Comic Book Artist #4 Preview

EMPIRE OF HORROR: THE WARREN PUBLISHING STORY

No.4 Spring 1999

$5.95 In The U.S.

JAMES WARREN ARCHIE GOODWIN ANGELO TORRES AL WILLIAMSON ALEX TOTH WILL EISNER RUSS HEATH BERNIE WRIGHTSON RICHARD CORBEN

WILLIAM DUBAY LOUISE JONES SIMONSON ANNE T. MURPHY BRUCE JONES FLO STEINBERG THE SPANISH SCHOOL

Uncle Creepy ©1975 Warren Publishing

conTenTs OUR COVER Courtesy of the artist, Bernie Wrightson, and avid Wrightson art collector Todd Adams, our cover features an unpublished Uncle Creepy drawing originally intended as a frontispiece for Creepy magazine. Colors by the newly computer-friendly Tom Ziuko! Uncle Creepy ©1976 Warren Publications.

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher TWOMORROWS JOHN & PAM MORROW COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Due to the ongoing legal battle between James Warren and Harris Comics over ownership of many of the characters originated by Warren Publishing (perhaps most prominently Vampirella), we have listed copyright notices as they stood, undisputed, at the time the original material was published. No infringement or support is intended to either party by our doing this.

Contributing Editors ROY THOMAS JOHN MORROW DAVID A. ROACH CAM VILLAR Proofreading RICHARD HOWELL JOHN MORROW Cover Art BERNIE WRIGHTSON Cover Colorist TOM ZIUKO

Contributors This Issue JAMES WARREN LOUISE SIMONSON • WILLIAM DUBAY BERNIE WRIGHTSON • RICHARD V. CORBEN ANNE T. MURPHY • BRUCE JONES • JACK DAVIS ALEX TOTH • AL WILLIAMSON • ANGELO TORRES WILL EISNER • DON McGREGOR • RUSS HEATH WALTER SIMONSON • JIM JANES • LARRY IVIE FLO STEINBERG • TRINA ROBBINS • AL MILGROM MICHAEL T. GILBERT (continued on pg. 2) CBA CORRECTIONS: I extend to Bob Layton my apologies for reprinting images from his fanzines in CBA #1 and #3 without his permission. It was purely a thickheaded oversight, and they should’ve been listed as ©1999 CPL/Gang Publications. I neglected to mention Kevin Stawieray (who graciously shared the penciled “War of the Worlds” page on pg. 33) in the list of contributors last time—sorry, Kev! And, though it’s probably ancient history by now, Scot McIntyre long ago noted that we were wrong to credit HannaBarbera with producing the Hot Wheels cartoon series back in CBA #1. The distinction goes to Ken Snyder Productions! Ta, Scot!

Visit CBA at our NEW Website at: www.twomorrows.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

ISSU E NO. 4 SPRING 1999

RANT: The Warren Experience 2 EDITOR’S The scoop on this “Empire of Horror” issue and our Summer con schedule!

MEMORIES OF JOE ORLANDO 3 Cartoonist Lee Mars recalls that old rascal comic artist and editor extraordinaire!

WINDSOR-SMITH: Storytelling Again A review of the artist’s new graphic novel from Fantagraphics, Adastra in Africa 4 BARRY SPRANG, COMICS MASTER A look at B. Koppany’s wonderful new book on the forgotten Batman artist 5 DICK COMMUNIQUES: Dick Giordano’s Rebuttal 7 CBA Replies to “Carmine Infantino’s Rebuttal,” and other missive missiles B-&-W WORLD OF WARREN PUBLISHING Archie Goodwin’s personal look and history of the great comic book company 8 THE DATELINE: @#!$?%!

12 HEMBECK’S Our Man Fred checks out the real “Collector’s Edition” of the Warren Days WARREN INTERVIEW 13 JAMES “Someone Has To Make It Happen,” and the emperor tells us how he did it TIMES Richard Howell waxes nostalgic about Warren’s Golden Age of b-&-w horror 44 GOODWIN TORRES INTERVIEW The great artist gives us a brief interview about his Warren work 46 ANGELO WILLIAMSON INTERVIEW Interview with EC fan favorite artist on his “Success Story” at Warren 48 AL T. MURPHY INTERVIEW 52 ANNE Archie Goodwin’s wife remembers the great writer/editor’s tenures at Warren I FORGET: TOTH’S WARREN DAYS 56 BEFORE Alex Toth uncovers the challenges of his black-&-white and tonal work SPANISH INVASION 63 THE David A. Roach’s amazing, in-depth investigation of Warren’s Barcelona Era DuBAY INTERVIEW Sharing memories of heaven and hell with Warren’s longest-running editor 78 WILLIAM WRIGHTSON INTERVIEW The master of the macabre arts recalls some of his finest work at Warren 86 BERNIE JONES SIMONSON INTERVIEW Weezie reveals the goings-on behind Warren Publishing’s Second Renaissance 92 LOUISE EISNER INTERVIEW The Father of Sequential Art reminisces about his Spirited Warren experience 100 WILL STEINBERG INTERVIEW 103 FLO A talk of errant monkeys and rubber bats with the “Captain” of the Company!

JONES INTERVIEW One of Warren’s greatest writers discusses his work, Weezie, and Wrightson 104 BRUCE HEATH INTERVIEW 110 RUSS The master storyteller shares a little “Give & Take” on his Warren days

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, $8.40 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. ©1999 TwoMorrows/Jon B. Cooke. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Editor’s Rant

The Warren Experience Are You Experienced? Black-&-White Horrors Await!

Contributors (continued from pg. 1)

David A. Roach • Cam Villar J. Hiroshi Morisaki • Todd Adams Glenn Danzig & Black Line Fever Words & Pictures • Richard Garrison Richard Howell • Bill Alger Fred Hembeck • Michael T. Gilbert Mark Wheatley • Underwood Books DC Comics • T. Horvitz • Albert Moy Sarge’s Comics • Glenn Southwick Roger Hill • Jeffrey H. Wasserman Ray Kelly & Kelly’s Comics Steve Alhquist & Atomic Comics Special Thanks James Warren & Gloria John & Pam Morrow • Beth Cooke Benjamin, Joshua & Daniel Cooke Ina Cooke & Nick Mook Andrew D. Cooke & Patty Willett Richard Cooke • Chris Cooke Susan Cooke-Anastasi • Becky Cooke The Boys at Graphic Innovations Trina Robbins • Michael T. Gilbert Mike Friedrich • Lee Mars Ray Kelly & Kelly’s Comics Michael & Julie & Zachery Taylor of Fantasy Zone • Steve Alhquist & Atomic Comics • Constance Mussells Providence Creative Group, Inc. Tim McEnerney • A.J. Greenwood Roger Hill • Richard Garrison Anne T. Murphy • Weezie Simonson Alex Toth • Al Williamson • Bill DuBay Allen Milgrom • Larry Hama Flo Steinberg • Angelo Torres J. David Spurlock • J. Hiroshi Morisaki Will Eisner • Victor Lim • Jeff Rovin Jim Janes • Richard Howell Jim Amash • Bhob Stewart • JD King Todd Adams • Sarge’s Comics Walter & Louise Simonson Bernie Wrightson • Dave Stevens Above: Bernie Wrightson spot illo of Uncle Creepy, circa 1976. Right: José Gonzales’ great Vampirella painting. Above right: Promo button. All ©1976 Warren Publishing.

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Well, we’re a few weeks late with this issue of Comic Book Artist but I hope you might find it was worth the wait. We uncovered so much fascinating material about the otherwise little-known history behind James Warren, his great publishing company and its many contributors, that we’ve added a startling 48 pages to the mag at no extra cost to you—throwing in an extra thick Alter Ego section to boot! There’s nearly twice the CBA section here than last issue—and about three times the work for yours truly.

I’ve had the pleasure to interview over a dozen participants (with a 12-hour interview with Jim Warren alone!) and, tardy or not, I think that this is the best issue yet. Hope you feel the same.

My prime motivation for helming this magazine is purely selfish. I have this compulsion to satisfy my curiosity about so much I don’t know about the comics I’ve enjoyed most in my life, and to hope some readers might like the ride. Apparently some of you are enjoying CBA because we’ve just received the honor of being nominated for GEM and Harvey awards! Thanks very much, ye nominating folks!

For those of you less interested in the storytelling of the behind-the-scenes antics, joys and heartaches of producing great comic books, this might not be an issue for your tastes. CBA has taken some criticism as being both a publication with a tinge of sensationalist promotion and a magazine designed to be the National Enquirer of the industry. Oh, well. I take no satisfaction in the ongoing slamfest taking place in the letter column and just hope some folks can lighten up about events of 25 years ago. Me, I’d like to have CBA likened as a Comics Journal focused on the days when there was no Comics Journal, though without the edge.

Anyway, this issue is as much about the person-alities and events that shaped one of history’s great comic book producers as it is about the art and stories that made it so. It’s a story of fortuitous happenstances that set events into motion leading to the creation of some truly legendary work—and maybe it’s a tale of pure dumb luck that books that good ever found a mainstream audience to begin with. Like the history of the man behind the company, the larger-than-life James Warren, it’s a story of great heights and woeful lows, about risktaking, sacrifice, success and failure—but mostly, it is a story about people.

Some of whom we need to know only by one name: Warren, Forrey, Harvey, Gloria, Woody, Williamson, Archie, Frazetta, Maroto, Bernie, Russ, Louise, Corben, Eisner, and on and on (plus a couple of guys named Jones). This here is a celebration of great stuff from fine people.

My publisher and I were a bit nervous about this issue, our first without bulging, spandexed biceps on the cover, and one that showcased (egads!) black-&-white magazines devoted to (gak!) horror. I was adamant about adding a Warren spotlight to our look at the ’70s (even before I met Jim Warren at a Big Apple Con prior to CBA #1 going to press) mostly because I’ve always been so damned curious about the company (and

pitifully little, besides Les Daniels’ chapter in his 1970 book, Comix: A History of the Comic Book in America, and an essay here and (hardly) there, has ever been written) and because discovering those magazines was such a kick way back when—an experience worth revisiting; but John Morrow and I were itchy about what the response might be because this ish ain’t about superfellas and all that. Well, we just got the orders from our distributors in for this issue and—if that don’t beat all—they surpassed CBA #1.

While certainly an anomaly in this first-issue fixated marketplace, maybe the figures reflect that readers are just as curious as I am.

I’d like to hope you’ll buy CBA regardless of the declared subject and more for the quality of the content, and accept us whatever our hits and misses, but I know better than that!

Anyway, rest easy and get that nap in now, John, because TwoMorrows’ Big Summer Push of Convention Hell is about to begin!

Producing this rag on some semblance of a schedule, all the while trying to maintain a full-time job (“I’ll get to that layout, Constance! Tim, what’s the d.p.i.? What timesheets, Lisa? Michelle, A.J.—get me an ambulance!”), fathering three boys (“‘Dad’? ‘Dad’ who?”), and being a dutiful spouse (“‘Husband’? I have no ‘husband’!”)—and don’t even mention freelance, Paulo!—can be taxing, and (cue the violins!) having just turned 40, I hope my creaky old bones can get out CBA on a (ha!) quarterly basis; but, please, be patient with TwoMorrows. We’re spinning off Roy’s A/E into its own quarterly mag plus we’ve more than a few special projects up our sleeves. In addition to getting out two—count ’em—two issues of CBA over the Summer, you’ll find John, Pam and I are off to look for America; on the convention circuit, that is.

Look for us at WonderCon, Madison Square Garden, Wizard, Heroes, San Diego, and SPX. And for those of you still hesitant to buy regardless of the subject matter, our themes for the Summer CBAs will be sequels to our first two issues, “DC Comics 1967-’74: The Daring and the Different” (#5—with *snif!* CBA’s final Alter Ego installment… promise you’ll write, Roy!) and “The Marvel Bullpen: 1970-77” (#6). Then we’ll steer away from the Big Two to take a peek at “The Madmen of MAD Magazine” in #7; but expect that one later in the Fall—after we wake up from the Summer heat.

Okay, now turn the lights low, snuggle up on this chilly night, turn the page, and come hither into the Gloriously Gruesome Black-&White World of Warren Publishing. Venture forth into a new experience of a history untold till now, of a monster mogul in the making, of a novice comics editor intent on reviving past glories, and of a crew of artists hellbound to create the best illustrated b-&-w horror stories of our fading century. Don’t be too afraid. Set a spell…!

— Jon B. Cooke COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

The Empire of Horror

The Black-&-White World of Warren’s finest writer/editor, Archie Goodwin, gives us the history

by Archie Goodwin [The following intimate overview of Jim Warren’s b&w magazines was written by that line’s greatest editor and writer, the late Archie Goodwin, who helmed Creepy, Eerie and Blazing Combat during their spectacular mid-’60s heydays. It was originally written for a foreign publisher’s history of comics in 1981 and first published in the U.S. in the horror anthology magazine Gore Shriek #5 in 1988, titled “The Warren Empire: A Personal View.” We thank Anne T. Murphy, Archie’s wife, for her permission to reprint this fine essay written by a wonderful writer, editor, and lover of comics who will always be sorely missed. Please note there are some dated references.—JBC]

Above: Typically fine Basil Gogos cover for Famous Monsters of Filmland, this of the great Boris Karloff from the actor’s memorial issue, #56, July 1969. ©1969 Warren Publishing.

Below: Bernie Wrightson letter column header for Eerie magazine. ©1976 Warren Publishing.

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Practically 20 years ago, Publisher James Warren held a dinner at the Cattleman restaurant in New York City. His guests were Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Reed Crandall, Roy Krenkel, Angelo Torres, Gray Morrow, Joe Orlando, George Evans, Russ Jones, and Archie Goodwin. They were all sharing drinks and steaks to celebrate the launching of a new magazine. Its name was Creepy.

Unlike any other magazine which Warren had published at that time, Creepy was entirely comics. Unlike any other comics published at that time, Creepy was in black-&-white and a magazine-size format. It was also done without the Comics Code Authority seal.

The time was 1964 and the American comics scene was beginning to come excitingly to life again after a ten-year doldrum brought on by the McCarthy-era hysteria which marked comic books as a major cause of juvenile delinquency. Within a year Warren’s comic line had expanded to three titles: Creepy, Eerie, and Blazing Combat, with a fourth, Vampirella, to be added several years later. Warren was the first new publisher to seriously enter the field since the ’50s and the only one among a number who would follow to succeed. The Warren comics never seriously challenged larger companies such as Marvel and DC in sales, but they very successfully created their own special niche in the market and in comics history, providing an alternative to the mainstream emphasis on super-heroes and a showcase for promising new talent as well as some of the greatest names in both the U.S. and Europe.

