Comic Book Creator #24 Preview

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Scout: Marauder TM & ©2020 Timothy Truman.

A TwoMorrows Publication

No. 24, Fall 2020

Scout Master 1

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Cover art by Timothy Truman

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Ye Ed’s Rant: Keepin' nose to the grindstone in this new Covid-19 landscape............... 2 CANDIDATE WOODY CBC mascot by J.D. KING

©2020 J.D. King.

About Our Cover Art and Colors by TIMOTHY TRUMAN

COMICS CHATTER Up Front: Scott Shaw! Cartoonist. Part one of our entertaining and informative chat with the Captain Carrot co-creator and renowned Flintstones designer............ 3 Funnybook Mutts: Master cartoonist Patrick McDonnell annotates a passel of pastiches featured in his Mutts Sunday strips of iconic comic book covers............ 22 Ten Questions: Darrick Patrick gets smart insight from writer John Ostrander............ 26 Incoming: On the late Joe Sinnott and the great P. Craig Russell, and lots more......... 28

Scout: Marauder TM & © Timothy Truman.

Janice Chiang, Woman of Letters: Michael Aushenker talks to the veteran letterer.... 30 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt tells us of the Covid-19 chaos in school libraries..... 38 Hembeck’s Dateline: Our Man Fred shows that there's more than one Sandman...... 39 Remembrance: Relevant man Dennis O’Neil is remembered by Bob Brodsky............. 40 THE MAIN EVENT

Above: This issue’s featured creator produced this portrait of Victorio Santana, protagonist of the upcoming Kickstarter-funded series, Scout: Marauder. To keep tabs on this exciting series, search “Scout Marauder” at www.kickstarter.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sincere apologies to CBC go-to colorist Glenn Whitmore for omitting his credit on last issue’s Hembeck’s Dateline feature. Bad Ye Ed!

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions!

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Timothy Truman: Scout Master.

Killer artist Tim Truman shares his life-journey from backwater beginnings in West Virginia; training at the Joe Kubert School; early work with role-playing game publishers; breakout with his co-creation Grimjack (soon to be a cable TV series); creator-owned success with Scout; establishing his own imprint, 4Winds; forays into graphic histories; accomplishments as a life-long musician; work on The Grateful Dead Almanac and illustrating Robert Hunter lyrics; collaborations with Joe R. Lansdale; career as Conan writer; and much more. We also learn of his latest, the launch of a new series featuring concepts and characters that long ago helped establish the artist as a fan-favorite, Scout: Marauder ........................ 42 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: The (Virtual) 2020 Eisner Awards by Kendall Whitehouse............ 78 Coming Attractions: The big one is coming with Barry Windsor-Smith in CBC #25!..... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Trevor Von Eeden gets totally batty!........... 80 Right: A detail of Timothy Truman’s original art for his 1985 Scout retailer promotional poster, featuring Emanuel Santana, better known as Scout! Scout TM & © Timothy Truman.

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Comic Book Creator ™ is published quarterly (more or less) 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 601, 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. NEW! Two-issues subs: $23 US, $34 International, $9 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.

up front

Cartoonist Scott Shaw!

Part one of CBC’s career-spanning chat with the witty co-creator of Captain Carrot Interview conducted by JON B. COOKE

Portrait © Greg Preston. Captain Carrot TM & © DC Comics. The Flintstones TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

[A ubiquitous guest at just about every Comic-Con International: San Diego since its beginnings, cartoonist Scott Shaw! (always with an exclamation point, don’tcha know!) has, over the last 50 years or so, also maintained an impressive presence in the fields of animated cartoons, licensing art, and comic books from his Southern California environs.

Maybe best known in comics for co-creating (with writer Roy Thomas) DC’s funny animal-slash-super-hero series, Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, Scott is also renowned for his hilarious Oddball Comics Live! presentations—soon to be translated as a bona fide book coming from TwoMorrows. He was interviewed by phone, in a world quite unlike our present one, in the Summer of 2019, and it was transcribed by Rose Rummel-Eury.]

CBC: Where are you from originally, Scott?

Scott: I was born in Queens, New York in the Navy hospital. My dad’s ship was capsized at Pearl Harbor. Obviously, he survived or I wouldn’t be here to speak with you. Since the Navy suddenly really needed officers, Dad was made one very quickly.

They referred to guys with that promotion a “Mustang.”

We lived on Long Island in the servants’ quarters of a mansion because my father had been assigned to be an aide to an admiral.

We moved to San Diego when I was about two-anda-half. Again, it was because my dad was in the Navy, but he had always wanted to live in San Diego because that’s where he went to boot camp before he was shipped out to Hawaii when he was a kid. I consider myself a San Diegan, but my secret origin is in New York City.

CBC: Do you have siblings?

Scott: Nope, I’m convinced that I became a weirdo due to being an only child.

Frankly, I enjoyed it and never yearned to have a sibling. I liked to read and draw and watch television, so I was never bored. When you’re an only child, your parents give you plenty of room.

Now kids are practically forced to take piano lessons on Monday, singing lessons on Tuesday, judo lessons on Wednesday, and so on. My parents apparently had been trying to conceive for a while and I was finally the big payoff. They never had another kid; I don’t know if it was a biological problem or not. I was in the first group of kids in California to go be in the San Diego City School System’s GATE program for “Gifted and Talented Education.” I think they were targeting the smartest kids to guide into science and math so we could help President Eisenhower destroy the Commies. [chuckles] This was in the ’50s. I was born in 1951. My teachers told my folks that I could “do anything I COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2020 • #24

put my mind to,” which was the worst thing they could have told any parent. It set their expectations waaaaay too high. Besides, I had zero interest in being like the other smarties in my class. I was interested in paleontology and cartooning.

When a teacher told me that studying paleontology would land me a good job at a big oil company, I decided, “Well, it’s cartooning for sure.” [chuckles] Then, of course, in 1960, HannaBarbera’s The Flintstones came out, and that prime-time show kinda changed my life.

CBC: How old, roughly, were your parents?

Scott: They were probably in their late 30s, which was about ten years behind most parents. Kinda unusual for their generation.

CBC: You had a lot of time to yourself? It was a suburban neighborhood you grew up in?

Scott: Yeah. The great thing about living in San Diego was, once we moved there, we never had to move again. There were nine active Navy bases in town

Above: Greg Preston portrait of the cartoonist in question, here surrounded by Simpsons figures he designed. This pic was taken in or around 2016..

Inset left: Detail of Captain Carrot from Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #4 [June 1985], with art by Scott Shaw!

Below: Besides the wielder of cosmic carrots, Scott Shaw! is well-known for his work as animator of The Flintstones characters, the cartoon show that changed the cartoonist’s life when it debuted in 1960.

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Above: Irreverent from the start, Scott Shaw! mugs for the camera while out strolling in his baby stroller in the early 1950s.

Below: The future cartoonist’s very first super-hero comic book was the innocuous Superboy #57 [June 1957], with its “Strong Boys of Smallville” cover feature, written by Otto Binder with pencil art by Curt Swan (and, according to The Grand Comics Database, quite possibly Ray Burnley inks).

#24 • Fall 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Superboy TM & © DC Comics.

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and my dad was like an honest “Sgt. Bilko” because he really knew how to “work the system.” I think growing up in the Depression made him bolder, too. Anyway, if it was time for him to be reassigned, and if he wanted to work on Coronado Island for a while—this was back before San Diego’s Coronado Bay Bridge was built, in 1970, and he had to take a ferry to go to work—he’d make a few calls and probably call in a few favors, and boom, they’d move him to Coronado. He went from one base to another for two decades. The most exciting thing that ever happened for him (and me!) was when he was made the commanding officer of San Nicolas Island, off the coast of Santa Barbara. It was the island in Scott O’Dell’s The Island of the Blue Dolphins, a popular book with Californian fourth-graders. That was a top-secret facility and he had to go to school in Florida to earn top secret clearance.

Again, he managed to “get his bearings” (as he’d refer to his routine of getting his way), and wrangled a way to fly me out there on a Navy plane for ten days. I was nine years old an I felt like Jonny Quest, though it was 1960, so this was pre-Jonny Quest, which didn’t air on ABC until 1964! There were live sea elephants on San Nicolas and flocks of cormorants. They had an undersea cave with petroglyphs of whales, sharks, and seal lions on the walls. It was the wildest place I’ve ever been. My dad even found a human skull and some bones from an ancient tribe that the gulls and cormorants unearthed; we donated them to the Museum of Man, in Balboa Park. It was very cool experience for my dad, who was stationed there for a few years. He’d drive back home every other weekend and bring abalone

and lobsters that the sailors on San Nicolas had caught for him. After he finally moved back to San Diego, it wasn’t long before the Cuban Bay of Pigs crisis. Because he had top-secret clearance, I’m pretty sure my father was aware that San Diego would be one of the foreign missiles’ targets if the situation turned bad. Of course, America dodged that nuclear bullet.

CBC: Were you tight with your dad?

Scott: Yeah. I never knew this until his funeral, but some of my father’s friends from the town where he grew up traveled out to San Diego told me that my dad had wanted to be an artist, too. Apparently, he had hoped to be a commercial artist—a sign painter, that sort of thing. At least that’s what they said. Oddly, my father never said a word about it to me. But looking back, his interest in art was obvious. Dad enjoyed lettering, and when I was a little boy, he taught me how to letter with speedball pens. He brought home those early versions of marker pens that had so much solvent in them you could probably inhale the fumes and the pigment in ’em would color your nose green. He loved to spend time painting those then-popular paint-by-number kits when he was away from home, and he made some very elaborate Christmas displays to decorate our house, which, in the ’50s, was a big deal in California’s suburbs. At the funeral, his buddies asked, “Oh, did you know your dad wanted to be a cartoonist too?” I said, “No, he just showed me how to do stuff.” Looking back, he wasn’t much of a handyman, but he was great with the stuff I was interested in. I kinda took it all for granted, y’know? “Oh, he’s my old man. He knows how to do everything.”

I had so many cartoonist heroes at a young age: people like Dr. Seuss, Mort Walker, Jay Ward, Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, and many others, Dad probably thought, “Oh, I’ll sound like an a-hole if I say that I wanted to be an artist, too.” He was a very humble guy.

