Comic Book Creator #1 by TwoMorrows Publishing

ALEX ROSS keeps it real

Mulling an independent life...................p.24

KURT BUSIEK V2.0

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The Astro City writer revitalized.......p.36

FRANK ROBBINS by Michael Aushenker The cartoonist’s Mexican sunset......... p.8 orge TODD McFARLANE by JKhoury

Spawn-man’s Show-All Book.........p.12

T h e

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N e w

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

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o f

t h e

No. 1, Spring 2013

C o m i c s

M e d i u m

p.48

$8.95 in the USA

Cover art by Alex Ross

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ALTER EGO #117

KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2

BRICKJOURNAL #24

JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond! Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

JOE KUBERT double-size Summer Special tribute issue! Comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. Kubert interviews, rare art and artifacts, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, pin-ups and miniinterviews by faculty, students, fans, friends and family! Edited by JON B. COOKE.

LEGO TRAINS! Builder CALE LEIPHART shows how to get started building trains and train layouts, with instructions on building microscale trains by editor JOE MENO, building layouts with the members of the Pennsylvania LEGO Users Group (PennLUG), fan-built LEGO monorails minifigure customization by JARED BURKS, microscale building by CHRISTOPHER DECK, “You Can Build It”, and more!

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ALTER EGO #118

ALTER EGO #119

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LEE WEEKS (Daredevil, Incredible Hulk) gives insight into the artform, YILDIRAY ÇINAR (Noble Causes, Fury of the Firestorms) interview and demo, inker JOE RUBINSTEIN shows how he works, “Comic Art Bootcamp” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, “Rough Critique” of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, and “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and software! Mature readers only.

GOLDEN AGE ARTISTS L.B. COLE AND JAY DISBROW! DISBROW’s memoir of COLE and his work on CAT-MAN, art by BOB FUJITANI, CHARLES QUINLAN, IRWIN HASEN, FCA (Fawcett Collector’s of America) on the two-media career of Captain Video, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, Cat-Man cover by L.B. COLE!

AVENGERS 50th ANNIVERSARY! WILL MURRAY on the group’s behind-thescenes origin, a look at its first decade with ROY THOMAS, STAN LEE, JACK KIRBY, THE BROTHERS BUSCEMA, TUSKA, ADAMS, COLAN, BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, MERRY MARVEL MARCHING SOCIETY, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, FCA, Golden Age Blue Beetle artist E.C. STONER, unused Avengers cover by DON HECK!

MARC SWAYZE TRIBUTE ISSUE, spotlighting FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America)! Salutes from Fawcett alumnus C.C. BECK and OTTO BINDER, interview with wife JUNE SWAYZE, a full Phantom Eagle story from Wow Comics, plus interview with 1950s Dell/Western artist MEL KEEFER, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and a SWAYZE Marvel Family cover art from the 1940s!

X-MEN SALUTE! 1963-69 secrets, rare ‘60s BRAZILIAN X-MEN stories, lost ‘60s XMen “character sheet” by STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS on the 1970s revival, art and artifacts by KIRBY, ROTH, ADAMS, HECK, FRIEDRICH, and BUSCEMA—plus the MARVELMANIA fan club story, interview with Golden Age writer ED SILVERMAN, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, and JACK KIRBY’s unused X-Men #10 cover!

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BACK ISSUE #64

BACK ISSUE #65

BACK ISSUE #66

BACK ISSUE #67

BACK ISSUE #68

“Bronze Age Backup Series”! Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Metamorpho, GOODWIN and SIMONSON’s Manhunter, PASKO and GIFFEN’s Dr. Fate, “Whatever Happened To…?”, Nemesis, Rose and the Thorn, Seven Soldiers of Victory, art and commentary by CARY BURKETT, JOHN CALNAN, DICK GIORDANO, MIKE GRELL, ELLIOT S! MAGGIN, DAN SPIEGLE, cover by GRELL and JOE RUBINSTEIN.

“Bronze Age B-Teams”! Defenders issue-byissue overview, Champions, Guardians of the Galaxy, Inhumans, PETER DAVID’s X-Factor, Teen Titans West, Legion of Substitute Heroes, an all-star chatfest of Doom Patrol interviews, plus art and commentary by ROSS ANDRU, SAL BUSCEMA, KEITH GIFFEN, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, ERIK LARSEN, GEORGE PÉREZ, BOB ROZAKIS, cover by KEVIN NOWLAN.

“Bronze Age Team-Ups”! Marvel Team-Up and Two-in-One, Super-Villain Team-Up, CLAREMONT and SIMONSON’s X-Men/New Teen Titans, DC Comics Presents, SuperTeam Family, HANEY and APARO’s Batman of Earth-B(&B), Superman/Captain Marvel smackdowns, plus art and commentary by BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, GIFFEN, LEVITZ, WEIN, and a classic GIL KANE cover inked anew by TERRY AUSTIN.

“Heroes Out of Time!” Batman: Gotham by Gaslight with MIGNOLA, WAID, and AUGUSTYN, Booster Gold with JURGENS, X-Men: Days of Future Past with CHRIS CLAREMONT, Bill & Ted with EVAN DORKIN, interview with P. CRAIG RUSSELL, “Pro2Pro” with Time Masters’ BOB WAYNE and LEWIS SHINER, Karate Kid, New Mutants: Asgardian Wars, and Kang. Mignola cover.

“1970s and ‘80s Legion of Super-Heroes!” LEVITZ interview, the Legion’s Honored Dead, the Cosmic Boy miniseries, a Time Trapper history, the New Adventures of Superboy, Legion fantasy cover gallery by JOHN WATSON, plus BATES, COCKRUM, CONWAY, COLON, GIFFEN, GRELL, JANES, KUPPERBERG, LaROCQUE, LIGHTLE, SCHAFFENBERGER, SHERMAN, STATON, SWAN, WAID, & more! COCKRUM cover!

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S p r i n g 2 0 1 3 • T h e N e w 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

Ye Ed’s Rant: Dignity and the mission of Comic Book Creator.............................................................. 2 Comics Chatter Derf’s Friend Dahmer: The City cartoonist on his acclaimed, smash hit graphic novel...................... 3 Hembeck’s Dateline: Hembeck: Our Man Fred ponders Jack Kirby’s legacy in the future............... 7 ARS for Art’s Sake: Shawna Gore explains how the Artists Rights Society can help comics folk..... 8 Super-W©©dy, the Copyright Crusader CBC mascot by J.D. King

About Our Cover Painting by Alex Ross Alex Ross photo by Seth Kushner Kurt Busiek photo by Barbara Randall Kesel Frank Robbins photo courtesy of Fran Rowe Robbins Todd McFarlane photo by Anna Peña CBC friend and comic book super-star artist ALEX ROSS depicts a confident and proud JACK KIRBY among his subjects, who sprang from his imagination, the piece a brilliant echo of Alex’s work for his and Mark Waid’s 1996 graphic novel Kingdom Come. Alex recently co-created (with his Marvels and Astro City cohort, Kurt Busiek) the Dynamite sub-imprint Kirby: Genesis, a line of comics which generously benefited the estate of Jack Kirby. All imagery TM & ©2013 the respective owners. Comic Book Creator is a proud joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

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: $36 US, $50 Canada, $65 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2013 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/ TwoMorrows. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

The Good Stuff: Todd McFarlane discusses his new show-all book with George Khoury................. 12 Aushenkerology: Michael Aushenker chronicles the Mexican twilight of Frank Robbins................ 14 Irving on the Inside: A night with Denny O’Neil & Neal Adams hosted by Christopher Irving......... 22 REMEMBRANCE Les Daniels, The Incomplete History: Part one of a look at an amazingly creative life................. 32 COVER STORY Kirby’s Kingdom: The Commerce of Art: Jon B. Cooke’s examination of Jack Kirby’s business dealings over the decades, spotlighting unjust and underhanded treatment by unscrupulous men, as well as those who treated Jack with dignity and fairness........................40 FEATURES Alex Ross Gets Real: The CBC interview with the painter-comic book artist supreme, covering much of the previous ten years since Ye Ed last spoke with him for print, the business of comics, and maybe a future that includes producing “The Great American Graphic Novel”.................... 54 Astro City’s Kurt Busiek: Ye Ed converses with the renowned comics scripter about his rise doing fan comics with Scott McCloud, his breakthrough with the age of Marvels, the mechanics of writing, and treating the King right with Kirby: Genesis............................................................... 68 Creator’s Creators: Ye Ed gives you the Cooke’s Cook’s Tour............................................................. 79 Coming Attractions: The scoop on what’s in store for our next visit — our tribute to Joe Kubert!.... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Tom Ziuko opens his massive art archives for y’all........ 80

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Comic Book Creator #1 “Director’s Cut” Digital Edition includes over 20 bonus pages not shown here, featuring extended interviews with Alex Ross and Kurt Busiek, more Ross art and Busiek artifacts, plus Jack Kirby esoterica and other treasures. All CBC #1 readers can download the bonus material as a FREE PDF file at: http://twomorrows.com/freestuff (The full Digital Edition is only $3.95, or free for all subscribers)

Find CBC online at www.cbcmag.net & twomorrows.com/comicbookartist, and be sure to “Like” us on Facebook!

This issue is dedicated with gratitude and affection to Bob Brodsky ™

The New Voice of the Comics Medium

The Word is Dignity Ye Ed’s journey and the urgent mission of Comic Book Creator

JON B. COOKE

John Morrow

Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER

Associate Editor

ALEX ROSS Cover Artist

JORGE “GEORGE” KHOURY CHRISTOPHER IRVING TOM ZIUKO

Contributing Editors

Brian K. Morris Senior Transcriber

STEVEN E. Tice STEVEN THOMPSON Transcribers

J.D. KING

CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO

CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON

CBC Illustrator

ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

Greg PRESTON SETH KUSNER

CBC Contributing Photographers

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK CHRISTOPHER IRVING JORGE “GEORGE” KHOURY ALAN KUPPERBERG TOM ZIUKO

CBC Columnists

Comic Book Creator is always in search of interviews, art and artifacts related to the field, and we encourage those interested to contact us at jonbcooke@aol.com or through snail-mail at CBC, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston RI 02892 or call (401) 932-1967 2

Confined to the basement, so any and all loaned materials remain safe in my second floor office — they will be returned!

Another reason I wanted to return to the field so urgently was because of developments over the past few years which do not bode well for the rights and treatment of comic book creators. There was last year’s decision against the estate of Jack Kirby (discussed in my cover-featured essay to come); also Gary Friedrich’s loss to attain rights to his character Ghost Rider; and recently, the ruling against the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel for ownership. These distressing judgements, combined with the fact comic book characters are generating billions of dollars at the box office — virtually none of which is shared with the creators of the lucrative properties — instill in me a desire to help. I hope for CBC to be of service, and play an advocate’s role by informing and discussing the issues, and do what we can to support the artists and writers who have given so much. But I’ll also do what I believe I was meant to do: produce an engaging, informative, and entertaining magazine that celebrates and enlightens. Not too different than CBA, except now within a definite number of pages, all in color, and disciplined to strive to meet a precise schedule. Oh, different too is the double-size special we’ll have every summer! And, oh yeah, we’ll also be adding expanded “Director’s Cut” Digital Edition PDFs (see bottom of our TOC for details) and, time permitting, website extras — because I can’t resist indulging in at least another format or three! Most of all though, this is all about dignity: Ye Ed attaining the virtues of being reliable, accountable and a man of his word. You, the reader, being treated with the grace of getting what you pay for: a quality publication on-time and delivered as promised. And I greatly wish to bestow the dignity deserved to so many comic book creators. May this be a venue to tell the stories of their lives, be shown our respect, and bask in appreciation for how they have so enriched our lives by sharing their dreams, imaginations and talents. May CBC be that place. — Ye Crusading Editor

Sal Abbinanti Bob Booth Neal Adams Amanda Bullock Brent Eric Anderson Kurt Busiek Andres Avila Philip Challinor www.alexross Mike Chandley collector.com Mark Chiarello Nick Barrucci Michael Cho John Backderf Yoon Chung Jill Bauman Shaun Clancy Christopher Bing Jeremy Clowe Stephen R. Bissette Andrew D. Cooke

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe Sean Howe Image Comics Josh Johnson George Khoury The Kirby Museum Charlie Kochman Seth Kushner Lori Matsumoto Greg Matiasevich

You former readers of Comic Book Artist, this mag’s two-volume predecessor (published for 25 issues by TwoMorrows and six by Top Shelf Productions): thanks for stopping by. And any newcomers, welcome! It’s been quite awhile since CBA V.2 #6, and much has transpired in Ye Ed’s personal life: Raising three sons to adulthood, making it through the recession (so far!), housefire*, flood, hurricane, and simply getting my head and heart in the right place. In the comics-related field, I scribed introductions for Marvel and Dark Horse collections; coproduced and wrote a full-length feature film, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, directed by my favorite younger brother, Andrew D. Cooke, and also taught and lectured on comics at the Rhode Island School of Design. Not all that much for Ye Ed being seven years gone. Much as I wanted to restart CBA, get back into the game, and do good for Chris Staros and Brett Warnock — two great guys who served as my publisher for V.2 — I’d been mired again in ambivalence and an ennui of isolation. Oh, I attempted CBA’s return a Jack “The King” Kirby few times, but, well…. by Ronn Sutton Importantly, a few years ago, I started working again — in a production capacity — for my longtime buddy John Morrow. And, at near the end of my one-year stint as Alter Ego’s “layout guru” (hi, Roy!), I was talking with my one-time publisher about how much I missed the give-&-take, collaborative relationship we shared during the years I toiled with him, first on The Jack Kirby Collector as associate editor (hi, Pam!), and then the five-year run of CBA V1. In your hands — or screen — you’re viewing the results of that chat of less than a year ago. I couldn’t be more grateful returning to Ye Ed mode, as I frantically finish our fabulous first ish. Boy, it is great to be back! *

cbc contributors David Cowles Dynamite Entertainment Jackie Estrada Patrick Ford Steve & Suzan Gervais Stan Goldberg Shawna Gore Heritage Auction Rand Hoppe

Scott McCloud Bruce McCrae Luis García Mozos Martin Mull Dennis O’Neil The Mad Peck Anna Peña Greg Preston Fran Rowe Robbins Norman Rockwell Museum

Alex Ross Cory Sedlmaier Cortney Skinner Alan Sondheim Vin Suprynowicz David Thibodeau Jason Ullmeyer Ty Varszegi Katrina Weidknecht Scott Williams Chet Williamson

#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

Editor/Designer

ye ed’s rant

comics chatter Derf’s Friend Dahmer Derf Backderf on the process behind his critically successful graphic novel by DERF BACKDERF Guest Columnist [This following was derived from a lecture that occurred at the Rhode Island School of Design Chace Center, Providence, RI, on Jan. 28, 2013, the same day the American Library Association awarded My Friend Dahmer (the subject of discussion) with an Alex Award for one of the ten “Best Adult Books to Appeal to Teen Readers.” The slideshow presentation was hosted by RISD’s Illustration and Literary Arts + Studies Department, and introduced by Philip Eil, whom CBC thanks for an assist. The author discusses his storytelling approach and some insight into his relationship with the notorious multiple murderer. Text ©2013 Derf Backderf.]

erf.

erf Backd

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

My Friend Dahmer is the true story of my teenage friendship with the strange boy who would grow up to be the most depraved serial killer since Jack the Ripper. The book itself follows Jeff and I through our time together in junior high and high school. Over the course of these six years, his actions became more and more bizarre as he marched inexorably toward the edge of the abyss. Jeff had this whole shtick where he faked epileptic fits. He pretended he had cerebral palsy, just to get attention, and there was a group of us kids who ate this up. My friends Neal, Mike, Kent and I actually had something called the Dahmer Fan Club. For a time we took Jeff in and made him the mascot of our particular social circle, and we encouraged him to act up. What we didn’t know was that his perverse sexuality was beginning to gurgle up from some horrible chamber in his psyche, and just took him over whole. He was fantasizing about dead bodies. This was his sexual ideal. The only way he could combat these terrible thoughts was by drinking. Heavy drinking, as in a fifth of liquor before the morning bell! He used to walk through the halls of the school with a cup full of scotch or whisky. He’d just walk by teachers with it; they thought it was a cup of coffee! One of the most amazing parts of the story is the adult indifference, the indifference of the school authorities. They just didn’t care, didn’t notice, or didn’t want to notice. It’s really a fascinating part of this tale. The Dahmer Fan Club, my friends and I, are a secondary storyline, our very mundane but happy lives contrasting with Dahmer’s ever more dysfunctional life. So there’s a lot going on in this book, which ends when he kills his first victim, a young hitchhiker Jeff picked up outside a local mall, two weeks after our high school graduation. Needless to say, it’s a creepy story, but it has gotten quite a bit of critical acclaim, which I’m very grateful for. The book has been twenty years in the making. The project started in July 1991, when Dahmer was finally captured in Milwaukee and the news exploded onto headlines everywhere. I can’t even think of something comparable. Maybe the Newtown massacre. It was that big. Now, put yourself in my shoes. At that point, it’s 13 years after high school graduation. I’d come to terms with my teenage years. I can’t say I enjoyed high school a whole lot. It was okay, and as I look back at it now, I probably had a better time than I thought I did while I was in the midst of it. I’ve made peace with it. There were fun times. I had great friends. But then, in an instant, my entire teenage history was completely redefined. Suddenly, everything took on this ut-

terly creepy, new definition, as this monster wound his way through my own personal story. It really messed with my head. Dahmer was on the cover of every news magazine, on every TV network. I remember walking into the grocery store and there was a magazine rack by the checkout counter, and Jeff’s face was on every single magazine. This was a guy I used to give rides home from school. So, it was, for lack of a better term, a total mindf*ck. Very shortly after the crimes broke, within a week, I got together with my friends, Mike and Neal, who were two members of the Dahmer Fan Club and are characters in the book, just to commiserate and to share stories about Jeff and what was happening to us and around us. And I heard some things I hadn’t heard before, because, getting back to that redefinition, we kept many of our stories involving Jeff to ourselves. They didn’t seem important, they didn’t have a point, whatever — but now they had a point. So I heard things I hadn’t heard before and jotted them down in a sketchbook. I knew right then, you get that little alarm bell that goes off in your head when you’re a writer: Wow! This is an incredible story. And it was one that no one was really telling, not that I could see, even early on. I thought, “I’m going to do something with this.” I just didn’t know what at that point. It so happened that we met at Neal’s house, and he lived just down the street from Jeff’s boyhood home, which was now ringed by yellow police tape as forensic investigators sifted through the dirt looking for bone fragments of his first victim. They only found 100, the biggest of which was just half-an-inch big. Jeff had turned this poor kid to powder. Up and down Bath Road, which goes by Jeff’s house, there were probably, I would say, three miles in either direction, media — camera trucks, reporters’ cars — and they were going door-to-door asking people if anyone knew Dahmer. If they had known that three of his friends were sitting in a house 100 yards away, it would have been like a school of piranha. I didn’t want to be involved in the whole sleazy, tabloid thing that was going on. I knew I was going to wait and

Top: My friend Derf Backderf as snapped by Ye Ed. Above: Cover art of Derf’s acclaimed graphic novel discussed herein. 3

comics chatter

Above: Derf’s high school identification card issued during the last school year of his friendship with Jeff Dahmer. Inset right: High school portrait of Dahmer, future serial killer who took 17 lives between 1978-91. Below: Dahmer was the subject of any number of cartoons by Derf during their high school association, plus Derf would insert Dahmer caricatures into posters on the school walls, and The Dahmer Fan Club also encouraged their “mascot” to sneak into school club yearbook group photos. Derf says of the cartoon below: “It’s spooky enough drawing a cannibal as a bag of groceries, but the scariest thing about this drawing is my spelling of ‘grocerys.’” Courtesy of the artist.

do this in my own terms. In January 1992, Dahmer was put on trial in Milwaukee — it was actually the first trial carried live on CourtTV and it kind of put them on the map. Then, the following Spring, he was carted back to Ohio to stand trial for the one murder he committed there. And then he was put in jail for 15 consecutive life terms and there he languished. Two-and-a-half years later, he was killed, bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate. There was another last blast of media coverage and then, from my vantage point — at that point, I hadn’t talked with anybody— the whole story just kind of dissipated out into the Zeitgeist and became this weird, pop-culture urban legend. I sensed that shift and thought, “Maybe now I can do something.” So, in 1995, I started pulling things out of my sketchbook to see what I could do with it. Over the next two years, I did six short stories of varying length. The longest one was ten pages. I was just trying to work out what I was going to do. Now, at the time, I was doing my comic strip, The City, and that’s all I was known for. It’s pretty cartoony, very expressionistic, exaggerated and over the top. There’s a real difference stylistically between how I was drawing then and how I’m drawing now. And I just couldn’t figure out how I was going to tell this story using this style. I liked the way I was drawing. I was getting a lot of attention for it, but it wasn’t flexible enough to tell a complex story. The Dahmer short stories are not very good; they’re very stiff. The figures are almost planted into the panels. And it’s actually the narration itself that’s moving the story forward rather than the dialogue and action on the page, and that’s really not how you make comics. I had a pretty high standard of what I thought good comics should be and I wasn’t meeting it here. It was a tougher transition than I expected, moving from comic strip to a comic book. I thought it would be easy, but perhaps through ignorance and/ or arrogance it proved to be a little tougher. I thought it was still really good, but I wasn’t happy with it, so I began to widen the scope. I started with my own papers. I kept a high school journal and it was a great resource. I had these thoughts from adolescence I had written down, and this was just crucial, because it’s in my voice from high school. And I was able to capture that voice for the story. The book has my adult voice, the narrator, but it also has my teenage voice, and my journal is how I remembered what that teenage voice sounded like.

It was still straight memoir. I was sticking with my own memories and those of just a few friends. The first short story was published in the anthology comic Zero-Zero and I got a lot of nice feedback from that. I then sat down and I wrote a 100-page graphic novel. (And, by writing, I mean pencils and the dialogue. That’s writing to me.) This was in 1998. I then spent the next four years trying to sell the story, in vain. No one would buy it. Every publisher in the business turned me down (and I’m getting a great deal of pleasure going [blows a raspberry] now that it’s a bestseller!). Finally, in 2002, stonewalled and frustrated, I self-published a 24-page comic book, as an ashcan promo, just to get something out there to say, “Look, this would be a great book if you guys just take a chance on it.” That didn’t happen. It continued to be ignored. But, much to my surprise, this little floppie became an instant cult classic. It was nominated for an Eisner Award, was written about in magazines and books, and — my favorite — it was adapted and staged as a one-act play by the New York University theater department. All the attention and press just affirmed that this was a story worth telling. The question was how to do it? I didn’t like what I had done so I decided at that point to scrap everything and start from scratch. Again, this is why it took 20 years to complete. I re-thought the whole project. And Step One was to learn how to make graphic novels, really learn how to be a storyteller. The only way to do that was to make some books. I completed my first book, Trashed, which came out shortly after the floppie. This book was very well-received, too. It’s a memoir of my career as a garbage man at age 19 in my hometown — and Dahmer’s hometown. It also got an Eisner nomination. I found I loved making books. Comic strips are not really permanent. They’re disposable. You read ’em, maybe you laugh for a second, or don’t, and you toss it aside. On the plus side, there’s an immediacy: you draw something and a few days later it’s in print or online. But books have a permanency. They last as artifacts. And, purely from an ego standpoint, it’s nice to know that something you’ve done has that long shelf life. I really got off on that, to be quite honest. I started to work the craft and to figure out what I wanted to do with a book-length story — I did another book, Punk Rock & Trailer Parks — and I began to feel confident in my storytelling abilities. Then, finally, I came back to My Friend Dahmer. I had never stopped collecting data for the project, even when I was doing other books. It was always in the back of my mind. I widened the scope. I interviewed dozens and dozens of people: teachers, neighbors, contemporaries, classmates, and, of course, my own friends, whom I talked to for hours and hours and hours. If I ran into someone at a local watering hole and he told me something I hadn’t already heard, I wrote it down on a cocktail napkin, came home, and added it to my files. I got ahold of transcripts that Dahmer had given to criminologists, FBI profilers, psychologists. Once he was caught, unlike most serial killers, he was very open and forthright, and he would talk to anybody who asked (though he became a little frustrated by the end, I think). These transcripts are gold because it’s Dahmer’s memory #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

derf’s my friend dahmer

history. I said it was redefined? Well, actually I have two definitions. I have the memories later redefined by Dahmer and how that changed me; and then I have the same memories of my unaffected life during those years in high school. I’m able to separate them. It’s a weird thing. My friends are able to do this, too. The way I made the book fun for me is I zeroed in on recreating this world, the school, recreating the local mall I used to hang out in and the goofball antics we used to do. It was Jeff’s world, but it was also my world. That was fun for me. At several times during the course of researching this book, if the opportunity arose to gather ©2013 Derf Backderf. material, even though I wasn’t actively working on it, I would take that opportunity. You can’t pass that up. For example, they had an open house at the schools one year — my folks still live in my hometown – and my mother mentioned this to me when I was down for a visit. I forget what they were doing. Maybe passing a construction levy or trying to. So anyone could walk in and tour the school buildings, unsupervised. I grabbed my camera, which I had in the car, and went down to the school and took hundreds of reference shots. I thought, “I’ll never get this opportunity again, especially if this construction levy passes because they’ll remodel the schools.” It was all still “period.” So I took pictures of light fixtures, of water fountains, toilets — anything I could think of. They must have thought I was a nut, but it was invaluable. I used these reference photos a lot. Now, to recreate Jeff’s personal world, this took a little more work. I knew the countryside better than most because I lived it. This is the advantage of memoir. I’m actually not a

Top left, counterclockwise: Jeff Dahmer would, for attention and shock-value, impulsively fake epileptic fits, “spaz-out,” impressing high school buds, Neal, Mike and Derf, the Dahmer Fan Club. In My Friend Dahmer’s earlier incarnation, Derf featured such an incident (this one staged in a school hallway) as a full-page splash panel. Next, the pencil page for the final graphic novel version, now set at a mall, and, directly above, the final inked and toned page. Below: In 2002, frustrated at not finding a publisher, Derf self-published an ashcan, the b-&-w comic book “floppie” that earned an Eisner nomination and became a cult hit.

in his words. The advantage of waiting so long is that enough time had passed — he’s long dead at this point — and no one cared anymore whether you got this stuff. In fact, the entire FBI file, some 30,000 documents, is available. You can buy a disk from Amazon now — why, I don’t know — I guess everything’s on Amazon. I began by building a timeline, and this is something I spent years working on: Placing these events, the right scene in the right sequence, because no one, still, had told this story accurately. They glossed over it. It was Dahmer’s childhood, it was strange, it was weird, he did this, he did that. But that was pretty much it. Most writers wanted to get right to the killings. That’s not what I was interested in. I was interested in the spiral-down, because, of course, that was the story I was a part of. It took about six or seven years, and I finally got to the point where I was comfortable with the timeline. It was a lot of hard journalistic digging. My degree is in journalism, not art, so actually I know how to do this. It was fun. These are not muscles I use a lot in normal comicstelling, so I enjoyed it, I have to say. The other thing I wanted to do was to truly capture this time and this place, this weird little town in the late ’70s, because I really do believe that we are all a product of our time and place. And Dahmer was, too. He was able to get away with his drinking and bizarre behavior because of the era he came of age in. Had it been as little as five years later, I’m not sure he would have gotten away with it. I mean, the culture changed that much, particularly school culture. When I produce a graphic novel, it’s about a two-year process from start to finish, once I start drawing pages. That’s an awful long time to spend in Jeffrey Dahmer’s head. Not a lot of fun. Most of my work are comedies, which are a lot of fun to do. The way I made My Friend Dahmer fun for me is, once I wrote my first draft, I detached emotionally from the story. This is similar to the way I’ve managed to compartmentalize my life — the Dahmer stuff and my own personal

Above: Derf depicts dropping off Jeff during the final days of their friendship. Below: Derf by Derf self-portrait. Ye Ed thanks the author for all of his help.

big fan of memoir comics; there are a lot of them out there and I think most of them are really bad, but there was no other way to tell this story. I’m a character in this story, I’m part of it, so it had to be memoir. The advantage is I know this setting far, far better than any other writer on the planet, because I lived the same experience. If it’s at all possible, I always recommend to young writers that you go to a setting and put yourself in that space with all of your senses working, because you’ll never know what you can pick up, as opposed to only staring at a photo. For example, when I was walking along the berm on Bath Road, I noticed that my feet were crunching on the gravel — crunch, crunch — and I worked that into the opening scene. That comes from actually going there, to the setting. Some scenes you rely on memory, visual memory of the things that stick in your head. For example, a lasting visual for me was driving those country roads at night, with the eerie illumination from the headlights (there are no streetlights, there is no light at all, it’s just pitch black). The lights bounce off the trees in front of you, which loom eerily overhead. And then if you come upon something on the road, it’s startling, a sudden shock. I captured that surprise in the page where I pick up Dahmer one night. Recreating Jeff’s house was a problem. I hadn’t set foot in there since 1978. I sort of remembered what it was like, but not really, and everything else I had meticulously researched, so this bugged me. How was I going to draw the house interior? I couldn’t really knock on the door and say, “Hey, I’m doing a comic book about the guy who killed somebody in your house. Can I come in and look around?” That wasn’t going to go over. Then, in 2005, manna from heaven: a guy I know bought the house. I tried to talk him out of it, but he bought the

house. So for the first time I had access again to the interior of Dahmer’s house and I went into there with a sketchbook and filled page after page with reference drawings. So the interior scenes of the house are very accurate. This sounds totally anal retentive, I know, but I think the more texture you add to your work and the more details you add to your work, the more people respond to it on some kind of instinctual level. Even if they don’t understand that it’s real, they see that detail and think, “Wow, this guy’s put a lot of work into this. Maybe I should pay attention.” (This is my own storytelling fantasy; I don’t know if it’s really true.) I would go to any lengths to come up with photo reference. I had a lot of classroom scenes and it’s hard to draw classroom scenes, if you think about it. They’re pretty visually complicated — desk, books, piles, filing cabinets. I was looking for something period and I found this old TV show, Square Pegs, which came out in 1982, right after my time in high school. It’s a horrible show. I watched it on Hulu with the sound off and just took screenshots for reference. This is how I make a book: I start with roughs, just getting in the basic words and figures. It’s a visual shorthand that only I can interpret. From there, I go right to pencil. I do a fairly tight pencil, and from there to finish. It’s that simple. There are some guys who do a couple more layouts steps, but I like to get pencil scraping across paper pretty fast in the process. I like the immediacy it brings to the work. And also I don’t like to spend a lot of time on layouts. As I’m sketching the roughs, I see these things pretty clearly, like little film loops that play in my head and I like to get them down really fast. Because my instincts and storytelling techniques at this point, after having done all these books, they’re pretty good. I may or may not suck, but nobody draws like me and nobody really writes like me, and that’s something I’m proud of. I’m pretty confident in my own storytelling instincts. And that’s how the book came together, scene by scene, over — it probably took me roughly two years from front to start, once I finally sat down and began going to town on the pages. Two hundred and some pages, so do the math about how many pages I was doing a day. You just chip away at it. You always have the larger vision in mind but I don’t think, “Oh god, I have 50 more pages to go!” I don’t think about it that way. It gets done when it gets done. The actual plot structure is the classic three-act breakdown that playwrights have been using since Shakespeare. The original stories hopped all over the place and I didn’t like that. This is such a powerful tale. My simple goal was to not get in the way of it. Let the story itself do the work, and don’t screw it up with bells and whistles. So I went with that very simple structure. It later got sub-divided into five chapters because it started to get a little big. Still the basic structure is three acts. And it works. [Derf Backderf is also author of Trashed and Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, two graphic novels published by Slave Labor Graphics and available at amazon.com. The best of The City, the weekly comic strip (now in its third decade appearing in alternative newspapers), is also available. Soon to come: the Apocalyptic Giggles portfolio and, natch, a new graphic novel. Visit the cartoonist at derfcity.com. My Friend Dahmer was nominated for Ignatz and Eisner awards, and named one of the Top Five Non-fiction Books (not just comics) of 2012 by Time magazine. Other “best of” lists include The Comics Journal, Publishers Weekly, BoingBoing, MTV, Onion AV Club, and Comics Alliance. It is currently in its fourth printing, with Mon Ami Dahmer and Mein Freund Dahmer released this Spring. Derf, who in 2006 won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for cartooning, lives in Cleveland.]

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#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

hembeck’s dateline: @11?*

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

chatterbox

ARS for Art’s Sake

Protecting Comic Book Artists New York-based Artists Rights Society is now expanding to help comics creators by SHAWNA GORE CBC Guest Columnist

Visit the Artists Rights Society at www.arsny.org. It’s described as “the preeminent copyright, licensing, and monitoring organization for visual artists in the United States.” Safeguarding intellectual property rights of painters, sculptors, photographers, and architects, ARS is now reaching out to comic book artists. Below: A page from Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations for his Frankenstein adaptation. The artist is a member of ARS.

regarding comics artists in 2010, when I was an editor at Dark Horse Comics. At that time, I was working with a numMost of the important ber of great artists, including Bernie Wrightson. Janet Hicks, stories to emerge from the the director of permissions for ARS was a friend of mine world of comic books are from college, and she remembered a conversation we’d had largely based on the queswhere I mentioned working with Bernie. So, when she saw tion, “What if?” What if an his name on a list of American artists who were owed money ordinary-seeming person by a Danish publisher, Janet contacted me, and we helped possessed hidden, extraorBernie collect the money he was due. dinary powers? What if a Artists Rights Society has historically worked with major man could deflect bullets and visual artists in fields considered fine art. ARS represents leap tall buildings in a single thousands of artists and estates including Andy Warhol, bound? What if there are fantastic worlds beyond the Georgia O’Keefe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso, Henri one we know? Matisse, March Chagall, and Frank Stella, among many But an organization based in New York is asking a new others. The increased awareness of the plight of comic book question of the comics industry — what if American comic artists and their important impact on our culture is opening book creators had free and easy access to the same kind of new doors of opportunity for those artists. In spring of 2012, legal and copyright protection that major international artists ARS began a new program extending membership to comics have enjoyed for decades? Artists working in any field in artists, offering them the same generous benefits of legal the U.S. have historically suffered terrible rights violations counsel and copyright protection that their existing members in regard to the work they produce compared with artists enjoy. working in other countries, especially in Europe, where the To an entire industry of working artists who are more intellectual property rights of artists have been protected accustomed to being taken advantage of than taken care for nearly ninety years by of, this kind of offer might seem unusual. But there is no organizations dedicated to hidden agenda for Artists Rights Society, and increasing enforcing these rights. its membership roles benefits ARS in ways that are very And no artists have suf- important, if not exactly financially lucrative. Because in adfered more for this lack of dition to working with individual artists and states to protect protection than comic-book copyright and collect money on behalf of its member artists, artists, the men and women ARS also engages in much larger-scale work: lobbying at who are the backbone of the federal level for better legal protection for visual artists. what is arguably the most While working with comics artists to protect their copyrights creative and innovative — and collect nominal fees for reproductions will never bring in as well as the lowest-paid the kind of money for ARS that handling licensing for, say, the and most labor-intensive Warhol estate does, it is of great benefit to ARS’s ability to — industry that employs vi- speak on behalf of the rights of artists working across many sual artists. Even today, the mediums. In other words, the more artists ARS represents in work of the very biggest various disciplines, the more effective its lobbying efforts on name in comics, the “King” behalf of all artists will be. himself, Jack Kirby, reCurrently, ARS is the major sponsor of a federal bill that mains embroiled in a nasty would institute a resale royalty for original art — an act that legal battle with Marvel would potentially provide a great benefit to comic artists, Comics over the recogniwho are often forced by financial need to sell original art tion of Kirby’s role in creat- cheaply, only to see the same work turned around and resold ing the legacy characters by speculators for a much higher price. The resale royalty that make up the bulk of the act (or Droit de Suite, as it is known internationally) would Marvel Universe. guarantee a substantial royalty be paid out to the creator of Artists Rights Society any work with each subsequent re-sale. (ARS), the New York-based These broader efforts, in addition to the daily copyright copyright protection orprotection activities of Artist’s Rights Society and its sister ganization, was created in organizations around the world, might someday prove key to 1987 on the same model as providing the kind of legal protection and financial security European copyright protec- that comic-book creators have needed and deserved since tion societies that formed the earliest days of this industry. If you’re an artist interested as early as 1926 in France in learning more about protecting your rights, visit www. to protect the intellectual arsny.com. property rights of artists. I was first contacted by ARS

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#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

Online Course Starts June!

Comic Book Creator editor Jon B. Cooke is proud to announce that his course, The History of American Comic Books, presented by Rhode Island School of Design Continuing Education, will have its first “virtual” class in June! This six-week online course examines the art and industry of the American comic-book tradition, shaped by its artists, writers and editors. If you have Internet access and understand basic Web browsing — and live anywhere on Planet Earth — you’re ready to join Ye Ed for this mixture of image-rich presentation, forum discussion and self-directed investigation that reveals where comics in the United States have been and where they might be headed. Our examination takes us from the birth of the form through its super-hero heyday, to near-death due to hysteria in the ’50s, to the ’60s undergrounds, and finally to the modern day ascent of the graphic novel. Jon is the five-time consecutive Eisner Award-winner for “Best Comics-Related Periodical,” and Harvey Award recipient. Also writer and co-producer of the full-length feature film documentary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist (boasting a Tribeca Film Festival debut), Jon is co-editor of The Warren Companion. He created, edited & designed Comic Book Artist magazine from 1998 to 2005.

visit ce.risd.edu

and search “Jon B. Cooke” for class details

The Storyteller’s Story Official Selection in over 25 film festivals worldwide “The best comics bio I’ve ever seen… It’s wonderful, well done.” Brian Michael Bendis “An essential doc for comics fans, ‘Portrait’ will also enlighten the curious.” John DeFore, Austin American-Statesman “Entertaining and insightful. A great film about a visionary artist!” Jeffrey Katzenberg Arguably the most influential person in American comics, Will Eisner, as artist, entrepreneur, innovator, and visual storyteller, enjoyed a career that encompassed comic books from their early beginnings in the 1930s to their development as graphic novels in the 1990s. During his sixty-year-plus career, Eisner introduced the now-traditional mode of comic book production; championed mature, sophisticated storytelling; was an early advocate for using the medium as a tool for education; pioneered the now-popular graphic novel, and served as inspiration for generations of artists. Without a doubt, Will Eisner was the godfather of the American comic book. The award-winning full-length feature film documentary includes interviews with Eisner and many of the foremost creative talents in the U.S., including Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Chabon, Jules Feiffer, Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Stan Lee, Gil Kane, and others.

Available Now on DVD & Blu-ray • www.twomorrows.com Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

THE ORIGINAL GOES DIGITAL!

Go online for an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all print issues HALF-PRICE!

The forerunner to COMIC BOOK CREATOR, CBA is the 2000-2004 Eisner Award winner for BEST COMICS-RELATED MAG! Edited by CBC’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. ALL BACK ISSUES NOW AVAILABLE AS DIGITAL EDITIONS FOR $3.95 FROM www.twomorrows.com!

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com

Order online at www.twomorrows.com COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUME 3 Reprinting the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #7-8 (spotlighting 1970s Marvel and 1980s indies), plus over 30 NEW PAGES of features and art! New PAUL GULACY portfolio, MR. MONSTER scrapbook, the story behind MARVEL VALUE STAMPS, and more! New MICHAEL T. GILBERT cover! (224-page trade paperback) $24.95 • ISBN: 9781893905429

#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more! Plus ADAMS thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen NICK CARDY pages from a controversial Teen Titans story, unpublished TOTH covers, and more!

STAN LEE AND ROY THOMAS discussion about Marvel in the 1970s, ROY THOMAS interview, BILL EVERETT’s daughter WENDY and MIKE FRIEDRICH on Everett, interviews with GIL KANE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, MIKE PLOOG, STERANKO’s Unknown Marvels, the real origin of the New X-Men, Everett tribute cover by GIL KANE, and more!

(80-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(76-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

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

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

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

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

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

(60-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(116-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

#12: CHARLTON PART 2

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

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

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

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

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983! Interviews with Charlton alumni GEORGE WILDMAN, NICOLA CUTI, JOE STATON, JOHN BYRNE, TOM SUTTON, MIKE ZECK, JACK KELLER, PETE MORISI, WARREN SATTLER, BOB LAYTON, ROGER STERN, and others, ALEX TOTH, a NEW E-MAN STRIP by CUTI AND STATON, and the art of DON NEWTON! STATON cover!

(108-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

(108-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

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

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

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

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

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

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

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

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(104-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

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

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

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

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

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

(122-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

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

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $3.95

the good stuff

Todd McFarlane:

“I Was a Stubborn S.O.B.”

The Image artist/business mogul on his new show-all book, The Art of Todd McFarlane

by JORGE (GEORGE) KHOURY CBC Contributing Editor

Above: Cover of Todd McFarlane’s “visual biography,” The Art of Todd McFarlane: The Devil’s In the Details, published by Image Comics, the company Todd help found, which is still going strong after more than two decades. View a video Q&A starring the artist at http:// www.youtube.com/user/McFarlaneCompany/ ©2013 Todd McFarlane Productions.

strike that up to maturity and not being a realist. But, again, I also was an athlete and played at a high level. In fact, I With a comics career that began nearly thirty years ago, played Pac-10 baseball, so I was very competitive. And so, the time was more than right for Todd McFarlane to look some of the things that I ended up doing in my career were back at his career within the retrospective coffee table book just follow-ups of that sports-athletic competitiveness. So I entitled The Art of Todd McFarlane, from Image Comics. was then able to shift it from sports to my career, per se. But From his humble beginnings it’s interesting that because of all the amateur stuff that’s in in Coyote and Infinity, Inc., there… I’ve had that literally since I did it. So people have to the heights of comics looked at the book both in my office and some of the signings superstardom on Spider-Man that I’m at, and they’re, ‘Ohhh, you’ve got some cool stuff that and Spawn, it’s all covered in I never saw before. All this stuff! And seeing it in chronologithis book with rich detail and cal…’ And it’s the right answer that I was hoping for. But frank honesty by the artist. from my perspective there’s no one image in there that’s a For his old faithful fans, all the surprise because I drew them all! So, I go, ‘Everything that’s trademarks of that energetic in that book? I knew it in advance before any of you guys.’ artistic style you remember Because I was doing it, right?” are in here in spades. For As you follow McFarlane’s career within the narrative newer admirers, this book of this book, it becomes clear that his early success started shows us the story of a fellow with self-efficacy and taking charge in creating artwork that comics fan and dreamer who stayed true to his artistic instincts. That giant leap in maturity was determined to do things is evident when he started inking his own pencils in books his way and find success by like Batman: Year Two or Amazing Spider-Man in the late any means necessary. ’80s; it’s there you find a jump in quality, exuberance, and One would have assumed style that only continued to grow in later years that an artist of McFarlane’s “Along the way in the book,” explained McFarlane, “as popularity would have had part of the voice-over, if you will, I try to show what I believe a book about his art ages are some of those marks, and you picked one that was a very ago… but that wasn’t the salient moment for me because it was the moment where I case until late 2012. In a got to begin the process of putting on paper what it was that recent conversation, McFarwas in my brain. Up to that point, I thought I was putting on lane confessed, “I wanted to paper what was in my brain but then different inkers would show my artwork, warts and have different interpretations, so the public wasn’t seeing all, from the beginning when what was in my brain. And I’d go, ‘The only way I am going to I was trying to break into get there is if I handle both pieces of that chore, both pencils comic books to where I’m at and the inks, and though the inking was very rough and rugnow. To show people, espeged at the beginning, like anything else, you do it over and cially any aspiring artists, you don’t have to be an awardover and over, and you start to figure out a method and you winning artist now—I wasn’t when I broke in; I became, start to get a little bit better at it. It’s like learning a language. eventually, an award-winning artist, but I was far from that Any one of these things—writing, coloring, lettering, pencilwhen I broke into the business. I’m hoping that the visuals ing, inking—it’s all just a creative language you’re learning. will show people that the Todd McFarlane that they know And the more you do it, the better you get at the language. wasn’t nearly as polished when he broke into the industry or I had a head start in penciling, so the penciling was better was trying to.” than the inking, and the inking eventually got better. At some I had often read and heard about the staggering amount point, I decided I wanted to write so then that basically is of rejection McFarlane suffered in his search to break into now the novice part of my career. It’s like, ‘You’re not a very the industry. Although this book is mostly an art book, he good writer but he’s a pretty good artist.’ Because I had a documents the early chapters of his humble beginnings as five- to eight-year head start on the art over the writing. So, seen in his early samples, journals, and rejection letters. just trying to dissect some of this stuff to people, again, you With straightforwardness, Todd provides readers with a don’t have to be perfect to get into the business and you tour and a reexamination of his artwork. Wouldn’t you think can actually get in as a penciler and eventually you can, that this soul-searching task would have led the artist to maybe, have the opportunity which I had which was being a rediscover something about him that would have totally been penciler, inker, writer, and eventually publisher/editor. I didn’t forgotten with the passage of time and life? know any of that was going to happen when I got my first McFarlane replied, “I knew who I was: I was a stubborn penciling job. It just became the evolution of the opportunity S.O.B. Because people saw that my artwork wasn’t good and in front of me.” I still insisted on trying out and that I got hundreds of no’s and There are many who confuse McFarlane’s drive with ego, I still insisted on trying, on keeping going. I guess you could but his ability to see his vision to fruition is a key component #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

george khoury

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one of the most eclectic out there, if not the most.” Even with all his hard work in his toy company and outside ventures, he hasn’t gotten over comics. I asked the popular Image founder if despite being a successful businessman, he still feels, in his heart, that he’s a comic book creator. McFarlane answered, “Yeah, sure. Again, it’s unfortunate (or fortunate; it depends on where you’re sitting at any given time) to get the art out the way I wanted to see it, to make the toys I wanted to do, to do some of the things I wanted to do, I had to start up for me personally some of these corporations and do what I had to do. But I am acutely aware every minute, every hour that I am doing “business” is an hour I’m not being an artist. It frustrates me at times. I just go ‘Uck!’—I’m in some business-marketing meeting instead of drawing another page. But the problem is if all you do is hunch over the board and do the pages, somebody has to do that piece, and if you’re not going to be willing to let somebody else do it on your behalf—and I wasn’t wired for that—then the only other option is for you to do it yourself. So, I go, “Okay. At least in terms of comics and toys, I need to do it myself.” There are other things I’ve done where I’ve let Hollywood take over stuff and let them do it the way they see fit. But you just make those decisions on every individual opportunity that comes along, you decide, ‘Okay, how much do I want to have a direct impact? How much am I willing to basically collaborate?’ And, as part of the collaboration, that means you have to let people come in and make business decisions and live with it!’ And live with it! Every time I’ve done a collaboration, I live with it—good, bad or indifferent. I don’t want to be the guy who says, ‘No, I’m going to collaborate and then bitch about it afterwards.’ And those opportunities are when I go, ‘No, I feel like I can’t live with the end result and I’m going to bitch about it? Then I’m just going to do it all myself and I take the bitching away from me. I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be that artist in whatever occupation who just always rails against the other guys, the corporate guys. I used to when I was in my twenties but now I’m a little older and wiser, and I see that the artist and corporate—or executives and artists – [are] simpatico. They both need each other and, to me, the way to deal with it is to balance those two guys. You don’t let one guy run it. You don’t let the artist have the run of the asylum and you don’t have the executive run roughshod over—what should be happening is that they both are on the same team and they both have equal impact.”

fin

Background: Todd McFarlane’s done okay for himself, ya think? Here’s a portrait of the artist/writer/publisher/executive photographed by Anna Peña and no doubt taken in the Arizona desert. Courtesy of Todd McFarlane Productions. ©2013 Anna Peña.

to his work in Spawn, toys, and films. McFarlane added, “Well, let’s be fair. Anybody who wants to do anything artistically—whether that’s acting or music or art or writing novels—and you’re gonna put it out for public consumption? There is an ego component on it and anyone who denies it isn’t being— because if there wasn’t ego, then just write it and put it in your drawer. You don’t have to show the world your artwork. Very few people that I know that have done art on any level, in any of those areas, have put it out in hopes that people reject them, so the ego part has to be there. To be a politician you have to have an ego because you think you’re going to be elected, right? ‘Vote for me.’ So there are a lot of occupations where it’s just part of it but, again, it also adds to our neuroses. We’re a bit of a neurotic group, us creative people. It’s our blessing and our curse. It’s the reason why we can come up with the ideas but we can at times be a frail lot.” Long gone are the days when drawing funny books for just Marvel and DC were the only game in town in terms of creativity or employment security. With or without Image Comics, today’s writers and artists have to follow their inspiration and own their work. McFarlane explained, “Well, with Image, we came out the gate saying, we don’t want to own anything on opening day, all of us individually, the co-owners of Image owned our characters individually, right? So Image was just a publishing house. Fast forward now, over twenty years, and Image is exactly the same thing. Image has never owned any character, ever. You bring us your characters, we help you get it out to the marketplace, take an overhead for that, but we don’t have any ownership stake in any of it. So if you want to go out and make toys or movies of your character, God bless ya! It’s always been the piece I’m most proud of: we came out with the best deal and it still is by far the best deal, where the other companies have now gotten to the point where they routinely lock people up and put them into contracts. We just go, ‘You want to come and work for us and do your thing? Cool. If you don’t, we’re not going to force you. We’re not going to contractually obligate you. I’ve never done that. Even at my own studio, I’ve never done that. If you want to stay, stay. If you don’t, I can’t have some contract to keep drawing for me. That seems a silly way to keep people around. Image is now over twenty years old and they’ve been writing the demise of Image for twenty years now. We’re not going away. We’ve become very eclectic. Where we started as a group of super-hero-minded co-owners, we now have a company that’s probably

aushenkerology The Mexican Sunset of

Frank Robbins

Fran Rowe Robbins and friends discuss the final years of the renowned artist/writer by Michael Aushenker CBC Associate Editor

Above: A self-caricature by cartoonist Franklin Robbins.

Right top and middle: Fran Rowe Robbins and Frank Robbins during their 1980s-90s Mexican romance and marriage (courtesy of Fran). Bottom right: Renowned Archie cartoonist Stan Goldberg and his friend Frank Robbins, Mexico, 1994 (courtesy of Stan and his son Bennett). 14

In the 1970s, polarizing artist Frank Robbins simultaneously astounded and repelled mainstream comic book readers with his anatomically flipped-out work on such series as Captain America and The Invaders at Marvel, and DC’s The Shadow and Detective Comics (in which he created Man-Bat). The late artist brought a cartoony flair he had developed while working on the syndicated comic strip Johnny Hazard, heavily inspired by mentor figure Milton Caniff, to such features as The Human Fly and “Legion of Monsters.” Robbins even wrote classic stories for other artists, such as his famous Batman #250 campfire tale, “The Batman Nobody Knows,” and a few “Unknown Soldier” missions, and as an artist, he took some throwaway licensed properties, such as Marvel’s Man From Atlantis, and breathed animated life into these otherwise rote comicbook adaptations of B-level entertainment properties. But understand this: By the time Frank Robbins retired to Mexico in the late 1980s, where he spent his final five years, he was done with comics. Done. As in: Never looking back again. “When he finally retired, he retired. That was it!” Fran Rowe Robbins, his widow, told Comic Book Creator in an exclusive interview this past October. “Frank very rarely talked about cartooning. I knew about Batman

because the books were there. I knew about Johnny Hazard and Scorchy Smith. But I didn’t know about any of the other stuff [such as The Invaders, The Human Fly, etc.]. I was so unaware about how popular he had been.” “The other painters down there knew [Frank] as a painter,” said longtime Archie Comics artist Stan Goldberg. “He didn’t stress it that much that he had a career in comics. He didn’t make a big deal about it.” What Robbins was not through with, however, was the arts, with which the dynamic artist had a lifelong love affair. Depicting life as he saw it around his quaint Mexican village, Robbins took to the canvas with brushstrokes that remained unapologetically, unmistakably Robbins-style, even if his subject matter had switched from a pair of human torches combating Nazi man-monsters to the graceful, poetic grandiosity of a matador or a ballet dancer in motion. If anyone writes a coffee table book about the man, it should be titled Love It or Hate It: The Art of Frank Robbins. Flamboyant and colorful, Robbins’ late-period art, while more abstract than his Marvel or DC output, retains the figurative elastic-

#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

The Robbins enjoyed San Miguel’s laid-back pace. “Everybody walked The Shadow TM & ©2013 Condé Nast Publications. everwhere,” Fran recalled. “We can go to all the restaurants and clubs within 10–15 minutes.” Located four and one-half miles northwest of Mexico It seems natural that Robbins turned to painting in retireCity, the small town of San Miguel de Allende was, approment. What may not be as expected is that Robbins was, priately, something of an artist’s colony when Frank Robbins in his widow’s words, “the musical guru of the City of San settled down circa 1989. Miguel.” Robbins enjoyed jazz, pop, and opera, and he had “He was extremely happy in Mexico,” Stan Goldberg myriad albums in the collection of the local library there, said. “He was part of the community down there.” where they remain still. Music, after all, was an intrinsic part Still friends today with Fran Rowe Robbins, Goldberg reof his artistic process when creating comic books. members socializing with a very happy couple while visiting “When he was drawing, when he was cartooning, he Mexico in February 1994. “She was a teacher from upstate New York who had stopped teaching and moved down there,” Goldberg said of Rowe. When Robbins met Fran, she was staging play readings and directing theater in San Miguel. “I taught English there,” she said. “I met Frank while I was directing a play reading of Amadeus.” In the late 1980s, Robbins had been healing from the death of his longtime life partner when his path crossed Fran Rowe’s. “His wife had died two years before I met him,” his second wife recalled. “We were together for about five years. We had a wonderful marriage. It was a big loss when he died, let me tell you.” It was only in 2011 when Fran Robbins finally packed it up and moved back to the United States, due to health reasons connected to atmospheric conditions in Mexico. “I was there for 21 years,” she said. “Unfortunately, at 6,500 feet, the air is very thin… I had to move back to sea level. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to.” Now a resident of Vero Beach in Florida’s West Palm Beach, Fran sounds misty-eyed for her previous life south of the border. “We had a gorgeous Casa de los Padres, built in 1710. A Colonial house with a patio and garden, and 20–30 foot ceilings,” she recalled. The house had a courtyard and shared the wall with the adjacent Oratorio of San Felipe Neri church. “When we looked out the bedroom, we saw these gorgeous towers.” Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

ity that once spawned some crazy, impossible contortions in super-hero books such as Power Man and Ghost Rider, and stirred up Marvel’s letter columns (pro and con). By all accounts, Robbins was always professional, albeit uneasy drawing the “Marvel Way.” In an interview with Jim Shooter in Back Issue #20 (for this writer’s piece on The Human Fly), the former Marvel editor-in-chief admitted that Robbins did not really fit in aesthetically with the Marvel house style. And yet, based on Robbins’ reputation as a syndicated strip artist, Shooter was moved to make sure he continued to get work, as his eccentric brilliance pored through his superhero work. Robbins had many high-powered fans within the Bullpen, including Marvel’s art director, the legendary artist of Amazing Spider-Man, John Romita. “He was just as much a fan as anybody else,” Goldberg said.

