stuck my head in and smelled it. You didn’t, I did!”

CBA: Did you have to deal with fans at all?

Marie: No, not really.

CBA: You did some really scathing cartoons.

Marie: Well, you’ve seen them! They were terrible! There was this little boy whose mother couldn’t see him and he was drawing that he was going to kill her! He was going to kill everyone actually. You didn’t have to be a psychology major to see he was going to turn out rotten.

CBA: Linda was talking about some letters they used to get. Did you see them?

Marie: Only the ones that Flo showed me. But she would say, “I should have saved them all, they would have made some book!”

One of them was a man who wrote, “Dear Mr. Kirby, Would you draw me Captain America with only his boots on”! [laughter] I said, “Flo! Isn’t that funny?” So you know what we did? We mailed it back to Mrs. Whatever-his-name-was! So I hope he was hung by his… beard!

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

CBA: You were evil!

Marie: Oh, there is a God… or Goddess.

CBA: Do you remember when Herb Trimpe came on board?

Marie: Oh, yes, he was very nice. He looked at us like we were all nuts. He had just come from Vietnam. Nice guy. You know, he goes down to the World Trade Center site. He goes there all the time.

CBA: He had a reputation of being the hunk on staff?

Marie: [laughs] That’s because he was the youngest! He was pretty cute though. There was something very nice about him.

CBA: Do you remember Linda Fite joining up?

Marie: Oh, yeah. I don’t know where she came from though. She just appeared.

CBA: She wrote a fan letter to Stan and said, “If you can ever find a job for me, please do.”

Marie: Oh, that’s how it happened. I guess I was told but I just forgot. Because she didn’t act like a fan. She wasn’t as goofy.

CBA: She’s almost an anomaly. For one thing, here was a young woman who was into comics because they were fun. And she clued into Marvel at the height in ’66. She had the chutzpa to write Stan and get a job out of the deal.

Marie: She’s a very smart girl and probably phrased the letter in a very sensible fashion, not like “I’m going to cut your tie off and sell it.” I liked Linda right away. She was good.

CBA: In ’68, all of a sudden you had the explosion of books.

Marvel stopped being controlled by the DC distribution system and went with Curtis. All of a sudden the output doubled. Instead of 17 books, you had 36. Do you recall that? Right after the company was sold to Perfect Film?

Marie: Well, we were very busy but they were always bringing in more people to help. I just was disgusted because every time I turned around they had a different health plan which I never paid that much attention to anyway. But I had all these new forms to fill out! I remember saying to the guys, “Which one are we in now and who owns us?” Because it was changing all over the place! It was busy, but we handled it.

Below: To bring inspired moments of levity in the often hectic workday in the Marvel Bullpen, Marie Severin would often whip up quick cartoons caricaturing staffers and commenting on situations. Here the Mirthful One shows Flo Steinberg under attack from a bunch of pit bulls representing Roy Thomas, Stan Lee, Sol Brodsky, and, yes, Marie herself. Courtesy of Trina Robbins. ©2002 Marie Severin.

25-B

Above: Another pic of the woman who has so far received the most coverage in Comic Book Artist (and we’re not done yet!), Marie Severin, during a ’70s comic con.

Below and opposite bottom: In 1965, Esquire magazine devoted an issue to not only Marvel Comics but also collegiate real-life heroes of the day. ©2002 Esquire.

26-B

That’s when I really started getting into helping with the covers. So I was coloring Xeroxes and drawing covers and getting them approved.

CBA: You were cover designer for awhile, right?

Marie: Right, but the artists were still pretty responsible for getting the covers done. John Buscema was like, “You send me this cover rough by Marie but I can’t do what she’s already done! If you had let me try it first, I’d probably have come up with the same thing.” I’d probably feel the same way myself. I know what he meant.

Somebody’s done it already so why do it again?

CBA: Where’s the inspiration?

Marie: Right. But not all the artists were like that.

CBA: When he started at Marvel, Stan had Kirby do page layouts for John.

Marie: Big mistake.

CBA: Yeah, because he’d just erase Kirby’s pencils and do his own thing. Then Stan would look at it and say, “Kirby’s not in there, it’s all Buscema! Pretty neat stuff.” When did Frank Giacoia come on board?

Marie: Oh, must have been around ’74?

CBA: Did he come on as an art director, do you recall?

Marie: Well, he thought he was!

I wasn’t and John Romita wasn’t but, in order to get Frank and I was told this by one of the guys, Stan promised him the art director position but he really wasn’t. But that was how Stan was able to get Frank on board. I remember when Romita told poor Frank that he didn’t have the title and how furious Frank was! The poor guy. He was one of the best inkers in the business and he didn’t need a title.

But I guess it was later in life and he really wanted one. Romita would know more about that than I would. And then, one time, they told me that I was assistant art director! And I said, “No way, Jose!

Don’t ever call me that!” Because it really doesn’t matter. If you have something like that, you can only lose it. [laughter] Of course, when Shooter took over, he didn’t want John Romita as art director or me as assistant. So he moved Romita in with Sol Brodsky in an entirely different department and Sol put me in Romita’s old office which I really didn’t care about. That was a rub against Shooter who didn’t want that. He wanted to be art director like Stan. But I was very happy. I didn’t care where they put me as long as I had enough room for my files because I would still be getting the same amount of money no matter where I was. You just knew that it didn’t mean that much. Later on, when everything settled down, Romita was put back and I was gone and that whole business. It all worked out.

CBA: Did Johnny come on staff pretty soon after coming over from DC? Marie: Ah, well, he came on in ’65, I don’t know when he left DC. Well, Stan liked the way John drew women. He did great stuff. And when he got into the swing of Spider-Man, he just helped Stan so much. He really helped define that character. He took on the burden and solidified it with Stan though they were really shaky because the kids loved Ditko. They really got a good solid character out of it. I mean, Johnny’s version of Spider-Man became the company symbol for quite a few years. Even the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon was based on Johnny’s version.

CBA: Johnny says he had his head down most of the time during those days. He was ambivalent to the amount of work that Stan gave him at times. Was he pretty much nondescript in the Bullpen as you recall?

Marie: Oh, John could get into these great political arguments. He was a talker. Like Johnny Craig, he was a slow, meticulous worker, slow because he wanted it done right—the way that he considered right. First of all, John Buscema could have knocked out all this stuff but, I mean, he wouldn’t have. I don’t think he could have worked with Stan in that volume of work. Romita was very patient and did whatever Stan wanted and added to it but he did it at his own pace.

He was pokey but it was all good stuff.

CBA: Were you looking to do a regular gig? Was “Doctor Strange” the only regular strip you did, besides Sub-Mariner and Kull?

Marie: Yeah, and the only reason they gave it to me was because Bill Everett had followed Ditko on it and Bill couldn’t keep up with anything because he was ill. So they gave it to me. I mean, it wasn’t a matter of choice. They were like, “Well, give it to her because it’s not that great of a character anyway.” So there I was but it worked out.

They moved me around anywhere they wanted and I didn’t care that much. I don’t think I would have wanted to do the big books because you were really nailed to the wall. It was easier to do something here and there rather than be tied down and then you had to fight for it too. I guess I was really lazy.

CBA: Did you like doing super-heroes?

Marie: They’re okay.

CBA: Was Kull a lot more satisfying?

Marie: Oh, yeah, because that was more of a fairy tale. The old well illustrated Howard Pyle stuff was what I liked. It might be more work and research and of course, having John, my brother, inking on it in the way I always wished I could ink and it looked so good.

CBA: You guys always seemed like the perfect complement to each other. You loosened him up and he added this real elegant varnish to your loose approach.

Marie: Well, it was a nice male/female approach to the story which was really nice. I’m sorry we got cut down on that.

CBA: How many projects did you work on with your brother?

Marie: Oh, we did one or two stories so many years ago that I couldn’t even tell you what they were. Short stories. No, we didn’t work together often. John was always loaded… [pause] COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

CBA: “…down with work”? [laughter] Marie: Oh, yes! Oh, boy, am I going to be in trouble! I used to call him up from Marvel and say, “John, you ought to do this and you ought to do that!” And he’d say, “Marie, I can’t. I’m too busy.” And I’d say, “But Sol said that if I could get you to ink, I could pencil it!”

But he was too busy! I liked to see his stuff. But he was never really crazy about super-heroes. He preferred to draw horses or Kull.

CBA: Who was Tony Mortellaro?

Marie: Oh, he was a production guy. Really great, funny guy. I think he was a friend of Sol’s.

CBA: Is he gone?

Marie: Oh, yeah, he passed away.

CBA: You seemed to have some fun with him. You liked to make fun of his lecherous nature in some cartoons.

Marie: Well, he liked his pin-ups! He was a regular guy and, boy, was he Italian! Gee whiz! But he was okay. I liked Tony.

CBA: Who was Stan Goldberg?

Marie: Stan was always a sweet guy and very low key. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. I first met him I the ’50s. Him and Danny Crespi after I left Mad. When the Comics Code knocked everything out, and I went up to Stan and I met those guys there. Stan was close to my age. We were the kids then. He is a very nice man with a wonderful sense of humor but he’s not a show-off. Very easy going.

CBA: When did Danny Crespi come on board?

Marie: Well, Danny worked for Stan in the ’50s.

CBA: Was he a production guy?

Marie: Yeah. He became production manager for a while until he got ill. He and Artie Simek were in the original Bullpen in the ’50s, along with Chris Rule and Joe Letterese.

CBA: Joe was over in Marvel?

Marie: Yeah, in the ’50s. Who else was there? Ray Hallaway was a letterer. That’s the old Bullpen.

CBA: What was Chris Rule like?

Marie: Oh, he was really funny, a riot. He came from a very wealthy family. The Crash had knocked them all down but he still acted like he was a playboy or something. He was funny. One time after I had left Timely in the ’50s, I was walking down Madison Avenue, shopping or something and this big man grabs me and kisses me! I’m thinking, “Oh my God!” and I look and say, “Chris Rule!

What are you doing? You dirty old man!” He was so funny. He was a nice guy. He took me to the Stork Club.

CBA: So he invited you to the Stork Club?

Marie: Yes, and I had my first martini and proceeded to go up to the ladies room and get sick! And who comes in but Stan’s wife, Joanie! She says, “Are you all right?” And I said, “No, I’m not, I just had some drink…” [laughs] So Chris just put me into a cab and I was sent home to Brooklyn. By the time we got to the Brooklyn Bridge I was fine but I was young, you know? I had never had gin before. [laughter] CBA: Did you perceive there was a new generation coming in?

Marie: Well, the company was growing and we had to get more people in to do things. I didn’t think of it as a new generation. I’m not a fan, you know, so I don’t perceive things like that.

CBA: I think that’s to your advantage, Marie. I love talking to you Bullpenners from the ’60s because you’re real people. Like Herb. I love talking to Herb because he’s a regular person. Not some flaky type, like me, who argues about who inked Fantastic Four #1.

[George Klein, I tell you!—Editorman] Marie: Not me! I can’t tell you that! Well, back to Flo, if something was happening she’d come up to me and say, “Oh, Marie, these people are so strange!” She had a lock on what was happening and would see a lot more of things than I did being cloistered in a room working. You have to pay attention when you’re drawing or pacing stuff. But she handled incoming calls and stuff and I’m sure was used to being a buffer between the artists and Stan and Sol and I’m sure she heard all the intrigues going on, too.

CBA: Do you remember Stu Schwartzberg?

Marie: Oh, sure, I think Stu is a doll. I’ve got to call him. It’s getting to the point where I get in contact with these people only at holidays. He’s a very funny guy. He should have been a cartoonist. He could draw but he didn’t have the drive to push to do it because you have to really work at it and be persistent. But he could write humor March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

stuff and I really liked his material. He was a friend of Herb and John Verpoorten.

CBA: You and Stu teamed together on some material, didn’t you?

Crazy, Big Apple Comix….

Marie: Oh, yeah, we did a story or two together.

CBA: Did you like doing the humorous stuff?

Marie: Yeah, that was fun.

CBA: Was it easier and quicker to do?

Marie: Sometimes. I love satire. I enjoyed it better than super-heroes. Super-heroes you had to stick to the line. I couldn’t put much of myself into it but the humor stuff, I would go crazy and that was fun.

CBA: You were teamed with Herb for awhile on The Hulk, weren’t you?

Marie: Oh, yeah. He inked me on a couple of things. Nice crisp lines. On the Hulk and a couple of humor stories.Then I was dying for my brother and I to work on something together so what do they do? They put John inking The Hulk and me penciling Sub-Mariner, because they wanted John to do something else. What was he doing? Thor, Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer or something like that.

Everybody was shuffled around like on a checkerboard or something.

I was like, “Now my brother’s penciling The Hulk and I want him to ink me.” So we didn’t get together until Kull.

CBA: Do you remember Big Apple Comix?

Marie: Yes, perfect example of Stu’s humor. Good stuff.

CBA: There was a incredible mix of talent on that book. Some real cutting edge people and some people from the Bullpen. There was Wally Wood.

Marie: Well, she knew everyone, you know? It killed us all because we were all late with our assignments.

CBA: That was a real fun book. I think it’s a great testament to her personality. How do you look at Flo overall?

Marie: She was different than most people and was a typical person adjusting to New York from out of state. She looked Asian, but she was Jewish, born on St. Patrick Day, and she had this Boston accent! What could be more different than that? It just struck me as so funny.

Above: Another Marie Severin editorial comment on the pressures facing Flo Steinberg in the Marvel Bullpen. Courtesy of Trina Robbins. ©2002 Marie Severin.

27-B

Above: Apparently, the art department and Flo had a goodnatured feud regarding the ordering of art supplies in the Marvel Bullpen, as indicated in a number of Severin cartoons. Courtesy of Trina. ©2002 Marie Severin.

Below: Marie shared this ’60s cartoon by her depicting her satirical view of Marvel fans in the day. ©2002 Marie Severin.

She could work for the CIA. She could get into any place.

CBA: I’ve seen pictures of when she worked for Warren and she had this deep tan and she blended in perfectly with her Hispanic coworkers! Sometimes a flower child, sometimes Laura Petrie….

Marie: I think she’s bewitched somehow! [laughs] But you could never get mad at her. I never heard of anyone getting mad at her. She’s just such a nice lady. I miss seeing her. It’s been years. It’s just like with Nancy Murphy. If it wasn’t for Nancy, we wouldn’t be having any reprints at Marvel. She saved all the proofs, you know? Otherwise, they would be shooting from the magazines.

CBA: Who was Nancy Murphy?

Marie: She did the subscriptions for years. I think that was her first job.

CBA: She stayed at Marvel for 20 years?

Marie: Oh, longer than that, I think. I went in for her farewell party. She was the watchdog.

Sometimes people would just wander in. This one time, they had security guys that Marvel had hired because things were being stolen, artwork and everything, and they were walking around seeing how loose everything was and all of sudden Nancy comes marching out. I had asked them who they were and they just said that they were just looking around and they were in suits so I guessed it was someone in for Stan. So Nancy comes marching up and goes, “What business do you have being here?” [laughs] She was the absolutely the only one who stopped these two guys! “Oh, we’re here seeing Stan or Martin Goodman,” whoever was in charge at the time. She goes, “Well we don’t like people walking around in here too much,” because there was always things disappearing from her office. She used to have complete sets of the comics before they bound them.

Even editors from the men’s magazines would come in and snatch them. She would get so furious!

They were file copies! Later on, Marvel had to go and buy them back!

John Romita artist/cover editor/art editor/art director CBA: When did you come on board at Marvel?

John: I left DC in the beginning of July, 1965.