I was one of those at James Warren’s dinner, steak in mouth and drink in hand. I had written about half the stories in that first issue of Creepy and, by dint of knowing most of the artists involved in the venture, was sort of unofficial chief writer on the project. By the second issue I was declared story editor and by the fourth, I was the magazine’s full-fledged editor. For me, it was an extremely heady experience. I had been a comics fan since my early teens,

particularly of the EC line published in the ’50s. The Warren comics were initially an attempt to reincarnate that line and most of the artists who contributed to the early issues—as a reading of the dinner list shows—were strongly associated with the EC era and well-known and well-regarded by fans and professionals because of that association. As a fan, I had set my sights on becoming a comic book artist, but I believe I always harbored strong leanings toward becoming a writer and editor as well, even without any true knowledge or suspicion of what the latter even involved. I wouldn’t just draw, I would envision features which would fit into a whole comic book which in turn would be intended as part of an entire comics line. When my ability to produce in volume enough to fulfill these grand ambitions sagged well below the one-comic level, I began constructing imaginary comics and comics lines, drawing up lists of working artists I admired and assigning them to the various titles and features I intended my “company” (AG Publications, I believe it was) to produce. When EC actually used several of my choices, the entire process seemed justified—and though these lists never actually made the trek with me when I left my home in Oklahoma to seek fame and fortune in New York, the memory of doing them certainly influenced many of my choices of artists when I finally became an editor for Warren. I suppose a case can be made that teenagers often unrealistically nurture a fantasy, but you couldn’t prove it to me. Most of mine came true—and with the very first full-time job I held in comics.

Had Warren attempted the plunge into comics a year or so later, it’s doubtful the remarkable group of artists who launched Creepy would have still been available. The long dry spell of scrambling for assignments that since the late ’50s worked their toll on comics was rapidly breaking up and a large variety of higherpaying work was materializing more and more rapidly to tempt them all—but it hadn’t quite happened yet when Warren began Creepy. Busy though they might have been, they still had the time—and, more importantly, the enthusiasm.

Unlike other parts of the world, black-&-white comic books were something of a rarity in the United States. In an attempt to escape the comic book censorship imposed upon them, EC tried converting to a magazine format and eliminating dialogue balloons in favor of typeset text in what they would call their Picto-Fiction line. Distribution problems killed the concept, but the experiment did prove that their staff of artists could work well and with more variety than in the four-color comics. Other attempts were made by other publishers, but with the exception of Mad and several imitators, the black-&-white magazine format found no welcome in the marketplace.

Again, if time favored Warren in being able to gather the right group of artists, it also favored him in terms of an available audience. Warren had already perceived it and was reaching it most successfully with his pioneer publication, Famous Monsters of Filmland. The early ’60s saw the release to television of the classic horror and monster movies of the ’30s and ’40s, usually in the form of a regular scheduled “Shock Theatre,” complete with ghoulish host to introduce the films and make bad puns and jokes about them. These won a whole new audience for the old movies and their classic Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman characters.

Great Britain’s Hammer Films followed this success in movie theaters with their own new series of horror films and widened the popularity of the genre even more. In his efforts to broaden the range of products he was creating for the market, Warren began experimenting with visual adaptations of some of the most popular movies (and COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

Warren Publications behind the world’s greatest b-&-w horror magazines some of the deservedly obscure as well). Some of these were done in fumetti format, using comic book captions and balloons with photos from the films serving as art; others were done as actually comics inserts into his regular monster magazines. Russ Jones was packaging most of this material for Warren and he had managed to get both Wallace Wood and Joe Orlando to work with him; particularly impressive were two adaptations from Universal’s “Mummy” series done as comics inserts in Warren’s Monster World. Having done these, utilizing two of the most popular of the EC artists, it was not a great leap to the notion of producing the full magazine in the EC tradition.

Larry Ivie, a publisher, writer, and comics historian, had already approached Warren with the notion of doing such a project, but before Warren had experimented with comics-related format and fan reaction to them. It hadn’t been something he was ready to act on at that time—but, a year later, when Russ Jones resuggested the idea, Warren was receptive. Jones then enlisted Ivie to work on the new project. Ivie contributed three scripts to the first issue of Creepy and would continue to make contributions from time to time as the magazine grew, but it was also through him that Al Williamson first met Jones and became interested in Creepy. Al then brought in many of his friends from the EC era such as Frazetta, Krenkel, Crandall, and Evans. He also brought Angelo Torres and Gray Morrow, who had come into the comics field just a bit too late to become popular EC staffers, but who certainly possessed the potential, had the line continued. Williamson also volunteered me as an additional script writer for Creepy.

Al had met Larry Ivie and me when we were both in art school in New York and both rabid fans of both EC and Williamson’s artwork. He was responsible for starting the two of us comics writers by having us do scripts for him. Al continued to encourage us and was always ready to volunteer us for any likely project that came up. He was the same way with his other friends and fellow artists.

This was particularly true at the beginning of the Creepy project and aided substantially in getting it started toward success.

By the time the second issue of Creepy was out, Warren was already planning two more titles. The first was a companion magazine to Creepy, which—after much debate among Warren, Jones, and myself over such title possibilities as Ghastly, Spooky, and Macabre—became Eerie. The second was Blazing Combat. In addition to its successful horror and science-fiction comics, EC had done two magnificent and innovative war titles, conceived, edited and written by Harvey Kurtzman (who went on to do Mad and “Little Annie Fanny” and, in between them, a more obscure humor magazine called Help!, which was published by James Warren).

Since our version of EC-type horror garnered a good reaction, Warren was willing to gamble on another EC-style project—but this gamble was not a commercial success. Blazing Combat lasted only four issues. Yet it is well-remembered even to this day. Though the material I wrote for Blazing Combat was done relatively early in my career, I still get fans talking about it at every convention I attend.

One of the things most remembered is that the stories took an antiwar stance before protest over the escalating Vietnam war became popular or accepted in the United States. One story, “Landscape,” drawn by Joe Orlando, apparently caused the book to be banned from Army post stores since it portrayed U.S. and South Vietnamese forces being just as destructive to the life of an uninvolved peasant as were the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. With time, this has been blown out of proportion a bit, making it seem we were far greater crusaders than was actually the case. Basically, I was trying Spring 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

to write the same type stories that Harvey Kurtzman had in his EC war comics and to make those stories good enough to please and inspire the artists who were doing the book. In addition to Creepy regulars Angelo Torres, Gray Morrow, Reed Crandall, George Evans, and Joe Orlando, Blazing Combat also attracted the services of John Severin, Alex Toth, Wallace Wood, Russ Heath, and Eugene Colan, all of whom had an affinity for the material and managed to contribute some of their very best work to this short-lived title. Even Frank Frazetta, who is generally thought of as strictly a fantasy artist (perhaps the best fantasy artist), contributed four very striking and dynamic covers that lent the book an especially unique look.

Eerie, which would last much longer than Blazing Combat, had a far more troubled beginning. Once we finally settled on the title, we began promoting it in Creepy. Then Warren discovered that another publisher who used his same distributor was bringing out an imitation of Creepy and intending to call it Eerie. In the late ’50s, there had been a one-issue attempt at a black-&-white horror comic; its title was Eerie.

With its failure, rights to the title had lapsed. Now, whoever got their version of Eerie out first would have new claim to the title. Since Warren’s rival was going to be reprinting old horror comics material from the ’50s, there seemed little chance of beating them into print as all our stories for the first issue of Warren’s Eerie were still with the artists and none of them near completion. The distributor was after Warren to give in as the other publisher had a much larger line of magazines and was therefore considered a more valuable customer.

Warren had one day before he was scheduled to meet with the distributor and the rival publisher to argue his case. He had me and letterer Gaspar Saladino meet with him and, utilizing some inventory material from Creepy as well as some material already printed, the three of us cobbled together a pamphletsized little magazine emblazoned with the Eerie logo already designed for us by our regular letterer, Ben Oda. Warren had simple line repro printing done on it overnight.

By the next morning, there were 200 copies of “Eerie #1” in existence. Some were shipped to other cities where Warren had arranged for them to be displayed on sale. When he went to his meeting, Warren tipped the newsstand operator outside his distributor’s building so that several copies of our freshly printed “magazine” would be displayed. Entering the meeting, Warren handed a shocked distributor and competitor copies of Eerie #1 and announced that it was on sale downstairs. Confirming this, the pair capitulated (the rival publication wound up being something called Beware, I believe, and most buyers took it literally; it didn’t last long). Eerie was on its way and an instant collector’s item had been created.

The hastily-assembled, wretchedly-printed little pamphlet that launched the title would

Above: The above drawing features the notation: “Original pencil sketch for Uncle Creepy (1964) done for Warren Publishing Co.” and is signed “J. Warren, 5/22/70.” Below: Original cover sketch by Larry Ivie as he envisioned the cover of “Creepy Comix” #1. ©1999 Larry Ivie.

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You Axed For It!

THE JAMES WARREN INTERVIEW Spring 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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CBA Interview

“Someone Has To The James Warren Interview: Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Who is Jim Warren? I had no idea other than unsubstantiated stories about a legendary publisher who rocked the industry over and over again in the ’60s and ’70s, by shear force of personality and the quality of the magazines he published: Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, The Spirit, and Blazing Combat. After he had utterly disappeared from the field in 1983 (when many thought he had passed on), I was astonished to find James Warren manning a booth at a Big Apple comic show in March 1998, and I worked up the chutzpah to approach him and ask him to write a tribute for the recently-deceased Archie Goodwin. Immediately he said yes—to a total stranger, yet—and since that moment we developed a friendship. I confess I like Jim Warren. He is energy personified, ever the salesman and always “on,” but also a man with true heart. His passion for excellence attracted such incredible talent… but, let’s hear him tell the story. The following interview took place during two long sessions (on October 17, 1998, and February 11, 1999) in the home of Jim and his paramour, Gloria (who joins in on the talk at times), located in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Jim provided the final copyedit (”Jim! We’re on deadline here!!!”).

Comic Book Artist: It was mentioned in a Rolling Stone article that you had a wall plaque that read: “Someone has to make it happen.” What’s the significance of that phrase?

Jim Warren: It means just what it says: Someone has to create the concept; someone has to see it through; someone has to get it into the hands of the public; someone has to make sure it’s accepted. Someone has to do it.

The deed becomes much more difficult when it involves working with a number of other people. If something simply has to be done—like filling up the bird-feeder—I can do it myself. If it involves two or three people, it comes a little harder because you have to coordinate efforts.

If it involves 25, 50, or 100 people it gets a helluva lot harder but it still means one person has to direct those efforts—and if 25 or 50 of those people happen to be writers, artists, editors—creative people—oh boy! You must never lose control, because if you do, you’re not going to make it happen. In this business (and it’s a marriage of business and the arts, as is the motion picture industry), having to work with creative people is a blessing, a joy, fun. It’s also a serious type of brutal torture—but no matter how bad the torture, one person has to see it through. It can’t be done alone, and it requires a lot of people with different disciplines—from the magazine wholesaler to distributor to retailer to any one of the artists, writers or editors. The difference between the business people and the creative people is usually light years. One person has to see it through, and has to deal with all those people. Someone has to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Someone has to eventually take the high ground—and the others will follow. Things rarely happen by themselves (except with very few exceptions—the sun rises, and the moon comes out, and even God does that!). Whew! Were you expecting a simple answer to this question?

CBA: [laughs] Newsweek magazine called you a “monster mer14

chandiser par excellence.” What is it that defines you? Where does your relentless drive come from?

Jim: “What makes Warren run?” Is that what you’re asking? Well, what makes people like Jon B. Cooke run after me?

CBA: A desire to know, to explain.

Jim: We’re driven by the same forces, but for different reasons. A lot of people have asked what makes me run. It’s particularly significant with me because it comes from the book What Makes Sammy Run? Bud Shulberg was the author (along with On the Waterfront and many other fine books and films). He was a friend and neighbor of mine for many years on Long Island. I’m getting ahead of myself, but there’s a quote by Gloria Steinem in that Rolling Stone article in which she likened me to Sammy Glick, the title character in What Makes Sammy Run? When you ask, “What makes Jim Warren run? Where did you get your relentless drive?” I have to be philosophical and say, “Yes, I run—but what makes guys like you run after me for interviews?” There must be something that makes you travel 300 miles for an interview—and, whatever that is, that’s what makes you run.

(Sammy Glick, by the way, was not a very nice guy; he was a Hollywood-based hustler who knew how to make things happen even if he had to work two points south of decency, and sometimes below.) You either have a drive or a dream or you don’t. Some mens’ dreams are to just be happy, live happily, and not tilt at windmills. I never wanted to be passive; I always wanted to be in the arena. I never wanted to be Vice-President of anything, even if it was General Motors or MicroSoft; I always felt I could do more in the power seat.

I’m not a team player and I never was per se, except in the Army. I guess I was born to be a solo operator, and always have been, most of my life.

When Newsweek said I was a “monster merchandiser par excellence,” they were referring to the fact that I could see the great appeal our subject matter had to the readers, and could marry that editorial material to items that could be sold, because they belonged in the same neighborhood. I never thought I was in the magazine business; I always thought that I was in the youth business. Our average reader back in those days was between 10 and 18, and if they liked your product and were on the same wavelength—they’re going to like the products you sell. If you love ice cream, you’re probably going to like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and other flavors—but you might not like Jell-O or pie. Our magazine was chocolate ice cream and the things we merchandised were vanilla, strawberry and other flavors—but it was still ice cream. That’s what Newsweek was referring to.

CBA: Can you tell us about your background? You’re from South Philadelphia?

Jim: I see written on this list of questions you ask if I was born “Hymie Taubman from South Philadelphia.” Do you remember where you got that reference?

CBA: That was from David J. Skal’s book, The Horror Show, in his footnote references which cited a book by Bill Warren called “Keep Watching the Skies,” published in 1987.

Jim: The name Bill Warren is familiar. [Bill Warren was an occasional scripter for Creepy and Eerie, and no relation.] Was he the one who said I was born “Hymie Taubman of South Philadelphia”?

CBA: That was the footnote.

Jim: I’ll give you some truth: I was not born “Hymie Taubman of South Philadelphia.” I was particularly curious about that reference.

Did you know that “Hymie” is a derogatory term for Jews?

CBA: Yes. Jim: Morons and sick people who want to make an ethnic slur refer COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

Make It Happen” The Emperor of Horror speaks! to New York City as “Hymietown,” so I found this particularly interesting and I’d like to track down who stated it as fact. I would like to look this guy Bill Warren right in the eye and say, “Why did you tell that lie?” I want to see him look back at me and lower his gaze because he won’t be able to look me in the eye.

CBA: I’ll photocopy the reference for you and track down Warren’s book.

Jim: Don’t go to too much trouble. Someday I’m going to bump into this guy. He’s been bad-mouthing me for decades, so I’m not surprised by his anti-Semitic reference. What he wrote was a made-up, deliberate lie. The name on my birth certificate is James Warren Taubman. I legally dropped the last name when I was 21.

CBA: I was suspect of the reference, and that’s why I did it in the form of a question.

Jim: That’s all right. Now I know where the Big Lie came from.

In one of your questions, you said I’ve been described as “feisty, pugnacious, and a dynamo of energy,” and then you ask if I attribute my drive to growing up in the city. No. I think it came from confidence. Confidence gives both energy and strength. My confidence was given to me by my family. I had a loving family. A mother and father, both loving, plus aunts and uncles—five of them—living in one house in South Philadelphia. They were foreign-born, plus a few firstgeneration Americans. My grandfather came over from Russia and landed on a dock in South Philadelphia (instead of Ellis Island, which was crowded that day, so they routed the boat to South Philadelphia where they had a separate little Ellis Island). He settled there along with an entire generation of “tired, poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” He fathered five children: My mother and her siblings. I was the first-born son which in an Italian or Jewish family is a very big deal. My mother and those aunts and uncles surrounded me with tremendous encouragement, applause, support and enthusiasm for whatever the hell it was that I did. If I made a drawing with my Crayola, all five of them would rave about it and tell me how great it was and encourage me to do more. If I broke a window, they would all rally around me and say, “Okay, we’ll fix it—it’ll be fine—but here’s how to throw the baseball so you won’t break a window again—and it doesn’t mean you should stop playing ball.” I had all this great support. It gives you great confidence. I thought that I could do anything because they made me feel that way.

