Comic Book Artist #22

SPECIAL

THE TREASURES OF GOLD KEY COMICS

™

TRIBUTE No.22 October 2002

$6.95

In The US

Cover art by Bruce Timm Magnus ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

MANNING • SPIEGLE • EVANIER • ROYER • GLUT • SANTOS

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At

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

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

©2002 Bill Sienkiewicz

Sweet Sienkiewicz One guy we’ve always been meaning to cover (and we will in our forthcoming “Urban Legends” theme issue, CBA’s look at artists and writers of Batman and Daredevil) is the phenomenally talented Bill Sienkiewicz, Moon Knight, Elektra: Assassin, Big Numbers and Stray Toasters artist.

Bill tells us his book, Bill Sienkiewicz: Precursor, is available from Hermes Press. The tome presents 73 original and unpublished works, all in full color. Hermes’ press

release trumpets that each study is alive with form and color, highlighting the artist's skill in mediums like watercolor, acrylic, ink and pencil.

Also shown are some of his tasteful nudes.

Excellent work throughout, this precedes a larger and more complete volume due in the next year. We heartily recommend Bill’s work to the uninitiated and wish him the best success with the book (of which its innovative cover is shown here.

©2002 The Krigstein Archives

KNIGHT TO REMEMBER While we’re late in singing its well-deserved praises, Brian M. Kane’s superb biography, Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators—Father of the Adventure Strip is one gorgeous tome, worthy of inclusion in every art lover’s library. Not only has Brian lovingly produced a definitive biography on perhaps the finest renderer of comic strips in American history, but the author had access to the creator of Prince Valiant’s personal archives, giving us an astounding array of rarely-seen—some previously unpublished!—Hal Foster artwork, leaving the reader to crumple in amazement.

This is truly the finest book so far produced by Vanguard Productions, one that certainly earned it a coveted Eisner Award nomination for Best Comics-Related Book this year. Introduced by James “Doc Savage” Bama, this volume is available in both hardcover and softcover editions available through Diamond and Bud Plant. Tarry not, good reader!

Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators—Father of the Adventure Strip. By Brian M. Kane. 208 pp, $29.95 hc, $19.95 sc. Published by Vanguard Productions, Lebanon, NJ. ISBN #1-887591-49-4; #1-887591-25-7.

JOE KUBERT’S TEX What is the most astonishing comics-related discovery Ye Ed has made this year? No, it’s not a pristine, tobe-slabbed-and-never-read comic book collection or even a rare cache of funnybook art; it’s the existence of a (gulp!) 223-page Western graphic novel drawn by none other than the master, Joe Kubert, published in 2001 but available only in Italy! It was during a chat about upcoming J.K. work (Ye Ed trying to determine the possible release date of the artist/writer’s long-anticipated Holocaust graphic novel) with Peter Carlsson when the Kubert archivist dropped the bombshell by casually asking, “Well, you know about Joe’s Tex book, right? You know he was working on that for the longest time.” Nooooo, I sure didn’t know that! This editor has been jonesing to find new work by Joe for quite awhile so needless to say, I was floored upon getting the info. While Pete wasn’t sure where a copy could be found stateside, rest assured Ye Ed scoured the nation—or, at least, the book stalls at the San Diego convention— but, alas, even comic art guru Bud Plant was unaware of the Sergio Bonelli Editore edition’s existence. Dejected, I stumbled home to find e-mail from CBA pal Alberto Becattini who, after an exchange, happily sent me a copy of the thick trade paperback.

(Thanks, A.B.! For the book and your marvelous contributions to this Gold Key ish!) The buzz is that the tome will be translated and sectioned-up for release as a color mini-series in the states sometime soon. (Now, where’s that Italian dictionary…?)

HANGIN’ WITH THE CON ARTISTS

WILL POWER!

CBA snags 2nd Eisner Comic Book Artist and our TwoMorrows comrades had a banner year at the 2002 International Comic-Con: San Diego this past August, scoring our best sales ever for the show, as well as taking home this mag’s second Will Eisner Comics Industry Award for the Best ComicsRelated Periodical. (Sez Ye Ed: “It’s an honor to be nominated, but also a helluva lotta fun to win!”). CBA is grateful to those many contributors and supporters who helped us gain the distinction, especially the creators who are so generous with their time and artistry making the mag so chock-full o’ cool stuff! Many, many thanks to all!

Because this year TwoMorrows had the superb team of hucksters Tom Stewart and Eric Nolen-Weathington covering the tables (gracias, amigos!), not only was John and Pam Morrow able to show off darlin’ Lily, their adorable daughter and company mascot, to con attendees, but Ye Ed slacked big time to hang out with any number of groovin’ guests!

Wednesday night, we hooked up with CBA pal Brett Warnock, Top Shelf’s astounding art director, for our annual pre-show gnosh-fest. Thursday, it was lunch at the Marriott with Herb “the Hulk” Trimpe and “Larfin’” Linda Fite, freshly arrived from NYC for their first S.D. con visit.

Friday found us chowing with Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson by day and hobnobbing with Dan DeCarlo’s gorgeous granddaughters by night, as well as yakking with Kyle Baker, Shannon Wheeler, and that “smarmy guy with moustache,” Jim Pascoe, ’til the wee hours. And Saturday… well, besides being introduced to the vivacious trio of Charles Biro daughters, who can remember anything by that point! (Still, many thanks to Bob Chapman for allowing such CBA riffraff to attend the great Graphitti Designs party that closed the show on Sunday night, where Ye Ed sought out the inner “Alpha Male” under the spell of Svengali Bob “Flaming Carrot” Burden!) A con to remember, to be sure.

But the absolutest coolest time was to talk up old funnybooks endlessly with the Brothers Hernandez at their table in Artist Alley. Be it Gold Key, Little Archie, or Dennis the M., nothing beats babblin’ about the books with Gilbert, Jaime and Mario, guys who love comics just as much as anyone, even if they are freakin’ cartooning geniuses! Los Bros.: You rock. (And—YOW!—thanks, Xaime, for agreeing to draw the cover of our forthcoming Archie Comics ish!)

Still, there’s nothing like having my real younger brother, Andrew D., not only there to witness me gettin’ an Eisner, but attending to collaborate with Ye Ed on our project for 2002: Putting together a film documentary on the life and career of— who else?—the ol’ Spirit-meister himself, Will Eisner! We spent many a hour at the con videotaping testimonials from everyone from Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons to Scott McCloud and Simon Bisley! We also covered the American Association of Comic Book Collector’s testimonial dinner on Saturday night (thanks, Dave!), as well as captured Will getting his own Eisner! CBA will keep you informed on the progress, so wish us luck with the project (though we’re still in the production stage). Thanks, Jackie Estrada & Co., for a great show!

NATLAMP HELP WANTED! We desperately need some back issues of National Lampoon, as well as merchandising items of that satirical mag for our NatLamp Comics ish.

Please see page 43 for a list of our needs! Thanks!

CBA’s Jon Cooke is back in April!

Make ready for COMIC BOOK CREATOR, the new voice of the comics medium!

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $17.95 (Digital Edition) $6.95 • Ships July 2013

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

TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

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

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

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THE FRONT PAGE: LAST MINUTE BITS ON THE COMMUNITY OF COMIC BOOK ARTISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS CBA scores our second Eisner, the new Hal Foster book, and unknown Kubert work discovered!........................1 EDITOR’S RANT: MINING FOR GOLD Ye Ed waxes on about those wild, wild Western books of his childhood and a feeling of belonging ..................5 KHOURY’S CORNER: READ, RIGHT AND COOL Our assistant editor takes a look at Marvel’s latest hardback anthology, Captain America: Red, White & Blue....7 CBA COMMUNIQUES: FILTHY, DISGUSTING PERVERTS R US? The meaning of Mitch O’Connell’s CBA #19 cover gets twisted all ’round, and more malevolent missives ........8 MICHELLE’S MEANDERINGS: DAYS OF COMIC BOOK CHAOS Our beloved columnist remembers confusing times during the Dell Comics/Western Publishing “divorce” ....12

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

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

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 Bruce Timm. Magnus ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Cover Painting BRUCE TIMM Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD LONGBOX.COM STEVEN TICE Logo Designer/Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King Issue Theme Song NO SUCH THING John Mayer Visit CBA on our Website at:

www.twomorrows.com

THE TREASURES OF GOLD KEY COMICS LITTLE FREDDY: GROWING UP IN THE SILVER AGE OF COMICS BY FRED HEMBECK Our Man Fred remembers the confusion surrounding the debut of Gold Key back in the early 1960s................15

Contributors Bruce Timm • Shel Dorf Paul Norris • Don Glut Mark Evanier • Dan Spiegle Christopher Irving • Andrew Lis R. Robert Pollak • Alberto Becattini J.D. King • George Khoury Andrea Giberti • George Wilson Russ Manning • Robin Snyder Tom McKimson • Bill Janocha Jesse Santos • José Delbo Nevio Zeccarra • Alberto Giolitti Mike Royer • Mañuel Auad Scotty Moore • Richard Kyle Joe Caporale • Ed Rhoads James Van Hise • Biljo White Roy Thomas • John R. Borkowski Fred Hembeck • Michelle Nolan Chris Hunt • Ray Kelly & Kelly’s Comics Jeff Kapalka • Toni Rodrigues Ina Cooke and Mom & Pop’s Dan Forman • Gregg Hazen The Mad Peck • Scotty Moore Daniel I. Herman • Russ G. and the TwoMorrows Mailing Crew Bill Rosemann & Marvel Comics

WESTERN CIV 101: UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY OF GOLD KEY COMICS Chris Irving digs up the histories of Dell Comics, Western Publishing, and their child of divorce, Gold Key ......16 DORF’S DISCUSSIONS: MANNING THE MAGNIFICENT Superfan Shel Dorf visits the studio of Magnus maestro, Russ Manning, in this unpublished ’69 interview ......32 CBA TRIBUTE: ALBERTO GIOLITTI, “FATHER” OF TUROK The life of renowned Italian comic book artist of the Son of Stone is examined by Alberto Becattini ................38 DAN SPIEGLE INTERVIEW: THE SPLENDOR OF SPIEGLE The superb comic book artist talks about everything from Hopalong Cassidy to his current Boys’ Life work ......44 MIKE ROYER INTERVIEW: WRANGLIN’ MIKE ROYER TELLS ALL! The masterful inker discusses his early days in comics as Russ Manning’s assistant and Gold Key artist ............56 PAUL NORRIS INTERVIEW: PAUL’S GOLD KEY MEMORIES Artist Paul Norris discusses his illustrious career—from Aquaman to Brick Bradford—with Joe Caporale ..........68 GEORGE WILSON INTERVIEW: THE PHANTOM PAINTER Maybe Gold Key’s greatest cover artist—little-known George Wilson—gives his one and only interview ..........74 CBA PROFILE: THE TALE OF TOM MCKIMSON The life and career of the animator, comic book artist and art director as related by Alberto Becattini ..............76

This issue dedicated to

NEVIO ZECCARRA INTERVIEW: THE STAR’S TREK Andrea Giberti shares a brief interview conducted with the Italian comic book artist of Star Trek #1 ................79

Alberto Becattini COMICS LOVER SUPREME and all of CBA’s fine readers from Italy!

MARK EVANIER INTERVIEW: WESTERN GOES WEST The respected historian/writer/columnist on the origins of Gold Key and his experience at Western Pubs ........80 JESSE SANTOS INTERVIEW: THE ROMANTIC STYLINGS OF MR. JESSE SANTOS In a rare conversation, the superb Filipino comic book artist discusses his prolific days at Gold Key ..................88 DON GLUT INTERVIEW: OF DAGAR AND DINOSAURS The multi-talented creator reveals his prehistoric roots and thinking behind Dagar, Dr. Spektor and Tragg ........98 GOLD KEY GIANTS: THE TOP TEN ILLUSTRATORS OF WESTERN PUBLISHING Alberto Becattini gives us a list of superlative Dell/Gold Key comic book artists, complete with profiles ........116 Previous page: We believe this is a previously unseen Magnus illustration by Russ Manning, depicting the great Gold Key Robot Fighter. Courtesy of Biljo White (with assist by Roy Thomas). Above: Courtesy of Ray Kelly and friend, it’s a panel from Space Family Robinson #16, words by Gaylord Du Bois, art by Dan Spiegle. Magnus, SPF ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc. Please send all letters of comment, articles and artwork to: Jon B. Cooke, Editor, Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 Phone: (401) 783-1669 • Fax: (401) 783-1287 • E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com

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Editor’s Rant

Mining the Gold

A fond look back at the engaging comics of Western Publishing

I was born too late to be a card-carrying EC Fan Addict and the ranks of the Merry Marvel Marching Society appeared to be exclusively represented by my oldest brother in our household (as, under the threat of a painful wedgie, Richie would allow none of his siblings access to his treasured Marvel collection), so when I encountered Gold Key comics in 1968, I felt I finally belonged somewhere, at the ripe old age of nine. For a couple of years in the late ’60s, each issue produced by Western Publishing devoted three or more pages to the Gold Key Comics Club, one to pure hype about upcoming comics, another to drawings (of aliens or monsters, for instance) submitted by readers, as well as a “Jokes on You” section featuring reader riddles and gags, and usually capped with a dumb gag cartoon single-pager.

Sure, the focus was silly and downright juvenile, but I was a silly juvenile (still am!) and their output was perfect for a sub-teen like myself. Gold Key, for that time in my life, was simply The Place To Be. None of DC’s oh-so-serious super-heroes or Marvel’s convoluted and complex continuity of the day for me! Nosireebob! Just books like Carl Barks’ superb Uncle Scrooge reprints, Russ Manning’s stunning version of Tarzan, Jack Sparling’s crude yet effective rendering on Mighty Samson, and more expert adaptations of favorite films and TV shows than a kid would ever dream of. Me, the comic book versions I dug were Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel, The Avengers (with Emma and John, not Wanda and Pietro), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Star Trek, and especially those two Movie Comics one-shots, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (hey, the author of James Bond 007 created that, dude!) and The Yellow Submarine, with the cartoon version Fab Four.

Of the latter two, I probably most appreciated the groovy pull-out posters (which apparently justified the 25¢ price tag) most of all, which I distinctly recall fawning over while lying in the front yard of our Croton-on-Hudson digs during them fateful days. Sigh.

But those golden days ended soon enough. The allure of changing times at DC was compelling… I mean, Batman was investigating the “death” of Paul McCartney, man! And, soon enough, after months of mysterious “Kirby is Coming!” blurbs, Jack did arrive at the House of Superman where I was introduced to his brilliant storytelling, and comics became an addiction forever changing my life, leading me to the more harmful “drugs” pushed by Marvel, the undergrounds, and even sinister Warren! And though by then Gold Key seemed somewhat innocent and quaint compared to the super-slugfests ensuing over at the Big Two, the comics of Western Publishing came back into the forefront at Casa Cooke when I discovered the unbeatable team of writer Don Glut and artist Jesse Santos working their magic on such titles as Dagar the Invincible, The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor, and even some book called Tragg and the Sky Gods (not to mention Jesse’s great work on Brothers of the Spear).

Lemme tell ya, I really thought those books were IT for Gold Key, and can’t tell you how disappointed I was when those adventure books were cancelled by 1976 or so, and even more distraught that the pair pretty much disappeared from the comics scene for good.

Now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight (and back-issue bins), Ye Ed realizes that much of Gold Key’s 1960s line-up featured some truly excellent material, the pinnacle probably being Russ Manning’s extraordinary run as artist—and sometime writer—of 22 issues of the line’s finest title, Magnus, Robot Fighter, a book that still takes my breath away. Bob Fujitani’s great artwork on the initial five issues of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom (never mind those superb Richard Powers covers!), as well as Frank Thorne’s amazing art job on Mighty Samson and Dan Spiegle’s consistent artistry on Space Family Robinson are also notable achievements for that decade. And who October 2002

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can forget Wally Wood and his studio’s glorious work on Total War/M.A.R.S. Patrol #1-3? Maybe Marvel and DC garnered all the glory in that turbulent decade, but some major cool sh*t was coming off the presses in Poughkeepsie, New York!

Now, as one may ascertain from the accolades expressed in the above paragraph, you’ll find there’s a distinct emphasis on Gold Key’s adventure material in this retrospective. While we hope the interview with Mark Evanier and Alberto Becattini’s focus on Tom McKimson, as well as A.B.’s “Top Ten” list of Gold Key/Dell funny book artists, give a degree of balance, I realize the super-hero prejudice is strong in this ish, so maybe we’ll conduct a more in-depth examination of their funny animal material in the future. But we make no apologies as often the adventure comics of Western Publishing are the ones worth checking out, and we’re proud to say that this edition of CBA is probably the most comprehensive survey of Gold Key comics ever attempted, however woefully short. (But give us credit for adding another 16 pages—at no cost to you—to add more material.) Chris Irving’s wonderful history lesson alone is worth the price of admission, as he digs deep to unlock the myriad mysteries of Western Publishing, beginning with its relationship with Dell Comics—dating back to the late 1920s!—and on to the 1961 advent of the Gold Key imprint (a “child of divorce,” as Chris will inform you) to their disappearance from the comic book scene by the mid-1980s CBA does beg forgiveness from José Delbo, artist extraordinaire, for having to bump his comprehensive career-spanning interview until next issue and we hope Alberto Becattini will understand that we had to limit his superb contributions this issue due to space limitations (but look for his Gold Key/Dell artist index soon hereabouts).

Special thanks are due to Bruce Timm, the best comic book artist—besides Frank Frazetta and Dave Stevens—not actively working in the field today, who leapt at the chance to do his “painted Gold Key cover” version of Magnus; as well as J.D. King, for his “Woody” robo-drawing gracing this page, as well as for agreeing to come on board as permanent CBA “editorial rant” page illustrator!

Along with the very special group of contributors herein, you guys make me feel like I’m a Gold Key Comics Club member all over again!

—Jon B. Cooke, Editorman

Above: If he only had a clue! CBA mascot Woody—in his guise as an automaton from 4000 A.D.—gets recharged after a severe walloping by a certain Gold Key robo-hater in this piece by J.D. King. We’re happy to announce that the cartoonist—a friend of Ye Ed since the early 1970s—will be a regular contributor to our humble ’zine starting with this issue! Woody and art ™ & ©2002 J.D. King.

CORRECTION Our apologies to scribe STEVE DARNALL, author of the Alex Ross “Day in the Life” article in CBA #21, for misspelling his name throughout the issue. Our bad.

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A COMICS HISTORY GAME-CHANGER!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES

THE

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

This ambitious new series of FULLCOLOR HARDCOVERS documents every decade of comic books from the 1940s to today!

Each colossal volume presents a year-by-year account of the comic book industry’s most significant publications, most notable creators, and most impactful trends.

This ongoing project enlists TwoMorrows’ top authors, as they provide exhaustively researched details on all the major events along the comics history timeline! Editor KEITH DALLAS (The Flash Companion) spearheads the series and writes his own volume on the 1980s. Also in the works are two volumes on the 1940s by ROY THOMAS, the 1950s by BILL SCHELLY, two volumes on the 1960s by JOHN WELLS, a 1970s volume by JIM BEARD, and more volumes documenting the 1990s and 2000s. Taken together, the series forms the first cohesive, linear overview of the entire landscape of comics history, sure to be an invaluable resource for ANY comic book enthusiast!

JOHN WELLS leads off with the first of two volumes on the 1960s, covering all the pivotal moments and behind-the-scenes details of comics in the JFK and Beatles era! You’ll get a year-by-year account of the most significant publications, notable creators, and impactful trends, including: DC Comics’ rebirth of GREEN LANTERN, HAWKMAN, and others, and the launch of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and multiple earths! STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY’s transformation of superhero comics with the debut of FANTASTIC FOUR, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, X-MEN, AVENGERS, and other iconic characters! Plus BATMAN gets a “new look”, the BLUE BEETLE is revamped at Charlton Comics, and CREEPY #1 brings horror back to comics, just as Harvey’s “kid” comics are booming!

NOW SHIPPING! The Best of FROM THE TOMB Compiles the finest features from the preeminent magazine on horror comics history, along with never-seen material!

(192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $27.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.95 ISBN: 9781605490434 • Diamond Order Code: AUG121322

The co-founder of Filmation Studios tells all about leading the last American animation company through thirty years of innovation and fun!

(288-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95 • (Digital Edition) $9.95 ISBN: 9781605490441 • Diamond Order Code: JUL121245

MATT BAKER: The Art of Glamour The fabled master of glamour art finally gets his due!

(192-page HARDCOVER with 96 COLOR pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 9781605490328 • Diamond Order Code: JUN121310

TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

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

PRINTED IN CANADA

LOU SCHEIMER: Creating the Filmation Generation

All characters TM & ©2013 their respective owners.

1960-64 VOLUME: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 9781605490458 • Diamond Order Code: JUL121245

Khoury’s Corner

Read, right and cool A review of the Captain America 60th anniversary anthology

by George Khoury It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a year since 9-11. Only a year since I saw the city that I love endlessly bleed smoke for days. Only a year since thousands of innocent lives were lost and two towers were turned to dust. Being born in Jersey City—across the Hudson River, under the shadow of The Big Apple—I don’t remember a day without the magnificent sight of those buildings prior to that godforsaken day. If you live in Jersey City then you would know that to only make something of yourself, you’d certainly need to go to New York City—where you can find anything your heart desires. But a year later, you look into that metropolis and it doesn’t look like a fantasy anymore… no, it just seems real, devastatingly real.

Nowadays I stare at that empty space across the river and wonder to myself, “If only….”

Yes, this is still a review for Captain America: Red, White and Blue… it’s just that looking at its on-sale date of September 11, 2002, made me review on the year gone by, too. We Americans are in a different place, although there are those who grinningly live in ignorance as if 9-11 never occurred. Just because it happened yesterday, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Things have changed, if that change is for better or worse is entirely up to you. Since last year, Marvel Comics has changed, and for the better. By no means are they the best comics being made, but at least they’re trying-trying real hard to put out good stories. I remember thinking that super-hero comics would seem so trivial in our post 9-11 world… I was wrong.

Super-heroes have always been important, especially during times of war and economic depression; they are rich with metaphors and an escape in the darkest of times into worlds of splendor and awe.

Marvel Comics, throughout their books, have demonstrated that social awareness and at the same time improved the overall quality of their books.

To commemorate the belated 60th anniversary of the debut of the Sentinel of Liberty, Marvel has issued a 192-page hardcover tome that’s half-original short stories and half-reprinted classics of the patriotic avenger. The reprinted-half serves as a time capsule for golden stories from Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Frank Miller and others. The remainder is dedicated to the short tales and has an interesting list of creators, some well known (Alex Ross, Bruce Timm and Max Allan Collins) and some lesser known in the mainstream (Matt Madden, Peter Ferguson, Yann Lepennetier), and yet all of them together paint a beautifully provocative picture of the good Captain. It’s not Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace but 15 short stories that are very effective and—at times—inspiring. At first sight, the book seems to be a mishmash of styles that don’t quite compliment one another, but upon reading the lead story by Tony Salmons, I found it hard to put down as each story managed to show me the star-spangled hero under a different light. Interestingly, the stories are told in black-&-white with red-&-blue spot coloring, which only add to its patriotic flavor.

Among the best shorts in the book are “Faces,” by Paul Pope and Nick Bertozzi, a powerful Red Skull story that effectively shows the building hate within a young German boy. “Why I Fight,” by Bruce Jones (the story title a play on legendary film director Frank Capra’s WWII propaganda movies series) with Richard Piers-Rayner’s Virgil Finlay riff proving to be the most visually stunning tale. Another winner is “American Dream,” by Mark Waid, Mike Huddleston, Bill October 2002

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Sienkiewicz and Jose Villarrubia—a poignant tale about Cap and Bucky that coincides with the events prior to the Lee-Kirby classic Avengers #4.

Also, I have to admit to never being a fan of Pascual Ferry’s art, yet even he blew me away in “A Winter’s Tale”; I just wasn’t aware his storytelling and rendering had evolved so much. Even the story that I disliked the most, “Red Raid,” from Yann Leppenetier and Phillipee Berthet, which makes a mockery of capitalism, must be good ‘cause I haven’t stopped thinking about it since reading it. And the only story directly involving 9-11 is “Desecration,” which Jeff Jensen and Mike Deodato handle very skillfully. Unlike the Batman: Black & White stories (the just-released second volume of which is to be reviewed next issue by yours truly), this book is not centered on super-hero artists doing their thingy, but it’s focused on a more eclectic mix of indy and established artists doing what they do best. I mean such comic book stalwarts as David Lloyd, Dean Haspiel, Frank Quitely, Peter Kuper and even Evan Dorkin have great work in this book!

What gives?

For a minute, I thought alt publishers Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly published this classy extravaganza.

The times certainly are a changin’!

The beauty of Captain America is that he’s a character created out of necessity in World War II—who lifted the spirits of folks in the 1940s and is still an icon in a completely new century. Like Uncle Sam, he’s a symbol that embodies what’s pure and noble about our country’s idealism and foundation. Yes, there have been bumps throughout his sixty years of comics and films, but he’s still here deservedly wearing our flag with pride. And this lovely book, drawn by an international list of artists, demonstrates that the Captain will always continue to serve us well. With Red, White and Blue, Captain America’s calling… will you give him a second glance?

Below: Dean Haspiel’s stylin’ art on his alt strip Billy Dogma is so rip-snortin’ dynamic—not to mention his splendiferous versions of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents featured in CBA #14—we were wondering just how groovy an all-out superhero story by the Cool One would be. Well, we certainly weren’t disappointed by the artist’s rendition of the Star-Spangled Avenger in the kick-ass retro “Capsploitation” tale in Captain America: Red, White and Blue.

Courtesy of Editor Andrew Lis, here’s the splash page sans lettering. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

7

CBA Communiques

Filthy, Disgusting Perverts R Us? Plus letters on Fab Flo, Atlas, Arthur Adams, and much more

Above: Yikes! Talked about a twisted view of an innocent game of Twister! An anonymous reader complained that aspects of Mitch O’Connell’s (apparently) controversial CBA #18 cover “nasty” and was “disgusted” by the activities of growed-up Harvey characters.

Oh, well. Art ©2002 MO’C. Characters ©2002 Harvey Entertainment, Inc.

Inset right: Jay Stephens’ creations, Tutenstein and Jetcat, share a quiet moment reading through their fave retro mag about comics in this custom sketch contributed by the artist. Thanks, Jay! Look for the spunky mummy boy to appear in his own Saturday morning ABC cartoon series in June, 2003! ©2002 Jay Stephens.

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A Reader via the Internet [What] struck me negatively about [Comic Book Artist #19] was the Mitch O’Connell cover. I’ve never had cause before now to question either your judgment or your taste but, Jon, what were you thinking?

Such disturbing imagery is entirely inappropriate for an issue devoted to what was possibly the finest line of children’s comics America ever produced. The absurdly pneumatic Little Dot figure bumping booties with B-Man is bad enough but the pitchfork-wielding Princess Farina straddling a diapered, adult Hot Stuff is just plain nasty. Surely you could’ve persuaded Warren Kremer or Ernie Colón to contribute something a little more wholesome! I sincerely hope that in the future you’ll think twice before running anything like this. I don’t ever want a CBA cover to disgust me again…

[Hokey smokes! This was the last kind of response I would ever hope to get for such a patently silly and fun cover as rendered by one of my fave artists, MO’C! Little Dot and B-Man are just disco dancin’ and the pair on the back innocently playing Twister at the Harvey house party (where there is, admittedly, some drinking going on, but the fact the kiddie characters were turned into adults should’ve made that okay).

Really, no offense was intended and methinks the imagination can go a bit too far afield. I asked the artist for his response.— Ye Editor.

“I can’t disagree with Kurt’s idea of Ernie Colón or

Warren Kremer doing the cover, [and] I’m sure it would have been great. It never occurred to me that my cover would be viewed as offensive, I thought I might have moved the bar no higher than ‘silly.’ If readers are going to be shocked to the point of disgust by comic characters doin’ the Hustle or the concept of drawing Little Dot as an adult, I don’t know how they could make it through the day without fainting every few seconds by something they might read, hear or see. ‘Quick!

Hide every issue of Mad from the ’50s! They might contain comic parodies!’ If their concern is with children being exposed, Comic Book Artist is obviously a magazine for grown-ups. My seven-year-old son Leo enjoys reading Harvey comics (as do I) but he’s not going to curl up under the covers at night with a flashlight and CBA and thrill to an interview with Sid Jacobson discussing his interest in big band music. Well, maybe this reader does have a point: Leo did see the cover art and has looked at our Twister game with a gleam in his eye ever since. If I were drawing an actual Harvey comic cover, of course, I would have done it differently. But I’m not, and I think what I did for CBA is lighthearted and fun. Good lord, kind reader!

Relax!”—Mitch O’Connell] Jay Stephens via the Internet Whoa! Hold up! Hold up!

Not that I’m complaining, but you’re pumpin’ these things out so fast it’s damn near impossible to lavish praise in a timely manner!

First off… Warren Kremer [in CBA #19]. Thank you so much for the dope on the Good Ghost Artist! I’ve wanted a name to attach to this distinct style forever. As if anyone who’s seen my work couldn’t tell, I love this guy! In my humble opinion, the unparalleled success of the Harvey Kids line was due almost entirely to Mr. Kremer’s supernatural knack for knowing exactly what kids’ eyeballs would be attracted to (It sure wasn’t the hackneyed, insipid storylines). And his horror work… Wow! I just can’t believe Warren Kremer isn’t better respected in this business.

Apparently you have to spend at least a decade drawing supermen to get any attention around here.

Or maybe not. Despite the immense talents of Eisner, Elias, Wood, and Simon (well, maybe because of Simon), the Harvey Hero line never got off the ground. Super-fans are fickle, obviously. And they COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

like their stuff a little straighter than that loveable kook Joe Simon was prepared to deliver. I, for one, have a soft spot for what Scott Shaw! calls “Oddball” super-heroes, and was thrilled to get this inside peek.

But don’t mind me… I’m eagerly awaiting that special issue on Dell’s “super-monsters”!

This past weekend at the Toronto Comic Convention, Joe Kubert graciously grasped my drawing hand in a friendly shake, and I swear I’ve been sketching out work at least ten times better than the week before! Living Legend? Damn right! Thanks for the schoolroom roundtable with the Kuberts [CBA #20]... one of my favorite things about CBA is your interest in capturing the real people and quiet moments behind the work. Loved the Flo Steinberg issue [#18], for example, and I’m sure this is the same reason you’re a hit with guys like Chabon. Real stories.

Surprised that nobody mentioned the Marvel Tryout Book in relation to John Romita Jr.’s influence! Geez, I can clearly remember saving up the dough from my paper route to buy that thing. The staging, pacing… just beautiful stuff. Taught me everything I needed to know to get started in comics. JR Jr. is the first guy I inked… the first artist I ever “collaborated” with… and I think you’ll find that’s true for a lot of guys my age.

And his dad? My hero. To me, John Romita is super-hero comics.

When I started hoarding the things at age six or so, Romita was Marvel. His refined distillation of Kirby, Ditko, Caniff, and his uncannily bold, crisp linework etched into my young brain, and despite subsequent discoveries along the way, I’ll always think of him first when I think “comic books.”

As for your ‘best selling’ issue, well, I’m all for CBA covering current, working professionals of note, but Adam Hughes? I mean, the guys’ artwork knocks me out… it’s fantastic! No question about his immense talent as an illustrator. But he’s a pin-up artist, Jon! The name of the magazine is COMIC BOOK Artist, remember? Sheesh.

Let’s just say I’m really looking forward to the Mignola ish.

Paul J. Maringelli Sunnyside, New York A friend recently gave me a copy of Comic Book Artist #19. Boy, did it bring back memories! Not only did I grow up—like many of my generation—reading Harvey Comics but I also worked there. In 1978 I was hired as a freelancer by Sid Jacobson to ink a few one-page Richie Rich stories. I have to admit my inking was only passable.

When I brought my pages in, I was introduced to [Harvey production manager] Ken Selig. I was informed that Ken was looking for a fulltime assistant to help out in the bullpen and I quickly applied for the job. While in the bullpen I worked as an all-around production artist, doing paste-ups and mechanicals mostly, but also coloring and retouching art. I also shot photo stats, something no art department does anymore.

What a thrill it was meeting and working with such greats as Warren Kremer, Ernie Colón (a trick I learned a long time ago for distinguishing Ernie’s Richie from Warren’s is to look at the legs and feet), Lennie Herman (who always had a joke to tell), Joe Rosen (a quiet but very intelligent and nice man), Stan Kay (who was always drawing caricatures of the staff), Joe Simon (who would come by to visit and chat) and, of course, Alfred and Leon Harvey. It was a treat to make friends with people whose work I admired while growing up.

Once Sid invited my co-worker, Angelo DeCesare, and myself to his apartment for lunch and he played records of the many songs he had written. Another time, Joe Simon invited us to his place and let us view some of his original artwork from the 1940s.

I still remember the joy when I learned that Ken Selig inked the “Spoonmen,” a two-page promotional comic story for Nabisco that ran in Harvey Comics in the ’50s. I think Ken was more surprised when I told him “As a kid, I thought these were the best artwork in any Harvey book.”

Another perk of the job was that I was allowed to go through the file library and catch-up on storylines I missed as a kid. I used to joke “It took me 20 years to find out how Dick Tracy caught Flattop Jr.” In 1981, I left Harvey to take a better paying job. I had recently married and needed the extra money, and even that is a Harvey story. I met my wife in the Gulf & Western Building where the Harvey offices were located. Also the first date I had with my future wife was bringing her to Sid Jacobson’s surprise 50th birthday party. Sid used to joke that I owed him big-time for that! Of course, I agree.

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But my association with Harvey Comics doesn’t stop there: In 1986, when Ken Selig became managing editor (forgive me, Ken, if I’ve gotten the title wrong), he called me to do some coloring. He knew I was fast and could come in under the deadline. So I returned as a colorist for the Harvey family where I freelanced ’til 1989.

When Jeff Montgomery bought the company, Ken hired me to come in on occasional weekends to help on production work. I also, sadly, helped catalog and file artwork that was to be shipped to the new offices in California. It was the end of an era.

In 1995, I returned to comics when I became executive art director of Penthouse Men’s Adventure Comix. At that time I renewed my friendship with Ernie Colón. He was very prolific, drawing for Penthouse Men’s Adventure Comix, Penthouse Comix and Omni Comix, in addition to the many other books he drew for other companies.

Around the same time I received a telephone call from Alan Harvey who told me he was once again publishing but under the Lorne-Harvey banner. He asked if I was interested in doing some coloring. I jumped at the chance because it was always enjoyable working with Alan. I colored a Shock Gibson story, “Like a Bolt from the Blue.” Unfortunately the sales weren’t as good as they should have been and Alan had to discontinue publishing any new stuff.

I am good friends still with Alan Harvey, Ken Selig, Angelo DeCesare (who has gone on to authoring children’s books) and Ernie Colón.

The photos, interviews and articles you’ve published has brought back many fond memories. I want to thank you for doing such a good job. Keep up the good work!

Link Yaco New York, New York Listen, I hope your readers appreciate what a staggering accomplishment the Harvey issue is. I mean it, man! The research, interviews and huge wealth of esoteric, hard-to-find data (e.g., Steranko details, the creation of “Colorama”) are absolute delights and an essential cornerstone to what I'm sure we all hope will one day be a serious academic examination of the largest, best-selling comics company of several decades. Some nice gossip there as well.

Thanks again for a real treat. Don't know how you keep it up, but keep on keepin' on.

YE ED’S NOTE: Comic Book Artist and comic artist genius (and former CBA columnist) ALEX TOTH have decided to go our separate ways. His column, “Before I Forget,” will not appear within these pages. While we regret this situation, Ye Ed extends his profound gratitude and thanks to Mr. Toth for his contributions and support of this magazine in the past. We wish Alex the best of health and happiness in the future.

Below: Genius comic book artist Warren Kremer, featured subject in CBA #19’s retrospective of Casper and Company, looks over that issue with his wife, Grace, a talented letterer in her own right, during a Harvey bullpen gettogether held this Summer at the Kremer homestead in New Jersey.

Thanks to Bill Janocha for the pic!

Rob Smentek via the Internet Now, to be perfectly honest, I could not care less about Harvey Comics. I never liked the humor books, and the super-hero stuff I have seen is horrible.

But, damnit, I just read CBA #19 cover to cover.

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It occurs to me Comic Book Artist isn’t just an entertaining maga-

zine, it is an important magazine. You are documenting the comic HEAVY book history with more detail and attention than anyone has done Somehow, you are making the absolute worst comic publishMETAL before. ers interesting. Never would I imagine that I would be intrigued with ITEMS the inner workings of Atlas/Seaboard, Charlton, and especially Now you have me waiting to see an issue to devoted to NEEDED! Harvey.

Archie (which surely can't be too far off… plus I do have a soft spot Ye Editor and Welsh associate David A. Roach, along with French compatriot Jean Depelley, are compiling the definitive history of The Adult Illustrated Fantasy Magazine, Heavy Metallurgy, a tome due to arrive in 2003. While everything is coming together swimmingly, we’re still in need of a few HM items to catalog and index: HM Spring 1988 issue, Bride of HM Special, HM War Machine, HM Software, HM’s 20th Anniversary Special hardback, and HM Spring 2000 Special. While we hope not to have to pay too high a price for the above—even a loan would be greatly appreciated— please contact us if you can help us with any of these items. Email jonbcooke@aol.com or call Jon at (401) 783-1669. Hope to hear from you!

OOPS! HE DONE DID IT AGAIN! CBA owes our associate editor Chris Knowles, as well as assistant editor George Khoury, an apology for printing that it was George who first suggested the concept for “A Day in the Life” column. It was, in fact, Chris who first ventured the idea. Sorry, guys.—Y.E. 10

for those Archie [!mpact Comics] super-hero revival titles of the ’80s).

I simply cannot get enough CBA. [Umm, thanks! Yes, we will be doing an Archie Comics issue pretty soon. I already have a fascinating Bob Bolling interview by Gary Brown on hand (Bob was artist-writer of perhaps the best of the Archie family titles, Little Archie). Combined with a tribute to Dan DeCarlo (featuring an interview by “Bongo Bill” Morrison and other goodies) and the usual CBA treatment, this issue should be just what the Smentek ordered!—Ye Editor] Tom Heintjes via the Internet I just received the Harvey-themed CBA, and while I haven’t sat down to peruse it yet, it looks fantastic! I always loved Harvey when I was a kid, so this one looks to be really special. My brother and I used to think the Casper/Hot Stuff relationship was weird. Casper is a child who died and went to heaven, we figured, so Hot Stuff must have been a child who died and went to hell. The Harvey Universe sure did present religious conundrums for us to grapple with!

Congratulations again on another winner! Keep up the great work.

And as for trying to assess what your readers are interested in, I would suggest that you continue to follow your own editorial instincts about what would make an interesting, stimulating magazine, and you'll do fine! Your current readers will continue to buy and read, and the new ones will come.

[Tom helms Hogan’s Alley, the superb magazine devoted to comic strips (and often comic books), and we strongly urge all readers who haven’t already experienced the wonders of that periodical to break down and sample a copy. Send $8 to Hogan’s Alley, P.O. Box 47684, Atlanta, GA 30362, and tell ’em Editorman sent ya!—Y.E.] Mick Scott via the Internet I’ve been enjoying Comic Book Artist so much, I just can’t express it in a few lines. The books you celebrate are the same ones I read in my mid-teens, always with the feeling that they were something special. These books included Kirby's “Fourth World,” (as well as Kamandi and The Demon) the works of Chaykin, Simonson, Gulacy, and many others. (I also remember the first time I saw Marshall Rogers in print, thinking, “Well, it’s all over now! There’s a new generation of artists coming along, and they’re just not as good!”

How wrong I was!)

I especially remember the excitement I felt when I discovered Atlas Comics; they were like a whole new world! I was so excited, I scoured my town and a few surrounding spots, buying everything I could with the Atlas logo. Yet from a fan’s limited point of view, I was baffled to find the books changing so radically from month to month, and confused to no end when the company simply disappeared from the comics racks. I’m so happy with your latest issue; it’s very fulfilling to read the other side of the story, to get all the background info on that situation.

I'd like to comment on one title that wasn’t covered very thoroughly in your magazine: Rich Buckler’s Demon Hunter. At the time of publication, I was a big Buckler fan; I followed his work in the Fantastic Four, I bought the one issue of Conan the Barbarian he penciled, and I remember a Batman story he penciled and inked—though at this point, I don’t know if that came before or after Demon Hunter.

I remember thinking of him as my “favorite” artist at one point, and feeling that he was extremely reliable—I knew I would enjoy his work, no matter what he drew. I was thrilled by his Demon Hunter. I still have the book in storage (along with many other Atlas titles), and didn’t have a chance to review it before writing this letter, unfortunately, so I may get specifics wrong—but I think the first or second page had a panel scheme that was extremely innovative for its time— and you gentlemen probably know the material far better than I— with smaller and smaller panels detailing the action from moment to moment. I believe he used this scheme again in an issue or two of Deathlok, but again, I’m not sure, it’s been a while. After the demise of Atlas, Buckler recycled the “Demon Hunter” character for use in

Marvel Comics—though again, I don’t remember the specifics, just a similarly-garbed hero with an identical mission and a nearly identical name. (I believe Chaykin did the same with many of his characters.)

I know that Mr. Buckler ran into some kind of trouble shortly after this time—though again, I don’t know the particulars—and his career hasn’t been the same since then. I think that’s a shame. He had a lot of talent, and I’m sure I wasn’t his only fan. I hope you don’t think I’m being critical of Mr. Buckler’s exclusion from your Atlas/Seaboard issue; I know you have a great deal to cover every month—I just wanted to share this fond memory with someone I thought would appreciate it. Thank you again for your publication. Not a month goes by that I don’t think, “I’m so sick of today’s comics; I wish they made ’em like they used to.” With your publication, I now have the option of enjoying those books again. They’re not dead, they’re vitally alive.

Carl Gafford via the Internet Did you know of the problems Atlas/Seaboard had with the original art of The Destructor #1? Steve Ditko likes drawing big, so he did the book at the old twice-up size (which Woody inked). Well, Chemical Color Plating said they’d charge Atlas this huge fee for reducing the art to size (a crock as far as I know, but perhaps the “fix” was in from the competitors to Chemical to make as much trouble as possible for Atlas). So Steve Mitchell had to get the entire ish photostatted down to regular 10" x 15" size.

Tony Isabella Medina, Ohio I’m about 30 pages into the Atlas issue and enjoying the heck out of it. You are the master of “mediocrity,” but we already knew that from your running a portion of Jon Knutson’s interview with me.

I may be able to shed some light on “Speed Demon” (page 32): During my time as editor of some of Marvel’s black-&-white magazines, I had Mike Sekowsky pencil a story called “Speed Demon.” I don’t remember too much about it other than this: It was my basic idea, but I can’t recall if I wrote the plot or not.

If I wrote the plot, I’m sure I handed the scripting over to someone else and it might have been David Anthony Kraft.

If I came up with the basic idea and turned it over to someone else for a full script, that someone might have been David.

I remember being disappointed by Sekowsky’s pencils. I have a vague memory of too many car shots and not enough human shots.

And I remember being kind of pissed off when the same basic story showed up in another magazine, maybe one of the Atlas black&-whites, before we got this story into print.

I’m not sure if Marvel ever published the Sekowsky-drawn story.

Ernie Colón via the Internet I think what you're doing is so important—this is a field to which so many craftspeople devote their whole lives; to see their efforts celebrated and set down is really just wonderful.

Your style—informal, witty, personal—fits perfectly with the medium we love and are so often frustrated by. To have comics and its denizens—warts and all; the foibles and the fabulous—collected in this handsome publication is precisely what the field needs so badly.

So, from my view, let me give you my sincerest admiration and congratulations. Great good luck to you.

Michael T. Gilbert Eugene, Oregon I just got my Comic Book Artist #16 and thoroughly enjoyed laying on the couch catching up in arcane Atlas/Seaboard history.

Atlas, the Great White Hope with a glass jaw! Reminds me a bit of Tundra in that respect. Funny thing, I went to a antique/junk store last week and found a couple of boxes of ’70s-’90s comics at 50¢ a pop. Someone must have sold him an Atlas collection as I picked up about 45 different issues for $20 total, knowing that the CBA retrospective was coming out. That’s about three-quarters of the entire line.

I guess the pundits of old were correct when they said these would be valuable collector's item's someday. They originally sold for 25¢ and I picked ’em up for 50¢. That's a 100% profit in a mere 30 years! Try getting that kind of return at the bank!

The issue itself is great (I’m still reading it), and the kind of in-depth look at forgotten companies that I love. What a strange, short-lived company; “Vengeance, Inc.” indeed! I remember when the books first came out and how exciting the possibilities seemed, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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both as a fan and a potential contributor. And how quickly those dreams faded as some moderately interesting and moderately original titles morphed into really bad Marvel imitations. This, of course, when I was getting thoroughly sick of Marvel, too!

What were they thinking? Of course Martin Goodman’s two edicts throughout his Marvel reign were “imitate whatever’s popular at the moment” and “shove dozens of cheap knock-offs out fast!”

Unfortunately, this time he wasn’t in charge of Marvel/Timely/Atlas, just a cheap imitation. As such he didn’t have the name or brand loyalty to get away with such cheap tactics. More importantly, he didn’t have Stan Lee or Jack Kirby.

Imagine if Goodman had sold Marvel a few years earlier and stolen Jack in 1968, at the peak of his abilities. And (much greater stretch of the imagination!) imagine if Goodman actually let Jack do his comics his way! Goodman might actually have pulled it off, and we’d be reading a bunch of Atlas comics today—some of which we might actually enjoy! As it was, we got a second-rate company doing third-rate comics for first-rate rates!

Anyway, another great issue, Jon. Congratulations!

Mark Cannon Canberra, Australia Just a note to say how much I’ve been enjoying Comic Book Artist since it started. Even those issues on comics that I’ve never really read or collected, like the Warren issue and #15’s “Love and Rockets” coverage, still manage to interest me (and in the case of the Warren issue, the coverage of the Spanish artists helped me to identify a particular artist whose other work I’d enjoyed in Australian reprints as a child!).

I’ve just gotten #16, and while as yet I’ve only had time to skim the contents, it looks good. I’d imagine that my experience of the 1970s Atlas was similar to that of many other readers; I noticed the comics in the shops, was intrigued enough to flip through several of them, but never bought any of them at the time. I was still in high school, my limited comics budget was largely dominated DC and Marvel, and the Atlas stuff just didn’t seem interesting enough for me to drop other books. Soon afterwards they vanished and I didn’t actually buy any of them until I found a pile a couple of years later, still in the comics rack at a railway station news agent in the middle of Sydney. Presumably they’d never been removed because replacement issues had never arrived. This time I bought them, and while for the most part they justified my earlier caution—there weren’t too many world-beaters in the pile—they were still enough fun to make me to pick up several more as I found them over the subsequent couple of decades. I’m certainly glad to see the comics, and the story of the creators and company behind them, receive the coverage that you’ve given them.

I’m a little saddened to read that you’ve been accused, even jokingly, of building “monuments to mediocrity.” Companies like Tower, Atlas and Charlton may never had the influence of a DC or Marvel, but they were still part of the Silver and Bronze Ages, and have their role in comics history. There’s a lot more to comics in those eras than the modern day Big Two! Nobody seems to object to the attention given to, say, minor pre-Code horror publishers of the early ’50s or the more obscure Golden Age publishers, so what’s wrong with looking at the lesser lights of more recent eras?

I’m pleased to see you have an issue coming up on Harvey—just as with Atlas, I found some of their super-hero comics in a shop a couple of years after they were published! I wouldn’t mind eventually seeing issues with a similar focus on ACG, 1960s Archie (including Mighty Comics and the spy and super-hero trends that hit the mainstream Archie books), Gold Key/Whitman, Dell and others.

Hey, I wouldn’t even mind seeing some articles on some of the real obscurities of the ’60s, like Lightning Comics (which published both CC Beck’s wonderful Fatman, the Human Flying Saucer and the appalling Super Green Beret) and the Myron Fass-published version of Captain Marvel. Boy, if some people think you’ve covered mediocrities, they ain’t seen nothin’ until they’ve seen that one!

John Backderf via the Internet Well, your Atlas-Seaboard ish was everything I hoped it would be!

Lots of snarping and bitter feelings, still deliciously raw even after 25 years. Terrific! The Chaykin piece was especially entertaining. Your best since Carmine Infantino’s remarkable rants in your first couple issues. What a great tale the whole Seaboard catastrophe is! Martin Goodman must have been an absolute bastard, which, of course, October 2002

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many have implied in your interviews before. The comics industry was such was such a backward, abusive system. The fact that Goodman was forced to share “profits” with creators… nearly forty years after comic strip creators had gained that right… does not make him a good guy.

He’s a scumbag who got rich by stealing the work of others.

Usually, one of your theme issues sends me prowling eBay to fill in the gaps in my collection. I went bonkers on Warren stuff, completed my Question run after the Charlton two-tome extravaganza, been seeking out Tower goodies. But, y’know… I’m not at all interested in adding to my Seaboard holdings… which consist of a grand total of Destructor #1 and 2.

Simply because, really, the Seaboard line is easily the worst collection of drek in comic book history… and that’s saying something.

You’re too nice, Jon. A Neal Adams cover meant nothing when it was wrapped around a Mike Sekowsky hack job. It’s not a “diamond.” It was baaaaaaad. And most of it was exploitative and vile. I remember being really disturbed by Ironjaw, Morlock 2000 and the like.

On a more trivial note: Hey! I've got some honest-to-God comic books coming out! Trashed! (52 pages!), an autobiographical account of my career as a garbageman was released by Slave Labor in February. And then in March, inspired by the Cooke Publishing Empire, my own Derfcity Press released My Friend Dahmer, a recollection of my high school friendship with the future serial killer.

Twenty years after leaving home to become a comic book artist I finally realize that goal, now merely a creative exercise on my part. In no small degree, inspired by reading Comic Book Artist. Really. I wonder... if I had gone into comic books as I wanted to… if I’d be the subject of a CBA interview (“Derf... the man who brought Baby Huey back to life!”) and wailing about the abusive treatment I received at the hands of a Goodman-like overseer?

[As always, nice to hear from youse, Derf! Thanks for the comics; My Friend Dahmer is a very effective book—not gratuitous at all—and I heartily recommend it to CBAers!—Y.E.]

Above: Our last issue, the Adam Hughes extravaganza, sold through the flippin’ roof, prompting us to go back for our first reprinting since CBA #1! Our thanks to Adam. Here’s another Wonder Woman sketch by the wünderkind, just for old time’s sake! Art courtesy of and ©2002 Adam Hughes. Wonder Woman ©2002 DC Comics.

11

Michelle’s Meanderings

Days of Comic Book Chaos The confusion of Dell and Gold Key Comics in the early ’60s Below: Without a doubt, the most significant comic book material published by Dell and Gold Key was the work of Carl Barks, the masterful storyteller of many a duck tale, most importantly the adventures of Scrooge McDuck.

While the creator is not adequately represented in this issue, we thought we’d open with this Barks cover image. ©2002 Disney.

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By Michelle Nolan What was the most dramatic change in the comic book world of the 1960s?

The easy answer, of course, is Marvel’s gradual Silver Age takeover of the super-hero scene after more than two decades of dominance by DC (National).

Indeed, that will be your final answer if super-heroes are synonymous with comic books for you.

But if you were a collector four decades ago with interests ranging beyond the funny book folks in the super suits—in the days

long before comic book stores and adequate (or even inadequate) information for fans—you will have a different answer.

You will remember the halcyon days of Dell and Gold Key chaos!

So return with us now to those confusing days of yesteryear, when almost every trip to the newsstand in 1962 produced thrills, frustration, or both for fans of the good old original Dell comics line.

Now there was a virtual comic book earthquake. Never before or since have there been such wholesale changes involving a comic book company.

By 1962, when most comic books had recently increased from a dime to 12¢—not an insignificant consideration in those days—Dell was asking 15¢ for its comics.

Since 1938, Western Printing and Lithographing—which produced a wide variety of popular paper goods—had packaged the thousands of comic books published under the Dell imprint.

Until the monumental changes of 1962, the indicia of what everyone knew from the familiar left-comer logo as “Dell Comics” read “Published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc.,” at the beginning and “Designed and produced by Western Printing and Lithographing Co.” at the end.

When Dell increased its comic book price to 15¢ in 1961, after flirting with that 50% increase with several of its titles in 1957 and ‘58—thereby driving store clerks bonkers!—sales fell dramatically on most titles.

But little did the nation’s ill-informed comic book collectors realize in 1961 what would soon become an amazingly convoluted transition from the “Old Dell” to the split between the “New Dell” and “Gold Key.” For many years, Dell had been nothing if not stable, selling more comic books than DC or anyone else during the 1950s, largely with long-running titles. Even in the early ’60s, the Dell/Western alliance was the number one producer of comic books, publishing 377 of the nation’s 1,493 comics in 1960 (DC published 346) and 356 of the 1,508 comics in 1961 (DC published 338). (Thanks to consummate indexer Dan Stevenson for the numbers.)

But by 1962, the combination of slower sales and licensing costs convinced the folks at Dell to “design and produce”—as the indicia put it—their own comics, This led to a convoluted split from Western, which in mid-’62 took several crucial steps, all of which proved critical in leading to many of the most memorable and still fondly remembered comics of the Silver Age. Shortly after the “Old Dell” became the “New Dell,” Western began producing comic books under the Gold Key imprint. Western took the vast majority of the popular licensed titles—Disney, Warner, Hanna-Barbera, MGM, Lantz and others—and immediately reduced the prices of Gold Key comics from 15¢ to 12¢, matching the rest of the industry.

I know first-hand how crucial that economic step was. I was there to buy many of the first Gold Key issues during my freshman year in high school, and one big reason I bought them was the price decrease. It might seem hard to believe in this era of the $2 and $3 comic book, but a two-cent increase was a big deal 40 years ago and a 15¢ price point meant I had dropped most Dell comics from my purchasing list. Gold Key comics also just looked a whole lot better!

They had large, glossy covers with art that often jumped out at you compared to Dell’s new in-house product, which not only seemed less glossy and glittery but just plain cheap—and still sometimes 15¢ for a while after the split, to boot!

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

Western, of course, had by far the better and more experienced comic book production staff in 1962, not to mention most of the more popular titles.

Even the Atlas/Marvel implosion of ’57—during which a distribution fiasco chopped the company’s line from more than 70 titles earlier in the year to eight titles per month beginning with issues dated November, 1957—could rival the Dell/Gold Key chaos of ’62.

Would you believe there were a total of at least 136 different titles published by either or both the “Old Dell,” Gold Key and the “New Dell” in 1962—and that doesn’t count most of the Four-Color series one-shots produced early in the year. And, intriguingly, the total number of issues from the three firms was 348 of the 1,431 comics in 1962 (DC produced 343).

Long-running and short-running titles alike either disappeared forever, or reappeared a few months later under the Gold Key label.

And, remember, in those days the vast majority of comic book readers not only had to haunt several newsstands to be sure of getting all their favorites on a regular basis, but also had no way of knowing whether a title was being dropped or changed.

Many were the titles I read, totally unaware there would never be another issue!

I well remember being utterly baffled and befuddled by these daffy doings from Dell. But I also recall being delighted by some of the handsome, intriguing titles that emerged from Gold Key in the last three months of 1962.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the first Gold Key comic was not Doctor Solar #1 (Oct. ’62), but rather one of the Old Dell’s flagship titles, Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories #264 (Sept. ’62).

How well I remember seeing that issue, with the fancy new Gold Key logo! And, of course, I noticed immediately that it was priced at 12¢. For some reason, by the way, I have no memory of the fact that Dell dropped the price on Comics & Stories to 12¢ for #262 and 263 just before the switch in imprint logos.

Ah, but that was just the beginning of a wonderful Gold Key onslaught! Western Printing produced no fewer than 53 initial Gold Key issues in the months from Oct. ’62 through Feb. ’63—many of them new and many other continued from the “Old Dell.” Several titles lasted only one or two issues—not counting the one-shot movie specials—but many more enjoyed long and glorious runs through the end of the Silver Age. Six of the new Gold Key titles were unqualified successes, lasting from 17 issues (The Phantom, which was continued for many years by other publishers) to 97 issues (the Boris Karloff horror title, which began seven years before the actor’s death after a film career lasting more than five decades and innumerable movies). The other original Gold Key hits were Magnus, Robot Fighter (46 issues including a batch of reprints), Space Family Robinson (36), The Jetsons (36) and Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom (27).

Meanwhile, plenty of longtime Dell standards such as Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Little Lulu, Beetle Bailey, Flintstones, Popeye, Tarzan, Turok and Woody Woodpecker successfully continued along their merry way for many years under the Gold Key imprint.

In contrast, Dell—which abandoned comic books for good in 1973 after 37 consecutive years in the industry—tried numerous new titles but enjoyed success with a relative handful, including Combat (40 issues), Ghost Stories (37), Thirteen Going on Eighteen (29), Alvin (28), Kona (21) and Ponytail (20). The vast majority of New Dell titles ran fewer than 10 issues until the company left the industry.

Although all of these relatively longing Dell titles still have a few fans today, they pale in comparison to the popularity and collectibility of their Gold Key counterparts.

What helped to cause so much of the confusion was that no fewer than 50 of the Dell titles published in the first nine months of ’62 were not continued by either the “New Dell” or Gold Key, or were picked up after breaks of more than a year. This constituted one of the most massive cases of mass comic book failure in the history of the medium.

I vividly recall how disappointed I was when one of my favorite Dell titles, Tweety and Sylvester, seemed to unexpectedly and abruptly disappear forever with #37 (June-Aug. ’62). I loved those characters, both in the comics and the cartoons! Fortunately, the wily bird and the hungry cat returned late in ‘63 for a long Gold Key run— October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

unlike my favorite knockoff versions, DC’s fun-filled Flippity and Flop, who last chased each other in 1960.

I was also dismayed when Beep Beep the Roadrunner seemed to run off the cliff permanently with Dell #14 (Aug.-Oct. ’62).

I searched and searched and searched the stands in vain for the Gold Key transition issue. Little did I know that Beep Beep would not return to running under Gold Key for a full four years.

One of the other great blessings of the shift from Dell to Gold Key—although I’m sure most readers didn’t care much, just us blooming collecting types— was Gold Key’s use of a sensible numbering system.

Who can forget when Dell went to a bizarre (and impossible to remember) eightnumber system early in 1962? We didn’t even realize until years later that the last three numbers were the date of the comic (e.g., 208 meant the comic was dated August 1962).

Even now, many collectors use only those last three numbers to list 1962 Dell issues.

In today’s comic book milieu—when there are dozens of publishers if not the high circulation of days gone by—it might be difficult to realize what an impact the Dell/Gold Key split caused relative to the market as a whole.

Even though the Silver Age is seen as a Golden Era, so to speak, in comic book history, it must be remembered that the field consisted almost entirely of only a few publishers in the early ’60s. After all, Dell and DC accounted for about half the comics published and much more than half of the total sales.

In fact, not many people realize that were were only six publishers of consequence in the 1960-62 period: Dell/Gold Key (both versions), DC, Charlton, Harvey, Archie and Marvel, plus far more minor firms ACG, Gilberton (Classics Illustrated), Prize and Hallden. Dozens of the most popular comic books had circulations far in excess of what we see today—many comics still sold 200,000plus—but they were concentrated in the hands of a few corporate owners and independents were unknown.

Sad to say, Gold Key also suffered an ignominious fate when the imprint became known as Whitman in the early 1980s, then vanishing for good in ’84. Whitman was doomed by distribution problems and the disastrous “comic pack” plan, which continues to haunt collectors trying to complete runs of many titles today.

It’s difficult to comprehend that American icons like Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and Woody Woodpecker are no longer published in the United States. But then, I guess they aren’t really icons to the under-21 generation.

So, if you were not buying comics in the ’60s, check with family members or an older friend. Chances are, if they were paying attention at all, the Dell/Gold Key split was a source of consternation they still remember.

Above and left inset: As with the Disney licensed books, there were other titles which made the transition from Dell to Gold Key, significantly the longrunning comics version of the seminal early ’60s TV science-fiction/fantasy anthology series, The Twilight Zone, hosted by Rod Serling. At left is the second issue published

by Dell (though technically called Four Color #1288); above is Gold Key’s 30th issue. Twilight Zone ©2002 Cayuga Productions, Inc.

A NOTE ON COPYRIGHTS & TRADEMARKS As with some other now-defunct comic book companies, it has been difficult to ascertain who exactly is the current owner of the numerous characters and properties created by Western Publishing, Inc. Some reports tell us that Western changed its name to Golden Books Family Entertainment, Inc., in the ’90s, with the corporation declaring bankruptcy last year upon selling off its holdings to both Random House and DIC Entertainment, Inc. Since our purpose here is historical study and because, of course, we have no wish to become entangled in any ownership issues, we are crediting all Western-created properties as “©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.” unless otherwise indicated (such as Turok, which is ©2002 Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.).

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

15

©2002 Fred Hembeck. Superboy ©2002 DC Comics. The Phantom ©2002 King Features, Inc. Dracula ©2002 Dell Comics. Be sure to see Fred’s weekly strip in The Comic Buyers’ Guide.

Buried Treasure

Unlocking the Mystery Chris Irving digs deep to reveal the curious history of Below: Superb Russ Manning artwork featuring Tarzan. Courtesy of Bob Pollak. Tarzan ©2002 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

by Christopher Irving The Gold Key comic book imprint and its history are firmly rooted in the histories of other companies. Besides their licensed books (most memorably Carl Barks’ work on the classic Uncle Scrooge), Gold Key is best remembered, perhaps, for three distinctive and atypical adventure heroes: A man who gave new meaning to the term “kung fu” grip; a scientist always green around the gills; and a pair of Native Americans lost in a prehistoric land. Although Gold Key proper—as well as two of its memorable trio—didn’t come to life until the 1960s, the imprint’s genesis lies in the development of Dell Publishing, a company that dates back to the 1920s, in the time of the earliest comic books.

“Dell Comics are Good Comics” Dell, a company who would grow to be one of the largest book and magazine publishing houses in American history, was started by George Delacorte as a periodical concern in 1921, specializing in pulp fiction. By the mid-’40s, Delacorte owned more than 200 publications and his impressive comic line (once selling in the range of 300 million copies per year) had become the main supplier for powerhouse magazine distributor American News Company in 1942, when Dell entered the increasingly lucrative paperback book business.

“My father started the company with a partner, a man who worked with the New York Sun,” George’s youngest son Albert Delacorte recalled in a recent interview. “My father was very sociable and he belonged to the

16

newspaper club and played pool with all the editors. He was still a very young man in his twenties. This man, named Johnson, put up $10,000, [George] put up $10,000, and my grandfather put up $10,000. His printing was either partially or entirely on credit and his distribution the same. [The printer and distributor] must have felt that he was an up-and-coming guy, and I suppose they wrote contracts that guaranteed venture capital: If the guy does well, they have a contract that keeps the business with the printer or distribution company. In other words, he can’t go to another company until that contract expires.

“He started with only little unimportant pulp magazines: Famous Stories (just stuff taken out of short story anthologies, an imitation of a very successful magazine called The Golden Book), Cupid’s Diary, Sweetheart Stories, War Stories (tales of World War I, of course), and there were lots more of them.”

Albert believes one of the venture capital partners in his father’s initial deal was American News Company, the distributor whose downfall in 1957 would adversely effect the magazine industry (significantly Martin Goodman’s Marvel imprint (then called Atlas Comics), leading that comics house to strike up a hobbling distribution deal with its’ nearest competitor, DC Comics). “In those days, my father did everything,” Albert continued. “He was his own circulation department, he sold advertising, and appeared on radio with his editors who were all women; they would dramatize the stories, and he’d be the male part. They would carry on these love stories in dialogue in a small radio program.

“I can recall the only person he had helping him was an AfricanAmerican who was very able and wrote operas. His name was Valdo Freeman. I remember going down to a bindery, and seeing Valdo and my father trim magazines; it was one of these huge things where you pulled a lever down, and you’d see chips of this cheap newsprint paper flying all over the floor. The magazine was relatively trimmed.”

Witness at the Creation Amongst the relevant publishing landmarks George Delacorte is associated is the 1929 debut of The Funnies, the first collection of allnew original comic strip material in periodical form and thus regarded as the first so-called “Platinum Age” comic book. The format of the weekly Funnies was the same size as a Sunday comics newspaper tabloid supplement section until #5, and the odd size is most likely what contributed to the title’s initial failure, as it was often mistaken for—naturally—leftover Sunday comics supplements. (From a historical perspective, The Funnies featured the work of Victoria Pazmino, the first published female comic book artist.) Even reducing the 10¢ cover price to a mere 5¢ with #25 didn’t save the title, and publication ceased with #36, cover dated October 1930.

After a few more hits and misses on the comic book newsstand, Dell released Popular Comics in February 1936 in the by-then-standard comic book format. What ensured Popular’s success was the newspaper comic strips reprinted within its covers: Chicago Tribune Syndicate’s Dick Tracy, The Gumps, Gasoline Alley, and numerous others. Within the year, Dell would release a revived Funnies comic book as well as The Comics, both being reprint titles. All three comics were packaged by the legendary M.C. “Max” Gaines, who would later help launch All-American Comics with DC, and the pioneer who founded Educational (later COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

of Gold Key Comics Western Publishing’s hugely successful comic book line renamed Entertaining) Comics—the mythical EC Comics of the 1950s.

Dell would become more of a contender on the newsstand in 1938, when another publisher engaged in producing printed material for children, Western Publishing and Lithograph Company, came into partnership with Dell as the packager of licensed comic books. Before we continue chronologically, we need to take a look at the background of Western, the publisher who would create the Gold Key Comics imprint.

The Big Little Company In 1907, Racine, Wisconsin’s West Side Printing Company, was purchased by former employee Edward Henry Wadewitz with help from his brother Al for $2,504. By 1910, the printing house changed its name to Western Printing and Lithographing Co., after buying its first lithographic press. Three years later, Western acquired the Hamming-Whitman Publishing Co. of Chicago, creating the subsidiary Whitman Publishing Company. By the end of the decade, the publisher produced its first 10¢ children’s book and successfully distributed the new line to Woolworth’s and other “five-&-dime” department stores.

Whitman published the first Big Little Book in 1932, The Adventures of Dick Tracy, featuring Chicago’s renowned comic strip crimefighter. Within a year, the publisher scored its most lucrative deal by signing a contract with Walt Disney, obtaining exclusive licensing rights to Mickey Mouse and all of Disney’s characters. The first Disney Big Little Book is published shortly after, reprinting Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse syndicated newspaper strips.

According to an essay on <biglittlebooks.com>, “In 1918, the company received its first printing order from a retail firm, S.S. Kressage Company, a major five-&-dime chain. The order was for dozens of children's books. A foreman working on the order confused the ‘dozens’ to mean ‘gross’ quantities, and twelve times the correct number of titles were printed. There were too many for S. S. Kressage to use, thus Whitman was faced with the decision of whether to write off the error or to try to sell the books. The decision to sell was made

by Western's Sam Lowe. He persuaded F. W. Woolworth Company and other retail chain stores to experiment with the books by placing them on display year-round. The public's response led to long-term contracts and Western went into the development of materials designed for such a market. Lowe convinced Western to start a new 10¢ book line. The immediate success of low-priced books prompted Western to establish a separate Whitman book division for the purpose of developing such items for market. Sam Lowe was made president of the new division—the Whitman Publishing Company.

