Comic Book Artist #6 Preview

ROMITA SEVERIN COCKRUM BRUNNER MCGREGOR RUSSELL SUTTON THE PRISONER

No.6

$5.95

Fall 1999

In The U.S.

Man-Thing, Sise-Neg, Dr. Strange ©1999 Marvel Entertainment.

THE MARVEL BULLPEN: 1970-77

NO. 6

CELEBRATING

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THE

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LIVES & WORK

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OF THE

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GREAT CARTOONISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS

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FALL 1999

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EDITOR’S RANT: MY TURN ON THE CENTURY Ye Ed ruminates on the spirit of collaboration, nostalgia, and Steranko’s History of Comics ....................2 SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT: GOOD-BYE, CHUNKY RICE—HELLO, CRAIG THOMPSON! Charles Hatfield reviews the debut graphic novel of one hot, up-and-coming cartoonist..........................3 PUBLIC SERVICE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMIC ART Editor John A. Lent makes the pitch for his latest addition to comics scholarship, IJOCA ........................4 CBA COMMUNIQUES Skeates on his interview, Infantino & Orlando on Bat Lash, and letter bombs from our readers ..............5 PINCHERA’S PIX: MR. SATURN Our resident cartoonist begins his new series: Candid shots of superfolk in everyday life ........................6 FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE: @!!?* Fabulous Fred regales us about Steve Gerber and the writer’s, umm, Giant-Size Man-Thing ....................9 JOHN ROMITA INTERVIEW: SPIDEY’S MAN From nefarious kick-backs at ’50s DC to the chaos of the ’70s Marvel Bullpen, JR Sr. spins his tale! ....10 MARIE SEVERIN INTERVIEW: MORE THAN “JUST MARIE” Cartoonist, colorist, cover designer, caricaturist, and the heart of the Bullpen, Marie talks Marvel ........22 DAVE COCKRUM INTERVIEW: BLACKHAWKS, X-MEN, AND JOHN CARTER OF MARS Fan artist turned fandom favorite artist, Dave chats about his mutant Marvel past ................................28 RETROGAZE: WEIRDNESS ON THE PLANET OF THE APES Chris Knowles looks at the wacky fun of Doug Moench’s b-&-w monkey business ................................32

CBA #5 CORRECTIONS: CBA’s most profound apologies go to Len Wein. Not only did his and Mark Hanerfeld’s photo come out terribly, and the last line of his interview get dropped (which was supposed to say: “Home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in.”), but THREE proofings failed to catch the greatest faux pas, ye editor’s characterizing Swamp Thing as Len’s “nadir” as a writer. That landmark series was, of course, precisely the opposite: ST was Len’s zenith as a scribe, in my humble opinion. My American Heritage Dictionary is ever closer, by my side. Sorry to R. Gary Land for his uncredited Alex Toth “Black Canary” contribution on pg.

61—Dennis O’Neil told ye ed at SDCC that he wrote the initial script for that story but it was substantially changed by Alex. Apologies to Scott McAdams for failing to mention his Moldoff art contributions from last issue’s A/E section. Mea culpa to Robert Knuist and Jim Higgins who also contributed art to CBA. Arnie Fenner’s wife and collaborator is Cathy, not “Carol” as misnamed in the letter column last issue—sorry, CF! Keith Craker tells us the Rudy Nebres art on pg. 96 was “originally in an early Creepy and reprinted in the ‘Best of’ issue Creepy #50.” Mart Gray informs us that the Kaluta rough on pg. 88 was not an unused concept but was finished as a cover, “I would guess, at around Secrets of Haunted House #14.”

Visit CBA at our NEW Website at: www.twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/

TOM SUTTON: “I WENT APESH•T!” Chris Knowles’ mini-interview with the artist on his outstanding Planet of the Apes work ....................35 FRANK BRUNNER INTERVIEW: OF DOCTORS & DUCKS The artist discusses his work on Dr. Strange, Howard the Duck, and his days at the House of Ideas ......36 P. CRAIG RUSSELL INTERVIEW: THE VISUAL POETRY OF PCR A conversation with the artist, from Dan Adkins assistant to coming into his own on “Killraven” ........48 DON MCGREGOR INTERVIEW: MCGREGOR’S RAGE! Finally! The McGregor interview reveals the verbose one’s thoughts behind T’Challa and Killraven ......60 PHANTOM BOOKS DEPT.: THE PRISONER THE PRISONER THAT NEVER WAS Tom Stewart investigates the unpublished Marvel adaptation of McGoohan’s cult TV show............76 NONE OF SIX—INSIDE THE PRISONER Steve Englehart remembers his participation in Marvel’s version that never came to be ..................78 DEAN MOTTER ON THE PRISONER THAT WAS The premier artist/designer shares his recollections of the DC adaptation that did see print ............79

All letters of comment, articles and artwork, please mail to:

SECRET ORIGINS OF THE DIRECT MARKET Part one of Bob Beerbohm’s ground-breaking essay on the real background of the comic book biz........80

Jon B. Cooke, Editor Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204 West Kingston, RI 02892-0204

CLOSING ARGUMENT: DAN RAEBURN’S THE IMP The best discovery of ye ed’s Summer of Convention Hell, Dan’s annual magazine is wicked fun! ........92

(401) 783-1669 • Fax (401) 783-1287 e-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com ARTIST™

NEXT ISSUE

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MORE ’70s

MARVELMANIA!

COMIC BOOK 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 401-783-1669 • Fax: 401-783-1287. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $5.95 ($7.00 Canada, $9.00 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $30 US, $42 Canada, $54 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.

CBA Interview

John Romita Sr.: Spidey’s Man Yakkin’ with Marvel’s (de facto) ’70s Art Director

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by John Morrow and Jon B. Knutson What can you say about John Romita Sr.? Jazzy? Well, that’s pushing it, but I found the artist to be a regular guy who treats annoyances like Ye Ed with courtesy and consideration, and one (as you’ll find) who speaks quite frankly as one of Marvel’s premier artists in the ’60s and ’70s. Tellingly, he’s still married to his childhood sweetheart and (if the axiom is true that the character of the parent is revealed in the manner of the child) he’s a good father—just look at the graceful demeanor of his talented son, John Jr. The old man is a gentleman.

John was interviewed via telephone on May 19, 1998, and the artist copyedited the transcript.

Right: Spidey promotional illo by the Senior One. This was used to guide “the huge facade cut-out for the Marvelmania restaurant,” sez Mr. R. Courtesy of Mike Burkey.

Spider-Man ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Ever diligent, here’s JR SR. at work in the ’70s in this unabashedly swiped pic from FOOM #18. ©1977 Marvel Comics.

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Comic Book Artist: You started working as a ghost for Atlas?

John Romita: Yes, back in 1949. One of my fellow high school graduates from the School of Industrial Arts and I met on the subway once. I was doing artwork for Coca-Cola; someone else would do the main painting, and I would do little associated pieces for both sides of the displays. I tried to use the same colors as the painters on the Coke bottles and Coke glasses; I could do the Coke logo in my sleep. [laughter] So I saw him on the train, and he said, “How’d you like to pencil for me?” He was an inker who couldn’t pencil. He gave it up in a couple of years, but he was pretty good, and he certainly had a lot of contacts; more than I did. He was working for Stan Lee, but Stan was looking for pencilers. He must’ve bragged to Stan that he could pencil and ink if he needed it, and then he got cold feet. So I penciled for him for six months to a year.

The first one we did was a gangster story, 1920s mobsters with machine guns and old limousines. I was so pressed for time I faked a lot of it, and it was pretty

weak. Stan was turning out 50 titles a month, and he just wanted to fill pages.

I kept working for Stan through this guy for close to a year, and then I got drafted. That was the end of that.

CBA: I’m familiar with your comic strip influences; Caniff, Sickles, Raymond, Foster. Did you admire any comic book artists?

John: Oh, Jack Kirby, from the time I was ten years old and first noticed Captain America Comics was handled differently than any other book. The only line of books that came close to Kirby’s stuff, wherever he was, were the Charlie Biro books, which I think are a forgotten gem in history. He was quite a guy. He was almost doing what Stan Lee was doing years later, without being noticed.

CBA: You came back from the Army….

John: Actually, I was stationed at Governor’s Island in New York Harbor. I was doing recruiting posters, believe it or not. A friend of mine was there, and he told me, “If you’re going in the Army, and you don’t go to Georgia for training, give me a call when you’re almost finished with Basic Training.” I did, and he said they were looking to fill the place of some guy who was getting discharged. All he could do was put in for me; his captain was the art director. Korea was a year old when I went in. The guys I trained with did go to Korea; I had been slated to go to Germany, and I was almost rooting to go, because I figured it would be a great experience—but I couldn’t say it out loud because my mother and my girlfriend Virginia would’ve killed me. [laughter] The chances were a million to one, but sure enough, I got the call to go to New York. I spent a year-and-ahalf doing recruiting posters, and while I was still in uniform, I started working for Stan Lee. CBA: So your wife Virginia was your first sweetheart?

John: Oh, yes. We grew up together. I’ve known her since she was nine years old and I was eleven.

CBA: Where was home?

John: In Queens, right on the Nassau County border. I moved there because of Carmine Infantino; he was a buddy of mine. I got his brother into Governor’s Island. Just before I left, I was a Staff Sergeant, and I got Jimmy Infantino in the same way my buddy had gotten me in two years earlier. Later Carmine told me, “Anything I can do, let me know. You want to work for DC? I’ll give you a couple of editors.” So he gave me the romance editors’ number; he didn’t give me Julie Schwartz’s number. [laughter] I was given entrée to DC; at the time he called up Stan Lee and said, “Any work you’ve got you were putting aside for me, give it to John Romita, because I owe COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

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him.” Stan said, “You don’t have to beg me to give work to John Romita; I’ll give him all the work he wants!” [laughter] I think that was the first time Carmine realized I was not just a little schnook. [laughter] Carmine and I were buddies, and he taught me a lot. He was a hell of a help to me when I was young. He showed me how to draw women. He said I was doing too lumpy a silhouette, and he was right. He said you need to get a very compact, simple silhouette, and put the details inside. That was one of my turning points. That’s why I was able to do romance stuff.

