Comic Book Creator #16

$8.95

Dean Haspiel & Dan Parent Interviews

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Characters TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

in the USA

No. 16, Winter 2018

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A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

PLUS: BUCKLER • MARIE SEVERIN • JACK KIRBY ON THE BOB SITCOM Cover art byRICH Mark Schultz

W i n t e r 2 0 1 8 • Vo i c e o f t h e C o m i c s M e d i u m • N u m b e r 1 6

T RIVERDALE WOODY CBC mascot by J.D. KING ©2017 J.D. King.

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Ye Ed’s Rant: The Only Constant in Life is… change....................................................... 2 COMICS CHATTER

About Our Cover

In Remembrance: Rich Buckler Part one of Michael Aushenker’s career-spanning chat with the late artist on his early years as fan artist and young pro..................... 3

Art by DEAN HASPIEL & DAN PARENT Colors by GLENN WHITMORE

R.I.P. “Rick” Butler: Hugh Surratt recalls fellow Detroit comics fan turned pro.......... 12

Characters TM & © Archie Comic Pubs., Inc. X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Incoming: Discussing a so-called missing Blazing Combat story by Russ Heath.......... 14 Make Mine Marie—Spotlight on “Sev”: Your humble editor visits the great and awesome “Mirthful One,” Marie Severin, for a trip down memory lane................. 18 All About Bob and Jack: Paul Power shares memories of Jack Kirby’s guest appearance on Bob Newhart’s situation comedy back in the early 1990s............... 32 Hembeck’s Dateline: Our Man Fred on the meteoric rise and fall of MLJ’s Comet..... 38 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt on the Tales of Nathan Hale................................... 39 THE MAIN EVENTS

Above: Artists DAN PARENT and DEAN HASPIEL jam on our succulent #16 cover art, with Dan contributing the Riverdale gang and Dean sharing his take on MLJ superheroes of yore. Natch, this is a pastiche of Dave Cockrum’s classic X-Men #100 [Aug. ’76] cover.

Dean Haspiel is On the Hook. CBC chats with Dino about his diverse and curious career in the world of modern funnybooks, including his start as assistant to legendary artists Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson, and Bill Sienkiewicz, work in the alternative comics press, mainstream forays at Marvel and DC, work with star writer Mark Waid on Archie’s The Fox, collaborations with the late and lamented Harvey Pekar, and his fascinating pedigree!.............................. 40 Our Pal Dan Parent. The longtime Archie Comics stalwart artist, today the imprint’s “classic” style cartoonist, discusses his formative years at the Kubert School, early entry into Archie Comics, and his stream of successes with the Riverdale Gang, whether launching the first Veronica solo book, helming the Archie Love Showdown storyline, and creating the Archie universe’s first gay character, Kevin Keller. We also cover Dan’s ongoing creator-owned series Die Kitty Die!................................. 60 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: Kendall Whitehouse captures pros mugging for the camera........ 78

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR is a proud joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

Coming Attractions: The wondrous, weird, and wacky world of Wallace Wood........... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Ted McKeever’s “Man and Tapeworm”....... 80 Right: At top is a detail of Dean Haspiel’s cover illustration for the proposed The Fox: Fox Hunt collection and, below, a detail of Dan Parent’s Life with Kevin #1 cover art, featuring his creation Kevin Keller.

Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are now available as digital downloads from twomorrows.com!

Comic Book Creator ™ is published quarterly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Jon B. Cooke, editor. John Morrow, publisher. Comic Book Creator editorial offices: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $43 US, $66 International. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2018 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

This issue is dedicated to the memories of FLORENCE R. STEINBERG , SAM GLANZMAN, and LEN WEIN ™

JON B. COOKE Editor & Designer

JOHN MORROW Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER Associate Editor

DAN PARENT & DEAN HASPIEL Cover Artists

GLENN WHITMORE Cover Colorist

GEORGE KHOURY RICHARD J. ARNDT TOM ZIUKO Contributing Editors

STEVEN THOMPSON STEVEN TICE BRIAN K. MORRIS Transcribers

J.D. KING CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON CBC Illustrator

ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE CBC Convention Photographer

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK GEORGE KHOURY TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists To contact CBC, please email jonbcooke@aol.com or snail-mail CBC, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 2

Cha-cha-changes at Casa CBC and life’s inevitable flow of choice Weirdo stories and even Since 2010, it’s been a delight some new strips. to reconnect with one of my finI’m also proud to announce a new est collaborators, publisher John collaboration with my younger brothAnthony Morrow, and to again er, Andrew D. Cooke, with whom I join with the TwoMorrows team. teamed last decade on our biographTo keep CBC achieving the same ical feature-length film documentary, level of success I was blessed Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential to have with Comic Book Artist Artist. For the 20-teens, the Brothers magazine back in the late ’90s Cooke are intensely confabbing on a and ’00s, starting next issue, this project (in an unexpected medium) mag’s getting bigger and — that will be of interest to all who love I think — even better. Like our the history of comic books. More sister mag Alter Ego (which Roy info as we fine-tune the venture but Thomas relaunched in good ol’ suffice to enthuse how great it is to CBA back in the day), Comic be in cahoots again with ADC! Book Creator is increasing its Thankful as I am for this abunpage count from 80 to 100 (for dance ahead for me, all is tempered only a buck more), which gives with the sad recognition of those who Ye Ed more space to take the have recently departed this mortal in-depth “carpet-bombing” coil. The great writer-editor Len approach of the old CBA that Wein, who shared a day with me in everyone loved. This method is his Woodland Hills abode back in the terrifically labor-intensive, but early ’00s; premier cartoonist Sam J. I think it’s a better answer than Glanzman, a friend for whom I wrote increasing this mag’s frequency an extensive biographical essay for to gain more pages. Thus, I’ll be his U.S.S. Stevens collection; and the sticking to four times per year for lovely and wonderful Fabulous Flo now, so as not to sacrifice the Steinberg, a buddy to the end who quality you’ve always expected would always call a few times a year from both mags. to chat and share non-comics conCBC has a faithful (and Dan Parent (top) and Dean Haspiel versation — all have passed on. appreciated) readership, and I’ll

by Ronn Sutton I especially want to pay tribute to do my best to stay on schedule, Flo and, as she and the unforgettable Wallace Wood while continuing my involvement with other TwoMorshared a romance that was an open secret in the rows projects (such as collaborating on Roger Hill’s field back in the day, I will include an essay about my follow-up to his recent Reed Crandall: Illustrator of the beloved friend for our Woody tribute coming in the next Comics, which will be a biography on another Golden issue of CBC, the first in our new 100-page format.

Age giant). With the success of my latest project with Before I go, my thanks go to CBC #16 cover artists John, KIRBY100: Top Creators Celebrate Jack Kirby’s Dean Haspiel and Dan Parent for their participation in Greatest Work, you can be assured I’ll be striving to produce terrific tomes, as designer, writer, and/or editor this double-header issue, one with a rather tenuous for my buddy’s glorious imprint. (And, boy, are you gon- link to the hero and humor comics of Archie Comics. As usual, we’re maintaining focus on the artists na love what’s in store for TwoMorrows’ upcoming 25th themselves and less on corporate properties they anniversary in 2019! Stay tuned, true believer!) toil on, with the balance more weighted toward their Besides the new gig, yours truly is endeavoring creator-owned projects. Dino’s shared New Brooklyn to finish up The Book of Weirdo for my chums at Last Universe, featuring his Red Hook super-hero, and Gasp, an exhaustive comprehensive look at the great characters by Vito Delsante, Ricardo Venâncio, and humor comics magazine edited by R. Crumb, Peter Bagge, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. This project is many late CBC pal Seth Kushner, can be found at www. years in the making — ridiculously so! — but hopefully webtoons.com. Dan’s collaboration with fellow Archie worth the wait, as it includes the reminiscences of over stalwart Fernando Ruiz, Die Kitty Die, is available at 100 contributors and surprises galore, including reprints www.diekittydie.com. Buy early and buy often!

cbc contributors

Richard J. Arndt Michael Aushenker Gregory Biga Jerry Boyd Gary Brown Rich Buckler, Sr. Dewey Cassell

Andrew D. Cooke Michael T. Gilbert Stefano Giovannnini Kim Gottlieb-Walker Jason Harris Productions Dean Haspiel

Heritage Auction J.D. King Mister Kitty David Anthony Kraft David Merrill John Morrow Dan Parent

— Ye Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

Paul Power Fernando Ruiz Marie Severin Hugh Surratt Ronn Sutton Art Thibert Kendall Whitehouse

Glenn Whitmore Tom Ziuko

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Kelley Jones portrait ©2016 Ronn Sutton.

GREG PRESTON CBC Contributing Photographer

Life’s Only Constant

in remembrance

Buckler’s Beginnings Part one of a two-part interview with the late comic book artist Rich Buckler, Sr.

by MICHAEL AUSHENKER CBC Associate Editor

Deathlok TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Buckler portrait ©2017 the estate of Richard Buckler, Sr.

Rich Buckler, Sr., enjoyed a lengthy and storied career in comics before passing away on May 19, but the 1970s is when Buckler ruled the roost. Three words say it all: “Deathlok the Demolisher.”

Debuting in Astonishing Tales #25 [Aug. 1974], Buckler’s creation, which he penciled and co-wrote with Doug Moench, ran only 11 issues, but proved unusually dark and counter-culture for a Marvel comic book, made a deep impact not only on the comics industry with innovative panel-work and stark, bleak, and subliminally irreverent imagery inked by Klaus Janson, but also on the movie industry, with passages anticipating such science-fiction classics as John Carpenter’s Escape from New York [1981] and Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop [1987].

In 1973, Buckler also embarked on the first three issues of writer Don McGregor’s “Black Panther” feature in Jungle Action. Then, in 1974, Buckler landed his dream book, Marvel’s Fantastic Four, after a decade-long pursuit, and produced some of its most memorable post-Kirby issues.

Deathlok was not the only offbeat, hell-raising anti-hero the Detroit native forged during the Bronze Age. Buckler’s 1975 character Demon-Hunter for Atlas/Seaboard later inspired a more popular and longer-lasting counterpart at Marvel dubbed the Demon-Slayer.

The Motor City penciler, whose Marvel credits also include “The Living Mummy” and myriad spectacular covers, has given back to his industry in more ways than one, penning how-to books as well as mentoring young artists. Two of them, George Pérez and a 14-year-old Denys Cowan (who would eventually pencil a Deathlok comic title that outlasted Buckler’s more than three times over), have learned well under his tutelage.

Buckler’s talent as an artist is so strong, it has over-

come accusations of “swiping” which has shadowed the artist following a 1983 Comics Journal piece. The resilient penciler nevertheless went on to draw Justice League of America and All-Star Squadron as well as work for Archie (as editor of their Red Circle imprint) and Valiant.

Long based in Manhattan, in the 2000s, Buckler turned to painting, proving prolific with some trippy, downright cosmic canvases exhibiting all over the country. And yet, he did not abandon his fans, especially devotees of his greatest creation: Deathlok the Demolisher.

On a more specific and personal note, Buckler’s book How to Become a Comic Book Artist — along with How to Draw the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema and Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes — became the holy triumvirate a budding ye assoc. editor checked out the most often at the Fairfax Branch Library, on South Gardner Street, in Los Angeles, back in the late ’70s/early ’80s.

A few years back, yours truly caught

up with Rich “Swash” Buckler (as Lee would name him) for an email conversation. — M.A. CBC: How did coming from Detroit — also home to Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Mike COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Above: Self-portrait of Rich Buckler, who reinvented himself as a surrealistic painter in the ’00s. Far left: Buckler was, during an earlier stage of his career, a filmmaker. Left inset: Cover detail of the artist’s trademark creation, Deathlok the Demolisher, which debuted in 1974.

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Above: Rich Buckler’s first professional job was a fourpage historical adventure in the back of Flash Gordon #10 [Nov. 1967], starring the father of our country, George Washington. Inset right: The cover of that very same comic book, artist unknown. Below: Before becoming a full-time professional, Buckler was a prolific art contributor to comics fanzines in the 1960s, even publishing his own, Intrigue and Super-Hero.

This is an ad for the former, replete with a self portrait.

paintings in print.

So, anyway, back to my beginnings… That “Washington Attacks Trenton” story for King Features was drawn in Detroit and it got printed in Flash Gordon #10. There I was appearing in the same book as Alex Raymond! Was I thrilled about it? You bet I was! But it was no cause for celebration because after that illustrious debut, King Features had no more work for me.

My second break came shortly after. It was a six-page story for DC’s House of Secrets [#90, Mar. 1971]called “The Symbionts.”

That assignment was also drawn while I was still living in Detroit. The artwork was mailed in to the publisher, but there was no follow-up on that one either and I was beginning to see a pattern forming there.

Detroit was somewhat of a hotbed of activity for early organized comics fandom. I knew Jerry Bails, and through Jerry, I met Roy Thomas. I was close friends with Shel Dorf, one of the founders of the Detroit Triple Fan Fair and later the founder of San Diego Comic-Con. Shel lived about ten

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Flash Gordon TM & © King Features Syndicate.

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Vosburg, and Alan Weiss — prepare you for the comics industry, Rich?

Rich: Moving from Detroit to New York, that was a necessity back then, you know. There was no way around that.

These days we have e-mail, file transfer protocol, Federal Express, and UPS, so you can live just about anywhere and still work for the major companies. But, back in the late ’60s, early ’70s, you had to be there. If you were an artist and you weren’t living in New York and didn’t make yourself accessible at all times, well, not much could happen, no matter how good an artist you were.

While I was a teenager living in Detroit, my first few brave attempts at becoming a professional comics artist were done by mail. But to get those actual assignments, I had to be there each time in person.

I was 18 when I landed an assignment from King Features.

That was my first printed work in the comics [“George Washington,” Flash Gordon #10, Nov. 1967]. The penciling and inking for that story was done using the old “largesized” original art format. This was just around the time that the industry was changing to the 11” x 17” standard size for comic art. I still own those originals. I still have quite a few of my original sample art pages that were done in that size, too.

Here is how I got that gig: I was attending the New York comic book convention as a fan, but during my stay in Manhattan I also took advantage and spent a few days to make the rounds of the comics publishers looking for work.

It was during those early treks to New York City that I connected in-person with other would-be pros too. Comics fans who were artists that I only knew otherwise via mail and telephone; like Tim Battersby, a young and very talented “fan artist” who worked as an assistant for Wally Wood.

Tim was an early contributor to one of my fanzines that featured amateur comics. So we actually met for the first time in New York.

Tim arranged for us to visit with Wally Wood at his art studio. That was a real piece of luck! Yes, that Wally Wood. I was a bona-fide comic book geek back then, so this was earth-shaking stuff for me.

Those early comic fan days were seminal times for me as an artist. At that time Wally Wood was doing it all — writing, editing, drawing, and publishing, just like Jack Kirby did in the ’40s and ’50s. That was what I wanted to do! So it was really exciting.

Really important, too, because that was also one of the earliest opportunities I had back then to view actual original comic art.

Another time, along with Marv Wolfman and Len Wein, I had the good fortune to meet with Frank Frazetta at his home in Brooklyn. During that memorable visit, Frank showed us every one of his original paintings in his attic art studio! And, let me tell you, there’s a world of difference between viewing the originals and seeing the

All are © the respective copyright holders.

blocks from my house. Both Shel and Jerry were sort of early mentors.

I was close friends with a few comics fan that were my age — Arvell Jones, Desmond Jones, Keith Pollard, and Aubrey Bradford. We did hang out together. I would visit them, they would come to my place, and we’d take part in “home theatre” showings of 16mm versions of old movies and movie serials.

We organized a film group and did things in a roundtable fashion. Each member would chip in some money.

One showing would be at one member’s place, usually somebody’s living room or basement; the next month, at somebody else’s home.

We rented the films and showed them on a rented movie projector. So we got to see the old black and white serials, such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Spymaster, Captain Marvel, and Superman, as well as a lot of horror and fantasy/sci-fi classics like Metropolis.

I lived on the opposite side of town from Arvell and Keith and the guys, and it wasn’t always easy for us to get together.

I remember, at that time in Detroit, things were really racially polarized. Well, not just Detroit. It was like that all over at that time. So that did complicate things a bit.

Arvell was publishing his fanzine Fan Informer and I was publishing my fanzines, Intrigue and Super-Hero. I had taken over the publishing of Super-Hero from Mike Tuohy, who was going off to college.

So Arvell and the guys, we would trade comics and exchange ideas and discuss comics, movies, music, and art. And we would help each other out with the fanzine publishing. We were very active in comics fandom, too.

Nearly all of us, at different times, worked as board or staff members on the committees for Detroit Triple Fan Fair conventions. I was on the staff of the first Detroit convention, as a matter of fact, and then I was co-chairman after that with Robert Brosch.

Fans often mistakenly think that all the artists in comics that are from Detroit knew each other well. Mike Vosburg I didn’t meet until after I moved from Detroit. I also knew Al Milgrom and Greg Theakston, but I only met Jim Starlin once at one of the Detroit conventions.

I remember John Verpoorten at Marvel making a comment about my friends one time. This was after I had turned pro and was just starting to make a name for myself.

It wasn’t racist and he probably didn’t mean anything by it really, but I remember that it hit me kind of sideways. Arvell and Keith Pollard and a few of my artist friends from Detroit COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

were visiting Marvel to get work, and I was there to give them a recommendation.

After John finished his meeting with them, I remember he turned and said to me: “Rich, you got any friends from Detroit who aren’t black?” And I replied: “Hey, John, you got any friends who are not white?”

CBC: Backing up a moment, can you elaborate regarding that first break at DC? Rich: DC Comics occupied an entire floor of a large office building. They were officially known back then as National Periodicals and they were actually owned by Kinney National, which, believe it or not, was a conglomerate that owned and managed a network of parking lots!

Luck was crucial and an artist had to be in the right place at the right time and right there in New York was where it was all happening business-wise.

Well, there I was. And you would think it would be more than enough to be smart and qualified and have a plan. But sometimes it still takes that extra something or someone to counter the ennui and shake people out of their complacency.

My portfolio was always in top shape. I made sure I had professionally prepared examples of my penciling, inking — even lettering. But sometimes even being that well-prepared is not quite enough.

So the deciding factor turned out to be somebody who was shaking things up a lot and making way for the new — Neal Adams.

Neal was the catalyst… no, let me correct that. Neal actually made it happen!

He started out in comics a few years before I did. He is eight years older than me, so we’re not quite a generation apart, which is generally understood to be at least 25 years.

Anyhow, like me, Neal had started out in his teens.

This page: Rich Buckler, a tremendously ambitious artist even in his teenage years, was an avid participant in the burgeoning field of comic book fanzines during the 1960s, contributing not only covers and illustrations to amateur publishers across the nation, but comics story after story starring a myriad of super-powered creations.

From top left is his contribution to Golden-Age #4 [1969]; Pinup of the Butterfly, the first black super-heroine, intended for a Skywald publication [1971]; and Comic Fandom Monthly #7 [1972]. Below is Buckler’s cover art for Comic Crusader #7 [1968].

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Top: At left is Rich Buckler with Neal Adams in the late 1960s. At right is Buckler (in white shirt) with fellow comics aficionados, including Marty Greim and Allen Milgrom. Inset right: Buckler (left) with comics historian Dr. Jerry Bails, likely in the late ’60s. Below: Shel Dorf (pictured), longtime Buckler friend, ran the Detroit Triple Fan Fair in the latter ’60s before co-founding what would become the largest gathering of comics fans in the world, the San Diego Comic-Con. Included below are the Motor City gathering’s 1965 poster and Jim Steranko’s cover art for the 1970 program book.

That’s how Klaus Janson got his first work at Marvel. He wasn’t even officially hired. I vouched for him, the way Neal had vouched for me. That’s still fresh in my memory, how that happened: One day at Marvel, I snatched up my Black Panther pencil pages in a decisive moment. I was assigned to ink my own pencils.

But this was a chance to give Klaus his big break. As I was walking away from the production office at Marvel, I yelled over my shoulder to John Verpoorten: “Hey, John, I’m taking my pages and Klaus is inking them.”

“No, he’s not!” said John. “Yes, he is!” I yelled back, stubbornly. And, well, you know the rest.

CBC: So at DC… Rich: So at DC, that was how I got my first big break. This was late ’69/early ’70. After I finished it, that art job was filed away in DC’s inventory, so, with no real deadline, the artwork languished at Neal’s home studio for some time.

It didn’t get printed until about a year or so later. I actually finished a portion of the inking at Neal’s home. And this work occurred before virtually anybody at Marvel had even heard of me.

I remember really knocking myself out on those pages while I was in Detroit, and I penciled really tight, because Neal Adams was going to ink it. I was working in a rundown portion of an enclosed back porch of the house where I lived on Darcy Street. That was my fanzine publisher headquarters and it was my first art studio.

My drawing table then was the same one that I had designed when I was 12 years old and which my grandfather, who was a carpenter, had built for me.

So, after I mailed my work in to DC Comics, there was an agonizing long wait and I learned, much to my dismay, that they had no plans to give me more work. I was dumbfounded. Another setback.

Very frustrating, but I was not discouraged! I’ve lost count of the number of times back then that I heard “no” until I finally — finally! — got a “yes.”

So weeks went by and nobody at DC called me back.

I was patient and I continued to work my regular job in the daytime — which consisted mostly of deliveries and pick-ups by car from clients for a small advertising studio.

At night, I would spend hours and hours drawing up new #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Program cover art TM & © James Steranko.

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So, when I first met Neal at a Detroit convention, I was surprised at how young he was. And, of course, I was a wideeyed kid then and I was in complete awe. Neal was one of my heroes, like Jack Kirby — and he still is.

So I had met Neal once before, and he knew how serious I was. At that time, he was working on “Deadman,” and he would draw, from time to time, at his own work alcove in DC’s offices. So I met up with him there during one of my early visits to New York. This was, I think, my second time in New York. I showed Neal my latest work and then Neal showed those sample pages to Dick Giordano.

At first, I was turned down flat. I didn’t take that news very well. I must have really looked like a sorry case, and I think both of them felt really bad about that.

So I was told to wait: “Don’t leave yet.” Neal and Dick talked a bit off to the side, working out a new strategy. Then they disappeared for a few minutes, and after some cajoling and arm-twisting, they were back again. This time with the editor who was about to hire me.

Editor Murray Boltinoff was this short, middle-aged man with a seriously furrowed brow and serious mustache, and he was all business. I didn’t know him, but I knew his name from the comics. Hard to believe he was once a cartoonist.

Anyway, he didn’t look happy when Neal introduced me to him, and if he was trying to hide what he really thought, he was doing a very poor job of it.

So Murray gave me a script, and really, he never had a chance because Neal and Dick were indomitable!

And that’s what it takes sometimes: Somebody who believes in you and steps up and gets involved to help make things happen.

That’s how it was for all of us “second generation” artists in those conservative times.

advertising studio, and I was off and running! Honestly, I had no idea what I was in for. Did I know what a huge risk I was taking? Not really. I wasn’t even looking at things realistically.

So, let’s take a look at that prospect: what was driving me to do this? What did I know about life, really, at that age? Well, I’ll tell you: not a whole lot. I just knew that I wanted what I wanted.

And what I wanted wasn’t in Detroit.

So, with no back-up plan — and failure was certainly not an option! — I just knew that this was it.

This was what I was meant to be.

CBC: What kind of an environment had you come from?

Rich: I was born in Detroit, but I was raised in upstate Michigan, in a small lakeside resort town, Prudenville, near Houghton Lake. Lots of trees, a few paved roads, no streetlights. So, before I lived in Detroit, I was a country boy, really. Real dull stuff and not too many memories there.

After my father died, when I was around ten years old, my mom moved the family — which was myself, my brother and my sister — to my grandparent’s place in the suburbs of Detroit, near Livonia and Farmington. I lived there throughout my teen years.

Now, this was the suburbs, mind you. This was not the

Inset left: Perhaps Rich Buckler’s last published work was his text appreciation for Jack Kirby in Kirby100, a centennial tribute book honoring the King of Comics published last year in time for Jack Kirby’s 100th birthday.

Buckler drew this tribute to his idol in 1994.

Below: Rich Buckler’s first published work at DC Comics was featured in House of Secrets #90 [Mar. 1971], “The Symbionts,” which sported stellar inks by the great Neal Adams.

The Thing TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. House of Secrets and “The Symbiant” TM & © DC Comics.

sample story pages or redrawing the ones I already did. Well, finally I just couldn’t leave things dangling like that, so I decided to call up Dick Giordano in New York.

This was me, mind you, a young kid living in Detroit who was far removed from the actual business of comics publishing. I was nobody special to them. My only connection so far with other pros, up to that time, had been mostly at comics conventions. So, when we talked over the telephone this time, I got right to the point. I said, “Dick, let me ask you something: if I moved to New York permanently, would that make a difference?”

There was a long pause and then after a few seconds he said: “I can’t make any guarantees.” Then he said, choosing his words carefully: “I’m not speaking on behalf of DC Comics when I tell you this but, yes, that would increase your chances greatly.”

For me, that was more than enough!

CBC: So you bought a one-way plane ticket and make the big move.

Rich: At that time I was still contributing my amateur work to fanzines and publishing Intrigue and Super-Hero.

I cleared away all my fan obligations and put that behind me. I quit my lame job as an apprentice/messenger at the

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

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Street YMCA. That was some experience, let me tell you! It was like a rundown residential hotel, only a lot cheaper and more dilapidated, if you can picture that.

The cost was 50 bucks a week. No telephone or running water. Communal toilet. No cooking was allowed. Really bare-bones. What you got for your money was a tiny room about the size of a closet. There was a rickety cot to sleep on, one chair and one window — that was it. Sounds real cozy, right?

That particular YMCA was a real zoo. For me, it was unreal, like something out of movie. The place had a really bad reputation too, which I only heard about later, and it seemed to me that it deserved it. I met every kind of character you could imagine. So, it was really unpleasant all around.

But I knew my stay there was only temporary, so I put up with the inconveniences and the insanity around me and I got through it. All I really needed was a place to sleep and to be able to do my drawing.

I only had a few changes of clothes and one pair of shoes. Same as back home, really. It was winter time then and I had one coat. Good thing I brought that. There was no getting sick, either. I couldn’t afford to!

So I had to manage my money carefully. Rent was the biggest expense. After that, food. In order to stretch my dollars I ate a lot of graham crackers for breakfast and grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.

By the way, other new comics guys I had heard about had it even rougher. I heard that Barry Smith slept on park benches, and Steve Englehart, on his way to stay with me at my first apartment in the Bronx, got mugged crossing Central Park.

CBC: Wow. Rich: What kept me going was knowing deep down that somehow somebody had to have work for me!

I’m self-taught as an artist. Never had any academic training. Not even a single drawing lesson. I just learned by doing. I learned to draw from books. By artists like Andrew Loomis and George Bridgeman. My first drawing book — and I lived out of that one! — was Loomis’ Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth.

It was only years later I would learn that most of my favorite artists taught themselves to draw — Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko. For comics storytelling, I had to figure that

Above: Pencil page by Rich Buckler for Warren Publishing’s Eerie #48 [June 1973], the second installment of the short-lived “Werewolf”saga, “On a Stalking Moonlit Night,” written by fellow Detroit comics fan Allen Milgrom.

8

TM & © The New Comic Company.

Inset right: “Forbidden Journey” splash page, from Creepy #36 [Nov. 1970], produced by Motor City’s own Greg Theakston and Rich Buckler. The latter co-wrote the story as well as contributed pencils and inks.

big city. It was on the outskirts of Detroit, really. Downtown was not exactly a hop, skip and a jump from there.

So that meant no tall office buildings, no high-rise apartment buildings or elevators, and certainly no rapid transit.

There were buses, of course, but in Detroit you drove a car to just about everywhere you had to go. I did anyway. So nothing in my life experience prepared me for the sturm und drang of life in the big city.

Just to give you an idea, I remember that I immediately noticed when I first visited New York — before I permanently moved there — how incredibly noisy it was. And the air smelled awful! I wondered, “How could people stand it?” But you get used to it.

Those first impressions of New York City were vivid and profound. I found New York to be this incredibly densely populated labyrinth of concrete — with skyscrapers, traffic jams, crowded streets, crowded buses — just a whole lot of everything! Honestly, it was all nearly overwhelming at first.

The pace was nothing like it was back home. Everything in Manhattan was bustling at a maddening pace, 24 hours a day, non-stop.

CBC: What did you do upon arriving to New York City?

Rich: For the first eight weeks or so I roomed at the 34th #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

out myself. There were no schools for cartooning back then that taught how to draw comic books.

So, to actually learn real drawing, when I was 14 years old, I went to the local library in Detroit to get books to study from. The librarian always sent me to the kids’ section. Well, there was never anything helpful there.

I wasn’t interested in drawing Fred Flintstone or Mickey Mouse or Popeye. I didn’t want to draw funny animals.

What thrilled me were the monsters and heroes from those now classic Ray Harryhausen movies, like Jason and the Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

I did have one advantage. It was something big that nobody else I know of ever got! And that was an endorsement from Jack Kirby! To me that was worth a million bucks at least! Hey, not that I was otherwise lacking in self-esteem or self-confidence. I had plenty of that.

CBC: How did Jack Kirby endorse you?

Rich: Jack Kirby had just made the big move over to DC and he was cranking up production on his Fourth World creations. This was for a brief period when he did some auditioning for inkers. Even finding out about something like this was a big deal. You had to hear it through the grapevine.

I was still living in Detroit then and I had by this time developed my inking chops. And I was good — not great.

But I was determined to learn every aspect of creating the comics, so I practiced working in ink, too.

I did my own studies of different ink styles and I inked other pencil artists on tracing paper or vellum. So I did lots of practicing, experimenting — all kinds of “mad scientist” stuff.

The lucky break came when my friend Shel Dorf, who would act as a go-between, told me about Jack Kirby looking for inkers. I jumped at that chance. I inked some photocopies of Kirby’s Marvel work, which Shel had supplied to me. Then through Shel, I mailed my art samples to Jack at his new California address.

After Jack got my package in the mail and he had looked things over, he rang me up. I was at the drawing board on my back porch when I heard my mom call out loud to me: “Rick!” (That was my name back home: Rick, not Rich.)

“You’ve got a phone call. Somebody named Jack Kirby.”

TM & © The New Comic Company.

I dropped everything I was doing and scrambled to the phone. I was dumbfounded and nearly tongue-tied. I could barely come to grips with the fact that I was about to talk to the King! Well, he talked. Mostly I listened.

He told me he had to pass on hiring me as an inker.

“Sorry, kid, your inking is okay, but not quite what I’m looking for.” Really direct. So, wow — big letdown, right?

But the story didn’t end there. He told me he was impressed with my pencil pages that I had included with the inking.

Now what I had sent him were photocopies of my work in different pencil styles, some like Al Williamson, some like Burne Hogarth and Jim Steranko. Strong storytelling stuff, most in the Marvel style. Even some pencil work emulating Frank Frazetta.

So when he told me that about my penciling, I took a very deep breath. I could hardly believe what I was hearing!

It was like the master was telling the student that he is finally ready! What he said next — well, those words still ring in my ears clearly like he just said it yesterday. He said, “Rich, if you’re ever in New York, go see Stan Lee — and tell him I said to give you a job!” Those were his exact words. And Jack Kirby never minced words.

CBC: Is that what happened when you got to Manhattan?

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Above: Penciler Rich Buckler teamed with the great and stellar inker Wallace Wood (the subject of the next issue of Comic Book Creator) for “Snow,” a horror tale published in Creepy #75 [Nov. 1975].

Inset left: Splash page for writer Allen Milgrom and artist Rich Buckler’s “Werewolf” feature in Eerie #48 [June 1973], published

by Jim Warren.

9

Above: One of Rich Buckler’s favorite assignments was All-New Collectors’ Edition #C-58 [Apr. 1978], Superman vs. Shazam!, depicting the epic slugfest between the Man of Steel and the Big Red Cheese.

Below: Comics creator Rich Buckler was rather audacious in his retooling of his Atlas Comics creation, Demon Hunter, to become Devil Slayer over at the House of Ideas less than two years later, and, four years after that, morphing the character to become Bloodwing for an Astral Comics one-shot. From left, the covers for Demon Hunter #1 [Sept. 1975], Galaxia Magazine #1 [June 1981], Marvel Spotlight #33 [Apr. 1977].

meeting Jim Warren for the first time. Now, I had heard of course all kinds of stories about how tough Jim Warren was on artists and how high his standards were.

Hey, this is the publisher who bought and published all those amazing Frazetta paintings. And he published artists for Creepy and Eerie, like Neal Adams, and Al Williamson, and John Severin, and Wally Wood! So that was a bit foreboding, and I had no idea what to expect.

Alan Weiss and I went on that appointment together, and this was when Warren had an office on 42nd Street near Grand Central Station. A few weeks earlier I had called Alan, and he was living in Las Vegas then. I had just gotten to Manhattan, and it was only a few days later and I was already employed. And I told him on the telephone: “Alan, I’m in New York, and guess what? I’m getting freelance work from just about everybody!”

I knew Alan from fanzines and correspondence by mail. As an artist, he was far more skilled and advanced than me. Anyway, I was really excited and I told him: “You’ve got to come to New York! The time is right. Because if they hired me, I am sure as hell that they will have work for you!”

So we were sitting in the waiting room of Warren’s office that day and I was called in first. I was this tall scrawny-looking, baby-faced guy in his twenties with long hair. I looked like an unemployed singer for a rock band.

So there was Jim Warren, a short well-groomed, business-looking guy who just exuded confidence and control. He motioned for me to sit down. Then he told me: “So, you’re an artist looking for work. I used to be an artist, you know.”

I showed him my portfolio — and he

#16 • Winter

2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye © Sonny Liew.

10

Rich: While I was still staying at the YMCA, I did ring up Stan Lee, like Jack told me to do. I just called up Marvel and asked to speak to Stan. I didn’t get Stan, but I got his secretary and she made an appointment for me for that very afternoon. So that’s how it went with nearly every one of my appointments. I just made calls and met people face-to-face.

I started out each day with a roll of dimes from the bank.

I needed those because I had to use the pay phones on the street to make all my business calls. (No cell phones back then, folks!) And I was not shy about it. So I pounded the pavement and knocked on doors. Every publisher’s door!

And I actually got work everywhere I went. Even Warren Publishing!

I remember getting that appointment at Warren and

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye © Sonny Liew. Stranger Things © Netflix Studios, LLC.

loved my work. So we talked a bit for a few minutes and then I came out shortly after that with a script in hand and it was Alan’s turn, and I said to Alan, “Good luck!”

Alan came out only a few minutes later looking grim and disappointed. I asked him, “So, how did it go?” Alan said, “He tore my stuff apart. Hated it.”

CBC: Oh, no!

Rich: I was utterly amazed at that outcome because I knew that Alan could draw ten times better than me!

A similar thing happened to me when I went to King Features. They turned me down. They also had an office on 42nd Street.

Anyway, the editors there remembered my work from the Flash Gordon assignment, but they weren’t interested because, according to them, my stuff looked too much like super-heroes. Even the illustrative work I showed them was not realistic enough for them.

