Comic Book Artist (Vol. 2) #2

THIS PAGE: The vivacious Shanna, the She-Devil, as rendered by our featured artist this ish, the Monkey Boy himself, Frank Cho! This illo is being used to promote the artist-writer’s upcoming Marvel mini-series, coming soon. ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

“For the Celebration of Comics” SERVING READERS SINCE 1998

Jon B. Cooke EDITOR/CREATOR/DESIGNER

Chris Staros & Brett Warnock Top Shelf Productions PUBLISHERS Managing Editor BARBARA LEIN-COOPER George Khoury SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR Christopher Irving ASSOCIATE EDITOR/CHIEF CORRESPONDENT Chris Knowles ASSOCIATE EDITOR Steven Tice TRANSCRIBER Greg Preston CBA PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER

MASTHEAD AND COVER DESIGN Bissel & Titus www.bisseltitus.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS David A. Roach Fred Hembeck Michelle Nolan Joe McCabe TITLE ORIGINATOR/CBA CLASSIC LOGO Arlen Schumer CBA MASCOT Woody J.D. King ISSUE THEME SONG “Blue and Yellow” The Used COVER ARTIST

Frank Cho

www.cbanow.com www.topshelfcomix.com Editor: JonBCooke@aol.com Publisher: staros@bellsouth.net

Comic Book Artist ™&© 2003 Jon B. Cooke

This issue dedicated in beloved memory of:

Cathi Earley 1961-2003 “Gone but not Forgotten”

ERRATA etc.

Comic Book Artists Don’t Cry… CBA “BONER OF THE YEAR” award goes to Ye Ed for referring (in CBA Vol.1, #25) to HILLARY BARTA, the renowned male cartoonist of “Splash Brannigan” fame (note gender), as “HILLARY SWANK,” the Academy Award-winning thespian who copped an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Boys Don’t Cry, in which she played a girl passing herself off as a guy in an effort to get a girl… oh, never mind. Our apologies to both Hillarys for that mix-up, a statement originally written too late at night, which passed unnoticed by too many sets of tired eyes. (Now, someone get a hanky for Chad Lowe over there!)

Carmine Inspiration

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In CBA Vol.1, #25’s “Front Page” send-off list of kudos and thank yous, wouldja believe that Ye Ed — who said he’s miss some deserving people’s names — inadvertently omitted one of the most important names of all? Our apologies to the great CARMINE INFANTINO for such an unfortunate oversight.

Without your great tenure as DC Comics editorial director and publisher between 1967-75 to celebrate, CBA would never have come into existence! Why, our very first ish was dedicated to your halcyon days of leadership, the fabled “Daring and Different” era of the artist-editor. Please forgive the unintended exclusion and our thanks especially to you, ROUGE ENFANT…

25 PASSAGES Stumbo Sleeps…

This summer, we were very saddened to learn of the death of one of the comic industry’s most under-appreciated and deserving creators, mainstay Harvey comics cartoonist, WARREN KREMER. A co-creator of the phenomenally popular “Poor Little Rich Kid,” Richie Rich, Kremer also established the Harvey house style, was the company’s quintessential character designer, and was probably its most prolific freelance contributor, drawing virtually every single cover — from Little Dot to Casper — over a 20-year period. He was, if you will, the “Jack Kirby” of kids comics. While superb in illustrating the adventures of every character, Kremer was truly sublime in delineating the exploits of another creation, Stumbo the Giant, a gentle goliath fiercely loyal in protecting his Tinytown. In the end, Harvey would abandon Kremer, leaving him and his lovely life, RUTH (a longtime Harvey letterer) to chronic illness and financial woes. Rest easy, Warren. We’ll never forget you.

PAM, 1928-2003 Just as we were going to press, CBA was crushed to hear from the artist’s son of the passing of PETER A. MORISI — a.k.a. PAM — the memorable cartoonist of many Charlton comics stories, including Johnny Dynamite, Vengeance Squad, Kid Montana, and perhaps his most famous creation: Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, a property he would buy the rights to. Though suffering ill health, CBA found Pete (a former NYC cop) to always be generous and friendly — if reluctant to attend any cons! — and we will miss you, amigo.

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#2

DEPARTMENTS 4 Ye Ed’s Rant My Summer Blackout Knowles Knows Show Me the Magic 6 Khoury’s Corner Alex Ross: Myth-Maker 8 Comic Book Chit-Chat Fandom’s Faddah: A Talk with the Legendary Julie Schwartz 9 Must-Have, Doule-Bagger: Joe Kubert’s Yossel 13 Allred in the Family: Catching Up with the Madman creator 14 A. DaViD’s Watching American Splendor 18 Irving on the Inside Flying High with Rags Morales 22 Critical Mass Reviews by Ye Ed, Joe McCabe & Frank Plowright 22 Fred Hembeck’s Dateline: @*!?# 25 To Be Continued… What’s in next ish & contributor’s bio 112

FEATURES

34 85

Alex Ross Sketchbook 26

The artist contributes rarely-seen work both in pencil and in color

Frank Cho: The Monkey Boy Speaks! 34

The Liberty Meadows creator on his life and work

Frank Cho Art Gallery 85

44

A mind-blowing selection of Monkey Boy art

J.J. Sedelmaier: An Unambiguously Happy Life 44 The field’s hottest talent talks about his upbringing, the “reality” of super-heroes, & the future (plus a color section!)

Comic Book Artist Classic 47 Star*Reach Color Cover Gallery 48 Reaching for the Stars: A Star*Reach Overview 49 Mike Friedrich: The Saga of Star*Reach 50 The writer/publisher/artist rep on the dawn of alternative comics

Complete Star*Reach Comics Index 75 COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published 10 times a year by Top Shelf Productions, P.O. Box 1282, Marietta, GA 30061-1282 USA. Jon B. Cooke, Editor. Chris Staros & Brett Warnock, Publishers. Editorial Office: P.O. Box 204, 3706 Kingstown Road, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 USA • 401-783-1669 • Fax: (401) 783-1287. E-mail: JonBCooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to Top Shelf, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $10 postpaid ($12 Canada, $13 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $39.50 US Media Rate/$59.50 US Priority Rate; $69.50 Canada Air Mail; $89.50 Air Mail elsewhere. All characters © their respective copyright holders. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © their respective authors. ©2003 Jon B. Cooke. Cover acknowledgement: Liberty Meadows ©2003 Frank Cho. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

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Ye Ed’s Rant My Summer

Blackout Mea culpas galore as it’s been a long time between issues of this here mag No. No ranting by Ye Ed this ish. This is more a time to be contrite as it’s been a long time between issues so I’ve some amends needing to be made, as well as sobering news to convey.

First up: This Frank Cho number — second of CBA’s newest incarnation as volume two — was supposed to be out in July and, the calendar telling me it’s mid-October already at Casa CBA, that makes this a very late release and, of course, I take full responsibility for the tardiness. I extend my apologies to all concerned — specifically those freelancers and contributors who helped with the contents of this issue, advertisers who lent support, readers expecting a more periodic appearance, and especially to my publishers, Chris Staros and Brett Warnock, who have been patient beyond measure regarding this unfortunate situation.

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I could say what caused the delay was due to Ye Ed suffering an extended, six-week bout of acute, chronic bronchitis over much of August and September, which neither steroids or antibiotics could allay — all true — but greater truth to tell, the issue was already late, so the problem was simply compounded. I had hoped an extended respite between the last TwoMorrows issue and the first of this new Top Shelf edition would have given me a chance to properly set up a doable and timely publication schedule, but the lateness of those issues just made a bad situation worse. So, the first Top Shelf issue did not see release at the 2003 International ComicCon: San Diego, a blow to finances as well as to Ye Ed’s ego, it being the first time I have not made a deadline in seven years of attending that show, perhaps the most important debut of my career.

Illness reaped only more delays and Ye Ed, stressing to meet obligations, retreated to get the job done. But leaving e-mail unattended, shutting off the phone, and ignoring the answering machine didn’t help the already chaotic situation, succeding only to instill frustration into anyone trying to contact CBA through the late summer and early autumn. This was no way to run a business and I apologize to eveyone who suffered the illmannered indignation. (If you’ve still unanswered questions or concerns, please try reaching CBA again, as I am now committed to being as reliable as possible keeping on top of such communications.)

Now, with issue two about out the door, Top Shelf and CBA now are facing some unsettling realities about the immediate future of this magazine.

Foremost, to get a grip on scheduling (partially to not

force Ye Ed to risk health again by cranking out the next two issues at breakneck speed) and to regain the confidence of our distributors and retailers, CBA #3 and 4 are being resolicited for Spring 2004 release — hopefully March and April, but probably April and May. Thereafter, CBA will maintain a “two-months on/one-month off” schedule, striving to produce nine issues a year.

We certainly regret these delays and apologize to our faithful readers, though Tip Shelf and I are confident these changes will result in a more timely and revitalized Comic Book Artist.

As Ye Ed has maintained far too strong, far too impractical a grip on the actual production of CBA — micro-managing every single aspect of the magazine by doing virtually all of the grunt work myself — we’re also committed to expanding the staff of the production department beyond that of my lonesome self. To that end, look next issue for the debut of Barbara Lein-Cooper, late of the lauded comics-related Web site, Sequential Tart, as CBA’s managing editor (as least for #3, but on-going if she likes the gig), who will help with scheduling, submissions, the upfront review section and copy editing… at least to start!

Looking forward to working witcha, Barb!

CBA is also looking for help closer to home (as Barb lived Texas-way) as we’re currently seeking interns to assist with scanning and office work, so if any Rhode Island area students — or interested folk with time on their hands — are interested in semi-fun work, surrounded by zillions of comics, at virtually no pay, give Ye Ed a shout and join up with Team CBA!

ABOVE LEFT: Captain America gives Ye Ed what for at the 2003 Chicago Wizard World Comic Convention this past August. We’ve lost the name of Cap’s secret identity, so if you can share that info with Casa CBA, we’d be mighty appreciative! Cap ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. TOP: Craig Thompson inscribes Ye Ed’s copy of the brilliant creator’s latest graphic novel, Blankets. (Read the editorial for description.) ©2003 Craig Thompson.

The summer wasn’t an entire washout for Ye Ed as we were busy attending the aforementioned San Diego Con, as well as Wizard World in Chicago. But the top event of the season was certainly my close brother — and oft creative partner — Andrew D. Cooke’s matrimonial extravaganza co-hosted with his lovely new bride, Patricia Willett! Patty and Andy were married in a breathtaking ceremony — off breezy Narragansett Bay on Mount Hope Farms in Bristol, Rhode Island, on July 26, a crystalline day this sentimental brother will never forget. Ye Ed was decked out in a snazzy tux (head usher, natch!) and we all danced the night away under an open-air tent, as the happy couple pulled out all the stops to give guests an affair to remember (even going so far as to lease a Del’s Lemonade truck for the kids!

It’s a Rhode Island thing, people!). The pair are back living in New York City. (Patty works in the movies on the production end as Andy slaves away in the same medium, currently collaborating with Ye Ed on a film documentary on the life of the great father of sequential art, Will Eisner.)

Though Ye Ed was pouting about not having CBA V2 #1 ready in S.D. and griping about not being nominated for an Eisner Award this year

(snif) — as well as missing the company of his frequent SDCC buddy, brother Andy (who apparently had more pressing things to worry about… sheesh!) — he spent many hours in superb company, especially the wacky Top Shelf gang — Chris, Brett, Wayne, Rich, Craig, and, of course, the indomitable Eddie Campbell, — as well as CBA contributing editors Chris Knowles, Joe McCabe (attending with his charming companion, Sophia Quach, a talented photographer and all-out cool gal) and Chris Irving (who introduced his sister Meagan to the crazy worlds of comic-cons). Of course, we made time to chat with many CBA pals, too many to adequately name here, but suffice to say, it was a blast. Next ish, we’ll try to feature some more pix of the con season (especially ones with ol’ con cohorts, Rat Bastards Tim Bird, Cliff Gailbraith and Cliff’s delectable partner (dah-ling, she’s simply divine!), that dazzling dame, Judie Luszcz!

Wizard World was great, too, and Ye Ed was a bit more relaxed to have Andy and my oldest boy, Ben, along for the long ride to Chicago, as well as having the first issue of the new CBA debut at the very busy Top Shelf booth. Moments spent with Craig Thompson were especially appreciated, though there wasn’t much time for idle chatter with Blankets flying off the shelves and the brilliant young cartoonist inscribing every one sold with a custom-made stamp, personalized cartoon and signature! Check out the C.T. cartoon on the page opposite, drawn after Andy and I complimented the guy on his apt description of two brothers sharing a bedroom in Blankets. I said the only difference with the Brothers Cooke was my closet, wallpapered with Kirby, Steranko and Adams pages and able to perfectly accommodate a mattress, was a refuge. (The spitting thing? Well, you’ll have to talk to Andy about that; I was just innocently reading my comics!)

Again, let me extend my apologies to you, the readers of CBA, and I promise this upcoming reboot will be a good thing. I am determined to make this magazine — a labor of sincere passion and something I dearly love doing — a better periodical, one that reflects my appreciation for having the best job on earth.

fin

ABOVE LEFT: CBA contributing editor Joe McCabe poses with his talented partner, Sophia Quach, in San Diego this year. Sophia contributes the photo portrait of Frank Cho accompanying Joe’s interview with the artist. ABOVE RIGHT: CBA contributing editor Chris Irving and his sister Meagan, also lensed at the San Diego Comic-Con.

5 CBA V.2 #2

Knowles Knows Show Me the Magic A commentary on the nature of magic — real and junk — in funnybooks

6 CBA V.2 #2

BY CHRIS KNOWLES I’ve been thinking a lot about Alan Moore lately.

Not simply because I recently received the gala Alan Moore issue of CBA [V1, #25], but also because there is a veritable deluge of material out there dedicated to him, released in anticipation of his retirement from comics.

I first became familiar with Mr. Moore 20 years ago, since I was one of the 34 or so souls who was a regular reader of Saga of the Swamp Thing . Alan replaced original writer Marty Pasko and immediately took the title on a rocket ride into the ether. I was along for the trip for a couple years, but lost interest around the time of the menstruating werewolves story. I then kept hearing about the Watchmen series, but since I was spending my time — morning, noon, and night — reading and re-reading Frank Miller’s Batman, Daredevil and Elektra work, the book didn’t make much of an impression on me. The missus liked it so I picked up the series for her, and then read them when she was done. But, in comparison to the Zeitgeist-seizing work of Mr. Miller, it was weak tea to my palette.

The next work from Mr. Moore to catch my eye was of course The Killing Joke, a book deserving its classic status. But thereafter, both Moore and I seemed to drift away from the comics mainstream, and I didn’t catch up with him until much later.

I’ll lay out my prejudice on the table: I lean much more heavily towards the gut-bruising emotionalism of Miller’s ’80s work than the dry, intellectual nihilism of Moore’s storytelling from the same era. I’m not a terribly intellectual character, and my left brain is surely vestigial at this point. But the memory of “Swamped” and “Another Green World” stuck with me, even if their follow-ups seemed less important. It wasn’t until the dawn of America’s Best Comics when I fully fell under Mr. Moore’s spell. Tom Strong, Promethea and Tomorrow Stories hit the spot.

The nihilism and preachiness of Moore’s ’80s work was joyfully absent and in their place was fun, humor, wonder and joy, qualities that were altogether absent in 1990s comics.

My favorite title was Promethea, as that

was the book where Moore seemed most likely to take the gloves off and really bring the reader on a trip somewhere else. He did just that, but where the writer travelled was to a multi-issue meditation on the Tarot and the Kaballah, which I found to be as entertaining as a marathon teach-in at a Theosophist summer camp.

Promethea was no longer a comic; it was a lecture. Promethea herself was reduced from a fascinating spin on Wonder Woman to a

wide-eyed naif lost in CrowleyLand. As Moore’s energies focused on this journey, the other ABC titles lost steam and now we are nearing the end of the line.

Now, this is not to bash Mr. Moore, a man for whom I have tremendous admiration. But as brilliant a technician and craftsmen as he is, he remains a human being just like you or I. And like each one of us, he feels the need the follow his passions wherever they may take him. And where they are taking him is out of comics. Mr. Moore feels that “magick” ( a Crowleyean word I despise, so from now on I will stick to “magic”) is far more important and meaningful to him than comics.

Although Mr. Moore would have us believe he woke up one morning a few years back and decided to become a magician, I believe this process was a long time in coming. Certainly there were hints of it in Swamp Thing. But the title of his most famous Batman graphic novel shows just how early on this process began to manifest itself. I don’t think he called that book The Killing Joke on a whim. He named it after a British PostPunk band who were explicitly Occult-oriented and Crowley-influenced in the ’80s. It’s probably safe to say that our Alan was listening to Killing Joke’s disturbing and abrasive music back then.

The band’s psychotic album and poster imagery (created by designer Mike Coles) made use of murderous jesters, which might have given Mr. Moore the idea for the story in the first place.

Now there is a lot of loose talk about magic these days. We’ve seen the popularity of films such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, as well as shows like Charmed, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

Traditional religionists are horrified with all this, and with no small degree of justification. Interest in magic and the occult usurps the monopoly of religion on supernatural experience, and democratizes the spiritual in a very Promethean sense.

After 1500 years of the unchallenged supremacy of the Abrahamic religions in the Western World, we are seeing what may well be a return to the natural order — a polyglot of mutating beliefs and practices that overlap and often, clash.

Now this is all very (to use another word I despise) empowering. For feminists and gay folk, the goddess-centered Wicca religion helps to celebrate the feminine archetype so degraded and repressed by Middle Eastern monotheism.

For insecure kids, a belief that they might have latent magical powers can help them negotiate the horrors of adolescence. And whole new communities are forming on the Internet centered around philosophies and gods the world had hitherto forgotten. But magic… magic. Hmmm.

Magic is humanity’s perpetual problem child. It is something we all wish to experience, but something that is at the same time so elusive, and often… disappointing. We all have experienced moments of some strange kind of grace, where our perceptions or our physical limitations themselves are momentarily taken out of the “Black Iron Prison” of everyday reality and into a place or state where dreams come true, wishes are granted, laws of physics are broken, and we get a peak under the dress of big “R” Reality. And although we cloak this concept in sci-fi drag more often than not, it is exactly the longing for these moments that all super-hero comics are based upon.

ABOVE: Spread by penciler J.H. Williams III and inker Mick Gray in Promethea #27 (Nov. 2003). ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

Now, magic exists.

We all know that.

We just call it by different names. Christians call the kind they like the work of the Holy Spirit, and the kind they don’t like the work of the Devil. Jews and Muslims have slightly different terminology, but it’s roughly the same thing. Scientists even acknowledge its existence by giving it a hoity-toity name, “Anomalous Phenomena.” Miracles, grace, sorcery, necromancy, white magic, spells, prayers, invocations, mass delusion, witchcraft, hallucination, the paranormal, Fortean phenomena… there are any number of terms with any number of shades of meaning that all, ultimately, boil down to one thing: magic.

Super-heroes and mutants and all the rest of the miraculous creatures parading through the funny pages have no basis in science or ordinary reality: they are all magic. If you were bitten by a radioactive spider, chances are good you’d get a horrible rash, go into toxic shock and then die, not wake up the next morning buff and ripped.

Mutations usually are not pretty, nor powerful, nor very long-lived. The X-Men are fantasy, not science-fiction.

But there are a lot of folks in comics giving lip service to magic lately. Which is right and good. People who write and draw comics should be thinking about magic. It’s their job. But it gets problematic when you make the leap from Kirbyean magic to Crowleyean magic.

Aleister Crowley seems to be the well-spring for most of today’s interest in magic, particularly that of the “ceremonial” variety chatted up by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

Now, this is altogether unwholesome, considering that Crowley spent most of his time taking drugs, humping anything with a pulse, and fucking with people’s heads to the point that he drove many around him to their destructions. And, ultimately, Crowley’s alleged magical prowess did little to save him from dying broke, despised and addicted. I’ve read some of his writings and found them to be rather dire. I’m not even sure how seriously he took any of it , nor am I convinced that he wrote all of it himself. I think his “magic” was drugs and fornication, and the rest of it was just fodder for the rubes. Junk magic, indistinguishable from the junk science of his time.

How junk magick can corrupt even talented and intelligent minds is made manifest in this excerpt from Grant Morrison’s astonishingly inane and insensitive 9/11 commentary, “Fall of Empire: Bombs and Magic”: “Be careful with the hypersigils folks and go read the prophetic Marvel Boy trade again if you want to hear what our new baby god has to say about our future. Horus is the Lord of Force and Fire. He levels and destroys, in order to rebuild anew. Horus, like all children, wants to play. He

can't be fought — he's younger, faster and stronger than all of us and always will be because he is a powerful, living archetype. He does not like restriction and if restricted will explode in our faces. He is the Spirit of the Age and he likes to play with fire.”

This statement shows a lack of basic knowledge about Horus, the Egyptian Pharaonic god, so complete and overwhelming as to be nearly stultifying. Morrison is identifying Horus with Marvel Boy, his lithe and pouty rebel archetype from the mini-series of the same name.

Marvel Boy was an exceptionally entertaining comic, exquisitely drawn by J.G. Jones, but has as much to do with Horus as I with Fred Flintstone. He also was, by implication, identifying Horus with Osama Bin Laden. But who is Horus?

Let’s turn to the words of Zahi Hawass, Egyptian Minister of Antiquities: “Every pharaoh was an incarnation of Horus, who according to legend conquered Seth the evil god of Upper Egypt. Seth was god of turmoil and confusion who murdered Osiris, Horus's father. Horus avenged his father's death and became the god of order and justice.

Therefore the pharaoh in Ancient Egypt became Horus on earth, the ruler of the two lands (Upper and Lower Egypt).

“Horus, represented by the hawk, was the god of the Sky, a symbol of divine Kingship, and protector of the ruling King.”

Now contrast Morrison’s rant with Hawass’ scholarship. Don’t stop there: read every description of Horus, from archaeological texts to esoteric scripture, and they will tell you the same thing: Horus represents kingship and eternal Order in triumph over Chaos. Does this sound like someone who “does not like restriction and if

restricted will explode in our faces” as Morrison claims?

Morrison’s description more closely resembles Seth, god of Chaos. And considering that Morrison probably learned about Horus from the “Great Beast 666” Crowley, it all begins to make sense. (For a much more faithful parable of Horus, skip Morrison’s work and rent the film Pushing Tin, a delightfully clever retelling of the Contentions of Horus and Set.).

And there is the problem with all this Magic talk. Anyone can say anything, regardless of the facts, make up any old prattle, call it “magic” and end the discussion there. Certainly Moore is not guilty of this, if anything he errs on the side of fidelity to received tradition. Promethea’s journey from Kether to Malkuth was fascinating and valuable as a tutorial, just not terribly entertaining as a comic book.

Which brings me to the central tenet of this essay. I don’t want to read comics about magic; I want to read comics that are magic. I am talking about comics that do what magic is supposed to do: take you out of the everyday world and put you somewhere else. Comics that offer what life supplied to us when we were young: new experience. Rejuvenation. A sense of real wonder.

Too many comics suffer from what every other pop culture media is presently suffering from: too much emphasis on technique, too many gee-whiz digital pyrotechnics, too many committee-driven decisions , too little magic. And the kind of magic I believe comics need is not the charts-&-graphs magic of Alan Moore, nor the junk magic of Grant Morrison; it needs a more primal magic. It needs the magic of the shaman, of the seer, of the visionary. This is the magic that I bank on. This is the magic that you can do more than read about.

The kind of magic I am talking about doesn't need drugs or kinky sex to make it work. It is the magic of an inspired creator, who throws him or herself into the primordial ooze of the Imagination. Who ventures forth into those places in the collective unconscious where the gods dwell, speaks to them, and then brings back their secrets to us. It is a true form of magic to make a bunch of random squiggles and symbols coalesce on a page and give the reader a true, immersive experience. Not just a momentary diversion, not simply a riveting entertainment, but the kind of experience that pulls readers out of their everyday lives and takes them somewhere so radically new that the journey changes the reader forever.

Tall order, right?

Not really. Magic is out there, all around us, waiting for an inspired creator to tune into it and bring it into our lives. And I can’t think of a more appropriate place to channel it than comics.

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TOP: The title character is captured in this detail from Marvel Boy #1 (Aug. 2000). Penciled and inked by the excellent J.G. Jones. ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Khoury’s Corner Myth-Maker Kidd & Spear’s early Valentine to Alex Ross and his glorious DC super-heroes

BY GEORGE KHOURY, CBA ASSOCIATE EDITOR God, where does one begin in writing about a book with so much goodness, I ask? Listen close, my friends, as life is filled with its share of disappointments and heartbreak; it brings great pleasure to inform you that this book — Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear’s Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross — is neither. While not a biography per se of the young artist, it’s more an amazing showcase of Ross’s extraordinary art as presented by famed book designer/author Kidd and pop photographer Spear. Cover to cover, this is the type of volume one would conceive only in dreams, for in it we enter a realm where the unbelievable becomes believable. It’s a romanticism to the now mythological icons of the DC Universe, giving those beloved heroes a level of prestige the likes they’ve never seen.

While often said that pictures speak louder than words, this compendium certainly makes that cliché a mute point. Proving that Ross is no mere overnight sensation or phenomenon, the book traces the artist’s attachment to DC superheroes back to a time when his medium was crayons and construction paper his canvas. By the time Ross was 12, he’s an artist who had a good sense of composition and storytelling ability better than most twice his age. Also evident are the influence of comic book idols who the young artist emulated: Neal Adams, George Pérez, Joe Staton, among others… and the better question becomes, “Who hasn’t influenced Alex Ross?”

The painter has studied his chosen field by seeming to absorb something from every comic that crossed his path, something we see for ourselves

Khoury Also Recommends: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. By Al Franken.

Dutton, $24.95. ISBN #0-525-94764-7.

Comedian-turned-political pundit Al Franken’s excellent satirical style exposes the sins and hypocrisy of America’s Right Wing in government and media. Though anyone skeptical of U.S. Defense Department claims, Fox News and Ann Coulter would appreciate this hilarious read, especially noteworthy to comics fans is the return of veteran cartoonist Don “Megaton Man” Simpson who provides nifty spot illustrations for one chapter (see accompanying illo) and jams with the former Saturday Night Live writer and performer on a comic story entitled, “The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus.”

as we absorb painting after painting.

As with Kidd and Spear’s earlier effort, Batman Collected, the authors have graced their new coffee-table book with an abundance of tenderness in the design and impeccable presentation of Ross’ art, which shines brighter than ever in these pages. As a reader, I was overwhelmed with 288 pages of these vibrant images so perfectly capturing the charm and appeal these characters have had upon popular culture, superheroes much more iconic and wholesome compared to their Marvel colleagues. Page after page, the passion of Ross instilled into the sketch-

es, thumbnails, lithographs, plates, covers, strips, and doodles lovingly shows throughout.

Within the book are a consonance of illustrations and designs straight from his sketchbook along with galleries of heroic images both new and old to his legion of fans. In all Alex’s work, the artist has captured every hero in their prime, their personae and attitudes exactly as we remember from our favorite stories. What the book lacks in text and biographic content is easily compensated by the volumes his art speaks to its readers.

As if there wasn’t enough in the presentation, there’s a groovy new Superman and Batman strip written by Mr. Kidd, which Ross brings to vivid life in gouache, that’ll doubtless bring out the kid in you.

There are those naysayers who tell us what Ross does isn’t comics — that the use of paints and models can never be comic book art. Yet they might be right as what he does might well be beyond comic books! His style is more sensational and attractive than most funnybooks and truer to comics’ pulp roots. Like Norman Rockwell, who excelled at paintings depicting average American life which the average man could appreciate; Ross reigns supreme at illustrating super-heroes who are accessible to all. Within the book are examples of the hard work and extremes the artist goes to in the hopes of striving for perfection in his images. So tell me again he’s not a comic book artist and I’ll show you a man who bleeds comics.

Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross.

By Chip Kidd & Geoff Spear. Pantheon, $35.

ISBN # 0-375-42240-4.

500 Great Comic Book Action Heroes. By Mike Conroy. Barron’s, $18.95. ISBN # 0-7641-2581-8.

This is a well-researched and entertainingly written reference book by Mr. Conroy, a veteran correspondent for the British magazine Comics International, featuring a concise, lively series of mini-essays chronicling the most important characters inhabiting our medium of choice.

American Splendor: Unsung Hero. By Harvey Pekar & David Collier. Dark Horse, $11.95. ISBN #1-59307-040-3.

If you enjoy the film and the collection of his self-published work, American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, you’ll cherish this book where we find Pekar at the peak of his storytelling abilities. Unsung Hero follows a black American G.I. named Robert McNeill through his tour of duty in Vietnam where the teenage soldier learns all about life the hard way.

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TOP: Alex Ross cover art sporting Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear’s coffee-table book celebrating his art, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross. ©2003 DC Comics.

ABOVE: Don Simpson, creator of the unforgettable Megaton Man, illustrates Al Franken’s political humor in the comedian’s bestseller, Lies… ©2003 Al Franken.

Comic Book Artist’s shameless hype, capsule reviews, news briefs, mini-interviews & other ephemera of note

• October 2003

Fandom’s Faddah Yakkin’ with the greatest comic book editor of all time, Mr. Julius Schwartz

BY JON B. COOKE/TRANSCRIBED BY STEVEN TICE Comic Book Artist: Were you cognizant of EC Comics when they were coming out?

Julius Schwartz: I knew about them, but I didn’t read them. I may have glanced at the magazines, but I was not aware they had the equivalent of a fan club..

CBA: So you didn’t have any interest?

Julie: I don’t want to say I had no interest, I just never got around to looking at the stuff, that’s all.

CBA: With the revival of the Flash, was there a lot of mail you received from readers that came into the office? Were they responding well to the revival?

Julie: Well, the Flash’s tryout in Showcase depended on sales, not fan mail. Fan mail represents less than one percent of the overall circulation. If we’re selling say 100,000, if you got 50 letters a month, that would be pretty good.

So it was a very small percentage of the readership comparatively.

CBA: Did you read the mail as it came in?

Julie: That was the best part of my day!

Did I have a letter department at that point?

CBA: No. Julie: Let me go to when I just started the letter department: When the mail came in, I read every letter and graded them. In other words, it would be a plus or a minus. I would grade a positive letter A+ or B+ or C+, whatever. And if it was a negative, I would mark it A-, B-. So when it came time to do the letter department, I would pick up a couple of pluses and a couple of negatives. I would start with the A’s, and when I ran out of the A’s, go to the B’s. If I received, say, 50 letters a month, I didn’t have time to

reread them. So all I had to do was choose the A+ letters, pick an A+, then back it up with an A-, and so on. I’d have maybe two positives for each negative, but was always very careful to make sure I included a negative. You know about my encouraging fan mail by offering to give away artwork?

CBA: Right.

Julie: Many people say “bless you” for that, because many of the most valuable stories survived because of that gesture, important stories would otherwise have been lost forever. The first one I gave away went to Jerry Bails (the founder of fandom, I always say). Jerry received the first Justice League of America story, the first tryout.

CBA: Did you get a lot of intelligent, critical mail, where you could tell there was a thoughtful, more mature segment of the readership that was really responding well to your efforts?

Julie: Oh sure! I always looked forward to the mail. One of the first things I did in the morning was to read the fan mail. I loved to get reaction.

Not that I would take to heart 100% of what they wrote; I had to use my own judgment, but I’d have to balance it with what the readers said.

If 99% of the readers liked the same type of story, I’d make sure I’d look over that story. “What attracted them so much? Was it the plot, the beginning, the characterization, the art? What was it?” I study their reactions and proceed from that point on. I was a big student of fan mail, even though I knew they represented only a fraction of of the overall, readership. But I did love to receive fan mail.

Otherwise, life as an editor would be pretty dull if you didn’t know what was going on in connection with the work you’re producing.

ABOVE: His name is Schwartz… Julie Schwartz. The Great One is gussied-up for a banquet in this undated pic, courtesy of J.S.

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Comic Book Chit-Chat CBA: As you were continuing to revive the characters, was that just plain and simple in response to the sales, or were you also responding positively to the fans?

Julie: I would guess both. You know about the origins of Showcase?

CBA: What was it?

Julie: Let me repeat what I wrote in my book: In those days, when a magazine was published, and it only went to newsstands, we didn’t really get sales reports until anywhere between four and six months later. Now, let’s assume you started a magazine with issue #1, and now, four or five months later, the report comes in that the sales were terrible. By the time we got the report on #1, #2 was already on the stands, #3 had the artwork already prepared, and the publisher would have already invested a lot of money on a losing financial situation. So the idea of Showcase was let’s spotlight a new product and wait four or five months and see how the sales were.

Now, the first three Showcases did not do well, and the fourth one was “The Flash.” When that came in and the reports were so good, I put out another issue featuring the Flash, Showcase #8, then #12, and so on. So it’s simply a means of saving your neck, speaking financially. Do not put out a magazine if it’s not going to sell. How else are you going to know? Nowadays, with the way the direct market is, things are very different, I’d imagine.

CBA: Today, you get the purchase order from Diamond Distributing and just go to press.

Julie: And if the number of orders isn’t too high,

10 CBA V.2 #2

you say, “Well, this isn’t such a good idea.”

So, for the time, Showcase was a way to test market titles. I mean, it was the simplest way in those days. Put out a magazine, find out how it’s doing, then put another one. Do not put out a magazine immediately followed another one with the same feature. Of course, that proved successful and we did the same thing, more or less, with The Brave and the Bold. As I recall,

“The Justice League of America” had its tryout in B&B #24, or something like that.

CBA: So you would occasionally edit The Brave and the Bold, or was that one of your regular titles?

Julie: No, the editor’s position would rotate between Bob Kanigher, Jack Schiff, Murray Boltinoff, and myself. As I vaguely recall, the first Showcase was edited by Jack Schiff. That was “The Firefighters.” The second one was maybe edited by Kanigher. Then it was a Sea Devils type of thing, which Bob also edited. I was in full charge of “The Flash.” We were having an editorial meeting to decide what would go in the

fourth issue of Showcase, and the idea of reviving the Flash came up — and no one remembers who exactly submitted the idea — “how about putting out the Flash again?” The immediate objection was, “Why put out the Flash when it flopped in 1950? And here we are in 1955.” I made the point, in those days the readership of comic books was eight to 12, so those who read the magazine in 1950, when the last Flash appeared, weren’t reading comics anymore.

With the numbering of The Flash, when I had the first issue ready to go to press, I went up to Irwin Donenfeld, editorial director at the time, and I said, “What number are we going to give the title?

Number one or…” Well, the original magazine was called Flash Comics, right? And the one I put out was called The Flash. So theoretically, it was an entirely new magazine, and the consensus was to start again with #1. But Donenfeld said, “Absolutely not! We’re gonna continue with the old numbering because any reader who comes across a comic and sees the #105 next to a #1, he’ll chose the #105 because it’s tried and true.

Who knows what kind of magazine the #1 is? It may be a bust or a hit.” So The Flash started with #105.

CBA: There’s a switch in thinking these days!

You’re a science-fiction fan from way back, right?

Julie: Way back! Since 1928!

CBA: Did you contribute to fanzines?

Julie: “Contribute”? I STARTED them! With some fellow, whatever his name was… I think it sounded like Mort Weisinger… we worked on a fanzine together when we were at the age of 16.

I don’t know if I emphasized it in my book, but this is a good point: Something happened. It was a club called the Scienceers. They used to have notices in the science-fiction pulp magazines about people living in the same city. If you wanted to talk to someone about science-fiction, what better way than to talk to a neighbor, so to speak? So clubs were formed to encourage people to get together and discuss sciencefiction. Well, the one in the New York area was called the Scienceers. I wrote to them, and Mort (who was a member) invited me to attend a meeting. On that momentous day, I went to the meeting and something happened that changed the course of my life and maybe the history of science-fiction, as well. Mort Weisinger’s name is familiar to you, right?

CBA: A little bit, yeah. [laughs] Julie: Mort Weisinger was the treasurer of the club and when it came time to give a treasury report, he reported there was no money in the treasury because he’d spent it on wine, women and song. Ha-ha-ha. (He’d probably spent it on going to the movies or buying science-fiction magazines, whatever.) So the other members were angry and they said, “That does it! The club

TOP: “The Steven Gang” 1937. [Standing, left to right] Jack Williamson, R. Sprague DeCamp, John D. Clark, Frank Belknap Long, Mort Weisinger, Edmond Hamilton, Otis Adelbert Kline. [Kneeling, left to right] Otto Binder, Manly Wade Wellman, Julius Schwartz. ABOVE: Julie showing off his ’67 Alley Award for Best Editor. Courtesy of J.S.

is breaking up! We’re getting out of here!”

So they all stormed out of the club meeting.

That’s when I arrived. I said, “What the hell is going on here?” There was Mort Weisinger, all by himself. Mort explained what happened and we immediately bonded. We sat there and talked science-fiction.

What I’m trying to point out, if the meeting had progressed as normal, there would have been 20, 24 people there, and I never would have had a chance to talk to Mort and to bond with him, you see. The mere fact we got together led to the reformation of Scienceers.

Now, Mort and I wanted to know about these writers who contributed to the science-fiction magazines. Who was David H. Keller? Who was Edward E. Smith?

Who was Paul Milton? All these names. So we wrote to the various authors in care of the magazines, “Please give me some information about yourself, we’re going to put out a Who’s Who in Science Fiction.

Please let us know not only about your background, but what you’re working on.”

I have a standard question I ask at conventions, which I’ll ask you: If you were a true science-fiction fan, and you bought the latest issue of a mag that just came out, what is the first thing in the magazine you’d turn to?

CBA: I’d turn to the contributor’s page?

Julie: That’s wrong. Other people would say, “We’d turn to the letter column to see if our letter was printed.” That’s wrong! The true science-fiction fan would look for the blurb where it says “coming next issue.”

CBA: That’s true! [laughs] Julie: We’re not interested in what’s in the magazine now! That’s the present. We want to know what’s coming out TOMORROW, in the future!

So Mort and I asked for information on the writers’ upcoming projects. Anyway, when the responses came in, instead of putting out a Who’s

Who, we said, “Gee, we have all this information on what they’re working on, so how can we get this info to other fans?” So Mort and I both came up with the idea of putting out a fan magazine. I came up with the title The Time Traveler. We put it out as a six-page, mimeographed issue, and it sold well, and eventually a follow-up magazine, Science Fiction Digest came out. For our anniversary, we had 80 pages of printed material selling for a dime. We had original stories by well-known science-fiction and fantasy writers. We had round-robin stories, where I’d ask a fantasy writer, I’d come up with a title for a story, “A

Challenge from Beyond,” and I’d get in touch with one of the top writers in the field and say, “Give me 1,000 words for a story called ‘A Challenge from Beyond.’” Then we’d turn it over to the next writer and have him continue it. The second writer would have no idea what the first writer was writing.

CBA: And you had some very notable contributors to that, right?

Julie: We had the top men — and women! — in the field! The first one was written by C.L. Moore.

The second by Abe Merritt, a top writer in the field. The third one was by H.P. Lovecraft. The fourth one by Robert E. Howard, and the fifth one was by a fellow named Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft’s best friend. They each wrote about 1,000 words or so, and that’s how it went.

I liked the idea so much, I said, “Let’s do the same title with science-fiction writers.”

These guys would drop everything to contribute!

In those days, they’re writing in the dark, so to speak, and didn’t know anyone liked their work until the fanzines came along. So they became very excited and enthusiastically supported our efforts.

So that’s how Mort and I created fandom, which ultimately gave birth to magazines like yours and your cohorts.

CBA: How did you sell the magazine through notices in the science-fiction magazines?

Julie: How did we sell it? I’m sure we must have sent letters to the various professional magazines announcing that there was a magazine called Science Fiction Digest or whatever title we were using, and a free copy would be included. I don’t think we’d ask for a dime. We never had a tremendous circulation, a few hundred maybe. But it was the beginning of fandom.

CBA: Was it important for you to send free copies to professionals?

Julie: Oh yes, absolutely, because we wanted interviews with them! For instance, when I wanted an interview with Dr. David H. Keller, who in 1930 was a favorite science-fiction writer, I wrote a letter and included a copy of our fanzine, asking if I could conduct an interview. Not only was he glad to do it, when he was in New York he invited me to his hotel and treated me to lunch! As I remark in my book, it was the only time in my life up ’til that time when I’d ever eaten a meal outside of home. This was the Depression era, understand? He liked me so much he invited me to come with him to his home in Pennsylvania, where I spent the weekend with him. Now, Mort was so jealous that I was invited that he hitchhiked his way there, and when Dr. Keller and I got to his house, there was Mort waiting for us!

CBA: [laughs] Obviously, this led to a number of connections for you, right?

You became a literary agent for a period of time?

Julie: Mort Weisinger and I got the idea of becoming literary agents. There were writer’s magazines where literary agents advertised. Our main interest was to read the stories before they saw print. [Jon laughs] We had nerve, because in those days it was customary for literary agents to charge a reading fee, so Mort and I said, “Sure, we’ll charge a reading fee. You want to send us a script, it will cost you one dollar for us to read it.”

Well, the first time we got a dollar from an author,

ABOVE: Two photos of Julie Schwartz in the DC Comics editorial office during the ’60s. Courtesy of J.S. OPPOSITE PAGE AND ABOVE: Vignetted Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson drawings of the Silver Age and Golden Age Flashes. From the Schwartz-edited “Flash of Two Worlds,” The Flash #123 (Sept. ’61). ©2003 DC Comics.

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Comic Book Chit-Chat

12 CBA V.2 #2

we laughed and said, “This is silly,” and we sent the dollar back.

CBA: [laughs] So obviously it’s very linear of you getting into a professional career from fandom.

Julie: Exactly, of course. The same went for Mort Weisinger.

CBA: Was Mort hired by DC first?

