Comic Book Artist #3 by TwoMorrows Publishing

No.3 No.3 Winter Fall1998 1999

$5.95 In The US

Neal Adams: The Marvel Years

NO. 3

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

WINTER 1999

COVER STORY: THE ADAMS IMPACT The tale behind our cover and the “Nefarious” One’s unpublished X-Men graphic novel pages ..............1 EDITOR’S RANT: SHAPING UP THINGS TO COME Ye Crusading Editor on Neal Adams’ forthcoming graphic novel and promises lost ..................................2 CBA REVIEW: THE “FAX” OF WAR Jon B. Cooke ruminates on Joe Kubert’s graphic novel, Fax from Sarajevo................................................3 FUNNYBOOK BOOKS: KNOWING LES, LEARNING MORE Reviewing Superman: The Complete History and a friendship with author Les Daniels ............................4 CBA COMMENTARY: READING BETWEEN THE PANELS Roy Thomas checks the facts in Steve Duin & Mike Richardson’s Comics Between the Panels ..................5 CBA COMMUNIQUES: CARMINE INFANTINO’S REBUTTAL DC’s ex-publisher responds to CBA #1; Sal Amendola discusses DC; and more missives from readers......7 STRIPPED Rick Pinchera reveals the rejected Merry Marvel Mutants ......................................................................11 FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE:@!!?* Detail of Neal’s pencil art from Astonishing Tales #12. ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

Our man Fred chats with the late Captain Marvel about Krees, Skrulls and war ....................................12 CBA SPECIAL SECTION: NEAL ADAMS AND THE AGE OF MARVEL NEAL ADAMS: THE MARVEL YEARS Interview by Arlen Schumer..............................................................13

CBA #2 CORRECTIONS: Kevin Hanley co-wrote the Steve Englehart interview with Bob Brodsky—my sincere apology for the oversight. “The Uncensored Conan” panels on pg. 51 were from the story in Conan the Barbarian #12, not #11 as printed, and the entire story was originally intended for Savage Tales #2 (as was the above “Man-Thing” story). Syd Shores inked the unpubbed Avengers cover on pg. 21. Jim Starlin insists he did not draw the Marvel Super-Heroes cover on pg. 71, though it sure looks like Jim to me! Sal Buscema was the artist of the Captain America page on pg. 68. The Dr. Fate panels in the Alter Ego section, pg. 12, were drawn by Howard Sherman. Bob Yeremian, where for art thou? COPYRIGHTS: The Angel, Ant-Man, Avengers, The Beast, Black Bolt, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Cyclops, Goliath, Havok, Ice Man, Iron Man, Ka-Zar, Killraven, Magneto, Man-Thing, Marvel Girl, Medusa, Professor X, Rawhide Kid, Rick Jones, Sauron, The Thing, Thor, Tomb of Dracula, Triton, Vision, War of the Worlds, X-Men ™&©1998 Marvel Entertainment Inc. Captain Marvel, Batman, The Joker, Robin, Superman ™&©1998 DC Comics. Conan ™&©1998 Conan Properties. Uncle Creepy ™&©1998 Warren Publications.

TOM PALMER: THE ART OF INKING NEAL ADAMS Mini-interview with possibly Adams’ greatest inker ....23 NEAL ADAMS’ MARVEL WORK: A CHECKLIST by David Berkebile ............................................................39 ARTIST SHOWCASE: NEAL ADAMS’ LOST X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL Six pages of an aborted project ............47

The Avengers get intergalactic in this digitally manipulated panel from Avengers #96

Visit CBA on the Web at: www.fantasty.com/comicbookartist/ All letters of comment, articles and artwork, please mail to: Jon B. Cooke, Editor Comic Book Artist P.O. Box 204 West Kingston, RI 02892-0204

NEXT ISSUE — WARREN PUBLICATIONS: THE EMPIRE OF HORROR!

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published quarterly 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. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $7.40 elsewhere). Yearly subscriptions: $20 US, $27 Canada, $37 elsewhere. First Printing. All characters are © their respective companies. All material is © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © their respective authors. ©1998 TwoMorrows/Jon B. Cooke. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Cover Story

The Adams Impact Celebrating Our Featured Artist and His Stint at Marvel Comics

Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

no worse color for comic books than eggshell blue [the most prominent color on the cover]… Look at the reproduction inside. The way this thing happened was they called me and said, ‘We’re going to reprint this stuff.’ And I said, ‘I’d kinda like to have the black-&-whites to retouch them—we’re in the ’90s now. Can I rework the pages just a little bit?’ They said, ‘We’ve already started work on it.’ I said, ‘Okay. How about I art direct the color?’ They said, ‘Sure, we’ll send you over some of these proofs.’ I know what that means, so I said, “Okay, I’ll do the cover.” So I did it and they vignetted it, and the rest just disappeared! How much can one sabotage by good intentions?” Holding up the CBA #3 cover proof and the X-Men collection, Neal said, “I submitted this and I got that. How would that make you feel? So Comic Book Artist gets the cover.” Thank you, Neal. As for our special Artist Showcase, six pages of an unpubbed X-Men graphic novel, Neal answered my second query: “In the early ’80s, I got a call from Jim Shooter and he said, ‘Do you have any problem working for Marvel?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I’ve got a graphic novel I would like you to do.’ I said, ‘I would love to do it but let me let you know ahead of time just so you know, Jim—I’ve sort of taken this stand against workmade-for-hire, but it’s not hard to write a contract that’s not work-made-for-hire. And you can take everything; it’s not a problem. So you know that going in.’ “He said, ‘Yeah, that’s not a problem.’ I said, ‘Well, as long as you understand that, I’m fine. No problem; I’ll be glad to do it.’ Of course, everybody was surprised; I never said no. “Jim said, ‘Let me send you the outline,’ which I think he wrote. So I read it and talked to him afterwards, and I said, ‘The outline’s a little loose; can I have flexibility to play with it?’ (something I always ask when I get a new job). And he said, ‘Sure.’ “I said, ‘How’s the contract coming?’ He said, ‘We’re working on it but you can get started if you want to.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ “The result is what I did. I called a couple of weeks later and he said, ‘I can’t put the contract together. I can’t do it.’ And I don’t know why. So they gave the project to Brent Anderson [God Loves, Man Kills]. I said to Jim, ‘I’ve already done some pages.’ He said, ‘What can I say?’ [laughs] So I guess I sent him Xeroxes of the pages and said, ‘Maybe some other time.’ “These were the pages that were done and never paid for.” The Adams generosity continues. For a peek at the neverbefore-seen X-Men graphic novel pages, please turn to page 45 to see a bit of what could have been….

As we were coming down to the wire on putting Comic Book Artist #2 to bed, rushing to get the issue ready for the San Diego Comic Con, we were faced with the prospect of announcing what’s coming up in issue #3. The plan was originally to feature “Empire of Horror: The Warren Publishing Story” as the subject for our third edition, but we had virtually no specific material on hand to promote in the Previews solicitation (due the same day we had to finish CBA #2). Somehow—and I can’t remember the exact chronology—I found myself on the phone late on that Sunday night chatting with Kris (Adams) Stone, Neal’s daughter and manager of Continuity Associates, and she offered CBA use of two incredible works by Neal: An (oddly) unused X-Men wraparound cover and six pages of an unpublished X-Men graphic novel. Well, needless to say, as a fax of the cover art came out of our machine, the probability of a “Neal Adams: The Marvel Years” issue became very real. (That moment—as this extraordinary image was transmitted between facsimile machines—won’t be forgotten by this editor for some time to come.) Very special thanks to Neal, Kris, Cory (who again—under crushing a deadline—colored our cover to perfection), Jason, Zeea, Josh, Marilyn, and all the fine people at Continuity Associates. (Because of their efforts we were able to have proofs of our cover available for inspection at the San Diego Con, certainly the hit at our booth.) To make this issue a reality, we next had to line up our pal Arlen Schumer, undoubtedly the world’s biggest Adams fan— author of the bestselling “Neal Adams: The DC Years” issue of Comic Book Marketplace [#40, reprinted in #56] and one-time Continuity employee—to helm this companion issue, using his interviewing skills and design magic to bring this issue to light. Arlen is a big DC fan, so it took some work wearing him down to focus on the Marvel stuff but, as the talk and layout reveal, he put in great enthusiasm and (yet again) has achieved seminal work. Arlen and I traveled down to Continuity’s New York studio and spent a number of hours interviewing Neal about his Marvel experiences. While I just sat back and soaked in Neal and Arlen’s conversation, I could see that a great issue was coming together and all of my questions were being answered… except two. As the duo took a breather, I asked Neal, “Why are you giving CBA this great piece of art for our cover? What’s the story?” Neal said that he originally drew it as a wraparound cover for the X-Men Visionaries 2: The Neal Adams Collection trade paperback that was released in 1996, compiling the entire Adams/Thomas run of X-Men. “One of the reasons I offered you guys use of the cover, was that Marvel vignetted these characters—not even using Xavier’s face—and cutting out the rest.” It seems some freelance art director had different thoughts about Neal’s submitted piece. Neal was “terribly upset” with the published cover. “There’s

Above: Can you believe that Neal submitted the cover art of this issue to Marvel originally for use as the cover art to X-Men Visionaries 2: The Neal Adams Collection and Marvel came up with the above, severely revised (and over-designed, methinks) finished piece? Go figure. ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

Editor’s Rant

Shaping Up Things to Come Ramblings On Promises Made and Barroom Chats Comic Book Artist Staff Editor/Designer Jon B. Cooke Publisher TwoMorrows John & Pam Morrow Contributing Editors Roy Thomas John Morrow Arlen Schumer Designer, Adams Section Arlen Schumer Proofreading John Morrow Roy Thomas Cover Art Neal Adams Cover Colorist Cory Adams Contributors Neal Adams • Arlen Schumer Continuity Associates Roy Thomas • Tom Palmer John Morrow • Sal Amendola Rick Pinchera • Fred Hembeck Glenn Southwick • Albert Moy David Berkebile • Cory Adams Tom Horvitz • Victor Lim John Fanucchi • Mike Thibodeaux Richard Martinez • David Hamilton Shawna Ervin-Gore & Dark Horse Phil Straub • Fiona Russell Words & Pictures Museum Tom Stewart • Bob Yeremian Special Thanks Arlen Schumer & Sherri Wolfgang John & Pam Morrow • Beth Cooke Roy Thomas • Neal Adams Benjamin, Joshua & Daniel Cooke Ina Cooke & Nick Mook Andrew D. Cooke & Patty Willett Richard Cooke • Chris Cooke Susan Cooke-Anastasi • Becky Cooke Graphic Innovations, Inc. • Bork Trina Robbins • Dez Skinn Fantasy Zone • Atomic Comics Providence Creative Group, Inc. Tim McEnerney • Steve Kortes Joe Kubert • Kris Stone Marilyn & Josh Adams D. Hambone • Glenn Southwick Cliff & Tim, those Rat Bastards 2

Things are starting to cook for CBA/AE (be sure to check It’s not easy being editor of Comic Book Artist. Much as I out our “Upcoming Themes” blurb on the next page), and we’re love producing this magazine—working with my best buddy John gratified by our baby mag’s welcome from the world of fandom. Morrow, who publishes CBA and helps out with production enorWhile you’ll see two critical commentaries in our letters section, our mously; talking with my true comic book heroes (artists, writers, mail has overwhelmingly been in favor of our efforts—it’s hearteneditors and publishers all); receiving photocopies of art treasures ing to be appreciated by from comics fans the world over; you folks. and plotting world conquest by Though we’d saving comic book history, one love to go bi-monthly, indifan at a time—there just is so vidualize page spread much room to fill each issue, and designs, and include more I’ve been forced to leave out a color in each issue, please ton of material just to squeeze note that John and I still stuff in. I’m getting better at maintain full-time jobs in anticipating story lengths and advertising and, frankly, space requirements and can only we’re lucky that CBA covhumbly request that our readers ers costs. So don’t stop put up with the learning curve. hoping for more CBA, give Well, if you’ve already us time, and hopefully we’ll perused this issue’s table on confind a way. tents, you’ll note that this isn’t As I mentioned the sequel to last issue’s on page one, Arlen “Marvel’s Second Wave” as Schumer and I visited Neal’s promised. Again, interviews with Continuity office in Marie Severin, John Romita, Don Manhattan, and as we McGregor, and Dave Cockrum were being graciously ushhave been postponed to make ered into the conference room for this issue’s massive Neal room, we found Neal at the Adams conversation, and I can table, inking pages to his only extend a sheepish apology upcoming graphic novel, A and vow that they will appear in New Model of the the aforementioned sequel as Universe: A Conversation soon as we schedule the special. Between Two Guys in a We also hoped to Bar. Neal had posted two include Roy Thomas’ recollections pages of this new project at of his Avengers collaborations his Continuity booth in San with Neal Adams and other Diego—atypical splashes artists (including the almost-team- Neal calls this an atypical page from his forthcoming graphic novel, A New Model of the Universe: A Conversation Between Two Guys in a Bar. ©1998 featuring dinosaurs [one up of Thomas and Alex Toth!) but Neal Adams. [See Neal’s ad spread in this issue for more information.] appears here]—and this alas, inclusion has not come to pass, and the “Walking Tour of the Kree-Skrull War” should appear innovative graphic novel was the buzz of the con. A description of the book from Neal is on page 51 of CBA #1 and in this issue’s ad. soon in our flip-mag, Alter Ego. Our thanks to Roy for his patience A graphic novel about two guys chatting at a bar, disand courtesy, and for suggesting that we appropriate his cover this cussing tectonics, with a Tyrannosaur occasionally thrown in? Can issue for our special one-time wraparound cover featuring the Neal sustain a reader’s interest for over a hundred pages, discussing Adams/ Thomas X-Men (but be sure to peek at the inside back science and physics? Judging from the work we saw, you betcha! cover for an exclusive Shelly Moldoff cover for A/E!). This is different—a book this Adams fan is eagerly looking forward This year’s San Diego Con was a smashing success for to—and proof that Neal continues to break down barriers and TwoMorrows and our thanks to everyone who visited the booth doing what he does best: Trying something new. Set for release in (located, as luck would have it, right next to Neal’s Continuity early 1999, look for a solicitation notice in Previews and check out exhibit!). Roy took time out of his schedule to join us for a signing Neal’s ad in this issue, or call up his homepage at www.nealand even such luminaries as Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Vin Sullivan, Julie Schwartz, John Broome, Nick Cardy, Russ Heath, and Jim Warren adams.com on the Web. Tell ’im CBA sent you. stopped by! Yee-hah! What a great time! And thanks everybody And how better to sign off then by sending an oblique for the kind words regarding our sister magazine, The Jack Kirby message to my fellow San Diego revelers: “Top of the stairs, mate!” Collector, and CBA/AE! — Jon B. Cooke COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Winter 1999

CBA Review

The Fax and Truth of War Another Look at Joe Kubert’s Magnum Opus, Fax from Sarajevo by Jon B. Cooke Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo, a breathtaking graphic novel revealing the real horror of war—as far removed from the artist’s previous interpretations of war as any of the thousands of Sgt. Rock pages he has drawn—is, most intensely, a testament to his friendship and affection for his friend Ervin Rustemagic, international businessman and Joe’s art agent. Though first published as a hardback in 1996, Fax has been newly released as an affordable trade paperback edition, and it is Joe’s most profound work to date, revealing an intelligence and emotional depth the artist has never portrayed so exactly. The book, better defined as a “graphic documentary” than “graphic novel,” is clearly Kubert’s best work and (considering the eminence of the artist in the field) well deserving of a read. The book is the chronicle of the Rustemagic family’s survival through the Serbian siege of Sarajevo in 1992-93 through Joe’s interpretations of Ervin’s faxes from the wartorn city. An exchange between Barry Windsor-Smith and Gary Groth (in BWS’ interview in Comics Journal #190) concerning Fax from Sarajevo as a book somehow faulty because it has a typical Kubert approach to the material has long bothered me. Barry asks, Fax from Sarajevo. By Joe Kubert. 207 pp. $16.95 sc. Published by Dark Horse Books, Milwaukie, OR.

WHAT’S COMING IN CBA: For those of you who care, following is a tentative list of future themes for Comic Book Artist. If you have any ideas, appropriate art (especially unpublished work), interviews, old fanzines, or concepts you would like to see CBA explore, please write us and get on board for free issues! NEXT ISSUE: “Empire of Horror: The Warren Publishing Story.” Featuring a massive, definitive interview with Jim Warren. Interviews and features on Archie Goodwin, Bernie Wrightson, Richard Corben, Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, and more! CBA #5: “DC’s New Blood: 1967-74” From the Writers Strike to the Great Creator Exodus, we examine DC’s “new” talent including Mike Kaluta, Sam Glanzman and Art Suydam. CBA #6: “The Other Guys: Charlton, Tower and Atlas/Seaboard” Looking at Wally Wood, Steve Ditko and many of the other great creators not at DC or Marvel in the ’60s/’70s. CBA #7: “The Marvel Bullpen” Featuring the inhabitants at the House of Ideas, from the Severins to Frank Brunner. Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

“I’m looking at these pictures and I’m assuming that Joe’s sincerity is deep and profound. But did Joe ask himself, ‘Should I draw this in my Sgt. Rock style?… This stuff is supposed to be pathetic, it’s supposed to be horrifying; the little girl getting blown up by a Joe Kubert explosion… It’s a Joe Kubert little girl, and it’s a Joe Kubert explosion. And there’s a sound there that’s a Joe Kubert sound effect: Kaboom!… it just left me confused.” This begs the question, how else should Kubert approach his own rendition of such a highly personalized story? In Harvey Kurtzman’s style? George Pratt’s? Joe Sacco’s? art spiegelman’s? Barry Windsor-Smith’s? No. This is Joe’s story about his friend, told in the style the artist knows best and most truthfully—his own. While the book has some minor drawbacks (occasional stilted patterns of dialogue), it is certainly the most significant work of Joe’s career, bereft of an Enemy Ace-like ambiguity about war and death. At the risk of misinterpreting Barry’s confusion, Joe has no more affective style than his own—if Fax resembles Sgt. Rock it is because they come from the same creator’s point of view. In a recent conversation, Joe revealed that his next major work will involve a look at the Holocaust, leading this writer to believe that Joe has still a great number of significant stories to tell. At 72 years old, Joe is as vital to the field as ever, not just as mentor, artist and businessman, but as a writer. Buy Fax from Sarajevo and judge for yourself.

Don McGregor • Bill Schelly Kevin Eastman • Allan Rosenberg Simon Bisley • Paul Smith Dave Elliott • Bob Polio Tom Stewart • Mel Nash Lee of Lee’s Comics • Nick Cardy Steve Englehart • Steve Leialoha Jim Amash • Al Feldstein Les Daniels • Steve Ditko Fantagraphics • Eric Reynolds Marv Wolfman • Tony Isabella Mark Evanier • Sergio Aragonés Jim Warren • Shawna Ervin-Gore Frank Brunner • Bryan Talbot Chris Staros • Chris Orr & CBLDF Shel Dorf • Ron Turner/Last Gasp Bud Plant • Quebecor Printing Josh Sheppard • Glenn Danzig Batton Lash & Jackie Estrada Kurt Hathaway • Bill Lawling Ed Hatton • Richard Howell Tom Ziuko • David A. Roach and all you crazy cats in San Diego! Dedicated to Robert H. D. Aherns

FUTURE IDEAS: “The MAD Men: EC After Kurtzman,” “Frank Miller & Company,” “Dealers, Con Men, and the Direct Market: The Fan Explosion 1964-1978,”“Women and the Comics” (guest-edited by Trina Robbins!), “Joe Kubert: His Art & Legacy,” “Peeking at the British Weeklies,” “Looking Over the Undergrounds,” “Not-So-Secret Wars: Marvel in the ‘80s,” “Fun Stuff: The Joy of Comics” (kids’ comics), “The Schwartz Effect: The Silver Agers,” “Return to The Studio,” “Cartoons & Comic Books,”“The Filipino School,” “Image Comics,” “Fantagraphics,” “Comics & the Movies,” “Comics & Advertising,” “Comics as History,” “Heavy Metal,” and “The Interlopers: Pacific, First & Eclipse.” Plus we’d love to devote issues to specific artists, such as Alex Toth, R. Crumb, Will Eisner, Alan Moore, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Barry WindsorSmith, and others. Zat nuff? 3

Funnybook Books

Knowing Les, Learning More by Jon B. Cooke

Les Daniels. Photo by Beth Gwinn.

