Comic Book Creator #22 by TwoMorrows Publishing

The Drama King ™

P. CRAIG RUSSELL $9.95

in the USA

No. 22, Winter 2020

A TwoMorrows Publication

82658 00398

Cover art by P. Craig Russell

Interactive Catalog

2020

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CONTENTS American Comic Book Chronicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Companion Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Digital Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Comics Artists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Modern Masters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Jack Kirby Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Magazines:

Jack Kirby Collector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Draw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Write Now (and “how-to” books) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Comic Book Creator/Comic Book Artist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Alter Ego . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Rough Stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Back Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 RetroFan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 BrickJournal (LEGO® magazine) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

respective owners.

All characters TM & © their

Pop Culture Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 LEGO® Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

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You’ve probably heard that Diamond Comic Distributors closed in March, leaving small publishers like us with no way to get our publications to comics shops. Then, our distributor for the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain also closed without warning, just as our new issues were about to go on sale. The end result is, we took a huge loss by printing and shipping tens of thousands of copies of six new magazines and our Anniversary book that distributors are not paying us for, and having to dispose of the unsold copies. We hope distributors and stores will eventually reopen, but until then, mail order and digital sales are TwoMorrows’ lifeline, to ensure we stay in business. We have bills to pay on all those existing publications, and plan to keep publishing new ones. So if you’re able to help, please: 1) Purchase our World of TwoMorrows 25th Anniversary book, which is available now in Softcover, Ultra-Limited Hardcover, and Digital Editions. If you’ve enjoyed the material we’ve produced for the last quarter-century, you’ll love learning how we made it happen all these years! 2) Download our new, easy to use 2020 Digital Catalog at: https://www.twomorrows.com/2020InteractiveCatalog.pdf and order some books and mags online. Best of all: We’re currently offering 40% off most magazines! And we’re fully operational and shipping worldwide (my wife Pam and I are packing and mailing all the orders due

to North Carolina’s stay-at-home mandate). If you have trouble ordering online, we’re happy to take your order by phone or email. 3) Pre-order copies of Alter Ego #164, Back Issue #120, BrickJournal #62, Comic Book Creator #23, Jack Kirby Collector #79, and RetroFan #9, all of which will be shipping by mail over the next few weeks. Or please consider: Since BrickJournal #62 and #63 and RetroFan #9 and #10 (and possibly later issues) will not be sold at Barnes & Noble, now is a great time to… 4) Subscribe or renew your current subscriptions! The next issues of all six of our magazines are ready to go to press, and by subscribing, you’re helping us maintain a regular release schedule for your favorite titles. In 1994, I founded TwoMorrows Publishing with the publication of The Jack Kirby Collector #1. I didn’t start out by selling through comics shops or bookstores—only by mail order and subscriptions. And I’m prepared to keep working that way indefinitely, regardless of when stores and distributors reopen. So stay safe, and together, we’ll keep the World of TwoMorrows spinning for another 25 years! John Morrow, publisher TwoMorrows Publishing 919-449-0344 www.twomorrows.com

Winter 2020 • The Lyrical Art of P. Craig Russell • Number 22

Ye Ed’s Rant: 2019 was the Year of the Good and the Sad.............................................. 2 OPERATIC WOODY CBC mascot by J.D. KING

About Our Cover Art and Colors by P. CRAIG RUSSELL

COMICS CHATTER Sunday with Sinnott: Visiting Saugerties, N.Y., to lounge and lunch with the great Joseph Leonard Sinnott and son Mark, chatting about his non-Marvel ’60s work.... 3 Bill Schelly: A Comic Book Fan’s Life Well Lived: The late award-winning author and comics historian is remembered by his best friend, Jeff Gelb............... 18 Weirdo Comes to Columbia: Photo gallery of the culminating event of Ye Ed’s Book of Weirdo tour, attended by guests R. Crumb, Aline, and Peter Bagge........... 20

The Spectre TM & © DC Comics.

The Great American Graphic Novel: Appreciating the late Howard Cruse’s superb masterpiece, Stuck Rubber Baby, his quasi-memoir of self-realization....... 22 Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio: Talking with graphic novelist Derf Backderf about his latest, a “comic documentary” on the tragic 1970 shooting of 50 years ago..... 26 Darrick Patrick’s 10 Questions for Jay Leisten: Q’s for the Marvel inker ............... 32 Frank Quitely Paints Glasgow RED: The awesome All-Star Superman artist tells Robert Menzies about his biggest canvas yet: illustrating an actual hotel!.... 34 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt on Free Comic Book Day’s bestest freebies........... 42 Above: P. CRAIG RUSSELL’s spectacular cover featuring DC Comics’ “Avenging Wrath of God” character is actually a recent recreation of The Spectre #26 [April 2003] cover art by PCR, one of a nine-issue run of his covers for the title. With thanks to Wayne Arnold Harold for his assist. Colors on the original version by Lovern Kindzierski.

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 Strange men in even stranger lands... 43 THE MAIN EVENT The Drama King: CBC travels to Kent, Ohio, to conduct a career-spanning interview with the wonderful artist about his small town upbringing, breakout at Marvel, and, of course, his brilliant body of work, from Kipling to Wagner, Salomé to Sandman, Coraline to The Giver, opuses all!............................................................ 46 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: Kendall Whitehouse’s gallery on “Vertigone But Not Forgotten”.. 78 Coming Attractions: Next time is an epic talk with Wendy Pini on her creative life...... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Gil Kane’s Dracula is rudely awakened!...... 80 Right: Detail of P. Craig Russell’s depiction of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Our mailbox is EMPTY! No letters column this ish. Please write us LOCs! Alas, because CRAIG YOE is so busy with his book imprint and possible move to Europe, we have to postpone the second part of his interview (hopefully until next issue). Plus, because I had to cut the Ohio trip short, a promised piece on visiting CAROL TYLER does not appear herein. Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are available as digital downloads from twomorrows.com

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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 ©2020 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 BILL SCHELLY, MITCH BERGER, TOM LYLE, TOM SPURGEON, GAHAN WILSON, and HOWARD CRUSE ™

JON B. COOKE Editor & Designer

JOHN MORROW Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER Associate Editor

P. CRAIG RUSSELL Cover Artist

LOVERN KINDZIERSKI Cover Colorist

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 CBC Contributing Photographer

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE CBC Convention Photographer

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

Life was great in 2019, but also tragic with the loss of friends I’ll be honest and tell you I was Tempered by the passing of pretty choked up when I came upon good friends and with whatever BICLM’s new digs in Sullivant Hall humility I can muster, I have (where the venerable institution, the to express how simply awelargest of its kind in the world, moved some this past year has been in 2013) and saw, chiseled in stone on for myself and my own. Over a pillar before the entrance, the name the past number of years, my of the OSU research library. I can’t beloved partner in life, Beth, and tell you exactly why my eyes welled I have been through the ringer with tears, but I was moved and had — and then some! — mostly a moment to consider that the art due to the tribulations of one of form I love so much, and to which I our offspring, and my freelance have devoted a significant portion of income being not so steady. But my life, has indeed come of age. with the generosity of a relativeBut I was quick to realize that the ly distant and deceased family library’s home of Columbus, Ohio, was member and the culmination of also the home of Tom Spurgeon, who a mountain of work, it’s all come had stunned the entire comics industogether in 2019, and I couldn’t try when he suddenly passed away be more grateful. mere days before my arrival. I hadn’t The Book of Weirdo tour has many dealings with Tom, though he ended, after a great finale — the did contribute to the Top Shelf edition “Weirdo Comes to Columbia” of Comic Book Artist and we were event — hosted in late October always friendly and cordial — he was by the Manhattan university easy to like — and I recognized he and its Curator for Comics and was a valuable, intelligent presence Cartoons, the loverly Karen in my world, whose Comics Reporter Green, and I was able to live out website was a vital source of coma dream gig as moderator of a ics-related news, particularly from panel peopled by the greatest the alternative realm. cartoonist of all time, R. Crumb, In recent months we had also lost along with brilliant creators Bill Schelly, who was as much a comAline Kominsky-Crumb, Peter P. Craig Russell by Ronn Sutton patriot to me as anyone in the field Bagge, and Drew Friedman. It and a historian whose writing I admired and whose was simply incredible. (If ya don’t believe it happened, check out the photographic evidence within this issue!) achievements I envied. We’d had ups and downs since becoming acquainted in 1998, but mostly we were In November, I visited Weirdo pals/cartoonists friendly and helpful to one another. And, as a contribuMark Zingarelli, David Coulson, and Wayno, and tor to my mags, no one I had ever dealt with was more attended Drew’s All the Presidents event at Ohio State professional than Bill, who always made deadline University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and was ever-ready with items that would be useful. where Curator Jenny Robb and Museum Coordinator Though he contributed mightily to my most recent projAnne Drozd treated yours truly like a king, giving Drew ect, The World of TwoMorrows, I didn’t know he was and I a breath-taking behind-the-scenes tour of their mind-blowing archives, as well as having me join them sick and I’ll miss him, very much. Safe journey, Bill. I’m confident enough in my achievements to call for dinner (along with superb illustrator-caricaturist C.F. myself a peer of both Tom and Bill, and their shockPayne, my bestest new pal!). Rounding out the Ohio Valley tour was a visit to P. Craig Russell, who (as you’ll ing deaths bring my mortality to the forefront. I have much, much more to do. Why, working on this issue is read herein) gave me a wonderful career-spanning interview. He also took me on a tour of the site of the Kent prompting me to get to that Treasure Chest retrospective! Plus there’s that John Severin biography I need to State shooting (the subject of Derf Backderf’s newest finish co-writing… and also Slow Death Zero, a revised book—see accompanying article), and he brought my edition of R. Crumb: The Weirdo Years, never mind that whirlwind visit to an operatic crescendo by hosting a book celebrating Last Gasp’s 50th anniversary… Miles dinner party with me as guest of honor! Wow! to go before I sleep…!

cbc contributors

John Derf Backderf Mike Best Robyn Chapman Janice Chiang Columbia University Butler Library

Jean Depelley Christopher Diaz First Second Books Jeff Gelb Michael T. Gilbert Karen Green

Wayne Alan Harold Heritage Auctions Lovern Kindzierski Sam Maronie Robert Menzies Josh O’Neill

— Ye Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

Greg Preston Morgan Rath P. Craig Russell Cory Sedlmeier Joe Sinnott Mark Sinnott

Glenn Southwick Steve Thompson Colin Turner Michael Weston Kendall Whitehouse Rob Yeremian

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

GREG PRESTON

The Good and the Sad

up front

Sunday with Sinnott Visiting the great Joseph Leonard Sinnott on his home turf of Saugerties, New York! Conducted by JON B. COOKE [For years I’ve been promising Joe Sinnott and his son Mark that I’d drop by the Hudson River Valley town of Saugerties, New York, for a Sunday visit. And, finally, on the second day of fall last year, I made good on that vow. Mostly I wanted to just hang with friends and chat about Joe’s 1960s work outside Marvel Comics, when he did great stuff as penciler and inker for Treasure Chest and Dell Comics (where he produced a memorable comic book on The Beatles during the height of their fame). I’m glad my stopover was delayed as a few weeks prior to my arrival, the local historical society had hosted a reception and exhibit opening honoring its native son entitled, “Celebrating the Retirement of Joe ‘Joltin’ Sinnott.” My appearance gave Joe and Mark a chance to share in person about the experience (which you’ll find discussed in the sidebar). Plus it gave me the opportunity to see just how my 93-year-old pal was faring, and while I found him a tiny bit slower and tad easier to tire, Joe was overall as sharp and keen as ever. This conversation was transcribed by Steven “Flash” Thompson. — JBC] Comic Book Creator: It’s Sunday, September 22nd. We’re at Mark Sinnott’s house to talk with his dad, with Mark joining in the conversation. [to Joe] I’m finally here! I’ve been talking about coming here for a long time, Joe. Joe Sinnott: You said you’d say that, Jon. CBC: Well, first up, I just found out that you’re Irish, so should I assume that you’re Catholic? Joe: Yes, and my mother was Irish, too. Her name was McGraw. She was related to John McGraw, the old manager of the New York Giants baseball team. They all came from the middle part of the state, and they were all working in railroads. They were conductors…I remember my grandmother on my mother’s side, she used to get free tickets because her husband worked on the railroad, you know? So, she used to come down from Albany and we’d pick her up. She traveled free! Those were the days. That was back in the 1930s and we always used to love to see her come because she always brought us peanut butter in the little white containers with the metal handle. CBC: Like a little bucket? Joe: Yes. They used to deliver ice cream that way years ago, too. I don’t know whether you knew that. CBC: What, door to door? [Interviewer’s note: Ice cream sold door-to-door? I’m obviously a knucklehead.] Joe: No, no. If you went in the store, you could’ve bought a quart of ice cream and they would’ve put it in this little container with a wire handle, and that was your quart of ice cream. [chuckles] Mark Sinnott: Like Chinese food? Joe: Yeah. Right. CBC: So, did the Sinnotts come over because of the Potato Famine? Joe: Yes, to begin with. 1840. Thomas Sinnott. There were five brothers who came over all at once and they split up. One came up to Hudson Valley, one went to Chicago, one stayed in New York, one went to Canada, and I think the other one went to California. But, in any case, the one that went to Canada…His name was Michael Sinnott. He moved COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

to Connecticut and he got into the theater and he went out to Hollywood. He made it big out there and he changed his name from Sinnott… CBC: [Realizing Joe’s revelation] No way! Joe: To Sennett! S-E-N-N-E-T-T. CBC: Mack Sennett?! Joe: Mack Sennett. CBC: Are you serious? The Mack Sennett? Joe: Yeah. CBC: He was huge! Joe: In comedy. Yeah, he discovered Bing Crosby and a lot of people who are well-known today. And Michael Sinnott was his real name. He thought Sennett would look better up on the marquee. CBC: Was he thinking of Irish prejudice or something? Joe: [Laughs] No, he just thought it would look better. So that was the early ’10s. CBC: So is there an Irish contingent up here in Saugerties? Is there a community? Joe: Well, actually, there’s a great story: This area was founded by the Dutch years ago, when New York City was called New Amsterdam. When the British took over, they changed it to New York. Same way with Albany, which used to be called Fort Orange. In any case, right down here you pass through Glenerie, and, of course, that’s an Irish name. When the Irish came over from Ireland and they went through Ellis Island, they didn’t know anything about New York or the United States. So they asked them, “Where should we go?” And they were told there was an Irish community up near Saugerties, called Ulster. That was way back in the early 1800s. So the Irish came up here automatically because they knew that there were people like themselves, their churches. Mark: So they all settled here and they called it Glenerie, which is an Irish name, because it was an Irish community. Joe: And there was a lead mill down here near Glenerie,

Above: Selfie by Ye Ed of himself, Joe Sinnott (center), and Joe’s son Mark, taken during the September interview. Below: Joe’s relative, Hollywood’s “King of Comedy,” Mack Sennett.

Above: Joe Sinnott in his Saugerties High School s enior portrait, circa 1944.

Below: From 1943, these caricatures of the Sinnott and Moore families included young Joe Sinnott, at the far right, with his brother, Jack, who would be killed in action a year later, in combat during World War II, leaving Joe as the oldest living son. Inset right: Joe remembers his beloved older brother in this 1996 memorial piece by Joe.

ruler, about that thick, and if you did something wrong, you had to go up by the desk, hold your hands out and she’d hit you over the knuckles with this green ruler… hard! And we had a kid in the class and he was always in trouble. Bill Wurzel. He went up there one day—he was doing something wrong in class—and she made him put his hands and she took the ruler and went to hit ’em and he pulled his hands back and she hit the desk! That ruler went into a hundred pieces. CBC: Then she beat the hell out of him! [laughter] Joe: Everybody remembers Sister Agnes. She would hit you for practically nothing’, y’know? But they were tough in those days. There were a couple that wouldn’t hit you, but just as many would hit you, y’know? St. Mary’s was a tough place to grow up. It really was! I’ve got so many stories I could tell you about St. Mary’s! It was an old… I don’t wanna say it was a barn, where the school was held, but it had… [counting] one, two, three, four… four rooms. First and second grade were together, the third and the fourth, then the fifth and sixth. The seventh was separate and so was the eighth grade. Of course, down through the years, they slowly were replaced by lay-teachers but we had all Sisters. I graduated in 1941 from St. Mary’s. Mark: Then he went to high school. There was no Catholic school after eighth grade in the area. There was years later. Joe: Coleman High. It was a beautiful school, too. They just closed that. Mark: They just closed that this year. When I went to school, I graduated from St. Mary’s, in ’75. We had the lay-people and nuns. And it wasn’t just St. Mary’s. I think, in general, the nuns were just strict! Joe: They weren’t all like that. Mark: Yeah, there were exceptions. Sister Elaine was a sweetheart! She was the exception. CBC: Were you happy to move on to a regular school secular school? Joe: Well, we looked forward to it. It had a lot of things going for it that St. Mary’s certainly didn’t. It had a sports program, ’cause, you know, most of us were into sports. And it had art classes, which they didn’t have at St. Mary’s. In fact, if you were caught drawing, that was… that was… Mark: Grounds for the ruler! [laughter] CBC: Did you get whacked for it? Joe: I got whacked quite a bit. [Mark laughs] CBC: But somehow you survived! Joe: I’ve got a pretty good memory. I can remember I got a zero one time on a math test. I lived right up the street from the school, so Sister said, “You take this home.” She drew a great big zero up on top of the page. She said, “I want you to #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All artwork © Joe Sinnott.

so most of ’em were told they could get a job at the lead mill. My great-grandfather was Thomas Sinnott and he took a job there. He died at 39. A lot of the workers used to get lead poisoning because they didn’t realize the danger, which was very prevalent. Great little community. It’s about three miles from Saugerties. Mark: Just down the road. Joe: They had no church in Glenerie so they used to hitchhike or ride into Saugerties, Saint Mary’s, for going to church on Sundays. It was amazing in the wintertime. If they couldn’t get a ride, they would walk the three miles! But they had their soccer games. They had the Irish style of living. Mark: And cabbage. [laughs] Joe: Sure. That was a great time in their lives, actually. They didn’t live long because of the lead mill, really. The women did, but not the men. Like I said, it was a great story. CBC: Did you go to Catholic school? Joe: Yeah, I went to St. Mary School. We had a school that went from first to the eighth grade. We had no high school and after you graduated from St. Mary’s, you went over to Saugerties High School. In fact, they just closed the St. Mary’s grade school. My father even went to that school when he was young. Mark: Me and my brothers and sisters went there. They just closed it a couple years ago. The school. You know, the classroom that used to have had maybe 40 in it, then it went down to 20, then to five. That’s the way it’s goin’. Joe: Anyway, when you go back, there’s a great history. You had the nuns. They were the Sisters of Charity. They were situated across the river. Mark: [Whispers] They were brutal. Joe: And, in the wintertime, they used to walk across the [Hudson] river on the ice, to teach! At St. Mary’s. Can you imagine? I mean, you’ve got women—probably in their 50s and 60s—and they crossed the river on the ice to teach. CBC: Were the nuns tough? Joe: Oh! Sister Agnes, she had an 18-inch green

Saugerties Celebrates Joltin’ Joe Sinnott Day

All photos courtesy of Mark Sinnott. With thanks to Janice Chiang.

On Saturday, Aug. 31, 2019, the small Hudson Valley town of Saugerties, New York, honored a beloved and devoted native son, Joseph Leonard Sinnott, by bestowing upon him the “Pride of Ulster County” award and declaring that late summer Saturday as a “Day of Recognition” for the legendary Marvel Comics artist. The occasion was hosted by the Saugerties Historical Society, which featured an exhibition of Joltin’ Joe’s artwork and artifacts of his charmed life, as well as opening its grounds for a gathering of friends, neighbors, and fellow comics professionals from the region. The recent passing of Stan Lee and subsequent cancellation of his syndicated Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip, which Joe had inked since 1992—never mind 69 years as a comics pro!—was reason enough to declare the date an “official” retirement party for the now 93-year-old veteran. “For the first time in my life,” son Mark Sinnott said, “my father would not have to get up each morning to start each day by drawing. Now, Joe still draws each day, but only if he feels up to it, and nowadays it’s with no more deadlines or commitments.” Mark explained that the Saugerties Historical Society had long hoped to host a Joe Sinnott event and, he said, “They felt that now, more than ever, was the perfect time to do a retirement celebration. And, once underway, it began a summer-long endeavor to get over 80 pieces of art and memorabilia of Joe’s to adorn the walls and be placed in display cases.” The Kiersted House Museum, an 18th century stone building located on Main Street in Saugerties, devoted three rooms to the Joe Sinnott display, which included his many Bing Crosby album covers he had illustrated, various books and DVDs about Joe’s life, plus trading cards, puzzles, figurines, and a large collection of comic books adorning the large main exhibit room. The middle room featured various banners from conventions he attended and posters the artist has illustrated. The Saugerties Room at the entrance featured items which, Mark shares, “My dad is probably the most proud of, as it’s filled with numerous drawings he had done for local people in town, some for contributions to and accomplishments in the community. Even his high school yearbooks, complete with his cartoons, are proudly on display. Also featured is the logo he designed for the local fire department which adorns their fire truck, the official ‘Village of Saugerties’ logo, Joe’s U.S. Navy Seabee uniform from World War II, as well as many photos from his childhood, sports participation, local accomplishments, and his comics career.” The exhibit remained open to the public throughout September. According to Mark, when Joe got his first look at this enormous display, “My dad was totally blown away! We have had different art gallery-type shows through the years, but they all paled in comparison to this museum-type presentation. Hundreds of people showed up for this event to celebrate the life, art and retirement of Joe, including Saugerties residents, friends, family, and a very large representation from the comic book community.” Indeed, comic-book luminaries, including Barry Windsor-Smith, Terry Austin, Janice Chang, Joe Jusko, Fred Hembeck, and others, were among the attendees. Mark said, “My father was very grateful, humbled, and honored by the large outpouring of people that came out for his day to wish him the best in his ‘retirement.’” Doubtless, the culmination of the day’s events was when an official stood before the crowd to proclaim that the Town of Saugerties, Ulster County Legislature, Ulster County Executive, and 115th Congress of the United States of America all respectively declared that Saturday, August 31, 2019, would be known to all as “Joe Sinnott Day.” Inset top: Program book made available at the Saugerties Historical Society event. Bottom: Top row: Joe Sinnott and Fred Hembeck. Joe and Joe Jusko. Joe and Ron Marz. Bottom row: Barry WindsorSmith and Joe; Terry Austin and Joe; Joe and Janice Chiang; and the Mark Sinnott clan with Joe — Top row: Belinda and Mark; bottom row: Trevor, Joe, and Dorian Jack Sinnott.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

Above: Joe’s first published comics work along with the cover of the issue it appeared in, Mopsy #12 [Sept. 1950]. Below: Caricatures drawn for his high school yearbook.

my youngest brother—they asked him to do a picture of Our Blessed Mother. Naturally, Eddie didn’t wanna do it. So he came home and said, “Joe, I gotta have a drawing of the Blessed Mother by tomorrow. Will ya do it for me?” I was the oldest in the family, so I would draw him a picture. This one time I drew him a nice big picture and they put it on the easel up on the main altar in church and Eddie said, “I swear, when we walk by that easel in the morning, the Blessed Mother’s eyes would turn and look at me as I walk by!” [laughter] There were so many stories like that. CBC: Did you read comics at a young age? Joe: Yeah, I read Batman. That was my favorite, and then I liked “Hawkman” because the drawing was very much like Alex Raymond or it tried to be. CBC: It was actually a rip-off. Sheldon Moldoff… Joe: Wasn’t much of a Superman fan. In 1934, they came out with Terry and the Pirates and I was eight years old. You had to follow Terry and the Pirates. Actually, the strip was more about Pat Ryan than it was Terry, who was the kid. There had been a strip before that called Dickie Dare. Milton Caniff had worked on it. A couple of people had worked on it. But it was a little kid and he used to get in all kinds of adventures, but Terry was almost like him, only Terry grew with the strip. He got older. Later on in his life, he became a pilot in the Air Force. CBC: He was of draft age by World War II. He really did age a lot then. He was about 12 years old at the start… Joe: Actually, the first one to age was Skeezix, in Gasoline Alley. CBC: Now, they really aged! [laughs] Joe: They all jumped on the bandwagon. Perry Winkle. He had three friends and one of ’em was killed during the war, in service, to make it more realistic. The strips back then were so exciting. Not like today. CBC: Did you get into the artistry of it? You know, Noel Sickles and Caniff… Joe: Noel Sickles is the one that influenced Caniff. His style of art was so good, but he didn’t want to do comics. He wanted to do murals. He was above his normal ability to do strips, but he had Scorchy Smith in, probably 1934, ’35, ’36. That was his big years. He had inherited the strip from another artist and he was so good, but he wanted to do bigger things. In fact, during World War II, he worked for Life magazine, drawing war illustrations. He was really good. Whereas Caniff was more like the Dickie Dare style of art. Very cartoony. But then he learned from Noel Sickles. They shared a studio together so he used to copy Noel Sickles. They would work together. They did a thing. It was very well done: “Mr. Coffee Nerves.” I think it was Postum ads. It was the best art and ran in with the comic strips on Sundays. They worked together, but it was a lot of work. As you know, Jon, drawing comics is not easy. It’s a lot of work but… All my brothers, they could build houses, but I couldn’t drive a nail, you know? But fortunately, I could draw. CBC: So when were you in the service? Joe: Well, here’s another story: My brother went in. He had rheumatic fever. He and I were both sick in 1942. I was 14 and Jack was 17, and we went swimming one day down at Jones Beach. We were visiting friends and, the next day, we were both sick, so we came on home. The doctor put us to bed and Jack was worse than I was. He had rheumatic fever. It turned into it. This was September. Just about this time of year. The beach was closed. CBC: Did you say Jones Beach? On Long Island? Joe: Yeah, Jones Beach. It was a very popular beach, but they didn’t care about cleanliness back in those days. In any case, they put us to bed in September. We were both in bed September, October, November, and December. CBC: Wow! Joe: And we didn’t go back to school until January, after the Christmas vacation. We’d lost weight. It was a bad time for both of us. At that time, Jack had just turned 18, so he got his draft notice from the Army, in January of 1943, and

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Trudi, Mopsy TM & © the respective copyright holder. Yearbook caricatures © Joe Sinnott.

show this to your father.” So I brought the paper home, but I didn’t know how to give it to my father to show the zero up on the top. I lived about three blocks from the school so halfway home I bit it off and chewed it up and swallowed it. [laughter] So my father never saw the zero on my arithmetic. Oh, I could tell ya a hundred stories. CBC: How many brothers and sisters did you have? Joe: I had six. [Jon laughs] I’m Irish, Jon. I had five brothers and a sister. My oldest brother was Jack. I was second in line. Jack was killed in France, World War II. Twenty years old. CBC: Did any of your family want to be in the church? To be priests? Joe: No. I don’t remember that. CBC: Did you go through Catechism? Joe: Sure. Every day, we had a class in religion, you know? So we knew our catechism pretty well. Mark: My dad never missed a day of church. Well, he’s in assisted living now so they have like a Monday service. But even when we went to shows and that, if they had a show on a Sunday, we always went to church before. I was an altar boy, so he would go to 6:45 a.m. masses throughout the week… years ago! He was devout! [to Joe] Remember those, Dad? The 6:45 masses? Joe: Oh, yeah. CBC: So you didn’t keep a late schedule like Jack Kirby did? He would stay up all night, basically. Joe: Kirby worked around the clock. I was probably the best artist in the school. I used to draw things and it upset Sister quite a bit because I used to draw in books or anything I could get my hands on but in any case, if something came up among my other bothers where they had to draw something for sister — naturally, Eddie or Frankie or Lenny — they would ask me to do it. So one time, Eddie — he was

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he reported. And he passed a physical. The doctor wrote a note saying, “This man can’t be drafted. He’s got rheumatic fever and it’s settled in his legs.” It did. Jack had trouble walking. In any case, they took him in the Army in January, February, March… of ’43. I got better. I had no after-effects of the disease. So, anyway, he went up to his draft board with the note from his doctor saying that he was not draftable because of the problem. So he tore up the note and he threw it away, because he wanted to serve! So they drafted him and he was sent to South Carolina and two or three times he was hospitalized because of the rheumatic fever. He had trouble marching. In any case, after stays in the hospital they kept shovin’ him further and he wound up going to North Africa. He took a ship. He fought at Sicily and then they invaded Italy. He was in the third Division. Jack was in A Company. Audie Murphy was in B Company. They fought all through Anzio and Jack spent the whole giant war without getting hurt. CBC: Was he an Infantryman? Joe: Yeah. Like I said, Audie Murphy was… Mark: Racking up kills! [laughter] Joe: He was obtaining all these medals at the time. Then they invaded southern France, in August, 1944. CBC: Oh, I didn’t know that. So, there was Normandy in June, and then, in August of ’44, from the South? From the Mediterranean? Joe: They came up from the south, yes. When they took Sicily, they moved the First Division to England for more training and the Third Division, which is where my brother Jack was, they kept him there to invade Italy. So, in other words, the First Division for a whole year stayed in England planning for the Invasion — D-Day. Jack fought all through Italy and, August 15th, they invaded southern France and he was in the invasion. He was killed two weeks after the invasion, halfway up the Rhône Valley. CBC: By Nazis? By the Germans? Joe: Oh, yes. So anyway, he was killed in August. I would’ve been 18 in October. So, I went out and signed for the draft and, at that time, they were taking all 18-year-old kids. My mother said to me, “Joe, would you do me a favor and join the Navy, because maybe it might be safer?” She was afraid of the Army. That was in September. I was back in high school. I was a senior and I was playing soccer, having a great time, but I went up and I joined the Navy, in October of ’44. And they took me Oct. 13th. I loved the Army. I didn’t like the Navy, but I did it for my mother. What she didn’t realize…They put me in the Seabees. You didn’t have any choice back in those days. So I was driving an ammo truck! Can you imagine? I couldn’t even drive a car at home. [Jon chuckles] But they taught you how to drive a big truck. CBC: How many gears? A lot? Joe: I think so… if I remember. Anyway, it was very interCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

esting being in the Seabees, but you were all by yourself on the truck. There was no co-driver. And we had to deliver hand grenades and stuff to the Marines up on the front lines. We had to drive through Japanese areas. CBC: Where were you? What area? Joe: Okinawa. Are you familiar with Okinawa? CBC: Whoa. It’s a tragic story. Joe: Yeah, I knew Okinawa like I know Saugerties. I knew all the little towns because by then the Army had gone through, and the Marines. CBC: Okinawa was Japan proper? It was a part of Japan, the first island we hit when we came into the mainland. Joe: Yes, on our way to Tokyo. CBC: That was a horrible, horrible battle. Joe: It was the last battle of the war. We didn’t expect the atom bomb, Jon. That was just something out of the blue. We just didn’t expect it. ’Course, when that happened, you can imagine how the troops felt, you know? CBC: Well, it took two. Joe: In any case, that brought us up to the end of the war and they shipped us back but they kept us in for another six months. We drove for the military government in our trucks. But that was my time in service. CBC: I live quite close to Quonset, Rhode Island. That’s where the Seabees are headquartered. Mark: That’s where he was stationed… [to Joe] Rhode

Above: At left is Joe and Elizabeth — Betty — Sinnott on the day of their espousal, in 1950. At right is the couple renewing their wedding vows. Betty passed away in 2006.

Below: The Sinnott magic was conjured from this very drawing table, located in Joe’s longtime home, in Saugerties, New York. Today, his son Mark owns the abode. As viewed on inset, Joe has drawn and signed a headshot of Ben Grimm on the table.

Above: For the 20 th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Joe drew his first Treasure Chest assignment, for Vol. 17, #7 [Dec. 7, 1961]. Below: Treasure Chest Vol. 18, #5 [Nov. 8, 1962] cover by Joe.

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

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Island was where you trained, wasn’t it? Joe: Camp Endicott was the name of the camp. I’m trying to think of the name of the town. CBC: Quonset Point? Joe: That was it: Quonset Point. I was only about 14 years old when the war started, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. We didn’t even know what Pearl Harbor meant. Nobody did. We took everything as it came along. But, as the years progressed, it got closer and closer to… Actually, people don’t realize it, but, when they had the first draft in 1940, it was 26 to 50. That was the age. They didn’t draft anybody less than 26 or more than 50. I had an uncle who was 50. His number was picked first. And also, his number was the first one picked in World War One! So he was the first picked in both drafts. In any case, when we realized the war was gonna be tougher than we thought, they lowered the draft age to 21, and then, of course, eventually they got it down to 18 years of age, and, when I reached 18, I was eligible for the draft. But that was in 1944, toward the end of the war, with only had about a year to go. You can’t believe the times we had. Everything was rationed: tires, food. You had to have stamps. For everything. You could only use so much gas a week. Things were very hard. If you wanted to buy a pair of shoes, you had to have so many stamps from your book.

