Comic Book Creator #25

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No. 25, Spring 2021

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A TwoMorrows Publication

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Cover art by Barry Windsor-Smith

S p r i n g 2 0 2 1 • T h e B a rry Wi n d s o r-S m i th I s s u e • N u m b e r 2 5

T WOODY THE ARTISTÉ CBC mascot by J.D. KING ©2021 J.D. King.

About Our Cover Art by BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH

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Ye Ed’s Rant: Last year’s ass-whoopin’ comes home and gets personal......................... 2 COMICS CHATTER Up Front: Sal Quartuccio’s Hot Stuf’: The pro-zine publisher and portfolio maven shares about the 1970s’ comics scene and breaking in as an independent ............. 3 Rapping with Rick Leonardi: Robert Menzies talks with the veteran artist about Spider-Man: 2099 and his connection with a Scot named Hamish MacInnes......... 18 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt on new books about seafarers and warriors......... 25 Sitdown With Shaw!: Part two of our ginormous chat with cartoonist Scott Shaw! about Captain Carrot, his animation and advertising work, and so much more.......... 26

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith

Ten Questions: Darrick Patrick chews the fat with Chew artist Rob Guillory............... 36 Hembeck’s Dateline: Our Star Fred shows there’s more Stars in Comics, Horatio...... 37 Once Upon a Long Ago: Our newest columnist,“Booksteve,” on his Secret Origin.... 38 THE MAIN EVENT

Our cover boasts a close-up look at a page from Barry WindsorSmith’s long-awaited graphic novel, Monsters, shot from the original art.

The 370-page book, 35 years in the making, was released by Fantagraphics this past April, earning rave reviews.

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions!

C’mon citizen, DO THE RIGHT THING! A Mom & Pop publisher like us needs every sale just to survive! DON’T DOWNLOAD OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE! Buy affordable, legal downloads only at

www.twomorrows.com

Making Monsters: An Close Look at Barry Windsor-Smith’s New Masterwork CBC’s exclusive, thorough, and intimate examination of the Storyteller’s mammoth new graphic novel includes a rare one-on-one interview with the veteran artist/ writer, a revealing and sensitive review by graphic novel expert Paul Gravett, as well as an exhaustive and extensive essay by Ye Ed on the book’s 35-year journey.

Monsters’ sojourn started as a one-off issue of The Incredible Hulk, in 1984, only to metastasize over the decades into the current 360-page masterpiece.

The book, featuring the finest, most exquisite artwork BWS has ever put to paper, is represented here with superb, high-resolution scans of the original art pages, as well as by examples of outtakes and pages from BWS’s original Hulk story...... 40 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: Kendall Whitehouse recalls ye olde New York Comic Con............ 78 Coming Attractions: Longtime fan fave artist Terry Dodson is coming in CBC #26!...... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Alan Kupperberg’s Evil Clown!.................... 80 Right: The life of Janet Bailey briefly intersects with that of young Elias McFarland in a chance meeting the youth will never forget. Artwork from Monsters by (of course) Barry Windsor-Smith.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to space limitations, Ken Meyer, Jr.’s “Great Fanzines of the 1970s” feature has been delayed and will appear in our next issue. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

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

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

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: $46 US, $69 International, $18 Digital. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2021 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437.

Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

Dedicated to the memories of BOB FUJITANI, RON COBB, RICHARD CORBEN, ADELE KURTZMAN, ANN EISNER, DICK LUPOFF, FRANK THORNE, S. CLAY WILSON, and KIRK TILANDER ™

JON B. COOKE Editor & Designer

JOHN MORROW Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER Associate Editor

BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH Cover Artist

RICHARD J. ARNDT TOM ZIUKO STEVEN THOMPSON Contributing Editors

STEVEN TICE ROSE RUMMEL-EURY Transcribers

J.D. KING CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON CBC Illustrator

ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

GREG PRESTON CBC Contributing Photographer

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE CBC Convention Photographer

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

Last year’s ass-whoopin’ comes home and gets personal

Just as I was toiling away on this So far (knock wood) it’s not issue (which went through a major Covid-19 that’s come to darken revamp halfway into production), I Casa Cooke’s doorway, but the have learned that perhaps the most family is facing a serious health celebrated contributor to my horror concern, so I appreciate—very comix anthology has passed away, much—your patience and unwhich has left me utterly stunned. derstanding regarding the Following heart surgery, Richard frequency of this magazine Corben died on Dec. 2, 2020. The artist during this trying time. was a wholly original creator whose Your humble editor is workbrilliant work spanned the segreing as best as he can, juggling gated niches in the world of comics. various projects while attending His stories appeared in fanzines, to the needs of the ailing family underground comix, prozines, blackmember. Much of the available &-white comics mags, full-color slick time has been devoted to The mags, European albums, alternative/ Charlton Companion, a bookcreator-owned comics, and even length history of the notorious in mainstream super-hero comics.

Derby, Connecticut, all-in-one He made an impact in commercial comics outfit that adorned the illustration (Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell spinner racks of America bealbum cover art) and in animated movtween 1944–1986. And don’t think ies (Heavy Metal), and he introduced this 256-pager, full-color baby is an entirely new approach to coloring. a mere repackaging of the CharlRichard was notoriously recluton issues of Comic Book Artist sive, and while he always declined magazine. Au contraire, mon my requests for a career-spanning ami! With the able consultation interview, he would still occasionally and assist of Michael Ambrose, join various projects of mine, including editor of Charlton Spotlight, and The Warren Companion, and he was some superb guest contribualways willing to share a quote or tors, this tome will feature an two. The artist, an absolute favorite of all-new prose narrative, a lot of Barry Windsor-Smith by Ronn Sutton mine, was always kind and respectful. it a wholesale rewrite of much Richard was also playful, teasing about the paltry of the company’s history and its founders. What I’ve discovered in my research (no small feat when visits to page rate offered to all who participated in SDZ. In February 2020, he wrote me (referring to collaborator libraries and universities are out of the question due to the pandemic) is pretty amazing stuff. Whether Charlton Bruce Jones), “I’m waiting for that big fat check and I know Bruce is, too. I think he had his eye on a yacht.”

Comics, all too often dismissed as a third-rate outfit, is worthy of this much attention is for someone wiser than He was even grateful to be a part of the anthology, to team again with Bruce, “just like old times.” And he me to assess, but I do promise a rollicking fun read! candidly admitted, in a colossal understatement: Look for it sometime in 2022 from TwoMorrows.

“Well, I guess I’m really not doing it for the money.”

Another book I’m working on is a history celebratI have always been in awe of Richard’s work, ing the 50th anniversary of Last Gasp of San Francisco, ever since becoming absorbed as a young teen upon Mind Candy for the Masses, which includes a massive interview with publisher Ron “Ronzo” Turner, the under- reading a ragged copy of Rowlf, his epic tale of a hapless German Shepherd magically given the body ground comix legend. It’ll take a bit of time to wrassle of a man. The mix of realistic rendering, slapstick this one to the ground—so many moving parts!—but cartooning, remarkable conveyance of mood, unique hopefully this sucker will see the light of day sometime blend of humor and menace… and this was all drawn this year. Keep your eyes peeled to this editorial. in black-&-white! That is, even before he revolutionized In the meantime, Last Gasp’s Slow Death Zero is comic-book coloring, introducing a Day-Glo palette! now available, an anthology of environmental horror I am genuinely shaken by Richard’s death. Hours stories that I edited, which features an incredible before I heard of his demise, I was pondering how to array of cartoonists and comic book storytellers, some (once again) ask him for an interview. I’ll miss him. veterans of the original comix series, some Last Gasp Peace to you, RC. You’re now one with the universe. alumni, and some relative newbies—and all talented.

cbc contributors Aaron Caplin Joe Crawford Fantagraphics Gary Groth

David “Hambone” Hamilton Chris James Rick Leonardi

Caroline Miller Amelia Munro Felipe H. Navarro Chris O’Brien

Greg Preston Sal Quartuccio Patrick Rosenkranz Cory Sedlmeier

— Ye Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com Scott Shaw!

Andrew Speers Margaret Stewart Ernie Stimer

Steve Thompson Barry WindsorSmith José Villarrubia

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Barry Windsor-Smith portrait © 2020 Ronn Sutton.

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK STEVEN THOMPSON TOM ZIUKO

2021: A Life Odyssey

up front

Sal’s Sizzlin’ Hot Stuf’

Phase one of CBC ’s two-part interview with pro-zine/print master Sal Quartuccio Interview conducted by JON B. COOKE

All items TM & © the respective copyright holders.

[For many years I promised Sal Quartuccio that I’d interview him. I’d always been very curious about his presence in comics fandom during the 1970s and ’80s, as publisher of the excellent pro-zines, Phase and Hot Stuf’, publications that stretched the boundaries of what comics could be, years before the alternative comics scene matured. I’d also been aware of Sal’s print publishing during the days when it became a full-blown fad in the industry, first with the outstanding “Jungle Man” portfolios

by Neal Adams and ultimately with a batch of well-recalled Marvel sets.

What best I remember is buying a copy of Phase #1 at a Phil Seuling Comic Art Convention in the early 1970s, no doubt blowing a good portion of my allowance for the three-day show! It was money very well spent. I finally conducted the promised chat in September and here’s part one… —Ye Ed.] Comic Book Creator: You’re a Brooklyn boy, Sal? Sal Quartuccio: Yes. I was born in Manhattan, raised in Queens for the first 11 years, and then to Brooklyn.

CBC: What did your dad do?

Sal: He served with Patton in World War II. He was a tank driver. After the war he met my mom. They were both born in Manhattan and actually lived about two blocks away from each other. They got married in 1950 and in 1952 there I was! [laughter] My dad started out pretty young doing silk screening printing for a company and then, after the war, he wanted a city job and went for a policeman job, but had a little bit of shrapnel in his eye from the war, so they couldn’t take him. He then went to become a fireman, but because of the shrapnel, they couldn’t take him. He ended up at the sanitation department where they were happy to have him. He stayed with them until he retired.

CBC: How many siblings?

Sal: A younger brother and sister.

CBC: Was your mom a housewife?

Sal: Yep. Mom was a housewife.

CBC: Middle-class life, pretty much?

Sal: I’d say so. We lived on the second floor of my aunt’s house in Queens and, once all three of us were born, my dad found a house in Brooklyn, a few blocks away from his parents’ home. He took in my mother’s parents—who were still in the Lower East Side—he brought them over. So, my mother’s parents lived in our basement and my father’s parents were six blocks down the road.

CBC: So, a big family?

Sal: Yes. My father had a lot of brothers and sisters, so I had a lot of cousins. Pretty much every Sunday, everybody was at my grandparents’ house. We had a ball. It was a COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

nice childhood, with a nice bunch of cousins. And we’re all still in contact with each other.

CBC: Did you pal around with kids in the neighborhood?

Sal: Once we moved to Brooklyn, I did. I was just sitting on my stoop and would see this really big kid walking up the block, reading comic books. Now, I was always into comic books. So, that’s where I met John Carbonaro. He lived up the block from me. We met playing stickball. He was a real Marvel guy, but I wasn’t—I was an Archie guy as a kid, but got into DC and World’s Finest, which my mom got me a subscription to and that was great. So, I was a DC kid and John let me borrow some of his Fantastic Fours, and I said, “Holy smokes!” From that moment on, I became a big Kirby and FF fan.

CBC: How old were you when you met John?

Sal: I was 12 or 13, and John was a year older than me. He went to a different high school. He was always into comics.

CBC: Were you creative as a kid? Did you draw? Did you write? Were you good in school?

Sal: When I was pretty young, nine or 10, my mother had a typewriter. I used to love the holiday comic books: Halloween specials, Christmas specials, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that DC published every year, and all the seasonal stuff that Gold Key and Dell did, as well as the Little Archie stuff. For some reason, I became an

Above: Sal Quartuccio prompted early ’70s comics fans to take notice with the excellence of his pro-zines, the one-shot Phase One and Hot Stuf’ (which lasted eight issues, ending in 1978). The publisher (seen below) was also the behind-the-scenes production guy behind a couple of New York Comic Art Convention souvenir books.

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a big Halloween fan.

CBC: Never mind you’re destroying perfectly good comics! [chuckles] What possessed you to do that? Where did you get the idea from?

Sal: I don’t know! [laughs] I had all these comics and I loved the Halloween stuff. I guess I would just look at the stories—there were mainly short stories—and I felt that, “That type of story should go with this story and this type of story should go with that story. Little Archie should be in that story because they’re in costume.” If I ever find a copy, Jon, I’ll make a photocopy. I felt that particular stories should be in this comic book collection. So, I just redid them.

CBC: In retrospect, do you think you had a touch of obsessive/compulsiveness?

Sal: Maybe just a little bit! [laughter] I guess I just loved the idea of combining and moving things around.

CBC: Did you see fanzines?

Sal: Oh, sure. I think that was somewhere around 1966 or ’67, when I saw there were classified ads in Marvel and DC for Rocket’s Blast/Comicollector. I think that was the first fanzine I saw. From there, I found out about The Comic Reader, which I think Mark Hanerfeld was editing at the time…

CBC: On the Drawing Board, right.

Sal: Before Paul Levitz took over. Between those two, you found out who’s doing what and what’s going on. Monster Times was just starting. I was into Creepy real early, too.

You start to piece it together and found out there was fandom.

