Secrets in the Shadows: The Art & Life of Gene Colan by TwoMorrows Publishing

Secrets in the Shadows The Art & Life of

by Tom Field Introduction by Glen David Gold Afterword by Mark Staff Brandl

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

Secrets in the Shadows:

The Art Art & & The Life Of Gene Colan Colan Gene by Tom Field

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

Secrets in the Shadows: The Art & Life of Gene Colan

by Tom Field Book Design by Rich J. Fowlks

Published by TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614

919-449-0344 • www.twomorrows.com Softcover ISBN #: 1-893905-45-4 Hardcover ISBN #: 1-893905-46-2 First printing, July 2005 • Printed in Canada

Copyrights: Iron Man, Daredevil, Captain America, the Owl, Red Skull, Mandarin, Scorpion, Dracula, Howard the Duck, Jester, Mr. Hyde, Cobra, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, SubMariner, Human Torch, Toro, Krang, Freak, Captain Marvel, the Avengers, Leapfrog, Electro, Stilt Man, Gladiator, Matador, Falcon, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Black Widow, Galactus, Medusa, Black Bolt, Clea, the Hulk, Frank Drake, Rachel Van Helsing, Taj Nital, Edith Harker, Quincy Harker, Blade, Black Panther, Lilith, Torgo, Mandrill, Dr. Bong, Man-Think, Korrekk, Jennifer Kale, Brother Voodoo, Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime, Shanna the She-Devil - all TM and copyright 2005 Marvel Comics. All rights reserved. Batman, Superman, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Spectre, Demon, Night Force, Swamp Thing, Robin, Alfred, Nathaniel Dusk, the Phantom Zone, Hard Time, Batgirl, Nocturna, Thief of Night, Our Army at War - all TM and copyright 2005 DC Comics. All rights reserved. Jughead and Archie - all TM and copyright 2005 Archie Comics. The Escapist - TM and copyright 2005 Michael Chabon. Detectives Inc., Ragamuffins, Stewart the Rat, Blood Scent, Curse of Dracula, Warren Magazines - all TM and copyright 2005 their respective copyright holders.

Table of Contents Introduction by Glen David Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Chapter 1 - The Other G.C.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Chapter 2 - The Early Years

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Portfolio: Travel Sketches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20

Chapter 3 - Emerging Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 Portfolio: Art School Days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

Chapter 4 - The 1950s: High Hopes and Hard Times . . . . . .31 Secrets #1: Timely Secrets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

Chapter 5 - A Love Story

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45

Chapter 6 - The Early 1960s: Make Mine Marvel

. . . . . . . . .47 A Conversation with Stan Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 Portfolio: Warren Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66

Chapter 7 - Glory Days with DD and Doc

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 Special section: Colan in Color . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .(following page 80) Secrets #2: Inking Gene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81 A Conversation with Tom Palmer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87 Portfolio: Dream Teams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .94

Chapter 8 - Dracula Lives! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97 Secrets #3: Writing for Gene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 A Conversation with Steve Gerber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114

Chapter 9 - Marvel: the Last Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123 Chapter 10 - DC and the Ups & Downs of the Eighties . . . .131 Portfolio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .138

Chapter 11 - The 18-Panel Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143 A Conversation with Adrienne Colan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .146

Chapter 12 - The Fan

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .152

Afterword by Mark Staff Brandl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .153

Appendix The Essential Gene Colan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .157

Bonus Features (Hardcover edition only) Secrets #4: How Gene Draws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161 Portfolio: Secrets In The Shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .164

Acknowledgements and Appreciations So, it all started with a phone call from Glen David Gold. He’s been a friend of mine for a handful of years now, ever since we met via the Internet on the Gene Colan message board. We grew up on a lot of the same comic books in the 1970s, and we’ve had a ball swapping memories, insights and even original comic artwork – especially, Gene’s. Eventually, our conversation turned to what it would take for someone to put together the perfect Colan art book/biography. More than just a nostalgic look back on Colan’s career, this book needed to be a history – a multi-faceted study of his personal and professional lives, reflecting on the impact of his 60-year comics career. We talked about this a lot, actually. The book needed to properly showcase Gene’s life and life’s work, and it needed to be written by someone who could have one foot in the comics world, the other in the real world, and be able to convey fundamentally: Why Gene Colan Matters. Like us, in other words. This book needed to be written by Glen and me, with a little help from our friends. I think we knew that from the start, but the thought never became reality till late last summer, when Glen found himself in a conversation with John Morrow, publisher of TwoMorrows books and magazines, and he actually started pitching the book. Next thing I knew, Glen was calling me saying “Call John Morrow.” And then John Morrow was on the phone saying “Hey, go write a Gene Colan book!” So, here we are. Secrets in the Shadows: The Life and Art of Gene Colan is exactly that – a portrait of an artist who doesn’t just portray lives in nuance, he lives one. This book intends to show you where Gene Colan came from, what inspires him, his highlights and lows, his setbacks and successes. The comics fan will find a lot of rare, unpublished artwork within these pages. The more casual reader will come away with some insights on a pretty remarkable life. All of us, I trust – the readers and writers alike – will emerge from the experience knowing exactly why Gene Colan matters. If we succeed there… well, then we’ve just plain succeeded. Enjoy!

GENE COLAN

A hearty thanks to the folks who made this book possible, including… Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, John Romita, Dick Ayers, Steve Leialoha, Dick Giordano, Joe Rubinstein, Tom Palmer, Gerry Conway, Marv Wolfman, Don McGregor, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Jim Shooter and Clifford Meth, who all contributed insights into Gene’s life and work. Glen Gold, Michael “Doc V.” Vassallo, Dave Gutierrez, Mark Staff Brandl and Calvin Reid, who all wrote and/or shared art for the book. Mike Arnold, Michael Baulderstone, Lee Benaka, Philippe Benoist, Bruce Canwell, Jim Cardillo, Ivan Cheung, Steve Cohen, Michael Dunne, Len Fausto, Benny Gelillo, Steven Gettis, Frank Giella, Dave Gutierrez, Kevin Hall, Richard Howell, Mark Howland, Greg Huneryager, Bob McLeod, Jim McPherson, Dominic Milano, Mike Pascale, James Romberger, Brian Sagar, Mark Sinnott, Kevin Stawieray, Marc Svensson, Lars Teglbjaerg, Tom Ziuko and everyone else who lent art – or just plain assistance – for this tome. Rich Fowlks and John Morrow, who simply saved this book. My dearest friends – you know who you are! – who simply cared. Je t’aime! My wife, Cindy, and children, Justine and Dennis, who tolerated all my nights and weekends on the phone, online or closed in my office. Adrienne and Gene Colan for opening their archives, their lives and their hearts to me. My Dad, Percy Field, who redefined “hero” with the selfless way he served my Mom in her final days. And finally my Mom, Elizabeth C. Field, who died on Good Friday, 2005. She bought me my first comic book when I was 4, and encouraged me to be a writer when I was 10. Little did she know all that would lead to this, and I do wish she were here to share the moment. — Tom Field, June 2005 5

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

don’t believe me? Okay, I’m game, watch me fail: look at the Introduction: Glen David Gold You page next to this essay. This is a page from Daredevil #87 from 1972. It’s five panels and it’s what you’d call an in-between page, in that there’s no fighting, no revelations, nothing but Daredevil (that’s the guy in the costume) swinging over the City of San Francisco. He’s thinking. No character in the history of storytelling has thought more than Daredevil. As far as quiet reflection goes, he makes Swann from a la recherché du temps perdu look like the Incredible Hulk. Part of that is Gene’s fault. Writers for the last 40 years have known that if their script says, “On this page, Daredevil calculates reverse repurchase litigation and its impact on farm subsidies,” the art will come back looking like this. There is motion here, and restlessness, and a feeling of melancholy turning into joie de vivre, our hero billyclubbing through the city

Howard the Duck: Mid-’70s Howard the Duck illustration that appeared in Jim Steranko’s Mediascene. That Sonofabitch Gene Colan is Cool. No, no one is quite sure how he does it. If you’re picking up this book and hoping it’s going to explain how Gene Colan draws things, well, yeah, the technical analysis will be here. There will be reminiscences by people who asked him to draw things, who were then amazed when they saw what he’d done. There will be displays of the stuff he’s drawn, with smart commentary about how good it looks. There’s a section where we see, step by step, him drawing stuff. And if you read carefully, there’s honest talk about the human cost of him doing it, part of what makes Gene such a generous human being. But I’m here to tell you: if you are hoping to divine the essence of Gene Colan yourself, you’re out of luck. The secret is locked up tighter than any flavor of Coke you can name. Gene is all nine spices in the Daredevil in Acton: Scene from Daredevil #87, 1972, by Gene Colonel’s recipe. Colan and Tom Palmer. GENE COLAN

simply because he can. The panels go from detailed, with a San Francisco background suggested in the first tier, to minimalist at the bottom, as the camera pulls in to see him ponder at the edge of a roof, then take off again. Check out the blacks on this page. The term for the play between light and dark is chiaroscuro, and no comic artist has ever used it more masterfully. Folds of increasing darkness invite mystery, they engage the eye, cause it to travel along fabric or metal or the brick of alleyways. Gene alternates this with high contrast, black against white (as in the first panel) in a way that teases the reader, a blend of sharpness and subtlety that keeps us from ever getting too comfortable, keeps us looking hard at each panel for clues.

go. Gene Colan, the Dave Brubeck of comic art? Maybe. Classic comic book art style seems to split into two camps: those who follow the en point finesse of Steve Ditko’s work, and those schooled in the powerhouse rhumba of Jack Kirby. There’s not a lot of cross-over. But unlike just about anyone else, Colan is equally good at the light step required for Doctor Strange and the heavy muscled heroics of Captain America and Iron Man. Yet he doesn’t draw like either Kirby or Ditko. In fact, rather famously, Colan is the only guy in the 1966 Marvel bullpen whom editor Stan Lee didn’t tell to draw like Kirby. In that Daredevil #87 page, I see ripples of theater, poetry, and our friend chiaroscuro that must have unsettled artists such as young Frank Miller and young Mike Mignola. But who else? Colan just doesn’t have a school of artists following in his wake. I can’t think of critics who discuss his work with any frequency, and until the last few years, the prices of his original artwork hadn’t headed into ionosphere.

But I’m no closer to understanding why the page works. Studies of Jack Kirby pages (to name an artist whose specificity makes him the anti-Colan) are arrow diagrams of motion lines, the gaze being carried helplessly around the page, from character to character. Here, Gene has DD swinging to the right, then braking and going left, then he turns him around entirely again before he sails up I think I know a reason. He was done and out of the page in the last panel. no favors by 1970s printing technology, The camera goes from horizon-parallel which rendered his moody lines into to overhead, foreshortening him in the fried hushpuppies. Colan, 60 years second panel, to hip level, to below him, into his career, is a cult artist because and not only should such motion make so few people have really seen his us all seasick, but in the bottom tier, work in its best form: in person. there’s that interrupting panel of the tossing of the club, effectively slicing in FOOM #13: Colan cover to this Marvel fanzine In 1992, when I started collecting art, half two full-view shots, and for- from Spring 1976. the only work I wanted was Kirby’s. I godssake, the background is black. In made friends with another collector that last panel, the left leg, did any left leg ever look like that without named Cy Voris, whose tastes were a little broader. At the 1996 its owner having been knocked sideways by a Mack truck? San Diego Con, Cy couldn’t make it. But he had a deal in progress to buy the cover of Marvel’s 1970s fan magazine, FOOM #13. I was And hey! If the point is for us to empathize with DD, then shouldn’t to pick it up for him. we, oh, see his face a little? This was a Colan cover featuring Daredevil swinging past the There’s no way this should work, much the same way the bumble- FOOM logo. I’d seen it when I was a kid, but I’d never seen it, if bee should just lie on its back, drumming its feet in the air. But you know what I mean. When the dealer handed it over, like it here we are, looking in wonderment at the page and a thousand happens in the movies, I fell in love at first sight. In black and more just like it, and there are quite a few of us who dig them in a white, it was a whole different animal. My head spun, I wondered way we just don’t dig any other artist. if I would be able to hand the cover over to Cy. “She’s mine now, Voris. Damnit, we love each other.” I don’t know much about music, but Gene’s work reminds me of 1950s and early 1960s jazz, improvisational and intuitive, where Another dealer had in his portfolio an interior page to Colan’s the skinny ties and sunglasses matter almost as much as the notes Daredevil #154. Which I bought instantly. It, too, had suffered in being played. Gene Colan is cool. I am reminded of the tempo the four-color world. In person, it was subtle, playful, with details shifts of Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” where there is no that publication had run together in blurs and fuzz. I didn’t know who discernable reason the alternation of fast and slow should work, or inked over Colan’s pencils (it turned out to be Steve Leialoha), “Take Five,” where the extensive drum break should drive you but right then I understood that was important. Artists like Kirby insane with its repetitive tension, and yet it simply brings you have a line that inkers can cling to like a life raft – but Gene was along and up and down and wherever the instruments tell you to so thoroughly at the mercy of his inkers (whom he often terrified) 7

INTRODUCTION

playing cards with the Devil, based on an old magic poster which I hoped would one day grace the cover of the novel I was then writing. Gene took the image and made it his own. The inspiration was still there, but he’d changed the expression on the Devil’s face so that it reflected not the expectation of triumph, but an annoyed, “here we go again.” It was a wonderful take on the nature of losing. And he’d also drawn Howard with his eyes closed. And he was wearing pants. I’m not sure why.

A First: The author’s first piece of original Colan artwork from DD #154, inked by Steve Leialoha. Howard Beats the Devil: This commissioned drawing is a riff on the cover to author Glen David Gold’s 2001 novel Carter Beats the Devil. Pencils by Gene Colan, inks by Steve Leialoha.

that the assigning whims of an art director could make a story look brilliant or awful. I’ve heard complaints by people who don’t get Colan. They say there are pages where it’s hard to see what’s going on, where there are bursts of energy, and extended limbs, and swirls of god-knows-what. What you have to understand, if you’re an inker, or a critic, is that Gene Colan’s art is a manifestation of Anton LaVey’s satanic theory of how a true witch should consider dressing. Gene’s work is like the seam on a black stocking – a glimpse of it leads you to want to see more, and yet you can’t, and you’re seduced into looking harder. This has to be played softly; it should never look like it’s trying too hard. In fall 1996, I saw an ad in the Comic Buyers Guide: Colan was selling commissioned drawings. I was wary – artists who’d performed well in 1966 tended to have lost their stride 30 years later – but I had to give it a try. I wrote a note asking Gene to draw Howard the Duck

GENE COLAN

This began a decade-long, so far, relationship with Gene based on both admiration for his work and exasperation as Gene, cool, cool man that he is, lives by Miles Davis’s famous retort when asked what he was going to play: “I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.” He began doing a ton of commissions as the internet and eBay became viable methods of selling art (I think previous methods hadn’t worked out too well – he and wife Adrienne sold too low, and they felt with good reason that they’d gotten burned). His art kept getting better. That’s a platitude, something required for books like this, but the fact is, Gene, like the woodcut artist Hokusai, was born 8

in his 70s. Which is another mystery I can’t explain – why so many guys tread water or decline after a certain age, and yet Gene faces each new commission like he has something to prove.

pornocopia, something that could never be stared at directly, that would probably get us all arrested if we dared to show it in broad daylight.

A favorite commission features Daredevil facing off against Doctor Doom above a Manhattan skyline. There’s a cathedral below them. Doom is standing on a gargoyle. DD is falling. The musculature, the fabric, the expressions, the architecture – it’s all breathtaking. And Doctor Doom is cutting DD’s lifeline with… garden shears. I cannot tell you how many times that has made me laugh aloud. I’ve even come up with my own narrative, which begins like this: “Doctor Doom, evil genius and mechanical mastermind, is shopping in the lawn care section of Home Depot, and is struck by inspiration…”

On the last day, I appeared at his table, and Gene looked at me again. With disappointment, and not in himself. A deep sigh. “Listen, Glen, all that stuff you wanted me to do, I just couldn’t do it. I have a reputation here, I just can’t… do… that… kind of… thing.” And he put his hands up, case closed. I tried to protest (“What I wanted you to do? Me?”), but Gene didn’t want to hear any excuses from me. This led to one of those Abbott-andCostello like moments of me stammering, but for reasons completely different than what Gene was thinking.

In person, Gene is hilarious, gravel-voiced, patient, happy to be working, happy to be thought of, proud to be the surrogate uncle to a group of 200 Yahoo group members (celebrating birthdays, commiserating with surgeries, updating us on the latest hurricane to mow him and Adrienne down) and he also continues to drive me crazy.

Eventually, I regained my composure, and, every time I’ve asked for a commission since then, I’ve made sure to ask Gene to throw in a couple of lesbians. In 2003, Michael Chabon and Dark Horse asked me to write a comic book story, my first. I said something along the lines of “Sure, as long as Gene Colan draws it.” I figured this would be akin to the movie star who once told me Sure, she’d be in the script I’d just written, as long as I got Stanley Kubrick to direct it. But, an hour later, Chabon called my bluff – there was an email from Gene in my in-box saying he’d signed on.

At one comics show, I handed him a copy of Picturing the Modern Amazon, a pictorial on female athletes and bodybuilders, and though he was supposed to be working on commissions, he took his time looking through it and began to cackle with delight. Adrienne rolled her eyes. “You shouldn’t even get him started. You have NO IDEA what he’s like. NO IDEA.”

So now I was in the position of getting paid to tell Gene Colan what to draw. The editors suggested I write a full script, but I told them that was like letting the usher direct the movie. Instead, I wrote a synopsis, a page-bypage breakdown of the 20page story. Not a lot of camera angles, but dialogue to suggest character and atmosphere.

Which is how I got my own idea: next commission, screw the superhero stuff – do something sexy. He put the book down and fixed me with one wise eye. “Really? How sexy?”

“That’s up to you.” My request for “something sexy” Garden Tools Over Gotham: Daredevil vs.Dr. Doom, who’s was the last time I got specific wielding a curious weapon. Note the curious choice of inkers on about it. But not Gene. The this commissioned drawing, too: John Byrne. I kept hearing from people convention was four days not involved in the project long, and so was our conversation about this piece of artwork. who were concerned about my choice of penciler. Gene hadn’t Every time I walked by his table, Gene gave me a thumbs-up done a 20-page story in years, and there was a small crowd formand began launching into the calculus of exactly how sexy this ing at the sidelines, ready to commiserate if he couldn’t quite hack pin-up was going to be. He wasn’t specific, but there was a lot it. And I heard from other people wondering if I was at all intimiof cackling going on. After a couple of days, the room felt like it dated – my first comic book story being drawn by Gene Colan. was overheating as Gene hinted at a generous and wicked 9

INTRODUCTION

Well, yeah, turns out I should have been. I doubt I’ll forget my first story conference with Gene, if that’s what it was. Mostly, I was stammering all over again. I was standing in my back yard, trying not to wake my wife up, as it was 11:30 my time. Meaning 2:30 AM his time. You know, when most septuagenarians work. When he gets to the drawing board, Gene seems to whip himself into a low-grade frustration. His voice gets craggier and grouchier. I imagine him on the other end of the phone, frowning and cracking his knuckles as he realizes I might have written novels, but when it comes to comic books, I could well be an idiot. Here is the first three minutes or so of Gene’s side of the phone call, after “hello”:

planes, montages, and vertiginous cityscapes. When Gene turned in the story, he’d followed my directions where he needed to, and then followed his own muse in terms of pacing and panel placement, coming up with better stuff than what I’d asked for, but also ignoring my request for a full-page splash of a hand on a doorknob. I re-wrote the dialogue and captions based on what Gene had handed in, and then Diana Schutz, editor and queen of all media, moved my captions so that they actually made sense. It wasn’t until I saw it in print that I realized that not only had working with Gene made the story better than when it had started, it made me a better writer. As Tom Field has been sharing with me some highlights of his interviews with writers who worked with Gene, I realize this is a common feeling – Gene draws it, and tells you what it is later. In the meantime, it’s your job as writer to jump in, grab a saxophone or ukulele or whatever your pen is shaped like, and play along... That kind of fusion is the true spirit of improv and collaboration.

Glen? It’s Gene. Sorry to call you so late, but I need to ask you some questions about page three of your story. This is a weird story. It’s weird enough for me to work on, but anyway, so, it’s a cemetery, right? They’re underground. There’s a At the 2004 San Diego show, I got to superhero, and he’s tunneling stand next to Gene and sign copies of the from coffin to coffin underground? book, which was thrilling enough, but Right? And he’s rescuing a kid then, to see the ripples going back from each coffin, and then he goes through the line – as no one seemed to to the coffin after that, and he resknow he would be there – everyone cues another kid? With six kids? All pointing toward him and whispering, of them going from coffin to coffin? “That’s Gene Colan.” Yeah! That’s right! And they get to the last coffin? Is that right? All seven of them in one A few hours later, Gene showed me the coffin at the end? Uh-uh. How big is original art to our story. I brought it to a that thing supposed to be, anyfriend who has been handling original art way? [pause] Uh-huh. I’ll make it since the 1970s. This is a guy who has held work, don’t worry. And then he’s in not just Kirby and Ditko pages, but stacks the coffin, and he sees a bomb on of complete Kirby and Ditko stories. the last coffin? Just the last coffin, right? Not on the others? Good, He’d expressed mild, polite interest in because I didn’t draw bombs on the seeing what Gene was doing lately. But other ones. So, there’s a bomb, and he can’t defuse it because it’s on the “Now You See It...”: The Escapist as written by when he saw the pages in person, he fell into a cathedral-style hush. “The outside of the lid? Then how does he the author and drawn by Gene Colan in 2003. printed version just doesn’t do these see it? [longer pause] Because he has an X-ray device he’s wearing? Yeah, you didn’t mention that in justice,” he said. “How old is Gene? Seventy-eight? No!” My your outline. But I drew it that way. Is there reference on this X-ray friend is normally a talkative guy, and can tell you the intricacies thing? No? Good. ‘Cause I made it up. Okay, when they get out, of Bob Montana’s Archie versus Dan DeCarlo’s, or why Vince and they go up, and there’s sunlight coming down, and a shad- Colletta should have worked in the circus. But he was staring at ow falling across the coffins, that’s good, but back on page two you the Colan pencils in silence. said it was midnight. [even longer pause] I’m not going back and making it daylight before. There’s a lot of pencil on that page. I Finally, he spoke. “How – how did he do this?” mean, I’m happy to have the work, I’ll do the assignment, but this stuff doesn’t always make sense. You can take care of that with the I dunno. Let’s all turn the page and see if we can figure it out. captions, maybe it took him all night to dig or something. Okay, on Glen David Gold is the author of the best-selling novel Carter the next page… Beats the Devil, currently translated into 12 languages. He has written for Playboy, McSweeney’s, The New York Times and Los And so on. Angeles Times Sunday Magazines, as well as for film, television I’d tried to make the script a sort of a Gene Colan’s greatest-hits, and comic books. As a comic art enthusiast, he has contributed with graveyards, rain, antique furniture, German shepherds, astral frequently to the Jack Kirby Collector. If you see him bidding on something on eBay, please don’t bid against him. GENE COLAN

1 The Other G.C.

To Gene Colan, there never was anyone quite like the man who shared his initials: Gary Cooper.

most difficult thing I ever approached,” Colan says, recalling how he worked from movie magazine photographs. “To get his likeness was very, very difficult. I concentrated on his eyes, and really didn’t go about it in the proper way. My own eyes were extremely untrained at the time.”

Everybody’s all-American. The original “strong, silent type” of classic film. Gary Cooper was the leading man among leading men in Hollywood’s Golden Age. And from the time he was 10 years old and first saw Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936), Colan idolized him.

And then Colan tried to meet Cooper. “It was 1939, I was 13, my parents had gone out to California on a business trip, and they took me with them,” Colan says. “When we got there, I asked my father if we could find out where Cooper lived, and someone told us where he was up in Beverly Hills somewhere.”

“There was just something about him,” Colan says. “He represented the classic American face, and I think every young boy – even grown men – wanted to be very much like him.”

Although never much of a student, Colan was always a diehard film buff, The Colans searched the streets fruitand he studied Cooper. “I learned as lessly for just a mailbox with Cooper’s name much about him as I could,” he recalls. on it. As they were about to pack it in, Gene To Colan’s delight, he learned that spotted a red roof amidst a clump of trees – Cooper, born in Montana in 1901, Gary Cooper: Colan’s idol in one of his bestan area the Colans had not explored. They started out just like him – as a cartoonist. then drove up that street, found a beautiful known films, High Noon. “But he couldn’t make it as an artist,” private home – and that was it! Colan says. “A lot of his friends had gone out to Hollywood and got jobs as stunt people, so that’s what he started to do.” “I looked in the mailbox, where he had some letters, and there was his name on the envelopes,” Colan says, chuckling at his Cooper landed his first lead role in 1926, went on to make memorable youthful indiscretion. “Nobody was home, so I even peeked in the movies such as The Virginian (1929) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). window! I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven.” By 1939, he was making just under $500,000, which earned him the U.S. Treasury Department’s distinction as the nation’s top wage earner. Colan noted Cooper’s address, and later, upon returning home, he penned a letter. “In no time flat, he answered it,” Colan says. It The more he learned about Cooper, the more Colan was was a short, polite response–’To Gene Colan, best wishes, Gary impressed. “I used to pick up on little things that he did on screen,” Cooper’ – but Colan was blown away by the personal touch. “He Colan says. “I tried to copy every single move. He had a way with his wrote out everything in pencil in his own hand, including the hands that no one else had. He did something with his fingers, envelope with my address on it.” wrapped around the stock of a rifle that was very special. I took note of what he did and how he walked, and I tried to do those things.” Cooper, of course, went on to enjoy a glorious film career, winning best-actor Oscars for his performances in Sergeant York As an aspiring artist, he also tried to draw Cooper. “It was the (1941) and High Noon (1952) before his death from cancer in 1961. 11

THE OTHER G. C.

Colan, too, grew to enjoy a stellar career–as a comic book artist, developing a unique illustrative style, which he lent to the likes of Hopalong Cassidy, Daredevil, Dracula and Batman, entertaining generations of comics fans with his cinematic approach to storytelling. Reflecting, Colan regrets that he never actually met his hero. “If it had been today [with the Internet and fan conventions], there would have been a much greater opportunity to meet him,” he says. “But at the time? No.”

If he had met Gary Cooper, what would Colan have done? “Oh, my God! I’d probably have sat down and cried, he meant so much to me,” Colan says, thinking aloud. “He summed up what a man should be like. Everything he appeared to stand for on the screen sent a clear message about integrity.” Colan pauses for a minute, then answers: “I might have asked him if I could see his artwork.”

Gene Colan: Self-portrait drawn in 1970 for Marvelmania magazine. GENE COLAN

2 The Early Years

icture: A mid-Manhattan town house in the 1930s. It’s the boyhood home of Gene Colan, who cradles his father’s box camera and walks slowly from room to room, framing his environment like he would a film on a movie screen. “It was like a pan shot,” Colan says. “I enjoyed that sensation of seeing the images go by me as I walked from one room to another.” And although no one knew so at the time, this exercise was the birth of Gene Colan’s cinematic approach to comic book storytelling.

Eugene Jules Colan was born in the Bronx, NY, on Sept. 1, 1926, the only child of Harold and Winifred Levy Colan. Harold, whose grandparents had emigrated from Germany and changed the family name from “Cohen” to the unique “Colan,” was a musician at heart. A violinist, he played for a time in singer Sophie Tucker’s band, but the group had broken up by the time Gene was born, and so Harold went to work at his father-in-law’s ribbon factory. After the stock market crashed in 1929, signaling the start of the Great Depression, Harold lost his job and moved into the insurance business, where Gene says his dad enjoyed quick success. “He was a great salesman,” Colan says. “My father was such a good communicator; he could have been a trial lawyer.”

childhood in a well-to-do neighborhood at 88th and Broadway, and his family always employed a live-in maid. “I wasn’t aware of any need for anything,” he says. “My parents always saw to it that I had what I needed.” Which isn’t to say he always got what he wanted.

Winifred, in contrast, had the makings of a good field general. A strong-willed, decisive woman from a wealthy family, she had attended Columbia University at a time when many young women didn’t pursue college educations–and she clearly headed the Colan household. After nursing young Gene through infancy, Winifred decided she wanted a business interest of her own. So, she began trading vintage German beer steins, which quickly grew into a self-supporting antiques business. Ultimately, Winifred opened her own antiques store, and Harold quit the insurance business to help support it. “She was very bossy–my mother kind of ruled the roost,” Gene says. “My father always sort of gave in to her a lot as far as how things should be done. I realized that more and more as I got older, and I didn’t always like it. But that’s the way it was.” As a young boy, Gene had no interest in school, sports or even socializing with the neighborhood kids. He liked being alone with his imagination. And although he grew up in the heart of the Depression, moving from the Bronx to Manhattan as a toddler, Colan doesn’t recall any sense of deprivation. He lived most of his

Gene as a toddler: One of the earliest photos of young Eugene, probably about age two, complete with curly locks. T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

Harold Colan: Gene’s father with the violin he played in Sophie Tucker’s band.

Mother and child: Gene with his mother, Winifred.

“My mother being quite strict, she didn’t give me very much of what I wanted in the way of toys; she thought they were a waste of time and money,” Colan says. “She always wanted me to read more books, which of course I never did. I was not a good student; I hated school.”

Every year, Colan saved up his pocket money, and a couple of weeks before Christmas he’d go down to Macy’s department store with his favorite aunt, his mother’s sister Jewel, and come home with as many presents as he could afford for his family. “I loved doing it; it was such a big deal to me.”

Although nominally raised Jewish, Colan was hardly devout. “I did go to temple [Temple Emmanuel on 5th Ave.],” he says, “and I did as badly if not worse there than I did at regular school.” It was a humbling experience, too; attending temple with boys from families even more affluent than his own. When he showed up for his confirmation at age 13, for instance, “I was the only one who arrived by bus; everyone else came in a limo.”

An Eye for Art As early as age three, Colan was obsessed with art.

Despite his Jewish heritage, Colan was enchanted by the Christmas holiday. “Personally, I Classic car: This illustration of an automobile is always celebrated Christmas,” he from the 1930s. Note Colan’s use of textured pensays. “It was a magical time, and I cils even at that age. still think of it as such.” GENE COLAN

“I drew a lot–I was always drawing,” Colan says. “My biggest joy was to be sick in bed, so I wouldn’t have to go to school or any of those things, and I would plan out my day to just draw pictures, pictures, pictures. Always with a pencil and a pad that didn’t have any lines in it.” Mostly, Colan would draw from magazines, working tirelessly to reproduce the famous Norman Rockwell covers to the Saturday

Evening Post. As he got older, he’d walk over to Central Park to sketch the WWI 7th Regiment memorial statue, and occasionally he’d even sit on a bench along Broadway, copying the huge CocaCola poster on the side of a building. And Colan’s parents nurtured his talent. Often his father would sit down and draw right beside him. “There were things my father could draw that I couldn’t do,” Colan says. “He had a knack for drawing an automobile with the fenders just right. Those were the years when fenders were sort of separate from the car. I couldn’t draw one as well as he could, and it bothered the life out of me!” Yet, at the same time, Colan’s mother especially encouraged the boy to get out of the house and play with other kids. Colan: I was a loner. I had some friends – I could mix it up with the guys and play stickball or hockey, but I wouldn’t say that I sought them out very often. I had a tendency to want to stay indoors a lot, but my mother wouldn’t allow me to. She’d leave orders [with the maid] for me to stay out until about 5:00, and then I could come in. She wanted me not to be alone, but to mix up with other people. She wasn’t wrong – she was right – but I just couldn’t help it. I had no interest in it. I could entertain myself for hours just drawing. I would draw pictures out in front of the house, on the stoop. I was really in my own world of make-believe. That was my world, and I would draw it out in story form on a blank pad.

Copy cat: Gene reproduced this magazine illustration at age 13, in 1939.

Inspired by Comics Entertainment was important to the Colan household, and one of Gene’s earliest passions was for comic strips. There are three prominent comic strips Colan recalls from the 1930s: Al Capp’s Li’l Abner – The Dogpatch hillbillies were a source of amusement and inspiration for young Colan. “I had a hard time in school with some of the bullies, so Li’l Abner with Mammy Yokum kind of helped me through it. She was very tough!” Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates – The greatest adventure strip of its day was at its artistic height during Colan’s teens, and he was totally entranced by the growth of Terry Lee, Pat Ryan and crew. “I can even remember the smell of the newsprint. I’d put the paper right up to my face…” and get lost in Caniff’s stylish rendering of action, adventure and adult romance. Coulton Waugh’s Dickie Dare – A boy, his dog and their adventures ’round the world. Those are the elements that

The artist at 13: Gene Colan in his own world, 1939. 15

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Seminal Strips: From top to bottom, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, and Coulton Waugh’s Dickie Dare entertained and inspired Gene Colan in his youth. appealed most to Colan, who recalls this strip as his favorite among favorites. “Every day I couldn’t wait to see what would happen with that poor kid. The strip appeared in the New York Sun, and my father would always come out of the subway with a copy on his way home from work. I would wait for him topside, and I’d grab the paper just to see the next installment.” Colan also remembers acquiring some of the early comic books – including Action #1, the groundbreaker that introduced the world to its first comic book hero, Superman. Yet, it wasn’t this embryonic superhero or its spin-offs that truly captured Colan’s interest. Instead, he was most engrossed in the other key character from Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – hardboiled Slam Bradley, who supported Batman in Detective Comics.

GENE COLAN

Inspired by Caniff, Waugh, Siegel & Shuster, Colan just prior to WWII created his own adventure hero: Jim Turner, American Spy. “This was just about the time we got into the war with Germany, so I created this character of my own, and I pretended I was in the adventures with him,” Colan says. “He was in the service, so I was there with him, too. It was very interesting, and I could amuse myself with this for hours.” Colan misplaced his “Jim Turner” artwork decades ago, but even today he can still visualize the pages: “Little panels, like you see in the comic book,” Colan says. “No fancy, twisted panels – I didn’t do that. Nothing was factual, of course–I didn’t do any research. But I thought it was factual enough for me!” The “Jim Turner” experience also was enough to convince the

the gun looked so real! I would make up a gun. I didn’t feel I needed to go to a book and take out a photograph of a real gun. It was a real eye-opening experience.

Motivated by Movies To the entire Colan family, movies were magic. Every Friday night, the Colans would head out to the local theater. “As a rule, we generally went to what my parents wanted to see,” Colan says. “I remember some very sophisticated films – one Somerset Maugham wrote, for instance, called The Letter (1940) starring Bette Davis.” And he saw virtually all of the Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn films first-run. On Saturdays, Colan’s Aunt Jewel, who was like a second mother to Gene, often took him to the matinees, where they’d sit in the children’s section and enjoy Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy series and the Deanna Durbin films of the late ’30s and early ’40s. As he got older, Colan got so caught up in the movies that he increasingly wondered how they were made. How did directors light nighttime scenes? Why didn’t the soundtracks have the same static and scratches as his 78 rpm records? How were particular scenes framed? Colan’s most memorable film experience came on a fateful day in 1931 when his father took five-year-old Gene to see the original Frankenstein–the most terrifying thriller of its day.

Jim Turner, American Spy: Here’s Gene Colan’s 2005 interpretation of the character he created and drew as a teen 65 years earlier!

“My father didn’t think the film would bother me; he just took me because he wanted to see it,” Colan says. “But I was never the same after that…”

young artist that he wanted to draw comics professionally. At age 14, Colan summoned the nerve to visit the offices of DC Comics, which to him was “the MGM of comic books.” The DC gatekeepers apparently were encouraged by what they saw in Colan’s art portfolio, because they invited him into the bullpen to see how comics were produced. Colan: They took me inside and showed me some original artwork. Bob Kane (creator of Batman) was sitting in that art room, and I met him momentarily. I even to this day remember what he was working on, it so impressed me. It was a panel of a hand holding a gun, an automatic. You could see the bone structure of the hand, which impressed me because at that time I knew nothing about anatomy. My hands looked like loaves of Karloff as the Monster: One of the great bread. Just awful. His had the influences in Gene Colan’s life–Boris Karloff’s skeleton behind the skin. And Frankenstein (1931). 17

Colan’s terror began at his first sight of Boris Karloff as the monster. “When he came on the screen, I just couldn’t imagine a human being could look like that,” Colan says. “I was frightened to death. I knew I was looking at a movie, but still and all… I never expected to see anything as frightening as that! I sat there slumped in my seat, hiding behind my father’s arm & peeking out, saying ‘Tell me when he’s off the screen!’” Colan had always been sort of a fearful child, scared of such harmless objects as rubber bands and balloons. “I was frightened to death of Halloween,” he says. “If I could see someone a block away in a mask, I was finished–I’d run like hell in the street! I’d hide behind my mother, duck into a doorway…”

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But Frankenstein took Colan’s fears to a new level. After that experience, Colan was scared even to sleep or be left with a babysitter. “If I’d had a brother or a sister, I could have bounced off them and maybe not been afraid,” Colan says. “But I was fearful of my parents leaving me alone. I would beg them not to go out. They would have to wait ‘til I fell asleep before they could even leave the house.” But, still, Colan couldn’t purge the horrific Karloff monster from his memory. “I decided that I would create a monster of my own, so I got out big sheets of paper–I was creative in that respect – and I drew one.” Decades later, when the 45-year-old Colan first set pencil to paper to draw Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula comic book, there’s no question he remained inspired by the fears of a five-year-old’s first encounter with the Frankenstein monster.

Growing Pains As the Colan family’s antiques business grew, so did the need for Harold and Winifred to travel on long buying trips through Europe. During these excursions, Gene would be left in the care of his grandparents, who lived nearby. Mostly Colan’s grandparents stayed at his house – and it’s good that they did because, to his dismay, young Gene quickly found that when he left the comfort of home, his fears traveled with him. At his grandparents’ house, Colan was frightened by a peculiar chair. “I remember my grandparents lived on the second floor, and they had a big carved chair in the corner by the window,” Colan says. “This chair was made of a heavy, black wood – mahogany or oak, maybe – and there was a face carved into the backrest. When an automobile outside would pass, the headlights would reflect off the ceiling, off the walls and light up the chair. It was unusual and frightening – like some kind of satanic monster coming alive out of the chair. I’d put my clothes on it to hide the face, but sometimes my clothes themselves would look like they were alive.”

Colan was left alone with his older cousin Franklin, whom Colan recalls as “slightly backwards – a lot like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Never having seen a dead body before – and suddenly feeling adventurous–Colan tried to convince Franklin to sneak over with him to the wake. “Franklin warned me against it, but I said ‘Come on, nobody’s going to know! Let’s go see the body!’” Colan says. “He didn’t want to do it. I talked him into it, and so we went.” When the two boys arrived at the house, they snuck around to the side, near the window of the room where the body was on display. “We got right up to the window, and the minute we saw the body – that did it,” Colan says. “I couldn’t believe the stillness, the wax-like quality of the body. It no longer looked like a person; it looked like a sculpted image. Not the real thing, but I knew damned well it was. After that, I was afraid to close my eyes and go to sleep!” Back home in New York, Colan contented himself with his outdoor drawing sessions – which were now attracting a crowd. Among the interested onlookers was Colan’s first girlfriend, a

Street scene: As a teenager, Gene drew this scene outside his grandparents’ home in Manhattan. Interesting to note that the original illustration is quite small – about the size of a single panel in a published comic book.

Every Easter vacation, Colan would visit his uncle’s home in Stroudsburg, PA. On one visit in the late 1930s, Colan fell victim to an entirely new kind of fright – from his first encounter with a cadaver. The circumstances: a family friend had died, and Colan’s

GENE COLAN

uncle and aunt had departed for the wake at the friend’s nearby home.

pretty blonde teenager named Toni. “She just came over to see what I was doing,” Colan says. “She lived a block away, but I never knew her or had ever seen her before. We started to talk…” and before he knew it, “She was my first real, honest to goodness date.”

below his pant legs. “I saw it, but she didn’t – at least I think she didn’t,” Colan says. “I said ‘You have to excuse me!,’” and I ducked into a doorway to roll up my pajamas as fast as I could!” By this time, in his mid-teens, childhood fears and adolescent phobias aside – and despite the occasional slip-up with the ladies! – Colan was increasingly comfortable with himself and his talents. Colan: I wanted to be a radio actor – I enjoyed the idea of acting – but I never tried out for anything. I could see that I could draw well, though, and I knew that was my entry in show business. So, I continued to draw. I never had any ideas about being a fine artist, a painter or an illustrator like Norman Rockwell. I just wanted to do comic books. In the neighborhood, right across the street, lived a chauffeur for one of those guys, Siegel or Shuster. They would drive in this limo, and make me realize I wanted to be someone in the comic book business.

Extended family: Pictured from left are Gene’s Aunt Jewel, cousin Franklin, father Harold, mother Winifred and Gene as a boy, sometime in the 1930s. Of course, courting is never without its conflicts, and for Colan the issue was tactile. “I couldn’t wear clothing that would make me itch – that herringbone material that pricks away at your skin,” Colan says. “To me it’s like sitting in a wet, sandy bathing suit. I hated that!” And, yet, his best suits came with pants made of the prickly material. Colan’s solution to relieve the sensation? “I’d put my pajama bottoms on under my pants, and I’d roll up the bottoms so that they wouldn’t show!” The pajama bottoms worked – to a point. They eased Colan’s comfort, certainly. But one time, while on an early First love: Portrait of Gene’s first girlfriend, Toni. Colan often date with Toni, Colan’s pajama bottoms slipped down wonders what’s become of her. 19

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Gene Colan Portfolio Travel Sketches As a boy traveling with his parents in the 1930s, Gene Colan drew the following sketches on a trip to Quebec. These illustrations were drawn in pen on a small, unlined steno notebook, and reveal lots of hints about Colan’s emerging style.

GENE COLAN

SKETCHBOOK

GENE COLAN

3 Emerging Style

icture: Gene Colan at the movies in the 1940s, wondering how he could depict with a pencil what he saw on-screen. How were the sequences staged? How were the night scenes lit? “I developed my drawing style from film,” Colan says. “I would always refer in my head to what I’d seen on the screen, and I would draw my stories that way. So many thematic scenes were shot in the evening, at sunset or in the rain. Warner’s, it seemed, was always staging dramatic scenes in the rain, with the pavement wet – they put a lot of weather in their stories. And I picked up on all that stuff.”

New York City had the perfect place for teen-aged Gene Colan: the School of Industrial Arts (later known as the School of Art and Design – the visual arts version of the performing arts school portrayed in the movie Fame!). This public school boasted the best art education in the city, and proved to be the training ground for many of Colan’s eventual contemporaries, including Carmine Infantino, Frank Giacoia and John Romita. But, alas, Colan’s lackluster study habits betrayed him. “I passed the art test with no problem, but my academic scores were nowhere near high enough,” he recalls. Having to settle for a traditional education at New York’s George Washington High School, Colan continued to draw, inspired by the movies, and he set his sights on an eventual career in comics.

Profile: Undated sketch of Gene’s grandfather. Then came the war. When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, 15-year-old Colan was caught up in the same fervent wave of nationalism that flooded the rest of the country. And two years later, at 17, he even lied about his age and tried to enlist in the Marines. “I thought it was a very romantic thing to do, very heroic,” Colan says. “But when my father heard about it, he came right down to the recruiter’s office with me and told them I was way underage and had no business enlisting. They took me off the list.” The service setback did pay career dividends, though. After high school graduation in 1944, Colan was able to use his drawing

Diploma: Gene’s high school graduation diploma. 23

EMERGING STYLE

1st Work?: This one-pager from Wings #52 (1945) may be Gene’s first published comics work. GENE COLAN

samples to secure his first professional comics work – a summer job as an artist at Fiction House, publisher of genre comics such as Wings, Rangers and Fight.

While recovering, Colan stumbled into a lucrative commercial art scheme. Colan: I became friendly with all the nurses, and I would draw sketches of the GIs there in the hospital. They would send these sketches home to their families. One of the GIs said “Why are you doing these for nothing?” I said, “I don’t know. It never occurred to me to charge.” He said “You could make a few bucks! Don’t do it for nothing.” I began to charge $3 or $5 for a sketch – somewhere in there – and that kept me plenty busy. In fact, I wound up making more money at the end of the month than the government paid me!

Working in a small art room at Fiction House’s Manhattan office, Colan recalls being impressed by the pros he encountered. “I met Murphy Anderson there,” Colan says. “George Tuska used to come up there with his work every now and again, and I was aghast at it, it was so great. Lee Elias would show up. He was almost identical to Milton Caniff. There were several women who worked there, too, as artists – a good mix of people.” And while most of the pros encouraged young Gene, at least one intimidated him: Howard Larsen, who drew steadily for Jungle Comics and Wings. “He was much older than most of us, and he was quite a cynic,” Colan says. “He had a nasty streak in him, and I didn’t much Grandfather: Undated sketch of Gene’s grandfather. care for him.” Years later, when Colan established himself in Stan Lee’s bullpen at Timely Comics, Larsen strolled in one day looking for work. “He came over and said hello to me – he knew right away who I was, and I knew who he was,” Colan says, “but I didn’t have much to say other than ‘hello’ in kind of a Mickey Mouse laugh. He didn’t get the job. It was a shame in a way because he was an older man looking for work, but he didn’t get it.” Colan drew only a handful of stories over that summer in Fiction House, among them a one-pager in Wings Comics #52 and some five-pagers in Fight Comics #23 and Wings #53. But the experience was enough to whet his appetite for more. Alas, the job ended at Labor Day, and as of Sept. 1, 1944, Colan was 18 – old enough for active duty in the military. On Valentine’s Day 1945, Colan was activated by the Air Force and prepared to go overseas as a tail gunner. But before he even got into training, the war in Europe ended with Nazi Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945. “The announcement was made on the field,” Colan says. “All the schools shut down, and eventually I was sent to the Pacific Theatre in Manila.” Before he shipped out, though, Colan caught a nasty case of pneumonia.

Upon his release, Colan went overseas to the Philippines for an experience unlike any he’d ever encountered as a boy growing up in affluent New York. The actual war was virtually over – the Japanese finally surrendered in mid-August 1945 – but the Philippines remained within a war zone. Security was tight, tensions were high, and Colan got an up-close view of some of the physical and psychological scars inflicted by the fighting in the Pacific. “I thought I was going into summer camp when I first went in,” Colan says. “But I was naive and as green as you could get.”