Above left: With writer Denny O’Neil, Frank Robbins obviously had a ball drawing the adventures of The Shadow (here the cover of #5, June-July 1974). Above: Frank was also a fine comics writer, as evidenced by his creation of Man-Bat. Here’s the splash to Detective Comics #429, Nov. ’72, also drawn by Robbins. Below: As artist, Robbins had a memorable run on The Invaders. Here is his entry for The Mighty Marvel Bicentennial Calendar (1976) featuring that title’s Golden Age heroes.

michael aushenker

Clockwise from above: Paintings by Frank Robbins include “Club Mama Mia,” “Dancer,” “Loss of Youth,” and “¡Hay Toro!,” all rendered during his Mexican years. Please visit www.frankrobbinsartist.com for many more lovely examples. Courtesy of Fran Rowe Robbins.

listened to music,” Fran Robbins said. “It was, in general, classical music. His knowledge was very extensive. He knew all the pop singers: Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Mel Torme… He knew all of them, the clubs in New York City, Harry Belafonte. He really knew music.” Robbins’ daily life centered around music appreciation. “In the afternoon, they had comida — a dinner in the middle of the day,” Fran said. “In the afternoon, he listened to music for two hours. He would just sit there, smoke a pipe, and listen to music.” Goldberg recalled how Robbins also enjoyed a glass of mescal, “the poor man’s tequila with the worm at the bottom of the glass.” Point of interest: “All the houses [in San Miguel], they utilized their roofs,” Goldberg said. So it was not uncommon to have an after-dinner drink with Robbins on the roof of his house. “People don’t realize this,” Goldberg said, “but Frank was not only a great artist, he was a great fencer, a great inventor, he loved classical music. He was a true renaissance man.” Robbins was also a passionate cinephile. “He read a lot and he watched movies,” his second wife reported. “We had tapes of 600 to 700 movies. He loved Kurosawa. He had a collection of Japanese armor. He loved Fellini, Italian directors, foreign, Goddard, the noir films. He loved them all.”

Robbins enjoyed contemporary films as well. “We went to the movies often,” she continued. “There was only one theatre. There were a lot of movies on television that he was able to tape… He loved Hitchcock, John Ford, Orson Welles, Chaplin. He liked Spielberg, Scorsese, Billy Wilder. He loved all the Italian movie actors. He thought the most beautiful actress was Ava Gardner. He thought she was more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor. He loved Marilyn Monroe, especially in films such as [Wilder’s] Some Like It Hot. Frank was a big buff.” The one medium he did not indulge in during his final years? The one he made his name on. “He very rarely talked about his own work,” Fran Robbins said. “[Artistically], he was interested in bodies in motion. It isn’t just simple lines. A lot of it was action.” Beyond meeting with the occasional cartoonist, such as Goldberg, who would sweep through town by the early ‘90s, Robbins stayed clear of the comic book world, including conventions and cartoonist events. Part of the reason he #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

perhaps detached from the industry, Fran Robbins suggests, had to do with an ugly episode taking place in the years before his death. “Frank had a bad situation with a stalker,” Fran said. “This stalker followed him from New York to Mexico. Frank kept the envelopes and photos. He was frightened. He was scared. The guy got a hold of his phone number and Frank had to change his number. This man was suggesting all these revisions to Frank’s work and had all these characters he came up with that he wanted to discuss with Frank.” The intrusion on Robbins’ privacy escalated until, “all of a sudden, he just stopped, either he was put in an institution or he died,” Fran theorized. “The things we got in the mail were all postmarked from Dallas. Then he showed up in Mexico.” Fran continued, “It was scary. It was hairy for about seven years. There was nothing the cops could do. It

stopped about three years before Frank died.” Fran shakes her head musing over the episode. “A cartoonist,” she pondered rhetorically. “Why would anyone want to stalk a cartoonist?”

Franklin “Frank” Robbins entered the world on September 9, 1917 in Boston. He started drawing when he was just three years old. Growing up in a New England settlement house, he learned about Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. He discovered drawing. “He knew how to make gesso,” Fran Robbins said. “He knew how to make his own paints. He went to art school, he was very classically trained. In the height of the Depression, when this was considered frivolous, he ended up supporting

Above: Perhaps Frank Robbins’ greatest claim to fame is his long-running syndicated adventure comic strip Johnny Hazard. Here is his Dec. 3, 1961 Sunday. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions Below: Prior to Johnny Hazard, Frank worked as comic strip artist on the renowned Noel Sickles’ creation, Sorchy Smith, between 1939-44. The original art, dated March 22 (year undetermined), is inscribed to fellow cartoonist Gill Fox! Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

michael aushenker

Above: A pic of Frank Robbins at work in the 1970s from the Spanish magazine (subtitled “Studies and Information on Comic Strips”) BANG! #10 [1973], featured in an article on Frank Robbins by Antonio Lara. Opposite page: Photos of Robbins working on Batman and Johnny Hazard in 1972 are by the late Spanish-born French photographer and cartoonist Francisco Hidago. If anyone knows where the latter pix appeared, please give Ye Ed a shout! All photos used with the permission of Antonio Martín, editor of BANG! (who tells us he has a Jordi Bernet portrait of Robbins, and a caricature of the artist drawn by cartoonist Alfonso Figueras, which he will share for the CBC #3 letter col! — Thanks, Antonio!

his mother by the time he was 14. She worked for a hat maker. Then they moved to New York and he started to do other things that were impressive. He painted billboards in a movie theater. Lobby paintings at Radio City Music Hall. He also did the murals.” Of Jewish descent, Robbins did not connect profoundly with his heritage beyond the most casual of ways. “He was a cultural Jew,” Fran Robbins said of her late husband. Of course, in the immigrant-driven world of comics’ Golden Age, many of his closest cartoonist friends were Jewish. “He wasn’t a religious Jew at all, but he was a humanist. He studied at the National Academy of Design, then designed murals for a children’s studio at NBC. Even when he was young, he had a talent. He was a prodigy, obviously.” Robbins seemed to be very much a product of his times. “He used to smoke cigarettes,” Fran said. “That was a time when everyone smoked. He used to use a long cigarette holder. The last twenty years of his life, he didn’t smoke cigarettes.” Robbins, whom many editors and colleagues accused of aping Caniff, befriended his hero. “Milt Caniff was a friend,” Fran Robbins said. “He really admired Caniff. Who didn’t?” Something of a mystery man in the comic book industry, Robbins rarely socialized with other cartoonists, a fact reinforced by the reality that Robbins, like most of his ilk, freelanced from home. Two artists who did consider Robbins friends were Golden Age comics artist and Dondi co-creator Irwin Hasen and Goldberg. “He was a very, very private serious man,” Hasen, who knew Robbins from National Cartoonist Society meetings decades ago, told CBC last October. “Very little can be said about him. He was a great inventor and a great artist. He

was a very private guy. He was a cartoonist’s cartoonist. He was low key and laid back. If one were to be asked about him, they couldn’t talk about it.” When asked if Robbins had much of a sense of humor or personality, Hasen shot back with an emphatic “No!” and then laughed. “Frank was a marvelous painter!” Goldberg said. “He was a great artist. Hasen, his dear friend, said that Frank Robbins was one of the greatest artists, it’s just too bad he had to be a Milton Caniff clone,” Goldberg said. “He could have been his own man. He was that great. In my eyes, he was great.” The late Jerry Robinson, co-creator of the Batman mythos, was another close friend of Robbins. “Frank and him were very, very, very close,” Goldberg said. “Jerry told me the story, the first official job in ‘38, ‘39, for Look magazine, was a job that Frank was supposed to do but he was very busy. So he passed it onto Jerry. Jerry remembered that he gave him his first very big professional job. Robbins also worked with Alex Toth. Robin Snyder asked Alex Toth to do a whole feature on Robbins.”

Stan Goldberg and his wife love to travel. And so, in February of 1994, the Goldbergs passed through San Miguel while on vacation in Mexico. The Archie cartoonist had heard Robbins lived in the village, so he found a phone directory, took a stab, and bingo! “There, in English, there it was: ‘Franklin Robbins,’” Goldberg exclaimed. When Goldberg reached out to Robbins, the former recalled, “He knew I was a cartoonist in town and he said, ‘How fast can you come over?’ #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

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create a similar aviation-adventure strip, Johnny Hazard, on which Robbins enjoyed a decades-long run that overlapped with his mainstream comic-book work. By the late 1960s, Robbins had landed at DC Comics, where he initially wrote and later drew a number of features into the mid-’70s. Though Goldberg said “Frank didn’t like DC,” Robbins produced impressive scripts for Batman, The Flash, and Superboy, as well as contributing some knockout artwork on Batman, Detective Comics, The Shadow, and for the mystery anthology titles. When Robbins cold-called DC’s competition in 1974 to ask if they could use his help, Marvel production manager John Verpoorten reportedly said, “How fast can you get over here?” Robbins transitioned to Marvel with early work that included art for “Morbius the Living Vampire,” Power Man, Ghost Rider, and Captain America before joining writer Roy Thomas for a lengthy stay as penciler on The Invaders (roughly dividing the issues with another Caniff disciple, Lee Elias), and collaborating with writer Bill Mantlo on short-lived books Man from Atlantis and The Human Fly (the latter for which Elias also drew issues). Producing his daily comic strip even as he pumped out a prolific monthly comic-book output, Robbins wrapped up Johnny Hazard in 1977 (after a 33-year or so run!) while still employed by Marvel. Despite being something of a square peg during the Bronze Age’s super-hero comic-book scene — as, again, Robbins was both loved and loathed by comic book fandom during the 1970s — Goldberg insists Robbins did not leave the industry angry. “He wasn’t bitter, [just resigned],” Goldberg opined. As if to ask himself, “Why am I knocking myself out here?”

frank robbins: the final year

Goldberg spent some time with Frank a mere nine months before the Johnny Hazard cartoonist passed away. When Goldberg arrived at Robbins’ home, he found Frank on his shortwave radio. It was via that shortwave where “he heard that Jack Kirby had died,” Goldberg reported. In general, Goldberg learned, Robbins had moved to Mexico because “he wanted to be left alone. He had a very close-knit handful of people as a gringo living his life down in Mexico.” Yet Robbins was by no means aloof. He just yearned to socialize amid a different scene. Goldberg remembers the Bohemian environs inside Robbins’ Mexican hacienda.“He painted big paintings of jazz musicians,” the cartoonist remembered. “He had pictures on the wall that he did when he was seven and eight years old.” Goldberg remains agog trying to describe the impression Robbins’ monster canvases had on him. “It would explode off of the wall,” Goldberg said. “It’s hard to describe his style. It wasn’t his Milton Caniff style, that’s for sure. He had that drummer, he captured him in three or four shots in one painting.” The kinetic motion of the figures, the color palette, and the multiple, quasi-Cubist depictions of figures strayed from Robbins’ relatively ham-strung renditions of super-heroes colored in Ben-Day dots. Robbins’ latter artwork might be compared to something akin to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal 1912 canvas “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.” “He would’ve loved to have been a serious painter, but he had to make a living,” Goldberg said. Hence, a career in comics. As a first-time syndicated cartoonist, Robbins took over Scorchy Smith in 1939 after Bert Christman (co-creator of DC’s Sandman soon thereafter) left the legendary Noel Sickles-created strip. Robbins’ run on Scorchy proved so impressive, King Features Syndicate hired him in 1944 to

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Retiring in Mexico hardly came out of the blue for Frank Robbins. “He used to vacation in Mexico for many, many years,” said Fran Robbins. When he finally settled down in San Miguel, he felt at home among the vibrant regulars at Mama Mia, a restaurant and music club in town which fed his imagination. “There were a lot of artists there, photographers, a lot of ex-pats,” she said of the mix of Americans, Canadians, French, and Germans living in town. “He did a really interesting painting of Mama Mia. He painted Don Clay playing the congas. He painted Peta Glen, with her blond hair, with a glass of scotch on top of the piano, a lot of musicians smoking… you can just feel the atmosphere. They were regulars. They were people who either were retired or that just sort of floated into San Miguel and never left. Guys who escaped the Vietnam draft. They sort of settled in and had a sympathetic community there.” Fran remembers watching her late husband attack the canvas with gusto. “He was very fast,” she said. “When he painted big pictures too, he worked on a grid. He could put it on a grid

Frank Robbins passed away on November 28, 1994. Unfortunately, it was a death that could have been avoided. “He had a kidney stone,” Fran Robbins said. “We went to the emergency room. He had an attack around 7 p.m. They

Above: Yeah, if you’re a dedicated Aushenker reader, you no doubt know he’s an unabashed Human Fly freak and likely have already seen this treasure, Frank Robbins pencils for an unpublished Human Fly cover, which appeared in Michael’s definitive article, “The Human Fly: Pretty Fly for a Real Guy,” gracing our sister magazine Back Issue’s #20 (Feb. 2007) ish. We wanted to share not only to plug our Associate Editor’s previous work, but also as an example of Frank Robbins’ simultaneously charming and exasperating anatomy, with arms and legs akimbo, often bent at fantastical angles! Inset Right: Frank Robbins contributed this hand-lettered mini-autobiography for a National Cartoonist Society annual. Courtesy of John Heebink

within ten or 15 minutes. What took time for him was just looking at it and deciding what he was going to do with it. The whole image was there already.” He also simultaneously worked on multiple paintings. “He’d get an idea for something else, so he’d put the other painting aside and work on another one,” she said. In San Miguel, Frank and Fran lived a good life together. “We used to go out and socialize with musicians a lot,” she recalled. Another little-known fact about Robbins: he was something of an electronics whiz. “We had a sound system that was second to none,” Fran Robbins recalled. “He created a single cone speaker that was astonishing. It was very pure sound, very clear. wonderful, wonderful. He knew a lot about sound. He had boxes and boxes of research about sound. “He did a lot of recording for the library, tape to tape, CD to tape. People would donate their collections to the local library.” As did Frank. He lent his collection to the librarian there, Theresa Malakoff. “His real contribution to the town was a musical one,” Robbins’ wife said. “He always did my music, my sound effects. He also was the one with the expertise.” Fran can still picture the poster Robbins did for her charity production of the musical play Guys and Dolls. “He did a drawing for Ibsen’s The Ghosts, a play that takes place in this isolated Scandinavian place. He created a big mountain on an icy blue field.” “I went to a party at his house when the production was over,” Goldberg recalled. “[Fran] invited many people over to the house.” The Robbinses were an active couple. “We did a lot of walking there and swimming,” she said. “There was a very good pool. We had a hot springs there. There were some tennis courts. He didn’t play tennis. but mostly what people did was walk.” To the second and final Mrs. Robbins, Frank seemed to be just short of a super-hero. “He was an expert marksman,” Fran said. “He had an air gun. He was a fencer. He could also shoot arrows. He was a good swimmer. He was truly a Renaissance man.”

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were going to operate at 5:00 in the morning. He had so much pain. I went and I tried to get him a shot of morphine. That’s the only thing that might have helped. He had a heart attack and he died.” A contributor in his death could have been that medical care in Mexico was, perhaps, not as sophisticated or advanced as that of his native U.S., and that not enough people were staffed at San Miguel’s facility. “This was a very tiny hospital,” Fran recalled. “His doctor wasn’t there. He died while his doctor was at dinner.” Right after he heard that Robbins had died, Goldberg sent an obituary he wrote to the local newspaper in San Miguel. Goldberg did not attend the funeral, and it was unlikely he could have even if he had tried, as the burial happened very soon after Robbins’ demise. “There’s a law in Mexico,” Fran Robbins explained, “[that] you’re buried within a day after you die. After 24 hours, you’re buried. I think that’s true in a lot of warm countries.” Robbins’ widow describes her late husband’s funeral as intimate and tasteful. “There was some music that was played,” she said. “We had a little get together at the house afterwards. It was just so fast and shocking.” Frank Robbins was buried in the Panteon. “There is an English section there, and he has a crypt,” Fran revealed. “There were many people I talked to after Frank died. There were some really nice tributes to him in cartoonist magazines, weeklies, annuals. I was very grateful for the outpouring.” “He was the best at what he did,” Goldberg said of the great 20th-century cartoonist he called his friend. “The energy, the action,” despite the fact that many compared his style too much to Caniff’s for his comic-book work to be taken as seriously. “When you’re the first guy doing it, and then Frank comes along, it’s always the first guy.” Goldberg feels blessed he got the opportunity to spend some time with Robbins, an artist he so admired, mere months before the Invaders artist died. “No question!” Goldberg said emphatically. “I have been very fortunate that I got to go to this little town for 20 years and I had this chance to spend time with this idol of mine.” As detached as Robbins had become regarding his profession in his final year on this planet, perhaps the whole damn thing mattered just a smidgen, in the end. “He was great with me,” Goldberg said. “It’s strange. He didn’t want to get involved in comics, but he asked me a lot of questions [about what was going on in the industry].”

On September 8–15, 2012, the Bordello Gallery in San Miguel presented a posthumous exhibition of Robbins’ paintings. They can also be viewed at and/or purchased through FrankRobbinsArtist.com.

Above: Steve Gan ably inks Frank Robbins on the opening page of Marvel Premiere #28 (Feb. 1976), which introduced that team terrible, the Legion of Monsters!

Michael Aushenker, associate editor of Comic Book Creator, is writer/cartoonist behind the “El Gato, Crime Mangler” series, “Those Unstoppable Rogues,” and “Silly Goose” (CartoonFlophouse.com), and he has written issues of Bart Simpson (Bongo) and Gumby’s Gang Starring Pokey (Gumby). The first article he ever wrote was for Back Issue on The Human Fly ( #20), and Aushenker is cartoonist and editor of the forthcoming comic book The New Adventures of the Human Fly. A Human Fly movie is also in development. Visit www.thehumanflymovie.com. Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

irving on the inside An Evening With

Denny & Neal

The legendary Adams-O’Neil comics team discuss social relevancy in their ’70s work

Above: Dennis O’Neil, writer (left), and Neal Adams, artist, shake hands at the Big Event in this portrait by Seth Kushner. All photos of the talk are used with his kind permission.

Inset right: Seth Kushner’s photo of Joe Simon’s drawing hand and a certain Big Apple landmark grace the cover of his and writer Christopher Irving’s smash tome, Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of the American Comics, available in bookstores and comic shops and via their publisher at www. powerhousebooks.com. Many thanks to our chums for the words and pictures here!

Moderated by CHRISTOPHER IRVING CBC Contributing Editor When writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams teamed up in the early 1970s, their take on Batman restored the Dark Knight to his brooding roots, and established the version that is reflected in the recent films. Just as importantly, they introduced social relevance into super-hero comics with Green Lantern/Green Arrow, most famously with the drug abuse issues, in the process elevating super-heroes to a more adult, earthbound level. A former crime reporter, O’Neil brought real-world grit to the genre, while Adams’ art style and design elicited both a breathtaking realism and dynamism rarely found in the super-hero comic book. O’Neil edited the Batman line at DC for a number of years. Adams continues to draw and write comics, most recently with DC’s Batman: Odyssey series, and is currently drawing The First X-Men for Marvel, co-written with Christos Gage. Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics (Powerhouse Publishing) writer Christopher Irving and photographer Seth Kushner, and Housing Works Bookstore Café reunited O’Neil and Adams for a special benefit panel on social relevancy in comics. This talk took place before an audience on July 17, 2012, at the SoHo café. Christopher Irving: Seth and I — Seth, say hello to the people. Seth Kushner: Hello. Thanks for coming tonight. Neal Adams: Doesn’t Seth get a chair?

Christopher: No, he’s going to be photographing because he’s a shutterbug… Neal: Ohhh. Seth: He does the talking and I take the pictures. Christopher: I do the writing and he creates the pictures. [To Dennis and Neal] You guys can relate, right? [laughter] Anyway, Seth and I started a website called GraphicNYC four or five years ago and the culmination of our artistwriter-creator profiles is Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics, which has about 50 or 60 creators, at least, including these two handsome gentlemen sitting right next to me: Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams. [applause] Let’s get started. Do you want to try and make some time for questions? Then there’s going to be a quick signing with Neal and Denny. Okay. They need no introduction but I am going to introduce them anyway. Dennis O’Neil was born in 1939, the same year that Batman first swooped over the rooftops of Gotham City in Detective Comics #27. While working as a newspaper reporter in Cape Girardeau, Michigan — Dennis O’Neil: Missouri. Christopher: Missouri? Oh! I’m ashamed! I’m sorry. Neal: Scratch that out. Christopher: I don’t have a pen, unfortunately. I’ll just use my fingernail. [Neal hands him a pen] Thank you. Okay: Cape Girardeau, Missouri. A meeting with upcoming comic book writer and editor Roy Thomas led Denny to move to New York to write comics. He started writing for Marvel and then became a mainstay at Charlton Comics. He later went to DC Comics in 1968 with his [Charlton] editor Dick Giordano. Neal Adams brought an unprecedented sense of realism to super-hero art of the 1960s, stemming out of his prior work in advertising and also his artwork on the Ben Casey comic strip — Neal: And Archie. Christopher: That’s right. How many Archie stories did you do? Neal: Just some pages. Just a few. Christopher: Real quick: Just as an aside. Neal, who did you meet with when you first went to Archie? Neal: His name is Gorelick. Victor Gorelick. Christopher: There was someone else working there who first warned you away from comics. Neal: You’re talking about Joe Simon? I didn’t meet Joe Simon. They called him on the phone because they took pity on me because I was such a sad case. I went up there three or four times because Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were doing The Adventures of the Fly and “The Shield.” I didn’t go up there to work for Archie; I went there to see Jack Kirby. Joe Simon didn’t come in though they said he would come in every Thursday, but he didn’t come in. I came in every week to try to get work and I brought my

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Right Courtesy of Heritage Auctions, a layout for the cover of the first Green Lantern/Green Arrow collection published by Paperback Library in 1972. Note they subsequently swapped the back and front covers for the printed edition. Also check out the ultimately unused cover blurb, “Comix That Give a Damn!” You’ll find the unused cover art, featuring a different rendition of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on a following page. Art, of course, is by Neal Adams.

samples — every week I had more samples — so they got him on the phone. And Joe Simon says, “Kid, I’m going to do you a big favor: I’m not going to use your work.” [laughter] “It’s good but get a real job doing something real. There won’t be comic books in a year.” Christopher: I actually asked about that because, besides being the hand on our cover [of Leaping Tall Buildings] — we have a very special guest. [To audience member] Emily? Can you please stand? Joe Simon’s granddaughter Emily came here. Everyone give her a round of applause. C’mon, everybody! [applause] Neal: [To Emily] Your grandpa told me he was going to do me a favor by not giving me work and he said, ‘Kid, you’re not going to understand it now, but this is the biggest favor anybody could do for you. Comics will not exist in America in a year.” [laughter] So the guys at Archie gave me Archie pages to do. Pitiful. “Comics are doomed!” [laughter] I love your grandpa! I just want you to understand that he didn’t give me work. Christopher: So, I — Neal: Wait a second! I have an end to the story! [laughter] Christopher: Please, Neal! Neal: It’s a great story. [To Emily] You’re hearing this for the first time, right? After awhile I became “Neal Adams.” It took me a bunch of years. You know, the guy in the white hat on the horse who saved everybody’s career and all the rest of it. So Joe Simon, your grandpa, comes up to DC Comics and he’s heard of my reputation with original art and all the rest of it. He says, “Neal, I’ve got to talk to you about this. I’m trying to get the rights back for Captain America but I don’t know what process to follow. You obviously know more than anybody on earth about it, so how do I do that?” I said, “Come on to Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

Inset left: Covers for the first Batman and Green Lantern O’Neil/Adams collaborations, Detective Comics #395 (Jan. ’70) and GL #76 (Apr. ’70). Below: Detail from the Neal Adams (pencils) and Berni Wrightson (inks) Batman #241 (May ’72) cover. (Yep, Ye Ed confesses to flopping the art!)

christopher irving

Above: Poster for the charity event as designed by Seth Kushner (and, natch, featuring the shutterbug’s pix, as well).

Right inset: Bob Kane’s iconic Detective Comics #33 (Sept. 1939) cover and the Neal Adams homage cover, Batman #227 (Dec. 1970).

the coffee room.” We went to the coffee room and I gave him the phone numbers and cards of two lawyers, neither of whom charge money — I know, this is fantasy, right? [laughter] — I gave him these cards and I gave him some advice, like sending bills to people who you think owe money to you and they will send it to the accounting department and the accounting department — are there any accountants here? Accountants have glue on their fingers. So if you send them a bill, they can’t throw it away. They try to throw it away but they can’t do it. Because they think one day, ten years later, someone will come and say, “Do you have a bill from that guy?” And they go, “Oh, sh*t.” So they can’t throw a bill away. You’re going to pile them up with these bills and they’re going to have to pay them eventually or else there’s just going to be this big pile. So, anyway, I have this long talk with Joe Simon. Your grandfather is this very tall guy and I look up to him in many ways. So we have this conversation and we’re leav-

ing, right? And he thanked me and I realized, stopped him, and said, “Mr. Simon, can I buy you a second cup of coffee? I have another story to tell you.” [chuckles] “You turned me down when I was a teenager.” “No!” [laughter] Okay, that was it. Christopher: That’s a great story. So, leading up to January 1970’s issue of Detective Comics [#395], “The Secret of the Waiting Graves,” which teamed up Denny and Neal in the first of their atmospheric and very gothic Batman tales. Neal had previously drawn Batman in The Brave and the Bold, including an issue which had the newly redesigned Green Arrow, courtesy of Mr. Adams here. A question I have for you, Neal, is: You worked primarily with writer Bob Haney on The Brave and the Bold. Neal: Right. Christopher: How was your work with Bob different from your work with Denny? Neal: I was not used to comics being written realistically. I was used to comics being written in that ’50s style. I was aware of Dick Giordano bringing Denny O’Neil to DC Comics but I was not aware of his history and how he got to things. But in talking with Denny, it seemed to me he was a child of the ’60s — the marching on Washington and the Chicago Seven trial — and he seemed to be into that stuff. Bob Haney was into comics and he did terrific stories. All I asked him to do was to make the stories happen at night and I put a better cape on Batman and gave him a realistic anatomy. I had a great time working with Bob, but my goal was to work with Julie Schwartz, the science-fiction editor-god of DC Comics. He said, “I got this guy, Denny O’Neil, whom I am stealing from Dick Giordano.” I said, “Is he going to write that stupid Batman I see on television? Because that’s not what I want to do.” Julie said, “No. He writes realistically.” I don’t think we did clown-villains for five or six stories, did we, Denny? Finally, we did The Joker. He wrote realistic stories about people and events that had nothing to do with The Mad Hatter or Two-Face or Clay-Man, or whatever the hell that was; he wrote stories about people. He wrote stories that delved into the Orson Welles-type character that you might find in good, classic drama. He wrote “The Secret of the Waiting Graves,” about flowers that keep you young. He wrote comics stories that other people didn’t do because he came from a place that really wasn’t that comic-book genre. Not that he didn’t understand it; he’s written superhero characters most of his life. But he had that gritty, realistic style that you wanted to see in Batman. Christopher: Denny, what was it like to work with Neal as compared to, say, Irv Novick, who was also drawing Batman?

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Dennis: When I wrote “Secret of the Waiting Graves,” the mission, as I chose to take it, was to do something better. Comics had been, kind of half-heartedly, trying to follow the path of the Adam West TV show, which was a comedic take on super-heroes and Batman. Satirical. And I had no quarrel with that. That’s a way to interpret it but I don’t think very many of the comic-book guys really got camp. I talked to Stan Lee the morning after the first show and I asked him what he thought of it and he said, “I liked the little bit of animation in the beginning, but the rest of it, no.” But, nonetheless, because it was having a positive effect on sales, the comic-book guys tried to do camp. But then it was over like that. The TV show lasted two years as a semi-weekly serialized thing and then it limped into its third year and it was cut. Julie said we’re obviously going to continue to publish Batman (though Detective Comics may have been on a slippery slope at that point). So, what I thought we did was simply take it back to what Bill Finger and Bob Kane did in 1939. [To Chris] Detective #27 was May 1939, by the way, also the same month I was born. [laughter] Neal: Wouldn’t you also say Jerry Robinson? Dennis: I was being polite. [chuckles] You could add a few other names in there. Christopher: [Deadpan] It wasn’t all Bob Kane? Neal: No. Dennis: Are there any Time-Warner executives in the crowd? [laughter] [To Neal] What you and I did was… strongly implicit in Batman, after the first issue, after the origin… but wasn’t very much to emphasize. I got the idea from reading an essay by Alfred Bester. Does anybody in this room not know who Alfred Bester was? You can go to hell if you don’t. [laughter] Christopher: No pressure. Dennis: Arguably, Bester was the best science-fiction writer in the 20th century and he was a guy who got his start in comics. He wrote an essay for Science-Fiction Writers of America magazine about writing for obsessed characters. I read that and realized that’s the psychological key to Batman: he’s never gotten over seeing his parents killed. I don’t think I would have come up with that if Bill Finger had not written that seventh story [“The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom,” Detective Comics #33, which contains the origin of the character], it was always strongly implicit, but not very much explicit and then gone for years at a time. [To Neal] So what you and I did was… I kind of have a false memory, but this is what it should have been— Neal: We went back to the origin and tried to pick it up after Jerry Robinson let it go and it went to hell. I mean, you don’t

want Bob Kane to draw comic books for too long; he’s just going to draw crap. Then he’s going to hire ghosts to draw crap, so you get a lot of crap. Then they’re going to try to save it and then the TV show came along and they did crap. So the question was with Julie Schwartz, how do we avoid doing crap? Maybe we should get some talented people to do it. Du’oh! [rising laughter] So they did, and we didn’t do crap any more. I mean it really comes down to that. Denny and I picked up where Jerry Robinson had left off. We did the same Batman. We can’t say we did a better Batman, we didn’t even do a more original Batman. We basically did The Batman. I remember Julie Schwartz, before we started this little partnership, stopped me in the hallway when I was doing Batman in The Brave and the Bold and asked, “Why do you think you know how to do Batman and we don’t?” I said, “Julie, it’s really not just me — it’s me and just about every kid in America. The only people who don’t seem to know what Batman is all about is you guys here at DC Comics.” [laughter] Dennis: Among other things, they were trying to duck the heat that came with the witch hunts. There was no such thing as an attempt at, say, consistency at characterization. The best tool I had when I was editing Batman was the bible, which, originally when I first wrote, it was about four pages, and now with writers and my assistants adding to it, it’s currently 30 pages and they’re still using it. Part of it was, “Look, this is the ballpark I’m asking you to play in. Batman does not fight aliens! Batman does not time-travel or fight dinosaurs! Here’s the ballpark. Anything I haven’t said you can’t do, do.” Nothing like that was ever on the radar for a comic book editor before. So Julie Schwartz did a Batman and Murray Boltinoff did, allowing for sameness in the costume, in terms of characterization, a very different Batman. Some of them were trying to follow, I think, the lead of Mort Weisinger’s Superman, what I like to think of as “sciencefiction light.” Y’know, silly

Above: Finals panels for the first collaboration of Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams,“The Secret of the Waiting Graves,” Detective Comics #395 (Jan. 1970).

Left inset: Batman’s origin is revealed in this Batman #1 (Spr. 1940) page. Art by Bob Kane, words by Bill Finger; and penciller Neal Adams’s take of same, from Batman #232 (June 1971). Script by Denny O’Neil; inks by Dick Giordano.

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christopher irving

Above: Unfinished and (obviously) unused cover for The Brave and the Bold #85 (Aug.Sept. 1969), which featured Neal Adams’s brilliant redesign of The Green Arrow. Art by (obviously) Neal Adams, who tells CBC, “I had the habit of rejecting my own covers, and doing them over. This one was a particularly stupid and meaningless cover.” Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

stories about time travel and story after story after story about poor, numbskull, blind Lois Lane trying to find out who Superman really was. [laughter] She should have removed a little lock of hair. [laughter] I’m not as down on that stuff as Neal is. I don’t enjoy it but I kind of understand what they were trying to do was appropriate for what was the time and place. And nobody knew how to edit comics! I was a comic book editor for 27 years and I don’t remember anybody giving me instruction. Dick Giordano was close to a genius in that he could suck good work out of me when I was working at Charlton for four bucks a page. Weezy [Louise] Simonson was like that. Some of them just had a way to do it. One poor woman was pulled off the street. She helped her husband write a couple of comic book stories and someone wanted her husband to relocate to New York and he brought his wife — it was sort of an old-fashioned marriage — and she had seven comic book titles plunked on her desk and was told, “You’re editing these.” And that was it! She had no editorial experience, damned little writing experience. (I had edited a news magazine, I had helped edit books and had edited lots of different kinds of things. Comics are the hardest by far.) So this poor woman was just off the deep end of the pier and trying to swim. By the time she realized she was sinking, she came to Mike Carlin and I and asked for help, but it was too late. That’s the kind of business it was. Loosey-goosey.

Neal keeps talking about quality — as well he should — but [chuckles] was anyone really worried about that at the time? I don’t remember anybody using that word. Neal: They might have been worried about it if they had read the comic books but they did not. From editorial on up, they didn’t read the comic books. That’s why we got away with so much. I had a guy come to me with a letter from the governor of Florida saying — we had just done a Green Lantern/Green Arrow story [“And a Child Shall Destroy Them,” GL #83 (April-May 1971)]— and the governor wrote, “You caricaturized Spiro Agnew, the Vice-President of the United States, in your comic book and made a fool of him! If you ever do this again, I will see to it that any DC Comics are not distributed in the state of Florida.” [laughter] Dennis: Oh, how things have changed! Neal: We had already done it. We weren’t going to do a second one. So, kind of an empty threat. But the people at DC above editorial, they are the people who came in to me with the letter and said, “What’s this about?” “Ahhh, we made fun of Spiro Agnew in this comic book. Didn’t you read it?” [laughter] “Oh!” They had no idea. That’s how we got away with all that sh*t. Dennis: Julius Schwartz didn’t really feel that there was any obligation to let his boss know. One of the articles of faith is that you could not have a continued story and once a year he did a “Justice League Meets the Justice Society” [two-parter]. So I asked him, “One of the first things I was told is that I can’t do continued stories.” He said, “I didn’t ask for permission.” And I’m sure he didn’t tell anybody where we were going with Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Our job was: save the book. It was floundering. “Do what you want.” The first guy [from DC who] was interviewed [about GL/GA] by the Village Voice — Neal wasn’t mentioned, I wasn’t mentioned, Julie wasn’t mentioned — I bet the son of a bitch had no idea what that reporter was talking about! [laughter] Then we began to actually get publicity. We got invited places and we became respectable. Neal: Carmine got invited to tour all around the country to do radio interviews as if he did it. [chuckles] Dennis: Do you think he knew? Neal: He had no idea. Poor Carmine. I love Carmine. Dennis: We just saw him three weeks ago. In Florida. Neal: I love Carmine. Carmine is a great guy. He didn’t read the comic books. Dennis: It was the Peter Principle. Christopher: When Julie put you two together for Green Lantern/Green Arrow, whose idea was it to team the two heroes up? And why make it a book about America? Why make it socially relevant? Neal: Julie. Dennis: Well, it was, “This book is in sales trouble.” A lot of guys wanted to get the assignment for Superman; I wanted a book that was failing or iffy or needed help, because that meant that fewer people were going to be looking over your shoulder. So, with that, I had done some (my vocabulary falters here) relevant material in a story for Charlton, which people still sometimes mention, called “Children of Doom” [“Can This Be Tomorrow?” Charlton Premiere #2 (Nov. 1967)]. [I also did] something for Julie Schwartz based on that river in Ohio that caught fire [“Come Slowly Death, Come Slyly,” Justice League of America #79 (Mar. 1970)]. And I was an active dude. I was married to a Catholic Worker at the time (and nobody knows what Catholic Workers are and that’s okay; if you don’t know who Alfred Bester is, you don’t know Catholic Workers). Anyway, I was going on peace marches and stuff, and this was a chance to do that. [To Neal] I don’t know if you know this, but I wrote [“No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” GL #76 (Apr. 1970)] assuming Gil [Kane] would do the art. Neal: Actually, Julie kept secrets. Dennis: Yeah, he did. When I looked at the splash page from the proofs— Neal: By the way, Gil had been off of that title for some time #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

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dennis o’neil & neal adam

publicity people said, “Green Arrow” was obviously an attempt to cash in on Batman’s popularity. He had a kid sidekick, he had an Arrow Car and an Arrow Cave (yeah, it was just all a coincidence). But he had no characterization ever, he had no backstory; we didn’t know anything about him other than he had this kid sidekick and he shot arrows that were sometimes gimmicky. So he could be anything we wanted him to be, and that made him an ideal candidate to be the guy who would argue with Green Lantern. Neal: Grist for the mill. Christopher: One question I have for you, Denny: when I interviewed you in ’09 for GraphicNYC, you had talked about your time in the Navy and how you used to be a little more conservative. I always wondered, because Green Lantern/ Green Arrow is so much about Green Lantern’s discovery that there are grays rather than black-&-whites; how much of your time with the Navy did you tap into when you were writing that? Dennis: First of all, I should admit that I was probably the worst sailor in the entire history of the United States Navy. As for my conservative background, my high school girlfriend is sitting right here. Maryfran, was I a conservative guy to date on Friday night? I was unbearable! I was a Catholic goody two-shoes, go-to-confession-and-mass-three-timesa-week and obey-the-rules kind of guy. And it wasn’t working for me. But in the Navy, and through encounters after the Navy — well, I never had any doubt that racism was wrong and that we needed to integrate this country. I think I got that from the Superman radio show. When I was about seven, they did what I now know as a public service announcement in which Superman explained to us kids — the gang — “Hey, gang! Some stuff called melatonin makes some skin dark and some skin light. And that’s the only difference in people.” And that stuck. Though my parents were shanty Irish, blue

Above: From left, moderator Christopher Irving, writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams at their July 2012 talk. Photo by Seth Kushner.

Inset left & below: Original cover art intended for the first volume of Paperback Library’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow collection, featuring a version of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that was altered when finally used as the book’s back cover art. Kudos to Heritage Auctions. Below is the actual cover.

before a brief return and then went on to other things at that point. Dennis: Oh, he had? Neal: Jack Sparling had been working on it. A whole bunch of guys. It had been going down the tubes. And now Gil Kane was gone. [to audience] Do you know who Gil Kane was? [applause and cheers] Green Lantern had lost Gil Kane because Gil Kane had gone on to do Blackmark, the graphic novel. He was gone and they were willing to give it to anyone who wanted it and walked into Julie’s office. I went in and I said, “Julie, before you cancel this damn book, how about letting me do a few issues?” He said, “I’ve got an idea, kid. I’m going to get Denny.” So he got Denny to do it. And, by the way, apparently the Green Arrow character I did in The Brave and the Bold [“The Senator’s Been Shot,” #83 (Aug.Sept. 1969)]? Apparently fans loved it but it had no place to go, so I guess Julie kind of co-opted it and threw him in with Green Lantern. Dennis: No, that was me. Because we needed a dialectic. Neal: Another green guy. [laughs] Dennis: We needed somebody— Neal: We want to use the Toad. [laughter] It’s not easy being green. Dennis: The Green Goblin belonged to another company, so what were we going to do? That was a minus, actually, that they were both green. The idea was, “We’re going to do stories about real problems.” That’s a given. Hal is going to be the best cop who ever lived. I was living in this neighborhood [SoHo] at the time and I was a hippie, and I didn’t have any great love for the boys in blue. But I had known a couple of cops who were really, really good guys. So that’s Hal. His problem would have been that he takes his orders from somebody else. He believes in authority, and if there’s one thing I didn’t believe in when I was 27 years old, it was authority, and if there’s one thing I don’t believe in when I’m 73, it’s authority. [laughter, applause] We needed somebody to provide a dialectic. Neal: I, on the other hand, am a cop. So that applause was out of order. [laughter] Dennis: [Chuckles] And I don’t expect to get home without handcuffs tonight. We needed somebody to be the voice of the counterculture. Neal had done a sensational job — even before I thought I was ever going to be involved with Green Arrow, I saw The Brave and the Bold and “Oh my God, this is what this character is supposed to look like!” He looks like a tough guy, for one thing, not like a paper doll. The other thing about him was that there was very little baggage. He was created in 1940, allegedly by Mort Weisinger. There is a movie serial called The Green Archer, which was shot in Westchester County [New York], and I kind of sat through half of it. Christopher: [Lead actor] Victory Jory, right? Dennis: Yeah. Christopher: I sat through, like, maybe a third of it. Not so good. Dennis: Despite what

Above & right: Shaun Clancy, who’ll be a regular contributor to CBC starting next issue, kindly shared scans of this 1972 Comics Code Authority pamphlet that featured the revisions made to the presentation of drugs and addiction in the funnybooks. Thanks, S.C.!

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collar people, they had somehow escaped being bigoted themselves, though bigotry was all around us. So I grew up believing in that and then, in the Navy (but more through other encounters), I came to believe we had no business to be in Vietnam. I don’t think I would ever call myself a pacifist, but I thought that war was wrong and we should get the hell out. And everything kind of flowed from there. I have probably edged two inches closer to the conservative — I can no longer be a total pacifist; there are times when we have to defend ourselves because that guy out there thinks he is not going to go to heaven unless he kills me. And he believes that with his whole heart and I have no choice other than to defend myself. But most wars suck. Don’t get me started… [laughter] Christopher: Onto our next topic: In 1971, Stan Lee did anti-drug issues of Amazing Spider-Man. [#96-97 (May, June 1971)]. The Department of Health, I believe, had asked him to address the drug problem. This is how he handled it: Basically someone pops pills, falls off a ledge and Spider-Man saves them — Neal: Happens every day. Christopher: All the time. I think they were caffeine pills. I’m not sure. Dennis: Mogul will destroy you! Christopher: The portal. So, the Comics Code, which was the censorship board at the time — they no longer exist. They did not want Stan to publish this issue but he went ahead and published it without the Comics Code. Now, with the Green Lantern/Green Arrow’s anti-drug issues [GL #85 (Aug.-Sept. 1971) and #86 (Oct.-Nov.)] with the sidekick (tragically named Speedy) — Neal: Wait a second! I got a story to tell you. Christopher: That’s what I’m waiting for. Neal: So I go to Julie Schwartz and I say, “Julie, Green Lantern ought to have a back-up. Somebody who, if some-

thing happens to him, he’s got someone to take over.” Julie says, “Well, he already has a guy.” I say, “I’m sorry, Julie, I don’t read all the comic books. Who does he have?” “It’s this guy named Guy Gardner.” And he pulled out a comic book and it’s this blond guy from the Midwest who’s a gym teacher. “So, Julie, this alien comes to Earth with this ring and he’s going to find the bravest man on Earth. And the ring skips over Bruce Wayne and it skips over Superman, and all these other guys, and he goes to a test pilot. I can buy that. Not too bad. Sure. Fine. Now it goes out again and finds this white Anglo-Saxon Protestant gym teacher. Ahhh, I don’t think that’s right. It doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t get it.” Julie says, “What don’t you get?” Julie, you gotta understand, is a New York Jew. He’s got to be liberal. Automatically, if you’re born a New York Jew, gotta be liberal. Right? That’s the way it is. So he doesn’t want me questioning him. “Julie, what do you want to do?” Okay, let’s put it this way: Ever watch the Olympics? Ever see three white guys up on the stand, all together? I mean, archery maybe… [laughter] Dennis: Golf! Neal: Maybe swimming, but you know… It doesn’t make any sense. “What do you want to do?” “Well… Asian. Black…” “You want to do a black Green Lantern, don’t you?” “Well, Asian would be okay. We’ve already insulted the entire culture by calling this Oriental guy ‘Pieface’.” Dennis: He was an Eskimo. Neal: Whatever — he should be black. Pull one out of the fire. Maybe we can do that. “Okay, fine. We’ll do it. You gonna draw it?” “If Denny writes it.” “Fine.” So I get this script from Denny — I dearly love Denny — and I read the first page. There’s this guy, he’s an architect, he’s out of work, makes sense, he’s black. (Like — heh — architects are liable to be out of work in the ’60s. Not a good thing, right?) And his name is Lincoln Washington. [laughter] So I hunt down Denny and ask, “Denny, this isn’t your name, right?” Denny says, “No, Julie.” [laughter] I go to Julie, “Lincoln Washington?” [laughter] He says, “I know lots of guys with those kinds of names.” [laughter] I said, “Julie, that’s a slave name. If you do that, every black guy in America is going to write a letter to you and tell you to go f*ck yourself.” [laughter] “What do you want to call him?” “A name! John Stewart. How about that?” How would I know he would become a comedian on late night television? We hadn’t been down to Muhammad Alitype names yet. Of course, we did the two-part drug story, which Julie was not supposed to do. The other story is this: We’re not supposed to do drugs and, by now, we’re winding down. We had taken on overpopulation (a questionable subject, I suppose), and we had very little area left to go, except drug addiction. Denny and I had both been asked to write a proposed book about drug addiction for the City of New York, and we both handed in our #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

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him. [laughter] In other words, it was written without any regard for comics as a possible art form, much less as a decent way of communicating. And with damn little regard for the English language and very little for the history of literature. Neal: So we had great comic books like Mr. District Attorney, My Greatest Adventure, and my favorite, Pat Boone comics. Dennis: You like it, too? I love it! [laughter] It was a big favorite of yours, right, Mare? Neal: It was drawn by Bob Oksner. He kept himself in bread-&-butter for two years doing that thing. Dennis: Well, they were desperate. Another Julie Schwartz story is when cowboys were a big thing. Other companies were doing well with Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry, so they send one of the suits out to Hollywood to get someone we can license. And he comes back and says, “Boys, you ready for this? I got it. Jimmy Wakely comics! Neal: Did you ever hear of Jimmy Wakely? [No response] There’s a reason. [laughter] Christopher: Who was Jimmy Wakely? Neal: He was a cowboy. Dennis: He was an imitation of an imitation of an imitation of Roy Rogers. He was a guy with a guitar and two six-guns and he sang. Only he didn’t shoot people, he kinda shot at them. [laughter] Christopher: The Comics Code wouldn’t let him shoot people. Dennis: God forbid if I should ever apologize for the Comics Code, but remember it was created to keep the Feds off the back of people who were in a dead panic. If you read David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague — it’s a fine book and a magnificent job of research — and what I learned was that virtually overnight 800 people lost their jobs because of the witch hunts. And most of them never worked at their discipline again. So these guys had mortgages, kids, and bills, and thought of themselves — a lot of them were veterans — decent, God-fearing Americans and suddenly they’re being called the scum, the creators of juvenile delinquency.

Below left & below: Neal Adams cover art for Green Lantern #85 (Dec. ’71-Jan. ’72). Left is the unused cover; below the cover art of the used version. Latter courtesy of Scott Williams. Former? Gee, I think we used it in Comic Book Artist Vol. 1, #1, so it’s been so long, I forgot! Apologies, amigo!

Above: Steve Gan ably inks Frank Robbins on the opening page of Marvel Premiere #28 (Feb. 1976), which introduced that team terrible, the Legion of Monsters!

treatments and they rejected both of us. This was one time where Denny and I really agreed. They didn’t like it because we were blaming society, parents, and sh*t like that; we should have been blaming the kids for becoming drug-addicted. But that didn’t make any sense, because they would send us to Phoenix House and the guys at Phoenix House would say, “You guys don’t know what you’re talking about.” So we learned a little about drug addiction. Anyway, so I figure — that cover that you saw? I went home and I drew it, and I handed it in to Julie. Julie goes, “Wha--hah! Whoa! We can’t do that.” He said, “We can’t do that!” I said, “Julie, we can do this. We can figure out a way.” I took it into Carmine, who understood it but “you can’t do that.” I took it to the executives of the company. “You can’t do that.” I go over to Marvel to visit Johnny Romita, a friend of mine. [whispers] “Come here! You know what Stan’s doing?” “What?” “He had me drawing a guy popping pills and walking off a roof.” I was the president of the drug association in the Bronx. It had been a nunnery but they closed it down to make a drug association. I walked guys with their noses running from 42nd Street all the way up to the Bronx to get them off [drugs] and into the institutions. I know something about drug addiction. I never heard of a guy popping pills and walking off a roof. Maybe it happened. Possible! Within the realm of possibility. But Stan will tell you he doesn’t know anything about drug addiction, but he did this. What happened was the Comics Code sent it back, so what’s Stan going to do? He went to his uncle, who was the publisher, and he got permission to run it without the little seal on it. Really? I come back two weeks later. “Johnny, what happened to that comic book?” “Nothing.” Nobody even noticed. Nobody missed the seal. The distributors distributed the comic books. At DC Comics, the sh*t was hitting the fan. Because this was a voluntary, self-regulating organization run by the comic book companies and DC Comics had that Green Lantern cover in their drawer, saying, “We can’t publish that.” Within two weeks the Comics Code was changed. Two weeks. And right now the Comics Code is obsolete. I wish we could take credit for it, but it was Stan Lee. Dennis: [To Neal] Didn’t they ask you to change the drawing? Neal: Yes, they changed it to take the fixin’s off the cover, the spoon and the rubber tube. Dennis: And, yet, the scene that it’s taken from inside the comic is untouched, right? That’s one of the many things I loved about the Comics Code: It wasn’t consistent. For all my ostensible rebelliousness, tell me what the rules are and I will follow the rules or will walk away. I’m not going to fight ’cha. Neal: [To Dennis] Did you ever read that thing? Dennis: The Code? Yeah, I debated it with [Code administrator] Len Darvin. Neal: You can’t use the word “crime” on the cover of a comic book. Dennis: Roy Thomas has the best example. You can’t use zombies, but you can use ghouls. He looked it up and found out that ghouls are people who eat corpses and zombies are the walking dead. So you cannot show a corpse walking, but if he sits still, he can have somebody eating

christopher irving

Above: Neal Adams drew this DC Comics house ad trumpeting their win at the first annual banquet for the Academy of Comic Book Arts, featured in October 1971 titles.

