Comic Book Artist Special Edition #2

COMPILING BONUS MATERIAL FROM ALL 3 COLLECTIONS!

E D I T I O N

# 2

Batman TM & ©2013 DC Comics, Inc.

S P E C I A L

KIRBY • WEISS • WRIGHTSON • JONES • ENGLEHART & ROGERS • SIMONSON • GULACY

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

C O N T E N T S CBA #1-3 COVER GALLERY! Devoid of logos, here’s the exquisite Neal Adams and Gil Kane cover art in glorious full color! ..............................................2 ALAN WEISS INTERVIEW: “THAT KID FROM OUT WEST!” The artist discusses his days at DC and Marvel with tons of incredible artwork! ......................................................................6 “DEDICATED NURSE!” PAGES FROM AN UNPUBLISHED JACK KIRBY ‘SOUL LOVE’ STORY The greatest super-hero comics artist of all time give us the 411 on black romance in this unpubbed story ..........................24 “BEDAZZLED!” PAGES FROM A LOST JEFFREY JONES STORY Pages from an unfinished House of Secrets story, penciled and partially inked by the splendid Jeff Jones! ............................30 BERNIE WRIGHTSON MINI-PORTFOLIO Unpublished Wrightson drawings ............................................................................................................................................36 SPECIAL SECTION! THE STORY BEHIND THE ENGLEHART/ROGERS/AUSTIN/WORKMAN/SCHWARTZ BATMAN! STEVE ENGLEHART INTERVIEW: GETTING BACK TO BASICS The noted scribe discusses his legendary 1970s run and the essence of the Darknight Detective ............................................38 MORE STEVE ENGLEHART: THE ENGLEHART OUTTAKES Excised from his CBA #18 interview, here we feature the writer’s comments on his background and philosophy ..................46 WALTER SIMONSON INTERVIEW: PRELUDE—DR. PHOSPHOROUS A candid recollection of his short Batman stint with collaborators Englehart and Milgrom by the remarkable artist ..............52 ALLEN MILGROM INTERVIEW: BREAKDOWNS AND THE BATMAN The artist/editor on his two-issue inking assignment over Simonson and working with the Rogers/Austin team ....................55 MARSHALL ROGERS INTERVIEW: THE RISE OF MARSHALL ROGERS Remembering his breakthrough on the Batman, the artist also looks back on his career in comics..........................................58 TERRY AUSTIN INTERVIEW: THE ARTISTRY OF TERRY AUSTIN The sublime inker recalls his early days in comics and the bittersweet Batman assignment ....................................................68 JOHN WORKMAN INTERVIEW: SIGN OF THE BAT Memories of retro look on the fondly recalled Detective Comics story arc by the renowned artist/letterer/editor..................76 BONUS! A LOOK AT DC’S CANCELLED COMICS CAVALCADE Courtesy of Bill Alger and Michael Grabois, we take a gander at the legendary, ultra-rare compilation from the 1970s ........79 PAUL GULACY ART GALLERY Courtesy of the artist and Numero Uno Gulacy fan Dave Lemieux ....................................................................................................88 THE MIGHTY MARVEL VALUE STAMP STORY Forget those S&H green stamps and inverted Jennys! Rob Anderson uncovers the real ’70s happenin’ hobby ..................................92 KILLRAVEN OF THE APES! British Marvel’s weird morphing of “War of the Worlds” with Planet of the Apes is examined by Rob Kirby ..................................98 JAY LYNCH & COMIX BOOK The veteran underground cartoonist on why he chose not to work on the Marvel black-&-white comix mag ................................109 MR. MONSTER SCRAPBOOK GHOULISHLY GLORIOUS GALLERY Way cool look at awesome oddities ’n’ delights from Michael T. Gilbert’s vault of eerie esoterica..................................................110 SOLVING THE HOSTESS TWINKIE MYSTERY WITH BOB ROZAKIS Seanbaby conducts a riotous (albeit brief) interview with the writer on those strange snack cake ads ............................................116 COMIC BOOK ARTIST Special Edition Two ©2013 Jon B. Cooke & TwoMorrows Publishing Jon B. Cooke, Editor and Designer • John Morrow, Publisher

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, 919-449-0344 E-Mail: twomorrow@aol.com, Web: www.twomorrows.com Digital Edition published April 2013, compiling the new material from Comic Book Artist Collection, Volumes 1-3 COPYRIGHTS: Abel, Adam Strange, Anthro, Aquaman, Atomic Knights, Bat Lash, Batgirl, Batman, Big Barda, Black Canary, Blackhawk, Blue Beetle, Brother Power the Geek, Cain, Calculator, Captain Fear, Captain Marvel, Challengers of the Unknown, Clayface, Deadman, Deadshot, Deserter, Doom Patrol, Dr. Phosphorus, Enemy Ace, Flash, Funky Flashman, Granny Goodness, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Harley Quinn, Hawkman, Hugo Strange, Inferior Five, Jimmy Olsen, Joker, Jonah Hex, Justice League of America, Kamandi, Kid Flash, Mad Hatter, Manhunter, Metamorpho, Mr. Miracle, Odd Man, OMAC, Penguin, Phantom Stranger, Prez, Robin, Sandman, Sarge Steel, Sgt. Rock, Shade, Shazam, Silver St. Cloud, Stanley and His Monster, Steel, Streaky the Super-Cat, Superboy, Supergirl, Superman, Swamp Thing, Teen Titans, The Creeper, The Legion of Super-Heroes, Tomahawk, Tommy Tomorrow, Vixen, Warlord , Wonder Woman ™&©2013 DC Comics. • Absorbing Man, Ancient One, Angel, Ant-Man, Apeslayer, Avengers, Balder, Baron Mordo, Beast, Black Bolt, Black Knight, Black Panther, Black Widow, Brother Voodoo, Bucky, Bucky Barnes, Byrrah, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Carrion, Clea, Cyclops, Daredevil, Deathlok, Doctor Strange, Dominic Fortune, Dormammu, Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, Dragon Man, Electro, Enchantress, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Femizons, Galactus, General Ross, Ghost Rider, Gladiator, Glob, Golem, Goliath, Green Goblin, Grey Gargoyle, Grim Reaper, Gwen Stacey, Hammerhead, Havok, Hawkeye, Hela, Hercules, Howard the Duck, Hulk, Human Torch, Iceman, Invisible Girl, Iron Fist, Iron Man, J. Jonah Jameson, Ka-Zar, Kang, Killraven, Kingpin, Kraven, Leader, Lilith, Living Mummy, Lizard, Loki, Magneto, Man-Thing, Man-Wolf, Mandarin, Mantis, Marvel Girl, Mary Jane Watson, Master of Kung Fu, Medusa, Mephisto, Modok, Mole Man, Molecule Man, Moon Knight, Morbius, Mr. Fantastic, Ms. Marvel, Mysterio, Nick Fury, Nightcrawler, Odin, Omega the Unknown, Owl, Plunderer, Power Man, Professor X, Prowler, Puppet Master, Quicksilver, Rawhide Kid, Red Ghost, Red Guardian, Red Raven, Red Skull, Rhino, Rick Jones, Sandman, Sauron, Sgt. Fury, Shang-Chi, Shanna the She-Devil, SHIELD, Sif, Silver Surfer, Simon Garth, Son of Satan, Spider-Man, Starhawk, Stranger, Sub-Mariner, Super-Skrull, Swordsman, Thing, Thor, Tomb of Dracula, Triton, Vision, Volstagg, Vulture, War of the Worlds, Warlock, Warriors of the Shadow Realm, Wasp, Watcher, Werewolf by Night, Wolverine, X-Men , Zemo, Zombie ™&©2013 Marvel Characters Inc. • American Flagg!, Time2 ©2013 Howard V. Chaykin Inc. • Bizarre Heroes, Border Worlds, Megaton Man, Ms. Megaton Man, Pteranoman ©2013 Don Simpson. • Cap'n Quick and the Foozle, Dalgoda, Demonslayer, Djinn, The Dog and Pup, Elvira, Evangeline, Harold Hedd, Kiss, Kung Fu, Nightingale, Quark, Steve Canyon, Thundercats, Vanity ©2013 the respective copyright holders. • Captain Action ™&©2013 the respective copyright holder. • Conan, Kull, Red Sonja ™&©2013 Conan Properties. • Detectives Inc. ©2013 Donald Francis McGregor. • Donald Duck ©2013 Walt Disney Inc. • Dynamo ©2013 John Carbonaro. • Eerie, Creepy ©2013 Warren Publishing Inc. • Elric ©2013 Michael Moorcock. • Forever Warriors ©2013 Richard Buckler Sr. • Fu Manchu ©2013 the Sax Rohmer Estate. • Goodman Beaver ©2013 Harvey Kurtzman Estate. • Groo ™&©2013 Sergio Aragonés. • Heathcliff ™&©2013 Creators Syndicate. • Hot Wheels ©2013 Mattel. • Indiana Jones, Star Wars ©2013 Lucasfilm. • Inkspots, Kelly, Mary Monster, Mr. Monster, The Reflection, The Wraith ©2013 Michael T. Gilbert. • John Carter ™&©2013 Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. • Johnny Hazard ™&©2013 King Features Syndicate. • Linus ™&©2013 United Features Syndicate. • Mandro the Barbarian ™&©2013 Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith. • Maus ©2013 Art Spiegelman. • Nero Wolfe ™&©2013 Columbia Features.

• Nevada ©2013 Steve Gerber. • Nexus, Origami ©2013 Mike Baron & Steve Rude. • Pictopia ©2013 Alan Moore & Don Simpson. • Planet of the Apes ™&©2013 20th Century Fox Film Corp. • Rune ™&©2013 Barry Windsor-Smith.

• Sable ©2013 Mike Grell. • Space Ghost ©2013 Hanna-Barbera Inc. • Tales of the Green Beret ©2013 Tribune Media Services. • Tarzan ©2013 Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. • The Fly ©2013 Archie Publications Inc. • The Prisoner ™&©2013 ITV. • The Rook ©2013 William DuBay. • The Shadow ™&©2013 Condé Nast. • The Spirit ©2013 Will Eisner Estate. • Too Much Coffee Man ©2013 Shannon Wheeler. • Understanding Comics, Zot! ©2013 Scott McCloud.

• Vampirella ©2013 Harris Publications Inc.

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CBA Collection Extra!

“That Kid from Out West!”

Alan Weiss talks about his rootin’, tootin’ times in ’70s comics Right inset: From a tribute to Jack Abel, here’s a Weiss panel featuring young Alan and his brother Howard reading comics. The onepage strip will be featured in TwoMorrow’s autobiographical anthology, Streetwise. Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Alan Weiss.

Below: Courtesy of the artist, here’s Alan Weiss ready to saddle-up in a recent photo.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson We’re including an interview with Alan Weiss because, for one thing, he’s one of those few artists from the ’70s who was perfectly at home drawing for the Big Two, DC Comics and Marvel—or at Warren, National Lampoon, Esquire, and Atlas/Seaboard, for that matter!—and for another, we think his artwork is simply superb. As enthusiastic today about comics as when he first entered the field in 1970 or so, Alan proves to be a highly entertaining interview, giving insight to some legendary stories of the past and enriching us with ones previously unheard. The artist was interviewed via phone on March 9, 2000, and he copyedited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: There’s very little on you written in the historical record.

Alan Weiss: I’m that mysterious, “Who the hell is he?” guy.

CBA: I think you first appeared rather early in Silver Age fandom, in the letter column of Fantastic Four #3.

Alan: I was there. I didn’t know who the artist of FF was at the time, and I think that’s what the letter was about. Remember, they didn’t credit the jobs quite yet, and I was commenting on the very first issue. “I think your book will be very successful.” Stan wrote something like, “What do you think we are now, chopped liver?” [laughs] They’d just come out of being Atlas Comics. I thought it was pretty brash for them to be calling FF “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine.” [laughs] “Yeah, prove it, sucker—where’s your cape?” [laughter] CBA: You were born in Las Vegas?

Alan: No, Chicago, but from age seven on, I lived in Las Vegas.

CBA: Remember your first comics?

Alan: Soon after I got to Vegas. There are some earlier, vague memories of looking at a Lone Ranger comic book, or perhaps Superman, because I used to watch him on TV, and I must have started drawing even that early.

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CBA: Your brother Howard is older or younger?

Alan: Younger.

CBA: Did you both draw together?

Alan: Yeah, we did. I have another brother, Curtis, who’s younger than Howard, but it was mostly Howard and I that drew together.

My dad, while never a professional, was a hell of an artist and a fine painter, and he knew a lot. He directed us in terms of the fundamentals, the basics. One time, he drove us out to the local newspaper, and we got the end of a giant roll of newsprint, right off the machines, because when they got to the end, they couldn’t use them anymore, but it was enough paper for us for three years. I’d made the decision relatively early that I wanted to have my own style, and the way to do that was to learn real anatomy rather than just drawing versions of other people’s drawings, so that’s what we did.

Fortunately, this was before I discovered girls, or else I never would’ve put in the work, I’ll tell you that right now.

CBA: [laughs] So, did you seek out the Bridgeman and Burne Hogarth anatomy books?

Alan: You bet. Bridgeman, Loomis, Hogarth, and just about everyone else. We learned the Latin names for the muscles really early on, long before I took any courses in anatomy, and certainly before I did any life drawing.

CBA: Was your ultimate goal to do super-hero comics, per se?

Alan: Yeah, sure! Well, certainly comics. Super-heroes were my favorite thing, but I liked all different kinds of genres. Give me sword-&-sorcery or the Hercules comics being done at the time.

I was following the movies, and even then, I always liked cowboy movies and Western stuff.

CBA: You were introduced to fandom through the letter pages?

Alan: Yeah, I saw the letter from Roy Thomas in Justice League of America that mentioned Alter-Ego, and they printed the address, so I sent for it. That was the beginning in finding this whole other weird world by mail. I did a lot of fanzine work in those days, and that’s how I discovered the old characters, as I’d never seen any of the ’40s comics at all. It was a real delight that at the exact same time, some of the old heroes were coming back into the Marvel books. I was learning about their previous history in the ’40s, like my favorite, Sub-Mariner, and Captain America, of course. My uncle used to tell me about reading those books when he was a kid.

CBA: What was it about Sub-Mariner?

Alan: I missed the fourth issue of FF with Namor’s revival, and I was frantic to get hold of it. So, I wrote to Marvel—because I was just a little kid, and I didn’t know what they did and didn’t do—and asked, “Do you guys have any extra books, because I sure want one, and I’d be glad to pay for it.” Well, the very day I bought the fifth

issue, FF #4 arrived in the mail from Flo Steinberg, with a little note that said, “Here you go—we happened to have an extra, but don’t worry about it.” So, I got to read them back-to-back, “The SubMariner Returns” plus Subby’s team-up with Dr. Doom, and that was it for me. I was gone! Those two issues blew my mind, and I loved that artwork—and there’s something about Subby… I mean, he is such an absurd idea in so many ways, a guy dressed in a swimsuit. But he had a kind of alien nobility about him, an elfinlooking eeriness, with that weird head and the eyebrows, pointy ears, and really, the stupid idea of the wings on his feet… stupid, but cool, like comic books are supposed to be! [laughter] I have this concept that I haven’t been able to do in print yet about how he can fly with those little, tiny wings… it’s a real great pseudo-scientific explanation… but if you go by straight physics, I don’t think so. [laughter] CBA: Did you seek out the Golden Age issues?

Alan: I did eventually send for a few of the earlier issues from the guys who were hawking old comics at the time. I ended up getting some of the ones from the ’50s.

CBA: The Bill Everetts?

Alan: Yeah, actually that was some of Everett’s best work. In fact, I think it was some of John Romita’s best work on Captain America, too, when John was doing nice, tall figures. Those books were really special. At the same time, I found a couple of Mac Raboy Captain Marvel, Jr.s—Raboy’s right out of Alex Raymond, and that was my favorite stuff. Fortunately, my father encouraged me. He was more into fine arts, but he wasn’t a snob, so he loved good animation and illustration, and he certainly loved Prince Valiant and The Spirit. He remembered The Spirit from the newspaper insert, the cinematic quality of it. It was great to have a father that well-rounded.

CBA: Was your father from Chicago?

Alan: He was originally from New York, and then lived in Chicago for many years before going out to Las Vegas. He worked at various jobs in the gaming industry; but my grandfather—his father—had been a gambler always, back to the old speakeasy days in New York and Chicago. “Silent Max” had the connections, so he was there when Vegas was first starting up. Casinos used to hire him to not only shill, but also to keep an eye on everybody else, because he could spot the cheaters. It was just kind of a cool thing. So, both my father and his brother followed him out to Vegas. I was real sick as a kid, with very bad asthma, so they thought it would be a good idea for us to be in a warm, dry climate.

CBA: Was growing up in Las Vegas like one would imagine—provocative?

Alan: I don’t know if it’s like what you’d imagine! “Nobody lives there, do they?” [laughter] You know, we were kids, didn’t go near the gambling. We just got to sort of enjoy the fringe benefits of it, the pretty lights and the food. Mainly, as kids, we had desert two blocks away from anywhere you were at that time, so you could run around, chase lizards, and play cowboys. It was just really a great place!

Of course, when we first landed, I was very disappointed. “Where are all the horses? What are these taxicabs doing here?” I was a little kid, I thought it was going to be like a Western movie. I had no idea we were actually going into the modern West. I thought we were just going to ride horses from then on, there wouldn’t be any cars…

CBA: The Wayback Machine. [laughs] Alan: But it’s an amazing place. Everybody dwells on just the strip or the downtown area, but 40 miles in one direction you’ve got the world’s largest man-made lake, with that fantastic dam across the Colorado River, and a few miles in the other direction, you’re up in the mountains, where you can ski in the Winter. Every time I’d go back there, I’d have friends come through, and it was great to take them out of the city… like Steve Englehart. We’d go up to Pine Creek and spend a day going around checking out the petroglyphs, you know, and making up stories. Vegas is really beautiful, but it’s become so huge and congested compared to what it was—about 50 times larger than what it was back then, and a whole lot more pollution—but it’s still a great town. It really is the adult Disneyland, if you can take that as a compliment. [laughter] My brothers are still there. I went to school there, UNLV. “Tumbleweed Tech,” it was called back then.

CBA: Did you make a conscious decision then that you were going to be a comic book artist at a certain stage?

Alan: It’s the kind of decision you make in stages. You say, “I’d like to do this, but I don’t know if it’s really a practical thing,” so you think, “Maybe I’ll become a medical artist,” or “Maybe something in design.” None of them quite got to the level of reality, but I worked for both newspapers in town, working my way, proverbially, through college, so….

CBA: What were you doing?

Alan: Artwork. Different kinds of things, some for the paper, some

Above: Detail of a Solomon Kane pin-up by Alan Weiss, the same work the artist and pal Jim Starlin “liberated” from a fan during a 1976 cross-country trip. The omitted section of the drawing features a gruesome sex crime murder scene.

Courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2000 Alan Weiss.

Solomon Kane ©2000 Robert E. Howard Estate.

Left inset: Page from Alan’s 1968 fanzine comics story, “Boy, You Sure Don’t Look Like a Hero,” appearing in Star Studded Comics #13. The entire six-page tale can be found reprinted in compiler Bill Schelly’s Fandom’s Finest Comics Vol. 2. ©2000 Alan Weiss.

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Above: Panels from “It’s Better to Give,“ House of Secrets #92, written by “Virgil North” (that’s Mary Skrenes) and penciled by Alan with Tony DeZuniga inks. ©2000 DC Comics. Opposite page, top: Page from “Over the High Side,” House of Mystery #205, penciled by Alan and inked by Ralph Reese. ©2000 DC Comics. Below: Alan as a Roman sculptor, taken in the early ’70s by Jeff Jones as photo reference for an ultimately never finished story “Bedazzled” intended for an Orlando mystery book.

Look for pages from that aborted project on pgs.

29-31 of this collection!

Courtesy of Alan Weiss.

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outside ad work, and so on… pretty much whatever they had. Some mechanicals, drawing a little fanzine-thing just for the army of paper boys. That was fun, though, because I got to invent my own comic strips for it.

CBA: Was that your first real published work?

Alan: Yeah, I guess you could say that, other than the fanzine work and the usual piddling yearbook stuff.

CBA: Did you have friends in town who also collected comics?

Alan: There weren’t many. I had a good friend named Lynn Pedersen. Years later, Lynn opened Page After Page, the best comic book store in Vegas. I think he’s out of the business now, doing animation for Disney.

At a certain point, you get to that stage where you’re getting too old for the comics—or not. I’d bring comic books to college, and all the big jocks would say, “Oh, you’re still reading comics?” Then the next thing you know, they’re sitting there reading them, and then, it’s, “Hey, this SpiderMan, there’s no ending on this! It’s continued! You got the next issue?” “Well, this is the new one, so the next one won’t be here for a month.” “Oh, man, a month? You’ve got to bring it in when it comes out!” “Yeah, sure I will.” [laughter] CBA: When did you go into college?

Alan: 1965.

CBA: So did you graduate in ‘69?

Alan: I didn’t graduate, I came to New York. I dropped out for a while, then

went back. At a certain point, it felt like it was getting too repetitious, and I wasn’t really making headway. I wasn’t making any decisions, and couldn’t see what the future was going to be. So I figured, go to New York, take a shot, find out if you are or aren’t good enough, and if not, you can always come back home, finish college, and make new plans. That didn’t happen.

CBA: Going back to your fanzine days a little bit: Was mail like a magical thing for you? Were you always looking forward to correspondence and the latest fanzines?

Alan: Oh, it was—finding these people who were interested in what you were interested in. It was like Christmas every day in some ways! Of course, I went through the usual sequence of subscribing to the comics, and they would arrive two weeks before they came to the stores, except they were folded in half—that drives collectors crazy! You didn’t want it folded in half, for God’s sake! [laughter] So I had a year’s worth of subscriptions for a while, and that was fun.

Most of the guys who did the fanzines were the same age, and there were some older folks who remembered the books from when they originally came out. Fanzines were the first place you could have any kind of intellectual contact with the present-day creators of the comics—a little interview with Steve Ditko, like that. I started up these long-distance relationships with guys who I eventually met in New York—Rich Buckler, Jim Starlin, Roy Thomas.

CBA: You had a lot of published work in fanzines?

Alan: Well, I don’t know if it’s a lot, it was a certain amount.

CBA: Well, there was Star-Studded Comics, for instance.

Alan: I did work before Star-Studded. I think the first black-&white ink work was for Bill Spicer’s Fantasy Illustrated. I don’t think I even knew you inked with a brush yet, I’m trying to do it all in pen, some of them must’ve been lettering pens—who the hell knew? I don’t think I saw an original page until I went to visit Ronn Foss in California one spring, and he had those giant DC originals—huge pages. He had some Kubert Hawkman pages that’d take your breath away.

CBA: When you visited Ronn: Was that before college?

Alan: It was probably still in high school, yeah. I was doing black&-white work during the college years—17, 18, 19 years old. StarStudded was one of the main ones, but there were a few others. I did Dr. Weird, and I did some of my first original characters for them.

I did two Westerns, as a matter of fact—nobody was doing Western fanzine work, nobody cared about that.

CBA: “Boy, You Sure Don’t Look Like a Hero”?

Alan: Yeah, and “The Battle of Credibility Gap.” [laughter] Which featured the same character.

CBA: And you wrote them!

Alan: Yes, and then, I did a character of my own called Dragonfly.

CBA: What kind of character was he?

Alan: He was an insect-based character! [laughter] I wanted to do some version, some cross between Spider-Man and the old Fly, from Harvey, so there were some different bits with him. He had kind of a nice outfit. They just reprinted one of those in Fandom’s Finest Comics.

CBA: Yeah, that’s actually where I saw the Western strip.

Alan: It was pretty accurately costumed, I’ll tell you. I was doing my research back then. I wanted to show the difference between the real old West and the Hollywood West. That was the point and the purpose.

CBA: I’m surprised, for early work, to see it really has your idiosyncratic style. The posturing of the characters is very identifiable as Alan Weiss! You were developing a distinct style relatively early.

Alan: Well, it was mostly from trying to extrapolate from reality— which also includes films and magazines—but there’s also the level of your own aesthetic, of how you feel it in your own body, in your own makeup, and how you relate to those emotions. I really wanted to get facial expressions. I would sit there with the yearbook and draw everybody, to try to get them both realistically and in caricature—even the really hard stuff, meaning the irregular features, or the soft features, the things you wouldn’t necessarily go right to for a comic strip character, because they’re not exaggerated. If you can get the racial differences without exaggerating them, get the logical flavor and a feel for the three-dimensionality of it, that’s the real challenge. You’re trying to put in your artwork what you like

about other guys’ artwork, but you’re just trying to do your own version of it.

CBA: When you say that you were particularly attracted to any specific styles, was it Alex Raymond?

Alan: Well, I hadn’t seen Raymond’s work until later, when those reprint Flash Gordon books came out. Of course, I fell in love with it, as I had with Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. As a young kid, I had a little mannequin who I’d named Kirby Kane Kubert, the three K’s, because they were my three favorite guys in comics, at least names that I knew. I came in after the ECs, which is a damned shame, but when I saw Al Williamson, I went crazy! I didn’t discover him until his Flash Gordon comics in about ‘67, ‘68, remember?

CBA: Beautiful stuff.

Alan: Yeah, those will ruin you! You can’t go back to that flat DC style after looking at Al, you know? “How are you going to keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Al Williamson?” [laughter] Williamson, Reed Crandall—holy sh*t, Reed Crandall!—and Alex Toth, doing those beautiful wash drawings, and on and on… my God, John Severin, Russ Heath—I’d seen Heath’s work in those Warren war mags… and those washes by Gene Colan—how about those, right? Things were revving up into the ’60s, and it seemed like comic books were taking on this whole new kind of life and majesty and interest. I was more interested in the more illustrative type art, of course, but I liked cartooning, and when the Harvey Spirit reprints came out, I said, “Oh, this is great, because this is like Wally Wood in Mad magazine!” Of course, that’s putting the cart before the horse, since Woody was inspired by Eisner, but I loved those Spirit stories so much. I still want to do one. I had a small taste when I got involved with that Spirit Jam that came out in about ‘80.

CBA: So, going to New York was specifically to go to the comic book publishers and try to seek work?

Alan: Yes, I went to the Seuling convention in the summer of 1968. I had my trusty little sample case, and went to the Big Two. I’d sent work to various people and got my rep with a number of pink rejection slips, but I would’ve been in the next issue of Web of Horror, if there’d been a next issue.

CBA: The fourth issue?

Alan: Right, the one Bernie Wrightson and Bruce Jones were putting together. It was a weird situation. You couldn’t get past the waiting room at Marvel, really, even when it was a small place. But the scene at DC was a better story. I went up there, and they had this receptionist named Carol Fein, who had a real thick New York accent, which of course sounded a lot thicker to me then. I’m there with my partner—Scott Bell, a fine artist and a good friend I’d collaborated with on a lot of the fanzine work —and she took our stuff in, came back out, and says, [mimicking a New York accent] “Carmine says that these are not quite up to professional standards at this time, but good luck, and feel free to try us again.” And I’d come 3,000 miles for this! I managed to ask, “Why not? Why aren’t they good enough?” Of course, she didn’t know, so she says, “Let me take a minute.” She goes back in, she comes out with Dick Giordano, the greatest thing that could ever happen. So Dick—being the guy he was—took us back to the snack room, and sat with us for, I swear, it must’ve been two hours! To this day, I can remember specifically what he said… how to consider the whole page as a composition, and to vary the weights, and think about things on grids… it was just the most wonderful, friendly thing to do. I stayed in contact with Dick.

So, I came back to New York for the convention the next year.

Rich Buckler and I had gotten fairly close, because we felt we were at a similar level of development, and right about that time, the first cracks were opening for new guys to get in. Now, Neal Adams and Jim Steranko were already there—and I consider them to be a twoman wave of their own of new ideas, new thoughts and new styles.

Bernie Wrightson was the first one of our generation really, to get in, with “Nightmaster”—I think because Williamson didn’t want to do it, and he recommended Bernie. Barry Smith came in soon after.

Anyhow, after the convention, Buckler gave me a call and said, “Listen, I’m in New York, getting some work, and you’re as good as me, so I think the key is to be here so you can turn the corrections around overnight.” Simple as that! So I said, “Okay, Rich, I’ll be there in two weeks.” I didn’t know how I was going to do it at the

time, because I didn’t have a dime, but I figured if I didn’t make up some date—it could be six months to two years—I’d never go. So, I lit an artificial fire, and it worked. It was good. I’d met Neal Adams at the previous summer’s convention, so I was staying in contact with him, and Giordano said, “Well, Jim Warren owes me a couple of favors, so I can get something going for you over there,” so that’s how I got started at Warren. We did some filler pages, sometimes just single-page stories or ad pages, things like that. I was working with Neal, assisting and even penciling, and he’d pay out of his pocket. It was just a really special time back then. So, little by

Below: Panel detail of an early Weiss job—both drawn and written by the artist—from his story, “Lair of the Horned Man,” Eerie #34, 1971. ©2000 the respective copyright holder.

9

Above: Penciled page by Alan Weiss of a real early Marvel Job (1972) from an unpublished Rawhide Kid story. That’s Rawhide meeting Billy the Kid. Courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2000 Alan Weiss.

Rawhide Kid ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Opposite page, bottom: Splash from 1972’s Sub-Mariner #54 back-up story, one of Alan’s first Marvel jobs. Pencils and inks by Alan, script by Mike Friedrich. Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. 10

little, a couple of us sneaked in, and then a couple more. Buckler was doing work, Howie—oh, excuse me—Howard Chaykin came in soon after that, Jim Starlin came in… that was the story. Kirby left Marvel about that time, so some of his features were open.

CBA: Did you immediately join a community of like-minded young artists?

Alan: Well, we pretty much knew each other though the various fanzines and the conventions, and then a little bit later, it turned out that so many of us just happened to be living in almost the same part of town. There was that great little artists’ community, so to speak, in the 70s and 80s on the Upper West Side. In one building, Jeff and Weezie Jones were on the sixth floor, and two floors above were Wrightson and Kaluta, and then later on, I moved in with them, and when Kaluta moved out, it was just Bernie and me for the last year or two. Barry Smith was in that neighborhood, and so were Frank Brunner, Archie Goodwin. Jeff and Weezie had these get-togethers on the first Friday of every month, and whoever was in town would come to 135 79th Street. Since it was Friday, people would be turning in jobs, or picking up checks, or doing whatever the hell they were doing, so it was convenient. Vaughn Bodé would come after delivering his job to Cavalier. Gray Morrow would be there, Williamson if he was in town. It was just priceless… Roy Thomas and

of course, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, and that gang.

CBA: Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood?

Alan: Absolutely. Krenkel, and many times Woody, sure. Larry Hama.

CBA: Larry Hama, straight out of the service?

Alan: Yeah, fresh out of the service, full of stories, and they were all hilarious. He’s a really good storyteller. Just sitting here, talking about it, I’m thinking of some of the weirdest stuff that happened at those things, I just don’t know if I want to tell you! [laughter] We were so nuts in those days! Chaykin was completely crazy, Steve Mitchell and Alan Kupperberg were just really still teenagers, we weren’t much older… Dan Green used to be up there, as I recall.

CBA: Did you feel like you were living in unprecedented, magical times? You guys developed your talents so quickly. I look at Bernie’s work in ‘68, then in ‘72, and it’s night and day, just a grand progression of talent—and you came in, and your work just adapted very quickly and excelled.

Alan: If I could tell you the difference between trying to learn it, back in Nevada, and learning in the first six months in town—it would’ve taken six years to learn any other way, because you’re there! I could just go over to Neal’s place, and look at what he’s doing. Of course, there was a certain level of competition, but it was just to try and be as good as the guy next to you!

CBA: Did you try to top each other?

Alan: I really don’t think it was that. We each had our specialties… what, you’re going to try and top Wrightson in horror? That’s just not the way it works. I’ll tell you, especially among that small group—we wanted to be the new EC guys. We wanted to be the new illustrators in the comic books, to do both. See, for me, I’d loved Kirby, but the abstraction… I just loved what the reality looks like.

So, I didn’t want a photographic, still feel, but if there was a way to get Kirby’s animation, and draw it realistically—or at least render it somewhat realistically—that, for me, was the way to go. So, when Neal Adams hit, I said, “There it is! That’s the blend! He knows how, he’s not afraid to exaggerate, but then he renders it realistically so it’s perfectly believable, and it looks solid.” Of course I wanted some grace as well, that’s Al Williamson’s influence. I wanted accuracy in terms of costuming and historical flavor and feel—that’s Crandall, Severin, and Heath. My God, these guys… they’re magic! It’s one thing to look at the work, but if you’re drawing, and trying to understand what it takes to get to that level, these guys become all the more magical.

CBA: So when you saw Neal Adams’ work, did you say, “Yes! This is what I’m trying to achieve with my work”?

Alan: Pretty much. I’d been following his Ben Casey strips while I was working at the Las Vegas newspaper, and I just loved the feel of reality there. And then, I used to think, “Geez, if this guy was doing some comic books… “—BLAMMO!—the next Summer, first he drew those couple of war books, and then… Deadman. With Batman and Deadman, that was it, boy, look out! That was about as good as you need. You could obviously tell he loved comic books, you could tell he appreciated what had come before him, but then he was adding a whole other dimension to it. He loved Kubert, loved Kirby, certainly loved all the Mad magazine guys, but he brought a new take.

On the other side of it, on the graphics and layout side, you had Steranko coming in, with his cinematic style. And Gray Morrow… he’s technically of the EC school, he just missed the ECs. But Gray, my God, he’s just brilliant! He really understands so much about the reality of things. There were guys drawing romance books that had an extra flavor, it was fantastic.

We really felt we were some kind of parallel of those few guys, those excellent EC artists—or at least we were aiming for it. The Fleagle Boys, right? Williamson, Torres, Krenkel—those guys used to go and sword fight in the park, and we used to do that. We lived on 79th, right near the Museum of Natural History, we’d throw the Frisbee and climb the trees, and Wrightson would sing the theme from Robin Hood… or break into his Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff voice… or Daffy Duck!

Neal was the guy that got us all in. He was our big brother.

He literally was our protector, a guy who would pay you out of his pocket so you could eat and stay in town another couple of weeks.

That was the very early, early days, before Continuity was even

officially formed. We used to go up to his house and eat meals, and play with his kids, and it was really something.

CBA: Were you guys seeking to try to go into Marvel and try to change it your way, hoping to make it more open?

Alan: Not so much change it; we just wanted to do our own thing, and Marvel was very resistant to that at the beginning. They had a house style and wanted a certain level of conformity. It was pretty much, “Look like Kirby—if you want to look a little like Ditko, that’s okay, too.” They wanted those real, big, round shoulders. That’s one of the reasons Wrightson didn’t get the Conan book, because his stuff had too many lines on it, and his Conan wasn’t hugely muscular enough for their taste. At first, they asked Wrightson to ink Conan—I saw some of the samples he inked over Smith—but I believe Bernie inked about two-thirds of the page and said, “Hmph, not for me!”

CBA: You and Bernie were pretty tight.

Alan: Well, we were living together at that time.

CBA: Your first break was at Warren.

Alan: There were only two or three. I got to write them, as well, and that was good, considering that it was my first break. We were always trying to break in to Marvel or DC. Warren wasn’t bad, and there were a few other lesser black-&-white companies along the way there. I was doing a job for Skywald, a story I wrote, when I got the call to do some samples for “El Diablo.” I literally took that Skywald page, threw it off the board to the other side of the room, and started on those samples that night. [laughter] CBA: Joe Orlando called you?

Alan: Yeah. I was That Kid from Out West! “He can do cowboys, he can do horses.” [laughter] Wrightson would always say, “Here, Al, you do my horses, mine just look like big dogs.” [laughter] CBA: Did you do a lot of animal drawings?

Alan: They say a horse is one of the most difficult animals to draw, but it’s such a beautiful, dynamic, balanced machine—come on, you’ve got to believe in God when you see humans and horses in actual motion! It’s just too wonderful. So, yeah, but for instance, there was a job for Orlando for House of Mystery [#205], which Joe offered to Wrightson first, because he knew how some of these things would work: If one of us couldn’t do it, maybe one of the other guys could.

CBA: “Ask your roommate.” [laughs] Alan: The story had to do with a motorcycle gang. He said, “Bernie, are you good at drawing motorcycles?” Wrightson said, “No, I can’t do it.” So, he asks Mike, “Well, how about you, Kaluta?

Motorcycles? You know anything about motorcycles?” Mike says, “No, I don’t want to… “ So he says, “Okay, what about you?” I said, “Motorcycles? Sure!” I’d never drawn one in my life, I figured I’d go buy a magazine or two and figure it out—and I got Ralph Reese to ink that, too, and Ralph is really good on mechanical stuff.

That was a fun job, I enjoyed that. Ralph put on the back of one guy’s jacket, in the studs, “Alan’s Angels.” [laughter] I hadn’t penciled that. Ralph inks with a precision that is beyond mere mortal men. He could get into a concentration that was really phenomenal.

CBA: Ralph got his start with Woody?

Alan: Yeah, he was one of Woody’s guys, and he has a very unique sense of humor, too. I guess we all have our angles, but Ralph was something, I’ll tell ya.

CBA: He didn’t seem to stay in mainstream comics too long.

Alan: No, not really, but then again, in some ways, he was kind of like me. He’d go away and come back. You’d see him doing the Byron Preiss project, One-Year Affair, which is a brilliant piece of work. Or how about his piece in Flo Steinberg’s book, Big Apple Comix?

CBA: That was a great job.

Alan: That job Reese and Adams did is absolutely… well, the whole book is a classic.

CBA: Oh, that was that dual story, right?

Alan: Yeah, “Over and Under.” Wasn’t that fantastic? And you had Herb Trimpe in there, you had a little Archie Goodwin job…

CBA: You had Stu Schwartzberg, you had Marie Severin, the most eclectic crew, with the Woody cover.

Alan: And Ralph’s back cover. We had some great meetings to put this book together over at Flo Steinberg’s place, down in the Village.

What a group! Can you imagine just a punk kid like me working with

guys like these in the same book? Wally Wood, for God’s sakes!

And I got to write, pencil and ink my own story. It was about this kid that comes from the West to New York City to be an artist! [laughter] I was really getting my brushwork together.

At that point, the Filipinos had already gotten into the business—Nestor Redondo, Alfredo Alcala, and Rudy Nebres. I just thought their brushwork was exquisite, and I was trying to nail my own version of that style in some way. I think a lot of it comes out on that job. I’m trying to get Flo to do a 25th Anniversary Second Issue. She said, “Oh my God, I can’t go through that now!” [laughter] Flo’s still at Marvel. She’s great.

I believe it was Larry Todd who coined the phrase “ground-level comics,” an overground approach to underground comics. With no holds barred, nothing restrained, creator-owned, all that. There were a few experiments along those lines that were successful. I just think the single best one was Big Apple.

CBA: Were you involved in ACBA at all?

Alan: Yeah. I was there at the initial meetings. At one point, Neal wanted me to get involved at some sort of administrative level, but I didn’t want to do that—it’s just not my cup of tea. I also felt it would

Above: Subby pencil study by Alan. Art ©2000 Alan Weiss.

Sub-Mariner ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Above: Splash page from Our Love #16, penciled and inked

by Alan in 1971. Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Right inset: Alan, along with Tom Palmer, helped Neal Adams ink The Avengers #96.

We’re not exactly sure if Alan inked this panel detail from that issue but everyone involved did a spectacular job on the entire story! Courtesy of Tom Palmer. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. 12

be more valuable to be more connected with my peers, the freelancers at large. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about the meetings of a bunch of freelancers who can’t get along or agree on anything. [laughter] That’s a little bit of an oversimplification, but there were a lot of obstacles. Still and all, it was quite a big thing, a very positive move for its time. It would be harder to put together something like that now, since there are so many more people involved in the business and so many of them don’t live in or around New York.

Back then, it was a very insular society, and most of the people had access to or lived somewhere in the Manhattan area. A lot of those meetings were just terrific, especially afterwards,

when you’d go out and party, it was amazing. But I remember some kind of bitter stuff. There was some controversy about whether the writers were entitled to keep any of the artwork, and things like that.

CBA: Actually, Roy Thomas implemented that policy at Marvel for a period of time.

Alan: He did, and that’s what led to—at least in my mind—the famous Craig Russell story.

CBA: What was that?

Alan: Craig peeled off the pasted-up word balloons off the artwork, put them in an envelope, and sent them to the writer! [laughter] CBA: I thought Craig told me, “I didn’t do it, Jim Starlin did it!”

Alan: It sure could’ve been Jim, [laughter] but I heard it was Craig.

See, if you say it’s Jim, I’d believe it in a minute, but if you say Craig, I’d say, “Oh, geez! Mild-mannered Craig Russell?”

CBA: One would think it takes a long time to achieve the kind of results you did with your art. Were you prolific at all? What was your general rate? Could you have had a regular book every month, and been able to meet the deadlines of a 20-page book?

Alan: Sure, I could have, but I didn’t really want to at the time.

Sustaining that pace can really get to be a grind with that deadline looming all the time. It’s hard to keep the quality consistent under that constant pressure. I mean, how many times have you seen a book looking real detailed, then by the third issue, it looks like somebody else drew it? Some of us didn’t want to do a regular book as much as we wanted to go for variety. That would have been an extension of the EC experience, where you’d do a science-fiction story, then some historical period story, then a horror, or a war, or a romance.

CBA: So working not just for one publisher, but for a lot of publishers. It was a much wider field then.

Alan: That’s right, sure. Plus there were different formats available to work in. There were also the half-books, so those stories were a different length, as well. Sometimes if I do a whole book of one character, it feels like more than just one issue. I’m trying to vary the angles on the heads and the lighting and the expressions so that it’s more of an experience than just knocking out a homogenous look.

Also I got into doing layouts. I can do layouts as fast as just about anybody. But after a certain point I didn’t want to do layouts anymore because mine were as tight as a lot of guys’ pencils—I’ve heard that said, so I’m not making this up.

CBA: Were you offered a regular assignment?

Alan: Oh yeah, lots. I turned most of them down.

CBA: You inked Neal Adams on some Avengers. Was that you just showing up, being available? I think you’re highly underrated as one of Adams’ best inkers, maybe because you didn’t ink a great deal of work.

Alan: No, I didn’t do a whole lot of inking on Neal’s work. It would’ve been nice to do more. There was a point there where the first two guys of our generation that he asked were Wrightson and me. He got Wrightson to ink a page or two of that Green Lantern.

CBA: A whole issue, actually, right.

Alan: Well, it started with a page or two in a previous issue. Then, the whole Kaluta issue, right, with the Kaloota machine. I inked the splash on that job. I can remember to this day what Neal said about it, and I’ll never do that again on a background!