Julie: Oh, yes. Mort and I became agents in 1934, I guess it was. Mort was also interested in writing his own stories and had one accepted by a magazine. One of the editors there liked it so much that they told Mort they needed another editor up there. The fellow who read Mort’s story was a guy named [future DC editor] Jack Schiff, who also invited Mort to become an editor, a position he accepted. In due time, Mort became the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Now, a fellow named Whitney Ellsworth sold stories through Mort and Jack Schiff. So when Whit became an editor up at DC Comics (or whatever it was called at the time), he invited Mort to join him. He said, “Pulp magazines are dying, so why don’t you come into comics?” In 1941, Mort left the pulps and got a job at DC Comics, and in due course, when Mort was drafted, Mort invited Jack to take his place while he was in the service. Of course, Jack stayed behind and built up the magazines so much that when the war was over, both Mort and Jack Schiff were able to retain their jobs. That’s a very brief description of what happened.

CBA: Did you ever aspire to be a writer, yourself?

Julie: No. I only wrote one story in my life.

I don’t want to go in why that was happening, it’s too interesting a story, and I’m sorry I forgot to put it in my own book. But I did write one story. It’s called “Why the Eggs Fell.” I had Mort Weisinger edit it for me and he took co-writer credit.

CBA: [laughs] Did you feel you didn’t have it?

Julie: I was more interested in planning stories than writing them. I didn’t have the facility Mort had. I knew I could write, but not well enough. It would take too much effort on my point. I would rather have a writer submit a story to me and let me point out the weak and strong points and what they should do. I thought they could sell better that way, so….

CBA: You do come across as a “people person,” somebody who likes to deal with people.

Is that it? Is it that aspect of collaboration?

Julie: Oh, of course. There’s nothing worse than an agent receiving a story through the mail and dealing with it and you don’t even know who you’re dealing with. Personal relationships are very important.

Many editors and agents back in those pulp magazine days would simply submit stories to the editor and never even meet the editor. I was more interested in meeting an editor and talking to him.

I would ask, “What kind of stories are you looking for? What are your favorite types of stories?” I could tell the various writers working with me,

“Look, they would like to use a nice time-traveling story, they aren’t getting any.” So I would suggest to writers what they would have a better chance of selling. That is the function of an agent, actually.

CBA: Would you say your greatest asset is your sense of curiosity?

Julie: Yes, I guess you could say that. It’s a good enough word: Curiosity.

CBA: There’s a type of person who puts together fanzines and seeks out the “coming next issue” blurbs before anything else. It’s always wanting to know what’s not known.

Julie: Exactly. Always wanting to know what’s not known, and imparting it to the general public.

CBA: Right, being the first to break the news.

Julie: Of course, that’s called a scoop. Mort and I would always say, “Man, I got a scoop! I have something no one else knows!”

CBA: Was it gratifying when Jerry Bails came out with Alter-Ego? Julie: Oh yes!

CBA: Do you recall when Jerry first got in contact with you?

Julie: He recalls it better than I do. I know Jerry came into my office and I told him about fan magazines and conventions, and stuff like that.

He has written about it. He was more impressed by what I said than I was less by what I said, if that makes sense. I don’t recall all the details. But I don’t know what he said, because when I was a fan, I met an editor or a writer for the first time, I remembered every word that we exchanged. You see? So Jerry remembers every word that we exchanged, but I don’t.

CBA: But you apparently imparted to him — Julie: Oh, yes. I told him the whole background of science-fiction fandom. He was very impressed. I guess, to a certain extent, that conversation began comics fandom.

CBA: What did you think of the growth of fandom? Were you actively giving information to fanzines through the ’60s?

Julie: I must have. I just have no immediate recollection.

I’m sure I must have been very helpful.

CBA: Overall, what has fandom done for you? You started fandom, so how do you look at it?

Julie: I never sat down to analyze it, so what can I say? All I know, if it wasn’t for fandom and that fortunate meeting with Mort Weisinger, my whole life would have been different. But that’s how life goes, y’know? One little thing can change the whole course of your life, and you never realize it when it happens,

only later when you look back. “My God, if it wasn’t for that, that whole life would have been different!”

CBA: Do you still read fanzines today?

Julie: If they’re sent to me. I may not read every word, but if anything interests me, I’ll read ’em.

Let me tell you something about fan magazines which I never managed to do anything about. When I was reading science-fiction, I was not only interested in the story; I was more interested in the writer. But even more interesting than the writer, was what he looked like, you understand? Nowadays, all these articles appear, a big article about Sal Buscema, a big article about Alex Toth, and they’ll include all these drawings and illustrations, but they hardly ever include a photograph of the guy himself, oddly enough! I always complain to Roy Thomas when I see him. I said, “Would you please, if you’re doing an article about Sal Buscema, hardly anyone has ever met Sal. Let’s see a couple of photographs of him, will ya?” Thankfully, Roy has been doing that lately.

CBA: After the second issue of CBA, I realized I had to include photos, try as I might.

Julie: Believe me, it’s nice to look at all the artwork and everything else, or even to see what kind of a script Gardner Fox wrote, but what did the person look like? You’ve got to put a face to the work.

CBA: So you obviously still read — Julie: I get a lot of fan magazines, Roy’s [Alter Ego] and Comic Book Artist. If they’re sent to me, I’ll look at them. I may not read every word, but I go through them, look at the art and photographs, read the fan mail and the editorials.

That’s about it.

fin

RIGHT: Joe Kubert’s portrait of the legendary editor from the cover of The Amazing World of DC Comics #3 (Nov. ’74). Art ©’03 Joe Kubert. Characters ©2003 DC Comics.

Must-Have, Double-Bagger Kubert’s Yossel A life that could-have-been as the great comic book artist looks at the Holocaust

BY JON B. COOKE, CBA EDITOR I’ve always had an unhealthy obsession with some rather dark events in world history.

Whether the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or the sinking of the Titanic or the crash of the Hindenburg, since childhood I’ve read voraciously on innumerable real-life tragedies, accumulating a not insignificant library of material over the decades.

But no other horrific era has captured my interest as much as that of the “Final Solution,” Nazi Germany’s attempt to systematically exterminate Europe’s Jewish population during World War Two. Since my mother delicately revealed the suffering of that period — which would later be termed the Holocaust — to me when I was a young boy, I tried to fathom the unfathomable, and always came away shaking my head, simply unable to comprehend the horrors man can bestow upon his brother. But some creative works do offer a glimmer of understanding.

Certainly, Claude Lanzmann’s eight-hour film Shoah, a brilliant documentary containing not a frame of archival footage but able, through contemporary interviews, to convey the banality of bureaucratic evil in the guilty who ran such an awesome apparatus of death. Steven Spielberg’s touching Schindler’s List conversely expresses the suffering of those caught in the maelstrom and no more effectively than with a heart-wrenching scene of doctors euthanizing bed-ridden patients as Nazi stormtroopers smash through the hospital doors. Even Bob Fosse’s movie version of Cabaret, with its chilling final freeze-frame — a swastika armband reflected in a distorted mirror — capably hints at the devastation to come.

Yet, as the years go by, I see that any lessons to be learned from such a incomprehensible nightmare are more likely to be found by trying to understand not only the despair suffered by the Jews, but their sense of hope in a hopelessly dark world. And no other event, it seems to me, expresses that people’s incredible resolve than the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when those faced with evacuation to the Death Camps would chose instead to revolt and fight for their lives against a vastly more-powerful enemy.

Ill-fated or not, the rebels final act of defiance is maybe the most revealing lesson about the

perseverance of humanity in a savagely inhumane world.

It’s against this turbulent backdrop — that of the Warsaw rebellion — where comic book legend, Jewish artist-writer Joe Kubert, effectively tells the story of what could-have-been had he

and his family remained in Eastern Europe instead of finding refuge in the United States when Joe was an infant. Yossel: April 19, 1943, part-illustrated novel, part-comic book, tells the tale of the artist’s 15-year-old Doppelgänger, Yossel, a fictional boy as in love with adventure, comic strips, and drawing as the real-life Joe, albeit living in Hitler’s Poland and not the streets of FDR’s Brooklyn of the early ’40s.

Yossel is an epic told through prose and picture, blocks of lettered text complementing pencil drawings, ultimately giving the reader a feeling of authenticity that otherwise may not have been as strong if expressed through the creator’s usual mode of conventional comic-book storytelling. There’s a hurried quality to the rendering — you can still see the basic outlines

of when Joe’s pencil roughed-out a scene— a style obviously intended to convey an intimacy and urgency, and it’s an approach that works.

It is as if young Yossel, on the sly and during brief moments of respite amidst the Uprising, is scratching out pencil drawings on stolen bits of paper. (It needs to be added that Kubert the mature artist is not aping the work of a talented teenager, but — as always — delivering his artistry in peak form and, in Yossel, his abilities are better than ever.)

The master artist’s method here clearly separates Yossel from Joe’s innumerable other graphic stories of World War Two, and there’s never a hint that Sgt. Rock and his Easy Company could smash onto the scene, fists flyin’ and Tommy guns blazin’, coming to the rescue. No, this is as real a world as Joe has ever attempted, light years away from his Hawkman, Enemy Ace and Tarzan, and Yossel is a commendable graphic novel (if you will) superior even to his last great work, Fax from Sarajevo.

In Yossel, we know it is Joe who is participating in the story, if only through an alter-ego, not just as a friend awaiting word of modern-day atrocities at the other end of a phone facsimile transmission. As remarkable a work as Fax is, Yossel is more the true autobiographical work (odd to say, I know, about a fictional piece, but his earnestness overwhelmingly contradicts), and autobios being the supreme genre in comic books (so says I), Joe might well have blessed his fans — and, importantly, readers from outside the field — with the finest work of his long, laudable and excellent career.

In the end, Joe Kubert will have left this world as truly one of the finest creators — one who has excelled for over 60 years! — this field has ever produced. And as superb a writer and outstanding an artist Joe is, I suspect his legacy as a teacher might just top them all, not only as by instruction at his school or as inspiration for thousands of aficionados, but as a wise teller of tales about human struggle and achievement. Yossel might just be the teacher’s most pertinent lesson of all, inferring us to take a journey in a less-fortunate person’s shoes, seek out the what-might-have-beens, discover the doppelgangers within ourselves, and finally embrace the common humanity in us all.

Well-taught, Mr. K.

fin

Yossel: April 19, 1943. Written & illustrated by Joe Kubert. ibooks, $24.95. ISBN #0-7434-7516-X.

ABOVE: Cover to an advance copy of Joe Kubert’s heartfelt graphic novel (published by Byron Preiss’s ibooks), Yossel: April 19, 1943. ©2003 Joe Kubert.

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Comic Book Chit-Chat Allred in the Family The artist hearthrob on Di, the latest Madman opus, and wonders to come

BY JON B. COOKE/TRANSCRIBED BY STEVEN TICE Comic Book Artist: So what’s all this trouble with Buckingham Palace?

Michael Allred: Well, in the pages of X-Statix, writer Peter Milligan and I have brought Princess Diana back to life and made her a member of our elite, mutant super-team of celebrities. [laughs] It was a natural fit, a brilliant idea coming from Peter and our humble editor, Axel Alonso. It was announced officially fairly recently and then the spit hit the fan. Some people are skeptical about our intentions, and among those is Buckingham Palace, who think we’re just being exploitative, so they declared our intentions as “appalling.” [Editor’s note: Since this interview was conducted in early July, Marvel has decided to omit Princess Di from the storyline.—Y.E.] CBA: Oh, really?

Michael: Having penciled the first two issues and read the scripts for the next two issues (it’s a five-issue arc) — I haven’t seen the last issue — but I know where we’re going with it, and in my opinion, it’s fun and slightly irreverent, slightly disrespectful, but none more so than any disrespectful or irreverence Buckingham Palace ever showed Princess Diana. Ultimately I think it’s very affectionate. In my own opinion, I always admired Di, and I thought she did wonderful things. She very easily could have spent all her time on yachts having make overs or whatever, but she did an amazing amount of charity work, and was an excellent example for millions and millions of people and did a lot of good for millions more.

14 CBA V.2 #2

We can’t even count how many lives she may have saved in her efforts in cleaning up abandoned minefields and the like, where innocent children were being disfigured and murdered long after any war had ended. So I have nothing but respect for her and like to think that wherever she is right now, she’s thinking this is pretty cool, that somebody thought well enough of her that they wanted to turn her into a super-hero. [laughs] CBA: How did this turn into a media circus?

Michael: I think just the concept in and of itself is pretty radical. When we first took that route I thought, “Wow, this should be fun!” I also thought it might generate some interest, but not the kind we see happening.

CBA: Has the major media have been in touch with you?

Michael: Not with me. I’ve tried to stay out of the loop. Peter — normally the more silent of the two of us, but now that’s been reversed — being British makes him clearly the more important spokesman on the concept. So he’s already given quotes to the London Times… I’ve lost track of all the places that he’s spoken out already. I think it’s more his place to do the talking. I’ve given my opinion, which is simply that I like what we’ve done so far, and again, I feel it’s affectionate.

It’s pretty brilliant stuff.

CBA: Di is an actual team member and she interacts and has powers?

Michael: Yeah! There’s a little “poking fun” here and there, but I think there’s a clear admiration and affection for the woman.

CBA: You might recall an early ’60s issue of Action Comics with President John Kennedy in it. This is really not that much different, right?

Michael: It’s funny you should say that, because I just finished inking this Teen Titans one-shot which Titans’ creator Bob Haney wrote, and it has John Kennedy as an intergalactic super-hero. [laughter] That was written months and months ago and nobody knows anything about it. I think it’s ironic and highly coincidental that I

would be involved in both these projects.

CBA: Two martyred, highly charismatic people who died young….

Michael: Yeah, and making fictional accounts of them after their tragic deaths. The Teen Titans project hasn’t even been solicited yet, so it will be interesting to see if people think that one influenced the other. I can tell you that I know for a fact that neither did.

CBA: When did you marry Laura?

Michael: The same year Princess Diana was married, 1981.

CBA: Wow! You’ve been married 22 years?

Michael: Our anniversary is July 22, so yeah, 22 years.

CBA: How many children do you have?

Michael: Three.

CBA: Do any of them work in the field?

Michael: Yes, our oldest son, Han, who’s 18.

CBA: Is he named after Han Solo?

Michael: Um… yes. [laughs] I was a teenager!

I didn’t know better! I think it’s a cool name, and having lived with the name “Mike” my whole life, the last thing I wanted was to give my kids names that, when they were called out for roll call, 14 Mikes shoot up their hands.

CBA: What are your other children’s names?

Michael: Bond (guess who our second son is named after?) [laughter] and for our daughter, we made up her name: Kelby.

ABOVE LEFT: Really fuzzy pic of the “Handsome One,” nabbed from an issue of Madman.

ABOVE INSET: Mike Allred sent Ye Ed this nifty bookplate depicting his creations, The Atomics and Madman. ©2003 Michael Allred.

interacts with rock ’n’ roll history. So my band, The Gear, recorded the concept album to tie in with the comic book and film. That’s why it’s called the Son of Red Rocket 7.

So, having done music and film, I worked it out of my system. While I enjoyed it very much and I could have gone in either of those directions and been happy to commit my life to either, what it did ultimately was clarify that what I wanted to do most was make comic books, and make as many of them to the best of my abilities for the rest of my life. So that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. You can see that after 1997 my productivity in comics has multiplied considerably.

CBA: Collaborations with Peter Milligan notwithstanding, is it the auteur element of comics, that your vision comes through, which is so compelling? Perhaps cartooning and comics are just about the purest art forms.

Michael: That was probably 90% of my decision to devotion to comics, because with both music and film, I needed help on everything.

It was obvious you just couldn’t do everything yourself.

CBA: Unless you’re Orson Welles. [laughs] Michael: Whereas with comics, I could do everything myself if I had to. So it is a clearer, purer vision. Having said that, when my collaboration with Peter Milligan started, it was the first time where I could see myself working with somebody on a long-term basis in a collaborative relationship. I don’t see the end in sight yet. So far, so good. There is a different kind of satisfaction from… As we’re speaking, I’m inking the Madman King-Size Special, which is due out by the end of July, and there’s a completely different kind of satisfaction from doing something which is completely mine.

CBA: Yet, with this Special, aren’t you bringing other people into the process?

Michael: Yes, but I do the main 24-page story.

Then there’s supplementary section and also three eight-page stories done by Nick Derrington, Steven Weissman, and Daniel Krall, respectively.

Han has colored some of those stories.

Coloring is the one aspect of comic books where I absolutely have to collaborate, because I’m colorblind. I need and am fortunate and incredibly blessed to be married to somebody like Laura to fulfill that need. So I guess the collaboration continues. But most collaborations are very pleasant and also educational. I’ve never not learned something from a collaboration.

CBA: So what else is in the future?

A NEW Kirby Comic!?

Captain Victory ©2003 The Estate of Jack Kirby.

Han’s colored several books. In fact, he’s helping Laura on the Teen Titans book and has colored all of The Atomics one-shot specials Oni has released: Mr. Gum and the It Girl special, and stuff like that. He’s also colored a few issues of Madman.

CBA: Is Han working at home with you and Laura?

Michael: Yeah, he’s got his own studio in |the house.

CBA: Are you proud of him?

Michael: Very much. He’s very talented. His mother’s influence is obvious, but Han also has his own style. I can look at two colored pages and tell who colored what. Similar styles, but also very distinct differences. He’s also a very talented musician and he’s got a recording studio.

CBA: Were you an actor?

Michael: Yeah.

CBA: Are you still?

Michael: Not professionally, but Laura, myself, and our daughter Kelby… Kelby was invited to be a Spy Kid in the second Spy Kids movie, so we went down and Laura and I ended up in the film, too. I wouldn’t call that acting, so much. I also have a cameo in the G-Men from Hell film.

I play a bum at the very end of the movie.

CBA: You’re friends with Spy Kids director Robert Rodriguez?

Michael: Yes. CBA: Do you have the film bug in you? Would you like to be more involved in film?

Michael: I DID have the bug. In the mid-’90s, I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to do, where I should devote all of my energies.

That’s why I did the Red Rocket 7 project.

I did a feature film….

This is how I originally got in touch with Robert Rodriguez: Madman had been optioned by Universal Pictures. We approached Robert. He had written this book called Rebel Without a Crew, in which he described how he made his first film, El Mariachi, for $7,000, which then became a hugely successful film release around the same time that Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith respectively broke out. They were the Big Boys at Sundance and they arrived around the same time. That book was a huge inspiration for me, so I made my film using his formula, sent it to him, and we’ve been friends ever since. He was impressed enough to give a quote for the video box. That film was called Astroesque, and it’s a prequel and sequel to my Red Rocket 7 comic book series, which is about an alien clone who

Any true comic book fan knows that the greatest super-hero comic book creator of all time, Jack Kirby passed away nine years ago. And, even by 1994, we hadn’t seen a new comic book from The King of Comics since years before then (the Topps’ “Kirbyverse” titles notwithstanding). So imagine our surprise when Casa CBA received a copy of the “Graphite Edition” of Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #1! Yowza!

While technically most of this material appeared in the first two issues of Jack’s Pacific Comics title in the early ’80s, what makes this a “new” Kirby Komic for Ye Ed is its glorious presentation in Jack’s penciled form (though Mike Royer’s inks on the original issues were awesome, truth to tell) and the re-creation of the giant’s original plans for the project, as a 50-page graphic novel! TwoMorrows Publishing — CBA’s former imprint and, yep, we’re still friendly! — has pulled out all the stops in this superb comic book and we can’t recommend this delectable effort enough!

But don’t expect to find this one in the comic shops, folks! All proceeds from the comic go to the notable effort to preserve thousands of pages of photocopies in the Kirby archives.

(Many were repro’d on thermal-type Xeroxes, which are increasingly fragile and quickly fading.)

We urge you to fight the good fight and get this groovy new comic from the Master by ordering directly from TwoMorrows by mailing $8.00 (postpaid) to 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605 or call (919) 833-8092 or fax (919) 833-8023 or check out their Web site at www.twomorrows.com!

Tell ’em Comic Book Artist sent ya!

ABOVE INSET: Iconic Madman pose by Mike Allred, repro’d from a Dark Horse Madman collection. ©2003 Michael Allred.

15 CBA V.2 #2

Comic Book Chit-Chat

16 CBA V.2 #2

Michael: I’m doing a one-shot with writer Stephen Seagle for Vertigo, called Vertical, and Philip Bond is inking that with me. Shelly Bond is editing. She used to be Shelly Roeberg, actually the first editor I ever had at Comico for the first book I was ever contacted to do, which was written by Stephen Seagle. Because Comico went Chapter 11, that project never came out. So this is like closing a circle in many ways, with the three of us finally able to do a project together.

CBA: What was that Comico project?

Michael: It was called Jaguar Stories. It was actually solicited, but never came out. We did several issues. Nobody knows where any of the artwork is. It’s never been seen since. I don’t want to draw it over again, so we simply started from scratch and came up with a whole new concept. It’s pretty fun. It’s a vertical book, so every time you turn the page you’ll have this incredibly long vertical story. The book itself will be half the width of a comic book, so if you understand, when you turn the page you’re actually looking from top to bottom, but there’ll be…

Imagine a layout the entire length of two vertical comic books. So that’s the kind of format that we’re playing with.

There’s something I’m doing with Evan Dorkin, which I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about yet, for DC Comics. Also, I’ve been approached by DC to do one of their Solo projects, where they’re giving various creators a full book to do anything they want with any or all DC characters and any or all creatorowned characters, all in one book. We’re being encouraged to experiment with different kinds of art styles. It’s just a book where, “Hey, here’s an artist, and we’ve let him do whatever he wants.” I hope to use all the DC characters I ever wanted to. I’ll probably have appearances by Madman and some of my creator-owned characters, as well as new characters.

But the thing that I’m most excited about is what I’ve referred to for a few years now as my “Top Secret Personal Project,” which I’ve been working on in what little spare time I have. Just doing little bits at a time. I think ultimately it will be the most important thing I ever do in my life. I

want to make sure that it’s perfect before I release it.

CBA: No hints?

Michael: Nope, that’s just it. That’s all I’ll say.

CBA: You and Neil Gaiman, I tell ya! [laughter] Michael: I figure it will be out in less than four years. I can’t imagine it taking me any longer than that to finish it.

CBA: It’s a major project in length?

Michael: I’m not sure about — I don’t think length is so much the challenge, it’s just the

significance. I think it has significance. I don’t like being a boastful person, so I risk criticism by saying this, but I would say that it’s my Maus.

It’s as close to a Maus as I could ever imagine myself achieving. Not that I could ever match that achievement, but that’s the kind of significance that I would hope that it would hold when it’s done.

CBA: Is there any progress made on the Madman film?

Michael: Yeah, we’re actually kind of in “wait” mode right now, because Robert has just finished Spy Kids 3, and last we talked, Madman would be the next film. But Robert is constantly generating ideas, so I don’t know. That’s kind of what we’re waiting to see, if it in fact will be the next one he does. And if it is, based on how much involvement

I have with the film will determine how soon any of these other projects get out.

CBA: What’s up with AAA Pop? Is Oni pretty much taking over the publishing of The Atomics material?

Michael: Yes. We call it “co-publishing,” but truth be told, they’ve simply taken all of that burden from me. The AAA Pop logo is shared with the Oni Press logo, which I’m grateful for, because from a creative standpoint, what they receive is the completed book on a computer disc, but they’re doing all the legwork as far as solicitation, promotion and printing.

CBA: You’re pretty much using Oni to sell your material?

Michael: Yes. They’re a great company I’m very proud to be associated with and to be friends with them. I’d do anything for them, and am thrilled they’ve done so much for me, so it works out quite nicely.

CBA: Reading anything these days that you particularly enjoy?

Michael: Well, I just picked up that JSA All-Stars issue which had really cool Darwyn Cooke “Doctor Fate” story in the back inspired

by Howard Sherman’s original stories. That was very cool. I’m reading a lot of old stuff. I bought the DC Challengers of the Unknown Archive with all the Jack Kirby artwork.

I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve been enjoying Catwoman even though Darwyn and I are off it.

[Jon laughs] But Javier Pulido is really good. I’ve been enjoying Batgirl: Year One, which I think is really good.

CBA: Do you work a healthy schedule or is it just crazy?

Michael: Healthier. I’ve been taking on inkers lately. Originally it was kind of stressful, because I’m not used to people inking my stuff, although it has happened. I’m protective that way. But it’s actually been joyful and it’s taken a lot of the pressure off me, and has actually increased the quality of my pencils, because knowing I wasn’t going to ink it myself, I’ve built more into it. All in all, it’s really turning out nice. Philip Bond inks X-Statix #12 and J. Bone is inking the Princess Diana arc. I’ve been really happy. It also allowed

ABOVE: Peter Milligan & Mike Allred’s mutant team, the X-Statix made the scene in this cover detail from their first issue (Sept. 2002). ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

me time to finish Madman, and I think because of that, this is probably the best-looking Madman book I’ve done in years. I’ve put a lot of effort into the inks and pencils, just everything. It’s got a fun structure. There’s actually two inner dialogues taking place at the same time. One more of a surface dialogue and more prone to discussing the events taking place, and the other one is deeper, almost spiritual, inner dialogue, that also comments on but also contradicts the events taking place as you’re reading it. So it’s very simple and solid storytelling, but it’s also got an extra layer of complexity to it that I’m really excited about.

CBA: Do you have unending plans for Madman?

Is he always going to be around?

Michael: Yes. Since the regular comic book series is all but officially ended, I now I’m allowing myself the luxuries of Specials when and how I can do them, this being the first. It’s kind of odd, because after the original three-issue series, what I’m doing now is kind of what I was planning to do then, to have kind of Tin Tin-inspired formats, self-contained adventures.

CBA: Album kinds of thing?

Michael: Yes, because when we were still at Tundra, they weren’t married to the traditional comic-book format. When they decided that that was irresponsible and that they did, to some extent, have to live by the traditional pamphlet comic book, we then split up the first album and made it a two-part comic book. It was originally a 64-page one-shot; it became two 32-page issues. So this is more in the mood and tone what I originally wanted, for each issue to be like a special event. Although now, with these other really cool talents that make it kind of almost an annual kind of feel, like a classic — CBA: Eighty-Page Giant?

Michael: Yeah, like a Batman 80-Page Giant. Or in the ’70s, when DC was releasing the DC 100-Page Super Spectaculars? You’d have a brand-new story like that Alex Toth story where Batman is battling the bi-plane…

CBA: “Ghost of the Killer Skies.”

Michael: Yeah! Then the rest of the issue.

So you’ve got this new, big, meaty story, but then a lot of these classic reprints. Here we don’t have those 100 pages, but we also have all-new stories. [laughs] But it’s fun, I was really excited about it, and the whole package. The cover, which I just sent out, I think is one of the best covers I’ve ever done. It’s very simple and bold. I’m just having a great time.

CBA: Is it really coming at the end of July?

Michael: Well, I sure hope so! [laughs] CBA: Can you work that tight? I mean, it’s almost July Fourth right now…

Michael: I had two issues to get done on X-Statix, which allowed me a little breathing room since I didn’t have to immediately ink them myself. Peter supplied me with the next two scripts, so

I’m going to do that again and marathon them. I go out to the West Coast where we have a small house, where I’m there all by myself and that’s all I do. I almost go into a trance, and that’s all I do is just draw. Draw… eat… sleep… draw… eat… sleep until it’s all done. What it’s done is it’s allowed me to have more time to increase the quality of my work and also to carve out some vacation time. So we’re actually going to go on a week-long family vacation next month.

CBA: Where are you going to go?

Michael: Well, we’re kind of knocking that around. Last time we had a vacation, we went to Hawaii, but that’s why we ended up buying this lake property on the Coast, because we figured we could do that anytime we wanted to for far less than what we had to spend to go to Hawaii.

With the exception of the scuba-diving among tropical fish, everything that we did do there we can do out at the Coast.

CBA: And you go as an entire family?

Michael: Yeah. Well, not when I’m out there drawing, then I’m by myself.

CBA: Is it a comic book house? Are all you guys into comics? I get this mental vision of Laura coming in with her exceptional coloring and then Han rushing in to have you check his work…

What’s it like in the Allred household?

Michael: It’s a mini-art gallery. Both homes have walls just jammed with original art. I have most of the Madman art that various talents did when they did their renditions of Madman for the trading cards and gallery sets, so you can see all that on the walls. I’ve built bookshelves… I built one bookshelf which is like a secret passage, it slides out like in Young Frankenstein.

CBA: “Put the candle beck!” [laughter] Michael: I’ve become handy and built a lot of things like that. I built a library full of about every art book you can think of. That’s why I like the books like the DC Archives and the Marvel Masterworks, because it’s a way to justify having all these bookshelves, to have things on the shelves that look nice. I’ve even made slipcases to put comic books in when they’re not in the collection so I can put those on shelves as well. Of all the hundreds and hundreds of comics I have, I have very few of them in bags. They’re either lying out and around where I can grab them in an instant, or they’re in a slipcase of somehow available on a shelf.

CBA: You’re a sick, sick man. [laughter] In one of these secret passageways do you have a portrait that ages while you don’t? [laughs] Michael: Yes, I do actually. How’d you know that? [laughter] CBA: [Make rimshot noise] Are you doing any shows this season?

Michael: Nope. It’s all about getting the work done. I don’t think I’ll be doing any shows for the foreseeable future. I love-love-LOVE talking to people, love answering questions, love asking questions of people who read our work, what they like, what they dislike, if anything inspired them. I love that interaction, but I’ve found the bigger shows just are not the place to do that anymore. So the next shows I do will most likely be Portland or San Francisco like WonderCon, where it’s a little more intimate. You just can’t have that kind of exchange when you’ve got people shoving people through in lines. Those experiences I do not like. What I dislike even more are people who don’t even know who I am or are not familiar with my work as they throw a sketchbook down in front of me just like trying to meet a quota or something. It’s stressful. “Here, perform, monkey!

Draw me a purty picture!” [laughs] CBA: “Whoever you are.”

Michael: Exactly!

CBA: “And make it snappy, mister!”

Michael: That trend really kicked in in the past four or five years, and it’s one I do not like at all.

fin

ABOVE: Va-Va-Va-Voom! It’s the “It Girl” from Mike Allred’s retro-style super-hero team, The Atomics. Cover detail from #3, (Mar. 2000). ©2003 Michael Allred.

17 CBA V.2 #2

A. DaViD’s Watching Where Have You Gone,

Harvey Pekar?

A look at the “reality” behind Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor

18 CBA V.2 #2

BY A. DAVID, CBA VIDEO REVIEWER Harvey Pekar looks exhausted. With the white-hot light of the HBO camera crew searing his drooping face, he glances down at his melting snow cone, grumbling his reply. Next to him, Joyce Brabner, his wife, stands silent, seemingly poised to defend her husband against this public relations onslaught. Behind them, in the big room of a stark but trendy Manhattan nightclub, HBO is throwing a lavish party for the premiere of American Splendor, an inventive film based on Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic book of the same name. On this hot August night, the place is full of actors you’d recognize but whose names you’d never place — the bald Jewish guy from Sex In the City, the wife of the guy who owns that Italian restaurant in The Sopranos, the sicko who raped and killed Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry and Frodo’s buddy Sam from Lord of the Rings.

The party’s theme is Cleveland, Harvey’s hometown and the setting for the movie.

On the brick walls, a slide show of Cleveland “landmarks,” a collection of factories and industrial complexes which appears as dull as I could ever imagine the Ohio city to be. A writer who I follow into the party and who’d grown up in Cleveland himself supplies me with a running commentary.

“That river there, burst into flames one summer when I was a kid, and it took them forever to put it out. Pollution.” Waiters and waitresses (in American Splendor T-shirts) snake through the crowd hoisting platters of hot dogs, pizzas, snow cones and orange soda mixed drinks.

Even White Castle, the mini-hamburger chain, has its own stand. Clearly, in promoting Pekar’s cinematic life, HBO spares no expense.

American Splendor is the kind of movie that HBO does best. It is a crime, that in the almost 25 years since Easy Rider, only HBO consistently produces movies which tell uniquely compelling human stories. No other American film production company has made the commitment to personal vision as HBO has. That being said, it’s also a crime that American Splendor won Sundance this year. As good as the movie might be, how could a film financed by the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world (HBO is owned by AOL Time Warner) be considered an independent film?

It’s a smack in the face to every struggling filmmaker who’s ever been subjected to script notes from a “film buff” dentist investor. You might as well argue that the latest Project Greenlight movie (documented in an HBO series) is REALLY made for a million bucks. Even a movie as small and personal as American Splendor cost three times as much.

But Hollywood is the land of illusionary delusion. Look at reality TV. It’s a mass manipulation of the truth for the sake of manufactured drama. Instead of telling it as it is, it tells it in a convenient promotable package. It’s not messy and incoherent the way life and Pekar’s stories sometimes are. And that, right there, is my disappointment with American Splendor. Like reality TV, writer/directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer can’t play it straight. Clearly they feared that if they told Harvey’s life and art, as it

was laid out in the comic book, episodic and teeming with minutiae, then they’d be rewarded with an audience of maybe five people (all from Cleveland). Even Robert Crumb (a friend of Harvey’s who had his own film treatment, a documentary called Crumb) himself admitted this predicament in his introduction of a collection of Splendor stories — “Pekar has proven once and for all that even the most seemingly dreary and monotonous of lives is filled with heroic struggle.

All it takes is someone with an eye to see, an ear to hear, and a demented, desperate Jewish mind to get it down on paper...while Pekar’s work is highly respected in certain intellectual circles, it’s definitely not very commercial.”

Pulcini and Springer seemed compelled to sex up the story, create a dramatic device whereby the film cuts between Paul Giamatti, the actor playing Harvey Pekar, and Harvey himself (bitterly commenting on his own sad predicaments). With this admittedly unique approach, they get the best of both worlds by including the real eccentric Harvey while condensing his life events to hang a movie plot on. In theory, it’s a pretty smart move. And in the long run, it’ll probably sell more tickets too.

Problem is, dramatically, the result is a movie that’s severely disjointed. Anytime the real Harvey is on screen, I couldn’t help but want to hang with him, not Giamatti. Within the conceit of this structure, film “reality” is irrevocably compromised which in turn shatters the cinematic illusion.

Don’t get me wrong: Giamatti is a great actor who plays the movie Harvey certainly more

LEFT: Harvey Pekar bobblehead toy sent out with American Splendor press kit. Courtesy of and ©2003 Fine Line Features.

TOP: Harvey Pekar in American Splendor. Photo by John Clifford/HBO. Courtesy of and © 2003 Fine Line Features.

proficiently than any other actor could. But when you get right down to it, Harvey himself makes a better Harvey.

He’s a guy you love to watch because you aren’t quite sure if he’s gonna spontaneously combust right there in front of you. And truth be told, you kinda hope he will because it’ll be great to see and an awesome story to tell all your friends. Harvey threatens you merely by his presence. And, as good as Giamatti is, you never feel he could really hurt you.

I mean, Harvey, he’s one mean mo fo.

Next to Crispin Glover, he’s the only other guy who ever came close to kicking David Letterman’s ass on air (Pekar was a semi-regular guest on Letterman’s NBC show until the legendary crank flamedout in a blaze of self-destruction).

You can’t help but hope, now with Harvey’s reemergence in the public eye, that someone at Late Night will see the entertainment value in a live televised rematch (now that’s reality TV worth setting the TiVo for).

So, is American Splendor a bad movie? Well, it sure ain’t The Hulk, not by a long shot. (The big green fellow was a piece of pretentious, humorless CGI ca-ca). And by the standard of this summer’s mind numbing retreads, Splendor is both a breath of fresh air and really fun to watch. There are even some truly brilliant moments, as when Harvey tells the oh so simple story of his discovery of other Harvey Pekar’s in the Cleveland phone book (taken straight out of the pages of American Splendor #2 — illustrated by R. Crumb). His exchanges with his co-worker Toby (a seemingly functioning autistic played

magnificently by Judah Friedlander) are truly priceless.

Toby is surely one of the most unique and original characters to come down the pike this year. His love of White Castle burgers, Revenge of the Nerds, and his cutthrough-the-bullshit advice to Harvey provides the movie a fine relief to Pekar’s all-consuming self-absorption.

At the premiere party, oddly mimicking the movie itself, the real Toby mingles alongside the movie Toby. Not far away, Paul Giamatti talks to friends near where Harvey is being interviewed by the HBO PR crew. The cancer is back, my friend tells me, as we watch Harvey and Joyce from a safe distance.

The couple chronicled Harvey’s first bout in his comic book Our Cancer Year, (on which part of the film is based) and now years later, the disease has returned.

Despite this setback, you realize this is a guy so tough he’s gonna outlive us all. C’mon, I mean he’s Harvey Pekar, for gosh sake.

My mind wanders back to something Crumb wrote about Harvey: “There is drama in the most ordinary and routine of days, but it’s the subtle things that get lost in the shuffle.”

When Harvey publishes My Movie Year, I’ll be the first on line to see what bizarre little details he pulls from this big overblown premiere party, which celebrates his simple and cranky existence.

LEFT INSET: Hope Davis as Joyce Brabner in American Splendor.

LEFT: Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar.

Pics by John Clifford/HBO. Courtesy of and ©2003 Fine Line Features.

fin

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

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

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

BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

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

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

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

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#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

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

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

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

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Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes

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

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#12: CHARLTON PART 2

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983!

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

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

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

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

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

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

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

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

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#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

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

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

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

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

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

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#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

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

New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

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

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

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

HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

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

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

Previously available only to CBA subscribers!

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

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

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $4.95

Irving on the Inside Flying High with Rags A conversation about the superb stylings of Hawkman artist Rags Morales

22 CBA V.2 #2

BY CHRIS IRVING Rags Morales first gained notice as a penciler on DC Comics’ short-lived Black Condor series in 1992, an attempt to revive the Quality Comics character once drawn by the legendary Lou Fine.

His work also appeared in various issues of Valiant/Acclaim’s Turok comic book, with him returning to DC for the Hourman series in the late ’90s. Upon the cancellation of Hourman, Rags realistic, classically drawn pencils are now gracing the newest Hawkman ongoing title, with writing by Geoff Johns and inks by Mike Bair. A diverse artist whose work has evolved in strides from Black Condor to his current winged hero, Morales agreed to an interview in June 2003. This brief interview was copy-edited by Rags —C.I. Chris Irving: How did you land the Hawkman gig?

Rags Morales: Through Hourman, really. I had done that JSA crossover with Hourman, around #19, and it caught the eye of Stephen Sadowski.

So when they needed a fill-in artist on JSA at the end of the Hourman run, [DC editor] Peter Tomasi gave me a call and said, “Do you think you can go ahead and do this work?” I said, “Great, I don’t have work coming up, and Hourman’s being cancelled.”

Peter became familiar with me, and I was one of the people he was considering for the new Hawkman book. He thought Mike Bair and I did such wonderful work together, and it seemed appropriate that he and I would continue. We had the option of doing the JSA title or doing Hawkman. Bair said, “I’m a little burned out on JSA, and would like to do something else for a while.” So we took Hawkman.

Chris: Was Hawkman a character you had been very familiar with?

Rags: I grew up with the old Justice League of America comics during the ’70s, the Dick Dillon penciled-books with Frank McLaughlin inking, as well as the Lou Fine “Black Condor” reprints.

Hourman was a completely different animal, since I didn’t see much that had been done before him.

Chris: There were the stories by Bernie Bailey.

Rags: Yeah, there was Bernie Bailey and Murphy Anderson [Showcase #55 & 56]. But, because of book’s concept, he was a New God, and New

Gods were Kirby, so you had to rethink everything.

I mixed what Val Semeiks did in JLA: One Million and a little bit of the New Gods approach. When I came up with the costume design, I was thinking in terms of Kirby. From there, I started drawing to the best of my ability. When I found out who my inker was, I tried to adjust my pencil style to my inker, which is probably why my work looks different from title to title.

Chris: I suppose some pencilers see the inker as a member of a support staff?

Rags: They’re the final word, the last person as far as the linework goes, and you can’t dismiss that. I prefer a guy like Mike Bair, who is the best inker I’ve ever worked with. I like him because he takes an illustrator’s point of view; he and I have the same influences. We have sat there for hours and hours, having conversations just based on ideas, and that’s refreshing. We really symbiotic that way, even so much as to discuss what type of paper or brush we should use. I’m very laborintensive anyway and I want my inker to be comfortable with me. In the end, I want them to feel like they’ve actually contributed to the work, and I’ve gone out of my way to help them get there.

Chris: More than a tracer?

Rags: Absolutely. I give them everything there, and they can either trace (because I have it all there for them) or go ahead and do things from their own point of view. What works for them, works for me. If it’s a better piece in the end...

Chris: What about the setting of St. Roch in Hawkman? It seems a cipher for New Orleans.

Rags: It really does address the life and death thing, doesn’t it? St. Roch is a very old, living/dead type of city, and we’ve got two living/dead heroes.

There’s a mysticism there that works, and adds more to the mystery of the title. Where Midway City was a very clean and snazzy city, St. Roch is very ancient, as is Hawkman. I think it works out very well.

We just developed a character called Headhunter, who comes out in #20. I just finished drawing his first full appearance. I called Geoff with an idea and he and I came up with what eventually became Headhunter. It comes from

Talking Heads’ tune called “Swamp.”

The opening line goes, “Let me tell you a story/The devil he has a plan/A bag of bones in his pocket/Anything you want.” I was thinking it would be cool to have someone walking around with a bag of bones, and he takes a bone, throws it to the ground, and — poof! — the zombie of that person appears. It’s like he has a bunch of dead people in his hand.

Headhunter can actually have an army in a bag. We were looking at the Rogue’s Gallery of Hawkman, which Mike thought was kind of thin.

You’ve got Matter Master, Hath Set, and Shadow Thief. There’s no Joker to Hawkman’s Batman.

Chris: Shadow Thief, the ’60s Hawkman villain.