They ran out of work so I was on my own. Stan had me take on Daredevil but I didn’t actually go on staff until January of ’66.

CBA: You were doing freelance for Marvel at home for about five months?

John: Yes. I was working at home and

28-B

going into the office once a week or so for a while during the Summer and Fall.

CBA: When you were working with Stan during the ’50s, was it full script?

John: Oh, yes. I worked on full scripts from Stan until Marvel cut back drastically because of the [Kefauver] hearings in the mid-’50s when comics were nearly destroyed. In 1957, Stan cut back from dozens and dozens of titles to one or two books and all of us were let go except for a couple of guys. I think Don Heck and Dick Ayers stayed on staff.

CBA: When you came back in ’65 and started with Daredevil, were you surprised by this new “Marvel Method” scripting approach?

John: Oh, yeah, I was shocked! I said that I didn’t think I could do it, and I definitely told them that I didn’t want to pencil because I felt that, at the time, I was burnt out. I had done eight years of love stories for DC and every story at that time was like a mountain I had to climb. So I told them I would ink, because I wanted to make a living, but just inks. They said okay and I inked one story and then they sandbagged me with Daredevil! [laughs] When he told me it was plot only, I was absolutely paralyzed. The only thing I hadn’t thought of was that I used to make changes on the stories when I was doing love stories. Even on Bob Kanigher’s scripts I would rearrange panels and make changes. So I was sort of doing editorial stuff but I didn’t realize I was doing anything else than just my job.

When he told me I was to get just a plot to work from, I told Stan that I wouldn’t even know where to start! I had to struggle through those first two Daredevils. They had Jack Kirby doing layouts on the stories, who did these very rough pasting layouts which determined close-ups, long shots, how much space to allocate for copy in each panel, and so on.

CBA: Was it helpful?

John: It was very helpful. In fact, I learned more from those two stories than I did in eight years at DC. CBA: Did Jack’s breakdowns loosen you up?

John: It did in a way. To be frank, if I hadn’t needed the money I don’t know if I would have kept up with it. I did it because it was the only way to make a buck, but I was terribly nervous about the whole thing and never quite sure about how to handle it. I used to have this “blank paper” syndrome where I would look at an empty sheet and not know what to put on it. It was very daunting.

CBA: You were Marvel’s de facto art director. You had an office right next to Stan, right?

John: Well, the fact that I was right in the office made a big difference, too. Because I was present, he probably wouldn’t have made as many changes as he did (though he was always known for making some changes). When I was freelance, for those seven or eight years, I would still make changes in artwork. He would ask me, “Hey, while you’re in, would you change this?” And I would spend an hour or two making changes. One of the first times I met Jack, he was up in Stan’s office, and this was when Flo was there in about ’65.

I would go in with some pages and Jack was there correcting a pencil of a Ditko cover! No one believes me about this but I saw him! I went up to him and asked why he was making the changes and he said that Stan thought this was a little bit too strange of a rear shot and he wanted it a little more glamorous. Somehow, Steve’s art on that job bothered Stan. We were joking about it! Here was Jack Kirby making a correction on Steve Ditko! I guarantee you that nobody would’ve imagined that!

CBA: Do you think Stan was idiosyncratic about his changes or were they pretty rational requests?

John: Stan was very clear about what he wanted. A lot of it wasn’t because he disagreed with the artist but it didn’t necessarily agree with what he wanted to write. In other words, if he wanted to set up a private joke and the face wasn’t right, he’d ask for a change to make it more clear. In other words, it was all story-orientated, it wasn’t a problem with the artwork. He always loved everyone’s artwork. He was amazed at some of the things that the guys could do. But he would make changes in it because of storytelling, even in my stuff. 95% of it was expression changes.

CBA: It reached critical mass in the late ’60s and early ’70s when an awful lot of changes were being made. For instance, Neal Adams—who inarguably can draw some of the most beautiful COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

women in comics, ever—had the faces of a beauty in his pencil-only “Man-Thing” story [Astonishing Tales #12] erased and your faces penciled in. Neal is virtually incapable of not giving a woman a gorgeous visage. Do you recall why the changes were made?

John: I don’t remember that one at all. I probably did the changes.

I did changes on Gray Morrow and John Buscema’s work but it was usually on characters that Stan had created and only because I was there to make them. I will say that Marie Severin changed many faces on my first Daredevil stories, because I wasn’t in the office in those early days. I would deliver the pages and then see the book later and there were Marie’s changes on my faces. I have the original pages and Marie’s paste-ups are peeling away.

CBA: So you were on both sides of the fence, so to speak. You had your art changed and you changed other people’s art.

John: Everybody had their art changed. I even changed Gene Colan’s art and that was no easy task!

CBA: Did you have to be a chameleon?

John: I had to learn a lot of different styles.

CBA: Did you feel ambivalent about it?

John: Let me tell you, I never made a change on a Kirby page without feeling awful about it. This was before we found ways to change the artwork without harming the art. My happy times came when I could make a photostat on the panel and I could make the change on the photostat and paste that up. Then, later, you could pull up the stat and still have the original art. Those were the only times I was really happy. The years when we would touch it up with white-out or stuck rubber cement over artwork were very annoying and upsetting to me. I didn’t like that.

CBA: Do you remember when Marvel started using photostats?

Was that in the late ’60s?

John: More like the early ’70s. Technically we just couldn’t do it until then. A lot of times I would use vellum overlays to make corrections, which was one of the first techniques I developed to keep from harming the original artwork beneath it.

CBA: Did you have fun being in the Bullpen?

John: You know, it was mostly fun. If I could have been in the Bullpen and just done my daily work, instead of the last 20 years when I was art director and didn’t have to do any actual work…

CBA: There’s a Freudian slip! [laughter] John: I mean actual deadline work! For my first ten years, I was doing Spider-Man and other jobs evenings and weekends and that took away some of the fun because I was generally walking around like a zombie never getting enough sleep. I’d be working until 3 or so in the morning and then get two hours sleep and come into the office. So those were long days. Sometimes seven days a week for a long period especially when I was doing the syndicated Spider-Man daily strip. I didn’t know what to do. Do the job and give up the strip? Give up the job and do the strip? I was too greedy and tried to do both. I was working seven days a week for four years.

CBA: Was it greed or a matter of survival?

John: Here’s what I told Virginia: “I’m going to be working hard on this and if the newspaper strip doesn’t keep growing, adding so many new papers a year, I’m going to drop it.” And it grew for about three years, going from about 100 to 450 papers. The prospect is that it could have been a blockbuster. I could have been making $100,000 a year if it kept growing. So I told her that as soon as it starts shrinking, I’m going to drop it. And that’s what happened. In the fourth year, it started to lose papers and I dropped the assignment. I said, “I’m not going to kill myself for something that has no future.” And the strip is still going! [laughs] The thing is, whoever works in syndication these days has to do it as a sacrifice because there’s not a lot of profit to go around unless you own it yourself and even then it’s not a big way to make a buck. So I got out of it properly because I didn’t want to get beat up on it anymore although it was fun getting fans all over the world. I thought that was the greatest feeling to reach people in places like Finland, Australia, all over the world.

CBA: It was a beautiful looking strip, John.

John: Oh, I killed myself on it! I wanted it to be the best-looking strip I could do. My idols were Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, guys like that and I wanted to be able to hold the strip up to March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

the same level of quality as they put into their work. I never quite made it, of course, but that was my goal. I tried very hard on that strip.

CBA: When you were hired on staff at Marvel in ’66, were you given a particular job or title?

John: No, I had gone at Stan’s insistence and because I did not have enough persistence to put in enough hours at home. Inking I could do anytime. Give me a bunch of penciled pages and I could do them anywhere. But to pencil takes me forever. So I told him that I didn’t want to pencil anymore and then he gave me Daredevil and then Spider-Man. I started Spider-Man, coincidentally, at the time that I came on staff at Marvel in ’66. What I told him was that I needed to come into the office if I’m going to pencil. I needed the discipline of going to the office to force me to sit down and get the pages done. So I went into just do Spider-Man and Stan would put a sign on my door, “Do Not Disturb” and then he would be the first guy through the door! [laughter] CBA: Like a rocket!

John: He used to tell Sol Brodsky, “Now, don’t go in there and interrupt John. He’s got a deadline.” Then Sol would see Stan going in and Sol would come in and say, “I thought we weren’t supposed to be bothering him!” [laughter] CBA: Was it obvious that Spider-Man was Stan’s favorite book?

John: Stan was writing all of the books at that time or all of the major ones anyway. We were publishing something like 17 books and he was writing, I think, 14 of them. He did know that some of them had a limited appeal. He was proud that Spider-Man was the biggestselling title. When he showed me Ditko’s 30 issues in preparation of my taking it over, he was very proud

Above: Marvel’s de facto art director in the mid-’70s was John “Ring-a-Ding” Romita (of whom we will be extensively covering in CBA’s forthcoming “Fathers & Sons” issue featuring the artist and his talented son, John Jr.). This pic

by Raeanne Rubenstein is from rock ’n’ roll magazine Creem’s April 1973 issue which featured an article on the Marvel Bullpen by Mike “Nexus” Baron. ©1973 Creem Magazine, Inc. Below: Though we sorely hoped to have this issue out by St. Valentine’s Day as a present for Flo, unforeseen circumstances blew that deadline and we unfortunately also missed having the mag ready for the Fab One’s birthday on March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day!). But we hope Ms. Steinberg appreciates this issue in the appreciative spirit in which it was produced. Courtesy of Mike Burkey, here’s Spidey wishing Flo a grand 29th birthday (again?) via this merchandise art by John Romita Sr. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

29-B

of those books. He said, “We hit a gold mine here. We hit a vein here where the people care about the characters very much. It’s not just the normal battle scene stuff but it’s human interest.” I think that was why he picked me for the book.

CBA: Did he read into your lack of discipline working at home or did you have to come to him with the idea of coming into the Bullpen to work?

John: I was going to get into advertising and I took a job at BBD&O before Stan asked me to come over to Marvel. I was going to be sitting next to Mort Meskin. I never did show up that first day.

Stan talked me out of it. I had accepted the job on a Friday, went to Stan and told him I was never going to work for Marvel again and we went out for a three-hour lunch and he talked me out of it. So I had the embarrassment of having to call on Monday morning and tell

Above: Mike “Romitaman” Burkey shared an astounding array of rarely-seen and unpublished John Romita Sr. original art, including this, the cover art for Creem magazine Vol. 4, #11 (April ’73). Now, imagine the goodies we’ll have in CBA #20!

Spider-Man ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Boy Howdy! ©1973 Creem Magazine, Inc.

30-B

them that I had changed my mind. I’ll always wonder what would have happened if I had stayed with that advertising job. The thing is, I told him that if I do continue to work in comics, I have to come into the office. He said, “I’ll give you a desk and a space to work. Just come in anytime you want.” How can you turn down something like that? Come in if you want, stay home if you want. I could pull an all-nighter and stay home. So I was on a comfortable routine there for a while.

CBA: You’ve previously told me of shady dealings going on with a (now deceased) editor at DC when you worked on the romance books in the earlier ’60s. Did you feel more comfortable at Marvel?

John: You know, I had worked for Stan for seven years before I went to DC. I stopped working for Marvel in 1957 because all the work dried up! There was nothing else but DC around, and I did feel

a little like a fish out of water because there was a lot of tension around the DC office. Because there was more than one editor, and the editorial staff was more cannibalistic. One editor would play an artist like a banjo. In other words, if you turned in a job for another editor before his work, you were gone. They were always threatening. There was always a lot of tension in that office. I always felt out of place there and I worked there for seven or eight years. I went in every two weeks and turned in my romance work and no one ever sent me over to the adventure editor. I felt like an outsider. I felt much more comfortable and at home with Stan. There was only one guy you had to please and that was Stan. It was much more conducive to me and I never felt uncomfortable at Marvel.

CBA: Working with Marie? How was that?

John: Interesting. I went over there in July and Stan conned me into doing Daredevil. Roy Thomas left DC after a short stint at about the same time I did and almost within weeks, Marie was put on as production. When I first went there, outside of the freelancers, there were only three people there: Stan, Flo and Sol Brodsky. One of those skeleton teams and I just accepted it. There was a huge Bullpen when I worked there in the ’50s and that was even after he laid off a lot of people. The Gene Colans, John Buscemas, John Severins. They were all gone by the time I got there. When I went back, there was no Bullpen at all. Everything was freelance. Flo would send stuff out.

Letterers would come in. Joe Rosen and Artie Simek would come in and pick up pages and I would stop by Artie’s and drop pages off. So it was a skeleton crew. My first image of it was three small offices.

Well, Stan’s was kind of big but the other offices were small. It was a relaxed Bullpen with Marie and then John Verpoorten came on to do general production to help Marie out because she started out doing almost all the coloring. So it was a very relaxed, wonderful; it was fun.

CBA: So you actually looked forward to going into work?

John: Oh, yeah!

CBA: What was Flo like?

John: Flo was the facilitator. In other words, Stan was always jumping out of the room and running down the hall, Sol had a million things to do, and Flo was the person to tell you, “Relax. Don’t worry about it. It sounds crazy but it’ll work.” If you had any misgivings, Flo was the person to calm your fears. She always had a way of taking the sting out of somebody’s peccadilloes. [laughs] CBA: Was she the perfect person for the job?

John: Oh, I think so. The reason Stan started referring to her in the Marvel Bullpen Bulletin Page, referring to her as “Fabulous Flo” and things like that, was because I think he basically understood that the readers wanted to feel like they were a part of the family. And he immediately made everybody feel that way. So he’d call everybody a “True Believer” and he’d say “Fabulous Flo is thinking of only you,” and then refer to me as “Jazzy John” and Kirby as “Jolly Jack,” and all of that stuff. [laughs] I always kid Stan that we got those nicknames in lieu of increases in our rate. [laughter] CBA: God bless you, John, but “Jazzy,” you’re not. [laughter] John: When my mother, who was very skeptical, saw that credit on a comic book, and she took it wrong. She looked at it and said, “‘Jazzy John,’ huh? You tell Mister Stan Lee everybody can’t be as ‘jazzy’ as he is!” [laughter] In other words, she took the wrong angle on it and believed it was sarcasm, but the truth of the matter is that it sounded friendly and comforting to the reader, frankly. He didn’t care that I wasn’t “jazzy”! It was alliterative and that’s all he was concerned about.

CBA: “Joltin’ John” and “Jaundiced John” just don’t work as well. [laughs] Do you think Marvel lost something when Flo quit?

John: Oh, I think so. You know, the sudden growth and popularity of Marvel brought on an intangible that was unexpected. You don’t realize the success is happening, but it is, quickly. Here Stan is, all alone, and then he’s got one person helping him, Flo Steinberg. Then Sol Brodsky comes on to do production and administration. You don’t even know it’s happening, but suddenly it just grows like Topsy. Flo is doing things nobody anticipated, and she helps you out, and she understands, she’s capable, she’s got an even temper, and it’s a pleasure to work with her. Instead of being bitchy about things, she was smiling and supportive. And that makes a hell of a difference in running an office. So, absolutely, we missed her when she left.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

I’ve often wondered that, because she had a good affinity for people, if she helped people stay there longer than they might have. I think it may have happened with Steve Ditko. I don’t know how long Ditko wanted to leave but I’ll guarantee you that somebody like Flo could have kept him there longer than he would have stayed, you know what I’m saying? Because he may have grumbled to her and she might tell him, “Oh, that’s just the way Stan is. You know the way he is. He doesn’t mean it. It’s fine,” that kind of reassurance. I often wondered if maybe Flo left Marvel because she didn’t approve of the way some people were treated. I have always meant to ask her but never did.

