Comic Book Creator #21 by TwoMorrows Publishing

™

$9.95

in the USA

A TwoMorrows Publication

No. 21, Fall 2019

82658 00389

R. Crumb Interview Steve Mannion Diane Noomin John Romita Sr. Rick Trembles & Jack Tremblay Ryan North

ERIC ERIC POWELL: POWELL: 20 20 YEARS YEARS OF OF THE THE GOON! GOON! Cover art by Eric Powell

Fall 2019 • 20 Years of Eric Powell’s The Goon • Number 21

T DEPRESSION ERA WOODY CBC mascot by J.D. KING

About Our Cover Art and Colors by ERIC POWELL

Ye Ed’s Rant: Goodbye, MAD magazine, and Ye Ed’s plans for autumn and winter........ 2 COMICS CHATTER R. Crumb on Weirdo: A chat with the greatest cartoonist of all about his anthology..... 3 Incoming: Letters on the “All Joes” ish and about CBC’s reason for existence............ 16 Weirdos All Around Us: It’s been the Summer of Weirdo for Mr. Ye Ed and the Missus after they embarked on their epic San Diego Comic-Con adventure........... 18

John Romita Sr. on Milton Caniff: The great artist discusses Terry and the Pirates, the death of Gwen Stacy, and his two finest issues of Amazing Spider-Man.......... 22 Bearing Witness: Diane Noomin discusses her #MeToo comics anthology, Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival................. 28 Darrick Patrick’s 10 Questions for Ryan North: Q’s for the writer of Squirrel Girl .30 Trembles on Tremblay: New wave/punk cartoonist Rick Trembles shares about his dad, Jack Tremblay, Golden Age “Canadian Whites” comic book artist............ 32 Above: The Goon gets the job done in this cover drawn and colored by ERIC POWELL.

Please Note Due to international trade issues (hopefully resolved soon), to stay economically feasible, we faced the necessity to either raise the price of CBC or cut the page count and keep the same cover price. We chose the latter and thus had to postpone items intended for this issue, including part two of the Craig Yoe interview and our brunch with Joe Sinnott feature. Look for those next time!

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions! C’mon citizen, DO THE RIGHT THING! A Mom & Pop publisher like us needs every sale just to survive! DON’T DOWNLOAD OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE!

Hembeck’s Dateline: Our Man Fred imagines some super-hero mirror opposites...... 40 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt talks of finding comics in the strangest places...... 41 THE MAIN EVENTS The POW! of Eric Powell: A conversation with the creator of The Goon on his background and career development, just as his publishing outfit celebrates the 20th anniversary of the character and ambitiously expands its line of titles...... 44 Man, Oh Mannion!: The terrifically talented and terribly overlooked artist Steve Mannion gives a biographical sketch of life before his creation of Fearless Dawn and his great work today for Eric Powell’s Albatross comic book line........... 66 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: Kendall Whitehouse lenses the 2019 Eisner Award winners!...... 76 Coming Attractions: The Lyrical Art of P. Craig Russell.................................................. 78 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Aquaman by Ramona Fradon in color!........ 80 Right: At right is a detail featuring The Goon and Franky along with some evil dead fellers from a promotional poster by Eric Powell.

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

Buy affordable, legal downloads only at

www.twomorrows.com or through our Apple and Google Apps!

& DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep producing great publications like this one!

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: $45 US, $67 International, $18 Digital. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2019 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

This issue is dedicated to the memories of ERNIE COLÓN, SAM GAFFORD, WILUM PUGMIRE, and BILL SCHELLY ™

JON B. COOKE Editor & Designer

JOHN MORROW Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER Associate Editor

ERIC POWELL Cover Artist & Colorist

GEORGE KHOURY RICHARD J. ARNDT TOM ZIUKO Contributing Editors

STEVEN THOMPSON STEVEN TICE ROSE RUMMEL-EURY Transcribers

J.D. KING CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON CBC Illustrator

ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

GREG PRESTON CBC Contributing Photographer

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK GEORGE KHOURY TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists To contact CBC, please email jonbcooke@aol.com or snail-mail Comic Book Creator a/o Jon B. Cooke P.O. Box 601 West Kingston, RI 02892 2

Ruminating on today’s comics—and socioeconomic—scenes The spirit of Harvey Kurtzman had First on the agenda is to lived on though, importantly (sez I) acknowledge that, rather than in the pages of the 1980s alternative raise the per copy price of CBC, comix anthology, Weirdo, the history TwoMorrows has dropped the of which yours truly has made a page-count of this mag from veritable industry out of. Promoting 100 to 84 in response to the The Book of Weirdo has involved tariffs. We can only hope this is various events held throughout the a temporary situation and pray year, including appearances at San you derive the same pleasure as Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum and usual during this time. As always, a jaunt to Winters, California (where thank you for your support. lived the Crumbs during the Weirdo Next up is to bid adieu to years). Plus there was the TBOW the newsstand edition of MAD panel at San Diego Comic-Con (which magazine, an American cultural bestowed an Inkpot Award on myself, institution over the past 67 years, thank you very much!) and a presever since it debuted as a comic ence at Terrificon, in Connecticut. book in the summer of 1952. But likely the most memorable It was that initial incarnation, occasion of them all will be the under the obsessive direction of upcoming “final” date of TBOW tour, creator, editor, and pretty much to be held at Columbia University, sole writer Harvey Kurtzman, and featuring the first and likely only which would, over the years, joining together of all three Weirdo eventually make a massive editors at a public event. Yep, none impact on the art form. other than Robert Crumb and Aline If you’d care to hear my Kominsky-Crumb will be joining Peter opinion, I deem MAD #1 as the Bagge in Manhattan for the onesecond most important American night, “sold-out” affair, planned for comic book, ranked after the a few days before Halloween. As Ye first issue of Action Comics and Ed has spouted ad nauseam, I think above ZAP Comix #1. My judgR. Crumb is the greatest cartoonist ment is based not on the huge of all time and, as the man is usually financial success and cultural Eric Powell by Ronn Sutton extremely reluctant to make public influence of the subsequent appearances (particularly in the U.S.), this “Night of magazine edition, but rather the incalculable effect Weirdo” may be my greatest achievement in comics. Kurtzman’s irreverent and downright subversive satire But life isn’t only about Weirdo. Big plans are afoot would have on an entire generation of iconoclastic for the coming year, including authoring a book devoted cartoonists. These artists would go on to establish underground comix, a movement which would lead to the to the 50th anniversary of Last Gasp, thus far called alternative comics and graphic novel world of today. Mind-Candy for the Masses, as well as editing Slow I confess I hadn’t read an issue of MAD for many Death Zero, a trade paperback anthology of horror years, certainly not with the same regularity as I did in comics stories featuring environmental themes. So the early ’70s. That is, until it’s very recent reboot with far, Richard Corben, Bruce Jones, William Stout, Rick a new #1 under the refreshing direction of incoming Veitch, and other stalwarts have signed on, thus it’ll be editor (and CBC buddy) Bill Morrison. The revitalized worth a read, I promise… There’s also a revised edition mag was not only funny, but it featured a boatload of of R. Crumb’s The Weirdo Years to come and possibly a new, exciting talent — and a lot of pals! — so I was reprint collection entitled The Weirdest of Weirdo. genuinely excited when my step-father gifted me with a And, natch, I’ll be continuing to work with the outfit subscription. Then, the sudden departure of Morrison, that got me into this crazy business, TwoMorrows whose awesome career at Bongo Comics was detailed Publishing, particularly to finish up the 25th anniversary in his CBC #7 interview, was a huge letdown. So the celebration, The World of TwoMorrows, and to finally subsequent announcement regarding the demise of the finalize co-writing and designing John Severin: Amernewsstand version just hammered nails into that coffin. ica’s Two-Fisted Talent with chum Greg Biga. Oh, and continue putting out this rag! See ya!

cbc contributors

Abrams Books Rich Arndt Peter Bagge Maya Bradford R. Crumb Chris Anthony Diaz

Frank Forte Gregg Gannon Karen Green Carol Hernandez Heritage Auctions Joe Jusko

Denis Kitchen Ivan Kocmarek Last Gasp Steve Mannion Una McGurk Mannion Diane Noomin

—Y e Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

Eric Powell John Romita, Sr. Joe Sinnott Mark Sinnott Rob Smentek Rick Trembles

Connie Tsang Colin Turner Kendall Whitehouse Rob Yeremian Craig Yoe Tom Ziuko

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE CBC Convention Photographer

MAD Nevermore?

up front

R. Crumb on Weirdo A rare chat with the great cartoonist on creating and editing the comix anthology Conducted by JON B. COOKE [The legendary Robert Crumb was very helpful when I was putting together The Book of Weirdo, a retrospective about the humor comix anthology he created in 1981, and (despite what he says below) I sensed his assist was because he had an enduring affection for his creation, which had ended in 1993, after 28 issues. What really clinched it for me was that the usually reticent cartoonist readily helped with the book’s promotion, whether posing with a copy alongside the author last March, or agreeing to participate in an upcoming panel talk, in New York City, to be moderated by yours truly. Plus he agreed to the following interview, which was originally made for the inaugural episode of my ongoing podcast devoted to underground and alternative comics, Subterranean Dispatch (which can be found at www. subterrdispatch.libsyn.com or from most podcast providers). The chat took place via Skype on March 28, and it was transcribed by Steven “Flash” Thompson. — JBC]

Art © R. Crumb. Weirdo TM & © R. Crumb. The Book of Weirdo © Jon B. Cooke.

Comic Book Creator: I’ve been in contact with you, as you know, very erratically for the past 12 years. And you don’t seem to suffer nonsense too easily. You can be a little… well, you know… you can be impatient with fools. [laughs] R. Crumb: Or just like stuff that I’m not interested in or I don’t think is worth bothering with, you know. CBC: But this seems to be different—me working on The Book of Weirdo. You were extremely helpful to me and you were enthusiastic about this project. Why? Crumb: Yeah. Uh… why? I guess because you were so dedicated to it. I wasn’t enthusiastic about it and a lot of times I felt if I… the more I cooperate with this guy, the more he’s gonna ask me. The more he’s gonna want from me. That’s the impression I got over the years, you know, that every time I answered a bunch of questions in writing — like, spent hours and hours writing these long letters answering stuff — I would just end up with more questions

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

and more answers. [Jon laughs] And I thought I’d just… Jesus. That’s why I put off sometimes answering you for that reason. I thought the more I cooperate, the more sucked into the project I’ll become. Because you just can’t help yourself. You’re so… utterly and completely like… thorough! [Jon chuckles] You could have devoted that dedication to thorough research to some great worthy project like discovering the corruption in bio-medical science or something. [laughter] Instead of dedicating it to Weirdo magazine! But, no. It’s sort of flattering on the one hand and then on the other hand, do I really wanna get sucked into this, y’know? [laughs] CBC: But you did let yourself get sucked into it! Crumb: To some degree, but, like I said, sometimes I just would put off answering you and sometimes I wouldn’t answer you at all and you would kinda let it drop and then you’d re-contact me a few months later or a year later or whatever. ’Cause, you know, it did go on for a long time. CBC: I sense that there’s something about Weirdo magazine that you’re proud of. Did you want a book like this done? Did you want a history of the magazine? Crumb: No. I had no idea or desire or interest to ever have a review of Weirdo done like that. It never occurred to me. It just never even occurred to me. CBC: And now that it’s done, what do you think? Crumb: [Chuckles] Well, as I’ve often told you, I sit down and I always find something new in there. I never actually read it from cover to cover when you sent me those galley copies. I’d just pick up and flip through and find something of interest. It’s so vast! There’s so many people that give testimonials in there. I just… To me, after spending a few hours looking at it one day, I said, this is an unbelievable monument to Weirdo, the crazy f*cking magazine that I did, and Aline and Peter Bagge did for ten years. It’s an incredible, amazing document! [laughter] And, like I think I told you before, to me it’s like it’s not just a monument to Weirdo, but to that decade, the 1980s. It really kinda says a lot about that time period. It’s a strong statement of that time period. As strong as anything I’ve seen! Don’t know how much attention it will get or how much people will look at it and recognize it. I don’t know. [laughs] Probably not because it’s so obscure. It’s not a… oh, how would you say it? A high-class operation, y’know? Now the whole thing — neither the magazine nor your monumental commentary on it. [laughter] CBC: I’m misguided, is that it? [laughter] Crumb: Mmmmm… maybe. I don’t know. Maybe. I have to admire your dedication. Jeez! You know? Wow. CBC: It was pretty obsessive. There was a list. I had an index. I built an index. These are real people and I can do my best to try to track down these people. Into the rabbit hole! Crumb: You certainly did. You certainly did that. Incredi-

Above: Self-caricature of R. Crumb hawking ZAP and Weirdo. Inset left: Logo of Ye Ed’s Subterranean Dispatch podcast. Below: Drew Friedman’s cover of The Book of Weirdo.

This page: Above is a Topps salesman brochure produced by R. Crumb in 1965. Below is the cover of Help! #26, the last issue of Kurtzman’s mag. R. Crumb, briefly on staff, appears in a fumetti in the issue as a party guest. Circle image is the cartoonist from the back cover, and bottom is from an actual print. Next page: At top is Weirdo #13 [Summer 1985]. At bottom is Erna Rae and Jenny Burger, modeling for a fumetti in Weirdo#3 [Fall 1981]. Photography by Gregg Gannon.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Salesman brochure © Topps Chewing Gum Company. Help! magazine TM & © the respective copyright holder. Photo print courtesy of Denis Kitchen.

ble. Amazing. CBC: I thought as a side thing, was your life at the time. I was able to get a real true sense of you. I look at it as between the years with the IRS troubles and the house in Madison… Crumb: Yeah. CBC: [Between] when you moved to Winters and when you moved away, and I hope that was conveyed. Crumb: Yeah, it’s definitely living in Winters’ Central Lane period. We moved there in 1978 and then we had Sophie in 1981 and Weirdo starts right around the exact same time that Sophie was born. Then it ends around the time we left America and moved to France and we did that one more issue in France [#28], that Aline more or less put together, that Verre D’eau. CBC: How did the idea for Weirdo start? Crumb: I was meditating… I was just beginning meditation and it came to me in a flash like maybe the second time I meditated. [laughs] The name and the whole idea and kind of basing it sort of partially on Kurtzman’s Humbug and on this kinda new, sorta like punk attitude that was coming up in these little zines, and all that stuff. And also, I guess, a way to continue the whole comics thing in back to a more semi-underground attitude, you know? I decided to keep it all loose and crazy and it all kind of came to me in a flash. [laughs] I even saw, like, the logo and stuff in my mind, you know? That first cover. I kind of saw it in my mind.

CBC: Besides Kurtzman’s covers, was the interior based on anything or just an amalgam of different things? Crumb: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was an amalgamation of the old underground comix thing, the punk zine thing, and Kurtzman’s attitude in his last issues of MAD magazine and Humbug of doing all kinds of oddball stuff. And even Help!, where he had that “Public Gallery,” where he had young amateur cartoonists — including me — in there, and Jay Lynch, Paul Merta, and other people like that. And using old stuff, throwing in old stuff. Kind of inspired by that. CBC: Just as a side thing, Kurtzman was the creator of MAD comics and then MAD magazine, and you worked for him briefly. Crumb: Yeah, I did. I worked for him in the mid-1960s. I went from the summer of ’64, when Terry Gilliam was working there as assistant editor and I worked with Terry Gilliam on some stuff, appeared in one of those fumettis, one of those photo funnies things, and just, you know, I was a “go-fer.” I ran around taking materials over to Harry Chester who was the production studio. Then, in ’65, he hired me to take Terry Gilliam’s place. Terry Gilliam had left for England so it would be me as assistant editor. So it would be Gloria Steinem, Terry Gilliam, and then me! [laughter] So I show up and the day I get there… I moved to New York from Cleveland with my wife. We rented an apartment and moved in and that Monday I reported for work at Help! magazine and there’s Kurtzman with a forlorn expression on his face, leaning on the wall outside of the office door and guys are taking desks and furniture out of the office so I said, “Harvey, I’m here! I’m here to start working on Help! Um… What’s goin’ on here?” He said, “Oh, James Warren decided to fold the magazine. It’s over.” [laughter] “Really? Oh jeez, I moved to New York, I rented an apartment!” He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you work.” He felt guilty, y’know? He felt responsible for me. So he connected me with Woody Gelman at Topps, the bubblegum company, and I worked for them for several months. It was just awful workin’ for them. Totally awful! [Jon chuckles] Woody Gelman was a nice guy, but he didn’t set the rules. They were set by the guys who owned the place, who were just cheapskates. CBC: Was this Nostalgia Press or Topps? Crumb: Well, Woody Gelman had Nostalgia Press as a sideline thing of his own, but he was an executive at Topps, the guy in charge of the creative department, making card sets and other gimcracks that they sold with bubblegum — like the worst, sh*ttiest… the flat squares of gum that they used to put in with the cards. You ever see those? CBC: Of course. Crumb: Maybe you’re too young for that. CBC: No, I’m not. [laughter] Crumb: Often the gum was stale. It was like hard and would crumble when… CBC: Oh, yeah. Crumb: It was awful. Topps was a sleazy operation. CBC: You sent Harvey issues of Weirdo, right? Crumb: I guess he saw it. He was kind of in decline in the ‘80s. Started getting Parkinson’s Disease and he became increasingly out of it. I don’t remember what his reaction was to Weirdo. CBC: Yeah, you published a letter, a note. Comments from

Weirdo TM & © R. Crumb. Bean Sisters photo courtesy of Gregg Gannon.

him. Crumb: Did I? Oh. CBC: It was a [wise]crack, y’know? So how did you go about… Were you a house on fire making Weirdo? Crumb: “A house on fire”? Is that what you said? CBC: Yeah. Crumb: Gee, I don’t know if I’d categorize myself that way. All I remember is trying to find time to get any work done. We had this babe, this child, and I had to do other stiff to make a living. There was no money out of Weirdo. Editing something like that, I saw that this was probably going to be only as good as the amount of time and effort you’re willing to put into it. It was just very hard to fight for the time to do that. So I had to do a lot of things that were cheap. No money. I don’t even know what I was doing. The layout and paste-up and all that was all new to me pretty much. And when you had to set type and use images from other sources and all that, I didn’t know what I was doin’. I learned as I went and got better at it. This guy Gary Howard who had a production studio in San Francisco… He was a really decent guy. I took some of the first stuff down there and tried to get him — his production studio — to so those photo-funny layouts, and he said, “It’s gonna cost you a huge amount of money. You can’t afford to have us do this for you. You’ve gotta learn how to do it yourself.” These photo layouts. Because I had just drawn like rough sketches of how everything should be laid out and hoped that his production studio would do the work. Give ’em the photos. “Here’s the photos. Here’s how I want it laid out.” He says, “You’ve gotta learn to do this yourself. You’ve gotta get these screened, get the photos screened to the size you want ’em and use this hot wax method and… ” He explained it all very carefully, how to go about doing it. So I struggled to try to figure out how to do those photo layouts myself and got better at it as I went along, with my model being those 1940s girlie magazines like Pin-Up, or whatever they called it. Twitter, Wink, Flirt, Peek — all those things that had those photo-shoots with girls with geeky guys, mostly burlesque comedians I suppose. And the layouts were so bold and great. Worked so well with the flashy logos and photos at all kind of angles and cut at different angles and stuff. Very bold. The guys obviously who did those had a lot of experience behind them to get to that point of doing ‘em that way so I kind of gradually figured out how to do that better and better and got better at it. The hardest part was getting decent photographs, professional looking photographs was very hard. And that guy Gregg Gannon, that “Stomp Ganos” that’s in there… ? You put him in the book. He had all this fancy equipment and told me a whole cock-and-bull story about what a professional photographer he was. His photos were just terrible! He didn’t know what the f*ck he was doing. He had all this expensive equipment — fancy umbrellas and backdrops and fancy cameras and tripods and he was terrible! We got so disgusted with him after a few times of him doing those that then I got like Aline or Terry Zwigoff just to use a plain cheap little flash camera and we did better with that than Gregg with all his fancy sh*t. I still… When I look at those photos I still get angry all over again that I fell for his line of bullsh*t. CBC: Hm. And you also were influenced by the Mexican… Crumb: The fumettis, yes. Those Mexican photo comic books that were hugely popular. I don’t know if they still are. You know, they were always melodramatic. Bad girl gets punished and there’s these religious overtones and… [chuckles] Have you ever seen any of those? CBC: Oh, yes. Crumb: Mexican photo comic books. CBC: Yep. Crumb: The one that was most inspired by them was the one where Aline was pregnant and Erna Burger plays the bad girl, comes over and I strangle her at the end. [laughter] CBC: That was great! That was a great one. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

Crumb: She was a totally good sport! She was great. Erna was great. She loved to ham it up. None of it bothered her. She was completely up for all the hijinks — and her daughters, too! All three of ’em. All three of her terrific looking daughters were up for it. CBC: The Bean Sisters. [laughs] Crumb: What a family. Yeah. Erna Rae, Roberta, and Jenny. The three daughters. CBC: Yep. So some of this became a social thing, right? Crumb: Oh, the photo-funnies? Yeah, it was kind of a social thing. In fact, it was hard to keep people on track because people wanted to try to turn it into a kind of party, those photo-funnies sessions. Y’know? They’d bring alcohol or wine or beer or something. They’d bring food to eat. And Gregg was the worst. He always wanted it to be a party. He forgot… ! One time he forgot to put the film in the camera! We did a whole session! It was hot and we did a whole thing with the two Bean sisters, Erna and Jenny, and we thought, “Aw, it turned out great!” Everybody was lookin’ happy and Gregg looked all shot down. “Gregg, what’s wrong?” “I… I… I… forgot to put the film in the camera.” [laughter] We had to do the whole f*cking thing over again like a week later! CBC: So, were you gonna enlist your old ZAP [Comix] mates to work for it? Where did you see that you were gonna get people to contribute? Crumb: Ones that I liked like… Spain. I asked him to do stuff for Weirdo. Wasn’t so interested in Moscoso. Griffin was not available. Gilbert Shelton not so available. Who 5

CBC: Oh, Comical Times or Comical Funnies. Crumb: Comical Funnies or whatever it was. And, uh… I dunno. People would send me stuff. CBC: Did you send stuff back? Did you send postcards? Crumb: I did. I had exchanges with some of those guys and some of them had this really, like, kind of obnoxious punk attitude and considered me part of the hippie era which they were in rebellion against so they had to put me down. [Jon snickers] Who was that one guy? “Legs” something or other? CBC: [Punk magazine co-founder] “Legs” McNeil? Crumb: Yeah, he was always puttin’ me down. One of the old farts from the hippie era, y’know? [Jon laughs] CBC: And so you made a deal with Last Gasp? Crumb: They… were… They were happy to print it. “Sure, we’ll print it.” But I had to negotiate with Ron Turner on paying for the production costs for the photo-funnies and such. He was willing to do that. I think it was only a few hundred bucks. The most it ever cost was $600 for one of those photo-funnies sessions. It’s to pay all the models and pay the photographer and all that. Mostly they were cheaper,

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Ziggy TM & © Ziggy & Friends, Inc. American Greeting Cards © the respective copyright holder.

else? Robert Williams. Was he in Weirdo at all? CBC: Yeah, a little bit, yeah. Crumb: A little bit, a little bit. But those guys had become so unavailable and were doing comics so minimally — Robert Williams and Griffin and Moscoso. Spain was still active. Gilbert Shelton was doin’ his own thing with The Furry Freak Brothers and he was already… may have been already in France by then. And Wilson… Ehhh, I was kind of lackadaisical about Wilson by that point. But, like, I wanted to get Spain in there if I could. CBC: And you did! Crumb: Yeah, I wasn’t particularly fixated on the continuation of the ZAP gang, y’know. I was kinda disillusioned with that whole thing anyway. CBC: You got exposed to mini-comix? How’d you see them? Crumb: People sent ’em to me or I saw ’em in shops. I saw ’em… I can’t remember but I definitely saw them. I was exposed to ’em and found a lot of them very interesting! And other kinds of punk zines, you know? Punk magazine itself. What was that other one that Peter Bagge was involved with in New York? What was it called?

Firestone High School yearbook page courtesy of David Scroggy.

a few hundred bucks usually. But there was no pay for editorial time, no pay whatsoever, as Aline and Peter Bagge will attest. CBC: You just got the page rate? Crumb: Yeah, we just got the page rate like everybody else — 50 bucks a page for whatever artwork we contributed, including the cover. CBC: You had an agreement? Was it an agreement… ? How formal was it? Crumb: There was no contract. Nothing in writing. Just a verbal agreement with Ron Turner. CBC: And you would do the covers and something inside? Crumb: Well, I didn’t guarantee or promise to do every cover, either. That was not something that was worked out. CBC: Oh. Crumb: Maybe I’m… Maybe I’m remembering now. Maybe Ron required that. I’m not sure. I don’t remember. Maybe he wanted me to do the cover, he thought that would keep it more commercial if I did the covers. Might have been. That rings a bell. He might have insisted on that as part of the deal, that I had to do the covers. Not sure. Sounds familiar. CBC: And the street comix coming out of Berkeley? Were they an influence? Crumb: Which? CBC: Bruce Duncan, Tele Times… ? Crumb: Oh, Tele Times and all that stuff. I was following that quite closely, yeah. Ace Backwords and Bruce Duncan and… they had a couple other crazy guys in there for a while. Yeah, I had a big interest in that, closely followed that. CBC: So what was the reaction to the first issue [of Weirdo]? Crumb: The reaction to the first issue was a lot of very… quite negative reaction, in fact. A lot of people didn’t like it. We got a lot of criticism but, you know, comics fans are always very, very fussy and critical. Comics readers, fans… and all those snotty comics writers that wrote for Comics Journal, and all that. They’re always nit-pickin’. Nit-pick, pick, pick, pick! [Jon chuckles]. And cat yronwode? You remember her? CBC: Sure. Crumb: She was really down on Weirdo. Really down on it. Is she still around? CBC: Yes! Crumb: Well, you shoulda got her to write something. Shoulda got her to comment ‘cause she was really down on Weirdo when it first started. CBC: Well, I tried. Crumb: You did? You tried to reach her? What happened? CBC: She doesn’t reply to anybody. Crumb: Oh, really? She didn’t respond, eh? What’s she up to now, do you have any idea? CBC: None. Crumb: Eh. CBC: I know she’s writing a foreword for a book I’m working on, but I’m not the editor of it. I just found out the other day. Crumb: Oh, yeah? CBC: I’d love to talk to her. I mean, she’s got quite a history. Crumb: Yeah. CBC: But… how about the photo-funnies? What kind of response did you get to the photo-funnies? Crumb: Mostly negative. People didn’t like ’em. People criticized them for their technical flaws and they were right about that, the first issue was technically bad. That was all Gregg Gannon’s photography and lighting and stuff. Terrible, terrible… One, you can barely see the bunch of vacuum cleaners, it’s so dark. I dunno… just… little automatic flashes, and all that didn’t work. And then the second one is too light. It just came out terrible looking. The one with Jenny where I give her a spanking, called “The Brat Girl Gets Creamed.” COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

CBC: Yeah. Crumb: It wasn’t very good. And the comic fans in general didn’t like the photo-funnies. For one thing, they didn’t like the girls. The girls were always too much my type, y’know? [laughter] Too “thick.” The girls were too thick. Only one that they liked was Dori Seda. They loved her. CBC: How did you know Dori Seda? Crumb: She worked at Last Gasp. She was the bookkeeper there. And she was just beginning to fool around with drawing comics and I guess she just had some kind of in-born talent. She took off very fast, doing good work very quickly. Didn’t take her long, y’know? Like, most cartoonists take years to build up to where they’re doing anything interesting. But it took her just two or three times and there she was! Full-blown, right? And you know, I liked her personally. It’s crazy, amazing to imagine her as a bookkeeper but she was the bookkeeper at last gasp. [laughs] That’s how she started. CBC: Then you supported her work by publishing a lot of it, right?. Crumb: Did I publish a lot of it? I don’t remember. CBC: You certainly launched her, [printing] her first published piece. Crumb: Her first thing was all the panels in circles. CBC: Right. That was her first thing. Crumb: That was her very first thing, I think. Pretty much. CBC: And she improved exponentially! Crumb: She did improve, very fast! CBC: What happened to her?

Previous page: At top is Crumb’s faux beauty ad in #2 that was produced as a hand-colored silkscreen print in 1983. Inset bottom is Crumb’s cover art for Bruce N. Duncan’s Tele Times #21 [July 1980], which impressed the cartoonist while he was contemplating a new magazine. This page: Top is Kurtzman preliminary art for MAD #24 [July ’55] and above Humbug #2 [Sept. ’57]. Both also inspired R. Crumb’s Weirdo. 7

Above: Crumb’s fateful postcard to Peter Bagge resulting in his taking over the reins of Weirdo. Below: Bagge renders Crumb. The Rocket [Mar. 1991].

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Rocket TM & © the respective copyright holder.

Crumb: What happened to Dori? CBC: Yeah. Crumb: She got hit by a car and then lasted about a month and then died. But she had very, very bad emphysema from all that chain smoking. She just smoked like a chimney. Unbelievable. She’d come to your house and then just fill your house with smoke. After she left, the smell of the smoke would linger for weeks. She smoked so intensely. She was always coughing and she claimed she had silicosis from working with clay and making pottery a few years earlier, but I think that she just couldn’t face the smoking addiction, you know? She was living with [underground comix publisher] Don Donahue when she died, and I saw Don afterwards and I asked him, “What happened to Dori? What happened?” He said, “Well, she was in this accident. She was convalescing and then she just kind of curled up in a ball and died.” I think she was in very bad health in general from smoking and drinking and everything. I don’t know.

CBC: Yeah, I wrote it in the book that for the community — for the Weirdo community — it was probably the biggest event that took place, her passing. She was young. Crumb: She was. Mid-30s I think. She was a big loss. Big loss. CBC: So, Terry Boyce was another woman cartoonist that you… Crumb: Yeah, Dori’s pal, Terry Boyce. She did the “My Penis Pet” stories. You know, none of the women liked those stories. None of the women liked the “My Penis Pet” stories. CBC: But you did! Crumb: I liked ’em! Yeah, I thought they were funny. But they were a very kind of frank admission of female sexuality, female sexual lust, and which then, of course, she completely… What’s the word?... renounced… in herself, all of a sudden, and became a Christian and stopped doing any comics at all. Now she’s some kind of Christian evangelist. CBC: She’s a minister, yeah. Crumb: That’s incredible. CBC: [Laughs] That’s a journey, isn’t it? From Weirdo to ministry. Crumb: Yeah. CBC: What was going to the mailbox like or going to your post office like? Crumb: [Laughs] What do you mean, what was that like going to the post office? CBC: I used to do a zine. I remember it was, like, “Wow!” You just didn’t… I didn’t know what I was gonna get! And sometimes I’d just get this crazy, crazy-ass sh*t! But sometimes it was wonderful. I mean, you got unsolicited… You had your address in the magazine. Crumb: Yeah, yeah, sure. We got all kinds of unsolicited stuff. All kinds of stuff. The worst stuff was just uninteresting, you know? Elinore Norflus might be unreadable, but it’s interesting, you know? There’s something strong going on there. And that’s unusual to find something out of the blue that’s really strong arriving in the mail. Most of what actually ended up in there was stuff that I found or hunted down on my own, like [Norman] Pettingill or [Stanislav] Szukalski, stuff like that, stuff that didn’t just arrive in the mail one day. CBC: Szukalski was from the book? Glenn Bray’s book. Crumb: Yeah. Behold!!! the Protong. The book, yeah. CBC: Pettingill. How did you encounter his stuff? Crumb: Pettingill… I think… How did I encounter Pettingill? I don’t remember exactly. CBC: Could be in the introduction. You wrote the introduction to his book, so I should look at that. Crumb: He may have actually written to me, in fact. CBC: He was old, then! Right? Crumb: Yeah. He was, yeah. He was quite old then. Might have been in his 80s already. CBC: Did it become a burden after a while? You did nine issues and you were pretty steady with the output and uh… Crumb: Yeeaaah… It became more time-consuming dealing with all the artists. As it went along more and more people were submitting work and you had to give each person some kind of attention. You had to deal with them. You couldn’t just ignore them. Aline was more casual about it than I was. She started just ignoring them. The stuff would just pile up. But I felt that I owed these people some kind of response, you know? Sometimes I would send them detailed letters or criticisms or suggestions of how they could make it more readable. Suggestions of what they could do maybe that I thought might be more interesting. Yadda, yadda… you know. Or if you told ’em you were gonna print their stuff, you had to deal with that. It was just time consuming. Finally, I just felt… I guess I’d spent several years doing this and I kind of had more motivation to go back and do more of my own work again. So I quit Weirdo and I started doing, I think, Hup Comics. Started working on that in the late ’80s, and then again having to do other stuff for money to make a living.