“With connections to chain stores, Whitman's production began to extend beyond books. A box department was added to the firm in the early 1920s, thus bringing about the development of boxed games and jigsaw puzzles.

“In 1932, Sam Lowe created a special book that would be bulky but small so that it could be easily handled and read by a young consumer. He made up three samples using cover and paper stock that would be used in the printing. He had the art department do black-&-white drawings and insert keyline text so that the dummy samples would serve as prototypes. Taking the prototypes to New October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

York, he presented them as a 10¢ retail item, packed one dozen per title in a shipping carton.

Retail buyers were intrigued with the concept and were particularly impressed with the titles. Lowe returned to Racine with more than 25,000 books pre-ordered.… All had hardboard covers and paper spines. They were called Big Little Books®. Rapid sales of the books through the five-&-dime chains led to the quick creation of other titles and a planned production of comic character, radio character, motion picture themes, and in-house pulp-type western, adventure, and crime stories.

The books were produced at a rate of about six titles per month. This was the Golden Age of BLBs.” In 1934, Western buys a Poughkeepsie, New York printing plant, and soon the company begins printing books and magazines for such major American outfits as Simon and Schuster, Grosset and Dunlap, and significantly, Dell Publishing.

Mickey Mouse Magazine #1 is published in 1935 by

Inset left: The distinctive Gold Key Comics logo. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Below: Previously unpublished presentation drawing of Dagar the Invincible by Jesse Santos. Courtesy of the artist and Don Glut.

Art ©2002 Jesse Santos.

Dagar ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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All the Disney and the three or four big cartoon companies [e.g., Warner Brothers, MGM, etc.]. It was almost like one company as far as the editorial work was concerned. Even though I was the editor of [Dell’s] Modern Screen, which was a movie magazine, we were so close to them that I knew all the executives.”

“I know that we worked together on this licensing,” Holeywell explained. “It wasn’t that ‘That was Western’s problem.’ Western Printing invested heavily in the machinery and equipment to print [Dell’s publications]. Western were printers, and the creativity was something they got on the outside, and [the creatives] were expendable, apparently. With Western, it was machinery [that was important], but the people were something else. What Western was interested in was feeding the maw of these hungry presses, and whatever we put on them was of little consequence as long as they were working. The client, in this case, was Dell.”

Right-Hand Woman

Above: A major growth sign was the 1929 move to the new main plant in Racine, Wisconsin. Photo and info from Steve Santi’s Collecting Little Golden Books, Third Edition, Iola, WI: Krause, 1998. Courtesy of Ina Cooke and Mom & Pop’s Book Shop.

Right inset: In 1910, West Side Printing Company changed its name to Western Printing and Lithography and moved to this Racine, Wisconsin location. Photo and info from Steve Santi’s Collecting Little Golden Books, Third Edition, Iola, WI: Krause, 1998. Courtesy of Ina Cooke and Mom & Pop’s Book Shop.

K.K. Publications, a Western imprint (“K.K.” standing for Disney merchandising magnate Kay Kamen, who handled the account since 1933). Initially edited by Hal Horne, later by Alice Nielsen Cobb for Kamen, the monthly magazine is distributed by Dell. In 1939, Kamen departs and the magazine is retired, then reborn as a proper four-color comic book (in need of new, non-reprint material) called Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, a title suggested by editor Eleanor Packer.

Contrary to popular belief, Dell did not produce the comics; they contracted and distributed them. All editorial and production, from conception to printing, was done through Western. Where Dell profited through their distribution of the Western-produced comics involving high license fees, Western also benefited from their partner’s relationship with American News Company, then the nation’s largest newsstand distributor.

By the 1940s, Dell’s paperback branch benefited from a surplus of wartime paper Western had stockpiled, material that was becoming more and more scarce to private industry during those days of wartime rationing.

So Happy Together Below: Western’s business started in 1907 in this basement print shop, which consisted of not much more than two battered presses, a few fonts of one type, and a hand-powered cutting machine.

Photo and info from Steve Santi’s Collecting Little Golden Books, Third Edition, Iola, WI: Krause, 1998. Courtesy of Ina Cooke and Mom & Pop’s Book Shop.

18

“Whoever franchised the properties had to see it before we went ahead and printed it, since they were clients and had the franchise for the properties,” Arnold Holeywell, assistant to Western art director Ed Marine, said.

“They’d take the printing bills, and that’s what it was all about: Western making money printing. In order to keep the printing presses going, we wanted to keep the client happy and the business for printing purposes.” “[Western] had their office in Poughkeepsie when I was [at Dell],” Albert Delacorte said. “Later they had their own building called the Western Publishing Building on Boulevard and Third Avenue, in the Thirties to Fifties in Manhattan, [where] they had the editorial offices. [Dell and Western] worked together as if we were one company. There were constant conferences and lunch dates, and visits to Poughkeepsie, discussing new titles, helping each other beat the competition. We had virtually a monopoly on all the characters that were franchised:

George Delacorte was the president of Dell, but according to his son, the entrepreneur was able to semi-retire by the time he reached his mid-forties. “I guess he was a rather intimidating boss,” his son surmised. “He had a way of calling people by their last name. It puts you in your place when someone calls you ‘Smith.’ He was a very agreeable father, and terribly strong. He couldn’t resist strong women: He had one at home, my mother, and he had one at the office, who was Mrs. [Helen] Meyer, who became the president of the company in about 1960. He would always clear everything with her. He frequently promised me a certain row, and then would clear it with her.

When my brother and I were younger, he was really wonderful, tossing the football and helping us with our homework. We had a very close relationship.

“I wouldn’t say that he abused his power, but I remember him once saying to me, ‘Now, Albert: Every now and then, you have to say no to people. Even if you know they’re right, you do it to assert your authority, because you can’t always say yes.’

“He had an interesting philosophy from when he started the company in the 1920s,” Albert continued. “He hired mostly women, not because he was a feminist, but because he could pay them 60 or 50% of what the men would get. He reserved jobs for men, mostly in the advertising and circulation department.” George Delacorte had little directly to do with the Dell Comics line, most of that was left in the hands of his right-hand woman, Helen Meyer.

The president would retire in 1960 and pursue philanthropy (donating, for instance, the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in New York City’s Central Park, as well as a theater and magazine journalism school to Columbia University), leaving Meyer to assume his post.

Helen Meyer had first come to work for Dell as a teenager. “She was a very impressive figure, but a terribly hard bargainer,” Albert Delacorte said. “People really hated her; the people who worked for her, she was anathema to. If people asked for a raise, she’d look at them coldly and ask, ‘What do you think you’re worth?’ That would freeze most people. For example, breaking away from American News and breaking away from Western, she was a vicious bargainer who would act like she didn’t understand what you were saying.

“She was hard and tough, and pretty as a picture, but if you told some people what I’m saying now, they’d say, ‘Come on! She’s the nicest person I’ve ever met!’ Like everybody else, she was two or three different people. I remember once, there was a minor executive who died. She went up to his house and cooked a meal for his griefstricken widow, and spent all sorts of time comforting this widow and sharing some real sympathy, which we have to presume was genuine.

Then she could be hard as a tack, and steely and nasty.”

According to East Coast Gold Key editor Matt Murphy in his COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

autobiography MYBIO: The Life of Matthew Hilt Murphy, Meyer was a rough customer for Western to deal with: “Despite her reputation for being tough in the business, I found she could be thoughtful and kind.

Still, when Helen Meyer went on a rampage with Western, the ground shook from Poughkeepsie to Racine and sometimes as far as our Los Angeles office. Whenever Western executives went to call on Helen Meyer, they approached her as though they were walking on eggs.

H.M. Benstead, who was top dog at Western, said, ‘Helen is as mean as cat piss!’

“Years later, when it became the fashion to call in a management study group, Dell followed Western’s lead and hired an outside company to examine the way Dell operated. It was reported to Helen that she was a roadblock to the efficiency of the company because everything that was decided had to be approved by her. They suggested that she reorganize Dell and delegate some of her authority to others. Mrs. Meyer immediately fired the management study group and resumed operations in her normal way.”

“She was a very pleasant, dynamic woman, business-like, and had a real marketing sense and knew what she liked,” Arnold Holeywell said. “Helen Meyer was the client, basically, because she represented George Delacorte. He was the boss of the whole thing, and Western, being the creative service, or the newsstand division of Dell, had to submit things to Helen. Helen would say either ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it.’ Helen’s big thing was ‘I don’t like it.’”

Albert Delacorte would leave his father’s company upon Meyer’s appointment as president in 1960, since he saw “no future” in the company, perhaps having hopes to inherit management of the company from his father.

The Dell/Western comic book line would prove to be the most successful throughout the 1950s, with titles meeting the axe of cancellation if they did not sell more than 600,000 copies. (Today’s comic books would be lucky to reach a fraction of that sales mark.)

In the City of Angels Western had two creative branches, one on each American coast: a Los Angeles office based in Beverly Hills and one in downtown New York City. Comic books featuring licensed Disney characters were produced in the California office, as were titles with TV and film properties, due to the company’s proximity to that mecca of American entertainment, Hollywood, where resided the major film studios.

Besides the animated cartoon character titles, a few titles of the many comics produced by Western’s L.A. office were Tarzan of the Apes, Magnus Robot Fighter, Space Family Robinson, The Jungle Twins, and most of the motion picture adaptations. According to former editor Zetta DeVoe, they averaged twenty titles a month, plus March of Comics (a sales premium Western produced, using their licensed characters, sold to retail stores to use as giveaways for promotional purposes). Writer and comics historian Mark Evanier (himself a scribe of many of Western’s cartoon titles) reports that some issues of March of Comics were produced in excess of five million copies.

“It was three stories,” editor Bob Cavanaugh recalled of the Los Angeles Western office. “They were also producing Golden Books for Western Printing and Litho. One floor was editorial, where we were buying the stuff and editing. The guy next to me was handling all the business stuff. Up on the third floor, they had a group of artists who did the titles and any corrections we had to make on illustrations.

They did it twice-size on the pages and, if anyone needed corrections, they did it there. Downstairs was all commercial: They were doing 24-sheet billboards, puzzles for and Golden Books themselves.”

Artist Sparky Moore started working for Western, but eventually found himself producing artwork for Disney. “It had been an art gallery, and the rooms and all were better than average cubicles,” October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

Moore said of the Beverly Hills digs.

“They did have a bullpen where Wes Bennett did his miraculous work of changing your art that you brought in from looking half-decent to something that was unrecognizable! He had a fetish about hats. For some reason, he liked to change hats.

We did a lot of Westerns with weird hats that he had gotten to. “[Wes Bennett] went on to become one of the art directors, but he was then the clean-up guy,” Moore continued. “Back then, they’d have a guy who would do lettering corrections, or if there is a piece of art they wanted to change, he’d white it out and theoretically redraw it. Usually, they weren’t up to the standards of the original artists. Sometimes the corrections were pretty glaring.

That’s what Wes did. He was a huge man. With today deploring obesity, he was into the obesity end.

I remember one day, I was almost not able to stay in the room. I brought my work in and laid it down for him to look at. He reached down and opened his desk drawer, pulled out a bowl of corn flakes with milk, that had obviously been sitting there all morning. He’d eat while looking at your work, and he’d dribble a few drops on your page. He didn’t last too long at that, and he went on to other things. I ran across him later. He had a love of comics, but not enough talent.”

“I was still in school and was studying art, and I started writing a few things in my last year,” Cavanaugh remembered. “That had to be 1953, and I freelanced, writing a lot of Red Ryder stories, that type of thing. Then I went to the army for three years and, when I came back, I freelanced for a year, writing feature pages for all the Western [genre titles], and I also wrote some of the stories for books like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. That was in 1956 and I worked there for a year. Then I went on staff as a Western editor, and I worked under Chase Craig, and a gal named Zetta DeVoe. We were all editors. We bought the stories, and were doing all the major TV shows, and then added the art. It also went to our art director, Chuck McKimson.”

According to a rough timeline compiled by Robin Snyder in his newsletter The Comics, the earliest editors in the Los Angeles office included Kellogg Adams from 1952 to ’57, Alice Cobb, Del Connell, Chase Craig from 1950 to ’75, Jean Klinordlinger from 1954 to ’62, and Zetta DeVoe, who Moore remembers fondly: “Zetta was a lovely gal, and I liked Zetta. I used to bring her rabbits. She was from the South, and they couldn’t get rabbits up here, at least in the market. I had 4-H kids that raised rabbits.

Occasionally, when I’d butcher, I’d bring her a rabbit.

“When you look at Zetta, you might think she was a dumb country hick. You may not want to get sucked in on that because she was pretty sharp. She was not flashy.

She looked like a country woman and had this heavy Southern accent. She was pretty sharp about what she knew and had been at it for 50 years in one capacity or another.

Inset left: Western struck gold with the early 1930s release of their successful “Big Little Books” line.

Captain Midnight ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Ye Ed and Chris Irving would like to acknowledge that information in this article was gathered from a good many sources, including firsthand interviews, and we would especially like to express our appreciation to Don Markstein's Toonopedia™ Home Page, Antony J. L. Bedard, Mark Evanier, solarguard.com, turok.com, biglittlebooks.com, randomhouse.com, dicentertainment.com, and Steve Santi’s book, Collecting Little Golden Books (Third Edition, Iola, WI: Krause, 1998).

Below: Another hugely popular venture into children’s publishing was Western’s Little Golden Books imprint (with Ye Ed’s absolute fave being their sixth release, The Poky Little Puppy).

Courtesy of Ina Cooke and Mom & Pop’s Book Shop. ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

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“I got along great with Zetta, except when I worked with Western Publishing. You would go for months and they wouldn’t pay you. Being a freelance artist, if you didn’t get paid, you went broke in a hurry. I told her, she grits her teeth, and said, ‘Write that CEO a letter and tell him what you think.’ I wrote, and they fired me!

Western was bold and, after a couple years, they called me and hired me back. That was fine, except they turned around and did the same damned thing. I wrote them another letter and said, ‘This time I’m not going to give you another chance to fire me. I quit!’ I never worked with them since.”

License to Thrill

Below: Reproduced from a Brazilian comic book, this Jesse Marsh pin-up of the Jungle King expertly shows the artist’s superb approach. Courtesy of Toni Rodrigues. Tarzan ©2002 ERB, Inc.

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Since Western handled all of the packaging and licenses for Dell, artists and editors had to often work hand-in-hand with the licensors.

Sparky Moore recalled his path from Western to Disney artist: “The very first job I got a salary for in my life was for taking care of horses.

Naturally, when I started to draw, I drew what I was familiar with, so a lot of my drawings were of horses and cowboys. There was a magazine out called Western Horseman, and it is still in existence today, it’s the oldest horse magazine in the country. There was a little ad in the back that said, ‘Artists wanted for cowboys and Indians.’ I fumbled together the few drawings that I had, sent it in, and a man named Tom McKimson, the art director at Western Publishing, called me. I went in and started doing comic books. Later on—I’m sure you’ve heard of Chase Craig—he had been dealing with somebody over at Disney named George Woolf, I believe. I was doing Zorro for the European market, and he’d be on the phone with Woolf every day for four or five times a day. Woolf was at his wit’s end, and finally said, ‘Send the damn artist over here and I’ll give him the damn script.’ I went over and Woolf said, ‘If I give you the script, can you

draw it, deliver it the next week, and stop bothering me?’ From there, I started to work directly for Disney.”

Another artist who had an interesting arrangement was Tom Gill, who drew The Lone Ranger for 20 years and worked out of the New York City office. “When my publisher, Dell Comics/Western Publishing found out that I could draw horses, and had a chance to see the [previous] Gene Autry strips that I’d done, they started to get me to do more Westerns,” Gill recalled. “All of a sudden, one day, George Trendle, who owned The Lone Ranger, said that he didn’t like how they would take the daily strip, cut it up and try to make a comic book out of it. He didn’t think it worked, and I had to agree with him. So he told the Dell people that they had to find somebody who could do original pages for the comic books. It was then that they got me to do it. When we started it, they said, ‘This is pretty good, it ought to go for a year or two.’ What happened is that it went for 20 years, from 1950 to 1970.”

Picture Perfect Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Dell/Western licensed comics was the photo covers, featuring still-shots of the characters the books were licensed on, such as Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger, comedienne Lucille Ball, and even cowboy star Roy Rogers.

Bob Cavanaugh revealed the truth behind the covers which many would assume were taken from studio publicity stills: “We started taking Ektachrome pictures for our covers, and I got that job,” Cavanaugh said. “I had to rent the location and go to Western Costuming and get the costuming for the heroes. We had a photographer that I had to arrange for. Like when we did Rin Tin Tin, with the kid Rusty, we had to make arrangements to have the kid and his tutor there, and the dog handler had to be there. They had a dog named Flame, Jr. He was a great dog, by the way. There was a huge location in Corriganville, where they had a Spanish village, a lake called Sherwood Forest, a Western town, and they had a fort named Fort Apache… We’d get down to Baldwin’s Arboretum, down by San Andina, where there were jungle plants they’d brought in, and we’d shoot covers there.”

In shooting the covers, Cavanaugh would have to follow a strenuous shooting schedule and, at times, was even called on to play the “heavy” to save on having to hire someone on union scale.

“We’d go out and would shoot about 30 covers,” Cavanaugh explained. “What we did, by Hollywood jargon, was shoot ‘up the hill.’ We got there early in the morning so that the sun was low and we could get shots under the cowboy hats. As the day went on, we’d keep moving up the hill [as the sun went up] to keep the shadows off the faces. It was fun but a lot of work. I’d get up at four in the morning and check the weather report, and see if it was going to be a good day to shoot. I had to coordinate everybody and get everybody there. We’d have to take all these people off to lunch afterwards, if they wanted to go. We did a shooting with Roy Rogers until 1:30 P.M., and had been out there since dawn. We asked, ‘Want to get some lunch, Roy?’ He said, ‘No, I’ve got some plowing to do.’ I wondered what he meant by that. We were driving back in later that day (he lived out that way where we were shooting), and he was on a little Ford tractor, plowing the field!”

Like any average comic book studio, Western was apparently populated by colorful characters. “Hi Mankin had an eyepatch and was an extremely funny man,” Sparky Moore fondly reminisced.

“He drew beautifully, and he loved to draw girls. He’d start a job and draw all the girls first, and then do the rest. Hi was always late, and it never made a difference what the deadline was; he was always late.

At one point, they sent Jack Taylor to his house to get the work, and Hi chased him with a butcher knife!” Moore laughed. “Even then, we thought all this was pretty funny. Jack had a chance to get some exercise because of Hi’s work. Hi, later on, worked at the studios. Hi had two automobiles: one was a Cadillac, and one was an old Ford.

He drove the Cadillac when he was employed, and the Ford when he was unemployed. He always managed to put his foot into anything he was doing, to turn it into a fiasco. The first day he got a job at Hanna-Barbera, he went and took his Cadillac to a car wash because it’d been sitting a while. As it went through the car wash, the water hitting the car somehow set off the electrical system, and all the windows rolled down, and his car filled up with bubbles. He got up at the job with the whole back of him all wet.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

“He got into a minor love affair to the point where he decided he would move out one Friday. Every day he would come in and give us a blow-by-blow description of the love affair. He said, ‘I’m going to tell my wife on Saturday that I’m leaving.’ We couldn’t wait until that Monday to hear how it went. He came in and didn’t have anything to say, so finally we couldn’t stand it and said, ‘Well, what did she say, Hi?’ He said, ‘She was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, and I told her, “I’m leaving.” She said, “Oh?” “Yeah, I’m moving out!” She said, “Okay,” and never even looked up from the newspaper!’ She ignored him, so he called the girlfriend and said it was off because something was going on here and he didn’t leave. Poor Hi. Remember when the jogging fad first came in, with President Kennedy?

Poor Hi came back from jogging one day, came back and sat down, and dropped dead. He lived to the end.”

East Side, West Side Western Publishing’s New York office was located in the Toy Building, at 23rd Street, 200 Fifth Avenue, so named because the building also housed toy companies. According to artist Tom Gill, the door read Whitman Publishing Company. “Oscar LeBeck was editor; he seemed to have a bullpen of cartoonists that worked for him,” Gill remembered of the early Western New York office.

“One day, as I walked past the dividing panels of that bullpen, I was bopped on the head by a paper ball. I looked up into the laughing face of Walt Kelly [who would create his timeless comic strip character Pogo while a staffer at Western]. Lebeck retired and was replaced by George Brenner who was followed by Matt Murphy.”

Matt Murphy, one of Western’s most notable editors, joined on in the Summer of 1952, to replace George Brenner, who had recently died of an embolism. Murphy was hired by Dick Small, “a handsome, soft-mannered and well-spoken gentleman,” according to Murphy.

“The people were so nice up there, and it was so easy to get along with everybody,” artist Frank Bolle said. “There was Bill Harris, Matt Murphy, Paul Kuhn and Wally Green; they were the editors I dealt with and got along great with. I’d go in one week, have pencils ready, they’d give me a script, I’d be back the next week with a new seven pages, penciled, and they’d give me the lettered stuff back to ink. It was a regular routine. I lived in Forest Hills at the time, and I was only 20 minutes away on the subway. It was great working for them, and they were so nice.”

“The building had eighteen floors,” recalled Bolle, who now draws the Apartment 3-G comic strip. “The first time I went there, I walked into the building, there was a beautiful lobby with marble floors, statues, and black marble walls. I went to the elevator, and I was looking around at this beautiful elevator with carpeted floors. I pushed the number 18; they didn’t have buttons, they had those brand new squares that you’d touch and then light them. I’m looking at the squares and they’re dusty. I thought to myself, ‘My God, here’s this beautiful building and they’ve got dusty buttons in this elevator!’ As people are walking in, I’m dusting off these buttons, and they’re all lighting up. They’re all looking at me like I’m strange, and I realized that I was pushing all the buttons and they weren’t dusty, they were frosted glass! They’re standing there looking at me as we’re stopping at every floor. If I were a coward, I’d get off on the second floor, but I was brave and stayed.”

“Once I began producing comics at Western,” editor Murphy wrote, “I realized with dismay that management regarded them with disdain. They were considered barely respectable publications for children who had no taste for ‘real’ books. Yet comics was the locomotive that pulled the newsstand ‘train’ year after year. Despite the favored position, paperbacks in their best year never brought in as much money as the comics. Dell books brought in about $8,000,000 of Western’s business, at a time when comics brought in about $12,000,000.

Later the figures became $18,000,000 for comics and $12,000,000 October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

for paperback books.”

In July 1962, Murphy was named executive editor and vice president of K.K. Publications, the newsstand division started over 20 years earlier by Kay Kamen. As VP, Murphy was in charge of evaluating potential properties for Western to license for the Dell Comics line. The benefit of having such recognizable licenses as the Disney characters came with a price, according to Murphy in a letter to Robin Snyder’s The Comics: “All of the art created for licensed comics was burned by Western according to the licensing agreement. The policy was instituted at a corporate level so that the artwork could never fall into unauthorized hands. Licensors would never want to try to protect the copyright if the pages were to be reprinted by publishers or merchandisers. Use of the art could not be controlled by licensors if there were thousands of pages outstanding. Western felt the same way about any characters I created, such as Turok and Doctor Solar, for their publications.”

Inset left: The formidable Dell Comics logo from their 1950s titles. ©2002 Dell Publishing.

Following spread: Just to give you an idea of the breadth of cover painting art gracing the Turok, Son of Stone title, here’s a thumbnail look at the first 84 issues (of 130).

Turok ©2002 Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.

Below: Another Jesse Marsh Tarzan pin-up reproduced from a Brazilian comic book. Courtesy of Toni Rodrigues. Tarzan ©2002 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Hunting Honkers While Western would thrive on licensed comics, they did have a relatively successful original character, who would later outlive both its original publishers, Dell and Western: Turok, Son of Stone premiered in December 1954’s Four Color #596. Turok followed the exploits of two pre-Columbian Native Americans, Andar and Turok, in their attempts at escaping the seemingly inescapable Lost Valley,

21

Above: The first few Doctor Solar covers featured knock-out work by noted science-fiction paperback cover painter Richard Powers.

Here’s #3. Below: The good doctor in repose, reprinted from a Brazilian comic courtesy of Toni Rodrigues. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

which was populated by dinosaurs (called “honkers” by the pair). While Turok may have been created by editor Matt Murphy, the writer on the first issue remains debatable (perhaps prolific scripter Gaylord Du Bois?). One aspect is certain: The art was by Tarzan renderer Rex Maxon. Upon writing Turok #8, the unbelievably productive comics writer Paul S. Newman would start a 26-year writing streak on the misplaced characters. Within a year of his debut, Turok appeared in another issue of Four Color, and was soon given a quarterly comic book, dated March-May 1956.

Newman wrote the majority of the stories, while Italian artist Alberto Giolitti took the art chores over on what was to become a bi-monthly title.

According to the late writer’s wife, Carol, Giolitti used his young son Gino as a model for Turok.

“I have a very nice story about Giolitti,” Carol revealed.

“Paul always admired this man’s work and, of course, wanted to get in touch with him again when Jim Shooter proposed the new, all-encompassing issue on Turok. Paul managed to find Giolitti, who lived in Italy most of his life.

We wrote to Rome, where Alberto Giolitti was living. Giolitti wrote him back and said, ‘Are you living in Columbia, Maryland?’ Paul was very excited, because Giolitti’s son lives nearby and owns two restaurants. We got in touch with Gino Giolitti, and became very good friends with him. When Paul wrote back to the father, to say, ‘I’ve contacted your son,’ Alberto had passed away. He’d never read the letter from Paul saying, ‘We’ve met your son, we love each other, and have become very good friends. Giolitti had two little granddaughters.

“Gino tells marvelous stories of his father the illustrator, and how he modeled for Turok… and [how Alberto’s] dinosaurs are all accurate, and the research on his dinosaurs was superb. Paul said that Giolitti had the genius and, when Paul gave him the script, Giolitti always knew how to lay it out, Paul wouldn’t have to tell him. There was always an enhancement when he would give some action Paul hadn’t indicated and Paul was thrilled with that.”

Newman’s Own Paul S. Newman, who was declared to be the “Most Prolific Comic Book Writer” in the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records, wrote over 4,100 comic book scripts, many for Western Publishing’s material for the Dell and Gold Key lines. Newman wrote The Lone Ranger for Dell/Western for 24 years, which came in second to his 26-year run on Turok, Son of Stone. His other work for Dell/Western/ Gold Key included Doctor Solar, Zorro, I 24

Love Lucy, and Indian Chief, not to mention innumerable television and film comic book adaptations.

“I think that he was loyal to his craft and when he had an assignment, he gave it his all,” Carol reflected. “Paul worked alone, he was at his desk. But I would say, judging from the people with whom he worked, I would guess he had integrity as a writer. I don’t know if there was any one publishing house he felt loyal to.”

“When your announcement with the totals came in,” Paul S. Newman wrote to Robin Snyder’s The Comics in 1993, “I muttered to myself ‘My God, Did I write all that?’ The truly astonishing thing isn’t that I wrote 4,016 stories, but that having another 5,000 story ideas rejected didn’t lead me to suicide.”

“Paul was a very practical fellow, also,” Carol added. “He wasn’t going to knock himself out and go all the way downtown.

He’d go from one publisher to another as long as they were within five to ten blocks of one another. He was in Connecticut and would get out at Grand Central Station and just walk in that neighborhood.

He was very direct, and he just kept gnawing at people until he got work. He never worked in the office with the publisher, that I know.

“Paul was exceedingly resilient. Paul was an independent, he never had anything to do with the artists who drew his scripts. His dream was to be a playwright, and he picked up the comic book business as a source for steady income. He found a great facility in it, and it was steady money and good money. He had many plays optioned for Broadway, and he had several screenplays optioned, also.”

In order for a book to be approved by Dell for publication, a mock-up needed to be made in the offices for presentation to company president Helen Meyer. “When I worked there,” Albert Honeywell said, “I was the staff illustrator, and I would work on preliminary studies and sketches which we would then show Helen and, if she said she liked it, we would then find an outside freelance artist to go do the rendering, and then we’d take it back to show Helen. We [did] all our work when I was in New York, and all the comic work was done in Poughkeepsie. When I worked there, we were in downtown New York City, 200 Fifth Avenue, and then we moved up to Madison Avenue in 48th Street, in a nice new building.

It was a very happy place, business was booming and was a very pleasant part of my life.”

Living outside the Code Dell trumpeted themselves as “good comics” for parents concerned that funny books would become fodder for delinquent children. In the Western genre comics, for instance, guns could not be shown directly fired at another character; the result was that a character would fire off-panel in one panel, while the next would be the result of his aim (usually a gun harmlessly being shot out of a villain’s hand by a glancing shot). When the Comics Code was implemented in the mid-1950s, Dell was able to avoid the branding, perhaps through a combination of influence and mild, inoffensive comics.

Dell Comics was present at the “Kefauver hearings” (so named for the 1954 Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, headed by U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver), which questioned any corrupting influence by comic books on America’s youth, in the guises of Dell president Helen Meyer and Western editor Matt Murphy, who both gave testimony on April 22, 1954. Meyer cited that Dell Comics sold on average 800,000 copies as compared to most horror and crime comics which moved 250,000; that Dell constituted 11 of the 25 top-selling magazines on the newsstand.

“Actually we exploited and profited by it,” Albert Delacorte said of the Kefauver hearings and the Comics Code. “We lifted our skirts and said ‘We have nothing to do with that filth.’ We were an entirely different cat.”

Collapse of the American Empire Until the mid-’50s, American News was the major distributor of magazines and other newsstand periodicals in the nation. American, at a time, was so powerful that they could force clients to only distribute at American-approved newsstands on both national and local levels. According to Albert Delacorte, it is highly likely that American News was one of the companies that took an interest in George Delacorte’s newborn company in the 1920s, and invested money for reasons of venture capital (where Dell was locked into a contract for so many years in exchange for the initial financial COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

Left and right: Doctor Solar cover roughs. We believe Scotty Moore shared this with us but could be wrong. Can anyone identify the artist? Doctor Solar ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc. Below: Detail of George Wilson’s cover painting on an issue of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

support); however, documentation of this has yet to be found. The split between Dell and American News (with or without the possible venture capital contract) was a huge nail in American News’ collective coffin. American News’ sales were declining by 1954 at a loss of $13 million for the year, although they experienced a stock value increase for a brief time in 1955. According to an article in a 1955 issue of Saturday Review, it was possible that an outside interest—later whispered by some to be organized crime—was trying to take over the distributor by acquiring concentrated amounts of stock quickly. In a statement by then-president of American News, Percy O’Connell, business had “improved during the last months of 1954, and the trend continued through the first quarter of 1955,” and that he was confident the then-current management would stay. Despite O’Connell’s confidence, business continued to plunge. By April 1955, it was revealed that the trend of improvement was actually a loss of $113,955. The following June, Time, Incorporated pulled its stellar line of magazines—Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated—from American and contracted with competing distributor Select Magazine News for exclusive distribution. Stockholder Henry Garfinkle became president of American News by late June 1955, replacing O’Connell and hoping to repair any damage done by the previous management, and compensate for the loss of an estimated drop to 40% of magazine business. A mere few weeks after his appointment, Garfinkle announced that American would revise their policy to allow clients to handle local distribution on their own, in an attempt to keep the existing clients they had. Other clients followed Time, Inc.’s defection to Select Magazine News, causing that distributor to grow to a size that rivaled American. The downward spiral upon which American was riding would eventually deliver a crushing blow to the comic book industry, and resulted in many publishers switching over to other distributors.

Albert Delacorte described a meeting between Garfinkle and Dell Publishing: “This story was told to me: They were sitting in my father’s office, and [Garfinkle], the last president of American News, had some papers.

All of a sudden, Helen Meyer jumped up, grabbed the papers from his grasp and said, ‘You can’t keep secrets from us!’”

By May 1957, American News had lost clients such as Newsweek, The New Yorker, Vogue, Glamour, Better Homes and Gardens, Collier’s, and all of the Ziff-Davis Publications. Popular Mechanics and Dell Publishing both went independent. In the previous month, Dell not only took away their comic books and magazines, but also their highly successful paperback line. According to the May 25, 1957 issue of Business Week, Dell’s loss “took away a major part of American News Company’s magazine volume.” While American only October 2002

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Above: Courtesy of Gregg Hazen, here’s an unpublished Magnus, Robot Fighter panel by Russ manning. Art ©2002 the Estate of Russ Manning. Magnus ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc. Below and opposite page: Artist Russ Manning submitted a number of concept presentations to Gold Key editor Chase Craig before the green light was given on Magnus, Robot Fighter. Note on the image below that Russ did originally intend his hero to have red—not white— boots. Courtesy of R. Robert Pollak. Art ©2002 the Estate of Russ Manning. Magnus ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

closed their newsstand distribution wing, that comprised 250 of their 300 branches, with the remaining 50 kept for merchandise distribution. It was speculated that American could still thrive through subsidiary company Union News, and could experience a burst of profit through sale of everything from delivery trucks to real estate.

Interestingly enough, while American News was declining, Western Printing was on the uprise, becoming the 486th largest company in sales and volume in the U.S., and now had roughly 3,432 employees with a return on invested capital of 6.4%, a return that earned Western the 184th position in the Fortune 500 list.

Breaking Up Ain’t So Hard to Do The downfall of both Dell and Western’s relationship came in 1962, when Dell apparently took their commercial success for granted. Late that previous year, most comic book publishers had raised cover prices from a thin dime to 12¢. Since Dell had been selling 25¢ giants, and 15¢ expanded issues of Uncle Scrooge, a decision was made by the publisher to raise the cover price of the entire comic book line a whopping 50%, to 15¢, despite protests from Western. Apparently the kid readers thought Dell Comics weren’t that good, as the price increase failed, hurting sales and the companies’ relationship, and causing both to part ways, severing a 25+ year partnership.

“When we were breaking with Western, one of their executives had the Dell account, and left the briefcase in [Helen Meyer’s] office,” Albert Delacorte said. “She immediately sent it to the art department and had [the briefcase’s contents] all copied. She called him up and said, ‘Did you leave, your briefcase? I’ll send it all over.’ Meanwhile, 26

my father had a complete file of prices and so forth and more negotiating materials. It’s like having a good hand in poker: You don’t show it until you’re ready to play [your hand]. That was the sort of information he had.” The new Western comics imprint was christened Gold Key, continuing the precious metal brand motif used, for instance, on their successful Golden Books line. The “new” comics house would produce many a series of titles with the same level of quality as they had under the Dell imprint, but minus their former contractor’s awesome distribution; and conversely, while Dell Comics may have made it onto more newsstands, their books lacked that Western panache.

It has been claimed that Western lost the benefit of American News’ distribution, but this seems unlikely since, according to a 1957 Business Week article, Dell became an independent distributor that year. Dell’s decline in the comic book arena allowed National Periodical Publications (DC Comics) to fill the void left behind.

Dell Comics are Dull Comics Dell vainly tried to regain some of its former comic book glory by relying on some licensed characters and by producing original comic characters. Debuting heroes like Nukla, as well as a super-powered trio of copyright-free monsters—Dracula, Werewolf, and Frankenstein—and the results are considered painful from both a critical and doubtlessly a business perspective. Among other original concepts tested by Dell was Brain Boy, a super-hero who first came to life under the capable—if rushed—hand of the late artist legend Gil Kane in Four Color #1330. Frank Springer, who would draw subsequent issues, said recently, “Through a chance meeting on the street, I heard that I should go up to Dell and see what they had. I went up there. I think it was Lenny Cole who picked a script off a pile of scripts and handed it to me, and it was Brain Boy.” [Look for a full-length Frank Springer interview in CBA #24, the Comics of National Lampoon ish!—Ye Ed.] Upon getting the assignment from Dell’s 745 Third Avenue office, Springer would stay with the assignment from #2 to the final issue, #6. Brain Boy would be indicative of some other Dell titles: Short-lived, though on some long-staying books, such as Ghost Stories, artist Springer would remain a perennial contributor.

According to Albert Delacorte, the imprint’s struggles may have been due to the lack of familiar licensed characters Western had retained; another very likely reason was the 15¢ cover price on some of the Dell books, versus the 12¢ cover prices on the average comic book. Also, editorially speaking, Brain Boy and some other Dell books had an odd layout: One-page stories would appear on the inside and back covers. Among their other titles were Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Outer Limits, Mission: Impossible, Bewitched, Rat Patrol, Perry Mason, and original titles like Naza, Kona, and Spaceman. Dell gave up the comic book line into the early ’70s, by that time relying exclusively on reprints to fill out the books.

“I remember, when I was a little boy, like all children we loved comics,” Albert Delacorte reflected. “We passed by the newsstand and I wanted to buy a copy of Mutt ’n’ Jeff. [My father] said, ‘Boy, that’s junk. You don’t want to read that kind of junk.’ He once said to me, ‘I don’t think of myself as a publisher; I think of myself as a converter of paper.’ He was a businessman. When he published the Dell books, he never read any of them. Possibly, sometimes, when a big advance was considered he would be consulted, but he was not a publisher in the sense of looking out for a scripter. [He was] not one of those people who actually had editorial aspirations and is not just a businessman or a literary critic. He didn’t have those interests but was a converter of paper, just like a guy that produces suits but doesn’t [wear] them.

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As for Helen Meyer, she continued to work for Dell Publishing until her retirement. “Helen Meyer is alive, but I think she’s very handicapped, and is in her middle-nineties,” Albert said. “Actually, she was quite bitter towards my father, as she had turned down other interviews. At Western, people were getting big bonuses, people she thought of as nobodies were getting bonuses of a million dollars. My father never thought of her that way. She got lots of expense-free stuff: she had a car and all her meals covered, but there was no transfer of stock, and no big bonuses or anything. She was very bitter about that. She even complained to me. She thought of me as somebody who had to be crushed: I was like Carthage to the Romans; ‘Carthage must be destroyed!’ was their slogan, and with her it was ‘Al Delacorte.’ Occasionally, she would come crying to me about my father’s injustice, at least in her eyes. She preserved that bitterness. She came to all these openings, or big parties at Columbia University [where George contributed heavily], but there was always that wall between them and her recollections of his failing to reward her for running the company so well for years.”

A Golden Age “At that time, we were losing a lot of artists, who were going back to studio work,” Western salesman Larry Mayer of the California office recalled of the days after the break-up with Dell. “I guess that it did affect [us] quite a bit, because Dell was quite popular. It got an upswing when Russ Manning started with Magnus, which was quite successful. We were down on Eighth Street at that time, and had moved down from Beverly Hills. I was working on covers at that time, with Ed Marine in New York. They weren’t doing too well, I guess, so I went with commercial sales then, as an assistant to Don McLaughlin, who left and went over to Disney.

Then Jack Thomas took over, and I assisted him. We moved across to the office in Hollywood, in the Max Factor building across from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.”

Not only would the California offices of Western relocate, but the New York digs would move as well. Freshly arrived in a brand new building at 850 Third Avenue off 51st Street, the publisher had earned the right to have their name put on the front of the place: the Western Building. Dell Publishing had moved to Third Avenue and 46th Street, only a few blocks away. With Dell out of the picture as distributor, Western saw it fit to restructure the comic book line.

Renaming the newsstand division Periodicals Publishing, Gold Key was made part of Golden Press, to be headed by Dick Eiger.

Executive editor Matt Murphy writes, “Dick Eiger replaced Mark Morse as my supervisor for the publication of Gold Key Comics. Dick had no editorial experience and was accounting-oriented. He was a consummate liar and told everyone whatever he thought we wanted to hear.” Unhappy with his position under Eiger, Murphy would leave for the product development arm of Western, eventually retiring in 1970, leaving his position to Del Connell. The Gold Key line would not only feature a variety of licensed characters, but would also star three original characters who had more in common with Charlton’s Action Hero line than either DC or Marvel’s popular super-heroes.

The Golden Trio The Son of Stone first appeared as a Gold Key character with December 1962’s Turok #30 (which, as did other transferred titles, picked up the numbering from the late Dell series). Turok remained the same, walking with his young companion amongst archosaur anachronisms, and maintained his place in Gold Key’s rather small pantheon of heroes that would only enjoy the frequency of a quarterly publication schedule.

Grasping onto the fears of the Cold War—as well as those of the Atomic Age—Western’s New York office came up with Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom, a red-garbed character who, despite his super-heroics, was originally envisioned sans the obligatory skin-tight costume. Premiering in his own first issue, dated October 1962, Solar would undoubtedly become the most colorful of Gold Key’s characters. It is believed that Paul S. Newman wrote the first issue, while the art chores were taken by noted artist Bob Fujitani, who had cut his teeth in the 1940s on such work as “The Hangman” for MLJ (now Archie Comics), and was drawn in a style unlike anything else being done in comics: the coloring per panel was registered so exactly that outside panel borders did not need to be drawn in, leaving an open colored panel.

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When Dr. Phil Solar was caught in a nuclear accident engineered by a spy, he was transformed into an immensely powerful irradiated figure. Now living with green skin, Solar usually operated wearing a lab coat and his dark sunglasses, and wore protective clothing when around his colleagues. By the fifth issue, however, Doctor Solar was wearing a bright red bodysuit with a visor covering his eyes. While it was the first appearance of the costumed version, it was the final issue with Fujitani’s artwork. Early issues of the title featured beautifully painted covers by Richard M. Powers, an artist who would be given a Hugo Award for his outstanding science-fiction paperback book covers. Solar’s adventures were written mostly by indomitable Paul S. Newman, and the art chores were taken over with #6 by artists Frank Bolle (#6-9), Alden McWilliams (#20-23), Ernie Colón (#24-26), and finally José Delbo (#27), though two issues were produced in the 1980s featuring the artistry of Gold Key mainstay Dan Spiegle.

Bolle recently revealed an interesting aspect about drawing for Gold Key, one that involved the company later being able to repackage the material in smaller editions: “[The art paper used] had two borders,” Bolle said. “They had a quarter-inch around regular border in blue dots, where you weren’t supposed to put anything important,

Above: George Wilson cover painting for Magnus, Robot Fighter #28.

Courtesy of Mike Royer. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

like the lettering, because when they reprinted in pocket-book [digest] size, they cut the outside edges off so they could do a smaller version.”

After Bolle’s stint on Doctor Solar, the artist undertook a run on the longrunning anthologies, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery and The Twilight Zone, amongst others. Today, he draws the Apartment 3-G syndicated newspaper comic strip from his studio in Connecticut.

The final member of the trio of Gold Key characters was created through the California office. Magnus, lovingly drawn by the legendary Russ Manning as an Adonis in red chain-mail tunic and white boots, was perhaps the most successful of the Gold Key heroes, one that has enjoyed a couple of brief revivals. Premiering in February 1963, he would prove to be the most resonant of the line’s characters. Set in the future world of 4000 A.D., and the city of North Am (a vast metropolis encompassing the entire North American continent), Magnus was raised alone by Robot 1-A to save mankind from their dependency upon robots.

The concept of Magnus was initially conceived by Gold Key editor Chase Craig who had apparently been contemplating artist Russ Manning for the project, but did not yet have a writer. Manning, upon hearing this from art director Jack Taylor in March 1962, went to Western’s office and convinced Craig to give him the writing and art chores. While Craig had envisioned Magnus as a variation of the future on display in H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, Manning viewed Magnus as a space-age Tarzan. Manning walked away with a letter dated February 26, 1962, that outlined the ideas Craig and his staff had come up with. “Shortly, I submitted a two-page layout, describing the world of 4000 A.D. and the hero, as I pictured and thought of 27

Right inset: An often-overlooked Gold Key run are the first three issues of Total War/M.A.R.S. Patrol (1965-66) featuring outstanding art

by Wally Wood and his studio.

Here’s the splash panel to #2.

Courtesy of John R. Borkowski. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Below: Cover detail of the gorgeous painting gracing the cover of M.A.R.S. Patrol Total War #3.

Courtesy of John R. Borkowski. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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them,” Manning explained in an essay written for The Comic Reader #28 (1964). “But the hero, still a Tarz of the future, had a gimmick… a great stone hammer, slung at his waist, which he used to power robots.

Had Thor (Marvel) been originated then? At any rate, I hadn't seen it at that time. The names I submitted were Hammer… Mann… and Magnus (this latter inspired mostly by Maximus in [the] Mary Perkins, On Stage [newspaper comic] strip). Chase and his assistant, Zetta DeVoe, went over my layout, made suggestions and changes, and chose Magnus as the new hero's name.”

After numerous revisions from meetings with Craig and DeVoe, the hammer angle was dropped (at the recommendation of Manning’s wife, Dodie) to make way for Magnus’s famous karate-chop and ability to render robots into scrap with his bare hands. After drawing the first issue with Magnus in only red trunks and soles that mysteriously adhered to his feet, the New York office requested the hero not run around bare-chested, hence his distinctive tunic. The boots, while intended to be blueblack or dark brown, were left white by the colorist since Manning had not indicated any boot color. “I suspect that an absolutely one man-creation is an extreme rarity, and certainly Magnus is not one of the items,” Manning wrote. “Quite a number of us worked to hone Magnus into the more or less consistent fellow he is.”

Manning had been introduced to Western’s editors by longtime Tarzan artist Jesse Marsh, and would have a fifteen-year career with Western, drawing everything from Tarzan (the Gold Key comic which he would draw during and after his stint on the futuristic Robot Fighter), Western Roundup, Dale Evans, Wyatt Earp, and 21 issues of Magnus.

Magnus has all the underpinnings of the traditional Greek/ Roman classical hero/demigod, according to an essay by Erling B. Holtsmark in a 1979 issue of The Journal of Popular Culture. Whereas the likes of Hercules and Oedipus came from questionable parentage, so did the orphan Magnus; where heroes were often shown saving a village from a terror or monster of great power, so did Magnus eliminate evil robots in North Am; and while classical heroes often relied on wits and cunning to foil their enemies, so did Magnus. While Magnus, Robot

Fighter presents a hero who, on the surface, seems a bit of a technophobe, the character is not out to obliterate all robots, he is more or less fighting man’s growing over-dependence upon technology.

Magnus rings more true with the world of the early 21st century: more time is spent on the Internet than outdoors in many cases, and people today refuse even to get off the sofa and change the volume on the television. Through his adventures, Magnus would battle the evil robot H-8 (or “Hate”), the villainous MekMan, and even the likes of a Polyphemus/Cyclops-like monster robot (Magnus defeats the monster robot in a manner similar to Odysseus, by disarming the robot through its single eye). Magnus, Robot Fighter cannot only be viewed as a prime example of Russ Manning in his prime—the artist would do a superb rendition of Tarzan after Magnus—but also as a commentary of 1960s society. Magnus is eerily prophetic of today’s society in—shades of Ted “Unibomber” Kaczynski!—his fears that mankind will become the slave to technology and, possibly because of this social relevancy, he enjoyed a fair success when revived in the 1990s.

Forgotten Heroes While considerable space has been given here to the above trio of adventurers, another significant addition to the ’60s Gold Key line of original characters was the science-fiction hero, Mighty Samson.

Though the writers remain unknown, the title was nicely drawn for a number of issues by then-comics-newcomer Frank Thorne, an artist who would go onto considerable acclaim for his work on Red Sonja, Son of Tomahawk, and his own creation, Ghita of Alizarr. Samson is a fabulously strong, eye-patched survivor of a nuclear holocaust, complete with fur tunic and cape, who travels the post-apocalyptic ruins of the once great metropolis, “N’Yark,” with companions Mindor and Sharmaine (respectively the requisite genius scientist and his daughter), spending most of their time battling various giant mutated monsters about the devastated island of Manhattan.

Subsequently drawn by the ubiquitous Jack Sparling, the title had a 12-year run lasting 31 issues (32 if you count the 1984 one-issue revival), the stories were always variations on the same theme but they retained a certain charm, especially under the brush of Thorne and behind the lavish cover paintings by Morris Gollub.

Another well-regarded Gold Key title from the 1960s, is Total War, featuring great Wally Wood artwork (with the strong presence of studio mate Dan Adkins) and an interesting premise: In the not-sodistant future, the United States, Soviet Union, India, and Hong Kong are invaded by a massive armed force of unknown origin—perhaps alien—hell-bent on taking over the world. To the world’s rescue comes the elite Marine Corps fighting foursome, the M.A.R.S. Patrol COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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Left and below: Are these unpublished pages from M.A.R.S. Patrol Total War? Well, contributor Russ G. and Ye Ed are pretty sure (though there’s still a few holes in our respective collections), but if not, and you can identify the issue it did appear in (and perhaps the artist who rendered them!), we’d be mighty grateful! ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

(standing for Marine Attack Rescue Service)—Lt. Cy Adams and his men: African American Joe Striker, Caucasian Russ Stacey, and Japanese American Ken Hiro—who battle the mysterious enemy (who look vaguely Asian but whose identities—as far as the Wood issues go—are never revealed) on land, sea and air. The third issue, last to be drawn by the Wood studio, has a title modification to M.A.R.S. Patrol Total War, and under that name the series continues until #10, with art chores ably continued by Dan Spiegle and Jack Sparling.

Other original Gold Key adventure characters of the 1960s include the Jack Sparling-drawn Tiger Girl one-shot; the female spy team Jet Dream (also lasting a single issue); a two-issue revival of the Golden Age hero, The Owl (scripted by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and drawn by Tom Gill); and the long-running science-fiction series, Space Family Robinson. This last title lasted for 54 issues, featured great art throughout its run by Dan Spiegle, as well as gorgeous cover paintings by George Wilson, and though it is commonly thought to be a comics adaptation of the Irwin Allen’s TV series Lost in Space, the Chase Craig-created comic book actually predates the show by three years.

Adding to the confusion, the comic did add on a “Lost in Space” subtitle on its cover upon the TV series’ debut, lasting until the book’s cancelation in 1969, though the title was revived from 1973 until ’78.

Also of note are the long-running horror anthology titles bearing the Gold Key logo: The Twilight Zone (1961-79, ’82; 92 issues), Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery (196280; 97 issues), Ripley’s Believe It or Not (1967-80; 94 issues), and Grimm’s Ghost Stories (1972-82; 60 issues). While a number do feature distinguished work by the likes of such artists as Al Williamson, Alden McWilliams, and George Evans (the latter sometimes assisted by none other than Frank Frazetta!), most include lesser material by many a tired veteran or unpolished newcomer (the latter including newcomers Jeff Jones, Alan Weiss, Walter Simonson and Frank Miller, among others).

Interestingly, the publisher introduced the digest comics format in 1968 with Walt Disney Comic Digest (naturally featuring Donald Duck and Co. reprints), followed the October 2002

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next year by Golden Comics Digest, which generally featured reprints of the non-Disney licensed animated character stories (with an odd issue devoted to Turok or The Lone Ranger here and there), and Gold Key branched out into slightly more mature territory with 1972’s Mystery Comics Digest, where the most significant Gold Key creative team of the ’70s made their debut.

Writer Don Glut and artist Jesse Santos first collaborated in the pages of Mystery Comics Digest where, by the third issue, the duo were introducing characters that would turn up throughout the mini-continuity created by Glut (one that would traverse comic companies and even mediums, as you will find in the writer’s interview in these pages). Together they would also chronicle the adventures of Dagar the Invincible, The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor, and Tragg and the Sky Gods, leaving behind a bright legacy of perhaps the best work to see print at Gold Key during in a decade otherwise in decline.

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Right inset: Cover detail of yet another Gold Key gorgeous painting, this one sporting the cover of Mighty Samson #7. The title character had the consistent misfortune in having to battle giant mutated creatures throughout the greater New York City area in the obligatory comic book milieu of a post-apocalyptic world in the “near distant future.” The earlier issues also feature some very nifty Frank Thorne artwork. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Below: Perhaps the longest running artist/writer team to work at Gold Key in the 1960s and ’70s was respectively Dan Spiegle and Gaylord Du Bois on the title Space Family Robinson (which added the subtitle Lost in Space after the debut of the CBS science-fiction TV series), a collaboration that spanned about 15 years. Gold Key was also able to export a huge amount of comics material for overseas consumption. This foreign edition cover features the exploits of the Robinsons. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Tarnished Gold In its heyday, a Disney-licensed comic book title produced by Gold Key might regularly surpass sales of one million copies. Within its first few years of publication, Magnus, Robot Fighter’s print run was apparently in the realm of a quartermillion copies per issue. By the 1970s, the writing appeared on the wall as neither format changes or price increases could stem everdwindling profit margins at Gold Key Comics.

In a bid to combat dwindling newsstand sales, Western tried to distribute their titles through department stores, wrapped in plastic, three to a bag.

These “value pack” books were given the Whitman brand, and soon they overpopulated department store racks, gathering dust and disinterest. Newsstand editions continued to sport the Gold Key imprint. Aside from their core heroes and the Disney books, Gold Key had also produced comics with other licensed properties, many of which didn’t make it past 12 issues (if even), such as Star Trek, Bonanza, Get Smart!, Bullwinkle, H.R. Pufinstuf, Zorro, Secret Agent, I Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Secret Squirrel, and The Green Hornet. Gold Key also produced many one-shot adaptations of television and film properties as well, including Yellow Submarine, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, How the West Was Won, and First Men in the Moon. Their most successful, longer-running titles included The Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, and many of the Disney licenses. but by the late ’70s, the bloom was off the rose at the comics house.

According to executive editor Matt Murphy, losing the certain, solid distribution of Dell resulted in a myriad of smaller distributors. To top it off, high returns (copies that were sent back unsold from the newsstand) coupled with the royalty fees paid for each license, made the comics less profitable. Add in a price hike from 10¢ to 15¢ on the normal 32-page comic books, one can see how Gold Key Comics may have suffered, never mind a shrinking readership. But the comics imprint—whether labeled as Gold Key or Whitman— managed to stick around until 1984, when the line was finally put to rest. Of the three main heroes, Magnus ended with January 1977’s #46 and Turok with April 1982’s #130.

With Doctor Solar (whose title was cancelled in 1969 after 27 issues, albeit briefly revived for #28-31 in 1982-83), these three characters had somehow survive the demise of their mother company, but only after suffering in a limbo-like comic book deep-freeze for nearly 10 years.

A Valiant Effort After the end of his controversial run as Marvel Comics’ editor-in-chief (when he helmed the company for some of its most monetarily successful years), Jim Shooter launched Voyager Communications in 1989 with media lawyer Steven Massarsky. While the initial goal of financing a theatrical production was stillborn (one that, according to Shooter in an interview on www.comicbookresources.com, involved licensing the Marvel Comics characters), Massarsky and Shooter decided to go into the comic book arena. In April 1990, Voyager 30

launched various books featuring characters licensed from Nintendo video games, such as Super Mario Brothers, in the direct market. The $1.95 priced books did not fare as well in comic shops, but did find life in toy and department stores, as well as newsstands. By that following December, it was decided that a Valiant comics super-hero line would be launched, with the first title featuring Gold Key’s immortal Magnus, Robot Fighter in May 1991. The marketing plan of title would utilize trends similar to those set

by DC’s Man of Steel comic book four years earlier, which sported multiple covers: The first eight issues of Magnus would each include a trading card drawn by a popular artist, as well as a voucher coupon; when all eight coupons were collected, they could be mailed in and redeemed for a copy of Magnus #0. This Magnus relaunch put a spin on the Russ Manning origin, courtesy of writer Shooter. Magnus fought the “Freewill”— or independent—robots in the first issues of his title. Whereas Manning’s Magnus was content to thrive in the spires of North Am, this Magnus soon found himself the champion of the Freewill robots, whose only desire was to live. Helping them set up a colony, Magnus soon operated out of the lower, impoverished depths of North Am. Eventually, Magnus got a chance to fight robots when the evil Malev race of robots invaded Earth; by leeching brainwaves, they were vampire robots of a sorts. Magnus’ new adventures would not only reveal his parentage (super-humans from the past give birth to the child and send him into the future), but also had him abandon the red tunic and white boots for a golden metal armor by the 25th issue of his new book.

Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom was revived without the doctorate in his name as Solar, Man of the Atom, with a September 1991 cover date. Written by Shooter, and drawn by Don Perlin and Barry Windsor-Smith, with inks by Bob Layton. This version of Solar was a Dr. Phil Seleski, who grew up reading the Gold Key comic book, Doctor Solar. When caught in an accident with a fusion reactor, Seleski finds himself imbued with the powers of his childhood hero.

Unfortunately, gaining the powers destroys his Earth, throwing him through time and space to another Earth, where he resumes his career as Seleski (merging with his alternate version) and fights alien invasions as Solar, Man of the Atom, patterning himself after his comic book hero.

“We started publishing the super-hero stuff and it wasn't an instant hit,” Shooter noted in the Comic Book Resources interview.

“We were selling okay numbers. I think Magnus started out selling 80-90,000 and then trickled down into 50,000 or so. Solar, with the Barry Windsor-Smith thing. Big name, right? Nothing. Sold like 40,000, I think. They weren't doing that well.

“To me, the real turning point was February of ’92 when we actually made money. We had a new title come out and we were breaking even with the rest that we made about $20,000 that month.

They were making their orders for April, March orders were already in and I don't think that was a great month. April we did pretty well, I think we made $100,000. Because sales went up, virtually everything was selling 100,000 and some even selling 200,000 which for a small company like us was pretty good. Pre-tax profit in May and June was half a million dollars a month.”

Turok, would make his first appearance since the Gold Key days in Magnus, Robot Fighter #12 dated May 1992, and would premiere in his own title later the next year. Apparently, Shooter approached COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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Paul S. Newman about reviving Turok for Valiant. It is highly possible that Newman was approached before Shooter’s ouster from the company, and that Shooter’s successors decided to go with the then-popular “grim and gritty” approach to the character.

“Paul absolutely loathed the remake of his characters,” his widow, Carol Newman, said. “He wasn’t necessarily possessive of them, but they were characters that maintained a character that was changed. Turning a gentle Indian hunter in Lost Valley to some big guy on steroids holding an AK-47, just infuriated him.”

This new version of Turok—a “Dinosaur Hunter” rather than “Son of Stone”—was cast into the inter-dimensional Lost Valley, where he fought not dinosaurs, but enhanced and intelligent bionosaurs. Through a chain of events, Turok found himself catapulted to modern-day Earth, where he used modern-day weaponry (hence Mrs. Newman’s AK-47 reference) to fight the bionosaurs that had been let loose on an unsuspecting Earth. The first issue featured a “chromium” cover and sold a reported 1.7 million copies, and was not the only gimmick cover Valiant would do in the post-Shooter era.

The Valiant line would struggle through until 1996, when Magnus was cancelled with #64, Solar ended with #60, and Turok with #43.

Acclaim Entertainment, most widely known for producing video games, came into ownership of Valiant and, in an attempt to market the characters for video games, relaunched the main Valiant characters. The new line of Acclaim/Valiant titles would feature complete revisions of the characters: Magnus, having lost everything, travels to the past to eliminate the robot threat before it becomes palpable (shades of Terminator?), Solar passes his powers on to a set of twins, and Turok was once again retooled in an attempt to “update” the character. This new Turok was a member of the Fireseed family, a Native American line which sends the oldest son of each family to protect the Earth from the Lost Land (as the valley was

October 2002

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now called). This new Turok is actually the most successful of the Gold Key characters, at least in today’s terms, and has spawned a set of mini-series and one-shots, as well as two hugely successful video games. Magnus’ new series only lasted a year and a half, ending in 1998, while the newest incarnations of Solar as written by Warren Ellis and Christopher Priest, trudged through two mini-series.

Unfortunately, the Gold Key characters have been retooled so many times that, in some cases, they are unrecognizable from their roots (with Magnus being the only one remotely similar to the original).

While Turok may experience more comic books in the near future, former Valiant editor-in-chief Bob Layton expressed his doubts towards a return to those characters for some time in an interview on Comic Book Resources. “Unfortunately, I believe the market has such a bad taste left in its mouth from Valiant that it would be almost impossible to surmount,” Layton said. “What a shame that the company's entire rich legacy has been consigned to the cut-out bins at the local comic shop.”

Certain questions do remain about Western/Gold Key/Whitman, such as, what exactly became of the publisher? The last Western comic book was published in 1984, when the company gave up on the funny book business, and soon thereafter the Whitman brand disappeared into the ether as well. Sometime in the last 15 years, Western Publishing reportedly changed its name to Golden Books Family Entertainment, Inc., and was said to be thriving in the mid’90s. Apparently fortunes changed as the publisher is said to have declared bankruptcy in 2001, and they sold the Golden Books division to Random House, and its other media holdings have become the property of DIC Entertainment, Inc. The fate of the trademarks and copyrights? Who knows? Acclaim Entertainment declares Turok its property, but the fates of all the other company-owned characters remains an unfortunate, perplexing mystery.

Below: Western’s lock on innumerable licensed properties led to a vast array of funnybook adaptations, from Scooby Doo to Fantastic Voyage. Here’s a random set of covers featuring some fondly-recalled TV shows, a kids’ movie and a certain Man of Bronze. All are ©2002 their respective copyright holders.

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Dorf’s Discussions

Manning the Magnificent Shel Dorf chats with the legendary Magnus and Tarzan artist Conducted by Shel Dorf with Rich Rubenfeld Transcribed by Jon B. Cooke

Above: Small pic of legendary comics fan and con organizer Shel Dorf, a most frequent and welcome contributor to the pages of Comic Book Artist. Courtesy of Mike Royer. Below: Superb comics artist Russ Manning at his art board in another photo courtesy of his onetime assistant, Mike Royer.

In the latter part of August 1969, Rich Rubenfeld and Shel Dorf took a trip to the Los Angeles area to interview Jack Kirby and Russ Manning. After getting his number from the phone book, the pair called Manning and asked to visit, and he replied that he would be delighted but had one condition: The artist needed to work on his Tarzan strip and would be ready for them at 4:00 P.M. Shel said, “It was very difficult to find his place, because Russ lived at the bottom of a canyon, and we had to drive on narrow, winding roads—like you see in the movies—with sheer drops on one side. It was exciting… and we finally found Russ’s house, set back in a wooded area, and I almost expected him to come out, swinging from a tree!… Russ is really a country boy at heart and is also a volunteer at the local fire department as fires are quite a hazard living in that canyon. We had a wonderful visit as you will hear.” Our thanks to Shel for his generosity in sharing this rare interview with a comic book master.

Shel Dorf: If you could say a few words for the fans?

Russ Manning: Sure! “A few words for the fans.” [laughter] Shel: Let’s get started: When were your very first inclinations to draw or paint?

Can you remember back that far?

Russ: Hmm, let’s see… No! [chuckles] The first time I can remember anyone being enthusiastic about something I drew was a sketch I made of a tree out in the yard, and my father said, “Keep it up.

Something good will come of that.” I can’t remember how old I was but I remember the yard, the house, but the age I can’t remember.

Shel: Where was it?

Russ: Los Altos, California. Central California.

Shel: That was where you grew up?

Russ: Yup. Shel: That’s great. Did you have any formal training? Did you go to an art school?

Russ: Yeah. I had good training in high school where I had a wonderful art teacher. Then, during the first year of [junior college], she happened to move on into j.c., and she taught me there, and then recommended that I try an art school. I went to Los Angles County Art Institute in L.A. for a year-and-a-half. I happened to hear that a little film company wanted a cartoonist and I quit school and joined them. Six months later, they went broke and I went into the National Guard and over to Korea.

Shel: Oh, wow. What year was this?

Russ: I went to Korea in the mid-part of ’50, and I came out in ’52. I had already met Jesse Marsh [artist on the Tarzan comic book] and he took me down and introduced me to Western Printing Company and said, “Here’s a man who is just back from Korea and he needs a job. Have you got any work for him?” Tom McKimson, the art director, said, “Well, if you can prove to me he can draw, we might.” And I went home and just started drawing like crazy. As soon as I had anything at all to show Tom, I came back down from Santa Maria—Los Altos—California, and I showed the art director. He would take a look and say, “Uh-uh.” I’d go home, try again, get up another batch of samples and get back to him. Four times this happened! On the forth one, he said, “Here’s a ‘Brothers of the Spear.’ Take it home and start.”

Shel: That’s marvelous, really something. You mentioned meeting Jesse Marsh. Did you seek him out? Did you just go to him with a portfolio of your work? How did the two of you meet if this was a turning point in your career?

Russ: Well, in a way, that was through Vernell Coriell, well known Tarzan fan and creator of any number of Tarzan [fanzines, including the very first, The Burroughs Bulletin, established 1947], of course. I had received one of Verne’s fanzines and had written to him. If I remember rightly, he said, “Go see Jesse Marsh. He lives somewhere in the Los Angeles area,” and gave me the address. And, lordy, I was glad to! I called Jess and he invited me out, and I may have taken artwork—I don’t recall now, but probably, because I was already copying comic books, copying Jess, Hal Foster, and everybody that I considered to be great in the field, just to learn how to draw really, not with any idea of being in comic books. So I went out and saw Jess. He’s a wonderful gentleman and very enthusiastic, and he liked what I had taken (not that there was anything special about it, but I think he was just being nice). He was a fine gentleman. He showed me what he was doing at the time—a Johnny Mack Brown comic book, if I remember right—and he had a bunch of

Tarzans around. He said that if I were ever interested in it, he would take me down to Western Publishing Company and introduce me.

Well, gosh, I went home and started drawing Tarzan and… John Carter of Mars. I started doing some John Carter of Mars with perhaps interesting the comic book company in it.

It was just at this time when the little film company I was working with went broke and the National Guard called me. So, for a year-and-a-half, I wasn’t able to take Jess up on his kindness, but then, coming back out of the Army, why, I got back in contact with Jess and he took me down to Western.

Shel: That’s fascinating.

Maybe we’ll send a copy of this [tape] to Verne and maybe he’ll use this. Let’s get into Magnus a little bit: Magnus, of course, was the first time that we saw a full Russ Manning comic book… the one that I remember. [To Rich] You say that he did Sea Hunt and what else?

Rich Rubenfeld: Rob writing—on what you think the story should be, draw some sketches, Roy… and bring ’em back.

Shel: Rob Roy… [unintelligible discussion] Can you tell us a little If I recall, I went over to a nearby bar (where I happened to bit of the story behind Magnus? After this, I would like to kind of get know the bartender), and sat there, just grinning at everybody. Why, into how you work, the procedure, and so on. I here was a chance to come up with my own creation! A super-hero, know you told us that you have a dinner science-fiction, everything I was truly interested in, and it didn’t date at about 5:30 and it’s already ten after now, so we’ve got some time to squeeze in.

Russ: Now, Magnus is a… I think I’ve written for a fanzine and the story’s there, but Magnus was the creation of Chase Craig of Western Publishing Company. But the Magnus that he had in mind was a very vague and morpheus subject; he had no concrete image that he wanted presented. He had just convinced the big shots back East that a comic book of a science-fiction super-hero would be the thing to try at the time. If I remember right, DC was beginning to boom a bit; Marvel hadn’t quite come into the picture. So, evidently, they felt that science-fiction [was a consideration] and they wanted to try a subject. I heard this from one of the other members of the staff and went running into Chase because I had this big love of science-fiction. I had read it all of my life and felt that I knew more than anybody there about science-fiction. I told Chase that I was interested, knew Above: The earliest existing presentation concept the subject, and art by Russ for the proposed Magnus strip (the initial version, featuring the robot fighter complete with would like to hammer, has yet to be found). Manning’s idea was for try it. He said, the character to basically be “Tarzan in the 41st “Good. Go Century.”Courtesy of Bob Pollak. Art ©2002 the home and do Estate of Russ Manning. Magnus ©2002 a couple of Western Publishing, Inc. pages— October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

Above: Two pages of Russ Manning’s John Carter sample story, drawn prior to his stint at Western. Art ©2002 the Estate of Russ Manning. John Carter ©2002 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

33

Above: Page from Magnus, Robot Fighter by Russ Manning— reproduced from a volume of Jerry Bails and Hames Ware’s excellent Who’s Who of American Comic Books—includes a handy recap of the hero’s origin. Courtesy of Alberto Becattini and Mike Friedrich. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc. 34

really, uhh…

Shel: As much freedom as anyone could ask for.