CBA: So you went in uniform to Stan’s office?

John: Yes. I remember Morrie Kuramoto used to always remark, “Who the hell is that guy in uniform coming up here all the time?”

But I didn’t get to know anybody; I was always so quick to get back on duty. I had a Class A pass, so anytime I wasn’t working I could go uptown.

CBA: At that time there were no staff artists at Atlas, right?

John: No, there was a production department; letterers and colorists.

I remember Morrie and Artie Simek were up there, and a couple of other guys. As far as I know, there weren’t any artists up there. They had disbanded in 1947. Gene Colan told me there was an overnight massacre; they were all let go.

CBA: John Buscema told me that Martin Goodman discovered a whole closet full of inventory material that would never get used, and fired the whole group.

John: That was the nature of the business; that was not uncommon. Everybody had the same specter hanging over them; an editor would buy the stories, and he would pile them up for emergencies.

He was keeping artists busy so he could always call on them. The publishers never understood that. Inventory was a natural thing.

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for a twelve-page story; it was very generous. That was like eight weeks pay, and he never used the story. When I went in there, he put it on top of a pile on his desk that was about a foot tall; fivepagers and six-pagers that he was never going to use. He put it on top, just as a gesture, and said, “I’m not going to use it, but it’s here in case I need it.” He supported artists during all sorts of slumps. He was a wonderful guy.

CBA: What was the Spring of ’57 like? Did you think it was all over?

John: I thought I would never be in comics again. I couldn’t believe I got work at DC. When Stan pulled a western book out from under me in the middle of a story, I figured, “That’s it.” I never got paid for it, and I told Virginia, “If Stan Lee ever calls, tell him to go to hell.” [laughter] I’m glad I never did that. [laughter] We were watching the Senate Committee hearings; everything sounded as though this was the death knell.

The bells were tolling; I had been expecting it since the mid-’50s, because I thought television had killed the golden goose.

That was the 10-year cycle Gene Colan feared. When he came back into the business again at Marvel, he said, “I was there in ’47 when they cut our throats. I was there in ’57 when they cut our throats. I don’t want it to happen again.” I told him I thought it was going to be different this time, that ’67 was not going to be the problem.

CBA: Gene worked with you at DC on the romance books, right?

Above: John’s original sketches for his character, The Prowler, originally named “The Stalker.” Thanks to Mike Burkey. Prowler ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc. Left: Mary Jane Watson in repose by John. From a 1975 portfolio. Courtesy of Al Bigley. Mary Jane ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Above: John was romance artist supreme at DC before joining the Marvel Age of Comics. Here’s his cover for My Love #4, the artist taking another spin with the lovey-dovey stuff—this time for Stan. Courtesy of Jerry Boyd. ©1970 Marvel Comics.

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John: Yes, he was there for the same reason I was. We were looking for work. I always felt a little like an outsider there, because I was a little bit shy. I would not push myself on anybody. I also tell everybody I used to pass through the flat files that had all the original artwork of all my favorite artists: Kubert, Gil Kane. All the sensational stuff I could’ve had—just open the drawer and take it out—and I was too afraid and too ashamed to admit that I would do that. I just didn’t want to be pushy; I regret every minute of it. [laughter] CBA: What editors did you work for on DC’s romance line in the 1960s?

John: Zeena Brodie was there when I first started. Phyllis Reed had the longest tenure. Then I worked for Jack Miller for the last year or so.

CBA: Did you ever try for an editorial position at DC? John: Phyllis Reed was leaving, and she did want to put me up for editor of the romance section, but I’d be losing my own top artist when I came in. [laughter] I was doing all the major stories, the cover stories. We would do a cover, then write a story about it.

CBA: Who were most of your writers?

John: I was working a lot with Bob Kanigher’s stuff. He complimented me one day in the elevator; he liked what I was doing with the romance stuff. In my stupid naiveté, I said, “I hope you don’t mind I made a few changes in the stories.” He almost went through

the roof of the elevator! [laughter] He said, “What the hell are you talking about?” I swallowed hard and said, “Sometimes I’d add a panel, or take out a panel and do double duty with your copy in one panel.” He just tore me apart before we got to the lobby. He shredded me. [laughter] CBA: Were you ever interested in writing?

John: I do think about it, but every time I try it, I tie myself up in knots, because my writing process is so long and drawn out that I would never get it done. I’m too much of a perfectionist, and it would not flow out of me quick enough to make a deadline.

CBA: Did you catch wind of nefarious things like kickbacks?

John: Actually, Jack Miller was very blatant about it. After being with DC for about seven years with all the women editors, I never had the slightest hint of kickbacks, or any kind of seamy underside.

Jack Miller takes over, and the first Christmas he had me at his desk to talk about a script, and there were gift certificates on his desk, to be signed by artists. I was too naive and stupid to even know what it was about. I asked one of the other artists about it, and he said, “Oh, did you give him one? Did you sign one?” It was like a $100 gift certificate for Macy’s. I said, “No.” I didn’t even know what it was for. He gave me one, but I just put it down, going, “Oh, that’s interesting.” [laughter] I was such a stupid kid. I don’t know why he kept giving me work; I guess I was regarded as one of the top men in the romance department. I think he probably was pissed off at me after that. [laughter] I never heard about it at Marvel; Stan Lee was above reproach, but I heard about it at other places. An editor at DC started telling guys he was investing in an art studio, and he wanted us all to work for him. He was dangling big money in front of us, and he had me conned into thinking I was going to illustrate a book on the American Indian with him. I was even giving him samples; that’s how stupid I was. What he did was say he needed a little money to get off the ground with the project. I was getting about $360 for a 15-page job.

DC’s practice at the time was to give you a script and a check for the job at the same time; the editor said, “What I want you to do is write me out a personal check for $360 after I pay you for this, and then I’ll pay you for the next job—it’ll really be for this one.” I swallowed that. It went that way for about six months, and sure enough, the day after Christmas 1964, he died. I went into the office, and there’s about half a dozen guys all with sweat beads all over their foreheads.

Some of those guys were $2000 into the company, and as far as the company knew, the artists and that editor had pulled a scam. They didn’t treat me badly; I paid them back the money—I did the artwork for it, I think. Other guys, they said, “If you don’t lay a check for $2000 on the desk right now, we’re gonna have the police come.”

CBA: At some point, the romance work started drying up. Were you eager to move on?

John: A few months later, they said, “We’ve got so much inventory, we’re just not going to buy any more artwork for a while.” I was too stupid to say, “How about taking me into Julie Schwartz and introducing me?” I did know a few of the production people and some of the editors, but I never got an offer from them, so I went over to Stan Lee. I always had a feeling somebody was keeping me out of the adventure department.

About two weeks after I left DC, I was assigned to do Daredevil.

I got a call from George Kashdan asking me if I wanted to do Metamorpho. Ramona Fradon just had left it, and I regretted it; I had a handshake deal with Stan, and I think they would’ve paid me more. Only my foolish, naive honor kept me from telling Stan I’m going back to DC. So I stayed with Stan; I guess I did the right thing.

CBA: Why did you work over Kirby’s breakdowns on those first Daredevils? Was that a request from Stan?

John: I had inked an Avengers job for Stan, and I told him I just wanted to ink. I felt like I was burned out as a penciler after eight years of romance work. I didn’t want to pencil any more; in fact, I couldn’t work at home any more—I couldn’t discipline myself to do it. He said, “Okay,” but the first chance he had he shows me this Daredevil story somebody had started and he didn’t like it, and he wanted somebody else to do it. While I was up there turning in a cover, he asked me to sort of sketch out how I would work out this certain page of Daredevil. So I sketched it out quickly in pencil and he loved it. He said, “Wanna help me out? How about penciling this COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

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CBA Interview

More Than “Just Marie” The Glorious Artist Marie Severin Talks Up Marvel Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by John Morrow

Right: In the late ’60s/early ’70s, Marie designed many covers for Marvel. Here’s a rejected Captain America layout circa 1971.

Courtesy of R. Gary Land. Cap ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Possibly Marie’s apex at Marvel was her collaboration with brother John Severin on Kull the Conqueror, one of the most exquisitely produced books of Marvel’s line. This is one of the plates from the Severins’ Kull portfolio. Courtesy of the artist.

Kull ©1999 The Estate of Robert E. Howard.

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Marie Severin started in comics as a colorist for the EC Comics Bullpen, sharing an office with genius Harvey Kurtzman. Then she went on to become, along with Flo Steinberg, the heart and soul of the Marvel Bullpen. The artist is a superb caricaturist and highly underrated cartoonist. Still working in the biz, Marie was interviewed via phone on June 16, 1998, and she copy-edited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: You left Marvel and Atlas in 1957.

When you came back, how'd you hear that they needed help?

Marie Severin: In 1964, I needed help! [laughter] After I left Mad in the early ’50s, I went up to Atlas, with Stan, Joe Maneely, John Severin, Bill Everett, and all those guys in the bullpen. There were a lot of really nice guys in and out; in those days they dressed up. The didn't look like hobos. [laughter] They wore ties and shirts, sports jackets. No sneakers, none of that. This was the ’50s. You could leave the office and go into the Plaza and still look okay.

I left Stan when everything collapsed. It was the aftermath of when comics sales went down. They flooded the market, as everybody knows. I think they had 600 titles. Everything just died. Stan had to decimate, and it was just awful for him. He must've been miserable.

I had a friend at the Federal Reserve Bank, and they wanted to put out a book about the automated check system; those funny numbers you see at the bottom of checks. So I did a comic book on that, and I wanted it to look really nice, so I had my brother John do the final illustrations. At the time it was the most-printed comic book every published.

CBA: Was it cartoony?