CBC: So, when did you come back home? Joe: I went in Oct. 13th, 1944, and I came home May 24th, 1946. So I was in maybe two years, something like that. CBC: What were your prospects when you came back? Joe: Well, I was 19 years old. I went in when I was 17. So when I came back out, I missed playing ball. All the way back to high school, by the way, because I had left high school as a senior. When I came back, I went back to high school. The other kids were 17 and 18, and there were about ten of us that were servicemen going back to high school. It was quite a different experience. High school was a lot different then. You didn’t feel like joining any clubs. You felt like you were out of place. But we made it through the year, graduated. My father was a foreman at the cement plant and he got me a job up there for the summer. First thing you know, I was playing ball, having a good time. I knew I wanted to go to art school and I stayed here at school for probably two-and-a-half years, maybe three. CBC: Art school? Joe: Yeah. The winter of 1948 was the coldest winter in New York history and I was working in a quarry. I said to myself, “I’ve gotta get outta here. I’ve gotta go to art school. This weather is killing me.” CBC: What were you quarrying? Joe: It was a limestone quarry. They made cement out if it. I did all kinds of yard work, moving the track for the little railroad that we had. We had small cars we’d fill up with stone. So, I saw this ad in the paper one day for the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, run by Burne Hogarth and Silas Rhodes, down in New York, and I said, “Gee, that’s just what I want.” CBC: You had the G.I. Bill? Did you always know you would take advantage of that in the back of your mind? Joe: Yes. In the back of my mind, but I went back to high school. I didn’t use the G.I. Bill. One of my buddies did and they paid him to go back. I didn’t want to use it. I wanted to save it. CBC: How were your grades in high school? Joe: Oh, they were average. I wasn’t an A student. Mark: It’s like Custer who graduated last in his class. [laughter] CBC: And yet we remember him today. Joe: So, I took my little samples. I was always drawing at home, copying the strips — Smilin’ Jack, Terry and the Pirates. So I brought my samples. I made an appointment to see Silas Rhodes down at the school. I thought maybe the samples weren’t good enough to get me in. I showed him the drawings and was as nervous as you can be. He said, “Oh, these are great!” I thought he was kidding, just saying that so I wouldn’t be turned down and I would come to the school. I thought maybe they were having trouble getting students. He says, “Gotta show these to Burne Hogarth.” So, he calls Hogarth in and, of course, Burne drew Tarzan — great artist! — and he says, “Say, these are good! You’re a natural cartoonist.” I still thought they were pullin’ my leg! He said, “What did you wanna do?” I said, “I wanna be an illustrator.” He said to me, “Illustration is kaput. It’s tough getting a job doing illustrations.” He said, “Comics is where you wanna be.” And there were a lot of comic companies at that time, all the way from Dell and Fawcett, St. John…You could go on and on. Anyway, he said, “I would advise you to take the cartooning classes here. Your work is… You’re a cartoonist, a born cartoonist!” I said, “Well, you’re the boss.” And he signed me up for the cartooning course. So that’s what I took. I was there two-and-a-half years and Tom Gill, one of my instructors, he liked my work and he asked me to be one of his assistants. CBC: He was doing the Lone Ranger syndicated strip at the time? Joe: He had a bunch of strips. He taught all day at the school and at night. He lived in Rockville Centre. He would draw The Lone Ranger and different movie adaptations like Western Union. They made a good movie out of that. A

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lot of things like that that were made from movies. At first I did the backgrounds, and he had one other fella working for him, Norman Steinberg. I’ll never forget him. He drew beautiful horses! He could draw horses, but after about six months, he shot himself.* He was at the Battle of the Bulge and never got over the horror of it, I guess. I was his only assistant then and I started penciling Kent Blake, a detective, and Rick Davis, an FBI man. I would pencil it and then would ink it and I’d do everything but the heads. I’d leave the heads up to Tom. He wanted to make it look like his work. So I didn’t do the heads. Then, after a while he let me do the heads. I was doing everything. Especially for Marvel — Rick Davis and Kent Blake and Red Warrior, characters like that. Finally, I got married and I said to Betty, “I’ve been doing a lot of Tom’s work. There’s no reason why Stan Lee shouldn’t buy it. He’s already buying it now.” So I went over to see Stan with my little samples and he said, “I thought somebody was doing Tom’s work. I think maybe we can take you on.” He gave me a three-page story—“The Man Who Wouldn’t Die.” It was a Western. Took me all week to do it. I took my time. I brought it in, Stan liked it, and I was with him for 69 years. [laughter] CBC: Were they in the Empire State Building at the time? Joe: Yes, they were. How did you know that? CBC: I know a lot, Joe. [laughter] So, what was your notion? Did you want to get into comic books or did you want to get into comic strips? Joe: Well, you would like to get into comic strips if you could get into anything. CBC: Were you aware of the grind? Joe: Yeah. The first class was foundation. We had a whole year of foundation where you drew the model and things that would help me. CBC: What’s the best thing that you remember learning? Joe: Actually, I learned more from Tom Gill. Once I started working for Tom, and he let me do all the work, I was doing actual work for publication. CBC: Hands-on learning. That’s always the best way. Joe: I had some good instructors. Guys you never heard of. Maurice Del Bourgo? Did you ever hear of him? He was a good artist. He taught cartooning. I had a year of foundation. A guy named Gil Peterson. I went from Gil Peterson to Maurice Del Bourgo. Tom Gill was never my instructor. He was someone on the side. CBC: Did Burne Hogarth ever instruct you? Joe: He would come into classes and show us how to draw. Little things he taught us. Always have the character looking into the artwork, for instance. Little things like that. Of course, he was brilliant. Up at the easel, he could draw anything. He was a great artist. I can’t say enough about him. It’s amazing the things that were going on at the time. Al Williamson was doing some work for Burne Hogarth at the time. Al was a year younger than I, but, at the time, I remember Al was thought of as being pretty good, you know? He could do work for Burne Hogarth. But you couldn’t wait to do strips! Guys would come in and say, “Did you hear that so and so was looking for an artist for so and so?” You couldn’t wait for information like that! That’s how I got my first story for St. John. I remember Samm Schwartz, he came in and he said, “Did you hear? St. John is looking for someone to do a strip for the Mopsy comic.” So I took my samples and I went up to St. John’s and it was a woman editor. I forget her name. She said, “I think you’ll fit in.” And that was the first thing I ever did for money in comics.

CBC: Was that like a Millie the Model kind of thing? Joe: Exactly. She would have given me more only that’s when Tom Gill asked me, “Would you like to be my assistant?” So, naturally…He was doing Lone Ranger and all these Westerns and adventure stuff that I wanted to do so I didn’t go back to St. John’s. But I could’ve gotten more work from St. John’s. CBC: So, you were doing Gill’s strip. Did you go to Gill’s studio or did you pick it up and go home to do the work? Joe: I went home to do the work. CBC: Did you take the train? Joe: You mean when I first started? I was living in the city when I attended the school. I worked for Tom while I was in the city. I had an apartment — Betty and I.

This page: All are from Treasure Chest Vol. 18, #11 [Jan. 31, 1963], including the above opening panel to Joe’s “Man in Space” four-pager. The marvelous wraparound cover, by Golden Age great and TC contributor Reed Crandall, features a spot-on caricature of Joltin’ Joe doing his best to dodge Fran Matera’s trombone. Other memorable cartoonists performing “The TC Stomp” include Frank Borth (playing violin with bow), Dick Giordano (flute), and the cover artist himself (hair comb, startled by cymbals).

* Transcriber’s note: Norman Steinberg actually committed suicide, in Dec. 1952, by attaching a vacuum cleaner hose to his car’s exhaust pipe because, his family stated, marital difficulties, but an artist who worked with him said it was survivor’s guilt from the war.—Steve Thompson. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

This spread: The most talkedabout feature in the history of Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact (the full name of the Catholic bi-weekly comic book), is the 1964 serial “1976: Pettigrew for President,” drawn by Joe. Ostensibly a ten-part civics lesson about the presidential nominating process, but is also, readers discover in the surprising denouement, a progressive parable about racial equality. Above is Joe’s wraparound cover for Vol. 19, #11 [Jan. 13, 1964].

a beautiful layout, and his sponsor at the time was Old Gold, the cigarette, and they had a lady and her little daughter and they used to dance and they were rehearsing for the show. We’d be upstairs in Ted Mack’s little cubicle. Looking down on the stage and they’d be dancing down there to the tune of the commercial. It was a lot of fun. So anyway, this guy from the paper, Variety — he’s the one who introduced me to Ted Mack — said, “Joe, Ted’s a real nice guy and you’ve gotta make him look like a nice guy.” And he looked like somebody from Guys and Dolls. [laughter] He looked like a gangster! He had these beady eyes and he wanted me to do a caricature of him! “Ohhh!,” I says. So I started drawing him and I said, “I think I could do a better job in my room on 74th Street.” He said, “Aww, don’t worry about it. Just draw me as you see me and don’t worry about it.” So I tried to draw him, but I was as nervous as you could be. I had Frank Murphy with me, and he says, “By the way…” Mark: [To Jon] Frank Murphy went to art school with my dad and they became best friends. [to Joe] You were Frank’s best man at his wedding and godfather to his… Frank just passed away a couple years back. Joe: Yeah, anyway, he said, “Would you guys like to go out and have supper with me?” The other guy said, “Where you goin’?” He says, “Oh, I dunno. Maybe up the Stork Club.” So, here’s me and Frank…Frank had a shirt on, a couple little buttons were missing… [laughter] We made up some excuse that we couldn’t do it. Mark: Aww, man! Joe: I often wish I’d went. Mark: I would have gone! They’d have given you a tie when you went in the door. #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

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CBC: Where’d you meet Betty? Joe: Oh, she was from my hometown. That’s a long story. But the school used to send me…They used to get a lot of calls for cartoonists. “Could you send me over one of your better cartoonists? We’ve got a little job here we need to handle.” So they used to send me over a lot. These were hard things to do. You remember Ted Mack? CBC: What, Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour? Joe: Yeah. He took over for Major Bowes, who had the show for years. Anyway, they called me up and they said, “Joe, Ted Mack, over at NBC, wants someone to draw his picture—a caricature, for Variety magazine, and we thought maybe you could handle it.” I used to draw caricatures of the teachers, you know. So they gave me the address of NBC and my buddy and I went over. Oh, he had

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Joe: Anyway, the school wanted to send me over to one of the studios to see Ham Fisher, who did Joe Palooka, which was very big in those days. He says, “You’ll like him. He wants you to draw Joe Palooka’s picture on an easel on TV.” I was scared to death to do that job, so I begged away from that. I didn’t do it. They sent somebody else over. Ham Fisher was a good cartoonist but, on the easel, he had it already drawn, Joe Palooka in blue pencil. [laughter] CBC: So it wouldn’t be picked up on the TV. Joe: Yeah, I coulda done that! Mark: And if you’d done that, look at the career that you coulda had! [laughter] Joe: Well, anyway, I backed off of that one. CBC: How you hear of [Treasure Chest’s] George Pflaum Publishing? Did you know that they were a possibility to get freelance work from in the ’50s? Joe: No. The kids went to catholic school and that’s where they had Treasure Chest and Little Messenger… Pflaum published a couple of publications. They had them when I was in St. Mary’s. That’s when we had the belly-up in… Mark: Due to the Comics Code. Joe: Right. Marvel shutdown production for, like, six months, in any case, so guys started scrambling around looking for work. One of the kids… [to Mark] one of you kids… Mark: It wasn’t me! I wasn’t around yet. It was my sister Linda who brought home a Treasure Chest comic book. Joe: So anyway, she brought it and I said, “I remember these!” There was “Chuck White” and a couple other strips that I recalled. So I said, “Gee, I’ll send my samples up there to Ohio.” So I got some samples together and mailed them out to the editor and he called me back and said, “Joe, we like your work and we’re doing a story on…” They liked the way I did likenesses. I had just done The Beatles comic book for Dell… Mark: No, that would’ve been later, a couple years later. CBC: I got to visit Frank Borth and spoke with Fran Matera. Joe: Well, he’s dead now. CBC: Right, but I work on these retrospective for decades, Joe. You know Shaun Clancy? Mark: Oh, yeah. You remember Shaun Clancy, dad. Shaun writes to you all the time. In fact, Shaun has a piece of art of my dad’s, from art school! Remember, dad? Shaun’s good friends with that guy you went to art school with. John Bulthuis. [to Jon] Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of Treasure Chest. Dick Giordano worked for Treasure Chest. Reed Crandall. Joe: Reed Crandall. Mark: Did you interview Reed or no? CBC: Oh, no. He’s long dead. Pretty far back. I was in college when he died. Mark: Okay. [points to Joe] And you’re just getting’ around to this guy, now? CBC: I’ve been planning it forever! [to Joe] You sent me a wraparound cover that you did. You sent me a Velox of it. I still have that at home. I meant to bring it and forgot it. Joe: [Looking through Treasure Chest bound volume] That was Fran Matera. CBC: Yeah, “Chuck White.” Mark: Now, what is this book? CBC: I bought it off eBay 10 or 15 years ago. It’s the volume of the 1963-’64 run. Mark: So, it’s the complete run of Treasure Chest? CBC: Of that volume, yes. For that school year. You know “Pettigrew for President”? That’s probably the most important story to come out of Treasure Chest, culturally. Mark: What did that run, like…four issues? A few issues, right? CBC: Ten issues, I would say between the primaries and the convention. The story was about a presidential candidate but the reader didn’t see him until the last page, when it’s revealed he’s the first African-American candidate for president. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

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.

Mark: Not until the last panel, right. CBC: Do you remember doing “Pettigrew for President?” Joe: Oh, yeah. [to Mark] That [artwork] was stolen from me, Mark. Mark: [To Jon] If you ever see Treasure Chest pages of his original art, they were stolen out of the house. Joe: Two-hundred pages. CBC: Two-hundred pages? Mark: We do have Treasure Chest art, but 200 pages were stolen. If there’s ever a page on the market, it was never given to anyone. It was never sold, it was stolen! He got back every Treasure Chest page he drew, so if it’s out there, it’s stolen. Stolen in 1975! CBC: In 1975? Did you know who did it? Mark: He has an idea.

This spread: Splash from Treasure Chest Vol. 18, #11 [Jan. 31, 1963] and panels from TC Vol. 18, #20 “[June 4, 1964].

This page: As never before or since, Treasure Chest was briefly in the national spotlight with the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first African-American U.S. President, as the 10-part 1964 serial drawn by Joe, “Pettigrew for President” was reexamined and called prescient by the media, including the National Catholic Reporter (see below Oct. 12, 2008, story).

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Treasure Chest TM & © the respective copyright holder.

It could be one of two people. They’ve been questioned. Police report was filed. It’s still on file. We think the guy thought he was just taking super-hero stuff. He probably didn’t realize until he got home. “Aw, this isn’t super-hero!” So we’re just hoping it didn’t get thrown in the river. I would hope not. CBC: I would imagine the original art for anti-communist stuff would be pretty valuable. Mark: Oh, yeah. [indicates Joe] He’s still got quite a bit of original art. CBC: “Pettigrew 1976” Who wrote that? Do you know? Mark: I remember his name. Was it Berry Reece? I think so. CBC: [To Joe] When you started the story, did you have any idea what the denouement, what the final ending…? Joe: Was going to be be? No! They even fooled me. And I was the artist! CBC: Wow. Did you question the fact that they never showed the face? You had to always do that throughout the chapters. Joe: Oh, yeah! They told me: don’t ever show his face. Always have a tree

limb or something blocking his face. Mark: It’s great art and the whole story is great. It’s a great story, Dad. CBC: It took place right at the height of the civil rights movement and it was a great denouement, one with cultural significance. Mark: And that took place in 1976, though the comic was from 1964. CBC: The timing was the same as the 1964 presidential election. Mark: Right. Then, when Obama was elected, “Pettigrew” came back into the news. CBC: So it did. Joe: Readers should have realized that he was going to be a black guy seeing as how he was covered up. Mark: I don’t know. I don’t think it came across that way. They were shocked when they saw it at the end. That’s what I think. It wasn’t, “This is what I expected.” I don’t think anybody expected it. CBC: I think, historically, it’s the only Treasure Chest story arc that’s discussed, besides the anti-communist stuff. Other than the quality of the artwork. Joe: [Admiring the bound volume] This is a great book. CBC: Isn’t it, though? I lucked out that it was this particular volume, the same at “Pettigrew.” Mark: They used to send ’em. We have all the Treasure Chest comics they sent, but at the end of every year, they used to send… It’s not bound like this, but they had holes punched in… CBC: Like the teachers’ binders? Mark: Yeah, like the teachers’ binders. That’s what it would be. We have a few of those. But not that thick. CBC: It’s a bound book. It says on the flyleaf, “a gift of the bookbinder.” They might have been extras or something, but the spine would say Treasure Chest and the volume. Nice, huh? Joe: Oh, it’s great! I didn’t know I did good work like this. Mark: Oh, jeez! CBC: Yep, that’s pretty neat to see. Mark: That’s the actual comic books, right? Just bound in there. I love when they do that. CBC: [Looking at Joe leafing through hardcover book] Look at that. Every page that you turn to, it’s you. [laughter] “Red Victim.” So what do you think of the anti-commie stuff? Was it corny to do or…? What did you think of all that? Joe: Oh, I didn’t even worry about it. CBC: It was just propaganda as propaganda? Joe: That’s it. [laughter] CBC: It’s a job, huh? Do you remember what they paid? Joe: I’m trying to think. Treasure Chest paid me more than anybody. More than Marvel. They paid close to $50 a page for pencils and inks.

The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps Limited.

CBC: You shipped pages out through the U.S. postal service? Joe: I think $44 a page was the highest Marvel paid. CBC: [To Mark, indicating Joe] Did he keep accounting? Mark: Yeah, we have his ledgers. CBC: Are you serious? Can you find numbers for me? Mark: Yeah, if my knees allow me to get up. CBC: [Indicates Sinnott story] And that’s a serial, too. “The Red Victim.” It was a whole series. Joe: These characters! CBC: They were really good. Frank Borth was great. The coloring’s quite good, too. So, okay, you sent them samples. Do you imagine that you sent them your [Battle #66, Oct. 1959] Fidel Castro story? That was before Cuba went communist, right? Joe: Yeah, I guess. CBC: Certainly before the Bay of Pigs, and he became a U.S. adversary. That’s a really nice job! You did some biographies, right? Was that for Dell or was that for…? Joe: He had some tough stories to do. Jeez. CBC: So, about Treasure Chest: Your daughter came home with a copy of Treasure Chest and you saw the address and you just cold-called them so to speak? Joe: I mailed some samples up to them and they called me right up. I can’t remember the fella’s name. I can remember the second one, Bob Wischmeyer. He and I worked together quite a bit. The other guy had retired or something. He was the editor. CBC: Berry Reece, Jr., was the editor. He was the guy that responded to you first? Did you know him? Joe: I met him, but I didn’t know him. He’s the one that gave me the work originally. Bob Wischmeyer and I were very close. In fact, I did a couple of things for him — ghosted — which naturally I didn’t get paid for. But it was a good story, actually. CBC: This was a pitch, something you just did on spec? Joe: Yeah, we tried to sell it on spec, but they weren’t buying adventure stuff then. He was a kid trying to make the basketball team. I mean, this was the early ’60s, when they were actually burning colleges, you know? At that time. But the artwork I thought was very good. I don’t know whether Mark…? Mark: Johnny Hawk, All-American. CBC: Johnny Hawk, All-American? That was the basketball player, the college student? The strip that you did with the other editor, Bob Wischmeyer? You guys became just friends through the mail or did you ever meet him in person? Joe: Never met him. CBC: So just on the phone. Joe: Right. CBC: So, you’d receive a script from Treasure Chest? Joe: A script? Yes. [looking through Joe Sinnott: Brushstrokes With Greatness] Look: that was the college kid. CBC: Yeah! A really nice job! Joe: I thought so. CBC: That’s really great. It didn’t sell? Joe: No, they were looking for humorous stuff. CBC: So you had a regular assignment with Treasure Chest and you recall they paid $50 a page. How long would it take you to do a page? Pencils and inks. Joe: Well, I had to do it in a day. CBC: A day? One day, one page? Joe: Oh, yeah. CBC: You probably did 10 pages an issue. Eight maybe? Joe: Some were longer, some were shorter. Mark: Probably six, Jon. CBC: So, was $300 good for a week’s pay? Could you pay the mortgage? Joe: In the early ’60s? Yeah, that was good money, sure. CBC: How much was the mortgage on this place? What did you have to meet? Joe: When I bought this house, I paid, $15,500. My mortgage payment a month was $78. [raucous laughter] And COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

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.

that included the escrow and taxes, so all I paid was $78 a month. Mark: So, if he did two pages, he had leftover money for gas and lunch. CBC: That’s just from Treasure Chest, though. You did other freelance work, right? Joe: I did. CBC: Did you have a regular thing at Dell? Joe: After I did The Beatles. CBC: How did you get the Beatles job? Joe: A guy called me up,Vince Prezio. I’d never met him. “We’re doing a story on The Beatles and we want someone that can do likenesses and you look like you can do likenesses pretty good” So he says, “Would you like to see our script?” They sent me the script. He was an illustrator, this Prezio. But they sent me a script — five pages or whatever — they wanted me to pencil and I penciled it for ’em and they liked what they saw. They said, “Yes, would you come down and look at the script?” So I went down to Dell. CBC: Where were they? In Poughkeepsie or…? Joe: No, New York City. So I went down there and they liked the way that I handled likenesses. I think they asked me to do some pencil drawings of the Beatles. Because I was always pretty good at doing likenesses. CBC: From the beginning! I saw your high school stuff.

This page: By the time Beatlemania crashed onto American shores in 1964, Joe Sinnott was renowned for his ability to capture likenesses and thus he was tapped to draw the Dell Comics one-shot 72-pager, The Beatles [Sept.–Nov. ’64].

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Treasure Chest TM & © the respective copyright holder.

Joe: And I liked it. He gave me the script right away and it was a fairly easy story to do. It wasn’t like some of the Treasure Chest stuff. Like, I did the life of… Oh, who was the astronaut, Mark? Mark: Alan Shepard. Joe: Next time you come, Mark can show you all of that stuff — Alan Shepard, the Beatles. It’s all downstairs. And then I did MacArthur, Eisenhower, John Kennedy. I did a lot of biblical drawings. CBC: Was that all for Dell? Mark: Treasure Chest and Dell. Joe: It was all published. It was all stolen from me. Mark: Dell would be The Beatles, The FBI, Jungle War Stories… 12 O’Clock High. I think they’re the four things you did for Dell. CBC: I forgot about 12 O’Clock High. Was that for the TV show or the movie?

Mark: The TV show. The book, I guess, was doing very well. He did, what? [looks at Joe] Two issues of 12 O’Clock High? And then they canceled the TV show and they said when the TV show is canceled, they can’t continue the book. Even though the book was selling. Joe: I loved doing the airplanes. It was a lot of fun. Mark: But all the historical people… Alan Shepard. They were all Treasure Chest. Except The Beatles was Dell. CBC: Did you know who The Beatles were when you first got the script? Joe: No, I’d never heard of ’em. Not many people had. In fact, it was hard to find references for the book. CBC: You had to go down to the offices to see reference? Joe: I used to go to the stationary stores and newspaper stores to see if I could find any magazines with The Beatles. I found one or two and I used those. I’d look at the art and I’d clip it. I did everything with the art. Mark: From the photos. Joe: Considering that it was done in a hurry, we did a pretty good job on it. CBC: Why was it done in a hurry? They just wanted it fast? Mark: I think the Beatles book was in ’64, but it came out before they were on The Ed Sullivan Show. CBC: Well, that would be February of ’64. Is that possible? Mark: Dad, wasn’t it before they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show that the book was out? Joe: It was almost the same time. CBC: Looks like September. Mark: September of ’64? I could be wrong. CBC: You said “we” when you were talking about this. Did anyone help you with the art? Joe: No. Did I say, “we?” No. It was a lot of work but…Well, what was so hard about it was drawing the guitars. That took time. More so than, say, Ringo, with the drums. Drawing all the frets. I was so particular about doing everything so accurately. I put everything I had into it. It was a very short deadline and they couldn’t believe that I did it that quickly. CBC: People need to realize that an issue of Treasure Chest came out every two weeks. A full-length comic book every two weeks. So you actually, in a month, would have to get done two issues worth of your contributions. You had to do a lot of work. Joe: Anytime you had likenesses — even airplanes — you need reference. You can’t make that up. CBC: Did you have a clip file? Joe: A file? I had a big file. I never used it for this. I never had anything on the Beatles. But I had a big file. Looking back, when I was doing Treasure Chest… CBC: Did you go out to Ohio and visit them? Joe: I was never at the offices. CBC: Ever face to face with anybody from there? Joe: Yeah. Berry Reece, when he, uh…what was the story? He came to Saugerties and we both went down to Maryknoll, the mission. It’s right down the river. A beautiful place! CBC: To reference for certain stories? Catholic artifacts? Joe: Let’s see. What story did we do? It may have been the Bishop Walsh story. We wanted to be as accurate as possible. They had thousands and thousands of pictures in file cabinets on the old huts, straw huts, and everything you could think about China, they had it. Of course, all the floors in Maryknoll, they were flagstone. I remember that well because they told me I could pick out anything I wanted from the library, I had to bring it back to the desk, show them the stuff I had picked out and they had to okay it. Some they wouldn’t let me take. There were pictures of dead Chinese and Japanese and things like that. But they let me have a lot of stuff. CBC: You mean you borrowed the stuff and brought it home for reference? Joe: Yeah, for reference. I had to bring it back, of course. CBC: How far away is Maryknoll from here? Joe: Oh, 60 miles. CBC: Did you need Berry to get in there? Why did Berry go with you? He was in the area? Joe: I never thought about it that way. I never had any problem, but Berry was always with me. CBC: And you were probably preparing for that Bishop Walsh serial? Joe: Yeah, it was probably for the Bishop Walsh story because that was like 64 pages [in total]. It was a long story, so I needed a lot of reference. It showed, I think in the artwork. It was one of the stories that was stolen from me. I hated to see it stolen because it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever worked on. You can see in your book there.

CBC: “Red Victim.” Do you think you got the entire script of all the chapters or did you get them piecemeal, one chapter at a time? Joe: Oh, one at a time. Mark: You didn’t get the entire script. No, you probably wouldn’t have because they were done two weeks apart. Like the Pope John, which ran six issues or whatever. CBC: It ran ten issues. Mark: He was probably getting a script every couple of weeks. CBC: Treasure Chest was really unusual. It came out every two weeks, which was even more than twice-monthly. A monthly’s coming out 12 times a year. This is coming out 20 times during a school year! That’s really fast! And then, of course, you’ve got the downtime in the summer or whatever it was for you. Do you remember what the period was for you, with summer vacations and all? Because they’d stop after the school year for the summer vacation. The schools would not be receiving it. Of course, this would be months before because of the production schedule… Mark: However! Treasure Chest did make a Summer Special book, which was like a giant-size. CBC: That was just a couple, though, right? Didn’t they do it just a couple years? Mark: May have been one book per summer. I think you’re right. They only did that a couple years. [indicates Joe] He didn’t take a vacation until…Remember his run in the FF from #44–94, whatever that was? He called Stan and said, “Stan, I’ve never had a vacation. I need to take a couple weeks off and go on vacation.” So that was the first vacation he ever took. Would have been 1969–70. And he’d been working since 1950, so 20 years. So that was the first vacation he took, but then he said, years later, had he known that Jack was leaving the FF in just a few issues, he wouldn’t have gone on vacation then. He’d have just done it right to the end, you know? CBC: Who was the replacement? Dan Adkins …? Mark: No, Frank Giacoia. Then it was him and Buscema… Verpoorten. Joe: [Indicates “Pettigrew for President”] This was a hard one. CBC: “Pettigrew for President.” Boy, is that wordy. Who did the lettering? Do you know? Joe: Jon D’Agostino. CBC: Yeah? He did a lot of work for Charlton, too. Joe: He was good. CBC: He was a cartoonist, also? Joe: Yeah, he worked for Archie. CBC: That’s right. So, at this time, the early ‘60s, were you also doing Charlton work? Romance stories? And Vinnie was inking them. Mark: Yes. ’59 to ’62…’63? I think so. CBC: So, Marvel [work] really picked up with Fantastic Four #43 or 44, I think, so that would be 1964. That would be…Oh, my heavens, you must have been busy as hell! Joe: I was busy, that’s for sure. CBC: [Looking at Charlton index of Joe’s work] So you did overlap with Treasure Chest. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

Mark: He did 139 pages of Gorgo. CBC: Did you go over to Derby, Connecticut, at all? Mark: No. CBC: You must have been at the post office all the time. Did anything ever get lost in the mail? Joe: No, not at that time, no. I did lose something years later. I sent something and I didn’t send it Priority. I sent it Regular mail. It was a cover. Supposedly, Jack Kirby had penciled it. It showed up. The guy moved. It was very complicated. So they tried to track it down but they never could. He finally said he threw it away because he didn’t think anybody was gonna own up to it. Mark: That was a fan. That was a commission piece you did, Dad. The guy had moved. CBC: Did you like working for Treasure Chest? Was it pleasant? Joe: Yes. They paid well, but it was hard work. [Indicates “Pettigrew 1976”] Look at all the drawings I had to do. A lot of work. CBC: No assistant? Joe: No, I never had an assistant. I had a couple guys who worked doing backgrounds. Mark: Not on Treasure Chest, Dad. That was years later at Marvel, when he had some background assistants. On Treasure Chest, you didn’t have any help, Dad. The Marvel stuff you had a lot of background help, later on: Keith Williams, Dan Green, Jim Balent…. CBC: [Points to index] So this was the first serial that you did for them? Mark: “Pearl Harbor” was the first story. The Pope [John XXIII] was the first serial. CBC: “Man in Space” must have been Alan Shepard. So, from sporadic in ’61, right from the get-go in ’62. But you missed a bit at the end the year. Arguably that was because you were busy with your Marvel work. Mark: Oh, yeah. He was doing “Thor” in Journey into Mystery there. He was penciling and inking those five or six “Thor” stories. CBC: Would be interesting to see what would possibly have been assigned to you here. They seemed to be loyal. Was Treasure Chest loyal?

Previous page: Joe Sinnott drew the multi-part “Red Victim,” which related the achievements and persecution of Maryknoll Bishop James E. Walsh (inset center), who spent 12 years in Communist Chinese prison. Joe Sinnott recalls Treasure Chest writer Berry Reece, Jr. (seen above) joined him to visit the Ossining institution (lower pic) to conduct research about the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers organization. The splash is from TC Vol. 19, #1 [Sept. 12, 1963]. Reece was also writer of the “1976: Pettigrew for President” serial in TC. Below: Mark Sinnott (left) and Joe in the studio, 1970s.

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.”

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Art © Joe Sinnott.

Mark: They constantly gave you work. You never had to call them and say, “Are there any jobs for me to do?” Joe: Oh, no. No. CBC: Did you just wince a little? I said “loyal” and you went, “Eh.” Joe: They knew what I could do. That’s why they always gave me the stories where likenesses had to be shown. CBC: You had some really nice stuff. I’m really glad I saw that high school work of yours. You were really good at likenesses right from the word go. [Looking at index entry] What was “Archaeology, the Greatest Detective Story”? Was that just vignettes? Joe: That was about the findings in the pyramids. Mark: Like hieroglyphics and stuff like that. CBC: So it was pretty much a documentary, not a story. Mark: Right. He did a few of those. There’s one there called Canyon Lands which is all about out West. Monument Valley and all that. CBC: On “Pettigrew,” did it feel like it was important? Or even now, in retrospect? Joe: I would have thought so. CBC: So it’s “Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll”! Now [“Red Victim”] makes sense. [Mark laughs] And Berry was writing this, so he was doing research, too, when he was down there. So, in the school year ’64-’65, you just did one-shot stories and no serials. [to Mark, indicating index] Is this based on the issues you have? Mark: Based on his ledger and the issues I have. That’s complete. There’s nothing missing there as far as Treasure Chest work. If there’s some issues missing, he didn’t do that issue. CBC: It’s just curious. In 1963, he did every single issue. Mark: Yeah, but if you think, in ’63, he didn’t do a lot for Marvel. He was doing more for Dell. [to Joe] I don’t know when you did The Beatles. You probably started that in ’63. May have been ’64, I don’t know. CBC: To the kids at home: Joe is penciling and inking these while he was doing the most fantastic inking job on Jack Kirby in the ’60s. Then you did biographies of Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, de Valera (who was the President of Ireland). And then pretty much one-shot stories. You stayed busy right to the end, What was the end like? Do you remember? Mark: The end of Treasure Chest. Did you know it was coming to an end? Joe: Only because they told me. Mark: When did they tell you? Were you still doing work for them and

they said, “Joe, we’re probably gonna cease operation in a couple months. Sales aren’t good and we don’t know how long it’s gonna be?” Joe: It was something like that, but it wasn’t exactly that way. CBC: [To Mark] Did you get Treasure Chest in school, Mark? Mark: Yeah. CBC: So you actually, literally, told classmates, “Hey! My dad is in this!” Mark: [Laughs] Yeah, they knew. CBC: That has got to be one of the coolest feelings in the world. Mark: Yep. The coolest feeling in the world was going to art class as a junior or senior and they wanted to know how comic books were made and I had to give the whole lecture on that and bring in the Fantastic Four #200 cover that he did with Kirby. And you know, we had the original cover and we had the comic book. We don’t have the original cover anymore because [nods toward his dad] someone must have sold that for five bucks. But you know, giving that talk was really cool. CBC: Mark just gave a stink-eye to his dad, folks. [laughter] Mark: When I got married and I’d come back home, I was, “Dad, where are all those covers?” “Oh, I sold those at some shows.” Because I wasn’t doing the shows with him in the ’80s. Mom and he were doing ’em. Five dollar Buscema pages were going out the door. But, hey, y’know, that was probably good money back in 1980. CBC: So, Mark, what other freelance assignments were there? Mark: He did Archie. Archie Comics. For… Joe: Jon D’Agostino. Mark: He was ghosting for Jon. You were doing the inks, right? Jon was penciling and then you were doing the inks. And then I think you were leaving the heads for Jon to ink. Joe: I don’t remember. Mark: But like Tom Gill, he ended up eventually doing all of it. CBC: What year? Mark: Well, you’ve got the Charlton, which was… CBC: Around 1962–63. Mark: A bunch of Charlton. Okay, here’s Archie. Archie Comics. Now, here’s the thing. He was not credited for these. However, now when they do Archie Digests and they do reprints, he’s starting to get credit ’cause now they’ve found out. Back in the day, unless you were DeCarlo, you weren’t signing stuff. There’s his Archie stuff. And the next page. Early 1970s. CBC: What else? Mark: ACG. He did “John Force, Magic Agent.” CBC: Let me ask you about Jon D’Agostino. Did he live in the area? Joe: No. CBC: So you would mail him. Did the lettering pages for Treasure Chest come to you or did they go to him? Mark: Jon used to come up to the house. CBC: So you did meet him? Mark: Jon D’Agostino, Dad. He used to come up to the house. Joe: Once in a while. Mark: He would drop stuff off and pick stuff up. Joe: Yeah. CBC: What was he like? Mark: Oh, he was great. Jon was great. He stuttered. Joe: Jon stuttered, yeah. He couldn’t talk. Nicest guy you’d ever wanna meet, though. Mark: And then there was a New York Comic Con. I’m gonna say… 2012. They got together again for the first time in 40 years and then Jon died maybe six months later. It was neat that they got back together. Yeah, Jon used to come up. I’m not sayin’ all the time, but he was up quite a bit. CBC: Why would he come up? Mark: I think to drop off the art. A lot of times it wasn’t mailed. He would drop it off, maybe come back the following week and pick it up. He probably just liked to get out and drive. CBC: Were they lettered pages first or were lettered after being inked? Mark: Oh, that I don’t know. I believe everything was lettered. I believe everything was done and penciled. Because Jon was the letterer, the penciler, and the inker. CBC: That was for the Archie stuff. But this stuff? Mark: Oh. [to Joe] For Treasure Chest, Dad. When you did a Treasure Chest, when was the lettering added? Before or after you did the art? Joe: Usually before. CBC: Isn’t that kind of stifling? Joe: No. I’d rather have the lettering done beforehand, Jon. That way you know just how much room you’re gonna have. No, I’d rather have the lettering done.