Photos courtesy of Peter Bagge.

CBC: Do you have cartoonists that you considered that you discovered, that you kind of nurtured? Crumb: Well, I think I kind of nurtured Dori Seda. I encouraged her. Probably a few others. I can’t think of any more offhand actually. Some of them that I thought showed real potential, that I printed and encouraged them, and they just kinda came and went anyway. They just didn’t stick to it anyway. Like the guy that did Fish Lips or whatever. People like that. But they had the potential to do more interesting work but… It’s tough to stick with comics. It’s tough! It’s a big commitment. You’ve gotta be willing to really put the time in when you’re young, you know? And for very little economic reward. You’re not gonna get the economic reward. The work is its own reward when you’re doing comics these days. CBC: How would you characterize your editorial experience? Would you ever be an editor again? Crumb: No. I wouldn’t. [laughs] I wouldn’t do it again. That was enough for me. I learned what that was about. In many ways, it was a thankless job because you’d end up with a lot of angry, pissed-off people who felt that you rejected their work unfairly or they weren’t happy with the way it was printed, or whatever. And then there was no pay so it was… And the readers. Always a lot of criticism from the readers. Some liked this, some liked that, of some didn’t like this or some didn’t like that. CBC: Were you hypersensitive to it, in retrospect? Crumb: Yeah, I think I was. I was hypersensitive to it, overly concerned about the commentary, criticism of stuff. The photo-funnies… I finally just kinda gave up on that thing ’cause nobody liked ’em. [laughs] CBC: Do you remember when Aline announced that she was gonna do it again? That she was gonna start [the photo-funnies] up again? Crumb: She did? CBC: She said she was but it didn’t happen. Crumb: Yeah. CBC: You know, I agree with Peter… he was the one that got that postcard from you. Peter Bagge was just stunned and thought you were joking when you almost very casually just offered him the editorship of the magazine. Crumb: Eh, all right. I read that. CBC: Was it casual? Crumb: No, it wasn’t. I was serious. I was totally serious. I could see that he was a young, energetic artist who wasn’t afraid of work. I could see that about him right away. CBC: How so? Crumb: You could see that he… I mean, among these younger generations, he was a guy that would churn out very cogent work and he was very prolific. When I actually asked him on the phone if he would take over Weirdo, I said, “Would you be interested in taking over the editorialship of Weirdo?” He said… and it’s, like, y’know, “Boy, would I!” [laughter] CBC: “Gaw-LEE, Mister Crumb!” [laughter] Oh, boy, huh? What he got himself into! Crumb: Yeah. I warned him! I did warn him. I said that this is a lot of work and not much money but he was thrilled at the idea of taking that on. And flattered, I guess. I had no idea at the time… Here and there it shows up in the various testimonials that you printed, that a lot of people thought that Weirdo was a big deal. To me, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. For one thing, there was no money in it. The sales figures weren’t really great, so… I don’t remember ever actually seeing sales figures, but talking to Ron Turner, it didn’t seem like it was a big seller of big sensation or nothin’. It was barely scraping by, so it seems like it was not making much of an impression on the world that I could tell. But these people were… some of them, like Peter Bagge or some of those artists that contributed, thought it was a much bigger deal and a more important thing in the world than it actually was. [laughs] CBC: Do you think that they might have seen something COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

with it that you didn’t? Crumb: I suppose. I guess so. They’re younger so, yeah, I guess, y’know… ? And the punk zine thing and all that was very homemade, most of it, so that anything that was actually printed on a legitimate press and distributed through legitimate distribution channels, I guess, to them seemed like big time! CBC: In comparison, was the reason for it RAW magazine? RAW preceded Weirdo by about six months. I think a year. Crumb: That’s right, but I dunno. Maybe unconsciously. I wasn’t thinking about it consciously, of it being something alternate to RAW magazine. It wasn’t in my head. You know I had gotten disillusioned with ZAP Comix because the way those artists were and that they had made it a closed shop. You know, no other artists allowed after these seven. After me, and Wilson, and Griffin, and Moscoso, and Spain, and Gilbert Shelton, and Robert Williams. That’s it. Somehow, they decided, that’s it. No other artist can get in here. And then it took so long to get an issue out! My aspiration, my ideal had always been to get something out more or less regularly. So, in 1980–81, around there, I couldn’t imagine doing a comic that was all my own work and keeping it coming out… Well… I guess that’s not true. I guess I just liked the idea of an anthology magazine. Like I said, it came to me in a flash in 1980 — to put out a magazine that was almost a compendium of all that crazy and interesting stuff, visual, that fits into a modest black-&-white magazine. Visual stuff, comics, and other kind of low-life type stuff, punk

Above: Peter Bagge chats with Aline Kominsky-Crumb during a 1997 trip to Madrid, Spain. At left is Fantagraphics co-publisher Eric Reynolds.

Below: This could well be the only photo of all three Weirdo editors together to date, shot by Carol Hernandez, during the 1991 MisfitLit gallery exhibition. From left is R. Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring, Jaime Hernandez (front) Gary Groth, Daniel Clowes, and Gilbert Hernandez.

This page: At top is an undated photo of the Crumb brothers, (from left) Maxon, Robert, and Charles. Above is Robert’s cover for the Maxon-edited Crumb Family Comics, published by Last Gasp, in 1998. The collection, which also included the art of Robert’s daughter, Sophie, and son, Jesse, was supposed to have been released along with the premiere of Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s film documentary on Robert’s crazy life, including an outrageously dysfunctional upbringing. Below are samples of the art of Maxon (left) and Charles.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Jesus Loves You TM & © the respective copyright holder.

stuff, old stuff that’s funky, and life, you know? CBC: If there were a magazine like that nowadays… ? should there always be a magazine like that? Would it be good? Crumb: There should be, but it takes someone with the right editorial attitude. Like I told you about when Fantagraphics came out with those anthologies, Centrifugal Bumblepuppy. I thought that was really… The editorial decision-making there was very interesting, their attitude about it. But it’s a personal thing, y’know? CBC: Can you think of any that came close? Crumb: Let me think. Off the top of my head… CBC: Zero-Zero? Crumb: Again, same. The editorial decision-making there was very uninteresting. And Mone, the same. It had some interesting work and some work that was pretentious. CBC: Have you seen Now? Crumb: Hm… ? CBC: NOW. It’s Eric Reynolds editing. It’s Fantagraphics… Crumb: No. I haven’t seen it. How long has that been coming out? CBC: About a year-and-a-half, I’d say. There are three issues that I’ve seen. Squarebound. It’s interesting. I always like anthologies. There’s always something to get out of it? Was the criteria of Weirdo that the material be funny… or just weird? Crumb: [Pauses] Hard to say, hard to say. I like stuff that’s funny… but I like stuff that’s weird. Oddball stuff, but from

the lower echelons of the culture, y’know? And outsider stuff. Crazy people. I like art by crazy people. The best art show I ever saw in my life was one I went to with my brother Charles when he was in a state mental asylum in 1970, ’71. I went to visit him there and in the day room, they had a big board covered with art by the inmates of this institution that were… Just the best art show I ever saw! [chuckles] Some of the art by the crazy people… wow! Look at that! I just wanted to steal the whole thing. I wanted to take it all down and gather it up and take it home. It was all just done on pieces of notebook paper and stuff. Nothin’ fancy. Done with Magic Markers and ballpoint pens and stuff… but wow. CBC: You know, if you were to take away the fact that you’re their brother, would you find that Maxon’s work and your older brother Charles’ work… ? Would you be just fascinated with that as well? Crumb: [Laughs] Well, Maxon’s work, definitely, absolutely. I put him in Weirdo. He definitely belonged in Weirdo once he started doing artwork. His stuff is really… ! That first set of stuff I put in, that first one was just stuff outta notebooks, in ballpoint pen and stuff. So crazy and strange! But I kind of regret the way I laid it out. The layout was too distracting. I should have made the layout less flashy. It kind of interferes with the artwork. My fault. CBC: Charles got obsessive, right? Crumb: Charles… ? [pauses] Yeah, but he lost interest in drawing at an early age. CBC: Do you have any… can you have any opinion about your tenure as the editor of Weirdo? Were you happy with the results or… mixed? Crumb: I’m never totally happy with the results of anything I do. If I start looking, I just get critical all over again. I shouldn’t have done this, I shoulda done more of this… and blah-blah-blah. Too bad I didn’t know what I was doin’ when I started those photo layouts… and yada yada. I shoulda had this girl go further than she did, in like the one where Cecelina Franchescini is makin’ spaghetti [“Untamed Passion for Pasta” photo-funnie, Weirdo #6]. I didn’t push her far enough. I could have! I realized afterword she woulda been up for anything! Some of those girls were game for anything! They were local Davis College girls and stuff. Like Janet Mercurio. She was so game! Sometimes you had to tone her down. “No, you don’t need to take your clothes off!” CBC: [Laughs] Hold up, hold up! Crumb: Yeah. So yeah, regrets like that. I’m never that satisfied with anything I do. But, on the other hand, I think Weirdo, for its time, was fairly interesting, fairly interesting. What to compare it with, I don’t know. What else was there at the time? Those crazy music magazines which sometimes had mildly interesting stuff in them… sometimes. CBC: Well, everybody in that decade I think compared it to RAW and, in the book, you can just see this constant theme of people comparing it to… Crumb: Yeah. CBC: Were those comparisons true? Crumb: I don’t know what the comparisons were, so… CBC: They were highbrow and Weirdo was less so. Crumb: [RAW co-editor

Rick Griffin artwork © the estate of Rick Griffin.

Art] Spiegelman had this idea of raising the whole comics medium to a more respectable level in the art world. He had somewhat more what I would consider pretentious, arty tastes than I did. And he also liked really fancy printing gimmicks, you know? The finest paper and cutouts and all kinds of fancy schmancy printing stuff which I… I liked the idea of the cheaply produced comic pamphlet. It’s always a thing that I loved the most. Still do. Sad that that’s kind of died out. But there’s still guys producing that, like Whatsisname that puts out Noah Van Sciver’s stuff. What’s his name? And this other guy. Damn. I can’t think of his name. CBC: Sam Harkham? Crumb: Not Sammy Harkham. This guy’s on the East Coast now. He has his own little press that he puts out his own book. You’ve seen those Noah Van Sciver books. CBC: I’ve seen his comics. Crumb: Yeah, his comics. The guy that puts those out. CBC: Oh, hmm… Crumb: Yeah, he does good stuff and there are another couple of young artists that he puts out that are quite good. Quite good. CBC: So what’d you think… ? Did you sit back with Peter Bagge during his tenure? Did you have an opinion? Did he ask you for advice? How involved were you with Weirdo then? Crumb: I was involved with it. I don’t remember to what degree. The thing is I was so happy that he picked up the torch and kept it going with pretty much the same feeling that it had through my tenure and Aline’s tenure. He just kind of kept it going that way so that was really nice to see that he had the right idea and was willing to do the work. He put the same amount of work or maybe even more work into it than I did. He kept the quality up. He kept it up. I was very happy to see that. He more than fulfilled my hopes in continuing the magazine with the same feeling that I’d started it with. I had a lot of respect for him for that. CBC: The aura of the magazine… Did the tone of the magazine change under him? Did you sense it to be different? Crumb: That’s the thing: it wasn’t that different. He didn’t alter it radically at all. He just kind of kept up the same feeling, the same mood that it had before. Maybe he was even a little tighter than I was about the quality of the work. I don’t know. I guess the photo-funnies thing had ended by the time he took over, right? There was no more photo funnies. CBC: Yeah, no one did it again. But his letter pages just burst wide open. Crumb: And he hand-lettered the pages, right? The letters pages? Just like I did. CBC: Yep, and there was just this whole community… Of course, it had been with your letter pages, as well, but it exploded because he included comic strips as well, from like, Mary Fleener, Ken Struck… Crumb: He put the work in! He wasn’t afraid of doing the work. It’s a lot of work. It’s a huge amount of work. CBC: Did he call you for commiseration? Crumb: Mmm… I don’t remember if we talked that much. I went up there a few times. CBC: When he moved to Seattle? Crumb: Yeah. CBC: You said there wasn’t that much of a discernable change between you and Peter. How about in comparison to your wife… to Aline’s tenure? Crumb: Well, I worked more closely when Aline was doing it. I became actively involved in it again. Did she come after Peter Bagge? CBC: Yes. Crumb: Yeah, she was the third editor. I got more involved in it again, putting it together. CBC: Do you recall, how did that change take place? Peter wanted to give it up. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

Crumb: Yes, he did. CBC: You didn’t want to see the magazine die, right? Crumb: He reached the same point that I reached of burnout on it after nine issues. I think he also did nine issues. Almost exactly the same time period as I put in and came to the same exhausted, overwhelmed point that I did, of dealing with all the artists and everything. And there was just no money. It’s be one thing if you were getting’ paid to do that but you had to do other stuff for a living. He just said he couldn’t do it anymore. Then Aline took it over, but I helped Aline a lot. I was back to doing layout of the ads and everything like that, but Aline, she handled the whole letter thing. I think she hand-lettered the letters pages, too. CBC: She did. You helped. I had to sit down… I had to sit down. You know, I was forced to sit down and read all the letter columns from the 29, 28 issues. [laughs] Read them all! Crumb: Oh, my god! Jesus Christ! Oh, lord! [laughter] Lord help us! CBC: It was really entertaining to read her letter pages because she would have these themes that would keep going. Crumb: Aline, right… CBC: She had this persona! She had this kind of “drunk housewife looking for boyfriends.” Crumb: That’s right. [laughter] Flirting with the readers and stuff.

This page: At top is the jam cover art for The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics, by R. Crumb, Aline Komisky-Crumb, and Sophie Crumb (who is now a mother with three kids, living not far from her parents in the south of France). Below is the final page of R. Crumb’s profile in People Weekly, the June 24, 1985, issue. He agreed to the feature in the hopes of promoting Weirdo but, alas, the publication resulted in no apparent sales bump.

Above: Peter Bagge’s recent trilogy of women memoirs, all published by Drawn & Quarterly and featuring some of the cartoonist’s finest work. Crumb calls Bagge, “A great storyteller. One of the best. I always say there’s two kinds of cartoonists: there’s literary cartoonists and there’s visual cartoonists. He’s definitely a literary cartoonist. He’s a storyteller. His work is all about the stories.” Below: The back cover of R. Crumb’s last major work to date, his illustrated adaptation of The Bible’s Book of Genesis [2009], a 224-page straight, literal visual interpretation.

with so many suggestions. I’m, like, “Yup. Sounds great!” Because what do I know? But you did have some opportunity and tried, right, when you mentioned Weirdo in People magazine. Crumb: Did I? Did I mention Weirdo in People? CBC: Yeah! There was a notice. I think it was like 120 paragraphs in or something like that. A very small notice about what you were doing now. Crumb: I remember now. I remember asking Ron Turner, “Did that mention of Weirdo in People magazine… ” — which had a circulation of, like, millions! — I said, “Did that affect sales of Weirdo at all?” He said, “No, not at all.” [Jon laughs] It had no effect whatsoever. No mention of Weirdo that I ever made in any public venue had any effect on the sales. It was too hard to find. People weren’t gonna write to Last Gasp and ask for Weirdo. If it’s not out there where you can find it easily, people aren’t gonna go to that length to find something. How many people are willing to do that? A couple hundred maybe. CBC: Right. What did you think of Peter Bagge’s work, overall? What do you think of it? Crumb: I think he’s a great storyteller. A great storyteller. One of the best. I always say there’s two kinds of cartoonists: there’s literary cartoonists and there’s visual cartoonists. He’s definitely a literary cartoonist. He’s a storyteller. His work is all about the stories. I liked his book he did about Zora Hurston. You know, the black woman writer? CBC: Oh, yeah. Crumb: His drawing style is so kind of like incongruous with the story. [laughs] This wacky, zany drawing style of his! And yet he did an excellent job of telling the story of her life. It’s like that strip, The Bungle Family? You know that strip? A comic strip from the ’20s, ’30s… In the late ‘20s, that was the best literary comic strip of its time. The best! Tops! Head and shoulders on the literary level but any other comic strip of the time and yet the guy’s drawing is nothing much to speak of, you know? So Peter Bagge, his drawing is wacky and zany, but his stories are heavier than the drawing. Once I sent him this thing and I said, “What if your stories were drawn like this?” and I sent him some sequence of panels from one of his stories in a realistic style. I think he actually printed it somewhere. But just like three or four panels I did in this somber, realistic style which I thought ironically suited the work better than his wacky, zany, lighthearted style that he has. [chuckles] Like sometimes when people are angry, the drawing’s so #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Woman Rebel, Fire!, Credo © Peter Bagge. The Book of Genesis © R. Crumb.

CBC: How did the idea come about for her to take it on as editor? Crumb: How did it come about for her to take on being editor? Jeez, I don’t remember exactly. Don’t remember. I must have talked about it and she seemed willing to do it, but I agreed to help her with it. There was no way I was gonna let her do it without my help. I didn’t think she could do it without my help. I think she would have been… I knew how much work was involved and how much time it took. I said she’s not gonna be able to do this. She’s got too much else goin’ already… taking care of the kid, teaching exercise classes, and doing her own comics. She did her own comics through that whole period, too. CBC: That’s right. During this whole time, did you try to promote the magazine? Look, I researched the thing! There’s not much material out there. There was The Comics Journal that would cover it… Crumb: Yeah. CBC: … and hardly anybody else. [laughs] Crumb: And Last Gasp did nothing to promote it. Last Gasp: not good at promotion. I got them to publish this author that I liked, J.R. Helton, and in order to get them to publish the book, I did the cover for it, and they did it. They printed it, published it with my cover, and it just like dropped into obscurity completely. They did nothing to make the public aware that they even had published the book. I’m not sure if they even put it in their catalog. [laughter] CBC: They’re doing better with The Book of Weirdo. Also a great help is Drew Friedman. He’s just very excited about the book and is like my partner in promotion. Crumb: Is that right? Oh, good! Great! That’s good. CBC: He’s really… he’s the one that’s coming up

Love That Bunch, Need More Love © Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Crumb family photo courtesy of Gregg Gannon.

exaggerated, you know? And yet what’s actually taking place, what’s actually transpiring in the story, doesn’t merit this extreme exaggeration of the drawing. [laughs] He’s a great storyteller. I really liked Neat Stuff. I read every issue of that. Hate, also. Both of those. CBC: I think he’s one of the truly great cartoonists. Crumb: Yeah! CBC: And that’s the thing about Weirdo. You had three awesome cartoonists at the helm, directing this thing. Crumb: Yeah, yeah. CBC: Obviously, I’m leading into your wife. I’m almost at a loss for words how much I love the work. It’s just so… Crumb: Confessional. CBC: Confessional’s not even the word. But my opinion means nothing! I love it. What do you think of your wife’s work? Crumb: I have the highest regard for her work and always did. From the first time I ever saw it. I was, “Wow! She’s like the only woman ever to do what she’s doing!” Right away I saw her first crudely drawn… She never stopped being crude in her artwork but her first strips were rally raw looking. But… totally readable, very funny, and deeply personal, right from the get-go! When she first came to San Francisco, in 1971, she started right away doing these deeply personal, confessional comics about herself that were funny and readable. Strong, strong stuff. I liked her stuff right away and I’ve always been a big fan of her work. The comic fans have always been lambasting her, all the boy fans, because her drawing was so crude and everything. They just couldn’t get past the crude drawing. A lot of people had that problem with Rory Hayes, also, when he first came along. “Too crude.” Like Janis Joplin: when we printed Rory Hayes’s work in Snatch Comics. She liked Snatch Comics, thought it was funny. She liked Wilson’s work, liked my work, but she said, “You guys shouldn’t print this guy Rory Hayes’s stuff. This guy’s just a psychopath. He shouldn’t be in here. Big mistake to put his stuff in with your stuff.” CBC: [Laughter] Will you just encourage him? Is that it? Crumb: I dunno, I dunno… but, again, getting back to what I liked to see in Weirdo, anything that’s that far out there, on the edge… Using that visual medium, the comics medium, or the illustration medium to do something that’s expressive in that crazy, weird, outsider way? To me, that’s the stuff. That’s the good stuff. Somebody should do a whole magazine of just that kind of stuff. That’s what the world needs: a magazine of just the most crazy outsider illustrations. [laughter] That’s why I tried to get stuff from prisoners, you know, for Weirdo? The problem with prisoners is — and I found this out when I went and taught classes… Aline and I taught classes, very briefly, at Vacaville State… facility for the criminally insane. Charlie Manson was in there for a while. We talked to these artists that were doing this rather conventional and uninteresting artwork. I talked to ’em and I said, “Well, how come you don’t do something more personal? What’s really goin’ on inside ya?” They said, “We can’t.” “Why not?” “Because we have to go to psychiatrists every day and if we even tell them what’s goin’ on inside of us, they’ll just keep us in here longer.” [laughter] “Let alone draw it! We can’t draw what we really feel? Just a reason to keep us locked up longer.” [laughter] CBC: Isn’t the reason for art, in many ways, being able to project and get things out? You did that, right? Crumb: I sure as hell did! I used it for that purpose and foisted it on the public, got away with it. But it was different in the mental institution, like where my brother was, because that wasn’t for the criminally insane. They were just free to draw whatever they felt like in that place. They weren’t incarcerated for some criminal reason. Somebody should comb the mental institutions of America. I don’t know how you’d find work like that by interesting people who would be considered crazy but were doing some kind of expressive art about it. It would be a raison d’être for a COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

good magazine. CBC: Mm-hm. What did you think of your work? Can you assess your work within Weirdo? Do you have any favorites? Crumb: Nah, not really. I don’t really have any favorites. A lot of people say that “Psycopathia Sexualis” was really good. I dunno. I don’t remember what else. People liked the covers. I put a lot of work into those covers. I tried to keep up the Humbug tradition, with those covers, of just odd and unexpected… Change the logo. Don’t use the same logo every time. Make elaborate covers but every one very different, you know? Try different experimental things. Like that one cover. It’s just all collage, cut-outs from magazines. Number six I think. CBC: Right. Crumb: You tried stuff like that. There were different experiments. CBC: There were a couple of unpublished ones and one of them I don’t think I specifically asked you about was about a guy going, “Psst! Psst! Come over here. I’ve got something to tell you.” What was the background gonna be for that? The whole left side of the cover was kind blank. Crumb: Yeah… CBC: You remember? Crumb: No, I don’t remember. Don’t remember. But I ended up using that, I think, inside the magazine. CBC: Yeah, you did. Crumb: I redrew it, though, didn’t I? CBC: You did. Much more of a close-up. As I said, and I’ll just say it again, I think “Uncle Bob’s Midlife Crisis” is just wonderful. Crumb: That’s funny. You’re one of the few people that’s had that sort of a positive comment on that. CBC: There’s been negative comments on that? Crumb: Not negative. Just indifference! No comments! [laughter] CBC: That’s the problem with so much: indifference.

Above: Recently, Drawn & Quarterly published Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s collection, Love That Bunch, which compiles her comics work from the 1970s to the present day. Below: Her graphic memoir, Need More Love, was published in 2007.

Below: The Crumbs, circa 1983.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

“Uncle Bob’s Mid-Life Crisis” © R. Crumb.

Crumb: Indifference. CBC: So do you look back at it and say, “Yeah. Job well done?” Crumb: Yeah, I think so, in general, but like I said whenever I start looking through it I’m just too critical. My mind is too critical. And then I just, like, throw it down and go, “Jesus! It coulda been so much better.” Blah, blah. [Jon laughs] But to make it better would have been twice as much work. It just was a matter of time. How much time were ya gonna put in, y’know? CBC: Do you think there’s an affliction of just trying to achieve perfection? Crumb: Yeah, I’m totally perfectionist that way! Anything I undertake… any endeavor! Even if it’s like repairing a crack in the wall with some plaster, I’m so perfectionist it’s gonna take me all day to get it right, you know? I suppose that’s a part of what makes the artwork good is the perfectionist tendencies. People ask me, “Wouldja do me a doodle? Just scratch a little doodle out for me. You don’t have to take a long time. I just want some… ” But I can’t do that! I can’t make a doodle. I can’t do those quickies. If I do that I always regret it if I see it later. Just sloppy drawing. That’s my legacy! I don’t wanna leave a bunch of sloppy drawings behind. [chuckles] I dunno. I can’t do it. CBC: But doesn’t it add to more anxiety? Crumb: It does. I’m a very anxious person. CBC: And you’re all right with that? Crumb: No, I’m not. [chuckles] I’m not all right with that. I’m uncomfortable, actually. I’m just uncomfortable in my skin. I’m an ectomorph, I guess. I don’t know. CBC: [Laughs] So it’s a trade-off then? Crumb: Well, ultimately, I want to be able to look at whatever I’ve done, repairing a crack in the wall or drawing, and be satisfied I did the best I could. One thing I just hate is sloppy work, work that’s facile or involves a little gimmick some way that looks good, so you can crank it out and get it done. I don’t like that, and I’ve been guilty of that myself when I was younger in the underground comics days of the early ’70s, and there were all these little publishers and they all wanted artwork by me because my work sold better than… a lot of the other stuff. So they all were after me and I was just trying to do as much work as I could and do it as fast as I could and get it done, and now when I look at it, it looks too facile. I developed this cute style and just cranked it out too much. I don’t like that. I don’t like it when people crank stuff out. CBC: Obviously, I think between 1990 and ’93 there was a lull in Weirdo’s output. You were originally, back in 1990 before you moved to France, you both decided to…

Crumb: Yeah, it was gonna be the end of it, really. Number 27 was supposed to be the end of it. Then, once we were in France, Aline got this bright idea to do one last issue and call it Verre D’eau. CBC: [Chuckles] Keep it going or… ? Crumb: No, that was just a one-shot. CBC: No, I mean, you moved on to Peter Bagge and then you moved on to Aline, and you helped out there. Did you think of maybe passing it to another person? Or did you try? Crumb: No. Didn’t. Uh-uh. When Aline was ready to throw in the towel, we thought pretty much that was it. We did a ten-year run, almost — a nine-year run — and we put out 27 issues. That’s… what? Three issues a year? I thought that type of a magazine, for those days? It lasted longer than Humbug. RAW kept goin’! But we got more issues out than we did in the entire history of ZAP Comix, which only lasted 16 issues over a period of 40 years! By the end of ZAP Comix, you couldn’t get those guys to put out an issue of ZAP Comix more than once every 10 years! Ridiculous! That was just ridiculous. CBC: The timing was such that… I think the first issue of Weirdo came out pretty soon after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Crumb: Eighty-one, sometime in there. Late ’81 was it? CBC: Early ’81! Crumb: Early ’81? CBC: Spring of ’81, yeah, and he came in in January of ’81. Crumb: Spring of ’81? I guess I got the idea and worked on the first issue in 1980. Yeah. Right after that motherf*cker Ree-gan got elected and sent the United States down the path that led to… guess who? The guy that’s in there now. Ya gotta start from Reagan. It’s a straight line from Reagan to Trump. CBC: Was Weirdo a reaction in a way to the go-go ‘80s? You called it an “era of bared fangs” in the first issue of Weirdo. Crumb: [Laughs] I did? Well, yeah, ’cause the hippie ideal was definitely winding down in the late ’70s and a lot of people were drifting, wandering, stumbling around, and confused. I was, like, “Gee, what happened? What happened to all that idealism and everything?” And then the money guys got, with Reagan, got right back in the saddle with the politics and immediately started deregulating and had all these stupid ideas like the trickle-down theory of economics, Jack Kemp and all that stuff that they were touting, that Reagan deeply believed in and appointed Alan Greenspan as the head of the Federal Reserve because… guess why? They were both fans of Ayn Rand! You know who Ayn Rand is? CBC: Oh, yes. Ayn Rand. Sure. Crumb: They were both big fans of her! CBC: Selfishness! Right. Crumb: The creative men, the people that are the creative forces in society in business and finance should be left alone to do what they want, should not be dragged down by all the small-minded bureaucrats and petty considerations of the ignorant working classes. [laughs] And they believed in that stuff! Those motherf*ckers believed in that stuff and just sold everything as fast as they could. CBC: And they’re still selling it. Crumb: And, yeah, it’s continued apace since then. It wasn’t slowed down during Clinton. It wasn’t slowed down during Obama. CBC: No… So, was it Aline’s idea to come out with that last edition, Verre D’eau? Crumb: Yeah. It was kinda her inspiration. She more or less edited it and used all these French artists. The one guy in there that she used I think was a big mistake was this Christian Roux guy. His work is terrible. I don’t know why she… I couldn’t talk her out of it. I said, “I don’t know if that belongs in there. What’s that have to do with anything? It’s kind of arty nonsense. I don’t see what it has to do with what Weirdo’s about. I think it’s on the back cover of that, some arty thing with a bottle on it, something like that. CBC: Mmm. Crumb: But she was impressed with him. CBC: And your submission to that was… pretty controversial. Crumb: Oh, that was my “N******s Take over America.” That’s right. “When the ‘N-word’ Takes Over America.” Can’t say that word. That’s right. I forgot. Excuse me. CBC: I’ll bleep it out. You really can’t. Crumb: You can say “motherfucker,” or “c*nt,” or “bitch” or anything, but you can’t say that word. CBC: No. No. And you say that it was compulsive. You had to do it? Crumb: It came to me in a flash! I couldn’t have had that idea and executed it if I was still living in the United States but I was safely ensconced

“A Short History of America,” “Whiteman Meets Bigfoot” TM & © R. Crumb.

outside of the country. CBC: Why? You needed perspective? Crumb: Why what? CBC: Why could you only do it outside the country? You needed some distance? Crumb: Yeah, some distance, yeah. Had some distance. CBC: What was your meaning behind that story? Crumb: I don’t know. You tell me. That’s not my job. CBC: That was picked up by some [neo-]Nazis and… Crumb: Yeah, some white supremacist newsletter reprinted it, yeah. They said, “Crumb’s on our side! Crumb’s one of us!” CBC: Were you? Crumb: Those dumbasses… Just proves how dumb they were that they didn’t get the satire of that. But then neither did Art Spiegelman or Bill Griffith. They thought it was too harsh. They put me down for that. Spiegelman gave me a big lambasting, although he denies it now. He denies it, but he did. A terrible lambasting over lunch or something, I forget what. CBC: But the San Francisco Examiner and also The New Yorker took exception to it, didn’t they? Crumb: I don’t remember. Did they? CBC: Yeah, the Examiner called you up and said, “Did you know that a white supremacist newspaper reprinted your COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

story?” And it was news to you. And then The New Yorker picked up on it. Crumb: Oh, yeah. I think I might have that New Yorker article somewhere. CBC: [Laughs] Well, it’s in the book, so… Crumb: That’s where I saw it! [Laughs] I saw it in the book. That’s right. Yeah. CBC: Well, I’m gonna be shameless here and ask you to, uh… You wrote something to Denis Kitchen and you wrote it about… a tribute. Can you say something about The Book of Weirdo and what it means to you… what it is? Crumb: Cooke, have you no shame?! [laughter] CBC: Nope. Crumb: Yeah, that thing I wrote to Kitchen, I said things like a “monumental tribute to me” more than I’ve ever seen… No one else has done this or ever will again, [Jon laughs] spend, like, 12 years of their life doing this tribute to this thing that I created. It’s incredible. CBC: Thank you, man. Crumb: Why you did it, I have no idea! But… there it is. CBC: Thank you. Well, to get you to say that, I guess. [laughs] That’s great. Crumb: Nah, I’m sure that’s not why you did it. You’re just like some compulsive researcher and just latched onto Weirdo.