So, yeah, it was quite a privilege to be trusted with it. Neal knew I loved the line variation he got, and I think he felt that I could understand the construction, because I

myself was taking that approach. You know, Neal had taken me into the famous Art-O-Graph room during one of these early jaunts to New York, one of the first two trips before I even got in the business.

He sat me down, and very honestly asked, “How do you want to do this?” What he meant was, “Do you want to do it right? Do you want to do it photographically and realistically, or do you want to cartoon?” And he was honest enough to tell me—to warn me—that if I wanted to come at it as an illustrator, it was going to be a harder road, and a higher hill to climb. I told him, “Well, I just want to do it like you, like Gray, Williamson… these are the guys that excite me most, who are producing the most intelligent, complete work.” He was testing me, he wanted to find out if I’d be tough enough. He knew, walking into Marvel, they’d say, “Oh, no, get rid of this rendering, we want these guys to be bigger.”

CBA: Kirby, Kirby, Kirby!

Alan: “Make it bigger.” So, that was a good thing.

CBA: How do you take that in retrospect now? Was he right?

Alan: He was absolutely right; but I don’t think I made the wrong decision either. It was a little tougher. I mean, look: I don’t want to make it sound like it was a martyrdom of any kind, because it was wonderful. At that time, it was a privilege and a joy to get through the front door and work for the company that was one of the main reasons you came to town. Before we knew anything about the business, we were just drawing artwork, boy! [laughter] When we all got in, we thought, “Uh-oh, The Big Time! Look out!” [laughter] See, Wrightson and Mike Kaluta were not interested in doing superheroes at all, they really wanted to do mood stories, horror stories, science-fiction. I didn’t care; I liked the super-heroes, and I liked the cowboys. I wanted to do Classics Illustrated, for God’s sake! Give me some period stuff! I never really did much war, but I liked that genre, and it was so much fun to get involved with some of the romance books too. Not too many, but I co-wrote some with Mary Skrenes, and one of my own.

CBA: Was this for Dick Giordano?

Alan: This was for Dorothy Woolfolk at DC. CBA: What was she like?

Alan: [laughs] You know, when you ask me these questions, my brain just explodes in thoughts that I haven’t had in a long time. I seem to recall that Dorothy used to have little crush-like flirtations with the younger artists, even if some of us looked a little strange, you know—some of us had hair that was a little long, some of us might have beards, even. [laughter] At that point, I always had my cowboy boots on, and hell, Frank Brunner, the first time he went into DC, wearing a buckskin jacket with long blond hair, they said, “It’s Tomahawk!” [laughter] But Dorothy, she was all right, she was a sweetie. Mary Skrenes was writing stories for her. I could be wrong, but Mary might’ve been the only female writing romance stories, or any other kind of stories, for that matter—certainly the only female writing horror stories. That’s why she had to have a male pseudonym, “Virgil North.” We co-wrote the first full-length job I drew, for DC, for House of Secrets [#92]—that issue also included first Swamp Thing story. It was in the back and was about a little kid and a bum.

Tony DeZuniga inked my pencils on that, but Mary and I wrote that together.

CBA: So you met Mary when she was working for Dorothy?

Alan: No, Mary and I were college pals. She came to New York from Vegas with me the first time, and we also had another friend from Vegas who lived in town here.

CBA: Did she have any interest in comics?

Alan: Only because I had told her there were some exciting new things going on, and one thing led to another, she came to that convention, she met a couple of people. She was always interested in writing, so it just sort of fell into place. I don’t think she had set out to do it, but she ended up doing a considerable amount of work with a lot of different people. She was also quite a muse to a lot of guys!

CBA: What kind of person was she?

Alan: She is a delight! She’s a tough gal—beautiful, lithe, but she can handle herself in a conversation and handle herself on the street.

She could drink and swear with the boys, you know? Everybody was in love with her, and she was just a great spirit. She was always welcome to hang with the guys.

CBA: She was obviously one of the few women who were

involved professionally with you guys, right?

Alan: Yes, that’s true. Even before Weezie Jones got involved in the game. The only other women were those who got in much earlier—Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin—and that’s about it. A few women were in maybe the administrative or the mechanical side, right? I think Dorothy was certainly the only editor back then, and that was because her husband, Bill Woolfolk, was her entreé.

CBA: Actually, Dorothy goes back to Fawcett. Her maiden name was Rubichek. So, yeah, she goes back.

Alan: I remember a few times Dorothy would come out for a drink with the younger guys after work at the old Abbey Tavern, across the

Above: Claws of the Cat page penciled by Alan and inked by Frank McLaughlin—the book was co-penciled by Alan and Jim Starlin, both featured as characters in the top panel (no, no—the people with the facial hair, dummy!). ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: The Darknight Detective meets Alan Weiss in the legendary Rutland Halloween story, “Night of the Reaper,” Batman #237. Pencils

by Neal Adams, inks by Dick Giordano. Courtesy of Alan. ©2000 DC Comics.

13

Alan: That’s the difference between drawing purely mechanically and having a feel for it, and you extend that out to how you perceive how Errol Flynn moves, how Bruce Lee moves, how a dancer moves…

CBA: There came a point where this culture actually was realized within the comics themselves to some degree. There was a Batman story, “Night of the Reaper,” which took place in Rutland, Vermont.

You were there in Rutland, right?

Alan: Yeah, I was there two years in a row. The first year was the year that the comic book was based on.

CBA: What was your memory of that? Was it just being spooked out in the woods?

Alan: Oh, no, the whole thing was so magical. We knew from fanzines we knew they had this Halloween parade and party. But it was small-time until it started to integrate into the comics. A whole bunch of us went up there, and they had the costume party in this house in the woods, it looked like a haunted house with this big belfry with a red light in it. It was Halloween, and there was a full moon, the whole thing. At one point, Bernie, Denny O’Neil, and I were walking back to the house through the woods, and Wrightson told an axe-murderer type of story, just to try and scare us. Now, we’re adults, but still, we’re in the deep, dark, black woods, and it had one of those “boogey-boogey” punchlines, where he’d jump on you or something. O’Neil got a kick out of that, and he wrote the Batman story.

CBA: And Bernie, Mary Skrenes, Gerry Conway, and you were all prominently featured as characters in the story.

Alan: Right… my character almost gets killed! But to me, the real kicker was what happened the next year. We had the actual printed

street from DC when it was up on Third Avenue. Guys like Steve Mitchell and Alan Kupperberg worked at DC in production, and they have a lot of stories about that generation of folks: Murray Boltinoff, Jack Adler, Sol Harrison.

So sure, there were times up at DC… I remember late Friday nights.

Everybody’s gone, most of the lights are off, we’re jamming on a job with Neal Adams—in fact, I think it was an Avengers job, but we were doing it up at DC. [laughter] Kupperberg was doing Zip-A-Tones and filling in blacks, I was inking a little bit, Mitchell was there. Afterwards, we’re playing Neal’s patented version of Hide-nSeek, which was Gorilla—if you got caught by the gorilla, he’d pick you up and slam you down on a desk or something. [laughter] CBA: Was Neal the gorilla?

Alan: Well, it varied, but it was just… gosh, DC. I mean, we were kids, and here we were in the place where they made the comic books that we grew up on, and we’re stalking each other up and down empty dark halls in the middle of the night, [laughter] but it was in one of those sessions that I came up with the phrase the kinetic aesthetic, the way of drawing along the lines of how you feel your body move, and the weights and the balance, and the extension. I was in a room with Len Wein once, and my back was turned to him, and he threw my coat at me and said, “Think fast!” I swung around to catch it, and he said, “You did that just like you would draw a guy doing that!” [laughter] So I came up with a name for that, the kinetic aesthetic.

CBA: You are what you do. [laughter] 14

comic book with us when we went back there the following year. So I’m at the parade—and everybody up there’s seen the comic book— and at a certain point, this guy comes up to me, dressed just like the villain in the comic book, the Grim Reaper, and he has a real scythe! [laughter] He has a mask on—I had no idea who this guy was—and he comes up, points at me, and says, “I know you,” and I say, “Oh, my God, it’s him!” So, I’m young and brash, and I say, “Hey! I’ll tell you what, sucker. I’ll meet you on the dam tonight at midnight, and I won’t bring Batman this time.” [laughter] So that was the running joke, and word got around.

CBA: There’s going to be a rumble in Rutland!

Alan: After the parade, there was an all-night party. There were all sorts of things happening, just sequence after sequence of great stuff, a lot of dancing and running around. At a certain point, Jim Starlin, Steve Englehart, and I think Allen Milgrom and myself took off to go to the dam, and the whole damn party eventually follows us. We go across the dam below it, walk across the rocks across the river, so we are on the far side of the dam, and the rest of the party is on the other side. A full moon is hanging directly over this dam, the trees are forming deep black shadows, and there’s this black silhouette of this big haunted house over on the other side with a red light in the belfry, and we’re joking and shouting and yelling into space there… and this Grim Reaper shows up! Now it’s starting to get more real.

So, on the other side of the dam, are some guys I know and I like from the business. But they aren’t very… hedonistically inclined, shall we say? So, at one point, I remember one of them saying, “Oh my God, they’re drunk, they’re stoned! He’s gonna hurt himself, he’s gonna kill himself!” I remember thinking to myself, “What a fool! How could he possibly think I’d do anything to jeopardize the miraculous vehicle for my consciousness that is this body…!” But I’m telling you, on top of that, Jon, imagine: I look across this dam, and there’s just the light of the moon, and here’s this guy standing there. Now, the dam doesn’t look like it does in the story, it’s not as grandiose for one thing, but on one side, the water was almost up to the level of the dam itself, within six inches. On the other side, there was a drop-off to rocks, which is still about 12 feet, it looks higher standing on it. It is enough of a drop to where you could break a leg, or if you land on your head, you’d be pretty messed up. I’m wearing my Eisenhower short jacket and probably bell-bottom jeans, cowboy boots always. My guys, Englehart and Starlin, are yelling, “Go get him, Al! You’re our boy, go get him!” [laughter] So, I step out on the dam, and you hear rumblings in the distance from the crowd on the other side, and I’m processing this in about four different dimensions.

Now, this guy’s on the other side, so we start walking towards each other, and we meet in the middle—and you hear some hoots and some calls from each side… and here you are, it’s become performance art, and your friends and acquaintances, the best young people in the comic book business, are your audience. So, I’m thinking to myself, “Okay, well, this is cool. Once we get into the middle, what are we going to do?” Well, he’s got this real scythe. I have no idea what he’s saying to me, but I’m joking with him, old-time stuff, like “Your shoelace is untied,” sh*t like that. I think, “The guy is not really a homicidal maniac, and he’s not really gonna kill me out here, and he’s not really

gonna slice me in half with that scythe.” At that point, this guy takes a swing with the scythe, and he splashes it into the water, and the water splashes up on me…. a real wake-up call! At that point, I’m saying, “I have no idea who it is behind this mask!” Probably somebody I’ve never met, but I don’t know what he is! Now, I’m thinking, “Hmmm… but I can’t back up.” [laughter] “I’m not gonna back up on the dam on Halloween! Sh*t!” I step back a couple of steps, I whip off the jacket and wrap it around one arm, like you do in a knife fight, big deal, and I’m realizing, “This is surrealism, Alan—here you are in your own life as a comic book artist, you appeared in this exact scene in a comic book, now you’re taking that to the next dimensional layer.” So it was just this fantastic rush, can you imagine? So, I just say, “F*ck it, this guy’s really not gonna kill me, if I start advancing towards him, he has no choice.” So I just do it, on a wing and a prayer. I start walking towards him, if he isn’t gonna kill me, he has to back up. So, I back this guy up to the other side of the dam, and at the point of doing so, I hear this cheer rise from the woods! You want to talk about a “Top of the world, ma!” moment! I look up, there’s the full moon, I’m thinking, “All I need here is a little Erich Wolfgang Korngold theme music, and this is a perfect picture.”

So, I’m telling you, nothing could have brought me down for the rest of that night. [laughter] That was only the beginning! Skrenes and I adventure around town, we meet the guy dressed as the Grim Reaper, we go to his house—that’s a whole other adventure! Later on, there is Indian wrestling going on in the party itself—Neal Adams-style, where you

Above: Page from “Castle of the Undead,” written by Roy Thomas and penciled by Alan, with Crusty Bunkers inks (mostly by Neal Adams). Solomon Kane meets Dracula from Dracula Lives #3.

Courtesy of Alan Weiss. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Solomon Kane ©2000 Robert E. Howard Estate. Opposite page: Two pages from 1971’s Batman #237, the classic “Night of the Reaper” tale written by Denny O’Neil, inspired

by Bernie Wrightson, and refined

by Harlan Ellison, with Neal Adams (pencils) and Dick Giordano (inks) art. Featured as characters are real-life comics creators Alan Weiss, Bernie, Mary Skrenes, and Gerry Conway.

Courtesy of Alan Weiss. ©2000 DC Comics. Left inset: Panel detail of Weiss’ Solomon Kane from Dracula Lives #3 (1973).

Pencils by Alan, inks by Neal Adams. Courtesy of Alan Weiss. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Solomon Kane ©2000 Robert E. Howard Estate.

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Right inset: Panel detail of Alan and Steve Englehart’s infantile villainess, Deadly Nightshade, from Captain America #164.

Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Page from that memorable Deadly Nightshade/Yellow Claw story from 1973’s Captain America #164 featuring an evocative Yellow Claw. Art by Weiss, words by Englehart.

Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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stand with your feet on a line, clasp one hand, and try and push or pull the other guy until he moves one foot off the line. It’s balance as well as strength. Neal used to do that with all of us to prove he could kick anybody’s ass, and when he’d win, he’d toss you across the room. I was the only guy who could beat him—not out of strength, but because I have long arms and a decent center of gravity—so if I could keep him from pulling me back from beyond my point of gravity, gradually pulling my arm across my chest, and I’d get him.

He’d just take one little one step back, and that’s the difference.

So, we were Indian wrestling, and along came this big, Vermont lumberjack. I thought, “I must be insane to Indian-wrestle this guy,” but I beat him! I remember Milgrom saying, “You guys were so low, your knuckles were brushing the floor.” That’s how bent the knees were.

It was such an incredible night, and it was Halloween! Talk about feeling like, “Wow, what a great time, what a great business, we’re in comic books!” Of course, this could give the impression that we were partying all the time, and that was certainly hardly the case, but….

CBA: You had to work.

Alan: Yeah, sure we did! And we worked hard, but we managed to have fun. Wrightson had all his lizards and snake cages in there between us. At one point, after Kaluta left, we painted the place. He

said, “I’ve got this plan to paint the place orange and blue.” I said, “You’re out of your mind, that’s going to look garish and ridiculous!”

He said, “No, no, it’s gonna work. Trust me!” Well, it did, because we had all these black cases, black file cabinets, and glass terrariums in the middle, where the drawing boards were, the ceiling was blue and the walls behind it were orange. It looked better than it sounds, [laughter] but what it looked like to me was the inside of a toy box, and that’s what the apartment got nicknamed, The Toy Box, or The All-Night Freak Show. Since all the other freelancers knew we worked at night, they would just drop in at all hours. If they were in town to see a Broadway show or were working late on a job, people would show up, and sometimes they’d be there until dawn, and we’d go walking in Riverside Park at daybreak.

There’s this big Civil War monument in the 90s in Riverside Park, and it’s got columns and it looks like it could be from John Carter of Mars, drawn by Roy Krenkel. In fact, Kaluta and Wrightson used to call it the Krenkel Monument. To this day, I still think of it as the Krenkel Monument… “Yes, there goes the 6:10 to Barsoom… “ [laughter] and it’s right over the Hudson River. It’s beautiful architecture, just a great place to hang around.

We used to go out for snacks in the middle of the night, up Broadway, and you want to talk about running into horror stories?

This was gritty New York in the 1970s. Bernie didn’t like the realities, but he liked the fantasy! I dug the reality. For me, coming to New York was a dream of getting to the place where all those dark alleys were, film noir in reality, whereas I’d just come from Las Vegas, which was a different kind of fantasy-land, everything was bright, brand-new and shiny-clean.

CBA: There’s something to your work that you seem to seek out enormous diversity in race. You drew women who were certainly not typical comic book women, and I always perceived a level of humanity to your work, a humanism that was very intriguing.

Alan: Oh, I love to hear that, because I was certainly trying to go away from the norm, and go for some of my preferences, and mostly for the variety of it.

CBA: Yeah, you had black characters who looked like real black people, I mean, there wasn’t a stereotypicality to their depictions.

There was a villainess, Deadly Nightshade, that comes to mind. She was a… I don’t know, disco princess teeny-bopper… you know?

Didn’t she even have platforms?

Alan: She had big black boots, with the high heels. I went completely bananas inking those leather boots. And Englehart and I portrayed her as a little girl. She’s this terrible, scary villainess, with the personality of this little girl, this flirtatious teenager.

CBA: And you had her hair up in a bun, which visually seemed to

indicate that there was a little girl quality to her.

Alan: I also tried to get it in the posing, the expressions, in the little things. You know, there’s a story about that Captain America book. Englehart and I always wanted to work together on something or other, that was one of the main times we got to do it, that and a later Kung Fu. I had this idea: I’d love to do Captain America fighting pirates—swashbuckling is another genre I really liked. Wouldn’t it be fun if Cap was fighting modern-day pirates… but they were still dressed Long John Silver-style, because their base was an offshore gambling ship that, as its cover, was a replica of a pirate ship? I just had this visual of Captain America swinging around in the rigging, like Errol Flynn or Burt Lancaster. So we thought, “Great, we can do this, this’ll be easy, it’ll be terrific, and we haven’t seen Captain America do this before,” and we took it into Roy. He said, “Nope! Pirates don’t sell.” BLAM! That’s that.

“Well, okay, what’s selling these days?” “Well, monsters seem to be hot.” So I look at Englehart, he looks at me. I said, “Steve, werewolves?” He said, “Okay.” [laughter] Then I said, “Well, if I’m going to do this prison full of werewolves, I’m going to try to make them all look different.”

Great idea, and then the more you think about it, the more of a pain in the ass it is to actually do.

CBA: You’ve got your Pekingese werewolf… [laughs] Alan: Oh, yeah, and how about Deadly Nightshade’s little pet guy Sparky? [laughter] I even had a very effeminate-looking werewolf, he’s got curly hair. I remember Roy said, “All right, I’ll let it go through this time, but after this, take it easy on the leather ladies.” Now having said that, fast-forward 15 or so years later when everybody was wearing stuff like that.

CBA: Yeah, so it was atypical of Marvel. You were putting characterization in the most minor of characters, giving them personality and life.

Alan: The way I felt about it was, let’s try to make it all special, so there’s really nothing that’s cast away, or just faked and hacked out.

The first time I spoke with Gray Morrow, after Neal introduced me, I was trying not to be too ridiculously fawning, but I said, “You know, I just love the fact that you go past most artists in terms of the research. Real costumes, real weapons, and a variety of them— everybody in a Western isn’t just carrying the same old Colt Peacemaker.” And Gray, in his typical way, would just raise his eyebrow as if it was nothing, and say, “Well… that’s the fun!”

You know, some of my favorite stories hinge on, “Well, that’s

the fun.” The first full job I did for Marvel was a Sub-Mariner back-up, in an issue drawn by Bill Everett. Mike Friedrich wrote it, and I drew and inked. I was really proud of those undersea hybrid characters, especially the mermaid. There was the shark head, the hammerhead guy, and the octopus guy. I even tried to figure out new ways to split the panels to make them look like undersea caverns. This is a story that Wrightson relates in A Look Back—Bernie said, “Yeah, Al worked all night on this mermaid, and he did a beautiful job, and he came in the Bullpen and the older artists jumped all over him for it, saying, ‘Oh, yeah, of course, you’re a

Above: Page from Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #2. Pencils

by Alan, inks by Allen Milgrom, and script by Steve Englehart.

That’s Milgrom, Weiss, Englehart, and Starlin in the background of the third panel!

Courtesy of Alan Weiss. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Fu Manchu ©2000 Sax Rohmer Estate.

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Above: Marvel calendar piece, 1980, penciled by Alan and inked by Joe Rubenstein.

Courtesy of Alan Weiss. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Alan’s Kiss character sketches for a proposed 1977 animation project. Next time we promise we’ll talk to Alan about his and Steve Gerber’s best-selling Kiss Marvel Super Special! ©2000 the respective copyright holder.

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hippie, and you don’t have to do this stuff fast, I guess you don’t care if you make any money.’” That’s Bernie’s memory of it, but here’s the real story: I bring that job in. I have to finish a panel up there, and this is a big deal, you know? It’s the first Marvel job I get to both pencil and ink, and it is the Sub-Mariner, my favorite character. I am trying to really express my vision of him and make him look real, but more than real, and very noble, because I loved the John Buscema SubMariners. So, that day, I’m in this little cubicle with Herb Trimpe and

John Romita. Gil Kane is in the office that day. Now Gil has some pointed opinions about the younger artists and what he considers their overuse of rendering; and I get a talking-to from Gil Kane, a lecture. He’s pacing back and forth, orating about masturbatory rendering. Here, we want to be illustrators, and we are trying to utilize the rendering for the sake of a hyper-reality. But what they are saying is, “This just takes too long! That’s the main reason we don’t do it! It costs money!” Of course, at that age, we are just doing the best we can, and speed and finances are a secondary consideration! [laughter] There was a radio interview with Kaluta where he said, “I don’t know how we survived, sometimes I wonder how the hell we ate!” You know, he would work for God knows how long on an eight-page story, until he thought it was done! He’d do tons more research than you ever had to do, because that was the fun!

So I’m sitting there—and here’s one of my three earliest favorite artists telling me I’m doing it wrong! Oh, sh*t! He’s saying, “Well, m’boy…” and proceeds to list all things I shouldn’t be doing. Then John Romita chimes in with his story—”Yeah, once I did this romance job for Stan, and I put in the feathering”—they have different words for feathering, sometimes if they are denigrating it, they’d just call it “hay”—”and I did all this illustrative linework, and when I came in all the other artists collared me at the elevator saying, ‘Are you out of your mind? Now he’s going to want us all to do that! How are we going to make a living?’” So they were all pissed off at John, because it was going to cost them time and money. So, Romita’s telling me this story, further discouragement, and I’m thinking, “I can’t, I’m not going to open my mouth to Gil Kane,” not at that time—I was 21, 22 years old!

Here’s Herb Trimpe, the guy with this relatively cartoony style, right? The least amount of rendering, just nice, big, thick Marvel lines, right? And I didn’t know Herb, but his certainly wasn’t the style of artwork I was trying to do. I’ll never forget this, he’s playing with little toy cars—sort of absent-mindedly running this little car he is holding in one hand around the drawing board—very mild mannered. Herb is the one guy who has an encouraging word, and he says, simply this: “I don’t know, I think you ought to just do it the way you want to do it!” Just like that. It was the best thing that could’ve happened, you know? It was just so right! It was really wonderful, it lifted my spirits, and I’ve been grateful to Herb ever since. Let me tell ya, if I hadn’t been the biggest Herb Trimpe fan before that day, I sure as hell have been ever since! [laughter] He’s a

terrific artist, he’s as good as anyone ever has been—did you ever see Savage Tales in the ’80s? Herb wrote and drew this postapocalyptic flying strip—you’ve got to see this! It’s the best Herb Trimpe artwork you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s real high-contrast, illustrative… beautiful.

CBA: Did you read Herb’s article in The New York Times?

Alan: Oh, I read that, that just broke my heart. Yeah, that really hurt, because… that story’s become all too common these days.

Herb deserved a lot better from the industry—and he’s not the only one. Fortunately, that story had a happy ending. Herb’s okay, it’s Marvel’s loss.

CBA: You had the opportunity to work in a different field, in advertising, which is obviously much more lucrative and varying.

Alan: Neal brought a bunch of us in to advertising work through Continuity and his own work. I learned everything I knew about advertising work from Neal—storyboards, comps and animatics. I started out assisting him, and then he let me move up a little, do a little penciling. When I came back from California, I got into splitting my time between advertising work and comics. To me, the comics work was much more important and most enjoyable.

Later on, after working with Neal, I worked with Jim Sherman for a while, and I did some work out of Studio 23 with a bunch of guys that included Ralph Reese, Joe Barney, and Joe Desposito. Carl Potts had a couple of clients that he would get his comic book pals to do storyboards for. Sometimes they’d call in three or four of us for four days running to do an entire campaign. We’d do all-nighters, and then we might not hear from them for a bit, so then I’d go back and work on comics. For me, this was really, in its way, the best of both worlds. It wasn’t this incredible grind for a relatively small amount of money. But it also wasn’t the way to stardom, I’ll tell you that. The way to stardom is frequency and visibility. [laughter] CBA: And ownership?

Alan: Well, for ownership, I would do it! That was part of the decision, too, if I was going to go through that much of a grind, I’d like to do it as an investment in some future, rather than just being the 895th guy to draw Batman. There’s nothing wrong with that, depending on where you are when it happens. Don’t forget, this was before the big royalties kicked in. Look, I still never quite got my shot at Superman, and there’s no question I’d still like to, but I did this Batman Elseworlds Western graphic novel a couple of years back, The Blue and Gray and the Bat. It was my concept, and I co-plotted with Elliott Maggin. Okay, so I was number 896, but I had a great time.

Elliot’s a good friend and a terrific writer. Again, I don’t think he’s as well-appreciated as he ought to be. He’s not the only one.

Cary Bates is terrific. Remember Cary’s book Video Jack? I drew a pirate segment for him. Cary and I also did a story for Secret Origins, the origin of Captain Atom, and it was the old Charlton Steve Ditko Captain Atom… I loved the chain-mail. I did another Secret Origins, Johnny Thunder, with Elliott. It was a beautifully-written, solid little 13-pager. That was fun, and that kind of led in to working on the Batman thing with Elliott, who was a big Abraham Lincoln fan, and he took direct quotes and inserted them into within the narrative.

CBA: You did one mean Sub-Mariner, a great Captain America, but there was one character that is somewhat identified with you.

You drew Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane for a couple of stories.

Alan: Yeah. I loved that character. That character was introduced to me by Bernie Wrightson. I’d read Conan before I got to New York, but I’d never seen Solomon Kane. He said, “Oh, you’ve got to read these!” And he pulled out one of the paperbacks with a Jeff Jones painting on the cover, and he says, “This guy is right up your alley, because you like to do those tall, wiry-muscled guys,” and he was right on the money! So, I was really glad to have gotten the chance to kind of be, in essence, the signature artist on it. The first one was drawn by Ralph Reese, but I did ghost several pages of that job.

CBA: In pencil?

Alan: Yeah. I believe Ralph inked that job, he probably did. But I loved the idea of that character, and I really think I made a real connection with him… Here’s this guy, this religious Puritan, swordsman, swashbuckler. “Yeah, okay, I’m going to rationalize my skewering people by the fact that I’m doing it for the Lord.” [laughter] They were mysterious, really gritty stories. So, again, while I might’ve done

a total of three or four stories, it feels like a lot more, because I was so into that character. I did research on the Matchlock rifle he had, I was really working with the leather textures of the boots, and trying to get the right angle of that hat. I suppose Solomon Kane really could’ve become a signature character for me, my Swamp Thing or Shadow, but there weren’t really enough of them. The same goes for Pellucidar.

CBA: Did Joe Orlando approach you for that?

Alan: No. The Burroughs line-up went like this—Joe Kubert was doing Tarzan, Frank Thorne drew Korak, Murphy Anderson had “John Carter of Mars.” Orlando had Kaluta on “Carson of Venus,” and he’d signed Wrightson for “Pellucidar.” Again, I hadn’t read Pellucidar, but I had the books because of the Frazetta covers, so I said, “Well, my roommate’s going to be drawing this strip, I should at least pay him the respect of reading the books.” So I read the first four of ’em, and it’s a good thing, too, because about the time I was finishing up, Wrightson had done the first Swamp Thing story around that time—not to digress, but I worked on that, too; a couple of us did. I penciled most of the female heads, and I think I drew a head or two of Bernie, with the long hair and the round glasses.

CBA: Was the main female character based on Weezie?

Alan: Weezie Jones, absolutely. So around the time he would’ve

Above: Page from Shazam! #34, featuring Alan’s Raboy-esque version of Captain Marvel, Jr.!

Pencils by Weiss, inks by Joe Rubenstein. Courtesy of Alan Weiss. ©2000 DC Comics.

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Above: Page from What If? #37 X-Men story featuring The Beast, written and penciled by Alan, inked by Jim Sherman, from 1982. Courtesy of the Alan Weiss. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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started on “Pellucidar,” they decided to do Swamp Thing as a series.

Given the choice, of course, he preferred to do horror. So, that left “Pellucidar” up in the air. I used to hang around Orlando’s office, and he had the covers of the books he edited up on the wall, and I didn’t want to say anything outright—I would just kind of hang around and look up there and say, “Yeah, Burroughs’ stuff, I really like it.” At one point, he said, “What?!? What do you want?!?!

What?!?” I said, “Well, you know, this ‘Pellucidar’ thing, Bernie’s not going to do it.” “Nope. Gil Kane’s going to do it.” That’s it, nothing more to be said, Gil Kane’s going to do it, he’s got it, I’ve got no chance. So I walked away. A couple of weeks later, I get this call from Orlando, and he says, “Uh… Gil Kane can’t do this thing, what do you know about ‘Pellucidar’?” I said, “Oh! The Thipdars and the Mahars and Hoo-Hahs,” whatever the hell. [laughter] So, he said, “Okay, do me up a couple of sketches.” So I did samples, and that’s

what got the gig. It was Bernie’s intention to do Roy Krenkel as Abner Perry, which couldn’t be more perfect, because not only was Roy a wonderful Burroughs artist, but a delightful curmudgeon as well. We all loved him. So I wanted to follow through on that Bernie had taken a bunch of Polaroid shots of Krenkel, so he gave them me, so I worked from that reference.

I did the character samples on Vellum overlay-type sheets, inked with Pentel felt tips.

Orlando loved the look of the inking, he thought it was very unique, and he said, “Why don’t you ink the book this way?” I said, “Well, do you think it’ll reproduce all right?” He says, “Oh, yeah, the way our reproduction is now, it’ll be just fine, no problem.” So, that’s how I did the first installment, and when I saw it printed, I just about died, because half the linework dropped out. It looked broken, it looked sketchy, and the originals did not look like that. I felt, “This is my first series thing, oh, my God, everybody’s going to think this is what it’s supposed to look like!” I felt awful about it, so I made sure on the next one to just ink the sh*t out of it, you know? I took out the brush and really went to work. I was much happier with the second one. After that, as the dreaded deadline doom descended, we got the Crusty Bunkers on the inks. #3 was among the first jobs the Crusty Bunkers worked on.

CBA: Were you a Crusty Bunker?

Alan: You bet, one of the charter members! [laughter] I’m a charter Bunker! Yeah, it was Neal’s name.

CBA: Did the name come from working on Swords of Sorcery?

Alan: You mean Chaykin’s thing?

CBA: I think that was the first job. Were you called the Crusty Bunkers because you guys were doing basically swashbuckling on the first story?

Alan: No, no, no. Crusty Bucklers?

Swashbunkers? The name “Crusty Bunkers” has nothing to do with swashbucklers at all; it was a phrase that Neal’s used with his kids. It was like calling somebody a name that really wasn’t dirty.

CBA: [laughs] “You crusty bunker!”

Alan: “You crappy bastard”? No, “You crusty bunker”! It didn’t really mean anything, it just sounded good, you know? So he adapted it as a name. I think at one point, before it was even “The Crusty Bunkers,” it was just “Crusty Bunker,” singular—but that’s all it was. Neal just threw that name on it. We liked it. It sounded tough, abrasive, and a little bit rebellious, right?

CBA: Yeah, sounds like pirates to me! So you worked on ‘Pellucidar,’ and then you worked over at Marvel for a time. You were basically back and forth?

Alan: I was freelancing for both Marvel and DC and other companies as well. I did some humor stuff. I did some work for Lampoon.

Did you ever see that Esquire thing? Jeff Jones, Barry Smith, Bernie Wrightson, Mike Ploog, and I invented characters for this short feature—we were “the new artists of the ’70s” Bernie did “Redneck,” this flying super-hero. Mike Ploog did a “Spirit” kind of a guy, but I think he was black, it was really nice. Barry Smith did some sort of super-soldier, Jeff Jones did an out-of-body soul/spirit thing, Egyptian… what was mine? Oh, yeah! [laughs] Geez! He was called “The Incredible Phizgink.” He was the most insane, mundane, and something else that rhymes with that… inane, mundane, insane, that’s it. [laughter] He was just this surrealistic hero who could return lost time in bio-degradable containers. [laughter] He fought against such villains as Plastic Patsy and Captain Apathy. It was vaguely political satire, weird, bizarre. He had sparklers on his helmet. I don’t

even know where the idea came from now, but it was a lot of fun.

CBA: You told me a story about the creation of Shang-Chi. Alan: Yeah, but Englehart didn’t tell the whole story [in “Everybody Was Kung Fu Watchin’,” CBA #7]. In fact, he forgot the punch line! Englehart talked about the use of the Bell Telephone Building for ShangChi. Well, this was a night that four of us prowl all night around town—as a matter of fact, it’s the very night before the day I was to leave New York to go to Vegas, and I don’t know if I’ll be back or when. So, we just have this all-night incredible prowl and adventure in the streets… he mentions there were guys working in the street with big arc lights, with welding torches that cast these gigantic shadows? That’s exactly true, it was a phenomenal sight—middle of the night, quiet, no traffic, and we’re watching these giant shapes in shadow moving on the skyscrapers, on the buildings. It’s downtown, so it’s older buildings, not as high as midtown skyscrapers. There’s a huge, big construction site that we go into and we’re climbing on all the big rigs and construction tools—they are all shut down, but we’re climbing on everything that night. We go down to the World Trade Center, which is still under construction, but we get in there—I don’t know how, we just kind of walk past everybody.

At one point, we go to this big skyscraper with no windows! It looks like this big monolith. It looks like something out of George Pal’s The Time Machine that the future Morlocks would construct…no windows! Two openings out of a building that must be 30 stories high, with four kind of separate pods. They look almost like giant meerschaum pipes on each side, we don’t know what they were.

We’re trying to figure out, “What the hell kind of building can this be with no windows?”

We go walking all around it, looking for an entrance or something, and we finally get to a doorway, and it’s the Bell Telephone Building. It looks like the wall to the door is eight feet, then there is the door, then on the other side, there is eight feet of thickness. By now, we’re attracting the attention of the rent-a-cops. It’s the middle of the night, and there’s these four hippie types running around!

What the hell are they up to?

CBA: “Are they Weathermen?” [laughs] Alan: [laughs] You know, of course, that’s the last thing we are. It’s just, “Oh, what a great idea! How about we have the Sub-Mariner come in.” “Oh, no, what about Captain America… “ So this guard

comes out, and he ascertains that we’re completely harmless, and friendly, and he needs somebody to talk to, because it’s lonely up there—no way is anyone breaking into this building! [laughter] He is from the Burns Detective Agency—I’ll never forget this, the guy has a Spanish accent—and he is explaining why the building has no windows, because it’s where the transatlantic cables come in, so it’s atom bomb-proof! So, they can keep the telephone lines humming even if the rest of New York is reduced to ashes around it! [laughter] And the people inside can stay alive, until the radiation filters through those little apertures that we saw, right? So we think this is pretty

Above: 1986 cover illustration for Steelgrip Starkey and his All Purpose Power Tool. Pencils by Alan, inks by Jim Sherman.

Courtesy of and ©2000 Alan Weiss.

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Above: Double-page spread barroom brawl scene from Armageddon: Alien Agenda #3, Weiss pencils and inks.

Featuring several old DC Western characters: Bat Lash, Pow-Wow Smith, Firehair, Matt Savage, Jonah Hex, Johnny Thunder, and that’s Captain Atom (!) in a cowboy outfit. You can spot Alan playing piano in the background. Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 DC Comics. Below: A photo of Alan and Pauline Weiss (the salty sea captain and his dragon lady), taken at a Bernie Wrightson Halloween party in the early ’80s. CBA thanks Pauline for all of her great help with this section.

Courtesy of Alan.

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interesting, and we’re thinking maybe we can do something with this at some point down the line. But here’s the punch line: Englehart says to him, “Well, tell me, sir, what does the Burns Detective Agency manual advise as tactics during a nuclear holocaust?” [laughs] So the guy says, “Well, I don’t know what the detective agency say, but I’ve always heard that you should bend down and put your head between your knees.” And Starlin says, “Yeah, and kiss your sweet ass good-bye!” [laughter]. We work our way down to South Ferry, one of my favorite parts of the island. Battery Park is where my story from Big Apple Comix is set— where that big eagle is, facing the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. That’s the point where you really feel like you’re on an island. In fact, if you’re standing exactly at the edge there, you can almost believe the whole island is a ship. We get there by dawn, watch the sun come up, you know? So, that was an incredible way to send me off.

CBA: Then you moved to California.

Alan: Well, I didn’t know yet I’d be settling in California for some years. I spent most of the next year back in Vegas. Englehart came through, and we scouted California together. Steve fell in love with it, and he’s lived there ever since. A bit later, Starlin and Brunner came out too. We all ended up in the Bay Area. Tom Orzechowski and Mike Friedrich were there as well. For awhile, Starlin, Brunner and I shared Studio Zero, a basement… hence the name.

CBA: Did you have any exposure to the undergrounds while you were in the Bay Area?

Alan: Absolutely, lots. We got to know a lot of those guys. We were interested in owning our

own creations like they all did. At one point we were approached by Rolling Stone to produce a comics insert feature, all creator-owned characters. We were really excited about it! Wow—a chance to do something outside of any editorial policy or censorship—but the whole thing turned sour fast. Rolling Stone wasn’t really interested in any innovative concepts. They wanted super-heroes in glitter bands!

So that thing never happened—and of course there were the many dead-end adventures with various hippie entrepreneurs who were all going to create the newest, most futuristic, hip, creator friendly comics company…but ended up blowing any capital on announcement party favors. [laughter] CBA: So after a few years, you returned to New York City?

Alan: Well, I’d headed back out West to back off from the comics for awhile, to refresh and reprioritize, so to speak. You know, there are some elements of the business end of the comics business that can tend to really grind down your original love and youthful enthusiasm for the medium. So while I was out there I spent a little less time doing comics and a lot more time exploring, researching, and experiencing…you know, real “meaning of life” stuff.

CBA: And did you find the answer?

Alan: Maybe not the answer, but my answers—enough to recapture my enthusiasm for comics, and then some. It was during that time I began concentrating on creating some original characters and concepts of my own. Since then, I’ve had deals with four or five companies for several of these strips, but for one reason or another the only ones that have actually seen print so far are Steelgrip Starkey and his All Purpose Power Tool for Marvel’s Epic line, and War Dancer for Defiant. I was developing and producing four more of my properties for Broadway Comics’ creator-owned line when the company folded.

So after a short stint in animation down in Hollywood, I decided to go back to the East Coast. Jim Starlin was down there, working with Ralph Bakshi. “Wait for me in Vegas for a week or two and

we’ll drive back together. Well, that trip turned into a minor odyssey! Lots of adventures. There was this guy I’d done an X-rated Solomon Kane illustration for use in his fanzine. Well, this jerk wouldn’t return the original. I couldn’t reach him by phone or mail so I was helpless—but that October, Starlin and I showed up at his house in Missouri. I had all these angry plans…” Yeah, if he won’t give it up we’ll grab him, tie him up, and keep him in a motel room till he…”

“Hold it,” says Starlin. “Calm down.

We can’t do that. This is not our home state, and if we go kidnapping people they may not realize we’re the good guys!”

Instead, Jim pretended to be an art dealer/buyer to case his place and see where the art was. Then he came out to get me, to bring me in as his partner. The guy froze in mid-introduction! I think he peed his pants! So I got that piece back.

CBA: [laughs] When you got back to New York, you worked for both DC and Marvel?

Alan: Mostly Marvel for awhile. A few stories for DC—Flash, Atom, Supergirl… I did a lot of inventory issues and Fanfare jobs for Allen Milgrom, because they were on extended deadlines and they’d just schedule them as fill-ins whenever they needed one. That way I got a crack at lots of my favorite Marvel characters— Quicksilver and the Inhumans, The X-Men, Iron Man, Power Man/Iron Fist, John Carter of Mars, The Avengers, Silver Surfer, Dr. Strange—a Western—and, of course, the Subby, my favorite.

CBA: You also did Captain Marvel for DC. It was a real surprise to see your work on Shazam!, of all things.

Did you clue into Mac Raboy very strongly?

Alan: Well, the main reason I wanted that gig was because it featured Marvel Jr., and I loved Raboy’s work so much. Captain Nazi was in it, too. Joe Rubenstein did some really nice inks on that job. As a kid, I’d never seen Captain Marvel.

My first exposure to the character was Wally Wood’s “Superduperman” strip in a Mad reprint, so when I finally saw a copy of Whiz Comics, I was really disappointed in that flat outline coloring book Marvel had. Sure, that style has a charm of its own, but it wasn’t what I expected. Raboy’s Marvel Jr., though… that was the stuff! So when I got my shot at Captain Marvel, I added a little Woody-style lighting to the guy to add a bit of dimension, and gave him that Fred MacMurray face. That was a lot of fun. A few years later I proposed a redo on another ex-Fawcett character, Bulletman.

Another case of “close but no cigar” at DC. They were gonna do it, then they weren’t, then they were, but of course they didn’t. I thought I had a nice angle on a relatively ridiculous character, and I actually got to use it later in War Dancer, where Bulletman became Billy Ballistic and the Bullet Babes.

CBA: How do you assess those times? Did they form you?

Alan: They either formed me… or de-formed me. Sure! In every way. The New York experience, especially my early years, was like coming to this amazing gritty real-life Oz, the place where it’s all done, where it’s always been done. It was a big risk too, because that’s where the toughest competition was. So if you can make it there… you know how the song goes.

Drawing comical books for a living—what a surrealistic thing!

See, to the average “read-’em-when-I-was-a-kid” type of person, a comic book is just a comic book—but to those of us who love them, they’re still an extraordinary dimensional doorway. I don’t want to wax too fantastical about it, but look: an idealistic viewpoint is what keeps you relatively sane and fresh, so you’re still having fun. So even after kicking around…and being kicked around… this biz for a stretch, there are those of us who, far from being burnt out, feel they’re at the top of their form, the peak of their powers —and that’s just how I feel.

Above: Alan penciled and inked this extraordinary pin-up of Archer and Armstrong at Little Big Horn for Valiant in 1992.

Courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2000 Alan Weiss.

Archer and Armstrong ©2000 Barry Windsor-Smith.

Editor’s note: We sincerely look forward to talking with Alan again about later aspects of his career, and we thank the artist and his wife, Pauline, for their herculean efforts in supplying us with art and extensive copyediting. We hope you enjoyed reading this talk as much as ye ed did conducting it.

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CBA Collection Extra!