Superman: The Complete History. The Life and Times of the Man of Steel. By Les Daniels. Book design by Chip Kidd. 192 pp, 200 color images. $29.95 hc. Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco. 4

Les Daniels and I, we go way back—farther back than he may realize. In the early ’70s, when the only histories of comics out there were about comic strips (with hardly a mention of funnybooks), somehow by chance or circumstance, I uncovered Les’ and Mad Peck’s glorious tome, Comix: A History of the Comic Book in America. Absorbing that book, my eyes popped and brain exploded (à la Basil Wolverton) as I read a real history of comics, at once informative, entertaining, and (yes) downright subversive. Not only did Les discuss Jack Cole, Will Eisner, and EC, he also exposed me most importantly to the genius of Harvey Kurtzman and Harvey’s “sons,” R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and the whole underground gang. Les told me that Mad was once (gasp!) a comic book, and that other Kurtzman wonders (Trump, Humbug, and Help!) lurk out there. With Comix, my obsession with Harvey began and I haunted Providence’s Thayer Street bookstores to unearth those Ballantine paperback reprints of Mad comics—and I’ve never been quite right since. As a kid I heard that the author lived in my puny state, and I saw his name pop up here and there as critic and local wit. I first encountered Daniels on stage during a Martin “Fernwood Tonight” Mull stage show (they used to jam in a band called The Double Standard Quartet), and I would devour his film review column, “MindRot,” every week in the Providence Eagle, a free tabloid. Les was into everything I was into, and he wrote with such erudite, literate and accessible panache that I just knew he was one of those few cool guys who dug really cool stuff. (And I’ll betcha you don’t know that Les is also one of the premier horror writers of our time, didja? Les has written an exquisite series of historical novels featuring his aristocratic vampire, Don Sebastian, including The Black Castle, The Silver Skull, and Citizen Vampire. Check ’em out!) I didn’t get to actually meet Les until I started up my own (short-lived) horror fanzine back in 1991 (with the appropriately obscure title for a Lovecraft-inspired rag, Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror) and chose Les as the subject of the first issue. And we hit it off rather well, once traveling together to some horror soiree in New York City, and calling each other every six months or so. And we mostly talked about comics. (Even during the Tekeli-li! interview session, I asked him more about comics than horror because, well, I dig funnybooks more.) Then he came out with Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics and, more recently, DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes, two worthy volumes that are surprisingly concise and frank for corporate-sponsored books. Now my friend Les brings us Superman: The Complete History, a 192-page chronicle of the world’s first super-hero, designed by the most excellent Chip (Batman Collected) Kidd, and just in time for

the 60th anniversary of the Man of Tomorrow’s debut. My first impression of this delightfully affordable, handsome book is raging jealousy. Right with the opening unpublished panel from the Superman newspaper strip, Les scores with any number of scoops: An unpublished 1936 sketch by Joe Shuster (prophetic doodlings of the merchandising power of the thenunsold Superman); a minute and detailed study of Superman’s creation; a layout drawing for an unreleased 1940 test reel of Fleischer’s unsurpassed cartoon series; surprisingly open interviews with Shuster, Jerry Siegel, the “real Lois Lane,” Whitney Ellsworth, Mort Weisinger, Curt Swan, and other luminaries; Bruce Timm’s superb designs for the recent cartoon series; and (yow!) a concise examination of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and the agony of televising the couple’s wedding. Okay, I was kidding about the last bit. My one complaint about Les’ recent comic book histories is their over-emphasis on non-comic book material (leaving me with the impression of editorial/corporate insistence on the material’s inclusion—forcing a self-conscious legitimacy where it simply isn’t necessary— especially evident in the DC overview). But combined with Kidd’s excruciatingly detailed and microscopic views of Super-merchandising and the exclusive visuals, this combination of mediums works in Superman: The Complete History; while I normally could care nary one wit about The Adventures of Superman TV show (at least, those episodes without Phyllis Coates), Les combines interesting anecdotes by Ellsworth, Larson and others, with great images (like the creepy lifemask of George Reeves) sustaining my interest throughout the chapter. Equally impressive as Les’ prose is Chip’s innovative design. Smaller than his Batman Collected of a couple of years ago, the book is still a package chock-full o’ cool stuff, thoughtfully laid out. There’s an emphasis on the recent Timm/Paul Dini cartoon series, featuring a few breathtaking background paintings. Best of all might be the cover—dust jacket featuring detail drawings by Joe Shuster; inside covers by (the dangerously-close-toover-exposed—but still impressive) Alex Ross [see left]. Full comic stories are included with mixed results; from the best (1942’s “Powerstone”) to the mediocre (“Metropolis 900 Mi”—John Byrne’s 1987 Lex Luthor vignette which doesn’t even feature Superman), though one suspects Les had some slim pickings to choose from if the criteria was keeping story lengths short. And naturally Chip chose to shoot the tales directly from the original comics, achieving a feel of authenticity and sepia-toned nostalgia. My nitpicks? Few and decidedly self-centered: I had hoped to see a greater emphasis on the 1970s (that being CBA’s era, I suppose), enlightening us to the “Swanderson” approach and maybe a talk with Jose Garcia-Lopez. I was disappointed that the great stories by Gil Kane and Marv Wolfman were overlooked (“The World Without Superman” is a personal favorite), but aside from these quibbles, I was quite impressed. Word has it that Les and Chip will also be compiling companion volumes featuring Batman and Wonder Woman, each character celebrating their own 60th anniversaries. If they follow this book as template, the new team of Daniels & Kidd can’t miss. Oh, and Les says to look for a fancy-schmancy edition of this book called Superman: The Golden Age in June. COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Winter 1999

CBA Commentary

Reading Between the Panels by Roy Thomas Back in the mid-’60s, during the early days of the Vietnam War, the national news media discovered comics fandom. (I’d prefer to think there was no causal connection between those two events.) When Newsweek and other magazines and newspapers and TV programs began to feature stories on comic books old and new, I was almost invariably appalled by the number of mistakes of fact which crept into generally simple-minded and often fairly brief coverage. If the media couldn’t get facts about comic books and comics fans straight, it slowly dawned on me, how the hell was I supposed to believe what they were telling me about a war that was going on on the other side of the world? I think we all know the answer to that. And, unfortunately, that’s more or less the way I feel about the new $50 volume Comics Between the Panels by Steve Duin and Mike Richardson, published by Dark Horse Comics. Here’s why: I freely admit it: When a new book about the history of comics comes out, I follow pretty much the same procedure that most professionals I know do. Namely, the first thing I do is look up any references to myself and the material I’ve worked on, to see if they got those right. From there, my reading radiates out in concentric circles to other topics I feel I know something about, and from there to the ones I want to know something about. By this point, I figure I have a rough idea of how much I can trust (or will like—not necessarily the same thing) the rest of the book. Like other pros, of course, this approach naturally means I must always brace myself for evaluations of my work and career which may rub me the wrong way (as in much of Jones and Jacobs’ The Comic Book Heroes) or even for being downright ignored (as in Maurice’s Horn’s ponderous tomes on comics about women and the Old West, wherein he managed to go on at great length about Red Sonja and Red Wolf and mention everyone connected with those characters by name except me—I suspect because we didn’t exactly hit it off in the early ’70s). So let me say up front that I certainly can’t complain about the tone of coverage of ageing comics writer/editor Roy Thomas in Comics Between the Panels. I could quibble about the fact that a two-column entry on the subject spends 60% of its space on my first two weeks in the industry, and almost all the rest on how I became Marvel’s editor-in-chief in 1972, with nary a single mention of Conan the Barbarian, The Avengers, or any of the other work I did in three decades at Marvel and DC. But then, the book’s dust jacket declares that “the authors take an irreverent, idiosyncratic look” at comics, and Duin in his introduction says the book “was never intended to be a comprehensive reference work.” So I’ll take them at their word, with no complaint. Having written their own mission statement, they’re under no obligation to serve up anything more about any person or area in the comics field than they want to. But it seems to me that they do at least have a responsibility to try to be reasonably accurate. Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Okay, so since I know a bit more about Roy Thomas than I do about, say, Will Eisner or Magnus, Robot Fighter, I turned to the entry under my name. Let’s go by the numbers: 1) In the very first sentence, my first real comics boss Mort Weisinger is referred to as “perhaps the only DC editor Thomas hadn’t bombarded with fan mail over the years.” Bzzzz. Wrong. To the contrary, I never wrote more than one or two letters to any DC editor except Julius Schwartz, and there’s no evidence anywhere that I did. A minor error, sure, but one that bodes ill for what follows. 2) Next paragraph, I’m quoted as saying Weisinger was a “malevolent turd.” Now, I can’t say my conversation never verges toward the scatological, but never at any time have I ever referred to Mort as a “turd.” What I did say, as quoted in Bill Schelly’s The Golden Age of Comic Fandom and elsewhere, is that he reminded me of a “malevolent toad.” A small but real distinction. Still, maybe I was misquoted somewhere, and Duin and Richardson managed to stumble across the one place where someone got it wrong. The sentiments toward Weisinger are pretty much the same, whatever the phrasing. 3) Final paragraph of the entry: “Thomas survived [as editor-in-chief] two years before Shooter took him out.” Bzzz. Wrong again, and more significantly this time. Jim Shooter wasn’t even working for Marvel when I stepped down as editor-in-chief in 1974. The authors are only about six years off— and that’s ignoring the fact that, far from being “taken out,” I simply left Marvel when my contract ran out in 1980, despite an offer from Shooter of continued contractual full employment. 4) Later in that same final paragraph, I’m said to have ventured out from Marvel and DC “to adapt Dracula and Jurassic Park for Topps in the ’90s.” Bzzz. Nope. Bram Stoker’s Dracula... Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein... Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga... Cadillacs and Dinosaurs... Hercules: The Legendary Journeys... Xena: Warrior Princess... The X-Files: Season One... the fact is, Jurassic Park is damn near the only Topps Comics series of any duration that I didn’t work on! Not once! Who did the research for this book, anyway? All right, so that’s maybe four mistakes on what amounts to a page. Not too bad, perhaps—though I wonder if one reason the entry is as accurate as it is is the fact that way over half of it is continued on page 51

Cool cover design by Tom Gould, who also laid out the interiors— nice work! Can you name the comics whence the letterforms came from? Me, I missed “G” (sorry, Sergio & Mark!)—JBC

Comics Between the Panels. By Steve Duin and Mike Richardson. Edited by Jackie Estrada. 504 pp, 500+ color images. $49.95 hc. Published by Dark Horse Comics, Milwaukie, OR. 5

Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ‘zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more!

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Celebrates the 50th anniversary of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and the birth of Marvel Comics! New, never-beforepublished STAN LEE interview, art and artifacts by KIRBY, DITKO, SINNOTT, AYERS, THOMAS, and secrets behind the Marvel Mythos! Also: JIM AMASH interviews 1940s Timely editor AL SULMAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and a new cover by FRENZ and SINNOTT!

See comic art and script BEFORE and AFTER the Comics Code changes, with art by SIMON & KIRBY, DITKO, BUSCEMA, SINNOTT, GOULD, COLE, STERANKO, KRIGSTEIN, O’NEIL, GLANZMAN, ORLANDO, WILLIAMSON, HEATH, and others! Plus: FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, JIM AMASH interviews Timely/Atlas artist CAL MASSEY, and a new cover by JOSH MEDORS!

DICK GIORDANO through the 1960s—from freelance years and Charlton “Action-Heroes” to his first stint at DC! Art by DITKO, APARO, BOYETTE, MORISI, McLAUGHLIN, GIL KANE, and others, Dick’s final convention panel with STEVE SKEATES and ROY THOMAS, JIM AMASH interviews Charlton artist TONY TALLARICO, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and ROY ALD, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, & DITKO/GIORDANO cover!

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Big BATMAN issue, with an unused Golden Age cover by DICK SPRANG! Interviews SPRANG and JIM MOONEY, with rare and unseen Batman art by BOB KANE, JERRY ROBINSON, WIN MORTIMER, SHELLY MOLDOFF, CHARLES PARIS, and others! Part II of the TONY TALLARICO interview by JIM AMASH! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

1970s Bullpenner WARREN REECE talks about Marvel Comics and working with EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, STAN LEE, MARIE SEVERIN, ADAMS, FRIEDRICH, ROY THOMAS, and others, with rare art! DEWEY CASSELL spotlights Golden Age artist MIKE PEPPE, with art by TOTH, TUSKA, SEKOWSKY, TALLARICO Part 3, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, cover by EVERETT & BURGOS, and more!

Spectre/Hour-Man creator BERNARD BAILY, ‘40s super-groups that might have been, art by ORDWAY, INFANTINO, KUBERT, HASEN, ROBINSON, and BURNLEY, conclusion of the TONY TALLARICO interview by JIM AMASH, MIKE PEPPE interview by DEWEY CASSELL, BILL SCHELLY on “50 Years of Fandom” at San Diego 2011, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, PÉREZ cover, and more!

SHAZAM!/FAWCETT issue! The 1940s “CAPTAIN MARVEL” RADIO SHOW, interview with radio’s “Billy Batson” BURT BOYAR, P.C. HAMERLINCK and C.C. BECK on the origin of Captain Marvel, ROY THOMAS and JERRY BINGHAM on their Secret Origins “Shazam!”, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, LEONARD STARR interview, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

GOLDEN AGE NEDOR super-heroes are spotlighted, with MIKE NOLAN’s Nedor Index, and art by MORT MESKIN, JERRY ROBINSON, GEORGE TUSKA, RUBEN MOIRERA, ALEX SHOMBURG, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and part II of JIM AMASH’s interview with Golden Age artist LEONARD STARR! Cover by SHANE FOLEY!

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SUPERMAN issue! PAUL CASSIDY (early Superman artist), Italian Nembo Kid, and ARLEN SCHUMER’s look at the MORT WEISINGER era, plus an interview with son HANK WEISINGER! Art by SHUSTER, BORING, ANDERSON, PLASTINO, and others! LEONARD STARR interview Part III—FCA—Mr. Monster—more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and a MURPHY ANDERSON/ARLEN SCHUMER cover!

MARV WOLFMAN talks to RICHARD ARNDT about his first decade in comics on Tomb of Dracula, Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, John Carter, Daredevil, Nova, Batman, etc., behind a GENE COLAN cover! Art by COLAN, ANDERSON, CARDY, BORING, MOONEY, and more! Plus: the conclusion of our LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about FF #1, history of the MMMS, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art by KIRBY, AVISON, SHORES, ROMITA, SEVERIN, TUSKA, ALLEN BELLMAN, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by BELLMAN and MITCH BREITWEISER!

3-D COMICS OF THE 1950S! In-depth feature by RAY (3-D) ZONE, actual red and green 1950s 3-D art (includes free glasses!) by SIMON & KIRBY, KUBERT, MESKIN, POWELL, MAURER, NOSTRAND, SWAN, BORING, SCHWARTZ, MOONEY, SHORES, TUSKA and many others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover by JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY!

JOE KUBERT TRIBUTE! Four Kubert interviews, art by RUSS HEATH, NEAL ADAMS, MURPHY ANDERSON, MICHAEL KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, and others, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY’s Comic Fandom Archive, FCA’s Captain Video conclusion by GEORGE EVANS that inspired Avengers foe Ultron, cover by KUBERT, with a portrait by DANIEL JAMES COX!

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CBA Communiques

Carmine Infantino’s Rebuttal Carmine Infantino New York, New York CARMINE INFANTINO’S REBUTTAL When the editor of this publication approached me about an interview I initially refused. My instincts suggested I keep away. But my friends finally talked me into doing it. I, unfortunately, listened to my friends. I had advised this editor I would not be involved with any publication if a certain recreator of comics history, the Californian “King” of Con, was involved. They assured me he was not. But it seems that this “comics-savant,” Tom Stewart, certainly used such people as his sources. How sincere are they…? It took an attorney’s letter to get Mr. Cooke to admit that he wrote the malicious “The Battle Over ‘Jericho’” piece. This despite the fact that he spent hours with me in my home and never asked for my version of the Jericho fiasco or about the rest of the misinformation concerning my tenure. Is that balanced reporting? Here are the true facts— REBUTTAL TO "ALONG CAME GIORDANO" It was my decision to hire Dick Giordano. I introduced Dick to Irwin Donenfeld as one of my choices for editor. Irwin was favorably impressed. The main reason I hired him was that he had a working relationship with Steve Ditko, Denny O'Neil and Jim Aparo. It was my assumption that they would continue to work with him on DC projects. That was what I meant when I talked about a "package deal," in my interview. The arrangement I made with Dick was that he could do freelancing inking afterhours and weekends while he held a DC staff position. With his four-hour commute, I assumed he would not do much of that kind of work. My assumption was wrong, and after a time I felt Dick was doing more inking than editing. The basic idea for The Hawk And The Dove was not Steve Ditko's. It was mine. See my interview in Comic Book Artist number one. Was I in the right job? You bet I was! I learned my craft from the bottom up, after years drawing scripts that did not translate well visually. I had a point of view about what made good comics. I never saw Dick as a threat to my position. He was always too tired from inking to be a threat. Did Dick Giordano quit DC? Absolutely not—I fired him! I kept him on as an inker because he was good at that, and it would be a shame to lose him as an inker. I did not fire him over his choice of Gray Morrow for this particular western story. I suggested that Gray would be more suitable for other kinds of books. The fact that Gray was still there on "other things" proves my point. Why should I harass Dick into quitting, when I could easily fire him? All of Dick's books lost money—period! I had to find out why. The day I decided to fire him was when I called him into my office to "pick his brain" about the editor's role in the creating of a comic book. Dick's answer stunned me! I quote. "Well, Carmine, I feel an editor's role doesn't matter since fifty percent of a comic Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

book print run doesn't see the newsstands, it remains in the distributor's warehouse. The remaining fifty percent, maybe the retailer puts out half of that and half of that gets sold, regardless of what's in it." I was astounded—Charlton Press mentality! It was then and there l removed Dick as an editor. That evening, after I removed Dick as editor, I called in two editors to assume his books, one of whom still exists. Did I get everyone to "toe the line”? As an artist I knew that would be the wrong way to encourage creativity. To obtain "good creativity" you must create an atmosphere of experimentation without fear. In this atmosphere it's okay to make a mistake—but only once in a project. You must be ready to change directions and have a strong editorial point of view, but in Dick's case it never succeeded. About clarity in storytelling—I complained to Dick about Neal Adams’ layouts. How he was sacrificing storytelling to show off his art skills, which were considerable. When I saw a repeat in the next issue, I decided to give some visual panel layouts that would be acceptable to my storytelling standards. I should have never been put in that position, but then I realize Dick probably could not tell his future "business partner" to clean up his act. So much for allowing an editor to freelance. Dick should have fought as hard for clarity as he did for getting the word "flicker" printed in a comic book. It has been charged that I killed books even though they were selling well. That is a really dumb lie! Why would I kill a book that was selling? I will not go into why a lie like that was spread around, but I can tell you that I worked with distributors' figures. A book lived or died by these numbers. DC was paid by distributors on the first return number. We got to keep that money, or give some back if the book did not live up to the first return. Sometimes we received more money when, final sales exceeded the first return number, and other times we had to give back money if the book fell short of the first number. I had to answer, good or bad, to someone above me. As I said in my original article for this periodical, Bill Gaines insisted I make and save copies of all my memos, notes and sales figures in case the day came when some malcontent would try to re-invent my tenure at DC Comics. Well—I'm ready. Which leads to... THE BATTLE OVER "JERICHO" It is implied by the writer of that piece, editor Jon Cooke, that discrimination, the Viet Nam war and pollution were issues DC Comics were exploiting during the sixties. I always urged my 7

Above: Thanks to Keith Hammond and Nicholas Caputo, two astute CBA readers, we’ve found the cover Gil Kane described in his CBA #2 interview as his favorite work at Marvel in the ’70s. Not the Kid Colt that Gil remembered, but one thirsty Rawhide Kid from Mighty Marvel Western #44. ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

editors to deal with relevant issues because it made good business sense in the sixties, and I think it still holds true to this day. Was DC management blind to the pain of the Viet Nam war, racial discrimination, gender inequality? Were Marv Wolfman and Len Wein the relevant, sincere, liberal voice of DC Comics during the sixties? What a horse laugh! They were two young fans allowed to roam the halls of DC at will, haunting editors for work. Willing to write on speculation to prove they could write better than writers like Bob Haney, George Kashdan, and Arnold Drake. Perhaps even as good as Gardner Fox and John Broome. Inept writing is bad writing. I never felt that Len or Marv should have been given the freedom they had around DC offices. Finally I'm proven right with Dick Giordano "admitting" that he and they were part of a group that stole a considerable amount of artwork. "Carmine was gun-shy"— Len Wein. There was never fear that DC "wouldn't be able to sell [the issue # 20 of Teen Titans that they wrote, or any book for that matter] in the South," as Len Wein speculates. We NEVER had problems selling down South. No black heroes at DC? They forgot that Bob Kanigher was writing them into his war books since 1961, while they were still in school. Neal Adams loved "Jericho”? With due respect to Neal Adams, he had no editorial position at DC Comics. I allowed him to keep a desk in our Production Department because he was a talented artist, but as far as his editorial acumen, I always had my doubts. If he went out of his way to"save the story," it is because he had his own agenda. He always thought that he should be DC's publisher. "Len and I were both blacklisted!"—Marv Wolfman. If they were, how could Dick or Joe give them short stories without my knowing it? They were not getting work from Julius Schwartz, Murray Boltinoff or Mort Weisinger because they preferred their own experienced—trouble-free—writers, like Fox, Broome, Kanigher, Denny O'Neil, etc. Now, Mr. Wolfman, to your facts about the cover to "Jericho." Anyone with half-a-brain would conclude, IF I wanted to hide a Black face I would have it simply redrawn. Plus the fact that when you color a night scene, what color would you use…? YELLOW??? Your charge is totally ridiculous. Now some final notes on the "Jericho" affair. After my reading it, I gave it to Boltinoff and Weisinger for their opinions, since it is very costly to kill a finished book. Murray shook his head and Mort called it garbage. But they both agreed the editor was responsible for that mess. That brings us to… THE MATTER OF BAT LASH, WONDER WOMAN AND FABRICATION Tom Stewart is seemingly to quickly become the master of misinformation. His history of Bat Lash is fictitious as his sources. Shelly Mayer created the first (Showcase) issue of the flower-loving Bat Lash—not Sergio Aragonés! And Joe Orlando created his name. When Joe brought me the completed story and art of Bat, it was good, but not what I had in mind. So I whited out all the balloons and rewrote the story over the existing art, to make sure Bat would follow a distinctive path. I then went home and plotted the

next three years (18 issues) of story, including the death of Bat Lash and the beginning of a legend. Then every other month I dictated the plot to Joe and Sergio. Sergio would then pace the plot in picture form. Nick Cardy would draw it and Denny would put in his magic words. In a recent call from Nick Cardy, he was appalled after reading this base, fallacious reporting of the facts regarding the creation of Bat Lash. He was there when I worked on the initial and subsequent issues, and he will back me up on the true facts. I tore my heart out when I had to cancel my baby, but the sales were not there. The European market pleaded for more, but sales numbers in the USA won out. Further, Joe Orlando definitely agrees one-hundred percent with my version of Bat Lash's creation. Which leads directly to the next subject: I contacted Joe Orlando about your Mr. Stewart, who claims that he had contacted Joe on his Mike Sekowsky article and certainly not in his writing of his Bat Lash article and Joe does not recollect any calls from that person. Now on to the further ramblings of this Tom Stewart—this time concerning Mike Sekowsky. I was dictating the plots of Deadman and Wonder Woman to Jack Miller, who was quite ill and died suddenly. I quickly assembled Sekowsky and O'Neil in my office and dictated to them the next four issues of Wonder Woman. By the way, Denny injected the wonderful "I Ching" character. My workload was getting much too heavy. I was putting in twelve and thirteen hour days. I made Mike the editor. That was a mistake. He immediately fired Denny and began to write the book himself I told him he would be responsible for the sales. The next couple of issues bombed. I replaced Mike. Another fabrication, this from Garrie Burr. Burr's attribution of creation of the Jason's Quest series is erroneous. Jason's Quest was a character I created for myself to do as a newspaper strip. After becoming editor, those thoughts soon died. I had produced three weeks of pencils, Sundays and dailies, and had plotted the strip for several stories. I gave Mike the three weeks of strip and the plots to have something to work on. CONCLUSION I think the editors and publishers of this tabloid-slanted magazine would be wiser to concentrate their energy on ways to correct the malaise of a leaderless and floundering business, instead of catering to a small group of self-serving writers and artists who fabricate lies and use specious memories that have no regard for the true facts. Jon B. Cooke replies: I confess that I pursued Carmine Infantino pretty vigorously to get his involvement in CBA #1. My hope was to be as thorough and balanced as possible in reporting about DC Comics during Carmine’s management tenure and, without his participation in CBA, I just don’t think I could achieve a definitive, fair look at that era. My opinion remains that I believe that Carmine helmed the company through an unusually productive and innovative period, and the books produced were exciting and provocative, and my intention was to appropriately celebrate the “daring and different” of DC Comics 1967-74 in the first issue of my magazine. So, while it was a bumpy ride finally getting there, I was able to have two informative and enlightening phone interviews with a gracious and forthcoming Carmine Infantino. I was later able to spend time (along with my friend Arlen Schumer) in Carmine’s New York City apartment, casually chatting with the artist about various aspects of the past and admiring his fantastic collection of original art. We even spent a fine evening eating dinner together at The Alamo, just down the street from his place. I parted with Carmine feeling elated and satisfied that CBA would be fair and balanced. But, when I later called Carmine to elicit his reaction to the issue we dubbed “A True Golden Age,” I immediately realized that he was very unhappy with the published results, likening the magazine to the National Enquirer. After some back and forth (that took months, missing the deadline for CBA #2), the above serves as Carmine’s response: An unedited rebuttal, with his formatting intact. And now my response to some issues Carmine brings up: Carmine writes: “It took an attorney’s letter to get Mr. Cooke to admit that he wrote the malicious ‘The Battle Over “Jericho”’ piece.” While I regret not putting in my byline for the article (as I neglected to for the Kubert interview in #1 and Kane’s interview in #2), it was purely an oversight and I never intended to conceal my COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Winter 1999