Russ: Right, right! It was everything I wanted. Maybe Tarzan or a sword-&-sorcery (as they call them now) [strip] would have been just as appealing to me, but I wasn’t going to quibble. I really wanted to try this Magnus thing, so I came home and began working on it, of course. As I’ve written before, Chase had given me the movie script of Time Machine—the Wells story—which had just been done by MGM, I believe, at the time. That was, more or less, what he had in

mind; instead of these Morlocks, I believe they called them, the weird creatures at the end, taking over from the very weak Earth people, Chase had the idea of robots. Now, that appealed and it kind of went along with what science-fiction has always said about robots, along Isaac Asimov’s lines. I thought, “Well, if I can combine these two and come up with a hero who is semi-Tarzan-like—a simple, nature-type person—who doesn’t trust the machines or need them, why we might have something.

Really, what I had in mind at first was a 4000 A.D. Tarzan, I presented this to Chase and he says, “It’s fine. Go home and draw it now. I like the idea and we’ll take it just as you’ve come up with it so far.” Well, at the time I hadn’t thought about North Am which is, of course, the continent-spanning city—no dirt anywhere, all concrete, there’s plastic—but the second time in, I brought a type-written synopsis of the world, North Am, Magnus as I had conceived him, and by then I’d sneakily used, as you well know, my wife’s idea of a guy who uses karate chops on robots. Where in the world he got the edge of his hand that tough, who knows? [laughter] I’ve got to give Dodie credit for that and, of course, Chase Craig deserves all the credit in the world for the original idea and for giving me the freedom… now, how often do you find that?

When I did the first script, he and his assistant, Zetta DeVoe, did a great job of editing it, telling me what was essential and what was non-essential.

One of the important things here was that Chase was entirely open to whatever we wanted to present, but Zetta was not. She had some preconceived ideas of really what a comic book should be, what science-fiction was, and it helped. In this one case, it helped, because she was able to tell us, in a way, that certain things might have been too far out shouldn’t be left in; to tame it down a little bit. I think that in this one instance, censorship helped, and the fact that she said that she knows all about science-fiction and this is how it should be, in this case, worked.

That’s one of the credits I have to give an editor. An editor has a definite job at times. He’s got to take all of our wild, hare-brained ideas, and coalesce them into something that he believes the public wants. If he’s wrong about what he believes the public wants, well, he’s not going to be an editor very long.

Shel: Had you read much science-fiction in your youth? Growing COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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up, were you a big science-fiction fan?

Russ: Oh, sure. I can name all the science-fiction authors up until 1952, when I got too busy to read anymore. I don’t know any of them now. Asimov, Kuttner, Ben Vogt, and all those guys were favorites of mine.

Shel: What was your first exposure to Burroughs?

Russ: The public library in Los Altos, California, when I was in high school, they had all the books on the shelf. How many kids would be lucky enough to find that in a library now?

Shel: Maybe only in Tarzana…

Russ: Right. The books that the library didn’t have on the shelf, the librarian was sweet enough to order for me.

So, I’d read one, put it back on the shelf, and order another one. So we got most of them….

Shel: So that librarian was definitely responsible for the artist of the Tarzan strip today!

Russ: Yeah. I wish I could remember her name, but I don’t.

Rich: If she were following the strip, would she recognize your name?

Shel: Let’s see… what are your feelings about Ed April’s Cartoonist Showcase and his use of your daily Tarzan strip, which unfortunately is not in as great a syndication in 1969 as we wish it was. We hope that in the next two or three years, it will double or triple [the circulation] what you have now. Certainly the quality is there and all you need now are a battery of salesmen; if you were working for King Features, you would have about 600 papers by now.

Russ: You brought up a point there in asking about Ed April’s publication. Per se, I think the publication is beautiful: Fine paper stock, the reproduction is as good as anyone could possibly hope for, considering the quality of proofs he gets, which are not too good, frankly. United Features proofs are not the best. I think the English strip in there [Modesty Blaise] shows what proofs can really be. For my money, even [Al] Williamson’s great strip [Secret Agent Corrigan] suffers a bit from the quality of the proofs that Ed is getting.

Anyway, aside from the quality of those proofs (which is not… Ed isn’t responsible for them), I love it. I like the way he breaks the panels down, slides them around and everything, when necessary. But there’s one thing—and you brought it up, Shel—that concerns me: That is, I wonder really if the strip should be reprinted in Ed April’s publication so soon. I wonder if it doesn’t take some of the pressure away from the newspapers to carry the strip. Look at all the fans who say, “Well, gee, I can go and get these three great strips in Ed April’s publication,” which, in the case of Tarzan, [appears] within one year of its publication in the newspaper. “To heck with the newspaper! I don’t need the newspaper! I can get it from Ed April.”

Shel: Yes, but for $5 a copy we don’t get that much Manning!

Russ: But the other strips are great. I really do think that’s taken some of the pressure off of the newspapers. I almost wish that Tarzan would be dropped out of Cartoonists Showcase and I could get these other two great strips for the money. I’d be willing to pay it and maybe wait for a year and let a little more pressure come against the papers to carry the thing. I could be wrong. I’ve talked to [Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. representative] Bob Hodes about this.

Shel: I’d rather see the other two dropped and the whole book be Tarzan! [laughs] Russ: Oh no, no! The other two are great strips, especially Modesty Blaise. [general unintelligible discussion] Rich: Can you tell us how you work? What your schedule is…

Russ: Constant! [chuckles] Forty-hour day and, what? [calculates] October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

420 hours a week. That’s about right. I usually finish the previous week… I do it backwards: I finish the previous week on Sunday, so that means that on Monday, I have to start fresh, writing. The Sunday page… because I have to get it to the stat office, to get the stat copy in order to color, I try to get the Sunday page out of the way quickly… or first, rather. (Nothing is “quickly,” unfortunately.) So I write the Sunday page and immediately start drawing it. Sometime about Wednesday, I’ll be through—Thursday I’ll take it to the stat office—so the remainder of Wednesday, I’ll write the dailies, start on them Thursday. Color sometime between Thursday and Sunday and finish the dailies between Thursday and Sunday.

At the moment, since Mike Royer has left me and I’m working without an assistant, it is taking a full-day’s work, seven days a week… well, not quite seven. That’s not exactly true; maybe about six and a half. On the extra half-day, I’m trying to move ahead slightly so I can [chuckles] take a day off once in awhile.

Shel: Sure. What are your best working hours? Some artists I know prefer to work in the midnight hours until dawn. Do you find any time of the day when the ink flows a little quicker?

Russ: Well, I’m very consistent. I start work at about 8:00 in the morning, 8:00 or 8:30, and work until 2:00, break for lunch, and I may not get back to the board until after dinner. But I’m always back at the board after dinner. If there may be things that have to be

Above: Yet another concept drawing from Russ Manning’s pitch to his editors at Western, this one featuring a jump-suited Magnus.

Russ did finalize our hero’s lady friend Leeja’s amazing translucent mini-skirt design (though the hairdo was still in progress!). Courtesy of R. Robert Pollak. Art ©2002 the Estate of Russ Manning.

Below: Magnus cover painting detail. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

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Above: Russ Manning’s first Tarzan Sunday syndicated comic strip.

Opposite top: Manning Star Wars Sunday. Courtesy of R. Robert Pollak. ©2002 Lucasfilms, Ltd. Opposite bottom: Manning drew this piece for then-ERB, Inc. executive Bob Hodes. Tarzan ©2002 ERB, Inc. Below: Russ Manning self portrait, probably from his Star Wars days. Courtesy of Alberto Becattini. ©2002 Estate of Russ Manning.

36

done in the afternoon—the lawn needs mowing or I have to go to the store, or who knows what—that is the one time during the day…

Shel: Don’t say this! Fans don’t want to see their god mowing the lawn, going to the store or taking out the garbage!

Russ: You have to keep in contact with reality! Good lord, what’s this “god” business, anyway? [chuckles] Rich: What kind of pen points do you use?

Russ: That’s a good question. One fellow, a very good fan, Jim Jones wrote…

Shel: Before we get to pen points, you asked a question about “what’s this ‘god’ business?” Remember how you felt towards Foster? Hogarth?

Russ: Sure, sure.

Shel: Isn’t it reasonable for someone to feel the same way towards you?

Russ: [long pause as Russ’s wife, Dodie, enters the room] May I introduce my charming, delightful wife, Dodie? This is the young lady who came with the idea for Magnus I sneakily used.

Shel: Hi, Dodie. I’m Shel Dorf. This is Rich Buckler…

Rich: “Rich Buckler”? [chuckles] Russ: Rubenfeld. [Shel discusses then new, up-&-coming artist Buckler] Rich: You want to say hello to Rich Buckler?

Russ: [laughs] Good luck, Rich Buckler!

And I mean it! To finish what I was going to say in answer to Rich here: Jim Jones… [laughs] wrote me a wonderful letter complimenting me, but then he says, [laughs] “What size matchstick do you use for your inking?” [laughter] Shel: “Matchstick”?

Russ: [chuckles] I’m sure he wasn’t being derogatory in any way; he’s thinking about some of the modern techniques. We use just about anything in the world to get an effect.

Shel: You know, Leonard Starr told me he uses a #3 brush and that’s the whole shooting match.

Russ: You can tell that that guy’s a great brush-man. I use a #290 pen for the linework and then whatever size brush is appropriate for the brushwork and the blacks.

Shel: Do you use a different ink for the solid blacks?

Russ: No. Shel: Because on some originals, they use a masking ink for the detail and then they fill in solids with a thinner kind of ink. Do you apply the Zip-ATone or do you just indicate it with blue [pencil]?

Russ: I wish I could just indicate with blue. No, the syndicate sent back the ones I indicated with blue and said, “Please apply your own Zip.” Shel: Do you work from photographs or do you draw the figures from your head?

Russ: I think I would have to say that it’s 99% non-photographic. I would like to work from photographs if I had the photographs, which I don’t. But, with as much work that I have to do, I do not have time to go to the file and try to find the figures. I just have to remember how a figure looks and go from there.

Shel: With this page you’ve turned to now, you have an overhead shot perspective with the figure diminishing into the distance and then there’s an under-eye-level shot. Did you learn this in art school perspective drawing or what? Being an artist myself, this to me was always the most difficult part of figure drawing; to draw the figure in proper proportion. And when you don’t have a model, it’s ten times as difficult to imagine how the figure will look from different views.

Russ: No, art school didn’t teach me this either, because how often are you able to get up above a model and look down on him? What I think gave me the training that I have now was the fact that Whitman [Western] Publishing Company hired me when I was fairly young and paid me to learn. Look at the early stuff I did. It was probably all…

Shel: That’s quite an improvement.

Russ: There’s bound to be.

Shel: Of course, you still had the talent and if you didn’t have the talent in the beginning…

Russ: Hey, I get to ask you a question: Do you gentlemen approve of the way I’m showing Jane?

Rich: I do. I was like, wow, that’s a lot better…

Shel: I like Jane better in period clothes in the Tarzan comics. I feel that Jane is… no… Jane could be Tippy Teen, the Pin-Up Queen, something like this. She’s too modern. This is just my own opinion.

Jane doesn’t look like she’s really got the guts to live in the jungle with an ape man.

Rich: I think the best Jane you did was the first page of the first Korak. You had a beautiful shot of Jane and Tarzan and a tree, etc.

The way she was dressed then, I think…

Shel: I think her hair is a little too… of course, I’m thinking of Maureen O’Sullivan… but I think her hair is a little too… beauty parlor. She has a very simple hair-do, which I could imagine falls in natural ways with natural curls. However, there’s something about it… I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe her eyebrows are a little too perfectly drawn. She looks like she just got out of Max Factor in this particular spread. Sorry, but I’ve gotta level with you. That’s how I feel.

Russ: Okay, now you have brought up the exact reason why I asked the question. Since the books have been coming out showing COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

so many more photos of Maureen O’Sullivan, I am suddenly struck with how feminine she looks, delightful and sweet, and an almost perfect counterpoint to the movie Tarzan. I begin to worry about the way I’m showing Jane who is exactly, as you say, a 1969 glamour girl.

I’m just wondering if this is really what she should be.

Rich: I think you’re just keeping up with the times. Maybe the way she’s dressed, you could, I don’t know… the way she looks, the hairstyle, the facial features, I think are fine.

Shel: Well, Rich is from another generation. There’s 15 years difference between the two of us.

Rich: I grew up on Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan movies, too, but that was the Jane of the 1930s. My favorite picture of Jane is that one in Korak #1…

Russ: I’ll have to look that one up.

Rich: The way you had her… I think she was a brunette then.

Russ: Uh-uh. They may have colored it that way…

Shel: To wrap this up—I notice it’s 5:30—Russ, is there something fans can do for you?

Russ: That’s not fair, Shel. There’s something I can do for the fans: That is, thank them, as I’ve tried to do at other times, for the fact that I’m drawing Tarzan. Truly, no one else is responsible for this. The fans wrote into Whitman when I was doing Magnus and asked— demanded, in some cases—that I be allowed to try Tarzan. For once, the comic book company paid attention and read the letters. It was actually fans who got me this position drawing Tarzan (and Magnus, in some respects). So I have to thank the fans.

To ask what they can do for me? Well, if they want to demand that Tarzan be run in their newspapers, if it isn’t already, that would help.

Shel: Would it help if they wrote to the features editor of their newspaper? Do they pay much attention to these letters?

Russ: Some papers do and some don’t. The paper that I get here that has Tarzan, The Santa Ana Register, Tarzan is appearing in that paper solely because of one very, very articulate fan in Santa Ana, John McGeehan—and his brother Tom McGeehan—and they are October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

completely responsible for Tarzan being in that newspaper.

They’ve written in any number of times and the one time that I happened to get in contact with the newspaper, by phone, the feature editor said, “There’s one fan in this town who will not let us drop Tarzan. He compliments us, he talks about Tarzan, and we’re running it for him!” So, at least in this one case, it has helped. Now, who knows?

Shel: [to Rich] Do you have any questions?

Rich: Do you write the Tarzan strip?

Russ: Yes. Rich: You have no assistants at the moment?

Russ: No. Rich: It was very nice to have met you. I think that about wraps it up for Shel’s visit.

Russ: It’s entirely too short and I’m sorry I’m committed already.

Shel: Thank you for a very good interview. It was one of the best. We’re just going to start writing those letters. Thank you.

Russ: Thank you, Shel.

Thank you, Rich.

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CBA Tribute

Giolitti, “Father” of Turok Alberto Becattini looks at the life of the premier Gold Key artist Inset right: Giolitti page from Have Gun, Will Travel (Four Color Comic #983, 1959), adapting the Richard “Paladin” Boone TV series. ©2002 CBS, Inc.

by Alberto Becattini Although Alberto Giolitti’s name is not unknown to Italian comic readers, collectors and researchers, few of them will be able to tell about the series and characters he drew during his 54-year-long career. The reason is that, unlike most Italian comic artists, Giolitti worked primarily for the foreign market, and for 33 years produced hundreds of stories for Western Publishing Company, under its Dell, Gold Key and Whitman imprints.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Below: Self-portrait of Giolitti, courtesy of Alberto Becattini. ©2002 Estate of Alberto Giolitti.

Giolitti was born in Rome on November 14, 1923. At sixteen years old, in September 1939, he started providing illustrations and comic pages to Il Vittorioso, a weekly magazine published in the Italian capital city. “My father had an ice-cream shop,” Giolitti recalled, “and after school I’d work there. When dad saw my first efforts, he allowed me to devote myself to drawing in the evenings, instead of making ice cream. I even convinced him to let me quit commercial school to join art school.” After high school, Giolitti attended the Academy of Fine Arts and then entered the faculty of architecture at the University of Rome. It was during this period that Il Vittorioso ran his first continuing story, “The Fearless Ones” (1943). The War was still on, but as a university student, Giolitti was drafted and discharged immediately after. Although he had also worked as a scenographer and movie poster artist, Giolitti had made up his mind. Determined to be a comic artist, he decided to seek his fortune abroad. “Comics belonged in the U.S.A., so that’s where I wanted to go,” Giolitti said. “The economic element was also very important. For a while I was a substitute teacher in an art school in Rome, and among those who were attending night classes there was one of Will Eisner’s assistants on The Spirit. He told me that one page of comic art, twelve panels on three tiers, was paid $70 in the United States! So I thought that if I was going to do that job, I’d better go to the place where it was paid best.”

To Pastures New After getting a passport, the young artist boarded a ship in Genua on December 31, 1945. The following day he was leaving for New York, where he arrived on January 15, 1946. The U.S. Immigration Office, though, did not allow him to stay, as he only had a transit visa to Venezuela. Three months later, he was leaving again. Rather than going back home, he decided to move to Argentina, where he stayed for three years, working for Editorial Lainez and Columbia Hermanos. In July 38

1949, he was finally able to go back to New York and to reside there.

He showed his bulging portfolio to several comic book publishers, and eventually entered the East Coast offices of what was then called Western Printing and Lithographic Company, which for over a dozen years had been designing, producing and printing comic books, magazines and paperbacks for Dell Publishing (that went on until 1962, when Western parted company with Dell and became a publisher in its own right). Under the Dell imprint, Western produced a wide variety of comics, yet whereas their Los Angeles office mainly dealt with titles adapting animated-cartoon characters (due, of course, to the vicinity of Hollywood animation studios), their New York branch concentrated on realistic titles, most of them being adaptations of movies and TV series. Western’s editors immediately liked Giolitti’s bold style, which cleverly mixed an illustrative approach à là Raymond with a masterful, dramatic use of chiaroscuro. His solid figure drawing and his detailed backgrounds were also greatly appreciated, along with his ability to tackle a whole variety of genres.

Indians and Mounties The first strip Giolitti drew for Western was a 14-pager entitled “The Exile,” which appeared in the second issue of a Native-American series entitled The Chief (later known as Indian Chief), dated AprilJune, 1951. Giolitti did not stay on this title too long, as by 1951 he was assigned to illustrate Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Written by Gaylord DuBois, the comic starred a mustachioed Mountie who had originated on the radio in 1947, later moving onto TV with a CBS series which lasted from 1955-58 (during those years, the comic had photo covers portraying actor Richard Simmons). “I had a problem with dog-drawn sleds, which were a mainstay of the series,” Giolitti COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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recalled. “Initially, the only reference I had was a cover from the Italian magazine La Domenica del Corriere that my dad had sent me, a great Walter Molino illustration. Shortly after, I decided to move upstate to Lake Placid and then to Lake George, near the Canadian border, in the Adirondack Mountains. That’s where James Fenimore Cooper set Last of the Mohicans. There I found all the sleds I needed.

I also met a Frenchman who raised Malamute dogs and I bought one, calling him Kimo. ‘Kimo Sabe’ was what Tonto called the Lone Ranger in the TV series—that’s where I got that name from. I trained him and made him a team leader. Yes, later on I bought a whole dog-team and rode my own sled. I’d often stay away for days, and one time Western sent the police looking for me. They were worried about me—or rather, they were worried because they weren’t getting any work.” Anyway, in 1953 Giolitti left Lake Placid for a vacation in Rome, and when he came back he seemed to have had enough of the North, as he relocated down in Florida.

The Name is Adventure Although Sergeant Preston remained Giolitti’s main occupation until its demise in late 1958, the Italian artist found the time to produce other excellent work during those years. Worthy of note were the two 30-page adaptations he did for the short-lived series, Dell Junior Treasury. These were “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” (#1, 1955) and “Gulliver’s Travels” (#2, 1956). Both stories employed dialogue balloons along with narrative captions under each panel, and the latter (scripted by Gaylord Du Bois) was the recipient of the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Award.

During the ’50s, Giolitti also drew several issues of Tonto—the Lone Ranger’s Companion, where he showed a remarkable amount of research in depicting the tribes Tonto interacted with. From 195961, Giolitti was the resident artist on Gunsmoke, visualizing the feats of Dodge City Marshal Matt Dillon, as portrayed by James Arness in what remains TV’s longestrunning western series (1955-75). Written

by Eric Freiwald, Robert Schaefer and Paul S. Newman, the Gunsmoke comic was revived as a Gold Key title in 1969-70, with Giolitti once again at the helm.

Still in the ’50s, Giolitti’s atmospheric art graced several one-shots in the Four Color Comic series, such as Alexander the Great (adapting a 1956 movie starring Richard Burton), Tales from Wells Fargo (later known as Man from Wells Fargo, from a TV series starring Dale Robertson), Jungle Jim and Zorro among others.

Although Giolitti never lettered any of these stories, he did all of the sound effects (inside and outside panels), “drawing” each of them with a characteristic cast shadow. Although it employed neither sound effects nor balloon dialogues (only narrative captions were used), a remarkable effort was the 96-page Abraham Lincoln Life Story, scripted by Gaylord Du Bois, which was published as a Dell Giant in 1958.

The following year Giolitti had a chance to once again show his talent at depicting horses and gun-slingers when he took over the drawing on Have Gun, Will Travel, which adapted yet another successful western TV series, starring Richard Boone (1957-63).

Back in Italy Meanwhile, in 1955, Giolitti had obtained American citizenship.

“I’d married an American woman and I’d been living in the U.S.A. for six years, but that was not the main reason why I needed it,” Giolitti explained.

“With a U.S. citizenship, I would be able to stay in Italy as long as I wished.” In 1960, because of his father’s critical health conditions, Giolitti, his wife and his daughter (a son was born shortly after) left for Rome, where they should have stayed for nine months. Instead, they never went back to the United States. That did not affect his collaboration with Western Publishing at all, as it would continue as smoothly as ever from overseas, through the mail. Well, sort of. As Wally Green (Western Publishing editor from 1959-84) recalled, “Italy would have these postal strikes, [and Giolitti] would have to run to the Vatican and have [the pages] sent to us by Vatican mail.” By 1962, Giolitti had set up his own studio in October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

Above: Ye Ed needs to review materials sent to him by CBA contributors with a keener eye as he assumed these Turok dinosaur panels featured Alberto Giolitti’s pencil work for the series, yet as Ye Ed is setting captions—literally the same day this issue is going to press—Alberto Becattini’s copy reveal these panels were, in fact, penciled by Giolitti studio artist Giovanni Ticci. Sorry about that, chief! Art ©2002 Giovanni Ticci.

Turok ©2002 Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.

Inset left: Giovanni Ticci’s unfinished splash panel along with Ticci and Giolitti’s definitive version of the same from Turok, Son of Stone #49 (1966). Turok ©2002 Acclaim Entertainment, Inc. 39

Inset right: More Turok, Son of Stone panels penciled by Giovanni Ticci at the Giolitti studio.

Courtesy of Alberto Becattini. Art ©2002 Giovanni Ticci. Turok ©2002 Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.

Below: Splash page from an unpublished issue of Turok, Son of Stone. Words by the prolific Paul S. Newman. Art by Alberto Giolitti.

Courtesy of Robin Snyder. Turok ©2002 Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.

Rome. “It all started as a favor to some fellow artists,” he recalled.

“They had been working for the British publisher IPC for a while through an agent who lived in Milan and who didn’t speak English. Once they asked me to act as an interpreter, and eventually I replaced their former agent.” Indeed, Giolitti’s ability to deal with domestic and foreign clients soon bore fruit. With an ever-increasing number of artists, for almost thirty years the studio would produce several strips for Italy, Great Britain, Germany, and—of course—the U.S. Turok, Son of Stone had been created by writer/editor Matt Murphy in 1954. It told the (mis)adventures of two Native Americans, the young Turok and teenage Andar, who got stuck inside Lost Valley, a new version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, inhabited by cavemen and prehistoric creatures, and occasionally visited by aliens.

Initially drawn by Rex Maxon, who was followed by Bob Correa, Ray Bailey and Bob Fujitani, Turok was taken over by Giolitti as of #24 (June-Aug. 1961). It was Giolitti who set the series’ definitive look, continuing to work on it for over twenty years, mostly on scripts by the ubiquitous Paul S. Newman. Still on Turok, it must be noted that, contrary to what some sources (including the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide) state, Giolitti never did any of the painted covers that embellished the series (these were done by Morris Gollub and later by George Wilson). Giolitti, though, did the only line-drawn cover for the series, which graced issue #63 (Oct. 1968).

The Ticci Touch From 1960-67, Giolitti received considerable help from a young Italian artist who for a while not only worked, but lived at Giolitti’s homestudio. Giovanni Ticci (Siena, 1940) was only twenty years old when he started helping Giolitti with the penciling (initially on backgrounds, then on characters as well) on Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, and Turok. Of the latter title, Giolitti and Ticci did about ten stories together, then Ticci moved back to Siena and basically did all the drawing himself on another ten stories, with Giolitti only inking Turok and Andar’s faces. While Ticci was living at Giolitti’s, the two artists would use themselves as models for the characters they drew (Turok, by the way, had Giolitti’s face features). “The pictures were taken mostly by Giolitti’s wife and daughter,” Ticci later recalled, “but sometimes an ‘official photographer’ came to the studio: a retired U.S. Navy lieutenant who lived in Rome and had a real passion for photography.”

Although Turok was their main and most regular effort, Giolitti and Ticci collaborated on several other titles which included Boris Karloff Thriller/Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery (1962/63), Freedom Agent/John Steele Secret Agent (written by Paul S. Newman, 1963/64), The Twilight Zone (from Rod Serling’s legendary TV series, 1963/65/66), Ripley’s Believe It or Not!—True Ghost Stories (1965), Lord Jim (adapted from the Peter O’Toole movie, 1966), Laredo (one-issue adaptation of a TV western series, 1966), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (adapted by writers Dick Wood and Marshall McClintock from Irwin Allen’s TV series, 1966-67), Cowboy in Africa (another TV adaptation one-shot, written by Paul S. Newman, 1968).

They also drew four issues of Tarzan (#168-171, 1967), most of which adapted Burroughs’ Jungle Tales of Tarzan. Incidentally, one of the stories in #169, “The God of Tarzan,” was the only one that 40

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Giolitti ever managed to sign among the multitude he drew for Western.

Another notable joint effort by the two Italian artists was the 64-page adaptation of King Kong (1968), which Western published in three different editions, one of which measured a huge 10” x 13”.

During their collaboration, Ticci reportedly drew a few stories without Giolitti’s help. He did two “Ned West Gunsmith” fillers in Have Gun, Will Travel (#13 and 14, 1962), “The Incredible Sea Hunt of Sub E-11” in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!—True War Stories (#1, 1965), “The Five Casks of Greed” in Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery (#13, 1966), and “Captain Sabre and the Apache Monster” in Laredo (#1, 1966). On the other hand, Giolitti did at least one job without Ticci’s assistance. He illustrated all of “The Jungle Dragon” in Korak, Son of Tarzan #22 (Apr. 1968), except for Korak and Kaz, the little native boy, who were drawn by Mike Royer.

Early in 1968, Ticci went his own way to draw Italy’s most popular Western hero, Tex (which he is still doing today). Yet, three years later (not through the Giolitti Studio) he did one last story for Western. “Wally Greene called one day,” Ticci recalls, “asking me if I’d like to draw a story set in Siena, as he knew I was born there and lived there.” Written by Paul S. Newman, “The Day of the Palio” appeared in The Twilight Zone #42 (Mar. 1972). Not only did Ticci profit by this occasion to draw Siena’s medieval streets and the world-famous Piazza del Campo in detail, but he also gave his own face to Tony Marco, the protagonist of the story.

to appear in the magazines published in Germany by Bastei Verlag. The studio could count on about 30 artists in Italy and 25 in Argentina. Among the latter there was the great José Luis Salinas, who had drawn the Cisco Kid strip for King Features from 1951-68.

(Curiously enough, in 1957-58 Giolitti had illustrated several issues of the Cisco Kid comic book for Western).

In the 1970s, the studio continued producing high-quality art for the Western/Gold Key/Whitman comic books. As we have seen, Giolitti concentrated on Turok and Star Trek, often with assistance from his capable associates. Sergio Costa (Rome, 1935) penciled and partially inked several episodes of Turok from 1968 well into the 1970s. Massimo Belardinelli (Rome, 1938) did some background work on Star Trek, especially as regards the Enterprise spaceship and occasional alien monsters. Belardinelli later drew lots of stories, including “Ace Trucking Co.” and a new version of the classic space hero Dan Dare, for the British comic 2000 A.D. Some of these stories were eventually published in the U.S. by Fleetway/Quality.

Giorgio Cambiotti (Rome, 1931-2000) was a top-notch penciler, who had been working for the Giolitti Studio since 1969, drawing the science-fiction strip Perry Rhodan for Germany.

Inset left: Turok, Son of Stone panel penciled by Giovanni Ticci at the Giolitti studio. Courtesy of Alberto Becattini. Art ©2002 Giovanni Ticci. Turok ©2002 Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.

Below: This splash page for “The God of Tarzan” (Tarzan of the Apes #169, 1967) is the only one bearing artist Alberto Giolitti’s signature. Courtesy of Alberto Becattini. ©2002 ERB, Inc.

Journey Among the Stars Before Ticci left, the Giolitti Studio had been entrusted with drawing yet another title for Western. Star Trek started on TV in September, 1966, and although it only lasted three seasons, it proved incredibly popular in reruns. That allowed its comic book version, which made its debut in July, 1967, to continue being published by Western until March, 1979. As Giolitti was too busy with Turok, the first two issues of Star Trek (the second one appeared in June, 1968, almost a year after #1) were drawn by another studio artist, Nevio Zeccara (Rovigo, 1924), whose style was definitely more “cartoony” than Giolitti’s. Giolitti himself took over the series as of the third issue (Sept. 1968), reportedly because Zeccara was too busy with other commitments. He would tackle the paper space adventures of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock for over ten years, working on scripts by Dick Wood, Len Wein, Arnold Drake, Gerry Boudreau and Allan Moniz among others. “I never saw a single episode of Star Trek on TV,” Giolitti later confessed. “I always worked with stills as reference.” In 1976, Western published a collection of Star Trek stories, entitled The Enterprise Logs, under its Golden Press imprint. It included an article, “Portrait of an Artist: Alberto Giolitti,” which for the first time acknowledged the Italian artist’s longtime contribution to the series.

Only from 1978 onwards would some of Western’s comics (including Star Trek and Turok) carry writer and artist credits.

Other Studio Staffers The Giolitti Studio was going full steam ahead in the 1970s, with several hundreds of comic pages being produced every month, 400 of which were October 2002

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41

Born and living in Florence, Italy, ALBERTO BECATTINI is a freelance journalist and a comics historian. He has written hundreds of articles and several books on the subject. A regular contributor to Disney-Italy’s comic magazines, he has written for Gladstone Publishing, and is a senior editor of Who’s Who of American Comic Books. CBA would like to thank Alberto for his herculean efforts in helping to make this issue as definitive as possible. Grazi, A.B.!

Right: Artist Alberto Giolitti’s splendid swan song: Back to the wild West with Tex Willer and Kit Carson in Lawless Land (1989). ©2002 Sergio Bonelli Editore.

Below: Full-page drawing by Alberto Giolitti from the awardwinning “Gulliver’s Travels,” Dell Junior Treasury #3 (1956). © 2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

During the 1970s, Cambiotti sometimes collaborated with Giolitti on U.S. comic book stories. He reportedly worked on Star Trek, Turok, The Twilight Zone (“The Unseen Thing” in #34, 1970) and Boris Karloff (“A Game of Squirt” in #39, 1972). The only U.S. story Cambiotti received an official credit for was Steve Skeates’ adaptation of a Robert Silverberg tale, “Collecting Team,” in #2 of Whitman’s sciencefiction title Starstream (1976). Previously, he had penciled another adaptation, this time from the movie Goodbye, Mr.

Chips (1970), on which he collaborated with Mario Pedrazzi (Turin, 1938), who occasionally helped Giolitti with the penciling on Star Trek.

It is worth mentioning that in 1972-73, Belardinelli, Cambiotti and Pedrazzi were among the Giolitti Studio artists who drew several stories of Mandrake and The Phantom for the Italian publisher Giuseppe Spada, under permission from King Features Syndicate. In fact, Pedrazzi had already drawn several Phantom stories on his own in 1965-70, and one of them, “The Trap” (1967) was eventually published in the U.S. by Charlton in The Phantom (#61 and 62, 1976).

As for the above-mentioned Nevio Zeccara, he did other work for Western in the midto late ’60s, contributing to The Twilight Zone (“Mars: Dead or Alive” in #17 and “Second Hand Clothes” in #18, both 1966, and “Survival” in #22, 1967), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (he drew the “Explorers in the Unknown” fillers in issues #7-14, 1967-68), and later on drawing an Arnold Drake adaptation of Robert Bloch’s story, “And the Blood Ran Green,” for Starstream #4 (1976). For this last effort he was officially credited (although his surname was misspelled “Zaccara”), and he was even able to sign it on the splash page.

The Giolitti Studio did not only produce realistic-adventure strips for Western’s comic books. From 1971-74, Massimo Fecchi (Rome, 1946), drew Warner Bros.’ Bugs Bunny, Tweety and Sylvester and Yosemite Sam, as well as MGM’s Tom and Jerry. An excellent draftsman, Fecchi later produced several episodes of “Fix und Foxi” for the German publisher Kauka, and since 1998 he has been drawing Donald Duck for the Egmont Publishing Group in Denmark. Sandro Costa (Rome, 1941, Sergio Costa’s younger brother) also tackled the Warner Bros. characters, concentrating on Tweety and Sylvester from 1974-76, before switching to Germany’s Fix und Foxi as well.

Western’s Decline and Fall During his last decade at Western Publishing, Giolitti worked in a “slicker” style which often did without his one-time dramatic use of light and shade. While continuing to draw Turok and Star Trek, he adapted the movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), did a few more stories for Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery and The Twilight Zone (1970-71), and in 1976 he drew “Dominus,” adapted by Arnold Drake from a Barrington J. Bayley story, for Starstream #1.

Early in 1982, Western Publishing suspended publication of his titles due to distribution problems. For two years they had been selling their comics (now sporting a Whitman label) in bagged sets of three. Now they had suddenly stopped production, trying to empty their warehouses of unsold Whitman bags. Later in 1982, Giolitti bitterly observed that “Western has put aside $25,000 worth of ready-for-publication material, and hasn’t been printing a single page for six months.” When Western re-started production in February, 42

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1983, only some of their funnyanimal titles were brought back, mostly using reprints or inventory until they folded for good in April, 1984. The few adventure titles they still had were gone for keeps in 1982, and none of what had been shelved ever saw the light. That included #41 of Flash Gordon (whose last published issue was #37, Mar. 1982), which, edited by Robin Snyder, featured a story written by Bob Haney and drawn by—Alberto Giolitti.

Below: Superb Alberto Giolitti page from Five Years Later (1986). © 2002 Editrice Comic Art.

Return to Italian “Fumetti” Thus, Giolitti’s long collaboration with Western Publishing came to a sad, if natural, end. For a while, the Roman artist dropped his pencils and brushes, trying to think of himself exclusively as a studio manager. In fact, he soon went back to the drawing board when Britain’s IPC Publications requested him to illustrate a new series, and at about the same time he once again became active on the Italian comics market. He had, indeed, made a hit-and-run comeback in 1976, drawing thirty pages of “Bloody Sands,” an episode of the western comic series Tex, which was completed by Ticci. Otherwise, he had been missing from the Italian comics scene for almost four decades. In 1983, his unmistakable style resurfaced in the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero, where he drew a sequence of a story entitled “Welcome to Rome.” Then he contributed to the magazine Comic Art with a superbly-drawn postnuclear-holocaust story entitled “Five Years Later” (1986). In 1989 came the excellent 226-page Tex graphic novel, Lawless Land, after which Giolitti drew other stories for the regular monthly series starring the western hero, occasionally using the pen-name “Gilbert.” Unfortunately, an incurable illness led him to an untimely death on April 15, 1993. His last Tex stories would only appear in late 1996, once again completed by his one-time assistant and ever-true friend, Giovanni Ticci.

In 1995, two years after reviving Turok, Son of Stone, Valiant published two issues

of The Original Turok, Son of Stone, reprinting four classic stories by Alberto Giolitti. It was a due homage to a master draftsman and a real gentleman, whose contribution to American comic books, as well as to comics in general, must certainly be revalued and treasured.

NATIONAL LAMPOONS NEEDED! In our crusade to produce as definitive a history of the comics of NATIONAL LAMPOON as possible, Comic Book Artist is in need of some NatLamp issues. We’re basically looking for complete and readable copies—no near mints, thanks—as well as hoping not to pay eBay prices. So if you’re sympathetic, we’d appreciate you checking out the following list to see if you might have some issues to share.

Here’s our needs: 1970: May, June, July, August, September, November.

1971: January, February, June, August.

1972: March, April, October.

1973: May, September, October, November.

1974: March, May, August, October.

1975: February, March, April, May, June, August, Sept., Nov. 1976: February, March, April, May, September.

October 2002

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1977: April, May, June, September, October, November.

1978: February, March, April, November, December.

1979: January, February, April, May, June, August, September.

1980: January, February, April, May, June, August, Nov., Dec. 1981: All issues 1982: All issues except January and June.

1983: All issues 1984: All issues except February 1985-1993: All issues.

Also, if you have any of the National Lampoon specials or merchandising you might part with, drop me a line and I’ll tell you if we need it or not. If you can help us, please contact Ye Ed at (401) 783-1669 or e-mail jonbcooke@aol.com, or snail-mail Jon B. Cooke at P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204. Thanks!

43

CBA Interview

The Splendor of Dan Spiegle From his Hopalong Cassidy strip to current work at Boys’ Life

Below: Courtesy of the artist, here’s a self-portrait of Dan Spiegle surrounded by some of the best-known characters he has rendered. Art ©2002 Dan Spiegle.

Characters ©2002 their respective copyright holders.

44

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcription by the LongBox.com Staff

ing yet! This utterly captivating an charming gentleman was interviewed via phone in July 2002, and Dan copyedited the transcript.

Dan Spiegle is simply one of those rare comic book artists who, even into their golden years, just gets better and better with age. While he appeared like a bombshell on the syndicated comic strip scene with his renowned ’50s work on Hopalong Cassidy, and was well-regarded for his consistent artistry on the long-running Space Family Robinson in the ’60s and ’70s, it was his teaming with writer Mark Evanier in the ’80s—with Blackhawk and Crossfire—where he seemed to hit his peak as an artist. But, upon seeing his recent work in, of all places, Boys’ Life magazine, Ye Ed can firmly attest that we ain’t seen noth-

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from, Dan? Dan Spiegle: I was born in the state of Washington in Cosmopolis. We then moved to Southern California, then Hawaii, and then to Northern California where I went through high school. We came down to Los Angeles during the War where I joined the Navy.

CBA: What year were you born?

Dan: 1920 CBA: What did your father do? Why did you move so much?

Dan: My father owned a drug store in Cosmopolis. He developed health problems and his doctor said my father should retire, so he sold the store, we moved to San Diego and then over to Hawaii because my aunt and uncle owned a couple hotels over there and they wanted us to buy a home there. We were living in a beach house near Diamond Head when the stock market broke in 1929.

CBA: Do you remember the drug store?

Dan: I remember the second one. We had moved to northern California where my father bought another drug store in a small town just south of Eureka. That’s where I went to high school.

In fact, I’m drawing an interior of the drug store. I want to do this for my kids so I’m drawing the interior and lettering the different things that I remember about the drug store and how we used to wait for the Sunday papers. The comic section would come into the drug store on Thursday and then the rest of the San Francisco Examiner would come in on Sunday morning with the news. My dad would put the whole paper together. I remember that I could hardly wait for Thursday. [laughter] There was Flash Gordon and other comics that I enjoyed.

CBA: Was your father a pharmacist by trade?

Dan: Yes. CBA: By the time you were 15, comics were coming in pretty strong. Did you have any interest in comic books?

Dan: Not comic books, but comic strips. I didn’t even know about comic books really. They didn’t have many at that time. My father had quite a magazine section and I used to read them all. I would read G-8 and His Battle Aces, Doc Savage, and all the World War I pulp magazines. I used to draw stuff. I had visions of doing a comic strip like Flash Gordon. Well, not exactly like Flash because while I liked the adventure strips, I hated super-heroes and stories of the future. I think there’s enough stories around us all the time to make life interesting and I just didn’t care for other types. I wanted just a good story.

CBA: You were attracted to Alex Raymond’s rendering?

Dan: Not so much. My favorite was Buz Sawyer by Roy Crane.

I liked the simplicity of his drawing and yet the detail that he could put into it, like Alex Toth of today. I love Toth’s work because of that.

Anyone who can tell a clear story is what I’m interested in and these guys were masters.

CBA: Did you clue into Roy Crane’s use of benday? There was a lot of shading.

Dan: That’s why I started using it on the Hopalong Cassidy daily strips. After the first year drawing the strip, when King Features bought it out from under the L.A. Times Mirror Syndicate, the new owners sent me to New York to see how King Features worked because they had a lot of questions and I also had a lot of questions. They helped me out and gave me about halfdozen of Roy Crane’s original daily strips and I so admired the COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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way he handled the Craftint that I started using it in Hopalong.

CBA: Wash Tubbs, Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer are beautiful strips. Would you say Crane was the artist you admired the most?

Dan: I would say overall because he could tell a story so clearly. It really impressed me. I also like Terry and the Pirates, that was great. I never tried to imitate their style because I felt like everybody has their own and I really didn’t want to be influenced too much by anybody else. I was having enough trouble with my own style and trying to develop something that would work for me.

CBA: When did you first start drawing?

Dan: From the time I could first hang onto a pencil I guess. I used to get these 5¢ drawing tablets with the rough scratch paper and I would draw a continued story.

CBA: So you were creating a homemade comic book story, for all practical purposes? What was the subject matter?

Dan: Whatever was popular. Mainly war stories and gangster stories, and anything with action.

CBA: Did you go to the movies a lot?

Dan: When they were available.

CBA: Did you go to movie serials? You really came of age in the Golden Age of adventure.

Dan: The Saturday matinees were great.

CBA: Did you reach a point where you decided that you could draw for a living?

Dan: I didn’t know if I could make a living at it, but I know I wanted to do it. Whether it was a living or not really didn’t bother me at that time. I drew a couple of Sunday pages, inked and colored them, and sent them to King Features. I said, “I’d like to do this, are you interested?” They sent back a nice letter that said, “Your story looks nice, but in the future, if you send something, don’t color it. We do the coloring.” I didn’t know how they printed that stuff.

CBA: How old were you when you sent that Sunday strip?

Dan: I was in high school, so about 15 or something like that.

CBA: Were you known in school as the artist?

Dan: Yes. In fact, when I graduated in 1939, under my picture in the yearbook, they put down, “Our Walt Disney.” [laughter] Not knowing years later that I actually would do work for Disney!

CBA: Did you draw for the yearbook? Did the school have a newspaper?

Dan: They didn’t have a newspaper and they didn’t do any artwork for the yearbook. It was strictly photographs as I recall.

CBA: So you would draw in class?

Dan: I was always drawing and then there was art class where I learned to watercolor. I enjoyed that. Art class was always the class that I hoped would bring up my grade average. [laughter] CBA: What did your parents think?

Dan: My dad always wanted me to be a druggist. He was not really happy, but never discouraged it. My parents were both very supportive of whatever I wanted to do. He was very quiet, gentle, proper man who also dressed with a tie when he went to work in the morning. He thought that was the practical way to make a living. He thought cartooning was a pretty shaky business.

CBA: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

Dan: I had one brother and one sister. My brother was six years younger and my sister was two years older than me.

CBA: Do they have any artistic inclinations?

Dan: No, neither one was a bit interested.

CBA: Was there anyone else in your family at all?

Dan: No, but my father had beautiful handwriting. He was October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

an instructor in college in penmanship and I remember him writing in a very fancy style with a lot of flourishes. That was the closest it came to any artistic ability. My mother was not a bit interested in that.

CBA: Was there an advantage because your father owned the drug store with the pulp magazines? Did you always get the stuff for free?

Dan: What I would do is pick up a couple of the magazines and was always careful to take good care of them. I would take them home, read them all, and then put them all back. [laughter] CBA: So you weren’t a collector, you were a reader.

Dan: Also, at that time, if you didn’t sell the magazines, you could tear off the covers and mail it back to the company for a refund. I would take the old, coverless ones that I hadn’t read and then read those because otherwise my father would just throw them away.

CBA: Did you have other friends who were of like mind who appreciated the adventure material?

Dan: Not with the same interest in drawing, but I did have one good friend in our little town, Lolita. This friend of mine was really good at model airplane building and he ground them out like McDonald-Douglas and had them hanging in his bedroom by string.

I used to go to his house and we would play with his airplanes. We would put firecrackers in them and blow them up. [laughter] CBA: Of course, the 1920s was also the Golden Age of Aviation.

Dan: I remember when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. That was 1927 and I was in San Diego where Ryan Field is located where they built the Spirit of St. Louis. I remember my father taking me down to the field. I don’t know why except they were having some performance because there were a lot of aircraft around. That’s all I remember about that because I was only seven years old.

Above: Portrait of a young man as syndicated comic strip artist. Dan Spiegle in his mid-twenties at the beginning of his professional career as artist on Hopalong Cassidy. Check out the schedule on the chalkboard at upper right.

Courtesy of Dan Spiegle.

Below: Dan Spiegle drew up some Western strips upon graduating art school, a sample of which appears below. Dan tells us it was after viewing the classic movie Red River when he became determined to draw a syndicated cowboy strip.

Courtesy of & ©2002 Dan Spiegle.

45

Above: A trio of Dan Spiegle’s Hopalong Cassidy syndicated newspaper comic strips, these from 1955. Courtesy of the artist. ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

46

CBA: So you saw bi-planes with some frequency?

Dan: Yes. In San Diego, they were all over the place, especially on North Island. The funny thing is that years later, when I came back from overseas, I was stationed at North Island Naval Air. CBA: When you were a teenager were you firm in your conviction to become a cartoonist?

Dan: Yes, I knew then that I wanted to, either that or a magazine illustrator. I just liked good illustrations.

CBA: The major illustrators had outlets like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Were you able to leaf through those magazines, as well, at the newsstand in your father’s store?

Dan: Yes, all the magazines were there.

CBA: What was your plan as you were approaching high school graduation?

Dan: I was hoping to come down to Southern California where the aircraft industry was booming and the streets were paved with gold. I was intent on making my fortune. I hoped to earn enough money to go on to art school somewhere. I didn’t know of the art schools at that time, but I figured they were all down in Southern California, so I came down and got a job at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica and worked there until the war started.

CBA: What were you doing?

Dan: I was working in the experimental department building new parts for the airplanes. We were making new improvements like I was working on a 20MM gun tub. It held four 20MM cannons and hung under the bomb bay of the Douglas A-20 attack bomber. The first one we built, we fastened it on the aircraft, took it out, test fired it and it popped all the rivets off the gun tub, so something was wrong. [laughter] We had to take it back, but while we were working on this sort of stuff, I was also drawing all the time. One of the fellows in the department saw my drawings and said, “You ought to be in the technical art department of Douglas Aircraft drawing up some new

ideas. Would you want to do it?” I said, “Okay,” and he took a section off an engine cowling and set it down on the floor and said, “Draw this in detail.” So I drew it with every rivet and everything on it and the people in the illustration department liked it, called me up, and I started to work there. Though all of my friends were going into the service, I could have asked for a deferment but I joined the Navy for the adventure. The funny thing is you felt like you were in an office doing nothing while all these guys were out there having fun. [laughter] CBA: Did the war seem eminent? That it was definitely going to reach American shores from your point of view?

Dan: At that time, after the Japanese fired on the oil refinery above Santa Barbara, we were certain we’d get in the War. I can remember one night when somebody thought enemy aircraft was coming over. Civil defense had a bunch of antiaircraft guns in places around the city. Somebody fired a shell, it exploded in the air and all the searchlights centered on that puff of smoke. Everyone thought they could see an aircraft and all hell broke loose as the antiaircraft guns in the area opened up. But there was nothing there. [laughter] That was the feeling of the times. My mother was dead set against me going in the service and kept saying that she was going to cut off one of my toes. [laughter] I really thought she was going to do it! I remember losing a bit of sleep at night. [laughs] CBA: In San Diego, did you join the Navy?

Dan: Yes, but we were living in Santa Monica at that point. That’s where I joined and went through boot camp in San Diego, then off to Norman, Oklahoma to go through aviation ordinance school, and finally over to the Hawaiian area.

CBA: Where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?

Dan: I was working at Douglas Aircraft at that time, so I joined the Navy in spring of the following year.

CBA: Did you go overseas?

Dan: Laughingly, we called it overseas, but it was in Hawaii and eventually I was stationed on Maui. I served at a carrier aircraft service unit which was called CASU 4. We serviced all planes that came off carriers going south and returning. Our job in aviation ordinance was to load bombs, clean and bore sight guns, and do all the maintenance. In the latter part of the war, we started to mount rocket launchers onto the wings of planes. Before that, we had rockets but they weren’t too reliable for the pilots.

CBA: Were you able to use your artistic skills while in the service?

Dan: I got out of a lot of guard duty by painting the squadron insignias. As the different squadrons would came in, we would service them. Now, each squadron had an emblem and some of the fighter pilots liked to have their squadron emblems on their planes. I didn’t do any of the naked women on the aircraft because our base didn’t allow that. They said you could paint the squadron insignia—usually like a flying bomb or whatever—but no women!

CBA: Did you design them from scratch?

Dan: No. At that time, the squadron was completed, having already designed their insignia, and this would be the first stop on their way COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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south. They would be on an aircraft carrier and then, when the carrier got in our region, they would all fly to our base, and stay for a couple weeks, practice dive bombing, target practice, and all that stuff.

CBA: Did you rub shoulders with the pilots?

Dan: Yes, we would go up a lot of times because the radiomen or the rear gunners got tired of flying and so we could always get a hop if we wanted just for fun.

CBA: Were you envious? Did you want to see action yourself?

Dan: Yes. That was always the dream: Going south and coming back a hero. It was a chance to hop in a plane and go up. Sometimes we’d fill our white hat, particularly the torpedo runs where the plane would move back and forth in a half-circle and make you sick. The TBMs you’d ride in the turret in the back and you’d be looking backwards at the plane following you and the plane following him and each one is moving in different directions. It made me dizzy.

CBA: Working around ordinance, performing maintenance and also doing the technical drawing back at McDonald-Douglas, did that give you an advantage where you were stationed?

Dan: I think so. I could have stayed in Norman, Oklahoma, as an instructor for blueprint reading because it just seemed to be a natural thing for me. I had never taken it before but knew what they were talking about so it was real easy for me. There again, I wanted to go with all my buddies to the War and become a hero. So you just kept going along with the group. I drew for the base newspaper, too. It was the CASU 4 newspaper and, at that time, all they had was a mimeograph machine so it was very crude, but I would draw an aircraft in each issue and it came out once a week. Because I was illustrating all the different squadrons that would come in, the officers club wanted a painting of each one of the insignias so they would hang them on the wall, all around the top of the walls abutting the ceiling. These were 12” x 12” slabs of masonite or wood and I took them down to the paint department and had them sprayed white. I went into town because we didn’t have different colored paint around and couldn’t find anything that you would normally use, so I just used regular household paint.

CBA: No art store, so you went to a hardware store?

Dan: Right. I went to a hardware store, picked up these little cans of regular enamel and that’s what I used to paint these insignias. I would do that and that would get me out of night watch, so it was worthwhile.

CBA: So you were stationed in Oklahoma until the end?

Dan: No, I was on Maui. From Oklahoma, we went to a transfer unit in San Francisco on Treasure Island and stayed there for a week. From there, they did all the transferring, put you on a ship and then we went over to Pearl Harbor where we stayed for about a week. That was another transfer unit. At that time, they would split off again and send guys wherever we were needed and I happened to get Maui.

CBA: Was it nice on Maui?

Dan: It was really nice. It was great. In fact, a friend of mine and I bought a 1933 Ford off of another couple of sailors that were transferring out. There were about a dozen guys that had cars and we used to use airplane gas and it burned out the valves in all the cars. It was really hot stuff, but you couldn’t get gas otherwise.

CBA: Were you sociable?

Did you go out clubbing?

Dan: We’d go out, drive around, and saw the island pretty well.

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

CBA: And you were single guy?

Dan: Yeah.

CBA: When was your service over?

Dan: In January 1946.

CBA: What was your reaction to VJ Day? Was it a joyous time?

Was there any thought about the atomic bomb?

Dan: No, we figured that the Japanese had it coming and we were glad to get out of the mess.

We were bored staying on Maui—it got to be a little much after a while.

CBA: Hawaii and paradise got to be a little much? [laughter] Dan: Yeah, because every fourth day, we had liberty and we’d check out a truck and go by the chow hall and have them make up a bunch of sandwiches and we’d buy a case of Cokes and go to the beach and play volleyball and body surf all day. It was tough duty.

CBA: What did you do in ’46?

Dan: I came back with my friend I was in the service with, and he and I were waiting to go to school. He wanted to go to college and I wanted to get into Chouinard Art School. I was accepted but had to wait until the Fall group to go in. This was January or February so we went over to Catalina Island and started working for

Above: Alas, this is the single example of original art we’ve uncovered of Dan Spiegle’s expert 15-year run as artist of Space Family Robinson (Lost in Space).

This page detail is from #46.

Courtesy of the artist. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Inset left: Dynamic splash page by Dan Spiegle in Space Family Robinson Lost in Space #43.

Courtesy of Chris Hunt and Ray Kelly. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc. 47

contractors. At that time after the War, everyone was interested in rebuilding their houses and getting ready for the tourists in the Summer. We re-roofed and jacked up old houses and crawled under them to put in new foundations. We ripped out all the old plumbing fixtures of a hotel and brought it into town because people couldn’t get plumping equipment and everything because metal was still scarce. All of this stuff was valuable and contractors were putting it in apartment houses that they were building or rebuilding. We did any kind of labor like that.

CBA: Did you go to Chouinard?

Dan: Yeah, I went to Chouinard in the Fall, in Los Angeles, and took Illustration. It was a fine art and illustration school and Mrs. Chouinard really frowned on comics. About a year after I was going there, the John Ford motion picture Red River came out starring John Wayne and that was the kind of story I liked. It was no longer a B-Western, it was an A-type, well-done Western and it had good characters.

CBA: With those beautiful vistas, wonderful landscape shots?

Dan: Right. So I decided that was what I wanted to do in comic strip form: I wanted to produce a quality Western strip for the 48

newspaper. I started drawing out ideas and, because I was paid under the G.I. Bill, I couldn’t afford to take much extra time to do it so I started doing some of it in class. I would do some of the strips on pieces of paper under the drawings I was supposed to be working on for life class; I would start the figure drawing, get it going rather quickly, and then I’d flip the page over and start working on my stuff. When Mrs. Chouinard came in, I’d flip the page back over and pretend to be drawing because, if she found out, she’d have kicked me out! [laughter] You were out of there if she caught you doing anything else. She was very strict. I was going on 26.

CBA: Were your classmates who had not been in the service 18-19 years old?

Dan: Yeah, but there weren’t many. Most of my classmates were all ex-G.I.s. I had a good friend that was in the European Theatre. He flew the Thunderbolt fighter and I had another friend that flew that Mustang fighter. He later stayed in the Reserves and plowed into the side of a hill during one of his flights and we lost him. He was a really talented kid and could have been great in the art field.

CBA: Did you have any cartoonists of note as classmates?

Dan: Yes. Bill Ziegler, who later took over the Mary Worth strip, and John Dempsey, Playboy cartoonist. Most of them were interested in advertising and commercial art, not much in the way of illustrators. I had one friend who just couldn’t make it in the art field because he was not that good at drawing but he had a great color sense. He went on and became very good and had his own business as an interior decorator. There were other fields.

CBA: You really hit upon something that got me thinking. Tell me if I’m wrong, but Red River came out in ’47 or ’48, just prior to the advent of television, just before the big Western craze that would dominate TV for years to come. Wasn’t it incredibly fortuitous for you to be considering doing an authentic Western newspaper strip at that time?

Dan: Yes! It was a great idea, just at the right time. In doing these Western samples, I had to draw a lot of horses and was struggling with them, but we had an excellent illustrator instructor, Don Perceval, a British gentlemen who had done a lot of maritime battle scenes for the British Navy—some beautiful scenes he had done in oil—and he was also excellent at drawing animals. I told him my problems and he instructed me on drawing horses. So that was a first rate education.

CBA: Were you holding him in confidence by telling him you were doing a strip on Westerns as Mrs. Chouinard would disapprove?

Dan: Yes, because all the instructors knew I was doing this. That is, everyone but her, so I’m sure they were sympathetic. They knew we were all struggling and I think that they’d all been in similar shoes at one time or another.

CBA: What was the name of your character?

Dan: I can’t remember. But what I was interested in was making it look authentic, so I went down to a Western museum in Pasadena and sketched old lamps and all sorts of background materials. I wanted to put those in my strips because I wanted these to look as authentic as possible. After I’d been at Chouinard about three years, it just so happened a friend of mine saw a want ad in the newspaper looking for a “cartoonist writer.” My G.I. Bill was running out and I was getting desperate—I’d just married so things had to come to a head in a hurry—and this friend of mine (which shows you how valuable friends are when you think about it, all the good things that have happened to me are because of friends and that’s why I value friendship so highly) showed me this classified ad—asking for a cartoonist/writer. I was desperate and said I’d take it and run. It was up in Hollywood and they wanted somebody to do Bozo the Clown.

I said, “I can’t do that kind of stuff. I’m more of an illustrator, not a real cartoonist.” The fellow looked at my work—the cowboy strip samples—and said that his brother was office manager for the Hopalong Cassidy organization and they were just around the corner on Hollywood Boulevard. He said, “Go around there and show your stuff to them.” So I did.

CBA: You originally went there for a Bozo the Clown comic strip?

Dan: They wanted to do a strip because Bozo the Clown was a character on television who all the kids loved.

CBA: I think the guy’s name was Larry Harmon. It started in L.A., so this is roughly 1950? Television was just starting to get its steam COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

going. This obviously also preceded Hoppy’s incredible popularity via TV with a new generation of kids?

Dan: William Boyd, the guy who played Hopalong, had just bought up his old movies and sold them to TV. The fad was just beginning to really roll. Hoppy was getting popular by then so when I went into the office he had covered pretty much all aspects of promotion, but I asked the office manager if they would be interested in a Hoppy comic strip. They said it was a good idea because they wanted to get into all fields. Things just turned out just right because Boyd happened to be in his office at that time, so the guy took me back and introduced me and I showed Boyd what I had done. He really liked the idea of a strip right away. He said, “I like the fact that you can draw a horse. I don’t care if you can draw me or not, but if you can draw a horse that’s the main thing that will sell the strip.”

CBA: So this is a really marvelous chain of fortuitous events? You were very lucky to have had Boyd in the office at the time, just before he hit huge with television.

Dan: That was my lucky day, if I’d ever had one!

CBA: Even when you started drawing at Chouinard, did you have sketchbook after sketchbook of reference material?

Dan: I had scraps of paper. I was never much for using a sketchbook because I felt I was going to lose them. So I just kept the things in my head, remembering details about certain things, and it worked out okay.

CBA: Were you into Western Americana? Did it excite and interest you?

Dan: It did at that time, but first of all, I was interested in a good story of any kind, as long as it was an adventure story, I was for it. I’d never really thought that much about Westerns until Red River. When I saw that film, I realized I loved that type of Western.

CBA: That movie just felt authentic. That had Montgomery Clift in it, right?

Dan: That’s correct. They carried their guns low and looked like real gun-slingers to me. It just seemed real.

CBA: There was dirt and dust everywhere.

Dan: It was not a clean and fancy place, and the guys didn’t look like Roy Rogers.

CBA: They had pretty weathered faces.

Dan: John Ireland got his start in movies in that film. He was just great as a cowboy.

CBA: I believe that was also Monty Clift’s first picture. He had this great conflict with John Wayne, playing the liberal guy and the Duke played the conservative.

Maybe that was the magic of John Ford: He made these very simplistic stories but they held such weight, had such dramatic tension. He used the simplistic Western setting for tales of good vs. bad, then adding shades of grey. Getting back to when comics were coming on strong: Did you keep an eye on them at all? Did you read them?

Dan: I kept my eye on most of newspaper strips.

CBA: What about comic books?

Dan: Not comic books. I didn’t really think about them at that time.

CBA: Weren’t they going around?

Weren’t servicemen reading comics a lot that you could see? Weren’t they around as part of the adult culture?

Dan: Not that much. The guys read any magazine that came out, from the Hollywood magazines to Popular Mechanics.

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

CBA: You didn’t give any thought to super-hero or crime comics while they were coming out?

Dan: No, I didn’t know they existed at that time.

CBA: The syndicated strip is what your eye was on?

Dan: I like that idea of continued stories. I know that when I was drawing these stories on 5¢ tablets, they were always continued stories that would go on tablet after tablet with the same characters fighting crime and all that stuff. Humphrey Bogart-type crime movies.

CBA: Do you know comic book writer Don McGregor?

Dan: The name sounds familiar.

CBA: Don is a huge Hopalong Cassidy fan. He’s even

Above and inset left: Fine as his Gold Key material was, Dan Spiegle kicked into high gear when he teamed-up with writer Mark Evanier (whom the artist calls his favorite collaborator). Perhaps the team’s pinnacle achievement was the Hollywood exploits of Crossfire, a costumed adventurer working the Tinseltown beat.

Above is a page from Crossfire “about 1987,” says the artist. At left is a pin-up image of the hero.

Courtesy of Dan Spiegle. ©2002 Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle.

Opposite page: The Evanier/ Spiegle team’s first collaboration was on a notable revival of Blackhawk in the early 1980s.

Top is a page penciled and inked by the artist. Below is Dave Cockrum’s cover to the team’s first effort in Blackhawk #251.

Art courtesy of Dan Spiegle. ©2002 DC Comics.

49

Below: Dan Spiegle tells us a comic book adaptation of The Wiz (a major Broadway hit cum Hollywood flick based on the classic movie) was “another project which was well on its way towards completion when Universal Studios decided to cancel. I was having fun with this one!” This previously unpublished page appears courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2002 Dan Spiegle.

Characters ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

50

interviewed William Boyd’s widow, who sounds like a hot sketch.

I was in his apartment and he pulled out tear sheets of the Hoppy strips—dailies and Sundays—and it was such accomplished early work that I saw. For a beginner, so to speak, your work looked really good.

Dan: Thank you. I took particular pride in the Sunday pages, experimenting with color as I was able to indicate my own color choices and they were very good about matching. They really tried. I even took to tinting dialogue balloons in color and leaving the white spot in the pictures where I wanted an accent and experimented with different things like that. I tried different pen and brush techniques. I never tried to follow anyone else’s work because I always felt that when I tried, it just didn’t work for me even though I liked Roy Crane and Caniff’s work so much. But it was ridiculous for me to copy them because everybody has a different stroke. Your hand and arm moves in a different way and you can’t do what they do, so there’s no sense in trying.

CBA: So you didn’t have any major influences?

Dan: No, I didn’t. There were a lot whose work I would look at and marvel at what they did. I’d say that’s great for them, but I can’t do it.

CBA: How was it writing?

Dan: I wrote the first story for Hopalong and then they said they wanted a Sunday page, too. Because I was just starting out, I didn’t know anything about the business, so I was floored with the request.

I said I couldn’t handle all of it and so they got a writer. His name was Royal King Cole. [laughter] He was a character just like his name. I didn’t think he was a good writer at all and I never liked his work.

CBA: What was his background?

Dan: He wrote for the movies and mainly television. This was a sideline and it was a big mistake.

CBA: What was wrong with his writing?

Dan: I just thought it was terrible. [laughter] I suppose this emphasizes the conflict an artist always has with writers. You see things differently then they do. With the exception of Mark Evanier, I’ve always had problems with writers. Not to the point where I was mad or we argued, but everybody has a different vision of life and how things should turn out. [laughter] It wasn’t always my way of thinking. But Mark to me is the greatest writer that I ever worked with. He is so good with not only his ideas but the humor he puts into his stories and even little messages of morality are just really great. Mark has been a very good friend and has helped me a lot in the comic book industry.

CBA: Did your star rise with the success of Hopalong Cassidy?

Dan: Yeah, it had to. I was just starting, so I was at the bottom! It gave me a reputation so as Hopalong lost its popularity, so did I. The strip lasted for six years and it was used as a promotional strip for the TV show and merchandising. And that was how King Features wanted to use it. So when he started losing popularity on TV, the strip started losing subscribing papers to the point where they asked me to take a cut in pay. I didn’t feel that I was being paid that much to begin with, so I started looking around for work, and that’s when I went over to Western Publishing. Because I had done the Hoppy strip, they knew of me and knew my work so it was no problem getting a job and right away they put me on all the Westerns.

CBA: Were you adamant about staying in California? Obviously, the major publishers were in New York, along with the major newspaper syndicates. Did you say, “I have a family and want to stay out West?”

Dan: That’s right. My wife was a native Californian and I was practically a native and we liked it here. My one regret is that I think I could have gone further in comic books if I had moved to New York or that general area.

CBA: Were you generally happy staying in California?

Dan: Yeah, we love it here.

CBA: How many children did you have?

Dan: Four kids and we have four grandkids now.

CBA: You got married in 1950?

Dan: No, 1947.

CBA: Did you have the kids immediately?

Dan: 1950 was our first son and another son in ’52. Then two daughters a few years later.

CBA: I see that a Carrie Spiegle is credited with lettering a great number of your stories. Are you related to Carrie?

Dan: Yes, Carrie’s my daughter. She was a letterer for quite a while for me. She has her own appraisal business in Santa Barbara. She loved to letter and would continue, but with computer lettering today, you no longer need it.

CBA: How old was she when she started?

Dan: About 20, I guess.

CBA: Was it just the reality of you being in California and the companies being in the East that she did the lettering?

Dan: Yes, it was great. I have a small avocado ranch and subdivided it into a large house up front where we live and Carrie and her husband were renting the older house in the back, so they were close by. I could just layout a page, circle a couple balloons where I wanted them, and let her letter. Then, when I got the lettered pages back, I would draw around her lettering. Whatever was left was my space.

It worked out great.

CBA: Did she just letter your work or did she also take in outside jobs?

Dan: She lettered for quite a few other artists here on the West Coast by mail. There were some out of L.A. that have since told me she lettered for them.

CBA: Carrie is the elder daughter or the younger daughter?

Dan: She’s the oldest daughter.

CBA: Where were you living while doing Hoppy?

Dan: San Fernando Valley, we bought our first tract home for $9,200. [laughter] We parlayed that into a $15,000 house in Ojai and lived there for six years and loved the Ojai Valley. But the heat COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

was so intense in the summertime. We’re beach people and always ended up next to the shore, so when we came across this place in Carpinteria, we fell in love with this area. It’s a little beach town just south of Santa Barbara. We’ve been here for 40 years.

CBA: Were you desperately looking for work when you came upon Western?

Dan: I was winding down with the Hoppy strip and I knew it was just a matter of time. King Features was making noises about not being able to afford me and that sort of stuff. So I started looking around and came across Western and they said they could give me all the work that I could handle. So I said goodbye to Hoppy.

CBA: This is roughly 1957?

Dan: This would have been about that time, late 1956 or early ’57.

CBA: Did you have any inkling with what was going on with Frederic Wertham and the pressures being placed upon the comic book industry?

Dan: No, not a clue.