My uncles would literally toss me around like a ball; they would stand in a circle (I was about three years old) and they would throw me—not hand me—but throw me to one another. One uncle would catch me and throw me to the next guy—and I loved it! I always knew that when one threw me, another was going to catch me. It gave me great confidence, and that’s what I think made me feisty. I never thought there was anything I couldn’t do if I really wanted to do it.

CBA: Did you have any brothers or sisters?

Jim: I had a younger brother and an older brother but they didn’t survive. I lived in the spotlight. I had no siblings to compete with—but I also had the disadvantage early on of not learning, when I was young, how to get along with people.

CBA: What were your interests when you were a child? Did you have an interest in fantasy material, comics and movies?

Jim: Oh hell, yes. It started with comics when I was about four, Sunday comics spread out on the dining room floor with my aunts and uncles. One uncle in particular was an artist—a brilliant guy. Every generation in my family has spawned an artist—my uncle and a cousin before me, myself, and my younger cousins. Each generation produced an artist, and I was the one for my generation. My uncle, who was 15 years older than I, was the artist of his generation and he Spring 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

was brilliant. He would sit down on the floor and read me the comics along with a shirt cardboard (when you got your shirt back from the cleaners, there would be a sheet of cardboard in it) and, with a pencil, he’d say, “Let’s draw this one—let’s draw The Little King,” and I would draw The Little King. He would then say, “I want you to sign the name of the artist because that’s very important, Jim. Always give the artist credit.” He would make me letter “O. Soglow,” for Otto Soglow, the artist on the strip. Comics were my first big thing. I learned to read them and draw them at the same time.

CBA: Were you attracted to the adventure strips?

Jim: You bet! As I grew older, my taste in comics changed. Like everyone else, I had my own favorites. The first one I remember in the adventure category was Hal Foster, because of the great art.

CBA: His Tarzan or Prince Valiant?

Jim: Prince Valiant. My favorite in the adventure category was Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Then I developed a great love for Roy Crane and Milt Caniff.

CBA: Just to set a time for this, you were born in 1930?

Jim: Yes. A great time for comic strips. They were my number one genre. Comics were everything to me because they encompassed a story that excited me, coupled with the art, which I would copy on any drawing surface I could find. After you copy a lot, you tend to do your own original stuff. It’s like writers—you read a lot, and it’s like filling up a pitcher with water: Eventually the water’s going to overflow, and the overflow means you’re going to start to write yourself.

The more you read, the more you’re going to start to write; the more you see cartoon and comic book artwork, the more you’re going to draw.

Above: Making it happen. The Emperor of Horror, James Warren, hard at work at the office in the mid-’60s. ©1999 James Warren.

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Above: Jim Warren’s Sopwith Camel replica, gracing the front of his renowned Westhampton, Long Island beach house in the mid-’70s. Jim is a lifelong aviation buff, taking his first bi-wing plane ride as a boy with his father.

Below: Jim continued his love affair with all things airborne with his purchase of Action Comics #1 in 1938. “Superman to me was like seeing a movie in color for the first time,” he said. ©1999 DC Comics

16

Gloria: Jim had a fabulous comic strip in his high school newspaper, and he was also a great fine artist.

Jim: C’mon! This is my interview! You can have yours later! [laughs] The next big thing after comics was radio. You lived in a house in the early 1930s and radio was your television. On radio I distinctly remember being in the house when Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds came on. I didn’t understand any of it or even know the subject matter—but I knew my father was highly excited. I couldn’t understand what he was telling my mother or what he was saying on the phone but there was this incredible excitement.

I found out years later, of course, that it was the famous Orson Welles broadcast on Halloween in 1938. I was eight years old.

CBA: Was your father upset?

Jim: I asked him later, “Did you believe that an alien invasion was happening?” He said, “Yes.” Even though there was a disclaimer before the broadcast, people missed it.

Gloria: Why wasn’t your father frightened?

Jim: First of all, my father wasn’t frightened of anything. He was fearless. My father was born with a medical disability; he was born with no nerves. For that reason, he had no fear whatsoever. He had no fear of heights and he gave that gift to me. He took me up in an open-cockpit Sopwith Camel when I was about 10 years old. When we landed, my mother almost killed him! [laughter] Gloria: She still remembers! [laughs] [Jim’s mother is now 95.]

Jim: We went out on the ledges of tall buildings. He had absolutely no fear, which I inherited.

CBA: [laughs] He was actually welcoming the aliens! He was looking forward to seeing them?

Jim: He wasn’t scared by the broadcast because they were supposed to have landed in New Jersey, and we lived in Philadelphia. I don’t remember exactly how he articulated it, but he said he believed it in the beginning—but gradually he saw it was Orson’s little trick on the world. He was excited by the fact that Orson Welles could pull it off because my father loved Welles and Mercury Theatre.

On radio I would listen to The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, the serials on at the time (Jack Armstrong, the AllAmerican Boy, Captain Midnight with his secret decoder ring). The radio was really the place where my imagination took off.

My world consisted of comic strips, radio and movies. I was about eight when I went to my first movie. I lived in the movies on Saturdays. On Saturdays there was a double-feature (a western and something else), a newsreel, selected short subjects, a cartoon, and then, after it was all finished, it ran again with no interruptions. My mother had to come to the theater and drag me out.

By 5 or 6 o’clock I wouldn’t be home so they let her in (because they recognized her) and she went down the aisle calling, “Jimmy!” It was embarrassing! [laughter] CBA: Did you immediately recognize Superman as something cool?

Did you clue into super-heroes?

Jim: That was the one that started it for me. Superman. I remember when it came out. I was eight years old and it was during the Summer. It was absolutely incredible for me. In the Action Comics which I got and kept (my mother threw it away while I was in the Army), I saw for the first time, a comic strip character that was not like Mandrake the Magician or The Little King or anything that was going on in comics at the time. The cape, blue suit and big “S”—the Man of Steel with that great jaw—was drawn by Joe Shuster who was only 19 years old at the time, and written by Jerry Siegel (who was about the same age) and Superman to me was like seeing a movie in color for the first time. It was just astounding and, of course, I drew it. A few hundred times.

However my big interest at the time was airplanes and not superheroes. To understand this, you have to go back to the way things were in the late ’30s. My idea of adventure and excitement was airplanes, Hollywood and adventurers. The movies I loved the most were with airplanes, Dawn Patrol (which I must have seen 800 times as a kid) was my favorite. Roy Crane drew airplanes in his strip Captain Easy, and they looked like this. [Pulls out a photo of a Sopwith Camel.] I drew these in school and out, whenever. This one in particular…

CBA: The GeeBee. Jim: How did you know that?

CBA: From The Rocketeer.

Jim: The GeeBee was a plane I loved because it won the Thompson Trophy. My father bought me my first model airplane kit and it was a GeeBee. We sat at the dining room table and (I was too young, but I helped a little) he built it for me, and taught me how to build them myself. I was nine. He told me all about the GeeBee and how five brothers had built it. It was built by the Granville Brothers and the man who actually flew it. It was very difficult to fly… not only did my father build the plane for me but he also made me read about the history of it (he didn’t have to work too hard to make me). While he was putting it together, rather than me just sitting there and watching him, I would read all about the plane. By the time it was finished, not only did I have this great model but I knew a lot about it. I learned that the pilot who mastered this tough-to-fly aircraft was a man named Jimmy Doolittle. Is that name familiar to you?

CBA: Yah. Thirty Seconds Over Toyko.

Jim: You sure know your history, Jon B. Cooke! Jimmy Doolittle flew off an aircraft carrier and led the first planes to bomb Japan during World War Two—and he did a lot of his early flying in this GeeBee. Alex Toth plays a role in this “love of early aircraft” saga. Let me show you why: [Pulls out Toth’s Bravo for Adventure strip from The Rook #3 and 4] Jesse Bravo was patterned after Errol Flynn. We ran these stories. I loved the excitement of the ’30s and the adventures with these airplanes (the same ones I had built). Manuel Auad honored me by asking me to write a foreword for a second book on Alex Toth and let me read you a paragraph which has to do with the airplanes: “Alex and I share the same age. We both discovered comics during the wonderful 1930s. As a kid, I built model airplanes because I first saw those planes in the great newspaper strips drawn by Roy Crane and Milt Caniff. Dawn Patrol was my favorite boyhood movie. Errol Flynn was the adventurer I wanted to be. When Warren Publishing produced segments of Alex’s Bravo in the 1980s, I secretly relived my Errol Flynn days courtesy of Alex Toth. Alex gave me back the ’30s we had both loved. Airplanes, adventurers, Hollywood, Howard Hughes, Wiley Post, Jimmy Doolittle; these are names that probably mean nothing to you, Dear Reader, but nobody memorialized that exciting world better than Alex Toth.”

CBA: And, boy, you received some of his finest work.

Jim: The story now has a happy ending. Again, when I was about eight or nine, my father took me up in a Sopwith Camel, the first plane I had ever been up in (I wish it had been a GeeBee but, of course, they were scarce). A barnstorming pilot in Atlantic City flew rides out of a small field. I think he got $4 a ride (an incredible amount of money in those days). Kids went free (if you were small enough to sit on your father’s lap). We got into the open cockpit (there were two cockpits), I got on my father’s lap and they strapped us in. We went up and I’ll never forget it! It was incredible! It was the kind of thing you dream about all your life after it happens. Every time I fly I think of it. Flying in the Sopwith Camel was an early dream come true.

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Spring 1999

Above: Robert Crumb was introduced as an accomplished cartoonist in the pages of his idol’s Help! magazine. Crumb contributed two travelogue strips, this one chronicling a trip to the New York City neighborhood, from #22. ©1965 Central Publications.

Below: Not funny. The inside cover that drove a permanent wedge between editor Kurtzman and publisher Warren. ©1961 Central Publications.

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read by kids and young adults.

Ours was read by a more sophisticated, Woody Allen crowd.

CBA: Was Help! side-by-side with Mad on the stands?

Jim: No. Again, they didn’t know where to place it on the newsstands. It didn’t belong next to Mad. They wouldn’t put it next to the New Yorker.

Distributors were fed up with me because each time I came out with a new magazine it created a new category. They didn’t know where the hell to put it. The fact that I was breaking new ground and creating a field that didn’t exist before didn’t matter to them. Of course, if it was successful, 25 competitors would come in and they’d enjoy the business; but it didn’t matter to them. “Here’s another strange Warren magazine! Where the hell are we going to put this one?” It didn’t belong next to Mad or FM or TV Guide, so where did it belong? “Why the hell doesn’t Warren give us normal magazines like all the other publishers?” You tell me. Hearst was our Help! distributor and I told them, “All I can tell you is where Help! shouldn’t be—it shouldn’t be with sports, women's, or TV Guide. The closest I can think of is to position it with Playboy.” They tried—and failed—but the thing that killed Help! was not the distribution problem. I had lost heart. I lost my passion and enthusiasm. I also lost $50,000—a lot of money in 1960. We stopped publishing and I don’t even think Harvey and I shook hands when we closed the office in 1965.

Ten years later, 1975, at a Phil Seuling New York Comic Convention, Phil invited all the comic industry biggies to a private cocktail party. Harvey was there. It wasn’t an enchanted evening but I looked at him across the crowded room.

Harvey was surrounded by people who had not seen him in a long time and I thought, “I don’t want to go over there; let him have the spotlight. Later I’ll go over and shake hands.” Before I got that chance, Phil Seuling rapped the tabletop podium and introduced Harvey. Much applause. Harvey went to the podium to say a few words. I stood in the back of the large room.

Harvey made a nice speech during which he said, “The industry needs many kinds of people; we need talented people but we also very badly need people like Bill Gaines and Jim Warren, both of whom are credits to the industry.” I almost dropped my vodka tonic. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In a million years, I never thought Harvey Kurtzman would say that about Gaines or me! But he did and I wanted to kiss him for it. I think Harvey had a change of heart in those ten years. Maybe he had had time to reflect.

After he left the podium, I waited a while and then maneuvered over to Harvey and spoke to

him. We shook hands and I gave him a hug. He was smiling and happy, and so was I. It turned out to be an enchanted evening. I wish it had happened ten years sooner. Later that night I thought about Harvey Kurtzman and realized that a large part of me loved him. The Beatles said, “All You Need is Love.” And then they broke up.

CBA: Terry Gilliam replaced Gloria Steinem as editorial assistant.

What was he like?

Jim: Strange and brilliant. Terry was a free spirit and a funny, off-thewall, innovative, wild guy. You saw his work on Monty Python? Only Terry could do that! I never thought that Terry would emerge as a filmmaker. Who knew? Look what he has done with his talent! His movie Brazil was named one of the top 100 films by the American Film Institute. He has worked hard—and it shows. All of his films are “must-see.” I hope he has a long career.

And let’s not forget that we published art spigeleman—and Robert Crumb…

CBA: Did they come around the office? In some ways, that’s where the counter-culture began.

Jim: Harvey had them come to the office. They were a colorful bunch. They were rebels, it was a rebellious time, and these kids were all young and destined for greatness. It was the early ’60s, and it was their time. I forgot to mention that we also did a lot of partying… and worked all night. I ordered in sandwiches from the Stage Delicatessen.

We ate tons of food, and worked all night.

Gloria: Tell him about how you would lock the doors.

Jim: When we had a tight deadline and I sensed the people were tired and wanted to go home, I would lock the doors and say, “You’re not coming out until you finish the job!” [laughter] “Here’s food; I’m sending in food.”

CBA: What was Gloria Steinem like?

Jim: Have you ever seen her on television?

CBA: I’ve met her on several occasions.

Jim: Great lady; superior mind—I agree with most of her views, but not all of them.

CBA: Gloria told Rolling Stone, “Jim Warren is a great operator.

We used to kid him about it; about being a Sammy Glick-type character. Y’know, great big cufflinks. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s entered into the apocryhpha of James Warren that he used to do things like ride around in the Summer with the windows rolled up so people would think he had air conditioning.” Is that true?

Jim: I’ve always had immense regard for Gloria. I’ve read most of her books. It was not very nice to say, but in those days, Steinem felt it necessary to make up cute things that would make her look good in print and this was one of them. There were no cufflinks—I never owned cufflinks; my shirts were custom made, with small, dark buttons. I never owned a pair of cufflinks because I didn’t like French cuffs. I didn’t own a car. During those years in New York I only knew three cars—Hertz, Avis and limo. Gloria still rates very high with me. I liked her then and I like her now. She’s a good woman.

CBA: You were quoted as saying, in the same article, “At a party a long time ago, I think in fact it was Gloria Steinem who said, ‘Watch out for him. He’s laid everything except the Atlantic Cable.” Did you party?

Jim: If I ever got around to counting the number of dumb things I said when I was young, it would come in at 7,952. That was one of them.

CBA: Did you have a good time? Were you a bon vivant?

Jim: Me, a bon vivant?

CBA: Gil Kane told a couple of stories.

Jim: Are you asking this question in order to inflict discomfort on me? What did Gil say?

CBA: That… ahhh… you guys womanized and partied.