Rags: How intimidating is he? He’s a guy who can melt into the shadows. Okay, great. Headhunter is a character we’re trying to make into that one character Hawkman is afraid of, one who represents death. You would think that a hero who is reincarnated isn’t afraid of death. But this villain can take you before you’re ready to go. When you have this whole relationship between Kendra and Carter, and the fact that they are and aren’t... when these things that matter to us in life are unresolved, these are the things we’re afraid of leaving when we die. Like not coming to a resolution with the person you were angry who dies.

Even if Hawkman can come back, he can’t control how or where he comes back to. With that in mind, and not having resolved anything with Kendra, I think it would be a very scary situation for him to die prematurely. That’s what Headhunter represents to Hawkman: A guy who can eliminate all Hawkman’s carefully laid plans. You make plans and goals to meet, because you have a limited time to do them in, before you die.

Chris: How has Hawkman been received?

Rags: Geoff has this goal of getting it past 33 issues, since there hasn’t been any Hawkman title that has gotten past #33. The most I’ve ever done of a book is 20 issues of Hourman, so I’m going to see if I can get Hawkman up into the 30s.

TOP: Detail of Rag Morales’ double-page spread in Hawkman #1 (May 2002). Inks by Michael Blair. ©’03 DC Comics.

fin

Re: Views THE SILVER AGE OF COMIC BOOK ART

’60s psychedelic concert posters with overblown repros of Steve Ditko Doctor Strange panels from Strange Tales.

Often playful — such as the designer’s audacious use of Jack Kirby Fantastic Four head shots “relit” to mimic the classic Meet the Beatles album cover photography (the spread is titled, natch, “The First Fab Four”!) — usually reverent, and always explosive, Schumer’s spreads are pure dynamite, always surprising, quite clever and consistently appropriate. The author obviously loves this stuff, whether Jack Kirby’s bombastic machinery or the moody despair of Steve Ditko, and his passion for the medium evident on every page.

But you won’t be shortchanged when it comes to the content — text-wise, that is — as Schumer weaves in the subject’s own words (culled from whatever interviews exist in the fan press) among his insightful discussion of said artist’s impact on the field. Still, as with the subject discussed, words are only part of the equation: It’s the graphics that hammer-home the prose, the brilliant and sophisticated collages which really tell the whole story. This, quite frankly, is Real Thing, baby. — Jon B. Cooke

by Arlen Schumer Collectors Press, $29.95 (s/c), $49.95 (deluxe h/c) ISBNs #1-888054-85-9 (s/c), 1-888054-86-7 (h/c) Two confessions: First, this isn’t nearly adequate space to give this mind-blowing coffee-table extravaganza its due — hopefully next issue we’ll feature an excerpt — and, second, I admit to being a close friend of the author, cozy enough to have written the book’s jacket copy as a favor (even as I was suffering from a hellacious bout of late summer bronchitis). So, prejudiced in favor of the art tome’s success or not, I must unabashedly exclaim that this is an extraordinarily beautiful book, detailing the achievements of eight of the mainstream’s finest artists — Carmine Infantino, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Gene Colan, Jim Steranko, and (of course, as Arlen Schumer is probably the world’s leading authority on our last creator) Neal Adams — and a history book unlike few others ever seen.

Y’see, while the writer has a breezy, intelligent and commanding approach in his writing, his even greater ability is that of a designer. And, here in the pages of The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, Schumer has designed the hell out of Infantino and Company, expertly melding classic images in complementary arrangements, startlingly juxtaposing contemporaneous artifacts such as late

IN SEARCH OF A MONKEY SUIT Anthology by Various Monkeysuit Press, $9.95 ISBN #0-9673289-8-5 Anthologies are frustrating little things. For if — as Sturgeon’s Law suggests — 90% of everything is trash, then the anthology editor has the unenviable task of finding the 10% that is not trash, sorting through it, and collecting the best of it.

Thankfully, the good folks at Monkeysuit have been doing this for several years now, and Monkeysuit Volume Four: In Search of Monkeysuit maintains the high standards of preceding volumes. Some past Monkeysuit favorites are present and accounted for; though the absence of Bill Presing and Matt Peters’s delightfully over-the-top “Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher” and Enrico Casarosa’s Miyazaki-inspired “Mia” is felt somewhat. (One longs for their return in Volume Five.) But the creators who have shown up to play are clearly still having a very good time, and it shows in such strips as Miguel Martinez-Joffre’s “Atomic Shelter” and Doc Hammer’s Cronenbergesque “The Flesh Pocket.” Most of

the Monkeysuit roster has worked in animation, and the series continues to possess an Adult Swim sensibility, albeit with significantly more visual flair. It’s hard to think of a regular anthology so consistently entertaining, or one that wastes so little of its reader’s time.—Joe McCabe

BERLIN #10

by Jason Lutes Drawn & Quarterly, $3.50 Spotlighting the tensions and freedoms of late 1920s Berlin, Jason Lutes weaves a complex study of a complex city during complex times.

The initial focus on a newly arrived art student permitted a liberal outlook from the off, and Berlin has grown to encompass a broad sweep of intriguing characters with wildly differing agendas. This current issue, for instance, adds depth to AfricanAmerican Johnny, visiting the city with his jazz band. Lutes’ research is thorough, and his art is clear, expressive and detailed, but this is obviously a graphic novel in progress with few concessions made to readers encountering the sadly now annual individual issues. Have a flick through the collection, then jump on board for

an unsettling but compelling tale. — Frank Plowright

life in the Marvel Universe is just, after all, confined inside a comic book. Fun stuff! —JBC

ALIAS #24-27

by Brian Bendis & Michael Gaydos Marvel Comics, $2.99 per issue Red-hot comics writer Brian Michael Bendis is clearly having a whopping good time playing in Marvel’s superhero playground — albeit in their “explicit content” imprint, MAX Comics, in this instance — and nowhere is his joie de vive more evident than in Alias. The current story arc, “Purple,” will close out the series (apparently to be relaunched after #28 as The Pulse in coming months) and in the first four installments, Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos (with flashback sequences drawn by BMB’s Ultimate SpiderMan collaborator, Mark Bagley) explore the super-heroic past of Jessica Jones, now a private investigator specializing in cases involving costumed characters. And what a romp it is! The writer’s knack for snappy, realistic dialogue is going full-throttle as BMB reveals that Jessica’s nemesis, an obscure old Marvel villain called “The Purple Man,” has the insight to realize that

PROJECT: TELSTAR Anthology by Various AdHouse Books, $16.95 ISBN #0-9721794-2-9 If you’ve been looking for the perfect book to read while listening to The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, your search is over. Chris Pitzer’s AdHouse Books has released its first anthology title. More specific in theme than Monkeysuit (and generally more poignant in tone) Project: Telstar chooses to focus on robots and outer space. AdHouse’s previous claim to fame was Joel Priddy’s Ignatz Award-winning Pulpatoon Pilgrimage, and this book should serve to broaden the publisher’s appeal. With it’s eye-catching Dave Cooper cover and black-&-white-&metallic blue interiors, this is a pretty snazzy package, one that would look as at home at Urban Outfitters (Don’t laugh — mine carries Drawn and Quarterly!) as it would at the local comics shop. Unsurprisingly, Priddy’s “Long Slow Flight of the Ashbot” is a standout winner, although Bernie

TOP: Cover of Arlen Schumer ’60s history of funnybooks, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art. All characters ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

23 CBA V.2 #2

Mireault and Sam Hester also contribute noteworthy tales. This is certainly one of the best-designed anthologies around.—JMcC

people. He manages to actually draw their motion, their movement. So you feel the movement — it’s not a description of movement, it is the movement.”

ONE BLOODY YEAR: FALL One only has to read the first page

by Michael Lacombe of this album to understand what Michael Lacombe Illustration, $5.30 McKean’s talking about. Mattotti presents Hyde as a shadow, an invisiMichel Lacombe’s comic work has been sparing, but characterized by a ble force of no finite shape or size; density of plot and art that avoids the gliding through a city populated with static quality often endowed by over- half-formed men and bestial women, each a reflection of Jekyll’s tormentreliance on photo reference. ed psyche. Using every tool the mediLacombe is dealing with vampires here, an unsavory bunch behaving in um offers — color, composition, timing — Mattotti explores Evil in a way the uninhibited manner of those most comics artists wouldn’t dare. knowing themselves above redress.

Highly recommended.—JMcC Newly converted vampire Geoffrey Connor is the exception, retaining human sensibilities and brutalized by SENTINEL #1-6

by Sean McKeever & Udon Studios the vampire gang led by the former Marvel Comics, $2.50 per issue nerd who coveted Connor’s high Marvel’s line of manga-styled comics is hardly a collective artistic triumph, but Sentinel is a diamond in the rough. The art by Udon Studios has that animated feel, complete with blurred effects for movement, and JACK STAFF #1-4

by Paul Grist Sean McKeever’s talent for writing Image Comics, $2.95 per issue endearing high school soap opera (see The Waiting Place) is well Talented artist-writer Paul Grist’s applied here. Outcast Juston Seyfert relaunched series starring “Britain’s stumbles across the wreck of a giant greatest hero,” Jack Staff, is an robot Sentinel. Socially awkward, absolute delight, even better now in Juston is mechanically adept, and color than the (soon-to-be collected begins to the see the robot as the

by Image) Dancing Elephant Press solution to his school problems. High original 12-issue black-&-white run.

Bedecked à là Captain America in the school drama is an obvious genre to a U.K. Union Jack costume, the char- market to teenage comic fans, but it’s not been attempted by a major acter jaunts about the English countryside battling villains reminiscent of American comics publisher for early ’60s Marvel Comics — that is to decades. The disaffected teenager now buried deep within you should say, Grist’s approach is full of charm enjoy Sentinel.—FP and energy, likeable to the extreme.

Every time a major character is introTHE WOLVES duced (which is every couple of IN THE WALLS pages or so), the artist-writer gives

by Dave McKean us a full-blown splash page, custom HarperCollins, $16.99 logo and all, reminding this reviewer ISBN #0-380-97827-X of those great old Atlas monster stoAnd speaking of Dave McKean: Upon ries by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Wherever Grist is going, I’m in for the the release of McKean’s first children’s picture book, The Day I ride, all the way. —JBC Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (written by longtime collaborator Neil DR. JEKYLL Gaiman), Darcy Sullivan in The AND MR. HYDE Comics Journal remarked, “While

by Lorenzo Mattotti NBM Publishing, $15.95 Gaiman has pared his style down, ISBN #1-56163-330-5 McKean has not been moved by this impulse… McKean backgrounds This English-language translation of each illustration with layers of color, Italian comics maestro Lorenzo photos, found illustrations, newspaMattotti’s adaptation of the Robert per strips, paper scraps and, it Louis Stevenson horror classic isn’t seems, any piece of crap he could exactly new — NBM released it find. It looks great, if wildly oversometime last year — but seeing as how it recently won the Eisner Award done.” Whether or not one agrees with Sullivan’s assessment of (for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material), this may be as good a time Goldfish, it’s clear that McKean has, as any to sing its praises. Cages cre- in fact, pared his style down for ator Dave McKean once remarked, “I Wolves. Warm beige walls adorn a family’s home before the titular think the best comics artist who’s ever been is Lorenzo Mattotti… I just wolves appear; while ghastly bleached beige paper is used to think he’s in a league of his own. He manages to draw the essence of the depict those same walls after the school girlfriend. The high price is justified by 40 story pages, and this is an intriguing study of character under extreme duress.—FP

24 CBA V.2 #2

wolves have come out of them.

McKean’s trademark photo collage is still used to good effect, but there’s a deliberate color scheme at work that serves to control any background from getting out of hand. Best of all, Wolves in the Walls is, essentially, comics, with some very discreet word balloons and some highly expressive lettering. As such, it’s a perfect way to introduce young children to the medium.—JMcC

Monkeybrain, Inc. And it’s an excellent start for the fledgling publisher.

Though it’s title may suggest otherwise, the book comes fully endorsed

by League co-creator Alan Moore, who goes so far as to call it “an important part of this vast, imaginary global edifice we’re constructing, and will certainly be an invaluable guide to any reader, no matter how knowledgeable they may like to think themselves.”

Nevins’s book originated from his MY UNCLE JEFF extensive website, devoted to annoby Damon Hurd & Pedro Camello tating every panel of the League’s Alternative Comics, $3.95 first series. And he’s poured it all into Well done, Alternative Comics, for Heroes and Monsters, including a bringing this originally self-published running commentary by League co“picture novella” to a wider audicreator Kevin O’Neill and an introducence. Damon Hurd writes a touching tion by — and interview with — consideration of his Uncle Jeff, the Moore, who offers numerous clues as family misfit and a man many would to what lies ahead for the League. consider a loser. Hurd doesn’t gloss Nevins (who’s currently annotating over Jeff’s problems, but for him a the League’s second series) has an considerate nature outweighs social encyclopedic knowledge of Victorian status. Hurd concentrates on one — hell, any kind of — literature, side of his lineage, but tantalizes with which no doubt benefits from his the dark stories mentioned in his run background as a librarian, but his through of the opposite family tree. book thunders with the crazy heartQuite remarkably, artist Pedro beat of comic-book love. Heroes and Camello worked without any photo Monsters really is essential for anyreference, yet imbues the cast with one who cherishes Moore’s work. It’s the humanity and character required the best kind of companion — one by the script. All in all, a very pleasant that fully enriches the original text. surprise indeed.—FP —JMcC

THOR: VIKINGS #1-3

by Garth Ennis & Glenn Fabry Marvel Comics, $3.50 per issue Another MAX title of note — this one a five-issue mini-series — is the wildly violent and audacious Thor: Vikings, scribed with sadistic glee by Garth Ennis and lushly rendered by detail-oriented artist, Glenn Fabry.

The premise is simple: What if “reallife” Vikings — albeit a 1,000-year-old band of warriors endowed with supernatural powers, as well as rotting flesh — were to engage presentday New York City and Marvel’s God of Thunder. Oh my, what carnage they wreck on both the city and our hero, in an apocalyptic onslaught not dissimilar to Alan Moore’s destruction of London in his Miracleman #16. I can’t tell where this one’s going with the third issue slowing down a bit but the introduction of the female Viking wannabe raider, Sigrid, is a cool and unexpected twist. Keep an eye out for the inevitable collection. —JBC

HEROES & MONSTERS: THE UNOFFICIAL COMPANION TO THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN

by Jess Nevins Monkey Brain, $18.95 ISBN #932265-04-X Jess Nevins’s Heroes and Monsters is the debut release from Chris Roberson and Allison Baker’s new

AMERICAN SPLENDOR: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HARVEY PEKAR

by Harvey Pekar & various artists Random House, $15.95 ISBN #0-345-46830-9 With the award-winning film version of American Splendor making a splash (and not just in the shallow wading pool of comics-to-film adaptations), Random House has released this collection of Pekar’s first two books, themselves collecting the early stories of his American Splendor comic book series. Pekar’s slice-of-life storytelling is patient, observant, and charmingly scruffy; and he’s ably assisted by R. Crumb — who’s art here is, no surprise, flat-out wonderful — and various other illustrators. It’s interesting to observe how Pekar helped lay the foundation for today’s autobiographical comics, and paved the way for wry observers like Dan Clowes (at my local Barnes and Noble, Pekar and Clowes can now huddle for warmth in a blizzard of manga and super-hero titles). Even if the extraordinary film version of Splendor (you have seen it, haven’t you?) should fail at the box office, its release will have been worthwhile if only for the fact that it provided an opportunity to get these tales back into print. And, yeah, the film’s DVD release, when viewed with Crumb and Ghost World, will make for a pretty funky movie marathon.—JMcC

fin

25 Be sure to read Fred Hembeck’s strip in The Comic Buyer’s Guide. ©2003 Fred Hembeck.

CBA V.2 #2

26 CBA V.2 #2

THIS SPREAD: Alex submitted this outstanding image for the cover for the first volume of the Marvel Encyclopedia, though the House of Ideas used only the Hulk and Spider-Man for the published book. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Alex Ross. Characters ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ALEX ROSS SKETCHBOOK

27

CBA

V.2 #2

Six-year-old Alex Ross renders a battle between Electro and SpiderMan in this previously unpublished 1976 sketch, courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2003 Alex Ross. Characters ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

28 CBA V.2 #2

Alex drew this pin-up of Doctor Fate in 1985 or ’86. “This shows more of my George Pérez-clone style at that time,” Alex said. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Alex Ross.

Doctor Fate ©2003 DC Comics

The Dark Knight, with Alex’s description written on the reverse, seen below.

Catchy name! “This specifically relates to my discussion [in last issue’s interview] talking about Shadow Lass and her influence on my character ideas.

Drawn in 1979 at the age of nine. Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Alex Ross

NEXT PAGE TOP: At age 16, the artist tackled this ambitious editorializing pin-up in 1986. “It was hot on the heels of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I was relating to my Pérez influence with a sense of humor about the series’ repercussions.” Previously unpublished. Courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2003 Alex Ross. Characters ©2003 DC Comics.

BELOW: NOW Comics ad promoting Alex Ross’s first pro comic-book assignment, the Terminator: The Burning Earth mini-series. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

ABOVE: During his first professional gig at a Chicago ad agency, young Alex Ross produced a series of comps for a proposed Miller Lite beer commercial featuring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

29 CBA V.2 #2

ABOVE AND RIGHT: Final pencils and thumbnail respectively for the Anthrax We’ve Come For You All CD cover.”The band specifically wanted to be featured like heroic figures, so that’s why they sought me out.” Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Alex Ross.

LEFT: Pencils to Rob Leifeld’s Family Supreme.

“The final printing only appeared as a Dynamic Forces litho as the series had suddenly stopped publication. I only took on the assignment because of Alan Moore, who had been writing the series, but he would have nothing more to do with Rob.” Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Alex Ross. Characters ©2003 Awesome Entertainment, Inc

30 CBA V.2 #2

LEFT: Alex proposed this interior illustration to Wizard magazine for an article speculating on a cross-over of the artist’s respective blockbuster successes for DC and Marvel respectively. The article did not come to pass but here are the previously unpublished pencils.

Eventually the illo appeared as the cover for Wizard #2000(!). Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Alex Ross.

Characters ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

BELOW: Previously unpubbed thumbnail pencils for the “Heroes” cover of Wizard #42. Drawn in 1994. Art ©2003 Alex Ross. Characters ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

31 CBA V.2 #2

LEFT: Alex’s first Battle of the Planets illo, finished for Wizard #116. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Alex Ross.

Characters ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

32 CBA V.2 #2

ABOVE AND LEFT: Previously unseen designs for the Unbreakable DVD packaging. The tilted postcard above was included in the final product (with a Samuel L. Jackson portrait on the reverse). Courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2003 Alex Ross. Unbreakable ©2003 the respective copyright holder

BELOW: This Legion of SuperHeroes painting appears in the forthcoming coffee-table book, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross by Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear. ©2003 DC Comics.

RIGHT: “Here’s a favorite of mine and a good example of me channeling Neal Adams. This is the cover proof for the second Astro City hardcover collection, Confession (1997), seen in its completed form. I laid-out and drew the figures, then Brent Anderson penciled the city. The letterer decided the dustjacket’s text should be more legible and pretty much cropped the paintings on the overflaps.” Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Juke Box Productions.

ABOVE: Painting of the Batman and compatriots rendered by Alex for a friend’s sketchbook.

Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Alex Ross.

Characters ©2003 DC Comics.

33 CBA V.2 #2

IN THE HALL OF THE

MONKEY KING

a conversation with

Frank Cho 34 CBA V.2 #2

ThE CBa InTErVIEW CONdUCTEd & TRANSCRIBEd BY

J O S E P H

Frank Cho is a sneaky one. You probably first

M c C A B E

enthusiastic and talented kid like this.”

noticed the verve of his seductive ink line on

But, as you’ll see in the following chat,

Liberty Meadows, the cartoonist’s newspaper

conducted in early 2003, the artist phenom

strip (collected every month or so by Image

would actually prefer to make it in the fourcolor world and — gas up the car

in the ongoing comics title) and after a glance at his

and load up the kids, folks!

bodacious rendering of

— Frank’s Shanna and

the strip’s star, Brandy,

Conan are set to debut

you may have thought,

in the coming months,

“Hmmm… this guy’s

so just maybe he’ll

not too shabby!”

just stick around…

Then you note Frank’s

But still keep an eye

a pretty damn good

on the awesome artist — certainly one of the finest

storyteller, does an expert

young talents to arrive in the

job at pacing, and delivers the

last decade or so — ’cause if the

pathos and ribaldry in just the right doses. And you just might lament, “Too bad

Tarzan newspaper strip becomes available,

he’s already hit the Big Time with a comic

Frank may just sneak out of funnybooks

strip. Poor ol’ comic books could use a

as quick as he’s come in! — Ye Editor.

P O R T R A I T

P H O T O G R A P H Y

S O P H I A

B Y

Q U A C H

35 CBA V.2 #2

36 CBA V.2 #2

Comic Book Artist: What was the first thing you remember drawing?

Frank Cho: Probably my mom and dad or an Army soldier. That was when I was in kindergarten or even earlier...

CBA: Did your parents give you a lot of encouragement?

Frank: When I was very young, yes, but as I got older, not really. They didn’t encourage me, but they didn’t discourage me. They liked that I was happy drawing, but they really didn’t want me to make a career out of it, because they thought I was going to starve as an artist. [laughs] But ever since fifth grade, that’s all I’ve wanted to be: a comic book artist, and I’m one of the very lucky few who have made a career out of something they’ve always wanted to do.

CBA: It’s interesting that a lot of Golden Age artists drew comic books, yet really longed to draw comic strips. But you have a strip and yet always wanted to draw comic books. What made your prefer comic books to comic strips?

Frank: Well, I grew up in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, and the modern comic strip just sucked. It was poorly drawn, not funny, just bad! But at the same time, comic books were rocking, and they had much better art and stories. So I felt that doing a newspaper strip was slumming it and comic books were the complete opposite. Comics were the Holy Grail. The funny thing is that I became a syndicated cartoonist first. I enjoyed it, but my true loves were comic book and book illustration. So here I am, living the dream! [laughs]

CBA: When did you finish college?

Frank: 1995.

CBA: Did you have any formal art education?

Frank: No, my degree is in nursing. I picked up drawing from copying other artists. Fortunately, I copied artists who were classically trained, none of that modern-art b.s. or artsy-fartsy crap. I learned to draw by copying Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, Don Newton, John Buscema, all those great guys. And also classical painters and sculptors like Michelangelo, Velazquez, John Singer Sargent, people like that.

CBA: Who was the first artist you really latched onto and found to be an inspiration?

Frank: Probably Norman Rockwell. I came to the United States when I was six, back in 1978. I think that was roughly around the same time Rockwell passed away. There were a lot of Rockwell tributes all over the place. One of the first Rockwell images I vividly remember is the “Saying Grace” painting, where they’re at the café — the old lady and the little boy — saying grace before their meal and there are all these onlookers. As a kid, I thought that was a photograph and it just blew my mind when I learned it was a painting. I went, “Holy crap!” So I quickly latched on to Norman Rockwell when I was six and from there I went on to other artists.

But it was actually comic books that first inspired me. The first comic book that really grabbed my attention was Detective Comics #509, illustrated

by Don Newton and inked by Dan Adkins. It featured Batman and Catman. I

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Frank Cho “self-portrait” used as the logo for his Monkey Boy Press. Photo portrait of Frank Cho courtesy of and ©2003 Sophia Quach.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Cover art of the recent Liberty Meadows collection published by Image Comics. TOP: Another Monkey Boy “self-portrait,” rendered à là Norman Rockwell

by Frank Cho. ABOVE: “Ape and Babe,” from Frank’s first volume of Sketches and Scribbles. All art courtesy of and ©2003 Frank Cho.

37 CBA V.2 #2

38 CBA V.2 #2

first discovered it when I was in fifth grade, and I still have that issue.

There’s one panel of Batman bursting out of the water that made my jaw drop when I first saw it. My God! Don Newton was one helluva artist.

Nobody seems to know him, but I thought his stuff was incredible. I was in fifth grade when I saw that issue, and it was already several years old. So when it finally dawned on me that I had to get more of this guy’s stuff, it was too late. That’s when I heard the news that he’d just passed away. It’s too bad, because he was at his peak when he passed away. It was a great loss.

CBA: Newton didn’t seem to swipe from too many sources (at least not many that were obvious to me), considering the way a lot of those old Batman artists swiped.

Frank: Newton did his own thing. I would kill to get the original art from that issue. I actually found someone who has some of the pages from that issue, but he wanted some crazy lopsided trade for them.

CBA: He probably wanted more when he knew you wanted them. You should have sent a “representative” to initiate the business negotiations. [laughter] Frank: Yes. I said, “I love his stuff, but I’m not going to pay that amount.”

But it’s too bad people don’t draw like that anymore...

CBA: Who are some other pencilers you admire?

Frank: Art Adams is incredible. Art just sent me a jpeg file of a King Kong drawing he did, and I thought, “Jesus Christ, all that detail...” He’s a great guy, too. I was looking through that Art Adams issue of Comic Book Artist [V.1, #17], just to see how he drew the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Some artists would just fake it to get that textured look, but, Christ, he drew every single scale! Art Adams would draw every single scale. And every single hair on Wolverine!

CBA: It’s real easy to get spoiled by Adams though. Since he usually packs all that detail into each panel, you miss it when he doesn’t.

Frank: I’m pretty sure it’s the inker’s fault. The inkers he gets would sometimes shortchange him by not inking all the little details.

CBA: I know there’s a lot of different classical artists and illustrators you draw inspiration from, but is there any one you find particularly inspiring?

ABOVE: Cover art for Liberty Meadows #34.

Frank: I especially like classical illustrators. As far as inked line work goes, I like Franklin Booth and J.C. Coll. As far as painting goes, I like N.C. Wyeth, the whole Brandywine school, Gil Elvgren, Norman Rockwell, and John Singer Sargent, but Sargent was a fine art painter, not an illustrator.

My influences are all over the place.

CBA: I’ve also read of a dry-brush artist who influenced you...

Frank: There’s an illustrator named Dan Smith, whom no one has ever heard of. He’s actually a big influence on Mark Schultz. Mark is another artist whom I absolutely adore. He’s one of handful of artists who are currently working that I follow religiously: Adam Hughes, Mike Mignola, Geoff Darrow, and Art Adams. I also like Bryan Hitch, Serpieri, Justin Sweet, Gary Gianni, Bill Stout, Terry Dodson and good ol’ Budd Root.

Hitch is a tremendous artist. I’ve been enjoying his Ultimates book.

Great cinematic layout and beautiful pacing.

CBA: You acknowledged Mark as your hero on the dedication page of the Insights Studios art book, IS Art. Frank: Mark is a great guy... and very tall. He doesn’t have any hair, but I’m not going to hold that against him. [laughs] He’s actually a very funny guy, a goofball.

CBA: You did University2 while still at the University of Maryland. Had you done much work for the school’s newspaper prior to that strip?

Frank: Prior to that, I went to Prince George’s Community College, where I did comic strips for the student newspaper and illustrations for the student magazine.

CBA: What was the initial inspiration for University2?

Frank: Bloom County. I’ve been a huge fan of the strip since middle school, and when I went to high school I drew spot illustrations and a comic strip for the student newspaper heavily influenced by Bloom County and Mad magazine. I also drew homemade comic books for friends. When I went to college I just had that drawing bug. But you can’t create comic books in college — there are no venues for comic books — so I joined the student newspaper and started drawing comic strips again.

When I was at Prince George’s Community College, I was the newspaper’s art director and I really pushed for the full-page comic strips.

That was a failure. [laughs] But I had a great time; it was a great learning experience, being the art director of the newspaper.

Courtesy of and ©2003 Frank Cho.

So if you go to Prince George’s Community College and go through their newspaper archives, you’ll see bunch of my old crap. [laughs] I recently came across some of my old stuff, and it’s pretty bad. I’m surprised they even made me the art director.

CBA: What made your work improve?

Frank: I don’t know. Practice and luck, I guess. To be honest with you, I can’t stand any of my college stuff, even University 2. I cringe every time I look at it; but there is a certain charm about it, a certain raw passion that stands out. It’s interesting because, as I was doing the strip, I didn’t notice my style evolving or maturing. When I was in college, I thought I was doing the best work, but when I look at it now, it’s so crude compared to my work today.

CBA: You won an award for University2 that led to Liberty Meadows?

Frank: Correct. I won the Best College Cartoonist of 1994, sponsored by the Scripps Howard Foundation, and I won the Charles M. Schulz Plaque for Excellence in Cartooning. That opened the door for my syndication deal.

CBA: One of the things you’re known for is your ability to fuse together two different traditions: the “funny animal” tradition (by way of Berke Breathed) and the more classical work of people like Al Williamson. I would guess the classical stuff influenced you first, but was Bloom County the first “funny animal” work that you responded to?

Frank: Yes. Bloom County was the newspaper strip that made me notice the newspaper comic medium because it was just so damn funny. Prior to that, you had Peanuts, Cathy, Family Circus, Hi and Lois, and all these over-the-hill, unfunny strips. Then Bloom County came along and just blew everyone else out of the water. It made me notice that newspaper strips can be funny. So I quickly latched onto Bloom County, and that was the strip that made me fall in love with newspaper strips.

Then came Calvin and Hobbes. I think Bill Watterson is absolutely incredible, one of the top three greatest cartoonists who ever lived. (I think the greatest cartoonists who ever lived were Walt Kelly, Hal Foster, and Bill Watterson. That’s how I rank them.)

CBA: A lot of pros praise Watterson.

What is it about Watterson that makes him such a cartoonist’s cartoonist?

Frank: He broke down the wall. His pacing and his layouts were mind-blowing. He started pushing the artistic boundaries of story telling and he is such an incredible designer and so good at laying out the strip and telling jokes.

It’s too bad that he retired. It seems the good ones always leave while the bad ones stay. I heard Watterson is like a hermit now and only doing oil paintings.

CBA: He retired young.

Frank: He retired in his late-30s or early 40s. Way too young.

CBA: The Watterson influence is visible in some of the gags in Liberty Meadows, but it’s interesting to compare your work with Breathed’s. Your characters are actually a good deal more expressive than his.

Liberty Meadows may be inspired

by Bloom County, but after it uses that inspiration to get started, it proceeds in a

different direction, largely from the strength of the artwork.

Frank: When I first started Liberty Meadows, my main focus was the joke: set-up, punchline, boom! And, as the years went by, it evolved into a kind of soap opera, which I enjoyed. Early on, the focus was on humor for humor’s sake, but now it’s story for story’s sake. So you have these longer story arcs and continuing subplots, which worked out really well. I get tons of letters and e-mails about them, and I guess I’m evolving as a writer. Don’t get me wrong: I still enjoy humor, but it’s not the priority it once was.

CBA: Well, your sense of pacing has evolved. With that, I suppose you can develop more complex stories.

Frank: Yes. It’s kind of weird, because a fan once told me in an e-mail that reading Liberty Meadows was sometimes like watching a movie, because it’s paced so well with the different camera angles, especially with the wordless panels, where it’s the physical expression that communicates the message. He thought those were some of the best strips he’d seen in a long time. He said I’m bringing a lot of the pacing of movie and comic book narratives to the newspaper comic-strip format. He said that’s why he enjoyed it, but I think he just liked Brandy’s big knockers. [laughs]

ABOVE: Rarely-seen painting of Brandy (and Weiner Dog) completed for the Lone Star Comic Convention (though Ye Ed has taken Photoshop liberties with the text!). Courtesy of and ©2003 Frank Cho.

39 CBA V.2 #2

40

CBA: Did Liberty Meadows premiere right after you graduated from college?

Frank: Yes, pretty much. I actually took a year off to try and break into comic books. Liberty Meadows didn’t start until March of 1997, and I had graduated in December of 1995.

So I asked my syndicate if I could take a year off and do other stuff before we launched Liberty Meadows. I really wanted to break into the comic-book market. The comic book that I really wanted to do was Tarzan, which was published by Dark Horse at that time. During that year, I busted my butt drawing Tarzan samples to get my foot in the door. But I didn’t get the job. I was pretty heartbroken.

CBA: At that time Allan Gross (with whom you later worked at Insight Studios) got the job of writing Tarzan.

Frank: Right. Al Gross went on to write Tarzan for Dark Horse and United Media Syndicate. That was the only comic book that I really passionately wanted to do at that time, but I didn’t get the job.

Actually, I don’t think they ever gave me any feedback. Whoever was in charge of Tarzan brushed me aside. Well, I guess I don’t blame them. I had just come out of college and I had no comic book experience. I was a nobody.

CBA: Did you first meet Mark Wheatley of Insight Studios around that time?

Frank: Yes, I first met Mark around 1994, at the very first Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, not too far from my parents’ house. I was still going to nursing school at the time, and had my portfolio filled with artwork. I showed it to various professionals at SPX and they all said I could immediately begin working professionally if I wanted to, and they all pointed me to Mark Wheatley, saying how he was about to start a big project with DC Comics. I approached Mark and he flipped through my portfolio rather quickly and gave me his card and said, “I’m kind of busy right now, but swing by the studio and I’ll take a closer look at your portfolio.” I didn’t have much time or money because I was still a full-time student but fortunately Insight was located about a quarter-mile from my thengirlfriend’s (she’s now my wife) house.

So, I decided to take my portfolio one weekend and talk to Mark again.

It’s kind of a funny story: I went in, he sat me down, and started going through my portfolio pieces, breaking everything down, saying “This is weak. This is off. This coloring is bad. The anatomy doesn’t work this way.” I was getting pretty mad because half his criticisms were off base and purely subjective on his part. [laughs] I thought, “I’m not going to get the job,” and prepared to leave with my tail between my legs. He shut my portfolio and said, “So, do you want a job?” I thought, “What? You just

CBA

ABOVE: Provocative painting entitled “Tiffany.” This image was used on the back cover of Frank Cho: Sketches and Scribbles, Book One. Courtesy of and © Frank Cho.

V.2 #2

criticized my entire portfolio and then you offer me a job?”

I was kind of taken aback by that. It was a weird beginning, but that’s how I started at Insight Studios.

Eventually the DC project fell through at the 11th hour, but Insight was so close to my girlfriend’s house that I just continued to hang out there. Mark was kind enough to let me stay, and eventually I became part of the studio.

CBA: Insight seems very supportive of different styles of art.

Frank: When I first joined Insight Studios, it was not a “studio” studio; it was just Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel’s office. They went in to check their mail and occasionally draw their stuff. Wheatley was drawing and self-publishing his Radical Dreamer comic and Marc Hempel was doing Gregory and Tug & Buster.

Prior to my arrival, Wheatley had a full studio of people putting comic books together for other companies, but I think he got tired of it and decided to concentrate on his own stuff and let everyone go.

Then I came along and the popularity of University 2 and Liberty Meadows kind of forced him into becoming a publisher again.

CBA: Did you do much of your work at Insight headquarters?

Frank: No. I did 99% of the artwork at home and then brought it to Insight to use the computer, because they have a big flatbed scanner. Eventually I broke down and bought my own. For the last year-and-a-half I was with Insight, I barely went to the studio. I just went there once a week to check my mail.

CBA: A lot of people comment on your art, but few seem to mention the fact that Liberty Meadows is very funny. There are not a lot of books out there that make readers laugh out loud while they’re reading them. Why is it so funny? You mentioned once that your sense of humor came from your mother.

Frank: Yeah, she’s a nut! My mother, the card! [laughs] But seriously, I’ve always written jokes for myself. If I thought something was funny, I wrote it down. Luckily for me, my sense of humor is similar to lot of people out there.

So, I guess that’s why the kids like Liberty Meadows; that and my ability to draw monkeys and busty women. [laughs] CBA: Two very valuable skills! The humor in Liberty Meadows seemed to get more successful and sophisticated as the strip went on. You would play more with the fourth wall, having characters break through panels and fall into the panels beneath. What influenced you to explore that direction?

Frank: I don’t know. Perhaps I was feeling restricted with the four-panel grid? I just like pushing things to see what works, to have fun. I don’t really make any conscious decision to do something weird just for the sake of weirdness. I’m just playing around, there’s no master plan or anything. I’m

just stumbling onto things, one thing after another.

CBA: Are there any Golden Age strip artists who inspired this type of physical humor?

Frank: Oh, yeah. Like I said, I think Walt Kelly is the greatest cartoonist who ever lived. I was also inspired by Harvey Kurtzman’s work in those early Mad magazines, especially his collaborations with Wally Wood and Will Elder... their stuff was just gorgeous. Also, just from reading in general and trying to figure out how to tell stories in comic book form... and watching movies and trying to figure out how to transfer some of those elements onto stationary paper images.

CBA: Trying to figure out how to get more out of the medium?

Frank: Yes, exactly. I still don’t know how my style will change or evolve later. Everything is just a learning process.

CBA: There have been a lot of different story arcs in Liberty Meadows: the Great Weiner Dog Race, the Forest Fire, Evil Brandy...

Which one is your favorite?

Frank: My favorite is the Evil Brandy arc. That was me tipping my hat to Red Dwarf, the great British sci-fi comedy show.

I’m a huge fan of that show.

I got the idea for that Evil Brandy story from one of the Ace Rimmer episodes I thought was a hoot. I was also tipping my hat to the fun and overly dramatic Star Trek evil Kirk episode [“Mirror, Mirror”].

Another of my favorite storylines is the blizzard story.

I think I did a pretty good job on that one. Everyone gets trapped in a fishing cabin; Frank goes out to rescue the animals but gets injured, and Brandy goes out and saves Frank’s life. There are a couple of very dramatic points revealed during the story that I thought came out very nicely. I got a lot of fan mail for that story, as I recall.

CBA: One of the things you included in a Liberty Meadows strip was your own wedding.

Did your wife get a kick out of that?

Frank: Oh, yeah.

She loved it. I also put my best man, Mike McSwiggin, in the strip several times as well, and he loved it, too.

CBA: In Frank Cho: Illustrator, you said some Liberty Meadows characters are based on friends you had from college. Could you give me an example?

Frank: A lot of the story ideas are taken from my experiences with other people. In the beginning, a lot of it was based on my college roommates and my friends. And it still is, to a certain degree, but less so. Now it’s based more on random meetings I’ve had with people. If something strikes my fancy, I’ll inject it into my story.

CBA: Was the decision to bring Frank and Brandy a little closer inspired by your own need to settle down?

Frank: No. Actually, it just happened. If I had my way, I would have drawn that story out longer, but it came out just the way it was progressing. It just seemed right to let it unfold naturally, because the whole Frank and Brandy dynamic was changing and growing and evolving.

Dragging out the whole relationship between the two would just seem forced, so I just decided to let it unfold by itself and to let things happen naturally.

CBA: I’ve noticed that the strip’s Frank, while not entirely based on you, does have your hair.

How do you decide how much of yourself to put into Frank’s character?

Frank: To be honest, I was modeling Frank the vet after Woody Allen and little bit of my friend, Mike McSwiggin...

CBA: But as time went on, I guess more of your own personality went into him?

Frank: Yes. It’s only natural.

As you write, a lot of ideas are based upon your experiences, so they just naturally transfer into your main character.

CBA: How do you feel your writing skills have improved as you’ve done Liberty Meadows?

Frank: You learn through trial and error, and by getting feedback from other professionals and especially from readers. It’s a great education; you learn what works and what doesn’t, and you figure out how to make something better. If you read University2 from my college days, and compare it to Liberty Meadows, you’ll find there’s now more of a flow to my stories and writing in general.

CBA: In the comic book, you often mention your difficulties with newspaper strip censors. What was the single biggest thing the censors objected to?

Frank: There’s so many...

CBA: Was there one thing that made you especially angry?

Frank: It depends on the day. I was pretty mad when they altered the art of Jen eating at the barbecue. She was sucking on a pork rib, and they redrew her mouth and the pork rib so it wasn’t touching her mouth. That got me pretty mad, because I didn’t know about it. It was stupid censorship.

Another time, my editor called me up about one strip and said I couldn’t

ABOVE: Frank Cho’s cover art for the Image Comics title PvP, #2. Courtesy of and art ©2003 Frank Cho.

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use the word “bra.” I said, “Why not?” My editor said, “Because it’s offensive.” I said, “Have you seen a newspaper lately? Just open one up and you’ll see a full-page bra-and-panty ad.” He said, “Yes, we know, but we can’t use that word in the family comics section of the newspaper, because it’s offensive.” I said, “That word is pretty much the punch line. I’m not going to do another strip just to change one word.” He said, “Well, you can use the word ‘brassiere.’” I said, “That doesn’t make any sense... I can’t use the word ‘bra,’ but I can use the word ‘brassiere’? What’s the difference?”

He said, “Bra is offensive, and brassiere isn’t.”

CBA: Well, “brassiere” sounds so much more sophisticated, so much more French!

Frank: Whatever. That was one of the dumb censorships that kind of stands out in my mind. And I’ve always gotten into trouble with Brandy’s appearance. Too sexy and voluptuous. Oh, and there was the swimming pool storyline I did, in which Brandy and Jen were having a pool party. My editor at the time (I’ve gone through seven editors) said I could have the storyline, but I couldn’t show Brandy and Jen in bikinis or bathing suits. I said, “How can you have a pool party if you can’t have them wearing bathing suits?” She said, “Your women are too sexy, Frank. You’re going to offend someone.” I said, “What am I gonna do? They’re just walking around in bathing suits!” Throughout five years of syndication, the one constant complaint I received was “Brandy is too sexy.” Every single month I’d get a major complaint from a newspaper asking me to make Brandy or Jen uglier.

CBA: And yet Charles Schulz himself called you up and complimented you on your women?

Frank: Yes. Charles Schulz called me up my first year and told me that I draw some of the sexiest women in comics, which was very nice of him... and kinda surreal!

CBA: Liberty Meadows seems like a prime candidate for animation. Have animation studios approached you?