CBA: In the ultimate scheme of things, she’s one of the most important non-artists, non-editors, non-writers, non-publishers in the business. She was obviously hired as a Gal Friday but I’m finding out, certainly, she had a profound effect on the Bullpen.

John: It’s true because part of the thing that made me stay with Marvel for years was that family feeling and she very much contributed to that atmosphere in the Bullpen. I remember that aspect was very important for me. When I would walk into DC’s bullpen, I never felt like it was a family. They would say hello, but there wasn’t any warmth or any camaraderie. Whenever I waited outside of Stan’s office, guys like Jack Abel and Dave Berg and whoever was doing mystery stories, always exuded a warm, friendly attitude there. Even before Flo, there were other secretaries that were cordial and friendly and would come out to greet you. There was something about Stan that seemed to dictate to have a positive cordiality in the office. Some people may have thought it was phony but I know it was genuine. I don’t think he could have carried it off for all those years if it wasn’t real. And I think, yes, she was crucial to that. I would love to ask her if people like Ditko and Don Heck who were not completely happy at Marvel, whether she left thinking that she didn’t want to have any more of that kind of treatment of people. She was very sensitive that way. She also did publishing. Do you remember that book she did with Wally Wood, Big Apple Comix? Maybe one of the reasons she left was that she was envisioning those kinds of books, writing, editing and publishing.

CBA: You know, the world was changing at that time. It was a tumultuous society that we were living in. She went to San Francisco, did the hippie route, and came back to New York. A woman named Robin Green replaced her. Do you remember Robin?

John: You know, I remember the name but I cannot place the face.

CBA: Marie used to call her “Legs.”

John: Oh, yeah! I can remember her. I can just picture her in a cute outfit. She was a tall kid.

CBA: She’s an executive producer and writer for the Emmy Awardwinning HBO show, The Sopranos.

John: [astonished] Is that right?

CBA: She wrote this article in Rolling Stone, back in ‘72, that was a look at the Bullpen. I believe you were interviewed for it, too.

John: I remember the Rolling Stone article, yeah. When Marvel started to become this pop culture phenomenon, we got a lot of press. That’s a riot about Robin! I’d never known she became a Big Shot! I’d never have put it together. [laughs] CBA: Do you remember Nancy Murphy?

John: Yes. She ran the subscription department.

Actually, I think she worked at Marvel the longest of all of us.

She started by working for Martin Goodman at Magazine Management for years before Marvel Comics took off, and ended up doing comic book subscriptions. I think she ended up way over 40 years, from teenager to middle-aged woman.

CBA: Did something change when Stan wasn’t coming in the office very much by the early ’70s?

John: When he was in California?

CBA: Yeah, and when Roy quit. Did something change?

John: Oh, sure. Every time there was a big change, it didn’t get better. When Stan left, there was a little bit of carry over because he would regularly communicate with us. We were always talking with him.

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

When he relocated to the West Coast, it was really interesting because Stan had asked me to go with him to California and I often attribute the fact that I didn’t have any guts to do it. Also, Virginia absolutely refused to live in California. She just didn’t want to leave New York. But it would have been a terrible tearing out of my roots to get me out there and I just didn’t have the guts to do it. And I also envisioned that I’d be out there hopping, jumping through hoops for Stan with his movie stuff and I didn’t want to lose comics. But yeah, every time somebody left like that; when Roy left, there was a wrenching. Then we had this merry-go-round of editors for a while.

It was terrifying.

CBA: When were you officially an art director? Were you ever? [laughs] John: Actually, for years, I wasn’t in title. It was really just a handshake, by just a word from Stan saying, “I’d like you to.” I remember one time, he took me off Spider-Man because he didn’t like how the line’s covers were looking and he asked me to just supervise the covers for a few months. That’s when he called me the art

Above: Stan, Marie and John share a moment with Spidey in a publicity shot taken in the early-’70s in Stan’s office. From FOOM #16. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Sometime during the late ’60s or early ’70s, John Romita Sr. worked on a “Li’l Spidey” concept featuring kiddie versions of the crew. Courtesy of Mike Burkey. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

31-B

Above: We haven’t figured out exactly what this “beardless Stan Lee as Lectureman” piece was for though it somehow looks like a Spidey Super Stories page, maybe due to the Win Mortimer inks.

Penciled by John Romita Sr., with touch-up by Marie Severin.

Courtesy of Mike Burkey. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Romita merchandizing art.

Courtesy of Mike Burkey. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

32-B

director. The reason he didn’t make me an official art director after that is that I think when he renewed his contract, he needed to add the title to his resumé, to get his salary increased. So he took the art director title away from me and called me art editor.

When Marie took over from me, she was called art editor and she grumbled about that because she thought it was an anti-female thing. [laughs] CBA: It was not disingenuous of Stan to call himself an art director, was it?

John: Oh, no. I always considered him the art director because all I was doing was his whole approach. Down through the years, Stan had indoctrinated me and then every time I would be in the office, I would see him indoctrinating the next guy and I got to know that whole spiel, that whole approach, how to get extreme action and emotion out of the pages. I got so that I could say it almost exactly like Stan. So the first time it happened he was too busy or was going on a trip and he would have an artist come in and would ask me to give the guy the full Marvel spiel.

I did and that’s when I sort of took over that part. Again, there was no official document, no nothing. It was all totally casual.

CBA: For better or worse, you’re always going to be considered a Marvel artist. How do you feel about that?

John: You know, I’m amazed. Stranger than that, Jon, is the fact that I am still introduced as the Spider-Man artist. Like “this is the guy who did Spider-Man” and I say, “You know, I stopped doing Spider-Man in the ’70s. How could anybody know about it?”

Reprints, of course, has made me familiar to younger people. When I go to a convention, I still am shocked that people come to me and talk to me about my stuff, 35 years later.

CBA: Yeah, but at the Macy’s Day Parade, there’s the giant John Romita Spider-Man floating above you.

John: You know, I couldn’t have done it better if I had planned it out because the whole thing just happened, none of it was anticipated. In fact, I would have avoided all of it, if I could have. I would have avoided being art director like the plague if I could have.

I didn’t even know it was happening. It was creeping up on me. I did

not want responsibility, I did not want to hire people, did not want to fire people, I just wanted to do my stuff. I did want to be able to give my opinion and to give whatever expertise I had though. I would offer to editors but never on a basis that if you don’t listen to me, I’m quitting. So I didn’t want power. Power is not what I looked for. I was looking for comfort and ease in producing the Marvel books as well as we could, believe it or not.

CBA: But if you could do it over again, you’d do it the same way?

John: Yes. CBA: So you would rather have responsibility foisted upon you than look for it?

John: Well, I would not have the responsibility at all if I could avoid it. I would have avoided it if I had known what is was going to be.

The reason I accepted the official art director position in my last few years at Marvel is because I didn’t have to do any deadline work. So I said okay, it’s a good trade. But I still hated that part where I had to hire people like Don Perlin or Steve Geiger… but then the best experience that I had was The Raiders, the apprentice program Jim Shooter inaugurated, which was just a wonderful idea and I had wonderful help with those guys.

CBA: Do you think there was an attitude at the Bullpen that was still a ’50s mentality of “Well, Stan’s the boss, we’re not going to go up there, there’s no reason to challenge him for anything.” Though certainly freelancers like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko had their own distinct, occasionally combative, point of views.

John: Oh, definitely. I never was combative. For some reason, I never said that I wanted to plot stories. I plotted stories by osmosis. In other words, I started cuing my plots in while Stan and I were doing it together. After a while, he got into a comfort zone where he’d say, “Okay, John. I’ll leave it to you. Just use Doctor Octopus as suchand-such, maybe The Kingpin.” And he would just give me very quick parameters and then I would plot the stories. But I was never one who said, “I want to plot the stories, I want to have final word.”

I never wanted that. But it’s funny, a strange combination of lacking in confidence and confident enough to say, “I have a better plot than you gave me.” But no, there was a casual approach and I always felt that Marvel was much more viable and allowed for people of personality to come in there and they would bring their personality and slip it in and it would help the overall picture. You’re absolutely right. The fact that Jack Kirby was a genius and created things casually, constantly, like a machine gun. Stan worked with him very well but he had a knack of accumulating his stuff and filtering it out in a plausible, palatable story. The point is that it came out much better than it came in. It came in chaotic. I always tell people when I finished a 20-page silent story, a picture version of a plot, I very seldom had much faith in it. I would always think, “Oh my God, how is he going to do this? How is he going to do that? What do I do here? I was vague there.” By the time he wrote it, it was almost like we had planned every single turn of events in that story. Stan made it so natural and he did the same thing with Jack, he did the same thing with John Buscema who really did not want to do storytelling. John Buscema would much rather have just done the drawing. “Tell me what you want, I’ll draw ’em. I don’t want to hear any more about it.

It’s all crap.” But Stan managed, no matter who did the artwork— when Marie did artwork, she had her own approach. Herb Trimpe did artwork, all of them, he wrote this stuff with these people and he made it look natural. He made it look like it was planned. The whole thing was so helter-skelter, I can’t imagine how instinctive we were.

We did a long sequence with The Kingpin in the books, starting with, maybe #69. We also did a long, long, drawn-out sequence about the tablet, the Rosetta Stone. If you look at that, you would think, “Wow, these guys built to a climax, about seven or eight months.” But there was no thought of even a third issue. The whole thing just grew and we kept making it up as we went along. It’s almost like the Warner Bros. of the ’30s. They said the same thing. They used to make up the stuff—even Casablanca was made up as they went along and changed daily. We did the same thing, but it looks to the reader as though we did everything schemed and perfectly planned. [laughs] CBA: And this material is still in print today.

John: And you know, it still holds water. That is probably the most satisfying thing that I have ever done. The fact that all of those things that were done in haste, in terror, in fear [laughs], in sweat, and they COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

turned out to look like, “Wow, that must have been fun to do those stories.” I’d say, “Wellll… [laughs] there’s another angle to it.”

Before we end this, I just wanted to add this: I got the one benefit that Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and only a few others had: I got the chance to work directly with Flo. After all those years, she came back and worked with us and the last few years I was there, she was proofreading, and it was wonderful. I loved to go into her office. Even during the years since I left the company, I’ve gone in and seen her there. It is very comforting to know that she’s still there.

CBA: And she still had the presence?

John: She still does. She still knows what’s really going on, but she never intrudes and is always there with a smile and a nice word. And that’s the way I always want it to be in an office. I did not want any tension or anybody pushing anybody around. I wanted comfort and ease and she delivered.

Steve Skeates staff writer What can I say about Flo? That she’s one of my all-time favorite people in all of comicdom? That hearing her distinctive voice (is there such a thing as a New York City drawl?) at the latest Big Apple Convention brought a broader smile to my continence than at that point I had even realized I was capable of producing, even as I whirled about, attempting to locate the source of that oh-so musical sound? There is, of course, the salient actuality that Flo— and Marie too, for that matter—was/were quite definitely extremely instrumental in helping a certain green-kid version of this particular raconteur retain what little semblance of sanity I possessed way back there in 1965, during those two weeks (or so) in which I was about as far out of my league as anyone can possibly get—an apt baseball metaphor, especially considering that what I was up to was attempting to fit into the original Marvel Bullpen, having incredibly been somehow hired as Stan Lee’s assistant editor.

You see, back in ’65, Stan ran a want ad in The New York Times asking everyone interested to apply for an editorial position at Marvel and to write those applications in comic book form! Meanwhile, in a small college some three hundred miles away (where certainly The New York Times was available, but not the want ad section; that portion reaches out only about 50 miles from the city!), on a mere whim, I had decided to apply for a job at Marvel and further devised the clearly clever and “original” notion of making my employment request come off with all the verve and sass of a bunch of comic book captions! Ahhh, the wonders of serendipity! Of course, everyone else who applied, knowing that the application was supposed to be in comic book style, overdid it, whereas convinced that this was my own beautifully inventive idea, I didn’t push it, and therefore I easily landed the job!

So, there I was, directly out of college, knowing absolutely nothing about publishing (my previous employment had been as a phone solicitor, a waiter in a coffee house, and an assembly line worker at a windshield-wiper plant)—in addition, I had no idea what a fanzine was and had never even tried to write a comic book script— attempting to make it as an assistant editor! Needless to say, I understood less than two-thirds of what Stan had to say—yet, already possessing an ego the size of Montana, I was unable (or, should I say, “quite utterly reluctant”?) to admit how utterly in the dark I was!

Furthermore, I’ve never been particularly into male-bonding—having grown up in the suburbs yet having had no desire whatsoever to drive a car (let alone know anything about the inner-workings of that ever-popular chrome-plated deadly weapon) and not giving a hoot about sports, why would I want to hang out with people whose main topics of discussion were automobiles and football, when I could instead pal around with members of a gender that were at least enjoyable to gaze upon! Oh sure, in suburbia especially, the conversations amid the young women could be as silly as the boys’; still and all, it was fun to watch their lips move!

All in all and anyhow now, what I’m getting at here, of course, is that Stan found me impossible to work with, and after two weeks of utter frustration on his part, he called in Roy Thomas to take my place! However, I’m quite certain, if it hadn’t been for Flo and Marie clueing me in, the two of them being somehow able to pound through my thick skull at least a rough idea of what the hell was March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

going on, I surely wouldn’t have held onto that position even that long! Nor would I have been capable (thanks to the knowledge they imparted) of subsequently getting out there and finding scripting employment elsewhere—working for Tower, Charlton, DC, Warren, and even ultimately for good ol’ Marvel once again! Thus, if gratitude is (as those in the know say) a major component of joy (other basic components are simplicity, harmony, and order—and just judging by this complicated tribute which seems to be more about me than about Ms. Steinberg, it certainly isn’t that much of a stretch to realize I’ve got a long ways to go vis-à-vis those other three; yet I do believe I’ve got gratitude down!), how can I help but think back about Flo and Marie and my early days at Marvel and wind up smiling endlessly? And how could I not—right here, right now—quite emphatically thank those two truly wonderful women for making it possible for me to even have ever had a career in comics??!

Above: Perhaps John Romita Sr.’s greatest Amazing Spider-Man story starts off in dramatic fashion in ASM #108. The Jazzy One also considers it his favorite story and confesses that it was inspired by Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates newspaper strip. Courtesy of Mike Burkey. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Roy Thomas Marvel staff writer/assistant editor/editor-in-chief CBA: When did you come on board at Marvel?

Roy Thomas: Early in July, 1965.

CBA: Did you come after Steve Skeates?

Roy: Yeah, I think he was in there a couple weeks before I came along. Stan had hired him after reading an article Steve had written for a college magazine and put him on staff as a writer. He and I didn’t exactly have any official titles, [laughs] but we were working there, partly as staff writers (which was what I was hired to be, now 33-B

Above: The Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club welcome letter. Only “The Bullpen Gang” signature appeared on the original. The other Marvel contributors added their names at the request of Aaron Sultan, who graciously shared this—and many other fine MMMS fan club material (as well as an article later in this ish)—with us. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

34-B

that I think about it) and partly as editorial assistants.

CBA: Did you know Steve at all?

Roy: Not before. I did get to know him slightly during those early days, and we worked together on one or two things. He wrote a Western, and I recall helping him a little with that, but Stan didn’t like it anyway, and got upset with both of us. [laughs] CBA: Do you recall your first meeting with Stan?