Jim: That’s outrageous!! Nothing like that ever took place! And if Gil says it did then he ought to be hanged upside-down like Mussolini! That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever… oh, all right, so we did socialize a little.

Look, I was in my early 30s. I was single. I was working hard to build Warren Publishing and I was playing hard. However I worked more than I partied. It reminds me of that famous Dean Martin expression: “If I had as many women as people say I have, my testicles would be talking to you from a test tube at the Mayo Clinic.” [laughter] Gloria: He remembers too many Saturday night television proCOMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

grams!

CBA: So you dated Carol Burnett? [laughter] Jim: We never actually dated but we did spend a wild weekend in Palm Springs.

Gloria: You never told me about that.

Jim: It happened during a decade I don’t remember much about.

Anyway, I worked more than I partied—but I was not a womanizer. I was merely a credit to my gender.

Gloria: Over the years, I have heard from a couple of women who dated Jim; they always described him as a fabulous gentleman—very kind, sweet and fun.

Jim: Who could ask for anything more? Look, for 10 years the company office in New York was housed in a duplex penthouse apartment. The offices were downstairs and I lived upstairs. People thought that any time there was a woman in the office I would grab her and take her upstairs. Not true! I let people think it was true; it was good for my image. Hell, I loved my work but when it was time to relax, it was New York, and it was a fabulous city to party in.

CBA: You were obviously friends with Gil? Jim: I liked Gil. He was a good artist and a good guy. All of our artists were nifty guys. Each was different and individual and there was something to like about each one. Al Williamson (another great fun-loving guy), Wally Wood (an absolute maniac), Frank Frazetta (the wildest of them all in terms of being able to drive you crazy)— but I loved them!

Above: It’s… Terry Gilliam! The now-world renowned film director (seen here as soggy cover model for ish #24) once served as Harvey’s assistant editor on Help! Terry honored his old boss by naming a character “Kurtzman” in his classic film Brazil. ©1965 Central Publications.

CBA: Marie Severin mentioned that Angelo Torres, Al and Frank would hang together and be the Bad Boys.

Jim: They looked like they were bad boys and put on the appearance, but they weren’t. They were pussycats—pussycats who were also top artists, top pros, top you-name-it.

Let me tell you a Frank Frazetta story: I was at Frank’s house one day, and during the course of conversation I mentioned that another artist had gotten sick and couldn’t deliver his painting for one of our Eerie covers. Without saying a word, Frank went downstairs into his basement and returned with a piece of old plywood. Right in front of my eyes he put the plywood up on his easel—and 30 minutes later he finished the Neanderthal cover [Creepy #15]. It’s monochromatic because he didn’t have time to use colors! He hands me the plywood board (I get a splinter from the damned thing!) and says, “Here’s a Spring 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Harvey Kurtzman on Help!

The following interview excerpt originally appeared in Joe Brancatelli’s lively (but short-lived) magazine, Inside Comics (#2, Summer 1974), and is from an interview with satirical genius Harvey Kurtzman entitled, “Conversations with the Brother-in-Law of Underground Comics.” In his introduction to the piece, interviewer Jeffrey H. Wasserman wrote: “[If] you were a card-carrying member of the American Grafitti generation… you read Help! magazine—and laughed. Or maybe you couldn’t believe your eyes when Help! displayed the talents of dozens of the world’s best known performers… And if you were unusually sophisticated back then, you filed names like Bob Crumb and Jay Lynch and Denis Kitchen in the back of your mind—all those peculiar names that popped up in Help!’s ‘Public Gallery.’ All those names who eventually became the backbone of the underground comix movement of the late ’60s.”

Our thanks to Joe and Jeffrey for their permission to reprint this excerpt, which is copyright 1974 by Galaxy News Service.

Jeffrey H. Wasserman: You returned to satire and you and Jim Warren began Help!

Financially…

Harvey Kurtzman: Warren and I dealt with each other on a partnership basis. He had been after me for a long time to do something.

Help! was essentially Warren’s money and my editing. Jim was fairly active at the time, so we pooled a certain amount of our resources. Jim was very deep into Hollywood photo-type magazines and Help! was a sort of a hybrid.

Wasserman: What do you mean, “hybrid”? Was Help! originally slated to be something else?

Kurtzman: I did a couple of western magazines for Warren on a non-partnership basis, an issue-by-issue basis.

That’s where I developed this format of using Hollywood photographs to fill pages in a satirical way. That sort of set the pattern for Help!

Wasserman: Help! was basically a fumetti magazine, though, and that originally became popular in Europe….

Kurtzman: Yeah, true. A lot of halftone stuff.

Wasserman: Help! never really made it though, and that’s always puzzled me. After all, these fumettis were phenomenally popular in Europe.

Kurtzman: All kinds of things happen in Europe that just don’t work here. My own longtime conclusion is that in the business of media, the ramifications of each foreign environment are so complicated it’s impossible to explain why something is a big smash success over there and nothing happens over here.

Wasserman: Did you think American television could have had some sort of impact on how the fumetti might have done here?

Kurtzman: It’s possible although the European fumettis were totally different in character. They were real soap opera stuff and had a much broader base than ours. We did satire, which was never very popular. European fumettis were soap opera sagas and very often they were a collection of still photographs. They would turn them into a photo-picture story.

Wasserman: Rather than putting out a novelization of the movie they would just put out a fumetti of the movie?

Kurtzman: Yeah, and it was real broad base kind of entertainment. So that may explain it. They once tried to translate European fumettis and it never worked. They’re still very popular in South America….

Wasserman: In many ways, Warren as a publisher was just as domineering and possessive as Gaines was. Did you have similar problems?

Kurtzman: It was a totally different situation, luckily.

Above: The With Warren, it was strictly a partnership basis, and I Help! gang guarded my half of the partnership very zealously, had a deliver in good lawyer, and we were on equal footing throughout the 1961 in project. these illos Wasserman: Even though Help! folded after several from #6 dozen issues, it was an amazing magazine. There were dozens of ©1961 Central continued on next page

Publications.

27

The Era of Archie

Goodwin Times A Brief Look at Warren’s Golden Age of B-&-W Horror

by Richard Howell

Above: The highly-underrated artist Jerry Grandenetti’s splash page to the Goodwin-authored story, “The Art of Horror,” from Creepy #14. ©1967 Warren Publishing.

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By the early 1960s, horror comics were essentially dead. They'd been dead since the mid-1950s, and—unlike so many of their characters—showed no signs of a surprising return from the grave. Oh, sure, there were those milder “mystery” comics, which mimicked the chills of real horror comics. These pretenders regularly featured Strange Tales—of Suspense, Phantom Strangers, Mysterious Travelers, Amazing Adventures, Journeys into Mystery and even encounters with the (hopefully) Unexpected; but the ghouls, vampires, ambulatory rotting corpses, menacing monsters, and unnamed horrors from other dimensions were nowhere to be found.

The reason for all this is no Mystery, of course.

The very public demise of EC Comics’ enormously successful line of horror titles, in the wake of Congressional hearings on the alleged link between comics and juvenile delinquency, ensured that no other comics publisher would be willing to print material that was that strong. (By “strong” I mean “intense,” through the EC material was also prodigious in terms of quality.) The demise of Tales From The Crypt, Vault Of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, and their fourth title, the practically-stillborn Crypt of Terror, as well as that of all their imitators, left a huge genre void in the comics publishing field that no one was being encouraged to fill.

As time went on, the American public became less concerned with the evil effects comic books might have on impressionable youngsters (movies and TV being obviously much more subversive), and the atmosphere for comics grew less oppressive. By the waning days of the ‘50s, there was quite a bit of experimentation going on.

In 1958, publisher James Warren tested the waters for horrorbased magazines by launching Famous Monsters of Filmland. The new magazine was under the titular editorship of science-fiction agent and enthusiast Forrest J Ackerman; the photos and writing in FM were exclusively his. Encouraged by the success of his first horror venture (and egged on by both Ackerman and Kable, his distributor), Warren took the big plunge, and in 1964 launched

Creepy, a quarterly, black-&-white, magazine-sized comic book that featured horror stories—real comic book horror stories. For the first time since 1954, a publisher was carrying on the EC tradition.

Warren’s faith in Creepy was justified by encouraging sales, and the magazine jumped to bi-monthly with its second issue. Those first two issues featured, along with some spectacular art, some fine, craftsmanlike stories by Russ Jones, Bill Pearson, Larry Ivie, and a relative newcomer to comics named Archie Goodwin. By the fourth issue, initial editor Russ Jones had departed and Goodwin—by then the series’ primary writer—assumed the editorial chores as well.

Goodwin’s background was working in the editorial staff of Redbook magazine, and he’d gotten acclimated to comics via various assignments in the comic strip field (including a stint as scripting assistant on Leonard Starr’s superb On Stage). His early scripting efforts on Creepy showed great promise, and he quickly established himself as a meaningful—perhaps irreplaceable— component in the new line’s success.

Goodwin’s scripting work of this period contained all the elements which would eventually propel him to the top of the industry. His stories were expertly paced, very economically dialogued, and flawlessly structured. Using the EC-horror story as a model, Goodwin mastered it and used it as a framework for fashioning tales of lurking horror, hinting at a chaotic universe which continually threatened the “safe” reality of normal life. Most of these stories hewed to a successful, familiar model, which still managed to be enjoyable, surprising, and—at times—genuinely frightening. The very act of reading Creepy or Eerie during Goodwin’s tenure was to surrender to the atmosphere of menace and chaos, and the cover copy frequently emphasized this phenomenon: “Join us for a haunted journey into illustrated terror and suspense!!” “Can you face these new haunting tales of fear and terror?” and “ Within this magazine lurks a world of illustrated terror and suspense! Can you meet its fearful challenge…?”

It should also be mentioned that Warren published a third comics-style magazine during these years, the war anthology Blazing Combat, which was also edited by Archie Goodwin and was comparable in quality to Creepy and the latter-day addition Eerie.

Blazing Combat was launched in October of 1965, and was a worthy successor to the late, highly-respected EC line of war comics masterminded by Harvey Kurtzman. (Early Vietnam-era America did not seem ready for the gritty, downbeat, anti-war sentiments of Blazing Combat, though, and it was discontinued after a scant four issues.) Perhaps because of early, discouraging sales reports on Blazing Combat—or perhaps merely because it made good business sense—Warren’s new commitment to comics-style publications was next manifested by his expanding in the same direction as his already-successful Creepy; another horror magazine, in other words.

For all his facility as a writer, however, Goodwin’s real flourishing at Warren was as an editor. One of the aspects of his ability at managing talent was that under his tenure, the Warren comics-style magazines continued to add more and more talent to their roster on “Contributing Artists.” Creepy #1 listed Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, George Evans, Franks Frazetta, Gray Morrow, Joe Orlando, Angelo Torres, Al Williamson, and Maurice Whitman. By the time the sun had set on Goodwin’s run as editor on the Warren magazines, those stalwarts had been joined by such stellar talents as Neal Adams, Dan Adkins, Gene Colan, Johnny Craig, Steve Ditko, Jerry Grandenetti, Rocco Mastroserio, John Severin, Alex Toth, and Wallace Wood!

What would attract that level of talent? These were immensely COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

CBA Interview

Shades of the Crypt Al Williamson discusses his great work at Warren Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Okay, so you’ve heard the phrase before, but for Al Williamson, it’s true: He is an artist’s artist. Almost more an illustrator than comic book artist, Al was a part of the original EC gang of S-F artists and was, according to legend, pivotal in helping to organize the first Warren dream team. Still hard at work in the industry, Al kindly submitted to a telephone interview on January 20, 1999.

Below: You can call him Al. Williamson’s send-off panel from his tale “The Tube,” which appeared in Flo Steinberg’s Big Apple Comix.

Art ©1975 Al Williamson.

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Comic Book Artist: When did you first meet Wally Wood?

Al Williamson: Maybe 1948. I met him briefly while he was going to Burne Hogarth’s art school. I was working for Hogarth at the time. I penciled a couple of Tarzan Sunday pages for him but it was nothing to write home about.

CBA: How was it working for Burne?

Al: It was a pain in the neck. Let me put it this way: I was just a kid and you always defer to your elders when you’re a kid. I have to admit he always treated me very nice—except a couple of times when I could have killed him. I met Hogarth in 1945 when I just turned 14; I was attending his sketch class.

CBA: Then what attracted Burne to hire you?

Al: When you’re a kid, you’re influenced by Alex Raymond, Hal Foster and Hogarth—they were the three at that time. I went up to United Features to get some comic books that I was missing, and the girl came out and said, “I think we have them; please wait here.”

While I was waiting there with my mom, there were pictures up on the wall of the people who worked for United Features at the time: Ernie Bushmiller and others. The gal came back with the books and I said, “Which one is Hogarth?” (I didn’t know his first name as he only signed “Hogarth.”) She said, “This guy here,” and pointed him out. She said, “Are you interested in art?” I said, “Yeah, I like to do comics.” And she said, “Well, he has a school,” and she gave me the phone number. I was too chicken to call, so my mom did and he said, “Yeah, I have the school.” So we made the appointment, went to see him that Saturday morning, and I showed him my work. That’s how I met him.

CBA: Your work was heavily influenced by Raymond. Did you look back at the old illustrators?

Al: No. I didn’t know them at the time. I didn’t realize illustration until I met Roy Krenkel in the Fall of 1948. He opened my eyes to all the good stuff. Raymond was my boy and, of course, Hogarth wasn’t too keen about that— he didn’t like Alex’s work.

CBA: Why? Al: After about two months of going to the school, I guess maybe I talked about Raymond once too often and he just went off on a tear. He said, “Raymond can’t draw! Austin Briggs can draw rings around him!

Every time Raymond draws male figures, they all look like fairies!” This went on and on and on. Here I am, 14 years old, see, [laughs] and he’s absolutely raving! I figured, “He’s Hogarth, so he should know.” But he didn’t.

CBA: Do you feel you picked up anything from Burne?

Al: No. Not a thing. Anything I picked up I had to quickly forget. As time goes on, there’s nothing in Burne’s work for me—time will tell.

Raymond and Foster are better now than they were 50 years ago and Hogarth hasn’t moved. I’m sorry but that’s

the way I feel about it.

CBA: Did you want to get a syndicate comic strip as opposed to comic book work?

Al: Oh yes. When I discovered Flash Gordon, I found what I wanted to do—and I discovered him through the films, which were in English but with Spanish subtitles—the best of two worlds.

CBA: How did you meet other guys who were into comics?

Al: I went up to Fiction House where I met Bob Lubbers, Johnny Celardo, and dear old George Evans (who I’ve been buddies with ever since). I also met a wonderful artist who I liked very much: Joseph Dillon. George and I became friends right away.

CBA: Marie Severin told me that you, Angelo Torres, and Frank Frazetta were known as “The Fleagle Gang.”

Al: Harvey Kurtzman gave us that name.

CBA: Were you guys carousers?

Al: Not in the way that you might think. We would go to films together and play baseball together—that was about it. We had a wonderful time but we didn’t carouse and go to beer joints, get drunk, and raise hell. No, no, no—nothing like that. It was strictly films and baseball.

CBA: Did you live hand to mouth when you first became a pro?

Al: No, my mom worked so I worked at home in Brooklyn.

CBA: Did you ever work in-house at EC? Al: No, I just went in to deliver the work. I usually went in around lunchtime and they’d always invite me for lunch (and that’s why I went in at that time of day).

CBA: Bill Gaines would hold court?