When Jack Kirby came to DC in the early ’70s, his obligations included producing a line of black-&-white magazines intended to appeal to adult audiences. While his In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World made it to the newsstands (albeit for one issue each), an aborted project called True Divorce Cases was initially developed and later refined into an all-black romance title, Soul Love. While the project was abandoned, copies of Jack’s stories survive and we’re proud to feature pages (sans the splash—which can be found in The Jack Kirby Collector #23) from the tale, “Dedicated Nurse.” Inks by Vincent Colletta. Courtesy of and art ©2000 the Jack Kirby Estate. Soul Love ©2013 Jack Kirby Estate.

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CBA Collection Extra!

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Previously unpublished, here are six pages from an unfinished House of Secrets story penciled and partially-inked by the legendary Jeffrey Jones and written by Marty Pasko in 1971. (See page 172 of this Collection for a photo of Alan Weiss modeling for this very story!) Our thanks to the artist for his consent to publish most of the eight-page story, supplied to us courtesy of Albert Moy. Art ©2000 Jeff Jones. Story ©2000 DC Comics.

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Bernie Wrightson Portfolio

CBA Collection Extra!

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Opposite page: Unidentified late-’60s/early-’70s page. ©2000 Bernie Wrightson.

Left: Cover layout. ©2000 Bernie Wrightson.

Below right: Swamp Thing illustration. Swamp Thing ©2000 DC Comics.

Art ©2000 Bernie Wrightson.

Below left: Pencil layout for the Plop! story, “Molded in Evil.” Art ©2000 Bernie Wrightson Right: Daredevil by Alan Weiss (pencils) and Bernie (inks). Art ©2000 Alan Weiss & Bernie Wrightson.

Daredevil ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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CBA Interview Extra

Bringing Back the Bat Steve Englehart returns the Darknight Detective to his roots Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by LongBox.com Staff

Below: A quintessential iconic image of the Batman by his cocreator Bob Kane. From Detective Comics #34. ©2002 DC Comics.

Steve Englehart, noted Marvel writer of the early to mid-1970s (as well as numerous other companies and time-frames) only briefly resided as a DC Comics scribe when he first arrived in 1976. In fact, his work on Justice League of America, Mister Miracle and Detective Comics lasted a mere 12 months, as Steve intended this to be his last year in the industry as he hoped to move on to a new career as a science-fiction author of “real” books. But what a year that was!

Though destined to periodically return to the field, his Batman stories, drawn by artists Walter Simonson and newcomer Marshall Rogers respectively, are considered to be classics. [CBA interviewed the writer in our 18th issue regarding his ’70s Marvel work.] This interview took place by phone on and the transcript was copyedited

by Steve.

Comic Book Artist: What did you think of the Batman overall?

Steve Englehart: He was always my favorite character. I can remember as a little kid reading a Batman comic book, Detective Comics #230. (I saw it 20 years later on sale and instantly knew it was the one I had read.) I remember going to doubleheader baseball games with my father; we would stop and pick up a comic book somewhere, and Batman was always the character that I wanted. In many ways, he’s the archetypal comic book character because he, among all them, works best in black-&white. That, of course, is the basis for all comics, but

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any other comic book character needs color to be defined. I was also always a sucker for a nice black line in the artwork, whether it was Paul Murry’s Mickey Mouse or Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. When I was a kid, Dick Sprang was drawing Batman and his stories were always spectacular. All in all, I liked the character and was more than happy to get a chance to write him.

CBA: Before you wrote Batman, did you have any exposure to the quintessential Batman of the early Detective Comics, the pre-Robin stories?

Steve: When I got this gig at DC, the first thing I did was to ask for photocopies of those stories from their library. DC has all the comics they’ve ever published in nice bound volumes in a room somewhere in the building. So they agreed and got somebody to get me all that stuff. In fact, Denny O’Neil got interested and got a second set made for him. They gave me the first two or three years of his appearances in Detective and Batman in gray xeroxes (which were not all that clear but good enough). I always knew that Batman had come from a pulp background, knew about his connection to the Shadow and the Spider—that general dark-hooded thing had been around before Batman first appeared. That I knew from Steranko’s wonderful History of Comics. So I just soaked in those photocopies, getting the whole pulp atmosphere of the character, which certainly had a big effect on what I did with him.

CBA: Obviously, your intention was to get back to the essence of the character, the quintessential Batman?

Steve: When I came over to DC Comics, [publisher] Jenette Kahn had just taken over and she wanted me to revamp the Justice League to get them up to speed with the Marvel characters. I really didn’t have an objection, but I did say, “Well, I really want to do the Batman.” I like a lot of those Justice League characters and had a good time with the Hawkpeople, Wonder Woman, and so forth, but Batman was the guy that I was most interested in. Most people’s concept of Batman in 1975 was based on the late ‘60s television show. If you went out on the street and asked people about the character, they’d say, “Oh yeah, that campy Adam West thing with all the pops and pows and bams.” Nobody outside of comics was taking him seriously as a general concept.

CBA: In the interim, the character reached a highpoint under Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil.

Steve: Absolutely. I had worked with Neal during some of that time, but that was a period where DC was steadily losing readership to Marvel. Neal had even gone over to draw X-Men and Avengers.

Denny and Neal had done work which certainly caught the attention of comic book readers, but as a general concept, most people on the street didn’t know about that stuff. I don’t think DC or I expected to change that perception, but there was a feeling that because I was well known and coming off some regarded runs of Marvel titles at the time, my coming to DC would help put them—and Batman—back on the map. I knew I would enjoy writing the strip and realized that I had just come off some top stuff at the competition, so I had a pretty good regard for what I might be able to do. But, going into it, I didn’t think it would as become as big as it did become. I just knew that I was going to do something that was going to make me happy.

CBA: Was Batman the top-selling character at the company at that time?

Steve: I have no idea. During the TV show’s heyday, they sold a million copies

each. But by the mid-’70s, most of the top creative people had left DC and the company was in a pretty moribund state. I don’t mean to malign anybody good who was still there, but as a general concept, Marvel was the hip-happening place to be and that’s where most people, even Gil Kane, guys who had been doing this forever at DC— they were now all over at Marvel. I don’t know how Batman was selling but the entire line was definitely not selling as well as DC would have liked.

CBA: While I don’t have any factual evidence to back this up, there was a general perception that while Batman was tops in the mid- to late ‘60s, by 1970 sales had slipped again. Then, at some point in the late ‘70s into the ‘80s, he ascended again and continues to be the top-selling character at the company. You came on at time which arguably was a pretty dry time for comics, creatively. It seemed to be that a lot of people had left the field to try their hands independently. At the time, some of the only rays of hope were from Michael Golden, a young Frank Miller and, of course, the Englehart/Rogers/Austin Batman story arc. Were you drifting away from comics? Did you feel like it was becoming a stagnant field?

Steve: I just wanted out. I don’t think I thought comics were stagnating at that time. To me, everything was viable as ever, but I could have been wrong. I still think there were several more years of good energy to be had before things begin to drift away, but a lot of that is in the mind of the beholder. All I had planned to do was be a Marvel writer and all of a sudden I was on the phone telling Gerry Conway that I was not going to work there anymore. I certainly had no plan in

place about what I was going to do when I left Marvel because I just up and quit. When Jenette called and said, “We’d like for you to do some stuff for us,” it was like, “Okay, that works.” At that point, comics were a disappointment to me (but little did I know how much of a disappointment they were going to be before it was all over) [laughter]. I just told her I didn’t want to write comics long term or be involved in the business. There was too much petty bullsh*t. So I told DC that I would write for one year and then I’d be gone.

CBA: Was that by verbal agreement or did you have a contract?

Steve: Just verbal. I knew from the start that that one year was going to be all I’d ever do, so I better pour everything that I wanted to do with the character into those Batman stories, as well as everything I had wanted to do with the Justice League. It was a good thing in that regard.

CBA: Your tenure on Detective Comics is very self-contained, almost like chapters of a graphic novel.

Steve: Nobody thought about graphic novels in those days. I did not sit down and say here’s what I will do issue by issue and how it will all end up. I was still working in my usual fashion: I know where I want to start, know some things that I want to do and I’ll throw some balls in the air and see how it all comes down. The climax with Silver and Boss Thorne just evolved during the course of writing it. But I did know that I was going to have to wrap it up. I couldn’t go on ad infinitum by my decision.

CBA: Did you want to be teamed with a specific artist for the entire run?

Above: Great Golden Age artist Jack Burnley recreated this classic Dynamic Duo image from the artist’s original cover to Batman #16. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Inset right: The climactic battle between the Batman and his rival, The Joker, from the Englehartscribed and Rogers & Austindrawn epic in Detective Comics #476. ©2002 DC Comics.

Below: Jerry Robinson, artist of the illustration below, created the Batman’s greatest villain, The Joker, in Batman #1, where this panel detail initially appeared. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Steve: No. I come from an era where you just got assigned to things. I’ve learned that who you’re teamed with is more important now and you should pay more attention, but in those days, you just didn’t ask for specific people. You could, but it wasn’t the usual procedure and I didn’t do it. On the other hand, when they said Walt Simonson wanted to work with me, I was pleased to hear that.

CBA: You didn’t specifically ask for Walter?

Steve: No. I remember being told Walt was a big Batman fan and when he heard that this opportunity was there he wanted to do it. Maybe a couple days later, Walt and I were headed towards the Washington, D.C. area (where his parents and my grandparents live) on the Metroliner, just talking Batman the whole way because we were both very excited about what we were going to do.

CBA: He only worked with you for two issues. He told me that the Dr. Phosphorus came from an idea he got back in art school from an instructor.

Steve: We did talk about Phosphorus as we rode on the train because we’d just gotten the gig together and were talking what we were going to do. I would have thought it was my character, but I haven’t had to think about it in a long time, so if he says he thought of it, then I certainly believe it. We were just two Batfans working out what we were going to do.

CBA: Did you hope for Walter to go the entire distance with you in Detective Comics?

Steve: Absolutely. I’m a big Walt Simonson fan and was hoping that he would. What developed over the first couple issues is that he did very loose breakdowns

which Al Milgrom finished. Now, I like Al’s work very much, but always think he does his best work over his own pencils. Later on, Al and I did West Coast Avengers together and for a long time Marvel tried to get Joe Sinnott inking Al. The end result never really worked for me, as much as I like both of those guys, because Milgrom can draw a face that’s a couple dots and a slash, for instance, and it will look real within the context of the entire Milgrom art. But when you put an inker like Sinnott on Al’s pencils, Joe tries to ink two dots and a slash (and I don’t mean that pejoratively), he over-realities it. It was too much. Al does fairly abstract kind of art, which I like, and feel that he’s best served when penciling and inking himself.

So, on Detective Comics, here was Simonson doing fairly abstract layouts and then Al was finishing them abstractly, and I have to say it didn’t have the dark intensity I thought the character needed. But just as I didn’t ask for my artists, I didn’t ask to get rid of them, either. I honestly don’t know why the change was made to Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin.

CBA: You didn’t feel that with Marshall coming on there was a mini relaunch after doing those two test issues?

Steve: They weren’t test issues; they were real issues. But I didn’t know who was going to take it over. I was writing all the scripts in advance. Most everything I had done previous to the Batmans was Marvel style. (I did some Vampirella scripts in advance, but mostly I had worked Marvel style.)

DC wanted scripts done in advance, and I found that to be a very good system for the Batman because I was really able to pace it. So much of Batman is mood and, by scripting in advance, I was really able to make it move at exactly the pace I thought it should. In addition to that, I didn’t have to wait for someone to draw issue one before I could start working on issue two. I was ahead.

This is the weird thing about how it all turned out: The first two issues were done by Walt and Al and I wasn’t crazy about them, but I was already up to writing issue five by the time I saw the artwork. By the time their second issue came out, it was time for me to leave as I had made arrangements for my wife and me to go to Europe and travel for nine months. We sold our house, took half the money, put it in the bank, and took the other half and we went to Europe. We bought a van and tried to make the money last as long as possible which ended up being nine months. It was one of the best years of my life. I had a wonderful time driving around doing nothing except enjoying the alternate realities of Europe.

And, based on our previous interview, I have to add that I don’t mean drugs here. [laughter] I’m just talking about how each culture was differ-

ent from the one I knew.

CBA: You weren’t thinking about the comics?

Steve: I had written all eight scripts and then left the country and I did not know who was going to draw them. Considering who was available at DC, they probably weren’t going to be very good. All I could do was write the best scripts I could, hand them off and leave the country. It wasn’t until eight months later, at least, that we were living in Majorca. We had a house in a little village overlooking the Mediterranean where I got a package from Julie Schwartz and inside were three comic books. I was like, “Holy smokes, look how good this is!” I had no idea what had transpired in between that time. I did not know Marshall and don’t think I knew Terry. I didn’t ask for them.

It must have been Julie who went out and found them.

CBA: Did you suggest or instruct in the scripts themselves for the artist to emulate the late ‘30s stories look?

Steve: So much of that was in my brain, I really don’t know if I put it in my scripts. The one thing that I did ask was for all the panel borders to be thicker than normal. If you make all the panel borders a little darker it would add darkness overall to the page, a good thing for the Batman. Beyond that, my best guess is that I was wandering around the halls raving about making him more pulp-like and somehow that got conveyed to Marshall because he obviously caught on.

CBA: Well, however it happened, there certainly was incredible collaboration, and everyone involved seemed to click.

Steve: Marshall did what he did, Terry had that nice black line which I really liked, we had the thicker panel borders, and it was all perfect for what it had to be. John Workman was doing his superb lettering, and Julie must be acknowledged. Julie had been an editor who pretty much generated all the stories for his books. He would sit down with Gardner Fox, John Broome or whomever and say, “Here’s the cover and here’s what I’ve been thinking about,” and then they’d sit in the office and work out something to Julie’s satisfaction. Now, I certainly didn’t work that way. That wasn’t the milieu that I came from. During that initial lunch with Jenette, I recall saying that as much as I liked Julie, there might be a problem with me writing one of his titles. She said, “Julie just wants the books to be good.” When I started to work with Julie, he said, “I understand how you want to work and so long as it all comes out okay that’s all right by me.” Julie was a hands-off editor as far as I was concerned, which was the right thing to be to get my best work.

CBA: Marshall recalls the only edits Julie put in was in the scene when the Joker goes into the copyright office and does his soliloquy.

Julie added some banter between the Joker and his henchmen.

Marshall summoned up the courage to change it back to your version and he said, as far as he knew, Julie never noticed.

Steve: I never knew about that. That’s a tough scene to draw. The Joker is flamboyant but he’s still just talking to this particular bureaucrat and Marshall captured all that beautifully. I’ve said for years comics is a collaborative effort. I’m always very appreciative of people who can hold up their end of the process.

Marshall, Terry, John, and Julie all did on that. I’m not trying to say I did something and they helped me out. We all helped each other out and were all on the same wavelength.

CBA: Did you have an inkling of the critical acclaim that it received.

Steve: To some degree, because there were the letter columns printed in the book, saying “the definitive Batman,” “Best Batman ever!” [laughter] When I did come back to America, I spent some time in New York before heading to California. I went to the DC offices and was hearing it from all sides how well the books were received. I read a lot of the letters that didn’t get published. I hung out with Julie and told him thanks, and I also met Marshall there for the first time, and maybe Terry, too. I have this slight feeling that I might have known Terry before but I don’t think so. I was going to meet these guys who had done such a nice job, and they had been hearing it and we had long conversations about how cool we all were.

CBA: Did you hit it off with Marshall on a personal level? You guys worked together pretty often after that.

Steve: Yes. We later did Scorpio Rose, Madame Xanadu, Coyote, and Silver Surfer. Marshall and I got along very well. It’s interesting because, though we hadn’t actually met when we did the Batman stories together, we very much resonated to the same things.

Whenever we had a chance to work together, we did.

CBA: Did you have any idea that DC was nervous about having Marshall on the series?

Steve: Not at all. I never heard that.

CBA: John Workman vividly recalls the editorial staff being antsy about whether this new kid could pull through with this stuff. They were just astonished when they saw the final job.

Above: Professor Hugo Strange, as he appeared in his third and final Golden Age appearance, in Detective Comics #46. Art probably by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson. ©2002 DC Comics.

Above: Three decades later, the evil prof reemerges, albeit briefly, to torment the Batman in the first Englehart/Rogers/Austin Batman collaboration, “The Dead Yet Live,” in Detective Comics #471. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Above: Though Marshall Rogers is generally credited with refining her attractive appearance, Bruce Wayne’s greatest love, Silver St. Cloud, debuted in an Englehartscribed story drawn by Walter Simonson and Allen Milgrom.

These panels of the couple’s first meeting appeared in Detective Comics #470. ©2002 DC Comics.

Below: Marshall drew this sketch of Silver getting ready to join her boyfriend for frequent collaborator Terry Austin. Courtesy of the inker.

Art ©2002 Marshall Rogers.

Characters ©2002 DC Comics.

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Steve: Marshall was the new kid (which is why I had no idea he was around to do it). When I saw who was available at DC, I was looking at the old guys and they weren’t really there. Part of the reason DC was in the situation they were in is that they did get nervous about anybody who didn’t fit into the mold that had solidified over 30 years. That was an era that needed to change and I’m glad I had something to do with that. I can easily believe that the people would have trouble trusting Batman to some new guy.

CBA: Over at Marvel, you developed women characters like the Scarlet Witch and Mantis into being pretty strong characters, certainly having personality.

Steve: To me, they are all characters, all interesting. Another writer once said, back when we were first getting started, “The only people we can ever really write are white males.” I said, “Bullsh*t. I’m never going to be black.

I’m never going to be female. But as a writer, you need to put yourself

inside other people’s heads.”

CBA: It’s called imagination.

Steve: I never had a problem writing dialogue for characters who weren’t white, Anglo-Saxon and male.

CBA: Would you call yourself a feminist?

Steve: Yes, but I have a populist attitude that believes everybody is cool, not just women. I’m sure this is all leading back to Silver St. Cloud, and it seemed to me that I wanted to do two things with this Batman. I wanted to do the quintessential creature of the night, vowing over the graves of his parents, but I also wanted to see the realistic side of Bruce Wayne. If he’s supposed to be this rich playboy, he ought have a girlfriend. If he had a girlfriend, she’d have to be somebody who could live with that kind of personality and stand up on her own. If she were some shrinking violet, he wouldn’t be interested. All that stuff just came together. She was somebody who moved in Gotham circles (and we all knew Gotham was really New York City).

It just had to be that way.

CBA: In her first appearance by Marshall Rogers, Silver is lying in bed, talking on the phone to Bruce, and it’s obvious that she had had sex with him the night before.

Steve: I’m not shy about sex. Batman is a mature guy and this was an adult woman he was with. He’s a playboy so why wouldn’t he have sex with her? When I wrote that scene, I distinctly recall it made total sense and I knew I could do it, but at the same time I knew some would be taken aback with this because comic book heroes never slept with anybody, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t talk about it. These were grown people living in a grown-up town — that was just another aspect of the Batman.

CBA: Did you feel that she would go the way that she did, leaving Batman’s life?

Steve: I think so, because I was aware that I would leave the strip and would tie it all up. So I threw her and Boss Thorne up in the air and saw where they landed. Pretty soon I came up with a way to get the Joker and the Penguin in there as well and then the last couple of issues just wrote themselves. I had all these balls in the air and they were all coming down right at the right time and the right place and it just rolled very trippingly off the tongue. Boss Thorne running out of town and meeting Silver and she comes back and he’s haunted by a ghost (the ghost I stole from Dick Tracy, my homage to what got me interested in comics to begin with. Flattop Jr. killed Skinny and then she hung on his neck till he went crazy in 1955, although I read it in reprint). [laughter] I got halfway through my run and then saw what the other side of the hill was going to be like and I rolled down it. But like I said, for the first couple of issues, I did not know how it was going to end.

CBA: In the ever-present comic book obsession with continuity; there isn’t a beginning, middle and end to story arcs necessarily.

What made your Batman story refreshing was it was your swan song for comics, so it was a complete package. I always felt that maybe it

went too quickly. You created this great female foil for Batman and Rupert Thorne was a very interesting character to introduce. Things were going on where you could build endless stories out of and yet it was very satisfying that it did indeed end and stands on its own as a novel. So it was fortuitous that you intended to leave comics. Did DC call you up and ask you to please come back?

Steve: As a matter of fact, when I came back a year later and went up to DC because I knew I was going to be in town for a little while, I was hoping to get some more work. I was told flat out that Paul Levitz did not think that either Marshall or I was right for the Batman. He hadn’t liked our series.

CBA: But why should Paul’s personal opinion matter? Didn’t sales indicate that readers wanted you guys to return to the title?

Steve: In those days, they wouldn’t tell you sales figures, and they still don’t like to. Back then, you didn’t have Wizard’s Top 100 lists, so you really didn’t know on any level of how things were selling. As Marshall and I have said to each other, we’ve never met anybody who was around then who hadn’t read it. For years afterward, everybody I met would tell me that they had read it, so we had a pretty good idea how well it sold. And of course, the Greatest Batman and Greatest Joker books have been in print for over ten years now.

CBA: But DC editorial didn’t look for a sequel from you?

Steve: As editorial becomes more entrenched, it starts thinking that it is what’s important. I recently had an editor (not at DC—so where could it have been?) [laughter] tell me that if a book he edited had really good writing or artwork, he got the credit because he picked the writer and the artist. He was serious in believing that the quality of the book was all due to him because he picked the people that were doing it. [laughter] Two or three years ago, when I was doing a little bit with DC, I was told that half the people wandering the halls think, “That Englehart didn’t do anything; there was nothing special about that stuff.” So what are you going to do? There’s a calcification, a not-invented-here, all those things come into play.

CBA: Regardless of the editorial non-decisions made at DC, for years afterwards everyone read those stories. You told me previously that some people in DC did think well of the series.

Steve: There were different camps. Dick Giordano was an old friend of mine from those days when I used to hang around Derby, Connecticut with him. I had people around who did appreciate what I was doing, but it wasn’t a universal feeling. Madame Xanadu was part and parcel of the same conversation with Paul where he said, “Though we didn’t like your Batman work, apparently the readers do, so why don’t we put you two on a project together.” So that’s how Madame Xanadu was started, and that led to Marshall and me doing Scorpio Rose...

CBA: Do you feel that the Vicki Vale character in Tim Burton’s Batman movie was influenced by Silver St. Cloud?

Steve: Oh sure. She is Silver St. Cloud. What they were trying to do with that movie was adapt my story. As I understand it, it was a fairly last minute thing to change Silver to Vicki Vale and Boss Thorne to Carl Grissom. (I talked about this in the introduction to the Strange Apparitions book.) By the time the movie did get made, it had been 13 years since those stories first appeared. Silver St. Cloud had not appeared in those intervening years, so they changed her name, and that of Jack Palance’s character, but it was all based on my writing.

The reason I know that, I’ve got the scripts that were generated between ‘76 and ‘86 and they all contain Boss Thorne and Silver St. Cloud. The reason I have those scripts is because I was hired as a script consultant in ‘86 to help make the movie and I wrote two treatments for it. So they gave me copies of all the scripts that had gener-

ated to that point. What they had in those drafts was essentially James Bond as Batman, with very 007ish gadgets. The producers told me no screenwriter could catch the essence of the character like I could, so they brought me back in.

CBA: Of course, there was also the climactic fight with the Joker, right?

Steve: That ending primarily came from my treatment, which ended with Batman and the Joker up on a tall building, and the Joker was having a helicopter come in and get him and he ended up falling.

They played with it a little bit but if it didn’t come from my original stories, it came from my treatments to a great extent. Not every single thing in the movie originated with me but 75% of it did.

CBA: As far as you know, had DC collected the stories and used them to pitch a Batman movie?

Steve: The story I heard was that Michael Uslan, the guy who produced the Swamp Thing movie, had optioned Batman and was quoted as saying that my Batman stories finally showed him how an adult Batman movie could be made. So, after a couple years of being unable to put together a deal on his own, he went into business with Warner and they did it together. When you see the credits on the screen, he’s executive producer, which usually means “had the project originally.” [laughter] CBA: What did you think of the final product?

Below: Though he would have preferred to depict Silver standing before her disguised lover defiantly in the nude to emphasize her strength of character, artist Marshall Rogers is still rightfully proud of these scenes of the resolute woman clad only in a bath towel. From Detective Comics #475, words by Steve Englehart and inks by Terry Austin. Courtesy of Terry. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Above: Even Robin was skillfully reteamed with his old ally, the Batman, in the hands of Englehart, Rogers and Austin, after years of solo action. From Detective Comics #473. Courtesy of Terry Austin. ©2002 DC Comics.

Right: Steve Englehart at a comic shop appearance in a photo from the late 1970s, courtesy of Steve.

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Steve: I was pretty happy with it. 75% of it was mine. My big thing with the Batman is he’s not crazy and in those ten years the “Cult of the Crazy Batman” had grown, so a lot of people would just matter of factly say, “Of course, he’s nuts.” In my opinion, he’s driven and totally tightly wound, but were he to let himself go over that edge that he is standing right on, he would not be as effective as he wants to be. So Batman will not allow himself to go crazy. Michael Keaton doesn’t play him as crazy and I think there’s a line where the character specifically says “I’m not crazy.” Somehow he makes it verbally clear that that was his opinion, something that I pushed very hard for in my treatments and my stories.

CBA: Doesn’t Jack Nicholson say to him, “We’re two sides of the same coin?”

Steve: That’s always the Joker thing. The Joker knows that he’s nuts and figures Batman must be, too. When I did the Joker I did make him more insane than he’d ever been. In the early days, he was this cold-blooded killer, but for the last 30 years he was a funny clown villain. Denny was the first one to turn that around, a couple of years before. My thing was in that scene where he starts rambling on about fish faces; he was a killer and all of that, but primarily, he was just insane. I do see Batman and the Joker as two sides of the coin in the sense that one side’s crazy and one side isn’t. If the Batman were to descend into madness, why exactly would he have

the moral high ground on the Joker?

Since I made the Joker crazier, I made sure to stop the Batman before he went there. That’s how Nicholson played him and so to answer your question, I was pretty happy with the first movie. Ask most people and they’ll tell you the movies got progressively worse as they continued, and I wasn’t involved in the continuations.

CBA: In your series, you reintroduced the Bat Cave, gave Alfred a role and had a visit by Robin, really getting back to some of the other fundamentals that originally made Batman such a fun comic book.

Steve: I was definitely trying to get to the essence.

CBA: In the fourth issue, Batman was hardly in the story. It was really about Robin and Alfred.

Steve: I wanted to do a Robin story. I wanted to do a Penguin story. I wanted to do a Joker story. If I’d had more issues, I would have done Riddler (which I later did in Legends of the Dark Knight). I would have done a Mad Hatter story (which I later did in a prestige book DC’s holding onto for some reason). Pretty soon you leave the top echelon of Batman villains, and I’m not sure I would have gotten to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but I thought that if I didn’t write a Robin story then, I probably wasn’t going to get another chance.

CBA: So you poured in everything including the kitchen sink into those issues?

Steve: Pretty much, I tried to get everything that I thought was cool into those story and still, as always is the case, you’ve got to get on and then off the stage and in the process make it look easy. You can’t just be dumping stuff out there, so I had to come up with beginning, middle and end for each issue and still have an ongoing story. All that stuff is just craft. That’s just stuff you do if you learn your trade somewhere along the line. I was trying to use every gun in my arsenal to its greatest extent.

CBA: Speaking of guns, there was an insert issue featuring a villain called Deadshot?

Steve: I don’t remember the story on that, but that’s the extra issue. There was going to be seven issues and all of the sudden they said we’re going to put in an eighth one. With that, once I had the space I was able to make use of and I extended some of the stuff and worked a little bit more on the Joker. Deadshot certainly would fall somewhere below Tweedledum and Tweedledee on my list of characters that I had to use. It was an extra issue and that was the villain. It seems to me, Julie must have said, “We want to bring this guy back.”

There was some reason outside myself that it was Deadshot because he didn’t interest me particularly.

CBA: Marshall recalled Julie saying, “We’re using the Joker in Batman this month, so we don’t want to start the same villain in Detective Comics at the same time.” Apparently, that was the reason for the fill-in.

Steve: That sounds perfectly logical.

CBA: Do you think it was worth choosing for the Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told compilation? Was it a nod to the overall story arc, which was obviously too long to include?

Steve: Quite honestly, I like all those stories. If somebody had said pick somebody else, I probably would have picked the Riddler rather than Deadshot, but I was still trying to do the best Batman sequence I could possibly do. It didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for the overall series. I gave you the best Deadshot story I could come up with in the midst of all this. I think it’s a perfectly legitimate story.

CBA: Did you feel after the series was done that this was one of the high points in the Batman milieu?

Steve: I did because I had learned my craft starting back on Captain America and “The Beast,” and all that, I had a four- or five-year run of doing comics on a regular basis and finding out that people were pretty happy with what I was doing. Not too long before that, I had Kang come back three times in a row over in The Avengers. I’d had Doctor Strange meet God and Death, so I was pushing a lot of boundaries and it was paying off. My intention was to write a classic Batman and by the time I got to the end of it, I was pretty convinced that that’s what I was doing. It was all falling into place so nicely and felt just so good. When people started saying it was the definitive Batman, I’m not without an ego, but I certainly would not have gone that far on my own. But every letter was saying, “This is really cool.” By the time I came back and met Marshall, we didn’t have a lot of doubt that we’d done something classic.

CBA: How much would you attribute the success of that run on Batman with the art?

Steve: Everybody was doing their thing. I think I was real good, Marshall was real good, Terry was real good, John was real good and Julie was real good. There really wasn’t a weak link. I can only talk about it from a writing standpoint so maybe I talk about the scripting more than the rest of it, but I’m totally in agreement with whoever said we all kicked butt because we all put in our best effort. It’s happenstance that it all came together that way, but sometimes it does.

CBA: It just does seem like kismet. You reached back to the quintessential character, got to the core of the icon and it wasn’t confused or muddled, but very clear. This was the Conrad Veidt Joker—Jerry Robinson’s Joker—and there was Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s Batman.

Steve: I started my habit of throwing in Finger Alley, Fox Gardens, and stuff like that, on that series. I’m very interested in acknowledging those who got me to this point. I very much honor the people who came before me and did stuff that was inspirational.

CBA: Have you revisited Batman other than the Legend of the Dark Knight Riddler story?

Steve: Not really. I did a one-shot thing with Doctor Phosphorus and Batgirl. I was only able to wrangle that one story from DC. Two years ago, I did a story in Batman Chronicles called “Got a Date with an Angel” about Batman finding out in the first week of his existence that he thought he was going to continue to be a playboy and prowl the city at night. He soon discovers that he can only have one mistress and has to kiss off his girlfriend, and that was a nice little thing. After that, I did my Mad Hatter (my next villain up), by creating a new, weirder Mad Hatter. His hat covers a hole in his head and he can stick his finger in there and masturbate his brain [laughter].

But there are still people up at DC who hate owing me and Marshall and Terry as much as they do. Or maybe, as somebody said about a year ago, there is no Batman any more, there’s only “this month’s Batman”—and mine’s something else. Whatever; the Mad Hatter’s in a drawer.

CBA: If you could go home again, would you like to team up with Marshall again to do a series?

Steve: I would love to. When I came back from Europe, DC was saying they didn’t think either of us guys was right for the Batman, so Marshall and I said screw this and we created what would have been a graphic album about the Batman. We went to DC and said we’d like to get the rights to a one-shot thing which we would publish ourselves. We would pay the money to publish it, but we’d also take the profits. DC came back and said we could only print 10,000 copies, a ridiculously low number (in an era of 300,000 sales) from which we would never make any money. So we passed on it. The book featured Batman on this Zeppelin flight to Hell, but we never got to do that.

Above: Writer Steve Englehart’s allusion to Bruce Wayne and Silver St. Cloud having a healthy, active sex life is evident in this provocative panel drawn by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin. This sequence from Detective Comics #471, the team’s first collaboration, was a major aspect of why the series was so well received by readers, if not by the higher-ups at DC. Courtesy of Terry Austin. ©2002 DC Comics.

Right: The Joker makes his grand entrance into a U.S. trademark office in this panel from one of the greatest Batman stories of all, “The Laughing Fish,” Detective Comics #475, by Englehart, Rogers and Austin. Courtesy of Terry. ©2002 DC Comics.

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CBA Interview Bonus

The Englehart Outtakes Spending a bit more time with the writer on his background Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson As promised in Comic Book Artist #18, the special issue devoted to the Cosmic Comics of the 1970s, what follows are outtakes from writer Steve Englehart’s interview, detailing pertinent biographical information of the outspoken scribe’s life. We thank Steve for his patience and understanding. This interview was conducted by phone on Dec. 16, 2002, and was copyedited by Steve.

Below: Another laudable Englehart project from DC Comics in the later ’70s was his revival (with— surprise!—artist Marshall Rogers) of Mister Miracle. Here’s a shot of Steve during a visit to a comic shop during those years, where he met Scott Free, Big Barda, and some gloomy cat name Darkseid.

Courtesy of the writer. Characters ©2002 DC Comics.

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Comic Book Artist: Steve, where are you originally from?

Steve Englehart: I spent most of my childhood in Louisville, Kentucky, but when I was 13, we moved up to Indianapolis, where the rest of my family still lives.

CBA: How many siblings do you have?

Steve: One brother, one sister. I’m the oldest.

CBA: Were you drawn to comics at a young age?

Steve: Yeah, I liked comics as far back as I can remember. The stuff that I enjoyed were the “dark” ones, Batman, Dick Tracy, and even the Mickey Mouse mysteries in the back of Walt Disney Comics and Stories. Paul Murry’s Mickey Mouse was the version I was into.

(Murry came along after Floyd Gottfriedson, and he had a nice, black, juicy line. I was always a sucker for a juicy line.)

CBA: Those were the back-ups with Goofy as the side-kick?

Steve: Yes, they were three-part mysteries. They were pretty fun.

CBA: Did you start drawing at a young age?

Steve: I didn’t know until sometime towards the end of my college days that I wanted to draw comics, but I always drew and always wrote, and there do exist comics I did when I was seven, which I would write and draw. But there are also novels I’d type out, and

make sure all the pages came out right, so if I folded them together, they’d work. I was always doing projects like that.

CBA: Did your homemade comics feature established characters, or were they your own knockoffs?

Steve: Both. Like a lot of other kids, I was inspired by “Mickey Mouse,” and I did Paul Murry-like stories, but I was also creating my own characters. I was also inspired by the Dick Tracy reprints, where they’d take the original art and add to it on the side, I always thought that was kind of cool, you could see where it was done, so it was like solving an old mystery. There was about a year when I cut out all the Dick Tracy strips out of the newspaper and pasted them up and drew on the outsides of them to make them look like the comics. As we talk, I’m sitting here coloring “Russell’s Christmas Adventure,” a free project I’m releasing on the Web. So I color, draw, write; I do all that stuff. Even the process, I guess, of doing comics, publishing, whatever. All the different aspects of it have always fascinated me, too. I don’t letter, but I’m impressed by people who do! [laughter] CBA: Did you drop out of comics during adolescence?

Steve: Yes, I got too old for them. When I was 13 or 14, I read an issue of Superboy where somebody wrote in and asked, “How come Superboy doesn’t fight the Communists?” and the editor’s answer was, “Well, he just doesn’t, because Superboy’s not involved in that kind of stuff.” I thought, “Eh, I don’t know… in the real world, people fight Communists!” (This was back when they did.) So, I said, “This is fantasy, not reality, and I’m interested in reality.”

It’s interesting to me that I delve into fantasy with my work, but I always try to base it in some sort of reality, even if it’s Doctor Strange, the Silver Surfer or Green Lantern, any characters like that. If it were real, it’d be like such-and-such. So, I’ve always had a real strong interest in what’s real, though I consider magic to be real, on one level or another, so I can incorporate that into my world view. At that time, Superboy was just pure fantasy, and I said, “I’m not interested in pure fantasy, I want something that’s got a little more meat to it.” So I gave up on comics when I was a teenager.

CBA: Did you get into juvenile literature at all?

Steve: Well, I read The Hardy Boys when I was younger. My dad had actually kept a lot of his Hardy Boys collection from when he was a kid, so I was able to read the 1920s versions, and I thought it was interesting to see a different reality, one from the ’20s. Frank and Joe would ride their little putt-putt motorcycles, and their fabulous little motorboats, and they called each other “chap.” [laughter] CBA: Did you read juvenile science-fiction, or did you develop more mature tastes early on?

Steve: Actually, I was reading a lot. In high school, I was read-

ing a lot of Shell Scott, who was a very funny, very ’50s sort of private detective who always had a lot of sexy babes around. It’s action and mystery, but the guy’s also funny! Plus he got laid a lot! [laughter] But I was never big on science-fiction. It’s not that I dislike it, but I never really went into it. I’ve read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, Ray Bradbury—the classics in that sense—but I really spent my time on mysteries. I read a lot of Ellery Queen, Perry Mason, Shell Scott. I think that’s what I went after in comics: Action-adventure and mystery.

Mind puzzles were always interesting.

CBA: Did you read Doc Savage when he was resurrected in the Bantam paperbacks?

Steve: Yes, I read those, and a couple of The Shadow books, and while I like The Shadow as a concept,the books didn’t do a whole lot for me. I did read the first 80 or so Doc Savage novels.

CBA: [laughs] “The first 80 or so”?

Steve: Well, they were coming out monthly, but I read most of them when I first came into comics. It was just an adjunct to my comics work.

CBA: Where did you go to college?.

Steve: Wesleyan, in Connecticut.

CBA: What brought you there?

Steve: I wanted to go East. Again, I’d lived in the Midwest—well, Louisville is quasi-South, sort of on the border. I wanted to see the world beyond the Midwest.

Wesleyan is not an Ivy League school, because it’s too small, but if it were bigger, it would be, and it was only a couple of hours outside New York City. I liked the location and the ambiance of going East to college. I was just 18, I wanted to see some other part of the world.

CBA: When did you get into college?

Steve: 1965. I graduated in ’69.

CBA: When did you start thinking about a career as an artist?

Steve: When I was in college. Again, Wesleyan’s in Middletown, which is only half an hour away from Derby, Connecticut. One rainy Friday afternoon, I either didn’t have class or bailed out on it, and I didn’t have a car in college, so I hitchhiked down to Derby, and I showed up at Charlton Press, where the editor—a guy named Dick Giordano—was very friendly to this kid showing up in the middle of a rainstorm. He invited me in (they weren’t doing a whole lot on a Friday afternoon) and showed me the printing presses, showed me Steve Ditko pencils, I met Rocko Masteroserio, and I got to know Dick. He lived not too far from Derby, in Bridgeport (which is not all that far from Middletown), so I’d go down and visit Dick once every four months for an afternoon.

It’s not like I was hanging on him or anything, but he was a comic book guy, and this was Charlton comics when they were publishing Steve Ditko’s Blue Beetle, Jim Aparo’s “Nightshade,” and that mysterious writer Sergius O’Shaughnessy. This was in the middle of the big Charlton era, and it was right there, pretty much on my doorstep.

I was also able to go down to New York City, and go to Marvel, where they said, “We’re a bullpen, and there’s only ten people working here! We have no time for you! Go away!” [laughter] Then I went to DC, and they said, “Really? You’re interested? Come on in and meet Julie Schwartz,” and Julie said, “I’ll spend an hour talking to you. Gee, it sounds like you’re interested. Would you like some copies of The Brave and the Bold”—whatever the Justice League issues were—”I’ve got some extras here, you want any of those?” I went, “Yeah, sure, I would!” Remember, this was back when it was possible to do stuff like that, and of course, all that just fed my appetite. I now knew people in the field, and I was close to comics. Once I got interested, once I got to hang out with Julie Schwartz, Dick Giordano and people like that, I thought, “Well, they’re not weird, demi-god, strange people! These are cool guys!” Once I got into it, I started thinking maybe I’d like to draw comics. Dick was kind enough to critique my stuff. I’d come down and say, “Here’s what I’ve been working on since we last met,” and he’d tell me what was wrong with it,

which was a lot. But he was always nice about it, never judgmental.

CBA: Did you take art classes?

Steve: No, that was later. Sometime in there, after I moved to New York, after the Army and all that, I took a life-drawing class at one of the major art schools in Manhattan. I did take art classes in college, but they were generalized classes, not comic book courses.

CBA: What was the process of working with him? Was it an afterhours kind of thing?

Steve: This was while I was still in the Army. I was stationed three hours south of the city down in Aberdeen, Maryland. When I had a three-day pass that allowed me to get up to New York, I’d up and go.

You know who Wayne Howard was, right?

CBA: Sure!

Steve: He also went to Wesleyan, and he had some of his work published by Charlton. So I went back to Wesleyan and saw him. He was the first working professional of my generation that I had met.

On that same trip, I dropped back down to New York, went to DC, and ran into Neal. He heard about my situation in the Army (this was before I decided to get out), and he said, “Well, look: How about you take the train up and come to DC every Friday, and I’ll be up here whatever the time is.” I was usually able to get off around 2:00 P.M. in Maryland, drive up to Wilmington, hop on a train, go to New York, show up at DC by 5:00, before everybody had left DC. So I’d work with Neal while he’d be drawing Green Lantern/Green Arrow. I remember we were discussing “Ulysses Star is Still Alive” [GL #79] at one point, telling me about Denny’s scripts, and telling me how he would draw this and that. He was teaching me, and in the early days, it was all, “Here’s what I do, here’s how it happens, now I’ll work on

Above: Nice commission drawing of the Golden Age Batman by Marshall Rogers. Courtesy of Sandy Jarrell. Art ©2002 Marshall Rogers. Batman ©2002 DC Comics.

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Above: The first time this Marshall Rogers commission piece appeared (in the Alter Ego section of Comic Book Artist #5), the contributor was miscredited. It was Steve Bloom who graciously sent us a photocopy of the Batman getting the best of his arch rival, the Joker.

Art ©2002 Marshall Rogers.

Characters ©2002 DC Comics.

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this for a while.” Over time, it evolved to where he’d say, “Here are my layouts for this page. Why don’t you pencil it and let’s see what you know, and what I can teach you?” Sometimes I’d do layouts, but I need to make it very clear that in all of these cases, by the time the page actually got done, it was 90% Neal. It’s not like Neal took what I gave him and ran with it, as I think became a little more prevalent later with other artists in the Continuity days, but back then, it had to be Neal at the end of the day. But he did give me my shot to see what I could do, which he could then work off.

CBA: What stories did you work on?

Steve: I don’t even remember specifically. The one I remember most is the one I got credit on, “Soft, Sweet Lips of Hell,” in Vampirella #10. It’s a Denny O’Neil script, and Neal insisted the art credits go to “Neal Adams & Steve Englehart,” because he wanted me to have a published credit, so I’d be able to go around and show people this stuff. Again, it was 90% Neal, but that’s definitely one where I did layouts for half the pages, and he did the pencils, and others where he did the layouts, and I did the pencils, and then he fixed the pencils. You can’t really tell that I’m in there anywhere, but he had me work on all aspects of it. It was unheard of to have your assistant get his name in the credits, but Neal was that kind of guy!