Neal: Toilet paper. Dennis: Yeah. They panicked. Of course, they panicked! Neal: I’m sure you guys understand this, because at a certain time in our country we were going after Communists and, once that was done, and it kinda got turned around, people’s lives were ruined, and Congress had a little extra energy left over, so they attacked comic books. Communists, comic books! They both start with “c.” [chuckles] Dennis: I think it was really, mostly — Joe McCarthy over in the House [of Representatives] was getting a lot of publicity by lying — lying, lying! — authority figure lying? Yeah. I think [U.S. Senator] Estes Kefauver [Democrat from Tennessee] saw that he had a chance to make himself a viable Presidential candidate — Neal: See, this is why I worked with him on Green Lantern. Just pull that string: Rrrrwwwwaaarrr! There he goes. Dennis: So, about a mile from here, Kefauver convened an inquiry into the “comic book menace.” Out of that came Mad magazine, so it wasn’t a total disaster. But that’s what I think it was all about: political opportunism and a total lack of conscience. Christopher: There are two unsung heroes who worked on Green Lantern/Green Arrow (one you’ve already spoken

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of). The first is the inker, Dick Giordano, who was also a famed comic book editor and artist. Up on the wall here (though I can’t quite see it), on the lower left-hand corner — this is a house ad from DC celebrating the Shazam Awards won by Green Lantern/Green Arrow. In the upper right, we have Mr. O’Neil followed by Mr. Adams. Beneath it on the lower left-hand, we have Dick himself. Neal, what did Dick Giordano bring to your artwork that no other inker could? Neal: What did Dick Giordano bring? He slopped his ink all over and made a lousy mess of it. Disgusting! He should have been ashamed. [laughter] Dennis: [Jokingly] Well, he was always drunk! [laughter] Neal: No, Dick was probably one of the best inkers in the field. I didn’t have to go in and break his knuckles every once in a while. He did a great job inking my stuff and he learned that I really, truly drew sh*t under that stuff and he learned to draw better so that he could ink my work. He came out of it a very good and popular artist in his own right, drawing his own stuff. I have been very lucky. It’s a different period now, but early in my career, think about it: I had Roy Thomas and Denny O’Neil as my writers, and I had Dick Giordano and Tom Palmer as my inkers — the two best inkers in the field inking for me and the two best writers writing for me. So I was as happy as a pig in sh*t. Dennis: I just realized I am sitting between the two people [Seth Kushner and Neal Adams] who have ever made me look good. Really, even at 30 years old, I wasn’t that good looking, but the photo you guys published [the poster for the event] — wow! I was showing that to everybody. I never, never looked that good. [laughter] Neal: I remember coming down from DC Comics with that picture. “Who’s this guy? I wanna talk to him.” Dennis: And they looked at me and said, “Nah, not him.” Christopher: Well, I can’t take any credit for the picture, but Mr. Kushner can. And the second unsung hero, whom we have already spoken of at great length, was Julius Schwartz. What did Julie bring to Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Batman that no other —? Neal: What did Julie bring to Green Lantern. Julie constantly said to me — and you have to understand that Julie is a mentor for many artists, science-fiction writers, comic book writers — and the thing I remember most that Julie Schwartz said to me was, “Adams, get the f*ck out of my office! Get the f*ck out!” “Oh, okay, Julie.” That’s how I remember Julie. [laughter] Dennis: He was, for a writer, an ideal editor because, first of all, he never intruded his own ego into the process. His goal was, “How good can we make this story, right here and now, given what our limitations and resources are?” But never, “I want you to write the story I would have written.” I think I usually saw him on Thursday morning and I had the thing pretty much parsed out in my head; it was going to be a very short visit. It was going to be, “Okay, Batman is going to do this, this and this,” and I’d leave, go home and write the script. If the cupboard was bare, Julie would talk until I had enough to get started and, after a while, experience could take over. You can write the first few scenes and maybe experience will take over from there. So, what I’ve just described, what seemed to me to be most important was his own lack of ego. He and Stan: I don’t know if we’d be here without them. Between them, they re-invented super-heroes at a time when the field desperately needed re-inventing. But Julie’s ego never got in the way and, despite his very gruff manner — Neal’s imitation was pretty good — I really think he did have the proverbial heart of gold. For the last year or so of his life, I made a point of going up there on Thursday mornings — I was teaching a course on editing for the company and I would choose to teach it on Thursday morning so I could spend 30 minutes with Julie, just talking about stuff, nothing in particular. A very nice man. Neal: These very nice stories about the very nice Julie Schwartz? The last time I saw Julie Schwartz was at a comic book convention and Julie Schwartz went up to my son and 30

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’71)–238 (June), 240 (July)–242 (Sept.), 244 (Nov.)] which DC Comics was kind enough to print with hardcovers [Superman: Kryptonite Nevermore (DC Comics Classics Library), 2009]… The birdcage lining ended up in hardcovers. [chuckles] It was an interesting year. It was hard. I was able to do a Batman story in about three days, three working sessions. The thought process took longer on Superman. Eventually I figured out I do not identify with god characters and, at his pinnacle, Superman was God. My favorite Superman panel of all time is he blows out a star. [laughter] “Okay, God, top that!” I don’t identify with omnipotent characters. Neal: Superman is a stupid character. When you get right down to it, he’s a bloody alien. He comes from another planet. He’s probably got two asses. Dennis: With the various romances, you wonder — could anybody in this room mate with a chrysanthemum? Because the odds would be about the same as for one to mate with somebody from a different galaxy. Neal: Human being mating with marshmallows… So far I’ve done X-Men, and Batman with Denny, and Green Lantern/Green Arrow. I did a Batman recently and I’m working on an X-Men called First X-Men — the X-Men before the X-Men. I was talking to Grant Morrison at dinner last night and I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool in a story if someone took Superman’s DNA (like you could get a needle in him!) and discover that he was human. Wouldn’t that be interesting? That he really was a super-man? Audience member: Would you two ever work together again? Neal: Sure, we would. We love each other. He’s a nice writer. Dennis: Make me an offer. Christopher: One more question. Audience member: [A question about more realistic depictions of people artistically.] Neal: I think we’re moving into a time where we’re getting better and better artists. Part of it I take a certain responsibility for and a fine amount of ego — what a lousy thing to say, “a fine amount of ego”… I say to other artists who are in college or learning to be artists, “You know, it’s a great medium to be in, so no matter how skilled you are, it actually is a good place to be.” So we have a generation of artists now — and a generation of writers — who beat the hell out of any previous generation of artists or writers. We are taking over the world. You didn’t expect that answer, did you? Rembrandt, Michelangelo… we’ve had good artists forever, we just haven’t had them in comics. Audience member: I want to know the secret. I want to know if it was Dick or you— Neal: Draw like a son of a bitch. Dennis: It’s sad but Neal isn’t going to teach you how to draw and I’m not going to teach you how to write. You’re going to do that for yourself by applying your posterior to a hard surface for a given number of hours a week and doing it until you’re good at it.

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says, “Your father dyes his hair!” [laughs] What we should know about Julie Schwartz is that as a teenager, he wrote to all the great science-fiction writers in the country and they were not used to fans, and they were not used to doing good business for themselves; and with Mort Weisinger, the two of them became agents for science-fiction writers. And all those science-fictions books that you may love, as we love science-fiction books, as many of them were agented by Julie Schwartz or Mort Weisinger, they represented that teenage insanity that fans turn into editorship or whatever it is, they represented people, like, the best — Alfred Bester. In my mind, they put Bester and Julie Schwartz together with all those great writers. Dennis: If you wanted to make a triumvirate, you could add Ray Bradbury, another of Julie’s discoveries as a kid in Los Angeles. Neal: Ray Bradbury! Represented by Julie Schwartz. This is not a small guy. Comic books was how you get past the bad times. Dennis: Well, by the time he was 25, it was how Neal described: Mort had already gone to work for DC but Julie was the guy in the country who handled science-fiction writers. Christopher: We have time for maybe one or two questions before Neal and Denny sign some books. Let me see some hands. Mr. Haspiel in the black T-shirt. Dennis: Dean! Yo! We have an Emmy-winner with us! Dean Haspiel: You’re both such great storytellers on your own. In terms of process together, do you work full-script? And the second part of that question is what did you learn from each other working together and name one virtue — Neal: Got it! Let me tell you my half, okay? Any time I work with a writer, I always do what he has on the page. If I write, I expect the artist to do what I have on the page. So, when I give myself over to a writer, I try as much as I can to tell that story, every part of it and as much of it as I can. Denny wrote a page, like half a page, in Green Lantern/ Green Arrow, right? He described this page with Speedy being taken out by the cops, and these two drug addicts, one of them was unconscious, and Green Lantern was doing this and doing that. Denny was writing this thing and he wrote about a half a page of description, most of which I didn’t quite need, and so at the end, realizing he had written all of this, he wrote, “And, oh yeah, throw in a couple of rhinoceroses.” [laughter] So I did. [laughter] The statue in the foreground. And he came to me later and said, “I didn’t really mean that.” [laughter] Dennis: We did not work collaboratively. I wrote a script and gave it to Julie Schwartz and time passed. I saw a proof. but what was great about those years for me was: I could trust him. If I asked for something, that’s what I would get. A lot of the Comic Book 101 stuff, like an establishing shot, he gives me a stoop of a Brooklyn brownstone and that’s well-established and we don’t have to worry about it. Other artists I have worked with would not have bothered, because, yeah, it’s just a stoop of a brownstone. But for me, location is character. It’s very important that things look like what they are. That and the body language of the actors in the story Neal always got right. And that was a great gift. Christopher: We have time for one more question. Audience member: Did you ever think of redoing Superman in a more down-to-earth — Neal: Are you talking to Denny or myself? Audience member: Both of you. Christopher: Denny did do Superman. Dennis: Yeah, I did a year’s worth of Superman, [#233 (Jan.

Housing Works, who sponsored the panel, is a non-profit for people living with HIV/AIDS, and they can be reached at www.housingworks.org.

Below: After the talk, the group posed for a final pic. From left, Dennis O’Neil, Neal Adams, Christopher Irving, Amanda Bullock (director of public programming at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe), and Seth Kushner.

in memoriam

Les Daniels

The Incomplete History Celebrating the writer/historian who gave the world much more than he got

by JON B. COOKE CBC Editor

Above: The Mad Peck’s cover art for his and Les Daniels’ seminal comic book history, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, which would eventually lead to an entire series of publisher and character retrospectives for Les. Though a familiar byline among comic fans, readers may not be aware of the exemplary achievements of the man in horror fiction (and non-fiction), and film criticism, as well as a singer/songwriter/musician who played “furious banjo.”

the background from a TV with sound turned down. The conversation might be freeform, Claude Rains, Plastic Man, and Ambrose Bierce being subjects of equal stature, and though Let’s get right to the point: Leslie Noel Daniels the Third was smart. Very smart. He laid waste to his opponents every the talk was often rambling from one emphatic point to the next, if Les was talking, the guest could learn a thing or two. year at the summer camp-like Northeast Writers ConferY’see, while Les may not have been destined to be a ence (NECON) “That Damned Game Show” trivia contest. He smoked them. He was smart about movies, literature, comics professor, though he was more than capable — he was far too ornery and impatient to suffer any collegiate tomfool— really, the entire gamut of pop culture. By the end, he even knew baseball, irrational ery — he was a nearly unparalleled master in his multiple though he could be, expecting fields of knowledge. And virtually everything he learned of his subjects of expertise was gained outside the ivy-covered his beloved Red Sox to win institutions of higher learning — aside comic-book spinner every game. The Mad Peck, no slouch himself in the brains racks in the corner pharmacy, within darkened midnight screenings in second-run movie houses, and amidst hushed department, calls the man, bookstacks in decrepit used bookstores. Okay, you get it: Les “Not only the most towering was a brainiac about the cool stuff, the material for which intellect I ever encountered, we share a passion. But let me get to the best part, patient but also the most educated reader: best of all, this cat could write! person I have ever known.” If you read the Les Daniels byline before, chances are it Les received that educawas for his extremely well-researched, erudite, and beguiltion, the formal part anyway, ing books on comics history: Comix, Marvel, the DC book, or at Brown University, where those super-hero Complete History collaborations with Chip he earned his bachelor’s Kidd. Yep, informed, good work, solid and impressive in deand master’s degrees, the tail. And if that’s the extent of your knowledge of the writer’s latter with his thesis on Mary legacy, not too shabby. But let me, your humble scribe who Shelly’s Frankenstein. He loved the Ivy League school’s came as close to being the man’s Boswell as anyone on the planet, let me tell you of the mountain of achievements you host city enough to reside here all of his days, where he don’t know about Les Daniels, my friend who passed away around Halloween 2011, accolades that will take two issues became, according to writer of CBC to tell. Rudy Cheeks, “a central figure in Providence’s creative Les Daniels was born on Oct. 27, 1943, in Danbury, Conn., community.” For decades, growing up in nearby Redding. His father, Leslie Daniels, Jr., Les would live in a delightfully creepy apartment on the “was a writer,” said NECON mainstay and friend Bob Booth. “He wrote for radio, Jack Armstrong, All American Boy. They East Side’s Benefit Street, lived in a house either next to or across the street from one bat door-knocker and all. His owned by Mark Twain.” The growing boy was a bookworm. phantasmagorical basement “I was the kind of kid who was reading a lot of stuff when he flat was situated not far from the setting of H.P. Lovecraft’s was very young,” he told the Australian horror ’zine Tabula “Shuttered House” or Edgar Allan Poe’s ex-fiancée’s home, Rasa in a 1995 interview. “I was reading Poe when I was both on the same gloomy colonial avenue, and Les fit snugeight or nine, and Ambrose Bierce was another one — that gly in its Gothic ambiance. was a little later — and he gave me some nightmares. And Inside, in the subterranean apartment filled with bookI discovered Lovecraft when I was about eleven or twelve, cases brimming with EC Comics Library sets, Aurora model kits, and Uncle Scrooge figurines, amid walls plastered with and that was a big thing. Because in addition to liking Lovemonster movie posters and snapshots of scream queens, Les craft stories, he is very much a ‘pied piper’ kind of figure if you get into reading his non-fiction or reading about him, and would invite friends down the ill-lit hallway into his sanctum sanctorum, the island counter bisecting his kitchen and living the way he encouraged people around him to get into the field. I think a lot of people my age — even though he’d been room. Here, with tabletop illuminated by a desklamp, guest dead for decades — sort of felt that they were also being and host would sit atop bar stools, and the night’s entertainencouraged in some way.” ment would commence. Niceties done, the visitor would be He added, “But I didn’t do anything then. I wrote little regaled by the bachelor’s wit and wisdom, and a repartee stories when I was a small kid, but as a teenager and a colwould engage, fueled by bourbon, cigarettes, and an infeclege student I felt not smart enough to do what I wanted to tious boyish enthusiasm for all things deliciously gruesome. Hours would pass like minutes in that nicotine-stained, dusty do, but smart enough to know that I couldn’t.” Booth recalls, “His father gave him a book by Ambrose Bierce and that cavern, where often an old black-& white movie flickered in

Portrait by Cortney Skinner 32

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Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

Above: Sam “Tex”Tidwell, at left, waits for his cue to start fiddlin’ while Les Daniels, center, plays next to singing Martin Mull. “The Double Standard String” band played Providence and, importantly, Club 47, a renowned folk music venue in Cambridge, Mass. All would go on to greater fame: Tidwell as a legend in bluegrass music and Mull as Hollywood actor. Daniels? Well, read the article, son! Photo courtesy of Sam’s boy, David Thibodeau.

started him in his life’s direction. For Les also had a taste for the macabre and a wicked sense of humor. Like Bierce, he was also a pretty fair journalist. He followed the literary trail from Bierce to Lovecraft and that gave him a yearning to see Providence.” Thus, after high school, Les moved to the Ocean State metropolis, and Booth adds, “He never went back. From then on, Providence would be his home.” Attending Brown University as an undergrad, Les would hook up with two important creative partners: establishing a musical partnership with Martin Mull (subsequently a renowned comedian and film/television actor), who was attending the neighboring Rhode Island School of Design, and also meeting, in Les’ first year at Brown, John Peck, who in the late 1960s would join Les to produce the first comprehensive book devoted to the study of American comic books. Mull recalls first encountering Les at a RISD cafeteria, where people would perform, in the early ’60s during the heyday of folk music. “That’s where we met and started

Portrait Artist Cortney Skinner on Knowing Les Daniels I was proud to have known Les, usually seeing him at the New England Horror Writers Conference (NECON) in Rhode Island every summer. In this oil portrait [preceding page], Les is seen on the campus of Roger Williams University where NECON was held for a number of years. The Mount Hope Bridge is in the distance, and Les is holding two books that he authored. The top one was the work he was the most proud of, The Black Castle. Underneath is the book I have on my own shelf, Superman, The Golden Age. Painting Les’s portrait was a very bittersweet but satisfying undertaking for me. Just as a portrait, it was a challenge to capture a pleasing likeness posthumously with only grainy, less-than-optimal snapshots from various sources, no single one of which was very helpful for use as reference for the painting. I also had to place Les into a naturalistic setting and in a situation that never actually transpired. Living with this image of Les during the weeks-long process of painting the portrait brought back many pleasant memories of the times spent with him at Necon, yet knowing we’d never see him there again brought on such a keen sense of loss. 34

playing bluegrass together,” he said, “Les on his banjo and me on guitar.” Peck remembers that Les had taught himself to play the five-string banjo. Mull and Daniels initially locally performed bluegrass, string band, and jug band song covers under their own names. Then, teaming with renowned fiddle player Sam S. R. “Tex” Tidwell and rhythm guitarist Dana McDevitt, The Double Standard String Band was formed, playing at Club 47, the Cambridge, Mass. club where Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had appeared. “I remember Leslie as being extremely funny and quick-witted,” Mull said, “and his and my tendency to be silly suited us as a team on stage.” By now, the duo was songwriting, sometimes together, often individually, and they developed a knack for humorous songs set to hillbilly chords. “They were sort of a cross between The Foggy Mountain Boys and Monty Python,” Booth said, “tight playing combined with absolutely insane satirical lyrics.” Adds Cheeks, “They wrote and performed satirical and funny songs like ‘Margie the Midget’ and ‘Do the Nothing,’ a would-be dance craze that never caught on — probably due to the fact that there was no dancing involved, just a bunch of sitting around and doing nothing.” Contemporaneous musicians Tom Akstens and Neil Rossi, on their CD liner notes discussing their cover of a Daniels/ Mull collaboration, recall seeing the band at Daniels and Mull’s peak: “One of the wonderful bands we saw at the Club 47 was the Double Standard String Band, a zany, ragtag conglomeration from Providence. Legend has it that banjo player Les Daniels, who led the band, would do a heartfelt monologue about how they had been trying to record an album, but they’d only been able to save enough money to print the album jackets. So they sold the jackets! They went to the Salvation Army store, bought used Mantovani and Patti Page records (for a dime apiece!) and put those in the jackets, ‘So you, our fans, will know what it will look like and feel like when it’s done.’” Mull said, “We played as the Double Standard String Band for a year or two, then decided — like everyone else — to go electric.” Tidwell followed his muse elsewhere and the pair added a bass player (who would later quit to join The Fuggs, Peck says) and a keyboard player, and become Soup. Only, according to Peck, there was already a rock ‘n’ roll band with that name, so Daniels, Mull and company became Soop, eventually recording In the Soop for Vanguard Records (“Ill#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

remembering les daniel copyright holders.

Les graduated Brown in 1965 with honors in English Literature, and moved on to what Peck recalls as an accelerated master’s program. Another college pal, Alan Sondheim, remembers, “I met him in a class at Brown on 18th Century Literature, and the very first class was incredibly dull, and I was fidgety. We were going to read Gulliver’s Travels first and I do remember well Les asking: ‘Tell me, is Gulliver’s Travels a novelistic allegory or an allegorical novel?’ And Les and I both started laughing and the rest of the class spent a couple of weeks discussing this. So I knew then he was amazing and we did live together for a while in a commune.”

fated,” Martin calls it, “because it wasn’t promoted and received no fanfare”). “But there was not much call for a banjo player in rock,” Peck said, “yet, by then, Mull and Daniels were a songwriting team, with Les switching off vocals with Martin.” Issues not uncommon to the experimental nature of the ’60s arose and it became difficult, Mull said, to keep the partnership together, “So I moved to Boston and started another band. But, in later years, if I was touring through, Leslie would join me on stage with his banjo, and we’d play the old songs.” Mull, who has appeared in innumerable TV shows, most memorably on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman/ Fernwood Tonight, Roseanne, and Two and a Half Men, as well as the movies Clue, FM and Serial, is also a renowned painter who once paid for his RISD tuition by money earned through those gigs with Les. He continues to think fondly of his former partner. “I remember best the memories of sitting in my apartment with Leslie playing for hours and hours,” Mull assessed. “The camaraderie that playing music together produces is special and Providence was a special place at the time. For all the negativity of that era, the 1960s, with sex-&-drugs and rock’n’roll, the time and place made for a boiling pot of creativity which sparked our own creative flames.” While Les wouldn’t ever fully abandon his music — he’d be a part of such ensembles as “Snake and the Snatch,” “The Swamp Steppers,” “The Local Yokels,” and “Dr. Daniels and Mr. Lee” well into the ’70s, and pluck his banjo singing satirical ditties at NECON roasts beyond — his musical career decidedly would take a backseat for the remainder of his life. He had, after all, a higher calling. Of those tuneful times, Bob Booth says simply, “Tidwell went on to be a bluegrass legend, Mull went on to Hollywood, and Les stayed in Providence and wrote.”

Above: “In the Soop” album

During summer breaks, Les would return to his Connecticut cover for the Mull & Daniels home and Peck, who came from Fairfield, would spend time rock band, Soop, from 1974. with him. Peck said, “We watched TV together and sh*t like that,” and sharing a love for comic books. “I’m like a lot of people,” Les told Tabula Rasa. “I wrote for school, I wrote papers, I wrote my Master’s thesis; I wasn’t writing my little short stories or anything. In fact, I got into fiction backwards, by writing non-fiction.” And much of his early writing outside of academia was done in association with John Bottom left and below: Martin Mull, Les Daniels’ musical partner during the 1960s, was a graduate of Peck, writer, editor, cartoonist, critic, and the Rhode Island School of Design and is recognized as collector, who is also a life-long Providence an accomplished painter. An exhibiting artist, Martin’s staple. “We met when I was a sophmore work has been shown in numerous galleries and and Les was a freshman,” Peck says. “We museums nationwide. Painting, Drawing and Words, a

collection of essays and reproductions of recent work, was released in 1995. Ye Ed thanks Martin for recently sharing his memories of Les with CBC.

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

Above: The Mad Peck, a Rhode Island icon and easily recognizable figure at yard sales, flea markets, and whereever collectors gather in Li’l Rhody, is our own underground comix pioneer, who turned his Johnson-Smith catalog-inspired merchandise compendium into a mail-order booklet and quasi-comic book, The Mad Peck Catalogue of Good Stuff, #4 seen here with both front and back covers (above left and center). Peck also helmed the mini-sized Ghost Mother Comics, (above far right) which featured the earliest work of autobiographical comics trailblazer Justin Green, whose Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary remains a seminal work in the field of sequential art.

shared the same dormitory.” Both had an affection for pop culture, with comics playing a key touchstone. “In the Spring of ’64, he discovered a place on Sixth Avenue in New York City selling back issues of comics: Tales from the Crypt, Mad, the old EC’s,” and Les shared the location with Peck, who would make his own journeys to build his collection. Peck majored in engineering and minored in the new field of computer science, earning his degree at Brown in 1967. But facing a nationwide glut of job-seeking engineers and being politically unsuited for government computer jobs, Peck sought to cut his own path, one straight into the heart of American counter-culture. “The thick Johnson Smith catalog of the 1950s just blew my mind as a kid. They were the same people who sold novelties like X-ray glasses and had those little ads in the back of comics and girly magazines,” Peck said, and he realized a like compendium, only updated to include nefarious items of appeal to hippies, just might be marketable. Thus was born The Mad Peck Catalogue of Good Stuff, which hawked cigarette papers and other stash supplies, posters, and even U.S. Army surplus gas masks rigged to inhale various substances. Importantly, the 5" x 8" publication also contained cartoons and spot illustrations, and some comics. “I established a niche as an artist,” Peck explains, “appropriating simple and iconic drawings that became the beginning of my art style.” Learning production and layout skills from Providence printers, who were “very generous and taught me everything I needed to know,” Peck released subsequent editions of the Catalogue, each with improved production values. They also featured other artists’ work, including then-RISD student Justin “Binky Brown” Green’s first published work, and even Mull and Les had cartoons printed. “The catalog was an early underground comic book,” Peck said, and it began to attract the attention of other comix artists, including R. Crumb, who sent Peck Zap #1, #0 and #2, an association that would later prove fruitful. (In 1968, Peck would release his own bona fide comic, the digest-size Ghost Mother Comics, which includes work by S. Clay Wilson and Green.) Peck adds that Jay Lynch of Bijou Funnies was also very helpful. Underground newspapers were also coming of age and, bartering for ad space to sell his Catalogue, Peck worked as paste-up artist at weeklies up and down the East Coast. He’d hitchhike to New York to help layout Other Scenes and the

EVO or thumb up to Massachusetts to work at the Boston Avatar. He also joined the staff of the new Providence underground, EXTRA!, where he contributed cartoons and became a self-appointed music critic. Having finished his thesis on Mary Shelly’s monster and the brief Fort Hill commune foray, Les was tapped by Peck to contribute to a “relatively national” rock magazine called Fusion, where Peck was newly hired as graphic artist/rock critic. “I dragged Les up there because I knew he could write,” Peck said. “At Brown, I saw him polish off a 10-, 15page serious paper in one pass, after doing the research.” At Fusion, according to Bob Booth, “He wrote rock journalism for a while, interviewing the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.” Tellingly Les also submitted articles on E.C. Comics and the undergrounds to the magazine. Then Fusion got ambitious, Peck explains, wanting in on book packaging. “They got a book deal with the imprint Outerbride & Dienstfrey and did Feels Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues & Rock n’ Roll and also an unauthorized biography of Frank Zappa.” And thus Les got an idea. “My first book ever was a history of comics, a general history,” Les told Tabula Rasa. “It was called Comix: A History of Comic Books in America. That was in 1971.” The writer had been impressed with the success of Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, but knew he could do a more comprehensive examination. “Feiffer’s book was just about super-heroes,” Peck explained, “but it did rather well, so Les saw an opportunity for a more thorough, literate book.” Peck surmises, “He might have engineered the whole deal. I was toiling in the background and he worked it out.” Les wrote a sample excerpt that Fusion used to pitch O&D. “The Comics Code Controversy” was an important chapter on a personal level for Les. “[Comix] was, to some extent,” he told Tabula Rasa, “based on my concerns about censorship, and the fact that when I was a boy in the 1950s, the horror comics were more or less banned in the United States [and they were] something that I’d been reading, specifically the E.C. comics, Tales from the Crypt and its sister publications, like Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear.” The writer recalled the Wertham and Kefauver onslaught as an affront. “This was sort of traumatic for me in some sense, because I enjoyed the medium,” Les told Tamara #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

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Wieder of the Boston Phoenix in a 2002 interview, “and I think that attempt to destroy it actually had the effect on me, and a number of other people, of making them see it as something special, to be preserved in some sense.” He continued, “I think really the whole business of the attack on comics, which worked better than any attack on any other medium, really had a terrible effect: There were dozens and dozens of comic-book companies publishing, and there were maybe five left when the dust settled, and they had gotten a bad reputation of being kind of corrupt, and they never really recovered.” Fusion made the deal and, with the packaging share, “We got a contract that really sucked,” Peck said. “Fusion got 50 percent, so Les and I each got a quarter.” The team then got to work. Like the Feiffer book, Comix was to include complete comic-book stories, only not just those of costumed crimefighters, but tales running the gamut of the form to date, from multiple genres: good girl art, war, horror, funny animal, satire, underground comix, and even (gasp!) a few panels from a “Tijuana Bible” porn eight-pager. Subjects chosen, they then had to find the actual comics to reprint. “So we got the book advance,” Peck said, “and Les made some forays to New York City to find the stores which were becoming the first comic book shops.“ Les selected all but two, “Uncle Scrooge” and “Fox and Crow,” Peck’s picks. And a recent development in comics fandom proved invaluable in that selection process. “One big key factor was I had discovered the first edition of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, which had just been released,” said Peck, “and was essential to fill out blanks in comic-book history. Les had a much wider grasp of the subject than I, but the timing of Overstreet was vital.” Then came the formidable task of obtaining permission to reprint the stories from an array of publishers and the duo’s start with industry newcomer/upstart proved the other key component for the book’s sucess. “We went to New York City, bootstrapped ourselves, and started at the bottom to work our way up,” Peck recalled. “We went to Jim Warren. Les was already familiar with Creepy and we knew Warren was a making an impact — the new kid on the block, so to speak. So we went up to see him and braced Jim. And he liked us and was impressed with our plans for the book. We assured he would get big play in Comix, as much exposure as Marvel and DC — in other words, we gave Jim a stake, which would make him as big as the big publishers.” The horror comics mogul not only gave the boys the rights to reprint choice Warren b-&-w comics; he also gave them access to those further up the food chain. “Because,” Peck explained, “if the book would take off, he would look good. So he called around and got us introductions to DC, Marvel, and, I think, Bill Gaines. Essentially, Jim ran interference for us, giving us a clear field.” Peck was emphatic about spotlighting the publisher’s impact on their book. “Warren should get a lot of credit, because we were really winging it.” Les did not write all of Comix but gave a “substantial portion” of the “Dumb Animals” chapter to lifelong friend and fellow Brown alumni Frank Muhly to scribe. And Peck, credited in the book as “Mad Peck Studios,” was assigned the “Mighty Marvel” story. Peck, who had been picking up Amazing Spider-Man since its fourth issue, said he was given the chapter because, “Les wasn’t particularly into Marvel,” ironic for an author who would earn more for his subsequent Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics than from any other book. Peck also confesses, “I filched most of that chapter from Steranko’s History of Comics,” though he did possess a near complete Marvel collection with their Bullpen Bulletin pages to reference. (Peck also, in a fashion, contributed the “Underground Comics” chapter, which was originally an article he wrote for Fusion, though Les rewrote the entire piece.) Les was far more interested in things E.C. “He would go down to New York City and interview Harvey Kurtzman,” Peck said. The book’s text finalized, Peck made what he describes as

his most important augmentation to Comix. “While they had a designer putting the book together, I made my big contribution: I told them if they printed the color section in Providence, they could print twice as many pages at the same price.” Peck also made the color separations, having learned by producing concert posters for national acts that included Cream, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, and The Who. “Color seps are hard!” he exclaimed. “It was Zip-A-Tone!” Peck also contributed the cover, adapting the “E.C. font” for the Comix title and drawing the art, which he made sure to mash four sturdy comics genres into the image: Superhero, funny animal, war and good girl art. When published, the book did well. “Comix did better than the publisher had anticipated.” Peck recalled. “The initial order was bigger than the print run. And Outerbridge & Dienstfrey immediately sold it to Bonanza Books. The price on the first edition was $7.95, but Bonanza sold their edition for $4, so royalties went down. Still, we got some money. I got a car. We split several thousand dollars.” Comix: A History of Comic Books in America was a revolutionary book for the study of this art form, giving equal stature to most genres; heaping long overdue praise on genius Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Gaines; acknowledging the

Above: The sublime Providence poster (and postcard), produced by Les “Doc” Daniels in collaboration with the Mad Peck and I. C. Lotz, is a much beloved image that has graced Rhode Island walls and refrigerators since 1978, and is among the writer’s most enduring works.

ton. 2013 Bob Eggle © ver illustration n B. Cooke. Co 13 Jo Tekeli-li! ©20

Ultimately time would prove that nobody could clean up the comics. The unclean kept cropping up like fungus. Even Code-approved comics soon evolved new ways of symbolizing Dr. Wertham’s trilogy — sex, violence and anarchy. Every art form is always expressing these concepts, for it is a duty as well as a curse. When we call these concepts by their respectable titles of “love,” “death” and “freedom,” we recognize their true significance as our most meaningful triad of spiritual mysteries. The comics made the fatal error of expressing these dreams openly in an oppressive atmosphere where the established opinion-makers favored

careful observation and dissection. And so they fell from favor for a while. Thus, after writing humorous songs, tackling a master’s thesis, and contributing to hippie newspapers, Les finally had his first bona fide book, one that showcased a talent for prose and dedication to research, two virtues he would put to superb use over the course of his life, the remainder of which will be covered in the second and last part of “Les Daniels: The Incomplete History.” Dear reader, at this point indulge me, please, a personal aside. Way back near this article’s beginning I referred to myself as a near-Boswell of Les Daniels, an appelation begging explanation. Back in 1990, long before my own foray into comic-book history, I became involved in that year’s H.P. Lovecraft festivities, which celebrated the centennial of the famed macabre writer’s birth. Not because I was devoted to horror writing, but because I love my adopted state, “the Biggest Little State in the Union,”and ol’ “I am Providence” HPL is perhaps Rhode Island’s greatest claim to fame. In the course of my activities, I fell in love with horror ’zines (of the Crypt of Cthulhu ilk) and published my own short-lived Tekeli-li!: Journal of Terror. Having gotten to know — and deeply admire — Les Daniels, I exhaustively featured him as my first issue’s subject (checklist and all!). Not only because he was my friend, but because his talent as a writer of fiction was shockingly, exquisitely excellent. He was always grateful to me for that coverage (Tek! was a pretty spiffy li’l ’zine) and even if I didn’t particularly like the schlocky horror movies he enjoyed, we could always turn down the volume and talk comics. He also was a big supporter of Comic Book Artist — not enough to write anything other than LOCs for it, for he was a working writer and my rates were truly abyssmal! I also commissioned, with his permission, what would have been the first comics adaptation of a Daniels short story, “The Good Parts,” a delightfully vulgar zombie tale. When I showed the finished story to him, Les hated it, and so ended my only attempt at comics anthologist! But, hey, I tried to bring together the two mediums he was best known for, so whaddaya want! I respected the guy, okay? Anyway, we would get together over the years, as often as a new Les Daniels book came out and I’d swap whatever books of mine were recently published. It was a ritual that I treasured. I love the gent and he represents to me the very best maybe one day I could be: meticulous in research, unabashed and unashamed of his passions, and deadly serious and protective about the good stuff. I subtitle this “The Incomplete History” because I failed in following his example by not recognizing opportunity, nor covering the subject thoroughly. I missed getting the first-person life story of Les Daniels on tape. I could have interviewed him over the years, like a true Boswell, but I squandered the opportunity. I guess I thought we had forever. But maybe I’m making up for it. Anyway, how could I regret cultivating a friendship with a man I admire? It’s a tradeoff. Still, I would’ve swapped my Plastic Man Archives collection to have him see this. I think Les would approve. Next Up: “Fact & Fiction,” the final part of “Les Daniels: The Incomplete History.”

Above: Fellow Ocean Stater Bob “Godzilla” Eggleton’s art graces the cover of the first issue of Ye Ed’s early-’90s selfpublishing venture, Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror, much of it devoted to a celebration of the fiction of Les Daniels, which will be covered more deeply in this article’s conclusion. Tek! was a short-lived H.P. Lovecraftinspired zine, but well-received, and the Daniels coverage, replete with interview, testimonials, portraits, book excerpt, checklist and analysis was a joy to produce for a man who remains a Rhode Island legend.

important work of the undergrounds and recognizing Crumb and Gilbert Shelton as essential contributors to the form’s endless possibilities; and especially calling out Dr. Frederic Wertham and his “disgraceful” Seduction of the Innocent for the inane accusations, as well as pointing out the devasation caused by the censoring Comics Code, especially the reprinting in full the Code’s ludicrous restrictions and, “by strange coincidence,” hinting at the Authority’s apparent vendetta against a single company, E.C. Comics, producers of the most innovative and well-done comics of that day. Also, the special emphasis given to one of the few geniuses of the field, Harvey Kurtzman, was long overdue. And refreshing, too, was to give weight to the writer/artist/editor’s post-Mad satire, Trump, Humbug, and Help! Of the progenitor itself, Les called Mad “the most extraordinary comic book ever to appear, and one unparalleled in its effect on the national conciousness.” High and worthy praise indeed. For this young reader who devoured what little there was on the subject’s history in the early 1970s, Comix was liberating. Yes, it acknowledged super-heroes as an important genre, but Zap and Bijou Funnies, Creepy and Eerie, the work of Jack Cole and Carl Barks, they all received equal footing, and by being inclusive, Les and Peck helped us realize the potentials of the form were well beyond the mainstream. And Les took comics seriously, without apology, granting it a dignity and respect well-deserved. And, for anyone who sensed there was more to comics than Batman’s “powcrunch-boom”and the eternal love triangle of Archie Andrews, Les gave validation and comfort to us in that comics — welldone comics — whether by accident or design, could be considered literary achievements on their own merits. Comix is also artfully written, meticulously researched and exhuberant in its advocation for the form, as well as crystalline in recognizing the art-killing cancer of repression. Read this selection from “The Comics Controversy”:

fin

[Many, many people deserve thanks for their assist with this effort, all of whom shall be listed with gratitude in CBC #3, but major props are extended to Martin Mull and especially John Peck for sharing memories with Ye Ed.]

#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

M O B

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

WHY HAVEN’T JACK’S HEIRS

MADE ONE

MEASELY THIN DIME OUT OF THE $ BILLIONS

OF DOLLARS

GENERATED BY HIS CREATIONS

HOLLYWOOD IN

MOTION PICTURES? Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

The Commerce of Dreams Comic book creators haven’t always been the sharpest pencils in the drawer —

(with some creations making the leap from the comic book page to movie screen), their reward is a work-for-hire contract and a

when it comes to business, that is.

page rate, with maybe a prom-

Of course, there are exceptions, but by their nature, those

ise of a “gratuity” if the work

writers and artists who spend

is deemed successful. Here is the cautionary tale

their workdays and nights

of a single creator, albeit

are ill-equipped to match the

one of the most prolific and talented the field has ever

wiles and stratagems of the

known. His publishers called him

publishers and their cadre of corporate lawyers. For those whose creativity have

“King,” but often treated him like a knave.

envisioned enduring universes of characters

It is not, beloved reader, a pretty picture.

“It’s the will to create that tells the truth.” — Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby: Job Creator

Jack Kirby, likely the most prolific comic book artist of all time, singlehandedly established the visual vernacular of the super-hero. His lithely muscled, earnest champions (whether of the earthbound or cosmic variety) are in perpetual motion, defying gravity as they swing weighty fists and clobber armies of opponents with panache, fearlessly lunging into the chaotic tumult to win the day. Such was the artist’s template: one righteous man (with occasional sidekick) fearlessly doing battle against multitudinous hordes of evildoers, risking all for truth and justice and, if not the American Way, then for what is eternally good. Kirby’s singularly idiosyncratic approach epitomized the look of costumed crime-fighter stories from the genre’s earliest years until the present day, as his dynamic style continues to be appropriated by generations of artists far removed from the Golden Age. Ask most knowledgeable comics fans and they’ll opine, yes, as supremely talented as he was regardless of the category — whether the subject is crime, romance, mystery, Westerns or even funny animals — Kirby’s most lasting impact is the stories exploding from many thousands of super-hero pages he drew for Marvel and DC Comics. But he was more than an exquisitely gifted cartoonist, more than an exceptional writer, more than a great storyteller. Jack Kirby was — and remains — the most important creator the field of mainstream comic books has ever produced. Period.

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Measured in dollars, the impact of his creations is tremendous. Motion pictures based on characters Jack Kirby created or co-created have generated $6.5 billion (so far) in worldwide box office grosses, a climbing tally that does not include DVD/Blu-ray/”agnostic platform” receipts, merchandising, or (lest we forget) comic book sales. Marvel’s The Avengers, populated by his Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk, is the third highest-grossing movie to date. Of all time. Sequels and new releases starring other Kirby creations and co-creations are forthcoming, as the super-hero genre is as firmly ascendant as ever in Hollywood. But there was one essential thing, alas, he wasn’t: Jack Kirby weren’t no businessman. By his own admission, he gave his all to the work and, perhaps too often, innocently trusted in the fairness of his publishers and his partners. “I didn’t know how to do business,” Kirby told The Comics Journal. “I didn’t know where to begin to do business. I was a kid from the Lower East Side who’d never seen a lawyer, who’d never done business. I was from a family that, like millions of others where doing business was concerned, I was completely naive.” Unlike his peers Will Eisner and Joe Kubert, who were better equipped to look after themselves in the world of comic-book commerce, Jack hadn’t the mind or the interest to maximize his take in the ledger book. His job was to create, feed his family, and ensure there was always a next assignment coming after finishing the one on his drawing board.

by Jon B. Cooke Portrait by Greg Preston 42

• Intro art by Alex Ross

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putting imaginations to paper

This is not to belittle Jack Kirby’s meteoric success in the comics field. The “Simon & Kirby” brand was the most recognizable art credit amongst avid readers during the 1940s, perhaps second only to “Walt Disney,” and certainly rivaled the Superman stamp of “Siegel & Shuster.” During the Marvel ’60s heyday, Kirby’s was a name familiar on college campuses across the country. It seems fair to surmise that, as a partner or on his own, Kirby usually commanded top page rates and, despite sporadic financial hardship through the decades, the Kirby family mostly lived a comfortably middle-class existence, one far removed from his decrepit, poverty-stricken Lower East Side upbringing as a boy. But the captains of the industry for which he so excelled, could be a repellent and vile lot in their dealings with Jack Kirby and his artist and writer peers, sometimes blatantly, at times obliquely. Unlike book publishing, few copyrights were retained by the creators of the material and little in the way of royalties was granted. Famously, Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster were paid $130 for the rights to their creation, the first super-hero, Superman. It would take foresight for the few — consider Bob Kane and William Moulton Marston, respective creators of Batman and Wonder Woman — with the wherewithal and influence to negotiate terms aided by legal representation to strike Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

Above: A Kirby family portrait from 1961. From left, Neal, Roz, Barbara (sitting), Susan, and Jack. Below inset: Young Jack Kurtzberg and Rosalind Goldstein out and about in the early ’40s. Below right: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in a ’50s S&K publicity shot. Bottom right: A rare shot of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby together, this from a 1964 National Cartoonist Society function (courtesy of David Folkman).

But Simon & Kirby’s tenure at the comics house is considerably shorter. Royalty checks for Captain America Comics are suspiciously small, aware as the team is to the book’s popularity. “We knew it was big when so many publishers attempted an imitation,” Simon wrote in The Comic Book Makers. “Martin Goodman was elated, but cautious. ‘Don’t tell anyone how good it is,’ he advised. ‘If they ask about sales, cry a little.’” But comics, being an insular business rife with nepotism, intrigue and gossip, can’t keep any secret for long: Morris Coyne is the accountant for Goodman’s publications. A grey-haired, jovial bachelor in his 50s, he is the antithesis of a stereotypical bookkeeper. Morris often hovers over the artists, telling stories, asking questions. “None of us,” Simon says in TCBM, “including Goodman, knew at the time that he was the ‘M’ in M.L.J. Publications [rival comics publisher Archie Comics].” Simon continues, “Morris made out our royalty checks for Captain America. The sum was disappointing in view of the immense popularity of the magazine. Once, when we were alone in the office, he confided to me that I was getting far less than the 25 percent that I had bargained for. ‘They’re piling salaries and overhead for most of the operation on Captain America,’ he said. ‘You’re getting the short end, but I doubt if there’s anything you can do about it.”

Let’s Rap About Cap

National Service

It is unclear when exactly, during their tenissue run producing Captain America Comics (and other Timely features), Simon & Kirby learn of Goodman’s deception, but the business side of the partnership seizes the moment to explore outside opportunities. “The team of Simon and Kirby had become synonymous with profits in the industry and this was the time to cash in on it,” Simon writes in TCBM. “I made a call to Jack Liebowitz, who had taken over the administration of [Harry]

While moonlighting together in 1939, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby conceive of Captain America, compiling the first issue of what would become Captain America Comics #1 while they, by day, respectively fulfill assignments for other publishers and comic packagers, according to Simon’s My Life in Comics. Timely publisher Martin Goodman, feeling too dependent on the outside vendor, comics packager outfit Funnies, Inc., gives Joe Simon the position of Timely’s first editor. Upon informing Kirby, it’s suggested they pitch Goodman the “Sentinel of Liberty” in the guise of a Simon-drawn sketch, which includes the signed note: “Martin: Here’s the character — I think he should have a kid buddy or he’ll be talking to himself all the time — I’m working up script — send schedule.” It is signed by Joe Simon only. Simon meets with Goodman, relating in My Life in Comics, “I didn’t tell him that we already had the first issue on our shelf, complete with Bucky. He was very impressed, so we negotiated. He offered us 25 percent of the profits for the title, as well as our regular page rate [$12]. I agreed and kept 15 percent. Jack would get ten percent.”* By all accounts, with its debut in December 1940, Captain America is an immediate sensation, early issues of the self-named monthly title selling upwards of a million copies each. Jack Kirby is hired as art director of Timely Comics (for reportedly $75 a week, while Simon earned $85) while continuing art assignments, both for Goodman’s other comics titles and pulp magazines, as well as producing with his partner roughly 390 pages of Captain America Comics over the next 10 months. During this period, Stan Lee, a relation by marriage to publisher Goodman, is hired by Simon for office help, including writing text pages, later becoming chief scripter, editor, and sometime art director for Timely/Atlas/Marvel Comics, a stint that would last for the next three decades. Interestingly, in his 1990 book, The Comic Book Makers, Simon writes, “Goodman offered 25 percent of the profits, 15% for me, 10% for the artists.” Note the generalized plural.

Top inset: Cartoonist Michael Cho’s portrait of Jack Kirby. Courtesy of the artist. Inset right: Steve Rude captures the moment that would catapult young Jacob Kurtzberg into using his imagination and artistic ability to escape the hellish poverty of New York City’s Lower East Side. Rude art was commissioned as the cover for TwoMorrows’ Streetwise: Autobiographical Stories by Comic Book Professionals [2000] edited by John Morrow and Ye Ed. 44

equitable bargains that would leave them and their subsequent estates comfortable. For the vast majority, it was “take what’s offered or there’s the door.” There were virtually no contracts, only page-rates, and even the concept of returning original art was hardly ever considered. With the assumption that Jack Kirby was a preeminent comic book creator — the top in his field and capable of garnering a vast, sustained audience, both as the quintessential artist and perhaps the most influential force in the industry since its inception — allow us to examine not so much his laudatory aesthetic achievements, but Kirby’s treatment by the business to which he contributed so enormously. It’s not a pretty tale, but perhaps it will instruct other artists and writers, as well as editors and publishers, how to properly treat those who toil and share their modern-day mythologies of good versus evil, the foundation of this art form. Many already know the broad strokes of the “origin” of the future “King of Comics” — born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917 to immigrant parents, hardscrabble youth in Depression-era New York City, early comic strip work at Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate, abortive career as “in-betweener” on Popeye cartoons, formative stint working in the Eisner & Iger comic shop, and crucial meeting with Joe Simon while working for Victor Fox (where Simon tells us he is “splitting the paychecks” with young Jacob, because “he needed the cash”) — so let’s begin subsequent to the fledgling artist adopting an Irish-sounding nom de plume of Jack Kirby when the nascent Simon & Kirby team is about to arrive at Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics, home to Marvel Mystery Comics’ Human Torch and Sub-Mariner.

#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

Donenfeld’s DC Comics, the company that published Superman and Batman. DC was the biggest.” A meeting was arranged between Simon and Liebowitz, with Donenfeld present. Simon continues: Liebowitz came right to the point. “Simon and Kirby should be with DC Comics.” I told him we wanted $500 a week between us, and a year’s contract. “I’ll have the contract drawn up. Have your lawyer get in contact with us.”

The Greatest Partnership

While still working for Timely, young Jack Kurtzberg enters into the most lasting and important partnership of his life: In mid-1940, the artist begins dating Rosalind Goldstein, and the team marry on May 23, 1942. Mark Evanier explains in Kirby: King of Comics, “Roz became more than his spouse. She was his partner in every aspect of his life, his work included.” Evanier continues, “She consulted with him on every aspect of his career and acted as a stabilizing voice of reason when, as happened all too often in Jack’s life, that career gave him cause for anger… From the day they married, Jack Kirby was a two-person operation.” Roz would give Jack four children: Susan (born in 1945), Neal (’48), Barbara (’52), and late arrival Lisa (’60). After his discharge, the couple lives with her mother in Brooklyn, as Roz tells TJKC #10, “We had the bedroom, and he worked there. I’d go to bed, and the baby [Susan] was sleeping, and he’d be working all night long. That’s the way he liked it.” The family then lived in their own apartment nearby, eventually purchasing a house in Mineola, New York, on Long Island (across Brown Street from Joe Simon and his family), where the Kirbys lived from 1949 until the early ’50s.

Yet the pair does not immediately jump ship as they continue with their Timely commitments, though word of the upcoming defection makes it to Goodman’s office. (Is it the recently-hired help who snitches or the machinations of accountant Coyne working at the behest of another publisher? We may never know, even though Kirby reportedly grumbles about his future creative partner, Stan Lee, “The next time I see that little son of a bitch, I’m gonna kill him.”) The Timely publisher wants the boys out. Simon explains in TCBM, “We finished the tenth issue of Captain America, emptied our desk drawers, and departed without goodbyes. In fairness to Stan, I wasn’t at all convinced that he was the one to spill the beans, so to speak. There must have been over a dozen people at DC Comics who knew of our arrangement and could gain points with Martin Goodman by telling him of our plans.” (Despite the value of their brand within the youth market, Simon & Kirby would be wiped clean from Timely history after their departure in revisionary, Stalinesque fashion, as Martin Goodman proclaims himself the creator of Captain America, as seen in Stan Lee’s 1947 booklet, Secrets Behind the Comics, as well as entirely being left off the credits — and out of the profits — on the 15-chapter movie serial produced by Republic Pictures in 1944.) Simon & Kirby ascend to National Comics (a.k.a. DC) with creativity afire, as they originate or modify “Manhunter,” “Sandman,” “The Newsboy Legion,” and, their greatest hit at the comics house, “Boy Commandos,” with its self-named title lasting until the end of the decade (and which, Simon writes in TCBM, during its heyday “consistently sold over a million copies a month,” adding, “Boy Commandos was the last of the comic book mega-hits of the war years”). By both accounts, the partners felt that Jack Liebowitz treat them fairly, fulfilling and renewing the handsome salary deal (widely viewed as the most lucrative of its time for comic book creators). “We were to turn in 25 pages a month and would be paid extra for any additional pages.” Simon tells a convention audience (as transcribed in The Jack Kirby Collector #25), “DC had voluntarily been paying us royalties on Boy Commandos —characters we left behind. They did wonderfully by us and we appreciated it.” Kirby tells The Comics Journal, “Jack Liebowitz was a fine old man, and he treated me very, very well.” In the same magazine, Simon concurs, calling the National Comics publisher, “The fairest publisher we dealt with.”

Liebowitz, correctly sensing the creative partners would be drafted after America entered World War Two, requests a year’s worth of story inventory from the boys, and, indeed, they enter the armed services — Simon stationed stateside in the U.S. Coast Guard; Kirby shipped to the European theater as infantryman in the U.S. Army. Both return to civilian life by the war’s end to find a changed comics industry.

Above: Newspaperman Pete Hamill said of the creative team, “Until I learned the names of Simon and Kirby, around 1943, I didn’t know that men actually sat down to write and draw comics. That knowledge would change my life” [A Drinking Life, ’94]. S&K were super-stars, their names emblazoned on comic book covers, rare indeed for creators. Adventure Comics #80 [Mar. ’43] cover courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Left: On a Coney Island excursion, Joe Simon (left, with date) and Jack Kirby and Roz Goldstein, in the early ’40s. Courtesy of the Kirby Museum. Right: A shot of the artist, apparently from the early ’40s. Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

Hustling

What does the Museum do? So how does the Kirby Museum go about fulfilling its mission of promoting and encouraging 46

the study, understanding, preservation and appreciation of the work of the King of Comics as is written in its Mission Statement? Its most public effort involves keeping the “Kirby-ness” on the Internet. Visit kirbymuseum.org and you’ll find quite a few Museum blogs run by volunteers — entries of which often get forwarded to Twitter and Facebook — and an active Google+ page and Tumblr site. In the physical realm, Rand and trustee Tom Kraft (of whatifkirby.com) keep busy building digital archives, setting up scanners at conventions and collectors’ homes to build the Museum’s vast Original Art Digital Archive. They also rescan all of the photocopies of Kirby pencil art to attain digital negative/archival quality. The Museum also helps scholars with their research, the exhibits of other museums and galleries, producers with their website/TV/movie

projects, as well as aiding the general populace with any questions about Jack and his work. How can you help? The Museum is currently in the midst of a campaign to raise funds to open a Pop-Up Kirby Museum storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the neighborhood where Kirby was born and raised. Limited edition prints and booklets as used as incentives, and they are almost two-thirds of the way to their goal of raising $30,000, so your contributions will help establish a proper brick-&-mortar location for “real world” Permanency. Additionally, all Museum membership dues goes to the General Fund, which, for the most part, helps the Museum keep up with convention appearances. — Rand Hoppe

www.kirbymuseum.org

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About The Jack Kirby Museum If you’ve been following The Jack Kirby Collector, published by TwoMorrows, or been looking for Kirby art online, you’ve probably noticed the Kirby Museum. Officially named “The Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center,” the museum is the brainchild of and is spearheaded by Randolph Hoppe, longtime Kirby fan, but Rand has also been the TwoMorrows webmaster since, well, before the Great Flood! In addition to giving her blessing to the non-profit’s formation, Roz and Jack’s daughter Lisa Kirby is a founding trustee who has donated a significant stock of posters used to this day as membership premiums.

“We were going to have to come up with something new.” Undeterred, S&K go to Hillman Periodicals, publisher of Airboy Comics, to work on crime and teenage humor comics; and Simon scores some gigs at Prize Comics (also known as Crestwood), packaging Headline Comics and Justice Traps the Guilty. During this period (while still freelancing for DC), the team survives on page rates. When interviewer Gary Groth asks Kirby in TCJ about publishers making good profits off of his work, he replies, “I accepted that fact because I was bringing in more money. Don’t get me wrong — the more money the books made, the more money I received, and I was feeling great. My purpose was what my father’s purpose was — to make a living and to have a family. I was going to do the right thing. My dream to me was to have money to support it and to live in the kind of house I liked.” Groth asks if he resents publishers. “No, I didn’t resent them,” he says. “In fact, I got along well with them. When I wanted a little more money, they gave me a little more money.” Certainly a major dynamic in the partnership is Joe Simon’s increasingly savvy business acumen. “Joe was an impressive guy,” Kirby tells TCJ. “He still is. He got square deals for us, where in the past to get a square deal was an unknown quantity. Comics as a business became a real thing for all of us.”