Roy: I remember it was the Friday after the Fourth of July, 1965, because there was a short four-day work week at DC (where I was briefly on staff). I spoke to Stan on the phone on Tuesday at 5:30 from my hotel, took the Marvel writing test which Flo Steinberg had handed me on Wednesday, passed it in to Sol Brodsky on Thursday.

Then, Friday morning, Flo called me at DC and asked conspiratorially if I could come over to see Stan, because it was only a ten-minute walk on my lunch break. So I did.

CBA: And that was the first time you had any contact with Flo? Roy: No. She had come out into the outer office to hand me the Marvel writing test on Wednesday—also during my lunch hour. But when she called on Friday, she had a recognizable voice. I was proofreading a Jim Mooney “Supergirl” story when I answered the phone.

Flo said a word or two, and I said, “Hello, Flo.” I remember she said, “I’m a spy today,” or words to that effect.

CBA: What is it about her voice that’s so recognizable?

Roy: Well, it’s high-pitched and cheerfully bouncy. Anyway, I didn’t know many people who were likely to call me at DC, especially a female. I had only been in New York less than two weeks.

CBA: When you first saw her face to face, can you describe her?

Roy: Well, if I described her then, I’d be describing her based less on memory than on seeing the photo that was taken of the two of us shortly afterward, which was published in Les Daniels’ Marvel book and more recently in Alter Ego #13. I just recall meting her out in the little reception area they had. She was very friendly and smiling when

she handed me the test. It was just a couple of minutes, at most.

CBA: When you went over to Marvel, was the atmosphere discernably different from DC? Was it more relaxed?

Roy: Oh, yes. After all, the only people working in the Marvel part of the office were Stan—on whatever days he didn’t stay home and write, an average of maybe two or three days a week—and Sol Brodsky, who had come on board as full-time production manager only recently; before that he was freelancing the job, I guess—and Flo, who shared an office with Sol, where there was a corrugated desk they put me at. Flo had been hired about two years prior. I knew her name before my first visit to the office. You saw these names in the comics, and “Fabulous Flo Steinberg” was a name I vaguely knew from reading it a time or two in the Bullpen Bulletins, like everybody else. Those days, it was relatively rare to see a female name in comics. Marie Severin was off in another office, which she shared with a woman who was doing some commercial-type comics that Marvel was involved with, that didn’t last much longer. That was it, those three offices, counting Stan’s, which took over half of the total space, and a little hallway between them. With the reception area, which I think was shared with the magazine department of Magazine Management, that was about it.

CBA: That consisted of the entire staff in 1965?

Roy: That was the whole staff. Morrie Kuramoto would come in to do some correction lettering, but that was freelance. Frank Giacoia was there a lot that first week or so. Sol wouldn’t trust him to ink Millie the Model at home, so he would have to be there working in the office. But Frank would keep chattering while he worked, talking to me about the movie Gunga Din, which I hadn’t seen then. It got so that Sol finally took me aside and said, “Just don’t talk to Frank, and don’t let him talk to you. He just wants an excuse not to work.” [laughter] CBA: We know that Marvel was limited with the books that it came out with.

Roy: Yeah, though I never heard anything about that at the time, as far as I can recall.

CBA: But if they had limited output, why was the company growing? I mean, there’s only so many titles that could be produced.

Roy: Basically, DC was concerned about Marvel’s increasing market share. I recall they held a meeting about it (which I didn’t get to attend) during the two weeks I was working for them. I think John Romita was at that meeting, or another one like it. Since DC’s sister company, Independent News, distributed their main competitor’s comic line and because they had access to Marvel’s sales figures, DC was discovering that these new comics—Fantastic Four in particular, and Spider-Man, secondarily, and even the other titles were all picking up in sales, while DC’s stagnated.

CBA: But why would Marvel expand its staff if there’s no increase in the number of titles?

Roy: First of all, Stan, at the time, had not been writing everything.

Remember, his brother Larry Lieber was writing some, though Larry was somewhat slow and didn’t really enjoy writing super-heroes. By this time, Stan had taken back the dialoguing of the super-hero stories, as he thought Larry was better off writing and drawing books like The Rawhide Kid, perhaps more Larry’s forte. That was one thing.

This left Stan writing more than he really wanted to, and more than he had been scripting till recently. They didn’t really add books right away, but Stan was looking to lighten his load with some “young blood” like Steve Skeates and me. Stan felt he was writing a bit too much. He wanted to be able to think about other things the company could do. He had the MMMS going, for instance, and was working on other publicity, things like that. Stan wanted to be able to profit from those, and he was hoping to get out from under some of the writing. Of course, I had had no idea, when I’d lived in the St. Louis area, that he didn’t really want to write all these comics he was writing or co-plotting.

CBA: You thought the position was going to be just editorial work?

Roy: As a matter of fact, I was hired as staff writer, my first official title… not as an editorial assistant. I don’t know Steve’s exact arrangement, although I suspect it was the same. That changed over a period of a very few weeks, because I discovered I couldn’t really write at the office from nine to five. Basically, they kept giving me COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

proofreading to do—mostly just backstopping Stan at first, because he proofed all his own work and just about everything else then. For one whole day, I tried to do coloring but Stan found out about it and took my crayons away from me. He said he didn’t want me wasting my time learning to color. He had other things in mind for me.

CBA: Did your responsibilities, all of a sudden, become so overloaded that within a month, the Bullpen needed Dennis O’Neil?

Roy: Well, it wasn’t a month, more like a couple of months, I think.

It was maybe early fall when Denny came on. Whenever it was, I hadn’t been on staff very long myself at the time. I remember it took Stan a week or two to get Denny up there, so maybe the hiring was even sooner than I recall. The basic thing is, somehow, Stan and Steve Skeates didn’t mesh that well. Stan liked Steve, but for some reason he just didn’t feel he was working out on staff, so Steve was released, but maybe he had a bit of freelance work… I don’t remember. Then Steve went over to Tower comics and I also suggested he try Charlton which, later on, he did. In the meantime, Stan asked me if there was anybody else I knew about who might make a good staff writer, because he knew of my involving with fanzines and Alter Ego. I knew of a number of good writers in fandom, but two that came to mind immediately were Tom Fagan, one of the best of the fan writers… and Denny, who wasn’t really in comics fandom at all, as we used the term. Some people have insinuated that I suggested Denny because he had written an article about me for the newspaper he worked for in my home county in Missouri, back when I was a teacher, but in actuality he had written two earlier articles about comics my mother had sent me (I lived in St. Louis at the time).

These articles dealt with comics, and one of them included a smattering of humorous dialogue between Superman and Batman. I just knew Denny could write, and he was somebody I knew. Though I knew some good fan writers, there was just something about Denny’s writing that made me feel he would be someone to whom we should send a writing test. In the meantime, of course, I’d sent Dave Kaler up to Charlton where he ended up getting work. I was also thinking about my old hometown buddy Gary Friedrich in the back of my mind, and I got him up to New York by sometime around October or November. So I was just gathering people to work at Marvel. Steve Gerber came through for just a visit, that summer, having just graduated from high school. I brought him in to meet Stan, and that helped lead to something a few years later. So people were coming through.

Marvel wasn’t going to expand the number of books greatly just yet, but there was always that possibility. Stan just wanted more writers. I think he just wanted to get out from under some of his scripting chores.

CBA: Do you suspect that Martin Goodman, the publisher, increased Marvel’s budget with all of the publicity and increased sales?

Roy: I don’t know. I never heard anything about budgets.

CBA: So you would have no idea whether Stan’s freelance money was shifted to you guys?

Roy: I really don’t know. I never really knew Stan’s rate. I remember that when he hired Arnold Drake a couple of years later, Gary and I were upset because we found out that Stan gave Arnold a slightly higher rate than we had. Not because we didn’t respect Arnold, March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

because we did, but because we were there and selling books and didn’t think Arnold should automatically have a higher rate. I guess he’d talked Stan into it, because DC’s rates were higher than Marvel’s then. And Stan told Gary and me, “Well, his rate is even higher than mine,” but of course we didn’t know that for sure. Let’s just say we were skeptical. [laughs] But anyway, I think that Stan evened it out pretty soon, gave Gary and me a raise, and it all worked out okay. I never saw Stan’s vouchers. Flo would be more likely to be able to tell you about budgets and rates than I could. Or Sol, but of course he’s gone.

CBA: I was just curious whether the budget was increasing commensurate with sales.

Roy: I just never knew much about the money. Nobody ever offered too much information. There’d be tidbits here and there, but nothing much and, even if I did know, it hasn’t stayed in my head. I’d have been more likely to talk to Sol about financial matters, and he was closed-mouthed and would never tell you anything that he didn’t think Stan wanted you to know. That was okay, and I didn’t push.

CBA: What was Sol like?

Roy: Sol was a great guy. People have different feelings about him, because once in a while he had little vendettas he’d take out out on people, like most of us will do from time to time. We’re only human. You know, when you’re production manager—and Verpoorten did this, too, I think—you could hold back a voucher. [laughs] I remember he got mad at Vinnie Colletta once over something, so he held back a voucher for a couple of days. I know Gil Kane didn’t like Sol. Some people got annoyed at him if he wouldn’t pay them in advance like they wanted. [laughs] But Sol was, I thought, basically a very nice guy, and people like Dave Kraft and others agree with me on that score. Sol and I went to lunch almost every weekday for two, three years, and while it was never really a close friendship, we enjoyed each other’s company. I’d ask him about the old days in comics, sometimes.

CBA: Did you hit it off with Flo?

Above: Marvel editor-in-chief poses for a Crazy magazine fumetti shot taken in the mid-’70s. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Inset left: First page of the MMMS newsletter. Courtesy of Aaron Sultan. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 35-B

Above: Marvel character headshots by various artists adorned the MMMS scribble pad sheets.

Courtesy of Aaron Sultan. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. 36-B

Roy: Yes. Flo and I got along well, and we hung out together a little bit. And, of course, then Denny and then his girlfriend Anne moved up to the city, too. Denny and Anne got married. Then Gary moved up. I remember when I went with Len Brown, his friend Marty (who was a dead-ringer for the rock singer Fabian), and Flo during in those first few months to see the entire 12 or 15 chapters of the Republic Captain Marvel serial down in Times Square one night. Flo and I also went to see Bob Dylan up in White Plains, back in ’66. We weren’t close buddies, I suppose, but we got along real well. I was really sorry to see her leave a year or so later, I guess over that little raise she wanted.

CBA: I spoke to a lot of people from the ’60s Bullpen, and they all say that Flo was an integral part of the atmosphere of Marvel.

Roy: That’s true. Of course, in the Bullpen Bulletins, “Fabulous” Flo was just this fictitious character. As far as the office went, she was a nice, friendly presence when she called people up. I remember Sol telling me once that he tried to get her to call somebody or other that she hadn’t called before, and she said, “Oh, Sol. You know I don’t like calling new people”—which is strange for a corresponding secretary. [laughs] But I’m sure she still did it. Sol said that when Stan first saw her from a distance, when she was waiting to be interviewed, he thought she was a nice-looking woman, so he called Sol in. “She looks like she could be nice. She might be good for our receptionist.” Sol said, “Well, she’d just come from working for the phone company.” Stan said, “So, in that case, she must be great.” So she was hired. Stan did really like Flo. She could say things to him sometimes that the rest of us couldn’t. [laughter] CBA: Martin Goodman would have to approve all raises?

Roy: I’m sure he did.

CBA: In Bill Schelly’s article on Flo, I read that Stan was really disappointed to lose Flo. Do you recall?

Roy: Of course, you always hate to lose somebody who’s been part of this growing company for several years. But, other than paying her the raise out of his own pocket, there wasn’t anything he could have done, really. I think he was sorry to see her leave. And he was always happy to see her when they bumped into each other later.

CBA: She was able to serve as liaison with the fans at Marvel?

Roy: Oh, yeah. She was very popular with the fans, because she was friendly and outgoing and would talk to people. And she was sincere. Sometimes, with any kind of job, you have to have to kind-of turn on a charm or friendliness you might not always feel, but she was good at that, too. I was glad she stayed in the field by working for Warren later. Sometimes she could be creative, too. She used to open the readers’ letters to Millie the Model. They would send in their sketches of clothes Millie could wear—and of course usually they were just confusing scrawls. But Flo would take their names and stick them on some drawing of Millie or Chili in the story that had been done by Stan Goldberg, and while the dress there didn’t look anything like what they had sent in, the little girls—and occasionally little boys—would be delighted. They would write back and say, “Oh, thank you for making my dress look so lovely!” She always got a kick out of that. I remember, too, how sad she was when she learned that some Marvel fan she had exchanged a letter or two with had been killed in Vietnam. When you establish a rapport with readers, you remember some of their names. She had recognized my name, I think, because I had previously written several letters to Stan, though not nearly as many as I had written to Julie Schwartz at DC. So she knew who some of us were before we ever came in.

CBA: How did she look at fandom? With bemusement?

Roy: [laughs] Probably. Fandom wasn’t something she was especially interested in, because she wasn’t a comics reader. I’m sure that to many people, myself included, writing or drawing comics seems a strange way to make a living as an adult, and it’s hard to understand being engrossed in comics once you get past the age of 14 or 15 or whatever. But Flo is a live-and-let-live kind of person, and I think she enjoyed the experience. Still, she didn’t want to get too involved with the fans, understandably—because some of them can become real pests. Some of them attach themselves to you like barnacles. [laughs] I think she didn’t want that to happen. Plus, being an attractive woman, that would have happened to her very easily, had she let it.

CBA: Were you straddling both worlds? An intense fan as well as a cool professional?

Roy: Yeah, but I was pulled off that fence real fast, because, as soon as I was hired, Stan told me not to give out any advance news to fanzines, or to anyone. It wouldn’t have been a problem for me if I’d kept publishing Alter Ego, since that wasn’t a newszine—I didn’t have to stop doing Alter Ego; I just got too busy to continue it for several years—like basically about thirty—but I couldn’t give out much information.

CBA: Have you stayed friendly with Flo? Roy: Oh, sure! We talk a few times a year, and I see her occasionally when Dann and I are in New York, but we’re not there that often lately. She’s got a standing invitation to come down here to South Carolina to visit us, and I hope she will sometime. I like seeing her and Peter Sanderson and the other couple of people I still feel I “know”at Marvel, though of course Jack Abel and George Roussos have passed away in recent memory.

CBA: Denny mentioned there was this handicapped young man who worked in the Bullpen?

Roy: Oh, that would be Ron Whyte. That was by the turn of ’66 or thereabouts, too. Ron had written a play, won some kind of award, and Stan hired him on the basis of that. He was a really droll, funny, witty guy, and I remember Marie Severin was especially fond of him, but it turned out that he didn’t write gutsy enough dialogue—you know, purple prose—when he tried a couple of scripts. He was on staff very briefly, but I don’t remember if Marvel ever published anything with his name on it. I think he was trying to write “SubMariner” and a couple of other strips, but Stan felt it didn’t work out.

He was a good writer, but he didn’t seem to adjust to Marvel Comics.

Steve Skeates, of course, did prove himself a good comic book writer.

So did Denny, even though he and Stan turned out to be on different wavelengths from the start. I remember Stan having me rewriting something of Denny’s once—a “SHIELD” story or something—and I was very chagrined, long afterward, when someone told me that Denny thought the rewrite had been my idea and that I was “sabotaging” him—but maybe the guy who told me that was embellishing a little. In any event, when Ron didn’t work out, I think that may have been the occasion of Stan’s hiring my friend Gary Friedrich, who’d been writing for Dick Giordano at Charlton since I’d sent him up there. Ron kind-of wandered off, though I don’t remember much about the circumstances. I seem to recall seeing a book or play by Ron in a second-hand bookstore one day when I was visiting New York, though… and I’d like to think that he got to live his dream, the same way I got to live mine. Not many people do, you know.