CBA: What editor were you dealing with when you first came to Western?

Dan: Tom McKimson. There was Tom and Chuck McKimson. Tom was the older brother and he handled more of the Golden Books and stuff like that. Chuck was doing the comics books. There was also Del Connell, the editor who developed the Space Family Robinson concept. That was my longest-running book, something like 47 issues.

CBA: When you came on board, your assignments were mostly licensing based on Western genre TV shows?

Dan: Yeah, Maverick, Seahunt, Lawman, The Rifleman, and all the Disney stuff starting with The Hardy Boys, and Ol’ Yeller. There were so many I can’t remember.

CBA: How was the page rate?

Dan: It was a laugh! I started out at about $20 a page, but the thing was the artwork was very simple and you’d just grind the stuff out. It was so much work that they were not really interested in quality, at that point in time. Also, you couldn’t sign your work.

Later on, for just your own pride, you settled down, did better work, and that’s how it evolved. My first Western that I did for them was just slap-bang and they liked me because I drew fast. Doing daily and Sunday pages, I had learned to be quick and I didn’t pencil in any backgrounds at all, they were all done in pen and brush. My pencils were so rough that no one else would have been able to work off of them.

CBA: Were you given photos for books based on TV shows?

Dan: That’s right. Once you got into that reference, that slowed you down because they wanted some likenesses. A lot of time before they had publicity stills, they would send me out to the studio where I would meet the stars. That’s how I met James Garner, who was doing Maverick. They put me right on the set and I just started sketching. It was the same way with The Green Hornet. I met Bruce Lee on that set. On Ol’ Yeller, I met Fess Parker. I was also on the set of Mary Poppins because they didn’t have enough stills from that.

CBA: Do you actually get to meet Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke?

Dan: Yeah, but very briefly. There’s nothing much to add. Same with Fess Parker, who was a very friendly sort of guy, but it was all business. James Garner was much better to deal with because he was more relaxed.

CBA: Now a lot of studios are notorious for wanting approval of likenesses for their performers. Was it like that for you? Did you have to redraw with frequency?

Dan: Only a couple times that I recall. A few times they sent back the roughs and would say, for instance, that his nose is too big, but generally they were not that concerned. I don’t think they even saw the printed comic book.

CBA: When you first came aboard, you were working on Dell comics. Were you privy to why there was a break-up between Dell and Western?

Dan: No, I have no idea.

CBA: Did they call you and say we are going to do our own imprint, Gold Key? Dan: They just said that the title has been changed. It was the same people that worked with us at the office and everything was the same.

October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

CBA: It didn’t mean anything to you?

Dan: No, it went from Dell to Gold Key and I can’t remember why, it was just a change of name.

CBA: On average, how many pages could you do in a day?

Dan: I could do two completely penciled and inked pages. It finally got to the point were they didn’t have to approve the pencils at all and they just said go for it. They trusted my judgement.

CBA: Was the lettering done over there?

Dan: At the beginning, they took the pencils and the letterer did his job and then I inked it. If they were in a hurry, they would say go ahead and ink. Finally, Carrie did my lettering. Then there was no problem, we did the whole thing here and they would accept the finished job.

CBA: There was an extended period at Gold Key were there were no borders on the stories. Do you remember why that was?

Dan: I remember they just wanted to do something different.

I know I did it on Space Family Robinson.

CBA: So it was policy?

Dan: They said try it, we tried it, and did not like it too much.

So they went back to using borders.

CBA: Did you enjoy the typical Gold Key package with a very nice painted cover?

Dan: They looked good. Gold Key had some pretty good illustrators. A lot of the Space Family Robinson covers were done by an illustrator from New York and I thought they were very well done. I liked them.

Above: Calling Rosebud and anyone associated with Graphic Classics! Dan Spiegle reveals, “I had just completed Count of Monte Cristo for [First Comics’] Classics Illustrated and was finishing Sea Wolf when they went bankrupt! Anyone want a complete 44-page story?”

Somebody get this beauty into print pronto! This unpublished page was penciled and inked by Dan and appears here courtesy of the artist. ©2002 Dan Spiegle.

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Above: Dan Spiegle produced samples of his period comic strip Penn and Chris (which Dan wrote as well as drew) to pitch the newspaper syndicates. Though unsuccessful in that bid, Dan contributed strips to Richard Kyle’s fondly-recalled prozine, Wonderworld, in the 1970s.

Courtesy of & ©2002 Dan Spiegle.

Below: Dan Spiegle got a once-ina-lifetime (albeit shortlived) chance to work on the creation of artist hero Milton Caniff, the adventure strip Terry and the Pirates, in 1997, following the Hildebrandt brothers stint.

This strip, written by Jim Clark, appears courtesy of the artist. ©2002 Tribune Syndicate.

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CBA: So you were a workhorse. Were you doing two titles a month?

Dan: At least two. Sometimes more.

CBA: What was the routine? Did you have the finished job shipped over there or did you go by the offices and drop them off?

Dan: When I lived in San Fernando Valley and I first started working for them, I went to the office a couple times a week taking stuff in for approval. Then they just said I could send it in. Sometimes I’d bring in the pencils and they did the letters and would mail it back out to me. When we moved to Ojai, which is further out, they said to do everything by mail and then when we got here, to Carpinteria, that was further yet and everything was done by FedEx or courier.

CBA: Did you like going into the Western offices?

Dan: The first office I went to was in Beverly Hills and I enjoyed going in because I liked meeting the guys. That’s where I met Alex Toth briefly. I’ve always wanted to know him better, but he’s a tough guy to get to know and was never there that often. He just one day happened to come in the same day I did and I just happened to meet him.

CBA: Did you have a nice little chat?

Dan: As I recall he was friendly and a very nice person. He’s a master of the form, my idea of the perfect comic book artist.

CBA: Obviously there was a point in comics when super-heroes were really coming on strong. Were you gratified that you were able to work in other genres?

Dan: Yes, I was real happy. I never wanted to get into superheroes as it never did appeal to me.

I felt that the characters were too much alike. Even though they were said to be different, they were all running around in underwear and everybody tried to design their own skimpy outfit. The main problem I have with super-heroes is there is really no cliffhanger. You never feel like this character is in any real danger because he is so super, nothing could happen to him. So what’s the point? Real life is exciting.

CBA: How do you recall the creation of Space Family Robinson?

Dan: That was Del Connell’s idea.

CBA: Was it created in connection to the TV series, Lost in Space?

Dan: No, the book came out way before and, in fact, went on way after CBS broadcast the series. Gold Key was thinking about suing the production company but our corporate lawyers said it wasn’t wise because we were already doing other work for them— Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Daktari, etc.—and we’d be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

CBA: So they both got along and Lost in Space was a phrase used on the cover for a while.

Dan: Originally, it was Space Family Robinson and then when Lost in Space came out they made it Space Family Robinson: Lost in Space.

CBA: Can you give me an idea of what the offices were like in Beverly Hills when you went there?

Dan: Just like any office. There was a main clearing room when you came in. That was where you dropped your package, off of the main room were little offices and each of them had an editor in them.

You’d go to your editor, if you were working on a story where they were involved.

CBA: Can you name some of the editors?

Dan: Mainly I dealt with Del Connell, and sometimes Chuck McKimson and Chase Craig.

CBA: Are the other guys doing the big foot humor or the licensed material?

Dan: They were doing coloring books and other types of books.

We were doing mainly the real adventure comic books.

CBA: Did you encounter Russ Manning with any frequency?

Dan: I came across Russ several times and enjoyed talking to him.

CBA: What was your impression?

Dan: Really nice person and very warm, I liked Russ very much.

CBA: Did you encounter Mike Royer?

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

Dan: Yep, but I don’t believe so. I believe I met him at Disney.

He’s also a very nice person.

CBA: He’s up in Oregon now.

Dan: I got a note from him with the change of address, but I haven’t really talked to him.

CBA: He’s back doing comic book work.

Dan: The last time I worked with him was on the Dick Tracy movie adaptation for Disney. He was an editor there and called me because they had a rush job, one that paid very well because they were in a rush. [laughter] So I said yes, yes, yes.

CBA: Was it an adaptation of the Warren Beatty film?

Dan: Yes, it had to be done within a week or something like that. It was needed really fast. I dropped everything and got on it.

CBA: Did you always ink your own work? Have you ever had anyone else ink your material?

Dan: No, because they couldn’t decipher my pencils.

CBA: Did you ever ink someone else’s work?

Dan: A couple of times but only a page or two. One time, somebody started and for some reason couldn’t finish it so I completed it, but it is tough trying to work with somebody else’s technique.

CBA: There’s another aspect that you were fortunate enough to not have to be stuck in: The assembly line process, other then the lettering.

Eventually you got Carrie to do the lettering, so you were doing everything at the house and able to produce a finished package that would go to Western. As far as you know, they would mail it East where it would be printed?

Dan: Correct.

CBA: So there was no printing plant out West, as far as you knew?

Dan: As far as I knew, the only plant was in Poughkeepsie, New York.

CBA: Did the rates get better over the years?

Dan: Yes, much better.

CBA: Did you enjoy Space Family Robinson?

Dan: It was fun even though it was science-fiction, not my favorite genre. I did enjoy it because they let me do my version of what I thought space would look like. Del would say, “Design a space station that does not look like a space station.” The whole idea was that we didn’t want it to look like everybody else’s so my space station was strange, but it was something that I dreamed up somehow. The little space sled that came out of the station which they’d use to fly to the planet’s surface was not pointed and did not look like Flash Gordon. I was shaving one morning with my electric razor—it was a square Remington but had rounded edges—and I said, “Here’s a good design!” That’s the shape I used for that spaceship.

CBA: Were there favorite books that you worked on in the ’60s, such as The Green Hornet?

Dan: I don’t know that I had a favorite. I enjoyed them all for October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

different reasons. Each one was different and, if it had a good story, I was interested. If the story was bad, it was a chore and tough duty.

CBA: So you wouldn’t make any writing changes?

Dan: No. I respected the writer. They have their own viewpoint.

The only exception was with Hopalong, when I talked to the man in charge, Hoppy’s manager, but he didn’t know anything about comic strips either. I went to him and said, “This story stinks. Can’t we do something about it?” He’d say, “What do you suggest?” and I’d say, “I don’t know. I’m not a writer but the dialogue is so stiff and juvenile, can’t we make it more adult?” He would then say it was for kids and that’s about as far as I got with him. I never tried to change anybody else’s work.

CBA: What writers of note were you dealing with at Western? Do you remember if you worked on Paul S. Newman’s stuff?

Dan: I don’t recall the name. I really don’t know because, unless I met the guy, I was not really interested. It was just a name at the bottom of the page. I’d get the script and get right to it.

CBA: That’s an aspect annoying to some freelancers at Western:

They worked anonymously because they weren’t allowed to sign their name to the published work. Did that bother you?

Dan: It did. It bugged me at first and I thought that it was their policy, but by complaining subtly a little at a time, finally they relented. It was the same way with Disney. For years, I did a lot of Disney stuff and was never able to sign any of it.

CBA: For Disney comic books?

Dan: Yeah, the TV stories or the Disney movies. At the very beginning, we didn’t sign anything, but later on we were allowed to.

CBA: It seemed to be near the end of the run of publishing new material in the early ’80s, I recall seeing your name in print. You took over Doctor Solar for a few issues and there were Magnus back-up stories. This was right at the end of Gold Key when they were about to close. They finally allowed credits.

Dan: It was not too long before the end.

CBA: Did you ever have your eye on working with the New York publishers even though you were in California? Was that ever a thought?

Above: Imagine Ye Ed’s surprise when he encountered the work of the masterful artist Dan Spiegle in the pages of Boys’ Life magazine!

And who better than Dan to render the exploits of the original inspiration for the artist’s longestrunning comic book assignment (a certain clan “lost in space”!), Swiss Family Robinson? Dan’s work on the strip (seen in the May 2000 issue and produced as a “Bank Street Classic Tale”) proves the artist’s abilities are more finely honed than ever! ©2002 Bank Street College of Education.

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Dan: I wanted to work with DC. I liked their stuff. It wasn’t until Mark Evanier got me in with the Blackhawk assignment.

CBA: Mark told me that when he started off working as an assistant to Jack Kirby—after Jack had moved to California—the idea seemed to be (although it didn’t pan out this way) that Jack would helm a “DC Comics West” outfit. Jack would head this network of West Coast freelancers to work on DC books. Do you remember that at all? You were going to be asked to draw Kamandi. Jack was to come up with the concept and pass it on to you to visualize.

Dan: No, I was never involved with that. But I do remember when Mark was working with Jack Kirby. That’s when Mark and I first met.

We were doing Scooby Doo. CBA: That was 1976 or ’77, but the DC Comics West idea stuff was ’72 or so. Did you attend Shel Dorf’s San Diego Con? Dan: Sure.

CBA: Did you get any attention from fans?

Dan: No. [laughter] I’ve always been “in-between” in this business because the comic convention is for comic books and what I was known for was mainly the Hopalong comic strip. When I got into comic books, we couldn’t sign the stuff, so nobody knew me and what I did. I finally did something that was known, Crossfire, then I had fans who remembered me from that and some for Blackhawk, too.

CBA: Did you go to San Diego to socialize at all?

Above: Gawd, but Ye Ed loves that space station design! One last look at Dan’s great art job on those loveable Robinsons adrift in the cosmos! Panel from Space Family Robinson Lost in Space #19.

Courtesy of Chris Hunt and Ray Kelly. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

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Dan: I liked to meet the other cartoonists and I always tried to, but I didn’t go out of my way. I’m not a very pushy person. Through Mark, I met quite a few and when we cruised around the floor at San Diego, I met a lot of cartoonists because of Mark. He knows them all.

CBA: Basically, Western stopped using new material by 1976, relying mostly on reprints. How do you remember it?

Dan: Yeah, but I don’t remember being out of work because I must have gone on to DC. CBA: It seems to be an almost immediate transition.

Dan: I can’t remember how it came about, but I was doing mainly back-up stories for DC and then, with Mark, we did the Blackhawk series which went quite a while.

CBA: Did you work with Mark at Western? Was Scooby Doo a Gold Key comic?

Dan: Yes, that was where we started working together. Then I think we did some work for Hanna-Barbera.

CBA: Did you like doing humor work? Was it different, easier?

Dan: I liked it. The drawing technique is different. It’s a cleaner, simpler style of drawing. At first, I remember when they asked me to try Scooby Doo, I said (like I always did) that I’m not a real cartoonist, I can’t do funny stuff. They said it was semi-cartoony and they thought I could handle it, so I tried. It was fun and I enjoyed it, but I still don’t think I can do really funny stuff. It would have to be something in-between.

CBA: With the demise of the Western genre in comics a disappointment to you?

Dan: I guess it was, but I really can’t remember. [laughter] I seemed

to stay busy and it was just a matter of getting a call from someone else and I would do it. That’s how I worked for Dark Horse doing a few things for them, like Indiana Jones. That was after the demise of the stuff that I was doing for some of the other companies. Then another company would call me and I would stay busy with them.

Eclipse was coming to an end at that time and that’s when I did work for Dark Horse.

CBA: Are there any projects that you would characterize as labors of love or did you approach everything the same? Were there any jobs that were extra special to you, jobs where you would spend twice as much time?

Dan: I always loved Mark’s work. His writing is inspiring. First, I would read the script and laugh at the funny things. Just the whole idea of his stories made sense and they were easy to illustrate because you get a feeling about it. You know how when you read a story you picture in your mind how it should be visualized. You picture how things should go and that sort of stuff and with Mark it was so easy and never a chore. I did the Terry and the Pirates strip for The Chicago Tribune five or six years ago—when it ran for a year-and-ahalf—after I took it over from the Hildebrandt brothers. Over 100 newspaper signed up because of their name, but the story had taken a bad turn because they tried to bring it up to date too much. They even got into science-fiction stuff. For instance, they had a Chinese junk that morphed into a torpedo boat. They even threw in some sex, and you don’t do that in newspapers because that’s family stuff!

That was the kiss of death and the syndicate started losing papers right and left. Here again, the art was fine—it was the story that was weak. They finally called me and said that they wanted to change artists and if I was interested. I said “Sure, how many papers is it in?”

They said, “Six.” [laughter] I said, “Forget it,” but they said they’d pay me a salary and wanted to see if they could revive it and keep it going because they were thinking about doing a TV series. The Tribune would have been involved financially and it would have been a good deal. So we tried and it only went a year-and-a-half and they said that they couldn’t afford me, so they let it go. The problem was in the story more than anything else and when I took it over, they changed writers and the new writer was a newspaper reporter out of Orlando, Florida. Talking to him on the phone, he said he’d thought it would be “fun,” and I said we have to come up with good ideas and cliffhangers every day. It’s a whole different way of writing but he just never realized it. It was a chore. I loved doing the work because I liked the adventure and being able to draw boats and airplanes, but that assignment just never amounted to anything.

CBA: Did you work on the side while you were doing that or was everything focused on the strip?

Dan: I think a did a couple books on the side but not too much because that was dailies and Sundays and that’s a job.

CBA: When you made the transition from Hoppy to comics, was there any difficulties or any difference that you could see?

Dan: No, it was really a pleasure because doing the comic strip for six years, and having to hit the deadlines, there were always problems and you’d get behind. I developed a stomach ulcer in the first year with Hoppy because I was doing everything and didn’t know what I was doing. I wish I could have started out in this business working with a group of artists in a studio where you could walk over and see what the other guys were doing, see the type of pencils, pens and brushes that they used, for instance. I never had the benefit of that. I had to figure it all out on my own and I think it has been a distinct disadvantage in doing it that way.

CBA: When you started on Blackhawk, I thought your work looked inspired; it just exploded. It was wonderful. You really seemed to COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

find your spot. The Gold Key stuff seemed to be less detailed and that you did it fast. Was it that you were working on an aviation strip or that you were working with Mark?

Dan: It was a combination of both. I liked the idea that the story really appealed to me. I always liked war stories and, in fact, I enjoyed doing a couple issues of Sgt. Rock. I loved those stories because that was the stuff that I’ve got all kinds of reference. Scraps of paper with my drawings of military equipment. It’s always been fascinating to me, and working with Mark made it fun!

CBA: Did you work for Joe Kubert?

Dan: Yeah, on Sgt. Rock I did. The first job I did for Joe Kubert was an Unknown Soldier. I did a story in there and didn’t have to send in pencils but, when it was printed, I could see some Kubert brush strokes over my drawing. [laughter] I realized that I was not bold enough. You know how bold his stuff is. It’s terrific and it reduces so well. My stuff often loses some of those fine lines that I put in. With him, I learned to beef my artwork up with heavier strokes and so when I did Sgt. Rock I used heavier blacks and I was happy to see that when it came out, it was all me. [laughter] CBA: Did you admire Carl Barks’ work?

Dan: Yeah, it was great.

CBA: What was the highlight of your Gold Key career?

Dan: I would say Space Family Robinson. I enjoyed that very much and it was fun and different for me.

CBA: Outside of Gold Key, what was your favorite work?

Dan: Crossfire is first, number one, absolutely and Blackhawk is a close second.

CBA: Did you like working for DC? Dan: Yeah, I enjoyed it and enjoyed the editors there. They were very nice and I especially liked the Sgt Rock series. I thought that was really fun. Working with Mark was also a great pleasure because, with him, I would send the originals to him, then he would look them over and send them on, in the meantime we’d talk about the things I did and didn’t do that could be improved in the next issue. He came up with some good ideas and good page layouts, particularly with Crossfire, and then he’d say leave this large panel here and in the background I’m going to put a copy of a newspaper or things like that I wouldn’t do on my own. He had a lot of good ideas.

CBA: It was a really collaboration.

Dan: Yes, a very close one.

CBA: He would give you a finished script to start?

Dan: Yes. Sometimes he would doodle on the edge of the page, sketch out a layout he thinks would be effective and so that way I could work from his ideas, too.

CBA: So Mark was working to your strengths?

Dan: Right. He knew what I like to do and said that we are going to do a story about this or that. It was great.

CBA: Did you enjoy the Hollywood milieu of Crossfire?

Dan: Yes. That was interesting because of his experience and his knowing so many of the true stories about the stars and their problems. It came across as being very authentic.

CBA: When you were back at Western and able to go onto the sets of these various productions. Were you starstruck in Hollywood?

Dan: It was exciting, but I don’t know if you would call it “starstruck.” [laughter] It was interesting to meet these people and see what they are like in real life.

CBA: You did a lot of issues of Crossfire: about 26.

Dan: Yes, I was really sorry when that folded because I felt we were really on a roll. But then Eclipse put a lot of money into it. They gave us good paper and color and did the best they could for us. It was up to us and the book just ended up not being that popular overall and things have to give. The last few issues were done in black-&-white and, finally, that was the end.

CBA: I was astonished by your recent comics work in Boys’ Life.

Did you put real effort in that or are you just getting better and better?

Dan: I hope the latter. [laughter] I hope I’m getting better. I’m getting slower, I’ll say that. It could be slower is better. Boy’s Life is great because they realize that all young boys love adventure stories.

CBA: Did you handle all the stories and the coloring on that too?

Dan: Tom Luth does the color.

CBA: So it’s like the Mafia over there. Evanier’s Mafia. [laughter] October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

Is Stan Sakai and Sergio working on your stuff, too?

Dan: Sergio is just over the hill from me, he lives in Ojai, where we used to live, and that’s about 20 miles away.

CBA: Do you see or speak with Mark frequently?

Dan: We haven’t for quite awhile but I’d loved to work with him again.

CBA: Overall how would you assess your Gold Key experience?

Dan: Enjoyable. I enjoyed it all and I enjoyed the people I worked with, as I got along with everybody, but the editors were very fair and very nice people. It was interesting and the stories were always fun. I enjoyed doing the Disney movie adaptations, the Herbie series, That Darn Cat, and so many of the movies were interesting because they would send a lot of stills that went along with it and it was fun going over those and envisioning what the rest of the movie looked like. Sometimes, I would go down and they would show me the movie in the studio before they even had dialogue. That was interesting to see it before it was cut and put together. And it was fun for my kids because I would take them down a lot of times and they could walk around the studio. I enjoyed that time period and that’s when my kids were small and interested in comic books, too.

Whenever I went to Western, I’d pick up the Donald Ducks and all the Disney books and I’d come home with my briefcase full of that stuff and I’d dump it on the living room floor and you would not hear the kids for the rest of the evening. [laughter] I do think that’s how they learned to read.

Above: Looks like another Spiegle masterpiece is in the works, if this page of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is any indication. Keep your eyes peeled for the artist’s adaptation in an upcoming Boys’ Life. Courtesy of Dan Spiegle. ©2002 Bank Street College of Education.

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CBA Interview

Wranglin’ Mike Royer Tells All! The master inker on his days with Russ Manning and Gold Key Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice

Below: Unused Magnus cover art

by Mike Royer. Courtesy of Scotty Moore. Art ©2002 Mike Royer.

Magnus ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

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Ye Ed has been an admirer of Mike Royer’s superb inking abilities since first encountering the artist’s work over the pencils of Jack Kirby back in the early 1970s on DC’s legendary Fourth World titles (and I still firmly believe Mike is the finest and most faithful inker the King ever had). Even more of a hoot was to meet the man in person as, at a recent San Diego Comic-Con, Mike turned out to be eminently friendly, talkative, and funny as hell. (Someday we hope to talk to M.R. about his work with Kirby, but for now the talk is on Western Publishing.) The artist was interviewed via phone on July 22, 2002, and he copyedited the transcript.

Comic Book Artist: So where are you originally from, Mike?

Mike Royer: I was born and raised in a little town in Oregon named Lebanon. In high school, we joked about the Marines landing… the late ’50s and the other Lebanon.

CBA: What year were you born?

Mike: Oh, God, you want to know that?

CBA: Well, roughly. [laughs] Mike: Aww, man! 1941… June.

CBA: Were you into comic strips and comic books early on?

Mike: At about eight or nine, I started clipping Vince Hamlin’s Alley Oop strip out of the newspaper. Like a lot of kids who collected comic strips, it didn’t make much sense to just put them in a pile, so I made a cardboard viewing device with hand cranks, and I’d sit down and run the strips, Scotch-taped end-to-end, through it. I learned this from the back pages of one of my comic books. Every comic had to have one text page in it, plus at least a four-page back-up feature, which was required to get second class mailing privileges. I remember in one of the Harvey comics a text page with the headline, “Take your favorite comic strips and make movies out of them.” It described how to construct the viewing box.

CBA: Obviously, you love film. Does that go back to your childhood?

Mike: Oh, yes. I was a Saturday matinee kid. In small town America in the ’40s and ’50s, every theater had double features, and the program usually changed three times a week. In our small town, the longest run would be Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Then there was the Monday/Tuesday bill, and Wednesday/Thursday was always cowboy movies. I went with my Dad to see Joel McCrea in Four Faces West. I was hooked on movies from that point on… my earliest movie-going memory… my dad… and cowboys.

CBA: Did you have any exposure to movie serials?

Mike: Serials were winding down as far as popularity and quality in the late ’40s, and I have a conscious memory of seeing only a few in the theatres—which doesn’t mean I didn’t see more—but one that stuck with me as a kid was King of the Rocketmen, which would have played our area when I was nine or ten. I also fondly remember Columbia’s Superman at that age. There were two theaters in our town, and I went to the fancy new theater to see an episode of the Batman and Robin serial, and walked out on it. So I guess I had some kind of critical ability in those days.

CBA: Well, it did suck. [laughs] Were you drawing at a young age?

Mike: Well, my mother was a musician and an artist. Actually, I came from a family of musicians, but she also did a lot of drawing, painting and pastel work. From my earliest memory, she encouraged me to draw, so I drew a lot of things. I don’t know if I ever learned anything, but I was drawing all the time. I think it helped me get through high school, because for some reason I was not interested in anything in school except girls. My grades were so-so, but then I would do some sort of an art project for the teacher to help get my grade point up. I’m exaggerating… I was not a bad student, but I was always drawing.

CBA: Did you draw comic strips or stories?

Mike: In grade school, I absolutely fell in love with Frank Frazetta’s Thund’a, King of the Congo #1, and, of course, I was so disappointed that the series was continued by Bob Powell (who I think was a brilliant comic book artist. He knew how to lay blacks in. Everything of Bob Powell’s… look at it, and it just looks wet, such great brushstrokes!) because I wanted the Frazetta version. I still have old books from my childhood that on the fly pages have my own homemade COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

versions of Thund’a. Also, I don’t know how I came up with the name, it’s not that it’s a hard one to come up with, having probably appeared in half-a-dozen theatrical cartoons, but as a grade schooler I did my own little science-fiction/space opera that I called—get this—“Space Ace.” Boy, isn’t that an original name? [laughter] CBA: What a clever boy. [laughs] Mike: [sarcastically] Ohhh, yeah.

Years later on television, I saw a Little Audrey cartoon, and she was reading a comic book called Space Ace. Maybe as an eight- or nine-year-old, I saw that cartoon and it just stuck with me. When you’re young and you want to draw comics, stealing ideas is not a foreign concept.

CBA: I used to swipe my villain characters from Scooby-Doo. [laughter] Mike: When you’re young, you steal. I think sometimes when you’re old, you steal, too, under the legitimacy umbrella that it belongs to the company, so you use it. I’m sure over the years that Alex Toth’s models became springboards for innumerable characters in subsequent shows after he left his tenure at Hanna-Barbera.

CBA: Oh, absolutely. He’s just the quintessential animation designer. I was looking at Birdman on Adult Swim and just contemplating that design, thinking, “That’s a neat design.”

Mike: I inked a “Birdman” story for Gold Key and Sparky Moore penciled it. Sparky assumed that whoever inked it would be familiar with the character, but I was not supplied with any model sheets and he didn’t pencil any blacks or indicate where they were. So, of course, I didn’t ink any, I didn’t know who the character was. [laughs] Of course, as I recall, the editors didn’t do anything to fix it, so it was rather vapid when printed.

CBA: Well, maybe sometimes it was a good thing Gold Key didn’t have credits. [laughs] So did you reach a decision at a certain age that you were going to go to art school?

Mike: Well, I can find all kind of excuses for not having the right kind of ambition. I think my mother wanted to be a famous artist, and if she couldn’t be it, I would be it. So everything I did was “wonderful.” Now, when you constantly hear that everything you do is wonderful, it doesn’t put you in the mind set to be receptive to learning. I didn’t realize how little I knew until I decided to pursue a career. Then I realized, “I have to learn something first.”

CBA: Did you go to art school?

Mike: I went to art school for a short time in Seattle. It was The Burnley School of Professional Art, which was headed by Jess Cauthorn, a well-known Pacific Northwest illustrator. The school doesn’t exist anymore; it was absorbed probably 25 years ago by some chain of art schools. Coming from a middle-class family who did not have the funds to send me to school, I had to earn it on my own.

I got a small student loan, and moved to Seattle, and I worked first at night as a doorman at the Coliseum Theater in downtown Seattle, and then got a job at the Ben Paris restaurant. Both a couple of nice jobs because I got to see all kinds of movies for nothing, and also got to eat two meals a day that I didn’t have to pay for. The rest of the time I was in school, trying to do the homework, and after six or eight months either I wasn’t dedicated enough or it was just an impossible load to handle. So I returned home and got an ordinary job.

CBA: So when did you start pursuing your career?

Mike: In late 1963 or early ’64, I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom through one of the ads in Forry Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

CBA: These were the fanzines, ERBdom and Amra?

Mike: Yeah, Camille Cazedessus, Jr.’s ERBdom. Through that fanzine I became interested in all the Burroughs stuff being printed

by Ace Books. I had inherited my parents’ worn hardcover Burroughs Tarzan books and loved them. Then suddenly here was all of this other Burroughs material being published I’d never been exposed to.

October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

I embraced fandom. Although I thought they were great at the time, I look at them now and cringe, was a couple of pages adapting The Mad King which were printed in ERBdom.

Through that fanzine, I found Russ Manning, whose work I greatly admired for years. I had finally learned his name because Magnus, Robot Fighter became popular enough that Western Publishing’s editors actually asked him to sign the work because they were getting so much mail asking, “Who’s drawing this book?”

I wanted to meet and ask him if I could be his assistant. Don’t ask me where I got that idea… that he would at all be interested in some kid outta nowhere, but I decided that since Russ was a Burroughs fan that, of course, he would attend the Dum-Dum at the World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland, California, in the Fall of 1964. Another fan, Dale Broodhurst from Idaho, and I produced—with the blessing of Hulbert Burroughs—a black-&white amateur comic book adaptation of The Wizard of Venus. I did the art (if one can be kind enough to call it that) and we printed a few hundred copies, and went to Oakland. I felt this comic would be my “introduction” to Russ Manning.

Well, Russ didn’t attend the con, but Caz gave me Manning’s address, some encouragement, so I drew up some more samples and I sent Russ the pages. Several months later, he wrote back and said, “Well, if I ever needed an assistant, I think you’d be able to handle it.” So that was all the impetus I needed to quit my job, pack up my family, and move to southern California. I had been working as a silkscreen delineator at a sign shop in Corvallis, Oregon, and told them I wanted to take a one-month vacation, borrowed five hundred bucks from a finance company (which in ’65 was a hell of a lot of money for a 23-year-old kid to borrow), took my wife and three toddlers... Another thing that people do when they live in small farm communities is get married early….

CBA: [laughs] I guess so!

Mike: I packed up and, in essence, moved into Russ Manning’s backyard, probably to his chagrin. But, bless his heart, he gave me work. The first thing I did for him was the “Aliens” back-up feature in Magnus #12. He handed me the pages and half of the aliens were inked and half tightly penciled, and my job was to complete the unfinished pencils and finish the inks so that when it was completed, you wouldn’t know what I did. To me, that’s what real assisting is.

Inset left : Courtesy of James Van Hise (whose Rocket’s Blast Comicollector ’zine is looking mighty good these days!), here’s a panel detail of Magnus, Robot Fighter from the hero’s very first issue. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

Below : One tough hombre living the life out in the desert of the American Southwest. Get along, li’l Royer! Courtesy of Mike Royer.

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Above: Mike Royer’s very first job for Western/Whitman was actually Superboy puzzle art produced in 1966. Courtesy of Mike Royer. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Ultimately, my assisting was on Korak and Magnus proper and then Tarzan, but most of the stuff I did for him until the late ’70s (when I did full inks on Tarzan and Star Wars), was “ghosting.” For instance, Russ would give me a page that might be one-half or two-thirds tightly penciled and inked, with the remaining rough pencils uncompleted (i.e., there would be a figure with one leg and head inked (the figure “keyed”) or perhaps a group of robots or apes, one of which would be finished and the rest left for me to “match.”

One couldn’t tell where Russ left off and I began, hopefully.

His work was so popular with the comic-buying public, especially after Russ took over the art chores on the Tarzan comic and Western started doing the novel adaptations, that his editor, Chase Craig, wanted him to do more and more work, and Russ said the only way he could do it was if his assistant had full-time work.

CBA: Now was that true, or was he going to bat for you?

Mike: It was both. I mean, Russ was telling the truth. He couldn’t do more work unless he had me assisting him, but the only way it would work is that I would have to have full-time work so that I would be available to him at the drop of a hat.

I had moved to Southern California in April 1965, and I spent eleven months assisting Russ Manning and I worked during the daytime at a Sherwin-Williams paint store as credit manager. Then Sparky Moore, whom I had met at Gold Key or Western Printing and Lithography, as they were called then, called me and mentioned that Grantray-Lawrence Animation needed people who had an interest in comic books to work on Marvel Super-Heroes. I was there for eleven months. So it would be mid-’67 that I started doing more stuff for Western, beyond my work with Russ, at home and at his studio.

CBA: These were those crude Marvel animated cartoons...?

Mike: Well, they took stats of the original art, pasted them down

and extended the artwork, did an occasional “new” in-between panel, and because at that time there had been so few [Tales to Astonish] Sub-Mariner stories that we did a whole lot of new Sub-Mariner stuff. Hell, it was great for me. I got to work with Doug Wildey, Mel Keefer, Sparky Moore, Mike Arens, and ink these guys, as well as do additional pencil artwork. I seemed to do a lot of new Iron Man stuff, too, as well as in-betweens. But it was Russ who gave me my start in comics. I met Sparky because he was an old buddy of Russ’.

CBA: Who is Sparky?

Mike: Richard Moore, one of the guys who was the backbone of Western Printing and Lithography. Not many people know of him.

In his career, he drew things like the Lassie and Rin Tin Tin comics for years. He did all kinds of things… Westerns, jungle, funny animal… everything.

CBA: Was he a good cartoonist?

Mike: Yes! I learned my best lessons from Sparky! He said, “Mike, you get your first job on your ability, and every job after that is on your dependability.” At least, that’s the way the business worked when I started. He said, “There’s always that clock up there at the top of your drawing board, and you only have so much time to do each page based on the deadlines, and you do the best job you can in the time allowed.”

CBA: Did you live by that axiom?

Mike: Well, I got my first mortgage in 1968 based on the strength of a letter from the editors at Western Publishing and Lithography that said, “We set our clocks by Mike Royer.”

CBA: Whoa! This was Del Connell or Chase Craig?

Mike: The editor I worked most closely with was Chase Craig, an interesting guy. I liked Chase and didn’t like him. I don’t know if that makes any sense....

CBA: What did you like about him?

Mike: Well, he was interesting. He’d been around a long time, from way back in the ’40s, but there were things about his business ethics I didn’t care for. Sparky and other people had told me early on that the modus operandi at Western was that the editors got bonuses by keeping [page] rates low. I have no actual proof, but I believe that’s the way it was.

There were things Chase didn’t like: He didn’t like foreshortening, among other things. [laughs] I don’t know. Maybe he was right, but Chase would not give me that many penciling assignments except for covers, if you can believe this. [laughter] I did lots of covers for things like Hanna-Barbera Super-heroes... God, I wish I could remember the titles. All of my comics are boxed away in boxes labeled, “Mike’s Life in a Box.” So much of this stuff is in the past, and since I don’t think about it all the time, the titles get lost. You’ve got walking encyclopedias like Mark Evanier who can tell you exactly what every title was called. But there were two or three different Hanna-Barbera titles, High Adventure Heroes, something like that. I did covers for those books, but Chase wouldn’t give me too many interior assignments, so I asked him once, since I was inking so many guys that were drawing these books, “Everybody’s so busy up here, what if I, in essence, produce the book for you. I’ll get the artists, guys that you approve, Sparky and Mike Arens and so on. Then I’ll ink and letter it.” I think Chase liked the idea because I didn’t say I wanted any money to do it. [laughs] So, with Mike and Sparky’s permission, I penciled the whole book and they said they did it and Chase couldn’t tell the difference.

CBA: What was that book?

Mike: I knew you would ask that! [laughter] CBA: Well, y’know, we can ask Mark Evanier to fill in the blanks. [laughs] Mike: It’s very flattering to have somebody ask me about my career, but embarrassing to realize so much of it is locked away in memory. Humorist Dave Barry once said that our brains have the capacity for only so much storage, and at a certain age we start throwing stuff out to make room for the new. So it might be on my brain’s hard drive somewhere, but I have to find the right “password.”

CBA: In the very beginning, when you were doing work, was Russ just getting really busy really quick? He was hitting his stride then?

When you arrived he was able to sign his own work?

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

Mike: Russ was doing Magnus—and he wrote most of them, too— and he was doing the “Brothers of the Spear” back-up in Tarzan.

Shortly after that, Jesse Marsh [artist on the lead Tarzan feature] retired.

CBA: I had heard that because of diabetes his eyesight was going.

Mike: I can’t remember the exact reason, it’s so long ago. I guess Jesse had been a kind of mentor to Russ. Western asked Russ if he wanted to take over the Tarzan book, because of the years he had done short Tarzan stories in the large Tarzan Jungle annuals that Western had produced. I don’t know the number, but the first of Russ’ Tarzans was original stuff. Who knows, it might have even still been from the typewriter of Gaylord Dubois, I’m not sure. But it was something about astronauts and their capsule being parachuted onto a plateau or something. Then, immediately after that, they started adapting the books. So for a while, Russ felt he could do both Magnus and Tarzan.

CBA: So things were just backing up.

Mike: And at some point in there, I even wrote a couple of Magnus issues. The last book Russ had anything to do was the first of the two I wrote. He did scattered panels equalling comparable to at least four or six pages of pencils. But, other than one page that was complete, I don’t think any others were “complete.” I penciled about four pages, but it was two panels on this page, a panel on that page, the way Russ worked. He bounced all over the place. He felt that’s how things were “consistent.” If he had a bad day, everything on the bad day was spread all over. Conversely, all the good stuff was spread out, and it would be equalized by the time the book was finished.

CBA: Is that what you learned and applied to your inking? You told me that’s what you did inking over Jack Kirby.

Mike: I did, in the early days, inking for Western. By the time I started inking for Jack, I tried it and I wasn’t doing it fast enough.

So I’d just start a page, finish it and do X-number of pages a day to survive.

CBA: We were looking at The Prisoner [unpublished] pages and were wondering why only certain panels were fully inked on any given page with the other panels still in pencil.

Mike: I still might have been playing around with that technique occasionally.

CBA: Maybe you had time, because I don’t think there was a deadline on that job anyway.

Mike: The first book that I wrote for was Magnus. Russ got started and just told Chase that no way he could do it all. Who knows, it may have coincided with the point that the Burroughs people asked him to do the daily comic strip. Everything happened, in memory, so fast. As Sam Spade would say on the old radio show, “In less time than it takes to tell…”

CBA: You were a Burroughs fan. I’m just curious about the mid-’60s Tarzan trademark situation: Charlton Comics jumped in and published the unauthorized Jungle Tales of Tarzan. It seems that around the same time, Gold Key started the novel adaptations and also put a fan-favorite artist on Tarzan.

I’m wondering if that was in reaction to the shake-up caused when the copyright was thrown into question. Do you remember that at all?

Mike: Well, I don’t know if one had anything to do with the other. I do know that Charlton just made a mistake, because even though the old business manager for Burroughs, Inc., let the copyright lapse on six of the novels, several people interpreted that as meaning that the character had fallen into public domain. Robert Hodes, October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

who endeared himself with the Burroughs estate, went to court. (I think he took the Russians to court, too! And won!) Hodes proved that since the character was trademarked, the comic strip had been running all these years, that it was a continuing character. That those particular books may have fallen out of copyright, but that the character itself was not. I think maybe the first of the Ace books that came out may have been unauthorized editions, but the business minds at Ace were smart enough to negotiate licensing and continued a very successful run. Charlton must have thought, “Well, hell, Tarzan’s in public domain…”

CBA: Jesse Marsh had been on the book since the late ’40s and he worked on the title up to around 1966, almost twenty years straight.

Mike: As long as Jesse had been healthy, he probably would have stayed on the book. That was an example of what Sparky told me was the rule of thumb at Western. You get your first job on ability and every job after that on dependability. Jesse Marsh was the kind of a guy that over a weekend did a complete 77 Sunset Strip comic book.

CBA: Holy Mike Sekowsky!

Mike: You might look at it, say this is pretty fast and loose Jesse Marsh stuff, but...

CBA: It works.

Mike: Right. What did I just read in The Jack Kirby Collector, one

Above: Mike Royer (left) hanging out with fellow comics fanboys Martin Griem (editor of the exquisite Comics Crusader fanzine as well as the creator of Thunderbunny!) and Steve Sherman (one-time assistant for Jack Kirby and present-day puppeteer, renowned for his work on the Men in Black films, among others). Pic from the mid1960s. Courtesy of Mike Royer.

Below: Who knew that Mike Royer (inking over Western mainstay artist Mike Arens’ pencils) contributed to the world’s biggest—and we do mean BIGGEST!—comic book of all time, the one-shot Giant Wham-O Comics, published in 1966?

Courtesy of Mike Royer. ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

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Inset right: Three Tarzan artists.

From left to right, Burne Hogarth, Mike Royer, and Russ Manning, pose for a picture at a 1970s comic book convention. Courtesy of Mike Royer.

Below: Russ Manning rejected this splash page for a European Tarzan comics album (apparently redrawing it only slightly different). ©2002 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

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of the latest ones [#35], Marshall Rogers said Vince Colletta could ink 17 pages over a weekend. While I’m sure it was just hyperbole on Marshall’s part, just his way of saying Vince was fast.

Well, Jesse Marsh was the guy that actually could and ink 17 pages over a weekend!

CBA: How was it writing the Magnus story?

Mike: First, I need to give you an idea of the conservativeness of Gold Key (the later publishing entity for Western Printing and Lithography after they split from Dell in the early ’60s): I wrote two versions of my Magnus script, because I was enamored of Stan Lee’s writing at Marvel. I wrote my first version as a Marvel-type script for Magnus, the hip dialogue and everything. And, of course, I gave it a

really “original” Marvelesque title, “What Price Victory?” Basically it was a story about Magnus having to fight and potentially kill 1-A, his “father.” Of course, it was the old ploy of a meteorite that lands on the ocean near to 1-A’s Quonset hut, and exposed to deadly radiation, warping his mind, and he sets out to conquer the world, and here’s Magnus facing the fact that he may have to destroy the one robot that raised and taught him everything he knew. So that was the first script. Then I rewrote the script and turned it in, and Western bought it. It was written in a very conservative style. But I still titled it “What Price Victory?” And Zetta De Voe, the office manager (but I’m sure she didn’t feel that was her only function.

It was to be a creative consultant), in her eminent wisdom, retitled it “Threat from the Depths.” [laughter] CBA: So the only Marvel holdover was changed.

Mike: I also wrote a second script which was penciled by Paul Norris, which was about Magnus and babysitters, believe it or not. It was an idea that my mother gave me.

CBA: [laughs] Robot babysitters?

Mike: Yeah. She asked me, “What would happen if Magnus was faced with beating the living bejesus out of these gorgeous women?”

CBA: “What’s going on there?” [laughs} Mike: “Time to eat your supper, be sure and brush your teeth, or I’m going to kill you.”

CBA: A little Twilight Zone.

Mike: It was done in two parts, a 14-page lead story and a seven-page conclusion. Paul Norris penciled, I believe, the first 14 pages, but instead, Western decided to use reprints in the title. The remaining seven pages were never penciled.

CBA: Do you have any of the old Gold Key original art?

Mike: When I asked if I could have some originals, the stock answer was, “We can’t go to all that trouble to get those originals back!” Of course, as you’ve probably heard from other Western contributors that we would then see those pages of art at West Coast comic conventions, being sold by Western editor cronies. Or we’d pick up fanzines and see a piece of artwork one had done in the private collection of such-and-such, and you remember when you’d asked for that page and were simply told that, “We can’t go to that trouble.”

CBA: José Delbo told me the same story. The guy wouldn’t even sell him back the original art at a discount! Was it eleven months of full-time work at Western?

Mike: I used to measure things in eleven months as Russ Manning’s assistant and Sherwin-Williams credit manager. Then it was eleven months as Russ Manning assistant and Marvel Super-Heroes animation work… Russ evenings and weekends, Marvel Heroes Monday through Friday days. That was followed by eleven months as Manning assistant, Western Publishing assignments and SpiderMan layout animation work. It seemed to be eleven-month cycles until Kirby called.

I worked, as I say, on the Marvel Super-Heroes. Big deal, I got screen credit for that. Then everybody was laid off and I started doing more and more work at Western. The first thing they gave me was I penciled a Superboy frame tray puzzle, which that New York artist, Anderson, painted. Superboy rescuing a small pup from a hungry grizzly bear. I still have some of those in my “Life in a Box” boxes.

CBA: Were you still at Sherwin-Williams at this point ?

Mike: Oh, no. I quit Sherwin-Williams when I was hired at Grantday-Lawrence Animation by their art director, Mike Arens. “Big COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

Mike,” as he was called after I came on board—with me being named “Little Mike,” of course—was one of the unsung heroes of Western… the backbone of the company, like Sparky and others whose names remain relatively unknown to this day.

Before his long tenure at Western, Mike Aren’s early work was as an assistant to Fred Harmon on the Red Ryder newspaper strip in the late ’40s. Mike said they had to go punch cows every morning before they sat down at the drawing board. If you’ve ever seen those metal, reproductions of the tin signs, one with Red Ryder and Little Beaver in the back of a chuck wagon (I think it’s a candy bar ad), you’d swear that Fred Harmon drew it, but it’s actually by Mike Arens. Mike then went to work for Western Printing and Lithography when they produced for Dell, and one of his regular assignments was as artist on the Roy Rogers comic Sunday strip for most of its run and probably two-thirds of the daily strip run. (A couple of the other artists on the daily strip were Hi Mankin and Johnny Ushler). Then he did all kinds of comic books at Western, like Buck Jones and things of that nature. I met Mike at the animation studio in mid-’66, and he became like a second father to me. Russ may have gotten me started in the business, but Mike was really my mentor. Mike’s the guy that said, “You’ve got to learn to letter, so that when somebody offers you a job, you don’t lose it because you don’t letter as well.” I worked with him, while we were at Grantray-Lawrence on a Batman comic strip that appeared in supermarket supplements in the South during the days of the TV series. In later years at Western, I inked Mike on Scamp and Chip ’n’ Dale and everything under the sun. We also did work together in Wham-O Giant Comics #1… the only issue.

CBA: So Mike was pretty versatile, right? He could do funny animals, as well as Westerns?

Mike: Oh, yes. Funny animals, serious stuff. They were all versatile… guys like Sparky, Mike and some of the other guys I met peripherally in the offices because I worked on their pencils, guys like Hi Mankin, who did a lot of stuff in the late ’60s in the animation October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

field, especially at Hanna-Barbera. A lot of people don’t know his name, but for people who remember the Brenda Starr comic strip and the character’s lover/boyfriend/husband with the eyepatch, that’s based on Hi Mankin, who assisted Dale Messick for years before coming to the West Coast.

CBA: Were you happy jumping between animation and doing free-lance/licensing art and doing comic book work? Or did you really want to have a regular nine-to-five gig. You had three kids and a wife…

Mike: I liked working, being busy all the time. It seemed when the Marvel Super-Heroes shut down, it coincided with getting more work at Gold Key, so there were no stretches when I wasn’t working. Once I started at Grantray-Lawrence, and then got more work at Western because of Russ’ workload, I never was out of work. When GrantrayLawrence went back into production with the very first Spider-Man network Saturday morning show, I was called in.

In their eminent wisdom, Grantray-Lawrence hired as their production manager some guy who was from the building trades, so he had no experience in animation. I told him that I was doing so much work at Western that I couldn’t come to work in-house, I had to do it at home. That was okay with them, and I’d always had a great rapport with Grant Simmons (the “Grant” of Grantray-Lawrence).

(He and Ray Patterson came from working on the HannaBarbera Tom and Jerry cartoons.)

The business manager said, “Okay, you can work at home,

Above: Russ Manning penciled and inked this superb Tarzan pinup for a ’70s San Diego ComicCon souvenir book. The copy invited guests to color it for a contest. Courtesy of Shel Dorf. ©2002 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Below: Mike Royer inking a Russ Manning Tarzan Sunday strip in the 1970s. Courtesy of Mike Royer.

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Above: Nice Russ Manning panel from Magnus #8. Courtesy of Daniel I. Herman. Below: Cover detail from Magnus #28. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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but you don’t get screen credit.” Being a dumb kid, I didn’t know I could go to the union and say, “This son-of-a-bitch said I couldn’t have screen credit,” and they would have said, “Are you kidding?!”

And I would have gotten screen credit! In actuality, I laid out one-third of those twenty-some Spider-Man shows and never got any screen credit. I even laid out an entire show, where the Green Goblin, The Rhino, and Electro escaped from prison, and go after Spidey.

After two weeks of turning in work, Grant Simmons called me into his office and said, “Mike, everybody on staff is madder than hell at you.” I asked, “Why?” He said, “Because the layouts you’re turning in and billing 20 hours

for is more than anybody is doing in-house in 40 hours.” I said, “Well, that’s because I’m just sitting at the board and all I’m doing is working. There’s no meetings, no gab-sessions, no breaks…”

CBA: So he said...?

Mike: “Well, what you do is work 20 hours a week and bill me for 40.” I went, “Okay, I can live with that.”

CBA: You’d have known better if you were in a union. [laughter] Mike: Well, I was in the Screen Cartoonists Union, but I was honest. So for the remainder of however many weeks it was, 25 or so, I billed for 40 hours a week and worked 20. However, the reason the place went bankrupt is that Ray Patterson’s wife, who was the story editor, had a team of five writers, and each week she would have each writer do the same script from a synopsis, but their version, and then she’d pick the one she liked the best. Now, it’s funny that she was so surprised when suddenly they were out of money. You know, instead of five people writing five different scripts, it was... [laughter] Well, anyway... it was very interesting. One Friday afternoon I got a phone call from Grant Simmons, a really great guy. When I worked with him he’d give me these layouts that were just stick figures and field sizes and then I’d bring him back the key layout drawings which they’d give to the animators and the in-betweeners and so on. Anyway, Grant called me up and he says, “Mike, come by the studio tomorrow morning and if there is anything you want, you can have it.” So I came in that Saturday morning and backed my car up to the door. He said, “Take anything you want, the sheriff’s closing us down Monday.” I went, “Okay...” Don’t ask me what I took, because it wasn’t the right stuff. I took only stuff that interested me. I don’t even know what eventually ever happened to it, but I think I had every damn painted cel title for every Marvel Super-Heroes show that we’d ever done. I did take a few of cels and a handful of original art pages that Marvel had sent out instead of the usual stats. Saved nothing of Spider-Man except some of my own drawings that I got rid of years ago. All I have now are yellowing Thermofax copies of storyboards and model sheets. A lot of great Doug Wildey, Mel Keefer, and Sparky Moore drawings from Marvel Super-Heroes, but they’re all copies.

CBA: Did you like jumping around between the industries?

Mike: I didn’t even think about it. It was fun. I just liked doing lots of things. I liked the people that I was meeting. I mean, go back to before Spider-Man… one day Stan came out from New York and visited the studio. It was just cool to spend the whole day visiting with Stan and walking around with Doug, Mel, Herb Hazelton, Sparky, Mike Arens, and a lot of these other people. The studio supplied the brushes we used when we inked our new drawings, and we all were doing the old “lick-it” test to see if the brushes were any good. I’ve never forgotten, it’s 1966, and Doug Wildey is licking a brush and he says to Stan, “God, this stuff is sh*t! You can’t get a decent brush anymore.” God, I wish they were as good now as that “sh*t” in ’66! I don’t know if I consciously thought about liking one job or the other better. I was just having fun. I was supporting my family… we weren’t high on the hog, but it was enough. I was working so much at home, all the neighbors thought I was unemployed!

CBA: [laughs] Were you solidly middle class?

Mike: Yes. CBA: Obviously, the ’60s was a very hip time for Southern COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

California. Did you get caught up in the “happenings” at all?

Mike: Well, I thought it was pretty cool to be living in southern California where one thousand people a day were emigrating.

CBA: Did you dig the underground comix that started coming out?

Mike: Well, let’s see. I found the underground comix kind of interesting.

I’d gotten to know [book dealer, critic and comics historian] Richard Kyle through Southern California fandom and guys like the late Rick Durell, who was a great comic book collector and original art collector. And I met the McGeehan brothers who used to publish a fanzine called House of Info, or something like that. They were early Southern California fan publishers. Rich and I got to be pretty good friends.

CBA: Did Kyle have the bookstore in Long Beach?

Mike: It was before he had the bookstore. Although it seems like he’s always had it, but I think it was before the bookstore. None of us knew what Richard did before the store. And I still don’t know.

CBA: Come to think of it, I don’t know either. [laughs] Mike: One time I thought maybe he was a detective fiction writer, but Richard told me, no, he wasn’t. Richard encouraged me, he said, “Why don’t you try something for the undergrounds?” So I did an eight-pager and he said, “Mike, this is not underground, it’s just pornographic.” And I went, “I guess I just can’t see the distinction.”

Mark Evanier produced a title for Kitchen Sink called High Adventure. In 1968, I saw a Finnish film called The Day the Earth Froze, a silly little European potboiler based on Finnish folk legends.

But I just fell in love with the whole concept, this Finnish mythology, and went out and got the Harvard Press printings of The Kalevala that Elias Lonnrot collected for years, walking all over Finland, getting the stories and writing them down from the old storytellers.

CBA: These are the Norse legends?

Mike: Finnish legends. And I wanted to do a strip based on the characters. The first thing I did was something that would have been in Jack [Kirby]’s Superworld if it had ever come to fruition, and it was called “Heroes of Kalevala.” But the more I thought about it, I didn’t want to do a strip where some guy was the hero. So I took a character that would have just been the romantic interest in my strip, a minor character (who was the third wife of Lemminkainen, the great Finnish hero, and the sister of Ilmarinen, the magic smithy) and I decided to make her the lead. I named the strip “Annikki,” after her.

She became, in my mind, a female, ball-busting Conan.

Ultimately, in 1973, an Annikki story was printed in Kitchen Sink’s High Adventure. So that’s my big association with underground comix. I did a couple of one-pagers for some friends in San Francisco, one of them the back cover of some underground, called “Be a Master Detective: Identify What’s in this Picture.” It was something that when you looked at it, it appeared to be incredibly obscene. All it was was a shoulder with a lot of hair on it, but it was something that looked horrible.

CBA: [laughs] Besides your work as, in my opinion, the greatest inker over Jack Kirby, the first thing I recognized your name on was, when flipping through the vinyl LPs at my local record shop, a long series of Cruisin’ album covers. How’d you get that gig?

Mike: After Grantray-Lawrence animation, I worked on The Banana Splits for one season.

CBA: Get out!

Mike: I worked on Three Musketeers, did layouts and clean-ups.

During that period that I acquired my collection of Xerox Alex Toth model sheets. Every time I would go in to talk to Bob Singer, who was the director I was working with, I would spend an hour in the Xerox room copying every Alex Toth model sheet I could find from the previous years.

CBA: Did you ever meet Alex?

Mike: Oh, well, yeah! When I first moved to California, I phoned him one day and said, “I’ve got a stack of Noel Sickles’ Scorchy Smith October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

daily comic strips and I understand you’re a fan of his work. Would you like to see them?” He said, “Yeah, come on over to the house.” I was there for at least eight hours, to his wife’s chagrin. We even took a breather in the conversation to watch Jonny Quest. It was in the first few months after moving to Southern California… Spring 1965.

At Hanna-Barbera, I met Paul Gruwell, one of the layout artists there, who called me one day and asked if I would like to do the finished pencil art, inking and lettering on some record album covers. The albums were being produced by a place called Watermark.

He did little four by four thumbnails for each cover. If you’ve seen any of the later covers, he insisted that they be signed “Royer and Gruwell.”

When Howard Silvers of Increase Records bought the title and material of Cruisin’ from Watermark, he called me at Disney in 1979 and told me of his plans to do new Cruisin’ albums. He asked, “Do we need Gruwell?” I said, “No, we don’t,” because Paul had ticked me off. I used to run into him at parties and he would say, “Hey, this is Mike

Left inset: Inker extraordinaire and all-round raconteur Mike Royer plugging away at the board during his days working for the preeminent comic book genius Jack Kirby.

Courtesy of Mike Royer.

Below: Mike Royer inked—and wrote!—this page of “Threat from the Depths,” the lead feature in Magnus Robot Fighter #28. Pencils

by Paul Norris. Courtesy of Mike Royer. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

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Above: Mike Royer toiled plenty in the pages of Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes, notably inking Mike Aren’s pencils on “Space Ghost” as seen here. From #3.

Courtesy of Mike Royer. ©2002 Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

Below: Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes, #3. Courtesy of Mike Royer. ©2002 Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

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Royer, who inked my Cruisin’ covers!” For the first two groups of releases, 1954 through 1969, he’d given me thumbnail layouts of each cover, usually with goofy perspectives, and then told me that I would have to go find all the historical objects—cars, magazines, gas prices, etc.—and that they had to be “real.”

I’m the kid that went to used car lots in East L.A. and, under the curious gaze of two big, swarthy-type guys in their three-piece suits, I’d study these classic cars. They’re like, “Why does this little punk white kid want to take photographs of this ’58 Impala’s dashboard?”

CBA: Were there albums for each year in the ’50s?

Mike: We started with 1955, and there were about six or seven of them. We later went back and did ’54. And it eventually ended with Woodstock and the year 1969.

So the layouts and thumbnails were Paul’s contribution. Then, almost a decade later, I was called by Howard Silvers at Increase Records, who had worked at Watermark at one time and who wanted to continue the series. He wanted to start with a Cruisin’ Years compilation, with a cover that has the scrapbook with the football programs in it and the photograph of the album cover character Eddie after he was drafted. There were a couple of the originally done covers that I did not have the originals or copies of. 1968 to 1969, which for some reason had never been released. 1968 was the reuniting of Peg and Eddie in front of a theatre showing 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1969, intended as the last of the series, had Peg and Eddie in the front seat of their psychedelically painted VW bus in the traffic jam leaving Woodstock. Seated between them is Peg’s young son from her husband who was killed in Vietnam. In 1968, Peg and Eddie find each other at a Vietnam War Widows rally.

CBA: I didn’t know there was a story to the covers.

Mike: Oh, yeah, there’s a damn story! They first meet in a used book store in ’54 and started dating. I believe the earlier covers were also written by Paul. After Silvers reactivated the series with The Cruisin’ Years, I did a recreation—from memory—of 1968 and beginning with 1969 (and including the compilation mentioned), I created all the cover situations onward. 1969 was a new situation.

Instead of the series ending and her having the kid from her late husband, Peg and Eddie are on their honeymoon and the newspaper on the floor says, “Beatles rumored to split.” Every cover has a little bit of tension in it. In 1970 where, because Eddie is now an aspiring lawyer, having gone to law school, he’s on the golf course with Mr. Dollarhide and they’re talking about this Kent State thing, and Peg’s

wearing her short tennis outfit with the wind blowing, showing her cheeks, and she’s leaning over the Corvette with the tennis pro and she’s saying, “That’s okay, Eddie, Mike wants to show me some more things,” or something like that. The only truly happy cover that has no angst or tension in it is a Christmas cover, and I don’t know if Howard ever released it, but Eddie’s in his Santa Claus suit putting presents around the tree, and Peg’s in a filmy negligee, coming down the stairs with a plate and she says, “Here, don’t forget your milk and cookies.”

CBA: [laughter] Sounds like you wrote that one!

Mike: Oh, yeah! Increase Records also packaged groups of Cruisin’ CDs for “Big Box” stores, and I did at least three covers for these box sets. I had to create covers that would fit the continuity of the years covered in a set. I did one where Eddie pulls up to Peg’s house to take her to The Blob, but she wants to stay home because Elvis is gonna be on Ed Sullivan.

You know, stuff like that. Then Howard started a new series, since getting much further into the ’70s wasn’t what he considered the “history of rock ’n’ roll” anymore. We did three covers for albums that were simply called Cruisin’ With… and they featured a particular famous disk jockey. And they were still Peg and Eddie covers. There really is a story.

CBA: Do you have any of the original art left?

Mike: I was able to acquire the original art back from the original producer. He was in Hawaii and I just wrote him, “Hey, I want the originals.” Nobody ever said I couldn’t have the originals back. So he sent them to me, but couldn’t find ’54, ’68 and ’69. But I sold them all to Howard Silvers.

CBA: When did the San Diego con start?

Mike: Well, this was the 33rd Comic-Con International: San Diego, so you do the math. The very first show was called the Golden State Mini-Comicon. Shel Dorf put on this little weekend thing at a hotel down there. I was the first cartoonist guest. Jack Kirby was the first guest at the official convention, but the initial show was, I guess, like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney saying, “Let’s put on a convention, but first let’s see if it will work.” So they do one but it doesn’t count.

CBA: A dry run?

Mike: I think the first guests were Forry Ackerman and me. God, I wish I had a better memory.

CBA: Have you gone to every San Diego ComicCon since?

Mike: No. I went for probably four or

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

five years in a row. Probably until the mid-’70s. I was at this one- or two-day show in Orange County, and was talking to Shel and he asked, “Well, are you gonna come down to the convention?” I said, “Sure, as long as you’ve got a place for me to stay, I’ll do anything you want, I’d be on panels or whatever.” Shel said, “Well, we figured since all you guys on the West Coast would be comin’ anyway, we can’t give you rooms anymore.” So I stopped going. Not that I deserved a room, but up to this point, I always volunteered for everything that they thought I could be used on, or with.

CBA: You were the very first guest, too? You should have been grandfathered in.

Mike: Yeah. But they weren’t comping us rooms, so I didn’t go for several years. A few years later, Gene Henderson called and asks, “Mike, are you going to come to the convention?” I says, “No, I’m not comin’.” He says, “Mike, you gotta come, they’re giving you an Inkpot.” I said, “Okay, I’ll be there.” Jim Steranko, the master of ceremonies for that award evening, knew why I hadn’t been going for the last few years. When he announced my award, Jim said, “For his tireless support of the San Diego Convention, the recipient is Mike Royer.” We thought that was pretty funny. Hours later, after partying all night long, I’m standing in a hallway with Burne Hogarth—who also got an Inkpot that year—and he puts his arm around my shoulder and says, “Well, kid, we got ours.” I thought, “This is cool!” [laughter] I have a photograph somewhere of Burne, myself, and Russ Manning in the lobby of a hotel where the World Science Fiction Convention was held the year—1972—when Burne’s Tarzan of the Apes came out from Watson-Guptil, the one that looks like China painted in the Black Forest. All of his originals were on display. I lovingly refer to it as a photo of three Tarzan artists. It’s Burne Hogarth, me, and Russ Manning. I’ve got almost shoulder-length hair and look like hell, but hey, it was a holdover from the late ’60s!

CBA: Did you notice a difference between East and West Coast artists at Gold Key? Mike: Yes. The biggest difference, that made them look different, was some kind of cockamamie editorial policy that for years all the books Western Printing and Lithography produced in New York City always had their original art with blue lines on it to allow for a quarter-inch between balloons and borders of each panel. If you want to tell whether a story was a New York book and which one is a Los Angeles book, just look at how the balloons are in the panel. If there’s air around it, it’s New York.

L.A. tried this only briefly.

CBA: [laughs] Why was that done?

Mike: I don’t know!

There were so many strange things that they did...

October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

we used to joke, “We’re Western Printing and Lithography. We don’t compete.” [laughter] CBA: Why didn’t you go East, where the comics industry generally was based?

Mike: I don’t know. Probably because I couldn’t afford it. I suppose if I had been raised at a different time and in a different part of the country rather than a little agricultural valley, I might have been able to do things like Bernie Wrightson and those guys, get two or three friends with similar interests and rent a loft somewhere to practice and learn. Instead, it seemed that the imperative that I lived by was “support the family.” So it was even a risk just packing everybody up and moving to Southern California. I mean when I think about it, that took a lot of balls. [laughter] We just packed up everything we had, what would fit in the U-Haul trailer and drove south.

CBA: [laughs] Did your wife just have faith in you and say, “Okay, I guess...”

Mike: We were just a couple of dumb 23-year-old kids, you know. I say that affectionately. Anything is possible, I guess, when you’re young.

CBA: Well, you had a lot of responsibilities—your children—so that’s the main reason for not coming East?

Above: Final page of Mike Royer’s superb inking job on Jack Kirby’s The Demon #1. ©2002 DC Comics.

Inset left: Mike Royer (left) and Jack Kirby share a moment at a California comic book convention in 1972, at the height of their capabilities. Courtesy of Mike.

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Above and below: Mike Royer contributed to the wholesome Western line as well as underground comix. ©2002 the respective copyright holders.

66

Mike: Well, I knew the closest market was Los Angeles, and knew there was a lot of stuff produced down here, and some of my favorite material was produced on the West Coast. So it was if I wanted to do comics, I had to go to Los Angeles.

I guess if the closest market had been Chicago, I would have figured out some way to go there.

CBA: What was Russ Manning like?

Mike: Russ was one of the most interesting guys I’ve ever met. In the old connotation of the word “straight,” which used to mean normal, regular... Russ was the straightest, most normal guy I’ve ever met. As opposed to every other cartoonist and artist I’ve ever known, none of whom are regular (which I think is great).

Russ was a very intelligent, tremendously civic-minded man. He lived in Majeska Canyon, in the foothills in Orange County.

He was a volunteer fireman, and if there were fires out there, the only people to put them out was the volunteer fire department. Bill Stout, Dave Stevens and others who worked with Russ will mention the classic story, where they’d be sitting there working and suddenly this blaring noise from this box on the studio counter announcing there’s a fire, and Russ jumps up, turns it off, and says, “I’ll be back,” and runs out to fight a fire. Well, maybe it’s just all the other people I met were strange and there were a lot more normal people in comics, I don’t know. I guess there weren’t any visible eccentricities that I ever noticed about Russ; he was just level-headed. I always noticed that there was an interesting relationship he had with his wife. I don’t know whether it was his own feeling about his work and it being his responsibility and no one else should be bothered with it, but I can remember many, many times on a Friday afternoon, it being 4:30 and we would be done at 5:00 and then my job was to take the package in to the post office and ring the bell and hand it to the guy so it would go special delivery to wherever it was supposed to go. His wife would stick her head in the studio door at 4:30 and say, “I’m going to town.” He’d say, “Okay, have a good time.” But never once did I hear him say to her, “Well, if you wait a half an hour, hon, you could take this to the post office and save Mike the trip, which is several miles out of his way.”

CBA: [laughs] Did you ever make notice of that?