Treasure Chest TM & © the respective copyright holder.

Mark: I’m thinking it was on the Archie, too. It was done like that. CBC: To do that, you’d have to block it out first. Mark: Say he drew this guy bigger before the lettering. CBC: Did you ink the lines, the balloons themselves? Joe: No. Mark: No, the balloons were there. Joe: I don’t remember if this lettering was done before or after. CBC: I’m thinkin’ after. It’s expensive to be willing to do it through the mail that many times. They must have been used to you down at the Post Office. Then it was FedEx by the time the Spider-Man newspaper strip came along. Joe: They knew me at the post office! [laughter] Mark: Actually they knew my mom. CBC: You kept regular hours and were available to the kids? Joe: I was. Most of that was done right here in this house. I’d start about quarter ’til eight in the morning and work until like 4:30 in the afternoon, ’cause the kids had Little League, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, and Betty didn’t drive. I had to take ’em everyplace. Mark: Yeah, he was very involved in everything. Not only did he take us to this. He coached! CBC: So you guys were tight. You had a loving father… Mark: Nah, he sucks! [laughter] Yes, yes! He was always there for us. There’s a Bitty League and a Junior League. It was like 10–16. After the age of 16, they’re still in school until 18, and if you’re not playing JB or Varsity, there’s no basketball. So he said, “These kids need to be doing something.” So he started Senior League. The “Joe Sinnott Most Valuable Player Award” trophy. Everything was named after him. Half Court League was sponsored by Marvel. The teams all had their jerseys. Sawyer Motors was one of the sponsors. The Marvel Comics jerseys? They were covers of comic books! Everybody had a different comic on their chest and a number on their back. How great is that, y’know? And Stan had actually written about us in his Soapbox a few times, because we had some championship teams or whatever. CBC: [To Joe] Were you proud to be part of the Treasure Chest team? Were you glad that your work was in there? Joe: Oh, yeah. I feel sorry for some of those guys. Fran Matera was a good artist, but his style… Where else could he get work? Frank Borth. He and I worked for Treasure Chest, but a lot of people don’t know it. Mark: You feel it’s some of the best art you ever did. Joe: No question, because I penciled and inked it. Mark: Right. You took more pride because it was all your own. Joe: I did this kind of stuff back in the ’50s for Marvel/ Atlas. When they went to the super-heroes, they split us up, penciler and inker. The satisfaction was not as good as it was when you did everything. I loved doing the drawings. CBC: So, in the mid-’60s, was it pretty much Marvel? Mark: Yeah, he did Archie in the ’70s. He did crossword puzzle covers. He did a lot of stuff in the early to mid-’60s. Charlton, Dell, ACG, crossword puzzles, advertising. CBC: Were the crossword puzzles for Dell also? Mark: No, they were Quality Crosswords. He did Classics Illustrated Junior. He did “The Enchanted Deer.” CBC: And what year was that? Mark: Nineteen fifty-eight. Joe: Stuff like this, Jon. When I had an opening, they were done for a Catholic publisher up in Albany. CBC: The Evangelist. Joe: They had a Sunday supplement, so to speak. CBC: So this says 1963. This was in addition to your regular assignments! Wow. You were busy! Mark: He worked steady. CBC: Hip deep! You were in every single issue that year and still… [indicates The Evangelist work] You must have gotten this through Treasure Chest, right? Joe: Oh, yeah. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

CBC: How long did this last? Joe: Oh, it lasted quite a while. I did little spot drawings like this, depending on what they needed it for. Mark: Yeah, he used to do little drawings maybe of Christ carrying the cross, you know? Or of a nun talking to a kid. Little things like that. He did a lot of religious stuff. Joe: It was a lot of fun for me to do this kind of work. CBC: How old is your oldest brother, Mark? Mark: He’s 10 years older than me. Born in ’51. CBC: So he was of age! Mark: Oh, yeah. CBC: Was he in college? The draft? Mark: He had a draft number but Joey was never drafted. His number never came up. Joe: They stopped the draft. CBC: Anything else to say about Treasure Chest? Joe: Probably a hundred things to say and I can’t think of ‘em. [laughs] Mark: If he says, “You know what I shoulda told Jon?” I’ll let ya know. He does that a lot. You know what Dan Rather always says? “What’s the one question you wish I had asked you?” What’s the one question you wish Jon had asked you, Dad? Joe: I know there’s something probably. CBC: Then that’s a wrap! Thanks, Joe!

Previous page: Joe Sinnott recounts his son Mark’s basketball highlights. This page: Well into his Marvel heyday, Joe continued with Treasure Chest until it closed down, in 1972. Above is original art for his splash page in Treasure Chest Vol. 23, #11 [Jan. 25, 1969]. Below is his cover of same.

bill schelly r.i.p.

A Comic Book Fan’s Life Well Lived

Jeff Gelb remembers his best friend, the author and historian William Carl Schelly by JEFF GELB

Above: Bill Schelly produced 12 issues of his fanzine, Sense of Wonder, in the mid- to late 1960s. He would go on to scribe the definitive history of comics fandom and then write essential biographies of legendary comic book greats. Below: His masterpiece, Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created MAD and Revolutionized Humor in America [2015]. Inset right: Bill Schelly.

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created MAD and Revolutionized Humor in America © the estate of Bill Schelly.

Bill Schelly, who passed away, at the age of 67, in mid-September, started like so many of us: as an everyman fan. As a youngster of the 1960s, he was entertained by Superman and Batman, then enthralled by the atomic explosion of the Marvel Comics Group and their super-heroes with human frailties. Like many of us, Bill started contributing art and articles to comic book fanzines, and then started publishing his own. His fanzine high-point was undoubtedly Sense of Wonder, which ran an even dozen issues in the mid- to late 1960s. When his dream to enter comics as a professional artist was thwarted by — of all people — Vince Colletta, who looked at the young man’s artwork and pronounced it not good enough, Bill abandoned the dream of being a comics pro and essentially left comic books as a hobby as well. He entered the real world of college, then jobs, bills, friends, and other past-times. Sound familiar? Then, years later, like so many of us, Bill was reintroduced to comics, fortunately right at the time when creators like Alan Moore and Frank Miller were blowing up the medium and recreating it for adults who grew up loving super-hero comics. Their works re-instilled in Bill an active interest in following the medium he had adored as a child. He even invested in and worked at a Seattle comic book store. Then he joined the venerable amateur press alliance, CAPA-alpha, to start writing and drawing his own fanzine again. But where Bill veered away from most comics fans was when he began writing articles and then self-publishing books about comic fandom and its creators. This started as a pursuit to pay tribute to his childhood heroes. Soon, he engaged with one of those champions, Roy Thomas, to become an associate

editor of Alter Ego, where he started writing regular features about comics fandom. He also wrote about a dozen introductions to DC Archive volumes. But that was not enough for Bill. He started to write books about comics pros, living and dead, whose work had appealed to him; people like Otto Binder and Joe Kubert. And, with every article and book Bill wrote, he became a noticeably better writer. As he tackled ever bigger subject matter, he upped his own ante by doing a Herculean amount of research, unearthing surprising facts about comic creators that made his books must-read page-turners. At the same time, he challenged himself with every book to become a better writer overall, so that his books would be on a par with any biography ever written. And he succeeded. His 700+ page biography of Harvey Kurtzman won an Eisner award, the comics equivalent of an Oscar. His last completed work, a definitive biography of James Warren (done completely without the help of the subject himself), was an astonishing piece of detective work, piecing together hundreds of sources for a riveting look at the inside world of a secretive visionary. The future looked bright for Bill Schelly. He was contemplating writing a biography of Steve Ditko, convinced that he could bring something new to the table regarding this comic book mystery man. And I’m certain, had he lived, Bill would have done so. But that was not to be. In the Summer of 2019, Bill was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer called multiple myeloma and, mere months later, on Sept. 12, he passed way. Bill was my very best friend for the last 30 years of his life. As teenagers, we had contributed to the same fanzines, including one another’s. We’d met again through the pages of CAPA-alpha, in the late 1980s, and had instantly bonded. Beyond comics and fandom, we shared a love of James Bond, film noir, rock music, Mexican and Thai food, and so much more. The next three decades saw us emailing daily, traveling together to comic conventions, and visiting each other’s homes in Seattle or Los Angeles. We were like brothers, but really, even closer than that, because we never fought! Days before he died, he told me by phone that he had led the life he’d wanted, accomplished what he had set out to do, and was at peace with the notion that his life was at

an end. That gave me some small measure of peace about losing this wonderful and talented man, who had used the gift of his life to enrich the lives of his readers and fans. The last time I saw Bill Schelly was at San Diego Comic Fest 2018, where I hosted a panel with Bill, the “Fan Guest of Honor.” We spoke for 45 minutes about his life and career, his work habits, hopes and dreams. It was a peak moment for our friendship and thankfully, one captured on video by Mike Catron, who has posted it online on The Comics Journal website (search for “Bill Schelly”). If you knew Bill, or you did not, but admired his work, it’s a great place to get to know him on a more personal level. Bill was a very humble man who might have been

surprised about all the fuss that was made when he passed away. He was aware of his talents, but never overwhelmed by them. He simply wanted to entertain and enlighten like-minded comic book fans, though he deserves our accolades and attention. Over time, he became comic fandom’s greatest biographer and we may not see his like again. Paying tribute to Bill Schelly is really like paying tribute to comic books and comic fandom. Bill was very much a comics everyman, just like the rest of us. But he was also a dreamer, and when he made his dreams come true, they benefited every comic book fan, with a body of remarkable and entertaining work that will live on for many generations.

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

Above: At left is Jeff Gelb’s favorite photo of him and best buddy Bill Schelly together. That’s Jeff on the left. At right is Bill’s office, about which Jeff shares , “The desk area is his workspace, which I cleaned up a bit after he passed, when I went to his home to organize his collection to be sold.”

My Peer, My Pal Bill was a great writer. Ever since his Joe Kubert bio, I loved his style and it was, as mutual friend Jeff Gelb mentions above, an aspect of his writing that improved with every book he wrote. And his prose genuinely challenged me to write better myself and I try harder and hope my work does improve with every piece I compose. Bill’s legacy, his remarkable body of work, beckons me to do my best, and I am ever grateful for his example. It needs to be said that Bill was also the most professional contributor I have ever had the pleasure to work with in my two decades-plus producing books and mags in this biz. No one else, in my experience, has been better prepared upon submitting work and it was always a joy to work with him. I’ll miss Bill tremendously. I am probably the last person to have interviewed Bill as we talked this past spring for an hour and 15 minutes for my podcast, Subterranean Dispatch, about Harvey Kurtzman and Jim Warren and their connections to underground comix. You can hear his love for the subjects and overall enthusiasm for comics history in his voice. Listen to Bill at subterrdispatch.libsyn.com. Bill didn’t tell me he was sick during that interview or afterward. After his death, I learned of the heartache he had endured when he lost his son to illness. Bill was a great guy, a fine historian, and a superb writer.

— Jon B. Cooke

Above inset: Perhaps Bill Schelly’s last work to be published will appear in the upcoming 25th anniversary celebration co-edited by me, The World of TwoMorrows, which features his essay on the original Jerry Bails/Roy Thomas Alter Ego. 19

the big night

Weirdo Comes To Columbia

No way it could get better than this! R. Crumb, Aline, and Pete Bagge Come to Town! The culmination of The Book of Weirdo tour occurred on Monday, Oct. 28, 2019, when your humble editor moderated the “Weirdo Comes to Columbia”event at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York City, with Weirdo editors R. Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Peter Bagge, and TBOW cover artist and Weirdo regular Drew Friedman, along with a star-studded

audience of comix greats! Co-sponsored by Columbia University Libraries, Last Gasp, and School of the Arts, the festivities were a smashing success, thanks to Beth Cooke, Rob Yeremian, Andrew D. Cooke, Colin Turner, Kendall Whitehouse, and Chris Diaz, heroes all! With very special kudos to Columbia’s Curator for Comics and Cartoons, Karen Green. — JBC.

Photo by Chris Diaz

by Kendall Whitehouse

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All photos except Chris Diaz photo © Kendall Whitehouse. Chris Diaz photo © Chris Diaz.

Unless otherwise credited, all photographs on this page are

Courtesy of Billy Ireland Library & Museum

Photo by John Beauchemin

Chris Diaz photo © Chris Diaz.

Photo by Chris Diaz In mid-Oct., sponsored by Last Gasp, I participated in Litquake, San Francisco’s literary festival, where I made a presentation on The Book of Weirdo, at Live Worms Gallery, along with authors/artists Jeremy Fish, Brian Fies, and Mark Ulriksen, hosted by Jody Weiner and Nancy Calef (with a shout-out to pal John Beauchemin for putting me up!). During that weekend, I broke bread with Last Gasp publishers Ron and Colin Turner, and Ron drove me to visit Stanley Goldstein, at Hunters Point Shipyard.

In mid-Nov., I went to Pittsburgh to visit Mark Zingarelli, David Coulson (and wife Wendy) — who had me stay over… thanks!), and Wayno; and I then drove to Ohio State University to attend Drew Friedman’s All the Presidents talk, at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, hosted by illustrator C.F. Payne. Library curator Jenny Robb (who took Drew and me on a mind-blowing tour of the archives) kindly invited me to dinner with Drew, his wife Kathy Bidus; C.F. ; and museum coordinator Anne Drozd.

Previous page: Clockwise from top right: (all are left to right) R. Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Peter Bagge, Jon B. Cooke, Robert Yeremian, and Drew Friedman; R. Crumb; Karen Green, DF, RC, AKC, and PB; DF, RC, AKC, and PB; JBC, RC, AKC, and PB; Bill Griffith, Diane Noomin, Karen Green, Beth Cooke, and Ron Turner; JBC and RC. This page: Clockwise from top left: Jon B. Cooke and illustrator/caricaturist C.F. Payne; David Coulson, Mark Zingarelli, JBC, Kate Zingarelli, and Wendy Bennett; Ron Turner, JBC, and Colin Turner; Live Worms Gallery, San Francisco; JBC and Ron Turner; JBC and Stanley Goldstein; JBC and Wayno; Drew Friedman; and center is Jenny Robb, Billy Ireland Library and Museum Curator. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

an intimate epic

The Great American Graphic Novel

Howard Cruse’s Magnum Opus, Stuck Rubber Baby, is a National Masterpiece

Below: Cover to the latest edition of Stuck Rubber Baby, winner of a Harvey Award and an Eisner Award, Howard Cruse’s 1995 semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a young Southern man’s struggle to embrace his sexuality set against the scenario of the ’60s Civil Rights movement. Sadly to be released after the author’s passing this past November, this volume demarcates the 25 th anniversary since its debut and is to be published in May by First Second Books.

I’ve long been of the opinion that, ever since its 1995 debut, Howard Cruse’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby, never quite received the attention It deserved as one of the very best of its kind. That 210-page, exquisitely-drawn story is conversely both epic and intimate in content. “[Set] against the backdrop of the American South’s race wars of the 1960s,” Chris Brayshaw writes in The Comics Journal #182 [Nov. 1995], in as good a description as any, “The graphic novel tells the story of Toland Park, a 20-something gas station attendant, whose involvement in the civil rights movement eventually leads him to question the South’s dominant ideologies of racial and sexual bigotry, and to an eventual understanding and acceptance of himself as a gay man.” It also depicts the lead character fathering a daughter and he and the mother giving her up for adoption, a real-life occurrence for Cruse, who said to me, “[SRB] is almost autobiographical, but not quite! In the book, Toland says that when he visits Ginger and the baby at the Hannah Bay Home for Unwed Mothers, he says he was seeing his daughter for ‘the first and last time.’ But, in real life, things played out in a happier way. [Daughter] Kim found us when she was grown and we’ve all been in contact ever since.” SRB is unquestionably Cruse’s magnum opus, and Ho Che Anderson surmises in TCJ #182, “I suspect that joy in creating these characters was with Cruse through most of his journey, and I think it was a joy he has been able to communicate.” Indeed, Howard told me, the period making SRB, “those were the most exciting four years I’ve ever spent creatively.” SRB was reprinted in 2010 and, for 2020, it is to be given a celebratory release by First Second, news that excited Cruse when he last emailed me. I asked the publisher for comment, and their editor Robyn Chapman replied, “We are heartbroken by the passing of Howard Cruse. I wish he could have lived to see Stuck Rubber Baby back in print, and that he could have experienced the renewed appreciation of his work that would surely follow. The best we can do now is honor his legacy and pay tribute to this groundbreaking graphic novel. And that’s exactly what the 25th anniversary edition of SRB aims to do. It features over 20 pages of unpublished material, including rare photos and preliminary sketches. It also includes some of Howard’s last writing, as he wrote the detailed about-theauthor and making-of sections.” Chapman continued, “After Howard’s death, his family became more involved in the book. His daughter, Kimberly Kolze Venter, whose birth inspired this story, and his husband, Ed Sedarbaum, who shared a life with Howard for 40 years, have both written touching tributes that we’ll include

in the book. All this extra material gives a fuller picture of who Howard was and how this book came to be.” In her introduction to the 2010 edition, Alison Bechdel — who instantly knew her life’s calling when she first read a Cruse comic book — calls it a “masterwork” (the same word Chris Brayshaw equates in his TCJ #182 review, parenthetically adding, “[A]nd that’s the only word which fits; let’s be clear: Stuck Rubber Baby is the first North American graphic novel since Maus to approach Spiegelman’s work in terms of graphic polish and thematic complexity”). In that same TCJ, Ho Che Anderson expands on SRB’s attributes to include the draftsmanship: “Howard Cruse draws like an absolute motherf*cker… his art is nothing short of magnificent… [with] bravura displays of technique.” Bechdel was also in awe. “Many of the pages are so densely cross-hatched that appear to have a nap — as if they’d feel like velvet if you ran your hand over them.” No less than Harvey Pekar called SRB a “compelling work of art,” and playwright Tony Kushner wrote, in his introduction to the first edition, “In the beauty of its details, in the subtlety of its narrative, its heart is manifest: Its author addresses his work to the labyrinthine internal politics one encounters in trying to be a good person in the world.” Howard Cruse was a friend of mine, one I had visited back in 2016 to interview at length for CBC, and he passed away just as I was finishing up this current issue. Another friend, Karen Green, Columbia University’s Curator for Comics and Cartoons, then opined on Facebook that Stuck Rubber Baby was the “Great American Graphic Novel.” Inspired by her impeccable assessment, I immediately set out to do this piece on SRB and its author. Thus I then asked Green to expand on her notion and give us a final word: A wise man I know has posited that what separates a “graphic novel” from a long-form comic is that a novel tackles important themes in the course of its story. To me, Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby is the Great American Graphic Novel. Why? Well, we often hear tell of the Great American Novel. That phrase was coined in an 1868 essay in The Nation, and posited a book that captured the “ordinary emotions and manners of American existence;” that painted the “American soul.” I’m not sure I can think of anything more suitable for such a description than the intolerance of American whites for American blacks, or American straights for American gays. It would be lovely if the American soul were best represented by something loftier, but that intolerance, that dehumanization, is part of our country’s original sin of slavery, and it infects all too easily our ordinary emotions and manners. Howard, drawing on his own life experience, tells a story that serves as a vehicle for those themes, in a way that few other books I can think of have. Even the book’s art, modified from his hitherto cartoony style to a moody stippling, embodies the gravity of his story. I believe that Stuck Rubber Baby should be on every school curriculum, because its greatness would encourage its readers to reflect on our “American soul.” #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Stuck Rubber Baby TM & © the estate of Howard Cruse. Photo by and © Ed Sedarbaum.

by JON B. COOKE

CELEBRATE

THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF

STUCK RUBBER BABY Available in Bookstores Everywhere

MAY 2020

An imprint of Macmillan

This rich and moving tale of identity and resistance is back in print. Complete with unpublished archival material and a behind-the-scenes look at Howard Cruse’s creative process.

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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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.

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

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

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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!

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TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

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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!

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book look

What If You Knew Her? Backderf talks about his new “documentary comic,” Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by JON B. COOKE

Above: Cover of May 18, 1970, edition of Newsweek, featuring John Filo’s Pulitzer Prizewinning photo which instantly became the most iconic image of the Kent State shootings. Inset right: Derf Backderf’s cover art for his latest effort, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, coming from Abrams ComicArts, in April. Below: Derf and his renowned graphic memoir, My Friend Dahmer (2013).

Derf Backderf captures the era and the event itself in his latest, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, a 288-page graphic “novel” about the shootings. In our interview, I began with a query about whether his 10-year-old self in 1970, growing up in Richfield, Ohio — 20 miles or so from Kent State — had any personal connection with the incident. “The book opens with the National Guard occupying my hometown,” he explained. “There was a big trucker strike at the depots near the turnpike exit and the Guard was dispatched by the governor to crush it. Once that was accomplished, the Guard packed up and raced off to Kent. Some of those same soldiers opened fire on campus a few days later.” Indeed, in the book’s first pages, Derf depicts himself as a kid “shaken and disturbed” by the armed presence in his hometown. He is shown, MAD magazine in hand, as a passenger in his mom’s car as she drives past a phalanx of National Guardsmen armed with M1 carbines. “I was living this carefree kid life and then suddenly my town is under military occupation. The Guard camped right across the street from our grade school. All day long, I stared out my classroom window as jeeps and trucks roared past, filled with soldiers. When kids took the school bus home, if the route went by the Guard and the strikers, the bus driver would make the kids lie on the floor of the bus! The strikers were men I knew. They were the fathers of my friends and classmates, my Little League coaches and Cub Scout leaders, and here are soldiers pointing guns at them. It was as if that entire contentious era came rushing in to my sleepy, little town all at once. It really freaked me #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Newsweek © The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. My Friend Dahmer © John Backderf.

Maybe it should come as no surprise that Derf Backderf, author of the 2012 graphic memoir, My Friend Dahmer, uses the iconic image of the Kent State University shootings — the moment teenager Mary Ann Vecchio, arms outstretched, wails in horror over the murdered body of Jeffrey Miller — to bring his latest effort to a dramatic crescendo. That second, of course, was immortalized in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo seen the world over, and yet, even though I was braced for Derf’s version, I was still surprised and rendered nearly breathless by the cartoonist’s expert storytelling and breakneck pacing in his epic new telling of that pivotal event in American history. The Kent State massacre was arguably a turning point in the U.S., when, on May 4, 1970, during a campus demonstration protesting the Vietnam War, four students were shot dead and nine wounded by the Ohio National Guard. Just days before, President Richard Nixon, who won office promising to end the war, announced he was now escalating the Southeast Asian conflict, informing the public during a televised address that American forces were invading the sovereign nation of Cambodia. (Though, truth be told, over a year before the TV speech about the “Cambodian incursion,”on a Sunday after church, Nixon had ordered “Operation Menu,” the covert — and devastating — carpet-bombing of that neutral country.) It was soon learned that all four of the Kent State dead were students, two merely bystanders simply walking between classes. Over a span of 13 seconds, 28 National Guardsmen fired almost 70 rounds. Of the wounded, two of the nine were crippled for life. All of the students were unarmed. It was a radicalizing moment for many, and outrage was the response from college kids of the era, with some 450 campuses going on strike and a massive demonstration in D.C. the following weekend. When a banner was unfurled that spring at Columbia University which declared, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” young Americans showed their fury at soldiers shooting students just like them. In an email to NPR, one shared, “Up until that incident, I was a pretty conventional young person. I was 20. But when I saw my government killing innocent students who were just walking to class, I was radicalized, totally radicalized.” Less than three weeks after the tragedy, Neil Young recorded the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young protest song, “Ohio,” which included the refrain, “Four dead in Ohio,” and declared, “Soldiers are cutting us down.” Thus, the fury had its own theme song.

Cleveland Plain Dealer © Forest City Publishing Company. Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio © John Backderf.

out. Then the shootings happened. Many kids from my town, and some of my relatives, attended Kent State. Also, I was a paperboy, so I was more clued in to the news than most kids my age. That was my entry job into the newspaper business, where I would have a long career. Picking up those papers that day and seeing the headline, ‘Four Dead’… and then discovering it was the same Guard unit that had been in Richfield, that really shook me. So, that is my connection to May 4, which is not the strongest one, to be sure, as there were hundreds of people getting fired at on campus who were a lot more affected by it. I know people who had bullets whiz over their heads! But that’s how great history works. It reverberates through society, even filtering down to young rubes like me.” From then on, Derf proceeded to take an interest in the greater world. “I started to read the paper in earnest,” he said. “That sounds obnoxiously precocious, I know, but I went on to become a journalism major, so news was something I was interested in early on. Sure, I won’t say that, at age 10, I wasn’t turning to the comics section first, but I would also read the news pages, and try to figure out the political cartoons on the editorial page.” Indeed, Derf would go on to devote a good portion of his career to the newspaper trade. He produced The City, which, according to Gocomics.com, with its “tortured perspective, gritty realism, and outlandish urban humor,” the weekly comic strip “kept an outsider’s beat on current events, trends, and out-there aspects of contemporary culture.” The feature, which ended in 2014, appeared in some 150 publications and Derf estimates he produced over 1,500 strips. In 2006, The City was honored with a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for political cartooning. Then, in 2012, Derf expanded on a 24-page comic book he had self-published in 2002 to produce the full-length graphic memoir, My Friend Dahmer, about Derf’s high school friendship with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Later made into an acclaimed movie, Derf’s book received the “Revelation Award” for best debut graphic novel at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Ten-year-old Derf kept abreast of current events, but he didn’t feel any direct impact from the Vietnam War. “For kids my age,” he explained, “the war wasn’t as scary as it was for college kids, because we weren’t in immediate danger of being dragged off to the jungle. They had seen the war take shape and grow out of control. From my perspective, there’d always been a Vietnam War. There’d always been civil unrest. There’d always been riots in cities. It was so commonplace in our lives, we kids didn’t even notice these events. Kent State was different. It hit home.” Prior to talking with Derf, I had, at his suggestion, visited the site of the shooting, guided by artist and Kent resident P. Craig Russell (this issue’s cover-featured creator) who graciously took me on a tour. I visited the markers in the parking lot that commemorate where each of the four had fallen on that day in May, 1970. Most profound was to encounter the metal sculpture on the grounds of Taylor Hall known as “Solar Totem #1,” a towering abstract piece made of half-inch thick steel plates. On that notorious mid-spring Monday almost 50 years ago, when only three years had passed since its installation and located midway between the Guardsmen and the protesters, the sculpture was pierced by an M1 carbine bullet, leaving a hole that today remains testament to the lives lost at Kent State. Of the four dead and nine wounded, Derf said, “Frankly, it was a miracle that there weren’t more killed. Twenty-eight Guardsmen fired their weapons, but most shot into the air or at the ground. It was only eight to ten soldiers who, for

Above: Full-page splash from Derf Backderf’s Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, the cartoonist’s 288-page depiction of the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University, which left four dead and nine wounded when Ohio National Guardsmen shot into a crowd of protesters.

Inset left: Front page of the May 5, 1970, Cleveland Plain Dealer, reporting on the tragedy at Kent State the previous day. When all the facts were in, it was nine who were injured, two permanently. 27

Below: Derf Backderf’s newest — his “documentary comic” — is centered around the infamous Kent State shootings, as told through the lives of the four who were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen.

general history of the anti-war movement. “We see what they see and experience what they did,” he said. “It’s a very personal story about these four people and what happened to them. I think it’s a pretty engaging read because of that. I don’t get bogged down with needless ‘60s nostalgia. It’s a page-turner that packs an emotional wallop at the end.” At this point, I struggled over what exactly to call his effort, as it was neither a “graphic novel” nor a “graphic memoir,” and Derf ventured a new classification. “The phrase people are tossing around about these types of nonfiction comics is ‘documentary comics,’ which I like,” he explained. With a nod to Joe Sacco and others doing similar material, he added, “I think that’s a good name for it. It’s not a novel, obviously. It’s reportage.” When applauded for the fearless reintroduction of the word “comics,” Derf chuckled and said, “Well, help spread the word!” So why this particular documentary comic book? Why Kent State on the heels of his chilling graphic memoir about a classmate who later becomes a reviled multiple murderer-slash-cannibal? “You know, it’s just a story I’ve carried around with me,” Derf said. “I’ve always been interested in Kent State. The aftermath went on for 10 years — the investigations, the cover-ups, the court cases. It was constantly in the news in Ohio and I followed it. There are annual commemorations each year on May 4, when all the old protesters and current students get together on campus and mark the event. I’ve gone to a lot of those over the years and they’re very moving. Kent State is just something that’s always held my interest.” Derf continued, “Also, I was struck by how many people I met over the course of my life who were there. Some were students, some were reporters and photographers, and even a couple were Guardsmen, and I heard all their stories. It was on my list of potential books, because it’s such a compelling story and I thought comics would be a great, fresh way to tell it. It’s complex, with a lot of moving parts and a lot of surprises. Most people think, if they think about Kent State at all, that there was a protest that got out of hand and the Guardsmen shot some people. It was a horrible accident and that’s that. There’s a lot more to it, from the naked political ambitions of a governor, to the secret machinations of the Nixon Administration, the FBI and the CIA, all the way down to scruffy, and somewhat naive student protestors and incompetent local officials. I thought it would be really interesting to tell that tale, especially from the perspective of those four people who were gunned down. History is at its most poignant and most effective when you make it about people who get caught up in events, rather than just about the events themselves. As he did with My Friend Dahmer, Derf spent years researching the incident. “I did all my own research,” he shared.”I started with interviews, and I talked to people who were there, and who knew the four who were killed, and talked to some of the wounded. I dug through archives, through court transcripts and depositions, and pored over news reports. In the published book, there’s about 25 pages of footnotes in the back. Everything is sourced. It took a #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio © John Backderf.

reasons known only to them, fired directly into a parking lot at the bottom of the hill. But those guys emptied their clips! That lot was filled with 500 students, on their way to and from class. Suddenly there was, without warning, this fusillade of gunfire. It was pure luck it wasn’t 50 people shot!” In his telling, Derf focuses more on the days and hours of the four who were shot and killed rather than giving a

Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio © John Backderf.

long time to research. There is a mountain of available material. That’s a process I enjoy. I have a journalism degree, so it’s right in my wheelhouse, but at a certain point, you have to say, ‘Okay, I have to stop digging now and start writing and drawing.’” However provocative the research materials, practical realities had its impact on the author, and for this specific project, the 50th anniversary of the event, May 4, 2020, is on the horizon. “Deadlines have a way of forcing your hand,” Derf said. “But I’m researching again because I’ve got slide shows and lectures to prepare for [when the book tour begins]. You also go flying off on side paths. For example, I got really interested in the Weathermen, who were the extreme radical left of Students for a Democratic Society. Very violent, dogmatic, absolutely crazy radicals who were involved in earlier anti-war activities at Kent, although not on May 4, as they’d already gone underground by then. I started digging into their history, just for fun, really. It’s hard to stop once you get deep in a project.” Derf shared his overall assessment of the Kent State shootings and their impact. “I think,” he said, “that it was a tragic crime that resulted from political and cultural forces that percolated for years, and all came crashing together, inexplicably at this unremarkable university in Ohio. You can add in a healthy dose of incompetence. It’s certainly a cautionary tale. Have we learned anything in the 50 years since? I don’t think so. I think, in fact, we’ve circled back around to 1970. The political rancor and the hatred of the “other side” is just as intense now as it was then. I think we’re close, very close, to another Kent State and that’s utterly depressing.” Asked to expand on the possibility of another massacre, he said, “All it takes is some nut to pull out an assault rifle. Look at that Charlottesville nonsense or the heavily armed militia nuts marching through Portland in a show of force. All it takes in a volatile situation is one jerk or one cop who panics. It could happen again, absolutely! Who knows what this coming year holds for us all. I think we’re all dreading it. I have no insight or prediction about what will happen if it gets really bad, but it is a fear, sure.” The tide of public opinion, in Derf’s opinion, was turning against supporting the Vietnam War by the dawn of 1970, even before Kent State. “It started with the Tet Offensive, in 1968, when the American people really started to sour on the war. But COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

even so, the war went on for another four or five years! Nixon wound down the war when it suited him, to grease his reelection in 1972. He certainly didn’t end it because of Kent State. In fact, his popularity soared after the shootings. The immediate after-effect was people turned against the anti-war movement, not against the Vietnam War.” Maybe likely due to self-preservation, many American youth were decidedly anti-war. After all, people just like them were being fired upon by National Guardsmen. “The shootings greatly affected the anti-war movement,” Derf said. “They changed the draft in 1969, a few months before Kent State. The government instituted a lottery system, so it removed a lot of the fear from the draft because you knew whether you were likely to be drafted or not. All the people who knew they weren’t going to be drafted, I think, they lost a lot of zeal for anti-war protest. Not that they weren’t still against the war, but they thought, ‘Am I so much against it that I want to die for it? Not really.’ Yeah, Kent State definitely had a chilling effect on anti-war protest. There were still large protests, and immediately after Kent State colleges around the country exploded in anger. Higher education basically ground to a halt in Spring 1970. As time wore on, though, over the summer and into the fall, it petered out, certainly on campuses.” In fact, though far less covered in the media, a mere 10 days after the Kent State killings, another campus suffered loss of life at the hands of authorities. At Jackson State College, in Jackson, Mississippi, 40 state highway patrolmen fired some 420 shotgun rounds into a crowd of 100 African-American students, killing two and injuring 12. It’s natural to ponder, given the positive reviews of his My Friend Dahmer’s movie adaptation, whether the film industry has expressed any interest in Kent State. “Oh, yeah. Already,” Derf said, with a chuckle, “Comics are movie

Top: From previous page to above, four stages of a panel from Derf Backderf’s Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio. From farthest left, pencil rough; final pencils; inked artwork; and with tones added. Derf informs us that the final book, due in April, will be rendered in two colors, black and a blue-gray tint. “I wish I had time to do it in full color, but I just didn’t,” he admitted. Above: The Kent State massacre was a rallying cry for the anti-war movement during 1970, as evidenced by this button. Below: Emblem of the Ohio National Guard. Bottom: Derf depicts his ten-year-old self in a panel from Kent State.