CBC: What was his name?

Scott: Garlin.

CBC: And your mom’s maiden name?

Scott: Dorothy Lacy. They were both from the same place in a fairly large town in the middle of Illinois—Decatur, known as “the Soybean Capital of the World,” which was on a sign posted on the way into town. My dad lived on a farm, but his father also owned the first beauty shop there.

My mom lived in town. Many of Decatur’s residents worked at Staley’s, the corporation that owned the local soybean plant, but my dad wanted to see the rest of the world, so he joined the Navy. He and my mom both attended the same high school and even lived in the same house at different times but never knew each other until after World War II when, at a mutual friend’s urging, they started corresponding with each other.

CBC: Interesting. Did she go to college?

Scott: No, they were both high school kids. Mom was more or less self-educated; when I was in high school, she was the office manager for an insurance company. They were both smart people but for some reason, they rarely read for pleasure, just the San Diego Evening Tribune for the news. I was always reading, so I was the odd one in the family. My dad’s favorite thing was to lay on the living room floor in his underwear, staring into the flames in the fireplace. I have a feeling that was how he handled his memories of the terrible stuff he experienced in WWII and, later, the evacuation of Vietnam.

CBC: Did you have newspapers coming into the house?

Scott: Yep, newspapers and comic books. I was born in 1951 and my parents were already buying me comic books when we lived in New York City, so I was under two.

Decades later, I asked my mother, in reference to Dr. Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, “Were you trying to turn me into a juvenile delinquent?” Mom rolled her eyes and said, “All I know is you seemed to really need them.”

Comic books and comic strips gave me the opportunity to teach myself how to read before kindergarten. The pictures

Coltman TM & © Scott Shaw!

account! The Quisps, Quakes, Cap’n Crunches, even King Vitamins with Joe Flynn’s voice—I love all that stuff! I even had an opportunity to intern at Jay Ward as a kid. I was in the 11th grade and was a teacher’s aide—at my old junior high school, with my old teacher, the only art class I ever was allowed to take, due to the GATE program—assisting her operate her art class. One of the school’s other art teachers had an ex-husband who worked at Jay Ward.

She was very supportive of my goal to become a cartoonist and asked if it would be okay to sent my sketchbook to her ex for a critique. His name was Jim Hiltz and he was one of Jay Ward studio’s top animators and directors; he even worked on Yellow Submarine, my favorite animated film!

Anyway, he must have liked my samples, because at his suggestion, Jay Ward’s management contacted my parents for permission to ask me, “We like to know if you’d like to come here and work as an intern?” This was when George of the Jungle was airing on ABC—the only show Ward ever entirely animated in the U.S.—which was blowing my mind every Saturday morning. Somewhere along the line, no one had told our contact that I was a 14-year-old high school student. It was an insanely wonderful opportunity, but my parents weren’t going to move from San Diego to Los Angeles so I could have a free job for a few months at a cartoon studio. It just wasn’t in the cards. If that had happened, things would have worked out even better for me… or not.

Who knows?

CBC: Do you think you could have just as well been a writer?

Scott: I think writing is easier than drawing and I think my writing is better than my drawings. I started writing most of my comics about twenty years ago. I’m willing to work with writers I trust and whose work I respect, but there aren’t many of ’em left other than Mark Evanier.

CBC: Why? Scott: If you’re gonna be a writer of animated cartoons or comic books, it’s necessary to have a keen sense of visualization. Unfortunately, most don’t. Things might be better if the editors who hire writers had keen senses of visualization, but they usually don’t either. Those are the people who give you scripts that are impossible to draw.

The average writer doesn’t seem to understand that you can’t have somebody climbing a ladder and carrying six items at the same time. Nobody wants to get stuck drawing a story about a guy who repeatedly climbs up and down ladders. That’s a typical example.

Writers, even good writers, need to have their material fixed a bit. And of course, since I mainly do funny stuff, most writers who think they’re funny do not share my sense of humor, and that’s always a bad situation. So now, with a few exceptions, I write the stories that I draw. If I write, “The Prussian Army is coming over the hill,” then I’m the sucker who has to draw it. My scripts intentionally give myself challenging things to draw that may take me a week to draw for almost no money. But, at my age—I’ll turn 69 in September 2020—I feel it’s important to keep getting better.

Will Eisner and I talked about adjusting your approach to fit what you’re capable of drawing. So far, my eyesight is good, my hands are steady, and my brains still firing on all plugs, so I want to get a lot of challenging cartooning work done while I still can. I don’t want to give you the same ol’ stuff. I realize that lots of cartoonists kinda grind it out. I don’t ever want to be the guy who grinds it out.

CBC: You don’t want to be a hack.

Scott: Nope, not me. Never. Uh-uh.

CBC: What’s your favorite piece you’ve ever done?

Scott: I don’t have one.

CBC: Top ten?

Scott: I really don’t know. I’m constantly thinking about my next thing. If you’re a freelancer, you kinda have to, but my brain is always cooking up new stuff. I’ve got an agent pitching a number of graphic novels of mine, some for kids, some for adults.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2020 • #24

Y’know I am proud of those Pebbles cereal commercials that made half of America’s children diabetic, [chuckles] but it was because I got to help make the Flintstones funny again and animated much more fully than most of H-B’s original episodes. I did dozens of ’em yet I’m always surprised when people know which ones I worked on, because most people don’t keep track of commercials. We had the time and the budget to animate them here and to make ‘em the way I intended. But even those have flaws or one sort of another. I know that no one notices them but I do and I’m a perfectionist. When look back at my body of work, I see all the flaws, and think, “Well, I’d better not do that again.”

CBC: Were comics always of big interest to you?

Scott: Comics, cartoons, and any application thereof. I was interested in editorial cartooning. I did editorial cartooning for my high school and college papers and I really admired editorial cartoonists; I especially liked The Los Angeles Times’ Paul Conrad. It’s bad enough that newspapers are dying, but even worse, editorial cartoonists are being attacked for doing their job in an era of history when they should be considered essential workers. Some people think like comedians and editorial cartoonists shouldn’t have the right to mock the government. Geez, at least in the case of editorial cartoons, this is why they were created in the first place. My response to those haters is “Haven’t you ever heard of Thomas Nast?” And their response is, “Who’s that?”

CBC: Hmm. When was the first time you were published?

Above: San Diego Evening Tribune article on anti-drug and pro-comic book Scott Shaw! printed during his senior year (and reprinted in Rocket’s Blast Comicollector #63).

Below: As his Crawford High School mascot was a colt, Scott Shaw! produced his super-hero parody comic strip, Coltman, for his class newspaper, The Pacer.

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Scott: In fifth grade, I did a watercolor painting of what I imagined downtown San Diego would look like at midnight on New Year’s Eve. It wound up in a San Diego City Schools art show in Balboa Park and they did a nice, published booklet that reproduced my painting in it. That was 1960.

When I went to Horace Mann Junior High, I initially just stole newsprint paper from the math department to draw endless serialized comics about school life, which I’d pass around among my classmates. In ninth grade, I wound up working as a columnist and the staff cartoonist on our school’s paper, The Cougar. My first comic strip was a direct swipe of a Short Ribs Sunday strip. I really liked Frank O’Neal’s drawing style a lot. It looked like a combination of the house-styles of Jay Ward and Hanna-Barbera.

My strip was called Waldo Wipeout, a surfer because San Diego was a surfing town. I edited out a few panels from the original Short Ribs, but otherwise, it was pure juvenile plagiarism.

CBC: Like he said… “steal.”

Scott: No wonder I liked Hanna-Barbera—they con-

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Gory Stories Quarterly TM & © the respective copyright holder. The Turd TM & © Scott Shaw!

This page: Of acute notoriety during Scott Shaw!’s earliest comic book work is his odorous swamp monster parody, “The Turd,” which appeared in Gory Stories Quarterly #2½ [1972].

vinced me that “it’s okay to rip off people!” Hey, that’s how you sell cereal! [laughter] Two years later, I was writing columns and drawing comics for Will C. Crawford High School’s The Pacer, a bi-weekly newspaper. My first comic strip was called Coltman because our school mascot was a goofy red colt. He was a super-hero with a colt’s head. It wasn’t a swipe, but it was a parody of super-hero comics with gags that nobody but my fanboy friends understood.

Was I just ahead of my time? After a dozen installments, I was convinced to retire Coltman and focus on more familiar high school topics in a new feature called Shaw!s Strip.

(Yeah, I’d been attaching that exclamation point to my name since Waldo Wipeout.) Crawford was by far the biggest high school in San Diego, therefore we had enough comics, sci-fi, and monster movie fans that we had our own club, The Underground Film Society, bearing that name since it sounded cooler and more mysterious than The Comic Book, Sci-Fi, and Monster Movie Fan Club. We even had a smart, cute track-star girl as a member! Nobody messed with us.

In fact, a lot of us were involved in the creation of the San Diego Comic-Con. CBC: Who else was in the group?

Scott: Cartoonist/illustrator/commercial artist/painter/fine artist John Pound was two years behind me and we collaborated on fanzines and episodes of both our Pacer strips.

He took over job of staff cartoonist for our newspaper after I graduated. Both of us were first published in a comic book called Gory Stories Quarterly, published by Ken Krueger, one of the co-founders of the San Diego Comic-Con. CBC: Featuring Scott Shaw!’s “The Turd.”

Scott: Guilty as charged. Our fan group also included science fiction author Greg Bear, who has won multiple Hugo Awards, and Professor Roger Freedman, who’s a physicist who’s also an author of textbooks, has taught classes in “science fiction for scientists,” and used to letter my underground comix stories. David Clark, my only friend who got drafted to Vietnam, was also a key member who’s both a sommelier—a wine salesman—and a poet. Jann Morris, the only fangirl in our gang, lost touch with fandom after graduation for 40 years, but now is a popular presence at various San Diego fan events. We had a lot of people there making it pay off. Many of us went to the same junior high, so we really knew and trusted one another and our supportive criticism and friendly competition were great influences on honing young creator-types’ skills.

CBC: How would you describe San Diego of your youth?

Did it have a small-town feel to it?