Al: Yeah. It was great. He was fun to work with.

CBA: From the interviews I read, it seems that work could be agonizing for you.

Al: Well, it’s not agonizing so much as… [sighs] impatience. I never thought I could do it as well unless Frank would help me or Roy would do a background—unless I worked with somebody on it, which was always fun and I always enjoyed that.

CBA: You bonded with the guys because you were into the same stuff?

Al: I think so. We all loved good stuff like music. We were all Sinatra buffs and I liked jazz very much (most of the guys didn’t dislike it but they weren’t into it like I was). Ange and I were into classical music.

We had different likes but they all had to do with art, creative stuff.

CBA: Did it feel like a community? Was it a part of your lifestyle to be with these guys?

Al: We all knew what we were doing. We were all in the same business. Ange, Roy and I used to go to the movies a lot.

CBA: What is Angelo like?

Al: First of all, he’s the gentleman of the bunch. He really is. He has a wonderful sense of humor and is very bright, talented, and a down-to-earth fellow. We had something in common in that he spoke Spanish and we had that together because we could make jokes in both languages. [laughs] CBA: I would argue that you both had a similar style. Did you two rely on photo reference?

Al: No, we made all of that stuff up. Sometimes we used photos but I would take them myself and only from time to time would I swipe from other photos. As a rule, I would take the Polaroid shots myself for my own stuff.

CBA: In James Van Hise’s The Art of Al Williamson, there were ’50s photos of you guys posing. Was that for your stuff?

Al: Yeah. I guess we all wanted to be in the films and this was the closest we ever got. We photographed ourselves with guns, pretended COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

CBA Interview

Anne & Archie A talk with Archie Goodwin’s widow, Anne T. Murphy Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Anne T. Murphy was the wife of Warren’s greatest editor—and quite possibly greatest writer—the late Archie Goodwin, and she is a lifelong editor herself for Redbook magazine (where she met Archie when they both served on staff in the early ’60s). In meeting the many artists and writers Archie worked with, Anne witnessed much of the history of American comics in the last 35 years, including the early days of Warren. She has keen insight into the inner workings of our art form and is, as you’ll read, an engaging conversationalist.

The following telephone interview took place on February 9, 1999 and the transcript was copyedited by Anne.

Below: Archie Goodwin’s high school chum, noted poster artist Paul Davis, drew this cartoon of the artist/writer/editor for the EC fanzine Squa Tront. It depicts Archie working on Hoohah! (another EC fanzine) during the 1950s. Art ©1999 Paul Davis.

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Comic Book Artist: Do you recall Russ Jones’ involvement with the formation of Warren’s b-&-w horror magazines?

Anne T. Murphy: Russ Jones’ contribution seemed—to me— that he brought all these people together and managed to convince everybody there would be work for them with this guy Warren and to generally get things underway. Somehow, he didn’t carry through very well and many people ended up feeling he couldn’t be trusted— but he did set the stage in a way, and Archie, as the main writer, was in place when whatever went wrong went wrong. So Archie ended up as editor. It’s not the only job in his career that came to him this way.

CBA: It seems that Larry Ivie might have been the one to initially put the bug in Jim Warren’s ear.

Anne: That’s possible; I don’t know. I knew Larry Ivie as a comics fan and former art school classmate of Archie and Paul Davis. Larry also trained in Visual Arts and was involved in a lot of interesting things then—but I recall Archie dealing mostly with Russ when he started writing for Warren. I forget who drew Archie into working for Warren—maybe Al Williamson. Archie and I were dating at the time and he was also still working at Redbook. He did the writing in his spare time on nights I was at NYU getting my Masters and actually was able—even with his full-time job at Redbook and going out with me—to churn out two Warren stories a night in those years, a pretty incredible turn-out.

CBA: What were the rates?

Anne: I don’t remember— everybody recalls them as terrible rates. I don’t think they were working for the rates, because there hadn’t been much real comic book work available and they were all interested in doing this work.

CBA: Did Archie always aspire to comics work?

Anne: Oh, yeah. He talked about the fact that he never had wanted to do anything else—and he had to battle his father to do it, just like a lot of people in comics. As far as his

father was concerned, you couldn’t make a living doing it. He had also had to battle his father to go to art school and was made to put in several months at the University of Oklahoma first. He came home at Thanksgiving and simply told his father he was never going back, he was going to New York. His mother was supportive but his father never stopped arguing the issue. Archie had also taken care to make sure he wasn’t really passing his classes. [laughs] He was determined to do what he wanted and his father was determined that he wasn’t going to—but truthfully Archie was right, because what would he do in Oklahoma? His father had no real idea what he should do; his father just knew what he didn’t want Archie to do. His father was a truck driver and then a gas station owner and finally had a tire retreading place. Archie worked in the gas station for a half-year when they couldn’t pay to send him back to School of Visual Arts. I think his father wanted him to stay in Oklahoma and be like a normal person, only he wasn’t sure what he meant by “normal.”

CBA: Was Archie a “born artist”?

Anne: He was just one of those kids—and you’ll find a lot of them in comics—they weren’t jocks, who had their noses in books and lived in these private worlds and found a little circle of friends who fit their interests—they definitely weren’t friendless but neither were they all-American boys who grow up to be businessmen or lawyers like Dad. This is very common in comics, I think. Archie was born in Missouri and his family lived all around the Missouri/Kansas area his parents came from. Both his parents came off farms on the MissouriKansas border. They lived for a while in Coffeyville, Kansas, famous for the Dalton gang’s last shoot-out when they tried, and failed, to rob two banks at once. When Archie was in junior high, his father picked the family up and moved down to Tulsa, getting involved in a partnership in a trucking company. Tulsa was Archie’s first experience with truly segregated schools and movie theaters, and he mentioned how strange it seemed even though Kansas and Missouri didn’t exactly boast mixed neighborhoods. Archie didn’t make many friends in junior high because it was too short a time to really connect with anyone—but when he got to Will Rogers High School, he made a circle of friends who were all in art class together; Paul Davis the illustrator and poster artist was one of them and so was Russell Myers, who does the comic strip Broom Hilda. After graduation they all wanted to go to New York except for Russell who went to Kansas City to work for Hallmark Cards, and they all thought he was nuts.

Then, years later, he pops up with a successful comic strip! They all shared a very good art teacher called Hortense Batehoiz.

CBA: Did she help direct him to seek an artistic career?

Anne: They always spoke well of her, so I would imagine so. Paul and Russell also went on to art careers; I always got the impression she was a teacher who brought out the best in the kids, and they did all go on to good art schools and to work in fields that interested them. I know, when our children went to specialized art schools in New York City—our son, Sean, to Music and Art and our daughter, Jennifer, to Art and Design—Archie did say he would have loved to have had somewhere like that to go to.

CBA: So Archie came to New York and went to school and his first professional job was at Redbook?

Anne: He may have had something before but Redbook was the first long-standing job. That, of course, was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army. He was in the Army from 1960 to 1962, or thereabouts, during the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisises. I met him after he came back to Redbook; I was in editing—in the fiction department and later in copyediting and production—and he was in the art department. So that’s where we met, although I was COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

CBA Commentary

Alex Toth: Before I Forget The artist discusses the challenges of his black-&-white work at Warren Magazines

“Proof Positive” Creepy #80. ©1976 Warren Publishing.

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

Spanish Gold

The Spanish Invasion An in-depth look at Warren’s Spanish Artists

by David A. Roach

Far right: Cover to the first issue of the legendary British “cartoon” weekly comic, The Eagle, April 14, 1950. ©1950 Hulton Press

Europe

Inset: Map showing the location of the Barcelona school of artists in Catalonia, Spain. There’s got to be something in the water, eh?

Preceding page: Sanjulian painting used as the cover to Eerie #41. ©1972 Warren Publications.

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In early 1971 fans picking up the latest copy of Vampirella would have had no idea that they were witnessing the start of a revolution. Hidden deep in the pages of Vampirella #11, cover dated May ’71, was a story drawn by the artist Luis Roca which heralded an invasion of artists, not from America, but from Spain. In the magazine’s next issue, readers were greeted by a Sanjulian cover and a “Vampi” strip drawn by José Gonzales and, by #15, it was being drawn entirely by Spaniards. Over the next decade, Warren would come to use 45 different Spanish artists and transform his own fortunes in the process. For a while they also appeared at Marvel, Skywald and Charlton—but it was an invasion that was short-lived and left no lasting mark on American comics, no acolytes to carry on in its tradition.

There is a saying that history belongs to the victors, and this is true of an American comics industry built on the success and dominance of super-heroes. On the rare occasion that historians have written about Jim Warren’s line of horror magazines, they have invariably been seen merely as an epilogue to the glory days of EC. The usual story goes something like this: Warren wanted to recreate the old EC horror books and gathered together as many of the original artists as he could find. After a few years of great comics, they all left and the company slid into the doldrums only to be saved by cheap foreign artists from Spain. They could draw pretty pictures but couldn’t tell a story and after a while Warren went under. The End. But the true story of Warren’s great Spanish experience is far more complex than that. It’s a story that has its roots not only in Spain but also in Britain. It’s a story of warring art agencies and it’s the story of a generation of artists that created something unique and then gradually disappeared. Almost all of Warren’s artists came from the city of Barcelona, the capital of the Spanish region of Catalonia, and were mostly born within a few years of each other. As the artist Marcel Miralles puts it: “The biographies of Spanish comics artists are almost always the same: Most are from working class families, and as they say in bullfighting, ‘A hungry bull is the meanest.’

Perhaps this is what leads these kids to get into comics. These artists are self-taught Catalonia, and they usually start Spain working when they are 12 or 13.” Spain in the 1950s was an isolated, repressed country, dominated by one of Europe’s last dictators: Generalissimo Francisco Franco. It had its own comics industry but it was small and woefully underfunded.

There was an alternative, however: Britain. Working for British comics they could earn the relatively vast sum of a thousand pesetas a page and it gave them access to the sort of Western consumer lifestyle their fellow countrymen could only dream about—but to explain how the Spanish came to work in Britain, one first needs to

understand the history of British comics themselves.

Comic books first appeared in Britain in the 1890s, a good 40 years before America; they were aimed at a young audience and dominated by two publishers, Amalgamated Press (later known as Fleetway) and D.C. Thomson. Up until the Second World War, it was an industry without a significant tradition of adventure comics, rather their strips were either humorous funny animal tales or stories of children that owed their origins more to the book illustrations of the day. In 1940, paper rationing severely curtailed the output of the big two companies, but also allowed a number of smaller, so-called “pirate publishers” to step in, offering gaudy, cheaplyproduced comics to a thrill-starved audience. In the ’30s, American comic books had begun to establish a foothold in Britain but the outbreak of war effectively brought that to a halt, allowing the pirates to step in. With a generation of artists at war, the pirates had to make do with whoever they could find and their resulting efforts were sometimes exciting but more often brash and crude.

1950 was to prove the key year in British comics. It saw the end of paper rationing which heralded an explosion of publishing including the first issues of Cowboy Comics and Schoolfriend from Fleetway, and The Eagle from Hulton Press. The Eagle’s editor was a priest, the Reverend Marcus Morris, who had been so appalled by one of the pirate comics, The Bat (published by Gerald G. Swann), that he became determined to create a more acceptable alternative.

The Eagle, with its mixture of full-colour painted strips, informative features, and text stories was an instant success selling 750,000 copies a week. Its main appeal was the science-fiction strip “Dan Dare,” drawn by Frank Hampton and a small army of assistants (including inkers, painters, photographers and prop builders!), which set an almost impossibly high standard for the rest of the industry to follow—but follow they did and as more glossy tabloid-sized comics appeared, so too did artists like Ron Embleton, Don Lawrence, Frank Bellamy and John M. Burns to fill them. Eagle was in many ways the voice of the establishment, resolutely middle-class in its worldview and respectable in every way. So too were rivals like Junior Express, Boys World, Ranger, Look and Learn and T.V.21. Hulton soon expanded its line to include Swift and Robin (for young readers) and Girl (for the burgeoning female market created by the success of Schoolfriend). Fleetway’s Schoolfriend was a comics revival of an earlier story paper (Britain’s rather more genteel equivalent of the American dime novels or pulps) and it was aimed at an early-teens female audience. With sales of a million copies a week, it was the biggest-selling comic in British publishing history and naturally spawned a whole industry of imitators. The typical Schoolfriend story would involve plucky young girls, boarding schools, horses, ballet, and derring-do in endless permutations, a formula seized on by rivals like Girls Crystal, Princess, Diana, Tina and June.

Schoolfriend’s format, roughly the same dimensions as a Warren magazine, printed mostly in black-&-white on cheap paper and usually 32 pages long became the industry standard. Boys weeklies like Valiant, Tiger, and Lion soon followed, all containing a mixture of war, suspense, sport, detective, and humor strips and at anytime COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

from the ’50s to the ’70s boys had the choice of up to twenty-such titles to choose from.

The third major format had its roots in the story library tradition of the detective series Sexton Blake; 64-page digest-sized booklets with painted covers. In the late ’40s, Fleetway editor Leonard Matthews was contacted by a New Zealand firm to produce western strips. These proved to be so successful, Matthews reprinted them in Britain, adopting the story library format simply because there was spare capacity on the presses. The resulting title, Cowboy Comics, proved as successful in Britain as it had in New Zealand and Fleetways’ line soon expanded to include Super Detective, Thriller, True Life, Love Story, Air Ace, War and countless other titles. Rival D.C. Thomson responded with Commando, which is still being published today, well into its 3,000th issue! At 64 pages, the picture library format encouraged more considered, literate writing, and it was generally aimed at an older readership.

Where most British comics were published weekly, these were initially published twice a month (though this gradually increased to eight issues a month for Battle and Commando and a staggering 12 a month for War).

For every boys’ comic there was an equivalent (or two) for girls, for the under 10-year-olds and even those under five. Nursery comics like Playhour, Jack and Jill, and Pippin were intended to be read aloud by mothers to their children and is one of few areas of the industry still healthy today. The pre-war humor tradition is still very much alive as well and D.C. Thomson’s Beano and Dandy comics are both well into their seventh decades. American comics have always been reprinted in various formats and, in the ’50s and ’60s, a flood of repackaged strips appeared. Dell, Fawcett, Prize, Charlton, and Marvel were all extensively reprinted and even the most obscure titles (Silver Kid Western or Captain Flash anyone?) could have a British equivalent.

For a country the size of Britain to support an industry that big is astonishing, but largely explained by the postwar baby boom that conveniently supplied an ever-expanding audience. For a nation only just emerging from a decade of rationing, and with television still a relatively scarce and expensive commodity, comics represented a cheap and exciting form of escapism. The problem facing publishers wasn’t finding an audience for their comics—it was finding the talent to draw them. Homegrown artists were assiduously sought out and cultivated but they were never going to be enough to cope with the demand so the industry turned to Europe. The first foreign artist to appear in Britain was Giorgio Bellavitis in Swift, soon Spring 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

followed by Jesus Blasco in Comet. The year was 1954.

Soon after they were joined by Francisco Cueto, Ruggero Giovanni, Ferdinando Tacconi, and an avalanche of others. These first artists were invariably represented by the Belgian art agency A.L.I. and one of the peculiar features of British comics is the ubiquity of these agencies. In fact, until the appearance of 2000 A.D. in the late ’70s, almost all comic artists worked through agents or agencies, and this was particularly true of foreign talent. In 1955, Gino D’Antonio started drawing for Junior Express through Rinaldo D’Ami’s Creazioni Agency in Milan, and soon others entered the fray.