CBC: Was there an epiphany that, “Hey, somebody like me made this by hand, so I can make one just like it”?

Sal: It started to cross our mind when John and I started talking about seeing RBCC and seeing other people doing fanzines. Gary Groth was doing [Fantastic Fanzine]

and Bill G. Wilson was doing [The Collector], Martin Griem [Comic Crusader]… all that stuff I was starting to order by mail. I said, “We can do this, can we or can’t we?” John knew a few fan artists in Brooklyn and so did I. We decided to do a little fanzine called A.C.E. (Amateur Comic Enterprises), and it was a combination of some sketches we received some articles and quick interviews and a couple of comic strips by different people—none I can think of that got into comics. Selwyn Goldstein, a terrific guy in Brooklyn and some people John met in high school. I think around 1969, I was reading The Daily News, and saw that there was going to be a comic book convention in New York. We said, “Comic book convention!?” That really fried our brain.

A whole batch of us went to the city and attended the ’69 Seuling Comic Art Convention and we saw… just everything.

CBC: You read that in The Daily News?

Sal: In The Daily News. There was a little article talking about what was going on in the city that weekend… what was on Broadway, etc.

CBC: So, just a few days before?

Sal: Two days before. My father, God bless him, brought The Daily News home every day, and I read the comic section, probably the only reason I spotted that article.

CBC: What year were you born?

Sal: I was born in 1952.

CBC: So, you were 17?

Sal: I was 17.

CBC: So, would you say that seeing that article changed your life?

Sal: Totally, completely, it’s all Phil Seuling’s fault (as I say to this day—God bless him, too). We took the train in to the Statler Hilton Hotel. I was with Jimmy Ciccolella and Doug Foley… I think Jim Glenn was also there. We all wandered around and I came to the Witzend booth and I guess there was Bill Pearson selling the first maybe three issues of Witzend. That was it. I spent all my money on these three issues. The idea of a publication that size and the gorgeous paper, the gorgeous printing—the crisp, black line—that was it for me! When I saw that, we went back home. We had sketches by Neal Adams, Gray Morrow, Gil Kane, and all that. We half-heartedly finished A.C.E., which was part mimeo, part offset… we didn’t really make a go of it… we sold a few copies. After that was done, we thought we could do a whole lot better. I think I have a copy in a box somewhere. We decided to do more of a real pro-style zine.

It was Billy Graham that said, “Lose that A.C.E. thing.” So, we came up with different titles and decided on Phase. We then decided we would contact all these people we just met: Jeff Jones, Mike Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson, Neal Adams, Gray Morrow… and we met Bil Maher from Canada at the ’69 convention, as well.

CBC: Who is Bil Maher?

Sal: He is the same age as us, but terrific art! We saw a couple of pages he had and we hired him at almost $10 per page to do a story called “Hero,” which appeared in Phase. He then went into doing different things besides comics. We wanted him to stick with adventure stuff. He had an idea for a character called Scarecrow—now, this is going way back—and it was just a great design and story idea. He would do sketches of it and we’d offer him money to do it, but though I kept asking him to do Scarecrow, he

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Little Lulu TM & © Western Publishing Company, Inc. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Annual TM & © DC Comics. Little Archie and related characters TM & © Archie Comics Publications, Inc..

Above: Sal Quartuccio in a photo from the mid-’70s. Next page: Clockwise from far right is an article on the Comic Art Convention that appeared in The New York Daily News, July 5, 1969, Sal Quartuccio’s first con.

The photo includes founder Phil Seuling, who was an essential component for Sal’s future success; souvenir book cover of that same show along with con badges; cover for Sal and John Carbonaro’s first collaboration, the fanzine A.C.E. (Amateur Comic Enterprises), with #1 cover art by Selwyn Goldstein; and the table of contents for same, which indicated most of the issue contained convention sketches by an impressive array of seasoned comics pros.

Below: Christmas-themed comics from Sal’s childhood, when he would create customized holiday anthologies from various titles. Vignette from the cover of Little Lulu #90 [Dec. 1955]; Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer Annual [1962]; and panel from The Adventures of Little Archie #33 [Winter ’64/’65].

editor. I took these comics apart and made up my own Halloween specials. I loved Halloween—still do! So I would take a Little Lulu story from here, a Donald Duck story from there, throw in a Little Archie from there, and I’d put them together as a comic book. I’d even staple them and type out a little sheet, saying what was in that volume. And I did about 10 or 12 of them and, somewhere in the murky depths, I think I still have them. I got a kick out of combining different characters and different stories. I had a theme. I was

Prince Valiant TM & © Hearst Holdings, Inc.

would never do it. He did advertising work and computer work with Ed Catmull of Pixar when they were all up at the Computer Graphics Lab, on Long Island.

Then he went to Disney’s Imagineering department and worked there for six years. He got out of the comics side and then became an art teacher and moved back to Canada. I always felt his stuff was gorgeous, a combination of Eisner brushwork and Ditko tone work. I think he could’ve been popular in regular comics.

CBC: Looking at “Hero,” I think he could’ve written his own ticket in comics.

Sal: Though I think he would have trouble meeting a deadline.

CBC: You’re lucky to get this nice, long story out of him.

Sal: It was luck that he actually finished it.

CBC: You and John, you’re both nobody, so to speak, when you stepped into that 1969 con. I recall, at my first Seuling con, in 1972, that everybody was so accessible. They were just sitting at their exhibit tables. How did you persuade them to contribute? Did you offer a rate? How did you get this blockbuster lineup for Phase #1?

Sal: Kaluta and Jones had already been doing short stories for different fanzines. Jeff Jones said, “I’ll do a four-pager for $20 per page,” and I think Kaluta did a two- or three-pager. Bernie already had a pin-up already done that we liked and John bought it for $10 or $15. Some people did not want to be paid. Ken Barr did a painted war story, a three-pager, but did not want to be paid. Neal Adams didn’t want to be paid. He wanted an opportunity to do “A View from Without,” and I said, “Definitely, do whatever you want to do; it’s fine by us.” He did it and didn’t want to be paid. It was about half really reasonable rates and the other half, free. I think people got a big kick out of what we were trying to put together and it was a professionally done, attractive package.

CBC: What was the

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

package you showed them?

Were you showing them A.C.E.?

Sal: I don’t remember showing A.C.E. around very much. By this time, I knew Phil from the 1969 con and he had a little comic shop on the other side of Brooklyn and I used to stop there once in a while. So, Phil called and asked, “Do you have a cover for Phase?”

I said, “Not yet.” He said, “Well, Steranko is here.

Why don’t you come by and he has a cover for you.”

I jumped in the car and went over and Steranko (I loved his work, especially his paintings!). He had a Western painting, of just a cowboy leaning against a tree, two guns, pistols up, but it was really dark and it was a Western theme. I said, “Gee, this really isn’t going to fit anything of what we’re doing. It doesn’t fit Phase.” We politely said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Not long after that, I decided to talk to Ken Barr about a cover. He had his idea. He wanted to do a wraparound cover—the whole King Arthur thing. I said, “That sounds great,” and it ended up being the cover.

In 1970, when I went off to college, I took graphic arts and advertising at New York City Community College, which is now New York City Technical College, and one of the professors there—they were all very nice—you learned process cameras and plate making, ink-matching, color matching, every type of press, typesetting, paste-ups—everything to do with advertising and graphic arts. This one teacher was in the field for many years and worked for The Daily News. I showed Professor Abrahams the beginnings of what I wanted to do with Phase. He showed me the different ways to reproduce different types of art: What a drop-out halftone is, this should be a line, this should be a combination, and then he recommended a printer in New York he worked with. When Phase was ready to go to press, I had a pretty good idea of how to get it printed… and we did!

CBC: You’re at the 1969 comic art convention and hanging out at the Witzend table. Make the connection for us to, “Hey, I can do a prozine like this.” Was it immediate?

Sal: Yes. CBC: But you knew it would be an expensive proposition, right?

Sal: Oh, yeah! John had a little bit of money and I had a little bit. When we made the presentation to Phil—he used to buy chunks of a print run and split it with Bud Plant in California. If it was printed on

Top: A visibly grateful Scott Shaw! displaying his basket of goodies on a 1950s’ Easter Sunday morning. Above: Recent pic of cartoonist Orlando Busino.

Bottom: The first few issues of Archie’s Tales Calculated to Drive You Bats contained Busino’s work, a huge influence on young Scott Shaw! This Busino cover is from #3 [Mar. 1962].

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Mr. A.” [Officially “Comic Art Publishers, Phase Magazine”—Ye Ed.] By this time, I was wrapping up the two-year college course in 1972. I got a full-time job at a printing and packaging company in Manhattan that did all the really expensive perfume cartons and packaging. I was assistant to the production manager.

It was on West 37th and was a big place with seven floors of equipment and people. I learned more about printing, more about embossing and die-cutting, process camera stuff, everything. I worked there for five years. I did the 1971 Comic Art Convention program book for Phil, which was supposed to be produced

by Rich Buckler, but he got bogged down with Marvel stuff.

It was the one with Steranko’s cover of his Talon character.

He gave us a nice Velox of it, which he then signed.

CBC: That program was saddle-stitched.

Sal: Yes, it was 5 ½" by 8 ½", saddle-stitched, and printed in New York by my guy. It worked out well. For 1972, Phil was willing to let me be a little more elaborate. It was still 5 ½" by 8 ½", but it was perfect-bound and had a really nice Vampirella cover by José Gonzalez that Warren gave us.

That was nice. Around 1971, I got to meet Warren and we became friends… we still keep in touch. He took me on a tour of his offices and the mail-order department with the masks, model kits, back issues, and all that.

CBC: Was Flo there?

Sal: Flo Steinberg? I don’t remember seeing her there. A lot of times when I went to Jim’s office to pick up advertising, it was always late at night. I’d drive in from Brooklyn into Manhattan and stop and pick him up a sandwich.

CBC: What kind of sandwich did he like?

Sal: I don’t know whether it was egg salad or chicken salad, but some kind of salad-type sandwich.

CBC: At a specific deli? [chuckles] Sal: It was at a specific deli just a few blocks from their office on 32nd Street. I would stop and pick up the sandwich.

It would be eight or nine o’clock at night and he’d be the only one there.

CBC: Did you have gumption? You look at Ken Barr’s story in Phase 1 and you look at Neal Adams’ story… which I don’t think has ever been reprinted and I think it’s one of the best things Neal ever did!

Sal: It was reprinted about three years later by Marvel: Unknown… #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Western painting, Talon TM & © James Steranko. Phase One cover painting © the estate of Ken Barr. T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents TM & © Thunder Agency, LLC.

This page: Clockwise from above is Jim Steranko’s painting that Sal declined not to use as Phase One cover; this Ken Barr effort was utilized instead; Jim’s Talon character graced the 1971 Comic Art Con souvenir book cover, for which Sal did production; John Carbonaro (left) with Sal in 2004. John purchased the rights to the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and even had his own short-lived imprint, JC Comics, in the early 1980s.

the East Coast, Phil would handle it and if it was printed on the West Coast, Bud would handle it. They would ship half to the other and split the bill. I showed Phase to Phil and he liked it, of course, and offered to buy so many copies and we gave him a good price. He up-fronted us a couple of grand.

I guess it covered about two-thirds of the print bill, which was pricey at the time, looking at old bills. I think we did 5,000 copies at the cost of a buck a copy. It was an 80-pager plus the cover, so it cost about $5,000.

CBC: What was the retail on it?

Sal: I’m pretty sure it was five bucks. Which was pretty high. Phil thought it should be $3, but we didn’t think we’d break even. I think we stayed at $5, but I have to check that one. Between Bud and Phil…

CBC: It says it here on the indicia, “Phase 1 is $5 a copy.”

Sal: For you, $6! We did it and during the printing and distribution and all that side of it, John had a girlfriend (which was just the biggest mistake of his life). She was a ball-breaker and didn’t like that he was hanging out with me, Jim, and Doug. She forced him to back out of Phase.

I said, “Well, this is quite the time,” but he did. He said, “You finish it. I’ll still give you a couple hundred dollars,” or whatever the amount was. His name stayed in it because he was there from the beginning. He did it, but didn’t want to be involved anymore. Then, associate editor Jim Ciccolella and associate publisher Doug Foley were getting involved in back issue sales. One of them—I think Jim— was working at My Friends Bookstore, on Flatbush Ave., where everybody hung out, from Levitz and Kupperberg and us—anybody from Brooklyn went to My Friends Bookstore to get their back issues. Jimmy got a job there and realized that retail was where the money is. He said, “I want out.” I already had the second issue planned, but Jimmy and Doug didn’t want to do it. I said, “Oh.” John was already out. For some bizarre reason, Jimmy and Doug sent me a letter saying, “You’re not authorized to use the name Phase; we’ve already registered it,” which I don’t think they ever did. They got together with Joe Brancatelli to do a Mr. A Special: “Phase Presents

“A View From Without” © Neal Adams. “Hero” © Bil Maher.

CBC: …Worlds of Science Fiction. That’s right. That story was pretty ballsy for 1971. What were your politics back then? Were you sympathetic to the anti-war movement or was it just, “I’ve got a Neal Adams story”?

Sal: Hey, I don’t know. At the time, I really felt… I was prepared, I guess. That was during the whole [draft] lottery system.

CBC: You were born in 1952, so that was close.

Sal: Yeah. That was the lottery system for my group. I had a high number, so it looked like I wouldn’t get called.