This spread: The three greatest masterpieces of R. Crumb, in the opinion of Ye Ed’: “Uncle Bob’s Mid-Life Crisis,” “A Short History of America,” and “Whiteman Meets Bigfoot.”

incoming

A Medium… Not a Genre

Your editor reminds us of this mag’s raison d’etre, genre ghettoizing be damned Write to CBC: jonbcooke@ aol.com or P. O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892

[A couple of missives in the ol’ mailbag this issue, including one from the ever-reliable Joe Frank, who rarely misses a chance to send us his comments on the latest ish. Thanks, Joe! Devotion such as yours keeps us going! The other letter is from the author of the TwoMorrows series of books regarding the House of Ideas over the decades, Marvel Comics in the 1960s, as well as ’70s and ’80s volumes. — Ye Crusading Editor]

Joe Frank

Above: As reported on the Hudson Valley One website, the town of Saugerties, New York, declared Aug. 31, 2019, “Joe Sinnott Day.” Below: Another Joe from last issue, Joe Jusko, visits with the great comic book artist during the summer event.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos courtesy of Joe Jusko.

Hard to offer too many Joes for my taste. You hit my favorite Joe of all the ones in comics: Joe Sinnott. He, in conjunction with Stan and Jack, made the Fantastic Four a treat, every month, for years. Too bad he had other accounts, early on, or he could have kept going on the title from his impressive debut on #5. Still, I’m more than grateful he did eventually return, with #44, and was well-established by the time I discovered the book the following year. Loved his incredibly smooth and precise inking. Still do. When I reread some old story, I remain totally impressed, especially as it was done under deadline. Hope you will have a chance to connect with him over Sunday brunch, as planned. Hell, I’m not fussy. It could be on Taco Tuesday. Just so you can chat with him and find out more details. I know very little about his work on Treasure Chest. Also, if you haven’t already had your encounter, maybe bring a FF reprint volume, or some of his initial “Thor” stories, to see if it refreshes any memories. Just amazing that the first “Thor” and Dr. Doom appearances were casual assignments to him. Also was quite surprised — and pleased — with your coverage, at this late date, of Joe Maneely. Here, thankfully, it was more de-

tailed history and far less speculation. As for conjecture, it can’t be answered, other than it would have been different. I was sorry his life ended so tragically young. But, again, he might’ve moved on to other companies or assignments totally unconnected to super-heroes. Bill Everett and John Severin, big names from that same time frame, eventually returned to help with the various characters. Yet, initially, Everett, busy elsewhere, couldn’t even complete his co-creation, Daredevil, on time. So, it’s no comment on their creativity. Just that they had other assignments and clients at the time. It could have held true for Joe, too, who was expanding from Atlas. So often, when the concept is explored, it comes across as dissatisfaction as to what we had — as is — with what Stan, Jack, Steve, Larry, Don, and others came up with. I’m of the view we should be tremendously grateful for the work just as it was. If Maneely could have, somehow, supplemented the Marvel heroes, great. But I don’t believe he or anyone could have done them any better than the brilliant works we were given. Joe Jusko’s corner box paintings were fun but, as a fan of the day, I much preferred the faces in the left-hand corner compared to the later full-figures. Still, a novel and amusing project. As for “Just a Guy Named Joe,” Steve’s last issue of Amazing Spider-Man, I disagree, for once, with Fred Hembeck. I liked it and the constant twists at the end of the run: Betty missing, the mystery of the Goblin escalating, Peter more misunderstood at college, etc. If Steve was going in a more dramatic or tense direction, that’s good drama. Even in his last three issues, he introduced new villains. He wasn’t rehashing past glory. I don’t find the issues that followed his departure anywhere near as original or compelling. It ended the mystery elements and updated Peter to more of an Archie-type character with two potential girlfriends to chose from. He got along better with his classmates, bought a ’cycle, moved away from his aunt, etc. Far more popular, in his civilian life, but, in retrospect, was that necessarily a plus? It lost aspects and handling unique to him. Steve decided it was time to go. His choice. But I see his last year, including the Master Planner heavy-lifting sequence, as a maturing of the character and welcome growth. I also liked your convention photos and the Rich Buckler interview conclusion. Rare for pages to have no illustrations but, here, it was fine as I was more interested in reading about his subsequent career, after comics, than looking to have it broken into another chapter. Lots to enjoy this time around, Jon. Thanks.

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell. The Golden Age © Jon B. Cooke & Andrew D. Cooke.

Pierre Comtois After reading in the last couple issues of Comic Book Creator regarding your complaints that the mailbag was too light, I thought I’d drop you a note to help perk up the letters page. Just finished reading CBC #18 (I’m way behind my reading as you’ll see) and have to compliment Michael Aushenker’s interview with the late, great Rich Buckler. This was only part two of the interview, but the heart of the order so far as I’m concerned and covered in appreciated detail Buckler’s involvement at Marvel in general and Deathlok in particular. I’ll be looking forward to reading the next chapter covering his later work on the Black Panther. But among the subjects raised in this chapter were Buckler’s complaint about being cut out of the coloring process for Deathlok. Despite what he said about going directly to Stan, I still can’t help feeling that the editor-in-chief had something to be upset about. Buckler did go over his head to the publisher who obviously had other things on his mind than production details dealing with the color comics line; something the editor-in-chief would be expected to know more about on a day to day basis. Just from these comments from Buckler, I’d be inclined to suspect that he was someone difficult to work with. His attitude seemed to be one of defiance and an overinflated ego. As to Rich’s comments about the Comics Code and “having come a long way;” that may be, but how many kids did comics lose along the way? Kids who comprised 90% of the audience? The average comic went from 100,000+ per month in sales to on average 20,000 in the years since the end of the Code. The industry traded healthy sales for being on life support. Finally, Buckler has talked of having a contract with Marvel to produce Deathlok, a circumstance I’ve never heard for anyone else, especially for the early to mid-70s. But there’s scant evidence for a hard and fast, signed contract. Who did he sign this contract with? Who drew it up? Under what circumstances? Did Stan have anything to do with it? (Which might explain why he went to Stan over the head of the editor-in-chief). Inquiring minds want to know. I also loved the article on Neal Adams’ Tarzan covers, a subject I’ve never seen covered before. My only regret is that it wasn’t long enough! Which is a good segue to my main complaint about CBC and why I’m not a regular buyer. Like letter writer Joe Frank, I have little interest in underground comics, in fact, you might say I have zero interest in them and only a little more for independent comics. So, when CBC spends too high a percentage of its page count on these subjects, the cost/enjoyment ratio for me becomes unbalanced and the nearly $10 cover price for the magazine becomes too prohibitive. My suggestion is spend a lot more page space on mainstream and some independent comics (re: super-hero/action/horror). In this category falls Steve Rude. He wasn’t a main draw for me this ish, but he is a great comics artist and I was interested in his Marvel/DC work (especially his great Hulk/Superman special). Unfortunately, in this massive 55-page interview, almost nothing was said about his mainstream work, including his work on Nexus. I was appalled to be reading page after page of irrelevant commentary until I gave up and just skimmed over the rest. In future, I suggest you keep interview subjects on topic and not let them to ramble on like Rude was allowed to do. Access doesn’t equate to putting into print everything that comes out of the mouth of a creator. Some editing with the fan reader in mind is required. Now, I realize that your sister mags, Back Issue and Alter Ego, cover a lot of that ground, but that still leaves you with quasi-comics or off-trail subjects to cover such as the COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

aforesaid Neal Adams piece or the recent Wally Wood issue as well as the upcoming Frazetta issue. Other subjects might include cover painters Earl Norem and Boris Vallejo (both of whom had some connection with comics). And comics creators who’ve gone on to other fields like film, book covers, TV, advertising, etc. But mostly I’d advise to back off on the underground cartoonists. Boring! [As appreciative as I am for your opinions about CBC’s content and the direction I take with my interviewing, I confess to being almost at a loss for words in responding to you, Pierre. You’re apparently missing the intent of this magazine. The reason for Comic Book Creator’s existence is to examine the lives and experiences of artists and writers in this medium, regardless of genre, no matter whether in mainstream, alternative, or underground comics. I believe the Steve Rude interview is a remarkable back-and-forth regarding an idiosyncratic and complex man, and we explored some fundamental, existential questions about creativity in a commercial realm, serious stuff very rarely discussed. It was, as advertised, a “day in the life” of the artist. As I have ranted about for two decades now, my interest is rarely in the artifact (or character or genre), but rather in the artist, and in that person’s journey to where they are today. I’m curious by nature and want to learn the essence of what makes a particular person who he or she is and, frankly, I don’t want to ask the same questions that have been asked a hundred times before. To do the latter, I think, is boring. Ever since I was a kid, my taste in comics has been quite broad and, I think, egalitarian, and I love the medium because it’s a great mode of self-expression. And few types are as expressive as the undergrounds. I’m sorry they bore you, Pierre, and I believe you’re missing out. They have much to offer. As you can see with my shameless self-promotion, either in CBC or on my social media, perhaps my life’s defining work, The Book of Weirdo, is about an underground comix anthology, edited by R. Crumb, the greatest comics artist of ’em all. Or so sez I! To each his or her own. — Y.E.]

Above: Steve Rude, whose interview in CBC #18 caused a letter writer a fit of consternation, produced this great cover for a variant edition of The Goon #4 [July 2019].

Right: Your humble editor has been working for years with his brother Andrew D. Cooke on a play about the earliest days of American comics, The Golden Age, which will be fully staged this coming spring at a to-be-announced venue. Stay tuned! 17

how i spent my summer vacation

Weirdos All Around Us

It's the summer of Weirdo for Mr. Ye Ed and the Missus in our Comic-Con adventure

This page: Clockwise from left, your fearless editor visits the legendary “birthplace of the counter-culture,” the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, in central San Francisco; yours truly and pal John Beauchemin, generous host during Ye Ed’s mid-June visit to the Bay area; Heidi Bekebrede, one-time singer in the Rural Sophisticates, R. Crumb’s old timey band with Robert Armstrong, alongside her one-time step-brother, your humble editor; the aforementioned Armstrong, creator of Mickey Rat and the Couch Potato craze of the ’70s/’80s, posing with Y.E., during the latter’s visit to Winters, Calif., the Crumbs’ old hometown; and participants of The Book of Weirdo event held at S.F.’s Cartoon Art Museum, on, June 15.

In mid-June, following the late May debut of my exhaustive retrospective, The Book of Weirdo, at East Coast ComiCon, I traveled to San Francisco, as guest of Last Gasp, publisher of TBOW. Baba Ron Turner and son (and co-publisher) Colin Turner treated me like royalty, as did my longtime buddy from my advertising days, John Beauchemin, who put me up for the visit, my first to the City by the Bay. The reason for the trip was multi-fold, foremost being the Cartoon Art Museum’s “Toon Talk” evening discussion, where myself, Ron, and CAM founder Malcolm Whyte were joined by multiple Weirdo magazine contributors, seen in the group photo seen above. Top row is (from left) Steve Lafler, Kevin Coffey, Jay Kinney, and 18

Norman Dog (Raymond Larrett). Middle row is Ron Turner, Malcolm Whyte (there to discuss his Art Out of Chaos: The Illustrated Biography of Maxon Crumb), and Brad Johnson. Front row is Colin Turner, myself, Carol Engberg, and Harry S. Robins. Along with discussing my future Last Gasp endeavors with Colin, a highlight of the trip was to travel with him to the Winters community, where the Crumbs lived during the Weirdo years, where they enlisted many friends and neighbors to help with the mag. The audience was chockful of enthusiastic folk who shared their Crumb and Weirdo-related anecdotes. Special thanks to Andrew Farago of CAM and Sally Brown of the Winters Community Library, and all those associated, for their facilitation! #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photo by Kendall Whitehouse

Glenn Head

Kendall Whitehouse photos © Kendall Whitehouse. (Beth Cooke photo by K. Whitehouse.)

Photo by Kendall Whitehouse

This page: Clockwise from top left: Despite my dozen or so visits to San Diego for Comic-Con, this year, now accompanied by my significant other, was my first to take in tourist destinations, such as the world famous San Diego Zoo and Hotel Coronado; at San Diego Comic-Con, I pose with Columbia University Curator for Comics and Cartoons Karen Green; my onetime publisher Chris Staros of Top Shelf Productions and myself; posing with this issue’s cover-featured creator, Eric Powell; Beth and I with Mary Fleener; and yours truly upon receiving the Inkpot Award, pointing out whose fault it really is: fearless TwoMorrows publisher and my bestest buddy of them all, John Morrow, the guy who got me into this goofy biz! July had me attending Comic-Con International: San Diego, only this time as a guest of the show, able to bring my beloved spouse of 32 years, Beth, who prompted me to do touristy things with her before and after the con. There was also a Book of Weirdo panel, as seen above. Top row is (from left) moderator Colin Turner, Mary Fleener, Bob Kathman, me, Bruce Carleton, and Carol and Gilbert Hernandez; front row is Krystine Krytrre, Ron Turner, and Kaz. I was both honored and touched to be presented the ComicCon’s Inkpot Award by Gary Sassaman. Beth and I are grateful to Comic-Con, especially Janet Goggins and Becky, who were so kind and helpful. This, I realize, is as good as it gets… and, boy, was it great! COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

Photo by Kendall Whitehouse 19

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #4

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

4-issue subscriptions: $45 US $67 International

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #5 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #6 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #8

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others! Plus we look at the triumphant final splash of the late, great BILL EVERETT, Prof. CAROL L. TILLEY discusses the shoddy research and falsified evidence in the book SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, DENYS COWAN interview part two, and more!

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(192-page paperback with COLOR) $21.95 (Digital Edition) $9.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #9 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #10 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #11 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #12 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #13

JOE STATON on his comics career (from E-MAN, to co-creating The Huntress, and his current stint on the Dick Tracy comic strip), plus we showcase the lost treasure GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS drawn by Joe! Plus, Part One of our interview with the late STAN GOLDBERG, JOHN WORKMAN’s Mighty Aphrodite, GEORGE KHOURY talks with artist LEILA LEIZ, plus HEMBECK and more!

WARP examined! Massive PETER BAGGE retrospective! It’s a double focus on the Broadway sci-fi epic, with a comprehensive feature including art director NEAL ADAMS and director STUART (Reanimator) GORDON, plus cast and crew! Also a career-spanning conversation with the man of HATE! and NEAT STUFF on the real story behind Buddy Bradley! Plus the revival of MIRACLEMAN, Captain Marvel’s 75th birthday, and more!

Retrospective on GIL KANE, co-creator of the modern Green Lantern and Atom, and early progenitor of the graphic novel. Kane cover newly-inked by KLAUS JANSON, plus remembrances from friends, fans, and collaborators, and a Kane art gallery. Also, our tribute to the late HERB TRIMPE, interview with PAUL LEVITZ about his new book Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel, and more!

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #14 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #15 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #17 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #18

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

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

A look at 75 years of Archie Comics’ characters and titles, from Archie and his pals ‘n gals to the mighty MLJ heroes of yesteryear and today’s “Dark Circle”! Also: Careerspanning interviews with The Fox’s DEAN HASPIEL and Kevin Keller’s cartoonist DAN PARENT, who both jam on our exclusive cover depicting a face-off between humor and heroes. Plus our usual features, including the hilarious FRED HEMBECK!

The legacy and influence of WALLACE WOOD, with a comprehensive essay about Woody’s career, extended interview with Wood assistant RALPH REESE (artist for Marvel’s horror comics, National Lampoon, and underground), a long chat with cover artist HILARY BARTA (Marvel inker, Plastic Man and America’s Best artist with ALAN MOORE), plus our usual columns, features, and the humor of HEMBECK!

Career-spanning discussion with STEVE “THE DUDE” RUDE, as he shares his reallife psychological struggles, the challenges of freelance subsistence, and his creative aspirations. Also: The jungle art of NEAL ADAMS, MARY FLEENER on her forthcoming graphic novel Billie the Bee and her comix career, RICH BUCKLER interview Part Three, Golden Age artist FRANK BORTH, HEMBECK and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95

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

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

FINAL PRINT COPIES OF CBA VOLUME 1!

#14: TOWER COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

(112-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(104-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

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

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

(76-page Digital Edition) $4.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $4.95

TwoMorrows now offers Digital Editions of Jon B. Cooke’s COMIC BOOK ARTIST Vol. 2 (the “Top Shelf” issues)

CBA Vol. 2 #1

CBA Vol. 2 #2

CBA Vol. 2 #3

CBA Vol. 2 #4

CBA Vol. 2 #5

CBA Vol. 2 #6

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

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

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

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

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

Double-sized tribute to WILL EISNER! Over 200 comics luminaries celebrate his career and impact: SPIEGELMAN, FEIFFER & McCLOUD on their friendships with Eisner, testimonials by ALAN MOORE, NEIL GAIMAN, STAN LEE, RICHARD CORBEN, JOE KUBERT, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, JOE SIMON, and others!

(128-page Digital Edition) $6.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $5.95

(252-page Digital Edition) $12.95

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #19 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #20 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #21 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #22

Celebrating the greatest fantasy artist of all time, FRANK FRAZETTA! From THUN’DA and EC COMICS to CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA, STEVE RINGGENBERG and CBC’s editor present an historical retrospective, including insights by current creators and associates, and memories of the man himself. PLUS: Frazetta-inspired artists JOE JUSKO, and TOM GRINDBERG, who contributes our Death Dealer cover painting!

NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOES! Interview with JOSEPH MICHAEL LINSNER (CRY FOR DAWN, VAMPIRELLA), a chat with JOE SINNOTT about his Marvel years inking Jack Kirby and work at TREASURE CHEST, JOE JUSKO discusses the Marvel Age of Comics and his fabulous “Corner Box Collection,” plus the artists behind the Topps bubble gum BAZOOKA JOE comic strips, CRAIG YOE, and more!

ERIC POWELL celebrates 20 years of THE GOON! with a career-spanning interview and a gallery of rare artwork. Plus CBC editor and author JON B. COOKE on his new retrospective THE BOOK OF WEIRDO, a new interview with R. CRUMB about his work on that legendary humor comics anthology, JOHN ROMITA SR. on his admiration for the work of MILTON CANIFF, and more!

P. CRAIG RUSSELL career-spanning interview (complete with photos and art gallery), an almost completely unknown work by FRANK QUITELY (artist on All-Star Superman and The Authority), DERF BACKDERF’s forthcoming graphic novel commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, CAROL TYLER shares her prolific career, JOE SINNOTT discusses his Treasure Chest work, CRAIG YOE, and more!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Spring 2020

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

store@twomorrows.com

Order at twomorrows.com

Conducted by JON B. COOKE This spread: Clockwise from above is a detail of the Terry and the Pirates "Death of Raven" Sunday comic strip [Oct. 19, 1941], which caused a bona fide sensation in American culture at the time, outraging newspaper readers of the day; Amazing Spider-Man #121 [June 1973] cover art; Dragon Lady specialty drawing by Milton Caniff; Caniff self-portrait presumably from the 1940s; licensing drawing of Spider-Man by one-time Marvel art director John Romita, Sr.; recent candid photo of the man.

[A few years back, Ye Ed was also helming the monthly magazine ACE: All Comics Evaluated, and the following — a talk with the great Marvel Bullpen artist and all around superb human being, John Romita, Sr. (Jr.’s no slouch either!) — was featured in the first issue. Today, I can’t recall exactly what prompted me to call Johnny and ask for an interview about his devotion to Milton Caniff and Terry and the Pirates, but I’ll bet it was due to a reread of the awesome Doctor Strange cross-over in Amazing Spider-Man #108–109 [May–June, 1972], which has Caniff all over it! Anyway, while the artist said he didn’t do interviews any more, he couldn’t resist this chance to gab about a favorite comic strip creator. (Plus he likes me, so whaddaya gonna do?) The talk — of which here is an extended version than what was featured in ACE — took place via phone in Feb. 2014, and was transcribed by Steve “Flash” Thompson. — Y.E.]

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Terry and the Pirates TM & © Tribune Media Services, Inc. Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Comic Book Creator: I just read your afterward in an Amazing Spider-Man Marvel Masterworks and it’s just overflowing with gratitude — to Steve Ditko, to Stan Lee, but especially you talked about your favorite story arc in ASM, and that was the Flash Thompson Vietnam story. John Romita Sr.: Yeah, I just got the oversize IDW book and they’re in that. I’m sittin’ there glowing and it’s making my head swell. They just did the full-size 11" x 17". I just got a batch of books. They weigh a ton, but it’s worth it. [laughs] CBC: As a kid, I saw those stories and did appreciate your artistry. They were my favorite stories, as well, that you ever drew. I know they were influenced by your love of Milton Caniff and his Terry and the Pirates comic strips. John: I’ve got [the Terry and the Pirates collected editions] right here on my bookcase, in one of my cabinets. I’m looking at them now. I’m afraid to open them again because every time I open them, I lose two days. [laughter] I get into the books and never come out! CBC: I really think that there’s an entire generation who are starting to forget the history of comic strips. After all, it’s been a long time since Milt Caniff did a story. John: Oh, yeah. It broke my heart when I sat in on Klaus Janson’s class and asked if they’d ever heard of Hal Foster,

Caniff, and Alex Raymond. I asked them to raise their hand, and out of maybe 40 kids, maybe one raised his hand. If I were running this class, I’d have one day a week I would be teaching the evolution of comics from the book illustrators down through the comic strips — the Hal Foster initiation into adventure, and all of that stuff — and Caniff. I would stuff you so full of it, you’d probably hate me! [laughter] CBC: But then we’d get to look at this beautiful stuff! When did you first encounter Caniff? John: I will say that the biggest tragedy of my life is that I was born too late. I was 10 years old in 1940 and Caniff had already been doing that for six years! And I missed those six years! So, at 10 years old, I started to notice it in the Daily News with the full-page, glorious Sunday strips… I have a box in my cabinet here with tear-sheets that are crumbling. I have all the way up to ’46 when Caniff left the strip. Yellowed pages. I used to look through them almost once a month. And, just think, I missed some of the most glorious stuff in 1938, ’39, and ’40… and ’41 and ’42! So, it always broke my heart and when I got a chance to get these collected editions, I went back into ’34 and I just started from scratch like I should’ve done when I was a kid. CBC: So it was in the New York Daily News? John: It was the Daily News, on the back page of the Sunday comics section for a while, and then inside. Every Sunday, I spent two to three hours diving in and just gazing. I’ve said this many times in my interviews: I recognized almost immediately why he did things… why he put smoke in a certain place, why he put shadows in a certain place. I was aware, from the time I was 13 years old. I had been drawing imitation comics since I was 10. I started drawing when I was five and became a comic freak when I was 10. I was the kid in my neighborhood who discovered Jack Kirby and Milton Caniff. The biggest phenomenon of all, something I only realized until many years later, is that almost every time I go into the Caniff stuff to look at the artwork (because as an artist I need to study it), that, by page three, I’m interested in the story and forgetting the artwork! I’m accepting the art because it’s so brilliant and such great storytelling, and I don’t have to even think about it anymore and suddenly I’m hooked! Even if I’ve read those stories a hundred times, I still get hooked on the dialogue.

Terry and the Pirates, Dragon Lady TM & © Tribune Media Services, Inc. Caniff portrait © the estate of Milton Caniff. Amazing Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

So it isn’t just that he was a great artist; Caniff was a marvelous, marvelous writer! I don’t know if he got any help as a writer… I don’t know if his buddy Noel Sickles, who did Scorchy Smith, helped him write. I think more likely Caniff helped Sickles write Scorchy Smith! But the thing is, I realize Caniff not only made me an artist, but he also made me a storyteller, which is more important because the story is what sells a book. You can have the best artwork in the world, but the story is what gets the reader and digs into that person’s system. CBC: What a superb writer! What a superb storyteller! That really pulls you in. For a comic strip, when you read these continuities lasting months, there’s really little redundancy that’s rather typical of other strips. It just flows very naturally. John: Yeah, and even if you just saw the Sunday page, he used to do a recap of the week prior in the first panel and get people who missed all the dailies right up to date. He was an amazing, amazing storyteller. CBC: What is it specifically about his art that appealed to you? John: I used to tell young artists when I was art director at Marvel, “You must not make your stuff unpleasant to look at. In other words, it needs a certain amount of glamour. Even if you’ve got a villain, you have to give him some humanity and glamour. If you’re doing Doctor Doom, you can make him look horrendous or you could make him look like a human being with a tragedy because of his face.” The thing is, Caniff did this without even hesitating. Every one of his characters was glamorous, even the ugly ones. He had characters like Redbeard, whose commentary was funny but deadly, but he made him a jolly looking old man like Santa Claus with a red beard. To me, that stuck in my mind. Almost everything Caniff did stuck in my mind and I used it every one of the whole 50 to 60 years I was doing comics. I used almost everything Caniff did every chance I had. CBC: What specifically about the art itself appealed to you? John: Well, Sickles taught Caniff how to do the scenics, in other words, airplanes and mountains. I mean, when you were in Caniff’s strip, you were in China. I felt like the location was authentic and he did it all courtesy of a library card. He said he just read up on China and learned everything he could about it and he became a fanatic. I remember scenes that I could swear must have been taken COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

right out of the National Geographic. He was a genius about atmosphere, getting you to believe what you were looking at. Believability. The fact is, no matter how simply he did the work (he used to say he never could draw hands), he didn’t have to know how to draw every knuckle. All he had to do is do a genuine, familiar expression with the hand, the way a hand would act every day when you see people gesturing with their hands. All you have to do is make it a recognizable gesture and you don’t need to do every bone. That was another thing that was amazing to me, because he did not draw as well as, say, Alex Raymond or Hal Foster (although Foster was stiff and very limited by photography). Caniff was not limited. He got all the depth and all the convincability of every panel that he did without laboring over the art. CBC: Would you call it impressionistic at all or minimalist? John: It’s not impressionist; it’s illusionist. You’re giving the illusion of reality, because this is genuine. The characters in your strip are like an actor to a director. He directed his actors so beautifully. And, if you looked close, you will see that Pat Ryan had a certain body language, Terry Lee had a certain body language, Burma had her own. Everybody, all the villains, had their own body language, so subtly that you just accepted it! If you look back, you’ll see that Pat Ryan never did certain poses and Terry Lee did poses that Pat Ryan never did. My three heroes in the world are the movie director Frank Capra, Irving Berlin, and Milton Caniff. Those are people who I consider genius in every level. When Caniff was doing Dickie Dare, he was an average artist! I mean, he was already making you care about the characters, but he wasn’t drawing slick and he wasn’t making people look like movie stars. But, by 1936, he was just… boy! I know that it’s the influence of Noel Sickles and I think they helped each other. One of them helped for the scenics and the other one helped with the human beings. Because I don’t think Scorchy Smith was great on characterization as much as it was for scenics. CBC: Those three heroes of yours are quintessentially American guys who were from…. 23

Above: John Romita, Sr., was greatly influenced by cartoonist Milton Caniff, even down to the exotic Asian setting, in his pair of Amazing Spider-Man stories, #108–109 [May–June, 1972]. Inset top right: The cover of the fourth volume of IDW's Terry and the Pirates collected editions acknowledges the impact of Raven Sherman's death on readers. Below: Caniff’s unforgettable sequence in the Terry and the Pirates daily strips of October 16–17, 1941.

Stan never knew it. CBC: Can you give an example? John: Sure. For instance, the death of Gwen Stacy. Stan and I didn’t plot that. I was working with a young guy, [writer] Gerry Conway. He was 21-years-old and we were instructed to kill a character. Stan Lee had just gone to Europe for his first vacation in about 20 years and [editor-in-chief] Roy Thomas was in charge. He said that he and Stan were talking about that they were thinking of killing Aunt May. When I got with Conway, I told him I don’t think we should. He said maybe Aunt May. So I told Conway and Conway and I plotted as equals. He did not try to dominate

me on plots. He actually gave me top-billing and we’d actually plot it together. I was very influential in the plot by that time. I had been that way with Stan, but it was more pronounced with Gerry Conway. And I said no, there’s no way we should kill Aunt May because all of Peter Parker’s apprehensions and fears would disappear, and the character wouldn’t even have to worry about his identity anymore. I said Aunt May was crucial even though I know everybody wrote in and said that old lady drove ’em nuts (including John Buscema, who used to say, “That ol’ lady is crazy to draw!”). But I loved that old lady. The thing is, we needed to kill somebody important and that final decision was based on Caniff. When I must have been 13, Pat Ryan’s love died. CBC: Raven? John: Raven Sherman died. And now, I’m 13-years-old and I felt it like a member of my family had passed away. I’m in the grocery store buying groceries the next day and I hear two grown-ups talking. One of them says, “Did you hear Raven Sherman died?” I jumped out of my shoes because I thought this was kid stuff! I didn’t think adults cared about Raven Sherman! That never left my mind. So you kill somebody important or don’t kill them at all. If Aunt May had gone or Mary Jane had gone, most readers would’ve taken it easier because neither one of them was as important as Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s love! I said, “That’s the one you kill.” Conway at the time agreed immediately. Since then his memory has gotten a little mushy and he thinks he thought of it.” [laughter] But I think I even told him that Raven Sherman was the reason for it. Let me tell you, after 40 years, people are still asking every time they meet me. They ask, “Why did you kill Gwen Stacy?” And I tell ’em, “Because nobody would have care if it was anybody else.” That’s right out of Caniff! And you’ll see when Snake Tumbler dies and when two or three other characters die in Terry and the Pirates, it’s all calculated to shock you and make you believe this is real life, this is not #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Terry and the Pirates TM & © Tribune Media Services, Inc.