Above: My Kirby takes the morning train… A photo of The King, noted on a Facebook page as being from the files of Greg Theakston. Looks to be from the 1950s, perhaps after Jack and Roz had moved to the ’burbs of Long Island in 1949. Courtesy of The Kirby Museum. Inset right: Simon & Kirby’s letterhead illustration from the late ’40s features a number of their Fox, Timely, DC, and Harvey Comics characters. From the cover of Pure Imagination’s The Jack Kirby Treasury Vol. 1 [1982]. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Upon returning to the States, Jack works a few DC assignments and waits for his partner to be released from the service, but their marquee has changed. Evanier writes in KKOC, “There was little enthusiasm for letting anyone, even Joe and Jack, be outside suppliers any longer.” Simon rejoins Kirby and he hooks up S&K with his friend Alfred Harvey, ambitious comics publisher. “Alfred made a tempting offer,” Joe says in TCBM, “Harvey Comics would publish a new line of Simon and Kirby comic books at a 50 percent profit-sharing split.” Mulling over the proposition, Simon writes in MLIC, “Jack and I had become pretty disillusioned by the habits of people who would take everything away from you, put the copyrights in their own names, and not deliver on the royalties or fudge them up. But… it was a good business opportunity.” The duo promptly create Stuntman and Boy Explorers, but the titles fail. There is a market glut and newsdealers, Simon explains, “kept only established titles. Bundles were returned, unopened, for credit. The Simon and Kirby Comics were cancelled after we had completed two issues.” Though the boys would return soon to work with Joe’s friend, “Our 50-50 deal with Alfred Harvey had gone sour,” Simon writes in MLIC.

The Romance of Success

Working on My Date, Hillman’s Archie-like title, the pair wonder if a serious true love comic book, one geared for girls and women, might have legs — serious legs. The idea is too good not to insist on profit-sharing. “We’d pull the first issue together — produce the main stories, and invest in other artists to do the filler material that would go in-between our stuff,” Simon explains in MLIC. “Before long we had Young Romance on our shelf — our pushcart — and were ready to show it around.” Crestwood is interested. Simon insists on a 50-50 deal and a contract is signed. “Ever since then,” Simon recalls in 2011, “people have said it was a brilliant business deal. Actually it was a stupid business deal — at least for us. Because the deal was that we would supply the entire package, and incur all of the costs. That meant we would take the first hit if it lost money. That’s not what happened, but it could have happened.” When Young Romance #1 hits the stands, the team is going full-force. Ray Owen’s “Jack Kirby: A By-the-Month Chronology” at www.marvelmasterworks.com lists the artist producing an astonishing 152 pages of comics cover-dated September 1947. Truth to tell, over the years, when times are flush for the pair, they will pull in some aces to assist; but suddenly Young Romance is a huge sensation, launching the most successful genre in the entire history of American comics. The S&K romance titles alone sell in the millions (as the team adds Young Love as a sister publication, and by 1950, begin Black Magic, a relatively tepid but successful horror title). It is time for the shop doors to open wide. “With all the titles we were producing, we took Crestwood, a relatively small publisher in the field, and made them number one in comic books,” writes Simon in MLIC. During this successful run, the team takes in a top-notch crew of freelancers, including Mort Meskin, Will Elder, Jerry Robinson, John Severin, Steve Ditko, John Prentice, Leonard Starr, and others. “We went through quite a lot of artists,” Kirby says in The Art of Jack Kirby [’92], “There was always a high turnover. Most of them just could not do the work, others just needed an extra job to help make ends meet. We did our best to give everybody a chance for a job, but I would be embarrassed to tell you who I turned down and even more embarrassed to tell you who we let go.” These are the Simon & Kirby salad days.

In the chips, the partners upscale to new and larger abodes, now in East Williston, not far from their starter homes. And they return to Harvey Comics for a spell to produce some of their finest work as a team: six issues of Boys’ Ranch. They also briefly enter the 3-D comics craze with Captain 3-D (Harvey) and spoof their own “Sentinel of Liberty” with Fighting American (Crestwood) in 1954. The boys eventually learn their romance comics publisher has been deceitful regarding “incidentals,” amounting to $130,000.53, according to Simon’s TCBM. They settle for $10,000, “plus back payments Crestwood had been holding out on us,” relates Simon. And like the crooked accounting, the comics industry itself is going sour.

Mainline Fever

Despite evidence of the field entering turbulent seas — an excerpt Dr. Fredric Wertham’s anti-comics screed, Seduction of the Innocent, appears in November 1953’s Ladies’ Home Journal, and threats to regulate comic books waft about Capitol Hill — Simon & Kirby go for broke and create their own publishing company, Mainline. “Both of us decided if the other publishers could make money at it, why were we feeding them?” Kirby says to TCJ. “And he was right. We had good stuff, and we were innovative, and why not do it for ourselves as well as for the publishers?” But not only is their timing off, there are money

Above: Undated and colorized portrait of Jack Kirby, likely from the late ’60s.

Inset: Baby boy Neal, mama Roz, papa Jack and little girl Susan pose, we assume, on their Long Island lawn in the early 1950s. Upper right: Dad with daughter mugging for the camera. Far right: Neal posted this photo of Jack and himself to accompany a special 2010 online Father’s Day essay.

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TJKC ©20

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Above: Dr. Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent gained wide notice with an excerpt in the Ladies’ Home Journal of Nov. ’53. Unfortunately the mag’s opening spread featured a crime title produced by the Simon & Kirby studio, Justice Traps the Guilty.

Soon, gone were the days when one in three periodicals sold in the U.S. was a comic book. The team of Simon & Kirby had successfully ridden the wave of success in the comic book business for 15 years before hitting the rocky shore of American public opinion, which had been swayed by major forces in the country bent on demonizing an easy victim — a victim that millions had been reading and now hastily swore they did not. Jack mentioned coming out of “the fog” in 1955. Perhaps that clouded his judgment in a lot of issues which crept up during 1956, and into the glory days of his work for Martin Goodman in the ’60s. (Charlton, bottom-rung comics publisher for most of its existence, do offer the team its own imprint. “They said they were going to start a new publishing company called Simon & Kirby Publications,” Simon tells TCJ. “I still have the stationary. That’s about all I have of it.”) Simon seems to land on his feet, purchasing an even more upscale Long Island home as he eases into lucrative advertising work for the New York State Republican Party and expands into humor magazines of the Mad ilk; Kirby does not land so smoothly as the pugnacious artist hit the bricks in a desperate scramble for work. Pretty soon there would be a surprising addition to the family, a new mouth to feed by the name of Lisa.

Falling Sky/Rising Star

Kirby finds freelance work at DC Comics (as well as a brief stint at Atlas — formerly Timely Comics — before Goodman and Lee suffer their own distribution debacle), where he works for editor Jack Schiff producing Challengers of the Unknown with writer Dave Wood, and other features. Schiff hears tell that a newspaper strip packager is looking for an outer space strip property and brings in Kirby and Wood. Sky Masters of the Space Force is conceived and a deal carved out. “[The packager] was to get a cut off the top. Kirby and Dave Wood would split the rest, but with all the expenses — hiring an inker, paying the letterer, making stats, etc. — coming out of the artists’ share,” Evanier reports in KKOC. “It was a very poor deal for Kirby, but it got worse when Schiff began demanding a cut off the top as well.” Because Kirby eventually refuses to pay what he feels is an extorted kick-back to his primary employer, the matter ends up in court. Ill at ease on the stand, the artist loses the case, and is humiliatingly still forced to pay Schiff. In the process, Kirby is blackballed at DC and Sky Masters crashes to earth less than 18 months after launching. With little option left, he calls on Stan Lee to see if the Atlas outfit could use some Kirby magic. Martin Goodman’s comics house barely survives the collapse of American News and is now restricted in how many titles it can release per month. Editor/writer Lee and plotter/artist Kirby hit the ground running and, by 1961, The Fantastic Four #1, commonly referred to as the beginning of Marvel Comics, revives the company despite the limited rack space restrictions.

The Kirby Age of Marvel

The Marvel super-heroes created by Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Lee result in a steady rise in circulation fueled, no doubt, by the interest of older readers, as well as those yawning at the bland DC line. The publisher’s books enter the Zeitgeist of American popular culture and Marvel initiates a fan club, sells T-shirts, and signs licensing deals for animated TV shows, plastic model kits, bubble-gum cards — you name it. Lee hits the college lecture circuit and, with the aid of his jocular “Stan the Man” persona exuding from the comics’ text pages, he attracts media attention, and far more publicity than his freelancers will ever garner. Only a few years since being on the brink of padlocking its doors for good and the arrival of a returning king, Marvel, once the copy-cat comics company, is suddenly the hip, innovative underdog. “Marvel was still scrappier, with a faster growing-fan base [than DC],” writes Sean Howe [who will be interviewed in CBC #3 — Y.E.] in his recent Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. “Marvel was more Mets than Yankees, more Rolling Stones than Pat Boone… it was the Pepsi Generation challenger to DC’s Coca-Cola giant.” Though Lee and his brother Larry Leiber fill in the word balloons after receiving the pencilled pages, the lion’s share of storytelling is the burden of the artist, who pencils a plot, establishes pacing and fleshes out what might be the skimpiest of direction, if any. Kirby and Ditko, by their own admission, need no such guidance, more often than not delivering tightly penciled pages for Lee to dialogue (who is aided by the artist’s margin notes clarifying the action and suggesting speech). This is deemed the “Marvel Method,” established

Left: Ye Ed suggests examining John Morrow’s fine chronology of Jack Kirby’s Marvel experiences, “Key 1960s Moments,” recently published in The Jack Kirby Collector #60 [Winter ’13]. It is an excellent accoutrement to this article, as it outlines major flash points Kirby had with the comics publisher and editor Stan Lee. Find TJKC at www.twomorrows.com. #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

issues, as well. Kirby continues, “The whole trouble was we were undercapitalized. We published for a little while, but we didn’t get many issues out.” Simon says that distribution — or lack thereof — doomed the venture. “Our distributor was Leader News Company,” he tells TCJ. “We chose them because they were usually successful. And they had one major client. That was Bill Gaines — E.C. Comics. So E.C. Comics collapsed during the Kefauver investigation. Leader News went bankrupt and they put us out of business. They couldn’t pay us. We were doing very well. Bullseye was a big hit.” “Then,” Simon says, “we went to the graveyard. That was Charlton Publications… The last port of call.” Selling off their remaining inventory, the team, the most successful in the brief history of American comic books, decides to call it quits. Roz sees the end of S&K as simply, “Joe went his way, and Jack went his way. They both had families to support, so they did the best they could. It was just economics.” In his Mainline history in TJKC #25, Bob Beerbohm sums it up thusly:

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to ease the editor-writer’s burden, with the onus placed on the artist, who becomes, in actuality, the artist-plotter. Kirby’s kinetic, idiosyncratic approach to super-hero action is adopted as the “house style” at Marvel, and incoming artists are often given Kirby’s breakdowns — stories scantily rendered in pencil but with plots readily apparent (with notes added to margins, recommending dialogue and explaining scenes). Whether with his fully-rendered pages or loosely sketched stories for others to tighten the pencils, Kirby — and colleague Ditko — are assuredly more than mere plotters. They are also writers — only not being paid for it. That paycheck goes to those who fill in the balloons with snappy exclamations and scintillating retorts. Nor do the artists receive remuneration for their work being exploited on merchandise and in the weekday Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon series, which utilizes the actual panels (albeit with minimal animation). Still, Kirby is making a decent living in the service of the increasingly popular Marvel Comics Group. But indignities mount and page rates don’t reflect the growing popularity of the books. Evanier writes in KKOC, “His value to the company was immense; his compensation was not.” He receives promises from Goodman. “Kirby later said it was significant, but it was not on paper. Almost nothing about Jack’s working relationship with Marvel was on paper — not even, at the time, any delineation of what rights he had or was giving up to the material.” A litany of events sours Kirby to the House of Ideas — the appropriation of his beloved creation The Silver Surfer, needless art corrections demanded of his work, publicity hogging by Lee, and humiliation in his hometown press. A notorious 1966 Herald Tribune article describes the artist: “[I]f you stood next to him on the subway you would peg him as an assistant foreman in a girdle factory”; Lee is the “rangly lookalike of Rex Harrison.” Kirby has “baggy eyes” and “a baggy Robert Hall-ish suit”; Stan, “a deep suntan” and “the brightest-colored Ivy League wardrobe in captivity.” The writer also notes the outfit has tripled circulation in 42 months to 35 million copies sold a year; the same span since Kirby’s return. There is also the lack of writing credit and compensation. “Jack’s plots and designs were on TV shows, his art on toys… and he wasn’t seeing a nickel from any of it,” writes Evanier, “just the occasional rate increase of a dollar or two per page. There was nothing for him to live on if he became unable to draw.”

A Timely Favor

On May 22, 1968, less than a year before Kirby resettles his family to California, he borrows $2,000 from Marvel publisher Martin Goodman to help finance the cross-country move from his Long Island home. He repays half by Aug. 31. The loan may not be as it appears. Roy Thomas (then Marvel staff writer) tells TJKC #18 that, at around the same time Kirby receives the lent money, Goodman makes a “loan” to artist Bill Everett. Thomas says it’s actually an off-the-record agreement between Marvel and the Golden Age comic book artist/writer, with an understanding that no money would have to be repaid — “so [Everett] wouldn’t sue” for ownership of his aquatic creation, the Sub-Mariner.

Top left: Jack Kirby visits the Marvel Bullpen in 1966, probably Spring judging from the covers behind him. If so, Steve Ditko would have just resigned the company. Above: Kirby self-portrait, late ’60s. Mike Royer inks (his first job on the King’s pencils!). Below: Kirby’s I.O.U. signed when he borrowed $2,000 from Marvel publisher Martin Goodman. Above and below courtesy of John Morrow.

which he’s been sitting on since July 1970. The document transfers to Marvel any rights Kirby has or might have to Captain America, as well as rights to all other characters he created at the comics publisher. There is no mention of any benefit for Kirby in the assignment and oddly, when he signs it, he is already working for DC Comics. (Evanier says there’s a reason Kirby signs the document: “Basically, Jack signed it under duress,” adding he will detail it in a forthcoming fullscale biography of Kirby: “It’s a very complicated story.”). Suffice to say, in 1972, Goodman calls in the remaining $1,000 balance (plus 6% interest) of the May 1968 loan. This coincides with a meeting between Kirby and Simon, where Kirby tells his former partner that Marvel has still not paid him any part of the money owed since the Nov. ’69 settlement with Simon for ownership of Captain America. It’s not entirely clear if this is when Kirby becomes aware Marvel has concealed from him the settlement agreed upon with Simon, which was $3,750 (as reported by TJKC #24). Marvel launders more than half of the settlement paid to Simon through his attorney. By shielding the full amount from Kirby, Marvel is obligated to pay the artist only a fraction of the overall (lawyer-and-all) Simon settlement — that is, only the same as paid to Simon directly, rather than the much larger amount turned over to the attorney. Simon describes this as an underhanded tactic used by Marvel/Goodman to avoid paying Kirby his full share. It would seem that in exchange for signing the assignment, Marvel waives the $1,000 balance owed on the loan and pays Kirby an undisclosed amount in April ’72, followed by a second payment in June.

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Jack Kirby in Argo. © 2 0 1 3W arn er

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nment. e r ta i Ent ers

Let’s never forget the real-world impact Jack Kirby’s artwork had at a desperate moment in American history. As immortalized in the motion picture Argo (winner of this year’s Best Picture Oscar), it was Kirby’s designs, produced in the late 1970s, which were used as persuading visuals in an elaborate CIA ruse to save American embassy workers trapped in Tehran during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. In the movie, Kirby is portrayed by Michael Parks in a brief scene delivering artwork to a CIA front, but in reality the work was produced a year prior to Iran’s revolution, for a bona fide movie project, an adaptation of Roger Zelanzy’s s-f novel Lord of Light. Hired by producer Barry Geller to visualize characters and settings, the artist also designed “Science Fiction Land,” a planned theme park to be built during post-production using the film’s intricate set. The project was dropped, but Jack achieved an immortality separate from his supreme status in comics.

#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

Above: Our pal Jack Kirby illustrates an early 1970s DC Comics text page with a cheerful self-caricature of the King at the drawing board.

Marvel’s loans to Everett and Kirby are shadowed by lawsuits filed by Human Torch creator Carl Burgos and Captain America co-creator Joe Simon. In 1966, Simon petitions the New York State Supreme Court in a suit against Goodman and his wife, Jean (as well as Krantz Films, which distributes Marvel Super-Hero cartoons, and others, including Weston Merchandising, whose “Captain Action” doll includes a Captain America disguise). The lawsuit claims loss of earnings on Captain America, citing Simon as the “sole author” of the character. (Simon explains in his 2011 autobiography, “I submitted the proper paperwork, but didn’t include Jack Kirby because he was working for Marvel at the time, on projects that included Captain America. I thought it would constitute a conflict of interest.”) The following year, Simon files suit in federal court, this time against the Goodmans, Timely Comics, and parent company Magazine Management. In 1969, both cases end with an out-of-court settlement, with Simon acknowledging his work “was done as an employee for hire of the Goodmans,” relinquishing any claims on the “Living Legend of W.W.II.” Burgos’ lawsuit apparently never makes headway and, weeks after the loan to Kirby, Goodman’s Magazine Management is purchased by Perfect Film and Chemical. Goodman does, however, remain as publisher and he promptly finds a new distributor for the comics line. Thus freed from the restrictive IND distributor, the number of Marvel titles explode. On May 30, 1972, Kirby signs an agreement with Marvel,

“This is a very complicated story,” Simon tells TCJ, “and it turns out some of the dirty little angles Marvel pulled… On Kirby; not on me… Very dirty. They got him on their side. Even Kirby doesn’t know the reason I settled. You know how a copyright works if there are two authors? One author renews, the other author is entitled to complete 50% of all negotiations, profits, sales, that type of thing. You know I told [Marvel] the truth. I told them what they did to Kirby on that Captain America thing was disgusting. Disgusting.”

Escaping Artist

Kirby has been trying without success to work out a freelance contract with Goodman since early 1968. Frustrated in attempts to negotiate with the publisher, Kirby has his attorney contact Perfect Film executives, and travels to New York from California in an attempt to reach an agreement. “Jack went to New York in December of 1969 to try and work out a new deal with Marvel,” explains Evanier. “He didn’t succeed at that but while there, he agreed to write and draw two issues of a proposed Inhumans comic and draw the first issue of a planned KaZar comic. He went home and did them. In late January, he was asked to revise them into ten-pagers and he did whatever was necessary to make that happen. He did Silver Surfer #18 around the middle of February. In between these, of course, he did issues of Thor and Fantastic Four… After he mailed in FF #102, he phoned Stan and told him it would be his last.” Kirby makes a concerted effort to work things out by going to New York, but is rebuffed in Jan. 1970 by Perfect Film insisting that, if he wishes to remain at Marvel, it will be only on their terms. Even after receiving an “onerous contract” in early January — which contained “no raise, no credit, not even any security” (Evanier writes in KKOC), Kirby continues working through March, and has his attorney contact Perfect Film in one last attempt to revise the contract. The attempt fails and Kirby calls Carmine Infantino at DC. Kirby adversary Jack Schiff and oft-S&K nemesis Mort Weisinger are gone as editors at DC. The age of the artisteditor has dawned and Kirby begins plans for a “DC Comics West,” where he would package books for the New York HQ. Instead, Infantino wants him as an ongoing artist/writer/ editor, not managing a regional office. The pay is equitable, the credit given honest, and there’s security in a five-year contract. Kirby’s output is phenomenal (as usual) and the content is arguably the finest work of his life. But corporate pressures — DC had been purchased in the late ’60s by what in the early ’70s, has become a media monolith, Warner Communications — and erratic management make for a turbulent tenure for Kirby. “Every time Jack got off the phone with New York,” Evanier relates, “he’d turn to Roz and make Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

the same joke about having fled a slave ship only to arrive on the Titanic.” His magnum opus, the hugely ambitious Fourth World, is cut short within two years of his arrival and he bides out the contract doing what he does best, creating unforgettable comic books.

A Prophet in His Own Country

Shockwaves resonate through the comics industry in 1975 when Marvel announces the return of the King, now a fullfledged writer-artist-editor, helming his own titles. Stan Lee has ascended to become publisher and “The Man” delegates, often in absentia, to a burgeoning Bullpen. Kirby does his best, producing work that is today acclaimed but, during this last tenure at the now number one comics publishing empire (of which he set much of the foundation), he is disrespected in the New York offices and his work is ridiculed in fan circles. A promised contract renewal never materializes and, anyway, work-forhire contracts the new editor-in-chief Jim Shooter is sending out would add insult to injury, reducing the brilliant visionary to a mere “supplier.” But without DC or Marvel, where can a comics creator of his stature find work? There are still bills to pay, health insurance needed…

Above: A 1972 snapshot of Jack Kirby and his esteemed ’60s Marvel-era inker supreme, Joe Sinnott, at a New York City comic convention. Inset left: San Diego Comic-Con mainstay cartoonist Rick Greary’s caricature of the King of Comics, who also attended each summer. Courtesy of the artist. Below: John “Jack” Byrne delineates Mr. Kirby for this FOOM #11 cover, inked by Mr. Sinnott.

Hollywood Haven

As his Marvel contract expires, Kirby falls into a career in television animation as a presentation artist and all-around concept guy (maybe a fresh career, but hardly new work as ideagenerator!). For the period, the highly lucrative job cannot have come at a better time. Plus he is greatly respected by management, consistently recognized for his achievements, and is gushingly idolized to the point of worship by his colleagues. Though here, as in comics, he owns nothing of what he creates, at least the compensation is exemplary, the hours reasonable, and he is given a degree of appreciation from higher-ups he has rarely experienced in the comics industry. “Jack was enormously happy with his experience at Ruby-Spears,” Evanier says in TJKC #11. “He told me they gave him the title of producer at some point, he was working with Hollywood people, and he was out of that environment of the closed shops of DC or Marvel. Television, at least, had a little more dignity to it. He got paid very well, and got a health plan, which became very handy for the family.”

Marvel Char

acters, Inc.

Worldwide Box Office Grosses of Films Derived from Jack Kirby Co-Creations X-Men (2000) X2: X-Men United (2003) X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) X-Men: First Class (2011) X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

X-Men franchise: $1,890,097,619 Hulk (2003) The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Royalties for Royalty

Incredible Hulk franchise: $508,788,031 Fantastic Four (2005) Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) The Fantastic Four (2015)

Iron Man (2008) Iron Man Iron Man 2 (2010) franchise: Iron Man 3 (2013) $1,209,107,553 Thor (2011) Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Thor franchise: $449,326,618 Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Captain America franchise: $368,608,363 Marvel’s The Avengers (2012) The Avengers untitled sequel (2015)

The Avengers franchise: $1,511,757,910

The 1980s proves to be a decade when Jack Kirby is, on the one hand, embraced with unadulterated affection by the comics community — at least a solid portion of aficionados — and he also finds himself treated with deserved respect by one of the “Big Two” publishers. The industry is rapidly changing with the advent of the Direct Market, and DC (under more enlightened leadership than in the early ’70s) perceives the writing on the wall, perhaps, and institutes creator-friendly inducements, including profit-sharing (if a title meets a sales threshold). The House of Superman is particularly open towards Kirby by offering a magnanimous deal to design action figures based on his Fourth World creations for the company, as well as assigning lucrative comics work tied to merchandizing. The King is also given “created by” credits on a number of characters (which are steadily gaining popularity, some becoming part of the bedrock of the DC Universe mythos up to this present day). “We thought that Jack hadn’t been appropriately paid for his lifetime of work in the comics industry,” then-DC President Jenette Khan says, which prompts her and publisher Paul Levitz to formulate the deal. “If there was an opportunity to make things right,” Levitz explains, “we worked hard to find it.” The brand-new West Coast publisher Pacific Comics also offers the creator a fair deal and, after two long years without a new Kirby comic book hitting the racks, Captain Victory and His Galactic Rangers makes a steady, bi-monthly appearance in comic shops, followed by Silver Star, an adaptation of a screenplay he had written in his (ahem) downtime. Kirby also gets into the habit of keeping his penciled pages to then sell uninked, by having inkers embellish copies of the original art or inking on vellum overlays (which, in turn, are sold) because Kirby original art is becoming a very valuable commodity — especially his most popular work: the Marvel pages from the 1960s. In one sense, these are Roz and Jack’s best days. There’s the adoration at the San Diego Comic-Con every July with an endless stream of appreciative fans from all walks of life; well-paying commission work from well-to-do art patrons; maybe two days a week max of work at an animation studio, which was winding down anyway… and there are grandchildren to dote on and finally time for the long-married couple to relax a little more together. But they are aging and Jack has his health issues, including heart problems and vision difficulty. Plus, in an industry that never offers a pension plan, from where is the next check going to come if Kirby can’t draw? And what will Jack and Roz leave behind for their son and daughters and grandkids?

Ant-Man (2013) Total Worldwide Box Office (as of 2/27/13):

6,557,313,576

Amounts distilled from boxofficemojo.com

Total Domestic DVD Sales* (as of 2/27/13):

753,342,333

* Figures unavailable for pre-2005 movies; Fantastic Four figure is percentage. Does not include Blu-ray sales. Amounts distilled from the-numbers.com

Grand Total:

7,310,655,909

(Total does not include merchandizing and other movie-related products.)

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A King Ransomed

On the other hand, in a very real way, the ’80s are also the worst of times for Kirby and his family, suffering as they do the stresses and indignities foisted on them by “The House That Jack Built.” Though Marvel Comics has no right — moral right, at the least — to do so, the publisher holds hostage Kirby’s rightful (and quite valuable) possession, what remains of his original artwork from the 1960s. (Truth to tell, the artist is entitled to all such work — albeit a portion divvied out to any respective inker — but, over the years, comics publishers are notoriously cavalier with the material in their charge, gifting art to visitors, potential business partners, and to journalists writing flattering portrayals of Bullpen celebrities. Plus a thorough inventory — later released to the press — reveals the specter that perhaps thousands of pages are lost, destroyed or stolen.) The rise of creator rights in the ’70s and the good public relations resulting from the appearance of such largesse (Marvel makes sure these are not designated as any return of property to an owner, but as “gifts” bestowed to the freelancer) are not the only motives of the publishing houses; there is also the sticky realization that no state sales tax was paid for this hitherto ignored commodity purchased from “suppliers.” Thus DC’s storeroom is cleaned out and courier vans loaded up, lickity-split. For the most part, Marvel follows suit as Bristol boards are FedEx’ed to freelancers after being kept, it is said, safe and secure in the editor-in-chief’s office. But, for the “Stan Lee Presents” imprint, Jack Kirby is a special case. When being returned pages, freelancers are instructed to sign a single-page release that promises they will make no claim to any rights or trademarks. But Kirby receives a four-page form, as Marvel seizes the opportunity — dangling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Kirby property as bait — to entice the artist/writer to sign away any future claims to his work or characters. The creator balks at the singled-out humiliation. The comics community comes in droves to Kirby’s defense, the fight is long and hard going, and a compromise is reached. Kirby receives the art to leave as his grandchildren’s inheritance. [CBC intends to delve much deeper into this controversy — and the theft of original art — in the near future.—Y.E.]

Twilight of the Mythmaker

In his last years, Jack Kirby is often treated with dignity and fairness by some seeking the fruit of his imagination. Over time, especially those difficult days toiling for unappreciative companies, Kirby had stockpiled concepts and characters, which he hoped one day to put to use for his own and his family’s profit. That day arrives when Topps Comics, imprint of the bubble-gum outfit, comes calling and, using the King’s ideas, they launch the Kirbyverse, and the industry’s best and brightest join in the fun and pay homage to the master. Oh, and the money was good. Jack Kirby passes away on Feb. 6, 1994. He is 76. He leaves behind universes of concepts, characters and legends that will, we reckon, live on long after we’re dead and buried. Rosalind — Jack beloved, essential, lifesaving Roz — departs this mortal coil in Dec. ’98, and her and Jack’s offspring carry on the job of protecting Jack’s legacy and defending what is rightfully theirs. Today that involves a court battle against a monolithic corporation. Much of his life’s work is currently in print and pages of his original art are commanding astronomical prices (including one iconic Fantastic Four page, featuring Kirby’s most beloved creation, The Silver Surfer, selling at auction last year for $155,350). Opposite page top: A more principled pair of comic book creators you’ll be hard-pressed to find: Alan Moore and Jack Kirby at the 1985 San Diego Comic-Con. Photo taken by and courtesy of Jackie Estrada. Opposite page bottom: In this pic by Alan Light, it is Will Eisner and Mr. and Mrs. Jack Kirby at a San Diego Comic-Con dinner in 1982. Found on Flickr. This page: Another superb portrait by Greg Preston taken during a 1992 visit to Jack Kirby’s home. Courtesy of Greg. Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

Conscience and the King

Say what you want about his God-given gifts, but the artist was just a guy who wanted a square deal, expecting to get what he gave. Tenacious and never afraid to brawl, Jakie Kurtzberg fought tooth and nail to escape the decrepit, despairing poverty of his ghetto streets. Through lock-jawed determination, he did make a break and got away scot-free. And then some. Jacob found safehaven in a brand-new industry bursting at the rafters, one that could eat a kid up and spit ’im out, and he owned it. He quickly fixed for himself a permanent place at the table reserved for the top of his fledgling field. And soon, among his peers (who gaped slackjawed at his speed and ability) and his fans, the head of that table was set for Jack Kirby, where he truly reigned a king. In the Lower East Side that formed him, there were two disparate native sons a scrappy urchin could look to as role models. There was a thug and a thespian: Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the gangster who masterminded Murder, Inc., and became bloody rich off of sin and death; and there was James Cagney, the gifted performer who parlayed his charm, acting skills, and dancing ability into Hollywood fame and riches. “You became a gangster,” Kirby told TCJ, “depending on how fast you wanted a suit.” But a mobster’s life wasn’t in the cards. Instead of the pistol, he wielded a pencil to get what he wanted. He’d go Cagney’s route: self-expression. But Jack never quite escaped from racketeers in flashy duds who took what belonged to others; maybe it wasn’t .45 automatics they brandished, but contracts and legalese. Still, the shysters came from the same dark hole as those Manhattan mobsters. Even into his golden years, he was a maker forced to confront the takers who wanted it all. The parasites in their shiny suits control much of Jack Kirby’s life’s work now. The Marvel/Disney empire is raking in billions of dollars from the fruit of his imagination and they aren’t leaving scraps for his children and grandchildren; what they are sharing with progeny Susan, Neal, Barbara and Lisa, and their children is nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Perhaps we who care about creators rights and the treatment of those whose legacy formed this very industry, need to be appalled that the custodians of Jack Kirby’s pantheon are the antithesis of eveything his heroes stood for. Maybe it’s time to get tough and do what Jack did best: show a little street-smart gumption and tell the truth.

fin

“The King shall have the custody of the lands of natural fools taking the profits of them without waste or destruction, and shall find them their necessaries, of whose fee forever the lands be holden. And after death of such idiots, he shall render it to the right heirs.” — English Law, 1374

King-Size Kolossal Kudos Ye Ed is especially grateful to Patrick Ford & John Morrow for their much appreciated consultation regarding this article, hopefully the first of many on a subject this magazine is dedicated to: creators’ rights. 53

Coming into his third decade of comic book super-stardom, the artist reflects on the

Nelson Alexander Ross is in coasting mode. Though urged by frequent collaborator and friend Kurt Busiek, among others, to focus on creatorowned material — and nagged by his own desire to produce the Great American Graphic Novel — the artist is hesitant to risk all in the face of a sluggish economy and fickle comics medium, choosing, for the moment, to play it safe. But the examples of Kirby, Adams, and Ware continue to entice the ambitions of Alex Ross.

had the pleasure of first interviewing Alex for the debut issue of Comic Book Artist Vol. 2, the Top Shelf incarnation of my former magazine. That conversation took place just shy of a decade ago, in April 2003, and we talked about his youth, career in advertising, early success with Marvels — the breakthrough mini-series that catapulted writing collaborator Kurt Busiek and Ross to critical acclaim and mass acceptance — and we covered the artist’s subsequent adventures in the comic-book trade up ’til then.

Yours truly had a couple of minor regrets with CBA V2 #1 (some unfortunate printing glitches and color fidelity issues), and much as I loved the Superman cover artist team-up of Neal Adams pencils and Alex Ross finishes, I’ve always had a hankering to have an all-Alex cover gracing my mag. I got my wish. Thanks, Mr. Ross. Once again, you make me look good. The following was conducted by phone on Dec. 5 and 10, 2012, and it was copy-edited by the artist for clarity and accuracy. We start the talk centered on Neal Adams.—Ye Ed.

Interview conducted by Jon B. Cooke

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illusion of realism, keeping old school in the digital age, and the call of independence as a teenager. The ’80s was an explosion of opportunity and everybody sort of finding that there were new doors that allowed for everybody to get a more personalized voice out there. There was more business opportunity, and of course that would open up even bigger in the ’90s with what would eventually happen with Image and other publishers, but the real explosion of that came in the ’80s. I mean, thinking back upon Marvel having the Epic line, and, of course, in the last 25 years, they’ve had nothing like that since. I don’t know if you can count their creatorowned line [Icon], although that might be the closest thing to be its stand-in. And DC has had a long period, beginning with the work Alan Moore did, opening up doors, and then eventually creating an entire sub-line, the Vertigo line, to foster creative ideas. And that fed over into the DC mainframe as well, too, and that’s where you find a good part of my career. And those doorways have closed in recent years moreover, but I feel we’re due a kind of reversal at some point here. The biggest crime in the industry of the last decade is that they modified the system to become more one where the creative juices and direction, and the big ideas for everything, come from the top down. So, instead of you hiring talented people to craft and chart the course of where the creative community and characters go, you’re really try to have the guys that are — or they made this happen — the men who hold those reins as publishers and

Next page: Alex Ross’ portrait of Norman Rockwell [2012], courtesy of A.R. and the Norman Rockwell Museum. Used with permission. Inset left: Alex in 2011 by Seth Kushner. Below: Promo illo by Alex for the mini-series Uncle Sam.

Transcribed by Steven E. Tice & Steven Thompson Photographic Portrait by Seth Kushner

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

Comic Book Creator: [Discussing disappointment that Neal Adams did not draw the final chapter of Kree-Skrull War, The Avengers #89-97, June 1971-Mar. ’72, due to deadline constraints] Whether they realized it at the time or not, these things have a really long life to them when they’re done well. They’re worth waiting for. Alex: Well, I think Neal has made comments like this. I just saw a documentary about Steve Rude where both Neal and I comment separately on our friend Steve, and Neal says that people of Steve’s generation (which includes me) came into a world of publishing much more open, having been broken open for greater creative control, involvement, and ambition because people like Neal and his generation of craftsmen really fought to bend it to that direction. And so somebody like me has never really fully experienced the struggle it was to get there, as well as the fragility of that, that it was always in a state of flux. That’s what my entire career has kind of been in that bobbing and weaving of this time period that had been a new landscape for creative elaboration and creative ambition in comics, and seeing that rise and fall and go through high and low periods, and that any of that was achievable before. We’re not the generation — guys who’ve been working in comics for the last 30 years — we’re not the ones who grew up in the dark ages of comics where there was almost no freedom given. CBC: Right. “Creator” was just another cog in the machine. Alex: Or the idea of pitching a project, genuinely going forth into completely independent territories. Those were very slim corridors of opportunity back then, and certainly nobody was thinking along the lines of such incredibly uncommercial concepts as what people have been allowed to do more in the last 25 years. CBC: Where do you see it today? Do you see it as malleable, or was there a time when it was more pliant? Alex: Well, everything has been less pliant in the entirety of my career than the period when I was just reading comics

Above: After receiving the August color rough [see opposite page] for Alex’s CBC #1 cover, a few modifications were suggested by Ye Ed — tightening the focus on Jack, for instance — and the artist sent the above pencil sketch a month later. The piece included yet another thoughtful contribution beyond the revised art. “The logo is another stab at a way to approach the book,” Alex wrote. And so, again, yours truly mulled over an attractive option. But, grateful as I am for Alex’s generosity, Ye Ed opted to stay the course, though we did immediately adopt Alex’s subtitle for the issue, changed from Y.E.’s “Kirby Lives!” to A.R.’s “Kirby’s Kingdom,” one resonant with multiple meaning, whether alluding to Jack’s fabled nickname, his right to characters he co-created, and — again — an echo of Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come masterwork. Bravo!

often manifests itself to be story material for the movies, and yet that there’s this conflict taking place within the publishers of… It doesn’t seem often that the creative teams win out. The characters are more important, very often, than the creative teams of making good stories. Alex: The obvious answer to that is that the characters are owned by the company, and the creators are not. So the creators at some point have to be shown they’re replaceable for the sake of the larger entity to maintain its complete, total control of power. But that, itself, is an excuse for not necessarily advancing into the broader world of fiction writing, of novels, the way there is greater creative control on the part of authors writing books, that they create what they create, they’re given their participation in whatever they create. It’s not a bunch of individuals all crafting characters to be then owned by Random House or whatever. So, in a way, we could have evolved in that direction, but we keep having these roadblocks that always stop it from completely getting that way. And, of course, you’ve got both companies owned by larger corporations that are never going to completely make that a possibility, but there’s sort of middle ground there that can be achieved of a peace between a vibrant creative community and the characters always maintaining their ownership by the larger company. But there’s mainly the deep root of greed that always stumbles that up, and a lot of times that greed is — it’s, again, subjective, not to the times as much as the individuals, key individuals making the choices that hold things in a certain pattern that they’ve been in. CBC: Do you think the decline of sales in the last 20 years is a permanent thing? It’s just a continuing, steady decline? Or do you perceive shifts? Alex: I think there’s going to be some unseen shifts. I mean, I hold onto too much (possibly false) hope that the business could right itself, in some ways find some new inspiration here and there, that there’s always a chance that things could pick up in a much better way than they currently might be. I do feel like one of the biggest problems is not necessarily just a creative difference of getting better material out there, but there’s just simply too much stuff, too much demanded of the audience that’s addicted to it. And, for the audience outside of comics, too much thrust at them to even navigate for opening their eyes to this art form. So there’s more published than what there’s needed to be, more than presidents of the companies are getting to play like the fans that there’s an audience for, regularly, and that’s one of the probthey are, turning the publishing sandbox into their own particulems, I think, until that really changes. And the thing is, I’m lar sandbox. So, everybody else is essentially hired to effectively told that takes really another crash like the kind that I guess realize the top guys’ vision over anybody else’s individual vision. was felt ten to 12 years ago. You have to have that happen And I know some people that would argue that’s the same thing again before there’s kind of a self-reduction in the number as what Stan Lee had to do in the early ’60s, which I think was a of books. But that same self-reduction will take away jobs different thing there, because that was just a Hail Mary pass in from countless creators. So, with that necessary adjustment some ways, in Stan building a new form of that company. Where that should be made, it’s going to hurt so many people. And things were going, they had no idea it could turn into what it it just seems like there could be an adjustment of it — Well, I became. There they were just trying to keep the doors open. don’t need to keep going on about it. I could make a real stink I think right now you don’t have a place where that kind about how I don’t think things are run well. I think if you’re of talent can be fostered and nurtured as much. Like the time going to launch a line of books, maybe you don’t start with when you had Alan Moore coming over to the States — not a certain number over 50. Maybe see how well you can pull physically — but coming over to take over the Swamp Thing people into your plans, make it seem reasonable to buy into book and making it “The” book, just surreptitiously, on its own, the entirety of the line you’re doing, make it economically becoming the book everybody was talking about, and that feasible, let alone intellectually feasible. it would begin to affect the entire mainstream of American CBC: What is it, $3.95 for a comic book? publishing. That same opportunity isn’t there the same way, Alex: I think it’s $3.99, yeah. And, when you think about how because the person who is working on Swamp Thing today is a majority of these books, they read pretty quickly. You’ll be working from a more confined way in which that book is afdone with them in under ten minutes. You know, four dollars fected by the other books it ties into, and the way it’s affected by for an experience that’s not that long. Well, that’s not really the entire guide for the whole universe. So, things are a whole where the value comes from. It still comes from physical lot less individualized, allowing less opportunity for the next Alan possession, I think. There’s a mindset about the owning of Moore to emerge in quite the same way. a piece of art, and the attachment to that, and that’s where CBC: Maybe the mainstream comics industry, DC and I find that the whole thing of the digital age still stuns me, Marvel, there’s a schizophrenic kind of thing that happens. that the price point there, which should be the same as a There’s the licensing, there’s the characters, the road to the purchase for your iPad, but technically, when you think about movies. Then there’s the creative, where you get a good how transitory it is, how we don’t value things that only exist creative team to do a good story, and that, obviously, very in cyberspace the same as we do a physical object that’s #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

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been completely burned into existence. It just, it doesn’t seem like there’s a sustainable kind of difference. CBC: What do you mean exactly? As far as the iPad comics, the expense of them? How much they are? Alex: Well, if you buy them directly, then it seems like eventually that would have to give way, that it can’t stand. CBC: The physical comic book, you mean? Alex: Well, no, I would say that the price would have to rapidly go down on digital versions to broaden that base as much as they would like, and, of course, if that then completely outlasts and outlives the print version, you’re going to have that much less money to be paid out to the people making the stuff. You know, that much less of a pie to share. Now, it would be a much better thing if we knew we could reach hundreds of thousands of readers who could afford almost, like, a quarter a book, because they had interest in comics through — Probably many, possibly millions of people, who would be interested in the content of comic books if it wasn’t such a giant money suck. CBC: How much is a digital comic book? Alex: I believe it still is the same price, so when they release them same day to stores, you’re paying $3.99 online, or $2.99. Actually, it looks like DC has a range of prices. They have $2.99 over a lot of their mainstream books, but then they, some of their key titles, the most popular titles, they bump up to the $3.99. CBC: Obviously, then, you want to increase the volume on that to be able to bring the price down, and then, like you said, to open it up. Alex: Yeah, I mean, if we were selling comics like there was back in the ’40s, then that economy would work out. Selling six million comic books a month would be a lot to split up, then, a lot of shared accomplishment. CBC: You know, it’s very strange how it just remains in flux. It doesn’t seem to want to settle down. It’s just that we’ve been talking the same talk for 15, going on 20 years now: What’s the business model? What’s going on? But we’re also seeing, albeit contracted almost in a natural fashion, that the direct sales market still survives, that the physical comic book still gets distributed. Alex: Yeah, and to speak for those that I’ve talked to who have been through the last couple years, this year was better than the prior year. Just about a year-and-a-half ago it was a much worse time. Things had fallen a great deal, and a lot of these things that have happened, a lot of these things that I don’t necessarily care for, have helped pick it up, helped pick up additional attention. And when the economy goes in a way that I don’t necessarily understand why it’s working that way, or I don’t agree with the creative direction, you do start to have that terrible feeling of, like, wow, I really — What do I have in common with either the readers or the business in the way that I completely disagree with the path that’s been taken, but look at how the proof is in the pudding. CBC: Well, can you be specific? Alex: Well, say, the redirection, rework everything. Either redesign — Throw everything out in terms of either storyline or continuity, and basically trick your audience into buying a thing that is essentially the same as it was before, but now, look, it’s got a new number one in front of it. Well, that’s not necessarily honest, and both publishers have done that to death, and of course they’ve done that in big ways in the last couple years. But I find fault with that because I just think like, I’ve been reading this stuff for 40-some years, and I’ve seen this trick applied again, and again, and again. I would think that the rest of the audience would be as jaded or as critical of that as I am, and when you find that they’re not, that they’re actually responding wholeheartedly to it, then you kind of realize, “Oh, it may be a young man’s game,” or I may not have what it takes to really connect with the audience that dominates. CBC: Yeah. Look at the top ten TV shows and how many of those do you enjoy. Alex: Right. Well, I know Alan Moore had said a thing — It

wasn’t one of his best statements, but it was one from just a year ago that was something about how he perceived his audience, his faithful audience, as being one that he had such great respect for, that they were principled people exactly like him that valued the same things that he did. And it was a wonderful thought and statement, but it’s one that I thought was, wow, that really might be a whole handful of naiveté, that you can’t assume that the people you’re reaching out to share quite the same things with you in common. I’ve definitely made that mistake, myself, time and again, and I felt like he made that mistake in that proclamation. CBC: When did you make that mistake? What happened? Alex: Oh, just simply putting all your heart and soul into things that wouldn’t necessarily prove to be as popular as maybe you thought they were in your head. [laughs] A lot of the time I put into the Earth X trilogy series at Marvel was one that felt like it was something that it had gotten great sales at a certain point, and then it fell down like a lot of things do, and at a certain late stage of working on the third series, finding out that pretty much the audience had largely moved on to other things. So I might have been the belle of the ball at one point. There was no recapturing that. It was an audience that had moved on. I hadn’t. And I was still adjusted to this idea of this thing as being this super-cool thing that I thought was doing such unique or original little storylines within the history of comics. And there are some that maybe still kept with it, but I felt I was tapped into the Zeitgeist at one point, and now I know you can definitely

Above: This cover rough was sent by Alex last August, with which he corresponded, “[This is what] I had envisioned to make the best case I can for this design that was in my head. As you can see from the layout, it’s corresponding to my own most popular work, putting Kirby in the center spot… This also shows a logo mock-up that was my best stab at how I thought the trade dress could look.” Ye Ed confesses an immediate attraction to Alex’s logo treatment — never mind downright swooning over the Kingdom Come-esque motif of the artwork! — but feeling A.R.’s logo design possessed a bit of a (albeit Golden Age) super-hero vibe, yours truly opted to retain the current logotype of CBC. Still, that logo does kick ass...

lose it. I think that, when some of my previous projects had come out, they were in some ways just the right thing at the right time. Marvels kind of hit that way, and so did Kingdom Come. And so you definitely can get drunk on that kind of success.[…] Ours wasn’t a project that was developed and invented by one of the presidents of the company like The Ultimates, so we didn’t have that kind of backbone with Inc. the publisher to do anything but rs, te ac ar Marvel Ch publish what we had until it was TM & ©2013 declining in sales. So when our decline began, it was a reasonable assumption to say, “Hey, but the trades are still selling like gangbusters for the prior series, so it must be that the audience is largely clicking over to saving their money until it’s all put together. They know we’ll put it all in the right order they need to read it and give it to them later on, so why waste your money on those upfront issues?” And that was just destroying us at the publisher, so when we concluded the series, we were at a very weak state with our position with Marvel. [There] was a creative greed [with Earth X by us] where — It’s a different

form of greed. It wasn’t looking at it from, like, “Oh, let’s create this thing because it’ll make us more money.” It was that, oh, we have this story to tell, and wouldn’t it be cool if we have a spotlight, a special on this guy, and this guy, and this guy? And much of that was kind of almost to fill a list of spotlighted characters we thought were worthy of that kind of additional attention, like Captain America or a Spider-Man special that John Romita worked on that I’m very proud of. We did a storyline that had John Romita drawing an aged version of Peter Parker married in what was a fantasy sequence in the story, but married to an old, 50to 60-something-year-old Gwen TM & ©2013 Marvel Char Stacy. And to get John Romita to illustrate that acters, Inc. is pretty bizarre, just to see something like that happen. But, you know, we couldn’t figure out how to roll those things into the main series, so we got ahead of ourselves. We got creatively greedy.