One time in Manila, Colan got caught up in the middle of someone else’s bar fight – the type you’d see in a movie. “I’d never been in anything like that, but I was caught in the middle of this thing that was escalating big time,” he says. “Some soldier came over to me and said “Look, keep your back to the wall, take your belt off, and don’t let anyone get behind you!” When I heard that, I knew I was in deep doo-doo! But nothing happened; at that very moment, the MPs came and broke up the whole affair.” It didn’t take long for Colan to realize he’d been thrust into a true melting pot of spirited young men – many of them aimless and angry and busting for a fight. It was an intimidating experience, and in the face of it Colan fell back into a familiar pattern. “I didn’t make friends easily, so I reverted to having drawing be my companion,” he says. “Drawing was something I liked to do, something I liked to be with, so I decided to do a cartoon diary of my experience in the service.” A little bit Bill Mauldin, a touch of Milton Caniff, Colan’s service diary eased his transition into life overseas, and it gave him a bit of notoriety on base in Manila. By day, Colan was a truck driver in the motor pool; by night, he was an in-demand sketch artist.

“I caught it on bivouac in Biloxi, Mississippi, and it hit me like a ton of bricks,” Colan says. “I couldn’t continue with the rest of the unit; I had to go to the field hospital.”

“I would draw guys going overseas, draw the natives around our base,” Colan says. “I remember drawing a Philippine girl by candlelight – I wanted to do it that way. And I also drew a picture of our tent boy. The major loved that drawing so much he said “I’ll

EMERGING STYLE

Times of His Life: Sample page from Gene’s “Army Life” strip in The Manila Times. GENE COLAN

Gene, and who already had done a lot of professional work for Life and other leading magazines of the day. Kidd, who specialized in military illustration and eventually became the official U.S. war artist assigned to the Korean conflict, quickly took an interest in Colan. “He was a great eye-opener to me,” Colan says. “Everything I drew at that time was on small pieces of paper – the size of a published comic book – and he said to me “Why do you draw so small all the time? Think in bigger terms.” He got me thinking bigger, on bigger sheets of paper.”

Kidd Stuff: One of Steven Kidd’s remarkable military paintings. give you my jeep for the day if you’ll give me that picture!” Before long, Colan secured a part-time job with the Manila Times newspaper, contributing illustrations of Army life. Then he met a man who completely changed his young professional life.

A Kid Under Kidd Colan’s air base sponsored an art contest, and he quickly knew he wanted to enter with his cartoon diary. His entry caught the attention of the natives who worked on the base. “They knew me pretty well, and some of them would ask, “Would you like to win the contest?” I’d say “Of course!” They’d smile and pat me on the back and say “We think you’re going to win…” What he didn’t realize was that the Filipinos were rigging the contest for him to win! “I was aghast because I was really up against some top illustrators, and of course my work was nothing compared to what they were doing,” Colan says. “They were older and more seasoned–I was a child! They were pissed!” One of the runners-up paid more than passing attention to Colan’s work. His name was Steven Kidd – a painter and illustrator from Illinois who was 15 years older than Dear Diary: Sample of Gene’s wartime diary. 27

EMERGING STYLE

One time, Kidd asked Colan to draw a human ear. Gene drew one that he thought was pretty authentic – for a comic book ear. Kidd looked at it and said “Well, I know what you’re drawing because it’s what I asked you to do, but it’s totally incorrect.”

Others went on at 12 o’clock midnight and didn’t get off until 6 in the morning. Not a car could be seen on the road, only for all the MP jeeps patrolling back and forth. The whole thing has about blown over now, so there isn’t any need to worry. This morning I had to make my run, in order to bring a few of the workers into camp. My carbine went with me. None of us goes anywhere without our rifles, especially while walking up dark streets around these native villages. All of this is just a precaution in case of trouble. There is a lot of valuable equipment lying around, and every once in a while those Filipinos walk off with it. By tomorrow everything will be OK. With all the artillery in our hands, the Filipinos, I think, know which side their bread is buttered on. Am feeling fine, and can’t describe in words how much I miss you both. I’ve just got to get home soon. Please pray hard!”

Another time, Kidd asked Colan to draw a tree. “I did it in 10 minutes, and he says to me “It took God 100 years to make a tree; you can’t sit down and make one in 10 minutes!” Inspired by Kidd’s professional experience and masterful paintings, Colan took his mentor’s lessons to heart. “He really got me onto a whole different path of art,” Colan says. “Long after I got out of the service, I looked him up and found him somewhere in the suburbs, sharing a studio. His studio was no bigger than a closet. He eventually passed on [in 1987], but his work was beautiful.”

“all my love, Gene.”

Today, Kidd’s military work is still on display in the Pentagon, Air Force Museum, and in The White House.

In another letter, dated Sept. 4, 1946, Gene muses about Toni – the girl he left behind.

Letters Home

“I find myself thinking a lot about Toni lately. It Throughout his Air Force must be one of the stint, Colan maintained an movies I saw the other active correspondence with night. The name of it his parents back home in New was Bedlam, and Anna York. He’d typically receive Lee played the female several letters per week from lead. I always thought home – sometimes two in a that she looked so much day. And Gene would dutifully like Toni. Yes, I did get a respond, detailing his experiraw deal before leaving ences and insights overseas. – something that was very uncalled for – but One letter, dated April 24, don’t we all have faults? 1946, betrayed Gene’s concern Toni, on the other hand, about security in Manila. has done very nice things, too. Always “A state of emergency remembered me on my has developed here in the birthday and other Philippines since the start occasions. Always had of a new election. The a grand time with her, War Department felt it Army Life: Sample of Colan’s wartime journal. too! Once I took her necessary to arm every downtown with the man with a carbine, and double the sentry duty all around. As soon purpose of seeing quite an expensive show. You know she wouldn’t let as the Filipinos gain their independence, they might try to burn and me spend the money? …I’ll never forget that incident. Many a time we overtake government property. Their fondness for the American sol- had dates where I thought we’d just walk around Broadway instead of dier isn’t what you might think it is. The excuse for lectures on the car- going to the movies, and talk about different things a bit. Most girls bine was only a come-on, so that none of the Philippine workers love to be dined and wined on a date, no matter what the expense, around camp would suspect anything. At the very first opportunity, but Toni was different in that respect. You could always spend a nice we were explained the real reason. Every one of us received 45 quiet evening with her without going to the show.” rounds of ammunition, and at different times of the day we were put on watch. I pulled six-hour duty yesterday, guarding one area. Finally, on Nov. 22 of that year – a date that would become GENE COLAN

Sketches: Colan’s doodlings from his art school days. infamous with the assassination of JFK 17 years later – Eugene J. Colan was discharged from the Air Force.

A League of His Own Throughout his two-year Air Force stint, Colan never stopped thinking about comics. And upon his discharge as a corporal first class, he returned home to his parents’ house in New York and resumed his quest for a career in comics. “I came back and went to DC again,” Colan says. “They were not all that interested – told me to go to art school. So I did.” With help from his Mother and the GI Bill, Colan enrolled in the Art Students League of New York, where he studied anatomy, illustration and painting under two distinct fine artists: Frank J. Reilly – a renowned magazine illustrator whose classes were standing-room-only, and who could teach art without ever even opening his mouth. “He didn’t do much in the way of teaching,” Colan says. “He would bring in his paintings halffinished and then finish them to show the class how they were

done.” Ultimately, Reilly left the Art Students League to form his own art school. One of his last students in the 1960s was a young aspirant named Tom Palmer, who later became famous as one of Colan’s best-known collaborators. Yasuo Kuniyoshi – a Japanese-born painter who emigrated from Japan in 1906, studied at the Art Students League, and eventually made a name for himself with his textured landscapes and female portraits. “He was strictly modern, and that was a class I really never should have been in,” Colan says. “But it was a fascinating experience for me. I was with some really fine painters and artists, and I was nowhere near their class.” After about a year of daily attendance at the Art Students League, Colan had polished his roughest edges. He’d studied anatomy in plaster-of-Paris nudes and live models. “I didn’t know the names of the muscles and such,” he says, “but I knew where stuff went!” And then he summoned the nerve to prepare some new comics samples and go knocking on the door of Timely Comics – to see a young editor named Stan Lee.

EMERGING STYLE

Gene Colan Art Studies These are life studies from Gene Colan’s days at the Art Students League of New York in the 1940s. Even then, he had an eye for expression and a pretty lady!

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4 The 1950s: High Hopes and Hard Times

icture: The first meeting between Gene Colan and Stan Lee, 1947. Colan, determined to break into comics professionally, prepares art samples and drops in unannounced at Timely Comics. The art director, Al Sulman, is impressed and takes the samples to show Timely’s editor, young Stan Lee. Minutes later, Colan is summoned to an inner office. “I walk into this office, and there is Stan Lee, playing cards and wearing this beanie cap with a propeller on it!” Colan says. “Stan is boyish, very charming. He says to me, “So, you want to be in comics, eh? Sit down!”

Nothing like first impressions. Colan distinctly remembers discovering Timely Comics’ location in the Empire State Building (he looked up the address in the indicia of a comic book); preparing a sample war story (“I even inked and lettered those pages,” he says); the anticipation of how editor Stan Lee would receive his work; and then his actual audience with the man in the beanie cap. “A big stiff wind was blowing through the window and would take that propeller on his cap and give it a twirl,” Colan says, “He was certainly a departure from what I thought he’d be like!” Departure, indeed. Colan left Lee’s office with his first staff job – igniting the spark that thrust Colan headlong into his comics career. For the next decade, Colan would hone his skills in genre comics, at Timely and elsewhere in the industry, experiencing the highs and lows of the business – from the collegial atmosphere of Lee’s Timely bullpen to the raging outbursts of editor Bob Kanigher at DC. And from the peaks to the valleys, his personal life kept pace.

The Time of His Life at Timely All-True Crime, Justice Comics, Lawbreakers Always Lose, Amazing Mysteries, Marvel Tales. These were some of the Timely Comics for which Colan drew in those formative years. Horror stories, war, Barn Dance: Archie-style teen comics clearly were on Gene Colan’s mind western, humor – he worked all the genres, honing with this undated ‘Barn Dance’ illustration from the 1940s. 31

HIGH HOPES AND HARD TIMES

Timely Debuts: Among some of Gene Colan’s earliest superhero stories are these tales from Human Torch #31, (1948), and Captain America #72, (1949). his versatility and storytelling skills. All he lacked was an ongoing assignment – a single character like a Captain America or a SubMariner that he could embrace and evolve with over time. “I really wanted to get a character that I could work with – not just to get a four- or five-page story,” Colan says. “I wanted to get to know a character, get comfortable with it, call it my own.”

There were rows of eight or nine desks in neat lines from the door to the window as you walked into the room. Syd Shores’ desk was the very last before the window. Over the course of a week, as artists would move in and out of their seats, Colan recalls, the desks would slowly creep back from the door to the window. “By Friday, Syd was practically out the window,” Colan says. “Good thing we didn’t work Saturdays!”

But Timely’s big-name characters – those that were still published in the late 1940s, after the initial bubble had contracted, if not burst – were mainly reserved for the company’s big-name artists, although Colan did get a shot or two at drawing the Human Torch and Captain America.

Home, at the time, was still his parents’ house at 88th and Broadway. Although in his 20s and a military veteran, Colan had no desire to move out on his own. “I was not a person to be by myself,” he says. “I had to have the comfort of a family.”

Syd Shores, Dan DeCarlo, Vince Alascia, Mike Sekowsky, John Buscema. These were among the luminaries who worked alongside Colan in the Timely bullpen, schooling him daily on art, comics and life. “We had one riotous time – oh, my God!” Colan says. “We were always telling jokes, laughing about something. The guys up front would get heavy into politics. Then around 5:30 or so, we’d punch out on the time clock and go home.”

In a lot of ways, Colan’s fellow artists became surrogate family members. Sekowsky was like a big brother to Gene, impressing him with his style, versatility and pure speed. “His pencils were something to behold,” Colan says. “Very loose, but so beautifully done. At that time, there was no one like him.”

Colan distinctly remembers the physical layout of the art room:

GENE COLAN

Shores, the defacto dean of the bullpen, was a father figure, showing Colan how to render, how to ink – how to draw horses, even! “At one point, I even tried to imitate Syd’s drawing style,” Colan says.

Bob Stuart, an inker whose name isn’t as well-known as Sekowsky’s or Shores’, also was a major influence. “He took me under his wing,” Colan says. “He knew I was green as grass about everything, so he tried to be a big brother or a father to me.” Unbeknownst to Colan, even his earliest comics work, its cinematic inspiration evident, inspired his fellow artists. John Romita, a colleague who broke into comics a few years after Colan (and who later became famous drawing Spider-Man in the 1960s and 70s), recalls his first impressions of Gene’s work:

At a time when contemporaries such as Romita were still searching for their own styles, Colan clearly was honing his. “The one thing you knew immediately about Gene, there were no generic qualities about his stuff. He was very distinctively an individual stylist.” Colan, naturally, is more self-critical in his appraisal. “I wasn’t really all that great,” he says. “Looking back on some of that old stuff, I want to run!” Still, he is grateful for having been thrown straight into the Timely bullpen and being forced to produce comics from day one. “It was definitely a baptism by fire, which to me is the best way to learn,” Colan says. “I’m not good with school and learning in that manner. I’d rather be out there and be shown something, then get through that and be shown something else.”

Romita: I knew his work before I ever connected it to his face. He amazed me. He did a couple of South Pacific war stories with pilots. I remember one in particular: he did a panel – I’m talking 1949, 1950 – he did an aerial shot of a plane crash landing in the ocean, and he did the whole thing black with just a little splash. And I was amazed. I remember saying “I don’t have the guts to do that!” But he made it believable. Y’know, there are guys who can use space very well, and there are those who can’t use space – they don’t know all the ways to use it. He was one of those guys who could – I guess it was his natural instinct to use space. I couldn’t get over it.

One of the biggest lessons Colan learned early on was to treat every freelance job like it was his last – because someday he would be right! As diverse as it was, the comic book marketplace was volatile in the 1950s. Genres went in and out of favor; publishers went in and out of business.

At the end of 1949, beginning of 1950, Colan had a couple of years of professional work under his belt, and he wanted to diversify a bit. Getting word through Romita also recalls his network that there being impressed by the was freelance work to be human expressions First Blood?: Check out this early vampire story from Strange Tales #7, had at rival publishers Colan could capture in (1952). Shades of Dracula comics to come? such as Ace, St. John his characters. “I was and Ziff-Davis, Colan set aware that [Colan] would use a photograph as a guide on some out on a Friday to line up some new accounts. When he got back to faces,” Romita says. “I was amazed at that because I barely had work at Timely the next Monday, he was stunned to learn that he time to get my work done, let alone look for photographs! But his and all his colleagues had just been laid off. The publisher, Martin stuff was always so sharp, and so convincing.” Goodman, had instructed Stan Lee to get rid off all of the staff 33

HIGH HOPES AND HARD TIMES

artists, to rely instead on freelancers. “Everybody was milling around the art dept., not working,” Colan says. “They were all stunned because they’d heard they’d got the pink slip–they were all out of a job. In my case, I just happened to be lucky enough to pick up work before the weekend. “That’s how it was for a freelancer.”

natural thing to do for a young couple in their 20s. But even amidst the wedding plans, Colan had serious doubts about the couple’s future. “I’d seen too many red flags in that relationship,” he says. “I knew it would be wrong. But we do stupid things in our lives, and of course when you’re young you do even more stupid things.” Gene and Sallee indeed did marry, they settled down in an apartment in Bronxville, and before long they were the parents of two young girls, Valerie and Jill, born in 1954 and 1957 respectively.

Unlucky at Love

For most of the 1950s, Colan clung desperately to his rocky marriage. “I held on like you would hold on to the edge of a cliff,” he says. “I didn’t want to let go–there were children involved. But it was a disaster to me, and I couldn’t cope with it.”

Throughout the turbulent 1950s, Colan’s personal life kept pace with the ups and downs of his profession. His emotional woes actually began in 1946, when he first returned from Manila and tried to resume his relationship with Toni. But having been virtually incommunicado for the nearly two years he was gone, Gene was not well-received.

Professionally, the course was no smoother. A full-time freelancer once he left Timely, Colan had to constantly hustle to line up assignments. And then once he secured them, he had to lock himself into his home studio to complete them. Colan was productive – he generally produced two finished pages per day, seven days per week – but he had to work nearly around the clock to succeed.

“We had an argument because I didn’t write while I was in the service,” Colan says. To his mind, the oversight was simply chalked up to youth. “You get overseas, you’re young, and you forget these things,” he says. “I didn’t think she’d remember me or care much about it.”

“I had to work my butt off all day, all night and into the next morning,” Colan says. “My father would say to me, “You think you’re making money? You’re going to hand all that back to the doctor!” My mother would say to him, “Keep quiet, and let him work. A little work never hurt anybody.”

He thought wrong. “Right away, she let me have it–oh, boy, she did,” Colan says. “She put me in my place. I was all stutter- War Comics: Splash page to Battleground #3, (1953). ing and stammering. I wanted to come back at her with something, but I couldn’t. She was better with words than I was. I just let it go.” Colan produced some wonderful genre work during this period Soon after the split-up with Toni, Colan met another young woman named Sallee. “She lived only a few blocks from where I did,” Colan says. “I was going out with her friend, and had seen Sallee once. We double-dated, and I was very taken by her – she was a very good looking girl.” Before long, talk turned to marriage – which seemed like the

GENE COLAN

– war, crime, western and horror stories for a variety of publishers, including Atlas, nee Timely. And he did finally get attached to an ongoing character in 1954, when DC hired him to draw the comic book version of William Boyd’s Hopalong Cassidy movies. But at the same time, Colan felt besieged by some of the editors he worked with – two in particular: Harvey Kurtzman and Bob Kanigher. 34

So, how could a young up-and-comer such as Gene Colan not want to draw for EC?

In and Out at EC In 1952, Harvey Kurtzman was one of the most powerful editors at one of the most influential comics companies, overseeing the groundbreaking adventure comics Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales for EC Comics. Three years later, EC effectively would be shut down by the anti-comic book fervor ignited by

“I tried to get in with Harvey Kurtzman,” Colan says. “But he was very difficult to deal with. I got one try-out, and I had to almost literally nag him into it.”

First Born: Colan’s daughters Valerie and Jill, from his first marriage, circa 1958. The try-out was the six-page war story “Wake!” which appeared in Two-Fisted Tales #30, Nov.-Dec. 1952. The story is signed by Colan and betrays great evidence of his textured penciling style, but also looks influenced by the cartoonier touch of Jack Davis, one of Kurtzman’s regular stable of artists. Colan poured himself into this job, hoping it would lead to bigger and better work at EC. Then he invited Kurtzman home for dinner to discuss the audition. “He didn’t really jump up and down over it,” Colan says. “He didn’t think I had hit the mark.”

EC Rarity: Splash to “Wake,” Colan’s one-and-only EC story, from Two-Fisted Tales #52, (1952).

Colan never got another EC assignment after that – a distinction he shared with fellow comics great Joe Kubert, who was similarly rejected by Kurtzman.

Fredric Wertham’s 1953 treatise Seduction of the Innocent and the U.S. Senate Subcommittee’s 1954 investigation of juvenile delinquency. But in its heyday from 1950-1954, EC produced some of comics’ most memorable stories, executed by some of the medium’s best artists, including Johnny Craig, Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen, Bernie Krigstein, John Severin, Al Williamson and Wallace Wood.

Around that same time in 1952, Kurtzman was hospitalized because of exhaustion and jaundice. As a kind gesture, Colan visited Kurtzman’s hospital room – and was summarily insulted. “He looked at me and said “You’re the perfect dupe,” Colan remembers. The charge might have been accurate – Colan was young and green, and he would believe most anything that anybody would tell him. But Kurtzman’s attitude and tone were totally off-putting. “He was kind of nasty about it,” Colan says. “He was not someone I wanted to continue with, so I didn’t.”

HIGH HOPES AND HARD TIMES

Viva la Hoppy: These scans of Colan’s Hopalong Cassidy work are taken from French editions of the stories. John Romita recalls what it was like working with Kanigher.

Down and Out at DC Colan was in heaven in late 1952, when he finally broke in at DC Comics – the premier publisher in the business.

Romita: He considered himself a boy wonder. He was very egotistical. I used to do romance stories from his scripts. The saving grace for me was that he wasn’t my editor; he was just the guy who wrote the scripts. I worked on a series with Kanigher – he wrote two series for me in the romance dept. One about an airline stewardess, and one about a nurse. He used to compliment me whenever he’d see me in the bullpen. “Like the stuff… like the stuff…” That was about the amount of conversation we had. Then one day we were in the elevator together, and he said “Like the stuff.” I, like an innocent fool…. I used to do some adjustments to his pages. If he had a heavy-copy panel, I might take a balloon from one panel and put it in the next. Just because I was distributing space. I was so stupid and naïve; I said to him “It doesn’t bother you, does it, that I sometimes switch some of the panels around and move some of the balloons from one panel to another?” He started to chew me out in the elevator! “Who the hell do you think you are, changing my stuff? Where do you come off changing my stuff? You don’t know anything about this business!” I figured that’s it; I’m finished at DC. But he never mentioned it to the editor; he kept it to himself. I think I worked there another year after that.

But he soon found himself in hell, working for brutally abusive writer/editor Bob Kanigher. Kanigher, a prolific writer who was equally adept in any genre – he enjoyed long, memorable runs on both Wonder Woman and Sgt. Rock, to name just two of his diverse characters – first broke into comics at age 25 in 1940. By 1952 he was the chief writer/editor of DC’s “big five” war comics – Our Army at War, Star-Spangled War, Our Fighting Forces, GI Combat and All-American Men of War – and he exercised more than a little proprietary interest in the artists who drew his stories. “He was impossible,” Colan says. “Kanigher was very abusive. I think he was depressed – he was a lunatic, in plain English.” Sometimes Kanigher’s complaints would be about composition, other times about storytelling, but always the criticisms would be delivered with a cutting edge. “There was just no pleasing him–it was a brutal time,” Colan says.

GENE COLAN

One time Romita witnessed Kanigher lighting into Colan over his depiction of a romance story. “Kanigher was telling him that his 36

girls did not look trim and stylish,” Romita says. “He used to say things like “You call that a good looking girl? Look at the fat waist! The stupid hair comb!” Right in the middle of the bullpen, where everybody was listening! It was a terrible moment. I don’t know how Gene didn’t let go and clock him right there.” Ultimately, in 1957, Colan did explode at Kanigher. “One day I told him “Y’know, you’re crazy,” Colan recalls. “Julie Schwartz, his desk was back-to-back with Kanigher, and he heard me. Kanigher said “Julie, did you hear what he said? I’m crazy.” I said “yeah, you’re crazy.” Oh, I wanted to throw him out the window.” Instead, Colan got thrown out of the office – fired from his DC assignments.

“The only other thing I could think of was magazine illustration, which I really didn’t want to do, but that’s where all the work seemed to be,” Colan says. He approached two prominent New York advertising firms, Cooper Studios and Chaite, but neither offered any encouragement. “They wouldn’t have anything to do with me,” Colan says. “I was knocked around quite a bit.” Eventually Colan did secure work with a smaller advertising agency. But the art director didn’t particularly like Colan’s style, and Gene didn’t enjoy the atmosphere or the assignments. “I worked there for a few years, and then I was fired,” he says. “My attitude had changed. I didn’t want to work, didn’t want to do anything.” When he lost that job, Colan lost everything – including his family when his marriage finally ended in divorce.

Desperation It was a tough time to lose a job. For a while, Colan was able to pick up more genre stories back at Timely/Atlas, where Stan Lee once again was filling countless anthology comics. But just like before, boom times led to bust, and when the Atlas line imploded in 1957, Colan was essentially out of work. “It was like plunging down an elevator shaft or a dark tunnel,” Colan recalls. “You just don’t know where you’re going to wind up.” Earlier in the decade, he’d tried to diversify his portfolio by launching his own syndicated newspaper strips – one, a humor strip called “Mary & Chester,” another a variation of Lloyd Bridges’ Sea Hunt TV show. Neither sold.

Forced to move back in with his parents, Gene was unable to find any comics work at all in 1959. Finally, he secured a job drawing educational film strips for Paul Sherry at Sherry Studios in New York. Colan worked at Sherry for a few years into the early 1960s, abandoning his lush rendering for a simplified, line-drawing style. “Whenever I tried to do sort of realistic drawings, they didn’t like it,” Colan says. “They wanted me to simplify. I would fall asleep at my table, it was so boring.” He’d begun the decade with high hopes, but by the end of the 1950s Colan was divorced – from his family and comics. “It was a rough ride,” he says. “What a nightmare.”

Sample Strips: In the mid-1950s, when Colan was trying to diversify his work, he drew a couple of weeks’ continuity of a strip he called “Mary and Chester,” a humor feature about a charwoman and her husband, who was night watchman at the Schubert Theater. 37

HIGH HOPES AND HARD TIMES

DC War: Page from “The Phantom Frogman,” of Our Army at War #13, (1953); inks by Joe Giella. GENE COLAN

Secrets #1: Timely Secrets A Historical Perspective on Gene Colan’s Timely Comics Work By Dr. Michael J. Vassallo

Gene Colan’s debut at Timely Comics coincides with yet another expansion by Martin Goodman of his burgeoning comic book line. Never a leader, always a follower, in 1948 Timely introduced new genres (crime, romance, western) and titles across the board and even made a last-ditch effort to inject life into its hero line with titles like Blackstone,

Genre Colan: Splash to Complete Mystery #1, August 1948 Namora, Sun Girl, Venus and The Witness. It was into this milieu that Gene’s first published Timely work seems to have appeared, in the Spring ‘48, #1 issue of Lawbreakers Always Lose, in a story titled “Adam and Eve – Crime Incorporated”. This job was Gene’s very first story for Stan Lee at Timely.

Timely First?: Is this Gene Colan’s first Timely Comics work, a story from Lawbreakers Always Lose #1, spring 1948?

Colan debuted as a penciler, and almost without exception his earliest work in 1948 was penciling for the crime comics line in titles such as Lawbreakers Always Lose, AllTrue Crime, Crimefighters, Justice Comics and Complete Mystery. One exception was a Human Torch story in the July ‘48 issue (#31), and I wouldn’t be surprised if a full

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search of all concurrently published hero books turned up one or two more Colan stories. While Timely’s superhero titles were certainly waning as the decade wound down – a trend reflected industry-wide – contrary to popular belief, the superhero art assignments were not necessarily given only to “name” artists. Certainly, artists such as Bill Everett, Carl Burgos, Mike Sekowsky and Syd Shores pulled down the majority of the plum characters, but there was so much being published that many late1940s hero stories were drawn by second-tier artists, some of whom have yet to be identified today.

Colan, even at this early juncture, had more raw talent and could practically draw rings around almost anyone there, including Shores. Landing Complete Mystery shows you how much Stan Lee immediately recognized Colan’s talent and had unconditional faith in his ability, because the second book-length issue went to Syd Shores and the third and fourth went to Carl Burgos – both longstanding Timely veterans. By cover date Jan. ‘49 Colan landed the assignment of drawing a Witness story that was ultimately used as a back-up in Ideal – The World’s Greatest Stories #4, another short-run experimental title that attempted to do “book length” stories based on historical figures. The Witness was a Shadow/Phantom Stranger-like character who had his own one-shot in 1948, and additional stories were possibly scheduled for a second issue that never appeared, thus used as fillers in other titles.

Within three months of his debut, Colan had nine crime stories under his belt, and he was given the Torch story in #31 to accompany a Sekowsky Sub-Mariner story in the same issue. Colan handled this iconic Timely character wonderfully and with enough deftness to imply he’d been drawing these heroes for years (which he hadn’t), and in my opinion surpassed many One observation that can earlier versions of the be readily discerned in character. But as superhero much of the Timely art is the sales plummeted, more problem with differences in attention was being given to the finished product. Timely the new genre of crime had many staff inkers of comics, which had debuted varying talent. Some were at Timely with Official True wonderful like Chris Rule, Crime Cases and Justice George Klein, Bob Stewart, Comics sporting Fall ‘47 Chu Hing, and Vince cover dates. By 1948 the Alascia. Their inks over crime line expanded and Timely’s pencil artists in Martin Goodman and Stan 1948 and 1949 resulted in Lee tried an experiment. All flowing, cinematic panels crime titles and genre titles and lushly rendered stories. in general were usually But other less talented anthology books consisting inkers resulted in stiffer, less of 4, 5 or 6 stories per issue. Shades of the Shadow: Colan draws The Witness in Ideal detailed and less vibrant In the spring of 1948 a new #4, 1949. story art. Looking back after crime title changed this format, almost 60 years, we must and Timely attempted to do a “book-length” 25-page crime story accept that the Timely bullpen was a comic book factory whose each issue. Stan Lee took this title upon himself as he scripted sole imperative was to get out as much story art as fast as three of the first four issues, and the art chores of the showcase competently possible. The delineation of duties between penciler debut issue of Complete Mystery #1 (Aug. ‘48) were given to Gene and inker helped facilitate this speed. It was basically an assembly Colan. Colan turned in a magnificent story and all the storyline, and a large portion of the post-war material was turned out telling techniques that would be honed to perfection in the future in this fashion. There were exceptions. Bill Everett was a freelancer are evident here. who inked his own work, as did apparently funny-animal artist Milt Stein (also a freelancer), Al Jaffee, Morris Weiss and others Almost from day one, Colan was one of the best pencilers at in the humor titles. Allen Bellman was a staff artist who inked his Timely. Colan may be modest and relate how Syd Shores helped own stories, and I’m sure there were a handful of others, him out and gave him pointers (and this is certainly true), but including Carl Burgos. GENE COLAN

As 1949 progressed, in addition to crime stories, Timely’s newly added horror line, debuting with Amazing Mysteries #32 and #33, each featured stories penciled by Colan, as did the second horror title added Marvel Tales #93 (Aug. ‘49) and #94 (Nov. ‘49) (continuing the numbering of Timely’s flagship title Marvel Mystery Comics), and the third title as well, Captain America’s

scious criminal mind. A real tour-de-force and an inkling of what is to come in the panoramic background settings of Dr. Strange 20 years later. I want to digress a bit about artist John Buscema, one of Colan’s best-known contemporaries. Big John was very prolific at Timely in 1948-50 and was all over the romance, western and crime titles, including many covers. While Gene’s Timely output was heavily slanted in the crime books, Buscema for some reason was heaviest in the romance books (Faithful, Girl Comics, Love Adventures, Love Tales, My Own Romance, True Life Tales And True Secrets) followed by crime (All-True Crime, Amazing Detective Cases, Crimefighters, Justice Comics, Lawbreakers Always Lose, True Complete Mystery) and then westerns (All Western Winners, Blaze Carson, Tex Morgan, Two-Gun Western, Western Outlaws And Sheriffs,

Night Cap: Colan draws the cover to Captain America’s final Golden Age issue, #75 from 1950. Weird Tales. The latter was the conversion to a horror format for its last two issues by the formidable Timely hero title Captain America, with a Colan story in #74 (Oct. ‘49) and #75 (Feb. ‘50) ,as well as sporting a Colan cover on #75, the very last issue! This was an additional coup. Only a handful of artists handled cover chores for Timely’s genre True Love: Colan lends his touch to romance in this story from books, and Colan clearly was considered one of Timely’s Love Romances #101, 1962. top tier artists. But before we say good-bye to Captain America, a final study of the very last hero issues turns up a single Western Winners and Wild Western), including romance-westerns Colan-penciled story in #72 (May ‘49), “Murder In The (Cowboy Romances, Love Trails, Rangeland Love, Romances Of The Mind!” This is a wonderful 12-page psychological crime West). In addition he drew stories in Man Comics Suspense, True Adventures, and Young Men. All this pencil art was inked by a varithriller by Colan, co-starring Golden Girl and with swirling ety of inkers and like Gene Colan’s Timely output, the slickness of depictions of insanity and psychedelic vistas of the subcon- the finished product varied from issue to issue and story to story. 41

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Vince Alascia was one of the better Buscema inkers and most of the rest remain unidentified. In a few of them the Buscema features are very strong and I wonder if he possibly inked a few himself. Like Colan, the seeds of greatness can be seen in the diverse story genres and the groundwork is being laid for his later blossoming. John Buscema at Timely was a wonderful diamond in the rough and with Gene Colan is one of the two greatest Timely bullpen stalwarts to have long-running success in the Marvel age of comics.

better inker assignments for the romance stories and was the most prolific romance penciler on staff at this time, drawing stories in just about every romance issue published from 1948-1950. Nineteen-fifty saw more crime stories, but then a dive into the horror line in titles such as the aforementioned Marvel Tales, Journey Into Unknown Worlds and now also Suspense, as well as a story for Timely’s only sports title, Sports Action in #3 (June ‘50). But the event that rocked Timely next had the happy result in allowing us to see the full art – pencils and inks – of Gene Colan. At some point in mid 1950, after discovering the oftheard “closet full of inventory”, Martin Goodman closed his staff bullpen and except for a handful of production artists

Early Horror: Here’s a ghost story by Colan from Suspense #8, 1951. As 1949 ended, Colan’s work could be found in western titles such as True Western, Rangeland Love, and then in many romance stories. Timely in mid-1949 flooded the Zombies: Colan horror cover from 1954. stands with romance titles, and the demand for romance story art was at an all-time high. Gene penciled stories in and editors, let everyone go. All story art would now be done freetitles like Our Love, True Life Tales, Loveland, My Own Romance, lance. Somewhat contrary to Colan’s recollection, the bullpen staff Young Hearts, Lovers, Best Love and Love Romances. These stories was seemingly let go a little at a time over the course of the early are not as well-inked as the crime and horror stories were and months with a possible watershed firing in mid-1950, which is show good storytelling, but a less-than-stellar finished appearance what Colan probably remembers, as he was likely one of the last to – very generic by my accounting. Mike Sekowsky by far got the go. When Colan went freelance, he began to sign all his stories. GENE COLAN

And as Timely, now known as Atlas, expanded into the early 1950s it flooded the stands and was by far the industry leader in “quantity” of redundant titles. Colan was all over the place in 1951 and 1952, drawing crime, horror, westerns and for the newly-introduced war and adventure titles like War Comics, Man Comics, Men’s Adventures, Young Men, War Combat, War Adventures, Battlefield and Combat Kelly. In the horror titles he could be found in addition to some of the aforementioned, also in Venus, Mystic, Mystery Tales, Astonishing and in Strange Tales #7, in what may be the first Colan vampire story, “He Wished He Was a Vampire”. 1951 and 1952 also had Colan in crime titles such as Amazing Detective Cases, Spy Cases, Justice Comics and All-True Crime. He also drew the occasional romance story as in Love Romances #17 (July ‘51) and My Own Romance #18 (Sept. ‘51), the latter seemingly inked by Mike Becker due to the fact that it was leftover Timely bullpen inventory.

Another anomaly is also noticed. Possibly due to the fact that Colan was concurrently working for DC, he began to not sign his stories for Atlas in late 1955 and will actually never sign them again throughout his continued tenure freelancing for Stan Lee, including his earliest years back at Marvel in the mid-1960s, when he’s known as Adam Austin. At Atlas, his signature vanishes and his style changes to a looser, more open and simpler storytelling technique, allowing quicker penciling and less time spent on the stories, thereby allowing his output to increase. Almost without exception, every story from 1956 and 1957 is exemplified by a large page one, full-page splash and simpler panels in the pages that follow. This complemented the tamer post-code content well, and Colan was as prolific as anyone, perhaps second only to Joe Maneely in the total quantity of stories produced in 1956 and 1957 – well over 120 stories for Stan Lee alone, 99% exclusively for the war titles, and in addition to what he was doing over at National. Another peculiar thing I noticed and never confirmed is that there are a handful of these 1956-57 stories that I could almost swear were inked by none other than Mort Drucker! This is not an established fact, just a strange observation of similarity by me, an observation that Colan could not recall or remember when I asked him about it several years ago.

By 1953 and 1954, Colan settled in almost exclusively with horror and war stories for Stan Lee. Colan drew for almost every title being published in these genres, including a handful of covers on Battle Action #4, War Comics #17, Adventures Into Terror #27 and a killer cover for the prototypical Atlas horror title Menace, on #9 (Jan. ‘54). There also were western stories, a few romance tales, a humor story As the Spring of 1957 in Wild #4 (June ‘54), “The rolls around, as is commonly Monster Maker”, and a real known, Martin Goodman esoteric religious bible story Rare SF: Although never a huge SF fan, any work was good work to slashed – actually decimated adaptation, “The Good Colan in 1962, when he drew this story for Strange Tales #102. – his line when he lost his Samaritan,” in Bible Tales distributor, and the “Atlas For Young People #4 (Feb. ‘54). As 1954 led into 1955, at least Implosion” occurred. Atlas was the largest industry publisher of 75% of all the work Colan did was in the war titles. He was every- titles and employed a vast army of comic book freelancers. When where! Battle, Battlefront, Battleground, Battle Action, Navy it went under, scores of comic book artists were forced out of the Action, War Comics, Marines In Battle, as well as horror titles like business due to lack of work and the loss of their main work Journey Into Mystery, Journey Into Unknown Worlds and westerns accounts, many to never return. Stan Lee and a small group of freeand romance stories in Love Tales and My Own Romance. This lancers including Dick Ayers, Jack Keller, Al Hartley, Morris artwork is absolutely stunning, almost surreal in its cross Weiss and Joe Maneely, kept a small line of 16 bi-monthly titles between flowing cinematic rendering and also lifelike photo real- going utilizing National’s distributor, Independent News, and kept ism. Colan was settling down and crystallizing a style that would publishing a combination of inventory and new story art. Colan serve him for the rest of his career. had done many stories that were turned in before the crash, but never published, and they would appear as inventory for Stan Lee 43

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in titles throughout 1958 and even into early 1959. In June 1958, as the inventory was running out, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko returned to Stan Lee at the exact moment that Stan’s #1 artist Joe Maneely was tragically killed in a commuter train accident. Kirby jump-started a new fantasy line with Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Paul Reinman and others, and Goodman continued publishing the teen, western and romance titles in what is known as the “pre-hero”

period. This would ultimately lead to the re-birth of Marvel Comics with Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. ‘61). During this earliest Marvel period, Colan drew almost 20 new stories for Stan Lee, none of them hero stories for the new super hero line. This was a very bad time for Colan, as you know, and I’m sure Stan fed him as many scripts as he could while not taking them away from his regular freelancers. Colan drew two romance stories in Teen-Age Romance #85 (Jan. ‘62) and #86 (Mar. ‘62), the last two issues of this title; two stories for Journey Into Mystery #81 (June ‘62) and #82 (July ‘62), the last issues before the debut of Thor in #83; a story in Strange Tales #102 (Nov. ‘62), and a story titled “The Last Rocket” in Tales Of Suspense #39 (Mar. ‘63), the issue that debuted Iron Man. Colan would also draw about 9 or 10 western stories for the titles Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt Outlaw during 1963 and into 1964. With the Marvel superhero line up and running, why Gene Colan was not given a chance to dive in and be a part of the resurgence is unknown. As it stands, these stories would be the very last work Colan would do for Stan Lee until his return as Adam Austin in a few short years, and caps a 15-year period from 1948 to 1963, what I call “Gene Colan at Marvel, the Timely Years.”

At Home on the Range: Colan loves the wild west, as evidenced by this splash from Kid Colt #114, 1963. GENE COLAN

About the Author: A Manhattan dentist by day, by night Dr. Michael J. Vassallo (Doc V., as he’s known to collectors and historians) squirrels himself into his basement among moulding piles of pulp paper where for the last 20 years he has been trying to accurately unravel the creator history of Timely comics. With an incredibly tolerant wife Maggie, children Michelle and Jason, and a Sheltie named Cindy after Ken Bald’s Timely teen siren, “Doc V.”, in his defense, can at least attest to the fact that he’s home every night. He is also extremely grateful and happy to shed a light on a wonderful and often neglected part of Gene Colan’s career.

5 A Love Story

icture: A singles-night social at a Poconos resort in Pennsylvania in 1962. All of the hopeful attendees – Gene Colan among them – stand outside on a stone patio, when all of a sudden, just before dinner, people start pairing up for the evening. “I am so startled by the suddenness of it that I can’t move quickly enough,” Colan says. “And I didn’t know what to do anyway; I was very shy about these things.” And then he spots her: “Absolutely the most beautiful woman I ever saw before in my life.”

By 1962, Gene Colan was almost completely discouraged. His marriage was over. His comics career was hopelessly stalled, following the collapse at Timely/Atlas and his own firing at DC. At age 35, Colan lived with his parents, worked at a no-brain illustration job, and he wondered ‘When will things finally turn around?’ Then it happened, starting with a suggestion from his cousin Helene that he go away for a week to the Tamiment Resort in the Poconos. “I never liked to travel anywhere, and certainly not by myself – I was not used to that type of thing,” Colan says. “But I went to this place – didn’t know a soul – and thought ‘Let’s see what happens…’” “What happened” was that Colan attended a fateful singlesnight dinner, where he spotted 19-year-old Adrienne Gail Brickman of Fairlawn, NJ. And that was it. Colan: There was Adrienne with a friend of hers, sitting sort of on the stone fence. She was absolutely the most beautiful woman I ever saw before in my life. She was very young, maybe 19 or 20. I couldn’t believe that our eyes met, and there seemed to be a mutual attraction. I started to walk toward her, and yet I was walking off in a different direction at the same time. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to start up with her, but at the same time I felt sort of embarrassed about the whole affair. Somehow it worked out, and we did get together that very moment. She was just wonderful to me.

day, dined and danced by night. “There was an immediate connection,” Colan says. “I was even wondering if I ever got married to her, what would the children look like? She was so beautiful; I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. I thought I’d met a movie star.” Colan drove Adrienne home to Fairlawn at the end of their stay, and from then on they kept in constant communication. Late at night, not wanting his parents to know his personal business, Colan would walk downstairs to the neighborhood candy store, where he’d use the pay phone to call Adrienne at home. “I’d speak to her for hours on end,” Colan says. “In fact, I spoke to her so late one night that the operator on the other end of the line fell asleep and forgot to bill us!” Before long, the talk turned to marriage – a topic unpopular in both the Colan and Brickman households. “My family was like, “What are you jumping back into it for? You just got out of one marriage, and now you want to get into another?” Colan says. “Her family didn’t like that there was such an age difference, and that I’d been married.” Despite the families’ concerns, on Valentine’s Day 1963 Eugene Jules Colan and Adrienne Gail Brickman presented themselves to be married at New York City Hall. It was a weekend, but they found a judge who would marry them. And Gene convinced one of his colleagues at Sherry Studios to stand in as a witness. After a quick honeymoon, the young couple settled into a modest apartment in Queens. And then, after settling down Gene personally, Adrienne set about helping him re-establish himself professionally.

Starting that night, Colan and young Adrienne were inseparable. For the remainder of the vacation, they swam and strolled by

The rehab began one day soon after the marriage, when

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Adrienne popped in unannounced at Gene’s office. “It was the most boring job I ever had – I even fell asleep at the art board, it was so bad,” Colan says. And Adrienne picked up on the bad vibes right away.

we don’t need this place – and you’re going to get work elsewhere. You really shouldn’t be here.” I kind of went against her at first because I had nothing to leave for – at least there was an income coming in. She said “To heck with the income; don’t worry.” The way she acted, she could sell you a house on swamp water! I let her lead the way. I really didn’t have the courage to do it, but she had the courage for two of us. So off I went with her. Took my art board, packed it into a cab, and off we went.

Colan: She said to me “You’ve got to get out of here,” so easy like that. “To work without artistic challenge will destroy your soul, your passion for life,” she said. And I said ‘Go where?’ She says, “We’re going to leave here –

In fact, they brought that art table home to their Queens apartment, setting it up in a corner of the bedroom. Gene would work all day, all night and into the early hours of the next morning. When Adrienne would grow tired, she’d climb into bed and listen to talk radio with Gene until she fell asleep. Sometime later, Gene would retire to bed for a few hours before arising and renewing his daily routine. Looking back, Colan recognizes now that Adrienne’s leadership qualities were emerging even then. “Adrienne is very strongminded; she knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want,” Colan says. “She can’t stand injustice, and when sees it – she takes control.” In Gene’s case, someone else looking after his best interests is a good thing. It frees him to focus on the artwork at hand. In this way, truly, the Colans complement one another. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs like every marriage has, but it’s held together,” Gene says. “Miraculously, it’s held together.” And soon after Adrienne convinced Gene to quit his dead-end job, Stan Lee called with work.

The Colans: Mr. and Mrs. Eugene and Adrienne Colan, married Feb. 14, 1963.

GENE COLAN

6 The Early 1960s: Make Mine Marvel

icture: Sometime in the late 1960s, early ’70s, at a New York hotel – maybe the Taft. The time and place aren’t nearly as important as the event, which is Gene Colan’s first comics convention. It’s a dizzying experience, all the fans, the energy, the attention paid to Colan, who not so many years earlier couldn’t even get a job in comics. “I was wearing a suit coat and tie, I remember, and by the end of the day my shirttail was hanging out,” Colan says. “The fans – one of them even followed me into the bathroom and asked if I would sign his book! I was overwhelmed by it.”

Then, in 1965, as Marvel’s comics were bursting with more characters than Kirby and Ditko could handle – Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, the Avengers, Daredevil… Stan called Gene and asked him to come back full-time.

What a difference a few years make. While Gene Colan was toiling outside of comics in the early 1960s, his old boss Stan Lee was firing off a revolution within the dormant medium. Beginning with the debut of The Fantastic Four in 1961, Lee and primary co-creators Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko inaugurated a whole new era: The Marvel Age of Comics, whose superheroes emphasized personality over platitudes, and whose creators were encouraged to showcase storytelling and style over conservatism and conformity.

But Gene was skeptical. “There was something about Marvel that I didn’t like. It seemed looser than I cared for,” Colan says. “DC was extremely structured and, I thought, maybe the better of the two places.” Colan recalls visiting with Lee at his home while delivering the latest pages to a western story. That was when Lee asked Colan to quit DC and work full-time for Marvel.

Colan’s path back to Marvel began shortly after his Feb. 14, 1963, marriage when young wife Adrienne encouraged him to quit his job at Sherry Studios and renew his efforts to get back into comics.

Colan: I told Stan, “If I’m going to leave one place, it’s got to be for a good reason – not just because you want me to come over.” At It was slow going at first. Colan was able first he didn’t offer anything to make me to get a little work from the romance want to switch. I said, “How much more can Early Marvel: Splash to Gunsmoke department at DC, where the Kanigher you pay me than I’m getting from DC?” He Western #65, July 1961 – months conflict had more-or-less been forgotten. didn’t want to pay me anything. So I shook his And then in 1963 he scored a steady assign- before the Marvel era began with the hand – I was at his house when this happened ment at Dell, illustrating the tie-in to the TV publication of Fantastic Four #1. – and I said, “Well, Stan, I understand how series Ben Casey. you feel, but you have to understand how I feel. If you don’t care enough to pay me more than I’m getting now, Also in 1963, Colan began to pick up work again from Stan then what’s the point of coming over?” I said “Thank you very Lee. A mystery story here and there as back-up in Journey into much,”got up and shook his hand and left. The very next day, he Mystery; the occasional western story for Kid Colt Outlaw. called me back and said “Come on in and let’s talk.” That’s how I got back in. I had to call his bluff.