CBA: Do you recall a story that Marv Wolfman and Len Wein wrote for Teen Titans that was bounced? Carmine: I rejected it totally. I remember looking at it. They did that for Giordano, I believe, and after it was done I thought it was terrible. I wouldn’t print it. As simple as that. I don’t remember any specifics about it now, but I know that I just didn’t like it. I used my best judgment. The entire interview transcript was edited and revised by Carmine before publication. I am surprised that Carmine writes that Nick Cardy was “appalled” by Tom Stewart’s story. I spent time with Nick in San Diego and he expressed to me only good impressions of CBA #1. I committed a faux pas in telling Carmine that Tom Stewart had spoken to Joe Orlando. I assumed, because of Tom’s thanks to Joe in CBA #1, that Tom had finally gotten through to Joe after leaving repeated messages. My apologies to Joe and Tom. CBA stands squarely behind our writers, Tom Stewart and Garrie Burr, and the stories that appeared in CBA #1. While I’m heartened to learn another hitherto unknown factoid about DC— that of Carmine’s creation of “Jason’s Quest”—our belief that the series was a Mike Sekowsky creation is certainly a fair assumption (and hardly a “fabrication”) given the lack of credit boxes in many of DC’s books of that time. To close, I am dismayed that Carmine feels he was misrepresented in CBA (especially considering there were two interviews featuring him) and, due to respect for him, I have allowed for this one-time arrangement to have his response appear here unedited. I can only hope that Carmine—and anyone else—will, in the future, simply just write a letter to the editor, and leave it at that. Tom Stewart replies: "I'm sorry Mr. Infantino doesn't see things the way others do. I stand by my sources and my articles." Now a letter from another one-time publisher… Stan Lee Los Angeles, California I just had to write and congratulate you on issue #2 of Comic Book Artist. Maybe I’m prejudiced because I’m one of the interviewees, but I really thought the magazine was beautifully written, edited and illustrated. While it’s a perfect publication for the rabid comic book fan, I feel that CBA would also be of great interest to the general reading public because it’s so intelligently and interestingly done. So, please accept my compliments on your fine magazine. I’m delighted to have been included as one of your subjects for issue #2. With all best wishes for a long and successful publishing career. Excelsior! Robert H. D. Ahrens Edinburgh, Scotland I’m a 22 year old college student, taking on an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and facing a severe pre-life crisis as more and more of my contemporaries begin “real” lives. And I f*cking love comic books. (Please excuse the harsh language; I guess I tend to think of it as a kind of punctuation.) Every day the notion of writing comics gets a little more The Man himself! Photo courtesy of Stan Lee. Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

fictional; the dream a little more desperate. The other night I… read the X-Men Visionaries TPB, reprinting the Neal Adams/Roy Thomas X-Men issues with the Sentinels, Sauron and return of Magneto and Professor X. I took particular pleasure in the concluding chapter of the Sentinels story, “Do or Die, Baby.” That made me dig out my copy of CBA #1 and re-read it. I’m just writing to say that this magazine is a light in the darkness for the sincere comics lover. For me the synthesis of changing artistic forms and capture of current pop-cultural zeitgeist makes comics’ history so fascinating. As a kid, I read British blue, black-&white reprints of the early Lee & Kirby X-Men. For years, I used to say things like “Move along, ya crumb bum” and “Ease off, doll.” When I was seven I read the Moore & Davis “Captain Britain” story where the Fury accosts Captain UK at the end of the story. A year later all my comics got accidentally given away at a school sale (I had them in for a class project on hobbies). I totally forgot that story (although I could clearly remember the accompanying Daredevil reprint, with Matt Murdock crying “Hit ’em low, Olive Oyl!” as he and Elektra burst into action). Years later, I picked up the Captain Britain TPB in which the Fury appears in one panel in a “gallery of foes.” Just seeing it sent a bolt of fear up my spine and the whole story came to me in a flashback. I never did find out what happened. I love this medium and I just wanted to write and thank you for providing CBA: It’s a beautiful insight into the mind of the medium and it’s great to know how much love the guys who made those masterpieces put into them.

authorship. It was only when Carmine alluded that another writer composed the piece that I volunteered the information—it did not take “an attorney’s letter.” Carmine continues, “This despite the fact that he spent hours with me in my home and never asked for my version of the Jericho fiasco or about the rest of the misinformation concerning my tenure. Is that balanced reporting?” As a matter of fact, I had earlier spoken to Carmine about “Jericho” in a phone interview session, and subsequently published the Q&A on page eight of CBA #1, reprinted here:

Chris Considine New York, New York Your first two issues look magnificent. I was so excited looking through them in the store and seeing all the incredible artwork. Gil Kane’s Amazing-Man cover is… well, amazing! How about a series? And some of Neal Adams’ unpublished work is breathtaking. Having now read the zines, however, I am repulsed and disappointed. These beautiful books contain National Enquirer-level journalism—you should consider renaming the zine, Rant of the Comic Book Artist. I bought the zines with the expectation of actually learning something about the subject matter advertised on the covers—two prime creative periods by the major companies that are usually ignored or artistically undervalued. I feel ripped off about the lack of such content. I got a bunch of bellyaching no better or more inspired than the average office politics. Comic book artists are not alone in coming into conflict with management. They’re not alone in facing the conflict between artistic creation and commercial exigencies. Any creative person who works commercially shares this burden. Based on what I’ve read of the “art world,” even there very few creators work without selling their work as a factor, and frequently with equally difficult problems of maintaining integrity. There may be a few notable incidents of conflicts between companies and creators that merit documentation. But interviews like those in CBA, which detail every minute occurrence of conflict, elevate the petty politics of this situation far beyond their worth. I learned nothing of interest about the creative processes of those interviewed, except Ploog and Starlin. And the interview with Bill Everett’s daughter was touching. I will not buy further issues in spite of the beautiful artwork. Your zine fails to enlighten about either the creative process or the time periods covered. [But could I interest you in the wordless edition of Comic Book Artist we’re planning for exclusive Manhattan distribution? —JBC] Sal Amendola Brooklyn, New York Your Issue #1 of Comic Book Artist has great, profound meaning for me. It speaks of “my time” at DC. I lived

Above: We can’t list the many readers who wrote in to identify the Neal Adams’ thumbnails as seen in CBA #1, but a hearty thanks to all! They were used as layouts for the Batman Power Records “Stacked Deck/Trumping the Joker” booklet, and were inked by Dick Giordano. We also missed a few pages, and feature them above. ©1998 DC Comics. 9

Above: Cover art by the man who inspired the story within. Neal Adams work on Detective Comics #439. Plotter/artist of “Night of the Stalker”Sal Amendola discusses the story’s background in our letter column. ©1998 DC Comics.

through much of issue #1—was part of it. Consequently, I may have some useful insights to add. About some of the “rejected” Neal Adams cover sketches, specifically: Phantom Stranger (page 20); House of Mystery (page 21); The Brave and the Bold (page 35); Green Lantern, (page 44). I’d like to make clear that Neal rejected those covers himself. Whatever it was that he was trying to capture in those layouts, he personally felt dissatisfied, so chose to redo them. None of the inking on those specific covers is his. None. Much of the actual penciling was gone over by someone else after Neal had discarded those cover pages. Neal and I were like brothers. We had great regard for each other; yet we got on each other’s nerves all the time. One of those times led to his drawing me as the evil little marionette on that House of Mystery [#191] cover. About the “Cracking the Code” article: I had a minor part in the so-called “liberalization” of the Comics Code. The article does not describe the sequence of events in quite the way I remember them. If I may suggest, please talk to Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Denny O’Neil, and Carmine Infantino. They were right in the thick of it. I don’t know how Denny feels about being characterized as having had a personal “1960s radical orientation.” I know I don’t like the implications in that statement. Denny was, and most probably remains, a man of great intellect, ideals, integrity, insight, passion and compassion. If every citizen of our great nation had Denny’s “orientation,” ours would be an even greater nation. The “failure” of “relevancy-comics” was not intrinsic to the concept. It was due to a clumsiness—an artificiality—a self-consciousness in approach. For some writers and artists, it was no more than a “Trendy” thing to be part of. For some others, it was: “What ‘the boss’ wanted.” For a variety of reasons, the concept made some individuals uncomfortable. There was powerful resistance to the idea; so it was never properly nurtured…

his Batman incident: Carmine walked out of the artist’s room chuckling, “You’re an animal, Neal. An animal.” All the way down the hall to his office, we could hear Carmine chuckling and saying, “He’s an animal… an animal”; Denny laughed his shy, breathy, almost inaudible laugh as he shuffled shyly from one foot to the other; Joe Kubert laughed his loud, booming, infectious laugh; Editor Julie Schwartz jingled the coins in his pocket and walked out of the artists’ room without comment (his way of telling Neal that “Time was money,” and that he still had deadlines to meet). Nobody took up Neal’s Batman incident. I went home and told Neal’s “incident” to my brother, Vinny. He encouraged me to “Do it. Do it.” I wrote an outline. Talked it over with Vin. He said what he liked and what he didn’t. Example: The scene on page nine of the story, where one of the criminals (whom I drew to look like Neal) charges toward the Batman, and they both go over the cliff. My outline had the Batman saved on a branch that he already knew was sticking out of the side of the cliff, and the villain falling to his death. My brother thought that the Batman should “T’row da guy off da cliff” (my brother spoke “Brooklyn”). I told him that the Batman “don’t t’row nobody offa no cliffs.” Julie Schwartz and I were at odds on that point, as well. Julie, in looking over the artwork, asked, “Where’s the villain” who charged toward the Batman, sending both over the cliff. I said that he’d fallen to his death. “You mean Batman killed him?” “No,” I responded, “The Batman let him die.” He insisted that I indicate that the Batman had saved the criminal, and to add a panel that would confirm that fact. “Batman doesn’t ‘let’ anybody die!” At first, I was angry about that change. I’d wanted to show the Batman so blinded by outrage that he would be driven to the edge of murder; to become almost as unprincipled as the sociopaths he hunted down. I later was glad for this particular change.

In your interview of Archie Goodwin, you asked about an issue [Detective Comics #439, “Night of the Stalker”] with the “Story idea by Neal Adams” credit (fourth question from top left, page 72). The following is exactly how that whole thing came about: Around 1970, Neal Adams described an incident that he thought would be exciting to incorporate within a Batman story. He told the “incident” (story pages 11 & 12) over and over again to anybody who’d come into “The Artists’ Room” at DC Comics. He told it each time as if it were the first. He was appropriately and effectively histrionic. I fought off goose pimples each time I heard him tell it. Some of the reactions I recall from others to whom he told

Englehart did a great job on the dialogue, but it was also in this scene that one of several points upon which Steve and I disagreed came up. I wanted the character to be in a frightened, horrified panic. I (still) feel that it would have added to a sense of horror over the merciless outrage that churned within the Batman—for him to have so coldly “allowed” the death of somebody so “whipped.” Steve apparently felt that the guy should be a “mad dog” for the Batman to have “allowed” his death. Dick Giordano inked the villain’s expression as “angry,” appropriate with Steve’s dialogue. Since I also inked the backgrounds, when the pages passed back to me from Dick, I tried to change the expression back to ‘”whimpering desperation.” A small part of the story, but not a wise thing to have done. It risks confusing the storytelling. It should have been one emotion or the other not a confusing mix of the words saying one thing, the drawing suggesting another. When first I wrote the outline, I presented it to Neal. He’d agreed to write the dialogue and do the penciling. Then I learned that he’d given it to writer Mike Friedrich to dialogue. I was “hurt.” Neal was angered. He returned my outline. My brother said, “Do it. Do it.” (pencil it). I did. Showed it to everybody I could. Everybody had some “shot” against it: Marvel (Marie Severin, Johnny Romita, Sr., specifically) said, “Super-heroes don’t cry.” I said that it wasn’t the Batman who cried. He took off his mask—it was Bruce Wayne who cried. That it was symbolic of the Batman’s “dual nature”: Self-righteous conservative vigilante as the Batman, bleeding-heart liberal do-gooder as Bruce Wayne. “It doesn’t matter,” they said. Marie was more adamant, saying that the story should be rejected. Dick didn’t like that I’d made the Batman’s “panties” looser, indicating his manhood within (“Super heroes don’t got no balls!”). He didn’t like that I showed the Batman’s eyes in the close-up on page three; and he refused to ink the eyes black in all the other panels (but since I did the backgrounds, when the pages passed back to me from Dick, I blacked in all the eyes. Damn! How could you take seriously a crazed vigilante who has Little Orphan Annie eyes!?). Nobody liked the drawing I did of the Batman crashing through the door on page ten of the story. (Sergio Aragonés’ remark was that I’d made the Batman “look like a seesy [sissy]!”, and Neal “presumed” to redraw it.) At one point, I’d spilled coffee on several of the pages. I’d intended to “light-box” them onto new Bristol. Dick talked me out COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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of it. He said that the stain would not interfere with reproduction, and that I’ve got to learn to avoid any unnecessary work, thus I would avoid wasting precious time and money. I showed the pages to Joe Kubert. He looked favorably on the work, overall, but the coffee stains inspired a particularly ironic compliment: “Hmm, nice ‘special effect’!” He then let loose his familiar, loud, booming, infectious laugh. I redid the pages. I presented the finished pencils to Julie. We argued about changes that he wanted me to make. He won some. I won some. With one exception (Julie said that the title, Déja Vù, would not be understood by the readers; that it would have to be changed), the compromises weren’t too painful for either of us. We talked about getting someone to do the dialogue. He wanted Len Wein. I was afraid that Len’s approach would be “Holy Adam West, Bats,” and so I insisted, “NO!” He suggested Roy Thomas. I was ecstatic. Carmine rejected him, because Roy worked for Marvel. We agreed on Steve Englehart. But then Julie rejected the story, anyway. “What can I tell you, my boy,” he said (every single time I offered him a story). “There’s no plot!” Around 1973, Archie Goodwin came back to DC as editor. He asked to see my Batman story. Accepted it. Steve dialogued it. Archie proudly showed me the job lettered and asked me what I thought of it. I misunderstood. I thought Archie wanted to know what I thought. So I told him: I didn’t like the “Marvel-style” title. The lettering was poorly done. Steve got “top billing” as writer. Neal was given no credit at all (but since I also did the background inking, when the story passed back to me from Dick, I lettered in Neal’s credit, myself). The Batman talks. The next-to-last page was dropped (to make room for an ad, I was told—never got that page back… was never paid for it)… Archie got mad and said, “What the f*ck, Sal!” After all, he was the only one who had accepted my work without personal judgment. I apologized for my “attack.” He removed the Batman-dialogue. Years later he conceded that he should have reworked the credits, too. Winter 1999

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The colorist did not understand the “foreshadowing” (first panel, page four of the story) and colored the shadow too light in value. The story was nominated for the industry’s Academy Award. Archie called me to his office, to read the stacks of letters that had come in on the story. Only one letter was negative (“The only good thing about the entire book was the cover!”). One letter writer said he cried at the end of the story. That one letter alone made it all worthwhile. David Allen Rancho Cucamonga, California Just finished Comic Book Artist #2. Another sterling issue! Interesting interviews, clean design, very few typos. The comics field is truly blessed to have such a professional publication exploring the nooks and crannies of its history—particularly its middle period, the 1960s and often-overlooked 1970s. The 1970s Marvels remain my favorites, for personal reasons. I began collecting in 1974, at age 10, and our small town in Illinois received only Marvels and Gold Keys—no DCs until 1976! So I became a Marvel addict by default. Still, despite my personal fondness for this era, I like to think there was something special about that period of Marvel history. No, it's not the glory days of the Stan Lee era. And yes, the 1970s basically consisted of attempts to cash in on hot genres—kung fu and lots of monsters, most notably. Yet writers had a lot of freedom to put their personal imprint on those genre exercises. The result was a lot of fun, quasi-experimental, yet unabashedly commercial comics! You did a good job of exploring that time, although I'll have to reserve final judgment until I see #3, which continues the theme, to see how comprehensively you hit the high points. In the meantime, though—and feeling a bit churlish for finding fault in an otherwise-excellent publication—I want to point out CBA’s failing. Look on the bright side: I can only find one. (And if continued on pg. 52

Hey, Fanboy! Need to find a comics shop near you, or one when you’re traveling? Call:

Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

The Marvel Years

Interview by Arlen Schumer In the 1960s, I was a DC Comics fan: The Weisinger Superman line, Julius Schwartz’s sci-fi super-heroes, and, of course, Batman (the debut of the ’66 TV series was a seminal event in my childhood). Marvel didn’t appeal to me; they seemed too complicated, too busy-looking (too many words!) compared to the somewhat banal simplicity of DC’s line. My brother, though, was a Marvelite and devotee of Jack Kirby. I was a fan of newcomer Neal Adams, who had every DC follower excited by his work on “Deadman.” We would argue endlessly about who was “better,” and daydream about company crossovers, like what if Kirby went to DC, or Adams worked at Marvel. In those days, it was unheard of for any artist to be working for more than one company at a time (we didn’t know then that Marvel’s new “Sub-Mariner” artist, Adam Austin, was DC’s war artist Gene Colan, or that Marvel’s “Mickey Demeo” was a pseudonym for DC’s Mike Esposito!). It was a shock when DC stalwart Gil Kane drew a few issues of “The Hulk” in 1967, but nothing prepared us for that day in 1969 when Neal Adams began drawing the X-Men! The X-Men? According to my brother, the title had been going downhill ever since Kirby stopped drawing it years earlier, and, save for a few recent issues drawn by the great Jim Steranko and new kid on the block Barry Smith (then a Kirby clone), the title was all but forgotten and destined for discontinuation. Suffice to say, even my diehard brother became an Adams believer because of his breathtaking X-Men work. Above: Portrait of Back then, I was too enamored by what Adams was doing at DC with Batman and Green Lantern/Green Neal Adams from the Arrow to notice what a body of incredible work—in addition to his X-Men—Adams was compiling at Marvel. 1970 Comic Art Convention Program book. Doing this interview as a follow-up to “Neal Adams: The DC Years” was an eye-opening experience for a self-styled Adams expert like myself, as revelations of the breadth of his storytelling achievements came to light. Just as his Batman became the modern standard, influencing Frank Miller years later to do The Dark Knight Returns, which in turn influenced the movie portrayals, making Batman DC’s franchise character, so too did Adams’ X-Men, with far less fanfare, go on to become the new model of the characters, influencing a new generation of Marvel artists and writers to create their versions of the X-Men based on his, which became the cornerstone of Marvel’s hegemony in the ‘80s (and “spawned” Image’s super-hero line). So one might argue Adams’ Batman and X-Men are the twin pillars upon which today’s DC and Marvel rest. Like his contemporary Steranko, Adams’ relatively small body of Marvel work stands in direct converse proportion to its enormous influence. So I was not surprised by Neal’s answer to my first question, “Why did you go to Marvel Comics?” [The following interview was conducted in two sessions during September and October 1998 and was transcribed by John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke.] Winter 1999

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Arlen Schumer: Why did you go to Marvel Comics? Neal Adams: I was inspired to come to Marvel to a great degree by Jim Steranko. He dropped in to DC’s offices months before and caught me there—I was there nearly every day—and after we had a good-humored yuck over my “Hey, it’s a Jim