One of A.L.I.’s artists, Jorge Macabich, suggested to Fleetway editor Barry Coker that they set up an agency together and Bardon Arts was created, with offices in London and Barcelona. A.L.I. soon faded from the scene but D’Ami and Barden were soon joined by Studio Giolitti of Rome, Luis Llorentés Creationes Editoriales of Barcelona, V.V. Arts, the Solano Lopez Studio and Selecciones Ilustrada (S.I.).

Agencies such as Bardon, or the British Temple Arts, often paid the artist on completion of a strip, and then passed the work onto the publisher for payment. Knowing that they would get paid irrespective of the job’s quality (or the vagaries of the editor) must have given the artists a strong sense of security.

Nevertheless, their lineup of artists was far from stable with artists swapping agencies in the pursuit of ever-more-favorable terms and agencies constantly stealing the top talent from each other. Events had grown so serious by the late ’70s, that the top three Spanish agencies—S.I., Bardon, and Creationes—held a summit meeting to calm things down and eventually traded off artists between them-

Above: An unpublished promo piece done to create interest in a Vampirella movie. Half the panels are José Gonzales reprints, half originals. Vampirella ©1972 Warren Publications.

Above: Jesus Blasco page from the series “Invasion” as seen in 2000 A.D. #2, March 5, 1977.

Panels two and three depict U.K.’s then-Prime Minister Jim Calaghan being hanged! ©1977 IPC Magazines Ltd..

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CBA Interview

The Big Push & Other Tales William DuBay reveals the real horror stories of Warren Conducted by Jon B. Cooke William DuBay (a.k.a. Bill or Dube) was Warren Publishing’s longest-running editor (whether as editor-in-chief, contributing editor, consulting editor, art director, story editor or managing editor—he was always running) and a prolific writer and artist to boot throughout the ’70s and early ’80s. He is probably best known for his creation of the time-traveling character The Rook (which received its own book in a memorable 14-issue run). William was interviewed via telephone on January 10, 1999, and he copyedited the final transcript. Before I even got an opening question in, Dube was off and running….

Above: A William DuBay self-portrait, “produced in those early days,” DuBay explains, “when I’d just opened the studio, was still going to college and drawing those freelance stories for Warren—including ‘The Frog Prince,’ ‘Devil’s Hand,’ and ‘Life Species.’” ©1999 W.M. DuBay.

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William DuBay: We both know what you want to start off with. You want a Jim Warren story. Something fun. One of the legends you’ve heard so much about. Why else would anyone do a Warren Publishing special? Fine.

Here’s my lead-off. I call it: “Boris.”

I remember one morning when Jim and I were catching up—just chatting in his office after he’d been away a while. He was nonchalantly opening a huge stack of mail as we spoke. Not giving it his complete attention, he picked up a nice, padded, oversized envelope and slit it open. A huge spider virtually leaped out onto his lap.

Jim shrieked like a banshee, bolted four feet into the air and came down stomping like a flamenco master… until the spider somehow managed to “skitter” safely under his desk.

“Did you see that?” he screamed, pointing at the floor as he curled up cross-legged, feet perched safely on his plush executive rocker. “Did you see the size of that mother? That was one of those killer African tarantulas,” he gibbered, visibly shaken. “Get Donato and Jacinto in here,” he ordered, referring to his Captain Company shipping crew. “Tell them to bring something big and heavy to smash that steroided little bastard.”

Nonplused, I walked out, afraid that I’d bust if I told him that the spider was simply a realistic toy… a sample sent by some manufacturer who wanted Captain Company to carry his product.

I told Flo Steinberg (his Captain Company buyer) though. We rolled with laughter. Then, she ordered a gross of the little rubber guys. From there after, we dubbed the spider “Boris.” We figured that if anything could scare Jim Warren, it deserved a frightful name.

To this day, I don’t know if Jim ever figured out that he’d almost been assaulted by a toy.

That said, who exactly is this guy W. B. William Bill Dube DuBay you’re talking to?

In a nutshell: A good Catholic boy, William DuBay grew up in a big family in San Francisco in the 1950s. He knew he wanted to write and draw comics early in life, and started with Charlton while still in high school. He was writing and drawing pieces for Marvel, Warren, and Sproul (Cracked) while in the Army and college. Before

receiving his degree, he opened his studio, The Cartoon Factory, and published The Bay Area Entertainer, a weekly S.F. newspaper.

Joining Warren Publishing full-time in ’73 as editor/art director, he opened a Cartoon Factory office in New York and dabbled in advertising, animation and comics-related work. He drew several dozen comic stories, wrote several hundred more, and probably became best known for his humorous cartoon-style contributions to Cracked and Crazy magazines. His style has been categorized as a cross between Mad’s Paul Coker, Jr. and George Woodbridge.

DuBay left the Warren magazines in 1982, a year before the company closed its doors. He kicked the Cartoon Factory into high gear and was inundated with television work—in animation, licensing and screen writing—for Twentieth Century Fox, Marvel, DIC, Saban and Disney. Still doing the same today, he has a lot to say about his first love, the medium of comics.

Comic Book Artist: You’re from San Francisco, aren’t you?

William: Born and raised.

CBA: When did you develop an interest in comic books?

William: Early on. My grandmother was a nurse in the children’s ward at San Francisco County Hospital. She’d bring comic books home from the hospital from about the time I was three or four years old. I always had a pretty vivid imagination, so I genuinely believed that some of those comics had comforted kids in their dying moments. With that viewpoint, comics seemed like a worthwhile and even noble career choice—at least to a four-year-old. Grandma didn’t particularly agree. She wanted me to study medicine or enter the priesthood. To avoid either, I let it be known, even at that tender age, that I was headed for comic books—and that was simply the way it was going to be.

CBA: What comics particularly interested you?

William: I loved Mickey Mouse’s adventures. The only trouble was, I always seemed to get the first half of a continued story. I really didn’t care for the super-hero stuff until much later. When I was eleven or twelve, I remember a friend of mine asking if I’d seen “this new Hawkman” character. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about—but, after I tracked down a copy of that first The Brave and the Bold issue, I was hooked.

CBA: Were you interested in any specific artists?

William: From early on, I felt that anything Joe Kubert drew was just fabulous. He captured a dark and surreal mood that seemed a nice fit with the comics of the period. I never really cared much for Dick Sprang or anyone who signed the name ‘Bob Kane,’ no matter who it was—though I later had the chance to meet and befriend Jack Burnley who was doing an awful lot of Superman and Batman work in the ‘40s.

CBA: How did that come about?

William: When I was in high school, our journalism class took a tour of the old San Francisco Call-Bulletin operation—San Francisco’s afternoon newspaper at the time. Though it was after hours and there was no one in the art department, I saw Jack’s name on the assignment board and, wondering how many Jack Burnleys there could be, I gave him a call the next day. Turned out, he was indeed the same guy who had created DC’s Starman and had been that company’s primary Superman/ Batman ghost artist. That was about ’64 or so, and we struck up an instant friendship.

CBA: I’m surprised you recognized his name back in 1964.

William: By that time, I was well into collecting comics. I had mounds, and had long since begun to recognize different styles of art and storytelling—even though most stories went uncredited. Some, like Kirby, Kubert, and Ditko, were uniquely distinctive. Others, like COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

Infantino, the Barrys, and Toth had a studio sameness—with enjoyably differing subtleties. I made a game out of identifying, studying, and emulating those differences.

I also liked to think I could recognize those rare timeless treasures when they hit the newsstand. My buddy, Marty knew how, too. The day they came out, we stockpiled every copy we could find of Fantastic Four #1, The Flash #123 and Amazing Fantasy #15.

Grandma thought we were nuts; but she saw the passion—and encouraged it.

CBA: Is that Marty Arbunich, who worked with you on Fantasy Hero, Voice of Comicdom, All Stars and The Yancy Street Journal?

William: Man, you don’t live anything down in this industry, do you!? [laughter] Yeah, we helped each other out, Marty always tackling the more anal aspects of the job. He used to justify type on his typewriter, just so the columns of his fanzine looked perfect! And bugs! “Stretch” (so nicknamed because of his 6’ 6” frame) could find the most decorative printer’s bugs devised by man—placing them with an almost artistic precision—just so his pages would look nicer for his readers.

He also had a talent for making friends. He made one of Steve Ditko—and got him to produce the single best piece of art Ditko ever drew. We used it on the cover of All Stars #1, then Stretch tucked it in the back of a closet where it’s hidden to this day—a piece of work that should be in a museum; or on my studio wall.

CBA: Were you obsessive about comics?

William: I made a career choice, way early, and studied every aspect of it to the best of my ability. I’m from a long line of proud French Catholics. Oldest son of an oldest son. Strong, focused, (and I’d like to think) disciplined. Starting to see why comics looked a whole lot better than San Francisco General or St. Paul’s rectory?

Obsessive? No—but, I was then and remain a good student. Did I keep any of my old funny books? Some. The fun ones. The rest I’ve brought to kids on children’s wards. Have you seen the price of today’s hospital stay? I always imagine that Grandma would find it somehow karmically bemusing.

CBA: How did you break into comics?

William: As I said, I worked hard at my studies. By the time I was sixteen, I was convinced I was the best comics writer/artist who’d ever lived. I started submitting my work to DC, Marvel, Charlton and Gold Key then, and it would come back to me with the standard form rejection. After two or three months, I couldn’t understand why I was having such a hard time breaking into the field.

Jack, who’d become a friend by that point, explained that comics was an “old boys’ network” in those days, and not just anyone could walk through the door. That’s when I hit on the idea of sending my art and story samples to an editor using his name, coupled with a note saying, “I’d like to get back into it.” Sure enough [laughs], it worked. The first assignment was from Dick Giordano at Charlton— for Go-Go Comics, one of those really hot, cool sassy ’60s titles. [laughs] I completed the assignment, a simple four-pager, and turned it in with a note from “Jack”: “Didn’t have time to finish this, so I gave it to my assistant—Bill DuBay. Did a wonderful job, didn’t he?”

Dick wrote back when he sent the first script intended for me. “Boy, he sure did!” [laughs] From there, I was off and running.

CBA: So Dick published it?

William: In Go-Go #4. My first professional work. Bylined and all—and I was still in high school—which just confirmed the fact that I was the best who ever lived! [laughter] I did a couple of assignments for Dick until I graduated. 30 seconds after that, I was awarded the earliest draft number imaginable and had to relinquish a budding career to join Uncle Sam. CBA: You had some fan art in Creepy #12. So, you were clued into the Warren magazines when they first came out?

William: When Creepy debuted in ’64, I was already well into collecting those “ancient” ECs. Since Warren was using the same artists, I don’t think I was the only one who felt, “They’re back—and they’re better than ever!”

CBA: With your prolific fanzine efforts, did you develop an early taste for magazine production work?

William: Publishing was our life back then. Marty and I worked up four or five issues of Fantasy Hero, a half-dozen Voice of Comicdoms and maybe a dozen or so Yancy Street Journals. We received some excellent material from some wonderful contributors. People like Ronn Foss, Biljo White, Mike Vosburg, and Tom Conroy and Roger Spring 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Brand—two guys that, if they’d lived, would’ve been among the industry giants.

Like us, Roger was out of the San Francisco area. Throughout high school, he’d come around and we’d play a little basketball together. He was maybe four or five years older than Marty and I (and a pretty good hoopster, too). Besides comics, basketball was Marty’s, Rudy Franke’s, Barry Bauman’s and my main interest. We’d hit the court, play hard and talk comics. It was a lot of fun—and Marty’s still about the best center I’ve ever met. The social aspect of what we were doing was far more rewarding than any of the production work.

CBA: Were you trying to attract professional talent with your fanzines?

William: Wasn’t everyone? We were able to snag a few interesting contributions—most notably the aforementioned work by Steve Ditko. He did a few other spots for us along the way; but, for me, the fun was in tracking down Golden Age writers and artists for interviews, retrospectives and appreciations—and because I liked picking their brains. It was probably the most exciting part of my educational process.

CBA: How did you begin working with Warren Publishing?

William: I was in the Army and had been stationed at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina for about two years—editing the newspaper there, The Ft. Bragg Paraglide—when I took a trip to New York, walked into Jim’s office and introduced myself. Jim was always pretty confrontational, so the first words out of his mouth were, “So, what makes you think you’re good enough to work for me?” I shot back, “‘Cause I’m the best who ever was!” I then whipped a couple of pages from my portfolio and threw them on his desk. “That’s why I think I’m good enough.” [laughs] We struck up an instant adversarial friendship—and I walked out with a script. That was in ’69—and it was that regrettably forgettable story that appeared in Neal’s “Rock God”

Above: When the boss was away…. DuBay as the emperor-inabsentia. “I was just a boy feelin’ my oats,” DuBay professes meekly, looking back at embarrassing photos from that era. Alongside DuBay are (clockwise, standing) advertising production artist Sherry Burne, assistant editor Louise (Weezie) Jones and colorist Michelle Brand. Photo by W.R. Mohalley.

Below: “As far as I was concerned,” DuBay said, “this magnificent Steve Ditko cover contribution to our fanzine All Stars #1 was the single most beautiful piece of art of his entire career.

Now, you’d need a crowbar to get it out of Marty Arbunich’s closet.” ©1965 Steve Ditko.

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CBA Interview

Wrightson’s Warren Days Bernie Wrightson talks about his great b-&-w work Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Bernie Wrightson is the penultimate comic book horror artist (after Graham “Ghastly” Ingels) and one of the first superstars of the field to emerge in the 1970s, acclaimed primarily for his work on DC’s Swamp Thing comic series—but his best work for comics could very well be his handful of black-&-white horror tales done for Warren Publishing during that same decade, including the renowned tale of murder and obsession (written by Bruce Jones) “Jenifer.”

(The artist’s recollections of his ’70s work for DC will be covered in the next issue of CBA.) Recently relocated to the Los Angeles area, Bernie gave this interview via telephone on January 24, 1999, and subsequently provided the final copyedit.

Right: Bernie’s unused cover for the (legendary if aborted) fourth issue to Major Magazines’ Web of Horror (with logo design

by Bruce Jones!). Art ©1970 Bernie Wrightson.

Below: Bernie Wrightson’s contribution to the 1977 Warren Calendar. ©1976 Warren Publications.

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Comic Book Artist: You grew up in Baltimore and were obviously a fan of EC Comics. When did you first realize that Warren was publishing horror comics?

Bernie Wrightson: I was actually there for the first issue of Creepy in 1965. I was buying Famous Monsters and they were advertising Creepy so I was keeping an eye out for it—and, oh God, I loved it! I thought it was great. I read ECs as a kid in the ’50s and they disappeared. Then in the mid-’60s Ballantine Books came out with the paperback-sized reprints of ECs and that was around the same time as the first Creepy. It was just a thrill to read Creepy.

Frazetta’s story in the first issue (which was the last comic book story he did) was incredible as was just everybody in the magazine. There was Frazetta, Al Williamson, Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres, Gene Colan—all of those guys. Frazetta was absolutely my favorite. I had been following his work for a few years with the Ace Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback covers.

CBA: So you became an avid reader of the Warrens?

Bernie: Absolutely. In 1966, I had my first published work on a Creepy fan page.