John: Ohio? Yeah, that’s right. There are great artists all over the world. I mean, there are artists that I admire everywhere! I have a long list of people who I think are great. All of my contemporaries, all the top guys, who are so great. I learn from everybody! But I took most from Caniff, and Caniff was in my mind almost all the time. It affected the way we plotted stories because, when I plotted a story with Stan, I constantly brought Caniff into the picture though

Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and related characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

a panacea of good times. This is life! He reminds you that life is fragile and life is tenuous. You don’t even have to analyze it. All you have to do is feel it in your gut. This is important! CBC: Did you ever get to meet Caniff? John: You know, I did. Colleagues have asked me if I ever met him and I say I did, but it was the most tragic thing at all. We had spoken by phone and he had asked me to do a seven- or eight-week sequence as a fill-in, and I was always too busy. We used to have an annual dinner. I don’t even remember where it was. Some hotel! Hundreds of sports figures and big stars and a lot of comic people would share the dais. In other words, there was like a dais with 25 people on it. Caniff was on it, Gene Tunney was on it, Max Baer, all the big stars in sports… some Brooklyn Dodger heroes. I used to love it! That was one of the things I’d stay in town for. So Caniff was there and I went over to talk to him and say how is he feeling and wanted to talk to him about the possibility of doing the fill-ins. And we got into this wonderful conversation, but about 20 minutes into it he suddenly was taken ill in front of my eyes and they had to take him out of the room. I never saw him again. I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times, but the one time I was gonna do an eight-week sequence, as a ghost, he was taken to the hospital in an emergency before he was able to supply me with the plot. So I came that close to doing a ghost job for him. I don’t think he ever recovered from that time in the hospital The next thing I heard, he had passed away. It just broke my heart. I never had a chance to sit and talk with him the way I wanted. I wanted to spend a weekend with him! CBC: You did channel him, though, in that pair of Amazing Spider-Man stories with Flash Thompson. John: Oh, I knew it! I would’ve been a Caniff clone if I was able to. Whenever I wanted to be Jack Kirby, I couldn’t do it. And whenever I wanted to be Milton Caniff, I couldn’t do it. I came as close as I ever got because I used a big bold brush. The irony of it is Caniff used a pen, a very flexible pen, for his figures. I didn’t know that until I read that later. I was always assuming he was a brush man. He did his blacks with brush but he did all of linear stuff with a flex-

ible pen. I tried it. It was very hard. To do Spider-Man, I had to use more of a pen than a brush. When I did Daredevil and all the older romances, I was doing nothing but brushwork. When I got Spider-Man, I was forced to do pen work. It was a little bit awkward and a little bit harder for me to get graceful. It took me until #107, 108, and 109 to get really wild and become a brush-man again. CBC: Did you plot those pair of stories, the Vietnam stories? John: Oh, yes. I plotted it with Stan. Both of us would present 10 or 20 ideas and, when I’d get home that night after we’d be in the office plotting a story, I never precisely remembered what we agreed on. So I had the freedom to pick and choose the ones and I think I was slanted in my own ideas. [laughter] And when Stan got them, he never criticized. I used to be responsible for bridging all the different scenes. We would have action scenes for four pages and then personality and family scenes for a couple of pages. My responsibility was to make a plausible bridge between all of the elements that Stan wanted in the story. So that gave me great power, but he never was critical of how I interpreted his stories and no matter how much I worried about whether I had solved all the problems. Stan invariably was able to turn it into a gem. Whenever I had grave misgivings about a story… I would do 20, 21 pages and I would say, “Oh my god, I hope I did this right. I hope I did that right.” I didn’t have any faith in it. I didn’t have the confidence. But Stan almost invariably turned it into a gem without any major changes. He used to do minor changes, but

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2016 • #13

Above: Johnny Sr. was responsible for the cover artwork gracing the 1972 “rockomic,” Amazing Spider-Man: From Beyond the Grave vinyl record album (of which the cover is inset), which contained elements of JRSR’s plotted Spidey comics. Below: Penciled by Gil Kane and inked by John Romita Sr., a panel detail depicting the hero’s grief over the death of his beloved. Amazing Spider-Man #122 [July ’73]. Next page: Clockwise from top left is original art from Amazing Spider-Man #109 [June 1972]; Steve Ditko's cover for ASM Annual #2 [1965]; and Kendall Whitehouse's photo of JRSR, taken at the 2010 New York Comic Con, along with a Romita licensing illo.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. John Romita Sr. portrait © Kendall Whitehouse.

never any major changes. Later on, I realized I must have been doing some dang good plotting! CBC: And you did! In that story, there was a real intrigue that’s reminiscent of Terry and the Pirates. Can you describe that story and what appealed to you about it? John: Oh, I loved it! As soon as we worked out the plot, I said, “Wow, I’m gonna enjoy this.” I very seldom enjoyed doing any work. It was mostly hard work that I struggled through, had grave misgivings, and then the great satisfaction when I solved all the problems. I would walk away and say, “Okay, I can live for another day.” [Jon laughs] Because I solved the problems. But I never had it easy like John Buscema or Jack Kirby. I always struggled with every story. My poor wife used to see me agonize on it through the night. But yeah, I relished the fact that I could do the Asian people, a beautiful little girl, all of the Asian trappings that I could feel like I was doing Terry and the Pirates. Yes, it was a tangible moment. Almost every minute I was doing those two stories, I almost hated when the story was over. CBC: [Laughs] Was it your idea to bring in Doctor Strange? John: You know, I don’t know. I think that might have been the kind of thing Stan would bring in. I probably would not have thought of it. I think that’s why we worked so well together, because he had a knack. A lot of times I would ask to introduce a character, but most of the time when he had a secondary character in there it was to do a two-parter. He wanted to make them both separate so we could have a different character on the cover for each book. It was strictly market-driven. [laughs] CBC: For the Amazing Spider-Man Annual # 2, Ditko teamed up Doctor Strange and Spider-Man for a very memorable issue, and to see that team return under you, as a very enthusiastic artist working on this… I guess I’m just making a statement… it was wonderful to see those two trademark characters put together, this time under the Romita stylings. John: And I loved Doctor Strange. The only thing I hated, all of the costume details were time-consuming!

CBC: It’s interesting that very soon after you did this pair of issues—the Spider-Man issues with Doctor Strange—this "rockomic" came out that you did the art for, for the album cover, and Doctor Strange was a part of it! It almost seemed like it was bouncing off of this issue of Amazing Spider-Man. Was that your memory of that? John: You know, I’m trying to remember who wrote that. The guy who conned me into doing it, that album cover and the two-page thing where you follow the story with the pictures while you were listening to the recording. I think the guy’s name was Steve Lemberg. And he was a guy producing record albums. It may have been his plot. I’m not sure. There was no writer’s name on that I don’t believe. I believe he did write it… And the thing is, it was a great guide. When he gave me the plot and the dialogue. I didn’t get the dialogue. There were only titles of individual titles on the end of the page. Yeah, it was a big help to me, because I didn’t have to frame it. He farmed it and I put all the details in there. That was quite an experience. That’s the only thing I ever colored for myself. CBC: So that is your coloring! I was gonna ask that. That’s a nice job. John: Yeah, I did the coloring on that myself and to this day I cringe every time I see my blue lines were never erased on the cover. [laughs] I left the blue lines showing through. CBC: Milton Caniff should not be forgotten, should he? John: Oh, I wish I could contribute to some way to… The only reason I would take on any teaching things—although I think I’m over the hill now. Since I can’t remember names anymore, I wouldn’t be much help to them. But the thing is, yes, I think it’s a crime. I just hate the fact that nobody knows Frank Capra anymore! They see his movies and they don’t even realize. When they’re hearing, “This is a Frank Capra movie,” they don’t know how great that is! It drives me nuts! And I can’t get my grandson to sit down and watch the movies that I think… I will have to tell you that movies framed me just as much as Caniff and I think almost in the same way because I think of Terry and the Pirates as a movie. One big gigantic, wonderful series of stories. I lived in the movie theaters. My mother used to have to come and drag me out of theaters. Because it was cheap in those days, I could get in for 15¢. [laughter] CBC: That’s great! Thank you very much. I wanted to talk about this great influence on your life, Milton Caniff, and all that he contributed. John: The main thing is that I went there as an artist, looking for art to treasure and I found storytelling which ended up being more my forte because I never considered myself a dazzling artist. I did always tell myself I could tell a story. I used to say, “I can’t create stuff from scratch like some people can but you give me a plot or a character and I’ll make it better.” I tell people, “I don’t consider myself a creator. I consider myself a guy who can do wonders with whatever your idea is.” And everybody laughs and says it’s false modesty but I really believe that. I believe my storytelling was what kept me alive and the fact that you’re even asking me questions now is because of my storytelling and not because of my artwork. CBC: Bada-boom! All right. I’ll let you believe that, Johnny. Okay. [laughs] Great storytelling. Those are great stories and you just gave me a wonderful interview and I very much appreciate it. Thank you, John. John: Take care, kid.

book look

Bearing Witness

Talking to cartoonist/editor Diane Noomin about her new anthology, Drawing Power by JON B. COOKE Below: Photo of Diane Noomin and her 260-page hardcover anthology, Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival, just published by Abrams ComicArts, taken during a recent visit to her and husband Bill “Zippy the Pinhead” Griffith’s Connecticut abode. Inset right: Israeli comic book artist Hila Noam’s concluding page, depicting her method of dealing with sexual harassment, from her Drawing Power contribution, “ On the Road.”

friend. Thus intimate concern for people I’ve come to care for adds an intensified empathy to my reading. Carol Lay’s litany of workplace harassment and understated (albeit stunning) final panel. Mary Fleener’s recounting of being drugged unconscious and raped by a fellow musician and, years later, not being believed when revealing the incident to an old high school pal (“Worse than rape,” she writes). Carol Tyler’s unsparingly frank look at her college days, being date-raped by a linebacker, enduring slut-shaming by peers, and falling prey to self-loathing. And, perhaps most jarringly, Lee Marrs personalizes a common and perpetual fear that haunts survivors of sexual assault: the ever-present dread that a perpetrator may be lurking around the corner or in the back seat or down a darkened hallway, spying on them and ever prepared to attack. “There’s different varieties of abuse, from sexual harassment to what it’s like to live in a world where basically men are in control,” Noomin said. “And, if you’re a woman, you go into an elevator, you really don’t want a man to come in, as it can be incredibly nerve-wracking.” Male readers should not be surprised to comprehend (though, doubtless, some will be) that their thoughtless or boorish behavior often can result in unease and distress for girls and women. Shoulder massages, intrusive comments about appearance, inappropriate questions about sex, wolf-whistling, co-workers “just making a joke”… As one might imagine with the 60+ or so storytellers involved, each telling their own tale in this collection, there’s much to learn. Of course, this anthology is one result of the era we all live in today. This is the age of #MeToo, coming in the #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

“On the Road” page © Hila Noam. Drawing Power TM & © Diane Noomin.

Though I’ve never spoken of it in public before, I can say that, in my mid-teens, I was sexually assaulted by a trusted family friend. I soon enough learned that this was someone who, for years, abused an older sibling, which ultimately had cataclysmic repercussions throughout the family. To this day, the wounds remain tender and, while justice was never achieved (the slime-ball fled the country), the abuse did finally stop for us when, right after the incident, I warned my little brother to stay away from the creep. Setting free the vile secret of the predator’s crimes has had its lingering impact over the years, but the ever-so-slow healing did begin and, today, my family is the better for it. (Still, now and again, sweet revenge is contemplated). I’m not entirely sure if that personal anecdote is appropriate here, but, as I am convinced that speaking out about previously unspoken abuse can be good for the spirit and empowering, I reckon it is relevant. And I can also say that conviction is shared by others in a vital new hardcover comics anthology, Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival, edited by Diane Noomin. As the coda states in “Bothered,” the Wallis Eastes story therein: “Let’s not all die of words unsaid.” Many words are said and pictures shown in this remarkable compilation of stories by over 60 women cartoonists of every type. A renowned underground comix veteran best known for her character DiDi Glitz, the editor said in a recent chat, “I just wanted to get as many people from as many age groups, as many ethnic groups, as many sexual preferences as I could.” And there is a variety of true stories shared, from the seemingly mundane —“Adult Comics Drawn by a Girl,” by Roberta Gregory, which dwells on male responses to her comics — to the horrific — ”’Blackie’ from the Deuce,” by J. Gonzalez-Blitz, which relates her true-life story when, at 14, she is raped in the desert and left for dead by “it,” a man on the run for having already murdered an eight-year-old girl. Given the nature of the subject matter, the collection — described on the jacket flaps as one that “gives women cartoonists a platform to speak about their own personal experience with assault, harassment, and rape culture” — is, indeed, a recounting of disturbing (to say the least) violations of varying degree against girls and women. But the book is also, in parts, strikingly radiates empowerment and hope, virtues quite effectively expressed by those here who have all embraced the medium of comics to give expression to trauma and its aftermath. While many of the talents are new to me — a number with amazing facility (to name two: Katie Fricas, of New York City, and LubaDalu, of Barcelona, Spain) — a few of the contributors are acquaintances I’ve long admired as a fan and, with some, also as a

“Got Over It” page © Lee Marrs. Drawing Power TM & © Diane Noomin.

wake of movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s exposure as monstrous sexual predator and the ascent of a certain polarizing national figure. Regarding the genesis of Drawing Power, Noomin said, with no hesitation, “It was Trump. It was from what he said on that Hollywood Access tape, when he came off the bus with Billy Bush and said, ‘Grab ’em by the pussy.’ (And that’s the title of my story, ‘Grab ’em by the Pussy.’) I was just so angry, but I couldn’t think of anything that I could do. I started to have a lot of flashbacks. I think a lot of women did. Memories of things they had forgotten or they hadn’t realized that they had been either abused or harassed, though they realize when it was rape. There are those who suppressed the memory.” Noomin shares her story in a preface — being groped at 25 by a doctor — and admits her choice was obvious regarding “what to do” in the face of #MeToo. “I’m a cartoonist and an editor. The only logical way I could respond to this onslaught was as a cartoonist and editor.” That onslaught is starkly revealed in her own comix contribution to the anthology, a two-page strip starring her trademark character DiDi Glitz. It’s about, Noomin later said, “being overwhelmed every single day by some news about someone being accused… day after day after day.” One of her pages is a single panel featuring a swirling maelstrom of the names of celebrity men recently accused of sexual abuse. Even this topical list was proved dated by the time of the book’s printing as Jeffrey Epstein, among the worst offenders exposed thus far — and who had committed suicide by the time of our talk — was not listed and, sadly, many more names are likely to come. From that came the idea for Drawing Power. “I started the book even before I had a publisher,” Noomin said. “I was just determined to do it. At first, I asked women cartoonists who I knew and women whose work I liked. And almost every one of them had a story to tell. It’s remarkable.” Her search for contributors was simple, though tremendously assisted by the internet (“Instagram was incredibly helpful,” she says).”If I saw something I liked on the internet, I would email and ask, ‘Do you have a story? Do you want to be in this book? How many pages do you thing you’ll need?’ And ,as it got filled up, I had to assign pages.” In her preface, she reveals, “Out of all the women I approached, only one said she had never had such an experience.” Yet not all who agreed to participate could complete their work, and it was an arduous assignment for everyone involved. “And that will come across when you read it, how difficult it was,” she explains. “There’s a huge amount of people who have just suppressed it and, 30 years later, went to a therapist and started talking about it. There were some women with whom it was still too raw and they could not figure out a way to tell a story about their experience. Some had committed, but then said, ‘No, I can’t do it.’” The completed effort brings satisfaction to the editor. “I’m very happy with the book,” she enthused. And could she imagine another volume? “I think I could have made the same book with 60 other women who are out there and it would have been as good. There is a huge amount of very talented women doing comics today.” While she professes, “I wanted people from all over the world,” Noomin was still startled at the sheer expanse of female voices out there, from across the globe. “I had no idea how many women cartoonists there are, working in groups all over the world. In Finland, there’s this huge feminist comics collective… all over… Russia…” (Speaking as a fan of editors, I can say that Noomin is a tremendously gifted one. For years, I’ve known that’s was true through her work on the two-volume anthology collection, Twisted Sisters, compiled in the 1990s, and especially courtesy of her Lemme Outa Here, a remarkable COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

and overlooked comic book anthology from 1977. Featuring autobiographical stories all exploring the theme of “Growing up inside the American Dream”(states the cover’s subtitle), the one-shot boasts an astonishing roster of contributors, including husband Bill Griffith, R. Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and even the father of autobio comix, Justin Green, and others.) When asked what impact she hopes her Drawing Power anthology will have, Noomin replied, “Drawing people together; drawing women together… I teach as the School of Visual Arts and two of my former students are in this book, so they are the youngest, and [contributor] Joyce Farmer is in her ’80s, so she’s the oldest, so that’s the range: from 19 or 20 to 80s, and I wanted that connection.” She also finds strength in the book’s diversity. “I have Arab women; I have Israeli women,” she said. “And many women of color, and I didn’t want it to be, ‘Okay, these are the white feminists that are privileged.’ This isn’t their book; this is everybody’s book. And that’s what I really do care about… aside from the topic. The topic really is universal.” Drawing Power is an appropriate title, one from which can be derived multiple meanings. While some stories can be unsettling, wincing, disturbing, even despairing at times, the strengths this anthology ultimately emits is one of profound courage as well as healing — with, as well, a pinch of vengeance, truth to tell — and, yes, female empowerment. This is indeed powerful stuff.

Above: The last page of the Lee Marrs story, “Got Over It,” which appears in Drawing Power. Editor Diane Noomin cites this tale of sexual assault that occurred in 1969 at the cartoonist’s apartment complex, as one of the most effective for Noomin in the entire anthology. Marrs, of course, is recalled by old school comics fans for her title, Pudge, the Girl Blimp, and her hilarious comics in Plop!

darrick patrick’s ten questions

The Inventive Mr. North A handful of queries for the taller-than-Knickers writer of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Portrait by Connie Tsang

by DARRICK PATRICK Ryan North is a professional writer who has worked on comic book titles such as The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Jughead, Adventure Time, Original Sins, The Midas Flesh, Inhumans: Once and Future Kings, etc. Books of his include How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, To Be or Not To Be: That is the Adventure, Machine of Death, Romeo and/or Juliet: A Chooseable-Path Adventure, and more. He is also the author of the daily webcomic, Dinosuar Comics.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photo portrait courtesy of Ryan North.

Darrick Patrick: How did you become a pro writer? Ryan North: It was a pretty indirect path. I went to school for computer science, and in my last year of undergrad started a webcomic, Dinosaur Comics, which I still update three times a week today. After that, I went to grad school for computational linguistics, which is a field of AI concerned with getting computers to understand natural languages, and ran Dinosaur Comics the whole time. It was only when I graduated that I faced the choice between getting a job in my “field” — linguistics — or to instead become a full-time internet cartoonist. That was actually a really easy choice, because to become a full-time cartoonist all I had to do was fail to get a job, which is really easy to do! I wrote Dinosaur Comics for a decade before taking on other writing work, like writing books, choosable-path adventures, Marvel Comics, non-fiction time travel guides, and so on! Darrick: Who are some of the people that greatly influenced you while growing up? Ryan: I think a lot of comedy writing is making yourself laugh, and a lot of being someone who can make themselves laugh is having funny people in your life. Being able to learn from them, seeing how they make jokes, how they find their way to a punchline, the different styles of humor people have, and how that works for you. It’s kind of an always-running background process, something that you’re usually not really thinking about, but also something that can have a profound effect on how you write and how you tell jokes. So, to answer your question, it’s a lot of the people around me, especially those who made me laugh — and usually everyone in your life has made you laugh at some point in your relationship. Darrick: Any words of advice for other individuals looking to make a career with their abilities in writing? Ryan: Imagine someone who plays basketball just for fun, just to throw the ball around. And they do this every day for 10 years. There is a zero percent chance that at the end of that decade, after 10 years of playing basketball every day, that they’re not a better basketball player than when they started. Simply by playing the game you become better at it, even if you’re not trying to improve. You can’t avoid it. You’ll notice things, you’ll get better at things, you’re training even if you’re just having fun. Writing is the same way. If you’re doing it every day, you’ll get better at it. You can’t avoid getting better at it. You can speed that up, obviously, you can read books on writing (and you should be reading every day too if you can — you need to see what you like and how other people are pulling off the tricks you enjoy), but even if you just sit down and write, you’ll improve. So, my advice is to sit down and write.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. How to Invent Everything © Ryan North.

Darrick: How do you spend your time on a typical workday? Ryan: I know that I work best in the morning, so I get up at 7:00 a.m. and start working then. I try to do most of my writing before noon, and then take care of other things such as emails, non-writing projects, etc., in the afternoon. There are days where I can write in the afternoon too, and those are great, but I try not to count on them. I’ve learned from hard experience that once 5:00 p.m. or so comes around, I’m pretty useless. I “can” write things, but it’s really hard and the next day it’s not very good. So, I tend to stop around then. It’s also good to have this time off to avoid burnout or feeling like you’re trapped. Throw in an hour or so break in the middle to walk my dog Chompsky and you’ve got a typical day! Darrick: For new readers who may not be familiar with your work, what are some projects of yours that you would recommend to begin with? Ryan: The easiest and most accessible is Dinosaur Comics, because it’s free. That’s at www.dinosaurcomics. com. I think I’m pretty standard in that I think my most recent books are my best books, so if you’re only going to read one of them, start with How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler. It’s the book I’d always wanted to read, so I finally wrote it myself. The premise is it’s a repair guide for a time machine, but time machines are incredibly complex and have no user-servicable parts inside, so instead the book tells you how to bring the future back to you by rebuilding civilization from scratch. I’d often (irrationally?) worried about going back in time and saying, “Hey, the future’s great, we have computers and antibiotics!” and people saying, “Great, how do you invent computers and antibiotics?” and me saying, “I… don’t… actually know?” But, with this book, you’ll know. Also, it’s funny! Darrick: Who are a few of the people in the comics industry that you hold a high deal of respect for? Ryan: Oh, so many. Comics is an industry that’s not exactly a place people go to become rich and famous. We’ve got movies for that. So those who are working in it tend to be those who really love the medium and are just really good people. There are folks like Kazu Kibuishi, who thinks so much about what he’s doing, how his books can help people, and how to have the greatest positive effect on the world. There are mad scientists like Jason Shiga, who is without hyperbole one of the smartest people I’ve ever COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

met, making comics that push the medium into places it hasn’t gone before. And there’s people like Tillie Walden, who create books and stories that seem effortless with how smoothly they slip inside your mind, and who are just at the start of what’s going to be an incredible career. I look around me at all the talented people in our industry and I think, “Okay, perfect, I never want to be the smartest person in the room because I want my friends to be way better people than I am so I can learn from them. This is great.” Darrick: Outside of constructing stories, what are you other interests? Ryan: I like dogs, I like long-boarding, I like cooking. I like film — actually I did a minor in it — though that doesn’t count because my wife and I always talk afterwards about what worked and what didn’t, so really we’re examining stories and storytelling. I’m trying to think of things here that are completely unrelated to what I do, something apart from writing, and “dogs” is about as close as I can get. Dogs: they’re great! Darrick: What is your oldest memory? Ryan: I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen. It has a bird landing on my finger, Snow White style, and then I tell the bird a lie — knowing I shouldn’t — and it never lands on my finger again. This may be my oldest memory but it’s just the oldest dream I remember… or is it? Darrick: Tell us something most people don’t know. Ryan: Most people know I’m really tall, but how tall? Here is how tall: that really big cow from a few months back, Knickers, that everyone was freaking out about? I am taller than she is. (Also she’s not that tall, she’s big, but she was photographed with some small cows that look like regular cows). Anyway, I’m two meters tall, which is really convenient when trying to get things off of high shelves or seeing things over the heads of others, but less convenient when on airplanes, trains, or really any other form of transportation. My friend, Karla Pacheco, is the same height as an average cow, so when we’re together we’re a walking cow facts visualization. Darrick: If you had 24 hours left to live, how would you spend that time? Ryan: I’d spend it with my wife and dog! I’ve got lots of books written, so it’s not like I’d frantically be trying to write more. That would have to be enough. Okay, that’s a lie, I might write some nice notes to my friends too. And maybe a final letter to the public. Dang it, I would write after all.

Above: Three covers to issues of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, each #1. The series, of course, was written by Ryan North and drawn by Erica Henderson. Left is the March 2015 edition with cover art by Henderson. Center is the Dec. 2015 edition, art by Henderson. Right is the variant cover of the March 2015 edition, with art by Arthur Adams.

Below: The concept of Ryan North’s fictional handbook, subtitled “A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler,” is that it contains instructions for creating civilization from scratch should the sojourner find himor herself stuck in the past. Ryan’s effort was selected as a Goodreads Choice Semifinalist for the 2018 “Best Science and Technology Book.”

from the golden age to new wave

Trembles Confesses: ‘I Was The Montreal-based cartoonist of oft-outrageous alternative comix fondly recalls his lasted through much of WWII. During the war years, comics from the Great White North were dubbed “Canadian Whites” because comic [Rick Trembles, who became an acquaintance due to his books published up here were largely printed in black-&work for Weirdo magazine, is probably best known for his white (the interiors, anyway). These vanished overnight comic-strip film reviews titled “Rick Trembles’ Motion Piconce WWII ended. According to John Bell’s 2006 book, ture Purgatory,” which has thus far been collected in two Invaders From The North: How Canada Conquered the Comvolumes published by FAB Press. He describes himself as an “illustrator, post-underground cartoonist, writer, filmmak- ic Book Universe, the origins of the Canadian Whites were er, and musician,” and The Comics Journal quotes R. Crumb a result of government austerity measures: as describing him as, “Even more twisted and weird than [S]hortly after Canada’s declaration of war against me.” It was likely through a Facebook connection where I Germany, the Foreign Exchange Control Board was eslearned Rick’s dad was also an artist who dabbled in comic tablished to oversee the rationing of foreign currency, books, albeit not in the 1980s/90s alt comix period, but in something it would do with varying severity until 1951. In the Golden Age, specifically contributing to the “Canadian December 1940, as Canada’s trade deficit with the United Whites” books, World War II era black-&-white comics. States grew, and British gold shipments were curtailed, This page: Cover of the second I had been pondering asking Rick for a feature on his dad government intervention in the economy broadened with volume of Rick Trembles’ Mo- when I learned Jack had passed away, on Nov. 11 of last the introduction of the War Exchange Conservation Act. tion Picture Purgatory collec- year, at age 92. This spring, I asked for that piece… — Y.E.] by RICK TREMBLES

tion, which compiles his movie review comic strips. Below is a hilarious — albeit gory — example (atypical as most Trembles strips include an excessive amount of text), this one making fun of the ultra-violent Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 movie Western, Django Unchained.

Aimed at countries outside the sterling bloc, it was primarily designed to conserve American dollars by restricting the importation of non-essential goods from Canada’s largest trading partner. Among the items banned were fictional periodicals, a category that encompassed pulps and other newsstand magazines, including comic books. As a result, the government inadvertently laid the groundwork for an indigenous comics industry.

The end of the war in 1945 meant American comics were allowed to flow back into Canada and since the Canadian companies couldn’t compete, titles started dropping like flies. My father’s work is cited in this book as part of Canada’s “Golden Age” of comics, and I even got acknowledged as his son in a mention of my own work being part of Canada’s DIY small press explosion of the ’90s. My father’s principal WWII character was Crash Carson, a pilot who’d shoot down Nazis and Japs in his fighter plane with the Devil’s Angels Squadron. Yes, racist cardboard stereotypes were the bad guys, as they were in most comic books of the era. Years later, when I found myself following in my father’s footsteps, I often joked how drawing comics was more complicated for me, because things weren’t as black-&-white anymore. So, since I was never given as clear an enemy as his generation, I decided to make myself my own worst enemy. One year, my father drew “the enemy” replacing Crash Carson when he doctored one of his old comic book covers swapping Crash’s face for mine to turn it into a birthday card for me. For drawing these comics at the time, he was the envy of all the other kids on the block and took home three big bucks per page after mailing out each issue’s artwork to Toronto from his Verdun, Montreal, neighborhood. Three dollars was a lot of dough for a 15-year-old back then. I probably make less than that in the equivalent of today’s currency with my comics. I managed to hold onto a stack of preliminary sketches from various aborted comics ideas of his which I cherish to this day, along with my yellowing collection of Wow Comics. The amateur stuff he drew as a kid before he got more polished was what gave me the courage to try my own hand at it. Young Jack made it look doable. Funny thing is, for some reason, up until very recently, the Whites weren’t #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Motion Picture Purgatory TM & © Rick Trembles.

My Canadian Golden-Age cartoonist dad, Jack Tremblay, was born on the first of May, 1926, in Providence, Rhode Island. His family settled in Montreal when he was eight, and he began drawing comics by age 13. Within two years, after winning a pair of roller skates from a drawing contest held by Toronto’s Bell Features Comics, Jack ended up working for them as 15-year-old writer/cartoonist for their line of Wow Comics and Commando Comics, a gig that

the Son of a Superior Artist!’

Wow Comics cover by Jack Tremblay © the estate of Jack Tremblay.

father, onetime “Canadian Whites” Golden Age comic book artist Jack Tremblay

even worth that much to collectors, probably because they’re from Canada. Maybe they weren’t as sought after because, like my father, so many early Canadian cartoonists moved out of the field as fast as they could to pursue more lucrative careers in commercial illustration instead of sticking to comics like their American counterparts, who established enduring cartoon characters that provided the kinds of trajectories and chronologies fans like to track. The fact that the Canadian comics industry took a nosedive after WWII surely was no help. The longest cartooning gig I ever had was drawing movie reviews done as comix splash pages called “Motion Picture Purgatory” for a free weekly, The Montreal Mirror, from 1998–2012 until the internet supposedly wiped out all print media. I’m still doing the same series, but it’s a monthly now, for the canuxploitation.com blog, and I have to make the panels scroll downwards like a roll of toilet paper, so people can read them on their phones. One of the earliest comics I have by my father, I used to like saying preceded my movie comix conceptually by seven decades. He’d create handmade renditions of favorite scenes from B-movie actioners he watched at his local theatre and sold them to the kids on his block for five cents. He originally “printed” them out individually on shabby newsprint by putting pencil shading all over a blank sheet to make homemade carbon paper, then he’d trace every copy onto multiple pages and bind them with string. I must have the only two duplicates left in existence, which were based on the 1941 film, “The Return of Daniel Boone.” In 2005, New York City cartoonist Michael Kupperman published his first Tales Designed to Thrizzle comic book and alerted me that one of his stories was directly influenced by this five-cent comic my father did. I had previously explained to Kupperman the storyline of Jack’s comic COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

when he was visiting Montreal and he found the premise so funny he had to replicate it. Jack’s story consisted of one incredibly long, drawn out fight between two tough cowboys about a horse. After pummeling the bullies, our hero turns to the reader and asks, “Now does anybody else wanna know where I got that horse?” Kupperman called his version, “Are Comics Serious Literature?” And he reproduced the fight scene, but changed the punchline; “Now who else says comics aren’t serious literature?” He even gave special thanks to my father in the credits page. Jack got a big kick out of this.

This page: Above left is photo of Jack Tremblay and son Rick Trembles from the 2014 documentary, Lost Heroes: The Untold Story of Canadian Superheroes. Above are covers of “Canadian Whites” Tremblay appeared in. Below, Tremblay doctored a Wow cover to feature his cartoonist son.

Above: In a rare comic book shop appearance, Stan Lee visited Joe Field’s Flying Colors Comics and Other Stuff in the summer of 2013, to help celebrate their 25 th anniversary. By the way, little known fact: Joe actually worked for Stan and Joan Lee as publicist for Joan’s steamy novel, The Pleasure Palace, published by Dell Paperbacks, in 1987!

Below: After a visit to Rick Trembles, where he saw Jack Tremblay’s juvenile work, cartoonist Michael Kupperman was so inspired by a homemade Western sequence by Tremblay, that he swiped it for a scene in the first issue of his Tales Designed to Thrizzle [2005].

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Panther, Western comics panel TM & © the estate of Jack Tremblay. Tales Designed to Thrizzle TM & © Michael Kupperman.