He was thinking, “This will help Steve down the line, so I’m going to insist that this happen.”

Other than that, I did some stuff on some of his Batman stories and some Green Lanterns, but again, it was in that context. A very cool part of the process was a couple of times where Neal would say, “You know, I’ve got an entire cabinet of artwork over there, ‘Deadman,’ Batman… If you want something, take it!” [laughs] So I’ve got some nice Neal Adams artwork. I was sort of quasi-fanboy working to be a professional artist but I was probably more of a fanboy than an artist in any sense. In any event, the way this process worked, I’d come up on a Friday evening, we’d work until one in the morning, and then we’d go out and get some dinner at some New York deli, and I would then go to Columbia University, where I had some friends, and sleep on their couch. On Saturday, I’d go out to

Neal’s place in the Bronx, and we’d work all day long. His wife at the time, Cory, would feed me dinner, and then when it got to be late Saturday night, I’d go back to Columbia, and then on Sunday I’d take the train back down to Maryland. So it was Friday evening, and allday Saturday, every weekend, for maybe six months.

CBA: Do you still talk to Neal?

Steve: I don’t see him all that much anymore, because he still lives somewhere in New York City, and I live out here at the other end of the continent, so we don’t end up in the same place all that much.

Again, my comics involvement comes and goes, and his is mostly out of the business, I think. So we don’t cross paths very often. Like everybody else, Neal’s reputation has become colorful, but the guy that I knew was a very intelligent, straight-up good guy, a professional who would put his assistant’s name on a job… I mean, he was Neal-f*cking- Adams! Why would he want to put some unknown’s name beside his on artwork? He was that kind of guy! Again, I don’t see him all that much, but I consider him my friend for life.

CBA: Were you involved with the Academy of Comic Book Arts?

Steve: Yes, because Neal Adams was involved. Neal was one of the movers and shakers, and we were all Young Turks, though we didn’t know exactly how screwed we were getting by the companies.

They came in and asked, “You want to work in comics? Here’s what we’re paying.” It wasn’t cold-blooded—or at least it didn’t come across that way—but it was the only game in town. Nobody said, “We can get a better deal elsewhere,” because there was no “elsewhere”; it was just the way the comics business was. In later years, we began to realize that people who are working in other publishing media were getting royalties, health care and things like that, and over the years those things have happened in comics, primarily because Jim Starlin was another activist. We basically went to Marvel and said, “This is what we want,” and they said, “Oh, we can’t possibly afford that.” So many of us left, and after a while, they said, “Well, maybe we can afford it.” Both Jim and I can take some credit for improvements that were made, for going in there and putting ourselves on the line (though, as soon as I say that, my statement

sounds a little melodramatic and over the top). We said, “We want this, and we’re not going to be happy unless we get it,” and they said, “We can’t ever do that,” and then it turns out they could, so times and conditions changed. That was the time of the Siegel and Shuster controversy Neal was also involved with. Neal was an activist, older than all of us guys, had had a much longer career, obviously, since he started when he was 18 or so, a career that wasn’t entirely in comic books but also in advertising and syndicated comics strips. He was the natural leader in the Turk community.

CBA: Where did you go when you got out of the Army?

Steve: I went up to New York City. Neal knew other people who were coming in to New York, and I ended up getting an apartment up at the Bronx with six other people, including Rich Buckler and his mother! [laughter] Jack Katz was also there, and he was doing First Kingdom. I was unknown, and the other people who were there remained unknown. But I only lived there for four weeks. I had a car that I parked on the street, and one day the battery had been stolen out of it. This was in the middle of Winter, it was a fourth floor walkup, it was the Bronx… I just developed a great longing to go live in Connecticut again! [laughter] I wanted to get back where there was grass and trees, and there wasn’t a fourth floor walk-up, and they weren’t stealing things out of your car on the street. It turned out that Sal Amendola also wanted to move out, so he and I got an apartment up in Milford, two hours outside the city and a suburb of New Haven. At the time, Sal was doing regular work for DC, and I was doing irregular stuff, backgrounds primarily, for Bob Oksner. I did backgrounds on Supergirl and Jimmy Olsen with Bob, and I did some one-shot mystery stories for Murray Boltinoff. I thought, “Well, I only have to make so much money in order to pay the rent,” and pretty soon I was not making even that much money! [laughter] I was limited, shall we say. I had enthusiasm, had a good eye… when Neal would teach me stuff about “Here’s how muscles connect” or “Here’s how light falls on things,” I got that, but when I tried to render—particularly when I tried to render it like Neal Adams—I became very aware of the limitations of my own hand. I could do layouts, tell an interesting story visually, but I wasn’t good enough to get much penciling work. When it comes to drawing backgrounds, there isn’t a whole lot of need for being able to tell a story visually. Actually, Joe Orlando set me up with Oksner, which I’ve always appreciated, because I would’ve been in worse trouble if I hadn’t been working with Oksner, who was a cool guy whom I liked a lot.

CBA: Was Bob living in Connecticut?

Steve: He was in Teaneck, New Jersey, so I would drive down to his place. I want to say that I spent all Saturday and Sunday working with him, but then I would’ve had to have slept at his house, and I don’t remember doing that. Maybe I went back to New York to sleep on a couch, because I’m sure I didn’t drive all the way back to Connecticut, and then come back on Sunday. But I worked at Bob’s house, and he was a good guy to hang out with while you were working, as a lot of comic book people are. Whether they’re good in crowds or not, they’re good to sit in a room with.

CBA: Did you ask Bob about his career?

Steve: Not really. I did, but I’m not going to be the source for a Bob Oksner story or article here, because I don’t remember that much about it, really. We were just chatting. My intention was focused on not screwing up his artwork, and I was working hard at that concept.

CBA: Did you like his style?

Steve: I did. Obviously, it was totally different from Neal Adams, shall we say. But Supergirl and Jimmy Olsen by Bob Oksner? That was nice stuff. He was halfway between cartoon and straight art. He had drawn Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and those humor books, of course, but he could also do the straightforward stuff. It was very clean, very nice, very ’70s.

CBA: And the way Bob drew girls! [laughs] Steve: Yeah!

CBA: Have you ever been an editor?

Steve: Not really. I’ve been an editor at a small Army-oriented newspaper—not part of the Army, but they marketed it to soldiers— and I was the editor of a Web site, games.com, last year at this time, back when there were dot-coms! [laughter] I’ve done editorial work, but in terms of comics, no, other than being my own editor, being the guy who’s ultimately responsible. But I’ve never had the title. I’m not

saying this out of great nostalgia, but I do recognize that if I had the title, that would mean something.

CBA: You rose in prominence as a writer along with Steve Gerber and Don McGregor, and you guys developed your own followings.

Did you start noticing early on that you were having an impact in the field?

Steve: Yes. I don’t know within the field, but I know when I was doing this bi-monthly book about the Beast, it was getting these letters where people were writing, “This is really cool!” I can distinctly remember getting letters from people that said, “I really like this! This is different from other people’s stuff!” and I said, “Well, that feels good! I like that!”

CBA: Didn’t you reintroduce Patsy Walker into that strip? [laughs] It was a clever twist to use her from Patsy and Hedy, the Millie the Model-type comic.

Steve: Stan had Patsy and Hedy go to the FF’s wedding in FF Annual #4…

CBA: So they were in the real Marvel milieu! [laughs] Steve: …and that was it! They showed up long enough to be in a panel and go, “Oh, Patsy, look, there’s Sue! Isn’t she pretty!” But to me, that scene was part of the “reality” of the Marvel Universe, and I thought, well, it would be interesting to have Patsy Walker actually enter this universe. Her title had been cancelled, so I wasn’t screwing the character up at all, and I thought I could do something there. [laughter] When I did Hellcat, it all came back to me. She is, to me, this kind of typical girl, not a super-hero, didn’t swear on the graves of her parents she was going to avenge their deaths, but she felt the need to become a super-hero. I saw a character, thought it could be interesting, how this particular person, getting into this world would

Above: Evocative splash from Detective Comics #475. Pencils by Marshall Rogers, inks by Terry Austin, and words by Steve Englehart Courtesy of Terry Austin. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Above: Despite her character’s name of Vicki Vale, Kim Basinger in the 1989 hit motion picture Batman, bore little resemblance to the Golden Age namesake girlfriend of our hero, but was the spitting image of the Steve Englehart creation, Silver St. Cloud: One capable, willful and hot woman! ©2002 DC Comics.

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have an interesting story to be told.

CBA: The learning curve seemed to be quick for you. You immediately started using the Marvel Universe as your playground, as Roy had done for some time.

Steve: Again, I had been reading Marvel for a long time, and when I got the chance to do it, I knew what I wanted to do.

CBA: Did you go to conventions with frequency?

Steve: Oh, yes. There was another writer at the time when I first got into comics, whose basic attitude was, “These f*cking fans! Why should we have to give up our Saturdays to go see these guys?” I always thought they are the people I’m doing this for! They want to go to a convention to see me, who am I to say, “I’m not going!” So, if I got invited to a con, if it was at all possible, I went. I’ve always tried to do whatever the convention organizer would like me to do in order to make his event work out. I just think that’s part of what I do. If I went to a convention as a fan, I’d want to see the creators I was interested in, so I think it’s up to the guys who are interesting to people to be there.

CBA: How is your relationship with fans?

Steve: It’s always been real good. I can get up on the stage and talk to people, say whatever they want me to talk about, as this phone call proves… [laughter] I can talk about whatever is interesting to them! Over the years my stuff has not been reprinted in a lot of cases, and yet, there’s a sizeable contingent of people who still talk about my work, and that’s just because they liked it, and they’ve maintained an interest. They were satisfied fans.

CBA: Did you have a highlight when you worked in the ‘70s?

Steve: As I said, Batman. The other highlight was quitting comics and traveling around Europe for nine months! Which I loved greatly, I had a wonderful time! It was my first time going to another continent. I’d been to Mexico, and Canada, but it was my first time seeing German gas stations, you know? It’s a f*cking gas station, dude, but it’s a German gas station! [laughter] I was experiencing other realities.

It was like going to Earth-Two. (Actually, my wife says Earth-Two is Canada.) [laughter] I speak Spanish, French and German, so I could talk and relate to people, so I could go to these countries and wasn’t shut off by a language barrier. So I had a great time, and that was wonderful. But in terms of comics, you know, other than the blow-up with Gerry and being stuck writing Skull the Slayer once—which I really hated—I enjoyed pretty much everything I wrote to a great extent. If you ask, the number one is Batman, but if you say, “What did you like?” it pretty much includes everything. I know we’re only talking about the ’70s, but that was true for the ’80s and ’90s and for today! If I’m doing it, I’m making it interesting to myself, so… I always have a good time working. If you ask me for the highlights of my career, I’d be throwing in pretty much everything that I ever did, one way or another.

CBA: If you can give a ballpark figure, since the ’70s, what has been the percentage in any given year of your work devoted towards comic books?

Steve: Well, it varied. I’d worked for six years straight in the ’70s in comics, when I came back from Europe in ’79, I started doing a little bit here and there, and pretty soon I was doing Coyote and other stuff for Eclipse, and I kicked back into full time in 1983 and worked through ’89, so I did another six years. But in the ’70s, that six years was pretty much all comics, with the occasional outside job. I did a short story called “Viva” for Byron Preiss’s Weird Heroes. In the ’80s, there were six years I was doing comics full-time, but I was also doing video game design, and towards the end I was doing some children’s books. In the ’90s, I had three years at Malibu, full-time, but by then, I was doing children’s books, video games, probably started some animation. Now, I’m doing these limited series, one after the other. I’ve

also done live-action television, more animation, video games, children’s books, this Internet thing, Russell’s Christmas Adventure, which will be old news by the time this appears in print. I’m interested in the Internet, and I’m interested in everything, and try to pursue everything! [laughs] So, my percentage devoted to comics goes down over time, but like I said at the beginning, I really like doing comics!

CBA: How is Marvel now to deal with? Has it improved under Joe Quesada?

Steve: I’m not doing enough to be an expert. Nothing that’s going on today is as much fun as Marvel in the ’70s. There’s just too much structure in place that gets in the way of doing good work, but things were so bad five years ago, that I’d say things are better today. But not compared to the ’70s.

CBA: Marvel today has an artist as the editorial director, which hasn’t happened very often in comics. Carmine Infantino, Harvey Kurtzman, Sheldon Mayer, Archie Goodwin to a degree… it just hasn’t happened very much, and I’m wondering if there’s a change in the company.

Steve: Once upon a time, I was part and parcel of the whole company, but I’m not that today. I deal with a few editors for occasional projects, so I’m not the guy who could give you any sort of insider’s opinion on Marvel. I don’t think there should be as much structure as there is. I’ve discovered when I was doing Big Town—which was a disaster—that not only does the editor edit your book, but they get another editor to read it over and make sure your editor did okay. [laughs] Then it goes to the continuity editor, who’s supposed to be in charge of all the books, and then it goes to the editor-in-chief! So that’s four extra guys now, when there used to be no guys! [laughter] I don’t think that’s necessary, but for some reason, they do. But I couldn’t tell you why they think it is.

CBA: I fixate on this perhaps, but it seems to me there are two kinds of people who came into the business in the 1970s. First, there are those who primarily were enamored with the super-heroes, the characters themselves, and there’s another type who was simply there because they wanted to tell stories, albeit through the genre. I mean, for the former super-heroes were the ends, and for the latter, super-heroes were the means. Starlin was telling stories about the paradoxes of being human, while others were writing tales about the Spidey-mobile, y’know? Personally, I was always more in tune with your stuff, as well as Steve Gerber and Don McGregor’s, because you guys wrote as if Howard the Duck, Killraven or The Beast were real persons, not just archetypes, as absurd as that sounds. You weren’t writing about Captain America as the Sentinel of Liberty so much as you were dealing with Steve Rogers and his disillusionment with America. There’s a question in here somewhere…

Steve: No, I understand what you’re saying. I was interested in exploring personalities, and it turned out that it didn’t really much matter to me what character it was. People ask, “What character have you never done that you’d like to do?” I go, “I don’t know!” I really don’t think like that. You’re correct. In those days, they would hand you stuff! I was just talking about those days with a Marvel editor a little while back, because today you have to tell them what character you want to do and your plans for the next 12 months. All of that’s very boring to me because of the way I was trained. In the old days, they’d just come and say, “Captain America’s opening up, would you like to write it?” They could’ve said, “Millie the Model’s opening up.” You just never had any particular say over what books you were assigned. When it was still a bullpen…

CBA: You got what you got! [laughs] Steve: I didn’t plan on writing The Avengers. I didn’t lust for writing that book, because in those days, you couldn’t! Roy was writing The Avengers, it was Roy’s book for as long as he wanted it, so there was no sense sitting there thinking, “Boy, I’d really like to do that.”

But yeah, we were so close in one sense, though each of us is different: Starlin’s approach is different from mine is different from Gerber’s is different from McGregor’s approach… But all of us knew we were in the right place at the right time, riding a wave, and we somehow managed to be the guys on the front of the wave. There were things definitely moving all the time, and if we were going to represent Marvel, we were going to do stuff that lived up to what we thought Marvel should be, because we’d come up with that wave, as it had gotten bigger and bigger, and now we were on to it, we were going

to be good at it. That was important. We had total freedom to be good, and we wanted to make good use of it. Little did we know it wouldn’t always be like that. It would have been unimaginable…

CBA: There seems to have been damage done to the industry for the sake of adhering to this all-important continuity. Super-hero comics from the Big Two are almost inaccessible now, in the sense that if a new reader comes in, there’s so much back story, so much continuity, that the simplicity and appeal of the characters are often lost.

Steve: In those days, we were only ten years into the continuity, and there was no question then about using that continuity. It was part and parcel of the Marvel Universe. All these guys lived in the same universe, they interacted. If Daredevil had met Hawkeye, that was part of their reality and so on. To jump to the meta level of this, I liked that approach, I liked the fact that there was a common reality, that it had some relationship to the “real” reality. I got into that, and every time I would take on a new character, I’d go back and read all the back issues, and take notes, thinking, “Okay, this is a plot point that never really got developed, this is unexplained. If I want to use the Scarlet Witch, she met this guy at this point, that happened, I should know that.” So I became known over time as a guy who was very big into continuity. Now, jumping all the way to the present, there’s a couple of factors that are different. One, after 60 years of Captain America, nobody can be expected to have read every single issue. It shouldn’t be the price of admission that you know all that stuff, because it’s much too difficult. Secondly, it’s no longer a universe in the sense that nobody reads all the books, except maybe [Marvel editor-in-chief] Joe Quesada. I mean, the books cost too much, and so you’d have to be really rich to want to buy them all.

When I came back and started doing stuff for [Marvel editor] Tom Brevoort, I said, “I’m embarrassed about this, because it used to be if you were a writer for Marvel, you knew all this stuff. But I don’t really know what Patsy Walker has been up to for the last 10 years, I don’t know what the relationship is between all the devils in the Hellcat series.” Tom said, “No writer does anymore. It’s the editors who are supposed to know that stuff. It’s my job now to tell you what the continuity is. So don’t be embarrassed.” It’s a totally different world.

My take on it now is, if I know something happened, I’m not going to violate it. But in every series I’ve done, somebody’s written in and said, “But, you just did something that contradicted something,” and it’s always something I didn’t know about, and I don’t feel bad anymore, because it’s like, well, Tom Brevoort or whoever didn’t tell me, and I don’t blame it on Tom, because how he’s supposed to know all this stuff, really? So, the whole thing has changed, and my take on it now is, I like to not screw up continuity, but I’m not requiring you to know it, if you want to read my stories.

CBA: Obviously, in a sense, it was Stan Lee who started this by having Ant-Man in the FF, with the footnotes referencing back issues, the crossovers and the things like that, but Roy almost elevated it to an art form at Marvel. He’d very cleverly tie-up loose ends from World War II, or whatever, and he took the fabric that Stan, Jack and Steve created, and made it into a quilt. You embraced Roy’s enthusiasm, certainly with Captain America, though you were perhaps a bit more political. I thought it was great that you brought in the 1950s Captain America, as a rabid reactionary, no less!

Steve: Well, it’s well known that was Roy’s idea. I just took his plot idea and turned it into that story.

CBA: Stan, Jack and Steve created breathtakingly simple and vibrant characters. Stan then made the characters interact, though pretty much in confines of New York City. Roy sometime brilliantly shoehorned a compelling logic as the Marvel world grew and grew.

Jazzed by Roy’s cleverness, you guys added your own idiosyncratic approaches and I think the charm was still apparent in the books.

The continuity was getting a bit denser, but a fundamental appeal was still obvious. But at some point, it seems to me, comics just turned into something that’s become almost encyclopedic. It’s gotten to be so ludicrous that you have to get so many mutant titles to understand what the hell was going on in The X-Men. I’m always beating the drum that it’s the archetypes that matter! It’s the simplicity of the characters that give them their strength!

Steve: Well, The X-Men is a specific thing, because of the way Chris Claremont went at it, and that was different from all the rest of

us. He created an X-World, and it was very convoluted, though it was just a more complex extension of what we had been doing. For that issue of Captain America, I found stats of the Cap books we actually published in the ’50s, and actually wrote the reprints into the storyline, because I’m thinking, “We’ve got to show the guy from the ’50s!” People have different opinions about how valid continuity is at any given time. Jumping ahead, when I was at Malibu, we did crossovers, and for the first time in my life, people would write in and say, “Damn it! You made me spend another $2.50 on this book I wasn’t buying!” That was totally new to me, because before people had totally embraced the idea of Daredevil meeting Thor, so you’ve got to buy a Thor book. But in those days, Thor was only 12¢, 15¢, or 25¢, as opposed to $2.50 today. It wasn’t a big deal to purchase a book you ordinarily wouldn’t buy, and it just enforced the idea they all did live in a shared reality. Again, it’s a fake reality, but it was a “real” reality, [laughter] if you follow me. You could believe they were there, that they’d know each other, that they had gone to the same place at the same time. It was not a problem to do it, and I liked it, and honestly, nobody ever complained throughout the ’70s and the ’80s. It was in the ’90s, when the books started getting really expensive that people started complaining about being “forced” to go buy stuff. That was a surprise to me!

Above: Just for the hell of it, here’s a smokin’ Kevin Nowlan pin-up of two characters Steve Englehart will forever be associated with, the Darknight Detective and the Sorcerer Supreme. CBA will be devoting a special issue to Nowlan in the winter of 2003. Courtesy of Cyrus Voris. Art ©2002 Kevin Nowlan. Batman ©2002 DC Comics. Doctor Strange ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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CBA Interview Extra

Prelude: Dr. Phosphorus Walter Simonson recalls the real origin of the brilliant bad guy Inset right: Artist/writer Walter Simonson smiles for a pic (by Ye Ed) in his New York home.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by LongBox.com Staff It goes without saying that Walter Simonson is one of the most highly regarded artists in the comic book industry. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Walter first gained notice drawing that award-winning “Manhunter” strip, written by Archie Goodwin, and he went on to greater fame with his 1980s Thor revamping.

Having just completed a 25-issue run of Orion, the artist/writer is planning next to reteam with science-fiction author Michael Moorcock for a major comic book project. For a career retrospective, please see CBA #10.

Below: Walter Simonson had a hand in the creation of the short-lived Batman villain, Dr. Phosphorus, as you’ll learn in this interview. Here’s Walter and Allen Milgrom’s splash page art to the back-up story in Detective Comics #469. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Comic Book Artist: What are your feelings about Batman?

Walter Simonson: I like the character. I think he is one of the most elastic super-heroes out there. Batman has been done so many different ways. And a lot of those variations have worked very well indeed, more so than with any other super-hero character.

CBA: Can you think of highlights in the approach to Batman?

Walter: I like some of the very early material by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson. The first Joker story's really creepy. I also enjoy the Dick Sprang stories which seemed completely from some other planet, even when I was a kid. I like the Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams take on

the character in the ’60s. Of all the Joker stories I've read, the Englehart/Rogers/Austin Joker story [Detective Comics #475-76] remains my favorite. It seems a remarkable encapsulation of the Joker’s ruthless insanity wedded with his hysterically funny but insane logic. Alex Toth drew a beautiful Batman story with a World War I triplane [Detective Comics #440] for Archie Goodwin in the early ’70s. All these stories were very different takes on the character visually. They explored various aspects of the essence of the character. And yet, they all seem to partake of the essential quality of the Batman. I always think of the Platonic Theory of Forms; somewhere out in the abstract, there is the perfect Batman in all his many variations, and all these writers and artists are accessing some aspect of that perfection in the dimension of their stories.

CBA: Do you enjoy drawing Batman?

Walter: Sure, I’ve done him several times and I really tried to do him a little differently with each assignment. I did the long-eared, long limbed, long caped Batman in “Manhunter,” a version that was inspired by Neal's visualization and by Bernie Wrightson's in Swamp Thing #6. That version seemed almost a dancer to me in the way I tried to suggest his movement. I did a squat, short-eared, lanternedjawed Batman in a single story Elliot Maggin wrote called “The Cape and Cowl Death Trap,” two years after “Manhunter,” maybe less. It had a very different inking style and was a very different visualization, a bone-crunching, teeth grinding, criminal hater. The two Batman stories I did with Steve Englehart were drawn as layouts, not full pencils.

And I was really trying to do a super-hero Batman, wasp-waisted and wide shouldered, taller than the guy that I had done in the Maggin story and probably broader shouldered and not quite so graceful as the character I had done in “Manhunter.”

CBA: Have you drawn the character since?

Walter: I did two or three stories that Dick Giordano inked in the late ’70s including a story for Detective Comics #500, and that was pretty much straight super-hero stuff. Len Wein wrote a couple of those and he and I also did a little two-page Batman story. We really cribbed it from Snoopy’s Great American Novel. Len's idea was to take all the quotes that Schulz had written for Snoopy's novel in the Peanuts strip, things like, “It was a dark and stormy night…” and “Suddenly a ship appeared on the horizon…” and stuff like that. Len sandwiched the quotes together and I drew a two-page story that was just those quotes as captions. It made a very short Batman adventure but it was fun. I did a Batman black-&-white story four or five years ago which was a look at the legend of Batman rather than the actual character. Visually, I was thinking in some ways about all the Batman toys, the action figures with their myriad costumes and accouterments, that were available about that time. So I’ve really played with the visualization of Batman myself in the opportunities I’ve had to draw him.

CBA: Do you feel like you’re Batman-ed out, so to speak, or would you like to re-approach the character one more time? It’s interesting that you haven’t done a major story arc with Batman as your angular, designy style seems a nice complement to the character.

Walter: These days, there are several Batman books and they’re all tied together in some ways, not unlike the Superman books. Or at least they were last time I looked. Generally, I work and play well with others, but I’m not so interested in doing Batman under those circum-

stances as a regular gig. I can imagine doing a special project someday with a self-contained story. It would be fun, actually, but the opportunity or the moment never seemed to quite be there for me to do a major Batman storyline. A lot of other guys have done him, and maybe I prefer some of the more offbeat heroes anyway. Archie once wrote, in an introduction to Manhunter, how he always seemed to prefer the Green Llama and some of the more obscure heroes to Superman and other headliners. Looking back over my career, I think that perhaps I share that preference, working on some of the guys that are a tad more offbeat and not quite so mainstream, although I've done plenty of mainstream characters as well.

CBA: Regarding the two-issue Dr. Phosphorus story you did with Englehart, did you know Steve beforehand?

Walter: Steve did live in New York for awhile. I can’t remember when he moved back to the West Coast, but he was East when we were all new in comics. I knew Steve when everybody hung out together at Continuity Associates and around at the various company offices in the early to mid-’70s. I don’t remember now how my involvement in that story came about, whether Steve talked to me about it or someone else did. The only clear memory I’ve got—and I hope this jibes with what Steve remembers—is that the Doctor Phosphorus character started in a way out of my experience as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. One of the teachers I had there, Tom Segorous, was a wonderful illustrator and painter, and when he was younger (before I knew him), he was interested in comics himself. He interviewed with Al Capp about doing some work for him although in the end, Tom decided to go his own way. But once, when Tom and I were talking about comics, he told me that he and his brother, I think, had come up with a character called Phosphor who was some sort of fire guy. I suggested the idea for Phosphor as a character and Steve ran with it.

Somewhere along the way, Julie Schwartz, who was editing Detective Comics at the time, decided that the name Phosphor was too obscure; he changed it to Doctor Phosphorus. But in some ways, the germ of that idea came out of the stuff Tom had told me about when I was back in art school. I talked to Tom about using Phospor in Batman and he was perfectly cool with it. He thought it was a riot to have a distant version of this character from his youth actually show up in a comic book somewhere.

CBA: The characters from your small press comics collaboration with Gerry Boudreau, The Outsiders, were personifications of the elements and one of them was Fire. Was there any relation with Doctor Phosphorus to that character?

Walter: Not really, I didn’t draw the Outsider character as a skeleton. I don’t remember what Tom told me about Phospor when we talked about the character and his powers at the time but I expect he had a burning quality. When you drop phosphorus into water, it goes off like sodium, almost like a burning explosion.

Tom may even have visualized him as burning skeleton; I don't remember now. But the character didn’t owe anything to The Outsiders visually. That particular fire character probably owed something to the Human Torch if anything.

CBA: Did you realize that Steve wanted to go back to Square One with the character?

Walter: I don’t know if we talked about it that much and I think I was just doing two issues in any case. I don't even remember at this point if we worked DC style or Marvel style. Steve may remember that. I do know that I've worked from very few complete scripts over the years. Whether or not that story was done from a full script or whether I talked with Steve and then he gave me a plot and I broke it down and he wrote the dialogue afterwards, I couldn't say. I don’t think I had any sense of where he was going with the Batman character beyond our story; for example, that the Joker story was going to end up the way it did. I read it when it came out like everyone else. We were all young and just doing comics a month at a time back then.

CBA: You only stayed for two issues. Was that intentional from the start?

Walter: I think so. They may simply have needed somebody to step in and do a couple of issues for some reason. I don’t remember having any thoughts about becoming the regular artist on Batman and I usually remember when I've been offered ongoing work. I think in this case, I was offered a couple of issues, and I hoped they’d be fun to do. I don’t think I had worked with Steve before then. I liked Steve’s writing so I thought I would enjoy working with him. I generally tried to work with writers whose work I liked.

Above: We took the liberty of flopping this awesome image by Walter Simonson and Allen Milgrom. From Detective Comics #470. ©2002 DC Comics.

Inset left: Okay, we know this is actually a detail of Jim Aparo’s cover art to Detective Comics #469, but we just couldn’t resist using it! ©2002 DC Comics.

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Above: The “Snoopy-inspired” Batman story, by Len Wein and Walter Simonson, appeared in Detective Comics #500. Below: Nice shot of the Darknight Detective by Walter S. and Allen M. in a panel from Detective Comics #469. ©2002 DC Comics.

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CBA: Where you satisfied with Al Milgrom’s inks on that?

Walter: Yes. I gave Allen layouts, I wasn’t doing tight pencils on that stuff. There was a period of time in the mid-’70s where I did a whole bunch of layouts, starting with Hercules Unbound. Partly I was putting myself back in school because I felt I wasn’t making graphic decisions in comics fast enough to suit me at the time. I was doing maybe one page a week or a little more. (Don’t ask me how I was staying alive because I couldn’t tell you!) I wanted to learn to think

faster about storytelling and putting visuals together, so I did a lot of work where I was just doing layouts for a while, teaching myself to solve each page quickly. Batman, Rampaging Hulk, Hercules Unbound, my first run on Thor—they were all layout books for me.

What I wanted from an inker when I was done with the layouts was for him to come in and do the best finishes he could. That’s what Allen did.

CBA: Did you get the same rate when you were doing breakdowns rather than pencils or was there a special rate?

Walter: I don’t remember my actual rates back then, but the way it used to be was that the company established a page rate for pencils and for inks. They paid X amount of dollars per page for pencils, Y amount of dollars for inks. And they paid X minus $20 for breakdowns. Essentially, the idea was to shave a few bucks off the penciler’s rate and add them back on to the inker’s rate. Hence, the overall amount the company paid for a page of pencils and inks remained the same. The inker made Y plus $20 for bringing the pencils up to a finished state and then inking them. At least, that's the way it was being done back in the ’70s and ’80s.

CBA: Are your breakdowns similar to the way that you would pencil for yourself that you ink? Some of your stuff is very loose in the pencil stage.

Walter: It can be. If I’m really working for a job that somebody else is going to ink, I usually put more in the breakdowns then if they were layouts for me to ink. I might put less in if I were doing pencils I was going to ink myself. Depends on what I'm penciling. But I’m trying to give the inkers all the stuff they really need. I want to do the storytelling, to establish the compositions, to organize the pages. I’m not necessarily placing blacks or doing a lot of rendering, but I am composing the story visually and putting in what I would regard as the essential structure of the drawing. Then it's up to the inker to lay the finish on the surface.

CBA: What did you think of Marshall Rogers when he came on the scene?

Walter: I thought he was really good and that Detective stuff was phenomenal. Back then you had to come to New York to work in comics and get started, and Marshall worked out of Continuity for awhile. We were all hanging out there, so I knew him. I thought he did great work.

CBA: Were you impressed with the series as a whole?

Walter: Oh, yes. That was actually one of my favorite Batman runs. I thought Terry Austin and Marshall were a really complementary pair and with Steve Englehart, they were a great trio. All three of them produced a remarkable body of work. I think if you took any of them out of the equation, you would have had a very different end product. It may have been as good or maybe not, but it certainly would have been different. That Batman run really has the indelible stamp of the talents of those three guys.

CBA: Austin inked you on the Teen Titans/X-Men book. Was it enjoyable to work with him?

Walter: Sure! I’ve known Terry since he first came into the business and so it was a real treat to have him work over my stuff. He did a beautiful job on it, just lovely. In fact, I’m really crabby right now because Marvel just reprinted that X/Titans job in a $25 paperback format in an collection with the other three DC/Marvel cross-overs, and they managed to screw up all the full bleed pages I did in the original version. Marvel put out a reprint of the X/Titans story several years ago, and they misaligned the pages then. So now that they've put it out again on fancier paper and are charging more money for the whole package, they're still misaligning it. Hello!!! Anybody home!!!?

Go back and take a look and you’ll see that all my bleed pages bleed off the bottom with big white borders around the other three sides. I called Marvel and I was pretty angry about it.

CBA: Did you complain the first time?

Walter: Probably, that was long enough ago that I don’t remember it for sure, but I sure as hell complained about it this time.

CBA Interview Extra

Breakdowns & the Batman Artist Allen Milgrom discusses his inking job on Simonson Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by LongBox.com Staff Artist and editor Allen Milgrom came on the scene of mainstream comics in the early ‘70s, quickly becoming an established and prolific inker for both Marvel and DC Comics. CBA interviewed Allen on his contributions to Marvel in the ‘70s in our recent 18th “Cosmic Comics” issue. This short interview on his work inking Walter Simonson on Detective Comics #469-470 was conducted by phone and was copyedited by Allen.

Allen: The first of the two was pretty successful. He was happy with it and I was relatively happy with it. The second one, I was in the middle of a deadline crunch and may have stretched myself a little thin. I tried experimenting. I know that Joe often worked with markers as well as regular brushes and I think in an effort to try to duplicate what he does, I tried to do the same and I’m not a good enough artist to pull that off. I should have stuck with the regular utensils.

CBA: Walter says he gave you pretty loose layouts?

Allen: Walter’s job on the Batman/Doctor Phosphorus story was loose but they were supposed to be breakdowns. I wasn’t sure if I

Below: Bats and the mad doctor tear it up in this Detective Comics #469 page by Steve Englehart (words), Walter Simonson (pencil breakdowns) and Allen Milgrom (inks). ©2002 DC Comics.

Comic Book Artist: How do you recall your work with Walter Simonson on those two Batman stories?

Allen Milgrom: Only vaguely. It was 30 years ago. Walter and I were living together at the time in Queens. He and Steve Englehart were talking about what Batman should be, and Walt was excited about drawing the character, having worked briefly on him in the “Manhunter” strip. I don’t remember if it had a tighter deadline than he was used to or he was working on something else at the time, which is possible, but instead of doing full pencils, he decided to do breakdowns, looser pencils and I don’t even know who asked me to come on board as the inker. I don’t remember getting an official call from Julie Schwartz. It was possible they just said, “Hey, let’s get Milgrom to ink it.” Julie, being an old-style editor, usually would go through the proper channels. I was tapped to do it and was into it. I don’t know if I had done any Batman prior to that, maybe just backgrounds for Murphy Anderson.

Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were the DC triumvirate, and everyone wanted to work on those icons. I decided to not do as much linear work as Walter, but more as a black-&-white design approach and I think it was a mistake to go that way. This was very early in both our careers and I didn’t do quite as much extra drawing on the stuff as I should’ve and on top of that at the time this was all new and exciting to me and I was getting to work with Walter. We worked together before on Swords of Sorcery, on the “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” strip. This was must have been 1973 because I had just finished a year with Murphy doing backgrounds and suddenly I started getting a little bit of work on my own. Walter had a real tight deadline and said, “I could really use some help inking this strip. Any chance you could come over and hang out at my place for a couple and while I’m penciling it? I’ll hand pages over for you to ink.” We did that production line thing. I moved in with him for a couple days. We talked way too much considering the deadline, went out for pizzas, and hung out in the neighborhood. Chaykin may have lived in the neighborhood at the time, too. So Walt would pencil a page and I would immediately then ink it. I had a tight deadline of my own, working on some pages for Dave Cockrum on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and was due to fly out of town at the end of the week, so we were busy cranking out stuff.

Some time during that stint doing those two Batman stories, somebody called and said, “We have a job we’d like for you to ink.”

I said, “I’m really pretty busy right now, I don’t think I can.” They said, “Don’t you want to ask who the penciler is?” I said, “Okay.

Who’s the penciler?” They said, “Joe Kubert.” And I said, “Of course, I’ll squeeze him in!” [laughter] So while I doing the two-part Batman story with Walter, I also ended up working on a two-part “Sgt. Rock” story for Our Army at War. I remember it featured Mussolini. It was a scary thrill to be able to ink Joe Kubert.

CBA: Did it work?

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Above: Another lauded Rogers & Austin collaboration, one edited

by Allen Milgrom, was their oneyear stint on Doctor Strange (#4853). Courtesy of Terry Austin. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Recent snapshot of Allen Milgrom by Andrew D. Cooke.

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should have done any extra drawing on the Doctor Phosphorus character because he was basically a guy with a black skeleton and somewhat of a difficult character to render. Walter drew him in breakdowns very loosely and he was a character that you could see his black skeleton through his glowing skin and neither one of us did an awful a lot of research on the human skeleton. Walt’s stuff is more designy than draftsman-like, especially early on. I look at that in retrospect and think maybe I should have pulled out an anatomy book and done a little bit more refinement on the skeletal structure. I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the way that came out, but it was one of these things where it was part of an experiment and parts of it worked and parts of it didn’t. I said, “Walter, I wish I had that job to do again” and he goes, “Hey, they were breakdowns, you were doing finishes. When someone does finishes over my breakdowns, I don’t expect it to look exactly like what I would have done.” He mentioned Tony DeZuniga and Joe Sinnott having inked him on Thor and even Klaus Janson on Battlestar Galactica. He says, “When I do breakdowns, I expect the inker to have free reign with what he puts down for the finish.” So he was very nice about it, but I was a little disappointed in the way the final book looked. Although again Walt being as popular as he is, they’ve reprinted the stuff even as recently as maybe two years ago.

CBA: Did you have any inkling that these two issues were going to kick off Englehart’s refinement of the Batman?

Allen: Certainly Steve said so. Steve is not only a good writer, but he loves the character and talks a great story, too. He would describe how Batman was a creature of the night, looming over Gotham City was his thing, but there had already been elements of that which had already returned to the character. You had Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s putting a spin on the character.

Certainly the stuff in the ‘60s, when we were kids, the Bob Kane stuff where Batman fought aliens and Moth Man and Kane’s studio kept it very simplistic. But Neal doing the character knocked your eyeballs out because it was a radically different look for the character, really the creature of the night, a guy to be feared… that whole “criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot” had gone out in the ‘60s and Batman was out in the daylight way too much. Jumping on giant typewriters.

CBA: Dick Sprang could draw a mean story.

Allen: He had a nice warped sensibility with his perspective and those giant things. I liked that material. When you think of Batman, my generation, it’s all the stuff in the Batcave, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the penny, the two or three things that made it the Batcave, I always think of Dick Sprang.

CBA: Do you recall why Walter and you just did two issues?

Allen: I don’t think the expectation was that we were going to do more. Walt hadn’t signed on for any long-term thing. Walter always likes to pick and choose the project and he may not have wanted to get on a another real regular schedule or it may have been that he was doing a couple of fill-in issues. Marshall had knocked around trying to get into the business for a while and was rejected a number of times, but every time he came back with better and better looking samples.

CBA: How was it working with Marshall and Terry on Doctor Strange in the early 1980s, a title you edited and Roger Stern wrote?

Allen: I enjoyed it. At the time, somewhere in my files, there’s a photo of me working as an editor at Marvel with about 15 or 16 titles on the wall behind me, all the titles I was editing at the time. It’s not quite as odious as it sounds because I was younger and had lots of energy, and I had a very capable assistant editor in Mary Jo Duffy.

As I recall, the sales on Doctor Strange were low, so I called up Marshall Rogers and said, “The title having some difficulty selling, but he’s a great character, and we liked what you did on Batman. You and Terry are a popular team, so we’d like to use you two to try and boost sales,” Marshall was up for it, and said, “I love that character, and I’ve got some ideas for stories.” I said, “Good! I’d love to hear them.” Roger Stern was the writer. (Now, I don’t remember whether I talked to him or Marshall first.) After I talked to Marshall, I said to Stern, “He’s interested in doing it, has got some story ideas, so do you want to work with him?” He said, “I prefer working with the artist knocking ideas back and forth.” So it was a good thing because Marshall had some neat concept ideas which Sterno help tie together and make stories out of them. He kept up the establishing shot and telling people who he was and not just going crazy with psychedelic mishmash. The last guy that we managed to pull on board was Terry because he can sometimes be a difficult sell. You call him up and say, “Hey, Terry! How would you like to ink so-and-so?” He’d say, “Well I don’t know.” He may have just gotten off inking Marshall for the Detective stuff and maybe thinking, “I’d like to ink somebody else for a while.” Terry’s not the world’s fastest guy, but I think he does a good two pages a day so you have to keep the work coming for him.

He doesn’t like it when he gets two pages one day and then six pages three days later. I talked to Terry and was convinced that he told me he would do it. At some point, I called him up and said, “Marshall is turning in pages and as soon as I get them lettered, I’ll send them to you.” He goes, “But I never agreed to that work.” [laughter] I went, “Yes, you did. I’m sure that last time I talked to you…” He said, “I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds good,’ or something vaguely positively but not an actual affirmation.” But, obviously, he eventually did agree to ink the series.

I do remember that run of Doctor Strange having a nice combination of Marshall’s wacky ideas and Sterno’s good, solid storytelling.

I don’t really remember the storyline, but it was a lot of fun.

This page: While Detective Comics editor Julius Schwartz couldn’t recall much about the Englehart/Rogers/Austin run, he kindly photocopied his assignment log for us, indicating with arrows the related entries. Thanks, Julie!

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CBA Interview Extra

The Rise of Marshall Rogers The renowned artist on his breakthrough work with the Batman Opposite page: Marshall Rogers’ painting of the Batman, the character he is perhaps most fondly associated with, from the cover of Phil Seuling’s 1979 Comic Art Convention souvenir book, the event where the artist was the featured guest of honor.

Art ©2002 Marshall Rogers.

Batman ©2002 DC Comics.

Right: Late ’70s photo of artist Marshall Rogers from the 1979 Comic Art Convention souvenir book, taken by Bob Keenan.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by LongBox.com Staff The unanticipated arrival of Marshall Rogers on the increasingly dull and tepid mainstream comic book scene of the mid- to late 1970s caused a sensation with readers hungry for new and innovative work.

Most creators of note from the previous glory years—Neal Adams, Steranko, Barry Windsor-Smith, Bernie Wrightson, Michael W. Kaluta, Frank Brunner, Mike Ploog, and many others—had moved on to other fields (including advertising and the then-hot portfolio market), with the anemic industry in dire need of infusion. Along with John Byrne, Michael Golden, a young Frank Miller, and very few others, the fresh blood Marshall gave us were moments of majesty in the comics ghetto of those years, helping to bridge the time when the field would again meet their promise. This interview took place by telephone in the Spring, and was copyedited by the artist.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you from?

Marshall Rogers: Ardsley, New York.

That’s in Westchester County, about 20 miles north of Manhattan. It’s just next to Dobbs Ferry.