John had a lower number, but wasn’t in the best of health.

I wasn’t that knowledgeable on it. I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have. Looking at it, Vietnam was a silly waste of human life, but at that time, it wasn’t really on my mind.

CBC: Did you recognize that the story was flat-out radical?

Sal: Oh, yeah, but that didn’t bother me at all.

CBC: Did you sense the underground spirit that was going around at the time was a part of this. You came out with a real pro-zine.

Sal: A lot of people called it a pro-zine because it was mainly pros. It was a magazine-sized glossy, so it wasn’t really underground comix-size, which didn’t happen for us until I started doing Hot Stuf’, in 1974. I did two issues magazine-size and some distributors recommended doing it comic-book size, so I did, which helped sales when we switched. The idea was they would have complete freedom to do what they wanted to do. If Jeff wanted to do a sci-fi story, great. If Tony DeZuñiga wanted to do a little warrior story, fine. If Ken Barr wanted to do a war story because he was in the army in England and Scotland, “Fine by me. You do what you want to do and I’ll put it together. If it makes any kind of sense, we’ll do it.” Even Steve Skeates and Denny O’Neil… Originally that story was going to be the story Neal Adams was going to illustrate. He did a drawing of a fish guy. I wish I could find that. Then Neal thought it was maybe a little too silly, so he went and did his story and Steve and Denny played around and did their little drawings of a fish and did their story. I said, “We should print that because it is kind of a different take on things.” We had 80 pages to fill up, so what the hell? It worked out. Gray Morrow and Gerry Conway did a little prose Western story with four or five spot illustrations, which was very nice. I was an easy editor as far as content. I just wanted to give them the freedom. They weren’t getting paid top dollar, so “Do what you want.”

CBC: Wild stuff! I’m going to ask you some nerdy questions: Is Neal playing narrator in “A View from Without”?

Sal: Yes. Neal’s wife, Cory, took the photos and Neal touched them up with a brush and made them look a little more alien-ish, like the eyebrows and stuff. Corey did the lettering and did most of the paste-up work involved. Yeah, that was Neal.

CBC: It was 1972 and I was 13 years old, and my brother and I saw an ad in the Warren magazines about a convention going on in New York. We lived in Rhode Island (and I still do). We took the bus down and I met Jack Kirby, and that con changed my life. We were pretty darn poor, so there were only a very few things we could buy. I bought Phase I and, like you with Witzend, I was pretty much wiped out financially. “That’ll be $5, kid!” I think Playboy was two bucks at the time, so $5…! But Phase was such a beautiful production. I just want to say it’s not a dissimilar experience. I went home and started to do my own fanzine. It’s a long road and I’m still at it! I’m always fascinated because the Seuling con went year after year and I had no idea it was you doing the production on the program book.

Sal: I did two of them, 1971 and 1972. When I started working full-time, I told Phil I didn’t think I could handle it, so Paul Levitz did 1973, ’74, and ’75. Then, I came back and did a very quick job in 1976 when something went haywire somewhere.

CBC: Was that Sgt. Rock or Swamp Thing on the cover?

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

Previous page: Clockwise from top is Rick Yager’s Sunday-only comic strip Little Orvy [1960–62]; panel from Carl Barks’ story, “Forbidden Valley,” Donald Duck #54 [Aug. 1957]; R.F. Zallinger’s art graces the cover of Life magazine [Sept. 7, 1953]; Scott titled this pic of himself as a young’un, “Swinger Scott Shaw.” This page: Clockwise from top left, Scott’s first published artwork; Jay Ward’s Bullwinkle and Rocky; The Alvin Show [1961–62], Scott says, “was the by far the best example of that creative early-1960s period of prime-time cartoon shows”; San Diego Zoo patch.

Sal: That was the Sgt. Rock program, yes. It was quick job that was saddle-stitched. There was very little time to put that together, so I did it quick. By that time, I was just about finished working at a company for about five years and, I guess in 1974, I was working and decided to do Hot Stuf’, but everybody involved in Phase said, “Why don’t you do another Phase?” Phase was in early 1971, so in ’74, I decided to do Hot Stuf’. I had Ken do the cover again and I had Ernie Colón, George Perez, Rich Buckler, Rich Corben, and Bil Maher working on #1. We debuted it at the ’74 July con and I only did 2,500 copies because I wasn’t sure. But we sold out! We blew through the print run. Phil was very kind and let us have a room to display paintings, so Neal let us exhibit some Marvel paintings. Ken Barr loaned us some paintings; we had Gray Morrow stuff. We had a really nice display room. In the middle of it, we had a table selling Hot Stuf’ and I had one or two Corben prints that I did at that point. Corben was in Hot Stuf’ #1. He did the back cover and two short stories. From that point, I just did Hot Stuf’ once a year and went into different directions… I did The Art of Neal Adams and The Art of John Buscema… that stuff.

CBC: So, can you talk about Ken Barr? What was he like?

Sal: Ken was a real professional illustrator. He was mainly doing paperback cover work—a lot of it. He was very

Above: Final page from Neal Adams’ anti-war masterpiece, “A View From Without,” the highlight of Phase One. Below: Terrific cartoonist Bil Maher was a Hot Stuf’ mainstay, though otherwise did very little comics work. Panel detail from Phase One’s “Hero.”

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Above: Ken Barr’s original cover art for Hot Stuf’ #1 [Summer 1974]. Left: Ken’s 2007 self-portrait. The Scottish artist passed away in 2016. Below: Ken’s mini-biography appeared in Creepy #35 [Sept. 1970]. Inset bottom right: Splash page of Ken’s Phase One story, “Veteran,” written by his wife, Katherine.

reliable. He had an agent who couldn’t even keep up with it because he did so many covers. Every once in a while, he did a few covers for Marvel. He did a few covers for Warren.

CBC: He did work for Joe Kubert and (I think) Archie Goodwin for the DC war books.

Sal: He did do war stuff for Kubert, that’s right. He did some covers and stories for DC, but his main thing was the paperback covers. Then he got into the movie posters and the video boxes and that type of thing. He did The Terminal Man and The Wind and the Lion—that big wraparound painting with Sean Connery. He was the hardest-working man in show business and such a pleasure to work with.

In either 1969 or ’70, I first met him and his wife, Kathy, and they had a little round table in the hallway, and he was selling a little sepia-tone barbarian print. I stopped and talked and we became friends and stayed friends until he passed away. We knew each other for 40-some odd years.

CBC: Did he ever give any interviews? I was sad to find out he had passed.

Sal: I think he did some things with Questar, with Bill Wilson. I want to say there was another fanzine, Comic and Crypt. I think he’s got something in there. I can’t think of anything else.

CBC: He was from Scotland?

Sal: Yes and, as a kid, he was an apprentice sign painter.

His lettering—he did the Hot Stuf’ logo… and the Phase logo, now that I think about it. You name it, he could do it, and he enjoyed doing it. When he retired, he moved back to Scotland and always had the plan to do a Dracula painted graphic novel. He started it somewhere in the ’80s.

I remember seeing the first few very large beautiful pages.

Had the whole 72 or 80 pages laid-out and, when he went back to Scotland, he took his time and finished it, but never really showed it to anyone. I think I was the only one who really saw it. Then he got ill and had a few strokes and finally passed away. He never had a chance to show it to a publisher. It was sitting in his wife’s basement for quite a few years. She was cleaning out the house and called me and said, “You won’t believe what I found.” I drove up to Boston and picked it up. Now the whole graphic novel is here and I have to show it around. I only showed it to Scholastic Books because it’s a PG-sort of version. That was it.

It’s been wacky the last year and I never showed it to any other publisher. Since that time, and all those years he was working on it, there were so many Dracula graphic novels, I don’t know if it would have an actual impact, aside from the art, which was amazing to see. It’s very nice work, Jon. CBC: That sounds perfect for Kickstarter, Sal. I can’t tell you how excited I am to hear about this. Wow! I always suspected Steranko was the designer for the New York Comic Art Convention program book covers. Was he? I’m pretty sure he did the word-balloon logo for the event.

Sal: Did he? I don’t know. Every year, they did a different logo.

CBC: Who did the cover design? In the back ground with

Hot Stuf’ TM & © SQP Productions. All artwork © the estate of Ken Barr.

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#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Hot Stuf’ TM & © SQP Productions, Inc. All artwork G the respective artists. Sgt. Rock TM & © DC Comics.

the figure of Vampirella on the front?

Sal: The 1972 program book design was done by Warren.

CBC: Bill Dubay maybe?

Sal: Right. It probably was Dubay.

CBC: He was there at Warren at the time.

Sal: It’s true. They did the front cover—they composed the whole front cover, and the back cover was their house ad.

So they supplied us the whole front and back.

CBC: Was Jim Warren’s help invaluable? Was it essential for what you did?

Sal: As far as the convention goes, he was a big supporter of Phil’s. They were good friends. He did support the convention—he always had panels, displays, and booths.

As far as what I was doing, he was a big supporter of that. I got a lot of inspiration from him, besides the black-&-white artwork—besides Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, and all that, but also the idea of the mail-order department. Between Warren’s mail-order department and when Phil was still in an apartment in Coney Island, before he got a house, he had a small closet he was doing mail-order. It was called the Old Abandoned Warehouse. [chuckles] He was selling Phase and a lot of that stuff and advertising in Monster Times and, I guess, other places as well. Over the years, we did a lot of catalogs for Phil. I always loved the idea of not being totally dependent on a distributor because that, as we know, can go haywire very quickly, so I always had from the beginning from Phase on, I always had a mail-order division. Still, to this day, close to 50 years later, I still have a mail-order division—especially now with Facebook, you’re always growing your market and a lot of people that never heard of us and all the portfolios and art books, are finding us and buying older product.

CBC: To what do you attribute your longevity?

Sal: Gosh… Pasta?

CBC: Pasta doesn’t help longevity! [laughter] Sal: I think the important thing is, I never wanted the interference of having investors or people trying to rule the world. I did not want to be a big publisher.

I wanted to do what I wanted to do and deal with the people I wanted to deal with. I wasn’t looking to become a millionaire and succeeded in that. If I can make a living and support my family and have some fun and work with people I want to work with…? Fabulous. It worked out.

Over the years, during the Hot Stuf’ era and when I started doing portfolios with Wrightson, Adams, Kaluta, and Jones… Chaykin, all those people.

Getting back to book publishing during the computer age allowed us to scan COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

artwork and tweak it and get all the tone out of it. That really became the specialty of my pal Bob Keenan, we met in 1973 and became business partners years later. That’s what made me start doing art books with Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, Esteban Maroto, Mike Ploog —there’s been about 200 art books altogether. The idea of using pencils and reproducing those pencils in a really good fashion. It just grew from one thing to another thing to another thing. We did the Marvel portfolios for a while. I had that idea. It was successful—maybe too successful because I don’t think Marvel appreciated it. They cancelled our license after a few years. At the beginning, everybody liked what we were doing. Jim Galton liked what we were doing and gave us the license. We did a lot of them. I don’t remember how many we did. We did some black-and-whites with Michael Golden and Paul Gulacy.

CBC: You did the Michael Golden Doctor Strange portfolio? That was gorgeous!

Sal: Yes, we did. Golden is just something else. He’s fantastic.

CBC: Did you go down to Continuity? Did you see Neal Adams a lot?

Sal: I was at Continuity many, many times. I used to visit Neal when he was sharing an office with Murphy Anderson at DC. They had just two drafting tables. I’d visit Neal there.

Later, when he formed Continuity with Dick Giordano, I used to visit him there. We started working on, I guess around 1975, The Art of Neal Adams. And, the amount of advertising work they were doing—there were quite a few people working there. Russ Heath was working there, a lot of other people, a lot of people in and out. That’s where I met Mike Nasser and Marshall Rogers. Larry Hama was there and Golden was there. There was always somebody there.

CBC: Was Frank Miller there?

Above: From left to right are the covers for Sal’s outstanding pro-zine, Hot Stuf’, with #2 by Ken Barr, #3 by Richard Corben, #4 by Ken, and #5 by Richard.

Hot Stuf’ #1 and 2 were magazine-size and all subsequent issues were comic book-size.

Below: Sal was called in by Phil Seuling at the last minute to do production work on the 1976 New York Comic Art Con souvenir book. Cover art by the co-creator of Sgt. Rock, Joe Kubert. Bottom: Covers for the final three issues of Hot Stuf’, with #6 by Rich Larson and Steve Fastner; #7 by Michael W. Kaluta, and #8 by Neal Adams.

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Hot Stuf’s Hottest Stuff!

This page: Clockwise from top left, Sal Quartuccio’s logo in the later ’70s; Rich Corben panel, Hot Stuf’ #2; Gray Morrow’s work in HS #2; Corben panel, HS #3; Robert Kline panel art, HS #4; Herb Arnold art, HS #3; Will Meugniot panel, HS #2; Tim Kirk’s splash page, HS #3; panel detail featuring caricatures of Hot Stuf’ #1 co-publishers John Carbonaro and Sal Quartuccio, drawn by fledgling artist George Pérez; Corben panel; HS #2; and detail from Rich Buckler’s work in HS #1.

All are TM & © the respective copyright holders.

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All are TM & © the respective copyright holders.