Dennis O’Neil staff writer CBA: When did you start working at the Bullpen?

Dennis O’Neil: About 1966, I guess.

CBA: You came on as an assistant editor?

Dennis: That was the title given.

CBA: What was the office like?

Dennis: Well, it was not the “we’re all having fun, sitting around, making funny books” environment that some of the fans thought it was. On the other hand, it was loose and friendly, small, occupied one end of a long suite of offices that was mostly Magazine Management’s other periodicals. They did confessionals, men’s mags, crossword books, and comics. It was all part of an empire. It was very friendly though it was odd because on one hand, suits and ties were de rigeur. That was required. I mean, in recent years, I’ve had assistants who don’t always wear shirts to work. [laughter] Back then, it was a lot more businesslike and Madison Avenue-ish than it became a generation later. Having said that, the atmosphere was not uptight, by any means.

CBA: Conversely, was it uptight over at DC? Dennis: I don’t know. DC had that rep. By the time I got to DC, yeah, I would say they were uptight. On the other hand, I was already deep in hippiedom by the time I got over there. By that point, I had long hair and was not wearing Macy’s clothes when I went uptown. But the atmosphere was more sedate, a lot more older guys.

CBA: Conservative?

Dennis: Yes. CBA: Do you recall when you first met Flo? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Dennis: Sure do! I got a phone call from Roy Thomas at the Missouri newspaper where I worked, saying that Stan Lee wanted to hire me as an assistant. I did the most irresponsible thing of my life: I decided to leave that very night. So I wrote a note to the editor, packed my car, and drove East. I arrived in New York on a Monday morning, went to the offices of Marvel Comics—I think it was on 59th and Madison at the time—and there was nobody there. The whole place was closed up and I couldn’t figure that out at all. This was Monday! So I looked up the only name I knew in the phone book, Florence Steinberg, whose name I knew from reading Stan’s Bullpen Bulletins which had items about Fabulous Flo. I called Flo and she informed me there was a Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, and that’s why everything was closed. Jewish holidays were not much of a factor in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. [laughs] So I had no idea. So yeah, she was the very first person I dealt with in New York City and I think she kind of took me under her wing a little bit, tried to show me around and teach me little New York survival techniques.

CBA: How would you describe her?

Dennis: She was extremely warm and friendly. She was also quite good looking, a very pretty, very vivacious woman. But mostly what you responded to was her warmth.

CBA: Did she have a presence in the Bullpen?

Dennis: Oh, absolutely. When you walked in the offices, she was the first person you saw.

CBA: Do you recall Flo fending off the hordes of fans that would come?

Dennis: Well, she had to deal with them. She also had to answer fan mail. Stan would sometimes take a letter and just write “NN” on top and that meant to Flo “Nice Note.” Like, let’s answer this and let’s be very polite to whichever fan sent it in.

CBA: And how long did you last at the Bullpen?

Dennis: Six months, something like that.

CBA: It just wasn’t working out?

Dennis: I have never found out why. [laughs] In the introduction to the last book I wrote, which he was nice enough to write, Stan said, “We should have never let Denny go.” I don’t know. I was given freelance work immediately so I didn’t suffer. But we had a parting of the ways so far as the assistant editor job went.

CBA: Were you the first assistant editor or were you replacing Roy? Dennis: Roy, at that point, had come in a month before me and was already up the food chain a bit. So, yeah, I think I did replace him. Steve Skeates was the first assistant that they hired. I don’t know why that didn’t work out.

CBA: Because he was inept at spelling, Steve told me. [laughs] Dennis: Oh well. That would do it. [laughs] Anyway, then came me and then a guy named Ron Whyte, one of the bravest human beings I have ever known, who is now dead, he followed me. I became friends with him and we actually wrote a novel together. As he himself once put it, his body was the Battle of Antietam the morning after. He had been sort of short-changed physically, suffering severe birth defects. A lot of things wrong and I think he died in his forties. He was also the funniest and bravest man I knew because he refused to let some fairly severe disabilities get in the way of leading a complete and full life. He went on to become a playwright and a film writer and a minister. He had a wide circle of friends, romances, everything, and could make really funny jokes about stuff that 90% of the people on Earth would have been so discouraged by the ongoing stuff he had to put up with. A brave, honorable and very decent guy who’s not remembered in the comic book world any more, and that’s a shame.

CBA: By virtue of you mentioning Ron, he will be remembered, hopefully.

Dennis: The last evening I spent with him was a Christmas Eve. I was going to fly out to St. Louis and had a few hours to kill. So I went with a girlfriend to Ron’s for a Christmas Eve party. The first thing you saw when you went into the apartment was instead of the traditional crib scene in the manger, it was a crucifixion scene. And instead of little sheep, and so forth, there were snails. [laughs] Ron explained, “Well, they got there 33 years too late.” [laughs] That’s the kind of very dark, but very funny, humor that was typical of Ron. CBA: Where was he from?

March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

Dennis: Out West somewhere.

CBA: What was the novel you two wrote?

Dennis: It never got published and I don’t remember the title. At various times, over the years, Ron would call me and say that this movie producer or that actor or whoever was interested in it. It was a novel about an estranged kid, living on the Lower East Side, as I was at the time, whose estranged father was murdered while visiting him.

And he gets sucked into trying to solve the killing.

CBA: It was a mystery?

Dennis: Yes. We wanted to write a detective story. If we ever published it, one of us would have had to have rewritten it because

Ron’s humor was so much darker than mine so I think the book was probably pretty uneven with me thinking, sort of, John D. MacDonald and him thinking somewhere blood, like in a black hole. [laughs] CBA: Did you two stay in contact throughout his life?

Dennis: Yeah, I would occasionally go see him. We had a lot of mutual friends. As I so often do, I regret not having gotten closer to him, but his death was a real kick in the stomach.

CBA: Do you remember roughly when it was?

Above: MMMS bumper sticker from 1966. Top two by Jack Kirby; Spider-Man by John Romita, Sr. Courtesy of Aaron Sultan, who provided us a wealth of Marvel memorabilia for this issue. ©2002 Marvel Character, Inc.

37-B

Above: Hangin’ at a ’70s Marvel Bullpen softball game, it’s (from left) Michelle (Brand) Wrightson, Flo, Alex Trimpe and Linda Fite. Below: Flo at bat, circa 1974. (Dig the bell bottoms!)

Courtesy of Linda Fite.

38-B

Dennis: That would have been maybe 15 years ago.

CBA: Do you recall at all what his experience at Marvel was?

Dennis: No, I don’t even know why he quit. He lasted about the same length of time that I did.

CBA: Was he a comics fan?

Dennis: Yeah, but he was also an extraordinarily literate guy. I mean, he had one of those huge West Side apartments, eight or nine rooms. Every room, floor-to-ceiling books. He was an extraordinarily fast and hard worker.

He once wrote a play, I think, over a weekend and it was good.

CBA: Was he ambulatory?

Dennis: Yeah, he could get around though he lost a foot, or maybe both of them, sometime before he died.

CBA: Do you recall fondly your experience at the Bullpen?

Dennis: Yes, on a lot of levels. In being asked to imitate Stan, I bristled at that a little bit because I was 24 and I knew everything. [laughs] I knew everything about comic books after two weeks. But I was being asked to imitate the guy who was, by a wide margin, the most successful and most interesting writer in comics.

Everybody imitates somebody, whether you know it or not. When in your first handful of jobs, you don’t find your voice, you’re struggling to master the form, the craft of it and I was asked to imitate Stan Lee. Well, you could do a lot worse. It taught me how to write comics. I eventually ended up writing not very much like Stan, but it was a good place to begin. I would write titles like Millie

the Model. There ought to be books like that today for beginners because it was a way to deal with the form and the craft, and yet there wasn’t anything at stake, really.

CBA: You could make mistakes without great consequence?

Dennis: Yeah, you learn. Today, if you’re a “hot writer,” you’re given a mainline title to write almost immediately, and everybody’s watching you. But doing Millie and the Westerns was a way for me to kind of ease my way into this very, very strange literary form. So, 37 years later, I still think it’s pretty strange. [laughter] CBA: And you just wrote the book on it. [laughs] Does what you said about Stan a few minutes ago hold true to this day? You called him the most interesting and best writer of comics.

Dennis: Yes. In 1966, I don’t think there was any doubt about that at all. Who was close to being in his league? I mean, he reinvented comic book writing. He was in his forties and I think he had about seven years where he just didn’t make a single mistake.

Everything he did was interesting and we’re all standing in his shadow, to some degree, to this day. For example, characterization in comics before Stan was, with maybe a few exceptions, but by and large, it was not much of a consideration. The stuff was plotdriven. I guess the writers thought of a gimmick and then went from there. There was this sort of standard good guy and sometimes the costume determined the characterization or the power that he had, if he was fast or he flew, or whatever. Although early, Stan made his characters fallible, he made them funny, he showed them to be petty and jealous, and still they remained heroes. Later on, people kind of misunderstood that and made the heroes jerks.

Stan never did that. He just made them flawed human beings who were, nonetheless, consistently heroic. And the thing that nobody ever talks about he sort of gave people like me permission to read comics because of the tongue-in-cheek footnotes, and so on. You know, comic books were for kids and there’s a part of us that loves the fantasy and adventure. But if you were like I was, a college graduate who had been a journalist and had been in the Navy and all that stuff, comics were beneath you. But if you thought he wasn’t taking it seriously, then it was okay for you to enjoy them. It was just a goof. And I’m convinced that what we were really enjoying was the heroic fantasy.

CBA: There was a subversive element bringing you in and then you appreciated it for what it was?

Dennis: Yes, and it was okay to read it because it was just a goof.

You weren’t going to be considered an idiot by your peers if you were caught reading a comic book if it was one of Stan’s. It’s because he would kid himself a lot and sometimes even kid the form itself.

CBA: Have you been in contact with Flo since those Bullpen days?

Dennis: We just spoke to her last week. Here’s an unknown fact about Flo Steinberg: She is my son’s de facto godmother. I’m not sure I remember who his real godmother was… somebody who was in the Peace Movement at the time that neither Anne, his mother, nor I have seen for probably 30 years. But Flo filled that niche in his life.

They exchange Christmas gifts and when Larry’s in town, he still makes an effort to have lunch with Flo. He keeps up with her and when she talks to [Dennis’ wife] Marifran or me, she always asks about Larry. She became very good friends with Anne, my first wife, and friends with Marifran. Maybe I was put on Earth to provide Flo Steinberg with friends by virtue of who I marry. [laughs] But I’ve always been pleased by the fact that Larry and Flo found each other.

She fills, certainly, a space in his life, and I’d like to think the reverse is also true.

CBA: Is it a maternal aspect that she has?

Dennis: I think so, yeah. It’s that warmth, again.

CBA: Johnny Romita said that Flo was the heart of Marvel Comics, and I’m almost thinking that she could probably be one of the most important non-artist, non-writer, non-editor, non-publisher (besides Big Apple Comix, of course) ever in the business. Generally speaking, Flo was hired on as a secretary, Stan’s right hand, and yet she had a profound influence within the Marvel Bullpen and, to a lesser degree, with the entire readership. She became a personality that was important to the mix.

Dennis: She was this sort of warm presence there, somebody you could talk to, somebody who was unfailingly cheerful, and just nice.

She exuded niceness. She’s a lovely woman.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

Linda Fite production assistant/artist CBA: Did you read comics as a kid?

Linda Fite: Some. It seems to be something where, as a kid, if you went somewhere with your mom, like a drug store, you would ask for a comic book. I do remember visiting my grandmother in Shreveport, Louisiana, walking down to the air-conditioned general store and getting a Dreamsicle and a comic, and that was like heaven.

I loved to get a new comic book. You know, that old pulp smell! You don’t get that from today’s comics, which is one of the reasons I don’t like comics these days—they don’t have that smell! Back then, I’d go back in the shade and read my comic. That was great.

CBA: What kind of comics?

Linda: Mostly I liked Little Lulu, Archie with Betty and Veronica, I like all of those. As far as super-heroes went, I liked Wonder Woman and Sheena. Oh, those were so thrilling! I loved Sheena’s body. Here I was a pre-pubescent girl and I loved her body! I wanted one just like that. I liked Superboy because there was more love and high school stuff. I can’t remember what else. I think sometimes we bought love comics if we weren’t too ashamed. They were thrilling.

CBA: Do you have siblings?

Linda: Yes, I have younger sisters.

CBA: Where did you grow up?

Linda: Well, my dad was in the Air Force so I grew up all around, here and there. Spent time in England, Alexandria, Virginia, and Plattsburgh, New York. My parents are from the South and I love to visit but don’t want to live there. It’s a creepy place to me. That whole racism thing is so prevalent there.

CBA: Did you go to college?

Linda: In Virginia. I went to Sweet Briar College, which is thought of as a country club now but it wasn’t then. It was very rigorous.

CBA: What did you study?

Linda: English Literature, of course. What else does somebody study who can’t face the world of working? [laughs] I wrote a lot of papers, though! My math requirement was fulfilled by taking astronomy.

CBA: When did you graduate?

Linda: Very, very long ago.

CBA: When you were going to college, were you aware of Marvel Comics?

Linda: That’s when I discovered them! I guess it was in 1967 when I went down to Raleigh, North Carolina, with a friend from college.

We hitchhiked (and got in trouble for it.) Anyway, we went to visit this really cool guy at this place called the Sidetrack Café and it was right near the railroad tracks. It was this big club where you could hang out, drink, and he would bring in all these great musicians in to play—Tom Rush, Kweskin, blues guys, like that. Very cool for Raleigh.

Anyway, this guy was really into Marvel comics and he brought some in and I was thrilled! Then I would go into Lynchburg and started buying all the Marvel comics I could. It had been five years or so since I had bought a comic. Then I found those horrible Charltons! I loved those comics because they were so good-bad. In fact, I read a comic written by Gary Friedrich. When I later met him at Marvel, he told me that he had written for Charlton. My favorite Charlton story had been written by him, a romance story called, “Too Fat to Frug.” [laughs] Because I have always had a problem with my weight, I really dug it.

CBA: Did you clue into the kitsch aspect of comics?

Linda: I did. I still like that kind of stuff. Campy, weird, maybe a little bit kinky kinds of thing.

CBA: Statistically, there are very few female comic collectors.

Linda: I know, but I’m a comic reader first and foremost. I love a good story and I love a quick story. I would read anything I would think was cool. It was neat to read comics because that fit in with my Ken Kesey whacko type of attitude.

CBA: Was Stan Lee as a personality in the books an aspect that brought you to Marvel?

Linda: Definitely. He was quite the personality whether he was writing Stan’s Soapbox or the stories themselves. He was quite the powerful personality.

CBA: Was Marvel compelling?

Linda: Yeah, that was what was so exciting! That you knew the March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

people behind the art.

CBA: He made personalities out of the staff members?

Linda: Yeah, that was the whole beginning of the cult of personality thing in comics there.

CBA: “Jolly” Jack, “Smilin’” Stan….

Linda: You could say that Stan predated Deep Throat, and Woodward and Bernstein. Before we didn’t know much about reporters either. The people behind the stories got interesting. Comic artists as movie stars.

CBA: Did you write to the letter columns?

Linda: Never.

CBA: How did you connect with Marvel?

Linda: When I was a senior, my friend and I decided to move to New York City after graduation.