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John Romita, who’d worked alongside Colan in the romance dept. at DC, jumped ship and joined Marvel a few months earlier, and recalls Gene seeking his counsel about whether he should accept Stan’s offer.

Even so, Colan refused to let go of his DC assignments when he first rejoined Marvel, and he also held onto his name. Fearful of repercussions if DC’s editors found out he was moonlighting, Colan drew his initial Marvel superhero stories under the pseudonym of “Adam Austin” – a name made up by Stan Lee, who found alliterative names such as “Bruce Banner” (the Hulk’s secret identity) and “Peter Parker” (Spider-Man’s) easier to remember. Not that Colan’s style wasn’t instantly recognizable to anyone who cared to notice. But at least he wasn’t openly rubbing his moonlighting into his DC editors’ faces. And at Marvel in the mid’60s, pseudonyms were the norm. Penciler Gil Kane debuted at Marvel as “Scott Edwards,” and inkers Mike Esposito, Jack Abel, and Frank Giacoia initially appeared as “Mickey Demeo,” “Gary Michaels” and “Frankie Ray” respectively. Few artists who’d lived through comics’ tough times in the 1950s were willing to stake their real names to such a risky venture as Marvel in the early-to-mid-’60s.

Subby and Shellhead

Early Marvel II: Colan stories from Tales of Suspense #39, left, (the debut issue of Iron Man, by the way) and Journey into Mystery #82, right. Is that a self-portrait of Colan? Romita: He said to me “I want to ask you a question. You know I’ve been stung a couple of times by these layoffs. Do you think there’s any chance this could happen again?” As 1967 approached, he said “I’m conscious that there were collapses in ’47 [actually, ’49] and ’57. I’m afraid if I stay here until ’67 there will be another collapse.” I told him “Gene, I don’t really know; I’m not a businessman. But this doesn’t look anything like the market of the ’40s and ’50s. To me, I don’t feel any danger of anything collapsing, Certainly not in ’67. Down the road, who knows?” But he was ready to find another source of income because he didn’t trust the industry. I had to allay his fears so that he would stay. GENE COLAN

With the August 1965 issue of Tales to Astonish, Gene Colan made his Marvel Age debut, drawing the first 1960s solo appearance of the revived 1940s character, the SubMariner – a short-tempered, super-strengthened, waterbreathing, half-breed prince who lorded over an undersea nation of warriors, and who constantly waged battle with the surface world. The Sub-Mariner, created by stylist Bill Everett in the late 1930s, was a prototype comics character – one of Timely’s “big three” of the 1940s, alongside the Human Torch and Captain America. With Timely’s rebirth as Marvel, the Sub-Mariner was revived by Lee & Kirby as an anti-hero in Fantastic Four, guest-starred in other comics in the early ’60s, and received enough favorable response to warrant a shot as a 12-page monthly co-feature alongside the Incredible Hulk in Tales to Astonish. The Sub-Mariner’s debut story was entitled “The Start of the Quest,” and it applied equally to the character and to Gene Colan’s career at Marvel. Ironically, Colan’s first Marvel superhero assignment was the one he liked least. “I didn’t enjoy the Sub-Mariner,” Colan recalls. He remembered the character from his stint at Timely in the 1940s, and certainly he respected the work of Sub-Mariner creator Everett. 48

But he wasn’t comfortable with the character’s settings or style. “There was a lot of underwater stuff, which was all right in and of itself. But [Sub-Mariner] comes from this place called Atlantis, and that meant a lot of work on a lot of stuff that I didn’t want to get into. It was almost like a science fiction thing, and I just didn’t relate to it all that strongly.” Then there was the flat-head, Frankenstein-like appearance Everett had given the character. “I just couldn’t do the flat head,” Colan says. “It looked like the top of his head had been lopped off! That just worked against my grain.” Still, an assignment was an assignment,

Created by Lee and artist Don Heck in 1963, “Iron Man” combined all the classic elements of early Marvel: character, conflict, and a healthy dose of Commie-bashing. The “iron man” was Tony Stark, a millionaire weapons manufacturer who’s wounded and imprisoned in Vietnam. Dying from a piece of shrapnel stuck too close to his heart, Stark creates a transistorized iron armor that empowers him – while also keeping his heart beating. Taking over the character roughly three years after its debut, Colan was challenged at once to bring out the expression in a hero

When Titans Clash: Iron Man and Sub-Mariner square off on this cover from Tales of Suspense #79. and Colan gladly took the job. He made the character his own, rounding off the Sub-Mariner’s head so that he looked more akin to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. The stories also quickly took on the Colan style, exploding with full-page action scenes, and engaging the readers with unique character expression. Where Stan Lee had succeeded at writing superheroes with believable human qualities, Colan was the master at illustrating these facets. Five months after his debut on “Sub-Mariner,” Colan was given his second big assignment: drawing the monthly, 12-page adventures of Iron Man in Tales of Suspense. Splash Page: Colan/Colletta artwork from Tales to Astonish #76, April 1966. 49

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who wore an expressionless iron mask. Colan: I didn’t have to worry about the details in a face for one thing, which allowed me to work more speedily. The only thing I tried to figure out was how to capture emotion in his mask. Eventually I got the thought that this was all artistic license, and you could draw things that in real life wouldn’t happen, so I got it into my head that maybe this mask is made out special steel that could flex, so if he smiled you would know it, or if he got angry or sorrowful it would show because he could make that suit

move a little. It had to be subtle. I enjoyed it; I really did. I liked Iron Man. So did the fans and Gene’s contemporaries. Roy Thomas, a prominent comics fan in the early ’60s and Marvel’s #2 writer by the middle of the decade, recalls Colan’s immediate impact at Marvel. “When Gene’s work first started coming out at Marvel as ‘Adam Austin,’ I was still teaching school, so I was seeing it as a fan. And I liked it,” Thomas says. “It had a different look, but it was dynamic. I liked that about it.” Thomas actually scripted Colan’s first Iron Man story in Tales of Suspense #73, but the credits for that issue leave the reader wondering who exactly did what. As opposed to most Marvel Comics of the day, which clearly spell out who wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered a particular story, this issue’s credit box reads: “All these Bullpen buddies had a hand in this one: Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Adam Austin, Gary Michaels, Sol Brodsky, Flo Steinberg and merrie ol’ Marie Severin!”

“Stan asked me to dialogue [that story] after it had already been penciled,” Thomas recalls. “Of course, it was beautiful stuff, and I had a lot of fun with it. It was one of the first superhero stories I did.”

IM in Action: At left, Iron Man battles the Freak in a Jack Abel-inked page from TOS #75, March 1966. At right, see a multi-paneled end page from TOS #86. GENE COLAN

Ultimately, Lee ended up rewriting about half of the script, Thomas recalls – hence the long list of credits. But Roy remains puzzled about why Colan’s debut

wasn’t heralded a bit more prominently. “In retrospect, [the credits box] looks odd because you’d think Stan would have found a way to play up Gene (or Adam Austin) as artist.” No worries. Before long, in his Iron Man and Sub-Mariner stories, Colan found his own ways to announce his presence.

then get George Tuska to draw it. I’m not George Tuska.” I had a lot of nerve saying that, but I just wouldn’t do it! I was prepared to walk if I had to! I had a lot of nerve to even consider that; I had a family to support. But Stan never bothered me again. Roy Thomas, who worked in the Bullpen as Lee’s right-hand man when Colan returned to Marvel, doesn’t recall any discussion

The Man Without Peer John Buscema. John Romita. Werner Roth. Jim Steranko. George Tuska. What do those noted comics artists have in common? Each made his 1960s Marvel debut drawing over story layouts penciled by Jack Kirby, the anointed “king” of the Marvel style. Unlike DC, where the artists were directed to make their stories look the same, at Marvel they were urged to make them feel the same – dynamic, emotional, in the reader’s face. In other words, to draw comics as Jack Kirby drew them. John Romita: That was the whole difference between Stan and DC. Marvel would put storytelling before art. At DC they were more interested in a sharp-looking, quality piece of art. The storytelling was secondary. The guys who were storytellers at DC were Carmine Infantino and Alex Toth. The rest of the guys were what I would call cosmetic artists. They were all good men – the Irv Novicks and all those guys – they did beautiful stuff. But it was cosmetic; it was all to show off how pretty a drawing they could do. They were not getting the guts of the story in there. Stan Lee’s way of ensuring that artists drew comics the Marvel way was to have them take hands-on lessons from Jack Kirby, who would rough out an entire story on art board and give that to the artist as a storytelling blueprint.

There’s one exception. One artist who never was asked to draw over a Jack Kirby layout – who from day one was not just allowed but encouraged to show off Iron Giant: Powerful scene-setter from TOS #86, Feb. 1967. his own natural style. Gene Colan. No one – not even Colan – recalls whether there was ever even a discussion about him drawing a story or two over Kirby layouts. But Gene does know how he would have responded. Colan: I wouldn’t have done it. Stan [in the 1950s] once tried to get me to draw like Joe Maneely, who died in a train accident. I refused to do it. There was another artist, George Tuska, who was very popular at one time–everything that he drew sold books. Stan wanted me to draw like George Tuska, and I said, “Stan, if you want me to draw like George Tuska, 51

about Gene working over Kirby layouts. “When Gene started drawing the Sub-Mariner, Stan just had him start right out doing the pencils, and never had Gene work over Jack for even one story,” Thomas says. “I don’t know if [Stan] thought it just wouldn’t work, or he saw something Gene did and felt “Well, Gene’s got his own style so much that he’s not going to adjust to that like maybe some other people would have.” That was exactly the reason, says Lee himself. “Gene’s style was too unique, too different,” Lee says. “It would have handicapped MAKE MINE MARVEL

Gene [to draw over Kirby layouts]. He shouldn’t have to draw over anyone else’s layouts because it wouldn’t look like Gene Colan.” [For more details, see the Stan Lee/Gene Colan interview at the end of this chapter.] And, of course, the work did look like Gene Colan’s, so before long he said goodbye to the “Adam Austin” ruse and started signing the stories with his own name. By 1966, Colan had been working professionally in comics for over 20 years, but he was only then beginning to explore his true potential as a comics storyteller. Three factors contributed to Colan’s emergence at Marvel: Adrienne’s encouragement – It can’t be overstated enough, the influence of young Mrs. Colan on Gene’s confidence and career moves. She’s the one who made him quit his work-a-day job at Sherry Studios, and pursue a return to comics. She saw possibilities, whereas Gene only saw his next paycheck. Ongoing characters – Colan always said “Give me a steady character that I can sink my teeth into,” and with Sub-Mariner and Iron Man he now had two. These assignments gave Colan the opportunity to establish scenes, settings, characters that he could develop over time – not just within the space of a single five-page

story. “Just living with the character, it became real to me – a real person,” Colan says. “I liked that. And I could get more realistic with the places the character appeared. I would go to downtown NY with my Polaroid and take pictures all over the place. I loved the research. It wasn’t something anyone asked me to do. I took it on myself because it made the work in the end look good to me.” The “Marvel Method” – Without question, the single most important factor in unlocking Colan’s storytelling abilities was Stan Lee turning over half of those responsibilities to Gene. At the time, with the exception of the few comics scripted by Roy Thomas or Stan’s own brother, Larry Lieber, Lee was writing the entire Marvel line. He didn’t have time to write a full script for each individual story, so instead he would huddle with artists such as Kirby, Romita and Colan, giving them just the bare bones of a story idea – “The Mandarin captures Tony Stark, not knowing he’s secretly Iron Man…!” – which the artists then would develop and pace within the allotted space. “I much preferred to work with Stan, because he left everything up to me,” Colan says. “When I worked with Stan, he’d give me a sentence or two, and he’d say, ‘Now, turn that into an 18-page story.’” It didn’t take long for Colan’s style to fully emerge. Within his first few issues of TTA, Gene was opening up the pacing in his SubMariner stories, offering full-page spreads to highlight action scenes or showcase the underwater settings. On Iron Man in TOS,

Captain Marvel, Sub-Mariner and Iron Man drawing from 2002. GENE COLAN

he stylized the armor, giving the character distinctively broad gauntlets, buccaneer-like boots, and a metal face mask inexplicably capable of capturing the expression of the man within the armor. He also played fast-and-loose with page composition, offering full- and half-page splashes, and varying the panel composition on individual pages. Colan: I fooled around a lot with the panels. I had a different thought about the panels, that they should reflect the mood. If it was a quiet conversational scene, then the panels might be a little off-center. If there was any action going on, then I’d go crazy. Stan didn’t like that; he’d say “You’re really throwing off the reader; they don’t know what panel comes second or third…” I really went a little haywire there. I rebelled. I knew how to follow the pages, but I know it wasn’t easy for the reader. I still do [approach pages the same], but now I think I have it more organized so you can follow it. Around this same time, late 1965/early 1966, Colan started freelancing for Jim Warren’s line of black-and-white anthology magazines. And the results were breathtaking. Paired with writer/ editor Archie Goodwin, Colan penciled, inked and wash-toned a dozen or so short stories for Warren’s Creepy, Eerie and Blazing Combat, infusing these magazines with lush, lavishlyrendered artwork that helped raise the line – and Gene himself – to new artistic heights. To that point in his career, the Warren work was the purest Gene Colan artwork ever produced in comics.

This relatively small body of work caught the eye of fans and contemporaries alike, and it influenced Colan’s approach to his Marvel stories. It also didn’t take long for one of Colan’s signature challenges to emerge: His failure to properly block out and pace a story before he sat down to draw it. By his own admission, Colan never read a plot or script from beginning to end before he sat down to draw the story. He didn’t want to ruin his own surprise. Instead, he would sit down and draw each individual page one at a time, breaking up the pace here and there with a full-page splash… and then frequently he’d reach the end of the story and discover that he’d run out of pages before he ran out of plot, so he’d have to cram the end of the story into a jumble of panels on the final page. “I’d draw myself into big trouble,” Colan says. “I’d wonder ‘How many pages do I have left? How much plot?’ I didn’t have the patience for page roughs.” Roy Thomas: All of a sudden he’d have to end the story at a place that wasn’t what they’d agreed upon – I remember that a time or two in the early days – or he would suddenly crowd 10 panels on the last page or so to make it work out. Sometimes Stan would not be too wild about it. He’d like it, but would say “If only he’d pace it a little better!” I remember he got a little upset once and called Gene up and said “Well, didn’t you see this was coming up?” And Gene said “Well, y’know I don’t read the plot until I get to that page.” I guess Gene liked to read it at the same pace as a reader would. Stan liked it, but that kind of thing was atypical of other artists, so it would drive him a little nuts. He always liked the end result, but sometime it took a little extra work.

“In those days, nothing was ever reproduced from pencil,” Colan says. “I loved the stories–Archie was a Classic Covers: Two of Colan’s bestwonderful writer and a known cover illos from Avengers #63, wonderful man to April 1969, and Iron Man #1, May 1968. work for–and I wanted to do the very best piece of work I could do. Rather than have any other inker do John Romita, who would meticulously break down his stories it, I would ink it myself.” page-by-page on typewriter paper before even beginning to pencil a story, was awestruck by Colan’s approach. “If I could The Warren stories were painstaking and time-consuming have managed to do it that way. I would have,” Romita says. work for Colan. “I’d lose more money than I’d make, but I “But I couldn’t. I was too nervous to start a story without wasn’t interested in that,” he says. “I felt the point was to be as knowing where every panel would fit.” good an artist as I could be.” Gil Kane, another mid-’60s import from DC, approached a 53

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story just as Romita did: He’d thumbnail every page on bond paper, then lightbox it. “I caught that sickness, too, and it used to cost me money,” Romita says. “But it’s the only way we felt we could pace the story the way we needed to. It was a hell of a thing to ask a guy to sacrifice two or three days without earning any money, but it was for the good of the story.”

Gene and I talk about pacing a story. The thing is Gene would put a lot of action shots – big panels – at the beginning of a story, and then he would run out of space. And you know who was worse at it? Jack Kirby! If you look at Kirby’s stories, one of the things that drove Stan crazy – and one of the reasons I started doing corrections on Kirby – was that he would do this wonderful 10- or 12-page epic, and then he would squeeze in the balance of the story Stan gave him on the last four pages. He’d end up with these tiny little one-inch panels on the last page. It drove Stan nuts because he’d want to do a billboard for the next issue. He had me and Gene talk a couple of times about pacing the story and leaving enough room to finish up the story with enough power. But very few of us paced a story to Stan’s satisfaction.

Increasingly in the ’60s, Stan relied on Romita as a defacto art director, and occasionally he asked the artist to counsel Colan on storytelling. Romita: I do remember once or twice that Stan would have

Idiosyncrasies aside, Colan meshed beautifully within the melting pot of styles at Marvel. Asked for his opinion on how Colan’s work fit in with that of his contemporaries at Marvel in the mid-’60s, Thomas says “Oddly. He was always a little out of the mainstream.” But that was a good thing, Thomas stresses – for Marvel and for Colan. Thomas: Other artists – the John Buscemas and even the Sterankos – they all fit the same kind of Kirbyesque mold. Ditko was out of that mold, but even he told stories much the same way. Gene was off in a corner by himself, but you want people like that. Steranko was sort of like that; Barry Smith became like that. Jim Starlin made his own take a little later. With Gene Colan, you don’t see that same style in his work in the 1940s and ’50s. You see the same photographic realism, but you don’t see anything like what he developed when he came back in the ’60s doing Sub-Mariner, etc. Here was something that was very dramatic, and the artwork was exciting… What he brought to comics was his realism, which brought people back a bit from the true dynamism of Kirby, which was good, but it was good to get back to the realism. Gene could do both. He had the dynamics of Kirby, but the realism of some of the comic strip artists – the things that people liked later in Neal Adams and other artists. Maybe Gene was kind of a transitional figure between Kirby and Neal Adams – two of the great influences. Mainly, he just told a lot of good stories – and he’s my wife’s favorite comic book artist.

Father & Son: Namor meets his Dad in this Colan/Esposito page from Sub-Mariner #46, 1972. GENE COLAN

Conversations Stan Lee and Gene Colan

In mid-December 2004, Stan Lee and Gene Colan were reunited via telephone for a conversation that spanned decades of collaboration, friendship and merriment. To paraphrase a Stan Lee caption from the Colan-illustrated Daredevil #33: “If anyone else can write an introduction that will do justice to this great exchange between Lee & Colan – be the author’s guest!” Stan Lee: Y’know, don’t tell anyone, but we used to fight all the time! Gene Colan: No, we did not! Lee: He used to say, “How do you expect me to draw all that stupid stuff you keep writing?” And I kept telling him “Will you stop ruining my great stories?” We were at each other’s throats all the time. Colan: [laughing] No, we were not! The only thing I remember us at odds over was the car chase that ate up about six pages of story (in Captain America #116), and you said “What did you do here? You could do this in two panels, but you take up six pages of story to tell it?!” Lee: [laughing] You hear about writers who get paid by the word? Gene got paid by the panel! (To Colan) The one real masterpiece I thought you did – I’ve probably mentioned this before – was in a Captain America story (issue #122) where you just had him walking down the street for, I don’t know, three pages – it seemed like 100 pages! – doing nothing in particular. And the way you drew it was so interesting – each panel was like watching a movie. It was such a pleasure to write that. I’ll never forget it. Colan: Everything to me was a movie. Every story I ever got, I would pretend that I was watching it on the screen. I was highly influenced by the films. Lee: You were the first guy who ever told me that you used to save video cassettes of all the movies. Colan: I still do. I’m into it up to my neck!

Gene and Stan: Photos as printed in Lee: You must live in one closet, and the rest of the house is all full of video cassettes! Fantastic Four Annual #7, 1969. 55

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Tom Field: When did you two first meet? Lee: I have no memory of what year it was. Colan: It was 1946. Lee: Really? Colan: That’s right. It was called Timely Comics, then. Al Sulman was the art editor, and I just came in cold off the street. I had some samples, and I was determined to get a position somewhere in the business. And Al went into your office to show them to you. The longer I waited out there, the more opportunity I felt I had to be hired. I waited 10 or 15 minutes, and then finally Al came back and called me in. You were playing cards, and you had a beanie cap on. Lee: Playing cards? Colan: Yes. It was lunch hour. You had a beanie cap with a propeller on it. Lee: Of course! What else would a fellow wear? Colan: Well, I have to say you were very young at the time! Anything goes in your early 20s! Lee: I can picture the beanie cap, I just can’t remember the cards. I never was a card player. Maybe we were playing with trading cards? Colan: Could be; I don’t know. But I think you were with someone else. So, that’s how we met, and that was the beginning of my career – thanks to you.

The Car Chase: Famous Bullitt inspired car chase from Captain America #116. Inks by Joe Sinnott.

Soulful Stroll: Stan Lee and the readers were blown away by this powerful scene of Captain America on soul-searching stroll. From Captain America #116, February 1970. GENE COLAN

Field: Stan, what’s your first memory of Gene?

Lee: Well, I don’t know if that’s the case. Your penciling was so tight, that I think almost anybody could ink it.

Lee: Oh, God, I don’t know. It seems to me Gene was always there. I really remember Gene from the Marvel days, and the thing I always loved about Gene was that his style was so unique. Nobody could copy it, nobody could imitate it – he was Gene Colan, and nobody could draw like him!

Colan: Well, I had so much in [the penciling] that a lot of inkers didn’t know what to do with it. Lee: Well, then they were stupid! I always wished we could reproduce your art just from the pencils because they were so perfect.

Colan: And nobody could ink it, either! [laughing] Colan: That’s how my work is reproduced now. Lee: Really?! Colan: Everything I do is reproduced from pencil – absolutely. I’ve done work for Dark Horse recently – (Michael Chabon’s) The Escapist – that was reproduced from pencil. Lee: They’re able to do that now? That’s great! Colan: The printing is so sophisticated, they can do anything. Lee: Just my luck. I worked when they couldn’t do that; now all these new guys have it easy! Colan: Stan, do you use a computer? Lee: Oh sure. But I only write on it; I’m no good at doing anything else with it. I write, and I do my e-mail. Colan: Oh, I can’t even do that! I’m lucky if I can turn it on, and then I worry I’ll get so lost out in cyberspace that I’ll never get back! Lee: You do much letter writing? Colan: No. Lee: Because if you did, e-mail is the greatest thing – it saves so much time. Someone sends you a letter on e-mail, you read it, you type a fast response, hit the button that says “send,” and that’s it. They’ve got an answer, but you don’t have to address an envelope, or fold a piece of paper, get a stamp, go to a post office. It’s wonderful.

Storytellers #1: First page of a story starring Stan & Gene from Daredevil Annual #1 (1967). 57

Colan: What you’re saying reminds me of a time very early on when I would deliver the work to you. We were living out in Jersey, and rather than put the artwork through the mail system, I would get in the car and deliver it to you, making sure it would get there. And you told me, “Gene, you are wasting your time. Roll it up and A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S TA N L E E

Colan: I’d rather work the way Stan started to do it – by plot. He could turn out more work that way, and I was completely on my own with it – which I loved…

stick it in the mail – I’ll get it!” Lee: I didn’t say that because I was considerate and worried about your time. I figured if you did it that way, we could get more work out of you! [laughter]

Lee: Yeah, he could draw Captain America walking alone for three pages! [laughter]

Colan: Whatever the reason, I took your advice right away. Colan: He would give me the basic idea. We’d discuss it on the phone – I’d tape record the calls, and then I’d refer to the tapes. It was easy for me – wide open for me as an artist. I could let

Lee: So, you’re still doing strips today, Gene? Colan: Very little. Most of the work I get is commissions. Lee: Gee, that’s wonderful. It’s like Matisse or Picasso… Colan: Do you love to do films? Lee: Oh, yeah, I’m mad about it. Colan: I once told you, long before you ever went out to California, “Stan, if there was ever a place you should be, it’s in the film-making business. You have the personality for it, and the courage for it – all the right things for the right reasons.” You didn’t think much of it at the time. You said “Ahh, I’ll never get into that…” But within a couple of years of me mentioning it, out you went! Lee: It’s not that I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t know how to do it! I always wanted to. Field: Gene, what’s your first memory of working with Stan and actually drawing his stories? Colan: Very early on, I don’t know if Stan wrote any of the crime stories I drew, but he did write westerns. Field: Full-script or plot only? Colan: Oh, they were full scripts. That’s why I’m not sure if Stan wrote them. Lee: Oh, no, I wrote full scripts. Until we started the Fantastic Four, just about everything I wrote was with a full script.

Field: Gene, talk about the difference working on a full script versus working from just a plot, as you would with Stan on Daredevil, Iron Storytellers #2: Second page of a story starring Stan & Gene from Daredevil Man, Sub-Mariner, etc. Annual #1 (1967). GENE COLAN

my imagination run wild, and Stan accepted what I did. Not all the time, but he would let me know if something wasn’t quite right. As a rule, he let me go with it. Lee: Oh, I’d say 99%of the time it was not only right, it was perfect. Y’know, sometimes I might say something like “Oh, do you want to add a lamp post to the background” or some stupid thing. Gene’s stuff was wonderful. Field: Stan, would you work to an individual artist’s

strengths, knowing if Kirby or Ditko or Gene were going to draw a particular story? Lee: Yes, more or less. When I came up with a plot, almost subconsciously I made sure it’d be the kind of plot that would be ideal for the artist I knew would do it. Although it wasn’t much of a problem because these guys – Gene, Kirby, Romita and so forth – they could draw just about anything. It wasn’t as if “Boy, I’ve got to give him a special thing or he won’t be able to draw it.” I can’t think of a thing Gene couldn’t draw. Field: When you think of Gene, are there certain stylistic techniques that stand out? Lee: Well, the thing about Gene is that he was very good about close-ups. Almost everything he ever drew was in close-up. He never gave you a long shot where you could barely see the figures. Gene was interested in people and in characters and their expressions, the way they moved. I always felt the stories he did were very personal. You always got to know the characters and care about them. There was also a great sense of design in Gene’s work. Each page was meticulously designed. Where some artists would do just panel by panel, I always got the sense that in the back of Gene’s mind the page was a canvas. Field: Now, Gene did you approach Stan about returning to Marvel in the 60s, or Stan did you let Gene know that suddenly there was a lot of work available? Lee: It was a little bit of both as far as I can remember. Colan: Yes… Lee: The one thing I remember is that Gene was always a little bit concerned about the comic book business. He had been through a few bad times in the past, and he was always wondering “Is this going to last? Should I be looking for work elsewhere?” I think Gene never felt that secure in comics… Colan: No, I didn’t.

Storytellers #3: Third page of a story starring Stan & Gene from Daredevil Annual #1 (1967). 59

Lee: And I can understand why. At that time, it was not a very secure business. There were ups and downs, and there were times when whole staffs had been fired because business had been bad, and they never knew when there would be more work. It was really–when you A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S TA N L E E

with those characters for a reason?

look back now and write about it, it all seems very glamorous and fun, but there were some tough times. And Gene was a family man and concerned. I could understand that.

Lee: They were available, and he was available. Like I said, Gene could have drawn anything.

Colan: I was a big worrier. Field: Interestingly, he’s the one artist to come into Marvel at that time that you didn’t have working over Jack Kirby layouts. Heck, Ayers, Romita, Buscema, Tuska, Steranko – they all started out working over Kirby. Gene was the one exception. Why?

Lee: And I used to try to make him feel better. I’d tell him “Gene, you’re one of the best! You’ll be the last guy to be clinging to the lifeboat before it goes down!”

Lee: Gene’s style was too unique, too different. It would have handicapped Gene. He shouldn’t have to draw over anyone else’s layouts because it wouldn’t look like Gene Colan. Colan: Boy, that’s a terrific compliment. Lee: I mean it, too. Field: Gene, did you look at Jack Kirby’s work when you came to Marvel? Colan: Oh, sure. Before I even knew Stan, I was looking at Jack’s work. I marveled at the impact Jack always had. If one of the characters was breaking through a stone wall, you really felt it – you knew it. Bricks were flying out of the panel – it was wonderful. I really loved Jack’s work. He had a truly unique style. Field: Well, you had a bunch of unique styles corralled there in the Bullpen when you stop to think about it. Ditko, Romita, Buscema…

DD King-Size: Cover to Daredevil Annual #1, 1967.

Colan: I admired John Buscema’s work a lot. He was a draftsman – a painter, illustrator…

Stan’s Fave: Cover to Daredevil #47, the famous “Brother, Take My Hand” issue.

Lee: John was sort of the Michelangelo of the group.

Colan: Stan told me once that he hesitated to tell me to make a change or do something different for fear that I would drive myself nuts or crazy and not be able to do anything! So, the less he would tell me to do, the better he felt I would be.

Colan: Oh, and he could do it quickly. That was the thing. He could draw quickly and accurately. I could not do that.

Colan: Ahh, that never happened!

Lee: The amazing thing about John’s stuff is that there were as many drawings on the backs of the pages, where he was doodling, as there were on the fronts of the pages – and they were all good! He was fast.

Field: So, when Gene joined Marvel, he started drawing Iron Man and Sub-Mariner right away. Did you pair him

Field: Do you recall any favorite stories the two of you worked on together?

Lee: Yeah, for years I didn’t speak to him at all!

GENE COLAN

up, too. I would tell Gene as little as possible, knowing he could flesh out everything else. Field: Almost sounds easy, Gene. Colan: I enjoyed it. I enjoyed every moment because it gave me all that freedom, as I said. Stan gave me the freedom to do it. Lee: I couldn’t do that with an artist who did not have that ability, obviously. But Gene did. Field: It must have been a challenge to keep up with all the characters, plots and subplots. Colan: Stan was very unique in that way. Other editors that I’ve had experience with were not anything close to that. They had to have complete and total control. But Stan could spot a really fine artist from way off – he had that ability with everybody. Field: Stan, did you rely on the margin notes that the artists wrote on their pages to remind you what the story was about? Lee: Absolutely. A) I might have even forgotten what I’d told them, and B) very often the margin notes were Clash of Titans: Iron Man vs. Sub-Mariner in a recent comissioned drawing. additional things that the artist had Lee: It’s hard for me to remember because we did so many. But added to the story – things I hadn’t even thought of – and there’s one in particular that sticks in my mind. It was a they were very valuable. Usually great ideas. Daredevil story (#47) about a blind policeman who comes back from the Army, and he helps Daredevil; Daredevil helps Field: I was talking to Roy Thomas last week, and he said him. I think we called it something like “Brother, Take My Hand.” often the pages would come back and Gene – who never I don’t even remember it clearly, but I remember I loved that read ahead in his plots – would have run out of pages story, and I loved the way Gene drew it. before he’d run out story! Field: Stan, when you worked with Gene, what did you give him for a plot? Lee: Not very much. Gene could fill in everything. You see, Gene and all of the guys – the top guys at Marvel – the beautiful thing about them is that they were writers also; they were visual storytellers. If I would tell Gene who the villain was and what the problem was, how the problem should be resolved and where it would take place, Gene could fill in all the details. Which made it very interesting for me to write because when I got the artwork back and had to put in the copy, I was seeing things that I’d not expected. Gene would always add a lot of stuff that I had never told him, so it was like I was writing a new, fresh story – which kept my interest 61

Lee: Well, I guess that could happen… Colan: I never liked to read the whole story. Lee: Gene liked to surprise himself, also! Field: Gene, it sounds like you got into a pickle once or twice because you had to end the story too quickly. Colan: That’s right! Because I’d allotted too much space in the middle for other drawings, and then I wound up in a very tight area at the end. Lee: That kept me on my toes because then when I’d have to A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S TA N L E E

Colan: Yes, and I said “I’m determined to get it” because it was something I knew I could do, that I wanted to do really badly. So I spent a day auditioning for it. I did a page of Dracula in various positions and facial expressions – things like that to interest you. I penciled it and inked it, then sent it in. That very same day you received it, toward the end of the day, you called me and said “Gene? The job is yours.” And that was the end of it.

write it, I had to write it as though that was the way we planned it to work out! Colan: [laughing] Lee: I enjoyed it. Colan: That takes a lot of skill…

Lee: Now that you’re mentioning it, I’m beginning to remember – yes. Well, I mean, you were born to do Dracula.

Lee: Luckily, I’m incredibly skillful! [laughs] Field: Gene brought up an interesting point earlier about inkers. A lot of them did find Gene’s pencils challenging to handle. How did you go about finding the right inker for Gene’s work?

Colan: That’s right!

Lee: I don’t remember. I had just handed it off – “Hey, Joe, ink this,” or “Hey, Sam…” – and they did it. I never paid that much attention. To me, the penciling was everything. Once the penciling was in there and it was right, it was hard for an inker to ruin it. In fact, I remember Jack Kirby once saying “I don’t care who inks my stuff. Nobody could ever ruin it!” That was the height of self-confidence! [laughs]

Lee: I bet you wouldn’t! [laughing] Hey, don’t lose your sense of perspective about this, Gene! Y’know, vampires aren’t real! It’s all fantasy! Although maybe you couldn’t draw it as well if you didn’t believe in it.

Lee: I think there’s some Transylvanian in your blood! Colan: I wouldn’t mind going there!

Colan: I’m an atmosphere guy. That’s why I love New England. I’d live up in the Arctic if Adrienne would go! Lee: The man is insane! I am doing an interview with a man who is certifiable! [laughter]

Colan: And I didn’t care. Once it left my hands, I knew I’d done everything I could do.

Field: Stan, when you reflect on Gene’s work, what’s the one body of work that stands out?

Lee: And the thing is, no matter who Classic Titans: Cover to the one-and-only inked Gene’s stuff, it still looked like Iron Man and Sub-Mariner #1, April 1968. Lee: I just think of some great artwork. Gene’s stuff. Nobody could really ruin When I think of Gene’s work, I just picture it. It was too strong. the layouts, and the blacks and whites so perfectly spotted… there’s no one particular thing, just all of it. It’s the same with all Field: Did you ever think there were characters or types of the artists. When I think of Kirby, there’s no one thing… or Ditko, books that might not be ideal for Gene? Romita. I can picture what their pages looked like; I can identify their styles in my mind. But Gene did so much, and the other guys Lee: No. He could do romance, he could do western, advendid so much… there’s really no particular thing that stands out. ture, mystery – no, he could do everything. I don’t know if he was a good cook, but other than that… Field: Gene, when you think of Stan’s work, what stands out? Field: Let me ask you about the Tomb of Dracula strip. Gene, of course, was assigned to it, but he always tells the story about how you first promised it to Bill Everett. Do you recall?

Colan: Mostly the freedom he gave me. Stan was not very critical of my work. He made me feel good all the time. If he accepted the job, I knew he liked it. And that was fine. Every now and then, he would tell me “This is great.” I loved the freedom. I loved the way he spoke to the fans. He loved the fans – he knew how to speak to everybody. Stan, I’ve always said you remind me of Jack Lemmon…

Lee: No. It’s possible… Everett would have been good for it, too, but Gene was a natural. Colan: What happened was that you had promised it to Bill Everett.

Lee: [laughs] Colan: It’s the boyishness that you have, the enthusiasm that you show all the time. If I were sitting in front of Stan, having

Lee: Had I? GENE COLAN

delivered a job, and he felt I should put a little more effort into the drama, motion or stance of a figure, he would think nothing of getting up and imitating. Whether it was on a desk, a chair – anything. He was very, very dramatic and animated with it. “This is the way he should look!” There’s nothing like seeing it in front of you. Stan was like that – very unusual, very wonderful fellow. I wish I lived closer to you, Stan. I’d annoy the hell out of you!

Colan: Oh, I know…! Lee: Y’know, the funny thing about acting out those stories… I always wanted to be an actor. I’ve always been a frustrated actor. So I would almost find faults in some artwork just so I could say “Wait, don’t do it that way! Do it like this!” That gave me a chance to strike a pose. Colan: Well, the acting could come – you’re in the right place!

Lee: So do I, but you’re never gonna live close to me as long as you want to live in those cold places – that’s for sure!

Field: Actually, you’ve developed quite a film resume. Lee: Oh, yeah. I’m lobbying now for the movie industry to have awards for the best cameo every year! [laughter] Wait till you see the Fantastic Four, where – if they don’t cut it – I actually have a cameo where I say a couple of words! Field: Stan, where is Gene’s place in the old Marvel Bullpen? Lee: He’s right up there in the pantheon of the Marvel greats! Colan: Thank you. Lee: Well, you know that! Colan: I don’t always know that! Field: And Gene with the writers and editors you’ve worked with over the years, where do you put Stan? Colan: Right on top. Lee: Oh, no! I’ve got to have my own category! [laughing] Colan: OK! I loved working with Stan; I really did. I’m not just saying that, either. We go way back. And I want to say one more thing, which really has nothing to do with comics. I had a bad time in my life in the ’50s. My marriage fell apart, and I was beside myself. I didn’t know who to talk to. I happened to mention this to Stan in his office – he knew something was wrong. He felt so badly, he took me out to lunch and talked to me a little bit. He tried to make me feel much better. Do you remember that? Lee: No, but it sounds like the type of wonderful thing I would have done! [laughter]

DD Unpubbed: A “lost” Daredevil page as featured in Marvel’s FOOM Magazine #13. 63

Colan: Absolutely. And I’ll never forget it. I A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S TA N L E E

was in my worst place, and Stan was like a brother to me. He really was. He said “It’ll all pass, Gene, and you’ll move on. Don’t worry about it. Don’t give it another thought.” I remember it very well. Also, when I had eye surgery (in the 1980s), Stan and Joan sent me a wonderful basket of superhero cookies! [laughing] Oh, so thoughtful! That’s one of the things I remember about Stan that set

him apart from everybody else I’ve ever dealt with. Field: You’ve mentioned some other names. I’d be curious to hear you two talk about some of the creators you drew inspiration from – people the fans might not remember today. Colan: Joe Maneely. You remember him, right, Stan? Lee: Oh, sure. Joe Maneely has a special place with me because… well, it was so tragic. Joe Maneely to me would have been the next Jack Kirby. He also could draw anything, make anything look exciting, and I actually think he was even faster than Jack. Joe almost inked without penciling. He would have almost a stick figure for penciling, and he would ink over it. He was also, like Gene, a wonderful guy. He cared about what he did. He wasn’t quite the worrier Gene was – he really didn’t worry about anything. But I liked him. He was a great guy. And unfortunately he died in an accident when he was, I don’t know, maybe 30 years old. It was terrible tragedy. Such a shame because I think Joe – like Gene – would be remembered as one of the greats. But now very few people know of him except me, Gene and the people who were there at the time. Field: You’re right. As a reader, I’ve not been exposed to a lot of his work, but what I’ve seen has been beautiful. Lee: And he could do anything! He did a strip with me – a humor strip like Peanuts – and he did that beautifully! He did knights in armor, he did westerns – he could do anything. Colan: Syd Shores comes to mind a lot. He taught me a lot that I didn’t understand how to do, and he could correct my pages in a split second. He was great. Syd could draw horses – anything. For a while there, I tried to copy his style, but I just couldn’t grab hold of it.

DD by the Dean: Classic Colan from Daredevil #48, January 1969. GENE COLAN

Lee: That’s just as well because your

style is even more commercial. Syd was a great guy. He inked a lot of Kirby’s stuff, and he also penciled beautifully. The only thing his artwork lacked when he penciled… it didn’t have the excitement it needed. It was a little subdued. But other than that, he was great. A great guy, too. He was a pleasure to work with. Field: Stan, you had a soft spot for Bill Everett, too, didn’t you? Lee: Oh, sure. Bill was an incredible talent. And like Gene, Bill had a style that was so unique that nobody could copy it or imitate it. You couldn’t change it. He drew his own way, and it was a great way. I loved it. And he was smart. He could write also. He’s the guy who did the first Daredevil with me, actually. I don’t remember what happened that he didn’t do the others… but he was terrific. And of course the work he did on the “Sub-Mariner” was absolutely brilliant.

maybe you wouldn’t have known the difference for a while. But Gene and Bill couldn’t and wouldn’t. That was very distinctive. Colan: That’s true… Lee: Take John Romita when he took over Spider-Man. For the first few issues, he drew like Ditko. Then little by little, he eased into his own style. I wouldn’t have asked Gene to do that because it would have been too much to ask of him. Field: At that point, did you still think Ditko might return? Lee: I always hoped he would, yes. Colan: Is Ditko still around? Lee: He’s around, but I haven’t heard from him in years. Colan: I’ve never met him.

Field: It strikes me now that you had an artist like Bill Everett who created Sub-Mariner, as well as Steve Ditko who co-created Dr. Strange. These were very individual talents, and Gene later came along and drew both characters. You couldn’t have more different interpretations – and yet it worked.

Cap Classic: Cover to Captain America #119, Nov. 1969. Lee: Well, you’re absolutely right. Y’see, with Dr. Strange Gene didn’t have to draw like Ditko. What Gene needed for Dr. Strange was a feeling for the occult, for mysticism. And even though Gene’s idea of mysticism was different from Ditko’s, it was genuine, and All About Stan: This new Marvel it was dramatic, and it was perfect for Dr. Strange. Visionaries: Stan Lee book includes the

Lee: Not too many people have! [laughing] And he’s not a bad guy – he’s a good guy! I ran into him maybe seven, eight, 10 years ago when I visited the Marvel office in New York. He was there, and I discussed with him “Maybe we’ll try something together again.” He never wanted to do Spider-Man or Dr. Strange again – for some reason he would never do them – but he said he might be willing to do something new. And we discussed some stuff for a little while. But now that I think of it, nothing ever came of it. He was pleasant enough, nice enough. I always liked Steve. Field: What occupies your time now, Stan?

Colan classic "Brother, Take My Hand” Field: Gene, when you drew those characters did you from Daredevil #47. Lee: Well, I’ve formed a look back on Ditko’s or Everett’s work? new company called POW! Entertainment, which I’m sure you’ve already figured Colan: I looked at the work, but I didn’t draw anything like them. out stands for Purveyors of Wonder. We’re doing movies, television shows, DVDs, even little animated spots for cameras in Field: I know Everett never liked that he rendered the SubAsia. Whatever has to do with entertainment, we’re into. Mariner’s head flat, but you rounded it off! [laughter] Colan: That’s wonderful. And I have a feeling, Stan, that you just love it. Lee: The funny thing is, Gene and Bill Everett are two artists who couldn’t draw like anybody else. Well, maybe they could, but they Lee: Oh, I do. Everybody says to me “Why don’t you retire?” didn’t want to, and they shouldn’t have. Most every other artist at But I’d have to be crazy. Y’know, when you retire you usually Marvel, even the very good ones, they could have imitated somesay “Now at last I can do all of the things I want to do.” But body else’s style. They could have taken over another strip, and I’m already doing all the things I’ve always wanted to do! 65

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Gene Colan Portfolio In the mid-’60s, as Gene Colan was reviving his career at Marvel, he also was stretching his artistic muscles at Warren, drawing exquisite black-and-white wash stories for the likes of Creepy, Eerie and Blazing Combat. On the following pages, we showcase some of this rarely-seen, seldom-reprinted work from 40 years ago.

From Blazing Combat #4 (July 1966). GENE COLAN

From Blazing Combat #3 (April 1966). 67

PORTFOLIO

From Creepy #8, April 1966. GENE COLAN

From Eerie #3 (May 1966). 69

PORTFOLIO

From Blazing Combat #4 (July 1966). GENE COLAN

From Eerie #9 (May 1966). 71

PORTFOLIO

From Eerie #10 (May 1966). GENE COLAN

7 Glory Days with DD and Doc

icture: Midtown Manhattan in the late 1960s. Gene Colan strolls purposefully, his Polaroid camera in tow, snapping photos of people, places and things. Images. He’s creating visual context for his Daredevil and Doctor Strange comics. “I loved the research,” he says. “It wasn’t something anyone asked me to do. I took it on myself because it made the work in the end look good to me.”

To Colan, this legwork represented his commitment to Marvel, which made a commitment to him by finally giving him ongoing series of his own – characters he could get to know and bring to life. “Just living with the character, it became real to me – a real person,” he says. “I liked that.” In a sense, Gene Colan has Steve Ditko to thank for Daredevil. When Ditko, the enigmatic co-creator and illustrator of SpiderMan and Doctor Strange, abruptly quit Marvel in 1966, his assignments were quickly doled out to emergency replacements. Bill Everett, the creator of Sub-Mariner (and co-creator of Daredevil), inherited Doctor Strange, while Spider-Man – which was quickly becoming Marvel’s most popular character – was DD Sketch: a 1998 sketch of Daredevil – the character with whom Gene Colan is entrusted to John Romita, a slick most fondly associated. stylist whose only real superhero For Colan to be offered Daredevil was a heady experience. Up to this experience was drawing Daredevil from issues #12 through #19, just point at Marvel, he had been given major characters to draw, true – Subprior to the Spidey assignment. When Romita shifted to Spidey, DD Mariner and Iron Man were among Marvel’s “A list” of heroes, and they was offered… to Colan. remain popular even today. But each character shared its respective comic book with a co-star, hence the stories were only 10-to-12 pages long. Daredevil was unique – a blind superhero who overcame his Half a standard comic book. Daredevil was a feature-length assignment, disability to fight crime as both a costumed hero and a top-notch attorney. presenting Colan with 20 full pages to dig in and really tell a story. Created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett in 1964, the Daredevil comic book had plugged along ever since under the guidance of Lee and “I said ‘Oh, God, let me have it!’” Colan says, recalling his response artists Joe Orlando, Wallace Wood, Bob Powell and Romita. to Stan Lee when offered the DD job. “I didn’t know how long it would 73

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run,” he says. “But I could’ve stayed with Daredevil forever.”

from Don Quixote, not Sancho Panza the Cuban cigar).

Romita has always maintained that he felt like a temporary replacement on Spider-Man – that Ditko would resolve his differences with Marvel, then return and reclaim the book. So, as best he could, Romita tried to simulate Ditko’s unique style, as though he were “ghosting” the book during a leave of absence.

Choreography – Never one to draw the same fight scene twice, Colan got totally caught up in directing Daredevil’s battles with bad guys. Leveraging the character’s natural gymnastic ability, Colan would draw complex fight scenes drawn from multiple angles and including matchless moves.