It’s ironic that just a few years later, by way of personal recommendations from letterer Ben Oda, I would be hired by the Barry brothers — first to “ghost” pencil Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon newspaper strip, and after that, Sy Barry’s The Phantom. Ironic, I’m saying, because both of those strips were handled by King Features!

And those chops that I had developed on those Al Williamson-inspired sample pages, that came in handy later. It was a good thing I had studied and learned from Al Williamson’s work, and from Wally Wood and Reed Crandall, and all of the EC Comics artists I admired.

Just prior to the ghost work I did on The Phantom and Flash Gordon strips, I got hired by Al to pencil and ink a week of dailies on the newspaper strip Secret Agent Corrigan! which also, by the way, was for… King Features Syndicate.

CBC: So, let’s get back to where you left off with meeting Stan Lee. Rich: That appointment with Stan at Marvel could not have gone better than it did. Stan actually gave me a job right on the spot! No scripts or assignments were available, so he just made something up!

CBC: How did that happen?

Rich: At that time, Marvel’s office was in a modest building on Madison Avenue. Marvel wasn’t the huge corporation it is now, and back then DC Comics were the big guys and they were number one.

So picture this fairly modest set-up that was basically two rooms plus an alcove of drawing tables for visiting artists, then a tiny reception area at the front with a row of hard wood chairs. That was Marvel Comics.

Stan’s office was enclosed and it had a window with a view, but it was otherwise sparse and modestly furnished. Not at all what I had expected.

He greeted me with a smile and a firm handshake and it was like we had already met and knew each other. That didn’t put me at ease. It actually made me more nervous.

The actual meeting lasted all of about 15 minutes. Stan made up a character and story, which I remember being a version of Man-Wolf — and this went later into Marvel’s inventory. Unlike that short story I did for DC, this one never did see print. I don’t know why, and I never found out what happened to those art pages.

I remember Stan talked smooth and fast as he outlined the whole thing for me as I sat there mesmerized. Nothing was written down. I didn’t even take notes! And then Stan said, “You got that?”

“Yep, got it.”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

And I went back my room at the YMCA and I drew it! But you know what? In the excitement of the moment during that meeting with Stan I actually forgot all about my “ace up my sleeve” — Jack Kirby’s endorsement. I completely forgot to even mention it!

CBC: That’s hysterical!

Rich: I’ll tell you another funny story related to this: In 2011, when I was a special guest artist at the Detroit Fan Fair convention I had the opportunity to tell that anecdote to Stan in person. The part about Kirby recommending me.

We were at a convention party and there were people all around, a crowd that was a mixture of fans and guests, and they were all listening closely and most of them hanging on Stan’s every word. I approached him cautiously. At first, Stan’s bodyguards wouldn’t even let me near him. So Stan and I began to talk. I told him that story and how Jack said, “And tell Stan Lee I said to give you a job!”

Stan just looked at me with his Hollywood grin, doing his best to pretend that his memory was as sharp as the sharpest razor, and he said, “Well, I would never do something just because Jack told me to do it! But I remember giving you that assignment. And it was probably because I am such a wonderful guy!” That’s Stan for you.

Above: Rich Buckler pin-up of his most recognized creation, Deathlok the Demolisher.

Inset left: The character debuted in Astonishing Tales #25 [Aug.1974]. Art by Rich Buckler and Klaus Janson.

Below: Ye Ed’s pic of the artist at New York Comic Con, 2009.

TO BE CONTINUED 11

remembrance

Talented. Driven.

Hugh Surratt recalls his fellow fanzine artist and pal, Richard “Rick” Buckler

by HUGH SURRATT

Above: Courtesy of Gary Brown, Hugh Surratt’s pencils and Richard “Rick” Buckler’s inks on their Comic Comments #16 cover art from the late ’60s.

Below: Ye Ed’s pal Hugh Surratt at New York Comic Con, 2009.

12

I can’t really remember exactly how Rick Buckler and I actually met, but I suspect it stemmed from mail correspondence in 1966 or 67. We both lived in the Detroit area during high school and, eventually, I made my way down to his house for a visit.

By the way, I knew him as “Rick,” not “Rich.”

That’s what his family called him back then. As I recall, his family was small — it consisted of his mom, a brother and maybe a sister (who I never met). There was no father and I never asked where he was. They lived a pretty tough life and didn’t have a lot of money.

But they had a modest little house in a rather lower middle class neighborhood closer to the city on the West Side. At that time, Rick’s mom made a living by doing ironing for neighbors and her two sons had various part time jobs while they attended high school. Actually, I’m really not sure if the brothers made it all the way through high school. For sure, neither went to college.

Like most of us comics kids back then, Rick’s bedroom was filled with stacks of comics and comics-related stuff. But what was different was that he had a drawing board and many, many pages of his own artwork. He actually inspired me to get my own drawing table! When we first met, he had just taken over the fanzine, Super-Hero, from fellow Detroiter Mike Tuohey, so there were always lots of ditto pages in various stages of completion for an upcoming issue. He also was in the process of creating a new fanzine called Intrigue, which (unlike Super-Hero) he envisioned as an outlet for fan fiction — strictly comics with no editorial or articles.

I was a fledgling amateur artist — certainly nowhere near the level of Rick. But as we got to know each other a little better, Rick invited me to contribute artwork. At first I did a few spot illos and some logos. Eventually, I even “inked” one or two of his stories which appeared in Super-Hero and Intrigue. I put quotes on “inked” because the artwork was done on ditto masters and most of the images were finished with ballpoint pens.

Much to my pleasure, turnabout was fair play, because Rick even inked one of my drawings that was used as a cover for Gray Brown’s Comic Comments fanzine.

I think the two words I would use to describe Rick back then are talented and driven.

I was amazed at his pencils on those ditto pages. The guy could really draw and honestly made it look effortless.

While I enjoyed drawing comics, there was simply no way I could match his skills or output. In a way, it was intimidating to this teenager who was a year younger. I mean, we were like, 16 or 17 years old!

Early on, he was all about Jack Kirby. If you look at his early work, it’s plain to see. He had a true grasp of delivering strong action scenes, as well as a pretty darn good sense of anatomy. If you want to check out some his early fanzine art, I think Bill Schelly reprinted some of those stories in one or two of his books about early comics fandom. And, somewhere in a box in storage, I actually still have copies of those fanzines that he cranked out in that tiny little house.

Rick always made one thing perfectly clear to me: he was absolutely going to eventually break into the industry and become a professional comics artist. The guy was totally focused on that goal.

Now, to be sure, we weren’t best pals or anything. I reckon I visited Rick at his house maybe five or six times during those couple of years. I had my own world out in the suburbs and really had no desire to become a pro. Frankly, drawing comics was just too damn difficult for me and, as I got older, my interests started to veer away from drawing comics.

So, in 1967–68, as I was finishing high school, Rick urged me to put together a portfolio and travel to New York.

He was leaving home and heading to the center of the comics universe to break in and become the thing he always wanted to be, a professional comics artist.

I, however, had other designs. While he headed east, I headed to college. And, in fact, I actually sold my entire comics collection at the time, figuring that I was entering a phase of my life where comics weren’t going to have a place. We lost touch and never spoke again (until maybe 40–45 years later, at a convention here in New York City). Of course, I went back to buying comics almost immediately when I got to college. And, to my amazement (but definitely not surprise), I started to see Rick show up in various DC and Marvel titles.

Holy sh*t! He really made it! That totally blew my mind.

Interestingly (and unbeknownst to me), Detroit was then spawning a bunch of guys who went on to become comics pros — Jim Starlin, Keith Pollard, Arvell Jones, et al. I’d imagine that they all have their own share of anecdotes and memories of Rick.

As for me, I did stick with art for awhile. I majored in Art for a couple of years and then got the gig as the concert poster artist at Michigan State University, where I drew maybe 100-150 posters and newspaper ads. Coming full circle, while running RCA Records’ marketing department in the 2000s, I also assumed the duties of running the label’s creative department, too.

In a way, I think those early days in Detroit, working with Rick on his fanzines, kind of primed the pump for me and helped give me the confidence to lay it all on the line and have my artwork taped to dorm walls all over campus.

I always felt proud of my brief association and collaborations with Rick Buckler. After all, the guy drew every one of the most iconic characters for Marvel and DC and had a helluva run. It’s what he was born to do and he made no bones about it. Not bad for a kid who came from the humblest of beginnings. I’m sure there were things that he wanted to accomplish and never did, but if you think about it, Rick certainly achieved much of what he aspired to do in life.

I can only hope that all of us can say the same when all is said and done.

R.I.P., Rick Buckler.

Talented.

Driven. #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

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Heath’s Ancient Mystery LOCs on an unpublished Russ Heath war comics page and other CBC-related stuff.

Write to CBC: jonbcooke@ aol.com or P. O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892

[Seems that lately I’ve been lucky to expand on the usually sparse pickings in the CBC mailbag (nowadays it’s an email inbox, I reckon) by sharing a bit o’ back-and-forth from a string of correspondence, as we did over the last few issues regarding the Alan Brennert/Roy Thomas e-missives about possible roots of the alien invasion theme in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. This time it’s regarding a mislabeled Russ Heath page that first appeared in Alter Ego back almost 13 years ago, but was referenced in CBC #4… This email exchange, sent to both Roy and myself, is courtesy of our pal Michael Catron, who is currently an editor of that great publishing company he co-founded back in 1976, Fantagraphics. (Thanks to Mike and Roy for permission allowing us to use… oh, and write letters, people!

— Ye Crusading Editor]

Mike Catron Someone wrote to me about an unpublished Russ Heath page, published in Alter Ego #40 [Sept. 2004] and said to have been intended for an unpublished fifth issue of Blazing Combat. I thought you guys would like to read my reply.

Vincent Bellizia I own the hardcover of Blazing Combat, published in 2009,

by Gary Groth and Kim Thompson, reprinting Warren’s Blazing Combat #1–4.

I’m currently reading TwoMorrows’ Comic Book Creator #4 [Winter 2014], profiling Russ Heath. On page 41, there is reference to a Heath story, written by John Albano, that never saw print, for the unfinished issue #5 of Blazing Combat.

Do you know of any publication of this story, whether in another collection or elsewhere? The only reference is a splash page from TwoMorrows’ Alter Ego #40.

Mike Catron I’m afraid Comic Book Creator #4 and Alter Ego #40 both got it wrong, Vincent. The page printed in A/E #40 was not done for Blazing Combat, and there is no unfinished issue of Blazing Combat #5.

I once asked Archie Goodwin about unpublished scripts or art for a Blazing Combat #5, and he told me there weren’t any. That’s not hard to believe, because the book was a quarterly, and it was in trouble, so it makes sense not to get the next issue underway until you’re sure there will be a next issue, which, as it turns out, there wasn’t.

The splash page shown in A/E #40 is a curious thing because, while it is numbered as the first page of story, it bears no logo or title (nor is there room for any to be dropped in later), just the credits, “Story: John Albano, Art: Russ Heath (with Heath’s signature in place of the regular lettering). Perhaps page two carries the title/logo, and it was planned for the first two pages to be a spread.

According to both The Warren Companion and comics.org, John Albano never wrote for Warren Publications. In fact, he seems to have only started writing comics (at least for DC) around 1968, which would be way too late for Blazing Combat.

The page in A/E #40 that is purported to be for Blazing Combat #5 features a headshot of a soldier (drawn to resemble Sgt. Rock) in the upper left narrating and setting up the scene. The second dialog balloon refers to Sgt. Hawk.

Sgt. Hawk was a character whose one-and-only appearance was in Blazing Battle Tales, only one issue of which was published by Seaboard/Atlas Comics in 1975. (Evidently he was also used in a few issues of the short-lived Atlas revival in 2011–12).

Ah, but the Sgt. Hawk story in the only issue of Blazing Battle Tales was written by — John Albano. (But not drawn

by Heath.)

Sgt. Hawk — even the name — was a thinly disguised ripoff of DC’s Sgt. Rock. The dialogue is something that clearly wouldn’t have gotten past the Comics Code, so I would guess it was prepared for a black-&-white war comic that Seaboard/Atlas published or intended to publish. I 14

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

don’t have any knowledge of whether the story this page is from ever saw print or not, but it’s safe to say it was never intended for Blazing Combat.

That’s what I know, and that’s what I can figure out from the evidence in front of me. I hope this helps.

[Thanks for sharing, Mike! Me, I agree that the tale was likely destined for an Atlas/Seaboard black-&-white comics anthology magazine, but I’d bet the ranch it would’ve been for Thrilling Adventure Stories, which lasted a mere two issues back in 1975, but for which unused inventory apparently exists. Included in those unpublished treasures is an unused Walter Simonson story about a Godzilla-like monster taking on Washington, D.C., and (if memory serves) a ultra-violent Russ Heath gangster story with a Death Wish vibe. Maybe I’m trippin’, but I think that’s true.

Oh, and just to keep yakkin’, I’ve been thoroughly harassed on Facebook to adapt and expand the Atlas/ Seaboard issue of Comic Book Artist into a book-length retrospective. What do you folks think?— Y.E.]

Joe Frank

Ben Gross I just wanted to send this email to make a few comments on the great mag.

I have been reading since inception, and have just ordered the Kelly Jones and Mark Schulz issues directly from TwoMorrows. I’ll definitely be looking forward to the Wally Wood issue, but this brings me to my point.

But with artists like Wood, Gil Kane, etc., this is really quite well-trodden material. What I think would be a great contribution to the hobby is to cover those great artists and writers who are still with us, and whoEhave not PE been RIL! & TH YELLOW NS! WOW! X, DRUGS, The BBI exhaustively interviewed ofSAcovered. recent HMER! ROpassing “RO of Bernie Wrightson shows us that time may be short, we never know when it may be too late. That is why I think it is so vital to cover the great creators that are still able to speak on their careers. Before it is too late…

Some of the creators that I think should be given extensive articles and documentation, are: Richard Corben. I don’t know if Corben has ever been thoroughly interviewed, but if not, then surely he deserves it. a giant in the field.

Bruce Jones: His work at Warren is legendary I suppose. I still have my dog-eared copy of Creepy #63 [July ’74] with his and Wrightson’s “Jenifer.” I was 10 years old and this tale just knocked me out. Bernie made the girl’s body so beautiful and sensuous and her face so horribly nauseating.

I was both attracted and repulsed. What an insane story!!

Jim Steranko.

Jerry Grandenetti. I don’t know if he is still living. [Sadly, no. — Y.E.] I first became aware of him with Eerie #35, from 1971, in a tale which to my recollection is called “Cats and Dogs,” about brothers who happen to be a werewolf and some kind of were-cat or leopard man. Naturally, they fight.

Grandenetti’s bizarre, German expressionistic, off-beat style is truly unique, and he is a superb talent.

Tom Palmer. Tom is noted for being mostly an inker, but what an inker!!! His work overIntrAdams is, I think, far better oduction by Rich ard Klaw Afterword

by Stephen R. Bissette than Giordano over Adams, and no one has ever made Adams look better.

I know there are many others, but this makes for a good start.

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Above: Ye Ed had the honor to moderate a special Black Panther panel at the 2016 East Coast Comicon, where I interviewed the late Rich Buckler [left] and good pal Don McGregor [to right]. That’s cosplay king Bill Johnson suited up as T’Challa! Below: Among the myriad projects your humble editor has also been working on are books published by editor Drew Ford’s imprint, It’s Alive Press! Red Range, a reprint — now in color! — of writer Joe R. Lansdale and artist Sam Glanzman’s graphic novel is now on sale, with Trina Robbins’ adaptation of Dope due any day now!

SAX ROHMER

Lots of intriguing material in the latest CBC [#14]. For once, the smaller supplementary articles were of more personal interest. First off, love that the letter column got lively again with a profusion of well-deserved compliments about the Gil Kane issue.

I also enjoyed your new photo feature about professionals at conventions. As someone who no longer attends (too crowded), it’s a nice peek inside.

Appreciated the coverage of the Drew Friedman books.

Those are wonderful. Such a range of portraits; from reverent to comedic. Nice to have faces to go with the names.

In fact, in the recent sequel, Drew came up with both faces and names I wasn’t familiar with. So, it was an entertaining and learning experience. Of the era he’s exploring, he hit virtually all of the top pros, as well as many charming and quirky ones who also contributed to comics. The nice thing is it’s not solely confined to comic figures prior to the Comics Code. Many of them continued on into the ’60s and beyond. If some pioneers are still around and not active in comics, that says more about current publishing than about them. A tremendous achievement and, to me, more loving and humorous than simply scholarly.

The Bob Kane article was of tremendous interest.

I’m far from a great Batman fan (aside from the earliest reprints and the Englehart/Rogers/Austin run). What’s intriguing to me is someone who has an achievement, in the context of a collaboration, striving, retroactively, to paint it as a solo effort. So, a dichotomy: admire the individual for his achievement or resent him for misleading others about it? It’s seemingly needless in that I don’t believe anyone thought less of, say, Siegel and Shuster for needing two men to create something spectacular. While the glory-grab practice is hardly confined to Bob Kane alone, his was one of the more egregious examples. There’s a paper trail of contradictory claims undercutting his own assertions; both his own and many others.

That Kane used assistants after the co-creation was published is one thing. If everyone was fine with the deal, at the time, that’s up to them. But to claim all aspects of the Batman debut when he clearly knew otherwise seems, for lack of a better word, dishonest. So, though it doesn’t change his important co-creator role in introducing Batman, it sure does lessen the respect due him in misrepresenting the events and individuals responsible.

I’m still pleasantly surprised the creator credits have now been changed to include both men. Sadly, forty years

late to be of any benefit to Bill Finger himself, so far as pride or payment goes. But it does caution that, eventually, the truth does come out. Those relentless self-promoters who think everyone is fooled by solo claims may be self-tainting their own legacy. Better to be honest from Day One and let all those who made vital contributions have their earned share of the spotlight. Then, no need to fear the day when the truth can no longer be ignored and one’s reputation takes a nasty, well-deserved nosedive.

In a tale of hope set amidst the hyper violence of Ameri the tale of Red Mask ca’s 19th century, Red , a tough as nails Range tells vigilante who rides dominated Texas to fight tragic racism . Written by multip of the Klanle Bram Stoker Award illustrated by Golde winner JOE R. LANS n Age comic book DALE and master and WWI this volume presen I veteran, SAM J. ts the classic graphi GLANZMAN, c novel in color for introduction by Mojo the first time, and includ Press’ RICHARD es an KLAW and afterw As a bonus, this book ord

by STEPHEN R. contains a little-s BISSETTE. een story by Glanz Red Range has been man, “I Could Eat called “an edgy tale a Horse!” like no other” (Fanta story, on par with stic Fiction) and “an Quentin Tarantino at his best” (Comic outrageous monstrous, genres Grind bending story twist er), and the saga is replete with a that is nothing less when originally releas than mind-blowin ed in 1999, the time g. Shamefully ignore is finally right for d a tale of savage venge Lansdale & Glanz ance, stone cold justice man’s Red Range , , and beastly & bloody comeuppance!

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IDW.indd 1

Introduction by Richa

rd Klaw

Afterword by Steph

en R. Bissette

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3/10/17 12:27 PM

The forerunner to COMIC BOOK CREATOR, CBA is the 2000-2004 Eisner Award winner for BEST COMICS-RELATED MAG! Edited by COMIC BOOK CREATOR’s JON B. COOKE, it features in-depth articles, interviews, and unseen art, celebrating the lives and careers of the great comics artists from the 1970s to today.

ALSO BY JON B. COOKE:

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

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#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

Previously available only to CBA subscribers!

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

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

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#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983!

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

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

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

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NEAL ADAMS/ALEX ROSS cover and interviews with both, history of “Arcade, The Comics Revue” with underground legends CRUMB, SPIEGELMAN, and GRIFFITH, MICHAEL MOORCOCK on comic book adaptations of his work, CRAIG THOMPSON sketchbook, and more!

Exhaustive FRANK CHO interview and sketchbook gallery, ALEX ROSS sketchbook section of never-before-seen pencils, MIKE FRIEDRICH on the history of Star*Reach, plus animator J.J. SEDELMAIER on his Ambiguously Gay Duo and The X-Presidents cartoons for Saturday Night Live.

Interview with DARWYN COOKE and a gallery of rarely-seen and unpublished artwork, a chat with DC Comics art director MARK CHIARELLO, an exploration of The Adventures of Little Archie with creator BOB BOLLING and artist DEXTER TAYLOR, new JAY STEPHENS sketchbook section, and more!

ALEX NIÑO’s first ever full-length interview and huge gallery of his artwork, interview with BYRON PREISS on his career in publishing, plus the most comprehensive look ever at the great Filipino comic book artists (NESTOR REDONDO, ALFREDO ALCALA, and others), a STEVE RUDE sketchbook, and more!

HOWARD CHAYKIN interview and gallery of unpublished artwork, a look at the ’70s black-&-white mags published by Skywald, tribute to Psycho and Nightmare writer/editor ALAN HEWETSON, LEAH MOORE & JOHN REPPION on Wild Girl, a SONNY LIEW sketchbook section, and more!

Double-sized tribute to WILL EISNER! Over 200 comics luminaries celebrate his career and impact: SPIEGELMAN, FEIFFER & McCLOUD on their friendships with Eisner, testimonials

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Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! CBC #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2 FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, rememberJOE KUBERT double-size tribute issue! ing LES DANIELS, a talk between NEAL With comprehensive examinations of each ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artALEX ROSS cover, and more! ist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert (Digital Edition) $3.95 School. KUBERT INTERVIEWS, rare art, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, and interviews with JOE 4-issue subscriptions: anecdotes, KUBERT, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT, RUSS HEATH, and FRANK THORNE! $43 US

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #4 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #5

RUSS HEATH career-spanning interview, essay on Heath’s work by S.C. RINGGENBERG (and Heath art gallery), MORT TODD on working with STEVE DITKO, a profile of alt cartoonist DAN GOLDMAN, part two of our MARK WAID interview, DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series, VIC BLOOM and THE SECRET ORIGIN OF ARCHIE ANDREWS, HEMBECK, new KEVIN NOWLAN cover!

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others!

Plus we look at the triumphant final splash of the late, great BILL EVERETT, Prof.

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SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up The Heap!

Man-Thing! Swamp Thing! Marvin the Dead Thing! Bog Beast! The Lurker and It! and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, MAYERIK, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, VEITCH, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

The creators of Madman and Flaming Carrot—MIKE ALLRED & BOB BURDEN— share a cover and provide comprehensive interviews and art galore, plus BILL SCHELLY is interviewed about his new HARVEY KURTZMAN biography; we present the conclusion of our BATTON LASH interview; STAN LEE on his final European comic convention tour; fan-favorite HEMBECK, and more!

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Retrospective on GIL KANE, co-creator of the modern Green Lantern and Atom, and early progenitor of the graphic novel. Kane cover newly-inked by KLAUS JANSON, plus remembrances from friends, fans, and collaborators, and a Kane art gallery.

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JACK KIRBY’s mid-life work examined, from Fantastic Four and Thor at Marvel in the middle ’60s to the Fourth World at DC (including the real-life background drama that unfolded during that tumultuous era)! Plus a career-spanning interview with underground comix pioneer HOWARD CRUSE, the extraordinary cartoonist and graphic novelist of the award-winning Stuck Rubber Baby! Cover by STEVE RUDE!

MICHAEL W. KALUTA feature interview covering his early fans days THE SHADOW, STARSTRUCK, the STUDIO, and Vertigo cover work! Plus RAMONA FRADON talks about her 65+ years in the comic book business on AQUAMAN, METAMORPHO, SUPER-FRIENDS, and SPONGEBOB! Also JAY LYNCH reveals the WACKY PACK MEN who created the Topps trading cards that influenced an entire generation!

Comprehensive KELLEY JONES interview, from early years as Marvel inker to present-day greatness at DC depicting BATMAN, DEADMAN, and SWAMP THING (chockful of rarely-seen artwork)! Plus WILL MURRAY examines the nefarious legacy of Batman co-creator BOB KANE in an investigation into tragic ghosts and rapacious greed. We also look at RAINA TELGEMEIER and her magnificent army of devotees, and more!

Celebrating 30 years of artist’s artist MARK SCHULTZ, creator of the CADILLACS AND DINOSAURS franchise, with a feature-length, career-spanning interview conducted in Mark’s Pennsylvanian home, examining the early years of struggle, success with Kitchen Sink Press, and hitting it big with a Saturday morning cartoon series. Includes rarely-seen art and fascinating photos from Mark’s amazing and award-winning career.

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make mine marie!

Spotlight on ‘Sev’

A recent visit with the great cartoonist and “Mirthful” Marvel Bullpen stalwart Interview conducted by JON B. COOKE

Above: Marie Severin never shined brighter as a humor cartoonist than in Marvel’s parody title Not Brand Echh. Here’s the cover by Sev for #3 [Oct. 1967].

Below: Ye ed’s candid pic of a playful Mirthful One taken during a recent visit.

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Batman, Detective Comics TM & © DC Comics.

18

[Sometimes you just have to go for it. Working on a future CBC feature about Mirthful Marie Anita Severin’s late brother, John (like his little sister, one enormously talented artist), I discovered where the longtime Marvel Bullpen stalwart has been spending her years in retirement and, having been very friendly with her back in the old Comic Book Artist days, I decided, after making a call to see if I would be welcome, to make a drive down to the greater New York City area and spend a chilly late winter Sunday afternoon with the lady, one of my most favorite cartoonists ever! By the time you read this, Marie will be 88 and, as anyone can certainly understand, her memory on certain aspects of her career can a little bit hazy, but about much of what we discussed, the wonderful woman is sharp as a tack, and still as sly and witty as all get-out!

Thus CBC is delighted to share the conversation, which took place on March 12 and was transcribed by Steven “Flash” Thompson. — JBC]

CBC: You’re a great cartoonist, Marie, and I wanna give you this. [Hands her a copy of CBC #13.]

Marie: Ramona Fradon! Oh, good. She’s nice. I like her.

She’s good! Oh, wow. That’s great!

CBC: You’ll really like the interview. She’s quite a character. I hadn’t known she did all that she did in her life!

Marie: Oh, yeah! She’s talented. She doesn’t push herself.

I didn’t know her when she was younger. Can I keep this?

CBC: That’s for you.

Marie: Gee! Thanks! I’ll draw anything you want!

CBC: [Laughs] You’ll draw anything I want?

Marie: Yeah! Sure, I wouldn’t mind.

CBC: You’re still drawing?

Marie: Yeah.

CBC: I’d love to do a big interview with you. I’d love to do to you like I did with Ramona, if you’d like.

Marie: Sure. I have nothing better to do and it would be a good thing I would think. This is lovely. Can I have these?

CBC: Yeah.

Marie: Oh, wow. Gee, that’s nice. I’ve got something to read! Yippee!

CBC: Let’s talk about when you went into the Marvel Bullpen. That was around 1964?

Marie: I don’t remember the exact year. You’re probably right.

CBC: What was it like? Who was there?

Marie: Let me bring myself back.

CBC: There was Stan…

Marie: Yes, and Larry Leiber. I haven’t thought of that era in so long. [laughs] Anyway, ask me questions.

CBC: Well, let’s start with EC Comics. What did you go in for when you first came into the bullpen?

Marie: Let’s see. My brother came out of the Army. All the guys — Jack Davis — and all of them. They got into comics and, all of a sudden, they needed all the help they could get from colorists. John knew that I liked to color because my father was an artist and so we were brought up as artists and had the materials. The only table I had was the kitchen table, which three times a day when the meals would be served, so then I had to color in my bedroom. [laughs] It was a metal table and it was just perfect for me. It was hard enough, you know, for paper to be on it. Both my brother and father shared this “studio.” And my mother could make clothes. So the whole house was using the space to do things, you know? So I thought everybody drew.

CBC: Where were you living?

Marie: I was born out here in Oceanside, New York, which is right near East Rockaway, pretty near the water. Once the Depression hit and making money was hard, in the ‘30s, my father moved us to Brooklyn because then it was only a subway ride away, which cost a nickel, instead of a dollar and something, whatever it cost for the Long Island Railroad.

So we moved to Brooklyn, and it was a nice section. My father, as an immigrant — as a two-year-old — came from Norway and they settled in the Scandinavian section in Brooklyn and it was nice.

CBC: You are Scandinavian?

Captain Marvel, Shazam! TM & © DC Comics

Marie: My father’s Norwegian and my mother was from here. Her father was a Yankee from way back and her mother was from Ireland.

CBC: What was your mom’s maiden name?

Marie: Powers. Oh, I forget her mother’s maiden name. It was some Irish name. My father was born in Oslo, Norway.

His father came over and was a shipbuilder. But the money was so bad that he moved to the States, set himself up, and then called for them. My father was two when he came.

CBC: Do you know roughly what year he was born?

Marie: No. He was drafted for World War I. He was in his teens when he went in the Army. I think about 17, maybe 18. When was that? 1917, ’18, ’19… something like that. That’s when he went in. He was a kid.

CBC: So he was born around 1902 maybe?

Marie: Yeah. He had a job, in Manhattan, in an office. He must have had some schooling. So he had this job and when he left, two people took over his job. I don’t know if it was accounting, but he was very good at math, which is unusual for an artist, they say. Because I came along and I was good in math, but my brother was terrible. [laughs] John was funny. John didn’t like school. Well, he liked reading and history like I did, but he didn’t like the studying, you know? Math and stuff like that. He could do it. He was a good student. But he’d rather draw. In drawing, you teach yourself because he was constantly bringing books from the library and my father had two sets of encyclopedias. When you’re a foreign-born, you want to know when to shake hands with ’em in the country, so we’d got the encyclopedias and didn’t have to run always to the library.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

CBC: What was your father’s name?

Marie: John Edward Severin. And my mother’s name was Powers. She came from upstate New York. A real Yankee!

CBC: What was her first name?

Marie: Marguerite.

CBC: And your brother was John Powers Severin, right?

Marie: Right. On the Powers side, they didn’t have a male to carry on the name, so my mother added it to my brother’s name.

CBC: What is your middle name?

Marie: Anita, because my aunts’ names were Ann, Gertrude, and Marie. I took Gertrude for my confirmation. So I’m Marie Anita Severin and Anita is like Ann, so I had the three aunts’ names, who had no boys.

CBC: So you’re Catholic?

Marie: Yeah.

And my father was whatever Norwegians are and then he converted. I was in grammar school when he converted to Catholicism.

CBC: Just for your mother?

Marie: Well, he was always bringing her to church and he liked it. He liked these Catholics so he got into it, you know, bringing her there. So he joined ’em. Made it convenient, you know? He got into the whole thing. We weren’t big devotional people but they sent me and John to Catholic school.

Inset previous page: Self caricature by Marie from a reply sent to an EC Comics fan in 1954. Above: Despite also being the main colorist for the legendary line of EC Comics, Marie is best known as a member of the Marvel Bullpen from the 1960s–’80s. Center inset: For Denis Kitchen’s button series, John contributed this portrait.

Below: Folks probably best recall Marie’s dramatic cartooning on her collaboration with John on Kull the Conqueror.

19

Above: Photo of the Severin siblings (and unidentified cousins) around 1935. That’s John at far left, aged 14 or 15, and Marie (nicknamed “Babe” by her kin) in striped shirt, at six or seven.

Inset right: A self-caricature of “Mirthful Marie” Severin, drawn in 1967 while a mainstay in the Marvel bullpen. The artist included the caption, “They used to discourage the sort of stuff I get paid for now.”

20

CBC: And you went through Confirmation.

Marie: Oh, yeah.

CBC: When were you born?

Marie: The 21st of August in 1929. I’m a Leo. [laughs] CBC: So do you have memories of Long Island at all?

Marie: Oh, yeah! I loved it. I was so mad when we moved to Brooklyn, but it was during the Depression and my father lost a job. He had been in World War I and when he came out he was lucky to find

work. It was just like after World War II, when they all came out at once. Everybody was looking around to get work. We had moved out to Long Island because my mother’s sisters lived there. We had a big house with them. My father couldn’t handle it so we moved to Brooklyn.

CBC: To an apartment?

Marie: Yeah.

CBC: That’s quite a change.

Marie: I didn’t like it but we were on the top floor, so I had the roof. I went up there a lot.

CBC: How old were you when you moved? A teenager?

Younger?

Marie: No, I was about four or five, but I remember it clearly how I missed my cousins. [Mimics crying]… I started school and I really liked it. I had friends at school and friends on the block. [laughs] I was out all hours… In those days there’d be two cars coming down the street a day. When we came, it was like two cars on the block, you know what I mean?

CBC: How much older was John?

Marie: Seven years. I was a surprise. [laughs] I was spoiled rotten.

CBC: You were cute as a button!

Marie: Oh, my brother was so good to me. Johnny would play with me. And that’s why I was very advanced, because he would play games with me and I would play with his soldiers and then I would be building forts or something.

My mother, she said, “Look at the baby!” I remember her saying, “Look at the baby,” because he played with me and he was seven years older and in the house we would play and also outside. I learned so much about buildings, though, because I was into building forts. I was intrigued by all this. You know, girls don’t get that. Maybe they might now but in those days… So I really was learning an awful lot as a four-year-old and it showed up in school and they said, “How come she knows how to build those things?

She’s designing houses over there!” [laughs] I had a brother and father who draw and my mother lets me! [laughs] CBC: You say your dad was an artist?

Marie: Yeah, he worked for Elizabeth Arden Cosmetics.

He designed a lot of their products. He was very good at math, too, as was I. My brother wasn’t. Most artists are not supposed to be good at math. My father was excellent. And he could draw. I liked math. So I always made out good in school, you know? Couldn’t spell worth a damn. [laughs] But I could add! My father worked for Elizabeth Arden and he did everything that she wanted. She had a studio, too.

CBC: He worked for Elizabeth Arden herself? The Elizabeth Arden?

Marie: Yeah. She was from Canada. She had a beauty parlor up there and knew a little about chemistry, and she started making her own perfumes and creams for her beauty parlor. She was making out so well, she said, “Sure, I’ll try New York!” Well, she took off like a cannonball because her stuff was really good! Like her creams. My aunts said, “What a difference!” Your skin really felt good. My aunts were so pleased, because they always looked nice. Well, he would bring a lot of the stuff home and my mother and my aunts all went crazy and, later on, I did, too!

But I didn’t like make-up. I’m too lazy.

CBC: Where did you go to school?

Marie: Bishop McDonald Memorial High School. All Catholic with five orders of nuns.

I had nuns for grade school and they were Canadian. They were so strict! And I was a hellion.

CBC: Were you?

Marie: Yeah. I was always fooling around. My mother said I was born laughing. [laughs] “Jack, I don’t know what I’m #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

EC Comics Thank You note © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc. The Story of Checks TM & © Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

gonna do with her!”

CBC: She called your father Jack?

Marie: Yeah.

CBC: Were you a tomboy growing up?

Marie: Kind of. Yeah, I was a tomboy. I loved to play with the boys because it was much more interesting and fun kidding around. My brother had all these plastic guns, y’know?

In those days, all the guns were for boys and they looked like real guns! They had the six-shooters… I loved ’em! It was much more exciting than a doll. I mean, all you can do is change the clothes on a doll. I don’t want a doll! What am I gonna do? Change diapers? Thank you very much.