Marie: Yeah. I did the layouts for it. Producing a comic for the Federal Reserve Bank is like working for the Catholic Church. [laughter] You had to go through committee and be sterilized and looked at and turned over and redone. I have infinite patience, and when I finally got it okayed, I had John do it, and it really came out a nice-looking book.

CBA: So you did the breakdowns, and

he did the finishes?

Marie: Yeah. I did the production on the whole thing. John's artwork was more finished than mine, and who better to do it? It was reverse nepotism, [laughter] but I wouldn't trust anybody else with stuff like that.

But the bank wasn't exciting work. I did some film strip work, but they thought I was too comic-booky. So I left there, and I thought I'd go back into comics until I got into something else. I went up to Harvey Comics, and they gave me the runaround. I didn't like to backtrack, but I figured I'd go see what Stan was doing—and I never got out of the office. [laughter] I went in to Stan with this portfolio with all this stuff in it, and Stan never looked at it. "Marie, Marie!

Oh, this is great! Look Solly, it's Marie! Give her some work; we need somebody on production." So I started doing their production, and Sol was happy. Then I started doing some corrections, and all of a sudden they had a one-person production department, because I could correct some of the art. I was not a Gene Colan or a Jack Kirby, but I knew enough about it to do some corrections. The Bullpen was just Sol and Flo Steinberg and myself. Morrie Kuramoto would come in, and so would Artie Simek to do the lettering.

Then the comics started to grow, and the next person who came in was John Romita, then John Verpoorten came in out of the clear blue sky. He started doing a lot of the production stuff; because Ditko had left, I started doing “Dr. Strange.”

CBA: How'd you get that job?

Marie: They had nobody else to do it. I was never that ambitious; COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

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I never came into the office saying, "Ooh, I want to do Dr. Strange."

I said, "Okay, I'll do that," or "Gee, you need a correction? Okay."

It's a job and I got paid, and it was a man's world and subject matter, and I wasn't pushing it. One time Esquire magazine wanted Kirby to do a spread on comics and the college culture, because the college kids were into comics, and the dope culture was just beginning to get noticed. Stan or Sol—I don't know which—decided they didn't want Kirby taken off what he was doing, because he was essentially doing all the major stuff, and they didn't want him to lose any time doing this Esquire stuff. I'm sure he would've been delighted and charged a lot more than I did, but I went over to Esquire representing Marvel.

They gave me a page to do, which I brought in the next day, and they were delighted and gave me a five-page spread. I thought, "Gee, that's nice, and it's freelance!" Martin Goodman saw it, and said, "What is she doing in production? Give her artwork to do." So that's when Stan said, "Oh, okay." So I started doing art as well as designing covers and whatever.

CBA: Before you did Dr. Strange, how much finished art—penciled and inked—had you had published?

Marie: Just fill-ins, letter pages, stuff like that, even at EC. I wasn't doing stories; I just had learned along the way. I was following so many people and looking at their stuff and handling it at Marvel, I suddenly discovered when they asked me to do it that I wasn't afraid, and I just did it.

CBA: You were doing inter-office cartoons, so they knew you could do humor. Did they just not consider you for the work?

Marie: They didn't know where to put it; and also, Stan isn't that funny. I mean, he's funny, but he's no Harvey Kurtzman. Well, who is? [laughter] That's no insult to Stan. I think if Harvey had seen what I started doing, then he'd have found somewhere to use me.

CBA: You and Harvey shared an office at EC, right?

Marie: Yes. I did some cartoons for office parties and stuff, but I was not skilled and ready to jump into stories, and I never even approached anybody to do that. My stuff was very amateurish. I had an essence of something, but I wouldn't even approach it. My technique was hardly perfected; I don't think I ever perfected it. [laughter] They knew I had a talent, and some things I excelled at.

When you're surrounded by guys like John Severin, Davis, Wood, Craig, etc., you know your place! [laughter] I hadn't really worked at it. I was not as good as those guys.

CBA: Other than just assimilating what was around you, did you have any direct influences? Did you check out other cartoonists?

Marie: Sure. You must recognize the best storytellers and try to understand them. I always communicated with people all my life, and I'd write letters to somebody and draw a little cartoon on the envelope. My brother had done this, and I thought it was very funny.

When I was in grammar school, I thought everybody drew, because at home everybody could do this stuff, so I didn't think it was unusual. It was when I went to school that I realized only one or two people in the classroom could do stuff like that. When you are in the field, the background you came from, your education, and means of communication all come together—then you see how techniques work. Some cartoonists are pure genius.

CBA: Did you work on your high school yearbook? Did you do cartoons for that?

Marie: Some. It was a Catholic school, so I wasn't about to be that rambunctious anyway. [laughter] You did holy pictures and portraits of other kids.

CBA: I've heard how unbelievably small the bullpen office was.

You were literally shoulder to shoulder.

Marie: It was disgusting. [laughter] Thank God we were all clean and bathed. [laughter] No windows—we were stuck in this little matchbox; but that's the way it was at Marvel in the early days.

When we moved again, bookkeeping and all the advertising people had windows, and the art staff was stuck in the middle. [laughter] It was so annoying. When they offered me a [freelance] contract at Marvel many years later, I said, "When? When can I leave?

Please…" [laughter] CBA: Do you remember when Roy Thomas arrived?

Marie: Yeah! I thought, "Who is this little guy? [laughter] Gee, he must be good, because Stan is surrounding himself with productive people, so he must be okay." Roy was a riot. He was so young and Fall 1999

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such a fan, and I had my doubts; but of all of them that came, he was the pick of the bunch. He was the first and the best. He knew everything about comics, and besides being absolutely obsessed with comics, he could write. He really could write, and he had respect for the stuff. I really liked working with Roy. CBA: You did hit it off with Flo, right? Did you guys socialize?

Have lunch?

Marie: She's great. Oh yeah, we had lunch a lot. She was a funny lady. She had the same attitude toward comics that I do. "Aren't they funny? Aren't they weird? These people; what are they doing?

These fans are a riot!" [laughter] CBA: Do you remember when the fans started showing up at the offices, bothering you guys?

Marie: In the beginning, it wasn't bothering. I remember the first time I really knew things were beginning to move. Flo had a little sculpture on her desk: "Look what I got from the fans! They gave he this award!" It was a little statue—nicely done. "And the mail is coming in like crazy!" Stan was beginning to be very happy, because he was getting some respect from the industry, because his books were beginning to sell!

CBA: Who were you working with on the Dr. Strange stories?

Marie: I was very lucky in that Stan worked closely with all the artists. Gene Colan would develop a method of taking a tape recorder in, because if he missed something in the conversation with Stan, he'd call Stan and ask him, and Stan wouldn't know what he was talking about. Stan created so quickly, it was just out of his head.

"Next, please." [laughter] It's just wonderful, the juices he revs up.

Me and Romita and Trimpe were the last ones he had time to use the old method on. At that time, he'd talk a plot with you, and you'd make notes and come back with it sort of layed out. Maybe he'd type something up, I forget. You'd come back with a rough layout and notes in the margin and he would go over it, standing all the time by the drawing board.

Panel by panel, inch by inch, he went over it quickly,

Above: Marie tells us this was a gag cartoon she drew for a proposed (but never realized) college newspaper syndicate venture featuring Marvel’s beloved characters

by Stan Lee. The Man penned the ’toon’s risque gag line: “12 bucks to find out she’s only got a vitamin deficiency!” Courtesy of the artist. Dr. Strange ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Marie even includes cartoons with her change of address notices! I received this one, a caricature of the artist herself, after her move to Long Island last year!

Ain’t she sweet? ©1999 Marie Severin.

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CBA Interview

Dave “Blackhawk” Cockrum The Marvel Days of the Co-Creator of the New X-Men Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Dave Cockrum got his start as a fan artist way back in the ’60s and broke in the field as Murphy Anderson’s assistant at DC Comics. After a memorable run on “The Legion of Super-Heroes,” Dave went on to the House of Ideas where he co-created, with Len Wein, The New XMen, the franchise that went on to give Marvel enormous financial success in the following decades. Dave was interviewed via telephone in July, 1998, and he copy-edited the transcription.

Below: Dave’s seminal creation, Nightcrawler, depicted in way-cool horrific fashion. This illustration appeared in a 1975 art portfolio.

Courtesy of Al Bigley.

Nightcrawler ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Comic Book Artist: You were involved in comics fandom quite a bit. What did you do?

Dave Cockrum: The fanzine I did the most for was called Fantastic Fanzine which was published by Gary Groth (who now acts as a super-critic against comics in The Comics Journal). He was a big fan in those days. I also did some work for a tabloid called Enterprise Monthly and stuff for Buddy Saunders and the Star-Studded bunch in Texas.

CBA: You invented characters and had an eye on creating heroes….

Dave: I had a huge stable of my own characters. It’s a story that Len Wein loves to tell about the creation of the New X-Men; the famous “Dave’s Comics Super-hero Sketchbook.” I had this huge sketchbook filled with characters I had come up with. Len keeps remembering that I took the X-Men drawings out of that book but that’s not actually true. I made them up separately, but I did have that book of characters. That’s one of the things I loved to do: invent characters.

CBA: Who were the greatest influences in your drawing?

Dave: Guys whose work I really loved were Wally Wood, Gil Kane, Murphy Anderson, and Joe Kubert. A little later, Jack Kirby because I hadn’t seen his work until Marvel started up. I didn’t discover Will Eisner until later but I just loved his stuff, too.

CBA: You obviously collected comics for some time….

Dave: I started in the ’50s, but every time I blinked, my folks would take the books and burn ’em. I started collecting when Fawcett was still publishing Captain Marvel, and I have very strong memories of Captain Marvel Junior.

CBA: Were you attracted to the more realistic style of Mac Raboy’s work?

Dave: I loved C.C. Beck’s work but when I first started working in comics, DC had revived the Captain Marvel stuff, and I openly agitated to do Captain Marvel Jr. because I

loved Raboy’s art. That was just before I quit DC and went to Marvel. Had I stayed, I think that I would have been the regular artist for Junior.