Frank: Several studios have approached me in the past. I almost signed a deal with Nelvana studios. They did the Care Bears [laughs], Droids, Ewoks. I think they did some of the early Image cartoon shows. I almost signed a contract with them, but we couldn’t get over a couple of points in the contract, so that kind of fell through.

But if there is a good offer, then, yes, I’ll do it. So far, I’ve gotten a couple of offers and they haven’t been that good.

CBA: Is there talk about producing a Liberty Meadows animated special?

Frank: They’ve been talking about making it into an animated series. I guess I’m spoiled by Image and the other comics companies. Compared to them, Hollywood studios are pretty evil. They want to keep all the money they make off the property and not give anything to the creators. So I’m still shopping for the right deal to come along.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: A friend of mine who just got a deal said that, in some of the deals, the movie studio will actually take some of your comic book’s profit.

Because they say, “Once we announce the deal, it’s going to increase your comic book’s circulation, so you owe us a piece of the profit.” It’s crazy.

CBA: Though it’s no longer published in strip form, do many newspapers still ask for Liberty Meadows?

Frank: Actually I’ve re-signed with Creators Syndicate; I went back to my syndicate. They offered me a contract that was a win-win situation: they’re not going to censor me at all, whatever I turn in they’re not going to touch or alter in any way, but they will only syndicate it in Europe, overseas, where nothing is censored. So Liberty Meadows will be re-launched in European newspapers this year. I’m going to give them everything from the first comic book issue to the present one. So, technically, I already have five years worth of stuff in the bank when they launch it. So I’ll basically make money doing nothing! [laughs] The way it has worked out, Creators Syndicate will deal with the newspaper rights and Image Comics will deal with the comic book and book rights. It’s less confusing that way.

CBA: What was the impetus to leave Insight and take Liberty Meadows to Image?

Frank: It was just time. Things changed. I’m grateful for all the things Mark Wheatley has shown me and guided me through, but after seven years at Insight Studios, it was just time to move on and face new challenges. And Image offered more money. [laughs] More money and more exposure.

But, more than anything else, it was the arrival of my baby girl, Emily. My wife gave birth and suddenly I couldn’t just think about myself anymore. I had to think about the baby’s security and her future. So a good part of my decision was financial. I have a baby and wife to support.

CBA: Image has certainly attracted a lot of talent in the past decade.

Frank: Jim Valentino is a madman and a genius. He is truly one of the great innovators in comics publishing now, and he’s an all-around great guy. continued on page 80

ABOVE: The cow gets mad on this cover art for Liberty Meadows #32.

Courtesy of and ©2003 Frank Cho.

TOP: Peter Bagge’s splash from last year’s The Megalomanical Spider-Man ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. ABOVE: P.B.’s Murray Wilson from Hate. ©2003 Peter Bagge.

The Unambiguously Happy Life of Mr. While the award-winning animator’s credentials certainly merit examination by any self-respecting magazine devoted to the graphic arts (as exemplified by our following guest’s inclusion in a recent issue of Hogan’s Alley, a quarterly magazine devoted to comic strips and unofficial sister publication to CBA), it was an act of generosity on J.J. Sedelmaier’s part which led to this feature interview. Nearly a year ago, this editor received — out of the blue and unsolicited — a freshly-printed copy of The Ambiguously Gay Duo Comics, a faux four-color funnybook used to promote J.J.’s animation achievements (which is discussed within). Now, we here at CBA are familiar enough with the guy’s stuff — from his work on Saturday Night Live’s cartoon segments — but who knew just how hip Sedelmaier was to the world of comics… yet one look at the Alex Ross cover (seen at right), never mind J.J.’s prestigious lineage, prompted us to ring up the ever-friendly guy and schedule an interview (which was conducted on March 6, 2003). The transcript was copy-edited by J.J. 44 CBA V.2 #2

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY JON B. COOKE ABOVE: After an advertising photo shoot, a very young J.J., costumed as his super-hero idol, clowns in the mid-’60s for some gag photos with his talented father, Joe Sedelmaier (who would eventually become world-renowned for his “Where’s the Beef?” and “Fast Talking FedEx Guy” TV commercials in the 1980s). Courtesy of J.J.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from, J.J.?

J.J. Sedelmaier: I’m from the Midwest. I originally grew up in Evanston, Illinois and Chicago.

CBA: And what’s “J.J.” stand for?

J.J.: “Good animation.” [laughter] It’s John Josef, but I don’t go by any of those names anymore. The last person who called me “Johnny” was my dentist when I was a kid.

CBA: [laughs] And you let him get away with that?

J.J.: Oh, no. He did it once and that was it! [laughter] CBA: Your father was into comics?

J.J.: Yeah, my father was into comics as a kid, comics and movies, and he held onto his comics and actually was able to convince his mom to hold onto them as well. So I grew up reading the first issue of Batman and all the classic Golden Age comics, and (like I was telling you earlier) I was really the only one of my friends who knew any of the Fawcett heroes like Captain Marvel and Spy Smasher and Ibis and all the other people who I thought were kind of cool, but they’d disappeared off the face of the Earth by the time I was a kid. But sitting and going through his stuff — And he taught me how to make sure I didn’t bend back the covers, and as a result the comics are, they might as well be from the Mile High Collection.

CBA: Really?

J.J.: Oh, yeah, they’re gorgeous. No stiff boards or Mylar bags. They were just in a corrugated box with dry-cleaning plastic, that thin kind of wispy stuff, wrapped up. And they’re in beautiful, perfect condition.

CBA: Does your father still have them?

J.J.: He’s still got them in Chicago. He kept all his comics, his Big Little Books.

CBA: Wow! That’s highly unusual, I guess.

J.J.: Well, it’s highly unusual not so much that the kid held onto them, but that the parents didn’t put them into the paper drive for the war, or just didn’t dump them. So I was very fortunate to have that as an influence and a background… and reference, actually.

CBA: So did comics have a mystique for you when you were a kid? Did you have a thrill?

J.J.: They were what taught me how to draw.

They taught me anatomy. They taught me… they were really what influenced me to get into drawing. That’s what I wanted to do, originally. I was either going to do comic books in New York when I

T R A N S C R I B E D

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ABOVE: Alex Ross’s great cover art for the J.J. Sedelmaier Productions, Inc. promotional comic. Courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier. Ace and Gary ©2003 The Dana Carvey Show.

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finished school or do animation in California. I didn’t know there was animation in New York when I moved here. But I found out what comics were about when I finally got there, and it was a real kind of — The mid-, late ’70s was a pretty bad time for comics in America. Really pretty boring. So I just started taking my portfolio all around and showing it to anyone who would look at it. And that’s when I found out there was animation going on in New York, and got into that because it was — I enjoyed the idea of being involved with that as much as comics. And I think in the long run I benefited much more by getting involved in animation and doing the sort of thing I ended up doing than staying in comic books, because animation got me involved in all sorts of design. And film, and getting to know cartoonists and artists and illustrators and designers. The people I’ve worked with, Jon… if you could have told me 30 years ago that I’d be working with these people, I’d just, “Get the @#%*$ out!” [laughter] CBA: I know the feeling. [laughter] J.J.: “You can’t be serious!” Just the middle of last year I worked on a project with Neal Adams. I mean, Neal Adams, before I got to New York in the late ’70s, was the best. Because he was able to do good drawing and interesting storytelling and take these bankrupt characters and resurrect them. I found that so exciting. To finally get together with him and get to know him a little bit, it was just great. [Editor’s note: As of August ‘03, Sedelmaier had completed a second project with Adams.]

CBA: What does your father do?

J.J.: He is a commercial filmmaker.

“Where’s the Beef?” and the Federal Express [fast-talking guy] spots. That whole realm of film making. In some ways, his work… he’s kind of semiretired now. He just had a short film [Open Minds] in Sundance this past year, but he hasn’t done a commercial in a long time. But he wanted to be a cartoonist as a kid. He moved to Chicago to go to the Art Institute.

He had always been interested in film and had made his own movies.

But his films and his work in some respects are almost like liveaction comic strips. His characters. He’s really influenced by

[Charles] Chaplin and [Buster] Keaton and W.C. Fields. But the way he structures his stuff can sometimes be illustrative or comic/cartoon-like. His stuff was so much in the casting. He had such a hand in changing what people were conditioned to accept for these kind of plastic actors who didn’t look like “real” people. They were all perfect teeth and well-groomed and coiffed hair and so forth. And he was really the first one to successfully bring everyday-looking people into commercials, certainly, and he’s influenced people in film as well.

CBA: Obviously, in the early ’80s, your father’s career really exploded. I recall even a 60 Minutes segment on him, right?

J.J.: Yeah. 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, the cover of Esquire. Separate from maybe people like George Lois and Stan Freberg, there aren’t too many commercial makers who hit like he had hit. I’m thankful that when I did get involved in animation, I didn’t get involved in the commercial realm of animation; I got involved in series, longer form… not feature-length animation, but television animation that wasn’t commercials, because if I had gotten into commercials at that point…

CBA: You would have felt inhibited because of — J.J.: Well, not so much inhibited, because I wasn’t in a position yet, since I was just starting out entry-level, to really have an influence or any sort of control. But it would have been a pain in the ass hearing, “Ah, you’re Joe’s son. You’re following the old man.” In the area of animation I was involved in, no one knew the name Sedelmaier at all, so that was fortunate. Then, by the time I got into it, I had enough confidence and had enough presence in my little realm to feel a lot more comfortable and it didn’t bug me at all.

CBA: Probably the tagline Joe Sedelmaier will always be best known for — I think it was even introduced into politics — was “Where’s the Beef?”

J.J.: Yeah, the [U.S. Vice President Walter] Mondale thing.

CBA: Isn’t there an anecdote about that Wendy’s commercial? That the catch phrase was different and it changed on the set?

J.J.: The phrase was originally was “Where’s all the beef?” And I believe continued on page 101

THIS PAGE: Title cards for shorts produced by J.J. Sedelmaier Productions. All courtesy of JJSP. The Ambiguously Gay Duo. ©2003 The Dana Carvey Show .

Captain Linger ©2000 Turner Entertainment Group. The X-Presidents and School House Rock ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

Cody Starbuck ©2003 Howard V. Chaykin. Used with permission.

About Our Cover To call MIKE FRIEDRICH a generous soul would be an astounding understatement at Casa CBA, as the maverick publisher has donated hundreds of vintage fanzines, as well as taped interviews, and a plethora of Star*Reach production material (much of which is seen in the following pages), all in the cause of comics history. Among the treasures he gave us was a photostat of what appears to be a rejected Star*Reach #1 first-printing cover design

by HOWARD CHAYKIN, a variant Cody Starbuck pose. (Readers should note that, for the second printing of S*R #1, Mike decided to swap HVC’s cover and Jim Starlin’s back cover.) Though neither Mike or the stellar artist could remember the piece, both gave us their blessing to have it colored by CBA’s delightful colorist Aaron Reiner and used as the “cover” for our special section devoted to the history of Star*Reach. Our thanks to all!—Ye Ed.

Star*Reach Color Cover Gallery

Certainly, the initial run of Mike Friedrich’s early independent comics title, Star*Reach, sported some gorgeous cover art by a number of the field’s hottest mainstream talents of the 1970s. Here’s the first seven issues. TOP ROW: (Left) #1, Sept. 1975 (second printing), art by Jim Starlin; (center) #2, 1975, art by Neal Adams; (right) #3, Oct. 1975, art by Frank Brunner. MIDDLE ROW: (Left) #4, March 1976, art by Howard Chaykin; (right) #5, July 1976, art by Howard Chaykin; BOTTOM ROW: (Left) #6, Oct. 1976, art by Jeff Jones; (right) #7, Jan. 1977, art by Barry Windsor-Smith.

INSET AT LEFT: #1, April 1974 (first printing), art by Howard Chaykin. All artwork ©2003 the respective artists.

Stephanie Starr ©2003 Mike Friedrich & Dick Giordano. Dragonus ©2003 Frank Brunner. Cody Starbuck ©2003 Howard V. Chaykin. Gideon Faust ©2003 Len Wein & Howard V. Chaykin. Elric ©2003 Michael Moorcock.

The “Ground-Level” Comics of Mike Friedrich & Company In the “everything for the fan,” print-to-order marketplace of today’s directly-sold comic books, it’s might be difficult to convey the eager anticipation many avid readers held about the coming of Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach comics in the mid-1970s. Back then, the Big Two — DC and Marvel — dominated the mainstream comics world, and though the rivals did release a number of commendable projects during the early part of that decade, by ’74 a chill was setting in and market shifts were quaking the publishing offices. The energy of the early ’70s, when some amazing young talents would produce quite seriously accomplished work, was dissipating as these “hot” creators, frustrated over the lack of royalties, pittling page rates and often serf-like treatment by the “fat cats,” began a Great Exodus out of the field, seeking out other mediums to ply their trade. With much of the better artists and writers leaving for book publishing, print-making, and Hollywood, comics were looking bland indeed.

THIS PAGE: Border illustration by Lee Marrs, originally used on the back cover of Star*Reach Greatest Hits (1979). ©2003 Lee Marrs.

Enter: Mike Friedrich, longtime comics fan, professional funnybook scribe, and respected friend to many of the industry’s most notable talents. Aficionados of the form knew Mike was “one of us,” judging from his earnest and heartfelt writing and from the calibre of his collaborating artists. What we didn’t know was that the guy would become, commencing with April 1974’s Star*Reach #1, a visionary comics publisher, one who would treat creators fairly with equitable profit-sharing and — gasp! — allow those artists and writers to retain ownership of their material, an unheard policy in the industry. And, prompted by the flood of adult material cascading from both San Francisco’s underground comix scene and Europe’s Métal Hurlant regulars, Mike figured his comics house would appeal to those older readers craving a more sophisticated and mature mix of fantastic material than the Houses of Ideas and Superman could offer. In short, as the man declared in the line’s house ads, Mike would make comics fun again.

ABOVE: ’70s illustration by Robin from Mile High Comics poster promoting in-store Mike Friedrich appearances, featuring M.F. caricature, and leading Star*Reach characters. Courtesy of M.F. All ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

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Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach comic book line of the mid- to late 1970s proved a significant development in both the growth of the direct sales market and the advent of independent publishing. Weaned as a writer from the mainstream super-hero houses — DC and Marvel — Mike would take his cue from the underground comix publishers and create his so-called “ground- level” imprint, blazing the trail for the ’80s alternative comics revolution.

Importantly, Mike was also an advocate for creator rights in the field, first by paying royalties to his contributors, unheard of in the mainstream comics industry, and later as an long-standing artist representative for an impressive stable of creators. He was interviewed by phone over three sessions in the spring of 2003 and Mike copy-edited the final transcript.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke * Transcribed by Steven Tice Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from?

Mike Friedrich: Well, I’m from Northern California, the Bay Area. I was born in Oakland and grew up in the suburbs of Hayward and Castro Valley. I now live in Berkeley.

CBA: Was it a middle-class upbringing?

Mike: Very much so, although with a blue-collar tinge. My dad was a mechanical engineer, and I grew up with kids whose folks worked in gas stations. I felt very comfortable in both college-educated and working-class environments. Having parents who had gone to the University of California, they spurred me to study a lot, so I became a college kid, as well.

CBA: Were your parents creative at all?

Mike: Not that I was aware of growing up. It was a very chaotic house.

I’m the oldest of a very large number of kids; we wound up being nine altogether. I discovered late in life that my father was very much a romantic, although I wasn’t really conscious of that when I was young. He was a science-fiction reader and I, as a teenager, started reading science-fiction stuff myself, although I never really got deep into it; it was casual. I was more into comics. I’m the only one in my family who wound up doing formally creative work. I have relatives who are musicians, but they’re mostly in-laws and nephews.

CBA: Did you end up helping in the care giving? Eight is a lot of siblings to have.

Mike: Well, I like to say that I’ve changed more diapers than most parents.

Yes, I was the oldest, so I did a good deal of babysitting, although my sister, two years younger than me, wound up with more responsibilities than I did.

CBA: Did you want to escape that pressure? Did you want to get out of the house?

Mike: Well, by the time I was a teenager, I definitely did. I was living in an attic that was very much of an escape situation. I certainly attribute my interest in comics as getting away.

CBA: Did you draw as a little kid?

Mike: I never drew.

CBA: Were you attracted to comic strips, initially?

Mike: Not really. No. I was only interested in comic books. I can remember the first comics I read in a very vague sense. I remember very clearly the first one I bought. I trace it very clearly to a summer vacation when I was 11, going down the street to a kid’s house and he had 50 comic books, which was just amazing to me. I remember just spending all afternoon one summer day, probably in July or August, sitting outdoors with two or three other boys, reading these comics. What hooked me the most was Green Lantern. It was one of the early revival Green Lanterns, probably an issue of Showcase or the first or second issue of his own title. I didn’t have much of an allowance then and was not getting around on my own much. But about six months later, I found out where comics were sold and started buying them. From then on, I was hooked.

CBA: When did you first encounter a fanzine?

OPPOSITE PAGE: Young Mike Friedrich in a 1970s photo. TOP: Logo design by Tom Orzechowski. Both courtesy of M.F. ©2003 Star*Reach Productions.

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Mike: There was a letter by Jerry Bails published in an early issue of Justice League of America talking about Alter-Ego. I remember there was an editorial comment that if you want a copy of A/E, just send Jerry a letter.

I sent him a letter and didn’t get Alter-Ego; I got the other fanzine he was putting out, called ComiCollector. So immediately, the whole idea you could get these 20-year-old comics, just that it was possible to do this, completely entranced me. Later on, I did order Alter-Ego. CBA: Were you initially interested in the fanzines to purchase Golden Age comics?

Mike: Well, I think it was just the curiosity of reading about the future and past, simultaneously. I really enjoyed reading fanzines to hear what was going to happen in the next couple of months, which, at the age of 12 or 13 or 14, a couple of months is quite a long time. So it really seemed it was just amazing they knew what was going to happen two issues later than what was currently on the stands. I loved that aspect. This was when there were no formal press relations with the publishers whatsoever. It was just fanzine editors who knew a DC editor who would give them information, so it was scraps of information. It took years for there to be any formal relationship with a consistent flow of factual information.

I was drawn into fandom by reading articles about what had happened in comics in the past. Of course, I was a big DC fan, and Alter-Ego focused primarily on the old DC heroes, although they did a little bit with the other characters, as well. I got to know a couple of other people who lived in the Bay area who also wrote letters to the editor. That’s how I evolved: I started writing letters to the editor, then got connected to a couple

other people here locally, and I remember one of them had a bunch of old ’40s Marvels in a couple of boxes. Visiting him the first time — and I would have been maybe 16 at this point — I remember actually seeing 1940s comics. Around that time I became a Batman collector and slowly started accumulating back issues of Batman and wound up getting a complete run of the Batman title and 95% of the Detective Comics issues (although that took me a number of years to do).

CBA: Was it 95% because you had no interest in the initial, pre-Batman 26 issues?

Mike: That’s true, but it’s more that the first 20 issues with Batman in Detective Comics were so expensive I could never afford them… and they’ve always been so expensive I could never afford them. [laughs] CBA: Do you still have your collection?

Mike: No. I sold them seven or eight years later to finance my publishing venture.

CBA: I guess we’ll get to that! Did you have a formula of writing letters that you knew would be published?

Mike: No. In retrospect, I can see an evolution in the kind of letters I was writing, and as they got more critical in the sense of “this is how you could have done things a little bit differently,” they were more likely to get published. But I wasn’t really conscious of that at the time. It was, “Why did you do this inconsistent thing in this story?” Also, I was very conversational in the way that I wrote letters, and at the same time, coherent. So I was having fun expressing an opinion, but it wasn’t rambling but focused. Probably that combination did it at the time.

CBA: When did Julie Schwartz first get in contact with you?

Mike: Well, actually, I contacted him. There was a point in 1966 when a crazy policy was started at DC when all the editors simultaneously said, “If you send us a self-addressed, stamped envelope, we’ll send you a reply.”

And, of course, they were deluged with mail they couldn’t reply to, so two months later they rescinded it. But in that two-month interim, Julie Schwartz was replying to my letters. That led to an ongoing correspondence, which I now own, by the way, because he sent me his copies. [laughs] Well, he sent me his carbons along with the letters I had sent him, and I had kept the letters he had sent me.

CBA: Did you hold Julie in high esteem?

Mike: Oh, yeah! Very much so. He was editing the comics I really enjoyed reading, and I liked the persona he expressed in the letters pages and his attitude toward the material.

CBA: Did this added dimension of being in contact with the people who produced comics extend your interest in the medium?

Otherwise would you not have continued through adolescence? Or were comics — just by themselves — very important to you?

Mike: I’ve never been asked that question before… I think the social nature kept me involved a little bit longer than I might have been otherwise.

I stayed a fan of comics from age 12 into my early 20s. Once I was writing comics as a career, then there was a professional reason to be reading them as well. But in the sense of getting paid to have a hobby, I certainly didn’t mind.

CBA: Did you have an active adolescence?

Mike: I was pretty withdrawn at that period. I had to work after school for a small business my dad owned and didn’t really do a lot of after-school stuff. In my senior year in high school, I joined a chess club, but that’s about as close as I remember doing much of anything in school outside of academics. In college, it changed dramatically. I blossomed suddenly when I was a freshman and became a very active person, socially, but in high school, no.

TOP: Cover of Jerry Bails’ Alter-Ego #4 (Spring ’61). This valuable artifact was donated to CBA by Mike Friedrich! Alter Ego ©2003 Roy Thomas.

ABOVE: Batman illo by Bob Kane. All characters ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

CBA: Where’d you go to college?

Mike: Santa Clara University, which at that time was about an hour’s drive from where my parents lived.

CBA: Did the blossoming happened because you were away from home and feeling emancipated?

Mike: Oh, very definitely. Also by this time, I had a life in New York City that was beginning. I went there the summer between graduating high school and starting college, and made friends with people I still know.

That experience was so totally different from life here in California that it drew me out and gave me a lot of self-confidence I hadn’t had before.

CBA: Did you produce your own fanzines?

Mike: No. I never had the impulse to do that.

CBA: But you did you contribute to others?

Mike: Well, I did a little bit. I did a couple of columns for Bill Dubay’s Voice of Comicdom, just basically badly written reviews. I was not very good at it.

The idea of creating comics came to me before the idea of commenting on them. Then I was very fortunate being successful at creating comics, so I never really got into the commenting. I was selling stories when I was 18, so the whole fanzine thing never happened to me.

CBA: You were obviously an avid reader of fanzines.

Mike: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I read a lot. I still do. I have always been a reader. At that time, I was reading a lot of fanzines and a lot of comics.

CBA: Did the emergence of Haight-Ashbury have any influence on your life? What was happening in the Summer of Love, for instance?

Mike: Well, yes. You couldn’t avoid it, but it wasn’t part of my daily life at all. It was “around”. I made my first trip to the Haight when I was back from New York after my first summer there. I went in on a weekend afternoon, and that was it. By then the Summer of Love was over. I came very close to going to the Monterey Pop Festival, but decided to go to New York instead. Again, that was just two or three weeks after I graduated from high school.

One of my “What-if” alternate life history stories was what if I’d gone to the Monterey Pop Festival instead of going to write comics in New York, and who knows what that would have done to my life. When I saw the documentary about the Pop Festival, it seemed like a great experience that I would have enjoyed, but that’s as close as I came. The other story I like to tell is I did not go to Woodstock because I didn’t have a ticket. [laughter] CBA: You didn’t need a ticket, Mike!

Mike: So that’s as close as I was to the counter-culture. I was there, but I wasn’t there. [laughter] CBA: Did you go through a political awakening at all, along with your entire generation?

Mike: The political thing is a lot clearer. The biggest change for me was that period between April and June of 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. and

Robert Kennedy were killed. I trace my current political perspective on war and peace to that night when Bobby Kennedy was killed and I realized I was part of the problem and needed to change. The culture of violence was something I participated in as an American and I needed to change it. I was coming out of a Republican household that was pretty conservative, so this was a fairly radical shift.

CBA: Did you get in debates with your father?

Mike: My dad was great about it. He was a Goldwater Republican who had been in the Army in World War II and served in Europe. But when I told him I wasn’t going to go to the Vietnam War and would go to jail instead, he said, “Well, that’s fine. You’re my son and I love you.” So I couldn’t ask for more than that. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go to jail.

CBA: What was your draft status?

Mike: Well, as a middle-class kid going to college, they let me be for a long time. Then, when they decided to create the draft lottery when I was a junior or senior, I hit a real high number.

CBA: So your number was never called up?

TOP: Mike Friedrich wrote this powerful Christmas story penciled by Neal Adams and inked by Dick Giordano in Batman #219 (Feb. ’70).

ABOVE RIGHT: Vignette of Green Lantern #73 (Dec. ’69) splash page. Pencils by Gil Kane, inks by Murphy Anderson. ©2003 DC Comics.

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Mike: No, it was never called, but I was determined not to go even if my number came up.

CBA: Did you participate in anti-war activities?

Mike: Oh, yes. My first newspaper appearance was being photographed at one of the rallies on campus. It was on the front page of one of the local papers. We were a group reading names of people who had been killed in the war. I was standing up at 7:00 in the morning reading off names and some photographer took my picture. So there I was.

CBA: Did you see you could perhaps have an effect on society through creativity? You could be a voice, yourself, through your work?

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Mike: Yes. Only working in superhero comics as I was, which were really very fantastic, and very fight-driven. It was hard for me to figure out how to express my social feelings. Eventually I drifted away from writing because I couldn’t resolve that conflict internally, for one reason.

Other people who are much more creative than me were able to, subsequently, do interesting things with significance, but I didn’t have the imagination to be able to do it, to pull it off.

CBA: When did the idea of writing comics come into play?

Mike: It literally was a whim.

It was never one of these longstanding dreams. I had the amazing fortune that as soon as I expressed the desire, it was answered. As I mentioned, I was in this correspondence with Julie Schwartz, where a couple of times a month we would exchange letters, a consistent backand-forth. I’m 17 years old, a junior in high school on my summer vacation, and I just write to Julie, “I’d like to try writing a comic.” It was a spur-of-the-moment idea.

It wasn’t as if I had been

thinking about it for any length of time. He writes back, “Sure! Let’s give it a whirl.” Now, what 17-year-old kid gets that response today? Nobody!

CBA: What year was that?

Mike: It would have been 1966. I know why it occurred, in retrospect.

Julie’s working primarily with two writers, and one of them — his best buddy, John Broome — has gone off overseas, and the other guy — Gardner Fox — has gone stale after 25 years. There was no talent pool, no people trying to break in to write comics. So to have somebody express interest was a godsend. Plus, of course, Marvel is beating DC over the head every month taking a bigger and bigger share of the market away from them, using a fresher, hipper attitude. The guys at DC were just clueless as to what was going on, so there was some push to try to bring in a younger perspective. So, to Julie, I was it. [laughter] Little did he know…

CBA: You must have read about the DC “writers’ strike” [in Comic Book Artist V1 #5].

Mike: Yeah. About 10 or 15 years ago, I was in New York when this story about the strike first surfaced, and I remember Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, one or two others, and I went to Julie and formally asked if he had been involved, and he became very angry and said, “Absolutely not.” He completely denied hiring us to replace the striking writers was ever an element in his thinking, and he expressed what I just said to you: John Broome was withdrawing from the field and Gardner Fox was going stale and Julie simply needed new writers. He wasn’t really dealing with the writers [Arnold Drake, etc.] where this story comes from.

I think the story is true. Certainly, my involvement in union work for the last 10 years would indicate to me that it’s true. There were 40-, 45-year-old writers — threatened by 20-year-old kids coming in — and they didn’t go and try to involve the 20-year-olds. The older writers ignored the younger guys. They didn’t understand us, either. There was a huge generation gap all the way across, with very few people able to cross it.

The guys who have told this story are not people who hung out with the young writers in any real way. I’d met a couple of them and had some short conversations with them, but they never really talked to us about this.

It was years and years later when I heard this story. There was no hint of it at the time. I do know that certainly at the point when [DC publisher] Irwin Donenfeld, who came to power in the mid-’60s after taking over from his dad, who had died, and Carmine Infantino coming in a couple of years later, hired by Irwin, were really definitely pushing new blood because Marvel was beating them up, and they just didn’t understand why Marvel was so successful doing as well as they were, and so they just were throwing the baby out with the bath water.

CBA: Did you admire the Marvel Comics line? Did you read them yourself?

Mike: Well, it depends on what age you’re talking about. When I was a young teenager, no, I didn’t read Marvel. Initially, the books put me off. I just couldn’t get into all the famous early issues of FF, Hulk and Spider-Man, at all. As I got into my mid-teens, I started reading them more regularly and liked them, but really only came to appreciate them as I got into my 20s.

It took me years to appreciate Jack Kirby, whose work I didn’t like when I was young.

CBA: What did you finally learn to appreciate about Marvel?

Mike: I appreciated the energy level. I was looking for coherence in comics when I was younger, and Marvel had this incoherent energy. Just the sheer, raw emotion that comes through those Kirby pictures is still

TOP: Mike Friedrich, writer and narrator, as drawn by Dick Dillin and Joe Giella in Justice League of America #89 (May ’71).

LEFT: Robin learns about communal living in Batman #235 (Sept. ’71). Art by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano. ©2003 DC Comics.

amazing to me. The problem was it really only worked when somebody could put a skeleton over that energy. That’s why Stan was so great, or Joe Simon before him, as they were able to instill story content which then could channel that energy. When Kirby was unchanneled, his work was all over the map and I had a big problem with it.

CBA: Did specifically the DC people ever ask you about Marvel’s appeal?

Mike: Oh, yes. By the time I was writing, I understood why Marvel made sense. I was actually accused, while working four or five years at DC, of being more a Marvel writer than a DC writer because I tended to focus on the personalities of the characters rather than on the story’s plot.

CBA: That’s not such a bad accusation, is it? [laughs] Mike: Hardly. After a while I got tired of being told what I wanted to do was bad, which is one of the reasons why I was very happy to walk down the street and get paid more money at Marvel to do stuff I enjoyed doing more, which felt more natural by that point. So I was walking away from characters I had grown up with and it was also the first step away from it being a hobby to it being a job.

CBA: What was your first professional writing assignment?

Mike: Well, the first one I sold was a Robin story, a Boy Wonder backup feature in Batman, but it didn’t get published for a while. They put in on the shelf, for good reason. The first published story was a Spectre story Neal Adams drew. In the same week was released that story and a Batman anniversary story in Batman #200. I had written those the previous summer, when I had gone there after high school.

The sheer luck of having my first published story be illustrated by Neal Adams was just awesome!

CBA: Did you appreciate Neal’s art at the time?

Mike: Oh, yes! He was one of the guys I met when I first went out to DC and instantly fell in love with his work. I had not seen his stuff before I went to New York. He was just starting to draw “Deadman.” I had not seen the earlier things he had done for DC, and I was just completely floored by his abilities. I learned a tremendous amount about storytelling from Neal right away.

CBA: Was the published Spectre story intact from your written script?

Mike: It had been edited somewhat and dramatically improved visually. Neal added story content through his drawings. Most artists literally interpret the story, but Neal came up with ways of doing facial expressions and body language that really enhanced the idea of the script in ways most other artists were not able to do. He was a much more subtle guy in that respect than most other comic artists at the time.

CBA: What was the story?

Mike: It was the story with Wildcat as guest star. It’s about this nebbish guy who all of a sudden accidentally gets these weird magical powers.

He’s not very bright and some sort of petty thief, and he decides to put on a costume and then stupidly steal things. [laughter] But he turns out to be very, very powerful. He runs into Wildcat first, and then the Spectre shows up

later. It wound up being more of a Wildcat than a Spectre story. Spectre is the deus ex machina who just comes in and resolves the story. But that was that, as the conflict was all earlier.

CBA: Why the impulse to do a Wildcat story, of all things? Did you know the character?

Mike: No. [laughter] It was just one of those things where I knew the character existed. I had read a couple of reprints. By this time, I had a number of the old All-Star Comics where the character appeared. I liked him in All-Star Comics, and thought he looked cool. I just liked the costume. There really was no character there. Then I just aged him. I figured, “Okay, this guy’s older now, so what does this mean?”

I played with that a little bit, but Neal was the one who really made it look totally cool. If a different artist had drawn the story, it wouldn’t have been half as interesting.

CBA: What was your reaction to seeing your name in print? You got a credit right up front, didn’t you?

Mike: Oh, yeah. I sold that first “Robin” story a month before I graduated high school. My parents had a three-story house — basement, main floor, and attic — and there were so many kids that the attic had been converted into a couple of rooms where a bunch of us lived in. I had a small little alcove to myself. My mother washed our clothes, and there would be these little boxes at the bottom of the stairs where she would put our clothes and, by this

TOP: Alan Kupperberg contributes this unused Neal Adams cover art for JLA #95 (Dec. ’71). Final cover seen inset. The writer signs off — seeking the forgiveness of author Harlan Ellison, who was used as a character in Mike’s story — in JLA #89 (May ’71). Art by Dillin & Giella. ©2003 DC Comics.

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CBA

TOP: Mike had occasion to write the framing sequences for the under-rated Dick Giordano-edited DC mystery series, The Witching Hour, often illustrated by Alex Toth and Neal Adams. This Toth panel is from #4 (Sept.’69). ABOVE: Editor Orlando & writer Friedrich taunt artist Kane (here inked by Wood) in House of Mystery #180.

©2003 DC Comics.

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time, my mail. So I came home from school and there in my box at the bottom of the stairs was this envelope, Special Delivery from New York, with a check and an edited copy of my first script.

I had sold a 10-page story!

Here’s the check! Julie had edited it instantly and gotten a check cut within 24 hours and sent it off. What I remember doing was just opening the envelope, seeing this thing, and running up and down the stairs for at least 10 minutes! [laughter] CBA: Excitable boy!

Mike: I didn’t say anything! I just had the biggest grin on my face, running up and down those stairs.

CBA: Did Julie send you a photocopy of the script?

Mike: Right. He went out of his way to make this an event for me and I’ll never forget his kindness. Back in his youth, Julie had been a literary agent, so he knew how writers react when selling their first story. So it was a great experience, and I’ve tried never to forget it when I meet somebody who’s brand new, that it’s a special time in his or her life and it only happens once.

CBA: Julie never seems to have lost that appreciation for what it is to be a fan. He always makes me feel very good; like I’m the only guy he calls “kiddo.” He acts like he’s a fan of my stuff, and it’s a special gift to be so generous.

Mike: Oh yes.

CBA: You said you had frustrations along with your professional career of being able to adequately express your political inclinations. Yet, very close to home, there was probably the most significant movement in the field taking place, with the advent of underground comix in San Francisco.

Mike: I didn’t tap into that until later. I tapped into it more as a publisher and editor than as a writer. I was only the most vaguely conscious of comix as a writer. This was 1969, ‘70, ‘71. I saw them and thought they were interesting but didn’t appreciate how revolutionary they were until I got a little further along.

CBA: You just saw undergrounds as a curiosity?

Mike: It was just something that didn’t relate to me. They weren’t about super-heroes. [laughs] I was a super-hero writer and a super-hero fan. I was not really a fan of comics in general; I was just a fan of super-heroes. Over time, I broadened my interests, and the undergrounds were something I became more conscious of.

CBA: Do you think that that kind of fan — the super-hero fan — down the road proved a liability for the industry?

Mike: Ultimately it was a liability. Absolutely.

CBA: There are writers that were fixated on

©2003 DC Comics.

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characters — not characterization, so much — and not on content, not the form. For instance, they really wanted to write Superman, not stories featuring Superman, if you catch my drift. Their dream was to write Superman.

Mike: Yes, and that’s actually what occurred.

You really hit it on the head.

What saved the comics industry were the fanatic superhero people in the late ’70s and early ’80s taking over the field — on the production level, the retail level, and the consumer level. But in “saving” the industry, they wiped out every other genre from the field. The diversity of comics that continued into the early ’70s was completely gone by the mid-’80s. By the mid-’80s, it was just totally super-heroes to the exclusion of almost everything else. It was not until we moved into the ’90s when we began to diversify again, and it’s that diversity now that is saving the field, this time around, from its current problems. But, if there hadn’t been that focus on super-heroes, I think comics would have disappeared. It would have gone the way of pulp magazines and there would have been no comics.

CBA: Do you think the form itself would have disappeared, or just comics as we knew them in pamphlet form? It seems to be such a resilient art form.

Mike: I can just tell you that I think the product would have disappeared.

If it were going to be reinvented, it would have been reinvented in a radically different way. Given the pulp publishing origins of all the people running the industry up through the ’70s, who would have thought about comic books any differently than the way they’ve been produced for 40 years? So I actually think they would have gone away. If comics had reemerged after the field had died, the form would have been radically different. But that’s all speculation. It’s like playing “what if?”

What did happen was the focus was on superheroes and that, in fact, provided enough profit to save the field from collapsing by creating an entirely different distribution channel. How many comics survive today based on what they sell through traditional magazine distribution channels? A dozen?

CBA: Did you work exclusively for Julie Schwartz?

Mike: Initially yes, but fairly quickly I went to other editors. The very first year I just worked for Julie. I remember talking to a couple of other editors that first summer, but not hitting it off with any of them. The second year they treated me really well, guaranteed me an income for the entire summer, and I wound up working for just about everybody up there: Joe Orlando, Murray Boltinoff, Dick Giordano, and almost

Joe Kubert (although that didn’t work out).

I hit it off really well with Dick Giordano, and wound up working with him pretty consistently through the end of my days at DC. I was less successful in forming relations with the other editors.

CBA: Did you feel that your youth was against you or being a newcomer?

Mike: Well, first off, I’m self-taught, so I didn’t have any training in writing at this stage. So I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was all very instinctual. I was not really able to articulate well what I wanted to do, I just wanted to do it. It was very… id writing. I mean, I’m just amazed, looking back, that I got published at all. I don’t understand how I got published, because I look at the stuff and there’s just so much incoherence to it. There was energy, there was enthusiasm… I don’t want to denigrate the work too much. But it was difficult for me to talk to editors and for me to understand what they were asking for. The reason it was a little bit easier with Giordano was because he didn’t, himself, have an articulate point of view about what he was looking for. He reacted more to how enthusiastic somebody was, and tried to channel that enthusiasm. I wound up doing some of my best work for Dick, in the sense of being imaginative and being interesting. I had weird little assignments for him. But one of my favorite super-hero stories was a Teen Titans job I did for Dick. I did a number of Witching Hour stories Dick edited, and they were also a lot of fun.

CBA: Who drew your mystery stories?

Mike: A lot of work was by Alex Toth, which was really cool. I also had an Al Williamson job. Those are the biggest names I remember. There was a lot of linking sequence material in the Witching Hour stories, and I wrote about half, maybe a third of them. Toth would draw them and they were great.

CBA: Were you involved in the development of those characters at all?

Mike: No, not at all.

CBA: Did you have a regular title you worked on while at DC in the early years?

Mike: Well, in the early years, no. But in my third year working at DC, I started writing two regular assignments, Justice League of America and the “Robin” back-up strips. (Robin was attending college in the stories, and I was in college, so they just figured it was a natural fit.)

CBA: Have you in recent days gone back and looked at that stuff?

Mike: Actually, yes. Amazingly enough, about six months ago, I had the brilliant idea that DC could probably sell my stories as a hardcover collection if you just focused on who drew them. [laughter] So I put together a proposal for DC. I’ve gotten a somewhat positive response, but no confirmation that they’re actually going forward with it. But, anyway, it meant that I wound up looking through a lot of that old stuff. There were about 50 comics I wrote over the four or five years I was there. There’s an impressively high quality of art that got attached to this stuff.

CBA: Did you look at DC as the “artists” company and Marvel as the “writers” company?

Mike: No! It was, in fact, the opposite for me. DC had better stories and Marvel had better characters. I liked the characters at Marvel more.

They had personality, where DC characters really didn’t have very much personality. And you can see that looking backwards even now, you compare mid-’60s Spider-Mans to mid-’60s Flashes, and The Flash is generic and Spider-Man is livelier and there is personality there, which was not true at DC. I thought the artwork at DC was more competent in the sense that

there was more ability. Marvel had more energy to it. Neal Adams — and, later on, Gil Kane — did a synthesis of this. Neal had the energy and the craft, Kane had the craft and added the energy.

Gil went through an amazing transformation in the mid-’60s, unique among artists.

CBA: Justice League seemed to feature some controversial political issue every month.

Mike: JLA dealt with social issues, not so much politics. They were political in the sense that politics and culture go together. I really did feel that times were a-changin’ and we had to write about it. I just don’t think I was any good at it. [laughter] I was not able to resolve anything, and it was like it became the moral of the month. I lost the basic story, wasn’t focusing on telling a good story living in a modern, conflicted environment; I was just focusing on the modern conflict.

CBA: Just before the revitalization of Green Lantern when Green Arrow came on board, I recall some GL stories by Gil Kane you had written, which seemed the start of an “On the Road” series. Was that an attempt, as far as you were concerned, to start a new continuity?

Mike: I did a two-part story that I enjoyed a lot at the time, just before Adams and Denny O’Neil took over. I was not made ware of their plans for the series. I was hoping GL would be a regular strip I could write. But I didn’t know Gil Kane was leaving the title. I didn’t know that they were planning this radical shift with Neal and Denny. So, yes, I did approach those stories as if I was going to write them full-time, so maybe that came across. I don’t know if I was writing Justice League regular at that point,

TOP: Mike Friedrich had some notable collaborations with star artist Neal Adams. Their first job together was The Spectre #3 (Apr. ’73). ABOVE: Adams contributed a few pages to Friedrich’s Justice League of America #94 (Nov. ’71). ©2003 DC Comics.

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or whether that came along right after that. I think instead of Green Lantern, I got Justice League. I don’t really recall.

CBA: Didn’t you also write the “Batgirl” back-up strips?

Mike: I did a few. I had a harder time getting into that character.

CBA: What was your favorite work you did for DC in those days?