Scott: It was a Navy town. A major portion of the local population was affiliated with the Navy—being in the Navy, working for the Navy, having businesses that relied on the Navy, or having a relative in the Navy.

San Diego was a wonderful place to grow up, at least to this middle-class white son of a naval officer. We had Balboa Park, the beaches, the mountains, Belmont Park and, just across the border, Tijuana. But downtown San Diego was the opposite, filled with strip clubs, pool halls, card rooms, porn shops, and flop house hotels. It wasn’t a savory place for drunken recruits on shore leave, so definitely not for naive fanboys. But that area also contained a huge public library and a lot of used bookstores and movie theaters, destinations which made it irresistible to my group of cultural weirdos. There were three grindhouse theaters in San Diego’s Horton Plaza, where you could see three movies for a mere 50¢.

Three or four of us would take the bus downtown, grab lunch at Woolworth’s counter, enjoy a few monster movies, scrounge around Broadway’s Ye Old Magazine Shoppe and the Lanning Bookshop, and triumphantly return home via the bus. Before each expedition, my practical dad would warn me [dad voice], “Make sure you take a flashlight because when sailors on shore leave go on a drinking binge and one of their buddies can’t hold his liquor, they park him in a theater until he sobers up, and he winds up puking all

the art of homage

Funnybook Mutts Patrick McDonnell has his Earl and Mooch pay tribute to iconic comic book covers [If you’re any fan of newspaper comic strips, you’re fully aware that one of the great practitioners currently working is Patrick McDonnelI, the masterful cartoonist who produces Mutts, called “one of the best comic strips of all time,” by no less than Charles Schulz. For 25 years now, the New Jerseybased creator has chronicled the charming antics of Earl the dog and Mooch the cat, in both daily and Sunday strips. For the latter, the cartoonist has made clever and often hilarious “title panels” that are direct parodies of everything from famous paintings to cereal packaging. And many times, McDonnell paid homage to classic comic book covers. So, after connecting for The Book of Weirdo (in which he talked of being pal and neighbor of Peter Bagge), I asked if we could include a feature of his best comics pastiches and—yesh!—here ’tis, along with P.M.’s comments!—Ye Ed.] I’ve always loved comic art. Some of my earliest memories are of looking at my mom’s Pogo and Jules Feiffer paperback books. I recall being mesmerized with how alive those pen-&-ink drawings were on the page. Later, I discovered Peanuts in our local newspaper and became totally hooked. I grew up in the ’60s and devoured all the amazing groundbreaking comic imagery of the time.

The newspaper comics (Harold Gray, Chester Gould and Ernie Bushmiller were still producing their classic strips); the kid comic books (Dennis the Menace, Little Archie, Richie Rich); MAD magazine (Don Martin and Sergio Aragonés); the Golden Age strip reprint books (Krazy Kat, Popeye); and all the super-hero stuff (some DC, but mostly Marvel, particularly Kirby and Ditko). And, in my teens, Robert Crumb and the undergrounds. These all had an influence on my Mutts work.

So, on occasion, I pay a direct homage to a favorite. The Sunday newspaper funnies have a title panel, also known as the throwaway panel, because some papers choose not to print it. So cartoonists can pretty much use them as they wish. In my Mutts title panels, I have fun recreating images from the worlds of art—fine art paintings, film posters, magazine, album and book covers, and, of course, comics. Presented here a few Mutts title panels that pay tribute to my comic-book inspirations. I’ve also included a couple of entire Sunday strips that do likewise.

—Patrick McDonnell

Left: MAD #1—The Nov. 2, 1997, Mutts Sunday strip. “Harvey Kurtzman has a wonderful spontaneity and looseness in in his art.”

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Photo by Kim Levin. Mutts TM & © Patrick McDonnell. Superman TM & © DC Comics. MAD TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc. Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Superman #1 – The June 16, 1996, Mutts Sunday strip. “Although I wasn’t thinking of it at the time, my first comic tribute was to the first Superman comic.”

darrick patrick’s ten questions

The Ostrander Method Grimjack’s co-creator and Suicide Squad re-inventor has some words for newbie writers

by DARRICK PATRICK [What better writer to showcase in this issue celebrating artist Timothy Truman, than his frequent collaborator John Ostrander? Prior to his start at Chicago-based First Comics in 1983, John was an actor with the legendary Organic Theatre, the group that originally produced the science fiction and comics-centric play, Warp! Early on at First, the writer co-created Grimjack with Truman. (An adaptation of Grimjack is currently in development as a TV series, produced by no less that the Russo Brothers of The Avengers: Endgame fame.) Other notable work includes John’s Suicide Squad reboot, The Spectre (with artist Tom Mandrake), and a number of Star Wars stories at Dark Horse.—Y.E.] Above: Nabbed from his Facebook page, a 2017 photo of writer John Ostrander.

Above: Superb Sandy Plunkett Spectre cover [#3, Feb. 1993], during John’s lauded run.

Below: The team’s line-up by Luke McDonnell, from Who’s Who Update ’88 #3 [Oct. 1988].

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The Spectre, Suicide Squad TM & © DC Comics.

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Darrick Patrick: What was the journey that led you to writing professionally within comic books as a career?

John Ostrander: I was always a reader, back as far as I could remember. I still am. Anything and everything. My family first learned I could read when I was reading the back of a cereal package (or maybe it was a milk carton) at the table. It’s the one thing I could do really well: read.

That especially included comic books, but my mother was influenced by Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (I don’t know if she read it or just heard about it), so super-hero comics were forbidden, which meant, of course, that I had to find them and then hide them. It was sort of my childhood porn stash and, every once in a while, my mother would find them and throw them out amidst a great deal of angst on my part. Some of the comics that were thrown out would be worth a great deal later on. (I should mention that, later on, my mom was quite proud of my comic book career, although I’m not sure if she actually read any of them. Take that, Dr. Wertham.)

In high school, I discovered the theater and acting and pursued that into college, all the time still reading comics. I also established a friendship with Mike Gold, which would pay off later. After college, I was involved in various theater companies in Chicago (running one—very badly—as well).

I also made the acquaintance of Del Close and took improv

classes from him as Second City in Chicago. This would prove very influential on me.

Mike was one of those starting up First Comics and, knowing my love of the medium, gave me a shot. And the rest, as they say, is hysteria.

Darrick: Who are some of the people that greatly influenced you (in your personal life) while growing up?

John: Let’s assume outside of comics. I’ll start with my twin brother, Joe. He’s my fraternal twin and we don’t look, act, or behave alike. To show you how little we are alike, in college Joe came up to me with a Sweet Young Thing he had recently met and said to me, “She doesn’t believe you and I are twins. Get out your driver’s license and show her.”

I grimaced and got the license out, but as I did so, I said, “Is he pulling that stunt again? I’m his cousin from California and we just happened to be born on the same day. He pulls this gag all the time.” Sweet Young Thing said, “I knew it!” and flounced off. Joe sputtered, “But… but… but…!” He growled at me and went off pursuing Sweet Young Thing. I never saw her again so I assume it didn’t work out.

Joe and I shared a bedroom together all through grade school and most of high school, too, I think. Joe was more of an extrovert; I was a bit of an introvert. He was the alpha of we two, but I found ways to get back at him by being sneaky and subversive—traits I still have. We both do Elmer Fudd impressions and have dueling Elmer Fudds whenever we get together or even just call. We start with a round of “Hewwo?” on the phone. I was the Best Man at his wedding, as he was at mine. He made me the godfather to his first child, Julie. My mom used to say that, as babies, we’d be out for a walk with her. If she sat on a bench, he would turn to me and say something in baby twin gibberish and I would respond and then we would take off in different directions. Mom was bigger and faster and was able to round us up pretty quick, but it was still a near thing. At some family gatherings, we’re not allowed to sit together because we can get up to something pretty fast. He’s my brother, my buddy, my co-conspirator. I love him.

There were others: family, of course, and my gang— Jerry Gavin, Pat Devaney, and Rick Rynders. In grade school, I wrote one-page serials for each of them almost every day, which, I believe, they never read and threw away, but I wrote a lot of crap out of my system and could be considered the start of my writing career. I even adapted one as a screenplay and, with the Super 8 movie camera that Jerry’s mom owned, we made our own movie one summer. I intended to sync it up with a tape recorder so we could have sound, but that never worked, so it wound up just a silent. It ended with a pie fight. We were going to put it on in a basement and charge neighborhood kids a quarter to see it, but my mom heard and made us give all the money back. Ghod help me, but the last time I talked with Jerry, he said he had a copy of that film somewhere, so it could yet haunt me on YouTube.

A girl I was crushing on in sophomore year went to an all-girl’s Catholic high school, Marywood, in Evanston. They were having auditions for a play and they needed boys for the play. I had never acted, but I figured, if I got in the play, maybe I might sorta kinda

incoming

PCR, Joe, Chadwick, and Don Art of a prince, passings of a master and of a king, and the humanity of McGregor Write to CBC: jonbcooke@aol.com or P. O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892

Below: Mark Sinnott, who kindly facilitated Ye Ed.’s visit to see his father, Joe, last September, was very kind to send a prayer card after the artist’s passing this past June. The reverse had “An Irish Blessing.”

Bottom: In answer to a letter writer, here’s the Frank Quitely pic not seen in CBC #22

Terrific interview with Joe and Mark Sinnott! I was expecting something far shorter and significantly lighter: a brunch conversation. Here, instead, an abundance of new information about Joe, himself, and his years away from Marvel. How ironic that Joe unintentionally learned of Treasure Chest from an issue his daughter brought home. Joe’s likenesses of the Beatles were, indeed, excellent.

What I especially loved is all the new photos of Joe surrounded by his fellow professionals on Joe Sinnott Day. People who liked his work and, more importantly, appreciate him as a cherished friend. Or the family photos of Joe graduating and on his wedding day.

As for the ending and questions you could have asked, well, maybe that could be an occasional new department?

It could be the way to have readers write in, too, to suggest areas you might’ve missed. I don’t think with 15 pages, you shortchanged us, but I had some curiosity about two things.

First: how did the five Sinnott Thors come about—Journey Into Mystery #91, 92, 94–96)? Extra time in Joe’s schedule? Why that instead of inking the Fantastic Four again on #14, 15, and 17–19, on sale at that same time?