This page: Clockwise from top left, perhaps the finest work

by Ernie Colon appeared in his “Manimal” serial featured in HS (this portion is from #6); HS logo; Alex Toth’s extraordinary work in HS #4; detail from Terry Austin’s pin-up in HS #7; Sonny Trinidad panel, HS #7; cover detail by Corben from HS #5; Girl Scout Godzilla by Bil Maher, HS #8 (with panels above by Rich Larson and Tim Boxell, HS #6); Corben assistant Herb Arnold’s work from HS #5 (with pair of panels above by Bil Maher from HS #7); and opening splash panel from HS #4 by Mike Vosburg.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

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Above: Neal Adams’ awesome cover art for the two volumes of The Art of Neal Adams, published by SQP Productions, Inc., in 1975 and ’77, respectively.

Below: Though promised with this teaser illo on the last page of Hot Stuf’ #1, Neal’s “Kent State Tragedy” documentary tale wouldn’t appear in the next or any other issue..

things were not too successful and I lost money on, but it averaged out.

I stopped publishing about the middle of 2017 at San Diego Con. I said, “I’ve had enough.” I stopped then and there. I could see that over the years—San Diego was the big show for us. A lot of people would stop at the booth with a list of what they were looking for. Then the toy companies started making a stronger and stronger presence. When you have to go to Hasbro to get that exclusive and you have to wait in line, and hours would go by for these people to be waiting online. Funko, much as I love them, I don’t care for the way they do business. You had to get in line to get a ticket to get on another line. So, you’d be tied up for hours, time otherwise be used for shopping down the aisles. Of course, that was the idea to tie up customers. Half a day just to get some particular item. That kept a lot of people out of the halls. You could see it over the past few years—less and less people walking the aisles. A lot of older exhibitors, Steve Schanes, Chuck Rozanski—one by one, they either pulled out or reduced their space. There just wasn’t the money in it. Attendees were just worrying about the exclusive stuff.

All the hotels outside were all starting to have little exhibits, so it really spread the crowd out. It kept people from walking the halls. By the end of that San Diego Con, I said, “I think this will be the last one, and I think I won’t be publishing anymore,” though I had quite a few planned. I just don’t think it’s worth doing. The audience isn’t there or there are so many other choices to spend their money on. Also, at the same time, we only had one distributor, Diamond.

They did the best they could, but once Capital went out of business, there went half the comic shops and we lost more than half our sales.

CBC: Was Doug Murray the one who came out with his Neal Adams Checklist?

Sal: I’m not sure… Greg Theakston did two volumes of The Neal Adams Treasury. I don’t know if Doug Murray… #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All characters TM & © the respective copyright holders. “The Kent State Tragedy” illustration © Neal Adams.

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Sal: I did not see Frank there. I met Frank, if I remember correctly, at Chaykin’s studio down in the 20s.

CBC: Was Simonson with Howard at the time?

Sal: I think Simonson, Jim Sherman, and Starlin were there. Jim Starlin was working on the Metamorphosis Odyssey portfolio. Chaykin was working on the Cody Starbuck portfolio. Simonson was busy. I forgot what Frank was going to do—he had something in mind, but we never got around to it. Marshall Rogers did the Batman portfolio and DC was very kind to let us do it. I think that was the only DC product we did. There were a lot of people at Continuity. Then there was the Studio. There was Bernie, Mike, Jeff, and Barry.

I had a basic deal for the portfolios—a certain amount for the rate and a certain amount of free copies.

Bernie was fine, Mike was fine, Jeff was fine. When I approached Barry, he said, “Oh, no, no, I have to receive much more money than what they’re getting.” I said, “Well, thanks anyway,” so I never did anything with him CBC: Barry started Gorblimey after that?

Sal: I’m not sure when he started. I think about the same time.

CBC: That was his bread and butter for at least five years.

Sal: I’m sure.

CBC: Did you give up-front money to the guys?

Sal: Yes, we did.

CBC: Were you good with saving money? Maintaining liquidity?

Sal: For the five years I was working. I was still living at home and didn’t have any real expenses, so all the money I made, I spent on publishing. Some things were successful and made their money back and some

Photos courtesy of Sal Quartuccio. The Neal Adams Portfolio, Toy Boy © Neal Adams.,

CBC: He did a checklist.

Sal: Doug did the index?

CBC: Warp characters doing a stand-off with DC characters on the cover.

Sal: Yep. That’s right.

CBC: How did you doing The Art of Neal Adams come about?

Sal: The first volume did very well. Neal did a really terrific cover and Corben colored it. Neal had a cover he did for The Spirit for the Warren version of the magazine. Eisner was not a fan of it. He didn’t like Neal’s version of The Spirit.

Eisner on an overlay did a new “Eisner” Spirit to go over Neal’s, which I guess didn’t go over with Neal because the cover never got published. I said, “Hey, Neal, I’ll publish the original version.” We did and Corben colored it and did a beautiful job. It was a very simple fanzine—32 pages with a heavy board cover and it did well. People loved it and reproduction wise, it was very tough to reproduce some of the very nice pencil work that Neal did. We tweaked a few things, but really I was never happy with it, but Neal liked it and it did pretty well. We did a second volume and Neal did another nice cover with Marvel and DC characters with Atomic Mouse between them. It was one of Corben’s associates, Herb Arnold, who did the coloring on the second volume’s cover.

CBC: Was the deal with Neal profit sharing? Did you pay him up-front? Was it royalties?

Sal: I think the deal with Neal was royalties, I believe, but it was really early on. It was like the first project—outside of Hot Stuf’, it was really the first art-zine that I did and I don’t think I was 100 percent sure how we were going to do it, but we ended up with royalties. I don’t think it amounted to a whole lot of money. It was a $3 thing and was on the pricey side also to print. I don’t either of us made a whole lot on it.

CBC: Did it go through multiple printings?

Sal: Just one that I remember. I think it did pretty well.

CBC: That was the first production you did after doing Hot Stuf’ #1?

Sal: Yeah, it was somewhere after #2 or #3. I think it was around ’75.

CBC: How would you describe Neal?

Sal: How would I describe Neal? It was great when I would visit him at Continuity. It came out of him—it just flowed out of him. I can’t think of another artist that I sat and watched—I can’t speak about Kirby because I never sat and observed him, but it’s probably the same. With Neal, it just flowed out of him. You’d be talking with him and he’d be doing an advertising piece or a comic book piece, and it just flowed out of him. Whatever you wanted and his storytelling is a whole other world. The stuff he did for DC and Marvel is just fabulous. It just came out of him so naturally, fluidly. He was a pleasure. We got along well and he always liked people coming up. I think he generally liked having company.

When he was working on illustrations for The New Heroes Portfolio, he’d have us come up to his apartment and he’d be working on the pencil pieces while talking and hanging out.. Certainly at Continuity, he had the company, as there were plenty of people showing him things and people doing coloring, doing storyboards, as well as animatics, and all that business. Neal can do anything. His paintings, especially the ones for the Marvel magazine covers and then the Tarzan paintings which were just fantastic. I was just thrilled to death he let us do the three sets of Tarzan portfolios. He did new pencil drawings, new illustrations for the portfolio envelopes and they came out gorgeous. We were able to shoot all those paintings. Just one painting was hanging in Jenette Kahn’s office. She let us borrow it and we returned it back to her. We had all 12 paintings… big, beautiful transparencies, shot from the originals. They came out really, really nice.

CBC: You know, a really big transition was taking place at that time. Comic books distribution was in crisis. The newsstands were floundering and Carmine Infantino was COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

summarily dismissed at DC and Jenette Kahn came in and had a new attitude. There was a lot of change taking place.

Out of this, Phil Seuling rose up Sea Gate, his direct sales/ mail order company. How do you recall the birth of direct market?

Sal: Phil was very close to Sol Harrison and very close with Jim Warren (though I’m not sure about Marvel), and he worked out an arrangement to buy a certain amount of copies. So, Harrison agreed to sell Phil a certain amount, a firm sale and nonreturnable, at such-and-such a price.

Warren was all for it, Archie was all for it, and, I guess, Marvel eventually fell into it, as well. It was a smart move, because there were so many comic shops popping up and it was impossible to get product from the newsstand distributors. I had stopped at a couple of distributor warehouses in Brooklyn and Manhattan and it was a mess. The product was considered crap. I remember going to the candy store as a kid and everything was wired tight and you’d try to dig through the stack to find the best condition of any given issue. So, I think everybody liked the idea of the firm sale.

They had a firm order, they knew precisely how many copies Phil needed. They set things up and opened up a warehouse near the printer in Illinois and it worked for quite a while.

CBC: They had a warehouse in Sparta, Illinois, near World Color Press? I didn’t know that.

Sal: Yeah.

CBC: Now, that’s pretty direct! [chuckles] Sal: That was the only way to get it across the country—start in the middle and work your way out. They opened up a warehouse, hired some people, and did a pretty good job of getting the stuff out there.

CBC: Was Phil successful?

Sal: Definitely.

CBC: Did he quit his teaching job?

Sal: Actually, I’m not exactly sure when he quit Lafayette High School, but he did quit. Conversely,

Above: Neal Adams in the mid-1970s. Below: Most of the discussion regarding Sal’s forays into the world of prints and portfolios (which became a veritable craze in the comics industry of the latter ’70s and early ’80s) will appear in the next part of his interview, but mention must be made that SQP’s first effort in that publishing niche was producing high-quality prints of Neal’s Tarzan paperback cover paintings in a series of three portfolio sets. (Please see Comic Book Creator #18 for an in-depth look at the artist’s “Jungle Man” series.) Next time we’ll learn about the portfolio work of Marshall Rogers and Berni Wrightson, and others, as well as SQP’s popular Marvel super-hero prints.

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there was Comics Unlimited—Ron Foreman and Walter Wang, who were a sub-distributor, you could call them. They were both high school teachers and I think they stayed working until retirement. I think they did their distribution work, but still taught until they retired.

CBC: Tell me about Phil. He was a big guy?

Sal: He was a big guy. If you were friends with Phil, you were friends forever. We’d have arguments for 10 minutes and go out to dinner. His heart was really in it. He loved what he was doing. He loved the business. He loved everybody. If people were in a jam, he’d help them out. He helped out a lot of people who were in jams and he never talked about it. He supported a lot of people. I don’t think you’d have half the market you have now if not for Phil. He brought the British material into the country with Forbidden Planet and helped open that store in New York. He did it all.

He loved every minute of it and did a lot to promote publishers. If it were not for him, I would not be doing this. If not for his support during those early years, I would’ve given this up a long time ago.

CBC: You had the confidence that if you were in a jam, you could go put the touch on him and get a loan. Was that a part of his appeal?

Sal: I wouldn’t say I “put the touch on him,” but if I needed an advance on something he was about to buy, if he could swing it, he would swing it. It was the same thing with his partner, Jonni Levas. If they could swing a couple of bucks my way, they’d do it; if they couldn’t, it was not the end of the world. We were very supportive of Phil. If he needed advertising done, we’d do it fast. If he needed catalogs done, we did some gorgeous catalogs. If he needed program books done, we did it. Don’t forget, we were both in Brooklyn. We were 15 or 20 minutes away from each other.

Whatever he needed, not a problem—we could do it. I think he really appreciated that and helped us along.

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Photos courtesy of Sal Quartuccio. All characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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].

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photo courtesy of Sal Quartuccio. The Art of John Byrne © John Byrne. Rog 2000 TM & © John Byrne. All other characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

CBC: Did you play poker with those days?

Sal: I never played poker. We played softball at Prospect Park together. John and I sometimes and then just me when John wasn’t up to it. We’d meet Phil and a few of his teacher friends from Lafayette, and Gray Morrow, who lived just a few blocks away from the park, Angelo Torres who lived near the park, Dick Giordano, and, believe it or not, Frazetta, a couple of times when he was still living in Brooklyn. What a dope I was that I didn’t have a camera! [laughter] I could kick myself in the ass. You want to talk about ballplayers: Angelo Torres and Giordano.

CBC: Even Giordano? He really was a good player?

Sal: Oh, yeah. They were good. I was just a skinny little kid.

I was awful. Phil was a terrific ballplayer. When it was over, we’d go over to Gray Morrow’s apartment and we’d have lunch. I would spend… [chuckles] I don’t know how much time in Gray’s apartment hallway at the entrance of his door.

There would be all these originals these guys traded with each other, so there was Wood, Williamson, Frazetta— gorgeous stuff—just hanging on the wall, most of which I don’t think was ever published. Gray also had just for fun, he would do these 9" x 12" full-figure portraits of different super-heroes—Marvel, DC, Golden Age… you name it.

And he had them all over the house! That led to a couple years later for the Heroes Portfolio that had six of those paintings printed. I think they were Joker, Modesty Blaise, Hawkman.…We should have done more, but we didn’t do that well on them. I think the black-&-white envelope kind of hurt it in a way. I think if they could’ve seen the plates full color, it would’ve done much better.

CBC: Did you have a convention presence when you did Hot Stuf’ #1?

Sal: Oh, yeah, for sure… at Phil’s cons, yes.

CBC: After Phase and you went off to work, was it fulltime? Was it good-paying? What was the job title?

Sal: Yes. I was assistant production manager of this printing plant. They designed and printed boxes for Faberge, Jovan, Chanel…

CBC: Wow. High-end stuff.