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Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio © John Backderf.

Top: Page from Kent State depicting the fusillade of M1 fire coming from Ohio National Guardsmen. Above: P. Craig Russell points out the bullet hole in the sculpture that stood between Guardsmen and students. The steel plating is one-half inch thick. Below: M1 rifle cartridge, actual size.

storyboards, right? I think most of my books are pretty cinematic, honestly. They’re all composed like movies. That’s the way I write. Almost all of my books have been optioned and one was made into a movie. Hey, if it happens, it happens. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. My goal is not to make a film, but to make the best book that I can. If I do that, good things tend to happen.” What’s next for Derf? “I’ve been working on a sequel to my first book, Punk Rock & Trailer Parks. Just for fun. I’ll finish that one, and then who knows? More books — work until you die. The big adjustment for me, coming from newspaper comics, was swapping weekly output for books, which take years to finish. Kent State took me four years. My Friend Dahmer took me 18 years! You’ve gotta have several things in the works, in various stages of completion, or you’ll never publish anything. Books are a daunting amount of work and Kent State was a really tough project. The drawing challenges just kicked my ass. There were times making this book, I was like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ There are crowd scenes, military scenes, night scenes, night crowd scenes — it was just very, very challenging.” On his growth as cartoonist, Derf said, “I hope I get a little better with each book. When I started out in the alternative press, I was doing these crazy comic strips, wildly experimental and expressionist, with perspective going everywhere and panels going in all sorts of directions. I enjoyed that, but when it came to doing books, I decided that particular style wouldn’t work. I got very traditional. I know this sounds odd, given my rep, but if you look at the panel layouts and the way I put stories together, it’s very traditional. I really backed off on the experimentation. I want the art to service the story. I had my artistic fun when I was younger and now I just want to tell good stories and this is what I need to do to tell good stories.” I remarked to Derf that, upon visiting the area and walking its streets, I found his book emitted an authentic feel for the town. “I spent some time in Kent when I was younger, so it’s a place I know” he replied. “I used to go to the music clubs there. We didn’t live far from Kent. It’s a happening college town and there’s a lot to do there. For the book, I did a lot of sketching on campus, just to put myself in that space where it all unfolded. When you stand on Blanket Hill, underneath the pagoda where the Guard was when they opened fire, and you look down at the parking lot and see the markers where the four fell, it’s very powerful. The Guard’s immediate narrative, which the shooters still repeat, was that they feared for their lives. It’s a joke. The students were nearly the length of a football field away. The Kent State quarterback couldn’t have heaved a rock from where those people were standing and hit a Guardsman. They were in no danger. I’m glad you went. It’s a moving experience.” The story also conveys the massive salvo that occurred over those fateful 13 seconds. “It was important to document what an incredibly violent event this was,” Derf explained. “Those bullets were over an inch long, fired by combat weapons. This was serious, serious gunfire.… The M1 is an extremely powerful gun. Its bullets can go clean through a tree trunk, and one did!” In Kent State, the reader is startled regarding the damage those bullets wrecked upon the nine wounded as well as the four dead. “There were some serious injuries,” Derf said. “Some of those students were left in critical condition. It’s really something when you get up close to some of these guys, like Tom Grace, the kid whose foot was half-blown off. I’ve talked with him a couple of times. One time we were walking along together through a campus building, and he’s limping badly, struggling to keep up, and that really brought it home. He still limps! This profoundly affected his life. It’s that up close and personal connection to history where you find the emotion of it, I think. You take that emotion and inject it into the story. My hope is that interest in this book transcends the generations. It’s a story about these doomed kids, no different than the college kids of today, who were steamrolled by history. It could happen again at any time and could happen to any of us.” And yet, even though the Ohio National Guard clearly fired while under no real threat from students, Derf still chose to give some focus to the Guardsmen, most of whom were in their 20s. “I was lucky enough to find the account of an anonymous Guardsmen (I know who it is, but I’m not going to reveal the name) and it’s a great account,” the author said. “It’s very detailed. He’s a bit of a braggart and he does tell a few fibs, but for the most part, it’s a very blunt, thorough narrative and I was happy to have it, especially since he was active in every part of the story. He was in my hometown at the trucker strike, he took part in every event on campus that weekend. He was up on the hill and was one of the shooters. “His account was stashed in the university archive. It was a written and taped account. It was a key find. Most of the shooters have not spoken and have maintained their silence for 50 years. Some have taken their secrets to the grave. This account is one of the few that exist, and I can bring it to life with comics.” As with My Friend Dahmer, the author will be traveling on a book tour to support Kent State when it’s released in April. “I’ll be crisscrossing the country and I’ll make a couple trips to Europe. We’ll see how I hold up… I’m not the road warrior I was at 25.” When his Buckeye State connection is mentioned, Derf said, “All my books have been about Ohio. I grew up in a small town outside of Akron, where my family is from, went to Ohio State University, and I’ve lived in Cleveland for 35 years. I find this area to be an incredibly rich area for stories. When you write what you know, you naturally have so much intimate detail, it makes the stories so much richer. That doesn’t mean you always have to write what you know, but it’s worked for me, so far. What

Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio © John Backderf.

cracks me up is I’ve had this huge success in Europe, especially in France. They are off-the-charts readers of comics. They buy as many comics there as we do here and there are only 65 million of them compared to 325 million of us. Somehow my crazy little stories about the American Rustbelt have resonated with French readers. I’ve become very well known in France, and in Belgium, and all my books are big sellers. I spend like two months of every year there, touring and doing signings. It’s the most unexpected and delightful thing that’s happened to me in my career.” I’ve been acquainted with the cartoonist since my earliest days in the field, back in the late ’90s, when Derf used to write letters of comment to my Comic Book Artist magazine. Thus, before finishing our chat, it was inevitable for me to get all nerdy and ask if Derf found any inspiration in his current work from past comic book artists. “Well, you can see a lot of Eisner in there,” he said. “I really studied how Eisner put together stories, beyond the experimental splash pages that he is known for. If you turn to the second page of a Spirit story and study how he composed the pages and the narrative — it’s textbook stuff. “Corben is another one. Corben is a brilliant storyteller. I have a Corben original hanging outside my studio. It’s from Hellboy, from The Crooked Man, and depicts two characters just walking through the woods. That’s all the page is and it’s just this beautiful moment-by-moment transition. How can this guy make walking through the woods this interesting? Just by moving the camera in all these different angles. I just live for that kind of stuff, Jon! This will sound goofy but bear with me, you’ll also see some of Kirby’s influence in this book, with all the splash pages and double-page spreads… that’s all from Kirby. I love the impact that he created with his story layouts. He’d always start out with the splash page and then there’d be that double-page spread — with Jimmy Olsen or New Gods — and then he’d have another splash page further in. It blew me away when

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I was reading that stuff at age 10, in 1970. My work looks nothing like Kirby, granted, but it’s that kind of inspiration I’m mining from these old masters, and then badly replicating as my own. They are my teachers. I think if somebody really looks closely at my stuff, they can see the roots.” What expectations does its author have for the book? “I just hope people read it!” Derf exclaimed. “It got its first review in Publishers Weekly and it was a rave one, so the folks at Abrams were pretty happy about that. Honestly, I’ve stared at these pages too long. I can’t tell anymore if it’s good. I think it is, and the people who’ve read it, people I trust, tell me it is. Many say it’s my best book. We’ll see how it’s received. The release is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the shootings. That looming date was my impetus to get off my butt and finish the book. It gave me a hard, unforgiving deadline. I promised myself I wasn’t going to kill myself with a tight book deadline again, but damned if I didn’t do exactly that. The media, of course, will be all over the anniversary of the shootings, because they love that kind of thing, and the book will be part of that, but once May 4 passes and the media moves on, the book will have to survive on its own as a graphic novel. Hopefully it will. I’m pleased with it. I think it’s the best book that I can do right now. I’ve felt like that about every book I’ve done. You give it your absolute best effort and then throw it out there and see how it is received. My fans will probably like it, and hopefully I’ll make some new fans, but you never know how a book will do until it’s on the shelves.” Given how successful Derf is, in my estimation, with making an event as big as the Kent State massacre into a moving, personal narrative while maintaining its epic scope, one wonders if the cartoonist might niche out in making other historical works. But Derf dismisses that notion with a Bronx cheer. “My trademark as a creator is I get bored easily, so I like to try new things. I don’t think I’m going to really make this my own little niche in the way Joe Sacco does. I’ve done fiction, I’ve done comedy, I’ve done tragedy — I like to mix it up. I can’t see changing that. I don’t know that I’m better at one than the other. That’s for the readers to decide.” Ultimately, Derf Backderf’s success with Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio is that he poignantly brings back to life not only the tragic event itself but also, with intimate detail, he reveals the personal, day-to-day moments of those oh-so-tenderly young people whose heartbreaking deaths would inflict a mournful impact on the American soul. Derf helps us to imagine what it might be like to know Allison Krause, 19; Jeff Miller, 20; Bill Schroeder, 19; and Sandy Scheuer, 20, and, horrifically, what it may have been like to find them dead on the ground.

Above: Below the Derf Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio panel, are (from top) Kent State victims, Allison Krause, 19; Jeff Miller, 20; Sandy Scheuer, 20; and Bill Schroeder, 19. 31

darrick patrick’s ten questions

The Confident Jay Leisten The inker shares about his life (and secret past as—gasp!—an euphonium player!) by DARRICK PATRICK Jay Leisten of Louisville, Kentucky, began his career in comics as an intern at Top Cow. After two years in Los Angeles working on Tomb Raider, Witchblade, Darkness, and Inferno, he relocated to Florida to join CrossGen Comics to work on Sojourn with long-time friend Greg Land. When CrossGen closed its doors, he was hired by Marvel and DC for several jobs. Within a few months, Jay was assigned to ink Thor, Legion, and Black Panther. Recently, Jay finished a three-year run with Greg Land on Uncanny X-Men, a year on Iron Man, Monsters Unleashed, Astonishing X-Men, and more. He also contributed his talents to Moon Knight with Jerome Opeña, Nightwing with Don Kramer, The Outsiders with Fernando Pasarin, Captain Britain, and Dark X-Men with Leonard Kirk, as well as Death of Wolverine, Secret Empire, and more with Steve McNiven, plus several other Marvel projects. Currently, Jay is working on a Spider-Man project, as well as Return of Wolverine, and a creator-owned project, Darling, described as a Above: Jay Leisten inked this “violent Western.” five-issue 2018 mini-series penciled by Steve McNiven, The Return of Wolverine. Below: Jay (right) with his inquisitor, Darrick Patrick.

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Wolverine TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Darrick Patrick: What was the road that led you to working professionally within comic books as a career? Jay Leisten: I started drawing seriously in high school with a group of friends after attending a small local conven-

tion, where I met Bob McLeod, Don Rosa, and Larry Elmore. It was so interesting to find out that the people who made the books were real people. A few years later, around my senior year, I met Greg Land. He started really showing me how the work is done. Within a few months, I was attending every convention I could find within four- or five-hours driving. At that time, between 1995 and ’98, it was pretty hard to make contact with editors or share your samples with other pros for feedback, so the convention circuit and the postal service were vital. At Chicago Comicon, in ’98, I met Batt [Matt Banning], Mark Morales, Joe Weems, and a few others who were just outstanding inkers. Up until then, I was doing pencil samples and inking samples over others, like Greg, and a few other aspiring artists like Don Kramer, Jonboy Meyers, Eric Powell, and the few pros who were generous enough to send me pencil samples. At that show, Mark and Batt introduced me to several editors and artists at Top Cow, Awesome, and Wildstorm to try to help me get a foot in the door. Just under a year later, I was making plans to move to L.A., work with Jason Gorder on Midnight Nation as an assistant, and ink my first projects at Marvel [Mutant X #20] and DC (uncredited inks on Birds of Prey #14, and an issue of The Flash over Scott Kolins). Darrick: Who are some of the people that greatly influenced you while growing up? Jay: I was always a huge fan of Al Williamson, Bernie Wrightson, Marc Silvestri, and many others as an artist. My dad and a cousin were both great artists, so I was a bit intimidated as a little kid thinking that I would never be that good. During that time period, when I was starting to do conventions, there were folks like Greg Land, Phil Hester, Solo Perry, and a few others who were huge in building up that confidence in myself. Darrick: Do you have any words of advice for other individuals looking to make a career with their abilities in artwork/inking? Jay: Inking is all about confidence. Believing that you are going to make the right choice of pen or brush, line-weight, texture, etc., that will make the image better is vital. Some of that is lessened by the new wave of digital art since undo is a little tougher with physical tools. The big thing I see is a real need to practice. The story I always heard was that Joe Kubert would tell students that four hours a day was the minimum number of hours needed to improve daily. I tell any young artist I meet that dedicated, quality practice is the key. Darrick: How do you spend your time on a typical workday? Jay: I generally start between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. with a short warm-up, and then get to working on the highest detail portion of the page. I do that because I want the period of the day when my eyes are fresh to be used on the smallest — and typically most important — details first. After my lunch break, I start focusing on the most forward objects and work my way towards the background. I save filling in the large areas of black space for last, so it doesn’t make seeing the more subtle lines nearby difficult. 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? Jay: My most well-known projects are probably Death

Wolverine TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Darling TM & © Jay Leisten.

of Wolverine, and Return of Wolverine. I also worked on events like AvsX (Avengers vs. X-Men), Death of X, Secret Empire, Monsters Unleashed, and Absolute Carnage. Also, projects such as Symbiote Spider-Man, and long runs on Uncanny X-Men and X-Factor. Some of my most memorable issues are Uncanny X-Men #500, the Death of Wolverine trade, and Sojourn #19, which is one of my favorites. Darrick: Who are a few of the people in the comics industry that you hold a high deal of respect for? Jay: I certainly have a ton of respect for the people I’ve worked with. Greg Land, for all the coaching and support over the years. Steve McNiven, for always challenging me to try new styles, and grow continually. Marc Silvestri, for believing in me early on, and the support he and Michael Turner would give us young kids around the studio. There’s also a great crop of younger artists who just really impress me, like James Harren, Tradd Moore, Daniel Warren Johnson, and Ryan Stegman. They are all really pushing comics, and the art form, in many ways. Darrick: Outside of helping to construct visual stories, what are your other interests? Jay: I grew up playing a lot of music, both classical and punk/hardcore, so I still enjoy listening to music a lot. I also study architecture and design a lot, as that was my training in college. Darrick: What is your oldest memory? Jay: I’m not sure if this is my oldest memory, but it’s definitely my oldest comics-related memory. My grandparents had a little farm about an hour from town, so we stayed there a lot in the summer. We would usually get a Moon Pie and a Coke on the way there, but I remember getting comics one time when my cousin Chuck and I went. We listened to the record that came with one of them, and just looked over the book so many times. It was one of those Power Records books that Neal Adams did. I was probably five or six years old at the time. Darrick: Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. Jay: In high school and early in college, I was a euphonium player in a British-style brass band. We would travel around the East Coast, and even Canada, competing in soloist and ensemble competitions. The reason I never pursued it more was because there were only about nine jobs COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

in the U.S. for euphonium players and they were all military or theme park positions. Darrick: If you had super-powers, what would they be? Jay: The ability to slow down time, so I could do all the projects I wanted to without missing out on the other things in life. Comics take a lot of time to produce, so you often have to make tough decisions in both your career and personal life. It’s totally worth the hard work. If it’s something you want to pursue, then get after it.

Above: Three pages from Return of Wolverine #1, inks by Jay Leisten and pencils by Steve McNiven.

Below: Lovely Sojourn #20 [Mar. 2003] cover. Greg Land pencils and Jay Leisten inks.

Inset left: Penciled page by Jay Leisten of his creatorowned property, Darling. 33

an accomodating artist

Painting the Hotel ‘RED’

Frank Quitely’s artwork shows up in a most unexpected place: a big city hotel! by ROBERT MENZIES [Our U.K. correspondent, Robert Menzies, has interspersed his narrative article with quotes from his interviews with Frank Quitely and associates, as well as some of the interviewer’s questions. — Y.E.] There’s something rather wonderful knowing that, when the Radisson Hotel Group were designing their newest boutique property, they head-hunted an artist best known for Superman, Batman, and Judge Dredd. This unexpected project — bringing together a terrific comic book artist with, of all things, a big city hotel — resulted in some incredible art that has, to my continuing astonishment, been little reported, and never in any detail.

Above: Frank Quitely’s first work appeared in the Glasgow alternative comic book, Electric Soup, which featured his irreverent parody of the long-running Scottish newspaper comic strip, The Broons.

Below: Cover of a Broons collection. Quitely posing with The Broons and Oor Wullie, Happy Days 1936-1969 [2008] in the Radisson RED hotel lobby.

Branding the Hotel According to the hotel’s own website, the Radisson Hotel Group’s RED hotels are designed to offer guests a “playful twist on conventional hotel stays, offering hangouts with a casual feel, buzzing social scenes and [a] bold design personality.” Color theory is central to their branding. Red is not only a warm color, but also a symbol of passion and love. It is bold, stimulating, and matches the hotel’s stated ambition to establish an assertive and confident branding image consciously targeted at millennials (generally those born between the early 1980s and mid-’90s), although, in practice, the demographic of the hotel patrons is far broader. The Glasgow, Scotland, establishment is one of five RED hotels and it first welcomed guests in Spring, 2018, and is a £40 million ($51¼ million U.S.), ten-story, newly built hotel located on the north bank of the River Clyde. Hotel “curator” at the time of my visit Michael Weston said, “Glasgow has such a vibrant music, art, and fashion scene. With every-

thing that is going on, and the evolution of the city, really, it was the ideal choice to place it here.” Interestingly, art is professed to be integral to the RED experience. Each hotel has been designed to have its own unique artistic personality. Rooms are referred to as studios, the general manager is known as curator, and the hotel blog has an “artist of the month” feature. It is that appeal that connects the Glasgow’s Radisson RED to one of the city’s foremost artists: Frank Quitely. The heART of Frank Quitely Born in early 1968, Quitely is a native of Rutherglen, a town about four miles southeast of Glasgow’s city center. While on paper Quitely is ironically too old to fall within the hotel’s main target demographic, he doesn’t at all look anything like his 50 years. Slim with closely cropped dark hair, he has avoided all the curses of middle-age with the minor concession of his stubble sporting some gray about the chin. His clothing is anonymous: jeans and a plain, unbranded jumper. Throughout our interactions I got the strong impression that he is a glass half full type of person. Quitely was once Vincent Deighan, and is still known to his family and friends as Vinnie or Vin. As a child and teenager, he wasn’t immersed in super-hero comics or British weekly 2000AD, which came to him relatively late. What he did get his attention at a young age was The Broons and Oor Wullie (that’s “The Browns” and “Our Willie,” with a Scottish accent), iconic Sunday Post newspaper comic strips continuously published since 1936. Both popular features were co-created and drawn by legendary cartoonist Dudley D. Watkins [1907–69]. Quitely: Watkins died around the time I was born, but it took DC Thomson years to find a replacement for him. So, for seven years, they just used reprints of Watkins’ material and I grew up reading [that] stuff. I loved the way he did pensioners [seniors], whether they were posh old ladies or hard old men.

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Electric Soup TM & © the respective copyright holder. The Broons TM & © DC Thomson & Co. Ltd.

In the 1980s, Quitely attended the world-famous Glasgow School of Art (as did Watkins) and cut his teeth on Electric Soup — subtitled “Scotland’s Adult Humour Comic” — an anarchic Scotch version of England’s Viz comic, infamous for its vulgarity and satirical, taboo-busting humor. It was here, drawing a spoof of The Broons called “The Greens,” where Deighan became Frank Quitely, a play on the phrase, “Quite frankly, this is rude.” While the pseudonym was partly to avoid endangering his unemployment benefit payments, it was mainly a ploy to avoid upsetting his family, his mum especially, lest they see the adult material he was creating and appearing therein. Jump forward to the 1990s and ’00s, and Quitely is now landing plum gigs illustrating some of mainstream comics heavy hitters – Superman, Batman, the X-Men, and Judge Dredd. And yet, regardless of the fantastical settings, there’s always a tangible verisimilitude to his work: his characters exude gravity, his buildings cast shadows. His art is so detailed and intricate that when it was enlarged to garage door-sized dimensions for his expansive 2017 exhibition in Glasgow’s beloved Kelvingrove Art Gallery and

Jupiter’s Legacy TM & © Mark Millar & Frank Quitely.

Museum, it looked like it had been created to be viewed at that size. Success has not severed, or even loosened, his ties to home: he still lives in Glasgow’s suburbs, and works from a city centre studio a couple of minutes from the old Electric Soup HQ. His most regular and successful collaborations have been with fellow Glaswegians Mark Millar and Grant Morrison. Quitely’s roots here are deep and the suggestion that he’ll ever leave the city seems a laughable fantasy. I wonder if it’s even occurred to him. There has been surprisingly little reporting of this ambitious hotel art project, even in the U.K., where Quitely has, for a comic book artist, a relatively high profile, so this is the first in-depth look at this delightful project. Photographer Mike Best and I spoke with both Quitely and former curator Michael Weston in the hotel’s ground floor restaurant before we took a tour. Menzies: Frank, I’d like to know how and why you were approached for this project. In a press interview you said that Jim Hamilton of Graven Images, Radisson RED’s local design contractor, saw your work at the Kelvingrove exhibition. Was that his first exposure to your art or did he attend already considering you for this project? Quitely: As far as I remember, Jim had seen the What Do Artists Do All Day? program on the BBC [first broadcast March 2014] and he thought, “I could use that guy for something at some point”. I don’t know if I crossed his mind again until the exhibition came up, but he goes to a lot… and he went to my Kelvingrove exhibition with his son, who’s really into comics, and he saw my work again…. When Jim approached me, I was interested immediately. We had a talk about the fact there were only four RED hotels so far. We looked at them online, and we talked about the pattern where in each city they use a local artist or artists to decorate their hotel. I wasn’t territorial about it being a Glaswegian who did it; it was just “I’m from here, somebody is building a hotel here...”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

In the past Quitely had decorated restaurants with murals, but this was on an entirely different scale and much more complicated. The hotel has 174 “studios”— i.e., hotel rooms — albeit with repeating imagery. I wondered if that had been intimidating and how the timing was for him workwise. Quitely: It was a big project. As is quite common for me, I underestimated the amount of work that would be involved. [laughs] Weston: While it looks like a relatively uniform building from the outside, the room types vary. Where a wardrobe is placed could affect whether one room has a very long wall. There are effectively 11 different styles of room that had to be accommodated. Quitely: The way I went about that was after submitting roughs and having conversations with Jim at Graven Images, I made a [virtual canvas] that was about 11 meters [36 feet] long. I worked the background out digitally and then I decided I would keep the background, mid-ground, foreground, and extreme foreground characters in separate layers, so I drew out my rough under drawing, printed out on sheets of A3 [11" x 16.5" sheets] in cyan, and then did all the line work on that. I then scanned all the drawings in and built a file that was effectively 11 meters long with all the different people in different layers. Which meant that if I had a four meters [13 feet] long wall and the door is on the left and the mirror is on the right, you can rearrange elements… I gave Graven Images an open file with all the images. I set the composition up based on how I thought it’s going to work in the room, and left the layers open, so they could move things slightly if they had a mirror which previously hadn’t been on the design. For the ground level, we have an L-shaped wall at the elevators, a long wall with the booths, and a frieze around the top of the deli bar. Like with the rooms, I was given the architect’s plans but, in a way, although there was more drawing for the downstairs area, it was actually easier insofar as I supplied it flat, in one layer. There were several different files for each of the areas but in a way it was a slightly simpler process.

Above: In 2017, the art of Frank Quitely was exhibited at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Because a design contractor had seen the Scot artist’s work here, Frank was hired to produce illustrations for the Radisson hotel’s interior design.

Below and inset left: While his exhibit was on display at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, in 2017, artist Frank Quitely was striving to finish the artwork on writer Mark Millar and his Jupiter’s Legacy 2 mini-series. A Netflix adaptation of the creator-owned concept is set to stream this year.

Above: Wall art by Frank Quitely used in the restaurant section of the Radisson RED hotel. Photos by Mike Best.

Inset right: It was specifically this Superman image by Quitely that inspired the interior designers of the Radisson RED hotel to request flying people as motif.

Below: The exterior of the Radisson RED on a typically overcast Glasgow day. Photo by Mike Best.

I was trying to finish Jupiter’s Legacy with Mark Millar before the opening of the Kelvingrove show and didn’t quite manage it. I finished it about half-way through the six-month run of the exhibition. This year, in my nearly 30 years in comics, is the first where I’ve actually had the luxury of being able to take my foot off the gas. I had taken on a bunch of covers to do, just to keep things ticking along while I decided what to do next. Then Jim approached me. I’ve had a lot of breaks that I consider to be lucky, but this was the first lucky break I got in terms of I was looking around for something to do. I actually also wanted something that was a bit of a different change of pace. I felt I needed a wee change and it just came along at the perfect time. Menzies: Did the hotel make any specific requests about the art? Quitely: We had conversations about the brand. I was given a very open brief but at the same time I didn’t want to fall into stereotypes, I wanted some subtle humor. It was more about trying to work from the RED themes of art, music, and fashion and try and cover as much ground as possible with the

huge variety we’ve got in both locals, tourists, and visitors. I would submit roughs to Graven and they would discuss with Radisson and the Forrest Group. Occasionally there were questions asked and things changed depending on the feedback. For the most part, it was just a gradual organic process of bringing these elements together. After that background discussion, Michael Weston led us on a tour. On the ground level, most available wall space is covered by Quitely art. Weston: We could have opened this with white walls and boring, nondescript, no-story art, and be forgotten. Whereas, by doing this, you create so many more experiences, not only in the room. Whenever we do show-arounds, or take guests up to the rooms, they stand there and look at the art for a couple of minutes before you get any kind of next part of the conversation.

Quitely: Where the flying figures actually came from was that the guys from the Forrest Group and the guys from the hotel both went to my exhibition. One of the things they particularly liked was the piece I did especially for the show and it was Superman flying over the Kelvingrove building. So that’s where the inspiration for this wall art came from… There’s bits and pieces that incorporate national dress from around the world. There’s dress that harks back to earlier ages like this man with the tricorne hat who seems to be from the 18th century. There’s a cowgirl, or lady, with a lasso. A guy with a guitar. There’s someone with a tailcoat 36

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Superman TM & © DC Comics. Wall art © the respective copyright holder.

Standing there, surrounded by the wall art, it was an unremarkable admission. The ground level contains the “neocanteen” OUIbar + KTCHN and travelling across the walls are a mural of flying figures, the closest Quitely comes to his reputation-establishing super-hero work. There are two notable features. The first is that the miscellaneous characters transcend ages, ethnic and national boundaries, and even historical time periods. Some are glamorous and young, some less so, although there are no caricatures, only an acceptance of flawed humanity in all its forms spiraling heavenward. Quitely described the surprising cast of fliers:

there [19th century]. A circus strongman. There’s another of those rocking-out grannies. An old rock drummer with a scarf. There’s even a Rank Bajin from Lobey Dosser [a bizarre, though fondly-remembered Scottish strip character that ran in a national newspaper from 1949-1955].

All-Star Superman TM & © DC Comics.

As one of the strengths of Quitely’s art is his depictions of buildings and three-dimensional locations for characters to inhabit, including real buildings (check our Rosslyn Chapel — made famous in The DaVinci Code — in Batman: The Scottish Connection), I was delighted to see that a variety of Glasgow’s tallest buildings and monuments were projecting up through the bottom of the frieze. Quitely described it for me as he panned across the foyer and restaurant: Quitely: Early on, I already had the idea that I would like to see Glasgow landmarks. What happens is, if we’re looking due north, if the walls weren’t there, we would see the spires of Trinity College Church. And if we’re looking due east we’ve got the [Charles Rennie] Mac[kintosh] building of Glasgow School of Art. (Minus the scaffolding, of course.) There’s a church on Bath Street [St. Stephen’s Church]. This is the top of the Greek Thomson Church [the St. Vincent Street Free Church; the designer Alexander “Greek” Thomson is more famous than the actual church], that’s Nelson from George Square. [Quitely may have been confused here: Sir Walter Scott is on the column in George Square; Nelson’s Column is in Glasgow Green.] Over there is the top of GoMA [The Gallery of Modern Art]. Similarly, if you look due south, there’s the top of the Angel Building at Govan Toll [on the other side of the Clyde]. On this wall you’ve got the Lighthouse [also designed by Glaswegian Charles Rennie Mackintosh [1868–1928]; now Glasgow’s Centre for Design and COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

Architecture]. And the Tron Theatre Tower and the Tron Steeple. Wherever you are standing you are seeing things you would see if the walls weren’t there. And if your vision was spectacular. Weston took Quitely, Best, and I to two of the rooms, the only ones available as the hotel was otherwise fully booked. The first was a king room, with an incredible view up the river. “It’s the most Instagramed place in Glasgow, at the moment,” Weston informed us as Quitely and I pointed out landmark after landmark. Weston explained the interior design further:

Below: All-Star Superman ranks among Frank Quitely’s best recalled work by many readers, a 12-issue mini-series [2005–08] written by fellow Scotsman Grant Morrison. Bottom: Radisson RED Glasgow’s reception area sporting wall art by Quitely, whose signature can be seen in red at the left of the door.

Weston: The color palette of the rooms is red, black, and gray. It alternates. On one level the walls will be black and wardrobes will be red, on the next level, the walls will be red, and the wardrobes will be black. So it goes red, black, red, black, top to bottom. Which explains the shift in colors in the images present-

ed here. The art inside quietly dominates the room. A characteristic of the Quitely art was quickly becoming obvious: a sense of movement. People are riding on a Vespa, they’re running, playing, flying; few are static.

Above: Glasgow Coat of Arms, a recurring background theme in Quitely’s Radisson RED work.

Inset right: Cupboard doors with woman with her IHHI jacket. Art by Quitely. Photo by Mike Best.

The humor that Quitely wished to inject into the images is perhaps most prominent in the grannies playing air guitar,

Menzies: Can I ask about the black girl with the Afro haircut who has “IHHI” on her jacket? There’s obviously lateral and horizontal symmetry with that letter sequence, and it’s also a palindrome, but I searched in the Urban Dictionary, and I don’t know if this makes any sense to you at all, but “IHHI” means “I Hope He Isn’t”. Quitely: Wow. Menzies: So have youQuitely: In what context? Or is it just in any context? Menzies: Usually something like “I hope he isn’t lying” or “I hope he isn’t cheating”. Weston: [To Quitely] We always wondered what that meant. I think we asked you at the start and you were like, “Oh, I just put it on there”. Quitely: I should have told you more than that. It was deliberate for two reasons. One is, it didn’t mean anything to me, it wasn’t a language thing. I should have tried the Urban

All artwork © the respective copyright holder

Above: Quitely in one of the large studios. Photographer Mike Best had just reminded the artist that he had inserted rude Scottish words in a Batman map when this was taken.

Quitely: I did the bedrooms first and had various ideas of what we might do. In the rooms we have a sense that all the world’s a stage. Menzies: Masks are a recurring feature in the art. Quitely: I had a bunch of Venetian masksMenzies: Which symbolize pleasure, and parties— Quitely: Yeah, and I suppose it’s a little bit of a tip of the hat to super-hero comics, where I come from, although there’s nothing obviously super-hero about any of this. People are wearing masks on the top of their head as a hat because they’ve taken it off to speak, or on the back of the head like Janus [the Roman god of time who had two faces]. It was just about creating different levels of potential meaning and potential interest for people because different people will be attracted to different parts of the artwork and they’ll get different things from it.

sometimes framed by dancing men of similar age, that are perhaps vaguely inspired by the miscellaneous background characters in Oor Wullie or The Broons. (In an example of art imitating life, the Broons visited Quitely’s Kelvingrove exhibition in a special strip!) The umbrellas are also an acknowledgment of Scotland’s well-deserved reputation for soggy weather.

All © the estate of Jack Tremblay.

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Dictionary, I didn’t think of that. The other thing is I wanted it to be a palindrome purely because in different studios with all these different backgrounds the characters might get reversed. [They were.] I didn’t want anything that was going to look like it had been printed the wrong way round. Menzies: That’s clever, the practical explanation hadn’t occurred to me. My first thought was it’s symmetrical and it’s a palindrome, that’s all you were going for. Quitely: Yeah. Menzies: Then later I wondered if you’d hidden something else, a message. Quitely: [Excitedly] And new meaning! I’m delighted it means “I Hope He Isn’t”!

All artwork © the respective copyright holder. Radisson RED TM Radisson Hotels International, Inc.

