Comic Book Artist #18 Preview

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

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

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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 ARTIST™

I S S U E

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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 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.

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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

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

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

FA B U LO U S

FLO STEINBERG &

NUMBER EIGHTEEN

CELEBRATING

THE

THE 1960s

LIVES & WORK

OF THE

MADCAP MARVEL

BULLPEN!

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

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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.

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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

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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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

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

“Welcome” letter from the Bullpen, and the Voice of Marvel record “The Merry Marvel Marching Society Wants YOU!” Those words still resonate 35 years later as I look back on those (331/3 RPM, mind you) featuring the voices of the Mighty Marvel glory years of mighty Marvel fandom! Fan clubs have always been Bullpen. Finding an unblemished membership card is probably the popular over the years—Little Orphan Annie and her secret decoder, toughest piece in both of the MMMS kits. the Superman Society… remember the David Cassidy fan club? In the The second kit came out in 1967. It contained probably the comic book world, where DC missed the beat, Marvel picked up the most famous button in all of Marvel Silver Age wonder—the white slack and most Baby Boomers and post-Boomer comic fiends fondly background “Make Mine Marvel” button featuring the mugs of 12 remember the days of the MMMS. I truly think the lure of joining this Marvel memorables, including Ice Man. (Ice Man? Go figure. Guess lofty cadre of True Believers brought fans that much closer to our they had to have an X-Man; always thought Cyclops would have heroes—at least it did for me. Introduced to the Silver Age of Marvel been the better choice). Additional kit items were another round of via the Spider-Man Saturday morning cartoon, one thing quickly led stickers, “Welcome” letter, membership card, scribble pad (a mustto another and before long our family was making a side trip to the have today!), sometimes a white pencil that said “Marvel Marches downtown newsstand after church each Sunday to purchase those On,” and the unforgettable second record, Scream Along with 12¢ goodies. And unbeknownst to me, my cooler-than-cool parents Marvel, featuring a cover by Marie Severin with the Hulk conducting joined my young self in the MMMS Fan Club, and life has never been the Marvel orchestra. Plus there was a plethora of ads and flyers for the same! I proudly wore my “Make Mine Marvel!” button everyreeling the Marvel maniac into parting with more of their hard-earned where I went. A wallet had to be cash. Between these issues were periodic updates in regular envelopes purchased to house my member- with each one essentially being a peek into upcoming issues, holiday ship card. The stickers didn’t last greetings, Stan’s “Item!!” and soapbox statements. Gotta love Stan’s too long because they didn’t hip communications to impressionable minds! stick well, but who could Other MMMS-related items? Well, my parents drew the line on complain? My heroes had been me buying the Marvel T-shirts, of which 12 were produced in two brought to life in 3-D with the series. The first, put out in ’66, contained most of the major Marvel MMMS club. My membership characters. In ’67, one new shirt was released (which is essentially solidified my ranking with non-existent today, the green-&-white version of Captain Marvel.

Mighty Marvel’s inner circle. I Try getting that one, I dare you!) Two memorable sweatshirts of the was now personally associated lovable Hulk toting his ducky and the “It’s Clobberin’ Time” Thing with Peter Parker, The Thing, Dr. were also produced. These are super rare; I have found the Rawhide IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, Strange, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Kid and X-Men shirts particularly hard to find. Of course, we can’t CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS and Thor. Little did I realize the forget other goodies like the vacuous No-Prize envelope and the ISSUE OR DIGITAL FORMAT! club was actuallyINrunPRINT by a bunch plastic blow-up pillows (the Spidey is a must but why did they show of people who looked not unlike the view of his back looking at a normal man? Sheesh!). I had always my mom and dad; Bullpenners thought they made only two pillows—Spidey and Thor—but I recentwho provided the brainpower ly discovered Sub-Mariner and the Hulk! And who could forget the behind all this.

MMMS Swingin’ Stationary Kit—the orange folder containing official Belonging was something special. Marvel even capitalized on envelopes and stationary for sending notes to grandma and Aunt that with the record, You Belong, You Belong to the Merry Marvel Connie? There was also the set of eight 11” x 17” posters, the threeMarching Society! Oh, the months spent playing that record dancing by-six foot Ditko Spider-Man poster and the three-foot Hulk poster. around with my Spider-Man Captain Action doll! If only I could’ve It was certainly a magical time for Merry Marvel. I have thorbottled those moments. In today’s world, little boys’ bedrooms display oughly enjoyed scouring the planet regaining these MMMS memories Power Rangers, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, new GI Joes—but in the late of ’60s-past. (And we haven’t even touched on Marvelmania or ’60s my room housed a true paradise of heroes on the pages of my Foom!) Oh my, did DC miss the boat on this promotional tool!

Marvel comic collection (especially Spider-Man!), the aforementioned For the Marvel maniac interested in starting a collection of Captain Action super-hero dolls, Major Matt Mason, Hot Wheels— Marvel memorabilia, I would suggest finding the second kit button, and safely tucked away in my dresser drawer: my MMMS kit. It the granddaddy of all Marvel items which can be had typically for wasn’t until 1987 that I rediscovered the magic of #18: MMMS. As partMARVEL of $50 orCOSMIC 1970s under. Perhaps find a Bullpen “Welcome” letter and when you a large Silver Age comic collection I had purchased was an old, dingy COMICS go to conventions, start having old Marvelites autograph it. After JIM STARLIN, WEISS and AL MILGROM, yellow folder containing the MMMS-related Roundtable poster setwith of eight.

OverALANworking on mine interviews with STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE LEIALOHA, and for five years, I now have some of the greats a decade later, much research has been placed intoBRUNNER, determining thethe lost WARLOCK FRANK art from plusRomita a FLO (my all-time fave), John Buscema, Gene Colan, including#16, John interview, tributes by who, what, when, where of MMMS. So readSTEINBERG on, true CELEBRATION, believer, andwith a FloMarie Severin, Dick Ayers, Roy Thomas and even Chic Stone!

HERB TRIMPE, LINDA FITE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, and face front, ’coz here is what I know!

I would love to get Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to sign it. This others! STARLIN/ MILGROM/WEISSSomeday cover!

One of the first MMMS-related offerings I have determined was is an easy and unique way to bring something very cool to your (104-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition)Marvel $3.95 collection. I know of one person that actually framed their the bland but extremely desirable “sayings” buttons. You know what http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_56&products_id=534 I mean—they were the five button set containing the classic Marvel MMMS kit for display next to their comics and original art. slogans “Face Front,” “Brand Echh,” “Hang Loose,” “Sheesh” and In addition to MMMS/Marvelmania, I have settled into collectmy personal favorite “’Nuff said.” Try finding these. Good luck. Took ing Amazing Spider-Man original art, especially by John Romita, Gil me years to put a set together. We are now at circa 1965. This is also Kane, Ross Andru, and Steve Ditko and any unique Marvel memorabilia when (drumroll please) the first MMMS kit was released. First? Yes from between 1965-75. Anyone who wants to talk MMMS, Marvel first. The first issue MMMS kit contained the classic “I Belong” red memorabilia, Spider-Man original art, or anything Marvel, please feel button featuring the Thing, Torch and Spider-Man! Also in this kit free to contact me at spiderboop@aol.com. were the pukey yellow stickers of the Thing saying “The MMMS So, faithful friend, until Jonah J. Jameson sings the Spider-Man Wants You!” Rounding out the kit were the membership card, cartoon theme song, make mine Marvel!

—Aaron Sultan.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18

March 2002