CBA: What did your father do?

Marshall: He was an electrical engineer.

CBA: Did you have anyone else who was artistic in your family?

Marshall: Well, my dad. After he died at a fairly early age, I was going through some of his stuff and found single spot cartoons that he had done as contributions to The New Yorker. He never sold them, but had aspirations at one time. He was artistic in that all of his free time was spent in rebuilding our house; he was a carpenter and woodcraftsman. That’s how he expressed his artistic side. My mother was a seamstress, not a professional, but she was of tailor quality and did sewing for friends, and that was her artistic outlet.

CBA: Was it pretty much a typical Westchester County suburban neighborhood?

Marshall: Absolutely. It was a white-bread environment.

CBA: Did you spend your entire youth in Westchester?

Marshall: Yes. CBA: When did you develop an interest in art?

Marshall: As a kid, I read comic books, and that made me want to draw.

CBA: How many other siblings do you have?

Marshall: One younger sister.

CBA: Did you spend a lot of time alone? For instance, did you read comics on your own or did you share them with neighborhood kids?

Marshall: Both. I would

have my downtime by myself and had a number of friends who were also into comic books so we would go around the neighborhood, traveling for miles, looking for trades.

CBA: Were you initially into the Dell comics, the Walt Disneys?

Marshall: Yes. The first comics I actually read were Mickey Mouse Adventures. I soon moved on to the very homogenized Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman of the ’50s.

CBA: You obviously missed the ECs, right?

Marshall: Yes, I did. I think there was basically a neighborhood censorship on those items. I don’t remember seeing them on newsstands.

CBA: Where did you buy your comics?

Marshall: There was a luncheonette, about a mile away from my house, in the downtown section of the small community.

CBA: Did you have outlets like that where you could buy older comics?

Marshall: No, not really. My grandparents lived out in Stonybrook, on Long Island and a very small community at the time and there was a small drugstore and they wouldn’t return their titles, so I would be able to find issues four or five months old and that’s really where I got my first Marvel titles.

CBA: So you were able to buy small runs of certain titles?

Marshall: Exactly. I actually found X-Men #2 there after buying X-Men #3 or 4 at my own town store.

CBA: The artist of those issues, Jack Kirby, was the first artist that influenced you?

Marshall: Absolutely. [For a thorough discussion of his memorable late ’70s run on Mister Miracle and Marshall’s opinions regarding Kirby’s work, please refer to Ye Ed’s interview with him in The Jack Kirby Collector #35.] But not just Jack. I was reading everybody. Gil Kane certainly caught my eye. Though Jack was the main influence. I would go down, once a week, buy a stack of comic books, bring them home and arrange them so that the Kirby issues were on the bottom. Then I’d quickly go through the others and then get down to the Jack’s work.

CBA: That’s self-discipline! [laughter] How about Steve Ditko?

Marshall: In the stack, he was always just above Jack’s work and I would start savoring at that point.

CBA: You mentioned in your TJKC interview the impact of Ditko’s first 20 issues or so of Amazing Spider-Man. There was also a wonderful run by Stan Lee and Ditko on “Doctor Strange” in Strange Tales. Do you recall that at all?

Strange embarked on an around-the-world sojourn, trying to keep away from Baron Mordru and his minions in astral form.

Marshall: Absolutely, and when I did my run on Doctor Strange [#48-53], I went back to those issues of Strange Tales as my source material.

CBA: What was it about Ditko’s work that compelled you?

Marshall: It was so different, and he was also an artist who put a lot of himself in his work. And I also felt that way about Jack. I got more than a twodimensional feel out of Jack and Steve’s work. I think they were men putting their heart into the material they were doing.

CBA: At what point did you say, “Hey, I want to be a comic book artist”?

Marshall: As a youngster, I’m sure that I dabbled with the idea, but I never remember announcing it to anyone. I had gone to college more to placate my parents as a dutiful son. They wanted me to get a degree and a career to get on with my life. As a compromise I chose architecture because I thought there would be some artistic outlet afforded me. When I had finished in two years, I had realized that the world probably wouldn’t accept Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in today’s economy at that time. The architecture that I was learning was designing parking lots for malls, heating and cooling systems, and it wasn’t giving me any artistic satisfaction. I realized what I really wanted to do was tell stories and comic books would give me the venue to do that and it was at that point I decided that I wanted to be a comic book artist.

CBA: This was in the early ’70s?

Marshall: That’s right.

CBA: Now, were you aware of that new generation that you’re a part of— Wrightson, Kaluta, Windsor-Smith, etc.—who were coming in at that time?

Marshall: Chaykin and Simonson’s work in particular made me feel that I can also do this. I really admire both men’s abilities. They weren’t following the tradition that Neal Adams had established; they were breaking away from that mold. They were working in a more linear, more impressionistic style in their approach to comics and that was what I could also execute. In doing samples, I tried to emulate Neal’s work, but I’m not capable of doing that type of finesse of which Neal is so expert. And that’s not really where my interest lies as much. I had to learn anatomy to tell stories, rather than knowing how to draw to get me into comic books. Storytelling made me want to get into it rather than having the chance to draw. I had to learn how to draw to do what I wanted to do.

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Below: Before they were made a bona fide fan favorite art team through their Detective Comics breakthrough, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin also drew a story for Batman Family #12. Courtesy of Terry Austin. ©2002 DC Comics.

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CBA: The early ’70s were a great time to appreciate comic books because there was a plethora of reprint material coming out at the time. Nostalgia Press was reprinting Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Eisner’s Spirit was back, there were DC’s 100-Page Super Spectaculars where you could see early work of Jack Kirby, Jack Burnley, Dick Sprang and any number of cartoonists. Did you look back at the past masters?

Marshall: Not at that time, I was looking at Chaykin and Simonson to see how I could execute the work that was more in my mind. Then I left DC Comics because I wanted to ink my own material. I went back even further and looked at the cartooning and the stylization of the 1920s and ’30s. I really studied the work of Herriman, McCay, Caniff and those newspaper syndicate artists and looked at the inking they were doing there, because it was so organic.

One of my all-time favorite contemporary pieces of cartooning is Calvin and Hobbes. I think Bill Watterson is a master cartoonist.

CBA: Absolutely. One of the compelling things of your work is that in late ’60s and ’70s, while there were enormously different styles coming to the fore, certainly Neal Adams’ influence really dominated at the time. The ultra-realistic, hyper-real approach was going on, which often devolved into the grotesque, in the literal sense of that word. Yet you came on the scene with an almost minimalist style. So you were attempting a minimalist, more cartoony approach?

Marshall: Yeah. A lot of my time was spent in the design and composition of the page, and so I had to take some short cuts and it resulted in minimalist approaches to the finished work. There’s just an innate artistic feel; negative space and simplicity not only aid in the design, but also propel the storytelling momentum. When there are dead areas in the story or in-between spots that just bridge one story element to another, I don’t think that the reader should linger on that panel so you can make it as minimalistic as possible to compel them to move on to the next panel.

CBA: Did you enjoy Alex Toth’s work for instance?

Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. Very much.

CBA: In our other interview, you said you had left comic collecting for a period of time. By the early ’70s, did you get back into reading comics after you decided to become a comic artist or before?

Marshall: It was more in conjunction. What was out there at the time, just after a third company had come on to the scene, Atlas/Seaboard, I had made a try at DC and Marvel and was getting rejected and I thought because Atlas was new they wouldn’t have all their slots filled and might be interested in talent that was more raw.

CBA: What happened?

Marshall: I started to get a couple small nibbles and got a couple small assignments to do spot illustrations for one of their black-&white books and we were talking about my being assigned to draw that kung fu character, Hands of the Dragon, and I had done a character design for that. The editor and I were starting to do some serious talking about it but at the time they were revamping the line because sales weren’t good and they were trying to boost them, but then the bottom fell out. I was dealing with a young guy, Jeff Rovin.

CBA: How did you approach DC and Marvel? Did you draw up sample stories?

Marshall: Yes. I was writing my own stories and drawing them and I gave them way too much material and somebody—I don’t remember who—suggested that I just start taking some existing stories and just start redrawing one or two pages of how I would approach the work as compared to getting them a whole body of work. At the time I was talking with everybody I could at that point, trying to get into the companies and then going to conventions and talking to the young artists who were getting work and they were giving me critiques on my work.

CBA: You’re from Westchester. Did you attend the Phil Seuling conventions?

Marshall: That’s where I was going before I started working professionally.

CBA: Did you approach people like Bernie Wrightson and Barry Smith?

Marshall: Everybody, including Neal Adams who told me to give it up and get a real job. [laughter] CBA: Did you remind Neal of that when you were later renting space at Continuity?

Marshall: I think it may have come up. I do remember it being like a challenge that I had to prove that I could do it.

CBA: Was it to your advantage, eventually, that you did not get in on the first go-round because that gave you time to develop your own style or were you ready at the initial stage?

Marshall: It certainly made me hungry when I got my first opportunity. I wanted to prove myself and wanted to do the work. When I finally got my chance it has been so long in coming that I was ready to give it everything I had.

CBA: Your first professional job was with editor Julie Schwartz on the Calculator back-up stories in Detective Comics?

Marshall: No, my first work was over at Marvel, through Marie Severin and Dan Adkins. Marvel was reprinting American material for a British audience and the pages were in a different format that was wider than it was high. They would reprint two American pages per British page and would only do half an American story per issue so they needed splash pages for every second issue and I was doing splash pages in everyone’s different style for those books.

CBA: So you would actually do a Daredevil splash in, let’s say, Gene Colan’s style?

Marshall: Yeah. There was a Colan Dracula story that I had to do a splash for. I had to do splashes in Jack’s style for the Fantastic Four stories.

CBA: Did you enjoy that?

Marshall: Yes, but as much as anything else, I was enjoying the fact that I was getting the work. [laughter] CBA: When you look back at the sample stuff, were you ready? Do you look back on it now and cringe?

Marshall: I still have almost everything that I’ve ever done and I see that that early work was all raw, absolutely. After those splash pages, I ended up doing a story with Chris Claremont for one the black-&-white books, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. “The Daughters of the Dragon,” with the Misty Knight and Colleen Wing characters from Iron Fist. I had inked that job and toned it with marker for the black-&-white book. Then I went over to DC yet again and talked with Vinnie Colletta who was the DC art director and showed him just one piece, a science-fiction drawing with two small figures in a large cavernous area, and Vinnie liked the composition and design of the work.

He was the first one who didn’t critique my anatomy (which had a lot of shortcomings), but recognized my talent in design and composition. And that’s what made him give me my first work at DC, which were back-up stories.

I had done a number of horror stories and also a back-up story for Kamandi, a “Tale of the Great Disaster,” which didn’t appear in Kamandi, but in one of their war titles, Weird War Tales. I had gotten the assignment and by the time it was finished, Kamandi had been cancelled. I think that was the first job that I worked on which had Terry Austin’s inks.

CBA: Terry is a good friend of mine and he called me about two weeks ago and said, “I read that you are doing this CBA Collection and you’re going to be talking about the Englehart and Rogers’ Batman, but don’t forget that I worked on that, too.” I said “Oh man! I just totally forgot, Terry! You’re right!” In fact, Terry was an integral part the collaboration, correct?

Marshall: Oh absolutely, and as a matter of fact, so was John Workman, whose lettering on the first few stories was great. The Englehart stories really sparked me and I gave those Batman stories everything I had and I think that inspired Terry and I think he really gave it everything he had. There’s no two doubts about that. I think the enthusiasm just infused everybody. I know John Workman was hyped up about the work. He really gave it everything he had. It was just a real collaborative effort.

Everyone was working off of everyone else’s enthusiasm on the project.

CBA: So you felt like something was happening? You had already done the Calculator back-up stories and Terry inked those, too. Did you feel like you two were a team? “Where he goes, I go”?

Marshall: Not to that extent, but Terry was also renting space at Continuity, and I thought that Terry’s inking made my stuff look really good and I was very happy about it. I never went in and said, “Good job,” because that wasn’t my place. He knew he was doing a good job, but I was very complimentary about what he was doing. I felt the early assignments we were doing together went really well and I was just fortunate in getting Terry assigned to the work that I was doing.

By the time we had done the Calculator stories, there was some resistance to that work, but it got published anyhow and there was a good fan reaction to it, and then we were assigned the Englehart stories and I anticipated that Terry would be working on it. As a matter of fact, I started to slightly change my style of drawing because I was anticipating that Terry would be working on it and I was to get a finished product that would look the best that it could.

CBA: What was the resistance to the Calculator back-ups?

Marshall: The resistance was that my anatomy was not fully developed, that the stylization of my work was not of the degree that DC often published, that my work was more raw, specifically the anatomy. Not that it was not without any basis; the anatomy, in particular, was very stiff and stilted in places, but because of scheduling, it had to go through anyhow. Then the positive reaction from readers

was the primary reason I got assigned to draw the Englehart stories.

CBA: What specifically was the reaction? Was it from fans or other professionals?

Marshall: It was fan feedback in the letter columns.

CBA: Despite the promise of Michael Golden and a few others, there was very little to talk about in comics during the mid- to late ’70s, I felt. Then you came along, doing something somewhat different than all the Neal Adams clones. Did you feel like you had finally made it?

Marshall: Not really, I was more intent on doing the work than the fact that I had “arrived” or anything. I wasn’t saying, “I’m doing the best Batman stuff that’s ever been done.” I was saying to myself, “Hey, I got a chance to work on the characters I always loved as a child but, with a few exceptions, I never saw brought out the way that I wanted to see.” So I had an opportunity to visualize my interpretation of the character rather than thinking that I was doing anything special. I was doing work that was special to me and I was

Above: Page from Marshall and Terry’s initial breakthrough job, the Batman vs. Calculator full-length story, “Battle of the Thinking Machines,” from Detective Comics #468. ©2002 DC Comics.

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happy that other people thought so, too.

There is one thing that I would like to add to that: I’ve always had a mirror by my drawing board for quick reference for hand and expressions, etc. I was working late at night on one of the Englehart Batman stories and I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror and realized that “Hey, I’m drawing the Batman,” something that I always wanted to do since I was a kid. The Batman was one of the first comic book characters that I started to draw as a child and when I realized that I was actually doing it, it gave me a real rush.

CBA: Obviously the Englehart/Rogers/Austin Batman harkens back to the pre-Robin Batman of the late ’30s, that creature-of-the-night kind of character. Did you realize there was this very primal, lone

Above: A refreshing aspect of the fondly remembered Batman story arc by Englehart, Rogers and Austin, was the depiction of Bruce Wayne’s mature, respectful relationship with paramour Silver St. Cloud. Here’s the couple and Dick Grayson from Detective Comics #473. Courtesy of Terry Austin. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Batman when you were a kid? Obviously, by the ’50s and ’60s, he was often a very campy super-hero.

Marshall: Yes, exactly. Though I never saw it on the pages, the primal Batman was what I wanted to see. If you had asked me as a kid, I never would have been able to express it; this is all in retrospect.

When Neal did his version of the Batman, it was almost there for me.

But Neal was too concerned with the body underneath the cape, in my opinion. To me, the Batman wears a cloak and I think the primary essence of the character is that cloak which fully wraps around and

shrouds him in darkness. That was the one thing about Neal’s work that didn’t quite hit the mark for me. Neal and Denny brought the character back to the darkness—absolutely what I always wanted to see—but not exactly how I wanted to see it. So I had a chance to do what I envisioned.

CBA: Neal did give the Batman’s cape personality. He was probably the first artist since Bob Kane—or whoever drew those early stories—to give the cape some character, right?

Marshall: Absolutely, and the elongated ears that was another element that was absolutely necessary. Short, stumpy bat ears don’t make it for me. You have to get the persona of the bat in silhouette as far as I’m concerned and the short ears never worked.

CBA: Did Julie Schwartz call and ask if you wanted the Detective Comics assignment?

Marshall: I did the last two Calculator back-up stories in Detective Comics, then the culmination of that would be a full-length story with those characters as guest-stars in Detective Comics with Batman. The artist doing the Batman lead story in those books was Ernie Chan and he left DC to return to Marvel to ink Conan and it happened that this coincided right when the full-length culmination story was to be done. Because I had done those last two or three back-up stories and they had an open slot and didn’t have an artist ready to go, I was offered the chance to do the full-length book and, of course, I jumped at the opportunity. I was elated to have a chance and did the story, and there were differing opinions in the editorial staff of whether it was good or not. Some people liked it, some people didn’t, but because of scheduling it had to be printed so it went out. The next issue contained the first Englehart stories with Doctor Phosphorus where Walt Simonson was asked to step in and pencil. By that time they had gotten the very favorable fan mail back on the Calculator story, I was offered the chance to draw the series after Walt’s two issues and, again, I quickly agreed.

CBA: Did your page rate increase commiserate with the fan reaction?

Marshall: No, I don’t think so. I don’t actually remember. I was getting raises along the way, but exactly when those came, I don’t honestly remember.

CBA: How did you prepare yourself for Batman? Did you look back at Detective Comics #27-37?

Marshall: I just dove into it. I saw those stories in reprints. A few years prior, DC was doing a lot of reprints and from that I got exposure. The Batman I drew was just the character I’d always wanted to see as a kid.

CBA: Was it different than any prior Batman you saw at DC? The cloak was the focus?

Marshall: Yeah, it was. It wasn’t really that I was thinking about what others had done before me, it was just what I wanted to do with the character.

CBA: Did you receive full scripts from Englehart?

Marshall: Yes. CBA: Did you have any discussion with him before you put pencil to paper?

Marshall: Nope. Steve has turned in all the scripts, actually except one. The Deadshot story was an afterthought because in the solo Batman title the Joker had been going through a number of issues—I forget exactly what the storyline was—but originally the first of the Englehart/Rogers/Austin Joker stories was going to appear simultaneously with the Joker appearing in the Batman title and Julie didn’t want to do that. So he got in touch with Englehart somehow (because I believe Steve had left the country by that point) and asked him to do one more story to put in before the Joker stories, so there wouldn’t be the Joker in the two titles the very same month.

Otherwise, the stories had been completely written and I got full script and just went in and totally ignored Steve’s page breakdowns and did my own for storytelling purposes. But I kept every essence that Steve had written of the emotion and action he had put into the character.

CBA: As you recall, Steve had done his story arc and that was it?

Marshall: That’s right.

CBA: Did you see all the scripts before you started?

Marshall: No, I was given each script on a monthly basis.

CBA: So Julie held them back? [laughter]

Marshall: Actually I’m not certain of the time frame. Steve may have still been writing some of it by the time I had started, but I don’t know. I know that I hadn’t known Englehart prior to our working together on this, and like I said, he was out of the country when I started and then he returned a couple months after the last of the Joker stories were done. And it was only then that we met. I don’t think he saw any of the published work until he was in Spain.

CBA: Did you omit any of the script? You said you retained the essence, but did you change some things around?

Marshall: I changed the pacing of the story somewhat because I wanted to get a couple of the elements to coincide with page turns for dramatic effect. I added a little bit when Silver St. Cloud was hitchhiking out of Gotham City after being thrown out of Rupert Thorne’s car. I had her walking over the hill to rent a private plane to get back to Gotham in time for her to see the Batman fighting the Joker. But that was for the page turn and pacing because I wanted to get her back in a timely fashion and didn’t want her to just disappear and then reappear out of the blue. The only writing I actually changed was some editing by Julie.

CBA: You changed it back?

Marshall: Yes. Steve wrote the Joker delivering a soliloquy, ranting on about getting copyrights on fish faces. Julie added all these silly henchmen into the scene, Snaggletooth and I forget who the others were called. So Julie had the Joker talking to his henchmen rather than making a soliloquy. That didn’t work for me, it toned down the Joker’s bent persona by having him talk to someone actually there rather than himself. And then there were some very silly Juliesque type of comebacks from the supporting characters that diluted the scene even more. So I took out all of Julie’s editing and went back to Steve’s original script. When I turned the pages in, Julie didn’t even notice and it saw publication as Steve originally wrote it. [laughter] CBA: Did Julie ever learn of that?

Marshall: I never mentioned it; I was too afraid of the consequences. [laughter] Julie was a sweetheart, but I was very self-conscious about re-editing the editor, but I just felt in my heart that the scene was too important to make those changes. The Joker is another icon that I have very strong feelings about. For the character, I went back to the original Jerry Robinson inspirations, down to the point of digging out a reprint where they showed the picture of Conrad Veidt that Robinson had used for his model for the Joker. I had that photo hanging over my desk for all the Joker work that I had done and that scene was just too important to me as a storyteller not to keep it as Steve had originally intended. But I was concerned about what I was doing so I kept quiet about it for a long time.

CBA: Were you gaining more self-confidence as you were doing these stories, that these were making your mark in the field?

Marshall: Not in the sense that it was making my mark, I don’t think you can do an artistic endeavor saying, “This is going to be my crowning achievement!” Because that’s going to taint it in one way or another. I was trying to do the best work that I could and someone else is going to decide how good it is.

CBA: Did you look at the assignment as a finite run on Batman or did you hope to be the regular artist?

Marshall: I hadn’t thought about it in those terms at all.

However, after working on the Englehart stories, I was finding the stories coming to me by other writers didn’t have the same flavor. I was starting to get frustrated because I had been able to do what I was doing because of Steve’s scripting. Again, that run of Batman stories was a collaborative effort—writing, penciling, inking, lettering, editing—that made it what it is today. It wasn’t any one person’s singular endeavor; it was the combination and I was hooked on that dynamic in those stories. I wanted to continue it, but I wasn’t getting that same feeling in the subsequent work. Julie was bending over backwards trying to accommodate me though I was a prima donna but still growing at the time. It wasn’t that I was thinking, “I’m the King Cheese!” But I was definitely improving in my abilities as an artist and it came to a point that I still had more to learn and didn’t feel able to do it in the same deadline structure DC required to keep their books on schedule. If I wanted to work for myself in personal artistic growth, I had to go somewhere else to do that and that’s why I stepped out into the alternative comics field at that time.

CBA: Did you grow tired of super-heroes? Did you want to branch

out into other genres? Perhaps achieve more mature work?

Marshall: Not at the time, particularly because I don’t really think of the Batman as much of a super-hero, but more as a costumed adventurer. At the time, I wasn’t thinking in those terms necessarily, but when I got out and was starting to do other work, I was looking at the syndicated newspaper comic strips from the 1930s and ’40s and was studying inking approaches, etc. I realized that there was a lot more to drawing than anatomy; there were the folds of fabric, page composition and dynamics, and everything else that goes into comic books. I started to gravitate towards stories that were less mus-

Above and below: Two aspects artist Marshall Rogers changed from the scripts he received for Detective Comics, was (top) to edit editor Julie Schwartz’s changes, bringing back the Joker’s speech to the original Englehart dialogue in #475, and (bottom) changing Silver’s method of transportation in #476. Courtesy of inker Terry Austin. ©2002 DC Comics.

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cle-oriented with big-breasted women but still basically retained that flavor of fantasy. It’s not that I can’t do muscles; it’s just not where my major interest lies.

CBA: You were basically challenging yourself to maintain an interest?

Marshall: Yeah.

CBA: Do you have short attention span as so many artists have?

That you’d get bored?

Marshall: I’m not sure if it’s a short attention span, but I don’t like to repeat myself. Looking back over the years, I realize that it’s not quite as possible as I thought it would have been when I was

Above: Lest it be forgot, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin returned for a dynamite run of Doctor Strange in the early 1980s, written

by Roger Stern. Above, courtesy of Terry, is a wordless page from #48. ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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younger, but I’m not a big fan of cookie-cutter material—the stuff that’s similar time after time after time again. I do like to work on broader ranges of the story, so whether that’s the lack of an attention span or if there’s another label, I can’t quite say.

CBA: Englehart came along and stripped away a lot of the baggage that came with the character and really got down to the essence of the Batman in the scripts. Steve created this wonderful ensemble of characters—Doctor Phosphorus, Rupert Thorne, Silver St. Cloud—and he returned the character to his roots. Did you look at the story arc as a potentially collected graphic novel? You obviously enjoyed Steve’s characterizations.

Marshall: Oh absolutely, and Steve brought it out very simply, and I don’t mean that as derogatory in the least. To my mind, simplicity is one of the greatest artistic talents that you can bring into any type of performance. It’s easy to try to overwhelm a reader with everything plus the kitchen sink happening within a script, but when a writer can boil it down to its very essence and have very primal elements driving the story, that is true craftsmanship. And I do feel that craftsmanship was there in those Batman stories. I didn’t necessarily recognize it at the time but it certainly drove me to make my own contribution to the work. Some stark emotions were happening in the script which allowed me to zoom in on the close-up on an eye, for example, rather than have to worry about anything else that was going on. It just made for a more dynamic element of storytelling rather than a far shot of a character twiddling his thumbs or tapping his finger while mulling over a complicated “should I or shouldn’t I? Will she or won’t she? How can I?” type of mental scenario.

CBA: Did you know from the start that Silver St. Cloud was going to be such a strong female character who would recognize that Bruce Wayne was the Batman? She’s one of the most memorable supporting characters in the history of the Batman.

Marshall: I recognized early on that she wasn’t a bimbo and that Steve was writing a very strong self-assured woman, and I tried to follow up on that. There’s a scene where the Batman comes into her room and she’d just gotten out of a shower clad only in a towel. The towel was only there because of DC’s censorship. She would have been naked if I felt that we could’ve gotten away with it. But it wouldn’t have been to exploit the character; it would’ve shown that, regardless of her being nude, she wouldn’t cower in front of the Batman. It showed her tremendous strength of character rather than gratuitous nudity. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember if Steve had written her as just coming out of the shower or not, but I do know I had her clad only in a towel and not being intimidated because of her lack of attire when confronted by the Batman, but standing up on her own because that was her inner strength. She only crumpled to the floor after he left, and that was because she was stunned to realize that the Batman was her boyfriend, Bruce Wayne.

CBA: With your very first shot of Silver in bed, it was implicit that she and Bruce had had sex the night before. This was a mature adult relationship in a mainstream comic book. Were you aware of a more sophisticated approach with the script?

Marshall: I think the tone of the writing implied that so I just went right with it.

CBA: When I think about the series, I recall the use of Zip-A-Tone for the flowered wallpaper in Silver’s apartment. Did you instruct Terry to do that?

Marshall: I wrote in blue pencil indicating where tone should be added and Terry took it one step further.

CBA: It was a wonderful complement to your angular work. This is obviously a manufactured, synthetic background, but it really worked.

Marshall: Design and composition are very much on my mind when first starting work on a story. I always first approach my work with a page-by-page breakdown and then panel flow within those pages and eye movement is an element that’s constantly on my mind.

The use of tone is part of that. Terry just took off and embellished it further because of his own artistic ability.

CBA: Another aspect is the lettering. There’s the thick panel borders, reminiscent of the late ’30s Batman, as is the lettering, with the initial-cap letter within the circle virtually lifted from those early Detective Comics.

Marshall: Absolutely, and I made indications for that approach for John. The circular starting letter in each caption box was used because I wanted to bring back that flavor of the early days. Like I said, everyone’s energy was feeding off of each other. John was giving us everything he could to make the book as powerful as it could be.

CBA: Not to dismiss Terry’s fine work at all, but in a perfect world, would you have loved to ink the series yourself? Are you your own preferred inker on all your work?

Marshall: No, not on all my work. Had I inked the material at the time, it would not have been as powerful as it was. As a matter of fact, if you look at the first issue of the Englehart story I drew and the

last one, you’ll notice that particularly the bodies had gotten a little bit fuller and a little bit less angular. My original approach to penciling was very angular and Terry’s approach to his work was very angular also. I felt the combination of the two of us in the early work was too angular. It wasn’t my place to tell Terry how to do his work, so I started to get a little bit fuller and rounder in my penciling and Terry made me a better artist because of it.

CBA: Did you color the work initially or was it just for the reprint series, Shadow of the Batman?

Marshall: It was just for the reprints.

CBA: Was it gratifying to go back and color it your way?

Marshall: Yes, it was. I feel that the coloring is just as important to the mood of the story as anything else and I did enjoy coloring those stories. I asked to color it specifically and was happy they said yes.

CBA: One thing I always love about Geof Darrow’s work is that it’s reminiscent of Hergé’s approach with Tintin; every single thing in the panel is in focus, just perfectly appropriate for the chaos of any given scene. There’s a similar look about your work, so much detail coming at the reader, but it clarifies rather than confuses… I can’t really articulate this fully… but you give so much detail that it adds a refreshing understatement than a typically exaggerated comic book story. I don’t know if it’s a philosophy to show all the details…

Marshall: Whatever is necessary to achieve the mood of the story is foremost on my mind. That required a great bit of detail so that the reader feels they are involved in the story—that they are there actually experiencing it; that’s what I wanted to try to achieve.

CBA: Was the fan reaction overwhelmingly positive when the series first came out?

Marshall: Everything I heard indicated that, but I didn’t get a chance to see the letters that came in, other than those that were printed. So I don’t know what the true pro/con reaction was, but I was certainly very pleased with the letters pages because a lot of fans recognized what Steve, Terry and I were trying to achieve in the work. I particularly remember a letter where someone observed the fact that Silver being clad in a towel wasn’t gratuitous, but was to show her strength. They hit it right on the head and it was very gratifying for someone to realize what I was doing and pick up on it.

CBA: Was this series ever collected in a single volume?

Marshall: Yes, just recently. Batman: Strange Apparitions reprinted the whole volume of the work in toto. I believe that Englehart/ Rogers/Austin stories are the most reprinted Batman stories, except for possibly the origin story. We’ve had our stories reprinted quite a few times.

CBA: Steve mentioned that the series was used to pitch a Batman movie?

Marshall: I don’t know that for certain. I heard all sorts of rumors but have no verification.

CBA: Did you feel this series influenced the first motion picture?

For instance, Kim Basinger’s character was quite similar to Silver St. Cloud, certainly more self-assured than the original Vicki Vale.

Marshall: I think they are different animals actually. I didn’t particularly see any correlation myself.

CBA: So you don’t have any ambivalence about the movie?

Marshall: Right. I did talk with the producer, Michael Uslan, early on but I was much too young and egotistical. I’m not a big fan of those Batman movies.

CBA: Would you like to return to the character?

Marshall: Sure. Just recently there was finally printed a five-issue storyline that had been started by Archie Goodwin which we had worked on together more than 12 years ago. This was during that time when Archie became ill and the project slowed down to a point where I had to find other work. In the interim, I got a job offer in the video game industry and moved over to there. Archie later was back into the swing of things but I’m afraid I didn’t have the time at that point. A couple years ago, I was in the DC offices and Archie and I talked about finally finishing that story but commitments on my side prevented us from pursuing it and then Archie, unfortunately, passed away.

CBA: What’s the name of the series?

Marshall: “Siege.” It was printed in Legends of the Dark Knight.

CBA: After your initial Batman work, did you work on Doctor

Strange?

That was over a few years later, right?

Marshall: I left DC and did some independent work, including Detective, Inc., with Don McGregor. I also did a story for Heavy Metal and started the Coyote storyline with Englehart for Eclipse. Somewhere within that time period was a gap in my workload I needed to fill. I talked with Allen Milgrom and he was interested in me working on Doctor Strange. Milgrom, the writer Roger Stern, and I got together to talk about story direction. My initial idea was just to do a couple of issues, but at the time, Marvel was trying to keep contributors on the books for longer periods, so they were giving bonuses for committing to a six-issue run and I “signed on” for a year (six bi-monthly books). Roger had some ideas about what he wanted to do, which was to introduce a character named Morgana Blessing as a new love interest for Doctor Strange and have Clea go on her way. I didn’t want to establish too many elements that the next artist would have to follow, so we agreed on a regression storyline that would bring my six issues back to the point where the new relationships were beginning. I love that Doctor Strange stuff! [laughter] I’m as proud of that as of any work that I’ve done.

CBA: Your series guest-starred such diverse characters as Brother Voodoo, even Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandos. These were fun Marvel comics.

Marshall: And we even had Doc visit the Fantastic Four when they were up against Rama-Tut in ancient Egypt. It was a true Marvel collaboration. Everybody was really great on that series and I again had the good fortune of working with Terry Austin.

CBA: Just backtracking a little, you went from full scripts with Englehart to Marvel-style with two issues of Detective Comics with Len Wein. How was that? Was that jarring?

Marshall: Yes, quite a bit. Having a full script gave me everything I needed to know as a storyteller and I was able to break it down into just a multiple run of panels and then decide where to make the page

Above: Marshall and Terry did get the chance, here and there, to return to delineating the Caped Crusader, including his start as a costumed adventurer, as seen in this panel detail from Secret Origins #6, written by Roy Thomas. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Below: Ending too short and too soon, the classic Batman collaboration of Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin came to an end with this final full-pager from Detective Comics #476.

Courtesy of Terry Austin. ©2002 DC Comics.

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breaks, etc. I would know exactly what the emotion of the character was by the dialogue or thought balloon that was going on with a full script. With a Marvel-style plot, I didn’t have any of that and didn’t feel I had a full handle on the characters.

CBA: So did it make you exit the Batman series quicker?

Marshall: I was beginning to feel antsy about my growth.

CBA: With Scorpio Rose and Madame Xanadu, you would periodically work with Steve Englehart again. Did you just plain enjoy working with him? Do you guys seek out to collaborate?

Marshall: Yes. The success of our Batman material was certainly an impetus and we looked for projects we could work on together.

CBA: What was it like to work with McGregor?

Marshall: Trying at times would be the best way to put it, but more from my end because I was going through a period of personal change. I have a tendency to get perhaps too involved with the work that I’m doing and had I been working on just frivolous comics, more action-oriented, I would have been able to breathe through the work and separate my own personal problems from the experience. But, by getting involved in characters that were introspective, it made me even more so. Basically, I was turning 30 at the time and there are changes that happen. A different mind frame does start to arise during that time.

CBA: It’s called maturity. [laughter] Marshall: Actually, for me, it was the lost sense of juvenile invulnerability. [laughter] CBA: Mortality?

Marshall: Yes. You realize your own mortality and it changes your point of view.

CBA: Could you maintain an enthusiasm about comics over the years, after your initial splash in the industry? Though I wouldn’t say that Silver Surfer was a step down for you necessarily, but it was a surprise to see you take on such an apparently routine assignment when you have done really interesting story arcs with Doctor Strange and with Don McGregor on Detectives, Inc., a mature piece of work.

Did an ambivalence creep in?

Marshall: No, not really. I’m going to digress for a moment: I found that the Surfer was just too all-powerful to be interesting and it takes away an edge from the stories that I enjoy working on. I got locked into a mindset in considering that space is really a pretty dark, cold place and you are not going to see the Aurora Borealis in comic books quite the same way as you would see in Star Trek and other science-fiction shows. Working in the restrictive medium of comics, you can’t really achieve that grandiosely painted scenario. So there wasn’t as much to work with with that character as there was with previous ones.

CBA: [Looking at a comic book index] You worked with Larry Hama again, for instance, on G.I. Joe… what other work did you do?

Marshall: I was also doing some projects for DC’s marketing side where I designed a game board and box for a Super Powers game and did some background promotional stuff. Then I made a very bad career decision. I took on more than I could handle and I shortchanged an editor. That was really a terrible mistake. I like to feel that I hadn’t made too many mistakes in my career, but this was one where I took on an assignment from Marvel and one from DC and thought I could do the DC work in a lot shorter time than I was able to and it shortchanged the Marvel work. So I burned some bridges that I do have regrets about.

CBA: There’s a perception in the comic book business that editors can bad mouth artists and it can have a lasting effect on people’s careers. Let’s say a freelancer turned a job in late, and because of water-cooler chit-chat, his reputation can be permanently scarred because of one unfortunate incident. Office gossip and bitch sessions can hurt a freelancer’s ability to put food on his or her table.

Do you think that’s fair? Yes, you confess to a mistake made, but should that one mistake damage your income, damage your life?

Marshall: Well, there are two sides to every coin. Being freelance can be very difficult, trying to juggle everything and try not to be delinquent. There are times when I feel that editorial demands are unrealistic, but these are realities editors do have to deal with because that’s what their job is. I don’t know if there should be a blacklist because of it because it may not be the reality of what the contributing artist is all about. It may have been a one-time situation that was unavoidable, but conversely it might be what the contributor is like all the time. An editor needs to know they can rely on their contributors.

CBA: I’m just advocating mutual respect and professionalism, virtues often missing from this infernally juvenile business.

Marshall: Exactly where that line should be drawn is not always clear-cut black-&-white.

CBA: I’ve never met you face-to-face, but you seem to be the same personality type as John Workman and Terry Austin, who share an attitude that its the work that matters, not status. It’s not about the ego. Everyone seems to just love working with these guys and, to me, you don’t necessarily have that star personality that often gets in the way. You just confessed that you burned bridges with editors and seem to have a realistic assessment of your career.

If you could, would you do it all over the same way again?

Marshall: For the most part.

CBA: As a reader, you were a star very soon after appearing on the scene. Maybe I’m naive, but it seemed that you could have written your own ticket. Your star certainly ascended with the Batman.

Marshall: You’re absolutely right, but I realized that to try to maintain that position would have been too taxing. If you approach

a piece of work thinking that it’s going to be the be-all answer to everything, I don’t think that’s actually going to happen. You can’t please all the people all the time. You can only do the best that you can. Then it’s going to be the audience that says, “I like this,” or “I don’t like this.” I don’t think you can predict what is going to be successful. I think that a lot of entertainment is more homogenized today because everyone is trying to anticipate what the public wants and that lowers the bar of creative endeavor, trying to please everybody, minimizing what the work could be potentially.

CBA: But shouldn’t you be rewarded for success, too? Your Batman stories are perhaps some of the most reprinted Batman stories, it not DC stories in history. You do spectacular work but yet the life of an artist often seems to be grinding the pages out and not getting proper royalties if a work is successful. If Stephen King just had to rely on royalties from the first five books he wrote, he would still make a very good living, and that’s the nature of the beast in the book business. I was looking at a Comics Journal interview on you which reproduced a check you got from DC for $7.50, your share of a reprinting. There’s a level of professionalism perhaps in comics that’s different than the outside world. I’m not really formulating this as a question, just expressing a frustration.

Marshall: I understand what you are saying. However, comics is a different beast than other forms of entertainment in that comics are really a spontaneous, of-the-moment event. Yeah, it would be nice to receive a larger royalty, but today there is a royalty. 25 years ago there weren’t any royalties. The fact that it’s not reprinted so many times that could put me into retirement comfortably, how can you gripe about that? Comics are not what the public is buying. It’d be nice if comics were regenerated as often as music is replayed on the

radio, but there’s not the audience there for it, so you better realize what you are getting yourself into. Otherwise look somewhere else.

CBA: Did you realize what you were getting yourself into when you started?

Marshall: If I could do it all again, I would make different decisions along the way, but I got into comic books because basically I thought this was my venue of expression. Comics are a unique form of storytelling, while movies and their special effects today can certainly bring about the same dynamics that was formerly only doable only in either animation or comics. But there is still a form of storytelling unique to comics and that is a part of what I do and enjoy doing. At times, I have thought about directing, but there’s so much more involved and I don’t know if all of that extra headache that goes along with it would make me any happier. I enjoy telling stories and that’s why I got into comic books. I don’t know of any other medium that gives such satisfaction. There are wonderful pieces of work out there that are done in book form, but it’s not the panel-bypanel breakdown and movement of the eye and the dynamics of the composition still unique to comics when it’s done in the comic book format.

CBA: Do you still love comics?

Marshall: I love the medium, but I don’t find as many pieces of work out there that are personally interesting to me, but I’m also at a different time right now.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to add a final thought: If the opportunity ever came up, I would absolutely jump at the chance to work with Steve and Terry again on a new Batman series, and hope that maybe this renewed attention to our work might spur new interest. You never know!

Above: Marshall Rogers not only contributed a set of new wraparound covers for the five-issue Shadow of the Batman reprinting the entire Englehart run (plus other Rogers & Austin collaborations), but the artist also recolored the interiors. ©2002 DC Comics.

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CBA Interview Extra

The Artistry of Terry Austin The sublime inker on his early years in comics & the Batman Inset right: Fading Polaroid shot of Terry Austin, posing in Continuity Studios in the mid1970s. Courtesy of Terry.

Below: Marker sketch by Terry Austin done for a fan. The artist added, “I’m the guy who does the grinning Batman!” Courtesy of Terry. Art ©2002 Terry Austin.

Batman ©2002 DC Comics.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice Terry Austin is perhaps the most fondly considered inker in the comic book industry, not only for his superb talents, but because he’s also a truly nice guy. A fan of the art form, first and always (and a very frequent and generous contributor to Comic Book Artist), the artist is best recalled for his award-winning work over John Byrne on The Uncanny X-Men in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He continues to wow readers in the field today. Terry was interviewed by telephone on April 4, 2002 and the artist copyedited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from, Terry?

Terry Austin: Detroit, Michigan. One of our neighbors was a Mrs. Trendle. I found out years later she was the widow of George W. Trendle who created The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet for WXYZ Radio in Detroit. All I knew then was that she made great cookies! [laughter] CBA: Did you get into comics at a young age?

Terry: Yes, I bought funny animal comic books as a little kid. At that point, anything you saw on TV you went to the store and there would be a comic book version. Huckleberry Hound and all the very early Hanna-Barbera stuff, anything that was a cartoon ended up on the spinner rack.

CBA: Did you copy the comics?

Terry: I remember copying what I saw on TV. I was an animation fan initially and then found comic books. I don’t remember much from my childhood, but do recall watching the first episode of The Flintstones and then laying on the floor in front of the set trying to draw Fred and Barney bowling.

CBA: From the very first prime time episode?

Terry: Right. I was also a big fan of Popeye, one of the first things that I grabbed onto as a kid. Howdy-Doody, and then Popeye. They were showing all the old Max

Fleischer black-&-white Popeye cartoons, and I would run home from school every day and watch that stuff.

CBA: Did you get into the DC super-hero books down the line?

Terry: The kids at school had Superman, and I thought, “That’s okay; I can get into this.” I got into the DC stuff fairly early on. I really loved Green Lantern, Flash, Atom, Justice League and all that good Silver Age stuff.

CBA: Did you clue into the early Marvels?

Terry: I remember my parents took me to visit some friends of theirs and I was bored, of course, like every kid who goes with his parents to see friends.

So I wheedled some money out of my parents and walked to the nearest store that sold comics, not much of a hike. I’d already got all my regular books that week, but I wasn’t about to go back and give Dad the change since that would set a bad precedent, so I bought some odd-looking books, Fantastic Four #8 and the first Strange Tales Annual, which reprinted all these monster jobs, and I remember just looking at these comics thinking, “Oh, man, there’s something wrong here!