One of the artworks shows the unexpected sight of three women, two men, and a dog on a Vespa. The Vespa is an Italian make of scooter that became world famous due to Audrey Hepburn riding one with Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday [1952]. In this image, Quitely has gone one better – or three, to be arithmetically precise. Menzies: The vase the man on the front of the scooter is carrying, is that a general art reference or a specific object in somewhere like the Burrell Collection? [The Burrell is a vast world-class art collection on the south side of Glasgow that Quitely often takes visitors to see.] Quitely: No, it’s not a specific vase. It’s there for you to read into it what you will. It’s slightly obscured by the bed but what you have here is five people and a dog on a Vespa rolling through an interior that is somewhat based on Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre [in London, England] but modified to incorporate the Glasgow Coat of Arms on the door and elements from it on the carvings at the sides. On the bike, two of the passengers have guitars. It’s a general composition with enough detail that there’s plenty there to look at should you actually want to spend time looking at the wallpaper… Menzies: I’m curious about the animal imagery. The masks are often animal masks, but you also have a dog on the man’s shoulder and a cat design on a girl’s T-shirt. Now is this just fun or is this recurring animal motif a subtle reference to the hotel’s pet policy? Quitely: [Pauses] What is the hotel’s pet policy...? Menzies: Guests are allowed to bring cats and dogs. Weston: [Nodding to Quitely] Uh-huh, yeah. Quitely: [Smiling]: Again, another happy accident! … COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

Menzies: From your expression in the photographs that appeared in January 2018 in The Daily Record and The Herald [two of the main Scottish daily newspapers], a few months before the hotel opened for business, it looks very much like that was you seeing the art for the first time. Quitely: You’re right. I had been here at an earlier stage to see the rooms but that was the first time I had come into the hotel with the drawings in place and I was delighted. Menzies: Have you been back since the visit then? Quitely: Yes, four times. I was first back after that for the opening with my wife. We had a lovely time. That was the first time seeing it working as a hotel. I had food and drink, and stayed the night, had breakfast, the whole bit; it was really nice. Then another design agency called Jamhot who organise artist talks every quarter and choose three different artists to give a half hour talk. They use a different venue every time, so they asked me and they arranged to use one of the rooms here, the one on the left as you enter the hotel. I have a friend in Finnieston, a few minutes from the hotel, and I suggested coming down here and we played pool for a while. Most recently, I have three kids and we were going to the West End and they hadn’t seen it, so we stopped in.

Above: Radisson RED restaurant area with Frank Quitely wall art. Photo by Mike Best. Below: Radisson RED branding.

Below: Large studio with Quitely’s air-guitar grannies on wall. Photo by Mike Best.

Menzies: How old are your children, if you don’t mind me asking? Quitely: My daughter is 14 and my boys are 20 and 23. Menzies: So, your sons fit in the hotel’s target demographic.... Quitely: They loved it. Although, having said that, they just walked around saying “Oh, these are really cool, dad, this looks great. Now, where’s the pool table? [Laughs.] And get us a drink while you’re at it.” Weston: What’s really interesting when you talk about demographic is there really is no demographic and ultimately at the start and the inception the brand was all about the millennial mindset, but as the brand has evolved that has been lost now. Since we’ve opened in the last three months, my parents have been here, and they’re close on eighty, and they think it’s the most amazing thing. Probably parental pride, right enough [Laughs], but they’re used to the very conventional, full service and beige offerings that you get

out there and then to see that generation come here and see it and get it is great. Really, there is no demographic that we hit here. Quitely: Each of the times I’ve been here, there’s no obvious demographic to me. Both Quitely and Weston exuded pride about the hotel. And rightly so. Their lofty ambition to redefine the hotel experience, especially in terms of the art, and make it accessible beyond a narrowly defined marketing demographic is laudable and one that Quitely, consciously or subconsciously, promoted by populating the hotel walls with an egalitarian spectrum of characters where all races, ethnicities, age groups, and body types are celebrated. Hopefully this experiment will lead to more hotel chains avoiding art factories and, instead, commissioning visionary local artists. The world, after all, can never have enough grannies playing air guitar.

All artwork © the respective copyright holder

Above: At left is Quitely during the hotel’s construction face having a look at his “air guitar grannies” artwork. Image from Radisson RED hotel website. At right is article writer Robert Menzies (left) and Frank Quitely. Photo by Mike Best. Below: At left is Mike Best pic of Quitely and Michael Weston, then Radisson RED hotel curator. Article writer Robert Menzies shares, “Michael was hugely helpful with background info and, though the article may not reflect it, he was massively important in its production.” At right is a detail of Quitely wall art. Photo by Robert Menzies.

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

#22 • Winter 2020 • 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 essays by former 1970s Kirby assistants MARK EVANIER AND STEVE SHERMAN! NOW SHIPPING! (160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5

ve owners. their respecti All characte

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!

rs TM & ©

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1940-44

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

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

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!

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

comics in the library

Worthy FCBD Offerings

First Second Books, Fantagraphics, Terry Moore, and other tantalizing freebies by R ICHARD J. ARNDT CBC Contributing Editor

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All are TM & © the respective copyright holders.

Free Comic Book Day occurs on the first weekend of May in participating comic stores. It’s a great way to preview age-appropriate graphic novels, both within and without the mainstream comics companies. The first free comic sampler that I enjoyed was from First Second Books, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press. There was an 11-page sample of Vera Brosgol’s Be Prepared that reminded me of how much I enjoyed her Anya’s Ghost, a decidedly creepy ghost story. Be Prepared is about a pre-pubescent girl’s experiences in an ethnic summer camp. Nothing in common I suppose, except they’re both excellent books and ones that I’m quite happy to have in my library. Hope Larson also had a nice nine-page sample of her graphic novel, All Summer Long, which I ordered but didn’t get due to over-ordering. Most school libraries, including mine, over-order on books that they want — with a do-not-exceed amount listed that the bookseller honors. The reason for this is that the vendors or jobbers don’t get paid by the school district until the order is finalized and back orders can take weeks, even months to be completed. If a librarian doesn’t over-order, the payment to the company can takes take as long as four months after the library’s ordering and even receiving most of the books to get paid. This is unfair to a vendor and it creates enormous amounts of unnecessary paperwork for the librarian and the front office. So we over-order with that do-not-exceed amount to have everything done and paid for in September. I liked Hope’s sample enough to put it on next year’s order. Cross my fingers that I get it! I also liked Charise Mericle Harper’s The Amazing Crafty Cat, but it’s too young for the age level of my students. Two other samples — Zita the Space Girl by Bemn Hatke and Real Friends by Shannon Hale and LeVyen Pham — were on the cusp. I didn’t order them, but I’ll keep ’em in mind for next year. First Second Books also had a sampler for younger ages and I did like and would recommend the Claudette Shuts-Up books, by Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado, based on the four-page sample that I read. It was funny stuff. Yen Press’s free sampler included a generous twenty-two-page chunk of Svetlana Chmakova’s Crush, part of a trilogy (so far) along with Awkward and Brave. Each book is headlined by a different student in the same middle school with each headliner becoming a supporting character in the other books. I ordered all three books but only received Brave, which was outstanding. Both Crush and Awkward will be back on my order list for the upcoming year. Also included in the Yen Press comic was a seven-page excerpt from the W.I.T.C.H. series, which didn’t impress me, although it is well drawn. Fantagraphics’ sample had a whole collection of avant-garde material, most of which wasn’t particularly age-appropriate and even necessarily readable by the average 12- or 13-year-old child but work by artists such as Jim Woodring, Simon Hanselmann,

Georgia Webber, Carol Tyler, and Dash Shaw did tickle my fancy and if you’re running a public, college or high school library, you should give work by those creators a look. Some reader somewhere will be happy you did. Far too old for my students, but perfect for the three other libraries I just mentioned was Jason Lutes’ Berlin. Lutes has been working on this book for quite literally decades and the sampler by Drawn & Quarterly is previewing not only the trilogy of books, but the massive omnibus volume that came out in 2018, as well. The books and the sampler feature brilliant historical storytelling and quiet, yet forceful artwork by Lutes. I was impressed enough to order the omnibus, which is the same size as The Complete Bone door-stop, but Berlin is such a good story that I don’t care. This trilogy joins the genuine classics of the graphic novels genre and deserves it. Terry Moore, one of the best artist/writers in the business, released a sampler of Strangers in Paradise, from his Abstract Studio Comics. Not only do we get a nineteen-page excerpt from that series but six sketchbook pieces that are simply beautiful. I’m well aware that Moore’s books are far too adult for my library’s readers, but they’re so good in both story and art that they’re certainly of interest to me. An odd, and somewhat funny note, is that after checking prices for Terry’s various books at Amazon, my recommended reading section blew up with recommendations for gay, lesbian, cross-dressing, and transgender books. Some of those were books I recognized — the Moore books I was actually looking at, but also Los Bros. Hernandez’s Love and Rockets volume — but the vast majority of the books recommended appeared to be LGBTQ porn. Or at least what I would term to be porn. It took some weeks to get rid of those full-color, large “recommendations” that were appearing on my entry page to Amazon and I’m a bit hesitant to order any of Terry’s or, for that matter, Los Bros. Hernandez’s books from Amazon for fear of a repeat onslaught. Just saying…. You may notice that I haven’t mentioned Marvel, DC, Image, or Dark Horse samplers in this piece. Marvel FCBD offerings have been underwhelming every time I’ve looked, incomprehensible chunks of story or pin-ups from comics that do neither the comics nor their creators justice. Dark Horse’s contributions have largely dealt with comics that I’m already aware of and often buying. I do like that they routinely include brand new stories in their FCBD books though. DC samplers reflect a combination of my remarks on both Marvel and Dark Horse — samples of stories that don’t interest or of books that I’m already aware of. Image books often miss the mark with me for either age or interest levels, although I’m there whenever an item by Jeff Lemire or Paul Tobin comes up.

Colors by Glenn Whitmore

. Adam Stranges and related characters TM & © DC Comics. Doctor Strange and related characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

hembeck’s dateline

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

SIZE MATTERS O

ur P. Craig Russell Fine Art Editions are beautiful 12"X17" oversized hardcovers that feature complete stories scanned from Russell's stunning original art. While appearing to be in black & white, each page has been scanned in color to recreate as closely as possible the experience of viewing the actual originals—including blue pencils, notes, art corrections and more. Pages are reproduced at original size on heavy paper stock to provide fans, aficionados and collectors with the best possible reproductions. Three volumes are currently available: •

P. Craig Russell’s Jungle Book and Other Stories

•

P. Craig Russell’s Salome and Other Stories

•

P. Craig Russell’s The Selfish Giant and Other Stories

wahprods.com artofpcraigrussell.com

WhereinVirtuoso Artist P. Craig Russell Discusses

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

P. Craig Russell portrait © Greg Preston.

It was a bright, brisk Sunday in mid-November when I visited Philip Craig Russell’s charming and cozy home in Kent, Ohio, an abode smack-dab up against the town’s fabled campus. His looked to be the only house on Craig’s side of the street, testament, he subsequently confessed, of his refusal to sell the place to an ever-expanding Kent State University as had so many neighbors. Decades ago, the artist had come to town to teach a class and still he remains determined as ever to keep that stay permanent, living alone in the gorgeously-sunlit domicile (as much an art gallery as home). But, by all indications, Craig doesn’t appear lonely, as, for one, he regularly hosts dinner parties — there was one planned for me as honored guest that very evening —

His Stunning Achievements in American Comics plus he has a regular crew of pals working on his comics, some who were invited to the repast. I had long wanted to interview Craig in his environs, hugely impressed as I have been with his phenomenal growth as an artist and by the utterly unique trail he has blazed as a comics pro. Starting off as a Marvel artist in the early ’70s, Craig soon refined his work well beyond superheroes to focus on, of all things, comic-book adaptations of the world’s greatest operas, as well as the works of Wilde and Kipling. Today he is recognized for multiple collaborations with Neil Gaiman — notably on what Craig considers his most renowned work, Sandman #50 — and the artist recently saw published his comics version of the renowned young adult novel, The Giver.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

Above: Looking to be from the late 1940s/early ’50s, a postcard of Main Street, in Wellsville, Ohio, where P. Craig Russell’s family clothing store was located. J.M. Russell and Co. was established in 1892. Previous spread: Greg Preston’s great portrait of P. Craig Russell at his drawing table, in Kent, Ohio, was taken on July 14, 2014, and it appeared in Greg’s book, The Artist Within: Book 2. Inset above: Map and call-out indicating P. Craig Russell’s hometown, located near the border connecting Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Below: Discount tokens and a newspaper display ad from the East Liverpool Evening Review newspaper, June 25, 1926, promoting J.M. Russell and Co. clothing store, Wellsville, Ohio.

Comic Book Creator: You’re originally from Ohio, Craig? P. Craig Russell: Yes, the upper Ohio River Valley, right across from the tip of the panhandle of West Virginia, so in the tri-state area of Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. CBC: Was it rural? P. Craig: Well, it was both. When you get in the Ohio River Valley, it was very industrial. There were steel mills and potteries, but now those are all gone. It’s a very depressed area now, but it was a busy small town with 5,000 people or so, and it was a long stretch, about three miles long and six blocks wide, so it was a narrow town. There was the river, the railroad, the town, and the hills. The houses are built right next to each other like a lot of towns there. Just like Pittsburgh. CBC: Did you live downtown? P. Craig: No, it was a neighborhood area. Downtown was just one street, Main Street. That was uptown. Downtown was where you lived in the residences and it was more exciting for you to go uptown, where everything was happening. CBC: What did your dad do? P. Craig: He had a clothing store that had been in our family since 1892, called J. M. Russell and Company, and eventually it became my father’s store and he eventually moved it uptown, which was a big deal in the ’20s, because it was right across from the railroad yards and all those men would come across for shoes and clothes. He had that until around 1980, and my mom worked there too, after we were out of grade school. CBC: Do you have any siblings? P. Craig: An older brother by four years. He lives in Virginia Beach and was in radio and TV, and worked down in Steubenville, Ohio, for a number of years, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and ended up in Virginia Beach, working for Pat Robertson. Regent University, 700 Club… CBC: Is he evangelical? P. Craig: I don’t know that you’d call him evangelical. Christian certainly, very involved in that, although he said when he’d see Pat Robertson coming down the hall, he’d dart into another room. CBC: Why? P. Craig: He’s kind of a scary guy! [Jon chuckles] I got inside on a Sunday afternoon when the place was deserted, back sometime in the ’80s or ’90s and I

was in the inner sanctum of Pat Robertson, and there was Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington. CBC: An original? P. Craig: There were a couple. There was money, a lot of money. That was the difference between him and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: Jim and Tammy Faye would have a painting of the Last Supper on black velvet. Robertson had incredible art around there. You could smell the money. He had some taste. CBC: Your brother had kids? P. Craig: Yes, two girls and a boy. CBC: What were your mom’s interests? P. Craig: Before she met my dad, she was an executive secretary, someone who knew where everything was and was one of the most efficient women in the world! She worked for a Mr. Wells, who was big money in the Newell, West Virginia/East Liverpool, Ohio area. They had bridges and potteries, and all that. She was his secretary. He wrote a letter to my father after World War II, when they got married, and sort of congratulated him, but said, “You’ve taken the best secretary I’ve ever had, you dog!” [laughter] Almost like 19th century grace. CBC: He saved the letter? P. Craig: My mom did. I don’t where it is now. I remember reading it. Then she was a ’50s housewife raising the kids. CBC: Middle class? P. Craig: For Wellsville, we were middle class. There was a time when it was really hand-to-mouth for a few years. Everything had changed, so the old Russell store was going out of business, because it was in a rough section of Main Street, and there was nothing going on there anymore. He moved it uptown and cut it down to a shoe store. It wasn’t enough. It was about four years he had that little store. CBC: When was that? P. Craig: Early ’60s. My brother and I had savings accounts. If you got $5 from your grandma at Christmas, it went into the savings account. I had about $105 and my brother, being older, had about $140 or something like that. My father took us aside once and said, “Boys, I’m going to have to use that money from your savings accounts.” Each account was in my name and my brother’s name, respectively, but also in our father’s name, though it wasn’t like he was didn’t trust us and thought we would raid our accounts! We would have to have dad with us to withdraw. He was right up front about it. He said he would lay awake at night wondering how he was going to pay the bills. He had to buy the shoes before he could sell them. CBC: He was that candid with you? P. Craig: Oh, yeah. He was always candid. When he’d #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

come home from work, I would ask him, “How much did you make today?” Saturdays were good, but some days, it was just nothing. And he paid us back, too. About the time I was a freshman in high school, there was a clothing store called The Esquire, and he arranged to buy it because the woman who ran it was old and she was ready to stop working. He got a loan and mom ran it. He also arranged to buy the hardware store that was going out of business and got a loan for that. He then combined the two and had a real men’s clothing store again. He got out of the little rental for the shoe store and sold The Esquire and put it in this. It was a small town that needed a good clothing store and it took off. For about 15 years, we were able to paint the house and remodel the kitchen and get a new used car, so things looked up. But, for those four years, things were dicey. Looking back on it, I would think, “Oh, we’re having fried Spam for dinner.” I thought it was because mom liked it, but now I know, “Oh, that’s why we had it!” CBC: We had a lot of casseroles. [chuckles] P. Craig: Spanish rice, beans-and-franks, casseroles. CBC: That seems remarkable for a man in the man’s world of the early ’60s to be that candid with his children. Money is such a macho thing and a status thing. P. Craig: It’s also private. You don’t ask people about it — even your parents — even today. People don’t know their parents’ incomes are. But mine were always candid. CBC: Did you have an intimate relationship with your parents? P. Craig: Yes, but they weren’t like today’s parents. They were in charge and you could only push them so far. CBC: Did you admire your dad? P. Craig: Yes, I did. He worked hard and could be irascible, but he was the warmer of the two. My mother was the cool one… CBC: No nonsense? P. Craig: Not emotional. I never saw anyone in my family shed a tear, not even my brother. CBC: Even you? P. Craig: Oh yeah. I just bawled. [chuckles] I was the drama queen in the family. My dad was the emotional person in the family. Even though he didn’t show it, he was sentimental. When my brother was getting married and they were having the rehearsal in street clothes just going through things, he said afterwards, that’s the moment he felt really moved, much more comparative to the actual ceremony the next day. It was him seeing them in their street clothes. My mother was just shaking her head, “Why? I just don’t understand.” CBC: He said that to you? P. Craig: She was there, too. We were just talking a few years later, I think. Maybe it was at the same time. CBC: Did you like them? P. Craig: What years are you talking about? [chuckles] CBC: That time. P. Craig: Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. He was my biggest fan; he pored over that stuff once I started getting published. When I did Night Music, in 1979, I used the front porch of a friend of mine as reference. I needed a porch in one of the panels on the “Starship Remembrance” story. He knew that book and had read it. Then Tom Batiuk, in a Sunday episode of [newspaper comic strip] Funky Winkerbean, swiped that porch. He needed a porch and spotted that. Well, Dad saw it immediately! It would have been in the same one where Tom referred to “Sir Russell of Kent” in the strip. So he was kind of giving me credit at the same time. But my dad knew my work well enough to recognize it if it showed up somewhere else. CBC: What did your parents think of comics while you were growing up? P. Craig: They put up with it, although I remember my mom looking at Fantastic Four and saying, “I don’t know why you want to read that terrible stuff,” since it was monsters. But, they let it go. The only time they bridled was COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

when I brought home Harvey Kurtzman’s Help!, I think it was. In one panel, there was a naked lady with a bow and arrow and she was saying, “I think that’s the last time they’ll mess with Rebecca of Sunnybook Farm.” My father said, “Do not bring that trash around here anymore!” CBC: Did you have odd jobs as a kid? How did you get money? P. Craig: No. I got a small allowance. My first was a dime. Then it went to $1 or $1.50. It all went to comics. CBC: What was it about comics? Was it a social thing that other kids shared at the same time as you? Or you zeroed in on it on your own? P. Craig: A few kids had them when I was really small. We had them between our twin beds — Donald Duck and probably Roy Rogers because my brother had a lot of Westerns. We had cap guns and little Davy Crockett flashlights. So I grew up reading that and there would be some trading back and forth, but after elementary school, no, it was like a secret vice. When I was a teenager, with a couple of my friends, I would rent my comics. You’d take five comics for a

Above: Craig’s mother and father. Taken from pics of framed photographs on PCR’s walls.

Below: A very young P. Craig Russell with his mom, circa early 1950s. Taken from snapshot of framed photo.

Above: XXX

Above: P. Craig Russell art produced for his high school during PCR’s senior year.

Below: P. Craig Russell and his Wellsville High School 50 th reunion in mid-2019. During junior and senior years, Craig was very active in his class.

week for a nickel. [chuckles] CBC: Did you write them down in a ledger? P. Craig: Yeah, I kept track of it. They didn’t have to buy the comics and they’d bring them back. I made some spare change and I’d buy more comics. It only lasted a summer or so. CBC: Reinvest! P. Craig: Yes. Poured it right back into the company. [laughter] It was only recently a classmate of mine, Also Mase, was reading all the same Kirby stuff in the ’60s — oh, what a shame, we could’ve been comic book buddies! I had no idea anyone else read this stuff, although come to think of it, you look at all the old spinner racks, who did I think was buying all that stuff?! CBC: They did it just for you! P. Craig: Yeah! I was there every Tuesday on

new comic book day. CBC: It was Marvel? P. Craig: Marvel, but I read everything. I had huge collections of Harvey Comics, though I stopped buying them in junior high school. I bought all the Archie Comics all the way into high school. All the DCs, all the Marvels, Tower, Charlton… though there were a couple of Charltons I wouldn’t buy. CBC: You would buy the anthology titles? Horror, mystery? P. Craig: Yeah. Two Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, Patsy and Hedy… everything, I just wanted to know. I had checklists and still have them somewhere, and would do an annual comic book report that listed every single comic I had by title and how many copies I had. I did that for four or five years and checklists for comics I didn’t have. By the time I finished high school, I had every single Marvel comic from the inception of Marvel. I started reading Fantastic Four from the third issue. I read them at a friend’s house, who had #3 through #14 and was like, “This is a revelation,” and started reading all of them. I bought the first issue from Howard Rogofsky… you know the name? CBC: Yeah! P. Craig: And I paid $10.50 and I kept it a big secret. If my parents knew I spent that much on a comic book…! Years later, I asked Dad to send that copy and the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man, because I sold those for rent money. He was like, “Are you sure? We can lend you the rent money.” I said, “No.” I wasn’t going to have that. I did that several times. It was great at the time and kept my head above water. CBC: You’re cool with that today? P. Craig: Yeah. CBC: That’s good; a lot of people could have kicked themselves. P. Craig: I was very lucky. My mother never threw away my comics. CBC: Did you sell your collections? P. Craig: A lot of it, I sold. I still have the Kirby Fantastic Four and Thor, and the Ditko Spider-Man except for the first issues. A few years ago, I sold some things, like the first issue of Hulk to bring in some money. My dad was my big fan of my work. When I was a sophomore/junior in college, I did formal portraits of them in pencil. I did Dad for Mom and Mom for Dad. While I was painting them, they caught on, even though I tried to keep it a secret, but didn’t do a very good job. “I have to go spend some time with Craig, but I can’t tell you why.” After my dad died, I was going through stuff with Mom and she was moving here to Kent from Virginia Beach and there was Dad’s portrait, it had been framed. I said, “Where’s yours?” She said, “It fell off the wall.” “And…?” “It broke, the glass broke.” “And…?” “It tore a little bit.” “Yes…?” “So I threw it out.” It was the best portrait I ever did. I labored over my father’s portrait. It was like Mt. Rushmore, but my mom’s was light and free and just caught her, [points to framed photo of her] very much like this picture over my head. A little voice in my head said, “Don’t say anything to her because it will be hurtful.” My stuff just didn’t mean anything to her, but it meant a lot to my dad. CBC: Does that hurt pertain #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

P. Craig Russell photos courtesy of and © Maronie Creative Services.

to this day? P. Craig: Well, I’m talking about it, aren’t I? [chuckles] So, yeah. CBC: “He says with a laugh.” Wow. Was it a happy household? P. Craig: It was. I had a friend across the street, Cheryl, and I never knew a time when she wasn’t there. She was always at the house and she said, “We thought of your parents as Ozzie and Harriet.” My mom kept a meticulous house — always clean and neat — and dinner at 5:30 every day when my dad got home. It was very Norman Rockwell from the looks of it, although Rockwell was more upper class in his paintings and ours was more like A Christmas Story set in the ’30s. We look at that movie and say, “That’s our carpet!” Our house was like that, though a little more modern. I would call it a happy house. CBC: I’ve never asked you this — and correct me if I’m wrong — you’re gay? P. Craig: Yes. CBC: Did your parents have any reaction when they found out? Was it a revelation for you? P. Craig: No. It wasn’t a revelation. CBC: You always knew it? P. Craig: Yes. CBC: Did you have to announce it? P. Craig: No, no. It was just never discussed. Once my mom was going through jewelry and had some nice rings, one was from my dad’s mother when she died. She had some big piece of ice and they drew lots between the aunts. She got it and she had some nice rings. She had her daughter-in-law and the granddaughters. She was going through them with me and said, “I guess you’re never going to need any of these.” I said, “No.” CBC: How old were you? P. Craig: I was in my 20s. Maybe I was 30 or something. I said, “No, give them to the girls,” her grandchildren. She did give me her father’s diamond tie-pin though. So I was covered. CBC: Was it a small town you wanted to get out of? P. Craig: Not really. I had such a good time there in my last years of high school. I was so busy. Once I got to college, it was, “Great!” This was a new thing and I was happy to move on. My junior and senior years in high school sort of laid the groundwork for everything because I was asked to be the chairman of the decorating committee for the prom and post-prom when I was a junior. From that, I became the class artist, who did the illustrations for the yearbook, the newspaper, all the set designs for the plays — the giant backdrop paintings for all the dances. I had people working for me showing up at the house every night. We had a large house because it was a duplex. When I was a child, the upstairs was rented out to others, but once we got the big store, then we took over the whole house and I lived upstairs. I had those rooms, all like art rooms, with a dozen kids coming in with paintings hanging all over the walls. I was busy! I was doing all this stuff and was delegating people to paint parts of stuff. That’s why I decided to go to college in art rather than in music. I was as busy doing recitals as I was drawing pictures. I had to finally come to a decision. I thought this was so much fun because of all of this social activity. Then I get this career where I spent 98% of my time at the drawing board by myself, which is the most unsocial thing possible! But I think it was that social play that helped me decide to go into art. CBC: How big was your class? P. Craig: Graduating was about 125. CBC: Everyone knew about your art? P. Craig: Oh, yeah. I was class artist. The index in the yearbook had the clubs that everyone belonged to. My resume was like half the page, by far the longest one. I had a great time. Before that, junior high was horrible and freshman and sophomore years weren’t much better, but once I found my art, it was so much better. I had so many friends. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

CBC: What about your sexual identity in a solidly heterosexual environment? P. Craig: It wasn’t even a question. I had girlfriends and dates. CBC: So you went through the motions? P. Craig: You know, I had a girlfriend for a couple of years and had a sexual relationship… more than one. Then you think, “Marriage?” Then, it would be, “Uh, no.” Then you get to college and the world opens up and you’re not just cluelessly following the river’s flow. CBC: Right. Did you go back to high school reunions? P. Craig: Oh yes. I was just at our 50th reunion last summer and I go every five years. Wellsville has a five-year reunion and, no matter what year you graduated, you are welcomed back. The town is packed and they have parades that last all week. I maintained contact with my friends through all the years and now there’s Facebook. We’re connecting almost every day. CBC: So, you are fondly recalled? P. Craig: Yeah. CBC: No bullying, no jocks. P. Craig: No. There were cliques, but, at the end of high school, everyone sort of fit in with everyone. I didn’t see bullying and, if there were drugs (and there was a little), it was so underground. This was an era that if a girl got pregnant, she just disappeared. You weren’t allowed to graduate with the class if you were married or had a child. I graduated in 1969. It changed pretty radically within a couple of years. CBC: A seismic change! P. Craig: Our theme for the prom was “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and we did these three giant paintings that were pure psychedelia! The adults thought it was cute. CBC: Peter Max. P. Craig: I loved Peter Max and I was doing posters in the style of that. CBC: “Sock it to me!” P. Craig: One thing had “sock it to me” on it!

Above: Young P. Craig Russell circa 1976. Photographer Sam Maronie says these were taken either at the Creation Con or Marvel convention that year.

Below: Dan Adkins, who took on P. Craig Russell as a protégé in the early 1970s, when the Western Pennsylvanian artist has his own shop catering to Marvel. During that period, Paul Gulacy and Val Mayerik were a part of the team.

Above: Craig penciled the lead story in Chamber of Chills #1 [Nov. 1972], where he audaciously ignored the writer’s directive. Inks by Dan Adkins. Below: Detail of Amazing Adventures #30 cover. Inset right: Panel from PCR’s Marvel Feature #10 [July ’73] work.

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

“Moon of Madness, Moon of Fear,” Killraven, Ant-Man, and Wasp TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

CBC: “Flower power.” P. Craig: And one had “flower power.” We had hundreds of giant flowers cut out and pasted all over the gym and little red footprints ... I remember Jonie Trainer, who I took to the prom both years, cutting out these little feet from construction paper and we pasted these little feet all over the entire gym, across the paintings and up the walls. CBC: Trippy! P. Craig: Very trippy! CBC: Did you get into drugs at all? Pot? P. Craig: No. CBC: Not even in college? P. Craig: Oh, sure, in college. CBC: LSD? P. Craig: No, no. I certainly had a lot of friends that did, but never went into anything more than that. CBC: What about the influence of San Francisco and psychedelia painting a bigger picture? Did that appeal to you? The undergounds? P. Craig: Oh, yeah! I saw ZAP Comix my freshman year in college. I remember the revelation of it because it looked so transgressive, but yet so familiar, because of R. Crumb and his old-style drawing influences. It looked like something I’d seen before: “Meatball” and “Joe Blow,” his story that went to the Supreme Court because of obscenity. He had that old funky style of drawing. It looked like something you’d known all your life, yet the subject line was so out there. CBC: When I first saw him, I thought he was an old animator, like some 60-year old cartoonist who went off the rails… P. Craig: That’s not so far from the truth because he was an old man when he was young. He didn’t iden-

tify with the hippies at all, from what I know. They adored him. But, like Woody Allen, he was very much into the ’20s and ’30s. He didn’t like rock ’n’ roll or any of that. CBC: There were major things going on in the music world — huge changes between 1962 to 1970, for instance. What was music like for you? P. Craig: I was there for The Beatles and loved them. CBC: Did you see them on The Ed Sullivan Show? P. Craig: Oh, yeah! I remember going to school the next day and everyone was talking about it. I was in the seventh grade. Everybody had seen it and was talking about it. The Stones were too rough for me, but I loved The Beatles, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Simon & Garfunkel. I wasn’t into heavy metal or anything like that. I got to college and was exposed to a lot more. I love all of that from the ’60s, ’70s, and into the ’80s, and then I fell off, but that was secondary. It was all about classical music for me since I was a little kid. I had this little yellow record that had four songs on it. They were children’s songs, but set to classical music: Offenbach’s “Barcarolle,” Dvorak’s “Humoresques”… different pieces like that. The Tortoise and the Hare was set to “Humoresques.” There is music that goes into a major to a minor key — and I didn’t know “major” or “minor” keys, but when it happened, I thought, “Oh, this is scary. I like it.” It was like seeing a Disney villain. I liked seeing the scary parts. That minor key and how it made it more dramatic and then went into a major key for a happy resolution. So, I had an ear for that and started taking piano lessons in the fifth grade and would make Beethoven recordings for Christmas presents. CBC: You were taking lessons and excited about it? P. Craig: Oh, yeah. CBC: [Chuckles] Oh, you were the one. P. Craig: I started in February and the recital was in May and I hadn’t progressed enough to be in the recital and was so disappointed and had to wait until sixth grade the next year. Jean Fogo Campbell had a shtick. She had old lady blue hair, chiffon scarves, and she called her piano, “My house,” and my piano, “Your house.” She’d say, “Now go to your house and play this.” She was a hoot. She would always have a theme. This year, she gave everyone a piece of Manila paper and you had to draw an interpretation of the piece you were playing. My piece was called “Rhapsody in Scale.” I drew a picture of a man sitting at a piano like this. [gestures image] That’s what my picture was all about: me playing it! [laughter] CBC: I never knew this about you. You had a performer in you always? P. Craig: You didn’t have to ask me to play twice! I wasn’t the shy kid who didn’t want to. Yeah, I was a performer. My brother was very quiet and a dry sense of humor, but I was the one that was the yacky-yackyyacka. CBC: Did you go to church? P. Craig: Oh, yeah. Every Sunday. CBC: Were you involved in Christmas pageants?