Mike: I never mentioned it to him. I felt it wasn’t my place. I will say, that of

all the people I’ve worked with, I probably knew Russ less than anybody, but I worked on and off with him for many years. I did learn some things from Russ, though, that have been with me all my life. The older I get, the more honest I get about certain things. I remember once, the first time that my parents came down to visit their son in Southern California, and I had to drive some stuff out to Russ on a Saturday morning that I was working on at home. This was before the Tarzan strip days. He was in the kitchen, sitting at the table having a cup of coffee, and I go in the house and hand him the pages, and I said, “Hey, my folks are here from Oregon. Would you like to meet them?” He said, “No.” [laughter] I didn’t know what the hell to say!

CBA: Now, Jack and Roz would have invited them in and fed them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, right? [laughs] Mike: Jack would have gone out and had them come in and swim in the pool and asked, “Do you want to stay for lunch?” But Manning was being totally honest, he just didn’t care to meet my folks. Why would he want to meet my folks? In the TV series Friends, there’s a line Phoebe delivers in the very first episode—you’d think after eight years I’d forget this, but I guess it falls into the category of Russ Manning sayings—and the guys are moving into an apartment across the hall and she turns, looks at them and says, “You know, I’d like to help you move, but I don’t want to.” [laughter] CBA: You know, I always got the impression—and correct me if I’m wrong—that he was an angry, tightly-wound guy. Did you ever get that feeling?

Mike: No, but you know, he might have been. Well, he may have been tightly wound, and maybe that’s why I got the impressions I did.

Once or twice, we attempted to do things socially. We spent a whole day together driving in our two different vehicles to some lake and we water-skied (where I got the sunburn of my life), but when we left the lake shore, we agreed, “We’ll meet up in this town on the way back and have hamburgers.” So we left the park at the same time. My wife and little kids and I got to the hamburger joint, and we sat there and waited almost two hours, and finally said, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here,” and we ordered our food. Just as we were finishing, Russ and family showed up, and they’re like, “Why didn’t you wait for us?” [laughter] So I don’t know if he was wound tight or not. I sometimes speculate that perhaps he never asked Dodie to deliver the art because it may never have dawned on him.

As far as I remember, his father had died when he was extremely young, so he spent all of his years growing up with his mother and sister. It may just have been so many years in a matriarch situation, that maybe it was just something that he wouldn’t ask his wife to do. Maybe he was just incredibly selfreliant and it was something he could trust me to do because I was his assistant and he felt it was part of the job. I don’t know. I do know that he did harbor some latent anger with the New York publishers like Marvel and DC, because with any attempt he’d ever made to secure work with them, he was turned COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

down. He didn’t draw enough like the DC or Marvel house look, he was told.

CBA: There’s something about Magnus that seems to be quintessentially Californian. It’s always sunshiny, with clear skies…

Mike: I think Magnus is probably the best stuff Russ ever did. He did some really beautiful work with Tarzan, some really beautiful art, but I just think that Magnus is his magnum opus.

CBA: “Magnus Opus.” [laughter] Mike: What’s interesting is, Magnus is Tarzan in the year 4000.

Had you never thought that?

CBA: No, I haven’t. [laughs] What do the robots represent?

Mike: Apes and natives.

CBA: In a way, I’ve never understood the strip. When I was a little kid, I would read it and saw that all the other humans seemed to get along with robots, but Magnus hated them…

Mike: Because he knew there were evil robots out there.

CBA: I believe Valiant played this aspect up later: It seemed that Magnus was kind of nuts, the only one who saw robots in that way. [laughter] But he looked so cool in that dress-like blouse and those white boots. [laughs] Mike: I loved the artwork. I thought—what was her name, Leeja?—she was cuter than hell. I remember, in the mid-’70s, when Bob Hodes wanted to become the Stan Lee of Tarzan publications, he wanted all the foreign stuff we produced to read “Robert W. Hodes Presents,” but the family wouldn’t let him, which was the beginning of their falling out, I guess. But he saw himself as Stan Lee. I don’t know. I always liked Bob. He gave me some good opportunities. I think the last full book Russ did was 48 pages. The first ten pages were penciled by Alex Toth, and I think Alex just got too frustrated trying to work with Russ. Russ had drawn these huge model sheets of Tarzan. Lots of figures, lots of heads, of Jane, Korak and stuff. I’ve still got them around somewhere. Russ kept telling Alex, “You’re not making them look like the model sheets.” Alex’s reply was, “Well, every damn one of your heads looks different!” I mean, it was Russ Manning’s Tarzan, but where Alex was coming from, if it’s supposed to be a model sheet, this wasn’t a model sheet. But I’m digressing again. I wrote that last volume where Tarzan goes to Pellucidar. The first ten pages were Toth’s breakdowns from Russ’s script, and then I wrote the remaining 36 pages and did the descriptions for every page, and Russ pretty much drew it the way I scripted it. I was just so upset years later when I found that Russ’s son, Roger, was selling the original art to that book, and of course I was never even approached and asked if I even wanted to buy some of the pages since I wrote the damned book.

CBA: Did you do a lot of writing?

Mike: Not a lot. At Western, I adapted some Tarzan stories for a couple of the digest magazines, I wrote The Jungle Twins comic book, which I attempted to draw. I wrote one or two Speed Buggys. Do you remember Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? CBA: Of course.

How would you assess your time at Western?

Mike: Well, thank God October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

they were there. I had income. It introduced me to a variety of very interesting and talented people, directly or indirectly, and the only bad thing is that it’s so many years ago that these days seem so trivial now. I do remember arguments with Chase about, “You can do this and you can’t do that,” and some of the incredible changes they would make in finished art simply because he didn’t like the way, apparently, he was feeling that day and didn’t want something done. And poor Bernie Zuber, who was the in-house bullpen, who had to make all the corrections, and... I don’t know what Bill Spicer is doing these days, but for years Bill lettered at Western.

CBA: In the ’60s as well?

Mike: Well, at least through the ’70s… ’80s? Bill did a lot of lettering there. Bill became a letterer at Gold Key because I recommended him. Most of the lettering in the days when I started doing stuff at Western was done by a man named Rome Siemen. I met Rome once, I used to have a whole set of his lettering guides. He lettered everything on a light board, never ruled any lines on the art. If you see there’s two different styles of lettering on the first 23 or so Magnuses, the ones that have more character to the lettering are the ones that Russ lettered himself, and then the others would have that real consistent, polished look, were Rome Siemen’s. Rome lettered so much stuff. A lot of stuff that Mike Arens did, he lettered himself. Mike lettered in what I call the Frank Engli style. (Engli was Milton Caniff’s letterer.)

CBA: Were you working there when they didn’t have borders on the panels?

Mike: No, that was early ’60s, I think.

CBA: Did you ever find out why they did that? Did you ever ask Russ?

Mike: No, but I think it was just so that they wouldn’t be confused for being comic books. [laughter] I say that facetiously, but I’m sure somebody said, “We don’t even need the Comics Code, because we do clean comics, we do good comics.”

(What was that old slogan, “If it’s a Dell comic, it’s a good comic”?) So I think they did painted covers and those kinds of things so that they, in their own minds, would not be perceived as run-of-themill, trashy comic books.

CBA: Well, they did look very classy. They even had Richard Price paint the early covers of Doctor Solar and things like that. They have quite a distinctive look.

Mike: I once had the painting that Anderson did for that story I wrote, “Threat from the Depths,” but in a moment of weakness I probably traded it for some Hopalong Cassidy 16MM films. I did layouts for two or three Magnus covers, comps for the painter. Then I did a couple of covers where I took the original painted cover and did a line drawing in a pseudo-Russ Manning style, which at the time I thought was pretty close, but if I were to look at them now, I would probably ask for a barf bag.

Above: For innumerable years, Mike Royer worked for Walt Disney, perhaps most notably creating the “sketchy” version of Winnie-the-Pooh and Friends.

Above is a 1996 “Shades of Summer” art pool placket.

Courtesy of Mike Royer. ©2002 Walt Disney.

Inset left: Annikki, a warrior heroine based on Norse legend, was created by Mike Royer and appeared in High Adventure #1. ©2002 Mike Royer.

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CBA Interview

Paul’s Gold Key Memories

Conversing with Aquaman co-creator and Magnus artist Inset right: Paul drew this picture of his co-creation, Aquaman, for the San Diego Blood Bank. Art ©2002 Paul Norris. Aquaman ©2002 DC Comics

Below: Paul displays a page of his original artwork from The Jungle Twins series. Photo by and courtesy of Shel Dorf. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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Conducted by Joe Caporale On April 26, 2002, Paul Norris turned 88 years young. He proudly has been called a protége of Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon and fellow Ohioan. Paul worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for the Dayton Daily News in the late 1930s. He moved to New York City in 1940, where he got a job with Prize Publications, producing such comic book series as “Yank and Doodle” and “Power Nelson, Futureman.” He joined National Periodical Publications (now DC Comics) later in ’40, where he co-created Aquaman with Mort Weisinger in 1941 and drew two episodes of “The Sandman” in Adventure Comics before Jack Kirby and Joe Simon took that strip over. Paul only drew the first ten stories of “Aquaman” in More Fun Comics before it was discovered that there was a clause in his contract to draw the newspaper strip, Vic Jordan, for the New York daily PM that prohibited him from doing comic books! He joined the service in ’43 and upon his return to civilian life in ’46, went on a work rampage that would continue until his self-imposed retirement in 1987.

Paul worked on the following newspaper strips: Vic Jordan (194243), Secret X-9 (three months in 1943), Jungle Jim (1948-54), Flash Gordon (briefly in ’53), Secret Agent X-9 (1950-60), and Brick Bradford (1952-87) as well as the feature, Six Days a Week Mystery Stories (1947-50). Please note that he was producing the dailies and Sundays over a two-year period in 1952-54 for Jungle Jim and Brick Bradford as well as working on Secret X-9 while drawing comic books for Dell Comics from 1946 onward! Among the known comic books he drew for Dell were Jungle Jim and Flash Gordon. For Gold Key, from 1968-76, he produced Magnus, Robot Fighter, The Jungle Twins, Tarzan, Woodsy Owl, Huck Finn, Hi-Adventure Heroes, and Fantastic Voyage.

Paul was married to his wife, Ann, for 61 years, who was his helper, partner, and best friend until her death.

They produced two sons, one of whom, Reed, followed the artistic leanings of his parents and was an artist

for the toy company, Mattel, for many years.

With such an amazing résumé, Paul was not concerned that he never signed his Dell and Gold Key work. He felt the work spoke for itself. He was awarded an Inkpot Award at the 1993 San Diego Comic Convention. He is a quiet, pleasant, and friendly man who did exactly what he wanted with his life and did it to the fullness of his ability. Proud of the fact that he never missed a deadline, he was very surprised to find out that he was listed on the Internet. Paul was almost embarrassed yet pleasantly surprised he had been found out.

Comic Book Artist: When did you begin working for Dell/Gold Key? Paul Norris: I started working for Dell in 1946, I think. The latter part of 1946, I did Flash Gordon for Oscar LeBeck, who was editor for Dell at that time. I guess it was the 1950s when I started doing the Jungle Jim comic book for Dell. Matt Murphy was my editor then. I was also drawing the King Features [newspaper strip] Jungle Jim from 1948 until it ended in 1954.

I guess my association with Gold Key started in 1968 when I moved to California and started working with Chase Craig there at Western Publishing until it all ended in 1976.

CBA: Chase Craig also worked with Alex Toth, Russ Manning, and other artists on the West Coast. Was he a good editor and did you enjoy working for him?

Paul: Oh, yes. To begin with, he was a cartoonist himself. Not too many editors were cartoonists. He knew the business. He knew it well. I enjoyed working with him. As a matter of fact, when Gold Key lost the contract with the Burroughs people on Tarzan (to DC Comics) that’s when Gold Key decided to do The Jungle Twins. That was a creation of Chase Craig and myself and we worked it out and then we got together with the man who had been writing the Tarzan stories. We got him to write The Jungle Twins. I don’t recall his name.

He lived in Florida and was a fundamentalist minister, I understand.

He wrote good, clean scripts that were easy to follow. There were some writers who would write a script and describe a scene from half COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

a dozen different angles. That would be confusing. This man in Florida was straight-on in his storytelling. Mark Evanier is straight-on with his storytelling, too. By that, you know where you’re going with the script. That makes it easier when you’re dealing with a script.

[Interviewer’s note: Mark Evanier and Paul Norris worked together on a mini-series for Marvel Comics based on Hanna-Barbera’s Dynomutt cartoon character. Both men enjoyed the experience of working together. With Paul’s retirement from comics in 1987, it is doubtful they will ever work together again.—Joe C.] CBA: All of your work at Gold Key was done from full scripts rather the Marvel plot-first method. Is that correct?

Paul: Yeah. The full scripts were handed right to me. I’d take them, lay out the pages, and send them in for lettering and they’d send them back to me (for inking).

CBA: What sort of freedom did you have as far as script changes, changing the dialogue or scenes?

Paul: That was not of my interest. They had the script all edited before they sent it to me.

CBA: Were there any books that you would have liked to continue doing?

Paul: Oh, yes, I would have liked to have continued The Jungle Twins. That was a personal favorite of mine. I think I was at my full stride when I was doing that book.

CBA: The blacks on these books were pretty well balanced. The panels are open. The composition was superb, both panel and page-wise. It’s drawn like a movie. First the camera is over here, then it’s over there. Each panel has a different perspective. You’re not supposed to notice it but that’s good storytelling. Who did the lettering? Was that Bill Spicer?

Paul: It could have been Bill Spicer at the office. That was a long time ago and Bill was around.

I’m surprised when I look at it myself, sometimes. I don’t remember doing some of it. It’s the same when I look back at some of the proof sheets for Brick Bradford. I’m amazed at the story lines. Even the stories I did for Secret Agent X-9. “Did I really do that?”

CBA: The stories have a free flow conscienceness. Once you get into the curve.

Paul: That’s right. Once you get a story started, it sort of moves on its own, it takes on its own identity. It’s amazing what happens.

CBA: Did you color your own Sunday pages?

Paul: King Features had about five or six artists [whose only job was to] color the Sunday pages, with the exception of Hal Foster and Milton Caniff. I don’t remember when they cut back on the art department colorists, but they did, and it fell to the strip artists to do their own coloring. For the last ten years of Brick Bradford, I did my own coloring on the Sunday pages.

CBA: Did you submit a reduced photostat and hand-color it or did you do it by the numbers or overlays?

Paul: I did overlays and, then again, we had numbers (for the colors). We had a whole chart, we had to choose numbers for colors.

CBA: If you wanted a certain green, it might be number 34 on the chart.

Paul: That’s the way the chart worked. I think the chart might have been from American Color.

CBA: At the same time from 1968 on, you were still producing Brick Bradford dailies and Sundays for King Features, what was your work schedule like? Did you, let’s say, devote part of your day to Brick Bradford and another part to your comic book work?

Paul: I would do Brick Bradford first. When I started on a comic book, I worked on the comic book. I would pencil out the comic book, send it in for lettering and any editing that might take place. They might have edited the script, but I wasn’t aware of that. It only took me about three days to do the dailies and Sundays for Brick Bradford.

It got to a place before I retired Brick Bradford (in 1987), the Sunday pages were so small, I couldn’t believe it! It kept getting smaller and smaller! It was hard to have a large vista [background] in a panel, it would have to go through all three panels of the strip to do it. I didn’t like to have less than two panels and usually I’d try to get three panels in a daily. The panels in the Sunday were pretty much specified and, not only that, there is a big panel, splash panel, in the Sunday that would be dropped off in a lot of newspapers and they would print what came after. It robbed a lot from the value of the feature having to draw so small.

CBA: When assuming an on-going project, you had a rare ability to emulate the work of the previous artist that hasn’t been given the credit it deserves. For example, early on when you took over Magnus, Robot Fighter from Russ Manning, it was difficult to tell the difference between Russ Manning and your work. Was it that your styles were so similar or was it a deliberate attempt on your part to maintain the look of the book?

Paul: Yeah, at least for a few issues I carried it through for a while. I did my first issue both penciling and inking. Those that came after that, Mike Royer inked them and I think he had worked with Russ Manning.

CBA: Yes, Mike worked with Russ for many years. He would later become Jack Kirby’s principal inker for all the Kirby DC Comics, eventually working for the Disney people.

Paul: That would make it easier, too, to carry on a similar style. Mike would ink it in the same style he had inked before when he worked with Russ.

CBA: Did you work with several different inkers or did you do most of the inking yourself?

Paul: I never had an inker with almost of all of my work on comic books.

CBA: With exception of Mike Royer?

Paul: Yeah, that’s all. I always did my own work. As a matter of fact, I was an inker on Mel Graff’s run of Secret Agent X-9. He had a terrible time keeping up with a syndicated strip. I October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

Above and below: The Jungle Twins created by Chase Craig and Paul Norris only ran 13 issues from 1972 to 1975. Respectively, here are pages 1 and 27 from The Jungle Twins #13. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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Above: Pages 2 and 11 from the adaptation of Tarzan and the Lion Man in Tarzan #206, the final issue of Western’s 30+ year run on the character. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. decided to award DC Comics the license for the next few years, where editor/writer /artist Joe Kubert executed a superb series. ©2002 ERB, Inc.

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would do a ten-week story and have it on ice for Mel when he would run into trouble. I was called, on occasion, to come in and draw and ink (in Mel’s style) the dailies when Mel fell behind with King Features.

CBA: It was believed that you produced at least two ten-week runs for Secret Agent X-9 and then it was taken over by Bob Lubbers.

Paul: Well, the last two, I did forty strips; that would be four tenweek [storylines]. I don’t really know how I managed it. I know I was tired and took a vacation. I found out when I returned that Bob Lubbers had been assigned to take over Secret Agent X-9. I spoke to the editor at King Features and he said, “Oh, would you like to have the strip?” I said no, I’d been drawing Brick Bradford so long that it was fine with me. Bob Lubbers didn’t draw very long. I don’t know what happened.

CBA: In fact, Bob Lubbers would sign the strip as Bob Lewis.

Paul: I don’t remember who took it over after him. [Al Williamson succeeded Bob Lubbers on Secret Agent X-9 in 1967.—J.C.] CBA: Back to your ability to cover another artist’s work, like in the case of Clarence Gray on Brick Bradford. You seem to be able to draw in his style as well.

Paul: I did that in the beginning but as Ron Goulart in his magnificent book, The Encyclopedia of American Comics, pointed out that when I got control of it the way I wanted to draw it after a couple of years, that he refers to it as my space opera or something.

CBA: Now, you wrote most of the Brick Bradford stories that you drew, is that correct?

Paul: Yes, I wrote them as well as drew them. It’s so much easier to write your own stuff. To write your own story on the paper and draw pictures around it. For me, it worked out great.

CBA: So much of the work you did for Dell and Gold Key was unsigned and although I admired the books, I, like so many others, didn’t know who did the work until years later. You did at least eight

Tarzan comic book adventures.

Paul: I think it was more than that for Gold Key. There, again, most of the time, Mike Royer inked them but he choose to go with Jack Kirby and from that point on I did the job of penciling and inking. I didn’t write the stories. The only thing I wrote were the Flash Gordon books for Dell. Paul S. Newman wrote quite a few back then.

CBA: When you did the Tarzan stories: the Burroughs people were supposed to be very protective of their properties. Did they review all the work the writer and you did?

Paul: I don’t know. That was up to Chase Craig and Western Publishing to handle that.

CBA: You submitted pencils. Were there many requests for corrections or changes of scenes from the editors?

Paul: Very little.

CBA: Chase Craig edited with a light touch.

Paul: As a matter of fact, there were very few changes. Every now and then, Chase would want something changed and I would change it. Remember I did Tarzan over a period of a couple of years….

CBA: Any difficulty in producing Brick Bradford and the Tarzan books over the same period?

Paul: No, not at all. I had a good helper. My wife, Ann, would prepare all the strips for me, I mean, she’d rule them for me, particularly the syndicated stuff. She’d always have a batch ruled up for me.

CBA: Did she, also, assist you as far as filling in blacks and such for you?

Paul: Oh, absolutely. She’d love to fill in the big black areas. I used to make little crosses for where black ink should go. When we were through, I would have to check everything to see if there still any Xs and every now and then, a little X would get through, but we got by with it.

CBA: So you would rate your wife as a very good helper?

Paul: Oh, she was great. She was an artist in her own right, you COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

know. She was skilled in many art forms.

CBA: Regarding your illustration, Red Wind, that I discovered on the Internet. What can you tell us about it?

Paul: Seeing that illustration again was a real surprise. Beginning in 1947, King Features had this feature called Six Days a Week Mystery Stories, it was edited by Clark Clinard. He would assign what mystery story might be used and, of course, by what prominent mystery writer of the day.

I had to read a book a week and break it down into six chapters and I had to create an illustration for each chapter and the Red Wind drawing was from one of the chapters. These illustrations were only, like 5” x 7” in size. I had a lot of those things lying around and threw them out. It was a shame. When I moved to California, I just threw them out. I am surprised what people are able to have on the Internet (for sale). I don’t know where they found them. I never put any value on them other than what King Features paid me. Six Days a Week Mystery Stories lasted for a couple of years. I think, from 1947 to 1950.

CBA: How long would it take you to produce an issue of Tarzan or The Jungle Twins? Did you produce two pages a day, five pages a day?

Paul: That’s really hard to say. When I was doing Tarzan, I tried to do the book all the way through as much as I could. I kept the dailies and Sunday pages well ahead so I would have time to do the book all the way through. Once, I was through with the book, I could go back and knock out some Brick Bradfords and maintain my backlog again.

I never really felt I like I was fighting deadlines on my books. Not like I did when I was first drawing for DC Comics. There I felt I was really fighting deadlines.

CBA: How many hours a day did you spend at the drawing board?

Eight hours? Ten hours? Or were you like Jack Kirby who preferred working through the night?

Paul: I really liked working at night because it was more quiet until the advent of television, which could be disturbing. I worked late particularly when I lived back East before I came to California. I would work well into the morning, sometimes, then try and get some sleep, then get right back and go after it again. I never really worked that way after we moved to California in 1967.

CBA: Did you ever meet and talk with Russ Manning on his approach to Tarzan and Magnus, Robot Fighter?

Paul: I never met Russ Manning. It’s amazing about this business. It was true in New York that we artists might be going in and out of the same syndicate and comic book company offices and not know who a lot of these people were. I knew very few other professionals. I knew Shelly Moldoff and Morris Weiss. We had a little luncheon club with George Wolf, the gag cartoonist. I got to know several comic book cartoonists that way.

In fact, in the case of Mort Weisinger, I didn’t really know who he was. I had seen him around the DC Comics office. The thing of it is we both lived in New Jersey. I lived in North Bergen right along the Hudson River and we both rode the Boulevard East bus. He lived farther up the line. One day, he saw me on the bus and he came over and sat by me and introduced himself. That’s how we met, on the bus. We talked about everything we had in common and we had a lot in common.

Prior to the creation of Aquaman, I did not discuss it October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

with Mort. I just spoke of it with the editor, Whitney Ellsworth. He was the one who wanted to develop a character. So I developed a character, the visual character, then he assigned Mort to write the story.

After I turned in the first “Sandman and Sandy,” Mort was really excited. He said, “It looks like we have another ‘Batman’ here”.

It kind of looked that way. Then, after two issues, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon took it over. I don’t know how long they did it. I understand they did it for quite a while.

When I got the job of doing the daily version of Vic Jordan for the New York daily PM syndicate, there was a clause in my contract.

I don’t know how my lawyer and I, both, missed it. But I had a exclusive contract with PM which meant I would have to do away with my comic book work. Mort Weisinger never forgave me for leaving DC Comics and going to PM to do the newspaper strip. Even after the war, I did some work for DC, but my relationship with Mort was never the same. He couldn’t accept the idea that I had left.

CBA: Did you, at any time, produce any of the painted covers for your Dell/Gold Key work?

Paul: No. That was all done by an artist in New York. I never met him. I don’t know who he was.

CBA: It seems you were never out of work until you choose to retire. It seems you always had something to do.

Paul: Yes, I always did.

CBA: Did you do any of the movie adaptations that Dell and Gold Key liked to turn out? Books like The Count of Monte Cristo, Prince Valiant, The Vikings, that sort of thing?

Paul: No, I didn’t. Some of the plots for the other books may have started there.

CBA: Looking over these beautiful bound collections of your Gold Key (Dell and other publishers) books, it’s amazing you were able to have a personal life

Above: Brick Bradford was created

by William Ritt and Clarence Gray in 1933, but written and drawn by Paul Norris for 35 years, while the artist also freelanced for Western. ©2002 King Features Syndicate.

Below: Magnus takes on his robomentor, 1-A, in the Paul Norrispenciled Magnus, Robot Fighter #28. Inks by Mike Royer. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

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Above: Three pages from Paul Norris’s sketchbooks. Courtesy of and ©2002 Paul Norris.

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considering the fact you were producing so much syndicate work all by yourself with only your wife to assist you!

Paul: Well, I worked very fast for some reason. I think it was the way I started out in comic books. You had to work fast and turn out as many pages as you could a week so you could make a good living.

That’s how you made money.

CBA: You were a freelancer for all those years. You were never under contract with Dell, Gold Key or any of the other publishers you worked for?

Paul: No, with none of them. Dell, Gold Key, DC. Never under contract.

CBA: Did you use the standard format of thumbnails and then layouts? Did you use a light box?

Paul: No, I just drew things.

CBA: You just did your penciling right on the board? You inked and, then, just erased your pencil lines?

Paul: Right.

CBA: But you didn’t do the lettering.

Paul: No, not on the books. I lettered my own strips, but when I got real busy, there was Frank Chilleno. Frank Chilleno worked at the syndicate and was the traffic manager there. He was the one who got all the strips through the syndicate. He would letter Brick Bradford for me every now and then.

CBA: You said you used a #3 Windsor-Newton brush. Was that your standard inking tool?

Paul: Yes, absolutely. That’s what Albert Dorne used for all those great illustrations he did. Milt [Caniff] also used a #3. With a #3, you could get the finest hairline, finer than you can with any small brush like a 0 or 00. That was a mistake a lot of people made that tried to use those fine brushes.

CBA: Many people claim to use #2 Winsor-Newton brushes.

Paul: Yeah, I’ve heard that. If you cut a #3, you get an interesting effect with it. I’m sure Milt, with a #3, after he made his outlines and he came in with the brush, it cut particularly well on clothing, boy, it was great. To get those heavy cuts like he had, like I would get. Of course, I used a #3 for line work. Milt used a pen for line work. I often wondered how he did it since he was left handed because a pen line doesn’t dry as fast as a brush line.

CBA: Being left-handed, an artist is in his own way.

Paul: Yeah, you’d think that. Milt would work, in part, on six dailies strips at the same time so that they would all dry at the same time.

That’s how he did it.

CBA: What was your page rate at Gold Key? Paul: I think it was $35 a page. You were paid separately for each task: penciling, inking, lettering. The amazing thing was on the Tarzan book, I was paid royalties! That was the only comic book I got paid royalties on.

In 1941, $8 was the standard page rate for art. If you wrote it, you got $2 for the script page. For Prize Comics, I got $10 a page because I wrote and drew the thing. For drawing “Aquaman,” I got $13 a page. That was for drawing and lettering it and that was big compared to what everybody else was getting.

CBA: Of course, this was toward the end of the Great Depression.

Bread was, like, 5¢. A movie might cost you 10¢.

Paul: Yeah, of course, things were a little higher in New York.

CBA: When you took over Brick Bradford, what was the circulation of the strip?

Paul: It was syndicated in two [formats]. I think the circulation was about 300 papers in 1952.

CBA: And what was the circulation in 1987 when you chose to retire along with the strip?

Paul: They said it was about 21 newspapers. That never included the foreign sales. You never knew what the foreign sales were. No one did.

CBA: Did you read comics to keep up with what was happening in the field? Did you follow the careers of your fellow artists like Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, or Russ Manning? Did you look at everyone else’s work while you were working in the field?

Paul: No, I was so busy, I just paid attention to what I was doing. I didn’t have the time. Of course, I always watched what Milton Caniff did. I feel flattered when people say I was a protége of his. They couldn’t say nicer words to me.

Milt was very helpful to me in many ways. I tried not to make a pest of myself. I would only contact him infrequently. I tried not to make him feel responsible for me in anyway. Although, he was responsible for me getting to New York. He was responsible for me getting into the business. He was certainly responsible for me getting the job of drawing Vic Jordan for PM. CBA: You did Woodsy Owl among other books for Hanna-Barbera at Gold Key and you seemed to have a real flair for drawing in a cartoony style. Had you ever thought of doing a humorous strip?

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

Paul: Oh, yes, I had thought about it. That’s the way I thought I would make it. As a humorous cartoonist. I don’t know how I got into the realistic stuff. It was simply because I started in comic books, I think that’s the reason. I did some little humor pages for DC before the war that were dropped into the magazines as filler pages..

CBA: It’s hard to believe that the artist of Dynomutt and Woodsy Owl is the same artist who did Magnus and Tarzan.

Paul: I tried to do the best I could.

CBA: Did you ever have to use a ghost for backgrounds or for when you could not produce the work?

Paul: Never on the comic books. I never missed a deadline.

I lost two Brick Bradfords in the mail when we moved to California, but I was able to make them up because I was so far ahead. When I first took over Brick Bradford, I had acute appendicitis. It started out of nowhere. It was so bad that my doctor drove me to the hospital. Before I left, I called the syndicate and told them what was happening and they had Lou Schwartz ghost a week of dailies. Lou had done some Sunday pages of Brick Bradford in the past when Clarence Gray was the artist. He did a good job. I understand he’s coming to the International Comic Con: San Diego this year. I haven’t seen him in a long time.

CBA: With all these long sessions at the drawing board, a person would have to be in pretty good health and have a lot of endurance for the man hours you put in. I was just wondering if you subscribed to any particular diet, any foods that you ate or vitamins that you took or anything like that that helped you get a little more energy?

Paul: That’s a tough question. My wife was a dietician. That was one of her great abilities. She was a dietician by her own training and she watched my diet very well. I have to thank her if a diet had anything to do with it. Oh, I got a backache now and then.

CBA: How about exercise? Did you run or play golf?

Paul: As a matter of fact, I used to run. That’s one I did do. I used to run around this whole area out here at least three times a week.

CBA: Even today, you produce artwork for your own amusement.

There’s at least one sketch book that we’ve seen around here. It would be nice to show fans that you are still quite the artist and haven’t lost your touch.

Paul: I still draw a little. Since my wife, Ann, passed away, I’ve done very little. I just sit around doing some sketching on some paper at night. I’d like to really get back to drawing something. I find it difficult to draw something if don’t have a purpose for drawing. If I’m following a script (using my own script), then I have something to follow. Then I have a reason for drawing.

That’s the thing that bothered me about painting. I could think up all these stories, but just to do a drawing. It was difficult for me to come up with an idea for a painting. I don’t want to paint a picture of a still life or something. So I haven’t painted.

CBA: Have the European fans acknowledged your Tarzan work?

Have you been invited to any of their conventions?

Paul: I never signed the Dell or Gold Key books, so nobody knew who it was. I haven’t been invited to any overseas conventions, I have gotten phone calls. There’s this one young man from the Netherlands who wanted to know if Mattel had ever made any Tarzan dolls. My son, Reed, who worked for Mattel for many years, tells me he doesn’t know of any that were made.

CBA: There have been reprints of your Jungle Jim strips currently being sold. I believe they are available through Ken Pierce Books.

October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

Paul: Yes, those are coming from Italy. I know of them.

CBA: Are you receiving any royalties from those reprint books?

Paul: No. CBA: Do you know what the circulation was for Magnus and was there any drop off after Manning left the book and you took over?

Paul: I don’t really know. After I stopped doing Magnus, I think Gold Key lost the contract with the original owner. The book continued to be published and I have a whole bunch of Magnus books that were published after that by different artists whose art was highly stylized.

As a matter of fact, my son Reed’s boss at Mattel was a big Magnus fan and always had issues lying around. Reed would bring home copies to me. I have a whole bunch of them.

CBA: You worked for Gold Key from 1968 to ’76. Did you choose not to continue to work for them after 1976?

Paul: No, they just went out of business more or less. Strange things were happening. You know Mattel owned Western Publishing for a time then sold it. After Chase Craig retired, there just wasn’t any business anymore. Del Connell took over the editorship for a while.

He had been an assistant to Chase for a while. They just seemed to go out of business.

CBA: I think the super-hero books were taking over the market.

Paul: That’s was the problem, they didn’t have any super-heroes.

They had already lost the rights to the Burroughs characters.

CBA: Have you seen any foreign editions of your work, other than Jungle Jim? Paul: Oh, yes, I have. I used to get fan mail from places like South America and Sweden. I got a series of fan letters from Sweden. Must have been some high school kids. They were probably in the same class, I’m pretty sure. They all asked about the same questions. The amazing thing in Sweden, they changed the name from Brick Bradford to Tom Trick! I could never understand what was wrong with using Brick Bradford. Maybe it meant something dirty or obscene, I don’t know.

CBA: It may have meant something different like when they changed all the Sav-on Drugs to Osco. A friend told me that Osco in Spanish means crazy. Nobody knew that so they changed them all back to Sav-on Drugs. There’s another story that years ago, Esso gasoline used a cute little bee for their trademark character. They ended up changing it because everyone referred to it as the Esso bee!

They now use a gasoline drop as their trademark. What a way to end an interview.

Paul: It’s been fun.

Above: From one of Paul’s sketch books, Aquaman, proud creation of Mort Weisinger and Paul Norris. When Paul co-created the undersea hero, he was unaware of the Sub-Mariner.

Art ©2002 Paul Norris.

Aquaman ©2002 DC Comics.

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CBA Interview

The Phantom Painter Perhaps Western’s finest cover artist—George Wilson—speaks Conducted by Ed Rhoades

Above: Pete Klaus (left) and Ed Rhoades (middle) pose with Gold Key cover painter George Wilson.

Courtesy of Ed Rhoades.

Below: George Wilson’s fine cover art for The Phantom #12.

Courtesy of Ed Rhoades. ©2002 King Features Syndicate.

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George Wilson’s work is ubiquitous, but most of his comic book art was unsigned, so the general public never knew the man behind those beautifully painted illustrations. When I was young, comic covers of pen, brush and ink were the usual, so when I saw the incredible stuff George was doing for Classics Illustrated and Gold Key, it really caught my attention. Initially, my favorite cover was the one he did for The Time Machine. A few years later, he continued to blow everyone away with all that he did for Gold Key. My friend, Pete Klaus, did a little detective work that finally led us to the artist and I got to know him a little through phone conversations and mail correspondence. My eagerness to meet him resulted in arranging a get-together with George, Pete and I for dinner near the artist’s home in Yonkers, New York, on November 16, 1999. Sadly, the visit with this warm and friendly man was to be our only chance ever to meet with this legendary artist. (He died shortly thereafter, on December 7.)

As the editor of Friends of the Phantom, I was particularly interested in the paintings which graced the covers of Western Publishing’s Gold Key and the illustrations for the Avon Phantom novels. His work received more world-wide acclaim and the few pieces of which found their way to eBay commanded some hefty sums, but until I met him, nothing had been published about him.

He mentioned that shortly before our dinner, one researcher recently did ask him about his involvement in the Hardy Boys mysteries for which he created pen-and-ink drawings, but nothing about him ever found its way to print..

Through a mix-up, Pete and I waited at the restaurant where we were going to eat while George watched for us at the lobby of his apartment. We kept calling getting George’s answering machine while the artist remained vigilant in anticipating our arrival.

Fortunately, he drove to the restaurant and we encountered him in the street outside as he walked up carrying a large manila folder with an illustration he created for Pete to use in our publication.

After selecting a suitable table, we finally had our opportunity to become acquainted with the legendary artist. Pete and I had seen his original art on the wall at King Features where we felt like we were in a museum looking at something we had only seen in print.

But now, we were about to see something entirely new, that no other Phantom fans had ever laid eyes upon and the excitement was overwhelming. Unable to contain our eagerness, we opened the envelope and were confronted with a stunning example of why his popularity was so enduring. His naturalistic portrayal of the Ghost Who Walks in a classic pose had that glowing aura that Wilson McCoy often signified with black ink feathering… only this time done in fiery yellows and reds. The figure itself was naturalistic… powerful yet unlike the exaggerated super-hero features of today’s comic illustration. It was a comic strip character brought alive but maintaining the mystery and grace of the original genre. It had all the

strength and charm of the Avon and Gold Key illustrations with the understated elegance of an artist who has mastered the medium.

For a moment for us, time stood still and we were in the 1970s seeing a new Phantom illustration for the first time done with the conventions and technique that thrilled fans everywhere. It was a moment we will never forget.

Our dinner began with him inspecting our pile of Gold Key Phantom comics to determine which ones he had done. Initially, in a phone conversation, he told me that he thought he only did the first few then worked on novels instead, but upon closer examination he recalled doing the cover art for all but three. Some he recalled immediately, but others required him to examine the art for details to jar his memory. Gold Key’s The Phantom #8 which shows the Phantom fighting villains on a tile roof, contains a self portrait of George as a bad guy emerging from a window.

One of the surprises was how much of George’s work I had encountered and enjoyed without realizing who the artist was, like all those Classics Illustrated comics from my childhood and even the covers to those romance novels my wife reads. (George did the Silhouette novel coverlets from 1983-92.) The following is the interview that resulted from out dinner.

Ed Rhoades: Were you interested in art as a young man?

George Wilson: Oh, yeah. I knew what I wanted to be when I was 16. You know most kids don’t know what they want to be when they’re 21 and graduating from college. Even when I was a little kid, I used to get up on a Saturday morning and sit on the couch and draw on the back of the dust jackets the rental library gave out.

Ed: You showed the talent early?

George: Well, I had the desire anyway.

Ed: Did you read comics and pulps?

George: At that time when I was growing up the best ones were the Big Little Books and my favorite was Alex Raymond (who did) Flash Gordon.

Ed: Did you ever work in pen-and-ink?

George: Oh yeah.

Ed: Did you do interiors of books?

George: As a matter of fact… a woman called me from California.

She said her husband is writing a couple of books on the Hardy Boys.

She said “I understand you did some. Can you get me the names of them?” And I said I’ll have to consult my workbook. I’ll get back to you; I’ll mail you the list. And son of a gun… I’d done twenty-two. I was surprised… one after another… I did this one… I did that one.

They were all pen-and-ink on the inside.

Ed: What other mediums have you worked with?

George: Well acrylic or oil or a combination. Sometimes when you’ve got a large area you want it to be smooth… acrylic will leave brush strokes, so you go over it with oils.

Ed: You were in the armed forces… which branch?

George: Engineer… camouflage. We went into Normandy.

Ed: Besides Alex Raymond, which artists influenced you?

George: Oh gosh, there are so many of them… Noel Sickles….

Ed: Did you like fine art, too?

George: Oh, yeah. I was strictly a realist… never went in for avant garde stuff.

Ed: Did you work on other comics besides the Gold Keys for Western?

George: Well when I first started with Western, the comic books were being done for Dell and then after awhile I think Dell wanted to do their own or something like that, so Western Publishing struck out COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

on their own.

Ed: What titles did you work on?

George: Turok, and I did those ones with Boris Karloff.

Ed: Andre LeBlanc did some of the interiors for them. You did the covers?

George: Yeah, I just did the covers. And I did Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

Ed: You did other commercial art besides comics?

George: Oh, yeah. From ’83 to ’92, almost 10 years, I was doing paperback romances for Harlequin. Funny thing… I thought I’d get tired of doing them… it’s just one clinch after another… but would you believe I never did. It paid pretty well.

Ed: Did you work for an agency?

George: No, I freelanced my whole career except for one period of 2 weeks, I worked for a studio and literally had to punch a time clock. We were doing work for the government, kind of catalogs and that work kind of played out.

Ed: Did you use models for your paintings?

George: Oh yeah. For the paperbacks yes… for the Gold Keys, I usually tried to resort to photographs I had already taken for other things… twist an arm around here… use another photograph for the arm back here… get them all mixed up.

Ed: Do you have a big morgue?

George: Well, I have files, loaded with photographs back there now that I was taking mostly for paperbacks.

Ed: You took your own photos?

George: No, we’d go to a photographer at a certain point… I don’t know what the date was. But some illustrator, bless his heart, was able to talk the client into paying for the model and for the photographic shoot and that was a big step. Because before we were very stingy in the shots we’d take, but with them paying for it, we were clicking away like mad.

Ed: Would you describe your materials?

George: As far as watercolor brushes, I only use Winsor-Newton, because they’re the only ones you can depend on to always come to a point. But I use other sable brushes and bristle brushes… .anything that will work. Different brushes give you different effects.

Ed: How would you describe your style or technique?

George: Realistic.

Ed: Did you keep any of the studies?

George: I got rid of that process stuff… that stuff will pile up on you. I live in a three room apartment… my books are driving me out in the hallway.

Ed: Did you read the books to get ideas?

George: It’s so long ago that I forget how I did those things. I must have been given a synopsis. Generally the way it works, I’d make a couple of rough pencil sketches and sent them in and they’d okay one or the other.

Ed: Why did you only sign some of your novels?

George: I probably just forgot. A lot of times I signed it but it was kind of hidden.

Ed: Are you still doing commercial art?

George: I do work for a WWII magazine and one called Wild West put out by Cole’s multimedia. They put out one called Military History, one called Civil War, WWII, and the one called Wild, Wild West.

Ed: Is it subscription only or available at the newsstand.

George: It’s subscription only.

Ed: What are you currently working on?

George: I just finished up a thing for WWII. Scenes of the last battle for Berlin. I handled it pretty roughly… I hope they like it.

Ed: How did you get your ideas for it?

George: They seem to accept a lot of just battle scenes and I wanted to get more than that so I did one of an SS trooper. In the scene I used three men coming up in the background and I thought it was pretty effective. And I did one of the Battle of the Bulge with a couple of Americans moving up through the woods trying to sneak up on the Germans. I tried to hook on something particular to make it more interesting than an ordinary battle scene.

Ed: What are your interests?

George: Shooting… there is a rifle range up near (here). I used to shoot competitions; I belonged to a rifle club. Now that the club October 2002

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broke up, I just go on my own.

I’ve been going there on Sundays maybe once a month. I won’t be going ’til Spring now because the weather’s getting cold. I go up there to enjoy myself not to test myself.

Ed: Only rifles?

George: Yeah, I live in a safe area and it takes so long for the license to come through.

Ed: So you like this area?

George: Yeah, I’ve been here for over 25 years.

Ed: Do you do any painting for yourself or is it all commercial?

George: Mostly commercial.

I’ve done some for myself.

Somehow I need a goal… gotta get the food on the table… gotta get the rent paid. I went up to the cemetery and I drove along the road and one side there are graves on the other side there is a little babbling creek that went along through there. I think it was fall and boy I had the camera with me and I was clicking away like crazy… terrific landscapes. And I did several landscapes there, but for the most part I don’t care to do (landscapes) just a lot of spinach… you have to have something there to bring it to life… human beings, or a cow or something like that to bring it into focus.

Ed: You probably don’t meet a lot of your fans?

George: No, as a matter of fact, I never know whether the stuff is appreciated or not. I did get one… I got a hunting knife…

I got it out in the car. I want to take it to have it sharpened. I had done a cover for a paperback novel and I showed this guy’s knife because I had been sent photographs of that and they wanted it to be used on the cover. So I did and I gave them a pretty good rendering of it and I got a letter back from this guy and this complimentary knife and a scabbard and all.

[George was an enigma, shy and outgoing, reticent and generous, open and articulate but protective of his privacy, talented and modest. He was grateful for having his work appreciated but adamant about not seeking fame for his efforts.

During our conversation, he was approached by friends who knew him from dining at the establishment. When the waitresses saw the comics and novels he was autographing for us, they were surprised by his talent. They would never learn of his fame from his modest unassuming personality. Even though his residence was in the outskirts of a large metropolitan area, one gets a feeling of close community from the people there.

The tone of our dinner was jovial and we were joking and laughing with George when we parted in the parking lot. Despite the fact that George has made no public appearances at comic shows and had no desire to do so, the fans would have certainly enjoyed his warm company. The evening Pete and I had with him certainly was a thrill for two longtime fans and it is our honor and pleasure to share it with the readers of CBA.—E.R.]

Top: “Savage” Steve Holland, a very popular male model back in the 1960s (recognize that mug from all those James Bama Doc Savage cover paintings?), poses for artist George Wilson. Courtesy of Ed Rhoades. Above: The final product. Detail of George Wilson’s The Phantom cover painting. ©2002 King Features Syndicate.

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CBA Profile

The Tale of Tom McKimson The life and career of the animator, comic artist and art director

by Alberto Becattini [What follows is a homage to a great artist whom I did not have the pleasure to meet, although I corresponded with him on several occasions during the ’90s. In fact, the following article incorporates what Tom kindly wrote in answer to my queries, as well as the results of my personal research on his career, both in the animation and the comics field. I do hope you will enjoy reading about this exceptionally versatile artist as much as I enjoyed writing about him.—A.B.] Below: Tom McKimson’s great cover for Bugs Bunny’s Dangerous Venture (Four Color #123, 1946).

Courtesy of Alberto Becattini. ©2002 Warner Brothers.

It’s All in the Family Thomas J. McKimson was born in Denver, Colorado, on March 5, 1907, the first of three brothers (the others being Robert and Charles). His father, Charles, Sr., was a printer, publisher, and editor.

His mother, Mildred, was an accomplished writer, and she helped Charles operate a number of country weekly newspapers in Colorado, Kansas, and California. Most of Tom’s hours were not spent in school, but were involved in learning the technicalities of editorial, typographic and pressroom production. At 12 years of age, he was the “collection man” for one of the newspapers, where he personally presented bills to local merchants for their monthly advertising accounts.

Now for a bit of family history: Tom’s paternal ancestor McKimson, along with 400 of his Fraser kinsmen, came to Canada from Scotland to fight at the battle of Quebec on the heights of Abraham under General Wolfe in 1759. Succeeding relatives lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, and Kansas. Tom’s father, Charles, lived to be 100 years, 9 months of age, still alert and very upset because his driver’s license had not been renewed. Tom’s maternal relative, Sir John of the Knowles, was already settled in a big, three-story stone home in New Hampshire in 1610, before two other ancestors arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. A later Knowles was General George Washington’s personal aide for eight Revolutionary War years.

California—i.e., Animation The McKimson family moved to California, via Texas, in 1926. In Los 76

Angeles, Tom attended the University of California and the Otis Art Institute. In 1928, he and younger brother Robert (who was then 17 years old) were hired by Walt Disney for his growing animation department at 2719 Hyperion Avenue, Hollywood. Tom assisted animator Norman Ferguson on such Silly Symphony shorts as Frolicking Fish and Arctic Antics (both released in 1930), as well as on several early Mickey Mouse cartoons, whereas Bob worked as an assistant to Dick Lundy. During the Summer of 1930 (or, according to other sources, in early ’31), the McKimson brothers were lured away from the Disney Studio by Romer Grey, who started his own animation studio with a loan from his father, noted Western genre writer Zane Grey, and his mother Lina. The Romer Grey studio was located inside a converted garage on Zane Grey’s main estate in Altadena, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. In the Spring of 1931, Romer Grey and the McKimsons created Binko the Cub, a new animation character which bore a curious resemblance to Mickey Mouse. Tom and Bob were the “veterans” in a small staff which also included such young and promising animators as Jack Zander, Pete Burness, Lou Zukor, Cal Dalton, and Bob Stokes. They started working on two Binko shorts, Arabian Nightmare and Hot Toe Mollie, but production did not go any further than the pencil drawing stage because by the Fall of 1931 Grey had gone bankrupt and his studio had folded.

The Romer Grey animators went their separate ways, and the McKimson brothers joined the staff of the new studio run by exDisneyites Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising in Hollywood. From 1930-33, Harman and Ising produced their cartoon shorts for Warner Brothers, whose animation division was headed by Leon Schlesinger and Ray Katz. Their main character was a kid named Bosko, and Tom McKimson animated on Bosko in Dutch and Bosko’s Mechanical Man (both released in 1933), as well as contributing to such Merrie Melodies shorts as It’s Got Me Again, I Love a Parade, and A Great Big Bunch of You (all 1932). To have an idea of how united and precise the McKimson brothers were, we will quote what Bob Clampett (who joined the Harman-Ising staff as an assistant animator in 1931) once said to animation historian Jim Korkis: “They marched right as in perfect step, went to their desks, took off their coats, and sat down exactly at eight o’clock and started to work. This was all very spectacular, like a Busby Berkeley routine.”

In August 1933, Harman and Ising had an argument with Schlesinger and stopped making cartoons for him. Bob McKimson went to work for Leon Schlesinger Productions/Warner Brothers, eventually becoming one of the outstanding animator/director personalities of the era. (After Warner Brothers stopped producing animation, Bob was a director at the De Patie-Freleng Studio until his death in 1977). Instead, Tom stayed with Harman-Ising, though they were having problems in finding a new distributor. During 1933, he animated on two Cubby Bear shorts which had been sub-contracted by the Van Beuren Studio (he also directed one of them, The Gay Gaucho), besides doing pre-production work on an unreleased animation feature based on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. All in all, the Harman-Ising staff was not paid for six months, until, on Valentine’s Day 1934, Harman finally signed a contract with MGM. *As confirmed by McKimson in the biographical notes he sent us.

According to the data in Graham Webb’s The Animated Film Encyclopedia (McFarland & Co., 2000), instead, McKimson would have been on staff at Schlesinger/Warner Bros. as early as 1940, since he is credited with drawing layouts for Farm Frolics (released May 10, 1941), as well as for 12 other shorts released before Tick Tock Tuckered.

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October 2002

Until 1938, when the Harman-Ising outfit gave up the ghost, McKimson animated on the Happy Harmonies series (which included more shorts starring a redesigned version of Bosko), as well as on Merbabies, a 1938 Silly Symphony that Walt Disney had subcontracted to his one-time Kansas City associates.

After Harman-Ising, Tom McKimson worked, this time as a layout artist, for Cartoon Films, an animation outfit whose productions (mainly educational shorts and commercials) were released by Columbia Pictures. Among the shorts to which Tom most likely contributed there were a Color Rhapsody entitled The Carpenters and two films in the This Changing World series (Broken Treaties and How War Came), all of them directed by Paul Fennell and released in 1941.

The Warner Years In 1943, Tom became a part of the Leon Schlesinger/Warner Bros.

Studio staff.* He joined his brother Bob as an animator and layout artist under director Bob Clampett, getting his first screen credit on the Porky Pig/Daffy Duck short Tick Tock Tuckered (released April 8, 1944), followed by the Tweety cartoon Birdy and the Beast (released August 19, 1944). He also showed his great talent as a character designer, drawing the definitive Tweety model sheet (dated February 12, 1944), and later creating the first sketch of Tweety and Sylvester as a pair, showing their relative sizes, for Tweetie Pie (released May 3, 1947). As a layout director, McKimson completely redesigned many model sheets of leading characters that included Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Porky and Petunia Pig, and Beaky Buzzard, as well as more obscure characters like Hook, a nice little sailor who starred in a series of cartoon shorts that the studio produced for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics during World War Two. All in all, McKimson got screen credit for layouts on eight shorts, although of course he worked on many more. About this matter, he would later say that “in the early days of animation, producers were very stingy about giving screen credits. Many talented artists were unknown to the public until years later. This was particularly true in the Schlesinger era when Leon wanted audiences to believe that he, personally, created all his studio’s cartoon films. Eventually, all directors, animators, layout artists, background painters, story writers, sound men, music composers, cameramen, checkers, inkers and painters were recognized with screen credits… which, unhappily, are flashed on the screen so rapidly that only those trained in speed reading can tell who is being credited.”

Anyway, as concerns Warner Brothers cartoons, McKimson’s name last appeared on the title card for the Daffy Duck short Mexican Joyride, directed by Art Davis and released November 29, 1947. Several months before, he had left the Warner Studio for a new adventure—on paper.

Freelance Comic Artist Since 1944, in his spare time at night and weekends, McKimson had been drawing comics. Since 1941, the West Coast office of Western Printing (a.k.a. Whitman) had been producing comic-book versions of the Warner Brothers characters, published in such Dell-labeled series as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies and Four Color Comics. Art director Carl Buettner, himself a former animator and an excellent draftsman, was still drawing “Bugs Bunny” and “Porky Pig” for these titles when McKimson started contributing to them. Soon, Tom was illustrating almost all of the “Bugs Bunny” 10- and 12-pagers that opened up each and every issue of the monthly Looney Tunes.

Alongside the most famous animated rabbit, these stories featured all of the other Warner characters, and McKimson had no difficulty in transferring onto the comic page what he was drawing at the Warner Studio. He penciled, inked and lettered all of his comics pages, in a delightfully accurate graphic style which exalted the expressiveness of Bugs and friends and often created a three-dimensional effect by superimposing the characters upon almost-realistic backgrounds.

Besides those monthly stories, Tom also embellished several Four Color one-shots, drawing such longer, adventurous yarns as Porky Pig’s Adventure in Gopher Gulch (#112, July 1946), Bugs Bunny’s Dangerous Venture (#122, Oct. 1946) and Bugs Bunny Finds the Frozen Kingdom (#164, Sept. 1947), as well as occasional premiums in the Cheerios and March of Comics series.

To show that he was not only good at drawing the Warner October 2002

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characters, in 1946-47 McKimson did a few Disney comic book stories too. He drew “The Li’l Bad Wolf” in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #74 (Nov. 1946), two of the stories in the first Uncle Remus and His Tales of Brer Rabbit one-shot (Four Color #129, Dec. 1946), a two-page comic preview of the 1948 Goofy animated short, The Big Wash (WDC&S #77, Feb. 1947), “Donald Duck in Radio Trouble” (Four Color #147, May 1947), three Mickey Mouse gag pages in Four Color #170 (Nov. 1947), as well as three titles in the Cheerios Premiums series: Pluto Joins the FBI, Bucky Bug and the Cannibal King, and Goofy Lost in the Desert (all published in 1947).

In early 1947, McKimson took what he called “an indefinite leave of absence” from the Warner Studio, and began working full time for Western in their Beverly Hills offices. Besides continuing to draw comic book stories on staff, he was entrusted with the art chores on the NEA-syndicated Bugs Bunny Sunday page, taking over from Carl Buettner. Once again, Tom did a wonderful job of depicting the grey rabbit and the other Warner characters.

The “Driver” Later in 1947, Carl Buettner left his post of director of art at Western, and McKimson succeeded him. For the next 25 years, he produced for domestic and international distribution hundreds of book and magazine titles featuring Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, MGM, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera animated characters, as well as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tarzan, and Mattel characters. Almost daily contacts with these studios kept productions up to the minute on new developments. Director Tom selectively signed up nearly 100 special contract artists in the Hollywood area to apply their talents to Western Publishing projects. Each had a particular specialty that covered pencil drawings, pen-and-ink, tempera, casein, acrylics and watercolor illustrations for a wide variety of formats. These included comic magazines, games, novels, puzzles, cut-out dolls and coloring books—all produced under Tom’s sharp eyes.

In his own words, Tom was “a driver, continually demanding top creative art. He never settled for second best. An iron fist in a velvet glove, but over all the years of dealing with a variety of talents, was never one to pound his desk or raise his voice to get results—a far cry from the way too many Hollywood executives brow-beat co-workers.”

Among the talented artists McKimson worked with there were Fred Abranz, Carl Barks, Jack Bradbury, John Carey, Ken Champin, Al Hubbard and Frank McSavage on funny animals; Nick Firfires on Western (genre) strips; Jesse Marsh on Tarzan; Al Andersen, Al Dempster, Millie Jancar, Norm McGary, Don MacLaughlin and Al White on children’s books; Maxine McCaffrey, Sue Mode and Bill Edwards on coloring books and paper dolls.

For over a year, besides art directing, McKimson continued to draw Bugs Bunny comic books (his last story appeared in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies #79, May 1948) and Sunday pages. Incidentally, it was during his tenure that the page temporarily turned from gag-a-week to continuity. Thus, during most of 1948 and ’49, Bugs went to the South Pole with Porky and to the Wild West with Elmer; had troubles with a mechanical man called Ronnie Robot; drove a “hot-rod” car;

Below: Tom McKimson in a 1990 photo. Courtesy of Alberto Becattini.

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Below: 1957 picture of Western Publishing’s California office staffers. Standing, from left to right: Ralph Heimdahl (Bugs Bunny syndicated strip artist), Chase Craig (former comic book writer/artist, now a comic book editor), Francis J. Hoffman (sales staff), A.L. Zerbe (sales staff), John N. Carey (Woody Woodpecker comic book artist), Guy Erne (sales staff), Carl Barks (master Disney Duck writer/artist), Robert S. Callender (head of Western’s Pacific Coast Division).

Seated, left to right: Michael H. Arens (Roy Rogers syndicated strip artist), Carl Buettner (former comic book writer/artist/art director, now a children’s book editor), J. Alfred Riley (sales staff), Jane Werner Watson (children’s book writer), Alice N. Cobb (comic book editor), Albert L. Stoffel (Callender’s assistant, as well as comics writer and editor), Thomas J. McKimson (art director). Courtesy of Alberto Becattini.

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and took part in a musical contest. In 1948, McKimson helped writer Jack Taylor and artist Ralph Heimdahl develop the new Bugs Bunny daily strip (The following year, Heimdahl took over the Sunday page as well, continuing to draw both until his retirement in 1979).

Of all the work McKimson did for Western, he only got credit for the children’s books he illustrated. His name first appeared on the first page of Bugs Bunny’s Treasure Hunt, which was published in 1949 as part of the Golden Story Book series. That year McKimson penciled his first Little Golden Book (Bugs Bunny, #72, 1949), with great color art added by Disney background artist Al Dempster. Other titles would follow in the same series during the 1950s, namely Bugs Bunny and the Indians (#120, 1951, with Dick Kelsey) and Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny—Just Like Magic! (#146, 1958, with Bob Totten).

Besides that, from 1949 until ’61, the Roy Rogers syndicated strip (produced by Western for King Features Syndicate) was credited to “Al McKimson.” This was, in fact, a house name made up by merging the names of story editor Al Stoffel and… art director Tom McKimson! In the same way, another Western-produced strip, Gene Autry, was credited to “Bert Laws,” an acronym for editor Albert Law Stoffel.

It must be added that, from 1954 until the early ’60s, another McKimson worked on the Western editorial staff. This was Tom’s younger brother Charles (Chuck), who had been a Warner Brothers animator from the late 1930s until 1954, mostly under his directorbrother Bob. After leaving Western, Chuck became director/producer of Hollywood’s Pacific Title commercial animation division. He passed away in 1999 at the age of 85.

Back to the Drawing Board Although McKimson retired as director of art for Western Publishing in 1972, he couldn’t remain idle long. Within weeks he was at his studio drawing board, producing more art for Little Golden Books, coloring books, puzzles, games, Big Little Books, and comic magazines. As concerns the latter, McKimson penciled most of the newly-produced stories appearing in the Bugs Bunny comic title from 1972 until its last issue (#245) in 1983. (The last job he did, finished on Jan. 11, 1983, appears to have been a Bugs Bunny Save Energy promotional booklet for the Southern California Edison Company).

His ability to “move” the Warner characters was unchanged, but since he only penciled these stories, inkers not always did justice to his graphic style, making it too flat. As mentioned before, during the ’70s, McKimson also contributed to several children’s books in the

Golden Press and Whitman lines, among which there was a 1976 Little Golden Book entitled Bugs Bunny, Party Pest, with color art provided by veteran painter Al Andersen. Since McKimson was now freelancing for Western, he occasionally did work for other clients as well. These included the Disney Studio, which entrusted him with drawing (this time in pencil-and-ink) Santa’s Crucial Christmas, a Christmas story which ran daily in US newspapers from December 224, 1974. Which, after almost thirty years, offered Tom another chance to draw the Disney characters. A whole lot of them, indeed, as the strip featured Dumbo and Timothy Mouse along with Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, Robin Hood and Little John, The Three Little Pigs and The Big Bad Wolf, Gus and Jaq with the other Cinderella mice, and Merlin the Magician.

Retirement?

Shortly before Western stopped publishing comic books in 1984, McKimson retired. From comics, that is, as he continued to devote his editorial and artistic talents to designing special publicity projects for the Grand Lodge of Freemasonry in California and Hawaii (which he had been doing for several years). In addition, he had been editing the organization’s official magazine for 16 years. From 1984 onwards, he was president and later director of the internationally respected Midnight Mission in downtown Los Angeles, a multi-million dollar enterprise which has been feeding and sheltering the homeless since the late 1920s.

In 1990, writing in third person about himself and his career, he stated that “to the delights of his Scottish and Pilgrim ancestors, Tom never wastes time, cannot abide procrastination, moves in a hurry. He walks fast and is always ready to hit his golf ball without delay… rides hard against polo opponents… reads a mile-a-minute and challenges deadlines with enthusiasm. He skillfully drives the dangerous California freeways with a sure hand. He is a leader who neither drinks, smokes or swears… and cheerfully accepts the ‘designated driver’ role with friends and co-workers. He knows exactly what he wants at all times, pushes determinedly for results, and is a skilled craftsman in many art areas. Tom has an inventive mind that thrives on creative projects.”

Ever dynamic and clear-headed, Tom McKimson spent his last years in Pacific Palisades, California, together with his wife Ernestine Lackey, married in 1936, who had borne him three children. Tom passed away on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1998.

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October 2002

CBA Interview

The Trek of Nevio Zeccarra Artist of the starship Enterprise is interviewed by Andrea Giberti Conducted by Andrea Giberti This brief interview with Italian artist (and sometime Gold Key contributor) Nevio Zeccara was conducted by telephone over the past Summer. The transcript has been translated by Andrea and edited by Ye Ed. Andrea Giberti: Where are you from?

Nevio Zeccara: I was born in 1924 in Rovigo, Italy, a tiny city near Venice. In 1939, my parents relocated to Genua, where I remained until 1955. During World War Two, because I was too young to serve in the Italian Army, I worked as a portrait artist in the streets, drawing soldiers and other people’s portraits for a little money.

In Genua, I attended the Artist High School and the Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1947, during my military duty in Turin, I began to work in comics. I don’t remember the names of the characters I worked on, but I do recall that it was a job for an editorial house in Milan.

Andrea: What comic book characters did you like to draw?

Nevio: Actually, none of them. The fact is that I didn’t love comics; drawing was only a job. I was interested only in supporting myself financially, but to be honest, the pay was never very much. But I took every job they gave to me.

Andrea: Did you read comics as a youngster?

Nevio: Yes. Like every other boy my age, before the war I read L’Avventuroso, which featured Flash Gordon, Phantom, Mandrake…

Andrea: You drew the first two issues of the Gold Key comic book, Star Trek. How did you get the job?

Nevio: A friend of mine (now deceased) spent many years in the U.S. and was a very good friend of the editor-in-chief at Gold Key. At the time, this editor was in search of an artist for sciencefiction stories, so I sent him samples of my work. He gave me Star Trek to do, as well as scripts for other science-fiction and fantasy stories.

To draw the Star Trek assignment, Gold Key sent me photos of the principal actors of the TV series, the starship, etc., but I made up all other visual aspects of the stories from my imagination.

Andrea: Did Gold Key pay well?

Nevio: I don’t really recall, but I do remember that the pay wasn’t enough considering the amount of work I had to do! The deadlines were very tight, so I had to be fast—but still accurate—and I also had to ship the job back via Air Mail to the U.S., which was very expensive!

I never received copies of the published comics I drew for the U.S. market, but I remember one day finding a copy of Star Trek at a October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

newsstand in Rome which carried American magazines.

In the 1970s, there was a magazine in Rome called Edizione Fratelli Spada, which they reprinted my stories for the Italian comics market…

Andrea: Did you get paid something for the reprints?

Nevio: Absolutely not! I went to them asking if they would pay me something but they kicked me out of the editorial office!

Andrea: Are you well known for your work in comics?

Nevio: To be honest, I’m not very well known in the Italian comics scene, though I did work mainly on two great comics magazine— Il Vittorioso and Il Giornalino—which are published by the Roman Catholic Church. I lived near their offices and they signed me to an exclusive contract and gave me a stable amount of work.

But they never, ever publicized my name or gave me credit on my published work. So much of my comic book work was done for the Church.

But today, I get some recognition, as four or five people like yourself have sought me out to tell me how much they liked my artwork.

In 1997 and ’99, I received two plaques of honor at comic conventions, and the Italian Communist newspaper L’Unita had an article about me which said some very nice things.

The publisher of Tex [a popular Italian comic series], Sergio Bonelli Editore, wanted me to work for them but because of my exclusive contract with the Church, I couldn’t. But I have done work for the British comics publisher, Fleetway. They were war stories…

I still have a large amount of original art, but no one wants to buy any!

Andrea: Is there anything you would like to say to the readers of Comic Book Artist?

Nevio: To all my American friends, I wish them happiness and all my best. I am just so thankful that somebody remembers my work.

Above: Rod Serling introduces Nevio Zeccara’s art in The Twilight Zone #17 (1966). ©2002 Cayuga Productions, Inc.

Inset left: Unfortunately, we couldn’t locate a copy of Star Trek #1 at press time, which contains Nevio Zeccara’s artwork, but we hope this cover image will suffice. ©2002 Paramount Pictures.

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CBA Interview

Western Goes West Writer/historian Mark Evanier on the background of Gold Key Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcription by the LongBox.com Staff Since beginning his involvement as a frequent letter hack, editor of the well-remembered Marvelmania magazine, assistant to Jack Kirby during the King’s salad days, and becoming a renowned comic book writer in his own right, Mark Evanier has been a significant presence in the American funny book industry, though the scribe has rarely worked full-time in the business proper. Perhaps most recognized for his years as a columnist (P.O.V.) for The Comics Buyer’s Guide, Mark has also spent considerable time in Hollywood as joke writer, story editor, and script writer for innumerable TV shows. He was interviewed in July and the author of the recent TwoMorrows release, Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life, copy edited the transcript.

Below: The man himself.

Portrait of Mark Evanier, courtesy of the writer.

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Comic Book Artist: You’re a native of Los Angeles and were born in 1953?

Mark Evanier: ’52.

CBA: Were you exposed to Dell Comics at a young age?

Mark: I was exposed to Dell Comics right out of the womb. I think the doctor slapped me and I dropped a copy of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. [laughter] I was reading them all my life and, for years, I used to live not far from where Western Publishing had its offices (which at that time were on Santa Monica Boulevard just inside the Beverly Hills city limits, about a block from where the Friars Club still is). We used to drive by there at times and I’d look at that building longingly and think, “That’s where the comic books come from.” I actually met a few people who worked for Western and I would pump them for details about this magical place from whence Bugs Bunny comics emanated. In my teen years, I gave up

funny animals for a while but I still bought a lot of their comics—in particular Magnus, Robot Fighter and Tarzan. Their office moved from the Santa Monica Boulevard location sometime in the ’60s and I just kind of forgot about them being local. Then, one day when I was about 18, someone suggested that I should write some stories for Gold Key comics and I went, “Oh, that’s right. They’re local.” I don’t know why that hadn’t occurred to me sooner.

CBA: Generally as a reader in the ’60s, how did you view the coming of Gold Key? Mark: I can remember the actual newsstand where I standing at when I discovered that at least some of the Dells had turned into Gold Keys. It was the first time I was conscious that a comic book could change companies. It was 1962 and I remember standing at the rack in Vons’ Market on Pico Boulevard and there, in my hand, was a Mighty Mouse with the wrong symbol in the corner. There were still Dells. There were Disneys that were Dell and there were Disneys that were Gold Key and somehow, my world had ruptured. I remember the early Gold Key looked very classy. They were better printed and had painted and very stylish covers. Even the funny animal ones seemed somehow more mature in their design because they would reprint the front cover without the type and logo on the back. I don’t recall ever seeing that before on a comic book CBA: Did you look at Dell as it was declining?