When I saw it printed, you could have knocked me over with a feather! I couldn’t afford to buy more than one issue—those things were expensive at 35¢!—but I showed it around to everybody. I stayed reading Warrens until they started with the reprints and then all the Spanish work—which didn’t appeal to me and kind of all looked the same. When the American comic book veterans started to disappear I lost interest.

CBA: You didn’t even consider submitting work to Warren when you started your professional career?

Bernie: No because by that time it didn’t seem as though he was hiring American guys. It was just full of the Spanish work and DC was doing the House of Mystery back then and that was what I really wanted to break into. DC was as close to EC as I thought I was ever going to come with full-color horror stories.

CBA: Did you want to work in black-&-white?

Bernie: I guess I always did. Color was never completely satisfying. I always felt that the color would

obscure the linework and it was hard to see my work. That was always a problem. When I finally started to work for Warren, it was great. I knew that every line I drew was going to be reproduced.

CBA: You did work in b-&-w in the early ’70s with a magazine called Web of Horror?

Bernie: Yeah, that was the Warren rip-off. That was done by a guy named Richard Sproul out in Long Island. His company, Major Magazines, put out Cracked magazine, obviously a rip-off of Mad magazine, and his whole line of magazines were rip-offs of other established, successful books. They had romances and the last few men’s magazines. The sweat stuff like Stag, For Men Only, and that kind of stuff.

CBA: “Real Balls Adventure.”

Bernie: [laughs] “Real Hairy Scrotum Adventure.” [laughter] A fellow named Terry Bisson tracked down me, Mike Kaluta, and Jeff Jones, and presented us with a proposal to do this b-&-w horror magazine in competition with Creepy. At the time, Creepy was doing a lot of reprints and—y’know I wasn’t looking at it as I already had all the stuff first edition—and Terry said, “Now’s the right time. We can do original material and really stand to compete well with Warren. We’ll give you total freedom.” That’s how it got started.

CBA: Did you look to try different techniques with the b-&-white medium?

Bernie: Yeah, it was a great opportunity to play around without strictly using hard line and being able to use tone. The first couple of things I did for him were wash jobs. A lot of the other guys played around too—Ralph Reese did some beautiful things with duotone board. Terry Bisson (who was writing blurb copy for romance magazines when I first met him) left after the third issue under very mysterious circumstances—and the running of the whole magazine, for some reason, fell into Bruce Jones’ and my laps (and I can’t remember if Terry said, “Here, you guys take over the editorial,” or if we volunteered). Bruce and I put together the whole fourth issue which had already been assigned.

CBA: Were you a de facto art director?

Bernie: We were working at home! We were calling the artists and we put together a monster drawing contest. We went out to the office in Long Island and would pick up all these packages of this artwork these kids sent in for the contest. It was just piles of stuff we put in Bruce’s living room, and we looked at every single drawing, trying to decide and pick the best one. There was so much good stuff there that we changed the prize to include first, second and third place, and honorable mention. I don’t know whatever happened to all this stuff because Major Magazines just literally packed up and left COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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CBA Interview

Weezie Jones Simonson Louise discusses her life & times as a Warren editor Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Though she’ll forever be immortalized as the model for the auburn-haired, well-groomed damsel on the cover of the first Swamp Thing appearance in House of Secrets #92, Louise Jones Simonson will also be remembered as one of comicdom’s great editors (especially for her tenure at Warren) and as a fine writer of fun comic book stories. Weezie (who was first married to artist Jeff Jones) is fondly recalled for her self-referential Power Pack comic for Marvel in the ‘80s and her current stint as writer on Superman. She is married to fan-fave artist Walter Simonson (who makes a cameo appearance during this talk). Weezie was interviewed by phone on January 25, 1999, and she submitted the final copyedit.

Comic Book Artist: Did you have an interest in comics and genre material when you were a kid?

Louise Jones Simonson: I read comics in the usual way that kids read comics. The most memorable comics story from my childhood, heaven help me, was in an EC comic—a Wally Wood story with two old couples sitting down to dinner. Aliens carried off the two women and neither man remembered it afterwards. The guys ended up as two old bachelors eating dinner together. That just blew my little child mind! I thought, “Oh man, what if that could happen? What if that were true? Whoa!” I read a lot of stuff but more books than comics.

CBA: Where’d you grow up?

Louise: Atlanta, Georgia.

CBA: When did you meet Jeff?

Louise: In 1964 at Georgia State College Art Department. I was an art/English major. Jeff was also from Atlanta.

Above: Richard Corben’s original cover sketch to Eerie #77, featuring his and Bruce Jones’ great story, “Within You… Without You.” Art ©1975 Richard Corben.

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CBA: What is your artistic forte?

Louise: [laughs] I didn’t have much of a forte! I’m a better writer! [laughs] I was such a naive kid—I don’t think I thought of either talent seriously in terms of a career. It was like, “Oh, well, I like to draw. Oh, well, I like to write.” I had never met any professional artists or writers; in a way, that was far above anything I aspired to.

I guess I thought that professionals were some sort of gods and I dared not look so high. [laughter] I knew that real people wrote books but…! [laughs] CBA: Was Jeff ambitious?

Louise: Certainly. He knew he wanted to be an artist; whether it was doing comics or book covers. Though he had a more serious interest in painting. We got married during the Summer of ’66.

CBA: What did you two do after college?

Louise: We moved to New York.

CBA: Were you looking for an editorial position?

Louise: Oh, no. I was pregnant at the time and looking to have a baby. Jeff was looking for art jobs—book covers were his main focus, though he did do a little bit of comic book work.

CBA: Do you recall when he got his break with Warren and was first published?

Louise: Gee, no, I don’t. [laughs] It’s bizarre but I don’t! I know he did something for Larry Ivie’s Monsters & Heroes.

CBA: And he did about four stories at Warren.

Louise: I have only the vaguest memory of those stories. Isn’t that funny? If you had asked me if he had done any Warren stories, I would have said no. So, there you go—that’s what my memory is worth.

CBA: Jeff was obviously in the fan circles. So were you starting to socialize with other fans and comics professionals when you were in the New York area?

Louise: Oh, yeah. Gee, we met everybody! At the time, there were “First Fridays” which were comic book meetings held on the first Fridays of every month when everybody got together; and quite often they would be at our apartment—maybe because we were centrally located but I can’t even remember why.

CBA: Roy Thomas says he started First Fridays.

Louise: Maybe he was out of the city by that time? I can’t remember why they were at our place, or why they were at other places other times. It’s been 30 years, give or take a few. [laughs] CBA: Well, I’m chronicling history here, Louise! [laughs] Louise: Yeah, it’s probably just as well that you get it down now because [laughs] memory is going to fade even more!

CBA: Alex Toth might be contributing a regular column to the magazine and its title is “Before I Forget.”

Louise: Fabulous title and quite appropriate. Alex’s memory is probably lots better than mine because obviously I’m fuzzy on a lot of stuff already! [laughs] CBA: Were First Fridays memorable get-togethers?

Louise: Sure. You’re looking for names: Let me see: Archie Goodwin, of course. (I met Anne later through Archie.) Neal Adams.

Bernie Wrightson. Mike Kaluta. Alan Weiss. I don’t remember if Woody was ever there. Bruce Jones, I think… Len Wein. Marv Wolfman. Bill Pearson. Allan Asherman. Roger and Michele Brand.

Vaughn Bodé. Flo Steinberg. Marty Pasko, maybe…? There were lots more people.

CBA: Word has it that you had a big apartment.

Louise: We had a couple of bedrooms and a pretty big living room. It was in one of the old pre-War buildings on 72nd St. CBA: Would the parties go on into the wee hours?

Louise: I suppose, though I don’t remember them running particularly late—but then I’m a late-night person so I probably wouldn’t have remarked on that. I don’t think they lasted till dawn, anyway! Ask somebody else! [laughs] We had a lot of fun and I remember enjoying them a great deal.

CBA: Do you remember Roy Krenkel?

Louise: Of course. What a character! He was cranky, talented, lazy (in his own way)—no, lazy is an ill-chosen word; what he wanted to do was what he wanted to do, and he didn’t want to do anything that anybody else wanted him to do unless it happened to coincide with what he wanted to do. That’s not lazy but just cranky.

He was a bit misogynistic—which didn’t bother me at the time because he was funny about it so it was hard to take him seriously.

It was pretty apparent, though, that he thought wives were a drag on an artist. He didn’t have a wife (as I remember—and we know what that’s worth—he lived with his mother) and was pretty much a COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

CBA Interview

A Spirit ed Relationship Will Eisner discusses his experiences with Warren Conducted by Jon B. Cooke As the supreme master of sequential storytelling, Will Eisner really needs no introduction (but we’ll attempt a suitable blurb anyway!). Best known as the creator of The Spirit and writer/artist on a number of graphic novels, Will is also a passionate voice for the educational use of comics and the advancement of sequential art (the academic name he gave our art form) as a practical form of communication, universally recognized and clearly understood. He is also, as Jim Warren succinctly described, a “regular guy.” This interview was conducted by phone on February 1, 1999, and was copyedited by Will.

Above: Rarely-seen “Joe Dope” comic page as published in Army Motors, Vol 5, #4, July 1944 (cover below). This work led to Will’s 20+ year run producing P.S. magazine for the U.S. Army. ©1999 Will Eisner.

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Comic Book Artist: You’re one of the truly rare, early examples of an artist who retained copyright to his work, correct?

Will Eisner: For the “Golden Age” period, yes.

Nobody in comic books at that time owned his own work—that goes for Siegel & Shuster and even Bob Kane (he just got a very good deal).

None of them had the “muscle” to retain their copyright.

CBA: You’re also recognized as a pragmatic, sensible businessman. If someone had come up with a good enough price, would you have sold the rights to do The Spirit?

Will: It depends on the price. [laughs] After 1952 until 1964, The Spirit had no value as far as I was concerned. I kept the artwork for some reason and it was just lying in storage. (I am one who just doesn’t like to sell his original artwork.) As a matter of fact, I kept it in a vault and held onto every one of those stories—I had 250-odd stories. In subsequent years, I’ve been selling off bits and pieces (as my wife keeps pointing out, she doesn’t want to get stuck with them as a widow… but she doesn’t know that I have no plans to go before she does!) [laughter] Actually comic book pages had no value back then though, I suppose, I would have sold the character and the art if I had a substantial offer. I doubt that I would have sold it because, now that you make me think about it, Columbia Pictures came to me between 1952 and ’55 and offered to do a TV series on The Spirit—but they stipulated conditions which I felt were absolutely humiliating so I just walked out of the meeting. So, it depends on the time and the conditions.

CBA: Is this the chronology: You were in the service from 194145 and then you stopped doing government work? And, with the creation of your educational comics company, American Visuals Corporation, you started the P.S. magazine work?

Will: When I got out of the Army in ’45 or ’46, I went back to doing “The Spirit,” and I didn’t start American Visuals until 1950,

right after the Korean War started. I started the company because the Army came to me and asked if I’d be interested in reviving Army Motors, which I did, as P.S. magazine. By then, I had become interested in selling the use of comics and the medium as a teaching tool, particularly to industry. It all formed together.

CBA: The first revival of The Spirit occurred in a Warren magazine, Help! #13 (Feb. 1962), when editor Harvey Kurtzman reprinted a seven-page section. Do you recall how you were approached?

Kurtzman, I assume, was a fan of your work?

Will: Harvey called me. He said he was interested in reprinting some Spirit material. We knew each other. Harvey was a dear friend and one of the “giants” who added a level of quality to comics that influenced many of the cartoonists who followed him.

CBA: Do you recall the public reception of the strip reprint?

Will: No, I don’t think it was significant. Certainly Harvey never wanted to print any more. I don’t recall getting any fan mail.

CBA: Then, in 1965, Jules Feiffer came out with his book The Great Comic Book Heroes, which featured a Spirit reprint. Did that really reintroduce your character to a new generation?

Will: It probably did because in 1971 or ’72, when Phil Seuling held his July 4th Comic Convention, I visited it and, to my surprise, there were a lot of people walking around with the old Spirit comic sections. They were talking about The Spirit, and I remember saying to Phil, “How the hell do people know about The Spirit? I thought it was dead!” And Phil said, “No, there are a lot of guys around who remember it.” I must credit Feiffer’s book with calling attention to The Spirit.

CBA: And the New York Herald Tribune came out at around the same time?

Will: Yes. Around 1964, the Herald Tribune asked me to do a fivepage Spirit story for their comics revival article. I received mail on it but nothing really happened beyond that. I was, at that time, very much involved with American Visuals.

CBA: But since you had such an inventory of material you still owned the copyright to, were you looking to repackage The Spirit?

Will: By then I had realized that The Spirit had some life left in it.

Actually, I never believed that a comic strip, once it had suspended publication, would ever come alive again. So, in 1966, Al Harvey [of Harvey Comics] decided to reprint The Spirit stories which only lasted two issues. That was one of the first reprintings of The Spirit since the Fiction House newsstand comic books in the ’50s. I included a new origin story for them—but it didn’t go anywhere. The Spirit was never terribly successful on the newsstands in competition with the super-heroes. It always did best as a newspaper insert. The Spirit was not designed for comic book readers but for adults—that’s what attracted me to the feature in the first place, because it gave me an opportunity to do what I always dreamed of doing: Using the medium for literary purposes.

CBA: So in the children’s medium of Harvey Comics, The Spirit just didn’t click.

Will: Well, they also did Simon & Kirby’s Fighting American revival and that didn’t go for them either. Perhaps the time was not right for revivals.

CBA: Then, in the early ’70s, there were some reprints of “Spirit” sections. Was Denis Kitchen behind that?

Will: Not as “sections.” But as a comic book project it began with Jim Warren’s books. At that Phil Seuling convention, I ran into Denis (who at that time was starting an underground comic called Snarf) and he asked me if he could reprint The Spirit. At that time, I was astonished that it had any value, so I said, “Sure. You can reprint it.”

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Spring 1999

There was another guy (named Gibson, I think) who did The Spirit sections in polybags. So Denis ran a couple of “Spirits” and after that I got a call from Stan Lee at Marvel who said he wondered if I would let them restart The Spirit—not as reprints but as a character in their comics line.

CBA: They wanted to license the character?

Will: Yes. By that time, I was running American Visuals, and another company, Educational Supplements, that involved producing social study enrichment materials for schools—selling it to teachers and colleges. These were substantial companies that needed full attention. So while I was thinking about Stan’s offer, I ran into Jim Warren. Well, Jim said that he’d like to run The Spirit on a reprint basis. I found that much more attractive. So I told Stan no, I would go with Warren—but that created a little bit of a problem because Denis had already gotten an inventory of stories, so the deal with Warren included that Jim would buy Kitchen Sink’s inventory to relieve Denis of the investment that he made. Warren then began publishing The Spirit as a bi-monthly and I began my relationship with Jim Warren.

CBA: Do you recall when you first met Jim? Will: I think I met Jim at a convention somewhere. He was “stealing” my employees [chuckles], like Mike Ploog. He would offer freelance work which lured a lot of guys over to Warren. Mike was working on P.S. magazine and suddenly I found out that he was doing freelance work. I said, “Who are you doing work for?” He said, “Jim Warren.” So when Jim and I met at that convention, I teased him about this. Of course, there was no way to stop anybody from “stealing” my employees. Jim said, “Well, you got the best staff of artists around town; I couldn’t think of a better place to go get them from!” [laughs] So I said, “I’m hardly flattered by that.” He then said to me, “Who owns The Spirit?” I said, “I do.” He said, “Would you be interested if I reprinted them?” I said yes and we made a deal that I was very happy with. I would rather have Jim do it than Marvel or DC because I felt if I did it with them, I would soon lose any personal connection with it.