Above: Prior to becoming a professional comic book artist, teenage Jack Tremblay created his own hand-colored comics, including a Batman knockoff by the name of The Panther.

nuances long gone since ages before I was even born. And the deceptively crude art of some of them gave me the guts to try making my own. Examples of some of the books he’d held onto from his youth, which I still own and cherish, are Thomas Craven’s Cartoon Cavalcade [1943], Gene Byrnes’ A Complete Guide to Drawing, Illustrating, Cartooning and Painting [1948], and A Complete Guide to Professional Cartooning [1950]. Stuff like Little Nemo in Slumberland and Smokey Stover had a profound influence on me. By the late ’60s and early ’70s, when comics were being rediscovered, he’d bring home the likes of compilations such as Grosset and Dunlap’s Krazy Kat with the intro by E. E. Cummings, and the massive Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century published by Bonanza Books, anthologies such as Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, George Perry and Alan Aldridge’s The Penguin Book of Comics (which gave a taste of the future by reproducing a page from Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat at the very end), and Les Daniels’ Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, which gave an even larger taste of the undergrounds. Soon followed A History of Underground Comics by Mark James Estren and I was a goner. For better or worse, my parents were liberal enough to let me blow my preteen mind over these pioneering taboo-breakers. I noticed many of the undergrounders took their cues from, and even occasionally mimicked artwork from the kinds of archaic newspaper comics I’d already been devouring. Exposed to such stuff, the old and the new, I could care less about contemporary mainstream comics. I was privileged to have been exposed to this material. I was obsessed with it, but it didn’t provide for much in terms of talking points with my fellow school chums who didn’t have the same access or interests. I was pretty isolated in my obsession. Back in the ’70s, the medium wasn’t as revered as it is today. It wasn’t considered a sane career move or even worthy of serious study yet. My father tolerated underground comix, even though I was underage. Especially Robert Crumb because he was such a “good draughtsman,” as he put it, but he’d browbeat me when other undergrounders were drawing genitalia badly. I especially remember his concerned disapproval over the inside cover of All Canadian Beaver Comix #1 After drawing comics, Jack became a successful writer where a gaping, talking vagina welcomed readers to the and commercial artist, publishing children’s books on Cana- issue. He brought me to a publishing trade show once where a distributer had a copy of Justin Green’s Binky diana, working at ad agencies, illustrating for the Montreal Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary on display and I begged Star Weekend Magazine supplement among many others, the man to sell it to me, but it was a firm no because of my and exhibiting his fine art acrylic paint canvases at nuage. The way the back cover of my copy of Don Donahue merous galleries. Being a commercial artist, he was never and Susan Goodrick’s edited Apex Treasury of Underground opposed to the brain-rot that is pop culture and actually Comics had laid out multiple samples of underground comix encouraged me as a child to delve into the history of comics with books he’d buy me that I always suspected were as covers as if they were trading cards made me wanna much for his own pleasure as mine. “Hey, whatever got the collect them all, and Binky was among them. It wasn’t long before I started sneaking into the downtown head-shops kid reading,” he probably figured. to stock up on all the actual underground comix I could Anthologies my father brought home contained mostly samples from the early comic strips he grew up with, start- find. Some of my collection still smells a little like incense ing at the beginning of the 20th century when they were still from those shops to this day. The nerdy hippies running those places tried to turn me on to super-hero comics but I experimental. They opened up a strange world of archaic wouldn’t have any of it. My earliest efforts to emulate the undergrounds embarrassingly hybridized the likes of Robert Crumb and Peter Max even though I was still a virgin to sex and drugs. The anachronism of my doodles got further reinforced by the fact that ’60s counter-culture was petering out by that time. But, lucky for me, punk rock was just around the corner. Just as the minimalism of punk convinced me to start playing music in the late ’70s, it also inspired me to create like-minded comix which I submitted to every zine I could find. Even though many of the ’60s undergrounders were punk precursors, punk didn’t seem to have any identifiable cartoonists besides a tiny handful like New York’s John Holmstrom, who did Punk magazine and some Ramones LP covers, and then later, Peter Bagge, who’d eventually

doms that the internet was beginning to provide broke, disaffected losers like me by posting a blog about my “career” and upbringing on my brand new state-of-theart 1999 homemade website. I sent a hard copy to my as of yet internet-less parents and they were horrified. I was dumbfounded because I genuinely thought they’d distinguish this particular project as a satirical take on Horatio Alger’s “American Dream,” a poke at the kinds of hackneyed rags-to-riches scenarios typical of most artist/musicians’ prefabricated self-aggrandizing promotional mythologies. I wanted to combine my contempt for such accounts with genuine bittersweet truths to illicit shocks in tandem with yucks. “It’d be fun for me to analyze my father’s paintings one day since they were probably his most honest effort at communicating,” I wrote, “but they weren’t made for the likes of the kinds of dumps I’ve been inhabiting ever since living on my own, according to the art world, and I don’t like hanging around stuck-up people’s houses or galleries. When will the f*cken bourgeoisie fall?” “As prejudiced a judgment as any bourgeois,” my father responded in a

Above: Wow Comics announcement declaring Jack Tremblay as a contest winner. Inset left: Tremblay in 1944, training to become a paratrooper. Below: Example of Tremblay illustration work, this from the Montreal Star Weekend Magazine [1972].

All © the respective copyright holders.

help shape alternative comics. Punk borrowed a lot from horror movies, which appealed to that obsession in me, as well. The early punk aesthetic, as applied to comix, for me, meant experimentation, confrontation, and transgression just like what I thought the music represented. So I traded psychedelia for abrasive surrealistic non sequiturs, and free love for unrequited polymorphous perversity, satire remaining an important element throughout, but deadpan all the way because I hate spelling stuff out for people. Biographical aspects eventually snuck their way in so I could shamelessly plug my own musical projects. These comix appeared mostly in music zines after all, so I figured I’d stay on topic. One night, according to my father, when I was nine years old, brat that I was, I crept up to him in the center of his bedroom while he was squatting on the floor trying to concentrate on his yoga meditations and proceeded to dangle a bell over his head and ring it, vying for attention. He decided to immortalize the moment in one of his earliest acrylic fine art canvases. He spent the rest of the ’70s accumulating such pieces, each becoming more and more surreal and ornate, occasionally landing himself exhibitions at various Montreal galleries. Jack was written about in art magazines and several of his pieces are in private collections. He had quite the temper when it came to his art, a trait I’m sorry to say I inherited. As a child, I once witnessed him violently destroying a fine art canvas he was working on that wasn’t going well, right in front of the family. He cursed loudly at it as if it was alive and kicked it in, putting a massive hole through it. We thought the world was ending. Our terrified reactions were similar to the way he once drew us in a ’60s advertisement. It depicted him angrily, literally “raising the roof” of our home, revealing an aerial cutaway view of the shocked family below. He used to take photos of us for reference. In my bitter late 30s, after having lived in one too many dilapidated dumps, I decided to abuse the free-

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

This spread: With all artwork by Jack Tremblay, clockwise from above is self-portrait of the artist from the1940s; “Crash Carson” splash from an early ’40s Wow Comics; Esthetic Comics [2014], containing his first comic work since the ’40s; cartoonist Seth and Tremblay [2014]; advertising work [1963]; Tremblay in 1989; a paperback cover [1975], and four of his paintings, three being surrealistic. The one immediately below was inspired by nine-year-old Rick creeping up on his dad, then deep in meditation, and ringing a bell above Pop’s head.

things together,” read his notes, “Think in larger masses of shape and tone, add detail within larger masses, not scattered, lettering should be readable, spread your ‘star’ theme for harmony, be consistent, technique should be the same throughout, try for color with blacks and greys, give them something for their money, where’s the word ‘comix’?” He was right on all counts, but after having my innocent scribbles compulsively corrected once too often, no matter how well-intentioned, I stopped showing him my doodles for fear of shrinking into nothingness before his immense professionalism. Later, when I’d finally developed and settled into my own crude style of cartooning based on and deliberately capitalizing on my limitations, I got confident enough to show him my work, especially if it was already in print and he couldn’t do anything about it. I’d been pretty typecast as a controversy-baiting artist by that point, which didn’t exactly attract plum jobs, and he’d always cynically ask me how much money I made from them. When the an-

swer was invariably “zip,” he’d manage to get the last word in by lecturing me how if I wanted to make a living with my art I needed to compromise a little. As he got older, I tried to get him to pass his trade secrets on to me and teach me how to paint, but he’d always tell me, “How am I supposed to teach anybody anything if I’m always learning myself?” Jack left the advertising business in the ’90s just as the digital revolution was turning it upside down. I graduated animation school around the same time only to be met with the same challenges since much of the old-school equipment I’d been trained on was already becoming obsolete in favor of digital. We both had to become self-taught once again. Forty years after being fed up with Jack compulsively correcting my artwork, the tables got turned between “student and teacher,” father and son, and I found myself incessantly bickering with him trying to teach him how to create art with computers. Ever curious about new mediums and technological developments in art, he got pretty good at it, manipulating drawings in Photoshop so he could print them out distorted and enlarge them onto canvas to paint. Always in love with print, he put together several mockups for art books he’d hoped to publish about Montreal #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All © the estate of Jack Tremblay.

hand-written snail-mail letter. “Dogmatism, intellectual haughtiness and a screwyou attitude toward the world are often attractive in brilliant young artists, but the anti-bourgeois pugnacity that charms us in the emerging young artist, becomes curmudgeonly and boring in the mature one.” Years later he did eventually give me a wonderful oversized painting he’d done of me posing outside one of my dilapidated dumps, but he made me sign a contract providing if anything ever happened to it, I’d owe him thousands. It’s been hanging on my wall ever since. He always thought I’d been brainwashed by the counter-culture. When firstwave punk started up and I jumped in wholeheartedly, my parents thought I was a goner. I remember my screaming mother tearing down the pictures of Johnny Rotten I had up on my wall and shredding to bits the jeans I’d torn a knee-hole into to look like The Ramones. Twenty-five years later, I’d smile with befuddled amazement at how congratulatory they were towards my teenage Pantera fan niece’s latest piercings and tats. It wasn’t easy growing up in the shadow of a superior artist. He started working at a very young age and became successful at it without much formal post-secondary education, so he thought if he could do it, anybody can, especially with the proper elbow grease. But the ’50s weren’t the ’80s. It still blows my mind that he was able to buy a house in the suburbs and raise a middle class family just by drawing. Is that even possible anymore? He worked his ass off nine-to-five at the ad agency every week and kept at it at home in his basement studio all night long on his personal projects, joining my mom every once in a while to watch TV just a few feet away. Thanks to this, I was named after Ricky Ricardo. Drawing people with “smiling phony faces,” as he put it, was a living, but his real passion was for dark distorted canvases. I got cartoons published for the first time in my high school paper thanks largely to his corrections, which made me feel a little like a fraud. He really picked apart the cover of the second issue of my self-published comic book Spoit that I was selling around the neighborhood in the ’70s; “Tie

Jack Tremblay artwork © the estate of Jack Tremblay. Seth and Jack Tremblay photo © Chris Anthony Diaz.

architecture and Greek mythology. My whole life I kept badgering him to draw comics again, but he dismissed it as a thing of the past. By the time he was pushing 90, I finally got him to cave in and convinced him to incorporate his drawings and poetry into a mini-comic we could give to friends and relatives and sell at zine fairs. The result was Esthetic Comics, his first foray back into cartooning in 70 years. He jokingly crowned me his archivist, cataloger, biographer, and agent, and I took him to every comics and zine convention I could get him into. In 2014, we were invited to the Doug Wright Awards

at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF). I told Jack we couldn’t pass up this opportunity, it’d be too much fun. As usual, he was surprised anyone could be interested in the comics he stopped doing almost a century previous. They paid for the hotel, but we’d have to find our own way there from Montreal, so we decided to split the costs on a train. Jack was given the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame (a.k.a. “Giants of the North”) medal of honor by Toronto cartoonist Seth, along with the only other surviving artist from the era of “Canadian Whites,” Gerry Lazare. The medal was beautifully designed by Seth, and from that day on, whenever I’d drag Jack out to a comics event for signings he’d proudly wear it around his neck like a decorated soldier. At the TCAF event, he had prepared a speech, but for some reason decided against it at the last minute and adlibbed instead, which he later regretted upon hearing his old colleague Lazarre’s comparatively lengthy oration. In fact, the fam never heard the end of it after that. He’d take every opportunity to let us know how he could’ve delivered just as dandy a speech if he wanted to. His moment at the microphone was brief; he laughed at how he couldn’t convince his neighborhood friends at the time that he was the Jack Tremblay who was drawing the comics they were reading, and mentioned how funny it was that winning a roller-skate drawing competition 70 years ago could land him in front of this audience. Here’s the original speech he prepared but opted out of: The uniquely American art form called comics was in its heyday when I was a kid with a pencil and a passion for drawing. Tarzan and Flash Gordon, both full page features in the Sunday ‘Funnies’ were my weekly lessons in anatomy and figure drawing. With the appearance of Superman and Batman in the new comic-book format, I was hooked on the medium. This was the art I loved, and I was determined to become a comic-book artist. The adventure yarns in COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

the British periodicals for young readers, The Triumph and The Champion, available in Canada before the war and for some time after the beginning of the European Conflict, were an inspiration in writing exciting adventure stories. My favourite was ‘Rockfist Rogan of the R.A.F.,’ a boxer/ flyer during the first world war, who, between bouts, flew the romantic bi-planes of the period, and subsequently embraced the deadly Spitfires and Hurricanes of WW2. An exciting period for budding young teen artists like myself caught in the maelstrom of a country at war. ‘War Propaganda’ everywhere, a booming ‘wartime economy,’ the prospect, as one came of age, of participating in the ‘real thing;’ World Conflict. To express oneself with the gift of art, by depicting imaginary heroes of all sorts, somehow felt like one was contributing to the defeat of the enemy.

Back in our fancy hotel room after the event, as I was in bed trying to get some shuteye, Jack suddenly started hovering over me fixing his gaze into my noggin, and began passionately reminiscing about WW2. I guess the awards ceremony jogged his memory and he needed to get it out. As exasperated as I was, I’m glad he did because it was a funny story. He explained to me how he became the Canadian Spy Agency’s official pornographer. While still a teen, Jack wanted desperately to go to the front lines as a paratrooper. He recalled how dangerously naïve an idea this was and he would’ve been a goner if he’d been sent to the Pacific. I may never have been born. He acknowledged that he’d been completely indoctrinated by the anti-Nazi propaganda of the time, which he also contributed to in his own way with his Crash Carson comics. Another strong motivation was that his older brother was already a tail-gunner who’d been on several bombing missions over Germany. He missed him greatly and had it in his head that if he signed up maybe they could somehow cross paths and reunite. His fervor prompted them to give him a psychiatric evaluation before joining up. He told them he was an artist and showed them his Crash Carson

comics and various other sketches, presumably nudes, which they duly noted and kept in his file. When he was 18, during military training at Vancouver’s Lake Ogopogo, he used to draw nudes on fellow soldiers’ backpacks for quick beer money. One day, while in formation on parade grounds, the lieutenant in charge of the platoon hollered out his name. Word had gotten around about his “talent” and the officers were looking for an artist to adorn the walls of the mess-hall with cheesecake pin-up art of pretty girls. They even promised to promote him to officer if he complied, but the war ended before that could happen. I was already plotting out how great a comic strip this would make, with the legendary Ogopogo Lake monster waving “hi” at us in the background and everything. After the war ended and my father got back home he learned that his younger brother had traded his whole comic book collection for candy while he was away. This would have included the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics, the first appearance of Batman in Detective Comics, and who knows what else I might’ve inherited currently worth millions. Thanks a lot, Hitler.

By his early 90s, ailing health and the onset of mild dementia prevented Jack from drawing much anymore, no matter how often I tried to encourage him. As always, I kept trying to fire him up by showing him whatever art projects I was working on and he always had some biting, albeit constructive criticism to offer. “How much did you get paid?” During one particularly bad spell in the hospital, I demanded he draw my portrait because it was my birthday. His wobbly doodle showed the signs of stress he was under from his illness and it’d prove to be the last thing he ever drew, but I thought he needed the “art therapy.” Jack’s true biographer would turn out to be a fellow we met at TCAF by the name of Ivan Kocmarek, who was a huge fan of the Canadian Whites. He couldn’t believe he was talking to one of the original Bell Features artists and announced he was working on the definitive anthology about these comics. Years later, I brought my father an early transcript of his entry in the book. I found him in the communal library of his nursing home and he asked me out loud if I brought any porn. “Could you ask me a little louder? The whole place

Trembles portrait © the estate of Jack Tremblay. Pale Ale Americaine beer can art © the respective copyright holder. Spoit © Rick Trembles.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Trembles portrait © the estate of Jack Tremblay. Heroes of the Home Front © Ivan Kocmarek. TCAF 2014 photos by and courtesy of Ivan Kocmarek.

hasn’t heard you yet,” I chortled. “Early on, Rick did not appear to be destined for an art career. His sister, eight years his senior, was an artist from day one, and she is today, in her own words; ‘In the family business,’ a master of Art History and among the personnel of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,” my father had ended Ivan’s interview with. What? “So when was the last time she made art?” I asked him. “She graduated in art history and teaches people about art at the museum,” he told me. I said I graduated art school before her and she’s a tour guide at the museum. He said I graduated from a school (I guess film studies and animation have nothing to do with art) and she’s been around the world. So I say, “Yeah, but has she been to hell? You have to have been to hell to be an artist.” So he says, “I know, I’ve been to hell.” So I say, “Exactly.” Sigh. You can never please the old man. He was hard of hearing, so we were both barking loudly in there and, at one point, a nurse poked her head into the room to see what was up. I was starting to worry if our conversation was

coming across as elder abuse, so I gave him the transcript and shook his hand goodbye till next time. That was our last cohesive “fight.” I was so taken aback by my father’s comments I had to intervene. It was very nice of Ivan to add this little postscript to his interview: “Note: Rick, however begs to differ on when he wanted to be a cartoonist. It was, he insists, one of his earliest desires, way before his teens. However, it was, indeed, a direct result of having been able to peruse his father’s comics.” The last time I spoke to my father, in his empty hospice room, I brought him the can of Pale Ale Americaine beer I had just designed for Dunham Brewery adorned with the kind of busy artwork I was known for, and was finally proud to say I got paid quite handsomely for it. He examined it and was impressed. I left the can there with a note not to drink it on doctor’s orders. I also brought along a copy of War Bears #1 to show him how closely the story resembled his own. Ken Steacy had just produced this three-part comCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

ic-book in collaboration with the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. She was apparently a fan of early Canadian Comics. At one point the character that War Bears revolves around, a young cartoonist for the Canadian Whites during WW2, was having a nightmare about his brother crashing in what looked like a Lancaster bomber. My own uncle, my father’s brother, happened to be a tail-gunner in the same plane during WW2, which I pointed out to my father while flipping through the comic book. In fact my uncle was one of the reasons that motivated Jack to draw for Canadian Whites in the first place. I contacted Ken Steacy to ask if, by any chance, his character had been inspired by my father’s story or if it was it just a coincidence. Ken replied how touched he was by my message and told me that honoring my father and his generation of Canadian visual storytellers was what Margaret and he had in the forefront of their minds when they created War Bears. He told me the comparisons were just a coincidence though, as it was a common phenomenon. Even he had relatives in similar situations during WW2. On my final visit with Jack, I had brought him a sketchpad and a pen because I noticed that the last time I was over, his had gone missing. I had brought his tablet too, in case he wanted to see photos of his old artwork again. He was so still in his bed that I had to take a photo of him to show him later, so we could laugh at how dead he looked. When I saw he wasn’t budging I called the nurse in. To our surprise, it turned out he had indeed passed away moments before my visit. His body was still warm. The staff gave me some time alone with him. I cupped his shoulder and placed my hand on his cheek and forehead. He was soft and was starting to get a little cold. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever touched a dead body. I wanted to leave before the death industry started gearing up. I grabbed his signed copy of Pascal Girard’s graphic novel Petty Theft because he’d been using it to scrawl over various pages. “Possibly his last written words,” I told my sister over the phone as we were discussing formalities. During one of my father’s hospital visits, it turns out he was being taken care of by Girard sidelining as a nurse. He recognized my father and gifted him a copy of his book. Small world. I noticed my beer can was gone. I hoped he hadn’t tried to drink it and that’s what killed him. Ivan Kocmarek was able to hand-deliver his newly published Heroes of the Home Front: Bell Features Artists of WW2 to my father mere months before he passed away. It features a whole illustrated chapter about Jack among many other heretofore unknown Canadian comic artists. He proudly displayed it on a pedestal in his retirement home along with his Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame Giants of the North medal of honor until the day he died, on Remembrance Day, 2018.

This spread: Clockwise from below is Tremblay at TCAF 2014 where he received a medal of honor; 1991 portrait of son Trembles by father Tremblay; Trembles early underground comix effort, Spoit, alongside his dad’s "corrected" version (right); Trembles portrait by Tremblay; Trembles artwork gracing a Canadian beer can; father and son man a shared booth at TCAF; and Heroes of the Homefront by Ivan Kocmarek, which includes a chapter on Jack Tremblay.

Colors by Glenn Whitmore

. All characters TM & © the respective copyright holders. Dateline TM & © Fred Hembeck.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

comics in the library

The Strangest Places…

A look at two recent masterpieces, The Night Witches and Katusha: Girl Soldier

All are TM & © the respective copyright holders.

by RICHARD J. ARNDT CBC Contributing Editor Comics are starting to arrive from the strangest places. In March 2018, the U.S. Naval Institute Press launched a graphic novel imprint called Dead Reckoning. To date, they’ve published (or are in the stages of publishing) 10 graphic novels, by authors and artists from the world over. All, of course, have something to do with the military — although not strictly the Navy. In terms of archive reprints, they’ve issued a volume called The Best of Don Winslow of the Navy, which fans of the Fawcett company’s 1940s title may well want to look at. In more contemporary work, other interesting books look to be Trench Dogs, a WWI effort by Ian Densford; Machete Squad, a graphic novel by Brent Dulak, Kevin Knodell, David Axe, and Per Darwin Berg, which deals with an American medic in Afghanistan; Stalingrad: Letters from the Volga, by Antonio Gil and Daniel Ortega; and one that really piques my interest: Men at Sea, a collection of graphic adaptations of war/sea stories by the likes of Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Mac Orlan, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Hope Hodgson, all adapted by French cartoonist Riff Reb. For those who know my love of horror stories, whether graphic or prose, quality adaptations of Poe and Hodgson — two of the best horror writers ever — is something to look forward to. However, the main reason for me sitting up and taking notice are their publications of two of the best writers or writers/artists currently working in the war comics genre: Garth Ennis and Wayne Vansant. The Ennis effort is a reprinting of his excellent Night Witches, with art by Russell Braun. It is a stunning tale dealing with the Russian female war pilots of WWII. The novel not only details their incredible exploits (little known in this country), but also the gender discrimination against them by the Russian high command, both during and after the war. Women pilots were considered of lesser importance than males, much like the U.S. treatment of women pilots in the same era, who ferried both bombers and fighter planes to staging areas, although the Russian women were assigned combat duty. They were initially given only obsolete bi-planes to run their bombing missions, aircraft far too slow against the German Luftwaffe. So they were forced to fly night missions exclusively. However, the bombs they carried were so heavy, they were forced to fly low, close enough to allow German ack-ack guns to rip them to shreds. So, during final bombing runs, they would idle their engines and essentially glide to their targets! Think about that. Idling their engines in a cold Russian winter sky, dropping a bomb from a very low elevation, getting your plane’s engine back up to speed before the bomb you just dropped hit the target and exploded underneath you and then flying away…! The women were so successful that the terrorized Germans tagged them the Night Witches. These women were heroes and the Russian High Command treated them shamefully. The Ennis/Braun collaboration is superb in both COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

script and art, with an ending that will break your heart. I notice that since its original publication the book has opened the door for various other writers to deal with the subject. There’s a nonfiction book on the Night Witches, as well as a young adult novel by Katheryn Lasky, both quite good and also entitled Night Witches, that have been published since the original appearance of the Ennis/Braun volume. The book is too adult for my middle school library, but would be excellent for any high school or public library, not to mention the readers of this column. It was published in March, 2019. This past April brought a book that I’ve been waiting for years to read. I’d read the first two thirds of Wayne Vansant’s Katusha: Girl Soldier of the Great Patriotic War, when those segments were self-published in 2013. To finally see the complete book as one single omnibus volume, running 572 pages in length, is tremendously exciting! Katusha deals with a young Ukrainian girl named Ekaterina Andreaevna Tymoshenko, nicknamed Katusha, who graduated from high school, age 16, the same day the Germans launch Operation Barbarossa — the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The book then covers her life as a witness to the aftermath of the slaughter of the Russian Jews at Babi Yar, as a refugee, a guerilla fighter, her eventual recruitment as a tank driver in the Russian military, and finally her promotion to an actual tank commander and love affair with one of her commanders, all within the years 1941–45. The artwork and coloring is stunning. Think Sam Glanzman’s work on his U.S.S. Stevens stories. The storytelling is masterful. Katusha encounters many characters, including a couple of German soldiers who first appeared in Vansant’s Knights of the Skull stories, yet all are easy to identify and remember. There are scenes of great savagery and great courage. Historical figures flicker in briefly, but the focus is on the ordinary soldier or resistance fighter, not famous names. The publication of this book is not just one of major events of this year’s graphic novel releases, but a book on the par with Art Spiegelman’s Maus. It’s that good and, in my opinion, that important. I firmly believe that it will become not only a classic in the war genre, but a game changer in the way we, and perhaps the public at large, will regard war comics. If you buy one graphic novel this year, let it be Katusha. It’s simply that good. Perhaps equally important is the release this June of Vansant’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front. The Remarque novel is a great piece of literature in its own right, but it’s also been memorably adapted twice for film (both the excellent 1930 film version and an equally good 1979 TV adaptation). Vansant’s take on the novel is strong, faithful to the book, and illuminating for the reader. It’s a bit too mature for middle school readers but should be an excellent choice for inclusion in high school, college, and public libraries. 41

Quality handmade comics with a pinch of spite.

GALAKTIKON ISBN: 978-0-9983792-5-8 $17.99

The goon Volume 1 ISBN: 978-1-949889-92-5 $17.99

GRUMBLE VOLUME 1 ISBN: 978-1-949889-90-1 $17.99

HILLBILLY VOLUME 1 ISBN: 978-0-9983792-0-3 $17.99

‘NAMWOLF ISBN: 978-0-9983792-2-7 $17.99

The goon

bunch of old crap An omnibus Volume 1 ISBN: 978-0-9983792-9-6 $29.99

bunch of old crap An omnibus Volume 2 ISBN: 978-1-949889-93-2 $29.99

HILLBILLY VOLUME 2 ISBN: 978-0-9983792-3-4 $17.99

HILLBILLY VOLUME 3 ISBN: 978-0-9983792-4-1 $17.99

REBECCA SUGAR’S PUG DAVIS ISBN: 978-1-949889-91-8 $17.99

SPOOK HOUSE VOLUME 1 ISBN: 978-0-9983792-1-0 $17.99

GRUMBLE VOLUME 1 ISBN: 978-1-949889-90-1 $17.99

HILLBILLY VOLUME 4 ISBN: 978-0-9983792-8-9 $17.99

SPOOK HOUSE VOLUME 2 ISBN: 978-0-9983792-7-2 $17.99

albatrossfunnybooks.com

Comic Book Creator: Where are you from, Eric? Eric Powell: Nashville. I was born and raised in middle Tennessee and never left. I grew up about a halfhour from here, in a town called Lebanon. CBC: What was your childhood like? Eric: Pretty normal for an ’80s kid: playing in the woods, Nintendo, Saturday morning cartoons… back when we still had those. CBC: Were comics important? Eric: Not as much as you would think. I read them, but they were not something that occupied a lot of my time. I was more into movies. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I got really hooked on comics. I can’t remember not drawing. I was also writing stories to go with my illustrations. When I was a teenager, a buddy lent me some comics of his and I suddenly understood, “Oh, this is what I should be doing.” Drawing and telling a story. Which is what I had already been doing in my notebooks. That’s where the love of comics came from. CBC: What comics were you getting? Eric: I grew up reading the typical stuff. There was a lot of Superman and Spiderman, The Hulk, and stuff like that… the comics that drew me into the modern stuff. I remember reading some Wolverine, some , and I really got into Bernie

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke • Transcribed by Rose Rummel-Eury 44

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Goon, all art TM & © Eric Powell.

This year has been a pretty big one for artist/ writer/publisher Eric Powell. It’s mostly due to the fact that 2019 marks the 20th anniversary since the first appearance of his signature creation, The Goon. Not only does the cartoonist have an exhausting schedule of 24 stops on the tour celebrating his milestone, but he’s also relaunched The Goon as a continuing series with his Albatross Funny Books. That ambitious imprint also publishes other creator-owned properties, such as Grumble, MegaGhost, Galaktikon, ’Namwolf, and Spook House, as well as another Powell creation, Hillbilly, which he describes as essentially a sword-&-sorcery epic set in Appalachia. Plus there’s progress being made on the long-planned animated movie adapting The Goon, with no less than David (The Social Network) Fincher attached as producer and Tim (Deadpool) Miller as director. So, by any measure,for this country boy made good, 2019 sure is a year to remember. This interviewed occurred in August.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

Wrightson and Swamp Thing, and all of my artistic taste came from getting into Bernie Wrightson and backtracking his influences. CBC: That’s an interesting time for Bernie. Can you put it down to a year when you were introduced to Wrightson? Eric: Not really. I was familiar with his art before I knew who he was. I could look at a Swamp Thing cover and say, “There’s that artist I like.” CBC: When you got attracted to it. Eric: I had seen his stuff when I was a kid. I had seen some Swamp Thing that an uncle of mine had copies of. I can’t remember when that was. When I got back into comics, I remembered him from those books. I had that connection to his work. CBC: It’s interesting that, by the mid-’80s, post-Frankenstein, Bernie agreed that he was a little past his prime or was in a slump by then. Eric: He did this book, Batman: The Cult, and that was one book that brought me back into comics. It wasn’t his best work, but it was definitely enough to influence me and get me to look at his older stuff. CBC: When you were younger, before as a teenager, you were watching a lot of movies? Which ones were you attracted to? Eric: Anything that was horror. Every Sunday when I was a kid, they would play the old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. Then there were the monster movies, like Godzilla or Creature from the Black Lagoon. I got into those pretty early, the Universal stuff. Anything that had a monster in it or some kind of horror, fantasy, or science fiction, I was all about it.

CBC: How old were you when you had a VCR in the house? Eric: I’m trying to remember. I was around maybe nine? CBC: You were young. Did you go to the video store and haunt the horror section? Eric: Yeah. The funny thing was, the first video rental place in town was out of the back of a Dairy Queen, an extra room or something they had. They lined the walls with shelves of VHS tapes for rent. Every weekend, we’d go there and rent something. My sister and I always had a set rule: We’d have to rent a scary one and a funny one. I always attribute that to where The Goon has come from — funny and scary — and that’s what has always appealed to me. CBC: Was The Goonies of appeal to you? Poltergeist? Movies that had humor and elements of horror? Eric: Oh, yeah, and The Evil Dead. Yeah, any dark comedyslash-horror movie is right up my alley. CBC: Did you have other siblings? Eric: It was just me and my sister. We did have a foster brother for about a minute. CBC: What’s the age difference with your sister? Eric: She’s a couple years older. CBC: Were you friendly? Eric: Yeah, with all the typical brother/sister stuff going on. She had her thing going and I had mine. We weren’t bosom buddies, but we get along well. CBC: It’s good to have sisters; gives you a different perspective. So, black-&-white movies didn’t turn you off. What were your favorite movies growing up? Eric: It depends. I was one of those kids who definitely had stages. I got into things for a year and got into another thing #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Best Cellars TM & © the respective copyright holder. Monster Boy TM & © Eric Powell. Swamp Thing TM & © DC Comics.

Previous spread: At lower left is cover detail from the forthcoming book, The Art (and Many Other Mistakes) of Eric Powell, a self-portrait of the man. On right is Goon promotional art. This page: Above is the original art and printed cover featuring a very early Powell effort, Monster Boy [Best Cellars #1, 1995]. Below is Eric’s cover for Swamp Thing #21 [Jan. 2006].