CBA: There was another comic in the ’50s that you liked a lot: Blackhawk.

Dave: Oh God, I’m a major Blackhawk fan. I had an opportunity to do the book at one point, but because there was a $30 a page difference in my Marvel rate and my DC rate, I couldn’t afford it. It would have been giving away every third page for free. So I settled for doing some covers and two back-up stories. Dan Spiegle ended up doing it. I’m kinda sorry.

CBA: What is it about the group you liked?

Dave: I dunno. I just always enjoyed them. I first discovered them in the ’50s, when they were flying jets, but I went back and bought the older Quality issues. I have nearly a complete run of Blackhawk.

It’s the only book I still actively collect.

CBA: When did you first have professional aspirations?

Dave: Real early. Drawing was something that I always could do and I started drawing super-heroes early on. I also wrote letters to the comics. When Marvel first came on the scene, there was a time when I wrote a letter to every Marvel book, every month. (Then I realized that it was too much work and I would right one letter that would address all of the books.) I met my first wife through the letter page of Fantastic Four #34. At the time, they were publishing full addresses and she read the letter and became interested because I was a sailor. We exchanged letters, she comes to California, and we get married!

CBA: Did you draw fan material during your time in the Navy?

Dave: Yeah. I was stationed in San Diego and later Guam. I would draw in all of my spare time, even drawing cartoons for the ship’s newspaper. I got out in 1970 and came straight to New York, just in time for Phil Seuling’s convention in July. I met all kinds of professionals there and then went up to DC first—but their attitude was that I was close to professional quality but just on the wrong side of it. And Marvel wasn’t ready for me yet, so Neal Adams sent me over to Warren. So that was where my first professional stuff appeared. It would have probably benefited me if I had stayed on and done more stuff for Warren because I was learning black-&-white techniques that I later quit using.

CBA: You had a real strong inking presence with a heavy use of blacks.

Dave: Yeah, I was imitating Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. At Marvel, they just wanted me to ink but I wanted to pencil. I clamored about it and finally they just let me go ahead and pencil. (I’ve been a penciler for so long, that I’ve pretty much lost my feel for inking.)

CBA: You went over to DC from Warren?

Dave: Yeah. I started doing background inking, first for Tony DeZuniga (who was doing a lot of House of Mystery and stuff like that). They weren’t running a stable yet, at that point. He was okay to work for, but his wife, Mary, was something else. She looked at my stuff and said, “Ehhh! Ten years, maybe, you might make it.” I stayed long enough to work on five or six issues, but Murphy Anderson needed a background inker for the work he was doing on Curt Swan’s Superman and Bob Brown’s Superboy. He also got the “John Carter of Mars” strip, which I desperately wanted to help out with (being a John Carter fan all of my life) but Murphy wouldn’t let me touch that. He’d say, “This is mine! Go away!” I worked for Murphy for about a year in a downtown Manhattan studio. It was COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Fall 1999

Retrogaze

Weirdness on the Planet of the Apes Examining Doug Moench’s “Gonzo Demolition” of POTA

by Chris Knowles Quick! Name an artistically successful and challenging movie adaptation in comics. Take your time, now. Having trouble? Okay, name a comics series based on a licensed character or concept that wasn’t just a slapdash cash-in or just a serialized toy commercial. It’s tough, right? Well, this is a bit of a trick question. For my money there’s been only one truly memorable licensed comic book and it was published in magazine format. Oh, now the lights come on out there. Yes, folks, I am referring to Doug Moench’s gonzo demolition of Planet of the Apes.

Above: Commingled human/ape gypsy tribes? Why the hell not?

Writer Doug Moench was just warming up! From POTA #6.

Planet of the Apes ©1999 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

Below: Wonderful example of Alfredo’s mastery of tonal art.

From POTA #7. POTA ©1999 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

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The Planet of the Apes movie series in many ways was the prototype for Star Wars. Not thematically, of course, but commercially.

Back in the ’70s, you didn’t have the kind of vertical integration of media and manufacturing that exists today, so licensing arrangements were often haphazard and muddled. Disney was the most aggressive in marketing their concepts—and had been from very early on—but by the ’70s, they didn’t have anything really worth licensing. Star Trek continued to spawn all sorts of spin-offs and tieins, but without new episodes to promote the line, the merchandising was low-key by today’s standards. It was Planet of the Apes that was the original model for today’s instantaneous licensing blitzkriegs—but unlike today, when boatloads of merchandise are readied before the movie is even finished, the Apes avalanche didn’t start until six years after the release of the first film.

The story goes that in 1973, CBS ran Planet of the Apes as the movie of the week on the night of a blizzard or some such and it garnered the highest ratings in the network’s history. Battle for the Planet of the Apes had been released that same year and didn’t dazzle anyone, but apparently the kids were hungry for a new obsession and Planet of the Apes , with its fashionable dystopianism, fit the bill. Soon your local K-Mart was bursting with Apes-junk of every conceivable variety, most of it as shoddy and miserable as most of the other junk that was peddled to kids in the ’70s by aging and miserable schlock merchants. One particular item that springs to mind was the hollow plastic Cornelius doll that

came, of course, with a parachute (proof positive that some inept product manager didn’t even bother to actually watch the Apes flicks). Not all of it was lousy—there are few 30-something guys out there who don’t have a warm spot somewhere in their hearts for Mego’s Apes action figures—but most Apes merch was rubbish.

However the era’s laxity in trademark protection also allowed a young comics writer immersed in radical politics and the Counterculture to take the Apes concept on the kind of rocket ride unimaginable in this day and age.

Planet of the Apes was not published as a standard comic. It premiered as part of Marvel’s late and unlamented black-&-white magazine line. In the early ’70s, publishers were placing their bets on horror and Kung Fu to get their circulation up and Marvel released most of their excursions in those genres in the format they cribbed from Jim Warren. Unfortunately they usually didn’t utilize their A-list talent on the books and most of the titles were short-lived. The idea with the POTA mag was to sandwich articles on the films between Ape funnies and fill whatever pages remained with advertising.

A Few Apes up his Sleeve Planet of the Apes started simply enough. Under the helm of Tony Isabella, POTA #1 featured a relatively straightforward adaptation of the first Apes movie drawn by Marvel stalwarts George Tuska and Mike Esposito. Charlton Heston didn’t allow his likeness to be used for the adaptation so Tuska drew Colonel Taylor looking like Tony Stark on a bad hair day. It was the opening feature that provided a portent of things to come. “Terror on the Planet of the Apes” was Moench’s concept of the Apes mythos. The themes of racial warfare in the films was made explicit and the villain of the piece was General Brutus, a gorilla with a double life. By day he was the local Peace keeper, mouthing Nixonian law and order platitudes and by night he was the murderous grand dragon of the Klan-like Ape Supremacists who murdered and terrorized the docile human population. The protagonists were Jason, a embittered human whose parents were murdered by Brutus, and Alexander, a Roddy McDowallian chimp.

Not content with this tableau of racism and murder, Moench then introduced a mutant race of drones who bred human-ape hybrids as slaves and were themselves in the service of a bunch of giant talking brains. The brains were using Brutus to do God-knows what and supplied the Apeists with futuristic rayguns to facilitate more efficient human killing. The Brains themselves were par for Moench’s course. One spoke in a typical portentous ’70s Marvel fashion, another spouted his pronouncements in rhyme and yet another spoke in a Yancy Street tough guy dialect. Why is anyone’s guess.

Moench collaborated with Mike Ploog on Terror. Ploog, formerly an assistant of Will Eisner, pulled out the stops and showed off the considerable facility he developed under the tutelage of the master.

After a last-minute hatchet job by inker Frank Chiaramonte on #4, Ploog began to do his finished art in soft pencil which gave the series a lush and moody look, reminiscent of the Filipino artists. On one of Ploog’s off-issues, Moench took the opportunity to riff on both Jack COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Fall 1999

CBA Interview

Of Doctors and Ducks Interview with Artist Frank Brunner on His Marvel Days Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Frank Brunner was almost immediately a fan-favorite artist when he came into his own as artist on “Dr. Strange” in the early ’70s, joining the ranks of Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, and Barry Windsor-Smith as a top artist on the Master of Mystic Arts. After a relatively short stay at Marvel, Frank went on to do distinguished work in animation design (notably on the X-Men cartoon series). He was interviewed by phone on July 22, 1999 and the artist copy-edited the transcript.

Right: Frank pitched this risque one-page (unpublished?) strip to National Lampoon in the early ’70s. ©1999 Frank Brunner.

Below: Portrait of Frank Brunner in the ’70s.

Photo taken from the book, After-Image: The Art of Frank Brunner (1978).

Courtesy of the artist.

36

Comic Book Artist: Where are you from?

Frank Brunner: Brooklyn.

CBA: Did you get into art early, when you were young?

Frank: Well, I grew up in a very poor neighborhood, and I got my break while in junior high school in Brooklyn, and attended the High School of Art and Design. This was when I was about 15 years old.

CBA: When did you get interested in comic books?

Frank: From the first comics I read in the late 1950s.

CBA: What comics were you into?

Frank: First I was into the Barks kind of stuff, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny. Then I went on to other things, like Batman and Superman.

Actually, my favorite first “serious” comic book I read was Turok, Son of Stone. I was reading Uncle Scrooge and Turok around the same time.

CBA: Were you too young for the ECs? Frank: Yes. So, when I found out I’d missed them, well, I ran around to every second-hand store, and got as many as I could, later on.

CBA: What particular artists were you keyed into?

Frank: Immediately, all of them had something. I guess at the time, fine artists like Wally Wood, Frazetta, Williamson, and Kubert.

CBA: When did you realize you could draw for a living?

Frank: When I realized I couldn’t do anything else! [laughs] I didn’t have any interest in doing anything but draw. As a matter of fact, when I went to the New York School of Visual Arts briefly, they asked what I was doing there. They saw what I was doing in the comics, and they said, “Get out of here!”