Top left: Alex’s reimagining of Jack Kirby’s famed Fantastic Four #1 cover (inset upper left, inks by Dick Ayers,) painted initially as a poster in 2003 and later used as a variant dustjacket for The Fantastic Four Omnibus Vol. 1 [’05]. Top right: Alex takes on Jack’s Incredible Hulk #1 cover image (inset upper right, inks by George Roussos) for The Incredible Hulk Omnibus [’08]. Opposite page top center: The 1999 edition of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide sported Alex’s version of The King’s cover of The Avengers #4 (inset left, inks by George Roussos) and was subsequently reproduced as a Dynamic Forces lithograph. Opposite page bottom center: Alex contributed this amazingly dramatic painting to grace our beloved sister mag (which founded the TwoMorrows’ ever-widening empire!) The Jack Kirby Collector for its 19th ish [April ’98], back when Ye Ed was Ye Associate Ed! It’s Alex’s paints over Jack’s pencils of an incredible Captain America full-page illustration that originally appeared in the first volume of The Steranko History of Comics [1970] (seen inset right). 58

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CBC: So you’ve taken a lesson from that with your subsequent projects? Alex: I would say that I’ve been a part of things that have had offshoots, like Kirby: Genesis being a good example, where there’s been tie-in books added to the schedule that have been too much for the marketplace to support. Any initial support just ultimately came and went, so we just didn’t have the project the company was hoping would be the super-success it should have been. Maybe it appeared it didn’t succeed because of things I wasn’t implementing, but I wasn’t putting those things in place. I was just a part of it all. Whereas my heart was completely wrapped up in how well this little corner of the Marvel Universe was that I’d set up. So I’ve been more of a participant in stuff where I’ve seen a planned line come into existence with — Currently, there’s multiple books that’ll launch out of the series I just worked on, the Masks series will have follow-ups featuring Ms. Fury, and a new Green Hornet series set in the 1930s, written by Mark Waid, of all people. They’ve already been announced in most cases, and they’ll be within solicitation in a matter of weeks. But those things are happening on projects I’m a part of all the time. Like, there’s a second Shadow book coming out that I’m doing covers for, with Matt Wagner writing it. Do I know that there’s room for another Shadow? I have no idea. So I’m more of a stand-back-and-observe kind of participant at this point. CBC: Looking at the X books, and work you’ve been doing with Dynamite: it’s not like you’re a studio head, but almost that you’re like a publisher within a publisher, certainly a project manager, right? Alex: To a limited degree, yeah. I mean, for the things I’ve had the

strongest hand in, I get a chance to look at the art, the coloring, the lettering, and definitely comments I’ve made regarding not just the crafting of the scripts, but, of course, how that’s finally conducted when it comes to final art. Like, when I was working on this long-running Superpowers series with Dynamite, we were reviving all these ’40s characters, and in some cases they were revived exactly as they were; in some cases there’s a redesign that I applied. And I’m kind of being the rough fact checker to make sure that things run consistent with whatever the direction given was intended to be. So I played somewhat that role. Basically, I’m working with a publisher that’s allowed me to maintain as much involvement as I care to make. Which is much harder to do, obviously, when you’re talking about the larger companies with the larger properties. So it’s been a fun, and sometimes maddening, experience. CBC: You’ve been with Dynamite for a while, right? Alex: Yeah, I guess… I mean, I’ve worked with them from the very beginning launch of their entire publishing empire with Red Sonja, but when I mainly started working with them primarily goes back, I would say, at least four years ago, if not five years ago, when I started to do so much work with them. I still maintained a lot of commercial work with DC and Marvel at that time. So just, things have kind of flowed in this way because it’s easy when you can get the publisher and president on the phone directly and bat around, not just ideas, but whatever you’re looking to try and do, or whatever your complaints are, you can hash out directly. When you have a larger corporate structure, that’s not as easy. Or it’s just simply the person in charge

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probably a very smart, pragmatic end of where to take your business, but I’d like to aim for the dream of just trying to create the Great American Graphic Novel. Like, I’ve got this story to tell. I think it’ll be worthwhile for your time if I can tell you this one tale. And that it would likely be finite. That it would be hopefully telling one good, strong story that comes across within its one physical embodiment. And that was the success for Watchmen for 25 years, and for Dark Knight for 20, and for many other things that we hold in high regard. It’s just that these stories never grew out of favor, but they were their own finite novels, of a sort. CBC: And they had shelf-life. Alex: But, of course, you can never control that. All you can do is try and create those works that have that playability. I mean, I have the greatest admiration for a lot of the talents that have gotten into full graphic novel creation, particularly Chris Ware, who I’m a huge fan of, and everything that people like him or Dan Clowes are doing in comics, those are the things that really do push the boundaries of the art form and show what more can be done to kind of bring it completely on the exact same par as any creative novel, as any work of fiction. CBC: And you’ve done Uncle Sam, and that strayed out of the boundaries, right? Alex: Yeah, that’s about my closest example for doing something that would be my kind of version thereof, and original story that’s a finite tale to stand outside the world of costumed heroes. What’s good about my art style is that, if I can bring something to life, I still need to apply it to things that are kind of fantastical and unliving, whereas if I just draw you an adventure starring a bunch of people standing around talking, well, you could either take photos of that, or you could get any number of different artists to interpret that. What’s the point of having this realism if it’s not applied to something that isn’t realistic, naturally? CBC: Do you actually have your creator-owned material? Do you make notes? Alex: Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ve been doing that for a very long time. In fact, I had one project that I was dreaming so heavily on for such a long time that — I mean, the number of sketches I’ve done really doesn’t matter, but I was so ambitious towards it that I thought I would go in that direction back about eight years ago, and made the detour towards what is effectively a more commercial product in the form of the Justice series, but it’s just where my heart kept going to, because I knew I had this story bursting inside me that I’d only

This page: Alex produced covers for the New York City weekly, The Village Voice, a number of which were subsequently turned into T-shirts sold by Bob Chapman’s Graphitti Design. Their Alex Ross topseller, by a longshot, was the Barack Obama image seen above and in the background. Even Ye Ed’s youngest, Daniel Jacob, made no bones about his support, proudly donning this “Super O” attire throughout his years as high school student.

you just never really see eye-to-eye with. At least I can say with my friend Nick Barrucci, who runs Dynamite, we see eye-toeye on a great many things, and that makes life a whole lot better, and I’m blessed to have him. So even if things weren’t going to be the same way forever, I can honestly say I prize this time I’ve spent with them. It’s been a great period of my life to have been in their company. CBC: And it couldn’t have happened at a better time? Alex: It really, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was a real relief. And, again, it was just organic the way that things went that way. It wasn’t with a sort of thought-through decision of, “Okay, I’m making this deal with them.” It’s like, no, it’s not really a deal, it’s just where things moved to. I still continue to work with other publishers and individuals all the time who contact me for different things. A lot of this for me is forestalling the inevitability of creating a completely original, creator-owned work, which I would love to invest my time to, and just looking for that moment to completely be ready to pull that trigger. I’m not lacking for ambition or ideas. In some ways it’s the will, but in other ways it’s the time to get all my pieces together. I’m happily able to say I’m kept busy enough that I don’t get enough time to just sit there and work on a pitch for somebody else to possibly publish. CBC: Well, that was naturally my next question. So it is on your mind for you to create your own universe? Alex: [Laughs] And I think that, itself, might be even its own misnomer. As much as you can create tons of characters for your own thing, I think thinking of it as just being something of an economic thing of, like, “Hey, I’ve got a universe of properties and that’s going to be great to sell to some big buyer with a lot of cash,” that becomes, itself, a short end,

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been thinking about for about a year at that point, but that’s where my creative instincts left me, and I more or less left my independent drive on the shelf. Not necessarily because of fear of jumping into that arena, but more just going, I know I have this thing I’m desperate to get out. I want to live the experience of telling this story. And I gave in to that drive. CBC: Is there a consideration that when you’re going to, let’s say, not spend so much time smelling the roses along the way [Alex laughs], that you will be devoting your full energies to this? Alex: Well, yeah. And part of my experiment that happened this summer, that wasn’t necessarily designed to be an experiment only for that purpose, but I thought it would be a chance to see how I could do interiors in my current schedule where I do have a lot of cover work. The Masks series I produced over three months doing about seven pages a month. And, aside from those seven pages, I had somewhere between three to four covers on top of that. It got done, and it got done without breaking me, without making me feel like it was the worst experience of my life. I wasn’t working in a horrendous schedule worse than I was used to, so it gave me hope that this was a reasonable expectation that I could go towards again. So I was very happy for that chance to test that out. Because there is something different from planning a cover, going from different subject matter of one composition to another, and a lot of times I’m doing one cover, start to finish, and then moving on to a completely new cover topic, whereas, with story pages, you’re doing a lot of things in bulk at one sitting. You’re penciling everything for a given month, or, as it happened, I was actually doing things in four-page increments a lot, so I would try to get through those four, and then tackle another four, or three, depending, and doing those, say, four pages I penciled in two days. Of course, I had already taken the layouts and reference, but that felt very satisfying to have finished off the pencils that quickly. Then I was jumping into painting a sort of half-tone stage for a couple days, but ultimately getting everything done within a fairly neat, quick turnaround, and not feeling like I had sacrificed anything of the labor that needed to go into that work. So to do that now with a fuller book would be fantastic. I just still have to curse myself, I never come up with small storylines. If I could come up with something that was, like, fifty to sixty pages and feel like I could go ahead and put that out as my great graphic novel, that would be awesome, but I keep manufacturing these ideas that take friggin’ forever to tell. So I only think in sort of epic form. CBC: [Laughs] Grandiosity, huh? Alex: Yeah, yeah. I’m very full of myself, that’s for sure.[…] CBC: I spent part of the summer going through your work and just reveling in Marvels again. I said this in the last interview, of when I first picked that up. Okay, there’s the conceit

that it’s painted and it’s a hyper-realistic approach to superheroes, and in a marketing sense, that’s really smart. But at Art ©2013 Alex Ross. All characters TM & ©2013 their respective owners. the core of Marvels is the fact that your cartooning is really solid. It’s what gives it sustainability. Above: Unfortunately, plans That’s what makes it authentic and genuine work in that it’s for a hardcover collection of really — I guess this isn’t really a question, but that’s why I the Alan Moore series 1963, hold you in such high esteem as a comic book artist— compiling the unfinished Image Alex: Oh, thank you. Comics series [’93] (featurCBC: — is that you give it your all, and you’re unabashed ing the work of collaborators about it, and, gawddamit, super-heroes are fun. Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Dave Gibbons, Don Alex: Yeah, well, at that time a big part of it was not necesSimpson, and Jim Valentino), sarily the fun aspect, it’s trying to conquer the thing that I were scuttled in early 2010. But think we all carried with us reading the stuff from childhood not before Alex completed the is that we didn’t question the belief in it. We thought these cover artwork. Note, on the penthings were real. We weren’t looking at them ironically or cil sketch in upper left, Alex’s thinking, “Oh, look at this way of drawing Superman, it’s so direction for logo placement. silly.” We accepted the fantasy as being a thing we wanted Both courtesy of the artist and to believe in, and did believe in, not wanted to, we just autoDynamite Entertainment. matically did. And to try and convince not just the audience that had been there that these things could be accepted as more real, but to convince an audience that maybe had always dismissed it as never seeming plausible was the great ambition I had. And there was these tiptoeing aspects towards that that came from artists like Dave McKean and Jon Muth, when they did things like either Black Orchid and Meltdown, projects which would show super-heroes in a slight, little context, a little, tiny view of, say, a Neal Adams costume in a painting, or Batman in the deep shadows with a little hint of his super-humanness. You know, I wanted to take it full board, where you could fully appreciate the idea that, no, no, here’s the stuff in the daylight, and it doesn’t look silly. I wanted to achieve that. I wanted you to buy the absurd fantasy, which is, while none of this stuff is possible, but if you squint and look at it this way, boy, it looks cool. And I think one of the key things that inspired me from when I was 20 and hit upon the idea and went upon the process of

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This spread: Alex’s cover sketches submitted to publishers of the book Stan Lee’s How to Create Super-Heroes. This unproduced book would have been the first depiction by the artist of Stan “The Man” Lee with his well-known co-creations. Alex comments, “It was absolutely essential for me to illustrate the hand and form (mostly blocked by Stan) of an artist there in the piece, acknowledging the part that either Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko played in creating these characters. I would never have done the piece with just Stan alone with these characters, as I believe it would simply continue a lie.” Alas, complications arose and Alex exited from the assignment. The status of the book, mentioned online as forthcoming in July from Dynamite Entertainment, is not entirely clear. Sketches courtesy of the artist, with the help of Dynamite Entertainment. 62

crafting really the rough pitch that would eventually become Marvels with Kurt, of course, is just the vision of, hey, if I can paint fire, applying that to the Human Torch, as opposed to any other costumed hero that you could give painted life to, if I can make you look at a man on fire, you can’t ever interpret that as being a farcical costumed hero. You have to be overwhelmed with the ferocity of that being, “Oh, my God! That’s a man on fire!” And suddenly you’ve broken through to a new place, and so I felt like the key thing there was having that visual brought into life. I almost would have had him in the entire series if I could have, but it was meant to be a historical retrospective. CBC: About Jack Kirby: What are your feelings about how Jack has been treated, whether in his lifetime, and the current fight that the estate is in. Is there anything you’d like to share on that? Alex: Well, I kind of feel like we know the great sin of how the Superman deal went is one of the biggest, most well-known stories in comics, given that that built the entire industry. But given that Jack Kirby himself almost built that entire other half of the industry by his own blood and sweat through countless books over a 50-year career, it’s got to go down as really the greatest sin of comics that in a way he didn’t both receive the amount of remuneration in his lifetime that he deserved, and that there isn’t a permanent structure set up for his family today. That may get accomplished at some point in our lifetimes. None of these stories are completely one-sided, of course, but, as you might expect, my sympathies are definitely with the artist in this case, and

I hope that, over time, people could come to understand that the physical effort that was there exceeded anything that most people wrap their heads around, which is it wasn’t that he was given a script to work on. More than most of the time, he was working on comic books that there wasn’t even a full conversation on. He was just jumping into it, turning it in, and then another guy would rewrite his dialogue. And if you think that’s the same thing as another person being an author of something, or a co-author of something, than you don’t fully grasp the level of effort that was there, that the invention of characters, that the originality of storylines that was so much of it coming from just what occurred to him on the page, or what was with him in his private moments, those are things that should come to be in the fullest understanding people should have for his work. If he and his family are never going to get the money, then at least understand what the damned guy did. Appreciate that, yes, he got robbed, but he at least should have your respect for what he created, by so much of his own sweat. CBC: Well, do you think he’s misunderstood by any number of fans who immediately jump to, “Oh, you’re bashing Stan”? Alex: Right, yeah. He is hugely misunderstood, largely because most people, of course, don’t know how much physical effort there is in illustration. That’s a big part of it. And then people might consider the time he put into that and then think, yeah, but then with the script, he still had his work rewritten on him. You know, dialoguing something, again, not the same thing as coming up with a full tale in your head, then putting it down, physically, breaking the story down, and illustrating every single moment of it before somebody else has a look at it to say, “Oh, I’m going to have this redrawn here,” or, “I’m going to have a paste-up artist do some work on this.” Anyways, I’m picking on the same things over and over again. Sorry. CBC: Have you had stuff that you plotted that was dialogued by others? Alex: Yeah. Including, in small part, the current book that I have out right now. I had a rough idea for a plot structure, most of it reflecting the way the first issue was told, and then it was realigned by the author who came in to work on this book, Masks, and fit the larger storyline that he wanted to tell. I mostly got to draw and paint the pages that I wanted to work on with, as I said, these adjustments made. I’ve had more pleasant experiences, probably, than the average person. My bigger problem is that I’ve been too naïve in not realizing how unique a structure the deal you made with the companies needed to be, where you had to make sure that your name goes in there as either co-writer of the story, or co-collaborator, whatever way. Like, it was a last-minute realization in the development of Kingdom Come that they couldn’t just give me the co-plotter credit that I was due. I mean, I came up with the pitch, came to the company with it. I had written 40 pages of handwritten notes telling the outline, and I was going to be just delegated to “artist.” And that was because I didn’t work out in the contract beforehand that I’m credited automatically as co-plotter. I figure a guy who writes gets paid for writing, and then whatever the credits read as will get that worked out. Well, that was my naiveté. I didn’t know. So what we did is we removed the credits that would differentiate who did what, and just said it was by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. But if you go out and check out, say, like the iPad version of it, they’ve got a format of how they list these things, so an iPad copy of Kingdom Come is going to say “writer/artist,” whereas the truth of who did what is much more blurred. And I’m not trying to take anything away from the writer’s efforts in that, it’s just that I obviously had this heavy hand in it. And it’s been muchdocumented, but that’s where there’s always a way that the stuff gets mixed up just by the deal-making of the stuff, that business comes in to ruin what could have been handled better. CBC: In the history of comics, these things have enormous consequences, don’t they? A throwaway character shooting #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

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across the realm of space, him being a herald for a worldeater, has changed aspects of the history of comics. Alex: Well, let alone the fact that the retroactive thing of you didn’t create this because it was created under the group title that you’re working on here that was initially claimed to be, you know, initially conceived by one other person, thus everything that you contribute to that, including the invention of new characters, will retroactively be given to the prior person. Like Bob Kane’s deal on Batman. And nobody ever fought, as far as I understand, between the estate of Bill Finger or any of the people who did the ghosting work for Bob Kane, nobody fought to somehow change that dynamic. It was just work at that point in history. And now, of course, you’ve got this flawed history that is kept. Until we get these independent books that come out and begin to start — Of which we’ve had plenty in the last 40 years, but still, it’s a story that needs to be constantly reaffirmed, what really happened, who really did what. CBC: Right. And it’s, whatever, sometimes parsing this stuff is, like — I mean, I think that there’s great importance to looking very closely at the margin notes in any number of these stories to really see the contribution within the Marvel method of what the artist did. And it’s just…it’s a lot of work, I guess. You know? Alex: Well, it’s not just a lot of work. It needs to be reconfirmed for people that, like — take a look at it, seriously, and you’ll see that the majority of those lines that wound up getting used, they’re there. They’re slightly reworded, but that means the entire script was crafted by the guy who drew it, and he doesn’t get credit as co-writer. He gets the designation as “king,” but not as co-writer. That’s not quite, again, the full truth. And he has the unfortunate thing of having died early so that he’s not here to still make the case for himself with his collaborations with other men who have lived to be in their nineties. CBC: And if we can segue right now into Kirby: Genesis. What’s the history of that? Alex: Well, it’s a deal that was made between Nick Barrucci and the Kirby estate, working with Lisa [Kirby, Jack’s youngest daughter] as their main representative. CBC: Who went to whom? Alex: Oh, I’m sure that Nick reached out to her. However that first hooked up, I’m not sure, but Nick has a feeling for a lot of the same stuff. We’re the same age, so we come at the material the family owns with the same kind of preconceptions about what was important in comics history, and what we think that might stir up some longings for people. Like, you know, he was right to get a hold of the Green Hornet property, because when he relaunched that, it made a big splash, and that hadn’t been seen in 20 years at the point that he was doing it. So nobody had done anything with the Kirby stuff since the Topps deal from the ’90s, and that also, it had its debatable points of strength. It did have the last published new artwork of Kirby’s stuff done from somewhere, I think, in the early ’80s, at the latest point of his work output. Despite that, it still never quite pulled together a whole universe, and our ambition was to try and build sort of a pocket universe of interrelating characters that could be there for the family to hold up as, like, this is our own self-contained Kirbyverse. And we came at it with, of all things, a writer who had worked on some of the Topps books with the Victory series Kurt did. And I think Kurt also worked on, what’s the kids’ book, TeenAgents? So he had history with both those things, and, of course, Kurt remains a strong talent in comics, so he certainly gave it his all in putting every idea that he could into that. I mean, there were a lot of original spins on this stuff. And also with research, he’s a huge research junkie, to research what it might have been that was left on the table, note-wise, from Jack in some of these things. Kurt’s instincts for a lot of things are very good, to match a lot of the comic stylings from our youth, whether it’s to give a name to something that was unnamed before that feels like it’s in keeping a bit with the way that either the author would have meant,

or of the time it came from. He’s always had a good instinct for that, and much of that has always gone into the Astro City book we work on. CBC: What jumped out at you of the stuff you hadn’t previously known that Jack came up with? Alex: Oy. Well, it was just, there was a whole load of stuff we threw in there that I maybe saw a snippet of in the pages of the [The Jack Kirby] Collector, whether it was storylines for things about prehistoric worlds… Geez, I’d have to put in front of me to remember the exact titles of some of these things. I used to have a trade in my office, so I would have had the proper research materials right at my hands. Nobody ever asks me about this, so why would I [laughs] be prepared to talk about it? Like, I didn’t know anything about Jack’s Secret City Saga, so where it related to these other characters that had never been tied to it before, they were just individual sketches, things like the sketch of Nightglider, or of Bombast, or Captain Glory, so the way that all that got tied together back in the ’90s being one way, and then there’s the notes that Kirby had made, and Kurt’s interpretation of it is to always try and somehow adhere closer to what he feels instinctively would have been Jack’s intention. And, again, we were just sort of throwing everything across; you know, making assumptions for where he might have taken a storyline or how he might have fulfilled something is a challenge that just can’t be met, because we’ll never know. All you can do is try and make something that seems to show that level of respect and appreciation for what was there. And I was adamant to try and maintain the consistency and authenticity of his designs, and to not redesign them. So in the case of how I worked on the project, I was doing layouts for every issue. A bigger part of the layouts was not just for the feel I was hoping to give the art style but was sort of 63

Above: Partner, pal and publisher John Morrow opened up his vast Kirby Vault to CBC and shared this colorized print, penciled, and inked by the King, entitled (what else?) “God.” The original is one of a set of three depicting the Supreme Being (all produced in 1970, perhaps in-between the Marvel and DC gigs), and are said to have been hung in the Kirby household in Southern California. We’ve long since lost the name of the colorist who finally hued this, so if you know, give us a shout.

my own bombastic interpretation of a Marvel style akin to Jack’s invention, not necessarily with Jack’s specific art in mind, but just sort of my intuitive response. For the pages that were done, it’s some of the most energetic layouts and thinking I’ve done in years, and it wasn’t intended for me to override the very talented artist who was working under me, but I wanted to make sure that with each layout he could see exactly, the kind of heft that certain characters should carry, you know, this certain way of drawing the human body that was unique to Jack’s style, whether it was a Captain America body, or a Hulk-style body. And I almost don’t trust anybody enough to let that go, and that’s what the situation was, there. That was me trying to keep such a strong hand in that I want to somehow be this filter of Jack that, through my own research, looking constantly at those images from the Collector and other sources, I wanted to be sure that I was filtering it all right, that what would be finally going down on the page would reflect what Jack did, implicitly. CBC: What did you think of Jack as a writer? I mean, his stuff was pretty unadulterated Kirby, right? Alex: Yeah. Well, you like the rawness of some stuff. I mean, look how far Frank Miller has gotten on a very brutal, shorthand version of Mickey Spillane-style writing, and people seem to think that stuff’s genius, and yet Kirby kind of always gets this backhanded like, “What do you think of that writing, huh? Huh?” Well, it’s not farcical. I mean, look at how much that stuff has still been reinterpreted and continues to inspire for the many decades since. It’s been adapted into multiple cartoons, it’s made its way into live action here and there, and I imagine it will continue to. I can’t imagine that a

New Gods film is so very far off on the horizon. So I think that his own delivery of his own words might have packed a certain amount of clumsiness, but there’s certainly a charm in there, too. Well, again, I accept it all as one whole thing that I thoroughly enjoy. When I get a hold of an original Jack Kirby comic, particularly from the seventies when it was so much Jack on his own, there’s an energy to that that is somehow the purest form, in my mind, of what a comic can be, and that so much of everything else that people like myself have done over the years to maybe update the kind of overly mature interpretation of comics almost seems too much. Like it’s missing somewhat the mark of what was the pure essence of how comics could be at their best.[…] CBC: You made very serious statements in Uncle Sam. Would you like to return to that at all? Social relevance? What do you think of that as being in comics? Alex: I think it’s as arguable a platform as anything. I mean, if some of the most celebrated comics are by independent craftsmen, the likes I’ve mentioned before — you know, Clowes and Chris Ware, whatever, where they’re speaking much more concretely to the unique human experience and things that are very removed from the over-the-top sensationalistic qualities of super-hero comics, than why isn’t this medium as reasonably useful for commentary upon the very fabric of our political society and our history in whatever way it touches, that it shouldn’t be about the politics? It should just be about commentary upon life. Every form of fiction can be utilized in such a fashion and I always thought that we shouldn’t have seemed so alone. We should have been much more embraced, I think, including by the readers of more in#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

dependent fare for doing something that wasn’t providing yet another adventure of… whatever, fill-in-the-blank. It seems easy, like you can take super-heroes and do some kind of commentary upon human life and perspective that way, but politics never seems to cross into this medium, and I would think that it’s a stone left unturned that more people would be drawn to explore. During the worst of the Bush years where I thought it was the greatest sin of our collective histories — some of the things that were being talked about that had occurred — I would have wanted to take a character like a Superman or a Batman and empowered them to go into the White House and then punch the guy in the face. Nothing like that ever occurred but metaphorically, there were things that happened from different creative levels that… of course, now the opposite is that you’ve got so many people that are so wound up they want to do that against the current president. There’s a fair argument that you should keep these property characters maybe a little bit more removed from making such a statement on behalf of a single creator vision or temperament. CBC: Now you say that you’re somewhat sheltered from social media. Alex: Yes, I have no involvement with social media. CBC: Now, but you do have any number of people who are devoted to your work, correct? Who would pretty much follow you. Would you think that? That you’re confident that you have a solid audience that’ll stick around and buy your stuff? Alex: I assume it, because I’m still employed. [laughter] And occasionally I meet people in person who tell me that, so, you know, you extrapolate an amount of it but you also Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

need to think that you don’t get crazy and think you’ve got more than you’ve got. I always figure I’m sort of a force that could be more impactful the more I take on. If I could produce more, then I could have more of a footprint in the business, much like the writers who produce five books a month are the king-makers for the companies they work for. I could be that in effect, except it’s impossible for me to have my hand on so many different things except for the part which you see me do it with: covers for multiple different books a month and then contribution to the storylines of many of those books. That is not seen by the majority of readers as being the equivalent of what those writers do who are able to turn out five scripts a month or more and helm so many of the biggest properties for those companies. CBC: So the equation has to include the pamphlet? I think that we had a little discussion of that last time. I don’t think we went as far as I wanted to go with it in our last interview. Like, Marvels itself as a single unit. Were the four issues necessary beforehand as it comes out incrementally, in installments? Is that an important equation to your income? You’ve got to get that money coming back from each issue, not just the collection? Or is it just really both? Alex: It depends on the project and the publisher. CBC: Let’s say currently, Dynamite. Alex: Well, in the case of Dynamite, certainly for them they need that regular pamphlet to come out. These things aren’t constructed to be long, indulged graphic-novel projects. They don’t particularly do a whole lot of that. They’ve got to make that money where they can, especially on something like a first issue. People will buy more of a first issue

Above: Heaven and Earth and Jack Kirby’s Higher Power are depicted in this awesome spread from Kirby: Genesis #8 [’12], featuring the heavenly paints and layouts of Alexander Ross, the earthy finishes and inks of Jackson Herbert, and soulful coloring of Vinicus Andrade. Courtesy of Alex and the guys over at Dynamite Entertainment: Nick Barrucci, Josh Johnson, and Jason Ullmeyer, all a tremendous help to Ye Ed regarding all the Dynamite material (and then some) when the dreaded deadline doom was nigh!

independent stuff, they’re taking that gamble at least initially. Some get into situations where their regular material that they produce independently has strong support from fans and retailers but it’s not, of course, guaranteed. CBC: Joe Kubert used to work Sunday mornings, like, four hours, five hours on the personal projects — Fax From Sarajevo, the Holocaust book, Jew Gangster — and that creator-owned work. He would allot four hours every single week. Obviously Joe was an extremely disciplined guy who could multi-task and put us all to shame. But is it a consideration like that for you? Alex: Yeah, I can multi-task. I could probably become as focused as he had been, but again, he has a greater satisfaction in that his ability to produce pages is not just faster than me as a painter, it’s probably faster than the average penciler in comics over the last 50 years. He had tremendous, exceptional speed. He’s Kirby: Genesis TM & ©2013 Rosalind Kirby Family Trust. amongst the fastest ever in the of something that might pique their interest than they’ll medium. In a way, comparing a person like myself to him, ever come back for the second and third issue. But if you it’s two very, very different things. I would just need to make Above: According to the Kirby: capture that interest right there at the start with #1 sales sure that I’m doing something that doesn’t risk needlessly. I Genesis trade paperback (where numbers, there’s much more enthusiasm for a whole project have to have the right level of energy to devote to it and that this Alex Ross drawing first or storyline. Whereas, if it’s all in one single release, one the economics work out from the work that I do that is the appeared), “This sketch is the compilation, then the support of readers or retailers may not commercial work, contrasted with the stuff that’s more of a first drawing done for the series be as reliable. The main business of comics is selling the gamble. project, before it was named. pamphlets still, whether that’s the physical pamphlet or the CBC: Currently, are you working 40 hours per week? You The basic design would become online numbers, the digital download numbers. a wraparound cover variant sounded before like you were a workaholic. CBC: I’m asking specifically about you. for issue #1.” Note the initial Alex: Yeah, I know. For 20 years, I was working seven days Alex: For me, it’s busting the monthly nut that comes from logo suggested by Alex, one a week and close to ten hours a day. There would obviously whatever I get paid to do. It’s not relying on the numbers not disimilar to DC’s Crisis on be some time off every month, and I was really just dazed that come from trade collections. You get bigger numbers, Infinite Earths (the latter which that somehow I wouldn’t get anything done, and by the end looks to have been designed by of course, if you own the thing but then again, you only get of the month, I could count like maybe a handful of days Gaspar Saladino). Thanks to the those bigger numbers if that thing’s in demand. I’m gonna try that were not quite the equivalent of taking weekends and artist and the folks at Dynamite but I might never achieve a success like, say, Robert Kirkman a few that were not productive. I would live my life generEntertainment. The mentioned has had with Walking Dead, which is, you know, the outlier. ally around the area where my desk was. If I’m sitting at my cover variant, by the way, was It’s not the norm for all independent materials. desk, I’m working. I’m not fooling around. only made available as a CBC: Do you see that in your future? Obviously, one of the CBC: Is it a joy thing or a Protestant work ethic thing? Joe “Retailer Incentive.” Sigh. aspects I want to explore with Comic Book Creator is the was always focused on meeting deadlines, going on to the independents. next thing. Jack Kirby was always about putting food on the Alex: Right. table as much as they, of course, must have enjoyed what CBC: Is it to be able to try to make your own way within this they were doing. industry and have as much control over it as possible? You’re Alex: I think it’s a different thing because I don’t come from working with any number of — with Marvel and DC — char- that background of suffering and desperate need of gatheracters owned by others. We discussed this somewhat last ing resources. For me it was more desperate need to prove time. Do you have a game plan? Is it vague? myself. Probably more to do with low self-esteem while, at Alex: It’s more vague than it was when I was working with the same time, a more tremendous ego wrapped in it, that the corporate characters because there’s more reliability I wanted to be able to take advantage of this opportunity of you’re banking on there. You know there’s a support system having a platform to reach a lot of people. I’d be driven by in place from the retail community and the fan buying the the idea of “If I could become known as the painter of comstuff. For one thing, you’re going to get a higher rate for ics,” somehow overshadowing even the careers of talented doing the stuff initially. If I do the work independently, I can’t people before me, I was damn well driven to try and achieve be guaranteed of anything matching the rate I might do for that. So for me it was a lot of greed. Not greed for the money Next page: Thanks to Alex something that’s commissioned by one of those companies so much as greed for the recognition and desperation to try and Dynamite Entertainment that owns the properties I’m working for, including Dynaand prove myself in people’s eyes. for both Alex’s cover sketch and mite! They’re not in the habit of publishing creator-owned CBC: And where are you now? final paints for Captain Victory stuff as much either. So I’m going to get paid something Alex: [Laughs] You hate to think of any kind of acknowl#1 [’12]. Note the suggested better for something that’s got a license to it. The thing is, edgement or declaration of coasting but there’s really some title “Galactic” on the sketch. that’s all about survival and people that are doing a lot of the part of that. I always feel like I’m trying to continually keep 66

#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

up the aspect of proving myself and sort of showing, like, “Hey, I still can produce work that looks like maybe what somebody did in half the time on a computer,” which I’m not even sure if it’s true. I think that, actually, my production time in generating a full painting is similar to what I’ve heard in terms of physical output of a lot of digitally painted work by contemporary artists and that it looks roughly similar in some capacities. But I also know there’s loads of stuff that exceeds what I can produce, especially when so many talented people have come out of the era of working through a video game generation and the kind of graphic elements that have developed. I mean, computer Photoshop painter effects from just even a decade ago are nothing nearly as accomplished as we have today. But I’m also gratified to know I still get to work with paint on paper and, to me, that’s a very stimulating fact that I probably take too much satisfaction from. I hate to be that cynical about my own drives and ambition but you just like to think that there’s a healthy marketplace, period. And when everybody can’t stop talking about the tumultuous turns that comics take, it causes you to go, “Errrrmmm, well… should I play it safe?” Especially with the length of time I talk about with some of these things. I can only envision things in large projects and if I’m going to create something of my own, I figure it’s going to take me that much more content to convince you that it’s worth your time and your care. I know the thing that I’ve got in mind, I keep mapping out by thumbnailing the project and writing notes. It’s going upwards of 150 to 200 pages or more, and I just wish the story ran shorter, but it’s got too many characters, it’s got too much content, it’s got too much it’s trying to do even if it has a relatively simple objective and storyline that I think it has. So it winds up being a Tolkienesque epic and, I guess, whether I like it or not, I only think in those terms. CBC: And there really is nobody who is going to lay out that kind of money for you to be able to focus on that right now? Alex: Well, there could probably be a deal made like that somewhere except then they own it or co-own it, and that’s another consideration you have to make is what are you giving away from this thing, for all the blood, sweat, and tears, it should by all rights be yours. But if you’re going to get a living wage in producing something, especially if it becomes your only output, you’re going to have to give something and you’ve got years’ worth of stories where people did that for just getting the survival money. And then they have to fight over who owns it by the end of the day. There may be a much simpler way to achieve what I’m thinking of than I fully have investigated. I’m not somebody who’s made an official pitch to anybody yet to have fully gotten the lay of the land. I’ve got friends in publishing and I could be pursuing that and seeing what really would work and it might be more achievable than I think. I just have to get myself around to that process and Kurt has been a part of kicking me that way too, to say, “You’ve gotta stop messing around, you’ve gotta do it!” So we’ll see, I might have more takers than I’m aware, you know. But the greatest joy in working in comics is the action of being able to really communicate information, communicate ideas. Of course, I can get great satisfaction from doing that with single cover images, but there’s always so much more to be gained by telling a full narrative. By completely immersing yourself in a story, I mean. Part of the joy I’ve always had in illustrating these things, with the attempt at such vivid realism, is the sense that hopefully the reader, like I, is somehow buying into this completely. That somehow it’s a more immersive experience than the tale you’re getting over here, whether it’s a novel that you just have to imagine the images completely or a comic book with more two-dimensional pen and ink images where I’m filling in the gaps for you, giving you something that’s lush and vivid and

the illusion of every color and every angle of a form. I used to have more of that satisfaction by bringing to life things that you’ve always known by their general twodimensional forms and trying to imbue them with a threedimensional life because you’ve known them all your lives, but you’ve never seen them maybe quite this way. Or, even if you knew Superman from a certain actor’s interpretation, you didn’t know this other connected group of characters brought to life until I just did them for you.

fin

Alex Axed Atrociously Oy vey! Did Ye Ed overdo it for the first issue of Comic Book Creator! As generous as Alex Ross and Kurt Busiek were with their time — A.R. spent four hours on the phone with yours truly, and KDB about six — come deadline, there was just no way to include all in the print edition. Our solution? Go get your FREE CBC #1 Special Bonus PDF at http://twomorrows.com/freestuff, which includes lots more of the Ross and Busiek talks, and then some! And keep an eye on our website at www.cbcmag.net for even more content featuring the Marvels-lous creative team! 67

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The Art of Writing Comic Books It’s been 20 years since Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross made a breakthrough with their innovative mini-series Marvels. While Alex was relatively new to the field, Kurt had already been toiling in the industry for a decade, as fill-in scripter, assistant editor, literary agent, and Marvel sales manager, before becoming a freelance scribe in 1990. The well-regarded writer, who has suffered dibilitating bouts of fatigue for decades, appears on the rebound, and is candid about his struggles. Kurt was interviewed via phone during three sessions, on Nov. 27 & 29, & Dec. 4, 2012, and he copyedited the transcript for clarity and accuracy.What follows are excerpts from our lengthy talk, more of which is available in the “Bonus Digital Edition” available online. Ye Ed strives to showcase a full-length transcript in the near future.

Torch.” Instead, say Carl Burgos creates the Human Torch much the way James Michener creates Tales of the South Pacific, and if you want to do a sequel, you stick with James Michener. [chuckles] And if you can’t get him to do a sequel, you hire somebody else to do a tale of South Seas adventure, but they make up their own characters. They do their own story. If ownership in the material that they created accrued to the creator the way it does if you’re writing short stories for Analog Science Fiction or even painting book covers, then the history of comics would be vastly, vastly different, but considerably more fair. Siegel and Shuster wouldn’t have to fight over what kind of control they had over Superman any more than Stephen King has to fight over who owns Carrie. He owns it. He has a contract with Doubleday and Doubleday has to live up to that contract, but the contract doesn’t give Doubleday the right to do sequels. It doesn’t give them the right to do Carrie: The Next Generation or The Legion of Super-Carries. [chuckles] If there’s going to be new Carrie material, Stephen #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

Inset right: Alex Ross’ cover for the Marvels collection is an homage to the John Romita, Sr. (layout) and Harry Rosenbaum (paints) cover of The Spectacular Spider-Man #1 [July 1968]. Inset page opposite: Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment, Alex’s cover for Kirby: Genesis #8 [July 2012] and vignette of Brent Anderson’s Samaritan from Kurt Busiek’s Astro City.

Comic Book Creator: How’s everything, Kurt? How’s your health? Kurt: Jon, not what I’d like it to be, but better than it was. A couple of weeks ago, I turned in my first finished script since February [2012] and now, within a week or so, I’ll be turning in the second one. So I’m clearly more productive. CBC: This summer, I sent you an email, one also sent to any number of other comics creators about Jack Kirby and how he has been treated. The original pitch was asking for contributors to imagine a world where Jack Kirby was treated fairly. And you brought up an example that was really very much at the beginning of his career. What would be a perfect world for comic books? Kurt: The question of what would an ideal comic book industry be like, you know — I immediately go to the question of how do you, instead of treating the comic book creators as employees from the point of view of ownership and freelancers from the point of view of benefits, why not treat them the way, say, Random House treated the authors that worked for them? So you don’t say, “Well, Carl Burgos created the Human Torch and when Carl Burgos leaves, we’re going to have a whole bunch of other people write and draw Human

King’s going to write it. CBC: You grew up right outside of Boston? Kurt: Yeah. Yeah, I was growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts. CBC: Did you go to the Creation Cons? Did you encounter comic book professionals at all? Kurt: I had bought that issue of Daredevil at the Colonial Pharmacy in Lexington. The next issue of Daredevil, by the time it came out, I had found a comic book store, The Million Year Picnic, in Cambridge. So I’d found a source where I could regularly buy issues. And I’d begun my interaction with the professional making of comics, as it were. There’s two different stories; one is that one of the guys working behind the counter at the Picnic was Richard Howell. He was either finishing up at Harvard or just out of Harvard, I don’t really know, but he was working the cash register at the Picnic and his girlfriend, Carol Kalish, was in often and they were talkative. We would talk about the latest comics and this and that, and Richard was doing his Portia Prinz comic. So the first time I saw a page of comic book original art, it was this slow time at the Picnic, and Richard was drawing on this piece of Bristol board while he waited behind the counter for somebody to come up and pay for something. So that was the first time I saw anybody actually drawing a comic and I was interested in what — how — what was the craft of doing it? Richard sketched out what he told me was professional script format. It turned out that it wasn’t really, but it was close enough that when I started writing scripts after that 60-page comic Scott [McCloud] and I did, I used that format for a while and it was certainly functional. But Richard was the first guy I saw drawing something that would later be printed out a comic. And sometime around then, I went to a convention in the Prudential Center Plaza, I guess it might have been a Creation con. It was in the hotel that’s part of that complex. I’d never been to a comic book convention before, and the Prudential Plaza was kind of confusing. I was wandering around, looking for the ballroom that the convention was in and couldn’t find it. And I was sort of getting lost, and then Red Sonja walked by. It was Wendy Pini, back before Elfquest existed, and she was dressed up as Red Sonja in chainmail Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

bikini, cape, broadsword, and she walked right by me and I thought, “She’s going to the convention.” [mutual chuckling] She could’ve been going to the ladies room. But by following Wendy, I got to the convention itself. Jim Steranko was there and Neal Adams was there and there were other guys, and I was way too intimidated to actually talk to anybody, but that was my first exposure to comic book conventions. “Look, here’s people selling sketches and original art and oh, my God, that’s Jim Steranko!” That was a particular threshold for me. CBC: When you were making your home-made comics with Scott McCloud — was [renowned childrens book illustrator] Christopher Bing involved with that at all or was he just a comrade? Kurt: Chris was two houses down the street from Scott. Chris was our gateway into undergrounds and indie comics. [Jon chuckles] We were reading Marvel and branched out into DC Comics, but Chris had Eerie and Creepy and Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Crumb and all of this stuff. He was a friend of Scott’s and at the time that Scott was figuring out how to draw comics, and very interested in guys like Jim Starlin,

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Above: Neighbors, schoolmates, friends, collaborators, colleagues. Scott McCloud (left) and Kurt Busiek have been there, done that. Here’s the lifelong chums in a pic by Lori Matsumoto. Used with permission.

Chris was heavily into Barry Windsor-Smith, Jeff Jones, guys like that. So Chris was exposing us to things that we hadn’t seen. The point where we actually did some work with Chris wasn’t with that 60-page monstrosity, The Battle of Lexington, but while we were working on it, Chris’ mother was on the — I want to say — Junior Committee at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which meant that she was part of a group that did fundraising. They were putting together plans for opening night for the Boston Pops season for, I guess, 1977 — ‘77 or ‘78, I forget which — and Chris said, “Why don’t you do a comic book?” And his mother said, “Well, how do we get a comic book done?” Chris said, “Well, I’ll do it.” And so Chris’ mom went and sold the Pops organization on the idea that part of the fundraising for that year was going to be — the opening day concert would be Comic Book Heroes Night and The Boston Pops would play the Lone Ranger theme and the Superman theme and all this stuff, and there’d be a comic book and it would be sold at the show and done as a slide show during intermission as part of the whole fundraising thing. And Chris was going to be the guy who was going to handle the comic. He was 18 years old at the time, maybe, and he immediately tapped me and Scott to work on it with him. Chris wanted to be the artist so I was going to write it and Scott was going to help out. What that meant was Scott did layouts for the whole comic and then Chris kind of drew it the way he felt he wanted to do it, using Scott’s layouts where it was appropriate and ignoring them where he felt like doing something else. We didn’t know anything about

business or the politics or the legalities of it so we just said, “You know what would be cool? If we could do a comic where the whole Boston Pops Orchestra gets kidnapped by a super-villain and like, Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and a bunch of Marvel heroes all get together and save them.” So the Pops organization contacted Marvel and DC and said, “Can we do this?” And Marvel and DC said, “Ohh-kay.” [Jon laughs] You know, they set some rules — there could only be 150 copies of the comic printed, and any copies that weren’t sold that night had to be destroyed. But with those restrictions, they were willing to be a part of the BSO charity thing for that year and I don’t know if anybody told them that the people who were actually doing the comic were like 15-, 16-year-olds. I guess it was ’78, we were 17-year-olds and Chris would have been, I don’t know, 19 at that point. He would have been out of high school. But we did this comic and it was written by me, drawn by Scott and Chris, and lettered by Richard Howell because he was the only guy we knew who could letter. [laughs] And it was done as a slideshow during intermission. They invited us to come and we brought dates, feeling very important. Nobody from Marvel came. Sol Harrison, from DC, came to the concert, and he wouldn’t talk to us. We were punk kids or something, and he was very surly and uncommunicative. But hey, we got to do this really cool thing. CBC: I knew Chris Bing when he lived in Providence. He was always busy meeting a deadline for The Wall Street Journal. It was just after Scott had moved out. He’s a remarkable illustrator. Kurt: Yes, that’s one of the things that flabbergasts me about it all. He just asked his mom, “Can we put together this comic book?” And the particular comic book, everybody who worked on that comic book, I mean — Chris is a Caldecott Medal nominee; Scott and I are Eisner Award winners and Harvey Award winners; Richard went on to become a comic book artist and writer and editor. And even the guy who did the slide show narration, Robert Desiderio, a Boston alternative radio DJ who had a group that did comedy radio spoofs, and they were roped in to doing the voices for the slide show — he went on and he had a Hollywood career where he had a couple of short-lived shows where he was the lead [Heart of the City, Maximum Security]. And it’s just like everybody who worked on this weird little comic book went on to do much bigger, more important stuff. It’s just very, very surprising to me. CBC: How does it stand up? Kurt: It’s… not great. [Jon chuckles] We’ve actually been talking about doing a reprint of it for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, doing a new edition, maybe get Chris to do a new cover and publish it so CBLDF can sell it. Marvel and DC both agreed in principle and then DC said, “But you’ve gotta have the Boston Pops guys sign off on it.” I said, “Well, we don’t really need to because the copyright is in our names and Marvel and DC’s. They had no legal right to it.” And they said, “Yeah, but we don’t — the charity stuff that we do, we’re not going to give you permission to print this unless the BSO is okay with it.” And it took quite a while to figure out who to talk to at the BSO and to get them to write us a letter. We’ve got the letter now that says, yeah, it’s okay. And during that time that I was getting it, I got pretty sick, which slowed me down enormously, and Paul Levitz left DC so now we sort of have to start over. [mutual chuckling] But when I have some time and energy, we’ll start that up again and see if we can’t do a new edition to make some money for the CBLDF. CBC: Were you familiar with the Marvel method of writing? Kurt: Yeah. Yeah, when Scott and I did The Battle of Lexington, we did it Marvel style because we’d started reading Marvel comics and we’d read How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way and that was how it was done, as we understood it. And it wasn’t until we were working on the “Vanguard” series for Rising Stars that Richard said, “No, write a script for this. This is what a script looks like, do this.” #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

py with the results I was getting, doing the full script. So when I did a plot, I had the chance to say, “Okay, this moment isn’t as exciting as I envisioned it when I was writing the plot, but I’ll write balloons that build up excitement and lead to a burst balloon and a big sound effect here, and this and this.” I was essentially able to be the guy who frosted the cake, and I was more committed to making Power Man and Iron Fist exciting than the artists were. The artists were pretty much just doing a job for the money at that time, getting what work they could. I can’t

This page & bottom left opposite: Kurt wasn’t kidding when he said the 60-page Battle of Lexington, the homemade comic produced by KDB and pal Scott McCloud during high school, showed vast improvement as it progressed. Above pgs. 5 and 6, below pgs. 42-43. Words by Kurt, art by Scott. Courtesy of KDB.

And so when I first sold — I sold a couple of “Tales of the Green Lantern Corps” stories to Ernie and I wrote those full-script. And the next thing that I did was I sold a Power Man and Iron Fist fill-in to Denny O’Neil and I wrote that full-script. And I wound up writing Power Man and Iron Fist for a year and I wrote full scripts for it, even though it was at Marvel because Denny asked for a script so I wrote a script. It wasn’t until I was working with Ernie Chan on the book and I thought that the artwork was not really suiting the story well — I was asking for various reference to be sent to Ernie and it wasn’t getting sent to him, so every issue, Colleen Wing and Misty Knight were wearing what looked like housedresses from Sears. I switched over to writing it plot-style so that I could put in the plot, you know, “Misty is wearing a black turtleneck and jeans and boots and Colleen is wearing this and this.” And after Ernie would draw the pencils, I could punch up the dialogue and try to make it seem more exciting because I could react to the art, rather than just write a script without seeing it ahead of time. So within the first year that I was writing comics professionally, I was writing both full-script and plot-style. You know, doing whatever it needed to make the job as good as it could be. CBC: And how was the Marvel method? Did you shine to it? Kurt: I like it. I liked it fine because like I said, I wasn’t hap-

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Above: In 1977, Kurt, Scott McCloud, and artist Chris Bing, another Lexington pal, conceived of Pow! Biff! Pops!, a promotional comic sold to raise funds for the Boston Symphony Orchestra at a Boston Pops performance, fully licensed to feature both DC and Marvel super-heroes, and with a print run of only 250 copies — with one estimate of only 7-10 now in existence, a genuine rarity if ever there was one! During intermission, the 24-page, side-stapled b-&-w comic was sold for $10 and, as Kurt told a collector, “The whole comic was projected as a slide show… with voices done by a popular local radio troupe, Robert Desiderio (who went on to do TV) and the Hour of the Wolf Matinee [a Beantown radio program]. The creative team attended, as did DC’s Sol Harrison, who was surly and uncommunicative. Nobody from Marvel came.” Few are known to have survived, with copy #146 selling at an auction for $1,075.50 last November! Check out the line-up on the credit page in above right. “Scott McLeod” is, of course, Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Zot! Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

imagine Ernie Chan was a big fan of Power Man and Iron Fist. It was a job. Me, I’d been a big fan of Power Man and Iron Fist ever since they first got together and I wanted to do stuff that was as cool as what Chris and John [Byrne] did or what Jo [Duffy] and Kerry [Gammill] had done and I wanted to jazz it up. I wanted to make it exciting so it was better for me to be the last guy in the chain, able to put in the bells and whistles and flash and sizzle than to leave it to other people in the chain who were not as invested in the book as I was. But you know, I’ve worked plot-style or full-script as needed ever since. I don’t think one of them is superior to the other. I think that they’re simply a matter of adapting to circumstance. So I write Astro City full-script because Astro City is a lot about what happens internally and you’ve got to make sure you’ve got those moments where those characters stop and reflect and there’s room for captions and the right kind of pacing and so on. But when I was writing Untold Tales of Spider-Man, I’d write that plot-style. Because Spider-Man never shuts up and it’s easier to write him when you can say, “Okay, here’s the panel, I’m going to fill all the available space with word balloons.” If you simply give the artist a script and it’s got eight word balloons in the panel, he’s going to feel cramped. But if you react to the art and put in dialogue wherever it fits, you can make a really chatty, uptempo, snappy character without the artist feeling cramped. I’m very happy to work with George Pérez plot-style because George is a wonderful storyteller; he’s going to pace the story his way and it’s going to be exciting. Locking him into my panel breakdowns doesn’t make any sense. Whereas working with Alex Ross, I’d work script-style because he was uncomfortable with a plot and didn’t know what to put in the panel if he didn’t know what the character was saying. So I find it useful to be versatile. I mean we talk about writing comics as if those are the only two ways to write comics. Classically, what somebody like Frank Doyle would do when they were writing Archie

comics is, they’d do what’s called a “visual script” where they’d sort of draw thumbnails of what the page would look like and the artist would work from that. When I was doing Conan with Cary Nord, for most of the second year of the book, that’s what I was doing. I was writing a script and then I was doing the page layout in stick figures and “this is what the panels look like” and “this is where we do a close-up” and “this is where we do a long shot” and blah-blah-blah. It was a way of taking the storytelling load off of Cary’s shoulders because he was slow. And after he’d done six to eight issues over my crummy layouts, he said, “Okay, I got it. I know how to do this. I know what you’re doing.” And from that point, he laid out the pages himself, but he knew how to interpret the script the way I wanted the script interpreted because he’d seen how I did it. For the first, maybe, three years on Astro City, I did little panel grid layouts. I didn’t draw what was in the panels, I just sketched out the shapes, showing that, say, “this page will have two horizontal panels then we’re going to have three vertical panels, and the second horizontal panel is going to be a bleed panel.” That’d be part of the information that I gave to Brent with the script. I did it that way because it got good results. So writing comics, it’s not simply a matter of plot-style versus script-style. It’s a matter of, how do you communicate to the artist in the way that will get the best results to make good comics? And that might be a visual script, that might be a plot, that might be a full script. You know, there was a period there where what John Byrne was doing, he was writing a full script, but he wasn’t putting in any page breaks. Alan Grant did this as well. They’d write 75 or 80 panels and that was the issue. Not 75 or 80 because that’s not enough. That’s like three to four panels per page? Whatever, they’d leave it to the artists to break it down into pages. So that’s a script, but it’s not really a full script. And there was a period on Justice League where I was writing it and I’d write a script, but I’d write it like a screenplay. I’d put in page breaks, but I wouldn’t put #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

stuff at the office, you know what to do.” So that’s the Marvel method as Stan used it, but that’s not plot-style as I did it. When I did plot-style, I’d write up a page worth of plot and I’d put my idea of what the panel breaks were. I’d do a paragraph per panel, but then I wouldn’t number them so that the artist would know he’s free to interpret it any way he wants. But yeah, guys like Kirby and Colan and Kane, they were doing a lot of the plotting. CBC: And you did visual cues for Cary on Conan, right? How detailed were they? Kurt: Jeez, I wish I still had copies. What I did, I had a grid that I printed up. I’d use a ruler and I’d draw in the panel borders and for a close-up of Conan, I’d draw a cartoon face with Conan with the blunt bangs and the gumdrop-shaped

Above: McCloud neighbor Christopher Bing drew Pow! Biff! Pops!, and here’s a spread from the promotional comic book. The last panel features then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and Boston Mayor Kevin White. Below: Bing would go on to become an acclaimed illustrator. This spread is from his adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood.

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in panel breaks. I’d just say “this happens, this guy said ‘this’, this guy says ‘that’,” and Ron Garney was able to say, “Okay, this interchange is one panel,” or “this interchange is three panels,” and break it down however he liked. I think that the most important thing in writing comics is making sure the comics are good. It doesn’t matter if it’s the best script in the world if the artist will be cramped and stifled by it, and you’ll end up with bad comics. It doesn’t matter if it’s a perfectly wonderful open plot if the artist won’t know what to do with it. What matters is the end result and the end result of the script is the comic, so you do whatever it takes to make sure that the end result is as good as possible. And that’s something that I think I learned early on with Power Man and Iron Fist simply by saying, “This full script thing isn’t working. Why don’t I try plot-style? Oh, this plot-style thing works better.” That didn’t make me say, “Plot-style is the better way to go.” That made me say, “Plot-style is the better way to go when working with this artist on this book.” CBC: That’s interesting that you brought up the Conan example. Obviously, there are some problems, perhaps, that some artists had doing what you call “plot-style” or “the Marvel method,” in that they felt that they were doing — Gene Colan, Gil Kane, Jack Kirby — felt that they were basically doing much of the storytelling, much of the writing. Kurt: Oh, and they probably were. I mean in Kirby’s case, sometimes he didn’t receive any input. You know, he just went home and he drew the next issue. CBC: Right. Kurt: Steve Ditko eventually got plotting credit on SpiderMan because he wanted to be credited for what he was doing. But Gene Colan? You know, Stan or Roy would call him up and they’d talk through a story and Gene would make up all the stuff that wasn’t there. I transcribed an interview with Don Heck once where Don said that what Stan would give him was an opening scene and an ending. You know, “This is the scene that introduces the villain and this is how the villain gets defeated at the end. And in between, we’ll have a bunch of action and then we’ll have a scene with Iron Man and Happy and Pepper and you know, you know how to do it, Don.” And so Don was plotting the way to get from the beginning of the story to the end of the story because Stan didn’t give him any middle. He was just, “Yeah, action and

Above: Spidey’s a real shutterbug on Alex Ross’ cover for the Marvels trade paperback collection. Courtesy of Heritage.

head, or if it was two characters facing off with swords, it’d be pretty much stick figures. Maybe not completely stick figures, but it’s an oval for the torso, curved lines for arms. [laughs] It’s enough information to let him know where the characters were. The kind of layout Keith Giffen used to do when he was plotting and laying out Justice League, except he can draw and I can’t, so his were rather more sophisticated. But you know, I was just giving layouts, “this character’s over on this side of the panel,” “this is how far away we are from the scene,” “look, here’s a building in the distance,” “there’s the building.” And I didn’t design the building, it was just like “but this is where it is in the panel” and Cary would take it from there. The reason we did it that way is because Cary was doing finished pencils where the color was done right over the pencils. There wasn’t any inking stage so they had to be pretty finished pencils and Cary is not a super-fast artist, so he needed some help to get the issues done on time. And at first, we brought in Tom Yeates to do backgrounds for him and then Tom started doing layouts to help speed him up. But Tom’s sense of how to tell the story and my sense of how to tell the story didn’t really match up so I was asking for a lot of corrections at the layout stage and at one point, Scott Allie said, “You know, this would be so much easier if you could just do layouts for it the way Mignola

does layouts for stuff that he works with another artist.” And I said, “Send me some of Mignola’s layouts,” and he faxed them to me, and I said, “I can do that. It won’t look that good, but I can do that.” [laughs] And so we tried it out and I did that for, like I said, six to eight issues and that was the point where Cary said, “Okay, I got it. I don’t need the help any more.” CBC: Now do you think that I know that obviously, you want to do good comics, you want to help the artist with his struggling. But you know as a practical matter in a black-&white world, should you be paid extra for going that extra mile, doing that extra work? I mean you’ve already written the words, right? Kurt: Yeah, on the one hand, yes and on the other hand, maybe not so much because the argument for “yes” is “I’m doing the work, I should get credit and payment for it.” This issue of Conan should read, “Script and layouts by Kurt Busiek,” and my check should reflect that. But on the other hand, if they’re going to take the money out of Cary’s paycheck and give it to me, well, that’s not going to help because Cary is going to have to draw more stuff in order to make the same amount of money and that’s going to slow him down [laughs] to the point where it’s just as much of a problem as it was before. And secondly, if I get paid, then what about if I do a plot and it’s a page-by-page — even panel-by-panel — plot, it’s not a “you make up the stuff inbetween here” — it’s a full plot and I give it to George Pérez, and George paces it out his way? Then George is doing more work than if he was just drawing from a full script. So should George get paid more for doing that? If so, then my answer would be, “Well, I’d like to have that money myself,” so I’ll write a full script [chuckles] and George would be, “You know, I don’t need to get paid the extra money for whatever I’m doing because it’s easier for me to do it this way and I have more fun doing it this way.” The way it was, it used to be reflected — I don’t know if it’s this way any more — on a plot-style story, the artist would get a half a percent higher royalty and on a full-script story, that half a percent would go to the writer. So Marvel did pay the person who did the storytelling breakdown, whatever it was, a little bit more, at least at the royalty end. I don’t know if they do that anymore. I don’t know if any other companies did it. But I would, at some point, like to do a comic series where I write and lay it out and we get somebody to do finished art from my layouts. And if I’m doing that, and that’s the idea going in, then I’d like to be credited for it and I’d like to be paid for it. In this case, it was more of a case of, “Ahh, I’m pitching in to help to get the book done on time and I’m making it easier for the book to be what I want it to be.” So I didn’t feel like I needed to be compensated for that, particularly since if I said, “I need to be compensated for this,” the answer would be, “Oh, we can’t afford that, then don’t do it.” In a perfect world, you can slice and dice who’s doing what in infinitesimal different varieties and you get to the point where you’re saying, “Well, you know drawing a splash page can be easier than drawing a six-panel page, so shouldn’t we pay less for splash pages and more for a six-panel pages?” And the answer is, you know, you’re just not working with that fine a comb. CBC: Yeah, but I mean it does get down to conceivably, it’s going to get down to a lot of these things are going to be parsed in the future, simply because of the economic viability of the value that’s being — you know, what did I just read? A quote from, I think, James Galton who said that Spider-Man is worth, easily, a billion dollars. So there’s this storytelling way of telling stories that was developed, the plot method, that might have enormous implications in the future as far as making money. Kurt: Yeah. I’m not going to argue that guys like Jack Kirby weren’t shortchanged. They absolutely were. They were not getting paid for plotting the stories and they were plotting the stories. On a book like Avengers, when I was doing it, I was plotting those stories. George was interpreting my plots as he saw fit, but the plot was all there. There #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

was no “page 16 to 20, fight scene.” I would plot the whole fight scene, and he’d feel free to rework it. In fact, to give another example of how this sort of thing can work, when I was doing Thunderbolts with Mark Bagley, I’d plot a fight scene, panel-by-panel, here’s the whole fight scene. And I’d plot five-, six-panel pages and Mark would draw like nine-, ten-panel pages because he had his ideas of what could be going on in the fight scenes, so he’d draw everything I asked for and add his own ideas, too. And I thought, “This is getting kinda crowded. These are the action pages, these should be all the big splashy pictures and we’re getting eight, nine, tenpanel pages.” So I asked Mark, “What I care about in the fight scenes is that the stuff that serves the story happens. If you’d prefer, I can plot the fight scenes like this: pages six through ten is going to be a fight scene and we’re going to need to establish this, this, this, and this; this character’s going to need to do this, and this character’s going to need to do this, and it’s going to need to end this way.” And Mark said, “That’d be great.” So I started plotting the fight scenes not as a series of plot descriptions, but as a set of bullet points. “This is the skeleton of the fight scene, wrap around that skeleton whatever you want.” And then we’re back to doing five- and six-panel pages and big, exciting splashy moments, and it worked just great. But the reason why I adapted my approach to the plot was because doing a full plot was confining to Mark. He didn’t have room to add the stuff he wanted to add. If I said, “Look, I’ll loosen up on the plot,” and if he said, “Okay, then I want to be paid more and you get paid less,” I’d say, “No, no, no, I’m happy doing the Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

full plot.” [laughs] The reason I was doing it this way was as an accommodation, as a way of making the comic better because he was choosing to do that extra work anyway. So I don’t think you’re wrong when you say that there are issues of compensation, but I think that if I’m writing a plot that’s tailored to the artist’s wants and needs, then I shouldn’t be penalized financially for doing what makes the artists happier and more productive. But if I was doing the Stan Lee method of “Hey, how about we bring back the Red Skull? Go!” than I’d certainly think the artist should be compensated for that plot, because he’s the one coming up with the plot. Essentially, what he’s been given is editorial notes, rather than an actual story to draw. When you talk about how Spider-Man is worth a billion dollars, Spider-Man is worth a billion dollars, but that worth is not based on who gets the money for deciding what the panel breakdowns are going to be in #173. It’s based on Spider-Man being really popular and making a ton of money as a licensing character and as a movie character. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko should both be cut in on that for creating the character. And when you see The Rhino show up, John Romita should be compensated for that; and what’s happening instead is wrong. This is money that is going into the pockets of the people at the company that should be shared with the people who actually created this. But when you’re getting down to as fine a line as, “Here’s a plot; who decided that this page would be five panels versus seven?” You’re slicing the baloney really fine there. CBC: Well, then these are semantics. I mean these are academic questions, perhaps, but I mean fair is fair is fair

Above: Wraparound cover art by Alex Ross for the hardback collection, Astro City: Dark Age 2 [’10].