Romita: I didn’t want to go on Spider-Man; I wanted to stay on Daredevil. I did [Spider-Man] to be a good soldier. I felt constrained to make it look like Ditko, but if [I] did not put that shackle on [myself], then that would have opened up all sorts of possibilities. Exactly. When Colan took over DD, he had no sense of how long the assignment might last. But he also felt no compulsion to ape Romita’s style. Although he initially followed Romita’s visual cues in depicting Daredevil, Colan immediately settled in and made the book his own, injecting it with what quickly was becoming his signature style: Cinematic pacing, realistic expression, full-page illustrations and non-traditional page layouts wherever he could get away with them. There’s a famous page in Colan’s very first DD issue (#20), in fact. On page five, where writer Stan Lee no doubt described in the briefest detail “Three bad guys break into Matt (Daredevil) Murdock’s apartment,” Colan turns that moment into a full-page scene. In an inset panel, one bad guy turns a pass key in the lock of Murdock’s door, and we’re focusing solely on the hand and the doorknob. Then the page explodes into an up-shot of the three shadow-eyed, gun-wielding hoods bursting into Murdock’s apartment, looking for trouble. A quiet scene brought totally to life, announcing the arrival of Gene Colan. To take a bit of a geeky diversion… Colan’s initial depiction of Daredevil is much like Romita’s and Wally Wood’s before him. The character’s trademark horns appear distinctly on each side of DD’s mask. But even as early as his second issue, Colan starts to shift the horns more toward the front of the mask, giving the character a subtly more dramatic appearance. Before long, Colan infuses The Doorknob Scene?: Stan Lee loves to tell a story about Colan drawing a the series with three other distinct elements:

whole page focused on a hand turning a doorknob – but he never identifies Glamour – Karen Page, DD’s love interest, the story. Could this page from Daredevil #20 be it? Inks by Mike Esposito.

morphs from a nondescript comic book woman into a stylish, mid-’60s aspiring actress. Humor – Foggy Nelson, Matt Murdock’s overweight, underachieving partner, is given a lot more character expression, as well as more of a Sancho Panza role (that’s Sancho Panza the character GENE COLAN

And he got to do all of this over the course of 20 pages – a wide-open canvas for this artist to paint. “I had a lot of story to deal with, which made me happy,” Colan says. “The longer, the better.” As he got used to the characters, the settings, the pace, Colan 74

drew subtle inspiration from one of his childhood favorite Sunday comics: Will Eisner’s The Spirit, which seamlessly blended drama, humor and design – all in about seven action-packed pages.

work today, it’s clear that he was a natural – he was meant to draw this character, and 40 years later he remains the definitive Daredevil artist.

“Oh, what an artist he was,” Colan says of Eisner. “I tried to emulate him. There was a certain naturalness to his work – a mix of cartooning and realism that put the character into the piece. He was not a tight artist. He was loose. And the characters were funny. He could get expressions on their faces that were riotous because he was a great cartoonist. Yet, the realism was still there. He could do great things with places, shadows, slanted lines, scenery – just about anything. It reminded me again of the movies.”

But at the time, there really was some question – even in his peers’ minds – of whether Colan could make the successful switch from romance, horror and war stories to suddenly drawing Marvel’s swinging superheroes. “There are books I would have thought Gene would have trouble

Cover Boy: Daredevil #27, April 1967. One of the elements that caught Gene’s fancy early on was Daredevil’s fatal flaw. He was a blind man, compensating for his disability with fantastic athleticism and an enhanced, bat-like radar sense. Colan: The fact that he was blind and could do all these things really appealed to me. I tried to figure out a way to actually illustrate his blindness so that the reader could follow it. He had an uncanny knack of actually seeing better than a sighted person because of his keen senses, and I tried to illustrate that in some vague way with pictures of what he saw. Strictly out of my imagination.

DD & BW: Daredevil and the Black Widow – one of the hottest couples in comics, Looking back on Colan’s early DD for a time – from DD #84, Feb 1972. Inks by Syd Shores. 75

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with that he still managed,” Romita says. “For instance, I thought Daredevil was going to give him trouble, but he made it his own. He used that powerful black-and-white style so well with these big figures jumping out.” Within a year of his settling into the book, in fact, Colan had so made Daredevil his own comic book that even the ever-loquacious Stan Lee was occasionally at a loss for words. Witness DD #33, page 14, a full-page splash of Daredevil slipping off a mountain while battling the villainous Beetle. The only writing on the page is this text block:

Among the highlights of Colan’s work in this period were: Daredevil – Starting with the 1967 king-size DD Annual – and its 39-page lead story – Colan embarked on a period of stunning innovation. That one story alone, featuring DD versus five of his greatest villains, sports three of the full-page splashes Colan made famous, augmented by another eight poster pinups in the back of the book, and three mini-

“And if anyone can write a caption – or dialogue – which will do justice to this great illustration of Gene’s, then go ahead – be Stan’s guest!”

Free Fall: Colan splash from DD #33, Oct. 1967. Inks by John Tartaglione. By this point, the formerly struggling artist was now Gene “the Dean” Colan, and his name was displayed as big and as boldly as any other Marvel Comics artist’s.

Breaking Out – and Breaking Down

Colan on Kirby: Colan got his first shot at drawing Dr. Doom and Galactus – two characters co-created by and most associated with Jack The years 1967 through ’69 were watershed for Kirby – in Daredevil #37, Feb. 1968. Inks by John Tartaglione. Colan. His work on Daredevil evolved to a wholly new level of cinematic choreography, and he demonstrated a remarkable range by tackling such diverse assignments as humor in Marvel’s spoof title Not Brand Echh, science fiction in Captain Marvel, high-octane super-heroics in The Avengers, and occult mysticism in Doctor Strange.

GENE COLAN

featurettes explaining DD’s powers, his all-purpose billy club, and even how Stan Lee and Colan worked together to craft these adventures. Following the annual, Lee and Colan ushered in 1968 with an outstanding run of DD’s that included: 76

Fantastic Four crossover in #36-38, pitting DD against the FF’s arch-villain Dr. Doom. The Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom were among artist Jack Kirby’s signature Marvel characters – not everybody could draw them well – but Colan’s interpretation was at once faithful and unique.

The plots of these stories were outstanding, and Lee & Colan deserve equal credit for them. But what took the adventures to the next level was Colan’s depiction, which increasingly relied on experimental layout techniques. Colan: I fooled around a lot with the panels. I had a different thought about the panels, that they should reflect the mood. If it was a quiet conversational scene, then the panels might be a little off-center. If there was any action going on, then I’d go crazy. Stan didn’t like that; he’d say ‘You’re really throwing off the reader; they don’t know what panel comes second or third…’ I really went a little haywire there. I rebelled. I knew how to follow the layout, but I also knew it wasn’t easy [for the reader]. I still do it, but now I think I have it more organized so you can follow it.

Brother, Take My Hand: Panel page from Stan Lee’s favorite DD story, #47, Dec. 1968. Inks by George Klein. Who’s Laughing?: Colan co-created the sinister Jester, who debuted in a memorable, multi-part story beginning in Daredevil #42, July 1968. Inks by Dan Adkins. The Jester Saga in #42-46, wherein a failed comedic actor turns bad guy and manipulates the news media to frame Daredevil for murder. “Brother, Take My Hand” in #47, one of the greatest DD stories ever, in which Daredevil befriends and assists a disabled, African-American Vietnam War veteran, Willie Lincoln. The story reinforces all the right messages about brotherhood – at just the right time in the USA’s turbulent history – but without ever once even mentioning the color of Willie Lincoln’s skin. 77

Marvel Super Heroes – This term refers to a comic book in particular, and to Marvel’s super-powered characters in general.

Beginning in early 1968, Marvel transformed one of its titles, Marvel Super Heroes, from a book reprinting past adventures of popular characters to one spotlighting all-new stories introducing new heroes in solo adventures. The experimental book lasted only nine issues before retreating to reprints, but Colan drew four of those lead stories, including: The debut of Captain Marvel, an intergalactic policeman (actually named Mar-Vell), who came to Earth to save the universe – and, G L O R Y D AY S W I T H D D A N D D O C

incidentally, to help Marvel Comics keep the “Captain Marvel” name in circulation so that rival DC couldn’t easily revive the popular, redsuited hero of the same name who’d enjoyed popularity in the 1940s. Colan liked being tapped to draw a brand-new character, whom he depicted for two MSH issue (#12 and #13) and in a handful of spin-off Captain Marvel comics (issues #1-4), but he wasn’t crazy about the genre – or the character. “I never liked the costume – it was too much like every other costume,” Colan says. “It was awful–just an imitation of any of the other costumed characters I’d ever done.” Madame Medusa, the hirsute heroine of Marvel’s superpowered band of outcasts, the Inhumans. She enjoyed her first (and last) solo story in MSH #15. Guardians of the Galaxy, a rag-tag band of colorful aliens who team up to rebel against the evil reptilian empire known as the Badoon. The Guardians debuted in MSH #18, and later became the stars of several popular series in the 1970s and ’90s.

have liked to have had the principles he stood for. I wanted to be like him.” Colan’s stint on Cap is also noteworthy for two famous sequences: a five-page car chase in #116 that was inspired directly by the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt, and a scene in #122 that simply had Cap walking down a street and ruminating for three pages. Doctor Strange – In mid-1968, just as Colan was in the midst of his landmark run on Daredevil, and as he was concluding his classic tenure on Iron Man in Tales of Suspense, he shifted from Captain Marvel to one of the most daringly different projects in his career: Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. Originated as a co-feature in Strange Tales by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1963, Dr. Strange was a former physician, Stephen Strange, who lost his medical practice after a crippling auto accident. He subsequently hit skid row, and was saved only by a trek to the Himalayas, where he studied the mystic arts under the tutelage of an ancient warlock called… the Ancient One. As the series developed, Dr. Strange became a stoic mystic who cast swirly spells and kept the world same from monstrous demons from nightmare dimensions. Pure fantasy.

Beyond the Marvel Super Heroes comic book, Colan had ample opportunity to draw some of the company’s other masked adventurers in three main venues: The Avengers, which Colan drew for just three issues, #63-65, in early ’69. No one recalls exactly why, but Colan was temporarily reassigned from DD to this title – New Cap: Marvel’s version not one that he particularly wanted. of Captain Marvel debuted He didn’t like having to track all by Colan in Marvel Superthose characters and costumes. Heroes #12, Dec. 1967. And yet the three issues are a fairly memorable run, including the transformation of archer Hawkeye into the giant strongman Goliath. Roy Thomas, the writer of these stories, recalls that Colan was a handy replacement for Avengers regular artist John Buscema. “Gene probably wasn’t the best choice for Avengers, and I don’t think he wanted to do it,” Thomas says. “But Stan suddenly decided he was drawing [the book]. I think that was a favor to me because Stan knew I wanted to work with a good artist when he was yanking John Buscema away!” Not Brand Echh, a humor comic in which Marvel made fun of its own characters. This beloved series debuted in 1968, and Colan drew several features during its short run, including an Avengers take-off in issue #5 and a Dr. Strange send-up in #13. “Those [stories] worked out great,” Thomas recalls. “Gene had a nice feel for doing parody. It didn’t exactly look like anybody else, but it was great.” Captain America, which is second only to Daredevil in terms of the length of Colan’s stint on the book. His first issue was #116 in August 1969, and he stayed with the title through #137 in May 1971. This was one of Colan’s favorite characters because it represented a lot of his own ideals. “Captain America is the kind of man, like a Gary Cooper type, where you wish you could be like him, wish you knew him,” Colan says. “That’s how I looked at him, like someone I would’ve liked, or would GENE COLAN

Madame Medusa: The incomparable Inhuman’s first solo story from Marvel Super-Heroes #15. Inks by Vince Colletta. But by 1968, Dr. Strange had graduated to his own featurelength comic book (continuing Strange Tales’ numbering with #169), and both Lee and Ditko were long gone from the character. 78

The magician now was in the hands of writer Roy Thomas, who was attempting to give the character more context both in the real world and in the pop culture’s concept of the occult. At first, Wallace Wood protégé Dan Adkins illustrated Doc’s solo book for two issues, but then the third was handed off to newcomer Tom Palmer. Then the fourth issue, #172, marked the debut of Gene Colan inked for the first time by the aforementioned Palmer. Roy Thomas: Nobody had thought seriously about Gene on Dr. Strange until one day he ended up doing it. I don’t even know how he was chosen. Stan probably made the choice. Who knew whether it would work or not visually? Forget whether it would sell, who knew whether we’d even like it?

tapped for the assignment. “Anything to do with fantasy stuff – spooky things – I was into it.” Colan was familiar with Ditko’s take on the character, but it didn’t resonate well with him. “It was well-designed, and you could understand every little thing that was in those panels,” Colan says. “But to me, I couldn’t draw like that or even tell a story that way. It wasn’t for me.” So, instead he reinvented the character. Basing his Doctor Strange on an older Errol Flynn, Colan set about recreating the character and his world so that they could appear to live in ours. It was a jarringly realistic approach to Marvel’s most unreal series. Thomas: Everybody before that stage – Bill Everett, Marie Severin, Dan Adkins – had been doing their own version of a Ditko Dr. Strange. Even Dan Adkins with his totally different art style, he was doing a riff on Ditko. When Gene came along, there was just no question of following Ditko in any way, shape or form. He was doing the same character, but it didn’t look at all like anything that Ditko had ever done. And he had his own view of what these other worlds should look like. Everyone else sort of copied Ditko’s versions of those extra dimensions, which were great and wonderful. When Gene came on, he didn’t feel any real rapport with that, I guess, so his extra dimensions tended to be just blackness and smoke and things of that sort. In some ways, of course, it doesn’t have the wild imagination that Ditko did, but it had its own realities. There was no reason why it could be only the way Ditko drew it. Sometimes it was a little strange for a dimension Doc Strange had been to before to look different when drawn by Gene, but nobody complained. That was just Gene’s reality, and I loved it from the start. Thomas says that Colan’s interpretation of Dr. Strange absolutely transformed the writer’s own take on the character.

Cap Redux: Colan got his second shot at drawing Captain America starting with issue #116 in 1969. This page from issue #125 is inked by Frank Giacoia. Oh, they liked it all right. Immediately, Colan embraced this character, throwing himself into the details of the realistic Greenwich Village setting, as well as the requisite nightmare dimensions. He pulled out every storytelling trick in his book – and maybe invented some new ones. No comic book ever had looked like what Gene Colan drew in Doctor Strange. “I’d done a few horror things, and Stan knew I was good The End…: Final issue of the 1960s version with atmosphere,” Colan says, remembering how he was of Doc Strange, #183 from Nov. 1969. 79

“I’d only written a couple of Doc Strange stories here and there before, and never really got into the character,” Thomas says. “Gene’s take on realism made me think of the characters as being much more real and based in reality. That’s why I would do stories having them walk around in the snow on New Year’s Eve – things of this sort – because I knew that would make him seem more like a real person. That led me to do stories that would deal a little more with his background.”

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Quickly, the Thomas/Colan/Palmer team established itself at peak performance, pitting Dr. Strange against the demon Dormammu and the Sons of Satannish cult. In issue #177, in an attempt to make the character at least appear more super-heroic, Colan gave Dr. Strange a dynamic new costume featuring a fullface mask. From there, the adventures only got more trippy, climaxing with issue #180, in which Dr. Strange encounters the godlike Eternity, meets writer Tom Wolfe (in a cameo appearance), and fights off dinosaurs in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Looking back, Colan today regrets all the hours he put into his work, feeling he deprived his children of their father. The children don’t necessarily agree. Son Erik, now a fine artist in his own right, is one of his dad’s greatest fans. Erik Colan: I guess I was fortunate to grow up with my father having his office in the house, but I just thought of it as normal – other than us getting colorful comic books every month for free. He’s been a great father. He’s actually a gentleman. I used to go to the companies with him, there’d be guys running around in T-shirts and roller skates. My dad would have a suit and tie always. Gentleman Gene they called him.

Heady stuff indeed, and although fondly remembered by fans, the Thomas/Colan/Palmer version of Doctor Strange ended with issue #183. Sales simply couldn’t justify its continued existence. Reflecting, the creators have mixed emotions on this body of work. Thomas looks back on the book as one in which he worked to the artists’ strengths. “I think that’s one of the reasons the book worked pretty well – and why it’s remembered, even though it wasn’t a huge seller,” Thomas says. “Gene even had a couple of other runs on the book, including sometimes with Palmer inking. But for some reason the combination of the three of us seems to be better remembered than the other runs, nice as they might have been.” From Colan’s perspective, Doctor Strange was memorable – and exhausting, both physically and mentally. Coming at a time when he was concurrently entangled in Daredevil, Doctor Strange completely tapped Colan’s resources, pulling him away from Adrienne and his young children Nanci and Erik, born in 1964 and ’66 respectively. Colan: Two pages a day, seven days a week was my goal. I always insisted on achieving two pages a day, and on top of that was the excellence I expected of myself. I was really married to my work, which wreaked havoc on my family life. I stayed up sometimes all night, until 4 a.m. Drank a lot of coffee – anything to stay up. Ultimately, the late nights and chemical stimulants took a toll, nearly landing Colan in the hospital from sheer exhaustion. As his father had predicted years ago, Gene finally was making good money, but he was giving it all to the doctors to keep him going. “It was quite an ordeal,” Colan says. “Adrienne went through hell, but what a powerhouse she was.” GENE COLAN

Dr. Strange, I presume?: Colan redefined Dr. Strange twice in the same decade – top, in a pinup (inked by Colan) from issue #180 of the first series, May 1969. Bottom, from #17 (inks by Tom Palmer) of the second series, Aug. 1976. By the start of the ’70s, Colan had regained his health, Doctor Strange was done, and he was able to focus solely on Daredevil and Captain America as his two steady assignments. And that’s what they were: steady assignments. By this time, Colan had mastered the craft of drawing superhero comics, and he was almost too comfortable with his assignments. He was ready for a new challenge. Little did he know it would come from the Tomb of Dracula. 80

Colan in Color

Spectre Collab: 1990s commissioned illo of the Spectre. Pencils by Colan, inks by Ernie Chan.

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Black Magic: Psychedelic 1970s black light posters adapted from Colan & Tom Palmer’s Dr. Strange stories from the 1960s. GENE COLAN

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COLAN IN COLOR

DD Drawings: Top, Colan’s 1999 Christmas card; bottom, cover to The Comics Journal #231. GENE COLAN

Together Again: DD and the Black Widow in a wistful piece drawn by Colan in 2003. V

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Famous Covers: Some of Colan’s bestremembered covers from throughout his career. GENE COLAN

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COLAN IN COLOR

Colan International: Some foreign editions of Gene Colan's work on Daredevil, Jaws II and Curse of Dracula. GENE COLAN

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Cap in Combat: Captain America fantasy cover penciled by Colan and inked/colored by Gutierrez. IX

COLAN IN COLOR

Drac & Janus: Recent commissioned piece penciled by Colan and inked by fan & frequent collaborator Dave Gutierrez. GENE COLAN

Recreation: Colan/Gutierrez remix of the cover to TOD #64. XI

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Drac #1 Reimagined: Colan’s version of the Tomb of Dracula #1 cover he never got the chance to draw. Inks and colors by Gutierrez. GENE COLAN

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Drac #1Rereimagined: Yet another Colan/Gutierrez variation of TOD #1. XIII

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Drac on Canvas: Colan’s cover painting for the Epic Comics Dracula revival in 1992. GENE COLAN

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Drac on Canvas II: Painted cover to the second issue of the TOD revival. XV

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Outdoor Life: 2004 piece drawn for Outdoor Life magazine; colored by James Romberger. GENE COLAN

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Secrets #2: Inking Gene

Inking. It sounds like a down ’n dirty production term, and at its most fundamental level that’s true. In comic art, the term “inking” is used to describe the process by which an artist embellishes a penciled page with black ink (from a brush or a pen) to define the images distinctly for publication. Today’s production techniques are more sophisticated and can pick up the subtleties of a penciled page, but in the old days – before the mid-’80s – inking was a necessity. Sometimes in comics the original pencil artist inks his own work, but most often, for expediency’s sake, the penciled pages are handed off, as if on an assembly line, to a second artist, who inevitably brings a bit of his own style to the finished drawing. Gene Colan, never a speedy penciler to begin with, rarely inked his own comic book work. For one thing, he didn’t like inking. “Inking made me very nervous,” he says. “I could not handle a brush well. A pencil is the most familiar tool I have. I’m in full control of it, whereas I never feel like I have full control of a brush.” But as a distinct stylist and storyteller, he also was more valuable to his publishers penciling several stories per month, versus penciling and inking only one or two.

Colan solo: Ink/wash page from one of Gene Colan’s mid-’60s Warren Magazine stories. 81

Which isn’t to say Colan never experimented with inking. Even in his early days at Timely Comics in the 1940s and ’50s, he penciled and inked the occasional story or cover. But he was never satisfied with the work – or the time it took him to complete it. INKING GENE

“I found it a little too overwhelming,” Colan says. “I could do a very nice pencil job, but I didn’t want to wreck it with bad inking.” At Timely, Colan’s work frequently was inked by his mentor Syd Shores or by bullpen artist Vince Alascia. Both did clean, professional work, but it still didn’t always set well with Gene. “The inker’s style always would shine through – that’s what I didn’t like about it,” he says. “You’re getting two different interpretations. The composition wouldn’t change, but the technique would.” At DC in the 1950s, Colan’s work often was inked by Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia, and subject to the same subdued house style that made the most dynamic adventure artists (Gil Kane, Alex Toth, etc.) look like journeyman advertising illustrators. “They wanted everybody to draw alike, which I never liked,” Colan says. “I never understood it. If they thought enough of an artist to hire him in the first place, they should have left him alone to do his thing.” At about the time he joined Marvel in the mid-’60s, Colan finally got the opportunity “to do his thing” on a dozen or so war and horror stories he drew for Warren Publishing’s black-and-white magazines. Archie Goodwin was the writer and editor of these genre stories, which appeared in Blazing Combat, Creepy, and Eerie magazines in 1966 and ’67, penciled and inked by Colan in a dynamic tonal wash.

Rare Romita: Doctor Strange #7, 1975, represents one of the few times that John Romita ever inked a Gene Colan story. “When I did some of those wash drawings for Warren, I had just gotten the notion that I wanted to ink again,” Colan says. “I put in my own tonal work, which was fun to do. I’d dip my pen in ink, then twirl the brush so that I could get the hairs on it to a very fine point. If I wanted a grey tone, I’d add a little water to the ink. The amount of water I’d add would determine the amount of grey.” At the time, this Warren work was just about the “purest” Gene Colan work that comics readers had ever seen, although he personally prefers the stories reproduced straight from pencils in the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s. “I think my purest stuff is what I’ve done of late in pencil,” Colan says. “But if you want to put down a final impression, then inking it is the way to go. To me, though, it’s too final. It’s very hard to correct if it isn’t quite right.”

Inkers on Colan

Dick Ayers: Sample of the Colan/Ayers collaboration from Captain America #130, 1970. GENE COLAN

Throughout Colan’s career, his unique “painting with a pencil” style posed a daunting challenge to artists who were used to inking simpler, more linear work. Tom Palmer, the artist who probably inked Colan’s work most and best (they collaborated on virtually the entire 70-issue run of Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula in the 1970s), describes the fundamental challenge:

In addition to Daredevil, Ayers inked several of Colan’s Sub-Mariner stories in Marvel’s Tales to Astonish in the 1960s, and in the early ’70s they collaborated on a handful of romance stories and a brief run of Captain America (issues #128-134). These later works are among Ayers’ favorites. “I have a page or two of one of those [Captain America] stories framed and on my studio wall,” he says. “The romance stories I enjoyed even more, and have one splash page also framed, as I thought of my daughter Elaine when I inked it.” Asked what advice he would give to an artist re: inking Colan’s work, Ayers says “Pass it on to me – I'd love to ink Gene’s work again!” John Romita Sr., a contemporary of Colan’s (they first met in the Timely/Marvel Bullpen of the early 1950s), rarely inked Gene’s work. They collaborated on one romance story, an issue of Dr. Strange (#7) and a few covers at Marvel in the 1970s. But as Marvel’s art director during that time, Romita recalls counseling several young artists on how best to approach inking Colan’s work. Romita: You know how I approached it? I left a suicide note! If I had to ink Gene on a cover, a splash or a story, it was terrifying. It was hard to do. I felt like a failure at it because I couldn’t keep

Colan & Colan: Gene’s then-teenaged son Erik inked this Tomb of Dracula magazine splash in 1980. Tom Palmer: His pencils are subtle. They may not look that way – they may look very powerful – but if you look at his penciled pages, you see there’s very light rendering, a grey. Now, you typically have three distinct values in these pencils: light, medium and dark. Some [inkers] ignore the light and make the medium as black as the dark, but I saw all three values. That was the difference. Over the course of his career, Colan was paired with scores of artists who retain strong memories – mostly good ones – of inking his work. Dick Ayers, who inked some of Colan’s earliest Daredevil stories at Marvel in the mid-1960s, recalls two distinct challenges: “Adapting my style to conform to Gene’s heavy use of blacks... and then keeping my shirt sleeve from getting all smudged while inking [the heavily-penciled pages]!” Ayers, a distinct penciler in his own right – at Marvel, he was best known as the main artist for the Sgt. Fury war comic – inked with a thick line that frequently complemented artist Jack Kirby’s bold penciling style. But as much as Ayers enjoyed embellishing Kirby’s in-yourface work, he also appreciated Colan’s more subtle style. “His work was much different from Kirby’s pencils,” Ayers says. “With Gene it was ‘all there’ and a joy to interpret once I got with the flow of his penciling.”

Abel-Bodied: John Romita would tell young inkers to follow the example of Jack Abel, who inked this Daredevil #82 page in 1971. INKING GENE

Steve Leialoha was one of those young artists assigned to ink Colan’s work at Marvel in the 1970s, and together they produced a memorable run on the quirky Howard the Duck comic (issues #4-13) written by Steve Gerber. “I’ve been fortunate to ink pages of most of my favorite artists at least once over the years (I started at Marvel in 1975),” Leialoha says, “and Gene drew the most beautiful and problematic pages of anyone.” A fan of the Colan/Palmer team, Leialoha looked to that work for his cues. “The challenge with Gene’s pencil art is figuring out how to turn all those grey shadow tones into black-and-white lines,” he says. “I try to keep as much as possible while varying the patterns and textures so it doesn’t turn into a grey fog – unless that's what Gene is drawing. He’s a master of fog scenes.” Early on in the Howards, Leialoha inked most everything with a Hunt 102 pen, but then began experimenting with brushes around the time of Howard the Duck #11. Leialoha: I picked up the pencils for that issue from the Marvel offices in New York. While visiting friends at Continuity Associates [a commercial art agency founded by comic book artists Neal Adams and Dick Giordano], Neal took an interest in the pages and asked if

Diverse Hands: Neal Adams and Russ Heath inked parts of this Howard the Duck #11 page, which otherwise is the work of Steve Leialoha. Can you find their contributions? all of Gene’s identity on it. I used to think ‘Oh, my god, people are going to think I’m an ego maniac!’ I wasn’t changing his work, but I couldn’t keep the flow and the movement that he had on his stuff. I always felt like I failed. Romita speaks to the same issue Palmer identified: distinguishing and then delineating the subtleties of Colan’s pencils. “It was a terrible challenge, but it was a crime to lose all that beautiful subtlety he had,” Romita says. “It was always a losing battle.” Palmer was considered the gold standard of Colan inkers in the 1970s. But because he was a well-schooled commercial artist in his own right – and brought a lot of his training to bear on Colan’s work – Palmer’s work was intimidating for some young artists. For inspiration, Romita frequently sent aspiring inkers to look at Colan’s earliest Iron Man stories, inked by Jack Abel (often under the pseudonym of “Gary Michaels”) in Tales of Suspense issues #73-83 in the mid-’60s. “Jack Abel inked him well,” Romita says. “I don’t know what Gene thought of his stuff, but I thought he did a wonderful interpretation of Gene. It looked like Colan, every single panel. I used to tell people ‘You want to learn how to ink Colan? Look at how Jack Abel does it.’”

Austin: Terry Austin inked this Howard the Duck cover. GENE COLAN

Giordano: A rare Colan/Giordano Batman collaboration from Detective Comics #530, 1983. he might play around with them a bit. He ended up inking a sizable amount on five of the pages, beautifully, all with a brush. That was my crash course in inking with a brush, which was amusing since Neal was, at that point in time, inking most everything with markers. I tried out inking a later issue of Gene's Daredevil (issue #154) almost entirely with a brush, to see how that would look. It worked out pretty well, although I don’t feel I completely got the hang of it until I inked the covers to [writer] Don McGregor’s Detectives Inc. [in the late 1980s] Reflecting on their work together, Leialoha cites the Detectives Inc. covers among his favorites, along with an eight-page Creepy story they drew for Harris Publications in the early 1990s. “More recently I've inked a few of the private commissions that Gene is doing these days, though I think they look fine unlinked,” Leialoha says. “I have a nice drawing of Howard and Dr Strange that Gene did for me many years ago that shall remain uninked.”

pieces like he’s doing these days.” Dick Giordano, one of Continuity’s founders and a prominent artist/editor at DC Comics in the 1970s and ’80s, first inked Colan’s work at Marvel in the mid-’70s, collaborating on the Dracula Lives! black-and-white magazine and “Brother Voodoo” in the Strange Tales color comic. He, too, struggled with the fundamental challenge of interpreting Colan’s fully-rendered drawings. “[Colan’s work] generally requires extensive use of feathering, cross-hatching and pen-like line work (which I did with a brush) in an attempt to duplicate the greys and keep it as illustrative as Gene’s pencils are,” Giordano says. “His art is so good to look at that some (myself included) have tried, with varying success to reproduce from Gene’s pencils, without first having them inked.”

As for advice to the aspiring Colan inker, Leialoha says: “Make photocopies of the pencils (they are nice to have in any case) so that you can refer back to them while inking. Light pencil work can get smeared or faded, so it gets tricky maintaining the grey tone balance as you’re applying a texture that’s three or more layers deep, especially on large

In 1981, when Colan quit Marvel and moved to DC, Giordano hired him to draw Batman – then had to find an appropriate inker. Palmer – the inker of choice – remained under contract at Marvel, so Giordano first turned to Philippine artist Adrian Gonzales, then to Klaus Janson and Tony DeZuniga, who both inked Colan’s work extensively at Marvel. Later, artist Bob Smith inked a majority of Colan’s work on the

INKING GENE

14-issue horror series Night Force and the Batman stories in Detective Comics. Asked how he selected a Colan inker, Giordano says “I favored an inker with an illustrative line, and one who drew well enough to be able to dig in and do justice to the lush but sometimes loose pencils.” When he could spare time from editing, Giordano personally inked a pair of Colan Batman stories (Detective #529 and 530) and many covers. “I surely didn’t do as good a job as Tom Palmer did on Tomb of Dracula, but I enjoyed the work and was fairly pleased with the results,” Giordano says.

Josef Rubinstein, an artist who came to prominence in the late 1970s, never directly inked much of Colan’s work – they only did one full issue of Marvel’s Harrowers together in 1993, and then a smattering of pinups and covers before and after. But as a former Giordano assistant, he had a hand in the Brother Voodoo and Howard the Duck stories that came through Continuity Associates. “I don’t know that I brought anything unique to [Colan’s work], except that I did pay attention to the fact that Gene was bringing an energy to the work that had previously been lost by a great number of people, and I tried to preserve it,” Rubinstein says. Rubinstein primarily inked Colan’s work with pen, but also would employ brush to depict energy. “My process is you start with the drawing contour: what’s the shape of the mouth, what’s the shape of the fingers? How do the pieces interconnect? Then it’s the rendering that adds the threedimensionality after the contours have been defined. But with Gene’s innovations, like a piece of Dr. Strange’s head floating off into space, you’ve got to be careful not to lose that quality.” A real student of the art form and its practitioners, Rubinstein has some strong opinions of who have been the best Colan inkers: Syd Shores (Daredevil), Frank Giacoia (Daredevil and Iron Man in Tales of Suspense), Tom Palmer. His personal favorite is Al Williamson, with whom Colan collaborated on several projects (including a four-issue Tomb of Dracula revival) in the early 1990s. “Williamson kept an energy and kinetic sense to the pencils, whereas other people would just round off the pencils and lose those qualities,” Rubinstein says. “Now, the one issue (of Harrowers) I did, I overdid that because I was so intent on not losing it that I went too far. Gene even called me up and asked ‘Could you hold back a bit on the next one?’ But there never was a next one.”

Rubinstein: This Colan/Joe Rubinstein Dracula pinup is from Tomb of Dracula magazine #6, 1980. GENE COLAN

The key to inking Colan’s work successfully, Rubinstein says, is to truly understand the structure, weight and value of the penciled work. “Don’t look at [the figures] as a series of lines that have to be very expertly covered; they’re a person that happens to be drawn,” he says. “When a lot of the contemporary inkers look at the work as ‘How do I laminate what’s in front of me?’ they will totally lose what Gene Colan has drawn.”

Conversations Gene Colan and Tom Palmer

Gene Colan and Tom Palmer.

Just as longtime comics fans have come to look upon the Colan/Palmer team as old friends, so, too, have the artists themselves formed a strong friendship – one built upon shared influences, experiences and mutual respect.

Their names are inextricably linked by more than 30 years of comic books – literally thousands of individual pages – drawn by the Colan/Palmer duo. Individually, these artists are superstars who come from separate generations, but share common roots. Colan got his formal training under Frank Reilly at the Art Students League in the 1940s, then went on to forge a brilliant 50-year comics career with his unique “painting with a pencil” style. Palmer, who also studied under Reilly until the mentor’s death in 1967, broke into comics at a time when a new generation of artists was breaking all the old comics molds. Quickly, this hotshot young illustrator found himself inking such distinct stylists as Neal Adams, John Buscema, Jim Steranko… and Gene Colan.

On Nov. 21, 2004, at The National comics convention in New York City, Gene Colan and Tom Palmer sat down with the author for a broad, memorable discussion about their lives and times together. Tom Field: Gene, what did you think of Tom Palmer’s work over your pencils? Colan: The best. He was the best. My stuff is never easy to do, I know. A lot of inkers have had a lot of trouble with it. TF: What specifically did he bring to your work?

Colan: Weight. A lot of good shadTogether, Colan and Palmer are a ow work, darks, heavy stuff – a lot super team. Revered as one of the like Caniff. I always admired Caniff, premier art teams in comics histoand [Palmer’s] work reminded me of it. ry, they started out on Dr. Strange in the late 1960s, hit their prime The Beginning: A Colan/Palmer page from their very first Palmer: And I didn’t even know with Tomb of Dracula and a host of story – Doctor Strange #172, 1968. about Caniff at the time! I was fresh horror hits in the 1970s, crafted a out of art school. Alex Raymond, memorable Black Panther serial in the 1980s, and then have reunited Caniff – any of those guys, I just hadn’t been exposed to their work in recent years for the occasional Batman or Daredevil story. yet. I saw it later, of course, but not when I first started inking Gene. 87

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of a comic book as something worthwhile and artistic. The publishers weren’t paying a lot of money, so in order to do comics you had to have a personal feeling for the artwork. That’s all I can say. Colan: You were expressing yourself, no matter what they paid. Palmer: Yes, I respected the artwork. Colan: Your work is on that page – nobody else’s. Regardless of what they’re paying, it’s still your work, and you want it to look as good as it can. You have to satisfy yourself. Palmer: You said it all! My name was on there. But even if they hadn’t printed my name… Colan: You would have done it anyway. Palmer: That’s right. Colan: And maybe without even thinking about it, you were improving all the time. Palmer: Oh, I was. Like on Tomb of Dracula, which we did

Try-out: The audition piece that won the Dracula assignment for Colan. Colan: You made my work look good. A bad inker can take a good pencil job and wreck it. On the other hand, a good inker can take a bad pencil job and make it look great. TF: What had bad inkers done to your work? Colan: They didn’t follow it. They drew whatever they wanted to draw. Vincent Colletta, I hate to say it: when he wanted to he could do very good work, but he didn’t take his time with my stuff. TF: Tom, is there anything you ever wanted to ask Gene about the work you did together? Palmer: No, I think Gene knows that he’s a terrific artist. I respect him and his work. I worked hard on it. [To Gene] Y’know, the first comic book I ever colored was with you on Dr. Strange. I forget which issue I was working on at the time, but I went in to Marvel and asked John Verpoorten “Can I color Dr. Strange?” He said sure. So I took that issue. I forget the number, but it was the Sons of the Satannish issue. I asked how long it would take to color. John said “Oh, a day – eight hours.” That’s how long it was taking guys. Two days later, I hadn’t even gone to bed! I worked two days around the clock, sitting there doing watercolors for that comic. And it’s because I saw the production

GENE COLAN

Colan/Palmer Reunited: The two artists who drew accolades for drawing Doctor Strange reunited for a long run on Tomb of Dracula starting with issue #3, 1972. 88

Calendar Boys: Colan & Palmer drew their two signature 1970s characters in this Dracula/Doctor Strange illo from a mid1970s Marvel calendar. for a number of years. Your work on it never really changed, but mine did. I developed more finesse to it; I was trying more things. I was probably adhering more to your pencils – I was seeing your grey lines. When you would model something, I would try to do more modeling, too, whether by zip-a-tone or by brush. Colan: I would leave that up to the inker; if he wanted to put the tones in, that was great. I penciled it for myself, but once it left my hands, there was nothing I could do about it.

Colan: I didn’t pencil for an inker, I didn’t pencil for reproduction… Palmer: Because that’s what you enjoyed. If someone had said “Gene, you’ve got to do it this way,” you would have hated to get up in the morning and draw. TF: It’s interesting. Of all the artists to come to Marvel after Kirby and Ditko – Heck, Ayers, Tuska, Buscema, Romita – Stan had all of them start out working over Kirby’s layouts. The one exception – the only Marvel artist who didn’t debut by penciling over Kirby… is Gene.

Palmer: You penciled for yourself. You didn’t pencil for an inker. Palmer: It never would have worked. 89

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Gory Days: Colan/Palmer spread from Tomb of Dracula #21, 1974. TF: Now, it could be because he had Stan up against the wall…

Palmer: No, no – the one with the green helmet. Oh, you never would have fit in with the original one by C.C. Beck.

Colan: No, the only time I ever had Stan up against the wall was for more money! [laughter]

TF: Have you ever seen the stories he drew for Archie Comics in the early ’90s?

Palmer: One thing that made Gene unique in the business is that he wasn’t per se a superhero artist. Now, I don’t know what he did before…

Palmer: You did Archie?! No kidding…!

Colan: Crime stories, mostly.

Colan: It was at a time when work was hard to get, and my wife said to me “Why don’t you try Archie Comics?” I said “But I don’t do that kind of stuff!” She said “Why don’t you give it shot?” so I did. And I got work. I stayed with them for about two years.

Palmer: But at Marvel, before Dr. Strange, what were you doing? Colan: Daredevil.

Palmer: Well, that’s the point I want to make: Gene is an artist. And if you’re an artist, if you can draw, then you can draw anything. Really, you can.

Palmer: Later you worked on Captain America – I worked on some of those stories with you – and you brought a different approach, a different look to superheroes. You did Iron Man. And there was a different character there; I’m trying to remember…

TF: Gene, when you left Marvel for DC in 1981, were you aware of any push to bring Palmer with you?

Colan: Captain Marvel?

Colan: No.

Palmer: Yes, Captain Marvel!

TF: How did you feel about the inkers they gave you at DC?

Colan: Not the original Captain Marvel…

Colan: They had different people ink me. Never consistent with

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anybody. Some of the inkers were very good, others not. I never had any say. Sometimes at Marvel I’d get up the nerve to say to Stan, “Please give this to so and so,” but they’d just end up giving it to whoever was available. TF: [to Palmer] Good thing you were available! Palmer: I don’t know that I would have had the same luck at DC. Years later, I went to DC, and they’re great people, but they work in a different way. I don’t know that I would have had the same freedom to work with Gene. Marvel was always kind of looser. TF: Writers often say that because there were so few people overseeing so many books at Marvel, that the editors really only stepped in if you were in trouble. Do you think you got more freedom because of that?

had in art school, Frank Reilly, died suddenly [in 1967] before I completed the course, and I was thrown into the business a little green around the edges. It was a private, one-teacher art school, and the teacher, Reilly, was one of my greatest mentors and my best connection in my career. [That loss] made me work harder to achieve some form of success. [To Gene] I knew of your work from Creepy, Eerie, Blazing Combat – the Warren magazines I saw in school – but you didn’t work in lines. It was all tones and wash drawings. So, all of a sudden I see these Dr. Strange pencils, and they’re like a version of wash drawings. Now, since I had no previous experience and had never seen comic book pencils before, to me this was routine and normal. I now realize you were unique – so different from anyone else in comics. Take a guy like Jack Kirby, who had a very precise line, he almost told you where to ink it. Colan: Very linear. You knew exactly what you were looking at. That was not the case with me. Sometimes you think you’d see a foot, but it wasn’t really there.

Palmer: Well, think about it. I walk in the door and pencil and issue of Dr. Strange – first job I ever penciled. At the time, I thought I did a good job, but really it was a stinker. It wasn’t up to par. I went back two weeks later to get the next issue, and they said “No, we’re getting someone else to pencil it; would you like to ink it?” I said “Sure!” I’d never inked anything before! But to this day, if someone asks “Can you handle this new assignment?” I’ll say “Sure!” I may not know how to tackle that specific assignment today, but by tomorrow or next week I will. I love a challenge!

Palmer: When I was on Dracula, I remember I might see a foot where he was standing – part of a foot – but if I just put part of that foot there, it’d look odd as hell because the rest of the leg was suggested in there somewhere. So I would draw the leg with maybe cross-hatch to show what was there. If you made it all black, it wouldn’t look right. Colan: [DC editor] Julie Schwartz had a thing with my figure work. He’d say “Gene, all your characters look like they’re taking a dump!” [laughter] I’d say “What are you talking about?!” He’d say “You’ve got them in a stance. They’re all leaning over, bending their legs, looking they’ve got to go really bad!”

TF: Pretty amazing to think that you were fresh from Stewart: Colan & Palmer had a ball on this 1980 rarity, art school, and yet Stan Steve Gerber’s Stewart the Rat. and Roy at Marvel immediately paired you with four of the most distinct stylists in the medium: Neal Adams on the X-Men, John Buscema on the Palmer: [still laughing] You should have said “It’s all in the eye Avengers, Jim Steranko on Captain America, and Gene on of the beholder!” Dr. Strange. It’s almost like assigning a newly-trained sculptor to carve Mt. Rushmore! Colan: I’ve had bad experiences with some editors. One in particular – no point in mentioning his name – but he made me Palmer: In retrospect, that is probably true. I wasn’t really good at a wreck. I never knew what he was going to do with my work. any one thing out of art school, but I was passionate in making it, doing many things artistically, in and out of comics at the same time. Palmer: I’ve heard from other artists – your contemporaries – that at one point, back in the ’50s, there was a real disrespect and even My advertising connection intrigued Neal Adams no doubt. He contempt for the work and for the artist. It had to have been very traumadid entrust me with his foray into Marvel, but he saw what I did not, tizing. As artists, we’re all fragile in many ways, even though we put up and it worked. What I didn't mention before is that the teacher I a front. We’re always putting ourselves out there, and our confidence 91

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and self-esteem can just be crushed by people who are brutal to us.

were doing everything. I sort of floundered. I went to advertising agencies, where I would see brilliant artists render with chalk. I didn’t know how to do that. So I attempted different things. It was at a time when I needed money badly, and my whole family system was being threatened. My pins were being knocked out from underneath me. But I hung in. What else could I do? I was ready to pump gas – I really was. Anything.

Colan: It got to a point where I’d just freeze at the board. “Oh, he won’t like this; he won’t like that.” It was hard to get over that. Palmer: What helped me was going into advertising at a very young age. I was beaten up – not physically, but the art directors were brutal. They’d be very critical of my work – of anyone’s work, really – and often without any constructive criticism. It tests your self-confidence and talent, but it also toughens you after awhile. You start to get feisty and actually go back at them.

Palmer: See? It’s almost like you’re talking about the Depression. You’re not, but people who lived through it, what they experienced were a lot like your own thought process. Colan: I would call Stan up at least once a week asking for work. “We’ve got nothing yet.” It was a very quick conversation. “I have no idea when.” My parents owned an antique store, and I was ready to go to work there. They said “You can work here anytime you want, but we advise you to stay in what you’re doing, and hang in.” Which is what I did, and eventually I picked up a job at an advertising agency doing advertisements, and it was the most boring job I ever had. I shared an art studio with other artists, and it was almost like working in comics. We were creating film strips – educational film strips. I did that for several years until comics came back. I don’t think failure should ever be an option for anyone in what they’re doing. Never accept failure. Just hang in with what you love, and eventually success will come.

Colan: If you have a family to support, it’s hard… Palmer: I hear you! That must have been a tough time. I was talking with someone yesterday about the Depression and the people who came though that. I missed that tough period in comics in the 1950s, when people didn’t get any respect. Colan: In the late ’50s, it all collapsed. I couldn’t get any work from anybody. I couldn’t get any comics work for about six years. Palmer: John Buscema went to Chaite Studios for 10 years, where he probably honed his fantastic drawing skills. Colan: I went there, but I wasn’t ready for it. I couldn’t paint like John.

TF: Tom, how has Gene’s style evolved in all the time you’ve worked together?

Palmer: Well, John was doing sketches, too. He was doing storyboards. He was a wellrounded artist.

Palmer: His layouts and rendering are looser today.

Colan: Oh, there wasn’t anything TF: Does that present a John couldn’t do. But John never different challenge to you? seemed very happy in comics. If you caught him on a good day, it Palmer: No, it’s just that the pages Colan/Palmer: “Black Panther” page from the late-’80s was all right. But as a rule there naturally aren’t going to look the serial in Marvel Comics Presents. always seemed to be something same as back when we did Dr. else he really wanted to do. Strange and Dracula together. The end result is different. Gene’s approach has evolved. His layouts Palmer: I always got the sense John was waiting for something, and rendering are looser. I still tighten them up, but it’s not the same. or he wanted to do something else. Artists like Gene and John, they came through at a time when illustration was still big. I know TF: Gene, how do you think your work has evolved in the John wanted to illustrate magazines, and maybe Gene did, too. years you’ve worked with Tom? But as they matured, that part of the market faded away. Comics became the alternative to doing magazine illustrations. Colan: Better. It’s gotten better since I’ve gotten out of comics fulltime because Number 1, there’s no pressure; I pretty much draw what I want. Number 2: age. I’ve been at it so long; I was just bound to get Colan: For me it was always comics – I only wanted to draw comics. For better. I think that’s what’s happened. It’s a mental thing, I believe. If you a while there, Stan and Jack were holding down the fort at Marvel. They GENE COLAN

love what you do, you try to do it even better than you’ve ever done before.

Colan: We might have a little bit.

Colan: Looser, but still heavy enough – which I love…

Palmer: Back then? No. I think I met Gene for the first time in Marvel’s offices. I don’t remember where or when; I just remember meeting him one day. Then we’d occasionally see each other at conventions. These days we talk more frequently.

Palmer: I don’t know if Gene can see it, but I have more skills at hand [today] for his textures, and I think I can show more subtlety in his work now.

Colan: I remember talking to Tom a few years ago about [cartoonist Al] Hirschfeld, and he had a book about Hirschfeld, which he copied on his own and sent to me.

Colan: Do you use a pen?