They got me a doll house. That was good, arranging the house and making things for it. It was really cute. But I wasn’t one for holding the baby and hanging up baby clothes. I saw all the things my brother was doing. “I wanna do that!” [laughs] And he helped me, too. He was good. And he was seven years older, too, so he was always ahead of me, which was good because I learned so much. And my father was helpful, too. My father was the type of man he would come home and if I was playing and I had one of my brother’s guns, I’d shoot him. He’d be just comin’ in the door and I’d go, “Ah!” Bang! Bang! And he’d go, “Uhhhh!” The hat would go off and my mother would say, “John, your suit, your suit!” [laughs] And he’d fall on the floor, I’d come over, I’d move an arm, move this arm, move a leg, and she’d go, “John, we don’t have the money to keep getting our suit cleaned!” He said, “The rug isn’t dirty and the kid’s havin’ fun.” I would say [affects babyish voice], “Daddy you’re shot in the heart. Yeah, shot in the heart! I think I got ya!” I’d play with my brother’s guns, y’know? My mother didn’t care.

CBC: In Brooklyn, did you have a group of kids that you hung around with?

Marie: Yeah, I guess. There were a lot of kids and a lot less traffic. You’d have maybe five cars come down the street, which is… Nowadays, it’s double parking on a wrong way street. I mean, crazy! But in those days, there were like five cars on the block so you could run, you could play ball. You could do all minds of stuff.

CBC: Was it wooded at all? Was there any country flavor to where you were in Brooklyn or was it all city?

Marie: Well, it was all houses and a couple of big, four- or five-story apartment houses. There was a park that was only five blocks away and then another park six blocks away, the Narrows Bridge. It was very nice. I mean, the bridge wasn’t even there, but we saw it being built.

CBC: Did you listen to the radio?

Marie: Oh, yeah!

CBC: What was your favorite?

Marie: [Pauses] That mystery one. The Shadow! “The Shadow knows!” [laughs] Oh, I used to know the names of all the programs. There was no TV and you sat looking at the radio. [laughter] Or drawing pictures while you listened.

I would station myself under the dining room table. My mother’d be yelling, “Ya can’t see anything!” [baby voice], “Yeah, but nobody bothers me.”

CBC: [Laughs] Was your brother into comics and cartoons?

Marie: Well, my father drew, too. My mother could draw a bit. She designed her own clothes very often when she had time. And my father always drew, too. My mother’s father was an architect up near Syracuse, New York. He’s built schools and stuff like that. And my father’s father was a shipbuilder in Oslo, Norway, where he was born. Then they had my brother who blossomed drawing back in the crib! [laughs] Then I came along and right away, same thing. They said, “A girl doing that! And my father goes, “I hope she can get a job.” I made out okay when I started in the comics because they knew me. By that time I was a

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2016 • #13

Above: A “thank you” note issued by EC Comics to readers in the ’50s and “drawed by li’l M. Severin.” Below: The cover and pages of the Federal Reserve comic illustrated by John and Marie Severin, The Story of Checks [circa 1957].

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little old to be a leading lady, so I worked first for EC — Bill Gaines — uptown. I wanted to work uptown! I loved my work up there. I picked up on how to make corrections on lettering, mastheads, paste-ups, and all that. I couldn’t spell without the dictionary! Terrible. Thinking is not my facility. [laughs] I still have to look up every other word.

CBC: So, did you like comic books when you were a kid?

Marie: Yeah. I remember they cost a dime and when the 25¢ ones came out and you’d save up for that. The kids in my neighborhood would say, “Hey, Sev! Can we borrow that after you finish?” and [funny voice], “Can I read that?” My aunts were working and, when they would come to dinner, they would always give me a quarter or 50¢.

At Christmas, I got a couple bucks and I spent a lot of money on comic books. And, once I discovered the library when I was older in high school, then I was heavy into books! [laughs] I just devoured them!

CBC: What was your favorite?

Marie: I liked mysteries and I liked things about foreign countries.

Mysteries were the greatest, and adventure stories. I was reading mostly the same things my brother was.

He’d bring a book home and I’d go, “Can I borrow that?” and he’d go, “No! I’m reading it!”

“When can I borrow it?” “When I’m done!” He was very patient.

CBC: John was out of the house when you were 12?

Marie: He was seven years older than myself.

CBC: Right, so by the time you were 12, he was 19. Was he out of the house?

Marie: No, not yet. Well, he went into the Army and all but he left home when he got married.

CBC: John served overseas?

Marie: He served in the Pacific, during World War II. My mother wouldn’t let him enlist with his friends early in the war and they got into Europe and they saw a lot of action. One of ’em was killed.

CBC: A neighborhood kid?

Marie: Yeah, a friend of his. They used to play baseball and everything. I remember my mother had to sign for him because he was a year too young. Then he went in and got assigned to the Pacific. He never saw any action and he felt like he got gypped! [laughs] And he knew more about war than the generals, y’know?

CBC: Gosh, yeah!

Marie: My brother was into history and into action and I’m sure he would’ve gotten into the fight if they had let him. He was in camouflage. Because he was good at drawing (though he was colorblind!) and he was working in their camouflage unit. [laughs] I told you my father worked for Elizabeth Arden, right?

CBC: Right.

Marie: He did greeting cards and things Elizabeth sent to movie actresses and stuff. He’d make a fancy card with flowers or a picture. For movie actors in the ’20s and into the ’40s.

CBC: Did he design her logo?

Marie: I don’t know. He might have. I think mostly it was greeting cards for her. He used to draw figures and flowers and stuff. My brother and I switched to all kinds of cartooning — super-heroes and muscle men and dinosaurs and #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

EC staff print © Marie Severin. Marie Severein caricature © the estate of Bill Everett. Alter Ego TM & © Roy Thomas.

Above: In 2000, Marie Severin produced this limited edition print depicting her EC Comics cohorts. Note the artist’s self-caricature in the upper right, multi-hued hand ’n’ all!

Below: Sev shared this Bill Everett caricature of her kind self, drawn in 1956. She adds, “Can’t remember why I’m in a plane — ’cept I like them.”

Inset right: The lady returned the favor in 1978, when Roy Thomas used her caricature of Wild Bill as A/E #11’s cover.

EC Comics material TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.

spaceships! I was into space! I loved all that!

CBC: When did you start drawing?

Marie: My mother said that I was three. I didn’t go commercial until I worked at EC. Before that, I think I did coloring for John when he started at EC and I liked it so much…

CBC: When you were you back in high school or elementary school were you known for drawing?

Marie: Yeah, in first grade, they want you to do crayon things. The nun had me do on the board for the kids to copy so she could sit back! Mine were better than hers! [laughter] And I felt so smart, you know?

CBC: Was that the idea for your future? Most women would either go to college, get a job, or get married. There weren’t really many options.

What was your plan?

Marie: Do what I wanna do! [laughter] CBC: And where’d you get that independence?

Marie: I think from both my parents. My father came over when he was two from Norway. My mother was born in the States to a Yankee family. Her mother was from Ireland. And her father was from, I guess, an English background. But the family name was Powers and they were up there for ages. I think they had originally come from New England.

CBC: That Yankee thing.

Marie: Oh, yeah.

CBC: Did your parents have expectations for you?

Marie: They never pushed me. I was drawing when I was three ’cause everybody in the house… Even my mother! She could make her own clothes, which were pretty and very good. When she was a kid she had infantile paralysis. She came from Syracuse, New York, where 25 kids got [polio] and two survived — my mother and a boy. They didn’t have the serum then. Her left side wasn’t paralyzed, but was smaller and weak, but you never noticed until she got older. But she did a lot. She could wash and hang clothes.

CBC: How long did they live?

Marie: Quite elderly. In the ’70s, my father was 72 or 73, and Mom, I think she hit 88. I think. The women usually last longer. I don’t know why. I think because they can bear children, they have more facilities or something.

CBC: So did you stay close with your parents?

Marie: Yeah, I lived at home. It was cheaper.

CBC: You lived at home all your life?

Marie: Oh, no. I stayed at home a long time. First of all, it was comfortable. They were nice to live with. They were very amicable. I didn’t mind them, and they didn’t boss me around too much. [laughs] I guess I was manageable. Well, I was so much like my father.

CBC: Did you date at all?

Marie: Yeah, a little bit, but I never got that crazy about anybody. Or, if I did, it was always somebody married. Because the good ones go first. [laughs] CBC: Did you wait too long? You’re just not the “marryin’ kind”?

Marie: I guess I wasn’t. I liked the idea. I love kids, but it didn’t bother me. I was always busy. I enjoyed their company and the sex bit didn’t bother me that much, you know? You know what I mean? I wasn’t driven by that. I was always occupied with something going on in my head. All of a sudden, “Oh! Look at that! I’m 30. How’d that happen?”

[laughs] CBC: You used humor, right? To be one of the boys, one of the guys?

Marie: Yeah, but I was always a little crazy, y’know? I liked kiddin’ around.

My father was a big jokester. My mother, she was a person who enjoyed life. You’d come and you’d have troubles and she was, “All right. I’m right with you,” but, by the end, she’d have you laughing. She was very good that way. And my father, he could be very funny!

CBC: Do you remember Pearl Harbor?

Marie: Yes. CBC: Where were you?

Marie: I was home in Brooklyn. We were living on 77th Street, in Bay Ridge. I knew it was real bad stuff because of my mother’s reaction. “Oh, no. We’re in it now!”

CBC: And your brother went in…

Marie: He was in already, I think. I think he had joined up or something.

Oh, yeah, I remember. His four friends—Johnny Bresson was the one I liked the most. Anyway, they all went, but my mother wouldn’t sign for my brother. He was just too young. They had to sign for him and she wouldn’t sign. And he was so mad! “Oh, Mom, all my friends are goin’ in and I’m not!” Then he was drafted! He made out good. But he never went into battle and felt bad about that ‘cause his friends got into combat in Europe.

CBC: Do you remember FDR dying?

Marie: Yeah. We liked him.

Top: Some examples of Marie Severin’s color guides — watercolors on Photostat paper — produced for EC Comics during her stint as staff colorist in the early to mid-1950s.

These would be sent to the color separators. Top inset: The young, adorable, and effervescent Marie Anita Gertrude Severin poses for the camera in the 1950s.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

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CBC: Your family were New Deal Democrats?

Marie: Yeah.

CBC: So you went to this school that you had a full scholarship at. Was that high school or was that… ?

Marie: High school. Bishop McDonald Memorial High School. Five different types of nuns in one school. It was good, though. They were very strict and you learned a lot… whether you liked it or not! [laughs] CBC: So your graduating class was ’47? ’48?

Marie: I think it was ’48. I’m pretty sure it was ’48.

CBC: And what were your plans?

Marie: Art! I wanted to do artwork. I got a job in Wall Street just to have money, part-time when I was still in

school. I went on Saturdays. I wanted my own pocket money, you know? I got a part-time job in a greeting card company.

CBC: American Greetings?

Marie: No, I think it was Hallmark. I’m not sure.

CBC: Well, what were you doing?

Marie: You sorted out the cards and put them in boxes…

CBC: So handwork. Not art.

Marie: No, I didn’t even have a portfolio. I was still in school. But it was nice to have some cash of my own, you know? And my mother couldn’t ask me for anything, so I could use it all myself! It was only when I went full-time she wanted rent. [Affects silly voice] “What? I have to pay?”

CBC: What did you spend your money on?

Marie: On books.

CBC: You have a big library?

Marie: Yeah, my brother and I together had a decent library. My mother and father had a bookcase with big glass doors and when John got married, he said, “Mom, can I have the bookcase?” “Oh, yes, because you’ll have children.” He got the bookcase… with the books!

CBC: With the books? That’s not fair!

Marie: I showed him! I bought books myself!

CBC: You said you worked in Wall Street?

Marie: Yeah. They had all these kids in Wall Street. In those days, they didn’t have computers and all those shortcuts, so you had to figure out all those kinds of things on paper, and I was pretty good in math. I was pretty fast with my fingers, so I could record stuff.

CBC: To go into the ticker?

Marie: Yeah. But in those days, they didn’t have calculating machines and you had to print it all out, you know? It was a long time ago. It was in the ‘40s. #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Doctor Doom, Hulk, Peter Parker TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Illustration © Marie Severin.

Above: Among the earliest discernible work by Marie Severin during her first years in the Marvel Bullpen is this pair of Marvel house ads featured in Amazing Spider-Man, #34 [Mar. 1966], left, and #30 [Nov. ’65], respectively. Note her ability to replicate Steve Ditko’s style on the latter. Below: Marie’s decidedly politically incorrect depiction of the denizens of Marvel’s reception area, 1970.

Doctor Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

CBC: So, by ’52, was John working for Harvey Kurtzman?

Marie: I think so, yeah. I think I was, too.

CBC: Did he make a spot for you? Did they need somebody and he said, “My kid sister can help”?

Marie: I remember John saying, “Gee, I have no time to do the coloring. I just don’t have the time. My sister is good.” Harvey said, “Well, try her out on this.” The job came back and Harvey said, “She’s in. She can work here all the time.” So I did. And that’s how it happened. Harvey was good because he was a perfectionist!

CBC: Did you like Harvey?

Marie: Yeah. You could see why some guys didn’t like him because he didn’t quite know how to correct people properly. He’d go, “I don’t like it this way! It should be this or that ” or, “You don’t know how to draw that!”

CBC: He wasn’t diplomatic?

Marie: Every once in a while he could be. I liked his personality. I got along fine with him. But, with some guys sometimes, I could tell he was acting too autocratic. But he wasn’t bad! I got along fine with him. I understood why he was that way, you know?

CBC: You were learning, too, right?

Marie: Right! I learned a lot from Harvey. He liked to tell you how to do something but he told it well. He was very good. There were some things about him that were annoying but they didn’t annoy me.

CBC: Did you like the New York type of guy?

Marie: Yeah, I thought they were smart. Smarter. But I liked ’em. Fun, faster talking…

CBC: Were you a “good girl”?

Marie: Yeah, I was pretty good.

CBC: Did you go out drinking with the guys every now and then?

Marie: Oh, not much. Later on, when in was in my 20s, but I wasn’t a bad teenager. I was acceptable.

CBC: Did you like the EC Comics in the beginning?

Marie: Oh, yeah! I read them and EC, to me, was the best and I was really proud that I was working there. I was just a kid, still in my teens.

CBC: And your brother did just phenomenal art!

Marie: Isn’t he great? You should’ve seen what my father did. And my mother could draw, too. She could sew like a dream so the whole thing was in the hands. Couldn’t miss.

CBC: Your brother was good all the way to the end. I mean, he could ink! Herb had his own style but he inked over Herb and just gave him such a slick look… And he inked over your stuff for Kull… wow!

Marie: Weren’t they great? I loved ’em!

CBC: Beautiful, beautiful stuff!

Marie: Yeah.

CBC: Do you think you were a better storyteller maybe? It was really good to see him ink you because his stuff, on his own, was a little stiff, wouldn’t you say?

Marie: Well, he was a very straight liner as far as character and I guess that showed. I liked the look of it! I liked that stiffness in it.

CBC: Yeah. Well, it worked for the military stuff and that was so much of his stuff!

Marie: Yeah, and he loved detail! He just was crazy about COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

doing it.

CBC: That’s why he got along with Harvey so well, right?

Because Harvey wanted the detail!

Marie: Oh, yeah! Harvey was a pest sometimes but I liked working for him ’cause I learned a lot. But he was a little autocratic. It didn’t bother me but it bothered some guys…

CBC: Alex Toth just walked right out.

Marie: And he’s so good. I could tell by the tone in my brother’s voice once that he was going to sock Harvey any minute. I said, “No, don’t do it!” [laughs] CBC: Did you know Wally?

Marie: Yeah. I liked Wally. He was a real character. He was fun but he was a character.

CBC: What made him a character?

Marie: I don’t know. Just the way he moved around was a little… not funny, but he was different. Not obviously. It was only if you watched. I watch people.

Jack Davis was interesting, too.

And Bill Gaines! I liked him. He was really funny!

CBC: So that story about how if you didn’t like some of the panels, you would color them all red, was that true?

Marie: Well… tell you what: if a panel was very gruesome, if I was ascared (“ascared”! See, I’m a kid again!)I was “ascared” that the book would be canceled because the Code thing was just coming on so strong and everybody went, “The Code won’t like it!” And I didn’t want that because I liked that company! The guys were really great, and Bill Gaines was a doll to work for. I just wanted them to behave so we wouldn’t get in trouble, you

Above: By the mystical cycles of menstruation! Marie writes that her rather adult gag was “One of a series of cartoons submitted to college papers — a Stan Lee project. Inset left: Ye Ed recognized the Mirthful One’s unforgettable style when he purchased stickers from a toy vending machine back in the early ’70s and he’s kept ’em ever since. Below: Detail of the splash page Marie’s first Doctor Strange story, “Alone, Against the Mindless Ones,” Strange Tales #153 [Feb. 1967].

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Above: xxx

Above: Original cover art by Marie Severin for Not Brand Echh #3 [Oct. 1967]. Left: Cover detail featuring Marie Severin’s sublime cartooning — and Marvel parody title mascot Forbush Man — from Not Brand Echh #8 [June 1968].

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Not Brand Echh TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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know? But it was good. And I didn’t see anything objectionable in, you know, the murder scenes and stuff. They could be hacking people. It didn’t offend me. I thought it was funny. I was, “Oh. Look at what they’re doing to that body!

Oh, that’s so funny!” Because it’s a comic, you know?

CBC: Some of that stuff is pretty gross, though. [laughs] Marie: I know it could be gross, but to me it was funny!

[Affects funny voice] “Oh look at what they’re doing to that fella’s eyeballs!” [Jon laughs] And I always colored over them so they wouldn’t be that obvious to the goo-goo-eyed censors. But I would color red over a whole bloody scene, and you could see it better with one color better than mixing all the three colors for the suits and jackets and stuff.

CBC: But sometimes you would color to kind of defend EC? Marie: Yeah, I would cover up some of the stuff… well, not cover it up but…

CBC: Obscure it a little bit?

Marie: Yeah, In other words, if they were cutting a guy and showing intestines or something flying out of his stomach, I would just color it red, right?

CBC: No purple or blue?

Marie: No veins! [laughs] CBC: And you were doing that in defense of the company?

Marie: Oh, yeah! I didn’t want them to close us! And also I would say to ‘em, “But you can see better what’s going on because there isn’t a blue dot and a red dot and a yellow dot confusing the intestine flying through in air, you know?”

[Jon laughs] And they’d say, “You know, you’re right, Marie.” I said, “You can see it better!” In yellow, you can see all the details—the intestines, everything!

CBC: Now, you were young. You’d stepped into this. Did you have a history of coloring at all? Did you just develop your own color theory or did Harvey just teach you?

Marie: I’d been drawing since I was three.

CBC: Well drawing! But color is a different thing, right?

Marie: Oh, I always liked coloring. I was better at it than my brother, who was colorblind.

CBC: Right, but did you have a theory for it?

Marie: No. I had nothing. My father left me alone because he used to say to my mother, “The Babe is with it!” (They called me “Babe.”) “She knows what she’s doing. Leave her alone.” So my mother said, “Okay, if she can make money at it.” Because she was afraid of me going into comics, because it was all men!

CBC: Afraid for your virtue?

Marie: Afraid that I wouldn’t get anyplace. Comics were pretty low down on the ladder. But I tried to convince her and then, when she saw my brother’s work, she said, “Hey, these are good!” “Of course they are! They’re your son’s!”

She goes, “Well, yes, but the subject matter is really classy, y’know?” She liked it when she saw what it was but she was always afraid that john wouldn’t get the kind of work that he excelled at.

CBC: Is it ironic what happened with EC? Bill Gaines liked you, Harvey liked you, Al Feldstein liked you… Everyone liked you, and then they got out of color comics. Everything was just MAD, which was black-&-white, with no room for a colorist.

Marie: No, they didn’t want me to leave because I could do corrections and I could copy styles. But I liked the idea that Stan Lee had of making comics and I enjoyed the more serious comics.

CBC: It was your decision?

Marie: Oh, yeah!

CBC: Did you make the right decision?

Marie: Yeah, I needed a change.

CBC: Bill paid his people well, right?

Marie: Oh, yeah! I would’ve made out like a bandit there later on.

CBC: But you just wanted more fun?

Marie: I guess you could say that. I never thought of it that way.

Not Brand Echh and Spoof TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

CBC: I mean, he would take his people on trips and he would lavish…

Marie: Oh, yeah! You could look forward to a reward for everything you did! I liked him! I didn’t leave in bad terms.

Al Feldstein said, “What is it you don’t like?” And I said, “Nothing! I just want to work uptown for a change” First of all, we worked down next to the police station in downtown New York. You’d go out at lunch there were no stores. There was nothing right there. And if I worked at home, well, so what? I could work at home for any job, y’know what I mean? Anything in the comics. So when I went uptown, it was all the stores up there and great to walk around at lunchtime.

CBC: This is where Atlas was? Atlas/Marvel.

Marie: It was near Bloomingdale’s or something at one time. But I would walk around at lunchtime and really enjoyed it uptown.

CBC: So that was another consideration? Location?

Marie: Well, yeah. I was a teenager, Jon. I wanted to see New York. I was brought up in Long Island and then Brooklyn, so being uptown in New York, looking at all the store window displays… Having lunch at the Stork Club!

It was around the corner when I was working for Stan. I went there for lunch. It wasn’t a big deal. I just wanted to say I was there. I wanted to see what it was like. Later on, we went there. The gang. But anyway, so I’m having lunch, looking around seeing if there’s any celebrities. And Stan comes in with his brother, Larry Leiber. They didn’t see me right away. I was sitting way in the back facing them the whole time and I heard Larry say, “Stan, there’s Marie Severin!” [laughs] I’m sure it deflated Stan that I would be there when he’s coming! He never treated anybody to lunch. [laughter] I liked him! But he couldn’t help it. I guess he was brought up in a real stingy family. I thought it was so funny! [Affects silly voice] “Stan, look! There’s Marie Severin!” And I didn’t even wave, so Stan was making like he never saw me.

CBC: What did you do for Stan in the beginning?

Marie: Oh, I did production, touch-ups because I knew…

I was familiar with comic book production. I was familiar with all the different aspects… “This panel needs to be flopped and this needs to go up there”… and that sort of thing.

CBC: So you knew exactly how to do all this.

Marie: Plus I could draw. I could sort of copy a style close enough. I wasn’t a genius but I was adept enough to fit in and, in some cases, I was a little better than the artist I was correcting.

CBC: The first time you worked for Stan, you weren’t there for long, right? Because you went over to the bank?

Marie: Oh, yeah! I worked for the Federal Reserve! They were wonderful. I worked there for a while, but not too long.

That was an experience. They were putting out a comic book explaining the new routing system they were putting on the checks — those numbers at the bottom of checks — which they used to identify where the checks originated.

CBC: Right, and this was the biggest, most widely distributed comic book of all time!

Marie: I guess you’re right! Copies went to 15 districts, which meant it probably was in every bank, whether they distributed them, I don’t know. I’d heard that was the biggest comic at that time.

CBC: Was that just a freelance job you did for the Federal Reserve?

Marie: Oh, no. I went on staff there for about a year. Oh, I did everything. I did posters for them. They loved ’em. I did stuff whenever they went on TV. So I did posters that they would show and graphs. I thought it was going to be weird, but a friend’s brother was head of public information at the Reserve and I thought, “I’ll do ’em a favor. I’ll go on staff for a while.” I really enjoyed it because I really had a lot of stuff to do and I could use my intelligence and they liked what I did. I was getting information out that was very eagerly COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

read by people. I was very fast at my work and so, if I had time, I’d volunteer at the public information department and say, “Let me conduct a couple of tours.” I’d bring the kids down with their parents or teachers or whatever, and I would let the kids sit on gold bricks! At that time we had gold bullion in from Europe being housed at the Reserve.

This was before it all went to Fort Knox.

CBC: You said that you’re good at math, but you’re also creative. Was that an asset when you were at the Federal Reserve? You could think outside the box, so to speak?

Marie: Right. Also, I had an understanding of how to teach. I was not a teacher in a classroom, but I could draw pictures that could fall together and be informative. Many people draw a picture and the next picture doesn’t correspond. Thinking has to be about context, always. You have to know how to make the eye go from one picture to the next picture and it works and a story’s being told.

CBC: That’s storytelling!

Marie: Storytelling. That’s the whole thing.

CBC: Where did you pick that up?

Marie: I don’t know.

CBC: Did you pick it up from Harvey and from your brother?

Marie: I think from my family. My mother would read

Above: Marie Severin cover art for Not Brand Echh, #10 [Oct. 1968]. Below: John and Marie Severin collaboration, the cover of Spoof #2 [Nov. ’72].

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This and next page: Yeah, yeah, we know that brother John drew most of the Kull images on this spread, but their collaboration on the interior stories remains some of the most finely rendered comics of the 1970s.

Marie’s pencils adorn the page on the top right inset.

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Kull the Conqueror TM & © The Cabinet Group.

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to me when I was very young. She would look out the window with me and say, “What do you see in the clouds?”

She wanted to know what kind of face. So I got that way with everything. I’d look at the picture in the water, or look at the grass or something.

And what it was doing was making me look, look, see, and think about it. It’s something. “Gee, that looks like a man bending over and he’s picking a flower,” you know? I don’t know what that does but it makes your imagination grow.

CBC: You are just very versatile!

Marie: Well, my family always, always supportive. If I wanted to sculpt, they’d buy me clay. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they’d give me a piece of clay. “Here, play with this. She’s good at that! That’s good, Babe!” Or I might be drawing and I’d pick up a fountain pen.

CBC: Right.

Marie: When my brother went into the service, I had access to all of his equipment, you know? And I was seven years younger than he so this was great! [laughs]

CBC: You were really good at caricature right from the start.

Marie: Yeah, John was really good at that. My father, too.

CBC: But you’re really good at that. You really get the sense of the personality, the comedic aspect… John could get the look but you could nail the essence… Like the Don McGregor cartoons that I’ve seen. [Marie laughs] Drawing him teeny tiny!

Marie: I shouldn’t of done it to him, I liked him! Yeah! I didn’t mean it with any malice at all, but I saw the funniness in people, you know? The dopiness. Like myself!

CBC: In yourself you saw the dopiness. [laughter] Marie: Yeah, the dopiness! And dopey is cute sometimes!

CBC: There’s a lot of dopey in comics.

Marie: Oh, yeah. There’s both kinds. Good and bad. Funny.

CBC: Where were you when JFK was assassinated? It was a Friday.

Marie: I was working and I had a studio.

CBC: You had a studio?

Marie: A friend of mine was a nurse who lived in the neighborhood and she was always working, so I’d use her apartment and give her a couple bucks for rent. But, anyway, I was still living at home and my father would bring stuff home to work on.

CBC: And you needed your own space?

Marie: I couldn’t work at the kitchen table ’cause my mother had to work at the kitchen table to make dinner.

CBC: You left the Federal Reserve. Was it a long time between that and Marvel? Marvel was ’64, right? That’s what you said before.

Marie: [Laughs] I don’t know. It must be in my biography. It must be in there.

CBC: We’ll find out. By ’65, you were doing “Doctor Strange” and soon working with Herb [Trimpe] on the Hulk.

Marie: Yeah, I liked it. I liked working for EC, too. They were fun.

CBC: The bullpen must have been fun, right?

Marie: Oh, yeah. The guys were good. They were funny yet they worked hard. There were times when everybody was quiet and then all of a sudden somebody would start talking. All of a sudden, somebody would yell out something, then, “Ha, ha, ha!” And then, “Shaddup!” [laughs] But they got along quite well.

CBC: Did you guys go out to lunch together?

Marie: Once in a while. That was fun. When I worked at EC, we’d go to this restaurant, which you could see from out the window, right across the street. And we’d sit in there and laugh! [Affects silly voice] “We have to go back, guys! Come on!” “Oh, one more drink!” But they weren’t drunk. Nobody ever was… that I knew of.

CBC: Was Doctor Strange your first regular assignment at Marvel? What was your first comic book work as an artist, besides the Federal Reserve?

Marie: Well, I colored stuff. I think “Doctor Strange” was the first story I drew. I did a lot of touch-ups and changes and copying styles and such, but I think “Doctor Strange” was my first full story. It was, like, ten pages.

CBC: Were you there when Ditko quit?

Marie: Yeah, I think so.

CBC: Do you remember if it was like a, “Whoa! What are we gonna do?” I mean. Johnny Romita always talks about that as a “whoa!” moment.

Marie: Well, Johnny would get very nervous. He was very conscious of the quality of his work, but he was so good. I used to think, “Why does he get so ner-

ments. Was that something you wanted to do?

Marie: Oh, yeah. I liked that stuff.

It was funny. But I was doing that as jokes right before, passing around cartoons to everybody in the office.

That kind of humor, you know?

CBC: Did you do that all the time?

Every day?

Marie: Yeah, pretty much.

CBC: I think Herb told me he had stacks of them, where you did cartoons teasing him.

Marie: Yeah, I’m very fast but like if something happened with Flo, and something had them laughing, I’d draw cartoons about it, whatever silly thing. [Affecting silly voices] “I did not!” “Yes, you did. You lost it!”

“No, I did not.” [Laughter] Stuff like that! And she’s so cool! And I’d draw something in reference to what the situation was and, as I passed by, Flo would say, “Oh, Sev! Oh, Sev!” CBC: “Sev”?

Marie: They all called me Sev, yeah.

(Both laugh) Or I’d pass it around the office and she’d say, “Oh, Sev! You’re always teasing me!” But I’d do it to everybody.

CBC: Did you like doing the comic book stories?

Kull the Conqueror TM & © The Cabinet Group.

vous about it?” He was in like Flynn, y’know?

He had nothing to worry about. And then his wife came to work at the office, too. And then they were both worried about their jobs, but they were in like Flynn. I mean, they were both hard workers.

CBC: Well, that was his nature, right?

Marie: Yeah, nervous.

CBC: He still is!

Marie: And he’s so good!

CBC: [Laughs] And he still thinks Kirby was so much better.

Marie: No, Kirby couldn’t do what he does and he couldn’t do what Kirby does. So what?

Neither can I! Neither one of ’em, you know?

CBC: And yet you could handle yourself to do a Spider-Man story just as well as doing a Not Brand Ecch story…

Marie: I liked what I did and because you like it you try to do very good on it. So I dearly tried to make it as good looking as I could.

And that’s the secret. You know, you figure out the way to copy what is good and try to copy that. There’s some ways that people draw hands for super-heroes… Doctor Strange.

You study how they draw it. Why does it look so dramatic? It’s the way they put the lighting maybe. You know what I mean? You try to figure out the little things that make this thing pounce for you.

CBC: When Not Brand Echh came out, that became another one of your major assign-

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

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Above: xxx

Above: Marie Severin lovingly depicts the wonderful, lamented Fabulous Flo Steinberg for the flip-cover of Comic Book Artist #18’s [Feb. 2002] tribute section celebrating Flo. Below: Marie shared this self-caricature and added this postscript: “1980+?

Can’t remember why this was drawn — but I like it.”

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Illustrations © Marie Severin.

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Marie: Yeah, I enjoyed it. A couple of ’em were dopey.

[Affects silly voice] “This is dopey, Stan!” “Why? Why?” “’Cause I don’t think it’s realistic…” “Well, change the caption until he’s more serious. I don’t care.”

CBC: How much storytelling did you do there? You know, like, the “Marvel Method.” Like Stan just giving a plotline.

“It’s gonna be Dr. Doom this issue.”

Marie: Yeah, with some stories. With “Doctor Strange” in particular, I had a lot of free reign because I liked magicians and stuff like that. That was good.

CBC: Were you able to do your own storytelling?

Marie: Pretty much. Well, Stan liked what I did. Stan wanted us all to do that because that made it easier for him. He didn’t have to think up the story, you know? You’d go in for a story conference and Stan would be talking to you about this or that plot and, all of a sudden, you’d see him turning like this. [Leans her head sideways] What the hell was he doing? I picked up on it, though nobody else did. This one time I said, “I’m going to find out what he’s doing.” So I came around his desk and I’m looking where he’d been looking and I see that it’s a mirror! Tucked between the wall and a bookcase. He was checking to see how he looked! I thought, ‘”Why that egomaniac! So that’s what

he’s looking at! A mirror!” [laughter] CBC: Do you remember when he started wearing the toupee?

Marie: Oh, my god, yes! Did we laugh!

We were saying, “How are we gonna let him know to get it off? We don’t like it.”

We were saying, “Let’s get a fish line and throw it over the thing.” We were awful!

If he ever knew of the disrespect…! But he was an egomaniac!

CBC: [Laughs] Stan the Man! Marie: He was like a movie actor.

Exactly.

CBC: Now, what did you think about the Marvel Method? You’re being paid per page to pencil, but you’re also writing, but not getting paid for that.

Marie: That’s right, but it was fun.

CBC: You were all right with that? How do you think about that now? Were you being ripped off?

Marie: No, because I would make sure I had enough art paper, and if I wanted any colors, I’d swipe ’em. I’d make up for it. [laughs] CBC: Fair enough!

Marie: No, I didn’t mind it at all. I liked what I was doing and I was still getting paid. If he wants to use shortcuts, okay, if he’s smart enough to do it.

CBC: For instance, Jack Kirby drew a Fantastic Four story and he introduced the Silver Surfer. Stan didn’t create that character. Jack did. But there’s still people who think Stan created the character.

Marie: Well, why didn’t Jack make a big fuss? Because he could have and Stan probably would have said. “Well, Jack, that’s fine,” and they could have made up for it with a pension or something like that.

CBC: The family made out, finally.

Marie: Yeah, but the thing is, Jack didn’t have to grouse about it. Not that Stan was right. But Jack could’ve corrected it because Stan couldn’t have done those things without Jack. So he could’ve talked to Stan and gotten what he wanted, I’m sure. So I don’t blame Stan that much.

Because Jack, I think, could have talked Stan into anything.

Without Jack on most of those characters, there would be nothing. But Stan was still pretty much of a genius in what he did.

CBC: What did Stan do?

Marie: Well, I think Stan was a damn good writer! He could make something out of just a phrase. I mean, he could see an entire story around a simple phrase — “That’s the situation!” He was good, and it’s excellent to work with a writer like that. You know, you don’t have to do all the work.

CBC: Stan also created the whole myth of the Marvel Bullpen, right? He created this whole promotional kind of huckster, right?

Marie: [Laughs] Yeah. Well, remember that big picture I did of all of ‘em? That big office picture? That was the way Stan liked being. He was just jolly happy and loved everybody. That was the one I did of all the characters in the office. Oh, gee. I always forget the names of ’em. The production staff, the letterers. Just like the office, the entrance over here and I drew people where they were stationed.

CBC: Oh, yeah! The FOOM cover.

Marie: Yeah, for FOOM. That’s it. You remember. I don’t. [laughs] That was so much fun!

CBC: Did you come in every day?

Illustations © Marie Severin and the estate of John Severin.

Marie: Yeah, because I could dabble in everything.

CBC: So nine to five?

Marie: Nine to five. Sometimes, if I freelanced, and it was due the next day, I would color a book overnight.

CBC: Take it home?

Marie: Yeah, I would take it, color it, and come in late the next day.