Secondly, when Joe returned for good, in ’65, why the X-Men #13 and “Nick Fury” stories in Strange Tales #139 and 140? Was he to take those over? Or just fill-ins till they saw how astoundingly improved he made the art, as inker, on Fantastic Four, with #44?

That interview, to me, would have been enough to love the issue, but you doubled-up with a great P. Craig Russell talk, as well. Thirty pages, but they zoomed by.

You even hit on something I thought isolated to me.

That is, I love his work on operas without even being an opera fan. I’ve only attended one, to keep a college friend company, and didn’t care for the experience. Too much loud singing! (My friend was amused. She told me, “Loved you

sneaking furtive looks at your watch.”) Yet, in his adaptations, there’s clearly a story told but in a way—visual rather than auditory—that captures my interest. So, the same material but in a preferable form that wins me over. I’m sure, for opera fans, it’s doubly pleasing. They like the music and art. Me, hardly so cultured, I still am amazed to be hooked. Yet, the storytelling and distinctive art is undeniably amazing. Even when he’s tackling fine literature, same thing. Identical story; more charm his way.

Though I prefer his art, solo, he’s also proven himself a respectful inker over other favorite artists such as Steve Ditko and Gil Kane. Superb workmanship! His Rom issues, over Steve, were extraordinary. I didn’t care about the story or premise, but the artistry was outstanding. Sad they didn’t combine, later, on something with more substantial content.

Yes, he must be self-assured in that he’s not tied down to one company or character. He’s still working and turning out fine material, for which I’m thankful. Nice to anticipate new work and not just reprints.

Additional gems this issue: Gil Kane’s Tomb of Dracula rough; the Frank Quitely hotel wall art; and the Bill Schelly tribute. That was unexpected and a shame. What a unique career: as a kid and an adult with a 20-year hiatus in the middle. Regardless, plenty of reasons to be glad he returned: meticulous coverage of fandom’s founders and early practitioners, along with in-depth biographies of Joe Kubert, Harvey Kurtzman, and James Warren, among others. He accomplished a lot, covered topics and individuals in great detail and added, significantly, to the history of the form. Best of all, it sounded like he really enjoyed it.

A tremendous issue, Jon. One of your very best.

[Thank you, Joe! Your loyalty as reader and letter writer is greatly appreciated! Joe Sinnott’s son Mark can’t authoritatively answer your question, he did say, “Remember, at that time, my dad was still considered a penciler and inker.”

A quick look-see on the Grand Comics Database for 1963 indicates the Joltin’ One was working steady for any number of clients—much of it pencils and inks—including Dell, Charlton, Dell, Marvel, and the aforementioned Treasure Chest (George A. Pflaum, publisher), so I’m betting he was already booked solid!—Ye Crusading Editor.]

Ian Millsted On my first visit to the local comic shop after stores started to re-open here in England, I found CBC#22 waiting for me, probably arrived there just as things were closing down.

Glad to see it as I wondered if it might have got lost in the shuffle with the Diamond temporary closure, etc.

Quite a full issue, but I feel I should start with the tribute to Bill Schelly. I never met Bill, although we did correspond by email a couple of times over a suggested contribution to his section of Alter Ego, which I never got around to doing for various reasons. Despite not having met, I felt a genuine sense of loss when I heard he had died. I enjoyed the Comic Fandom Archive and a range of his books. I felt I knew him a little from his memoir, Sense of Wonder. I also admired his ability to have an idea and then make it happen. Having recently committed to writing a biography of a British science fiction writer, I look to Bill as a model for how to do it. Half as well as Bill and I’ll be happy.

Sad too that this issue should reach me so close to the #24 • Fall 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Frank Quitely hotel room art photo by Mike Best.

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Joe Frank

a chat with chiang

A Woman of Letters

Michael Aushenker talks with letterer Janice Chiang about her long career in comics Conducted by MICHAEL AUSHENKER CBC Associate Editor

Above: Among the myriad comics titles Janice Chiang’s lettering has graced, DC’s Impulse [1995–2002] was a particularly charming book. This cover is from #48 [May 1999].

Below: The woman herself, Janice Chiang, in a 2012 photo.

Comic Book Creator: You’ve worked with so many luminaries in the comics industry. And yet, because of the assembly line nature of American comics, you probably have yet to meet many of your collaborators!

Janice Chiang: I recently teamed up with Danny Fingeroth on a short story for a collection named Yiddishland, where the theme is about cantors who ventured into vaudeville. I’ve lettered many projects, so I know the majority of freelancers by name only. I thought, ‘Oh, so that’s Mike Vosburg! He sounds like a really nice guy.’ I had met Rich Buckler while waiting on line at the Big Apple Comic Con, in October, 2009. We had teamed on some books back in 1975, when I was working in the Marvel Bullpen. Rich said he remembered me… nice to find a living witness of my first staff job in Marvel.

CBC: What are some misconceptions about letterers?

Janice: People think we’re just copying words and we can’t think for ourselves. It goes back to how I approach lettering. My background is fine arts. My fonts… it doesn’t look like anyone else’s. I studied at Hunter College. We were a very creative family. My mother could look at a dress and sew that dress. She could see a sweater and knit it. My father could build things. A big promotion by the age of 12 for me was to use a circular saw. My father had so much faith in us that we could do the process. I learned how to do crafts at age five, how to do create something out of nothing. I’m the first generation-born here. My parents #24 • Fall 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Impulse TM & © DC Comics.

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[A legend among letterers, Janice Chiang is a familiar name to any avid ’80s comics reader. She broke into comics in the mid-’70s, when she began freelancing for Marvel, and she continues to letter to this day. Best known to the Bronze Age generation for her lettering on such books as Transformers, Visionaries, and ROM, Janice also worked long stints on some of comicdom’s most popular series: Conan the Barbarian [1982–90), Alpha Flight [1987–94], Iron Man [1987–90], Ghost Rider [1990–96], What If? [1990–95], and Impulse [1999–2002]. She has also toiled for Dark Horse, Scholastic, Acclaim, and Tokyo Pop. “I simultaneously freelanced for Marvel, DC,and the now-defunct Tundra,” she tells me. “I worked on Disney Adventures—whatever editor Heidi MacDonald gave me. I recently worked on Archie Loves Betty and also an Archie Loves Veronica.” (And contrary to a credit on her Wikipedia profile, she did not do any work as a colorist!) “I lettered Mark Texiera on Ghost Rider, Mark Bright on Iron Man,” Chiang says. “I did Rob Liefeld’s first work for DC, on Hawk and Dove, as well as work by Jim Lee and Kelley Jones.”

Janice added, “I continued as freelance letterer for Marvel and DC until 2004, then I took a break from comics. From 2001–04, I worked for the Chamber of Commerce of Greater Harlem on “Harlem Week” campaigns as a freelance graphic designer.” Since the late 1990s, Chiang has not only returned to form, but she has adapted quite smoothly to the digital revolution that changed comic book production forever circa 1993.

Her Random House work includes Kagetora [vols.

2–5], Suzuka [1–3], and Air Gear [vol. 1–4]. “It’s great to see the young Japanese characters having the same problems as the kids have here,” she says. “In my youth, there were no positive images of Asian people. It was either the Fu Manchu stereotype, kungfu, or the nerd. These books reinforce sophistication and tolerance.”

For Papercutz, she recently worked on Smurfs comics and the Italian translation of Disney’s Fairies. Emma, Vol. 1, was chosen by NewType anime/ manga magazine as book of the month in September, 2006, and by the Young Adult Library Services Association as one of the greatest graphic novels in 2007. In 2009, The Village Voice named Danny Fingeroth’s adaptation of Stud Terkel’s

Working, one of the best graphic novels of the year, in which Janice lettered two short stories.

However, she is much more than the sum of her credits and the writers and artists she has teamed up with. She is a thoughtful, philosophical, complex and multi-layered artist with personal tastes that transcend her ostensible métier.

One of her favorite movies is Old Yeller, and one book impressed her was George Leonard’s The Art of Mastery.

Referring to her son, Janice said,“I gave Calvin this book, when he was ten years old, to help him gain some perspective of what is conditional, subjective, and what he could truly control on his path to whatever he decided to master.”

Janice shares, “If we can express our mutual understanding of how passion, diligence, and principle drives our work and other aspects of our lives… Sometimes we get lucky and we are able to pursue what we initially target as our passion. Other times, we find ourselves in situations that we never anticipated. The elements that comprise ‘passion’ may be applied in other arenas. If we’re fortunate, we do get another chance, as I am experiencing now.”

For 37 years, Janice has lived in Woodstock, New York, with her husband, Danny Louie. When asked how she’s managed to work so far away from Manhattan early on in her career, she responded that, in the old days, “Federal Express helped me out. I’d overnight it from Woodstock.

Basically, we built up the Federal Express business here. It was insane… When I was doing a lot of monthlies, I’d work on 5 to 10 pages at a time… and I never dropped the hot potatoes.”

Most of the following interview originally appeared on my Cartoon Flophouse blog in 2011, though Janice shares an update as an addendum. —M.A.]

ROM, The Transformers TM & © Hasbro, Inc. Photo © Kendall Whitehouse.

grew up in China. My mother’s name was Hop Kun. My father’s name was Bay Doc. My father came to New York when he was 13½. In 1892, after Chinese came to build the Transcontinental Railroad, there was an economic crisis. A lot of scapegoating went on with the immigrants. The Manchus were in control of China. The immigrants had to wear a long braid to differentiate them from the Manchus—a lot of Chinese had long braids… My father was sponsored as a paper son [fake relative] with a Chinese laundry or restaurant business. He did hand laundry.

My mom and dad ran a business at home. They were really accessible.

Basically, where we lived, they did hand laundry at these apartments on East Elmhurst, in Queens. I had two older sisters and a younger brother. One of my sisters is Fay Chiang, a well-known poet.

As far as the immigration experience, China was not a friend to this country until an open-door policy in 1962. It was not comfortable being Asian. You would keep a low profile. Look like what they did to the Japanese[-American] people [in California, during World War II]. Basically, all of us connected with the fine arts.

The creativity in the family home situation fit into writing and artwork.

My sisters, Fay and Jean, were at Hunter College, already studying fine arts. So I was the third Chiang in there.