Steranko effect” panel in “Deadman,” [Strange Adventures #216] he described the Marvel style to me: Basically, they just let you free to do whatever you wanted to do, and you just went ahead and did it. If you did it wrong they’d correct you, but he hadn’t been corrected along the way, so he was pretty happy; Stan had given him carte blanche to do anything he wanted to do storywise, within certain boundaries. It seemed to me to be a wonderful way to do comics. Certainly, coming from DC Comics, there was nothing at DC that even resembled what happened at Marvel Comics. We wrote scripts, we wrote descriptions, we wrote balloons, and the artist was expected to fit them into the pictures. Arlen: What’d you think of Steranko? Neal: I thought Steranko’s stuff was fantastic, and Steranko did a very similar thing that I did but within his style. Maybe what I did put the exclamation mark on what Steranko did, or maybe I just took it another way. Arlen: It was about a year after Steranko did his SHIELD epics; did the competitor in you see these works and say, in a sense, “How can I top what Steranko did at Marvel?” Neal: Not really. Part of what I did was say, “I like this Marvel style; it’s a little scary. I wonder what I would do with it if I had it available to me?” I didn’t know what I could do; when I came from comic strips into comic books, I felt a tremendous amount of freedom—so much so that I never turned back to illustration, which I was headed for. I felt this freedom and I thought it was wonderful. The next step in this freedom would be the Marvel style. Arlen: Was the discontinuation of “Deadman” the impetus to go to Marvel? Neal: I’m sure that it wasn’t. I was happy with the “Deadman” stories but at the end, I was writing, penciling and inking the book. After “Deadman,” others inked and most often others wrote with rare exception which I enjoyed, but I did feel the need to be “the storyteller” and the “Marvel Style” presented that opportunity. Arlen: Had you talked to Stan before this meeting? Did he know of you because of the splash you were making at DC? Neal: When I went over to see Stan, I didn’t go over to get the X-Men; I didn’t know what was going to happen and whether he would pick me up. I had no idea.When I went in to meet him, he told me that he was glad I came over and he COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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was Adam Austin. Neal: There were so many things that were wrong in comic books that had nothing to do with conscious efforts to be bad—but it’s almost like going to another country where they haven’t discovered fire and they’re eating raw meat. So you teach them to cook meat and they don’t necessarily like it at first but after a while they find that their digestive systems work a little bit better with it. Above: Oft-printed but still impressive rejected cover design (X-Men It was sort of the same way #56) by Neal Adams for his first Marvel comic book job. Neal says, “I in comic books; the things they did this cover and handed it in. Stan took it to [Marvel publisher were doing wrong would have Martin] Goodman and afterwards, Stan called me in, saying, ‘I really have to reject the cover, but if it were up to me, I would say go with it. been so evident to somebody But I’m told we can’t do it because the figures obliterate the logo.’ I from advertising or book publishing—any of these worlds said, ‘Stan, when it’s colored, the figures aren’t going to obliterate the logo.’ He said, ‘Well, it’s just not acceptable. You’ll have to do it over or outside of comic books—but I can get someone else to do it.’ I said, ‘No, no, Stan, I’ll do it.’ I comics were so insulated, they thought, they’re going to kill the book in two issues, and they’re worried didn’t know they were wrong; if anyone can identify the logo because of sales! If you obliterate the they didn’t know that they logo and make it hard to read, you might actually pick up sales! That’s were backward and foolish. not a thing I could argue, so I did the cover over because you can’t argue past a certain line.” ©1998 Marvel Entertainment. So, for me, it was perhaps an adventure in breaking these rules down but at the same time it was my day-to-day existence. It wasn’t like “I’m going on this adventure to break down this rule”; it was more “I think I should try to do this and see what happens and maybe I’ll get something else out of it.” My motives weren’t so clear, but certainly that little piece stuck in the back of my head when I went to ask Stan if I could do a book for Marvel. I had seen those altered names of artists in the Marvel books, and felt that passing back and forth from Marvel and DC would be good for creators. And I didn’t like the way creators were treated in general. Arlen: Didn’t Gil Kane do it about a year-and-a-half before you, in 1967 when he went to Marvel to do the “Hulk” for Stan Lee? Neal: Oddly enough, it seemed when Gil Kane went to Marvel and used the name “Gil Kane” that, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a significance to it; perhaps it became clear that Gil was “changing companies”! Somehow when I went, it seemed to make a statement. I’m not saying that going back and forth to Marvel and giving my name was my goal. It just seemed it was silly to hide it; I guess because of whatever position I held in the comic book field, my going and being so overt about it, and being so comfortable and willing to talk about it—which of course I did— had more of an impact. 15

wanted me to do something for Marvel. One of the reasons was that “Deadman” was the only DC Comic that the Marvel guys read. So he asked what title did I want to do. I said, “Well, I’m sure there are titles I can’t do.” And he said, “No, you can do any title you want.” Arlen: He would have given you any title? At the time, Kirby was still there and, other than his titles, you had the pick of anything? Neal: Yeah, but I don’t necessarily think he meant it, though he certainly was generous in his approach. I said, “Tell me what your worst selling title is.” And he said, of course, X-Men. Werner Roth had done the story just before me; they were giving it to anybody who would wander in. They gave the job to Barry Smith (and of his story, I would say the job he did on it was not his best); they gave the job to Steranko, but it was dribbling down. Not that I want to insult anybody but it didn’t seem that anybody was giving it much attention at the time. So I said I’d love to do it. Arlen: You did it only because it was a loser? You had no affinity for the characters? Neal: Not at all. Arlen: You were reading the books? Neal: Sure, I read all the Marvel and DC books at the time; I read everything. I had no idea what I would do with the X-Men. I just knew that I had this pile of stuff that nobody seemed to care about. Perhaps intentionally because nobody cared about them, I could remold them. So the process was to remold them from the core that Jack had begun. Arlen: Looking back on it now, if you had your druthers, what would you have drawn? Neal: Whatever their lowest seller was. Stan asked me why I would do that and I said, “If I do the X-Men, your worst selling title, would you pay that much attention to it?” He said, “No, you can do what you want.” So I said that’s probably a pretty good reason for me to want to do it. He said, “I’ll tell you what: I’ll make you a deal. You do X-Men for two issues—or however many issues you’re going to do—and after that you do a good selling title like The Avengers.” So I said, “Fine, I’ll do that.” And that was the deal between Stan and I. Stan then said, “How do you want to be known at Marvel? Do you want us to give you a different name?” I said, “No, my name will be just fine.” So Stan said, “Well, you know, here at Marvel we don’t like people working for the other company.” I said, “Well, I guess you can’t let me do the X-Men.” But Stan said, “No, no, no. That’s fine. It’s not a problem.” I said, “Good.” And he said, “Hey, how about I give you a nickname? How do you feel about ‘Nefarious Neal?’” I said, “Well, if you feel like doing that, I guess it’s okay. I’m not really prone to nicknames; I never had one, but if that’s what you’d like to do.” So I agreed to do the X-Men. Arlen: Your working at Marvel represents the whole breakdown in that pseudonym game, where for instance, Gene Colan

something to say about that. So Roy and I went to a coffee shop nearby, and I asked him about it. He basically said that he had worked only on that one previous book, and I asked him where the story was going. He told me that Cyclops’ brother was kidnapped by this guy in an Egyptian costume, and they were in a museum, and it might have something to do with blackmail; Roy wasn’t altogether sure what Werner was going to do with it and what was going to happen; he didn’t quite know where this was going to go. So I said, “Why don’t I just wing it and find someplace for it to go; we’ll take off from there.” Arlen: You mean you didn’t know where you were going? Neal: No. I usually hit the ground running anyway, and if you do a Marvel book, nobody hands you a plot. There was no written plot. So what you do first is what you’re secure in doing, setting the scene. I had been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and had seen an exhibit on the Aswan High Dam that the Egyptians had moved from the Lower Nile Valley floor to the upper tier of land, so this incredible sculpture would not be destroyed. I had magazines, photographs and brochures from that and I thought, “Jesus, this is an incredible place.” I said to myself, since this is a pharaoh, why don’t I just go to Egypt and start my story with the X-Men trying to rescue the brother not in some museum, but in Egypt, at the Aswan High Dam? The first thing I did was trace a photograph of the Dam to give me a solid lock into reality and I worked off of that. I try to give everything I work on a sense of authenticity so when you look at it, you believe it. Now what was I going to do? The next thing, to make a little time for myself to start to think, let’s have a fight! I’m at Marvel! Let’s have a fight! The Pharaoh threatens them, and suddenly these guys in Egyptian costumes start a fight. By the time I get through this— all of the X-Men are doing something with their powers, before anything else happens. That gave me a couple of days; in that time I worked out what was going to happen for the rest of the story, and I was able to put it down and send it to Roy. Above: Sequence from X-Men #57. Neal said,“[This is] an experiment. I looked to see what is the greatest dimension on a comic book page that I could make somebody fall from. I realized it wasn’t from the top to the bottom of the page, it was Arlen: You were literally making it up as you diagonally on the comic book page. I also realized that because of the way I set up the previous page, I couldn’t just have were going. the fall take place immediately on the first page. So it actually gave me the excuse to use the diagonal to make another Neal: What I did was take the pieces from the panel precede it, where the Beast gets knocked off the window and then we use the full page to have the drop taking previous story that didn’t seem to go anywhere place, and sock your eye back up to the top of the page. If I were doing it today, I possibly would reverse this page, so I and just reformed them so they would go would have this last panel down in the lower right-hand corner.” ©1998 Marvel Entertainment somewhere. I remember even talking to Roy, saying, “Why is this guy kidnapping Cyclops’ brother?” And Roy said, “I don’t think we really Arlen: So you agree to do the X-Men for Stan; then what worked that out.” Y’know, if they had cancelled that book after happened? that issue, nobody would’ve ever known. Neal: I was hit with a surprise: The extra thing Stan threw in I had a second conversation with Roy and said, “Y’know, if was that Roy Thomas was the writer. I had no idea who Roy Scott Summers has mutant abilities there’s a certain logic that was; I’d never heard of him. It came to me as a surprise. I asked says his brother would have mutant abilities. Can I take that and Stan if I could work Marvel style, and just go ahead and do the weave that into the story?” Roy said, “Sure, go ahead.” books and Roy would dialogue them. Stan said that was fine I thought, if I suck off the power from Alex and the Living with him, except Roy was the writer and he might have 16

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did the stories. I was the storyteller but I had one of the best associates you could have. I’m one of those lucky people who got to work with my favorite writers. At DC I got to work with Denny, and at Marvel I got to work with Roy, arguably the two best writers in comics in those days. Arlen: What about Stan Lee? Neal: I think Stan’s personality was very melodramatic. Even when Stan spoke, it was quite melodramatic. Every book that Stan did was melodramatic. But there are times in comic books that you don’t want to be melodramatic. There are times you want to be scientific, there are times you want to be conversational, times you want to be clever, or cute, or whatever it is. For me, I appreciate more the greater variety a writer can bring to the work, and that’s what Roy brought to the work. Roy crafted the flow of words so that they blew apart everything that had been done with group super-heroes right up to that day. There was no end to the way he would handle dialogue; the way he would approach the subject matter. When I had the Sentinels fly into the sun to destroy themselves, he basically described the sun in very dry terms, and said finally in the end that the arrival of the Sentinels would make the smallest of ripples. It was very, very beautifully and cleverly done. Stan would either say, “Well, there’s no need for words on this,” [laughter] or “Excelsior,” or come up with a very passionate description. Not that I want to criticize Stan, but I feel that Roy has a very fan outlook; he knows all the little things that we all know. He remembers all this crap that we all have stored away in our

Pharaoh takes it, what does he do with it? What character do I make him into? I don’t think I got to that problem until later in the book. Arlen: At what point while drawing X-Men #56 did you do the cover? Neal: Near the end. I didn’t know where I was going with this character to be perfectly honest. I knew that I wanted him to be sucking this power off. But I still had a page or two to go before I had to figure that out. Near the end of the book I realized I could turn him into the character on the cover. Arlen: So you’re working true Marvel style; you’re telling the story and Roy’s dialoguing it? Neal: You must understand where Roy was at this point: Roy knew the book was going to be cancelled. He really hadn’t made a lot of plans as to where he was going to go with the story. Nor did he understand whatever my capabilities were or whether it would be an interesting relationship or whether I would just be doing one or two issues and that would be the end of it. It was our first date. So I suspect he really didn’t put a lot of energy into what was going to happen. We were going to pull it out of the crapper or we weren’t. Arlen: In all these issues you’re just credited as artist or penciler; it doesn’t say “By Roy Thomas and Neal Adams,” it says “Roy Thomas, Writer” and “Neal Adams, Artist.” I think this is part of the misconception that these are Roy’s stories, and à la DC, you “just” drew them, yet these were your stories that Roy dialogued. Neal: Yes, but I must say this. It’s never really arisen as a question until it’s become part of some kind of history. We just

Below left: Panel from X-Men #58, pg. 5. Below right: Neal’s thumbnail of the same panel. Neal explains, “This was kind of an experimental drawing. I was looking to make an action sequence, looking to bundle up a figure and make it bulky like a block, and put everything inside of the figure. Normally if you do a blow, you have the fist or kick or whatever go outside of the figure and stretch it. I thought, ‘That’s the way everybody does it. I wonder if it’s possible to use dimensionality?’ I had the thing come toward us, and impact the blocky figure within itself, and not allow anything to come out, and still get across power. To some extent, the sketch is more successful than the finished piece. The blockiness is there more in the sketch than it is in the finished piece.”

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heads, and nothing gets by him. Roy has it in him to find these things, to craft them. Roy took his craft and gave another level to understand it on. Sometimes the level was totally different than what was there, and then, almost like a whiplash, came back and succeeded in enhancing the drawing, which is very hard to do; but if you take your time and are skilled enough, you can do it—and Roy did. For me, Roy made me know that I could move forward with confidence, that I could go just as crazy as I wanted with this comic book and he’d be equal to the task. You have no idea how that buoys a partnership. Because once Roy got to believe in me, we could sit and throw ideas back and forth. They were not necessarily story ideas but Roy, again, had this font of knowledge that he could throw at me. We would have these conversations and they never would really be involved with the story, but when I would walk away from them, I would feel that I had enough information to put these pieces together. I drew the stories, I handed them in to Roy, and he made sure that I made notes on the sides of the pages. As he explained to me, “Unless I know what’s coming up at the end of the story, I don’t know how to write the stuff early on.” So I would have to kind of add notes to describe what was coming up, and where we were going. I would call Roy about the rules and what he was concerned about and what he wanted to have

happen. But essentially I was doing something that I considered to be a very personal experiment in how to tell a story with this group of characters, hold them together and mold them through the story. Arlen: But the fact that you conceived and told these stories on paper, that is the act of “writing” that is not given enough credit. Because the Marvel Style developed the way it did, artists like you, Steve Ditko, Kirby, were not given enough credit for “writing.” Neal: Based on what you’re saying, I’ve spent a lot of time writing. If anybody cares to look it up, they can find the stuff I’ve written from The Spectre on down, and they can make their own judgment and decide what they want. The thing to remember is whether or not I wrote something or didn’t, plotted or I didn’t, I was smart enough to get the best writers to work with me. [laughs] So I must have known something. Most people who knew me knew what was going on at the time, and most people who knew the Marvel style knew what was going on. But essentially, it was never a question; we weren’t sitting down, splitting hairs about who was writing, who was drawing, who was telling a story. You have to understand that we were collaborators and the half that I didn’t do, Roy did. And the half that he didn’t do, I did. And that’s all I care about. It was an adventure, and we were on the adventure together. Arlen: How did it feel while you were working Marvel style and also working at DC from traditional full script? Once you got the taste of this freedom and expansion, were you feeling like it was hard to go back to the full scripts? Neal: No, what was so good about it was that one was a relief from the other. One I had to follow the script, and I enjoyed the pleasure of following the script and solving those problems; the other I could just kick out and do basically whatever I wanted, within a certain range. I think I can make an analogy that will make this more clear. The artist of a comic book is like the director of a film. There are times the director can sit down and write out the film the way he wants it, before it’s filmed. If he’s not a standard writer, he might then call in a writer, and say, “This is what I want it to be; can you write the script?” If the writer is a skilled writer, he can then add whatever his contribution would be to the outline the COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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director creates. Or, the director can take a script and then craft a finished movie out of it. Either way, he’s expressing some form of his abilities. At DC Comics, I would be like a director who got a script. At Marvel Comics, I would be as a director who crafted a story himself, called in a writer and said, “Can you write this, and put it down on paper? Then I will go ahead and make the movie.” There are similarities there; the similarities are never exact, so don’t take it as a pure analogy. But you can see how a director might enjoy both of those, and even at the same time, one right after another. I did; for me, writing is exactly the same as drawing; it’s a type of self expression. I don’t think of myself as an artist; I think of myself as a storyteller. The art is the facility I learned along the way in order to tell a story. Arlen: In “Deadman” you were doing all that incredible experimentation—some of which you were doing in The Brave and the Bold—while the “Batman” stuff you did was more mainstream six-panels-to-a-page; your X-Men picked up right where your “Deadman” left off, with your experimental panel and page layout. Neal: Relative to style, I treat each project that I do uniquely for that project. When you have a Batman story, you really only have to follow one character and enjoy the story. Here you have a series of characters, and yet you have to enjoy the story as much—that was primary. Very complex compared to a Batman, because there’s all these side conversations going on while Batman is very direct. So any solutions that you use for Batman almost by definition don’t work for the X-Men; you can’t do it the same way. You have to come up with other solutions. In other words, when I did the X-Men, I decided how I wanted to do the X-Men—it really had nothing to do with “Deadman” or “Batman;” I felt the project deserved my unique representation for that project. In the case of the X-Men, I couldn’t think of anybody who had handled team books correctly. I know that at DC Comics, they had the Justice League and they would take two characters off this way, two characters off that way, and two characters Winter 1999

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Upper right: Neal’s quick thumbnail of The Angel’s new costume design. Neal related, “After I created Havok, I said, ‘Y’know, I think I can do a better job on Angel’; the first Angel costume I designed was kind of interim. What I had in mind was a bird with a white breast, sort of like an eagle. What I didn’t know is if it would work. I couldn’t put it on the page until I put it down on paper. The sketch is the briefest of sketches; one on the right [not shown] to show the form, and one on the left to show the breakup of the color. Once that sketch was done, that was really all I needed. Small and minor in a way, it clearly showed the idea to me, and then I could have the confidence to put it into a page. I really like this costume; he looks more like a cool, modern angel.” Above: The Angel arises. Panel from X-Men #62. ©1998 Marvel Entertainment. 19

another way, and they’d come together at the end of the book. Arlen: What were they doing in the Marvel team books? Neal: They seemed to go in lots of different directions. Except for Jack Kirby, it didn’t seem that anybody had a handle on how to do group books; how to interweave the characters so you could get through the book. The Avengers was an attempt to do a group book, but again, my impression of it was that it would focus on a single character. It was like the Justice League thing: They would focus on one group of people and then focus on another group of people. There didn’t seem to be this interweaving that I feel is a good idea—to keep them moving along the same path but interweaving together. Because of that, when I got to do the X-Men, I really focused on interweaving

the characters. And to make it clear. You have to do things to make something like that clear. What I did was make the world of the X-Men more complicated; build one thing on top of the other, integrate one thing into the other, so that after a while, you get a whole world populated by these characters, all integrated, so that you started to see a tapestry of characters, all having these different interrelationships. I don’t think the X-Men ever should have been a story, and then a story, and then a story; it should be this tapestry that goes on. I think that if a contribution was made it was to tell people, yeah, you can do a group book and not do it the way the Justice League was done, and it could be just as satisfying as doing a single character book. You just had to make that extra effort to do it and it would work. I had never really seen it done before so that was intriguing creatively. Arlen: In your revamping of the X-Men, you were the first to actually revamp the Marvel characters, since they had all been created rather fresh only a few years before. Neal: You’d have to say that nobody really creates anything new; there’s very little new under the sun. We did a little analysis here at Continuity on what if Marvel were to only do one book of each of its main characters; how many titles would they have? We figured out around 12—almost all created by Jack Kirby. If you go to DC and do the same thing, you’d find they have about 12 titles, all created during the Golden Age by a variety of people, including Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and Bob Kane, and nothing since then. If you boil it all down, it’s all built on top of two solid foundations: The Golden Age of primitive, “Let’s create some super-heroes. What are super-heroes? Well, we’ll make it up,” and then Jack Kirby creating this whole universe. My contribution in the midst of that was to bring a bunch of that stuff back to life. I fed off of Jack’s stuff and I tried to bring back a lot of the stuff that Jack started. And that’s what I did. I don’t think I did anything first, but I think that in some ways I did it with such surprise, and it seemed bigger than life, that it made it seem almost new and different. I was re-establishing the characters; I was introducing new characters; I was saying, “Hey, this is a good thing—let’s play with it; this is something to do.” I didn’t like the idea that Marvel was waiting to cancel this comic book. I was trying to make this comic book come alive. Arlen: Critics say Jack Kirby created characters and you didn’t. But your act of recreating is original in and of itself—like Green Arrow, like Batman, like Deadman. You didn’t create Batman, but your recreation of Batman is just as impactful as the original. You recreated the X-Men in such a way as to give them new life. Neal: In a way, at DC, Batman was never my character. I kind of turned him into my character, but he was never my character. At Marvel, I felt to a certain extent that, especially with the X-Men, that enough bad had been done to the X-Men, that in a way I could recreate them and COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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Previous page and Right: Compare the only existing stat of Neal’s pencils to an X-Men page to Tom Palmer’s inks. Neal comments: “This page shows Tom Palmer’s dedication and ability. In the bottom panel, where I penciled this face not quite as tight as I might have, Tom took the ball and ran with it, and made this incredibly detailed, very powerful face, and took the time and energy to pull the Zip-a Tone out, and where I indicated a gray on the face, laid down the Zip-a-Tone to really add impact to the color, and to make it wonderful.” From X-Men #62. ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

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There are people who believe that Tom Palmer is my best inker. The thing about Tom’s work is it’s tremendously sincere and thorough. He never backed-off from anything that I gave him; he always went for it and, if I was vague, he cleaned it up; if I gave him something awfully hard to do, he did his best to finish it. He really, really did the kind of professional job that I respect. For me it was a wonderful job and I think he gave the whole series a classy look. Arlen: Even though these took place in the late ’60s—you even have a character wearing a medallion and a turtleneck, which might seem dated—because of the quality of the art and the intense realism, it’s not dated. The machinery, everything you used in here, still looks very fresh. It doesn’t have a dated look, and I think that’s just because of the quality of the realistic drawing.

they would become my characters. So to a certain extent, they did become my characters. Especially the new characters became my characters. Arlen: Like Havok, who had a revolutionary costume design. He precedes those black figures in the “Batman” story [“The Challenge of the Man-Bat”, Detective Comics #400]. This delineation had not been done in comics before— there’s a realism to the outfit yet it’s also very surreal at the same time. What was your thought process? Neal: It was like a mime who moves around—you look at the silhouette of the body; you don’t look at the interior of the body. It seemed to me that that would be a great idea for a costume—the idea of doing a silhouette like that and then doing the energy. So if you speculate on the idea, you can say that the costume isn’t really a costume; it is a kind of energy container through which you can actually see the energy inside of his body. So many guys draw Havok with this thing on his chest and that’s not the idea; you’re supposed to be able to see in the middle of his chest the energy no matter where he turns. Tom Palmer, in order to help me out and delineate the drawing, added highlights to Havok’s costume. I explained to him, “Tom, I’ve drawn the character in such a way that you can tell what he’s doing in every silhouette—you don’t have to worry about it; remove the highlights.” While there are positions you could put such a character in so that you would need highlights, I made it my business when I did Havok not to put the character in those positions. If you limit yourself to certain positions, you would never have a problem; the audience never loses track of it and they get it every time. That was the philosophy behind it. Havok was certainly not a Jack Kirby-type of character; he was something new and different, and a little hipper. Arlen: Let’s talk about Tom Palmer’s inking. Palmer had just come off of a great run inking Gene Colan on Dr. Strange that was beautiful. Neal: One of the things about Gene Colan that I have always felt was that Gene never got a good inker; I guess I must have liked what Tom was doing on Gene’s pencils. I think Roy offered me Tom Palmer and I must have talked to Tom on the phone. The other thing I liked was it was very clear from looking at the work and also hearing from him, that Tom was a Stan Drake fan and there was very much a Drake influence in his work. I thought, “I’m not seeing enough Stan Drake in comics these days, and if I had a Stan Drake kind of line on top of my stuff, it would definitely give it a different look”—and it did.