CBC: And these are the color guides, right? Where you have “YR2” or “B2” or whatever?

Marie: Yeah. I’d color right on the same size. Number two was a dot. Number three was a line and sometimes later on, the line… What it was, was this is 25, this is 25, this was 50 and then say 25 red and 25 yellow made flesh. And say 50 red and 50 orange and put a B2 in there and you get a brown.

CBC: B2 would be black?

Marie: No. B2 would be dot. Two is a dot. Three is a line, and black was solid. So you’d put a thing on the outside of the page border with an arrow to where it is in the spit and put, “This is a night sky of BR2,” which means red with a red dot and black with a black dot and that makes it a little deeper. Same with greens. You can have B2 and yellow would be a bright green and B2 and yellow3 would be a darker green. And then YB would be yellow-blue. And those three combinations of yellow, red, and blue make your flesh, browns, your purples. Yellow and red does that.

CBC: So, Photostatted pages would go with your color guides and go up to World Color? Then they would do that all out there?

Marie: Yeah, I would color the pages. When you think of who’s involved, first there’s the writer, then there’s the penciler, then there’s the inker, then there’s the Photostatter…

CBC: And the letterer.

Marie: The letterer. I missed the letterer. It’s all reduced down, the colorist gets it, it’s sent to the printer. The printer separates it so we get separation there. Now sometimes — very rarely — an artist on the covers want certain things done, certain highlights. And they would do so with an overlay showing where they want the yellow highlight, for instance. Very rarely this happened. They didn’t know how to do it, really. [laughs] CBC: Would that be for just like somebody special like Steranko or something?

Marie: Yeah. And they’d send a note to the separators.

And they would just follow what needed to be and they were grateful to have the whole color thing than just guess who to do it.

CBC: So, was Stan Goldberg doing coloring, too?

Marie: Oh, yeah! He did 90% of it.

CBC: He did 90% and you did the other 10%?

Marie: I did staff stuff. Anything on staff that was needed in a hurry.

CBC: If it was in a hurry, then you’d take it home and you’d color it?

Marie: Oh, yeah. If something happened in a story — and it happened very rarely — two similar situations. Explosions or two different tragedies might be in two different books.

It might be two different writers didn’t know the other guy was doing the same situation. Say the Brooklyn Bridge broke up in this one and the Brooklyn Bridge blew up in this one in the same month! You can’t have that.

CBC: Keep it in the overall continuity.

Marie: Well, suppose Captain America had the Brooklyn Bridge blow up and Spider-Man had the Brooklyn Bridge fall down. You can’t have that in the same month so, “Oh my god! We have to change that!”

CBC: So you were reading every story?

Marie: Well, they were trying to get it so there was an overall consistency to the line.

CBC: Oh, you did the corrections!

Marie: Yeah.

CBC: “Oh, this can’t happen so I’ve gotta… ” Marie: Yeah. Stan would try to review all that’s going on COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

and he’d say, “Wait a minute! There’s a bridge explosion at the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building. But if they blow these up they can’t have it in two comics in the same month! [laughs] “Captain America blew it up last week!”

CBC: So on a typical week would the freelancers come on on Friday to drop off their jobs and then pick up a check?

Marie: It could be any day it was due.

CBC: Stan was only there three days a week, right? He worked at home two days a week, I think.

Marie: If he did work at home, I don’t remember. In the early days, I thought he was there very day. I forget.

CBC: You also started doing specialty work, right? Like, Stan would call you and you would do specialty work [shows Marie licensing work] like that?

Marie: Yeah. Oh, I think I drew that.

CBC: You did.

Marie: Oh, that’s good.

CBC: You can tell your work, can’t you? [Shows her Esquire spread] That must have been a good paying job!

Marie: I did a cover for Esquire, too. Joe Namath on the cover standing on the Empire State Building…

CBC: Yeah! That was you? I thought it was Mort Drucker!

Wow, that must have been good paying!

Marie: I think it was a thousand dollars.

CBC: [Indicating Esquire illustration] Jack did this. Except you can tell that Johnny did that [Spider-Man image].

Marie: Yeah.

CBC: Jack said he was very well paid for this.

Marie: Oh, yeah.

CBC: You know, when I was a kid, I went to a vending machine, put in a quarter, got stickers, and I was delighted to see they were drawn by you. I could tell they were drawn by you!

Marie: Oh, I remember doing ’em. I forget what the subject was.

CBC: It was Doctor Strange fighting Dormammu.

Marie: Dor-muh-moo! [laughs] I used to call him Dor-muhmoo!

CBC: [Laughs] I don’t know what it is!

Marie: Did you see the Doctor Strange movie?

CBC: It just came out last year. It’s really good!

Marie: Oh, I probably won’t see it.

CBC: [Hands Marie a copy of Kull the Conqueror] Can you sign this?

Marie: Sure, I’d be flattered!

CBC: Do you miss drawing all the time?

Marie: No, I don’t. It doesn’t bother me. There’s gotta be something wrong with me.

CBC: [Laughs] You drew an awful lot. That’s for sure.

Marie: Okay, if you say so.

CBC: Thank you, Marie.

Top: Yours truly with the Mirthful One in Winter 2017. Above: Self-caricature by Marie Severin from a 1998 change of address notice. Below: Brother John affectionately renders his little sister for John Benson’s EC Comics fanzine, Squa Tront #9 [1983], envisioning Marie as a Civil War era warrior-slash-nurse-colorist.

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kirby on the boob tube

All About Bob and Jack Paul Power on that time Kirby guest-starred on Bob Newhart’s comics-based sitcom

by JON B. COOKE Twenty-five years ago and less than two years before his passing, the King of Comics received his widest recognition in front of an American audience when he was honored with a guest appearance — playing himself, the great Jack Kirby — on broadcast television. It was 9:30 p.m. (EST), on Friday, Jan. 29, 1993, when the comic book creator was first viewed on national TV in an episode of Bob Newhart’s third headlining situation comedy, Bob, a short-lived series in which the comedian portrayed comics artist Bob McKay, buttoned-down creator of the super-hero Mad-Dog. This is the story of Kirby’s moment in that spotlight, as told by Paul Power, an Australian-raised cartoonist and storyboard artist who facilitated the legend’s appearance, as well as the participation of other comic book luminaries.

Described by Wizard magazine Above: TV Guide cover from at the time as “short, muscular, Oct. 3–9, 1992. Below: Cover and clean-shaven, with thinning

detail by penciler Ty Templeton and inker Jeff Albrecht from Mad-Dog #1 [May 1993] , the shortlived Marvel l spin-off of the Bob TV series’ fictional comic book title.

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Mad-Dog characters TM & ©1992 Paramount Pictures, Inc.

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black hair,” Power had been hired as the show’s credited illustrator and, with his experience alongside any number of comic book pros while working in the animation field, he served as unofficial consultant on aspects related to the comics industry. During a story conference attended by the Bob team, one teleplay was almost discarded.

“On Monday,” Power shared, “we would have our story meetings — the read-throughs — and I’d be there with the production crew and actors, and we’d figure out if there would be any problem putting on any particular show.” The program’s creator-producers — Cheers veterans Cheri and Bill Steinkellner, and Phoef Sutton — were having doubts about their script involving an awards ceremony. “On that episode, ‘You Can’t Win,’ they said, ‘We’re not sure we can do this,’ because,” Power explained, “it contained comic book artists (who weren’t named) and they didn’t think they could do it. I shot up, like a rat up a drain pipe, and said, ‘I can make this happen!’

They all looked at me and said, ‘Alright, Paul,’ and I said, ‘Believe me, I can make this show happen,’ so they said, ‘Well, let’s do it then!’”

And on Bob, which is set in the comic book bullpen of fictitious Chicago-based publisher Ace Comics, the diminutive body-builder from Down Under contributed mightily to the show’s first season, including production of all the prop artwork, being the literal on-screen hand creating the drawings in the show’s title sequence, serving as background actor (with an occasional line and onscreen credit), and — for “You Can’t Win,” which imitated an actual Eisner Award ceremony at the annual San Diego Comic-Con — Power was the de facto producer, enlisted to enhance the installment with touches of authenticity.

The episode’s plot involves cartoonist Bob McKay and writer/studio head Harlan Stone reacting to multiple “Buster Award” nominations for their Mad-Dog series and the bullpen’s appearance at the ceremony, which is attended by their “peers,” real-life cartoonists and comics pros. Though an inter-company rival snags the lion’s share of trophies, the Mad-Dog crew ultimately wins the “Best Comic Book” statue and McKay scores “Best Artist.”

“So I got to produce that episode,” Power said, “and, through [San Diego Comic-Con co-founder] Shel Dorf, I got [cartoonist] Mel Keefer’s phone number and I asked Mark Evanier to get Sergio Aragonés. My concept was to get cartoonists who could act and knew show business — Sergio had done Norman, Is That You? and Laugh-In, and Mel had done the artwork for How to Murder Your Wife — and I wanted Kirby.”

The storyboard artist had become a fan of Jack Kirby in 1963, upon picking up a copy of The Avengers #2. “Me being a cartoonist in the first place,” Power said, “a lot of it had to do with loving the work of Jack Kirby.” Thus, by the late 1970s, when he arrived in the U.S. to work at Hanna Barbera, Power was determined to make contact with the King of Comics, and it was at that animation studio where the two first encountered one another.

“One of the main things I wanted to do when I

Bob photography by Kim Gottlieb-Walker TM & ©1992 Paramount Pictures, Inc.

came out to California,” Power said, “was to meet Jack Kirby, shake his hand, and tell him, ‘Thank you very much!’” Whether the comics veteran was there to do design work or be interviewed, Power couldn’t recall, but the meeting was nonetheless unforgettable. “Well, he turned up and, you gotta understand,” he confessed, “I was built like a brick sh*thouse, and still am — I’ve always been in good shape, but I was in fightin’ shape back then — so, when I see that Kirby’s there, I just shoot up out of my seat, forget about my job, because I was thunderstruck.

I’m meeting Jack Kirby! It was like meeting Elvis! Your legs go all wobbly… and he looks at me and says, ‘Who’re you? Captain America?’ I said, ‘No, no, I’m more like Bucky,’ and we had a good laugh.”

Power continued, “Jack started telling me about the Aussies he met during World War II and we were talking about Captain America, and all this stuff. I told him how great I thought he was and he said, ‘Why? I thank you!’

Which was one of the things Jack would say… I was just knocked out! Anyway, I talked with him for about an hour (and can’t remember the whole conversation) but, the next day, I come to work and there’s this drawing of me in a Kirby pose and it says, ‘Paul: Really great seeing you yesterday. Jack Kirby.’ I’m completely knocked-out, gobsmacked, and can’t say anything. Then I see Dave Stevens and Russ Heath are snickering — ‘Hee-hee-hee!’ — and I say, ‘What?’ Mike Sekowsky really isn’t reacting and he says, ‘I’m sorry, Paul, that’s really not a Kirby drawing.

We were playing a gag on you,’ and he sheepishly added, ‘I drew that.’ I said, ‘Oh, it’s all right, Mike,’ but I was crushed. It was a great drawing, man!”

(The star-studded line-up in TV animation during that era was chockful of extraordinary talent, many of whom doubled as legendary pranksters. At H-B, Power stated, “I moved into what I called the ‘Rude Room,’ with another Australian, Janine Dawson, a very good cartoonist, and Dave Stevens, Russ Heath, and Mike Sekowsky, and we had a blast! It was so funny! Scott Shaw was just across the hall, and in the next cubicle was Bob Foster of Myron Moose fame, and Don Morgan, who had worked for Chuck Jones and Walt Kelly, was our boss. Doug Wildey and Morgan took me on after Bill Hanna said to hire me.”)

Power periodically kept in touch with the King thereafter. “I went over to the Kirbys’ house a couple of times, usually with Shel Dorf. I’d see Jack at these art shows they held out in Orange County where he was a judge, and I went out to the house one time with Steve Rude… so I’d go out and see Jack and I’d call him and all that stuff.”

Once, the Kirbys attended a party hosted by Power. “It was the first time Jack met my (now ex-) wife, Bea, who was a big, buxom, and six-foot woman (and I’m all of five-foot one), and he said, ‘Big Barda! Is it true you women are taking over the world?’ Which was great because she loved that and knew who Big Barda was!”

Power shared how he landed the sitcom job: “A few years before Bob, I was called

by Anton Furst, the original production designer for Batman (a British guy who is no longer with us — he took a short walk off the roof of a three-story parking lot — really sad because he was a great guy). Anyway, he calls and I’m seeing all these great penCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

cil drawings… and I said, ‘What’s this?’ And he said, ‘The secret Michael Jackson project.’ I went, ‘Oh, bullsh*t! This is the next Batman movie! You’re going to have Michael Jackson as the Riddler!’ They laugh and go, ‘Oh, no, no, no!’ I said, ‘Don’t f*cking come with the raw prawn with me!’ So I was cracking them up. And at this stage I wasn’t bothered whether I got the job or not, and just having a nice time. They said, ‘No, no, seriously, this is what it is.’ I said, ‘Awright, awright. Have it your way. I’m up for it.’ They said, ‘Well, we like your work,’ because I had showed them my storyboards for Predator and they liked

Above: Bob Newhart and Jack Kirby on the set of Bob. Below: First row from left is Jack Kirby, Paul Power, Jim Lee, Bob Newhart, and Mell Lazarus.

Second row, from left is Sergio Aragonés, Mel Keefer, Bob Kane, and Marc Silvestri. The artists all appeared in the award ceremony sequence in the Jan. 29, 1993, episode of Bob entitled “You Can’t Win.”

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Above and inset right: Paul Power’s artwork featuring MadDog and his buddies used in the title sequence of Bob, which included the sitcom’s star, Bob Newhart, smiling his approval.

Below: In a few scenes during “You Can’t Win,” viewers can see Roz and Jack Kirby attending the “Buster Awards.” The show’s credited illustrator, Paul Power, was seated to the King’s left during the sequence.

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Mad-Dog and Bob TM & ©1992 Paramount Pictures, Inc.

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that. I had a copy of my comic book, East Meets West, which had been printed in 1990 by Innovation, and I had my phone number in the back of that comic, which got me quite a few calls. So I made copies of my storyboards and inscribed a copy of my comic book to Michael Jackson, and then I never heard anything! The next thing I learned was that Anton Furst had committed suicide, which was very sad, and then I get this call, from Dahl Delu, the production designer who had been an art director on Cheers, and he said, ‘We’re doing this new show about a comic book company and it’s starring Bob Newhart.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, I like Bob Newhart!’ He said, ‘We want you to come in and show me your stuff.’ So I show him my stuff, he likes it, and hires me.”

In 1993, Power told Andy Mangels, for a Mad-Dog #4 [Sept. 1993] text piece, that he designed the character from his very first sketch of “Mankind’s Best Friend.”

“I tried to make him look like a Doberman [Pinscher] with pointy ears, and it ended up looking slightly like Batman. That resemblance became a joke in the fourth episode.”

A suggestion made back in the ’70s by Alex Toth to take acting lessons at Austra-

lia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art proved fortuitous for the new Bob employee (“It’ll help you with your cartooning because you’ll get into characters and play with different emotions,” the legendary cartoonist told Power).

“I was hired to draw all the prop artwork and possibly to appear on the show, as well, because Dahl Delu said, ‘It would be good if you were in the background.’ I became a bit of an asset to them and my job went from just being an artist to also being an actor as a background player.

Sometimes I’d be drawing for next week’s episode right there in the background. I’m always in the shots. There are only two episodes in which I don’t appear. I also had lines on a couple of episodes, because that was a part of my deal, and they said they would give me a couple of speaking lines, which they did. So it worked out fine.”

Though he is consistently seen in the bullpen sequences through season one, Power appears most prominently in “The Lost Episode,” where he sits between two cast members watching Bob’s “daughter” jump rope, and, in the “Christmas Story” episode, the artist-actor is heard speaking the line, “He’s wearing the wrong pants!”

Power confided that had the show been extended to a second season (based in the comic setting), the producers hoped to increase his presence in the series, expanding on his role as “Paul” à la Cliff Clavin or Norm Peterson in the producers’ previous success, the sitcom Cheers.

For the Australian import, the job itself was sublime.

“If I said anything that was okay, they went with it. They were very easy to work with and, at times, I would work with the writers and suggest gags. I was in a couple of writing sessions. I got along very well with everybody on the show. It was a dream gig.”

The show’s setting was a perfect fit for the longtime comics fan.”The producers wanted to use a concept that was completely different than anything else, so they picked comics. The funny thing is that when you’re in the thick of these things, you just do it… It was a quick whirlwind and it was just a lot of fun,” Power said.

(Interestingly, a then-recently released coffee table book was utilized in the show. “They based a lot of Bob’s office set designs on photos of the actual Marvel Bullpen seen in the book, Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics, by Les Daniels,” Power revealed.)

The idea to get Kirby on the comics-based TV show first came to Power even before he secured the Bob gig.

“In my initial interview,” he shared, “they said, ‘We’d really like some cartoonists on the show.’ I said, ‘I can do that! But you gotta have Jack Kirby!’” (Plus, he recognized the producers might be receptive, as he pondered, “There must have been some love of comics with the producers because they were really into it.”)

Naturally, the Bob showrunners suggested having the

ative team hoped to make the “Busters” a recurring affair for the series. “I wanted to pick cartoonists who could really act mainly because, if this show worked and we were to continue, an awards episode would have become an annual event and we had the potential at least to go on for five years, and we were hoping this would be the first of many.”

As immortalized by Kim Gottlieb-Walker’s on-set photo of the comedian and the King used as the cover of Comics Interview #121 [1993], Bob Newhart (who had professed to Power his childhood desire to be a cartoonist, as well as his affection for both Captain America and Captain Marvel) was delighted to meet and get a chance to work with Jack Kirby. When Thibodeaux, who drove the couple to the studio, arrived on set with the Kirbys for the first rehearsal, the sitcom star, a notoriously shy and reserved celebrity, bounded from his dressing room and enthusiastically greeted a boyhood idol. “Bob came rushing out,” Power said, “and he said, ‘Jack Kirby? Captain America?

Boom!’ That was really cool.”

With the award ceremony scenes fully cast (featuring extras that included Art Thibert, his father, and brother, as well as Power himself, who can be seen seated right next to his hero), it was decided to include the King’s beloved in the sequence. “The entire crew really liked the loving

Above: The cast of the first season of Bob. Top row, from left: Ruth Kobart as Bob McKay’s curmudgeonly longtime associate Iris Frankel; Andrew Bilgore as insecure, nerdy gofer Albie Lutz; and John Cygan as arrogant McKay collaborator Harlan Stone. Bottom row, from left: Cynthia Stevenson as McKay’s flighty daughter Trisha; Bob Newhart as cartoonist Bob McKay; Carlene Williams as McKay’s sensible wife Kaye; and Timothy Fall as wacky inker Chad Pfefferle. Below: Paul Power appeared in nearly every first season episode as a background extra in scenes set in comics studio, though he was occasionally given a line and some prominence. At left, he’s between Fall and guest star Dick Martin; and at right , between Bilgore and Fall.

Bob TM & ©1992 Paramount Pictures, Inc.

most recognizable name in comics on that episode. “The producers wanted to get Stan Lee on the show,” Power said, “but I said, ‘No, if you do, I’ll quit.’ They were kind of shocked by that and I said, ‘No, let’s make this for Jack.’”

He clarified, “I’m not anti-Stan Lee, but I just wanted Jack to get some recognition away from Stan and the whole Marvel thing.” Plus the King was obviously in his twilight years, thus recognition was particularly important.

With the help of Kirby associate and artist Mike Thibodeaux, Power finally pitched the legendary cartoonist by phone. “When I did talk with Jack, telling him I’m doing this show with Bob Newhart and I really would like him to be on it, I asked him if he would do it, and, without hesitation, he said, ‘Anything to help!’ Which was great!”

In the meantime, ably assisted by professional comics inker Art Thibert, Power was in a mad dash to cast all of the other award ceremony roles with a diverse group of comics pros. “Artie was there when I was calling all of the artists to see if they could be on the show,” he said. “I had to work it very, very quickly.”

Regarding those who declined, Power revealed, “I called Burne Hogarth, because he was never shy from speaking (and sometimes you’d have a hard time shutting him up!), but when I called him, he said, ‘Oh gosh, gee-willikers, I can’t do it!’ I couldn’t believe it. And I called Alex Toth and said, ‘Alex, I’m doing this show called Bob.’ He said, ‘Not interested!’ (Afterwards, Alex said, ‘I should have done that show!’) I tried to get my good friend Mike Royer, but he missed out on that one. I called Steve Leialoha and Trina Robbins, but the show wasn’t going to fly them in, so they refused, which is fair enough.”

Of the comics pros who did make it on the show, Power said, “I got ’em all except for Sergio, who Evanier contacted.” It proved a diverse bunch, including comic strip artists Mell Lazarus and Mel Keefer (the latter whom Power knew from animation), as well as a pair of Image artists in their first flush of success. “I called Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee because they knew how to pontificate. In fact, with his lines in the show, we were really laughing at Silvestri, who gave a really long-winded, Academy Award kind of speech, which I found really funny.” Finally, Batman’s co-creator accepted an invitation to appear.

“I’d never met Bob Kane before and they mentioned they wanted him,” Power shared, “so I said, ‘Yeah, let’s get Bob Kane,’ and I called Shel Dorf and we got Bob Kane on. Now, with everybody else, I had personal contact with and I had a good idea of what they could do, but with Bob Kane, I had no idea. His wife was an actress and Bob was up there at the podium going on and on, and I had to say, ‘Just say the f*cking lines, Bob.’” If Bob went into multiple seasons, Power and the cre-

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Above: Paul Power collected sketches from most of the “You Can’t Win” guest stars, a souvenir of the episode he has treasured ever since.

Below: Paul Power (left) and John Romita, Jr., on the Bob set in 1992. The longtime friends have collaborated on a film together, I Just Draw, written and directed by Power.

Bottom: Paul Power and the Kirbys, Jack and Roz.

short amount of time.” The Aussie also managed to include his own work in the sequence, most prominently the cover of Power’s Professor Om #1, seen on an easel in the show. (Om and pages from his East Meets West comics appear on the bullpen walls throughout the first season.)

Overall, everyone on set, especially the producers, were impressed with Kirby’s delivery and his personality.

“The Steinkellners found Jack completely charming and they just loved him,” Power said. “What’s not to love with Jack Kirby? He really was the nicest guy in the world. And he did a great job! I didn’t have to worry about him. Even at rehearsals, he nailed it every time!”

Power did recall one problem during rehearsals: “On that Bob episode, the cartoonists all got along famously and the only people we had trouble with — and it made the producers very upset and that fell on my shoulders — were Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri, who were acting like prima donnas, late for rehearsal and f*cking around. So they received the cold shoulder and wondered why their experience was so bad on the show. At one run-through, Art Thibert and I played their parts and, if they didn’t turn up on time, we were going to play their parts on-air. We were secretly hoping they wouldn’t turn up, but they did and they did a great job just being themselves.”

After days of rehearsal, the final taping went swimmingly. “It was great fun!” Power exclaimed. “We got in a lot of comic book references. We plugged Maggie Thompson’s Comics Buyer’s Guide!” Also included were some in-jokes, as Power’s name can be heard being mentioned a couple of times during the episode, once when Lazarus cites “Paul Power’s Sex Cats” — a faux ACE Comics series mentioned over the course of the 1992–93 season — as a “Best Super-Hero Annual” nominee.

Throughout Bob’s first year, Power did his part to retain the most receptive audience possible for the live tapings of such a comics-centric series. “Shel Dorf and his San Diego comic book club attended for one episode and they had a great time,” Power remembered. “Even Bob Newhart said, ‘That was the best audience.’ But the truly best audience was the episode we had with Kirby.

The fire marshal warned us that we had too many people, but they gave us a break and relaxed the rules a bit. We had an overflowing crowd. Bob would come out to do the warm-up and the audience was crazy! That was a good night, a helluva night!”

Power gushed, “So many cartoonists and fans from San Diego were in the audience that day and they just loved it. All the actors couldn’t believe the vibe that they were getting from the audience. It was really something.

And it was really a very special day and my favorite experience on the whole show.”

Delighted with the results of his hard work, Power remains appreciative for the assistance of others who contributed to make it happen, expressing his indebtedness to Thibert for his effort and, Power shared, “I was really grateful for Mike Thibodeaux for helping me out.”

He continued, “My main motivation on that episode was to give Jack his due in my own little way, and I thank the Steinkellners and Sutton for making that happen. They were great and they were probably some of the nicest bosses I’ve ever had. So I was able to help make this show happen. It was pretty bizarre and a lot of fun. Great fun. Probably one of the best jobs I worked on in Hollywood.”

Regarding “You Can’t Win,” Jerry Boyd spoke with Sergio Aragonés and Mell Lazarus for The Jack Kirby Collector [#55, Fall 2010] about their time on set. The MAD cartoonist shared about the King of Comics, “[H]e was a very quiet man, not very talkative. I didn’t really chat with Jack that much. He sat with his wife… which was adorable. I talked more to her than Kirby. But it was all small talk, nothing about the show.”

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Sketch page characters TM & © the respective copyright holders.

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relationship between Jack and Roz Kirby,” Power revealed, “and I said, ‘It would be nice if we can put Roz in there, too,’ and they said, “Yeah, let’s do it!”

Indeed, the man’s betterhalf is repeatedly seen onscreen sitting beside her husband in the televised show.

The final broadcast also features Jack Kirby being introduced by Mell Lazarus as the creator of Captain America, receiving applause as he walks to the podium, and serving as presenter of the “Best Comics Cover” award (which goes to the titular lead’s rival).

Beside the stage is an oversize repro of his Jack Kirby Masterworks cover, and an illuminated screen features his signature and an image of Captain Victory.

In fact, as with any TV or movie production, clearances are an important aspect and it was left up to Power to insure that visual elements used as set dressing were creator-owned to keep within budget. While securing the use of Lazarus’s Momma, Silvestri’s Cyber Force, Lee’s WildC.A.T.s, Aragonés’ Groo, and Keffer’s Mac Divot was doubtlessly a cinch, this task led to another sticky situation involving the originator of the Caped Crusader.

“I picked artists like Mell Lazarus and the Image guys because they owned their strips,” Power explained, “so there wouldn’t be a big problem with rights, but with DC I got a bit worried. Even with Kirby, we had Fighting American, which he owned with Joe Simon, so I was very aware of licensing deals and how that could mess things up. With Bob Kane, DC Comics calls our office and says they wanted $20,000 a minute to show the Batman image.

We’re about to shoot — this is the day before — and our production manager calls me on the set and he said, ‘We got a problem. What are we going to do?’ A little bit of a panic set in. So I go over to Bob Kane… and I say, ‘So everybody is going to be up there, Bob, with their own creations right next to them, but nobody is going to know who you are because we can’t use Batman!”

Lickety-split, the veteran cartoonist jumps on the horn.

“Kane uses the stage phone and calls DC,” Power said, “and he gives them an earful. Well, within not even two minutes, maybe three, I get a call from the production manager, who says, ‘I don’t know what you did, Paul, but DC said we can use any of their characters at any time!’

And that was it! They folded!”

(In the episode, a likely Sheldon Moldoff-drawn Batman figure is used.)

Work for the episode also included prepping the cleared images to decorate the “Buster Awards” set. “I used an animation camera to shoot all the artwork and then do the retouching,” Power said. “And Art Thibert helped me with that, and we managed to turn it around in a very

Bob TM & ©1992 Paramount Pictures, Inc. Captain Victory TM & © the estate of Jack Kirby.

dating. “I had a deadline at the time. The TV set was like a studio, though! There was an artist’s drawing board on it, so I just brought my work with me.”

Asked if rehearsals were arduous, Aragonés replied, “No, not much. I had some dialogue, I remember. I’d been on TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes; Speak Up, America; and Laugh-In, so it was not a new experience for me.” He added with a laugh, “It was a new experience for most of the others! Everyone did well. But Bob Kane kept saying, ‘Cut!’ The director would say, ‘The only guy who does that stuff is me, Mr. Kane.’ [Kane] was so used to doing things his way. If he didn’t like a scene, or the way it was going, he’d just yell, ‘Cut!’ The director would explain, ‘Mr. Kane, don’t worry about it, we have a lot to cut from!’… Except for Bob Kane, everyone behaved… It was a big party.

When the time came, we just stood up and did our small parts and took our bows. Everyone had a good time….”

Asked to sum up his work on Bob, the cartoonist offered, “[Bob Newhart] was a very funny man! It was not the best experience of my life, but it… was a lot of fun! It’s not the situation people think. It’s work. You stop, you do something over — you take a break, and so on. It’s a work situation. We enjoyed it.”

For his part, Lazarus recounted, “The only thing I can clearly remember about the Bob show experience is as follows: There was a longish scene during the show, in which I was playing the part of the NCS [National Cartoonists Society] president (which I actually was). From up on the stage, I was supposed to introduce one of our members to an ‘NCS Reuben audience’ comprised of actors and extras. As it happened though, I forgot my lines and started to laugh — a real case of the giggles—for about three minutes. The director yelled, ‘Cut!’ and had me start over. Again, I began to laugh and couldn’t deliver my lines.

This time, to make it worse, others on the set had begun to laugh. My gaffe was repeated a few times, with everyone laughing hilariously, including the director himself.”

The Momma creator continued, “Finally, with amazing patience, that estimable gentleman brought everything to a standstill and waited patiently for me to pull myself together. After a few minutes’ break, I tried once again, and finally got my lines out.”

In Power’s estimation, “Even when we had the TV Guide cover, which usually gives a show a big bump in ratings, where we had Bob on the cover opening up his shirt, doing his Superman schtick with that SuperBob logo, but we got pre-empted that week by the network with a Kenny Rogers special, so that hurt us. And they kept shifting the show all over the place and they kept interfering and changing stuff, but the Steinkillners and Sutton had it right the first time and the network should have just left them alone to do what they were doing, because that was pretty funny.”

In the what-could-have-been department, Power revealed there was a planned installment that would have specifically dealt with contemporary comics. “They wrote an episode that dealt with the San Diego Con,” he said, “which would have included Frank Miller, who was living out here at that stage. After I saw him at the Golden Apple comic shop and told him about the show, he said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to do the show.’ But that didn’t transpire. I had John Romita, Jr., visit the set and I introduced him to everybody and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll have Romita on the show.’ And Johnny was going to do it but, by then, I told him, ‘Geez, I think we’re going to get cancelled.’”

In recognition for his efforts on the Bob series, and most likely his achievements on the “You Can’t Win” episode, Power received an Inkpot Award at the 1993 San Diego Comic-Con. Even more important than that honor, he admitted, were the words the King’s widow later expressed to Power. “After Jack passed away, Roz came out to attend my 12th wedding anniversary party, which John Romita, Jr., and the DiCaprios also attended, though she hadn’t been out of the house since Jack died. Roz said that whenever she wants to see her Jackie, she puts that show on. That really made me feel good.”

Top: Bob end credit screenshots of “You Can’t Win” guests and Paul Power credit. Above: Top is comic book prop used in Bob with Paul Power art, and bottom is Marvel’s Mad-Dog #1. Below: Screenshot of Jack Kirby in his 1993 appearance on Bob.

Despite its short run of only 33 episodes, when it was set in a comic book studio (as the second season — of only eight episodes — was a retooling of the show that dumped much of the cast and changed the workplace to a greeting card company), the first season of Bob is an interesting cultural artifact in regards to the real-world comics scene. It touches upon the conflict between wholesome and hyper-violent material, reflecting the emergence of gritty, dark content over lighter fare, while also commenting on the growing sexual objectification of women in the four-color milieu, and even gives acknowledgment to the Kefauver/Wertham anti-comics crusade of the 1950s, with the remarkable Mark Evanier-scripted episode, “The Man Who Killed Mad-Dog.” Beyond that, the series is an effective comedy, more a victim of CBS network’s repeated shuffling of the show across the weekly prime time schedule than its talented cast and crew.

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The Comet TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Dateline strip © Fred Hembeck.

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comics in the library

The Tales of Nathan Hale

Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales TM & © Nathan Hale.

Cartoonist Nathan Hale’s clever and black-humored series on U.S. historical events

ing full well that, unlike Scheherazade, he will not survive beyond the end of his tales. The author/artist also includes additional pages of historical bios, a sources page, a humorous description of his “baby researchers,” One of the pleasant aspects of my job is finding and reading a work that is truly a great read, but also something I normally wouldn’t have touched and a bonus tale of Crispus Attucks, the first African-American to die in the conflict between the Colonies and the British. Overall, One Dead Spy in the course of my daily reading. After seeing the covers in the online is a great set-up for the series and a fine book in its own right. catalogs for about a couple of years, I finally ordered the Nathan Hale’s Book two, Big Bad Ironclad, is an entertaining recounting of the first Hazardous Tales series for the library. battle of the steel battleships the Monitor and the Merrimac, during the Six titles came into our library this year, and the one I was really anticipating, Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood, which deals with World Civil War, and the third entry, and funniest in the series that I’ve read so far, is Donner Dinner Party. The destiny of the ill-fated wagon train in the War I, I actually haven’t had a chance to read yet. It’s been on a steady mountains of the Sierra Nevada is a huge historical backdrop in my home check-out since it arrived. Great for the pick… not so great for me. state of Nevada. The twisted humor of the title is a good signpost as to However, I have read the other five and, truth to tell, I have been how Hale approaches this story of lies, sheer blind ignorance, a horrenvastly entertained! Writer and artist Nathan Hale is enormously talented dous overland trek, and its ultimate grim, unappetizing conclusion. James at what he does. And what he does is a genuine hat trick. He is making American history — authentic, factually accurate American history, blem- Reed, one of the major players in the Donner tragedy, certainly doesn’t get handled with kid gloves here. He’s a complete flaming idiot, one who ishes and all—a subject that is both thoughtful and engrossing. But he’s makes the wrong decision, and not just the wrong decision, but the worst sneakily doing it in an utterly perverse way. possible wrong decision at every turn in the party’s fortune.

See, the underlying premise of these books is that Nathan Hale, Hale still manages to make the narrative proceed with a great deal the historical guy (no known relationship to modern-day author Nathan of humor. One of the most hilarious is a scene where the wagon train Hale) narrates all of these books by spinning historical yarns, much passes Independence Rock and James Reed calls out to his children like Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights tales, to prolong his life. All of the to take a look at it. They can barely see (or breathe) through the overstories are told by Colonial-era Hale while he’s standing on the gallows, whelming dust cloud being raised by the wagons and animals in front of noose around neck, shared with his hangman and British provost guard. them, and their dad wants them to look at a rock. Any parent who’s ever That’s already way more twisted than most middle school books get and driven cross-country with kids to have them experience our vast nation you’re barely into book one. Trust me, it gets a lot more weird down the will recognize the youths’ response to looking at another rock. So far, this road! The provost guard is, naturally, pro-British, but remains completely volume is my favorite. fascinated by Hale’s stories, as is the hangman, who is fat and jolly and The Underground Abductor is fifth in the series, and it is a bio of sorts reminds me of an Evan Dorkin character (although nowhere near as prodealing with the life of Harriet Tubman both before and during the Civil fane). One of the ongoing black humor jokes, which runs throughout the War. Hale does an excellent job expressing her fierce devotion to family, series, is that the hangman is entirely appalled whenever the historical narrative turns dark or someone or something is treated badly, but is com- even though a number of them were not nearly as devoted to her. This pletely unable to relate that to his own occupation and the consequences book isn’t as humorous as previous volumes and Hale even mentions in the narrative how difficult it is to be funny when detailing the horrendous resulting from his work. Sound familiar? condition and life of slaves in the Antebellum South. After her own esThe first episode that writer Hale scribes is naturally the story of his narrator, the historical Nathan Hale, who is best remembered today by his cape from slavery, Tubman spent years rescuing family members, as well as anyone else who wanted to travel the Underground Railroad system dying words,“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” It’s with her. Tubman was not only one of the most important known members called One Dead Spy. Writer Hale does a great job telling the biography of the Underground Railroad, but she was also the first woman in U.S. of this doomed, naïve young man, who was woefully unfit for the spying history to lead a military expedition during wartime. mission he found himself on, while also telling a spellbinding version of Book six is Alamo All-Stars and details the saga of the 1836 Texas the American Revolution’s early days.