Above: Penciler Keith Giffen and inker Jimmy Palmiotti’s double-page splash from Victory #1 (1994, for Topps Comics), scribed by young Kurt Busiek. Yep, it’s the Dreadnaught Tiger, the battle starship of the good captain and his fightin’ crew of Galactic Rangers. Inset right: Alex Ross cover for Captain Victory #6 depicting Tiger 20 beside Dreadnaught Tiger. Courtesy of the artist and Dynamite Entertainment.

and you described storytelling, ways of doing comic book scripts — you did a couple there that I hadn’t previously heard of — so there are numerous ways to cut the baloney. Kurt: Yeah. CBC: And again, it’s TM & ©2013 Rosalind Kirby Family Trust. what is fair and it’s like — Kurt: Yeah, but I think fairness is kind of a blunt sword. The fact that I did panel breakdown layouts for Astro City for the first three years or so, if what that means is that I should make more money from it than I did, I don’t care. I own Astro City. If Astro City turns out to be worth a billion dollars, Brent, Alex and I will all make a lot of money and we’ll all be happy. The idea of whether or not the right person is getting compensated for the panel layouts for the first three years? It doesn’t matter. You know, if we sell the movie rights for Astro City, or the rights to a MMPORG [massively multi-player online role-playing game] to Astro City, the money is not going to be based on the panel breakdowns, but on the stories, the character concepts, the visual designs, and honestly, you could get really anal retentive about, “Well, this design on Samaritan, it was Alex who came up with the dove design, it was Kurt who suggested the cape would look like a toga, it was Kurt who said he should have blue hair, and it was Alex who said he should have Semitic features — it’s easier to

just say that Alex and I designed that character together,” and leave it at that. I don’t think that 40 years from now, there’ll be arguments about how Alex or Brent or I got screwed on Astro City because we have an equity deal that cuts everybody in. And it’s an equity deal everybody agreed to going in. There isn’t a work-for-hire deal that says I get all the money and Brent gets nothing. We actually have notes on the characters that say that if there’s ever a Gentleman action figure, Alex gets the lion’s share of the royalty on that to the extent that we can separate them out, because the initial impetus for the character came from him. If there’s a Bouncing Beatnik action figure, I get most of that because I designed the costume. But if the Bouncing Beatnik is in a movie, we’re not going to split out the movie money to the point of, “Well, I designed 60% of this character and you designed 35 and this guy —” We’re going to say, “The movie rights, overall, I get this chunk, you get that chunk, he gets that chunk.” We knew that going in. If there was ever an idea that one of us had that we were unwilling to contribute to the book on the terms that we’ve agreed on going in, we’d just say that — but I don’t think that’s ever happened because the deal that we have between each other, between ourselves, is one we all think is fair and we thought it was fair going in. I think that if you asked Ditko and Kirby, back in 1961, “Do you think it’s fair that if Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four make billions of dollars in the future, you guys should get nothing?” I think Ditko and Kirby would say, “No! I do not agree to that deal!” [laughs] So that’s why there are issues today and why I think #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

we’re not going to have those issues with things like Astro City. We took it into account, because we saw what happens when you don’t. CBC: You just made some comments about Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Marvel is a comic-book monolith, with movies generating billions of dollars, and some of the creators of the characters are not seeing a dime for that. Do you have any issues with Marvel or Disney, its parent company? Is there a rationalization that takes place to continue doing The Avengers, writing the characters, for you? Kurt: Well, I can’t do anything about getting Marvel to compensate the Kirby family in a matter that I think is fair. All I can do is be open about my opinion online or in interviews and so forth in saying, you know, I think they should do considerably better by Kirby and by Ditko and Romita and Don Heck and everybody. I think that the deal that they offer today that says that I get a certain share of Thunderbolts licensing money and royalty money, it’d be easy to say, “And you know, we’ll give that to Stan and Jack on Fantastic Four and Thor, and we’ll give that to Ditko on Doctor Strange.” You know, clearly, paying Rob Liefeld a portion of X-Force royalties is not breaking the company. So paying Stan Lee and Steve Ditko a portion of Spider-Man royalties wouldn’t break the company either. I certainly think they could do it. But whether or not I write a Spider-Man story has no effect on whether they’re going to do it. When people say, “I won’t work for Marvel because they’re not paying Jack Kirby fairly,” I can understand and sympathize with that, but my issues working for Marvel have a lot more to do with the fact that Marvel doesn’t pay foreign royalties and that if I do a project for Marvel or DC that I’m really proud of, and they Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

don’t keep it in print, there’s nothing I can do about it. Everything that I’ve done with Stuart Immomen is in print today except for the best thing we ever did together, Superman: Secret Identity. CBC: Was Stuart doing Superman: Secret Identity? Kurt: Right, that’s the one thing that we’ve done together that isn’t currently in print. DC’s bringing it back into print next year, but it’s been out of print for quite some time. And when we had Shockrockets in print at Dark Horse, and it went out of print, we got the rights back and now it’s in print at IDW. So I have control over that work. I don’t have control if I do work-for-hire and that, to me, is a somewhat more immediate argument than “I’m not going to work for them out of protest that they’re not dealing with Jack Kirby fairly.” Much as I wish they would be, that they would deal with Jack Kirby fairly, I also want to make sure that when I do work, I’m not going to get similarly stuck in the future, going, “I can’t get a proper share off of this.”

Top: Jack “The King” Kirby’s mindblowing double-page spread giving us the big reveal of Dreadnaught Tiger in the concluding moments of Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #1 [ Nov. ’81]. (Ye Ed merged the pages together utilizing the magic of Photoshop.) Above: Breakdown artist Alex Ross rightfully replicates that cosmic moment in his and Kurt’s Kirby: Genesis #3 with (you guessed it) his own double-truck spread, which was adapted by finisher Jack Herbert for the print version. Courtesy of A.R. & D.E. 77

Above: The Busieks’ wedding day. Kurt says, “Adam Philips, my best man, gives the toast at Ann’s and my wedding. 1988.” Good luck to the former Ann Huntington! Courtesy of KDB.

Another way I look at it is, I did Kirby: Genesis. I took a whole bunch of Kirby’s sketches and designs, some fully fleshed-out characters and some just drawings, and Alex and I worked them up into something that the Kirby estate can maybe sell to the movies. So maybe I can’t do anything about getting Marvel to share Fantastic Four money or Thor money with the Kirby family, but I can do something about giving the Kirby estate something that they can market, that they can license as movies or games or a TV show or something. That could help them generate income from Kirby’s work and I dug that. So I’d say that when it comes to the question of whether you’ll boycott Marvel or whatever, I did Kirby: Genesis, so I’ve done a bunch of creative work that’s owned by the Kirby estate and that hopefully, they can profit greatly from. I’ve pitched in. I’d absolutely do that for Ditko, too, but I don’t think he’s interested. [mutual laughter] So again, we’re talking about different ways of slicing the baloney. But

I don’t feel bad that I wrote The Avengers for five years. I do feel happy that I was able to do something that enriches the Kirby estate’s possibilities of profiting from their father’s creator-owned material, as he’d have wanted them to. CBC: That is a lovely way of turning that question right around. [mutual laughter] And I have to say, was that a consideration going in? You say this is giving back to Jack… What is the genesis of Kirby: Genesis? Kurt: Well, the genesis of Kirby: Genesis is — the Kirby estate was talking to various publishers about how to license these characters, how to use these characters, how to make something out of them. Nick Barrucci at Dynamite was very interested, and when he was talking to the Kirbys, he contacted Alex and said, “Would you want to work on this?” And Alex said, “You bet!” And Alex called me and said, “How’d you like to work on this?” And I said, “Yeah, try and stop me.” You know, the chance to work with Kirby concepts is a terrific creative opportunity, and the chance to work with Alex is always fun. But yeah, part of it in there was that we were going to be building something, something they could maybe do more with. You know, a character like Silver Star is pretty much already in shape. The Kirby estate can try to license that, no problem. That’s fully fleshed out. That’s done. But something like the various designs that Kirby did for fantasy characters that Alex and I turned into the Heroes of the Mythlands? Those are just a bunch of cool sketches and a few notes. We were able to turn that into an idea that hopefully honors what Kirby put into them, but puts them in a form that [Jack’s daughter] Lisa Kirby and her representatives can then offer to publishers and licensing studios and say, “Here, here’s this thing in a form that you can understand.” We took characters that had been originally designed to be part of the New Gods series that were never used and we turned them into The Primals. And The Primals, now it’s got a name, now the characters have names, they have a role, they have an origin, they’re something that you could license. I didn’t create those characters, but I developed them with Alex from what Jack left behind. The character that we called The Wanderer, he’s someone you could build a TV series around pretty easily. In doing that, taking this material and putting it in a shape that the Kirby estate could then do something with, that was definitely part of the appeal doing Kirby: Genesis. Because I feel like I’ve done pretty well off of Jack Kirby’s creations. [laughs] It’s nice to give something back.

fin

Kurt Cut To The Quick!

Ye Ed is not kidding when we say this interview with Mr. Busiek was heavily cut due to space contraints. Look for lots more KDB in the FREE CBC #1 Special Bonus PDF at http://twomorrows.com/ freestuff #1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

creator’s creators Cooke’s Cook’s Tour Ye Ed gives a little background and thanks y’all for stoppin’ by. Come back soon! became associate editor of TJKC. It was a glorious Wow, it has been some time since yours truly time. I quickly developed a deep, abiding friendship was helmsman of a magazine, and like I said in the with John, a great editor and businessman, and “Ye Ed’s Rant,” it sure is great to be back. Me, I together we were a juggernaut of creativity. I still started collecting comics in the early 1970s, a parlove the lug. ticularly good time to be a fan, when mainstream After I wondered aloud why wasn’t there Colcomics were often full of remarkably creative lector magazines for other creators, J.M. took me work, the comix of the underground were blowing to task and Comic Book Artist was born, lasting five minds, comics history was starting to be recogyears as a TwoMorrows staple. Maybe it was hubris nized, with a wealth of reprint material coming out. and vanity that led me away from the fold; suffice With my three brothers, I put out a half-dozen isto say John and I are good now, and I’m grateful sues of Omega Comics Magazine Review (OCMR, for my time editing CBA with Top Shelf between as my six subscribers might recall). The print bug Ye Ed and my beloved Beth a few years back. Has it really 2003-05. Don’t ever get this wrong: Chris & Brett are bit hard but the fever reached pitch in college superb publishers and excellent human beings, got it? when I became editor of The Great Swamp Gazette, been 25 years, Wheffy? There’s gotta be a medal for that! I focused on domestic concerns and employan alternative magazine of the University of Rhode ment since drifting away from the magazines-about-comics field (though Island. At GSG I learned production, at URI I studied journalism and history. I established a career as a graphic designer in advertising and started to producing that Eisner documentary with my brother Andy remains one of my greatest collaborations). I also went through, well, changes. For the better. get ambitious when my first son, Ben, was born, conceiving of a children’s My family’s love for me and my love in return have put me on a miraculous science magazine called Dinosaur Times. That never quite gelled. Then, journey that continues to reward beyond measure. in 1990, I became involved in the centennial of H.P. Lovecraft’s birth (less Most of all, I am grateful to my lovely bride of 25 years, Beth Ann (I nickbecause I’m any fan of horror; more because I love my adopted state of Li’l named her “Wheffy” back in high school). Honey, you are my rock and you Rhody). Enamored with the horror ’zines (Crypt of Cthulhu, anyone?) and hold my heart. I love you. their incredible community — horror writers remain the nicest bunch I’ve So that’s about it. I hope you folks come along for the ride. Wherever CBC ever met! — I put out four issues of Tekeli-li: Journal of Terror. I lost my shirt takes us, it’ll be an adventure. The art form of comics is endlessly rewarding and vanished from that scene, feeling defeated, a victim of my addiction to and quite simply a wonderful medium, worthy of attention and respect. The higher, more expensive production values. (Poor, poor, pitful me!) By 1995, I toiled in a small Providence ad agency and, within moments of business side...? Weeellll, we can talk about that, ’kay? Get in touch, please. I couldn’t do this without you, kind reader, so many, surfing the web for the first time (after typing “Jack Kirby” into a browser), many thanks to you, too! Hope you liked the first of (hopefully!) many…. I discovered John Morrow’s The Jack Kirby Collector. By that month’s end, — Jon B. Cooke, Ye Ed (e-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com) I was writing two articles an issue for TwoMorrows and, soon thereafter, I

coming attractions: CBC #2 in july

Next: Remembering Joe Kubert

Cover art by Sergio Cariello.

Despite his age, when comic book giant JOE KUBERT passed away suddenly last summer, shock waves reverberated throughout the comics community… and beyond. Joe, it goes without saying, will always be regarded as one of comics’ most legendary creators, a man who entered the field at a tender age and remained to swiftly become a supreme talent who consistently forged his own way. His work always top-notch, his influence as inspiration and mentor immeasurable, we thought of Joe as immortal. But though Joe is now gone, his work and legacy will continue to have an impact for generations to come. And COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2, our first summer special book, will celebrate the artist, writer, editor, publisher, entrepenuer, teacher, husband, father, partner, industry leader and visionary with a heartfelt tribute. The double-size issue will feature testimonials, portraits, pin-ups and photographs contributed by colleagues, friends, family, students, fans and admirers the world over. CBC #2 will also feature a number of interviews with the man; a comprehensive essay on Joe Kubert’s life; a talk with his sons, superstar comics artists Adam and Andy Back cover art by Timothy Truman. Kubert; and we look at perhaps his greatest achievement, The Joe Kubert School.

Rare and unpublished work • Never-before-seen interviews Art & remembrances by peers • Kubert and his Jewish roots The Anti-War war comics artist • History of the Kubert School Tor through the ages • Joe, Adam & Andy: Father & Sons Memories of Muriel Kubert — and much more! This double-size Summer Special ships July 24 • 160-page trade paperback, $17.95 Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

About Our Closing Shot… Ye Ed’s longtime pal Tom Ziuko, TwoMorrows’ Colorist Supreme and comics veteran, has volunteered to cull his vast archives and grace the last page of each ish with his selection of exemplary cover art — sans logo and blurbs — and proving, indeed, with a great image, no words are necessary!! Turn the page… and behold!

a picture is worth a thousand words

#1 • Spring 2013 • Comic Book Creator

SUPER-W©©DY, The Copyright Crusader CBC mascot by J.D. KING

JON B. COOKE Editor/Designer

JOHN MORROW

J.D. KING

CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO

Publisher & Consulting Editor

CBC Colorist Supreme

MICHAEL AUSHENKER

RONN SUTTON

ALEX ROSS

ROB SMENTEK

Associate Editor Cover Artist

CBC Illustrator

CBC Proofreader

JORGE “GEORGE” KHOURY GREG PRESTON CHRISTOPHER IRVING SETH KUSNER CBC Contributing Photographers TOM ZIUKO Contributing Editors MICHAEL AUSHENKER BRIAN K. MORRIS FRED HEMBECK Senior Transcriber CHRISTOPHER IRVING JORGE “GEORGE” KHOURY STEVEN E. TICE ALAN KUPPERBERG STEVEN THOMPSON TOM ZIUKO Transcribers CBC Columnists

Cover Painting by ALEX ROSS Originally appeared as the cover of Kirby: Genesis #0, published by Dynamite Entertainment. Courtesy of the artist & Dynamite. COMIC BOOK CREATOR is a proud joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

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: $36 US, $50 Canada, $65 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2013 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/ TwoMorrows.

Bonus PDF

S p r i n g 2 0 1 3 • T h e N e w 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

B O N U S

P D F

T A B L E

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C O N T E N T S

Captain America’s Counterfeit Creators: Joe Simon & Jack Kirby’s Star-Spangled Super-Star was, on respective occasions, attributed as the creation of Martin Goodman & Stan Lee!.......... 3 Alex Ross Gets (More) Real: Portions of the CBC interview with the painter-comic book artist...... 5 Astro City’s Kurt Busiek: Ye Ed talks more with the renowned comics scripter.............................. 16

and the Curious Case of the Even after the team of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby suffered the indignity of being cheated out of royalties for their creation of Captain America, insult was added to injury when, in 1947, Timely publisher Martin Goodman is publicly given credit for originating the

ht hold copyrig ective the resp

YOU BET, CAP! YET SOMETIMES that hasn’t been the case! BUT EVERY RED-BLOODED, TRUE PATRIOT KNOWS we were created

GEE, BUCKY, YOU woulD THINK OUR PUBLISHER would STRIVE TO BE like “honest ABE” HERE and tell the truth, Right? LIKE about who created us?

imultaneous to the appearance of his article, “There’s Money in Comics,” in the November 1947 issue of Writer’s Digest, Stan Lee’s booklet, Secrets Behind the Comics, an inside look by the editor and art director of Timely Comics on how funnybooks are created, is published by Famous Enterprises. Included in the 100-page pamphlet is a focus on “exactly how Captain America was created.” Well, not “exactly.” Bizarrely, Timely publisher Martin Goodman is cited as the creator of the star-spangled hero and — surprise! — there is no mention of Cap’s real creators, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. This revisionism is particularly odd because, as any Marvel fan worth his/her salt knows, the author of the tract was hired in his initial comics job by the very same Joe Simon (then Timely’s first editor) and Stan functioned as a “gofer” for both Joe and Jack. In 1985, much to Kirby’s chagrin, the Cannon Group lists Stan Lee as creator of Captain America in movie trade publication advertisements (trumpeting the eventually aborted film version).

er.

“Sentinel of Liberty” by a guy who certainly knew better — Stan Lee!

NOT COOL: Variety’s Cannes film festival supplement included this ad which featured an erroneous acknowledgement giving Stan Lee credit for creating Captain America. Left: Relettered detail from Captain America Comics #9 (Dec. 1941). Art by Jack Kirby & Joe Simon. ©2013 Marvel Characters, Inc.

#1 • Bonus PDF Edition • Spring 2013 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

COUNTERFEIT CREATORS Secrets Behind

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2013 • Bonus PDF Edition • #1 the Comics sca ns courtesy of Javier Hernand ez.

More of the Alex Ross Comic Book Creator #1 Interview

Above: Alex Ross in 2011 in a portrait by Seth Kushner.

Comic Book Creator: I took out the collection of the KreeSkrull War [The Avengers #89-97, June 1971-March ’72], and I was looking at the last chapter John Buscema had drawn, lamenting that Neal Adams hadn’t been able to finish the saga due, perhaps, to the urgencies of deadlines. I was pondering that these high-quality masterpieces of comic books are going to be perennially in print, and it’s a shame that at the time they didn’t see the obviously high-quality work as having a shelf life. You know, it would have been really cool if Neal had been able to complete the last chapter. Alex Ross: Well, you know, you bring up something that brings us in conflict with our friend Roy, who, I think, in his introduction to the collection of that era of The Avengers, specifically says what the circumstances are that led to this, which were all scheduling and related to Neal’s late delivery for that work. But, given that Roy was editor at the time, if he had to do the same circumstance again, he said he would have to. But, then again, getting that book out on time was the law of the land at that point in history. I mean, not that it’s changed too much since then, but it was without allowance back then. There wasn’t any wiggle room there. So the way they look at it is like, nope, Neal was not worth waiting for given what they were facing in the distribution market they were stuck with at the time, whereas all of us look at it and go, “Really? You couldn’t

let this guy finish it, even if it was going to bump it by a matter of weeks from its ship date on newsstands?” CBC: Roy and Neal have different memories of the climax of the series. It’s water under the bridge, I know, but it’s remarkable there wasn’t a contingency plan to have a fill-in issue at the ready considering the epic nature of what was seeing print, so it would conclude properly. Alex: Well, especially when you’re building up to this moment that is not just the payoff for the whole thing, but it was also, I kind of presume, a fan moment for Neal sort of gracing his time going between the different comic universes, hitting everything on a checklist, it was going to lead towards him doing the Golden Age characters appearing in this salvation moment with [Rick] Jones. And you hate to pick upon anything that the great John Buscema ever did, but John didn’t have that same love for the material. It didn’t mean anything to him, so when he was drawing the stuff, yeah, those characters are there, but it was not the moment that maybe it was scheduled to be. CBC: You came up with two extremely iconic images of the last decade, the “aughts” I guess we’ll call them: One of George W. Bush biting the neck of the Statue of Liberty and one of Barack Obama as a super-hero. Alex: Do those count as iconic? CBC: Are they not? Alex: Oh, I don’t know. That’s kind of an evaluation I can’t make for myself, so… you know? If you tell me they’re iconic, I’m glad to hear it. I have to go with what another person’s opinion is, so… That’s cool! I’m glad to hear that. CBC: What possessed you… ? Alex: Well it was really building off of a relationship with The Village Voice. They had contacted me first after the

Interview conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven E. Tice & Steven Thompson Photographic Portrait by Seth Kushner #1 • Bonus PDF Edition • Spring 2013 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

DC Comics.

publication of the Mythology art book to see if I would do a full-painted cover of the pencil sketch we printed of mine showing Uncle Sam giving the finger which I couldn’t even remember we even published in the book but it was nice to know it got in there. And that led to a full painted cover of that and then whatever it was a year or so later… I think it was the lead-up to the election of Bush vs. Kerry that I did that cover of Bush biting the Statue of Liberty which I believe was a collaboration. I think they had an initial idea and it transformed a bit into what it became which I was very happy with because it technically doesn’t have Bush with cartoonish fangs added in. It’s really just sort of a lighting thing that makes it look more menacing than it was because the reference I found of him, I was able to mostly just cull those details and not really amplify anything too much. Later, after that, a less iconic image is the image I did for them of Bush and Cheney kissing, which was touching off the then very hot topic of gay marriage, which was becoming such a grand issue at that exact time. And then, when it came time for the run-up to the 2008 election, it was really me on my own, working with Bob Chapman at Graphitti Designs to do that [Obama] T-shirt. I had the idea and I wanted to do it. I thought it’d be fun and especially take advantage of one of his well-sold shirts of my Superman image figuring that, how can DC be upset? I’m stealing from myself and it’s not going to be Superman’s emblem. We did that and that TM & ©2013

Above: Ye Ed just can’t resist reproducing the cover art for his Comic Book Artist V2 #1 [July ’03], with Neal Adams’ pencils and Alex Ross paints, a dream come true for yours truly, who became a comics fanatic as a kid upon picking up Superman #233 [Jan. ’71], mesmerized by Neal’s striking orange cover.

was the most successful T-shirt we’ve ever done. We sold sooooo many copies of that Barack Obama T-shirt.[…] CBC: Did you take heat for those T-shirt images or Voice covers? Alex: I think there was heat there to be felt but I just wasn’t the one feeling it because I’m not on the frontlines of getting any e-mails related to me. For my Web site, I don’t run that, so any kind of negative stuff that might come through… Even when I did Uncle Sam with Steve Darnall whatever it was, 15 years ago, Steve might have seen some negative postings and whatnot but since I’m not a technologically adept person, I don’t check those things out and I don’t have my wife go looking for them for me so I have to go by anything that might be reported to me by a friend saying, “Wow, do you know how much activity there is out there where people hate you?” And certainly you figure if it reaches that kind of level then I know something’s gotten stirred up but for the most part, nothing like that occurred to me. Just some general things. I heard probably the worst of it is people that registered through other friends of friends, “Oh, you can’t do an image like that of the President!” That was, of course, the image of George Bush. But, you had an overwhelming majority of people that seemed to feel sympathy for that. CBC: Any idea how many Obama T-shirts you sold? Would Bob know? Alex: Oh, I think it might have gone into the tens of thousands maybe. I forget. It’s been a number of years. It sold very great for the first couple of years and then it’s consistently sold somewhat since then. I’ve never done better than that. Previously, probably the most successful shirt before that was the George Bush one. Actually, he turned all three of the painted covers I did for The Village Voice into T-shirts. The nice thing in doing the images for The Voice is that, because of the political commentary of them, it was something I officially would own. So, not really before having a copyright of my own on anything, it was an interesting experiment to have that now. CBC: Were you familiar with Obama, being from the Chicago area? Alex: Only vaguely. Really, when he was just a senator, I wasn’t terrifically up on him. I think I knew of him probably a good three or four years before because he started doing the public circuit of doing talk shows and things and I saw him in those places. If somebody went on The Daily Show, that’s probably how I got to know who they were in the first place. CBC: [Laughter] The Daily Show is the filter by which you know your politicians? Alex: Well, you know, it does that for a great many people. In many ways, being a Daily Show guest means that you’re capable of going on there. Even if you’re of a completely different ideology, you’re able to handle it. That’s a good measure of somebody, to know that they live up to that challenge. So Obama would have been one of those people doing that. CBC: Was there any thought of doing anything this election season? Alex: A thought, but nothing that was clear to me. Nothing that was clear as an image that would be likewise the same thing. And of course there’s a sense of not wanting to be too aggrandizing in a way of him that it would come off as naïve. I think that what people didn’t feel the same way during the initial election is that there was no sense of naïveté because we didn’t know better. [laughter] There was a sense of, you know, we all believed this was going to work out and, to whatever degree, that didn’t matter until you actually have the person in office. But I would have been happy to do something new if an idea really presented itself, if inspiration struck. I had inspiration just going back a couple of years ago to do a T-shirt that would have been a very right-wing

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vilifying shirt where I featured images of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and other commentators as sort of metaphors for the Batman rogues gallery with very close-seeming costuming added to them. Like treating Rush like he was the monocle wearing Penguin and such like that. I think my idea was… oh, who was the guy who used to have his own TV show on Fox… Ummm… CBC: Morton Downey, Jr? Alex: [Laughter] No, no, no! More recent! The guy who got kicked off after a few years. CBC: Glenn Beck? Alex: Yeah! Glenn Beck as a Joker-type figure with clown makeup painted on him and all that stuff like that. CBC: Right. Alex: Sarah Palin becomes like Catwoman and then I was sort of reaching for a fourth one so I made Bill O’Reilly a Riddler-esque looking figure. Well, anyway, my wife talked me out of doing it. Instead of getting more combative, stay on the more positive side is more the thought. Also, why give more attention to these people? CBC: Right. Did you have any sympathies for Occupy Wall Street? We haven’t really spoken for print in ten years. How do you look at what’s going on in America? Alex: [Long moan] I don’t know how grand my thought process might be on this. You know, it did feel like, in much of the last four years that, once you were speaking out about more progressive issues, you would be labeled much more passionately by other people. We’re in a culture now where we’re all being encouraged to really despise each other. In such a contrast to the previous decade where, when George W. Bush was in office, you could bring up these kinds of issues and there was more of a general public perception that, yeah, something screwy is going on. But now the tables have turned because the left wing got their party in so now everything they did was vilified. It hasn’t seemed quite as fair from, of course, my perspective. Suddenly the idea of

being as outspoken wasn’t maybe as encouraged because you then begin to realize that a portion of your audience you could be relating to, like even with this interview, would be of such a different spirit that they’ll then suddenly despise me for whatever views I shared in this way. CBC: You know, it would seem to me that—who am I?— sitting in the sidelines, I’ve never worked within the industry, but it seems to me they very often miss the forest for the trees. When Archie Goodwin as an editor, when Harvey Kurtzman as an editor, who fostered this environment for creative people to come in — and sometimes super-controlling like Harvey, or sometimes just very open like Archie — and the work that resulted very often is of such high quality that it’s always going to have a value, likely always to be in print in any number of different formats, consistently making money for whoever owns it — Mad comics, for instance. Sometimes I wonder whether in mainstream comics, when we get exceptional stuff, it’s due to benign neglect. Is there too much control coming down from the top? Alex: Well, I wouldn’t say there’s too many editors in comics because I know how understaffed the major companies are. I mean, hell, the one I work for most of the time, there’s one editor in the entire company for God knows how many books. So editing is a craft and a skill unto itself, so I don’t want to confuse what editors can do, and should do, with what the problems are. There are too many cooks in the kitchen, but that usually goes well above the editorial element and into the management up above. There’s more of a brain trust occurring within the major companies of a very small handful of individuals guiding the entire direction for everything, and putting up these barriers. You know: “You can’t use this character because he’s locked in over here,” or, “We gave you this project, but we’re going to ask you to write this storyline to fit this thing we have going on over here,” and so on. And there’s a greater marginalization of talent, I think, almost than ever before. You can’t do this

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Above: Ye Ed will be forever grateful to CBA V2 cover and logo design team of Dave Bissel and Jim Titus, who also merged Neal Adams’ pencils and Alex Ross’ paints for what was intended to be a two-page opening spread of #1’s color section. But, because of space constraints, ’twas printed sideways on a single page. well, a quarter of the intended size here, but at least the right orientation, fellas!

Above: Alex’s version of Jack Kirby’s Amazing Fantasy #15 cover. Inset cover inked by Steve Ditko. Opposite page top: Proposed cover sketch, one of several which the artist told George Khoury in The Jack Kirby Collector # 27 [Feb. ’00], he “threw” at the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide for the 1999 edition. This, of course, was the artist’s re-visioning of Jack Kirby & Joe Simon’s Captain America Comics #1 [Mar. ’41] cover (upper inset). Another was a retake on Jack & Vinnie Colletta’s Mister Miracle #1 [Mar. ’71] cover (opposite page bottom), though the publisher chose The Avengers #4 image, seen on previous page. Alex Ross sketches courtesy of John Morrow & TJKC.

broad idea you might have with a character here because that’ll get somewhat close to the big ambitions that this other guy has over here, and even though that guy’s not going to get to it for a few years, we’re not going to let you bring back the Joker or whoever might be the character property at that point. And just the fact that the last ten years of storylines have all been so buffeted about by the stunning turns of, you know, who’s dead now, or who’s going to be dying, who’s breaking up this particular group, or who’s messing up the look of this character, and that’s how they’re somehow demanding, forcing the remaining comic buyers into buying things they otherwise might go, “Oh, okay, status quo. I’m not going to buy that right now.” CBC: Does it really matter that there is, going back to the ’80s, a John Byrne version of Superman and a Jerry Ordway version of Superman, and maybe never the twain shall meet? Does continuity have to be the great god? It just seems to be so short-sighted. Alex: Well, I’ve been taught this enough to realize it’s part of the ugliness of the world we live in that people aren’t going to buy these things in the rabid kind of devotion that we’re used to if you don’t have these things seem to sort of intertwine, to have a living universe, in a way, and that’s something that, as a buyer who only had so many funds growing up, I was always used to picking on the key special projects, or something that was a unique event book or crossover event, but not every character’s main title. And

the only thing that keeps a lot of those readers on is the continuation of drama that pulls you in, not just to the one book month to month, but into all books that might tie in to that given book. Like, the second or third Superman title. So it’s an ugly economic reality of comics that it just can’t be broken, because otherwise they’re just not selling the numbers they need to, and then they begin to think, “Oh, maybe we’ll have to cancel this classic book that is otherwise a big part of history.” CBC: Or go back to #1. Alex: Or go back to #1, yeah, and show that everything that all these craftsmen did for so long is suddenly negated and thrown back into history as if it’s nothing but…. CBC: Did you have any idea what the story is with Karen Berger? Whether she quit, or whether she’s…. Alex: Oh, she’s gone? CBC: Yeah, that was the big news of yesterday, but there were no details. Alex: Oh, I didn’t know that. Well, I can’t say it’s a complete surprise. I mean, they’ve been marginalizing her as well as what Vertigo is has been — But, then again, there’s very strong editors and people in charge of Vertigo. I assume that Shelly Bond, she’s still there, and she mostly runs that ship. But Karen is the founder of that corner of DC, which has been a beloved corner, as well as all the projects that were under Karen leading up to that were a beloved part of publishing. But at a certain point, the heads of everything over there have — There’s no great love for that corner of DC. That becomes a remnant of a prior era. CBC: Yeah. Well, one would imagine she could land on her feet rather well. Alex: In comics? CBC: In publishing somewhere. Alex: Okay, publishing, probably, but, yeah, I don’t know — I mean, not a whole lot of options in comics. CBC: No, not a whole lot of options in comics. Why don’t we, if we can, I think it was almost, it was nine years ago, almost ten years when we spoke for Comic Book Artist, Volume 2, #1. What’s the last ten years been like for you? Alex: I fear talking that way because I’m going to be editing myself way too much. CBC: You fear talking? [laughs] Alex: Well, I hate the idea that I’m going to hold back so much of whatever I have to say, so I’m going to parse my words so much that I feel like I’m going to be lying to people by my sin of omission. So I’ll be speaking broadly— CBC: You can generalize, right? Alex: Yeah, I’ll be generalizing, basically. You know, in the evolution of the last ten years for me, what it’s meant is going from having a regular career path of designing projects I wanted to work on, things that were a long-scale ambition, things I may have envisioned years before and I finally got up to doing, and that would consume all my time. I basically graduated from doing only things like that to kind of eventually opening myself up to whatever came my way, because, if you follow what fortune I had from the beginning of the ’90s, when I was able to, along with Kurt, sell Marvel on Marvels, and then go straight from that to selling DC on, first, Kingdom Come, then Uncle Sam, then the series of one-shots that took me into the new century, and then the comic book Justice was kind of a late-end addition to that plan of saying, “Okay, here’s something more like a traditional comic book,” but it fit my overall view, long view, of these things that were my grandiose ambition in comics of what I thought I should do with the majority of my time, with the greatest of my efforts being what I could do for interiors. And that came to an end with that project, with general fatigue of completion, and that for so many years I had postponed various things I was invited to be a part of and requested to do work for that would have asked a little bit of my time here, a little bit there, and I was always — Well, not always, but a good amount of the time turning those things down, and now I could finally see what it would be like to live in a career that was buffeted

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about more by just where the wind was blowing, so I was less trying to guide the path of the storm and more let my boat get knocked about by it. Good metaphor? So that’s what led me to a lot of the projects that people have seen me do a lot of covers for and a lot of things I’ve done design and guide work for. Like, for example, the Kirby: Genesis series that Kurt and I worked on together was one that I had no expectation of coming to pass, and then they emerged. And all of them were things that I was happy to work and collaborate on. Nothing was sort of a deficit of, “Boy, I’m ashamed of myself for even doing this.” None of these things was far from the respect I would have for the projects I cared the most about, it was just trying to open my eyes to recognize, hey, you never know, something here might be one of the best things I’ve ever had a chance to work with. CBC: And so has it been satisfying? Alex: It has been satisfying. I mean, I’m gratified by the time to have also gotten a chance to live more of a normal life, because without the time I was putting into full interiors on the various projects I did, which would generally keep me working a seven-day work week, and much of that time when I was working, both when I was single and later when I was married, I would be working ten-hour days, often. I still work late into the night, but I get more time to basically live the life that I have wanted to live, that I have dreamed of living. So the first 20 years of my career were set up, hopefully, for earning the time I have now to maybe stop and smell the roses a little bit more, not work every weekend anymore. CBC: The past work that you’ve done, is a lot of it in print? Marvels, Kingdom Come, the DC one-shots? Alex: Yeah, to the best of my knowledge, the majority of stuff that I did, my lengthiest work on, interiors-wise, are all still out there, that people can find them in the average book store and find them online. CBC: You obviously get royalties from this, right? Or acters, Inc. Marvel Char whatever they would call it — incentives. TM & ©2013 Alex: Yeah, yeah. CBC: You do know they’re in print because you get a check for it, right? Does a check come for this old work every six months, or on a quarterly basis, or is it every year so that you, it can help during rough times or whatever? It’s just something nice to have? I mean, one of my philosophies is always have your work pay you back. Alex: Yeah, I mean, and certainly that’s been a consistent case much with the DC work because they have a very responsible accounting structure. They’re very on top of that stuff. That’s one of the things the company can still boast to people to this day, because the years that were put in the infrastructure of the way they ran things over there, they’ve got a strong system that monitors that, whereas Marvel is, say, a bit more fractious, where you just, you might get a check once a year, or every other year, depending on what you might have worked on for them. And, certainly, lots of things go out of print, so just having the trade collection of what you worked on once doesn’t mean that always comes to you. I’ve been fortunate, though, that a lot of the key projects I did work on, something like Marvels, has remained TM & ©2013 DC Comics. out there. It’s something that I take too easily for granted, because plenty of people work on astonishing stuff that hits big at a certain time and then peters out as far as how often it’s kept in ready supply. You go to an average bookstore, what few exist, though, and find, you know, this thing’s still on the shelves. Not everybody gets that option, so I can only imagine for guys we’ve known whose careers have been there to be on the grind, working on projects for ages, many of their things are barely ever kept in print. Some of the greatest creators in comics have barely had any of their work collected. Or in some case, the collections are only beginning now, after this long. CBC: Yeah, it certainly is interesting how the volume of reprinted material that’s steadily coming out. I was just considering the other day that the DC Archive editions, I remember when they started in 1986, 1987, and that they’re still — You know, at a much slower pace and everything like that, but that’s a heck of an achievement. Alex: That actually started in ’87? CBC: Something like that. [The DC Archives began publication in 1989—Ye Ed.] Or maybe that was the Marvel Masterworks, the first one was around then [Marvel Mas9

terworks began publication in 1987—Y.E.]. It wasn’t long thereafter that the DC Archive editions came out. Anyway, that’s quite a library of material that they now have… [Approximately 217 separate volumes to date—Y.E.] Alex: Yeah, and I’m one of those crazy fan collectors who gets as much of that stuff— CBC: Oh, really? Alex: Yeah, I have every edition at least of the Marvel Masterworks [Approximately 195 separate volumes to date—Y.E.], and I might have missed a few of the DC ones, but, yeah, for the most part, I have a complete collection. CBC: Wow, that’s quite a few books. That fills up a lot of space, huh? Alex: Yeah, yeah. In fact, I just had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves installed in my home because I needed the space with all the [laughs] various books I’ve got, which have been piling up for some time, so hopefully I will have licked it with this. CBC: [Discussing the Universe X series] Was it collected? Alex: Yeah, all the series, making a total of five trade paperbacks. CBC: And how’d they do? Alex: I believe most of them have been in print for a good long time. There may be some of them that are out of print currently, but over the last decade they’ve been out there in most of the bookstores I’ve seen, so knowing that did get out there. I don’t know how much of, say, the second and third series was read as much as certainly the first, that was very successful. But, oh, well…

CBC: I think you nailed it right there as far as I remember my confusion at the series at the time was you did have a lot of these spin-offs and one-offs— Alex: Oh, yeah, and that’s all just, that’s a creative— CBC: I didn’t know what I had and didn’t have. Alex: Yeah, that was a creative greed… CBC: How many creative people are you in touch with — writers and artists — you’re in touch with on a regular basis? Alex: Barely any. Barely any. The friendships I’ve kept for a very long time I still have, with writers like Kurt, of course, and Paul Dini and I, Steve Darnall, and, of course, Jim Krueger. But, for the most part, I’ve learned through the hard way that maybe keeping such a tight connection with maybe some of the talent that is doing the physical work underneath you is not always — It can always lead to some explosion of…whatever, blowout. I’m trying to think of some way to phrase it that’s— CBC: Creative differences? Alex: I don’t know if that’s even it. There’s always a great chance for ego conflict, where if I’m giving notes directly to an individual that it could be taken poorly, that I might handle it poorly, or that you get all manner of disruption based upon how something is handled in that delicacy. And I’m not a trained editor. I should not be — I’m not a trained art director. But if I filter those notes through the person who is the facilitator of that, I’ve been able to see how the work does get done well, and that’s a lot of what has worked well within my time with Dynamite. I’m getting to see any notes I’ve

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Above: Does Alex got it or does Alex got it? Ye Ed remembers the day he found this incredible Kirby: Genesis image zipping around the interweb thingie and he immediately selected it as his Technicolor screensaver. Great Kirby’s Ghost, it’s a beautiful explosion of Jack-created characters subsequently used in the Kurt Busiek-Alex Ross title — and the trio of spin-off mini-series, Silver Star, Dragonbane and Captain Victory. Space limitations kept yours truly from featuring it as a double-page spread herein, but readers can find it split into two covers on K:G #1 variants and properly displayed in the K:G trade paperback collection published by Dynamite Entertainment. Courtesy of Alex and Dynamite.

again, and we can edit this out if this is awkward for me to be asking you, though, but do you get a sense, I mean, you’re, again, you have enormous marquee within the comics industry. Alex: God, I hope so. [laughs] I still need to remain employed. I’m not independently wealthy yet, to be not working. CBC: I suspect that any number of artists from the ’70s who had some high marquee, they do commission work and they get well paid for it. Do you look at that as a possibility for you, just to do commissioned work? Alex: I guess it is. I mean, those offers come in, but the thing is that I’m hoping that would remain the furthest outlier of survival for me, because I still have the market for original art that has been healthy for a good long while, where the things I’m commissioned to do one time, for one person, there still’s an additional sell-through capability with a different entity over here where, again, the price fluctuates from the actual initial commission rate to things way above anything I imagined. So I’m happy to keep that going for as long as possible, and I’m not so directly opposed from ever doing commissions, but we generally haven’t had to go into that arena yet. And I know that’s been the province of a lot of creators that I admire. In some ways I know it’s not that they only want to do commissions, but they just don’t like maybe the creative directions the companies are in, or those companies are not inviting them back to the party. I have been invited back to the party in a number of cases, but for whatever they want of me, or whatever I think I want to do, it doesn’t match up. So I’ve been an obstinate cuss when it comes to being part of the big publishers as a lot of other craftsmen are. That doesn’t mean I disregard or dislike the work done by other people that work for them. It just means that whatever is right for me isn’t matching up, exactly, yet, for what’s going on there.

Below: A shattering explosion of Kosmic Kirbyness is depicted by Alex Ross in this detail from his and Jack Herbert’s two-page spread in Kirby: Genesis #0. Courtesy of Alex and Dynamite Entertainment.

CBC: Well, growing up on Marvel… Alex: Exactly, yeah. CBC: Are you working right now as

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wanted to be implemented be implemented. So I just know that there’s, you know, no matter how much other creators I’ve gotten to know and be friends with can say they admired what my opinion might be, there’s a breaking point. There’s always a point you could push too far with it. [laughs] CBC: Do you suspect that there’s a dynamic that’s taking place here because of your success, your marquee, so to speak, that that is a part of it? Might there be, for lack of a better term, resentments, for instance, or jealousies, or envy? I mean, it must be interesting, if you’re now going through the process of giving notes, and the notes are going through a middle person, and then that person is giving out notes, so you can see that you’re getting things accomplished, you’re going through, there’s a sense of humility there, right? You’re taking your ego out of it, and you want to see good work done. Alex: Oh, I don’t know about — I wouldn’t give myself that kind of clout. I don’t think that I’m taking myself out of it enough in that sense. I’m— CBC: But you’re being diplomatic, right? Alex: Hopefully that’s what finally comes across, but if I just get a chance to make a note and it’s been implemented by an editor who’s playing the ultimate good cop/bad cop and everything — Now, on the one hand, I don’t necessarily appreciate everyone being treated as just a hired gun that is not necessarily getting to make their own choices. I don’t like that to be happening to me, or for me doing it to anybody else. So I’m sensitive to that, as well. I don’t want to be party to that occurring to another individual. So I try and also be modest in any of the things I might be pushing for, but I know when I sit down to go through any amount of this communication, sending emails back and forth, that I’m ultimately just going straight for whatever my point is, not wasting time if I can cut something loose and say, “Look, this can fly, but here’s what my real problem is. If you can just fix this one thing, this one element is bad enough,” whereas not necessarily just grading the entire thing. And I’ve worked with people, oh, like, Kurt’s a good one, where, man, when you get notes from Kurt, you get notes. And my friend Steve Darnall is the same way. Like, he gives some loooong notes on stuff, like, “I don’t think this moment is exactly what was described.” So I try to look for, like, “Uh, the costume is missing its gloves at this one shot, here.” That’s what I try to keep my comments to. And sometimes you just have to recognize that when something isn’t interpreted the way that you could have hoped for, that, like, well, they just didn’t get it. Let it go. It’s not the end of the world. There are some places that I feel it is the end of the world, but I also have to recognize the place where I need to keep my greatest criticism would be on myself. CBC: Maybe that is the single most important thing to learn in dealing with other people is choosing your battles. Alex: Exactly. CBC: Just what is the right time. And raising kids, by the way, too. [laughs] Where can one be most effective in a situation? And,

Above: During one of our interview segments, Ye Ed asked the artist what he was working on at that moment and Alex replied a cover for Peter Cannon Thunderbolt, #8 [Apr. ’13], which was partly inspired by the Neal Adams cover for Green Lantern #81 [Dec. ’70], seen as inset on opposite page. Ye Ed thinks another “crowd cover” of Neal’s (seen inset at right), The Flash #195 [Mar. ’70], is pretty nifty, too, particularly with that awesome color design! Sketch and final cover painting courtesy of Alex Ross and Dynamite Entertainment.

we’re doing this interview? Alex: Of course, yeah. CBC: And what are you doing right now? Alex: I’m painting a cover for Peter Cannon, #8, specifically, and in this cover it’s sort of making up for the prior month where I got to do a nice close-up shot of him that I was done within about a day. But I’m doing a shot of him being attacked by a mob of people where all the figures making up the cover are somewhere in the neighborhood of, like, fifty, all ganging up on him. And this just revolves around a bunch of mostly average. They’re not characters in the story, they’re a mob. And they completely gather around this figure, swarming him, as reflected in the story in the issue, and this seemed very appropriate as for relating the content of the story, but also for just sort of showing a different kind of spin on a cover, that here’s the hero not posing in glory on the cover like I often wind up, like most of us wind up doing, but instead showing the difficulty. I mean, if anything, it’s much

more comparable to that classic cover from Green Lantern/ Green Arrow where the three characters are swarmed upon by — They’re on that planet where it’s overpopulated? CBC: Right, right. Alex: You know the one. So there’s just tons of figures filling up the cover, and that’s essentially the same kind of idea at play here in my design. CBC: Wow. That’s a lot of work, huh? Alex: Well, I’ve got to always — Like, last week I did a cover of The Shadow amidst an entire cityscape in New York, with every little window painted and indicated, and very specific buildings played out, and not just making a bunch of crap up. And, in a way, it’s just sort of always remind myself how hard some of the stuff is to get done, to never just completely turn out covers that only have a single figure and no background. CBC: You know, I just sometimes sit back and marvel in gratitude that we lived in a world that had movie serials, and that had pulp magazines, and that had 10¢ comic books, 64 pages, full-color! Alex: Yeah. CBC: You know? And then we have all this stuff. Because I return to it, and sometimes I used to get in discussions with John Morrow in which he would just kind of, exasperated, he would say, “It’s just comic books.” But finally he’s starting to turn around, going, “Well, it’s comic books!” Like you were talking about Chris Ware, and you were talking about Dan Clowes, that it truly is an art form. Alex: Well, the thing is, it can be both things. It can be complete tripe — Not tripe, sorry. It can be simple, disposable entertainment that’s as lowest-common-denominator as you can imagine, and it can be high-falutin’, self-important expressions of intimacy, and depth, and unique understanding of the human condition. It can be all those things. CBC: Didn’t you do a Humn Torch series? Am I misremembering? Alex: No, no. Recently, yeah. In the last few years. CBC: Dynamite, right? Alex: Uh, well, Dynamite packaged The Torch for Marvel, but Marvel published it. CBC: I was curious about that. What’s the deal there? Again, that’s what it was, that everything took place, Dynamite packaged the entire thing, or you dealt with Dynamite, they had a contract with Marvel? Alex: That’s right, yeah. Basically, before I had finished up all my work with, first, Justice, and then the time I spent doing covers for Batman, Superman, and the Justice Society, before I finished up all the run of those things I was doing then, Nick Barrucci had been working out the deal, with my blessing, with Marvel to try and get me back with them working on a brand new series, which I had nothing necessarily in my head I was trying to door was ambitious to try and pitch them, and he had this simple idea, which was crossing over TM & ©2013 DC Comics. The Avengers and The Invaders, and that that could be a big success, particularly considering the enormous success The Avengers had begun enjoying in the last ten years. So he got that contract with them. It took a couple years to get it all coordinated, just to get it signed, and then, yeah, I was effectively working for both Marvel and him at the same time, because Tom Brevoort edited it, and all the work was commissioned separately through Dynamite, and then they were paid later by Marvel. It was a really good deal, and it had its extensions going into follow-up potential, which then allowed us, from the success

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of that, to go into The Torch miniseries, which was something that I had wanted to work on ever since his previous big number anniversary, which was in 1999. Jim Krueger and I pitched something back then, and then now here it was 2009, and for his 70th anniversary, and it just seemed like we gotta get this done. This is the right time, we’re reviving him, bringing him back into the mainstream of Marvel publishing, and he’s their first hero, he should be up front somehow. And then the final project we had within that contract was just an Invaders reunion series that brought all these guys that had been revived, some by others, some by us, we revived Toro and Torch, and had all these original five members of the Invaders, or the All-Winners Squad, or whatever thing you want to note them for being, have them all together in the present day. CBC: “You’ll believe a man can fry?” I don’t know… Alex: It was one of the only things that made me happy with reviving Bucky, because I always thought, like, well, if Kirby decided somebody should be dead, you really should stick with that. Because if it made sense to him, I wouldn’t second guess that guy. CBC: You know, I talked to Kurt about this last night, and it’s one of the sad, eye-opening moments, when I recently learned that Carl Burgos was, in the mid-’60s, pushing to gain the copyright on the Human Torch, and, perhaps circumstantially, at the same time, Marvel Comics kills the Human Torch in Fantastic Four Annual #4, and it was brought out in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe, and it’s just, well, how mean? [laughs] For one thing, you’re reintroducing a character from the Golden Age so that you can reestablish the copyright on him, and then you kill him while the very creator who created the first Marvel hero is trying to get the trademark or copyright. Alex: Right, I mean, that was such a weird thing to— CBC: I read this a number of years later, but nonetheless, it was, like, so totally cool that the original Human Torch was back — and, wow, you know, the Vision connection Roy subsequently concocted making all these continuity connections — and it’s just a f*cking business decision. Alex: Yeah. One of the many rotten stories in the history of comics. CBC: I never quite figured out the Human Torch. I mean, for one thing, he’s not human, he’s an android. Okay, we all know that. But he burns! I mean what kind of power is that? [laughs] What did you dig about him? I have to have a fanboy question like this. Alex: What did I get off on with him? CBC: Well, it’s just like, you know, I mean, he really must seriously hurt the guys he goes after. Alex: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, artistically, what I responded to as a kid, aside from, you know, I liked The Fantastic Four and everything, but when I saw The Invaders, the blank-faced version of the Human Torch I thought was so unbelievably cool. Now, of course, it’s ironic because my entire approach is to give him a face, which I do in a photonegative approach so it looks like he’s lit from within, which to me was just a choice of how I’ve got to make use of my painted style to make it somehow sing in a new way, because if I do the faceless guy, it’s like I’m leaving something on the table unrealized. Do you know what I mean? So I had to kind of put that love of what really turned me on — Because I loved all those characters from the ’70s who had complete facemasks, starting with Spider-Man, going into White Tiger, and the Human Fly, you name it, anybody who had that kind of look, like the Prowler, I thought was the coolest, most mysterious thing

in comics, and so his faceless look really charged me up and made The Invaders one of my favorite books. You know, and having a little flaming kid sidekick would somehow seem absurd, but I’d think, well, the kid’s on fire and flying. That’s pretty cool. CBC: I don’t know. It probably all gets back to this reading Steranko’s History of Comics and just trying to, like, comprehend — No, actually, All TM & ©2013 DC Comics. in Color for a Dime, and reading it, and reading the chapter “Okay, Axis, Here We Come,” and you’re reading about these characters, and they’re really pulpish and viciously brutal. The Timely characters were really rather grotesque and extremely violent in their dealings with the bad guys. It was just like, wow, you know, to be hit by one of these fireballs, you’re really going to burn to a crisp. It’s a horrible way to die for robbing a bank. [laughs] Alex: Well, let alone what they did on the covers seemed to be pretty hard-core, because there’s more than a few Alex Schomburg covers that show tremendous death occurring to

