Comic Book Artist #22 Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

SPECIAL

THE TREASURES OF GOLD KEY COMICS

™

TRIBUTE No.22 October 2002

$6.95 In The US

MANNING • SPIEGLE • EVANIER • ROYER • GLUT • SANTOS

NUMBER 22

CELEBRATING

THE

LIVES & WORK

OF THE

GREAT CARTOONISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS

OCTOBER 2002

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

N EXT

ISSU E

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MACAB R E

M IKE

M IG NOLA

AN D

J ITTE RY

J ILL

THOM PSON!

Buried Treasure

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

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

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.

“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

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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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

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

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

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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.

CBA Interview

The Splendor of Dan Spiegle From his Hopalong Cassidy strip to current work at Boys’ Life Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcription by the LongBox.com Staff

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.

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-

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

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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.

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

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

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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

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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.

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

CBA Interview

Paul’s Gold Key Memories

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 Above and below: The Jungle Twins created by Chase Craig and Paul Norris only ran 13 coloring. For the last ten years of Brick Bradford, I did my own coloring on the Sunday pages. issues from 1972 to 1975. Respectively, here are pages 1 and 27 from The Jungle Twins CBA: Did you submit a reduced photostat and hand-color it or did you do it by the #13. ©2002 Western Publishing, Inc. 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

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.

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

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. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 22

October 2002

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.

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

October 2002

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

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: 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

October 2002

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

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

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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. October 2002

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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.

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.

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

October 2002

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.

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

Below: Writer Don Glut in 1971, around the time of his tenure as Gold Key scripter. Courtesy of Don Glut.

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

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 (1901-2000) IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, Federal School of Art. After doing gag cartoons for Captain Billy’s Born in Oregon, Barks drew gag cartoons for theCLICK CalgaryTHE Eye-Opener LINK TOWhiz ORDER THIS Bang, he moved to California and entered the animation field, before joining the Walt Disney Animation Studio in 1935. Initially OR DIGITAL ISSUE IN PRINT working atFORMAT! Disney, Harman-Ising, and Cartoon Films. In 1940, he he worked as an in-betweener, then he switched to the story departcollaborated with writer/artist Chase Craig on the Mortimer and ment, where he stayed until 1942, Charlie Sunday page. Thanks to Craig, in 1942 he was offered the job writing and sketching several of art director at Western Publishing’s Los Angeles office. Until 1947, Donald Duck cartoon shorts. While he supervised the production of several funny animal comic titles. He at the Studio, Barks drew his first also wrote and drew Warner’s Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, as well as comic book story for Western/Dell, Disney’s The Li’l Bad Wolf (that he co-created with Craig in 1945), “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold” Bucky Bug, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and the Seven Dwarfs among others. (Four Color Comics #9, 1942), From 1944-47, he also illustrated the Bugs Bunny Sunday page. From sharing art chores with Jack 1947-65, he directed the production of several Whitman and Golden Hannah. By 1943, he was writing Press children’s books, occasionally writing and/or drawing them. He and drawing Donald Duck tenalso contributed illustrations to The Golden Magazine. pagers for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Although he did some John Carey work on Barney Bear, Andy Panda, (1915-1987) Bugs Bunny and other non-Disney Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Carey started his career as an animator #22: GOLD KEY COMICS characters,Interviews he is remembered & examinations: RUSS MANNING Magnus Robot at the&Warner Brothers Studio. Working under various directors, WALLY WOODDuck & Total War M.A.R.S. Patrol, Tarzan by because ofFighter, the great Disney including Bob Clampett and Bob McKimson, he drew Bugs Bunny, JESSE MARSH, JESSE SANTOS and DON GLUT’S Dagar and Dr. stories he created during nextALBERTO Porky Pig,and Daffy and other characters for the screen until 1950, Spektor, Turok, Son the of Stone’s GIOLITTI PAULDuck S. NEWMAN, plus Doctor Solar,aBoris Karloff, Zone,to comics. He was hired at Western Publishing and 23 years. He gave Donald Duck whenThe heTwilight switched and more, including MARK EVANIER on cartoon comics, and a new and more complex personality, started the characters he knew best—the same he had definitive company history! New BRUCE TIMMdrawing cover! and created such legendary animated (122-page magazine) $6.95 at Warner. In 1953, he drew his first Woody Woodpecker characters as Uncle Scrooge(Digital (1947), Edition)story, $3.95 and for the next 11 years he was Woody’s premier comic book The Beagle http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_56&products_id=538 Boys (1951), Gyro artist, also tackling other Lantz characters like Andy Panda, Oswald Gearloose (1952) and Magica De the Rabbit, and Space Mouse. By the early 1960s he was drawing Spell (1961). Although he officially such Hanna-Barbera characters as Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear, retired in 1966, Barks continued as well as Western’s own The Little Monsters. From 1968 onwards, writing comic book stories while he concentrated on the Disney characters, drawing April, May, and painting the Disney Ducks in oils. June; Chip ’n’ Dale; Brer Rabbit; Goofy; and Donald Duck among others. From 1977-84, he was the main artist on the Winnie-theJack Bradbury Pooh comic book, written by Vic Lockman. (born 1914) A native of Seattle, Washington, in

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