Revolution, and it’s a fine addition to the series. I’m looking forward to But, beyond the character-building and historical information, the reading future books in writer/artist Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales series book is page upon page of gut-busting humor. Some is on the level of the Three Stooges, some of it is dryly sardonic (the artist has a startling ability (especially that Benedict Arnold story one he promised in book to make a sideway glance convey a great deal of dry wit and snark), some one). This is a great series with a lot to offer both students and of it is the blackest of black humor. Our narrator tells his own story know- adults.

by R ICHARD J. ARNDT CBC Contributing Editor

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#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Dean Haspiel portrait ©2017 by Kendall Whitehouse.

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The Fox TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Billy Dogma TM & © Dean Haspiel.

My longtime bromance with Dean Edmund Haspiel stretches back to the late ’90s, when I met the Big Apple-born comics creator at some convention, likely the San Diego show. Gregarious, affectionate, and deplorably enthusiastic, the cartoonist is one of those rare birds able to perch between the mainstream and alternative scenes, whether as artist on the Startling Stories: The Thing mini-series for Marvel, as creator of Billy Dogma, “the World’s Last Romantic Anti-Hero,” or as artist-collaborator with the late, great Harvey Pekar on the graphic novel, The Quitter. Of course, in recent years, Dino is known for his partnership with celebrated comics scribe Mark Waid on oldtime Archie Comics’ super-hero The Fox, of which the pair produced two memorable, highly entertaining mini-series starring the floppy-eared, uni-suited acrobatic character, Freak Magnet [2013] and Fox Hunt [’15].

He is also constantly working on many projects, whether creator-owned hero The Red Hook, or plays, or even a TV show.

This all-too brief conversation took place via Skype on Aug. 7, 2017, and was amended and corrected by Dean. The career of the writer/ artist, who has worked in the field since the ’80s assisting Bill Sienkiewicz, Howard Chaykin, and Walter Simonson, is, to our great regret, given too little space here and he is eminently deserving of a much more comprehensive chat.

Still, we’re delighted to include Dino in this issue.

Love ya, man! You do Brooklyn proud!

—JBC

American Splendor TM & © the estate of Harvey Pekar. The Red Hook TM & © Dean Haspiel.

Comic Book Creator: Did you have creative people in your family, Dean?

Dean Haspiel: Yes. My father always sketched and drew things, though not professionally. But he knew how to draw and he never pursued it. Still, whenever he had a pen in his hand, once in a while he would draw a little something and that always impressed me. But he went on to become a writer, with three books about Marilyn Monroe to his credit. The first book was about his friendship with Marilyn during the last eight years of her life. He met her when he was 16, a kid who left his family, lived on the streets at one point, re-started his own life, and during those hard times, meets an angel that greatly impacted his life and world view. And that angel was Marilyn Monroe. They established a mutual friendship. Later on he wrote articles about Hollywood and blonde bombshells for Films in Review and other magazines, and then ultimately got a book deal, and wrote about his experiences with Marilyn.

He’s also an expert regarding Marilyn. Larry King has interviewed him and he’s been on other TV shows. He’s in documentary films about Marilyn, and the BBC has come to him. Folks from Japan have reached out to him… I mean, from all over the place.

CBC: Wow. Dean: So he’s an authority on Marilyn Monroe. And he’s the one who is very respectful about Marilyn because that’s how he feels about her. So there was a lot of Marilyn Monroe in my life, growing up.

My mother, who hails from Gross Pointe, Michigan, was working in some capacity in the theater scene during her college years, and she befriended the actress Shelley Winters in the mid-1960s, who was in some production, I believe, in Michigan. Shelley became friendly with my mom, and my mom wanted to visit New York City and that’s where Shelley introduced my mother to my father, and eventually they got married and had kids, and Shelley became my godmother. So I’m on planet Earth because of Shelley Winters! [Jon laughs] My mother got a job as a secretary at the New York State Council of the Arts, and eventually became deputy director and worked there for 30 years. She was creative by helping the arts — you know, film, dance, art, poetry, theater, and all that stuff.

She’s a very good writer herself, but I don’t think she would ever consider herself an artist.

Nonetheless, I grew up in a very creative, boisterous family. I know there’s a term called A-type personality. I would hazard that both my parents had A-type personality qualities that were obviously passed on to me in some ways, even though I sometimes feel shy, I try to punch through that by just letting my flaws stand out before you, because being vulnerable is what connects us, I believe. I came to understand that later in life. I came to understand that after befriending and collaborating with author Jonathan Ames, I realized that one of his go-tos, what he does thematically, is he makes himself vulnerable to a situation, and to the reader so that the reader or the environment can open up to letting something happen.

And not necessarily judging it, either, you know? Also, working with Harvey Pekar, I discovered one of the things he did was he observed.

He listened. He would jot down what people were saying and doing and that would make up the bulk of his stories. Obviously, the man had his own opinions, but a lot of his stories are just revealing character. And those were the kinds of things I think I adopted from collaborating with Jonathan Ames, Harvey Pekar, and other authors, of course. And that kind

Interview Conducted by

Jon B. Cooke Transcription by Steven Tice Portrait Photography by Kendall Whitehouse COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

This page: Bottom left inset is Harvey Pekar caricature cover detail from American Splendor: Another Dollar [Jan. 2009].

Left is Haspiel’s Brooklyn-based hero, The Red Hook.

Previous page: Top center is vignette of Dean Haspiel’s rendition of The Fox. Middle right inset is Dino at Wizard World Philadelphia in 2015. Bottom left is Billy Dogma vignette from the cover of Keyhole #3 [Jan. 1997].

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Right: A snapshot, taken in 1967, of [from left to right] father James, baby Dean, and mother Barbara Haspiel.

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Photos © the respective copyright holder.

Above and top: Dean’s father, James Haspiel, has written extensively of his friendship with Hollywood superstar Marilyn Monroe while a teenager. At top are photos of the actress and her young pal, and above are covers of his various Monroe-related books.

of stuff insinuated itself into my work.

CBC: What’s the ethnicity of “Haspiel?”

Dean: The name is Austrian. And my mother is Polish, so I’m half-Austrian and half-Polish. And I think you can throw in a little bit of German and maybe even some Russian in there, too, I’ve been told.

CBC: What’s your dad’s name?

Dean: James Robert Haspiel.

CBC: And your mom’s maiden name?

Dean: Mom is Barbara Zymalski, but she goes by Barbara Haspiel. She didn’t change her name after they split up.

CBC: Do you have siblings?

Dean: I did. My brother Michael, and he unfortunately passed away, I believe, in 2005. At age nine, Mike discovered that he had juvenile diabetes and that was a tough time for our family, obviously, majorly for my brother. You know, you tell a kid he can’t eat candy and he can’t do this, he can’t do that, and then he has to take an insulin injection twice a day. That changes everything. And I remember at age 10 or 11 giving my brother a shot in the morning before we went to school. And I think, because of that, becoming a juvenile diabetic and having to deal with the strict diet, and the insulin injections, and everything else, I think he rebelled at some point and decided he was going to go a little Rambo and live life accordingly. So he kind of became a bad kid. He would skip school, play hooky. He was also majorly into comic books and could draw, as well. I remember I would see him at home and he would suddenly have original artwork from Marvel and DC comics. I was like, “Where the hell did you get this?” And he sometimes would go visit Marvel or a comic book shop during school hours where he would procure artwork. Michael was very charming. One of my family traits is that we’re fairly charming people. But, I mean, what was happening is he wasn’t really focused on getting passing grades, graduating, or getting a degree or anything. He was living life to his capacity, and then, slowly but surely, his physicality and his eyesight started to diminish greatly. At some point, when my mother left my father,

my brother split with my mother to Brooklyn, and I stayed with my father in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where we grew up. And then my brother kind of fell into a bad crowd and started taking drugs and that kind of stuff, and became an addict. And I always wondered if maybe part of him gravitating toward that was because he was taking medicine just to survive, you know?

He was medicating in different ways to cope with his fleeting mortality, his compromised chemistry. I don’t know. There’s a psychology to disability. But I’m no doctor or scientist.

CBC: Was he in a hospital for a while or was it sudden?

Dean: No, what happened is at some point, because of the drug thing, he had to go to a halfway house. He just got in trouble. And then he wound up at Roosevelt Hospital and then they gave him a choice. They said, “Well, you can go here, here, or here.” And he went to a halfway house in Des Moines, Iowa and rebuilt his life there, where he met a lot of great people and made good friends, girlfriends, and he babysat some guys who eventually became the music band Slipknot. But, little by small, his eyesight left him. He was almost fully blind at the end of his life.

CBC: Wow. Dean: Mike was great friends with Slipknot. Maybe he was abusing drugs or not taking great care of himself and, at one point, he fell into a coma for three or four days, and when he survived it, which there was a good chance he wasn’t going to survive, he woke up and had incredible damage done to his nerves and his fingers, and he was always in pain. So, at some point, some stupid doctor prescribed Oxycontin to him, and, as we came to know, Oxycontin is basically heroin, and you give Oxycontin to someone who is an addict, you’re just basically sealing their death, you know? So, Mike started abusing Oxycontin.

Like, if you have a monthly dosage, and you’re supposed to spread it out over four weeks, he was probably taking it through about two weeks toward the end of his life and needed more, and basically what happened is that my brother lost a lot of weight, could barely see. He was 115 lbs. or something like that when he died. And he died of a heart attack from the stress of Oxycontin and needing that kind of chemical. And it’s a shame. Mike was 37 when

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos © the respective copyright holder.

he died. It’s tragic. It’s sad.

But, so anyway, I did have a brother. And obviously there was more to him than just the tragedy of his life.

He was very talented, very charming. He was going to be an actor. He did theater work at Lee Strasberg’s The Actors Studio in Manhattan.

After school, sometimes, I would escort my brother so he could go act, or rehearse to be in plays with all these actors, like Fisher Stevens, Michael J. Pollard, Steve Railsback, and Susan Tyrrell, and all these amazing actors that he was on stage with.

And they did this production directed by our godmother Shelley Winters. So, Mike was the golden child in our family. But he had to wrestle with diabetes and then, I guess maybe moving to Brooklyn at a certain time and era where he was trucking around with some questionable cats, maybe the offspring of mafia? He just went down a different road… it got ugly, and then, eventually, it got him to Iowa, where it picked up a little bit better, but, by then I think his own chemistry and diminishing returns took hold.

And we were kind of estranged at one point, too. Not for any particular reason, but more because he was over there, and I was over here. Not that I was some goody-two-shoes, but I didn’t drink Olde English 800 malt liquor until college… well, that’s not true. I drank it in high school. But he did more of the naughtier stuff than I did. He did it earlier than I did. Let’s put it that way.

CBC: Who’s older?

Dean: I’m older by, like, a year-and-a-half.

CBC: Pretty close in age. Do you think his passing, your brother being so close, did that affect you in any way professionally?

Dean: Well, when I was doing The Quitter with Pekar, I knew that my brother was struggling, I dedicated the graphic novel to him and brought him out to our huge launch signing at Barnes & Noble with Pekar and family, and my mom, and everything. And it was hard for me because, at the time, Michael was sitting in the audience, and I could just see his eyes wandering because he couldn’t really see us. And I remember going to dinner and hanging out with him for four or five days, and I would say 80% of the time we hung out he was sleeping because of the withdrawal from Oxycontin or whatever the hell he was going through at the time.

He ended up dying a few months later. And besides it impacting me emotionally just that my brother died, I mean, creatively… It’s probCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

ably a combination of Jack Kirby’s blue collar kind of work ethic… Although I’m starting to believe that a lot of his comics were a result of World War II PTSD of sorts, you know? Like, the kind of themes that he wrote and drew about. But I would say the combination of learning about Jack Kirby’s work ethic, combined with my brother leaving this Earth so early, that made me push even harder, I guess, in a way, to write and draw. At the time I was just drawing other people’s stories, or curating projects for myself, because I was never on the “A” list of a Marvel or DC editor’s Rolodex, ever. So I’ve always kind of curated and managed my own career in a lot of ways, like trying to make matches of sorts, kind of like being my own show runner, as it were. I would try different things that were a cross between memoir and super-hero.

But I think it just gave me more of a drive, if that makes sense. Because, you know, people who pass away early don’t get to do a lot of stuff, although I saw a movie recently that put a different perspective on people who die young that consoled me in certain ways.

CBC: What was that?

Dean: I don’t want to spoil it, because it’s a big spoiler, but

Above: Dean’s mom, Barbara (left), who worked some three decades for the New York State Council of the Arts, was a friend of film actress and Dean Haspiel godmother Shelley Winters (holding young Dino at right), also seen inset left.

Below: T-shirt designed by Barbara, Dean, and Leah Garrett. Bottom left: The brothers Haspiel, Mike (left) and Dean.

Bottom: Recent snapshot of mother and son.

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Above: The recent science fiction motion picture release Arrival has had a cathartic effect on Dean regarding the losses of his brother and his good friend (and frequent CBC contributor) Seth Kushner. Inset right: From left, LaGuardia High School classmates Josh Neufeld, Dean Haspiel, Mike Hueston, and Eric Waldman, in 1983. Below: The team-up book Marvel Two-inOne, as well as John Byrne’s ’80s run on Fantastic Four were early influences on Dino.

it. I remember doing crack for, like, a month in college, just on weekends, because why the hell not? But it didn’t make me addicted to it, and ultimately it was just stupid, just dumb. And I didn’t get anything creatively out of it. Like, you know, people who get high and it opens their mind, they can become Jimi Hendrix or something. It’s not like that for me.

And even when I’ve drank — I’ve kind of gravitated towards whiskey, but I drink four or five whiskey on the rocks maybe once a month when I go hang out with my best friend, Mike Hueston, at Sunny’s Bar, in Red Hook. But I did recently turn 50, and I just don’t need that kind of recreation. I get high off of creation. I get high off of talking about new ideas and stories. I love stories. And I’m trying to re-balance my life now from being stuck at the art table and either trying to create new pictures or work on the stories I’ve sold to balancing that with actually living life again. And I need to experience more stuff so I can impart it in my work. But I never cared about that kind of… I mean, I hate drugs. Clearly I hate drugs, because it killed my brother. And I’m not impressed by people who need to smoke pot every day or whatever. And, again, I’m trying to not judge, but I also can’t help myself. [laughter] CBC: Were you a collector of comics or were you a reader when you were a kid?

Dean: I would say both, but not the kind of collector where it was like I needed to have a mint condition issue of something so I could bag and board it and then never open it up. I mean, you’re supposed to read and hold these things, you know? I never went as far as rolling up a comic book, or bending one in half and shoving it in my back pocket, because I understood early on that paper is precious. So, when I see something like that happen, I cringe. But I also support the spirit of it, because it means that you’re just enjoying it, and I prefer enjoying a comic rather than ogling it.

CBC: Did you have a run of Fantastic Four?

Dean: I don’t have the entire run, but I would go and get back issues. I think I started reading FF at around #197. I think it was a Red Ghost issue. I discovered comic shops, West Side Comics, and Funny Business, which was run by a therapist or a psychologist named Roger who was good friends with Bill Mantlo. Roger was one of those guys who smoked a cigar, so every comic book smelled like cigar smoke. I associate old comics with cigar smoke to this day.

And I would go there every Wednesday or whatever day new comics came out. Actually, it started with going to the newsstand, and I would run to the newsstand often to see if the new comics had come out. And then I discovered comic shops like West Side Comics, Funny Business, and others, and that was all Upper West Side stuff. And then I learned of Forbidden Planet. So I had a good triad of stores that I could pick up a bunch of British comics like Judge Dredd and 2000AD. And then it wasn’t until I found a place called SohoZat where I discovered Yummy Fur by Chester Brown and American Splendor by some guy named Harvey Pekar.

So then I was like, “Whoa! There’s a whole other world of underground, alternative comics that are black-&- white.”

See, my dream was to one day pencil the Fantastic Four.

That was the extent of my dream. And then when I saw Yummy Fur and American Splendor, I realized that I could create my own universes, and my own heroes, my own protagonists. Hell, I can even write and draw stories about #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Arrival TM & © Paramount Pictures. Marvel Two-in-One and Fantastic Four TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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it’s a movie called Arrival. It came out last year. A sentimental science fiction movie. So I don’t want to say it because I’d rather people who haven’t seen it see it, and then they’ll understand what I mean if they see the movie. So that’s all I’ll say on that.

CBC: So all of our readership will have to see that movie. [laughs] Dean: Yes! Absolutely! [laughter] CBC: There will be a quiz. [Dean laughs] So is there a graphic memoir in your relationship with your brother, do you think?

Dean: I did have a dream one time, many years before my brother passed away, when his eyesight was starting to go bad. I had a dream that I thought would make an interesting graphic novel, movie, story, whatever, where, because I hadn’t seen my brother in many years, I’d get a knock on my door when I lived on Thompson Street (with Larry O’Neil, Denny O’Neil’s son, and our upstairs neighbor was [humorist] David Sedaris).

This was when I lived in Soho in the late ’80s, early ’90s. And I get a knock at my door, and there’s a man on the other side of it wearing dark glasses and a walking cane. And at first I don’t recognize him, and then I realize, it’s my brother. He’s just gotten a little older. And he walks through the door, and we hug, and we catch up a little bit. And then he reveals to me— And, again, this was in a dream. He reveals to me that he only has six months left to see. The doctors have told him he’ll be completely blind in six months, and he wants me to take him around the world so he can see the world, and we can do that together so he could have that in his memories before he goes blind. And I always thought that would make a beautiful story if he and I had taken that journey together. So maybe that’s the story. You know, you can put in all the real stuff of what happened and build it up to this beautiful fantasy of a journey. And I’ve never been able to actually sit down and write it because it just… it makes me sad.

CBC: Was Michael’s life a cautionary tale for you?

Had you delved into the world of drugs and…?

Dean: This is the thing: It’s also about chemistry (and money). So there’s the combination of having to take insulin or something to survive versus a choice of some kind of recreational thing, and, luckily, the only addiction I have is, I think, I’m addicted to is Chinese food. I eat way too much of it. I’ve done cocaine and mushrooms, and I’ve smoked pot, but I don’t care. It did what it had to do at the time, but I never was drawn back to doing

Fantastic Four TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Shazam!, OMAC TM & © DC Comics.

my life. So that realization sparked a third eye.

CBC: Right. So when did you start to draw?

Dean: I don’t remember not drawing.

CBC: Right. And do you remember, did you encounter comic books, or were they just ubiquitous? Were they always around?

Dean: They feel like they were always there, but if I have a first memory, it really is looking up and seeing comics at a newsstand. I mean, I’m sure I was given comics… You know, there’s always been food in my life, but when do you seek a certain kind of food, you know? So I think I sought out comics. When I sought them out, it was at the newsstand at 79th Street and Broadway, in the Upper West Side.

CBC: And with your own money, what comics did you buy in the beginning?

Dean: I gotta be honest: I was a Marvel guy. [laughs] My favorite comics series, honestly, was Marvel Two-in-One, because of the Thing, who is my favorite character. And, obviously, I bought the Fantastic Four. The one DC comic I was really fond of was Shazam! and, later on, I would discover that they had to call it Shazam! because they didn’t have the right to call it Captain Marvel. And, actually, that was written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by C.C. Beck.

It was that revamp in the early ’70s. So I read Marvel and DC comics. Spider-Man, of course. I might have picked up Batman, but there was a curious thing that I’ve thought about, which is, Batman was a TV show character for me, at the time. You know, Adam West. And as much as I enjoyed the TV show as a kid, I always knew it was corny,

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

so I suspected that the comic book would probably just be corny, so I never really read Batman as a kid.

It’s not until you get older that you really fall in love with Batman ’66 or that whole television series because of how greatly campy it was. Then you come to respect that. But, as a kid, you just think it’s corny and stupid. So Batman, I mean, I missed out on, like, I don’t know, the Neal Adams Batmans by the time I was reading those comics. I can’t even tell you who was doing Batman at the time. Jim Aparo? But Batman didn’t click for me until much later, when Frank Miller did The Dark Knight Returns.

Then suddenly it had potential. So I read the classic comics, but Marvel-Two-in-One and Shazam! stuck out. So, like, I grew up on Ron Wilson and C.C. Beck. And then, of course, John Byrne and Chris Claremont’s X-Men blew me away, and then I started picking up Daredevil by Frank Miller and that blew me away, and then eventually great runs by Walt

This page: Though Dean characterizes his early years as being a Marvel fan, he did enjoy DC’s revival of the Big Red Cheese with Shazam! during the ’70s. Above is a Haspiel drawing of Captain Marvel; top is a 1981 C.C. Beck commission; and, inset left, Bob Oksner’s cover for Shazam! #11 [Mar. 1974]. Below is Dino’s tribute to Jack Kirby during the King’s centennial year.

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This page: Discovering the legendary ’zine review newsletter Factsheet Five (above) was a revelation for the young artist, introducing Haspiel to the amazing world of self-publishing. Below is mentor Howard Chaykin’s cover to Dean Haspiel’s early effort, Verdict, a short-lived super-hero series published by Eternity and Malibu between 1987 and ’88. At top right inset and bottom are various Haspiel covers of titles which include his long-standing character (and “last romantic anti-hero”) Billy Dogma, who debuted in the pages of Millennium Publications’ Keyhole, in 1996.

’zines and alternative comix in the country.

CBC: Right! Edited by Mike Gunderloy. A great ’zine!

Dean: A magazine that I loved, because I discovered more indie comics, like Xeroxed, folded and stapled, eightor 20-page self-published zines and comics and stuff like that. And, of course, I grew up in New York City, so I had access to what I believed was everything. From St. Mark’s Comics to ditty-bopping down the streets of the Lower East Side and discovering all kinds of weird stuff to these little underground shops that sold self-published wares and so much fringe culture from psychotronic movies, exploitation films, and pornography to indie/alt, underground comix, and back to the mainstream stuff. It ran the gamut and I was spoiled by that. I think one of the reasons why I can’t leave New York City is because I wouldn’t know how to survive in a small town that didn’t have that kind of thing happening.

Although, to be frank, it has diminished a lot because “print is dead,” and everything’s going online, and everyone lives on their smart phones and magic tablets.

CBC: And, getting back to ’86 for a minute, because the veil was raised on the industry, did that compel you to be independent?

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Factsheet Five, Verdict, Keyhole TM & © the respective copyright holders. Billy Dogma and associated characters TM & © Dean Haspiel.

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Simonson on Thor, and so on, and so forth.

And I think, in a way, as much as I’ve come to love Jack Kirby, in a way I think my introduction to Jack Kirby was through John Byrne, because Byrne was doing a version of Kirby.

A modern homage. You know, the auteur-style, the big panels, the grandiose stories. And, of course, Stan Lee was always narrating a lot of the comics in some way, or presenting them. “Who’s this Stan Lee guy? He’s got his fingers in everything.” It was always “Stan Lee Presents,” you know? And, also, he was the first comic book guy that you saw on TV, or you heard his voice. He was tooting the comic book horn. That was his greatest skill was tooting that horn and making comics cool and fun. And personal. That was another thing.

Stan Lee made you feel like he was talking directly to you, y’know? And I always admired that.

CBC: Okay, so when did you encounter American Splendor? Roughly what year were you at SohoZat? Dean: Oh, gosh. I mean, that must have been late ’80s.

CBC: And you mentioned the Dark Knight, ’85-’86 was a real watershed time for comics.

Dean: Oh, it’s huge. It’s groundbreaking. You had Dark Knight, you had Watchmen. Love and Rockets was amazing. I mean, come on! Something was happening in the ’80s that was shifting. In retrospect, Watchmen and Dark Knight were more like super-hero commentaries, but then it changed comics, and everyone’s been trying to do Dark Knight and Watchmen ever since. My work on The Fox was my criticism of that approach. I was trying to recapture the pulpy fun and zaniness of super-hero comics that weren’t too serious, you know? Back when things weren’t so bleak and apocalyptic.

CBC: And, in the mid-’80s, certainly you had the Jack Kirby art fight. You had The Comics Journal being the bête noire of the industry. You just had a lot of energy that was being point into that. You had the Jim Shooter— Dean: Well, you know what it was? It was lifting the creative veil. At the time, the only thing I knew about who made these things were the names; that assembly line credit box of who was making what, and then comics culture lifted the veil. There was The Comics Journal, which I loved. I wish there was still that kind of monthly print magazine talking comics shop, reviewing comics, criticizing comics and holding the work up as literature. I know there’s the internet and a plethora of comics websites but I miss the consolidated print version. The stuff that made muster. I also had a subscription to the Comics Buyer’s Guide, edited by Don and Maggie Thompson. And then, of course, I learned about the business by reading all the different articles. There was something called Factsheet Five, which was a ‘zine that listed reviews and the addresses of all the other homemade

Elektra: Assassin, Thor TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. American Flagg! TM & © Howard V. Chaykin. Billy Dogma TM & © Dean Haspiel.

Dean: Yeah. I would say the veil was lifted between creator and creation, and so suddenly we heard about the infighting.

We heard about who’s an assh*le or who did what and all this stuff. I mean, to the point where that’s the culture we live in now, which is just this obnoxious shame culture. Like, everyone’s shaming each other and outraged. It’s toxic. Back then it was like, at least you had to write a qualified article and then wait for it to be published in print, you know? [laughs] CBC: And so did you get at all, for lack of a better term, politicized about the industry, the reality? You’re in a unique position, I would say, within the industry of doing alternative comics and of working with DC and Marvel. You know, back then there was a real polarized climate in comics, like the political climate of today. One was pro-Jim Shooter or pro-Jack Kirby, pro-creator rights or comfortable being a cog in the Marvel machine… Did you envision either going to be work for yourself, the Harvey Pekar route, or working for a page rate for one of the Big Two? Dean: I was never good enough to get hired. That’s how I see it. I was just never talented enough as an artist to get hired by the Big Two. I mean, God knows, I tried.

And I have technically succeeded, I’ve been hired, but I still feel somewhat shunned because of my art style. And, listen, one of the things I tell up-and-coming artists of any dimension, I declare, “You grow up in public,” meaning not only as a person, but artistically.

And that will come back in your face time and time again. A lot of people come to me at a convention today and slap a comic on my table for me to sign that I don’t remember drawing, and I’ll cringe looking at it. And I probably don’t remember it because I don’t want to remember what I did, you know? [laughter] My own embarrassment, you know. Your catalog comes back to haunt you. Out of laziness, people get quarantined, right? So if you were to say, “What did Frank Miller do?” At least he might have three things listed on his gravestone, even though he’s done a ton of stuff.

Most people just get one thing that they did, and that’s it. Like, you’re remembered for one thing, either something that was a great hit or a great failure. I feel bad for people who are very public, very social celebrities who, as they get older, become more curmudgeonly, and then they get remembered for their curmudgeonly twilight years versus all the awesome stuff they did before that. And then they get slapped on the wrist for being a dick or something and that’s how you remember them? I mean, that’s awful.

But, yeah, I think that if I was trying to hopscotch between alternative and mainstream. I mean, I always said I’m too alternative for the mainstream and I’m too mainstream for the alternative. Like, I was always hopscotching, but I’ve always been in the middle. I was a hybrid of both, because that’s what I loved. And I’m more complicated than a person that just wants to draw a Curt Swan Superman or a Jim ApCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Above: Caption.

aro Batman (not that there’s anything wrong with that). If you desire to stand out or be an auteur, you’ve got to find your own thing. And I guess I was one of the early cartoonists who could toggle both sides. Maybe not greatly, but proficient enough to just continue to get occasionally hired and work in this business.

(Which I don’t recommend, by the way.) [laughs] CBC: During the ’90s, the scourge was the Image approach of everything in-your-face…

Dean: Agreed. Although, Image has reinvented itself today and is totally different.

CBC: Right. But then, all of a sudden, as far as what I noticed, by the ’00s, I would say the mainstream was epitomized by [Marvel editor] Axel Alonso. There was a sudden influx of eclectic talent into the mainstream, at least trying to experiment with different stuff.

Dean: Well, think about where Axel came from. He came from journalism and then working at Vertigo under the helm of Lou Stathis. He’s the one who started editing Preacher

Above: During the 1980s, young Haspiel learned the comics trade from three artists then at highwater marks in their respective careers — Howard Chaykin (then working on American Flagg!), Walter Simonson (Thor), and Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra: Assassin) Below: Dino’s Billy Dogma, 2014.

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and stuff like that. The point is that Axel came from journalism, came from the headlines and the news and thought about that stuff, which was brilliant. I mean, you have to, as a person that’s trying to crank out 75 years’ worth of intellectual property, it has to reflect today.

It is modern commentary or a riff on current events in some way or another. And then Vertigo, where you’re trying to push the envelope with non-super-hero stuff, and working with alternative talent, and then becoming editor-in-chief of a super-hero company. I mean, come on! Like, that’s a great road that you’ve traveled. But I’ve always admired Axel’s acumen in understanding talent and stories.

Just a few weeks ago, I saw Axel with his son in my neighborhood.

They were heading back home from playing basketball.

CBC: It was this reaching out for interesting approaches. When you have Peter Bagge doing Spider-Man, it’s interesting stuff.

It’s clever.

Dean: Yeah! I had the opportunity to work with Axel Alonso and Zeb Wells on Spider-Man’s Tangled Web, which was about the then-origin of J. Jonah Jameson. Look at that series: there was Paul Pope, Darwyn Cooke, Ted McKeever, Sean Phillips, there were all kinds of indie-folks working on those comics.

Don’t forget, comic books at one point, at least at Marvel and DC, used to have what I would call tryout books. You know, series where clearly they were trying out new talent in various anthologies; rotating stories. And I don’t know if they do that today. I don’t think they really do. There was Marvel Team-Up, with Spider-Man, and Marvel Two-in-One, with rotating talent in there. They would have sci-fi or horror books, which clearly had different writers and artists breaking in.

And, with the help of then-Marvel editor, Andrew Lis, that’s how I got to dip my toes at Marvel. I did an issue of a mini-series called Muties, conceived and written by a college-mate named Karl Bollers. I drew a silly Captain America story written by Karl for [Captain America:] Red, White & Blue [2002], and then Evan Dorkin and I did a Thing mini-series called

[Startling Stories: The Thing] Night Falls on Yancy Street [2003], and stuff like that.

I was working to the level of my talent, my skill set, and either the readers didn’t care for it as much or the editors maybe rolled their eyes when the art came in. I mean, I’m being hard on myself, but also I just have to be realistic. As much as I was putting in my best and the maximum amount of energy, I don’t think the actual drawing skill set was there. In fact, I’m fifty years old and still trying to figure it out. And I feel like, this is maybe something I have learned from Alex Toth, although I would never say I draw like Alex Toth, because he was a master and I’m still studying him from afar, but there’s a reductive quality to my art. It’s shortcut art in certain ways because of deadlines and information you’re trying to convey narratively, and I feel like I’ve become more of a writer in my art than an artist.

CBC: That’s an interesting thing to say. [Dean chuckles] Have you heard about DC’s announcement in San Diego, of tweaking their line?

Dean: You know, I kind of ignore a lot of the news unless it trickles down… I never understand any of the hype. Currently there’s something called Marvel Legacy, and I don’t know what that is. And I haven’t read enough to even unpack it, but I just feel like it’s all hype. I mean, of course it’s all hype. Do you mean the Mark Doyle thing, with trying to do one-shots— CBC: Exactly.

Dean: I did hear about that. Sounds cool.

Forward thinking. Listen, I don’t know the business of comics very well because it kind of shocks and disgusts me often, but I did think, maybe a decade ago, if you were to ask, “Well, how would you save comics, Dean?” And we’re talking Marvel and DC, not independent publishing, because that’s a whole different ballgame. But I always said that, well, you know what? I hate to say it, but mayyyybe you’ve got to get rid of the floppies. Maybe you’ve got to get rid of the monthly churning around of content, because ultimately they stop being single-issue comics.

I used to be able to pick up a comic in the ’80s and I

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All are TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

This page: Realizing a boyhood dream, Haspiel was a freelancer at Marvel artist during the ’00s, including work on the mini-series, Startling Stories: The Thing — Night Falls on Yancy Street. The artist also drew an issue of Muties [2002]. Inset right is, yep, Dino’s Ben Grimm. #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

American Splendor, Pekar Project, The Quitter TM & © the estate of Harvey Pekar. Mo and Jo © the estate of Jay Lynch and Dean Haspiel.

got a whole story in 20 or 22 pages, right? You remember that. And sometimes it was epic and sometimes it was just quaint. But I enjoyed it and I felt satisfied. Now you get one-sixth of a story that’s part of some complex crossover and it’s absurd. I can’t read a story like that.

We used to have situation comedies on television, too.

Most stories are developed as a “season” now. Current consumers tend to commit to longer stories. Which is cool, great even, but not all stories are that complex. I miss the anthology.

Anyway, my idea to save mainstream comics was to embrace the webcomic culture, the digital comic delivery system, and release these things monthly as you have via digital and then collect story arcs into print collections, “graphic novels,” and abandon the whole idea of having ten X-Mens, and ten Spider-Mans, and variant covers, and all that stuff. Reduce your output so that it’s more efficient, economical, and stop trying to clobber the market by having 100 titles where maybe three or four of them are significant, honestly, and the rest of it’s just deluge. And it reads and feels like deluge to me to the point where, again, I’m 50 years old, so maybe these comic books aren’t personally meant for me, but I do feel like they try to appeal to the 45 or 50-year-old white man, and now that’s changing somewhat, obviously, by trying to appeal more towards people of color and women and non-binary folks. And, again, Jon, growing up I never felt that. I might have been completely ignorant. But I would go to a comic book shop with my best friends, one was Spanish, one was black, one was Jewish, and there was me, who was half-Jewish, a mutt. And we didn’t think about color or race or gender. There were comics for all kinds of people. At least, we thought there were. But, now, despite some missteps, the comics industry is actively trying to be more inclusive and I commend that, obviously.

But DC and Marvel should publish more experimental comics. That’s where you get a Frank Miller or Paul Pope or Becky Cloonan or, hell, maybe someday an Emil Ferris. That’s what people are gravitating towards anyway, right? Auteurs… “Let’s see so-and-so do their version of…” And it doesn’t need to be Batman canon. It could just be a fun Batman story, y’know?