Everything’s dark and scary.” [laughter] The DC books were so light and airy and everybody looked pretty. Even the men were awful pretty. But here were these grotesque drawings with too much black in them. I read them and put them away, then I read them again and again and again, and then I’d put them away for a while, and came back and read them again. [laughter] I had the same reaction the first time I saw Alex Toth’s work. It was a while before I bought any more Marvel stuff. A little later, I got hooked into Marvel and gave up DC. In those days you didn’t see every issue because Marvel’s distribution was spotty. Then I eventually looked back at DC when Gil Kane was inking himself and that looked great, and I started buying DC comics again, and had to have everything from both companies.

CBA: Was there any appeal to Batman?

Terry: Well, I remember buying some of the stuff when I was a kid in the late ’50s, maybe early ’60s, and there were these dopey aliens and stuff, with Batman and Robin always fighting the “Alien from Dimension X.” There was no continuity, certainly, in those days, and the stories just didn’t do much for me, so I didn’t come back to Batman until I saw the first Carmine Infantino cover on Detective Comics, the first “New Look.” I grabbed it and thought, “Oh, man!

This looks great!”

CBA: So you really clued into the art, specifically?

Terry: At some point, yeah, once I got over the odd-looking style over at Marvel, I started picking artists. In those days, I really loved Mike Sekowsky’s art in Justice League. Early on I thought, “All the

characters look great, better than in their own books.” And I loved the artist on Flash, Carmine Infantino, though I didn’t know his name at the time. And I loved Green Lantern, which I later learned was by Gil Kane.

CBA: Were you all this time doing your own cartoons?

Terry: At some point, I got into doing parodies of the Justice League and stuff like that, though I certainly never showed them to anybody. [laughs] They were just for me. I’m fairly certain nobody else would’ve understood them.

CBA: Did you have any experience with early fandom in the ’60s?

Terry: No, I honestly didn’t. There was a huge fan base in Detroit, but I just never got near it. Maybe I wasn’t in the right neighborhood.

CBA: Did you continue reading comics through high school?

Terry: Yes. I still do. It’s just something I’ve never stopped. There was a race riot in Detroit around 1967 and I remember my parents saying we’d better leave, make ourselves scarce for a bit. I remember going down the street to where the drug store was, and everything was closed! There were tanks and army trucks going down the avenue. I remember being really upset because the first Daredevil Annual was due to be out and I couldn’t get a copy. [laughter] “What’s happening? The world’s going crazy! I can’t get my Daredevil Annual!” [laughter] I also recall the last thing I did when we left the house, which we weren’t sure would still be standing when we got back: I took all of my comics and put them under the table, just in case looters might look in the window and go, “Oh boy! Marvel Comics!” and decide to come in and help themselves! [laughter] CBA: When did you start thinking of a career in comics?

Terry: I was in Wayne State University in downtown Detroit, where I took all the art classes I could. I had a instructor who had been into EC Comics when he was in college. He had me over to his house one day and actually gave me the remnants of his ECs. (He’d kept them in a locker in his chemistry class, and the chemical fumes had started to eat at the books, so unfortunately, the ones he liked best—Weird Science and the horror titles—he put on top of the stack, and were badly damaged. The ones at the bottom of the stack were great copies of the less interesting Psychoanalysis and that New Trend stuff.) I had another professor who was into underground comix. So I basically did comic book stories for those guys. But I got more into painting, which I did a lot of. The professors didn’t know what to make of it because basically I was painting what I thought of as paperback covers, doing science-fiction and fantasy stuff. In the late ’60s, early ’70s, the commercial fields were looked down on and the true artistes were all painting for galleries. If you painted for commercial purposes, you were viewed with suspicion. So I was very upfront, but it was very funny, because I would say, “Well, I’m trying to illustrate this scene from this story,” and they’d say, “Oh! So you’re trying to point out the inhumanity of the mechanized age and our culture.” [laughter] I’d go, “Well, not really.” And they’d go on this whole diatribe about the symbolic value of what I had done. “No, it’s just a painting of a robot and a guy he killed, y’know?” [laughter] CBA: There’s this “Detroit Mafia” of comics fandom, which included Rich Buckler, Greg Theakston, Jim Starlin, Allen Milgrom, any number of people from the area. Did you know any of them?

Terry: I didn’t. I just didn’t run in the same circles. I was in a different part of the city. A couple of guys, Tom Orzechowski and Mike Kucharski, put on a convention and I got involved with them. I was working at a bookstore all through college and it was in Tom’s neighborhood, so I got to know him a little bit, and through him, Mike, and I ended up inking a lot of Mike’s stuff. I did meet Allen Milgrom at a convention in Detroit, about a year before I moved down to New York. I showed him some samples, talked to him for about five minutes. A year later I walked out of somebody’s office up at Marvel, having been soundly rejected again, and Allen looked up and said, “Terry!” I owe him a lot, because I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t remembered me from those five minutes a year earlier. He grabbed me and took me up to Continuity and introduced me to Neal Adams, and that was how I started working.

CBA: And the rest is history. [laughter] What made you think of getting into comics?

Terry: Where my folks lived in Detroit, across the street, there was

a family whose daughter, Beverly Penberthy, my parents had watched grow up. She became a model in Detroit, moved to New York, became an actress and ended up doing TV. For decades, she was a regular on a soap opera called Another World. Anyway, her parents moved from Detroit to upper Michigan and we’d go up and visit, and one time we came in and there was a huge box of Marvel Comics in their living room. I was, like, “Oh, my God! What’s this?” It turned out that their daughter’s son was visiting and was really into comics.

So Beverly and her son, Mark, lived in Westchester County, New York. Of course, Mark and I immediately hit it off because we talked the same language, the language of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. So I’d go up and spend some time in the Summers when he was up there visiting. And before I graduated from college, I flew out to visit them in Westchester. I was coming to New York after I graduated, basically with the intention to paint paperback covers. Somebody had some contact with Rich Buckler and arranged for me to meet him up at Marvel and show some stuff. I did, but didn’t get any work, but I did see the inside of Marvel Comics for the first time. Later, when I graduated, I decided to move to New York as the Penberthys offered to rent me the third floor of their house. In fact, I had gotten to meet John Romita on that earlier trip and showed him my paintings, because Marvel was doing those black-&-white magazines at the time. My mom had said, “Look, you’re going to an office. Make sure that you wear your suit!” so I had these big paintings on stretched

Above: Terry Austin penciled and inked this pin-up of Batman and the Penguin around the same time he was working with Marshall Rogers on the celebrated Detective Comics run. Courtesy of the artist.

Characters ©2002 DC Comics.

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Above: Regardless of the heat the penciler and inker took for this job in the DC editorial offices, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin wowed fans with their full-length Batman vs. the Calculator story in Detective Comics #468, the issue immediately preceding the start of Steve Englehart’s year-long plus run on the title. Courtesy of Terry. ©2002 DC Comics.

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canvas, and didn’t have anything to put them in. So I just wrapped them in garbage bags. There was this sight of a kid walking from Grand Central Station up to where Marvel was, probably more than a dozen blocks or so, and it was about 100 degrees out. I’m wearing this suit, sweating profusely, got these paintings in garbage bags, under both arms, and I’m walking up Madison Avenue. [laughter] I get into Marvel soaking wet and of course nobody is wearing a suit up there, nobody has a tie, no nothing, they’re all these crazy people running around, and here comes this wet guy in a suit with these garbage bags! [laughter] Anyway, I show John the paintings and he wasn’t sure. He said he was going to send me drawings, one by him and one by Dick Giordano, because they were looking for people to turn drawings by other people into paintings. He didn’t like my drawing very well, but thought maybe I could handle that. So I was to go back to Detroit and wait for these two drawings he was going to send me, and was basically to pick out a section and paint a section of those drawings and send those in. On my way out the door I said, “Well, I also like to fool around with pen and ink.” He said, “Oh yeah, okay, fine.” So I went back to Detroit and waited and then something like two or three months later I get this overnight FedEx package from John and it contained copies of penciled pages. To this day I have no idea if he forgot about the painting sketches, or if he found a note he scrawled three months earlier that said, “Send sam-

ples to Terry Austin” or something and he thought, “Oh, inking!”

Anyway, the painting idea went out the window. So that was how I became an inker. I inked these samples and moved to New York and basically got nowhere until I walked out of Romita’s office one day and Allen spotted me and took me up to Continuity.

CBA: Were you hired by Neal? Dick Giordano was also there at the time, right?

Terry: Well, this was late in the day, so I guess Dick had gone home. I was introduced to Neal and he looked at my stuff and told me how awful I was, saying, “Here’s a nice pen, there’s a nice brush, here’s a table, sit down and get to work.” So Neal put me to work right then and there. I was scared, I was a shy kid. And he pointed out this table and gave me some pages and I sat down and started inking stuff. It was on one of those Crusty Bunker jobs. Being nervous and not knowing what to do, I picked the biggest head on the page and started inking it. And, of course, I didn’t know what I was doing.

I remember seeing Neal walk by, seeing him start, and obviously his first impulse must have been to grab the page out from under me and shriek. But, to his credit, I saw him catch himself, obviously realizing that that would have sent me out the door and down the street in a panic. He stopped and said, “Um, that’s nice… why don’t you ink these drapes over here?” [laughter] And I caught on… “Oh, that’s right, I’m a new guy. I don’t know what I’m doing, I better do window sills and stuff.” Thank you, Neal, for showing that remarkable restraint.

CBA: Do you remember what the job was?

Terry: It was a Bob Brown “Lilith” job for one of the black-&-white books, Vampire Tales, or something similar.

CBA: So you passed?

Terry: It was a weird night, because I had gone in to Marvel, and was expected back at the Penberthy household in Westchester, having taken the train into the city. I was expected back for dinner. So Neal told me, “Sit down and go to work,” and I was too scared to ask him if I could go home. [laughter] So I ended up sitting there working until ten o’clock at night or something, and wouldn’t ask him if I could even use the telephone, because he was Neal Adams, and I’m in a strange place and I’m scared. So finally I got up and summoned up enough courage to say, “Well, could I maybe come back first thing in the morning and finish this up and do some more?” He said, “Yeah, yeah.” I remember I promised to be there at 8:30, but what Neal didn’t tell me was that nobody came in until about 10:30, so I was outside on the sidewalk for a few hours. But I remember that first night I took the train back to Westchester, and the Penberthys were convinced I’d been murdered, being so long overdue. But it was a great night. I was working for Neal Adams!

CBA: Did you go over salary and job specifics?

Terry: There was nothing like salary on the Crusty Bunker jobs.

When the printed book came out there’d be an office copy and you’d go through and look at the pages and you’d circle stuff you thought you had inked. Everybody was supposed to use a different colored Magic Marker. You’d circle stuff and then put your initials. Then Neal or Dick would look at the copy once everything was circled and try to figure out what percentage of the job you’d inked, and give you some money. Of course, there were always disputes. You’d circle something and somebody else would circle part of your area, and you’d go, “No, no, I’m pretty sure I inked that tree!” They’d argue, “I dunno, I think I inked the trunk. I think you might have done this leaf here.” [laughter] Oh, it was a mess. I’ve actually got an issue of Savage Tales that we all circled. I’ve kept it all these years as an artifact of those times.

CBA: When did you get your first solo job? Did you work on Crusty Bunker jobs for a period of time?

Terry: Yeah, I was there for about two weeks, I think. I remember one day Neal was working in the Art-O-Graph room, and I was working on the desk closest to the doorway, but on the outside, and I think Klaus Janson had been Dick’s assistant guy, and must have gone off on his own just before I got to New York. This day, Dick walked into where Neal was working in and said, “Hey, I need a background guy.” I heard Neal say, “How about that guy?” And I knew from the doorway that I was the only guy visible. I started to sweat. [laughter] Dick said, “Where?” Neal says, “That guy, sitting there.” Dick says, “Where?” Neal says, “That guy, there!!!”

CBA: The invisible guy! [laughter] Terry: Of course, every time that he said, “What guy? Where?” I’d start sweating worse, because I know he’s talking about me and I don’t want to look up. So Dick walks over to me, and I figure I became Dick’s background inker because I was sitting closest to the doorway. I ended up working for Dick for perhaps two years, because I was shy, had been rejected and wasn’t about to go back to these companies and have them kick me out again. Working for Dick was great; you couldn’t ask for a better boss. He was funny and kind, he paid you, and gave you some artwork to keep once in a while, if you wanted it. I moved into an office at Continuity, sharing it with Bob Wiacek, and it was next to the bathroom, where we could watch Jack Abel go in for his 4:00 dump every day and monitor that crucial situation. [laughter] CBA: Did Dick give you personal instruction?

Terry: Poor Dick, he inked everything with a brush. He’s like a Japanese Zen brush master. I’d watch him and he had the ability to tip a ruler up at an angle, and with a brush could rule straight lines on a background, for buildings and stuff. I can’t ink with a brush to save my life. I could paint, obviously, with a brush, but I was just helpless trying to ink with a brush. Every once in a while, I’d go up to his desk and I’d ask, “Can I have an inking lesson?” And oh boy, he’d sigh and say, “Okay. Take the brush, dip it in ink. Now make some straight lines. Now make some curved lines.” It could have been a mop that I had in my hands, I couldn’t do anything with it.

When I first got to New York, I was basically inking with technical pens, Rapidographs. I knew that they were too stiff. I was never going to get work just using them. It was pretty good for inking backgrounds, but not so good for doing anything else. I knew I couldn’t ink with a brush, so I basically had to try some more flexible tips and did pens until I found something where I could approximate some of the brush technique. A few years ago, I met Dick for lunch, after I’d started inking the Superman Adventures book and I was going to ink a job of his in the Adventures style. He says, “I’ve been looking at your stuff on the Superman book. Congratulations! You’ve finally learned how to use a brush.” But I said, “No, I’ve just gotten good at faking it.” He said, “Oh my God! You fooled me!” At that point I was so happy. I thought, “Boy, if I can fool Dick into thinking that I’m inking with a brush, I must have finally got there.”

CBA: You’ve made it.

Terry: 20 years later. [laughter] CBA: So have you stopped sweating?

Terry: Yeah. [laughter] After a couple of years of having me do backgrounds for him, Dick must have felt sorry for me; he was like the mother bird trying to push baby out of the nest… “Come on, you’ve gotta fly.” “No, I want to just lay here and have you feed me worms.” [laughter] So he took on a couple of jobs. They were Dick Dillin “Green Lantern” stories, back-ups in The Flash. He brought those back to Continuity and gave me the first one and said, “I want you to ink everything that you feel comfortable doing.” That obviously included some figure stuff. On that one, I did all the backgrounds and some of the people. And then on the second part, he said, “Do more,” and now I did everything but Green Lantern, which he inked, then he made sure my name appeared in the credits. At that point (this was after the first Superman/Spider-Man Treasury Edition), I’d gotten known to [DC publisher] Carmine Infantino and the folks up at DC saw all the crazy backgrounds in that book and decided they liked them. In fact, Carmine actually hired Bob Wiacek and I to do backgrounds on the regular Superman titles, because they were going to try to spark the Superman books up, artistically. They decided, “We want the backgrounds to look like that.” So they hired both of us, though I ended up doing very little. I had so much other stuff, I left it to Bob after the first issue or two. We were inking backgrounds at that point for Bob Oksner and Tex Blaisdell on Action Comics and Superman.

CBA: From out of Continuity?

Terry: Yeah. We would ink the backgrounds on the penciled pages first, before Tex or Bob got the pages. Even though we were working for Tex and Bob, I don’t recall if they or DC were paying us. Tex actually worked at the office, whereas Oksner came in once in awhile. I only remember meeting Bob once, and wish I had the chance to see him more.

CBA: How long did you stay at Continuity?

Terry: The point of the story is that the folks at DC got to know me and, with Dick’s help, I started to get work on my own. After I stopped working for Dick, Bob Wiacek stepped in. I was still at Continuity for about a year renting office space, but coming in less, maybe twice a week. Carl Potts took over my desk when I wasn’t there. Finally, I gave it up entirely, and was just working at home, in Rye, New York (which is in Westchester, about a 40-minute train ride out of the city). I lived with the Penberthys the first year or two, and then moved to Queens for a month, into an apartment with Continuity pals Carl Potts and Joe Brozowski, but I was miserable in this alien environment. So I moved back to Rye, next door to the Penberthys, with the Clement family, some awfully nice folks. Mr. Clement was George Bush’s cousin and I was still living with those folks when Bush became Vice-President, because they went to the inauguration, came back and brought me a big souvenir button from the occasion.

CBA: Did you first meet Marshall Rogers over at Continuity?

Terry: Yes, actually. I recall Marshall turned up at Continuity the way a lot of young guys did who came to town to work in comics.

He showed his stuff to Neal and Neal said, “There’s a guy working in one of the offices in the back, and you should hook up with him.”

CBA: Marshall said, “What guy?” and Neal said, “That guy!”

Below: Along with several other back-ups featuring various DC second-stringers versus the Calculator, a Bob Rozakis-created villain, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin drew this Hawkman installment (Detective Comics #467).

Contributor Terry explained that a well-regarded artist pitched in: “Neal Adams took the pages to the story out of my offices overnight and I returned the next morning to find all the fun stuff had been inked… and better than I could have, darn it!” ©2002 DC Comics.

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[laughter] Terry: At that point, DC had decided I was good enough to do back-up stories. In Detective Comics, I was inking a back-up about this villain called the Calculator, and his whole schtick was that he would get beaten by a hero and then press a button on his chest to inoculate himself somehow against being beaten by that hero again. It was written by Bob Rozakis. The first two chapters, which featured the Atom and the Black Canary, were penciled by Mike Grell. Then, for some reason, the third chapter was done by Ernie Chan. I was working on that installment when Marshall said, “I want to work with this guy.” So he went up to DC and asked to be put on that series. For some strange reason, Julie Schwartz let him. [laughter] CBA: Marshall went over to DC because he wanted to work with Terry Austin?

Terry: That’s my memory of the situation, yes. Neal told him that he should work with me, so Marshall found out what I was doing and asked DC to team him up with me. So he ended up penciling the next two chapters, which featured Green Arrow and Hawkman. (Neal actually hijacked the Hawkman pages and inked a lot of the fun stuff before I came in the next morning to start the job.)

When you were doing backgrounds in books, nobody paid too much attention, but then this whole series culminated in a book-length story which involved Batman and all of those heroes that the Calculator had already inoculated himself against, and DC decided to give us that entire book. It created some interesting ripples up at DC. These two kids, these goofballs, were doing a lead Batman story. You have to remember that this was in the midst of Dick Dillin, Jim Aparo, Irv Novick, and a lot of very great, long established artists drawing the lead story. For us two, it was sort of like Thanksgiving, with these two kids eating at the grown-ups’ table for the first time, and the kids brought along some awful strange food that nobody’d seen before and were pretty suspicious of. [laughter] So Marshall did the pencils for the job, and at that point, Vinnie Colletta was the art director, and was fairly supportive, but we always ended up getting sent in to to go see Joe Orlando, and Joe didn’t like the stuff. That’s putting it mildly. I remember sitting outside Joe’s office while he screamed at Marshall for about a half-hour the day Marshall turned the pencils in, just screamed bloody murder about how awful the work was. I’d been on the receiving end of that abuse from Joe from time to time. He obviously didn’t care for what I had to offer, either. So Marshall staggered out of there, and then it was my turn. [laughter] I went in and sat down, but Joe was exhausted from yelling at Marshall, so I got off easy that day. He was standing there red-faced and sweating, and I said, “What approach do you want me to take?” He said, “It doesn’t matter! There’s nothing you can do to save this crap!” I got out of there and left town, went back to Michigan to ink that job because the vibe was so bad that I just needed to get out of New York. Joe had it in for us and it was an awful assignment because of it.

CBA: Do you have any idea why Joe was coming at you? It was a Julie Schwartz book, right?

Terry: Joe was one of the overseers in DC editorial. Vinnie was the art director, and as I recall, in these scrapes—and we had them regularly—Vinnie was always on our side, “Give the kids a chance.” Julie was there, too, but he seemed fairly neutral. They were his books and he didn’t want them to look bad, and you certainly can’t blame him for that, but he was willing to take a shot on us, so he was somewhere in the middle. Joe inked everything with a brush—just to speak of my own problems with Joe—and I honestly think he saw no value in what I did. So I got called into his office quite a bit and just got screamed at.

CBA: To what end? Just to vent?

Terry: I don’t know. I learned to stay out of Joe’s way. When I saw him coming, I’d duck into somebody’s office. I dreaded getting called into his office because I knew nothing good was going to happen. One time, stepping off the elevator into Continuity, Dick could see that I was ashen-faced and asked what had happened. I said, “Well, Joe had me in again and screamed for 15 minutes, telling me what an idiot I am.” Dick said, “Well, I used to share an office with Joe up at DC. Joe was given a very hard time when he got into the business, and he feels it’s his job to give new people a hard time.” I was shocked, and said, “Well, wouldn’t that cause you to go the opposite way? If somebody really gave you a terrible time, why would you want to pass that on?” It still seems like an odd way of thinking to me. I honestly believe that what I did was so foreign to what Joe did that he saw no value in it, because I know people who had a perfectly cordial relationship with Joe. CBA: Yet there was positive reaction from readers, right?

Terry: That was what brought us back to the book, because after that debacle on the book-length Batman/Calculator, we were done with Batman. As far 72

as Joe was concerned, we were never going to touch Batman ever again. So we did that job and went on to do other stuff. We did a couple of back-ups in Weird War Tales that involved talking dogs fighting a war with insects.

CBA: Those were actually intended for Kamandi, but that book had been cancelled.

Terry: Could be. One day I recall walking into DC and I ran into Paul Levitz. DC had this wonderful way of keeping you humble, and, I presume, keeping you from asking for more money. I’ll never forget this: Paul said, “A bunch of people with no taste wrote in who liked your and Marshall’s Batman job, so we’re giving you guys Detective Comics.”

CBA: There’s a backhanded compliment! [laughter] Terry: I remember running back to Continuity and saying, “Marshall, Marshall!

We’re going to do Detective Comics!” This was about four or five issues after we had done our Calculator finale.

CBA: Did you know what Steve Englehart was intending to do with Batman or were you just told you were getting the assignment?

Terry: We didn’t have any idea what the story was going to be or anything like that.

Now, it turned out to be a great story, so we fell into a lucky situation.

CBA: When you were working on Marshall’s pencils, did you feel you were a good team?

Terry: Absolutely, and I still feel it every time that we do something. He’s one of those touchstone guys that I like to come back to every few years and hopefully do a better job than the one before. Sometimes there are guys you’re just on the same wavelength with. As an inker, those are the guys that you want to find. Years later, I remember Al Milgrom was an editor at Marvel and decided to give us Doctor Strange. Marshall and I met at the office to talk about what visual approach to take with the title, and I remember he sat down with a pencil in hand and said, “Well, I’m really thinking of bringing back the spots and crackle on Doctor Strange’s gloves.” I said, “Oh, man, I was just going to say that! And how about giving him a black collar, so it frames his face,” and Marshall said, “Oh, man, I was going to do that!”

CBA: Twin brothers from different mothers. [laughter] Terry: We were always on the same wavelength. There was some visual connection there, and I’d like to think that Marshall thought that, too.

CBA: Do you think that personality has something to do with that, too? You guys seem alike. I don’t know him that well but I don’t get the star attitude from either one of you.

Terry: Well, I never thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I’m a fan of other people’s work. People who come to my house keep telling me I should open it as a museum because it’s full of art, but I haven’t got anything up that I’ve done. I’ve got one piece up that I had anything to do with. I basically like everybody else’s stuff more than mine.

CBA: Especially when you were teamed with John Byrne on The X-Men, your star rose, at least among fans who truly appreciated your work. On Marshall Rogers, you were a necessary component to what was going on. Did you believe it when people would say that

to you?

Terry: I’ve spoken about this before. I was inking Marshall on Detective Comics and inking John on The Uncanny X-Men at the same time, a couple of jobs that cast long shadows. That material keeps being reprinted, so obviously people remember them fondly. I do feel I was an essential component on both those titles. At least, I hope I was. Of course, I look at that stuff now and think, “Oh, my gosh, if only I could do this over.” It just looks stiff and awful to me now.

CBA: Do you think you’re too harsh on your own work?

Terry: I’ve had discussions with other artists about this, and they always say, “If you look back at your old stuff and you’re satisfied,

Below: Nice page by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin of the Batman on patrol from Detective Comics #475. Words by Steve Englehart. Courtesy of Terry. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Above: Because editor Julie Schwartz did not want the same villain to appear in both Batman titles the same month, he requested writer Steve Englehart to write a fill-in issue of Detective Comics, using the bad guy, Deadshot, and thereby postponing the Joker saga for an ish. Cover art by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin. Courtesy of the inker. ©2002 DC Comics.

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that’s trouble. If you’re kind of embarrassed by it, that’s healthy.” [laughter] CBA: Did you approach those two high profile jobs differently?

Terry: They definitely weren’t high profile then. We didn’t know if anybody was going to look at the Batman stuff and The X-Men weren’t on anyone’s radar. I went up to Marvel and walked into Jim Shooter’s office one day, and he said, “Congratulations, you’ve just won an Eagle award for best inker of the year.” I said, “Oh, geez, really?” He said, “Yeah, I’d like to think it was for The X-Men, but that is some nothing little book that nobody pays any attention to, so I’m sure it’s for the Batman work.” So, when the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics tells you that The X-Men is some nothing little book that absolutely no one is paying any attention to, that shows you that nobody was looking at X-Men. [laughter] CBA: But did you approach those two assignments differently?

Terry: Well, I’d have to say no. I was inking the pencils, and the first and foremost thing to me in my job is to stay true to what the pencilers put down, so no.

CBA: You could do a Rogers page, put that down, then pick up a Byrne page and work on that?

Terry: Sure. In fact, it’s good to do two divergent styles as an inker at the same time, because it keeps you on your toes, to switch back

and forth.

CBA: Mike Royer would ink individual panels in any given story, jump from one page to another so that regardless how good or bad he was on any given day, it would all blend in to be a seamless job, at least in theory. Did you have a similar approach or did you start on a given page and finish it?

Terry: I would start on a given page and finish it. I still prefer to start with page one and then go to page two and three, because part of the job of an inker is storytelling. Some pencilers are tighter than others, and if a character’s cape gets ripped on page three, you don’t want him turning up on page fourteen with an intact cape. You’re supposed to watch out for continuity details like that. I’m baffled every time I read something about somebody making some movie and how they film stuff out of sequence, and I just think that sounds impossible. How do the actors know where their head’s are at? So I don’t particularly ink the panels in order, but I do work on the pages sequentially.

CBA: Would you do all the backgrounds on a page and then approach all the figures?

Terry: No. I usually work from foreground to background in any given panel. I do all the stuff that’s in the front first, then work my way back further and further in space, hopefully making the lines thinner and thinner as I go back, and trying to organize the space.

That’s part of my job as an inker. Sort of the way an editor will try to clarify a script by taking some things out and maybe adding some words here or there and making everything clearer, my job as an inker is to do that visually.

CBA: You were familiar with Neal’s work before you had worked at Continuity, right?

Terry: Oh, sure. Neal’s stuff was absolutely riveting when he entered the field. You couldn’t look away.

CBA: Did you note Neal’s take on the Batman, reaching back to the quintessential character, returning to a creature of the night kind of approach?

Terry: Yes. As I recall, Neal and Jim Steranko showed up at about the same time, and stylistically they were both so different, not only from each other, but from everybody else in comics. You couldn’t help but take notice. “Oh, man, let’s have more of this!” You’d follow their stuff. Neal took the sleekness of Carmine’s Batman and added the darkness and shadows.

CBA: Under Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil, their Batman was one of the high points of the character in comic books. And, considering how many times it’s been reprinted, certainly the Englehart/Rogers/Austin/Workman/Schwartz Batman was another high point. Did you feel it at the time?

Terry: Yes, absolutely. I knew that Marshall was doing stuff that didn’t look like anybody else. Obviously, in some offices up at DC that was viewed as not a good thing, especially on a mainline character such as Batman. And I certainly recognized the quality of Steve’s story. That was what kept me there. I don’t know if anybody’s noticed, but when Steve’s story was over, I wasn’t there anymore.

(Only I’d already inked the next cover, because covers were done in advance of the insides.)

CBA: You left immediately, right? Because Dick took over the inking on those Len Wein stories.

Terry: That’s another DC horror story. Basically, as the issues went on, as Marshall and I were working together, he got later and later and later and started putting less on the pages. I didn’t mind taking up the slack, because I felt like we were a team. If somebody falls a little bit, you do a little extra to help them out. We were both working at Continuity and were on the same side, and there were these guys in offices at another building that screamed at us. So Dick would come into my office and look at the pages that I was inking. Dick would always lecture me about being a businessman as well as an artist, and he’d say, “Look, it’s important that you look out for yourself. I know you’d do this stuff for free, because you love it, and we’re all like that, but you have to keep thinking of the business aspect.” He tried to educate us young guys like that. He’d say, “The corporations have all these lawyers and they basically can do whatever they want to you. Keep your eyes open.” So Dick would come back and look at these pages and he’d say, “Y’know, you really should be asking for more money. You’re having to do more, and

you’re doing a great job. You should be sticking up for yourself, and you should be asking for a raise.” I sort of didn’t do that as long as Steve’s stories were in the pipeline because I didn’t want to take the chance of something happening. So when Steve’s scripts were coming to an end, and I’d met Len Wein up at Marvel and he’d said, “I’m looking forward to working with you and Marshall. Your stuff looks great and I think we’ll do some good stuff.” I said, “Yeah, I’m sure that we will. The only thing is, I’m going to go up to DC and ask them for a little more money, so we’ll have to see what happens.”

Well, what happened was that I went in that fateful day and asked for a raise. I got taken into Vinnie’s office and then down to Joe’s office and everybody was upset. There was all this yelling, as there usually was. They said, “What’s the problem?” I said, “Well, I’m doing more of the work. I’m having to put in more hours and I should be getting some extra money.” I certainly wasn’t saying any of this to denigrate Marshall. He was doing a good job. Joe was screaming and hollering and said, “Get Marshall on the phone! Tell him to get his ass over here!” I thought, “Oh my God, this isn’t what I thought was supposed to happen.” So they told me in no uncertain terms that they were calling Marshall in and, by God, they were going to sit him down and were going to read him the riot act and he was going to do the pencils they were paying him to do. I just felt awful. I felt I had gotten my partner in trouble. This isn’t how things were supposed to play out. So they told me to leave the office.

Marshall was on the way over and they were going to deal with him.

They certainly weren’t going to give me any more money, but they were going to yell at Marshall and make sure that he did full pencils and in a more timely fashion. So I went out to the DC lobby and sat down where I could see people coming off the elevator, because I wanted to warn Marshall and apologize to him, because this wasn’t in the game plan. I felt like he was the Lone Ranger and I was Tonto, and I had set something in motion and he was going to be ambushed

by Butch Cavendish and his gang in the blind canyon. I just felt awful. So Marshall got off the elevator and I said, “Marshall, geez, I’m really sorry.” I told him what had happened, and said, “These guys are just going to scream bloody murder at you. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for this to happen.” Just then, Julie Schwartz walked out to the hallway there, and saw us, and he said, “Marshall! Come in here!” So Marshall got up and went in, and I went back to Continuity just feeling sick to my stomach, because I knew Marshall was going to get it. And I waited, and Marshall came back, and I asked, “What happened?” He said, “They told me I’m doing a great job and gave me a raise.” And that’s when I quit. I just walked away from DC at that point.

CBA: What a mindf*ck.

Terry: Yeah, that did it for me. Then of course they got Dick Giordano to come in and ink Marshall, and Dick had a much higher page rate than I did, so they ended up paying more to get Marshall inked after all. So I don’t know if anything was gained. But at that point I just went over to Marvel full time, where they actually seemed happy to see me when I’d walk in the door.

CBA: Did you ever return to DC at length?

Terry: Probably some years later, when Dick Giordano was editorin-chief, I felt like I could return. Dick would tell you something and you could take that to the bank.

CBA: Did you ever talk to Marshall about it afterwards?

Terry: [Sighs] You know, I’m not really sure. I must have said something to him that day.

CBA: Can you fathom what was going on? What had happened?

Terry: I don’t know, I think it was basically that the stuff was getting some attention, and in the long view, Marshall was the penciler, he was the star, and I was expendable. I don’t know any other way to look at it. It was, “Well, we’d better keep this guy happy and to heck with that guy.” “Plug another monkey in the slot,” is how I’ve heard the situation of inkers put over the years.

CBA: Do you look at that as a dysfunctional situation? Did you recognize “This is not a professional way of doing things”?

Terry: Again, I don’t know. Maybe Julie was sorry, and Vinnie usually came down on our side to some extent. I’m sure nobody thought twice about it when I quit. I’m fairly truthful and honest and above board and I just don’t like that sort of double-dealing. I’m sorry that it happened, would like to have stuck it out with Marshall, but as it

happened, he only did three more issues, and one of those was a few pages surrounding a fill-in. I didn’t want Len to feel like I was jumping off the boat because he was coming on or anything like that, because I felt like he would do some good stories, too, but it was just a matter of having enough, you know? Enough of people yelling at me who were not thinking much about what I was contributing.

CBA: In retrospect, how do you look back at that work?

Terry: Well, the stories were some of the best in Batman’s history, by and large. Marshall did a superb job. I wish I’d done better work of inking it, but that was what I was capable of doing at that time. A lot of people like it. That’s great, and I’m very grateful to them.

CBA: And you’ve returned to work with Marshall other times?

Terry: Yeah, we’ve done some other stuff. A job in Superman #400 for Julie. Doctor Strange, for Allen Milgrom. Marvel courted us as a team for that assignment. They said they were going to collect our run into a book, but that never happened. But that was fun. Roger Stern wrote some great stories. In fact, I ended up staying with Doctor Strange throughout a bunch of different pencilers after Marshall left. That was a good title, thanks to Roger. Marshall and I came back to do Mister Miracle a couple of years ago, we did a couple of issues. I hope we’ll get a chance to do some more stuff together in the not too distant future.

Below: Len Wein’s follow-up scripts were disappointing to many used to the Englehart stories, as was the fact that Terry Austin did not remain on board as inker for Marshall’s last two consecutive Detective Comics issues. But the superb renderer did ink this cover, “Done before my showdown with the DC brass,” he tells us, a confrontation which prompted Terry to quit the publisher. Courtesy of the inker. ©2002 DC Comics.

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CBA Interview

Signs of the Bat Letterer John Workman on his contributions to the Batman Above: Interestingly, the distinctive use of drop caps—knocked-out letters within circles—in the captions of the early Golden Age Batman adventures, began in the very same story which first introduced Professor Hugo Strange, in Detective Comics #36, a villain which would appear when letterer John Workman revived the usage briefly during the legendary Steve Englehartscribed run. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by LongBox.com Staff Comic Book Artist: Do you recall how you got involved in the project? Were you on staff at DC at the time?

John Workman: I was on staff and lettering freelance at night. I would take work home at the end of the day and bring it back the next morning. Mostly, I lettered covers. I had interior-lettered just a handful of books at the time, and Julie Schwartz seemed to like my style. I could never understand why because I didn’t like my style. I was still learning. (I hope I’m still learning today, but at that time, I thought what I was doing was just miserable.) Marshall Rogers was going to be taking over the artwork on Detective Comics, and we

had met in the office and got along real well. So I was supposed to be lettering that. I do remember, in particular, harking back to the old Batman stuff of the early ’40s, Marshall wanted each narrative caption to start with a distinctive initial cap, so I played around with different things there, looking back on the early Batman comics I had.

CBA: Did you actually go to the DC library?

John: I have a decent collection of Batman from that time period, so I just looked at my own stuff. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t avail myself of the DC library. Years earlier, I would have been in hog heaven sitting there reading comic books at lunch time! I intended on doing that, but I just never did.

CBA: Did you appreciate the lettering in the early Detectives?

John: Oh, yes! A lot the very early stuff was lettered by Jerry Robinson and George Roussos, I believe.

CBA: Were you distinctive also with the word balloons or was that homage too?

John: That was me trying to come up with balloons that worked. I used a French curve on those and gave them a distinctive look. I never was completely happy, but I hated my earlier word balloons. I didn’t come up with a type of word balloon that I was happy with until I started to work with Walt Simonson on Thor.

CBA: Which were just circles, weren’t they?

John: Pretty much; they were ovals. I actually used templates for them and would stretch and play with them. Initially, I would do them in pencil and then ink them freehand. After a while, I just started using the template directly and inking from that. Although even with the templates, I do some things to give the “ballooning” a little human feel. The word balloons that I was making use of back during that time were just terrible. I remember a Batman story… with the Penguin… that I lettered and that Mike Grell had drawn. I really messed up his artwork with my lousy lettering… especially the balloons.

CBA: In retrospect, was that a fair assessment?

John: I think so, I looked at it not too long ago, and it’s still awful. I didn’t know what I was doing! It was terrible.

CBA: On staff at DC, you must have had an occasion to encounter John Costanza and Gaspar Saladino. Did you seek advice from them?

John: I really admired both of them, and I stole from those guys like you wouldn’t believe. I thought it was so neat that John Costanza would do that page 13 bit. He didn’t have a credit on the story, but you knew Costanza had done it, not only from the look of it, but also if it was a story that had 13 or more pages, he would do the 13th page number in negative form as a signature. For a long time, I would use weird pseudonyms, sometimes having to do with the name Workman, but not always. I remember lettering a Bugs Bunny story for Joey Cavalieri in the late ’80s. I used the credit name “J.P. Patches” (who was a kid’s TV show host in Seattle back in the ’50s and ’60s). One time, I was watching Cat Ballou on TV, and so I became “Kid Shaleen Workman” for whatever story I was lettering.

People did comment on it, and they got a kick out of it. Sometimes when I dropped the Workman part completely, people didn’t know it was me. I’ve seen several indexes of letterers and old J.P. is in there.

CBA: Did you get the assignment from Julie?

John: He seemed to like my lettering, which I never did understand because all these far better people available; Gaspar is just brilliant as were John Costanza and Ben Oda. All of them were far better than me. I was lettering this Batman stuff and the thing I remember most was how worried people were—Sol Harrison and especially Joe Orlando—about the artwork because it was so different. Batman, at

that time, had become dull. A very good artist named John Calnan was doing the artwork on a lot of the Batman books, but he was primarily an advertising artist, doing this on the side. While he was, technically, a very good artist, he just didn’t have that spark. Here was Marshall, who you could pick apart on his technical failings… and perhaps he hadn’t yet matured as an artist… but he did have that spark, that enthusiasm which means a lot more in the long run.

Marshall’s stuff was so wonderful that I hoped they would leave it alone when it came in and they got a look at it. I just really thought it was great. But I was worried because not too long before that, there was an issue of Starfire drawn by Mike Vosburg that, when I saw it, I thought, “Wow, this very distinctive, just wonderful stuff.” But it scared the DC honchos so much that they had the entire book reinked to make it look more like what they felt comics should look like.

CBA: Inked on top of Vosburg’s own inks?

John: By Vinnie Colletta, I think. Probably re-inked on vellum.

Originally, it was Vosburg’s own inks. He’d done the entire art job and I think it was great, but they were so afraid of it that they didn’t want to release it as it was. I thought something like that might happen with Marshall. Terry Austin, of course, was inking Marshall’s work.

CBA: Was that a particularly nervous time for DC? John: Sales were falling like a rock, of course, and they couldn’t comprehend why. They thought the problem was all editorial. They thought they only had to change an artist to really jazz the thing up, and then sales would go up. They didn’t comprehend what was going on and, as I was 25 years old, I didn’t feel it was my place to say, “Well, gee, fellahs, you’re losing your base. The mom and pop stores are closing right and left and that’s why your sales are going down.

Certainly, you have to keep doing what you can editorially, but nothing done here in New York in the office is going to change this.” They got really worried about anything that was different.

CBA: So you got the call from Julie?

John: Yeah. It may have been Jack Adler, Paul Levitz, or E. Nelson Bridwell, I really can’t remember because so many people were involved in the whole thing.

CBA: So you had specific instructions to emulate the late-’30s Batman look?

John: As well as the distinctive drop caps, Marshall wanted the thick borders, a reflection of the artwork of the early ’40s.

CBA: Initially, I promoted this section as the Englehart/Rogers Batman. Then Terry Austin called and said, “You know, it is the Englehart/Rogers/Austin Batman.” Then I’m talking to Rogers and he goes, “It’s really the Englehart/Rogers/Austin/Workman/Schwartz Batman.” [laughter] He said there was a great feeling of collaboration going on, and without any one of these components it wouldn’t have achieved what it did. Which is arguably one of the high points in Batman history because it truly harkens back to the original, the most significant highlight since Neal Adams’ run.

John: I’ll go along with that. It was fun, and I really enjoyable reading the stuff. I remember my wife Cathy really liking it when I brought it home to work on, and it did reflect the best of Batman. He wasn’t a silly clown and wasn’t this grim guy. He was the real Batman. It was just wonderful stuff. I remember being so impressed because Batman wasn’t really in the second story I worked on. He was out of it during that whole thing and it was Robin and Alfred who really saved the day.

CBA: You told me a funny story about E. Nelson Bridwell?

John: This may have occurred on one of the later issues. I was involved directly in only the first two and after those, Milt Snapinn and Ben Oda did the lettering.

CBA: And they both followed your approach to some degree?

John: I’m sure they also talked to Marshall and he said, “Let’s go for those thick borders,” and all that. I thought Ben and Milt did a far better job than I, although I had grown to like the more distinctive word balloons that I was using. I thought they worked with Marshall’s art style.

CBA: Ben’s rather typical word balloons didn’t have the same character as yours.

John: I had a chance to go over those pages because I was doing the production on those later issues. I was going through and fixing spelling errors, minor art errors, putting the logo on the first page, if they needed to use the Batman logo.

CBA: Did you come up with that distinctive Batman logo usage?

John: Yes, I did that one in the office.

CBA: Who wrote the copy?

John: Maybe Nelson… or Denny O’Neil. I think I may have had a hand in writing some of the copy on that, but I may be wrong. I thought it was good to bring people up to speed with the introductory blurb, reminding me of the Captain Marvel first page back in the ’40s, used to establish the character for new readers. They told you his origin and a little bit about his powers. It was a nice idea.

Back to that anecdote… Nelson Bridwell was an assistant to Julie Schwartz and he showed me a Marshall Rogers Detective page with this beautifully drawn figure of Robin. Robin had been in a fight with bad guys and his cape had been torn. Nelson said, “I want you to white out the cape because it couldn’t possibly be hanging on his shoulder there.” I thought, “I hate to mess up this artwork; it’s so beautiful.” I didn’t go along with what Nelson wanted to do. Nelson and I were very friendly, I always got along with him, but we were at odds on this one. Finally, Julie came into the production department, Nelson called him over and explained what was going on, and Julie looked at the page and said, “Nelson, that cape’s hanging by a single thread. Don’t you see it? It’s right there.” Nelson said, “It is!” And he left it as Marshall had drawn it. I was so happy about that because, technically, Nelson was right. The cape would have been torn right off of Robin. But it looked so good hanging from his shoulder in that scene.