When we went to Hunter, Fay was in the anti-war movement. She was bringing literature in the house from the Black Panthers. It gave me a broad view of what was going on. What really got me angry was when they murdered Fred Hampton. It made me question, “What’s this democracy and who are we helping?” I became active in the anti-war movement. A lot of students were active. They’re killing people who look like us over there. Fay started organizing ethnic studies and we were very active in the Asian-American organization. Like what’s going on right now in Arizona, if you look Latino, you’re going to be stopped. We were all there [at Hunter] at the same time. Basement Workshop, an Asian-American multi-arts organization, was taking up community issues, Civil Rights issues. Larry Hama was part of that organization. He’s an artist and musician. That’s how I got into comics. Larry’s sort of my mentor. His mom is really talented. She had her own dress shop. She made couture clothing and she would copy it. Larry told me, “I love hanging around women! They smell nice and they’re creative.”

CBC: So that’s why Larry was off to a red-tag sale when I caught him for a phone interview [in Jan. 2010, for Back Issue]!

Janice: When he was 12, he got a subscription to Vogue.

I’ve known Larry since I was 13½. They would do these Asian arts festivals that he was a part of. This was back in 1972. The great thing about New York City is that it’s multi-ethnic. Back then, there was a big structure being built and no Asian-American workers on site. We said, “Something’s wrong here.” There were no Chinese policemen and there’s a big language gap, no bilingual teachers.

There were a lot of things to be done, and we were inspired by the African-American movement. There was a real flow of creativity.

CBC: How did a fine arts major such as yourself start on a path to lettering?

Janice: I never finished Hunter College; I just left. Basically, I made a lot of decisions that were unconventional.

Struggle is a big part of my life. You see something and you move forward rather than stand there and being scared.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2020 • #24

Larry Hama’s partner, Ralph Reese, taught me how to letter.

They were working together under the name of Crusty Bunkers [the gang of inkers at Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios].

I’d go there and Ralph would show me a few things, and then I’d go home and work on it. Different kinds of lettering and somehow it evolved.

CBC: Which letterers were you studying at the time?

Janice: The big-name letterer I really liked was Joe Rosen. The others were a little clumsy. I loved Joe’s hand because he had an interplay of thick and thin lines. I don’t like blocky, one-dimensional strokes. That goes back to my background. My father taught me how to use a calligraphy pen.

CBC: Were you already reading comics?

Janice: No! [laughs] I read books! I sort of stumbled onto comics. I tell my comics editors: “Just remember that my mother didn’t raise me to letter comics! [laughs] At Neal’s studio, there were some things floating around that were pitched to me. Neal called me over to Marvel Bullpen.

He contacted Danny Crespi. He was a letterer, too. His daughter, Susan Crespi, is the production manager now at Marvel. Thanks to Neal, I was in the Bullpen at Marvel, doing lettering corrections.

CBC: What was the Bullpen like in 1975 when you came aboard?

Janice: The Bullpen was one big open area. Freelancers would come in and drop off their art. I was younger than

Above: Among titles from the 1980s in which Janice Chiang worked as letterer are ROM and The Transformers, both based on toy properties and licensed

by Marvel Comics. Janice has some 2,782 citations on the Great Comics Database (at comics.org), and while we’re loathe to determine a precise figure from that total number (which includes reprintings), suffice to say she’s been an incredibly prolific (and excellent), as well as in-demand, comics contributor in her professional career. Below: Participants on the 2017 New York Comic Con panel, “Women in Comics: Celebrating Over 100 Years”: (from left) Dr.Sheena Howard, Janice Chiang, Karen Green, and Amy Chu. One observer shared, “Chiang spoke out not just on behalf of women, but of the power of the medium to impact lives.” Photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

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For this interview, it was initially agreed that yours truly would make the six-hour or so drive to creator Timothy Webster Truman's Lancaster home, located deep in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, for an extensive discussion, but the Covid-19 pandemic squashed those plans might quick. So, in this Brave New Age of Zoom, we settled on conducting online chats to complete the career-spanning Q-&-A that follows.

The conversation took place in late March, over three sessions, just as the virus was realizing its first-wave spike in the U.S. It was an especially anxious time for both subject and inquisitor (as well as the world!), but it was a welcome diversion to examine the life and work of such a multi-talented straight-shooter.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2020 • #24

Still, the ample time allotted to this interview was simply not enough to delve sufficiently into the sheer magnitude of the 64-year-old West Virginia native's work, whether as role playing game character designer; comic book penciler/inker/writer/editor; graphic historian, book illustrator; painter; publisher; comics packager; teacher; and (of particular pride for him) band-mate, songwriter, and kick-ass guitar player.

Winner of the 1991 Haxtur Award for his Hawkworld, Tim is a remarkably humble, unassuming, and regular guy, a “mountain boy” who lives with his wife of 43 years, Beth, and is father to two talented 30-something children, writer/game designer Benjamin and collage artist/instructor Emily. — Jon B. Cooke

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Comic Book Creator: This is the strangest time in history to be talking to a guy who is renowned for a dystopian storyline…!

Timothy Truman: Oh, man. It’s been weird, for sure.

I took a little walk around the block this afternoon and the kids who live up the street were out playing by the street.

Adorable little kids… the youngest is no more than threefeet tall, dressed in this country dress, with rubber goulashes on her feet—very “Punky Brewster meets Norman Rockwell.” She came running over to me to say hi, smiling, glad to see me, and held out her hand. I had to tell her “Oh, no, sweetheart, better not touch.” She walked away looking sort of downcast, like she was wondering if she’d done something wrong. The whole thing really depressed me.

CBC: That’s sad. It’s just a sad, emotional time. Let’s get some distraction, Tim. I’m very grateful for you participating in CBC. I’ve always loved your artwork. Please tell me the status right now of your latest, Scout: Marauder.

Tim: Scout: Marauder is going really well. I’m really having fun with the art and story, working on it every day.

It’s taking me a lot longer than I thought it would, though.

The Grimjack Amazon TV series held things up a bit. It’s just been a monumental task. Other than the basic color flatting and the lettering, I’m pretty much doing the whole thing solo—writing it, penciling it, inking it and doing the digital Visit Timothy Truman via the painting, too. I put a lot of pressure on myself because I’m internet at (you guessed it!): so used to meeting deadlines. The Kickstarter community www.timothytruman.com and those who’ve pre-ordered the book at my website have This page: Top row, left to right, is Wilmer Truman, Tim's father, in 1942; Wilmer during World War II, when he was in the U.S. military; six-year-old Sandra Truman and her one-year-old little brother, Timothy; and an atmospheric tourism image of scenic Gauley River (directly under the same-name bridge), in the Mountain State and near where Tim spent formative years. Second row is young un' Tim (the littlest here) posing with his sisters and cousins, in Jodie, West Virginia, in 1961; and Tim's mom, Judy Truman, on the occasion of her birthday, in 1964. Inset right is our esteemed interviewee during a 2012 visit to Arizona.

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been amazingly patient and supportive. I’m so thankful for them. People seem to be very understanding and eager to see it.

CBC: Are you shooting for a date or just doing the best you can?

Tim: I’d like to have it done in a few more months, hopefully by September, because that would be the 35th anniversary of the publication of first issue of Eclipse’s Scout #1. That would be pretty cool way to celebrate the occasion, right?

Meanwhile, I’m posting monthly updates and letting people know I’m still working on it. It’s a real labor of love. I think it’s the best artwork I’ve ever done. That said, I have to admit that it’s a little tough to work on it the last few weeks.

The situation that’s going on has been a little distracting, especially given the fact that, as you pointed out, Scout: Marauder is a dystopian story. For example, a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I was writing a diary entry for one of the characters, and he’s talking about something called the “Numo-C Virus,” In the story, it’s a deadly respiratory virus they have to watch out for in the various refugee and mission camps in the story. Basically, it breaks down the lungs, turns them to jelly. I was writing about this before I knew anything about the symptoms of Covid-19. So, yeah, it’s gotten a little weird, imagining these fictional worst-case disaster scenarios and then—bam!— here we are. #24 • Fall 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Above: Tim thinks this may have been the very issue that started his passion for comics, Our Fighting Forces #70 [Aug. 1962].

Cover by an artist who likely became the greatest influence on Tim, Joe Kubert. Below: Tim's senior portrait from the 1974 Gauley Bridge High School (seen at bottom) yearbook.

Inset right: Tim's uncle, Eddy Seacrist, received airplay with this 1958 rockabilly single on the short-lived KRC label.

However, any time they sat me down with a book or a comic, they didn’t have to worry; I’d be totally focused. With a pencil and paper it was the same. No one can remember when I first started drawing. They just said as soon as they gave me a pencil, I was doing it.

CBC: Were you exposed at all to comic strips?

Tim: Sure! A favorite was Lee Falk’s Phantom. I loved Prince Valiant, Mandrake the Magician, and L’il Abner, too. Dick Tracy might have been my favorite, though, with the Moon Maid and the little hover cars and the two-way wrist radios. That stuff always fascinated me. After we got home from Sunday school, Dad would read the paper and automatically hand me the funny pages. I’d stretch out on the floor and read the strips. I wrote an essay about that in one of the new Prince Valiant volumes.

CBC: Were you close to your dad?

Tim: Not as much during my teen years. We didn’t have many interests in common. But we came became very close again and really started to appreciate each other once Beth and I got married and had children. I always loved and respected him and Mom. Because Dad was a minister, as a teenager, I was quite careful about what I got into. I self-policed, because I knew if I got into some of the same things my friends were doing, it would reflect badly on Dad. He was a quiet man and not the “huggy” type, so he didn’t outwardly show affection until his later years. He eventually loosened up more in that regard. It was a family thing, really. His brothers were the same way.

CBC: How about your mom?

Tim: Mom was very hands-on. [laughs] She was a housewife and raised four kids, while Dad was working at the mines or selling insurance. Actually, Mom was a bit hyperactive, like me. She almost never sat still.

Very strong willed. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. But she was very loving and affectionate, extremely devoted. Very regal in her own way. She watched over us like a lioness. When people meet her they feel very at ease with her. She was Dad’s right-hand in every way. They were totally in love. Great role models.