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

CBC: I have my, within the collection of comics that I have, I have more than my share of Dean Haspiel work, and okay, let’s say that it’s, wasn’t best-seller stuff. It might not have been financially rewarding for you. But the pure eclecticism of the material is delightful. From doing Billy Dogma to the Thing to…

Dean: American Splendor! Red Hook! The Fox! I actually did get to draw Fantastic Four [#5–7, July–Sept. 2014] and, recently, Wonder Woman [Sensation Comics featuring Wonder Woman #1, Apr. 2015]. I bounce around a lot. [laughs] CBC: I mean, there’s got to be a satisfaction in that mix of work, right? Because you liked those kinds of comics when you were young.

Dean: Oh, there is, there’s complete satisfaction.

There’s a great satisfaction, but as much as I was criticizing that a lot of people at the end of their career (and we’re not talking about the end of my career yet, hopefully) are just known for a couple of things. That’s if they’re lucky. Like Mark Waid: no matter what he writes, will always be known for writing Kingdom Come with Alex Ross, right? And he’s an amazing writer.

Everything he touches, there’s always something really good in a Mark Waid comic, you can always be satisfied by a Mark Waid story. But as eclectic as I have been, I don’t have that “thing” that I’ve been known for, or I guess I’m still chipping away at what that “thing” might be. It’s very

This page: Of course, Dean Haspiel is noted for multiple collaborations with the late, great Harvey Pekar, especially as artist on Pekar’s graphic memoir, The Quitter, seen inset left. At top is Rick Parker’s depiction of the Pekar Project contributors (included a batboy named Dino). Below is Dino’s cover for Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever [Toon Books, 2013] a collaboration with another great and sorely missed comics genius, Jay Lynch.

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This page: xxx

Above: Dean Haspiel’s comic strip celebration of the life and achievements of friend and collaborator Harvey Pekar appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 24–31, 2010.

Below: Author Jonathan Ames [left] and Dean Haspiel pose with the latter’s 2010 Primetime Emmy Award for “Outstanding Main Title Design,” for the artist’s work on the HBO series Bored to Death. Dino shared the honor with fellow title designers Tom Barham, Marci Ichimura, and Anthony Santoro.

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Deadman TM & © DC Comics.

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exhausting to be eclectic, because there’s no metrics for it. Today, you get hired because of how popular you are on Twitter or something, right? And that’s because marketing’s become very lazy. People are using that as a marketing tool. Like, “How many fans you got?” Okay, you get to draw this comic for an issue or two and see what happens. And, again, I’m being a little silly be saying that, I understand, but I don’t have that “one thing.” I guess you could say I’m still credited for drawing American Splendor or The Quitter because of Harvey Pekar. I loved the work I did on The Alcoholic, with Jonathan Ames, but that hasn’t… the fact that he’s worked in television with HBO’s Bored to Death and Starz’ Blunt Talk, and stuff like that, I don’t know if that’s actually helped to significantly promote and sell our graphic novel collaboration. It really depends. It depends on what you’ve done that’s blown up, but I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that blew up.

Jon, talking to you, I’m excited to be having this conversation, and I don’t know what I’ve done to necessarily deserve a profile like this. But, except for the fact that I guess I am eclectic, and I have somehow trudged along and I’m still chipping away at this and kind of flipping the script between, all right, maybe this week I’ll do memoirs.

Next week, I’ll try to do super-hero, and after that I’ll try to

do something for Heavy Metal magazine. I did a collaboration with Stoya, the porn star, for Heavy Metal magazine [“One Such Partner,” #281, Aug. 2016]. Who knew I’d be doing that? And now she’s going to star in a play I wrote being produced and directed by Ian W. Hill in November at The Brick theater in Williamsburg.

So I jump around a lot, and I guess it might be because I just love stories. I love the different qualities of narrative. I love trying to push and challenge myself, and not only artistically and creatively, but in terms of appealing to different types of readers, different types of people who consume story.

CBC: I’ve known you since the late ’90s, ever since I started Comic Book Artist, and we hit it off rather well. You are also really a social owl.

Dean: [Laughs] Well, when I unchain myself from the art table I get to wave my freak flag. I just love people. Again, that’s a product of growing up in a family which was very social. My parents would throw parties and Shelley Winters would be there with a whole bunch of actors, and, like, Michael J. Pollard. I don’t know if you remember him.

CBC: Sure, of course! Bonnie and Clyde.

Dean: Steve Railsback from The Stunt Man, Susan Tyrrell, and people like that. And my mother, who deputy-directed the New York State Council of the Arts, she knew tons of people, as well, so I was always surrounded by celebrity in some form or fashion, from pop stars to underground. That’s what I love about comic books, in a way: the diversity of all of that and the kinds of people that those stories and those mediums attract. I love the people that love this kind of stuff because there’s a connection. As I said to my girlfriend the other day, what I’m doing is trying to connect with the people that also love the kind of stuff I love. We don’t have to love all the same exact things or the same stories, but it’s that drive, that obsession, almost, to feed on story.

CBC: The main reason I didn’t pursue drawing as a career when I was young is because it’s such a solitary act. I preferred to be among people, particularly girls.

Dean: The isolation actually defeats my personality. It defeats my personality to sit there and draw, often alone, which is one of the reasons why I love having a studio is that mix of quiet time and of camaraderie. You’ve got to have some quiet time to figure out a story or lay out something. I can’t be distracted, but once I’ve figured that out, then it’s all execution, and it takes hours to do that. So why not be around people who you can talk to about current events, or a movie you just saw, or put on some music or some podcasts and listen to other people talking about stuff so then you can react to that, and so on, and so forth?

I mean, that’s why I need to be in a shared studio. I think it was during the Thing mini-series with Evan Dorkin when I finally decided to pull the trigger and quit my part-time job so that I would just be working comics full-time and see what happened. I had about a year’s work ahead of me, so I decided I would just work at home. And I went crazy.

I was going nuts. Like, “This is not who I am, getting up and walking, like, six feet to my art table to sit there all day, half-naked, drawing comics.”

Then I discovered LiveJournal, the blogging platform on the internet, and I discovered old friends while making new friends. These people became my virtual studio mates, which eventually would lead to me creating and curat-

Deadman TM & © DC Comics.

ing ACT-I-VATE, an online webcomics collective. But that started because I was going nuts and needed to be socializing somewhat, so the computer kind of took over.

Which it has done for a lot of us now, with our phones and everything, to the point where now there’s a backlash and some people are turning off social media and turning off their phones so they can look up in the sky or stare at a tree or have a conversation with a stranger in real time and not just claiming how great Game of Thrones was last night.

CBC: It was great last night. [laughter] Dean: Oh, don’t say anything! [laughs] Unfortunately, because of my own finances, I can’t really afford cable TV, so I curate my TV experience by buying them on DVD. But, of course, buying it on DVD means waiting for it. But I get it. It’s like the water cooler. People go online because it’s like that water cooler conversation that people used to have in the office is now online. Although the fact that we can get news every second of the day has also made me crazy. I remember when the news didn’t happen until 5:00 o’clock or you had to wait for the newspaper the next morning. Or you had to wait for someone to actually figure out what the hell just happened and write an intensive article about it, you know?

CBC: You know, I would surmise, and you can argue this, that a part of your eclecticism, and now you’re a playwright and doing all these things, is having topics of conversation and to consistently renew that enthusiasm for being creative.

Dean: Absolutely. Absolutely.

CBC: And so, again, and that’s making a personal connection with it, whether it’s through Facebook or at a cocktail party or whatever, is that you’re just getting this feed back and forth and feeding this enthusiasm, because you’re alive, Dino.

Dean: To be present and to be current. I think you’re right. To be eclectic is to constantly be, as I said before, hopscotching between realms, right? In a way, you just made me have a connection, which was, not to disparage my father, but the fact that he is known for one single topic, Marilyn Monroe, right? Even though he did manage to get married, did manage to have two kids, did manage to do other things in his life, the one thing that he is known for, and the one thing that my father only talked about, really, is Marilyn Monroe. Maybe I’m having an allergic reaction to that. So, by having an allergic reaction means I can’t just be known for Billy Dogma or the fact that I drew a Thing mini-series or that I worked with Harvey Pekar. I need to hopscotch so that I can’t be pegged. Does that make sense?

CBC: Yes, and I think it’s also a personal connection in that, okay, so you didn’t do 102 issues of Fantastic Four that you’re known for, but you’re known for so many different things that you have these tangents that you can shoot from. It’s like what’s happening with our interview right now in that this is not a chronological interview, per se.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Dean: No, right.

CBC: This is just examining the artistic essence that you are.

We haven’t even talked about Bored to Death, which could be what they will put on your headstone.

Dean: Right.

CBC: It could be. You’re an Emmy-winner.

Dean: And only because of the Emmy Award. For all the comics that I’ve done, I have never won a comic-book award.* But I have an Emmy! I mean, what the hell is that?

Where did that come from? That’s crazy. And, of course, does an Emmy get me a comics gig? No. [laughter] I mean, it might help me get a TV gig, but it hasn’t gotten me one more comic book gig, I don’t think.

CBC: But there’s always the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. One thing I’ll say about you is there’s just no way that you’re bitter.

Dean: Not at all.

CBC: Which, a lot of your peers who would face these frustrations would be.

Dean: Well, that’s because I don’t put all my eggs in one basket. As we were saying before about the 1980s, when the veil between creator and creations lifted and we got to the ugly side of the business: every business has its unfair qualities, of course, and horror stories. I mean, consider Hollywood alone, right? So this bastard art form of comics that was basically ridiculed for so many years and now suddenly is the coolest thing since sliced bread! I think you and I both agree that we grew up basically having to apologize for liking comics and wanting to do comics to suddenly we’re, like, ambassadors of comics. Like, what the hell just happened? If you say you work in comics now to a new person, who probably has never probably read a comic book, but knows about it because of cosplay, because of Netflix, and the Marvel movies, and DC Comics’ TV

This page: Certainly, Dean Haspiel has received the biggest exposure to date of his work by his artistry being utilized in the three seasons of Bored to Death, the HBO comedy series created by Jonathan Ames that ran from 2009 to 2011.

Starring Jason Schwartzman and Ted Danson, the show also starred Zach Galifiankis as comic book artist Ray Hueston, creator of Bored to Death’s successful comic book series, Super Ray. Inset left is a promotional piece. Above is Dino’s character design for Super Ray, obviously based on Galifianakis and is seen below tempting fate in a full-page Haspiel splash.

* Subsequently, on Sept. 23, at Baltimore Comic-Con, Dino received a “Best Webcomic” Ringo! — the Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Award — for The Red Hook.

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Above: xxx.

Above: Caption.

Bored to Death TM & © Home Box Office, Inc.

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#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Bored to Death TM & © Home Box Office, Inc. The Alcoholic © Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel.

shows and whatnot. Suddenly you’re like some weird hero.

Like, “Oh, that’s so cool that you get to do that!”

Yes, it is cool to make comics, but it’s very difficult to maintain a living in it, and the amount of sacrifices one makes in order just to squeak by is considerable. So I’m not bitter, but I am very sober about it. So, by learning about Jack Kirby and what happened to him, and creator’s rights, and work-for-hire, I’m not naive. When I sign a work-forhire contract, I know exactly what I’m doing. I have decided that’s okay for that job to let them own it. They’re paying me money to help shepherd their character.

Let’s talk about The Fox: My friend Vito Delsante, a former actor who worked at Jim Hanley’s Universe (now JHU Comics), and I would see him every week, and he wanted to write comics and then we got an opportunity to work together on Batman Adventures, and he’s now an independent comic book writer with his creator-owned characters. We recently collaborated on The Purple Heart. But a couple of years before that, Vito told me that he had written a six-page Black Hood story for Archie Comics, for the (then) new Red Circle line. And I said, “I always loved that Fox character. Do you remember The Fox?” I remember, in the ’80s, picking up Black Hood, where a cartoonist named Alex Toth did a couple of short stories starring The Fox, and that amazing work was imprinted in my head.

I remember thinking at the time, none of the other comics looked like this. This was so different and bizarre and pulpy and black-&-white. You know, it was just beautiful.

And it always stuck with me. And, of course, I would later on come to learn who the hell Alex Toth was and what an amazing an artist he was. And, speaking of eclectic, can you think of one Alex Toth story that would recommend Alex Toth as a writer, or the one comic that everyone must read? I can’t. I know he did Bravo for Adventure, but he doesn’t have, like, his hit, his evergreen. Does that make sense?

CBC: Well, I would say it was Hot Wheels #5 [Nov.–Dec. 1970], “The Case of the Curious Classic.”

Dean: I love that answer. But that’s not what I mean. Like, you could pick a comic book more for how it looked than for what it said, right?

CBC: It’s funny. When I first encountered his work, I must have been seven or eight. But you just knew, it was just screamed authenticity. There was just something about it that was, like, wow!

Dean: It was pure design, it was just the way…

CBC: It’s perfect!

Dean: It’s perfection. I mean, no matter what he was drawing, how lame the story might be or how it didn’t become a classic, it always looked amazing. He was one of the few artists with whom, as you’re being entertained, you’re also being educated about how comics function. I said that recently about Frank Quitely, whose work is very entertaining, but every panel he chooses is perfection, and so he’s also educating you how to make comics as you’re being entertained. All-Star Superman is perfection.

Anyway, I talk to Vito and I ask, “Could you please talk to the editor and maybe I could do a Fox backup, like a sixpage story?” And he hooked me up with then Red Circle editor, Paul Kaminski. They were doing this New Crusaders series and I pitched him this little Fox story. He liked it. I wrote and drew it and his response was, “What about COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Previous and this page: The artist shares little-seen Bored to Death work featuring Super Ray, the super-hero created by Zach Galifianakis’ character, Ray Hueston. At inset left is the inaugural Jonathan Ames/Haspiel collaboration, The Alcoholic, a graphic novel published by Vertigo in 2009. Below is the cover of a rarely-seen Haspiel collectible, the 16-page one-shot distributed at the 2010 Comic-Con International: San Diego, The Birth of Super Ray.

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Above: Dean Haspiel’s kinetic work on his all-too brief stint on the Archie Comics super-hero The Fox is joyful work indeed.

This cover is from #1 [June 2015]. Below: Dino’s variant cover for The Fox #5 [Apr. 2014].

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Hangman TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

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doing a five-issue mini-series?” I’m like, “What the hell are you talking about?” And I, of course, had to say yes. I mean, I had to concoct something. And I pitched him this zany, pulpy plot.

But I didn’t feel confident in actually writing the dialogue for it, so I contacted Mark Waid.

After Mike Wieringo passed away, Mark and I vowed that one day we would collaborate with each other, because we had been talking about it for years. And we felt that sense of urgency because you never really know when you’re going to pass away. So I called him up, and Mark said, “Hell, yeah. Let’s do this.” And The Fox was our first collaboration. Also, The Fox was me trying my hand at super-hero commentary; bringing back the fun, and yet it still flexed serious consequences and we made something that meant something. I felt really, really good about it, and I’m proud.

I look at the artwork now and I cringe a little, but I think

you’re supposed to as you get older. You’re just supposed to always be improving, hopefully.

But I’m very proud of our collaboration and what we did. And then we got green-lit for a second series and I came up with a new story arc, but that’s when the editorial baton was handed over to Alex Segura, who had a different agenda for the Red Circle characters. It was different from what I wanted to do, which was to extend the zaniness, and he wanted it to be more a little darker, a little more grounded and gritty. And so I tried to meet the new dictum while brandishing some of the zany tone I set in “Freak Magnet” for “Fox Hunt.” I had ideas for other stories, too, involving Madam Satan and fossil fuel where she discovers the ancient bones of a giant dinosaur to animate and terrorize Impact City with the help of a resurrected, albeit zombified Jaguar. I wanted to reintroduce The Fox’s ex-girlfriend as a nefarious therapist for superheroes. I wanted to bring back Inferno and The Marvel and explore their budding romance, an idea I sparked in the pages of “Freak Magnet.” I plotted a “Dark Fox” story involving the original Shield, and Blackjack, and a psychotic version of the original Fox, the return of the father (a story I may use for my very own Red Hook). At the end of the day, I wanted The Fox to lead into a revamp of The Mighty Crusaders. But, I don’t know what’s going on with Dark Circle anymore. You published The MLJ Companion book, which you interviewed me for, right?

CBC: Right, I was co-author/designer.

Dean: So we’ve already discussed this a little bit. But, again, I don’t know what’s happened to that line of comics.

Now, one could hazard and say, well, it’s impossible to compete with Marvel and to have a super-hero line that’s competing against Marvel and DC Comics on the racks. But then you look at what Joe Illidge was just doing with the Catalyst Prime Universe, at Lion Forge, and so far so good.

I mean, the jury is out: will it last five years, ten years, one year, who knows? But he seems to be steering a cool ship. And I tried to build the New Brooklyn universe at LINE Webtoon with The Red Hook, The Purple Heart with Vito Delsante and Ricardo Venancio, and Seth Kushner and Shamus Beyale’s The Brooklynite.

But that’s online. I feel like they’re different hemispheres. They’re not even discussed in the same room.

CBC: Now, could you do a GoFundMe or a Kickstarter to put a collection in print of that?

Dean: It’s an interesting question because of the whole publishing business. I could probably talk to a publisher that would put out the collections of these things, but I want to perpetuate these universes.

I have a bunch of stories that I want to do. I’d want to almost leverage it, to be like, “Well, listen. You don’t have to pay for the production of these books because they already have been produced. You just have to pay for the printer’s bill and distribution and marketing.” And I would get a royalty on the back-end, because it already exists and you could fund new stories, pay me to create, extend this idea, and try to leverage that.

So, I’m currently working on a sequel to The Red Hook called War Cry, which is basically The Red Hook, Part Two,

The Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

in the New Brooklyn universe, and that’ll hopefully launch in November. I’m currently drawing chapter ten of 26 chapters as we speak, and that would be the second volume. War Cry centers on the resurrection of The Possum, The Red Hook’s dead girlfriend, and what happens when a woman shares the body of a teenage boy who becomes a human of mass destruction. Think a cross between Shazam! and OMAC, by way of the Hawk and the Dove, with a pinch of Firestorm, and you’ll get a sense of what I’m positing. It’s my personal brand of psychotronic comix. I already have stories outlined for volume three and four, and other stories.

I did a three-part story in Dark Horse Presents [#29–31, Dec. 2016–Feb. 2017] of The Red Hook called “Emotional Ebola” that could be collected. So I have the material and have the drive, passion, and desire. And, in a way, as much as I’ve been toiling with the occasional Billy Dogma, I’ve locked into The Red Hook because it tickles a lot of different sensibilities, whether super-hero, memoir, commentary… finding the hook to spark a dialogue, because we’re talking about a Brooklyn that’s seceded, literally and physically, from New York—ergo America—to start its own republic, a sentient being that dealing with the way the nation is reacting to current events. What inspired The Red Hook was me getting into Yaddo, an artists/writers residency in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 2012, and deciding, “I got in as a writer and I’m going to write screenplays and novels while I’m there for a month. So I’m going to shrug off all my comic-book sensibilities as best as I can so I can focus on developing this other skill set.” So what I did was to cleanse the creative palate is I wrote a short comic book script the first night I was at Yaddo, to just then put it in a drawer and abandon it, and that script was the very first Red Hook story that I came up with, which was a challenge of me trying to think, “Well, what if Jack Kirby and Alex Toth got together and created a character? What would that look like? What would that be?” That’s where the original idea for The Red Hook came from: it was inspired by that challenge. And then it evolved into this idea of there’s this New Brooklyn that’s basically seceded from America.

Then I roped in other talent to help develop and expand the New Brooklyn universe via Vito Delsante and Ricardo Venancio with The Purple Heart, which I co-created and co-plotted. I talked to Seth Kushner about adding his character The Brooklynite to the New Brooklyn Universe and we cooked up plans but then he passed away from an epic battle with leukemia. I lost one of my very best friends. Something I find hard to reconcile. Something the movie Arrival gave me some peace with. Seth’s collaborator and artist, Shamus Beyale, extended the concept of The Brooklynite and folded it into the New Brooklyn Universe.

In some ways, I was curating and developing my own Marvel universe. What I grew up reading and loving was influencing and encouraging my own creations.

But that’s me trying to actually invest more in myself versus investing in the characters I grew up loving and wanting to be the custodian of. For me, Billy Dogma was just a way for me to kind of dabble, to see, “All right, can I write? Do I know how to write? I’m afraid of writing. I don’t have the confidence in it.” Currently, with The Red Hook my attitude is, “F*ck it. I need to write. I have things to say. And because I’m so used to growing up in public and failing in public, it’s okay if I fail at this.”

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CBC: That’s going to be so cool. It’s a very exciting idea. I don’t know how relevant this is, but my favorite super-hero is Captain America, and the only reason for that is because, when I was kid, I was a history freak and he’s the one character, besides being an exemplary symbol of this country and fighting the good fight, tuned right into a specific time in history. There could be no Captain America before or after World War Two, as much as they try, he is tied to fighting the good fight against Adolph Hitler. He is tied to fighting for the Jews, in my estimation. And you have a universe that’s based on a very specific location in New York and fits the polarized zeitgeist of today. That’s a really cool idea because that’s the core of the New York being the center of the Marvel Universe way back in the beginning was that, oh, it’s not Metropolis, it’s not this made-up place. It really is New York. You could look up and maybe see Thor flying over.

Dean: It’s amazing. Stan Lee understood that. Stan Lee understood that staging the Marvel characters in real

This page: Hapiel’s teaming with writer Mark Waid on The Fox was an inspired choice, given their “old school” super-hero approach. Above is a page from The Fox #4 [Sept. 2015]. Below is D.H.’s #1 [Dec. 2013] cover.

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CBC: And now you’ve got your own thing that’s creator-owned. This kind of seems to epitomize your career.

Dean: In a way it has, because it shows that I have a facility to shepherd the toys, the intellectual property, perpetuate someone else’s thing, and be able to play ball, and to be edited and given guidelines and goals to meet. I was able to at least do that. And then, after I do my best work, it’s up to the publisher to market it and the stores to sell it and hope that the readers like it enough to warrant more. And I did get a sense that enough readers liked my version of The Fox enough that they would continue to buy it. The Fox was never an X-Men type hit or even a Walking Deadtype hit. But, then again, The Walking Dead has trumped all ideas of how to do things.

It’s phenomenal.

I felt good enough about that The Fox project that I would have done more, but luckily I had created The Red Hook, previously. So I felt comfortable enough to be able to return back to something that was creator-owned and throw off any shackles that might have bound my creative hands so I could just do my thing, and I had a hook (forgive the pun) of how to work this New Brooklyn conceit. And I’m having so much fun with it! I’m in this bizarre, autonomous space where I’m basically writing and drawing something I own on a platform that is the future. #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Hangman TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

life places with current concerns was a fantastic way to connect to the readers.

CBC: Make it real.

Dean: It made comic books more realistic and give it locales that we know. Like, we know that Spider-Man is from a specific locale in Queens. So I think the important lesson is to connect to readers by putting fictional characters in places that exist. Or, when you read something that you love, and then you decide, “I’m going to take a trip there,” you’ve already made some kind of emotional connection to it. And that’s so important; key to the success of not only stories and legends, but these characters that represent real spaces. That’s one way for us to connect to the characters.

CBC: Now, that’s one thing I was very excited with the Dark Circle stuff was that you were, and this even preceded that, was that, “Oh, Dean is being connected with The Fox!” [Dean laughs] And let’s hope that they don’t let that go in the future. It’s like a convergence, here, that’s going on. That was one of your recent mainstream successes, at least one seen by a lot of people going into comic book stores.

Dean: Right. That’s my most consistent work because there are at least ten issues of The Fox, right? Two story arcs, Freak Magnet and Fox Hunt. So it’s probably the longest project I’ve worked on in franchise comics.

The Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

Even though I first dabbled with Billy Dogma via ACT-I-VATE on LiveJournal, knowing that one day you would be looking on your phone more than your laptop, to doing “Street Code” with Zuda (DC Comics’ first webcomics initiative, and later collected as Beef with Tomato, a graphic novel published by Alternative Comics), I feel like I’m starting to meld super-hero with memoir now with The Red Hook.

Not that it’s memoir proper, but I’m putting more of my feelings about life and love and society into the super-hero genre more so than ever before. I guess, in some way, I’ve become my own combination of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, you know? [laughs] Trying to toot that horn, but also just do something wild and absurd, and also have it grounded enough so that almost anybody can connect to it. And there’s enough characters that you can connect to a character. You can choose one.

CBC: I think that it’s part of the connection that you and I have on a personal level. I’ve always liked you immensely, and it’s been wonderful to encounter— Dean: Right backatcha.

CBC: It’s just love, baby. [Dean laughs] And it’s this thing that it’s unashamed, you know? It’s just unashamed appreciation that we don’t have to segregate our love for the super-hero stuff. I think you recognize that in the magazine, too, is not meant to be prejudicial. The alternative stuff and the underground stuff are just as exciting for me as, say, the Archie super-heroes are. Comics are just exciting to me.

Dean: Well, like I said earlier, I used to feel like I had to apologize for what COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

I liked in high school and in junior high school. And, I’ve taken a no-apologies, no-permissions policy toward my creativity. For instance, Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! was a game changer in the 1980s and now his Divided States of Hysteria is something to behold.

I believe that you have to be bold, take some risks in order to create, otherwise it’ll stink. Like, fear smells bad. [laughs] You know what I’m saying?

You need to do, you need to be unafraid in order to make, or else it’s just— CBC: Bullsh*t smells bad, too.

Dean: Exactly. Exactly.

CBC: I’m really happy to hear about this. I only just started reading about the New Brooklyn universe and, for me, it hearkens back to what my love for the comics with the Marvel Universe, in the beginning, when these characters all knew each other, and Doctor Strange lived on Bleecker Street. You could actually walk down Bleecker Street and though you couldn’t see the Sanctum Sanatorium, but the street is real.

Dean: The late Seth Kushner and Chris Irving have a new book coming out from a French publisher where Seth (and another photographer, Carlos Molina, a good friend of Seth’s, who finished the project) took photos and pictures of all the destination spots of the DC and Marvel characters. Like, where the Baxter Building is, and also where Jack Kirby lived, or where Doctor Strange lived on Bleecker Street, that kind of thing. That speaks to exactly what you were just talking about.

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But, yeah, it’s weird to be in this spot. We’re living during a time where not only is everyone competing for someone’s wallet, now you’re competing for their attention span. Their time. There’s so much creativity. The door has blown wide open from me hoping to get sanctioned or hired by an editor at the Big Two, to, like, now you don’t need that nod at all.

You just need a web address.

And then how do you market that web address? How do you brand yourself?

How do you get people to know about you?

Well, there’s social media. There are practically three different comic events every weekend where you can promote your webcomic or print edition. The delivery systems have expanded. The amount of creativity that’s happening is exponential. It’s insane. And I’m learning from new talent and discovering new ideas all the time. It’s an exciting time and the old model is really starting to break apart. I don’t know how much more Marvel and DC can sustain publishing these monthly print comics, to be honest. Something’s got to give. It’s just too much. And how many more publishing

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Red Hook TM & © Dean Haspiel.

Previous spread: At the page tops are two glorious double-page spreads from Dean Haspiel’s work on The Fox #4 [Mar. 2014]. Below left is the cover for Dino’s 2014 effort, Fear, My Dear: A Billy Dogma Experience. Below right is the cover of Beef with Tomato [2015], a graphic novel about a New York City bruiser’s move from Manhattan to the wilds of Brooklyn. This page: Besides his playwrighting, Dino has most recently been compiling the exploits of his NYC-based super-thief, The Red Hook, who inhabits the “New Brooklyn” universe and, in the words of his creator, is “bequeathed the omni-fist of altruism and transformed into a hero against his will after a sentient Brooklyn’s heart is broken and physically secedes from America.” The character’s adventures appear at www.webtoons.com.

“events” can you come up with in a tenure? I would be afraid to be an editor at Marvel and DC right now. [laughs] CBC: So can you make a living from this?

Dean: Barely. Living in Brooklyn, New York, the most expensive city in the world, I have just enough work and money to squeeze by and do nothing else. Meaning, I can hardly indulge all the fruits that New York City provides in terms of entertainment and food. I live on cheap Chinese food, peanut butter sandwiches, the occasional steak dinner when I can. Otherwise, after this conversation with you, (I’m sitting on my couch in my Carroll Gardens apartment) I’m going to ride my bike in the rain over to my shared studio and plug in for ten hours. And I’m going to come back here tonight, pop in a DVD of a TV show that came out last year that I hope I don’t know anything about because of all the spoilers online. [laughter] And watch that before I go to sleep, and then return back to the art table tomorrow. But, meanwhile, because I hopscotch around, on Thursday I’m doing a casting call. We’re trying to find the male lead to my play, Harakiri Kane, that’s being produced and directed by a guy named Ian W. Hill, who produced and directed my first play, Switch to Kill, in 2014. And we’re going to hook up with Stoya and try out some lead actors for that play. I haven’t said this in print — I’ve said this to certain friends, but I haven’t said it publicly — so I’ll just tell you: I’m developing a TV show with co-writer, co-creator Jonathan Vankin, who was one of my editors at Vertigo. I can’t say much more than that. But, fingers crossed, maybe that’ll fly, and I’ll just be expanding my creative rubber band. Can I make a living at this? I’m one of the only people that I know in New York City who’s actually living off of making comics right now, but that could end by Christmas. [laughs] I know that. Every job could be my last job.

CBC: There’s also the possibility, because you have so many irons in the fire, that something could subsidize the comic book, right?

Dean: I’m hoping.

I’ve never been very good at being an IP farm, or turning ideas into T-shirts or toys, or somehow making money off of stuff I’ve done in the past. Like, I don’t live on royalty checks or anything like that, because, again, I’ve never worked on anything that was popular enough. One of my dreams of one day becoming the regular penciler of the Fantastic Four was kind of squashed, my next dream was to have done my Dark Knight so then I could go do my Sin City.

Does that make sense?

CBC: Yeah.

Dean: And I never did my Dark Knight. I don’t have a Dark Knight.

Although I have some ideas, actually, for a Batman story that maybe would function well in this new publishing iteration you were talking about that Mark Doyle’s doing over at DC, but we’ll see if I get the phone call back. But I guess my Sin City arguably could be if I committed more to Billy Dogma and was able to perpetuate more Red Hook.

CBC: To what do you attribute you tenacity?

All characters TM & © their respective copyright holders.

Dean: [Laughs] People like you. You know, people like you still believing in me.

Because, you know, there’s some days you’re like, “Why? What am I doing? I’m an idiot. I must be an idiot. I don’t make enough money at this.” But then I think about money, and money only does one thing: it just pays your rent and buys food, it buy stuff, right? So there’s a different currency here, and the currency is the fan base, is the passion and the love and the way you connect to other people that you had no idea… Because, when we talk about comics, we love what we’re talking about, and that energy fuels my blood and pumps my heart, right? For whatever psychological or emotional reason that is, I don’t even want to investigate because I don’t want a list of why that works, but I think it’s because of conversations like this.

It’s because, if you’re in a comic book shop, or you’re online and you’re reading some news, and you see something, “Oh, Dean’s doing this thing,” you might go check it out because you like me, and you’ve liked some of the stuff I do.

And that currency, that connection right there, is what drives me. And I love the magazines and the articles you do, and the interviews.

It’s perpetuating this creative mythology.

You know, we love stories. We loved these characters. We get mad at these characters.

We invest so much into this. In a way, and I said this in my speech at Baltimore Comic-con, this is my family. Comics are my family.

CBC: And I think that it’s a recognition that you, and what I was mentioning about Alex Toth, and certainly Kirby, and any number of professionals in the business, you guys are authentic. You just know you’re not a drudge, but in pursuit of something you believe in. You’re doing it because you love doing it.

Dean: Yeah, I love doing it, and because I have to. I wouldn’t know what to do otherwise. Yes, you can reinvent yourself and stuff, but what you start to do is you start to discover your trends. When you’ve done enough work, you can look back at your work and go, “Oh, gosh. I guess I keep writing about that thing, or I keep trying to draw that other thing and evolve it and make it better.”

In 1985, my senior year of high school, I had the opportunity to be an assistant to three cartoonists, starting off with Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants and an issue or two of COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Elektra: Assassin. I then transitioned over to working with Howard Chaykin on American Flagg! and occasionally assisting Walter Simonson on Thor.

Like, how crazy is that? I’m 17 years old, going on 18.

I’m completing my senior year of high school, which was at Music and Art, and then, in my fourth year, transitioned to LaGuardia High School, so we were the first graduating class of LaGuardia, hanging out with my buddy Larry O’Neil, hopping the subway downtown to the garment district to hang out and draw with these masters of the comic form, learning by osmosis, by just showing up and being there, because they didn’t teach comics at Music and Art/LaGuardia high school.

Most of our teachers kind of looked down on that. And then committing to comics and declaring, “No. I’m going to do this.” And, thanks to the Fantastic Four and American Splendor, hopscotching back and forth between super-heroes and memoir, growing up in a creative family environment, surrounded by theater people and actors and writers and producers. I eventually went to SUNY Purchase and I transitioned from art to film because I realized film speaks more to narrative than the fine arts. When I draw pictures, I’m drawing story. I have a hard time designing covers because I’m trying to sell a whole story in one image, which is what paintings do. Again, fine art is not my wheelhouse.

I’m used to the idea of images serving story and getting to the next panel, earning the next page, exploiting the real estate of that blank page for narrative purposes, because we’re showing a story. And if I can be afforded a break from comics because maybe I’m doing a TV show or a movie, or writing a play, I’m still telling and showing stories.

That’s what matters the most to me.

This page: The “New Brooklyn” universe was a creation of Dean Haspiel and his studio buds Vito Delsante, Ricardo Venâncio, the late Seth Kushner, and Shamus Beyale. As reported by Newsarama, “The series follows the adventures of a unique group of heroes who emerge in the fallout from Brooklyn’s decision to secede from New York state.” The NuBKU characters gracing the promotional poster seen at left include Haspel’s Red Hook, Delsante and Venâncio’s Purple Heart, and Kushner and Beyale’s Brooklynite. In recent months, Haspiel has been feverishly at work on his Red Hook sequel, War Cry (seen below), which “takes readers into the aftermath of an alien attack on earth that killed most of America’s super-heroes.” Dino also adds that it’s “Romeo versus Juliet but with super-powers.”

Judge for yourself at webtoons.

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#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Portrait photography ©2017 Kendall Whitehouse.

You have to hand it to mainstay Archie Comics contributor Dan Parent, a constant presence at comic book conventions nationwide. He’s a relentless self-promoter, whether hawking his commissions or pushing the cartoonist’s creator-owned properties, The Carneys and his ongoing collaboration with fellow Archie stalwart Fernando Ruiz, Die Kitty Die. Notably, for his creation of Kevin Keller, a recent addition to the Riverdale gang and the first openly gay character in the series, Dan received the “Outstanding Comic Book” award from the civil rights organization, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) in 2013. The artist/ writer, currently drawing the “all-new classic” series, Your Pal Archie, was interviewed by phone on July 28, 2017.