Mike: Anything Neal drew became one of my favorite stories. Also the stuff Gil Kane drew I really enjoyed.

He did a couple of Flash jobs I wrote, although they were horribly inked, they still were good, fun stories. I enjoyed those Green Lanterns. I enjoyed when Gil drew the Teen Titans story I wrote, then The Witching Hour work that Alex Toth did, they were really funny. There’s only one story I remember really liking a lot that didn’t have great artwork, and it was a Witching Hour story about a guy searching for a perfect wave and then he finds it, only it’s going the wrong way.

CBA: [Laughs] It’s going out to the ocean?

Mike: Right. That story was not well drawn, but it’s still fun to read.

CBA: Gil told me how he quit DC because of some bullshit happening over his Flash stories. There was a lot of internal squabbling going on there. Did you catch wind of the conflicts?

Mike: Well, since I was only in New York three months a year (and would go out during my school breaks), I was not really that aware of these issues except when I was there. But certainly I hung out at the office so I did pick up some of the politics. I remember it being a very political environment, but most of it was pretty ephemeral. I was not aware of the history of Carmine and Gil going back 20-something years. That was happening at a level that was way beyond me.

CBA: Did you think that Dick, as an editor, was an asset to that company? Was it unfortunate that he left?

Mike: Oh, yes, absolutely. It was extremely unfortunate Dick left. His material had a lot more life in it than most of the other material.

CBA: When did the writing on the wall appear for you at DC? What was it that made you go down the street to Marvel?

Mike: I remember leaving out of frustration, but it’s hard to remember now what

exactly that frustration was. Whatever it was, I certainly blew it out of proportion. The best way to talk about it is to explain there is a good part of me that’s a control freak, and that I wanted to write the comics because I wanted to control what the characters would do. When I realized the writers didn’t have any control, the editors had control, I wanted to become an editor. I was promised editorial work at DC, but what that meant was I got to read the slush pile. I didn’t really have as much control over my writing as I liked or wanted to have.

At Marvel, the writers pretty much didn’t have editors. The writers were expected to be their own editors and they communicated directly with the artists, and the only editing that went on was proofreading, virtually. I mean, if they liked what you were doing, they kept you on, and if they didn’t like what you were doing, they would hire somebody else. There wasn’t anyone discussing your stories with you like they were at DC. So there was tremendous amount of editorial control, in that sense, that I was given working for Marvel, and they were paying me more money. My income virtually doubled the first year I went to work at Marvel. And it was because without the editorial conferences, I could write a lot more stuff, and they were willing to have me write more stuff, so the amount of production I was able to do went up dramatically.

I also felt I was more in touch with what was going on in the world. Of course, then, as I moved along, I realized that editors didn’t have any control, publishers did, so I became a publisher. [Jon laughs] Then I realized that publishers don’t have control, retailers have control, and so I got into marketing! [laughter] Then I realized that the retailers have no control, it’s the content that’s the control, but by then I couldn’t write anymore, so it was too late. So that’s how I started working for the writers and the artists.

CBA: You immediately got steady gigs over at Marvel?

Mike: I actually did an occasional job for Marvel starting the second summer I was in New York, in ‘68. I wrote one job a summer for three years.

They were all little odds and ends, Western stories that would get published three years later and a couple of mystery stories I don’t think ever got published (or, if they did, I immediately was embarrassed and forgot that they exist). My first Marvel super-hero stuff literally started the day I started working there.

CBA: You did Iron Man, “Ka-Zar” [in Astonishing Tales]…

Mike: I wrote Iron Man, “Ant-Man,” “Ka-Zar”… Iron Man was the one constant all the way through, which I wrote for close to four years. I enjoyed the “Ant-Man” comic [Marvel Feature], where I worked with Herb Trimpe initially and then Craig Russell. I wrote Craig’s first professional job, as he had just come out from under the wing of Dan Adkins, where he’d been Dan’s assistant. I worked with Marie Severin on “Ka-Zar.” I remember working with Mike Royer on that strip for quite a while. I did an occasional Captain America, when Steve Englehart needed a break, and I enjoyed working with Sal Buscema.

My most ambitious work, and the most disappointing, was working on Warlock, where I started working with John Buscema. I think the only time I ever worked with John was on that one story and it was really a lot of fun.

But then he left and Gil came on and I had a good time with him, but then I was kicked off the book, which took the wind out of my sails. The new writer didn’t work out and they brought me back, but by then I didn’t care anymore.

They had a different artist anyway and it just petered out pretty quickly. I really loved the idea of trying to do Jesus Christ as a super-hero and do

TOP: Moving over to Marvel,Mike Friedrich took over the writing assignment on Ka-Zar. This Gil Kane-penciled, Frank Giacoia-inked vignette appeared in Astonishing Tales #15 (Dec. ’72). LEFT: Another fun Friedrich strip was his “Ant-Man” in Marvel Feature. This is Herb Trimpe’s cover to #4 (July ’72). ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

allegorical super-hero stories. It was an interesting challenge, but I never really got a chance to sink my teeth into it.

CBA: You’re credited as working on Captain Marvel?

Mike: Jim Starlin and I were housemates in 1972 and he had just come in from Detroit and was bringing these characters of his — Thanos, The Destroyer, etc. — along with him. I got him the job of introducing those characters in Iron Man. So there were a couple of issues there. Then I followed Jim along onto other ideas of his until he got the bright idea he could do it himself. So I dialogued Captain Marvel for a while, plus there was a Thing team-up book [Marvel Feature #11, 12, then Marvel Two-In-One] of which I did one issue with Jim. I was just going along for the ride after a little while, because these were really Jim’s ideas.

As I say, it didn’t take Jim long to figure out he could write them himself.

CBA: The last credit here is from 1975…

Mike: That sounds right. I lived in New York for a year after I got out of college, and that’s when I started working at Marvel. I then moved back to California and became the first regular writer to live out of town. They had veteran artists living out of town at that point, and Kirby and Buscema were not working in the office, but sending their art pages in, but pretty much everybody else brought their pages in at that point, and all of the writers did, absolutely. So I kind of trained Marvel to understand you could ship stuff through the mail and the book would still get out in time. But being out of the office meant that I really was out of the political arena at Marvel. Then again, I don’t know that my work was all that great. As things changed, they were offering me strips I was less and less interested in and then I began turning them down. Then, at some point, I just quit because I was started publishing. There was an overlap of about a year or a year-and-a-half of the first couple of issues of Star*Reach, the comic I was publishing, and working at Marvel.

CBA: Living on the West Coast, did you realize there was obviously no future for you to be an editor over at Marvel?

Mike: Oh, yeah. Again, being a writer, I was an editor. I just didn’t have any control, really, over my assignments.

CBA: Did you look at Stan Lee as a career model?

Mike: No, I didn’t really have much interaction with Stan. My connection to Marvel was Roy Thomas. Roy was certainly a role model to me. I liked Roy and liked working with him. When Roy left Marvel as an editor, that was really the beginning of the end. There was a revolving-door editor for quite a while and I got lost in that shuffle somewhat.

CBA: What prompted you to start thinking about getting into publishing?

Mike: Well, this gets back to the whole underground comix thing you were asking about earlier. By this point, I was back in California and got to know the first comic store owner I ever met, a guy named Bob Sidebottom, who lived in San Jose. I was living in that part of the Bay Area at that time, near where I had gone to college. I don’t remember how it happened, but he would drive up every week to go up to the magazine distribution warehouse in San Francisco, where he got all the current comics at a pretty decent discount because he was paying cash with no returns. For some reason, the San Jose distributor wouldn’t let him make this deal. So about once a month, or maybe every couple of months, I would go with him on one of these jaunts up to San Francisco to see the magazine warehouse. So my first introduction to how comics were distributed was seeing it from the warehouse level.

Bob would then swing by the two major underground publishers in San Francisco, Rip Off Press and Last Gasp, and pick up books from there, too.

So I got to see, by contrast, what they were doing, and that introduced me to a lot of comics I had not been familiar with. It was at that point (this was around 1972, ’73), I really began to get familiar with what had been going on in the undergrounds. So the light bulb that went on over my head wasn’t over content but about the business model, which was, “Hey, these guys own their own work.

They’re writing stories for grown-ups.

Plus they get royalties!” This makes a helluva lot of sense for the content that the Marvel/DC freelance people wanted to do that there was no outlet for in the super-hero world, which was primarily science-fiction and fantasy material. After one rather lengthy false start of working with Roy Thomas and Barry Smith to do a non-Conan Robert E. Howard property, I eventually got the first issue of Star*Reach together.

CBA: What was the Robert E. Howard adaptation?

Mike: I think it was “Bran Mak Morn.” For whatever reason, Barry only drew a few pages and never finished it. At some point, years later, Roy had Tim Conrad finish it, and eventually he sold it to Marvel. But that was years later. I remember I had the idea, and the thing sat around for about a year before I abandoned it and went on to talk to Jim Starlin and Howard Chaykin and, ultimately, Walter Simonson to do the first Star*Reach issue.

TOP: Two other regular assignments for Mike were Iron Man and Sub-Mariner (the latter pitching in to help an increasingly ailing buddy, the legendary Bill Everett. This cover detail with art

by Gil Kane is from Iron Man #54 (Jan. ’73). RIGHT: For a time, Warlock was a favorite gig of the writer’s especially when teamed with artist Gil Kane. Panel detail (with inks by Tom Sutton) from #5 (Apr. ’73). ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

59 CBA V.2 #2

CBA: Did you have a particular affinity for working with other creative people, with other artists and writers?

Mike: Well, they were my peers, so I hung out with them.

CBA: Were you pretty friendly with a good number?

Mike: Yes, quite a few. I mean, it’s hard to remember specific events, but I knew a lot of artists. I hung out with Frank Brunner and Bernie Wrightson. I also knew Chaykin and a lot of people who would hang out at Neal Adams’ studio.

CBA: Was it helpful, in the long run, that you weren’t involved in the intrigues taking place at the comic book companies?

Mike: I have no idea. I didn’t feel that at the time.

I felt left out.

CBA: But did it prove helpful in that you didn’t carry any baggage with you when you were going around soliciting for Star*Reach?

Mike: No idea. It could be.

CBA: Did you have grandiose plans? Were you starting a new empire?

Mike: Well, I was convinced this business model would take over the world. And it did, only I wasn’t there to do it. I made lots of great, classic mistakes: I told Wendy and Richard Pini I didn’t see there was a market for Elfquest, but they should publish it themselves, and gave them some advice. I told Dave Sim I didn’t think there was a market for Cerebus, but he could publish it himself, and I gave him some advice. The biggest mistake was in 1978 I was granted a license by DC Comics to do Batman graphic novels. I had Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, who at that time were doing Detective Comics, who agreed to do the book. But I wanted to do it in black-&-white, and they wanted to do it in color, and I didn’t want to spend the money to do it in color. Talk about your great “What-ifs.” [laughter] That was right around the time I was inspired by Dean Mullaney’s publishing

of the Paul Gulacy/Don McGregor graphic novel, Sabre. It was like, “Oh! I could do that with Batman!” Then I got the license. I was a publisher who was self-taught and made a lot of critical financial mistakes.

CBA: Did you talk to Ron Turner at Last Gasp? He was in the area, right?

Mike: Well, I did talk to Ron a little bit, but only in the sense of basics. I mean, Last Gasp introduced me to printers, and my color-separating people came through one of those connections. Beyond that, there really wasn’t a lot of conversation. We didn’t have inventory management discussions. [laughter] There was no publisher’s roundtable, no trade group where people were swapping tips.

CBA: What was the plan with Star*Reach?

Mike: Well, my plan was to enable the artists working for Marvel and DC who were frustrated to do work they really wanted to do which would connect to the older audience we all knew was out there. The publishers at that time continued to insist that demographic was not out there in numbers to warrant focusing on them.

And my plan was to do it in a way where the artists made more money than they did working for Marvel and DC, and that they owned the rights. It didn’t quite work out that way, but that was the plan. I mean, I was able to ramp up a decent amount of production. I went from nothing to eight or ten titles a year, and then a substantial backlist over time, which kept selling for a number of years. That was the good news and the bad news.

I discovered there weren’t an awful lot of artists willing to take the financial gamble. What Image Comics has to go through today is what I went through back in the ‘70s, which is the fact that artists need to get paid up front. It’s very hard for people to do work on spec the market is going to like.

It wound up being that I was publishing a segment of the books by people I could afford to pay up front, and then the rest would be by newcomers who

60 CBA V.2 #2

TOP: Young entreprenuer Mike Friedrich prepares to enter the publishing realm in this 1970s photo, courtesy of M.F. ABOVE: An early and celebrated contributor to Mike’s Star*Reach was artist/writer Jim Starlin, where the fan-favorite would deal with some pretty trippy subjects. Both from Star*Reach #1. ©2003 Jim Starlin.

would submit stuff to me, where the money wasn’t meaningful to them. They could afford to live within the page rate guarantees, which were about a third of Marvel rates.

CBA: Where did the name Star*Reach come from, and what does it mean?

Mike: That’s totally lost in memory. It’s just one of those “reaching for the stars” ideas that I turned around.

CBA: Was it specifically, as you recall, the name for the book itself or for the whole publishing she-bang?

Mike: I thought of it as a name for the comic, and then I took it as name for the company because of the comic.

CBA: What was “ground-level”? Did you come up with that?

Mike: Well, no, but I’m the one who popularized it. “Ground-level” was a slam Trina Robbins made that I thought actually was pretty cool. She made a joke about comics that aren’t Marvel and aren’t underground, “They’re ground-level, ha-ha-ha!” It was meant as a put-down. But I heard it and immediately said, “This makes sense.” So I used it as a sales hook for a year or two… and never lived it down. [laughter] I should have just laughed and forgotten it.

CBA: Why? What negatives come from that?

Mike: Well, it’s a silly term. It doesn’t have legs. [laughs] CBA: In historic terms, how do you look at the Star*Reach books?

Were they the first alternative comics?

Mike: Oh, yes. Historically, I don’t think of them as undergrounds and certainly didn’t think of them as being in the same universe as Marvel and DC. They really were something different. They were what I would call the predecessor of Image Comics. That is, doing the Marvel and DC riff but for yourself. I was also looking at things like Jim Steranko doing his own publishing, Wally Wood doing his own publishing. Those were some secondary inspirations.

CBA: Did you dream of having six regular titles?

Mike: Oh, yeah. I had the whole full-blown take-over-the-industry dream.

But since I wouldn’t hire anyone else to help me and tried to do everything myself, there was just no way that was going to happen. [laughs] CBA: How did you announce the coming of Star*Reach to the world?

Mike: I didn’t announce it, I just published it.

CBA: Well, did you have any publicity?

Mike: No. I put the book out in April of ‘73 and took it to a convention in Berkeley a couple of weeks later. The timing was coincidental. I knew who Phil Seuling was and I had met Bud Plant at this thing in Berkeley. I went to Ron Turner with it, he bought a few. Bud was really enthusiastic, so he bought a bunch. He suggested I send it to Phil Seuling. I

sent it to Phil and, from then on, everybody came to me. By the second issue, there were distributors and retailers coming to me directly. So I didn’t really do much outreach until I was at it for three or four years. Again, being in the right place at the right time and being very lucky.

CBA: There was the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe. Did you think of a Star*Reach Universe?

Mike: No, not at all. In fact, I had the opposite idea. I was hoping that all of the talent would create their own little characters. I had no concept. I was very disappointed people didn’t want to do regular characters. They would do single stories, but then wouldn’t want to do another one. You’d have to talk to the artists as to why they didn’t. I would suspect it had to do with the money, but it could also do with, they didn’t like how it turned out, or they didn’t like working with me, and people were offering them other stuff right there and I’m way out in California. I don’t know what the reasons are. But it didn’t build up in the way that I anticipated. The whole “shared universe” thing that came into Image was really something that really evolved through the ‘80s, it wasn’t happening in the ‘70s.

CBA: It’s interesting there would be any resistance by creators to come up with their own characters. They owned the material that was published?

Mike: Yup, they owned their own work. They still do.

CBA: The most lucrative aspect in comics is to have successful continuing characters to license…

Mike: What I remember — and I don’t remember this very clearly — it was more that people were basically being offered regular work by Marvel, so they didn’t have time to do work for me. I was, in essence, competing with Marvel. I couldn’t keep anybody alive working for me with anything like a full-time job. So they had to fit it in between the work they were doing for Marvel. Marvel doesn’t give you time to do extra work, they always give you 120% of your capacity. They still do. Part of how their business model has been so successful.

THIS PAGE: Besides Starlin and Walter Simonson, the other “star” contributor to Star*Reach #1 was Howard Chaykin, who introduced his character Cody Starbuck in its pages. Top is panel and above cover art detail from that issue. ©2003 Howard V. Chaykin.

61 CBA V.2 #2

CBA: Do you recall the press run of the first issue of Star*Reach?

Mike: I printed 15,000 copies to begin with, sold them all within six months, and ultimately, I did about three or four reprints of about five thousand per. I think I sold a total of somewhere around 30,000.

That was my best-selling issue, and that was kind of the norm. I think I was printing about 15,000 copies of just about everything as my initial print run for the first three or four years.

CBA: Could you make a living from it?

Mike: It took me a couple of years, but I was able to scrape by. I did invest my comic book collection, which I sold, and basically I lived off of that for a while. But, yeah, after about three years I was able to make a living.

CBA: Did you sell your collection in one bulk?

Mike: Pretty close to it.

It was over a two or three month period.

CBA: Was it substantial money?

Mike: Yes. I don’t remember the amount, but it was certainly enough to keep me going.

CBA: Probably in today’s numbers, it could have sold in the millions, right?

Mike: Well, I didn’t know the market, so I was just following the Overstreet Guide, and more or less I sold books for guide value. Therefore I made a lot less money on the early issues than I could have, because I didn’t appreciate that a guide is a guide. [laughs] But I don’t regret it terribly. Certainly the value of those books is dramatically higher now than it was then, but I wouldn’t have been able to do the publishing if I hadn’t sold it, so I have no regrets. The contents are still in my head.

I’m really glad that DC has reprinted a lot of these things in hardback, but when I get them, I sort of glance at them and reread them and I go, “Oh, yeah, I remember that story.” But it’s not like I go back and reread them all the time.

CBA: So you sat down and figured out the logistics that yes, indeed, you could do your own comic book. Did you work out any deals with any distributors?

Mike: Initially, no. I was pretty sure I would get a good response out of Bud Plant, but I didn’t really contact anybody in advance. I had enough money to do the first printing, and so just did that. I picked a number out of a hat, I don’t know how I did, but it was a good lucky guess.

CBA: You guessed the print run?

Mike: Yes. People got excited right away and I was able to pay back the printing bill very quickly and was into profit very quickly. It worked out very well.

CBA: What was your original deal with the creators in the first issue?

Mike: Oh, I don’t know. I’d have to really go back and dig out the numbers.

CBA: Just roughly. Were they going to get a cut of the profits?

Mike: Oh, no. It was set up like I understood the book business at the time. They received an advance against royalties, the amount of

62

which varied from creator to creator. The people with proven track records at Marvel and DC tended to get a little more money than the people who were pretty new, but at the end of the day, everybody got the same royalty.

There was a royalty for the whole book that was something like eight percent of the cover price, and I just divided it up by the number of pages and everybody got the same royalty. So on the early issues that sold really well, the people doing the back-up features made as much money as the people doing the lead stuff.

CBA: Now, with the original group, Walter Simonson and Jim Starlin and Howard Chaykin: were they contributing to support you or did they actually believe the project would work?

Mike: Well, you’ll have to ask them, I have no clue. I didn’t know Walter. I think it was Howard who sent me that material. I was just there saying, “Listen, I have some money, let’s try to

CBA

THIS PAGE: Neal Adams would also find occasion to contribute to Star*Reach. Top is a detail of his cover art for #2. Art ©2003 Neal Adams. Stephanie Starr ©2003 Mike Friedrich & Dick Giordano. ABOVE is a one-shot strip from #1, written by M.F. and drawn by Neal. ©2003 Mike Friedrich & Neal Adams.(

V.2 #2

do this.” I was paying them a reasonably competitive page rate to what they were getting at Marvel and DC, so at the end of the day it was a decent gig. If it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t, no big deal.

CBA: Were you explicit to say that there were generally no restrictions on violence and nudity and language?

Mike: Yes, although that changed a little bit over time as I discovered what my own editorial boundaries were. I wound up drawing the line on explicit sexuality and had stuff changed.

CBA: You were friends with Starlin?

Mike: Yes, I knew both Jim and Howard from working with them both in New York. I had worked with Jim on those stories we discussed and he’d been a housemate of mine for a couple of months. Howard I knew from us both hanging out at Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios. I don’t think he and I successfully worked on anything together. We did pitch one project, an episode of Beowulf for Marvel, but it didn’t fly.

CBA: You have a strip in the first issue called “Observations.” What is that?

Mike: That was one of those weird, spur-of-the-moment things that I had done a couple of years earlier. Neal Adams drew it in a day and gave it back to me.

CBA: Did you have any hopes to continue it?

Mike: No, it was just one of those weird little things.

CBA: The “Creativity Unchained” cartoon with Mona Lisa: was that something Lee Marrs came up with?

Mike: Oy. See, you’ve read all this stuff just recently.

I haven’t looked at any of this in years!

CBA: When did you first meet Lee? Mike: Well, I met her in New York, not too long before publishing the first comic. She and I met each other in Marv Wolfman’s office when he was an editor at Marvel on Crazy magazine. Lee showed me the Pudge, Girl Blimp book she was doing, and I thought that was totally cool. She lived not too far from me, so after I published the first issue, I asked if she was interested in doing some work for Star*Reach. I don’t remember whether I approached her or she approached me, but we started working together.

CBA: Lee came up with Pudge, Girl Blimp before you two met?

Mike: Oh, yes. Actually, before she knew me, Last Gasp published the first edition of #1, then I picked it up with the second issue and did #3, and then reprinted #1.

CBA: Was Pudge the second title you produced?

Mike: Yes. CBA: What about Pudge made you feel it was right for the Star*Reach catalog?

Mike: Pudge was just work that I liked. It struck a chord with me. It was the best of the personal comics I was seeing come out of the underground. I really appreciated the depth and humor of it,

so I was immediately attracted.

CBA: Did you have any kind of policy for Star*Reach in terms of content?

Mike: Most of the material I published was a mixture of science-fiction and fantasy material, so those were largely the kinds of submissions I got.

Nobody sent me a good super-hero story for me to ever have to decide whether I wanted to do one or not. I got a lot of bad super-hero stuff, but nobody sent me a good one. And I wasn’t really looking for it. I was trying to publish stuff people weren’t doing elsewhere.

CBA: You must have been buried by submissions, right?

Mike: Not as many as you might think, and most of the submissions were amateur.

CBA: Was Stephanie Starr the only character you created for the books?

Mike: Right.

CBA: How did that come about? It says in a text piece it was originally intended as something like a “Modesty Blaise versus the Aliens” series idea intended as a background feature in an overground comic Dick Giordano put together. Was that for DC? Mike: Yes, I think I had originally developed the idea for DC, but then Dick left his editorial position and it went no further in development. He was not going to commit himself to draw anything that would take away from the

THIS PAGE: Frank Brunner, late of Marvel, was another celebrated contributor, helping Mike to launch Quack! by submitting a Howard the Duck-like tale.

He also sold T-shirts via magazine ads (RIGHT). TOP is a vignette from Brunner’s superb Elric tale showcased in Star*Reach Greatest Hits collection.

Elric ©2003 Michael Moorcock. Art ©2003 Frank Brunner.

63 CBA V.2 #2

64 CBA V.2 #2

other work he was doing. Inking was fast and editing was his day job, so the penciling was stuff that he got to last, and he never got around to it. So it never got off the ground at DC. I don’t remember specifically if there was a particular magazine it was aimed for or what, but it was an idea he had liked and was interested in, and when I went off and did my own work, he said he was still interested. He was interested in helping me out, so it was also a personal favor. It was actually one of the best stories he ever drew. I like a lot of what he did in that story.

CBA: What was the concept behind Stephanie Starr?

Mike: Oh, it was “Modesty Blaise in outer space,” or “in the future.”

That was the real inspiration. Dick and I were both Modesty Blaise fans. But that’s really reducing it down to nothing. That’s where it started. It then took on its own life, although I discovered I didn’t have a second story. Nothing occurred to me after I did the first one. So although it sort of sounded like it was an ongoing feature, it was just a one-shot. Maybe it was originally intended to be just one.

CBA: I don’t be meaning to beat a dead horse here, but at the time in mainstream comics, anthologies were on their way out and super-heroes emerged on top. Why didn’t you pursue having regular, recurring characters?

Mike: Well, I encouraged people like Chaykin and Starlin to create characters, but other than Chaykin doing two or three “Cody Starbuck” stories (though they didn’t really build on each other; they were very, very different from one another), there really wasn’t anybody who seemed interested in doing regular stuff.

CBA: But you were an established comic book writer, yourself. Did you just not have time to do it? Or just didn’t have the interest?

Mike: Well, I had lost interest in writing by that point. I was much more interested in the editing and publishing. I’ve written less than a handful of stories since that time.

CBA: How did it feel for Star*Reach to become a relative success?

Mike: Well, certainly when I was younger, I always thought I was right about everything. So

it didn’t surprise me it was successful, as I expected it to be. I just thought, “Well, this is the stuff people really want to see. Let’s put it out.” Although I guess I wasn’t terribly surprised, I learned that people were not willing to follow my personal editorial interests into very different material. You can see a real strong connection between drawing super-hero comics and drawing science-fiction comics, which, in retrospect, it’s all of a piece. But going off and doing humorous material or personal history material, there just wasn’t a market for that. Certainly not within the outlets that I was appealing to, which were overwhelmingly Marvel Comics outlets.

CBA: What was the genesis of Quack!? Was it to exploit the success of Howard the Duck, pure and simple?

Mike: Oh, it was due to Howard the Duck, definitely. By this time, Frank Brunner and I knew each other pretty well…

CBA: Frank was in the Bay Area at the time?

Mike: Frank was living in Oakland. He and I were neighbors for a couple of years. I don’t remember if this was during that time or not, but it was in that general period. He didn’t stick with Howard the Duck, and the idea of having his own character made sense. But again, he only wound up doing two stories. It was too early for Dave Sim to be in it. [laughter] So his Beavers didn’t quite take off.

CBA: How did the appearance of Michael Moorcock’s Elric in Star*Reach come about?

Mike: That story was sent to me complete.

These guys had completed the whole story and just sent it to me. I said, “Hell, yes!” [laughs] It was gorgeous, just absolutely gorgeous. I didn’t know them at all, it just showed up in the mail one day. Then I commissioned a Jeff Jones cover for it and Jeff sends this portrait of Bernie Wrightson dressed in a cloak. Next to my first issue, that turned out to be the most successful magazine I published.

Elric was really very strong, identifiable character, which people recognized.

CBA: How did you get permission?

Mike: Well, somehow or another, I tracked down his agent in New York and got permission.

That led, down the road, a few years later, me to get the adaptation rights to the existing prose material, and I did that for close to 20 years.

CBA: Did you

TOP BACKGROUND: Quack! logo designed by Tom Orzechowski. ABOVE: Splash page to Brunner’s story in Quack! #1. Inks by Steve Leialoha.©2003 Frank Brunner.

THE BEAVERS

NEWTON, THE WONDER RABBIT

E.Z. WOLF

DAVE SIM

STEVE LEIALOHA

TED RICHARDS

establish a personal relationship with Michael?

Mike: Oh, yeah! I met him during my first international trip, in London in 1977. By this time, Heavy Metal magazine had come out. I remember pitching an idea for Howard Chaykin and I to do what eventually wound up being The Swords of Heaven, The Flowers of Hell (published by Heavy Metal). But that pitch was why I first met Michael in person. It never quite worked out for me to write it, and then Howard and Michael did it together directly.

CBA: What was your impression of Michael?

Mike: I’ve always liked Michael. I’ve only met him maybe three times. I saw him when he came out to the San Diego Comic Convention two or three years ago, and we sat down and had a wonderful chat. He’s somebody I talk to on the phone occasionally and e-mail now and then, and he’s always been very upfront, very straightforward, a nice guy.

CBA: What was his reaction to the story in Star*Reach?

Mike: He seemed to really like it, and thought the version of Elric drawn there was one of his favorites, and wanted Bob Gould to become the artist to do the material.

CBA: You had Ray Bradbury in that same issue.

Did you know Ray? Mike: I just asked him for something and he sent me this poem, so I got Alex Niño to illustrate it and I sent Ray a check for the standard writer’s advance, something like $30. A week later, the check comes back, and Ray writes, “Thanks very much, but I can’t accept this.” So I got insulted! [laughs] So I went out to a gift store and bought one of those sausage and cheese

THE WRAITH MICHAEL T. GILBERT

ON THE SKIDS ALAN KUPPERBERG

packages that cost $30, whatever it was the advance was. I then mailed it to him and wrote, “Well, if you won’t take my check, then you’ll just have to eat it.” [laughter] CBA: I assume the package did not come back?

Mike: Ray just sent back a postcard saying, “Thanks very much, ha-ha-ha.” [laughter] CBA: You know, you used Tom Orzechowski— Mike: —all the way through.

CBA: Because he was local?

Mike: Yes, I knew him. He had come out with Steve Englehart, Brunner, Alan Weiss, the gang who had shown up from New York. He was one of the guys who stayed. He still lives in the area, although I only see him occasionally now. Tom was the backbone of the company. I think one of the reasons why the material holds up to any degree is because of the high quality of the lettering, an aspect really under-looked in comics.

Tom was one of the best.

CBA: Steve Leialoha was also a frequent contributor. He was also local, right?

Mike: Yup. I met him at a little mini-con where he first introduced his material to Starlin and Brunner, and that’s how he got his professional inking work, showing his stuff to them. He was also interested in penciling, so I got him doing some work. I had fun with the stuff he did.

CBA: What kind of guy was Steve?

Mike: The same as he is now. [laughter] CBA: Well, our readers don’t know!

Mike: Quiet, unassuming; passionate about his work; droll in his humor. I had a great time working with him.

CBA: Did Gene Day’s work just arrive in the mail one day?

YOU-ALL GIBBONS

OREGON BOBCAT

KERWIN KEYSTONE

SCOTT SHAW!

DOT BUCHER

KEN MACKLIN

THIS PAGE: Most of the strips in Quack!’s six-issue run were repeating features. Here’s a rogues gallery. Characters ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

65 CBA V.2 #2

Mike: Yes. I really wasn’t soliciting a lot of material because, after the first couple of issues, people more or less came to me. I would go after the lead strips, but everything else came from the mail submissions. Gene Day got his job at Marvel when Mark Gruenwald, an assistant editor at the time, called me up and asked, “Will you give me Gene’s phone number?” I said, “Sure!” And that’s how Gene started working at Marvel.

CBA: Had you seen those big, oversize Gods of Mount Olympus stories drawn

by Joe Staton?

Mike: Yeah, I was sent those by Joe, and I said, “You know, I really like these, but it was being distributed in extremely limited fashion, a couple of thousand copies.

Not very many people have seen them.” So I asked Joe if he would just shrink them down and we could feature the episodes in Star*Reach.

“Go get Photostats, shrink them down to the size of the pages I was publishing, and I’ll publish them.” But instead, he redrew them all! It was easier for him to redraw them than to go get Photostats. [laughter] I never understood that one.

CBA: I long ago lost the oversize ones I had, so I was delighted to see them in Star*Reach. Did you encourage them to continue the series?

Mike: Yes, I think we did one new strip. I met the writer briefly up in Spokane, Washington, stayed at his house one night as I came through to see the Spokane World’s Fair. It was one little set of stories and it didn’t go anywhere beyond that.

CBA: Were the vast majority of the magazines sold at conventions?

Mike: Well, not by me. They were mostly sold in stores. The brilliance of the marketing, such as it was, was that I realized there were stores who weren’t getting as much product as they wanted. I was the first publisher

that really saw those stores as a separate distribution channel.

CBA: You’re talking about used comic shops?

Mike: Right. There were new comic stores, too, and there were quite a few of them. But yeah, they were collector stores that were then slowly finding ways to sell new Marvels and DCs, and there were enough of them, along with the mail order people and the convention dealers. Then they burgeoned through the ’70s. And of course, it kept going on into the ’80s. But I saw them as a separate market right away. No one used the word “distribution channel” back in the ’70s, but that’s what it was.

CBA: You had a lovely cover for #7, Artemis by Barry Windsor-Smith.

Did you try to get a story from him?

Mike: I tried, unsuccessfully. But the cover was a good thing instead. I mean, I had known Barry socially for a number of years before then, and you may recall that the first thing I was going to publish was going to be by him — “Bran Mak Morn” — only that didn’t ever get drawn, so it never got published.

CBA: Did a young Dave Sim’s work just come in the mail unsolicited?

Mike: Yes. I met Dave a couple of times in Canada, too. I knew him from his fanzine publishing. I think I was seeing his ‘zines and then he sent me a comic book he produced.

CBA: You mentioned he came to you with Cerebus?

Mike: Yeah, he did. By this time, I thought the idea made some sense, but Quack! had not succeeded financially, and I just told him, “Well, I don’t see a market for this.” So I encouraged him to publish it himself.

CBA: Oh, you’re the one? Three hundred issues later! [laughter] Mike: Three hundred issues later.

66 CBA V.2 #2

TOP: Synopsis of Pudge, the Girl Blimp, which appeared in two issues of the Star*Reach title. ©2003 Lee Marrs.

ABOVE: Lee answers her readers’ questions — before they’re asked! — in this funny bit from Pudge #1. ©2003 Lee Marrs.

CBA: You know this story, “The Bushi”?

Was this manga?

Mike: That was something that just showed up. The artist Masaichi Mukaide was an American comics fan in Japan whose best buddy had been the son of a Japanese diplomat here in the States and who had grown up reading American comics.

Then at something like the age of 10 or 12, his family moved back to Japan and he meets the Mukaide as a kid, they’re kids together. This first guy and Mukaide figure out where the American comics are being imported to, so both became American comic fans.

Mukaide just always aspired to be a comics artist; he had a manga influence, of course, but for whatever reasons was not working professionally in Japan. His work was this sort of Neal Adams-influenced, yet what we now think of as manga-influenced material as well.

I later found that Star*Reach was the first publisher of a Japanese artist in America, according to a book by Fred Schodt called Manga!

Manga! I didn’t know that at the time, I just thought it looked cool.

CBA: You know, at the same time these comics were coming out, in the later ‘70s, DC and Marvel went to plastic plates and the printing of the comics just became atrocious. But Star*Reach remained with pretty crisp reproduction…

Mike: Yes, we stayed with offset.

CBA: Your print runs hovered around 15,000?

Mike: Right. The early issues I would go back to press on, the later ones I didn’t. My most successful year was when I had quite a bit of inventory built up, and maybe 10 or 12 issues of Star*Reach, and then the Star Wars movie came out in the summer of 1977, and for the next six months, anything that had the word “star” in it, people wanted a million of them. So I sold a ton of comics that year. And that, of course, was what led to my demise. I really thought that I had finally caught the wave, and that’s when I started planning to do color comics, and it was the investment in color that killed me.

CBA: You know, you make mentioned (in Star*Reach #11) a letter from George Lucas that commented on a letter in #9, but I only have the reprint where there’s a big blank space where the letters column was for the first printing. Can you give me an idea what you said to begin with?

Mike: Howard Chaykin told me he got the gig to draw the Star Wars comic because George Lucas had requested Roy Thomas to hire him, and when Howard met with Lucas — and I heard this story from Howard; I don’t know George at all — George showed him Star*Reach #1 and said, “I want you to draw it like this.”

CBA: Like “Cody Starbuck”?

Mike: Like “Cody Starbuck.” And, of course, there were visual similarities between the characters in Star Wars and what Chaykin had done in “Cody Starbuck,” so I thought there was certainly some influence, and I made a somewhat snide comment in an editorial about this. Somehow or another, I had gotten George Lucas’s address and mailed him that issue. He saw my comments — he’s a big comics fan to this day — and wrote me a letter basically denying that “Cody Starbuck” had anything to do with Star Wars. So by this time he was probably already getting sued up the whazoo, but I sure wasn’t interested in suing him and neither was Chaykin, so I just printed his letter and let it drop.

CBA: Was Dean Motter and Ken Steacy’s The Sacred and the Profane the first real serial you ran?

Mike: Well, I had done “The Gods of Mount Olympus,” and Lee TOP: Didja know that Mike and Lee Marrs have been domestic partners since the 1970s? Well, now ya do! The cute couple is seen here in a ’70s pic. Courtesy of M.F.

Marrs and Mal Warwick had done two or three issues of “Earth Probe.” I can say it was the longest serial.

CBA: And did it just arrive blind in the mail?

Mike: Well, that may not be the case. Steacy would have been the one who would have contacted me. But it’s also possible that I would have seen the first issue of [Canadian science-fiction comics anthology] Andromeda at this point. And this is where I would really need to have somebody go back and compare publishing dates, or have better memory than me.

Steacy was in the first issue of Andromeda and I liked his material there. It’s possible I contacted him and asked him if he wanted to do material for me.

It’s also possible that he contacted me and offered. But certainly once we were in touch with each other, I was an instant fan of his material and loved it a lot. I was happy to run that whole series.

CBA: That was recycled a few times, right?

Mike: Later on. Archie Goodwin was a big fan of it and a few years later, when I was working at Marvel and Archie was editor of Epic Illustrated, we worked out the repackaging deal to have it redone in color for Epic and then collected. It was collected later on, there were two different deals.

ABOVE: Detail of our heroine, Pudge, from Lee’s cover for #1. ©2003 Lee Marrs.

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CBA: Michael T. Gilbert did an awful lot of work for you, too.

Mike: I think he lived here in the Bay Area and sent me stuff. I remember him living in a town just over the hill from Berkeley.

I remember visiting him there. I think he contacted me and showed me material and I liked the blend of humor and science-fiction he was putting together.

Michael was a production nightmare to deal with, because every page was a different size. [laughter] I never could get him to stop doing that!

CBA: Were you having fun?

Mike: For most of the time, yes, I was. I was saddened when the thing stopped working and I needed to go do something else.

Yeah, I would have liked to have kept doing it.

CBA: You published some of P. Craig Russell’s opera adaptations.

Mike: Right. I knew Craig from working with him at Marvel, where we collaborated on “Ant-Man.” I don’t know why I stayed in touch with him, but I would have solicited the material that he contributed.

CBA: What were the problems with color?

Mike: Well, going to color was the biggest mistake I ever made, financially. I screwed myself, marketing-wise, too. It’s one of those impulsive decisions you can never take back.

The printer I was using to do the black-&-white material told me that he could handle color and gave me a certain price. It turned out that what he was using was an old letterpress where the reproduction quality was atrocious. I had the color art scanned for high-quality reproduction, pretty fine screens, as I was very specifically not at all interested in having it look like a color super-hero comics. I mean, this was full-palette color. We were doing it in the French style, where it was actually a three-color separation and then a solid black overlay (which I later on learned that the French had stolen from American children’s books). Steve Leialoha figured out how to create bluelines to do the coloring work on and then we then created a solid black overlay. So I was spending a lot of extra money on color separations.

Anyway, the first couple of things that went out in color printed terribly, and I let them go out. It made a really bad impression on the market. Then I compounded things by putting out Cody Starbuck and Parsifal with this bad reproduction. I made the mistake of shipping them to the market because I thought I needed the money, instead of waiting another two weeks to have them reprinted. Which is, as I say, one of those crazy things I did that, in

CBA

TOP: A frequent feature in S*R was Mike Vosburg’s randy Linda Lovecraft, which mixed carnal delights with eldritch terrors. This Vosburg piece graced the cover of The Comic Buyer’s Guide #122. ©2003 M.V. ABOVE: A long-running serial in the middle years was Dean Motter & Ken Steacy’s “The Sacred and the Profane.” ©’03 DM & KT.

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retrospect, I should have done differently. I was so embarrassed by them.

I should have just swallowed the cost and scraped through a couple of weeks to get it reprinted the way it was supposed to be.

They were eventually all printed correctly. You see the color in the inserts going forward and the fullcolor ones, the copies that you have, these are really nice-looking books. But the initial editions of them were terrible. They sold very badly, and I understand why, I wouldn’t have paid money for them. By the time the reprints got out, nobody wanted them because they hadn’t sold the originals. So I had a double error.

That just put me in a huge hole, one I never got out of.

CBA: Why did you come out with Imagine?

Did you just want to do a companion title to Star*Reach?

Mike: Well, Quack! had not succeeded, but distributors and retailers were telling me they wanted product. By this time, I know enough distributors and retailers, and they’re telling me they want more things like Star*Reach. So that’s what I did. All of that material I had in Imagine was stuff coming in intended as Star*Reach submissions. I might have solicited a Frank Cirocco story in the first book, but I really don’t remember anymore.

CBA: Who was he? Did he work at Continuity?

Mike: Yes, he did. Well, he was from out here in California, but had gone to New York and was working at Continuity. Neal had written this story as a way for Frank to get some credit to be able to get some other gigs. Star*Reach was a good place, at this point, in the later ’70s, to act as a springboard for contributors to get work at Marvel.

CBA: Do you think you were perhaps pulled in too many different directions; being a publisher, as well as editor, as well as writer?

Was that a problem, or were you able to change hats easily?

Mike: Well, I became a publisher in order to become an editor, and then what I discovered over time was I enjoyed publishing, I enjoyed the business, more than I enjoyed editing.

So in that sense, yeah, I was pulled in a lot of different directions, but we’re talking four years into the experience, ’78, ’79, whatever, I would probably have, if given a choice, let go of the editing.

CBA: Was it difficult to deal with creative people? Why couldn’t you get a grasp on the editing process?

Mike: Well, other people would have to

answer that question. I really don’t know why it didn’t happen.

CBA: Did you deal with Archie Goodwin as an editor?