CBA: What, they didn’t support comics?

Frank: No, they just felt I could make a living. They said, “You don’t need to be here unless you’re trying to learn something about existential art.” By the way, it was at SVA when I first met Burne Hogarth, one of the founders of the school. I showed him a Tarzan-like story I was working on called “Carnak.” He looked at the pencils with

interest, then put them down, looked up at me and (with a deep sigh) he said, “This is very good, but don’t do comics! It’s all over; it has no future!” He looked very serious. Interestingly enough, a few years later, when he was rediscovered in France, he quit the school and was drawing Tarzan again!

CBA: The first work I recall seeing of yours was in the fan pages of the Warren black-&-white horror books.

Frank: Yeah, those were my little drawings that were at the bottom of my letters which I’d draw on whatever paper I had lying around.

CBA: Was that your first published material?

Frank: I would say so, yes.

CBA: When did you discover fandom? Were you a frequent contributor to fanzines?

Frank: It sort of happened at the same time. I was a comic book fan, and I’d go to the earliest conventions and see all the old Golden Age stuff, whatever; when I started drawing, it was for fanzines.

CBA: Do you recall who you hung out with at the shows?

Frank: Who did I hang out with? Not particularly. They were friends I’d met in school and college who were also into comics.

There was a kid who was a class behind me who became a writer for a while, named Bill Mantlo, who went to the same school. But we didn’t really hang around that much together.

CBA: Did you start seeking work from the mainstream comics?

Frank: Actually, I’d intended to become an underground artist. In New York at the time, there was an underground Sunday comics supplement that was part of the paper, Gothic Blimp Works. It was in color. I was out to get a feature in there. When I looked around, in COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Fall 1999

1969, suddenly the whole underground scene had gone to the West Coast. I then went to National Lampoon, where they’d published some pretty weird stuff, and I almost got a strip going for them.

Lampoon happened to be in the same building as Marvel at the time, and I remember my experience very vividly. I was going to the offices of National Lampoon trying to sell this one-page strip for their comics section. Anyway, when I went up there, nobody was laughing, they were all dead serious. I was hearing from other offices, people shouting, “Is this funny?” Then I went downstairs to visit Marvel for a while, because I knew Marie Severin and a couple of the other artists down there, but they were on the floor, rolling around on the floor laughing! And I thought, “Maybe this is where I should be working!” I remember what they were laughing about, too. It was an issue of Amazing Spider-Man; Romita had just done the cover, and the character was holding his head down, and I guess it was the death of Aunt May, or Mary Jo, or whoever—holding his head down, before John put the spider-lines in the head, it looked like Spidey was holding a large grapefruit in front of his face, and everyone was just hysterical.

CBA: Do you recall who you dealt with at National Lampoon?

Frank: Yeah, Michael Gross. Strangely enough, I didn’t know his name was Michael Gross when I first visited the office. I had a strip called, “Gross Tales from the Drive-In,” and so, I showed him this strip, and then I realized, “Oh, my God, his name is Michael Gross!”

He tried to act like he was not too thrilled with it because of the concept, but I knew it was the title of the strip. Then Gross told me this other weird story; he said, “You know, we had Frazetta do a recent cover. Well, I did a cover, too. And you know what? I offered to trade original covers with Frazetta, and he turned me down!” This guy was not on the same planet with the rest of us!

CBA: What was the name of the other strip you tried to get in the Lampoon?

Frank: Oh, yeah, it was “Smash Gordon,” obviously a satire of Flash Gordon.

CBA: Whatever happened to that stuff?

Frank: It wound up being published in Castle of Frankenstein and the last installment appeared in Marvel’s b-&-w Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1.

CBA: You were obviously submitting to Warren, and to…

Frank: Yeah, it’s a long and winding trail. Actually, I still have a 10-page story I’d done for Warren just out of high school, that was commissioned while he was on vacation, or out of town, or something. He saw it, and he rejected it. Then, I went to work for Web of Horror, they obviously liked my work. And the funny thing is—or not so funny—the way things worked out, Web ceased publication after three issues, and we all, Bernie Wrightson and Mike Kaluta and everybody had stories that were sitting on the shelf! So, I went out there to Long Island where Cracked magazine, the parent publisher, was located.

CBA: Robert Sproul?

Frank: Yes. I’ll tell you a little story about that—stories within stories. Sproul only allowed Web of Horror to be published because he wanted to keep Terry Bisson as editor of Cracked. Terry was preparing to leave unless he could start a horror magazine, so they allowed him to do Web. The guy had a good idea, because Warren’s books were going down the tubes really fast at that time, and Warren had lost all his original artists from the first 10 issues or so, and was just reprinting that stuff and some awful new art! So, it was a good time to get in, and Web was kind of popular. I sold my first story to Terry Bisson that I wrote and drew, called “Santa’s Claws.” I wrote it on a Christmas Eve, and it was about a vampire pretending to be Santa Claus. Terry bought that, and I thought, “Well, I’m off and running now!” Of course, like I said, three issues and Terry, for some reason or another, decided he was going to move to California and become a flower child. Immediately, Sproul cancelled the book, regardless of sales. Anyway, I went out to Long Island, I retrieved a lot of the artwork for a lot of the guys on my own, and then I heard through the grapevine that Warren was interested in hiring the artists from Web of Horror, so I went over to the office and I sold him a story that was originally intended for Web, and did some more stories for him.

CBA: Overall, how was your experience at Warren?

Frank: I remember one time I brought in a story, and there was a Fall 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

climactic scene where the monster is confronting this girl he’d been chasing, and Jim looked at the pencils and said, “You know, I’ll bet you $5 you can do this better.” He then took out his wallet and showed me a $5 bill, and I said, “Fine, you’re on,” because $5 actually meant something in those days. I went home, redid it, brought it in, and he said, “You know, I think you won the bet,” and he takes out his wallet and there’s nothing in it! Then he calls in his editor, who was Billy Graham at the time, and borrows the $5 from him to give to me!

CBA: I’ve heard he did that a lot to poor Billy.

Frank: I heard Jim did a lot worse things to people; sometimes if he didn’t like their artwork, he’d take out a stamp that said “Bullsh*t,” and he’d stamp it right over the artwork.

Basically Jim had a Hugh Hefner complex—except that he was no Hugh Hefner! That job was taken. At a convention, somebody overheard me calling him a bastard, and he confronted me with it. He said, “I heard you called me a ‘bastard!’” And here I am, sitting there trying to get work from him! I looked at him, and said, “I think I was misquoted!” At the same time, while I’m sitting there, he gets a phone call from Ralph Reese, and Ralph had just finished a job for him, and was bringing it downtown in a taxi; he was right outside the building, calling him to say

Above: Frank ‘s portrait of “The Doctor as I see him.” From After-Image. Below: Commission piece. Courtesy of the artist. Dr. Strange, Howard ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.

37

CBA Interview

Craig Russell’s Visual Poetry From Dr. Pym to Dr. Strange: Talking with PCR Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Sam Gafford Beginning as an assistant (of sorts) for Dan Adkins in the early ’70s, P. Craig Russell very quickly flowered as an artist during his stay at Marvel. His astonishingly sensitive work matured in dramatic fashion in those years, particularly as collaborator with writer Don McGregor on the series “Killraven.” [Please note that in this interview and the next—with McGregor—the terms “Killraven,” “War of the Worlds,” and “Amazing Adventures” are used interchangeably to describe the s-f series.] The artist was interviewed by phone on July 21, 1999 and he copy-edited the final transcript.

Below: Craig shared with us this treasured photo of Don McGregor (left) and the artist having a talk at a mid-’70s New York comic convention.

48

CBA: Let’s get right down to it: Craig, where are you from?

Craig: Wellsville, Ohio. Across from the tip of the panhandle of West Virginia.

CBA: When were you born?

Craig: October 30th, 1951.

CBA: When did your interest in comic books begin?

Craig: Oh, as a little kid. You know, we had the Walt Disney comics and the Harvey comics. You know, Casper and Hot Stuff—all that sort of thing. So I had little kid comics when I was a little kid, and then Archie comics when I was in elementary and junior high school. Then one day, I was at a friend’s house and he had #3-14 of Fantastic Four. (So this would have been about 1963, I suppose.) I sat down and started reading those and I was hooked big time!

CBA: Yeah? Were you familiar with Kirby’s work?

Craig: At the time, no, it was the stories!

And, of course, Kirby’s artwork but I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. I wasn’t sitting there and thinking, “What great artwork!” I was just reacting to it. It was about that time that I started becoming interested in the artists who drew the book and discerning styles; you know, detecting one from the other.

CBA: Were you drawing all this time in childhood?

Craig: Oh, yeah. Not obsessively, but it was certainly a pastime that I enjoyed. It seemed that from third grade on, I was always the kid in the class that could draw and I always got a lot of attention. That’s real positive enforcement for a kid.

CBA: Did you do comic strips and stories as a kid?

Craig: No. At the time I

started working for Marvel Comics I had done maybe two dozen comic pages, tops. I did one story in college. I did a story for my brother for Christmas once while I was in high school about the place where he worked, and a couple of things that I would start and never finish; then my six-page portfolio application for Marvel. So two or three dozen pages, I suppose.

CBA: In one of the interviews you did with Comics Journal, you mentioned Dr. Seuss as an influence?

Craig: Oh, definitely. I think that still comes out in my work from time to time. I responded to pictures from an early age whether through Disney animation or Dr. Seuss or Carl Barks. All of those things had a real effect. But, yes, Seuss was one of the first ones where I was really affected by the drawings, really drawn in and emotionally affected by them.

CBA: Was it the whimsy, the fantasy element that turned you on?

Craig: Well, yeah. There’s an emotional sense to his work. The stories I first read were… what is it? The 500 Hats of Batholomew Cubbins and Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Those drawings so perfectly captured that feeling—that fantasy dreamlike feeling. It drew you into the story in a way that realistic drawings couldn’t do.