Palmer: No, remember it was Rockwell? We were talking about the Norman Rockwell painting of a machine gunner. [Editor’s Note: the painting in question is “Let's Give Him Enough and On Time,” a 1942 poster Rockwell painted for display in US munitions factories.]

TF: How do you think Tom’s inks have evolved on your work?

Palmer: Oh, I use everything – a pen, a brush… TF: Even your thumb in some instances, right? I remember seeing nighttime scenes in which you’d create effects with your fingertips and thumb.

Colan: Yes, you’re right! Palmer: It’s the only one he ever did, and I had this book that included it. I said “Oh, I have it!,” and Gene said “You do?!” So, I made a color print and sent it off to him. He was ecstatic to get this. But it really was just a small gesture.

Palmer: Oh, sure! You can soften an edge of wet ink with your finger. I’ve even used an air brush. But I didn’t do that at the beginning. I’ve kept bringing new things to [Gene’s work].

Colan: Well, it was such a departure from anything Rockwell ever did…

TF: Now, my impression as a reader is that your later work looks truer to Gene’s pencils than your earlier work.

Palmer: Yes, it was very nice. TF: Gene, when you think of Tom, is there any one book or character that you associate with the Colan/Palmer team?

Palmer: Because I’m able to handle and treat his work with more subtlety. The way I treat it now is more subtle. I can see and render the pencils better than I used to. TF: Gene, is there anything you ever wanted to ask Tom about his approach to your work? Colan: No, other than just to say I’m very happy with it. I love the mystery of it – to not know exactly how it was done. I’d rather preColan/Palmer: 2001: One of the last Colan/Palmer serve the mystery.

Colan: [to Palmer] You did wonderful on Dracula and Dr. Strange, as well. There was a flow, a certain rhythm to it that made the work look just great. And, of course, with Stewart the Rat. There was an animation, I thought, to the rat, and you really brought that to the surface. You did a really great job on Stewart the Rat.

Palmer: That’s right, that’s right! That was for Jan & Dean Mullaney at collaborations – a 2001 Batman: Black & White story. Eclipse, right? It was black-and-white, Palmer: I think the way we both but very well done. The printing was on nice paper. I didn’t realize worked in this business, we had a book to get out every month, bills it at the time, working on it, until I saw it in print, but it made the to pay, and somehow we were put together as a team. We could comics look like pulps – the printing was that good. We worked have been forgotten and ignored, and we’d not be sitting here today. together month after month for so many years… But somehow, I think, the fans have brought us to this point of recognition. At the time, we never thought about how we did it. We were Colan: We were bound to improve. off doing our jobs, which Marvel presented to us month after month, but who knew we’d be sitting here today talking about it? Palmer: Yes. We were very comfortable together. Nothing against Marv, but sometimes on Dracula the stories were – eh, boring. And TF: I take it you didn’t talk much via phone when you were I could tell when Gene was bored! [Colan laughs] No, really! I working together? could tell when John Buscema was bored, too. But when [Colan and Buscema] were into it… oh, it was just so beautiful. 93

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Gene Colan Portfolio Dream Teams Gene Colan’s Pencils Interpreted by Comics Superstars By Glen David Gold

I’ve heard athletes say that marathons are good for proving yourself, but if you want a glimpse into your soul, try competing in an Iron Man triathlon. That’s what I imagine inking Colan is like. There are so many ways to ruin a Colan page and, when it’s done right, so many different ways it can be right – think of Sinnott versus Palmer, for instance. That’s what inspired me to get some non-traditional inkers on Gene’s commissioned pieces.

When I saw Gene’s pencils of the Black Widow/Batgirl piece, I immediately thought of George Pérez, who took on the commission enthusiastically... and without reading the letter I’d enclosed, which suggested he ink it with a brush. By the time he’d finished – inking the entire thing with a pen, which he uses exclusively, as he has double-jointed fingers – and looked at the note, he thought I might hate what he’d done. He told me that at times he worried he would never actually finish the obsessive detail of the stairs, the bricks, the iron ball, etc. He did a magnificent job adding his sense of order and precision to Gene’s impressionistic dungeon. GENE COLAN

Michael Kaluta was a sudden inspiration. I was standing in front of his table at a convention, looking at his work, and thought I saw some communion with Colan’s pencils. I showed him this Daredevil pinup, and learned that the Chrysler Building is Kaluta’s favorite piece of architecture. He knows everything about it. “Should I throw in the Shadow and an autogyro?” he asked. Like I even had to answer. Mike says that this is the first piece he’d ever inked by another artist. Nervous about taking over someone else’s work, he managed to plunge right in. What’s interesting about this is he didn’t erase Gene’s pencils, using them instead as grey tone shading. 95

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Frankly, I thought of John Byrne for the Daredevil/Doom pinup for two reasons: I like his inking and I wanted to see if, in spite of his infamous comments about Gene’s pencils, he might dig working on them for the first time. He insisted on lightboxing, rather than working on the same sheet of paper, which I think was a good choice – now there are two pieces of art to look at – but he did not respond to queries about how it felt to ink Colan. He might have smelled a trap or something. I think he did a great job on this piece. I have a wish list. P. Craig Russell. Barry Windsor-Smith. Bernie Wrightson. Charles Vess. And Neal Adams. Can you imagine? GENE COLAN

8 Dracula Lives!

Note: A longer version of this chapter originally appeared in Back Issue magazine #6, October 2004.

The Birth of Dracula Savage Tales looks like such a howlin’ hit that we’re following it up with a ghoulish 50-cent goodie called The Tomb of Dracula (or The House of Dracula. We haven’t decided yet). It’s a wholly new concept, starring Dracula himself, as he is – was – and perhaps will be. With art by Gene Colan, Berni Wrightson and Gray Morrow among others, and a team of the world’s most titanic scripters, headed by Marvel’s merry masters, Smilin’ Stan and Rascally Roy themselves! May we modestly say – it ain’t to be missed! – “Item” from July 1971 Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page

Nobody knew. Not Marvel Comics Editor Stan Lee, who decided in 1971 that Dracula should be the first monster in comics history to star in his own ongoing series, nor writers Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, who crafted the vampire lord’s heralded debut. Certainly not Gene Colan, who wanted the Dracula assignment so badly he auditioned for it. Nor even Marv Wolfman, the young, unproven writer who reluctantly took the reins with issue #7, but then saw the book – and his career – take off like the proverbial Hell-bat.

Strange but true, Tomb of Dracula owes its life to the Comics Code Authority. When No one knew that Tomb of the restrictive code of the 1950s Dracula [TOD], which began as was liberalized in 1971, vampires, just another trendy horror werewolves and other man-monsters comic, would last eight years were freed to star in mainstream and 70 issues, spawning a host comics. Marvel tested the market of memorable characters, four with Morbius, the Living Remake: Neal Adams drew the original cover to Tomb of spin-off films and a devoted fan Vampire, introduced as a villain base that today celebrates TOD Dracula #1. But in 2004, Colan fan Dave Gutierrez commis- in Amazing Spider-Man #101. as the best horror title of the sioned Gene to draw his own version – inks by Gutierrez. When this “real” bloodsucker Seventies. Maybe the best proved popular, Stan Lee – ever comic of the decade, period. eager to anticipate the next big trend – quickly ordered an entire line of monster comics featuring the usual stalkers: the Daredevil is the character that always will be most associated Frankenstein Monster, a Werewolf… and Dracula. with Colan. But TOD is Colan’s signature series. This chapter presents a brief history of the comic book that made history. Although the Werewolf struck first – his debut in Marvel

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Spotlight #2 (Feb. ’72) beat TOD #1 to the newsstands by two months – Dracula was actually intended to be Marvel’s premier horror star. His series was announced nearly a year earlier in the Bullpen Bulletins (see above) as the subject of Marvel’s second experimental “M-rated” (for mature readers) black-and-white magazine. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Three months after the initial announcement (and after “howlin’ hit” Savage Tales suspended publication after one issue), Marvel declared that TOD would instead be a 25cent, 52-page color comic. Soon after, the title was downsized yet again to Marvel’s new 20-cent, 32-page format. The forthcoming project also had a new writer – Marvel’s newest and youngest scribe, Gerry Conway. Although only 19 at the time, Conway already had an impressive resume of work on Daredevil, Sub-Mariner and Thor, so it wasn’t pure luck that this high-profile assignment would fall to him.

the castle, Clifton stumbles upon Dracula’s tomb. He opens the coffin, finds the bones, yanks out the stake (like Karloff in “House of Frankenstein”), and next thing you know… Dracula lives! Before the 25-page story’s end – after the vampire’s resurrection incites the ubiquitous torch-wielding villagers to raze the castle – Clifton is left for dead in a dungeon, and poor Jeanie succumbs to Dracula’s bite, leaving grief-stricken Frank alone to seek vengeance. Conway, who recalls having no input into TOD #1 until after the story was completely drawn, sought to distinguish himself with purple prose. “I tried to bring to it a kind of an eerie, dark, mysterioso style of writing and dialogue – pretentious, let’s say,” laughs Conway, a TV writer today. “I mean, I was 19 years old – what did I know, really?” Colan, on the other hand, was 45 years old and saw Dracula as his dream assignment. Although satisfied that with Daredevil he’d finally been given the chance to succeed on an ongoing series, Colan by 1971 was bored. He wanted a new challenge. So when he learned through the Bullpen grapevine that Marvel would publish Dracula, he leapt for the assignment. “Stan, I’d literally beg for this,” Colan recalls telling his boss – a rare stand for an artist who typically kept to himself and drew what he was told. Asked “why?” by Lee, Colan said firmly, “Because I know it’s something I’d love to do.”

And while Conway ultimately received sole credit for writing TOD #1, he had ample assistance from Lee and Thomas, the latter of whom recalls the book’s origins. “I plotted TOD #1 based on a couple of sentences from Stan, then gave it to Gerry to dialogue,” Thomas says. At the time, Lee was cutting back on his own writing assignments, gearing up to be Marvel’s next publisher, so the TOD pinch-hit made sense. And Thomas, Lee’s handpicked successor as Marvel’s ace writer, had no interest in writing the new monster books. According to Colan, Lee “I wasn’t really into horror,” promised him the Dracula Thomas says. “Gerry was, which assignment, but then absentis why he ended up dialoguing mindedly offered the same job from my plots on the first stories to Sub-Mariner creator Bill of Tomb of Dracula, “Man- Family Feud: Dracula clashes with descendant Frank Everett. Upon learning of the Thing” (in Savage Tales #1), Drake in this scene from TOD #2. Inks by Vince Colletta. mixup, Colan anxiously and Werewolf by Night.” reminded Lee of their verbal agreement, but to no avail; the job was now Everett’s. Devastated, In establishing Marvel’s Dracula, Thomas clearly recalled the Colan resigned himself to the loss. But his wife Adrienne didn’t. Universal monster movies of his 1940s youth. His basic plot for Inspired by the stories about Marlon Brando, who famously TOD #1: Frank Drake, ne’er-do-well descendant of the legendary stuffed cotton in his cheeks and auditioned for the lead in The Count, inherits Dracula’s Castle (shades of “Son of Godfather after being told the studio heads “didn’t see him in the Frankenstein”). Frank’s “friend,” Clifton Graves, schemes to role,” Adrienne urged Gene to try-out for Dracula. So, he did. He turn the castle into a tourist attraction, and the two of them – worked up a full-page, pencil & ink/wash character study of a along with Frank’s fiancé Jeanie, who also happens to be Clifton’s raven-haired, bearded Dracula, including a portrait of the Count, ex – travel to Transylvania to tackle the fixer-upper. There, while and a montage of the vampire king in different poses. He based plotting to kill Frank, win back Jeanie and get rich quick with his interpretation not on any of the classic Bela Lugosi or GENE COLAN

Christopher Lee portrayals, but rather on film actor Jack Palance, who impressed Colan with his version of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde in a 1968 Dan Curtis-produced TV movie. “He had that cadaverous look, a serpentine look on his face,” Colan says. “I knew that Jack Palance would do the perfect Dracula” (and later he did in a 1974 Curtis TV film). “I sent [the montage] to Stan, and the next day he called and said only ‘You got it!’” Colan says. “That was it!” Not quite. In addition to penciling TOD, Colan also wanted to ink the book – which he’d rarely done at Marvel. At first Lee resisted – after all, Colan’s value was as a penciler of multiple titles, not a complete artist on one – but he eventually acquiesced. April 1972: the debut. Finally, after nine months of preparation and anticipation, TOD #1, sporting a memorable Neal Adams cover (of a Dracula that, frankly, bears little resemblance to the character depicted inside the book), premiered to a primed audience. And the initial response was… lukewarm. The book sold well enough to justify continuation, certainly. Most first issues do. But the earliest fan letters, printed in TOD #3 and #4, included several complaints about Marvel’s version of Dracula. The plot seemed derivative, the art restrained, some readers said. Others didn’t like Dracula’s pale-white skin color, or how his bite created instant vampires (as opposed to the customary three-day wait).

In closing, Michelinie adds prophetically, “Let me say that you have a very good idea – if you play it right.”

Growing Pains If Marvel had a master plan for Tomb of Dracula, it wasn’t evident in the first six issues. Beginning with #2, TOD underwent the first in a series of seismic changes that rocked the book throughout its rookie year. First, the comic was promoted from quarterly to bimonthly, but the story pages were trimmed from 25 to 21 to 20. And although Conway happily took over the plotting as well as scripting with issue #2, Colan reluctantly surrendered the inking duties to… Vince Colletta. Imagine the comics fan’s shock at going from TOD #1’s complete Colan artwork to #2’s uneasy Colan/Colletta collaboration. Then imagine Colan’s own dismay at seeing his carefully-constructed characters simplified and his subtle backgrounds blotted out or even erased by Colletta, the late speed-inker whose artistic shortcuts always sparked controversy. “I didn’t like his interpretation of my work,” Colan says diplomatically of Colletta. “He messed it up.” Colan understood why editors liked Colletta, who’d inked Colan’s earliest Sub-Mariner stories. “They could give him a job, and he could probably turn it out overnight,” he says. But Colan didn’t like the results. “I worked real hard on my art; why should somebody… wreck it?”

But some fans also saw TOD’s promise. Among them, a young Louisville, KY, correspondent Issue #2’s story was also a named David Michelinie, who The Team Assembled: This page from TOD #7 introduces departure from #1, owing less to was just a few short years character Edith Harker and the new permanent creative Universal’s monsters and more away from establishing himself team of Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan and Tom Palmer. to the British Hammer Films as a big-name comics writer. that Conway preferred. Just as In his letter in TOD #3, Michelinie writes, “The only thing I Hammer eventually introduced Dracula to 20th century England, uncategorically liked about issue #1 was the potential of the Conway in TOD #2 moved the cast from rural Transylvania to general concept. A horror mag with a full-length, non-reprint swingin’ ’70s London. story featuring a continuing lead character (and a monster at that) is something new to today’s comic world, and much can be And then Conway, who’d now firmly exerted his influence on done with it. Intelligently-written tales of the vampire’s deeds, the direction of TOD… quit. The reason: impending burnout. travels and adventures both in bleak Transylvania and around Overwhelmed with writing assignments – the May 1972 Bullpen the world could be as entertaining and innovative as have been page notes that Conway wrote six of that month’s 18 Marvels, or your efforts concerning that barbarian, Conan.” roughly 120 pages – he had to let something slide. “It was far too much work even for a 19-year-old who had no sense of proportion,” 99

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Conway says. And, besides, he was about to be handed Marvel’s greatest challenge – to succeed the legendary Stan Lee as writer of the Amazing Spider-Man. “That was certainly a much more important book for me to concentrate on,” Conway says. With issue #3, TOD’s new writer was Archie Goodwin, the well-respected ex-Warren writer/editor, who also stuck around for only two issues. But in his short stint, Goodwin turned Clifton Graves into Dracula’s toady and introduced two major characters that grew to play significant roles in the series: vampire hunters Taj Nital (a mute Indian) and Rachel Van Helsing, the crossbow-wielding descendant of one of Dracula’s oldest foes.

Then he requested Dr. Strange, which wasn’t available. Instead, he was offered TOD. “I didn’t want to do it,” Wolfman recalls. He wasn’t a horror fan (and in fact was a little squeamish), had never even seen a Dracula movie, and he knew TOD was on shaky ground because of the creative turnover. And yet Wolfman also recognized a golden opportunity to

Also coming aboard with TOD #3 was inker Tom Palmer, who’d drawn rave reviews a few years earlier for his work with Colan on Doctor Strange. A master of subtle lines and shades who always brought out the best of the artwork he embellished, Palmer was the anti-Colletta – a perfect match to Colan’s textured pencils – and before long he became the book’s permanent inker, receiving every bit his due as one of TOD’s prime creative forces. With issue #5, ex-DC writer Gardner Fox stepped in for an undistinguished two-issue stint that toyed with the same Lovecraftian themes introduced in his equally short stay on Dr. Strange. But Thomas – who’d by then become Marvel’s editor – didn’t think Fox clicked on TOD (or at Marvel, period), so he quickly replaced him with a young, unproven writer who’d also just migrated from DC. Starting with #7, the Lord of Vampires would be scripted by a Wolfman.

Wolfman on the Prowl Marv Wolfman needed Tomb of Dracula just as badly as the floundering comic needed him. Although he’d made the tough transition from comics fan to pro in the late 1960s – he and boyhood friend Len Wein were among the first such migrants – Wolfman really hadn’t distinguished himself. He’d written and edited a bit for DC, Warren, Skywald. But by early ’72 Wolfman probably was best known for the job that cost him a job – 1969’s controversial Teen Titans “Jericho” story Key Moment: One of TOD’s first shocks – the death of vampire slayer that, because of racial overtones, had been rewritten, turned vampire, Edith Harker. Inks by Tom Palmer. redrawn, and resulted in Wolfman and Wein being effectively black-listed for a time at DC. Lured to Marvel by write with nearly total editorial freedom – to use TOD as a Thomas to be editor of Marvel’s new b&w magazine line, blank slate upon which to develop his own voice and style without Wolfman hoped to leverage that position to secure a steady writing having to fill Stan’s or Roy’s shoes. “I don’t think anyone gig. His first shot was the revived Captain Marvel, which he particularly expected [TOD] to be successful, so I was given no wrote for a couple of (by his own description) lackluster issues. direction,” Wolfman recalls. GENE COLAN

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But the freedom was balanced by a healthy fear of failure. “I just didn’t want to kill the book completely,” Wolfman says. “I did know that [this assignment] was probably make-it-or-break-it for me at Marvel.” In preparation for the assignment, Wolfman re-read Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, which impressed him as being as much about the vampire hunters as Dracula himself. Inspired, Wolfman immediately introduced two new stake-holders in TOD #7: Quincy Harker, the wheelchair-bound son of Stoker’s protagonist, Jonathan Harker, and Quincy’s daughter Edith. The Harkers, in conjunction with Frank Drake, Rachel Van Helsing and Taj, would form a powerful ensemble cast Wolfman ultimately would develop and explore as fully as Dracula himself. With TOD #7, a quiet, let’s-getthings-started issue, the core creative team, Wolfman/Colan/Palmer, was together for the first time – but not for long. Starting with issue #8, Palmer took a fourissue break and was replaced in succession by three inkers – Ernie Chan on #8, Colletta again for #9, and Jack Abel on #10 and #11 – who just didn’t mesh with Colan or the subject matter. No one today recalls why exactly Palmer was removed from TOD. “Maybe I was busy doing other things, or my plate was full, or maybe it took a few issues before they decided my style worked over Gene,” Palmer says. “No one, especially me, thought TOD would last as long as it did. The issues just kept coming, and we fell into a comfortable groove.”

agreed that Colletta had taken unacceptable shortcuts. The inked pages were turned over to the Bullpen for background restoration, Colletta was removed from the assignment (he never inked another TOD), and Wolfman let out a huge sigh of relief that he’d taken on a comics veteran and emerged with his own job intact. “Thankfully, Stan chose to side with the quality of the book,” Wolfman says. Next, in issue #10, Wolfman introduced Blade the Vampire Slayer, the African-American vigilante who went on to headline numerous Marvel comics and three big-screen movies starring Wesley Snipes. According to Wolfman, who lost a legal battle with Marvel over ownership of the character, he conceptualized Blade years before joining Marvel and landing the TOD assignment. But where better to debut a vampire-killer? And who better than Colan to help bring the character to life? Colan remembers the early Blade discussions with Wolfman. “Marv told me Blade was a black man, and we talked about how he should dress, how he should look – very heroic,” says Colan, who based his depiction of Blade on a composite of African-American actors, including ex-NFL star Jim Brown. “Marv might’ve said ‘Put boots on him’ – I don’t remember,” Colan adds. “The bandoleer of blades – that was Marv’s idea. But I dressed him up; I put the leather jacket on him and so on.”

From the outset, both creators felt Blade was a special character, and they kept him as a mainstay in the series, tracking down both Dracula and Deacon Frost, the white-haired vampire who killed Blade’s mother. Colan But before the Wolfman/ Blade: Page from a Blade solo story in TOD #58. Inks especially was proud to be in on Colan/Palmer groove, the Colletta- by Palmer, of course. Blade’s creation. “I knew it was inked issue – Wolfman’s third – good, this character Blade,” almost became the writer’s last. Trouble began when Wolfman Colan says. “Blacks were not really portrayed in comics up to first saw Colletta’s inked pages to #9, compared them to stats of that time, so I wanted to be one of the first to portray blacks in Colan’s penciled story (which depicted Dracula interacting with comics. I enjoyed it.” the residents of a tiny UK fishing village), and realized the inker had erased virtually all of Gene’s lush background illustrations. But despite the excitement brought by the introduction of Incensed (“This was one of the best jobs Gene had ever done!”), Blade, Wolfman believes the series’ first real landmark issue was Wolfman confronted Colletta, who reportedly denied the sabotage #12 – the start of a three-parter that included the shocking death – and then complained about Wolfman to Stan Lee, who sum- of Edith Harker, the origin of Blade, and the series’ first death & moned the nervous young writer for an explanation. Fortunately, revival of Dracula. “This storyline is when I finally figured out Wolfman had saved photocopies of Colan’s penciled pages, and what this book was about,” Wolfman says. It was about characters when he offered them in comparison to the inked pages, Lee – Dracula and his pursuers, although not always in that order – 101

DRACULA LIVES!

and how they grew. The key to advancing the series, Wolfman learned, was to figure out how the characters would interact and change – then simply execute those changes. “Within a short time, I had the book plotted two years ahead,” Wolfman says. “I didn’t know the details of the stories, necessarily, but I knew how the characters would grow issue to issue.” And although Colan had worked with Wolfman only once prior to TOD on a short story for one of Marvel’s early ’70s horror anthology comics, he quickly gelled with the young scribe, who worked to Colan’s strengths by involving him in the storytelling. “He’d give me a written plot, but he’d also discuss it with me over the phone,” Colan says. “I tended to ask questions, rather than to have him assume I got the idea.”

that showed multiple shades of gray. There is Frank Drake, the cowardly dilettante, who by the end of issue #24 is so fed up with his flaws that he’s off on a quest to find his hidden courage. There is Rachel Van Helsing, the cold, scarred slayer, whose beauty and warmth emerge as she falls in love with Drake and rediscovers her own humanity. There is Quincy Harker, whose own tragic backstory (Dracula killed his wife and smashed his legs) emerges over the early course of the series. There is Blade, the jive-talkin’, vengeance-driven slayer who’s been nipped so many times that he’s developed immunity to vampire bites. And then there is Taj Nital, who never says a word, but whose story speaks volumes. TOD is about unique stories: As Wolfman developed his writing skills, he experimented with different approaches. There are the popular “Dracula’s Diary” stories (issues #15 & #30), which started out as catch-alls for Wolfman’s loose plot threads, but which ended up as memorable character vignettes about Dracula. There are the unique issues, such as #22, which was inspired by a Russian vampire myth, and #25, which presents Hannibal King, vampire detective (and co-star of Blade: Trinity). And there are the morality plays, i.e. #35, in which Dracula falls under the sway of an evil fashion designer, killing off her rivals – and then setting her up for just desserts.

Wolfman was honored to work with Colan. “There was a magic in Gene’s work on Dracula that I don’t think even he understood,” Wolfman says. “He could do superhero stuff – he certainly proved that on DD and Iron Man and all the others – but he came alive in ways he couldn’t imagine on the Dracula book.” The readers clearly embraced Wolfman & Colan’s efforts, and TOD quickly was promoted to monthly status. And to close observers such as Adrienne Colan, the Wolfman/Colan synergy was evident from day one. “It was very apparent that Marv cared as much about the writing of it as Gene cared about the art,” Adrienne recalls, “and in a way, that was their most powerful bond.”

Of course, as much as anything, TOD is about the Wolfman/ Colan/Palmer collaboration, which settled into a remarkable creative groove. Early on, Wolfman stopped approaching the book as a series of episodic comics, treating it instead like A bond that would indeed Lilith: Dracula and daughter Lilith over London from TOD #60. an ongoing novel. Character generate a remarkable run of development dictated the plots, comic books. which Wolfman meticulously detailed for Colan’s interpretation. “I may have been the first writer at Marvel to break down an issue plot page by page,” Off and Running Wolfman says. “I needed the feel of pacing.” For roughly 20 issues, from #15 through #35, the Similarly, Colan needed the freedom to bring his own inspiWolfman/Colan/Palmer team took the opportunity to explore the rations to the book – and with Wolfman, he had that license. “I essence of TOD. Within that span, they showed us: did some things in TOD on my own that weren’t in the plot, and TOD is about Dracula: More than just a sleeps-by-day/stalks-by- then I would call up Marv and say, ‘What do you think of night monster, Dracula is revealed as a character of startling nuances. this?’” Colan says. “For instance, Dracula would be floating along the floor, and you’d see his face, but the rest of him TOD is about complex characters: More than a simple would be like smoke, floating, and I thought it was a good idea. I heroes-chase-villain series, this color comic came with characters kind of needed permission to go ahead and go off-field a little bit.” GENE COLAN

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Ripoff rarity: This half-inked page is one of 11 Colanpenciled TOD #24 pages that were stolen from the Marvel bullpen in the early 1970s, as the issue was being put together. Inker Tom Palmer had to recreate those pages by lightboxing photocopies of the pencils. Some of the originals – like this one – have resurfaced in the collector's market in recent years. 103

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The end result of the creative synergy was a book that rose above the monster comic trend to be a bonafide critical and sales success. TOD even spawned a pair of companion titles – the black-&-white Dracula Lives magazine and the color Giant-Size Dracula comic – which mainly existed outside of TOD continuity, save for the intro of Lilith, Dracula’s vampire daughter, in G-S #1. “Sales were jumping,” Wolfman recalls, and because of the commercial success, he was given the freedom both to learn to write and to serve as the book’s de facto editor. “Everyone knew [TOD] was working, so no one was going to get in my way unless I committed a major foul-up.”

Two of the readers’ – and Wolfman’s – favorite stories are oneshots amidst a handful of subplot-laden serials. The first, in issue #46, features an avenging, featureless corpse who comes back from a watery grave to exact vengeance – and extract facial features – from the corporate types who killed him to prevent his whistleblowing on their environmental shortcuts. “That story came about because I had blurry vision one day,” Wolfman says. “I was trying to read a comic, and in one panel all I saw was a blank face – all the features were gone. I then pieced together a Dracula story based on the idea of the features slowly coming back.” The next great one-shot is #48’s “A Song for Marianne” – Wolfman’s personal favorite script, and arguably the best single story in the TOD run. This tale opens with a female vampire, Marianne, pleading directly to the reader. As she relates her story, we learn that her father, husband and she all were victims of Dracula, and her real plea is with the vampire lord to gift her with eternal rest. The final panel of a sympathetic, stake-wielding Dracula, wife Domini at his side, represents the true growth this character had experienced.

Soon, Wolfman went from editor of the comic to editor of the entire Marvel line. And with his personal ascension, TOD reached its greatest creative heights.

Glory Days Issue #36 is a turning point for the series. In that issue, Dracula abandons London, relocating to the U.S. – to Boston – to track down the source of his mysterious loss of powers. And with him comes the entire supporting cast, soon to be joined by a pair of new members: hack horror writer Harold H. Harold (a Woody Allen act-alike) and Dracula groupie Aurora Rabinowitz.

At this point in its run, TOD wasn’t just a commercial or critical success; it was also a title respected by the creators’ peers. John Romita, Marvel’s art director in the 1970s, describes what it was like when the latest batch of Colan/Palmer TOD pages arrived each month:

The new locale gave Colan the opportunity to bring more authentic detail to the book. He even packed up his family, drove north to Boston and spent a weekend shooting reference photos of brownstones and cemeteries.

“I used to look forward to Marv Wolfman coming in with Gene’s stuff,” Romita says. “We’d spend an hour going over the pages, just admiring them. At the same time, Wolfman He’d say ‘You want to see this was promoted to succeed Wein Drac is Back: The Lord of Vampires regains his rightful throne in month’s? It’s gonna knock your (who’d succeeded Thomas) as this climactic scene from TOD #70 – final issue of the classic series. socks off!’ We’d ooh and ahh like Editor-in-Chief of the entire a couple of kids. That Dracula Marvel line. Wolfman’s new stuff was probably the most theatrical, cinematic stuff I’ve ever authority was immediately evident. He redesigned the logo and seen, and I don’t think anyone else could have done it as well.” assigned Colan to draw the covers, which previously had been drawn by other artists – mainly, Gil Kane. He also, shades of And yet as good as TOD was, Wolfman says, “I had no idea Stan Lee, threw a bold new blurb upon each cover: “Comicdom’s until the #50s that we were doing something unique. And the #1 Fear Magazine!” clue was: the mail coming in. These were thought-out letters During this period, the creative team’s energies surged, about the characters, not about monsters.” heightened by the steady efforts of letterer John Costanza and And yet as TOD hit its creative and critical peak… the end colorist Michele Wolfman (Marv’s then-wife), resulting in some of was near. the best stories of the entire run. GENE COLAN

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The End There isn’t any one reason why TOD ended after eight years and 70 issues. Rather, there are several factors that made cancellation inevitable. In part, the monster fad was over. Science-fiction was the rage by the late Seventies, and the major monster books of the decade – Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, the Spectre in Adventure Comics – were long gone. That TOD had lasted eight years was remarkable.

Shooter says. “Honestly, we kept Tomb of Dracula around so long because people liked it – because we liked it. It was Gene Colan’s best work – he and Tom Palmer had this genius thing going together. It was Marv’s best book, and it had this kind of sturdy cult following.” Yet, even before the sales slide, the creators were starting to burn out. Colan asked off the book as early as 1977, Wolfman recalls. “He was tired of the book, but we were ahead [of production],” he says. “At one point, we were six months ahead, and I had to make a decision about whether I would leave (with Colan).” As it turns out, Colan did leave TOD for a time, leaping at the chance to draw the shortlived Howard the Duck newspaper strip. But because TOD was so far ahead – and with the help of a Colan-drawn Blade fill-in (originally scheduled to appear in Marvel Spotlight) in #58 – the fans never noticed his absence. “He was gone six months, but then Gene called and asked to come back, not knowing he hadn’t missed an issue,” Wolfman says. The return was brief, though, despite Wolfman’s best efforts to accommodate Colan by cutting back TOD to a more comfortable bimonthly schedule beginning with issue #60. Within a year, Colan wanted off for good. “I told Marv, ‘Listen, Marv, I’ve had enough, I really don’t want to do it anymore.’ He said, ‘Thanks, Gene. If you’re not going to draw it, I’m leaving, too.’ He didn’t want to write if I wasn’t going to draw it.” Wolfman understood Colan’s feelings. “TOD generated critical acclaim for him, but not a lot of money,” he says. “It was a hard series to draw – it took longer than others. When he wanted to leave again, I just said ‘Can you stick around for three more months?’” Colan agreed, giving Wolfman the opportunity he needed to orchestrate the perfect ending. At the climax of a multi-part serial in TOD #70, the series ends where it began: at Castle Dracula. In a final confrontation between old foes, Quincy Harker uses the last strength of his lame legs to leap at Dracula, plunge a silver spike into the vampire’s heart, and then ignite an explosion that destroys Castle Dracula. In a final, three-page sequence, Wolfman, Colan & Palmer depict a tapestry of the series – of Dracula’s unlife – reminding us that despite what Dracula had been and the evil he had committed, in the end:

The End: Frank and Rachel discover Quincy Harker’s destroyed wheelchair in this scene from TOD #70, the final issue of the series. Because times had changed, sales slipped – and that got the attention of folks such as Marvel’s ex-editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter. “Sales started to fall, and we had to cancel it, but it was one of those books that earned the respect of the peer group,” 105

“Dracula was a man… and never should that be forgotten.”

DRACULA LIVES!

Postscript: Dracula Resurrected It’s never as easy as “The End.” Just as TOD the color comic ended in the spring of 1979, the series was revived as a black-and-white magazine. It seems that the comic’s sales, while weak for an ongoing mainstream title, were sustainable for a newsstand magazine. And after several months away from drawing Dracula, even Colan was on board for another go with Wolfman and Palmer.

editor,” Wolfman says. “Some books are made better because of editors; others, when editors come in, are compromised. With TOD and the Titans, any compromise blew what I wanted to do.” Wolfman’s last TOD magazine was #3, which reunited the Wolfman/Colan/Palmer team for one last Dracula hurrah (which, incidentally, ties into the earlier TOD #17 comic book). The magazine survived three more issues, with writer Roger McKenzie stepping in to write some genuine chillers in #4 and #5. Shooter himself wrote the final issue, a period piece set in the Civil War.

But after such a perfect ending, what would they do for an encore? One option was to turn the new TOD mag into a retrospective on Dracula’s past adventures, before the events of the final color comics. Another was to pick up where the comic left off, reviving Dracula, but ignoring Rachel, Frank, Blade and crew. Wolfman chose this second option, and proceeded to write a resurrection story that both he and Colan enjoyed.

Yet, again “The End” wasn’t final for TOD. With Wolfman gone, other writers stepped in to play with the previously off-limits TOD characters – and the results were mixed. TOD itself was revived as a four-issue Epic Comics miniseries in 1991. With Jim Shooter long gone from Marvel (he was fired in 1987), Wolfman and Colan reunited for this longawaited revival, but it was hardly a happy reunion. Palmer was gone, replaced by Al Williamson. And the story, involving Dracula, Drake, Blade and a series of new supernatural characters, just didn’t have the same spirit. “It’s an example of me and Gene not clicking,” Wolfman says. “I just despise those four issues.”

Yet, then Marvel’s powersthat-be stepped in and – without Wolfman’s knowledge or assent – reassigned Palmer, replacing him with inker Bob McLeod. It was the first time in seven years that a book called Tomb of Dracula was illustrated by any team other than Colan/Palmer. The fans were dismayed; Wolfman was outraged. “[The move] was done for political reasons and behind my back,” he says.

Reflecting on their TOD work, both creators are struck first by the flaws – the pages they now wish they’d drawn or scripted better. “I find TOD hard to read today,” Wolfman says. “My own style has developed away from that purple prose. I think TOD is probably over-written for today’s audience.”

Clearly, times had changed. While Wolfman had enjoyed editorial autonomy on the color TOD – even after he’d stepped down as Marvel’s editor-in- New Beginnings: Wolfman and Colan reunited for a chief, being replaced by a suc- short Dracula reunion in 1992. cession of Goodwin, Conway and Shooter – it was clear that the days of writer/editors were over at Marvel. Wolfman no longer had final say over the characters That said, Wolfman does appreciate TOD’s significance – as and creative teams of his books – and the Palmer/McLeod swap a comic book, as collaboration and as an achievement. “Dracula was a way of hammering home the point. “So, I quit,” Wolfman was Gene and me – nobody does better what Gene can do, drawing says. He immediately relocated to DC, where he soon launched real people with real emotion.” the mega-hit New Teen Titans with George Pérez. And, hands down, Wolfman says, TOD is the best comics At the time, Wolfman was bitter of his departure from TOD and series he’s ever written. “[New Teen] Titans eventually fell Marvel, but today he’s more circumspect. “Comics throughout apart; Dracula never did,” Wolfman says. “TOD was never less history are broken down into those that work best when creators who than what it should have been. And sometimes it was really, know the books are left alone, and those that are best with a strong really good.” GENE COLAN

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Secrets #3: Writing for Gene

Blame Stan Lee. Ever since Gene Colan returned to Marvel Comics in the mid1960s and started working “Marvel-style” with the company’s prolific head writer – with Lee giving his artists just the barest-bones plots with which to pace and draw their stories – he’s developed a unique storytelling style that both delights and challenges his collaborators. Understand up-front: Colan never reads a plot or script beginningto-end before he draws a story. And he never breaks down a story page-by-page before sitting down to render.

Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula and DC’s Night Force (and later Curse of Dracula at Dark Horse in the 1990s), says their working relationship evolved primarily on “Trust, as well as knowing that Gene drew incredible strong faces with real emotion. When you know that, you aim your stories to take advantage of his strengths.” For his part, Colan never much cared who wrote the stories he drew. “I would’ve taken on the Pope if he’d wanted to write a story,” Colan says. “It didn’t matter to me who wrote anything. It was an assignment, so I would simply take it and do it.” But that said, he did prefer writers such as Lee, Thomas, Wolfman, etc., who would give him both clear direction and total freedom. “I’ll take the story as it is,” he says, “and if I have the opportunity to do something special with it that the writer might not have had in mind, I’ll do it. So long as it doesn’t veer too far from the plot.”

Instead, he takes each page as it comes, one-by-one, as a reader would encounter a story, and then he makes decisions along the way about where to speed things up and where to slow things down with a full-page spread. If he gets toward the end of a story and starts to run out of room, he either crams a lot of action panels into the final page or two, or he fashions an argument for why the story really ought to end sooner than the writer intended.

Colan even has a pair of comics scripts to his own credit: two short Archie tales from Life With Archie in 1989 and 1990.

Roy Thomas, veteran writer/editor/ comics historian, broke in at Marvel in the mid-’60s and remembers his boss’ good-humored frustration with his Colan collaborations.

But mostly Colan’s career is distinguished by his collaboration with writers who – when successful – have leveraged his unique rendering and storytelling to create some memorable comics stories.

Thomas: Stan would just get a little upset when Gene would take a whole page to open a door, or when he would spend page after page in car races! Those would drive Stan nuts, but on the other hand they’re the things that people remember about his work. You want people to have an individual style. Marvel, if not in 1965 but in the next couple of years, was big enough and established enough to let people do their own thing a little more, as long as they took care of the basic dynamism we were looking for. Gene could certainly do that.

Writers on Colan

And how. Over the course of his career from the mid-’60s onward, Colan established himself as a brilliantly expressive storyteller. He wouldn’t necessarily stick to the letter of a story plot, but he would stay true to – and enhance – its spirit. And he would bring life and expression to the characters in ways that no other artist could match. Marv Wolfman, who collaborated with Colan for over a decade on 107

Over the course of a 60-year career, Colan has worked with scores of writers. But he’s developed special relationships with a select few. Here some of Gene’s favorite collaborators discuss the challenges and rewards of writing for the Dean. Roy Thomas co-wrote one of the first Marvel superhero stories Colan drew, the Iron Man feature in Tales of Suspense #73, Jan. 1966. Later, they worked together on Daredevil, Wonder Woman and even a single issue of the black-and-white sword & sorcery magazine Savage Sword of Conan. But likely their most memorable collaboration is the run of Doctor Strange they crafted with inker Tom Palmer beginning in 1968. “I worked with him just the same way as with anybody,” Thomas says. “Sometimes we maybe talked over the phone, but most of the time I’d type out a brief plot of a couple of pages and send it off to him, and he worked from that.” WRITING FOR GENE

Asked how he worked to Colan’s strengths, Thomas says: “Sometimes I’d sort of connect the dots. Stan hated stories where the panels were laid out oddly. Gene started doing that more and more in Doctor Strange. Stan wouldn’t have let him do that, but I sort of let it go because it fit with Dr. Strange. But in order to make sure the eye would follow the panel flow correctly, so Stan wouldn’t have both our heads – and so the readers wouldn’t work too hard to follow – I tried to use the balloons to lead the readers’ eye from panel to panel. In the long run, I think some of those things – along with Dr. Strange never being one of the most popular characters at Marvel – maybe contributed to the fact that the book died. But then it was never a huge hit, ever. Certainly, there were several memorable periods on it, and I think one of the top five memorable periods is when Gene, Tom and I were doing it.”

to Gene’s strengths. “Make sure you let Gene have lots of scenes with real people doing real things,” Wolfman says. “There's no one better [at depicting them].” When collaborating on their most celebrated work, Tomb of Dracula, Wolfman would present Colan with detailed, page-by-page plots. “As always I encouraged [Colan] to use what I write as a roadmap but not to slavishly follow me,” Wolfman says. “As long as he followed the story and the pacing, he could play with how he presented the story graphically.” Colan brought this same approach to his work with Wolfman on Night Force at DC in the 1980s and on Curse of Dracula, a new take on the vampire lord, at Dark Horse in the late 1990s. Reflecting on their work together over 30 years, Wolfman has several favorite stories.

Thomas’ single favorite Colan collaboration is included in that run: Doctor Strange #180. “That’s the one set in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and right at the stroke of midnight a Pterodactyl flies into the Times Square tower,” Thomas says. “That was the central image I built the story around. And we had some nice scenes with Eternity. I also got permission from one of my favorite writers, Tom Wolfe, to include him in a few panels.”

“I liked the faceless monster story [in TOD #46]. I liked the Janus storyline in TOD. I loved the last issue. There are a few Night Forces in there, especially the monster in the house story, and I loved his work on Curse of Dracula.” Asked what unique challenges he encountered working with Colan, Wolfman says “Not many.”

Interesting side-note: the cover to that issue of Doctor Strange was lost in the mail, and Marvel had to make do with a hastily assembled collage of Colan and Steve Ditko Dr. Strange art. In recounting this story, Thomas is reminded of a prejudice former Marvel publisher Martin Goodman bore against Colan’s covers.

Dinosaur in Times Square?: One of Roy

Wolfman: Gene liked to get his stories very early so there was always one waiting for him while he was drawing the previous issue. I tended to avoid super-science stories as Gene didn't seem to enjoy those. He liked the moody horror stuff, which, with Dracula, worked the best. Other than that, all I had to do was focus my stories on the characters and their emotions, and Gene could do everything else. Dracula was a character-driven series, and I can't imagine anyone better.

Thomas: Covers weren’t Gene’s strong point. Martin Goodman used Thomas’ favorite scenes, from Doctor Strange to get very upset and say “I can’t figure #180. Inks by Tom Palmer. out what’s going on in these covers!” Steve Englehart broke in at Marvel as an associate editor in the Gene’s the kind of guy who could draw a whole story with a character, and when you got done you were never quite sure what early 1970s, and the line on Colan then was: Great illustrator; not so the costume looked like. He’d draw him from so many angles, and great at pacing stories. So, when they commenced collaborating on there’d be weird shadows. Gene just had so many strengths that the Doctor Strange revival with issue #6 in 1975, Englehart quickly you just worked to those strengths, avoided the other things, and it endeavored to help Colan pace their stories. worked out beautifully. You wouldn’t expect Gene Colan, Jack “I undertook to give him page-by-page breakdowns,” Englehart Kirby and other artists to do certain things as well as they did others. Same is true with writers. The main thing is: if someone can do a says. “It was Marvel style – but advanced. I made sure I paced it handful of things well – and Gene certainly could – then that’s myself, page by page. With that in place, I never had a problem with enough to build a career on and be valuable to a company. Stan his storytelling or anything. It was just beautiful and exactly what I wanted every time.” always really liked Gene and considered him a prestigious artist. Marv Wolfman, who’s worked with Colan probably as much as any writer has, agrees that successful collaboration entails working GENE COLAN

Prior to working with Colan, Englehart enjoyed a celebrated Doctor Strange run with artist Frank Brunner – a very different kind of artist. 108

2-3: Two pages...panels possibly go across the top culminating in the LARGE double-page spread. Pull back. There’s an old 1940-50s WOODY station wagon speeding up the SF hills. Large fins, wood paneled side. Impressive and overly large. I want this to have weight, the kind we don’t see today. Also, I want to give the book a timeless quality. Inside, driving the car, is our new cast of vampire hunters. Make this as big and impressive as the 1950s Batmobile was–something bigger than life belonging to another time period. The Woody will be a character in its own right here; large enough for 6 people plus a large assortment of vampire-hunting weapons. Note, Gene, if you draw an ACTUAL car, let me know the make and model and I’ll incorporate it into the script. If you make it up, let me know where you derived it from.

The driver is SIMON. Simon (no last names, please–I still have family). He’s Spanish. A thin snake of a man in his early 30s. He seemingly has contacts everywhere. He can get anything he needs with a few phone calls. He wasn’t a mobster but he worked with them, procuring stuff they needed. When vampires wiped out the mob he worked for (his wife included), Simon managed to escape. Now Van Helsing pays him. Simon is a procurer and very, very paranoid. He’s into conspiracies, etc. He wears suspenders, white shirt, a very 1940s retro look.

Curse of Dracula #1 page 1.

Sitting in the front passenger seat is JONATHAN VAN HELSING, mid/late 40s, the great, great great grandson of Abraham Van Helsing from the Dracula novel. Van Helsing had his throat ripped out by Dracula ten years before. He now speaks with a microphone which he holds up to the scarred hole in his throat. 109

By Marv Wolfman

1: FULL PAGE SPLASH: Night. SEBASTIAN SEWARD, mid 30s, handsome, comic book hero type with a realworld look. He’s running up a SAN FRANCISCO hillside. He’s afraid, horrified, actually. His face has been cut, blood drips from his open wounds. His clothing is half torn. He’s a wreck in every possible way. A full moon is out. Play up the old-fashioned buildings, the San Francisco atmosphere. Maybe he’s racing up past a cable car. Behind him, half-blanketing the full moon is a horde of VAMPIRE BATS flying out of the dark toward him. As this is the opening page for this possible new series of graphic

novels, really play up the mood and atmosphere as well as the horror.

THE CURSE OF DRACULA #1 –Plot

NOTE: Here is the plot for the first three pages of Curse of Dracula #1, 1998. Look at the scans from the comic book pages to see how Gene Colan interpreted Wolfman’s ideas.

WRITING FOR GENE

Van Helsing is OLD money. He’s seen everyone of his family killed by vampires or hunted. He, himself, was repeatedly attacked as a child. There’s even some vampire blood in him, enough to make walking in daylight a pain, and to cast an uneasy reflection in mirrors. As a child he watched as his mother was slowly killed by vampires who were taunting him. He managed to escape with the aid of a man Van Helsing doesn’t talk about. Obviously, if this series continues, we’ll play on that character to some degree.