Neal: What I find that I enjoy about these books, is everything that I did, to one degree or another, was an experiment. I liked that experience. For example, here I was going to a company that was Jack Kirby-inspired. You had to have roomfuls of machinery. So of course, in my scientific-oriented world, roomfuls of machinery couldn’t just be random shapes—as lovely as random shapes are. They have to make sense to me. I had to take what was done before, and make them seem real to me. So here was a wonderful experience to be able to do all that machinery that I wasn’t obligated to do over at DC, and somehow make it look realistic and satisfy me that it worked. Arlen: One of the most fascinating of your “new” characters was Sauron; what was the genesis of that character? Neal: When I was doing Sauron, I thought, what I want to do really is a vampire, but a vampire that’s not a vampire, that doesn’t suck blood, that’s not based on a bat. Arlen: Why were you interested in vampires to begin with? Neal: I think the idea of sucking something out of somebody else, to make you powerful, is a very good theme. We did it on Havok with the Pharaoh. But as a super-villain, to be tragically dependent on somebody else is a very good theme for a story. I thought, “How far away can I go from a vampire and still keep the same idea?” So I went all the way back to pterosaurs, and used the idea of some kind of energy that’s based in some kind of disease, like a blood disease, to cause this character to have to... not suck blood, which the Comics Code wouldn’t have approved at that time, [laughter] but suck energy; mutant energy, to be satisfied. Presumably, in the years after he left this cave, he absorbed energy, not realizing what would happen to him if he absorbed a

lot of energy. In our book, of course, he absorbed that amount of energy which would suddenly turn him into this pterosaurtype character, which is sort of like Dracula absorbing a lot of energy and becoming a giant bat. The similarities are very obvious, though nobody’s ever brought it up to me! Apparently I had gone far enough away for the analogy to no longer apply. Arlen: What made you bring in Ka-Zar to the strip? Were you a fan of the character? Neal: The thing that set me off was the death of Magneto. They had done what I consider to be some terrible things to the X-Men at Marvel; you gotta read the issues that come before this, maybe two year’s worth. Magneto was essentially dead (he fell off a cliff or something), not that anybody much cared. I tried to imagine how Magneto, after falling off that cliff, could somehow survive. Rather than being washed up on shore somewhere, it seemed to me the way he survived was using his magnetic ability to burrow his way into the earth, and drive the earth away from him while he was falling, and slowing himself down. In the end, where would that take him? It might take him into this Ka-Zar land; it’s kind of a nice segue, and it works. Also, I had set up a cave with Sauron that led to some prehistoric place, which either has to be explained as some incredible cave that’s lost in time, or an incredible cave that leads down to the Savage Land. Well, since the Savage Land has been established, why not have it lead down to there? It’d make it much more logical that this’d be the case. The elements started to come together, and I realized that’s where I wanted Magneto to be: Down there, and since he’s down there, why do I want to reveal that it’s Magneto right away? Why don’t I just hide it? Who would ever suspect? Since COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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he had never taken his helmet off, no one knew what he looked like. When I finally revealed that he was Magneto, Roy supported it with the line, “Maybe clothes do make the man,” which I think has become a classic line in comics. Arlen: So you obviously did more than two issues of the X-Men; what happened? Did Stan say, “Neal, I like your first two issues. Keep going.”? Neal: No. They said they were going to cancel it in two issues or thereabouts. It wasn’t like it was decided and, once I started doing it, it seemed pretty much a given we were going to continue. Arlen: So the story grew and Roy was inspired. How did this whole thing just keep steamrolling along? Neal: It just kept on going, y’know? In the Marvel style, as long as you do your homework and have respect for the work—you have to have respect for the artists and writers that have gone before; you can’t just take it and throw it out the window and say, “Now I’m gonna show everybody.” With all that, to then take it and put your stamp on it, and go and create a Havok and a Sauron and bring back the Sentinels if you feel like it, and go into that world of dinosaurs, it was mind-boggling to be able to do that, and I did one a month for, like, ten months, and every single one took me further and further out. It was a tremendous experience! The X-Men was taking something that practically was ready to go into the garbage can and saying, “Wait a second! Let’s just go crazy with this!” Arlen: You brought Professor X back from the dead in your last issue—how did you accomplish that? Neal: Not only was Professor X dead, they took a year to kill him. They made sure that Professor X was so dead that he would never come back again. It’s incredible! No character in comics, that I know of, had been killed so unequivocally. Professor X got sick, got worse, got really bad, and before he died, he lost his powers slowly over a period of time, so Marvel Girl had to help him out. Then, after a lingering loss of powers, he finally dies. He was unequivocally dead! They buried him. How do you get out of this? It was really a hard thing to figure out but I did. First I laid in a clue: I brought the Sentinels back (I love the Sentinels; they were one of Jack Kirby’s greatest creations), unthinking, mindless robots who could beat the sh*t out of anybody and just want to kill mutants; they were such a solid concept. And how do you deal with the Sentinels? The guy who created them was dead so I brought in his son. I thought I have to lay in a clue, so when I bring Professor X back nobody can ever go back and say, “Nah, you’re cheating; you just made this up.” So the clue I laid was all these Sentinels had captured all these mutants that have appeared previously in the X-Men and put them in these tubes. And then, when the good guys win and the Sentinels get sent into the sun, all the mutants are let out of their tubes, except for one. And if you look at that panel, all the mutants that appeared in the X-Men up to that point are there except for one. That one is The Changeling and the reason that he’s not there is because he is dead in the place of Professor X. The story we did later (which I did with Denny O’Neil’s dialogue) was this: Professor X has found that there is an invasion that is coming from outer space and he has to protect the Earth. Only he can do it by moving the minds of everybody on Earth essentially. He can’t do that without training himself to do it. In order to train, he has to disappear for a year. While he is pondering his problem, the Changeling visits him and says, “Look, Professor X: I know you think I’m a rat, but I just found out from the doctor that I’m going to die, and I’d really like to make up for all the sh*t I’ve done all of my life.” Professor X says, “That’s really good but what can I do?” The Changeling says, “Can you think of anything I can do to redeem myself?” And suddenly Professor X says, “There is something you can do: You can pose as me.” But The Changeling doesn’t have the professor’s powers and abilities. “But if Marvel Girl helps you,” Prof explains, “your powers and abilities will seem as though you’re me in decline and dying. I can go away and train to save the Earth. She’s going to be the only person who knows this, and terrible as it is that you’re going to die, you will participate in saving the Earth.” And that’s how we brought Professor X back. Arlen: Did you know X-Men #65 would be your last issue? Why did Denny O’Neil script that issue? Winter 1999

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TOM PALMER: The Art of Inking Neal Adams Considered by many to be Neal Adams’ greatest inker, Tom Palmer was interviewed via telephone by Arlen Schumer on November 12, 1998. Following is a composite statement. I remember the first time I had seen Neal’s work— Roy Thomas had bought a half-page of “Deadman” [Strange Adventures #212, pg. 8] and had it framed, and it was quite different from other comic book artwork that I had seen up to that point. I was young, but I had seen Kirby’s stuff, I had seen Buscema’s stuff, it was all very good—I mean, just fantastic— but there was something else, there was a maturity to Neal’s work that was so much different. He should’ve been older than all of them to have that maturity; it was natural, almost a gift. By going to Johnstone & Cushing—that was the spot line-drawing studio of the city—and meeting Lou Fine, and Stan Drake, and all those people, Neal, at a very young age, was brought up the right way, he got the right input, and it served him well. Even without that schooling, he still would’ve achieved 95% of what he has. It is irrefutable when you see Neal’s work, that he is an exception. And he was then. Th e first issue of the X-Men is what I remember the most vividly. The first three to five pages, with the Sphinx in the background, the rocket car—I would just sit back and marvel at these beautiful renderings. In Neal’s second issue with the shot of King Faisal, where he’s pointing—you can see Neal used a photo—I was just taken aback by the rendering of that pencil drawing. It’s easy for me to describe from my eyes or my memory of that time, but to sit there and look at that stuff—I don’t mean to make this sound too much like a religious experience, but it was whatever would be close to that. I’ m sure other pencils have impressed me over the years when they’ve come across my drawing board, but maybe because Neal’s were the first, they left such an impression that it still lingers today. It’s like your first love— you always remember it. It really caught me between the eyes, the way it caught everyone else who saw those books, and it affected me the same way. Neal influenced a whole generation of artists—myself included—just as Milton Caniff did years prior. Neal’s ability—it was not so much the realism as the way he handled the pencil. I saw him penciling once, and he didn’t hold it as if you were writing with it, nor did he take the broad side of a pencil, so everything had a broad side. He held it at an angle, he turned it—not in a very mannered way, but as if he were sketching something, so the lines were not stroked as evenly-thick pencil strokes. I remember the line getting thinner and thicker, this pencil line that kind of undulated between the two; it ebbed and flowed as if it was a drawing done as a rendering. I’ve seen people try to pencil like Neal, but you could tell immediately it’s all bogus, because they never had that line. He was the natural, he was the one they were all trying 23

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to copy. Other guys today try to pencil as if they were going to ink it, or they’re trying to set it up for the inker. Neal penciled for penciling; the inking became another art that you brought to it. And I think that’s what I was challenged by. He didn’t put a line down that you just filled in. You didn’t trace it—you had to bring something to it. As far as inking over Neal, you realized you couldn’t do it all in pen, nor could you do it just in brush—you needed both if you wanted to pick up what he was doing when he inked. He would probably render in pen, and then go back with a brush, and hit some of the heavier lines, and also some of the shadowing. You could tell, because it was a real juicy black line; it kind of forced me to match it. I remember taking a day or more to ink one page— not every page, but certain pages. It wasn’t something that you knocked out in a couple of days. Not that I was doing that with Dr. Strange with Gene Colan, and that’s what I had gained some favor for. Maybe it was because of my youth, or the “golly-gee-whiz” point of my life—but I slowed down and put every ounce of whatever skill I had at that moment. I may have worked too hard on those X-Men issues—I may have stiffened up some of the fluid lines that Neal had done. In a way, I thought that the Avengers was my better work. When we got into that series, I think I had matured a little bit, plus I felt a little bit more at ease with Neal’s pencils. And I think Neal was more comfortable going in, too. Over the years I’ve come to realize, working with different people, you can tell when someone is interested or excited about the story. The Avengers was something Neal was really looking forward to. The first pages of that “Fantastic Voyage” issue [#93] just blew me away. Neal just amazed me with what was going on. There were some shots in there, some of the scenes—it was all so original. I remember spending a lot of time on that issue—and coloring it also. I don’t know if we traded coloring assignments, but I remember Neal felt confident about that. There was a satisfaction, I think, for both of us—that issue may have been the high point of it all. At least I remember being very proud it. It’s something I’ve always remembered; I kind of hold it up as the criteria to whatever I’m working on. Not to say no one ever reached that criteria, but in a different way. I’ve worked with some talented people, and I have respect for anybody in the business. Working with Neal was always fun, I always looked forward to it, and it helped me grow a little bit; each job helped me grow because it challenged me. And I know it did Roy; Roy was just on a cloud—he just loved it. Whether it was the writer, the colorist, the inker, or even the letterer, working on Neal’s stuff brought out the best in anyone.

Right: The great embellisher himself, Tom Palmer. Much thanks to Tom for the last-minute interview and supplying us with this promotional shot by Janis. 24

Neal: I was very unhappy with that, and I love Denny O’Neil’s stuff, but I did not consider Denny O’Neil to be the dialoguer of the X-Men. I knew who the dialoguer was; it was Roy. He didn’t dialogue this. It was just handed over to Denny, and Denny did it. It was not a happy situation for me. It was sufficiently unhappy for me to say if Marvel wasn’t going to cancel the book, maybe I’d have gone to something else anyway. I loved Denny O’Neil on Batman and GL/GA, but Roy and I had established a professional relationship and I didn’t find anybody else’s work to be as satisfactory. Also, Denny, as talented as he is, was thrown into the middle of this, a story that I had essentially started months before; suddenly, it’s thrown into Denny’s hands, and he has to come up with dialogue. I didn’t think that Denny was the greatest dialoguer in the world for a Marvel book. I thought Roy was, but as far as structuring a story is concerned, I thought Denny was a tremendous story structurer, and he knows how a beginning and a middle and an end work. I don’t know that I could look at the qualities of Roy and Denny and pick my favorite, because they’re so different from one another. One of the things Roy did almost better than anybody at Marvel is give the right amount of copy to tell the story and not clutter up the art. It doesn’t matter how good the copy is if you’re covering too much important art, because then you’re hurting the enjoyment of the story. Imagine me coming from DC Comics, where I am designing a page and the placement of the balloons, and at Marvel turning over that job to somebody else and have that person have the same or similar sensibilities—to be able to place the balloons in such a way that they read in order, they tell the story, and they don’t get in the way of the art. Arlen: Your last issue is also infamous for the blatantly obvious changes to the monster on the cover and interior art; what happened? Neal: I had decided, because not too much was going on in the story, that I wanted to have some watchdog in this alien ship. So I created a watchdog that would prowl through this ship, and handed in my pages for dialogue and inking. I came into Marvel one day, and Marie Severin—one of the nicest people in the world, the salt of the earth, kind to everybody—came running up to me and said something like, “It wasn’t me, Neal. Stan made me do it!” I said, “What are you talking about, Marie?” I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about until I got up front, and she was all over herself with embarrassment about the whole thing. I couldn’t for the life of me understand until I saw the inked pages. Sure enough, patches had been put in over my spaceship watchdog, who went around on all fours, and it had been turned into a man-like creature walking around on his hands and knees, which seems a little strange for a biped to have to do. But since the ceiling was there, he couldn’t stand up. COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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Below: The notorious watchdog sequence from Neal’s final issue, X-Men #65. On the left is the thumbnail drawing, possibly the only remaining evidence of Neal’s monster design. And, on the right, the final version as redrawn by the Marvel Bullpen under Stan Lee’s instruction. ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

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Arlen: Palmer inked it, and no records of the earlier pencils exist? Neal: None that I know of. And the patches aren’t even Palmer’s inking. It was one of those decisions that I think Stan made quickly. I have a feeling communications broke down somehow. Maybe Stan made some offhand comment that it shouldn’t be a dog-like creature, it should be something else; maybe that’s all he said. However it happened, I have no idea. It certainly isn’t something anybody would consciously want to do. That was such an atrocious change that I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Stan for that one. I guess I probably should’ve found the page and ripped that off and gone into Stan and said, “Stan, this is ridiculous!” [laughter] But I didn’t; I must’ve been tired that day. Arlen: Why were so many of your covers at Marvel retouched, unlike your DC’s? Neal: At Marvel, what would happen was, I’d get a layout or I’d submit a layout which would get rejected, and then I’d get a layout which I would have to pencil to. Then they would be dissatisfied with the pencils, and they’d work on it. It would just become a mishmash. Every time I tried to hand in something original, it was looked upon as being different and weird, where at DC I was expected to come up with original and fantastic covers. Stan Lee was always suspicious that I did better covers for DC than I did for Marvel; if he were to say it to my face, I’d have to say, “Gee, Stan, maybe that’s because you keep changing my covers.” If they left them alone, the covers would be fine. They felt they had a point of view, but almost consistently with Marvel Comics, the insides were better than the covers; where at DC Comics, the covers were better than the insides. [laughs]

Center image: Silent sequence from X-Men #62. Neal says, “This is one of those mime situations here. Nothing about this needed dialogue. This is not to say Stan would have put dialogue in there, but I think probably he would have. [laughter] Roy obviously looked at it and thought, ‘Gee, I don’t need to do it, and I don’t have to do it, and I don’t want to do it,’ and he made the choice not to do it. What a great choice! A writer is marked by what he doesn’t do as well as what he does do. I believe he was right in this case. It flows so well and goes right into the next sequence, it doesn’t even occur to you that there was no dialogue there. “ ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

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Arlen: Why was X-Men cancelled? Neal: I can’t even tell you why it was cancelled in the end. To be perfectly honest, I knew that it didn’t have the greatest sales figures in the world, but certainly it was bringing a lot of attention to Marvel. One of the things I and others observed was that after the X-Men was cancelled, almost every new artist and writer that came to Marvel wanted to do the X-Men because of those ten issues. And as the book was passed to each in his turn, they all do Sauron, they all do the Sentinels, they all do Havok, they all go into the Savage Land, they all do Magneto. Arlen: The impact of this work incubated for x-number of years amongst the Dave Cockrums, Len Weins, John Byrnes, the second wave that came in after you, paying homage to your X-Men. This is the foundation of the new X-Men, which in turn became the foundation of the modern Marvel Comics. Neal: It didn’t necessarily just stay with comic books; there were movies and television shows and all kinds of stuff. I don’t want to blow my own horn, but the first year of the X-Men animated series had an awful lot of our stuff. Although they weren’t direct adaptations, they were generally those series of stories—or relating to those series of stories that first year. Is there a direct link between the X-Men and a lot of creation between a lot of people? I think there is, and perhaps it’s speaking arrogantly to say this, but I’ve been told by enough people that the connection is direct. I’ve spoken to people at conventions; I’ve spoken to producers and directors and writers who said that series of X-Men books opened their eyes to what comic books could do; “You inspired me to do this, to think differently, to expect more. Not to think that this is trash, but that this is an art form.” So I think that those XMen—I’m not saying they’re the epitome of what comic books could be, but they certainly, for me, made and continue to make very entertaining comic books to read. Arlen: After your run on the X-Men ended, you did a couple of issues of Thor immediately following Kirby’s departure from Marvel; how did that come about? Neal: I don’t know quite when it was. Stan asked me, “What would you like to do next?” I said, “Y’know, Stan, I would love to work on a Thor with you.” He said, “Really?” But I don’t think Stan trusted me because he had seen my layouts on X-Men. He said, “I don’t really like those.” And I said, “Stan, don’t worry. I’ll do a Marvel layout. It’ll be just fine. In fact, I’ll do a ‘Marvel Comic Book.’” My intention with these two Thors was to do ‘Marvel Comic Books,’ so Marvel that you couldn’t tell if John Buscema or John Romita did it. You’d flip through the

Arlen: Why do you think that was? Neal: At DC Comics, there must’ve been six or seven editors, and they would discuss and have conversations with the production room, and there was more discussion, and they would discuss the insides as well as the covers. At Marvel, all there was was one guy, Stan. He had to go and take the stuff to his bosses, so basically he took the covers; I don’t think he ever took the insides. There was never a discussion about the insides. Essentially, the books were just pushed through as quickly as possible and printed. Arlen: You seem to have had an insider’s view of the workings at Marvel; did you do any work in the office? Neal: I did spend some time up at Marvel in order to get to know the guys. I’d go and spend the day—maybe once a week. I did a little drawing up there; I’d do a cover. I like to hang out in the office to get to know who the people are, who is there, and what they do. Mostly I would work at home but I spent enough time up there to meet Herb [Trimpe] and all of those guys. John Romita was there. Marie. Frank Giacoia was in and out. They had a very small office. They had cubicles with five people in one! A true bullpen. Arlen: Was it a happy place? Neal: Oh yeah. They had the thought in mind that they were kicking in DC Comics’ butt and it was almost a miracle that this was happening. They almost couldn’t believe it that out of this little place, they were kicking butt. Arlen: Was there any reaction at DC to the fact you were working for Marvel? Neal: They tried to pile more work on me. DC had the good sense not to fight something that was already done, but I was the first to go in and say, “I just want you to know that I’ve picked up some work at Marvel; it’s not going to interfere with my work here.” I didn’t turn down more work. I’ve never done anything in my life, to the best of my knowledge, to hurt anybody or hurt a business relationship. When you come right down to it, I wanted both DC and Marvel to do well, and continue to feel that way.

pages and go, “Yeah, it’s a Marvel comic book.” So then Stan asks, “What do you think you want to do?” I said, “Well, do you have a story?” Stan would go, “What do you think you want to do?” (rather than say no). So I said, “I’d like to change identities between Thor and Loki.” He said, “Oh, that’s fine. Go ahead and do that.” I said, “I’d like to do that for two issues. Is that okay?” He said, “Yeah, sure, sure. Go ahead and do it.” So that was pretty much the story conference. Stan dialogued the first book and after about 20 pages he comes up to me and says, “Y’know, I thought I was going to have a hard time with your stuff, but it was as easy to work on as anything I’ve ever worked on. I had a great time.” But Stan had a certain attitude about things. For example, I had left a space for copy [pg. 17 of Thor #180, second panel] because something had to be told there. So I left a space and wrote “Space for copy.” Stan got so upset with me that he called me and said, “Why did you do that? Don’t ever do that again! Don’t leave space for copy! You don’t make decisions where the copy goes!” He got all bent out of shape, but I thought it seemed to need some room for copy that I didn’t want to draw all over. “Well, I can take care of that! Don’t ever do that again.” Awright, Stan! I had forced him to write where I thought he needed to write, and he sure didn’t like that. Arlen: Roy says you had a different style with him; he says you’d leave blank spaces and leave a note, “Write pretty, Roy.” Neal: [laughs] Yes. And he would! He never let me down. Maybe that’s where I got spoiled. Arlen: So Thor #180 and 181 was as long as your collaboration with Stan lasted? Neal: I got my chance to work with Stan and do a couple of Marvel comic books. I was a happy puppy; I got to work with Stan, ya know. Arlen: I believe whenever you tackled specifically Kirby’s characters, your realistic style was at odds with them—which, in the case of Thor, made him look like a hippy with a helmet on. Neal: I didn’t think I was trying to do Kirby, but Buscema! Doing Thor was like me getting to be John Buscema for a book. This is the Thor of Buscema, Romita, and everybody else— sometimes Kirby. I didn’t think of myself as able to do Kirby; all I cared about was doing Marvel. Thor was me doing a Marvel comic, not a Jack Kirby comic because I never tried to do a Jack Kirby comic—and I don’t think anybody can. Is it a success? I think I successfully put together a book in the Marvel Style. I think this looks as much like a Marvel comic as any one either done by Kirby, Buscema, or Romita with Sinnott’s inking over it. Does it look like a Marvel comic? It certainly doesn’t look like a Neal Adams comic. It looks like my pencils, but in an awful lot of panels it really just looks like Sinnott. And wasn’t, in a way, Sinnott indicative of Marvel, and wasn’t this perfect to give to Sinnott? Arlen: Did you ask for him? Neal: Oh yeah, absolutely. I didn’t want to do it unless I got Sinnott’s inking. I love Sinnott’s inks! On anybody! Arlen: After your stint on Thor, you followed in the departing steps of Kirby again when you took over the 10-page “Inhumans” strip running in Amazing Adventures with issue #5; how did that come about? Neal: Roy was pretty much the person who would suck me into whatever was going on; he gave me a call and said, “So what are you going to do next?” Well, whaddaya got? “How would you feel about doing the Inhumans for a while?” I had made an agreement with Stan to do the Avengers, but I didn’t mind doing “The Inhumans.” I liked the Inhumans and said, “Sure, why not?” Winter 1999

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It seemed to me the Inhumans were right on, whereas the X-Men deserved to be remade. I didn’t think that the Inhumans deserved to be remade; Jack had done them so well. Arlen: Again, as in Thor, your realistic style clashed with Kirby’s—your Black Bolt lacked Kirby’s majestic, godlike feeling—it’s a guy in a slick black outfit with black boots. While your style worked for realistic characters, I don’t know if it necessarily worked for these godlike characters. Neal: I knew my style wasn’t Jack Kirby’s style but I felt the group wasn’t a Jack Kirby series as much as it was just a big group of people—so I tried to do the best “Jack Kirby Inhumans” in my style that I could. I tried to do a more realistic version of the Inhumans, but they are so incredible, so fantastic, there’s so many of them, they all have super-powers; in a way it was too much for a realistic artist. I think I would have to dedicate a chunk of my life to do it right, and I wasn’t going to do that. I think I did a good job on “The Inhumans,” a professional job. In the end, I felt if I had full books to do, I could have paid more attention to it. I thought maybe I could make a contribution, to in effect reenter the Inhumans back into the Marvel Universe, where they were missing from. People didn’t really make much of these stories; I liked them more than other people did. I added more of a melodramatic spiel to it—it wasn’t as big