CBA: Did you clue into fairy tales with the intensity that you ultimately showed them?

Craig: Ah, I read some fairy tales when I was a kid but I didn’t have any big collections of them or anything. I didn’t have that many children’s books. I certainly have a lot more children's books now than I did then! We had the little Golden Books but not very many fairy tales.

CBA: Were you increasingly becoming obsessed with art as you were going through adolescence?

Craig: In spurts.

For days on end I would produce drawings and then I would forget it for a few months and then I’d play the piano obsessively or I’d read

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Fall 1999

obsessively. It went from one interest to another but I always came back to drawing. By high school, it was a fairly constant thing. I was the class artist—the guy who drew backdrops for the band concert or did drawings for the school newspaper and the yearbook, and designed the sets for class plays, did banners for pep rallies, that sort of thing. So it was a real practical kind of application. Not much fantasy involved unless there was a fantasy element to the backdrop painting for the prom or whatever. So I was constantly involved that way.

CBA: When did you realize that you can actually make a living doing this? Were you conscious that you could actually get a job?

Craig: Well, when I got a job at Marvel!

CBA: [laughs] When it happened?

Craig: [laughs] Yeah, when it happened. Exactly. Even then, I figured I would be living in near poverty all my life! At that point I was so slow! I never had much facility. There are certain restrictions, of course, in comics that you have to draw certain pictures, you know, to connect the dots that you wouldn’t draw otherwise. Before that, I would only draw pictures that interested me. Not every single picture in an Ant-Man story really, really interested me. But you have to do them! For the first time in my life I was being disciplined to produce material that I would not do otherwise. And that’s good for training.

You really stretch yourself. If you don’t, you just tend to repeat yourself over and over again, although you might become very good at it!

CBA: What kind of challenges did you have in art school?

Craig: Well, I went to the University of Cincinnati and got a degree in painting. The tone of the school was certainly very antiillustration or any kind of representational drawing. Most of my teachers came out of the ’50s movement of abstract-expressionism.

Not all of them but certainly most of them and they discouraged any study of anatomy which plagues me to this day! So I got very little training for aspects of drawing or draftsmanship which I could apply to comics. But I did get a lot of exposure to elements of drawing such as design and shape, the use of color, that people don’t get who go directly into comics with no formal training.

CBA: And when did you first meet Dan Adkins?

Craig: I was, I think, a sophomore in college, so I was about 18 or 19. He lived just outside of East Liverpool, Ohio. He’s from the same area as me. My dad had met him after hearing about this artist that lived out there and he needed some artwork for a sign or something— and he told Dan all about this son of his who had 5,000 comic books in the attic and Dan told him to tell me to come out and meet him sometime; which is what I did. Dan told me that if I would work with him that he could get me into Marvel Comics. I showed him my drawings. I didn’t take him up on it right away. I did another year in school and then took some time off in my junior year and started working with Dan. CBA: Were you familiar with his work?

Craig: Oh, sure. I knew he lived in the area. I found out when I was a junior in high school. In choir, there was a kid there who was his paperboy and he said, “Yeah, I know Dan Adkins, the guy who works for Marvel Comics”—and I was just amazed that these people lived somewhere where ordinary mortals could meet them! So, yeah, I knew his work in Warren comics and the amazing stories he did in Creepy and Eerie, and I knew it from the Adkins and Wood stories that he did as Wally’s assistant, and his time as an inker at Marvel.

CBA: Those “Dr. Strange” stories....

Craig: Right, right. The “Dr. Strange” stories he did.

CBA: Right. That’s outstanding stuff. What was he like?

Craig: [laughs] Oh, my! We could spend the whole interview telling Dan stories! Everyone has a Dan Adkins story. If you just met him for five minutes, you had a Dan Adkins story! Well, he certainly washed the stars out of my eyes as far as comic book artists being a race apart! [laughter] Although with Dan, he is a race apart! He was a unique individual, very down to earth.

CBA: He tended to swipe a lot.

Craig: Oh, yeah. Almost everything had its source someplace else.

That’s the way he was taught by Wally Wood. Woody swiped enormously but he had such panache and native ability that he turned it into Wally Wood. His inking was so strong, no matter who he inked, it looked like a Wally Wood story. He’d ink Kirby and it’d look like Fall 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Wally Wood! So he was really able to absorb the source material into his drawing. Dan’s influences sometimes could stand out a little bit more. But his inking style was so strong and when he was really at his peak, even though he was pulling images from all over the place, it had a veneer that gave it a consistency.

CBA: Did you think that was his greatest strength— his inking or technical facility?

Craig: Well, certainly technical facility, yeah.

Those Warren stories, every single one was an exercise, in a different inking technique. The wash story. The Zip-ATone story. The crosshatch story.

CBA: Did Dan always have a lot of assistants?

Craig: No. He went through a period there when he moved back from New York City, where he’d been for a number of years, and I was the first one that worked there with him in his studio, I think. Val Mayerik showed up a few months later and then there was another kid who showed up, Mark Cursy. His name showed up in the “Ant-Man” credits. He came for a little while. Then just about the time that I left to finish school, Paul Gulacy showed up. Dan never really considered us his assistants. We did very little assisting to him. He was sort of training us and sort of sponsoring us and acting as art director, you know, away from the Marvel office for us. He’d do thumbnail layouts to show us how to tell a story. When we did the pencils on the story, he’d show us what to redraw and correct.

CBA: Was he more of a teacher then?

Craig: Well, yeah!

CBA: What was he to get out of it?

Craig: Just the camaraderie. Here he is, stuck out back in East Liverpool, Ohio, and here comes somebody else who’s into comics.

You welcome them! You’re not exactly awash in members of your own profession out there—and he just enjoyed our company and having somebody else to talk to about comics. And he did have a dream there, for a while, of having a studio there that would turn out material. He would do layouts, we would pencil it, he would ink it. Didn’t really happen. I was there temporarily. I always knew that I wanted to go back to school. He had us all work on one Barry Smith Conan that Smith had done the layouts on and then Dan’s studio was supposed to do the finishes. Well, that was just a disaster! I read in that Smith interview that he’s never looked at it since for which I’m grateful! The way it worked out was that Dan had me do back-

Above: Detail from Craig’s splash page to Amazing Adventures #28, giving us a glimpse at the rapidly developing design sense of the artist.

Courtesy of Don McGregor.

Killraven ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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CBA Interview

McGregor’s Rage!

Our Interview (finally!) with Writer Donald Francis McG.

Right: The “Dandy One” in a mid-’70s photo taken at a New York comic convention.

Above: Billy Graham’s exquisite depiction of the Black Panther in this detail from Jungle Action #17. Courtesy of Don McGregor.

©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson When I was a kid, my favorite comic book writer was Don McGregor. Don’s stories, particularly the serials in Jungle Action and Amazing Adventures, were multi-layered, mature, and downright dense, packed with verbiage and some pretty high falutin’ vocabulary for kiddie funnybooks. They were just about the only comics I advocated for close friends to read.

Don’s a passionate guy who never spoke down to his readers, and I’m proud to call him my friend. We spoke via telephone in June 1998, and the transcript was copyedited by Don. Comic Book Artist: When did you first become interested in comic books?

Don McGregor: When I was about four or five years old, I was actually on my way to kindergarten, and I remember going into the neighborhood variety store up in West Warwick, Rhode Island. In those days, they used to hang comic books from the ceiling on wires, and I saw all those comics hanging up there, with all this color, with words and pictures. It was just this incredible treasure I wanted to explore immediately.

I can’t recall a time when I didn’t read, and it was because of comic books. In those days, they believed people shouldn’t read when they had the measles, thinking it would be a strain on the eyes or something like that. I got the measles and my mother read Dick Tracy to me, and having Dick Tracy read to you was just not the same as reading it yourself!

The first comic book I ever picked up was a Hopalong Cassidy comic book, #65. I was six, and my dad gave me a dime allowance, and I went up and bought that comic book. When Dad came home from work that night, he said, “What did you get with your allowance?” And I said, [excitedly] “I got a comic book!” and I held it up in front of him.

Dad said, “No son of mine’s going to read comic books!” The next week, I get my dime, and what do you know, next month’s Hopalong Cassidy had come out. I’m sure I did not know a thing about comics coming out on a monthly basis, or any other time frame. Well, without a moment’s hesitation, I was in there handing over my dime and marching out with Hoppy!

When my dad came home, he said, “What did you get this week?” I said, “I got another comic book!” [laughter] And that ended my allowance for a while. So, from a very, very early age I loved comic books. And even though I was only in first grade, no one read those

Hoppy comics to me. I was reading them. Don’t ask me how.

CBA: Did you gravitate towards any particular comics, aside from Hopalong Cassidy? Did you read the ECs, for instance?

Don: I was very fortunate when it came to comics. I had an uncle who was a real jerk; he often treated other people terribly, but you had to give him this: He had great taste in comic books. So when I would go to my grandmother’s house, she had the comics up in her attic, and I spent a lot of hours up there. He had a lot of the comics from the ’40s—Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, the old Daredevil Comics and the “Little Wise Guys” stuff, Military Comics with the Blackhawks—I mean, we’re talking about Superman going back to the teens! So, I had a lot of that stuff, and I tease my mom to this day that she convinced me to get rid of those comic books when I was about 13; I never would’ve had to worry about what happened at Marvel Comics in the mid-’70s if I had all those comic books, but that’s another story.

From the very beginning, I had a great deal of love—but not just for comics—I also really loved film and books. It wasn’t my intent to become a comic book writer, I wanted to be a writer, period. In the beginning, I was writing prose more than comics. Then, when I was about 16, I got ahold of my dad’s old 8mm Bolex camera, and I realized if I wrote the movie, and if I directed it, and I starred in it, I always won the fights! It didn’t matter if the people were six-foot-ten, and they would say, “But Don, I could kill you! I’d just pound you on top of your thick skull and lay you out on the ground.” And I’d say, “Yeah, yeah, but you see, in the script here, right here in black and white, it says [laughter] I win! So, here’s how we’re going to do it.” But better than that, you always got the girl!