In the back seat we see the other two members of the cast. There’s an exotic as hell looking Eurasian woman. HIROSHIMA, mid 20s, halfAmerican, half-Japanese. She doesn’t know her father but he was an American Soldier on duty in Japan. When his tour of duty was over he left. Her mother was 19, fell in love. Hiro’s gorgeous but BLIND. When she was 19 she was group-bitten by a vampire coven and half-turned into a vampire. They played with her so long they didn’t have a chance to kill her before Van Helsing found them and destroyed the coven. She spent a year in his clinic in Switzerland undergoing blood transfusion after blood transfusion. Most of the curse was taken from her but not all. She was blinded during the group torture, but she has enough Vampire in her that she can see like a bat; she has perfect night vision. The ‘rape’ destroyed her emotions, and now she’s dedicated the rest of her life to destroying the vampires. Hiro wears a crucifix on a chain around her neck.

Curse of Dracula #1 pages 2 and 3.

Sitting next to her is NIKITA KAZAN, an ex-KGB agent. Mid 40s. He was involved with the Russian Parapsychology experiments of the 70s and 80s. Investigating some leaks he found a vampire coven set in the Kremlin. They’re partially responsible for the break-up of the Soviet Union. The idea was to destroy the Government and then put their own people in power. They were going to create a Vampire State. Kazan contacted Van Helsing, learned how to deal with the vampires, then, after proving successful, discovered he was persona non grata in the

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non-Soviet Russia. It turns out enough vampires were still in power that he had to flee the country or be killed. There’s a warrant out for his arrest. Nikita is a big bear of a man. Gregarious, happy. But very deadly.

Note, these four are very important; time should be spent designing them as they will be our regular vampire hunters, much the way Frank, Rachel and Quincy were. Please make sure there is NO visual similarity to any characters owned by Marvel. Gene, this page is the introduc110

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By Marv Wolfman

THE CURSE OF DRACULA #1 –Plot

tion to the new cast. Make sure we get good character shots of all of them. Inside the Woody, Simon says he doesn’t trust blind messages, no offense, Hiro. They get a phone call sayin’ there’s a vampire attack, Simon wants to know who it came from. People could be leadin’ us into a trap. Lots of people want them dead an’ all. Boris, from the back seat, places his huge hand on Simon’s shoulder. If it’s a trap, we fight our way out. If it isn’t, we deal with what’s there. Either way we find the Undead. Either

way we kill our enemy. From the front seat Van Helsing puts his mike to the hole in his throat – show clearly how scarred it is – he says first there’s been an extraordinary number of vampire sightings lately... like Vampires from all over are migrating here for some reason. If there’s room on this page I will have the characters mention a large number of people are missing–possibly kidnapped, but, as Nikita says, he doubts that’s the case. There’s been no ransom demands, kidnapping is actually a very rare crime. Hiroshima, her eyes blank as always, somber as always, too, says Quiet. I hear squealing ahead. Bats... hundreds of them. Now the largest panel, the one that extends over the double pager: Pull back wide on the scene. The SF street: Seward is caught in the Woody’s headlights. He’s surrounded by as many bats as you can draw, all pecking, clawing, cutting at him. This should be a powerful scene. The only light here comes from the Woody. The last panel on this page is small and inset into the double-page panel: the back seat BEHIND Nikita and Hiro flips down or slides open–your choice–revealing a cache of weapons. Among them are crucifixes, stakes, large gun-like weapons with wooden bayonets attached, a bullwhip made of silver cord instead of leather and studded with garlic cloves in the silver lash, a bandoleer replete with crucifixes, the bottoms of which have been carved to a sharp point so they are also stakes. Also, add anything else you want. If you wish show a hand reaching for them, but center the panel on the weapons themselves. Read ahead to see how they’re used.

WRITING FOR GENE

“Frank and I did Dr. Strange together – I’ve always been really clear about that,” Englehart says. “We’d have dinner, sit down for an evening, throw stuff back and forth and end up with something that was greater than its parts. Then we’d go off and do it, and everybody would say ‘Hey, what a great Dr. Strange!’” With Colan, Englehart sensed that the artist wanted less direct input in the direction of the book – he just wanted to draw the stories. “So at that point it became basically my book in terms of the writing and plotting. With Gene, I figured out a plot on my own, broke it down page by page, handed it off to him, and he drew it. It was wonderful art.” Asked to describe the difference between the Brunner and Colan Dr. Strange, Englehart says:

go back in time and meet Ben Franklin.’ He was a professional. I’m sure he went out and got his reference on Ben Franklin… but I never had to worry about it. Don McGregor, like Englehart, broke in at Marvel as an associate editor in the early 1970s. And although his first professional collaboration with Colan was on Amazing Adventures #26 in 1974, he actually scripted Colan-drawn pages in a writer’s test years earlier. “When I was still living in Rhode Island, Marvel sent me pages of Daredevil to script,” McGregor says. “It was the infamous car chase sequence. I had to script five or six pages of that. So I’d seen Gene’s pencils as early as then. It was kind of an audition, I guess.” Interesting to note: That exposure to Colan’s penciled pages later resulted in McGregor and Colan collaborating on four memorable projects reproduced directly from Colan’s pencils: Ragamuffins and Detectives Inc. for Eclipse, and two Nathaniel Dusk miniseries for DC in the mid-’80s, and the Spider graphic novel published by Vanguard in 2002.

“Brunner and I were both interested in magic as something to play with. So these evenings, in addition to plotting stories, we’d be talking philosophy and doing just everything. With Gene, I never really had any of those conversations, and yet his styles and sensibilities were such that he picked up on it and drew the appropriate images. He wasn’t, I don’t imagine, coming from any particular knowledge of mysticism; he just was coming from the fact that he could really feel and draw nuance. He’s real good at drawing facial expressions and shadows, the turn of a hand, the way a panel plays out… I never had a conversation with Gene about the nuances, but Gene got the nuances. Therefore, Gene’s Dr. Strange, which did not have the benefit of late-night dinners and philosophical discussions, was every bit as mystical as Brunner’s. That’s a gift.”

In addition to the pencils-only collaborations, McGregor and Colan crafted some memorable stories for Marvels horror magazine line in the 1970s, and with inker Tom Palmer they created a 25-part Black Panther serial in Marvel Comics Presents in the late 1980s.

When the Panther serial, “Panther’s Quest” began, McGregor knew the gist of it – the Black Panther would search for his longlost mother – but he didn’t know how the first story would develop. “Whatever project Gene was working End of the World: Steve Englehart and Gene on at DC ended, and he needed a plot Within their Doctor Strange run, Colan destroyed it all in Doctor Strange #13. right away,” McGregor recalls. Not Englehart liked issue #13 best – the Inks by Tom Palmer. having one, he basically described one wherein the Earth was destroyed the story as the Panther wandering and then rebuilt by the character Eternity, and only Dr. Strange around, ruminating at the start of his quest. Colan took it from knew what had happened. “I have no idea to this day whether there and drew quite a dramatic first chapter. “That was good,” Gene actually understood this stuff in any meaningful sense,” McGregor says. “It gave people a chance to get familiar with the Englehart says, “but on Doctor Strange I was working toward this Black Panther in this new setting.” point where the world was going to end, except it wasn’t really going to end. But then this being Doctor Strange and all, I said Throughout their work together over four decades, McGregor and ‘Why not? Let’s end the world and then recreate it.’ I was asking Colan have developed a friendship that has led to some ingenious for stuff quite often that had never been done before, and then – pranks by Gene “The Dean.” there you go – Gene would just draw it.” McGregor: In the second Nathaniel Dusk mini-series, I had a Englehart: You knew you were in good hands with Gene. I could character – one of the major league bad guys in the story. I say ‘Let’s end the world’ or ‘Let’s have an intergalactic war,’ or described him in great detail. I wanted him to look like he’d been ‘Let’s meet a hippie on the streets of Greenwich Village,’ or ‘Let’s in the electric chair, and all it had done was spike the ends on his GENE COLAN

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hair and take the color out of his face. If you saw this guy walking down the street, you wanted to cross to the other side. I got a call from Gene late one night – he would always pull this stuff late at night. He said “Ah, Don, that’s too cartoony – I can’t draw the character that way.” Then he proceeds to go on about how he’s going to draw this tall, gangly character. I think Gene told me later on he was patterning him after Stan Laurel! I say ‘What are you talking about, Gene? I think you can draw this character just fine!’ He’s like ‘No, no, no, no. I just can’t…’ Then, of course, the artwork comes in, and Gene drew him exactly as I described! I called him and said ‘Gene, didn’t we have a discussion at midnight about three weeks ago about how you couldn’t draw this character?’ He says ‘I just wanted to see how you’d react, Don.’

Bad Guy: No mistaking this bad guy for Stan Laurel – from Nathaniel Dusk II, 1985. Asked how he worked to Colan’s strengths, McGregor says, “You write for every artist individually when you know who will draw a strip. Different artists liked or disliked different things. Like with Gene, I would never diagram a page – he didn’t want that. But Billy Graham [who drew the Black Panther in Jungle Action in the 1970s] did – he really liked it.” What advice would McGregor offer to writers first working with Colan?

Panther Unplugged: McGregor was late writing a script for the opening installment of the Black Panther serial in Marvel Comics Presents #13, 1989, so Colan improvised and let T’Challa just do his thing. Inks by Tom Palmer. 113

“Be thankful,” McGregor says. “Write the best story you can, and know you’ll have a terrific human being and artist who will take your story and bring it to life. That’s what comics are all about. And Gene can do it all – from the big action scenes to the small, subtle moments. I don’t know of anything Gene can’t do.”

WRITING FOR GENE

Conversations Gene Colan and Steve Gerber

They’ve taken Dracula to the Vatican, Daredevil to San Francisco, Superman to the Phantom Zone and, of course, Howard the Duck to a world he never made.

Gerber: It’s absolutely one of the most gorgeous things you ever drew! It was terrific. Colan: No, I don’t remember [laughs]. I’m sorry.

Their body of work was relatively compact – all of it published between 1974 and 1982 – but the magic is such that not only are the stories memorable, but writer Steve Gerber and artist Gene Colan remain friends and fans of one another’s craft.

Field: Steve, what was it like for you when you first got the opportunity to work with Gene? Gerber: The first time I actually worked over Gene’s artwork, I wasn’t truly working with Gene. It was on Daredevil, and the plots had been created by Gerry Conway. I was somewhat removed from it. I was just handed this stuff that was really beautiful, and told to make a story of it! [laughs] It was astonishing. Interestingly – and Gene, there’s no way you possibly could know this – but the very first thing I ever wrote for Marvel, my writer’s test for Marvel, was a Daredevil sequence Gene had drawn.

In January 2005, Gerber and Colan reminisced about their unique collaboration.

Tom Field: I was trying to remember… what was the first thing you worked on together – Daredevil? Steve Gerber: It was either Daredevil or a Dracula story, one of those two.

Colan: Oh, my god!

Gene Colan: First thing I remember, Holy Bats!: First Steve Gerber/Gene Colan Gerber: Yeah! They sent me six pages of of course, is Howard the Duck, the collaboration, Dracula meets the Vatican from a Daredevil story, also plotted by Gerry, most outstanding project I’ve ever that was a kind of a takeoff on a car Dracula Lives! Inks by Ernie Chan. been a part of. The rest just fades into chase from [the movie] Bullitt. the background. Colan: Yes! Gerber: I bet you do remember that Dracula story. It was done for one of the black-and-white Dracula books, and we had Dracula Gerber: You remember that? I didn’t write the actual story, but they sent trapped in the Vatican. Do you remember that story? me photocopies of those six pages when I was still living in St. Louis… Colan: No… GENE COLAN

Colan: So, you were kind of auditioning? 114

Gerber: Yes, exactly. I had to dialogue them without knowing anything else going on in the plot. Colan: Well, that was one of the absolute best moves Marvel ever made, hiring you as a writer.

where we were put together. Field: Steve, you’d know this better than Gene would. By the time he got onto HTD (issue #4), Frank Brunner had drawn a couple of issues; John Buscema had done one. Did you think Gene was settling in as the artist?

Gerber: You’re being way too kind. Colan: No, I’m not – I’m telling the truth! I feel very strongly about your talent. You’re separate and apart from everyone else, and I always knew I was dealing with a very talented fellow. It was so obvious to me and my wife Adrienne. The two of us were howling at your Howard the Duck stories. Field: When did you first take notice of Steve, Gene? Colan: He has a special quality that comes out in his ideas and his writing. I just notice it; it’s hard to put it into words… Gerber: “Deeply neurotic” is what it is! [laughs] Colan: Well, maybe that’s what it is, but I’m pretty neurotic myself, so maybe between the two of us we make one big talented couple! Gerber: It was a match made in Heaven on that book [Howard the Duck]… Colan: I wish we were still working together in some capacity; I really do.

Gerber: There’s a very interesting story and, Gene, you’re going to deny this story, OK? [laughs] Brunner had left – and actually he had only drawn one issue of the regular book by himself. The second was done in collaboration with Jim Starlin and a couple of other people. He was having deadline problems and had to get the book out quickly. Then he decided to leave for whatever reason – I still don’t know – and John Buscema drew a fill-in issue. Then [editors] were asking me, “Who would you like to draw this book?” To me, there was no other choice. Gene was the choice to draw this book, simply because he was the least likely choice ever to draw a funny-animal looking character. His artwork was so real, and he drew people so well – to me there was no other choice among the other people working for Marvel at that time. He was the person I wanted to have do it if he were willing. Now, I don’t know if you remember this, Gene, and like I said I think you’re going to deny it. But John Verpoorten, who was Marvel’s production manager at the time, called and asked you if you’d be willing to do the book. I was actually standing in John’s office at the time. And you, Gene, thought you were being demoted to drawing funny-animal books!

Gerber: I do, too, Gene. Colan: Really? Was that my Field: Steve, did you ever get comment? [laughs} the chance to work with Gene on DD by yourself, or Gerber: Well, you’d never seen the did you always work over Duck Meet Cookie: Cover to Howard the Duck #6, 1976. book at that point, and John had to Inks by Tom Palmer. Conway plots? reassure you: “No, no, no… this book is really big with the fans! I think you’re really going to enjoy it!” Gerber: I did. Gene and I did a few issues together, but Gene was basically trying to move on at that point. He’d just started the Dracula Colan: Well, and I really did enjoy doing that book most of all book, and he’d been doing Daredevil for God knows how many because it was a combination of realism and animation – and I years. I think he wanted to do something else. So, I did get to write love funny stuff! the book by myself, but I never had a single consistent artist for any extended period of time. Gerber: My faith in you was completely justified the moment I saw the first stuff you did. I don’t know that you were born to draw that book, but Field: So, Howard the Duck was your first chance to work nobody else was, that’s for sure! You did it better than anybody else could together long-term? have possibly have done it. And over a much longer period of time. Colan: That and Stewart the Rat – that was another opportunity 115

Colan: Thank you. I wish that we had stayed together on that or on A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S T E V E G E R B E R

Gerber: No, no! I’m going back to even the very first issues that you did. Howard didn’t really look like Donald Duck.

something else. As a writer and an artist teaming together, it was the best thing that had come my way since I had been in comics. Really. Are you doing anything now in television or film?

Colan: Are they still doing it? Gerber: No, I’m doing a series [Hard Time] for DC Comics right now, and that’s really it at the moment.

Gerber: No, I don’t think the character is being published now.

Colan: OK, well, maybe you ought to think about TV and film as well. I think you’re extremely talented, and you may well have a crack at that, too.

Field: Howard didn’t read like Donald Duck either. Gerber and Colan: No! [laughter] Field: Steve, how did you write for Gene? Was it any different than how you wrote for any other artist you worked with?

Gerber: I’ve done some stuff for television, mostly for animation and a little bit of live action television, but… I don’t know; I guess I never really fell that much in love with television. Or it with me, for that matter! [laughs]

Gerber: Only in the sense that I had read so much of Gene’s work, seen so much of his work, that I had a really good sense of what kind of things he did best. Which mostly had to do with people and expressions – human things. I would write to play to those strengths all the time because nobody drew them any better.

Colan: OK. Well, you have to love what you’re doing. Gerber: Exactly! Field: Now, Gene, I’ve got to ask: Was that a tough adjustment for you? You’d been drawing Daredevil and Dracula and Doctor Strange. Then all of a sudden you were drawing Hard Time: Steve Gerber’s newest the duck!

comic book from DC.

Colan: No, I liked it. I enjoyed it. I did have a question about what Disney was going to have to say about it! It was so much like Donald Duck, the way it was set up originally. I thought we would get flak on it, really. But the only change we had to make, I think, was his trousers. We had to put pants on Howard.

Field: I remember a sequence in Howard where Winda Wester was showing off the various facial expressions she could make… Gerber: [laughing] Yes! Gene, unlike most comic book artists, was actually capable of drawing more than three or four expressions on characters’ faces! Colan: Well, I have to say you really brought out the best in me; you truly did.

Gerber: It was there. I just used what I already knew you had. Colan: Did you make up the Dr. Bong character? Gerber: Yes. Marie Severin, who was on staff at Marvel at the time, designed the costume.

Gerber: That was after I left the book, actually. Colan: I think we started out without the pants, just like Donald Duck would be. [Putting pants on Howard] was the way they could satisfy Disney and continue the series without having troubles with Disney.

Colan: Y’see? Right there! Just the name, “Dr. Bong” got to me right away. And all the rest of Steve’s ideas; they were really strokes of genius. I can’t say enough. I just enjoyed it. It was a time of my life that has come and gone, and I wish the hell it were still here. The best time I had.

Gerber: Personally, I don't think Howard looked anything like Donald Duck! [laughs]

Gerber: In some ways, I have to say that’s true for me, too.

Colan: No?

Field: Steve, did you write full-script for Gene, or did you give him plots?

Gerber: I don’t think Howard and Donald look anything alike! You look at the model sheets of the two characters, and they really don’t. Howard’s bill is shaped completely differently; Howard was yellow, not white; the two ducks wore completely different clothes; Howard’s feet were much bigger… But what can you say?

Gerber: There may have been one or two full-scripts in there just because of time constraints, but we generally did work plot-pencilsdialogue – the Marvel method, as it was called.

Colan: Maybe that’s how it turned out…

Field: How about for the sequences, say, in the “Quack Up” issues where there could be entire sequences of Howard arguing with himself – how did you plot those?

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Gerber: For those sequences, I almost always included rough dialogue in the plot and tried to break the continuity down almost panel-for-panel. “Insert argument here” simply wouldn't have worked. The characters’ gestures and expressions had to be in synch with the emotional and/or intellectual spikes and dips of the argumentation. The dialogue would, of course, be polished between the plotting stage and the final script. Field: Did you find the challenge other writers sometimes found, that as Gene would pace a story he’d occasionally run

out of pages before he ran out of story? Gerber: Not with the duck, [laughs] but, yes, a couple of times with Daredevil! One time with Daredevil was interesting because Gene drew this really magnificent 12-panel final page of a book, and it was one of the most cinematic pages I’ve ever seen done in comics. I actually used it as an illustration of cinematic storytelling in comics in an article I wrote for a magazine called Super8 Filmmaker. Colan: Actually, I think you gave me more to work with in the way of ideas, so that the pages worked out properly. Gerber: That’s probably true, but I also – because I knew you’d sometimes want to allot more room to a scene – I would sometimes just leave a page and say ‘OK, just use this to catch up…’ Colan: Yes, yes… Gerber: And it would work out that way. Kind of a crazy way of doing it, but it seemed to work out. Colan: Generally, you put that page in just the right place when you wrote the script. I was left pretty much on my own when Stan would write for me, and although I liked working that way, the pacing often fell short. Gerber: Stan did much less-detailed synopses for you than I did, I think. I would break it down for you pretty much in groups of pages. ‘This will be pages 1-4, this will be 5-7’ or whatever. Colan: Yes, but you would send me a written plot. Stan and I would just discuss the story for 10 minutes or so… Gerber: Oh, you didn’t even get it in writing? Colan: No, I would just tape record the conversations. That was all. Gerber: [whistles] Wow. Field: Steve, what would you say Gene brought to the Howard character in its development?

Wubber Walls: Howard cracks up in HTD #12, May 1977. Inks by Tom Palmer 117

Gerber: I don’t even know how to begin answering that question! Once we began working on the character together, once we were a few issues into the run, Gene really infused that character – and all the

A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S T E V E G E R B E R

Gerber: Marvel did not make that easy for you, either. There are a lot of things they could have done to make it easier, but they didn’t. To this day, I’m still pissed at them about that…[laughs]

characters in that series – with his personality as much as mine. I mean, Howard developed a certain set of physical mannerisms that Gene entirely brought to the character. Beverly developed a particular look, as did Winda, Paul and all of the rest of them. Past the basic division of the words on the page and the lines in the drawings, I don’t even know how to separate Gene's contribution from mine. There came a point in my collaboration with Gene when I was able to anticipate what he would draw from a given description, and I think I learned over time how much and what kind of descriptive guidance Gene needed from me in the plots. And Gene, I assume, likewise learned how to decode my descriptions and translate them into the kind of visuals I had in mind. After a while, I think we just came to trust each other. And as that trust grew, the visual concepts could get progressively crazier. We could go from, say, wrestlers and Winky-Man to Fifi and the Neezers, each of us confident that the other could pull it off.

Colan: Well, one thing’s for sure: You’ve got your talent, and I personally feel there’s no telling how far you could go with it. That what’s separates you from all of the writers [at Marvel]. They all had their strong points, but Howard was a very special thing, and you can really write humor great. Field: You’re the only writer, Steve, about whom Gene has ever said he actually read the stories from beginning to end before starting to draw them! Colan: Oh, I couldn’t put them down! I didn’t read them all – I’d read ahead just enough so that I could still be surprised. I tried not to read everything. But I would go into it a lot further than anything else I ever got.

Field: Gene, what did this book mean to you? It must have been a real release, given the other comics you were drawing?

Field: When did you feel like you really hit your stride with Howard? Gerber: Again, there were interesting moments early in the series, and some interesting moments later, too. Some of the stories we did with the Ringmaster and Circus of Crime, I think, were really strange and funny – those were toward the end of the run. Nearer the beginning, there was the Presidential campaign, Howard and Bev just trying to find money to survive from issue to issue… I liked almost all of the stuff we did, and it's remarkable how well both the stories and the artwork hold up today. It's still very readable.

Colan: Oh, it was. It was funny, very enjoyable, and it gave me an opportunity to stretch myself a bit as an artist. I think the ideas were so complete that the images came to me very quickly when I read Steve’s work. And so I didn’t have to wonder what I was going to draw or how I was going to do it. It was really mapped out so beautifully, in a sense without too much detail – just enough to get me going, and I ran with it.

Gerber: There really was almost a Colan: I liked the idea of him entering a telepathic connection there. I would world he didn’t make, so he’s not to blame see something in my mind, and that is for everything that goes wrong with it. I what you would draw! I’ve never had The 10-Panel Page: Cinematic conclusion to DD like that touch; there’s a lot behind it. that experience with another artist #110, 1974. Inks by Frank Chiaramonte. before or since. There was just, like, a Field: How did the syndicated strip psychic connection between the two of us on that book. evolve? Did it come from the popularity of the character? Colan: Thanks. I wish we could have continued with the Howard syndicated strip, I really do. I felt like I was just getting a stride on it [when they left the strip]. I probably overdid the first few weeks of it; I got carried away and worried about it. But as I got into it, I became a little more relaxed. The style even changed slightly. More animated, more easy-going, more natural, not so tight. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was such a big departure from the more serious stuff I did. The trouble was, I was trying to burn the candles at both ends. I didn’t want to let go of the comic book side, but really the Howard the Duck strip required full-time attention to develop that into a good syndicated strip. I tried to give it what it needed, but I just couldn’t. I was working morning, noon and night, hardly taking time for anything. Then something had to give. Unfortunately, it was the strip because I was too afraid to let go of the comic books, because they were my mainstay. I didn’t have enough courage, I guess, to stay with the strip. GENE COLAN

Gerber: Don’t take my word as gospel on this, but my understanding is that Marvel had been approached by the Register & Tribune Syndicate about doing several strips based on Marvel’s comic books. And the three they wanted to do were Howard, Conan and Spider-Man. So, that’s where the notion of doing a comic strip came from. Field: How did you write the strip differently than the comic book? Gerber: As I recall, with the strip I did have to write full scripts. The way newspaper strips were structured, you basically had three panels a day. One panel had to be a recap of what happened the day before, the middle panel advanced the story for that day, and third panel was a cliffhanger to get people to come back the next day. It was so tightly 118

Two Takes: See how Tom Sutton (left) and Gene Colan (right) approached the exact same scene from Gerber’s 1980 Stewart the Rat graphic novel. Sutton drew 10 pages of the book before being replaced by Colan. Sutton inks by P. Craig Russell; Colan inks by Tom Palmer. structured, I’m almost positive the strips were written full-script. Field: And, Gene, you inked those strips, too, correct? Colan: Yes, I did. I’m glad I had that opportunity, too. I’m glad it was my hand and nobody else’s. Field: Talk about Stewart the Rat. I know Gene wasn’t the first artist assigned to the book [Tom Sutton was]. How did he get on it?

have, after the Tom Sutton stuff came back & didn’t quite gel, we may have taken a leap of faith and just asked Gene on the off chance that he’d be able to do it. In fact, I think that is what happened, and as it turned out Gene was able to do it. Field: Gene, you had fun with that… Colan: I did. Again, it was something that was brand new, Steve was writing it – it was Steve’s idea – and that’s what I wanted. If I couldn’t do Howard the Duck with him, then let’s do Stewart the Rat!

Gerber: Gene wasn’t the first artist assigned to it…? That may be true… Field: Tom Sutton penciled about 10 pages, and P. Craig Russell started inking them. They’re the exact same script you gave Gene – same characters. But for some reason, Sutton and Russell left the book, and Gene and Tom Palmer drew it. Gerber: Y’know, I don’t recall what happened. It may have been that we didn’t think Tom Sutton’s stuff looked quite right for that character… but I also don’t think Gene was available when we first started doing the book, or at least we didn’t think he’d be available because of his contractual relationship with Marvel. But we may 119

Field: Was that your attitude as well, Steve – if you weren’t going to do the duck, you might as well do the rat? Gerber: Well, it was kinda that. There were a lot of things going on at that time. I was in the middle of my dispute with Marvel about the ownership of the Howard character. The problems with Disney had just started. And for me it was almost like revenge against both companies [laughs]. Fine, if you’re not going to let me do this duck, I'll do a mouse and we'll see how you feel about that! That’s where the rat idea came from. The book had its strong points and its weak points. The strongest point, certainly, was its A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S T E V E G E R B E R

Gerber: There were some problems with the story structure. Because it was limited to a one-shot, I have the feeling I was trying to cram too many ideas into too few pages.

art. Gene’s interpretation of that character was just gorgeous. I wish we’d had opportunity to do more with that character, really. Field: What were the weak points, looking back?

Field: Did you think at the time that Stewart may be an ongoing character? Gerber: We really didn’t know. I don’t think I was planning any future stories at the time I wrote it. It was intended to be a selfcontained “graphic novel.” Field: Was your next collaboration the Phantom Zone mini-series at DC? How did that come about? Gerber: I’d been bugging DC about wanting to do a Superman story. And I always thought that Gene would do an incredible Superman. Because of Dracula, probably, they had Gene sort of typecast drawing guys in bat capes, but I felt he would draw a real fleshand-blood Superman – and I was right! In fact, his Clark Kent was even better than his Superman! [laughs] As far as I'm concerned, that character has never looked more realistic or more human than in that Phantom Zone story. Field: Did you write it knowing Gene would draw it? Gerber: I believe so, yeah. Field: What was the difference between working at Marvel and DC at that time? Gerber: The atmosphere at Marvel in those days was a lot more freewheeling that it was at DC. One of the reasons the Duck stuff was as good as it was, from a writing standpoint, is that I almost never had anybody looking over my shoulder. I was essentially my own editor, even before I was credited as the editor on the book. All of the writers at Marvel in those days basically edited their own books. It was physically impossible for a single editor-inColan-penciled (and rejected) Spectre page from DC in the 1980s. At one point, Gerber was supposed chief to oversee on a page-by-page, to helm a Spectre revival, but his project never got off the ground. Colan drew the character for six issues panel-by-panel basis the 40 or so written by Doug Moench. books Marvel was publishing every GENE COLAN

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month. So a lot of responsibility fell to the writers – and the artists, too – to maintain the quality of the books and be responsible for their content. Colan: I think the people at Marvel – Stan, Roy and all the rest – gave the writers and artists a lot of freedom. Let us do our thing and show what talent we had without any interference. Whereas up at DC there was a lot of control. Gerber: I wouldn't say without “any” interference, but the hand of management was much lighter creatively than it is at Marvel today or at DC in the late ’70s. Colan:They wanted the artwork to look a certain way… I never could quite figure out what that “way” was, but once the inkers took over then it had that look. I didn’t like that part of it, but when you’re freelancing you take it as it comes.

off, and Doug Moench ended up writing it. But what makes me curious is that I know Gene drew some unpublished Spectre pages, and I always wondered if they might be to one of your unpublished stories. Gerber: Is that right? I just don’t know. Colan: A lot of the stuff I drew for DC ended up just going into inventory and never getting into print. Field: Not the best of days for either of you, then? Colan: No, there were very few good moments. I got along OK pretty much with everybody, but things had changed. By the time I left, the editors were looking more to see which books sold and which ones didn’t, and they’d blame the artists for the ones that didn’t sell. The artist really had nothing to do with it, I thought. It depends on the material and how popular that material is. But they were counting the numbers, and if the numbers on a particular book weren’t high enough, then that was the end of it for the artist.

Field: Must have been jarring for some of those folks at DC. Here come the Howard the Duck creators, and they’re working with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in the Phantom Zone! Gerber: Dick Giordano was the editor on that mini-series, and he pretty much let us work the same way we did at Marvel, at least on that particular limited series. I don’t know what Gene’s other experiences were like at DC, but Dick trusted me and stayed out of my way in plotting that stuff, and as far as I know, he let Gene draw the material his way as well. You can see the results in the book.

Gerber: For me, at that time, right after the Phantom Zone, most of what I was doing was on the West Coast in animation and TV. For the next seven or eight years after that, I really had almost nothing to do with comics. Field: Looking back on the work you did with Gene, what makes him unique in his approach to comic books?

Gerber: If you want to tell a story that is mostly about human Field: That was the last work beings, there are very few other you did together, wasn’t it? artists you can turn to. Gene is an Phantom Zone: This scene from Phantom Zone #4, 1982, absolute master at telling stories Gerber: You mean “ever”? features Colan drawing Superman, Supergirl, Batman, about real people. Howard the Wonder Woman and Green Lantern – heavy hitters all. Hmm, I guess it may be. Duck, paradoxically, was mainly about real people. [laughs] The Colan: Yes, it was. We went our separate ways after that and got fact that one of them was a duck was just incidental! lost in all the confusion. Colan: I thought that Howard was just the hub of everything. Beautifully Field: Now, Steve, you were slated at some point [mid-’80s] to written. Stewart the Rat, too. write a Spectre revival, weren’t you? Gerber: I’m going to be more critical of my work than you are. I tend to Gerber: Yes. But I’ve got absolutely no memory about the details. I be very harsh on my own stuff. Stewart, I felt, had some real weaknesses have no idea why that fell apart. in the writing. Had I written a third or fourth draft of that story, I think they would have come to light for me, but that wasn't possible. I had to Field: I remember reading that you were on the book, then keep it down to two drafts, or it never would have gotten finished. 121

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Field: Gene, you’ve worked with an awful lot of writers over the years, but whenever anyone asks you to name a favorite, Steve comes up first… Colan: You bet! Field: Why is that? Colan: Imagination. He would write a story far different than any other writer would. He would just drag up these ideas that nobody else would think of, and put such life into the plots. You had to enjoy it! He was a natural, an absolute natural. Field: Did you have a favorite character or sequence you enjoyed doing with Steve? Colan: I liked doing Bong a lot. [laughter] Field: There’s our banner quote from Gene: ‘I liked doing Bong…!’

Field: Steve, has your approach to comics writing changed to accommodate today’s tastes? Gerber: Somewhat. My style has evolved over the years, but I don’t think it’s a wildly different approach, exactly. I still want to tell a story, and I still want to interpose as little of myself as possible between the story and the reader. I’d rather the story and the characters speak for me. That’s something else that Gene facilitated really well. It sounds paradoxical, but I’ve always felt that as you’re reading a comic book, you really shouldn’t be aware that what you're reading has been written or drawn. You should be sucked into the story, you should be aware of the characters, you should be aware of the incidents and your feelings about them. But you should not be aware of the artwork as artwork or the story as writing. It’s fine if you recognize those things the second time you read it. But the first time, it should be such an absorbing experience that you’re not paying attention to that. You’re just going “Wow,” or laughing yourself silly – whatever the appropriate response may be. For me, the object of writing comic books was not to show off, but to involve the reader in an experience. Gene always made that possible.

Gerber: [laughing] I was going to say, he means drawing Dr. Bong, not doing the bong! Field: So, Steve, you enjoyed doing Bong, too? [laughs] It was years later, after I became a journalist that I found out you based Bong on one of my favorite journalists. Gerber: Oh, Bob Greene, yeah. Very, very loosely, yes. But I owed him one at the time! Field: Steve, you still work in comics today. Do you run across artists who demonstrate the same storytelling abilities that Gene has? Gerber: Well, even in those days when we were doing the duck, there were very few artists (if any) who could bring all of the qualities Gene brought to a particular story. The ability to tell the story, to do the action stuff, to portray the humanity of the characters convincingly. That was a difficult combination of talents to find in any single artist. And it’s harder today. Colan: It’s just that the industry has changed so much. A lot of different people have come along. I don’t think there’s anyone up at Marvel, outside of Ralph Macchio, who I’d recognize if I went up there. There are all these young people now, and it’s so different. Gerber: There is that, but also the expectations have changed. Artists today are not really selected on the basis of how well they tell stories in continuity. What seems to be valued a lot more is the ability to do the big poster – the iconic shot. That's great once in a while, but entire books full of them make for awfully dull reading, at least in my opinion. But it Dr. Bong: Colan’s favorite Howard villain – Dr. Bong, who was loosely seems to be what the current audience likes.

based on Chicago journalist Bob Greene. GENE COLAN

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9 Marvel - The Last Years

icture: The late 1970s, a long car ride from New York to Connecticut. Gene Colan and Marvel’s newest editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, are enroute to a live radio interview, and what should be a pleasant drive becomes an unbearable experience for Colan. “Shooter never had a word to say to me,” Colan recalls. “I tried to make conversation, but he’d just answer briefly. He had something on his mind – there was something wrong, something terribly wrong. But he was not friendly, not outgoing.” That day, haunted by the uncomfortable car ride, Colan returns home to Adrienne and confesses his fear: The rise of Jim Shooter just might signal the end of Gene Colan at Marvel.

Tomb of Dracula was hardly Gene Colan’s only comics job in the 1970s. After establishing himself as one of Marvel’s most distinct stylists in the 1960s, Colan spent much of the ’70s displaying his versatility on such diverse characters as Daredevil, Dr. Doom, Killraven, the Son of Satan, and Brother Voodoo. Who else, after all, could prove equally adept at drawing romance, horror, humor, and heroic adventure? At one time, in fact, Colan held the distinction of concurrently illustrating three of Marvel’s most distinctly different titles: Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts; Tomb of Dracula, Lord of the Vampires; Howard the Duck, the anthropomorphic fowl trapped in a world he never made (and the basis of a 1986 George Lucas film that he might wish he never made!). The latter may well have been Colan’s favorite assignment of the mid-’70s. Created as a walk-on character by writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik in the pages of the monster comic Man-Thing, Howard the Duck was just that – a cigar-smoking, sharp-tongued drake who got plucked from his own world and tossed unceremoniously into ours. Equal parts Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny and, well, maybe Lenny Bruce, Howard was a sharp-eyed social critic who quickly caught comics’ fans fancy and saw himself promoted from bit part to back-up stories to his own eponymous comic book in late 1975. Initially, the Howard the Duck (HTD) comic was drawn by young artist Frank Brunner. But Brunner left the book after just two issues, with Marvel veteran John Buscema handling the third. Then, with issue #4, the series fell into Colan’s lap.

Doom Lore: Splash page to the Dr. Doom story in Astonishing

Colan didn’t know what to think. Was he being demoted – assigned to draw Tales #8, Oct. 1971 – a classic story about Doom trying to a kids’ funny-animal comic? But as soon as he read Gerber’s sophisticated,

rescue his mother’s damned soul from Hell. Inks by Tom Palmer.

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his expressionism, his ability to juxtapose the real and the unreal – these qualities made Colan the perfect artist to depict HTD’s imperfect world. As the HTD stories got wilder and wackier – i.e. running Howard for President in 1976, guest-starring the band KISS in 1977, and then turning mild-mannered newspaper columnist Bob Greene into the malevolent villain Dr. Bong – the character evolved from cult favorite to cultural phenomenon. In 1978, Howard even became the star of his own syndicated newspaper strip, which Gene drew in addition to his regular comics work, thinking the comic strip would be his ticket to big bucks. In fact, Colan remembers a call from Marvel publisher Stan Lee, encouraging him to draw the HTD strip. “Oh, you’ll retire on what you make on [the syndicated strip]. Just keep going,” Lee said. “We didn’t make it, though, with the syndicated strip, because things weren’t coming in on time,” Colan says. “I couldn’t keep up the pace between regular comic work and Howard, and so the whole damn thing fell apart.” Adrienne Colan: I remember when the call from Stan came, and we were all in the kitchen, including the kids, and Gene picked up the phone, said it’s Stan, and he said, “How would

Star Waaugh: Parody cover from 1977 by Colan and Al Weiss. satirical script about a sleep-walking vigilante named “Winky Man,” Colan knew he wasn’t exactly in Disneyland. Colan: At first, I said, ‘How can you claim this is your own? Howard the Duck, this is Donald Duck here!’ Didn’t matter that he smoked a cigar, had a little hat on, that was enough! But if no one else questioned it, why should I? I enjoyed it, because Howard was the easiest thing to do, and it was such a chance to make things funny and lighten up a little bit. I enjoyed humor, and Steve [Gerber] was so funny. I’d just sit there and laugh my head off just reading the script, and I’d call him and say so. Typically, Colan didn’t read ahead in a script – he just read each individual page as he sat down to draw it. But Gerber’s wildly inventive and clever scripts enchanted him. He couldn’t get enough of these stories, which revolved around monstrous gingerbread men, presidential campaigns, mental institutions, and a recurring character known only as “The Kidney Lady.” “Whatever he had on every page was funny, it was just hilarious,” Colan says of Gerber’s work. “I had a good rapport with Steve.” And Colan clearly had an affinity for the stories. His storytelling, GENE COLAN

Brother Voodoo: Origin of a character who could have only come from the 1970s! Inks by Dan Adkins. 124

HTD Strip: A Colan penciled/inked daily newspaper strip from 1977. you like to make $100,000 a year?” And we just thought, “Oh, my God, our ship has come in!” and we started jumping around the kitchen. Seven months later, we’re flat-broke, to the point where we had to sell the only car we had and borrow my parents’ car. What a mess! Ultimately, Gerber’s relationship with Marvel deteriorated to the point where he quit HTD and left the company – left comics altogether for a time, working instead in TV animation. Colan hung in with HTD through a succession of writers, but the stories and the series never again packed the punch they had under Gerber’s guidance. Like Tomb of Dracula, the HTD color comic was canceled in 1979, then replaced with a black-and-white magazine illustrated mainly by Colan. But again like TOD, the HTD magazine was short-lived, and its cancellation left Colan wondering “What next?”

Byrne, Pérez, and Starlin were the new fan faves handling the A-list books, and a rookie named Miller was about to take Gene’s signature character, Daredevil, to even greater creative heights. So, what was available for Colan? He returned briefly to Dr. Strange, puttered around on odd jobs such as movie adaptations (Meteor and Jaws II), fill-ins (Marvel Team-Up #87, Captain America #256 and Annual #5) and the occasional special project (Marvel Super Special #10, featuring Star-Lord). But then the only regular assignment he could score was on the black-and-white Hulk magazine, a TV tie-in that was about two years past its prime, starring a character that Colan never particularly embraced. “He was ugly as sin, big and clumsy, didn’t look good on the page, and I couldn’t relate to him,” Colan says. “He was more like a big dumb Lenny (from Of Mice and Men) than anything else, and I couldn’t deal with him.” But just as Colan suspected from that fateful car ride to Connecticut, there was something on Jim Shooter’s mind: a growing sense that, just as Colan couldn’t deal with the Hulk, maybe Marvel – Shooter’s Marvel – could no longer deal with Colan.

Final Straws In some ways, the TOD and HTD series were like a long, overseas tour of duty for Colan. When they ended, he was sent back home to mainstream Marvel, wondering “OK, what do I do now?”

Jim Shooter is at once one of comics’ most celebrated and controversial Marvel wasn’t as easy a fit as it figures. He broke into the business in once had been. While Colan had been Last Hurrah?: Colan began drawing Howard one of the superstars of Stan’s Bullpen the Duck with issue #4 in 1976. This was one of the 1960s at age 13, helping to support his family by writing Legion of in the 1960s, Stan was pretty much out the last assignments he truly enjoyed before Superheroes stories for DC Comics. He of the comic book picture by the late things soured for him at Marvel. left the business briefly and returned ’70s, and the hotshot artists of Gene’s generation – Kirby, Buscema, Romita, and Tuska – had mostly in the mid-’70s as a writer, then an editor at Marvel. He became moved on or been displaced by the up-and-coming superstars. editor-in-chief at Marvel in the late 1970s, establishing himself as 125

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Rampaging Hulk: TVinspired advertisement illo penciled by Colan circa 1980. GENE COLAN

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a strong-willed administrator who helped whip Marvel’s chaotic business practices into shape – and alienated some of the company’s top creators by imposing his own sense of how comics should be created. Example: Writer/editor Roy Thomas, who’d dedicated himself to Marvel since 1965, abruptly quit the company and moved to DC in 1980 after a contract dispute with Shooter. Soon after Thomas left, a new conflict emerged: Jim Shooter vs. Gene Colan. Shooter, who left Marvel in 1987 and now has been out of comics since 1996, looks back on his conflict with Colan as merely a sign of the times – a sad result of the era’s economic pressures, forcing artists such as Colan to crank out as many pages as humanly possible to earn a decent wage. “[Colan] had to make so much a day, and so he had to crank out a fair number of pages a day to make that,” Shooter says. “That’s a lot of work, and so it’s understandable in a way that he would cut corners a little. If you look at those books back then in 1977, ’78, ’79, you’ll see that every time there’s an explosion in a Gene Colan book, he gives it a full page, and he uses the side of his pencil to draw some fluffy little clouds, and then 10 minutes later – that’s a page! And one page pays the same as the next…” Economic considerations aside, Shooter also had strong opinions about comic book storytelling, and these views were fundamentally opposed to some of Colan’s techniques – particularly how he paced a story. Whereas previous editors had been amused – at worst, challenged – by Colan’s habit of running out of pages before he ran out of plot, Shooter saw this as a flaw that needed to be fixed. Shooter: You see in some of those Gene Colan stories a lot of pages with big panels, and then all of a sudden you get to the last page and there are nine panels on the page. He’d cram the whole story into the last page. Before I came in, nobody was giving much direction to anybody about anything, quite frankly. So when I came in and started giving direction, a lot of people were upset about it. “Who the hell are you to be telling me anything?” y’know? “Well, I’m the editor-in-chief, you see, and it’s my job.” One of the things I tried to tell Gene was, “Y’know, I appreciate your problems, but you’ve got to tell the story.” It wasn’t just me; the writers he was working with, with the exception of Marv on Tomb of Dracula (because on TOD, similar to Marv, it was 127

After the Thrill is Gone: The Jaws II movie adaptation (top) and a brief tenure on Avengers were among the final assignments Colan got after the Dracula and HTD projects ended. Gene’s labor of love. He didn’t cut many corners on TOD), they would be coming to me out of their minds because they had written a plot, and [Colan] had kind of ignored it and drawn a lot of big, easy pictures, then 16 panels on the last page. I tried to talk to him, and occasionally asked him to redraw things. Because he was Gene Colan, I would pay him to redraw things. I’d say, “Gene, I’ll pay you to do this, but you’ve got to stop [cutting corners].”

Colan, of course, recalls the situation rather differently. “[Shooter] was harassing the life out of me. I couldn’t make a living,” Colan says. “He frightened me, he really did. He upset me so bad I couldn’t function.” The conflict came to a head when Colan was assigned to draw the superhero team book, the Avengers – a comic Shooter was writing off-and-on at that time. “He didn’t particularly want to do it because it had a lot of characters and was a hard book to draw – but he needed

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the work,” Shooter says. “Now, I don’t remember if I wrote him a letter or just told him, but I remember having the discussion: ‘Y’know, Gene, look: you’re going to have to follow the plots, and you’re going to have to put some work into it. If you don’t, you’re going to have to redraw it. And for a while I will pay you to redraw it…’

it somehow as a 32-page story, and it was in the house, mailed back, and we knew why it was mailed back. Gene hadn’t even opened it, because he knew it had to be [pages] marked up with corrections. So, we opened it up, and sure enough, there were 32 pages worth of corrections. It wasn’t every panel on every page, but every page had corrections. I said to Gene, “Do me a favor… go through the 32 pages, take about six that you’ll sit down with. On those six, if there are three panels on each that [Shooter] asks you to correct, correct one.” I’ll give you an example: there was a plane taking off in panel one, and Shooter says, ‘Oh, it’s not taking off from the right angle.’ Gene went to erase the whole thing. I said, “Don’t do that. Make the smoke coming out at a different angle.” He said “Okay.” Now, I knew he was going to quit when he said “okay,” because there were no shortcuts for him!

So began, for Colan, a nightmare collaboration. One time on Avengers, Colan recalls, Shooter asked for a panel of some character flying around the room – and then came back later and said “No! What you drew defies the laws of gravity!” Colan was unable to understand exactly what Shooter wanted from him. At one point, artist-editor hostilities escalated to where Colan called upon his old friend and boss, Stan Lee, begging for relief. Stan mediated and tensions were eased, but he also warned Colan that he was going to have to learn to get along with Shooter.

So, that’s the way we handled it, those six out of 32 pages got corrected, and maybe a third of each correction on each panel. He did it as just a token gesture, just to see if [Shooter] had been doing this to Gene all these two years just for the love of it. And I said, “Now, this is the important part, Gene ... when you’re ready to mail it back, give [Shooter] a call and very pleasantly – don’t be upset like you have acted all these two years – call him, act like, ‘Fine, okay, it’s on its way back, I’m putting it in the mail today!’ Be cheerful, pleasant, no problem, okay?” So he did. He put in a call to Jim to set him up to expect the job to be corrected. [Later] he gets a call from Jim. “That’s more like it!”