“Oh, let’s go there, it’ll be fun.” So, looking around for a job, I had made some other contacts but I just wrote a letter to Marvel.

CBA: Did you write to Stan specifically?

Linda: I don’t remember. I may have. I think I wrote something like, “Dear Stan, I’d like to work for Marvel,” and said something about being able to type. [laughs] “I’m a girl”… I told them this corny joke before about there being no heifers in the Bullpen. [laughter] That was so awful! But I told them how I had worked in Ted Kennedy’s office one Summer in the PR department, was a good writer, could spell and would do anything. I was shocked to get a phone call back from Flo! I was so thrilled. In her distinctive voice, she said they couldn’t offer me a job but that they were so impressed and Stan would love to meet with me if I ever got to New York. So that’s what happened. Even though I had two better job offers paying more money, I went to Marvel because it was obviously going to be fun.

Plus it was odd and there I was again, trying to be weird.

CBA: Did you specifically know of the artists? Could you recognize the different styles?

Linda: I certainly could see the difference between Kirby, Ditko and Romita. I liked them all for their different charms. I must confess that even though I loved Kirby and he was a fabulous, dynamic and engaging artist, I used to go, “What is with those feet? [laughs] This

Above: 1970s pic of (from left) trike-ridin’ and bronco-bustin’ Alex Trimpe, his mom Linda Fite, his godmother Flo Steinberg, and his kitty. Courtesy of Linda Fite.

Above: A quiet moment for married couple Herb Trimpe and Linda Fite in a late-1960s photo.

Courtesy of Linda Fite.

39-B

Above: Marie Severin and Wally Wood cover art of The Cat #1. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

40-B

is the most awkward freaking body! There must be something wrong with his vision!” Because the artwork was so distorted! I loved Ditko, but I wasn’t a fan fan. I was a story fan and if it was a good story told well, then it got me.

CBA: Were you just looking for fun when you graduated?

Linda: Well, I always do. Fun is the primary focus of my life. I don’t need much. I enjoy simple pleasures like kittens playing on the front porch. To me, that’s fun.

CBA: Where do you think you got that sense of fun from?

Linda: My mom and my grandmom. They were wild things. Wild things!

CBA: What made you go to the Marvel offices that first time?

Linda: Well, first off, it was cool and I wanted to be someplace that was cool instead of boring. Second, it was because Flo was so great.

Third, there was a real camaraderie. You could tell right away that it was a real fun place. It was just very appealing. I loved the creative aspect of it, liked what they were making not just the way that they made it. I like the product and liked the producers. I liked everything about Marvel.

CBA: What job were you offered?

Linda: It was editorial assistant. I don’t think there was an official title or that they called it “girl Friday.”

Probably along those lines.

My job duties included doing whatever needed doing. My number one priority was opening and dealing with fan mail. I would send out all those No-Prizes and answer all those letters and deal with all those creepy, scary letters we would get. Some of it was real kinky stuff.

CBA: Like what?

Linda: Um, there were some people who were really into Millie the Model… and not in a nice way! [laughter] Including some girls!

CBA: Did they think that she was real?

Linda: Oh, no… but I’m not so sure!

CBA: They wanted dirty pictures of her?

Linda: Yeah, they wanted to dress her in certain clothes like leather and stuff. [laughs] Then we used to get letters from neo-Nazis who were incensed— incensed!—that Captain America was fighting Nazis because didn’t the Nazis fight Commies, who were our real common enemy? That kind of bizarre stuff. One time, I think something came

in with a threat that someone was going to come in and shoot Stan.

They called the FBI on that one. They wrote, “I have my Luger and I’m going to come in there and show you who’s a patriot!” Really!

That was in the letter!

CBA: Were these few and far between?

Linda: Oh, yeah. We got a chuckle out of them. [laughs] Mostly the letters were just from really good guys. Stan really loved the letters from college kids and professors. Oh, he just adored those!

CBA: Would you take those and show those to him specifically?

Linda: Oh, yes, I would show him all the yummy ones, and the funny ones and scary ones. But the average, run-of-the-mill ones, I would just answer.

CBA: Do you recall your first meeting with Stan?

Linda: No, I don’t. I guess it went pretty well! It must have been normal. It wasn’t unpleasant, I know that. I remember my first Christmas. I’d been working there since Summer. I asked Flo, “What should I get Stan for Christmas?” She told me that he really wanted a Spike Jones version of the Nutcracker Suite. It was a very rare record in 78 RPM. I called all over Manhattan and found one in a store on the Upper West Side, went over and bought it. It was in a box and cost $25 which was really a lot of money back then. It was like a third or quarter of my weekly salary and I gave it to Stan for Christmas. And he gave me for Christmas a check for $25! [laughter] So it was a wash! He was very thrilled though. Like a little O’Henry “Gift of the Magi” story.

CBA: What were the offices like when you first went there?

Linda: The first offices we were in with Magazine Management and they were down the hall turning out that pulp Hollywood Movie Reporter, and all that crap. We got to see Mr. Goodman and Chip roaming the halls quite often, but we were tucked away in three rooms. Then we moved to our own little space further up Madison Avenue and that was really nice because we didn’t have to punch clocks anymore. We were free.

CBA: You had to punch clocks at first?

Linda: Yeah! Everyone had to punch a clock, as far as I remember, except for Stan, of course. When I first started working at Magazine Management there was an actual ka-ching type machine but that only lasted that Summer or so.

CBA: Can you describe going into that first office? You walk in the door and there’s what?

Linda: A reception room. A lobby with a lady sitting behind glass.

Then you went down the hall, walked and turned right and there was Stan’s office, Sol’s office and the Bullpen was on the left. Then further down the hall, was Magazine Management. I never went down that far.

CBA: Flo didn’t have her own space?

Linda: No, I think Flo was in with Sol, I seem to remember. I can’t even recall where I sat because we weren’t there very long before we moved to 635 Madison. Not much later Marvel moved again, but I was gone by that time, I think.

CBA: When you first went in there, was Marie already there?

Linda: Not in that office. It was all guys.

CBA: So it was Stan, Sol, and Roy? Linda: Yes, plus John Verpoorten and Al Kurzrok, though he actually left when Herb came into the Bullpen.

CBA: Herb replaced Al? Linda: I think so. He sat at the same drawing board. Al was part-time fill-in, just doing production work.

CBA: So you worked at Marvel before Herb came in?

Linda: Yeah, I was on staff first, although he was already working freelance. He didn’t come into the office until a couple months after I started.

CBA: Did you ever have it in the back of your mind that you wanted to write comics?

Linda: I was willing. I mean, I put a nudge on Roy every now and then. “C’mon, Roy! I can do that!” But I was never much of a self-promoter. I never presented him with a complete story. I’m always much better on the scripting side than the plotting side. That’s why Herb and I have plans to write together. He’s getting better at writing every year. He gets like 500 ideas a minute, literally!

CBA: Was The X-Men a title you particularly wanted to script?

Linda: No, I was turned off by the huge group. I also didn’t like COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

The Avengers. I didn’t like it when there were too many things to juggle. I liked it when there were solitary characters or duos. I liked Fantastic Four because there were young people in there with Johnny Storm, there was the Reed/Sue thing and the Thing thing. [laughs] They were all cool characters. I wouldn’t have minded doing Thor because I liked that whole Shakespearean Rag approach.

CBA: Did you get along with Flo? Linda: Oh, yeah!

CBA: What was she like?

Linda: How could you not hit it off with Flo? I soon discovered that she is really, really smart. She comes off like this simple, unassuming person but she’s really, really smart!

CBA: She knows what’s going on?

Linda: Oh, my God. She’s so intelligent and wise. She left Marvel before I did and I left shortly after but we stayed in touch ever since then.

CBA: Would you go out to dinner? Hang out on weekends?

Linda: Oh, yeah. All the time. She lived on East 31st and we lived on East 27th so you see how close we were. She was part of the regular crew. She’s my son’s godmother. We still see each other a lot.

CBA: So you guys have been friends ever since?

Linda: Yeah, yeah. She came to visit us when we lived in England.

We’re good buddies.

CBA: She didn’t stay there long after you started, right?

Linda: No, less than a year I think. Then we hired Robin Green when she left. Robin, who’s now stinking rich! So filthy rich! [laughs] But she still talks to us little people! She sent a note to Herb, I’ll have it framed. No cash. Just a note. C’mon, Robin, throw us a few thou!

CBA: Did it go immediately from Flo to Robin?

Linda: Yeah, I think so.

CBA: What was Robin like?

Linda: She was great, real fun, witty.

CBA: Was she into comics at all?

Linda: Nah. She was a real good sport, though. Real fun kid.

CBA: As a writer, did Robin have a similar background to you?

Linda: She was on the move, man! I don’t know what her background was. She obviously had some money somewhere because she lived on East 10th Street in a nice apartment. She must have had some family support.

CBA: Was there some prestige at all to be working at Marvel?

Linda: Yeah, because there was always something in the media about the company. We were always getting media attention in those days. We had a softball team, and played in Central Park against other media teams. It was fun. When you’d go out and people would ask you that rude question, “What do you do?” and when you tell them you work at Marvel Comics, they’d be like, “No kidding!”

Always got that reaction. “That must be such a cool job!” And they were right.

CBA: Were you cognizant of the other comic companies like DC at all?

Linda: Yeah. DC was huge. It was like Hertz and Avis. DC was always there.

CBA: The Marvel Bullpen seemed to be the antithesis of the environment at DC’s offices.

Linda: That’s what I’ve heard but I never went there. I heard that it was much more stodgy, professional hierarchy. Much more editor-driven than artist-driven. Artists were given scripts describing everything right down to the last balloon. I know that artists at Marvel used to say how much they loved the freedom to create at Marvel. The ability to develop the story from a loose plot.

CBA: Were you there when Perfect Film bought Marvel?

Linda: We felt a little afraid because the patriarchal system of Martin Goodman had been very good. It had felt very safe, very secure. He wasn’t a hard-ass boss. Herb actually got a personal loan once from Martin. So it was that kind of thing. “Just pay me back when you can.” No interest or anything like that. So there was some trepidation when the new regime came in. “What does this mean?

What’s going to happen?” But I’m always reactive, not proactive. It didn’t change our day to day work though.

CBA: But the volume of work picked up?

Linda: Yeah, it picked up incredibly, but I wasn’t in on any of the decisions or anything. I was copy-editing so that picked up for me. It March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

meant more pages to edit and proofread.

CBA: Did you write the answers in the letter columns?

Linda: Some of them, yes.

CBA: Did you have specific titles assigned to you or was it just whatever was needed?

Linda: It was absolute production. “Here, do this.”

Whatever came down the pike that day.

CBA: Were you guys nervous? The Saturday Evening Post, which was a part of the company, collapsed around that time. Were you aware of that?

Linda: No. If I was, I sure forgot. That was a long bloody time ago.

CBA: When did you first meet Herb?

Linda: I guess it was the Fall of ’67. I think he started working in the office at that time. He was married then, but that was another story.

CBA: Did you two hit it off?

Linda: We were friends for a long, long time before we started noticing there was something else there. I just loved his enthusiasm.

CBA: From all these cartoons Marie had done, it seems he was regarded as this real handsome, dashing guy.

Linda: He didn’t know it though.

Robin had a crush on him. Everybody had a crush on him.

CBA: Robin devoted a substantial portion of the Rolling Stone article to him.

Linda: Yeah, she thought he was dreamy. Then we had another girl who came up there, and though she had a boyfriend , she thought Herb was dreamy. But he was completely oblivious. He doesn’t have a clue! Not a clue!

CBA: That’s part of his charm!

Linda: And Marie thought he was cute, too.

CBA: Were there a lot of antics in the Bullpen?

Linda: Oh, yeah. It was like the circus in there. First of all, you know, someone sitting there drawing can talk. It’s not like writing, you know? So they had music playing. We’d always have the latest music on. Gary would run down and buy records and put them on for us. They’d talk about everything. Bullsh*t, bullsh*t, bullsh*t in the Bullpen. It was great. They’d talk about politics, women’s rights—of which I, of course, was a big supporter—and Tony Mortellaro would say, “Aw, that’s bullsh*t!” I’d say, “But I’ve met your wife and she’s a strong woman.” He’d say, “Yeah, but in my house, I’m the boss! If I’m happy, she’s happy!” The banter back and forth was all in good fun.

CBA: Would Stan ever come out and tell you guys to quiet down?

Linda: No, never.

CBA: Would he join in?

Linda: If we made too much noise, he might come out and make some funny comment about us loud kids. Avuncular. I don’t remember him ever coming out and joining the conversation.

CBA: Stan is the fastest walker I’ve ever seen. At cons, there’s no time to greet him because he passes by you like a rocket—zoom!

Above and opposite page: Courtesy of the artist, Ramona Fradon’s character designs for The Cat, a book she was scheduled to take over with #4 but that never came to be.

Art ©2002 Ramona Fradon.

Cat ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Shanna, The She-Devil #1 cover art by Jim Steranko. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

41-B

Herb gets comfortable. (“Marie’s just jealous,” sez Herb.)

After being fed-up listening to Herb and his wife Linda endlessly brag about their kids, Marie makes this illustrative comment.

“Typical American Boy” Herb Trimpe

John Romita Sr. and Herb Trimpe at their desks in the Bullpen.

Herb with a bi-plane in his eye.

Above: Bunch of Marie Severin cartoons teasing Herb Trimpe while they worked in the Marvel Bullpen. Courtesy of the victim. ©2002 Marie Severin.

42-B

Linda: Yeah, he was like a hummingbird. He’d be like, “Herb, come in here!” Then the door would shut and he’d be jumping around all over the place in there. Then, when Stan was finished, the artist would be ejected out of the office!

CBA: Was Stan starting to spend more time at home during the work week?

Linda: Yeah, I think he was.

CBA: First he took Tuesday off, then Tuesday and Wednesday, then Tuesday through Thursday. Did you know Gary Friedrich?

Linda: Yeah, Gary was there for a little while, and we got along real well. Gary was a character.

Herb, Gary and a few others were part of this bowling team up on the Upper East Side. We hung out together, Gary and I, for a little while. We went to see Theolonius Monk together. It was so fun seeing John Verpoorten pal around with Gary. John had one of those little hockey games with the goals and the guys that slide back and forth and you hit the little puck around. I was so good at that and Gary would get so mad!

CBA: Would certain personality types not fit into the Bullpen?

Linda: No, we had all kinds of people there. John Romita is not a particularly outgoing person but he fit in. He’d sit there at his board drawing away and interject a comment every once in a while, laugh along with the rest of them.

CBA: So it really was a mix?

Linda: It was, it was a good mix.

CBA: Was it one of the favorite experiences of your life?

Linda: Yeah, it was an excellent office. After that, I just went freelance and worked out of my house until I got this job I have now which is a great gig.

CBA: What do you do now?

Linda: I’m a reporter for a daily newspaper. Nobody’s as wacky as the Marvel folk from back then, but we have a lot of fun, so I’m glad to bookend my career with two very good jobs.

CBA: Why did you go off staff?

Linda: I went off staff because they wouldn’t give me a big enough raise. Marvel was paying me sh*t at the time, to be honest. I asked for $25 more a week and they came back with $5 so I said, “Sayonara.” I went and got another job that paid more and was within walking distance of my apartment. I became an art director at a trade magazine. It was called The Merchandiser and I’m not even sure it exists anymore, but it was all about mass retailing, like K-Mart and that type of thing. “And you get this large display unit!”

CBA: But you obviously stayed in touch with people at Marvel?

Linda: Well, yeah, because Herb continued working there.