Mike: Only briefly, and not enough to really get a sense of how he did it versus how I was doing it.

CBA: Did you voice your frustrations to anybody, looking for advice?

Mike: Well, that was part of the problem I had, that there wasn’t really anyone I knew to talk to, there was not really a community of publishers, certainly not a community of alternative publishers. There were only a couple of other people that were kind of moving in the same general stream that I was.

Ron Van Leeuwan up in Toronto, Sal Quartuccio, and Dean Mullaney. These people were a long way away from me and I didn’t know them very well. I’d see them occasionally, but it wasn’t like we all were chatting with each other on a regular basis. So I didn’t really have anyone to talk to.

CBA: Did you have a presence at the conventions in New York or San Diego?

Mike: I would go to the New York and San Diego conventions pretty much, although I didn’t set up tables. I was selling wholesale, I wasn’t selling retail. This is one of those things that was being worked out at the time: Convention dealers would have given me a lot of trouble over my “competing” with them if I had set up my own table.

CBA: So you would walk around, network and look at portfolios?

Mike: Yes, I did that. I enjoyed the San Diego show more than the New York one, but that’s because I like San Diego more than I like New York. Well, in the middle of the summer, anyway. [laughs] CBA: Would you say that you expanded too quickly?

Mike: Oh, yes, though looking back, I didn’t expand rapidly enough in one sense. I should probably have come out more regularly, even as a black&-white comic. What killed me was moving into color without really knowing what I was doing.

The amount of expense and production expertise needed to do that was more than I had. I learned, but I learned it at the cost of my company.

CBA: With Imagine and Star*Reach, why did you go from comic book size to magazine size?

Mike: Well, by then, things weren’t working, things were slipping, and I didn’t want to acknowledge what was missing was I didn’t have the sort of high-profile Marvel artist connections anymore and thought the problem might be the format. It was not the format. Comic-size proved to be the better size.

CBA: Why did you change the format? Was it because Heavy Metal was out there?

Mike: That’s probably the reason. Also some retailers would mention that the price of my comic was a lot more than the price of a regular-sized comic, and mine was in black-&white and theirs was in color, so I needed to differentiate myself. In retrospective, what differentiated me initially, what had made me successful, was the content, not the price or the size. It was the content that I was delivering. Young adult material instead of kids material, yet by the same people. The people who were reading Marvel and DC were now reading Star*Reach, and that was what worked. At the time, I wasn’t really as conscious of that.

CBA: Did you go seek out the big distributors like PDC or Independent News?

Mike: Oh, no.

Everything I’d ever heard about that whole system was negative. I did a test here in the Bay Area. I went to my local ID distributor and they carried a couple of issues. I even went in and did all the detail work by looking at their numbers and recommending where to put the books and how many copies to deliver and all that kind of detailed grunt work field reps have to do in the magazine marketplace. At the end of the day, the numbers just weren’t there, so it was not profitable. I certainly couldn’t see that there was any way of making it work on any large basis. I had a very cooperative local distributor who was willing to give it a whirl, but it didn’t work out.

CBA: Just the numbers weren’t high enough?

Mike: I don’t remember specific numbers, but I don’t think it made money. I didn’t lose a ton of money on it, but for all the time and effort, it just wasn’t there.

CBA: You were in the Bay Area, pretty much the birthplace of underground comix. You did come out with Pudge, but did you ever consider going overtly underground, or were you really just simply trying to find your own niche?

Mike: The short answer is no. I was interested in producing fantasy material that had more of an adult flavor, whether it was science-fiction or humor. Even the humor material I did

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Three other great strips were Johnny Achziger & Joe Staton’s Gods of Mount Olympus, Len Wein & Howard Chaykin’s Gideon Faust, and Eric Kimball & Bob Gould’s Elric adaptation.Note Jeff Jones’ Elric cover used Bernie Wrightson as the model! All characters ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

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was an effort to try to carve a different way of showing comics. I thought of myself as somebody who was blazing new trails. That was my big shtick at the time.

CBA: But what was the trail? Obviously Pudge had some overtly sexual — ergo, blatantly underground — material. Can you define what that trail was? Didn’t Heavy Metal and aspects of Warren Publications pretty much cover the more adult, mature middle ground between the mainstream and the underground material?

Mike: Well, if you’re talking about the spectrum of sexual explicitness, I was somebody who was very much middle of the road, middle ground on that. I was uncomfortable with explicit, graphic material. Lee and I had a lot of conversations about how explicit she was being in her material and the science-fiction material she did. I actually sent stuff back sometimes and said, “No, this is more than I want to show.” I was a little more comfortable publishing that kind of material in Pudge, Girl Blimp because it just felt more “of a piece.” That’s how I tended to look at it. You’ll notice there was much more sexual explicitness in my early years than there was in the later years. I tended to go the other way, tended to do less as I went through. To me, being adult was not about showing graphic sex; it was about dealing with different themes and different kinds of characters.

CBA: Were you and Lee partners at the time you were editing her stuff?

Mike: No. I think that our personal relationship would probably not have been able to evolve if we’d continued to work together. [laughter] CBA: Did you admire what was going on in undergrounds? Did you read them?

Mike: Sure. I won’t say that I’m a fan of the material, but I was certainly reading quite a few underground comix at the time. The aspect I admired was certainly the enthusiasm and energy people were putting into trying to find self-expression in a form that hadn’t been used for that kind of expression before. That was really interesting.

CBA: Did you recognize the significance of Robert Crumb, say, as above the other guys?

Mike: Not as much as I do now. At the time, he was just another cartoonist. I thought he did somewhat interesting work. It’s richer to me in retrospect than it was at the time.

CBA: Were you aware of the dire situation facing undergrounds in ’73 and ’74 with the Supreme Court ruling on obscenity?

Mike: Yes and it affected me, too, to a certain extent. When I started publishing, I assumed I was going to be largely using the underground comix channel, and it virtually disappeared in the space of two years. There was a huge crackdown on sexual material in comic book form, on material that involved drug use, and where the undergrounds were being distributed — the head shops — just dried up. Fortunately, at the same time, up popped the comics stores who were originally just convention dealers, and then there were more and more conventions, then more and more fixedstore locations, and that’s where the market wound up going. But initially, I was very definitely impacted by the collapse.

CBA: The overall perception is that comic shops really didn’t start until the late ’70s, but there was a strong network of used bookstores, right?

Mike: There was enough going on initially, with a good concentration here in the Bay Area (so I was seeing it firsthand) to get a lot of interest going for what I was doing. To be able to have Frank Brunner, Howard Chaykin and Jim Starlin doing grown-up comics was something the convention dealers and the initial comics stores were really able to grab quite quickly.

There was also a fairly substantial mail-order business going on. I don’t know how it developed, but certainly Bud Plant had a large list already at the point when I got started. And it did improve over time. Comic shops really did take off in the late ’70s, as opposed to the early years of that decade. It built up over time. But there were enough stores, just enough cobbled together of all the different strands in that field, where publishers like me could make it work for them.

CBA: An interesting, out-of-left-field publication for you to come out with was the singular issue of Roy Thomas’s Alter Ego published in the ’70s. How did that come about?

Mike: Well, there were two things: One was, I was nostalgic. Alter-Ego was the first fanzine I had seen. Two, I had been really good friends with Bill Everett [see “A Friend of Bill: Mike Friedrich Interview,” CBA V.1, #2], and I knew this Everett interview existed and just wanted to get it out. I was also somebody who was very impressed with Moebius, had really enjoyed meeting him, as short as that was. So the idea of putting those things out made a lot of sense. But it turned out that better people than myself know how to do these kinds of things.

CBA: Was there a plan to continue A/E? Mike: Well, initially I thought so, but I turned out not to have enough THIS SPREAD: Certainly one of Mike Friedrich’s longest-running and fruitful professional associations in life has been as art rep for artist-writer P. Craig Russell.

enthusiasm. I’m glad Roy eventually picked that ball up again and is running with it. It’s his ball in the first place.

CBA: How did your back issues sell?

Mike: Things worked best for me when I would bring out new books and then would get a lot of reorders for older editions. That was another thing I did differently from the traditional comics that were ID-based, which was that I had a backlist. I was like a book publisher, in that sense. As I previously said, the best year I ever had was the year Star Wars came out, and anything that had “star” in it just sold like hotcakes. By that point I had something like 15 or 20 titles in print, and I was selling all of them! This was through wholesale channels, where I was moving a lot of them.

CBA: But with the back issues it was 100% retail?

Mike: I never did direct sales to individuals. I was only involved in wholesale.

There was a brief period of time where I would sell to retailers directly, but I didn’t do that for long. Once the wholesale network was solidified, by 1976-77, I didn’t deal to retailers directly.

CBA: Why did you use variant covers when you reprinted? You swapped the front and back covers when you reprinted #1.

Mike: To my memory, I only did that once or twice. The one you refer to was because I had received completed covers from Chaykin and Starlin. I looked at them, decided I liked the Chaykin one more, so I made it my front cover. Later on, Starlin tells me, “You know, it was supposed to be the other way around. Mine was supposed to be the front cover.” So I went, “Oh, okay.” I didn’t want to offend Jim because he’s an old buddy, so when I reprinted the issue, I turned it around. I still think Chaykin’s was the better cover.

CBA: What happened with Star*Reach? Certainly, direct sales were picking up. Jack Katz was out there with First Kingdom. Dave Sim was out there with Cerebus. The Pinis were out there with Elfquest. This real movement was picking up steam, a movement you initiated, but by the 1980s, Star*Reach was history. So what happened?

Mike: Well, I lost my way due to two things: First, the move to color was disastrous. It gave me a huge amount of debt I never recovered from.

Second, I had stopped really focusing on the commercial aspects of comics, that is, the things that were more adult versions of traditional material. Cody Starbuck is an adult version of a 1972 Marvel comic. But by the time you get to the end of the Star*Reach run, I am doing more personal stories that are slighter, not as dramatic, and they were less commercially interesting.

The material I’m proudest of by the end of that run was all the material Craig Russell was doing, which has held up over the years and is still in print. But, at the time, it was not something wildly commercially popular.

(Today, it’s not wildly commercially popular either, but it has a continuing, solid, steady audience, because it’s really great stuff.) But the commercial aspect to what I was doing didn’t work, and I also was not willing and didn’t have the imagination to figure out how to get myself out of the hole. The things that I tried to do were the wrong things to do.

CBA: Did you agonize over the company’s demise?

Mike: Oh, it hurt a lot. I had a hard time adjusting, although I have to say I was fortunate in a certain sense because what I did next was connected to my publishing but so significantly different that it proved a great benefit.

I went on to work in New York City, where I set up the Marvel Comics sales department, which gave me all the insights into what I had done wrong. I had been trying to be a one-man band with Star*Reach, trying to do everything myself. I was not good at delegating authority at all, bringing other people in. One of the classic stories I tell is: I don’t remember what year it was, but at some point a young woman shows up in my warehouse and says that she really thinks Star*Reach is great, she’ll do anything to help me out, if I need someone to load boxes, she’s happy to do that, and I don’t have to pay her. I didn’t know what to do with that type of request, so I said, “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t need any help.” Two years later, she’s the editor of Eclipse Comics. [laughter] CBA: This was Cat Yronwode?

Mike: Yes, it was. I hadn’t known her previously. So that was one of the things. Also, having the professional day-in and day-out office experience working for a large company showed me how the pieces worked together the way they should work, in ways that I had not really understood when I was trying to reinvent the wheel on my own. I had not previously worked in that environment. I’d been a freelance writer, working out of my basement. [laughs] Star*Reach in one sense came when I was too young. I would have done a much better job as a publisher if I had started in my 30s rather than in my 20s. If I had had that kind of publishing experience from the inside of a larger company to then use as a reference point. But in the ’80s, when I took a look at getting back into publishing, it was a very different environment. It had gotten even bigger. Nothing quite came together for me.

OPPOSITE: Detail of PCR’s cover of Imagine #2. Top: PCR panel from S*R #8. RIGHT: Detail of PCR’s exquisite adaptation of “The Magi,” Within Our Reach. All ©’03 PCR.

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CBA: How did the Marvel gig come about?

Mike: Well, by 1979, magazine distribution is really shriveling pretty steadily, and there are serious concerns in the comics publishing community that they are not going to be able to make it. Meanwhile, there are people like Phil Seuling who are telling the publishers, “Listen, I’ve got the magic key. Give me the business and I’ll make you a fortune.” The way Marvel reacted was that they hired a consultant from Los Angeles to travel around with different people in the comic shop community.

I don’t remember the guy’s name, but when he came through Berkeley and met with the managing partner of Comics & Comix, John Barrett, John told him that he needed to talk to me. So the guy calls me up and we have a good, long meeting of an hour, an hour-and-a-half. This is sometime, as I say, in the spring of ’79, roughly. That summer, he makes the recommendation to Marvel that they need to set up a separate sales department for this emerging channel, and hire a manager for it. So they announced that position, and by that time my publishing was not doing that well, so I applied. I handed them my application during the 1979 San Diego comic convention, and about a month later they interviewed me, and we went back and forth for a couple of months on what the deal would be, and then in January I started the job.

CBA: Who interviewed you?

Mike: It would have been Ed Shukin, who was the vice president of sales, and this consultant whose name I can’t remember. The two of them met me together.

CBA: You were eager to put a dent in that debt you had accumulated?

Mike: Well, that was my whole reason for doing it. I had racked up a very substantial debt, something like $30,000 in 1980 dollars, so it was a good amount of money. I had in essence borrowed it from my printer. I had a deal with my printer where I paid him interest every month. So getting the job at Marvel, which paid pretty well — maybe $25,000 a year, which was a lot of money at the time — enabled me to take care of the debt over a couple of years.

CBA: Would I be wrong in saying that was the most money that you had seen in a while?

Mike: Um, yes. “Wow! This check isn’t gonna bounce!” [laughter] CBA: What did you think of comics in general at the time? Did you think that was a fallow period for the field?

Mike: Well, I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to Marvel at the point I came to work there, so I had a pretty rapid learning curve. I was more focused on getting the distribution system in shape. It was a real mess when I showed up, and it took me about a year, a

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TOP: S*R’s companion title, Imagine, did feature some cool stuff, including Lee Marrs’ satirical poke at Moebius (©2003 Lee Marrs) and, ABOVE, a magnificent tale of the perseverance of the Jew people in Michael T. Gilbert’s two-part “A Dream of Milk & Honey,” #4-5 (a story lauded by Will Eisner in a letter to the mag). ©2003 M.T.G.

year-and-a-half to really get it straightened out, to get it going in the direction, creating a solid structure that would then work in the future. So that was my primary focus. I was fortunate enough to show up right when Frank Miller made his big splash, and already Chris Claremont and John Byrne were doing really well with X-Men, and George Pérez was doing nicely on The Avengers. But it took me a while to really appreciate what these guys were doing, because that was not really my primary focus. I was working on the business side. I wasn’t really involved in the content side.

CBA: Throughout your whole tenure there?

Mike: This is the benefit of working at a larger company: They had an editor-in-chief [Jim Shooter] who was very strong-willed and had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do. We had to work out our way of working with each other. I mean, there’s always a tension between sales and editorial in any publishing company. We had those ongoing discussions all the time. The one thing I would say was, “The market is telling us that this artist and this artist and this artist are popular, so give us more of this, this, and this artist. That’s what the market is telling you.” So then the editorial market would have to deal with that information.

CBA: So how long did you stay at Marvel?

Mike: A little over two years. I started in a January and I left in an April, so whatever that is.

CBA: Why’d you leave?

Mike: Well, I’d paid off the debt…

CBA: Wow! I guess you lived cheap! [laughs] Mike: I lived cheap. I paid off the debt, saved a little money in order to buy a house, and I had been in a bi-coastal relationship for two years, which was really wearing on me. I didn’t like it. So I really felt it was time to come home. I really enjoyed the job. I liked working at Marvel. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the people I worked with, generally. I had a good time. I said then if they were headquartered in San Francisco, I never would have quit.

CBA: How did the Star*Reach artist representation start?

Mike: Well, that was one of those incredibly weird happy accidents. After I left Marvel, I did some consulting for Pacific Comics for a few months, with the expectation if things worked out comfortably, I would join that company.

But, while it was a good gig, we were not 100% in sync, and so we agreed not to go forward together on a permanent basis. I had not really thought about a back-up plan, at that point. For some reason I thought, “Well, maybe I could try packaging or

representing artists now that there’s all this demand for new material showing up.” So I made a couple of phone calls to people I knew in L.A., and amazingly enough, out of the first two calls, both led to projects that I worked on and was able to sell, so all of a sudden I had a business. I had maintained an ongoing relationship with Michael Moorcock and with Craig Russell respectively, so I had those two clients as a base, as well. I was overseeing the Moorcock material being adapted into comics form, so I had that material to work with.

Then new artists came along. It took five years for that to be self-supporting. I was doing other things at the same time.

The ‘80s for me was juggling two or three different things simultaneously.

CBA: What was the other L.A. gig?

Mike: Well, I talked to Mark Evanier and he had just originated this project called DNAgents, which lasted a couple of years. That was a monthly comic that went for 24 issues or something, so that was a good start for me. Then Steve Gerber came up with a new project he called Void Indigo, which we wound up selling to Marvel. Although it didn’t succeed, at the end of the day, it was a deal that helped me get on the map and have a business.

CBA: What was your job?

Mike: I always loved looking for properties and taking them to the best publisher for them. The biggest highlight was when Concrete came down the pike — I think it was ’86, I don’t remember the exact year — we had something like seven publishers bidding for it. That was a really strange experience because I had to sit there and make charts.

“All right, this is publisher A, B, C, D, E and F.” And Paul Chadwick went with “D.” [laughter] CBA: Did Concrete take a while to take off?

Mike: I remember when Paul first showed me Concrete, in 1984, I sent the proposal around — the origin story. It was totally lame. No one was interested in a walking rock and aliens.

Paul got very frustrated and said, “But that’s not what Concrete is about!” So a couple of years later he knocked off an eight-pager (which appeared in Dark Horse Presents #1) that was just totally killer, a phenomenal story.

So the second go-around we used that eight-page story to send around. Then, all of a sudden — and this is when

THIS PAGE: Two other noteworthy and frequent contributors were Steve Leialoha (autobio strip at TOP, from S*R #10) and the late Gene Day (ABOVE, from S*R #11). ©2003 Their respective copyright holders.

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the market was getting really large — a number of publishers started bidding on it (most don’t exist anymore). Paul went with Dark Horse, and [Dark Horse publisher] Mike Richardson was very good to him.

CBA: Do you still rep today?

Mike: I do a little bit. I have about five or six clients I work with in around my day job. Craig Russell is one of my clients.

CBA: You’ve been reping Craig for how long?

Mike: Well, I started publishing him in, what? In ’77? I started representing him in ’82, so whatever that adds up to. 20-plus years.

CBA: You’ve been kind enough to share your fanzine collection with me and you have an informed view of the history of comics. How do you look at Star*Reach in the realm of the whole picture?

Mike: That’s a hard one to answer.

CBA: How would you like it to be perceived, then?

Mike: There are three aspects in my mind that go hand in hand.

Star*Reach was the first company to really focus on the so-called direct sales channel. (I don’t think you can use that word anymore because there’s nothing to contrast it with, but the non-returnable sales model is the phrase I’ve been using in recent years.) We were the first publisher to really use that as the basis for how to sell comics, and of course now all comics are sold that way.

I was personally involved in helping the largest publisher make that transition and to set up their system, bringing in a good manager in Carol Kalish to sustain it and make it grow. That’s one aspect.

Secondly, of course, the audience tied into the distribution was getting older, dramatically older. In 1975 the reader who went into a convenience store or grocery store to buy a comic tended to be 12, and the reader that went to a comics store tended to be 22. So Star*Reach was the first publish-

er that really was creating stories for 22-year-olds, not for 12-year-olds. And I do think that was in contrast to what other publishers were doing. And, again, that kind of led the way, where Spider-Man now is aimed more at a 20-year-old than at a 12-year-old.

Tied into this, lastly, was the whole idea of creator’s rights. The comics industry in the early ’70s was really horrible as far as the relationship between the publishers and creators were concerned. At best, it was a benevolent, paternalistic system, which worked for a few people if they got along well with the publishers and editors. I knew people who did well, so there were people who benefited in that system. But it wasn’t tied into how well people did in the marketplace. Star*Reach was able to demonstrate that the talent was a really integral part of the success of the comic, particularly when you’re aiming at a young adult reader as opposed to the child reader.

And I felt, and feel even more passionately now than I did then, that the artist deserves to get paid for that. They should have ownership of the material and they should be tied into the revenue streams. Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane made their success because of the kinds of influence Star*Reach had made 10-15 years earlier in setting up a system that enabled them to cash in, when they in their turn were the people with the right content at the right time.

CBA: What was Within Our Reach?

Mike: That was in the early ’90s, when I had been out of publishing for about 12 or 13 years. I was at the height of the Star*Reach agency. We were really in the boom period in comics at that point and I was doing really well.

I had a staff of three, which was three times larger than I’d ever had. I don’t know how the idea came about, but at some point just the idea came together as a way to showcase our clients’ work. In order not to compete with our buyers, we made it a charity project. It got a good response. It was a nice-looking book. (The story Craig Russell contributed was reprinted just this last year by NBM.) It was a fun book, and I enjoyed that. Jim Salicrup was the editor at Marvel we dealt with on the approvals for SpiderMan. One big disappointment was that DC didn’t allow us to use one of their characters to do a story, but we were happy to work with Marvel. There’s some fun stuff in that book.

CBA: Is Within Our Reach the last official Star*Reach publication?

Mike: Well, funny that you should ask. The answer is no. This fall, Star*Reach is reemerging as a publisher. I’m going to be co-publishing the trade paperback version of Pudge, Girl Blimp.

CBA: [laughs] See, you do know marketing!

fin

TOP & INSET: Mike had fun in his role as “Big Shot” publisher as evident in these gag pix that graced S*R and Quack! editorials. RIGHT: Mike today. All courtesy of M.F.

COMICS INDEX

STAR*REACH #1 April 1974 Cover: Howard Chaykin IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text); “Creativity Unchained” (Lee Marrs illo); “Observations” (comic strip) Mike Friedrich/Neal Adams “Death Building,” Jim Starlin/J.Starlin & Al Milgrom 7 “Fish Myths,” Steve Skeates 2 “A Tale of Sword & Sorcery,” Ed Hicks/Walter Simonson 12 “Suburban Fish,” Steve Skeates 2 “Cody Starbuck” (part one), Howard Chaykin 16 “…The Birth of Death,” Jim Starlin 8 IBC: “The Origin of God,” Jim Starlin 1 BC: Jim Starlin Notes: Second printing (9/75) switches back cover with front. All lettering in Star*Reach publications reportedly by Tom Orzechowski (who also contributes first S*R logo design), unless otherwise noted. All stories in black-&-white unless otherwise noted. #2 April 1975 Cover: Neal Adams IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text); “Creativity Unchained” (Lee Marrs illo) [r: #1] Stephanie Starr: “In the Light of Future Days…,” Mike Friedrich/Dick Giordano 20 “I’ve Got the Power,” J. Starlin/J. Starlin & Al Milgrom 3 “The Return of the Fish,” Steve Skeates 2 “Key Club,”John Workman 8 “Lot For Sale,” Jim Starlin/J. Starlin & Al Milgrom 2 Earthprobe: “All a World of Dreamers,” Mal Warwick/Lee Marrs 11 IBC: “Reincarnalation,” Mike Vosburg 1 BC: Lee Marrs #3 October 1975 Wraparound cover: Frank Brunner IFC: Contents page (illo by Becky Wilson) Dragonus: “The Wizard’s Venom,” Frank Brunner 10 “I Hunger… and I Wait,” Mark Cohen/Mark A Worden 5 Earthprobe: “On the Shoals of Space,” 12 Mal Warwick/Lee Marrs 11 “And Sleep the Long Night in Peace,”

Mal Warwick/Bob Smith & John Workman 7 Linda Lovecraft: “High Priestess of Sexual Fantasy,” Mike Vosburg 9 “Wooden Ships on the Water,” Mike Friedrich (based on Jefferson Airplane song by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kantner)/Steve Leialoha 5 #4 March 1976 Wraparound cover: Howard Chaykin IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) Cody Starbuck: “Starbuck,” Howard Chaykin 11 Linda Lovecraft: “The White Slavers of Scrofula,” Mary Skrenes/Mike Vosburg 10 “Marginal Incident: The Prelude,” Steve Leialoha 8 Sherlock Duck: “The Adventure of the Animated Government,” Bob Smith 5 Earthprobe: “On the Shoals of Space,” 12 Mal Warwick & Lee Marrs/Lee Marrs 11 “Clik,” John Workman 4 Notes: Lettering on “Starbuck” by Alan Kupperberg.

Editorial mentions issue includes “Comicbook Writer”

by Gerry Conway & John Workman, but is replaced by “Clik” in interior notice. #5 July 1976 Wraparound cover: Howard Chaykin IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) Gideon Faust: “Warlock at Large,” Len Wein/Howard Chaykin 12 The Gods of Mount Olympus: “Chapter One: The Beginning of All Things,” Johnny Achziger/Joe Staton 16 “A Nice Place to Live, But…,” Frank Brunner 1 “Mandy, The Girl With the Most Comics in America,” John Workman 1 “Waters of Requital,” Lee Marrs 8 Linda Lovecraft: “Midnight in the Medina,” Mary Skrenes/Mike Vosburg 10 Notes: The Gods is a “reprint” (actually completely redrawn) of oversize portfolio [see CBA V1, #12 for details]. Co-lettering on “Midnight…” by Grass Green. #6 October 1976 Cover painting: Jeff Jones IFC: Contents page (illo by Becky Wilson)[r: #3] Elric: “The Prisoner of Pan Tang,” Eric Kimball

(story idea by Steven Grant)/Bob Gould 20 “Childsong,” Gary Patras/Gene Day & S. Leialoha 3 “Why Viking Lander/Mars?” Ray Bradbury (poetry)/Alex Niño 2 The Gods of Mount Olympus:“Chapter Two: Zeus and Prometheus,” Johnny Achziger/Joe Staton 15 “Out of Space, Out of Time,” Gray Lyda 8 BC: Jeff Jones Notes: Back cover is reprint of front cover sans type.

See #5 note for comment on The Gods story. #7 Jan. ’77 Wraparound cover: Barry Windsor-Smith IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “I’m God,” Dave Sim/Fabio Gasbarri 8 “The Bushi,” Satoshi Hirota/Masaichi Mukaide 6 (story idea by Steven Grant)/Bob Gould 20 The Gods of Mount Olympus: “Chapter Three: Apollo and Artemis,” Johnny Achziger/Joe Staton 9 “Headtrips,” Lee Marrs 10 “My Fears,” Jeff Bonivert 4 “Skywalker,” Mike Vosburg & Steve Englehart/ Mike Vosburg 11 Note: Lettering on “I’m God” by Bill Payne. #8 April 1977 Wraparound cover: P. Craig Russell IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) Parsifal: “Part 1: His Journey,” Patrick C. Mason (adapted from Richard Wagner opera)/P. Craig Russell 10 “The Interface,” Ken Steacy 19 “All We Are Saying Is…,” Mal Warwick & Mike Friedrich/Gene Day 6 “There’s Banging Up in Bangor,” Gene Day 3 “Aphrodite,” Johnny Achiziger/John Workman 8 “Crazy Lady!?”John & Cathy Workman 1 Notes: Lettering on Parsifal by Annette Kawecki.

“Aphrodite” appears to be the fourth Gods of Mount Olympus installment but is not labeled as such. #9 June ’77Wraparound cover: K. Steacy & D. Motter IFC: Illustration, Fabio Gasbarri (?)

The Sacred and the Profane: “Inventio: Figure of Menace,” Dean Motter/Ken Steacy 15

75 CBA V.2 #2

“Homestone,” Yves Regis Francois/ Danny Bulanadi & Ray Horne 11 “Seriah & Damon,” Mickey Schwaberow 8 “Divine Wind,” Gene Day 6 “Worlds Without, Worlds Within,” Michael T. Gilbert 8 Note: Lettering on “Divine Wind” by Dave Sim. #10 Sept. 1977 Wraparound cover: Frank Brunner IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “Mariah,” Mike Friedrich/Lee Marrs 8 The Sacred and the Profane: “Didpositio: Pattern of Wounds,” Dean Motter/Ken Steacy 15 “Aquarian,” Steve Leialoha 1 Parsifal: no title, Patrick C. Mason (adapted from Richard Wagner opera)/P. Craig Russell 10 Linda Lovecraft: “Nymphonecromania,” M. Vosburg14 #11 Dec ’77 Wraparound cover: Ken Steacy IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) The Sacred and the Profane: “Ellocutio: Plague Fugues,” Dean Motter/Ken Steacy 19 Stark’s Quest: “Tale One: The Sensor,” Lee Marrs 14 “Samurai,” Gene Day 7 Tempus Fugit: “Out One Era & In the Other,” Gray Lyda 8 #12 March 1978 Wraparound cover: Frank Brunner IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth,” Roger Zelazny/Gray Morrow 13 “Replay,” Michael T. Gilbert 3 “The Old/New/Final Testament,” Michael Nasser/M. Nasser & Steve Leiahola 8 The Sacred and the Profane: “Memoria: Vessels of the Past,” Dean Motter/Ken Steacy 16 #13 August 1978 Wraparound cover: Steve Leialoha IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) The Sacred and the Profane: “Pronunciato: Final Deliverance,” Dean Motter/Ken Steacy 16 “The Quicksilver Serpent,” (part one), Steve Leialoha (color) 8 Tempus Fugit: “Second Venture,” Gray Lyda 8 Tempus Fugit: “Part One: Genesis Revisted,” G. Lyda 8 IBC: Letters column 1 #14 August 1978 Wraparound cover: Ken Steacy IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text)

76 CBA V.2 #2

Stark’s Quest: “Tale Two: Touching,” Lee Marrs 16 “Counterpoint Communion,” Ken Steacy (prologue & epilogue by Dean Motter; color) 8 Tempus Fugit: “Part Two: Genesis Revisted,” G. Lyda16 IBC: Letters column 1 #15 December 1978 Wrap cover painting: S. Leialoha IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “The Mission,” Lee Marrs (concept by Takihiro Isuta & Satoshi Hirota)/Masaichi Mukaide 9 “Warriors,” Gene Day 7 “The Quicksilver Serpent” (part two), Steve Leialoha (color) 8 Tempus Fugit: “Tempus Fugitives,” Gray Lyda 16 Notes: Lettering on “The Mission” and “Warriors” by Mary E.M. Gordon. Lettering on Tempus Fugit by Carl Sennett. #16 April 1979 Wraparound cover: Rivoche/Steacy IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text); letters column Stark’s Quest: “Tale Three: Answers,” Lee Marrs 14 “Murphy’s Law,” Ken Steacy (text by Jeffrey Morgan)/Don Marshall 16 Note: Begins magazine-size format. #17 July 1979 Cover: Jeff Bonivert IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe/Jeff Bonivert 7 “Inter Flight,”Stephen Konz 5 “Chilly,” George Szostek [r: Brainstorm Fantasy Comix #? (U.K.)] 6 “GZ-15,” Stephen Konz 14 #18 October 1979 Wraparound cover: Lee Marrs IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) Stark’s Quest: “Tale Four: Decision,” Lee Marrs 16 Letters column 1 “The Soldier Who Guards the Gate of the City Freedom,” Masaichi Mukaide 2 “Crashing,” Steven Grant/Masaichi Mukaide 12 Note: Final issue.

PUDGE, GIRL BLIMP #1 Jan. ’76 (2nd ptg.) Wraparound cover: Lee Marrs IFC: Editorial, Lee Marrs; “Cartoonist Fantasy #27” illo by Lee Marrs “The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl

Blimp,” Lee Marrs 6 “The Case of the Venereal Virgin,” Lee Marrs 4 “Mei-Lin Luftwaffe,” Lee Marrs 10 “Who Was Dat Self I Saw You With?” Lee Marrs 3 “The Group,” Lee Marrs 2 “Cyberfenetics,” Lee Marrs 3 “The Big Fat Rip-Off,” Lee Marrs 4 Notes: Actual title is The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp. Magazine-size.

First published (in comic-size format) by Last Gasp, January 1974. As this index is only working from the June ’78 “second edition,” and Lee’s editorial states, “This reprint has been considerably enhanced, art improved, bigger size, better negatives, etc.,” we’re not quite how sure how this differs from the two previous printings, though the cover is dated 1978. #2 1975 Wraparound cover: Lee Marrs IFC: “She Was Still A… Virgin,” Lee Marrs “Further the Fattening Adventures. Pudge, Girl Blimp,” Lee Marrs 6 “Git Uh Job, Chapter One: Brother, Can You Spare A Rebate?” Lee Marrs 2 “Meanwhile… Out There Mars,” Lee Marrs 2 “Git Uh Job, Chapter Two: The Screen Queen,” Lee Marrs 10 “What Ever Happened To,” Lee Marrs 2 “Git Uh Job, Chapter Three: Got Them Part-Time Temporary Deduction Blues,” Lee Marrs 4 “Mei-Lin Luftwaffe,” Lee Marrs 6 “TV Twinkies: I Think I’ll Dump Him…,” Lee Marrs 1 “Git Uh Job, Chapter Four: The Pay’s So Low, This Must Be the Underground,” Lee Marrs 5 “That’s No Pimple, That’s Your 2nd Chakra,” L.Marrs 2 “The Group Dynamic,” Lee Marrs 2 “Am I Gay or Only Cheerful?” Lee Marrs 2 “Fiscal Interruptus,” Lee Marrs 4 Note: #2 & 3 are regular comic-size. #3 1977 Wraparound cover: Lee Marrs IFC: “She Was Still A… Virgin,” Lee Marrs “This Can’t Be Right… It Feels Too Good,” L. Marrs 7 “Midnite at the Oasis,” Lee Marrs 3 “The New Street: Campaign Capers,” Lee Marrs 4 “A Visit to Homebase (Some of My Best Friends…),” Lee Marrs 1

“Laid At Last,”Lee Marrs 4 “The Morning After,” Lee Marrs 2 “Movin’ On: Group Transformation,” Lee Marrs 1 “Funny Thing Happened on the Way to (During),” Lee Marrs 4 “—On the Campaign Trail,” Lee Marrs 3 “The Patter of Lil’ Feet… of Clay,” Lee Marrs 3 “Before and After,” Lee Marrs 2 Mei-Lin Luftwaffe: “A New World,” Lee Marrs 3 “Bye Bye Martians,” Lee Marrs 1 “Can I Interest Ya in a Climax?” Lee Marrs 4 “Loose Ends,” Lee Marrs 1 “The Close Call,” Lee Marrs 4 “After All, Tomorrow is Another…,” Lee Marrs 1 Note: Final issue.

QUACK! #1 July 1976 Cover: Frank Brunner IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “Duckaneer,” Frank Brunner/F. Brunner & S. Leialoha 11 “The Wraith,” Michael T. Gilbert 5 “The Incredible Exploits of You-All Gibbon, the Junk Food Monkey,” Scott Shaw!

7 E.Z. Wolf: “Smokey Mountain High,” Ted Richards 1 E.Z. Wolf: “Vincent Van Hogh,” Ted Richards 1 “On the Skids,” H. Chaykin/Alan Kupperberg 10 “Duckula,” Scott Shaw!

1 Kosmo Kat: “The Case of the Purloined Periodicals,” Mark Evanier/ Scott Shaw! (layouts) & Dave Stevens 12 BC: Illo by Alan Kupperberg Note: Lettering on Duckula & Kosmo Kat by Bud Gutz. #2 January 1977 Cover painting: Steve Leialoha IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text); letter and doodle by Sergio Aragonés “Newton, the Wonder Rabbit,” Sergio Aragonés/Steve Leialoha 10 The Wraith: “The Cure,” Michael T. Gilbert 7 “Be True to Your School,” Steve Skeates 3 Those Cool Cats From Queens: “On the Skids,” Alan Kupperberg (with writing assists by Mary Skrenes, Steve Gerber, and Alan Weiss) 10 Oregon Bobcat: “How To Recognize An Oregon Bobcat,” Dot Bucher 1

Oregon Bobcat: untitled, Dot Bucher 2 You-All Gibbon, “The Incredible, Edible Invasion of Earth,” Scott Shaw!

10 Kerwin Keystone: “A Job Well Done,” Ken Macklin 5 BC: Duckula by Scott Shaw!

Note: Lettering on You-All Gibbon by R. Duke. #3 April 1977 Cover: Dave Sim/Steve Leialoha IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “The Beavers,” Dave Sim 4 The Wraith: “Duck Death,”Michael T. Gilbert 12 E.Z. Wolf as Wolfjack: “The Case of the Missing Quack,” Ted Richards & Larry Gonick (with help from J. Michael Leonard) 10 You-All Gibbon, “Pig Foot, the Awful Boar,” Scott Shaw!

6 Kerwin Keystone: “Deserter,” Ken Macklin 8 Newton: “The Rabbit Wonder Meets the Barbarian Bunny,” Steve Leialoha/S. Leialoha (pencils?) & Alex Niño (with Tarlac assist?)

8 BC: Newton, the Wonder Rabbit painting by S. Leialoha Note: Lettering on You-All Gibbon by Carolyn Lay. #4 June 1977 Cover: Steve Leialoha IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text); El Drako illo by Steve Leialoha “Home on the Range, Rabbit,” Steve Leialoha 10 The Beavers: “Sgt. Duck,” Dave Sim 5 The Beavers, “Duck Trek,” Dave Sim 6 On the Skids: “Into the Breach,” Alan Kupperberg 7 Oregon Bobcat: “Bounce on the Wild Side,” D.Bucher 6 Oregon Bobcat: untitled 2 “The Wraith’s Pal, Inspector Mulehberry,” Michael T. Gilbert 1 The Wraith: “The Fall of the House of Silver,” Michael T. Gilbert 11 BC: The Wraith by Michael T. Gilbert #5 September 1977 Cover: Michael T. Gilbert IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text); Self-portrait by Michael T. Gilbert The Wraith: “The Reality Wraith,” M. T. Gilbert 16 Oregon Bobcat: “At Last, Long Love,” Dot Bucher 6 The Beavers: “The Victim,” Dave Sim 6 The Beavers: “A. White Beaver: Figure of Mystery,” Dave Sim 5

Kerwin Keystone: “Planet of the Ducks,” K. Macklin 10 “A Bird in Hand,” Gene Day 4 Newton, the Wonder Rabbit: untitled, S.Leialoha 1 BC: Kerwin Keystone by Ken Macklin Note: Lettering on “A Bird in Hand” by Dave Sim. #6 December 1977 Cover: Ted Richards IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “The Quark, Son of Quack,”Ted Richards, J.Michael Leonard and Larry Gonick 10 Newton: “Into the Motherlode,” Steve Leialoha 10 Editorial statement , Mike Friedrich; illo of You-All Gibbon by Scott Shaw!

1 “Duckaneer,” Frank Brunner [r: #1] 11 “The Fleet Foot Foogle,” Lee Marrs 8 The Wraith: “Fear,” Michael T. Gilbert 5 The Wraith: “A Christmas Carol,” Michael T. Gilbert 3 BC: Newton, the Wonder Rabbit by Steve Leialoha Note: Final issue. Mid-ish editorial on Shaw! missing deadline for his You-All Gibbon installment, prompting the need for the Brunner reprint. Final page of “A Christmas Carol” features signatures of many S*R contributors and innumerable Quack! characters.

IMAGINE #1 April 1978 Cover: Frank Cirocco IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “Flightmare,” Neal Adams/Frank Cirocco 10 “Anticipation,” Dave Sim/Fabio Gasbarri 5 “Making It,” Lee Marrs 1 “Disputed Sacrifice,” Marshall Rogers (color) 8 “The Nimrod Fusion,” Steven Grant/Richard Larson 9 “The Garbage Men,” Gene Day/Fabio Gasbarri 7 BC: Reprint of Frank Cirocco’s front cover sans type. #2 June 1978 Cover: P. Craig Russell IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “Black Crow,” Lee Marrs/Mike Vosburg 12 “Speed,” Gene Day 4 “The Avatar and the Chimera” (part one), P. Craig Russell (color) 8 “Days of Future Past,” Gene Day 6 “Drug Fiends on the Martian Moon,” Trina Robbins (with Steve Leialoha) 7 “Encounter at the Crazy Cat Saloon,” M.T. Gilbert 3 BC: Reprint of P. Craig Russell’s front cover sans type.

77 CBA V.2 #2

#3 August 1978 Cover: P. Craig Russell IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “The Spider Thread,” Masaich Mukaide (inspired by Atutagama’s short story) 4 “To Aging Children Come…,” Mike Vosburg (words by Paul Levitz) 10 “Ersatz,” Lee Marrs (Moebius spoof) 2 “The Avatar and the Chimera” (part two), P. Craig Russell (color) 8 Nebula: “Chapter One: Gavin’s Ring,” Mickey Schwaberow 11 “Fear of Death,”Dorothy Bucher/M.T. Gilbert 2 “Vignette: A Soft and Gentle Rain,” M.T. Gilbert 3 Letters column 1 BC: Steve Leialoha

#6 July 1979 Cover: Stephen Konz IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) The Song of Asmodeus,” D. Motter & K. Steacy 11 “Salvation,” Masaichi Mukaide 2 “The Dewcatcher,” Stephen Konz 6 Nebula: “Chapter Two: Bones and Spheres,” Mickey Schwaberow 8 Nebula: “Chapter Three: Beware of Ashenwaste, My Son,” Mickey Schwaberow 5 BC: “Siegfried,” P. Craig Russell 1 Notes: Final issue. Lettering on “Salvation” by Mike Friedrich. Back cover is rejected final page (by Marvel) of PCR’s “Siegfried” story in Epic Illustrated.