Mark: I just didn’t understand. In 1962, I did not understand what had happened to Dell and why some of it seemed to have turned into Gold Key, but then there were still comics, different comics, that said Dell in the corner. I didn’t grasp it and I had to go work for the company many years later to find out what had happened. Actually, I knew Mike Royer in 1969 and he had been working for Gold Key, and he told me a little bit about the difference and what had happened with the books.

But it wasn’t until I went to work for Western in 1971 that I one day—feeling like the biggest greenhorn on the planet—asked my editor if he could explain to me the relationship between Dell and Gold Key. I wish I’d had a tape recorder running that day because he told me an hour’s worth of stories about Western fighting with Dell and the “divorce,” as they called it, and how it rocked both companies. The thing I remember—and I think is still the funniest concept that I’ve heard in the comic book business—is the position that Dell was in at one point. One day, they had the number one selling comic book line in the world, staffed (albeit, indirectly) with the greatest artists around. They had all the star characters with Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, and Huckleberry Hound, and the next day they had nothing. They had no writers, no artists, no titles, no licenses, and they had to start to build a comic book company from scratch.

CBA: Who did they hire as an editor as the guy to get the adventure stuff going?

Mark: L.B. Cole, I believe. And he, in turn, hired whoever they could get who was willing to work cheap. Dell did their books on the cheap, which apparently accounted for some of the friction between the two outfits. One of the things I liked about Western Publishing was the people there seemed to have certain pride in being publishers. They thought of themselves as being book publishers more than magazine publishers. And they also thought of themselves as being printers. A story told to me by a couple of people was that in the ’60s, World Color Press came to Western and said, in effect, “We can print your comics cheaper than you can.” This was because World Color had presses more specifically designed for the printing of comic COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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books in mass quantities. But Western declined, feeling that they were printers and it was below their dignity to farm out printing, and also because they didn’t like World Color’s printing and they wanted to be in control of that. Finally by the late ’60s, when Gold Key was struggling to remain in business, they switched over to World Color, finally acknowledging that they couldn’t make money printing their own comic books. People in the office spoke of that as the beginning of the end for Gold Key Comics.

CBA: I always wondered why Gold Keys suddenly changed their size, suddenly conforming to the standard DC/Marvel size.

Mark: Yes, that was the reason. They realized that to keep the company alive they were going to have to stop printing their own comics.

CBA: The early printing did look superior. I read in a Comics Journal interview where you said you were working for some time on a history of Western Publishing.

Mark: I kept recording different people and interviewing them. So it’s on that list of things that I have to get around to doing someday, somewhere between finishing the Kirby biography and showering. [laughter] Unfortunately there are still a lot of holes in my knowledge.

CBA: Can you give us a nutshell of what you learned in general about the “divorce”?

Mark: What happened is that prior to the break-up, Western Printing and Lithography Co. printed the books and held the licenses, doing everything except finance and distribution. Twice a year, Chase Craig, the editor-in-chief at the West Coast office, and Matt Murphy, his opposite number at the East Coast office, would go to Dell and lay out presentations of what they would like to do for the coming year: Eight more issues of this, or a new comic based on a property that they’d just gotten the rights to. Someone at Dell, most often the president, Helen Meyer, would listen to the presentation and agree to do eight more issues of Tom and Jerry, another year’s worth of Looney Tunes, and to try six issues of the new Huckleberry Hound thing just brought in, or whatever. They would then plan out the next year to 18 months worth of what Western would produce.

That was an amazing lead time there and they needed it obviously because of movie tie-ins, new television seasons, and new properties deals made throughout the year, but essentially Western was in the business of selling comic books to Dell for Dell to sell to newsstands. At the same time, Western was in the business of producing comics for other clients like March of Comics, Donald Duck Teaches Kite Safety, and other forms of promotional and educational comics that did not compete with Dell’s exclusivity on the newsstand.

Chase would come back and say, “We have 12 more issues of Daffy Duck and eight more issues of Yogi Bear” and the crew here would start producing the material. As the deal was configured, Western was not assuming the financial risk. Western was being paid for editing the comics, producing the content and printing them. The financial risk was incurred by Dell. Oddly enough, this was not the only venue in which Dell and Western had this kind of deal. Western had actually over the years produced a lot of Dell’s paperback books that way. There was a time period when Western Publishing was buying the rights to novels and getting Dell to publish them and Western would produce the content. Western also was involved in producing jigsaw puzzles, coloring books, games, and other merchandise.

CBA: They did the Golden Book series, right?

Mark: Yes. And one of the most lucrative divisions of the company for years was one that produced and printed stockholders reports.

They were also nuts about innovating new press techniques. If someone came in and wanted to have books with fur on them, it became a challenge to come up with a way to do it. They did a staggering number of children’s books wherein they were the first to print on some unusual material or to incorporate a specific add-on, like scratch-and-sniff books or binding a little music box into a book.

There was a certain company pride in being able to do things like this, and usually to do them first. What was interesting is that the company thought of themselves as a book publisher that put out some comic books as opposed to DC or Marvel who always, or at least until recently, thought of themselves as magazine publishers who occasionally put out a hardcover book. It was a very different attitude. At no point was newsstand comic books ever a major component of Western Publishing’s income, even during the days October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

Right: Mark Evanier honed his writing chops scripting such fare as Super Goof. This is from the first issue. ©2002 Disney.

when they had comic books selling three million copies an issue. Comics were just one department and there was probably more revenue generated by the children’s books and the activity books, board games, magic slates where you would draw and then lift up the film and the drawing would disappear. You remember those things. That’s what Vince Colletta used to ink on. [laughter] CBA: Obviously, Western was a conservative company. It could have been more aggressive in the marketplace than it was. Do you think that because comics were more of a side thing, that that was one of the reason for its conservatism?

Mark: I think that they were a very conservative company in that when they were producing comics for years for Dell, there was no financial risk in the undertaking. The company was guaranteed a profit on every comic book that they packaged, a modest one, but a profit nonetheless. They were not investing. When they broke off with Dell, their comics were notching high sales figures and just on that momentum, they were guaranteed a profit… so there was no risk in publishing comics for a few years. As they got into the ’60s, they finally reach the stage where it was possible to publish a comic book and lose money. Revenue had declined and the industry itself had shrunk, and they were having huge distribution problems. Because comic books was a peripheral matter for them, Western did not have a distributor arrangement like DC Comics did with Independent News (essentially the same company as DC) or Marvel came to have with Curtis Circulation (essentially the same company as Marvel). At that point, Gold Key was basically an outsider on the newsstand with no strong distribution behind themselves. At the same time, comic books sales were declining overall. Both DC and Marvel were using their

Below: After severing ties with Western Publishing, Dell’s line-up quickly lost its way, reducing the line-up to such as a super-heroic Frankenstein. ©2002 Dell.

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Below: Despite generally being overlooked by contemporary comics historians, the Gold Key line-up was well-regarded in its day, as evidenced by the cover appearance of a certain robot fighter on this, the 46th issue of The Comic Reader (Feb. 1966).

Courtesy of Mike Friedrich. ©2002 the respective copyright holders.

comic book lines as loss leaders for merchandising, as well as for TV and movie deals. It was doubtful that DC and Marvel could have subsisted as long as they did without the funds that came in from the Batman TV show and the Marvel pajamas whereas Western was committed to publishing comic books for a whole bunch of characters they didn’t own. They didn’t get a share of the Bugs Bunny toys or the Mickey Mouse board games, except for the ones they licensed to produce themselves. On top of all that, comics were never Western Publishing’s entire business. It was a division which could be lopped off without ending the company. If Marvel got out of publishing comic books, there would not have been much left, but Western could stop putting out comic books and the revenue from the other divisions would still roll on.

They began to find other ways to market comic books. In the

early ’70s, Western did a whole series of experiments with digest comics and with comics that were distributed in plastic bags to toy stores. The company still had a great deal of clout in that venue based on their activity books and coloring books. Goods distributed to that marketplace had an odd shelf life because there, the comics would just sit until they were sold. For instance, a big department store chain might order a hundred thousand units of Disney comics, packaged three to a plastic bag, and then not order any more for months, until they’d sold the previous order. That kind of thing helped Western for a while but it had a limited value and in some ways, all they were doing on those racks was competing with their own coloring books. At one point, near the end of the time that I was working for them, Western made a conscious decision to pull their comics off the newsstands in several states. They looked at sales figures and said, “We can’t make a profit selling comic books in the 82

state of New York. We lose money, so why are we distributing comics there?” Actually, at the time, one of the Western execs told me that every company—DC, Marvel, Archie, everybody—was then losing money by distributing in New York but the other companies felt it was worth it to promote their characters for merchandising reasons.

There were several other states and districts they gave up on because there they were losing money.

CBA: Getting back to what my original question was, how do you see the divorce? Does the chain of events start with the collapse of American News in 1957?

Mark: I’m not sure. As it was explained to me, the root of the divorce was, as it always is in business, I guess, money. There was that Western felt they should be making more off the comics than they were and Dell felt that they were taking the risk of publishing and they should be making more. It was just two companies fighting over how the pie was to be divided up. As it happened in this period, the risk in publishing comics was microscopic and the proceeds were enormous.

CBA: Dell jumped from 10¢ to 15¢ in 1961. Wasn’t that a significant factor?

Mark: That was an attempt to try to bring in a few more dollars and Dell got cocky, trying to generate more revenue to keep the Dell/Western alliance. I really don’t know much about that era, but the last few years that they were together the companies had a lot of fights having to do with what should be published and how it should be published and how the dough should be divided. Quite a bit of what you saw in the Gold Key books over the first few years, the things that differed from the Dell era, were the people at Western getting the chance to do the things they always wanted to do. All the titles they felt they should have published but Dell said no to, changing cover formats to the way they felt should be done, and so on.

CBA: Did Dell let Western go?

Mark: I think what it was, was that they never came to terms on a new contract. They were negotiating a new deal and Dell offered X and Western said, “We don’t need this. We can publish ourselves.”

At that point, there was probably little financial risk in doing it.

CBA: With Dell putting a significant 50% increase on the books from 10¢ to 15¢, didn’t circulation just plummet and Western felt, “We can’t go along with this. This is suicide.”

Mark: As I recall being told, there was test marketing done prior to the jump to 15¢. Dell had done a survey wherein books had been distributed with two prices, and the results of that test led them to believe that the newsstand would accept 15¢ comics. It was probably one of those cases of a very flawed test yielding misleading results.

Western believed that if you got rid of the ads and put out a little classier product, that somehow people would pay that extra 3¢.

Really, if you look at the history of comics before the direct market, there was never a case of kids going to the newsstand and buying the higher-priced comics. It never happened, regardless of contents. Kids went to the newsstand and saw there was a comic book for 12¢ and one for 15¢, and they thought of it as, “I can get a comic book and three pieces of penny bubble gum or I can get just a comic book.”

Kids would pick the 12¢ comic every time.

Western probably misread the notion of comic book fans appreciating more pages and better printing. They never did understand until the business got whittled down to a very select group.

CBA: I recall that the first issue of Boris Karloff was a perfect binding. They were trying interesting things as they came out.

Did Dell have the Hanna-Barbera characters or Gold Key? Mark: They started with Dell but Dell never had the deal with Hanna-Barbera. Dell never had a deal with Disney. Dell never had a deal with Warner Brothers. That was all Western Printing and it all went back to Donald Duck in the ’40s. They went out and locked up the license to every animation property that was out there and many others as well. At one point in the ’40s, there were seven studios producing animated films for theatres and Western had the exclusive licensing for five of those. If you look at my web site, <www.POVonline.com>, I’ve got the history of that up. DC got the rights to Fox and Crow and the other characters from the Columbia cartoon studio because Western had passed them up. Martin Goodman at Marvel grabbed up the Terrytoons characters like Dinky Duck and Mighty Mouse because Western had turned them down, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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and that was pretty much it. Western had Disney, Warners, Lantz, MGM and most of the Paramount properties.

CBA: Donenfeld and Goodman [respectively, the owners of DC and Marvel Comics] must have had envious eyes looking at the powerhouse Dell was in the marketplace. Dell was big enough to ignore the Comics Code.

Mark: All these publishers looked at the newsstand as a finite marketplace that could accommodate only so much product. The key battle that Goodman had with other publishers was that they felt that he always tried to saturate the marketplace with some kind of comic, even to the point of killing it, whereas Donenfeld and Leibowitz at DC felt they could not put out more Superman or Batman comics without taking away from what there were already publishing.

Even Western, after they’d locked up and established all these funny animal properties, felt that they could only expand by carving out new franchises and new genres. They did a lot of that by tying-in with what was popular on TV and in the movies. During the mania for cowboy shows on TV, Western was selling staggering numbers of books like Rifleman, Sugarfoot, and Gunsmoke. These were some of the bestselling comic books ever produced in this country for a year or two.

CBA: And Dan Spiegle drew all of them! [laughter] Mark: He drew most of them, but even Dan, as fast as he was, could not draw all of them; he had to leave one or two for Toth.

CBA: Were the licensing deals the reason they had a West Coast office?

Mark: Western opened its West Coast office in 1940 and they hired a women named Eleanor Packer to run it. She had been Hal Roach’s secretary. When Western made a deal to do some Our Gang children’s books, she was engaged to write them. She apparently was an aspiring writer and, of course, she knew the characters. Western often did that when they licensed a property… try to hire someone

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within the licensor’s company to provide material. I’m guessing it simplified matters a lot. Later, Packer moved from being Roach’s secretary into being in charge of publicity there and later at MGM, which happened to also be distributing the Our Gang comedies for Roach. In either place, it was easy for her to not only write the books for Western but to arrange for photo shoots of the actors. The Our Gang books she wrote for Western—these were not comic books, this was before that—are amazing books. They really represent the ultimate in being faithful to a property. If tomorrow you hired someone to do a book on a current TV show, there is no way they could get access to the people and material the way she did because she

Above: Mark Evanier (right) chats with comics fan Bernie Zuber at a Don Glut house party in the 1970s. Courtesy of Don Glut.

Below: Mark Evanier served as editor—and frequent writer of—the European Tarzan comics albums produced in L.A. This spread is

by Don Glut (writer), Mike Ploog (pencils) and Dave Stevens (inker).

Courtesy of Dean Smith. ©2002 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

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Below: In the wake of the success of Marvel Comics and Batmania, Western released some new superheroic characters of its own, including this one-shot Tiger Girl (a.k.a. “shapely aerialist” Lily Taylor), which was scripted by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and drawn by the ever-present Jack Sparling (who also produced the cover detail seen here). ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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was right on the set. She became Western’s Hollywood liaison and an integral part of their outreach to the movie studios.

CBA: Was one of the reasons the Western cartoon comics were of such a quality due to the fact that they would hire animators to draw the books?

Mark: Yeah. When Oscar Lebeck got all the rights to these characters, it was obviously easier to have the material written and drawn by people who were already working for the studio because it solved a layer of approval problems. At that point, you had to remember that Warner Brothers were making their shorts almost a year before they hit the theatres. To engage someone who was working for Warner Brothers meant you were a year ahead of what the guys on the East Coast could see in the theatres. So every time Oscar made a deal with Disney or Warner Brothers, he would ask, “Can you recommend some writers or artists of your characters that I can hire without infringing on your production?” He asked Henry Binder, who was the studio manager at Leon Schlesinger’s animation studio to recommend someone to write and draw characters for the new Bugs Bunny license. Henry recalled that a writer named Chase Craig had just left the studio to do more print cartooning and that’s how Chase Craig became the writer and artist for the early Looney Tunes comic books. He eventually became editor-in-chief of the West Coast office. When Eleanor retired, Alice Cobb and Chase jointly ran the office from the late ’40s into the ’50s. Then Chase took over the main part of it. This is a man who topped a stunning career in comics with the fatal mistake of hiring me. [laughter] CBA: Do you think that he’s one of the great underrated editors in comics history?

Mark: Absolutely. I’m not able to be completely dispassionate about him because Chase was wonderful to me. I had two mentors in the comic book business: Chase Craig and Jack Kirby. Two men who were both born on August 28 though in different years, oddly enough.

Chase was an editor who edited in the

truest sense. He didn’t really re-write or re-draw, although he was capable of doing both. He really knew comic book production very well and an awful lot about what I know about the theory of what it takes to get a comic book produced, I learned at his feet.

He was, to me, a very benevolent editor. Some people who worked with him felt otherwise but I can only report on what I observed. I got to him late in his career and I didn’t have to deal with whatever kind of editor that he was in the early ’50s. When I worked with him, he was counting the days to retirement and he was good to me and good to all the people who worked for him. He was quite serious about making sure his 9,000th Daffy Duck comic book was as good as he could make it. He did not get bored with the job at the end or start dragging his feet. There were some internal problems with Western at that point, which made it difficult for him to make the books as good as he wanted them to be, but he was not sloughing off.

CBA: How did he treat the freelancers?

Mark: He treated his freelancers very well. One of the many things I found fascinating about Western was that they had a very great sense of moral obligation to their freelancers. I’ll tell you a story that I think is amazing and I can’t see any other comic book company that I ever dealt with doing anything like this: Western Publishing had a talent pool of freelancers, some of them guys who worked with them for 20 to 30 years. Near the end, there came a time and they stopped printing comics—or were printing them on a reduced schedule—but they did not close down the comic book division. They kept the freelancers writing and drawing and they continued to pay for comic book stories that might never be printed. Or if they were printed, it might not be for another year or two, so there was no urgency to get them done. Still, the folks at Western felt it was important to have the continuity of work and to keep the freelancers employed. They did not want to be the kind of company who just said, “Sorry, we don’t need you this week.

We’ll call you in a few months if we need you.” A man named Del Connell had taken over from Chase as editor by then and I was writing an occasional script for them. Del sat me down and said, “You have other work, don’t you?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I really like your writing but I’d rather not buy any scripts from you because I can only buy a limited number and I’d rather buy them from the writers that have no other source of income because they need the work.” I thought that was terrific.

In 1980 or ’81, Dan Spiegle and I were in New York together and went to the East Coast offices of Western Publishing, which were at 850 3rd Avenue, to visit the editors there. They showed us a pile of artwork which had to have been two feet high. It was material that had been written, drawn and completely paid for, for comics that might never be published, or which wouldn’t be needed for years. They had still purchased and paid for all this material. I remember on top of the pile was an issue of Thundarr the Barbarian, based on the cartoon series, written by John David Warner and drawn by Winslow Mortimer.

They’d done three or four issues of this comic book but had never printed it.

CBA: Are the pages lost to the ages?

Mark: I have no idea where they are today, but there were a dozen issues of Grimm’s Ghost Stories, Woodsy Owl, and whatever else they were publishing. Some of that material was completed because they had obligations to the licensors to produce material to be sold overseas. They had to produce a certain number of Disney pages per year to keep the license, but they had generated more pages than they were legally required to, and done whole issues of the comics they owned, because they felt that if cut off the freelancers, that would the end of the comic book division.

Ultimately, they had to do that but they held out, largely out of a benevolence to freelancers.

They were very interesting in many ways at Western. In the ’60s, there had been a series of different financial arrangements with their freelancers. A lot of freelancers COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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were put on health plans and were given vacation days at a time when if you mentioned such a program to DC and Marvel, they would have said you were an idiot for thinking a comic book company could do that. Things people at Marvel were telling Jack Kirby that no comic book company could possibly give him, like health insurance, the most prolific artists at Western Publishing were getting.

Western had a profit sharing plan for a time in the ’60s, based on if your comic sold better than the corresponding issue the previous year. That is, the July issue this year sold better than the July issue last year, you got a bonus. And some of those bonuses were very hefty.

They had pension plans. If you interview anyone else from Western ask them about the moment when Western closed down its pension plan and all the freelancers got all the money accrued in one lump sum and they had to pay taxes on it immediately. Western had several freelancer-friendly plans that over the years, as the business shrunk, had to be reneged on or phased out in various ways. They felt this ongoing financial obligation to the long-term freelancers to, at least, keep them working.

CBA: You touch upon an aspect that I think was your entry into comics. Did you work on Disney material first?

Mark: It was Disney first. Western was producing a certain number of pages of American comics and one of the things that happened to Western very seriously in the ’60s and early ’70s—and was a major factor with what was going on with that company—was that almost all their licensors were asking, “Why aren’t you producing more pages of our material?” Western would pay to have a story of comic book material written and drawn and then Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., for instance, would take that story and sell reprint rights to it overseas in various markets, and make a ton of money on it. Western lost the rights to various characters because they wouldn’t increase frequency of publication. All of the licenses they lost involuntarily were cases such as ERB, Inc. coming to them and saying, “We want you to publish Tarzan more often. We want you to publish Korak more often. We want you to publish John Carter of Mars.” Western said, “No, we are not going to increase publication.” So Edgar Rice Burroughs took the rights away from them for that reason. The same thing happened with Hanna-Barbera. Western was doing just a couple titles and H-B said, “If you want to keep the license, we want you to do eight to ten comics a month.” Western said no, so Hanna-Barbera approached Charlton and they were willing to put out eight to ten comics a month. The goal in each of these cases was to generate more pages which could be sold overseas as a source of income to the licensor.

CBA: These stories would be translated and then published in French comics and Italian comic books?

Mark: Correct. Selling comics overseas was so lucrative, many licensors set up their own operations in the ’70s. I ran a department for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., where we generated comic book pages of Tarzan and Korak strictly to be sold overseas. They were never published in America and ERB made a lot of money doing that.

CBA: You had some notable artists like Dave Stevens and William Stout working for you.

Mark: Not Bill Stout, but we had Dave Stevens, Dan Spiegle, Bill Wray, Will Meugniot, Alex Niño, Pat Boyette, Doug Wildey….

CBA: Was Russ working?

Mark: Russ Manning was the editor at first but Russ was trying to also do the newspaper strip, and he was also a volunteer fireman in his area, and he was having some health problems. He fell way behind so they had me take over the Korak material and then, when Russ had a falling out with the Burroughs people, I took over the entire line. We did that for a while and I later ran a comparable operation for Hanna-Barbera. Disney for years had an operation to do comic book material for overseas to supplement what they could translate of the Western Publishing material. In 1970, Mike Royer was trying to write a couple of stories for them and then through the lobbying efforts of a couple of people—one of them, me—he got the job of being Jack Kirby’s inker. Mike called me up one day and said, “Thanks a lot. I’m not going to have time to write stories for Disney.

Would you like for me to set it up for you to submit your own scripts?” I said, “Sure.” It had never dawned on me to try to write Donald Duck comic books but I submitted some scripts and suddenly I was writing all these overseas Disney comic books.

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CBA: One of the most poignant things Dan Spiegle said was to never underestimate the power of friendship. [laughter] Did that lead you on the road?

Mark: The editor I was dealing with at Disney was a man named George Sherman who became a champion. He began buying all the scripts I wrote and recommending me for other little writing jobs around the Disney studio. George was very ill and died in his late thirties a couple years later. He would be off for weeks dealing with his illness, and come back to find his desk piled up with Evanier scripts. I guess he looked at them as a drain on his health. [laughter] One of his other jobs was to act as a liaison with Chase Craig over at Western Publishing regarding what they were doing with Disney characters. One day Chase commented to George that a couple of his best writers had stopped submitting stuff and George said, “I have a kid here who is just perfect for you.” I had just written a Super Goof story (which I think was published in Rwanda and nowhere else) and George thought it was a really good story and so he sent me over to Chase. Chase called me up and said, “That’s the best Super Goof story that I’ve read in some time. Would you like to write an entire Super Goof comic?” It took me a long time to say yes—about half-asecond—and all of a sudden I was writing Gold Keys for the American market.

CBA: You were a longtime letter hack, with letters published in

Above: Even after his title’s demise, Magnus, Robot Fighter remained a favorite character by some fans. One reader-turned-pro was Rich Corben, who wrote and drew the parody, “Mangle, Robot Mangler,” for the underground comix horror title, Slow Death, in 1972. ©2002 Richard V. Corben and Last Gasp Eco-Funnies.

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Above: As Ye Ed prattles on about in his editorial rant this issue, one interesting aspect of Western Publishing’s Gold Key line was the presence of a club (of sorts) within its pages. Here’s a typical “news” page from 1968. ©2002 the respective copyright holders.

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super-hero comics and you certainly had an appreciation for super-hero comics. You were also Jack Kirby’s assistant for a time.

Were you egalitarian across the board with the different comic book genres?

Mark: I never had any preference for one kind of comics over the other. Neither did Kirby, for that matter. One of the things I found wonderful about Jack was that he was just as interested in drawing a western as he was drawing a war comic, a ghost comic, or a superhero comic. He preferred certain genres because he thought they were more commercial, but to Jack, the attitude was, “I’m a writer and I can write anything.” You’re dealing with stories about people and, regardless if those people fly or have duck bills and waddle around, your story must be about personalities and conflict. That’s what appealed to Jack and I guess some of that rubbed off on me. I never felt that writing Daffy Duck was any worse or better than writing Batman. Except that Daffy Duck paid one dollar a page less.

That was the big difference at the time.

CBA: Did Chase Craig deal with Carl Barks?

Mark: Yes, he was Carl’s editor.

CBA: Barks is widely considered to be one of the geniuses of the comic book form, and though I’d hesitate—no offense—to call you a genius, but Chase certainly saw that you were a good writer. That must have been gratifying.

Mark: The comic book industry has had about five geniuses and I’ve gotten to work with most of them. I wasn’t in the same phylum as those people, but an editor hires whoever he can grab at that moment, someone he thinks can tell a good story, who’s available and seems like they will turn it in on time and have some concept of what they’re doing.

I was in the right place when a lot of Chase’s older writers were retiring. The guy I most directly replaced was Michael Maltese. What happened throughout the ’60s was that Western was a safe haven for animation artists who were fed up working for HannaBarbera. One of the most brilliant funny animal artists of all time was a man named Harvey Eisenberg. He alternately worked with Hanna-Barbera and refused to ever work for them again. He’d work a year or so, get fed up with Joe Barbera, tell him off, jump in his car, and drive over to Western Publishing and say, “Give me all the work you’ve got.” Chase used to buy scripts well in advance so he always had a huge pile and when guys like Eisenberg walked in, Chase would load them down with assignments. Eisenberg would draw comics for months or a year or however long it was before Hanna-Barbera lured him back. He was not the only one. Phil DeLara was doing the Daffy Duck comic books, alternately working for Warner Brothers and other studios. Kay Wright was doing a lot of the Disney comics for Chase while moonlighting from Hanna-Barbera.

One of Chase’s best artists was a gent named John Carey, who had been in animation with Warner Brothers in the ’30s and had retired from animation. He was running a sign painting shop and he would take a script from Chase and work in the back of the sign painting business drawing “Foghorn Leghorn” or Daffy Duck stories when business was slow. If someone came in and wanted a sign painted he would just put the comic work aside. Chase could give

these guys work with very open deadlines because he was buying so far ahead. I remember when we were doing the Looney Tunes comic in the ’70s, I asked to have John Carey draw the “Foghorn Leghorn” strip because I knew he’d do the characters real well. Chase said to me, “I can assign him, but you’ve got to get the scripts in well ahead of Christmas because he’s painting signs all during November and December and I can’t get work out of him.”

CBA: Can we get into your creative process? How do you approach a Super Goof story?

Mark: On all fours. [laughter] I’ve never followed any sort of mystical way of approaching a story for any character. The thought process is always the same, whether it’s Super Goof or Mister Miracle. You know the character, you know what they do and how they function and think, so you ask yourself, “What’s an interesting problem for them this week?” If the characters have any sort of defined personality, you think about what you might do in the situation and then what might be the result. You just need to work towards some resolution to the problem.

CBA: Do you approach each story with a blank slate? Do you scribble notes about funny situations when a gag suddenly comes to you?

Mark: I used to keep a notebook. When I came up with a funny idea, I would write it down and there it remained, unused, for the rest of its life. Chase used to say, “I need three six-page Beagle Boys stories,” and I would just walk around the block and think about what I should have the Beagle Boys do. You try to create an interesting setting and find an opponent who is also interesting. You have to play it out in your mind until something seems to start to fall into place. That’s the only way I know to write any kind of story.

CBA: Did you learn simply by observing or did you specifically seek professional opinions on how to construct a story?

Mark: Whatever I know about writing is from a lifetime of watching TV shows, reading books and comics, and going to the movies. That doesn’t always yield a professional output, but I was very fortunate in that I figured out very early on in life what I was least inept at. When I went to my high school reunion, I found all these guys who were working at glorified temp jobs—smart guys, but they hadn’t figured out what they could do that everyone else couldn’t. So they were selling hats or making cold calls to get people to buy more toner. When I was about four or five, I realized I could write and even draw a little better than the people around me. I tell people that I was tested when I was six or seven by the Board of Education and they determined that I had the reading and writing ability of a ten-year-old, and that’s when I got my first offer to write for television. [laughter] The thing is, that was the one thing I had going for me because I was inept at anything physical. I was completely incompetent when it came to foreign languages and, to this day, after 30 years being around Sergio Aragonés, I know about three sentences in Spanish. I’m not good at math. I’m not good at science. I studied chemistry and couldn’t tell you how to balance a Redox equation if you pointed a Howitzer at my vitals. I’m just incompetent at all these things, but I have some level of competence in writing and drawing stories and accruing silly anecdotes and remembering who inked Fantastic Four #12. So I apply that.

If you can find a way to make your hobby into your career, you’ll be very happy in this world. One of the nice things about comic book art is that the generation of guys that I grew up with loved to draw and they loved the fact that they were getting paid to draw all day even though they weren’t being treated well by the companies and some were treated abominably. There was a certain joy in getting up in the morning and getting to draw all day to buy your groceries.

I interviewed John Buscema last year at San Diego and he was an old cranky curmudgeon and talked about how much he hated drawing Spider-Man, how much he hated super-heroes, and hated the way Marvel treated him… how he hated the inkers… and yet, he let it slip that he enjoyed getting paid to draw all day. I love the fact I get paid to write all day because I enjoy writing. Whether it’s a Super Goof story or a monologue for a stand-up comedian or a screenplay or a column for The Jack Kirby Collector—whatever it is, even when there’s no cash—there is a certain fun to it that’s inescapable. I never differentiated between writing Super Goof and writing anything else.

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October 2002

It’s just that the margin of the page changes, the type of joke you can do changes. The vocabulary can change but it flexes the same muscles.

CBA: The typical American attitude is that you are working for the weekend, working so that you can be away from work, so you don’t like work very much. Ernie Colón said it best in that the drive of a comic book artist isn’t to make money so much as their drive is to draw. Unlike so many, they love their work, are exploited and perhaps abused for their devotion to the form but nonetheless they are there for that love.

Mark: I think I met about eight jerks out of maybe 800 in the field.

It’s an incredible ratio. I don’t think the jerk ratio in any creative field is as low as it is in comics and even the jerks are just people who are angry with their lives and the way things have turned out for them. I feel more sadness for them than contempt.

CBA: Many times for those few people it’s a dysfunction that predates comics. It’s something much deeper there.

Mark: The comic book industry has treated a lot of its geniuses very poorly. To use Kirby as an example, when I met Jack in 1969, he was the highest paid artist in comics but that didn’t mean a lot of money and it meant almost nothing in terms of security or vacation time. Jack did not encourage me or anyone to go into comics because, at that point, his attitude was he had done about as well in comics as you could and it wasn’t that good. Yet he was still a very, very nice man, very open and incredibly helpful.

One of the joys of doing comics has been to work with people like Jack Kirby and Dan Spiegle. I love working with Dan. He is the nicest, most professional artist I have ever known in comics. If tomorrow you told me you employed Dan to do something and he was late with the job, I would not hesitate to call you a dirty liar.

Because I worked with Dan for 30 years and I don’t think he was ever late or failed to delight me with his work. I don’t think he ever didn’t give a job his all. He used to frustrate me by being so damn fast that I kept having to drop everything and write more scripts to keep him busy. But that was, quite literally, the only problem he ever gave me.

If you work in a creative field, you pray for collaborators who do everything they’re supposed to, when they’re supposed to do it, and who make your work look professional.

CBA: Dan called you his favorite collaborator and he loved working with you more than anyone else. It’s obvious in looking through Crossfire that he really put his heart into the work you scripted.

Mark: He always did do his best. I can’t tell you the number of times he bailed me by turning things around overnight and just doing the impossible. He did it for other editors, as well. I had to remind myself occasionally that Dan needed to sleep and eat because I’d occasionally expect him to produce brilliance at the rate of two or three pages a day. I love him too much to subject him to that stress.

He is, by far, the most wonderful collaborator I’ve had in my career.

He’s also got the house record for the most pages… except for that guy with the moustache.

CBA: Groo was, what? Something like 4,700 pages?

Mark: Last I heard, we were just short of that. The amazing thing is that we did Groo monthly for ten solid years at Marvel without a single book shipping late or even one fill-in issue. We didn’t even have someone else come in to ink backgrounds. And you still have people who say creator-owned comics are not on time. [laughter] The great things that I got out of Western Publishing was Chase Craig’s guidance and Dan Spiegle’s friendship. One of the things is— and I’m sure your readers will nod their heads in understanding—is there’s a looking-glass effect when you grow up reading a comic book by a certain artist and one day you’re writing the same title with that artist. I grew up reading the Hanna-Barbera comics that were drawn by Kay Wright and Pete Alvarado and one day, I was writing Hanna-Barbera comics drawn by Kay Wright and Pete Alvarado. I had the same experience in television when one of my first days on staff I had to write a joke for Groucho Marx. You pinch yourself and say, “I shouldn’t be doing this! I should be home watching Groucho on TV!” It’s a very personal, emotional moment on many levels because you have to find your identity as a grown-up in all this. When I was at Western, I was the youngest person working for them and, at one point, I was writing something like six comics a month for them. They were treating me very professionally. One of the things that Chase October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

did—that I will always be grateful for—is to not treat me as a kid. He treated me like any other freelancer. He was not afraid to say, “This one didn’t work.” He was nice about it, but he was not afraid to tell me when I was badly off-target and appreciated when I’d done right.

As a writer, you can only hope for people who are responsive and respectful of your work and of your time. They don’t have to like everything.

CBA: Western is not discussed as much as Marvel or DC, but they produced the best-selling comics for a time. What is the most ignored and overlooked aspect that should be noted about Western?

Mark: I think that people should first recognize how big the company was. However big you thought they were, they were bigger.

The sales they racked up in the ’50s with the TV tie-ins were astronomical in comparison to the ’70s, let alone today. I think they produced a lot of quality comics over the years—and some stinkers, of course—and they employed a lot of people. The books don’t all have the fan following today that some of the others do, but I’m amazed that they have a following at all. Yet there is a greater recognition of that material now and I’m sure it will only increase in the future. Your average comic fan only knows the name of Carl Barks and maybe Russ Manning. I’m glad you’re doing this issue because maybe the other guys may get some notice. It’s nice to see people get recognition when they’re around to appreciate it. I wish Chase had lived to see this issue.

Above: Gorgeous Dan Spiegle artwork gracing a European comics album starring Korak, Son of Tarzan. Dan would become a frequent and renowned collaborator with writer Mark Evanier on Crossfire and Blackhawk, among other projects. ©2002 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

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CBA Interview

The Romantic Stylings From Filipino komiks to his Gold Key years with Dagar, Tragg Below: This Jesse Santos painting was the very first visual conceptualization of the Glut/Santos creation, Dagar the Invincible, who was featured in a long-running sword-&-sorcery Gold Key title.

This hangs on the Santos wall.

Courtesy of the artist. Dagar ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice Though his American comics career was relatively short (1969-76), Filipino artist Jesse Santos make a big impression on Gold Key readers with his innumerable collaborations with writer Don Glut in the pages of the ’70s adventure titles Dagar the Invincible, The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor, and Tragg and the Sky Gods. The delightful artist was interviewed via phone on July 24, 2002, and Jesse copy edited the transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you from originally?

Jesse Santos: I’m from Luzon, in the Philippines.

CBA: What year were you born?

Jesse: I won’t tell. It’s my secret, to keep my youthful look. [laughter] CBA: Fair enough. Every man’s got a right.

Jesse: I’ll give you my age: I was born on June 24, 1928.

CBA: Did you draw at a young age?

Jesse: Yes. As a six-year-old, I would draw portraits of people in my small town, Teresa.

CBA: Did you attend school?

Jesse: I was a high school graduate. But everybody knew me very well because I was so young when I became popular; I was only 16.

CBA: Do you remember the Imperial Japanese occupation of the Philippines?

Jesse: Yes. Actually, the Japanese made our house into their camp. Early in the morning on December 7, 1941, at around four o’clock in the morning, the Japanese soldiers were opening our mosquito nets draped around our beds with bayonets. I was just a small kid. But they let us stay there at the house, the whole family, and the soldiers were nice to us. They made the area into a campsite where all the soldiers trained.

CBA: Why were the Japanese decent to you?

Jesse: Well, they saw my drawings on the

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wall, so they started letting me do their portraits. They were all so happy with my work that they gave us food and everything! I was drawing every day, drawing all the soldiers.

CBA: So they would mail the portraits back home to Japan to their parents?

Jesse: Yes. They were so happy with the work. So, every day I was doing portraits of every soldier. [laughs] CBA: How old were you in December of ’41? You’d have been thirteen, right?

Jesse: Yeah, something like that: twelve, thirteen.

CBA: What did your father do for a living?

Jesse: He used to be a schoolteacher, but was more of a politician.

He didn’t want me to have a career in art because he didn’t think it was a kind of profession where I could make money. So, to draw, I had to hide from him and do it in the forest. I even used to draw on leaves. But he spanked me when he saw me doing those drawings because during those days, art and photography was hardly a profession to aspire to. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor. [laughs] CBA: That wasn’t going to happen, huh?

Jesse: Right.

CBA: So did you have brothers and sisters?

Jesse: We were five boys, no girls.

CBA: Where were you, the oldest or youngest?

Jesse: Right in the middle.

CBA: Did any of your brothers have artistic talent?

Jesse: Two brothers loved to draw, but they weren’t good enough to get work.

CBA: So you were the best?

Jesse: Well, they were not like me. I was really more devoted to drawing.

CBA: Was your house used as a camp throughout the War until ’45?

Jesse: Yes. The house stood on top of a hill which overlooked the whole town. That’s why it was a practical location for them to use it as a camp.

CBA: Were you witness to the brutality of the Japanese?

Jesse: Yeah, I witnessed a lot of violence against Filipinos. We would be forced to run here and there ’cause my brother was wanted by the Japanese soldiers because he was a guerrilla soldier. We had to hide in town, the whole family.

CBA: Was it a very scary time for you?

Jesse: Oh, it was scary every day.

CBA: Did you see people killed?

Jesse: Yes. I experienced all those scary situations at a very young age. Whenever the Japanese would fight with the guerrillas it would be very frightening.

CBA: Were you able to go to school throughout the Japanese occupation? Were things somewhat normal?

Jesse: Yes, it became normal when the Japanese were trying to be nice. We had to go to school.

CBA: Did the Americans liberate the town?

Jesse: The Americans, yes, in 1943, I guess. We were all so happy, people were so happy to be liberated. So we loved those Americans, all those G.I.s….

CBA: So did you do portraits of the American boys? [laughs] Jesse: Oh, yes! I went to Manila with a friend of mine who was a reporter. Before I entered the city, there was the camp where the American soldiers were stationed. I started doing portraits of them COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

of Mr. Jesse Santos and Doctor Spektor to his animation career, the artist speaks there, at that university. They were giving out U.S. money and all this food. (I wasn’t very good about saving money then because I was so young. I was still wearing short pants!) [laughter] CBA: Did you have any art training?

Jesse: I didn’t have any training. I was born with the talent. When I was in grades three and four, I was requested by the priest of the academy church to do a painting in front of the church for Holy Week, at the station of the cross. I did the painting because there was no other artist in my town. I was using house paints. [laughter] CBA: Did it come out good?

Jesse: It came out good! [laughter] Almost all the people around the church were wondering how I did it. People were telling my parents, “You’d better hide your child, somebody might steal him because he’s so talented!” [laughter] CBA: So you were good at painting, and also at pen-and-ink?

Jesse: Yes. I also worked in watercolors, acrylic, pastel, oil… all media.

CBA: Was it all self-taught?

Jesse: All self-taught.

CBA: You never went to art school, ever?

Jesse: I went to school but I quit. It was the University of Santo Tomas, a fine arts school. All the students and all the people there knew of me very well because I was already well known. ’Cause I was doing the “DI-13” series, a strip à là James Bond, in the Filipino comic books. People would even call me by that name, DI-13. So when I was in school, sometimes the professor would tell me, “Okay, Jesse, you take over the class.”

CBA: Really? [laughter] Jesse: Because everybody knew me because I was so busy as a professional artist. I had to quit school, because I didn’t have time to teach! [laughter] CBA: And they’re not paying you to teach!

Jesse: During that time I would be interviewed on TV and radio. I was so young! Soon I became very popular in the Philippines. The “DI-13” series was also made into a movie.

CBA: Before that, you went to Manila in ’44, with your friend?

Jesse: Yeah. There I was introduced to this man who was considered the dean of comic books in the Philippines, Tony Velasquez. I was introduced to Velasquez by a preacher. I was still in my short pants. [laughs] When I started with his outfit, there were two artists, one a fine art graduate and the other a professor. I started my professional career with them. I was doing portraits of the G.I.s, and there would be a long line of U.S. soldiers every day. I was doing twenty portraits a day.

CBA: These were done in pencil?

Jesse: Yes. I could draw so fast because I was still young. [laughs] My co-workers were surprised because I could do two portraits at a time. The G.I.s loved my work. Tony Velasquez had this advertising agency. So when the G.I.s left for home, then I shifted to advertising work.

CBA: Did you illustrate?

Jesse: I drew illustrations for calendars, using my own concepts. I would do them in watercolor….

CBA: Were these landscape images?

Jesse: They were almost cartoony: children playing as doctors and nurses. Then I started doing covers for magazines.

CBA: What kind of magazines?

Jesse: Aliwan magazine, almost the size of Reader’s Digest. I drew wash drawings and they would be reproduced in color.

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CBA: Oh, the magazine’s production department would make the separations?

Jesse: Yes. It came out almost like a Reader’s Digest illustration.

But I wasn’t allowed to sign the work; my boss’s signature would be on the work.

CBA: He passed your work off as his own?

Jesse: Yes, but later on, I was was able to sign my own work. I was like his son, you know, so it didn’t bother me too much.

CBA: So it was okay?

Jesse: Yes. I was on salary for them there. Then, after that, the first comic book started, Halakhak Komicks.

CBA: Does that title mean anything?

Jesse: It’s means “laughing.” In comics, it’s “halakhak.”

CBA: Comical comics? [laughter] Jesse: Right. That was the first comic produced in the Philippines.

CBA: Did you see American comics at all from the visiting G.I.s?

Jesse: Yes. We had a lot of American comics. I was influenced a lot by Burne Hogarth, Hal Foster, Jack Kirby….

CBA: What did you see of Jack Kirby?

Jesse: Captain America.

CBA: Now, were these the actual American comics or reprints?

Jesse: Yes, the actual American comics. They were being distributed in the Philippines.

That’s why most of us Filipino artists have been influenced by the American comics field.

CBA: Is the import of U.S. comics the reason why comics became such a big thing in the Philippines?

Jesse: Yes. Anything you have here in the United States, we do it and we overdo it. [laughter] Anything! Rock ’n’ roll, love song singers, or whatever. And we always overdo it. [laughter] CBA: My friend, Mañuel Auad, sent me a whole pile of Nestor Redondo Filipino comics, and they contained such things as Rudy Nebres’ stories based hit song lyrics, and all these American-type genres….

Jesse: I know those comic book artists.

CBA: One issue would contain material in different genres. There would be a romance story, a mystery… Tony DeZuniga would do a James Bond-type spy story….

Below: A portrait of young artist Jesse Santos, sporting his trademark pompadour. With a love for American popular music, Jesse has established a “second career” as a lounge singer in Southern California, producing his own CD featuring standard love ballads.

Courtesy of Jesse Santos.

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Above: Jesse (far left) poses among his fellow illustrators with the husband and wife despot team, Filipino President Ferdinand and First Lady Imelda Marcos in a 1960s picture. Below: Santos’ work on the strip “DI-13” was noted in this Filipino newspaper article.

Courtesy of Jesse Santos. ©2002 the respective copyright holders .

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Jesse: A little while ago, DeZuniga was here. I know all of those artists very well. I was the very first guy in the comic books, who started in the comic books. They came later, all of those guys.

CBA: So you were the first guy?

Jesse: Yes. CBA: And you were drawing humorous stories?

Jesse: As well as learning in the company of the old masters. I was just wearing my short pants! They were laughing at me and teased me. [laughter] I was able to get insight from these old masters.

CBA: Who were the old masters?

Jesse: Tony Velasquez, Francisco Coching…. Have you seen Coching’s work?

CBA: No… Jesse: He was one of the best. He did so many, many stories.

He drew the Hagibis strip, which was like Tarzan. He wrote the stories, as well, and was so good at action, which came from inside him. With the action so good, that even if the drawing was wrong, it still looks right, because everything was so fast.

When he made a drawing, it’s like he’s playing with it, so you can see the freak brush strokes and all the action…

CBA: The energy?

Jesse: Yes, you could see the energy, the power in the work.

CBA: What kind of strips were they?

Jesse: All types of stories. Just like in my work. I’ve illustrated all types of stories: love stories, mysteries, adventure, humorous… we did everything.

CBA: Was there many super-heroes in

Filipino comics?

Jesse: Yes, we created some, but not many compared to America. We couldn’t make them as successful.

CBA: Did women read a lot of Filipino comics?

Jesse: Yes, especially when I started the “DI-13” James Bond-type series. I used to visit police departments, and I would spend time with the police, to take in the atmosphere and get the feeling I needed for the stories to appear authentic. I used to drink with them at night.

CBA: Did you like the cops?

Jesse: Yeah, I knew how to handle them. [laughter] Sometimes I would go to those underground clubs and saloons where they would drink and I would join them.

CBA: Did you also write the stories?

Jesse: No, I didn’t. But, most of the time, when there were certain stories that needed authenticity, the publishers would send me to the place where the story would be set. Then I would sketch all the reference I needed, whether it was a crowd of people, buildings, and everything. I would draw very quick impressions.

CBA: Did comics become immediately popular in the Philippines?

Jesse: Not really. When I was starting in comic books, not too many were reading them. Comics were just beginning, you know, and people were only just starting to see them. What I did to promote my work was to always get dressed up when I went out, looking just like my character in “DI-13.” I would even go to remote places, always sharply dressed in my suit. Even though it was hot, you know. [laughter] So I would get some publicity by doing that and I would appear in local papers, always dressed as my character, and people would get interested and start reading my book. Before this would be done, people thought comics were just funny stuff, you know, but when they saw the well-dressed artist posing as this spy character… I made it a gimmick. [laughs] CBA: So these were personal appearances to promote the title?

Jesse: Yes. I used to be interviewed on TV and radio….

CBA: Do you have any idea what kind of circulation the comic had?

Jesse: Actually, by percentage, the circulation was higher than the average circulation of a book here in the United States. Distribution covered the entire country of the Philippines. People became crazy about reading comic books.

CBA: Hundreds of thousands of copies?

Jesse: Yes. CBA: Did the work pay well? When the magazine started becoming more and more popular, were you getting more and more money?

Jesse: It depended on the popularity of the artist. If you were a top artist, you were paid top dollar.

CBA: So I would assume you were a top artist?

Jesse: I was one of the top artists, one of their top illustrators, and I was only at a young age.

CBA: Did you like comic work immediately?

Jesse: Yes, because it gave me the freedom to visualize different roles, different characters, and I love that. It was like acting.

CBA: What was your favorite type of comic book to work on?

Jesse: Whichever comes my way, I enjoy it.

CBA: You obviously did a lot of different genres, right? You did love stories and…

Jesse: Yes, every kind of story.

CBA: Did you do much fantasy?

Jesse: Yes, but a lot more love stories. The Filipino people like love stories.

CBA: They love their love stories, eh? [laughter] Jesse: Those people in the bayou, they love those kind of stories. I was also a singer of romantic songs. I used to sing in some clubs. I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

performed a lot of English songs, jazz, dramatic ballads.

CBA: Did you like Frank Sinatra?

Jesse: Yes. I like all types of singers, ’cause I listen to all kinds of music. Opera, classical, jazz, blues, all kinds.

CBA: Were American movies also coming over to the Philippines all the time?

Jesse: Oh, yes.

CBA: And did you enjoy those, and they were popular throughout the countryside?

Jesse: Filipinos loved American movies as far back as the silent film days.

CBA: Did you have any favorites?

Jesse: Those cowboy movies. Most of those movies shown at the time were cowboy movies. I enjoyed Buck Jones, The Lone Ranger, Gene Autry… I loved those when I was young.

CBA: Why? Jesse: Well, I don’t know. Maybe because of the action. I’m crazy about action. [laughs] CBA: Did you always look towards America as a place to work?

You were aware that comics were made in America. At a young age, did you think about doing work for the U.S. market?

Jesse: Well, I didn’t have any ideas about coming over and becoming an American, at least when I was young. That finally did happen in 1969 and I became an American citizen in 1974.

CBA: Was it the ’50s when you were doing the spy series?

Jesse: “DI-13”? Yes, that was in the early ’50s.

CBA: What did you do after “DI-13”?

Jesse: Then I was illustrating novels….

CBA: What, the covers? Or they had illustrations inside?

Jesse: Both covers and interior Illustration.

CBA: So you were busy.

Jesse: I was very busy.

CBA: Were you making a lot of money?

Jesse: While I was making a lot of money, but you know, I was young and spent it all so fast. I went out with my friends. And I was a single guy in Manila because my parents were back home in the province.

CBA: Have you always been single, or did you ever get married?

Jesse: I got married in 1952. My wife passed away in 1997.

That’s why I was in a depression for five years. Also because my son died in 1994. I was still working with the animation, but I didn’t get any sleep. Almost every night I couldn’t sleep. So when I went to work, I was like a zombie. It’s good that I was able to survive that situation, though. Even at Warner Brothers, the employees were telling me, “It’s good you were able to survive in that situation.”

CBA: Do you feel less depressed now?

Jesse: Yes. I was able to recover. That’s why I retired in 1998.

Because of that terrible depression. I have to rest.

CBA: So you’ve fully retired?

Jesse: Yeah. I can still work, but I don’t feel like it at the moment.

Warner Brothers has called me asking if I want to work. I told them I just like resting for a while.

CBA: After the spy series, what did you do? You said you illustrated book covers?

Jesse: Yes. I was being published in Liwaway magazine and illustrated a series of novels called “Paula,” written by Pablo Gomez.

I was doing every cover and there were so many….

CBA: Were you working on any other comic stories?

Jesse: Actually, I had work in all the animation studios, I was so busy. When I was at Hanna-Barbera, Western Publishing came to me and offered me work. But I quit doing those books in 1976. I was working at Hanna-Barbera in the early ’80s, and Del Connell, the editor at Gold Key came to me and he said they wanted me to bring back Dagar. But I told him that I was working full time in animation and was just too busy.

CBA: What were you doing in animation?

Jesse: Presentations to be used to pitch new animated shows to the networks. That was how the studios sold the shows. I was developing shows.

CBA: Who were you working with?

Jesse: The director during that time at Hanna-Barbera was Iwao Takemoto.

October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

CBA: Was Doug Wildey there?

Jesse: Wildey? I think so, yes…

CBA: Getting back to the ’50s, were you doing comic books, too, as you were going along?

Jesse: Yes. I had several assignments from other comic book companies, because they were always offering me work, you know. I was so busy, I only had time to sleep two hours a night. I was very fatigued during that period, and that’s why I wanted to quit. I got burned out from all of this work! [laughs] CBA: How many pages could you complete in a day?

Jesse: If I would really try, I could knock out three pages.

CBA: That would be pencils and inks?

Jesse: Yes. CBA: Did you do lettering, too?

Jesse: I don’t do the lettering. That takes a lot of effort. If I did the lettering, it would be too late for the schedule. When I was working with Gold Key, my assignments were Dagar and Doctor Spektor, so my schedule was almost two books a month. Bill Spicer was doing the lettering. Just imagine that for five years I only slept two hours a night. [laughter] Why do you think I developed this insomnia? [laughs] CBA: You wouldn’t feel right if you weren’t working at two o’clock in the morning?

Jesse: I told that to Del Connell when he was asking me to continue Dagar. But I told him okay, I’ll give it a try, just give me around four pages, five pages. Then he give me five pages, and I tried it, and by gosh, when I went to my regular day job, I was like a

Above: Before departing for the states, Jesse drew the Filipino adventure strip “Dar Agila.”

Below: Jesse’s expert portrait of blues singer Ray Charles. ©2002 the respective copyright holders.

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Above: Superb portrait of Doctor Spektor by cocreator Jesse Santos.

From The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor #4, courtesy of Don Glut. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc. Below: Jesse’s cover rough for an issue of the final Glut/Santos creation, Tragg and the Sky Gods. Courtesy of Don Glut. Art ©2002 Jesse Santos.

Tragg. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

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zombie. So I told Del, I’m sorry, but I think I can’t continue.

Because the money’s in animation, so I’ve got to stick it out here because I’ve got a family.

CBA: How many children did you have?

Jesse: I have five children. Four boys, one girl. We had no room for any more boys. [laughter] CBA: So how did you get into American comics?

Jesse: My wife came first here, along with my daughter, because she’s a school teacher and came over to teach in the United States.

CBA: Did she have friends over here or family over here to be able to stay with? Did she know anybody in the United States?

Jesse: Well, she was with a group of school teachers from the Philippines. They were assigned to work in the U.S. CBA: So she came over in ’68?

Jesse: 1968. Of course, I could not come over right away because I was still trying to finish some of the novels I was illustrating in the Liwaway magazine. So when I finished, I left the Philippines. I was still doing the “DI-13,” at that time.

CBA: So you did “DI-13” for eighteen years or so? Did you say that was made into a motion picture?

Jesse: Yes. CBA: Did you get money for that?

Jesse: Well, I got a little. [laughs] CBA: So everything you did was owned by the company?

Jesse: Yes, of course.

CBA: Oh well. Now, a lot of comics were made into movies in the Philippines, right?

Jesse: You mean did the properties come from the comics? Yeah, a lot of movies. The comic books became very popular.

CBA: What was your plan when you came over to America? Was it to work in comics?

Jesse: I didn’t have any plans. When I came over, I was a portrait artist in one of the art galleries here in Modesto, where I was living. I was hired by this guy who owns an art gallery when he discovered that I had done these portrait paintings.

He was doing these portraits that were copied from photographs. They would take a photo and then paint over that! [laughter] CBA: That’s cheating! [laughter] Jesse: The deal I had with my partner, because of my ability, my experience, my knowledge, was for me to receive a retainer, and I would deliver a freehand portrait, not taken from the photograph.

We would go to Reno, Nevada, where rich people were—they were the only ones who could afford portraits!—and some of the clients were families of U.S. Senators. When they saw my paintings, these clients, they were asking how could I do it? “That’s a real painting,” they said, and not like what the gallery owner was previously doing.

CBA: So you’ve always painted portraits?

Jesse: Yes. That’s my forté.

CBA: You still paint right now?

Jesse: Yes. CBA: How many do you do a year?

Jesse: I really don’t care too much because I want to rest. Once you’ve got a client, that’s enough.

CBA: Do they sit for you or do you do them all from photos?

Jesse: I do from photographs and from life.

CBA: Did you visit them or would they come to you?

Jesse: It depends if they want me to go to the house.

CBA: Would there be a special cost for that? These would be rich people, right?

Jesse: One time, there was this policeman who was killed in action and I was hired to do a portrait of him. There were two groups of families who had different ideas for the portrait. So I had to create two different portraits to satisfy both families, and I ended up painting them both in one day. I was so confused, I had to ask my partner how to bill for two portraits of the same person! [laughter] CBA: Your partner, the gallery owner: What was his name?

Jesse: Charles Alexander.

CBA: Did you like California when you moved there?

Jesse: Oh, yes, because the climate was almost like the Philippines.

CBA: Was it difficult to live in the Ferdinand Marcos regime?

Jesse: Well, at first it was fine, because I was a member of the National Press Club in the Philippines. I used to go to there after office hours and would drink with those senators and congressmen and even the President. So it was nice at first, but when he became a dictator, he changed everything, became a different kind of person.

Well, that happens with power, you know.

CBA: Were you happy when Corazon Aquino took over?

Jesse: Well, I was not there anymore.

CBA: Did the Vietnam War, was there any effect on the Philippines at the time?

Jesse: I was in the States during the Vietnam War. I was the vice-president of the Filipino Illustrators and Cartoonists for a long time, until I left the Philippines.

CBA: So you knew Alfredo Alcala, Nestor Redondo, Alex Niño?

Jesse: I know all of them.

CBA: Were you good friends with any of them?

Jesse: Yes, because we had parties and all that.

CBA: Was there anybody you were particularly close to?

Jesse: Not really that close, because they were a different group.

CBA: Obviously DC Comics came over to the Philippines in the early 1970s. You were already in the United States when Carmine Infantino and Joe Orlando went over there with Tony and Mary DeZuniga.

Jesse: Western Publishing discovered me.

CBA: And how did they discover you?

Jesse: I was with a friend who used to go to Western Publishing.

CBA: You went to Western and showed them your work?

Jesse: Yes, they looked at my work.

CBA: Who did you deal with?

Jesse: Del Connell, the editor.

CBA: Not Chase Craig at all?

Jesse: Oh, yes, Chase also.

CBA: Did you immediately team up with writer Don Glut?

Jesse: Yes, and we ended up working together for a long time.

CBA: So you were both new, and they just teamed you up? Did they pay you well there?

Jesse: Well, since I was doing the whole thing—penciling, inking, cover painting—I was just about making enough money for my family.

CBA: And you’re only sleeping two hours a night! [laughter] Jesse: I thought I wouldn’t keep up a schedule like that anymore when I left the Philippines. I thought it would be nice here, and it COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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happened again! [laughter] But here I’ve got so many fans. While I also had people who liked my work in the Philippines, here I had so many more fans. They would write me in care of Western. It would bother me a lot because I felt I had to answer all the letters. [laughter] CBA: Well, I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t write you, but I did love your work immediately after I first saw it.

Jesse: Thank you very much. Sometimes I gave readers some of my originals.

CBA: Really? Boy, you were nice! So Del Connell would give the mail addressed to you?

Jesse: Sometimes I would go to the office in Los Angeles, and every time I went, he takes me to the big restaurant and treats me to a good meal. He was a good friend, too.

CBA: Do you still see him at all?

Jesse: I haven’t seen him for quite a long time. He was the one who introduced me to animation when Gold Key stopped doing the books….

CBA: Was it nice to work for Western? Besides obviously you worked too much….

Jesse: They gave me the privilege of freedom. Sometimes I would ad lib my layouts, and just do what I wanted. I had freedom. I was also thinking up ideas for covers, and given the freedom to do that.

CBA: Did you enjoy working with Don? Jesse: Oh, yes. He is a nice person.

CBA: He would sneak a lot of little personal things into the scripts, right? Would he call you up and say, “I want you to put a little joke in for me…” [laughter] Jesse: One time… I don’t want to say anything! He might get mad! Well, it’s probably okay. The editor didn’t want the writer calling me to give me ideas of what to do.

CBA: But Don would call on the phone, right, and talk directly to you?

Jesse: I can think of one time. Sometimes we would meet at the Gold Key office here in Los Angeles.

CBA: Could you always read English?

Jesse: Oh, yes. In the Philippines, scripts were always in English.

CBA: They taught you how to write English in grade school?

Jesse: English is taught from kindergarten to college in the Philippines. Even small children can speak English.

CBA: Could you also speak Spanish?

Jesse: Well, I don’t really, because I grew up in Manila, where they spoke Tagalog. Our national language is Tagalog but we generally communicate in English because we have 125 dialects, some very different than the other, and we can’t understand each other.

CBA: Would you go into the office and Del would give you the script for the next issue?

Jesse: Sometimes they sent the script to my house in Modesto.

CBA: Is that far from L.A.?

Jesse: It is closer to San Francisco. It’s three hundred miles from Los Angeles.

CBA: How long did you live there?

Jesse: In the ’70s. We always had two homes there, but the main home that I had was five bedrooms with a swimming pool, but I sold it when my wife passed away. I have another house which I rented, but I sold that, too.

CBA: So where are you now?

Jesse: I’m here in L.A., in a condo I bought in 1991, because I was working at different studios. But every time that I work with a studio, I work full-time. I was stylizing shows.

CBA: What does “stylizing” mean?

Jesse: That the entire production would be based on my style designs.

CBA: You would draw all the model sheets?

Jesse: Yeah. All the characters, all the backgrounds. The people working on the show would have to copy exactly the way I did it.

CBA: What was the most successful show that you stylized?

Jesse: Prince Valiant. I stylized that show for the King Features Syndicate and Hearst, working together. I did a presentation for that, and then, when I finished the presentation, after it was sent to King Features, they loved it so very much. So they sent over some of their people to see me in Los Angeles to talk about it.

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

CBA: Did you base it all on the Hal Foster stuff?

Jesse: I changed everything. The hair was changed from a page boy cut to a windblown style. I did a brochure.

CBA: That was sent out to the TV stations?

Jesse: Yeah. And I did also a Prince Valiant CD cover.

CBA: What other shows were produced?

Jesse: When I was at DIC, I was the styling director at the animation studio…. Everything was based on my style. And there are some others….

CBA: That was good money, right?

Jesse: Well, of course! [laughter] The thing that happened to me was that a lot of studios were offering me jobs, so every time I was offered a job by a studio, I would go. [laughs] CBA: Getting back to the Gold Key comics: Did you enjoy working on Dagar?

Jesse: Oh, yes.

CBA: Were the characters you worked on based on any real people? Did you use any models?

Jesse: Sometimes I based a character on an actor, but I would usually do it from imagination.

When I started Dagar, if you look the first book that came out, he’s a good-looking guy, not like the invincible Dagar I

Above: Sensitive pencil portrait of Dagar the Invincible appeared in the special sword-&-sorcery issue of Jim Steranko’s Comixscene. Art ©2002 Jesse Santos. Dagar ©2002 Western Pub., Inc. Below: Panel detail from Brothers of the Spear #1 by Santos. ©2002 Western Pub.

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Above: Lest we forget, Jesse Santos contributed a mighty fine set of painted covers for Gold Key in the 1970s. This one is from the June 1976 issue of The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor. Courtesy of the artist. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

Inset right: Legendary Tarzan artist and art instructor Burne Hogarth posing with Jesse Santos in this picture from a 1970s California comic book convention.

Courtesy of Jesse Santos.

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eventually drew. Fans were writing saying that he was too good-looking! So I changed him gradually to a more fierce-looking character.

Every character that I do, I really portray their personality.

CBA: I notice you draw very sensitive eyes.

Jesse: It’s an expression of their personality you can see.

CBA: Because you are so busy, that your work would be…

Jesse: Don’t forget that I had no time for masterpieces! [laughter] CBA: I don’t know what to say now! [laughter] Jesse: Just imagine two books a month, plus I was doing cover paintings for the books.

CBA: How long would it

take you to do a cover painting?

Jesse: Almost a day-and-a-half or something like that.

CBA: Were they based on the story inside, or did you just come up with a concept?

Jesse: They were based on the story inside. I would pick up a visual idea from the inside.

CBA: Did you do sketches and then give them to Del and he would say, “Yeah, go with this one”?

Jesse: No, I just go straight to canvas. After I was finished, Bill Spicer did the lettering. Sometimes I would do rough drafts for the cover copy, too, just to indicate placement. I also did all the sound effects in the stories, ’cause if somebody else did it, it would not match the style of the art.

CBA: So you would draw the story title logo?

Jesse: Like the cover, the series I did, and even the logo for the Prince Valiant, I did the logo.

CBA: Did you always do the logos?

Jesse: Yes, but sometimes I don’t have the time.

CBA: If you had to letter, could you?

Jesse: Oh, I would be late. [laughter] Maybe I would not sleep ever again. [laughter] I also did Tragg and the Sky Gods, Brothers of the Spear, which was made into a whole book when I was doing it. I saw Russ Manning at a convention, he said, “It looks like yours now!” [laughter] CBA: Did you like all the strips?

Jesse: Yeah, anything that has action. As I said, I love action. Like that Hogarth action.

CBA: So did you look at Burne Hogarth’s work when you were doing Brothers of the Spear and be inspired by the work?

Jesse: Well, I am inspired by the work of all these great artists, but the style is my own.

CBA: Inspired by the memory?

Jesse: Yes, it’s better that way than to copy. I did a presentation for a Little Rascals cartoon series at Hanna-Barbera, and they wanted to show me the movie and still photos. So I told them, “Okay, just show me the movie.” So I watch the movie and I try to adapt the mannerisms of every character. I did it all from imagination to give it more action.

CBA: When you were in animation, did you think about directing?

Jesse: No. They wanted me to direct, but then I wouldn’t have time to draw anymore, to create. All you do is manage the people working for you. Anyway, I was the art director and already had people working under me. I had to create everything. It’s so hard.

And you’re handling people.

CBA: How big was your staff?

Jesse: Oh, it’s around four, but it was hard because…

CBA: You gotta keep ’em busy!

Jesse: DIC was a small studio before, and I was the only one who was doing the presentations.

CBA: The one guy?

Jesse: There was another guy, a director there, Guy Dierece. He’s French. He worked with the president, and he told me, “Jesse, this is just a small studio. We don’t want it to become big, because we don’t know how to handle it.” But what happened is that, ’cause when I was doing the presentations, I also talked with the network people. Sometimes the vicepresident of DIC, he’s French, and he talks to the network and he cannot be understood because he’s French.

So I talked with the network people and they understood me better.

So, we sold a lot of shows. All of a sudden we were extremely busy.

So the president told me, “Okay, Jesse, get all the people you need to get the work done.” [laughter] We didn’t know what to do. So I told them, “Oh no, don’t put me there as the overall director! No, not me!” I told them I only wanted one COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

department, I don’t want to handle a bunch of people.

CBA: Were you called the art director?

Jesse: I was the styling director. I didn’t want too many responsibilities because I was creating.

CBA: So you worked there from 1979 on?

Jesse: I started with Friz Freleng, the Depatie-Freleng Animation Studios.

CBA: What were you working on?

Jesse: It’s here in Los Angeles also. I started with Daffy Duck.

Sometimes they showed my drawings on TV. They just panned the work, like a crowd scene, without animating it, and it’s exactly my drawing. So they let me do also those futuristic buildings. They showed on TV my drawing exactly.

CBA: So did you work in animation from ’79 to the ’90s?

Jesse: I started in ’79 at Depatie-Freleng. Then it shut down, and then I was offered work by Filmation Studios. I was doing the promotional material, and was doing the key backgrounds for every show, even The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon.

CBA: What is a key background? The ones they would use over and over?

Jesse: The important backgrounds. I did them in ink, and they just put color in. And it comes out exactly as I drew it on TV, even the large crowd scenes they would pan without animating it.

CBA: You can tell that it’s in your style?

Jesse: Yeah, it’s in my style. The art director there went around every morning, telling everyone in the office, “Everybody, copy the style of Jesse!” Every morning! [laughter] CBA: Was he serious?

Jesse: Well, yes! Every day, that was the thing to do. The order came from the president. He had to do it because it came from the president. [laughs] CBA: Did you come up with ideas for any of the shows, or only the writers came up with the ideas?

Jesse: The writers did.

CBA: Getting back to the Gold Key. You first started working in the Mystery Comics Digest, in the small comics?