CBA: Did you start going with Herb while still at Marvel?

Linda: Yup, sorta.

CBA: You also did some freelance work for Marvel?

Linda: Some writing. I can’t remember what though.

CBA: How did you get into writing?

Linda: In every case, it was Roy asking me. “Linda, can you do this? Because we need you,” or “Linda, would you like to do a filler?” or “We have this idea…” Like that. The only time I think I said, “Let me write” was on a Kid Colt Outlaw. I did that one Western story because I was like, “C’mon! Let me write!” and they said, “Okay, do a Western.” The name of the story was “Dixie or Die!” and, paradoxically, Herb inked that story.

CBA: Did Larry draw it?

Linda: No, I think Werner Roth drew it, and it was nicely drawn.

CBA: What did you think of Marvel’s sudden infusion of women super-heroes: Shanna the She-Devil and Claws of the Cat? Linda: Well, I’m cynical enough not to get distressed about it. It’s a business that, besides the underground comix and the alternative material, is not known for innovation. Not on the commercial side, at least. I sneered a little but wasn’t upset, you know? We got the black thing going, we got the woman thing going. We got it all going! I was a little ticked that they had to name the character “The Cat.” Why did we have to name it “Cat,” Roy? Was it a “catfight”?

He was, “Well, because it’s cool.” Yeah, all right, whatever. (Of course, he was probably right.)

CBA: Were you involved at all in the creation of the character?

Linda: They had a name for the character and how she looked but I created all of the back story. What her powers were and her history.

CBA: She didn’t start out as one of those Patsy & Hedy characters, did she? No, she became Tigra, right?

Linda: Yeah, they did that later. She was a different character at first, with her own thing going on.

CBA: Did you write full-script or Marvel style?

Linda: I did a plot first and then scripted it out.

CBA: You gave it to Marie to do. Did you want Marie to do it?

Linda: Oh, yeah, I thought that was a nice thing to have women COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

doing it. Even if it was, you know, contrived. It was all right with me.

CBA: Did you see Wally Wood’s cover when it came in?

Linda: Yeah, I was pretty excited to have Wally working on it.

He was famous. He used to hang out with us at parties and stuff.

CBA: What was he like?

Linda: He was a bit of a sad sack but a great guy. He used to sing songs and play guitar at parties, this whole Woody Guthrie thing.

Smoking, drinking, and playing the guitar.

CBA: Did Woody have this dark pall around him?

Linda: He looked like he was definitely spiraling down, slowly, inch by inch. He never looked healthy. When he smiled, it was always painful. I never saw anyone with such a painful smile, but he was always good company. He wasn’t hard on the nerves.

CBA: How long did you write for Marvel?

Linda: I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you.

CBA: You did some Shanna.

Linda: I did? I don’t even remember. I haven’t seen one of those for so long. It just petered out, I guess.

CBA: When did you and Herb get married?

Linda: September of 1972 in Nashville.

CBA: An index says you wrote The X-Men #57?

Linda: Was that the eight-page filler? Jean Grey lifts the furniture to vacuum. [laughter] It was all tongue-in-cheek. “Telekinesis can make house work a hell of a lot easier!”

CBA: After you left, did you miss the Bullpen?

Linda: No, it was okay. Things come to an end sometimes, plus I got to hang out with most of those guys for, like, forever because Herb was still freelancing there.

CBA: Do you remember when Barry first came there?

Linda: Oh, God, yes! I feel like I was instrumental in Barry coming there.

CBA: Tell us the tale.

Linda: He and Steve Parkhouse wrote a letter, one of those letters I had to answer. My answer—from Stan—was the same that I originally got myself, which was, “If you’re ever in New York, come and see me. We’d love to meet you.” Then they showed up!

CBA: They took it literally!

Linda: Yeah, and they brought some samples which were pretty rough but showed promise. Barry was still very derivative of Kirby, but there was something there. Stan didn’t encourage everyone to come and see him, you know, but maybe because his wife was British, I don’t know, and they schlepped all this way to see him. So, anyway, they quickly ran out of money. They were staying in this flophouse hotel near my house. Someone ripped off Barry’s leather jacket right off his bed, so they moved into my place and slept on the floor. I was living with a roommate, my girlfriend Pam, and they stayed there on the floor for so long that it started to really bug us! We’d come home from work and they’d be sitting there on the floor and hadn’t moved all day. Barry would be sitting there strumming on his guitar singing some sad song or something so we eventually palmed them off on some of our other friends. I think they spent about three weeks on the floor of every college chum we had. I know they spent three weeks on the Upper East Side with Neal Orloff and then they ended up on the Lower East Side with Mary Cantey for a while. Yeah, I remember young Barry very, very well.

CBA: So you’ve stayed in touch ever since?

Linda: Oh, yeah, he’s godfather of another one of our children.

CBA: I’ve always been surprised that Barry is friends with you guys because you and Herb are quite different, y’know?

Linda: It’s funny about that, isn’t it? How you can just click with someone and it doesn’t matter what they are or what they become. Herb and Barry are born ten years and one day apart. Barry’s birthday is May 25, and Herb’s is May 26 and they’re ten years apart. In many ways, they’re very, very similar. They’re both hypersensitive but Herb does a much better job of masking it so you don’t always see it. But if you watch, he twitches, he sighs.

CBA: You know the signals!

Linda: Yeah, but they both have this type of nobility, believe it or not. There’s almost a chivalrous element to it. They just have an almost sibling relationship. They March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

care about each other but that’s like siblings, too. They just get along, and I just love Barry. That’s all there is to it!

CBA: I like Barry enormously. I’ve only known him for about three years and but I feel this deep kinship to him. It’s because of his sensitivity, I think. I can’t tell you how much he reminds me of my oldest brother.

Linda: It’s that heart that you’re seeing. That heart is in there. All that other stuff is bullsh*t, you know? It’s protective bullsh*t for the most part. It’s what he’s created to protect himself. He’s real deep, and he really, really means to do the right thing but he’s also not always very polite. Barry says what he thinks and sometimes it’s not the best thing.

CBA: I don’t think he’s collaborated with that many people in his life but there was the Machine Man mini-series that he did with Herb that was really dynamite!

Linda: That worked really well, didn’t it?

CBA: Yeah, it really did! And you’re talking really opposite ends of the artistic spectrum here.

Linda: Yeah, they really worked well together. I think they should do it more often.

CBA: You and Herb have been married how long?

Linda: Almost 28 years. Seems like only yesterday.

CBA: You have three kids?

Linda: Yeah, Herb has another daughter from his first marriage.

She’s wonderful—lives in Virginia.

CBA: You’re able to be creative in your writing for the newspaper?

Linda: Oh, yeah, I’m really good at it.

CBA: Do you write hard news or features?

Linda: Features. I can write hard news if I’m on on a weekend and someone falls out of a plane and dies, which happened one weekend.

Mostly fun stuff, though, entertainment. I get to interview people I admire. I actually got to interview Frank Black, the former lead singer of The Pixies. I was so thrilled! Robert Pollard. Guided by Voices. It’s just such a treat. Then I get to write about almost anything I want— chess, skiing, dog shows, whatever….

CBA: Good for you! I’m glad I finally got a chance to talk to you in depth. This was fun! It was delightful to meet you. I like you enormously.

Linda: Yeah, you guys are great. If you and your brother are any example I’d love to meet your whole family. What a wonderful bunch you must be!

CBA: That’s kind of you. A Cooke reunion would be, well, interesting! [laughs] Below: Herb Trimpe contributed this atypical Hulk pin-up to the Academy of Comic Book Arts’ portfolio in the early 1970s. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

43-B

Herb Trimpe

Above: “Maybe because I talked too much?” surmised Herb Trimpe about this Marie Severin cartoon drawn during their shared Marvel Bullpen days. Courtesy of H.T. ©2002 Marie Severin.

Below: Before conquering the world, Flo Steinberg (left) and pal Trina Robbins pose for a pic in Trina’s New York City apartment circa 1972. Courtesy of Flo.

44-B

production assistant/artist CBA: When did you meet Flo? Herb Trimpe: When I first went to work at Marvel. Linda worked with Flo then. I mostly dealt with Sol, you know? I got work through him. I met Flo the first year I worked there which was 1966. I didn’t have any real dealings with her, except for saying “hi,” and “good morning,” kind of thing. When I first started working, I was doing freelance so I was working for Sol Brodsky. He was my big connection.

CBA: Did you guys go out to lunch in a big group at all?

Herb: When I first started working there, no, not much. Later on, we did. I got connected to John Verpoorten, Gary Friedrich and Al Kurzrok and we were on a bowling team together. It was a riot because Gary used to get belligerent. He used to do things that would piss people off. There were a couple of times when we nearly got into it and we had to get him out of there before some big guy would beat the hell out of him!

CBA: Did you know John Verpoorten from the School of Visual Arts?

Herb: Yes, I knew him from SVA. I didn’t hang out with him there, though. He was in the class under me. I had my own friends. We had another friend, Bill Peckmann, who went into animation, and the three of us, especially after we started working in comics, got very chummy. Stu Schwartzberg also went to SVA, and I knew him when I actually attended classes. We hung out together to a degree, but didn’t get tight until Marvel, really.

CBA: Did Stu get his position at Marvel because he knew you?

Herb: Actually when I went off the stat machine and started working on The Hulk, I gave John his name and told him that Stu was looking for a job and that John might want to talk to him. So that’s how Stu got his job, on my recommendation.

CBA: Was Stu into comics?

Herb: He was into humor. I would call him a humorist. He was very, very witty and very caustic. He was also right on target, usually.

He had strip ideas going. I think he did some work for Cracked. He wanted to work for Mad but I don’t know if he ever did. He was in Help! a lot but he wanted bigger gigs. I think he would have been real happy to do a syndicate strip. He was always coming up with these wacko ideas for strips that they probably wouldn’t be ready for now let alone then.

CBA: Did you like working on humor?

Herb: I think I worked on Not Brand Echh! with Marie once. I might have done a few other humorous things, but not too much.

CBA: Do you recall when you first met Barry?

Herb: The only thing I recall is when he used to come into the office and was tied into Linda and her roommate because they staked him when he first came to New York, you know? But that’s basically my connection, through Linda, and the times he came into the office.

But I didn’t talk to him. He didn’t say much. Linda and I went out about our business and those guys just worked on their samples and tried to get work.

CBA: When did you become friendly with Barry?

Herb: It was during those years when we were all in the city. When he had The Studio with Bernie Wrightson, Kaluta, and Jeff Jones. We were in touch with Barry but we didn’t hang out with those guys on the whole. But Barry kind of gravitated towards us. I don’t know why.

CBA: You two remain good friends?

Herb: Oh, yeah! Very good friends. We get along very well. We’re like Frick ’n’ Frack.

CBA: Even after Flo left Marvel, you guys stayed in contact with her?

Herb: Oh, yeah. My true connection with Flo grew more and more out of Linda’s relationship with her. I mean, we were always on good terms. It was never that we weren’t! Actually, my connection with Barry is pretty much through Linda, too.

CBA: You two are obviously still friends with Flo? Herb: Oh, yeah, She just called Linda today, as a matter of fact. We talk to her on the phone about every two or three days. I stayed at her place one time when I came down to the World Trade Center site [where Herb works as a volunteer]. Just went up to her place to grab a few hours of sleep before I drove home.

CBA: Can you characterize her?

Herb: Flo is easy on one level. She doesn’t play those kind of games and doesn’t like gossip all that much. This kind of thing. She doesn’t like surprises.

CBA: [laughs] Uh-oh.

Herb: I don’t think she’d appreciate a surprise birthday party, or people just showing up at her door. She likes to have advance warning but that goes along with her territory. I think she’s always been that way. She’s controlled. Always been very controlled. Not overly sentimental or nostalgic about things. She has no patience for complainers especially if they have nothing to complain about. As far as her commitment to work, you couldn’t get anybody better. People will say that it’s her generation—I’ve heard them say that about me— but I think it’s more about upbringing. I mean, how many can you trust with your life like I would with her? Of course, she’d probably have a nervous breakdown if you did! You know what I mean?

There’s nobody more devoted, you know? Once she latches on, she’s a very faithful friend.

CBA: You contributed to one of her pet projects in the ’70s.

Herb: Big Apple Comix, yeah. That was great! If there was one thing I would have liked to have seen continued, it was that. It was a lot of work for her but I think it made out well. I had an opening there because some issues got to Japan somehow and they really liked what I did there.

CBA: “Roger Farnsworth”?

Herb: No, the other one. If you look at it now, it’s kind of Japanese style the way you’d see today. I think there was something in my style that appealed to them. I think that if I had paid attention I could have gotten in on manga before everyone else.

CBA: Did you enjoy working on that stuff?

Herb: Yeah, it was fun. Wally Wood inked me on some work in there. He was very frank. He says to me, “You know, I never really did like your work,” [laughs] but he did enjoy inking that story.

CBA: Do you think he put extra effort into that?

Herb: I don’t know. I have no idea! [laughs] CBA: That was great fun. I reproduced a couple of panels from that and I only notice later that it was the one instance of full frontal nudity I’ve had in CBA. Herb: I have a way of doing nudes that makes COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

them non-pornographic. [laughs] CBA: They ain’t naked, they’re nude! [laughs] And Flo is godmother to one of your kids?

Herb: Yeah. Alex. There’s a funny story to that: This is before I started to attend the Episcopal Church in Ellenville, but we were living in New York and Linda was an Episcopalian. So she went up to St. James and wanted to have Alex baptized. There was a woman there—I think she was one of the first women to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church—who was a deacon at the time and she did the baptism. Now when a member of the clergy does a baptism, they have to ask the godparents certain questions. Usually, there’s a brief meeting before the ceremony to go over the questions and what the answers should be from the prayer book. I don’t remember the exact part of the service; Flo being Jewish, was asked if she believed in Jesus. Did she believe in Christ as the Savior, and she just said, “Well, sure, why not?” [laughter] So that was what Flo was like. It’s ironic that there should be any kind of stumbling block at all with anyone wanting to be a godparent. There wasn’t in this case but there could have been in other Episcopal Churches or just other churches. For instance, a church in Nashville wouldn’t marry us because I had been married before. On the other hand, if I had come up to Ellenville, there would have been no problem. Churches, even within the same denomination are like chain restaurants… they’re all run differently.

CBA: Was being part of the Marvel Bullpen a pivotal time in your life?

Herb: Well, it was fun certainly. Didn’t we go through all of this before? [laughs] CBA: This is a quick wind-up! [laughs] Herb: Well… pivotal… it was certainly one of the most fun jobs I’ve had in that sense. But it was very short-lived as well. I was in the office for roughly a year, year and a half. It was great. It was a great job. What can I say? They were pretty tolerant of me. This Peekskill bumpkin commuting to work every day. It was great. It was a joy to behold. You know that. I’m sure you’ve heard many people go on and on about the early days of the Bullpen. You got to see guys like Everett or whoever. Everyone would come in at one point or another.

It was great! That whole particular time was just great. It was so much freaking fun and I don’t think I realized it back then and Flo was very much a part of it.

CBA: Yeah, “Fabulous Flo.” Herb: Yeah. She didn’t work there very long after I started there.

She was gone about a year after I was there. She obviously made an impact though. I don’t even know how long she worked there, do you?

CBA: Five years.

Herb: Five years! For a job, that’s not a short period of time but that’s not long either. But her impact was colossal. There were other women who worked in that office in similar capacities after her and more and more after they got bigger and more corporate, but Flo is just the quintessential female presence at Marvel Comics. Wouldn’t you agree with that?