Sal: High-end stuff. Unbelievable equipment for printing, embossing, die-cutting, window boxes, and I was right out of college. They interviewed me and I didn’t even want to work that summer. My professor said, “Hey, I’ve got a great job for you.” I said, “I don’t really want to go to work.” He said, “Go to the interview; it’ll be fun.” So, I went to the interview and my boss couldn’t be nicer. He said, “Want to learn?” I said, “I always want to learn.” He said, “You start Monday.” I started Monday and learned every type of printing press and how they did embossments and die-cutting, and everything to do with really high-end packaging. I remember they said the bottles and the packaging were always far more expensive than the perfumes, which is true. I did that for five years and there was a change of ownership at the printing plant and I didn’t particularly care for how a couple of salespeople took over the company. Ehhh… salesmen. They were up to no good and I knew they were up to no good. They knew I knew, so they let me go. Less than a year later, they went bankrupt after being in business for 60 years. They were embezzling and screwing around. I could tell they were screwing around — owing money for paper and other bills. It didn’t make sense because money was coming in. I called them on it—which I guess wasn’t a good idea… actually, it was a good idea! I said, “So long,” and took my address book with all my contacts. I took my stapler, which believe it or not, it’s still the stapler on my desk from 40 years ago. I said, “That’s it, I’m not going to work for anybody else. I’m going to see if I can turn this little fanzine into a full-time business.” And, gradually, it happened.

CBC: Okay! That wraps up this segment. Thanks, Sal! Sal: You’re welcome, Jon. TO BE CONTINUED COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

Above: Sal published The Art of John Byrne in 1980, just as the artist’s star was rising due to his outstanding work on The Uncanny X-Men. At left is John during that period.

IN PART TWO: In our next interview segment with Sal Quartuccio, Ye Ed talks to the innovative publisher about the lucrative 1970s/’80s heyday of comics art prints and portfolios, when SQP was king of that fad, plus chatting about his Judge Dredd comics line and long-standing “good girl art” publications, SQP’s current mainstay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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WENDY PINI discusses her days as Red Sonja cosplayer, & 40+ years of ELFQUEST! Plus RICHARD PINI on their 48-year marriage and creative partnership! Plus: We have the final installment of our CRAIG YOE interview! GIL KANE’s business partner LARRY KOSTER talks about their adventures together! PABLO MARCOS on his Marvel horror work, HEMBECK, and more!

Cover by WENDY PINI.

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Career-spanning interview with TERRY DODSON, and Terry’s wife (and go-to inker) RACHEL DODSON! Plus 1970s/’80s portfolio producer SAL QUARTUCCIO talks about his achievements with Phase and Hot Stuf’, R. CRUMB and DENIS KITCHEN discuss the history of underground comix character Pro Junior, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his wife, HEMBECK, and more!

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Extensive PAUL GULACY retrospective by GREG BIGA that includes Paul himself, VAL MAYERIK, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, TIM TRUMAN, ROY THOMAS, and others. Plus a JOE SINNOTT MEMORIAL; BUD PLANT discusses his career as underground comix retailer, distributor, fledgling publisher of JACK KATZ’s FIRST KINGDOM, and mail-order bookseller; our regular columnists, and the latest from HEMBECK! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Winter 2022

The forerunner to COMIC BOOK CREATOR, COMIC BOOK ARTIST is the 20002004 Eisner Award winner for BEST COMICS-RELATED MAG! Edited by COMIC BOOK CREATOR’s JON B. COOKE, it features in-depth articles, interviews, and unseen art, celebrating the lives and careers of the great comics artists from the 1970s to today.

CBA BULLPEN COLLECTING THE UNKOWN ISSUES OF COMIC BOOK ARTIST!

COMIC BOOK ARTIST BULLPEN collects all seven issues of the little-seen labor of love fanzine published in the early 2000s by JON B. COOKE (editor of today’s COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine), just after the original CBA ended its TwoMorrows run.

Featured are in-depth interviews with some of comics’ major league players, including GEORGE TUSKA, FRED HEMBECK, TERRY BEATTY, and FRANK BOLLE—and an amazing all-star tribute to Silver Age great JACK ABEL by the Marvel Comics Bullpen and others. That previously unpublished all-comics Abel appreciation (assembled by RICK PARKER) includes strips by JOE KUBERT, WALTER SIMONSON, KYLE BAKER, MARIE SEVERIN, GRAY MORROW, ALAN WEISS, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, MORT TODD, DICK AYERS, and many more! Plus a new bonus feature on JACK KIRBY’s unknown 1960s baseball card art, and a 16-page bonus full-color section, all behind a Jack Kirby cover!

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rapping with rick leonardi

Hamish MacInnes, Spider-Man 2099

Artist Rick Leonardi on Spider-Man 2099 and some Scottish mannie named Hamish

by ROBERT MENZIES

Below: Rick Leonardi poses with Secret Wars #8 [Dec. 1984], in the City Centre Comics shop, located in Glasgow, Scotland, on Sept. 27, 2019.

If you’re a Spider-Man 2099 fan, I know what you’re thinking: the alter ego of that character is named Miguel O’Hara.

So who’s this MacInnes gent named in our headline?

Glad you asked! Hamish MacInnes, OBE, is a Scottish mountaineering legend who climbed the Matterhorn at the age of 16 and was deputy leader of Sir Chris Bonington’s 1975 Mount Everest ascent. MacInnes also invented the “MacInnes Stretcher,” used in mountain rescue the world over, and he introduced the short ice axe and hammer with inclined picks for winter climbing. Got it?

You’re maybe now getting an inkling of how he connects to the Spidey of 2099, but let’s leave it to comic book artist Rick Leonardi to eventually fill us in on that and many other details related to Spider-Man, his black costume, and how, in the early 1990s, Peter David and Leonardi predicted Amazon’s Alexa and the cult of President Donald Trump.

First, a quick history lesson about the future The 2099 line of comics was about future versions of Marvel heroes and villains, with one entirely new character, Ravage, written by no less than Stan “The Man” Lee and illustrated by an under-appreciated Paul Ryan (who passed away in 2016). The initial four titles—Spider-Man 2099, Doom 2099, Punisher 2099 and Ravage 2099—were soon joined by new incarnations of the X-Men, Ghost Rider and Hulk. The Fantastic Four of 2099, with Leonardi helping with the launch, were originally written as the classic team only to be later revealed as copies created by the Watcher.

Spider-Man 2099 was an immediate success—the first issue [Nov. 1992] is the biggest selling book of Peter David’s entire career—and the title remained popular until the ending with #46 [Aug. ’96]. It was high profile enough that Now Comics released their parody Married with Children 2099 [June–Aug. 1993], a mash-up of the Fox TV sit-com, pop sci-fi, and 2099 characters. In the years after the line was cancelled, the characters made only occasional appearances and it was largely ignored (if not quite forgotten) until Spider-Man 2099 was revived in 2014, with Peter David returning as writer.

Information on the origins of Spider-Man 2099 is scant and what little can be found is nearly always from the perspective of writer/co-creator Peter David. He has reported that writers were asked to pitch ideas for the character and he made two core decisions: first, the new Spider-Man would not be a descendant of Peter Parker. Perhaps surprisingly, David was the only writer who proposed this genealogical distance and, for reasons Leonardi explained during our interview, it was that more than any other single idea which led Cavalieri to offer David the gig. David explained his other core principle to Newsarama, in 2009.

Pretty much every place where Stan [Lee] zigged, I zagged. Which is not to say that Stan did it wrong—quite the contrary. But my feeling was, if we’re going to make him a character unique unto himself, then we have to take all the choices that Stan Lee made with the original Spider-Man and do the exact opposite.

So whereas Peter Parker is a high school student, Miguel is a fully-realized adult working in a laboratory.

Whereas Peter was shy and reticent and didn’t know how to talk to girls but talky and outgoing as Spider-Man, Miguel O’Hara was a fully confident wiseacre with a fiancée… and as Spider-Man, relatively mute.

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#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Secret Wars TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Photo by Chris James.

Photo by CHRIS JAMES

Accurate as this is, there are certainly a few broad similarities, especially in their origin stories. Miguel and Peter are geniuses. Their powers are gained through a scientific accident, albeit with sabotage integral to Miguel’s transformation. Neither Miguel or Peter are especially likable in the origin story and their motivations are entirely selfish: Peter created a costume for a hopefully lucrative showbiz career and Miguel modified a festival outfit to avoid capture by the pursuing bounty hunter called Venture. Unable to stand back and let others be hurt, they become reluctant heroes.

The world of 2099 had discrete references to the Marvel of today. Spider-Man’s costume is made from unstable molecules and Reed Richards tech appears in #12 and 13.

The company Stark-Fujikawa, a call-back to Tony “Iron Man” Stark, is mentioned regularly, and there is a link to

Hulk supporting character Leonard Samson (“Samsonian psychiatry,” referred to in #17) and the Alchemax School for Gifted Youngsters, in #18, is clearly inspired by Professor Xavier’s place of learning. Throughout the series there are references to the Age of Heroes, with the Thorite religion featuring regularly.

Scotland Calling It had been a lengthy gap since artist Rick Leonardi’s first visit to Scotland when, fresh out of college, in the early 1980s, he’d gone hiking in the Highlands with a friend. This included a foggy ascent of the highest peak in Britain, Ben Nevis, and a daredevil traverse along Aonach Eagoch, a narrow ridge between two mountains.

On his return in 2019, following a brief stay in Edinburgh, Leonardi and his spouse traveled to Glasgow for an appearance at MCM Scotland Comic Con, allowing me to interview Rick on the Friday night beforehand. Rick and Cynthia also kindly agreed to an invitation to a meal at local restaurant The Ubiquitous Chip, where we were joined by Frank Quitely, artist on Batman and Robin, and wife Ann Jane; my long-suffering bride, Lesley; comic art collector Mark Brogan and Yvonne; Edinburgh Comic Con owner/manager James Lundy; John McShane, co-author of Robert Burns in Edinburgh [2015]; and Chris O’Brien, owner of City Centre Comics. The meal was great, the company even better.

The next day Rick attended the convention, where he was visited by Alyssa, his talented niece living here while studying at the city’s prestigious Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Cynthia, a doctor by profession and somehow twice as smart as that calling would lead one to assume, was with Rick most of Saturday—the wares of the local shopping plazas and the city’s best coffeehouses were the preferred option on Sunday—and was especially curious about the political scene, asking for an explanation for why Britain voted for Brexit and economic hara-kiri. Being a

sane person, I was unable to offer any clarification, although I did point out that Scotland overwhelmingly voted to remain a member of the EU. After the con, the Leonardis spent over a week touring the Highlands, stopping off at some of the biscuit-tin staples like the stunning Isle of Skye and the impossibly picturesque Eilean Donan Castle.

Mercifully, the usually mercurial weather was, for the most part, charitable to them.

But this isn’t a travelogue, so let’s return to the weekend in Glasgow: If Rick Leonardi is an example of the citizens of Philadelphia, then I regret having never visited the city. Soft-spoken, thoughtful, and clearly well read, he explains himself with clarity and conciseness. He has a profound understanding of comic books that I had time to barely scratch the surface of. As someone who’s been in education for two decades, it quickly occurred to me that he exhibits all the temperamental characteristics of an excellent teacher. On Sunday, he reinforced that impression throughout his instructive panel with writer J.M. DeMatteis. These are his thoughts on creative blocks and composition:

Above: Detail from penciler Rick Leonardi and inker Al Williamson’s cover art for Spider-Man 2099 #1 [Nov. 1992], featuring the debut of the future Spidey.

Inset left: Ye ed could not resist slipping in a cover [#1, Oct. 1983] from his favorite Leonardi work, Cloak and Dagger. Inks

by Terry Austin. Below: MCM (Movie Comic Media) Scotland Comic Con logo. Bottom: J.M. DeMatteis and Rick Leonardi joint panel at the same con.

Spider-Man 2099, Cloak and Dagger TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

With the important caveat that I have done very little writing, I would say if there’s a moment in the plot that’s not working and you can’t see your way forward, or the plot is in some way resisting you, is not to look at that as a problem, or an obstacle, but as a signal that the plot is telling you to go in another direction. This is the plot’s organic way of participating in its own creation. It’s an opportunity rather than a moment of panic. I have one or two simple rules. If I’ve had to erase a panel four times, then

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

19

Above: At Baycon 1968, left to right, David Clark, Scott Shaw!, and Greg Bear. Below: The San Diego Five String Mob, from Jimmy Olsen #144 [Dec. 1971]

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By his own admission Leonardi’s still adjusting to the number, geographic spread, and reaction of his fans. At the panel, he commented, “I’ve only been on Twitter a couple of months [as of July 2019] and it’s totally changed my perception of the audience and my relationship in this cosmos of comics. I had no idea. Working for 40 years in, more or less, isolation in the privacy of my own room without any real idea of what was going on out there and now it’s surprising and astonishing in a lot of ways.”

At his table at MCM, he focused intently on the art before him, a concentration unbroken even when nearby Glasgow University students directed Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2099 cosplayers to noisily act out the argument from the end-credits scene in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse [2018]. Studying the art before him, he would add a line, cock his head, ponder for a few seconds, add again, repeating this procedure until content. When drawing Scottish hero William Wallace, he spent five minutes on the chin alone, unwilling to move onto the next sketch until satisfied. He’s so absorbed when drawing that I’d almost bet my No-Prize from Stan Lee that he loses all track of time. Apart from stopping to patiently describe the developmental stages of artwork to passing con attendees, taking extra time over younger fans, one of the few interruptions that caused him to pause, albeit briefly, was when “Donald Trump” ordered “Deadpool” to get out of the country. This

made both Rick and fellow artist Bart Sears, sitting behind him, laugh and take photographs of the two cosplayers.