Left: Two great comic artists give us similar interpretations of the ruler of the Inhumans, Black Bolt. Top is Jack Kirby’s version from the cover of Marvelmania Magazine #1, and bottom is Neal and Tom’s splash page image from Amazing Adventures #5. ©1998 Marvel Entertainment. 27

a story as Jack would do. I also had been forced now to plant them in my psyche. Arlen: Did you feel like you told the story you wanted to tell with “The Inhumans”? Neal: I started to, but in a particular issue, Roy gave the dialoguing over to Gerry Conway. I was already a little upset with Roy at that time for not having dialogued the last issue of X-Men. I really agreed only to do this if Roy was going to dialogue it. Suddenly I had a writer who I didn’t agree to work with. I didn’t feel his writing matched in tone my artwork; I don’t think that our styles matched. That’s not even a criticism of Gerry; I just didn’t like the idea that another writer entered into this without my agreement. It’s odd; it shows you the difference between the companies. At DC Comics, the script, whether I did it or someone else did it, becomes established. You know who the writer is ahead of time, and generally you know who the inker is. There’s no opportunity for any kind of change, because the script is done already. So you’re pretty secure. It was very odd for me at Marvel, to feel secure in that I knew who my dialoguer was, and then it just got pulled out from under me. Some people might think, after these two experiences with Denny O’Neil [on X-Men] and Gerry Conway on “The Inhumans,” that if I was smart I would’ve seen the writing on the wall, and seen that this perhaps was going to turn into a disaster. I guess I didn’t see it; I guess I thought these were anomalies and this wasn’t going to continue. But certain things happened to make me think that, for whatever reason, however it worked out, I really wasn’t going to end up completing much of the projects I began at Marvel. I was going to start them, but I wasn’t going to get to finish them. That’s sort of the way it worked out. You can see that the forces were marshalling. Somehow this wasn’t turning out to be the wonderful experience I hoped it would be at the beginning. Arlen: Your first inker was Palmer. Did he get yanked off the book? Neal: I don’t know what he was doing. He was certainly busy. Arlen: How did John Verpoorten come to ink you next? Neal: I was asked if I minded having John Verpoorten ink my stuff. It’s funny; there were people who said, “You really don’t 28

want John Verpoorten.” At one point, I thought, “Y’know, I really want that Marvel kind of thing.” Arlen: What is the “Marvel kind of thing”? Neal: That big, thick line; very little sensitivity but lots of brushstrokes. Arlen: That sounds so contradictory to wanting a good artistic product. Neal: For “The Inhumans,” I felt I’d like to see that heavy brushstyle. I felt this was good for this strip. I had a very strong feeling about Marvel and, in some ways, John was the heart of what was going on at Marvel at the time, and it really pleased me to have him work on my stuff and do what he considered to be a sincere job. I had personal conversations with John, in which he told me how much he enjoyed inking my work. That pleased me. Arlen: But what did you think of his inking? Neal: He tried to do a good job. I realized he wasn’t Tom Palmer, but Tom was Tom and John was John. There were other people who inked better than John, like Frank Giacoia (who inked better than a lot of guys), but Frank has a certain coldness; I wouldn’t have used him on something like the Inhumans because it was very melodramatic. It wasn’t tragic, so it needed to have a little bit of warmth. No matter what you say about John Verpoorten’s work, a certain warmth came through—I can feel it. There was a caring and I liked that. I felt very good about what was going on. I had been inked by a lot of people, and I had my choices. When I did the GL/GA stories, I invited different artists to ink the stuff, including Giacoia, Bernie Wrightson, Dan Adkins, people with very different styles from one another, to see how they would look on my stuff. Some would disappoint me, some would surprise me. If I took a negative attitude about anybody I invited to work on my stuff, I think it probably would’ve shown in my pencils. I didn’t ever want my pencils to be the thing people were criticizing, so I penciled the same quality for each inker, in the hopes it would bring something out of him that he hadn’t experienced before. What you look for in an inker is a good percentage; you don’t look for what you would call perfection. You look for a sufficient number of areas where you agree, to make the work strong. Arlen: Who was your favorite inker? COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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Neal: People are constantly asking me that. Of course, sitting in the middle, I would have to say my favorite inker is me, because that’s the way I would do it. If I’m inking my own story, I consider it a discipline. If other people ink my story, I consider it an experiment. I like to experiment and I enjoy myself when I do it. I am always interested in change and in doing something new, something challenging, something different, and (to a small extent) something unexpected. Arlen: After your four-issue “Inhumans” stint, you finally went on to The Avengers. Because it came right on the heels of you finishing “The Inhumans,” was this a case of, “Okay, I’m done with ‘The Inhumans’; whaddaya got?” Or does it go back to the deal you made with Stan that you would do The Avengers after the X-Men? Neal: I don’t know what happened, to be perfectly honest. I don’t remember the conversation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Roy didn’t come to me one day and say, “Remember what you told Stan; you said you’d do it.” So many elements were mixed into this thing; my relationship with Roy was mixed in. When Roy had Gerry Conway dialogue the second-to-last episode of “The Inhumans,” I did not perceive that as a good experience; I was not happy with it. So I told Roy I would do The Avengers only if he dialogued it; I didn’t want anybody else working on them. My deal at Marvel was I got to work with Roy; I was much more comfortable with that. Arlen: Was Thomas writing and planting the seeds for the Kree-Skrull War before you came along? Neal: My memory—and I’m sure it’s different from Roy’s—says Roy had wanted to do this “Kree-Skrull War,” and in the issues he’d done—I think it was two issues before mine— the Kree and the Skrulls ended up going to war in some far-off galaxy, but he didn’t know for sure if I wanted to continue on that plotline, or go on to something else. He asked me how I felt about it. I thought, gee, a war, I’d love to do that. So once again, it was one of those “Where do you want to start?” things; I said, “Let me go and think about it.” Here we had these Kree and these Skrulls off Above: Note Neal’s suggestion for story title in the bottom margin of this, the pencils from in this intergalactic battle, and here we were on the splash page to Avengers #93. Neal says, “The first title that I designed was ‘Three Cows Earth, and there were no Skrulls… wait… no, Shot Me Down,’ and Roy changed the title to ‘This Beachhead Earth,’ which I feel is an infethere were these cows. Mr. Fantastic had somerior title, and I argued with Roy about it. But there wasn’t a moment that Roy didn’t get the how convinced these Skrulls that they were inference of ‘Three Cows Shot Me Down.’ He asked me about my title, I said, ‘Roy, maybe cows. I thought, at some point they’ve got to you don’t remember…’ Roy said, ‘You mean the three cows in Fantastic Four, right? The come out of this. They’re cows! They’re eating Skrulls?’ He got it right away! He didn’t miss a beat but he decided to do the other title. I grass, y’know? I think they’ll probably come out think ‘Three Cows Shot Me Down’ would’ve been the greatest title… maybe the best title in of it just before they get to the slaughterhouse, comics outside of “But Bork Can Hurt You.” [laughter] I’m sure that Roy wrote that title for Stan; it was definitely a Stan Lee title.” ©1998 Marvel Entertainment. [laughter] where they stick that trip hammer to their heads. It’s got to occur to them they’re title to be “Three Cows Shot Me Down.” Heh. smarter than cows, and maybe they don’t want to go in there. The concept of the War had to be left in the background, But given all that, I thought, “I like those cows; that’s a great because there was no rationale. We were talking about having a image. We ought to use that. We ought to have the cows do Kree-Skrull War, but how this would affect the Earth, and what something.” That was the basis of the way I wanted to start would be the significance, sort of got left in the gray area later reintroducing the subject. I indicated that I’d like the first story 29

This page and next: Maybe the finest sequence in super-hero comics— Ant-Man journeys to the center of the Vision in three versions (from Avengers #93). Left: Neal’s thumbnail, shown actual size. Below: Neal’s pencils. Next page: The printed page as inked by Tom Palmer. Neal says, “When Ant-Man goes into the Vision’s body and comments that it looks like Metropolis, ‘Fritz Lang’s, not Clark Kent’s,’ that just blew me away. I just thought that was so ballsy, so clever, so cool, and geez, maybe it got the kids to go out and watch some good movies and figure out what the hell the reference was!” ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

concepts, design work, all kinds of stuff. This was going to be a big deal to me, a very big deal. And it would include the Inhumans. I would make it, I thought, a validation of… well… never mind. The first issue was 34 pages, a big issue. Normal stories were about 22 pages in those days; that’s another half a book. I must admit, the idea of doing that many pages was daunting. But I was ready to do it, prepared to do it, and doing it. Arlen: Then how did the John Buscema chapter insert in your second issue come about? Neal: It came as a surprise to me; I did not ask for it and I did not feel that it was necessary. I thought, well, we’re off to a shaky situation here, but maybe if Roy’s concerned about the amount of pages I can get out, I’ll just make sure the next one is in quicker, so I did it. I talked to Roy about the story as it progressed, and we were collaborating more on the individual book storylines at that point, but only I knew where it was going. I suggested to Roy

into the progress. I realized at some point I wanted to bring Rick Jones into it for a very significant reason, and I didn’t quite know how, and I wanted to go into this other dimension where Annihilus is, and somehow utilize that to create the introduction of Earth into the War. Arlen: Your first Avengers is memorable especially for the opening sequence, in which Ant-Man travels microscopically within the Vision’s body; were you influenced by the comparable 1967 sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage? Neal: I saw it later actually, but I knew what it was about. I had a lot of characters to deal with, and I thought, well, let’s start off small—we started off incredibly small, inside the Vision’s body—and grow out from there. What a nice thing to do, to go all the way down, and start to move outward and outward into the universe. I decided I was gonna kick ass on this thing. I was going to dedicate myself to this Kree-Skrull War with these Marvel heroes, and just really go crazy with it. My view of the War was very expansive—I was headed toward a 10- to 30-issue miniseries of an intergalactic war between the Kree and the Skrulls using the Earth as a battlefield. I thought, this is gonna be one hell of a series. Inside my head, I was going to do the best series I had ever done. I was determined to do that; throw in new ideas and 30

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the idea of doing the next story from the point of view of a classroom in the future, telling the story of how the Kree-Skrull War got to Earth. Roy kind of questioned that; he thought it really sort of says that we survived. I thought it really wasn’t that important at that point; we know we’re gonna survive. I thought it would be an interesting way to do the story; he didn’t like it very much. I said I thought I could make it work; he said okay, go ahead. I went home thinking, “Let me think about this. Let me try out some different ideas.” After a few days I realized it really wasn’t going to work, so it probably wasn’t such a great idea. Not only that, Roy didn’t like it that much. So I just went back to straight narrative. I had some other work I had to get done at the time, and it took me a good week to get back to it. When I got back to it, I was fine. I had pages, I brought them in. Well, apparently Roy had decided he was going to go with a different way to tell the story, and he had sent the story to John Buscema! It threw me for a loop. As much as I had been surprised by some of his decisions in the past, this one just got me, and I thought, “This is not good.” I was just taken aback by the whole thing. There was nowhere for me to go, so I basically bowed out. I knew it was not going to be what I wanted it to be, go where I wanted it to go, or be as big as I wanted it to be. I really had the sense that I could do something bigger, something really, really big with Marvel’s key characters. If you look at the four issues of the Avengers and see all the stuff that’s in there, you really get the sense of a tremendous framework building in a short amount of time; it’s an awful lot of work. Consider the work that went into the layout of every page; look at the detail in these pages. I turned out an awful lot of pages for this with a tremendous amount of sincerity, and I felt it was going to turn into something. I was building a kind of Marvel New Gods. Winter 1999

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I felt I was embarked on an epic and I discovered the support for doing an epic wasn’t there, in general. The Marvel “machine” was not prepared to get behind something as big as this, for whatever reason. It just didn’t feel to me that the team 31

Neal: I didn’t even like it; it was just a good idea. There was potentially a better story. This character—later named Killraven—was travelling through his world, collecting things. And he would trade things in order to create and put together technology to fight the aliens. He carried his backpack all of the time and everywhere he went, he would trade off bits of technology for other bits until he could bring the world together, by putting the pieces back together again, to fight the aliens because civilization was being destroyed. I was putting together a science-fiction concept. This guy, in effect, was the son of Doc Savage—not the Doc Savage, but a Doc Savage-like character—his genes are imprinted with the desire to put the world back together again. It can only be done genetically; nobody can naturally do that. That is the advantage of this character. This guy is motivated by instincts he doesn’t even understand; he’s doing these things, but he doesn’t know why he’s doing

was operating as a team; I didn’t feel it was together. When something isn’t working, it starts to unwind. If you have a certain dedication to something, it gets worn away and there’s no use or reason to try to save it. Arlen: Did you ever have the desire to finish the War your way? Neal: Not really… Marvel folks have asked, but not in a way that seemed workable. It would be very nice to finish it, but I don’t think I’ll ever get to finish it—and I don’t necessarily think that anybody could finish it as well as I could (sort of how I feel about “Deadman”). Arlen: How is it that you came to do “The War of the Worlds” [Amazing Adventures #16] in 1973, a year after your Avengers run was over? Were you a fan of the movie?

Right: Main image of Triton from the splash page of Avengers # 95. Neal says, “I’m totally taken by how many people think this is one of the best panels in comics. They’re constantly bringing it up to me; they think that it has an influence on The Savage Dragon.”

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Winter 1999

Right: Unpublished page to “War of the Worlds.” Neal pointed to the children and said, “These are the twin brothers, and this [indicating the emphatic man] is Doc Savage.” Killraven ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

them—he’s very good at doing them because he’s the son of Doc Savage and he’s a wonderful geneticallycreated person. And he has a twin brother—only he’s working for the aliens. To me, that’s a set-up for a really good series. That concept got lost and, in place of it, was an adventure that didn’t actually have progression. My tendency is to move things from point one to point two and on, and when that’s not happening, then people jump in and out. It was like what was happening with “Deadman”; they would have writers come in and do a story that would have nothing to do with the last story or anything to do with the next story, so there was no progression. Here, this story was started by Roy and I, and midpoint into it, it was turned over to Gerry Conway again, so I backed out of it. This sounds like a criticism of Gerry again, but it’s really not. It has to do with working with the people and having a relationship, and trusting that it’s going to go forward and be positive, and it just seemed to crumble. I felt betrayed. Arlen: Then you went on to do Conan, in issue #37, in 1974. Neal: I started a Conan and they told me it was going to be a 32-page story—it was going to be a big book. I had decided to ink it, especially because I knew it was going to be a large book. I had done the first three pages and then was told that this was going to be a 19-page book! I couldn’t go back and redo those three pages, but I had to grab the remaining story and [straining groan] compress it to remaining 16 pages. It was in fact a 34-page book jammed down into 19 pages. I refused in Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

my own mind to limit the events of the book to shorten the story. For that reason, the book to a certain degree suffers because of the smallness of the size. There are a lot of little drawings in there; they’re like Sunday pages—13 panels to a page! So if you 33

Right: Thumbnail to a page from Conan #37. Neal says, “A very interesting thing is the musculature of Conan compared to Juma; Conan looks like he was put together like bricks and Juma looks rounded and bulgy; to me, doing the two kinds of musculatures next to one another was a fun way to show different kinds of anatomy.” ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

read that book, you almost have to mentally enlarge the pages to get the impact of the story, and there are pages that have a tremendous amount of lettering on them, simply because that much story had to be told. A publisher in France loved the book so much, they gave me the opportunity to re-layout the same

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Winter 1999

pages, allowed me to make diagrams of new layouts, and expanded the book to something near a 34-page book again, so you got to see some of these panels reproduced bigger. Arlen: What was your general artistic approach to Conan? Neal: I was first struck by Frazetta’s Conan, who was put together like bricks, and I relate to that character to a certain extent. I’m one of the few people who really relate to John Buscema’s Conan. Ideally, I see this character in my head very much the way I think Robert E. Howard saw him, certainly the way Frazetta saw him, maybe a little taller. Arlen: What happened with Savage Sword of Conan #14, “Shadows of Zamboula”? Though credited as “Art by Neal Adams and the Tribe,” the pages begin with what looks like your tight pencils inked by you first, then the Tribe, but by the end, only your basic layouts are detectable. Neal: After I had done the first Conan story, I told Roy I need to be able to have the time to do this. We agreed it wasn’t going to be put on the schedule until I finished the whole job (for the first time in my career). I laid out a book completely, so that I would be satisfied with the whole project. These layouts were done so tight that you could almost ink them. How this unsched-

uled book got put on the schedule, and what happened subsequently to that book, is something that I don’t really know or understand and consider a real tragedy in my professional life. Roy suddenly sent copies of my layouts to the Philippines, where they were finished up by Filipino artists who obviously didn’t understand them. To make matters worse, I had been drawn voluntarily into a battle to find some justice for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (the creators of Superman), and it absorbed much of my time. While I was out of the studio, someone from Marvel came to the studio and asked for the pages and in a spirit of cooperation they were handed over. When I returned to the studio, I was dumb-founded, but I was too involved with “The Boys” to respond to this unfortunate event. The rest is… as they say…. There are a certain number of pages here that I carried through exactly the way I wanted to see them done. In the panels that I inked, you can clearly see the sincerity of what I was doing. To have this thing treated this way was just so very, very disheartening. To have layouts taken away and done by other people is not something that should be done to anybody, for any reason. I really wanted to finish this story; I felt this would be my definitive Conan story. The thumbnails alone show the potential of that story. You can see the devotion I gave to these. That was pretty much the last positive project I did for Marvel at that time. Arlen: Why was that? Neal: My association with Marvel Comics had always been good, but in this time frame, with Conan, The Avengers, it was happening again and again and again. There was never a point—even though they were doing these things and making me crazy—where they would approach me with something and I would say, “No, I won’t do it. I’m pissed off at you guys.” I just couldn’t find it in myself to be mad at a company because things weren’t going my way. But when individual projects would go sour on me, it’s tough to drop them. It’s tough to drop a project like the Kree-Skrull War; it’s tough to back away from Conan when I thought I was doing the best Conan around; it’s tough to leave “War of the Worlds”—jeez, I was off to a run on that baby! So my contribution to Marvel was done in spite of the fact the logs were rotting under my feet. Arlen: At about the same time your color comics work for Marvel waned, the black-&-white magazine line was starting up, and you painted most of their debut covers. Neal: For whatever reason, they felt I had the drawing power to launch these magazines, and I never said no to them when they asked. I painted covers for them and never backed away from them. Not only did these paintings allow me to flex my muscles a little bit, but they also represented no pressure. I was doing an awful lot of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu covers, but as they went on, Right: Two of the same panel from Neal’s pencils to “Shadows Over Zamboula.” Apparently Neal was working on the job, simultaneously inking it while members of “The Tribe” (Tony DeZuniga’s Filipino crew) were also inking from photocopies of Neal’s layouts under instructions from Marvel—unbeknownst to Neal. The top panel is as inked by Neal and below by the Tribe. This represents the last major job Neal did for the House of Ideas and appeared in Savage Sword of Conan #14. ©1998 Marvel. Conan ©1998 Conan Properties. Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Above: Neal’s exquisite work for “That Dracula May Live Again” from Dracula Lives #2. On the next page inset is the thumbnail for the page. This story is Ye Ed’s favorite Neal Adams work (that is, if you care). ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

they got to be more like drawings that were colored rather than paintings. What’s interesting is that Marvel had a sister company that hired illustrators all the time, but they never seemed to go to these artists to do these illustrations. Arlen: The one interior black-&-white illustration job you did do was a beauty, Dracula Lives #2. Neal: One of the reasons I was so happy with this Dracula story was because I got Marv Wolfman, and I got to do this

really nice black-&-white Dracula. I think I got a full script for it and, if I didn’t, I got a full outline from Wolfman—it’s his story. Arlen: Did you want to do more Dracula stories—or more black-&-white stories of any genre? Neal: Not really. The truth is, for me to a job like this and to do it in wash, and to finish and ink it, was a loss. I don’t know what I was paid for these pages but it couldn’t have been much. And for me to sit down, lay it out, pencil it, have it lettered and brought back to me, ink it, and then to lay washes on it, is an awful lot of work. Normally, you’d give this to an inker and you take your check and go away. This is a lot of work for one guy to do, so I really did it for Marv and to do a Marvel Dracula story, and once done I’d better get back to doing easier-to-do stories so I can make a living. Arlen: It’s as if you never said no to anything they asked you, at DC and Marvel. Neal: I never did. Arlen: You took on as much work as you could do without saying no, satisfying everybody. Neal: I did it to the best of my ability every time. Arlen: Around this time you developed the inking crew, “The Crusty Bunkers.” How did they originate? Neal: When artists used to come in the field, they came directly to either my room or the coffee room at DC Comics. There was hardly any way to get up to Marvel (except through Herb Trimpe and some nice people up there), but at DC they came through me or the coffee room. Guys would hang out late at night bullsh*tting, and I’d say, “I just pulled in this Howie Chaykin job from the editor but I can’t do it all, so everybody else is going to have to do some of it; so start inking!” The money was split up by me; it was my decision. It was sort of like the guy who splits up the money when you get the check after dinner; usually the guy who’s in charge of it loses the most. [laughter] “There’s got to be a tip, right? Am I paying for everything?” You don’t want to be that guy; you want to be the COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Winter 1999

Right: DC’s quintessential 1960s/’70s cover artist became, for a time, Marvel’s number one cover guy. Neal did the covers for the first issues of The Defenders (Marvel Feature #1), Red Wolf (Marvel Spotlight #1), Dracula (Tomb of Dracula #1—at right), Werewolf by Night (Marvel Spotlight #2) and Man-Thing (Fear #11). Neal went on to become a major contributor of paintings to Marvel’s black-&-white line and continues to draw covers for the publisher today [see page 3]. ©1998 Marvel Entertainment.

guy who throws in 10 bucks. Arlen: Your work at Marvel, like your DC work, petered out at the same time as you formed Continuity Associates and did more advertising work; is that an accurate assessment? Neal: I don’t even know how this evolutionary process took place, but you have to remember that at both Marvel and DC, a tremendous amount of my time was reluctantly spent making changes in the field. I helped to change the code. I helped to satisfy and settle disputes between the two publishers. There was a certain part of me that said,

Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

“There’s more to do,” and another part that said, “I think I can affect more change from the outside than the inside.” I just simply didn’t accept work that I had no time to do. Everybody was getting confident that the comic book business was really good, and getting better. When enough people got in and DC and Marvel welcomed new people, we opened Continuity on 49th Street. Then people came up to Continuity, and that became the new meeting place to get together and hang out. It was time for me to back away and make my own way, 37

and to be a little less dependent on DC and Marvel. But there was never a moment when I ever said to DC or Marvel, “I’m going to say no to you. If you have a job and want me to do it (and I’m in a position to do it and handle the deadlines), I will do it.” But as time went by, I could handle the deadlines less and less because I had more work on the outside. It was time for a change and I was moving on. Arlen: If there’s a legacy to the Marvel years, I would say that, like Steranko’s, yours was a small body of work that had tremendous impact. Your X-Men and Avengers, in particular, seem to have had an enormous influence on artists and writers years later. Your stories—and of course, your artwork— have stood the test of time. Neal: Think of what Marvel is: Jack Kirby and the generation that followed. I jumped into the X-Men and jumped into the Avengers; the X-Men have had the longest and most powerful impact. When Marvel Comics wanted to go into black-&-white magazines with color covers, I started that off. With Barry Smith, I was given a shot at doing Conan; I don’t know how much impact my Conan has had, but I did a really, really nice Conan. The other work I did for Marvel was more spotted: The Dracula story, these other stories, but they all added a kind of sparkle to each area. Whether it was covers or Crazy magazine, all those things served to be a positive experience… or maybe it’s just me. On a personal level, I liked everybody at Marvel, I liked the people who ran Marvel. I never had a difficult time with Marvel; my relationships were always good. People were loving the work that was happening, and were just as disappointed as I was when things didn’t continue. When the work was good, it was great, and the work changed the face of Marvel to that extent—look at the X-Men. It was in the X-Men that the impact was felt because it was a continuity that lasted a good ten Left: X-Men teamwork. issues, and you can look at the run of it and say, this is Panel from X-Men #65. what the X-Men can become. The Avengers was a small, bright star that dimmed Below: Final panel of and went away; it’s too bad. I can’t have a conversaAvengers #95. ©1998 tion with Marvel fans without the subject of finishing Marvel Entertainment. the Kree-Skrull War coming up. Why didn’t I finish it… or will I ever finish it? It rankles me, because I know it would’ve been great, and I know they were disappointed, and I feel like I let them down. If I had finished that War, there’s a suspicion that The Avengers could have been as strong and as powerful as the X-Men. I know it could have and would have been. I feel in some ways that my work with Marvel is sort of an unfinished symphony that everybody would have enjoyed had we finished it.