This was definitely preferable to real life! And I thought, “I’m going to keep on doing this! This is great!” And I loved doing my own stunts, and did a lot of crazy ones.

When I finally got to do scenes with Alex Simmons, a few years later, we had a helluva time! There actually exists footage of Alex swinging an ax at my head, me ducking down below it, and it chucking into the tree over my head. Reason enough, for people who already consider me certifiable, to proclaim, “Ah ha! Here’s proof positive!” We didn’t have fake props! At that time, what the hell did we know about fake props? We hung off waterfalls, choking each other! Well, that’s a whole other area we could explore.

CBA: You didn’t pass on comic books at a certain age, like a lot of other kids did, when they’re 13 or 14, obviously, because you wrote letters to Marvel Comics.

Don: Well, there was a period when I got rid of my comic books when I was about 13, 14; yeah, I kind of did. I wrote about that transition time that faces all collectors in a Ragamuffins story, “The Pack Rat Instinct.” It was drawn beautifully by Gene Colan, and it was due to appear in a number of different Eclipse comics, but it never saw print. At the time, Dean Mullaney, the founder of Eclipse, said it brought tears to his eyes, and I had him hooked. I think anybody with that pack-rat instinct would relate. There wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house at the end of that story. But that artwork has been lost. I’ve been trying to track it down, I actually have my hand lettered copy placement with the art, but it isn’t clear enough to print, only good enough to show how beautiful those Gene Colan COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Fall 1999

Above: Another Rich Buckler pencil job, this one for the cover of Jungle Action #6, Don & Rich’s first issue depicting the Wakandan leader T’Challa.

Courtesy of Don McGregor.

Black Panther ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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were so supportive, because I certainly couldn’t have done it on my own. They were willing to put the time and effort into it—Danny Crespi was a beautiful man. For me, he and John Verpoorten often were Marvel Comics! But the downside of doing these pages was that I actually got some writers pissed off at me.

CBA: How so?

Don: From their point of view, I could understand what they were saying, although it didn’t change what I had to do. They said, “Don, you’re doing this stuff for Marvel for free, they’re going to expect us to be doing this kind of stuff.” The only thing I was concerned about was that Jungle Action book; that I could hold it in my hand and live with it, and 25 years later, if you’re asking me questions about it— even if I blew something—I could still say it was the best book I was capable of doing at the time, given the situation that existed. And if that “Lorna of the Jungle” stuff was in the back of Jungle Action, I just couldn’t have lived with it! I would’ve been in agony all the time, so I was always trying to find a way around it. Yet, some writers were really upset that I did it. But I said, “Whatever you guys do with your books is fine, it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m only concerned with trying to put out the best book I can put out. I’m not in competition with anybody, I just want to put out a book that I don’t feel embarrassed about.” I love comics, and I saw so much stuff festering in the comic book industry—the feeling that comic books were

a second-rate industry—and I didn’t feel that way. When it works, what an incredible business this is! You know, writing to me is just hard work, facing a blank sheet of paper and keeping it important day after day, month after month, year after year, keeping it important—but the time it really is exciting and fun to me is when the artwork comes in, an artist brings it to life, and suddenly it’s like I’m five years old again, and I’m that kid looking in that store window and seeing those comic books hanging up there! I’m saying comics can be anything; look at this, this is great! And I’ll go out and fight again.

CBA: You’ve still got that fight in you; you’re still a feisty guy.

Were you perceived as a difficult writer?

Don: I suppose that depends to whom you ask that question [laughs]. I think you have to take a look at the time those books were being done, and the reason they got to exist at all. Part of it was that there were so many different titles, one editor couldn’t hear every story pitch. (Later on, Marvel had a policy where writers had to send in a story synopsis, and they had a Junior Woodchuck squad go over every story before it ever got to an artist.) There wasn’t time to do that—the editor was just too busy coming up with covers or writing cover copy for the books, dealing with all the business people, or whatever. So the virtue of those books, is no one had anything to do with those books but me and the artists involved. Billy Graham had done only one book for Marvel. Craig Russell had only done one title for Marvel—when Marvel first put Craig on the “Killraven” book, it was because he had said in a fanzine interview critical comments about what Marvel had done to some of his artwork in a previous story. In those days, there weren’t a lot of comic fanzines, and to do that kind of thing carried a lot more weight than perhaps it would today, because you basically had only a few places to sell material to. So, Craig wasn’t on anybody’s high list at that particular time! Now, that changed, because once he was doing the “Killraven” book—and everyone could see Craig’s astounding, rapid growth as an artist, from book to book; then they wanted him off the book!

CBA: They wanted him on other stuff?

Don: Another writer wanted him, and they were saying, “You shouldn’t be wasting him on “Killraven”!” But thank God for Craig! He was very loyal and stayed with the book and it was a wonderful working experience. I had wonderful people like Billy Graham and Craig to work with on those books, and that part of it, along with the support from the readers, was the upside part of that time period as a storyteller.

CBA: How did you get pulled into “War of the Worlds”?

Because it was obviously going through so many creative teams?

Don: Exactly. They were kind of ready to write it off, and I guess they figured, as I said earlier, “Well, we can give it to Don, and when it dies, we can tell him we gave him a chance to write.” I don’t think they expected those titles to get as much response from the readers as they did. Initially, when I started to do that book, I felt when they gave it to me, this will kind of be my “comic book” comic book. I was putting so much into “Black Panther,” I didn’t figure I could possibly find time to put as much time into “Killraven,” and of course, it immediately grew, with those characters. It became more complex.

CBA: Do they really take on a life of their own, out of your control?

Don: Yeah, in many ways.

CBA: I remember some fantasy sequences with Old Skull and the Disney cute animal characters! It was juxtaposed with such violence.

Your work has a lot of anger and violence; a lot of rage.

Don: Because it exists in the world; there’s also a lot of humor and a lot of sex! These things exist! What gets to me is they’re continuing to say, “Well, we don’t want you writing about this stuff!” I say, “Why do you want to ignore all the stuff we should be exploring as human beings and as writers?”

CBA: You said that you started writing Killraven as a “comic book” story, and you really ended up writing a complex, fleshed-out story about characters.

Don: Well, “Killraven” just kept growing in depth, and the idea of what we could do, and then, when I started working with Craig, especially, then the possibilities just seemed endless, so it just kept COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Fall 1999

What If Dept.

The Prisoner That Never Was A Look at Marvel’s Aborted Prisoner Comic Series

by Tom Stewart Below: Page 5, the title page, of Gil Kane’s pencils to Marvel’s unused adaptation of The Prisoner.

Layouts by Joe Staton. Courtesy of David “Hambone” Hamilton.

Art ©1999 Gil Kane. The Prisoner ©1999 ITC Entertainment, Inc.

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His face clouds. His speech becomes clipped, the words bit off and spat at the viewer: “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered! My life is my own!” With that, the man known only as Number Six, turns and stalks toward the door. He doesn’t know where he is, where he’s going or how he’ll get there; all he knows is he has to get out.

Thus begins one of the strangest—and most frustrating—series ever broadcast by commercial TV, Patrick McGoohan's’ The Prisoner.

Conceived in 1967 by McGoohan and script editor George Markstein for British television, as an allegory on modern society, politics and the Vietnam war, The Prisoner’s 17 episodes hit the US airwaves in 1968, as a Summer replacement for The Jackie Gleason Show. I suspect that CBS and the viewing audience thought they were about to see a continuation of McGoohan’s previous series, Secret Agent. They were wrong. (Some claim that it was a continuation of Secret Agent, something McGoohan has always denied—but that’s another article).

In the first episode, we see Number Six angrily resign from an obviously top secret job (a running theme is how pissed Number Six is throughout the series. He does everything angrily), go home and start packing for a trip to a warmer climate. Unknown to him, he is followed, kidnapped, and awakes again in his own apartment... or so it appears. (First lesson of The Prisoner: Nothing is as it seems.)

When the blinds are drawn, he finds not the streets of London, but the strange, jumbled Mediterranean architecture of “The Village,” his prison for the next 16 episodes.

Number Six finds he can only make local calls, local taxi rides, and get local newspapers. He is summoned to the “Green Dome” by the apparent head honcho, Number Two, who asks the biggest question of the show—the reason why Number Six is held in the Village—“Why did you resign?” Number Six makes a speech (orations are another hallmark of the series), and storms out. He tries to escape, but is caught by the security system—a huge white ball called a Rover. Number Six is foiled for now, but time is on his side, and there is always tomorrow….

The series is basically a psychological cat-and-mouse game between Number Six and the forces of the ever-changing Number Two (and that’s getting into the realm of over-simplification). Number Six is a life-force, a caged animal, pacing back and forth, waiting for the moment to strike out and win his freedom. Number Two is his keeper and chief tormentor—but who is the real prisoner?

The show played out its U.S. run on CBS in 1968, was repeated in the Summer of 1969, then was gone—but hardly forgotten. It has enjoyed a cult following that continues to this day (it’s said McGoohan is very tired of Prisoner questions). In the ’70s, during a spate of other TV and movie adaptations, Marvel Comics bought the rights to do a comic book adaptation of the series, prodded by writer Marv Wolfman, who said, “I was a major fan of the series. I thought it’d be a wonderful comic to do.”

Marvel obtained copies of the original TV scripts—some with McGoohan's’ own handwritten changes—and work was started with Wolfman in place as writer. It was then Marv had to bow out.

Marv explained, “I would have loved to have written it myself, but when I became editor-in-chief I never believed I should do things like that… assign it to myself.” The script assignment then went to Steve Englehart, another Prisoner fan (see Steve’s sidebar article for details of his involvement). Art chores went to Gil Kane. The artist turned in his 17 pages, and Englehart hurriedly scripted them… ...and they were filed away.