A final observation before we hear from the man himself. Leonardi indulged in one activity that is almost inevitably an embarrassing or condescending no-no: he mimicked the Scottish accent. Ordinarily, this goes down like the proverbial lead balloon and is met with rictus smiles due to quite lamentable execution. Scottish accents are extremely tricky to imitate, and for the most part North Americans seemingly hear it as an Irish accent attempted by someone from New Delhi. Leonardi, however, has an uncanny ear for accents and managed a very convincing impression. (His Achilles’ Heel was that perennial problem for foreigners: pronouncing the last part of ‘Edinburgh’ correctly. Clue: it’s not how it looks!) I won’t lie, I was impressed; I had never encountered a visitor who has managed to sound like a local. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. As a young man Leonardi obsessively played the bagpipes to the point where he permanently damaged three fingers on his right hand and now draws by holding drawing tools with only his thumb and first finger! Even today, you will sometimes hear the bagpipes emanating from the room where he is bringing his latest illustration to life. It may be wishful thinking on my part but maybe inker Alfonso “Al” Williamson isn’t the only Spider-Man 2099 artist who has Scots blood in his lineage?

The following interview was conducted at City Centre Comics, in the West End of Glasgow, on Friday, Sept. 27, 2019, with photography by Chris James. Additional material and photographs were recorded at MCM Scotland Comic Con, which took place on the Saturday and Sunday of that weekend at the city’s Exhibition Centre. Thanks to CCC’s owner Chris O’Brien and MCM’s Caroline Miller and Amelia Munro for making this article possible.

Robert Menzies: Thanks, Rick, for agreeing to speak to me about Spider-Man 2099. I’d like to start by asking you about the original Spider-Man, Peter Parker. Do you remember when you first read one of his adventures?

Rick Leonardi: Wow. I remember reading at my Italian grandmother’s house. She barely spoke English, but she knew enough that to keep children quiet comic books had to be purchased. So she popped across the road where she lived in South Philadelphia and brought back two or three or four comic books and they turned out to be incredibly pivotal. [South Philly is traditionally where the city’s Italian community gravitated.]

One of them was back in the day when Doctor Strange and, I think, Nick Fury shared a comic book. Nick Fury was fighting the Yellow Claw at the time and I believe that it was the beginning of Jim Steranko’s work (or, if not that, then late Kirby). The back half was Doctor Strange fighting Dormammu, “The Pincers of Power,” and that was Ditko. It was an enormously influential thing to look at that age. “Oh my gosh! How’s he going to get out of this?!” Ditko made that impression and I went looking for more Ditko thereafter and found Spider-Man. I might have stumbled across the Ditko Spider-Man/ Doctor Strange cross-over and then I traded for more Spi-

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Strange Tales, Captain America, Nick Fury, Amazing Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Top: Back in the 1960s, Rick Leonardi’s Italian grandmother would buy comics to keep her grandkids occupied, with Strange Tales being a memorable title for the artist-in-making.

ST #161 [Oct. 1967], cover by Jim Steranko. Above: John Romita, Sr., licensing art of his signature character, a “hefty” rendition Rick particularly admires. Below: Rick’s “black costume” Spidey designs, from Marvel Age #12 [Mar. 1984] and the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #252 [May ’84]..

it’s time to try something else. Totally move the camera around, do something else. If it’s a scene in a plot that’s been given to me that makes no sense, can’t be done, then I’ll just rewrite it. And suffer the consequences later, if it comes to that. You have to deal with what’s possible.

If you have the time, and particularly if you’re working on a large piece like a pin-up, do the piece and then turn it to the wall and walk away.

Come back a day later and turn it back. Usually if there’s an error in composition or in drawing the error will jump out in that first half second of your eyes alighting on your composition. It happens every time, it’s an old trick. You can read descriptions of Rembrandt doing the same thing.

Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

der-Mans by John Romita, Sr. I think I got some very worn out copies of when Fred Foswell was being revealed as being the Big Man. That was all it took. I got a good dose of Romita, Sr., back when he was still in double digits, middle double digits, and then read him right up through the period where he was inking Gil Kane. That was fabulous work.

I’m one of the hugest fans of Romita over Kane. But then I dropped the title, like a hot potato, never to be read again, when Gwen Stacy was killed.

Menzies: I was on British reprint time, which was three years behind the U.S. editions, and I had about 18 months of U.S. continuity, and then she was killed. I never took to Mary Jane; it was always Gwen for me.

Leonardi: It’s Gwen all the way. That scene where she comes back from London…

Menzies: Yes, it’s great. A rare break for Pete. Can you talk a little about your take on Spider-Man? Leonardi: I always wanted to make Spider-Man plausibly anatomically correct. When Spider-Man became not just double-jointed but triple-jointed I felt like people were losing the bubble a little bit.

Menzies: Are you talking later, in the 1990s?

Leonardi: Yes. I like Spider-Man with a little bit of heft.

Like John Romita, Sr., used to draw him. You can go too far with that. There was a period where he was too heavily muscled for my taste. The thing that’s interesting, if you put him in the black costume, a figure drawn just in outline looks proportionally correct. Once you fill it in his proportions magically change, it looks wrong all of a sudden.

There’s a certain period of adjustment as far as that goes.

Menzies: You drew eight adventures of Spider-Man, the first published in 1982. On your Spidey issues you had some great inkers, like Bob Layton, Joe Rubinstein, and Jim Mooney, but my favorite of these—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—is Vince Colletta on Amazing Spider-Man #279 [Aug.1986]. It’s lovely.

Leonardi: It is. The scene where she puts herself through the windshield and takes out the driver, apparently there was a bet at the editorial level that it could not be drawn. [smiles] Surprise!

Menzies: The way the arc of her flip goes out of the panel and then back in is brilliantly done. On the subject of the black costume, it looks difficult to draw.

Leonardi: The [spider symbol’s] legs in particular, even now, are a challenge. There’s a couple of interesting tricks that I’ve only lately developed in terms of drawing the black costume. You know, decades later, when it’s too late.

[Robert laughs] I have some wisdom about how to draw the legs, especially how the legs wrap around the sides of the figure. How to use the legs to actually define the diameter, the curve, of the torso, rather than making it just a flat, appliqué kind of thing, now it defines the rib cage more.

Menzies: Before going into Spider-Man 2099, there’s one other Spider-Man-related query I have. It’s unclear what your input was into the final design of Spider-Man’s black costume.

Leonardi: Okkaaaay. [laughs] Menzies: We can skip this and move on…?

Leonardi: No. The story is, I presented myself for some reason in the Marvel offices one day and [editor-in-chief] Jim Shooter had a sketch from Mike Zeck with the black costume. I think it was just torso only or a shot from the waist up kind of thing. But it was the black costume and it did have a spider. The legs had just one joint, that is to say they went up from the body of the spider, the COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

central white figure, and then back down. So what I did, I was tasked with refining that and producing a three-view, a front, back and side view, for everybody to use as general reference.

I took what latitude I thought I had and put an extra joint in and separated the legs, so it wasn’t just a solid racing stripe kind of thing. And that was my contribution. Plus, maybe the white things on the arms.

Menzies: The original design you’ve described doesn’t make sense. A single stripe on either side is only two legs, a spider has eight…

Leonardi: Picture a white field with three thin pencil lines in it. That’s what it looked like. I think you see a return to that with some of the later Venoms.

Menzies: Ahh, okay.

Leonardi: So, I put in an extra joint in the legs and separated them a bit. Made him look more spidery.

Menzies: Hopefully, you’ve cleared up any questions about that now. Okay, I’d like to talk about Spider-Man 2099 now, which I bought at the time and which remains my favorite work of yours. Considering the fact it was a new line of Marvel comics with Stan Lee writing his first regular book for many years, there’s remarkably little online about the 2099 universe and your role in co-creating the most popular and enduring character. And what I did find was Peter David’s recollections. So today I’m hoping you can help fill in a lot of blanks for me. Why do you think they liked Peter David’s pitch for the character?

Leonardi: The way I always understood it was that Marvel, at the institutional level—and you have to remember this is the ’80s—one of the big cultural landmarks was the Terminator movie, where somebody comes back from the future and alters the past to alter the future. That got everybody’s wheels spinning in terms of time paradoxes, and one of the roadblocks I thought the writers were bumping up against, particularly Chris Claremont, after the whole “Days of Future Past” thing, he really wanted to explore much more of that kind of writing. The roadblock that he was consistently meeting was editors saying, “Well, if you explicitly state that this character that you’re coming up with is a lineal descendant of an existing character in present continuity and

Above: Penciler Rick Leonardi heard through the grapevine that editorial staffers were betting as to whether the artist could convincingly render this action sequence in Amazing Spider-Man #279 [Aug. 1986].

Looks like someone lost that wager! Inks by Vince Colletta.

Below: Rick penciled this panel in Spider-Man 2099 #10 [Aug. 1993] as homage to Steve Ditko’s Spidey figure that appeared in a panel of the Sturdy One’s last issue of Amazing Spider-Man, #38 [July 1966]. Perhaps due to Ditko’s departure, the Marvel bullpen patched together a cover from interior art, most prominently using this dynamic figure.

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Above: Original art from Spider-Man 2099 #5 [Mar. 1993], featuring art by the magnificent team of Rick Leonardi (pencils) and Al Williamson (inks). Rick’s signature is at page bottom.

Below: Legendary Scottish mountaineer and rescue expert Hamish MacInnes, OBE, passed away in November 2020, at 90.

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Spider-Man 2099 TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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the existing character in present continuity hasn’t yet got married and had offspring, then where’s the sweat if present continuity character is in some sort of life-threatening situation? Well, we know he’s going to get out of it because he hasn’t had his grandchildren yet!

Menzies: That makes sense. And Peter David was told he was the only writer who avoided that problem by making Miguel unrelated to Peter Parker. In interviews, Peter has said his default was to deliberately do the opposite of what Stan and Jack did. Where Peter is an orphan with no siblings, Miguel has a mother and brother. And so on.

Leonardi: That’s a cleaner explanation. I like that.

Menzies: He kind of loudly signaled the contrast to the reader in #2 by having Lyla offer an Aunt May appearance mode and Miguel ordered that it be dumped. It’s very funny and you even had a completely unamused Miguel break the fourth wall and look at the reader. As for the character design, Peter David said you designed it together.

Leonardi: Yeah, we were all gathered together in a [adopts dramatic voice] secret location.

Menzies: [Laughs] Can you reveal it now?

Leonardi: It was a hotel downtown somewhere. They

rented out a space in some hotel. We were supposed to meet there and talk it out. Peter said he wanted Spider-Man to be able to climb walls but not by any way of produced adhesive. He didn’t want sticky stuff. So I said, “Well, that narrows it down. It’s got to be barbs.” I was actually thinking of Scottish ice climbers at the time.

Menzies: Oh, wow.

Leonardi: [Adopting a very convincing Scottish accent] Hamish MacInnes.

Menzies: [Laughs] I’ve got my title now: “Hamish MacInnes, Spider-Man 2099.”

Leonardi: That’s pretty good. But, yeah, little barbs, that’s pretty much what you’re stuck with. So that was easy. I think I’d seen something, spiders actually do do this, they throw out these long spinners of web material when they’re young and they fly away. I think it’s actually the final dramatic closing scene in Charlotte’s Web, or something like that happens. [It is, although three of the spiderlings remain behind with Wilbur the pig; this airborne dispersal behavior is called ballooning or kiting—R.M.] Menzies: Those parachute webs are an example of how the Spider-Man of 2099 is definitely scientifically more grounded in terms of actual spider anatomy and capabilities. You and Peter spent a good amount of time just on explaining the practical implications of the finger and foot talons.

Leonardi: So that [web cape for gliding] sounds cool.

And then the maglev [magnetic levitation] roadway suggested itself. And then I think Peter wanted something about the Day of the Dead costume. Well, okay, he’s going to have a skull. Clearly, we’re going to have a skull on it somewhere, a skull and a spider, and I had already done the black costume work, so…

Menzies: The Day of the Dead costume was subtly linked to Miguel’s Mexican heritage through his mother. Did you take any preliminary sketches to the meeting?

Leonardi: I had a blank sketch book. That was it. I think I left there with a picture of the hand with barbs on it and a preliminary logo for the chest. I took that home and fooled around with it a bit.

Menzies: Do you still have that preliminary sketch?

Leonardi: Yeah, I have all that stuff.[Robert gasps excitedly] It was done in Sharpie, so it’s started to yellow and degrade a bit…

Menzies: I’d love to share those sketches, if you can find them. Had you worked with Peter David before?

Leonardi: That was our first acquaintance.

Menzies: Were you aware of his work?

Leonardi: Oh, yeah. Different writers have different styles, different strengths and weaknesses, and Peter’s dialoguing is fabulous. People read him for his dialoguing and for the humor that he inserts into the stories, and that’s great. As a penciler, you have to adjust to that, you have to understand that the story may to your eyes be departing four or five pages in an odd direction, but ultimately what you’re closing in on is some punchline that Peter’s developing. That’s fine. From that understanding, you’re kind of along for the ride.

Menzies: What was Joey Cavalieri like as an editor?