Godzilla and related characters TM & © Toho Co., Ltd. King Kong, Universal Monsters TM & © Universal City Studios, Inc.

the next year. In my teens, as I started junior high, I was into movie special effects and stuff and thought about doing that for a living. I was all into any kind of horror with big special effects. I was into Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. I liked all of it. CBC: So you read Fangoria? Eric: Oh yeah. I loved Fangoria. It was a little hard to get where I lived, but anytime I saw it on the stands, I would grab it. CBC: Is there any reason you need to rectify the hyper-violent stuff that was coming out in the ’80s and ’90s, and the classic mood-centric stuff like James Whale and any number of horror movies from that period, which relied more on atmosphere and the implicit, in contrast to the in-your-face explicit material? Or did you like it all? Eric: I liked it all. As an adult, I can analyze this and, like you’re saying, “This is more atmospheric and the directing and cinematography are more artistic,” but I found validity in all of it. There was always something I could take from it, even the cheesy stuff. “That was a dumb movie, but it was fun and this effect in it was cool. This camera angle was cool.” There was always something I could take something positive from it. Maybe to justify my taste! [chuckles] CBC: I was never into the slasher movies and hyper-violent movies, but I remember seeing Nightmare on Elm Street and remembering how simple and effective the effects were. Some of these movies were clever. When you were in junior high, what were your aspirations? You said you wanted to be a special effects guy? Eric: I wanted to do something like that, but growing up where I did, that seemed like an unattainable goal, a lofty ambition that would never happen. I knew I wanted to do some kind of art, but wasn’t sure exactly what I could do. For some reason, when I got the comic bug, it stuck. It never went away. I maintained a laser-focus, that this was what I wanted to do. CBC: When you were doing proto-comics when you were young, was it all monsters? Eric: Yeah it was all monsters! There was a lot of influence from the monster movies I was watching at the time. In one of the early ones, I had was a character named “Roadkill.” It was like a Freddy or Jason character who drove around the desert in a hot rod. [chuckles] Not a lot of deep plot going on there. [laughter] CBC: Your parents didn’t mind you watching all this violent material? Eric: They never stopped me, but they didn’t approve of it. They thought it was a little weird, but didn’t hinder me. CBC: What did your mom and dad do? Eric: My mom worked at Northern Telecom, a phone plant, and my dad was in construction and owned a drywall company. CBC: Were you a latchkey kid? Eric: [Chuckles] Yeah, but where we lived, I wouldn’t call it “latchkey,” because we never even locked the doors! It was pretty rural. We never worried about anyone breaking in. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

CBC: How far away were your neighbors? Eric: Maybe to the nearest neighbor… about a quarter mile. CBC: Did you have pets? Eric: Dogs; we always had dogs. CBC: Did your parents have a garden? Eric: Yeah. We had a cornfield. We lived in a trailer at first and there was a cornfield beside it that was fun to play in when I was young. CBC: Throughout your childhood, did you have the same bunch of friends? Eric: You would have that best friend for a year and then change classes and meet new friends. It seems like I had a new best friend each year, but there was at least one friend I palled around with year after year. CBC: Were they of like mind? Did they like monster movies? Eric: For the most part, but I don’t know if anybody liked them as much as I did. CBC: Were you a weird little kid? Eric: I was weird, though I can’t say I was picked on anymore than the average kid. I wasn’t singled out or had a rough childhood. I was pretty average. I was one of those kids scooting along and getting by. CBC: Blending in? Eric: Right. CBC: How were you known in school? Were you shy? Eric: Yes, I was a shy kid, but I was definitely known as the artist of the class every year. I was always the one everyone knew could draw. The content of my drawing was sometimes not approved of. It was always monsters or something weird or gross. I wasn’t necessarily asked to draw school mascots because teachers were too afraid of what I would draw. [laughter] CBC: Did your art teachers like you or were they wary of your interests? Eric: For the most part they liked me, but I had one teacher that didn’t like me at all. In fact, I think she went out of her way

This page: Top left is Eric’s rendition of the Toho monsters — a gatefold wraparound cover for Godzilla: Monster World #1 [Mar. 2011]— which had an impact on the artist as a boy, as did King Kong, seen above (Kong of Skull Island #1 variant cover, June 2017], and the Universal monsters, seen below (Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror TPB cover, 2006).

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. The Demon TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Perhaps the biggest impact young Eric Powell had during his first visit to a comic book shop was to purchase the fourth issue of the Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown miniseries. At top is art by Ballard Borich and Jon J. Muth from #3. Inset center: Eric would love a chance to create a Demon storyline using Kirby’s giant monsters. Cover detail by Eric from Arkham Asylum:: Living Hell #6 [Dec. 2003].

to exclude me from activities because she didn’t approve of my tastes and thought I was a sick kid. My other art teachers, I don’t think, cared about what I was doing one way or the other. But my art teacher during the last two years of school became my friend and was really, really supportive of what I was doing. So much so, he was a groomsman in my wedding. I think he’s responsible for expanding my points of view on art. He’d let me borrow a lot of his art books, including those of Renaissance artists, such as Rembrandt. It gave me an opportunity to look at other kinds of art that weren’t just Iron Maiden covers. [chuckles] CBC: Wow, that’s cool. What’s his name? Eric: Carole Townzen. CBC: Have you been in touch since? Eric: Once in a while, though I haven’t seen him in a few years. The last time we were doing a gallery show in Nashville and he came out to it. CBC: Great. What did he say about your stuff? Did he like it? Eric: He’s very complimentary. He’s proud that one of his students was able to go on and make a career out of it. CBC: When you were 16, did you get a car? Eric: I did. I got a hand-me-down truck. It was not a handme-down, it was in very good shape. I didn’t get a clunker. CBC: Did you drive around with your buddies doing the typical teenage things? Eric: Yeah, the night I got my license, we drove straight out to a comic shop in downtown and I could barely drive. CBC: The first day?

Eric: [Chuckles] Within like an hour. I told my parents I was going to drive over to my friend Andy’s house, and as soon as I got there, he said, “Let’s go to The Great Escape.” CBC: Oh wow! That’s a great store! Eric: So, I was like, “Oookay….” I don’t think I’d even driven on the interstate up until then. We got there and back, but it was the first time I’d taken myself to a comic shop. It was great because there was so much stuff I’d never seen before on the stands. CBC: Do you remember what you picked up? Anything memorable? Eric: I do. There was a Kent Williams and Jon J. Muth, Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown, from the late-’80s or early ’90s. The last issue has Wolverine coming out of a giant Havok skull and that cover really struck me. I remember that being one thing I bought. CBC: But you had gone to shops when your parents had driven you? Eric: No, I had gone only one time before. I remember seeing something in some kind of store, not a totally dedicated comic book store, but I remember seeing an advertisement for The Dark Knight Returns, which was about to come out. This was the first time I’d been in a place that had a bunch of comics. The closest thing I had was there might be a spin rack at a grocery store or gas station… or there was a Hallmark shop next to the grocery store in my town that had a pretty extensive magazine rack, where they’d have a bunch of comics. Most of the comics I bought came out of that Hallmark store. CBC: You were a collector from a young age? Eric: No, not until I was a teenager. CBC: Right. Can you name some titles you were particularly hot on to build a collection? Did you have Swamp Thing? Eric: I did. Swamp Thing was one, because of Bernie, I was definitely trying to get some. At that point in time, I had to settle for reprints, because, for me as a kid, the original printings tended to be expensive. I tended to collect the work of artists more than specific series. Amazing Spider-Man was always one I tended to gravitate towards, as far as a character. I remember getting a lot of that title. Then typical teenage boy stuff… the more violent the better. [laughter] “Look at all these spikes, so cool!” I bought a lot of terrible stuff. My taste was pretty bad, but I was a Marvel kid, too. I read a lot of Marvel. I definitely collected a lot of X-Men. CBC: Wolverine was big? Eric: Yeah, everybody loved Wolverine, like they still do. I was drawn to any of the darker characters, like my buddies who read comics, who were also into the dark, brooding, and violent characters. CBC: Are you still that way? Eric: I like stuff with a little more substance now. All the stuff I do is dark, brooding, and violent, so it doesn’t completely wear off, but I do try to have some substance to the story. CBC: Is there any corporate-owned character you could imagine yourself doing as work-for-hire? Eric: There are several. The Demon is one of them. I think I could do a really good Demon book. I’d like to take it back to that Jack Kirby giant-monster thing it started out as. But I’m pretty sure that’ll never happen. CBC: You would do a mean Demon, Eric. That would be awesome. Were girls a part of your high school years? Eric: Not really. I wasn’t much of a catch.

Razor Uncut TM & © tEverett Hartsoe.

CBC: Someone eventually caught you. [laughter] How would you characterize your high school years? Eric: Angst-ridden, like everybody else. We were all going through a time trying to figure out who we were as individuals. Things that seemed very important but, when you get older, you realize those things were just ridiculous. It was pretty typical, I think. I don’t have any real complaints. It was a good time for me, I guess. CBC: How were your grades? Eric: Terrible, terrible. School bored me to tears and I wasn’t the best student. CBC: Did you work during high school? Eric: I did. I worked at a Burger King. CBC: For how many years? Eric: Two or three. I was working there after I graduated for a little bit. CBC: What were your prospects after graduation? Eric: I thought I was going to Memphis College of Art, but that didn’t happen. I got married right out of high school. I went to the college and decided it was too much to put on a young family to try and go to school so far away from home. I did odd jobs and worked at an arts-&-crafts store. I jumped around from several different jobs. CBC: Going to a better wage each time? Eric: I was trying to find something that fit. I was disappointed in the positions. They weren’t jobs I wanted to stay at for any length of time. I was already trying to get into the comic business. I was doing comic samples and sending them to publishers and getting all the rejection letters and trying to keep it going. CBC: Were you just doing illustrations as a teenager, or were you doing full stories? Eric: I wrote some stories, but hadn’t written a full-length story and illustrated it until the first issue of The Goon. Up until then, I’d only written little snippets or short stories or samples trying to get work or pitch a book somewhere. The stuff I had done while I was a teenager was prose stories I would do some illustrations for. CBC: How would you characterize this style of art as a teenager? Was it any good? Eric: It was sloppy and pretty rough. Obviously I had some talent, but from a professional standpoint, I wasn’t ready to be a working artist. A couple years after high school, it started to click and it started being feasible for me to get work. CBC: I’m looking at a chronological list right now, and I’m seeing Best Cellars as your first published work. Eric: That was the first comic work of mine published. CBC: The character was Monster Boy? Eric: Right. It was a story about a character name Mog, a ten-page story, or something like that. It was about an ogre in the monster world. CBC: Did you write it? Eric: I did. CBC: Did you just pick the story out of a hat, so to speak, or was it something you had been working on? Eric: Well, I had seen a cartoon called Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, there was an episode where one of the mice turns into this monster with long arms and short legs and that inspired me. I wanted to do something like that. I decided, “I’ll do some kind of ogre-ish character.” CBC: The Grand Comics Database call Monster Boy a “Goon prototype.” Is that fair? Eric: In the loosest of terms, I would say it is. It’s the same kind of theme. But the world in that story is completely different. Monster Boy is almost a science-fiction story with a monster in it, set in the current day. There’s also a big guy and little guy. [chuckles] It was kind of a comedy with a big guy and little guy. I think that’s where the comparison ends. CBC: Is there a team you can harken back to, like in the movies or television that has COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

an echo perhaps? Eric: This is going to seem weird, but I base The Goon and Franky on Andy Taylor and Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith Show! CBC: That’s fair enough. Eric: And those Looney Tunes cartoons with a big dog and yappy little dog [Chester and Spike], that’s where that comes from. CBC: That’s cool. Warner Brothers cartoons and The Andy Griffith Show. [chuckles] The publisher, Out of the Cellar Comics, who are they? Eric: Two local guys named Chuck Angel and Larry Underwood. I was in a comic shop and saw they did a little horror comic called Monkey Stew. I contacted them because they were locals making comics. I mailed them a sample and they contact me and were putting together another book and would like me to contribute and that was Best Cellars. CBC: That was natural for you, since you’d already done prose writing, to write it yourself? Eric: Well, I wouldn’t say any of my early writing was any good, and I hope it has developed over time. I had a level of confidence with it that I could write a story myself.

Above: Early Eric Powell page, this from the “Let Us Prey” story scripted by Eric’s writing pal, Tom Sniegoski, in Razor Uncut #32 [Jan. 1997], published by London Night Studios.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell. Avatar Illustrated TM & © Avatar Press.

CBC: You got married right out of high school? Eric: I did, senior year. I married my high school girlfriend. We got pregnant right out of high school, so we got married. The positive side is we have two awesome boys and are really good friends, but we did split up. We were a little too young to get married. CBC: I got married at 30 and I still think that’s too young! [laughter] What are your boys’ names? Eric: Gage and Cade. CBC: How old are they? Eric: Gage is 25 now and Cade is 17. CBC: Do they live in the area? Eric: Yes, they are still around. CBC: You must have been jazzed to be in Best Cellars. Was it a good experience? Eric: I was thrilled to be included. I was very proud and excited. I hoped it would be a stepping-stone for more work. But it didn’t really happen that way. Here I had this little local comic and it would show them I was published, but I

still didn’t get much in the way of offers from anyone. CBC: What do you attribute the difficulties to? You were in Nashville and couldn’t do a one-on-one with a DC or Marvel editor? Eric: I think that’s important; you have to build camaraderie with an editor. Some people may think that’s not right, but, in this business, that editor has to depend on you. If they don’t know you, that’s hard to do. In my case, I don’t think I was ready. I wasn’t going to blow anybody away with what I was doing. I do think I was confident. I was confident after that I could start doing some work considering stuff that was being published, but I don’t think I would blow anybody away. CBC: Did you have a steady job in 1996–97? Had you found something you were doing for awhile? Eric: Around 1996–97, I had started doing some fill-in work and I met Tom Sniegoski at a Bernie Wrightson signing. He was writing Vampirella at the time. I showed my portfolio to Bernie and Tom was kind of looking over my shoulder and gave me his card. We ended up talking and, within a week, I got a job working on Razor, for London Night Studios, which was one of the bad-girl books in the ’90s. Before that, I was doing odd jobs, freelance illustration work… I even painted motorcycle helmets. I was doing anything I could do to make money and still make art. I was also Mr. Mom, staying home, taking care of my son, and working from home at the same time. After I got the job drawing Razor, I fully devoted myself to trying to get comic work exclusively. I ended up getting a lot of small-press work. A lot of things here and there… covers, one-shots, short stories. Then, I started doing some inking work for Kyle Hotz and some fill-in issues for Dark Horse for Buffy. CBC: How was inking? Eric: It was hard. Kyle was already very established artist at that time and I was cutting my teeth and learning. He had a meticulous way he wanted things inked, so I had to stay on my toes and unfortunately, he wasn’t always happy with the stuff I was doing, but I tried my best. CBC: Were you working through FedEx? Eric: Yeah. In those days, it was through FedEx. CBC: What was the first comic convention or show you

choices, correct lighting, proper perspective. It was the first piece I feel like was a professional piece. This was around the time that I started pushing The Goon. That was when I was starting to have a professional quality to my work. CBC: And who were your biggest influences at that time? Eric: Still Bernie Wrightson. Jack Davis was a huge influence, and so were Will Eisner, Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood… those guys. There were also people outside of comics like J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell, as far as my painting went. Might seem a little weird, but the textures Rockwell created in his paintings, since he does a very photo-realistic style definitely influenced my painting. CBC: Your iconic approach too, I think. When Bernie looked at your stuff, did he say anything constructive? Eric: He did. It was the first positive response I got from another professional. I didn’t expect him to say anything other than, “Yeah, keep it up.” When I sat the portfolio down in front of him, he said, “This is pretty good stuff.” Coming from Bernie Wrightson, I couldn’t be happier, coming from a big role model.

Previous page: Top left is considered the first or second appearance of Eric Powell’s The Goon, appearing in Avatar Illustrated #1 [Summer 1998]. Top right is what the marketplace considers the characters first appearance, in Dreamwalker #0 [Nov. 1998]. This page: Above is inarguably the third appearance of Eric’s trademark creation, from Dreamwalker #1 [Mar. 1999]. The Spring of 1999 brought forth the first Goon series and here, below, are the covers to the three existing issues of the ill-fated Avatar Press run, all painted by Eric.

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

went to? Eric: The first one I believe was Chicago Comic Con. CBC: How far away was it from home? Eric: Eight hours. I believe I drove up there with Mike Norton and some other local artists who were going up, so I rode up there with them. This would have been the mid-’90s. CBC: What was it like? Eric: It was interesting. It was my first time at a comic book convention. Today, I’m pretty jaded at this point — seen one comic convention, you’ve seen them all — but, at that time, it was all this amazing stuff you’d never seen before. CBC: You said you had Bernie look at your stuff. Did you seek out other professionals and ask their advice? Eric: I did. Tom Sniegoski and I went around everywhere and we were constantly pitching projects to everybody. I couldn’t even begin to estimate the amount of ideas that we came up with. I’d do a couple of drawings for a concept, he’d write a pitch for it, and we’d send it around. When that got rejected, we’d come up with another one and send that around. There’s no telling how many we did. CBC: Can you remember some that got rejected that had some resonance? Were they good or were they dumb? Eric: Some were better than others. I’m trying to remember some of the better ones… Tom had one called “The Ape.” It was some kind of god-like character in the form of a gorilla. There was some kind of gangster vibe to it. At one point, he had an ornate costume, but was also in a suit and fedora. [chuckles] CBC: How did you learn how to draw? Did you take classes? Eric: I didn’t take classes. It was just trial and error and a lot of practice. CBC: When did you reach a point that it clicked, “I’m on to something here.” You burst forth with The Goon #1, and that was, “Whoa, where is this guy from?” When did you start getting refined? Eric: I have a Goon painting that I kept and the moment I was working on something, I had an epiphany. “I’m making something.” Rather than a bunch of influences going this way and that, the painting had composition, actual color

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

Above: While painting this, in the early ’00s, Eric Powell had an epiphany and achieved, he says, “[C]omposition, actual color choices, correct lighting, [and] proper perspective.” Below: Powell art hero Jack Davis drew the cover for The Goon: One for the Road one-shot [2014].

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

CBC: Right. After all, he was Bernie Wrightson. For color, you said you were doing a painting of the Goon. Where did you develop your color sense? Eric: I think I stole all that from Frazetta. [chuckles] He did such a great job of using warm and earthy colors and I think I pulled all of that stuff into the paintings I was doing, or at least tried my best to swipe from. CBC: Where the concept of The Goon come from? Eric: I started out with the name. I thought “The Goon” would be a really cool name for a character and then I started taking everything I loved to draw. I didn’t want to do attractive characters — it wasn’t my strong point. I like drawing big, ugly characters. I kind of took that same formula I had from the Best Cellars format I had with the big guy with long arms and short legs with a gorilla build and made him kind of a gangster. I don’t like drawing modern buildings and cars, so I set it in this kind of weird Depression-era world so I wouldn’t be tied down to drawing like that. I also made it a fantasy world so I could make up anything that I wanted as I went along to keep from any type of reality. I could draw a 1930s-style grocery store next to

something that looked like it came out of a mad scientist’s castle. It was throwing everything I loved with horror and comedy and mashing them together. The Goon is what came out of that. CBC: Did you still have a partnership with Tom at that time? Eric: Yeah, we were trying to do stuff around that time. Nothing was clicking and I wasn’t getting any work. The inking work had dried up and I wasn’t getting offered anymore fill-in work from Dark Horse. It came down to, “Am I even going to be able to do this? Should I quit?” I told this story a thousand times, but this is the make it or break it point. I went to the Chicago Comic Con one year and was pitching The Goon around. Nobody wanted it and I didn’t get any work and I didn’t get the $100 back from the table in artist alley. I made the eight-hour drive back home, alone, which was the most depressing drive I’ve ever made, “Well, that’s my comic book career. It’s over with.” But, during that long drive, I thought, “I’ll give this one more shot. I’ll take out a loan and self-publish The Goon and see if I can’t make this happen. If I go out, at least I’ll go out on my own terms and I can’t say I didn’t give it 100 percent.” So, my now-ex and I went and took out a small loan and I self-published a few issues and somehow it took off right off the bat and Dark Horse saw it and offered to pick it up. CBC: So did you make the decision? Was she supportive of you? That’s a big decision for newlyweds to make. Eric: Robin is a big supporter. We’ve always been good friends and she’s super-supportive. She had more faith in my than I did. I’m kind of skeptical and a realist and didn’t know if this was a good thing to do, but she always believed I could make it. CBC: Let’s picture this. You were driving back… was it a Sunday? Eric: It was probably Monday. CBC: Did you call your wife before then? Eric: I’m sure I did. I called her and told her I didn’t make any money… CBC: So, you’re driving on Monday and you spent hours alone thinking about it and then, “Yeah, I need to give it one more shot”? Eric: Yeah. CBC: Then you sit down with your wife Monday or Tuesday? Eric: As soon as I got back home, I said, “Maybe I should try to self-publish.” She was like, “Yeah.” CBC: That’s awesome. Eric: Yeah, from what I remember, there was no debate. CBC: Did she know of the comics scene? Did she know how good you were? Eric: As I said, she had more faith in me than I did. She thought I was pretty good. She was a comics reader. CBC: Has she helped you with your stories at all? Are there aspects of her in your work? Eric: No, she never helped with the writing or anything, though I might bounce ideas off of her. But, no, there are no characters based on her suggestions. CBC: That’s very vivid memory to have. Would you characterize yourself as middle-class or poor at that time? Eric: We were pretty poor. I would say we were on the poorer side of things… CBC: You were renting? Eric: We were living with my parents at the time. It wasn’t like a spare room; it was more like a little apartment built on that we were living out of. We didn’t even have our own place. We were getting by. We weren’t barefoot and panhandling, or anything like that. We were a young couple with a young child, so money was tight. CBC: When was Gage born? Eric: March of 1994. CBC: So he was about four years old. You were working from home full-time on your comics? Eric: No, like I said, I was working from home, but anything

The Andy Griffith Show TM & © the respective copyright holders. Chester & Spike TM & © Warner Bros. Entertainment. The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

I could to get by. At the time, we were going to take out the loan, I had been doing some fill-in work and inking, but it was always whatever came along to pay the bills. CBC: What did you use for collateral to get the loan? Eric: It was a small loan, so we didn’t have to, like $2,500. But to us, that amount to pay back wasn’t easy. CBC: The comic book market at the time was volatile, after the Death of Superman stuff. The whole field went up and down. Were you cognizant of the fluctuations? Eric: As a young guy with this passion to make comics, I didn’t really care about all of that. It was more about me getting my book out there and doing my own thing. Also, during that time, everything I was doing was counter-productive to what was popular. [laughter] The mid-’90s, it was guys with futuristic bandoliers and shoulder pads and giant guns. Kind of that West Coast style of stuff was popular. I was a guy who drew like Bernie Wrightson and Jack Davis, a sloppier version of the E.C. guys, or something. It’s not surprising that everyone rejected The Goon. Plus, I had this book that was a weird comedy set in the Depression-era world full of monsters, so it didn’t relate to anything that was popular at that time. But I also feel like it was exactly what made it successful, when I self-published it, as there was nothing else out there to compare it to. I guess the closest thing at the time was Hellboy. Other than the supernatural aspects of a big guy punching monsters, but there’s not a lot of comparison between the two books from art style to writing. CBC: What was the first San Diego Comic Con you went to? Eric: I went and roomed with Tom Sniegoski. That was pre-Goon as well. I saved up money and thought, “I’m going to the big convention and I’m going to get a bunch of work.” As usually happens, you go to the convention and think, “I met these three guys and I think they have projects for me.” Then, you get home and start making phone calls and none of those things actually pan out. It was the mid-’90s; I can’t remember exactly what year. But, yeah, I went out there pretty early. CBC: Did Dave Stevens see the comic book? Eric: I think he did. I remember meeting him at San Diego and I may have given him a copy. I can’t remember. I do specifically remember going by his booth and meeting him. CBC: I can’t imagine him not being delighted with your book. I remember it coming out and it’s exactly as you characterize it. It was like nothing else, but yet harkens back to an awful lot of really good stuff. It was clever and smart. You had a lot of old Hollywood movie allusions in there and setting in the Depression was a fun and smart move. I knew Dave and I know he’d love this kind of stuff! Eric: Thanks. That’s extremely flattering; I’m a big fan of his. I wish I could have talked to him about this book. It’s extremely unfortunate that he passed away so young. CBC: Did you go up to professionals with The Goon? Did you give it to Bernie?

This page: Top two images are inspirations for The Goon/ Franky team, Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, from The Andy Griffith Show, and Warner Bros. cartoon characters, Chester and Spike. Above is Dark Horse Presents #157 [Sept. 2000].

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

Eric: I can’t remember if I gave it to Bernie. I’m sure I did. I stuck it in anyone’s face I possibly could! I remember showing it to Will Eisner and he gave me a mixed review. [chuckles] He hadn’t had a chance to read it because I showed it to him right there, but I gave him a copy. I asked him to flip through and tell me what he thought. I remember him saying something like, “The art is okay, but maybe work on your subject matter because I see all these kids out there with these killer-characters.” Even though he just saw the ultra-violent thing by flipping through, but the levity and humor in it wasn’t something he could see just by flipping through it. Still, I was super-excited just to get those words from him. CBC: Is there an element of The Spirit in The Goon? Eric: I think it’s definitely an influence. The Spirit is somewhat of a heightened reality, not as much as The Goon, but definitely that world and that environment influenced The Goon a little bit. CBC: Do you see a Goon universe that you see that is ripe with possibilities? Is he within a dimension with other characters? Did you ever team him up with other characters that are not yours? Eric: When I first got to Dark Horse, we did a Hellboy crossover. We were joking around— Mike Mignola and I — about doing a crossover and how it wouldn’t make any sense. Then Mignola said, “No, we should do it. In the end, Hellboy will just get hit in the head and at the end of it he’ll go, well, that was stupid.” CBC: I know you discussed the influences and different touchstones about where the Goon is from. In his reality, what is he and who is he? Eric: You mean from the most general description? CBC: Yes, you’re talking to an actor, for instance, you’d say, “This is the character.” Eric: If I’m talking to someone who is going to play the Goon, I’d say, “He’s that quiet guy in the corner that looks like a dummy, but is actually the smartest guy in the room. He’s a character that lives inside his own head. He’s also possibly extremely angry.” CBC: Ya think! [laughter] Eric: In the first story, everyone thinks he’s a big thug, but he’s actually the one running the show. He kind of uses his outward appearance as a camouflage. CBC: What’s his reason for existence? Monsters come his way and he fights them? Eric: Yeah, he puts on a persona as a tough guy shaking down the town, but he’s just doing this to take care of people. He keeps the persona of a tough-guy, that he’s a criminal and just in it for the money, but at the end of the day, when there’s a problem like a monster coming out of someone’s toilet, everyone in town knows who they have to call, and it’s the Goon. CBC: So you published the first comic. Did you deal directly with Diamond and Capital? Was Capital still around then? Eric: I never distributed anything with Capital. I don’t think they were around. I dealt directly with Diamond. Luckily, I traded some advertising work with a local printer to get some copies printed, so I had copies on hand I could send out. So when I sent out my submission packet to Diamond, I had some copies to include and that 53

The first few years of that were kind of crazy the way it was escalating. CBC: Did it improve your standard of living? Eric: Oh, yes! Leaps and bounds. CBC: Were you able to get a house? Eric: We actually bought my parents’ house. They found a house they liked and we bought the other one from them. CBC: Wow. Cool. Is that the house you grew up in? Eric: For half of my life. Like I said, I grew up in a trailer in rural Tennessee and then Dad built a house. That’s the home I purchased, which I’ve since sold. That was the first house I bought. CBC: Was it far from the trailer? Eric: It was 20 minutes away. We

were still in the same area. CBC: How many issues did you self-publish? Eric: Four books and a trade paperback. CBC: Did you stick with the same printer and everything was the same throughout that experience? Eric: The local printer I used and traded advertising with was in Murfreesboro, and then I started using Brenner Printing, out of Texas. They did the other books and the trade paperback. CBC: All this inventory was in your parents’ house? Eric: Yes, in the garage. CBC: Did you have to fill single orders or fulfill orders for the distributors? Eric: We did all of it. We did mail orders, but not too much of that. CBC: What were the demands on you besides doing the regular book? Did you do a lot of shows? Eric: I did a lot of shows for promotion. The timeframe of self-publishing was so short, though. Before our fourth book was out, I’d already agreed to go to Dark Horse. You’re talking maybe six months. CBC: You put them out fast! Eric: I think the first few books were around monthly or bi-monthly, but I was churning them out as fast as I could. It was my source of income. CBC: You were grabbing it before it went away? Eric: Yeah.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

helped me a lot to get them to go, “Okay, yeah.” CBC: Did they call you back or was it through email? Eric: I don’t think we were using email at that time. It was just through the mail. CBC: How many did they order? Roughly? Eric: I can’t remember… it would have been around 1,000 to 2,000, which isn’t a lot, but considering it was done by us, out of our house, we were able to turn a profit. CBC: Did distributors reorder? Eric: They did. It took off almost immediately. I can’t remember our orders, but they climbed by several hundred every issue. CBC: How many printings did the first one go through? Eric: Just one printing. CBC: Did you hold on to a box of first printings? Eric: Yes, I did. CBC: Has that been profitable for you? Eric: It has. [chuckles] I held on to a few copies of the old issues and, every once in awhile, we’ll throw them out there. CBC: What’s the highest it has gone for? Do you know? Eric: Oh, I don’t know. Somebody was telling me the very first Goon #1 was over $1,000 now. CBC: Cool. I have a friend who bought #1 and remains an avid, crazed fan of The Goon ever since. Did you have fans right out the gate? Eric: Come to think of it, I can’t say we weren’t using email, because the internet helped us at the start. We immediately got buzz on the web. There was a lot of comics guys online talking about the book. It was weird. I’d been struggling all these years and, all of a sudden, I put out this one book and it just kept escalating. “Oh, the first book came out and we made some money. Oh, look, the second book came out and we made more money. That’s cool. Look, all these people are talking about it! Wow! Hey, Dark Horse called and they want to publish it!” Then it comes out from Dark Horse and we got all this buzz and got nominated for an Eisner.

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

CBC: Who’s the Goon’s buddy? Eric: Franky. I find it funny, the Joe Pesci maniacal small guy. Joe Pesci from Goodfellas is in Franky. CBC: Cool. Are they immortal? Eric: No, they are pretty human despite how they look. CBC: Did Mike Richardson approach you? Eric: Yes, I had initially pitched it to Dark Horse and they turned it down. There was nothing comparable to it going on and they didn’t know what to make of it. So I self-published it and somebody put it on his desk and he said, “We need to do this book.” The editor I’d been working with on the Buffy stuff approached me. By that time, I was already getting a little burned out trying to juggle all of the demands of doing the book by myself so the opportunity to jump to, one: Dark Horse was my favorite publisher. [Dark Horse creator-owned sub-imprint] Legend was happening at that time, so we had John Byrne, Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Art Adams, Mike Allred, and all these guys together. I loved all the stuff they were doing. I was more than eager to jump to Dark Horse. CBC: What was the deal from Dark Horse? Eric: Dark Horse pays in advance. I got an advance per issue and then per-royalty based. Luckily The Goon just kept picking up steam. It built its fan base; it was pretty solid. CBC: How many copies were being printed by Dark Horse? Eric: I think we’d always been around 10,000. Sometimes more; sometimes less. CBC: Did you recognize the merchandising, licensing, Hollywood possibilities early on? Eric: I hoped it would have some life outside of comics because I care about the legacy of the work and the characters and I know, in order for it to live on and have a broader audience, there has to be something made beyond comics. I’d always hoped there’d be something else done with it, but I didn’t expect it. CBC: Was that a part of your agreement? They’d done The Mask and had some licensing history. Eric: Yeah. They had a good track record of books making it into films. Of course, I daydreamed about it. But then, Tim Miller from Blur Studio, who has now gone on to direct Deadpool and working on the next Terminator, and director David Fincher approached us about the rights. CBC: Wha--!? Did you talk with Fincher? Eric: Yeah, I had story meetings with him several times. That was 10 years ago. We’re still trying to get the thing done. We’re trying to do it as an animated film to stay true to it. CBC: CGI animation? Eric: Right. The great thing about it, it’s taking a long time because we’re trying to do an animated film that’s not kid-oriented, so there’s some resistance to that, but that’s changing now. On top of that, these guys have just really stuck with it and I don’t think I would personally have been willing to go at it this long if I didn’t feel like they really got the book and would do right by it. I feel like they really understand the world and the characters and don’t want to turn it into something else. We’re still churning away on it. CBC: Is the option for every five years? Eric: It’s different; we’ve gone through several trying to set it up in different ways. We just set it up at Fox, so we’ll see what happens there. There’s not guarantee but we’re in a great place. When Tim optioned this in the first place, he’d never done a feature film. Now he’s done a really big feature film and he’s about to do another really big feature film, it looks like, so his clout is growing and Fincher, I think, is actually opening some doors and I’m optimistic we’ll get this thing done. CBC: With Dark Horse, how many different merchandising items did you do? Eric: We did a statue with Randy Bowen in the early going and some T-shirts. If you go through the merchandising stuff Dark Horse does, we pretty much did all of it that they COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

always do—lunchbox, Zippo lighter, T-shirt, PVC figures… We’ve done a few things. Outside of the Dark Horse merchandising, Mezco did some action figures a while back… It’s been a few years… and then the Bowen statues. CBC: In the early ’00s, you were doing some inking for Marvel? Eric: Yeah, the stuff I was doing for Kyle. CBC: Why, if you were busy with The Goon? Eric: So, the first three issues of The Goon came out through Avatar and I wasn’t super-thrilled with the production quality, so I thought I’d wait out that agreement with someone else, and that’s when I started going around pitching it to other companies, but no one wanted it. It was in between. I did three issues that came and went and that’s when I did the fill-in work for Dark Horse and inked at Marvel for some of Kyle’s stuff. After that is when I self-published. CBC: Albatross? Was that your company? Where does the name come from? The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner? Eric: Yeah, it comes from that and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They have an albatross bit. I named the company, Albatross Exploding Funny Books, which was meant to mimic Monty Python’s Flying Circus — same kind of absurd, weird name. CBC: Albatross Exploding Funny Books. [chuckles] You just took out the “exploding”? Eric: Yeah, just Albatross Funny Books nowadays. CBC: So, how was the Dark Horse experience overall? Eric: Overall? I’m really thankful for everything Dark Horse has done for me, but at the same time, I’ve done things for them. I’ve made a lot of money for them over the years. We have a good relationship going and, even though I’m not publishing with them anymore, I have a lot of respect for those guys and Mike Richardson. Overall, it was a good experience. CBC: Are they your favorite publisher to work with outside of your own? Eric: I don’t know if I have a favorite one. All of them have a different M.O. Image has a pretty good deal, but you have to go in knowing they’re not going to help you much. That’s the trade-off. I wouldn’t say I’ve had a bad experience working for any-

This spread: At top on opposite page is, at top, a Goon rarity, Digital Webbing Presents #5 [Oct. 2002], and below are the self-published four-issue series of The Goon that ran between 2002–03 and a one-shot The Goon Color Special [’02]. This page, above, is the cover of the first Dark Horse issue of The Goon [June 2003], a series which ran for some 50 or so issues. To our chagrin, we have only room for this one cover of that long-running series! Left is Sean McNally’s Goon sculpture.