Adrienne Colan recounts the accumulation of incidents that ultimately led to Gene’s resignation from Marvel:

There was no specific [incident]; it had been something like two years of that kind of harassment, and I was just really concerned that this affected Gene’s health. I felt that my presence and the children’s presence in his life was, at this point, the only reason he was putting Unhappy Times: This Howard the Duck cover was drawn just himself through staying, and I about at the beginning of the end of Colan’s glory days at Marvel. felt guilty for that, sad, and Prior to Colan’s clash with obliged to kind of open that Shooter, writer Marv Wolfman had quit Marvel after his own run-in up for discussion. So I asked him one afternoon why he was staying with the new boss. Wolfman was now happily entrenched at DC, and putting himself through this. “Is it about the money, the house, making overtures to Gene to join him. Knowing that he had a new the kids, the whole suburban/married/kids kind of thing?” It’s job waiting in the wings, Colan in 1981 decided to take one last very rare when Gene stops what he’s drawing, to even turn stab at turning things around at Marvel. But both Shooter and Colan around in his chair. But he put his pencil down and turned around saw the end in sight. and said, “Yes.” I said, “I’m going to go into the next room, and I’m going to type out your resignation for you.” And it was a big moment, it was a really big moment. Jim Shooter on The End: Well, as soon as [Colan] had a safe landing place, then he got fierce with me. He pretty much told Before we mailed [the resignation], I had the thought to do one me, “No, I’m going to draw whatever I want, you’re going to last thing before we closed the door on this – to just give it all the pay for it, and that’s it…” I said, “Nooo, you have to draw what benefit of the doubt and to see if ... well, to just make sure it was the plot says and do a good job.” So he actually called the president not Gene’s imagination. He was working on some ... we remember of the company, Jim Galton, and told him what a monster I was. GENE COLAN

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Galton called me and said “Who’s Gene Colan?” I said “He’s an artist.” He said, “Is he good?” “He’s one of the all-time greats!” “Well, what’s he calling about, and if he’s so great then why are you giving him trouble?” I said, “Well, because he’s hacking. Yes, he’s an immense talent, but he’s hacking.” He said, “Well, make him stop.” “I’m working on that, Jim.” We got a new publisher at that point, Mike Hobson, who’d been there like 20 minutes. I went in and said “Here’s your typical crisis, Mike. It’s Gene Colan, one of the all-time greats, and I certainly don’t want to offend him or anything like that, but on the other hand he’s not doing his job, and he’s sort of rattling his saber.” Mike said, “So, I’m a great diplomat; let’s fix it. Let’s get him in here.” So, Gene came in, he sat with me and Mike, and Gene’s proposal to us was basically he would draw whatever he wanted, whatever way he wanted, and I would never tell him anything. Mike, who is actually a tremendous diplomat, said “That’s absurd. Sorry, you’ll have to leave now.” So Gene stormed off and went to DC and worked there, where he was reunited with Marv.

“Gene Colan Leaves Marvel – Signs ThreeYear Contract with DC Comics” That was the headline of the lead news story in The Comics Journal #63, spring 1981. “Gene Colan Leaves Marvel for DC” read the headline in the August 1981 issue of Comics Feature. Colan’s resignation was a public relations nightmare for Marvel. Coming on the heels of the recent departures of Jack Kirby, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein and Roy Thomas – the latter three of whom, like Colan, marched directly to Marvel’s bitter rival, DC – Colan’s exit became yet another piece of unpleasant baggage for Shooter to carry through the remainder of his tenure at Marvel. Fans were outraged to see one of their favorite Bullpenners seemingly shunned, while DC representatives basked in their own good fortune. Said Paul Levitz, then DC’s Manager of Business Affairs, “If Gene Colan is being positioned as having been rejected from Marvel Comics, we can only say we dearly hope Marvel will continue to reject all their talents of comparable stature. Then, soon we’ll have the Buscema brothers, and Tom Palmer, and Joe Sinnott, and John Byrne, and Frank Miller, and Walt Simonson working here.”

Gene Colan on The End: I called [publisher Mike Hobson] and said, “I’m leaving.” He says, “Before you do that, why don’t we have a meeting with Not long after Colan’s resignation, Shooter, and let’s talk this when details of the Shooter-Colan thing over and work it out.” conflict emerged, writer R.C. So I went into the city. I Harvey in The Comics Journal owed Marvel some money #68 (Nov. 1981) dedicated an on an advance payment, so Breaking News: Colan quits Marvel, from Comics entire column to dissecting the two I came over with a check creators’ storytelling approaches. Feature #11, 1981. prepared to pay them off Comparing two of Colan’s recent and leave, and the viceMarvel stories to a pair of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man president tried to talk me into staying at least another six months, issues penciled by Shooter (who was an advertising artist prior to and I said, “No.” Shooter was in the same room, and I said, joining Marvel in the mid-’70s), Harvey drew conclusions that “That man’s not gonna change. He is what he is. Whether it’s six came down decidedly in Colan’s favor. “Shooter can tell a story, no days, six months or six years, it’s not going to be any different, so question,” Harvey writes. “But his quiver of storytelling techniques I’m not going to put up with it for another minute. If you want to is not as full of telling shafts as Colan’s. And in laying out a story have me work here without being ruled by Mr. Shooter, and visually, Shooter does little to make the pictures dynamic or to being told what to do by Mr. Shooter, I’ll work here. I’ll continue. make the story any more dramatic than its events alone make it.” But for as long as he’s going to be breathing down my neck and telling me what to do all the time, and criticizing everything I do For Colan, meanwhile, his change of address led to a resurgence the way he does it, no.” And I left the building, walking by some of interest in his work. At DC, he would be handed the artistic keys of the artists and editors and other writers ... and everybody went to Batman and a re-launched Wonder Woman, and also given the like this [thumbs up]. chance to experiment with old friends Steve Gerber on the

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Superman mini-series The Phantom Zone, Marv Wolfman on the chiller Night Force, and Don McGregor on the thriller Nathaniel Dusk. Independently, he would draw McGregor’s Ragamuffins kids’ adventure serial for Eclipse magazine. A heady time indeed for an insecure artist coming out from under years of perceived abuse.

As far as Colan is concerned, the less said about Jim Shooter, the better. It’s a topic he hates to discuss, and his temper still can flare at just the mention of the man’s name. Looking back, Colan recalls a warning Stan Lee gave him after stepping in that one time to quell the Colan/Shooter conflict.

Roy Thomas, who preceded Colan’s move to DC after his own fiery clash with Shooter, is circumspect today about the events and attitude that led to Colan’s resignation. “When Jim Shooter took over, for better or worse he decided to rein things in – he wanted stories told the way he wanted them told,” Thomas says. “It’s not a matter of whether Jim Shooter was right or wrong; it’s a matter of a different approach. He was editor-in-chief and had a right to impose what he wanted to. I thought it was kind of dumb, but I don’t think Jim was dumb. I think the approach was wrong, and I don’t think it really helped anything.”

“He said ‘There’s going to be Jim Shooters everywhere in your life,’” Colan recalls. “But as far as I’m concerned, I’ve dealt with all the Jim Shooters I’m going to see!”

Decades later, neither of them working fulltime in comics anymore, Shooter and Colan still have entirely different perspectives on their rift. Shooter maintains that it was nothing personal, that he wasn’t trying to harass Colan, but rather he intended to show him a different path to success. Shooter: The whole affair was very sad. It just was a bad time for artists. Gene was between a rock and a hard place. Having been to his house once and seen some of the artwork he has framed on his walls, the guy’s not only a great comic book artist; he’s a great artist! You walk around his house and see sketches, drawings, paintings – it’s just an amazing talent this guy has. It’s a shame that somebody that good had to struggle to make a living in the comic book business at that time, but that’s a fact, and it led to all kinds of stuff. It led to him leaving Marvel and probably not liking me very much. It’s a shame. Things eventually got better, and you started to have comic book millionaires like Todd McFarlane. But at that time people were just grinding it out to get their Capping it Off: Another of Colan’s last Marvel jobs – a Captain America fill-in $50 a page or whatever it was.

from issue #256. GENE COLAN

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10 DC and the Ups & Downs of the Eighties

icture: A panel discussion at the Dallas Fantasy Fair, June 1982. Moderated (and occasionally egged on) by Gary Groth, founder and editor of The Comics Journal, comics creators John Byrne, Kerry Gammill and Jan Strnad discuss contemporary comics. Byrne, amidst his memorable run as writer/artist on the Fantastic Four, launches into a defense of controversial Marvel editor Jim Shooter – a defense that soon devolves into offensive comments about Gene Colan. “Shooter wouldn’t let Gene Colan do the kind of crap – banana feet and duck hands – that he’s been giving us for the last five years,” Byrne says. “Shooter wouldn’t let him do that, so he went over to DC where they said ‘Sure. Come and do garbage. We’ll pay you for it.’”

P It was big.

When Gene Colan quit Marvel in 1981, moving across town to set up shop at arch-rival DC, the news was huge. Fanzines buzzed with gossip about what had and had not been said between Colan and Marvel editor Jim Shooter. The comics news magazines tripped over one another to get to the latest information or photocopies from Colan’s first assignments. And he was given some plum assignments. Knowing they’d snagged a major talent – and had the makings of a major marketing campaign – DC executives immediately assigned Colan to draw the company’s two top characters: Batman and Superman. Colan’s DC debut was in Batman #340, Oct. 1981, a 25-page story written by Marvel ex-pats Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, and inked ably by Filipino artist Adrian Gonzales. Although Colan didn’t draw the cover, his name was promoted prominently upon it, and the first story page was devoted to a single illustration of Batman and an announcement from DC heralding Gene’s premiere. The story, about a prison escapeeturned-monster named the “Mole,” was a fun mystery with references aplenty to the EC horror comics of the 1950s. “It was a riff on the old Bill Elder/Harvey Kurtzman Mole character,” says co-writer Thomas, who’d recently moved to DC himself and was delighted by the reunion with Dr. Strange collaborator Colan. “It was neat to see Gene draw Batman.” Colan, too, was thrilled to finally illustrate the adventures of the hero he’d admired so many years earlier. “Oh, and how!” Colan says when asked if he enjoyed Batman. “It was exciting to draw Batman. I never had done it before, so this was my first opportunity.”

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Bat Splash: Penciled version of one of Colan’s first Batman stories, from Batman #345, 1982. DC: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF THE ’80s

Whereas TOD had at times read like a good novel, Night Force was designed from the outset to be one – to be a series of discrete horror novels, actually, within the context of an ongoing comics series. The one recurring character, Baron Winters, was an occult master (with an uncanny resemblance to actor Jonathan Frid, who portrayed TV’s “Barnabas Collins” in Dark Shadows) who led a Mission: Impossible cast of heroes into battle against the forces of evil. Debuting in August 1982, Night Force was a commercial risk, but an artistic triumph, unleashing Wolfman and Colan to create new magic in collaboration with inker Bob Smith. From afar, Colan’s colleagues and fans alike saw a new spark in his work – they felt he’d been re-energized by his move from Marvel to DC. “I think Gene was revitalized a bit by being somewhere where people respected him and weren’t trying to fit him into a predetermined mold,” says Thomas. “If you’re using Gene Colan, don’t try to make him into somebody else.” But Colan, ever sensitive to vibrations from people around him, felt something was amiss. Yes, he had high-profile assignments, and

DC Debuts: Colan made a big splash at DC with two of his first assignments: drawing Steve Gerber’s Superman mini-series, the Phantom Zone and Roy Thomas’ Wonder Woman re-launch. PZ cover inked by Dick Giordano; WW by Romeo Tanghal. On the heels of his Batman debut, Colan drew Superman in the four-issue Phantom Zone mini-series written by former Howard the Duck scribe Steve Gerber and inked by Tony DeZuniga, who’d also worked with Gene at Marvel. A tie-in to the film Superman II, which was in theaters in 1981, Phantom Zone pitted Superman against the most famous Kryptonian villains, and gave Colan the chance to draw a bevy of big-name DC characters, including Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and Supergirl. Upon Phantom Zone’s completion, Colan was the recipient of two high-profile assignments: Wonder Woman – One of DC’s best-known characters and worst-selling series, WW was designated for a big-time revival in late ’81. Under the auspices of Roy Thomas, Colan and inker Romeo Tanghal, the “sensational new” WW debuted in Feb. 1982. Night Force – A new & different horror comic conceived by Colan and former Tomb of Dracula writer Marv Wolfman. GENE COLAN

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yes he was receiving fan acclaim. But something still didn’t feel right. From the outset, he felt he was at DC less because DC wanted him, more because he was wanted by Marv Wolfman – co-creator of the New Teen Titans and at the time DC’s hottest writer – and DC wanted to keep Wolfman happy. That unsettled feeling never quite went away. Colan: At that time, I didn’t find the people at DC all that easy to get along with. It was not a friendly place. I felt threatened there, almost like a kid going to school and expecting to get a good tongue-lashing from the teacher. There was something about that place that bothered me.

Byrne: Shooter’s criterion is that you have to be able to understand it. If the closest you can get to that is readable crap, then functionally, that’s what you have to take. But you don’t take incomprehensible stuff that Gene Colan produces because it’s tricky. Groth: But by whose definition? Colan was on Tomb of Dracula for 70 issues and apparently it sold well enough to continue for those 70 issues. It wasn’t incomprehensible to the number of people required to buy the comic and sustain it. Colan’s been in the business for something like 25 years and apparently he has a good sales record. So it’s not incomprehensible to the people who buy his books. It’s incomprehensible to Shooter.

The Honeymoon is Over It got ugly. Within two years of leaving Marvel for DC, Colan’s honeymoon period wound to a close, and once again he began to hear criticism of his work. Although some of the sniping was unique to Colan – about his storytelling, his rendering, the challenge of inking his penciled pages – some of the backlash was endemic of comics’ eternal generation gap. In life, some species eat their young; in comics – as in television and movies – it’s the older generation that falls prey to the young turks. By the early 1980s, up-and-comers such as John Byrne, George Pérez and Frank Miller were the new superstars, while the Marvel Bullpen all-stars of the 1960s – Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and Dick Ayers – struggled to find work and/or respect. Within another decade, 1970s stalwarts such as Jim Mooney and Herb Trimpe would be forcefully 1st Bat: a page from Colan’s very first Batman story, issue “retired” from their jobs.

Byrne: No, it’s incomprehensible to me. If you take Gene Colan’s stuff and look at it over the 20 years and see how it has changed from clear concise drawings into “Dr Strange casts a spell,” and we get a panel of swirly stuff. We don’t get Dr. Strange, we don’t even get a hand. We get a panel of swirly stuff and that’s Dr. Strange casting a spell. We get what I said earlier about a dwarf in a Batman costume. I mean, can anybody believe that that’s Batman? This thing with legs growing out of its chest? And God knows what else he’s doing over there. And he’s getting away with it. The conversation turned into a discussion of whether Jim Shooter (in Strnad’s words) “… would recognize a good story if he tripped over one.” But Byrne, after taking shots at Roy Thomas and other former Marvel staffers who’d migrated to DC, returned to his criticism of Colan.

Byrne: Colan cheats. Colan just doesn’t bother to do it right. Because you can look at Jack #340, inks by Adrian Gonzales. Kirby’s stuff and you can say “nobody looks like that” but he This was the pup-eat-dog makes it work. He’s not cheating. He’s just drawing the way he environment 50-year-old Colan began to encounter at DC in the 1980s. draws. You look at Colan’s older stuff and there are bones, shoulders, arms connect on either side of the head and instead of at the hip. When Byrne’s over-the-top criticism was published in The And all of that stuff is right so you know that he knows it but he’s Comics Journal #75, Fall 1982, comics fans finally got a bitter, pubjust not doing it. Why is he not doing it? Has he had a stroke? lic taste of what was sometimes said privately, behind Colan’s back. Have too many brain cells burned up? He’s forgotten what a skeleton looks like? No, he’s just not doing it. He doesn’t do any Byrne: You look at Gene Colan’s stuff and 90 percent of the time underdrawing, did you know that? Colan draws the picture you can’t tell what’s going on in the picture. straight onto the page. There are no guidelines. Groth: So then Shooter’s criterion is basically readable crap. Groth: I’m not sure what you mean. 133

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DC’s veteran Superman artist, the late Curt Swan. Byrne: Look at Curt Swan who’s producing exactly the same caliber of work that he was producing 15 years ago. He hasn’t degenerated. John Romita hasn’t degenerated. Joe Kubert hasn’t degenerated. Groth: The problem with Swan is that he’s been boring for 20 years. Byrne: Define boring. It’s not big and flashy bullsh*t, it’s good solid dramatic storytelling. Groth: But Swan is symptomatic of what the industry requires. They adore Swan at DC because they give Swan a script and it says “Superman flies out the window” and they get the art and there’s Superman flying out the window. The script says “Clark Kent walking down the hall” and there’s Clark Kent walking down a hall. He’s just a technician who does exactly what’s required of him. There’s a distinction between that and what Colan does, but not an enormously great distinction. Byrne: The distinction is that they are both taking the shortest distance between two points. But one of them is doing it by simply doing the job, the clearest cleanest way possible, and the other is doing it by giving you bullsh*t. And if I was hiring and firing, I would hire a Curt Swan and fire a Gene Colan.

Night Force: Marv Wolfman and Colan reunited to create Night Force, a short-lived horror series at DC. Top: end page from issue #6, inks by Bob Smith. Bottom: penciled page from issue #3. Byrne: Y’know, here’s a circle, with a couple of lines on it to tell you where the eyes are. And he doesn’t do any of that. And you look at that stuff and you know he doesn’t do any of that. That’s why all his panels are a funny shape because he draws the picture and then he draws the panel border around it. And I as a fan am offended by it. Because I’m being cheated. I’m being asked to pay 60 cents for this. Gammill: I’m really awed by the fact that he can put a pencil down and draw like that. Byrne: I’d be awed if he were doing that and producing the quality of work he produced 15 years ago. But he’s not. Because you look at the Dracula stuff. And you look at how much Palmer has obviously had to say. And since Colan did the duck, he’s done nothing but duck hands. Have you looked at his people? They all have short stubby fingers and you have to count them to make sure there are four and a thumb. And everybody has banana feet. He’s a master of light and shade and that’s it. That’s all you get now.

In conclusion, Byrne and Groth debate the merits of Colan vs.

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Strong words, indeed. And they did not go unanswered. Although Colan himself refused to acknowledge Byrne’s criticism with a public response, friend and collaborator Marv Wolfman did fight back in a letter published in The Comics Journal #82. “Gene Colan is not only a gentleman, but he is a damn good artist,” Wolfman writes. “He has a power and compassion to his work that very few artists can match. He has a complete understanding of how body language affects characterization and how to compose each picture to give credence to each character portrayed.

“I shouldn’t have to defend Gene – his own work is defense enough. The fact is that when he took over both Batman and Wonder Woman sales increased only proves that the majority of readers agree. Added to that is the fact that Gene’s style is unique – it’s his alone. He is not some “super-adaptoid” who has to resurrect someone else’s art month after month.”

Wolfman’s letter engendered a lot of public and private support for Colan, which was good to see. What was sad to see was that Colan needed any kind of defense. Alas, the Byrne tempest was only a harbinger of tougher times ahead in the 1980s.

Ragamuffins & Nathaniel Dusk The gems of Colan’s mid-’80s work were a pair of projects written by Don McGregor, one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking men in comics. A Rhode Island native, McGregor grew up in the 1950s and came of age in the 1960s – a huge fan of Marvel Comics in general, Gene Colan in particular. Hired at Marvel as a proofreader in the early 1970s, McGregor soon got a crack at writing. Two of his first assignments were among his most memorable: the Black Panther in Jungle Action and Killraven in Amazing Adventures. It was on the latter title, issue #26, that McGregor got his first opportunity to work with Colan. It was a watershed moment in McGregor’s young career. Don McGregor: The thing about people like Gene Colan… you could ask him to draw anything, and he could draw it. Gene’s finished work is so beautifully rendered that before the storytelling even gets you, there’s the whole impact of the page and its tonal quality. I remember thinking early on at Marvel, when we’d see Gene’s penciled pages come through, “It’s a shame that we can’t print Gene’s pencils.” It’s not that the inking wasn’t fine – it was. But it would often lose the delicate touch and shading that Gene would put into his pencils. It wasn’t just a heavy black line, there was a real shading he put into his pencils. I remember thinking at the time, even back then, “If I ever get the chance to work with Gene” – and I didn’t even know how to do this – “it would be great to print directly from his pencils.”

The Baron: Moody splash to Night Force #9, featuring Barnabas Collins look-alike Baron Winters “Gene is a master of light and dark. His nine-year reign on Tomb of Dracula – eight of those years with me – was simply astounding. Where other artists simply took to hacking out their work, Gene kept improving, month after month after month. “On The Night Force his art continues to improve. Gene is trying things with design that he has never attempted before. His people have a realism and a sensitivity that virtually no other comic book artist can hope to approach.

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In the 1980s, McGregor got that chance – first with his Ragamuffins series of short stories at Eclipse Comics, and then with two Nathaniel Dusk mini-series at DC.

Ragamuffins is a series McGregor had considered as far back as 1969, when he wrote the first draft of his first Detectives Inc. adventure story. No superheroes, no supervillains, no supernatural menaces – Ragamuffins was a saga about kids growing up and encountering real-life heroes, villains and menaces. It wasn’t the most commercial concept for American comics in the 1980s, but it nevertheless caught the fancy of fan-turned-publisher Dean Mullaney, whose Eclipse imprint helped define the term “alternative comics.” Having already published McGregor’s futuristic adventurer Sabre and the DC: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF THE ’80s

aforementioned Detectives Inc., Mullaney gladly snapped up Ragamuffins and plugged it in as a serial strip in the Eclipse Magazine anthology, which debuted in 1981. McGregor was delighted to have sold the Ragamuffins concept. Only question was: Who could draw it?

DC, on the gritty 1930s private eye mini-series Nathaniel Dusk. Debuting in Feb. 1984, Dusk was an experimental comic at a time when DC was most willing to flout conventional comics. McGregor himself was actually surprised when DC bought the series.

McGregor: For me, Gene was the only artist at that time that I thought could draw it – who would understand what it was I was going after, and would have empathy for the project. In Ragamuffins, a lot of the story was small, subtle things. Gene was very, very good at small, subtle things – as well as the big things. A lot of the stage play – the body language, and especially the facial expressions – was going to be vitally important. There weren’t going to be any fight scenes. There weren’t even going to be any big horror scenes. This story was going to depend on real, small subtle things to carry the story across. And I just knew that Gene would relate thematically to what the material was about – to the little kids themselves. He’d understand them, their sense of wonder, fantasy, and the small, petty, cruel things they could do. I just knew Gene would get all that. Problem was: Colan was under contract – first at Marvel, then at DC. But Marvel in 1980 had given permitted Colan to draw the Steve Gerber-written Stewart the Rat graphic novel for Eclipse in 1980, and DC likewise released him to draw Ragamuffins. “That was the only series Gene could draw outside of DC at that time,” McGregor recalls. “They made an exception for that because there were no superheroes in it.”

Ragamuffins: Among the highlights of Colan’s 1980s work were the Ragamuffins stories by Don McGregor, published by Eclipse Comics. Compilation cover inked by Tom Palmer.

As soon as Ragamuffins and Colan’s participation were approved, McGregor started agitating to have Colan’s artwork reproduced straight from the pencils – without inking. “I gave Gene full scripts down to the smallest panel, and it’s probably the closest Gene’s ever followed a script,” McGregor says. The result? “Gene brought the characters to life – he brought everything to life. Without Gene, the story would have just laid there – it would have been dead. The relationships between the kids, the interactions with the adults, the settings – Gene understood all that.” And so did the readers when Ragamuffins debuted in Eclipse Magazine. After a few installments, the series was continued in the Eclipse Monthly comic book, and then all of the published stories were collected in a Ragamuffins one-shot from Eclipse in 1985. The experiment of reproducing Colan’s work from his pencils was deemed so successful that it then became virtually the default approach. And the very next time it happened was with McGregor, at GENE COLAN

McGregor: It was kind of a fluke thing. I was in Dick Giordano’s office, and I knew that Dick liked private eyes because he had done Sarge Steel [at Charlton Comics], so somewhere in the conversation it came up that I had this 1930s private eye series I wanted to do. Originally, when I was doing Dusk I came up with the name “Nathaniel Risk,” but I just didn’t like the sound of it. The soft “iel” at the end of Nathaniel just didn’t sound right going into Risk. And Dusk’s world really was dusky; it was a world always just on the edge of darkness. So, who else to draw the series but Colan? “I wanted Gene from the start, and I asked for him to do it,” McGregor says. “I knew he’d be perfect for it. He likes that genre, and it would involve period stuff that he’d be absolutely perfect for. And again it was very human material. All things that Gene is just terrific at drawing.”

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Colan gratefully accepted – for all the reasons McGregor detailed – and he genuinely enjoyed the experience, ultimately drawing two four-issue Dusk mini-series. The first, in 1984, didn’t do the best job reproducing Colan’s pencils, but the second story arc, in 1985, was state-of-the-art and remains some of Colan’s favorite artwork. There were challenges to drawing Ragamuffins and Nathaniel Dusk. Both series required copious reference material, and McGregor’s scripts – the polar opposite of Stan Lee’s “fill-in-theblanks” plots – were heavily detailed, requiring careful reading. “I gave him a very full script, but not broken down panel by panel,” McGregor says. “It was page by page – not that Gene stuck to that!”

Making up those gaps in the schedule, Colan devoted himself to a one-year run on the 12-issue limited series Jemm, Son of Saturn conceived and written by Greg Potter, and on the graphic novel adaptation of Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings. Colan did complete a substantial body of Batman work, both in the monthly Batman comic and later in a long run of stories in the companion title Detective Comics. Paired primarily with writer Doug Moench and inker Bob Smith, Colan drew Batman from 1981 to 1986, giving the character and his cast a consistent, dynamic, expressive look. But when editor Denny O’Neil swooped in to take over all of the Batman titles in 1986, he also swept out the creative teams and replaced them with his own writers and artists.

From Colan’s perspective, “Don was a great writer, but he overwrote. Sometimes so much that it was very hard to put the artwork in there. He should have been a novelist, and I told him that.”

But talk about going out in style. Colan’s last Batman story, in Detective #567, was a fun frolic written by famed writer Harlan Ellison.

But McGregor was such a thoughtful writer that he gave Colan some memorable scenes to depict. Colan: There was a scene at night in a mansion, where there was a conversation going on between Nathaniel Dusk and a couple of people in the place. Without showing them visually speaking in room, which had been done to death… I shot the scene from outside, showing the same building in each panel with dialogue balloons coming from it. Then it began to rain. Then there was a big lightning flash at the end, and the whole house lit up in that one panel. With the flash, out walks Dusk, and he leaves the scene. I thought that made for a very interesting page. Dusk Scene: One of Colan’s favorite scenes from

About the time Colan’s Batman stint ended, so did his contract with DC. Before the contract expired, Colan was invited to lunch by DC executive Dick Giordano. Thinking he was being wined and dined as a reward for good service, Colan was floored to learn that Giordano actually was delivering a friendly warning: Colan’s work was not proving to be as commercially viable as that of, say, Keith Giffen (of Legion of Superheroes and Ambush Bug fame). And unless sales of Colan-drawn comics started to improve… well, then DC might not be forthcoming with a contract renewal.

Nothing personal here – this was a sad business reality being delivered the second Nathaniel Dusk mini-series, 1985. on-the-level by straight-shooter It also made for an interesting Giordano (who a decade later found series – an artistic success if not a commercial hit. Alas, by the himself displaced by younger talent at DC). But Colan, then 60, was mid-to-late 1980s, DC was motivated more by commerce than art shaken by the news, and soon resolved that he would not be under – a mentality that spelled the end to Colan’s stint at the company. contract to any one comics publisher ever again. As soon as his DC contract expired, Colan went strictly freelance.

DC Divorce By the mid-’80s, Colan’s plum assignments started to disappear. Night Force ended after 14 issues – barely a year – with unfulfilled promises that, if sales warranted, it might return as a special project. Sales didn’t warrant. The Wonder Woman revival fizzled in proportion to the creators’ interest in the book. Roy Thomas stuck around for about half a year; Colan about a year beyond that. In retrospect, WW just wasn’t the project anyone thought it might be.

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The year 1987 started with a whimper of work at DC. Colan drew Silverblade, a 12-part adventure series written by Cary Bates, and he penciled the first six issues of Spectre, a ghost-cop revival written by Doug Moench. Then he just quietly slipped away from DC. But once freed, Colan hit the freelance marketplace with a bang. Starting with a part-time gig at Archie Comics, of all places – Gene Colan drawing teen comic star Archie! – and then continuing into a three-part Detectives Inc. mini-series with Don McGregor (the artwork once again reproduced straight from pencils), Colan started his seventh decade by exercising a right he’d clearly earned: He was calling his own shots. DC: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF THE ’80s

Gene Colan Portfolio

Double-page spread to Batman #344, 1982.

Secrets: Gene Colan Unplugged (or at least uninked) Unlike, say, colleague Jack Kirby, Gene Colan never saved photocopies of his penciled comic book pages before they were sent off to be lettered and inked by his publishers. So there are few surviving samples of his classic 1960s and ‘70s penciled work for collectors to ogle today. GENE COLAN

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Thanks to comics colorist Tom Ziuko, though, there are plenty of preserved copies of Colan’s penciled work from DC Comics in the 1980s. And what a key collection. It was a huge move in Colan’s career when he switched from Marvel to DC in 1981 – abandoning such characters as Daredevil, Captain America and the Hulk to tackle such classics as Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Likewise, it was a huge challenge for some inkers to take on the rendering of Colan’s nuanced pencils. Adrian Gonzales, Bob Smith and Romeo Tanghal are among the inkers who rose to that occasion and gave Colan’s pencils the sensitive treatment they needed. On the following pages, please enjoy a look at some of Colan’s penciled pages from the 1980s DC era.

Before & After: Splash to Night Force #3, as penciled by Colan and as inked by Bob Smith. 139

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New WW: Splash to Wonder Woman #290 – Colan’s third issue. GENE COLAN

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Unpublished Spectre: Penciled page from an unpublished Spectre story, circa 1989. 141

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Try-out: Colan’s unsuccessful audition to draw Swamp Thing. GENE COLAN

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11 The 18-Panel Page This chapter represents a perfect Gene Colan moment.

freckle-faced, girl-crazy teen from Riverdale High?

Just as Colan, throughout his career, would pace a story by happenstance – huge spreads and long scenes at the beginning and middle of a story, 18-panel pages (slight exaggeration) at the very end, when suddenly he discovered he’d run out of pages before he’d run out of story…

That’s exactly what happened in 1987, when Colan – again struggling to get regular assignments at DC – heeded wife Adrienne’s suggestion to give Archie a try. After all, one of his best friends, Rudy LaPick, worked there and spoke highly of the company. And with Howard the Duck Colan had already proven he could draw in a cartoony style.

… We’re approaching the end of this book, and yet still have so much to say about Colan’s life and career in the 1990s and beyond.

Starting with Archie’s Pals and Gals #186, March 1987, Colan embarked on a three-year-plus stint drawing – and even occasionally writing – the light-hearted adventures of Archie, Jughead, Hotdog, and the Riverdale gang.

So, in true Gene Colan style, let’s try to pack two decades into two pages (or so) and review some highlights of the past 20 years, including:

Return to Marvel Teaching Art With the departure of nemesis Jim Shooter from Marvel Comics in While still under contract at 1987, the door opened for Colan to DC Comics in the mid-’80s, Colan consider a return to the site of his found himself short of story greatest glories. And in 1989 he did assignments – but heavy with the just that, reuniting with writer Don usual financial obligations. So in McGregor and inker Tom Palmer an effort to generate new income – for a 25-part Black Panther serial in and give something back to the art Archie?: Colan indeed did a stint at Archie Comics, as the biweekly anthology comic and comics communities – he evidenced by this page from Jughead’s Time Police #4, 1990. Marvel Comics Presents. Beyond the started teaching part-time at New Panther, Colan freelanced all York’s School of Visual Arts and through the Marvel universe for the next several years, drawing a Fashion Institute of Technology. Never a fan of academic settings, Colan variety of comics including some Iron Man fill-ins, a pair of Wolverine didn’t feel entirely comfortable as a teacher, but he nevertheless devoted stories, a Wolverine/Nightcrawler serial in Marvel Comics Presents and a solid eight years to the endeavor. a Clive Barker-related horror series called The Harrowers. Among the highlights of Colan’s return to Marvel:

Drawing Archie Comics?

Can you imagine a more incongruous pairing than Gene Colan and Archie Comics? The man known for drawing shadowy stories about rotting corpses and hell-spawned demons drawing the simple adventures of a 143

Doctor Strange (third series) #19, July 1990 – a one-shot reunion on Doc with writer Roy Thomas. No Tom Palmer, though – Colan inked this one himself.

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Tomb of Dracula mini-series, 1991 – a four-issue Epic Comics revival written by Marv Wolfman and inked by Al Williamson. A highly-anticipated but largely disappointing reunion. Daredevil 1997 – a brief reunion with his signature character. Colan was thrilled at the chance to draw Daredevil again, but disappointed with the scripts he was given to illustrate. His first issue was DD #363, April ’97, but then was gone by #370 in December.

Heart Attack In 1989, while walking down the street in Manhattan, Colan suddenly suffered the warning signs of an impending heart attack – which hit when he was subsequently hospitalized for tests. His health improved after openheart surgery, but Colan then decided a change of lifestyle was necessary. He and Adrienne soon packed up and left the city, moving north to the quiet Vermont countryside.

Eye Problems Soon after the heart attack, Colan was beset with vision problems stemming from glaucoma, which originally had been diagnosed (and untreated) years earlier. After a series of operations to both eyes, he was left with a condition that has mostly remained stable since the mid-’90s: Virtually no vision in his left eye, which sees only shadows and movement, and only tunnel vision in his right eye – no peripheral sight. His ability to draw, thankfully, remains unaffected.

Freelancing Upon leaving DC Comics in the late 1980s, Colan found himself playing the field – and the 1990s offered a wildly diverse field. In addition to the work he did upon his return to Marvel, Colan also lent his pencils to such varied and fulfilling projects as: Bloodscent – a one-shot, 1988 horror comic published by defunct Comico. An adaptation of a vampire story by writer Dean Allen Schreck, the 27-page lead story is reproduced directly from Colan’s pencils, and is particularly notable because the lead character, a killer named George, is based visually on Colan’s son Erik. Predator: Hell & Hot Water – a three-issue 1997 Dark Horse Comics mini-series that gave Colan the chance to play around with a popular movie character – again in a story reproduced directly from his pencils. Curse of Dracula – a threeissue 1998 mini-series that reunited Marv Wolfman, Colan and the Lord of Vampires. Except this Dracula is notably different than the one Wolfman & Colan chronicled at Marvel in the 1970s. The character and tone are unique, as is Dracula’s appearance – which, incidentally, is based on the look of Colan’s Vermont landscaper.

On top of these notable projects, Colan has spent the bulk of the ’90s and 2000s working on a variety of special features. He, Wolfman and Tom Palmer reunited for a Tomb of Dracula send-up in (of all places) Disney Comics’ Goofy Adventures #17 in 1991. In 2001, Colan and The Benefit Palmer again reunited to draw a pair Amidst Colan’s initial round of of special stories: an eight-page, eye operations in the mid-90s, black-and-white Batman story for word of his plight spread to the DC’s Gotham Knights #15, and a sixcomics community. Everyone was page Daredevil/Spider-Man story sympathetic; one man took action. scripted by Stan Lee and plotted by Clifford Meth, a writer and longtime Strange Days II: Colan and Roy Thomas reunited for a Colan uber-fan Kevin Hall in comics fan, took it upon himself to single Dr. Strange story in issue #19 of the 1990s revival. Inks Daredevil vol. 2, #20. A year later, organize a two-pronged benefit for by Gene himself. Colan teamed up again with writer the Colans. An art auction solicited Don McGregor for a new comics contributions from the comics community, raising funds to help defray version of the pulp character The Spider. This graphic novel, again reprothe Colans’ medical expenses. And a Meth-written book, The Gene duced directly from Colan’s pencils, was published by Vanguard in 2002. Colan Treasury, produced by Aardwolf Publishing (a company cofounded by Meth), provided the first historical overview of Gene’s life Commissions and art. This book is now in its second printing, and Meth has gone on to enjoy a fruitful career as a writer and an active conscience in the One of the ways Colan has paid the bills and grown closer to his fans comics community. Since helping the Colans, he has subsequently since the mid-’90s is through commissioned illustrations. Starting out with spearheaded efforts to raise awareness and funds in aid of comics simple advertisements in the Comics Buyer’s Guide and evolving to today’s artists Dave Cockrum and William Messner-Loebs. genecolan.com, Colan has sold his services to his fans – creating

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customized, fully-rendered illustrations of whatever strikes their fancy. New, dramatic illos of classic characters such as Daredevil and Iron Man; faithful recreations of comics covers Colan drew in the 1960s; interpretations of characters he never got the chance to draw in comics – Colan has done them all in a decade-plus of commissioned illustration. His favorite piece was a pirate scene drawn as if straight from an Errol Flynn movie, drawn for Australian fan Michael Baulderstone in 2004. His most ambitious might be the aforementioned six-page Daredevil/Spider-Man story drawn for Kevin Hall in 2000. Hall, a Daredevil enthusiast who befriended the Colans and helped them launch their website in the late 1990s, plotted the DD/Spidey team-up for his own edification, commissioned Colan to draw it, then methodically persuaded Tom Palmer to ink it, Stan Lee to script it, and Marvel to publish it as a tribute to DD and Colan.

Painting Upon turning 75 in 2001, Colan’s interest in comics waned. He didn’t have the interest or energy for drawing an ongoing comics series anymore. And, really, his muse was taking him elsewhere – to painting. He’d always had an interest in painting – and in fact in the mid-1960s he initiated a huge canvas painting of two young boys sharing a snack on the front steps of a run-down Vermont farm house. But this painting, like Colan’s interest in fine arts, sat dormant for decades while he toiled in comics. Finally, starting in 2002, Colan picked up a brush and started a series of nature and western scenes – and he finally finished the Vermont painting, which now resides with daughter Nanci.

access to the man and his work as any North American fan who might meet him at a local convention. But beyond commerce, the Colans have found community. They’ve created an extended family. Today’s Yahoo Groups list started in September of 1999 as a modest chat group chartered mainly by fans who’d bought Colan’s artwork off eBay. Kevin Hall was the group leader, and the initial members he recruited included novelist Glen David Gold and fine artist Mark Staff-Brandl – two of the main contributors to this book, by no coincidence – and the Colans themselves. At first, list dialogue was an extended Q&A with Gene: “What were your favorite stories?” “Who were your favorite inkers?” Before long, as the community and its bond grew, so did the dialogue. Fans learned more about Gene and Adrienne Colan – their lives, loves and philosophies. And more importantly, the Colans got to know their fans beyond the bounds of comics. Graduations, weddings, births – these all became fodder for list dialogue, as the group membership swelled from a dozen to more than 250. The millennium, 2000 election, September 11 – these all became topics discussed as thoroughly and thoughtfully on the Colan list as in any other virtual community. The ultimate fan treat: in November 2001, Gene and Adrienne attended the wedding of charter member Steve Cohen.

The Internet It changed everything. Not only did the advent of the Internet alter the way the world communicates and does commerce, it changed Gene and Adrienne Colan’s Rare Spidey: Kevin Hall, a Daredevil enthusiast, lives. This is no exaggeration – if anycommissioned, plotted and helped get into print a thing, it’s an understatement.

The ultimate fan tribute: in the summer of 2001, Colan fans Kevin Hall, Dominic Milano and Marc Svensson worked with writer Mark Evanier to stage a 75th birthday party for Colan at the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego, and they also put together a documentary film including Evanier’s panel discussion and tributes from such creators as Stan Lee, Neal Adams and Harlan Ellison. On Sept. 1 that year – Gene’s real birthday – Hall spearheaded a weekend-long celebration in Worcester, MA., attended by the Colans, Don and Marsha McGregor, and dozens of the Colans’ fans, spouses and children from throughout North America.

In short, the Internet has bridged six-page DD/Spider-Man story that appeared in DD The Colans first ventured online #20, 2001. Script by Stan Lee, inks by Tom Palmer. the gulf between Colan and his fans. He is able to communicate and in 1998, when fan Kevin Hall concurrently launched their website (www.genecolan.com), started conduct business directly with them, and they are able to enjoy selling original Colan comic book artwork on eBay, and created unprecedented access to the man and his work. Today, Colan fan what has evolved into a Yahoo Groups list and webmaster Dave Gutierrez manages the Colans’ website and (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/genecolan/) dedicated to Gene’s eBay sales, while he and fan Joe Brusky oversee the dialogue on the Yahoo Groups list. Worldwide, scores of Gene Colan fans awaken life and work. daily to news and insights from one of their favorite comics creators. Since going online, the Colans have found new outlets for The Internet has become not only a virtual repository of the commerce – they continually sell original artwork via eBay, and new commissions come in weekly from all over the world. Colan fans accomplishments Gene Colan has made; it has become an ongoing from Singapore, Australia and Eastern Europe now have equal testament that he matters. 145

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Conversations Gene and Adrienne Colan

Throughout this book, we’ve looked for opportunities to spotlight some of Gene Colan’s most famous partnerships. When talking about Marvel, we spoke with Colan and Stan Lee. When discussing inking, we roped in Tom Palmer. For writing, it was Steve Gerber. It’s only natural, then, that as we transition into Colan’s semi-retirement and relocation to Florida in 2003, that we sit down for a discussion with him and his greatest partner – the person who’s been there with him every step of the way since 1963: his wife, Adrienne Colan. The following discussion with Gene & Adrienne Colan was conducted in April 2005.

On Teaching TF: When did you start teaching, and why? Gene: As soon as we moved to New York City, Adrienne strongly encouraged me to take advantage of the proximity to School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Teaching would be a way to share my knowledge with the younger generation of artists, and provide a basis for a stable income to offset the instability of my comic book career at that time. She drew up a proposal of what I’d teach and how I’d teach. It set up appointments with the presidents of these schools, and then I was immediately on-board. TF: Did you do this after you got off contract at DC? Adrienne: It was when we moved to New York in the early ’80s. He was at DC… but it was never a very secure feeling. In fact, Gene’s perceptions of some of the more successful titles he worked on, like Batman, is that – nothing was ever secure. It just didn’t feel that way. Of course, Night Force flopped – it was just a very insecure time. I had suggested to Gene that he teach at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) for two reasons: 1) He was getting on, and 2) for the foundation of financial security. Also, from an altruistic standpoint, to give back and pass on what he knew. I remember he contacted the school, made an appointment with the president, and he went GENE COLAN

Fantasy Commission: It’s a fun game: name one character Colan never got the chance to draw – but should have. The Demon was one fan’s answer. Commissioned drawing inked by Bob McLeod.

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down for an interview. What I did, because I had better skills at structure, I outlined a course for him, and we kind of rehearsed how he would present himself. Gene kind of decided, in order to overcome his shyness, he’d go in and pretend he was Burt Lancaster – to go in and put across the enthusiasm he felt for teaching. Gene: I’d seen him once do an interview, Burt Lancaster. And he was so convincing – of course, he’s an actor, and that’s his profession. But I pick up on these crazy things.

bloody thing, he could at least make their day with a treat! Who doesn’t love a teacher who shows up with bubblegum and lollipops? Gene: That’s a separate talent altogether, to be a good teacher. There were very joyful moments. I could only tell the classes my feelings on certain things. Some things you can teach, but most things are all up in the head and require patience. I had a couple of rough students I had to deal with. But that’s what teaching is: You have to take the good with the bad. For the most part, my students were good – conscientious and hard-working, and at the same time we had fun.

TF: Always comes back to movies with you, doesn’t it, Gene? Adrienne: The one good thing about Gene’s classes is that he decided from the outset not to try to mold anyone in his image, so to speak, but to do more-or-less a hands-on kind of a class. He would help each student enhance to the tune where they were drawing their view of what comic art should be.

Gene: It always does. TF: How long did you teach?

On the End at DC TF: Gene, when you left DC and went off contract in the mid-’80s, what was your mindset at that point? What did you want to do? Gene: I thought I might continue with comics, but I didn’t know where. Adrienne: He wanted two things. He was not happy with the projects he was being put on. And eventually DC stopped giving Gene work. He was on contract, but it was a freelancer’s contract – he had to do a certain amount of work, or he didn’t get paid. It wasn’t like a baseball player’s contract where they just pay you and don’t use you. DC had stopped using Gene. DC’s version of a contract at that time didn’t transfer to any obligation on their part to supply work so an artist could actually earn an income. It was very demeaning to Colans Today: Adrienne and Gene Colan at home in Florida, 2005. grovel around to editors, asking for work. He had to be Gene: Altogether, oh, maybe eight years total. Six in the city, and two available and accountable, but they didn’t have to give him work. more from Vermont. About six hours a week I taught comic book drawing, a little on anatomy – but not much. Storytelling, in general – I stressed that. Gene: After several months of no income other than school, I wanted to break the contract because they were not giving me work. When I TF: For someone who didn’t like school to begin with, what was it complained to Dick Giordano, he said ‘I’m telling you as a friend, you don’t like for you to teach? want to go against the lawyers. They’ll out-maneuver you – you wouldn’t stand a chance. I wouldn’t want to see you go through that kind of pain.’ Gene: I never felt I was a very good teacher because I wasn’t structured. I’d never taught before in my life, so I had no idea how to Adrienne: There was another incident in the last 6-to-8 months even begin to do it. I just jumped in and did it. Most of the students liked when Gene was no longer getting any work from DC. Gene what I had to offer, and others did not. One actually told me “You’re appealed to Dick’s assistant, Pat Bastienne… not structured!” And I wasn’t. Whatever came to my head, I would talk about for that given moment. One thing Adrienne and I felt strongly Gene: Pat told Adrienne and me that we were living on Central Park about was to not box the students in to my point of view. I was there to West, so why should DC care about supplying us with work? How enhance their individuality – I believe that’s the best approach. could it be that we were struggling? Whatever I said in response, it offended Pat. When Dick heard about it, he banned me from Adrienne: I outlined classes for him every week, so that he would coming into the office. He said “Leave your work out there by the have a course to present. I’d even find reference material from his secretary. I don’t want you in here. You’ve been banned from the files. But he struggled with his teaching, even if I outlined it all for him DC offices.” This stuff probably goes on with other people, but… on cards. Still, I always sent him off to class with bubblegum and lollipops for the students! [laughter] If he couldn’t teach them a Adrienne: He tried to audition for Swamp Thing with Karen Berger. There 147

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On Archie, Marvel and Independence

were things he wanted to do and felt he could really sink his teeth into – put a fresh look on. He really had a feel for Swamp Thing just as he had for Daredevil and Dracula. And you know that when he has a feel for something, he’s going to really shine. He worked up this monumental try-out piece, which Karen didn’t mind keeping – we never got the original artwork back – but he wasn’t even given the opportunity to try drawing the comic book. You ask what he wanted: He wanted to be employed, and he wanted assignments he felt worthy of his talent.