CBC: A wholesome environment…?

Tim: Absolutely. Probably the only trouble I had came during my high school and college years. I had a lot of inner turmoil about what I wanted to do with my life. I was interested in music, I was interested in writing, and I was interested in drawing, but I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. Mom and Dad didn’t quite fathom that I could make a profession of being an artist. That was a very foreign to them and outside their realm of experience.

Art was basically looked upon as a hobby, not a vocation.

They didn’t actually know anybody who made a living as an artist, except for art teachers and maybe some sign painters in the area. If we’d lived in New York City, maybe it would have been different, if I was raised in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side like Jack Kirby and those guys. And, as far as music went, well, that usually meant playing gigs in honky-tonks, clubs, and beer joints. It wasn’t looked upon as a very wholesome, vice-free kind of endeavor. Plus, we had someone in the family who’d actually tried that: my Uncle Eddy Seacrist, who was a rockabilly musician in the 1950’s and ’60s. He was the first white guy to headline at the Apollo Theater, as a matter of fact, in 1954. However, he’d finally realized it was too hard to raise a family and be a full-time musician, so he threw in the towel. Anyway, my folks didn’t discourage my interests—they recognized that I loved to play music, write and draw—but they didn’t wholly encourage it either. They just wanted to be certain that I’d be able to support myself.

CBC: How old were you when you moved to Dixie?

Tim: Around 1970. I’d have just turned 16. #24 • Fall 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Our Fighting Forces TM & © DC Comics.

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CBC: You were probably a cute kid.

Tim: I suppose so. They had to keep their eyes on me, though.

When I was playing, I was always getting into something.

I got hurt quite a few times!

CBC: What was the most dangerous thing that you got into?

Tim: Well, when I was really little, I did a lot of climbing.

I would actually climb dressers using the handles like a ladder. I got to the top of the dresser one time, and fell off and broke my collarbone. Once, I fell off a bed as a baby and split open my ear lobe—I still have the scar from it! [Jon chuckles] One winter, a friend and I saw these big, three-foot-long icicles hanging along the gutters of our two-story house. Of course, we decided “Wow! Those would make great swords!” We started heaving snowballs and chunks of ice at them, trying to knock a couple down. I bent down and—wham!

One of those icicles fell and hit me right on top of the head. Lots of blood, seven stitches, and another scar. A lot of episodes like that.

CBC: So they had to keep their eyes on you!

Tim: Oh, yeah. This sounds horrible, but it’s really not: When I was a toddler, Mom was trying to do some work in the front yard and I was pestering her to death. Dad came home from work and thought he’d remedy the situation: he went to the backyard and built a playpen for me out of wood and chicken wire! My mom took one look at it and said, “Wilmer, that’ll never hold him.” Dad just laughed and lifted me in, then they both went back to work in the front yard. About 10 minutes later, I came strolling around to the front yard, smiling, a piece of wood in my hand. They went around to the backyard and looked at the playpen. I’d totally demolished it—tore it up and gotten out. [laughter] Another time, I tricycled down the stairs of the really tall front porch one time, just to see if I would make it. Of course, I didn’t.

Whatever popped into my mind, I’d try!

The Johnny Cash Show ©1971 Screen Gems. "Jerry's Guitar" © The Grateful Dead.

CBC: Did you see the 1960s through your sisters, so to speak? Did you see what was going on in the country to some degree of that things were loosening up culturally?

Tim: Well, my oldest sister, Julia, was already married by that time. The next oldest, Sandra, was going to radiology school and working as a telephone operator, and my youngest sister, Cindi, was considerably younger than me. I really became interested in the counter-culture and music on my own. I was the “hippie” of the family, I guess. I started learning how to play the guitar just before we moved to Dixie. I analyzed music as intensely as I did comic art.

In fact, I was probably always more into collecting music and guitars than collecting comics. It would have pleased me to no end to hitchhike out to San Francisco and join a band. [chuckles] CBC: What kind of radio stations did you have out there?

Tim: The radio station from Charleston was really good and played a lot of underground rock and stuff. Then, at night, I would get a little transistor radio and put it under my pillow, and it would pick up Chicago, Detroit, and New York stations, when the ionosphere bounced the signal down to us Appalachians. I picked up on that stuff. Mike Gold and I figured out that, when he was a DJ in Chicago, I used to listen to him. We correlated the years and the hours and he said, “Oh, that would’ve been me.”

CBC: Was there seminal moment for music? A band or a song that woke you up musically?

Tim: We had to put our TV antennas on top of the mountains, so if there weren’t any branches laying across the antenna line, we could pick up the Charleston PBS station.

West Virginia had a remarkable PBS station. That’s where I first saw Bukka White, Hound Dog Taylor, and a lot of other blues musicians. They also featured a music series from San Francisco. I remember specifically watching a thing called Go Ride the Music with Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, and A Night at the Family Dog with Jefferson Airplane, Santana, and the Grateful Dead. I thought, “I want to do that.”

Another thing that really turned my head was when Derek and the Dominos were on The Johnny Cash Show.

Eric Clapton and Carl Perkins played “Matchbox.” As soon as I heard Clapton play guitar, I thought, “It’s over. I have to play guitar.” Not long after, Midnight Special and Don Kirchner’s Rock Concert started appearing on Friday nights.

My mom and dad and sisters and I were into variety shows—Mac Davis, Johnny Cash, Andy Williams, Dean Martin—shows with a lot of musical performances. We ate that stuff up. There was always music around. My family is very musical in the Southern church tradition. Really talented harmony singers. Two sisters played piano.

CBC: Did you sing as a family?

Tim: I was always bashful to sing in front of my sisters and parents because they were so good. I was self-conscious for some reason. If we were going to church in the car, they would all start singing these perfect gospel harmonies.

That’s how they’d pass the time. I’d read my comics or draw. Mom sang while she was working. There was always music on the stereo or radio. I always had music around me. I have a really vivid recollection of Mom standing at the sink, doing dishes, listening to the radio, and hearing Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” for the first time. That’s probably the first time that I was totally transfixed by a song.

CBC: My mother used to play piano and having it in the house—having these little performances in the house. I don’t know if kids experience that much these days.

Tim: I know exactly what you’re talking about. My kids, Ben and Emily, got to hear it a lot when they were growing up, when I played guitar in the evening or had some of my friends over to play. But I know what you mean.

CBC: It was special to have live music in the home.

Tim: All my sisters have good voices and Sandy was pretty exceptional in that regard. I remember her sitting at the piano and bursting into song. My youngest sister plays piano COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2020 • #24

and sings, too. And Julia, the oldest, was in a vocal group with two of her friends. Good memories.

CBC: Did your mother or anybody in the family garden? Did you have much connection to the soil?

Tim: Mostly with houseplants and things like that and I like to do work in the yard. I’ve gotten some of my best story ideas doing yard work. The best way to solve problems is to take a break from them. My mom and her mother always had houseplants in the windows and on the front porch. Dad wasn’t as into gardening. He really didn’t have time for it, since he only got one day off a week, being a minister.

We had a couple of gardens over the years, though.

The most experience I had was with my mom’s stepdad, whom I spent a lot of time with during the summer. He was a one-armed man, tall and skinny as a scarecrow. He had worked in the mines when he was younger and the roof caved in and pinned his arm under a ton of coal slate.

His buddies couldn’t pull it free and the company doctor couldn’t get there quick enough. So his friends had to amputate it without anesthesia, otherwise he would have bled to death. His right arm was gone almost up to the shoulder— he had a four-inch stub. However, he developed all sorts of techniques to do about anything a guy with two hands could do. I can see him in my mind’s eye with the how in one hand, hoeing a row of plants, shifting the handle over to the other side so that he could hold it beneath the stub, then bending down and grabbing some Blue Dragon fertilizer to throw onto the pepper plants and bean vines. He could load and shoot a shotgun, tie his shoes…

Try doing it with one hand sometime— it ain’t easy!… even roll a cigarette. He was something to watch. Anyway, he’d take me into the garden with him and he’d teach me things.

One thing we always had to be aware of when we were in the garden was rattlesnakes and copperheads. He and Grandma lived near a lumberyard that attracted poisonous snakes. Grandpa had been bitten about three times working in the garden. You really had to keep an eye out for them when you were out there or walking in the woods. Here, in Pennsylvania, I’ve never seen a snake when I’m out walking or hiking, but I still keep my eyes on the ground ahead of me!

It’s just habit from my childhood.

CBC: What made them attracted to the lumberyard?

Tim: I’m sure there were mice, bird’s nests, and things like that between the rows of planks, which were about nine feet high and neatly stacked. Also, West Virginia is like a rain forest in the summer, extremely hot and humid, so they’d lay between those stacks of lumber in the shade.

When it started to cool down in the late afternoon and evening they’d come slithering out, looking for prey. Of course, in the garden, they could find chipmunks, birds, beetles, and things like that.

CBC: Did you have pets?

Tim: Yeah, we almost always had a dog and a few cats that I fondly remember. I would always have a dog. I loved them. We had a really smart cocker spaniel named Twinkles… No, Jon, I didn’t name him…

This page: It was the guest appearance of legendary guitarist Eric Clapton, with his then-band Derek and the Dominos, on The Johnny Cash Show, which compelled young Tim Truman to play the same instrument as "Slowhand." Here, from left, is Carl Perkins, Clapton, and Cash, performing "Matchbox," on that Jan. 6, 1971, ABC broadcast.

Below: Tim is renowned for his Grateful Dead Almanac illustrations and album covers. Detail from Tim's illo, "Jerry's Guitar."

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Above: Awesome commission

by Tim featuring a fave Jack Kirby character. Below: Tim has stated Sam J. Glanzman's Kona comics [Dell, 1962–67] made a profound impact. Inset right: Photo of SJG with his beloved dog Lucky, circa 2000.

Tim: Yes, the Boy Scouts. In grade school, when we moved to the country, I was always in the woods. Always.

In high school, we lived in the New River Valley with steep escarpments, so I also did a lot of rappelling and mountain climbing.

CBC: Who taught you that? The Scouts?

Tim: My art teacher! He was in the Marine Reserves. In high school, he got together a few students he thought would enjoy this sort of thing. There was a group of about five or six of us, plus my older cousin, Eddie. We would go spelunking, camping, mountain climbing, and rappelling.