CBA: Absolutely! Flo wasn’t an artist or writer but there is just something about her. She’s probably the one “civilian” in the industry that can claim that.

Herb: That’s true. Second to her, Mary McFerrin was a tremendous presence in the office as well. Completely different. Not exactly what Flo was doing but she was quite a civilian presence as well. Oh, Mary…. Marie used to draw the hell out of her. Marie did Flo too, but she really had fun with Mary. She was very fair skinned, sandy hair, blonde, gangly, skinny, young kid. She’s not there now but she was there for about 20 years or so. She was there for a long time but still not able to knock Flo out of that particular spot that she has at the top of the pyramid in that respect. Flo’s awesome.

Trina Robbins production assistant/artist I first met Flo in the Summer of 1966—only I didn’t know that I had met her. I had arrived in New York from Los Angeles, wearing the shortest mini-skirt in the city (we wore ’em shorter in L.A.) and headed straight to Marvel Comics, to interview Stan Lee for the L.A. Free Press. Flo sat at the front desk, and when I breezed in wearing the aforementioned mini, without even an appointment—you could March 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

do that in those days—saying I’d like to write about Marvel Comics for an underground newspaper, she went back to the Bullpen and said, “You should see what just walked in.”

I don’t know if it was the mini, but I got to interview Stan Lee, have lunch with Roy Thomas, and even meet my hero, Wally Wood.

Two years later, in 1968, it was Woody who introduced me to Flo, although again, I didn’t know at first that she was Flo Steinberg.

Woody, who rather enjoyed being worshiped (and I did indeed worship him!) didn’t like to share the glory, so he simply introduced her as “Flo.” It wasn’t until she mentioned that she worked for Marvel that I put two and two together and blurted out, “Are you Fabulous Flo Steinberg?!?”

(Note: Flo has told me that a major source of amusement, or annoyance, is young fans who ask her at conventions, “Didn’t you used to be Fabulous Flo Steinberg?” She still is.)

Flo and I became good friends, and when I went to San Francisco (with flowers in my hair) in December 1969, I left my cat with her until I could send for him, rightly reasoning that Honky the Cat would not enjoy a cross-country ride in a cramped car. Later in 1970, after Flo and the cat flew to San Francisco together, I learned that while Honky was living in her apartment, she left the light on at night for him so he could find his way to the litter box. Flo’s kindness—too much kindness—to animals is why she never got a pet for herself. She once told me that if she had a pet she would never go out, because she’d worry so much about the poor dear being lonely.

In San Francisco, Flo was introduced to the local underground comix scene, saw what the cartoonists were producing, and a light bulb flashed over her head. “I can do that!” she thought, and upon returning to New York, she produced the immortal Big Apple Comix, an underground comix book featuring all the very best mainstream cartoonists, who just happened to be Flo’s friends.

I too am happy to call myself one of Flo’s friends. She is still Fabulous!

Les Daniels production assistant/artist Most people seem to know the Queen of Comics from the days when she was the Opener of the Way at Marvel Comics, but I’ve always been a little bit slow, so I didn’t get to know Flo Steinberg until the early 1970s, when she was working at Warren. I was up in their offices seeking information for my book Living in Fear when Jim Warren, acting out of either benevolence or self-defense, foisted me off on Flo. At that point she was running the Captain Company, that elusive entity which took out ads in the back of Warren’s books, offering the fans everything from back issues to posters to plastic models. Turns out all these goodies were kept in one big room just down the hall from the publisher’s office, and presiding over them was a bountiful, benevolent Flo. She told me to take whatever I wanted, and I’ve been a fan ever since, just like everybody else.

In a world full of cranky egotists, Flo is a genuinely nice person.

When I was interviewing Stan Lee for my book on Marvel, he never showed more interest than when I told him I’d just talked to Flo, and he made sure to say hello to her. Everybody smiles when they talk about Flo, but nobody’s smile is brighter than her own. I just talked to her a few weeks ago, and I still have the little Aurora model of Vampirella she gave me so many years ago. In a dim light, with its bright eyes and big grin, it looks a lot like Flo.

Marie Roussos Steinberg friend & daughter of the late George Roussos Florence was a friend and co-worker of my father. When he passed away, she took the time to call and write me on numerous occasions to pass on little bits and pieces of her memory of my father, George Roussos, at Marvel and to see how I was feeling. She asked if I would like to have my father’s items that were on his desk, something I didn’t even think about at the time and was so thrilled to receive, thanks to Florence. She went out of her way to let me know she cared about me, which truly showed she cared about my father. Though we share the same last name, we’re not blood relations but I hope I can call her my friend too, for she is truly a very caring person.

45-B

Fan Perspective

Musings of a MMMS Member Megafan Aaron Sultan on the Marvel fan club collectibles

Above: The Thing makes a declaration in this sheet from the MMMS fan club membership kit.

Courtesy of Aaron Sultan. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

46-B

“The Merry Marvel Marching Society Wants YOU!” Those words still resonate 35 years later as I look back on those glory years of mighty Marvel fandom! Fan clubs have always been popular over the years—Little Orphan Annie and her secret decoder, the Superman Society… remember the David Cassidy fan club? In the comic book world, where DC missed the beat, Marvel picked up the slack and most Baby Boomers and post-Boomer comic fiends fondly remember the days of the MMMS. I truly think the lure of joining this lofty cadre of True Believers brought fans that much closer to our heroes—at least it did for me. Introduced to the Silver Age of Marvel via the Spider-Man Saturday morning cartoon, one thing quickly led to another and before long our family was making a side trip to the downtown newsstand after church each Sunday to purchase those 12¢ goodies. And unbeknownst to me, my cooler-than-cool parents joined my young self in the MMMS Fan Club, and life has never been the same! I proudly wore my “Make Mine Marvel!” button everywhere I went. A wallet had to be purchased to house my membership card. The stickers didn’t last too long because they didn’t stick well, but who could complain? My heroes had been brought to life in 3-D with the MMMS club. My membership solidified my ranking with Mighty Marvel’s inner circle. I was now personally associated with Peter Parker, The Thing, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Hulk, and Thor. Little did I realize the club was actually run by a bunch of people who looked not unlike my mom and dad; Bullpenners who provided the brainpower behind all this.

Belonging was something special. Marvel even capitalized on that with the record, You Belong, You Belong to the Merry Marvel Marching Society! Oh, the months spent playing that record dancing around with my Spider-Man Captain Action doll! If only I could’ve bottled those moments. In today’s world, little boys’ bedrooms display Power Rangers, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, new GI Joes—but in the late ’60s my room housed a true paradise of heroes on the pages of my Marvel comic collection (especially Spider-Man!), the aforementioned Captain Action super-hero dolls, Major Matt Mason, Hot Wheels— and safely tucked away in my dresser drawer: my MMMS kit. It wasn’t until 1987 that I rediscovered the magic of MMMS. As part of a large Silver Age comic collection I had purchased was an old, dingy yellow folder containing the MMMS-related poster set of eight. Over a decade later, much research has been placed into determining the who, what, when, where of MMMS. So read on, true believer, and face front, ’coz here is what I know!

One of the first MMMS-related offerings I have determined was the bland but extremely desirable “sayings” buttons. You know what I mean—they were the five button set containing the classic Marvel slogans “Face Front,” “Brand Echh,” “Hang Loose,” “Sheesh” and my personal favorite “’Nuff said.” Try finding these. Good luck. Took me years to put a set together. We are now at circa 1965. This is also when (drumroll please) the first MMMS kit was released. First? Yes first. The first issue MMMS kit contained the classic “I Belong” red button featuring the Thing, Torch and Spider-Man! Also in this kit were the pukey yellow stickers of the Thing saying “The MMMS Wants You!” Rounding out the kit were the membership card,

“Welcome” letter from the Bullpen, and the Voice of Marvel record (331/3 RPM, mind you) featuring the voices of the Mighty Marvel Bullpen. Finding an unblemished membership card is probably the toughest piece in both of the MMMS kits.

The second kit came out in 1967. It contained probably the most famous button in all of Marvel Silver Age wonder—the white background “Make Mine Marvel” button featuring the mugs of 12 Marvel memorables, including Ice Man. (Ice Man? Go figure. Guess they had to have an X-Man; always thought Cyclops would have been the better choice). Additional kit items were another round of stickers, “Welcome” letter, membership card, scribble pad (a musthave today!), sometimes a white pencil that said “Marvel Marches On,” and the unforgettable second record, Scream Along with Marvel, featuring a cover by Marie Severin with the Hulk conducting the Marvel orchestra. Plus there was a plethora of ads and flyers for reeling the Marvel maniac into parting with more of their hard-earned cash. Between these issues were periodic updates in regular envelopes with each one essentially being a peek into upcoming issues, holiday greetings, Stan’s “Item!!” and soapbox statements. Gotta love Stan’s hip communications to impressionable minds!

Other MMMS-related items? Well, my parents drew the line on me buying the Marvel T-shirts, of which 12 were produced in two series. The first, put out in ’66, contained most of the major Marvel characters. In ’67, one new shirt was released (which is essentially non-existent today, the green-&-white version of Captain Marvel.

Try getting that one, I dare you!) Two memorable sweatshirts of the lovable Hulk toting his ducky and the “It’s Clobberin’ Time” Thing were also produced. These are super rare; I have found the Rawhide Kid and X-Men shirts particularly hard to find. Of course, we can’t forget other goodies like the vacuous No-Prize envelope and the plastic blow-up pillows (the Spidey is a must but why did they show the view of his back looking at a normal man? Sheesh!). I had always thought they made only two pillows—Spidey and Thor—but I recently discovered Sub-Mariner and the Hulk! And who could forget the MMMS Swingin’ Stationary Kit—the orange folder containing official envelopes and stationary for sending notes to grandma and Aunt Connie? There was also the set of eight 11” x 17” posters, the threeby-six foot Ditko Spider-Man poster and the three-foot Hulk poster.

It was certainly a magical time for Merry Marvel. I have thoroughly enjoyed scouring the planet regaining these MMMS memories of ’60s-past. (And we haven’t even touched on Marvelmania or Foom!) Oh my, did DC miss the boat on this promotional tool!

For the Marvel maniac interested in starting a collection of Marvel memorabilia, I would suggest finding the second kit button, the granddaddy of all Marvel items which can be had typically for $50 or under. Perhaps find a Bullpen “Welcome” letter and when you go to conventions, start having old Marvelites autograph it. After working on mine for five years, I now have some of the greats including John Romita (my all-time fave), John Buscema, Gene Colan, Marie Severin, Dick Ayers, Roy Thomas and even Chic Stone!

Someday I would love to get Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to sign it. This is an easy and unique way to bring something very cool to your Marvel collection. I know of one person that actually framed their MMMS kit for display next to their comics and original art.

In addition to MMMS/Marvelmania, I have settled into collecting Amazing Spider-Man original art, especially by John Romita, Gil Kane, Ross Andru, and Steve Ditko and any unique Marvel memorabilia from between 1965-75. Anyone who wants to talk MMMS, Marvel memorabilia, Spider-Man original art, or anything Marvel, please feel free to contact me at spiderboop@aol.com.

So, faithful friend, until Jonah J. Jameson sings the Spider-Man cartoon theme song, make mine Marvel!

—Aaron Sultan.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

KIRBY 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

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

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

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

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

97

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) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(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

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

(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

(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

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

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

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

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

98

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

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

KIRBY CHECKLIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

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

(128-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490380 • Diamond Order Code: SEP111248

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series.

Now the entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his powerful, uninked PENCIL ART, showing Kirby’s work in its undiluted, raw form! Also included is Kirby’s ILLUSTRATED SILVER STAR MOVIE SCREENPLAY, never-seen SKETCHES, PIN-UPS, and an historical overview to put it all in perspective!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

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

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

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

(52-page comic book) $5.95 • (Digital Edition) $2.95

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

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

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

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

(168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

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

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

Reprinting the fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered!

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

(60-page tabloid with COLOR) SOLD OUT • (Digital Edition) $5.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom!

TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

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

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

BACK ISSUE #54

BACK ISSUE #55

DIEDGITIIOTANSL BL AVAILA

E

BACK ISSUE #51

BACK ISSUE #52

BACK ISSUE #53

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

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

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

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

BACK ISSUE #56

BACK ISSUE #57

BACK ISSUE #58

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

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

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

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

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

by McDONNELL and BILL WRAY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

BACK ISSUE #59

BACK ISSUE #60

BACK ISSUE #61

BACK ISSUE #62

BACK ISSUE #63

“Toon Comics!” History of Space Ghost in comics, Comico’s Jonny Quest and Star Blazers, Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera line and Dennis the Menace, behind the scenes at Marvel Productions, Ltd., and a look at the unpublished Plastic Man comic strip.

Art/comments by EVANIER, FOGLIO, HEMPEL and WHEATLEY, MARRS, RUDE, TOTH, WILDEY, and more. All-new painted Space Ghost cover by STEVE RUDE!

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

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

Wraparound cover by ALEX ROSS!

“Superman in the Bronze Age”! JULIUS SCHWARTZ, CURT SWAN, Superman Family, World of Krypton miniseries, and ALAN MOORE’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, art & comments

by ADAMS, ANDERSON, CARDY, CHAYKIN, PAUL KUPPERBERG, OKSNER, O’NEIL, PASKO, ROZAKIS, SAVIUK, and more. Cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ and SCOTT WILLIAMS! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page TABLOID with color) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

2012 EISNER AWARD Nominee Best Comics-Related Journalism

Other issues available, & an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all issues at HALF-PRICE!

ALTER EGO #107

ALTER EGO #108

DIEDGITIIOTANSL BL AVAILA

E

ALTER EGO #104

ALTER EGO #105

ALTER EGO #106

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

See comic art and script BEFORE and AFTER the Comics Code changes, with art

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

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

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #109

ALTER EGO #110

ALTER EGO #111

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

1970s Bullpenner WARREN REECE talks about Marvel Comics and working with EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, STAN LEE, MARIE SEVERIN, ADAMS, FRIEDRICH, ROY THOMAS, and others, with rare art!

DEWEY CASSELL spotlights Golden Age artist MIKE PEPPE, with art by TOTH, TUSKA, SEKOWSKY, TALLARICO Part 3, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, cover by EVERETT & BURGOS, and more!

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

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

GOLDEN AGE NEDOR super-heroes are spotlighted, with MIKE NOLAN’s Nedor Index, and art by MORT MESKIN, JERRY ROBINSON, GEORGE TUSKA, RUBEN MOIRERA, ALEX SHOMBURG, and others!

Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and part II of JIM AMASH’s interview with Golden Age artist LEONARD STARR! Cover by SHANE FOLEY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

ALTER EGO #112

ALTER EGO #113

ALTER EGO #114

ALTER EGO #115

ALTER EGO #116

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

MARV WOLFMAN talks to RICHARD ARNDT about his first decade in comics on Tomb of Dracula, Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, John Carter, Daredevil, Nova, Batman, etc., behind a GENE COLAN cover! Art by COLAN, ANDERSON, CARDY, BORING, MOONEY, and more!

Plus: the conclusion of our LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about FF #1, history of the MMMS, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art

by KIRBY, AVISON, SHORES, ROMITA, SEVERIN, TUSKA, ALLEN BELLMAN, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by BELLMAN and MITCH BREITWEISER!

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

SAVE

15

WHE % OR N YOU SUMMER 2013 ONLDER INE! THE BEST IN COMICS ® & LEGO PUBLICATIONS!

ORDER ONLINE AT: www.twomorrows.com

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

All characters TM & ©2013 their respective owners.

(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

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

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!