Amazing Adventures, Killraven, and associated characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

P. Craig: We didn’t do much of that with Presbyterians, but I was in the choir and played the piano. CBC: Were you a good singer? P. Craig: No. I was good enough to carry a tune and be in a high school choir. CBC: You were all over the place. P. Craig: Oh, yeah! I was in the choir, in the plays, designed the sets for the plays… CBC: You must have been exhausted! P. Craig: The music thing… Jean Fogo Campbell. I guess Fogo was her maiden name. We had a Fogo family that lived across the street from us. CBC: Well, do you point to that experience, as the start of you bringing together art and music? P. Craig: It’s certainly informed my subject matter over the years, turning songs and operas into graphic stories. That was just looking for a good story to tell. It always gets me that people say, “I like your Magic Flute and I don’t like opera.” That’s because they’re not singing. A story is just a story. I think that turns some people off because, “That’s an opera and I don’t like opera.” It’s also a play by Oscar Wilde. It’s just words and pictures. But, a lot of the time, I’m listening to music and it’s informing my adaptation of it. Like in Salomé, which oddly is sort of an adaptation of an adaptation because I’m going from Richard Strauss’s opera, which is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s stage play and then they made a libretto out of it, which cut the play down by 50 percent. The opera was banned in Boston. People were scandalized! CBC: Really? P. Craig: Oh my god, yes! Religious organizations found it blasphemous and the play was banned in a number of places and then the opera. There’s a severed head of John the Baptist and this is 1910! Oh my god! There’s a point where he’s down in the cistern with the bars over it and she’s looking into it saying how dark it is. In the opera, it’s just dark, bass strings in the orchestra — getting darker and darker. In listening to it, you realize you’re going down into the cistern, so in the layout, you’ll see her — you’re above her and she’s looking down. Then you go down in the cistern, going through the bars and then you are looking up at her. Now, that came from listening to the music. The panel in the middle is solid black. There’s not drawing at all. You’re just there in blackness and then you’re looking up at her. That came from listening to the music. A lot of the stuff in The Ring of the Nibelung is related to the leitmotifs sprinkled throughout. At the end of “Gotterdammerung,” when the world comes to an end, there’s an almost 17-page silent sequence in the graphic novel. I had the music, listened to it, and played it on the piano. Every motif that has been in there: Valhalla, Siegfried, the sword, flames, the rainbow bridge, all the characters — it’s all in there and narratively explains what’s happening as Valhalla burns. And the Rhine comes up and the Rhine maidens and they retrieve the gold finally and it’s returned from where it’s stolen from in the end. Every motif is lined up in those last 17 pages and, of course, if you don’t know the opera, none of that will come through. But, hopefully it doesn’t need to if it works as a graphic story — it’s just a story — but that’s how it unfolded in my ear and in the structure. CBC: Have you had people who did recognize it? P. Craig: Yes. I was invited by the Wagner Society in Chicago; the Chicago Lyric Opera was doing a complete cycle of The Ring. It’s like a four-night performance, with 14, 15 hours of music. I was invited to do a slide presentation of it. For that audience, it was great. You go to performances of The Ring, especially if they’re doing all four, and it’s like Trekkies! People go from one performance to another, all over Europe and America and they’ll show up. They all understood and they were great to be around. CBC: What is it about The Ring…? P. Craig: It’s the same sort of thing about Lord of the Rings or Star Trek or Star Wars. It’s this epic cycle that covers COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

generations and all these archetypal themes that come in… the old man of the past that the young man has to get by. Basically, there’s a piercing, “You shall not pass.” Sometimes it’s a villain and sometimes it’s a young man like Siegfried who has to get up to the fiery mountain to find the sleeping maiden. All those symbols are so rich. There are so many interpretations of The Ring. I really took to heart Father Owen Glee who used to be on the Metropolitan Opera Live, on the radio, as one of their panelists. His knowledge of that. It’s about the redemption of the world about love. Other people have different interpretations of it, but the world is redeemed ultimately through love. CBC: [Chuckles] A German came up with it? P. Craig: Yeah! CBC: Is there romance in it? P. Craig: Oh, yes! Siegfried and Brunhilde. There’s always a scene that gets a laugh in the theater, which I’m sure was not intended: Siegfried has been raised in the woods by an evil dwarf and has never seen a woman. He’s finally out in the world and he hears this story and he gets up to the top and Brunhilde is in a magic sleep for 16 years, put there by her father. She’s covered with her shield. She’s a warrior woman with a breastplate and all that. He thinks she’s a man. He takes off her helmet and all this hair falls out and then he cuts the straps off her breastplate and springs back and says, “Das ist kein mann!” — “This is not a man!” — The audience always laughs at that. He’s suddenly terrified. He’s slain the dragon and that didn’t scare him at all. He’s trying to learn the meaning of fear. Mime has tried to teach him to be afraid, but he’s not afraid

Top: Craig Russell’s unaltered original art for Amazing Adventures #31 [July 1975] cover, before Marvel art director John Romita, Sr., made changes to Killraven’s face and the costume of Sacrificer. Above: Amazing Adventures #31 cover as published.

Above: Barry Windsor-Smith pencilled the layouts and Dan Adkins studio mates Val Mayerik and PCR provided backgrounds and finishes on this Conan the Barbarian #21 [Dec. 1972] assignment. Below: Windsor-Smith’s cover of same.

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Conan TM & © Conan Properties International LLC.

of anything. He goes after the dragon and slays the dragon and he’s still not afraid, but he sees the woman and he’s terrified! But very interested and immediately falls in love. It’s one of the great arias of all time. He tries to break down her resistance. She’s a goddess who’s had her godhood stripped from her by disobeying Wotan and he condemns her to sleep and be taken by the first man that finds her and she’s horrified and works on him — “I’m your will. I’m your daughter.” He melts and says, “Only the greatest hero can wake you, so still putting you to sleep, darling.” So, she wants to keep this chaste, perfect relationship, but Siegfried keeps pressing, “Be mine, be mine, be mine,” and finally she does and they march off into the light. CBC: The other graphic depictions… how did the Gil Kane and Roy Thomas’ Ring compare to yours? P. Craig: Oh, man, when I heard they were going to do that… You talk about… [searching] I’m not sure what the word is, “Who in the world is going to do The Ring of the Nibelung?” I had decided in 1973 that I was going to do it. CBC: Did Roy know you were going to do it? P. Craig: Yes, he did. We had long conversations in that back room at Marvel. He had been attending performances of The Ring at the Met. We got going about it… how I was going to adapt it one day and then he did it with Gil Kane.

So I wouldn’t even look at it, like I couldn’t look at any of the promos for the animated version of Coraline because I was doing the graphic novel at the same time. Same with American Gods. I can’t see anybody else’s version, because what if we come to the same conclusion about a storytelling problem because that’s the obvious conclusion, but I couldn’t do it because it would feel like copying, so I never looked at it. Someone told me said, “You can look at it; it’s not going to look anything like yours.” Once I did my layouts for The Ring, which took me about six or eight months to come up with thumbnail layouts — once I finished a chapter or act, I’d go look at Gil Kane’s to see how they handled it. I knew my vision, how I was going to handle it, was solid and wasn’t going to change. If it overlapped and if they did the same sort of thing — okay. It was really interesting to look. They took 200 pages to do it and I took 400. Mine was much more complex. CBC: Did they do a good job? P. Craig: I didn’t think particularly. CBC: Okay. You had inked Gil… . P. Craig: Yes. I inked his Jungle Book stories. That was fun and I liked doing it. He said he liked my inks. He said that they were sensitive. CBC: What was the story behind those stories? It started out as something else for Marvel… P. Craig: Fanfare. That’s where it ended up. They did it around 1970 or 1971, I think. They were going to adapt the Jungle Book stories. They did the first two issues or issue-and-a-half — these eight pages stories, and they were going to expand it like a Jungle Book series, but it got shelved. But those four, seven- or eight-page, stories just sat in a drawer for years. Then, when they started Marvel Fanfare, Al Milgrom said, “We could use these for Fanfare.” And that’s when they called me. CBC: It was going to be a title called Wolf Boy, right? P. Craig: Was that it? Yeah, I think so. CBC: You got a chance to ink them then. P. Craig: Yes, in the mid- or early ’80s. CBC: It was a lovely combination, Craig. P. Craig: I always preferred Gil Kane’s inks to anyone else. [Jon nods in agreement] I know it’s a minority opinion and I’m glad to see you do too. CBC: And Gil would agree! P. Craig: That’s right. With the caveat, I prefer his inks when he was really trying. I saw later inks that were kind of heavy-handed and clumsy, but in the ’60s… CBC: On his Tales to Astonish “Hulk” stories… P. Craig: Right! And on the T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents, Undersea Agent and this delicate rendering… I just love the line he had and I think he was using a pen then, and, in His Name Is… Savage, he was obviously really giving it his best effort by taking the time. So that’s how I like to approach if I’m inking someone: how do they ink themselves, or how do they ink if they’re really taking the time? It works best if you have a linear style with a linear artist. For example, Neal Adams and Joe Kubert are painterly artists. They use the brush and lots of cross-hatching to make lights and darks and shadows. Linear and painting art… To make it simple: With linear art, you can take some scissors and cut it out and you have a little vase. With painterly art, the vase might merge into the shadows. Like Frazetta: there’s no edge to the back, and you can’t just remove it from the painting. Artists like Kirby are linear, and so is Gil Kane. Most comic artists are linear until Neal Adams came along with that modern advertising art, heavily black-lined and painterly. A lot of artists inking Gil Kane decided they’re going to “fix” him — they added all the crosshatching to make him look like a real artist. It’s impressive in its way, but it hides the integrity of who he is as an artist. I want that to come through. I’m not trying to ink just like him, but I’m a linear artist — I don’t do those heavy inks and such. I brought my own style to it in a sense, but I

Conan TM & © Conan Properties International LLC. Killraven, Doctor Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

wasn’t trying to fix it, just trying to bring out what was inherent in his work. CBC: Sounds like a philosophical approach. P. Craig: Ethical or aesthetic, just trying to honor the needs of the artist and who they intrinsically are. When I was inking Steve Ditko, on six issues of Rom, some people said that sounded like a strange combination, but I never thought so. With Ditko, every line has a purpose. It’s starting here and that’s its destination and it’s like a curve or sphere or block. There’s not a lot of wandering around and I draw very much the same way. That line has a destination. It was sort of a fit. His layouts were very solid — it was worked out that the cubes and spheres and you were expected to embellish it. If it’s layouts, as opposed to pencils, you are supposed to bring more to it, add the blacks. I tried to be faithful to him and brought a lot to it but thought it was compatible to the way he worked. I know he liked it — he told Mike Carlin, the editor, that he thought it was good. There was one panel — I don’t know what he was doing — it was a close up of a face, a third of a page panel of a woman’s face, sort of startled — and it was just like a pie. It was an oval and hardly anything there. It would’ve been a Craig Russell face if I did anything with it. I looked through a ton of Ditko stuff that I had and finally found a Warren magazine, with one of his stories, that was a close-up of a woman’s face looking startled. I traced that off and put it on a light box, projected and enlarged it onto the page, traced that off and had a Ditko face and that’s what I inked — to keep it looking “Ditko.” I swiped Ditko for Ditko. [chuckles] CBC: Certainly kindred with your style in a certain way is Barry Windsor-Smith, certainly content-wise. P. Craig: For subject matter and, well, my first year in comics, I was heavily influenced by him. That big Conan piece later reprinted in Savage Tales was right out of “Red Nails.” He was certainly a big influence. CBC: Barry went from linear to painterly. P. Craig: Yes, he did. Very much loosens up and you can see the wandering, sensitive pen-work. CBC: It was inspirational?

P. Craig: Any good work is inspirational to me. Early on, I was influenced by Barry, to the point where people expected it. Those first few years, you’re always looking at other artists. Someone looked at the Killraven face and said, “Obviously, you got that from Barry Windsor-Smith.” I said, “Actually, that’s a Joe Kubert face!” [laughter] CBC: When did comics as a profession come into being? P. Craig: As a possibility? CBC: Right. P. Craig: When my dad met Dan Adkins. I was in college. CBC: Which one? P. Craig: University of Cincinnati, studying art. CBC: Did you go home on weekends? P. Craig: No, it was four or five hours away — clear on the opposite side of the state. CBC: You went home on holidays? P. Craig: Yeah. I was a sophomore and my dad still had his store. He saw an article in the East Liverpool Review about a Marvel artist living outside East Liverpool, named Dan Adkins. He was right across the river in West Virginia. He had moved back from New York City. My dad had wanted a piece of art for advertising, so he went out to meet him and told him about this kid of his studying art in Cincinnati who had 8,000 comics in the attic. Dan told him to have me come out and meet him. So I did. I showed him my work. He said if I worked with him for six months, he could get me into Marvel Comics because he wanted to start a studio in Ohio that would produce work that he would supervise, lay it out, ink it, and he’d send it to Marvel. I didn’t take him up on it until my junior year. I went back to school and I did some stuff for him over the summer — he wanted me to ghost a story he was doing for Warren, so I drew it and it wasn’t good enough and he didn’t use it. Then I went back for the fall semester in my junior year and did fall and winter semester and that’s when I took a leave of absence, moved back home, and worked with Dan. He would do layouts for me and I’d pencil and he’d ink. That were the

Above: PCR inked Sandy Plunkett’s pencils for this cover of Conan the Barbarian #251 [Dec. 1991]. Inset left: Pin-up of the Cimmerian as drawn by PCR under the intoxicating influence of Barry Windsor-Smith. This was featured as the inside front and back cover of Savage Tales #4 [May 1974]. Below: In 2005, PCR wrote and drew the three-issue mini-series, Conan and the Jewels of Gwahlur. This is the cover art for the collection.

The Opuses of P. Craig Russell 1973–2019

By the latter 1970s, PCR began to number selected works as his “opuses,” jobs he deemed good enough to include on the listing of his best.

1973

1974–76

1973–76

1977

1976–77

The Chimera

Killraven

Doctor Strange Annual #1

Dance on a Razor’s Edge

Parsifal

10-Plate Portfolio

Amazing Adventures #27–37, 39 War of the Worlds series

“And There Will Be Worlds Anew”

Night Music #2

Parsifal one-shot

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

1978

1979

1978

1979–80

The Avatar and the Chimera

Siegfried and the Dragon

La Somnanbula

Epic Illustrated #2

Night Music #2

Breakdown on the Starship Remembrance

Elric: The Dreaming City

Imagine #2 & 3

Marvel Graphic Novel #2

Night Music #1 56

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Elric TM & © Michael Moorcock.

first couple stories I did. CBC: Was Val Mayerik there? P. Craig: I was there for a few months and then Val showed up. He was from Warren or Youngstown, and so was Paul Gulacy. CBC: Gulacy came at the same time? P. Craig: He came after. I did six months there and decided to go back to school. Right when I left, that’s when Gulacy showed up. For a while it was Dan, Val, and I working in a studio about the size of this room — eight by 12 feet or something — with three drawing boards, in this tiny house he lived in and we worked late at night. We were all night owls because Dan was. CBC: Was Dan a smoker? P. Craig: Yeah, I think he was. So was I. Everyone did it and you didn’t notice it because it was everywhere. CBC: Did you actually see penciled Conan the Barbarian pages by Barry Windsor-Smith? P. Craig: Oh my god, yes! I saw original art by Gil Kane, Barry Windsor-Smith… those were the big ones because Dan was inking Conan and Captain Marvel for Gil Kane, or maybe Warlock. CBC: Dan did ink Warlock, too.

P. Craig: That’s the first original artwork I ever saw and it was a revelation to see, especially the Windsor-Smith stuff because he’d write all these notes on the margins and on the back explaining body language, “Conan’s elbows are pulled back because he wants to punch this king and he can’t.” That kind of thought was an education and then watching Dan’s inks on top of it, which were so meticulous. Barry asked for Dan as an inker. But Dan got so slow and he was entering a long depression and missing deadlines all over the place. CBC: What were the roots of the depression? P. Craig: I have no idea. I asked him once, “Dan you sound like you’re depressed.” “Nah, nah, I’m not depressed! That’s not it!” CBC: [Chuckles] That’s his voice! P. Craig: Twenty-five years later, we’re talking on the phone, “I found out what my problem was: I was depressed. That’s what it was.” CBC: [Chuckles] Did he drink? P. Craig: No. CBC: Not like Wally did. P. Craig: But he was a fabulist, so you never knew if the stories he was telling were true or not, and I caught him in some whoppers, so I think the stories about Wally drinking were true, but it’s hard to tell. CBC: There’s a Conan story that went through where obviously something wrong happened, I think with Val Mayerik inks — “The Monster and the Monolith,” maybe? — Were they really loose pencils…? P. Craig: Oh that! Oh my god! They were layouts. CBC: Just rough layouts by Barry? P. Craig: Yes. He penciled the first two pages and panels and we’d finish it. Dan was to ink the whole thing, so he would have this patina of Dan on top. Val did figures, I did all the backgrounds — trees, decorations on the wall, the throne, the two towers, the straw. Dan was to ink it and couldn’t get it together to finish the inking. So we were all… CBC: He was depressed? P. Craig: Yes, this was that six-month era. Then he gooned us into inking and neither of us had the style to do it. I was inking some of the backgrounds. There was also a kid there, I think he was Mark Kersey or something. He

Elric TM & © Michael Moorcock. Killraven TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

was doing some of the inking. He left after a little while — too depressing and living at the Y in Liverpool. It was a mess and so late, it looked like it was colored overnight — everything was yellow, orange, and blue. CBC: Did you hear from Barry? P. Craig: Through the grapevine, we heard how upset he was by it. It was recolored years later in that Dark Horse series and generally speaking, the color was awful, but the Colossus looked better! CBC: Thank god for “The Song of Red Sonja”! Your first solo job, were you inked by Dan? P. Craig: Yes, he inked my “Ant-Man” in Marvel Feature and my first six-page story, “Moon of Madness, Moon of Fear,” in Chamber of Chills [#1, Nov. 1972] and then a fourpage circus story he inked [“The Price is Flight,” Journey into Mystery #4, Apr. 1973]… no, no, a science fiction story [“Thirst,” Chamber of Chills #2, Jan. 1973] that I penciled and he inked, and then another little short story CBC: Was that on Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction? P. Craig: No, no, Chamber of Chills and might have been a mystery. Then, I did “Ant-Man.” The first issue, he inked that, and then [Frank] Chiaramonte and [Mike] Esposito, I’m not sure who all. That was my first full-length comic, that “Ant-Man.” After that, Dan wasn’t laying out anything. I was on my own. CBC: How did you feel about your work at the time? P. Craig: Oh, not good. You would think you’d be all excited about your first book, but I was self-critical and knew I was barely hanging on, just enough to be presentable in a sense that they would actually publish it. It wasn’t until I got my own subject matter and self-directed. I was living back in Cincinnati and started the Doctor Strange Annual. That was all on my own. CBC: Was that 1975? P. Craig: I started it in 1973. I did 20 pages in pencil and went to the New York Con, up to Marvel, and Roy saw it and said, “We can use this.” They paid me $20 dollars a page and put it in a drawer. I was so naïve and unaware of the politics! Someone has a regular gig on the book — Steve Englehart, they’re going to resent someone coming in with a story and saying, “Hey, I did a Doctor Strange book!” and Frank Brunner was the artist on that. So, I knew it was just sitting there for a couple of years. I think… [to himself] was I living in New York…? I forget. The first issue of Doctor Strange came out and I opened it on the stands, and it had my splash page, and I thought, “Hey, they used my story!” Then I started going through it and, no, it wasn’t my story, but I recognized one panel on a page from my story. So, I went in, and said, “Roy they’re just like cannibalizing this.

Compare this with the original art.” He said, “It does look similar.” He had to tell them to stop doing it. They were just slicing up the story. That one page, the one with the single panel, disappeared completely until a few years ago. There’s a collector in Florida that has it, un-inked in the original state. I’ve tried to get in touch with him, I just want a scan of it. After all these years — possession is nine-tenths of the law — you can have it, but I would like a good scan. I have a photo off the computer screen off a collectors’ site where it was posted. The Annual in 1976, where we decided to do it, I had to do a new splash page and a new library image where that missing panel was. It was quite an epic. I made a real leap in quality when I sat down by myself and camp up with a story that worked to my own strengths — all that art nouveau and magic spells and stuff, and not a six-inch man running through the grass with all the giant pop cans and matchbooks. When you can play to your own strengths, that really helps. CBC: What happened after the 20 pages were filed? P. Craig: I had finished “Killraven,” and actually the book was cancelled. About the same time, they decided they wanted a Doctor Strange Annual. CBC: Right, right. You went on to “War of the Worlds”? P. Craig: Marv was the writer and editor. He said, “Let’s use these 20 pages and we’ll do another 15,” I think it was to round out the story. I had projected as three 20-page issues ending in a mad wedding. That never happened. We got together and came out with the story that rounded it out, about a 35-page book. So, I inked those 20 pages from three years previous and did the new 15, inked the whole thing, and colored it. CBC: You were obviously at a different stage of your artistry from those previous years. You went through some leaps and bounds in ability, one of the most astonishing changes that took place in in mainstream comics. P. Craig: Yes. It helped in working with Don McGregor in that period. Although science fiction is not what we think of as modern science fiction, because “Killraven” was set in the dystopian world of destruction, which was also fun to draw. I didn’t have to draw a lot of modern, real-world stuff. CBC: As I recall, that book went through any number of artists for a period of time. It was a mess, really. P. Craig: Herb Trimpe, Gene Colan, well, Howard Chaykin originally… Neal Adams, so yeah, there were a number of different people before Don. Then Don’s first few issues. CBC: How did you get that? P. Craig: They just offered it to me. CBC: Did you know Don? P. Craig: No, not until I started working on it.

This spread: The albino Elric of Melniboné, science fiction/fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock’s tragic sword-&sorcery character, is wielder of Stormbringer, the sword that gives Elric strength so long as it is fed a diet of souls. PCR has been associated with the “doomed hero” since 1980, when his version appeared in Epic Illustrated, which was collected as the second Marvel Graphic Novel, in 1982. Detail of the cover of same is seen at inset left. Previous page are full pages from “The Dreaming City” by PCR and cover of Elric #1 [Apr. 1983], the latter with PCR layouts and inks over Michael T. Gilbert pencils. Below is PCR illo of the numbered edition of Elric of Melnibone: The Weird of the White Wolf [1991].

1981

1982

1982–83

1982–84

Isolation and Illusion

Elric: While the Gods Laugh

Elric: Elric of Melniboné

Epic Illustrated #14

Killraven: Last Dreams Broken

King of the Castle

Epic Illustrated #9

National Lampoon various mid-1983 issues

Elric #1–6

Marvel Graphic Novel #7 COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

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.

1984

1971–84

1984

1984–85

1985

The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow

The Insomniac

Unto this World Night Music #1

Jungle Book: The King’s Ankus

Eine Heldentraum

Night Music #2

Night Music #1 58

Epic Illustrated #33

Night Music #3 #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Killraven TM & © Marvel Characters Inc.

CBC: Where were you living? P. Craig: Nowhere! I’d been out beyond Flatbush with Duffy Vohland, where you had to a bus to get to the subway, and then I moved into a sublet from Alan Kupperberg in Brooklyn, then into Manhattan Spanish Harlem. I remember drawing part of it in a loft down in SoHo, in a loft of a guy who taught at Cincinnati. I was living out of a suitcase for a while until I found an apartment. I was drawing “Morbius, the Living Vampire.” When you’re starting, you do whatever they tell you. They said, “Do you want to do ‘War of

the Worlds’? Here it is if you want it.” “Well, yeah.” That’s when I met Don and we just clicked. I wanted to work with someone who really wanted to do something and none of the writers… I just wasn’t getting that feeling from it. It was just sort of journeyman work. There wasn’t this personal connection. With Don, there was just a connection. It wasn’t our personalities — I was very quiet, shy almost. CBC: I remember you from the conventions being shy. P. Craig: Which ones? CBC: Phil Seuling’s New York Comic Art Conventions. P. Craig: So Don was really running interference. CBC: He was not shy! P. Craig: No, he was not. Any problems we had always had to do with the subject matter and the writing, that’s where all the fighting took place — not the art. CBC: Describe the fights. P. Craig: I don’t recall. From Don describing it to them saying, “You can’t do that,” for different things. He’d be the one to ask. CBC: Oh, you mean the fights with editorial. Not with you two, but the bullpen? P. Craig: Oh, no! With us it was smooth sailing. No problem at all. CBC: Did you have affection for him? P. Craig: Oh, sure. Yeah! Don was a great friend and the energy of this man… we really clicked with yin/yang sort of way. At that early stage, yes, you need criticism, but you also need affirmation. I would bring in stuff and he’d start bouncing up and down in his chair at an expression I did, “This is just great! This is just Wow! Wow!” That makes you want to do better next time, “Wait until you see what I do next!” He would point to an expression on Old Skull’s face and just be gleeful. It was so rewarding. CBC: How did he handle if he needed something changed? Was he gentle about that? P. Craig: I don’t think he ever asked for any changes. CBC: Did you ever work with Archie Goodwin at all? P. Craig: Yes, but, not in a creative way. He was editor at Epic, so there was that interaction there. Actually, the one page in the “Death in the Family” where the rocks slide and I told you we worked Marvel style — he gave me a synopsis, not the final script — he wrote the final script after I drew the pages, he looked at this and it was a multi-panel page of ten or twelve panels, going in a rhythm from very small panels to larger, to larger as this giant rock slides on the Grok and the Indian, and ends with a third of a page of pile of rocks with smoke and dust. He looked at that and said, “It doesn’t need any words,” and Don McGregor left a silent page. CBC: For those of you at home: Don McGregor is known to be verbose and somewhat liberal with his words! P. Craig: I labored on that page and the storytelling. Don and I went to a lot of movies together. I didn’t hang out with a lot of them like a lot of them do on a regular basis. I had a whole circle of friends from Julliard School of Music. Everyone I lived with were musicians and a lot of avant-garde, modern classical musicians. That was sort of my social circle. Though I did interact with a few, like John David

Killraven TM & © Marvel Characters Inc. Elric TM & © Michael Moorcock. Robin TM & © DC Comics.

Warner, David Anthony Kraft, and Don McGregor, and I would go to movies together and hang out. CBC: Did you know Don was a reader? That he liked his crime books? P. Craig: Right! Ed McBain’s 87 th Precinct. CBC: What about you? Were you a reader? P. Craig: I was a reader, but not of the same things. CBC: What were you reading? P. Craig: I went through my Japanese phase, Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, Ishikawa. I get some of the writers confused with the directors. [chuckles] I was into everything Japanese. There were a lot of Japanese-art influences in “War of the Worlds” in my backgrounds and stuff. CBC: Really? Where did that come from? P. Craig: I loved looking at the Japanese color woodblocks from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. CBC: Where did you get exposed to that? P. Craig: Maybe in my art history classes, or just going to bookstores and happening across them. I have a lot of books here. I learned about color and pattern. It’s very graphic with so much of that art can be applied to comic books — the woodblock prints, because they’re simple and linear and a lot of shorthand for producing effects — almost like Alex Toth. The design… there is very dynamic and color. That was a big influence. CBC: Have you ever done your own version of that? P. Craig: I did The Dream Hunters. You’ll see a lot of that influence in the design and costumes, but that is where the story was set. Neil Gaiman’s Dream Hunters was a supposed medieval Japanese fairy tale, so that’s where it was set. I had to get books and already had a number of books with authentic costumes and utensils and all that. One of those rare times you actually have to be authentic. When you’re doing Elric of Melniboné or Conan, it’s a mythical world of all these different cultures, so you can pull from anything and mash them together. No one’s going to say, “There are three buttons, not two, on that Civil War sleeve,” you know, they can’t call you on that. CBC: Except Harvey Kurtzman. P. Craig: Right. But doing a Japanese thing, yes, I had to have some authenticity to it. CBC: Did you go to museums when you were in New York? P. Craig: Oh, yeah. I’d go to the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Art Museum… the one in the northern part near the Cloisters. There was one on Columbus Circle that’s been torn down… Yes. I’d go to shows at Carnegie Hall Cinema and the Bleeker Street Cinema — they’d have a different double feature every day, so I’d mark that on my calendar. CBC: It must have been a joy to be in New York City. P. Craig: Yes! It was. There was an Antonioni Festival, and I remember coming back and doing two pages in a “Death in the Family” and they were all widescreen — actually four pages like that and it’s all from Antonioni. I think it was L’Avventura. CBC: Far out. Music: when was the first time you saw an orchestra live? P. Craig: My parents took me, maybe I was in Pittsburgh,

when I was in the eighth grade. They’ve torn this down, but it was called the Syria Mosque. It was this ornate, sort of palace theater kind of thing and Van Cliburn was playing. I’d been taking piano lessons for a year to two and we went to the Syria Mosque to hear Van Cliburn, so I would have heard the Pittsburgh Symphony there. I forget what he was playing, whether it was the Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff piano concertos. Those were his big things. That was when Van Cliburn was in the Soviet Union. This tall Texan of like 21 years old, won the International Tchaikovsky Competition

This spread: PCR’s skills expanded in leaps and bounds compared to the original series when he and writer Don McGregor were given the chance to produce a sequel to their memorable “War of the World” feature in mid-1970s issues of Amazing Adventures. Killraven was published by Marvel in ’83.

1985

1986

1986–92

1987

Pelléas & Mélisande

Elric: The Dreaming City

Salomé

Batman: Robin 3000

Jungle Book: Red Dog

Night Music #4–5

(second version) Elric: Weird of the White Wolf #2

Night Music #6

Robin 3000 #1–2

Night Music #7

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

and German as long as the English is next to it, so I can follow the story. It’s just wonderful stories with great music. A lot of it is dense and complex and not always revealed to you on the first pass through. They talk about those dreaded quarter hours of Wagner, which can just be explaining something, which can be deadly the first time you hear it, because there’s nothing you can hang your ear on until you hear it again and it finally sinks in. It’s like Shakespeare until you really learn the language and it comes to life. CBC: What’s your favorite opera? P. Craig: Oh, that’s like asking, “Who’s your favorite child?” I would defer to The Ring of the Nibelung because it’s four operas! CBC: What’s the most touching one. What brings you to tears? P. Craig: Oh, the “most touching”… oh my gosh. I’d have to think about it. CBC: There are some sad stories in opera. P. Craig: Sort of the cliché is they are all sad and tragic. There are opera buffa, Italian operas that are almost slapstick. I just pulled one out from my library: Il segreto di Susanna, by Wolf-Ferrari, sort of an opera buffa; just one vinyl record. It is about an upper-class Italian woman hiding things and her husband thinks she’s having an affair. He bursts in on her in the end and she’s smoking a cigarette. That’s what she’s been hiding because she thinks he won’t approve. That’s not it at all and they light up together. A swirl of smoke at the end and they head into the bedroom — happy ending. CBC: Isn’t Carmen an opera? P. Craig: Yes, one of the first ones I would listen to. That is a very accessible one with one gorgeous melody after another and of course the “Toreador Song” — even if they don’t know they’ve heard it — from cartoons or whatever. Carmen and Aida, all the Wagner stuff. Tons and tons of things. I don’t know how many I know. CBC: Wagner can be problematic in a time of politically correctness. P. Craig: Oh my god, Jon, he was a vicious anti-Semite! Who had no problem working with Jewish people if they could play an instrument or sing, because they were useful to him. He wasn’t stupid that way. A lot of musicians worked for him because they believed in the music. But he was horrible. CBC: Is it problematic for you? P. Craig: No.

1988

1989

1989–90

1994

1992

30 The Golden Apples of the Sun

Ariane and Bluebeard

Human Remains

The Magic Flute

From Beyond

Night Music #8

Tapping the Vein #1

Night Music #9–11

Heavy Metal Vol. 18, #2

Ray Bradbury Chronicles #1 60

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

in Moscow and they gave him a ticker tape parade in New York City! This is the height of the Cold War. We heard later the judges went to Khrushchev and said, “Is this okay to give him the grand prize?” You gotta be careful in the Soviet Union in the ’50s. And he said, “Well, is he the best?” They said, “Yes.” “Well, give it to him.” So, he was a superstar. Can you imagine a classical pianist being given a ticker tape parade in this day and age? But they did, then. That would’ve been the first. CBC: What was it like? P. Craig: I just remember being there. I probably remember more of what the theater looked like. CBC: Was it awesome? P. Craig: Oh, yeah! I’d only seen the inside of a church in Wellsville; I’d never been any place remotely like that. The Syria Mosque was sort of Moorish architecture like a lot of movie theaters of the ’20s were. That’s what it was. I heard a lot of orchestras in Cincinnati. I spent a lot of time at the CCM, the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, in the practice rooms, playing the piano and going to student recitals almost every night, and then I would go to the Cincinnati Symphony sometimes. I don’t remember the first one I went to in New York City — probably the Metropolitan Opera. CBC: Was that the first time you went to the opera? P. Craig: I had been to student operas in Cincinnati. CBC: “Student operas”? P. Craig: Well, yeah. Anyone who has a music conservatory has an opera and the students are singing in it and the student orchestra is playing in it. CBC: Take the public attitude toward opera, say I’m somebody who doesn’t like opera, why is opera good? P. Craig: There’s nothing wrong with not liking it if it’s not your cup of tea. The irony is once upon a time, it was populist music and serious musicians looked down their nose at it; it was vulgar. These potboiler stories; it was for the common people in the 19th century who would flock to that like going to the movies today. If you were an esthete, you liked the symphony and if you were a real aesthete, you liked chamber music — string quartets, very intimate and cerebral. The opera, with blood and thunder, was common and vulgar. It evolved into the nose in the air, the highest culture, which is topsy-turvy. I love the music, I love the high drama of it, and learned to follow the libretto listening at home. I can read the Italian

Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: Do you get any heat for it? P. Craig: No, I never have, but I don’t know how many people in comics know anything about Wagner. I always try to separate the artist from the art. Once you go down that trail, I don’t see any difference between right and left and evangelical in that — they’re judging them from the point of view of ideology or morals. Once you start throwing that out — who is beyond sin? You’re going to trip yourself up and say something sooner or later and there goes Gauguin, who abandoned his family in a time where a wife couldn’t go get a job, to go to the South Seas islands. Caravaggio murdered someone! He was a murderer! Beethoven was a piece of work who trashed every place he ever lived… CBC: Picasso… [P. Craig nods] Here you are in the center of a college town, the center of political correctness. What is its effect on art? Do you sense it? P. Craig: It doesn’t impact me because I’m not teaching at the university. I don’t know how it would affect my critique of their work. If I was doing a history of comics… dealing with Robert Crumb. Here’s the irony and you must be aware if you’re following this. He is certainly persona non grata in certain PC quarters now. The irony is when he started he was up before the Supreme Court on obscenity charges and you thought of it as those stuffy, evangelical Christian right-wingers, which was true. They just thought he was an anathema — this horrible, horrible man. Now, without changing a bit, it’s the left coming after him — he’s a horrible, horrible man and he hasn’t changed one bit. He’s still the same guy. I heard of people trying to defend him and being excoriated for that and groveling through their apology of defending him. Now it’s easy to say, “Well, I wouldn’t do that,” unless you’re at the inquisition. I would hope I’d have the spine to say that this is one of the greatest guys in comics, who has ever

worked in this form and should never be exiled. Mostly for a lot of it, he’s excoriating himself and it’s sarcasm. I think a lot of people in safe space have no sense of art or understanding of sarcasm. CBC: They’re taking the work straight at face value. It’s an interesting world. For instance, [mentions graphic novelist name]… P. Craig: That’s who I was talking about. CBC: But it makes me wonder how I would react straight to the face of people who were hurt. It’s problematic for me. His response is problematic for me. “Oh, this person just folded.” But if I’m in that situation, I’m seeing the hurt in someone’s eyes, looking back at me, “This is hurtful to me.” As a sensitive human being, am I’m going to respond

This spread: PCR has collaborated with celebrated author Neil Gaiman frequently since they first paired up for Sandman #50 [June 1993], for “Ramadan,” inspired by the Arabian Nights fables. Above is a illustration based on that issue. On the previous page is a panel from that issue, along with Dave McKean’s cover, as well as a postcard from 1993 featuring the King of All Night’s Dreaming.