CBA: Were you looking for The Spirit to be exposed to a more mature audience than you might have gotten in color comics?

Will: Yes. As I said earlier, The Spirit was designed for a more adult audience—actually a newspaper audience—and that was the reason I got into this in the first place. I left Eisner & Iger because I wanted an adult audience and the newspapers gave that to me. I felt doing the newspaper Spirit was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach out and go beyond the classic 14-year-old reader. Marvel didn’t offer me an adult audience and with the hope of Warren coming out with the format that he did, I felt that I would possibly get a more sophisticated audience; but I wasn’t thinking of going back and doing The Spirit again, anyway—the one I did for the Herald Tribune was a one-shot.

CBA: Did DC Comics make a pitch for The Spirit?

Will: No, I never had an offer from them at all. I never even approached them.

CBA: You said in a Comics Journal interview that Carmine Infantino had also expressed an interest.

Will: No, not The Spirit. They were interested in another thing: Carmine and Sol Harrison came to see me because they wanted to buy my educational comics business. We were publishing a series of comic books called Job Scene in which we introduce the work ethic, so to speak, to young high school dropouts. We were using the comics medium. Carmine asked me if I’d be interested in selling or merging with DC, allowing them to acquire the company—as a matter of fact, Stan Lee had the same interest at the same time.

But I was not interested.

CBA: Was this a part of American Visuals or its own company?

Will: It was a kind of subsidiary called Educational Supplements.

American Visuals was the parent company—we had divisions, and were publishing under different names. We were also contract publishing, doing a series of books for outfits like the American Red Cross or General Motors. Then the company expanded (it was doing very well) and we did a continuing flow of employee relations pamphlets for industrial companies.

CBA: Back to Denny Colt: Was it gratifying to have material that was over 20 years old find a new audience?

Will: Yes! It was surprising and I was astonished and couldn’t Spring 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST

believe that this was happening. I never believed that a character that was closed down in 1952 would, 20 years later, find a new readership. That seems to be the fate of The Spirit anyway because it has been reprinted in entirety three times here in America—and just a few years ago it was reprinted in Spain, Italy, and Brazil—so I guess what I’ve got here is pretty much like Sherlock Holmes, which has also survived all of these years even though it was set in the Victorian period. Apparently The Spirit stories are still fundamentally sound. I was telling human experience stories rather than dealing with a super-hero that had a very shallow story base.

CBA: The longevity may also have to do that it was for, really, an all-ages audience.

Will: That’s right! I had a very unusual situation: I was blessed with the fact that he was in the newspaper whose audience consisted of mother, father, teenager, and little kids. I could go the whole range, any time I wanted.

CBA: At its height as a comic section, how many papers were you in?

Will: I think 19 or 20 papers. Circulation was roughly five million, which is not so tremendous when you consider some daily strips had 50-60 million circulation.

CBA: Jim Warren is from Philadelphia and he fondly recalls reading The Spirit in The Philadelphia Record. Did he express to you his admiration?

Will: When we first ran into each other, he talked about how he remembered The Spirit and loved it. Philadelphia was one of the pilot

Above: Unpublished cover art by Sanjulian originally intended for The Spirit #1. Will’s reaction to the art caused brief friction in his relationship with Jim. The Spirit ©1999 Will Eisner.

Above left: Will Eisner at the Eisner & Corben party held at The Plaza Hotel in 1974. Above: Will and Rich Corben at the same shindig.

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CBA Interview

The Bruce Jones Touch A conversation with one of Warren’s best writers Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Bruce Jones is a certified member of the “Macabre Mob”—a group of enthusiastic artists who emerged from the late ’60s to dominate comics art for a time, which included such luminaries as Bernie Wrightson, Michael W. Kaluta, and Jeff Jones. Bruce, a noted artist as well as renowned scribe, produced some of the most memorable stories for Warren during the ’70s. He went on to package the fondlyrecalled Pacific titles Alien Worlds and Twisted Tales. This talk took place via phone on February 1, 1999.

Above: Bruce Jones modeling for Bernie Wrightson, circa 1975.

Next page: Bruce Jones also served as the visual inspiration for Richard Corben with this cover depicting Jones and Corben’s greatest collaboration (in ye editor’s estimation, at least), “In Deep,” from Creepy #83. Oddly enough the cover wasn’t used until the story was reprinted in Creepy #101. It was originally rendered in b-&-w, with Richard coloring through his elaborate process of acetate overlays for separating the color plates. ©1976 Warren Publications.

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Comic Book Artist: Where are you from?

Bruce Jones: I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in St. Louis and Richmond, Virginia. I lived in New York City for eight years doing the comic book work, and have since been transplanted to California.

CBA: Were you into EC Comics when they first came out?

Bruce: I was a little young for EC when they were being published. I remember my cousin having a couple of issues but I didn’t see that many until later when I found back issues in bookstores for a nickel a copy. As a kid, the comics of my generation were mostly nonsuper-hero. I came of age in the 1950s and, even though I sort of missed the EC heyday, I was still very influenced by the non-super-hero comic books (though comics were just one of the things I was reading). I was a veracious reader and most of the stuff I ended up doing for Warren (or anybody really) was based on the short stories and novels I was reading, as well as comic books. The comic books were a factor because I was drawn to the short story type of horror and science-fiction kind of comics rather than the super-hero or the funny animal stuff (though I liked the Disney stuff—I remember I had a subscription to Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, and I thought Carl Barks’ stuff was brilliant). It was always the more anthology oriented short story stuff that I was drawn to. Super-heroes were on the way out and didn’t come back big until I was already in college in the ’60s.

CBA: So did you read Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft?

Bruce: I read Lovecraft and that stuff, and I liked it, but I was a really big fan of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. I liked the fantasy more than the hard science-fiction (though I read Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and those guys).

CBA: Were you into The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone?

Bruce: I liked The Twilight Zone but I especially loved The Outer Limits—I thought that stuff was just great.

CBA: Were you attracted to the darker and more grown-up aspects of The Outer Limits?

Bruce: Definitely. It was especially that first season which was so dark—the way it was filmed with that Gerd Oswald photography with those weird angles. All the stories were pretty oblique! And I enjoyed Thriller; when that show was hot, it was really hot! I recall the episode adapting Robert E. Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell” was just a masterpiece. Even today, it is creepy.

CBA: Were you also clued into other anthology television— Playhouse 90, Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling’s “Patterns”…

Bruce: You watched what you had and we had three channels— CBS, NBC, and ABC. That’s all we had and it was all black-&-white.

In the early ’50s, it was all original live productions and you either watched that or you didn’t watch anything! We were lucky. A lot of it was just being lucky because though there was a lot of crap, there was also a lot of really fine work by Chayefsky, Serling, and others. I was just assimilating this stuff, not knowing that that age was going to pass and America was going to get into a lot of really crappy TV. A lot of it was over my head; I recall watching Serling’s “Patterns,” and I had no clue what that was about, but you pick up more than you think you do, I believe, and that stuck with me and affected my work later on. I was very lucky to live through that period.

CBA: Did you want to work in comics?

Bruce: I just wanted to work. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to be an actor, I wanted to be a director. I wanted to do something that involved storytelling and, after college (where I studied art because it was easier than engineering) I knew that I was going to have to go to New York or California—but I didn’t have a clue how to get involved with movie making (I had no connections), and I had corresponded with a few people in New York and comics seemed easier. There seemed to be a logic to the comic book business: You put your portfolio together, put the stuff down on a table, and somebody said yes or no. That was it! But how the hell do you go out and make a movie? And screenwriting sounded harder to do than novels (for a long time I didn’t know how to make a living in the novel business, though finally became successful at it).

But I knew that I was good enough to draw some pictures and that someone in an editorial office would look at them and I could probably get an appointment. It was the path of least resistance, I suppose.

CBA: You artwork evokes a strong Al Williamson/Frank Frazetta influence. Were you especially clued into those guys?

Bruce: Oh, yeah. I think all of us were. Hal Foster was my biggest influence, more than anyone. I grew up with Prince Valiant and it really stood out in the Sunday newspaper—and, when I collected the EC comics in the used bookstores, the Al Williamson stuff really stood out. So when I moved to New York, I found out that Al was still there and still drawing! It was a big thrill meeting him at a comic convention—and then becoming his friend! It was a childhood dream come true. It was the next best thing to meeting Hal Foster. Frazetta was the same way because we just idolized the man—never mind there was no living to be made at it! We never stopped to think about that! We just thought, “We gotta do that!” When you’re 20 years old, all you want to do is be a terrific artist; you don’t worry about whether there’s any money to be made in it or how laborious it may be or how low paying. You don’t think about that, you don’t have a family yet. Also you think about the rational things like, when I moved to New York in 1968, the was no more anthology work, no one gave a hoot for science-fiction, and super-heroes—Stan Lee’s Marvel stuff—was ruling the roost.

The first office I walked into was Marvel and I had all this Fosteresque, Williamson kind of fantasy work, and (though I haven’t a clue who the editor was at the time) I put my work on the desk and the guy just didn’t have a clue. He looked at it and said, “What in the world!” Kirby was who you’re supposed to emulate and I was emulating Williamson—the guy must have thought I was out of my mind! I probably was; I don’t know where I thought I was going to get work! The only salvation was that I wasn’t alone; there were guys like Mike Kaluta, Jeff Jones, and Bernie Wrightson who were also into that kind of stuff. So we hung very closely together because we were all that we had! Of course, Bernie was so good and versatile that he was able to literally draw anything, and he could find work.

CBA: Did you meet those guys at the 1967 World Science-Fiction COMIC BOOK ARTIST

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CBA: When did you have your first published story?

Bruce: It was for Web of Horror. I can’t remember even the name of it now, but it was some kind of time travel thing with a wrecked spaceship, Williamson-kind of figures, and naked women. I drew and wrote it, and Terry Bisson bought it. I was amazed because I didn’t even have it finished; I just had three or four pages and I was taking it up as a sample of my artwork to see if I could get on as an artist.

Terry looked at it—and, of course, it didn’t have an ending—and he said, “This is okay but how does it end?” I think I made something up at the spur of the moment and he looked up and said, “Fine.

Finish the last page and I’ll buy it.” I was shocked as I walked out of there with my first sale—I couldn’t believe it. The page rate was $32.50 a page for artwork—God knows what it paid for writing! We must have all been out of our minds! It was crazy.

CBA: Warren during that time was in the doldrums. Did you choose not to go to Warren?

Bruce: I remember thinking as I first hit the streets of New York that, almost to the month, Warren was in a lot of trouble and was starting the reprinted stuff. Where I had hoped to get on was a place that was in a lot of trouble—and he didn’t come back from that until a year or two later. What happened with me was that Jeff Jones and I had become very good friends, and he was married to Louise at the time. I had not much luck with selling material as a writer or an artist to Bill DuBay—I met with him a couple of times and I think he was less than ecstatic about my work—but I wrote a story called “Jenifer” and he liked it a lot. (I don’t remember how Bernie got involved.) They printed it and apparently it caused some commotion, and shortly after that, DuBay left and I moved away from New York, and the next thing I know, I got a call from Louise Jones who was now the editor. We were already old friends, so that helped, and she offered me work. She said, “I loved ‘Jenifer,’ so what else have you got?” And I said, “As much as you want!” She said she’d pay me top rates and to send it in. So that’s really how it started. In all the years I wrote for Warren, I don’t think she turned down a single story. That was the best relationship I ever had with an editor in my entire career—of anything, whether it’s movies, TV, or novels—and she bought everything that I ever mailed in, and with almost no comment! It was incredible! I was living in a dream world and I didn’t know it! I thought, “Oh, this is just par for the course,” but nothing could be further from the truth. She was just wonderful.

CBA: At Warren, you might say that there were two styles of editing: Archie and Louise giving the writer pretty much carté blanche to do their best work; and then there’s a more controllingIF method YOUofENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, Bill DuBay who rewrote much of what reached his desk.

Did you CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS write to please Louise?

ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT! Bruce: I don’t think there’s any question about it. One of the first editors to realize that you simply allow a writer or artist to do their best work was Bill Gaines at EC. I’ve read that Bill would really lavish praise on the art when he went over it with Feldstein or Kurtzman— of course he had stellar talent at his bequest, but at the same time, I know that that is why those books looked so consecutively great. I ularly aware of. It did become character driven because of whatever know that when I would turn a story in for Weezie, she would personal paranoia was happening in my life at the time. Psychological always praise it and say, “You’re one of our best.” If more editors pieces were also the kinds of things I did; but let’s face it: I had great realized that artists and writers have very fragile egos and consider artists on my work and I was a very lucky man. It was completely their own work as an extension of themselves, they would get better serendipitous that I had moved away from New York and back to work. It’s not that hard; all you have to do is be nice—but you tend Kansas City, where I grew up, and just happened to have Rich to get more and more interference, and all that does is make the creCorben live a few blocks from me. I didn’t even know him when I ator feel less and less secure, and you end up with less than desirable lived there before I started working. He had lived there all of his life material. and I was there a good portion of mine, so we were able to get CBA: Louise mentioned that your stories are character-driven and together, compare notes and talk about the story. It was just pure not necessarily by gimmicks—normal people involved in extraordiCOMIC BOOK ARTIST #4guys like that, and Bernie Wrightson, Russ luck. about You don’t get Definitive JIM WARREN interview publishing EERIE, nary situations. Was that your approach to storytelling—trying to God! Theseinterwere extraordinarily talented guys whose CREEPY, VAMPIRELLA, and Heath—my other fan favorites, in-depth explore character more than situation? view with BERNIE WRIGHTSON with unpublished Warren styles were just made forart,that motion picture type of storytelling that Bruce: I always seem to write about the single man against plus up unseen art, features and interviews with FRANK FRAZETTA, I was trying to do. I don’t think that you can recreate that; I tried to the wall—I don’t know why; it’s probably just some RICHARD peculiar CORBEN, facet of AL WILLIAMSON, JACK DAVIS, ARCHIE GOODWIN, HARVEY KURTZMAN, and extent more! with Twisted Tales for Pacific Comics years do thatALEX to aNINO, certain my personality—and I tend to write about things that are happening BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!later and, in some ways, I think I was successful but I just think that to me at any given time. If you had to go back and explore every(80-page Digital Edition) $3.95 everything has its time and place. Weezie was there, Warren was single story, it’s probably embarrassing. They all seemhttp://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_56&products_id=523 to have somethere, Bernie was there, Corben was there, and all those talents who thing to do with sex and paranoia, and I’m sure that an analyst will happened to be in that mix at that time. It was like The Outer Limits look at a story of a man and a woman afloat in the middle of the or EC! People say, “How come those shows were so great?” Well, Atlantic with sharks pecking away at them and find all kinds of they were great because there were talented people involved who Freudian things in there (that I would find distinctly unpleasant). At happened to all be there at the time. It’s very hard to get that mix that time, I had a way of tapping into my psyche that I wasn’t partictogether; it’s complete serendipity.

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Above: Still more pencils for the Wrightson/Jones masterwork, “Jenifer,” which appeared in Creepy #63. These are from page four. Art ©1974 Bernie Wrightson.

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