(story idea by Steven Grant)/Bob Gould [r: #6] 20 Dragonus: “The Wizard’s Venom,” F. Brunner [r: #3] 10 “Cody Starbuck” (part one), Howard Chaykin [r: #1] 16 SECTION TWO: ALIEN CONTACT “I’m God,” Dave Sim/Fabio Gasbarri [r: #7] 8 “Waters of Requital,” Lee Marrs [r: #5] 8 SECTION THREE: INNER SPACE “Worlds Without, Worlds Within,” M.T. Gilbert [r: #9] 8 “Reincarnalation,” Mike Vosburg [r: #2] 1 “My Fears,” Jeff Bonivert [r: #7] 4 “Skywalker,” Mike Vosburg & Steve Englehart/ Mike Vosburg [r: #7] 11 BC: Border design by Lee Marrs

PARSIFAL

WITHIN OUR REACH

#4 November 1978 Cover: Steve Ditko IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “A Dream of Milk & Honey” (part one), Michael T. Gilbert 16 “The Summoning,” Paul Levitz/Steve Ditko (color) 8 “The Awakening of Tamaki,” Lee Marrs/Masaichi Mukaide 12 “Cosmix,” Dave Sim 4 BC: Painting by John Allison Notes: Lettering on “A Dream of Milk & Honey” by Mary Gordon. Lettering on “The Summoning” by Gaspar Saladino; coloring by Carl Gafford.

#1 May 1978 Cover: P. Craig Russell IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “Part One: His Journey,” Patrick Mason/P. Craig Russell (color) [r: Star* Reach #8] 10 “Part Two: His Temptation,” Patrick Mason/P. Craig Russell (color) [r: Star* Reach #10] 10 “Part Three: His Victory,” Patrick Mason/P. Craig Russell (color) 10 Note: One-shot issue.

#5 April 1979 Cover: Michael T. Gilbert IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) “A Sprig of Thaxin,” Paul Kirchner 16 “A Dream of Milk and Honey” (conclusion), Michael T. Gilbert 16 “Ravens,” Eric Kimball/Robert Gould 1 Note: Begins magazine-size format. Lettering on “A Dream of Milk & Honey” by Mary E.M. Gordon.

nn 1991 Flip covers: Paul Chadwick/Norm Breyfogle IFCs: Contents pages “The Gift of the Magi,” P. Craig Russell (adapted from story by O. Henry) 12 “So This is Christmas,” Lovern Kindzierski/Tim Sale 6 “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society,” Antonin Artaud/Rafael Kayanan 5 “Home for Christmas,” Shair/Eric Shanower 4 Concrete: “American Christmas,” Paul Chadwick (art assist by Jed Hotchkiss) 8 ALTER EGO “Star*Reach: The Business of Comics Art, #11 June 1978 Cover: Marie Severin & Bill Everett The Art of Comics Business,” M. Friedrich (text) 2 “Welcome to Alter Ego,” Mike Friedrich Spider-Man: “A Wolf At the Door,” Roy & Dann (text w/ photo portrait by Kevin Bermingham) 1 Thomas (plot idea by David Ross)/ Editorial: “The Altered Ego: A Final Bow,” Roy Thomas Jeff Butler & Gary Kato 8 (text with uncredited photo portrait) 1 “The Happy Prince,” Oscar Wilde (prose) 6 “Gir/Moebius: An Interview with Jean Giraud” (conBrother Elf: “A Gift of Peace,” Ron Fortier/Gary Kato 8 ducted by Mal Burns (with participation of and Sherlock Holmes: “The Season of Forgiveness,” forward & afterword by Mike Friedrich); Martin Powell/Patrick Olliffe 8 illustrated with Moebius art and self-portrait 7 “Santa’s Ashram,” Norm Breyfogle 7 “Everett on Everett: An Interview by Roy Thomas,” Creator Biographies 2 Bill Everett interview (editing assist by Don & Notes: One-shot flip-book style, perfect-bound comic Maggie Thompson; illustrated with Everett art used as a fundraiser for the AIDS charity, AmFAR, and includes uncredited photo portraits) 22 and the environmental group, Sempervirens. Coloring “Bill Everett, the Ancient Sub-Mariner,” Roy Thomas

by Digital Chameleon (except for “Santa’s Ashram” (text memorial with uncredited photo portrait) 1 by Nick Burns). Lettering on “Magi” and Concrete BC: Moebius self-portrait

by Bill Pearson. Lettering on Spider-Man by Gary Note: Edited jointly by Roy Thomas and Mike Kato. Lettering on Sherlock Holmes by Pat Brosseau.

Friedrich. One-shot as published by Star*Reach; final Publication design by Dean Motter with Jennifer issue of A/E volume one. Not a comic book proper, Winston. but certainly a publication about the form.

CLOSING NOTES

CODY STARBUCK nn July 1978 Wrap cover painting: Howard Chaykin IFC: Editorial, Mike Friedrich (text) Cody Starbuck: “Starbuck,” Howard Chaykin (color) 32 Note: One-shot issue.

STAR*REACH GREATEST HITS

nn 1979 Cover painting: Frank Brunner Contents; Forward, Mike Friedrich (text) 1 SECTION ONE: SWASHBUCKLERS Elric: “Elric of Mélnibone,” Frank Brunner (adapted from Michael Moorcock’s short story; color) [r: Heavy Metal, Sept. & Nov. 1979] 20 Elric: “The Prisoner of Pan Tang,” Eric Kimball

78 All characters ©2003 the respective copyright holders.

CBA V.2 #2

Between March and August of 1984, Eclipse Comics published six issues of Star*Reach Classics (very curiously the only S*R-related publications listed in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide (what’s up with that?) which featured reprints from Star*Reach and Quack! We’ve omitted the listings, though have thoughtfully included small cover images of #2-6 to show the cool new artwork used in the re-presentations.

A few of the above listings were culled from the Grand Comicbook Database at www.comics.org.

Compiled by Ye Ed with the help of David A. Roach.

All cover art ©2003 the respective copyright holders.

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Frank Cho continued from page 42

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It’s unbelievable how the whole Image deal works. The creator owns his characters outright. The creator gets 100% of the book’s profit, minus the printing costs and a small Image fee. But Image doesn’t get a cut. And if you get a movie deal, you get all the money. Image has nothing to do with it, unless they broker the deal for you, and then they get a very small percentage. I really don’t know how Image makes money. Jim Valentino explained it to me one night at a convention: they’re basically a non-profit organization. They make enough money to cover all the salaries at the studio and the printing costs, and whatever is left over is the creator’s. It blew my mind. I’m just surprised that more professionals aren’t taking advantage of Image.

CBA: It’s hard to believe it started with Todd McFarlane and company.

Frank: The difference between today’s Image and the Image of ten years ago is night-and-day.

Today’s Image is a creator’s paradise.

CBA: How big was the jump in sales after the move to Image?

Frank: The jump was over 6,000 copies. Through Insight Studios I was selling over 17,000 copies, and when I moved to Image I sold over 23,000. And it’s a black-&-white book! The break-even point for a black-&-white book is 3,000 copies.

CBA: Wow. That’s 20,000 copies of profit?

Frank: Yes, roughly.

CBA: I wonder how that compares with other successful black-&-white books, like Jeff Smith’s Bone?

Frank: Bone is a fantastic book. Bone was the benchmark for me because it’s a highly successful black-&-white humor book. So I thought if I could come close to Bone’s sales figures then I made it! I’ve never dreamed that I would surpass his numbers. Liberty Meadows surpassed Bone in sales around #23.

That was a huge milestone for me because Bone to me was untouchable.

It still is.

CBA: It’s a shame Bone’s storyline is ending.

Frank: It’s too bad.

Bone’s one of my favorite books. Jeff Smith is such a gifted cartoonist and a legend in the making.

I’m very lucky to be working in comics right

now. I consider today to be the renaissance of comics, because there are so many great comics out there, so many different topics, genres, styles of art and writing. It’s such a great time to be in comics.

CBA: Are there any new genres in which you’d like to work?

Frank: I’ve always been a big horror fan. I’m actually working on a horror project [Zombie King] with a friend of mine. We’re co-writing it. Eventually I’ll draw it, maybe three years down the road.

CBA: Why did you sign a semi-exclusive contract with Marvel?

Frank: More exposure. It will bring more attention to me and to Liberty Meadows. And also I was a huge Marvel fan growing up. I also had an itch to play with someone else’s toys for a while.

CBA: Marvel certainly seems more open to trying new things than they were several years ago.

Frank: Oh, yeah. For a while, before Joe Quesada, they seemed to be kind of...

CBA: Treading water?

Frank: Yes. But now, under Quesada, they’re hiring people you would have never thought they’d hire... like myself! [laughs] They’re just doing great stuff. I can’t say enough good things about Marvel, and the comics industry in general, right now. I don’t know why people are constantly saying, “The comics market is dying, blah, blah, blah.” I think it’s truly the “New Golden Age of Comics” right now.

CBA: Were you a Marvel fan during the ‘80s?

Frank: Oh, yeah. I just loved the whole Jim Shooter era. My prime collecting period was from ’83 through ’90. I loved everything that was coming out back then, and I still have most of them in boxes in my parents’ house. [laughs] I was looking through some of the Fantastic Four issues John Byrne did — they’re marvelous — and the Paul Smith X-Men. CBA: Oh, yeah! With that nice clean line he has...

Frank: Absolutely beautiful. I came along when Paul Smith just started. It was maybe an issue after he started. My friends were saying, “Man, you gotta read X-Men, because John Byrne’s X-Men rocks.” And I just missed that — he left XMen and was doing Fantastic Four, and Dave Cockrum was doing it, and, for some reason, his stuff didn’t quite connect with me. But when Paul Smith came onboard, it was mind-blowing.

CBA: Marvel put out some good books during Shooter’s reign. Even a secondary title like Doctor Strange would have

TOP: The plesiosaurs get frisky with Cavewoman in this 2002 Cho piece. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Frank Cho. Cavewoman ©2003 Budd Root.

PhoTo alBum

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Frank Cho (left) with his hero, Al Williamson.

Pittsburgh Con 2002. Hanging out with daughter Emily at home, Summer 2002.

Signing at Captain Bluehen in Delaware (’01), Frank and his good friend, Tiffany Taylor (Playboy Playmate, Nov. ’98). Frank at his drawing table (photo by Sophia Quach). Frank signing and sketching all afternoon at Mayhem Comics in Ames, Iowa in Nov. ’00. At the 2002 Pittsburgh Con, Frank poses with Mark Shultz (left) and Steve Kammer (Al Williamson’s bodyguard). “Go Speed Racer!”: Frank at the 2001 Lone Star Con in Plano, Texas. Goofing around in Texas, 2002 with (left to right) Scott Kurtz, Deborah Abbott, and Manny Carrasco. CENTER: At the 2001 San Diego Comic-Con with unknown fan.

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somebody like Marshall Rogers penciling it; and even unique, goofy little books like Power Pack were good.

Frank: Yeah. [laughs] There’s something to be said for goofy books. I remember Spider-Ham and... ROM! CBA: Speaking of offbeat titles, your first title for Marvel will be a new version of Shanna, the She-Devil. What can you say about Shanna?

Frank: Well, she’s single and she’s busty! [laughs] CBA: Will there be a lot of humor in this book or will there be more action and adventure?

Frank: It’s going to be a straight adventure story with dramatic moments and small doses of comedy. Have you ever seen Tremors? It’s going to have that flavor: a lot of action and drama with some humor. I’ve made a couple of references to the old Shanna comics for comedic effect. [laughs] But seriously, I told Marvel not to solicit it until I have all eight issues in the can.

Then release it monthly instead of bi-monthly. The way things look now, Shanna won’t hit the stands until late 2003.

CBA: I’d heard that, under the terms of your contract, you’ll be delivering 12 issues.

Frank: Yes. Shanna, the She-Devil is an eight-issue mini-series, and after it’s completed I owe Marvel four issues. I’m not sure what I’m going to do for the last four issues of the contract; Marvel hasn’t decided yet. But that’s at least a year from now, so we’re not too worried about it. They’re talking about publishing a four-issue sequel, if Shanna is successful. They may even extend it to a six-issue sequel, which is the size of a standard trade paperback.

CBA: Besides Shanna, are there any other Marvel characters you have an interest in tackling?

Frank: I would like to do Conan but I don’t know if it’s still a Marvel property [The license is currently held by Dark Horse Comics - Ye Ed.]. I’d also like to tackle Wolverine or Spider-Man, two of my favorite characters growing up.

CBA: Well I guess those characters are flexible enough that many different artists are drawn to them. It’s interesting that you enjoy drawing Spider-Man, since one of your strengths is drawing expressive faces.

With Spider-Man, do you ever feel limited when drawing his mask?

Frank: Not really.

CBA: You just see it as a different challenge, the way he expresses himself through body language?

Frank: Yes. The headache with Spider-Man is the friggin’ buildings! I never

got into drawing buildings and mechanical stuff. I’ve always drawn trees and bushes and leaves. I could knock those out without a problem but buildings have to be so accurate. I did three covers for a J. Michael Straczynski Amazing Spider-Man storyline. And when Marvel hired me, I asked, “What’s the story about?” They said, “Well, we don’t have it yet.” I said, “What do you want me to do for covers? What super-villain is he fighting?” They said, “Just draw an iconic Spider-Man figure.”

That’s what they gave me. I would’ve liked to have had a couple more people in the covers. But they turned out pretty nice. I just focused on capturing the classic Spider-Man poses.

CBA: I’ve seen the original pencils for those covers. You work on unusually large sheets of paper.

Frank: I can’t draw small.

DC and Marvel would send me standard 11" x 17" size paper to work on and when you actually draw on it and factoring in the borders, you only really have 10" x 15" to work on. It’s just a very small area, especially with some of these writers who pack in seven panels a page, asking for full-body shots. There’s no way, you know? I tried it and I just couldn’t do it. So I said, “I’m just going to cut my own paper, and make it twice the size of the comics page. So it’s much bigger then your standard comic paper.

CBA: I guess with your newspaper strip background, you’re just used to working with a larger sheet of paper. Those covers did look quite nice — they had that John Romita, Sr./Jim Mooney feel to them.

Frank: I’m glad you caught that, because I love John Romita, Sr. I don’t like the new Spider-Man with his eyes covering half his face, and his body like a skinny 12 year old kid’s, with big hands and feet. I love the classic John Romita, Sr. Spider-Man. I tried to capture that Romita essence. It got a pretty good response. Of course, there were a couple of kids saying, “Hey, that doesn’t look like Spider-Man! He should have a misshapen head and big eyes!” [laughs] CBA: Some artists draw Spider-Man a little too inhuman.

Frank: Right. “Inhuman” is the perfect word. These modern Spider-Man interpretations look like aliens. I don’t mind each artist having their own take on Spider-Man, but it’s reached the point where they’re doing it just to distort everything, and that’s not right.

CBA: The Romita stuff was great because it was so efficient.

ABOVE: One of Frank Cho’s passions is the work of science-fiction/adventure author Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the John Carter of Mars series. Here’s a certain young princess from an angry red planet. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Frank Cho. Dejah Thoris ©2003 ERB, Inc.

Frank: It moved so well.

Stan Lee did a helluva job balancing the action and the soap opera, but it was John Romita, Sr. who defined and gave the classic Spider-Man “look” for me.

CBA: Forgive me if I switch gears for a moment, but I’m curious as to the fate of Liberty Meadows. How much newspaper material has not yet been reprinted in the comic book?

Frank: With #36, I will have exhausted all my reprintable material, but a lot of people don’t know that I’ve been going back and redrawing and adding new stuff to the comic book since #1. Even though it’s technically a reprint, almost 50 percent of it is brandnew stuff.

CBA: You don’t really mention that too much in the book. You mention there is stuff that was censored in the strip and then put back in the book, but I didn’t realize the percentage of new material was so high.

Frank: If you actually read the newspaper-strip version and then the comic-book version, you’ll be surprised at how much of it has changed. Several people on my message board have asked, “Why does it take so long to produce Liberty Meadows if it’s a reprint?”

I’ll tell them, “Well, yes, technically, it is a reprint, but I’m never satisfied so I’m going back and redrawing and adding new stuff.” I’m basically redoing half of the book, and that’s why it’s sucking up so much of my time. I might as well do a whole new issue...

CBA: If the Liberty Meadows reprint material runs out with #36, will #37 continue with new material?

Frank: Yes, after #36, it’s brand-new material.

CBA: Will the book come out on the same schedule?

Frank: Yes, it’s going to continue as a bi-monthly book.

CBA: At that point, will you still be doing new stuff for Marvel?

Frank: Probably not. I think that’s right around the same time my Marvel contract expires, and I have five other books that I’m writing right now that I want to launch later on: One is a horror story called “Zombie King”; second, a humor comic strip called “Summer Days”; third is a science-fiction epic called “The Thousand”; fourth is an action/adventure called “Guns and Dino”; and the fifth one is an untitled sword-&-sorcery/fantasy story.

CBA: Will you be drawing those as well as writing them?

Frank: Yes, I will be drawing and writing all of them, but for two of the projects, I’m writing with a partner. The humor one, I’m co- writing and codrawing it with my good pal, Scott Kurtz.

CBA: In addition to the comic strip and comic book work, you’ve done some book illustration for Insight Studios. Is that something you’d like to do

more of? Illustrating Edgar Rice Burroughs novels and projects like that?

Frank: Well, my dream project is to illustrate the King Kong novel with fully painted paintings and interior art like those classic N.C. Wyeth illustrated novels (Treasure Island and Kidnapped, things like that). That would be my dream job: King Kong. Someday it may happen.

CBA: You seem to have a thing for monkeys. You always depict yourself as a monkey in Liberty Meadows. Why a monkey?

Frank: Because monkeys are so funny!

CBA: Who gave you the nickname “Monkey Boy” Cho? Frank: It’s just an old school joke. My college roommate and I used to call each other monkey boy. Actually, we nicknamed one of our college roommates “Mike, the Monkey King.”

CBA: After all the changes you’ve gone through over the past several years, what are your goals right now?

Frank: My general goal is to take over the world.

CBA: And to see it overrun by terrible, giant apes?

Frank: Right. And to bring back the dinosaurs and busty women in leather bikinis. [laughs] I don’t know. I’m very happy with what I’m doing right now.

And hopefully the fans will stick with me for the rest of my career, but who knows?

CBA: You certainly have a lot of projects in the works and a pretty busy schedule. What is a typical day in the life of Frank Cho? Frank: I wake up at 7:00. I walk the dog, feed my baby and take her to day care, come back home, eat breakfast, work out in the morning (lift some weights), take a shower, answer e-mails and then start to draw and write. I take a lunch break around 1:00 p.m., work some more, answer phones, and answer more e-mails. At 5:00, I pick up my baby from day care, come home, play with her, and clean the house a little bit. When my wife comes home at 6:00, she or I will start dinner. Then it’s more playing with the baby then my wife and I give her a bath and put her to sleep. Afterward, my wife and I will hang out for a couple of hours and go to bed, around 11:00. It’s kind of a boring life.

CBA: Whatever works. It’s probably healthy to keep such normal hours.

Frank: I’ve only done that recently, since baby Emily came along. Before

TOP: Frank Cho promises plenty of nudity and dinos in his forthcoming MAX mini-series, Shanna, the She-Devil. Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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the baby came, I would work from 10:00 at night to 4:00 in the morning and sleep until noon.

CBA: So you were never a morning person?

Frank: Well, I am now! [laughs] This schedule is finally, slowly working for me. For the first two months of this schedule, I was just tired and unproductive. I’m slowly getting used to it, and actually enjoying it. It’s weird: by working early in the morning, I seem to get more done. Having a baby is really a life-altering experience.

CBA: Do you hand her pens while she’s still in her crib?

Frank: She’ll just eat them. She’ll just stick them in her mouth. [laughs] It’s kind of odd... I’m hoping that my daughter will get some of my drawing talent so that I could share with her my love of art... and get her to draw the boring backgrounds for me: “Do you want to draw a background? Do you want to draw a background for Daddy? Draw this building for Daddy!”

CBA: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Frank.

Frank: Hey, my pleasure.

TOP: It’s a monkey boy brawl! Frank Cho gag cartoon featuring cartoon and comic character debauchery. Courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2003 Frank Cho. Characters ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

fin

GALLERY

85 ABOVE: Frank Cho’s line art from the cover of Liberty Meadows #16 (’00). Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Frank Cho.

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ABOVE: Brandy head pencil studies by Frank Cho.

Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Frank Cho.

87 ABOVE: Half-inked Frank Cho piece from Sketches and Scribbles: Book One. Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Frank Cho.

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THIS PAGE: Frank Cho’s cover art for Amazing Spider-Man #47 (Jan. ’03). Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

89 TOP: The Man of Steel gets the Cho treatment in this sketch from Sketches and Scribbles: Book One. ABOVE: Catwoman and mouse at play. Courtesy of the artist.

Art ©2003 Frank Cho. Characters ©2003 DC Comics.

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ABOVE: Shanna, the She-Devil gets a Frank Cho make-over by the artist for the jungle heroine’s soon-to-come Marvel mini-series.

This piece of promotional art courtesy of Frank. Shanna ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

91 ABOVE: Eye-poppin’ (and nipple-pokin’!) page from Frank Cho’s forthcoming Shanna, the She-Devil mini-series coming from Marvel’s MAX imprint.

Courtesy of the artist. Shanna ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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ABOVE: Unused cover art by Frank Cho for Image’s PvP. Courtesy of the artist PvP ©2003 Scott Kurtz.

THIS PAGE: Be nice and she might not scratch you. Oh, and watch out for the kitty, as well! 2000 sketch from Frank Cho’s Sketches and Scribbles: Book One. Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Frank Cho.

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TOP: Frank and Ye Editor share an affectionate for doubtless the greatest movie of all time, 1933’s King Kong. This piece appears in Cho’s Sketches and Scribbles: Book One, available from Monkey Boy Press. ABOVE: Frank and Brandy from the endpapers of the Eden collection. Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Frank Cho. Kong ©2003 RKO .

95 CLOCKWISE TOP LEFT: Liberty Meadows #29 cover inks. Lobo takes on Princess Leia in a 1997 gag piece. Cho’s Maryland affections show in this cartoon from ’93 of “Baltimore’s Original Bad Ass” (and noted 1800s U.S. author), Edgar Allan Poe.Pro bono cartoon for Maryland’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, 2003.

All courtesy of and art ©2003 Frank Cho. Brandy ©2003 Frank Cho. Lobo ©2003 DC Comics. Princess Leia ©2003 20th Century Fox.

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ABOVE: Frank Cho’s pencils for a Hellboy pin-up. Finished version is opposite. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Frank Cho. Hellboy ©2003 Mike Mignola.

97 ABOVE: Final inks for Frank Cho’s Hellboy pin-up. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2003 Frank Cho. Hellboy ©2003 Mike Mignola.

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ABOVE: Brandy pencil sketch by Frank Cho. Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Frank Cho.

99 ABOVE: Frank Cho’s final inked art for the cover of his first issue of Liberty Meadows published by Image, #27 (Aug. ’02). Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Frank Cho.

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ABOVE: Brandy and pals from the Eden collection published by Image.

Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Frank Cho.

J.J. Sedelmaier continued from page 46

it was [actress] Clara Peller who basically just said “Where’s the beef?”

And my father thought it sounded better and more real that way. He had a focus, had a vision, but he didn’t let it be so tunnel vision that if something happened on the set, he wouldn’t be able to go with it. And I’m very proud of being a part of the whole heritage. I would say up to about ’95, ’96, he started slowing down then and not doing as much work. Not slowing down as a person; just not taking as much work. It was like we were peers in the same industry; it was really terrific.

CBA: A viewer could tell one of your father’s commercials from a mile away, which was I think extremely unusual for the form, for a layperson to actually recognize the thumbprint of the creatives… There was just a wackiness about the stuff, a naturalism.

J.J.: The wackiness, and then you started also seeing people ripping him off, which is another sign of…

CBA: Fame? [laughs] J.J.: Fame, yeah. But usually that stuff was so over-the-top and everything that his stuff wasn’t, it was just someone’s impression of what they think a Sedelmaier was. And it really wasn’t, because when you look at what his stuff was, it stood out because it was taking everyday life and putting it right in front of you.

The other stuff, in some cases they even started casting almost deformed people. [Jon laughs] It was just very weird.

CBA: Joe’s career stretch back into the ’60s?

J.J.: He was an art director… He came in as an art director and then became an art director/producer. He made the major transition toward the end of his advertising agency career, when he was at J. Walter Thompson, I think. He had the Gino’s Pizza Roll account, which eventually I think became, in certain areas of the country, it was Chun King. They did a test film and he did the test film. He cast the people in the agency and directed, shot and made it. He showed it to Gino Pallucci, the guy who owned the company, who was the client. And he loved it. Gino said, “I want to air this.” The agency people said, “Oh, well, no, we’re not going to air that. It’s just a test.” He said, “Screw that! I want to air this!” [laughter] CBA: Go, Gino!

J.J.: Yeah! He was a really staunch supporter of what my father was doing. He slowly but surely got that in. I learned a lot by watching him do that.

CBA: What year was that, roughly?

J.J.: He went into his own business in ’67 or ’68.

CBA: As a kid, I grew up in Westchester, I remember these great Jack Gilford commercials.

J.J.: I don’t think he ever worked with Jack Gilford. Jack did Crackerjack spots, didn’t he?

INSET ABOVE: Joe Sedelmaier drew up this oversize birthday card for a young J.J. in the ’60s. Superman ©2003 DC Comics. All images courtesy of JJSP.

CBA: Yeah!

That’s right.

J.J.: Gilford was probably a little bit too well-known for my father to use.

I think that was just a little bit before my dad’s time. There was a school, anyway.

The Jack Gilford Crackerjack, the Benson & Hedges commercials with the too-long cigarettes which had the smokers inadvertently breaking them in elevator doors, etc.

CBA: [Singing a jingle] “One-oh-one… just a silly millimeter longer.”

J.J.: Yeah! And the Alka-Seltzer stuff…

CBA: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” [laughs] J.J.: Yup! CBA: I believe there’s a relationship with Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar, Harvey Kurtzman, Woody Allen, Levi’s Rye Bread… a real New York City Jewish sensibility that came into American humor…

J.J.: Help! magazine and the other publications that were influenced by Mad, and all the other real irreverent stuff.

CBA: But with a very strong element of humanity and warmth to it. It wasn’t hostile and excluding, actually inclusive and made fun of everything, especially itself !

J.J.: Yeah, it wasn’t as pissed-off at humor eventually evolved into.

CBA: Do you feel a kindred, a connection to this kind of humor? Because it seems to come out of your work, too, as well…

J.J.: Absolutely. I’m constantly disappointed with the lack of exposure people have to this stuff, because it’s so great to see all the stuff that really hasn’t been duplicated in its pure kind of first-generation sense. When you look at the influence of things like Your Show of Shows on today’s comedy, and it’s disappointing to realize how people are entertained by this stuff but don’t realize where it came from.

They’ve deprived themselves so much by not knowing.

I’m influenced by anything I’ve been exposed to and I dwell on stuff. I mean, if you could see the studio here, it would make sense, too, because the place is very visual. It’s peppered with old stuff, new stuff, just stuff that is interesting to look at. So if you want to talk about something like Your Show of Shows or things like that, we could go on forever! God, whenever I have a opportunity to not just do my version of something, but where I can incorporate stuff that’s entertained me from many years ago… Oh yeah! Also, to then flip it over into animation…

The whole craft of animation is such a wonderful thing to be involved in because you just have so much control. In particular, the sort of animation that I work in, which is now called now because it’s flat…

CBA: Because of computers?

J.J.: Right. It’s so versatile. Not only is it versatile because of the different sort of designs and techniques you can use, the visual things you can use,

101 TOP RIGHT: Late ’70s portfolio piece by J.J. ABOVE: Another gag pic of Father & Son Sedelmaier.

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The Collaborators and J.J. The creative whiz on working with some darned notable talents

©2003 The Dana Carvey Show.

After viewing the credits on the guy’s sample reels, we realized J.J. Sedelmaier and his White Plains, New York production company has worked with an astounding array of talented artists on a multitude of projects. So, just for kicks — and because we wouldn’t be CBA if we didn’t ask for our interview subjects to jump through hoops at the very last minute! — we asked our interview subject to rattle off some anecdotes via e-mail about collaborating over the years with such an incredibly diverse group. Here’s J.J.’s entertaining reply, listed by artist name in alphabetical order: NEAL ADAMS Comic book artist, Batman Neal and his studio, Continuity Associates, have helped JJSP produce animatics (a limited technique of production that allows an idea to be tested before full production is approved) for the advertising agency DDB in New York. The first project we did had Neal working with characters I designed (I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!) and the artist added a richness of which no one else is capable. Frankly, once I had gotten over who I was working with, it became a helpful learning experience in terms of animatic production.

The second project we collaborated on (finished about a month ago) had us working together with cartoonist Bonnie Timmons’ style. The success of that project shows how flexible he and his staff are. Another fun aspect is that he and Marilyn, his wife, work together just like my wife, Patrice, and I. DICK AYERS Comic book artist, Sgt. Fury Dick and his son, Richard, had seen an article in the newspaper about the studio here, so they called and asked if they could visit. I had no idea he lived in the region and was thrilled to have him come by. He spent an entire afternoon hanging out, telling stories and answering questions. It was soon afterwards when Robert Smigel called and said that Playboy had asked him to write a comic strip starring Ace and Gary, the Ambiguously Gay Duo, and would JJSP do the art. I had Dick lay out the piece and do the lettering. He added just the right amount of style harkening back to the ’60s that I was looking for. He helped me out on another Playboy piece, as well. I’d like to work with Mr. Ayers more!

R.O. BLECHMAN Cartoonist Bob was my boss at the Ink Tank from 1984 until ’90. He’s a genius who’s been an influential force in print and design for over 40 years. I was lucky to have cut my teeth there, where I learned there was room for both cartoons AND animation in commercial production.

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GEORGE BOOTH Cartoonist, The New Yorker I’ve worked with George on at least four commercials (and he also did a Christmas card for the studio about 10 years ago). He takes direction really well! It’s a totally collaborative process where we bounce faxes back and forth like nuts! The guy is so easy going, you can’t help but see his point of view. We share a love of W.C. Fields and Laurel & Hardy.

MIKE JUDGE Animated cartoon creator, Beavis and Butthead We did the animation for the first season of Beavis and Butthead. It was the first time we or MTV had produced “long form” work. They paired us up with Mike, who was searching through the process like all of us and ultimately responsible for every aspect of the show. He’s a brilliant writer and creator.

Luckily, I had animator Tony Eastman (and later Yvette Kaplan) working on the project. I think it was Mike, Tony and Yvette who really made it gel. I always wanted to work with him on commercial projects but once Beavis hit, he became too busy.

DAVID LEVINE Illustrator/caricaturist, New York Review of Books We did about six commercials for Brown & Co. over the course of three or four years. The spots used a caricature of a real person — George Brown — to sell investments. The ad agency discouraged us from having any contact with David because of budget concerns. They gave us a pre-existing print advertisement he’d done for them and said that’s it. I arranged to videotape George for reference and we used other “David Levine work” as reference, too. I ended sending the finished commercial to David to get his opinion. I held my breath for a week-anda-half waiting for his feedback. He loved it, thank God! ALEX ROSS Comic book artist, Marvels Thanks to the brilliant cartoonist Chris Ware (also living in the Chicago area), I was able to reach Alex to discuss having him do the JJSP promotional comic book cover. He originally did a sketch working off the cover of Batman #1. After discussing the design a bit more, he did a sketch similar to the final outcome — which I LOVE. It’s subtle and plays with the characters, as well as the genre. I also think it was an opportunity for Alex to dwell in a little self parody, too!

GARRY TRUDEAU Comic strip creator, Doonesbury We animated Garry’s “Mr. Butts” character for an anti-smoking television spot. It was the first time — possibly the last — I’d worked on a project where one single person had ultimate approval.

Whatta treat! He was in on every step and, as a result, we were able to change and develop material on the spot without worrying about approvals and any extra time it often takes to get stuff signed off on.

One of my favorite spots! ©2003 Garry Trudeau.

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Levine, Blechman illos, and Beavis & Butthead ©2003 the respective copyright holders. All courtesy of JJSP.

whether it’s working with artists or just abstract stuff, you’ve also got to develop a way of moving it. You’ve got to develop a technique of animation that’s going to be right for whatever design, concept and message you’re trying to get across. So there’s different levels of vocabulary that you have to put all together to make the thing really work. It’s very fulfilling. So when it’s entertaining, it’s even better! [laughs] CBA: What I enjoy about your work and Robert Smigel’s work is that it’s astonishingly unpretentious.

J.J.: Well, that’s good.

CBA: We see the obvious influence of bad animation from the ’70s and you have fun with that, whether it’s Super Friends or School House Rock. It’s reverent to the technique, it’s irreverent to the content, if you know what I mean.

J.J.: Right. I’m very, very fortunate to have been able to pair up with Robert on projects. There’s a guy, Stuart Hill, with whom I’ve done the Captain Linger stuff for Cartoon Network. And there’s guys at Cartoon Network, as well: Michael Ouweleen and Erik Richter. We did the Harvey Birdman pilot for Adult Swim… we only did the pilot; we’re not doing the series.

To pair up with people, that’s really exciting. To be able to find people who see things kind of your way, only in a different realm. Then you collaborate and you don’t step on each other’s toes. It’s just you’re adding to their stuff, they’re adding to your stuff. It wouldn’t be what it was if you weren’t both involved.

The Saturday Night Live work has been so important to animation, too, because if there’s anything that I set out to do when Patrice and I opened the studio, it was to try to take animation into realms it hadn’t been before. Not just in terms of design, but in terms of content, in terms of trying to get people to consider animation as a source of entertainment other than just for kids. To get out of the ducks and bunny stuff.

As much as I still love Marvel and stuff from Disney and the more conventional approaches to animation — the sort of work that’s being done — it’s fallen into such a trap and is in such a rut and there’s been such a glut of shit being done.

It’s done a lot of harm to the craft and I don’t know that it’s ever going to go away. CGI is running a real high profile now. It’s a very popular technique and it’s being given a lot

of attention, a lot of the money, and a lot of the development focus now.

Two-D is this old stand-by and I can’t imagine is not always going to be there. It’s just constantly waiting out these different trends, though, until all the sorting-out takes place. ‘Cause there’s not only CGI, but there are things like Flash and other techniques people sometimes try to use, but don’t know how to marry it with the right sort of design or whether it’s too limited for the design, or even too limited for the concept. So every time someone screws up in animation, it sets the industry back three times as far.

As a technique, animation is judged so harshly. I mean, you don’t judge live-action the same way. You don’t judge an actor the same way.

If you see a shit film with [Robert] DeNiro in it, that doesn’t mean you’re not going to go back and see a film starring DeNiro. But if you see a bad animated feature, watch out!

You’re not going to be as prone to go back to see another animated movie if that one sucks.

CBA: What was it, Treasure Planet? [laughs] J.J.: [Groans] Who knows what that was. [laughter] I didn’t even go to see that one.

CBA: That certainly sent a shiver through the industry, nonetheless.

J.J.: Yeah, but it’s interesting that the majority of the films nominated for Academy Awards this year are 2-D, for lack of a better description.

You’ve got people like Don Bluth [director of The Secret of NIMH] going out and saying, “We’re going to break away from Disney to do everything Disney isn’t doing anymore.” Then they go out and the work is nothing but watered-down Disney. As much as I’m not a fan of [Fritz the Cat and Wizards director] Ralph Bakshi’s stuff, I’ve got

TOP RIGHT: J.J. Sedelmaier today. TOP INSET: J.J. joking with The Avengers in the late ’60s. ABOVE: Autobiographical portfolio piece from the late ’70s (©2003 JJS).

All courtesy of JJSP. All characters ©2003 their respective copyright holders.

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©2003 Sedelmaier Film Productions Chicago.

Meaning I wanted to draw — I thought — the paneled kind of storytelling approach comics took.

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©2003 J.J. Sedelmaier.

TOP: J.J.’s father, Joe Sedelmaier’s claim to fame was a director of two extremely famous television commercials: Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef” and “The Fast-Talking FedEx Guy.” Here Joe is chatting with speedy-lipped John Moschitta on the set in the 1980s. INSET & RIGHT: Two more comics-oriented portfolio pieces by J.J.

T-shirt design ©2003 J.J. Sedelmaier. Superman ©2003 DC Comics.

to admire him for what he’s accomplished… I haven’t liked the rotoscope stuff he did (where you trace over live action), but boy, the guy is relentless.

The guy has drive!

CBA: If Bakshi could talk R. Crumb into doing something… [laughs] J.J.: Plus, he’s influenced [Ren & Stimpy creator] John Kricfalusi, too, and John’s done an incredible amount to take a very cartoony sense and make it for adults, which is terrific. Ren & Stimpy was just amazing.

CBA: Have you seen The Ripping Friends?

J.J.: Yes. I love that, too.

CBA: [laughs] Kricfalusi goes so far, you just really wonder what kind of upbringing he had.

J.J.: Oh, don’tcha? He’s incredible. We were involved at Nicktoons at the same time he was, and that’s when I got to know him. He would send us some of the episodes before Nickelodeon got their hands on them.

CBA: Uncut, so to speak?

J.J.: Yeah. In between the laughs and the gaping expressions on our face, we’re all kind of thinking, “Oh, the poor guy! What sort of turmoil is going on inside him?” But he’s an amazing talent. If you ever have an opportunity to have him take you through a storyboard, it’s truly an awesome experience.

John K. is one of those guys who — God forbid!

— if he didn’t find animation, you really have to wonder how he’d have ended up. He’s really got quite a drive in him, too.

CBA: You went to the University of Wisconsin?

J.J.: Mm-hm.

CBA: What was in your portfolio when you were going around in ’79?

J.J.: There were strips that I had done some illustration for, there were character drawings, life drawings… Most of it was pretty much “guy stuff.” I wasn’t as comfortable drawing women. I was very conscious of anatomy. It was pretty well drawn, but there weren’t a lot of ideas behind the drawings.

It was, “Okay, this guy can draw,” but it wasn’t really associated with story except for some of the strips I had illustrated but hadn’t written.

CBA: What did you want to be?

J.J.: I wanted to work in comic books.

CBA: Straight super-hero genre stuff?

J.J.: Pretty much straight super-hero stuff. But I didn’t realize until I started talking to people in the industry what a dead end it seemed to be. And it wasn’t even inspiring…

I probably would have gotten burned-out on it after a couple of months, as opposed to feeling like I was working my way up a ladder. At that point anyway, it seemed unless you had your own characters, your own strip, your own idea, your own concept, than you were just going to end up being part of an assembly line. Granted, it’s even more so at the beginning stages of animation, but what I found out is that because I’m very comfortable around people and dealing with them, getting into the creative process had more opportunities available, it seemed, in animation. There was a lot of commercial stuff going on.

CBA: Did you actually go to Marvel and DC? J.J.: Yes. I went to Marvel and DC. I went to Mad. Mad picked up my portfolio and without opening it just threw it in the garbage can… which is fine. I was happy to be there and meet everybody and look in their archives and stuff. I saw [editor] Mike Barr at DC, who basically said he needed to see more drawings of women. I can’t recall who I saw over at Marvel.

CBA: Who did you speak with to get the skinny on the comics industry, so to speak?

J.J.: It was just my impression after talking to these people, after I was there, something just didn’t click. Then I started really looking at the stuff being done. Then I went into hibernation for a couple of months.

In the meantime, I met Patrice, who became my future wife, who basically said, “Even if you’re discouraged, get out there and show your stuff to anyone who’ll look at it.” So I did. By doing that, I met a guy, John Anthes, over at PBS — Channel 13 in New York — who was a lovely guy. He really looked at my stuff and gave me a list of people to go meet.

Because he felt, “You know, your drawing style could work well for cartoons and animation.” He gave me the name of Robert Greenberg, who had a place called R. Greenberg that was kind of like a high-end, optical titles company. They did the Superman title sequence. The another person was R.O. Blechman, who I ended up working with from 1984 until 1990, right before we opened the studio here, and I probably learned more there than anyplace else. The third person was a guy named Tony Eastman, who is the son of P.D. Eastman of Go, Dog, Go ! and Are You My Mother? Dr. Seuss books. I’m still very good friends with Tony and I’ve directed his animated work more than anyone else’s.

CBA: You fell in with a good crowd!

J.J.: Oh, God, yes! R.O. Blechman was an idol of mine…

CBA: Was it advantageous to work with such a minimalist cartoonist as Blechman? He’s renowned for that very scratchy-wiggly line.

J.J.: Well, he’s another person who’s been endlessly ripped off and is a true influence on the industry because he was doing things differently than anyone else.

CBA: I had a long interview with Ed Subitzky, and he raves about what a mentor Blechman was.

J.J.: Oh, yeah. Blechman has influenced so many people. Also, he fell into the right crowd, too. He fell in with John Hubley, who was an animator/ director… John and Faith Hubley had a studio that really was the only studio consistently doing artistic work in animation. John was the one who said to Bob [Blechman], “You should design this stuff for me. You can animate —” Bob said, “Well, no. People don’t think my stuff can be animated.” John said, “Bull! It can be animated! Absolutely! Anything can be animated!” People thought, “Oh, well, you’ve got a broken outline , how are you gonna stop the color from spilling out? Where are you gonna stop the color if there’s no line to hold it in?” Now, to us, that seems insane! But back then there weren’t a lot of people thinking out of the box, thinking

outside of the line. So he was the one who goosed Bob into that.

To work with Bob… I mean, I started as an assistant animator, became an animator, then became a producer, then became the executive producer, then became the studio’s rep, and then the associate director, and finally director. So by the time I left, it was really… “I gotta get outta here, this isn’t my studio, this is his studio.” But the training and the exposure was tremendous… Bob didn’t only work in his own style; he would contract people to design things. That’s where I also learned what was out there in terms of the potential of the craft.