ARLEN SCHUMER, with his wife Sherri Wolfgang, runs Dynamic Duo, an advertising illustration studio in Westport, Connecticut. He also is one of the more articulate and enthusiastic advocates of comic book art in America.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Winter 1999

Neal Adams’ Marvel Work: A Checklist

by David Berkebile This checklist was initially based on the work of David Berkebile and augmented with reference to Doug Murray’s The Neal Adams Index (1974), Greg Theakston’s The Neal Adams Treasury (1976), research by Rick Norwood, Alex G. Malloy’s Comic Book Artists (1993), and Bob Overstreet’s Comic Book Price Guide (1997). Much thanks to Richard Martines, Roy Thomas, Albert Moy, Steve Alhquist and Atomic Comics, and (of course) Neal Adams and Continuity Associates for their assistance. (Heaven forbid there are any mistakes, but just in case: Any additions and/or corrections are welcome. Please write in care of the editor.) MAGAZINE

ISSUE #/DATE

SERIES

STORY TITLE

Amazing Adventures

#5 #6 #7 #8 #18

Mar 1971 Inhumans “My Brother’s Keeper” May 1971 Inhumans “Hell on Earth” + cover (Tom Palmer inks) July 1971 Inhumans “An Evening’s Wait for Death” + cover Sept 1971 Inhumans “An Hour of Thunder” + cover May 1973 War of the Worlds “The War of the Worlds”1

Astonishing Tales modifications]

#12

Jun 1972

Avengers

#92 #93

PAGES INKER/COMMENTS 10 pgs. 10 pgs. 10 pgs. 10 pgs. 10 pgs.

Tom Palmer John Verpoorten John Verpoorten John Verpoorten Frank Chiaramonte

“The Man-Thing”2

7 pgs.

pencils only [with John Romita Sr.

Oct 1971 Nov 1971

Cover “This Beachhead Earth” + cover

34 pgs.

Tom Palmer [with John Romita Sr.

#94 #95 #96

Dec 1971 Jan 1972 Feb 1972

“More Than Inhuman” + cover “Something Inhuman This Way Comes” “The Andromeda Swarm” + cover

13 pgs. 21 pgs. 21 pgs.

Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer

Bizarre Adventures

#28

Oct 1981 Shadowhunter

“Shadowhunter”

20 pgs.

Penciled w/Larry Hama3

Conan the Barbarian

#37 #44 #45

Apr 1974 Nov 1974 Dec 1974

“The Curse of the Golden Skull” + cover “Of Flame and the Fiend” (JB) “The Last Ballad of Laza-Lanti” (JB)

19 pgs. 18 pgs. 18 pgs.

Neal Adams Inks only w/ Crusty Bunkers Inks only w/ Crusty Bunkers.

“Crawler in the Mist” (JB)

22 pgs.

Inks only

(r) “Beast from the Abyss” (HC)

9 pgs.

Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

Ka-Zar

modifications]

Cover inks (GK). #116 Nov 1980 Conan Annual

1977

Conan Saga

#8 #10 #17 #31

Dec 1987 Feb 1988 Sept 1988 Nov 1989 Red Sonja

(r) “Curse of the Golden Skull” (CTB #37) (r)“Night of the Dark God” (GK) (ST #4) (r) “Shadows in Zamboula” (SSOC #14) (r) “Red Sonja” (EM) (SSOC #1)

19 pgs. 21 pgs. 39 pgs. 10 pgs.

Neal Adams Inks only w/”Diverse Hands” “The Tribe” (DeZuniga & Co.) Inks only w/ Chua (Chan)

Crazy

Dec 1972

“The Great American Dream”(as model)

3 pgs.

Appears in photo fumetti story

Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

King Kull

Crazy (cont.)

Crazy Super Special

Feb 1973

#61 #94

? ?

“McClown” “Live and Let Spy” (JB) (r)? (r)?

(r)?

Apr 1974 Bruce Lee Sons of the Tiger Jun 1974 Shang-Chi Aug 1974 Bruce Lee Sep 1974 Apr 1975 May 1975 Roger Moore Jul 1975 Bruce Lee Oct 1976 Bruce Lee

Cover “The Sons of the Tiger” (DG) Cover Cover Cover Cover Cover Cover Cover

Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #1 #2 #3 #4 #11 #12 #14 #17 Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #1 Special Album

5 pgs. 8 pgs.

Neal Adams Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

15 pgs.

Inks only w/Dick Giordano

Sum1974 Iron Fist

“Master Plan of Fu Manchu” Chap. 1 (FM) 10 pgs.

Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

“That Dracula May Live Again” “Castle of the Undead” (AW) “The Blood Book” (BB)

13 pgs. 12 pgs. 16 pgs.

Neal Adams Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

(r)“That Dracula May Live Again” (DL#2) (r)“Castle of the Undead” (AW) (DL#3)

13 pgs. 12 pgs.

Neal Adams Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

16 pgs.

Dracula Lives

#2 #3 #10

1973 Dracula Oct 1973 Solomon Kane Jan 1975 Lilith

Dracula Lives Annual

Dracula Solomon Kane

Epic Illustrated

#6 #7

Jun 1981 Aug 1981

Cover “Holocaust”4

Fear

#11

Dec 1972 Man-Thing

Cover

Giant-Size X-Men

Nov 1975

(r)“The Sentinels Live” + cover (XM #57) (r) “Mission Murder” (XM #58)

15 pgs. 20 pgs.

Tom Palmer Tom Palmer

Haunt of Horror

Nov 1974 Devil-Hunter

Pin-up

2 pgs.

Pencils only

Iron Man pg. 14

#72

Jan 1975

“Convention of Fear”5 (GT)

17 pgs.

partial inks on 2 panels,

Journey Into Mystery

Dec 1972

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (GK)

10 pgs.

Inks only w/Ralph Reese

The Kree/Skrull War Starring The Avengers

Sep 1983

Oct 1983

(r) “This Beachhead Earth” (A #93) + cov (r) 34 pgs. (r) “More Than Inhuman” (A #94) + cov (r) 13 pgs. (r) “Something Inhuman…” (A #95) 21 pgs. (r) “The Andromeda Swarm” (A #96) +cov(r) 21 pgs.

Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer

Kull and the Barbarians

#1 #2 #3

May 1975 Jul 1975 Solomon Kane Sep 1975 Solomon Kane

Four illustrations “The Hills of the Dead” (AW) “Into the Silent City” (AW)

Pencils only Inks only w/Terry Austin Inks only w/Pablo Marcos

Legion of Monsters

Sep 1975

Cover

Marvel Feature

Nov 1975 Red Sonja

(r) “Red Sonja” (EM) (SSOC #1)

10 pgs. Inks only w/,Chua (Chan)

Marvel Premiere

#10 #12 #13

Sep 1973 Dr. Strange Nov 1973 Dr. Strange Jan 1974 Dr. Strange

“Finally, Shuma-Gorath” (FB) “Portal to the Past” (FB) “Time Doom” (FB)

19 pgs. 19 pgs. 19 pgs.

Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

Marvel Preview

1975

10 pgs. 10 pgs.

Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

(r) “Finally, Shuma-Gorath” (FB) (r) “Night of the Dark God” (GK) (ST #4)

19 pgs. 21 pgs.

Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers Inks only w/Marcos & Colletta(?)

2 pgs. 10 pgs. 13 pgs.

#20

Cover “Good Lord” (DC) Win 1980 Bizarre Adventures (r) “Good Lord” (DC) (Marvel Preview #1)

Marvel Spotlight

#1 #2

Nov 1971 Red Wolf Cover Feb 1972 Werewolf by Night Cover6

Marvel Treasury

#6 #15

1975 1977

Masters of Terror

Jul 1975

(r) “One Hungers” (TOS #2)

7 pgs.

Dan Adkins

Monsters Unleashed

Nov 1973 Man-Thing

Aug 1974

Cover “Birthright” (GK) (r) “One Hungers” (TOS #2)

13 pgs. 7 pgs.

Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers Dan Adkins

#31

May 1976

“Over the Years They Murdered the Stars”

17 pgs.

Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

Power Man 40

Man-Gods

Dr. Strange Conan

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Winter 1999

Savage Sword of Conan

#4 #14 #60 #83

Aug 1974 Red Sonja Oct 1974 Blackmark Dec 1974 King Kull Blackmark Feb 1975 Blackmark Sep 1976 Conan Jan 1981 Dec 1982 Red Sonja

“Red Sonja” (EM) ? + cover “Beast from the Abyss” (HC) ? (GK) ? (GK) “Shadows in Zamboula” Storyboards (r) “Red Sonja” (EM) (SSOC #1)

10 pgs. 10 pgs. 9 pgs. ? pgs. ? pgs. 39 pgs. 20 pgs. 10 pgs.

Inks only w/Chua (Chan) Inks only Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers Inks only Inks only “The Tribe” (DeZuniga & Co.) Pencils only Inks only w/ Chua (Chan)

#4 #5 #6 #7 #10

May 1974 Conan Jul 1974 Conan/Ka-Zar Sept 1974 Ka-Zar Nov 1974 Ka-Zar May 1975 Ka-Zar

“Night of the Dark God” (GK) + cover Cover Cover “The Dream Temple of Candu Ra” (JB) “Requiem for a Haunted Man” (RH)

21 pgs.

Inks only w/”Diverse Hands”

16 pgs. 20 pgs.

Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers Inks only w/Crusty Bunkers

#179 Aug 1970 #180 Sept 1970 #181 Oct 1970

Cover (heavily altered by Bullpen) “When Gods Go Mad” “One God Must Fall”

20 pgs. 20 pgs.

Joe Sinnott Joe Sinnott

Tomb of Dracula

#1 #4 #6

Apr 1972 Sep 1972 Jan 1973

Cover Cover7 Cover

Tower of Shadows

Nov 1969

“One Hungers”

7 pgs.

Dan Adkins

Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction

Jan 1975

(r) “A View from Without”8

8 pgs.

Neal Adams

Werewolf by Night(?)

1998

Cover (see pg. 3 of this issue of CBA)

X-Men

#56 #57 #58 #59 #60 #61 #629 #63 #65

May 1969 June 1969 Jul 1969 Aug 1969 Sep 1969 Oct 1969 Nov 1969 Dec 1969 Feb 1970

“What Is the Power?” + cover “The Sentinels Live” + cover “Mission Murder” + cover “Do or Die, Baby” + cover “In the Shadow of Sauron” + cover “Monsters Also Weep” + cover “Strangers in a Savage Land” + cover “War in the World Below” + cover “Before I’d be Slave”10

15 pgs. 15 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs.

Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer

X-Men Classics

Dec 1983

Jan 1984

Feb 1984

(r) “The Sentinels Live” (XM #57) (r) “Mission Murder” (XM #58) (r) “Do or Die, Baby” (XM #59 partial) (r) “Do or Die, Baby” (XM #59 partial) (r) “In the Shadow of Sauron” (XM #60) (r) “Monsters Also Weep” (XM #61 partial) (r) “Monsters Also Weep” (XM #61 partial) (r) “Strangers in a Savage Land” (XM #62) (r) “War in the World Below” (XM #63)

15 pgs. 20 pgs. 9 pgs. 11 pgs. 20 pgs. 14 pgs. 6 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs.

Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer

Cover11 (r) “What Is the Power?” (XM #56) (r) “The Sentinels Live” (XM #57) (r) “Mission Murder” (XM #58) (r) “Do or Die, Baby” (XM #59) (r) “In the Shadow of Sauron” (XM #60) (r) “Monsters Also Weep” (XM #61) (r) “Strangers in a Savage Land” (XM #62) (r) “War in the World Below” (XM #63) (r) “Before I’d be Slave” (XM #65)

15 pgs. 15 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs. 20 pgs.

Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer Tom Palmer

Savage Tales

Thor

#1 #2 #3

X-Men Visionaries 2 The Neal Adams Collection

1996

X-Men/WildC.A.T.S.: The Silver Age

1997

Cover

FOOTNOTES: 1 Adams penciled pages 1-9 and 11; other pages are said by Adams to have been completed 2 Originally intended for publication in the cancelled Savage Tales #2, penciled piece with some faces erased and redrawn by Marvel Bullpen 3 Inks by Adams, Dick Giordano, Terry Austin, and Dennis Francis 4 Originally conceived as a record cover project with Eric Burden (formerly of The Animals) KEY: 5 Otherwise inked by Vince Colletta, Adams partially inked two panels—only the face of a character AW Alan Weiss FM Frank McLaughlin he identified as Continuity associate Steve Mitchell 6 Heavily reworked by Bullpen; Adams said the only thing of his remaining is werewolf vignette BB Bob Brown GK Gil Kane 7 Heavily reworked by Bullpen; Adams said only figures of his remaining are the victim couple DC Dave Cockrum GT George Tuska 8 Reprinted from Phase #1 DG Dick Giordano HC Howard Chaykin 9 Watchdog character redrawn by Marie Severin as humanoid EM Esteban Morato JB John Buscema 10 Facsimile edition published in the early ’90s FB Frank Brunner RH Russ Heath 11 Cover art drastically changed from submitted piece; see cover to CBA #3 and pg. 2 for details Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Hi there. Neal Adams again. Hi. You might remember that last promo ad that appeared a few months ago. Well, that’s my story and I’m not sticking to it. No, there were no two guys in a bar and that conversation never happened. You’ll see other promotions of this project telling that same

(Oh yeah... then how did it get here?).

The problem is, if all of this... And more is not true... What theory explains all of this better and still works with what we know. Tall order. It took me a couple of years to figure it all out... or so I thought. I wrote a 35 page chatty graphic novel and I began to draw it. The first 9 pages were relatively easy... Then I had to stop. The rest of the story/theory was vague and incomplete. To do the job I had to nail the big theory

story, but it’s a fantasy... This is the real story. About 22, or maybe more, years ago I became aware of the scientific community’s acceptance of a tectonic theory that we later referred to as the “Pangea” theory. Says that all the land on Earth was, once, part of a gigantic island, surrounded by water and that, over time, the land broke apart and spread around the planet. Being both a student and a fan of every branch of science and physics, I was appalled by this theory. As a storyteller I liked the middle of this fantasy... but not the ending so much and I greatly didn’t like the beginning. Problem was, like many of my contemporaries I easily saw the jigsaw reality of Africa and South America as well as other obvious connections. But this explanation fell into that well worn pit of rage and confusion that contained all those insane scientific “theories” that we’ve been

together so there were no holes, I had to explain how our universe was 1)made and how it 2)works. It took me the next 20 years. And the book expanded to 104 pages. Does the theory work? It seems to. Worse, I can’t disprove it, and I’ve tried reeeeally hard. If it’s true it’ll turn science, all of science, upside down. Do I think it’s true? No! But... I can’t disprove it. You see my problem. Does it matter to me if this theory is true or not? Well, I did work on it for over 20 years. But. truthfully I’ve had such a tremendously exciting time with all this that if it’s true, that will be as hard to handle as if it’s not true. I give it a .001%.

forced to swallow as “fact”, certainly all-my-life. Dig in there with me for a moment and we’ll find.

1. The Big Bang theory (chew on that one and see how it tastes). 2. The speed of light... is an absolute... but time and space are not. (Look, I like Einstein as well as the next guy...)

Worse case scenario we’ll all have a good time shooting it down. Best case... our whole understanding of the universe changes. Heh. So I’m inking the last 50 pages. And we’re producing a video tape or CD that will go with the book. If you want to keep up with the project for the next few months, read the info in the box on the right. I’ll see a lot of you soon.

Neal Adams

3. Light is both a particle and a wave. Wait... and it travels in a vacuum. (Admit it... that all messes with your mind). 4. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

Also: Bucky’s back! Yes, Bucky O’Hare is waiting for kids and adults at http://www.nealadams.com

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Artist Showcase

Between the Panels continued from page 5

direct quotations of things I’ve said. Anyway, nothing daunted, I went on to look up a couple of related items: Under “Alter Ego,” which deals succinctly with the first volume of the fanzine, I’m said to have lived at the time in “Jackson, Mississippi.” Not that it matters much, but it must be recorded in at least a hundred places that my home town is the much smaller Jackson, Missouri. Under the related heading “Fanzines,” I’m listed as a onetime editor or publisher of The Comic Reader. Uh-uh. The only fanzine I ever edited or published was Alter Ego. Unable to resist reading the “All-Star Comics” entry, though hardly expecting to be mentioned there, I saw myself referred to as being 11 years old when that comic died. Now, it makes scant difference to anyone, not even to me, that I was actually ten at the time—but since the authors obviously got this factoid from my letter printed in 1976’s All-Star #58, how difficult would it have been to get it right instead of wrong? After that, I pretty much stopped looking for Thomas-related entries, except that later I got curious to see if Todd McFarlane’s and my collaboration at DC was mentioned in the one on the creator of Spawn. It was: “[McFarlane] needed Roy Thomas’s help to get inking jobs on Infinity, Inc. in those early years.” Bzzzz. Honest, fellas, my buzzer finger’s getting worn out! All anyone had to do was check out any of the 24 issues of Infinity (plus one annual!) on which Todd and I worked together during 1985-86, and he’d see that they were inked by Tony DeZuniga, Steve Montano, and one or two others—but never once is Todd listed as anything but “penciler.” This was a pretty hard one to get wrong! Okay, end of my trip down personal-memory lane. I’m certainly not out to denigrate Mike Richardson, after all. I’ve always kind of liked the big guy, and I even wrote some comics for Dark Horse nearly a decade ago, and I’d be honored to do so again. He and his company are one of the pleasant success stories of the industry. And I don’t know Steve Duin, so I have nothing against him. But let’s look at the bigger picture: Comics Between the Panels is, make no mistake about it, a beautiful, lavishly-produced book. The cover is undoubtedly one of the best ever to grace a comics-related volume, with its “A-to-Z” depiction of letters from 26 comics logos, a brilliant concept. Right away the cover grabs your attention, because what comics fan could resist trying to rattle off the names of the comics from which each letter is taken? I impressed my local retailer by spouting off 23 of the 26—everything but the “H” (it had to be from a horror comic, but which one?), the “W” from Spawn, and the “Y” from Sin City. Which makes sense, since I don’t follow current comics all that closely, and I was never a horror-comics fan. I’m told Mark Evanier immediately reeled off to Mike Richardson the exact source of all 26 letters, and I can’t say I’m surprised. Like I said, a great cover. They should make a poster out of it, and they probably will. Inside, things get a bit more iffy. Besides what will probably prove a statistically high percentage of errors (if my non-scientific sampling holds up, and I fear it may), there is a certain one-sided mean-spiritedness in far too many entries. I mean, I and others have written less than glowing things about Mort Weisinger, and I’ll defend our (and Duin and Richardson’s) right to do so; but I still believe that an entry in even a determinedly unencyclopediac volume ought to strive to be a bit more balanced than the vitriolic one about Mort in CBTP. (The one about Julius Schwartz has a surprisingly nasty edge to it, too.) Gerry Conway, the scripter during the 1970s of many of Marvel’s most popular titles, is rung in almost solely so he can be castigated yet again, and less than accurately at that, as “the writer who murdered Gwen Stacy”; if Duin and Richardson don’t know yet that John Romita has long since ’fessed up that it was initially his suggestion as a way to shake up Amazing Spider-Man, and that Stan Lee’s memory is in error when he says he wasn’t told about Gwen’s death in advance, they really ought to have said nothing at all. (Like, Gerry, art director John, and I were really gonna waste Gwennie while Stan was out of town and present

Winter 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

him with a fait accompli. None of our mothers raised any children that stupid.) Poor Bill Black and his Paragon Publications don’t rate separate entries, but the authors don’t think it amiss to toss in a throwaway line about “the shabbiness of publisher Bill Black’s current cheesecake” in the entry on AC Comics. Forget about the hundreds of Golden Age stories that Bill has preserved and reprinted for us; they don’t even rate a mention. (While Margaret Brundage, a pulp-magazine cover artist who had absolutely no known or stated connection with comics, even in terms of influence, rates a full column and a huge color cover reproduction.) Still, when all is said and done, this is a book worth having in one’s collection, because it contains so many exquisite reproductions of comic art and photos of creators that aren’t available elsewhere. And the authors have humbly asked for our suggestions and corrections, so that the almost inevitable second edition will be better. But Mike Richardson is a respected, seasoned publisher; he should have taken a good hard look at the manuscript of this book, and delayed publication until the first edition of Comics Between the Panels was as good as we have reason to hope the second one will be. Meanwhile, if you want to read a lengthy and well-written discourse on comic book-related lawsuits, I suggest you look up “Legal Briefs” on Page 278 of Comics Between the Panels. And enjoy it, just as I did. But if I were you, I wouldn’t bet the farm on the accuracy of any given statement anywhere in the book, unless you can cross-check it with at least two other reputable sources. As someone once said—trust, but verify.