TF: So it wasn’t long after that you started doing work for Archie Comics. How did that come about? Gene: Adrienne suggested it. I said ‘What?’ She said “Haven’t you ever considered working for Archie?” Adrienne: I’d say to him from time to time, ‘Why’d you suffer so long in the 1950s, being unemployed so long and then working in this filmstrip company? Why didn’t you work for Archie?’ Rudy LaPick was over there, and he was Gene’s best friend – they had remained friends. Why not at least try to get work there?

Gene: We got a message one day from Dick and Pat that they wanted Adrienne and me to join them for lunch at the Top of the Sixes, which was the restaurant at the top of their building, 666 Fifth Avenue. I thought it was going to be something good – you don’t ask people out to lunch unless there’s a special reason for it. I never expected anything negative, but it turns out it was very negative. He was just warning me ahead of time ‘There isn’t going to be very much work for you because your stuff just isn’t selling.’ That was the first inkling I got about the industry changing. Marvel never would have blamed the artist if a book wasn’t selling.

Gene: I’d say ‘I don’t know. I guess I’m just not seen that way’ [in the Archie style]. Adrienne: It was not a matter of Gene not knowing he can cartoon – he can definitely cartoon. At that point, in the late ’80s, he was willing because we were really threatened financially. He called Archie, and thankfully the idea seemed novel enough to try.

Adrienne: He already wasn’t giving you much work, if any, but now he was saying there wouldn’t be a renewal of your contract if the sales didn’t pick up.

Gene: I enjoyed it very much. It wasn’t hard work; it was very easy. I held onto that work for a couple of years.

Gene: He mentioned an artist, Keith Giffen, whose work was selling very well. He says, “And I don’t have to watch him. With you, I have to watch you,” meaning the numbers – he had to watch the sales figures.

Gene: They ended it! They let me go. I caught them at a time when they were expanding. After two years, they started to scale back their operations. It’s a family-run business even to this day, and they felt insecure going into the direction the industry was headed in the 1990s. When they scaled back, they really didn’t need me, so I was out of work.

TF: So, why did it end?

Adrienne: He told Gene, “I’m in the business end of it; DD Redux: Colan had one last stint on Daredevil in the you’re just an artist – a very mid-1990s. Inks by Karl Kesel. Adrienne: But, y’know, it filled a naive man. You don’t know gap. When it was clear there the business.” I know from was no more work at DC, we had to think about independent Dick’s point of view he was doing this out of respect for Gene, companies like Archie, Eclipse, Comico. and he thought that he was handling it in a way that Gene deserved, to explain how the industry had changed. He told Gene: Somewhere along the line I stumbled upon Dark Horse. Gene, “The industry has changed. It’s not about your artwork; it’s about ‘Does it sell?’” He was trying to handle it in a way Adrienne: They came looking for you… that he felt was respectful to Gene. But it was very hurtful, and we really felt horrible. Gene: Well, whatever. I started to work for them, and they let me do anything I wanted to do – all reproduced from pencil. Gene: I felt lousy, like the bottom had dropped out. I didn’t know what we were going to do – had no idea. The handwriting was on Adrienne: They’ve been a highlight of Gene’s career, artistically speaking. the wall. At least I knew we had to make plans. GENE COLAN

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TF: Let me back you up a bit, Gene. I know you went back to work at Marvel after Shooter left. What was that like? Gene: I got work from Terry Kavanaugh [the Black Panther serial in Marvel Comics Presents], but he started to back away. Couldn’t reach him by phone, he didn’t want to be reached, and that became a hassle. Adrienne: Sometime in the mid-’90s, somebody called and offered him work on Daredevil, and he just jumped on it. He came into my room and said “I just got the call I’ve been waiting 25 years to hear.” I said ‘What?’ He said “They just asked me back on Daredevil.” I looked at him, and I couldn’t believe it. I mean, we’re so close, but he had never told me how much he missed that character. He said, “Yes, that’s always been my favorite character,” and he was thrilled… Gene: Until the scripts came in. TF: You can’t go home again? Gene: No. The scripts were all retro, and I couldn’t appreciate them. I kept calling the editor and asking ‘When are we going to see some Daredevil in action?’ I said the wrong thing. I said ‘I’ve got a script here, and the book is about Daredevil, and yet the character doesn’t appear until the last couple of pages. What kind of a deal is that?’

in trouble, and I didn’t want to face it, but I called Adrienne and told her what happened. She said “You can’t go any further. We’re going to have to go to a hospital and deal with this.” I did go to a doctor, but I was in the waiting room for over an hour, so I came home. Adrienne: We called our internist, and he led us to a cardiologist. At the cardiologist, Gene could not walk for one minute on the treadmill without the pain starting. The cardiologist brought us into the office, sat Gene down, said ‘Here are some pills – you’ll live forever.’ I said ‘Y’know, doctor… y’know how you always read these obituaries about people who were in such great health until they got up one day, started pulling on their socks, and then suddenly croaked? That’s not going to be Gene!’ I said ‘You’re telling us there’s a blockage, right?’ And he said yes. ‘But you’re saying you don’t know how many arteries are involved, right?’ He said yes. Then I said ‘Well, that’s it; we need to know.’ Oh, my God, he took back the prescription, and now suddenly he’s putting Gene in a wheelchair and telling us to get a cab and meet him at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Good thing, too, because he scheduled Gene to have an angiogram the next morning to see the size of the blockage. At 4 in the morning, Gene woke up to a heart attack. TF: Were you laid up for a period unable to work?

Adrienne: He carried on and carried on to the point where he asked off the book. But he didn’t care because I think he saw the situation as hopeless, where it was never going to get straightened out to his satisfaction. And maybe they weren’t so pleased with him. Maybe his look didn’t fit with where the new, young writers were going.

Gene: Yes, and I was wondering how in the hell I was going to get by – what it was going to cost. I was working for Marvel at the time. I knew I had royalty money coming to me eventually.

TF: Was it challenging to Wotta Woman: Penciled splash from Colan’s second work with some of the Wonder Woman issue, #289, 1982. newer writers? Gene: They were all nice young men. We’d chat on the phone about private life, etc., but the retro theme about Daredevil’s roots was boring to me, so I continued to complain.

On Health Crises TF: When did you first start to encounter health issues – like your heart attack? Gene: That was in 1989. We were living in Manhattan – had been for about nine years, at that point. I was walking toward Broadway, and I suddenly felt my jaw ache like it never had before. I knew I was 149

Adrienne: I called Ralph Macchio at Marvel – he was so kind. He helped arrange for Marvel to completely advance us money so that we had money to live off of, and the medical expenses were taken care of by health insurance.

TF: When did the vision problems start? Gene: It started in the 1970s, when I was in my 40s. I went to have my glasses checked, and that’s when they discovered my eye pressures were way out of whack, and I’d actually suffered some loss of vision. Adrienne: What happened was we were coming home from somewhere with the children one night, and the children and I saw a dog darting across the street. We screamed because it seemed like Gene wasn’t stopping – and he wasn’t, because Gene couldn’t see the A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H G E N E A N D A D R I E N N E

TF: How did he become aware of your plight?

dog. He ended up hitting it. We thought ‘How come we could see that, and you couldn’t?’

Gene: I don’t know. But he’s still doing that type of thing now. God bless him. He sure put some life in my veins.

Gene: I went to the doctor then, and they diagnosed me with glaucoma. TF: When did your vision problems start to endanger your career?

Adrienne: Oh, Gene dissolved in tears because A) the generosity, and not only that, but he heard from lots of people. Stan called. Roy called. Other colleagues…

Gene:Well, I was on eye drops, but I was not very diligent about taking them. I was kind of in denial. I don’t remember when it started affecting my vision.

Gene: They all did!

Adrienne: Right after his heart attack, when we moved to Vermont. He became insistent that we move out of the city. He’d actually taken a fall – he was not seeing well via his peripheral vision. He’d lost enough vision that it was a problem, but had not affected his ability to draw. It did affect his ability to see peripherally in large crowds, on the street – things like that. By the time we got to Vermont after his heart attack, first he ended up having back surgery because his back went out, and shortly after that… we went to a local doctor in Vermont, who sent us to a specialist in Boston. Before long, it was two surgeries in both the eyes. The surgeries retard the progress of the glaucoma, but you also lose a little bit of vision in the eyes. So, it’s a twoedged sword.

Adrienne: Cliff got a ball rolling, and we just had no idea. Gene dissolved in tears not only from Cliff’s call, but because of the message ‘Good news.’ It was Christmas, and y’know, Gene still believes… Gene: It was a fabulous outpouring of love and attention, and even to this day I can’t believe it. Stan and Joanie Lee even sent me a huge basket of giant cookies shaped like superheroes! TF: Now, you were genuinely concerned for your career at that point, weren’t you? Gene: I was concerned about my health because I was in a lot of pain from the eye operations. I couldn’t see well. Adrienne had to escort me through restaurants – I had a big bandage around my eyes. It was a tough moment. I forgot about the whole career part.

Gene: I remember Adrienne brought me to Boston for the first time. It was winter; there were ice and snow on the Adrienne: I just remember he was street. We didn’t know where in so much pain. We did talk about to stay, what we could afford in ‘What if he couldn’t draw?’ a hotel. We wound up in a flop house! And I had to stay put Gene: It never entered my mind because I was afraid I might that I would not be able to continfall on the ice. So Adrienne ue drawing. It was an unthinkable went out in the ice and snow – thing, and so therefore I didn’t I’ll never forget it – and then Come Hither: Commission drawing of the Black Widow consider that possibility. she came back in an hour or and Daredevil, inked by Bob McLeod. so, and she’d located a better Adrienne: I remember I did raise the question, and we did talk place – a tourist-class hotel called the John Jeffries House. I’ve about it. We discussed the idea that you might write or sculpt. always said if she were in the desert without water, she’d find an oasis somewhere. She’s always like that – very strong. Gene: When I got home, I did have an assignment from Dark Horse. It was Predator. I was drawing a particular person, a fisherAdrienne: It was there at that new place where, when we man, and it never looked quite right to me. The more I looked at returned from surgery, the fellows at the desk said ‘There’s a it, the worse it looked. It was all cockeyed. But I think I got over note for you from a Cliff Meth.’ We said ‘What? Who?’ All the that hurdle pretty darn quick. I compensated a lot. To this day, I’m note said was ‘Good news. Call me.’ It was Christmas… just working with the center vision of my right eye only. Gene: We called, and Cliff said there was going to be an auction, and he was going to produce a book to raise funds to cover my expenses. I just don’t remember all of the details, but I remember him telling us there was going to be some money. GENE COLAN

Adrienne: Through the years, somehow he continued through surgeries and treatments. Which isn’t unusual. I remember in the ’70s, he busted his right wrist and hand. He had a cast over his wrist and fingers, bent into a particular shape. He came home and never missed a beat! [laughing] 150

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all, the Internet has given us a family – a family of mutual support. That’s what I love, and so does Gene. That’s a beautiful gift we’ve brought to one another.

TF: So, how has the Internet changed yours lives and career? Gene: Well, without the Internet I’d probably be in the street with a pencil-holder. Without Kevin Hall and Adrienne, I might have faded out of comics and never have met the fans and colleagues that now are such a part of my life.

TF: Gene, what’s it mean to you to be so intimately in touch with your fans and colleagues? Gene: Well, the world. If it weren’t for the fans and their interest in my art, I wouldn’t be anywhere. I’m in absolute awe of the interest they’ve taken, and I have nothing but gratitude for all of it. I’ve never been busier because of the fans. The fans have turned everything around for me. I’m busier with commissions now than I ever was on my best day in comics. I still find it almost impossible to believe that there are people who are so interested in comics, and in what I’ve done. There are so many artists out there that are just as good – some even better. For me, it’s a ride that didn’t enter my mind would ever happen. I just got into the business as a way of entertaining. It’s hard to believe that so much spotlight has been put on me.

TF: When did you first become aware of the Internet?

Adrienne: In 1998, we were invited to a book signing at a store in Worcester, MA. We were living in Vermont., and it seemed like a nice thing to go. We came out, and it was supposed to be for an hour or so, but it turned into like a five- or six-hour marathon. We closed the place up, and it was a real feel-good experience. It wasn’t about money; it wasn’t a convention. We just tried to do it for the fans and the bookstore. When we first arrived, the fellow who’d invited us, Ken Carson, sat Adrienne: One thing Gene has not me down and was showing me said is that it’s been particularly gratisomething about the computer. I fying to discover with the Internet… was very frightened and intimidated really, neither of us knew how well his by it, but I sat myself down work was understood and appreciatbecause I was also curious about ed. More importantly, along with that, whether I could even grasp one you all grew up. He finds himself havconcept. I found myself grasping it ing friendships with men who now pretty quickly – it didn’t seem to be have families of their own, and most that much of a stretch. When we of them are accomplished men in went to leave, there was a fuse out their own careers and own right. This in the car. Kevin Hall, one of the has opened up a tremendous world fans, was there all day. He was to Gene. very interested, very vocal, very accommodating. He followed us Gene on Adrienne out to the parking lot, where we found this fuse blown. He helped TF: Gene, what has Adrienne us out. And Ken told us, ‘If you meant for you in your life? ever decide to do something with Gene: Real stability. A tower of the Internet, Adrienne, Kevin is strength. She won’t take guff from your man.’ Work really wasn’t anybody at all. I will hesitate to say steady – we were really seriously anything to anybody – she won’t. struggling. So I gave Kevin a call, Jungle Book: Shanna the She Devil back cover to One time early on when we were living bought an iMac… before long Marvel Comics Presents #13, 1989. in NJ, I parked the car and stepped Kevin created the website, and out of it one night, and a drunk started up with me. He was really giving then started Gene’s group, and it’s just been go, go, go. me a hard time, and I thought I was going to have to hit him. Adrienne TF: Now, I know you’ve been able to do commerce on the web had a sense of it, and it just so happened we had a baseball bat on the – selling Gene’s artwork on eBay, doing commissions, back seat. She got out of the car with the bat, came over to the guy and said ‘What’s going on here?’ She was ready to club him! etc. How else has it affected your lives? Adrienne: I didn’t raise the bat! It was an implied threat.

Adrienne: At minimum, it’s a four-part change in his life. A) He wound up with the ability to be directly connected to his fans, and all the joy that has brought. It’s brought support, and also an outlet for him to speak about his passions. It’s also given him the chance to be informed about stuff he didn’t even remember about his career or his work. B) There’s an income through commissions and sales. C) There’s a reconnecting with colleagues in the industry who have also gone on to be independent. It’s created a rebirth. D) Most of

Gene: It was implied, yes. But she wasn’t going to stand there and let anyone push me around. TF: And it’s been like that ever since? Gene: It’s been like that from the beginning! 151

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12 The Fan It’s day three of The National, the big, multimedia SF/comics convention held in New York City each November. For three days, Gene Colan has sat at a table along the celebrity row known as Artists’ Alley, receiving long lines of adoring fans. Some pay modest fees for quick sketches by Colan, some shell out significant dollars to buy his original art pages. Others pull out piles of old comic books and ask for signatures. Many of the older fans just want to meet the man they know only from the comic book credit boxes – “Gene the Dean” – and say something to the tune of “Thanks for all the years of entertainment.” During a break in the action, Colan stops to talk about one of his own childhood idols: movie actor Mark Lawrence. To quote Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia, Mark Lawrence was a “Darkhaired, swarthy, pockmarked actor, a venerable heavy in Hollywood films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, but subsequently a supporting player who has played skid-row derelicts, desert rats, and a variety of foreign-born characters.” “You would recognize him right away if you’re a movie buff,” Colan says. “He was never a lead performer; always in the background with very few lines to say. He played one part: always a gangster. And if ever there was somebody who should be in The Godfather, he was the one. High cheek bones, deep-set eyes… oh, my God!” As a young man, Colan was totally drawn to this character actor, and he looked for him in any film that required such a heavy. I Am the Law, This Gun for Hire – they were among the many films featuring Lawrence in Gene’s youth. And although he’s renowned most for his sinister roles, Lawrence actually played a wide range of characters, including a bewildered mountain boy in 1941’s The Shepherd of the Hills. Decades passed. Colan’s career wound up; Lawrence’s wound down. They both enjoyed incredible highs and suffered horrible lows – none any worse than when Lawrence fell victim to the infamous Hollywood black lists of the 1950s. GENE COLAN

Then, several years ago, while attending the annual San Diego comics expo, Colan met a video retailer. “He seemed to know a lot about film and actors, so just off-hand I mentioned Mark Lawrence, and he said ‘I know him!’ I couldn’t believe it! So I said, ‘Well, could you give me his address so I could write to him?’ And he did, but I didn’t write.” A few more years went by, and Colan again met this same video dealer in San Diego. “I asked him again about the actor, and he said ‘Yeah, he’s still around.’ But he had to have been well into his 90s. I said, ‘Would you happen to have his phone number?’ and he said ‘Oh, yeah!’ So he gave me his phone number.” Like the star-struck child who years ago combed the Hollywood hills in search of Gary Cooper’s home, Colan one day summoned the nerve to dial Mark Lawrence’s phone. “Some woman was taking care of him. She answered the phone. I asked, ‘Is Mr. Lawrence in?’ She said ‘Who is this?’ and I told her. ‘A fan – longstanding.’ She said ‘Just a minute.’” Colan affects a low, slow, old man’s voice as he recounts Lawrence’s half of the conversation. “Hello…?” Lawrence says weakly. “I’m a fan of yours from way back in the early 1940s,” Colan replies. “I never missed a film you were in. I admire you so much I can’t begin to tell you, and it’s such an honor just to be able to speak with you.” “Thank you,” Lawrence says, adding, “I’ve got macular degeneration [an eye condition causing blindness, primarily in the elderly].” “He tells me this right off the bat,” Colan says. “Just comes right out with it. I could tell he was upset, so I say ‘How long have you been suffering?’” “A year…” “Well, if it’s a year, how do you feel now – any worse, any better?” “The same ...,” Lawrence says. 152

“Well, it’s not any worse,” Colan says. “And doctors don’t know everything – it’s just an opinion. Who’s to say for sure that you’ve got it in the first place?” That reassurance does the trick. “It made him feel better,” Colan says. “That’s all I was looking to do. He thanked me for the call.” A week later, Colan calls again, just to see how Lawrence is doing. “This time he’s energetic, not half-asleep. He doesn’t sound as old as he did the first time. So we start talking. “What do you do for a living?” Lawrence asks. Colan tells him about his own career in comics. “Oh, he was fascinated,” Colan says. “His wife was a painter; his son is a painter. I never even knew he had a wife or a son!” At the end of the chat, Lawrence says, “Why don’t you send me some of your stuff? And if you’re going to be in San Diego, I’d love to meet you. Why don’t you come over?” Mid-anecdote, Colan is interrupted by another eager fan who just wants to shake his hand, get a signature and say “thanks.” Graciously, Colan devotes his full attention to the fan, entertaining his questions and signing his Daredevil comics. Minutes later, the fan walks away happy, and Colan returns to the Mark Lawrence story. “I haven’t spoken to him since those hurricanes in Florida [when the Colans lost phone service for weeks],” he says, “but I intend to call him again soon to see how he’s doing.” It’s pointed out to Colan that his affection for Mark Lawrence – an influential entertainer from his youth – isn’t so different from the emotion that overwhelms comics fans when they first encounter their idol, Gene Colan. Does he appreciate that feeling better now? “Oh!” he says sharply. “I sure do.”

hack-work. Comic fans, similarly, have viewed fine art as snobbish, deeming the often challenging works of experimental artists to be ruses or media hype. Even-handedly considered, both factions are Why Gene Matters mistaken – and yet, regrettably, at times spot on. For me, fine artists are those who create in the context of Comic Art, Fine Art, Colan Art galleries and museums, selling to collectors – and hopefully, at their When Tom Field asked me if I would enjoy contributing to this best, emphasizing a unity of content and form in experimental indibook by writing a piece putting Gene Colan’s artwork into a fine viduality. Likewise defined, comics means artists of the sequential arts perspective and telling why it matters in relationship to fine who create in the context of publishing and sell to a “mass” audience. (Or at least to a more “street-level” one. So-called “niche” art, I was both thrilled and daunted. audiences are replacing the mass public, as video games and the like replace comics as the most In the past I have sporadically popular mass-media entity, thus written on comics, but primarily I allowing comics a new life as a write reviews and theoretical articles more individual art form.) Comic about paintings, installations and artists are, at their best, creators so on. I’m a painter, installation merging reading and viewing into artist and art critic educated as a new, personal, visual, sequential an art historian. On the other art form. But, yes, too many fine hand, I had a piece published artists are technically incompetent, about Jack Kirby in The Jack faddish slaves of curatorial fashion Kirby Collector magazine, wherein trends, and too many comic artists I addressed a similar theme; are imaginatively incompetent, perhaps some ideas from it will faddish hacks acting as slaves to reappear below, as I believe that corporate “product” trends. Gene both artists have clear importance Colan is neither, by far. I contend to both comics and other art worlds. that he even offers a valuable model for avoiding either of these Why was I a bit apprehensive, forms of creative servitude. however, since it seems I am Some readers are now thinkideal for this discussion? – ing, “Oh no, Brandl’s one of Because Gene Colan’s artwork those Pop artists who raids was and is enormously and comics without respect for the directly important in my own genuine creators of the original artistic development, thus it material.” No, that pisses me off, worries me to write about this too. I am horrified that David personal hero. As a child learning Salle finds it unnecessary to pay to draw, I copied each and every tribute to the comic details he panel of every comic I could get “borrows” in paintings, while I drawn by Colan. Will I do him was delighted that Dave Muller justice? Will I get too lost in my knew and proclaimed the artists own admiration for his work? (John Buscema and Joe Sinnott) Will I talk too much about my cited in a work of his. I am not own art, as we egotistical interested in quotation, but in An Original: Mark Staff Brandl created this original painting painters are wont to do? Can I breaking down the barrier “Learning From Colan” especially for this book. limit the size of my ruminations between these fields, thereby to a publishable length? energizing, enlarging and honoring both. In fact, the original Pop The comic art world and the “fine” arts world have generally artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol began, perhaps been parallel yet distinct universes, each ignoring the other. unknowingly, to knock down the barrier between my two beloved Whatever crossovers have occurred were often derided and misun- worlds from the “fine art” side. Later, the work was carried on from derstood by one faction or the other. Unquestionably, they were not the other side by creators such as Gene Colan, Jack Kirby and as happily anticipated as the old Earth 1/Earth 2 crossovers in DC Steve Ditko. Realizing that they were indeed creating art equal to Comics’ Justice League of America. Nonetheless, both are significant any other, they began to demand recognition and more creative modes of creativity and are of equal value to many individual viewers, freedom. We all know the difficulties this brought them in circles including a number of fine artists such as me. Customarily, supporters still dominated by the “it’s just a job” syndrome. Yes, Pop art of “high” art have been disdainful of comic art, considering it a kind began as “slumming,” yet Lichtenstein clearly gained respect for of naive, accidental accomplishment at best, and at worst as corporate comic art as he developed away from an artist trying to shock the elitist art world into one using a new-found language to express

Afterword: Mark Staff Brandl

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philosophical considerations – and his children preferred his comic style over his earlier abstract work, too! Numerous fine artists and novelists today grew up with comics as their earliest art source, thus using them as reference without “camp” or cynicism, indeed with esteem. This is not always well understood by either of the two opposing camps.

Clearly, Brandl reveals and revels in his inspirational sources, especially those from his childhood that initially called him to be an artist. Apparent are allusions to the billboard sign painting and display-window decoration of his father, as well as references to superhero comics and their artists, including the renowned Daredevil delineator Gene Colan. His Panels and Covers paintings and installations are conceptual yet sensual, with the eloquence of fine art and the force of popular culture. Yet, for Brandl, this is not a fusion or cross-over, but a personal and disjunctive dialogue of mediation with allusiveness and impurity as his aesthetic guides and virtues. The Covers recognizably [refer to] comic book covers and pages. ... Nevertheless, Brandl does not simply appropriate an image, as did Pop artists. Rather, he engages this form as an inherited yet incomplete grammar, coaxing it to proclaim celebrations and complaints, desires and critical thoughts.” So, now I have begun to talk too much about my own art. The point is, let’s all forget “high” and “low.” Both ends should concentrate on being against mediocrity, cliché, and – most of all at the present – mannerist faddishness, the greater enemies of all art. Please join me in ignoring the division.

Inspiration: This Gene Colan/Tom Palmer page from Daredevil #95 inspired the author as a child, and today resides happily in his permanent art collection. My paintings and installations, for instance, feature images conceptually derived in processes reminiscent of John Cage or Marcel Duchamp. I have great respect for these two, for David Reed, Jackson Pollock, R.B. Kitaj – and Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, and Al Williamson. As has been written about my art (by Th. Emil Homerin): GENE COLAN

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Although long an admirer of Colan’s art, I personally met him, and Tom Field, through an internet discussion “list” group. Tom and I even initiated a tribute to Colan in the form of a round-robin comics “jam,” wherein a long list of participants wrote and drew a few pages of comic art using characters created by or important in Colan’s career. Through this group I learned that many creators have been influenced by Colan, yet have often gone off in seemingly vastly different directions from their comic base. To name a very few: Paolo Costa, into philosophy; Tom Field, writing; Glen Gold, novels; James Romberger, fine art and “alternative” comics; Gabriel Usadel, graphic design; Th. Emil Homerin, scholarship of religion; Mark Evanier, creative everything; and many others could also be listed here as well. This points to a very important effect of Colan’s approach. He was always greatly appreciated in comics, but not an artist whose style was much copied, even during his various peaks of popularity (of which he has had several). While he has had a large number of fans and “students” (without directly teaching classes), he seems to stimulate individuality rather than imitation. Like many important artists throughout the centuries, his work contains various (apparent) dichotomies and some clear strengths.

Colan’s style is highly unique and was so at a time when “house styles” were the rule. He was already at the onset of his career one of the few artists who editors such as Stan Lee let “be themselves.” He is self-driven, always experimenting, learning, improving. Even now, in his supposed “retirement,” with greatly impaired vision, he draws better than ever. Colan’s work has an immediate strength. To this day,

Crossover: This is a special 1999 commissioned piece, featuring Colan’s Daredevil side-by-side with Micro, a size-changing superhero created by Mark Staff Brandl as a child 30 years ago. I remember how my pre-teen chin dropped when I first saw a Colan Daredevil. While powerful, though, his art requires a sophisticated, imaginative, independent eye to truly see his achievement and depth. This is why he receives so many compliments, even from artists utterly unlike him in style. I will make no list of these professional admirers of Colan, as it would simply be name-dropping of most of the comic “industry” greats, past and present. While highly popular, there has always been a clear “fine art” aspect to his drawing. Costa, the Italian philosopher mentioned above, frequently likens him to Giovanni Tiepolo. I and others have mentioned Jacopo Tintoretto. Colan has always been renowned for his “looseness,” that is, his virtuosity with the pencil. Colan has a fluid directness of execution that may recall Diego Velazquez or Frans Hals as much as Syd Shores or Milton Caniff – and yet these are all only passing associations. In truth, Colan seems to have no direct precursors for his style. As James Romberger has insightfully pointed out, Colan’s work is an extraordinary integration of observational realism with haptic abstraction. To a large extent, line is content in Colan’s work. The artist’s line is subtle, flexible, painterly – making Painting with Pencil the perfect title for Tina and Matt Poslusny’s 1999 book on Colan. His line is his chief metaphor, stylistic achievement and even content. It is as important for its expression of energy, authority and suppleness as it is for serving as an outline

for whatever object it describes. The images themselves, such as the figures, the backgrounds, the objects, similarly bend, distort and swirl forcefully, while remaining true to observed elements of reality, especially the play of shadows across true-to-life human features – no typical comic shorthand for Colan. The artist creates harmonies of all the elements of comics (line, image, panel, page, sequence) based in whirling inventiveness. This is quasi-baroque in a hardhitting manner, more Caravaggio than Rubens. Furthermore, Colan carries this over pervasively and masterfully into every element, even panel shapes, variations on standard comic symbols such as speedlines, and sequential structure. We fans most often noticed this first in Colan’s commanding use of shadows, making Secrets in the Shadows a most apt title for this book. Colan’s individualistic fluidity helps explain the problems with inking his work –- acknowledged by all editors, readers and even inkers themselves. Tom Palmer and more recently Al Williamson have been the most successful. Palmer and Williamson each put a comparable, albeit personal and distinctive, swing into their brushes. This is correctly re-interpreting rather than covering or copying Colan; interpreting his painterly pencils in the sense of “performing” them, much as a great classical musician must interpret as well as follow a composer’s score, not just press it out. That is what Colan’s work calls for in an inker and in an appreciator or 155

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follower, perhaps more so than any other artist of his generation. His art calls out to us, the perceivers, to be ourselves, at least as close as we can in a society which discourages this. Many other creators in both comics and fine art seem to give rise to copyists, even when they do not (claim to) wish to do so. We, Colan’s disciples, are each more ourselves than we would have been without his influence. I don’t know much about Gene Colan in depth as a man outside his art, even though I have had quite a bit of correspondence and several phone conversations with him and his wife Adrienne. What I do know is that he has a wonderful wife who understands, appreciates and has always supported and driven him in his art, and a son Erik who is also a very promising artist creating works at the moment which construct wonderfully unique crosses between his father’s style, humorous cartooning and Jackson Pollack. In discussions, Colan (the man as well as the artist) frequently calls for individuality in us, a questioning of “house” rules and a quest for one’s own direction. This is why Colan matters. He stands for something of great consequence in art – and stands upright. In the “indy” comic world of today where creators see themselves as artists and novelists, not just purveyors of popular “product,” where even more individuality reigns than was allowed in the earlier days of corporate comics, Colan should be far more cherished for having anticipated this attitude. In the superhero and corporate comic world of today which still seems to hover too much around a handful of formulaic styles seemingly drawn by almost indistinguishable artists (hyper-steroid Imagestyle, dark and gritty gore, or Osamu Tezuka/manga copyists), Colan should be more of an influence. In a fine-art world collapsing into academic mannerism owing to tiny, curatorial fiefdoms, Colan should be a new source of the desire for individuality and power, despite the fact that this is actively suppressed. A call: All you appreciators of comics and/or fine art – bring attention to Colan’s art, look at Colan, study Colan and thereby follow your own guiding light (and shadow). A dichotomy again, but a truthful and fruitful one. Mark Staff Brandl is a painter, installation, and occasional comic artist from the US, living in Switzerland, who also writes about art frequently for Art in America in New York and The Art Book in London. He is currently working on a Ph.D. in Literary Theory at the Universität Zürich, owns some original Colan artwork and still learns from him. www.markstaffbrandl.com/ GENE COLAN

Calvin Reid on Gene Colan Just looking at the art of Gene Colan takes me back to a time when the work of artists like him, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko was at the core of the only “art world” that I really cared about. I was a teenager when I discovered these men, and I loved comics and Marvel comics in particular. And while Marvel’s stories and dialogue were also as inventive as the artists I just mentioned, it was their art work that transfixed me and all the rest of my comic bookaddicted buddies. We argued endlessly about who was the best, and we poured over every issue to pick out and focus on the different drawing styles and visual effects that we loved. These days I visit galleries and museums, examining new paintings, installations or performance pieces, and I attempt to provide an exacting and honest impression of the work, sometimes debating, sometimes praising the merits and deficiencies of new art. Back in the mid-1960s I went to the newsstand every week looking for new comics from the artists I loved, visually dissecting the newest issue with an intensity that easily matches my examination of a different kind of art today. Indeed if we were to look at the Mighty Marvel Bullpen of that time as a historical art world, we might characterize the trio of artists I mentioned earlier as visual stylists from a different but recognizable time. Perhaps Colan, with his romantic sweeping line, brooding atmosphere and sketchy gestural power, would be a latter-day Renoir. Like Renoir, Colan seems to combine elegance, mood and kinetic gesture in every picture. Indeed tracking Colan’s elegant style through his work on Daredevil, the Sub-Mariner, Dr. Strange and Captain America, right up to his most recent work on Michael Chabon’s The Escapist, we can see him nurturing a style of noirsaturated illustration that captures the eye with a quality of bleak psychological depth and holds that attention with bold vectors of action and inventive panel composition. Of course if Colan is a comic book Renoir, revealing the depth of passion in the middle classes, let’s call Kirby a new wave Fernand Leger, full of bold architectonic line and a fascination with freaky technology. And to complete the analogy, Ditko, disturbing and irresistible, brings to mind the allegorical idiosyncrasy and mannered physicality of Balthus – not to mention the awesome personal mystique. But this is just a clever way to draw attention to Colan’s gorgeous and inventive work. Yet in a very real way the comics art of Gene Colan and his colleagues was my first workshop in serious visual consumption. Studying the panels, figuration and lighting created by Colan during his long tenure on Daredevil probably forms the basis of my long fascination with complex visual rendering and the syntax of pictorial structure. Colan was one of the stepping stones to my own growth as a lover of pictures, someone who scrutinizes art and contemplates its relationships to other art. I couldn’t have had a better teacher. – Calvin Reid Art in America Publishers Weekly New York City 2005 156

Appendix: The Essential Gene Colan Typically, a book such as this one ends with a comprehensive index of an artist’s complete body of work. Usually the first time such a list has been compiled. But in Gene Colan’s case, his oeuvre has been profiled nicely and can be viewed in its entirety at Gene’s own website, www.genecolan.com. Thanks to Kuljit Mithra for making it so.

In place of an index, the lists you’re about to see are the result of refined thinking and polling among Gene’s most dedicated international fans. In 1999 and 2002, the members of the Gene Colan Yahoo Group [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/genecolan/] tackled two key questions: 1) What body of work comprises the essential Gene Colan? 2) If Marvel were to dedicate one of its “Visionaries” books to Colan, which stories should it include? Here are the answers to those questions:

THE ESSENTIAL GENE COLAN

FAVORITE SUPPORTING CHARACTER:

MARVEL VISIONARIES: GENE COLAN - WINNERS

FAVORITE SINGLE STORY:

#1: Foggy Nelson #2: Black Widow #3: Clea

1. Favorite SUB-MARINER story (or arc):

FAVORITE VILLAIN:

A. Tales to Astonish #101, Iron-Man & Sub-Mariner #1, it is one epic, two stories, 11 pages each – 22 pages

#1: Daredevil #47 #2: Dr. Strange (2nd series)# 9 & 10 #3: Doctor Strange #177 & 178

FAVORITE ONGOING SERIES: #1: Daredevil #2: Dr. Strange #3: Tomb of Dracula

FAVORITE LIMITED SERIES: #1: Nathaniel Dusk II #2: Detectives Inc. #3: “Panther’s Quest” from Marvel Comics Presents

FAVORITE GRAPHIC NOVEL: #1: Stewart the Rat #2: Ragamuffins #3: DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel #2: Nightwings

FAVORITE COVER: #1: Iron Man #1 #2: Dr. Strange #177 #3: Iron Man and SubMariner Special # 1

#1 (tie): Dr. Doom & Dormammu #3: Jester

6. TOMB OF DRACULA: A. TOD #1 (pencils & inks by Gene) - 25 pages B. TOD #48, 1st story (female vampire) - 12 pages

7. HOWARD THE DUCK: A. HTD #5 (Gene’s second) – 17 pages

2. IRON MAN: FAVORITE COLLABORATOR WRITER: #1: Marv Wolfman #2: Don McGregor #3: Stan Lee

FAVORITE COLLABORATOR INKER: #1: Tom Palmer #2: Syd Shores #3: Dan Adkins

A. TOS #s 95 & 96 (Grey Gargoyle) 12 pages each – 24 pages

8. MISC. HUMOR:

3. DAREDEVIL:

9. MISC. SUPERHERO:

A. DD #37 & 38 (Doc Doom) 40 pages B. DD Annual #1: How Stan & Gene Create Daredevil 3 pages (?)

A. Captain Marvel #4 (Cap vs. Subby) – 20 pages B. Amazing Adventures #3 (Black Widow) – 10 pages C. Astonishing Tales #8 (Doc Doom) – 10 pages D. Marvel Comics Presents #13 (Panther pt. 1) - 8 pages

4. DR. STRANGE: FAVORITE NON-COL AN CHARACTER THAT YOU’D LIKE TO SEE GENE DRAW: #1: Shadow #2: Phantom Stranger #3 (tie): Flash; Green Lantern; Spirit

FAVORITE MAIN CHARACTER:

FAVORITE COL AN TECHNIQUE:

#1: Daredevil #2: Dr. Strange #3: Dracula

#1: the non-traditional layouts #2: sense of shadow and light #3: dynamism

A. DS #182 (Juggernaut) 20 pages

5. CAPTAIN AMERICA: A. Cap #116: The five-page car case - 5 pages B. Cap #125 - 20 pages

A. Not Brand Echh #8, “Revengers” – 6 pages

10. COVERS: A. Captain Marvel #1 B. Iron Man #1 C. Dr. Strange # 177 D. Daredevil # 38 E. Iron Man & Sub-Mariner #1 F. Cap #117

ART 11. SPLASH PAGES: A. TOD try-out page

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APPENDIX

Weiss: How about a unique Colan/Alan Weiss collaboration – a take-off on the famous Star Wars movie poster? GENE COLAN

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APPENDIX

Rare Romita: Doctor Strange #7, 1975, represents one of the few times that John Romita ever inked a Gene Colan story. GENE COLAN

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APPENDIX

GENE COLAN

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APPENDIX

Secret #4: How Gene Draws Inside the Reinterpretation of Tomb of Dracula #1 By Dave Gutierrez The idea for the Tomb of Dracula # 1 Cover recreation was probably two or three years in the making. I tortured myself trying to come up with a worthy commission idea for Gene to tackle. It's a big commitment. So what would it be? Daredevil? Captain America? Iron Man? I could never decide. Suddenly one day I was looking at the TOD #1 comic thinking to myself “I wish Gene had done all the TOD covers, especially this one. It's #1 and it's not Gene.”

The Stages of a Colan Drawing: Ever wonder how Gene Colan constructs an illustration? Take a look at these images captured along the way as he drew his own interpretation of the Tomb of Dracula #1 cover – from rough beginnings to finished work. 161

H O W G E N E D R AW S

Gene is Tomb of Dracula. Something didn't seem right and.......bingo! On went the light, so I made the call, no hesitation, to Gene to get it rolling – his interpretation of the TOD #1 cover originally drawn by Neal Adams back in 1971. A month later, I was staring at the huge piece, knowing full well that I was going to ink it and mock up the title etc! As incredible as the piece was, and as ecstatic as I felt, my initial reaction was “Christ, look at all the leaves!” Not dreading the figures, trees or the castle and mist, but all those 1 million leaves Gene had been so kind to draw into the piece. His only remark -- and I swear I could hear him laughing over the phone -- was “Get to work!” Three days later and it was done, leaves and all, so I could put the brush away and stand back and enjoy the magic. I thought to myself “Ah, what could have been!” For me it's a part of history that I can hang on my wall and be proud and honored to be a small part of … All thanks to “Gentleman Gene” GENE COLAN

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H O W G E N E D R AW S

Vignettes

Of all the work Gene Colan has done in his 60-year professional career, he’s never drawn anything autobiographical. So for this special edition, I asked Gene to illustrate six key scenes from his youth. The results are on the pages before you. The words & pictures are purely Gene. The pleasure to behold them is purely ours. Enjoy! - Tom Field GENE COLAN

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The Chair – 1930 When I was five or so, my folks made a lot of European trips. They would sometimes leave me with my mother’s parents, who lived only a few blocks from where we lived. I remember they lived on the second floor, and they had a big carved chair in the corner by the window. This chair was made of a heavy, black wood – mahogany or oak, maybe – and there was a face carved

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into the backrest. When an automobile outside would pass, the headlights would reflect off the ceiling, off the walls and light up the chair. It was unusual and frightening – like some kind of satanic monster coming alive out of the chair. I’d put my clothes on it to hide the face, but sometimes my clothes themselves would look like they were alive.

VIGNETTES

Frankenstein – 1931 I remember my father took me to see the original Frankenstein movie. I was five years old; the theater was on a hilly street in the Bronx. When the monster came on the screen, I just couldn’t imagine a human being could look like that. I was frightened to death. I knew I was looking at a movie. My father didn’t think it would bother me. He just took me because he wanted to see the movie. I sat slumped in my seat, hiding behind my father’s arm, peeking out and saying “Tell me when he’s off the screen!” I was never the same after that. Never the same.

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The Body – 1934 I visited an uncle of mine in Stroudsburg, PA., every Easter. I’d spend the week there; play with his dog and with my cousin Franklin. He was slightly backwards – a lot like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. One night a friend of my uncle’s passed away. In those days, the body was always viewed in the home, which was just a block or so away from my uncle’s house. My uncle and aunt went over to view the body, but Franklin and I were left home and told to stay there. Franklin warned me against it, but I said ‘Come on, nobody’s

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going to know! Let’s go see the body!’ He didn’t want to do it. I talked him into it, and so we went. We came to the side of the house, near the window of the room where the body was on display. We got right up to the window, and the minute we saw the body – that did it! I couldn’t believe the stillness, the wax like quality of the body. It no longer looked like a person; it looked like a sculpted image. Not the real thing, but I knew damned well it was. After that, I was afraid to close my eyes and go to sleep.

VIGNETTES

Martin Eden -- 1942 When I was about 16, there was a film The Adventures of Martin Eden, starring Glenn Ford. In the story, he is at odds with another boy, and as children they are always fighting in the back alley. As the years go by, instead of their relationship getting better, it gets worse. Even in full manhood, they are still fighting in this little alleyway. Well, what the filmmakers did – they didn’t show the actors. The fight is narrated by Glenn Ford. You didn’t see him; you just hear his voice telling

GENE COLAN

it. All you see is a stone brick wall, with their silhouettes shown on the wall. As the years go by, they are still fighting in the same place, the same alley, but the shadows grow into larger, full-grown images. I was very impressed with how they put that across more effectively than if they’d shown the men actually fighting. I never forgot it. Never used it, though, in comics because if I did it wouldn’t be original. Just something I deeply appreciated.

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Steven Kidd – 1946 When I first went into the service and was shipped to the Philippines, I met a magazine illustrator named Steven Kidd. He was a great eye-opener to me. Everything I drew at that time was on small pieces of paper – the size of a published comic book – and he said to me ‘Why do

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you draw so small all the time? Think in bigger terms.’ He got me thinking bigger, on bigger sheets of paper. One time he asked me to draw a tree. I did it in 10 minutes, and he says to me ‘It took God 100 years to make a tree; you can’t sit down and make one in 10 minutes!’

VIGNETTES

Meeting Stan Lee – 1947 When I got out of art school, I was just determined to have someone in the comics business see my stuff and say “OK.” Timely Comics was in the Empire State Building – I got their address from comic book. Before going up there, I worked on a war story – inked it myself, and I even lettered it. Al Sulman was the art editor, and I just came in cold off the street with my samples, determined to get a position somewhere in the business. Al took my samples in to show the boss, Stan Lee. I waited 10 or 15 minutes,

GENE COLAN

and then finally Al came back and called me in. I walked into this office, and there was Stan Lee, playing cards and wearing this beanie cap with a propeller on it! Stan was boyish, very charming. He says to me, “So, you want to be in comics, eh? Sit down!” A big stiff wind was blowing through the window and would take that propeller on his cap and give it a twirl. He was certainly a departure from what I thought he’d be like. But I enjoyed him.

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Mary and Chester: In the mid-1950s, when comic book work was hard to come by, Gene Colan created his own humorous comic strip and tried – unsuccessfully – to syndicate it. Here are some previously-unpublished samples of the strip. 171

BLACK AND WHITE ARTWORK

DD Commission: Striking commissioned drawing of Daredevil done by Colan for collector Benny Gelillo. GENE COLAN

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Photo Reference: Colan is legendary for his filing cabinets full of photo reference, and for how he would snap Polaroid images of real people to incorporate into his comic book work. Here you can see, left, how Colan used his own son Erik as inspiration for the main character in the 1980s comic Blood Scent. Surrounding those images are photos of Colan himself in various poses for his comics – primarily 2002’s The Spider. 173

BLACK AND WHITE ARTWORK

Convention Sketches: An original Colan drawing is a collector’s dream, indeed. On this page, clockwise from top left, are sketches Gene drew for fans at convention/ store appearances: Nathaniel Dusk from the 1980s, Captain America from the late 1990s, and Dracula from the mid-1970s. GENE COLAN

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Duck Duet: In his latest of 'Dream Team' pairings, Glen Gold brought Howard the Duck artists Gene Colan and Frank Brunner together to render this illo of Howard vs. Dr. Bong. 175

BLACK AND WHITE ARTWORK

Colan on the King: Talk about a lost work – in the mid-1990s, when Marvel Comics was publishing a slew of comics about rock stars, Colan and John Severin were assigned to draw a graphic novel based on the life and career of Elvis Presley. The comic was never published, and Colan’s original artwork disappeared. All he has left are some photocopies of penciled pages such as the ones above. GENE COLAN

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Covers how Stan Lee went from writer to publisher, Jack Kirby left (and returned), Roy Thomas rose as editor, and a new wave of writers and artists came in! (224-page trade paperback) $27.95

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FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

Secrets in the Shadows Secrets in the Shadows: The Art & Life of Gene Colan is the ultimate retrospective on one of comics’ all-time unique artists. Featuring rare childhood drawings, photos, recently-discovered wartime illustrations, and original art and sketches from throughout his nearly 60-year career, this book offers new insight on the inspirations, challenges and successes that shaped Gene “the Dean” Colan.

Featured within this volume: Glory Days: A comprehensive, no-holds-barred overview of Gene’s glory days at Marvel, from his sizzling start in the Sixties to his dramatic departure in the Eighties, drawing DD, Iron Man, Sub-Mariner, Dr. Strange and many other memorable characters Writing for Gene: Marv Wolfman, Don McGregor and other favorite writers share plot/script samples and anecdotes of their Colan collaborations Inking Gene: Tom Palmer, Steve Leialoha and other noted artists show and tell how they approached the daunting task of inking Colan’s famously nuanced penciled pages Dream Duos: a new portfolio of privately-commissioned artwork featuring never-before-seen collaborations between Gene and such masters as John Byrne, Michael Kaluta and George Pérez

An introductory essay by Glen David Gold, best-selling author of Carter Beats the Devil Written by award-winning journalist Tom Field, who was given unprecedented access to the Colan family’s insights and archives, this book paints an intimate portrait of one of comics’ most inimitable talents.

ISBN 1-893905-45-4

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina ISBN 1-893905-45-4 $21.95 in the U.S.

Conversations: New, insightful interviews with Gene and four of his favorite collaborators: Stan Lee, Tom Palmer, Steve Gerber and Adrienne Colan