Jesse: Yes. CBA: Did you like that at all?

Jesse: I liked that. Everything that I worked on, I’ve enjoyed.

CBA: So you were happy with the printing?

Jesse: I was happy with everything, even if I didn’t sleep. [laughter] Because I’m interpreting different characters, different personalities. And I loved that.

CBA: You liked Doctor Spektor and drawing monsters?

Jesse: Yes. CBA: The workload must have been crazy after a while. You were also doing Tragg and Brothers of the Spear, for heaven’s sake! Were you satisfied with the schedule? Obviously your style would get looser.

Jesse: Sometimes it was so loose because I was late for the schedule. Sometimes I changed the tools I worked with. There’s a year when I used a straight brush, and there’s a year that I used a combination of pen and brush. Just to break the monotony. You feel better than if you’re working with just one implement….

CBA: Except for Russ Manning, you and Don were the first people allowed to sign their own work in Gold Key comics.

Jesse: Yeah. Actually, when I first started there, they started putting my name and even Don Glut’s name in there. Because my name would often go first, readers thought I was the writer.

Like you said, Gold Key usually never let anyone sign their own work, and they were finally able to let me do it. So the others got so jealous. [laughter] CBA: Did you go to comic conventions?

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

Jesse: Yes, I used to go to the comic conventions in San Diego and here in Los Angeles. I would just go and all I did was sign autographs for the fans.

CBA: Have you been to comic cons in recent years at all?

Jesse: No, I haven’t done anything in comic books since I started work with the animation studios.

CBA: Well, people don’t forget, you know. [laughs] Here I am calling thirty years later!

Jesse: Once one of my friends from New York called me here at home, but I was hiding from the phone, I didn’t answer because I thought it was a fan calling me. [laughter] CBA: I was glad to find you, too.

I couldn’t locate you anywhere for a time! Mañuel Auad gave me your number. I felt that I couldn’t do a Gold Key issue justice without you.

Because in the 1970s, I thought the best work to come out of Gold Key was the work by Don Glut and yourself. Do you miss comics?

Jesse: Well, since I was in the

Above: Superb example of Jesse Santos’ exquisite linework in this page from Dagar the Invincible #3.

Courtesy of Don Glut. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Inset left: Since his teen years in the Philippines, artist Jesse Santos was a great admirer of the work of Jack Kirby, one of the greatest comic book artists of all time.

Jesse got a chance to chat with his hero at a 1970s comic convention.

Courtesy of Jesse Santos.

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Above: While we wish we could have reproduced more than a fraction of the animation material the artist sent us, we just couldn’t resist featuring this Jesse Santos concept drawing for a proposed Zorro cartoon series. The artist spent many years in the animation business, only recently retiring.

Courtesy of Jesse Santos. ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

Below: The California Santos clan poses for a family portrait in the artist’s living room. Courtesy of Jesse Santos.

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Philippines I was doing comic books, you know… [laughs] CBA: So you don’t really miss them? [laughs] Jesse: Then I came here, and didn’t know I’d be working in comic books. I thought I would be doing portraits. But you know doing fine art for your bread and butter is really hard. You make good money, but not all the time.

CBA: Right. It comes and goes. So what’s your favorite medium to work in?

Jesse: Well, whatever I do, if it’s pen-and-ink or oils…

CBA: So you like variety?

Jesse: Variety, yes. I want always to change. I don’t want to stay in one place… I want to improve.

CBA: What was your favorite work at Gold Key? Jesse: Well, I really did enjoy Dagar and Doctor Spektor. The other strips were always the same, but once I got started on one of them, I would get inspired, you know. That’s the way I work. When I go do a painting, even if I haven’t done it for so many years, the same feeling comes back. I don’t forget.

CBA: The only other comic book company I found that you worked for—and correct me if I’m wrong—was Red

Circle Comics, an Archie Comics imprint, that was edited by Gray Morrow.

Jesse: Yes, that’s true. It was Jim Steranko who wrote me a letter and told me about Red Circle. I did one story [“Never Bother a Dead Man,” Mad House #96], and then did another one, and when they received that one, they said, “Jesse, you did it again!” But that story was never published and I never saw it again.

CBA: Did you want to work for DC or Marvel Comics?

Jesse: Well, I was so busy, I didn’t have time to think of working for other companies.

CBA: You didn’t know that they were paying more money for a page rate?

Jesse: Well, I didn’t know. Actually, when I just finished with Gold Key, I was offered Conan the Barbarian, which I didn’t go for, since I didn’t feel like working with different editors.

CBA: But you went to the conventions, right? Did you meet with professionals like Roy Thomas or…?

Jesse: Maybe I did meet Roy. Yes, I met most of those guys. I have a picture here taken with Burne Hogarth and Jack Kirby at a San Diego convention.

CBA: Did you talk with Jack Kirby?

Jesse: Yes. I would talk to him every time I attended a show, and would also speak to Burne Hogarth.

CBA: What was Jack like?

Jesse: Oh, he was a nice guy.

CBA: And Burne was nice, too?

Jesse: Yes. I liked his drawings, so such power in the work.

CBA: So you don’t miss comics work, right?

Jesse: Well, I do miss it, but then I think about the deadlines… [laughter] CBA: Well, they don’t have to be like that. Have you ever thought of doing your own story, doing what you want to do?

Jesse: Well, actually, I am not a writer.

CBA: You don’t feel you could write at all?

Jesse: I don’t know, but it’s hard, because I didn’t start out that way, and it’s not easy to learn new things at my age.

CBA: You have a lot of fans out there. I would think many people would love to see new work.

Jesse: I stopped answering the fan mail, you know, because I was hiding from them. Just imagine working so hard and all day and night, and you come home and then have to answer the fan mail. [laughter] CBA: Is life good now? Are you happy now, is it better?

Jesse: What I do now is sing. I have a CD, I’ll send you one of them. I sing in English and Spanish at this Italian restaurant here.

Most of the songs I sing are dramatic ballads, jazz, blues, and rumbas.

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October 2002

CBA: You’ve got careers all over the place! Are you in movies, too? [laughter] Jesse: When I sing, ladies come to me and they say my voice penetrates the heart and they ask how I do it? I tell them that when I do art, I base it from music, and when I do music, I base it from art.

Because it all comes in the same direction. Because it’s got the depth of feeling, the suspense and all that. That’s how I do it. When I sing, I

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dramatize the essence of the song, not just sing it.

CBA: Are you a romantic?

Jesse: Yes, kinda. Actually, the title of my CD is The Romantic Style of Jesse.

CBA: Why do I even ask such silly questions? Of course, you’re a romantic! [laughter]

Below: Perhaps the artist’s proudest achievement in the field of animation was his work on the proposed Prince Valiant series.

This presentation piece was used as the cover for a promotional brochure. ©2002 King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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CBA Interview

Of Dagar and Dinosaurs Exploring the myriad continuities of noted writer Donald Glut Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice

Below: Artist Jesse Santos drew this portrait of writer Don Glut and himself for Jim Steranko’s Comixscene in the early 1970s.

Courtesy of Don Glut. Art ©2002 Jesse Santos. Characters ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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Don Glut is a talent you may have encountered in any number of fields: Comics, paleontology, film history, contemporary B-movies and amateur movie-making, novels, and even ’60s rock ’n’ roll!

Perhaps best-known for the novelization of George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back, the writer also had a significant career as a comics scripter for Gold Key in the ’70s, most notably working with artist Jesse Santos on numerous collaborative efforts. This interview was conducted by telephone on July 22, 2002 and the transcript was copy edited by Don.

Comic Book Artist: Don, where are you from?

Don Glut: I was born in Texas on an Army base during the latter part of World War II. My father was in the Army Air Corps and stationed in Pecos, Texas. My mother, who was from Chicago (as my father was), followed him out there where I happened to be born. Shortly after that, my mother took me back to Chicago, and that’s really where I spent all of my youth.

My dad died a hero’s death, killed in action on Feb. 3, 1945, just 16 days before my first birthday. He was co-pilot of a B-24 airplane that got hit by enemy flak over Germany. The pilots are always the last to bail out. Once the crew was out, he and the pilot jumped. But they were too low—their chutes never fully opened. My mom raised me on her own, but it was tough for the both of us.

CBA: Were you old enough to read the EC Comics?

Don: I was when they were coming out coverless, three for a dime in these plastic packages. That’s when I really discovered EC. Although before that, I do recall being at a friend’s house and reading the issue of Mad comics that had the “Frank N. Stein” story in it. I remember vividly being captivated by these shots of the bodies being chopped up, something I’d never seen before, especially in a comic book. So I was aware of Mad to a small extent. I really discovered the horror comics about a year or so before the Comics Code came in. I would see them on the stands. My mother wasn’t too happy with those types of books, so I never really was able to read too many… I bought an issue of Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein (#32, 1954), which had a profound impact on me over the years. But the very first was Strange Mysteries #12 (1953), one of those Canadian horror comics, in which the artwork and stories weren’t too great. What I remember vividly about that comic was a story in which somebody had discovered skeletons that had turned to gold. I was really interested in skeletons per se as a kid so that particular issue had a special fascination for me.

I also bought off the newsstand an issue of The Thing that had a lot of Steve Ditko drawn stories. I didn’t know who Ditko was at the time, but it was the one that had the gigantic worm on the cover [#15]. There was some really grisly stuff in the book and I remember the day I bought that, I had to go see a cousin of mine who was in an accordion recital in which countless little kids came up and played the same polka on the accordion. We had to sit on these really hard chairs. The only thing that kept me going through that was that I snuck this comic book into the recital and kept reading it over and over and over again.

The really gruesome stuff just pushed buttons for me. I’d never seen anything like that before. So those are the three comic books that I actually COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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bought. Then there was a time right around there that the family went up for a trip somewhere, and some relative who had kids who read comics had a big box of comic books they were getting rid of. So my mother said, “Here, here are these comics.” Of course, she didn’t look to see what kind they were.

And it was two stacks of pre-Code horror comics.

CBA: [laughs] Jackpot!

Don: I was the most quiet little boy ever in that backseat. She had no idea what I was reading. Then, of course, later she happened to find them and looked through them and, like so many mothers, did me the “big favor” of cleaning out my room and they were tossed.

But later most of the ones that were memorable I was able to get through used bookshops over the years.

But those served as my introduction to horror comics.

At the time, I was like a lot of kids at that era: Mainly reading Superman, the DC and the Dell comics. So it was somewhat later when I really got into horror comics. And, unfortunately, then they weren’t being published anymore!

CBA: Did you have a television at a young age in the house?

Don: Well, we had a TV. We weren’t the first on the block to have one. It really was true what they say about that era, that whoever had the first TV, that’s where all the other neighbors went in the evenings. And our neighbor next door had a set and my aunt and uncle had a set, so my early experiences of TV were in other people’s homes. We had just bought a piano, and my mother gave me this song and dance about, “Well, people don’t have both a TV and a piano.” When I didn’t buy that explanation, it changed to, “Well, we’re waiting for color TV to come in and be perfected.” Sooner or later, we did get a set, I think around 1952, because I remember shows that I saw that I tracked down from ’51 that I’d seen on a friend’s TV. CBA: Did you watch Creature Features?

Don: Well, in 1951 we didn’t have any monster movie shows, per se…

CBA: I meant later on, as you were growing up.

Don: In 1951, there was a local show out of Chicago which was called Murder Before Midnight. To my knowledge, it had the very first TV horror host ever, predating even Vampira by a few years. The show would open with a lot of fog and smoke and there was a host who wore a swami outfit. He would be sitting there, gesturing over this crystal ball, and then we’d hear his spooky voice, “Welcome to Murder Before Midnight. Tonight’s movie is…” Then the camera would dolly into the crystal ball and the movie would literally start inside the crystal ball. They were running things like the old PRC and Monogram pictures. The first horror movie I remember seeing was a movie called The Face of Marble, which had to do with bringing the dead back to life. That I recall vividly. Those images were with me for maybe twenty-some years until I actually found out what that movie was called and talked to anybody else who had ever seen it. I used to October 2002

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describe it to people, and nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. And they ran the Kane Richman Shadow films and some of that sort of thing.

One of the other movies I saw, as a kid, on TV, which had a profound influence on me was the 1940 One Million B.C. That was again seen on my neighbor’s set.

As far as theaters go, as a little kid anyway, horror movies kind of scared me. I was afraid to go on dark rides in amusement parks. I didn’t like things jumping out at me, didn’t like darkness. That was all conquered years later, when I discovered there were such things as make-up and special effects with Creature from the Black Lagoon.

CBA: When were you introduced to dinosaurs?

Don: I discovered dinosaurs on a number of occasions when I was a little kid. When I was six or seven years old.

I remember a kid coming to grammar school one day with a postcard, a reproduction of a mural by Charles R. Knight from Chicago’s Field Museum, of a Stegosaurus. He said, “This is a dinosaur.” I really didn’t know what a dinosaur was. Then I was at a Cub Scout meeting once, and some kid had brought in a children’s book on natural history, and there were pictures of dinosaurs in there. So I had these fleeting images. I really wasn’t aware, except they were these really coollooking animals. We had a children’s book, I remember, in first grade, called Oil, that was on the shelf, and there were pictures of dinosaurs in there. I still didn’t know what they were. Then the TV show, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, had dinosaurs in one or two episodes. Again, they were kind of neat, but I didn’t know what dinosaurs were. When I asked my mother one day what a dinosaur was, she showed me an encyclopedia that had three of those Charles Knight murals, including the one that was on that postcard, reproduced as photographs. I was just really fascinated by this. So she took me to the Field Museum where they had a fossils hall. Those Knight paintings were up on the wall and those big skeletons were there looking down on me. But what really pushed

Inset left: The “barbarian” makes a vow on this splash page from Dagar the Invincible #1. Words by Don Glut, art by Jesse Santos. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Below: Writer Don Glut in 1971, around the time of his tenure as Gold Key scripter.

Courtesy of Don Glut.

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Above: Don Glut’s father, who died a hero’s death before the writer was born. Inset right: Don dons a Captain America costume and poses with lovely lass at a mid-’60s comic con. Below: Gettin’ ready for the wild, wild West, it’s Don Glut as a wee lad.

All courtesy of Don Glut.

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my buttons was, very shortly after that, two things happened within maybe the same month, maybe the same week. A movie called The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was released, first run, in Chicago, and the first issue of Joe Kubert’s Tor, then called One Million Years Ago, came out. Those two things together were really what cemented everything and got me on a track pursuing information about prehistoric life. I remember reading that first issue of Tor on the way to the drive-in theater that ran The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Those two just influenced me tremendously.

CBA: So did you start accumulating information on dinosaurs?

Don: Yes. After The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Tor, I started to pursue information on a more non-fictional level. In Tor they had this section called “Prehistoric Animals Scrapbook,” where they had factual information about dinosaurs, cavemen and whatever. In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, there was a scene where this guy was trying to identify the beast, and a paleontologist came over with a whole batch of photos.

As he was going through all these pictures and drawings and everything, trying to identify the beast, that inspired me to look for information on the other different kinds of prehistoric animals. I started going to the library, and finally, after I’d taken out all of the children’s books so many times that I could almost recite them by heart, I talked my mother, who had an adult card, talked her into taking out adult dinosaur books, you know, technical books and things, that would go out on her card. In those days, if you were a child, you could only take out children’s books. So I was reading college-level books on paleontology when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I found that the more I got into it, that the scientific reality of these animals was a lot more fascinating than the fantasy aspects that got me interested in the first place. There was a period in my life where I went to college, moved out to the West Coast from Chicago to go to the University of Southern California. This would have been in the ’60s, when my interest in dinosaurs waned for a while. I was really more into the movies and being a rock ’n’ roll star along with the serials, horror films, and all that sort of thing. Even though I never lost the interest in paleontology, at that point it probably cooled off for a while.

Jim Danforth, the stop-motion animator, and Tom Scherman, who was a special effects model-maker, were sitting around my apartment one day, and Jim was just getting ready to leave in a few days for England to do the effects for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and I had been talking about a book that somebody as a kid told me existed. It was allegedly called the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, and it reportedly

had every single dinosaur in it. I spent years looking for that book!

In bookstores, in libraries, bedeviling poor librarians. Finally, a couple of years later, this kid told me it was a joke, just a wild goose chase he sent me on. So I told them the story, and Jim and Tom said, “You’re a writer. Why don’t you write that book yourself?” And a little bell went off in the back of my head and I said, “Yeah! Why not?”

So that’s how the original Dinosaur Dictionary book came about. And it was at that point that I really got clicked into high gear. All the old feelings came back, and I started associating with paleontologists and really getting the hardcore information. So it just snowballed from that point on.

CBA: When did you start writing?

Don: Well, I always wrote. As a kid, I wrote my own stories and wrote and drew my own comics, usually horror and prehistoric adventure. I published a fanzine back in the early ’60s that I published with a friend of mine named Dick Andersen called Shazam. It was our own version of Screen Thrills Illustrated, but also included comics and science-fiction, everything we were interested in. I’d written for other people’s fanzines, too. I was never very good in school in my writing classes, I always got just fair grades in those classes. A lot of it had to do with apathy because the teachers, as soon as they found out what I was interested in, they wouldn’t let me write about those subjects.

So I felt I was always being suppressed as far as my creativity. I never really learned how to write until I actually had to do it. I had gone through a couple of “careers” that didn’t really pan out the way I wanted them to. One was the music business, which I was in for a number of years. And we almost made it several times as a rock band. We had Michael Nesmith [of The Monkees] as our producer, and we did a lot of recording, etc. Then I did a little acting. I actually did a TV commercial with Dick Clark and got good residuals from it for about a year. I did some writing, too.

When the smoke cleared, I found out that the thing I could make my living off of was writing. I wasn’t very good at the time, but I just read a lot and imitated other writers a lot. I made my first sale in 1966. It was for three articles, one of which was under the pen name Don Grant and one of which was not credited at all, to a magazine called Modern Monsters. Within a couple of issues I was editing the magazine and even posing for some of the mail order photos. Those were my first professional sales. It was very difficult for the first few years, without having a lot of credits, without having a decent résumé as far as writing. I never really set out to be a writer; I set out not to work. I set out to have some kind of a profession that I enjoyed doing that was not a nine-to-five job. When the music career didn’t pan out, when the acting thing didn’t work (I wasn’t really that interested in acting), I tried other things. I even had stunt man training for a while, trained by professional stuntman John Hagner. I almost did a Wild West show with John in North Dakota. When I wasn’t quite good enough for that, I found that I could write stories and articles and things and could sell them. That’s how it all started.

CBA: Was encountering Famous Monsters of Filmland an important moment?

Don: Discovering Famous Monsters was one of those pivotal points in my life. At the time, there weren’t magazines that specialized in publishing photographs from horror films. A few friends and I used to collect pictures from magazines, newspapers and ads, and paste them into scrapbooks. We had kind of a rivalry among the three of us, about who could get the most pictures in their scrapbooks. Getting a COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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picture of the Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man, or Dracula… you never saw that in magazines back then, except for one issue of Photoplay I saw that came out when they released the Shock Theatre package to television in 1957.

They had an article on that with a nice photo of Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. But getting a whole magazine, it never entered your mind that such a thing could ever exist. I remember walking down my street, Magnolia Street in Chicago, and one of these friends of mine, Victor Fabian, who lived on the third floor two buildings down from mine, called me from the window, and he opened the window. He had a copy of the first issue of Famous Monsters in his hand, and opened it up, and there were two pages of just photos of the Frankenstein monster. He said, “Look what I got!” And then he wouldn’t let me come up and see it. It was, like, the most infuriating moment of my life! Of course, I was finally able to track down three copies of that issue of FM within the next few weeks. What did I do to those copies of the same issue? Cut the pictures out, paste them into scrapbooks. And I saved the third one.

Who would have known that these things would be valuable someday? What was really important about Famous Monsters is that its editor, Forrest J. Ackerman, gave a lot of people like myself (who were making amateur movies, putting out fanzines, doing amateur artwork, and writing stories) a place where you could get your work seen and other people could comment on it. Before that, I was making these amateur horror films in my basement, in cemeteries, and in alleyways. The only people that ever saw those were my friends and relatives. Suddenly, with FM, there was a platform. Some of us got in touch with others, and we would become friends, and some of us, as years went by, became business associates and worked together professionally. So Famous Monsters is probably more important than Forry even realizes as far as creating this network of people with mutual interests, who before that didn’t have anybody to share those interests.

CBA: You obviously became an avid reader of the magazine, right?

Don: Oh, I read every word, every ad, even the contents page.

Every word of those issues I read, from cover to cover, really.

CBA: Did you write letters of comment to the magazine?

Don: Yes, I wrote a lot of letters to Famous Monsters. None of them ever got published, strangely enough, but I did write letters and sent in photos of my amateur films. They had a section there called “Graveyard Examiner,” edited by a guy named Ron Haydock, who became one of my very close friends, and I’d written a letter to Forry and the response came from Ron. We started corresponding, and found out we had a number of mutual interests besides horror films, like playing rock ’n’ roll music. And I told him about these amateur films I was doing, so he wrote the first article ever about me and the movies I was making. That established me as an amateur filmmaker at a time when nobody else, to my knowledge, was doing these sorts of things.

CBA: What year was this?

Don: Well, the article came out in FM #15 (1962). I was still in high school. I graduated in ’62.

CBA: Your friends must have been impressed!

Don: Well, that led to other magazines doing articles about me. I October 2002

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was ubiquitous in magazines like Castle of Frankenstein and Fantastic Monsters of the Films, and Famous Monsters, and I was sometimes called the king of the amateur moviemakers back then. If you look at some of the old amateur movie fanzines, I inspired a lot of people, including John Carpenter. There’s an interview with Carpenter published in Fangoria over twenty years ago and he said that he went into the movie business because he used to read all these articles about a kid named Don Glut making all these horror pictures. He said, “For a long time I wanted to be Don Glut,” or something very close to that. Once I read that, I called Carpenter’s office. Of course, he never responded, but he claims I inspired him, so I was very happy about that.

CBA: Amateur animators like Jim Danforth were making their own films, too?

Don: Yeah, a lot of these people were doing it, like I was, on my own. I didn’t know anybody else was doing it. Now I find out that there were people way back in the 1920s, the ’40s, etc., making amateur horror pictures. Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, this kind of thing, which I never knew about, again, because they didn’t get any real publicity. I was lucky, though, to make friends with people who were publishing the monster magazines. And they would run photos from my films. I know Bob Burns told me that in his Fantastic Monsters, they used to look at me as their good luck charm. They would always try to get a picture of me in there because it was, like, you get that in there, it’s going to be a good selling issue. [laughter] CBA: You were known in Chicago fandom circles, right?

Don: Yes. Chicago fandom had its own personality back then, split into two groups, the way I remember it. There was the real hardcore science-fiction group where people read literature, the magazines, the novels and all that. Then there was the other half that was into comic books and movie serials.

Chicago has always been big on comic books and

Above: Ever the hustlin’ go-getter, amateur movie director Don Glut poses with his crew on Superman vs. the Gorilla Gang in the early ’60s. Below: The writer as werewolf. Both courtesy of Don Glut.

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Above: Trio of Jesse Santos cover roughs, all for the Santos/Glut title, The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor. Courtesy of Don Glut. Art ©2002 Jesse Santos. Doctor Spektor ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

Below: Though the script was bought by Western editors, Don Glut’s origin of Doctor Spektor story was never produced. The writer believes this to be among his best comic book writing.

Courtesy of & ©2002 Don Glut.

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serials, at least back then. Serials because they were running them on television all the time. They were always running Flash Gordon, Rocket Man, Buck Rogers, all these things. I can remember as far back as about 1951 or so, seeing Flash Gordon on the TV set at a Cub Scout meeting when I was about seven. Comics because there were a number of stores in Chicago that sold back issues. And there was a lot of crossover between the two, mainly because so many of the movie serials had their lead character based on comic book heroes. You know: Superman, Batman, Captain America, The Phantom.

CBA: Obviously, fandom was coming to the fore in the early to mid-’60s, especially with the serials being rereleased, and Batmania really started from the Columbia serial.

Don: Yes, when they reissued them to theaters, I saw the first Batman serial at the Playboy Theater.

CBA: You were right there! That was a really important moment when Hugh Hefner showed that serial?

Don: Oh, yes, because people were laughing at that. I think that’s when people realized what camp was. The silly lines that were recited in dead earnest, not meant to be laughed at—and probably weren’t until Hefner started running them. Suddenly people found these very

amusing, and there was a whole new source of entertainment.

CBA: Did you see an opportunity there?

Don: Well, when I saw those Batman serials, I made my own Batman movie around that time, and I dubbed in the voices, and it’s done like what later became the Batman television show. I was a little ahead of my time on that, I think. All of my amateur super-hero films around that time were really intentionally campy. This was before the Batman TV show.

CBA: Did you look at the comics industry as a place where you could possibly work?

Don: Well, I always loved comics, and in the back of my mind was an intention to write comic books. My main dream though was to make movies, and I think I always looked at comics as a stepping stone to a film career, or something in-between. There was a point where I really was convinced that I never was going to get into movies, and so I was very comfortable at that time writing lots of comic books. I don’t think I would want to write comics now. The only comic book I would really want to do now is… there’s an artist in Chicago named Brian Thomas and he and I for years have tried to interest a publisher in a revival of the early ’50s Briefer Frankenstein book, and we just have never been able to do it. That would be a labor of love. Don’t tell my friend Brian this, but I would do it for free because I love that character and that book so much. Brian told me he won’t do it for free! I don’t think I would want to write comics as my “day job” again, but for a while, yes, I did want to write comic books. But I knew that I didn’t want to do it forever. I don’t know that if it ever really occurred to me if I would. When I was really writing a lot of comics, too, I had a number of friends who were writers and artists, like Roy Thomas and Rick Hoberg, and we hung out a lot, even though I was living out in California. So there was a camaraderie there, and there were a lot of parties and socializing and that kind of thing. But still, in the back of my mind, was the desire to make movies.

CBA: When Warren came out with Creepy and Eerie, that must have been of interest to you, right?

Don: Well, yes, for a couple reasons. First of all, they were horror stories that weren’t restricted by the Code, and I liked that. I was getting to read new stories with vampires and werewolves. But I also was able to make my first professional sale as a comics writer to Warren. The first story I ever had published was in an issue of Creepy [#29], and that was in 1969. So that was the first time I’d ever sold a story. I tried before that, tried selling stories to Charlton, DC, just about everybody. Writing full scripts and sending them out, even trying to come up with some new character ideas, but nothing ever happened. I got into Creepy through Famous Monsters. Forry COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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Ackerman called and said Jim Warren was looking for new writers, and at that time Warren was really looking for writers to adapt public domain classic stories, so Jim gave me a story by Washington Irving called, “The Devil of the Marsh.” So I adapted that, and that was my first published comic book story.

CBA: And you were a pretty frequent contributor to Warren for a couple of years.

Don: Right. In fact, the first issue of Vampirella, except for Forry’s opening story with the character and a story Nick Cuti wrote in the back, I wrote the entire issue. Which was just reprinted, and I tried getting some money out of it, but apparently the copyright laws from back then don’t apply in the same way they do today, so I couldn’t get any reprint money. But I tried!

CBA: Vampirella was probably the magazine you contributed to most, right?

Don: I never thought about which I did the most for, but you’re probably right.

CBA: For whatever it’s worth, I always associated you as a Vampirella writer at Warren. Was it fun to mix horror and sex?

Don: Yes, and that’s probably why I did more Vampirella stories. It was fun. It was pretty tame stuff we were doing back then. We were just trying to figure out ways to get the female characters to get their clothes ripped off. But it was the first material like that I’d ever done. The biggest thing was: how am I going to show this to my mother, who was extremely prudish.

That was the big thing. I very gingerly, I remember, brought the issue out, and said, “Mom, now, don’t get upset when you see this,” and I flash her the Frazetta cover.

“Ennh, okay.” [laughter] But, yeah, it was fun. I’ve always liked beautiful women and sexy stuff, so it was right up my alley.

CBA: It must have been gratifying to have Neal Adams do a wonderful pencil job over your script [“Goddess from the Sea,” Vampirella #1]….

Don: Yes. I think that was among some of the first work I’d ever seen him do. I was really flattered when I saw his name on my story. I was aware of his previous work, but I don’t think he was as big then as he eventually got.

CBA: Well, he certainly was on a roll. I think Vampirella was in 1969, and he really started hitting his stride by ’68.

Don: Reed Crandall was another big one for me, because I always loved Crandall’s artwork. And he was an EC artist!

CBA: Were you able to talk to either of them?

Don: I met Neal a few times years later, but I never met Reed Crandall.

CBA: At the time, were you still in Chicago?

Don: Oh, no. By then, I was in California. I moved out of Chicago in 1964. I was 20 years old, had spent two years at De Paul University in Chicago, and I wanted to transfer to USC because I heard they had something called a “film department.” So when I found out that you could go to school and your homework was actually making movies… to me, that was like the start of a new life. I was getting out of Chicago, because if you’re a creative person in that city, it is not a good place to live. There’s something about Chicago that stifles creativity, and I’ve never been able to figure out if it’s the politics or just the general hog-butcher-for-the-world mentality or what. I don’t know anybody who’s still in Chicago who has any dreams or aspirations to do anything important or interesting with their lives. Most of the people I know there October 2002

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work in offices or have blue collar jobs. For the most part they hate their jobs, or at least they don’t like them. They work, come home, pay their taxes, watch sit-coms, and go back to work the next day. All they talk about is the Cubs and their kids. That’s it. I’m not interested in either of those things.

Most of my friends from Chicago who achieved some success in the arts, which include films, music, art, comics, writing—whatever—had gotten out of the city. I mean, I know people who are close to sixty years old still living in their parents’ homes. They never go anywhere, and I just can’t live like that. So I decided to move out to California to get into film school and to get away from that kind of society. So I moved out here in ’64, and I really didn’t know what I

Above: Jesse Santos gave this portrait of the good doctor and his Native American assistant to writer Don Glut. Courtesy of Don. Art ©2002 Jesse Santos.

Characters ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Inset left: The writer posing next to the (unpublished?) Jesse Santos Santos pin-ups of Tragg (offcamera), Doctor Spektor, and Dagar. Say, Mr. G., what say you share Xeroxes of the Tragg and Dagar pieces with us? Courtesy of Don Glut. Characters ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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Above: 1975 San Diego ComicCon panel. From left: Jack Katz, Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Don Glut, and Marv Wolfman.

Below: Writer Don Glut at the same San Diego Con talking about his Gold Key comics work.

Both courtesy of Don Glut.

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wanted to do for a long time. As I said, I tried all kinds of things: I was in the music business for a number of years, and that was wonderful, because we had the groupies, were recording, playing gigs and all that, all the parties, the girls, and everything. I had that brief acting phase, the stuntman phase, too, but I just sort of slipped into writing and found that I could make a living off of that.

So my first professional writing of any sort wasn’t until 1966, for Modern Monsters, which was two years after I moved out here.

CBA: Do you remember a young fan named Doug Moench?

Don: You bet. Doug and I met in my basement during a screening of one of these old serials that we used to rent when I was in town before his “cool” transformation. I haven’t seen him in a few years. I talked to him about a year ago, tried to get him to invest some money in one of our movies. I know Doug very well. In fact, Doug introduced me to my future ex-wife. He had met a girl in Chicago named Brenda, then was writing these letters to me about how wonderful and good-looking she was. Then he later said, “You’ll never believe it: she’s got an identical twin sister!” I went back and said, “Okay, Moench, I want you to introduce me. But I don’t go out on blind dates, I don’t want any surprises. I’ve had a couple of those in my life, which I really regretted.” I said, “Bring Brenda over and I’ll check her out, and if she looks as good as you say and I say okay, then I’ll go out with Linda.” And we did that, and the rest is history.

So Doug introduced me to my ex-wife. [laughs] (Linda would appear as a character, by the way, in the fourth issue of Doctor Spektor.)

CBA: And you were able to give him some entree over at Warren?

Don: No, Doug sold his first stories to Warren on his own. But I got in through Forry Ackerman. At the time I was feuding with [the publisher] Jim Warren himself. I won’t go into any details, it was a real lurid little story. But… CBA: Aww, come on. [laughs] Don: Nah, it involves too many close friends.

Anyway, I didn’t think Warren would buy anything with my name on it. So my first sales to Warren were actually not for Creepy, but for a text article in Famous Monsters [#56?], on Boris Karloff, when the actor died. And I used the name Victor Morrison, which was a combination of Victor Jory and Brett Morrison, actors who played The Shadow, one in the movie serial and one on the radio show. Warren liked what I wrote. Then I submitted that first Creepy story under the same pseudonym. Then Warren said, “Who is this writer? I like this writer.” Forry finally broke down and told him it was me and explained the situation. Warren said, “Ahh, no hard feelings.” So, from that point on, everything was done under my real name and I did a lot of work for Warren. I don’t remember exactly

why I stopped. I think a lot of other writers came in at that point and I guess they just liked the other writers’ work better.

New editors came in, and I think they just liked the other writers better, a different style.

CBA: Later on you did do some super-hero work, but were you interested in that genre in comics at all?

Don: Oh, yes. When I was in my real “comics fan” days, still living in Chicago, super-heroes took top priority over the horror and everything else.

CBA: Were you interested in getting into Marvel?

Don: Oh, yes, but it was difficult, you know. Living in California….

It was hard then to sell anything to a New York company (a) if you were not part of a little “in-group,” or (b) if you were living out of the state without a track record. I didn’t really start doing a lot of super-heroes until my old friend Roy Thomas moved to California. I was close by, so we could work together on a lot of things.

CBA: So you two hit it off?

Don: To this day, Roy and I are really, really good friends. Just like Ron Haydock, Roy and I have a lot of common interests that have nothing to do with comics. We all played and sang in rock ’n’ roll bands and that sort of thing, so we had a lot to relate to on a more than just comic book level.

CBA: Obviously, you’re in Southern California and there was actually a comics publisher out in Beverly Hills: Western Publishing.

Don: The way I got in with Western was strange, almost through a side door. Boris Karloff died, and for that issue of Famous Monsters I told you about, there was also a paperback Forry was putting together for Ace Books called The Frankenscience Monster, which he had to get it out within a few days because Ace wanted to capitalize on Karloff’s death and popularity. So Forry wanted to know if I would do some writing. I said, “Okay, I just don’t want to do the same old stuff. I don’t want to do a biography of Karloff, and I don’t want to do a plot synopsis of Frankenstein.” So I suggested, “How about an article on Karloff in the comics?” Forry said, “Fine. Sounds good.” So I knew that Western was publishing a Boris Karloff comic book. So I called Western up and spoke to one of the editors named Chase Craig, and Chase referred me over to an assistant who did basically correction art and anything else that needed to be done, I believe, named Bernie Zuber. Bernie was also a comic book fan. So I went in there and Bernie gave me all kinds of information on the Karloff book, when it was published, when it started, and all that.

While I was at Western—I’ve always been a hustler, and never let a situation pass me by—so I thought, “Here I am at Western Publishing Company. They publish comic books. While I am here, I am going to make a pitch.” So I talked to Chase, and said I’d like to write some scripts sometime. The way Western worked—and it’s I think to their credit—they had a certain central loyalty to their contributors. If they had two or three whose work they really liked, Western would try to give those people as much work as possible, because they knew the artists and writers had families to support and had to make a living. So there was nothing there for me then, but a few months later I got a phone call, and it was from Chase. He said, “Look, we’re looking for somebody to write text stories for some of the books.” You know, those text stories they needed to get the Second Class mailing permits. So I wrote a couple science-fiction stories for Magnus or something, but they were never published. But my foot was in the door at that point. Then, maybe six months later, I got a call from Chase’s partner, the other editor there, named Del Connell, who said, “Hey, we’re doing a new book called Mystery Comics Digest. Have you ever written this sort of thing?” You know, I had a lot of experience with Warren, so I said, “Sure.” I went in and submitted a few scripts, and they bought them instantly, because they really liked them. Ironically, the first one they bought, which was called “Mask of the Mummy,” was illustrated by Jesse Santos. So that’s where Jesse and I began our long association. The mummy in that story, named Ra-Ka-Tep, I eventually used as the mummy COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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character in the Doctor Spektor books.

So I started writing Mystery Comics Digest, and in one I introduced a new host character, Doctor Spektor, who was influenced by such earlier features as “The Secret Files of Dr. Drew” and The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves at Charlton. I did a number of those stories where Spektor just hosted the tale, and didn’t really partake in the action. Then one day Del called and said, “Hey, we really like this character. We’d like you to do a whole Doctor Spektor book.” I said, “Oh, great!” So he let me go off to write the book. What I brought in was not what they had anticipated, what they wanted. Gold Key thought I was going to bring in three stories with Doctor Spektor just narrating, and I brought in a book-length story in which he was the lead character. They didn’t know what to do. They felt a little guilty because I had written a whole 25-page story, and thought people would only respond to a character like that if he was introducing the tales. I said, “Look, why don’t you just try it?” They hemmed and hawed, and finally put the book out, and it became an ongoing series from that point on.

After the first issue, they wouldn’t let me do full-length stories; they really liked that idea of him introducing the stories. So for a while anyway, there was a back-up story in each issue where Spektor was simply the host.

CBA: When you first saw Jesse’s work, what did you think of it?

Don: It was great! Jesse had a whole style that was totally unlike anything Gold Key was doing at the time, maybe unlike anything they’d ever done. Oh, let me back track a bit. So that was the trade-off we made: They would let me do the story of Doctor Spektor if we could also have the backup story he would narrate. So the next few issues were like that until I started coming up with stories that had so much plot they wouldn’t fit, and they let me try a full-length book and it just stayed that way from that point on. Also, once Spektor became a werewolf, Del thought it implausible that he’d still be narrating stories while having to deal with his new “affliction.”

CBA: Do you have any idea what Western’s thinking was for the short stories? Were they thinking about overseas sales, things like that?

Don: Western was constantly talking about reprinting. They didn’t like topical things that dated the books because they might want to reprint them.

There were all kinds of strange little restrictions that had to do with reprinting the books. I know about foreign language issues… I’m trying to think what some of those other things they told me I couldn’t do because of reprint… Oh, they wouldn’t let me do double-page spreads, because they never knew if the pages would be published exactly, if the righthand page would be the righthand page when reprinted.

One thing I learned from working with Russ Manning was what you should see on the last panel of a lower right hand corner before you turned the page. So I was using what I learned from Russ in those stories. If they were October 2002

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going to print the pages out of order, so to speak, that would have thrown everything out of whack. The Western editors weren’t of the same thinking as Russ. They didn’t think there was any artistry or any real thought that went behind the way you paced a page. To them, it didn’t matter. Sometimes they would cut a panel out because it had too much character in it or something and not enough action. They would literally shift up my whole story for one panel for the rest of the book and it would drive me crazy. So I had to kind of out-think them and learn how to pace and not put anything in that I thought they might take out. And that took some doing. But they were thinking of reprints.

If you think of how many anthology books they were doing back then, they really liked those kinds of books. They really liked books and series with the words “Tales of” in them. I remember when I did Dagar the Invincible, they wanted to call it Tales of Sword and Sorcery. I kept telling them, “That’s not the way comics are done today.”

The real problem was that they didn’t have a clue as to what was being published by the other companies, and had no interest. They would get stacks of comics from DC and Marvel, which they would give to me unopened because they just didn’t have any interest. They would look at me and say, “You think people really want to read this stuff?” I said, “They’re selling really well.” They would say, “Well, we don’t want to do books like that, we don’t want to make all the money… ” You know, those kinds of statements. But the whole atmosphere was different if you went up to DC or Marvel, there were a lot of youngish people running around in T-shirts and long hair. At Western, everybody wore suits and ties, and for a while they offered me an editorship there when Del was going to retire. The first thing they told me was that I’d have to cut my hair if I took that job. But what killed my chances was when I asked them—here’s a direct quote: “If I take this job, how much control will

Above: The only picture one-time rocker Don Glut found of his membership in the Mike (Monkees) Nesmith-produced band, Penny Arkade, was this Teen Beat article from March 1968 (Vol. 3, #7). ©2002 the respective copyright holder.

Inset left: Vignette of Frank Frazetta’s great Vampirella #1 cover painting. Though we hardly touch upon the writer’s work for Warren’s black-&-white horror mags in the late 1960s, Don Glut contribute plenty to the titles. For instance, Don wrote all but one story in the first issue of Vampi. ©2002 Warren Publishing.

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Above: Jesse Santos cover rough.

Courtesy of Don Glut. Art ©2002 Jesse Santos. Characters ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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I have over these books?” And they looked at me like, “What do you mean?” I said,“Well, if I want to have stronger continuity, if I want to do footnotes, if I want to do a letters page… ” I never got the job, Bill Spicer got it. I was glad, because I didn’t want to sit there in an office from nine-to-five with short hair and a shirt and a tie, doing something I didn’t like. You felt like you were up in an insurance company office or something, and there was no passion.

When you went to Marvel or DC, you had the feeling that when people left the office, they took their projects home with them and lived those projects all weekend, whereas at Western, when that five o’clock came along, you punched out, went home, and just didn’t think about work, you never even thought about comics, let alone talked about them. At DC and Marvel, you got the feeling that these were basically fans that became pros, and they were still fans when they left the office on Friday night. At Gold Key, the people were not former fans. They were simply hired, having had art, writing or editing skills in other areas. Del Connell, for instance, was an animator who had worked on some of the classic Disney animated features. Everyone at Marvel and DC seemed younger, at least at heart, while the Gold Key staffers seemed much “older,” more mature.

CBA: So Western was obviously a conservative place? Did you get that feeling because comics were relatively a small percentage of what they did?

Don: Well, you’ve got to remember, Western Publishing Company was an enormous company that also did Big Little Books and just everything else under the sun.

CBA: Coloring books, Golden Books, Whitman Books….

Don: Plus, they had the much bigger office in New York, where some of the comics, like Turok and Twilight Zone, were published, but also a lot of the other stuff as well. So comics were a really big part of Western Publishing Company’s California office, but they had done comics the same way since they were still doing the Dell books.

Nothing had ever changed, and they were living in constant fear of offending Disney. They didn’t want to lose the Disney account, so any time you got anything that was even slightly something that they thought maybe Disney might take notice of and not find favor with, it got pulled, got rejected and got taken out. They lived with this cloud of gloom, this Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads all the time, worrying that Disney, for some reason or another, was going to pull out.

CBA: Did you like the Gold Key books at all, during the ’60s?

Don: As a kid, I loved Turok, Son of Stone, even though it had

pretty much the same plot every story. As a little kid, I liked Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and all those. I also loved Jesse Marsh’s Tarzan books, as well as Russ Manning’s Tarzan. But most of the Gold Key books I didn’t really read or buy when I was a younger kid. I liked the movie adaptations, some of those things. But they were just so antiseptic. Obviously, they were geared for a totally different audience, which was not the comic book fan.

CBA: You mentioned that before you were writing for Western, you worked for Russ Manning?

Don: No. During the time, after I got the gig with Western. I met Russ at a convention. It was a witchcraft and sorcery con in Los Angeles, and we were on a panel together. We struck up a conversation, and he mentioned he was just starting to do a series of Tarzan albums for foreign release, and asked if I might be interested in writing some. So I went out to Russ’s place. I think the second time I went with my girlfriend—she wasn’t my ex-wife yet—and Bill Stout.

The three of us went out, because Bill was going to do some color work and Linda was going to work with Bill as his assistant. That’s when I spent the first evening with Russ. We sat down and talked about comics. We had a couple other conversations, as well. He said, “I’m going to insist on a few things here.” I said, “What?” He said, “These are the way I draw comic book stories.”

One of the things Russ mentioned was that on the last panel of what you see when those two pages are open, whether there’s an ad on the right side or whatever, so it could be a left-hand page, but the last thing you see should either be some kind of moment of crisis or shock or impact, or a scene change, because that motivates the reader to turn the page. So that’s one of the things he taught me.

When I tried that at Western, I had to take in consideration the ads, which always appeared in the same place, issue after issue. Russ taught me a lot of about pacing.

The first story I submitted to him was written more like Marvel style—I don’t mean art first, it was from a full script, but real caption-heavy, with a lot of unnecessary dialogue, people constantly talking rather than just doing things. So those are the things I really learned from Russ, how to pace a story, not use too much dialogue, and this thing about this last right-hand panel.

At Western, it was very difficult even to attempt writing too much dialogue or captions. We literally had to rule off, into panels, a sheet of typing paper and write everything— descriptions, dialogue, everything—within the space of those panels. Furthermore, Western gave you three “style sheets.”

They had just three panel-arrangement formats that the writer had to follow. It wasn’t until later, where I got a bit more freedom with Dagar, Spektor and Tragg, that I was able to get more creative in my panel breakdowns.

CBA: Was Mark Evanier there at the time?

Don: Yeah, I think he’s always been there. I can’t remember when he wasn’t, since I’ve been there. He handled more the funny books, and I handled the adventure stuff that was not COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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being written by whoever was not writing Tarzan, Brothers of the Spear, and those things. Mark once described my Western work as, “an island of adventure in a sea of ducks.”

CBA: So would you characterize yourself as pretty much the hippest person at Western? Maybe the person with the fullest appreciation of pop culture?

Don: “Hippest” in that environment is not saying much. I could be the biggest nerd in the world and maybe that statement would still be accurate. Yeah, they had no sense of rock ’n’ roll or counter-culture, any of that sort of thing. Of course, they also wanted to stay away from a lot of that type of thing. I tried introducing things that had never been seen before. I found a script to a Doctor Spektor story that never came out. They bought several that never came out because the book got cancelled. But I saved the scripts, and did an origin of Doctor Spektor. This was when Bill Spicer was editing it. And I’d forgotten how “hip” it was, if you want to call it that. It has Spektor growing up in the ’50s, listening to all the old radio shows and reading EC comics, hanging out with motorcycle gangs and things, and corresponding with the real Sherlock Holmes. All this kind of thing. I set it on my street in Chicago. I had everything listed, like the movie theaters and everything were the real places. It was really me, it was what I was doing back then, except Spektor was a little older than me by a few years, and I basically took my own background and I made it his origin story, and then he became Doctor Spektor. Because I always really, in many ways, identified with that character. I even grew a beard and moustache for a while like his. So it was a very personal story. But in this story, I mentioned things that I never could have gotten away with when Del Connell was still editing. I have a scene where Spektor was watching Tom Corbett on TV. I don’t say what the show is, but it’s like the character Roger Manning saying, “Go blow your jets,” and all these things he said on the show.

And that was probably the “hippest” story I ever did for Western.

CBA: That was not published?

Don: No. There were two full unpublished scripts I did on Doctor Spektor. They were even edited.

They were breaking it down to the art. There’s at least one Dagar, at least one Tragg, and a bunch of plot synopses that would have taken them a few issues beyond. It’s really a shame, because the best Doctor Spektor story I ever did, maybe one of the best comic book stories I ever did, maybe because it was so personal and real, was that origin story.

CBA: Damn! We’ve got to team you up with Jesse again!

Don: I don’t know who even owns the rights to those stories.

CBA: I would think and would believe that they still do. But I guess you could change the guy’s name, right? [laughs] Don: Well, I’m doing a movie script right now—I can’t give the title out yet, because it’s too good, I don’t want anybody to steal it—where the lead character is a parapsychologist, psychic investigator who has this live-in, beautiful, sexually-frustrated assistant girlfriend— CBA: Hey, this sounds familiar! [laughs] Don: —who’s always coming on to him and he’s always too busy. Of October 2002

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course, then he falls for a beautiful werewolf, which throws everything out of whack. But it’s very much patterned on Spektor, even though he doesn’t have a beard, he’s got a different name. But you can’t really trademark the psychic investigator angle.

I always looked at the character as Sherlock Holmes, anyway. Sherlock Holmes with a little Van Helsing thrown in.

CBA: The coolest thing about Gold Key for me in the ’70s was to pick up Doctor Spektor and Dagar and think, “Where did this come from?” I mean, these were not typical Gold Key comics; these were cool!

Because you were so tied to one artist, Jesse Santos, and because the characters really did interact with each other, it was like a little universe unto itself, the Glutverse!

Don: It’s funny. That universe is a little bit bigger than you might realize. If you read the stuff I did for Marvel, DC, Red Circle, and even Charlton, there’s crossovers running rampant. The Demonomicon, my version of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon turns up in all these other titles, there’s a mini-continuity running through all these books. The character Graylin from Dagar, who was named after my future ex-wife Linda Gray, rides off in one issue of Dagar, the last you ever see of her at Gold Key. Then a few months later, a character with amnesia but looking exactly the same, turns up in Marvel’s Kull the Destroyer. She’s got these memories of this barbarian boyfriend, and she doesn’t remember who she is. Finally she gets her memory back, doesn’t say who she is, but she goes off again.

I worked that Dark Gods/Warrior Gods thing into novels and movies I’ve done. When I die, somebody with a lot of extra time on their hands, can figure all this stuff out. I was influenced heavily by Philip José Farmer and Edgar Rice Burroughs, who both used to do a lot of this crossbreeding.

Right now, I’m working on this mummy film which includes a couple of references to Doctor Spektor. This werewolf movie I just mentioned, the “Secret Script,” is going to have references to Spektor in it. All of these movies cross-pollinate. I treated Spektor himself as a real character. Every word ever coming out of his mouth, whether it was in a comic book story—and they were all written in first-person, if you remember, everything was from his point of view—I also wrote articles under his name as if he were the author, which I personally signed his name to. In fact, I even signed my name to some of the comic art when there was a document in the story with his name on it, that’s my signature. I now use the name “A. Spektor” as references in things I write. In my Frankenstein novel series, there will be some “according to A. Spektor, PhD” references. In the mummy film that

Above: We’re not exactly sure why Western initiated it’s showcase title, Gold Key Spotlight, (especially considering the featured Glut/Santos characters still had their own titles at the time) but as Ye Ed always had a softspot for these types of comics, the more the merrier! Here’s another Jesse Santos cover rough.Courtesy of Don Glut. Art ©2002 Jesse Santos. Characters ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Inset left: Bring it on, spacedudes! Prehistoric couple Tragg and Lorn face the future—or, at least, superior technology—in this vignetted detail from the splash page of Tragg and the Space Gods #1. When artist Jesse Santos’s animation work became too taxing, Dan Spiegle finished up the title’s run with writer Don Glut. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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Above: Rick Hoberg illustrated this letterhead for Don Glut. Courtesy of Don. All characters ©2002 their respective copyright holders.

we just finished, The Mummy’s Kiss, his name is in the credits and acknowledgements.

His name has even turned up in the acknowledgements of my dinosaur books.

So there’s a lot more to this continuity than anybody has ever dreamed of, and sometime somebody with nothing else to do is going to figure some of this out. Even the editors didn’t know most of this continuity was even going on.

Gold Key didn’t like continued stories because they really believed that nobody was going to read two consecutive issues. And that no one would remember. That’s why there’s no footnotes saying “see last issue” or “seen in #34” or anything like that. So at times I would have to wait and hope that they wouldn’t remember that this was a character I used before. So, I had to wind up the Dagar/Scorpio and Spektor/Werewolf “story arcs” (I’m really tired of that term!) in just a few issues.

CBA: Did you know Gerry Boudreau?

Don: Yes, I did very well. I used to hang out with him when he was living out here in California. He did his own cross-continuity between Doctor Strange and Dark Shadows once.

CBA: Plus he related two back-up stories in DC’s Star-Spangled War Stories, drawn by Walter Simonson, to his scripts in Star Trek.

Steve Skeates did the same thing with Aquaman and Sub-Mariner.

Above, left & right: Besides his ambitious crosscompany continuity (linking, for instance, Dagar the Invincible with Marvel’s Kull the Destroyer), another Don Glut trademark was the inclusion of the sound effect “Kra-Ca-Lick!” which has been seen in Glut-scripted stories the industry over. Another inside joke, the effect is actually a play on a friend of Glut’s last name.

These examples appeared in various issues of Dagar the Invincible. Readers are encouraged to dig deep into their Bronze Age collections and send in their findings! (We’ll try and feature a montage in an upcoming ish of CBA). All art by Jesse Santos. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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These were interesting things to do, and really screwed with the minds of comic book fans.

Don: In Doctor Spektor, Doctor Solar mentioned this guy named Nick he had been working for. Where’s he been all these years since Solar’s book was cancelled? The text story actually spells out “SHIELD.” In a subsequent issue of Doctor Spektor that didn’t come out, where I was going to team up all the super-heroes into a group called The Gladiators, and I actually had a guy with an eyepatch smoking a cigar and he’s standing there giving orders to Doctor Solar in a big government complex. So, yeah, I had Nick Fury guest starring—sort of—in these Gold Key Comics!

I snuck a lot of stuff by. I got caught once using Barnabas Collins of Dark Shadows in a Doctor Spektor story called “Dracula’s Vampire Legion.” In that tale, Spektor says, “Well, we’ve revived these vampires. Here’s some more we’re going to revive.” Morbius stayed in there because they didn’t know who that was, also Count Noctilio, one of my own unsold characters, but the name Barnabas Collins they caught. They said, “You can’t do this! You can’t put Barnabas Collins in here!” I said, “Well, it’s a Gold Key book, isn’t it?”

They said, “Yes, but we just license that book.” I said, “Oh boy! Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.”

CBA: Did you ever get a chance to deal with Jesse Santos directly?

Don: I met Jesse a number of times. They didn’t like—“they” being the powers-that-be at Western—the artists and writers, or even artists amongst themselves or writers amongst themselves meeting each other, because the publisher was always afraid that we were going to talk about how much we were being paid more or less than the other.

The other thing is Western wanted to protect the creators as best they could from finding out about things like conventions, especially when Carl Barks started selling his stuff and became a celebrity. They were really afraid that, “If the artists and writers go to conventions, they’re gonna find out how much they’re in demand, how popular they are, and they’re gonna walk.” So it was a while before I actually met Jesse, years before I met Dan Spiegle. There was a whole different atmosphere at Western, a whole different world from the rest of mainstream comics.

CBA: What was Jesse like?

Don: Jesse was kind of a strange guy, and I mean “strange” in a nice and affectionate way. He had this huge pompadour like I did back in the 1950s. He would giggle a lot. He would constantly giggle.

You could say anything to him and he would start giggling and his whole body would shake. Very jolly. Jesse and I got along very well.

I’ve lost contact with him.

I hope he’s doing well and hope he’s in good health.

CBA: You know, it’s really interesting that you guys were constantly teamed together.

Don: Well, I think it was more of a practical thing than anything else, because before they started those books, they had their artists and writers for their existing books. There was Russ Manning doing Magnus and Tarzan, Dan Spiegle doing Space Family Robinson and Korak, Frank Thorne doing Mighty Samson. But the titles Jesse and I worked on were new books, so Russ and people like that didn’t have time to do them. So they needed a new writer and a new artist. Once they hired us, again with the thinking that they wanted to give us as much work as they COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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could so we can earn a living, they just kept giving us a lot of the same books. They took Jesse off Tragg and the Sky Gods after a while, when his workload just got to be too much.

Jesse seemed to have a strange sense of priority sometimes. If I remember correctly, he would get maybe two books, and one was due tomorrow and the other was due in three months. So, he would do the book that was due in three months first. So they took him off Tragg and they put Dan Spiegle on that title. But they kept Jesse doing the oil-painted covers.

CBA: Those are very nice paintings.

Don: Right before he went off Tragg, Jesse’s style got very loose in the Dagar and Spektor books. Sometimes it got difficult for the colorist, because Jesse would dilute his ink—or it seemed like he was diluting his ink—so you’d look at the original and it was more of a brown than black line. Often there would be no definition, no strict separation between, say, somebody’s sleeve and their arm, and the colorist didn’t know really what to color. So sometimes you would get these strange colorings where people’s arms are green and purple.

CBA: With at least Alex Niño and certainly Santos, the art could get to be hallucinogenic. I mean, I don’t know how to explain the appeal of Jesse’s work….

Don: If you look at his earlier stuff, like “The Mask of the Mummy” in the first issue of Mystery Comics Digest, it’s much much tighter than what he eventually was drawing. Compare the first issues of Dagar and Doctor Spektor to, say, the first issue of Tragg and the Sky Gods, a couple of years later, it’s like night and day.

One of the things they used to really hate at Western, was when my scripts would direct the artist to do his own thing. I knew Jesse could do these great montages, so I would just say, “Go wild, Jesse!” The editors would be afraid that he was going wild, so much so that you wouldn’t even know what was going on. So my instructions used to really irritate. Del Connell pulled me aside once, and said, “I wish you would stop saying this ‘go wild, Jesse.’”

CBA: [laughs] Were they worried he would go out all night and party and not get the job in on time?

Don: Well, being married then, I didn’t party quite as much as I do now!

CBA: They really were square, huh?

Don: Oh, you can’t believe it!

CBA: I read this article you wrote for Jim Steranko in Comixscene….

Don: Well, that has been dramatically updated and filled out for a book that just came out last year called Jurassic Classics, in which I really go into the Dagar thing a lot more. The Steranko article was mainly hype to sell the Dagar/Doctor Spektor books at the time. This revised piece is more factual and far more detailed.

CBA: I was surprised to learn that some of those Mystery Comics Digests were not all-reprint.

Don: The new stuff was all by me.

CBA: How much of a general percentage would that be?

Don: Usually three stories per issue, maybe an extra one. The original stories included “Midnight Mysteries,” profiles of Doctor Spektor…. You can tell the new material in each issue by looking at the contents page where my material was usually listed as both a story title and “series” title, e.g., Grimm’s Ghost Stories. I also did some text stories for the digests.

CBA: Tragg originally started in Mystery?

Don: No, Tragg sort of started at Warren, under a different name.

I did a story for Vampirella called “Scaly Death,” which was a dinosaur/caveman kind of thing, and I wanted to do some sequels, one of which was called “Cry of the Dire Wolf.” It was going to introduce the first werewolf to the world and give a pseudo-scientific explanation for its existence. Warren didn’t like the story… well, not Warren, but whoever was editing the books at the time rejected it. So I just kept it on file. When Mystery Comics Digest started, I reworked it into a Tragg story. So the character was kind of an offshoot of this Warren story. Then I did another Tragg story in Mystery Comics Digest.

CBA: Was it originally intended to be a continuing series from the get-go?

Don: I don’t think “Scaly Death” was. I thought of doing another one for obvious reasons. Dinosaurs, scantily-clad cave girls, what October 2002

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more can you want? My favorite comic book of all time is Joe Kubert’s Tor, and I always wanted to do my own version. So I think I was thinking of that at Warren. I even did a thing for Vampirella called “Devil Woman” many years later, which was about a cave girl (a spin on my never-sold Man-Lizard series), which was another thing altogether. I took the sequel to “Scary Death,” reworked it, and sold it to them for Mystery Comics Digest. Then I did another Tragg story about a zombie cave bear coming alive through some ritual and used Tragg and Lorn, the two characters from that earlier story. The editor said, “Well, we don’t know if we want to do this. Nobody’s going to remember…” I said, “It doesn’t matter if they’ve read the first story or not. It’s just a story where the caveman is called Tragg and his mate is called Lorn. If the readers never saw the first story, who cares? If we call them Joe and Mary, it’s the same story. Why don’t we give the fans, the few of them out there that might care about this stuff, this little extra frosting on the cake?” They hemmed and hawed, but finally agreed. So we had these two Tragg stories, and that’s when I really saw the potential of Tragg as a series.

For years I tried getting Tragg into his own book. They didn’t want to do it because they thought, “Oh, it’s just another caveman book, a guy running around a jungle. We already have Tarzan and Turok. So why do we need another thing with jungle characters and dinosaurs?” Then one day I got a call from Del Connell and he said, “Come here, I want to show you something.” I came in to the office and he laid out all these Erich Van Daniken books, including Chariot of the Gods, which I had read. Del said, “These are really hot. We should do a book, a series, in which we have these sky gods.” I said,

Above: Though the Gold Key comics only rarely feature pin-ups in the titles, an exception was this piece by Jesse Santos which appeared in Dagar the Invincible #16. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

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Above: The writer is also renowned for his dinosaur reference books and has lectured on the subject. Here’s Don at the Museum of Western Colorado during one such gig in 1985.

Courtesy of Don Glut. Below: For their last gasp in the ’80s, Western (now using the Whitman imprint) discarded the usual painted covers in favor of line art. This Jesse Santos piece graced the cover of Tragg and the Sky Gods #9. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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“It sounds like a great idea. Can I set it in prehistoric times?” He says, “Yeah, why not?” So I asked, “Can it be a Tragg book?” Finally, after he hemmed and hawed again, he said, “Okay.” Really, what I wanted to do was a Tor-type of series, but I had to do Erich Van Daniken, so that’s how the whole Tragg thing came to be. If it hadn’t been for Van Daniken, bless him, I never would have gotten to do my caveman book at Western.

I did a crossover with Tragg in Dagar that got changed at the last minute. Dagar goes back in time and ends up in this prehistoric world, and I wanted him to meet this lead caveman, who was the hero back then, who I wanted to be Tragg. Everything was finally okay until the last minute, when Del said, “No, wait a minute. Jesse has a knack for drawing his heroes kind of similar, and I’m afraid that people will mix up Tragg and Dagar, thinking they are the same.” So on his own, without consulting me, Del changed the caveman’s name name to John (or something) and had him drawn like a Neanderthal, with a brow and the whole thing, which looked nothing like the heroic Tragg. So I said, “Oy!” I called up Jesse (which I was always going behind Del’s back, sending Jesse in-jokes and things I wanted to slip in the stories), and I said, “There’s a crowd scene here. Please put Tragg’s picture among the crowd. It’ll be small, hardly anybody will notice it, but you and I’ll know it’s there, and I’ll be happy.” So if you look at that issue, Tragg did make an appearance.

Well, anyway, when we decided to do Tragg and the Sky Gods, Tragg and Lorn had to look different than all of the other cave people because

they’re subjected to these mutation rays or evolvo-rays or whatever they were called by the aliens. So I said, “Let’s give Tragg a brother.”

Because everybody else would look like these Neanderthals. So I said, “Lo and behold, let’s make Jarn, the name that Del had given to the caveman in the Dagar story, that’ll be Tragg’s brother.” By that time, Del had already forgotten the Dagar story, as well as Jarn. It made perfect sense. He liked the name, probably because he made it up, and forgot about it. So that firmly cemented Dagar and Tragg. Then Durak, another barbarian character, started off in the Mystery Comics Digest books, though he was first called Daggar!

The reason the Dagar book came about was because I brought in a story for Mystery Comics Digest, a short story with a barbarian hero which was Dagar. It was originally spelled with two g’s, like dagger (and I have a copy of the script where he’s named Shaark).

The editors thought, “No, that looks too much like a pun on dagger.” Which it was, that was the intent, but they didn’t like that. So they took one “g” out, none of us being aware of the fact that in the 1940s there was this sheik Arab character called Dagar. So anyway, I did a second Dagar story then, before the first one came out in Mystery Digest. And now Del started thinking, “Hey, this might make a neat series.” He’d wasn’t aware of Conan or anything, never heard of the term “sword and sorcery.” It was an entirely new genre to him, as far as I can remember. He said to me, “Let’s do a book.” I said, “Okay, let’s do a Dagar book.” So we did. Now we were stuck with two Mystery Comics Digest books with Dagar in them, and he didn’t want to waste the character in the Mystery Digest book. So he changed the name to Durok. Then, after the first story, somebody in New York or somebody said, “This rhymes with Turok, they’re gonna get those names mixed up.” So “Dur-rock” became “Dur-rack.” I said, “Oh, we’ve got two characters now. Let’s make them different from each other.” So I was very conscious to make Dagar more civilized. He’s basically a mercenary, fights for money, very rarely for causes. He relents a lot at the last minute. But he’s a mercenary and constantly telling people he’s not a barbarian because he comes from a civilized nation that just happened to get wiped out, even though he looks like a barbarian.

Durak, though, was a barbarian all the way. He fought just for the sheer thrill of it. So I looked at Dagar, and especially considering the way he looked, I looked at him as Kirk Douglas, and I looked at Durak as Errol Flynn. That, I thought, separated them, differentiated them enough that they could appear in a story together. I also gave Durak a beard, like a goatee, which disguised his features that otherwise looked like Dagar’s. And then I walked into the office and I had this story. Again, I would pitch these like you pitch a movie, trying to get Del so enthused in the story and wrapped up in it that things like continuity would slip by him, and he would finally like the story so much that he would feel guilty if he didn’t buy it. That’s what happened with Durak. I brought Durak into the 20th century in a couple stories, and tied it in with the whole Doctor Spektor thing, and he became part of that cast of characters. Simbar the Lion Man also started off in Mystery Comics Digest. A lot of those characters did: The Lion Man, Baron Tibor the vampire, Wulfstein the werewolf.

They all started off as one-shot stories in Mystery Comics Digest and I brought them all into this little universe that unfortunately most comic book fans, to this day, are not even aware of. It was just this little in-joke I had going. Now I’m getting calls from people. I was interviewed just recently for Trashfiend magazine by somebody doing a big retrospective story on Doctor Spektor.

CBA: Were you always somewhat subversive, trying to sneak these in-jokes in….

Don: I don’t know about me being subversive. I’ve always been a rebel, very individualistic. I’ve never fit in with the general population (if you want to call it that) of comic book writers and artists, and maybe that’s why, except for my stint at Gold Key, it’s always difficult for me to get work at other companies—unless Gold Key was the only one who liked my writing. When I go to parties and I’m among those people, most of them ignore me. They don’t always have a lot to say to me. I was just at one and spent most of the time petting the dog.

I don’t know what the reason is, if it’s because I project a certain kind of personality that’s in conflict with the general personality of writers and artists? I don’t know. I’ve thought about this a lot over COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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the last few years actually, and it’s always been this way. I was never one of the fan favorites at Marvel. I never got the great books, was never given the good assignments, even in TV animation.

I stopped to think about this, and feel that maybe something about my personality turns a lot of people off, maybe even threatens them. When I was a teenager, I was not one of these fans that just retreated into my little world and listened to film scores and created all these imaginary friends and super-heroes and fantasy worlds and Doctor Who and Tolkien, all these things. That sort of activity was part of my private life. What I did most, what my “nine-to-five job” was back then, I was a street kid. I used to hang out on street corners. I was in a gang called the Vandals, I played in various rock ’n’ roll bands. We did all the stuff you see in those old movies: we used to drag race on city streets, get into trouble with the cops, pick on the nerds at school, get into “rumbles,” and all that. I think there’s something about that life I had that I’ve never gotten out of my personality.

People somehow, even on a subliminal level, maybe pick up on this and feel either they don’t like me or feel threatened by me. Maybe they see me as someone that picked on them or something at one point, I don’t know.

But a lot of the people that went into this business, either as writers or artists, did so, I think, because of escape, escape from their tedious lives. I mean, I was… my main social thing to this day seems to be going to parties. If I was invited to four parties tonight, with a lot of pretty girls, I would be there even if I didn’t know anybody. A lot of creative people, their life is the computer screen or drawing board, and I think that might have something to do with it. I do know at the time these books were coming out, I don’t know anybody that read them unless I literally gave them a copy that I had. I didn’t know anybody who was actually reading Dagar or any of these other Western books. I would go to conventions and would mention what I did, and people would say, “What’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”

CBA: Looking outside of comics, you were one of the more high-profile of the guys who worked in comics. I would see the Dinosaur Dictionary, for instance…

Don: I did a lot of other things. Many of us are pigeonholed into one thing. There are animation writers who do nothing but write animation, and really think that stuff they’re writing is good. Out of all of the scripts I’ve written in animation, maybe there are two or three I’m actually proud to put my name on, as most of them are just crap. We write them for the network censors, we write them for toy company executives, we write them not for kids. You do anything that’s slightly off the beaten track or a little bit creative or original or doesn’t fit the standard story outlines they give—they don’t fit the format—you don’t work anymore. You’re a troublemaker, you’re a rebel. I found that whenever a story editor told me that my script was the best or most original of the season, I knew I wasn’t going to sell another one next season! They want people who write the same kinds of stories over and over, nothing different, episode after episode. But I’ve liked an awful lot of stuff besides comics. I read literature, I’m a tremendous music fan and have a big music background, I like electric trains, stage magic, motorcycles… I like a lot of stuff that enters into my work. No matter what I’ve done, one thing I’ve always been very careful of is to not lose an edge to the work.