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This spread: Above is Norman Rockwell’s charcoal study for his abandoned United Nations mural. Alex is heavily influnced by Rockwell, especially the latter’s lighting and composition, which Alex has incorporated into many pieces, most evident in the covers for Kingdom Come, Justice (trade paperback collection covers opposite), and, of course, this issue of CBC. Alex was celebrated recently by the Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh, with a gallery exhibit entitled “Heroes & Villains: The Comic Book Art of Alex Ross.” Alex gifted the museum with his portrait of the pop art icon, below. Inset right is Andy’s 1981 take on Superman by Curt Swan & Murphy Anderson.

the enemy, let alone the fact that he armed Captain America and Bucky. So the whole thing that even I was getting resistance on, not internally, but from people that saw it in Marvels showing it with Bucky with a machine gun under Cap’s arm, like, well, yeah! He had a machine gun a whole lot of the time, at least on the covers. And I guess in the comics they weren’t fighting the Axis as much as they were doing things on the Western front. They were still mostly stateside, in their adventures, I believe, isn’t that correct? CBC: Yeah, right. Alex: And yet all of the covers immersed us in the actual war we were living at that time. CBC: It’s almost like a separate universe on the covers than what was taking place on the inside. Alex: Well, that’s what it allows for creators in the last 40 years, including, starting with probably Roy Thomas and all the way up to the present, where we’ve now crafted this huge history of stories that took place during the war sending these guys overseas, but ©2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. the great absurdity there, too, is that most of these adventures occur in Europe, where we were in, for how many months were the American forces actually there? You know? I mean, most of America’s involvement was in the Pacific, but we don’t see nearly the amount of dedicated stories to that war because we had less intellectual connection to Asia and the Pacific. Or certainly wars on islands don’t afford you the same level of dressing up a story as it would be to set something in Italy, France, or Germany. I only connected with the idea that we had all these Invaders stories happening around great, stylish castles that Baron Zemo had taken over, or whatever. CBC: Bavarian castles, yeah. Alex: Yeah, I mean, that

was always my impression of what the war was, and then to find out, like, wait a minute, we were only in Europe for how long? Oh, my heavens! CBC: I know. I think of the Sgt. Rock stories, there must be three times the amount of Sgt. Rock stories than days that we were in the European Theatre— Alex: I think Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos mostly was focused on the European War, and it’s like M*A*S*H; here’s a television show that lasted longer than the war they were documenting. Well, anyway, none of this needs to be used. [laughs] CBC: Joe Simon said about Captain America that they were really horror stories starring super-heroes, and as I’m looking through the first ten issues of Captain America Comics, that’s true. It’s an interesting approach. It’s not super-heroes as much as monsters, really, being fought by super-heroes. And horribly disfigured people. Alex: But that’s also an excuse for the jingoism of a lot of those stories, too. It’s like, yeah, they’re monster stories in retrospect because their representations a lot of times of the Japanese were so outsized in their ridiculousness and their racist interpretations that you have to reassess them as being something that was not necessarily meant to be real, or it wasn’t responding to anything that was true. Does that make any sense? Do you know what I mean by that? CBC: Yeah. Alex: It’s sort of like, “Oh, we never intended that to be what we really thought about the Japanese.” CBC: Weellll, that doesn’t really hold up very well. Alex: Well, you know, it’s all part of the same discussion that gets into, like, what exactly did Will Eisner mean with— CBC: I knew you’d bring that up. [Alex laughs] That one hurts. That one hurts. Alex: The thing with him is, I was just thinking, he at least owes something for all that time that he did one of the most well-illustrated racist caricatures ever done in comics. [laughs] It’s almost worse in Eisner’s hands because his art was ten times better than the average artist, because when he drew, what was his name, Ebony? CBC: Yeah, Ebony. Alex: When he drew Ebony, it wasn’t just like the poor draftsmanship of like, say, how Steamboat in Captain Marvel comics was drawn, but here’s this extremely well-drawn caricature, but it’s a cruel caricature, and I would think that Will would have had to do something based in the AfricanAmerican community in his many years since I was born that he’s done original graphic novels, and I guess he did do this one that was based in Africa that he did, I think, somewhere about 12 years ago. Are you familiar with that? CBC: Well, he did a fairy-tale adaptation of a tribal folk story that was African. Alex: Maybe I’m thinking of that. But I thought it was a full graphic novel. CBC: You know what I love? I always get these fanboy things, to a certain degree. I remember the absolute plea-

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sure of getting a Kamandi book. Alex: Uh-huh! CBC: And to realize that, okay, you got page one full-page splash, then you open it up, you’ve got a double-page splash of pages two and three. And he did all these pages that were, like, four panels to a page of in-your-face, frantic action. I used to tease my brother — because I was the Demon guy and he was the Kamandi guy — it would take literally, two-and-half minutes, three minutes, to read the entire comic book. You know, we would use a stopwatch to see how fast it would to get to the last panel. The Demon was always more words. [laughs] So I was one that took a little longer and stuff like that. But it was, part of it was the driving force that would just pull you into the comic and spit you out right at the end. It was just like, amazing. It was an amazing experience and I’ll never forget it. When you channel Kirby, you really do get it spot on, it feels right to me. And I’d love to see that splash page, double-splash page, four panels, you know. [laughs] Alex: Well, the problem with me is that I never run out of excuses for another splash, or another spread, or layouts that — Because, as a layout artist, I am a 100 percent Neal Adams disciple, whether I want to be or not. It’s what’s in my bones, so you’ll get those angled panels like Neal did. For Kurt the layouts he would get from me for this stuff was never anything he envisioned, because he thinks in more of those squares laid across a page, the simple horizontal rectangle shapes. That was more akin to the comics

he grew up with, and I like to think of panels coming across like these little miniature paintings, not for the notoriety of it being a painting, but for the idea of every single thing being of its own impact and worth, graphically. Now, of course, there’s a much more unconscious and simple, direct way of that thinking that came through Jack’s hand, where no amount of power is diminished by the visual shorthand of the, you know, nine panels a page. When it has to come through my hands, because there is a certain deadness that can occur through realism, whether it’s mine or just realism in particular. It’s almost like you need to add that extra element that’s pushing things out in the way that Jack’s simple linework and presentation of reality would do naturally. So he could confine it in a square and it would still be bursting. Every figure, every angle, would still be bursting with energy. But if I did the same panel one 100 percent realisticly, it’s going to be subdued unless I’m giving you that further kind of Neal Adams twist, you know, the worm’s-eye view, or bird’s-eye view. There’s so many things that artists like me have learned in the last 40 years from the talents like the layout style of John Byrne, George Pérez — Hell, I’ll even say, when I was 17 and 20, I was very influenced by what Dave McKean did with Black Orchid, Arkham Asylum, layout styles that pushed things in directions that weren’t the norm before. And, again, the biggest guy will always be, for me, is Neal Adams. Neal Adams is some particular mountaintop of excellence and execution that I always hold as sacred.

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fin 15

, y Astro Cit s

More of the CBC interview on the Art of Writing Comic Books and Revitalized Life in the Age of Marvels

Inset right: Alex Ross cover for the Marvels collection is a homage to John Romita, Sr. (layout) and Harry Rosenbaum (paints) cover of The Spectacular Spider-Man #1 [July 1968]. Inset page opposite: Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment, Alex’s cover for Kirby: Genesis #8 [July 2012] and vignette of Brent Anderson’s Samaritan from Kurt Busiek’s Astro City.

CBC: Can you break down what your job is? For instance, how do you go about approaching a story? Kurt: Oh, jeez. [laughs] Now you’re asking a complicated question. There isn’t one specific way I’ll approach a story. I mea,n a story can spark from a whole bunch of different places; from seeing something and thinking, “Oh, you know you could do a story about that,” to saying, “Well, we haven’t seen this character in a while. What would they be up to?” so that you’re sort of asking the question, “What happens next?” You know, you could start from setting: “I want to tell a jungle story.” You can start from theme: “I want to tell a story about the heartbreak of young love,” “I want to tell a story about the effects of illusion on people,” or you can simply go, “Boy, it’d be nice to tell a story with Ultron.” So how I approach a story varies, depending on what kind of story it is. Typically, just to go the easy one, if I was going to be telling a story, an Avengers story, about Ultron or Kang or something, I would go and look at all of the previous appearances and say, “This is what they’ve done, what would they do next? What’s the next chapter? Given all that they’ve learned, given the defeats they’ve suffered, given their motivations, the things that drive them, their obsessions, what are they going to do next?” Because you don’t want to see a character come back and do the same damn thing he did last time. But at the same time, you don’t want him treated like this is a completely different idea. You know, if you’re going to do an Ultron story, it had better be in some way about robots and in some way about Ultron’s Oedipal obsession, but you try to figure out, how do I take it further? Or at least I do. In the case of building a story around a theme, I mean, the very first issue of Astro City [Kurt Busiek’s Astro City #1, Aug. 1995, “In Dreams”] was about — I had originally come up with that story because Scott McCloud was challenging me to do a 24-hour comic. And I never got around to that, but I was thinking, what would I do if I were going to do one? I’d been reading this book called Catapult: Harry and I Build A Siege Engine, by Jim Paul, which is about a couple of guys who got an arts grant to build a catapult and fling large, heavy things through the air. So I was thinking about that, and thinking about flight, and about what flight would feel like. And for this 24-hour comic I was thinking about doing, I wanted to do a story about flight and what flight would feel like, not simply in a physical way, but in an emotional way. Would it be freeing? Would it be exhilarating? And out of that

Interview conducted by

built this story about a super-hero who could fly, but who never had time to enjoy it. And it developed into this theme that turned out to be a lot more universal than I had originally thought it was, which is about doing what you love and being under so much pressure doing it that you don’t have time to enjoy it, so you don’t have time to experience it in the way that you love. And there’s a lot of people who — you know, work, family, all kinds of things — are in a position like that. And so the Samaritan story built around that. I don’t know, have I rambled on long enough? Have I answered the question, or at least started an answer? CBC: I guess we’re getting there. [chuckles] I know that it’s difficult to quantify, but how much is internal? How much is, “Oh, gee whiz, I want to do an Ultron story because Steve Englehart did a cool Ultron story.” [Kurt laughs] And yet, you did answer. You were talking about the internal pressures of life and about doing something that you love, for me to switch that a little bit and ask if comic book writing is a labor of love for you? Is it a primal desire within you? Kurt: Well, it’s certainly a labor of love and it’s one that can end up under so much pressure that I don’t have time to enjoy it, where I’ll take on an assignment because oh, man, that’d be so much fun to do, and then it has to be done by such-and-such a date and it has to be done under certain circumstances. And when I’m actually doing it, I’m trying to get it done in order to meet the deadline and I’m not necessarily able to have that sense of “Oh, I love this” that I imagined when I took on the assignment. And part of that is if you’re writing three books a month and they offer you something else, well, you know, you imagined the process of thinking, mulling it over, working out a story — but really, if you’re going to fit it in around three other monthly assignments, you’re going to be squeezing it in where there’s time. [chuckles] You’re just not going to have the air there to appreciate the process because you’re going to be in a hurry. But yeah, I mean certainly in doing stories, sometimes there is a sense of “Man, I really liked what Steve Englehart did, or what Roy Thomas did. I want to do something like that.” And in the case of doing a Kang story or an Ultron story, those are probably two of the Avengers’ top three villains, so if you’re writing Avengers, the idea of “Hey, let’s do a Kang story, let’s do an Ultron story,” it’s just always out there. It’s like doing a Fantastic Four series and thinking, “Ah, I should really do a Doctor Doom story.” With me, my

Jon B.Cooke Transcribed by

Brian K. Morris Steven Thompson Portrait by

Barbara R. Kesel

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Above: Alex Ross cover for Astro City: Dark Age #1 [2005] featuring Jack-in-the-Box, Kurt’s “clown hero.” From the original painting, courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

particular fannish tendencies also lean toward “Boy, I’d really like to bring back Ixar and the Ultroids,” who appeared in two issues [The Avengers #36 & 37, Jan. & Feb. 1967] by Roy Thomas and Don Heck, or maybe it was Stan even [It was Roy — Ye Ed.], and I thought that there were some cool ideas there. I talked to Tom Brevoort, the editor of Avengers, about bringing them back and he said, “Well, you know, you’re working with George Pérez, bringing back someone who maybe needs to be buffed up and made to look cooler and more modern, you’re working with the perfect guy to do it.” And I came up with an idea for the story and then just never got around to it. But there’s nobody, nobody out there itching to see the return of Ixar and the Ultroids except me, so the inspiration for that is I liked reading that story when I was younger. I’d like to catch up with those characters and see what’s going on. Bringing back Ultron or Kang is more like, who are the big, heavy hitters in the Avengers’ rogues’ gallery? Can we do anything with them? Because you do a good story featuring the A-level villains, that’s going to be a crowd pleaser. It’s also going to be fun to do for me because I’m part of the crowd, you know. I like a good Ultron story. So if I can write one, that’s real good. If you ask me to write a good Mr. Sinister story, I won’t have as much of a good time because I was never wild about him in the first place. So the thrill of doing the story would be much more about what I could find to bring to the character and not about any fannish memories of “Oh, boy. I loved that Mr. Sinister story back when I was however-old” because I don’t have any

feelings like that. CBC: What is the difference between playing in other company playgrounds? Astro City, obviously some of the archetypes are based on well-known characters and yet you certainly embraced them and made them your own. Kurt: I’m sorry, that’s not actually true. I mean what you said, actually, I’m not sure it makes grammatical sense. You said “archetypes based on well-known characters” and that’s not what archetypes are. CBC: Okay, go ahead. Kurt: I don’t mean to seem snippish or anything, but the Astro City characters are based on archetypes and there are other characters who are also based on similar archetypes. But what I’ve tried to do on Astro City is I try to get underneath the character as a symbol. So I don’t go, “Oh, I need a character like Spider-Man.” I go “You know, Spider-Man’s kind of a clown hero, always joking, always bouncing around. I need a character who fills that kind of role who’s a clown hero.” But that’s not looking to recreate Spider-Man any more than it is looking to recreate, say, The Creeper or The Blue Beetle or anybody else who’s that kind of energetic, urban, leapin’-around character. When we created Jack-in-the-Box, I mean we literally said, “What’s the archetype of this whole class of comic book hero?” And it was just like trickster, clown — okay, what can we do with clown imagery? A jack-in-the-box is a clown image, a jack-in-the-box has springs, a jack-in-the-box can bounce around — Jack-in-the-Box, now we’re working on an idea that’s as basic and simple as any of the others, but there’s no elderly aunt, there’s no radioactive spider, there’s no J. Jonah Jameson. The idea was not to treat Spider-Man as an archetype, but to say “Spider-Man, The Creeper, characters like that, they represent — they are different faces of a particular archetype. Let’s take that archetype and put our own face on it.” I don’t know if that’s really making sense, but a lot of times, people will look at Astro City and they’ll say, “Aw, you’re just telling Superman stories,” or, “You’re just telling Batman or Spider-Man or whatever —” and I’m not. That’s not my interest at all. If I wanted to tell Spider-Man stories, I’m sure Marvel would let me. I mean I did it for two years in Untold Tales of Spider-Man and I’m pretty sure they’d pay me to write Spider-Man stories if I wanted to now. But Jackin-the-Box, in the example we seemed to have stumbled onto, Jack-in-the-Box is a second generation super-hero, a character driven by the fact that he grew up fatherless and has a son and he doesn’t want his son to grow up fatherless. There’s nothing about Spider-Man in that. So Jack-inthe-Box owns a business, Jack-in-the-Box is a — I guess Spider-Man created his web shooters, so that the fact that Jack-in-the-Box builds his own super-powers, you could say there’s a connection there, but it’s coincidence. We decided that if he’s going to be a clown hero, a jack-in-the-box is a nice symbol, a jack-in-the-box is a machine, so how about a guy who builds toys, taking those principles of toys and turning them into super powers? And that’s where the idea came that Jack-in-the-Box was a toy manufacturer. So if you see that, and I realize I’m sort of nit-picking to some extent, we’re not saying, “Let’s start with an existing comic book character and do our version.” We’re saying, “What are the archetypes?” Superman and many other characters fulfill a kind of a “savior” archetype; Batman was something that Bob Kane and Bill Finger built out of earlier characters like The Shadow and The Scarlet Pimpernel, who themselves are built around this archetype of the vigilante, the scary guy in the dark. And what I did in creating The Confessor wasn’t say, “Oh, I need a character like Batman,” but say, “This archetype of the scary guy in the dark, there’s another character built on that archetype and that’s Dracula.” Now Dracula and Batman aren’t remotely the same character, but what if you saw a character that seemed to be a nighttime vigilante and he turns out to have more in common with Dracula? [chuckles] Then we’re building a new character. You know, that’s not Batman. There are certainly similarities, but the point

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of creating the character was not to have a Batman-like character. The point of creating the character was to have the archetype of the nighttime vigilante and have something that we could do with that that was different, that was new, that was our own thing. CBC: With the naming of the streets, the naming of any number of things within Astro City, you’re acknowledging comic book creators. There’s a running subtext about the history of comics itself in the series. Kurt: Yeah, that’s right. Our conceit for building the history of Astro City was to imagine that there was a company out there called Astro Comics and it had a history not unlike the others. So in the 1940s, they were reacting to the same kinds of cultural touchstones and imperatives that Marvel Comics and DC Comics and other comic book companies were. In the 1950s, you know, they were reacting to the Red Scare, they were reacting to monster movies. In the 1960s, they were reacting to the Summer of Love. Back before there were super-heroes, there were pulp-type heroes, there were war heroes, and those kinds of shapes and ideas that affected the development of comic book history, they affected Astro City history as well. So when we create a character who debuted in 1955, we’re not saying, “Well, it happens to be 1955, and here’s a character.” We’re saying, “If it was 1955, and we were creating a comic book character for the kind of comic book market and culture that existed back in 1955, who would fit that kind of role?” So that’s why, for instance, we have a super-hero version of Cleopatra who showed up around the time of the Elizabeth Taylor movie. Back when that movie happened, Cleopatra showed up in a whole bunch of comics and it was because “Hey, Cleopatra’s in the public domain, she’s in a big movie, let’s do Cleopatra in some stories and maybe we’ll sell a few copies.” And I imagined that the editors and creators at Astro Comics would go, “Hey, Cleopatra’s going to be a big thing. Let’s make her a super-hero.” So I wanted the history of Astro City to have the kind of familiarity of its own history that the comic book industry as a whole has, as opposed to doing something like, say, [the George R.R. Martin-edited super-hero/science-fiction prose anthology series] Wild Cards, which says, “We’re going to postulate that there was this event and then we’re just going to spring off it in completely different ways,” and you end up with something that does not look like a traditional super-hero universe because it’s not playing off of the same history and the same events. Does that make any sense? CBC: Yes. This summer, I sent you an e-mail, one also sent to any number of other comics creators about Jack Kirby and how he has been treated. The original pitch was asking

for contributors to imagine a world where Jack Kirby was treated fairly. And you brought up an example that was really very much at the beginning of his career. If indeed you’re channeling the real history of comic books through Astro City, what would be a perfect world for comic books in a way? Have you imagined that, like are there other events that you could see it being better played out for everybody involved, perhaps? Kurt: Well, I think we’re conflating two different things here. Astro City is not intended to be the comic book history as it should have happened. I mean Astro City doesn’t even get into the idea that if there are fictional creators behind these characters — other than Brent, Alex and myself, and we’re not usually fictional — how were they treated? We can’t really deal with the question of somebody like Kirby getting fed up at one company and going over to another company for a while because we’ve just got the one universe. [chuckles] So we’re not actually treating Astro City as an ideal business environment for comic book creation over the course of its history; we’re just taking Astro City as a super-hero history that played off of American history and world history in similar ways to the way other companies did. I mean Marvel created S.H.I.E.L.D. in the 1960s as a response to The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Wally Wood and the

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Above: Kurt Busiek (wearing the hat at right) attending a store signing with artist James W. Fry III, sometime in the 1980s, at the Dream Factory, in South Norwalk, Conn. Above right: The same event (promoting The Liberty Project, an early Busiek effort published by Eclipse Comics) with (left to right) colorist Adam Philips, artist James Fry, writer Busiek, and K.B.’s past mentor, artist/ writer/editor (and onetime Comic Book Artist proofreader!) Richard “Claypool Comics” Howell. Pix courtesy of KDB. Below: Kurt sans chapeau in this vintage pic of the future scribe while attending New York’s Syracuse University in 1979. Courtesy of KDB.

Above: Not entirely sure of the context of this one-pager but writer/penciller KDB tells us it’s from the mid-’80s, and was inked & lettered by Adam Philips, currently on staff in DC’s marketing department (and CBC pal!). Courtesy of KDB.

guys at Tower created the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Looking at that, you’re not saying “S.H.I.E.L.D. exists, therefore there should be some parallel to what you’re saying.” There was a response to James Bond and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and that response showed up in comics in different ways. So that response would show up in Astro City in some way and that’s not a question of whether it’s ideal or not. That’s purely a matter of those being the cultural triggers at the time. You know, there were probably superdogs in Astro City, dating back to back when Lassie and Rin Tin Tin were really popular because that’s when superdogs started showing up in comics as a general thing; because they were popular, dogs in the movies and on TV. So comic book companies said, “I’m going to latch onto that and we’re going to do Krypto and we’re going to do Ace the Bat-Hound and we’re going to do Rex, the Wonder Dog.” And those are all DC examples, but you can probably put together a list of thirty superdogs from the late ‘40s and 1950s that were just reactions to the popularity of those characters. That’s just a reflection of how popular culture reacts to other popular culture. CBC: Astro City is owned by you and Alex and Brent, correct? Kurt: Yeah. CBC: Was that a conscious decision that no one else is going to own this but us? Kurt: Yeah. Especially also going into it, I said to Brent and Alex, “Look, this is very, very personal to me and I want to make sure that we don’t get into a situation where we do it

for three years and then Brent says, “Oh, they offered me Batman. I want to draw Batman for a while. Goodbye,” and now I can’t do it any more. So Brent and Alex each have equity in Astro City, but I control it. You know, from the point that they stepped in, it was clear that I got to be the Big Dog on this one because none of us expected that seventeen, eighteen years later, we’d still be working on it. CBC: How many issues, all told, have there been? Kurt: Oh, I don’t know. I mean not nearly enough. [mutual laughter] But that’s because of illness and stuff like that, but who would think that if you start working on a comics project in 1995 that you’re still going to be working on it in 2012? Brent didn’t expect he’d still be working on it, but he’s still enjoying it. And Astro City, when it comes out, still sells well enough and it makes money and so everybody’s having a good enough time to stay, and it’s making money so that we can keep doing it. But going into it up front, we didn’t know that. Backtracking to your question, when I created Astro City, what I started with, I built up enough stuff and then went to Alex and asked him if he’d be willing to design characters for it and the whole ball started rolling. I had been talking to Marvel about doing an ongoing Marvels series and the idea wasn’t going to be “Here’s the adventures of Phil Sheldon.” You know, as far as we were concerned, Phil Sheldon was done after the first series. We were talking, we were going to do a sequel series, but Phil wasn’t going to be the lead character in the sequel. Charles and Royal Williams were — and then they turned out to be the leads in Astro City: The Dark Age. See, the idea was it was going to deal with Marvel history by taking various events and showing you a normal person’s eye view of it. Let’s say somebody who is working as an emergency room technician on the night the X-Men died in Dallas or somebody who is up against Matt Murdock in court, and the more we roughed this stuff out, the more I realized that this wasn’t going to work. In the first Marvels, we started to have editorial trouble the minute it was clear it was going to be popular. Once artwork started to be shown around at conventions and people started to get excited about it. Up until that point, it was just this four-issue mini-series by some journeyman writer who got to do Spider-Man fill-ins every now and then and some new artist who was good, but he’d never done anything before, really. So when scripts went to editors for their input and approval, they just said, “Sure, fine, whatever.” And when it was clear it was going to be popular, then they started saying, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, this is going to be a thing. I want in on it.” So we started being told, “No, no, J. Jonah Jameson could not be around in issue one because he’s younger than that.” And I pointed out the math and how old Jonah had been established as in the past, how old he need to be during that time and I said, “Look, it’s fine. He’s this old, therefore he can be that old.” But I was told, “No, you can’t do that.” And that’s why J. Jonah Jameson is never named in the first issue. We couldn’t take him out because it had already been painted. We were working on issue four, but we could change the script so that he’s some unnamed guy who sure seems like J. Jonah Jameson, and everybody who reads the story knows that he’s Jonah, but the editor who didn’t want it to be Jonah can say, “Yeah, it’s not really him. Look, he’s never named.” That was just one example. When we were working on the sequel, there was a scene in the first issue where again, the Spider-Man editor told me, “Spider-Man wouldn’t do that.” And I said, “Spider-Man did it. We’re re-creating a scene from a Gerry Conway-Ross Andru issue.” He said, “No, no, you can’t have Spider-Man do that. Spider-Man wouldn’t do that.” And I just — I don’t know what to say. I was literally showing what happened in an actual comic that had been published years ago and I was being told, “No, you can’t show that. That would not have happened,” even though it actually did. So we had to find ways around that sort of thing and I just sat there, going, “Doing this sort of thing every month? Needing to get

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approval from the X-Men office, the Spider-Man office, and the Fantastic Four office, and whatever; this is going to be a nightmare.” CBC: Do continuity glitches equate to negative cash flow in any way? Or is it just self-justification for editors to hold onto their jobs? Kurt: I don’t — you know… I - I - I, you know… [sighs] CBC: Speculation? [chuckles] Kurt: Yeah, I’m sort of at a loss because I’m the guy trying to not have there be continuity glitches. [Jon laughs] You know, I’m the guy trying to say, “I want the history to be what the history was shown to be.” And when I’m told, “No, you can’t do that,” then I’m just sort of pounding my head against the wall, going, “Why can’t I show what Marvel Comics has already shown?” [laughs] You know, these are stories that now have been reprinted in Masterworks or Essentials or whatever. They hadn’t at that point, not very many of them, but there’s a certain amount of protectiveness, I guess, where the editor is saying, “I need to protect my character. I need to make sure that they are portrayed well.” And oftentimes, what that turns into is, “I need to make sure that the character, when my character appeared in someone else’s book, he’s gotta look good. He can’t make any mistakes.” And to me, well, if you’re dealing with Spider-Man, that’s what he does. He makes mistakes and he fixes them because he’s not Superman. He’s somebody young who’s figuring it out as he goes along and he screws up and he fixes things. But it seems in some people’s eyes, that it’s okay to have a story show your hero screwing up if it’s his own book because you’re going to get to show him coming through and triumphing in the end. But if it’s somebody else’s book, well, they’re not showing a character as a fully-fleshed human, they’re just dissing him. They’re just saying, “Look at the screw-up,” [chuckles] and I don’t know, in some cases — I hate to keep ragging on Spider-Man and Spider-Man editors, but there was a point where I was up at the Marvel offices, and this was when I guess Byron Preiss was doing

Spider-Man novels. They had the Marvel novel license and they were doing novels and short stories with the Marvel characters and the Spider-Man editor told me, “Ha ha, you’ll never believe this. I had to just tell the Byron Preiss people that no, no, they can’t do that story. Man, it’s just like no, Spider-Man doesn’t have radioactive blood. That’s from that TV cartoon theme song.” And I said, “But you remember the Master Planner Saga? The best Spider-Man story ever? Stan Lee and Steve Ditko? Where Aunt May got a blood transfusion from Spider-Man and now she’s dying because his blood is radioactive and Spider-Man’s got to get the ISO-36 back from Doctor Octopus and it’s this whole big thing? Yeah, he’s got radioactive blood.” He thought he was protecting the character. CBC: “Not my Spider-Man.” [mutual laughter] Kurt: Well, he just thought, “Boy, they don’t know anything but the cartoons.” But it turned out, no, that line in the cartoon may sound stupid, [Jon laughs] but it’s actually based on a story. There is a story that establishes that yes, Spider-Man does have radioactive particles in his blood. So editing comics is not easy, and editing comics at Marvel and DC gets harder and harder every year. I mean I stop and think every now and then, I started reading comics in 1974 and the first comic that I read — aside from just reading the comics occasionally when I was younger and then throwing them away — I read Daredevil #120 and that issue had a call-back to Daredevil #83 and I thought, “Cool, it’s this thing from 40 issues ago and that stuff that happened then still matters.” It was maybe four years earlier. Daredevil had been bi-monthly for a while so maybe it was five years earlier. Nowadays, Daredevil #120 is so far in the past from today that it’s farther in the past today than Action Comics #1 was when I started reading comics. So if you throw around casual references now to comics from 1974, 1973, 1968, you’re delving back so far into these characters’ history that it’s like if I had picked up comics when I was fourteen years old and they were making all of these references to World

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Above left: Kurt explains, “A cartoon I drew in 1988, based on a food-poisoning-induced hallucination on my honeymoon in Disney World, in which I dreamed that I’d been hired to ‘take the FF back to their roots as a rock band.’ Inked by Richard Howell. I sold a story based on this dream, to What The--?!, which Richard also drew [Fantastical Four, “World Tour 1992,” #17, Mar. ’92].” Above right: Another Busiek original, this from ’87, depicting the original X-Men, apparently drawn for a fanzine cover. Both are courtesy of KDB.

Above: Scott McCloud begins to show his Zot! cartooning style in the Busiek collaboration from 1978, “Once More With Feeling,” which the pair hoped to sell to Marvel’s Epic Illustrated. The “terrible” lettering is by Kurt himself. Courtesy of KDB.

War II stories. The length of time covered and the amount of material that’s been covered with two and three and four Spider-Man books coming out per month, and all these Batman books, the idea that an editor can keep track of it all, that an editor can be the authority who can say, “No, no, no, Batman has never met Character X,” or, “This particular piece of information about The Daily Planet can’t be contradicted” is just bananas. There’s no way to know all of that stuff. And at DC, it’s compounded by the fact that every now and then, they blow up their whole history and rebuild it. So you don’t know if the history of Wayne Enterprises or the genealogy of Clark Kent is the same as it was five years ago. So I don’t, for a minute, want to suggest that editing comics and trying to keep these gigantic, sprawling universes straight is easy. But sort of to circle back around to the question, I knew I wanted to do stories about this sort of thing, and I knew that it would be a nightmare to try to do it at Marvel so I said, “Well, why don’t I make up my own city? Why don’t I make up my own world, all my own super-heroes and I can tell this kind of story? And I don’t have to go to anybody and say, ‘Can I tell this story the way I want to? Can I present the history accurately?’ Because I’m the only guy who gets to decide whether I can tell the story and I make up the history. So of course it’ll be accurate.” Naturally, in Astro City, I’ve screwed up my own history a few times, but at least I did it honestly. At least nobody was telling me, “No, no, no, you must contradict that earlier story.” Jumping back in time for a minute, before Alex and I did Marvels, I had wanted to do stories about what it was like to be an ordinary guy in the Marvel Universe. I’d even done a couple of them.

I did an “Iron Man” short story about a guy who works in the Stark Industries motor pool and every couple of months, puts in an application for transfer. He wants to be Iron Man. And I’d done a story, an Avengers comic back-up story in an annual. It was about a kid in Iowa who — the Avengers are his greatest heroes and we see what happens on the day the Avengers come to town to fight the Sons of the Serpent. It turns out his older brother is one of the Sons of the Serpent and he’s caught in the middle. I had actually talked to a couple of editors about doing a series called Marvel Super-Heroes in which “Marvel Super Heroes” was a deli in the Baxter Building. [Jon laughs] You went in and you got hero sandwiches and in the morning, you get your coffee and your bialys or whatever, get a bagel. And each story would be a story of somebody who came in and interacted with the deli and then went out to their normal life and dealt with the fact that they had to get to work; they had to get somewhere where the Hulk was tearing up midtown or they were due in court — you know, here’s your Matt Murdock story again — or whatever, and editors just laughed at me. And so doing Marvels was a way of doing that kind of story that I wanted to do. And if you notice, in issue four, one of Phil’s old friends from back in World War II, we see that he’s running a deli in the back of the Baxter Building called “Iggy’s Super-Heroes.” That’s our nod to that series idea I had before. So the idea of doing an ongoing Marvel series was a way of saying, “Look, I had wanted to do this series before and everybody laughed at me. Now that I’ve proved it can work, I could do it,” and then me realizing that the editorial difficulty of doing it in an existing universe would be so great that I’d be better off making up my own world and making up my own place. And once I’d figured out enough about it, I called up Alex and asked if he’d do covers and character designs and he said, “Sure.” And we started shopping it around without an artist attached, other than Alex. Our plan was that different artists were going to draw different stories, different arcs, and over the course of pitching it around and talking to different editors, we realized that that was just going to be too much of a headache, that even though a book like, say, Sandman worked that way, Sandman didn’t start out working that way. It just ended up working that way as artists left and the book sort of established itself as what it was. I ran into Brent at a science-fiction convention and asked if he’d be interested in drawing one of the stories, then I asked if he’d be interested instead of drawing a six-parter and then I said, “Well, how would you like to draw the whole series?” and he was very accommodating and said, “Sure” each time, and that’s how he got into the picture. And he and Alex and the guys at Comicraft, they’ve been around ever since. CBC: We were just discussing one of the jobs that the Marvel editor has is to keep an eye on this unwieldy, huge monstrous decades and decades of continuity. In your estimation, is that necessary? Is the thrill that you had in 1974 of noticing the footnote referencing Daredevil #83, is that still necessary? Is that part of the storytelling? Kurt: Part of the storytelling in Astro City or in just comics in general? CBC: In the Big Two comics, DC and Marvel. Kurt: They seem to be a lot less interested in that sort of thing. But on the other hand, there are times when it comes up. For instance, I haven’t read the Avengers Vs. X-Men mini-series to see if it’s any good, but I’ve seen commentary online that suggests that they’ve established that the earlier incarnation of The Phoenix was this Chinese or Japanese girl who’s connected to Iron Fist? Am I making any sense? Have you read the material? CBC: No, I haven’t, no. Kurt: Okay, well, there’s this six-part “Iron Fist” story by Chris Claremont and Rudy Nebres that ran in Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu back in the ‘70s called “Shall I Love the Bird of Fire?” It dealt with this ancient mythic story about this firebird girl who is this red-headed Asian girl and Iron Fist had

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dealing with 12 years of backstory is a much, much easier thing than dealing with 50 years of backstory. Hell, even by the time I was starting to read comics in the early ‘70s, DC wasn’t saying that all of those Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman stories had all happened. They were basically saying, “Well, the ones that we like, everything from about 1958 on, that stuff happened. But the stuff before that? Eh, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t.” Some of it happened to their Earth-2 characters. So they weren’t dealing with, at that point, a history that was even 35 years old. They split it in half. And nowadays, you’ve just got decades and decades and multiple books. It’s just a huge amount of material and keeping it all straight and honoring it all, it seems like it must — it may not actually be impossible, but it’s close enough to impossible that they handle it differently than they did back in the ’70s, back when you could fit everything Marvel put out into a single bookcase. CBC: I certainly recall really getting passionate about comics in about 1970, 1971 when DC was trying to “Marvelize” their line, trying to get some kind of over-arching continuity going. The Marvel stuff always seemed to be relatively complex and Kirby seemed to be a little grotesque to me. As a child, for whatever reason, my older brothers really liked Marvel, I stuck with DC. But I liked it

Above: Two pages from the Busiek/McCloud collaboration “Vanguard,” originally intended for the Richard Howell-edited anthology, Rising Stars, a never- published comics magazine intended to join Howell’s two (shortlived) b-&w mags, Fantasy Illustrated and Adventure Illustrated (below). The pair completed two or three chapters before word came that the mag was cancelled before it was released. Kurt would see his reporting published in Howell’s Comics Feature newszine. Courtesy of KDB.

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to protect her. And I don’t remember all of the details, but I remember flagging that and talking to Tom Brevoort about it and saying this could be an earlier version of Firebird, the Avengers character. And the two of them could be tied together in a way that explores her powers and her history. We never got around to doing anything with it. But it seems like Brian Bendis or, I don’t know, somebody else — I don’t remember who wrote that series, I think they had four different writers — somebody said, “Hey, hey, look at this character off here in Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu. We could tie this bird of fire to the Phoenix legend and get this cool story out of it.” So the thrill that I had at noticing that something from four years ago, or six years ago or eight years ago, still mattered — they’re still doing that, even as recently as the latest big crossover. Unless I’m completely wrong, it seems to tie back into this six-part story in a Marvel black-and-white kung-fu magazine which is, you know, that’s about as obscure as you can get. They’re just not treating it as rigidly as they used to. So if they wanted to establish — and here we are on Iron Fist, still — that there were all of these different Iron Fists in the past before Danny Rand? Well, as far as I remember, that violates Iron Fist’s continuity because nobody else had defeated the dragon and gained the power of the Iron Fist. Danny Rand was the first and now they’re saying he’s the latest in a long line, and they’ve decided to change that. And they got a good story out of it, so fine. Back in the ‘70s and ’80s, it wouldn’t have happened that way. You wouldn’t have just sort of decided “oh, by the way, we’re going to change the history of this character and ignore this stuff that’s part of his origin story in order to tell this other story.” And these days, it’s like, “Well, you know, it’s a good story so we’re shifting things around a little bit.” But they do use the past when they feel that there’s value in it and they ignore it when they feel that there isn’t value in it and things are much, much looser and that’s probably an inevitable consequence of the fact that we’re 51 years past the debut of The Fantastic Four. And

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when there was this continuity suddenly started creeping into the DC books. And then nowadays, it almost seems to be a bane. It almost seems to be often — well, now like you’re saying that Marvel is, at times, ignoring any sense of continuity and just going for story. Kurt: It varies. I mean I don’t think there is a single answer to the question. I can tell you that having that cross-universe continuity was a great idea when it came to making me a comic book fan in the first place, because I was a kid who loved series fiction. I’d go through the childrens library and look for any author who’d written a lot of books. If they wrote a lot of books, then maybe it was a series and that way, if I liked one, I could find out what happened next. So I’d read the Danny Dunn books and I’d read the Lloyd Alexander books and then I’d read E. Nesbit and Enid Blyton and the Oz books and any book that was a series. I’d be attracted to that because then I could see what happens to the characters after the story. Particularly something like the Oz books where first, you’d have The Wizard of Oz and you had Dorothy; and then the second story, The Land of Oz, introduced Ozma, but you didn’t have Dorothy in it and then Dorothy comes back and meets the characters that you met in other books so you’re seeing characters from different books connect up. That was something that I was very, very interested in as a reader. So when I stumbled onto this issue of Daredevil, it wasn’t simply that there was a reference back to Daredevil #83. That interested me. But Daredevil fought Hydra in that issue, as well. It was part one of a four-part story and you had all of these new Hydra chiefs of different departments. And they were characters who had appeared in other books, in Marvel Team-Up, in Sub-Mariner, in various — in The Claws of the Cat. So what the book was telling me was this is a series story, but it’s not merely that what happened earlier in the series mattered, what happened in whole different series mattered. Here’s a guy who fought Spider-Man and now he’s fighting Daredevil. Here’s a guy from Thor, here’s this whole thing about this S.H.I.E.L.D. series — even the text page was a history of Hydra and even that was continued in the next issue. [Jon laughs] So there were references to past stories, there was a cliffhanger ending that led you toward the next issue, there was a text page that led you to the next issue, there were all these connections that said “this isn’t just a series, this is a whole world. This sprawls out not just backward and forward, but sideways.” That hooked my series-loving heart, really hard. I wanted to find more comics. I wanted to find more — I wanted to find Daredevil #83, I wanted to find the issue of Strange Tales that introduced these weapons that the Hydra guys used, and I wanted to find that issue of Marvel Team-Up and, ahh man, it sent me looking for all kinds of stuff. Now there are people who would tell you that that sort of thing turns them off, so is having a lot of continuity a good idea or a bad idea? Well, when I was 14 years old, it was a great idea for me and it might have been a bad idea for you, looking at stuff and going, “This is a lot of connections to stuff I haven’t seen. I’ll stick with the DC books where there’s continuity, but it’s not quite this sprawly.” These days, I’ve gotta say the fact that I am less interested in the big, sprawling universes because they’ve been rebooted and tweaked and shifted around so much. I mean, when I started reading Daredevil, he was the spiritual descendent of the Stan Lee/ Gene Colan character and a little while later, Frank Miller came along and he turned Daredevil into a character who, you know, technically is the same guy, but it’s virtually a different series. The spirit of those earlier stories just — what Miller did was, he built the series around a whole different spirit — and I say “spirit” and I start thinking about his Will Eisner influence and well, now we’re sidetracking now on that. But for a while there, I thought of the Frank Miller Daredevil as kind of like the Earth-2 Daredevil, that the Lee-Colan guy and the Miller guy, they had various amounts of shared history and various technical aspects that were the same. But in terms of the spirit of the heart of the series, one of them is a gritty crime story and the other one is a super-hero farce. The guy that shows up in the Frank Miller stories did not have the daffy adventures that the Lee-Colan guy had. So it felt to me like somewhere in-between there’s a demarcation point where one series stops and it starts in something else. And then farther along, the Miller influence slips out and Kevin Smith does Daredevil and Brian Bendis does Daredevil and you’ve got this whole different sensibility with Daredevil. You’ve gone on so long that it does not feel like the guy who was in Daredevil #25 is the same as the guy who was in Daredevil #200 is the same as the guy who’s in Daredevil whatever-number-they’re-up-to-now. They have the same name and they have the same powers but really, they have about as much to do with each other as the two different Battlestar Galacticas. So the universe as a whole has been fragmented by essentially reinventing the characters for whatever the modern era is. I mean it happens, it’s natural, but somebody who was an X-Men fan in 1968, versus somebody who is an X-Men fan now, they’re reacting to 23

completely different books. And so it doesn’t feel like a straight progression from one to the other anymore and to somebody like me who got very, very strongly into the fact that this was a pretty well-knit universe back in the 1970s now looks at them and goes, “You know, this is a revision of a revision of a revision of a revision of what I fell in love with.” And it may be good stuff, but it’s not exciting to me because I know there’s another revision coming in a few years. And I know that it’s not going to last, it’s not going to feel the same. To somebody who’s young and discovering it now, it may be hooking them just as hard as it hooked me back then, so they’re not doing something wrong by not aiming the books at me. I’m 52 years old. They should not be aiming the books at me anyway. [laughs] I should be reading other stuff and I am reading other stuff, but the question of continuity, the question of how close do you tie these characters to their own history, it starts to just pile up too high. I mean my sense of who Peter Parker is says that when he was back in high school, he wore a yellow sweater vest and a red tie and a blue sports jacket. And in these days, if you tell a story of Spider-Man, back in his high school years and you dress him like that and say “this happened eight years ago,” he looks like some sort of alien being. People didn’t dress like that in high school eight years ago. People dressed like that in high school in the late 1950s when Steve Ditko’s fashion sense calcified, so you’ve got to change it, you know. You’ve got to loosen up, so the Peter Parker of today may be more like the guy in the movie. When he was in high school, he would have dressed like that, he would have acted like that; that’s not the Spider-Man I grew up with, but that’s the Spider-Man that’s probably right for today that’s appealing to an audience for today. So which is right? Which is wrong? Whatever connects with an audience is right. That’s the way I look at it. CBC: You know, I was also very much into series books. I started out with the Tom Sawyers — and yes, there are other sequels and poorly-written sequels — [mutual chuckling] oh, God — by Mark Twain. But I loved them as a kid. Then I got into the Doctor Dolittle series. In Boy’s Life, there were short stories about a trio of time-traveling Boy Scouts that was just great and then they made it into books and stuff. And I would ponder at times what is that? What is that about series? Why was I so attracted to series? And I wonder whether there was a dysfunction to have not wanting characters to go away, of wanting this perpetual, never-ending story, and comics fit nicely into that yearning. I didn’t want the characters to go away and wanted to fend off this sense of loss. I started with DC, and then it was Marvel, it was these universes where people didn’t really go away, but then I began appreciating stories with beginnings, middles and endings. Super-hero comics didn’t fulfill me so much anymore. I wonder if the continuity appeals to something that’s common within us fans of needing this “comfort food,” shall we say? Kurt: Yeah, maybe. Another way I look at it is when I was 14 years old, I really, really liked Daredevil and the X-Men and Iron Man. But you know, when I was a couple years younger than that, I really liked The Hardy Boys. Now should there be Hardy Boys comics coming out today, or Hardy Boys novels coming out today, that I would want to read? That seems a little ludicrous. Like I said, I’m 52 years old. [laughs] If I want to read adventure stories about people solving mysteries, I move on to Alistair MacLean and to Michael Connelly and to Robert Parker and all kinds of stuff where it’s aimed at me and I let the Hardy Boys fall behind and continue to say something that a 10- or 12-year-old is going to be thrilled by. And Spider-Man and Superman and so forth seem to have become something where there’s this large portion of the audience that are in their 30s or 40s or older and they want their childhood heroes to be still around and still entertaining them, even though they now have an adult sensibility. And the question there becomes well, if you do that, are you making these characters into something that will no longer appeal to the 10- or 12-year-old who fell in love with them in the first place? If Daredevil is a book that is appealing to me as a 50-year-old guy, well, is it going to appeal to today’s 14-year-old or today’s 12-year-old or whatever? And that gets into a problem because comics distribution has developed in such a way that it’s not as easy as it used to be to reach kids who were the age we were when we first started reading comics. So maintaining that existing audience is much more important than it was back in Mort Weisinger’s day when you assumed that anybody — you know, kids who read superhero comics read comics for four years and then they discovered girls, so you could tell the same stories over again and you didn’t want to refer to anything too old because the audience wouldn’t remember that. There was too much turnover, and the bulk of the audience had, at any one time, only been around for a couple of years. Now the market’s changed and it’s a tough question whether you want to make the comics appeal to the fans who keep them buying for decade after decade after decade or if you want to make the comics appeal

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to kids and find a way to reach those kids when they’re eight years old. It’s not a question with an easy solution. CBC: Well, arguably, those 14-year-olds are buying movie tickets, right? And they’re now beginning to encounter the continuity within the motion pictures themselves. Kurt: [Laughs] I have to laugh there. When they rebooted the Spider-Man movies and started off again with this past year, I thought it was a wonderful movie, a terrific Spider-Man movie. But I heard people complaining, “How often are they gonna just start over again?” And I thought, “Yeah, after all, it’s only been ten years since they began the last run. How many times has Spider-Man’s origin been retold in the comics in that 10-year period? And you’re complaining that here in the movies, they’ve done it once?” [laughs] It seems like 10 years is plenty enough time to say, “Okay, our actors are all ten years older than they were anyway, so let’s fall back and start over.” But that’s not even what you’re asking about. CBC: You know, looking at the history of comics, you see that super-heroes dominated between ’38 and ’45 and then they waned, crime comics came in, horror comics came in, romance comics came in and then humor comics came in the ’50s and then there’s a resurgence of super-heroes that takes place again. And while the sales of comics, it’s becoming more of a niche thing. I mean it’s just a precipitous drop in sales from 1950 up into the present day. As you know, we had many adults reading comics in 1950 and I guess there’s nothing but adults right now. Is this preoccupation

with super-heroes, is it healthy for the system? Kurt: No, of course not. CBC: Do you wish that there were more anthology books or other genres? Kurt: I think that… [sighs] well, it’s hard to wish things were the way they were in the past because the way they were in the past wouldn’t work anyway. CBC: I think there is a lifespan for a genre, for instance, that there is a shelflife. Kurt: Well, I’m not sure you’re right. For instance, you said that in the ’50s, humor comics came in and that’s not true. Humor comics were big all through the ’40s as well and humor comics were big in the ’50s and humor comics were big in the ’60s. CBC: I meant the satire comics of… Kurt: Oh, like Mad and that sort of thing. CBC: Yeah. Kurt: Okay, I see what you’re saying. But I think I’d still quibble with your historical overview a little bit, in that super-heroes were a very popular genre in the ’40s, but they weren’t the only popular genre. And once you got to the mid- to late ’70s, super-heroes had gotten to be the popular genre and everything else was kind of hanging on by the skin of its teeth, if it was hanging on at all. Romance comics, by then, were dead; Western comics were nearly dead; horror comics were fading; humor comics, there were many, many fewer of them than there had been. But the problem isn’t — a lot of people tend to look at it and think that the

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Above: Nothing to add here, huh? George Pérez’s cover for JLA/Avengers #3 [Dec. ’03], scripted by Kurt Busiek. Ye Ed’s exhausted just looking at this beauty! Courtesy of the mysterious world inside my computer.

Below: Relax, guys, you’re already assembled! George Pérez’s nifty cover art for the Avengers Assemble Vol. 3 trade paperback collection [’12]. Via that vast network of computers that dare not speak its name.

problem is super-hero comics. If only there were fewer super-hero comics, there’d be more room for other things. And I think that’s looking at it backwards, because super-heroes didn’t push the other genres out. The other genres all failed, leaving super-heroes as the last man standing. So the problem wasn’t “super-heroes are selling”; the problem was “war comics aren’t selling,” “Western comics aren’t selling,” “horror comics —” Horror comics actually have been one of the more durable genres, but they faded and came back, faded and came back. So it wasn’t that the super-hero comics got real popular and that spelled the end for Patsy Walker. Patsy Walker would still be going if people were still buying it, but people stopped buying it. The most loyal audience was the super-hero audience, and it was super-hero fans who built the comic book direct market. So the comic book direct market is built on this idea that “super-hero fans are dedicated and they want their comics and we’re going to find a way to get them their comics more efficiently and more dependably.” So it’s no surprise that the direct market is built around the super-hero fan, and that keeps the dynamic of the super-hero being the incredibly dominant genre going, that the industry is built for that. But whenever you get outside the traditional direct market function — the manga boom wasn’t about super-heroes, the stuff that’s happening now, like the graphic novels that are being published by book publishers like Scholastic and First Second; those aren’t super-heroes. Those are reaching out to a different audience than the super-hero fan and unsurprisingly, the stuff that works in those, in that way, are not things that will primarily appeal to the super-hero fan. So genre diversity can be done, it’s just it’s unlikely to be done by trying to package material that

is aimed at somebody who isn’t a super-hero fan, in a format that dedicated super-hero fans support, and putting it in and distributing it into a market that dedicated super-hero fans are the primary audience for, and then going, “Why didn’t anyone else buy it?” The answer is, “Because you’re not reaching them.” We are seeing comic book stores open up to other genres as we’ve seen the success of Vertigo and the rise of companies like Dark Horse and Image, and they’ve gotten more and more successful at reaching an audience that may have been primarily super-hero once. But the more the industry shifts over to a focus on trade paperbacks, the more the non-super-hero fan can find stuff that interests them that’ll stay in print, that’ll be available, that isn’t a matter of finding six or seven comics on the newsstand, if you’re lucky. Things are opening up, but they’re opening up due to publishers and creators responding to market conditions rather than wanting to turn back the clock and say, “Things should be the way they were in 1960.” Because in 1960, comics were failing. They were just failing from a lot higher on the hill than they are now. [mutual chuckling] You mentioned that the comics sales are much, much lower today than they were back in 1950 — and it’s a steady slope down. We look at the 1960s as a boom time for comics — you know, DC was having the Silver Age and Marvel was coming into its own and doing all of this Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, all the great super-hero stuff — but comic sales were lower by the end of the 1960s than they were at the beginning of the 1960s. So they had found a way, through super-heroes, to stave off the decline, but it was still a decline. CBC: Yeah, I’ll never forget Joe Orlando telling me an anecdote that between 1969 and ’70, there was just a massive drop-off in girl readership. So there was this desperate grab through Leave It To Binky and all these Archie rip-off titles that Henry Scarpelli drew for DC Comics. And then they went into the Gothic romances, just in this “where did they go? How do we get them back?” never to return. Kurt: Mm-mm, yeah. And probably where they went was television and romance novels. And if you want to read a romance story, and you buy a Harlequin paperback, you’re going to get such a better story — it’s not necessarily going to be a great story, but it’s going to be so much better than all what’s coming out under the title Young Love or Young Romance or whatever, back in 1970. The romance comics were pretty cool in the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, but by the 1970s, they were crap. So it shouldn’t be surprising that nobody wanted to buy those books. They were bad. And DC, they tried to catch that humor audience and the girl audience with books like Windy and Willy, which was just

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when DC published Challengers of the Unknown all through the ’60s and sales got worse and worse and worse and I don’t know if they ever stopped and thought, “How do we make this appeal to kids today?” They just thought, “This is Challengers. This is how we’ve always done Challengers and this is the way we’ll continue to do Challengers. This has got to work.” And they watched the sales tail off and tail off and tail off until the book was cancelled. I don’t know, I’m kinda babbling here, but I think the failure of the non-super-hero genre in comics — and for that matter, the slow decline of sales, even in the super-hero books — probably has a whole lot to do not just with the distribution changes and marketing changes and format changes and pricing changes, it also had to do with the fact that these middle-aged guys in their 50s and 60s were trying to do comics that would appeal to eight-and 10-year-olds, but they didn’t think that eightand 10-year-olds were any different than they had been 15 or 20 years before. So there was a disconnect and a lot of the comics weren’t as appealing to the modern audience because they weren’t aimed at the modern audience. They were aimed at the editors’ and creators’ idea of what kids liked. CBC: You know, you gotta shout out some props to Archie Comics, though, for staying resilient all these years. Any time I stand in line at a grocery store and I see one of the Archie Comics Digests, maybe the only comic book available to mainstream audiences. Today they’re introducing gay characters and they’re sticking with the times, and yet the model has remained the same since 1940 or whenever Bob Montana came up with that stuff, and I just had to shout out to Victor Gorelick and the guys.