CBA: When did you hook up with Robert Smigel?

J.J.: The first thing we did was “Cluckin’ Chicken” for SNL, in 1992. Which was a parody of a fast food restaurant.

CBA: When did you hang out your own shingle?

J.J.: We incorporated in 1990 and then opened the studio in ’91.

CBA: It was you and Patrice?

J.J.: Yup! We’ve stayed pretty small, except right after “Cluckin’ Chicken,” when Beavis and Butthead came in. Then we ballooned up to an incredible size. I think we were up to 50 people, which was really wild. But “Cluckin’ Chicken” was the first thing Robert and I paired up on, and I have to say, after working together on that, if you’d told me that two years later we’d be working together again in any capacity, I would have said, “No, no way.

There’s no way.” Because it was a very frustrating experience, and I said things to Robert in a professional kind of venue that I’ve never said to anyone else! God! [laughter] After we had done “Cluckin’ Chicken”, I got a call from a producer, Jeff Ross, at NBC because there was a new show they were going to start and they wanted to do animated titles. It was the Conan O’Brien show. So I go over to NBC and sit down with the producer, and Conan comes in, and Robert comes in. I thought, “Hoooly shit! What’s gonna happen here?“ I was

conceited enough to say, “This is a set-up!” (As if NBC would set me up. [laughter] So he starts, “Well, we want to do titles for the show and I worked with you over at Saturday Night Live… “ I said, “Wait! Hold it. You want to work with me? I said terrible things to you!” Smigel says,”Oh, everyone says that to me.” [laughter] So we went from there, and then, after Conan, he went to The Dana Carvey Show, and that’s where he had the idea for The Ambiguously Gay Duo, which at this point was a one-shot cartoon. He sent over the scripts and, y’know, I’ve read a lot of scripts I could see were funny, but, Jon, he sent me this thing that was so much a part of my psyche, it was a part of me.

People in the studio thought I was crazy because I was laughing so loud in my office. Because I could see this thing, even before it was produced. I was so juiced about the whole thing. To be able to do something that was going to be this long, that was going to poke fun at comic books and bad animation and be funny and the whole gay thing… It was just a great package (so to speak). [laughter] Soon thereafter, The Dana Carvey Show went off the edge of the cliff, but Smigel went to Saturday Night Live to see Lorne Michaels with the idea of doing these cartoons. We did the first three years of the cartoons and then I said, “I’ll continue doing Ace and Gary, but other than that, we’re going to back away.” Because we started getting so well known just for THAT type of work. We were also very busy commercially, and this SNL stuff wasn’t paying enough to send your kids to college. But you couldn’t beat the visibility.

CBA: It comes as a surprise that the SNL stuff didn’t pay that well.

J.J.: The only reason Saturday Night Live can do what they do for so long is that they divvy out the budget very carefully. Granted, the animated segments are very popular, but it isn’t where their money is going to go.

The other thing is, we had fallen into a little bit of a rut with it in that, even

TOP: A plethora of title cards from various J.J Sedelmaier productions. All are ©2003 their respective copyright holders. Courtesy of JJSP.

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though each segment was different, it still became a very grueling kind of production scenario. We had an average of three or so weeks to do three to four minutes worth of animation. Usually, I’ve got eight weeks to do a 30second commercial. But again, the fact that we were able to do this body of work that changed people’s image of cartoons that really had stuff to say, as well, was just wonderful. It was great!

CBA: The really big animated hit in the early 1990s was The Simpsons.

Was there an impact on the general field of animation with their success?

J.J.: Well, The Simpsons had a big influence on the mainstream certainly, but what was really important to the field of animation, more than anything else, was MTV. When they started out, they had so much edge and they were so cool (and still can be, but they became very corporate). In the beginning, they were hiring studios to do these 10-, 15-second I.D.’s [spots just promoting the MTV name]. They didn’t hire one studio to do those spots.

Sometimes they went to studios, sometimes to individuals, independent filmmakers, illustrators. Their idea about animation was, “How can we get something visually entertaining up there for 10 seconds that uses our logo which doesn’t change? Anybody who wants to do an I.D., do whatever you want, but you’ve got to work within this structure of what the logo is, your interpretation of the logo.” There was such a diverse variety of styles and approaches and film making techniques, and stopmotion and computer and all this other stuff, that I think the field started to get this momentum.

Of course, then the advertising industry starts going, “Hey, what’s cool?

What’s hot? What aren’t we doing that we should be doing?” And they started picking up on it. The advertising community was much more receptive to the idea of bringing this stuff into mainstream form and it really helped push things into areas animation hadn’t been before.

Another person who needs to be mentioned is Richard Williams, who really had a strong effect on the industry. He did Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a real Hollywood-type film, but his idea of taking this classical Disney type of animation but updating it was inspired. He had this influence on British commercial studios, almost all of them became disciples, in one way or another, of Richard Williams. Then British animation started coming over to the United States in commercials and starting really influencing… not “influencing”; what it did is it lit a fire under all the schmucks who were doing animation in America who didn’t really give a shit about the craft anymore and were figuring that they were just going to do cereal commercials for the rest of their lives, and now this beautifully designed, beautifully animated stuff started coming over from Britain, and anyone who couldn’t hold their own against that went out of business. Which is a good thing. It weeded out the industry.

CBA: Can you give us a for-instance of this British influence? Would CBA’s readership recognize anything that would be characterized as quintessential?

J.J.: Well, it happened so long ago, they probably wouldn’t recall. There was some stuff done for The Wall Street Journal. Kellogg’s started having their characters animated in a much fuller, much more involved manner.

Then also the use of illustrators who aren’t known for being animated and getting drawing styles not normally associated with animation, which select

small studios had started to do in the United States but the British picked up on as well. What it gets down to is the use of artist’s styles that aren’t normally associated with being animated. A wispy pencil or charcoal line technique. It’s a classical approach with an updated spin.

CBA: Was it Mike Judge that you met early on? How did Beavis and Butthead come in?

J.J.: MTV had a show called Liquid Television, which was produced by Colossal Pictures in San Francisco, a terrific animation studio. That was was a compilation of animated shorts. I think many of them were already produced and Colossal and MTV licensed them in this compilation form that became Liquid Television. Two of the shorts were Mike Judge’s, one being “Frog Baseball,” a Beavis and Butthead short. Evidently they started getting a bunch of feedback on Beavis from viewers. They did a little research, looked into it, and decided MTV should consider a series and do their own animation. So they contacted Mike.

Abby Terkuhle was the one at MTV you went to if you had an idea to do an I.D. So if MTV had an animation department, Abby would head it. So Abby contacted my representative, Andy Arkin, and the three of us started talking about whether it would be possible to do a series. I went over there to see the short and, y’know, I found myself laughing almost against my better judgment. But it really appeals to, I think, everybody, because everybody’s known a Beavis and Butthead while growing up. And the look of the thing and the crudeness and the naive quality to it was intriguing. And then I started looking at it some more and going, “Really, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of animation here.”

It was just around that time when I had gotten to know this guy named John Whitney Jr. and a company on the West Coast that specialized in digital ink-&-paint animation, had started to talk about how they could build up libraries of images they could repeat. You just had to re-expose the existing art. So applying that to Beavis and Butthead just seemed natural. We had Whitney come in to New York City for a meeting with MTV. His father, John Whitney, Sr., did optical/computerized-type animation in the ’40s. So he had this really unique grasp on this sort of thing. We basically said, “We can do this, but we can’t do it without John Whitney and his company’s [USAnimation, later called VirtualMagicUSA] involvement.” So we did 120 minutes of animation in five months, which was astonishing. There were no pencil tests, a very critical phase in the animation process where you get to see stuff just in line form before going to the final stage. There was none of that. We just dove in.

If this had presented itself and we had been open maybe two more years, I wouldn’t have taken it, and there were plenty of people, Colossal included, saying, “Are you out of your mind? We’ve heard of this project. This will be the death of you.” [laughter] And being as new as we were to everything, we just dove in. Then it really took off.

We only did the first season of Beavis and Butthead. If we continued, it would have just consumed us completely. It already had, and that was not what Patrice and I wanted out of the company, so after the first season, we said, “It’s better we do other stuff as well, and we can’t do both at the same time, so…“ That’s when MTV opened their own studio. It was great because a lot of people just hopped from our White Plains shop, over to MTV in the city.

ABOVE: J.J. Sedelmaier Productions worked on both the VW “Speed Racer ”print and television spots. ©’03 the respective copyright holder. Courtesy of JJSP.

CBA: With Beavis and Butthead, did your star rise? Did you get noticed?

That was a hit, right?

J.J.: Yeah, it was a big hit. I mean, [U.S. Attorney General] Janet Reno was talking about Beavis and Butthead! There were a lot of unfortunate other things that were kind of occurring in the news that were attributed to Beavis and Butthead. But, yeah, it put us on the map in a lot of ways, but it wasn’t something… I think I was subconsciously worried about being too closely associated with it because it had such a strong identity, too. But I tried to make as much as I could out of the association while it was happening, and parleyed into other things, which worked out pretty well. It’s a very nice, wonderful feather in the studio’s cap to have that in its background. They moved Mike Judge out here from Texas. He’d come, we’d go through all the stuff here in the studio, then they’d take him into the city and he’d supervise and in many cases do a great majority of the recording. So the first season really was a grueling process. Mike was amazing, because he was involved in every single aspect of the show.

CBA: Was Mike the voice of both characters?

J.J.: He was the voice of both the characters. He was the voice of Tom Anderson, the old guy, and other assorted characters.

CBA: Did Mike do a significant amount of writing?

J.J.: Yes. If he wasn’t doing the writing, he was going through all the scripts with everybody. It was a pretty overwhelming process because, you know, he’d just done those two films on his own, so really didn’t know what the process was. In a lot of ways, he didn’t even know his own style yet. I mean, we’re designing 50 characters, let’s say, and each character that he designed would kind of evolve. Well, there wasn’t enough time for things to evolve, they had to just happen.

CBA: What’s the concept behind The Ambiguously Gay Duo? J.J.: The concept surrounds people’s preoccupation with these two superheroes who follow the formula of the Batman and Robin type thing, the main character with a sidekick, and people’s preoccupation with them being gay

when they’re really not. (Plenty of football players slap each other on the butt, only that doesn’t make them gay.)

I don’t know if Robert [Smigel] was necessarily aware of Dr. Fredric Wertham [author of Seduction of the Innocent, a ’50s anti-comic book bestseller], but he knew the gags that were going on with the whole Batman and Robin shtick. Really, the funniest lines aren’t the ones where Ace and Gary go, “What’s everybody looking at?” The funniest lines are, y’know, when the villains reply, “Nothing!” [laughter] Now BigHead has gotten to the point where he’s totally preoccupied and spending his evil powers trying to set them up to look gay, to “out” them. We’ve done 10 episodes altogether and it’s been really a rewarding experience to know there are people all over the world who are so entertained and also just so happy to have the Ace and Gary characters put stuff out in the open which says it like it is. I never realized how many gay and lesbian film festivals there are! We get six or seven requests a month to enter the films into festivals, because it’ll show one place and they’ll see it in another place. This stuff has never aired on television overseas, so people are getting exposed through film festivals and word of mouth.

I’ve never run across anyone who has been outraged with TAGD. There used to be a magazine called Animato. We put a fifth anniversary ad in their magazine that just incorporated the title card from the Ambiguously Gay Duo. It was just an image amongst other images of stuff we had produced. I guess somebody from some sort of “Family Values” organization called the magazine and said, “We take objection, we are offended by this image.”

CBA: What, they wanted them to be unambiguously gay? [laughs] J.J.: Yeah, exactly! Who knows? But the guy at Animato called and said, “You know, the ad you ran really threw somebody’s nose out of joint. What we’d like to do is split the cost of doing the ad if you run it again.”

CBA: [laughs] I like that.

J.J.: That’s the only criticism I’ve ever heard. People find out you have any

107 TOP: This Esquire story goes from Win Mortimer-type art to John Romita, Sr.-like rendering, all with a “Fun With Real Audio” flavor.

Courtesy of JJSP. Spider-Man ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

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association with The Ambiguously Gay Duo, and if they’re gay, they love it. It’s very hot with the high school kids, they just love it. I’ll overhear stuff if I’ll be taking a bus or a train sometimes and if there are a group of kids together sometimes I’ll overhear them talking about it or even doing the theme song. It’s just great.

CBA: How is Standards and Practices to deal with at NBC? Have they actually said no to certain things? You do skirt a line, right?

J.J.: Yes, absolutely. They have asked for things to be modified, but it’s been pretty easy overall. SNL is in a unique position because they’ve been doing satire and parody for 30 years, let’s say, and as a result, there’s this built-in insulation process they have from really getting in trouble, because if it’s on Saturday Night Live, you automatically know it’s satire and parody. But no, there hasn’t been a lot of problems that way. Also, Robert knows the whole structure of the thing. He’s not going to delay the approval process by purposefully doing something that’s not going to get through Standards pretty quickly.

CBA: He’s not a Kricfalusi?

J.J.: Well, he does it more with the structure of his writing and the message that he has. His stuff is very powerful. And it’s also very powerful because it’s animated. First of all, it’s the type of animation, too. If it were well-animated and beautifully designed, it wouldn’t have the impact and edge to it. Also, I think with animation you loosen or warm people up and you can “come in through the back door.” [laughter] You can come through and hit them when they’re not ready for it. Just the fact it’s animated and in a realm of fantasy provides you with this way of telling a story and getting a message across that live action can’t do.

CBA: What’s the genesis of The X-Presidents?

J.J.: It’s playing off the idea of giving each X-President his own powers

and taking the absurd idea that these relatively normal human beings are capable of astounding feats and giving them the opportunity to save the world using their powers, and it’s really a Filmation approach. Even the announcer (voiced by Robert) sounds like Ted Knight [talent from Super Friends] . George Bush has got The Atom’s powers. Bringing back Nixon and his dog Checkers was great.

CBA: [laughs] Still kicking Tricky Dick!

J.J.: The sad thing is, half the people watching don’t know who the hell Checkers is, and maybe some don’t even know who Nixon is! [laughter] You can just hear some references flying over their heads sometimes.

CBA: Do you have an appreciation for bad comics? Obviously, in The Ambiguously Gay Duo, there’s at least an influence of pretty cheesy ’60s comics.

J.J.: Yeah. To me, the epitome of Superman is Curt Swan. I love Swan’s drawings, but I’m conscious of the fact that the reason I love his work is because I’m steeped in nostalgia. Nostalgia sometimes can be pretty spooky, because people start interpreting things as good art, good design, and so forth, when all it’s just a fond feeling for something you remember from being a kid. You get warm, gushy and all that, and end up saying Walter Keene’s a great artist or something (He was the painter who did the big-eyed kids standing in alleys or the cat with the big eyes and light, dilated pupils).

Sometimes I’ll do a commercial that hearkens back to something out of the ’50s and I’ll even do it in black-&-white. I’m taking something that originally had absolutely no sense of humor to it — the look of the drawing and the sensibility of it — and using it in a humorous situation. It pushes the humor that much farther, because you’re conditioned to feel that this stuff doesn’t have a sense of humor.

Curt Swan’s drawings, and the context of DC in the ’60s and Superman, was really a real base-level thing that didn’t have a lot of excitement to it.

Marvel was doing some interesting stuff, but Swan’s work was pretty mundane. So I try to use it as a device for humor and open up all sorts of possibilities. So, yes, I’m greatly influenced by the stuff. I know it inside-out and love to poke fun at it because that just wasn’t something you were supposed to do.

CBA: The reason that we’re talking right now is because you sent out this self-promotional comic book to me (which was flattering, as I am in no position to ever give you work), and I realized how astute it was concerning comics. I mean, it even had an Alex Ross cover painting featuring The Ambiguously Gay Duo! J.J.: Well, that came directly out of having done a four-page TAGD comic story for Playboy. After doing that, I thought, “What else can I do with this?”

Because I really enjoyed taking Ace and Gary and using them in a different realm. I was thinking to myself, “What can I do to make this complete?”

I had gotten to know Chris Ware just by contacting him and telling him I love his work and would love to do something with him someday, if he’s got ever any ideas he wants to investigate in terms of animation. I said, “Just call me, I’d love to talk about it and go through the process with you.”

Somehow I found out he knew Alex Ross, and I asked him for a contact. I called Alex and told him, “Someday, at some point, I’d love to do a little self-promotion thing for the studio, to show what the studio’s done in print.

I’d love to have you paint an old comic book cover starring The Ambiguously Gay Duo.” He just loved the idea, because it not only poked fun at what he does, but also pokes fun at the people he does the work for. Alex really

TOP RIGHT: Comic book veteran Dick “Sgt. Fury” Ayers contributed to this spot-on Playboy comics satire starring Saturday Night Live’s The Ambiguously Gay Duo. Courtesy of JJSP. ©2003 The Dana Carvey Show.

seemed to get off on it and he did a couple designs that helped us get to the point where we could find something he could do that wouldn’t be overthe-top. We wanted to do something that was going to be all Ace and Gary but was obviously going to be him, too. To take all of the self-important, humorless…

CBA: Smugness?

J.J.: Smugness… and put it in there. I can’t, for the life of me, think of what could have been done better than what Alex did. Because you don’t get the codpiece/package aspect right away. You see the title, you see it’s Ace and Gary, and then you get the joke… The other thing that’s nice about it, too, is that, okay, if you get it, that’s great, and if you don’t get it, you’re lost. [laughs] I’m not going to try to take it too much over the top because it just won’t have confidence in the work.

Then I started doing more print work and I got a Charles Atlas parody ad that we did for Playboy, too, and suddenly I started realizing, “Oh, this can be something!” It really was a lot of fun to do, a lot of fun to do. It took a long time just kind of gathering everything together and so forth, but…

CBA: Was there a kid-like enthusiasm for it, that you could do your own comic?

J.J.: [Sighing in joy and relief:] Ohhh! [laughter] CBA: I don’t know how we write that out. [laughter] J.J.: Well, it’s like coming full circle after all this time to finally do the @#%*$ing comic book. And then also starting to expand on the studio’s involvement in print. We started getting print work that was separate from any TV we were doing. I mean, we’d always been available to do print aspects of TV campaigns, but we started getting advertising print work separate from anything having to do with television that we had done.

And it really became, and it still is, an exciting aspect of the stuff that the studio’s doing. We’re doing a quarterly thing now for Texas Monthly. I put you on hold because Tom Stabler called from Playboy again, and they want to do now a photographic piece where it would be using three-dimensional characters that we’d photograph in a strip form…

CBA: Fumetti?

J.J.: Yeah! And everybody in the studio loves it, too, because they’re not going to get exposure to this kind of stuff anywhere else. So it’s turned into just an overall art/design kind of studio, and I’m getting involved in all sorts of really cool things.

CBA: You did “The Amazing Kirsten Dunst”… I think what’s so endearing about the material is that to look at it, it hearkens back to Spidey Super Stories, you know? It had Winslow Mortimer kind of adequate art, yet still cheesy…

J.J.: That was fun, too, because Esquire called and said they had this interview with Kirsten, and if they didn’t put something in there that had something fun about it, it was just going to be a bore. So they said, “We’ve got two pages and we’d love to do a Spider-Man-like comic, and we’d like you to do something like you’ve done with Saturday Night Live with the Real Audio stuff using a washed-out drawing style.” Then I said, “Well, what if the drawing starts to transform like Spidey from just being this real washedout approach, even in terms of color, this kind of boring, washed-out caricature, and we moved closer to a Johnny Romita look towards the end.

Do everything: the type, the panels, and evolve the look as it went along. I think we did it in, like, a week, too. There wasn’t a lot of time. But it was a lovely thing to have to put in the comic book. There’s a nice texture to the comic, because it includes all sorts of designs, all sorts of approaches, and it

does, I think, really nicely show what the studio can do in print form. Even down to the poster article in Print magazine about the old railway posters.

CBA: What’s the response been from your comic brook promo?

J.J.: Oh, just phenomenal! It was nice to get a call from Arlen Schumer [CBA logo designer and co-partner of Dynamic Duo Studio, which produces comic book art for advertising], who said, “Oh God! I didn’t know you were doing this kind of stuff. This is fantastic!” I also sent a copy to Dick Ayers, who helped us out on the Playboy “Ace and Gary” piece. People in the animation and advertising industries just love it, as well. We sent the packets out so they looked like Speed Racer promotional pieces, you don’t really know what it is, and then you open it up to see this great Alex Ross cover. [laughter] I think everyone really found it a really nice treat.

CBA: Well, obviously, the cover had this referential DC look down to the square box with “12¢,” which actually precedes you a little bit, doesn’t it?

J.J.: No, the “12¢” was definitely during my heyday. Twelve cents came in, what, like ’62.

CBA: Yeah, but they had it in the square box for about three months or so.

J.J.: Yeah, but that was the icon for me. It’s funny: You look at the cover and that little round circle [faux DC/National Comics logo] in the upper left just really takes you back. That whole structure just takes you back completely, although they never did fully rendered covers like that.

That was more along the Fawcett days, when every once in a while they’d do this highly-rendered Captain Marvel cover of the hero standing there or the Marvel Family flying around the Empire State Building.

I think they did five or six of these highly-rendered, painterly covers. DC never did anything like that.

That’s the only thing that conflicts with the whole DC idea.

CBA: But certainly the smugness, the seriousness of the characters fits right in.

J.J.: Oh, right! The color of the sky, everything about it. And Alex [Ross] liked it, too, which is very cool.

He’s got it on his Web site [www.alexrossart.com]. He was very happy with it as well.

CBA: Are you still a comics reader?

J.J.: Yes. I’m fortunate to have probably one of the best comic stores in Westchester, if not on the East Coast, down here, Comic Book Heaven. It’s on Court Street in White Plains. It used to be run by a guy named Morris Seitz. Then he passed away and his wife Irene runs it now. It’s really good, and they’ve got back issues, too.

Today, I love Mike and Laura Allred’s stuff! Oh! X-Statix is just so… I’m trying to get the Allreds involved in an animated piece now, trying to interest some people into animating them, because I love the way he’s taken, again, that kind of boring DC approach, but really distilled it down and given it a really strong graphic look. I love the drawing.

CBA: Have you ever met Allred in person?

J.J.: No, I’ve just spoken to him on the phone.

CBA: Michael’s one of those guys, like Neal Adams, who looks like his drawings. He’s beautiful to look at. [laughs] J.J.: I saw a picture once of Mike. Yeah, he looks very dashing.

CBA: He’s just so enthusiastic, so boyish, “I love comics!” He’s a guy who has a million ideas.

J.J.: Do you know who Peter DeSeve is?

CBA: No. J.J.: He’s the designer behind the computer animated feature film Ice Age. He’s designed a lot of animated motion pictures, but he’s also done a lot of New Yorker covers. I think you’d probably recognize his stuff. You look at his work and say, “This guy has got to be about 60 years old. He’s gotta be very

ABOVE: The X-Presidents were spun off into print with The X-Governors for a Texas Monthly article (featuring a pre-White House George Dubya!). Courtesy of JJSP. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

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seasoned. He’s obviously been around.” Probably pretty gregarious, he’s got a great sense of humor that comes out in his art, but he’s got a very classic kind of layered watercolor and vellum technique and he goes back in it with pen-&-ink, and it’s just beautifully well-drawn stuff. The first time I met him, I just wanted to hit him. Because he’s, like, 30 and right off the cover of GQ. [Jon laughs] Plus he’s the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet in your whole *$#@~ life! It’s just, like, “How the hell does that come in that package?”

CBA: [laughs] That’s not fair!

J.J.: That’s not to be allowed!

CBA: R. Crumb… yes. [laughs] J.J.: Exactly. What I do is wander through the comic stores and look for stuff that just grabs me, that looks interesting. Often I look at an interesting cover and then open up the inside and it’s a bore. At first I resisted Alex’s stuff, because it was just so illustrative and it was so self-important. But then I started getting into the fantasy world that just came through, and it’s almost like it has no business working. But it does for me.

CBA: You could characterize it as “over-rendered” approach, and yet there’s a sincere and abiding earnestness, a true enthusiasm and intelligence behind it that is irresistible…

Ross gets comics.

J.J.: Yup! I knew that if I had tried to use or propose Alex Ross to anyone in the art community — the people I know who are artists, designers, illustrators — they would think I had lost my mind. Yet using him on the cover for The Ambiguously Gay Duo comic, then they get it. That was something I wanted to do: be able to say, “You can like this.

You don’t have to poo-poo this.

This can work.”

You look at those live-action Batman movies and look at how much money was spent on them. Yet, I don’t think those people really understood comics, because… In particular, there’s a shot in the first one, where he’s running with Kim Basinger down the street and they’re going to the Batmobile. They took a long shot of him, but you can’t take a long shot of Batman, because he looks like a silly guy dressed in a costume running down the street.

If Alex Ross wasn’t sensitive to comic books, what makes them effective and what makes them work, his stuff would just look like a bunch of silly people dressed up in costumes. You’ve got the wrinkles, you can feel the Lycra. You almost can smell the material that the costumes are made of.

But if he didn’t stage it, if he didn’t pose it, if he didn’t art direct it and direct it the way he does, it would just fall flat on its face. But, for me, that’s what works. I love the idea of actually being able to see the characters as actual people. It’s almost as far as I can go. (Although Spider-Man worked very well. Spider-Man was a great film. I really did enjoy what they did with that).

CBA: Can you rattle off some names of people from the comics industry whom you have worked with?

J.J.: Well, I said Neal Adams and Dick Ayers…

CBA: We were talking about M.K. Brown the other day.

J.J.: Oh, so we’re talking cartoonists, too?

CBA: Sure.

J.J.: George Booth, David Levine, Garry Trudeau… Who else? Craig Yoe. Peter DeSeve. Sue Rose (who created Fido Dido and Pepper Ann), Philippe Weisbecker (who’s a French illustrator), Isabelle Derveaux, Doug Fraser, a very heroic kind of WPA mural sort of artwork. A lot of these people, or some of these people you might know by seeing their artwork. Gary Baseman. Do you know Gary Baseman’s stuff?

CBA: No. J.J.: You’d probably recognize it. It’s kind of like… Have you seen Teacher’s Pet on television? It’s a kid’s cartoon, and it’s really actually got quite a lot of

energy. It’s coming out as a feature soon, so you’ll know him after that.

Barry Blitt does a lot of stuff for Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.

Bonnie Timmons designs all the Quilted Northern Quilters commercials we’ve been doing. Kind of like a Blechman disciple, this squiggly, vulnerable quality to her work.

CBA: These aren’t the bears, are they?

J.J.: No, it’s the quilters, women sitting around quilting. The bear commercials are kind of addressing the quilters, because the quilters were animated first, and then the other company got into animation by using the bears.

CBA: The bears are animated very nicely, I think.

J.J.: Again, that’s the illustrative kind of British animation that you’d never see here before the early ’80s or so.

CBA: Right! Like the breakfast cereal commercials, when all of a sudden, Toucan Sam and Fred Flintstone really looked well-animated?

J.J.: Right. Even Tony the Tiger started having this very well-drawn, rendered quality. A lot of it had to do with Roger Rabbit, too, because… incorporating animation and live-action together and trying to make the animation look like it’s more a part of the live-action than ever before.

The other really cool thing that came up a year or so ago was the golf commercials that were a direct spinoff of The X-Presidents sensibility.

The fact that an agency saw the Saturday Night Live stuff we’d done and could reinterpret and understand and get it that by taking something like golfers and elevate them to godlike status was just brilliant. A great idea and really fun.

The fact they also understood the importance of actually using the golfers’ voices, who can’t act themselves out of a paper bag, lend that much more of an uncomfortable quality to it. It’s great.

CBA: So you’re having fun?

J.J.: Yes. CBA: Are there any comic book people or cartoonists whom you’d really like to work with?

J.J.: Well, Mike and Laura. I would love to do something with Chris Ware, but that’s a real challenge to translate and do justice to his stuff. But I would love to somehow incorporate the grid and the structure of his stuff. Whether it’s his advertising, his pseudo-advertising pages, or just his stripwork. Try to find out how to translate that to film, what language, what kind of new vocabulary do we have to develop to make that work. That would be really exciting, and I know the collaborative process with him would be really juicy.

He’s got great ideas, got a great spin on stuff. You know, I pattern my involvement based on what the artist wants to do, and I would just love to sit back and see what starts to evolve with him. I wouldn’t want to try to steer him; I’d let him try to steer me.

CBA: Forceful, Ware’s not. [laughs] J.J.: No, but still, twice as much impact.

CBA: Y’know, what would come to mind is Quimby the Mouse or that great little peanut character that he had. I wonder if someone could use that…

You know how he does those elaborate Winsor McKay kinds of layouts, and I wonder if you could animate the character moving between the panels, you know what I mean?

J.J.: I just think there’s something out there with Ware’s stuff that would really surprise both us.

I love the fact Bill Watterson is very conservative with his characters. I would never want to see Calvin and Hobbes animated. I don’t want to hear someone’s version of what the characters sound like. There’s just something about that strip making it so unnecessary for animation. It’s so full, so rich without being animated, and Bill is very protective over that whole realm.

LEFT: Golfers become super-heroes in the Sedelmaier-produced Foot Joy series. Courtesy of JJSP. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

Look at what happened to Peanuts, as successful as it’s been… and, again, talk about nostalgia! It’s crept into so many peoples’ beings. If you read his stuff from the early to mid-’60s, he’s got such incredible timing. It’s so economical, but so well done. To have timing on a printed page with two or three or maybe four panels? Oh, man! Once you lock it in on film, it’s there forever, and there’s no fun to it at all. Plus, it’s lethal in a theater. I remember walking in and seeing these huge, round, flesh circles on the screen, and going, “Ugh!” CBA: Right. I remember the Summer Vacation movie just not working.

J.J.: Yeah, just totally lethal.

Again, to hear Vince Guaraldi’s music, it’s wonderful. To see the characters dancing on the screen and all that. That was cool but it really had nothing to do with the comic strip other than the basic structure.

The wryness didn’t translate like Schulz did on the printed page.

I used to get one of those paperback Peanuts collections every time I got a grade above a “C.” I still have them. They’re great.

CBA: Do you have any other comic book-oriented material that will be coming out in the future?

J.J.: Well, I would like to move Captain Linger along.

Captain Linger is taking Curt Swan and playing with it a little bit. It was Stuart Hill’s idea to do the character (Stuart’s the guy at Cartoon Network I had mentioned before). He was going for a kind of Jay Ward/Bill Scott approach, a Rocky and Bullwinkle kind of approach.

He started telling me about it, and I felt, well, gosh, it sounds like what you want to do — because this is a super-hero who’s a little dim. I felt that if you drew him like Rocky and Bullwinkle, if you drew him silly, you knew something silly was going to happen. So I thought, well, what if we drew it like a comic book, a real straight ahead comic book look? I had mentioned Curt Swan as someone whose work you could look at to get what I was trying to say. Then you got people, I think, a little off balance and you might get more mileage out of the gags. So far they’ve only been interstitials, we’ve done eight of them for Cartoon Network and they show them on Adult Swim once in a while. Stuart and I have been trying to figure out a way of how to get him into the next level, maybe something a little longer than a minute and a half.

CBA: Do you like the current environment for animation?

J.J.: Well, it’s better than it has been, and I do like the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm, the DC/Warner animated stuff… It’s pretty cool. Again, some of the close-ups are a little hard to take because there’s so little detail. But the Batman show has got one of the best title sequences I’ve seen in a long time. I also think Iron Giant is one of the best animated features ever!

There’s still a big glut for silly, stupid kid stuff. After Ren and Stimpy came out, this kind of toilet humor thing was really overdone. I mean, I love

the design of things like Sponge Bob. I think the design is great, though I can’t really get into the cartoon, but I love the look of all the color. And you can see the influence of the ’50s type stuff in Dexter’s Laboratory. I think Cartoon Network has done some good stuff and has also made a point of trying to get people to think of animation differently with some of the adult stuff they’ve done, which is good. And now MTV’s getting into that to, they have, on TNN [Spike TV]. So it’s pretty good, but I’m just waiting for this sorting out process to finish, with CGI and 2-D and everything else. Oh, and Invader Zim! Brilliant!

CBA: Before we wrap-up, any other comics-related anecdotes come to mind?

J.J.: Yeah! Let me tell you a neat story: When my dad was working at Clinton E. Frank, an agency in Chicago — 1966-ish — he told me he had run into [Batman creator] Bob Kane at a lunch. Now, I flipped when I heard that because I was in the midst of “Bat-Mania” like the rest of the country at the time, due to the popularity of the TV show. He said that he'd probably see Kane again because of another conference that was being held in a few weeks. And, sure enough, about a month later, my dad said not only had he run into Kane again, but asked to get a sketch for his son. My dad knew I'd always loved the portrait of the Batman on the back cover of #1, so he suggested Kane draw that pose. It seemed like forever, but probably a couple months later, my father gave me a large flat package to unwrap. I opened it and found a water color piece of my favorite hero just like the back cover.

There's a word balloon saying “Crime Doesn't Pay!” and it's got Bob Kane's signature/logo at the bottom. But — BUT — it's personalized to me as well. Only one problem: It's inscribed to “JAY-JAY”! My name is spelled wrong!

It took awhile to get through that, but what the hell, right? Fast-forward about 15 years, and my dad and stepmother are visiting New York City and we're out to dinner. I'm psyched to tell him about a friend of mine, who runs the rare book room at B. Dalton’s in Manhattan, who’s having a autograph show in the gallery and, after I told this friend about the Batman painting, he said he'd LOVE to have it in the show. I tell Dad at dinner and he kinda blanches… my stepmom says, “Joe, you've got to tell him.” I ask, “Tell me what?” I ask. Then my dad says words that gave me the impulses of a homicidal maniac and an affectionate teddy bear all at once. He said, “I did that painting. I did it for you, not Kane.”

Cute, huh?

fin

CENTER: What ARE you looking at? The Duo in action for the Playboy comic strip appearance. Courtesy of JJSP. ©2003 The Dana Carvey Show.

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What’s comin’ up in Comic Book Artist • Just who do these wild ’n’ crazy CBA people think they are? • Shameless Self-Promotion

CBA Gets Byrne’d!

Showcasing top comics artist John Byrne in #3!

Next up is THE ART OF JOHN BYRNE! CBA visits the phenomenal fan favorite artist for a long comprehensive interview, discussing John's career and work, from Doomsday +1 to X-Men to his JLA collaboration with Chris Claremont! We also include an incredible gallery of previouslyunseen Byrne commission work, as well as other rare material. Plus we extensively interview writer ROGER STERN on his long association with comics, from

Doctor Strange to The Avengers. Our magwithin-the-mag section, COMIC BOOK ARTIST CLASSIC, boasts the most complete history to date of P.S. MAGAZINE, the U.S. Army preventative maintenance monthly which, over the last half-century, has showcased extensive comics material by P.S. creator WILL EISNER, MURPHY ANDERSON, MIKE PLOOG, ALFREDO ALCALA, DAN SPIEGLE, and even JOE KUBERT (the periodical's current artist!). Cartoonist extraordinaire JAY STEPHENS contributes an exclusive sketchbook section and we'll throw in many more surprises for this “Back for Spring” ish!

All You Ever Wanted to Know ’bout Knowles!

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Comic Book Artist associate editor, chief correspondent and columnist CHRIS KNOWLES was born in 1966 and grew up in suburban Boston. The first comic book he remembers reading was a coverless Superboy 80-Page Giant. He first began buying his own comic books while dressed as a cowboy down at the late, lamented Valles’ News in Weymouth Landing. His life was ruined forever when he picked up Kamandi #30 and was subjected to Jack Kirby at his most bizarre.

Following a school career distinguished only by excessive truancy, he meandered down to the wilds of New Jersey to attend the Joe Kubert School. It was there he decided, despite periodic backsliding, that he really did not want to draw comic books for a living. There he did meet his future wife, Vicky, however.

Following a two-year period of indolence and dissolution, Chris was forced by the impending arrival of his firstborn son to abandon what surely would have been his inevitable and meteoric rise to rock ’n’ roll superstardom

and accept a job as an in-house cartoonist for a childrens wear company. He toiled in those salt mines for a spell, until the world of comics sucked him back in its orbit. He worked for four-and-one-half years doing illustrations of the Hulk, Spider-Man and the X-Men for Toy Biz (now Marvel-whatever), and produced two mini-series for Sirius Entertainment and one for Radio Comix. He met CBA editor Jon B. Cooke in an opium den-cum-bingo hall in Kowloon and subsequently watched in horror as the diminutive dynamo wrangled countless hours of free labor from the overworked commercial artist. He currently toils as a freelance cartoonist and illustrator when he isn’t staring at the wall, wondering where it all went wrong. Only his wife, sons Jordan and Darius, and Shirley Temple-lookalike daughter Violet prevent Chris from selling off his all possessions and running off to Abu Dhabi to pursue a career as a flagellant.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Mr. Knowles, a valuable and insightful member of TeamCBA, is too modest — or embarrassed? — to mention his skillful participation as penciler on Ye Ed and Andrew D. Cooke’s comic book project, PRIME8™: CREATION, of which the Brothers Cooke are eternally grateful!]

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CBA Volume 2 , Number 3 coming your way in early March! • Look for our Darwyn Cooke special in April!

Art ©2003 John Byrne. Superman, Batman ©2003 DC Comics. Captain America ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. P.S. magazine in public domain.

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Edited by JON B. COOKE, COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the new voice of the comics medium, 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. It’s the follow-up to Jon’s multi-Eisner Award winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazine.

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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.

NEAL ADAMS vigorously responds to critics of his BATMAN: ODYSSEY mini-series in an in-depth interview, with plenty of amazing artwork! Plus: SEAN HOWE on his hit book MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; MARK WAID interview, part one; Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; Part Two of our LES DANIELS remembrance; classic cover painter EARL NOREM interviewed, a new ADAMS cover, and more!

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RUSS HEATH career-spanning interview, essay on Heath’s work by S.C. RINGGENBERG (and Heath art gallery), MORT TODD on working with STEVE DITKO, a profile of alt cartoonist DAN GOLDMAN, part two of our MARK WAID interview, DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series, VIC BLOOM and THE SECRET ORIGIN OF ARCHIE ANDREWS, HEMBECK, new KEVIN NOWLAN cover!

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others!

Plus we examine the supreme artistry of JOHN ROMITA, JR., BILL EVERETT’s final splash, the nefarious backroom dealings of STOLEN COMIC BOOK ART, and ascend THE GODS OF MT. OLYMPUS (a ‘70s gem

by ACHZIGER, STATON and WORKMAN)!

SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up Swamp Thing, ManThing, Heap, and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, BRUNNER, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, CONWAY, MAYERIK, ORLANDO, PASKO, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, YEATES, BERGER, SANTOS, USLAN, KALUTA, THOMAS, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

BERNIE WRIGHTSON interview on Swamp Thing, Warren, The Studio, Frankenstein, Stephen King, and designs for movies like Heavy Metal and Ghostbusters, and a gallery of Wrightson artwork! Plus writer/editor BRUCE JONES; 20th anniversary of Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror with BILL MORRISON; and interview Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre's BATTON LASH, and more!

MIKE ALLRED and BOB BURDEN cover and interviews, "Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman" cartoonist DAVID BOSWELL interviewed, a chat with RICH BUCKLER, SR. about everything from Deathlok to a new career as surrealistic painter; Tales of the Zombie artist PABLO MARCOS speaks; Israeli cartoonist RUTU MODAN; plus an extensive essay on European Humor Comics!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships May 2014

(192-page paperback with COLOR) $17.95 (Digital Edition) $8.95 • Ships August 2014

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Nov. 2014

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Feb. 2015

TwoMorrows now offers Digital Editions of Jon B. Cooke’s COMIC BOOK ARTIST Vol. 2 (the “Top Shelf” issues)

CBA Vol. 2 #1

CBA Vol. 2 #2

CBA Vol. 2 #3

CBA Vol. 2 #4

CBA Vol. 2 #5

CBA Vol. 2 #6

NEAL ADAMS/ALEX ROSS cover and interviews with both, history of “Arcade, The Comics Revue” with underground legends CRUMB, SPIEGELMAN, and GRIFFITH, MICHAEL MOORCOCK on comic book adaptations of his work, CRAIG THOMPSON sketchbook, and more!

Exhaustive FRANK CHO interview and sketchbook gallery, ALEX ROSS sketchbook section of never-beforeseen pencils, MIKE FRIEDRICH on the history of Star*Reach, plus animator J.J. SEDELMAIER on his Ambiguously Gay Duo and The XPresidents cartoons for Saturday Night Live.

Interview with DARWYN COOKE and a gallery of rarely-seen and unpublished artwork, a chat with DC Comics art director MARK CHIARELLO, an exploration of The Adventures of Little Archie with creator BOB BOLLING and artist DEXTER TAYLOR, new JAY STEPHENS sketchbook section, and more!

ALEX NIÑO’s first ever full-length interview and huge gallery of his artwork, interview with BYRON PREISS on his career in publishing, plus the most comprehensive look ever at the great Filipino comic book artists (NESTOR REDONDO, ALFREDO ALCALA, and others), a STEVE RUDE sketchbook, and more!

HOWARD CHAYKIN interview and gallery of unpublished artwork, a look at the ’70s black-&-white mags published by Skywald, tribute to Psycho and Nightmare writer/editor ALAN HEWETSON, LEAH MOORE & JOHN REPPION on Wild Girl, a SONNY LIEW sketchbook section, and more!

Double-sized tribute to WILL EISNER! Over 200 comics luminaries celebrate his career and impact: SPIEGELMAN, FEIFFER & McCLOUD on their friendships with Eisner, testimonials

by ALAN MOORE, NEIL GAIMAN, STAN LEE, RICHARD CORBEN, JOE KUBERT, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, JOE SIMON, and others!

(128-page Digital Edition) $5.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $5.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $5.95

(112-page Digital edition) $5.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $5.95

(252-page Digital Edition) $9.95

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com