Unhappy with the first effort, publisher Stan Lee brought in his old collaborator Jack Kirby for another try. Kirby was a master storyteller, and, at the time, was adapting Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for Marvel. If the King could put that movie of ideas into comics form, why should The Prisoner be a problem? The feeling COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Fall 1999

Deep Background

Secret Origins of the Direct Market Part One: “Affidavit Returns”—The Scourge of Distribution

by Robert L. Beerbohm

Prologue Right: Carmine Infantino at the 1971 Disneyland Convention.

Vincent Davis photo from Graphic Story World #2, July 1971, Richard Kyle, editor.

Below: Neal Adams sketch depicting the attitudes of a certain Cimmerian and his water fowl friend about big shot magazine distributors. This mid-’70s drawing was done for… well, we’re not sure! Art ©1999 Neal Adams.

Conan ©1999 Conan Properties.

Howard the Duck ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Carmine Infantino, the distinguished artist turned editorial director of DC Comics (1968-72) and then publisher (1972-76), made some pretty definitive statements in the recent past regarding the rationale behind canceling certain comic book titles before the advent of the direct sales market. Interviewed in Comic Book Artist #1, asked why he cancelled certain books, Infantino explained, “Bad sales. What most people don’t realize is that we had to be concerned for distributors. [Independent News Distributors was] part of our company… They came to us and told us that these books, after a certain point, started to lose money and we should consider dropping them. That didn’t only go for Jack [Kirby]’s books but some other titles as well. It’s a business!” In a letter to the Comic Buyer’s Guide #1128, Infantino wrote: “No publisher in his right mind would ever drop a profitable publication… Those decisions are dictated by the distributor on [the basis of] actual sales figures.”

It may be Infantino has been unfairly maligned for years by factions within comics fandom who believe politics play a bigger role in these cancellations than simple business information. With this article (excerpted in part from my forthcoming book on the history of the comics business), I hope to shed light on these points and provide context for a policy that, in hindsight, was fundamentally

flawed.

Distributor sales figures supplied to Infantino by Independent News were often probably 80

inaccurate and, with increasing regularity, possibly fraudulent. The publisher was doing what he was hired to do, and deserves substantial credit for a new, innovative era of creativity at DC, even when some may disagree with some of his judgment.

It was the growing frustration by the New York City-based comics publishers who, upon discovering the extent of the fraud, led them to participate in the creation of the direct sales market a quarter century ago.

Please bear with me as it is not an easy tale to tell. I have included a personal and anecdotal perspective to add a human element to this tale. There were many levels at play, and I apologize in advance if some of these concepts are difficult to follow in this, an abbreviated portion of my forthcoming book.

There is no doubt in my mind that Infantino, whom I respect a great deal, believes the decisions regarding the fate of Kirby’s Fourth World and other critically-acclaimed series of the early ’70s were, in fact, based on sales figures; however, as we will see, those figures were highly suspect at best, and most likely entirely bogus. It is important to note again that Infantino was referring to sales figures supplied to him by Independent News—wholly-owned by DC Comics—which serviced an independent distributor (hereafter, “ID”) market consisting of over 900 independently-owned wholesalers covering often small geographic areas. Evidence suggests many IDs suffered from widespread fraud—a situation that directly led to the direct sales market as we know it today.

Current publisher of DC Comics, Paul Levitz, wrote to me, “It’s possible the extreme fan interest in some of the late ’60s/early ’70s titles actually worked against their success and even survival in two ways: 1) for new launches, the enthusiastic fan purchases may have boosted the apparent ID sell-through of first issues in a way that made publishers overprint subsequent issues, pushing down sellthrough and ultimately hurting the titles and, 2) because fan sales were often “cash table,” they were the most likely sales to be unreported through the distribution system—and therefore the more fan sales, the lower apparent net sales.

“It’s hard to envision a scenario in which Carmine—or any contemporaneous exec—could have spotted these problems and adjusted their thinking for it,” continued Levitz. “So if they’re valid scenarios in large enough numbers (and that’s where I question your logic—a typical launch issue had a 300,000 or more print order in that period, so you would need 30,000 copies or more of fan sales to have a meaningful effect—probably a fair number on a few launches, but not on many) it might explain some of the behaviors.”

Infantino told me, “I started Kirby’s books—New Gods, Forever People, Mr. Miracle—out at 350,000 copies on their first issues. The COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Fall 1999

Drops in the market had occurred before, but in the 1960s-’70s there was a new element that had devastating effects on the creative output of the industry. That new element was a growing combination of greed and fraud.

Many unscrupulous local ID distributors, fueled by the demand by comic book dealers for certain issues, abused the old “consignment” system. The system was a century old and, by the late ’60s, fraud was rampant. It was known to some that the Mafia had infiltrated the magazine distribution business.

This combination of greed and dishonesty led many local distributors to report A Couple of Fandom Myths certain issues by the more In the Comics Buyer’s Guide, Peter David popular artists destroyed was pretty much on the mark when writing in his that had instead been sold IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, column, “It was the advent of Phil Seuling and the in large lots to local entreCLICK THE LINK TOpreneurs ORDERviaTHIS direct market that pretty much saved the [mainthe ID’s back ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT! stream] comics industry.” However, David goes door. The accounting on, “Suddenly, comic books became high-profit method was known as items for the publishers because they could print exactly what was “affidavit returns” (where distributors sign an needed to sell [the print run].” affidavit stating unsold copies were destroyed).

That latter assertion needs to be qualified. In truth, David’s Bestsellers Go Belly-Up “suddenly” took almost 10 years of hard labor beginning with less Neal Adams is one of the single most than 500 or so loosely organized, highly-dedicated comics fansimportant pioneers in the last 30 years who turned-retailers. More than 20 years ago, the few of us who opened the first comic book stores expanded the distribution method for fought the backward practices of the comics industry and underground comix. Undergrounds were published by alternative and ended up with more arrows in his back than darn near anybody else out there. He is to be revered for what his highly-independent creative people who took the fan movement of contributions to the comics field beginning in the the 1960s to a new level of achievement. late ’60s—and then for many years. Adams, In another recent issue artist/co-creator of the critically-acclaimed Green of CBG, publisher William Lantern/Green Arrow series, discussed the sad tale Tucci announced a “new” of fraudulent accounting print-to-order policy for his COMIC BOOK ARTIST #6 in his Comic Book Marketplace books and posited this on #40 interview.

When interviewer Arlen Schumer asked, Unpublished and rarely-seen art by, features on, and interviews with 1970s Bullpenners PAUL GULACY, P. “Why wasFRANK GreenBRUNNER, Lantern/Green Arrow cancelled?” Neal comics history: “Speculating CRAIG RUSSELL, MARIE and JOHN SEVERIN, JOHN ROMITA replied, “…Because it wasn’t selling. Before the age of the on comics makes for an unstaSR., DAVE COCKRUM, DON MCGREGOR, DOUG MOENCH, and others! Plus never-before-seen to an unpubcomicpencil bookpages store [i.e., the direct sales market], [certain] ble marketplace for retailers lished Master of Kung-Fu graphic novel by PAUL GULACY! dealers became aware that they could go and publishers. The direct marCover by FRANK BRUNNER! to their local distributor and buy ket was founded on the basis (80-page Digital Edition) $3.95 http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_56&products_id=273 quantities of particular comic of retailers knowing what they books. As a comic book might need to order and publishers become more popular, like knowing what they need to print. The industry has gotten ‘Deadman’ or GL/GA, they could go away from that in the last few and buy as many as they wanted, years…. ” and the local distributor would report To those who came in late, them as being ‘destroyed.’ Suddenly these remarks by an alternative GL/GA [was] not only not selling, but publisher of today may carry consales [were] even dropping a little! So viction, but they are ultimately anything you would think was making based on inbred misunderstandings a splash, wasn’t making a splash. of the origin and development of GL/GA got all kinds of attention, articles the direct sales market. To the extent that we in Newsweek, articles everywhere. acknowledge the late Phil Seuling as one of the Everybody in the industry knew about founders of the direct market, Tucci’s remarks this. Yet it didn’t sell.” are revisionist. Seuling was one of a number Infantino told me, “In the beginof early advocates of speculation. He taught ning, GL/GA was doing well. I was going others how to gamble on comics for the around the country doing radio interviews, express purpose of supplying still other specTV shows. GL/GA #76 did exceptionally ulators and dealers with the necessary tools well. and means of making a comfortable living. Any conception that “It was only in the #80s when the the direct sales comic book market was not about speculation is serireported sales began to fall,” continued ously flawed. This will become obvious as we trace the history of the Infantino. “I only went around [to regional distributors] with the very market since the late ’60s. early issues. Then it began to die. We found out then that first issues first issues [were reported by Independent News as] selling 50-51%.

The second [issue] did 44%, the third 42%, and so on—their sales reports were coming in and going down fast. [The Kirby titles] were really collapsing like hell and, by the fifth and sixth issues, the people upstairs began to get on my back going, ‘Hey, we’re losing money here.’

“There was a phenomenon going on I noticed back then,” Infantino continued. “We would… print 675,000 [copies of a Superman issue] and get a minimum of 58% sell-through; yet we would put Jack’s books out and get 4042% sales. In the past, I have been accused of having two sets of books on Kirby’s titles; that I kept one set for me and one set I handed to DC. This is absurd. Independent News [and] the DC accountant would come in, [and] we would then go over the numbers. I had nothing to do with getting the numbers, you understand? That’s how we had to operate; that’s the only way we could operate.”

Fall 1999

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6

Above: Jack Kirby’s extraordinary Fourth World titles whose fate is still hotly debated in fan circles. ©1999 DC Comics. Above left: Jack Kirby at the same Disneyland Convention. Photo by Vincent Davis. Reprinted from Graphic Story World #2, July 1971, Richard Kyle, editor. Left: The controversial Green Lantern/Green Arrow run by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams— victim of affidavit return fraud? ©1999 DC Comics. Below: Neal Adams at a mid-’70s comic convention.

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