1990

1991

1992

The Gift of the Magi

A Voyage to the Moon

Within Our Reach

A1 #1

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Selfish Giant

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Star Child

Dark Horse Presents #67

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 1

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

Batman: Hothouse Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #42–43 61

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

the same way? Am I going to throw Robert under the bus? P. Craig: “I don’t feel safe with this speaker on campus.” Grow the f*ck up. How coddled have you been all your life from your feelings being hurt and having to deal with different opinions that you feel unsafe. The hurt is genuine, but I think it’s mentally

1992

1993

1994

1996

The Sandman: Ramadan

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Young King

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Remarkable Rocket

X: Devils

Jungle Book: Spring Running

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 2

The Sandman #50

Comics’ Greatest World: X #6 “Riders of the Storm”

ComicsLit Magazine #6–8

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Jungle Book adaptation, Wolf Boy TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

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

unstable. If you’re hurt that badly, you shouldn’t leave the house. Get help. Do something. It comes from the world being ruled by the most sensitive. Their feelings are this club being wielded. That’s the final argument: I hurt. CBC: I’m going to club you to death. [laughter] Maybe that’s right. It’s like having a fascist attitude about being sensitive. P. Craig: The whole purpose of the university is supposed to expose you to a plethora of ideas and some of them are quite unpleasant and in doing so, you learn, maybe, how to argue intelligently against those arguments. CBC: How to cope with your feelings about them. P. Craig: And not just be shielded. They are demanding to be shielded from their feelings being hurt. CBC: It is the left and the right. The “how dare you” from the left and the right. “How dare you have an opinion like that!” “How dare you be for abortion!” All click-bait. P. Craig: The R. Crumb turnaround in the last few years is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in our little world: that this character could become an anathema to a whole world of young cartoonists. It’s sad to see and it hurts me. CBC: The attention span is 15 minutes, though. P. Craig: That’s one theory: say nothing or do not apologize and they’ll go look for someone else. Don’t apologize if you don’t mean it. You say you see the hurt in their eyes and you don’t want to hurt people, but I’m getting cynical about the hurt. I really am. CBC: Hmm. You can ride it out in this culture of shame. I have not been a victim of the shame machine. It’s come really close and probably will hit me. P. Craig: You may have said something or written something way in the past. They might have to go very far back. CBC: You are who you were 25 years ago…? That’s one thing I’ve learned in my life is that a person can change. I guess it’s maturity. P. Craig: One would think. CBC: I noticed on the original art downstairs you use terminology on the art margins: “opus” with a number. Is that from opera? What is that vernacular? P. Craig: Opus is a musical term. It’s just Italian for “work.” That’s where the word opera comes from. A lot of composers, especially from the 18th, 19th century, each new piece would have an opus number… CBC: To be chronological? P. Craig: To be chronological… as it went on, maybe as it was published. It might be in a drawer for a couple of years and the publisher would put a number on it when it was published. It doesn’t always reflect the year it was done, but generally it does. So I was aware of opus numbers and the comic collector in me… it really appeals to the collector. I would do lists; I had a chart. Beethoven did 135 opus numbers. I had a chart from one to 135 and would mark off in yellow if I had a recording of that. I think I have 90 of the 135 opus numbers, those recordings of that music. Since I jump all over the place from company to company as opposed to Walt Simonson, John Byrne, or Frank Miller, who would do 30 or 45 issues of the same thing, I decided in case, if anyone likes my work, if I put these numbers on

Illustration © P. Craig Russell. Doctor Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

them, they’ll know there’s something they haven’t seen that’s out there. That’s just kind of the thing. CBC: That’s a great idea! Almost nobody else does it. P. Craig: Not in this field. CBC: It might have been the team of Doug Moench, Kelley Jones, and John Beatty — they did it for their Batman stuff. That’s the only other time I’ve seen that, I believe. That’s great for us collectors. You have a running list? P. Craig: Yes, I do. Wayne has it up online. We can ask him at dinner tonight. I’ve got a list somewhere. I’m working on Opus 80 now with the Norse Mythology book. I’ve hoped to make it to 100. I don’t know if I will or not. When I started, projects were shorter — short stories, maybe a 30-page story. Now they’re 150 pages. My songs are two big pages. I don’t know if I’ll make it to 100 or not. CBC: What are what you consider your masterpieces? P. Craig: If I would take 10 or 12 out of 80. Obviously Sandman #50. That was a real perfect storm of an event. CBC: Was that the first time you worked with Neil Gaiman? P. Craig: Yes. That was because the year before, I worked on The Thief of Bagdad that he saw and that’s why he asked for me for the “Arabian Nights” Sandman. CBC: Without the response to it and without the rock star Neil Gaiman being a part of it, would you still say it’s one of your best? P. Craig: Absolutely. It’s the best original script I’ve ever been given. It’s so beautifully written and with those… not fake endings, but faux endings — the book ends, and then there’s another ending and then another ending. It reminds me of the Fritz Lang Scarlet Street, which keeps ending and each one is bleaker than the one before. I was trying a more animated cartoony style rather than pure realism and that fit in to that just great. It worked, like I say, to my strengths, all that Arabian architecture and the fire and water and all the elements and the starscapes, it was just my stuff and the right time in my career. We got Lovern Kindzierski to color it, which was a fight of epic proportions. If no one else had ever seen it or heard of him and he never wrote another thing, because it is on its own, it doesn’t matter that it was the biggest Sandman seller — it is what it is. That’s on the list. And so is The Ring of the Nibelung, Salomé, Isolation and Illusion (that 14-page pencil story I did), and I have a fondness for Clive Barker’s “Human Remains” and Neil’s Murder Mysteries, where I had to take these short stories and find the symbolism and all the visual solutions to things. Take it apart and put it together again. There’s a lot in those stories of what I call parallel narrative. I do some talks called “Finding the Pictures” — I did one down at [the Billy Ireland Cartoon and Library and Museum event] Crossroads, in Columbus, a few weeks ago, these pictures that are not in the book or the story at all. People don’t realize that when they’re looking at them, but you have to find something to visualize this or find on the page, or why not just read the book? Like in the Murder Mysteries — in the introduction to that, this man is talking about who he was then and who he was now, and nothing is happening, he’s just saying here’s what my life is like. In Murder Mysteries, in the previous life he murdered a wom-

an and her daughter, a little girl. Now he’s a grown man with a family and a little girl. That memory has been wiped out; it’s been taken from him. He doesn’t know what he did, but he knows there’s something missing. He’s looking out the window and I show kids on the swing set, a little girl on the swing — that’s not in the story that he looks out the window and sees the little girl on the swing in the last panel. In that image, way in the distance, there’s the house, which is the back of my house, up there in the window is the man and in the foreground is the swing set, lots of trees and gardens, and in the far distance is a hill and a little church and a graveyard. In the last panel, you see the little girl, her face with her hair blowing and much closer, the graveyard. You’re making this image of Death and the Maiden with the image of this little girl and the graves. That’s a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen later in the story. None of that is in the original prose, so that’s what you bring to the story. CBC: When do you get inspiration? By taking long walks? P. Craig: I don’t really know the process; it just comes from doing it over and over. Sometimes, in the course of things, it comes at the last minute, even if I’ve laid it all out! The worst is when it comes to you after it’s been published. At the end of Murder Mysteries, our protagonist is walking down the street and I have a three-panel of just sort of him at a diagonal of him walking and we’re looking down on

This spread: PCR has been adapting Jungle Book stories since inking Gil Kane’s “Wolf Boy” stories, in Marvel Fanfare, in 1983. Above is Mowgli from 2004. Below is PCR pin-up.

1993-95

1996

1997

Elric: Stormbringer

One Life — Furnished in Early Moorcock

Dr. Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen?

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Birthday of the Infanta

Elric — One Life #0 one-shot

One-shot

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 3

Elric: Stormbringer #1–7

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

The Clowns The Clowns (I Pagliacci) one-shot 63

1999

2000-01

2002

2004

2002

Star Wars: Episode 1 – Queen Amidala

The Ring of the Nibelung

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayers — Presumption

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Devoted Friend

In Flanders Field

One-shot 64

The Ring of the Nibelung Vols. 1–4

9/11 #1

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 4 #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Batman, Poison Ivy TM & © DC Comics. Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC. Buffy the Vampire Slayer TM & © 20th Century Fox Film Corporation,

This spread: A particularly fine Batman story drawn by PCR was Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #42–43’s “Hothouse” [Feb./Mar. 1993], featuring temptress Poison Ivy. The two-parter was written by the oft Howard Chaykin associate, John Francis Moore.

him. He has an internal dialogue of love and death and is there a connection and I was thinking of [story character] Tink, this girl he has known, and I just had those three, and realized in the middle when he was talking about love and death from the murder scene and the whole thing takes place in the Christmas season in L.A., which is the one direction Neil gave me, “Remember this is L.A. and it’s hot and it’s Christmas. It’s the City of Angels.” After this murder, which we never see, there’s a tin angel from this tiny Christmas tree that’s just knocked over on its side and the lights are hanging down from it and it morphs into the lights of Los Angeles. I thought of that and suddenly I took that picture out of him walking and put that picture of that tin angel on its side, sort of like a dead angel, which also rhymes with the first murder in heaven and a dead real-life angel lying on its side. There’re all these visual rhymes that go through. When the old man, who’s a fallen angel, offers the protagonist a quarter for a cigarette, I’ve drawn the quarter with “Liberty” on it… Jefferson and Liberty, and as he leaves at the end — his plane has left, I had a shot in the air of this tiny plane and all the electrical wires like you see from stop lights, and a street sign — and it occurred to me, “He’s escaping all this, he’s going back to England, what’s the street sign? ‘Liberty.’” That’s what that angel, in giving him that quarter, was offering him — freedom from this

horrible crime he’s just committed, and it says liberty on it. I didn’t even think about it at the time. I was just drawing the quarter, but as I got to the point of him leaving the city and going home. Liberty, like a temptress just falls into place. So, sometimes it happens when you’re laying it all out and sometimes it comes when you’re living it for three months. CBC: That’s a literary mind being applied to a visual media. Where does somebody… Let’s say we’re talking to a young artist. Is a lesson to “Read, read, read”? P. Craig: Oh, yes. CBC: You’re grasping onto something to symbolize, an illusion, allegory, simile… P. Craig: It’s not so strongly defined anymore, but, at one time at DC, you got a full script: panel, panel, panel. And at Marvel, you got a synopsis. Some artists don’t want the synopsis. “Tell me what you want. I just want to draw the pictures.” There’s the story being told. And there is the telling of the story. The story being told is when the writer gives me his script or when Neil gives me the novel and says, “I’m writing the script; I’m taking it all apart.” That’s the story being told. Now, there’s the telling of the story. Now I’m taking your story and I’m putting it into this other form, a visual form, and not only that, I’m taking your story apart line by line, cutting out 50 or 75 percent of it, stitching it back together, so nothing is missing and finding these visual solutions for internal monologue. So, I’m the one telling the story. It’s your story and I’m telling it. Those are two different twin poles, I guess. CBC: When did that strike you? P. Craig: I think early on, the first time I started… Well, with “Ant-Man,” I suppose. Mike Friedrich would send me these brief outlines… I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms, I suppose, I was learning it. His synopsis would be “pages 12 to 15, they fight.” [chuckles] Of course, Don would have a blow-by-blow description of what was happening! When I started working on Elric: The Dreaming City, I had never read any Michael Moorcock up to that point. That was my first exposure. Roy Thomas was writing it synopsis style, so I knew chapter-by-chapter what was needed, but then I went to the book itself and matched it with his synopses and I was taking conversations from the book, doing it panel-by-panel and writing it in, “I’m taking this from the book.” So it was like training wheels: I was doing an adaptation, but someone else was giving me a synopsis and doing the final script, but I was going to the original source at the same time. That’s how I learned how to do that. CBC: That’s like the mechanics of it, but when is the epiphany? When does it come to you that… Freeing yourself, dropping the avocations of the day to day and everything is in service of the story? Let me explain: I work in advertising and I have to do a logo and come up with five or six ideas. Nine hours out of ten are spent sitting or walking and thinking and thinking and just hopefully finding that epiphany, but being able to let go and the idea will come to me; it’s like this emancipation from expectation. You obviously have this. Is it the strength of the storyteller, pardon me, the per-

son writing the initial story? Does Neil instill a confidence in you, “I’m free to interpret it how I want”? When you were adapting Michael Moorcock, did you feel enslaved by the synopsis by whoever was credited as writer? P. Craig: No. No. If you’re working with a novel, why take someone else’s synopsis who’s telling you what it’s about and following that? It’s going to be watered down. It’s so much richer to follow the original prose. I take the synopsis and it gives me a way to see the mechanics to structure — “go from here to here because this is a good breaking point in the first issue.” I don’t know why anyone else wouldn’t go back to the original author, still following Roy’s structure of that. Maybe from reading Barry Smith’s notes on Conan, when he was working with Roy Thomas, I realized how much of that book and its success was Windsor-Smith. He wasn’t just drawing working from Roy’s synopsis. Like those sails unfurling on “Hawks from the Sea,” in the early morning like purple hyacinths… That was all Barry because he was writing notes there and he saw the poetry in all of this. Other artists wouldn’t think to do something like this. This wasn’t in Roy’s synopsis — I’m fairly certain from Barry’s notes, “Let’s have sails unfurl like purple hyacinths in the morning.” That’s Barry! I realize the artists could bring their own sensibility. I wasn’t here for the writer to using my drawing to jerk off the writer’s imagination. I was going to bring something to it, too, and realized that you could. CBC: Where did that ambition come from? Was that a performing thing? P. Craig: Yes. The buck stops here. I’m the one telling the story. Of course. That’s the only way it’s going to be interesting is if I bring my own sensibility to it. I can’t help but do that. CBC: Generally, in the artistic world, which you had a very big interest in — you liked opera… you were interested in culture. At that time, certainly when you were entering the comics field, it was looked down upon, it was disparaged, it was juvenile — not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it wasn’t looked at as the higher art it is perhaps today. Did you see the possibilities that the form, by your presence, could be improved? P. Craig: Yes. I had no doubts. CBC: You thought that exclusively? P. Craig: I had some chutzpah. The very first story I did that Dan Adkins did the layouts for — that six page werewolf story? CBC: I remember that! P. Craig: That was my first one. On the last page, he has a three-panel sequence of him transforming from the man into the werewolf. I thought, “That should be six panels.” Who am I? This is Dan Adkins working for Marvel Comics and it didn’t occur to me that it was a little brash or brazen, “Who the hell do you think you are?” But he looked at it and he liked it and it was fine. So, from my very first story, I was taking charge because I see how it works. I grew up with it and had the storytelling gene in my bones, which I guess everyone does who grows up with the form. It felt natural to do that. But it really came into focus in that “Human Remains” because it

was a rich, complex story; I think things just fell into place. But, you can’t tell anybody really how it works, because you don’t understand it yourself. I’ll show you an example from The Ring. Just hold on for a second. I had been working on the layouts for the end of Rhinegold. [Retrieves collected volume] CBC: What are we looking at? P. Craig: This is The Ring of the Nibelung and, towards the end, Valhalla has been built, the first murder has

2002

2003

2004

2003

Murder Mysteries

Between Two Worlds

Neil Gaiman’s Murder Mysteries

The Comics Journal Special Edition Vol. 2

The Sandman: Death and Venice

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: Nightingale and the Rose

The Sandman: Endless Nights

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 4

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

Gone The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings 65

his eye for wisdom. You go into the dark and there’s this drop of water, which has been a motif throughout this whole thing. The water hits and the plant starts to grow and it’s growing at the foot of this tree, and the sword ends up later thrust into a tree. So this plant grows, turns into the sword — there’s the sword and there’s the idea. We keep going on the sword, it reflects the light, the light is shining, and we come out the other eye and he says, “Yes, it will.” And they march into Valhalla. That’s a purely visual explanation of both an idea in someone’s head and a musical idea. When you’re listening to this in the theater, you don’t know what he’s thinking when he says, “Will it protect us?” But then you hear and there’s something about this springing theme of Siegfried’s sword just lancing out of the orchestra and something wonderful has happened because it’s a wonderful, thrusting theme that flashes out and they go marching out. It’s intuitive, musically, when you’re in the theater,

2003

2004

Fables: The Last Castle

Hellboy: Weird Tales: Command Performance

The Godfather’s Code

Lucifer #50

Daredevil, Vol. 2, #65

One-shot

“Lilith”

“The Universe”

Hellboy: Weird Tales #6 66

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

happened from the curse on the ring, and it’s all by Wotan’s skulduggery, and the rainbow bridge is here and the gods are ready to march into Valhalla, and he’s wondering if it will protect them in the night that’s coming — he knows things could go south. He thinks and in the orchestra, the leitmotif — like a musical theme — of the swords spring out in the orchestra. That’s him thinking and conceiving the idea of forging a sword that will be wielded by a hero, not by him that will save him. I was thinking, “How can I show that?” I just can’t have the words. I struggled and struggled. A friend came over. It was Saturday night and said, “Let’s go downtown and get a beer.” We got to the corner down here and like that, the whole page dropped into my head, once I let it go for a little while. That’s when he said, “Protect us, the night must come.” You go into Wotan’s eye that he’s given up for wisdom — he sacrificed

Doctor Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Conan TM & © Conan Properties International, Inc. Coraline © Neil Gaiman. The Spirit TM & © Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Hellboy TM & © Mike Mignola. Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

“Okay, I know something is going to happen.” I had to come up with the visual equivalent of that. I had to actually show the thought and all those symbols of the sword and tree came out and going in the one eye and coming out the other. I started jumping up and down on the corner. “I’ve solved this problem.” My friend said, “Do you want to go back?” I said, “No, I’ve got it. Let’s go downtown and drink beer.” CBC: Toast Valhalla! Do you still play music? P. Craig: Yes, we’re having a musicale in February. I’m practicing for that. I’m practicing a piece from the ’20s… “Deep Purple”… “when the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls.” I’ll play it for you later. It’s good to have an audience when you play it for somebody. I’ve got it memorized now. Puts you on your toes when you know someone is listening. It focuses you more than playing by yourself. CBC: Do you have an eclectic taste in music? P. Craig: Yes, this has a jazzy, Gershwin style to it. Basically classical, playing Beethoven sonatas and Chopin, and a lot of light salon music — lighter classical music… a little sappier. CBC: Did you have culture coming into the house? P. Craig: I was the culture coming into the house, I think. [chuckles] There were no other musicians or artists in the immediate family, although on my father’s side of the family, I had a great uncle, Ralph Russell, who went to the New England Conservatory of Music and was a virtuoso pianist and had a band that went all over Europe in the ’20s. I have a photo of him in Japan. I met him when he was an old man out in Santa Barbara and he was giving mini-recitals. CBC: Did you hear him play? P. Craig: Yes, he played for me and I played for him. That was the trip my brother and I took out there when I was 17. CBC: Did you like him? P. Craig: Oh, yeah! He used to send me silver dollars in the mail. I wrote him when I started taking piano lessons, I heard about Uncle Ralph. Here was this distance relative, writing an old, single man. He wrote back. They were wrapped in tinfoil. Maybe they were to encourage me to write again. We kept up a correspondence… CBC: You know, you first started working in comics you were doing… not pedestrian, but assignments, then you did the Doctor Strange Annual on your own time, not an assignment. When did you embrace it as art? P. Craig: I always thought of comics as art. CBC: The workmanship was taught by Dan? P. Craig: A lot of the basics. CBC: Did you do your own comics when you were little? P. Craig: No, just drew pictures. I had drawn maybe a dozen comics pages before I started working professionally. CBC: So it was actually your dad suggesting Dan Adkins? P. Craig: Yes, because he needed a piece of advertising art for his store. I don’t know what else I would’ve done. CBC: Were you trained for anything? P. Craig: No. I wasn’t trained for anything. CBC: You picked it up so quickly, you could have done the same with anything else, don’t you think? P. Craig: I don’t know. CBC: Are you truly a creator?

P. Craig: It worked for me in comics because I was imbued with that imagery from childhood from Disney animation, that sort of German romanticism of Snow White and Pinocchio when I was still influencing. That was their visual image. I’ve told this story before: My freshman year in college we were outside and painting a tree, “Draw a tree,” it was drawing class. I forget the medium, watercolors or what not. I drew the tree and

2005

2006

2007

2008

2011

Conan: The Jewels of Gwahlur Conan and the

Coraline

Hellboy: The Vampire of Prague Hellboy: The Troll

The Sandman: The Dream HuntersThe Sandman: The

The Spirit: Art Walk

Witch and Others

Dream Hunters #1

Jewels of Gwahlur #1–3 COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

The Spirit #17

2012

2013

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Happy Prince

Fables: A Delicate Balance

The Graveyard Book

Little Nemo in Final Slumberland

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 5

Fables #113

Two Anxious Songs (Whispers at Night, Beheading) unpublished

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

young! Almost stupidly confident! CBC: Was it reckless? P. Craig: I did something other people consider cutting your throat at Marvel. I’m sure everyone’s heard this story by now. You know the word balloons on the Doctor Strange art, my first year, they were keeping the artwork and then they started returning it and gave a portion to the writers. Don McGregor never took a single page. He said, “You’re the artist. This is your work.” I got all that back. So when I did the Doctor Strange with Marv Wolfman, he wanted his cut and that just infuriated me! So, all the lettering was done on paste-ups… you’ve heard this story haven’t you? [Jon nods] When the artwork, I took it all home and took all the word balloons off. I returned all the word balloons in a brown paper bag. What even got me on this…? Oh yes: cutting your own throat. When you take off the word balloons with the rubber cement, they’re all curled up like potato chips, so it filled the whole bag. Wasn’t like a flat file. I said, “Here’s your share of the artwork; it’s the word balloons that you wrote.” That could’ve absolutely ended my career at Marvel. Marv was editor-in-chief at that time, although they had a big turnover shortly after that. But I was starting to get into the ground-level stuff. I couldn’t see beyond next month. You’re young, you’re independent, and something will come in, and it did. [chuckles] There was work at other places — Star*Reach and Eclipse, and then Marvel. I was doing inking work and if they like your work and someone wants you inking them, you get the work. That could’ve been a disaster. I don’t think I’d have the balls to do that today if it looked like something out of Snow White because that’s what it looked like to me. The I’d thought it was something that would really impact my razzing I took for that! That would look like a future. cartoon type of drawing; they were way too CBC: Were you suited to do anything else? sophisticated for that. But I made a career out of that tree, you know? They just thought P. Craig: No. CBC: You’re a boring comic book artist! was hilarious. It was so pretty and Snow P. Craig: Well, I thought about animation, but it was White kind of looking. But that romanticism beyond me. about nature is lifeblood to me. That’s the CBC: How about design work kind of thing I did and responded to. So the for movies? leaps I took early on, I was primed for that. P. Craig: No. A lot of guys in my field have. You have to go A lot of it is just willpower. to the West Coast and get into the studios and all of that. It CBC: What’s the fire? Is it getting rent all seems overwhelming to me. I don’t feel suited. I would’ve money? You wanting more attention… had to be approached. “Here’s a job, do you want it?” And accolades? [P. Craig nods] then I might. I took the leap with comics and moved at New P. Craig: I always say many streams York City. Even though I started at Marvel, I took six months flow into the river. Yes, I like the attention. off and went back to college, so the work wasn’t coming in. Previous spread: On left is art It’s wonderful when people respond, but I’d be doing it in a I didn’t think I was big enough to live in Cincinnati and work and cover for Doctor Strange: cave on a desert island. for Marvel, so I moved to New York City so they’d see my What is it That Disturbs You, CBC: You’re your own audience, too? face in the office; I’d be around. Stephen? [Oct. 1997]. Left is art P. Craig: Right. I don’t know if I’ve ever pandered to an Turns out the “Morbius” script arrived in Cincinnati after and unpublished cover for Dr. audience. I want to draw what I want to draw. I really hope I left and a roommate downstairs or a friend mailed it to me. Strange Annual #1 [’76]. Above: they like it. It was good that I moved to New York City, but as far as beXerox of PCR’s unused splash CBC: Have you ever been desperate? ing assigned stuff, “Morbius the Living Vampire,” I couldn’t page image for his Doctor P. Craig: In what sense? imagine a character I had less in common with. I hated the Strange story featuring a layout CBC: Fear it might not work out… “I might fail.” design. I’m not interested in that genre, I hate vampires. But that was appropriated by Frank P. Craig: No. you can tell. I was doing “Morbius,” then “Killraven,” and I Brunner for the opening panel of CBC: You seem to have a rock-solid confidence. had another issue of “Morbius” to do, and then the second Doctor Strange #1 [June 1974]. P. Craig: I can’t believe my confidence when I was that

“Killraven.” Once I got into “Killraven,” you could see the quality go way up, but you didn’t see that in “Morbius” because there was nothing for me to hang on to. CBC: What is your magnum opus? P. Craig: The Ring of the Nibelung. That’s over 3,300 individual drawings, 400 pages, five years to do. The crazy thing about that is. I decided to do it in 1973 and, at the same time, [Dark Horse publisher] Mike Richardson, in that same year, made the decision that he wanted to publish The Ring of the Nibelung! What are the chances of that? When I finally thought I was ready to do that around the age of 45 and approached Dark Horse, he was there, ready to publish it and we both decided we wanted to do it at the same year. I had never met him until I started doing work for Dark Horse. That’s spooky. It’s the only sort of supernatural thing that ever happened to me. When I first started working on it, a friend, Wayne, was giving out little metal runes to a number of friends. The one he gave me had a symbol of harvest on it, which means “completion.” I said, “I won’t take this off until I finish The Ring of the Nibelung.” I wore it for five years. In the shower… never took it off. On the last night — as God as my witness… I am not making this up — I was sitting at the drawing board, within three hours of finishing it and I felt something slide down the front of me. I reached in and it just separated at the back of my neck and fell off. I get goose bumps talking about that. CBC: Harvest complete. What do you want to do now? P. Craig: I’ve got a bucket list. The illustrated songs I was showing you. There are 12 of them and I have a dozen more to go. CBC: What are they? P. Craig: I haven’t decided all of them yet. I’m doing a few of these have seen publication or in part over the years. Imagine a single comics page that is tabloid size — like a Prince Valiant page or Jeff Jones’ Idyl, which are oversized. Each one is a song, or adapted from a classical music song that has a good poem — the lyrics are interesting. I want to do 24. They started as 10" x 15" size running in Pulse magazine. I had “The Erl-King,” a Rachmaninoff song, the Schoenberg beheading song in 10" x 15" versions and then did and much more complex, larger size. A few have been published. I started in the early ’90s. It’s just in the last six years, I’ve made a much more concerted effort. Anyway, I’m halfway through that, and they take a long time to do because they are very complex pieces. There’s another dozen of those to be completed. I have the last fairy tale of Oscar Wilde to do, the 44-page “Fisherman and His Soul,” which I scripted and laid out 25 years ago. After I’d done the first two volumes of the fairy tales, I knew I wanted to wait to do the last one and by far the longest one of all and I think the cream of the crop. I thought I’d do it this year, but I got into the Norse Mythology book and those big illustrations I did early in the year and the year got away from me, so I have to finish it. CBC: What’s that? P. Craig: That’s Neil Gaiman’s retelling of Norse mythology that came out a couple of years ago. A retelling of the

Norse myths in his own voice. It will be 18 issues and 360 some pages. I’m doing the artwork for the 10-page introduction that will be on Free Comic Book Day and then the first six pages of the story proper. I’m doing Ragnarök at the very end of it all, about 30-some pages. I’m doing layouts for a number of other artists. Jill Thompson is doing hers, Mike Mignola is doing his, Jerry Ordway is working on his right now. Not all the artists are even slated. That will be another 16 months before I’m finished with it all. CBC: When did you first meet Neil?

This page: Your humble editor laments that we’ve not enough space in this feature to devoted to PCR’s exquisite work adapting the world’s greatest operas, a labor of love Craig has been drawing since the mid–1970s. Above is his particularly lovely page from Night Music #2, adapting La Sonnambula.

2014

2015

2016

Day and Night (Two Songs) unpublished

Two Songs by Hugo Wolf (Spring, Autumn) unpublished

All-New Invaders #12 (layouts & inking)

The Spectre of the Rose (Two Songs: Serenade, Departure) unpublished

Pendant to the Rose (A Symbolist Fantasy) unpublished

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

2019

2017–19

2019

2020–21

American Gods

The Problem of Susan

Locks

Norse Mythology

American Gods limited series: AG: Shadows, AG: My Ainsel, AG: Moment of the Storm

The Problem of Susan and Other Stories

Norse Mythology #1–18

The Giver

Bagdad, and thought of me. He said, “Now, if I’d had a genie, I would have thought about Charles Vess. I thought, “I can draw a genie… ” [laughter] Charles Vess sort of came up again because I asked him if he’d do the first six pages of the Norse Mythology book because it opens with the World Ash Tree and who does trees best but Charles Vess? So, he considered it. I sent him the six pages of layouts and then he demurred because he’d done almost the same scene 20 years ago with the norns and the trees and all of this. I offered it to Kaluta, who was booked, so I decided to do it myself. I had the shadow of Charles Vess hanging over me every time I worked on this tree, which… if you’ll hold for a second... [retrieves original art page] there’s the tree. That’s actually the second time I’ve had to draw that tree, because the first scene of The Ring of the Nibelung opens with the Ash Tree and the three norns. So I had to come up with a completely kind of tree and completely different kind of norns. CBC: You had your own kind of challenge. Have you ever worked with Alan Moore? P. Craig: No, there was talk of working on Promethea and I was approached through an intermediary. I actually sent him a box of books I had done in case he hadn’t seen everything. I wasn’t really interested in doing Promethea. But, I would like to do something like a Doctor Strange character. In retrospect, as great a respect as I have for his writing, I also know his scripts. I think it would’ve taken all the fun out of it for me. You’ve seen the great details for every panel and the minutiae describing everything that’s in it… that would take all the fun because I like telling the story. He’s done everything but draw the pictures. I don’t think it would have been a happy marriage. Neil has written two stories for me: Sandman and then “Death and Venice.” All original scripts. All the other projects… almost a dozen, I get to work with his prose and write the script and decide what the pictures are and how many panels on the page and that’s what I really like doing. I’m meticulously faithful to the author — the themes, the ideas, the dialogue — once in a while because I’ve chopped out things — I have to write some original dialogue, but it’s only three or four words, because I don’t want to jeopardize his writing, but sometimes I have to do some connective tissue. To get back to the quality of his writing: it’s so lovely and the stories are so good, it’s hard to decide what to cut, because you don’t want to. I tend to put too much in and want to put everything in. And I could, if I had a thousand pages to do it. I’ve found, not just with Neil but with other writers, they’ll have enough in a panel or a short paragraph like the last paragraph

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The Magic Flute © P. Craig Russell. The Giver © Lois Lowery. American Gods, The Problem of Susan, Locks, and Norse Mythology © Neil Gaiman.