CBA: Was that Julie just basically agreeing with you?

John: Yes. CBA: By his own admission, Julie always says, “Well, I don’t know anything about art.”

John: It wasn’t even so much an art thing as it was just… right. It

Above: Splash page of the first of the legendary Englehart/Rogers/ Austin/Workman/Schwartz collaborations, in Detective Comics #471. ©2002 DC Comics.

Below: John Workman. Photo courtesy of John.

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looked good. Some guy once said, if it looks right, it is right. It looked right.

Nelson was correct The cape shouldn’t have been there, but it looked so good.

Julie made everybody happy, “There’s a single thread holding it there.”

CBA: Nelson was a very nice guy, wasn’t he?

John: Yes. He and I used to talk about Secret Six and The Inferior Five. Wonderful books, and he seemed so happy that somebody remembered. We would talk about the X-Men issue that he did in Inferior Five and the satirical Tarzan issue, which was always one of his—and my— favorites. Quite a guy.

CBA: Did you feel that you were part of a team?

John: Oh, yeah. That was a big plus with whole Batman thing. I had felt badly about missing out on the renaissance that took place in comics in the early ’70s. Bob Smith and I had come to New York in 1975, and we both had the feeling we had just missed something wonderful. I remember that “Swamp Thing” first story [House of Secrets #92], which Jeff Jones had a hand in, and we sought elements of that kind of collaboration at Continuity, but it just wasn’t like it had been. Many of the great artists were working independently by that time. So I felt that we had missed the boat.

And then this Batman thing with Marshall, Terry and Steve Englehart happened, and everybody was working together. It was just great.

CBA: It was one of the very few bright spots during that time. A little while later came Frank Miller’s Daredevil. It almost seemed to be the only game in town for awhile. Was that your perception at the time?

John: I was disappointed with that era. I remember Sol Harrison making a speech to the production department in 1975 that got me nervous. Quarterly sales were down and it was not good. (This was before it became strictly DC Comics, and Sol would always call it NPP for National Periodical Publications.) Sol said NPP wasn’t doing well… and there were rumors, probably true, that some of the books pulled an actual profit of as little as $100. I was bothered by the capitulation to this new reality where management was cheapening the production of the books constantly in order to the keep the price of the titles as low as possible. If you look at the books from that time period, the printing and paper stock were not what they had been earlier.

CBA: From a production point of view, when I scan pages from the late 1970s comics for CBA and drain the color out, those books are really, really tough to work with. The lettering and linework break up, and it’s obviously due to the changeover to the plastic printing plates.

John: That was something. They were so excited about that. It was going to be a big thing and make things better. One of the first books that we saw that had been done 78

with that plastic polymer stuff was a story that had been drawn by Gray Morrow. It had this beautiful jungle girl in it, running around. Her legs and the lines around her body wobbled all over the place because the lines had been drawn too thin for this new process to maintain the integrity of the art. So everybody thickened up their lines after that and it really affected everything badly.

CBA: Would you consider the Rogers’ Batman your first collaborative effort? You are renowned for working with Walter Simonson on Thor (and actually teaming with Walter quite often on projects). Did you feel that maybe you getting more exposure because it was popular material?

John: Oh, yeah. Even at that time, whenever a book got into trouble, they brought in Batman because he still had some clout. The Bat-books had dropped off in sales, but they were still some of DC’s best-selling books. I remember, at the time, going back to visit my hometown in Washington state You could walk into any small town in the country, and there was Detective Comics on the stands.

CBA: With your name in it.

John: Yeah, I thought that was just great. The collaboration was a high point.

It made me feel better because after this wonderful flowering of things in the late ’60s, early ’70s, comics had settled into dullness. And then Marshall, Steve and Terry did something wonderful in the middle of that dry period.

CBA: From DC, you went over to where a new revolution was taking place, of sorts; you arrived as art director at Heavy Metal. Did you see HM as a watershed moment for the industry?

John: Over at Heavy Metal, we felt that we were carrying the ball for comics in the United States because I could see the other, more traditional, comics companies turning away and giving up on the newsstand market. They were turning to the fan market while we were doing all we could to get as many readers as possible from the mainstream audience, the same audience comics were abandoning. Entire companies, like Eclipse and First, never had a book on the regular newsstands. I do remember getting a call from Joe Orlando one time, and he came over and we had lunch. He was picking my brain about color. I never thought that I was very knowledgeable about color, but I had to learn what I could during the very early days of Heavy Metal and I thought I had become a decent colorist.

We were talking about different methods of doing coloring for comics. What I didn’t know was that Joe was gathering information about how they might do Ronin.

When I saw that book, I thought, “Good, here’s something done correctly, something right,” and I had a little more faith in what the regular comic book companies might be able to do.

Background: Marshall Rogers commission drawing of the Batman and the Joker.

Courtesy of Steve Bloom. ©2002 DC Comics.

From the Vault

Cancelled Comics Cavalcade The story behind perhaps the rarest DC Comics of all time

by Jon B. Cooke They’re an unassuming pair of books to look at, nondescript in their blank blue paper covers and black-tape bindings, but the two volumes of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade are just about the rarest DC Comics of all, though if not precisely, they undoubtedly hold the superlative of being the lowest print-run comics the publisher ever released. CCC is an artifact of the notorious “DC Implosion,” when in June of 1978, the company axed an astounding 31 titles, a direct result of the imprint’s rapid expansion of ’77 under neophyte publisher Jenette Kahn (balley-hooed by DC as their “Explosion”) when 12 new or revived titles debuted and the format of each regular book increased from 32 to 44 pages (as well as a price increase from 35¢ to 50¢). As stated in the editorial “of sorts” (penned by credited editor/packager Mike Gold) prefacing the volumes, the two issues were created because DC “had a whole mess of material ready to go to the engravers (or ready for last minute corrections); it was felt it would be a shame if this material would never see print.”

But a more pragmatic business decision was in play, one far more practical: “[CCC is] a two-shot which both preserves the material in question and guarantees DC’s copyright to same.” To that end, 35 pairs were produced, “34 of which will go to the creators and copyright people, set #35 will go to Bob Overstreet [of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide] to show the world it actually happened.” The first volume, dated Summer 1978, consisted of a Allen Milgrom-drawn “cover” frontispiece, Gold’s editorial, and 410 one-sided Xerox pages, reproducing the covers and/or interiors of various DC aborted books. The second tome, with a Fall ’78 date, sported an Alex Saviuk frontispiece, another Gold text page, and a whopping 530 pages of even more cancelled DC titles. [See accompanying sidebar in this section for CCC table of contents.]

Gold explained that, “Cancelled Comic Cavalcade was essentially the scooping up of an enormous amount of unpublished material, and having it published in Xerox form. It was sent out to Warner Communications’ printing shop… I suspect it was just Xeroxed and bound there, in the sub-basement of what is now the Time-Warner Building. We put it in interstate distribution, you could argue it was efficient for copyright purposes, which DC wanted to protect, and copies were made up for the contributors, so the people who had done the work, had reference copies. You know, this was right after the ‘DC Implosion,’ so a lot of people were out of jobs, and half the line was cancelled at that point. There was some really nice work, and a lot of stuff that really wasn’t so good. In point of fact, I put those books together, and [DC editorial coordinator] Paul Levitz had actually talked me out of running one or two stories that were really bad. You can only imagine what those stories must’ve looked like!

Because there were some books there, some stories we reprinted for that purpose that should’ve never seen the light of day. There was some very, very good material that was published in there, as well.

Not all of which was reprinted in the original from, so it was kind of a cool thing. Of course, the title was based upon the All-American Comics title of the 1940s, Comics Cavalcade.”

While much of the material could be characterized as pedestrian, there are a number of gems among the rough, featuring work by some of the greatest comic book artists of all time, including Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Joe Kubert, Jim Aparo, Michael W. Kaluta, Michael Golden, Russ Heath, and Don Heck. In the following pages, you will get a look at those rare beauties, as well as take a gander at two never released new titles featuring characters never seen since: The

Vixen and the Deserter, as well as taking a glance at fan favorites Deadman, The Creeper, Kamandi, and OMAC! Plus we include a gallery of unused covers, as well as the CCC frontispieces themselves and, because we just couldn’t resist, a glance at the odder pieces.

Many thanks to CBA contributor and pal Bill Alger for entrusting us with this ultra-rare treasure (valued, they say, in the thousands of dollars), to Mike Gold for his background help, to Michael Grabois for use of his invaluable table of contents, and finally Todd Klein (the designer of the CCC logos) who shared high-quality copies of the CCC “covers.”

Above: Allen Milgrom’s “cover” to Cancelled Comics Cavalcade #1, which the indicia told us was, along with #2, “published twice in a lifetime by DC Comics, Inc.,” and cost of a year’s subscription was $10,000, though international subs went for “$9,500 (’bout time they got a break).” Courtesy of Todd Klein. ©2002 DC Comics.

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Cancelled Comics Contents A detailed look inside the rare Cancelled Comics Cavalcade CANCELLED COMICS CAVALCADE #1, Summer 1978. 412 pages including frontispiece by Allen Milgrom and editorial by Mike Gold Black Lightning #12 (Nov.-Dec. ’78) Cover by Rich Buckler & Vince Colletta [C-816].

“Lure of the Magnetic Menace,” 17 pgs. [J-5407] Denny O’Neil, writer, Marshall Rogers, pencils; Mike Nasser and Vince Colletta, inks [r: World's Finest Comics #260]. The Ray, Untitled, 8 pgs. [J-5476] Roger McKenzie, script; Mike W. Barr, plot; John Fuller, pencils; Bob Wiacek, inks Black Lightning #13 (Jan.-Feb. ’79) Cover by Michael (Nasser?) [C-864] Claw the Unconquered #13 (Oct.-Nov. ’78) No cover. “The Travelers of Dark Destiny,” 25 pgs. [C-5327] David Michelinie, writer; Romeo Tanghal and Bob Smith, artists; Larry Hama, editor. Letters column, 1 pg. [L-107] Claw the Unconquered #14 (Dec. ’78-Jan. ’79) Cover by Joe Kubert [C-859]. “When the River of Ravenroost… Ran Red,” 25 pgs.

[J-5455] Tom DeFalco, writer; Romeo Tanghal and Bob Smith, artists; Larry Hama, editor The Deserter #1 (Dec. ’78) Cover by Joe Kubert. “The Deserter,” 25 pgs. [J-5423] Gerry Conway, writer; Dick Ayers, penciler; Romeo Tanghal, inker; Paul Levitz, editor.

[All pages feature Showcase notation, obviously once intended for that title] Doorway to Nightmare #6 (Nov.-Dec. ’78) Cover by Michael W. Kaluta [C-822, r: Unexpected #190]. “Tapestry of Dreams,” 25 pgs. [J-5371] Cary Burkett, writer; Juan Ortiz, penciler; Vince Colletta, inker; Jack C. Harris, editor [r: Unexpected #190] Letters column [L-134], 1 pg.

Firestorm #6 (Dec. ’78-Jan. ’79) No cover. “The Typhoon is a Storm of the Soul,” 25 pgs.

Gerry Conway, writer; Al Milgrom, penciler; Bob McLeod, inker; Jack C. Harris, editor The Green Team (#2?) No cover. “…In the High Price of Food,” 20 pgs. [JS-65] Joe Simon, writer; Jerry Grandenetti, penciler; Creig Flessel, inker The Green Team (#3?) No cover. “The Deadly Paper Hanger,” 20 pgs. [JS-146] Joe Simon, writer; Jerry Grandenetti, penciler; Creig Flessel, inker CANCELLED COMICS CAVALCADE #2, Fall 1978. 532 pages including frontispiece by Alex Saviuk and editorial by Mike Gold Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth #60 (Nov.-Dec. ’78) Cover by Rich Buckler and Jack Abel [C-827]. “Into the Vortex,” 17 pgs. [J-5402] Jack C. Harris, writer; Dick Ayers, penciler; Danny Bulanadi, inker; Al Milgrom, editor. OMAC, “For this is the New Origin of OMAC,” 8 pgs. [J-5230] Jim Starlin, writer and penciler; inked by Joe Rubenstein [r: Warlord #37 w/minor changes] Letters column, 1 pg. [L-138] Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth #61 (Jan.-Feb. ’79) No cover. “I’ll See You in My Nightmares,” 7 pgs. [J-5507]. The Sandman, “The Seal Men’s War on Santa Claus,” 18 pgs. [J-5200] Michael Fleisher, writer; Jack Kirby, penciler; Mike Royer, inker; Joe Orlando, editor. [Sandman story was incorporated in Kamandi tale, but was obviously originally intended to be The Sandman #7, r: Best of DC Digest #22] Jack C. Harris, writer; Dick Ayers, penciler; Danny Bulanadi, inker; Allen Milgrom, editor Prez #5 (no date) Cover by Jerry Grandenetti and Creig Flessel [JS-93]. “The Devil’s Exterminator,” 20 pgs. [JS-92] Joe Simon, writer; Jerry Grandenetti, penciler; Creig Flessel, inker Shade, The Changing Man #9 (Sept.-Oct. ’78) Cover by Steve Ditko [C-773].

“The Deadly Ally,” 17 pgs. [J-5306] Steve Ditko, writer and artist; Mike Fleisher, dialogue; Jack C. Harris, editor. The Odd Man, “The Pharaoh and the Mummies,” 8 pgs. [J-5307] Steve Ditko, writer and artist [r: Detective Comics

#487 w/changes] Showcase #105 (Oct. ’78) Cover by Jim Aparo [C-787]. Deadman, “Requiem for a Deadman,” 25 pgs. [J-5343] Len Wein and Gerry Conway, writers; Jim Aparo, artist; Paul Levitz, editor. [r: Adventure Comics #464 w/changes] Text page, 1 pg. [L-117] Paul Levitz, writer [discussing upcoming three-issue features for Showcase, including The Deserter, World of Krypton, and Huntress] Showcase #106 (Nov. ’78) Cover by Steve Ditko [C-808]. The Creeper, “Enter Dr. Storme,” 25 pgs. [J-5391] Steve Ditko, writer and artist; Jack C. Harris, editor Steel, The Indestructible Man #6 (Dec. ’78-Jan. ’79) Cover by Don Heck and Al Milgrom [C-848]. “Super Soldier,” 25 pgs. [J-5488] Gerry Conway, writer; Don Heck, penciler; Joe Giella, inker; Al Milgrom, editor [r: All-Star Squadron #8-9, partial] The Secret Society of Super-Villains #16 (Aug.Sept. ’78) Cover by Alex Saviuk and Dick Giordano [C-706]. “Murder Times Seven,” 17 pgs. [J-5185] Bob Rozakis, writer; Dick Ayers and Mike Vosburg, pencilers; Bob Smith, inker; Jack C. Harris, editor The Secret Society of Super-Villains #17 (Oct.Nov. ’78) No cover. “Death in Silver,” 17 pgs. (uncredited, pencil only, probably by Bob Rozakis, writer and Mike Vosburg, penciler) The Vixen #1 (Nov.-Dec. ’78) Cover by Bob Oksner and Vince Colletta [C-840]. “The Vixen is a Lady Fox,” 25 pgs.

[J-5261] Gerry Conway, writer; Bob Oksner, penciler; Vince Colletta, inker; Jack C. Harris, editor. [Credits also state “Aided and Abetted by Carla Conway”; last page of story is not lettered but actual script page is included, detailing dialogue] Army at War #2 (Dec. ’78-Jan. ’79) Cover by Joe Kubert [C-842] Battle Classics #3 (Jan.-Feb. ’79) Cover by Joe Kubert [features Sgt. Rock, Mme. Marie, and Bulldozer] Demand Classics #1 (Oct.-Nov. ’78) Cover by Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin [C-795] [features The Flash and the Golden Age Flash, from “Flash of Two Worlds”] Demand Classics #2 (Dec. ’78-Jan. ’79) Cover by Ross Andru and Dick Giordano [C857] [features The Legion of Super-Heroes from “The Death of Ferro Lad”] Dynamic Classics #3 (Jan.-Feb. ’79) Cover by Jim Aparo [C-860] [features split-cover of Manhunter and the Phantom Stranger from “The Dark Circle”] Mister Miracle #26 (no date) Cover by Michael Golden and Russ Heath [C-784] Ragman #6 (Sept. ’78) Cover by Joe Kubert [K-1582] Weird Mystery Tales #25 (Nov. ’78) Cover by Joe Orlando [C-802, [r: Secrets of Haunted House #20] Weird Mystery Tales #26 (no date) Cover by Michael W. Kaluta [C-834, [r: House of Mystery #265] Western Classics #1 (Oct.-Nov. ’78) Cover by Sherman and Whitman [C-813] [features Bat Lash] Western Classics #2 (Dec. ’78-Jan. ’79) Cover uncredited (Jose Luis Garcia Lopez?) [features split cover with Johnny Thunder and Bat Lash] Above: Alex Saviuk’s “cover” frontispiece for Cancelled Comics Cavalcade #2. The indicia of this read in part: “Annual subscription rate: $7.65 (couldn’t sell any at last issue’s rate).

Upon cancellation of this publication, all subscriptions will convert to Freedom Fighters, which will convert to Secret Society of Super-Villains, which will convert to Justice League of America, which, if cancelled, will most likely convert to a revived issue of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. Only West German Marks accepted as payment for subscriptions to this publication.” Courtesy of Todd Klein. ©2002 DC Comics.

Note: List partially based on research by Michael Grabois, used with permission.

This page: Perhaps the funkiest piece in CCC has got to be the first issue of The Vixen, with words by Gerry Conway and art by the incomparable Bob Oksner and the sometimes-okay Vinnie Colletta. A fashion model/super heroine who, if anything, sure is a sight!

Clockwise from top left: Oksner & Colletta cover; the splash page with indicia in place (indicating the issue was ready to go); our heroine’s first appearance; and the final, wordless page (though Gerry’s script was included in the package, the only one in the entire compilation. ©2002 DC Comics.

NOTE: Because the images in this section were scanned out of the bound books, some distortion has occurred. Also, most of the Xeroxes were of such poor quality that extensive reconstruction was required. —Ye Ed. 81

This page: The Deserter #1 featured a cover by Joe Kubert (top left), words by Gerry Conway, and art by Dick Ayers and Romeo Tanghal. The premise was that Aaron Hope, a Connecticut Yankee soldier in the War Between the States apparently deserted his post and, ten years after the war’s end, is still being hunted by the former Confederate sergeant, the one-eyed Willie Dredge (sssss!), as the ornery varmint explains in the panel immediately above. ©2002 DC Comics.

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This page: Quartet of covers from Cancelled Comics Cavalcade.

Upper left is Michael W. Kaluta’s Weird Mystery #26 cover, which eventually saw print in House of Mystery #265. Upper right is by Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin, based on Carmine Infantino’s classic The Flash #126 cover. Below right by Joe Kubert.

Below left by (Jim?) Sherman and (Reece?) Whitman, depicting Bat Lash in trouble yet again with babes and baddies. ©2002 DC Comics.

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This page: Editor Allen Milgrom was so intent on an unpublished Sandman story (splash at right) by Michael Fleisher, Jack Kirby, and Mike Royer seeing the light of day, that he planned to integrate that very story in Kamandi #61 (splash above), but the title was cancelled with #59.

Upper left is cover of Kamandi #60 (which featured an OMAC story, as seen on opposite) by Rich Buckler and Jack Abel. Left is Prez #6 cover. Cancelled Comics Cavalcade also included a full-length Prez story, which tweaked the idea of bugs in the White House with a literal translation. Remember, these were the days of Watergate, when bugging politicos was all the rage! ©2002 DC Comics.

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This page: Annoyed at the editorial shenanigans taking place at Marvel Comics, Jim Starlin took his talents across the way to DC (as well as to Warren and independent realms), where the artist/writer took on some Kirby creations including The New Gods and, of all characters, the notorious OMAC, the One-Man Army Corps. This revised eight-page origin tale of Buddy Blank’s alter ego eventually saw print in Warlord #37 with some minor changes. Words and pencils by Starlin, inks by Joe Rubenstein. ©2002 DC Comics.

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This page: The cover of Shade, the Changing Man #9 by Steve Ditko (above), who also wrote and drew the back-up story featuring Odd Man (below). Cancelled Comics Cavalcade also features a full-length Creeper tale (right) which was intended for Showcase #106 but has never been reprinted. Upper right is the glorious Mister Miracle #26 cover by Michael Golden (pencils) and Russ Heath (inks). We’ve heard Golden/Heath pages do exist intended for the interior. Seen ’em? Write us! ©2002 DC Comics.

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This page: Jim Aparo drew an entire Deadman story (cover above) which eventually was reprinted in Adventure Comics, though modified. Below is Jim’s Dynamic Classics #3 cover. Left is a dynamic Jerry Grandenetti and Creig Flessel panel from Green Team (#3). Don Heck (pencils) and Al Milgrom (inks) collaborated on this dynamite Steel #6 cover (right). Want more info on CCC? Go to: <http://lsh.0catch.com/ccc/ccc.htm>!

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CBA Collection Extra!

portfolio

Opposite page: Black-&-white line art of Paul Gulacy’s cover for Comic Book Artist Vol. 1, #7.

This page: Shang-Chi and Shaka Kharn (no, not the disco pop singer!) drawn by Paul for a fan in 1991 (courtesy of Dave Lemieux). Characters ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. Art ©2005 Paul Gulacy.

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This page: Various depictions of Shang-Chi by Paul Gulacy from various stages of the artist’s career. All courtesy of Number One Gulacy Fan, Dave Lemieux. Shang-Chi ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. Art ©2005 Paul Gulacy.

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This page: Master of Kung Fu #64 (May ’78) cover art by Paul Gulacy. Courtesy of Dave Lemieux. ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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CBA Collection Extra!

Marvel Value Stamps Or how to destroy your Bronze Age comics collection

by Rob Anderson

Above: The actual Cooke Brothers’ Mighty Marvel Value Stamp Book purchased in the mid-’70 from the House of Ideas. Courtesy of Andrew D. Cooke. Below: Just for kicks, Ye Ed made up this faux MVS of Mirthful Marie. Art ©’05 M.S.

Let me paint you a horrifying picture: it’s 1974 and I’m eight years old, sitting in the floor of my bedroom. I’ve just flipped to the letters page of a comic. I’m smiling because I’ve discovered that this particular issue contains a strange little thing called a Marvel Value Stamp—specifically, #54, Shanna the She-Devil.

Carefully, scissors in hand, I cut around the edges of the stamp, so as not to mess up the border. Satisfied with my work, I toss my copy of Incredible Hulk #181 back onto the stack. It has some funny character in it called Wolverine—his first full issue appearance.

I bought the comic for the stamp.

To this day, if you take a quick flip through any issue I owned between 1974 and ‘76, you’re likely to find a mutilated letters page that flaps in the breeze.

I wasn’t the only one taken in by this insanity. A search on eBay will reveal countless “reading copies” of Bronze Age comics available in great condition… except for that missing stamp.

In the strictest sense, Marvel Value Stamps weren’t really “stamps” at all. Basically, they were color portraits of Marvel characters, less than two inches on each side, which generally appeared on the letters page of selected issues. They had a little pseudo-perforated border running around the edge, but that was as close as they came to being stamp-like.

Really, they were just square pieces of paper, and they certainly weren’t sticky, unless you added your own glue.

Each stamp also had a number on it, ranging from 1 to 100, and I suspect that was the beginning of the end for obsessive collector-types like me. Add numbers to something that looks like a stamp, provide a book to put them in, and offer ill-defined but fabulous rewards, and a certain part of the population will find themselves compelled to collect them all. Not surprisingly, that portion of the population overlapped pretty well with those of us who were obsessively collecting comics in the mid-’70s.

Why stamps?

So where did this wacky comic book stamp idea come from in the first place? From the 1950s to the ‘70s, stamp programs outside of the comics world were huge. Businesses from gas stations to grocery 92

stores offered stamps to their loyal customers, and completed stamp books could be redeemed for all sorts of things, from toasters to silverware. The most popular stamp loyalty program, run by Sperry & Hutchinson (S&H), penetrated 60 percent of U.S. households at its peak, according to The New York Times (Nov. 26, 2001). S&H claimed that in 1964 it printed three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service!

So stamp collecting was still a common promotion in the ‘70s, but then-Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas recalls that there was also a specific precedent for stamps in comics. “There had been stamps in comics before,” Roy said. “Fawcett had them for several years back in the early ’50s, late ’40s, whatever it was—very similar to Marvel’s in the ’70s… It was a sales gimmick, I suppose.”

Although Roy’s memories of the origins of the Marvel program were vague, he seemed to recall getting the directive from Stan.

“Now whether somebody else suggested it to him or not, I don’t know,” Roy said. “But I have this feeling that it was Stan’s idea.”

The quest for stamp artwork Once the decision had been made to launch a stamp program, the next step was selecting characters and creating the artwork.

Characters chosen for the stamps ran the gamut from Spider-Man to Galactus, with everyone from Brother Voodoo to the Super-Skrull in between. The artwork for the stamps was lifted from covers, interior pages, and even house ads.

“It would have been too expensive and time-consuming to have drawn new art for these things,” Roy said, “and sometimes it took a long time to find just the right picture—and then you had to white out some of the art and maybe… get rid of a balloon that might overlap, or something like that.”

According to the April ‘74 Marvel Bullpen Bonus page, “Jazzy Johnny Romita, [Sr.], Mirthful Marie Severin, and Titanic Tony Mortellaro” were the parties responsible for digging up “the spiffiest bunch of super-hero drawings since George Washington first said ‘Cheese!’”

The stamps featured artwork by a wide array of artists, from Mike Ploog and Gil Kane, to Barry Windsor Smith and Steve Ditko.

Jack Kirby’s work made up the most stamps—18 of Series A, followed by John Buscema and John Romita, Sr. with more than 10 apiece. Marie Severin, a huge Kirby fan, felt that Jack truly “represented Marvel,” and she admitted that the large number of Kirby stamps was likely her doing.

Kirby, Buscema, and Romita were also favored in the selection process because, according to Marie, “Their artwork was clean and clear, and they did the major characters, and that’s what we were after—something that fit nice that wouldn’t need too much touching-up.”

“We sort of had to have a production eye doing it,” Marie continued. “A lot of stuff I did, I chose for reproduction—what would show up best. You can’t choose a mural and bring it down to an inch. So when you found a head, you would maybe cut off part of it; maybe do something like we did with [stamp #100] Galactus.” Lifted from the cover of Fantastic Four #49 by Jack Kirby, Marie remembered adding the “crackle” around his head on the stamp. “A lot of stuff had to be touched-up and backgrounds knocked out,” she said.

Gil Kane’s Man-Wolf stamp was another example of this. Lifted from an interior page of Giant-Size Super-Heroes #1, Man-Wolf needed a right foot, a left leg, and a right elbow added in order to

appear complete within the confines of the stamp. Others, such as Kirby’s Enchantress from the cover of The Avengers #7, were already perfect.

Where covers or famous splash pages were used, the stamp artwork is instantly recognizable—such as the headshot of Mary Jane Watson from the last page of Amazing Spider-Man #42. (“Face it tiger—you just hit the jackpot!”) Other stamp artwork is maddeningly obscure—like the Volstaag stamp, which originally appeared on an unpublished cover to Thor #170.

“Some of the subjects were hard to find,” Marie recalled. “[Volstagg] was hard to find because he wasn’t on that many covers. ...It wouldn’t be like [Doc] Octopus… where he appeared all over the place. Volstagg was [generally] on interior shots only.”

Although she was one of the people tracking down the artwork, Marie was not the person choosing which characters were to be featured—and she couldn’t remember who had done so. But she was central to much of the production, from touch-up to coloring. “I was doing other things,” Marie said, “but if they had a letters page, they might have thrown it at me one month and said, ‘Hey, get a stamp in here of such-and-such.’”

From the sidelines, Roy remembered the effort as “a fair amount of trouble. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, especially to get it going.”

How Marvel convinced us to cut up our comics So how did Marvel whip so many of us into a destructive frenzy?

The hype-fest began in issues cover-dated February of 1974. An unnumbered Hulk stamp appeared on the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins

page, soliciting guesses from fans as to what the stamp-like thing could be. The comics outfit was tight-lipped about the program, but promised “a zingier bargain than you ever saw on Let’s Make a Deal!” The following month, the Bullpen was still light on details, though heavy on hype, using fully half of the new Bullpen Bonus page to promote the program. Whatever the stamps were, we were told to “keep ‘em safe and secure, like the family jewels.”

To an eight-year-old mind, these stamps were clearly going to be something spectacular. Why risk leaving them in the comics?

Many of us went to work on our collections immediately. I know from talking to other fans that many of us also immediately went about “protecting” them—by pasting them into photo albums, taping them into notebooks, and undertaking other equally logical activities.

Two months after the initial teaser, a surprise followed for those of us who had been diligent. A stamp album would soon be available for purchase. I had already committed to the notebook and tape approach. It didn’t occur to me until much later that the stamps would need to be in a stamp book to provide any benefits.

Above: Opening spread of the first Mighty Marvel Value Stamp Book.

Look for the other 91 stamps on pages 98-99. All characters ©2005 their respective copyright holders.

Below: The book also came with a photo-realistic Spider-Man (produced in England, so ya gotta wonder if the supply was overstock from a weekly comics premium). Courtesy of Rob Anderson. ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

The Mighty Marvel Stamp Book The Series A stamp book was first offered for sale via a mail-in coupon in issues cover-dated July, ‘74. For a mere 50¢, the cost of two Marvel Comics at the time, it would be “winging its way” to you, along with a special bonus poster.

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Above: Courtesy of Rob Anderson’s splendid Web site devoted to this quirky ’70s comicsrelated thang, here’s the completed “poster stamp” pages from MVS Book Series B. Conan ©2005 Conan Properties, Inc. All others ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Cover of the Series B book.

Courtesy of Rob’s Web site. ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

The stamp book arrived in a plain brown envelope, with a nondescript “Marvel Comics Group” return address. Folded inside was an unusual Spider-Man poster with a seemingly live-action photo, which pre-dated the 1977 television show. The bottom of the poster read that it was “Printed in England by H.B. Dorey & Company Limited,” and carried a trademark notice for Magazine Management (London) Ltd. While the poster might have been disappointing, the stamp book itself was not. The 51/2” x 81/2” book carried portraits of Conan, Spidey, and the Hulk on the cover. Each book also had a serial number stamped above a pre-printed line.

The real draw of the stamp book was the interior. Inside, against a red background, all 100 stamps (other than the mysterious Stamp #100) were reproduced in black-&-white glory. It was almost like having a completed stamp book before you pasted anything inside. More than one collector, faced with the stamp book, decided not to fill it—even if the stamps had already been clipped.

The fabulous rewards Reading the Bullpen Bulletins with the benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty clear Marvel hadn’t figured out what the rewards would be when the program was launched. It wasn’t until July ‘74, five months into the promotion, that the benefits were unveiled. After such a long wait, many of us had grand visions of our reward. An all-expensepaid tour of the Marvel office, perhaps? A bag of unique goodies in the mail? At least a free subscription maybe?

Not exactly. It turned out that we could get discounts on admission to two comic conventions, the New York Comic Art Convention, hosted by Phil Seuling, and the San Diego Comic Convention, Shel Dorf’s show. The stamp book 94

had squares on the back where the discount could be stamped at the door.

At some later point—never mentioned in the Bullpen Bulletins— Marvel decided to hold a special event for MVS collectors at the San Diego convention. The 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program book contained a picture from the previous year’s San Diego con showcasing the “hardy souls who managed to clip and paste all 100 Marvel Value Stamps.” Of the thousands who had ordered a stamp book, the picture showed about a dozen kids.

According to Roy Thomas, the special program held for these stalwarts treated the group of young fans to a chat with Roy, Frank Brunner, and Mike Friedrich, among others.

“They were mostly younger kids, who by pasting that whole book full of stamps got admission to that little meeting,” Roy recalled. “I just talked to them for half an hour, an hour, I don’t know if they felt it was silly, but I tried to make it seem like it was a big deal. If there was anything other than the talk itself, I don’t remember it and didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe Marvel gave some free comics. I can’t recall after nearly 30 years.”

For the hardy souls who made it to the session, it might have seemed worth the effort. To an eight-year-old, living hundreds or thousands of miles away from the convention, a more disappointing benefit would have been hard to imagine.

However, all hope was not lost. The Bullpen stated they still had “a bunch of surprises up [their] sleeves.” Perhaps it should have been a warning sign that they admitted they were “racking [their] brains, every day, to dream up even more sensational surprises,” and then ended with a plea to send them suggestions on how the books could be used.

Months later, Marvel explained they were now “in the final stages” of preparing a list of comic-book stores and conventions where the filled-up stamp book would provide “free Marvel mags at a special MVS Discount!” For some reason, that list was never published.

The next mention of rewards didn’t appear until five months later, in April ‘75. To read between the lines of the hype, the fans were restless. The “batty Bullpen” was now being “constantly deluged with letters wondering just what sort’a goodies” were available.

In an apparent surrender, the stamp book now would entitle users to a 10% discount on Marvel mail-order merchandise. To receive this huge discount, we would only have to mail our stamp book to New York, which would (hopefully) be returned to us along with a 10% discount coupon.

The upside was that each time you risked your stamp book to the vagaries of the U.S. Postal Service, it would be returned with yet another 10% discount coupon. “In other words,” Marvel wrote, “all holders of completed Marvel Value Stamp Books are eligible for a perpetual ten percent discount.”

Based on that language, the discount should still be honored.

Perhaps someone should try sending in their stamp book and see what happens. It’s your best shot at getting “value” out of the program, because that was the last reward ever offered in print in exchange for all that comic book clipping.

And then they did it again In December ‘75, the same month that the last few trailing Series A stamps appeared, Marvel began releasing the second set of stamps known as “Series B.” This set featured “puzzle-piece” stamps which could be placed together to form larger images. In a later Bulletin, Bullpenner Paty Greer [Cockrum], a merchandising aide, was given credit for “conceiving the idea for [the] second stupendous set of stamps.”

For Series B, there were 100 stamps, making up 10 images, with 10 stamps per image. Many featured stellar artwork such as Barry Windsor Smith’s cover to Conan King-Size Annual #1, Frank Brunner’s Doctor Strange #1 (1974), and a Kirby Silver Surfer splash page from Fantastic Four #72. The last of the ten puzzles was touted as containing a “special secret super-stamp of a shocking Marvel star” which turned out to be none other than Stan “The Man” Lee, as drawn by Marie Severin. Unlike the Series A Stamp #100 (Galactus), which eventually appeared three times, the Series B #100, which completed the Stan Lee puzzle, really did appear only once, in the rather obscure Omega #3.

Despite some great stamp artwork, everything about Series B seemed to indicate waning support for the program within Marvel.

There was much less hype about the program in the Bullpen Bulletins—only four separate single-paragraph items, with a threemonth gap between the first announcement and the second. The series lasted a much shorter period of time—less than a year between approximately December 1975 and August 1976—and each stamp appeared only once or twice.

Even the stamp book itself seemed less complete. Unlike the Series A books, no stamped serial numbers appeared on the B albums, and instead of black-and-white versions of the stamps, the B book contained only blanks for the stamps (presumably to keep the completed picture a “secret”). No mention was ever made in the Bullpen Bulletins of the benefits received for a completed Series B book. The program just seemed to fade away.

If Series B received a lesser reaction from fans, perhaps part of the problem was that the individual B stamps simply didn’t stand on their own. You could get a single Series A stamp—and you immediately had a useless, but fun “mini-poster” (as the Marvel hype-masters referred to it). With a single Series B, you had one-tenth of a poster—maybe just somebody’s foot or an elbow—and even when assembled (if you could get the dang things to line up) you had a bunch of lines running through your “masterpiece.”

Still, the generation of fans who first caught the collecting bug around 1976 remember Series B fondly. Like most things nostalgic, it’s all about when you entered the game.

missing 14 Series A stamps and four Series B stamps.

There’s no way to estimate how many stamps were actually cut out, but no matter how you slice it, both programs left their fair share of gaping holes in Bronze Age comics.

Still chasing the stamps Marvel’s hype in 1974 indicated that all the clipping would be worth it in the long run. The completed stamp album was “bound to become a real collector’s item in the years to come,” they said. In fact, the Bullpen rather breathlessly pointed out that, at the time, Fantastic Four #1 was selling for up to $50 in comic stores, and that the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man wasn’t far behind. Of course, they didn’t mention how much less FF #1 would have been worth if someone had taken the scissors to it back in 1961.

So how rare are the stamp books now, and what are they worth 30 years later? As for scarcity, if the serial numbers are any indication, the print run on the Series A stamp book was probably at least 8,000. The lowest serial number I’ve seen is 100,043, with the highest being 107,116.

It seems unlikely that the print run exceeded 10,000. The print run of the Series B stamp book, which contained no serial numbers, is unknown.

And as for value? Believe it or not, the stamp books are the subject of some fairly fierce bidding on eBay. Apparently, there are still many of us who never quite got over our compulsion to have a completed set. In the latter half of 2003, stamp books with some number of stamps intact were selling for between $100 and $180, with an average over the last few years of around $130. Not bad for a stamp book, filled with pieces of paper, that gained the owner almost nothing in the mid-1970s.

On the other hand, if you compare the value of the comics destroyed to the value of the book created, the equation doesn’t quite balance. To use the worst example, if you cut the Shanna the She-Devil stamp out of Incredible Hulk #181, you probably decreased the value of your collection by at least $500. With just the difference in value on Incredible Hulk #181, you could currently buy yourself several complete Marvel Value Stamp Books on eBay. And by going the online auction route, you could enjoy the Stamp Book without the trauma of using the scissors yourself.

Maybe the people still seeking the stamp books never got to complete their set when they were kids. Or maybe it was something they had and lost in the past. Regardless of the motivation, you can bet you’ll see people trying to track them down for years to come. A nostalgia buzz is the main “value” the stamp books provide—but that’s enough for some of us. Excelsior!

Above: Inside front cover of the Mighty Marvel Value Stamp Book, Series B. Courtesy of Rob Anderson. The Vision ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Photo of the “hardy souls” who earned entry (by having filled up their Stamp Books) to an exclusive meeting with Roy Thomas & company at the 1975 San Diego Comic-Con. This pic appeared in the 1976 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention souvenir book.

FOR MORE INFO on Marvel Value Stamps, including complete checklists and sources for all stamp artwork, visit my Unofficial Marvel Value Stamp Index at <http://www.mvstamps.com/> Marie Severin was interviewed on Jan. 29, 2004, and Roy Thomas on Dec.17, 2003, for this article.

Thanks to Marie, Roy, and the many contributors to my Web site for their participation here.—R.A.

Letters pages that flap in the breeze So how bad was the destruction? Series A was the worst offender.

Of the 850+ regular sized-comics printed between March 1974 and November 1975, more than one out of three contained a stamp. In contrast, Series B only put around 125 issues total at risk.

To add to the pain, the stamps generally did not appear in reprint titles. So, whereas all the copies of Marvel Tales were safe, a run of Amazing Spider-Man (beginning with #130) could easily be 95

King Kull ©2005 Robert E. Howard Estate. All others ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Red Sonja ©2005 REH Estate. All others ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

CBA Collection Extra!

Killraven of the Apes!

Brit Marvel’s weird melding of “War of the Worlds” & POTA Insert right: Vignette of John Romita Sr.’s Killraven taken from the cover of Amazing Adventures #18 (May ’73). ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: The strange and wonderful morphing of “Killraven” with Planet of the Apes began in this issue, #23 (Mar. 29, ’75), of the U.K. edition. Cover art looks to be

by Ron Wilson (pencils) and Mike Esposito (inks). Courtesy of Rob Kirby. POTA ©2005 20th Century Fox. Apeslayer ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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by Rob Kirby By 1974, the Planet of the Apes franchise was viewed as a somewhat spent commodity, and we certainly didn’t foresee that the next Big Thing was only three years away (or so it seemed in youthful times), coming from some galaxy… “far, far away.” In all probability you probably think that nothing came in between these two cinematic giants, at least as far as comic adaptations are concerned, but you couldn’t be more wrong. There was something else, you just didn’t see it… unless you lived in Britain during the mid-’70s.

It’s name? Planet of the Apes!

After becoming publisher at Marvel Comics, Stan Lee started to take a look at the company’s various worldwide operations, and “The Man” quickly realized that his outfit’s other biggest English-speaking market was getting a pretty raw deal from the very limited imports that did reach the United Kingdom’s shores — usually as ship ballast (just to rub salt into the wound!). By Autumn 1972 Stan had solved that problem by creating a new Bullpen within the heart of the old one, and so was born the “British” Marvel Bullpen, a group of Yanks charged with producing weekly comics for the U.K. news-agent trade, and aided and abetted by some of the latest rising stars in the American comics firmament, such as Jim Starlin, Allen Milgrom, Marshall Rogers, Michael Nasser (a.k.a. Netzer), and Tony Isabella.

The long-lived Mighty World of Marvel comics weekly debuted on the British Isles in Oct. ‘72, and in the two years that followed the line-up began a slow expansion that would accelerate to a full-scale explosion by 1975. In Feb. ‘73, Spider-Man spun out of MWOM (as it understandably

soon became known in the letter pages) into his own title, SpiderMan Comics Weekly, the first in a long line of changing titles for that periodical, as it would be later known as Super Spider-Man With the Super-heroes, Super Spider-Man and the Titans, Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain, and then merely Super SpiderMan, to name but a few of the later merger titles).

The Avengers started out in MWOM before receiving their only U.K. book in Autumn ‘73, to be followed a year later by a double-release, one of which was the U.K. range’s first media crossover title, and so Planet of the Apes joined with Dracula Lives at the newsagents, the debut cover-dated Oct. 26, ‘74.

With the new Planet of the Apes TV series due to air soon in Britain, Marvel obviously felt that now was the best time to promote the Apes material to their new weekly audience, and it was this swift launch that caused the “scheduling” problems which prompted the discussion in this article. POTA (the letter pages positively buzzed with these abbreviations back then) notched up a very respectable 123 issues before merging into MWOM, in the latter’s #231 (coverdated Mar. 2, ‘77) and concluded in #246 (June 15, ‘77). Thereafter, Dracula Lives took over the Apes feature slot (though the bloodthirsty Count had merged as a co-feature in POTA way back in #88, creating a bizarre delayed double-merger. By the time the Apes exited the United Kingdom for good, every American strip had been reprinted at least once, and many of the cut-down color format American reprints had been used up too, probably simply because they were readily available for immediate use.

Planet of the Apes began its life in the same way that most of the early U.K. Marvel books did: reprinting the earliest adventures of whichever characters that respective comic featured. This voracious appetite by British kids for Marvel material created several headaches over the years. Only the gradual expansion of Spider-Man’s stateside titles saved the U.K. books from catching up completely (although the occasional jump back in time between a run of Amazing S-M, and then Spectacular S-M stories were kinda fun!)—even with most strips being divided over periods of anything from two to five weeks at a time. Having only been launched some two months after the American magazine, POTA took just 22 issues—one every seven days, mind you—to run out of material (a lesson soon taken to heart when Marvel prepared Star Wars for U.K. publication, which lead to adopting the task of producing two months of U.S. material on a monthly to grant enough slack for weekly serialization).