This spread: Among Eric Powell’s creations are the kids comic book concepts, Chimichanga, about a little bearded girl and her companion, a bizarre monster she guides through life in the sideshow; and Spook House, a horror anthology subtitled, “Scary Stories for Kids!” The Spook House Halloween Special is due this fall.

CBC: Right. Not really memorable for you? Eric: Not really. It wasn’t really stuff I was dying to do. CBC: You did the occasional inking job for Marvel? Eric: Yes, that was around the same time. CBC: Did you naturally have a drive to do a creator-owned title? Eric: Yes. That was the main goal. Like everybody else who’s influenced by comics, we all want to do those characters we grew up with, but I didn’t have a desire to do those characters as much as to do my own thing. The few things I got to work on stuff like classic characters, as much fun as I’d thought it would be, it wasn’t much fun actually doing it, because you might love the John Byrne/ Chris Claremont X-Men, but when you, yourself, get to draw X-Men, that’s not what you’re doing. You can’t recreate what someone else did. For me, it was kind of unfulfilling. I had more fun doing my own stuff. CBC: Was it philosophical at all? To be creator-owned is to be independent? To stay away from the corporations? Any of that? Eric: I wouldn’t say I had any philosophy like, “Corporations are bad.” It’s just that I had more fun doing my own stuff. If these guys, like Jack Kirby, who created all this classic stuff, even though they didn’t get to work in the creator-owned era, I think if they were alive today, they’d definitely be doing creator-owned stuff. I don’t think Kirby would be working for either Marvel or DC. CBC: It probably would have been philosophical for them, too. Eric: Oh, yeah, probably for him. He had trouble… or didn’t feel his rights were necessarily being respected. CBC: From the outside, it would seem Dark Horse was a good fit for you. Was it? Eric: Yeah. I had a good relationship with Dark Horse. I was definitely excited to be there. They were my favorite publisher when I was in my late teens going into my 20s. I loved everything they were doing and their talent pool was incredible, with Frank Miller, John Byrne, Mignola, Mike Allred, Paul Chadwick, and all those guys. It was pretty amazing. CBC: Did you ever think of teeming your character with Mr. Monster? Eric: I did, actually! [chuckles] I love Mr. Monster! I thought about it, but I never did contact them about it. I thought it would be a good crossover. CBC: He’s an awesome character, one of my favorites. You doing things with Mike Mignola seemed to be a natural. Eric: Yeah, other than the one crossover, we haven’t worked on anything together directly. I think Mike and I have similar sensibilities when it comes to the types of comics we like. #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Chimichanga, Spook House, and The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

body in the past. Really, I haven’t had problems with Marvel or DC, Dark Horse, Boom, or IDW. I would say everyone I’ve worked with has been pretty cool. CBC: Have you always had a professional attitude? Have you always been able to meet your deadlines? Eric: No. Meeting the deadlines is one thing. I do have a professional attitude about doing the work; I don’t put things off to play video games. I have a tendency to over-commit to things; that’s where I tend to get into trouble. I always think I can do more than I actually can. I think I still have that freelancer’s mentality that I have to say yes to everything because I don’t know where the next paycheck is coming from. I bite off more than I can chew. I do have books that tend to be late from time to time. CBC: You just describe me to a T! [laughter] What happened to Tom? Eric: He’s still writing stuff. He moved out of comics and was doing some books. He had, I think, an ABC Family show based on his series of novels called The Fallen. He’s actually working on some Goon stuff with me now. CBC: You guys never had a falling out? Just drifted apart? Eric: No, I was just doing my stuff and he was doing his. We’ve stayed friends. He was focusing on novels, so there wasn’t a lot of time to collaborate. But, we’d been talking about this one idea for Goon for years, and when I brought it back, we said, “We really need to do this one idea,” so we’re doing it. [The interview’s second session commences a week or so later.] CBC: I guess I need to understand the chronology here: You first self-published The Goon, right? Eric: No, three issues first came out from Avatar. CBC: Explain what Avatar is. Eric: Avatar Press is a smaller company and I had done three issues for them and it kind of came and went and no one really noticed it. I also wasn’t pleased with the production quality, so I decided to take it somewhere else and nobody wanted it, so that’s when I started self-publishing it, in the early ’00s. CBC: After that is when Dark Horse picked it up? Eric: Right. CBC: It’s coming altogether! [chuckles] Around the turn of the century, you had already been doing work for Dark Horse, some Buffy the Vampire Slayer titles? Eric: Yes. CBC: Was that an assignment they threw at you? Eric: Yes, it was just work. I don’t think I was well-suited to draw Buffy, but that’s what they offered me, so I took it.

Chimichanga, Spook House TM & © Eric Powell.

CBC: Right. What happened with Dark Horse? Eric: It was a lot of little things. It felt like it was time for me to move on. I still have a lot of respect for them and won’t get into a lot of detail. I consider a lot of them family. It made more sense. I started self-publishing again to see if it would work for me and it worked a little too well to consider going with a different publisher. If I can do all of this myself and not lose any sales and not split any profits, it makes more sense for me to do that. CBC: How long were you with Dark Horse? How many issues? Eric: It was over 50. CBC: That’s a long time. Eric: Considering the fact that it wasn’t a monthly, and was five or six issues a year, that is a long time. CBC: Were the deadlines for you an issue… not discipline, maybe, but sticking tightly to a schedule? Were you tight with the deadline or wanted to delay it to get the best possible product out that you could? Eric: We were never on a strict schedule. We kind of went bi-monthly at the beginning and then it became when I would get something done, we’d put it out. Because I was doing everything myself, it took a little bit longer than usual to produce a book, or a bit longer than with a book that had a team on it. Life gets in the way sometimes. I feel like we did an okay job keeping it out there. But, especially when you’re one guy driving the ship… you get sick, maybe, and life issues that come up that eats into your schedule a little bit. CBC: So you did everything? Literally Everything? You did have a colorist? Eric: We did on a few issues near the end. Dave Stewart came in and started coloring when we were doing it monthly. We had a year we did it monthly. He stuck around for a little while after that and then I went back to coloring it myself. CBC: Wow. You did computer coloring? Eric: Yeah, but I use a lot of washes, too. I would say it was a combination of working on the board and digital color. CBC: I like how you were able to switch off using color sequences and then perhaps say it was a flashback sequence and you’d do it in pencil, right? Eric: Yeah, I was always trying to experiment with techniques, trying to keep it interesting for myself and visually interesting for the reader. Any opportunity I got to change it up a bit, I would take it. It keeps the look of the book evolving a little bit. CBC: The pencils are remarkable. It’s interesting that you can translate that… the printing is that fine that you can bring that out. Do you have an affection for the Atlas monsters? Eric: I’m not too familiar with that stuff. I have some reprints and stuff. I love the old Kirby stories… the look of the old Kirby monsters. I haven’t read a whole lot of that stuff. CBC: You certainly nailed it! The current cover of The Jack Kirby Collector [#77, Fall 2019], you did the inking... the finishing? Eric: Yeah. I think that’s a Frankenstein monster from The Demon, right? CBC: Yeah, that’s frickin’ awesome! Eric: Thanks! CBC: What would you like to do? Where do you want to go from here? Eric: I just want to be in a place to just keep doing comics. I want to continue to do the stuff I want to do. I’m not out to make Albatross a giant company. I’m not out to compete with Boom! or Dark Horse or IDW. I just want to do my own thing and publish books that I like and do fun stuff. At the end of the day, I’d like my schedule to be a bit more relaxed and work on comics and have fun with them. CBC: Do you feel comfortable with the future of the industry? Eric: I don’t know. I’m not too gloom-and-doom about it. I guess because I’ve been working in it long enough. Since my first conventions, all I’ve heard is people in the business talking about the collapse and that’s been 25 years! [chuckles] I think there’s always going to be people who like comics. Whether or not I can convince people to read mine, but there will always be some way to format it and present it to people. Will the direct market survive? I don’t know. I love comic shops. I love the experience of going to comic book COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

shops. With the way things are changing, I don’t know. I feel comics will always be there in some way, shape, or form. CBC: Prior to this interview, I went out and picked up the Fancy Pants editions, which are very charming stuff, especially looking at it chronologically is really interesting. I’ve been reading them over the years anyway and they’re very endearing characters. They’re likable in a 1930s Warner Brothers way. What was the idea behind Albatross? At first it was to self-publish and then you expanded? Eric: I want to try to have a place to publish my own stuff. That’s the real basis behind it; a home for my own material. But I’d like to publish other people’s stuff and try to give it a home. I don’t want to try to make some giant publishing house out of it. I don’t want that much work for one thing! The idea of having a big, unwieldy company is the exact opposite of what I want to do. I want make something that’s more niche and specialized to the types of projects that I like. Just keep it small and fun. CBC: What was the first non-Eric Powell title you published? Eric: The first thing we did ever from Albatross that wasn’t mine was Rebecca Sugar’s book, Pug Davis, which we’re doing a new edition of that. I met Rebecca years and years ago when she was still a student and 57

Above: At press-time, this, the sixth issue of the latest Goon mini-series was on the stands. Here’s Eric’s cover painting of that issue. Below: Example of Goon merch, a Zippo lighter available from Dark Horse.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

I could see she had a lot of potential and it turns out she had more potential than I thought. She’s gone on to be an award-winning creator of animated TV shows. CBC: You started spinning off, having a Goon Universe… correct me if I’m wrong, with Buzzard… Eric: I don’t know if it qualifies as a universe yet. CBC: Maybe a neighborhood? Eric: Yeah, a “Goon Neighborhood.” [laughter] We have a story called Lords of Misery that we’ll be releasing next year that bridges the gap between the Albatross series and the Dark Horse series. Like another little bit of the “neighborhood.” CBC: You’ve branched out and done non-Goon comics… Chimichanga… What is Chimichanga? Eric: It started out as a pitch for an animated show. I was approached by a kids’ network to come up with a show. At the end of the day, they weren’t interested. I had showed it to my sons who were still pretty young at the time. Of all the stuff I’d ever done, Chimichanga was the only thing they ever kept asking me about. I started to believe there’s something there because my kids really liked it. So, pretty much for them, since there wouldn’t be a show, I turned it

into a comic for them so they could see something they’d been asking about. I had an idea, kind of classic bearded woman from the circus… I had the idea of making it a kids’ character by making it a little girl who would grow into the bearded woman. It’s a little bearded girl named Lula and she trades some of her chin whiskers to a witch in exchange for a magic egg that ends up being a giant monster that she names Chimichanga because she likes Mexican food. CBC: Is it her pet? Eric: Yeah. Kind of a pet; kind of a buddy. CBC: Is it horror… is it violent? Eric: No, it’s a total kids’ book. I try to make, when I do stuff kid-oriented, I try to make it fun for kids and adults. It’s definitely kid-oriented, but a fun all-ages book, for sure. CBC: How many issues was it? Eric: I think the first mini-series was three issues and the second one was four. CBC: Soup to nuts, you did everything? Eric: The first three issues from Albatross were black-&white, and then I brought it over to Dark Horse and Dave Stewart colored it. Then the second series, I wrote it and Stephanie Buscema painted it. CBC: Wow! Eric: She did a really great job. CBC: Stephanie’s great. You did Hillbilly next? Eric: Yeah, Hillbilly is what we relaunched Albatross with next. CBC: What about The Goon? Eric: We had wrapped up The Goon, but it was still with Dark Horse. CBC: You “wrapped up…” Was it on hiatus? Eric: I had brought the storyline to an end with the last series at Dark Horse. I felt like the story seemed to wrap itself up. I thought, “Well, I might eventually come back to The Goon, but if I decide I never want to pick it up again and move on to other things, the ending works.” It was fine where it was. After a couple of years, I got the itch to work on it again. CBC: What was Hillbilly? Eric: I always tell people it’s “Conan set in Appalachia.” [laughter] I just got this idea that all of the fantasy and sorcery-type stuff seems to always be set in an old-English setting. I thought it would be interesting to take all the sword-&-sorcery stuff and set it in an Appalachia setting or a Southern rural setting. Growing up here, lots of weird folk tales and creepy stories you hear about the woods. I thought it would be interesting to have a Southern fantasy character. CBC: Was it tongue-in-cheek? Eric: I would say there are elements of humor in it, but it is a straight-up fantasy. CBC: What kind of fantasy? Eric: It’s about a boy who is born without eyes. He gets suckered into helping a witch and the witch gives him his eyesight, but he loses his mother due to the witch’s treachery. The witch had given him the task of retrieving the devil’s cleaver because it was an object that could kill other witches and she had a rivalry with another witch. No witch could touch it because it was so deadly to anything evil, because the devil didn’t trust anyone who worked for him, so he made all of his objects deadly to any of his servants. She got this human boy to retrieve the cleaver and when he finds out the witch has double-crossed him, he kills the witch and takes it himself and vows to hunt down all the other witches. CBC: Are they all located in the Ozarks? Eric: Yes, there’s apparently a large witch population! [laughter] CBC: That sounds fun. And you returned to it. You did two mini-series? Eric: We have four volumes out right now. CBC: You seem to be quite clever in repackaging your work. You’ve had omnibuses. You’ve been able to make a

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

Above: Piece done for the Mondo Gallery exhibition celebrating The Goon’s 20th anniversary, which took place last spring at their Austin, Texas, location.

Below: A relatively recent Albatross Funny Books release is Eric’s Hillbilly, a sword-&-sorcery storyline based in the wilds of the Appalachian mountains.

very important artist to our company CBC: I think Steve is a big secret. Not enough people know of his art, which is absolutely delightful. I’ve been a friend of Frank Forte for many years now, who introduced me to Steve’s work. Any plans to do a regular Mannion series? Eric: We have some stuff in the pipeline we want to get Steve on. I think we’re open to anything he wants to do. CBC: What is Grumble? Eric: Grumble is a book by Mike Norton who’s known for about a thousand books. He’s worked for Marvel and DC doing just about everything. He’s known for Battlepug. He’s done a book at Image that’s very popular. It’s a book about a con artist wizard who turns himself into a pug to avoid bounty hunters and can’t get himself unstuck. It’s kind of like an on-the-run road book. It’s been described — and I think it’s a good description — as “Hellblazer meets Howard the Duck.” It’s a really fun book. CBC: How did you publishing him come about? Did you approach him? Did he approach you? Eric: I did. I think it was Chicago a couple years back. I told him, “Hey, if you ever want to do anything, I’ll publish it, whatever it is.” He said, “Be careful what you ask for because I have this idea of a guy who turns into a pug.” He described it as “Hellblazer meets Howard the Duck.” I love Mike’s stuff and love any kind of crazy stuff, so it was right up my alley. CBC: We met up at San Diego Comic-Con this year. How was San Diego for you? Eric: San Diego was great and seems to be the same thing every year. It was a good show. CBC: What makes for a good show? Eric: For us, personally? Some people do not have a good time at San Diego because of the crowds and so many shiny objects for people to be distracted, but we seem to always have a good show there and I think one of the best things about it — because it draws such a weird and diverse crowd, we’re able to expose people who aren’t aware of our stuff to it. CBC: And, obviously, Comic-Con is a huge media thing. Hollywood is there. Do you get in-person inquiries from people in the business? Eric: Yeah, all the time. They have no idea was The Goon is. They walk by and ask, “Has this been optioned?” It’s constant. “Has this been optioned?” There’s a lot of fishing going on. There are people out there who want to swipe up #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Illustration, Hillbilly TM & © Eric Powell.

perennial out of The Goon. Eric: Yeah. It’s been in print since I started publishing with Albatross. It’s not been out of print. CBC: That’s outstanding. Spook House: is that just for Halloween? Eric: It’s a labor of love. I had an idea to do a horror anthology for kids, because it’s something I would’ve enjoyed as a kid. Something fun for me and other creators to do around the Halloween season to give a little something to the kids and try to get them into some comics. CBC: Is that tied into the Steve Geppi’s Halloween comics giveaway—not Free Comic Book Day—but the event they sponsor at Halloween…? Eric: Yes, Halloween ComicFest. We’ve been involved with that the last couple of years. We do a Spook House mini-comic for that. CBC: I’ve seen that. It’s clever. You’re going to do another one? Eric: Yeah. We’ll do it this year. CBC: Are you beginning to get a stable… not a studio necessarily, but a group of artists you’re helping to develop? Eric: I wouldn’t say “helping to develop,” but we have guys that are definitely “Albatross guys.” We have Steve Mannion. He’s worked on Spook House, Hillbilly, Galaktikon. He’s done a lot of work for us. Always dependable, always takes care of the project and does good work. He’s a

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

options so they have a bunch of stuff to throw up against the wall and see if it sticks, without having any familiarity with the work. CBC: How do you feel about that? Eric: I think it’s gross. Real gross. I’m all for stuff being turned into films and creators having their work exposed to a wider audience, but Hollywood is pretty slimy. You get to experience some of the bad parts of it if you are a person with a comic book property when comic book properties are so hot now. A lot of the people, like I said, they just want the property—not because they like it, but to walk in a room and say, “I’ve got this, this, and this.” Just stuff to throw at a wall; they don’t even care. CBC: The Goon has been optioned, right? If you don’t like those people just collecting options to slap on a table, do you have criteria for people you would like to deal with? Eric: If someone just walks up the table and flips through a book and says, “Has this been optioned yet?” I just say, “Yeah.” I just kind of blow them off because they’re not… they have no real interest in it. They’re just scanning stuff. If I get interest, it’s usually never at a convention. It’s over the phone or email. They’ve read it and get it and have a real interest. I’ll talk to them about the property. Luckily, with The Goon, all the guys involved are not your typical Hollywood scumbags [chuckles]. They’re good guys and appreciate the characters and want to do right by it, so I’m in a good situation. CBC: Anyone needs to watch David Fincher’s films and see how great they are. Have you watched [the Netflix series on serial killers] Mindhunter? Eric: I love Mindhunter. It is great. CBC: It’s outstanding! If it wasn’t just serial killers and was just the characters, it… Eric: …would still be great. CBC: Yes! Those characters are so original and I’ve always been crazy for his work. Do you have other titles? You came out with Grumble versus The Goon. That was obviously a promotional thing… ? Eric: Yeah. I wanted to do something for Free Comic Book Day that wasn’t just an advertisement or a throwaway. I wanted to do something fun that was also kind of promote the company as a whole, so I thought a crossover would be good. CBC: I’ve always been curious about whether Free Comic Book Day is worth it for small publishers… Eric: It’s a good way to get out there, but as far as any analytical information to see if it draws people to your product because there’s no data… “This is what we did when we didn’t have Free Comic Book Day and this is what we did when we did.” There’s no way to make a comparison to see if it actually helped you. CBC: I wonder if you could do a QR, like inside the book to say, “Learn more about Albatross,” to see if it would drive potential customers to your books. Is it expensive? Eric: You’re usually doing more volume than you’re used to, so the printing is expensive, but it’s not really a situation where… you’re just going to break even. It’s a lot of work for promotion. CBC: You don’t see an end to The Goon, but do you see big epics you want to do? Eric: I don’t know. If something comes to mind, I’m sure we’ll do it. Right now, the way I see The Goon is a lot of little pulpy adventures and keeping it fun. There’s always moods or phases you want to do. I’m COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

not feeling the giant epic. I’m more in short story and pulpy adventure mode. CBC: Do you have an office separate from your house? Eric: We have a warehouse as well as an office in the house. We’re mostly working from home. CBC: Do you have an editor? I see the name of Tracy Marsh here. Eric: Yes, she’s our editor. CBC: Is everybody freelance? Eric: Yeah, for the most part. I try to use freelance to keep the costs low. If you don’t need anybody in-house, it helps. CBC: Do you feel like a publisher that you’re pulled away from the creative side of things pretty often? Eric: Yeah. I would say that’s a drawback. I could create more stuff if I weren’t publishing. I’ve given it thought to bring in other people for day-to-day so I could focus more on the creative aspect. CBC: Are you looking to publish other creators’ books? Eric: Well, we’re not actively pursuing anything. If something strikes me or I get an idea for something, or the creator themselves, maybe. If it’s somebody I’m a fan of their work, yes. CBC: Do you have a wish list? Eric: There’s a bunch of people on my list. [laughs] I don’t think Albatross is top on their radar. Some of the more high profile guys… if their choice is Image or Albatross, I think they’ll go with Image! CBC: Albatross has a certain flavor with horror and adventure, but humor, too. I’m looking at the cover of Mega Ghost. Eric: I think that’s stuff I gravitate towards. I like stuff that doesn’t take itself too seriously. That’s my own personality rubbing out on things we publish. CBC: There’s not enough of it on the stands otherwise. Eric: I would agree. I think there should be more of the stuff we’re doing, which is why I’m publishing it.

This page: It’s been in the works for a good portion of this decade, including a Kickstarter campaign that raised $441,900 to create “proof of concept” footage to entice a major studio to produce a Goon animated movie. Thus far, David Fincher, amazing director of The Social Network and Fight Club, and Tim Miller, director of Deadpool, are attached to the Eric Powell/Blur Studio/Dark Horse Entertainment project. Artwork on this page are production paintings by Sean McNally, whose other Goon work can be seen at artstation.com.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

This spread: Alongside an Eric Powell self-caricature, the cover of the latest Goon collection, from sketch to finish.

The Goon TM & © Eric Powell.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

Fantastic Four TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

This spread: Eric Powell contributes a variant cover for the recent reboot of Fantastic Four. Here is the cover art in all the various creative stages. Fantastic Four #1 [Aug. 2018].

Fantastic Four TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

How was I to know terribly overlooked and terrifically talented cartoonist Steve Mannion, an artist I’ve longed to cover in CBC, just so happened to be associated with Eric Powell’s Albatross Funny Books as I was putting this Powell cover-featured ish together? Heck, I always connected Mannion (whose Fearless Dawn comic books meld mucky monsters and irresistibly cute maidens into a fun, finely rendered series) with old pal Frank Forte and his Asylum Press, who remains a Mannion chum. Thus we’re delighted to include the guy, who has been drawing Spook House and Galaktikon for Albatross as of late, and, with time being of the essence, we asked the artist to share an autobiographical essay, which follows! Below: Back in 2013, Ye Ed asked old pal Frank Forte, the man behind Asylum Press and sometime guest editor of Heavy Metal, to include Steve Mannion’s outstanding cover art for Fearless Dawn: Secret of the Swamp [2011] in CBC #6’s Swampmen extravaganza. Alas, that was not meant to be, so we’re happy to feature it here!

cartoons and Star Trek, but that Batman TV show was real important to me! At four and five years old, I took it very seriously. One of the kids in our apartment complex had Famous Monsters of Filmland and all sorts of toys, plus MAD magazines, and things like that. That was during my Universal Monster/B-movie/Godzilla phase, what with the Aurora monster model kits and Chilller Theatre, Creature Feature, on Channel 9, 11, and 5 out of New York City. My fellow tristate older readers may remember! We were ’70s kids totally digging all that stuff. I got into whatever monster movie was on TV. Musically, I liked the Beatles, and whatever was on the radio. Now, when working, I usually just appreciate the silence. In school, I was singled out as an artist type, because I was always drawing. We had Tiger Talk, our middle school paper and I was the staff artist. In high school, I went all punk rock and, in 1983, I submitted a bunch of drawings for the yearbook, including the cover. As a child, I figured I’d be a garbage man or a school bus driver or something when I grew up. They played these scare “crash” movies for us in middle school and I remember one of ’em scared me out of any bus driver career. I think it was called Signal 13 or Highway of Death or something like that. I don’t think the thought the phrase “professional artist” really came to mind until senior year in high school when we got a Kubert School flyer sent to our graphics department at Watchung Hills. It seemed affordable and something I might possibly be able to do. So I saved up and went there. Back in middle school, I remember me and this other kid were drawing little comics. Total sixth grade potty-humor stuff. I copied him, basically, so we have that kid to blame for this career of mine! That’s my earliest memory of actually doing a sequential story/ comic-type art. It was really fun. Moving on professionally, I got out of the Kubert School, and kinda bounced around not doing much. Around 1993–94, I decided to get serious and started drawing stuff to try and get published. This was mostly MAD magazine/ Wally Wood influenced kinda stuff. I had no idea about the Image boom or the crazy numbers mainstream comics were doing at the time. But my lettering was good and that got me into the DC bullpen working the Xerox machine. That was #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Fearless Dawm, illustration TM & © Steve Mannion.

I was born and raised in New Jersey: the North Plainfield, Watchung area, and then Millington. I was in Dover for the Kubert School years and then the Hewitt/West Milford area. I now reside in North Carolina. That 1960s Batman show was the earliest pop culture thing I remember being totally into. I did watch Spider-man

This page: To Eric Powell’s delight, Steve Mannion rocks out with the Goon 20th Anniversary Championship Belt in a recent photo. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

he was my boss. He was always interested in seeing what I was up to. And when I left, he started Big Hairy Ape Comics. It collected all these ideas and stories I was doing. Sort of a hodge-podge of Mannion stuff. I did a couple of Batman stories around then, a Batman Black & White eight-pager [in Batman: Gotham Knights #37, Mar. 2003] and an issue of Detective Comics [#753, Feb. 2001], where Harvey Dent draws a comic book. All this work started coming in from a Scholastic-type publisher — Pearson Education — and I got out of the comics scene for a while. Desperation and eBay brought me back and I resurrected the Fearless Dawn idea. I also saw Eric Powell’s The Goon book around this time and was inspired by his vibe, you know? I thought comics could be fun and different and I might have a chance putting out my own title. Commissions through eBay contacts brought me back to comics shows and that’s where I met Jim Salicrup with his Papercutz line and snagged the Tales from the Crypt gigs. That’s how I got that, just by sitting next to Jim at the local Carbonaro shows, in New York City. Fearless Dawn and “The Bomb” were rolling about this time and, when I had five issues together, Frank Forte at Asylum Press offered to collect them and put it through Diamond for the shops. We figured to try the Fearless Dawn mini-series as well. I’ve been Kickstarter-ing single issues of Fearless Dawn ever since. He also got us into Heavy Metal, if anyone’s wondering. Frank’s been very good to us! It was great meeting Eric Powell. We shared a table at Heroes Con, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the next year at Heroes, he approached me to do some stuff for Albatross, the Spook House anthology. It was great. Jeez, who doesn’t wanna work with Eric! Then I got to do a little back-up Hillbilly story for Eric and that was awesome. Anyone who hasn’t checked out Hillbilly is missing out. Eric’s got something special with his art and storytelling, in my humble opinion! And it looks like some other folk’s humble opinions, too! We should have some exciting stuff coming out with his Albatross Funny Books imprint soon, starting with the new Spook House horror comics for the kids. #21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Tales from the Crypt TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent Inc. Batman TM & © DC Comics. Spook House TM & © Albatross Funny Books. Illustrations © Steve Mannion.

Above: By chance, Mannion exhibited next to Jim Salicrup at a Big Apple Con and that led to the cartoonist getting assignments for a Tales from the Crypt revival. Inset right: Ad for Spook House #2. Below: Before making an impact with The Bomb and Fearless Dawn, cartoonist Steve Mannion toiled in mainstream comics,, including brief stints on Batman and Captain America. Here is a 2012 Batman and Rat Fink mash-up.

a good learning experience and I got to see the Brian Bolland covers, Dark Knight and the Vertigo stuff, and all sorts of top-notch work. That’s where Kitchen Sink came into play. It’s a small industry and someone up there walked me into that job, Death Rattle #4 [Apr. 1996, with the six-page story, “(F)rats”] It was the time of the “Great Speculator Crash” for the comics field, so nothing more really came out from there. I was slated to ink a Cadillacs and Dinosaurs book at the time, but the whole thing went belly up. Others up at DC did start to notice my work, as I’d hang up pictures in my cubicle and that’s how I did all those Big Book of... stories. If anyone’s not familiar with the Big Books from the Paradox imprint of DC, they were these great collections of all short stories, usually historical in nature, with a theme of some sort. Like The Big Book of Death would have all these real-life stories of death and stuff. Usually they were written by one writer and had three- to four-page stories… sometimes longer… and each artist would draw these stories. I thought they were great, but that thing croaked out, too. Somewhere in there I quit the DC bullpen day job. That’s when I drew the Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty book [#10, June 1999]. They FedEx-ed me a big stack of Marvel boards. I thought I’d be set with work for those guys, but I never did another job for Marvel. I always hoped to get a regular job/book drawing for Marvel or DC at that period. All through this time, I’d be drawing little stories and coming up with characters and stuff. That’s where Fearless Dawn came from. Me and Andy Marinkovich were at DC;

This and next three pages: Most of the Steve Mannion artwork here was selected by the cartoonist himself (seen above).

nnion.

s © Steve Ma

All illustration

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

Fearless Dawn TM & © Steve Mannion. Spook House TM & © Flying Albatross Funny Books. Illustrations © Steve Mannion.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

nnion. & © Steve Ma The Bomb TM

nnion.

s © Steve Ma

All illustration

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

t holders.

All characters TM & © the respective copyrigh

Illustrations © Steve Mannion.