Leonardi: Joey had a hard job. He was in the position of enforcing the bible that I spoke of vis-à-vis the technologies that are in, technologies that are out, this is what the map looks like, Alchemax [O’Hara’s employers and the place where he gained his powers] is this, foreign competitors are that… that kind of thing. To the extent that he was being the referee that couldn’t have been an easy job. Particularly with the Englishmen because they wanted to go completely dark.

Menzies: Ravage 2099 went in a radically different direction when Pat Mills and Tony Skinner took over.

Leonardi: Dystopian fiction was big then, especially in the English scene.

Menzies: Yes, 2000AD was and still is the biggest-selling

Spider-Man 2099 TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Photo courtesy of Robert Menzies.

and most influential comic here. One particular strength in your 2099 work was your ability to create environments, vehicles, and tech that seemed plausible and functional.

When you drew Cloak and Dagger, you grounded their adventures in New York City. But while you could use photo reference to make your New York convincing, you couldn’t do that with Nueva York. What I thought was so impressive is that you made a completely fictional place convincingly real. Joey Cavalieri wrote in the editorial to #1 that you depict the future so well he suspected you had a time machine in your basement.

Leonardi: Well, when I grew up I read The Lord of the Rings over and over again. I read the Dune trilogy over and over again. All that stuff. But what I particularly liked about both of those things, and things like them, was the maps and the appendices at the back.

Menzies: The world building.

Leonardi: Right. The best characters are the ones that inhabit and interact with an environment. To the extent that you’re a penciler and you’re not drawing backgrounds, you eschew them, you scorn drawing buildings and trees and can’t be bothered, you’re not doing your job, far as I’m concerned.

Menzies: I fell in love with comics because of Ross Andru and the way he drew every detail of New York City. He’d go out with a camera to make sure his drawings were as accurate as possible. I saw similar attention to detail in Cloak and Dagger.

Leonardi: That shouldn’t be read that I’m in favor of fussy detail, either. Or photorealism, for that matter. Those are both valid approaches but they’re not necessarily the only ones available, if you really want to locate your characters.

There are other ways to do it. You can draw all the details on a waterfront, the fog, the pier, the gantry, the mooring, the tires, you can draw that. Or you can draw just one of them with fog and maybe a rope trailing off into the water.

Grab that key evocative detail. That’s just as effective a way to go. Pick one or the other. You have to do one or the other.

Menzies: The first two villains you co-created were excellent, but bizarrely anachronistic. The bounty hunter called Venture was a cyborg who looked as if he’d walked off the set of a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. The Specialist was a kimono-wearing samurai with a katana and a hover bike. When you both co-created the future Vulture, his tech looked less advanced than the classic Vulture design, with that trigger or pedal that activated his claws. Was that all down to you or did Peter help with the designs?

Leonardi: [Pauses] I don’t remember that he did. The problem I have is, if I don’t understand how a thing works, I can’t really draw it very well.

Menzies: That explains so much!

Leonardi: So, in the example of the Vulture, I needed to see how those claws pop out, what that handle mechanism would look like, how the wing folds work, all that kind of stuff. You can’t draw what you can’t see.

Menzies: Possibly my favorite panel in the series, certainly of the city and its tech, is a vehicle on page 1 of Spider-Man 2099 #6. It looked like it could really work.

Leonardi: I think there’s something a tad like that I may have swiped from Moebius. I swipe an enormous amount from Moebius. [laughs] Menzies: The only direct swipe I saw was of Ditko. Do you remember?

Leonardi: [Laughs] I prefer to call them homages. Which one? I’m sure there’s tons.

Menzies: Homages, sorry. [Menzies shows Leonardi the Steve Ditko Spider-Man figure from Amazing Spider-Man #38 [July 1966] and his Spider-Man 2099 figure from #10. The pose was also used by John Romita senior on the cover of Origins of Marvel Comics [1974]] You also did a homage to yourself in the Spider-Man 2099 Meets Spider-Man book.

Leonardi: [Laughs] This is all very incestuous.

Menzies: Well, I’m sure that was Peter’s idea, a funny COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

call-back to the opening splash with Spider-Man 2099 replaced by the Peter Parker Spider-Man of now. Fans like myself love when creators hark back to previous stories and eras. We pat ourselves on the back for spotting it but even better is that creators respect and love what came before.

Leonardi: I would argue there’s not enough of it. I think there’s whole generations that grew up unaware of their forebears, which is shocking, especially at the editorial level. People who think that the world started with Jim Lee. [Adopts comically scolding tone] Oh, no, no, no.

Menzies: Looking back, what’s your feeling on your run now?

Leonardi: I thought it was very good work. I thought we were extremely lucky to get Al Williamson on as the inker. Now, as a work of science fiction, it works only as well as the environment that the character is placed in, 2099 and Nueva York and all that advanced technology.

To the extent we stuck to the bible, so called, to the extent that we were consistent with what technology existed and what technology was still to come and was out of bounds like anti-gravity, for example. We spent a lot of time designing the maglev roadway idea. And in fact the maglev roadway was critical to the whole web cape thing because what we were proposing was a city that was built on the foundation of the existing New York, so supremely

Top: Rick Leonardi poses with cosplayer Andy Bell at the 2019 MCM Scotland Comic Con, held at the Scottish Exhibition Centre, in Glasgow.

Below: Rick got the opportunity to again render the future Spidey on this variant cover for Spider-Man 2099 [Jan. 2016].

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Above: Opening two-page splash original art by penciler Rick Leonardi and inker Al Williamson), Spider-Man 2099 #1 [Nov. 1992].

Inset right: Detail from Rick and Al’s cover art for the Spider-Man 2099 Meets Spider-Man graphic novel [Nov. 1995], also featuring Vulture 2099 and Venom.

Below: Rick playing bagpipes, in a photo taken by wife Cynthia, with the artist draped in a Menzies clan scarf (given by the interviewer when the couple received honorary clan membership during their Glasgow visit in Sept. 2019).

Menzies: So, did they ask to relaunch the character in his own book?

Leonardi: No, I was contacted unexpectedly to do the fill-in on #5. First, they contacted me and asked, “How’d you like to do the cover?” or the variant. I said, “Well, sure, I’ll do the variant cover. How about interior art? And, you know, it’s like the old team back.” “No, No, we’ve got a guy for Spidey 2099. But we might need you on #5.” I think they were forecasting that on past experience any penciler is usually in trouble by the fourth or fifth issue.

I really don’t have a clear picture where I stand with Marvel and what my relationship with the company really is any more. I was doing work for them pretty reliably there for a while, and then at some point during the whole bankruptcy era, the entire middle echelon of editors was let go more or less overnight. So all of my contacts were obsolete from one day to the next. Now one or two of them wound up over at DC, so I followed them there and I’ve really had a difficult time making my way back [to Marvel].

Menzies: What’s your opinion of the new suit?

Leonardi: By bringing him into the present you’re uprooting him from the whole environment where his old costume made sense. It makes him into an anachronism, almost. So I suppose there’s a certain wisdom in putting him in a new costume. The counterargument is how is he unique now? Is he just another guy in a spider suit…? #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Man, and related characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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tall, narrowly, densely packed, very tall buildings over a high voltage maglev roadway system that was generating all kinds of heat updrafts. So, the web cape idea flowed organically from that. That’s the best way to do science fiction: to follow the implications of your own designs. To the extent that we did that I think we had a successful book. Other writing teams started to diverge, and you had all kinds of weird things happening and all of a sudden they were using anti-gravity for carnival rides and stuff like that. Whoops!

Menzies: The next question is an inevitable one for any creator who has tried to depict the future. While 2099 is still 80 years off, it’s been a generation since the 2099 line began. Has there been anything in the intervening years where you’ve thought you predicted any trends or technology?

Leonardi: Oh, wow. Well, we’ve got the war of corporations, that’s happening, but we don’t have holographic assistants yet– Menzies: But you’re close with that one! Lyla is Amazon’s Alexa. They’re both virtual assistants. You ask it to dim lights, ask it about the weather forecast, and so on. Excepting the hologram, it’s Alexa 20 years before it was invented.

Leonardi: Isn’t that interesting. You’re right.

Menzies: The most amazing and astute projection is the popularity of Donald Trump, then primarily known as a New York real estate mogul and now U.S. President.

Leonardi: [Looking at #7, May ’93, pg. 16]: Oh my God. [reading] “For mutual protection many citizens join cliques.

I am the leader of the Freakers, the largest of the cliques.

There are others… the Throwbacks, the Scavs, The Trumps.” Woaw! That you can lay completely at the feet of Peter David!

Menzies: Why did you leave after Spider-Man 2099 #25?

Leonardi: I had been tasked with the graphic novel [Spider-Man 2099 Meets Spider-Man]. We had to jump off and do the graphic novel and then, rather than get back onto Spider-Man 2099, Joey Cavalieri had me doing Fantastic Four 2099.

Menzies: When they relaunched Spider-Man 2099, in 2014, did they ask you to be artist? Peter David presumably wouldn’t have been against it. Spider-Man 2099 #1 sold over a million copies, it’s the comic most fans ask him to sign (as of 2009 anyway) and David has commented: “Rick is an exceptionally talented artist with a strong point of view and is very much responsible for much of the book’s early success. No knock intended to those artists who came after him, but it wasn’t nearly as strong a title without him.”

Leonardi: That was a nice thing to say.

comics in the library

New Books for a New Paradigm Richard Arndt discusses three new acquisitions, all about seafarers and warriors

Piracy TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc. All others © the respective copyright holders.

by RICHARD J. ARNDT CBC Contributing Editor Three new books have been either purchased or donated to my library for this new school year and all three are of quite high quality.

First is Riff Reb’s Men at Sea, published by Dead Reckoning (the Naval Institute’s graphic novel branch). Born in Algeria and currently living in France, Reb is a graphic artist/writer renowned in Europe and, based on the evidence of this book, deserves to be in the U.S., as well. Men at Sea contains adaptations of famous seafaring tales from the likes of William Hope Hodgson, Pierre Mac Orlan, Marcel Schwob, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allan Poe. There are also illustrated excerpts from novels by Homer, Eugene Sue, Emile Condroyer, B. Traven, Jack London, Victor Hugo, and Jules Verne.

Reb’s art style is somewhat of a cross between Jeff Lemire and Bernie Wrightson, with human figures done in a somewhat cartoony style while backgrounds, consisting of mostly sailing ships—are set pieces featuring beautifully cross-hatched art of careening waves, maelstroms, and bizarre phenomenon on the sea. The result is stunning.

The large, beautiful illustrations and solid scripts—translated by Joe Johnson, who does a fine job—float together in crashing waves of enjoyment. The pages are colored in single-toned hues—red, green, blue, orange, yellow—or are presented in straight black-&-white.

The stories are not ones usually selected by artist/ writers looking to adapt these authors. Neither the two Hodgson entries nor the tale by Poe are the respective writer’s best-known nautical stories, but nonetheless solid and sometimes subtle explorations of the seafaring life.

My favorites are the Hodgson tales, Robert Louis Stevenson’s amusing “The Sinking Ship,” and the decidedly grim “Galley Slaves,” by Pierre Mac Orlan. Indeed, there are no bad stories here, some of which are excerpts from some famous novels of the sea, each accompanied by Reb’s spectacular artwork.

The second book received is Russ Cochran’s 1988 b-&-w collection of Piracy—donated by yours truly—the great pirate-themed EC Comic of 1954–55 and it hardly needs be said that this is truly superb material. Beautiful illustrations by the likes of Reed Crandall, Joe Orlando, Wally Wood, the team of Al Williamson and Angelo Torres, George Evans, Graham Ingels, Jack Davis and (my personal favorite) Bernie Krigstein. Scripts are by, unfortunately, mostly unknown writers—at least as of this date. Known contributors include Carl Wessler and Jack Oleck. The scripts are mostly very good, with the highlights being such tales as “Kismet,” “Blackbeard,” “U-Boat,” “Slave Ship,” “Salvage” (another fave), and “Solitary.” A nice book that I’m happy to see falling into the clutched hands of my students.

Book three just came in the other day, so I haven’t had the chance to read all of it yet, but it’s another delightfully quirky effort from Craig Yoe’s Yoe Books imprint, and he’s a packager/editor who’s been doing… well…yeoman service in the last few years producing various genre collections of short stories from the anthology comics of the 1940–70s. Last year, I picked up his collection, We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust, an excellent collection of comic book stories from 1955–2018 dealing COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

with the attempted extermination of the Jews. That one’s a book that should be in every graphic novel library collection from middle school through college. This new effort is somewhat of a companion to that book.

The Unknown Anti-War Comics is a full-color volume of war tales, from the years 1955–67 and all from the lowly comic book publisher Charlton. There a brand-new one-pager history lesson from National Book Award-winner Nate Powell as well as introductions from Peter, Paul and Mary singer Noel Paul Stookey, and Yoe himself.

The stories and the art are not generally from the best known artists in the field although eight of the stories are likely by author Joe Gill and definitely artist Steve Ditko, all from the late ’50s–early ’60s. There’s again also a number of stories where the writer is unknown and artists lesser-known Charlton creators like Bob Forgione, Rocco Mastroserio, Bill Molno, Sal Trapani, the “Nicholas Alascia” team of Charles Nicholas and Vince Alascia, Maurice Whitman, Dick Giordano, and Vince Colletta.