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Top of spread: According to Heritage Auctions, where these images were found, George Pérez drew these members of The Avengers circa 1978.

Below: Pérez cover for the collection of his Marvel super-team work, 1999’s Avengers Visionaries: The Art of George Pérez. Courtesy of Heritage.

old Dobie Gillis stories with the characters redrawn a little and the names changed. CBC: With new hair styles, yes. Kurt: Yeah, and if you’re taking a comic book from 1964, or 1963 or whatever that was, and you’re saying, “It’s almost ten years later and we’re going to sell exactly the same story with a little cosmetic difference and gee, it didn’t work? Why didn’t it work?” The answer’s not that mysterious. Kids don’t care about exactly the same thing. You can’t take a 1962 story and put the characters in bell-bottoms and tie-dye and expect it’s modern now. CBC: [Chuckles] Such disrespect for the reader. You know, I wonder if you can compare the ratings for [Gothic daytime TV soap opera] Dark Shadows and girl readership in comics and find they all shifted over to watching Barnabas Collins. Kurt: You might very well be able to do that. I mean one of my favorite teen humor comics, one of my absolute favorite teenage humor comics is a John Stanley book called Thirteen (Going On 18). CBC: Ah, right, yes. Kurt: I would show people a cover to one issue, where there’s a couple of guys and a couple of girls, they’re in a canoe, and somebody’s playing a ukulele and he’s got a porkpie hat on. And the joke is they’re about to go over a waterfall and they haven’t seen it coming. That’s the visual gag on the cover, but you’ve got the ukulele and you’ve got the canoe and you’ve got the porkpie hat. What year is it, would you say? CBC: [Laughs] You’re asking me? Nineteen forty-three? I don’t know. Kurt: Yeah, they’re singing “Roll Over, Beethoven.” CBC: [Still laughing] With a ukulele. Kurt: It’s 1968 and John Stanley had no idea what teenagers do in 1968. And that’s why you’ve got these characters canoeing with their ukulele and porkpie hat, thinking, “That’ll sell the kids today.” The people who did the comics didn’t relate to their audience. They weren’t changing. They weren’t looking at the changing audience. They were trying to do the same thing over and over again, even though kids and teenagers went through enormous changes in the ’60s. You ended up with material done under the assumption that these kids were just like their parents, but they weren’t. So it’s not a surprise that lousy romance comics died, or teen humor comics that were completely out of touch with what kids were interested in at the time. Archie at the time were a little smarter about what kids were actually interested in than the people at Dell or at DC. So yeah, this was a period

Above: Beautifully designed covers for Kurt and Stuart Immonen’s 2004 mini-series, Superman: Secret Identity. Ain’t they just lovely? Below: A vibrantly colored Stuart Immonen page from same.

Kurt: Oh, yeah. Oh, I also think that there’s a real strong value in the fact that Archie was their primary business. So while guys like Roy Thomas and Len Wein and Julie Schwartz were thinking, “How do I sell super-hero comics?” the Archie guys had it locked down how to sell teen humor comics. And the guys at DC who were doing teen humor comics, I don’t think they were thinking much about how to sell them. They were thinking more about how to sell super-hero comics. And they approached teen humor as something they just had to get done and out the door. There was a joke back in the ’80s that the way Marvel was assigning their movie adaptation comics was, an editor would just throw rocks out of the office door and the first three guys who say “Ow!” are the ones working on the adaptation. For the most part, they didn’t put a lot of care into those books. They were a sideline, not Marvel’s bread and butter. And then Dark Horse came along and said, “Let’s put as much attention and care into adapting movies as other companies do into super-heroes. Let’s make it a spotlight thing, let’s make it something you can be proud of. As opposed to Marvel where, if you had the license to do a James Bond comic, based on a movie, you were doing it because it’d make some money. So it’s handed to an editor who isn’t interested and he hands it to a writer who isn’t interested and it’s penciled by a penciller who isn’t interested and inked by Vinnie Colletta and his background guy and it’s crap — because nobody cares. Or if they do care, they don’t have the time. So when Dark Horse came along, it’s no wonder that their material

read a hell of a lot better than a lot of the Marvel movie adaptations. Now, Marvel had a long run with Star Wars and clearly, there were a lot of people along the way who cared about that and you had some really good comics. But for the most part, if Marvel was doing a movie adaptation, they were just trying to get it done. They weren’t trying to make it good. [chuckles] The tangent here I went off on was that Marvel took care of its main stock in trade and its main stock in trade was Spider-Man and the Hulk. And DC took care of its main stock in trade and that’s Superman and Batman. The Archie guys modernized what they were doing better than Marvel modernized Patsy Walker and Millie the Model and DC modernized Swing With Scooter because with Archie, that was their main thing. And with DC and Marvel, it wasn’t, so it didn’t get the full attention, it didn’t get the passion. I don’t know, maybe if you were really, really, really passionate about A Date With Debbi, you could make it into something cool, maybe, but I don’t think they were really trying. They were doing formula comics to fill a hole in the schedule. CBC: They were throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. Kurt: Yeah. CBC: That 14-year-old boy, did he realize that? Were the credit boxes important to you at the time? Did you realize people were making a living at this? Kurt: Not right away, but it didn’t take all that long. I mean, I started reading comics regularly in 1974, and the point at which I realized that this was a job, that people did this for a living, was probably around 1976. It was a letter column in X-Men — I want to say #98, now it might have been #97, somewhere around in there — somebody asked a question and Chris Claremont talked about his grandfather asking him, “Yeah, yeah, Chris, you do the funnybooks, but what do you do for a living?” [Jon chuckles] And I read that and I went, “Holy cow, this is what he does for a living. This is a job. This is something that he does as his job. That must be really cool.” And I had, for a long time, I’d wanted to be a writer, but I knew that if I wrote a novel, it would be bad because anything you’re doing for the first time is bad. [Jon chuckles again] So if I spent like a year working on a novel and it stank, or I spent a year writing a screenplay that was no good, I didn’t think I’d have the intestinal fortitude to get up and do another one. You know, it just seemed like such a big, forbidding job, particularly since I knew that the first try was going to stink. But when I noticed, “Hey, comics. This is a job. These things are 17 pages long. If I do a 17-page story that stinks… so what?” CBC: [Chuckles] It’s 17 pages. Kurt: It’s 17 pages. How long did that take? I’ll do another one, I’ll do another one after that, I’ll get better. So at that point, I’d gotten Scott McCloud reading comics too and he drew pictures, and I was interested in writing, so I said,

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ily Trust.

Characters

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13 Rosalin

Richard and I were cooking up a project to do for that and that’s something we were working on. And it turns out that my writing at that time seemed to fall into a pattern. The Battle of Lexington was a bunch of Marvel super-heroes showing up and fighting at our high school. When we were asked to do a comic for the Boston Pops, it was a bunch of super-heroes coming to Boston to save the Boston Pops. And when it was “let’s do a super-hero comic for this Rising Stars magazine,” here we are at Syracuse, so of course what we decided was, “Okay, let’s do a group of super-heroes, kids going to Syracuse who get powers and now they’re super-heroes at Syracuse University and we can have all the fights like there and there, and they can jump over that building.” I was in something of a rut there, I guess. [Jon chuckles] But we did a couple, three chapters of a super-hero series called “Vanguard” and before the Rising Stars magazine got going, it got scrapped and so that stuff never got published. But that was another way of practicing comics. We were practicing. Now that wasn’t — back on The Battle of Lexington, we were drawing on notebook paper — well, not notebook paper, but plain old drawing paper and lettering in pencil and so forth. For Rising Stars, we had Richard as editor and Richard was telling us, “No, no, no, you use india ink, you use Windsor-Newton brushes, you letter with an Ames Lettering Guide, this is how it works,” and so-and-so. We were learning the craft from somebody who knew it better than we did. And in-between, I’m leaving out one comic that we did. We did a comic called Once More With Feeling that was like a 24-page story of a champion of Life and a champion of Death fighting in a science-fiction scenario, but it actually holds together better than a lot of other stuff we did back then. We did it with the idea that we could maybe sell it to Epic Illustrated. And again, it was not drawn on Bristol board, it was all drawn and inked with Pilot Razorpoint pens. The lettering was terrible but you know, it was a complete story that wasn’t about pre-existing characters fighting for no reason. A big step forward for us. CBC: You mentioned a class that you took, a magazine production class.

TM & ©20

“Why don’t we do a comic book together? It’ll be fun. I’ll write it, and you draw it, and it’ll be a fun thing to do.” And Scott was interested in the comics from the stuff he’d been reading and he was up for it. And, for some reason, even though 17 pages was the standard in comics back then, we decided we were going to do a 15-page story — about five Marvel heroes fighting five other Marvel heroes in our high school and wrecking the place. And so we started doing this story, and we really had no idea what we were doing. It had no real plot, it was just fighting for no particular reason. And by the time we were done with it, we’d worked on it for three years. And it was 60 pages long and never did have much of a plot, and it kind of ended just by stopping. It wasn’t an end in the story, and there wasn’t really a beginning, either. So we spent more time on it than I’d have spent if I’d written two or three novels. [Jon laughs] But the advantage of it was, we were doing it together. So we weren’t alone in a room trying to find the energy to continue on with something that stank. We were having fun. We were experimenting. The first few pages are awful. The last few pages are pretty damn good. There’s no plot, but we’d gotten a whole lot better at pacing and drawing and telling a story and scripting characters in character. So over those three years, we figured out how to harness the craft of writing comics and went on to the question, “Okay, now that you’ve got some craft, what do you with it? How do you tell a story that’s worth telling?” But that’s how I got from that Chris Claremont letters page to actually figuring out how to do it. CBC: Was that the next major project, comic book-related project, that you did after Battle of Lexington? Kurt: We did that during Battle of Lexington. But yeah, I mean Battle of Lexington was the first thing we started and POW! BIFF! POPS! — yeah, that was the title — [Jon chuckles] — we did that during our senior year of high school. So those were our first two real projects. CBC: You were hanging around The Million Year Picnic, you went to the Prudential — what was that, a Creation Con? Kurt: You know, if there was a Creation Con back then that Wendy Pini and Neal Adams and Jim Steranko were all at, then that was it. [laughs] But all I really knew was it was a comic book convention, I don’t remember what brand name. CBC: What was the trajectory for you? You went to college? Kurt: Yes. Scott and I both went to Syracuse University. He went to Syracuse because they had an illustration program and by that point, he decided he wanted to be a comic book artist. And I went because they had a creative writing program and I wanted to write comics. Of course, the year I got there was the year they abolished the creative writing major, so that plan didn’t work out. I just focused on taking any course that I could take that would help me out as a comic book writer. I took Playwrighting, I took Creative Writing, I took Comparative Mythology, The Bible as Literature, I took a class in the Movie Musical because it struck me that movie musicals are structured a lot like superhero comics except that instead of breaking out into fights, they break out into dance numbers. I took a class that turned out to be very, very important to me, a class in Magazine Production so I’d know what the business issues of actually making magazines were like. Anything I could do that I thought would help me in my goal, I’d take it. And Scott went through the Illustration program. And while we were doing that, Richard Howell and Carol Kalish had gotten involved with a small publisher called New Media. They published a trade magazine called Comics Feature. It was supposed to be sort of like The Comics Journal, but more upbeat and not quite so elitist. And in addition to doing Comics Feature, they were going to do a comics anthology series. There was one called Fantasy Illustrated and there was one called Adventure Illustrated. And as far as I know, only one issue came out of each, maybe two issues of the Adventure and one of Fantasy, I’m not sure. And they were going to do a comics anthology called Rising Stars that featured new talent that hadn’t broken in at the major companies yet. So Scott and I were doing a project for that and

Above: Echoes of an earlier Kirbyverse! Top is Alex Ross’ cover for Kirby: Genesis #2 [’11], above a similar struggle graces Jack’s Thor #126 [Mar. ’66], with inks by Vinnie Colletta. Ross cover courtesy of the artist and Dynamite Entertainment. 28

Kurt: Yeah. CBC: You said it was practical information that you were able to use. Kurt: Well, the real key thing for that class that was important to me was a term paper. We had to interview the publisher of a national magazine, get certain information, write up a paper about it. And because I was so focused on comics, I wanted to do something with a comics focus. “National magazine” was defined by circulation, an ad circulation of such-and-such a number. And I looked up DC Comics and said, “Well, there’s no single DC Comic that sells as many copies as what would count as a national magazine by these things, but they don’t sell ads in Superman, they don’t sell ads in Batman. They sell ads in DC Comics as a whole, the same ads in all of them. And if you lump them all together, man, the circulation, the ad circulation’s really high.” So I convinced my teachers to let me consider DC Comics a national magazine and instead of interviewing the publisher, who would have at that time been Jenette Kahn, I wanted to ust. interview the editor-in-chief, Dick y Family Tr rb Ki d lin 13 Rosa Giordano. So I called DC and explained TM & ©20 that I wanted to do this for a term paper and they said okay. So Thanksgiving break of my senior year, I took the bus from Syracuse down to New York City and interviewed Dick for the term paper. I asked him questions about ad sales and all this other crap that I had no real interest in — he probably didn’t either. And at the end of the interview, I told him that when I got out of college, I wanted to be a comic book writer, and he invited me to send him some sample scripts. So that was the big thing — it wasn’t really the term paper. I do think the class was useful to me because it made me think about what the guy on the other side of the desk needs. You know, the editor isn’t going to publish your story because you really, really want to write a story. The editor’s going to publish your story because you’re offering something that he needs in order to fill his schedule, to fill his comics, to make his business work, so that was a very useful outcome of that class. But much more important was that Dick invited me to send him some samples. So I went back ust. to Syracuse and during spring y Family Tr rb Ki d lin 13 Rosa TM & ©20 break of my senior year, I took the entire week and wrote four sample scripts. I wrote a Flash script, I wrote a “Superman, The In-Between Years” backup script, an eight-page story, I wrote a “Supergirl” script for the series, Above: Reproduced from the back when it was running in Superman Family, during the original art, top is Captain period when she was a soap opera actress, and I wrote a Victory and the Galactic RangBrave and the Bold script, teaming up Batman and Green ers #9 [Feb. ’83] cover art by Lantern. Three of those scripts were my best shot at writing Jack Kirby (pencils) and Mike like Cary Bates and the other was my best shot at writing Thibodeaux (inks); and above, like, I guess, Bob Haney. And I sent them to Dick and Dick the cover of Silver Star #1 [Feb. didn’t have time to read them. I’m not sure he expected that ’83] with Jack doing a rare penI’d actually send him anything, but I kept calling and telling cil-&-ink turn. Courtesy of John his assistant, “These samples were requested, these samMorrow. Next page: Kirby: ples were requested.” And finally, Dick must have looked at Genesis #4 cover painting by the scripts enough to say, “Well, they’re in English, [mutual Alex Ross. Courtesy of the artist laughter] they’re not in crayon, they make enough sense to and Dynamite Entertainment. me.” He passed them out to the editors of the books they 29

were written for. So Julie Schwartz got the two Super-scripts and Ernie Colon got the Flash script, and Len Wein got the Brave and the Bold script. Len never read the Brave and the Bold script. I’m not really all that surprised — at the time, The Brave and the Bold was about six or seven issues away from being canceled so I think he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to buy it. And Julie passed the two Super-scripts to his assistant, E. Nelson Bridwell, and Ernie Cólon read the Flash script. And when I finished my last day of finals, it was like a week and a half until graduation, but I didn’t stick around. Scott and I just headed down to New York, started looking for an apartment, and I went up to DC and made appointments to talk to the editors who’d looked at my scripts. Nelson Bridwell told me that my scripts were perfectly professional, but… and the “but” part was the “Supergirl” I’d written for Superman Family, for Supergirl as a soap opera actress — Superman Family was cancelled and they were bringing Supergirl out in her own new series where she was a college student in Chicago, so my script was useless. And the “Superman, The In-Between Years” story, Nelson liked it reasonably well, but the “Superman, The In-Between Years” back-up series had been cancelled. So neither script was viable. But because Nelson thought my scripts were clearly professional writing, Julie asked me to come up with a bunch of springboards for Superboy fill-ins. And I went away and I came back with like 16 different Superboy springboards and he didn’t like any of them. Instead, he said, “Go to lunch and come back,” and when I came back from lunch, he’d typed up a plot outline for a Superboy story and he said, “Here, 15 pages. Start writing the script, bring it in in a few days and we’ll go over it.” So it was his plot and I wrote up about six pages of it and brought it in and showed it to him. And one of the things he said — actually, this was about my samples — was about the script format I was using. I was doing two columns on a page with the panel descriptions on the left and then the dialogue, and so forth, on the right, which involved a whole lot of moving the typewriter around and lining things up. But that was what Richard had sketched out for me, and he said he’d seen it in a Wonder Woman script Julie had shown him at a convention. And Julie said, “The first question I’ve got for you is, why are you writing scripts in a silly-ass format like this?” [Jon chuckles] And I said, “Well, I was shown that and told it was the format you used.” And he said, “Nah, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.” And he showed me what a script should look like and I wrote stuff after that in the actual Julie Schwartz format. Digression over. Anyway, I brought in six pages of script for this story and Julie read through it and said, “Ahh, this doesn’t work at all,” and he pointed out one reason or another that it didn’t work. He said, “I’ll tell you one thing: You’re cramming way too much stuff in here.” I said, “Julie, it’s your plot. You said I had 15 pages to fit it in and I’m trying to fit it all in.” He said, “You should tell me you need two parts for it.” [laughs] And I’m thinking, “I’ve never sold a comic book story in my life and you’re telling me I should tell Julie Freakin’ Schwartz, ‘No, you plotted too much? [mutual laughter] Give me more room?’” I was way too timid to say that and so I said, “I’m sorry,” and I never did sell anything to Julie. But at the same time I was going to meet with Julie, I was also going in to meet with Ernie Cólon. Ernie liked my Flash script, but he said, “I don’t need a Flash script. Cary Bates has been writing this series for 13 years,” or whatever it was at this point, “he’s not going to be stopping any time soon and we don’t need the fill-ins. But I also edit Green Lantern and we have a back-up series in Green Lantern called ‘Tales of the Green Lantern Corps,’ which is short stories about other Green Lanterns. We don’t have one steady, regular team on that so that’s open to scripts. Why don’t you come up with some ‘Green Lantern Corps’ ideas?” So I went away and I came back with like 18 ‘Green Lantern Corps’ springboards and he liked one of them. And he said, “Go ahead, write this one up.” And so I got that assignment on a Thursday and college

#1 • Bonus PDF Edition • Spring 2013 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

This page: A pre-Marvels writing assignment for Kurt was the Topps’ “Kirbyverse” gig, scribing Jack Kirby’s TeenAgents in 1993. Covers to the four-issue mini-series is top right. Jack’s concept drawing in top left, courtesy of John Morrow. Inset is Ryan Sook’s art featuring the kids on Kirby: Genesis #7’s variant cover.

graduation was that Sunday, so I had my first professional assignment before I actually graduated from college, even though I skipped the ceremony. [Jon chuckles] But I wrote it up — it was a seven-page Green Lantern story and I wrote it up and I brought it in to him, to Ernie, on a day I went in to the city with Richard Howell, who was also showing his work around and trying to get assignments. And Ernie liked it and he said, “You got any ideas about who should draw this?” And I said, “Well, my friend Richard is showing samples.” And so Ernie looked at Richard’s samples and said, “Okay, you got the job.” So my first major professional assignment was also Richard’s first major professional assignment, which was nice. But that was my first professional script and I should probably stop talking and let you ask another question. CBC: [Chuckles] Did you have relatives, even ancestors, who were creative? Kurt: I don’t think so. My family runs to doctors and teachers. In my father’s immediate family, there were seven kids and there were like three of them were teachers — four of them were teachers? One of them was a doctor and my father was a computer industry executive. So he was kind of the black sheep of the family. [Jon laughs] But even going back up to the St. Louis branch of the family, which I barely knew anything about, there’s a lot of doctors and teachers in

that branch of the family too. Busiek State Forest in Missouri is named after a great-uncle of mine who was a well-loved pediatrician. But I don’t know of anybody in… yeah, I can’t think of anybody who was an actor, a writer, a painter. I may well be the first. CBC: What’s the nationality of the name? Kurt: It’s a Polish name, but the family was German. What I’m told is that “Busiek” was a town in western Poland somewhere that had German overlords and my family descends from the overlords. There’s a lot of people out there named “Busiek” who spell it differently. There’s the Boston Bruins Hockey player, Johnny Bucyk, and I keep running into other people named “Busick,” “Busik,” and like that. These were people who had a Polish last name and came into the United States through Ellis Island, where it got translated into English a ton of different ways. But my family is Polish-German on my paternal grandfather’s side and British on my paternal grandmother’s side, although British a long way in the past. We go back — her family goes back to the early 1800s in the United States, maybe farther. On my mother’s side, it’s almost the same thing. My grandmother, my maternal grandmother, her ancestors are German. She was a Rommel and was actually related to [WWII German Field Marshal] Erwin Rommel. And my maternal grandfather, his ancestry was British so I’m sort of British and German on both sides. CBC: And how many siblings do you have? Kurt: I have four sisters — two older, two younger — no brothers. CBC: And were you vocal about that’s what you wanted to do with your life, you wanted a career, you wanted to go to college and graduate and start writing comics?

#1 • Bonus PDF Edition • Spring 2013 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Kurt: Yeah, once I knew that I wanted to do it, then yeah, I was not shy about saying so. And my father didn’t think much of that idea. But my mother was very supportive. Her feeling was, anything that we wanted to do, if we worked hard at it, we could accomplish it. So she was supportive of whatever we wanted to do. My father, when he and my mom got married, they were living in a trailer. He worked his way up from being a refrigerator repairman to a vice presidency at Digital Equipment Corporation. He had a very, very strong work ethic, rooted in the fact that he was born at the height of the Depression. So his ily Trust. sense of things wasn’t that you Kirby Fam Rosalind 13 20 © picked a career based on what you TM & wanted to do. His sense was you picked a career on what’ll make you money, what’ll give you security. And since he was successful in the computer industry, he wanted me to learn computer programming, get into the computer industry. It was something he understood. There was money in it. But I wanted to be a comics writer and he wasn’t… like I said, he wasn’t very supportive of it. It wasn’t until I’d been writing comics for a couple of years and I was struggling — I wasn’t making a good living by any means yet — but he was interviewing for a new executive assistant and one of the guys he interviewed for the job said, “By the way, are you related to Kurt Busiek, the writer?” My dad was startled that somebody else had heard of me and he called me up and asked me to send him some comics I’d written. So I sent him a bunch of what I’d written at that point and a couple of weeks later, for whatever reason, I was talking to his secretary on the phone and I asked her if she knew, had he read any of the comics? And she said, “No, I don’t think so, but they’re all on the coffee table in his office.” [mutual chuckling] So he was showing them off. “This is my son, the writer.” CBC: Beforehand, did you have these practical discussions? Did your father try to talk sense into you? And did you have any ammo that you could throw back at him, that “yeah, there’s money to be made here” or was TM & ©2013 Rosalind Kirb y Family Tru there no communication? st. Kurt: Oh no, I had no ammo whatsoever. [Jon laughs] I mean, I didn’t have terribly realistic career goals. At one point, I wanted to be in the Air Force. I wanted to fly planes out in different charts. So it’s kind of like you go to school and since I wore glasses, that wasn’t going to happen. And and learn how to be an acrobat, and then you get hired as I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know what I wanted to a crossing guard. And back then, I read some statistics that write until I stumbled onto comics. And one of the worst mo- said the computer programming was the most-often quit job ments of this whole conflict over what I was going to do was in the United States. Not that people would quit being a prowhen I got my SAT scores. I did pretty well on the SATs. I got grammer, but they’d quit the job that they were doing and go somewhere around 700 in English which is a nice score, but I work someplace else as a computer programmer because got an 800 in Math, which was perfect. So that was just more then they’d get to write a different kind of program. And ammunition for my dad, that I needed to go into a technical when they got fed up writing the two or three programs that field, not a creative field. There’s no money in writing funnycompany needed over and over, [chuckles] they’d quit and books, was pretty much how he looked at it. There’s money go to some other programming company, and so there was in machines. And I guess I was just mule-stubborn because some question about whether people like this would ever — well, I was interested in computer programming in junior get vested in pensions, but then the whole industry changed high and high school. But the thing is, learning to program in the ’80s and ’90s anyway so the stuff that I was reading the computer is like learning to be a tightrope walker. You’re about back then didn’t really apply. But I just wasn’t going learning to do all of these wonderful, cool things with great to do it. I didn’t take any computer courses in college. I was agility and then one summer, I was an assistant programmer not interested and didn’t do anything to prepare a fallback at Digital. My father got it for me as a summer job and, holy position. I was going to be a comic book writer and it was cow, it was the most boring job ever! All they wanted was the only thing that I was focused on. My dad was determined the same file-handling program written and rewritten and re- that I should have better options. But the minute that he was written and rewritten to handle different files and to put data outside, out of the room, I wasn’t paying any attention to him.

fin

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2013 • Bonus PDF Edition • #1

Above: Husband & Wife, PinUp Artists! Yep, it’s Jack Kirby’s pencils and Roz Kirby’s inks on this 1982 Captain Victory piece, later used as basis for the Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #9 cover (see three pages back). Courtesy of Heritage Auctions. Inset: Writer Busiek also scripted the (unfinished) Victory mini-series for Topps in the early 1990s. Artwork for the cover here of #1 [June ’94], the only issue of the proposed five, is by Keith Giffen (pencils) and Jimmy Palmiotti (inks). Virtually every Kirbyverse character was a part of this story arc’s action…. 32

Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ‘zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more!

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(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “AllInterview Issue”! Part 2 of an exclusive STEVE ENGLEHART interview (continued from ALTER EGO #103)! “Pro2Pro” interviews between SIMONSON & LARSEN, MOENCH & WEIN, and comics letterers KLEIN & CHIANG. Plus JOHN OSTRANDER, MICHAEL USLAN, and longtime DC color artist ADRIENNE ROY! Cover by Englehart collaborator MARSHALL ROGERS!

Bronze Age Mystery Comics! Interviews with BERNIE WRIGHTSON, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GERRY TALAOC, DC mystery writer LORE SHOBERG, MARK EVANIER and DAN SPIEGLE discuss Scooby-Doo, Charlton chiller anthologies, Black Orchid, Madame Xanadu art and commentary by TONY DeZUNIGA, MIKE KALUTA, VAL MAYERIK, DAVID MICHELINIE, MATT WAGNER, and a rare cover painting by WRIGHTSON!

“Gods!” Takes an in-depth look at WALTER SIMONSON’s Thor, the Thunder God in the Bronze Age, “Pro2Pro” interview with TOM DeFALCO and RON FRENZ, Hercules: Prince of Power, Moondragon, Three Ways to End the New Gods Saga, exclusive interview with fantasy writer MICHAEL MOORCOCK, art and commentary by GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, BOB LAYTON, and more, with a swingin’ Thor cover by SIMONSON!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

BACK ISSUE #56

BACK ISSUE #57

BACK ISSUE #58

“Liberated Ladies” eyeing female characters that broke barriers in the Bronze Age: Big Barda, Valkyrie, Ms. Marvel, Phoenix, Savage She-Hulk, and the sword-wielding Starfire. Plus a “Pro2Pro” interview with JILL THOMPSON, GAIL SIMONE, and BARBARA KESEL, art and commentary by JOHN BYRNE, GEORGE PEREZ, JACK KIRBY, MIKE VOSBURG, and more, with a new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

“Licensed Comics”! Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Man from Atlantis, DC’s Edgar Rice Burroughs backups (John Carter, Pellucidar, Carson of Venus), Marvel’s Warlord of Mars, and an interview with CAROL SERLING, wife of ROD SERLING. With art and commentary from ANDERSON, BYRNE, CLAREMONT, DORMAN, DUURSEMA, KALUTA, MILLER, OSTRANDER, and more. Cover by BRIAN KOSCHACK.

“Avengers Assemble!” Writer ROGER STERN’S acclaimed 1980s Avengers run, West Coast Avengers, early Avengers toys, and histories of Hawkeye, Mockingbird, and Wonder Man, with art and commentary from JOHN and SAL BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, BRETT BREEDING, TOM DeFALCO, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB HALL, AL MILGROM, TOM MORGAN, TOM PALMER, JOE SINNOTT, and more. PÉREZ cover!

JENETTE KAHN interviewed by ROBERT GREENBERGER, DC’s Dollar Comics and unrealized kids’ line (featuring an aborted Sugar and Spike revival), the Wonder Woman Foundation, and the early days of the Vertigo imprint. Exploring the talents of ROSS ANDRU, KAREN BERGER, STEVE BISSETTE, JIM ENGEL, GARTH ENNIS, NEIL GAIMAN, SHELLY MAYER, ALAN MOORE, GRANT MORRISON, and more!

“JLA in the Bronze Age”! The “Satellite Years” of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, with BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, PÉREZ, and WEIN, salute to DICK DILLIN, the Justice League “Detroit” team, with CONWAY, PATTON, McDONNELL, plus CONWAY and GEOFF JOHNS go “Pro2Pro” on writing the JLA, unofficial JLA/Avengers crossovers, and Marvel’s JLA, the Squadron Supreme. Cover by McDONNELL and BILL WRAY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

BACK ISSUE #59

BACK ISSUE #60

BACK ISSUE #61

BACK ISSUE #62

BACK ISSUE #63

“Toon Comics!” History of Space Ghost in comics, Comico’s Jonny Quest and Star Blazers, Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera line and Dennis the Menace, behind the scenes at Marvel Productions, Ltd., and a look at the unpublished Plastic Man comic strip. Art/comments by EVANIER, FOGLIO, HEMPEL and WHEATLEY, MARRS, RUDE, TOTH, WILDEY, and more. All-new painted Space Ghost cover by STEVE RUDE!

“Halloween Heroes and Villains”! JEPH LOEB and TIM SALE’s chiller Batman: The Long Halloween, the Scarecrow (both the DC and Marvel versions), Solomon Grundy, Man-Wolf, Lord Pumpkin, Rutland, Vermont’s Halloween parades, and… the Korvac Saga’s Dead Avengers! With commentary from and/or art by CONWAY, GIL KANE, LOPRESTI, MOENCH, PÉREZ, DAVE WENZEL, and more. Cover by TIM SALE!

“Tabloids and Treasuries,” spotlighting every all-new tabloid from the 1970s. Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, The Bible, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, The Wizard of Oz, even the PAUL DINI/ALEX ROSS World’s Greatest Super-Heroes editions! Commentary and art by ADAMS, GARCIA-LOPEZ, GRELL, KIRBY, KUBERT, MAYER, ROMITA SR., TOTH, and more. Wraparound cover by ALEX ROSS!

“Superman in the Bronze Age”! JULIUS SCHWARTZ, CURT SWAN, Superman Family, World of Krypton miniseries, and ALAN MOORE’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, art & comments by ADAMS, ANDERSON, CARDY, CHAYKIN, PAUL KUPPERBERG, OKSNER, O’NEIL, PASKO, ROZAKIS, SAVIUK, and more. Cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ and SCOTT WILLIAMS! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

“British Invasion” issue! History of Marvel UK, Beatles in comics, DC’s ‘80s British talent pool, V for Vendetta, Excalibur, Marshal Law, Doctor Who, “Pro2Pro” interview with PETER MILLIGAN & BRENDAN McCARTHY, plus BERGER, BOLLAND, DAVIS, GIBBONS, STAN LEE, LLOYD, MOORE, DEZ SKINN, and others. Fold-out triptych cover by RON WILSON and DAVE HUNT of Marvel UK’s rare 1970s “Quadra-Poster”!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page TABLOID with color) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

A COMICS HISTORY GAME-CHANGER!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES THE

1960-64 Volume NOW SHIPPING! 1980s Volume ships in MARCH!

This ambitious new series of FULLCOLOR HARDCOVERS documents every decade of comic books from the 1940s to today! Each colossal volume presents a year-by-year account of the comic book industry’s most significant publications, most notable creators, and most impactful trends.

This ongoing project enlists TwoMorrows’ top authors, as they provide exhaustively researched details on all the major events along the comics history timeline! Editor KEITH DALLAS (The Flash Companion) spearheads the series and writes his own volume on the 1980s. Also in the works are two volumes on the 1940s by ROY THOMAS, the 1950s by BILL SCHELLY, two volumes on the 1960s by JOHN WELLS, a 1970s volume by JIM BEARD, and more volumes documenting the 1990s and 2000s. Taken together, the series forms the first cohesive, linear overview of the entire landscape of comics history, sure to be an invaluable resource for ANY comic book enthusiast! JOHN WELLS leads off with the first of two volumes on the 1960s, covering all the pivotal moments and behind-the-scenes details of comics in the JFK and Beatles era! You’ll get a year-by-year account of the most significant publications, notable creators, and impactful trends, including: DC Comics’ rebirth of GREEN LANTERN, HAWKMAN, and others, and the launch of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and multiple earths! STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY’s transformation of superhero comics with the debut of FANTASTIC FOUR, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, X-MEN, AVENGERS, and other iconic characters! Plus BATMAN gets a “new look”, the BLUE BEETLE is revamped at Charlton Comics, and CREEPY #1 brings horror back to comics, just as Harvey’s “kid” comics are booming!

NOW SHIPPING! The Best of FROM THE TOMB Compiles the finest features from the preeminent magazine on horror comics history, along with never-seen material! (192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $27.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.95 ISBN: 9781605490434 • Diamond Order Code: AUG121322

The co-founder of Filmation Studios tells all about leading the last American animation company through thirty years of innovation and fun! (288-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95 • (Digital Edition) $9.95 ISBN: 9781605490441 • Diamond Order Code: JUL121245

MATT BAKER: The Art of Glamour The fabled master of glamour art finally gets his due! (192-page HARDCOVER with 96 COLOR pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 9781605490328 • Diamond Order Code: JUN121310

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

PRINTED IN CANADA

LOU SCHEIMER: Creating the Filmation Generation

1960-64 VOLUME: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 9781605490458 • Diamond Order Code: JUL121245

DIGITAL

NS DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional EDITIO BLE A “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and IL AVA NLY animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS FOR O 5 and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic $2.9 storytelling, as well as such DRAW! #4 skills as layout, penciling, inking, Interview with ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN lettering, coloring, Photoshop techNOWLAN on drawing and inking niques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, techniques, DAVE COOPER’s coloring techniques in Photoshop, BRET and a handy reference source—this BLEVINS tutorial on Figure magazine has it all! Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for comics drawing papers, and more! purposes of figure drawing. (88-page magazine) $5.95 INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS. (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #9

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

DRAW! #7

MIKE WIERINGO interview, BENDIS and OEMING on how they create “Powers”, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw great hands”, “The illusion of depth in design” by PAUL RIVOCHE, art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, and more!

Interview & demo with BILL WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO interview, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw the human figure in light and shadow,” Photoshop tutorial by CELIA CALLE, inking tips by MIKE MANLEY, reviews of the best art supplies, links, and more!

Interview/demo by DAN BRERETON, ZACH TRENHOLM on caricaturing, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” demo by ALBERTO RUIZ, “The Power of Sketching” by BRET BLEVINS, “Designing with light and shadow” by PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of art supplies, links, and more!

(88-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

Interview & demo by MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” by ALBERTO RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure” by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS SECTION, International Spotlight on JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, and more!

WRITE NOW #8 crossover! MIKE MANLEY & DANNY FINGEROTH create a comic from script to print, BANCROFT & CORLEY on bringing characters to life, Adobe Illustrator with ALBERTO RUIZ, Noel Sickles’ work examined, PvP’s SCOTT KURTZ, art supply reviews, and more!

RON GARNEY interview & demo, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and others discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ on Adobe Illustrator, interview with MARK McKENNA, links, and more!

STEVE RUDE on comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On Life”, Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER on merging traditional and digital art, MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, and more! New BAKER cover!

Demo of painting methods by ALEX HORLEY, interview and demo by COLLEEN COOVER, a look behindthe-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more!

(96-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

(104-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(112-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

In-depth interviews and demos with DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, and more!

Covers major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with BILL REINHOLD, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, and more!

In-depth interview with HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on HOW TO USE REFERENCE and WORKING FROM PHOTOS (by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY), and more!

Interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates his series, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

Interview & demo by R.M. GUERA, Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE demo and interview, DANNY FINGEROTH’s new feature on writer/artists with R. SIKORYAK, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on penciling & more!

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, Rough Stuff’s BOB McLEOD gives a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, Write Now’s DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights writer/artist AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the best art supplies and tool technology, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, plus Web links, book reviews, and more!

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop about his gritty, designinspired work with editor MIKE MANLEY, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews “Billy Dogma” writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL, plus more of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, FRANK MILLER interview, plus MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERNS VIEWS WITH KIRBY and EDITIO BLE A IL his contemporaries, AVA NLY FEATURE ARTICLES, FOR O $3.95 RARE AND UNSEEN $1.95— KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS from the 1960s-80s (from photocopies preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES).

DIGITAL

Go online for #1-30 as Digital Editions, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35

KIRBY COLLECTOR #31

KIRBY COLLECTOR #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #33

FIRST TABLOID-SIZE ISSUE! MARK EVANIER’s new column, interviews with KURT BUSIEK and JOSÉ LADRONN, NEAL ADAMS on Kirby, Giant-Man overview, Kirby’s best 2-page spreads, 2000 Kirby Tribute Panel (MARK EVANIER, GENE COLAN, MARIE SEVERIN, ROY THOMAS, and TRACY & JEREMY KIRBY), huge Kirby pencils! Wraparound KIRBY/ADAMS cover!

KIRBY’S LEAST-KNOWN WORK! MARK EVANIER on the Fourth World, unfinished THE HORDE novel, long-lost KIRBY INTERVIEW from France, update to the KIRBY CHECKLIST, pencil gallery of Kirby’s leastknown work (including THE PRISONER, BLACK HOLE, IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB, TRUE DIVORCE CASES), westerns, and more! KIRBY/LADRONN cover!

FANTASTIC FOUR ISSUE! Gallery of FF pencils at tabloid size, MARK EVANIER on the FF Cartoon series, interviews with STAN LEE and ERIK LARSEN, JOE SINNOTT salute, the HUMAN TORCH in STRANGE TALES, origins of Kirby Krackle, interviews with nearly EVERY WRITER AND ARTIST who worked on the FF after Kirby, & more! KIRBY/LARSEN and KIRBY/TIMM covers!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

KIRBY COLLECTOR #37

KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

FIGHTING AMERICANS! MARK EVANIER on 1960s Marvel inkers, SHIELD, Losers, and Green Arrow overviews, INFANTINO interview on Simon & Kirby, KIRBY interview, Captain America PENCIL ART GALLERY, PHILIPPE DRUILLET interview, JOE SIMON and ALEX TOTH speak, unseen BIG GAME HUNTER and YOUNG ABE LINCOLN Kirby concepts! KIRBY and KIRBY/TOTH covers!

GREAT ESCAPES! MISTER MIRACLE pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER, MARSHALL ROGERS & MICHAEL CHABON interviews, comparing Kirby and Houdini’s backgrounds, analysis of “Himon,” 2001 Kirby Tribute Panel (WILL EISNER, JOHN BUSCEMA, JOHN ROMITA, MIKE ROYER, & JOHNNY CARSON) & more! KIRBY/MARSHALL ROGERS and KIRBY/STEVE RUDE covers!

THOR ISSUE! Never-seen KIRBY interview, JOE SINNOTT and JOHN ROMITA JR. on their Thor work, MARK EVANIER, extensive THOR and TALES OF ASGARD coverage, a look at the “real” Norse gods, 40 pages of KIRBY THOR PENCILS, including a Kirby Art Gallery at TABLOID SIZE, with pin-ups, covers, and more! KIRBY covers inked by MIKE ROYER and TREVOR VON EEDEN!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” MIKE ROYER interview on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE GALLERY tracing the evolution of Jack’s style, new column on OBSCURE KIRBY WORK, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s TECHNIQUE AND INFLUENCES, comparing STAN LEE’s writing to JACK’s, and more! Two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” PART 2: JOE SINNOTT on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE PENCIL GALLERY, list of the art in the KIRBY ARCHIVES, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s technique and influences, SPEND A DAY WITH KIRBY (with JACK DAVIS, GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., and RUDE) and more! Two UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #39

KIRBY COLLECTOR #40

KIRBY COLLECTOR #41

KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

FAN FAVORITES! Covering Kirby’s work on HULK, INHUMANS, and SILVER SURFER, TOP PROS pick favorite Kirby covers, Kirby ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT interview, MARK EVANIER, 2002 Kirby Tribute Panel (DICK AYERS, TODD McFARLANE, PAUL LEVITZ, HERB TRIMPE), pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by MIKE ALLRED and P. CRAIG RUSSELL!

WORLD THAT’S COMING! KAMANDI and OMAC spotlight, 2003 Kirby Tribute Panel (WENDY PINI, MICHAEL CHABON, STAN GOLDBERG, SAL BUSCEMA, LARRY LIEBER, and STAN LEE), P. CRAIG RUSSELL interview, MARK EVANIER, NEW COLUMN analyzing Jack’s visual shorthand, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by ERIK LARSEN and REEDMAN!

1970s MARVEL WORK! Coverage of ’70s work from Captain America to Eternals to Machine Man, DICK GIORDANO & MARK SHULTZ interviews, MARK EVANIER, 2004 Kirby Tribute Panel (STEVE RUDE, DAVE GIBBONS, WALTER SIMONSON, and PAUL RYAN), pencil art gallery, unused 1962 HULK #6 KIRBY PENCILS, and more! Kirby covers inked by GIORDANO and SCHULTZ!

1970s DC WORK! Coverage of Jimmy Olsen, FF movie set visit, overview of all Newsboy Legion stories, KEVIN NOWLAN and MURPHY ANDERSON on inking Jack, never-seen interview with Kirby, MARK EVANIER on Kirby’s covers, Bongo Comics’ Kirby ties, complete ’40s gangster story, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by NOWLAN and ANDERSON!

KIRBY AWARD WINNERS! STEVE SHERMAN and others sharing memories and neverseen art from JACK & ROZ, a never-published 1966 interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER on VINCE COLLETTA, pencils-toSinnott inks comparison of TALES OF SUSPENSE #93, and more! Covers by KIRBY (Jack’s original ’70s SILVER STAR CONCEPT ART) and KIRBY/SINNOTT!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

KIRBY’S MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS! Coverage of DEMON, THOR, & GALACTUS, interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER, pencil art galleries of the Demon and other mythological characters, two never-reprinted BLACK MAGIC stories, interview with Kirby Award winner DAVID SCHWARTZ and F4 screenwriter MIKE FRANCE, and more! Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER!

Jack’s vision of PAST AND FUTURE, with a never-seen KIRBY interview, a new interview with son NEAL KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’S column, two pencil galleries, two complete ’50s stories, Jack’s first script, Kirby Tribute Panel (with EVANIER, KATZ, SHAW!, and SHERMAN), plus an unpublished CAPTAIN 3-D cover, inked by BILL BLACK and converted into 3-D by RAY ZONE!

Focus on NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, and DARKSEID! Includes a rare interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’s column, FOURTH WORLD pencil art galleries (including Kirby’s redesigns for SUPER POWERS), two 1950s stories, a new Kirby Darkseid front cover inked by MIKE ROYER, a Kirby Forever People back cover inked by JOHN BYRNE, and more!

KIRBY’S SUPER TEAMS, from kid gangs and the Challengers, to Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Super Powers, with unseen 1960s Marvel art, a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, author JONATHAN LETHEM on his Kirby influence, interview with JOHN ROMITA, JR. on his Eternals work, and more!

KIRBYTECH ISSUE, spotlighting Jack’s hightech concepts, from Iron Man’s armor and Machine Man, to the Negative Zone and beyond! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, TOM SCIOLI interview, Kirby Tribute Panel (with ADAMS, PÉREZ, and ROMITA), and covers inked by TERRY AUSTIN and TOM SCIOLI!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

WARRIORS, spotlighting Thor (with a look at hidden messages in BILL EVERETT’s Thor inks), Sgt. Fury, Challengers of the Unknown, Losers, and others! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, interviews with JERRY ORDWAY and GRANT MORRISON, MARK EVANIER’s column, pencil art gallery, a complete 1950s story, wraparound Thor cover inked by JERRY ORDWAY, and more!

Bombastic EVERYTHING GOES issue, with a wealth of great submissions that couldn’t be pigeonholed into a “theme” issue! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JIM LEE and ADAM HUGHES, MARK EVANIER’s column, huge pencil art galleries, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS, and more!

Spotlights Kirby’s most obscure work: an UNUSED THOR STORY, BRUCE LEE comic, animation work, stage play, unaltered pages from KAMANDI, DEMON, DESTROYER DUCK, and more, including a feature examining the last page of his final issue of various series BEFORE EDITORIAL TAMPERING (with lots of surprises)! Color Kirby cover inked by DON HECK!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

THE MAGIC OF STAN & JACK! New interview with STAN LEE, walking tour of New York where Lee & Kirby lived and worked, re-evaluation of the “Lost” FF #108 story (including a new page that just surfaced), “What If Jack Hadn’t Left Marvel In 1970?,” plus MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, behind a color Kirby cover inked by GEORGE PÉREZ!

STAN & JACK PART TWO! More on the co-creators of the Marvel Universe, final interview (and cover inks) by GEORGE TUSKA, differences between KIRBY and DITKO’S approaches, WILL MURRAY on the origin of the FF, the mystery of Marvel cover dates, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, plus Kirby back cover inked by JOE SINNOTT!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

“Kirby Goes To Hollywood!” SERGIO ARAGONÉS and MELL LAZARUS recall Kirby’s BOB NEWHART TV show cameo, comparing the recent STAR WARS films to New Gods, RUBY & SPEARS interviewed, Jack’s encounters with FRANK ZAPPA, PAUL McCARTNEY, and JOHN LENNON, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a Golden Age Kirby story, and more! Kirby cover inked by PAUL SMITH!

“Unfinished Sagas”—series, stories, and arcs Kirby never finished. TRUE DIVORCE CASES, RAAM THE MAN MOUNTAIN, KOBRA, DINGBATS, a complete story from SOUL LOVE, complete Boy Explorers story, two Kirby Tribute Panels, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, pencil art galleries, and more, with Kirby’s “Galaxy Green” cover inked by ROYER, and the unseen cover for SOUL LOVE #1!

“Legendary Kirby”—how Jack put his spin on classic folklore! TONY ISABELLA on SATAN’S SIX (with Kirby’s unseen layouts), Biblical inspirations of DEVIL DINOSAUR, THOR through the eyes of mythologist JOSEPH CAMPBELL, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, pencil art from ETERNALS, DEMON, NEW GODS, THOR, and Jack’s ATLAS cover!

“Kirby Vault!” Rarities from the “King” of comics: Personal correspondence, private photos, collages, rare Marvelmania art, bootleg album covers, sketches, transcript of a 1969 VISIT TO THE KIRBY HOME (where Jack answers the questions YOU’D ask in ‘69), MARK EVANIER, pencil art from the FOURTH WORLD, CAPTAIN AMERICA, MACHINE MAN, SILVER SURFER GRAPHIC NOVEL, and more!

FANTASTIC FOUR FOLLOW-UP to #58’s THE WONDER YEARS! Never-seen FF wraparound cover, interview between FF inkers JOE SINNOTT and DICK AYERS, rare LEE & KIRBY interview, comparison of a Jack and Stan FF story conference to Stan’s final script and Jack’s penciled pages, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, gallery of KIRBY FF ART, pencils from BLACK PANTHER, SILVER SURFER, & more!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES, edited by John Morrow Each book contains over 30 PIECES OF KIRBY ART NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED!

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

KIRBY CHECKLIST

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #10-12, and a tour of Jack’s home!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #13-15, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #20-22, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #23-26, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #27-30, plus new art!

Lists EVERY KIRBY COMIC, BOOK, UNPUBLISHED WORK and more!

(160-page trade paperback) $17.95 ISBN: 9781893905016 Diamond Order Code: MAR042974

(176-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905023 Diamond Order Code: APR043058

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905573 Diamond Order Code: FEB063353

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490038 Diamond Order Code: JUN084280

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490120 Diamond Order Code: DEC084286

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 ISBN: 9781605490052 Diamond Order Code: MAR084008

NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

Celebrate the 50th ANNIVERSARY OF FANTASTIC FOUR #1 with this special squarebound edition (#58) of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, about two pop-culture visionaries who created the Fantastic Four, and a decade in comics that was more tumultuous and awe-inspiring than any before or since. Calling on his years of research, plus new interviews conducted just for this book (with STAN LEE, FLO STEINBERG, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, and others), regular Jack Kirby Collector contributor MARK ALEXANDER traces both Lee and Kirby’s history at Marvel Comics, and the remarkable series of events and career choices that led them to converge in 1961 to conceive the Fantastic Four. It also documents the evolution of the FF throughout the 1960s, with previously unknown details about Lee and Kirby’s working relationship, and their eventual parting of ways in 1970. With a wealth of historical information and amazing Kirby artwork, STAN LEE & JACK KIRBY: THE WONDER YEARS beautifully examines the first decade of the FF, and the events that put into motion the 1960s era that came to be known as the Marvel Age of Comics! (128-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490380 • Diamond Order Code: SEP111248

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series. Now the entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his powerful, uninked PENCIL ART, showing Kirby’s work in its undiluted, raw form! Also included is Kirby’s ILLUSTRATED SILVER STAR MOVIE SCREENPLAY, never-seen SKETCHES, PIN-UPS, and an historical overview to put it all in perspective!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905559 Diamond Order Code: JAN063367

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

Compiles the “extra” new material from COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES 1-7, in one huge Digital Edition! Includes a fan’s private tour of the Kirbys’ remarkable home, profusely illustrated with photos, and more than 200 pieces of Kirby art not published outside of those volumes. If you already own the individual issues and skipped the collections, or missed them in print form, now you can get caught up!

For the first time, JACK KIRBY’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY GRAPHIC NOVEL is presented as it was created in 1975 (before being broken up and modified for the 1980s Pacific Comics series), reproduced from copies of Kirby’s uninked pencil art! This first “new” Kirby comic in years features page after page of prime pencils, and includes Jack’s unused CAPTAIN VICTORY SCREENPLAY, unseen art, an historical overview to put it in perspective, and more! (52-page comic book) $5.95 • (Digital Edition) $2.95

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

NOTE: THIS IS ISSUE #58 OF THE KIRBY COLLECTOR!

KIRBY FIVE-OH! CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE “KING” OF COMICS

For its 50th issue, the publication that started TwoMorrows presents KIRBY FIVE-OH!, a BOOK covering the best of everything from Kirby’s 50-year career in comics! The regular KIRBY COLLECTOR columnists have formed a distinguished panel of experts to choose and examine: The BEST KIRBY STORY published each year from 1938-1987! The BEST COVERS from each decade! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! And profiles of, and commentary by, the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus there’s a 50-PAGE GALLERY of Kirby’s powerful RAW PENCIL ART, and a DELUXE COLOR SECTION of photos and finished art from throughout his entire half-century oeuvre. This TABLOID-SIZED TRADE PAPERBACK features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by “DC: The New Frontier” artist DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, helping make this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Takes the place of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50. (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

NOTE: THIS IS ISSUE #50 OF THE KIRBY COLLECTOR!

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

Reprinting the fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered! Spotlights some of KIRBY’s finest art from all eras of his career, including 1930s pencil work, unused strips, illustrated World War II letters, 1950s pages, unpublished 1960s Marvel pencil pages and sketches, and Fourth World pencil art (done expressly for this portfolio in 1970)! We’ve gone back to the original art to ensure the best reproduction possible, and MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN have updated the Kirby biography from the original printing, and added a new Foreword explaining how this portfolio came to be! PLUS: We’ve recolored the original color plates, and added EIGHT NEW BLACK-&-WHITE PAGES, plus EIGHT NEW COLOR PAGES, including Jack’s four GODS posters (released separately in 1972), and four extra Kirby color pieces, all at tabloid size! (60-page tabloid with COLOR) SOLD OUT • (Digital Edition) $5.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

Printed in China