Available at www.twomorrows.com 53

continued from pg. 11 this critique sounds familiar, Jon, it's because I offered a version of it face-to-face in San Diego!) Essentially, I believe each issue of CBA needs some editorial material to lay out for the reader, and especially for the uninitiated, exactly what the furshlugginer issue is about! Your theme this time is "Marvel’s Second Wave: 1970-1977.” OK. Here are some logical questions: Why pick this as your theme? What's so special about these comics that you should devote 75 pages—or 150, once #3 is out—to them? What do you mean, "Second Wave"? Why does it start in 1970? Why does it end in 1977? Not only are a few of these questions not answered at the outset, I'm not sure they're answered after reading all 75 pages of interviews. (For instance, I assume as a knowledgeable fan that 1977, the end of this particular artistic era, coincides with Jim Shooter's rise and the tightening of editorial control at Marvel, but I don't recall this being stated anywhere in the issue. Perhaps it's mentioned once, but who can keep track?) I know you want to let the creators speak for themselves with little editorial intrusion; it works, mostly. But I don't think I'm asking too much when I request that you stick in one page or so at the outset of a theme issue to explain the theme! (I see only two sentences on page five that meet this criteria.) What else could you have discussed? During this period, Marvel at last surpassed DC in sales—a fact that's never mentioned once in the entire issue! This forever altered the status quo and the public perception of the industry. (Many people today think Marvel publishes Superman); Marvel attempted to crowd competitors off the racks by tripling its output. This is only briefly alluded to, mostly relating to the expanding workload and opportunities for fledgling creators. Did it work? I don't believe Marvel published so many titles again until the late 1980s. Heck, at one point in the 1970s at least one-third of the line were reprints—a very strange state of affairs, indeed! Compare that to today, when no reprint series are published by either Marvel or DC; Who were the notable creators? What were the notable runs? If I knew little about this period, what comics should I consider buying? If I were a newcomer, I'd walk away from this issue thinking that Master of Kung Fu (which got only a couple of mentions) wasn't very memorable, and I'd know nothing of Tomb of Dracula, which wasn't mentioned once! I wouldn't consider Doug Moench, Marv Wolfman, Don McGregor, Craig Russell or Steve Gerber to be particularly significant to the era either. (Maybe you'll correct this imbalance in #3?) Now, I'm playing devil’s advocate to some extent, because I do know this

period of Marvel Comics. But that's why I was able to see the glaring omissions. You see, with your first issue, which dealt with a period of DC that I'm almost completely unfamiliar with, I was often lost, like I'd walked into the middle of a conversation already in progress and no one was willing to tell me what had happened before I showed up. I learned a lot, don't get me wrong, but I'm still not sure of all the titles I ought to investigate. Another mystery: Some creators proclaimed that the mid-1960s "writers' strike" was a turning point in DC's development, but this was presented so blithely that I couldn't even figure out what they were talking about! Hey, the Q&A format is fun, I agree! The limitation, though, is that both parties assume a certain amount of knowledge just to keep the conversation from becoming bogged down—but for those of us out of the loop, there's no supplementary material to explain the very basics. I’ve taken a lot of space to argue these points because I think they’re important and I hope to convince you to write a more comprehensive editor’s message to kick off each issue. I think that would answer all my concerns in one fell swoop. But I don’t want my criticisms to take away from the gratitude I feel that CBA even exists, much less than it’s so interesting, so nicely put together, that I read every single word of it. It’s just that I think you could, without much extra work or any extra space, be significantly better. Because there’s really only one thing missing from CBA, and I can sum it up in one word: Context! [Thanks for the insightful and articulate letter, David, and I agree with the need for proper context in each issue of CBA. I had originally prepared to open #1 with an investigative report into the 1960s Writers’ Strike at DC but decided to postpone it for two reasons: One, while the “event” did prepare the way for an influx of new talent, I just didn’t think showcasing it in CBA was the proper way to set the tone for that issue (which, for all purposes, a celebration of an extraordinary era at DC); and, two, it fits better in the context of our upcoming “DC’s New Blood” issue (due in CBA #6, Fall 1999). I confess I’ve been reluctant to establish explicit context— wanting the principals speak for the times—but, again, I agree with you that we need to infuse each issue with the proper context. (Hopefully, Arlen’s introductory page to his Neal Adams interview does the trick this issue.) Look for the true sequel to last issue’s “Marvel’s Second Wave” in CBA #7, “The Marvel Bullpen Special.” Hopefully we’ll feature many neglected gems such as Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu, Don McGregor & Craig Russell’s “Killraven,” Marv Wolfman & Gene Colan’s Tomb of Dracula, and the Severin Siblings’ work on Kull the Conqueror. Keep ye eyes peeled, effendi!—JBC]

CBA’s Jon B. Cooke is back with his new mag, Comic Book Creator! Make ready for COMIC BOOK CREATOR, the new voice of the comics medium! TwoMorrows is proud to debut our newest magazine, COMIC BOOK CREATOR, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics, focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. Behind an ALEX ROSS cover painting, our frantic FIRST ISSUE features an investigation of the oft despicable treatment JACK KIRBY endured from the very business he helped establish. From being cheated out of royalties in the ‘40s and bullied in the ‘80s by the publisher he made great, to his estate’s current fight for equitable recognition against an entertainment monolith where his characters have generated billions of dollars, we present Kirby’s cautionary tale in the eternal struggle for creator’s rights. Plus, CBC #1 interviews artist ALEX ROSS and writer KURT BUSIEK, spotlights the last years of writer/artist FRANK ROBBINS, remembers comics historian LES DANIELS, talks to TODD McFARLANE about his new show-all book, showcases a joint talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL on their unforgettable collaborations, as well as throws a whole kit’n’caboodle of other creator-centric items atcha! Join us for the start of a new era as TwoMorrows welcomes back former Comic Book Artist editor JON B. COOKE, who helms the all-new, all-color COMIC BOOK CREATOR! (And don’t miss the double-size Summer Special #2, paying tribute to JOE KUBERT, this July!

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

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

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

KIRBY CHECKLIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

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

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

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

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

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

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

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

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

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

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

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

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

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

THE ORIGINAL GOES DIGITAL!

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

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

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

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

#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

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

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

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

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

#6: MORE MARVEL ’70s #7: ’70s MARVELMANIA

NEAL ADAMS interview about his work at Marvel Comics in the 1960s from AVENGERS to X-MEN, unpublished Adams covers, thumbnail layouts for classic stories, published pages BEFORE they were inked, and unused pages from his NEVER-COMPLETED X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL! Plus TOM PALMER on the art of inking Neal Adams, ADAMS’ MARVEL WORK CHECKLIST, & ADAMS wraparound cover!

Definitive JIM WARREN interview about publishing EERIE, CREEPY, VAMPIRELLA, and other fan favorites, in-depth interview with BERNIE WRIGHTSON with unpublished Warren art, plus unseen art, features and interviews with FRANK FRAZETTA, RICHARD CORBEN, AL WILLIAMSON, JACK DAVIS, ARCHIE GOODWIN, HARVEY KURTZMAN, ALEX NINO, and more! BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

More on DC COMICS 1967-74, with art by and interviews with NICK CARDY, JOE SIMON, NEAL ADAMS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MIKE KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, MARV WOLFMAN, IRWIN DONENFELD, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GIL KANE, DENNY O’NEIL, HOWARD POST, ALEX TOTH on FRANK ROBBINS, DC Writer’s Purge of 1968 by MIKE BARR, JOHN BROOME’s final interview, and more! CARDY cover!

Unpublished and rarely-seen art by, features on, and interviews with 1970s Bullpenners PAUL GULACY, FRANK BRUNNER, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, MARIE and JOHN SEVERIN, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE COCKRUM, DON MCGREGOR, DOUG MOENCH, and others! Plus never-beforeseen pencil pages to an unpublished Master of Kung-Fu graphic novel by PAUL GULACY! Cover by FRANK BRUNNER!

Featuring ’70s Marvel greats PAUL GULACY, JOHN BYRNE, RICH BUCKLER, DOUG MOENCH, DAN ADKINS, JIM MOONEY, STEVE GERBER, FRANK SPRINGER, and DENIS KITCHEN! Plus: a rarely-seen Stan Lee P.R. chat promoting the ’60s Marvel cartoon shows, the real trials and tribulations of Comics Distribution, the true story behind the ’70s Kung Fu Craze, and a new cover by PAUL GULACY!

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

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

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

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

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

#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

#12: CHARLTON PART 2

Major independent creators and their fabulous books from the early days of the Direct Sales Market! Featured interviews include STEVE RUDE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, DAVE STEVENS, JAIME HERNANDEZ, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, DON SIMPSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, MIKE BARON, MIKE GRELL, and more! Plus plenty of rare and unpublished art, and a new STEVE RUDE cover!

Interviews with Charlton alumni JOE GILL, DICK GIORDANO, STEVE SKEATES, DENNIS O’NEIL, ROY THOMAS, PETE MORISI, JIM APARO, PAT BOYETTE, FRANK MCLAUGHLIN, SAM GLANZMAN, plus ALAN MOORE on the Charlton/ Watchmen Connection, DC’s planned ALLCHARLTON WEEKLY, and more! DICK GIORDANO cover!

Career-spanning SIMONSON INTERVIEW, covering his work from “Manhunter” to Thor to Orion, JOHN WORKMAN interview, TRINA ROBBINS interview, also Trina, MARIE SEVERIN and RAMONA FRADON talk shop about their days in the comics business, MARIE SEVERIN interview, plus other great women cartoonists. New SIMONSON cover!

Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes by KUBERT, SIMONSON, JIM LEE, BOLLAND, GIBBONS and others, TOTH on continuity art, TOTH checklist, plus SHELDON MAYER SECTION with a look at SCRIBBLY, interviews with Mayer’s kids (real-life inspiration for SUGAR & SPIKE), and more! Covers by TOTH and MAYER!

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983! Interviews with Charlton alumni GEORGE WILDMAN, NICOLA CUTI, JOE STATON, JOHN BYRNE, TOM SUTTON, MIKE ZECK, JACK KELLER, PETE MORISI, WARREN SATTLER, BOB LAYTON, ROGER STERN, and others, ALEX TOTH, a NEW E-MAN STRIP by CUTI AND STATON, and the art of DON NEWTON! STATON cover!

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

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

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

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

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

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

1970s Marvel Horror focus, from Son of Satan to Ghost Rider! Interviews with ROY THOMAS, MARV WOLFMAN, GENE COLAN, TOM PALMER, HERB TRIMPE, GARY FRIEDRICH, DON PERLIN, TONY ISABELLA, and PABLOS MARCOS, plus a Portfolio Section featuring RUSS HEATH, MIKE PLOOG, DON PERLIN, PABLO MARCOS, FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE, and more! New GENE COLAN cover!

Interviews with Tower and THUNDER AGENTS alumni WALLACE WOOD, LOU MOUGIN, SAMM SCHWARTZ, DAN ADKINS, LEN BROWN, BILL PEARSON, LARRY IVIE, GEORGE TUSKA, STEVE SKEATES, and RUSS JONES, TOWER COMICS CHECKLIST, history of TIPPY TEEN, 1980s THUNDER AGENTS REVIVAL, and more! WOOD cover!

Interviews with ’80s independent creators DAVE STEVENS, JAIME, MARIO, AND GILBERT HERNANDEZ, MATT WAGNER, DEAN MOTTER, PAUL RIVOCHE, and SANDY PLUNKETT, plus lots of rare and unseen art from The Rocketeer, Love & Rockets, Mr. X, Grendel, other ’80s strips, and more! New cover by STEVENS and the HERNANDEZ BROS.!

’70s ATLAS COMICS HISTORY! Interviews with JEFF ROVIN, ROY THOMAS, ERNIE COLÓN, STEVE MITCHELL, LARRY HAMA, HOWARD CHAYKIN, SAL AMENDOLA, JIM CRAIG, RIC MEYERS, and ALAN KUPPERBERG, Atlas Checklist, HEATH, WRIGHTSON, SIMONSON, MILGROM, AUSTIN, WEISS, and STATON discuss their Atlas work, and more! COLÓN cover!

Discussion with ARTHUR ADAMS about his career (with an extensive CHECKLIST, and gobs of rare art), plus GRAY MORROW tributes from friends and acquaintances and a MORROW interview, Red Circle Comics Checklist, interviews with & remembrances of GEORGE ROUSSOS & GEORGE EVANS, Gallery of Morrow, Evans, and Roussos art, EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER interview, and more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

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

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

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

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

#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

#20: ROMITAs & KUBERTs #21: ADAM HUGHES, ALEX #22: GOLD KEY COMICS & examinations: RUSS MANNING ROSS, & JOHN BUSCEMA Interviews & Magnus Robot Fighter, WALLY WOOD &

Roundtable with JIM STARLIN, ALAN WEISS and AL MILGROM, interviews with STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE LEIALOHA, and FRANK BRUNNER, art from the lost WARLOCK #16, plus a FLO STEINBERG CELEBRATION, with a Flo interview, tributes by HERB TRIMPE, LINDA FITE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, and others! STARLIN/ MILGROM/WEISS cover!

History of Harvey Comics, from Hot Stuf’, Casper, and Richie Rich, to Joe Simon’s “Harvey Thriller” line! Interviews with, art by, and tributes to JACK KIRBY, STERANKO, WILL EISNER, AL WILLIAMSON, GIL KANE, WALLY WOOD, REED CRANDALL, JOE SIMON, WARREN KREMER, ERNIE COLÓN, SID JACOBSON, FRED RHOADES, and more! New wraparound MITCH O’CONNELL cover!

Joint interview between Marvel veteran and superb Spider-Man artist JOHN ROMITA, SR. and fan favorite Thor/Hulk renderer JOHN ROMITA, JR.! On the flipside, JOE, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT share their histories and influences in a special roundtable conversation! Plus unpublished and rarely seen artwork, and a visit by the ladies VIRGINIA and MURIEL! Flip-covers by the KUBERTs and the ROMITAs!

ADAM HUGHES ART ISSUE, with a comprehensive interview, unpublished art, & CHECKLIST! Also, a “Day in the Life” of ALEX ROSS (with plenty of Ross art)! Plus a tribute to the life and career of one of Marvel’s greatest artists, JOHN BUSCEMA, with testimonials from his friends and peers, art section, and biographical essay. HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

Total War M.A.R.S. Patrol, Tarzan by JESSE MARSH, JESSE SANTOS and DON GLUT’S Dagar and Dr. Spektor, Turok, Son of Stone’s ALBERTO GIOLITTI and PAUL S. NEWMAN, plus Doctor Solar, Boris Karloff, The Twilight Zone, and more, including MARK EVANIER on cartoon comics, and a definitive company history! New BRUCE TIMM cover!

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

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

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

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously available only to CBA subscribers! Spotlights great DC Comics of the ’70s: Interviews with MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN on JACK KIRBY’s Fourth World, ALEX TOTH on his mystery work, NEAL ADAMS on Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, RUSS HEATH on Sgt. Rock, BRUCE JONES discussing BERNIE WRIGHTSON (plus a WRIGHTSON portfolio), and a BRUCE TIMM interview, art gallery, and cover!

Compiles the new “extras” from CBA COLLECTION VOL. 1-3: unpublished JACK KIRBY story, unpublished BERNIE WRIGHTSON art, unused JEFF JONES story, ALAN WEISS interview, examination of STEVE ENGLEHART and MARSHALL ROGERS’ 1970s Batman work, a look at DC’s rare Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, PAUL GULACY art gallery, Marvel Value Stamp history, Mr. Monster’s scrapbook, and more!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

ALTER EGO #118

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #1 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2

BRICKJOURNAL #24

Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembering LES DANIELS, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and more!

JOE KUBERT double-size Summer Special tribute issue! Comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. Kubert interviews, rare art and artifacts, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, pin-ups and miniinterviews by faculty, students, fans, friends and family! Edited by JON B. COOKE.

LEGO TRAINS! Builder CALE LEIPHART shows how to get started building trains and train layouts, with instructions on building microscale trains by editor JOE MENO, building layouts with the members of the Pennsylvania LEGO Users Group (PennLUG), fan-built LEGO monorails minifigure customization by JARED BURKS, microscale building by CHRISTOPHER DECK, “You Can Build It”, and more!

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

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

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

ALTER EGO #119

ALTER EGO #120

ALTER EGO #121

JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond! Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

AVENGERS 50th ANNIVERSARY! WILL MURRAY on the group’s behind-thescenes origin, a look at its first decade with ROY THOMAS, STAN LEE, JACK KIRBY, THE BROTHERS BUSCEMA, TUSKA, ADAMS, COLAN, BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, MERRY MARVEL MARCHING SOCIETY, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, FCA, Golden Age Blue Beetle artist E.C. STONER, unused Avengers cover by DON HECK!

MARC SWAYZE TRIBUTE ISSUE, spotlighting FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America)! Salutes from Fawcett alumnus C.C. BECK and OTTO BINDER, interview with wife JUNE SWAYZE, a full Phantom Eagle story from Wow Comics, plus interview with 1950s Dell/Western artist MEL KEEFER, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and a SWAYZE Marvel Family cover art from the 1940s!

X-MEN SALUTE! 1963-69 secrets, rare ‘60s BRAZILIAN X-MEN stories, lost ‘60s XMen “character sheet” by STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS on the 1970s revival, art and artifacts by KIRBY, ROTH, ADAMS, HECK, FRIEDRICH, and BUSCEMA—plus the MARVELMANIA fan club story, interview with Golden Age writer ED SILVERMAN, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, and JACK KIRBY’s unused X-Men #10 cover!

GOLDEN AGE JUSTICE SOCIETY ISSUE! Features on JOHN B. WENTWORTH (Johnny Thunder), LEN SANSONE (The Atom), and BERNARD SACHS (All-Star Comics inker), art by CARMINE INFANTINO, PAUL REINMAN, MART NODELL, STAN ASCHMEIER, BEN FLINTON, and H.G. PETER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY to a vintage All-Star image by IRWIN HASEN!

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

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

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DRAW! #25

BACK ISSUE #65

BACK ISSUE #66

BACK ISSUE #67

BACK ISSUE #68

LEE WEEKS (Daredevil, Incredible Hulk) gives insight into the artform, YILDIRAY ÇINAR (Noble Causes, Fury of the Firestorms) interview and demo, inker JOE RUBINSTEIN shows how he works, “Comic Art Bootcamp” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, “Rough Critique” of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, and “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and software! Mature readers only.

“Bronze Age B-Teams”! Defenders issue-byissue overview, Champions, Guardians of the Galaxy, Inhumans, PETER DAVID’s X-Factor, Teen Titans West, Legion of Substitute Heroes, an all-star chatfest of Doom Patrol interviews, plus art and commentary by ROSS ANDRU, SAL BUSCEMA, KEITH GIFFEN, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, ERIK LARSEN, GEORGE PÉREZ, BOB ROZAKIS, cover by KEVIN NOWLAN.

“Bronze Age Team-Ups”! Marvel Team-Up and Two-in-One, Super-Villain Team-Up, CLAREMONT and SIMONSON’s X-Men/New Teen Titans, DC Comics Presents, SuperTeam Family, HANEY and APARO’s Batman of Earth-B(&B), Superman/Captain Marvel smackdowns, plus art and commentary by BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, GIFFEN, LEVITZ, WEIN, and a classic GIL KANE cover inked anew by TERRY AUSTIN.

“Heroes Out of Time!” Batman: Gotham by Gaslight with MIGNOLA, WAID, and AUGUSTYN, Booster Gold with JURGENS, X-Men: Days of Future Past with CHRIS CLAREMONT, Bill & Ted with EVAN DORKIN, interview with P. CRAIG RUSSELL, “Pro2Pro” with Time Masters’ BOB WAYNE and LEWIS SHINER, Karate Kid, New Mutants: Asgardian Wars, and Kang. Mignola cover.

“1970s and ‘80s Legion of Super-Heroes!” LEVITZ interview, the Legion’s Honored Dead, the Cosmic Boy miniseries, a Time Trapper history, the New Adventures of Superboy, Legion fantasy cover gallery by JOHN WATSON, plus BATES, COCKRUM, CONWAY, COLON, GIFFEN, GRELL, JANES, KUPPERBERG, LaROCQUE, LIGHTLE, SCHAFFENBERGER, SHERMAN, STATON, SWAN, WAID, & more! COCKRUM cover!

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Ambitious new series documenting each decade of comic book history!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1960-64 & The 1980s

JOHN WELLS covers comics in the 1960-64 JFK and Beatles era: DC’s new GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE and multiple earths! LEE and KIRBY at Marvel on FF, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, and X-MEN! BATMAN’s “new look”, Charlton’s BLUE BEETLE, CREEPY #1 & more!

MODERN MASTERS: CLIFF CHIANG

Spotlights the career of CLIFF CHIANG (artist of DC’s New 52 breakout hit WONDER WOMAN series) through a career-spanning interview, and loads of both iconic and rarely seen artwork from Cliff’s personal files. There’s also an in-depth look into the artist’s work process, and an extensive gallery of commissioned pieces, many in full-color. By CHRIS ARRANT and ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON.

1960-64: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 • Out now! 1980s: (288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $41.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5 • Out now!

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

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

THE STAR*REACH COMPANION

Complete history of the influential 1970s independent comic, featuring work by and interviews with DAVE STEVENS, FRANK BRUNNER, HOWARD CHAYKIN, STEVE LEIALOHA, WALTER SIMONSON, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, KEN STEACY, JOHN WORKMAN, MIKE VOSBURG, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, DAVE SIM, MICHAEL GILBERT, and many others, plus full stories from STAR*REACH and its sister magazine IMAGINE. Cover by CHAYKIN! MATURE READERS ONLY.

KEITH DALLAS documents comics’ 1980s Reagan years: Rise and fall of JIM SHOOTER, FRANK MILLER as comic book superstar, DC’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, MOORE and GAIMAN’s British invasion, ECLIPSE, PACIFIC, FIRST, COMICO, DARK HORSE and more!

DAN SPIEGLE: A LIFE IN COMIC ART

PLUGGED IN!

COMICS PROS IN THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY

Documents his 60-year career on DELL and GOLD KEY’S licensed TV and Movie adaptions (LOST IN SPACE, KORAK, MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER, MIGHTY SAMPSON), at DC COMICS (BATMAN, UNKNOWN SOLDIER, TOMAHAWK, JONAH HEX, TEEN TITANS, BLACKHAWK), his CROSSFIRE series for ECLIPSE, DARK HORSE’S INDIANA JONES series and more, with rare artwork, personal photos, and private commission drawings. Written by JOHN COATES.

Offers invaluable tips for anyone entering the Video Game field, or with a fascination for both comics and gaming. KEITH VERONESE interviews artists and writers who work in video games full-time: JIMMY PALMIOTTI, CHRIS BACHALO, MIKE DEODATO, RICK REMENDER, TRENT KANIUGA, and others. Whether you’re a noob or experienced gamer or comics fan, be sure to get PLUGGED IN!

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $6.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-048-9 • Ships May 2013

(104-page trade paperback) $14.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-049-6 • Ships May 2013

(128-page trade paperback with COLOR) $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-047-2 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Now shipping!

SUBSCRIBE! • Digital Editions: 3.95 each, or save with a digital subscription (digital editions are included FREE with a print subscription)! • Back Issue, Draw, Alter Ego & Comic Book Collector are now all full-color! • Lower international shipping rates! $

2013 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: (with FREE Digital Editions)

Media Mail

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

Digital Only

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$50

$68

$65

$72

$150

$15.80

BACK ISSUE! (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

DRAW! (4 issues)

$30

$40

$43

$54

$78

$11.80

ALTER EGO (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

COMIC BOOK CREATOR (4 issues w/Special)

$36

$45

$50

$65

$95

$15.80

BRICKJOURNAL (6 issues)

$57

$72

$75

$86

$128

$23.70

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THE BEST OF ALTER EGO, VOL. 2

This sequel to ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE presents more vintage features from the first super-hero fanzine, begun by JERRY BAILS & ROY THOMAS. Editors ROY THOMAS and BILL SCHELLY reveal undiscovered gems from all 11 original issues published from 1961-78, including features on Hawkman, the Spectre, Blackhawk, the JLA, All Winners Squad, the Heap, an unsold “Tor” newspaper strip by JOE KUBERT, and more!

No.3 No.3 Winter Fall1998 1999

$5.95 In The US

™

Neal Adams: The Marvel Years