You always want to keep an edge. Even Elvis used to say that when he was doing all those really horrible songs for some of those really silly movies he did later on, he was always afraid of losing his edge.

I think when you lose your edge, you become part of the mainstream. You’ve gotta have that little extra something…. Even the animation scripts, I tried to add a little bit, put a little characterization thing in there that wasn’t part of the “bible” they gave you to refer to, a little moment there where the characters say something to each other, if I could get away with it, where it made them more human or it made the episode stand out in some way. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to earn a living and be a little outside of the mainstream, it really is.

CBA: Is giving a wink to the audience important to you?

Don: I love doing that, as long as it doesn’t intrude on the story. I October 2002

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love movies with in-jokes as long as the person sitting next to me isn’t elbowing me in the ribs for two hours, “Did you get that injoke? Did you get that reference? Har-har-har!” I like to make it a bit more subtle, if I can, in everything I write, whether it’s a movie script, a comic book script, a novel. No matter what company it’s for, what publisher, always in the back of my mind is that all of these things take place in the same universe. I always try to put some little thing in there that gives that away, or if anybody is reading between the lines, “Hey, this relates to a comic book series that was published at Charlton years ago!” I love doing that sort of thing. But I don’t like it to be when you’re being beaten over the head with in-jokes. I like it to be a little more subtle. And I like to write stories having a basis in strong research—on real science, on the history or authentic love. For example, in Spektor #4, I had the doctor speak the exact words used in a real exorcism. And Spektor’s journey through the Egyptian “Afterlife” was right out of the old beliefs. And I could cite many more such examples.

CBA: Except for Russ Manning, you and Jesse were the first guys to really receive regular credit within the books, right?

Don: I insisted on that. I was the first writer, to my knowledge at Western, ever to get his name on a book. If you look at those early issues where my name first appears, it’s in the back, on the last page of the story. They wouldn’t put it on the splash page. They didn’t think anybody wondered or cared about who wrote the books. Again, they didn’t want us getting known, they didn’t want people to find out who we were, because of these, doing the convention scene and all that and maybe going someplace else. I had to fight for that recognition, but I always managed to sneak something into those stories where I wasn’t getting credit and, if you read between the lines, somewhere in there you will find some clue that I wrote it.

In Doctor Spektor, a character would go into an Egyptian tomb and if you turned the page side-

Above: A sampling of Don Glut’s books, including the New York Times best-selling book, The Empire Strikes Back, a novel that remains in print and the most recognized of the writer’s achievements. ©2002 the respective copyright holders. Below: Didja know that Ye Ed is a huge dinosaur afficionado, once even developing a children’s science magazine called Dinosaur Times?

What, you don’t care? Well, readers should at least recognize that writer Don Glut’s main passion in life is paleontology—that’s the study of ’saurs, silly—and here’s a couple of pix (courtesy of the writer) to prove it. Top is Don at the moment of discovering a snout fossil of a new species of extinct dolphin in 1981. Bottom is Don posing with his newly purchased T. rex skull cast in the early ’80s.

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Above: For a rather lean period in the writer’s life, Don Glut gratefully accepted Marvel Comics writing assignments from longtime buddy Roy Thomas, with the onetime Marvel editor-in-chief even bequeathing writing chores on Roy’s beloved Invaders title. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Another writing stint for the House of Ideas, was Don’s tenure on Captain America. Here’s a page of his work (with artists Sal Buscema and Joe Sinnott) from #213. Courtesy of Don Glut. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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ways the hieroglyphics would say “Don Glut.” That kind of thing. I had my own identifiable sound effects. One I use repeatedly, not only at Gold Key (until they caught me and figured it out), but also at Marvel (until Roy Thomas figured it out and told me not to use it anymore), which is “Krakalik.” That’s a friend’s last name with one letter changed, because it looks more dramatic with a “k” in the middle than a “c.” There’s a scene where the Frankenstein monster is getting zapped by electricity in Doctor Spektor, and krakalik is the sound effect. There’s a scene in Marvel’s The Invaders where the Sub-Mariner throws a lightning rod through a skylight window.

The sound effect of the glass shattering: Krakalik. I use this effect over and over and over again (that is, until Roy spotted it). In this film we just finished, The Mummy’s Tomb, when the mummy comes to life, the first thing she says (it’s a female mummy), the first word out of her mouth is “Kra-Ka-Lick!” It took the actress so long to get it right, because we were shooting very late at night. She said, “Now, I know I have to say this word exactly right. I don’t know why, but I’ve gotta get this right.” I finally explained to her that it was a friend’s name. So there’s little in-jokes throughout.

I mentioned “Graylin” before. Even Dagar, the “D-G”, that’s my initials. And he came from a place called “Tulgonia.” I also managed to sneak some “sex” past the Gold Key eagle eyes. Dagar and Graylin were clearly not married. And did we ever see or read of Lakota arriving for work at Spektor Manor or “punching out” at five o’clock?

There’s a lot of friend’s names who are characters. You can also tell in the stories I didn’t receive credit that I put more of an edge than the usual things that were coming out from Western at the time.

I think I was one of the first people to actually do werewolf,

vampire, and zombie stories outside of Dark Shadows, for Western.

CBA: Did that predate the Comics Code change [in 1970]?

Don: Well, Western never was part of the Comics Code Authority.

CBA: I know….

Don: The first monster stuff I did for Gold Key came out in Mystery Digest, then Doctor Spektor came out not too long after that. I was allowed to get away with things that the Code wouldn’t let you get away with. I could do vampires, zombies, werewolves, that sort of thing. I could not have characters say “ain’t.” I could not have characters say “darn.” I could not have characters say “heck,” because people would think that’s really “hell,” which it really is, but…. So I could have zombies, but my zombies could not say “ain’t.” [laughter] So there were all kinds of strange little things I couldn’t do.

CBA: How were the page rates?

Don: I don’t remember. It seems like I got $350 to $400, something like that, for a 25-page story. Del Connell would give me raises every now and then. Del was a really good guy, always looking out for me.

He would take me to lunch. I remember once, a writer friend of mine was jealous that I was doing all these stories, because he wanted to write some. He said, “Could you see if you could get just one assignment for me?” I said, “Well, okay.” So I went up to Del and I said, “Look, I have a friend who’s a writer and he’d really like to write a script.” Del, bless him, sat me down and said, “Don, we like you here. We want to give you as much work as possible. I cannot, in my heart of hearts, take money out of your pockets and put it in somebody else’s.” Which was an incredible attitude to have in a business like this. Animation is such a backstabbing business; you could write the most highly-rated show of the season, and next year not get the story editor on the phone. Western was really loyal to their contributors, I must say that.

CBA: If there’s anything you can say about the Gold Key books, they were consistent. When you had Russ Manning singularly doing a run on Magnus for such a period of time, or Dan Spiegle doing the entire run of Space Family Robinson for something like 15 years…

Don: They were letting Jesse Marsh continue to draw Tarzan even when his eyesight was failing. You look at some of his last Tarzan books, where the panels are aligned crookedly, they’re not perfect rectangles and things. Western let him get away with that, because they liked Jesse so much. He was probably one of their favorite artists of all time at Western. They thought he was just great because they were into that whole Milton Caniff school of art. I love Marsh too, though a lot of people don’t. But Western preferred Jesse’s art over Russ’ any day, and the editors were not shy about telling me so.

CBA: What was the background of Doctor Spektor? Were you thinking of the Mysterious Traveler or the Phantom Stranger?

Don: I wasn’t thinking of those characters so much. It in my mind was three things: the title was something similar, The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, “The Secret Files of Dr. Drew,” The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor, you know, they sound kind of the same. Some of the stuff Charlton was doing with host characters. Also, when Spektor became a continuing character, Sherlock Holmes was a strong influence. That’s why in that origin story I have him actually corresponding with and being influenced by Holmes, the “real” character, who was still alive and raising bees in Sussex. I used a monsterdestroyer character, Van Helsing, in COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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some of those stories as sort of a supernatural hitman. I had him talking like Clint Eastwood and everything. You know, he’s talking about contracts and making the hit and all that kind of thing. So I think it was probably “Dr. Drew” and The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, plus some of those other things that Charlton was doing at the time. I wasn’t so much thinking of EC, that was a whole different thing. I might have been thinking a little of, I guess his name was Mister Mystery, the old ’50s character that wore a tuxedo and looked kind of like a Mandrake the Magician type with a domino mask. The cloak, the style of cape, was pure Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows.

CBA: With your obvious fascination with dinosaurs, did you look to write Turok, Son of Stone?

Don: Oh, yeah! I begged to do Turok all the time. But, again, it was the same situation: Western had a writer [Paul S. Newman] who was doing the work to whom they were loyal. Plus, Turok was being done at the New York office, where I sold comparatively little material. The stories I did for New York were for their mystery books, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, Grimm’s Ghost Stories, and those titles. I was never able to get a continuing character book from them.

I wrote a lot of other stuff for Gold Key, too: Little Monster stories, some funny animal things like Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny. I was good at the Little Monster stories, but never really got the hang of the Porky Pig/Bugs Bunny/Tweety and Sylvester things. They finally said, “Look, you’re wasting your time with these. We think you should just concentrate on the adventure stuff, because that’s where you’re better.”

CBA: Were yours the only adventure books coming out of California during your time?

Don: The only ones I can recall, unless… well, Space Family Robinson was coming out of California. Dan Spiegle was drawing it.

CBA: Del Connell was writing it, wasn’t he?

Don: I don’t remember. He created that and it was a big heartbreak for him when Lost in Space came out on television. Western refused to take any legal action because they wanted to do the comic book.

CBA: Well, they were publishing the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea comic book, as well as a whole bunch of Irwin Allen stuff: Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants….

Don: Del was such a good man, like an older brother, almost a father figure when I was working with him.

CBA: So as far as you know, was Matt Murphy running the show in New York?

Don: The person I knew in New York was Wally Green. I don’t remember Matt Murphy, although I met several people from the New York office whose names I don’t recall.

CBA: Did you receive any fan mail when you were at Gold Key? Don: No, I don’t think I ever received any fan mail. Although I had a “plant”—a cousin who sent in lots of letters of comment and suggestions, none of which were taken to heart.

CBA: The fan mail would have gone to Poughkeepsie, right?

Don: Probably. It was hard even to find the books on the stands.

Some of those were quarterlies. First of all, it’s hard to establish any kind of continuity in a book that’s a quarterly or even a bi-monthly.

The readers never knew when or even if the next one was going to come out. They never knew if they had missed one, because it was hard to remember how much time went by.

CBA: Sometimes so much time went by, I would think they were cancelled. It was like, “Oh, I guess it’s gone.” Then a new issue would show up. “Oh, cool!” I just never knew their erratic schedules.

Don: Well, it makes more sense if you’ve got them all. Now, after twenty or thirty years have gone by, to sit down and read them in sequence. Then you discover all the things that are actually happening in those books, that I was able to slip by people, and in fact there is actually continuity from one story to the next.

CBA: Were you disappointed when it all came to an end?

Don: I was shattered, because most of my income at that time was coming from those three books and they all got cancelled simultaneously. I’ll never forget that because my mother and aunt had come out for a visit, and I had to take them to the airport. That morning two things happened. My car broke down, so I couldn’t take them, and Roy Thomas said I could borrow his car if I could just somehow October 2002

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get over to his house and get it.

Right before I left to pick up the car—and I knew my car was going to cost me an arm and a leg to fix—I got the call from Del saying, “I have bad news for you: All these books were cancelled.”

I’ll never forget. Everything just hit the fan all at one time. I was in Roy Thomas’s car, on the way back to pick my mother and aunt up, knowing my whole income at that point had been cut off, and I was going to have to pay for my car, going to the hassle of getting it to the repair shop, and I just let out one of these primal yells as loud as I could, in the car, with the windows up and the air conditioning full-blast. I just let it all out. It was real tough. Then, thanks to Roy (who’s another great friend because he was always looking out for me, too), he knew it was tough for me to get work in the mainstream, because I wasn’t a fan favorite and wasn’t part of the little Mafia groups. Roy started giving me work, and I did a lot of work for Marvel. Sometimes I did ghost work, sometimes new books, sometimes fill-ins. I did a lot of issues of What If? and Kull and Captain America and The Invaders for a while. So I was able to make the transition very quickly. Actually, I wrote quite a few stories for Marvel—that is, until Jim Shooter took over [as Marvel editor-in-chief] and many of us West Coasters— myself included—found ourselves out of work again. Around that time, I got The Empire Strikes Back novelization gig, which at least for a while had me riding high until two months later I got divorced and we have community property laws in this state, so that is a story in itself.

CBA: You’re actually making royalties off of The Empire Strikes Back book?

Don: Oh, yeah. Not much, anyway, because I had a real crappy deal with that. The royalties are a really tiny percentage. But I wrote that book mainly to open doors, and it still does, because it’s still in print. Though that movie is twenty-some years old, I can walk into anyplace and when they ask, “What have you done?” I say, “I wrote the Empire Strikes Back novel,” they know it. If I say I worked on Mystery Comics Digest, they can’t relate. But they can relate to the Star Wars franchise. I’ve been real lucky because in my whole career, I’ve been connected with so many big, high-profile franchises.

Above: Often, Don would instruct his writers to include in-jokes in the comic book work. Above is an example (we think from Dagar) translated for our benefit.

Courtesy of Don Glut. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc. Below: Film director Don Glut with the star of The Mummy’s Kiss, Katie Lohmann, Playboy’s Miss April 2001.

Pic courtesy of Don.

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Below: Other in-jokes the writer would inject into his Gold Key stories would be references to friends. Don Glut’s first wife, Linda Gray—well, her name, at least—makes an appearance in an issue of The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor. She would also make an appearance (of sorts) as Graylin, the paramour of Dagar the Invincible in his title. Art by Jesse Santos. Courtesy of Don Glut. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

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Tarzan, Star Wars, The Monkees, Masters of the Universe, Dinotopia, Transformers, the Universal Monsters… a lot of things people on the street recognize… you don’t have to be a fanboy to know what they are. You can just be somebody on the street who never read a comic book in your life, I say “Tarzan,” and they know who it is. I say, “The Transformers,” they know what it is because they saw it on TV or have the toys. I’ve been able to use a lot of those things to open a lot of doors.

CBA: “The Monkees”?

Don: I was a bass guitar player for a band Mike Nesmith produced called Penny Arkade. I had the nickname “Marve,” for reasons obvious back then. Now the Penny Arkade is suddenly becoming hot.

I’m getting interviewed all over the place for Penny Arkade. Nesmith has agreed to let the music be released. The album has been “out” since 1973 in one bootleg form or another, under various names, and now Sundazed Records wants to do it for real, a CD. So that’s another thing I’m involved in right now, trying to get out something that a lot of work went into, and a lot of Mike’s work went into it, and just to sort of bring closure to that whole thing. (Mike has, since this interview was conducted, agreed to release this album—a total of about 30 songs, the entire “canon” of Penny Arkade music. This is really exciting for me and the other members of the group.)

CBA: Were you able to get into the Southern California scene pretty well? Like, Whiskey-a-go-go and…

Don: I was really part of that whole scene. I was probably the first guy in Chicago to grow my hair long. I remember seeing The Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan, and from then on, I never got my hair cut while I was living in Chicago. When I came out to California, the whole “mod” scene that was already starting up. So I was part of that whole Whiskey-ago-go scene. I rode a motorcycle, dressed like a hippie, looked like one. I had a lot of my old greaser sensibilities in the back of my head, but…

CBA: But were you able to keep your head, so to speak, within that?

A lot of people obviously got trapped in drugs….

Don: No, I was never interested in doing drugs. I was very heavily into the music scene, though. I mean, we used to hang out at Mike’s (or “Nez’s,” as he likes to be called now) place. Everybody would come through there. I remember rehearsing once with the Buffalo Springfield and my bass amplifier blew up, and their original bass player came over and tried to fix my amplifier. We auditioned for the Peyton Place TV show, and played at a party for Screen Gems. I remember sitting next to Sally Field when she was doing Flying Nun and having a conversation. We were part of that whole scene, but because we were connected to The Monkees, we weren’t swept up into the whole drug scene. Some of the guys in the group smoked a lot of

grass, but we were more practical than many musicians and singers, let’s put it that way. I always like to think of myself as a dreamer, but a very practical dreamer. We were always conscious, at least, I was… you know, a lot of people will tell you that they got into rock ’n’ roll and all this because they were influenced by Muddy Waters or whomever and wanted to create great music… but I, at least, did it for the girls and for the money. Those are the two main reasons I did it. I think that’s why almost everybody really does it when it gets down to it. That was one of the best periods of my life.

CBA: Did the girls and the money come?

Don: Yeah. We made a lot of money in a short period of time, relatively speaking. We had the groupies. It was great! It was a whole different era back then, probably a lot different than San Francisco was, y’know, with the Haight-Ashbury thing. Hollywood was still Hollywood, and no matter how much of a hippie you were, you wanted to drive a nice car and have the air conditioner blasting. Plus there were all the beautiful actresses and models. I mean, the most beautiful women in the world are in California, and every day, more of them are coming to try to get into the movie business, maybe now more than ever. That’s what it was like out here. It was just great.

You could go into a nightclub like Gazzarri’s or the Whiskey, the two house bands could be The Doors and Buffalo Springfield, performing on the same stage on the same night. One band would take a break, and the other one would come on. That’s what it was like. You’d turn around, and there would be Jimi Hendrix standing next to you, or it would be Eric Burden. You thought nothing about it. You thought it was going to last forever. Of course, it didn’t, and that’s how I ended up writing comic books.

CBA: Obviously, you had the gumption to get up on stage and play in front of an audience, which is not the typical personality of the average comic book writer, who’s a pretty insular kind of guy. By having that real-life experience, were you able to get what you wanted at Gold Key, relatively speaking? Because you pushed for it?

Don: Yeah. First of all, I love performing. I still do. What I do now, as far as performing live in front of audiences, I do a lot of TV shows.

I just did a “talking heads” documentary show with Ray Harryhausen and a few other dinosaur people for the History Channel, which should be aired near the end of this year, and I got a call from the Arts & Entertainment Channel. I’m going to be appearing on a Biography. They said, “This is A&E Biography,” and the first thing that went through my mind was, “No, I’m not well known enough yet. They wouldn’t say that.” Then I was afraid they were going to have a show talking about somebody I didn’t like or something. Well, it turned out they were doing a show on The Munsters, and they wanted to have me express my Frankenstein expertise.

Once every few weeks, there’s a group out here that’s a promotional group called APS, Actor’s Promotional Service. We do seminars where I speak to a group of actors. I love getting up there. I talk for almost an hour, they laugh at my jokes… it’s such a rush for me, talking to people and them responding—just the way I’m hoping they will—to things I say. For a long time, I was doing a lecture called “Fantasy Dinosaurs of the Movies” with film clips and everything. I would give this hour-long lecture, mostly at museums. I would do this all over the country. In fact, I did it as far away as the Ulster Museum, Belfast, Ireland. That’s where I really got experience talking to people. The first time I did it, I was terrified.

When I was a kid at school, if I had a paper to read in class, I would get up there and I’d start blushing and giggling. I was very shy like that. I would start shaking. It wasn’t until I started playing in rock ’n’ roll bands, and after that started doing the dinosaur lectures, that I got real comfortable in front of an audience. Now I just thrive on it, love getting up there. I’m a real ham.

To answer your question a little bit more, I think so many creative people I’ve known who try to get work… Roy Thomas once told me, “The cover will sell that issue of a book; the contents will sell the following issue of the book.” You can apply that to people, too.

Most of the writers I know who are very successful writers look their best. I’m not saying they’re handsome or beautiful or anything, but given the raw materials they have to start with, they look their best.

They dress sharp and all this. Most of my unsuccessful writer friends, they might be very overweight or might dress sloppily or come off as kind of uncouth or whatever. I think whatever sells you first is the COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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image that walks through the door. I think people judge you within the first couple minutes of meeting, maybe the first few seconds.

They judge you on the quality of your work after they’ve already accepted you as a person they want to do business with. I learned this once, too, when I went to New York: In 1973, trying to get work with Marvel and DC, I ran into Denny O’Neil at a party at Gerry Conway’s house. We started having a conversation and got along really well. Afterward, I told him I was trying to get some work. So he said, “Come into the office.” So I came into DC on the next Monday morning. There was a huge stack of manila envelopes on Denny’s desk. He looked at me and said, “Do you know what those are? Those are submissions that have come in over the weekend. There might be a gem in there, but do you think I have time to read all that stuff?” He handed them to a secretary to send back, unopened. Then he said, “What did you bring me?” I handed him the scripts and he bought them. I realized that most of the work I’ve ever gotten on my own wasn’t done through agents; it was through personal contacts and people liking and responding to me in a positive way before they ever saw my work. It’s this whole thing they call networking now. I’m out there hustling and networking all the time. A lot of my artist and writer friends don’t hustle.

They sit at home and wait for things to happen, waiting for that knock on the door or the phone to ring. I’m out there going through the door to take advantage of whatever situation I’m faced with, and sometimes building my own door first.

CBA: The work is you and you are the work?

Don: Right. I have always been a hustler, I had to be. When I moved from Chicago, I didn’t have any friends or relatives in the movie business, wasn’t sleeping with anybody in the business. I had to just get out there, hustle and meet people. One of the things that Ron Heydock told me—one of the most important bits of advice I ever got in my life, whether it applied to writing or acting or music or anything—was, “Don, you’ve got to hustle.” Ron was out there hustling all the time, so he was one of my big role models when I first came out here.

CBA: What was your favorite experience working at Western?

Don: My favorite experience working at Western was that I really liked the free lunches Del would treat me to. Also when I would get the free Marvel and DC books. [laughter] You know, the stuff I did for Western is a double-edged sword, because I really liked the fact that I had these little personal universes, but I was really frustrated all the time by the censorship, the things we had to go through and the restrictions, the inability to move those comics more into the mainstream. I knew things I could do with those books would make them sell better, in my opinion. The editors just wouldn’t let me do it.

It was like beating my head against a wall sometimes. When Bill Spicer finally came in as editor, he let me get away with a lot more than I ever got away with with Del, because Bill was a comics fan, too, though more of an old EC fan.

But Bill liked to rewrite. He was, I think, a frustrated writer. I was in his office one day and handed him a script and he immediately put a piece of blank typewriter paper in the typewriter. I said, “Oh, what’s that for?” He says, “Well, I’m going to start doing the editing.” It wasn’t like editing on the script; it was like doing a rewrite without even reading it to know if it needed rewriting! So that was a little frustrating, too. It seems like so many things I’ve worked on, there just isn’t the freedom to do what I really wanted to do, and which, in my heart of hearts, I think is going to be the best, as a creative person. The more cooks you have sticking their nose in and interfering, the more problems arise. That’s what I like about these movies.

Being the director, writer and one of the producers, I have pretty much creative control. We make all our investors limited partners, so we can listen to them, we don’t have to do what they say. The only problem is lack of money, which translates to lack of time. So on the set, I’m constantly rewriting my own stuff because a prop didn’t show up or a permit’s running out or the light’s going too fast or we’re having a problem with an actress who’s having a tantrum or something. Those are the only things that limit you. But there’s no guy in a suit who’s twenty years old telling me that I gotta use his girlfriend as the leading lady, or his brother-in-law who’s a CPA who wrote some poetry twenty years ago that nobody’s ever seen wants to “improve” my screenplay… you don’t have to deal with that October 2002

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sort of thing.

CBA: Were there experiences working at Western you were able to apply later on in life?

Don: Oh, yes. One thing good about working at Western was I had regular books and learned how to think in terms of coming up with new stories using the same character. I’d never really had to do that before. I think maybe just working with people in an office and knowing how to conduct myself… learning how to do stories. Some of that old stuff I did, I don’t know how good it is, it’s been a long time since I have read it. But in reading these two unpublished Doctor Spektor scripts I found in the garage again, I was amazed at how readable they are. I thought, “Hey, this is pretty good stuff!” I think they were better because Bill let me get away with more in terms of personality and characterization, to flesh the characters out more as real human beings as opposed to just cardboard characters that said, “Great Scott!” and things like that. It’s really a shame that those books never came out, because I think they would have been the high point of each one of those titles.

I’ve got several scripts from, including the origin of Doctor Spektor. I’ve got the follow-up story and the plot for #28, and it only went to #25. The Dark Gods finally come in to take over everything, and Doctor Spektor had to team up with all these other heroes. It was basically my take on The Avengers, but with characters owned by Western Publishing Company. Either the ones that I created like Simbar, or The Owl, Doctor Solar, the characters from the ’40s like Hydroman, the Purple Zombie, they’re all in there and they call themselves The Gladiators. That story was called “Entry of the Gladiators,” which was a Julius Fucik march that got played at circuses a lot. For a while, I was also designing the covers. I would do a rough sketch of the cover, and then Jesse would do a rough sketch based on my sketch, and then if it was okayed, it would go to painting. When I started doing them, I tried to make them more like Marvel Comics covers. I was putting in stick figures and adding blurbs and then they would go to Jesse for a sketch, who apparently preferred doing big faces and montages. I found a bunch of stats of some of these preliminary and/or rejected cover sketches that Jesse had done.

I’ve got those scripts, too, and got the plot outlines of where some of these books would have gone. I even have some of the rejected scripts, some of the ones that they flat-out rejected. I did a Tragg/Dracula story, where Dracula went back in time and he turned into a bat and Tragg, thinking the bat was a pterosaur, threw a spear and impaled it.

Below: A detail of Jesses Santos’ wonderful splash page in Dagar the Invincible #8. Courtesy of Don Glut. ©2002 Western Pub., Inc.

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Gold Key Giants

Western’s Top Ten Alberto Becattini chooses the greatest Gold Key artists

by Alberto Becattini

Below: Some of the greatest comic book work of all time appeared in the pages of Dell/Gold Key’s “duck” comics, specifically those Uncle Scrooge stories written and drawn by Carl Barks. Here’s the Bark’s cover art on Four Color #408 (1952), featuring a classic image of Donald and the boys. ©2002 Disney.

Whereas it is a pleasure to write profiles of the artists one likes, it is painful to leave many of them out when one has to select only a few of them. The following entries concern ten artists in the “funny animal” and “adventure” categories, respectively. The reasons for choosing them have been various, yet primarily they have been selected on account of their historical importance within Western’s comic book production as well as for their outstanding, longtime contribution to one or more particular series. Again, there are certainly at least other ten artists who would deserve to be included in either category. I’m thinking about such funny-animal masters as Lynn Karp, Gil Turner or Frank McSavage, or about such adventure draftsmen as John Buscema, Everett Raymond Kinstler or Al Williamson. Not to mention such writers who really made the history of Western comic books, like Del Connell, Gaylord DuBois, Carl Fallberg, Paul S. Newman or John Stanley. Perhaps there’ll be another chance to highlight their excellent efforts at Western. Their names, anyhow, along with those of most of the other writers and artists who contributed to Western’s comics, are to be found in a section, “They’re (Almost) All Here!,” coming soon to CBA.—A.B.

FUNNY-ANIMAL ARTISTS Carl Barks

(1901-2000) Born in Oregon, Barks drew gag cartoons for the Calgary Eye-Opener before joining the Walt Disney Animation Studio in 1935. Initially he worked as an in-betweener, then he switched to the story department, where he stayed until 1942, writing and sketching several Donald Duck cartoon shorts. While at the Studio, Barks drew his first comic book story for Western/Dell, “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold” (Four Color Comics #9, 1942), sharing art chores with Jack Hannah. By 1943, he was writing and drawing Donald Duck tenpagers for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Although he did some work on Barney Bear, Andy Panda, Bugs Bunny and other non-Disney characters, he is remembered because of the great Disney Duck stories he created during the next 23 years. He gave Donald Duck a new and more complex personality, and created such legendary characters as Uncle Scrooge (1947), The Beagle Boys (1951), Gyro Gearloose (1952) and Magica De Spell (1961). Although he officially retired in 1966, Barks continued writing comic book stories while painting the Disney Ducks in oils.

Jack Bradbury (born 1914) A native of Seattle, Washington, in 116

1934 John Morin Bradbury moved to California and joined the Disney Studio as an assistant animator on Snow White and several shorts.

Then he became a full-fledged animator and contributed to Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi. He left Disney in 1941 and worked on wartime Liberty ships in the San Pedro Harbor shipyards. By 1942, he was back into animation, working on Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Sylvester and Private Snafu shorts at Warner Brothers for two years.

In 1944-45, he animated on educational shorts at Carry-Weston and Cathedral Films. 1944 saw his debut as a comic book writer/artist with the Sangor Shop, which produced funny animal art for such publishers as Standard, ACG, Rural Home, and DC/National. In 1950 he did his first job (a Donald Duck story in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories) for Western Publishing. During the next 16 years he would draw all the Disney characters (excelling on Ducks, Mickey Mouse, Chip ’n’ Dale and The Li’l Bad Wolf), along with Warner Brothers’ Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig, Walter Lantz’s Andy Panda and Oswald the Rabbit and Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil. From 1963-76, he wrote and drew hundreds of stories for Disney’s Overseas Comic Program, besides illustrating several Disney coloring books for Whitman.

Carl Buettner (1903-65) Neé Carl Von Buettner in Germany, he moved to the U.S. at an early age, settling in Minneapolis, where he became an art director at the Federal School of Art. After doing gag cartoons for Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, he moved to California and entered the animation field, working at Disney, Harman-Ising, and Cartoon Films. In 1940, he collaborated with writer/artist Chase Craig on the Mortimer and Charlie Sunday page. Thanks to Craig, in 1942 he was offered the job of art director at Western Publishing’s Los Angeles office. Until 1947, he supervised the production of several funny animal comic titles. He also wrote and drew Warner’s Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, as well as Disney’s The Li’l Bad Wolf (that he co-created with Craig in 1945), Bucky Bug, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and the Seven Dwarfs among others.

From 1944-47, he also illustrated the Bugs Bunny Sunday page. From 1947-65, he directed the production of several Whitman and Golden Press children’s books, occasionally writing and/or drawing them. He also contributed illustrations to The Golden Magazine.

John Carey

(1915-1987) Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Carey started his career as an animator at the Warner Brothers Studio. Working under various directors, including Bob Clampett and Bob McKimson, he drew Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and other characters for the screen until 1950, when he switched to comics. He was hired at Western Publishing and started drawing the characters he knew best—the same he had animated at Warner. In 1953, he drew his first Woody Woodpecker story, and for the next 11 years he was Woody’s premier comic book artist, also tackling other Lantz characters like Andy Panda, Oswald the Rabbit, and Space Mouse. By the early 1960s he was drawing such Hanna-Barbera characters as Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear, as well as Western’s own The Little Monsters. From 1968 onwards, he concentrated on the Disney characters, drawing April, May, and June; Chip ’n’ Dale; Brer Rabbit; Goofy; and Donald Duck among others. From 1977-84, he was the main artist on the Winnie-thePooh comic book, written by Vic Lockman.

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Phil De Lara (c.1914-1973) By 1940, De Lara was an animator at the Warner Brothers Studio, working for Chuck Jones’ unit. He also drew one comic book story for Better Publication in 1943, shortly before being drafted. He returned to Warners in 1946, now working with director Bob McKimson on Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn and other characters. He quit the studio in 1953 to draw comic books for Western Publishing.

Although he excelled at rendering such Warner Brothers characters as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, he also tackled, among others, Disney’s Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Chip ’n’ Dale, Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker, MGM’s Tom and Jerry and Barney Bear, and HannaBarbera’s The Flintstones and Quick Draw McGraw. All in all, his happy style graced most of Western’s funny animal titles for three decades, although in about 1969 he quit inking his pages, and the quality of his output declined considerably during his last years.

Harvey Eisenberg (1912-1965) At 18 years old, Eisenberg was an animator at the Fleischer Studio.

In about 1932 he went to work at the Van Beuren Studio, where he stayed until it closed in 1936, animating on Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper among others. In 1937 he joined the MGM Studio, where he was an assistant animator and later a layout man on many a Tom and Jerry cartoon. He left MGM in 1945 to work as a comic-book artist. Until 1947 he drew funny animals for Marvel (Super Rabbit, Krazy Krow, Buck Duck) and Laue/Dearfield (Foxy Fagan, Cubby Scouts, “Red” Rabbit). Then he went to work for Western Publishing, where he would become Tom and Jerry’s premier comic book artist.

In his dynamic style, Eisenberg also drew several other characters during the 1950s, including Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy and Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Pluto, Chip ’n’ Dale, and The Li’l Bad Wolf.

Though continuing to draw Tom and Jerry and other MGM characters for comics and children’s books until 1962, by 1959 he was also adapting the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon characters. During the following seven years his unmistakable style graced many an issue of Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and The Flintstones.

From 1961-65, he also drew the Yogi Bear daily and Sunday strips, and occasionally filled in for The Flintstones Sunday page. During his last years, he was closely connected with the Hanna-Barbera Studio, designing characters for their TV series (e.g., Top Cat) and specials along with his brother Jerry.

Walt Kelly

(1913-1973) Considered by many to be one of the greatest storytellers of all time, Walter Crawford Kelly, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, made his debut as a cartoonist in 1935, with a comic page entitled “Gulliver’s Travels,” published in New Comics. Later that year, Kelly went to California and apprenticed at the Disney Studio for a few months before being hired in January, 1936, in the story department.

He contributed to several Silly Symphony shorts before moving into the animation department. There he worked along with top animators Fred Moore and Ward Kimball on Mickey Mouse shorts, and later on sequences of Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and The Reluctant Dragon. Kelly left the studio in September, 1941, and moved to New York, where he was hired

by Oskar Lebeck, managing editor of Western Publishing’s East Coast office.

Initially, Kelly drew Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and other Warner Brothers characters, but then decided he would create his own characters, and in 1942 he gave life to Albert Alligator and Pogo Possum for Animal Comics. During the next 12 years, his delicate art and dialogue embellished such titles as Our Gang, Fairy Tale Parade, Santa Claus Funnies, and Peter Wheat. He also drew several covers for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, and did a memorable adaptation of Disney’s feature cartoon, The Three Caballeros (1945).

In October, 1948, Kelly became art director at the New York Star.

There he drew editorial cartoons and began the Pogo daily strip, which was taken over by the Post-Hall Syndicate in 1949. Pogo (who had his own Dell comic book title from 1949-54) gave Kelly fame and fortune. Besides comic strips, he was seen in many books, and in 1969, Kelly collaborated with animator/director Chuck Jones on a Pogo Special Birthday Special.

Above: Cartoonist genius Walt “Pogo” Kelly began his comics career at Western producing funny animal material for, among other titles, the Disney books. Here’s the master’s cover art for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #87. ©2002 Disney.

Below: Noted comic book artist Jack Bradbury draws a self-portrait surrounded by some characters he worked on. Both courtesy of Alberto Becattini. ©2002 Disney.

Al Hubbard

(1913-1984) Allan Hubbard had a brief stint as a Disney animator (1938-41) before making up his mind and becoming a comic book artist. By 1942, he was in fact drawing funny animal strips for the Sangor Shop, which sold them to various publishers including ACG, Standard, Rural Home, Jay Burtis, and DC/National. Although as early as 1943 he collaborated with Ken Hultgren (with whom he shared a studio at that time) on Bambi’s Children, it was in 1950 that he drew his first official story (a Mickey Mouse adventure entitled “The Black Pearl Mystery”) for Western Publishing, where he would spend the next 23 years. Working in a soft style which was definitely inspired by Walt Kelly (in 1952, Hubbard took over the Peter Wheat giveaway comic from Kelly), Hubbard soon became the Disney feature adaptation artist par excellence. He started with Unbirthday Party with Alice in Wonderland in 1951, continuing with Peter Pan (1952), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Aristocats (1971) and Robin Hood (1973), just to name a few. Another Disney character he was long associated with was Scamp (son of Lady and Tramp), whose adventures he drew from 1956-73. He also illustrated several Mary Jane and Sniffles stories in 1952-61, and—for a change—he drew human characters for the Andy Hardy one-shots (1952-53). From 1963 to ’79, he contributed several stories to the Disney Studio’s Overseas Comic Program, designing such characters as Feathry Duck, Hustler Duck, O.O. Duck, Hard Haid Moe, and Mickey and the Sleuth.

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Above: Panel of Mickey and Goofy

by Paul Murry, from Four Color Comics #1151, Nov. 1960-Jan. 1961. Courtesy of Alberto Becattini. ©2002 Disney.

Paul Murry

(1911-1989) Born in Stanberry, Missouri, Murry lived and worked on a farm until he was 26. In 1937, he entered and won a local art contest, and the following year decided to move to California where he was hired at the Disney Studio on the fifth of June. Murry learned his craft by assisting the expert animator Fred Moore on Mickey Mouse shorts as well as on sequences of Pinocchio and Fantasia. In 1940, Murry became a full-fledged animator, and during the next five years worked on Dumbo, Saludos Amigos, and Song of the South. By 1943 though, Murry was also moonlighting for the comic strip department, penciling the José Carioca Sunday page and occasionally filling in for Floyd Gottfredson on the Mickey Mouse daily strip. In 1945, he decided to work as a comic artist full time, drawing the Panchito and later the Uncle Remus and His Tales of Brer Rabbit Sunday pages. In May, 1946, Murry left Disney and went back to farming in Missouri, though freelancing comic art to Western Publishing. His first comic book stories featured Brer Rabbit and The Li’l Bad Wolf. By 1949, Murry was back in California, briefly working as an in-betweener at the Disney Studio, and drawing his first Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse stories for Western. In 1951-54, Murry temporarily left comic books to draw the Buck O’ Rue daily and Sunday strip, written by former Disney animator/writer Dick Huemer. In 1954, Murry went back to freelancing for Western, which he would continue doing for the next 28 years. Although he tackled almost all of the Disney characters, he is mainly remembered on account of the long Mickey Mouse adventures he drew for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, most of which were written by Carl Fallberg. In 1965, Murry graphically created Super Goof and drew the first few issues of his comic-book title. In 1959-63, Murry also drew a few stories starring such Walter Lantz characters as Woody Woodpecker and Inspector Willoughby.

Tony Strobl

(1915-1991) Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Anthony J. Strobl briefly worked with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (the creators of Superman) before moving to California and the Disney Studio, where he was an in-betweener and later an assistant animator from December, 1939, until December, 1941. He contributed to sequences of Fantasia, Dumbo, and The Reluctant Dragon, as well as to several Mickey Mouse shorts. His debut as a comic book artist took place in 1948, when he started working for Western Publishing’s Los Angeles office. His first story, starring Disney’s Bucky Bug, appeared in the January, 1949 issue of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. On Bucky, he succeeded former Disney animator Ralph Heimdahl, whom Strobl mentioned as one of his main influences. Still in 1949, Strobl’s art appeared in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, where he drew “Mary Jane and Sniffles,” “Bugs Bunny,” and “Porky Pig.” Until 1962, Strobl divided his time between the Disney and Warner Brothers characters, both in comics and children’s books. Although there was no Disney character that he did not draw, most of his stories starred Donald Duck and 118

Uncle Scrooge, earning him the title of “second-best Duck artist,” after Carl Barks. In fact, Strobl’s drawing was not always up to par, mainly because of the different Western staffers who inked his pages from 1955 onwards. From 1963-86, Strobl also wrote and penciled hundreds of Duck stories for Disney’s Overseas Comic Program. From 1963-70, he was the resident artist on The Jetsons comic book. In 1977-78, he once again drew these Hanna-Barbera characters for Marvel Comics. Strobl also worked on Disney syndicated strips, penciling several Mickey Mouse Sunday pages (1975-81) and annual Christmas Stories daily strips (1978-82). In 1986-87, he penciled the Donald Duck daily and Sunday strip, and during his last years he wrote more Duck stories for the overseas market.

ADVENTURE ARTISTS Mike Arens (1915-1976) Michael H. Arens began his career at the Walt Disney Studio in Hollywood, where he served as a second-string animator from January, 1938, until February, 1942. After WWII, he decided he was better suited for the comics field, and in 1947, he started a syndicated panel, Hey, Mac! with writer Arthur S. Curtis, which would last 14 years. A while later, he looked for more work at the Beverly Hills offices of Western Publishing, where he was assigned to draw several “westerns.” From 1952-58, his art graced such comic book titles as Range Rider, Roy Rogers, Rex Allen, and Western Roundup. Always inking and lettering his stories, he often managed to slip his initials, “M.A.,” into many a splash panel. Which he also did when, in mid1953, he was first assigned to draw the Roy Rogers syndicated strip, distributed by King Features Syndicate. Arens was eventually allowed to sign it, remaining its major artist until its demise in 1961. During those years, he also illustrated several children’s books for Western, including Little Golden Books starring Roy Rogers and Rin Tin Tin. In the early 1960s, Arens did more work for Western’s comic books, drawing a 32-page adaptation of Disney’s Mary Poppins, and contributing to Tarzan, Korak Son of Tarzan, and My Favorite Martian. In 1962, he drew a Chip ’n’ Dale comic book story and was the first artist to provide Disney stories (starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Brer Rabbit) to be published overseas. By the mid1960s, Arens was working as a layout and background artist at the Hanna-Barbera animation studio. He would contribute to such TV series as Scooby Doo, Where Are You? and Jabberjaw, as well as to the feature Charlotte’s Web (1973). As for comics, in 1965 he was assisting on the science-fiction syndicated strip Drift Marlo, produced by former Western colleagues Phil Evans and Tom Cooke. The following year, he started freelancing for Disney’s comic strip department on a regular basis. He drew the annual Disney’s Christmas Story for 1966, 1967 and 1971 and a few Uncle Remus Sunday pages in 1968, penciled the Scamp dailies and Sundays from 1968-76 and illustrated the Disney’s Treasury of Classic Tales Sunday page from 1973-76. In 1971, he also penciled a week’s worth of Mickey Mouse dailies, as well as a Donald Duck comic book story entitled “All the Crabby COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

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Ducks.” From 1973-76, he did more work for Western, penciling and occasionally inking Scamp and Chip ’n’ Dale. Right until his untimely death on June 19, 1976, he had continued working in animation at the Sanrio and Hanna-Barbera studios.

Bob Fujitani (born 1921) Born in Kingston, New York, to a Japanese father and an Irish/English mother, Robert Fujitani got his first job in the comics field at 19, while he was still attending the American School of Design. Tex Blaisdell phoned him, inviting him to join the Will Eisner Studio in the Tudor City building. Bob soon was on staff as a penciler at $25 a week.

It was there he developed the expressionist style which would characterize his 1940s efforts, first seen on such Quality Comics strips as “Black Condor,” “Dollman,” and “The Ray.” In 1942, Bob enlisted in the Navy, and served as a librarian and portrait artist at the Flatbush Air Station. Unfortunately, he was soon abruptly and unfairly discharged as an “enemy alien” on account of his Japanese looks and ancestry. He went back to comics, freelancing for MLJ (The Black Hood, Hangman Comics) and Hillman (“Black Angel,” “The Flying Dutchman”) until 1947, when he was hired by Charles Biro at Lev Gleason Publications to contribute to their crime comic line. In 194546, he drew the syndicated strip Judge Wright for United Features, under the pseudonym “Bob Wells” (writer Bob Bernstein was credited as “Bob Brent”). In the early 1950s, he was still working for Gleason, also drawing horror, romance and western stories for Atlas/Marvel. It was during this period, when he started to work in advertising as well, that his style got “slicker” and more realistic. In 1954, Fujitani began his nine-year collaboration with Western Publishing. He drew, among others, comic book versions of Prince Valiant, Jungle Jim and King of the Royal Mounted; illustrated several issues of Lassie, Turok, Lowell Thomas’ High Adventure, and Sherlock Holmes. In 1962, together with writer Paul S. Newman, he created Doctor Solar—Man of the Atom. The following year, Dan Barry asked him to assist on the Flash Gordon daily strip. Fujitani worked on it for two years, first inking and then penciling as well, and then again from 1969-86 (Sunday pages) and 1971-86 (daily strips), co-signing the strip with Barry from 1977 onwards. In 1966, he also ghosted a week’s worth of Mandrake dailies for Fred Fredericks. Having apparently retired in early 1986, Fujitani was lured back to the drawing board by John Prentice, to assist and ghost on Rip Kirby from 1994-98.

Tom Gill (born 1913) Born a U.S. citizen in Canada, Gill started his career as a staff artist at the New York Daily News in 1940. While there, he drew the first map of the Pearl Harbor attack. He also freelanced comic book art to such publishers as Chesler, Novelty and Parents. In 1946, he went to work for the Herald Tribune, where he created a syndicated strip, Flower Potts, about a New York taxi driver. In 1948, the strip’s title changed to Ricky Stevens, and as such it continued for another year. At the same time, Gill had started his long tenure as an instructor and administrator at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later known as the School of Visual Arts), which lasted forty years.

From 1949 until 1955, he freelanced for various comic book companies, including Harvey, Ziff-Davis, and Atlas/Marvel. From 1950 onwards, though, he mainly worked for the West Coast office of Western Publishing. Assisted by the associates of his studio (which included Ted Galindo, Bill Martin and later Herb Trimpe), Gill was The Lone Ranger comic book artist until 1972, also working on spin-off series Hi-Yo Silver and Tonto. Other notable Western genre titles derived from TV October 2002

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series he contributed to were Cheyenne, Bonanza, and Fury. During the 1960s, Gill also provided art for such one-shots as The Story of Ruth (1960) and Mysterious Island (1962), contributed to Western’s mystery titles (Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, The Twilight Zone) and drew the short-lived TV adaptation, Land of the Giants (196869). For Western’s sister companies Golden Press and Whitman, Gill illustrated children’s book adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (1956) and Around the World in 80 Days (1957), as well as hardbacks featuring such popular series as Batman, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Black Beauty.

A longtime member of the National Cartoonists Society, Gill was presented with the Best Comic Book Artist Award in 1970. From 1988 onwards, he has served as an art instructor at Long Island University and Nassau and Westchester Community Colleges.

Russ Manning (1929-1981) Born in Van Nuys, California, Russell George Manning learned his craft at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. A big science-fiction and Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, from 1947-50 he contributed illustrations to several fanzines. From 1950-52, he was in the Army, working as a map and base newspaper artist in Japan. Back home in 1952, he repeatedly showed his portfolio of Burroughs-inspired drawings to Western Publishing art director Tom McKimson, who finally hired him at the insistence of Tarzan artist Jesse Marsh. Manning’s long collaboration with Western started with “Brothers of the Spear” (a filler in the Tarzan comic book, which he would continue working on until 1966) and Walt Disney’s Robin Hood (in a giveaway comic). Manning’s clear-cut, bold style was developing during the early 1950s, when he drew, among others, Walt Disney’s Rob Roy and Dale Evans.

Although he drew several western strips, such as Rex Allen, Wyatt Earp and Rawhide, (often inserting his initials in the splash panel, or writing his surname on shop signs, e.g., “Manning’s Pawn Shop”), Manning proved to be a versatile talent illustrating TV adventure and detective titles (Sea Hunt, 77 Sunset Strip) as well as movie adaptations (Ben-Hur). By the early 1960s, he was a mature artist as well as a competent writer, so that Western allowed him to launch Magnus, Robot Fighter, a sciencefiction series set in 4000 A.D. Two years later, when Jesse Marsh dropped the art chores on Tarzan, Manning inherited the ape-man’s comic book title, also drawing several issues of Korak, Son of Tarzan. During the early 1960s, Manning also drew two strips, Laura Good and Joshua Trust,

Above: Exquisite Doctor Solar #4 page drawn by Bob Fujitani.

Words by Paul S. Newman.While we did contact the masterful artist, unfortunately Bob declined to be interviewed for this issue. Oh, well. Courtesy of Mike Friedrich and Alberto Becattini. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc.

Inset left: The Lone Ranger and his faithful steed, Silver, strike a classic pose drawn by that longtime illustrator of the Masked Man, Tom Gill. Courtesy of Alberto Becattini. ©2002 Lone Ranger, Inc. 119

for a giveaway paper distributed in Southern California supermarkets, and contributed to such magazines as Big Daddy Roth and Drag CarTOONs for Millar Publishing. In 1967, the dream of a lifetime came true, as Edgar Burroughs, Inc., and United Features asked him to take over the Tarzan syndicated strip. Manning did a wonderful job, writing and drawing the dailies until 1972, and the Sundays until 1979. In 1977, he was in charge of Tarzan’s comic book production for Europe, supervising the work of several U.S. artists, including Dave Stevens. He himself wrote and drew several stories as well as four fabulous graphic novels. In 1979, Manning left Tarzan to tackle the comic strip version of George Lucas’ popular science-fiction saga, Star Wars. He drew, and sometimes wrote it, until 1980, when he was diagnosed with cancer. He died the following year.

Jesse Marsh

Below: The vastly underrated Alden McWilliams served as artist on many issues of Gold Key’s Star Trek. Vignette by the artist appears courtesy of Alberto Becattini. ©2002 Paramount Pictures.

(1907-1966) Jesse Mace Marsh was born in Monrovia, California. A very reserved man, little is known about his life. He was already 32 when he joined the story department at the Disney Animation Studio in Burbank, where he was initially employed as a breakdown animator, working on Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940). Drafted in 1942, he came back to the studio two years later, now working as a story man and storyboard artist on Pluto and Donald Duck shorts (1945-46), Make Mine Music (1946), and on the “Johnny Appleseed” section of

Melody Time (1948). In 1946, he headed a crew of artists working on the unrealized project of a Don Quixote animated feature. While still at Disney, he started drawing comics in his free time for Western Printing. Art director Tom McKimson initially assigned him on Gene Autry (his first story appearing in March, 1945), which he continued to draw for both comics and children’s books until the early 1950s. In 1946, when Western decided to devote a comic book to Tarzan (a one-shot entitled Tarzan and the Devil Ogre, published in Feb. 1947), Marsh was chosen to illustrate it. Working for Western on a full-time basis from 1947 onwards, he would delineate the ape-man’s adventures for another 15 years, his art appearing in two one-shots, 153 regular issues and seven annuals until 1965. In his essential style, which made large use of contrasting light and shade, Marsh was strongly influenced by Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff. And if Tarzan’s anatomy often left much to be desired, Marsh was absolutely great at depicting jungles and animals, as well as tribesmen and native women. At Western, he also drew another Burroughs creation, John Carter of Mars (1952-53), as well as such Western genre strips as Johnny Mack Brown, Rex Allen, The Range Rider and Annie Oakley, besides adapting many a Disney live-action feature, documentary film, or TV series. In fact, from 1952-62, while producing thousands of comic book pages for Western, he also drew the Walt Disney’s Treasury of Classic Tales Sunday page. In two cases, he drew both the syndicated and comic book version of a Disney feature/series, i.e.

Davy Crockett (1955-56) and Nikki, Wild Dog of the North (1961).

In 1963, he reportedly penciled a few Flintstones daily and Sunday strips, whereas in 1965 he drew one Zorro story to be released overseas. Failing eyesight due to diabetes forced Marsh to retire from comics in 1965. He said he was going to devote himself to painting, but he died the following year, alone, in the same house where he had been born.

Al McWilliams (1916-1993) A native of Greenwich, Connecticut, Alden Spurr McWilliams graduated from the School of Fine and Applied Art in New York. His first job was as a pulp magazine illustrator for such publishers as Standard, Popular, and Street & Smith. After assisting on Lyman Young’s Tim Tyler’s Luck, McWilliams was one of the very first artists to work for the newly-opened New York office of Western Printing.

From 1935-1942, he drew adventure stories for managing editor Oskar Lebeck, starring such characters as Stratosphere Jim, Capt.

Frank Hawks, and Speed Bolton, both for the Dell-labeled comic book titles (Crackajack Funnies) and for Whitman’s Big Little Books. During 1939-42, McWilliams also freelanced for other publishers, including Centaur, Ace, and Quality. After spending three years in the Army on the European Theatre, he came back to the U.S. and to comic books, drawing crime, horror, romance and western genre stories for Hillman, Quality, Novelty, MLJ, St. John, Mainline, and Western (Tom Corbett—Space Cadet), and also contributing the science-fiction strip Space Conquerors to the magazine Boys’ Life. In 1952, Lebeck (who had since left Western) offered him to draw a new science-fiction syndicated strip, Twin Earths, which was distributed by United Features.

Drawing in a style which was clearly influenced by Alex Raymond, McWilliams did an excellent job on the strip, which lasted until 1963. From 1961-69, also for United Features, he was also drawing Davy Jones, written by Sam Leff. From 1965-68, he was again working for Western, contributing to The Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Doctor Solar, I Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild, Wild West and Run, Buddy, Run. Apparently inexhaustible, McWilliams even found the time to ghost on Rip Kirby (1964-65), Dan Flagg (1965-67), Captain Easy (1965-67), Rip Kirby (1969), and Mary Perkins On Stage (1969-70). In 1968, McWilliams started yet another syndicated strip, this time with writer John Saunders. Inspired by the popular TV series, I Spy (whose comic book version McWilliams had drawn for Western), Dateline: Danger! was “the first racially-integrated strip,” as its protagonists, Danny and Troy, were respectively a WASP and an African-American. After the strip’s demise, in 1974, McWilliams once again went back to comic books, drawing mystery, 120

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

adventure and war stories for Archie, Marvel, DC and Seaboard/Atlas.

From 1975-83, he once again ghosted on John Prentice’s Rip Kirby, also helping out Al Williamson on Secret Agent Corrigan and Alfred Andriola on Kerry Drake. During his last stint at Western (1976-82), he was the regular artist on Star Trek and Buck Rogers, also contributing to Starstream, The Twilight Zone, The Black Hole, and Flash Gordon. A member of the National Cartoonists Society, in 1978 he received their Award for Best Comic Book Artist in the Story category.

Dan Spiegle (born 1920) Born in Cosmopolis, Washington, Spiegle attended high school in the Northern California Redwoods and then enlisted in the Navy, where he painted insignias on combat aircraft. After the War, he improved his drawing talent at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. In 1949, the Los Angeles Mirror Syndicate launched a Hopalong Cassidy syndicated strip, and Spiegle was assigned the art chores, cleverly visualizing the adventures of the dark-clad, silver-haired western genre hero interpreted by William Boyd on the screen. Spiegle worked on the strip (which was distributed by King Features from 1951 on) until its demise in 1955. His six-year tenure on “Hoppy” allowed him to be hired by Western Printing to draw primarily the comic book versions of popular TV westerns, such as Maverick, Rawhide and Lawman, but Spiegle showed his versatility, rendering all kinds of stories and soon becoming Western’s most reliable artist. From 1956 until 1982, he drew dozens of movie and TV series adaptations, including several Disney productions such as Spin and Marty, The Scarecrow, Mary Poppins, That Darn Cat, Blackbeard’s Ghost and the Herbie/Love Bug trilogy, just to name a few. In 1966, he even contributed to the experimental Mickey Mouse Super Secret Agent series, drawing backgrounds and human characters around Paul Murry’s Mickey and Goofy. Yet the series he is fondly remembered for was Space Family Robinson (1962-69) which, co-created by him and editor Del Connell, was remarkably similar to the later popular TV series Lost in Space. Other notable series Spiegle worked on were Korak, Son of Tarzan (1968-72) and Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (1973-75), based on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. When Western folded in 1984, Spiegle had already done some work for other publishers, including Marvel (Scooby-Doo) and DC (Blackhawk, Unknown Soldier). With friend Mark Evanier, he conjured up Crossfire for Eclipse Comics (1984-87). He shared art chores with Dan Jippes on the Who Framed Roger Rabbit graphic novel for Disney (1988), and then continued to illustrate adaptations of Disney live-action and animated features, including Arachnophobia (1990), The Three Musketeers (1994), Pocahontas (1995) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). In 1996, he took over the revived Terry and the Pirates syndicated strip, drawing it until it folded the following year. More recently, he has been working on comic strips for Boys’ Life magazine.

Frank Thorne (born 1930) Born in Rahway, New Jersey, from 1944 until 1953, Benjamin Franklin Thorne played music and practiced magic before attending the Art Career School in New York City and deciding he would be a professional artist. Influenced by Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, he sold his first strip, The Illustrated History of Union Country, to the Elizabeth Daily Journal, which ran it daily in 1950-51. In 1951, he was assigned by King Features to draw the Perry Mason daily and Sunday strip, which unfortunately folded the next year. He then went to work for Western Printing, drawing the comic book likes of Flash Gordon, The Green Hornet, Tom Corbett—Space Cadet, and Jungle Jim, as well as adaptations of Moby Dick and Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, until LaFave Syndicate offered him to draw another strip, Dr. Guy Bennet. Written by B.C. Douglas (a pen-name for Michael Petti, M.D.), it ran daily and Sunday, and Thorne drew it from 1957 until 1961, when its title changed to Dr. Duncan and he took over the writing as well, continuing it for another year. The ’60s were spent mostly in the advertising field, illustrating for the Bell Telephone Magazine (1963-68) and other companies. Thorne did more comic book for Western in 1963-68. With Otto Binder, he co-created the post-Atomic War series Mighty Samson (1964), also October 2002

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

drawing the adaptation of the movie X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963), as well as several mystery stories for Boris Karloff, Believe It or Not, and The Twilight Zone in an essential yet effective style. From 1968-76, he worked mainly for DC (Tomahawk and Korak, Son of Tarzan) and Marvel (Red Sonja). In 1978, he created the erotic fantasy series Ghita of Alizarr for Warren Publishing, later collected in two volumes by Catalan Communications. More and more on the adult side of comics, Thorne created several other sexy heroines, such as Danger Rangerette (1979-80, for National Lampoon), Moonshine McJugs (1981-83, for Playboy), and Lann (1984, for Heavy Metal).

The latter, as well as The Erotic Worlds of Frank Thorne, made up two enticing comic titles at Eros Comix in the early ’90s.

Above: The Great Toth illustrated a memorable run of Zorro for Dell/Western in the late ’50s/early ’60s. Alex’s inimitable light-&shade style is highlighted here on this page from Four Color Comics #976, Mar. ’59. © Zorro Prod., Inc.

Alex Toth (born 1928) Born in New York City, Alexander Toth attended the School of Industrial Arts and the Art Students League before selling his first comic book page in 1943. From 1944-47, he freelanced primarily for Eastern Color, drawing for such titles as Heroic Comics and Juke Box Comics. His style, strongly influenced by such syndicated-strip masters of black-&-white as Noel Sickles, Milton Caniff and Frank Robbins, matured at DC/National where, under the enlightened editorship of Sheldon Mayer, Toth worked on and off for nine years, drawing super-heroes like The Atom, Green Lantern and Flash as well as such adventure and western genre strips as Sierra Smith, Rex the Wonder Dog, Johnny Peril, and Johnny Thunder. In 1950, he collaborated with 121

boarded a space monster scene for the film Angry Red Planet, and filled in for three weeks on the Roy Rogers daily strip. He then turned to animation, doing character design, layouts and storyboards for the Cambria Studio on Clutch Cargo and Space Angel until 1962. In 1964-68, 1972-74 and 1976-77 he was at the HannaBarbera Studio, working on various TV series, including Jonny Quest, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, The Herculoids, and The New Adventures of Huck Finn. Although animation work absorbed most of his time, he continued to produce astounding comic artwork, notably for Warren Publishing’s horror and war magazines (where he experimented with various graphic techniques) and DC’s mystery titles. Still at DC, he developed the Hot Wheels comic book (1970), after designing its animated version for Pantomime Pictures. His latter comic creations included The Vanguard (1977), Jesse Bravo (1980, a homage to his favorite actor, Errol Flynn, and favorite cartoonist/illustrator, Noel Sickles), and The Fox (1984). In 1981, with Spanish writer Enrique Sanchez Abuli, Toth created the first two episodes of the Torpedo 1936 gangster series. During the ’80s, he did more animation design work for the Ruby-Spears and TMS studios. Although since then he has only drawn an occasional cover or illustration, he remains one of the most respected and influential comic artists of all time.

Warren Tufts

Above: Holy moley! Is Warren Tuft’s work incredible or what?

This supremely rendered page (courtesy of Alberto Becattini) appeared as the splash page in Queen of the West, Dale Evans #21, 1958. ©2002 Roy Rogers, Inc.

122

Warren Tufts on “Aquila,” a memorable sequence of the Casey Ruggles daily strip. During the early 1950s, Toth also did stories for EC (drawing two fabulous war yarns written by Harvey Kurtzman), Standard (where his pencils were usually inked by Mike Peppe, except on the 1955 masterpiece “The Blue Gardenia”), Atlas/Marvel, St. John, and Lev Gleason. Drafted during the Korean War, Toth was stationed in Tokyo, Japan, and in 1955 drew the Jon Fury weekly page for his camp newspaper. Back home in 1956, Toth moved to California, where he immediately started working for editor Chuck McKimson at Western Printing. On and off, he would contribute to Dell/Western/Gold Key comic books for the next 12 years. In his inimitable, atmospheric style, Toth drew several western strips (Roy Rogers, Sugarfoot, Maverick), film adaptations (Wings of Eagles, Rio Bravo, Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People, The Time Machine), TV adaptations (Sea Hunt, 77 Sunset Strip, The Danny Thomas Show), but reached his apex with Zorro, derived from the popular Disney TV series starring Guy Williams. In 1960, he story-

(1925-1982) Born in Fresno, California, at 15 Tufts was already writing and acting for a San Joaquin Valley commercial radio station. During World War Two, he was an artist-correspondent and editor of Naval Air newspapers. Later on, he was a co-founder and program manager of radio stations in Fresno and Bakersfield. His debut in comics took place in 1949, when he sold the western genre strip Casey Ruggles, set in California during the Gold Rush days, to United Features Syndicate. He would write and draw it in his classic, bold graphic style until 1954, with occasional assists from Al Plastino, Alex Toth, Nick Cardy and Ed Good. After setting up his own syndicate, Warren Tufts Enterprises, he produced the humorous science-fiction strip, The Lone Spaceman (1954-55), and the beautiful, historically accurate western saga, Lance (195560). Always an aircraft buff, Tufts became a private pilot in 1957, eventually joining the Experimental Aircraft Association. From 19581960 and again from 1966-75, he drew comic book stories for Western Printing. Excelling at westerns, he was assigned to such titles as Dale Evans (1958), The Rifleman (1960-61), How the West Was Won (1963), and The High Chaparral (1968). He also drew, among others, adaptations of Disney’s Zorro (1959-61) and A Tiger Walks (1964), and a few issues of Korak, Son of Tarzan (1965-67), which he was allowed to sign. From 1960 until the mid-’70s, he was also involved in animation, doing story work, storyboards, layouts and even voices for Cambria (Space Angel, Captain Fathom), Joe Oriolo (The Three Stooges), and Hanna-Barbera (Jonny Quest, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, Super Friends). The “cartoony” side of his style was then seen on such Western/Gold Key comics as Gomer Pyle (1966-67), Scooby Doo (1970-72), The Amazing Chan and His Chan Clan (1973), and The Pink Panther (1974-78). His only non-Western comic book work was “The Diary of Ty Locke,” a mock-SF story for the gigantic Wham-O Comics (1967). Having founded Tufts Aircraft, he spent his last years designing his own planes. On July 6, 1982, he was killed in the crash of one of them.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

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

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

1970s Bullpenner WARREN REECE talks about Marvel Comics and working with EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, STAN LEE, MARIE SEVERIN, ADAMS, FRIEDRICH, ROY THOMAS, and others, with rare art!

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MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about FF #1, history of the MMMS, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art

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#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more!

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

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

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#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

#12: CHARLTON PART 2

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

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

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

Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes

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

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983!

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

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

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

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

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

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

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

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

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

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

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

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

HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

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

New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

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

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

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

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

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

Previously available only to CBA subscribers!

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

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

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $3.95

C o l l e c t o r

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

DIGITAL

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35

KIRBY COLLECTOR #31

KIRBY COLLECTOR #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #33

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

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

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

KIRBY/LARSEN and KIRBY/TIMM covers!

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

KIRBY COLLECTOR #37

KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

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

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

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

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

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

Two UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #39

KIRBY COLLECTOR #40

KIRBY COLLECTOR #41

KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

97

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

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

Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

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

Bombastic EVERYTHING GOES issue, with a wealth of great submissions that couldn’t be pigeonholed into a “theme” issue!

Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JIM LEE and ADAM HUGHES, MARK EVANIER’s column, huge pencil art galleries, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS, and more!

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

98

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

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

KIRBY CHECKLIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

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

(128-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490380 • Diamond Order Code: SEP111248

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series.

Now the entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his powerful, uninked PENCIL ART, showing Kirby’s work in its undiluted, raw form! Also included is Kirby’s ILLUSTRATED SILVER STAR MOVIE SCREENPLAY, never-seen SKETCHES, PIN-UPS, and an historical overview to put it all in perspective!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

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

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

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

(52-page comic book) $5.95 • (Digital Edition) $2.95

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

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

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

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

(168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

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

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

Reprinting the fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered!

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

(60-page tabloid with COLOR) SOLD OUT • (Digital Edition) $5.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom!

TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

ALTER EGO #118

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #1 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2

BRICKJOURNAL #24

Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembering LES DANIELS, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and more!

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

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

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

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

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

ALTER EGO #119

ALTER EGO #120

ALTER EGO #121

JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond!

Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

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

MARC SWAYZE TRIBUTE ISSUE, spotlighting FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America)!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRAW! #25

BACK ISSUE #65

BACK ISSUE #66

BACK ISSUE #67

BACK ISSUE #68

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

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

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

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

Mignola cover.

“1970s and ‘80s Legion of Super-Heroes!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambitious new series documenting each decade of comic book history!

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

JOHN WELLS covers comics in the 1960-64 JFK and Beatles era: DC’s new GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE and multiple earths!

LEE and KIRBY at Marvel on FF, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, and X-MEN! BATMAN’s “new look”, Charlton’s BLUE BEETLE, CREEPY #1 & more!

MODERN MASTERS: CLIFF CHIANG

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

1960-64: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 • Out now!

1980s: (288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $41.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5 • Out now!

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

All characters TM & ©2013 their respective owners.

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

THE STAR*REACH COMPANION

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

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

DAN SPIEGLE: A LIFE IN COMIC ART

PLUGGED IN!

COMICS PROS IN THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY

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

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

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

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

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

SUBSCRIBE! • Digital Editions: 3.95 each, or save with a digital subscription (digital editions are included FREE with a print subscription)!

• Back Issue, Draw, Alter Ego & Comic Book Collector are now all full-color!

• Lower international shipping rates! $

2013 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: (with FREE Digital Editions)

Media Mail

1st Class Canada 1st Class Priority US Intl.

Intl.

Digital Only

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$50

$68

$65

$72

$150

$15.80

BACK ISSUE! (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

DRAW! (4 issues)

$30

$40

$43

$54

$78

$11.80

ALTER EGO (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

COMIC BOOK CREATOR (4 issues w/Special)

$36

$45

$50

$65

$95

$15.80

BRICKJOURNAL (6 issues)

$57

$72

$75

$86

$128

$23.70

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TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

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

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THE BEST OF ALTER EGO, VOL. 2

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

COMIC BOOK ARTIST PIN-UP

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