Even though the British Bullpen had first-use of each newly completed strip (which technically then makes some of the later American issues the reprint edition), still the crunch came and a desperate plan was hatched. The production team was handed stats from an entirely different American series and instructed to redraw most of the characters as apes, re-dialogue where necessary, and

rename many of the characters. So commencing in POTA #23, noneother than Killraven, star of the “War of the Worlds” series in the stateside bi-monthly, Amazing Adventures, made his first U.K. appearance… as Apeslayer! The American serial co-stars were rechristened for the British hybrid: Old Skull became Socrates, Hawk is called Arrow, and everyone sprouted previously-unseen black hair. I know it sounds too outrageous to be true, but this was a desperate editorial decision, proving the truth behind the saying, “Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up!”

After eight weeks of frantic redrawing and recycling, the Apes weekly resumed its usual rotation of one film adaptation interspersed with new material by writer Doug Moench and artists Tom Sutton and Mike Ploog, backed up by a selection of science-fiction material sourced from Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, Captain Marvel, as well as the Warlock counter-Earth stories, to name but a few. And yet… still the comic devoured stories at a pace that even Seymour, the ravenous plant, would have been hard pressed to beat. I can almost see the British Bullpen crew eagerly awaiting couriers coming down the corridor outside their little den, deftly redirecting the latest package of Apes artwork into the hungry maw of the overworked production team. This, then, is where it gets really interesting.

For the past decade I have become embroiled in my own personal Mission: Impossible, in an attempt to compile, as near as is practical, a complete index to absolutely everything published by Marvel U.K., as it became known from the early ‘80s (later to be joined by Marvel France and so forth from the continent). When my work is eventually released onto an unsuspecting comics fandom, (and those British readers of this esteemed journal reading this, and who know me, will now be rolling about in fits of surely uncontrollable laughter), it will include listings for almost every teenage to adult reprint and U.K.-only strip (including several annuals that predate MWOM in 1972, but continued throughout the next two decades as official British Marvel products, even though initially released by other publishers). I can feel my pockets emptying of cash already!

The Apes strips turned out to be the most surprising source of previously-unseen material, at least since those six Americanproduced Star Wars strips came to light many years ago; having only ever been published in continuity within the pages of Star Wars Weekly, because they made way for an earlier start to The Empire Strikes Back adaptation in the color comic (the stories later made a brief appearance in two American paperbacks), the three Archie Goodwin and three Chris Claremont stories at least prove that Marvel had learned something from the “Apeslayer” debacle. Mind you, if I hadn’t been buying up cheap copies of any series I didn’t have an index for, in order to list and compare the material, then I might never have come across what follows at all! My collection would have been smaller though… well, slightly smaller anyway.

It was several summers ago when I finally got my hands on a good condition set of all 29 American magazines, and I swiftly listed out their contents in order to identify the source issue for every reprint and to check the page counts in case a story had lost any pages, making note of those tales which were incompletely reprinted (not many). This process had actually provided the impetus to thoroughly index all the U.K. comics in the first place, with a simple wish to compile a personal wants list of those issues that never appeared (or only ever incompletely appeared) in the British books.

I was convinced that I must have made a mistake when adding up the page counts for each story, several chapters from some of the movie adaptations seemed to have more pages in the U.K. comic, which surely couldn’t be right… could it? There was no alternative but to sit down with both versions of each offending story, matching up every corresponding story page-by-page. My initial disbelief quickly turned to delight as I discovered several pages removed prior to U.S. publication, and several more double-page sequences condensed down into just single pages by the time they had reached their American audience. A bit more than a minor discovery, I think!

It now seems reasonably safe to presume that once the UK books had made use of the newly-completed stories, artwork was then passed to the American magazine’s production team, which was when these pages were cut and alterations made in order to keep

within the very strict format they used. At this point, the odd mistake was also corrected before the pages were then grey-washed and many captions were re-photographed from white to black just for good measure, matching the look across the rest of the b-&-w magazine range.

Okay, so we’re not talking about unseen Steranko pages from S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 (we can only wish) or even U.K.-only Paul Gulacy Shang-Chi pages (although Grant Morrison did write a short British Master of Kung Fu story as part of the U.K. produced G.I. Joe/Action Force series), but if you are any kind of Apes fan—and specifically of Marvel’s sterling work across all five of the film adaptations—you really do owe it to yourself to check these strips out. After all, this is Alfredo Alcala, uncut and at his best, hitherto unseen artistry surely worth tracking down.

Good hunting!

Top: Taken from a Marvel U.K. house ad, here’s a smattering of covers for their weekly line-up. Conan ©2005 Conan Properties, Inc. Others ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. Above: Herb Trimpe’s Warlord character (a human who collaborated with the evil Martians in Amazing Adventures #20, Sept. ’73) was transformed by the “U.K.” contingent of the mighty Marvel Bullpen into the simian called… Warlord!

This vignette taken from the Marvel U.K. edition of Planet of the Apes #28 (May 3, ’76). ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. 99

Adams

This page: Before the War of the Worlds took over the Planet of the Apes: The original panels as penciled by Neal Adams and inked by Frank Chiaramonte from Killraven’s debut tale in Amazing Adventures #18 (May ’73). Panels below courtesy of Rob Kirby. ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Altered!

This page: After the Planet invaded the Worlds’ war, Marvel’s production team in charge of U.K. Marvel weeklies futz with the art, changing panels to include apes rather than the human Quislings of the Killraven serial. The hero was renamed Apeslayer and… voilá! Panels from the U.K. edition of Planet of the Apes #23 (Mar. 29,’76). Courtesy of Rob Kirby. ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Chaykin

This page: Chaykin & Chiaramonte’s Amazing Adventures #18 (May ’73) panels before the U.K. alterations. ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Changed!

This page: The revised British panels from the U.K. edition of Planet of the Apes #24 (Apr. 5, ’76). Courtesy of Rob Kirby. ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Trimpe Transformed!

Below: Trimpe & inker Frank Giacoia’s panels from Amazing Adventures #20 (Sept. ’73). ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: The revised panels from the U.K.edition of Planet of the Apes #28 (May 3, ’76). ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Checklist of the Planet of the Apes Planet of the Apes [U.S. Marvel edition] #1 “Planet of the Apes” [r: POTA (UK) #1] “Terror on the Planet of the Apes” chapter 1 [r: POTA (UK) #12], chapter 2 [r: POTA #12] #2 “Planet of the Apes” chapter 2 [r: POTA (UK) #2-3] “The Forbidden Zone of Forgotten Horrors” [r: POTA (UK) #14] Chapter 2: “Lick the Sky Crimson” [r: POTA (UK) #14] #3 “Planet of the Apes” chapter 3 [r: POTA (UK) #4-5] “Spawn of the Mutant Pits” [r: POTA (UK) #16-17] Chapter 2: “The Abomination Arena” [r: POTA (UK) #17] #4 “Planet of the Apes” chapter 4 [r: POTA (UK) #6-7] “A Riverboat Named Simian” [incomplete r: POTA (UK) # 18] Chapter 2: “Gunpowder Julius” [r: POTA (UK) #19] #5 “Planet of the Apes” chapter 5 [r: POTA (UK) #8-9] “Evolution's Nightmare” [incomplete r: POTA (UK) # 20-22 and in Marvel Superheroes #384 some years later] #6 “Planet of the Apes” chapter 6 [incomplete r: POTA (UK) #10-11] “Maiaguefia Beyond a Zone Forbidden” [r: POTA (UK) #75-76] #7 “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” [r: POTA (UK) #35-36] “Beneath…” part 2 [r: POTA (UK) #37-38] #8 “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” part 3 [r: POTA (UK) #39-40] “Planet Inheritors” [incompletely r: POTA (UK) #77,78] #9 “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” part 4 [r: POTA (UK) #41-42] “Kingdom on an Island of the Apes” [r: POTA (UK) #31] #10 “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” part 5 [r: POTA (UK) #43-44] “Kingdom on an Island of the Apes” part 2 [r: POTA (UK) #32-34] #11 “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” part 6 [r: POTA (UK) #45-46] “When the Law-Giver Returns” [r: POTA (UK) #79-80] #12 “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” part 1 [r: POTA (UK) 50-52] “Future History Chronicles I” [r: POTA (UK) #47-49] #13 “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” part 2 [r: POTA (UK) #53-54] “Terror on the Planet of the Apes: Phase 2” [r: POTA (UK) #87, POTA & Dracula Lives (UK) 88-89] #14 “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” part 3 [r: POTA (UK) #55-56 ] “Terror on the Planet of the Apes: Phase 2” [r: POTA & DL (UK) #90-92]

#15 “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” part 4 [r: POTA (UK) #57-58] Future History Chronicles II [r: POTA (UK) #81-82] #16 “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” part 5 [r: POTA (UK) #59-60 “Escape from…” part 6 [r: POTA (UK) #61-62] #17 “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” part 1 [incomplete r: POTA (UK) #63-64] Future History Chronicles III [r: POTA (UK) #83-84] #18 “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” part 2 [incomplete r: POTA (UK) #65-66] “Conquest of…” part 3 [r: POTA (UK) #67 (1/31/76)-#68 (2/7/76)] [NOTE: Part 3 (U.K.) includes two additional pages of story not found in U.S. edition (which is cover dated Mar. ’76).] #19 “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” part 4 [r: POTA (UK) #69-70] “Terror on the Planet of the Apes: Phase 2” [r: POTA & DL (UK) #93-95] #20 “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” part 5 [r: POTA (UK) #71-72] “Terror on the Planet of the Apes: Phase 2” [r: POTA & DL (UK) #96-98] #21 “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” part 5 [r: POTA (UK) #73 (3/13/76)-#74 (3/20/76) “Beast on the Planet of the Apes” [r: POTA (UK) #85-86 & POTA & DL #99-101] [NOTE: Part 5 (U.K.) includes one additional page of story not found in U.S. edition (which is cover dated June ’76).] #22 “Quest for the Planet of the Apes” part 1 [r: POTA & DL #102-104] “Quest…” part 2 [r: POTA & DL #105-107]

Above: Herb Trimpe’s cover art for Amazing Adventures #20 was adapted for Planet of the Apes (U.K.) #28.

Courtesy of Rob Kirby. ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. The accompanying checklist was compiled by and is ©2005 Rob Kirby.

#28 “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” part 7 [r: MWOM #233-234] “Revolt of the Gorilloids” [r: MWOM #243- 244] #29 “Future History Chronicles V” [incomplete r: MWOM #245-246]

Adventures on the Planet of the Apes [U.S. edition] #1 “Planet of the Apes” [r: POTA & DL #93-96] #2 “World of Captive Humans” [r: POTA&DL #97-99]

#23 “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” part 1 [r: POTA & DL #108-111] “Terror on the Planet of the Apes” [r: Mighty World of Marvel #235-236]

#3 “Manhunt” [r: POTA & DL #100-102]

#24 “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” part 2 [r: POTA & DL (UK) #112-114] “Future History Chronicles IV” [r: MWOM (UK) #237-238]

#6 “The Secret” [r: POTA & DL #109-111]

#25 “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” part 3 [r: POTA & DL #115 (12/29/76)#117 (1/12/77) “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” part 4 [incomplete r: POTA & DL #118-120] [NOTE: Part 3 (U.K.) includes several additional pages, including the original two-page introduction replaced by a solitary page drawn by Marshall Rogers in the U.S. edition (cover dated Oct. ’76).]

#9 “The Warhead Messiah” [r: POTA & DL #118-120]

#26 “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” part 5 [incomplete r: POTA & DL #121-123] “Northlands”[r: MWOM #239-240] #27 “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” part 6 [incomplete r: MWOM #231-232] “Terror on the Planet of the Apes” [incomplete r: MWOM (UK) #241, 242]

#4 “Trial” [r: POTA & DL #103-105] #5 “Into the Forbidden Zone” [r: POTA&DL # 106-108]

#7 “Beneath the Planet …” [r: POTA & DL #112-114] #8 “Enslaved” [r: POTA & DL #115-117]

#11 “Children of the Bomb” [r: POTA & DL #121-122] #12 “The Hell of the Holocaust” [r: POTA & DL #123]

Amazing Adventures [U.S. ’70s edition] #18 "Prologue: Future Imperfect" (U.K. edition title) [r: POTA (UK) #23-24 #19 “The Sirens of 7th Avenue” [r: POTA (UK) #25-26] #20 "The Museum of Terror" (U.K. edition title) [r: POTA (UK) #27-28] #21 “The Mutant Slayers” [r: POTA (UK) #29-30] [NOTE: As detailed in the proceeding article, parts of the U.S. edition — the War of the Worlds/”Killraven” series — were modified as “Apeslayer” for the U.K. edition.]

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The Lost Alcala from Planet of the Apes #18 (Marvel U.S. edition), “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” part 3, page 17.

This page, drawn by the incomparable Alfredo Alcala (whose work is reproduced throughout this feature) was pasted together from panels in the two pages originally drawn by the artist, as seen below.

Courtesy of Rob Kirby.

: idsTA k y, O ” He k! P est r e u o Lo onq neven “C ges se .! pa fore U.S be the in

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Planet of the Apes #68 (Marvel U.K. edition), “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” part 3, pgs. 17-18

the Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes #21 (Marvel U.S. edition), “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” part 5, pgs. 9-10

Planet of the Apes #73 (Marvel U.K. edition), “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” part 5 page.

This page, which comes between the two seen above, was omitted from the U.S. edition. Note the U.K. POTA did not feature the grey wash effect used in the American version.

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The Lost Alcala from the Planet of the Apes Planet of the Apes #67 (Marvel U.K. edition), “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” part 2 page.

This page, which comes between the two seen below, was omitted from the U.S. edition.

Planet of the Apes #18 (Marvel U.S. edition), “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” part 2, pg. 7 108

Planet of the Apes #18 (Marvel U.S. edition), “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” part 2, pg. 6

CBA Collection Extra!

Jay Lynch & Comix Book The underground comix cartoonist on not working for Marvel [Ye Ed recently received this e-mail from Jay Lynch, creator of “Nard ’n’ Pat,” Bijou Funnies, and Garbage Pail Kids for Topps. His comments and the check are reprinted here with Jay’s permission.]

I was in Barnes and Noble the other day… and I was looking through the [Jordan Raphael and] Tom Spurgeon bio of Stan Lee [Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, Chicago Review Press, 2003]. And it sez in there that I wouldn't work for Comix Book (the Marvel imitation of Arcade) and implies it was for some idealistic reason on my part. But in fact, I did do some stuff for the first issue, but when I got the check, there was a contract on the back of it where I would be assigning trademarks to my characters to Marvel… so I told them no deal and pulled my stuff because of that. So it wasn't because I liked or disliked Marvel; it was just a practical move on my part. I was just protecting my own properties.

I like Stan Lee. I think his public relations value and his gregarious personality is the greatest asset Marvel ever had... And I think Stan understood and respected my position on the Comix Book thing.

I still have the check, that I never cashed, with the contract on the back, which I never signed. Not that there was anything intrinsicallly wrong with the contract, which was pretty standard for comic publishers then… It just wasn't for me, since we were dealing with my trademarks there.

Inset left & below: Cover & page 138 in Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book.

Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book ©’03 Jordan Raphael & Tom Spurgeon

Above: Self-caricature by Jay Lynch.

Below left & right: Jay’s comix team, “Nard ’n’ Pat.” Both from The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics (1974). ©2005 Jay Lynch.

Above: Front and back of Marvel’s unendorsed and uncashed $40 check made out to Jay Lynch in 1974. From a facsimile transmitted by Jay Lynch. It appears here with J.L.’s permission.

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Top: Yeah, Ye Ed did alter this letters page header drawn by MTG. Above: Lucky letter writers received this MTG exclusive in reply. Both courtesy of and ©2005 M.T. Gilbert.

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Right: MTG’s cover art for an issue of The Frying Pan, a pro-APA zine. Courtesy of & ©2005 M.T. Gilbert

CBA Collection Extra!

Below: Scream Factory #19 (Summer ’97) cover art by MTG. Courtesy of and ©2005 Michael T. Gilbert

Above: MTG’s pencils for the upcoming Mr. Monster Special #3. Alex Horley will render the finished painting.

Below: MTG drew this for Mr. Monster fan Harlan Ellison after an earthquake hit the author’s California home in ’94. Both courtesy of and ©2005 M.T. Gilbert.

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This page, clockwise from left: This Mr. Monster bookplate was drawn by MTG specially for Bud Plant’s illustrated book and comic art catalog. Cover design for the never-realized Mr. Monster Annual.

Look for a discussion of the aborted Mr. Monster vs. Swamp Thing — and the project it mutated into, the realized MM vs. The Heap/Airboy Special — in Ye Ed and George Khoury’s forthcoming TwoMorrows book, Swampmen: Muck-Monsters of the Comics in Summer,’05! Another Bud Plant bookplate. Uncle Scrooge artist Don Rosa drew up this version of Mr. Monster. ©2005 Don Rosa. All other illos and Mr.Monster ©2005 Michael T. Gilbert.

112

This page, clockwise from left: MTG tells us that the first computer-colored comic book story ever appeared in Mr. Monster #5 (Eclipse, Feb. ’86), “Rot,” a four-page tale drawn by Jeff Bonivert and colored by Steve Oliff.

MTG called the process “Terror-Chroma” and pitched the idea of the world’s first computercolored comic with this cover rough. Eclipse passed… Mr. Monster intro page. Ramona Fradon’s cool rendition of the Monster Killer(©2005 R.F.), and the unused Mr. Monster 3-D cover. All courtesy of MTG and ©2005 Michael T. Gilbert.

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This spread: From soup to nuts, the creative process behind a Michael T. Gilbert collaboration with artist Dave Gibbons, “Wish You Were Here,” Mr. Monster Attacks! #1 (Aug. ’92).

Opposite page, clockwise from upper left: The only aspect missing from this look at how a Mr. Monster page is created is the tissue-overlay which was placed over this MTG rough. Then Dave Gibbon’s thumbnail was sent for approval, soon followed by Dave’s pencils. (MTG’s design suggestion for the story’s antagonist, an alien tourist completes this page).

This page, clockwise from right: Dave’s inked page.

Dave Dorman’s cover art for Mr. Monster Attacks! #1.

The final page, reproduced directly from the Tundra comic book. Finally, a wee mini-self caricature of MTG. All courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. Gilbert art and Mr. Monster ©2005 Michael T. Gilbert.

Gibbons art ©2005 Dave Gibbons.

DON’T FORGET, MR. MONSTER FANS! Doc Stearn is coming back in a big way in 2005, courtesy of Dave Elliot’s revived Atomeka Press! Look for three volumes of 48-page Mr. Monster Specials, all with boffo cover paintings by the terrifying talented Alex Horley! Tell ’em CBA sent ya! (And many thanks to Michael T. who contributed in huge fashion for the material he loaned us this time.

Sure, we’re monster fans of Michael’s character over here at Casa CBA, but our real hero worship is for the big guy himself, MTG!)

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Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist ©2013 Sequential Artisit, LLC. The distinctive Will Eisner signature is a trademark of Will Eisner Studios, Inc.

The Storyteller’s Story Official Selection in over 25 film festivals worldwide “The best comics bio I’ve ever seen… It’s wonderful, well done.”

Brian Michael Bendis “An essential doc for comics fans, ‘Portrait’ will also enlighten the curious.”

John DeFore, Austin American-Statesman “Entertaining and insightful. A great film about a visionary artist!”

Jeffrey Katzenberg Arguably the most influential person in American comics, Will Eisner, as artist, entrepreneur, innovator, and visual storyteller, enjoyed a career that encompassed comic books from their early beginnings in the 1930s to their development as graphic novels in the 1990s. During his sixty-year-plus career, Eisner introduced the now-traditional mode of comic book production; championed mature, sophisticated storytelling; was an early advocate for using the medium as a tool for education; pioneered the now-popular graphic novel, and served as inspiration for generations of artists. Without a doubt, Will Eisner was the godfather of the American comic book.

The award-winning full-length feature film documentary includes interviews with Eisner and many of the foremost creative talents in the U.S., including Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Chabon, Jules Feiffer, Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Stan Lee, Gil Kane, and others.

Available Now on DVD & B Blu-ray ___ \_WUWZZW_[ KWU lu u-ra ray ay

Solving the Hostess Mystery with Bob Rozakis While you’re reading Hostess ads, I’m sure you wonder, “What person wrote these f*cking things?” And then you probably wonder, “Who gave that person a sharpened pencil?” Or, if you’re the warden of an institution for the criminally insane, you might be thinking, “How can I capture and restrain this person to help my business grow?” I had an e-mail conversation with Bob Rozakis, who wrote hundreds of comics, was the executive director of production at DC Comics, and scripted six of the Hostess ads that tempt your tummy and stalk and kill you in your nightmares.

(Specifically, Bob wrote “Pirates’ Gold,” “Fruit Pies for Magpies,” “Lights… Camera…

Crime,” “The K-9 Caper,” “Concerts and Cupcakes,” and “Wonder Woman vs. the Robot Master.” After you see them you’ll know why for my own safety and sense of style, I wore a helmet during the interview.— Seanbaby Seanbaby: Your ads covered so many types of enemies... robot clones, pirates, movie directors, people at a concert, man in a dog-suit. What are some of the types of villains you would use today if you were still writing these? And, of course, if you weren’t allowed to use man in dog-suit again.

Bob Rozakis: I suspect the villains would still be pretty much the same, basically goofy, lame characters who could be stopped with the enticement of a sweet dessert food.

Seanbaby: I don’t think you’re being fair to the nonlame, non-goofy characters who could be stopped with delicious snacks, like any villain from Ethiopia. And speaking of places God rejected, do you remember any ideas for Hostess ads that were rejected? And if so, what in the holy sh*t could they have been?

Bob: I don’t recall any that were rejected, though my file contains only rewritten versions of “The K-9 Caper” and “Fruit Pies for Magpies,” so I guess there was something in them that they didn’t like. The heroes were chosen in advance, usually to fit a schedule that somebody (probably Sol Harrison and the [advertising] agency) had set up. We were instructed that the heroes could never eat the cupcakes, Twinkies or fruit pies, because that could be interpreted as an endorsement of the product. So, we were always pressed to come up with some interesting way to stop a crime or a riot or something else using a dessert.

Seanbaby: Behind the closed doors of insane asylums, past the hallways of feces jars, then past the room where patients carefully catalog those jars of feces, then still past the underground pit where the restless bodies of the insane rise to kill, I like to think there’s a breakroom where orderlies vote on who their favorite mental crazies 116

are. I also like to think that even further past that, there’s a room filled only with crazy people dressed like Napolean. What I’m trying to ask is, did you have any favorite Hostess ads?

Bob: I liked the ones that used some tongue-in-cheek humor. Of the ones I wrote, I’d say “Lights, Camera, Crime” was my favorite, especially the last line in which the Crime Director sets up the slogan and package picture as he’s being taken away by Batman.

Seanbaby: When I ask most people what the best part of Hostess ads are, and I do, they all say the same thing — FASHION! How much were you involved in fashion choices of the villains? Particularly, in “The Robot Master,” did you just give a vague description to the artist and leave, or did you stand over their shoulder and say, “No. Uglier jacket. My grandma could draw a bigger afro than that, and she’s in a dog-suit!

And you didn’t even make his sweater a turtlene — AGHHH! Just give me the pencil!”

Bob: All it says in my script for “The Robot Master” is that he is a “mad scientist type.” The actual design of the villain was left up to the artist. I never got to see the art until it was completed.

Seanbaby: Everyone knows about how Disney’s panty-sniffing animators have been sneaking pictures of penises into their movies for years. In The Lion King, the word “SEX” is spelled out in the sky; Little Mermaid grew a hard-on during the scene where she married the lobster (or whatever)… It’s the classic counter-cultural technique of shaking society up by subtly implying that it might have genitals. The Hostess titles “That Dirty Beach,” “Spider-Man Spoils a Snatch!”, and “Big Black Ball Banging!” are pretty suspicious regarding subliminal vulgarity. Was it intentional?

Bob: I can’t speak for what the guys writing the Marvel ones were trying to do. My approach to these was to try to use the characters in a way that was as close to the way they appeared in the books without turning them into pitchmen. It’s probably debatable whether I was successful in that.

Seanbaby: Most people have their own ideas of how these ads came about — maybe a magical troll tricked a marketing executive. Or maybe someone else tricked a marketing executive while the magical troll hit him on the head. We may never know since history is recorded by the victors, not magic trolls. Could you tell us what the first thing out of your mouth was when you heard that someone wanted you to write comics about super-heroes fighting crime with pie?

Bob: I’m sure my first words were “Hey, that’s great!” And my second line was, “What are you paying?” From what I can tell of the scripts I have, Aquaman in “Pirate’s Gold” seems to be the first one I wrote.

CBA’s Jon Cooke is back in April!

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

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

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

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

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TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

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

A COMICS HISTORY GAME-CHANGER!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES THE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

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

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LOU SCHEIMER: Creating the Filmation Generation

All characters TM & ©2013 their respective owners.

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

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

2012 EISNER AWARD Nominee Best Comics-Related Journalism

Other issues available, & an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all issues at HALF-PRICE!

ALTER EGO #107

ALTER EGO #108

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ALTER EGO #104

ALTER EGO #105

ALTER EGO #106

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

See comic art and script BEFORE and AFTER the Comics Code changes, with art

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

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

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #109

ALTER EGO #110

ALTER EGO #111

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

1970s Bullpenner WARREN REECE talks about Marvel Comics and working with EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, STAN LEE, MARIE SEVERIN, ADAMS, FRIEDRICH, ROY THOMAS, and others, with rare art!

DEWEY CASSELL spotlights Golden Age artist MIKE PEPPE, with art by TOTH, TUSKA, SEKOWSKY, TALLARICO Part 3, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, cover by EVERETT & BURGOS, and more!

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

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

GOLDEN AGE NEDOR super-heroes are spotlighted, with MIKE NOLAN’s Nedor Index, and art by MORT MESKIN, JERRY ROBINSON, GEORGE TUSKA, RUBEN MOIRERA, ALEX SHOMBURG, and others!

Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and part II of JIM AMASH’s interview with Golden Age artist LEONARD STARR! Cover by SHANE FOLEY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

ALTER EGO #112

ALTER EGO #113

ALTER EGO #114

ALTER EGO #115

ALTER EGO #116

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

MARV WOLFMAN talks to RICHARD ARNDT about his first decade in comics on Tomb of Dracula, Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, John Carter, Daredevil, Nova, Batman, etc., behind a GENE COLAN cover! Art by COLAN, ANDERSON, CARDY, BORING, MOONEY, and more!

Plus: the conclusion of our LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about FF #1, history of the MMMS, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art

by KIRBY, AVISON, SHORES, ROMITA, SEVERIN, TUSKA, ALLEN BELLMAN, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by BELLMAN and MITCH BREITWEISER!

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE magazine celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through recurring (and rotating) departments like “Pro2Pro” (dialogue between professionals), “BackStage Pass” (behind-the-scenes of comicsbased media), “Greatest Stories Never Told” (spotlighting unrealized comics series or stories), and more!

Go to www.twomorrows.com for other issues, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

BACK ISSUE #54

BACK ISSUE #55

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BACK ISSUE #51

BACK ISSUE #52

BACK ISSUE #53

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “AllInterview Issue”! Part 2 of an exclusive STEVE ENGLEHART interview (continued from ALTER EGO #103)! “Pro2Pro” interviews between SIMONSON & LARSEN, MOENCH & WEIN, and comics letterers KLEIN & CHIANG. Plus JOHN OSTRANDER, MICHAEL USLAN, and longtime DC color artist ADRIENNE ROY! Cover by Englehart collaborator MARSHALL ROGERS!

Bronze Age Mystery Comics! Interviews with BERNIE WRIGHTSON, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GERRY TALAOC, DC mystery writer LORE SHOBERG, MARK EVANIER and DAN SPIEGLE discuss Scooby-Doo, Charlton chiller anthologies, Black Orchid, Madame Xanadu art and commentary by TONY DeZUNIGA, MIKE KALUTA, VAL MAYERIK, DAVID MICHELINIE, MATT WAGNER, and a rare cover painting by WRIGHTSON!

“Gods!” Takes an in-depth look at WALTER SIMONSON’s Thor, the Thunder God in the Bronze Age, “Pro2Pro” interview with TOM DeFALCO and RON FRENZ, Hercules: Prince of Power, Moondragon, Three Ways to End the New Gods Saga, exclusive interview with fantasy writer MICHAEL MOORCOCK, art and commentary by GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, BOB LAYTON, and more, with a swingin’ Thor cover by SIMONSON!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

BACK ISSUE #56

BACK ISSUE #57

BACK ISSUE #58

“Liberated Ladies” eyeing female characters that broke barriers in the Bronze Age: Big Barda, Valkyrie, Ms. Marvel, Phoenix, Savage She-Hulk, and the sword-wielding Starfire. Plus a “Pro2Pro” interview with JILL THOMPSON, GAIL SIMONE, and BARBARA KESEL, art and commentary by JOHN BYRNE, GEORGE PEREZ, JACK KIRBY, MIKE VOSBURG, and more, with a new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

“Licensed Comics”! Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Man from Atlantis, DC’s Edgar Rice Burroughs backups (John Carter, Pellucidar, Carson of Venus), Marvel’s Warlord of Mars, and an interview with CAROL SERLING, wife of ROD SERLING. With art and commentary from ANDERSON, BYRNE, CLAREMONT, DORMAN, DUURSEMA, KALUTA, MILLER, OSTRANDER, and more. Cover by BRIAN KOSCHACK.

“Avengers Assemble!” Writer ROGER STERN’S acclaimed 1980s Avengers run, West Coast Avengers, early Avengers toys, and histories of Hawkeye, Mockingbird, and Wonder Man, with art and commentary from JOHN and SAL BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, BRETT BREEDING, TOM DeFALCO, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB HALL, AL MILGROM, TOM MORGAN, TOM PALMER, JOE SINNOTT, and more. PÉREZ cover!

JENETTE KAHN interviewed by ROBERT GREENBERGER, DC’s Dollar Comics and unrealized kids’ line (featuring an aborted Sugar and Spike revival), the Wonder Woman Foundation, and the early days of the Vertigo imprint. Exploring the talents of ROSS ANDRU, KAREN BERGER, STEVE BISSETTE, JIM ENGEL, GARTH ENNIS, NEIL GAIMAN, SHELLY MAYER, ALAN MOORE, GRANT MORRISON, and more!

“JLA in the Bronze Age”! The “Satellite Years” of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, with BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, PÉREZ, and WEIN, salute to DICK DILLIN, the Justice League “Detroit” team, with CONWAY, PATTON, McDONNELL, plus CONWAY and GEOFF JOHNS go “Pro2Pro” on writing the JLA, unofficial JLA/Avengers crossovers, and Marvel’s JLA, the Squadron Supreme. Cover

by McDONNELL and BILL WRAY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

BACK ISSUE #59

BACK ISSUE #60

BACK ISSUE #61

BACK ISSUE #62

BACK ISSUE #63

“Toon Comics!” History of Space Ghost in comics, Comico’s Jonny Quest and Star Blazers, Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera line and Dennis the Menace, behind the scenes at Marvel Productions, Ltd., and a look at the unpublished Plastic Man comic strip.

Art/comments by EVANIER, FOGLIO, HEMPEL and WHEATLEY, MARRS, RUDE, TOTH, WILDEY, and more. All-new painted Space Ghost cover by STEVE RUDE!

“Halloween Heroes and Villains”! JEPH LOEB and TIM SALE’s chiller Batman: The Long Halloween, the Scarecrow (both the DC and Marvel versions), Solomon Grundy, Man-Wolf, Lord Pumpkin, Rutland, Vermont’s Halloween parades, and… the Korvac Saga’s Dead Avengers! With commentary from and/or art by CONWAY, GIL KANE, LOPRESTI, MOENCH, PÉREZ, DAVE WENZEL, and more. Cover by TIM SALE!

“Tabloids and Treasuries,” spotlighting every all-new tabloid from the 1970s. Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, The Bible, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, The Wizard of Oz, even the PAUL DINI/ALEX ROSS World’s Greatest Super-Heroes editions! Commentary and art by ADAMS, GARCIA-LOPEZ, GRELL, KIRBY, KUBERT, MAYER, ROMITA SR., TOTH, and more.

Wraparound cover by ALEX ROSS!

“Superman in the Bronze Age”! JULIUS SCHWARTZ, CURT SWAN, Superman Family, World of Krypton miniseries, and ALAN MOORE’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, art & comments

by ADAMS, ANDERSON, CARDY, CHAYKIN, PAUL KUPPERBERG, OKSNER, O’NEIL, PASKO, ROZAKIS, SAVIUK, and more. Cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ and SCOTT WILLIAMS! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

“British Invasion” issue! History of Marvel UK, Beatles in comics, DC’s ‘80s British talent pool, V for Vendetta, Excalibur, Marshal Law, Doctor Who, “Pro2Pro” interview with PETER MILLIGAN & BRENDAN McCARTHY, plus BERGER, BOLLAND, DAVIS, GIBBONS, STAN LEE, LLOYD, MOORE, DEZ SKINN, and others. Fold-out triptych cover by RON WILSON and DAVE HUNT of Marvel UK’s rare 1970s “Quadra-Poster”!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page TABLOID with color) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

DIGITAL

NS DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional EDITIO BLE A “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and IL AVA NLY animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS FOR O 5 and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic $2.9 storytelling, as well as such DRAW! #4 skills as layout, penciling, inking, Interview with ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN lettering, coloring, Photoshop techNOWLAN on drawing and inking niques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, techniques, DAVE COOPER’s coloring techniques in Photoshop, BRET and a handy reference source—this BLEVINS tutorial on Figure magazine has it all!

Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for comics drawing papers, and more! purposes of figure drawing.

(88-page magazine) $5.95 INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS. (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #9

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

DRAW! #7

MIKE WIERINGO interview, BENDIS and OEMING on how they create “Powers”, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw great hands”, “The illusion of depth in design” by PAUL RIVOCHE, art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, and more!

Interview & demo with BILL WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO interview, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw the human figure in light and shadow,” Photoshop tutorial by CELIA CALLE, inking tips by MIKE MANLEY, reviews of the best art supplies, links, and more!

Interview/demo by DAN BRERETON, ZACH TRENHOLM on caricaturing, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” demo

by ALBERTO RUIZ, “The Power of Sketching” by BRET BLEVINS, “Designing with light and shadow”

by PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of art supplies, links, and more!

(88-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

Interview & demo by MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” by ALBERTO RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure”

by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS SECTION, International Spotlight on JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, and more!

WRITE NOW #8 crossover! MIKE MANLEY & DANNY FINGEROTH create a comic from script to print, BANCROFT & CORLEY on bringing characters to life, Adobe Illustrator with ALBERTO RUIZ, Noel Sickles’ work examined, PvP’s SCOTT KURTZ, art supply reviews, and more!

RON GARNEY interview & demo, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and others discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ on Adobe Illustrator, interview with MARK McKENNA, links, and more!

STEVE RUDE on comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On Life”, Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER on merging traditional and digital art, MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, and more! New BAKER cover!

Demo of painting methods by ALEX HORLEY, interview and demo by COLLEEN COOVER, a look behindthe-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more!

(96-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

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(112-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

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(88-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

In-depth interviews and demos with DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, and more!

Covers major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with BILL REINHOLD, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, and more!

In-depth interview with HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on HOW TO USE REFERENCE and WORKING FROM PHOTOS (by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY), and more!

Interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates his series, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

Interview & demo by R.M. GUERA, Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE demo and interview, DANNY FINGEROTH’s new feature on writer/artists with R. SIKORYAK, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on penciling & more!

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, Rough Stuff’s BOB McLEOD gives a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, Write Now’s DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights writer/artist AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the best art supplies and tool technology, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, plus Web links, book reviews, and more!

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop about his gritty, designinspired work with editor MIKE MANLEY, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews “Billy Dogma” writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL, plus more of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, FRANK MILLER interview, plus MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERNS VIEWS WITH KIRBY and EDITIO BLE A IL his contemporaries, AVA NLY FEATURE ARTICLES, FOR O $3.95 RARE AND UNSEEN $1.95— KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS from the 1960s-80s (from photocopies preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES).

DIGITAL

Go online for #1-30 as Digital Editions, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35

KIRBY COLLECTOR #31

KIRBY COLLECTOR #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #33

FIRST TABLOID-SIZE ISSUE! MARK EVANIER’s new column, interviews with KURT BUSIEK and JOSÉ LADRONN, NEAL ADAMS on Kirby, Giant-Man overview, Kirby’s best 2-page spreads, 2000 Kirby Tribute Panel (MARK EVANIER, GENE COLAN, MARIE SEVERIN, ROY THOMAS, and TRACY & JEREMY KIRBY), huge Kirby pencils! Wraparound KIRBY/ADAMS cover!

KIRBY’S LEAST-KNOWN WORK! MARK EVANIER on the Fourth World, unfinished THE HORDE novel, long-lost KIRBY INTERVIEW from France, update to the KIRBY CHECKLIST, pencil gallery of Kirby’s leastknown work (including THE PRISONER, BLACK HOLE, IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB, TRUE DIVORCE CASES), westerns, and more! KIRBY/LADRONN cover!

FANTASTIC FOUR ISSUE! Gallery of FF pencils at tabloid size, MARK EVANIER on the FF Cartoon series, interviews with STAN LEE and ERIK LARSEN, JOE SINNOTT salute, the HUMAN TORCH in STRANGE TALES, origins of Kirby Krackle, interviews with nearly EVERY WRITER AND ARTIST who worked on the FF after Kirby, & more!

KIRBY/LARSEN and KIRBY/TIMM covers!

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

KIRBY COLLECTOR #37

KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

FIGHTING AMERICANS! MARK EVANIER on 1960s Marvel inkers, SHIELD, Losers, and Green Arrow overviews, INFANTINO interview on Simon & Kirby, KIRBY interview, Captain America PENCIL ART GALLERY, PHILIPPE DRUILLET interview, JOE SIMON and ALEX TOTH speak, unseen BIG GAME HUNTER and YOUNG ABE LINCOLN Kirby concepts! KIRBY and KIRBY/TOTH covers!

GREAT ESCAPES! MISTER MIRACLE pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER, MARSHALL ROGERS & MICHAEL CHABON interviews, comparing Kirby and Houdini’s backgrounds, analysis of “Himon,” 2001 Kirby Tribute Panel (WILL EISNER, JOHN BUSCEMA, JOHN ROMITA, MIKE ROYER, & JOHNNY CARSON) & more! KIRBY/MARSHALL ROGERS and KIRBY/STEVE RUDE covers!

THOR ISSUE! Never-seen KIRBY interview, JOE SINNOTT and JOHN ROMITA JR. on their Thor work, MARK EVANIER, extensive THOR and TALES OF ASGARD coverage, a look at the “real” Norse gods, 40 pages of KIRBY THOR PENCILS, including a Kirby Art Gallery at TABLOID SIZE, with pin-ups, covers, and more! KIRBY covers inked by MIKE ROYER and TREVOR VON EEDEN!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” MIKE ROYER interview on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE GALLERY tracing the evolution of Jack’s style, new column on OBSCURE KIRBY WORK, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s TECHNIQUE AND INFLUENCES, comparing STAN LEE’s writing to JACK’s, and more! Two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” PART 2: JOE SINNOTT on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE PENCIL GALLERY, list of the art in the KIRBY ARCHIVES, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s technique and influences, SPEND A DAY WITH KIRBY (with JACK DAVIS, GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., and RUDE) and more!

Two UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

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

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #39

KIRBY COLLECTOR #40

KIRBY COLLECTOR #41

KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

97

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

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

Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

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

Bombastic EVERYTHING GOES issue, with a wealth of great submissions that couldn’t be pigeonholed into a “theme” issue!

Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JIM LEE and ADAM HUGHES, MARK EVANIER’s column, huge pencil art galleries, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS, and more!

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

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

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

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

98

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

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

KIRBY CHECKLIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

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

(128-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490380 • Diamond Order Code: SEP111248

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series.

Now the entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his powerful, uninked PENCIL ART, showing Kirby’s work in its undiluted, raw form! Also included is Kirby’s ILLUSTRATED SILVER STAR MOVIE SCREENPLAY, never-seen SKETCHES, PIN-UPS, and an historical overview to put it all in perspective!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

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

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

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

(52-page comic book) $5.95 • (Digital Edition) $2.95

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

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

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

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

(168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

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

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

Reprinting the fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered!

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

(60-page tabloid with COLOR) SOLD OUT • (Digital Edition) $5.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom!

TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

ALTER EGO #118

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #1 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2

BRICKJOURNAL #24

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALTER EGO #119

ALTER EGO #120

ALTER EGO #121

JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond!

Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

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

MARC SWAYZE TRIBUTE ISSUE, spotlighting FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America)!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRAW! #25

BACK ISSUE #65

BACK ISSUE #66

BACK ISSUE #67

BACK ISSUE #68

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

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

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

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

Mignola cover.

“1970s and ‘80s Legion of Super-Heroes!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambitious new series documenting each decade of comic book history!

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

JOHN WELLS covers comics in the 1960-64 JFK and Beatles era: DC’s new GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE and multiple earths!

LEE and KIRBY at Marvel on FF, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, and X-MEN! BATMAN’s “new look”, Charlton’s BLUE BEETLE, CREEPY #1 & more!

MODERN MASTERS: CLIFF CHIANG

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

1960-64: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 • Out now!

1980s: (288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $41.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5 • Out now!

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

All characters TM & ©2013 their respective owners.

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

THE STAR*REACH COMPANION

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

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

DAN SPIEGLE: A LIFE IN COMIC ART

PLUGGED IN!

COMICS PROS IN THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY

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

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

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

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

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

SUBSCRIBE! • Digital Editions: 3.95 each, or save with a digital subscription (digital editions are included FREE with a print subscription)!

• Back Issue, Draw, Alter Ego & Comic Book Collector are now all full-color!

• Lower international shipping rates! $

2013 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: (with FREE Digital Editions)

Media Mail

1st Class Canada 1st Class Priority US Intl.

Intl.

Digital Only

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$50

$68

$65

$72

$150

$15.80

BACK ISSUE! (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

DRAW! (4 issues)

$30

$40

$43

$54

$78

$11.80

ALTER EGO (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85

$107

$155

$23.60

COMIC BOOK CREATOR (4 issues w/Special)

$36

$45

$50

$65

$95

$15.80

BRICKJOURNAL (6 issues)

$57

$72

$75

$86

$128

$23.70

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TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

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

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THE BEST OF ALTER EGO, VOL. 2

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