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

In cooperation with DC COMICS, TwoMorrows compiles a tempestuous trio of never-seen 1970s Kirby projects! These are the final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time! Included are: Two unused DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales (Kirby’s final Kid Gang group, inked by MIKE ROYER and D. BRUCE BERRY, and newly colored for this book)! TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE, the abandoned newsstand magazine that was too hot for its time (reproduced from Jack’s pencil art—and as a bonus, we’ve commissioned MIKE ROYER to ink one of the stories)! And SOUL LOVE, the unseen ’70s romance book so funky, even a jive turkey will dig the unretouched inks by VINCE COLLETTA and TONY DeZUNIGA. PLUS: There’s Kirby historian JOHN MORROW’s in-depth examination of why these projects got left back, concept art and uninked pencils from DINGBATS, and a Foreword by former 1970s Kirby assistant MARK EVANIER! SHIPS DEC. 2019! (160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5

All characte

(288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $45.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-089-2

their respecti

In the latest volume, KURT MITCHELL and ROY THOMAS document the 1940-44 “Golden Age” of comics, a period that featured the earliest adventures of BATMAN, CAPTAIN MARVEL, SUPERMAN, and WONDER WOMAN. It was a time when America’s entry into World War II was presaged Look for the 1945-49 volume by the arrival of such patriotic do-gooders as WILL EISNER’s Uncle Sam, HARRY SHORTEN and in 2020! IRV NOVICK’s The Shield, and JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY’s Captain America—and teenage culture found expression in a fumbling red-haired high school student named Archie Andrews. But most of all, it was the age of “packagers” like HARRY A CHESLER, and EISNER and JERRY IGER, who churned out material for the entire gamut of genres, from funny animal stories and crime tales, to jungle sagas and science-fiction adventures. Watch the history of comics begin! NOW SHIPPING!

ve owners.

OR -COL FULLDCOVER HAR RIES SE nting me f docu ecade o d y! each s histor ic m o c

rs TM & ©

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1940-44

MAC RABOY Master of the Comics

Beginning with his WPA etchings during the 1930s, MAC RABOY struggled to survive the Great Depression and eventually found his way into the comic book sweatshops of America. In that world of four-color panels, he perfected his art style on such creations as DR. VOODOO, ZORO the MYSTERY MAN, BULLETMAN, SPY SMASHER, GREEN LAMA, and his crowning achievement, CAPTAIN MARVEL JR. Raboy went on to illustrate the FLASH GORDON Sunday newspaper strip, and left behind a legacy of meticulous perfection. Through extensive research and interviews with son DAVID RABOY, and assistants who worked with the artist during the Golden Age of Comics, author ROGER HILL brings Mac Raboy, the man and the artist, into focus for historians to savor and enjoy. This FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER includes never-before-seen photos, a wealth of rare and unpublished artwork, and the first definitive biography of a true Master of the Comics! Introduction by ROY THOMAS! ISBN: 978-1-60549-090-8 • NOW SHIPPING! (160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $14.95 Roger Hill’s 2017 biography of REED CRANDALL sold out just months after its release—don’t let this one pass you by! Get yours now!

Silver ary ers Anniv -2019 1994 ears 25 Y

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com Don’t miss exclusive sales, limited editions, and new releases! Sign up for our mailing list: http:// groups.yahoo.com/group/twomorrows

A 25 Year Celebration! th

THE WORLD OF TWOMORROWS

In 1994, amidst the boom-&-bust of comic book speculators, THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #1 was published for true fans of the medium. That modest labor of love spawned TwoMorrows Publishing, today’s premier purveyor of publications about comics and pop culture. Celebrate our 25th anniversary with this special retrospective look at the company that changed fandom forever! Co-edited by and featuring publisher JOHN MORROW and COMIC BOOK ARTIST/COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine’s JON B. COOKE, it gives the inside story and behind-the-scenes details of a quartercentury of looking at the past in a whole new way. Also included are BACK ISSUE magazine’s MICHAEL EURY, ALTER EGO’s ROY THOMAS, GEORGE KHOURY (author of KIMOTA!, EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE, and other books), MIKE MANLEY (DRAW! magazine), ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON (MODERN MASTERS), and a host of other comics luminaries who’ve contributed to TwoMorrows’ output over the years. From their first Eisner Award-winning book STREETWISE, through their BRICKJOURNAL LEGO® magazine, up to today’s RETROFAN magazine, every major TwoMorrows publication and contributor is covered with the same detail and affection the company gives to its books and magazines. With an Introduction by MARK EVANIER, Foreword by ALEX ROSS, Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ, and a new cover by TOM McWEENEY! SHIPS DECEMBER 2019! (224-page FULL-COLOR Trade Paperback) $34.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-092-2 (240-page ULTRA-LIMITED HARDCOVER) $75 Only 125 copies available for sale, with a 16-page bonus Memory Album! HARDCOVER NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH DIAMOND—DIRECT FROM TWOMORROWS ONLY! RESERVE YOURS NOW!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #78

(SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE!)

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (DELUXE EDITION with silver sleeve) $12.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95

2019-2020

AND DON’T MISS THE EXPANDED 2ND EDITION OF STUF’ SAID, OUT NOW! SUBSCRIPTION RATES Alter Ego (Six issues) Back Issue (Eight issues) BrickJournal (Six issues) Comic Book Creator (Four issues) Jack Kirby Collector (Four issues) RetroFan (Six issues)

ECONOMY US $67 $89 $67 $45 $48 $67

EXPEDITED US $79 $102 $79 $55 $58 $79

PREMIUM US $86 $111 $86 $59 $62 $86

INTERNATIONAL $101 $135 $101 $67 $70 $101

All characte

rs TM & ©

their respecti

ve owners.

Published 25 years after the launch of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #1, this special SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE shows how Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age of Comics with Challengers of the Unknown, examines how Jack revamped Golden Age legacy characters for the 1960s and beyond, outlines the lasting influence of his signature creation The Silver Surfer, and more! It includes special shout-outs to the fan and pro contributors who’ve helped publisher/editor JOHN MORROW celebrate the life and career of the King of Comics for a quarter century. And echoing John’s fateful choice to start this magazine in 1994, we’ll spotlight PIVOTAL DECISIONS (good and bad) Jack made throughout his comics career. Plus: A Kirby pencil art gallery, regular columnists, a classic 1950s story, and more! The STANDARD EDITION sports an unused Kirby THOR cover with STEVE RUDE’s interpretation of how it looked before alterations, while the DELUXE EDITION adds a silver cardstock outer sleeve featuring the Surfer with RUDE inks. SHIPS WINTER 2020!

DIGITAL ONLY $27 $36 $27 $18 $18 $27

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE magazine celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through recurring (and rotating) departments like “Pro2Pro” (dialogue between professionals), “BackStage Pass” (behind-the-scenes of comics-based media), “Greatest Stories Never Told” (spotlighting unrealized comics series or stories), and more!

Go to www.twomorrows.com for other issues, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

BACK ISSUE #108

BACK ISSUE #109

BACK ISSUE #104

BACK ISSUE #105

BACK ISSUE #107

FOURTH WORLD AFTER KIRBY! Return(s) of the New Gods, Why Can’t Mister Miracle Escape Cancellation?, the Forever People, MIKE MIGNOLA’s unrealized New Gods animated movie, Fourth World in Hollywood, and an all-star lineup, including the work of JOHN BYRNE, PARIS CULLINS, J. M. DeMATTEIS, MARK EVANIER, MICHAEL GOLDEN, RICK HOBERG, WALTER SIMONSON, and more. STEVE RUDE cover!

DEADLY HANDS ISSUE! Histories of Iron Fist, Master of Kung Fu, Yang, the Bronze Tiger, Hands of the Dragon, NEAL ADAMS’ Armor, Marvel’s Deadly Hands of Kung Fu mag, & Hong Kong Phooey! Plus Muhammad Ali in toons and toys. Featuring JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, STEVE ENGLEHART, PAUL GULACY, LARRY HAMA, DOUG MOENCH, DENNY O’NEIL, JIM STARLIN, & others. Classic EARL NOREM cover!

ARCHIE COMICS IN THE BRONZE AGE! STAN GOLDBERG and GEORGE GLADIR interviews, Archie knock-offs, Archie on TV, histories of Sabrina, That Wilkin Boy, Cheryl Blossom, and Red Circle Comics. With JACK ABEL, JON D’AGOSTINO, DAN DeCARLO, FRANK DOYLE, GRAY MORROW, DAN PARENT, HENRY SCARPELLI, ALEX SEGURA, LOU SCHEIMER, ALEX TOTH, and more! DAN DeCARLO cover.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

BACK ISSUE #110

BACK ISSUE #111

BACK ISSUE #112

BRONZE AGE AQUAMAN! Team-ups and merchandise, post-Crisis Aquaman, Aqualad: From Titan to Tempest, Black Manta history, DAVID and MAROTO’s Atlantis Chronicles, the original unseen Aquaman #57, and the unproduced Aquaman animated movie. With APARO, CALAFIORE, MARTIN EGELAND, GIFFEN, GIORDANO, ROBERT LOREN FLEMING, CRAIG HAMILTON, JURGENS, SWAN, and more. ERIC SHANOWER cover!

SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE 40th ANNIVERSARY! CARY BATES’ plans for unfilmed Superman V, ELLIOT S. MAGGIN’s Superman novels, 1975 CARMINE INFANTINO interview about the movie, plus interviews: JACK O’HALLORAN (Non), AARON SMOLINSKI (baby Clark), JEFF EAST (young Clark), DIANE SHERRY CASE (teenage Lana Lang), and Superman Movie Contest winner ED FINNERAN. Chris Reeve Superman cover by GARY FRANK!

MAKE MINE MARVEL! ENGLEHART’s “lost” issues of West Coast Avengers, O’NEIL and INFANTINO’s Marvel work, a WAID/ NOCENTI Daredevil Pro2Pro interview, British Bronze Age Marvel fandom, Pizzazz Magazine, Speedball, Marvel Comics Presents, and backstage at Marvel Comicon ’75 and ’76! With DeFALCO, EDELMAN, KAVANAGH, McDONNELL, WOLFMAN, and cover by MILGROM and MACHLAN.

ALTERNATE REALITIES! Cover-featuring the 20th anniversary of ALEX ROSS and JIM KRUEGER’s Marvel Earth X! Plus: What If?, Bronze Age DC Imaginary Stories, Elseworlds, Marvel 2099, and PETER DAVID and GEORGE PÉREZ’s senses-shattering Hulk: Future Imperfect. Featuring TOM DeFALCO, CHUCK DIXON, PETER B. GILLIS, PAT MILLS, ROY THOMAS, and many more! With an Earth X cover by ALEX ROSS.

NUCLEAR ISSUE! Firestorm, Dr. Manhattan, DAVE GIBBONS Marvel UK Hulk interview, villain histories of Radioactive Man and Microwave Man, Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy, and the one-shot Holo-Man! With PAT BRODERICK, GERRY CONWAY, JOE GIELLA, TOM GRINDBERG, RAFAEL KAYANAN, TOM MANDRAKE, BILL MORRISON, JOHN OSTRANDER, STEVE VANCE, and more! PAT BRODERICK cover!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR mag) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $4.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

BACK ISSUE #113

BACK ISSUE #114

BACK ISSUE #115

BACK ISSUE #116

BATMAN MOVIE 30th ANNIVERSARY! Producer MICHAEL USLAN and screenwriter SAM HAMM interviewed, a chat with BILLY DEE WILLIAMS (who was almost Two-Face), plus DENNY O’NEIL and JERRY ORDWAY’s Batman movie adaptation, MINDY NEWELL’s Catwoman, GRANT MORRISON and DAVE McKEAN’s Arkham Asylum, MAX ALLAN COLLINS’ Batman newspaper strip, and JOEY CAVALIERI & JOE STATON’s Huntress!

BLACK SUPERHEROES OF THE 1970s! History of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire! A retrospective of artist BILLY GRAHAM, a TONY ISABELLA interview, Black Lightning, Black Panther in the UK, Black Goliath, the Teen Titans’ Mal and Bumblebee, DON McGREGOR and PAUL GULACY’s Sabre, and… Black Bomber (who?). Featuring TREVOR VON EEDEN, STEVE ENGLEHART, ROY THOMAS, & a BILLY GRAHAM cover!

SCI-FI SUPERHEROES! In-depth looks at JIM STARLIN’s Dreadstar and Company, and the dystopian lawman Judge Dredd. Also: Nova, GERRY CONWAY & MIKE VOSBURG’s Starman, PAUL LEVITZ & STEVE DITKO’s Starman, WALTER SIMONSON’s Justice Peace (from the pages of Thor), and GREG POTTER & GENE COLAN’s Jemm, Son of Saturn! With a Dreadstar and Company cover by STARLIN and ALAN WEISS!

SUPERHEROES VS. MONSTERS! Monsters in Metropolis, Batman and the Horror Genre, DOUG MOENCH and KELLEY JONES’ Batman: Vampire, Marvel Scream-Up, Dracula and Godzilla vs. Marvel, DC/Dark Horse Hero/Monster crossovers, and a Baron Blood villain history. With CLAREMONT, CONWAY, DIXON, GIBBONS, GRELL, GULACY, JURGENS, THOMAS, WOLFMAN, and a cover by MICHAEL GOLDEN.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

store@twomorrows.com

Order at twomorrows.com

creators at the con

And the Eisner Goes to… This page: Comics creators are honored at the 2019 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Ceremony and here are the pics to prove it! On this page, clockwise from right: Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez accepts the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award; Lisa Wood (a.k.a. Tula Lotay) also gets a Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award; Jen Bartel receives the “Best Cover Artist” award; Paul Levitz accepts the Eisner Hall of Fame honor; Mitch Gerads picks up one of his two awards for Mr. Miracle (“Best Limited Series,” “Best Penciller/Inker Team”); Tom King accepts one of the four Eisner Awards he receives this year; and Mike Friedrich accepts the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing, after Mark Evanier congratulates him on stage (center). Next page: Top row from left: Richard Pini and Wendy Pini accept the Eisner Hall of Fame Award; Bill Siekiewicz quips, “This is very encouraging,” as he receives the Eisner Hall of Fame Award; and Sergio Aragonés hands Bill that award. Upper middle row: Eisner Awards administrator Jackie Estrada at the podium, as well as the audience giving Jackie a standing ovation at the conclusion of the Eisner Awards, in appreciation for her decades of work for the convention and on the annual ceremony itself. Lower middle row: Sergio Aragonés bestowing the Eisner Hall of Fame Award on Jenette Kahn; three Eisner Award Hall of Fame recipients, (from left) Jenette Kahn (inducted in 2019), Paul Levitz (inducted in 2019), and Karen Berger (inducted in 2018). Bottom row: all the 2019 Eisner Award recipients, including TwoMorrows publisher John Morrow, seated in the front row near the center, wearing a blue jacket and white shirt, holding aloft the “Best Comics-Related Periodical” Eisner Award won by Back Issue. Congrats, brother editor Michael Eury!

Photography by Kendall Whitehouse

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2019 • #21

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID (Expanded Second Edition)

After achieving the quickest sell-out in TwoMorrows’ history, we’re going back to press for an EXPANDED SECOND EDITION, including minor corrections, and 16 NEW PAGES of “Stuf’ Said” by the creators of the Marvel Universe! This first-of-its-kind examination, completed just days before STAN LEE’s recent passing, looks back at KIRBY & LEE’s own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and television interviews, to paint the most comprehensive and enlightening picture of their relationship ever done—why it succeeded, where it deteriorated, and when it eventually failed. Also here are recollections from STEVE DITKO, WALLACE WOOD, JOHN ROMITA SR., and more Marvel Bullpen stalwarts who worked with them both. Compiled, researched, and edited by publisher JOHN MORROW. SECOND EDITION NOW SHIPPING! (176-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-094-6 • Order at www.twomorrows.com

Advertise With Us! RetroFan & BrickJournal Ad Rates: Back cover or inside cover: $1000 ($900 for two or more) Full-page interior: $800 ($700 for two or more) Half-page interior: $500 ($425 for two or more) Quarter-page interior: $300 ($250 for two or more)

Alter Ego • Back Issue • Comic Book Creator • Draw • Jack Kirby Collector: Back cover or inside cover: $800 ($700 for two or more) Full-page interior: $600 ($500 for two or more) Half-page interior: $300 ($250 for two or more) Quarter-page interior: $150 ($125 for two or more) AD SIZES: COVERS & FULL-PAGE: 8.375” wide x 10.875” tall trim size, add 1/8” bleed. (7.625” x 10.125” live area.) HALF-PAGE: 7.625” x 4.875” live area (no bleeds). QUARTER-PAGE: 3.6875” x 4.875” live area (no bleeds).

Call or e-mail for frequency discounts! Send ad copy and payment (US funds) to: TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 919-449-0344 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com

We accept check, money order, and all major credit cards; include card number and expiration date.

These rates are for digital ads supplied (PDF, JPEG, TIF, EPS, InDesign, or Quark Xpress files acceptable). No agency discounts apply.

coming attractions: cbc #22 in the winter

The Lyrical Art of P. Craig Russell

CBC travels to the studio of multiple Eisner Award-winner P. CRAIG RUSSELL, the extraordinary comic book artist whose career stretches from Killraven and Elric to his Oscar Wilde adaptations and The Sandman to the present day with American Gods, for a career-spanning, intimate interview. Included, of course, is a gallery of PCR’s finest artwork, as well as photos. And, yes, we’ll talk about his fascination with opera! While in Ohio, we also talk with DERF BACKDERF, author of the ground-breaking My Friend Dahmer, about his forthcoming graphic novel commemorating the 50th anniversary of the tragic killing of college students, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio. We end our visit to the Buckeye State dropping by CAROL TYLER’s Cincinnati digs to chat about her prolific work, including her Fab4 Mania graphic memoir on her teenage Beatles obsession. Additionally, we look at an almost completely unknown work of FRANK QUITELY, renowned artist on All-Star Superman and The Authority: his awesome artwork decorating the walls of a Radisson hotel in Scotland! And we finally make that brunch appointment with JOE SINNOTT to discuss his Treasure Chest work, as well as include the final installment of our CRAIG YOE interview. Oh, and lest we forget, HEMBECK shares a new strip! Full-color, 84 pages, $9.95

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

MONSTER MASH

GROOVY

MARK VOGER’s time-trip back to 1957-1972, to explore the CREEPY, KOOKY MONSTER CRAZE, when monsters stomped into America’s mainstream!

A psychedelic look at when Flower Power bloomed in Pop Culture. Revisits ‘60s era’s ROCK FESTIVALS, TV, MOVIES, ART, COMICS & CARTOONS!

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-064-9

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $13.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-080-9

THE MLJ COMPANION

Documents the complete history of ARCHIE COMICS’ super-heroes known as the “Mighty Crusaders”, with in-depth examinations of each era of the characters’ history: The GOLDEN AGE (beginning with the Shield, the first patriotic super-hero), the SILVER AGE (spotlighting the campy Mighty Comics issues, and The Fly and Jaguar), the BRONZE AGE (the Red Circle line, and the !mpact imprint published by DC Comics), up to the MODERN AGE, with its Dark Circle imprint! (288-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $34.95 (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-067-0

SWAMPMEN

LOU SCHEIMER

CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION Biography of the co-founder of Filmation Studios, which for over 25 years brought the Archies, Shazam, Isis, He-Man, and others to TV and film! (288-page paperback with COLOR) $29.95 (Digital Edition) $14.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-044-1

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1950s-1990s 1940-44 & 1945-49 coming in 2019!

OR -COL FULLDCOVER HAR RIES SE nting me f docu ecade o d y! each s histor ic m o c

MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS

SWAMPMEN dredges up Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, Heap, and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou, through the memories of the artists and writers who created them! Features BERNIE WRIGHTSON, ALAN MOORE, MIKE PLOOG, FRANK BRUNNER, STEVE GERBER, STEVE BISSETTE, RICK VEITCH, and others, with a new FRANK CHO cover!

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID!

The creators of the Marvel Universe’s own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and TV interviews, painting a picture of JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE’s relationship—why it succeeded, where it deteriorated, and when it eventually failed. Includes a study of their solo careers after 1970, and recollections from STEVE DITKO, WALLACE WOOD, & JOHN ROMITA SR. (160-page trade paperback) $24.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-086-1

MIKE GRELL:

LIFE IS DRAWING WITHOUT AN ERASER

A career-spanning tribute to the master storyteller, told in Grell’s own words, and those of colleagues PAUL LEVITZ, DAN JURGENS, DENNY O’NEIL, MIKE GOLD, and MARK RYAN. Full of illustrations from every facet of his long career, including SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, WARLORD, GREEN LANTERN, GREEN ARROW: THE LONGBOW HUNTERS, JON SABLE, STARSLAYER, SHAMAN’S TEARS, and more!

(176-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER) $37.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-087-8

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION

IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB

In 1978, DC Comics implemented its “DC Explosion” with many creative new titles, but just weeks after its launch, they pulled the plug, leaving stacks of completed comic book stories unpublished. This book marks the 40th Anniversary of “The DC Implosion”, one of the most notorious events in comics, with an exhaustive oral history from the creators involved (JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, and others), plus detailed analysis of how it changed the landscape of comics forever! (136-page trade paperback with COLOR) $21.95 (Digital Edition) $10.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-085-4

(272-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $36.95 (Digital Edition) $13.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-073-1

(160-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $27.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-088-5

(192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $21.95 (Digital Edition) $9.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-057-1

ER EISN RD AWAINEE! M NO

HERO-A-GO-GO!

MICHAEL EURY looks at comics’ 1960s CAMP AGE, when spies liked their wars cold and their women warm, and TV’s Batman shook a mean cape!

Digs up the best of FROM THE TOMB (the UK’s top horror comics history magazine): RICHARD CORBEN, Good Girls of a bygone age, TOM SUTTON, DON HECK, LOU MORALES, AL EADEH, BRUCE JONES’ ALIEN WORLDS, HP LOVECRAFT in HEAVY METAL, & more! (192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95 (Digital Edition) $10.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-081-6

NEW 1990s VOLUME NOW SHIPPING!

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

TwoMorrows. The Future of Pop History.

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

ER EISN RD AWAINEE! M NO

a picture is worth a thousand words from the archives of Tom Ziuko

#21 • Fall 2019 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Courtesy of art collector Jim Martin, here is my coloring of a recent Aquaman commission drawn by the incomparable Ramona Fradon — rendered completely in pencil — no inks. I’d say she’s still right on top of her game, wouldn’t you? — TZ

ER EISN RD AWA ER!! N WIN ER EISN RD AWAINEE! NOM

BACK ISSUE #117

BACK ISSUE #118

BACK ISSUE #119

SUPERHERO STAND-INS! John Stewart as Green Lantern, James Rhodes as Iron Man, Beta Ray Bill as Thor, Captain America substitute U.S. Agent, new Batman Azrael, and Superman’s Hollywood proxy Gregory Reed! Featuring NEAL ADAMS, CARY BATES, DAVE GIBBONS, RON MARZ, DAVID MICHELINIE, DENNIS O’NEIL, WALTER SIMONSON, ROY THOMAS, and more, under a cover by SIMONSON.

GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD! ALEX ROSS’ unrealized Fantastic Four reboot, DC: The Lost 1970s, FRANK THORNE’s unpublished Red Sonja, Fury Force, VON EEDEN’s Batman, GRELL’s Batman/Jon Sable, CLAREMONT and SIM’s X-Men/Cerebus, SWAN and HANNIGAN’s Skull and Bones, AUGUSTYN and PAROBECK’s Target, PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Impact reboot, abandoned Swamp Thing storylines, & more! ROSS cover.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY ISSUE! A galaxy of comics stars discuss Marvel’s whitehot space team in the Guardians Interviews, including TOM DeFALCO, KEITH GIFFEN, ROB LIEFELD, AL MILGROM, MARY SKRENES, ROGER STERN, JIM VALENTINO, and more. Plus: Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon before the Guardians, with CHRIS CLAREMONT and MIKE MIGNOLA. Cover by JIM VALENTINO with inks by CHRIS IVY.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Jan. 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships March 2020

ALTER EGO #162

ALTER EGO #163

MIKE GRELL

LIFE IS DRAWING WITHOUT AN ERASER

Career-spanning tribute covering Legion of Super-Heroes, Warlord, & Green Arrow at DC Comics, and Grell’s own properties Jon Sable, Starslayer, and Shaman’s Tears. Told in Grell’s own words, with PAUL LEVITZ, DAN JURGENS, DENNY O’NEIL, MARK RYAN, & MIKE GOLD. Heavily illustrated! (160-page FULL-COLOR TPB) $27.95 (176-page LTD. ED. HARDCOVER) $37.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 • Now shipping!

ER EISN RD AWAINEE! M NO

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION

AN ORAL HISTORY OF DC COMICS CIRCA 1978! Marking the 40th anniversary of the “DC Implosion”, one of the most notorious events in comics (which left stacks of completed comic book stories unpublished and spawned Cancelled Comics Cavalcade). Featuring JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, and others, plus detailed analysis of how it changed the landscape of comics! (136-page paperback w/ COLOR) $21.95 (Digital Edition) $10.95 • Now shipping!

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID WORLD OF TWOMORROWS AMERICAN COMIC BOOK Celebrate our 25th anniversary with this CHRONICLES: The 1980s retrospective by publisher JOHN MORROW

WILL MURRAY presents an amazing array of possible prototypes of Batman (by artist FRANK FOSTER—in 1932!)—Wonder Woman (by Star-Spangled Kid artist HAL SHERMAN)—Tarantula (by Air Wave artist LEE HARRIS), and others! Plus a rare Hal Sherman interview—MICHAEL T. GILBERT with more on artist PETE MORISI—FCA— BILL SCHELLY—JOHN BROOME—and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY!

The early days of DAVE COCKRUM— Legion of Super-Heroes artist and co-developer of the revived mid-1970s X-Men—as revealed in art-filled letters to PAUL ALLEN and rare, previously unseen illustrations provided by wife PATY COCKRUM (including 1960s-70s drawings of Edgar Rice Burroughs heroes)! Plus FCA—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on PETE MORISI—JOHN BROOME—BILL SCHELLY, and more!

EXPANDED SECOND EDITION—16 EXTRA PAGES! Looks back at the creators of the Marvel Universe’s own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and television interviews, to paint a picture of JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE’s complicated relationship! Includes recollections from STEVE DITKO, ROY THOMAS, WALLACE WOOD, JOHN ROMITA SR., and other Marvel Bullpenners!

and Comic Book Creator magazine’s JON B. COOKE! Go behind-the-scenes with MICHAEL EURY, ROY THOMAS, GEORGE KHOURY, and a host of other TwoMorrows contributors! Introduction by MARK EVANIER, Foreword by ALEX ROSS, Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ, and a new cover by TOM McWEENEY!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Feb. 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $26.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 • Now shipping!

(224-page FULL-COLOR TPB) $37.95 (Digital Edition) $15.95 • Ships Dec. 2019

NEW PRINTING with corrections, better binding, & enhanced cover durability! KEITH DALLAS documents comics’ 1980s Reagan years: Rise and fall of JIM SHOOTER, FRANK MILLER as comic book superstar, DC’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, MOORE and GAIMAN’s British invasion, ECLIPSE, PACIFIC, FIRST, COMICO, DARK HORSE and more!

(288-pg. FULL-COLOR Hardcover) $48.95 (Digital Edition) $15.95 • Ships Feb. 2020

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

DRAW #36

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #22

KIRBY COLLECTOR #77

MIKE HAWTHORNE (Deadpool, Infinity Countdown) interview, YANICK PAQUETTE (Wonder Woman: Earth One, Batman Inc., Swamp Thing) how-to demo, JERRY ORDWAY’s “Ord-Way” of creating comics, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, plus Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY! May contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; for Mature Readers Only.

MONSTERS & BUGS! Jack’s monster-movie influences in The Demon, Forever People, Black Magic, Fantastic Four, Jimmy Olsen, and Atlas monster stories; Kirby’s work with “B” horror film producer CHARLES BAND; interview with “The Goon” creator ERIC POWELL; Kirby’s use of insect characters (especially as villains); MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, Golden Age Kirby story, and a Kirby pencil art gallery!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Spring 2020

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Now shipping!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #78

SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! How Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age and revamped Golden Age characters for the 1960s, the Silver Surfer’s influence, pivotal decisions (good and bad) Jack made throughout his comics career, Kirby pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, a classic 1950s story, KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover (and deluxe silver sleeve) and more! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (DELUXE EDITION w/ silver sleeve) $12.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Ships Winter 2020

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

Order at twomorrows.com

Relive The Pop Culture You Grew Up With In RetroFan! If you love Pop Culture of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, editor MICHAEL EURY’s latest magazine is just for you!

RETROFAN #7

(84-page FULLCOLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 Now shipping!

Please add $1 per issue for shipping in the US.

RETROFAN #1

RETROFAN #2

RETROFAN #3

RETROFAN #6

RETROFAN #8

Interviews with MeTV’s crazy creepster SVENGOOLIE and Eddie Munster himself, BUTCH PATRICK! Call on the original Saturday Morning GHOST BUSTERS, with BOB BURNS! Uncover the nutty NAUGAS! Plus: “My Life in the Twilight Zone,” “I Was a Teenage James Bond,” “My Letters to Famous People,” the ARCHIE-DOBIE GILLIS connection, Pinball Hall of Fame, Alien action figures, Rubik’s Cube & more!

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Interviews with the ’60s grooviest family band THE COWSILLS, and TV’s coolest mom JUNE LOCKHART! Mars Attacks!, MAD Magazine in the ’70s, Flintstones turn 60, Electra Woman & Dyna Girl, Honey West, Max Headroom, Popeye Picnic, the Smiley Face fad, & more! With MICHAEL EURY, ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, and SCOTT SHAW!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships March 2020

RETROFAN #4

RETROFAN #5

THE CRAZY, COOL CULTURE WE GREW UP WITH! LOU FERRIGNO interview, The Phantom in Hollywood, Filmation’s Star Trek cartoon, “How I Met Lon Chaney, Jr.”, goofy comic Zody the Mod Rob, Mego’s rare Elastic Hulk toy, RetroTravel to Mount Airy, NC (the real-life Mayberry), interview with BETTY LYNN (“Thelma Lou” of The Andy Griffith Show), TOM STEWART’s eclectic House of Collectibles, and Mr. Microphone!

HALLOWEEN! Horror-hosts ZACHERLEY, VAMPIRA, SEYMOUR, MARVIN, and an interview with our cover-featured ELVIRA! THE GROOVIE GOOLIES, BEWITCHED, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and THE MUNSTERS! The long-buried Dinosaur Land amusement park! History of BEN COOPER HALLOWEEN COSTUMES, character lunchboxes, superhero VIEW-MASTERS, SINDY (the British Barbie), and more!

40th Anniversary interview with SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE director RICHARD DONNER, IRWIN ALLEN’s sci-fi universe, Saturday morning’s undersea adventures of Aquaman, horror and sci-fi zines of the Sixties and Seventies, Spider-Man and Hulk toilet paper, RetroTravel to METROPOLIS, IL (home of the Superman Celebration), SEA-MONKEYS®, FUNNY FACE beverages, Superman and Batman memorabilia, & more!

Interviews with the SHAZAM! TV show’s JOHN (Captain Marvel) DAVEY and MICHAEL (Billy Batson) Gray, the GREEN HORNET in Hollywood, remembering monster maker RAY HARRYHAUSEN, the way-out Santa Monica Pacific Ocean Amusement Park, a Star Trek Set Tour, SAM J. JONES on the Spirit movie pilot, British sci-fi TV classic THUNDERBIRDS, Casper & Richie Rich museum, the KING TUT fad, and more!

Interviews with MARK HAMILL & Greatest American Hero’s WILLIAM KATT! Blast off with JASON OF STAR COMMAND! Stop by the MUSEUM OF POPULAR CULTURE! Plus: “The First Time I Met Tarzan,” MAJOR MATT MASON, MOON LANDING MANIA, SNUFFY SMITH AT 100 with cartoonist JOHN ROSE, TV Dinners, Celebrity Crushes, and more fun, fab features!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

SUBSCRIBE NOW! Six issues: $67 Economy, $101 International, $27 Digital Only

TwoMorrows. The Future of Pop History. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

DON’T RISK A SOLD OUT ISSUE AT BARNES & NOBLE!

SUBSCRIBE TODAY!

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

PRINTED IN CHINA

Featuring a JACLYN SMITH interview, as we reopen the Charlie’s Angels Casebook, and visit the Guinness World Records’ largest Charlie’s Angels collection. Plus: an exclusive interview with funnyman LARRY STORCH, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Captain Action—the original super-hero action figure, a vintage interview with Jonny Quest creator DOUG WILDEY, a visit to the Land of Oz, the ultra-rare Marvel World superhero playset, & more!