His name was Glenn Toler. We still get in touch with each other. I’ll say, “Man, the stuff we were doing in those days!

Nowadays, the parents would probably sue you!” We have a laugh about that. We did some outrageously cool things, but, in hindsight, yeah, it was pretty risky! [laughs] Taking 16- and 17-year-old boys off the side of a cliff! However, Glenn made absolutely certain we learned everything thoroughly and that we were doing things safely.

CBC: Did you rock climb with pitons and chocks?

Tim: Sure did. We also rappelled on belay. We learned how to do all that. Someone would have you on a line when you were rappelling—rock climbing, too. Glenn made sure we kept things safe. It was a great experience—very formative. You learned how to get past fear, work as a team and depend on the guy on the rock above you. It was way cooler and more interesting than being on a football team!

CBC: Did you know the climbs? Were they graded?

Tim: Glenn would scout things out on hikes and if we saw a place that looked cool, we’d come back and go for it. We were the first guys in the New River area to even try doing such a thing! It’s funny. Now there are books about the best places in the gorge to rock climb and they’ll name certain areas and say, “The first person to climb this point was blah, blah, blah, in 1980.” We’ll say, “Naw, we were the first in 1972, ’73, when we were freakin’ 16- and 17-years-old!”

CBC: So you and the art teacher hit it off?

Tim: Glenn? Sure. He’s had a fascinating career. He started the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. He used to be a leader with Outward Bound, where they bring troubled city boys out camping. He started that in West Virginia.

He also is a renowned potter. I owe him a lot. He was very encouraging.

CBC: Was he not that much older?

Tim: We figured out that he wasn’t much older, five or six years.

CBC: Was he in Vietnam?

Tim: No, he was in the Marine Reserves. However, we hung out with guys who were Vietnam veterans. If we spelunking or doing a more difficult climb he’d sometimes a friend along to help him out. One was also a teacher, a former Green Beret medic, who had spent a lot of time in the highlands with the [indigenous] Montagnards. He had some amazing stories. Then, there was Glenn’s cousin, a Marine who’d been in the thick of the action in Vietnam. They were fantastic guys. They’d watch out for us.

CBC: Did Glenn influence you, artistically?

Tim: Yes, very much so. He was the first guy who encouraged me to keep pursuing art and help me see that I might be able to make a career of it.

CBC: Did you ever travel to Chicago or New York when you were younger?

Tim: No, but we had family members in Alabama and Detroit that we visited, but I never really got to experience a major metropolitan area until I went to Columbus College of Art and Design, in Ohio. I didn’t even see the ocean until I was in the Kubert School, and Beth and I went to the Jersey shore. I was awestruck. I fell in love with the ocean.

CBC: Let’s talk about the comics: After Our Fighting Forces, when did comics become a habit for you?

Tim: Probably fifth and sixth grade. We lived in a little rural town outside Summersville, West Virginia. Every week or so, Mom would go to Summersville to do our shopping and #24 • Fall 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Kona TM & © the respective copyright holder.

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CBC: Tim says, “I didn’t name him!” without missing a beat. [laughter] Tim: We had a beagle named Hoosier—“Old Hoot.” He was the greatest old beagle. I had really pretty mixed-breed dog named Penny. I saw Penny get hit by a truck one evening and it devastated me. I remember going out every evening for a week after that and sitting by the road with a lapful of rocks.

If I saw that red truck that hit Penny, I was going to unload on them!

CBC: Did you go hunting?

Tim: I sure did. Everyone hunted.

CBC: What kind of rifle did you have?

Tim: When we’d go deer hunting, Dad had a .30-06.

For small game, a 12-gauge Remington shotgun. They wouldn’t let me hunt alone until I was 11 or 12.

CBC: You went hunting on your own?

Tim: Yes. Dad and his brothers were into gun safety, so they had trained me and my cousins how to use, handle, and walk with a gun. My cousins and I would shoot squirrels and rabbits.

However, I developed a distaste for hunting one time when Dad and I went out hunting for small game. We were taking a break, sitting on a fallen tree and, all at once, there was a big commotion in the brush beside us and we saw something darting directly toward us. It really startled both of us.

Without even thinking, Dad raised the 12-gauge and shot.

I would have sworn that a wolf was coming at us out of the woods, it was so sudden and scary, but it was a doe.

And there was a fawn there, too. The little one stood at the edge of the woods and then ran off. Dad told me that felt really bad about that.

From then on, I didn’t enjoy hunting as much.

CBC: Were you in the Scouts?

Grimjack TM & © John Ostrander & Timothy Truman Starslayer TM & © Michael J. Grell.

stuff, but there’s something about it that people seem to like. There’s a drive to it, I guess. Rick Veitch told me once, “There’s a drive to your work that can’t be ignored.”

I don’t know where it comes from; it’s just the way I draw.

I was lucky.

CBC: There was a period in the ’80s when it was almost like you had a “Tim Truman School.” You could recognize the books you were associated with at 20 paces. I can see it in Airboy and Skywolf. I can see it with Scout and Grimjack … since you were literally drawing a lot of the covers.

I’m not sure I can explain it, but you seemed like an industry unto yourself. However, for you to then jump into Hawkworld just seemed to be a real natural move for you.

Tim: I guess it was a school of sorts. I just wanted to do stuff that was very adventure oriented. After I met Chuck Dixon, I saw that we were of a like-mind about storytelling and the kinds of comics we really wanted to do. Even if we were doing super-hero books, we were going to make them adventure books. I took a tip from the Eisner & Iger shop and Simon and Kirby studio had packaged comics for different publishers. I started thinking, “Why isn’t anyone doing that nowadays?” So, I put together 4Winds and started packaging comics for Eclipse. Chuck and I started pulling together a stable of artists—good folks whom we’d met at conventions, whom we knew could meet their deadlines. It also sort of gave us a sort of “union.” If one month, one guy’s check was late, I could say, “We’ll just withhold work we’re doing until our buddy is paid.”

CBC: When did you first meet John Ostrander?

Tim: That was when I was still at TSR. When they accepted my samples for the “Grimjack” series, that sort of lit a fire at First, they were like, “Oh, this is really interesting.” I had really put a different spin on the look of the concept and gave it the “SF-noir” look that it needed.

Mike Gold was a big fan of the underground comix, too, so he could see that Spain Rodriguez influence in my work. He dug it.

He and Joe Staton saw that I could take it to some unique places. They arranged for me to meet John and, the first time we talked to each other on the phone, we became instant brothers. Beth and I still lived in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and weren’t far away from Chicago. I said, “Why don’t you just take the train up and spend the weekend with us?” He came up, we threw a bunch of ideas around, got to know each other better and the deal was sealed—brothers forever.

We’re very simpatico in every way—storytelling and politics and general outlook on life. It was like we’ve known each other all our lives.

CBC: The first professional comics work you did was the back-up “Grimjack work” in Starslayer, besides the DC war stuff?

Tim: Right, that was my first professional, as in makinga-living-in-comics, work. I was very lucky. It was the right time and right people to be involved with. For whatever reason, my work got popular. DC still wouldn’t have hired me, at that point. I heard from others that it was because they considered my work so underground comix-looking! At the end of my tenure with First, I was invited to do some book signings in California with my dear pal Thomas Yeates. After the tour, I took a week off and stayed with Thomas at his place in Jenner, on the coast north of the Bay Area. It was a great little vacation. [Eclipse publishers] Cat Yronwode and Dean Mullaney lived close to Tom, so they invited us over to their place for dinner one night. They invited me to do some work for Eclipse. First we did the Killer… Tales and, COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2020 • #24

after that worked out so well, I pitched Scout to them. They loved it.

CBC: Were the “Grimjack” back-ups intended to be a spin-off?

Tim: Sort of. It was a try-out.

After the very first issue, First was getting such positive fan response to it that they thought, “Hey, we’d better spin this off into its own book.” From the first or second appearance, it was pretty much sealed. They waited on me to be freed from my TSR job and gave it a few more issues to make sure. After three or four appearances in Starslayer, they were ready to launch it and we were ready to oblige them.

CBC: In a nutshell, what is Grimjack?

Tim: He’s a science fiction mercenary, a crusty old warrior/detective in this part-science fiction, part-fantasy setting. He operates in a metropolis called Cynosure, where all these realities meet—a dimensional confluence. Grimjack knows the whole city and he knows how to navigate these dimensions, so he’s part Solomon Kane, part …

CBC: Eternal Champion?

Tim: Sure! That idea that there are different incarnations of Grimjack did not really materialize until later,

This page: Tim's breakout in comics came with his work on the Starslayer back-up strip written by John Ostrander, "Grimjack. Soon enough, not only was Grimjack promoted to his own title, but Tim also drew Starslayer, illustrating two regular titles for First Comics.

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around the time that I was leaving the book. He has a lot of Michael Moorcock influence, but also has a lot of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He’s a private detective who carries a sword and wears a beret in this very science fictional setting. Because of the inter-dimensional aspects, anything goes, so I could draw anything. John would come up with these wild concepts, humorous, wacky influences, and inject them into the stories, but still keep them rooted in traditional hard-boiled detective novels, you know? It was a neat concept. We portrayed Grimjack as an older guy. We envisioned him as an “old man” of 50 years old. [laughter] The fact he became popular as an older character was really cool and proved the power of the character and the stories that John was writing.

CBC: What specifically can you point to that, in the storyline and setting itself, that you added besides the visualization?

Tim: I created a lot of side characters. I was talking about the Belfi influence earlier and every time you turn in a job, also bring something else to lay in front of them. So I’d do sketches of new characters we could introduce to the mix. I did Jericho Noleski; he

was mine. He was kind of a motorcycle outlaw. I introduced Bob, the Watch Lizard. I figured that Grimjack’s hangout, Munden’s Bar, needed a mascot, so I drew a picture of Bob drinking beer and lounging on the counter. On the art I wrote, “This is Bob the Watch Lizard. He’s a real party animal…”

CBC: Quite literally!

Tim: Quite literally! He was Munden’s watch-lizard. He lives here now. John loved it. That was one great thing about John: he’s really open to collaboration. We were in lock step in almost every aspect of the book.