Veronica, Kevin Keller, Your Pal Archie TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Kitty Ravencraft TM & © Dan Parent & Fernando Ruiz.

Chatting with the Archie Comics “classic” cartoonist about his favorite Riverdale girl, Kubert School training, his creator-owned Die Kitty Die, and bringing Kevin Keller to life in the Archie universe!

Comic Book Creator: Are there any other artists in your family, Dan? Dan Parent: No, not really. My mom had an artistic flair, but she never pursued it. I was really the only one who pursued it professionally.

CBC: Do you have brothers or sisters?

Dan: I do. I have a sister, Pam, who I call Mi-Mi. She’s a year younger than me.

CBC: Where are you from?

Dan: West Burke , Vermont, a small town in the northeast part of the state. I was also born in Vermont.

CBC: You grew up there?

Dan: Yes, I grew up in Vermont for most of my childhood. I was also raised in Connecticut for a period of time when my parents moved there, but we moved back to Vermont before I hit high school.

So, I’m pretty much a Vermonter, raised in a pretty rural area.

CBC: What was it like?

Dan: Well, it’s pretty much 10 miles to go to any kind of store, and the school was about 10 miles away. So, there was no going out of the house and walking to the store kind of thing. But it was good. I didn’t enjoy it at the time, but now I appreciate it more.

CBC: Did you go to high school there?

Dan: I did.

CBC: How many people in your class?

Dan: I know I graduated with 120 people. Is that a lot or not?

CBC: No, I don’t think so.

Dan: I think there were 600 in the whole high school, but keep in mind this

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

was the whole county, basically.

CBC: Was it a pretty typical upbringing? You were into TV, music, and pop culture — that kind of stuff?

Dan: That’s right. I was really into the TV big time and grew up watching a lot. I was big into reruns like Leave It To Beaver, The Brady Bunch, I Love Lucy, that kind of thing. Anything pop culture, really.

CBC: And when did comic books come into the picture?

Dan: Comics came into play when I was five, when mom was cleaning houses and she would have to bring me along with her when she was working. Just to keep me quiet or entertained, she started buying me comics. At the time, I think they were 15¢, so she’d buy six comics for a dollar and I would just reread them over and over again. She started me out on Harvey Comics and Archie. Those were definitely my first interests (though Harvey probably more so).

CBC: And did you graduate to the other imprints at all, Marvel and DC? Dan: Yes. When I was probably eight or nine years old, I started getting interested in the super-hero comics, and I was definitely more of a DC guy. I was really into Superman and Batman, and I really enjoyed Justice League of America. Once I got to be 11 or 12, The Legion of Super-Heroes was my favorite, totally.

CBC: How come?

Dan: Why was that? What I liked about it is it was Superboy with the Legion of Super-Heroes. I liked that whole dynamic. I loved Superman a lot, so then I followed the whole Superboy thing into the Legion. I think it was because it was such a weird variety of

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Top left: Young Danny Parent and his sister Mimi in their early years. Below inset: From left to right, Dan Parent, sister Mimi, and their mom.

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characters. You know, the Justice League was pretty normal, generally, but the Legion had a lot of odd characters and I just liked that. I think I was attracted to that.

CBC: Did you get into The X-Men at all?

Dan: I did read X-Men in high school. The John Byrne/ Chris Claremont era, of course. That was really popular. I did enjoy that, but the Legion still stayed my favorite.

CBC: There’s always been a lot of talk about the X-Men representing outsiders and just being something for people who felt “alternative.” I’m wondering if the Legion was like that at all for you.

Dan: I think I just related more to the Legion for whatever reason. Definitely I understood the whole thing with the X-Men, about people being attracted to that. People who felt like they were outsiders. The Legion was just more… goofy? [laughter] A little more light-hearted.

It wasn’t quite as dark as the X-Men got, so I think I appreciated that.

CBC: So, do you like “fun” comics? Not necessarily the way comics got dark in the ’80s?

Dan: I definitely gravitate more towards the classic style of comics. I’m probably one of Darwyn Cooke’s biggest fans, because I like the feel he brought to comics. I had stopped reading DCs and Marvels for a while because I was busy working for Archie and other stuff, but when

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Harvey Hits, Casper, and related characters TM & © Classic Media, LLC. Die Kitty Die TM & © Dan Parent & Fernando Ruiz.

Previous spread: At far left is Kendall Whitehouse’s portrait of Dan Parent taken at the 2016 New York Comic Con. Left inset is Parent posing with his 2013 GLADD Media Award for “Outstanding Comic Book.”

Top right is the first issue of Your Pal Archie, Parent’s current regular assignment.

Inset below are Parent-drawn vignettes of Veronica Lodge, Kevin Keller, and Kitty Ravencraft. Below: Parent drew the cover of Harvey Hits #4 [2017], and the Warren Kremer (whose Casper is seen in center inset below) influence is apparent in Dan’s Die Kitty Die #2 variant cover Harvey pastiche.

The New Frontier came out, that brought me back into comics. I think it was just the way Darwyn told the story. It was old-fashioned, but it wasn’t corny, either, and I think that’s what I’m attracted to in comics. I like some things and if the story’s dark, it’s dark, but I think I like my super-hero comics not that way.

CBC: So when did you start drawing?

Dan: I started drawing around kindergarten, and I just remember starting to take the Harvey comics, the Richie Rich comics, and I would start to copy what I saw. Then I started in with Archie. I don’t know if I have it anymore, but I know I had a report card cover from the first grade that had some Archie drawings on it. So, I guess I started drawing, trying to copy from comic books as far back as then. And I just never stopped drawing. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t. It just seemed like it was just natural to me.

CBC: Now did you aspire from a young age to want to be a comic book artist or cartoonist?

Dan: I did, but I don’t think I ever thought it was possible. I think I just thought, “Well. I love drawing and maybe I could be a professional.” But I never really thought it would happen.

I just knew I liked to do it. So I knew, like, in high school I just loved to draw. I just didn’t think it would happen. [laughs] I just thought, “Well, you know…” I would draw and enjoy it on the side, and then work at a real job! But somehow it worked out, strangely enough.

CBC: Were you known as an artist in grade school and in high school?

Dan: I think that started in junior high, where they could see I was really into it. I would never perform in plays and things like that, but I would do the artwork for the backdrops and things like that. In high school, there was myself and a couple other people in my class who were considered “the artists” of the school.

Strangely enough, it was me and two of my friends that I went to high school with are actually working in the business, too.

One is Scott McRae, who has been an

Superboy, The Legion of Super-Heroes TM & © DC Comics. Archie and related characters TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. The Ramones TM Ramones Productions, Inc. Archie Meets Ramones variant cover art © Jaime Hernandez. Love and Rockets TM & © the Hernandez Brothers.

inker and artist for DC Comics. He does a lot of Looney Tunes, and Pat Brousseau, who is now a letterer now for DC. CBC: You three were in this small Vermont school together and all three of you are pros?

Dan: All three of us, yeah! All three of us ended up going into comics.

CBC: Have you always been tight with those guys?

Dan: Yes. We’re still great friends, and we all went to the Joe Kubert School together, too.

CBC: Wow! Who came up with that idea? When did you first consider that?

Dan: Well, they came up with it first. They were smarter than me. When we graduated high school, I thought, “Well, I’ve got to be practical.” So I went to college to become an English teacher. They left right away to go to the Kubert School, and I very quickly regretted my decision. “Oh, I don’t want to do this.” And I was really upset and sad that they had gone on to do what they wanted to do and I didn’t.

So then I saved my money — and fortunately my mother and father were very supportive and they said, “Do what you want to do. Go where you need to go.” So I took a year off to save money to then go down to the Kubert School. So, when I did go, Pat and Scott were in their second year at school, and I was in my first year, so we weren’t in the same class because I had waited.

CBC: But back in high school, you in the same class, right?

Dan: In high school we were all in the same grade and graduated high school together, but when we went to Kubert School I started later because I dragged my heels. But strangely enough, I graduated from Kubert School and they didn’t. They didn’t go all three years. They got work in the industry, but I stayed the whole three years and loved it.

CBC: Did you always find the Archie comics appealing?

Dan: I did. As a kid, I just was fascinated with the whole Riverdale High School thing. You grew up and that’s kind of what you wanted your life to be like. You wanted to live in a town like Riverdale where they’re all friendly with each other and there’s no major problems. I definitely gravitated towards that whole feel. I just liked the characters, which were really good. And then, when I went to the Kubert School, I started to gravitate back towards that approach.

I was into the super-hero stuff in terms of drawing that, but everything I drew still has a little bit of a cartoony look to it. The Archie style really fit my style because, while I could draw well realistically, I always hated lots of detail. I always hated over-rendered and overdrawn stuff, and the Archie stuff just really seemed to really fit what I was trying to do.

CBC: Was the first comic book type work that you ever did, was it in the Kubert School? Or did you do some in high school or junior high?

Dan: Do you mean the first work that I got in comics?

CBC: No. I mean just comic book storytelling. Did you start doing it in junior high or high school?

Dan: You mean like doing my own stories type thing?

CBC: Yeah.

Dan: I know I did some assignments in high school and started to come up with my own stories. I think I even came up with a couple of Archie stories when I was in high school.

CBC: Really?

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Dan: They were really bad. I remember that. They were really terrible. [laughter] I did send in some stuff to Archie.

I think it was when I was in college before I went to the Kubert School. I sent in a story and, of course, it was rejected because it was bad. And then, a couple more times during Kubert School, I sent stuff in that got rejected. It wasn’t, of course, until my third year at Kubert School when I had improved a lot, and that was when I was actually hired.

Later, after I was probably working for Archie eight or nine years, Victor Gorelick, the editor-in-chief, was going through his files, cleaning out his old files of submissions, and he found my submissions that I had sent in and showed them to me. [laughs] I was like, “Wow! You still have these.” [laughter] They didn’t send them back. They sent you a letter back but they wouldn’t send the submissions back. It was kind of funny to see them and see how bad they were.

CBC: Do they still got them or did you get them?

Dan: I have them now. Yeah, they gave them back to me.

I have them somewhere. Hidden away where nobody will see. [laughs] CBC: You better dig them out for this, Dan! [laughs] Dan: We’ll see. I don’t know about that.

CBC: So, how was your high school experience?

Were you sociable? Were you popular?

Dan: I think I was kind of middle of the road. I was kind of nerdy and geeky, but I got along with everybody pretty well. I mean, I certainly hung out with the nerdier kids, but I was able to get along with the more popular kids. I was definitely kind of in the middle somewhere, but I did like school. I enjoyed going there, probably because I lived out in such a rural area. Going to school was my social life, basically.

There wasn’t a lot to do when I was at home, so I think I did enjoy going and socializing with kids that way.

CBC: Now, were you openly gay when you were in high school?

This page: Two big influences on the development of comic book artist Dan Parent were the Legion of Super-Heroes and Love and Rockets. At top is Parent’s clever mash-up of the Riverdale gang and the LSH and above is Joe Staton and Dick Giordano’s cover for Superboy & the Legion of Super-Heroes #250 [Apr. 1979].

Inset left is the unaltered Jaime Hernandez cover art for Archie Meets Ramones #1 [2016]. (For publication, the band members’ faces were blacked-out.)

Below is L&R #1 [Sept. 1982].

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Above: xxx

Right: Kubert School alumni smile for the camera at Bill Golliher’s “tacky X-mas party” in 1991. On left, top to bottom, Scott McRae, Katie McRae, Patrick Brosseau, and Chris LaForce. On right, from top to bottom, Dan Parent, Kathy Parent, and Donna Block-Benjamin.

Below: During his 1980s enrollment at the Kubert School, Dan Parent was drawn to co-creator Joe Staton’s charming E-Man revival at First Comics.

Dan: Actually, I’m bisexual. But I had a pretty regular high school life, dating and such. When I was in my mid-20s got married and had two kids, Adam and Alexandra, who are already 19 and 24!!

CBC: Where’d you meet your wife?

Dan: In high school.

CBC: All right. Were you two high school sweethearts through the years?

Dan: Oh yeah, Kathy, my best friend and soulmate! And then, when I went to Kubert School, she was also going to college and she moved down to Dover. Then we got married and I was working at Archie probably seven, eight years when we got married and then had kids. Then moved out here, to Pennsylvania, where it’s rural again.

I guess. It was weird because I think I tried to get away from that, growing up in that atmosphere, and then sort of ended back into a rural setting. [laughs] CBC: How did you end up there?

Dan: In Pennsylvania? Because, at the time, I was working at Archie and we were living in New Jersey and were wondering “Why are we paying all these New Jersey taxes when I’m working at home anyway?” So, if we move to Pennsylvania, which is another half-hour, 40 minutes, from where we are, we can just pay half the taxes we had been paying. So it seemed to be a no-brainer. We moved to Pennsylvania where it was much cheaper to live, and I was still working mostly from home.

At the time, Kathy could pretty much work almost anywhere, as she worked in the medical field, so there were always plenty of jobs there. And then I just worked here at home. I commuted to Archie for a couple more years. I was working at Archie, by that point, two or three days a week and doing most of my work at home. And then, yeah, then I just settled here in Pennsylvania.

CBC: So Archie was out on Long Island? In Mamaroneck?

Dan: Archie was in Mamaroneck up until about three years ago, when they moved to Pelham.

CBC: Did you know of Joe Kubert’s reputation and history before going there?

Dan: I did! Because, when we were growing up, we would always see the ads in the comic books, so we would always be like, “Oh, wouldn’t that be so cool to go to the Joe Kubert School?” But we always knew about it. And then, once we started, because this was the early ’80s still — I started in ’84 — the school had only been around about seven or eight years, so it was still pretty new. I was in the first year they moved into their big building that they’re in, in the “real school.” This was when you were just starting to hear the names of some professionals who were graduating and getting work, so you sort of knew it was starting to get a good reputation.

CBC: So you were a regular comic collector? You went to the comic shop by that time?

Dan: Oh, yes.

CBC: What were your favorite comics in the mid-’80s, when you were a student?

Dan: Let’s see: I remember I liked E-Man by Joe Staton a lot, and I liked it in the ’70s, too, when it was at Charlton. So, when First Comics came out, I liked E-Man and American Flagg, but more so the mid- to late ’80s, I loved Love and Rockets, and I still do. I still think that Love and Rockets is probably one of my most longtime favorite comics. I really love it.

CBC: What is it about it that is appealing?

Dan: It’s weird because Love and Rockets was a comic I could really relate to. It’s odd that I would because I’m not a Hispanic person who lives in southern California in an impoverished area, which is part of the setting of Love and Rockets. But I think what I like about that series is just the fact that the writing is really real. It’s like you know #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

E-Man and Nova Kane TM & © Joe T. Staton.

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Left: Dan Parent and some Kubert School classmates in the mid-’80s, a few who teased him about being a Kenny Loggins lookalike.

Right: The Vermont comic book mafia: from left, professional inker Scott McRae, pro letterer Patrick Brosseau, and cartoonist Dan Parent, in a pic taken in 2012 on the occasion of Brosseau’s wedding.

Betty and Veronica TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

the characters. But I think the Hernandez Brothers, since they’ve sort of aged the characters through time, you kind of become attached to them because they’re growing older with you. So I’ve always felt like, whenever I go back and revisit Love and Rockets, it always feels like a friend or something like that. And the art style, of course, is so appealing. Jaime Hernandez, especially, I just think his stuff is so great because it’s a got a little bit of that Archie influence, but it’s such a clean, slick style, and I just love it.

CBC: As you were going to the Kubert School, did you start feeling influences were coming into your work? Was Dan DeCarlo an influence? What did you want to do?

Dan: Dan DeCarlo was definitely a big influence, and some of the other Archie artists, too, like Samm Schwartz was an early influence because his Jughead was so unique. And Harry Lucey, too, had an impact on me, though that was a lot later. I didn’t appreciate his stuff until the years went along. But Dan DeCarlo is definitely my biggest influence, because he was the one, when I as a kid growing up, I would always see his artwork, and I would always be, like, who is that? This was before they gave the artists’ credits in the comics. So I’d see DeCarlo’s stuff, and I’d be like, “Oh my God, this guy is so good. Who is he? I just love his art.” And I was always trying to draw like him, trying to copy his stuff, still not knowing who he was. And then, once Dan DeCarlo became more known and they started giving credits, I knew his was a name to follow. He made it look so easy, his stuff looked so good, and it was so deceiving because it is not easy to pull off. He just made it look that way.

CBC: Now, was it the way he drew cute girls? Can you put your finger on what was so appealing?

Dan: Yeah, it was definitely the girls which is the first thing you notice of him. The girls are so gorgeous, and the fashions are good, but they’re just so cute. They were just perfect-looking. Dan used to say that he sort of think of it as doing Playboy for kids. The girls were so real and sexy and cute. Of course, they had to be wholesome at the same time, but he used to use that term, Playboy for kids, and I think that was very appropriate.

CBC: That’s funny. I designed and did the production on The MLJ Companion (for which I was given co-writer credit for adding material), and so I immersed in Archie Comics for about three months and I had this eureka moment. When I grew up, though I’m a huge comics fan, I just was never turned on by Archie Comics.

As much as DeCarlo and Stan Goldberg’s art was so appealing, I didn’t really get into the content of it until I worked on the MLJ book when I suddenly realized — duh! — that the teen humor This page: Legendary humor artist Dan DeCarlo (seen in a 2000 pic and with his Betty Cooper pin-up from Pep #160 [Jan. 1963] and Veronica Lodge pin-up from Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica #85 [Jan. ’63] at top) was not only Dan Parent’s greatest cartooning inspiration but the two also worked together — with DeCarlo as penciller and Parent as inker/finisher, as evidenced by this Betty and Veronica #53 [July 1992] page at right and Ronnie-as-Cleopatra pin-up, far right.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

stuff was about sex. It’s about hormones and about being a teenager. I just had thought it was lame humor comics and now I’m a total fan.

Dan: Right!

CBC: It took me until my mid-50s to realize that it is Playboy for kids, just like DeCarlo had said. Did you recognize that appeal? I mean, it’s sexy stuff, right?

Dan: Yeah. I mean, Dan DeCarlo really pushed the limits with his artwork. The thing is, and yet it is still wholesome at the same time. It’s a hard thing to pull off because so many artists, and I see this nowadays in comics, too, when they try and draw something that’s sexy, it always looks sleazy. But there are those artists who can pull off the sexy but wholesome thing at the same time, and it’s a bit of a challenge. Amanda Conner can do it. She can do really sexy drawings of girls, but they still count as wholesome. Some male artists and super-hero artists, though, will try and sex things up, and it just looks kind of gross. It just looks oversexed. Again, it just depends on the artist and how they’re doing it. But Dan DeCarlo pulled it off better than anybody, and so did Harry Lucey, too. Lucey used to draw these very curvaceous girls, bodies of which no high school girls I think ever had, because these girls were very, very much like Marilyn Monroe-type bodies. But yet there was still a wholesome quality to it.

CBC: When you started going to the Kubert school, did you have your eyes set on Archie Comics as a place to work?

Dan: Well, I was getting to know a couple people who went to the school that were working at Archie. They recognized that it was a possibility. I also was

Above: xxx.

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Inset right: xxx.

Above: Early on during his stint at Archie Comics, cartoonist Dan Parent was assigned any number of puzzle pages, including this 1992 submission inked

by Rudy Lapick. Below: Dan Parent’s B&V #276 cover.

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Micronauts TM & © the respective copyright holder.

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aware that Archie Comics would come to the school and look at portfolios. I started to put it together and believed, “Maybe I can pull this off.” As it happened, my assignments were really starting to get more Archie-ish. I was starting to draw more in that style and, for some assignments, we had to pick existing characters to work on, and I would actually pick Archie. It seemed to become more of a fit, so I definitely started to keep my eyes open for the whole Archie thing.

CBC: Now, when you were going to the Kubert school, there was a big explosion that was taking place within comics that they were being looked at as “sequential art,” and graphic novels were starting to rise up, and independent comics and creator-owned comics, and all that. Did you just pragmatically see yourself as a workhorse or was there something that you wanted to pursue aesthetically?

Dan: [Pauses] What are you saying?

CBC: Was it just a job or was there something else that you had aspirations to create?

Dan: My aspiration was to work. I was a realist and I always thought, “Well, this is a dream to work in comics, so if I can get some work in comics, that’ll be great.” But if I couldn’t even get a job working in the industry, then I could still get work, whether it be in production, working for a

newspaper, anything where I can use my skills that I have learned, and I will be happy.

The great thing with the Kubert School is that they teach you such a wide variety of skills. They’re teaching you that most are not going to get out of here into working in comics right away, “But we’re going to give you the skills where you can go work in an art department somewhere and know what you’re doing.” So that’s where I took it. And I actually didn’t mind doing production work. I like design, I like typography, so I was in that mindset, “As long as I’m doing something in the art field, I’m happy.” So, with that in mind, I was pretty confident I’d at least succeed there. But, luckily, I was utilizing my knowledge. It was the best of both worlds because I started working for Archie before I even graduated.

Archie Comics came down in, I think, March or April of my third year, the year before I graduated, and they looked at my portfolio and started giving me one-page assignments, the Archie gag pages. So I started doing those and pretty quickly started getting work from them, and so, when I graduated, I was lucky enough to get a production job up there. That’s how I started there: basically working fulltime doing production and then doing freelance at night.

CBC: What did production entail?

Dan: Production entailed making all the corrections.

There were proofreaders there and they’d give us the 11" x 17" art pages, with all the circled blue line corrections, and we would paste logos, do lettering correction, correct artwork when it needed to be fixed. But I was basically learning hands-on. It was stuff that I had learned in school became very applicable here because we were doing stuff with typography and we were using… This was back in the days before digital technology took over, so obviously we would work with rubber cement. We were obviously doing things the old-fashioned way and, of course, about five or six years later, digital publishing kicked in and that was a whole other thing I had to learn. But I was definitely able to use my Kubert School production skills at Archie. I really learned a lot.

CBC: You said “we” would make the corrections. Did you work with a partner or other people?

Dan: Yes, I worked with the whole Archie bullpen. A lot of different people have passed through the Archie production department over the years. So, yeah, there was… gosh, I had so many friends who have passed through there. But a lot of them were ex-Kubert students, and when I started up at Archie, probably half the art department was filled with Kubert alumni.

CBC: Now, as an artist producing Archie Comics pages, could you make a solid middle-class living?

Dan: Yes, I could. I mean, I found that with a combination of the day job and freelancer work, I could make an okay living. Working on staff wasn’t a great-paying job, but it was decent. Back then, you received health insurance and all that. So that was okay. And then, of course, the freelance at night was a bonus, but you really had to supplement your income taking on that night work. So by doing both, it was tiring, but I’d work all day and then come home and pencil a page or two at night. So, yeah, right off the bat, I was able to support myself right away. And I was also doing a lot of licensing work when I started, and that was kind of unexpected, so I was doing a lot of package designs, doing artwork for stickers and calendars, and things like that. So that was a lot of extra income. So I was really busy right away.

CBC: So you’d go home at 6:00 or 7:00 o’clock, and then work on freelance work into the midnight hours?

Dan: Right. I was commuting to Mamaroneck from Parsippany, New Jersey, at the time, so it was probably an hour or more commute depending on traffic. I’d go home 6:00, 7:00 o’clock, eat, start working, maybe work until at least 11:00 or 12:00. Then I’d probably go to bed, and then I was probably up at 5:00 or 6:00 the next morning. So I was

Micronauts TM & © the respective copyright holder.

probably going on about five or six hours of sleep, which at the time was fine because, during Kubert School, I was probably going on two or three hours of sleep. It was crazy back at Kubert School! So, when I started working, I actually was getting more sleep!

CBC: You graduated in 1987 from the Kubert school and you immediately went over to work for Archie?

Dan: Yes. I graduated in May of ’87 and then started. As I said, I was already doing a few freelance pages and stuff for them, but I started on staff in June of ’87, so I think I graduated, had a week or two off, and then started up at Archie.

CBC: Dude, that’s 30 years!

Dan: I’ve been there 30 years!

This is my 30th year at Archie.

CBC: And you look so young, Dan! Dan: [Laughs] Thank you. I guess doing what you like keeps you young, I guess.

CBC: I guess that helps. When did you get married?

Dan: I got married in 1990.

CBC: And you started having kids in the ’90s?

Dan: Yup. Our daughter, Alexandra, was born in ’93, and then my son, Adam, in ’98. So my son is 19 and my daughter is 24.

CBC: So were you at home? Were you a house husband, pretty much?

Dan: Sort of. After being at Archie for a few years, I went to going into work three days a week, and I was working at home two days a week. Kathy changed her job, so she was at home two weekdays a week. So basically, one of us was home every day, but there would be one day a week we were both not home. I think on Fridays neither one of us was home, so we had to use daycare. But, basically, one of us was usually home, so it worked out pretty well. We did that for, gosh, 10 or 15 years maybe. I definitely was hands-on.

I went totally freelance in 1996 or so, and then I was working just from home. Actually, I also went to work for Felix the Cat Productions, too, which is another story. But I was basically home a lot.

Let’s put it that way. So there was always somebody here to bring the kids to doctor’s appointments.

We were both actually very hands-on parents.

CBC: On a regular day, how many pages could you pencil?

Dan: If I were to just sit down and work from morning to evening without taking any breaks, I could do three pages of pencils in a day. I think once I did a whole five-page story in a day. I remember timing myself. I think once I got up at 5:00 o’clock in the morning on a Sunday morning and worked until, like, 1:00 or 2:00 into Monday morning, and I was able to do a full five-pages. But that was a very rare thing. And, of course, with running around with kids and doing stuff, obviously some days I’d get one page done, a page-and-a-half, because there were a lot of days where broken up by doctor’s appointments, errands, and things like that.

CBC: Did you always work from other people’s scripts or did you write your own?

Dan: I started writing my own stories a few years after COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

Above: xxx.

I started. At first, I started on other people’s scripts, and then, after two or three years, I started to write more of my own. And then, by the early ’90s, I had done this “Love Showdown” storyline, which was pretty popular. It got a lot of attention.

And after that I was able to pretty much write most of my own stuff. I still write stories for other artists to draw, but I have drawn from a lot of my own scripts.

CBC: Was it easy to learn writing? Was it new for you or did you get a nice background in that at the Kubert School?

Dan: I did learn as a student. They teach you narrative art, which is how to tell a story, so there’s that. But I was always so into movies and TV, and I always had so many ideas in my head, writing was pretty natural, and writing for these characters was a pretty natural step for me, so I definitely enjoyed writing them. It’s definitely easier to write your own scripts because you’re visualizing what you want to draw as you’re writing your scripts, so by the time you’re ready to draw, it’s all there for you, whereas, with someone else’s script, you have to get into their mindset. You going to have to read the script a few times, visualize what you’re going to do, so there’s a little bit more work in that, whereas, when you’re writing your own scripts, you’ve already got that mapped out in your head.

Above: Prior to his creation of Kevin Keller, Dan Parent was most associated with his rendition of Veronica Lodge, particularly his long run on her solo title. That series was initially devoted to her intercontinental travels. Veronica #1 [Apr. 1989] cover and splash by Parent.

Inset left: The New York Times ran this pic of Dan and Ronnie!

Below: 1998 pin-up by Parent.

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Above: One of the first Archie Comics’ story arcs to receive mainstream media attention was Dan Parent and Bill Golliher’s “Love Showdown,” which reintroduced Archie beau Cheryl Blossom to the Riverdale scene. Below: Original art for penciller Dan Parent’s Cheryl Blossom #37 [Mar. 2001] cover, with inks by Jon D’Agostino.

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All TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

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CBC: Now, as a senior, you were doing those one-page gags, right? Are they easy to do? I just wonder.

Dan: Yes. They’re easy because they’re over before you know it. They’re easy because they use them as filler, basically, to throw in empty spaces in the comics. If the gag is not that good, well, it’s only a one-pager and, hopefully the next gag will be better. That happens. But, yeah, it’s just easy because you don’t have to put that much into one page because it’s over with so quickly, so they’re fun to do. Not a lot of investment.

CBC: So were you able to work on a comedic theme with the one-pagers? Like Charlie Brown and Lucy’s football…? Do a series of working at variations of a particular kind of gag?

I wonder if the creative possibilities could be there, too, to do some interesting things with them.

Dan: I guess you could, but I just did the pretty much standard gags like George Gladir or Frank Doyle would write, just the goofy, regular stuff. I used to do a lot of puzzle pages, too. Back then we used to include a lot of games and puzzles also as filler, which were fun to come up with. Fashion pages, too, were pretty popular, so I would do fashion pages.

Those were pretty easy.

CBC: Now, were the fashions sent in by readers or were they made up?

Dan: Readers would send in their sketches with their names attached. Remember, this is pre-internet and, once the internet kicked in, you learned you really can’t

print kids’ names and the towns they live in, because a person could look them up and it could get messy. So we started to just print their names and that would be it. I think actually we would start abbreviating their names, like “J. Smith.” And then, about 10 years ago, we just started to get fashions out of magazines and from online. We just stopped using the ones that people sent in because it got a little risky. You didn’t want to create any stalking situations or anything like that.

CBC: Creepiness, right. Was it fun to work in the Archie offices? You had some real veterans working there, right?

Dan: Oh, yes. It was great. It was wonderful because you could see Dan DeCarlo’s and Stan Goldberg’s artwork as it came in. Back then, every Friday, Dan DeCarlo would come in. Bill Yoshida, our letterer, used to come in twice a week and he would letter right in the office. They’d give him covers and stuff. And different inkers would come in. Jon D’Agostino would come in sometimes, Rudy Lapick came in every Friday. So you had a whole crew of these classic Archie guys coming in every week, bringing in their work. And then you’d come in on Fridays because you wanted to get your invoices in so you’d get paid the next week. So that was always nice, being in the production department and seeing these people you looked up to coming in. And it was really nice, too, because after a while, as I was penciling and learning how to draw Archie, I started working with Dan DeCarlo, and he could just really show me a lot of what he did, and I started to actually finish his pages. He would come in with layouts and I would tighten his pencils. So I really loved it, because it was extra money, of course, which is nice. The company would pay me extra to do that. And I really learned how to draw the figures better because I was drawing over Dan DeCarlo, one of the greatest. You can’t help but get better! Something good has to rub off on you if you’re doing that! I think my work improved more doing that than anything else, because I was working on Dan’s stuff.

CBC: Did you socialize with Dan at all? Did you go out to meals, also, then?

Dan: Yeah! We’d go out and eat sometimes. He was funny.

He was a pisser. He liked to knock back a few. [laughs] He could handle his liquor very well. I couldn’t. But he was just funny. Dan was a very charming, easy-to-get-along-with guy. He didn’t know how good he was, because I was in such awe of him, and you think you’re going to meet your idol and they’re going to be these big shots who are going to look down on you, and he was just the opposite. And I remember when you’d say to him, “Oh my god, this page from so-and-so is fantastic! Can I buy it from you?” And he would just give it to you, “Take it.” He was as flabbergasted that somebody wanted his art as we were just to be in his presence. So he was very modest.

I don’t think Dan knew what kind of influence he had until the end of his career. Toward the end of his career, I think he started to recognize that, because conventions were popping up, and people were more talking about how he was an influence for them. I think he started to realize it toward the end, but he certainly didn’t have a full grasp of how appreciated he was when I was there in the office.

CBC: Were you privy to his frustrations about Archie?

Dan: You know, I hated the Josie situation that was going on, and he was frustrated about that, because he created Josie, and there was that whole back-and-forth situation that went on. And that was difficult, because the last couple years of his career, he wasn’t even with Archie anymore.

The Carneys TM & © Dan Parent & Bill Golliher. Sabrina and associated characters TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Die Kitty Die TM & © Dan Parent & Fernando Ruiz.

He was doing other stuff. So that was rough. At that point, I was home and wasn’t working in the office anymore, but that was sad to see that whole thing happen. I wish that they could have worked it out.

CBC: Was it sometimes a tempestuous place to work? I mean, there were a lot of office spats that were taking place, a lot of intrigue between the families that was taking place there.

Could it be difficult?

Dan: I kept my head down. [chuckles] Myself, I had very little drama there.

I always got along with both families, the Goldwaters and Silberkleits. I always just tried to just be about the work and not get involved in the office politics. And when I was working in production, the first couple years I was there full-time, but I went part-time shortly thereafter, so I guess I wasn’t there as much as a lot of people. My number one goal was just to draw, so as long as I was drawing, I was happy and tried to keep out of any office politics as much as possible, And, of course, there’s things that go on, but I try to avoid that and keep to myself.

CBC: Can you speak of the memorable work that you did in the ’90s? What stands out?

Dan: Well, I think the first mark that I made at Archie was actually in 1989, going into ’90, when I did the Veronica book, and that was the first time Veronica had her own solo title. In all the years at Archie, she never had her own series and, when I went into Archie, I asked, “Why doesn’t Veronica have her own book?” It just doesn’t make sense to me. So when they were looking for ideas for new books around that time, I came up with ideas for about four or five books. And, out of all of them, the Veronica book was the one that lasted. The other ones kind of went by the wayside. Some had minor success. Archie 3000 had about 20 issues, I guess.

The Veronica book stuck around for about… I don’t know… 20 years?

Or 18 years? It made it about 210 issues. It started out where the first issue was called Veronica in Paris. The first 20 issues were where she traveled to different locations, so that’s when it was a fresh idea that would keep it different from other books. So the first 18 issues of Veronica she traveled to different places. And then, with #18 or #19, it just became just Veronica, and I worked on that for, on and off, for about 18 or 20 years, about 150 of the 200 or so issues. I know I had a long, long run on it.

Then the next mark that I would say that I made was with my friend Bill Golliher, another Kubert school friend who came to Archie, and we worked on a lot of projects together and came up with this storyline called “Love Showdown,” probably the first COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

storyline to get mass media attention.

Today everything trends on social media, but this was the first time where we did a storyline that got picked up by the major media, such as the Today show and Entertainment Tonight. All of the entertainment shows picked it up, and the storyline was: Archie was going to have a new girlfriend other than Betty and Veronica. He was through with those girls and who was Archie’s new girlfriend going to be?

If you’re familiar with the character of Cheryl Blossom, who Dan DeCarlo created in the early 1980s, she was a very memorable character, but Cheryl was also very sexy, almost too sexy for Archie Comics. So there was a little bit of a pushback… “Cheryl’s too sexy, she’s too buxom.” So they phased her out in the mid-’80s, but Bill and I always loved Cheryl, and she was a fan favorite, so what we’ll do is we’ll say Archie is going to have this new girlfriend, and it’ll bring Cheryl Blossom back into the fold. So the “Love Showdown” thing was a four-issue storyline and, at the end, we reveal it was Cheryl, the new girl replacing Betty and Veronica. At that point, it was the beginning of a popular storyline, and, of course, Archie did end up going back with Betty and Veronica a couple months after that in the other titles, but it actually made Cheryl a real popular character.

So Cheryl Blossom had her own series for a while in the mid-’90s and was very prominent in the other books.