P. Craig: On the phone, when he called me about Sandman #50. I don’t recall exactly our first meeting. He was living out in the country in Minnesota in this huge, old Victorian farmhouse and I spent a weekend up there. CBC: What did you think of him? P. Craig: One of the nicest guys you’ve ever meet. Sweet, unassuming. Then, we were on that Comics Defense Legal Fund cruise with Will Eisner, Neal Adams, Jill Thompson, Jeff Smith, Gary Groth, Evan Dorkin, Neal, Frank Miller… a lot of us, down to Puerto Vallarta, and a hundred fans who booked to be on the cruise. A comic convention on the high seas. CBC: Did you click? Is he a genuine friend? P. Craig: Yes. I still have a number of recordings because he said he could never seem to get me on the phone. We would talk on the phone. This was when I had an answering machine. I have several years of tapes, of conversations, or just messages. CBC: Monologues… P. Craig: Yes, and if you don’t pick up quick enough, it would just click on. I have conversations with my parents who have both passed on now and different people. He left so many messages, I thought, “Jeez, I could put these on a single disc and sell them at comic book conventions — Messages from Chairman Neil.” [chuckles] CBC: What is it about his writing that separates him? P. Craig: From what? CBC: The other comic book writers. P. Craig: It’s so damn good, that’s all. They’re wonderful stories, compelling, the subject matter appeals to me, at least the stories I’ve done with him. There have been a couple modern, Murder Mysteries, one-half was set in Los Angeles and the other half in heaven, the origin of the universe. One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock, a fairly modern piece, a thinly veiled story of his school days and reading Michael Moorcock as a 12-year-old and devouring that stuff — a writer writing about a writer. Most of it has been mythological — Dream Hunters. No, Coraline was very much in the modern world — appliances in the kitchen and cars and streets. There was more difficult in a way for me to draw. How many ways can you do a refrigerator? She’s actually looking into the refrigerator — it’s part of the story, and that’s not a lot of fun to draw. It’s a lot of fun to tell the story and lay it out. CBC: Does he write to you? “I’m writing a Craig Russell story he will draw.” P. Craig: Only for Sandman #50. When we were on the phone, he talks about “casting.” He thinks about the best artist for the job. He saw Thief of

of One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock, I did three pages out of half-a-dozen lines because it’s so rich and so much going on I could see getting page after page out of this. In “Death and Venice,” he had written it as a four-panel page. I did 14 panels out of that script because I thought, “There’s so much here. This single word should get its own panel. I think that makes the storytelling — visually — stronger. It works with the script. It’s not changing anything; it’s amplifying. CBC: That’s like poetry, for instance, your epiphany with The Ring, going from a literary device you’ve done visually — moving from the empty eye and finally to the bright eye… to the living eye… Are you a poet? Do you see yourself in that kind of way? You’re looking at life in a lyrical sense? P. Craig: Hmm. Well, in that sense, if you’re talking about looking at life, I’m not a literal poet. In the sense of visual metaphors, if I’m talking to aspiring artists about storytelling, I say, “Look at the props around you that you can use to comment on what’s happening. You don’t have to look at the person’s face. Look at that candle over there. The flame from the candle could actually be commenting on something happening.” A lot of that comes from movies, the visual storytelling and coming up with ideas to tell the story visually, like I was commenting on the Liberty quarter and the street signs. I think a lot of that comes from… they’re always commenting on film, especially in the ’30, ’40s, and ’50s, imagery that comments on what’s happening. Orson Welles was great with that and Kubrick, so that’s where… Comics storytelling is not film, but it’s not pure art either. It’s a hybrid of the two. You can learn a lot from watching movies for visual storytelling, but a lot of modern comics try to look like movies and I think that’s a mistake. They’re not. You can learn as much from Orson Welles as you can from Rembrandt, and from the etchings of Albrecht Dürer. It’s a combination of both because you’re drawing and you’re telling stories from pictures that work in sequence, one next to each other. So, it’s the disciplines of both forms that come together to produce something that is neither, but is something of its own. CBC: Have you ever done something with film? P. Craig: No. CBC: Have you ever been approached? P. Craig: No, and I’m saying that with a question mark. I don’t think so. I was talking about those telephone tapes — job offers I’ve completely forgotten about. I had no idea I was offered that story. It was just a phone call and I say, “No,” and years later, and years later, why would I remember. But, I don’t think I have been approached. CBC: Hm. Comics, has it treated you well, as well as you’ve treated it? P. Craig: Comics have been “bery, bery good to me.” [laughter] I’ve never been unemployed and always had something. I’ve had to turn down work because I was too busy, partly because I was willing to work for peanuts. In the ’80s, all that stuff for Eclipse, I was being paid $100 per page, until we got up to that Clive Barker story and we negotiated for better money. That was for writing, penciling, inking, coloring — 100 bucks per page. That’s why I was doing so much inking for Marvel. That was my bread-andbutter money. I was never concerned about the money, I just wanted to do these stories they wanted me to do. CBC: Eclipse — for the peanuts they gave you — also gave you some good exposure, I recall. You had the Night Music, right? P. Craig: I did. Night Music was the second thing Dean Mullaney ever published. For the other things, yeah, they weren’t paying me much, but they said, “Do whatever you want.” “Okay, there was this Maurice Maeterlinck play that was turned into an opera by Paul Dukas, so I’m going to do that next. There’s a blockbuster for ya!” [chuckles] That was Ariane and Bluebeard… or the Salomé story. Even the Jungle Book stories picked up by them. We were COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

turned down by Marvel. We approached because Jo Duffy had suggested we do a Jungle Book story, and that was “The King’s Ankus.” She was the assistant editor and she approached Archie [Goodwin], and he, “Nah, this isn’t right for Epic.” So, we approached Eclipse and they said yes. Jo ghosted that first script, because she was under contract for Marvel. It was published and Jo showed it to Archie, who’d forgotten about it, and he said, “Oh, we could have done that.” Once he saw it — and I’ve always had that experience and I’m not a real salesman about ideas — but if I go ahead and do it I’ll find someone to publish it. But, if I try to sell them on an idea, there’s much less chance of that. CBC: Oscar Wilde: why did you go to him? P. Craig: Originally… in part, when I was in college, I came across a book called Dreamers of Decadence, which was about the symbolist movement of the late19th century of art — all the painters. They were doing mythological and proto- and surrealist painting before surrealism and the pre-Raphaelites, and all of that, and so many of the images were illustrations either Maeterlinck or Oscar Wilde — there was Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings of Salomé, so I was always aware of him. In the mid-’70s, when I was living in New York, I came across The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde and I read “The Young King,” and said, “I want to do this some day.” I bought that book. Wilde’s writing is so incredibly rich and descriptive; I just wanted to do that because it appealed to me. CBC: Hm. You’ve taught, right? P. Craig: Yes. CBC: Big classes, small classes…? P. Craig: I had 15 students. I taught at Kent State University. They bring in someone for the outside for a single semester and that’s what originally brought me to Kent. That was a valuable experience because I found that for students, I had to explain myself. I didn’t have to verbalize that before while working alone. In telling them why something wasn’t working, I had to explain why, so I had to explain that to myself. I found I always liked explaining the inner workings of a picture and one of the first ways I heard that was at a convention in 1978 or ’79 in San Jose and Burne Hogarth was there, and he gave a slide talk that showed works of art from medieval times to modern and he just picked them apart, “See what’s happening here? You see this? See what they did here? See how their eyes are moving over here?” He did it in such a way it was like listening to Leonard Bernstein talk about music. You make the most abstract ideas perfectly clear and accessible. I’d had four years of art history at college and none of them approached the one hour with Hogarth. None had that enthusiasm that brought you into the pictures and made you excited about them. Gil Kane was great with

Previous page: Page from The Magic Flute by PCR. Above: Page from his Ring of the Nibelung. Below: During a November visit to PCR, the artist gave a tour of his beautiful home, which included him displaying an actual replica (if you will) of Elric’s helmet.

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

that too, reading his interviews. That helped me learn how to think about pictures and talk about pictures. And then, when you make pictures every day, you start to understand composition and how the artist is moving your eye around. Now, you look at pictures and illustrations and it only takes a couple of minutes to look at it and understand what’s happening — how the artist is moving your eye from here to there. If you’ve ever seen a book of Norman Rockwell’s photographs that show the photos and then the paintings beside it. At first, you say, “There’s that,” and then you look closer and look how he’s moved an arm or a leg and got this out of the way and moved this over just a bit, so the composition is right. Even though it looks good in the photo, it wouldn’t have had nearly the impact if he’d done it exactly as in the photo. CBC: Your use of models: when did that come in? P. Craig: I had never been trained on anatomy, so I was looking at John Buscema and I knew I couldn’t do that forever. Then I would have friends pose live, so I was drawing from life. You can’t do that forever, asking people to give you that much time. So, one of the first stories I did post-Marvel, was that eight-page “Dance on a Razor’s Edge,” a ballet on the life of Yukio Mishima. It was a harikari story. Mishima, the Japanese novelist who was as famous in his country as Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer is here and just as outrageous, yes, committed harikari ritual seppuku after trying to take over the Japanese government with his private army — which was just insane. I was doing a story about that, and it was going to be one character in the process of committing seppuku with this sort of fantasy ideas in little vignettes going back and forth in this surreal world. So, it was this one person in a room in a single position. This was after two years of “Killraven” with all of these characters coming in and out and all of these situations, it was just one person in a room. So, I took all of these photographs of my friend who was Austrian-Japanese, and that’s the first time I worked very closely with photographs because I wanted to get him correct from all these different angles. Take all the pictures and then work with them. Lay them out and then lay out the story. “How do I do this?” That’s where that started. CBC: That’s kind of a backwards way of doing it, right? P. Craig: Yes. CBC: Usually a panel is framed or in movies, blocked… P. Craig: Or storyboarded… that’s how I do it now. CBC: Then you did your story from the pictures? P. Craig: I’m pretty sure. And from some pretty crazy angles. I took him looking through his arm from a bird’s-eye view. CBC: It makes sense, though. It’s one character. Who taught you about taking pictures? P. Craig: Nobody, I just got a camera. CBC: But, you knew it was done? P. Craig: Yeah. Dan Adkins — well, he didn’t take pictures, he just swiped. [laughter] He just did. He learned that from Wally Wood. I just came across a painting online from, like, the Golden Age of painting and illustration or something, of this Egyptian god with sort of a dog head. I thought, “That’s where Wally Wood got that! From a 19th century painting!” He just copied and put him right in there. CBC: Right! The “Cleopatra” story. He made it Wood. Dan did not. P. Craig: No. Gil Kane was talking about Joe Kubert’s inking style. He called it, “Pouring chocolate over everything.” That’s what Wood did: he poured wood over it and it became his. He was swiping Alex Raymond all the time and any number of others… CBC: Sheldon Moldoff... P. Craig: Dan didn’t have those chops, so his swipes were a little more obvious. CBC: Did you have less respect for him because of that? P. Craig: No. CBC: It’s a controversial thing to do.

P. Craig: Yeah. But especially when you’re starting, almost everybody does it. I have a stack of comics of people who’ve swiped me and sometimes outrageously so! But, that’s the way I learned how to do it. If don’t know how to draw this figure and it needs to look professional, you go looking… CBC: If you swipe, swipe from the best! P. Craig: I always used John Buscema and somehow nobody ever picked up on that. They would see my Barry Windsor-Smith influences or my Steranko influences, but they never picked up on Buscema because he doesn’t have the style of Gil Kane or Jack Kirby that you cannot swipe without recognizing Kane or Kirby. You can get the information from Buscema. You can get the same information from Hal Foster. We needed horses in the Elric story I was working on with Michael T. Gilbert and he was not a Foster fan. I was looking through these files for horses and one was a Foster and I said, “Here use this.” He drew it. It became a Michael T. Gilbert horse, but in the process, he had to really look at Foster and take it apart and — pardon me — fostered an appreciation of him because he had to really look at it. That was a common way of training an artist in the 19th century. You copied. You sat there and copied another artist or plaster-cast statue, but you learned how they put things apart. I think it’s a different thing in art from plagiarizing with writing. That’s an absolute nuclear no-go zone, of swiping another writer’s writing. I think there’s more wiggle room when you’re just starting out, especially if you’re just getting basic information from them of how the thighbone is connected to the hipbone. CBC: That’s because you have a real-life basis to it and writing is abstract. P. Craig: I compare it sometimes in using photos: If the writer says, “Establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower.” Well, you’re not going to take a flight to France, you have to look it up. If you look it up in the old encyclopedia, you’ll find a straight-on shot of the Eiffel Tower that you can copy right off. That’s not a swipe, that’s information. Now you go to National Geographic where the photographer stood underneath it and captured how the sun hit the rivets going up the side with little orange crescents against the blue metal, you’re swiping someone’s vision. Those are the twin poles, and you have a kind of gray area in between. CBC: Having classes, what’s the most important thing to teach? What is the lesson you can impart on the world? P. Craig: My focus was on storytelling and that’s what I do when people show me their portfolios at conventions. I don’t feel secure on anatomical technique and drawing and am impressed when I hear other artists giving portfolio critiques, but where I feel like I’m on real sure footing is if they’re doing layouts and storytelling. “Don’t show me pin-ups of super-heroes. Can you show me layouts with pictures? Let’s look at that.” I can critique that and make stronger storytelling decisions. “What are the props in your story that will amplify or strengthen the story?” That’s usually what I talk about. CBC: In looking at the theme of your life, it seems somewhat sedate — a lack of conflict, if you will. Is that true? COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

P. Craig: There hasn’t been a great deal of drama. I was able to get into the field fairly easily through some fortunate circumstances. I got my big break working with Dan Adkins, but after that, I had to work my ass off. You get your lucky break but then you have to prove yourself. I did really work hard. I was — early, living in Wellsville — I think working on “The Avatar and the Chimera,” that 16-page symbolist fantasy that was published by Star*Reach in Imagine. I remember my brother coming in and looking in sort of a disdainful way and said, “It looks like you’re trying to impress in every panel.” It only occurred to me later to say, “Well, damn right I am! I’m trying to make it in this field where guys who can knock off two pages a day of gorgeous work in a day and I’m not about to slip for a single panel. I’ve got to keep it going.” I’m a little more relaxed now. I was putting everything I had into every panel — that razzle-dazzle — you’d get ’em somewhere on the page. Someone once said of the “Killraven” work — and he said it in a more approving way — “There’s something on every page that makes you go, ‘Ooh, look at that!’” Part of it is to compensate for not having the facility to just throw figures down. CBC: That was an amazing work, the Killraven graphic novel that came out. What year was that? P. Craig: Nineteen eighty-two. CBC: Wow; 1982. Talk about the growth of your ability, for me, to look at that. It was one of the few instances you were able to get closure to something that was an opus — and I didn’t mean that like that — like an opus that was cut short, because I loved “War of the Worlds” and Killraven and you were able to give a truly appropriate, loving finish with the graphic novel. P. Craig: It wasn’t a finish, but it was rounded off… CBC: It was the best we could get. P. Craig: Yeah, yeah. That was the one working with Don and I said, “That’s one where I’d like a full script to work with.” The danger if you’re working a synopsis style you have a verbose writer, you can never as the artist, design the word balloons and the captions into the art and I’m very much of the belief that it’s an integral design part of the panels. “You can be as verbose as you want, as long as I can design it into the page so we’re not both knocking

This spread: A significant portion of the artist’s life has been devoted to adapting the works of Rudyard Kipling (specifically his Jungle Book stories featuring the wolf-boy Mowgli), as well as the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde — PCR tell us he has one more story to go to complete that series! — and, of course, his versions of the world’s great operas (of which he reveals he has one more production he hopes to depict to make for an even dozen versions). Craig’s magnum opus, he shares, is his 400-page, five-years-in-themaking adaptation of Richard Wagner’s epic four-part opera, The Ring of the Nibelung. Next page: PCR looking over his unpublished “Songs,” which he hopes to see in print someday.

shoulders, trying to get into the door at the same time.” In the course of about the ten issues I worked on with Killraven, I learned a lot. I learned how to anticipate. The first couple, I was filling the pages with pictures, all that work from a practical point of view, gets erased because the word balloons go over it. I don’t want the wasted labor. I should be able to anticipate what he’s doing. By the last of it, it was almost like a newspaper strip some parts of it. I kept the characters talking in the bottom half of the panel and left him a lot of space. Even then it was difficult and I, to this day, when I’m doing script layouts for other artists, I’m pencil lettering everything in and drawing in the ellipses and putting the percentage of the ellipsis for the letterer, because I’m designing the lettering and the movement of that all through the page, no matter who’s lettering it, I’m getting that down there. I think that’s one of the most integral parts of the design of the page — how you lead the eye around. It’s one of the things I don’t like about most of those comics that Marvel — when you’re working synopsis style — it doesn’t always work with the art — the lettering and the art part. They don’t always mesh. CBC: Did you ever see Barry Windsor-Smith’s Storyteller? P. Craig: Yes. CBC: I think his use of the word balloons was brilliant. The word balloons would bounce back and forth between panels… P. Craig: Yes, yes! CBC: For me, it blew my mind. It was so innovative. P. Craig: I learned this early on: It’s easy to forget because of how beautiful these drawings are and how complex, what a great storyteller he is. I got that partly from reading the notes on his things — coming up with the idea of the sails unfurling. Or the thing about… there’s this seagull and Conan reaches out for it and it flies out of his way [“Hawks from the Sea,” Conan the Barbarian #20]. That was Barry’s idea. It just appealed to him and Roy wrote some beautiful prose to go with it. How satisfying it is for a writer to get an artist that comes back to you with something you can work with. On the third or fourth issue of “Killraven,” the second one I inked, they were in the snow — Killraven and the M’Shula and some ATVs, and I’ve drawn a tree and I had drawn some blackbirds in it — it was just bare limbs in the winter and a couple birds. Don loved that and incorporated the birds into his script. He was looking at the art and the art was influencing, occasionally, how it was written because he’d respond to the imagery. CBC: Lovely. Do you have any favorite letterers you’ve worked with? P. Craig: Oh, Galen Showman is the absolute best. CBC: “The absolute best”! What makes him the absolute best? P. Craig: I’ll show you. It’s perfect. It’s so meticulously drawn and chiseled. He’s worked with the same pen point for like 17 or 18 years. He’ll be here later; you can ask him. He’ll center everything. If it’s of varying lengths of lines — it’s not staggered haphazardly — you could draw a line down the center and measure from that center line to the end of each line and it would be identical no matter how long the line up and down — eight lines of dialogue. [Jon chuckles] And when we do sound effects, they’re terrific. There was a big “slurp” in the one we did layouts for Jill, and I had kind of drawn it in as a wet thing and he finessed it, or I’ll show you the logo — I penciled the Norse Mythology logo — the whole design for that and measured things off, but asked our editor to okay that Galen would do the finish on it because the finesse would be sharper than what I could do. It was a great collaboration on lettering. I designed it, but didn’t have to fully 74

execute it. I’ve done my own logos and can do them, but if it can be done better, why not? CBC: So, you’ve got that coming up…? P. Craig: Norse Mythology. American Gods is finished, the last issue just came out, and The Problem with Susan, that short story. CBC: What is that? P. Craig: Six or seven years ago, I’d just finished something and was kind of in the doldrums, so I called Dark Horse. Within 45 minutes, I’d set it up to do one of Neil’s stories, “The Problem with Susan,” which I scripted and laid out and it was like 26 pages, but didn’t do it until last year because The Graveyard Book came up and The Giver, and all these things that kept delaying and delaying. I finally got it done and a four-page poem called “Locks.” Then I did scripts and layouts for “October in the Chair,” his story, and Scott Hampton did the finished artwork on that. There was an eightpage Paul Chadwick story rattling around and Daniel asked me, “Do you mind if we put that in the book, too,” because it had been all my scripts and layouts. “No problem.” If I’d done the finished artwork for “October in the Chair,” I would’ve felt differently, because I would’ve done everything, but we already had another artist in the book with Scott Hampton, so that was fine. Anyway, I’ll show it to you later. It just came out a few months ago. CBC: Sounds great. Any other big projects you see for yourself? P. Craig: I want to do one more opera, because I decided years ago I’d do a dozen and I’ve done 11. We’ve been talking to people at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, and they’d like me to do Stravinsky’s Nightingale, which is a Chinese fairy tale because they might want to do a production. They’ve done my Salomé, Ariane and Bluebeard, and Pelleas and Melisande, as theatrical productions where this professor of music theory rewrites the score, reduces it for chamber orchestra, they scan in every one of my pictures at 3,300 d.p.i., so it can be projected on a screen and then they play the music along and, like Ken Burns, they pan and scan, so you’re reading what they’re saying instead of singing on the big screen and they’re playing the music long and the music is synced with that moment. So you get the musical effect. It’s like having a soundtrack to a comic book. The first one they did, the computer effects they did were done live, so you had a conductor and he was also signaling this conductor over here who was dealing with the guy who had all the images on the computer and would hit each one. Cuing everything up… there were a couple of misfires in the middle of it and I could tell they were completely off track here, but for Ariane and Bluebeard, the computer programs are so sophisticated now, they can get two-and-one-half minutes programmed of this series of images and I worked with them developing it — they got into a pickle at one point. I said, “You can come in here and scan down and bring this up and come over here,” and now it moves smoothly, but now they have to click every two-and-one-half minutes to get to the next one. I’d been wondering, with live music if you have all this on a scroll. What if the tempo goes forward and backward, how do you sync this up? Now they do it every two minutes and it works perfectly well. Wayne put up a camera to film the thing and I have some video of their rehearsals. Paul Dukas, if you don’t know him, his most known piece is “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” He wrote like a dozen pieces and then destroyed everything else for the next 30 years of his life. He became such a perfectionist. CBC: Like Alex Toth. P. Craig: Maybe so! CBC: Who is Wayne? P. Craig: Oh! Wayne Harold. One of my best friends if not my best friend. For the past 20 years, he’s published the Sketchbooks and we’ve done all the videos together. CBC: What are videos? P. Craig: The Storytelling videos. Maybe half-a-dozen. He did a documentary about me called Night Music that showed up at the Cleveland Cinematheque or the Cleveland Institute of Art… it was in the Cleveland Art Museum, part of their film program. He always has a project going, he handles the fine-art editions, which he’s published. [P. Craig pulls out Art Editions] This is all his doing. CBC: A Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Fine Art Edition. P. Craig: Here’s The Jungle Book and the one on Salomé that has a bunch of stuff. Here’s the one that’s just coming out. The Sketchbook we did, then the videos, then The Jungle Book, and he deals with the printers and the specs and computer work that has to be done. CBC: [Looking at Arabian Nights] That’s nice. P. Craig: This is the story, Red Dog, that Neil saw. On our first conversation, he said, “That’s the finest adaptation of a story I’ve ever seen.” And that’s why he’s been willing to trust me with his stories, to adapt them and #22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

leave me to do it. CBC: You understand Gil Kane. A lot of people don’t “get” Gil, but you do. You took a nice lesson from him, in a sense. I love his stuff, but he didn’t love his stuff enough. He always thought he was limited. P. Craig: We all are in certain ways. I wish he had more of a poet in him. There was a Conan story or something where there was a rose at the center of the universe and it was just a rose with a bunch of curvy, crackling energy around it and you think what Windsor-Smith or Charlie Vess would do with a rose at the center of the universe. CBC: This is beautiful! Nice. P. Craig: This is the story that has the front porch that Tom Batiuk swiped… CBC: Funky Winkerbean! Good storytelling. Who’s the model? P. Craig: Chucky Powell. He was my model for this and the first Siegfried story I did. He’s been in a bunch of things. CBC: He’s a beautiful boy. P. Craig: He doesn’t look like that now! CBC: Yeah, well, none of us do. We were all cute once. I’m looking for the porch, where is it? Steranko there. P. Craig: There it is. Tom did a much simplified version, but even then, my dad could recognize it. [pulls out another Art Edition] There’s the Salomé. Wayne is in the process of scanning everything I’ve ever done and it’s really changed my career. With these Crowdfunding things, one premium, or whatever, is a full illustration for $1,000. I bring out my Sunday best drawings for those and I’ve done a couple dozen drawings I’d never done if isn’t wasn’t for the goal of doing this. [points to a piece] This one was in The Comics Journal music issue. It’s the story of Eric Wolfgang Korngold. That was nominated for best original short story, but I was beat out by Katie Mignola for that Hellboy story. CBC: Oh, yeah! That was in the early ’00s, right? That was a cute little story. Wow, beautiful. P. Craig: This we put in because everything is in color and I wanted to show a comparison of this is a two-color book. There’s no blue plate, it’s all red-and-yellow and no one noticed… partly because you put yellow with gray, it looks green and it’s not. Because it was drawn in blue and gray pencil that gives it kind of a bluish sheen to things. CBC: [Indicates the yellow and brown color motif of P. Craig’s living room]

That’s your color scheme! P. Craig: Oh, yeah! [chuckles] It was NBM and they said they didn’t have the budget for full color, so I took it as a challenge. “Let’s do it in two-color.” That’s one project you work on and think you’ve just thrown it down a well. I don’t know if anyone saw it much, but maybe because of that, it’s one of my favorites, but.... Have you ever seen Godfather III? That final 20 minutes I think are prime… I just think they’re terrific. That’s the golden nugget in that movie. You’re watching a production of Cavalleria rusticana as he’s carrying out this vendetta. You’re in the opera box watching as his son is singing and then you’re out… that whole thing is almost about the birth of the Mafia. It takes place in Sicily on Easter Day and they — “they,” kill Turiddu and throw him down the stairs. It’s great in the opera house — so much blood and thunder. You sit there waiting and it’s hot and he’s crossed them in some way. At the moment the red wine drops, he’s murdered behind the wall. You hear a scream off stage and she comes running — they kill Turiddu and they throw him down the steps. She’s the fallen woman and the church has turned their backs on her and as the bells ring, she runs to the church and the church closes its doors against her. CBC: It’s like… well, the drama’s in the work, right? P. Craig: I suppose! CBC: You know. In a way, as a storyteller, which I am in my own way, I’m looking for conflict in the lives of people. I’m not sensing much conflict in your life, for better or worse. Are you happy? P. Craig: Yeah, I guess. Depends on what day it is. Some days I am and some I’m not. CBC: Are you content? P. Craig: I don’t know. I really don’t. My friend Pat Mason, who I grew up with, he’s the happiest person I know, and he was on the faculty at Boulder, Colorado, and said out loud, “You know, I’m a happy man.” One of his colleagues sent him a note, “I was flabbergasted to hear you say that!” That anyone would say such a thing. But he said, “I’m just happy. I’m a happy man.” It’s like a shocking thing to say. CBC: It is what it is. P. Craig: Come out in the kitchen, Jon, and hang out while I prepare dinner.

This page: Clockwise from top left: PCR and Ye Ed; PCR in his art gallery room; PCR photobombs Michael T. Gilbert and Y.E.; PCR and his extensive Fiesta dinnerware collection; PCR in his wonderfully sunlit dining room; Wayne Alan Harold (left), Y.E., and Gaelin Showman. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

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! NOW SHIPPING! (256-page FULL-COLOR Trade Paperback) $37.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-092-2 (272-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! GET YOURS NOW!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #78

(SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE!)

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (DELUXE EDITION with silver sleeve) $12.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95

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)

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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. NOW SHIPPING!

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BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

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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!

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MIKE GRELL

LIFE IS DRAWING WITHOUT AN ERASER Career-spanning tribute to a comics art legend! (160-page FULL-COLOR TPB) $27.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-088-5 (176-page LTD. ED. HARDCOVER) $37.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-087-8 (Digital Edition) $12.95

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID

Digs up the best of FROM THE TOMB (the UK’s preeminent horror comics history magazine): Atomic comics lost to the Cold War, censored British horror comics, the early art of 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, and more! (192-page trade paperback) $29.95 (Digital Edition) $10.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-081-6

(176-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $26.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-094-6

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

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION

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!

ER EISN RD AWAINEE! NOM

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IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB

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! ED AND EXP COND SE ION! IT ED

HERO-A-GO-GO!

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

JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

The final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time, in cooperation with DC Comics! Two unused 1970s DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales, plus TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE and SOUL LOVE magazines! (176-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5

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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

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creators at the con

Vertigone But Not Forgotten This page: With DC Comics having retired the company’s storied Vertigo brand, a look at some of figures behind the groundbreaking imprint. Clockwise from upper right: Karen Berger accepts the Eisner Hall of Fame Award at the 2018 Comic-Con International: San Diego; another photo of Berger accepting the award; Former Vertigo editor Heidi MacDonald introduces speaker Karen Berger at the ICv2 Insider Talks at New York Comic Con 2016; Axel Alonso, who started as an editor at Vertigo, at New York Comic Con 2016 (when he was editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics); Then Vertigo Editor Shelly Bond holds two Eisners she accepted on behalf of Vertigo artists at San Diego Comic-Con 2015; and Berger and former DC Comics publisher Paul Levitz at San Diego Comic-Con 2017. Next page: Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, former Vertigo founder and editor Karen Berger now oversees Berger Books, a new imprint of Dark Horse Comics focused on creator-owned comics. Top photo is the team from the “Introduction to Berger Books” panel at New York Comic Con 2017. Below that are the creators from “Berger Books: the Second Wave” panel at New York Comic Con 2018.

Photography by Kendall Whitehouse

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

coming attractions: cbc #23 in the spring

Quest of the Amazing Wendy Pini

CBC #23 showcases a remarkable and revealing interview with comics pioneer and the artist extraordinaire of ElfQuest, WENDY PINI, about her difficult early years and escape to a creative life through fantasy fiction, adventure cartoons, Marvel Comics, and dance. We discuss her years as the quintessential Red Sonja cosplayer and 40+ years of ElfQuest, one of the first creator-owned titles that ushered in the new age of alternative comics, and much more about her amazing career, in a jaw-droppingly candid Q+A. We also talk to RICHARD PINI, ElfQuest co-creator, about their nearly 48-year marriage and their even-older creative partnership! Delayed from last issue, we present the final segment of our interview with CRAIG YOE, as we visit his New York abode to talk about his work on The Muppets and friendship with legendary Jim Henson, his career-changing book, The Art of Mickey Mouse, and current Yoe Books imprint. We also talk with LARRY KOSTER, onetime Gil Kane boyhood friend and business partner, about publishing His Name Is… Savage and other adventures with the raconteur comic book artist. Plus Michael Aushenker chats with the great PABLO MARCOS about his awesome Marvel horror work and so much more! Oh, and not to forget the wonderful FRED HEMBECK to round things up for our Spring ish. Full-color, 84 pgs,. $9.95 COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2020 • #22

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

I first met Gil Kane in 1974, when I was 17, at a Toronto comic con. He was selling his original art, including layouts he did throughout his career, which he would trace off onto final art pages for pencils and inks. At this point, he was still doing these breakdowns at the full 11" x 17" size; in later years he would prefer to do them at 8.5" x 11", then enlarge before light-boxing. Little did I dream that, a mere few years later, I would be a working professional colorist in the comic book industry and Gil personally asked me to color his various DC assignments. Here’s his full-size layout for the cover of Tomb of Dracula #19, which I’m proud to say I purchased that day in Toronto so very long ago, and still own today. Enjoy! And thanks again, Gil, for capturing literal poetry in motion and providing all with a lifetime of dazzling artistic amazement.— TZ

#22 • Winter 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

ALTER EGO #164

ALTER EGO #165

ALTER EGO #166

DRAW #36

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID

Spotlight on MIKE FRIEDRICH, DC/Marvel writer who jumpstarted the independent comics movement with Star*Reach! Art by NEAL ADAMS, GIL KANE, DICK DILLIN, IRV NOVICK, JOHN BUSCEMA, JIM STARLIN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, FRANK BRUNNER, et al.! Plus: MARK CARLSONGHOST on Rural Home Comics, FCA, and Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Justice League of America cover by NEAL ADAMS!

WILL MURRAY showcases original Marvel publisher (from 1939-1971) MARTIN GOODMAN, with artifacts by LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, MANEELY, BUSCEMA, EVERETT, BURGOS, GUSTAVSON, SCHOMBURG, COLAN, ADAMS, STERANKO, and many others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt with more on PETE MORISI, JOHN BROOME, and a cover by DREW FRIEDMAN!

FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA (FCA) Special, with spotlights on KURT SCHAFFENBERGER (Captain Marvel, Ibis the Invincible, Marvel Family, Lois Lane), and ALEX ROSS on his awesome painting of the super-heroes influenced by the original Captain Marvel! Plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt” on Superman editor MORT WEISINGER, JOHN BROOME, and more! Cover by SCHAFFENBERGER!

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! Contains mild nudity for figure-drawing instruction; for Mature Readers Only.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships April 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships June 2020

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(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

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BACK ISSUE #119

BACK ISSUE #120

BACK ISSUE #121

BACK ISSUE #122

BACK ISSUE #123

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.

HEROES OF TOMORROW! Mon-El hero history, STEVE LIGHTLE’s Legionnaires, and the controversial Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years era. Plus SEKOWSKY’s Manhunter 2070, GRELL’s Starslayer, Charlton’s Space: 1999 tie-in, Paradox, and MIKE BARON’s unfinished Sonic Disruptors series. Featuring the BIERBAUMS, BYRNE, GIFFEN, MAYERIK, SIMONSON, TRUMAN, VOSBURG, WAID, and more. LIGHTLE cover.

CONAN AND THE BARBARIANS! Celebrating the 50th anniversary of ROY THOMAS and BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH’s Conan #1! The Bronze Age Barbarian Boom, Top 50 Marvel Conan stories, Marvel’s Not-Quite Conans (from Kull to Skull), Arak–Son of Thunder, Warlord action figures, GRAY MORROW’s Edge of Chaos, and Conan the Barbarian at Dark Horse Comics. With an unused WINDSOR-SMITH Conan #9 cover.

Celebrates the 40TH ANNIVERSARY of MARV WOLFMAN and GEORGE PÉREZ’s New Teen Titans, featuring a guest editorial by WOLFMAN and a PÉREZ tribute and art gallery! Plus: The New Teen Titans’ 40 GREATEST MOMENTS, the Titans in the media, hero histories of RAVEN, STARFIRE, and the PROTECTOR, and more! With a NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED PÉREZ TITANS COVER from 1981!

SUPERHERO ROMANCE ISSUE! Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s many loves, Star Sapphire history, Bronze Age weddings, DeFALCO/ STERN Johnny Storm/Alicia Pro2Pro interview, Elongated Man and Wife, May-December romances, Supergirl’s Secret Marriage, and… Aunt May and Doc Ock?? Featuring MIKE W. BARR, CARY BATES, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB LAYTON, DENNY O’NEIL, and many more! Cover by DAVE GIBBONS.

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TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

WORLD OF TWOMORROWS COMIC BOOK CREATOR #23

Celebrate our 25th anniversary with this retrospective by publisher JOHN MORROW 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!

WENDY PINI discusses her days as Red Sonja cosplayer, and 40+ years of ELFQUEST! Plus RICHARD PINI on their 48-year marriage and creative partnership! SCOTT SHAW! talks about early San Diego Comic-Cons and friendship with JACK KIRBY, Captain Carrot, and Flintstones work! GIL KANE’s business partner LARRY KOSTER about their adventures together! PABLO MARCOS on his Marvel horror work, HEMBECK, and more!

(224-page FULL-COLOR TPB) $37.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 • Ships Dec. 2019

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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) $4.99 • Now shipping!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #79

See “THE BIG PICTURE” of how Kirby fits into the grand scheme of things! His creations’ lasting legacy, how his work fights illiteracy, a RARE KIRBY INTERVIEW, inconsistencies in his 1960s MARVEL WORK, editorial changes in his comics, big concepts in OMAC, best DOUBLE-PAGE SPREADS, MARK EVANIER’s 2019 Kirby Tribute Panel, PENCIL ART GALLERY, and a new cover based on OMAC #1! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Spring 2020

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

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RETROFAN #1

for shipping in the US.

RETROFAN #2

RETROFAN #6

RETROFAN #7

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!

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 Lone Ranger in Hollywood, The Dick Van Dyke Show, a vintage interview with Jonny Quest creator DOUG WILDEY, a visit to the Land of Oz, the ultra-rare Marvel World superhero playset, and 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!

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(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

RETROFAN #3

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!

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RETROFAN #9 (NOW BI-MONTHLY!)

RETROFAN #9 features interviews with two TV superheroes, Seventies’ Captain America REB BROWN… and Captain Nice (and Knight Rider’s KITT) WILLIAM DANIELS with wife BONNIE BARTLETT! Plus: remembering the Captain Nice TV series, the Wonderful World of Coloring Books, star-studded Fall Previews for Saturday morning cartoons, an eyewitness account of The Cyclops movie, the actors behind your favorite TV commercial characters, Benny Hill’s invasion of America, a trip to the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, 8-track tapes, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, Please add $1 per issue and SCOTT SHAW! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.