CBC: Who came up with the idea for Munden’s Bar? Tim: That was John. It was based on this seedy old bar he used to frequent in Chicago or Evanston.

When the Rolling Stones were in Chicago, they liked to drink there.

It was a total dive bar and the few times that I went there with John, the place was almost empty. It was a really interesting place. The bartender was great. He was an old gent with this little twinkle in his eye who seemed like he already knew everything about you.

CBC: When did the idea come up to use that as a springboard for a back-up series that was all over the place?

Tim: They wanted to do some back-up stories that would still have Grimjack content. It was also an excuse to have the opportunity #24 • Fall 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Grimjack TM & © John Ostrander & Timothy Truman Starslayer TM & © Michael J. Grell. Time Beavers TM & © Timothy Truman.

Above: Tim Truman’s original art for First Comics’ Starslayer and Grimjack T-shirt. The back of the apparel had the legend: “Cynosure: My Kind of Town.”

Margin notes reveal that “Cynosure: Love It or Leave It” was considered. Inset right: Tim’s OGN, a SF tale of time-traveling rodent saviors of reality. Below: Time Beavers character by Tim.

Grimjack TM & © John Ostrander & Timothy Truman Starslayer TM & © Michael J. Grell.

to work with some cool artists who might have time in their schedules to fit an eight-pager into. John could explore Munden’s a little more and it would give me a break from drawing so many pages. People really liked the Munden’s concept. It turned out to be real fun to do. I wrote a couple of stories and John got to work with all sorts of amazing artists. It was cool. [chuckles] CBC: So, there’s a Grimjack TV series in the works? Are the scripts done?

Tim: Yes. I’m told that, despite the Covid-19 crisis, preproduction work on projects continues.

CBC: At what stage is it?

Tim: We’ve read two or three versions of the pilot draft.

I’m not at liberty to say much because of the non-disclosure agreements, but they’re looking good. John really likes them. One thing that we have to our advantage is the producer and the screenwriter are total Grimjack fans. They even knew the names of different letter writers and asked if we knew what had happened to some of them.

CBC: Letter hacks?

Tim: Yeah, they were hardcore into it. So they seem to have a pretty good idea what Grimjack is all about.

CBC: So, you went out and met Cat and Dean. How long was Scout percolating in your head?

Tim: About a year. Whenever I was sitting in my studio, I was usually listening to news on the radio or watching it on TV. It was the Reagan era and I saw a lot of stuff that was bothering me politically and socially. At the same time, I really got involved in studying Native American history and culture, especially Southwestern tribes, the Apache tribal groups in particular. I started thinking about different environmental and social things that were rearing their ugly heads. I’ve always been a fan of dystopian science fiction, and started thinking about life after a series of apocalyptic events that did not include the dropping of an atomic bomb. I realized that the person best suited make it in the apocalyptic scenario that I started envisioning would be an old-style traditionalist Apache. These people were able to thrive in the harshest desert environment and run 60 miles a day on foot in intense, 110-degree heat. The environment that they chose to live in has literally shaped Southwestern Native culture in every way. They are the ultimate survivalists. The ultimate survivors.

Ideas started percolating. A concept started shaping up.

I went to visit Mike Baron, in Madison, Wisconsin. We were sitting around the swimming pool at his apartment complex.

He asked me what I wanted to do, “If you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?” Without even thinking, I said I would do “an Apache character with a Samurai sword, riding a motorcycle.” I suddenly envisioned the character. Everything started coming to fruition out of that.

I would eventually ditch the Samurai sword, but pretty soon all these various ideas and influences lined up. I knew that if I would do the story, it would take a lot of research, so I started gathering research.

CBC: It’s interesting that Grimjack inhabited a universe that was inter-dimensional and you had a great concept for a back-up series where you could do whatever you wanted, and then, with Scout, it immediately established that had its own history and it had its own universe, yet a futuristic extrapolation of the reality of Reagan’s America. It’s interesting that these things immediately started expanding into comic-book universes.

Tim: I was reading a lot of science fiction novels and for the type of stories I liked, I knew these guys were doing a lot of research. I also realized that there was a degree of world-building involved. I determined that if I was going to do comics and have my own characters, that I’d do world-building, just like “legit” prose science fiction writers. I would research the heck out of stuff and make it very believable.

One thing I learned at the Kubert School was, if you want the reader to believe stuff, you had to research it. Joe COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2020 • #24

Kubert often told me stories about the research Russ Heath and John Severin put into their work. I took that to heart and saw that it was clearly the way to go. Create your own world and have it backed up with input from the news, history, and culture.

That way, the story and the images you create will always be more believable.

CBC: Do you have other children besides Benjamin?

Tim: Yes. Emily—she’s an artist, too.

CBC: How much younger is she than Ben? Tim: Two years. When I was doing Scout, I took a break around issue #7, while Emily was being born.

I asked Thomas Yeates to draw that issue. I wanted to spend time with her and

Above: Grimjack #1 cover re-creation by Tim. Left: Starslayer #14 cover detail, also by Tim.

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Hawkworld TM & © DC Comics.

about it. They had called a few times. They wanted me to do Punisher and even asked me to do artwork for a Gambit series. I did do Ka-Zar for Archie Goodwin when he was an editor there. I loved Archie. Not much work for them beyond that aside from drawing a few pages for Savage Sword of Conan. At one point, one of their editors had really pissed me off. I was already getting a set page-rate from DC and I was at the upper end of their page scale. When Marvel called me, I asked them what the pay was and the editor sort of guffawed, and said they could only pay me their beginning rate, because, after all, I’d “never worked for Marvel.” That left sort of a sour taste in my mouth.

CBC: What was the Helix series, Black Lamb. Did you write that also?

Tim: Yes, I wrote and drew Black Lamb. I’ve always been sympathetic with monsters. I started with the concept that he was a vampire, but instead of a Dracula-type, he was instead a sort of a Shadow or Batman—The Avenger for the monsters. He protected them from humanity. Also, he would deal with monsters that went rogue and preyed on humans.

CBC: Kept them in line?

Tim: Yeah. It would bring too much attention to their secret community. The book was a lot of fun to do. I could do what I wanted with him. It was a horror story, but it took place in a future society, with the monster as a hero. Another Truman mash-up! It’s a fun book.

CBC: You spent a decade writing Conan?

Tim: Yeah, 11 years. That’s the longest I’ve ever been affiliated with one concept or character.

CBC: Were you able to inject mature themes into a sword&-sorcery strip?

Tim: Not as much as I would have probably liked. However, I did a lot of stuff with Conan that I set out to do. I wanted to keep it very, very true to Howard. In all his Conan stories, he’d always drop hints to other stories from Conan’s past.

I put together those little clues that Howard left in his own stories and use them to do the segments in-between the direct adaptations of Howard’s stories. We’d adapt a Howard story and, in order to get Conan to move along through the chronology, I’d draw upon the clues he’d left and put together my new stories. So there was a lot of detective work involved; creating stories based on the little hints THIS Howard had dropped along IF theYOU way. ENJOYED It worked out well.PREVIEW, I CLICK THE TO ORDER THIS was honored to do those stories, and am LINK especially glad ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL that I got to work with Tomas Giorello, the artist who drew FORMAT! most of the stories. He’s incredible.

CBC: That’s a long time to work with Robert E. Howard’s prose. What’s your ultimate assessment of Howard as a writer?

Tim: He was a huge influence on me. I discovered him when I was still in grade school—probably sixth or seventh CBC: Kind of magical, huh? grade. I had read Gar’s Kothar Barbarian Swordsman and Tim: Absolutely. He had a way of suggesting things to you then, the next time I went to the drugstore I picked up and you’d see them. Battle scenes, otherworldly scenes, Conan the Conqueror. I was just blown away by it. Conan magic in a nighted landscape… There’s a certain poetry became my favorite character and Howard became my there that I admire. He delivered things in a single parafavorite fiction author for a long time.

CBC: In retrospect, do you think the material is adolescent graph that would transfer you fully into the scene.

CBC: Did you like Conan as a character, as a “person”? or mature? In a politically-correct world, it’s hard to rectify, Tim: Yes, especially when I was younger. I think that in certain ways, aspects of Conan as a character. The Conan was a far more complex character than some folks character is… problematic.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #24 realize. [chuckles] I remember, when I was in high school, Tim: I suppose so, if youTIMOTHY only view the character through TRUMAN discusses his start at the Kubert School, I was playing softball and I was shortstop. The pitcher Grimjackare with not writermany JOHN OSTRANDER, and current collaboa modern lens. However, there authors who with son Benjamin. SCOTT SHAW! talks about early San and the batter hit the ball and this line drive came pitched can say that they actuallyrations singlehandedly created an entire Diego Comic-Cons and friendship with JACK KIRBY, Captain right into my chest, so hard that it knocked the breath out genre of fiction, like Howard did. wasAlso a poet, I enCarrot, andHoward Flintstones work!

PATRICK McDONNELL’s MUTTS comic book pastiches, letterer JANICE CHIANG of me. This is a weird thing: My first thought was, “What joyed seeing the way he’dfavorite put words together.

For instance, profiled, HEMBECK, and more! TIM TRUMAN cover. would Conan do?” [laughter] I kind of willed the pain away, when we were doing the adaptations, I became very fasci(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 nated by the fact that he would describe(Digital something and you picked up the softball and threw it to the first baseman.

Edition) $4.99 Batter out! Pretty hilarious. would see it in your mind. But, once I would try describing https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=133&products_id=1549 CBC: I thought Conan would’ve killed the pitcher. [chuckcertain monsters for artists to draw, I realized how little les] description that Howard was actually giving. Somehow, he Tim: Getting back into the game was my very first thought! could make one see these things fully blown in your mind, I was a 16- or 17-year-old pipsqueak. For a brief moment, yet many times he wasn’t delivering specific descriptions.

Conan gave me the will to man up! [laughs] His ability to do that mystified me.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Fall 2020 • #24

This page: Inspired by his friendship with legendary comics creator (and Hawkman creator), the late Gardner Fox, Tim produced a three-issue mini-series, Hawkworld [’89], which inspired a same-named ongoing series between ’90–93.

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