So then I was working on the Cheryl storyline through the mid-’90s. That whole

This page: With Kubert School alumnus Bill Golliher as collaborator, Dan Parent created The Carneys, a “freak family” that scored a 1994 oneshot at Archie [Summer 1994] (with cover seen at top) and were introduced in Sabrina’s Halloween Spooktacular #1 [1993], at left. The creator-owned characters have also appeared in Parent’s recent Die Kitty Die: Hollywood or Bust mini-series [’17].

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Right: Detail from the cover of Batman #530 [May, 1996]. Art by Kelley Jones.

And it just didn’t click. It was another storyline where we decided to bring Cheryl in. We were sending Cheryl away this time, but it was a little bit too forced and nobody really cared. It just didn’t click. But, you know, we would try and bring in new characters and do other things, and sometimes they would have some impact.

CBC: What’s the genesis of your creation Kevin Keller?

Dan: Now, Kevin clicked! That was a big deal. What happened was we’d run through the 2000s, with highs and lows, and some good stuff did come out. In 2008, the two owners of Archie, Richard Goldwater and Michael Silberkleit, passed away within six months of each other, so we were without direction. When Victor Gorelick kind of took over, he was editor-in-chief and just sort of managed things until the family figured out what they were going to do, and then Jon Goldwater came on board. And Jon was Richard’s half-brother, and he came on board, and he was much younger than the other previous owners, by 20 or 30 years, and looked at the whole company and said, “We need to really shake things up! Archie then looked like it was still stuck in the ’50s,” and to a point it was.

About a year before Jon came onboard, they had another big success with the marriage of Archie. And this was the biggest thing that had ever hit at Archie, even bigger than “Love Showdown.” The media gave the marriage a lot of attention. Of course, it was a future storyline where they’re older. But we announced that Archie was marrying Veronica. Well, the world was on fire because everybody loves Betty! How can he marry Veronica? But it was a marketing ploy because we were going to marry him off to both girls. It was a “what if” storyline, about what if he marries #16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Archie 3000 TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Felix the Cat TM ¶ © Dreamworks Animation, LLC.

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story arc really energized the line and brought a lot of media attention, which the publishers (naturally) liked. They liked the fact that Archie was in the national news. Since we got that attention, they decided, “Let’s keep this going. Let’s come up with more things like this.” But what we came up with didn’t quite click. We would do a couple other major storylines, but only certain things only hit. You can’t plan it. You come up with the best ideas, but some stories grab people and some don’t. But that “Love Showdown” thing was a big deal.

CBC: Now, over the last few decades, Marvel and DC have been known to host creative summits. They’d bring together a bunch of writers and editors out of the office for a weekend and determine the next year’s big cross-over events, as well as storylines aiming to grab media attention. Did Archie do that? Did they brainstorm, get groups together, organize gatherings?

Dan: We would have meetings, yeah, and I do remember, we did have some meetings on the storylines. We had modest success with a couple of other things. In the early, mid-’90s, we gave Jughead a baby sister, because we had never had births in the Archie comics. They were all pretty much only siblings, which was kind of weird, and it was high time for a baby to be born. So we had, Jughead’s little sister, Jellybean, born into the Riverdale crew. We stretched that storyline out, but it didn’t get the attention “Love Showdown” got, but it still received some nice attention, bringing a new character in. And then we tried to do Love Showdown 2, which just the title alone tells you is not a good idea.

All TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

Veronica, how would it go? What if he marries Betty? Oh, they knew that if they married him off to Veronica first, people would be outraged. And they were. Then they did the Betty storyline, and that settled people down a little bit, but I know at the time Archie never had as much press as they got. The sales of Archie went through the roof. They were numbers they hadn’t seen in years. So that really, really reinvigorated the Archie brand, and it made people realize, it made us realize how Archie is really like a part of Americana, because people were really invested in this. People got very, very worked up for this whole marriage storyline. Again, it was on all the media, the TV shows. Now, of course, this was when the internet had been around for a long time, so it was a huge story online. It was everywhere.

So Jon Goldwater comes in around the end of that, or when the story was simmering down, and he said, “Okay, let’s strike while the iron is hot. There is an awareness now of Archie.” He didn’t want to just go back to doing the same old Archie and settling back into the normal routine and people would start to forget about Archie again. So he looked at the whole brand and, as I said, he thought it was very 1950s. It didn’t seem relevant, and there were a lot of issues we were facing at the time, anyway. People had been commenting, “Why isn’t there more diversity? Why’s it this and not that?” So Jon was a big fan of mine — which is always great! — and we had some meetings, and he said, “We need to be more diverse.”

So first we came up with characters of different ethnicities. That was like the first thing. And then using more of the other characters that we had around who were of different

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

ethnicities. And then we thought, “What about having a gay character?” We couldn’t think of a reason not to do it.

This is 2010, and in gay culture, you had Will and Grace and gay characters were on a lot of TV shows at this point.

The national outlook had changed. So, because we couldn’t think of a reason not to do it, we decided to do it. So I was the one who came up with the character of Kevin Keller.

First, we thought, “Do we do a female character or do we do a male character?” I came up with a storyline where Veronica has the hots for this new guy who comes to town, but he’s gay, and first she can’t figure out why he isn’t attracted to her. She’s doing everything she can do.

She’s pulling out all the stops to attract this guy, but he’s just not responding. And, of course, Veronica’s so vain that she can’t figure out that he’s gay. She has to figure out what is she doing wrong… “Why isn’t he into me?” So, basically, everybody in town knows that Kevin’s gay except for Veronica. So it becomes a farce of hers, trying to turn on Kevin and we just thought that that was a good, funny, Archie-esque storyline. So that’s why we went with Kevin Keller, to fit the storyline I had in my head. So we introduced him, and, as you know, the character took off.

CBC: You obviously got press on it, right?

Dan: A lot of press.

CBC: Right. But you introduced him in not necessarily a splashy way, but a way that just eased right into the storyline. It was about Veronica’s vanity, right?

Dan: Exactly. And that was very, very important, that we didn’t do this to look like a stunt, because, at that time, other companies had introduced gay characters, some effectively and some not so effectively. But it was realized that other companies would introduce gay characters and then they would not use them anymore. It was just like it was done for the splash.

But we were very interested

Previous page: Dan Parent conceived of Archie 3000 which — yep, you guessed it — imagined the Riverdale gang in the year 3000 A.D. The title lasted for 16 issues between 1989–91. Cover and splash page from #2 [July 1989] seen at top.

Over the years, Parent has freelanced for the publishers of the wonderful, wonderful cat, working on licensing work and on the Felix the Cat Black & White series. This page: At top is Dan Parent’s rendition of the classic Pop’s soda shop pose.

Inset left is Parent’s cover for the final issue of the original run of Archie, #666 [July 2015], with Archie making eyes for Valerie Brown, back-up singer in Josie and the Pussycats, repeated below on D.P.’s TV Guide cover.

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This page: In 2012, Archie staffer and writer Alex Segura dreamed up the story behind Archie Meets Kiss, a mini-series teaming the Riverdale crew with the comics-inspired rock band. Dan Parent drew the four issues and, at top, poses alongside Segura with rhythm guitarist Paul Stanley and bass guitarist Gene Simmons (squeezing Parent’s cheeks at far right) to promote the teamup. Parent’s covers for the title are above and right. Below: Though primarily drawn by Gisele Lagace, Dan Parent did contribute a variant cover to the recent Archie Comics crossover event, Archie Meets Ramones: Next page: Dan Parent and George Takei (who gueststarred in Kevin Keller #6) at a Midtown Comics signing, Dec. 2012. At bottom are other Archie crossovers drawn by Parent.

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#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Archie characters TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. KISS TM Kiss. The Ramones TM Ramones Productions, Inc.

Above: Caption.

in a character that was going to stick around. We wanted to make him a good character, and we wanted a really good storyline to introduce him, so we worked hard to make sure that it didn’t come off like a stunt, that it came off as a good story. And we had planned to keep using Kevin. So while we weren’t sure if Kevin would take off, or if it would get a lot of media attention (though we knew we would get some because it was a gay character in an Archie comic), we just knew that if we did it right, that if we did a good story, that it would serve its purpose to permanently include him in the gang and if the character takes off, great. And, fortunately for us, the character did take off and people really liked Kevin.

CBC: Taking away sexual preference, how would you define Kevin in a nutshell?

Dan: I would define Kevin as like the boy next door. He is very good-hearted and a lot like Archie. In his storyline, Kevin is a kid who doesn’t quite belong because his father’s in the military and they move around a lot.

So Kevin’s always trying to find a home. He always feels a little unsettled. And we read stories about kids who feel that way, military brats who sort of never had that home base that they feel comfortable with. But with Kevin, even though he had that whole situation, he had a very strong family bond. So we basically just came up with a character who is a likeable kid with a good family.

There’s two things you can do with a character who is gay: You can make it so his family doesn’t accept him, or his domestic life is very difficult, or his coming out situation is much easier than what it would be in real life. We decided to go with Kevin having a very supportive family because it’s an Archie comic book, and people look to Archie Comics as a place for an escape. So the people see Kevin’s coming out story, as supportive and good as it is… I mean, some people have said, “Well, that’s not really the way it is, but this is how it should be.” So that’s the Archie motto: it’s fantasy and Riverdale is a place where you want to live. So that’s why we decided to go with Kevin’s coming out being as positive as it was.

CBC: It’s interesting that, instead of having him feel alienated from straight society, you instead placed the outsider aspect by latching onto the fact that he was a military brat.

Dan: Right.

CBC: He was just moving from place to place. You were able to have your cake and eat it, too, so to speak. That’s a clever approach to be able to still deal with it, the kid feels like he’s an outsider, but not because of his homosexuality, which, in Archie world, is normal, right? It’s just regular? But you were still able to convey that he needed to belong.

Dan: Right. In order to have a somewhat realistic story, we did show him getting bullied, and when he was a kid he was a scrawny kid who, they called him a sissy, that kind of stuff.

So we did address the fact that he was an outsider to some people. And there were some bad kids in the school who got on his case for being gay. So we had to touch on that somewhat, but, basically, the framework of the story is that at least he had a very strong family unit and a good core group of friends, mainly the Archie characters, who were

Kevin Keller and Archie characters TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Glee TM & 20th Century Fox. Sharknado TM & © The Global Asylum, Inc.

accepting. So we tried to cover both grounds. We tried to show both sides. But it wasn’t like a gritty coming-out story by any means.

CBC: Are the Archie comics digests still being sold in Walmart?

Dan: They are! They’re still huge sellers for us. They are in Walmart, Target, in a lot of supermarket chains, and I’m still writing and drawing classic stories, too, for the digests.

CBC: Do you think it’s fair that they always call DC and Marvel the “Big Two,” though Archie actually gets wider distribution because they’re alone in the retail outlets?

They’re “Where America Shops,” so to speak!

Dan: Well, I think that’s definitely a way why Archie stays in the limelight, because we’re still available to the general public. Since we had the reboot about two, three years ago, we finally got more of a presence in comic shops, but, really, we’ve stayed in sight in a big way because of newsstand presence.

There are so many Walmarts and supermarket chains, you know, where we have a very strong presence. When you’re up there alongside of TV Guide, People magazine, you’re really up there!

So, I think, that’s probably been the main way we’ve stayed in the limelight was from that exposure.

CBC: And it’s also the perennial love triangle between Betty, Veronica, and Archie is a part of the American mythos, isn’t it?

Dan: Absolutely! It always goes back to the love triangle. No matter what you do, no matter what character you have, or whether you bring in Cheryl, even when you bring in Kevin or another character, the storylines always revert back to Archie, Betty, and Veronica love triangle. And it’s just something that’s in everyone’s blood at this point. “Are you a Betty? Are you a Veronica?”

People relate to Archie. I mean, it’s just, yeah, it’s hard to explain, but it’s mainstream.

CBC: And it gets right to the sexual awakening of teenagers at a certain time.

Dan: It does. When you see this goofy Archie guy and these two gorgeous girls after him, I guess it kind of sets you up for failure, in a way!! You’re thinking, “Gee, maybe this is what high school will be like.” Of course it’s

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

not, but it offers that whole fantasy element of high school that is so appealing.

CBC: Boy, a lot has happened to Archie in the last few years!

I watched the Riverdale TV show. And I’m happy — and really shocked — to admit how entertaining it is. It’s clever how they were able to still take that love triangle archetype and just prove that you can play with it in so many different ways.

Dan: Well, Archie works in so many different formulas, it’s incredible. If you look at the years and stories we’ve done… there’s been Little Archie. There’s been Archie 1, which is a caveman storyline. There’s Archie 3000. I mean, then there’s been the reboot Archie, which is realistic. You’ve got the Riverdale, which is the gritty Archie. I mean, the formula works on so many levels, and it really still goes back to the characters. And people just like those characters and will let them work in so many situations.

CBC: Are you happy to remain there? Do you have aspirations of doing other books? We’ll talk about Die Kitty Die in a minute.

Dan: Sure. You know, I can’t think of a reason to not do it. [laughs] I mean, I know I’ve been there 30 years… “Oh my god, you’ve been there so long!”… but it’s always stayed fresh to me.

I’ve always tried to not allow myself to get bored. I’ve always tried to, when I think I need a change, I try to do something different.

Like, in the 2000s, I was working on Betty & Veronica Spectacular, and the sales were not doing so well on that, so I just decided to do a whole redesign on the book and made it like a fashion magazine.

And that reinvigorated the book for a few years and it became fun.

Introducing Kevin was a big deal, because it was introducing a whole new ideology to Archie. Then, just in the last few years, working on Your Pal Archie, which is classic Archie with a twist, because I’m drawing it in the classic style, but we’ve updated the look a little bit so that Archie’s hair sort

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Above: Dan Parent’s Pennsylvania art studio. Below and inset right: Though the artist certainly has any number of creative years ahead of him, it’s not all that unlikely that Dan Parent will be best remembered for creating the first gay character in the pages of Archie comics, Kevin Keller. The Riverdale cast member was first introduced in the pages of, at right, Veronica #202 [Sept. 2010], Kevin was initially viewed as a potential love interest by the wealthy and vain Ms. Lodge, who gets her due.

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All characters TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

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of looks like his hair on the TV show. The characters are a little bit made over so you can recognize them from the Riverdale show, but they’re still cartoony.

I’m really enjoying Your Pal Archie because it’s a makeover (of a sort) on my style, but it’s still my style. So, again, there’s always a way to make things interesting and fun. And now, it’s 30 years later, and I’m still at it and still able to feel creative. I think if I was having to still do the regular Archie, Betty, and Veronica stories I was doing 30 years ago, without any change or any development, then I think I probably would have gotten bored.

But they really allowed me to be creative — and make mistakes, even! They let me experiment a lot, so I can’t complain about that because they’ve even allowed me to make mistakes to learn from. So, I mean, that took a lot! [laughs] And I’ve made a few.

I’ve worked for other people. I am not exclusive, even though I do most of my work for Archie. I worked for Felix the Cat for about 15 years, on staff and did a lot of work for them. That was fun. So I’m always free to work with whomever else I want.

CBC: How many issues of Felix the Cat were there?

Was it licensing work?

Dan: I worked in-house, so I went to their offices, not far from where I live. It’s about a half-hour from where my house is. They’re in northern New Jersey. I worked on their website and then I would work on licensing designs. For about 10 years, we did a comic book called Felix the Cat Black and White, and then we just did one-off issues after that. I don’t know how long that went on… seven or eight years. So that was fun doing Felix, because he was a classic character that I liked.

And then I did whatever else just came my way. I did Barbie stuff for a while, which wasn’t that much fun, to be honest. I wasn’t crazy about Barbie. But I’ve just always been able to keep busy. And then, you know, about 20-something years ago at Archie, I did a book called The Carneys, which was a bunch of circus folk. Bill Golliher created them with me. Archie published that and the

Carneys appeared in issues of Sabrina, so I was able to create something there.

And we’re actually using the Carneys again now because, as you brought up earlier, since I’ve been working on Die Kitty Die, we have them as guest stars in that series. Die Kitty Die is another example of just wanting to do my own thing.

And I’m doing it!

CBC: What is Die Kitty Die? Dan: Well, it’s a book by Fernando Ruiz and myself. Fernando is also a longtime Archie artist, and we decided we wanted to do something that was sort of a parody of the comic book industry, kind of having fun with the comics we grew up on — super-hero comics, Harvey comics, Archie, and pretty much everybody. So we came up with a character named Kitty. Kitty’s a witch, and she’s a fictional comic book character for this company and her sales are really bad, so they’re trying to figure out ways to perk up sales, so they decide to kill her. Because they do that in comics nowadays, killing off characters for sales, but in our storyline, it’s a little harder to do that, because the characters are basically real. They coexist in the real world with the comic book publishers. So they’re trying to figure out, “How do we kill her off? She’s a witch!”

She’s very difficult to kill. So they recruit some of their other characters to kill her off. So we have our own versions of other characters which look sort of familiar. You might see some that look like Casper and other recognizable icons. So basically they’re in a race to see who can kill Kitty, and whoever can kill Kitty will get their own comic book again.

It’s mostly a very silly farce, but we get to have a lot of fun with parody. And so, when Fernando and I came up with the idea, we thought, “How are we going to do this?” Because we didn’t really want to shop it around because: A) people might take it and change it, and B) what kind of control would we lose? So we did a Kickstarter and it did very, very well. We doubled what we wanted for our fund, so we were able to do four issues. We were able to put it into a trade, make it a hardcover. And then, once we did that, we had a few offers from publishers, which is nice. We decided to go with Chapterhouse, in Canada, a new publisher, and we went with them because we thought we had the most freedom with them. And then they’re actually doing some really exciting stuff now. They publish Captain Canuck, which is a big comic in Canada.

So we are being published by Chapterhouse, and we’re still Kickstarting the books to fund them, and then we produce the books, and then Chapterhouse basically prints and distributes them for us. So far it’s a really good setup right now,

This page: Variant covers for Kevin Keller and titles featuring the character have been a particularly clever endeavor by Dan Parent and company, whether pastiches of longtime Archie Comics cover faves or, as seen below, parodies of icon covers from other comics publishers. All the above by Dan Parent (with Dan DeCarlo on Everything’s Kevin). Below are all by Phil Jimenez except for far left, which is by Dan Parent.

All characters TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

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This page: Currently published by Chapterhouse Comics, Die Kitty Die is Dan Parent and Fernando Ruiz’s creator-owned property. For more information on the duo’s satirical comic book, visit www.diekittydie.com. The creators are seen at top.

and the book has really been gaining steam. So it’s pretty exciting… and extremely difficult to meet deadlines! [laughs] CBC: Because you’re juggling your Archie stuff?

Dan: Well, we found out that it’s because we are doing a lot of comic book conventions to promote Die Kitty Die. When you’re doing a book for Archie or someone else, you basically just do the pages, send them in, and you’re done.

This is a little different because we’re running the entire show here, so we have to write it, produce it, and put the book together, and we also have to manage the Kickstarter and send the copies out to our supporters. So it’s also a whole job just managing it. While it is a great learning experience, it’s also a

lot of work.

CBC: How much of the work do you do, yourself? Is it evenly split?

Dan: Yes, it’s an even split. I handle more of the computer stuff. Fernando’s a little less computer savvy than I, so I handle the Kickstarter, the online graphics, and all that stuff.

And then, when we’re putting the stuff together, he does a lot of that, when we mail the stuff out. And we’ll probably going to have to get some help this time. There’s places where you can hire people to do this stuff for you, so we’ll probably have to be hiring more people. But it’s great. For all the work that it is, it’s a great way to create something that’s totally your own. And, when it’s funded by people, your fans, you’re doing exactly what you want to do, and they’re supporting it. And that’s why I think you’re seeing a lot more of this happening now in comics. You’re seeing a lot more Kickstarters because it’s a way to really, to do your own thing exactly how you want to do it. And publishers like it because it’s a proven product. You bring it to them and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, this is doing really well and they sold

Die Kitty Die TM & © Dan Parent & Fernando Ruiz.

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#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Riverdale TM & © Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc.

a lot of books.” It’s like a no-brainer. So it’s a win-win.

CBC: I don’t think there’s been a comic convention I’ve gone to in the last eight years where you haven’t been there, too. [laughter] How many cons do you do a year?

Dan: Well, I’m trying to cut down. I’m trying. I’m being hesitant, here. I did 28 last year, which was way too many.

CBC: Wow. Dan: I’ve cut it down to 16 this year, but I think it’ll trickle up to 18, because I kind of signed on for a couple extra ones. So I think I need to get it down to, like, twelve. If you get it to one a month, I think that’s a doable thing. It’s good to promote your product there, and it’s all very good money because I do a lot of commissions at these shows, and I sell a lot of prints and things. So, financially, it’s a nice thing, but you have to sort of pace yourself because you also need to have the time to produce the work to bring to the shows.

And then last year I agreed to do so many shows because you pick your shows a year ahead of time. You don’t know where you’re going to be. Last year I didn’t know we were going to Kickstarter at the end of the year, and I didn’t know it was going to be that busy. If I had known that, I would have not signed on for so many shows. But this year I knew what we were getting into with Die Kitty Die, so I did cut back on shows. I still didn’t cut back enough, but next year I’ll try to cut back a little more, and hopefully I’ll find a happy medium. But it’s hard. It’s hard because you just don’t know what’s going to be on your plate at any given time. Your Pal Archie popped out of nowhere, too.

CBC: Are you able to take vacations? Completely not draw, completely not do anything?

Dan: Not really. I mean, I’ll probably go away for, like, a few days at a time. I’ve done that before. But usually something follows me along, even if it’s on my laptop, like a cover I’ve got to color. I went to England last year for a week and I was going to just do nothing, and then I got a gig with DC doing some covers. And I’m thinking, “Well, I can’t say no to DC.” I’ve never worked for DC before, and I didn’t want to blow it. So I did them at night. [laughs] In the middle of the suite I was in.

Hopefully, as I get older, I’ll be able to do more of that, take time off to have fun. And it’s not as you have to, like after a convention. I was at San Diego last week, and you get so wiped out that sometimes you just have to have a day or two to decompress because I find myself honestly sitting there at my drawing board, and I’m not drawing because I’m putting my head down or I’m just watching TV. And I let myself go with it because I just need to decompress.

CBC: Right. How much of your income is from commissions? Is it significant?

Dan: I think quite a bit, yeah. I don’t know what portion it is, but a solid chunk of it is decent.

CBC: So 10% or 15%, maybe?

Dan: Yeah. Easily, yeah. I think so.

CBC: Do you get reprint rates from the Archie work that you’ve done over the last thirty years?

Dan: I don’t. I did for a while. They used to pay reprints back in the ’90s, but I worked out a thing with Archie where they’re pretty good because when I go to conventions, I’m sort of like the Archie representative and they’re very good with me. I can sell as many prints as I want with the Archie name. I can do what I want with the Archie name, basically.

They allow me to do that, and that’s like a royalty agreement I have worked out with them. So that’s worked out okay.

CBC: You said you did some covers for DC. Did you have anything coming down the pike that would be of interest?

Dan: Last year I did some covers for the new Hanna-Barbera line. You know, their updated versions of The Flintstones, and Scooby Doo Apocalypse, so I did some of those covers. I’ve got, coming up in October, a Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy cover with Betty and Veronica, because they’re doing a Harley and Ivy/Betty and Veronica crossover, so I just finished a cover to that.

CBC: Besides Kevin, are you primarily known as a VeronCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

ica artist?

Dan: Yes, because I know I created the book, came up with the idea for it. I’ve had about a hundred or so issues where it was just me as the writer and artist, so people know me for that character. I do sign a lot of Veronica books at conventions. When they ask me who I prefer, Betty or Veronica, I’m always very honest and I say Veronica.

CBC: Right. Besides her paying for your dinner.

Dan: Right. [laughter] I think, as a character, she’s just more interesting. And, nothing against Betty, but you need Betty and Veronica. I just think Veronica is more interesting. I think you can do more stories with her because she can be sort of a villain, but she’s not evil, either, and I think there’s a lot of stories you can do because she has wealth, so you can put her in a lot of situations. She can travel.

There’s just a lot more stories you can do with her, so I always just found her more interesting.

CBC: Do you like the Riverdale TV show?

Dan: I do! I’m amazed at how well-cast it is. The casting is really good. But I’m not surprised, because Roberto Aquirre-Sacasa, our creative director, is the creator of the show, and he cast it. And I think, because he’s such an Archie nut (like I am) and he grew up crazy about Archie, too, he knows the nuances of the character. And I think anybody else casting Betty and Veronica might have just gone with the cliché sweetheart girl and bitch, and he knows there’s more nuance than that, which I think is why the two girls playing Betty and Veronica are so good.

CBC: They are!

Dan: And Archie is great, too. So much of the show is casting. I mean, half of it is the writing, but you need the right cast. You look to the history of great TV shows, a great deal of any show’s success is the chemistry of the cast.

This page: Courtesy of Jason Harris Promotions, a photo of Dan Parent, ever the savvy and smart self-promoter, at the 2015 Vermont Comic Con. A vendor at any number of fan gatherings over the calendar year, check out Dan’s commission work!

Below: Alas, we would have loved to include a talk with Archie creative director Roberto Aquirre-Sacasa. the developer of the current CW series based on the Archie characters, Riverdale, but t’was not to be….

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creators at the con MUGGING FOR THE CAMERA: Clockwise from right, book designer and author Chip Kidd at the 2013 New York Comic Con; artist Paris Cullins at the 2017 Wizard World gathering in Philadelphia; artist Greg Capullo, Wizard World Philadelphia, 2014; graphic novelist Barbara Slate at the 2015 Wizard World in Philadelphia; artist/writer Jim Starlin at the Baltimore Comic Con, 2014; author Max Brooks at the 2012 Comic-Con International: San Diego; and cartoonist/writer Chip Zdarsky at Comic-Con International: San Diego, in 2015. At the center (with tongue extended), artist David Aja at the 2015 Comic-Con International: San Diego.

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#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All photos © Kendall Whitehouse.

Photography

by Kendall Whitehouse

WHERE EVERYTHING OLD IS COOL AGAIN!

NEW MAGAZINE FROM TWOMORROWS BLASTING OFF SUMMER 2018

coming attractions: cbc #17 in the spring

Celebrating the Wondrous World of Wood Though he has been gone from our world for over 35 years, WALLACE ALLAN WOOD — known to fans as Wally and friends as Woody — remains a legendary figure in the comic book realm, revered for his incredible artistry, independent spirit, and fierce dedication to craft. CBC honors the great artist’s memory and legacy with a 100-page special tribute issue that includes an extended biographical essay and the memories and acknowledgments of fellow artists. Also included is a career-spanning conversation with the great RALPH REESE, who began his career as 16-year-old assistant to Wallace Wood and went on to become one of the finest artists of his generation, whether working at Marvel, Continuity Studios, National Lampoon, or Bantam Books! We also chat with this issue’s cover artist, HILARY BARTA, about the Wood influence, his varied work in comics — from Image to America’s Best to Bongo — and the trials and tribulations of freelance life. Plus we feature the second part of Michael Aushenker’s interview with the late RICH BUCKLER Artwork © Hilary Barta.

and a remembrance of the late, great Fabulous FLO STEINBERG, as well as CBC’s usual features, including HEMBECK’s latest “Dateline”!

Full-color, 100 pages, $9.95

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2018 • #16

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from the archives of Tom Ziuko

a picture is worth a thousand words

Artwork © the respective copyright holder.

This is my unpublished original coloring done during the 1980s for the Vertigo Comics concept art by Ted McKeever; just your average, everyday story about a guy with a pet tapeworm. — TZ

#16 • Winter 2018 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

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ALTER EGO #150

ALTER EGO #151

ALTER EGO #152

ALTER EGO #153

BRICKJOURNAL #50

STAN LEE’s 95th birthday! Rare 1980s LEE interview by WILL MURRAY—GER APELDOORN on Stan’s non-Marvel writing in the 1950s—STAN LEE/ROY THOMAS e-mails of the 21st century—and more special features than you could shake Irving Forbush at! Also FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), BILL SCHELLY, and MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Colorful Marvel multi-hero cover

by Big JOHN BUSCEMA!

Golden Age artist FRANK THOMAS (The Owl! The Eye! Dr. Hypno!) celebrated by Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt’s MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Plus the scintillating (and often offbeat) Golden & Silver Age super-heroes of Western Publishing’s DELL & GOLD KEY comics! Art by MANNING, DITKO, KANE, MARSH, GILL, SPIEGLE, SPRINGER, NORRIS, SANTOS, THORNE, et al.! Plus FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Unsung artist/writer LARRY IVIE conceived (and named!) the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, helped develop T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, brought EC art greats to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more!

SANDY PLUNKETT chronicles his career, with art by FRAZETTA, CRANDALL, WOOD, KRENKEL, DOOLIN, and others!

Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Remembering Fabulous FLO STEINBERG, Stan Lee’s gal Friday during the Marvel Age of Comics—with anecdotes and essays by pros and friends who knew and loved her! Rare Marvel art, Flo’s successor ROBIN GREEN interviewed by RICHARD ARNDT about her time at Marvel, and Robin’s 1971 article on Marvel for ROLLING STONE magazine! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Special double-size BOOK! Photo editor GEOFF GRAY talks to JOE MENO about the beginnings of BrickJournal, TORMOD ASKILDSEN of the LEGO GROUP interviewed, how the fan community has grown in 10 years, and the best builders of the past 50 issues! Plus: Minifigure customizing with JARED K. BURKS’, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, & more!

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BACK ISSUE #105

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: CENTENNIAL EDITION

BACK ISSUE #102

BACK ISSUE #103

BACK ISSUE #104

MERCS AND ANTIHEROES! Deadpool’s ROB LIEFELD and FABIAN NICIEZA interviewed!

Histories of Cable, Taskmaster, Deathstroke the Terminator, the Vigilante, and Wild Dog, plus… Archie meets the Punisher?? Featuring TERRY BEATTY, MAX ALLAN COLLINS, PAUL KUPPERBERG, BATTON LASH, JEPH LOEB, DAVID MICHELINIE, MARV WOLFMAN, KEITH POLLARD, and others!

Deadpool vs. Cable cover by LIEFELD!

ALL-STAR EDITORS ISSUE! Past and present editors reveal “How I Beat the Dreaded Deadline Doom”! Plus: ARCHIE GOODWIN and MARK GRUENWALD retrospectives, E. NELSON BRIDWELL interview, DIANA SCHUTZ interview, ALLAN ASHERMAN revisits DC’s ’70s editorial department, Marvel Assistant Editors’ Month, and a history of PERRY WHITE! With an unpublished 1981 Captain America cover by MIKE ZECK!

FOURTH WORLD AFTER KIRBY! Return(s) of the New Gods, Why Can’t Mister Miracle Escape Cancellation?, the Forever People, MIKE MIGNOLA’s unrealized New Gods animated movie, Fourth World in Hollywood, and an all-star lineup, including the work of JOHN BYRNE, PARIS CULLINS, J. M. DeMATTEIS, MARK EVANIER, MICHAEL GOLDEN, RICK HOBERG, WALTER SIMONSON, and more. STEVE RUDE cover!

DEADLY HANDS ISSUE! Histories of Iron Fist, Master of Kung Fu, Yang, the Bronze Tiger, Hands of the Dragon, NEAL ADAMS’ Armor, Marvel’s Deadly Hands of Kung Fu mag, & Hong Kong Phooey! Plus Muhammad Ali in toons and toys. Featuring JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, STEVE ENGLEHART, PAUL GULACY, LARRY HAMA, DOUG MOENCH, DENNY O’NEIL, JIM STARLIN, & others. Classic EARL NOREM cover!

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This final, fully-updated, definitive edition clocks in at DOUBLE the length of the 2008 “Gold Edition”, in a new 256-page Limited Edition Hardcover (only 1000 copies) listing every release up to Jack’s 100th birthday!

Detailed listings of all of Kirby’s published work, reprints, magazines, books, foreign editions, newspaper strips, fine art and collages, fanzines, essays, interviews, portfolios, posters, radio and TV appearances, and even Jack’s unpublished work!

(256-page Ltd. Ed. Hardcover) $34.95 Ships April 2018

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

DRAW #34

DRAW #35

KIRBY COLLECTOR #73

KIRBY COLLECTOR #74

GREG HILDEBRANDT (of the Hildebrandt Brothers) reveals his working methods, BRAD WALKER (Aquaman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Birds of Prey, Legends of the Dark Knight) gives a how-to interview and demo, regular columnist JERRY ORDWAY, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY’s Comic Art Bootcamp!

Fantasy/sci-fi illustrator DONATO GIANCOLA (Game of Thrones) demos his artistic process, GEORGE PRATT (Enemy Ace: War Idyll, Batman: Harvest Breed) discusses his work as comic book artist, illustrator, fine artist, and teacher, Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS, JERRY ORDWAY’S regular column, and MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp.” Mature Readers Only.

ONE-SHOTS! Kirby’s best (and worst) short spurts on his wildest concepts: ANIMATION IDEAS, DINGBATS, JUSTICE INC., MANHUNTER, ATLAS, PRISONER, and more! Plus MARK EVANIER and our other regular panelists, rare Kirby interview, panels from the 2017 Kirby Centennial celebration, pencil art galleries, and some one-shot surprises! BIG BARDA #1 cover finishes by MIKE ROYER!

FUTUREPAST! Kirby’s “World That Was” from Caveman days to the Wild West, and his “World That’s Here” of Jack’s visions of the future that became reality! TWO COVERS: Bullseye inked by BILL WRAY, and Jack’s unseen Tiger 21 concept art!

Plus: interview with ROY THOMAS about Jack, rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER moderating the biggest Kirby Tribute Panel of all time, pencil art galleries, and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Summer 2018

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Now shipping!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Ships May 2018

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It’s

GROOVY, baby!

Follow-up to Mark Voger’s smash hit MONSTER MASH!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

From WOODSTOCK to “THE BANANA SPLITS,” from “SGT. PEPPER” to “H.R. PUFNSTUF,” from ALTAMONT to “THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY,” GROOVY is a far-out trip to the era of lava lamps and love beads. This profusely illustrated HARDCOVER BOOK, in PSYCHEDELIC COLOR, features interviews with icons of grooviness such as PETER MAX, BRIAN WILSON, PETER FONDA, MELANIE, DAVID CASSIDY, members of the JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, CREAM, THE DOORS, THE COWSILLS and VANILLA FUDGE; and cast members of groovy TV shows like “THE MONKEES,” “LAUGH-IN” and “THE BRADY BUNCH.” GROOVY revisits the era’s ROCK FESTIVALS, MOVIES, ART—even COMICS and CARTOONS, from the 1968 ‘mod’ WONDER WOMAN to R. CRUMB. A color-saturated pop-culture history written and designed by MARK VOGER (author of the acclaimed book MONSTER MASH), GROOVY is one trip that doesn’t require dangerous chemicals!

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-080-9 • DIGITAL EDITION: $15.95

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SUBSCRIPTIONS ECONOMY US Alter Ego (Six 100-page issues) $62 Back Issue (Eight 80-page issues) $76 BrickJournal (Six 80-page issues) $60 Comic Book Creator (Four 100-page issues) $43 Jack Kirby Collector (Four 100-page issues) $46 RetroFan (Four 80-page issues) - NEW! $38

EXPEDITED US $77 $92 $72 $53 $56 $46

PREMIUM US $83 $100 $78 $57 $60 $50

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The Future of Pop History.

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