The artwork on these stories is often crude, but the tales themselves are generally entertaining. Some are from the two issues of Never Again, an explicit anti-war comic from 1955–56, are darn good and feature introductions from the first “Unknown Soldier” from World War I as narrator. The art and possibly script as well for these introductions were done by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito.

The real cream here is the 1967 science fiction tale “Children of Doom,” from Charlton Premiere #2 [Nov. 1967], edited by Dick Giordano, written by Denny O’Neil (using his “Sergius O’Shaugnessy” pen-name), and illustrated by Pat Boyette, this partially in color and partially in black and white 25-page comic is probably Boyette’s finest accomplishment in comics—and that’s saying something as the Texan’s decidedly odd artwork graced some very good (and some very bad) stories over the years. O’Neil’s script is also top-notch. It’s really no wonder that he’s quoted as calling it one of his own favorite scripts.

This was an emergency story that was done very rapidly to fill an unexpected hole in Charlton’s publishing schedule, but you’d never know that from reading it.

“Children of Doom” is one of the best stories coming out of the 1960s and very worthy of being reprinted. If you buy the book only to get a copy of this story you’d be well-rewarded. Everything else here is gravy, including the quite good Ditko tales.

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sitdown with shaw!

Mr. Exclamation Point!

Part two of Scott Shaw!’s chat covers his professional comics and animation years Interview transcribed by

ROSE RUMMEL-EURY

Above: Cartoonist Scott Shaw! is all smiles for CBC Photographer Supreme Greg Preston in a circa-2014 pic. By the by, back in the early 1990s, it was Scott who first suggested that Greg begin photographing artists in their studios, a project that became the coffee table book, The Artist Within: Portraits of Cartoonists, Comic Book Artists, Animators, and Others. Below: Currently a slideshow he narrates at comic cons, Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics feature will be compiled into a book from TwoMorrows coming to comic shops in the future!

[When last we left the cartoonist, Scott Shaw! discussed his upbringing, lifelong affiliation with the San Diego Comic-Con, underground comix work, and friendship with the King of comics, Jack Kirby. In this second segment of his career-spanning interview, the San Diego-born artist discusses his breakout with Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew and subsequent long stint in animation and licensing.

Scott was interviewed by phone in mid-2019. Initially, we discuss the roots of his “Oddball Comics” feature. —Ye Ed.] Comic Book Creator: How did you get attracted to the oddball stuff?

Scott Shaw!: As a kid, I was attracted to the monster stuff. And of course, DC and Marvel were definitely playing to the monster fans. Even the Marvel covers, I think Stan wanted them to look as close as possible to posters for American monster movies. It certainly resonated with me, so I bought just any comics I could afford with a monster, a dinosaur, or a gorilla on the cover, which of course, was by order of DC publisher Irwin Donenfeld. Apparently he was stalking me because I was proof to his bosses that it was working.

Also as a kid, I bought all the funny stuff and then started adding in books edited

by Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz, and also Marvel books by that time, but I was always buying all the funny stuff that was good—Sugar and

Spike and Uncle Scrooge and all that stuff. So I always had a much wider interest than other fans and collectors would, I suppose.

CBC: Right.

Scott: And, a lot of the stuff I really liked as a kid, as an adult—I’ve been writing and drawing comics for a long time—but I can see exactly why I liked it. Two of my favorite oddball comics that had lots of dinosaurs in it were “The War that Time Forgot” feature in Star Spangled War Stories.

Bob Kanigher understood that boys liked to play with plastic dinosaurs and it always cracked me up because the colorist apparently had been given a bag of those plastic figurines you’d get and they’d always color them the same way: the tyrannosaurus was always red and the plesiosaurus was always purple. [chuckles] The other one was Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle, which was Sam Glanzman’s dinosaur comic book published

by Dell, which he wrote the first 10 issues—and they all read like a pulp magazine written on LSD. [Jon laughs] They are the weirdest comics I’ve ever read in my entire life and, in their own way, they are also brilliant!

I also loved the longest-running oddball titles of all time, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen and Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane. Even though I was a kid, I understood that Lois Lane wasn’t written by a woman because you could tell how just how much the writers hated the character! [chuckles] Every issue of these comics had a sitcom story with something freaky happening to Lois or Jimmy, and next would be serious with a little bit of Mort Weisinger gravitas to it. I mean, even though those comics are not exactly classics, they are brilliantly put together. In eight pages, I once described them as “a Fabergé egg made of crap,” because they are so cleverly made.

When I was writing my “Oddball Comics” column a few years ago, I realized you can’t leave out a single detail when describing a Jimmy Olsen or Lois Lane story or they fall apart. Everything that’s in there is put there for the payoff, especially if it involves something… DC always liked to use a gimmick called “the plastic with a memory.” Do you remember that?

CBC: No. Scott: Oh, “the gun that turns into a Frisbee.” It seemed like every other story had something in it in the ’50s—at least the ones that I was reading. [chuckles] I kept waiting to get my hands on some of that plastic.

CBC: Irwin Donenfeld told me that, at one time, Lois Lane was a top-selling book for DC. Scott: And, if or no other reason, the work in that book

by Kurt Schaffenberger was amazing. He was never a flashy artist, but if you look at his stuff, he didn’t leave anything out that was necessary. Everything was beautifully delineated. That guy was a real craftsman. On Jimmy Olsen, I’m always blown away at how good Curt Swan was at comedy! Not cartoony comedy, but actually he would have been perfect if he’d worked for Dell doing adaptations of TV sitcoms. He could get that kind of acting in his work. At the time I didn’t realize it, but that was his biggest asset—getting his characters to get the acting right.

CBC: Pretty early on, you were in the “ground-level” comics of Mike Friedrich. How did that come about? #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Scott Shaw! portrait © Greg Preston. Oddball Comics TM & © Scott Shaw!

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Conducted by JON B. COOKE

All characters TM & © the respective copyright holders.

Scott: Mike might’ve gotten in touch with me to contribute to Quack. I might have known him from Comic-Con early on. I was already doing underground comix, so this was a stab at something a little more mainstream. He wanted to take advantage of the Howard the Duck fad and feature the work of Frank Brunner. When I got in there, he needed people to fill pages.

CBC: You came up with You-All Gibbon, a parody of something I don’t think many folks get these days. [laughter] Scott: A lot of that material is based on pop-culture that is now so obscure. Euell Gibbons was the guy who was the on-screen pitchman for Grape-Nuts cereal. I actually met him while I was working at the San Diego Zoo, when he was walking around handing out wild hickory nuts! I’m not kidding. That was his gimmick. He always mentioned something about wild hickory nuts in those commercials. He was a self-sufficient woodsman and food expert—I’m not exactly sure what his credibility was. I thought, “What’s the opposite of that? Okay, someone who exists on nothing but junk food.” So, that’s how I came up with You-All Gibbon, the junk-food monkey. Not exactly a classic, but what the hell… better than The Turd! [laughter] Duckula was another thing I did for the Star*Reach comics, another low-hanging gag. It got me into a tremendous adventure. I’d only done a few pages, but they turned up at Filmation Studios, and a friend who worked there said, “Hey, we’re working on something based on your character.” I called other friends over there and learned it was for a new Mighty Mouse show, called “Quacula.” I was young and cocky, and I managed to juggle a lawsuit against Filmation and a divorce lawsuit against my first wife. I managed to keep them separate and keep myself relatively sane and, in the process, I found out they were doing model sheets and taking essentially my characters’ features and putting them on Bob Clampett’s Daffy Duck model sheets from the ’40s. I was friends with Clampett and I called him. “Would you be my expert witness if this goes?” He said, “Absolutely,” even though he didn’t own Daffy Duck. “I’d like to sue those S.O.B.s, too!” [Jon chuckles] I got into it and realized, even though I was in the right, it was eating me alive—the anxiety of it all and the depositions.

Ultimately, we settled out of court the day before trial.

CBC: How long were you married?

Scott: Eternity! [chuckles] Fortunately, Judith (my second wife) and I have been married for 34 years and counting.

CBC: You’re keeping your hand in undergrounds… you did Fear and Laughter, that Hunter Thompson...

Scott: Yeah, I put that together and edited it for Kitchen Sink. Got a lot of top-flight cartoonist friends to do it, too. It’s apparently collectible. I can’t find copies for myself. Apparently, Hunter Thompson hated people doing cartoons of him. So, even though I’m a big fan, if I’d ever crossed his path, he probably vow to kill me!

CBC: He would have shot you.

Scott: I tried to get Ralph Steadman to see if he would let me reprint one of his drawings and he sent me a very terse typewritten note on the thinnest onion-skin paper I’ve ever seen that said, “No, I don’t wish to be involved in such projects.” I sent him a copy after it was published and he sent me this florid handwritten… looked like it was in a pool of ink—the whole back page was encrusted with ink—that said, “Congratulations, it’s a piece of sh*t. But if you do another one of these, I suggest you get some decent nibs.”

CBC: [Laughs] He said “nibs?”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

Scott: Yes. Because It has that wonderful scrawl of his, but it looks like he’s drawing with blood clots! I’ve got it framed! I’ve met Ralph a few times and he doesn’t remember me, of course, but he’s a wonderful guy.

CBC: So, besides your lawsuit, how did animation start coming into play for you professionally?

Scott: Well, after the Jack Kirby poster, I had decided to back off from doing stuff that was too outrageous, so my work wasn’t ridiculously offensive. Mark Evanier, who I’d met at Jack’s house, was writing for Marvel on the Hanna-Barbera [H-B] line, in 1977 or ’78. He was working with an editor named Chase Craig, who worked for at Western Publishing editing a lot of Gold Key titles from their West Coast office. So Mark asked Chase if he’d give me a shot and the first thing I wound up doing, I inked a Yogi Bear cover by Pete Alvarado. That just snowballed from there. Then I inked those Funtastic Treasury Editions that had all those Hanna-Barbara characters. After a while, they had be drawing, writing, and inking stuff. We were

Left: Scott Shaw!’s “ground-level” comics work appeared in Quack, the Star*Reach funny animal title, which featured his “Duckula” and “You-All Gibbon” strips. The latter, seen top right, was a parody of a then-popular (though now largely forgotten) breakfast cereal spokesman, the health food advocate Euell Gibbons, seen here. Below: The cartoonist, obscured by Homer Simpsons’ doughnut, is surrounded by many of the characters he has drawn over the decades, even including his high school mascot, Coltman!

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me. Then I found out he died on the toilet at H-B, so there you go. [chuckles] Things like that happen. I turned them down at first, because I didn’t want to punch in for a job and I liked working from home in my pajamas—not even having to get dressed some days. They said, “Well, we’re doing a new Flintstones show,” and I said, “When do I show up?”

[Jon chuckles] CBC: Was it easy to adapt? When you were doing the Marvel H-B stuff, did you have access to model sheets?

Scott: Oh, absolutely! Most of the guys working on it, including Owen Fitzgerald, Pete Alvarado, and Jack Manning, they were already working on the H-B shows. When I was inking them, in some cases, putting them more on model, but when you’re inking a good artist, you wind up becoming a better artist. Once I got hired at H-B, I was still doing those comics on the side, so even though I went to college, that was my real college. Being around old-timers whose careers were practically the history of animation! They had worked on Snow White and Pinocchio! Working on Richie Rich was the nadir of their careers and yet, to me, it was the greatest place ever. I was so excited to meet those guys. I was working in the layout department and drawing model sheets freelance on the side. They were so generous with advice and not being jerks about it either. They were such gentlemen. And it was all men; there were very few women except in the ink-&-paint department and management.

These old guys were so happy to share things with me and that’s when my art started getting better.

CBC: These three guys you mentioned: they were well known in animation and then came over to comics?

Scott: Well, many cartoonists in the animation studios would also freelance by drawing comic books.

CBC: Was that because Western was located in California? Is that one reason why Western was located near the animation studios? Is that a connection?

Scott: Probably. It didn’t even apply to studios that were doing that, though. The American Comics Group had a lot of funny animal titles: Ha Ha and Giggle… they wound up having a relationship with a couple of cartoonists who then went to all of their buddies and said, “Look, we can write and draw these things at night and get $25 a page,” and most of their cartoons were drawn by animators who are a very big deal, like the Terrytoons comics. Bill Tytla and Connie Rasinski were drawing the other cartoons, too. That’s why the comics look so good.

CBC: They did it through the mail?

Scott: Yeah.

CBC: Except for Jack Kirby, Marvel use freelancers from the West Coast much. Most everybody was within the tristate area.

Scott: Right. Charlton Comics had the H-B license for years. Typical of Charlton, they did every possible variation. Barney Rubble had his own comic book.

Dino had his own comic book. The Great Gazoo had his own comic book.

They flooded the racks. The problem was, the characters barely looked like the model sheets. There was no attempt to really stay

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Man-Spider and characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Hanna-Barbera TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

Above: Upon becoming acquainted with Roy Thomas, Scott went full-on mainstream with his work appearing in What If? #8 [Apr. 1978], his “Man-Spider” story, which he both wrote and drew. Below: Both the cartoon and human versions of animation legends (and creators of Tom and Jerry) Joseph Barbera and William Hanna, who founded their Hanna-Barbera animation studio in 1957, which grew to great success with their Saturday morning TV cartoon shows. The cartoon Joe and Bill are derived from a 1972 publicity cel; the real fellers from a 1990 photo.

also doing a lot of stuff for overseas so I worked with a lot of other cartoonists.

My favorite assignment was a series—I, even as a H-B expert, I’ve never seen a single one of their cartoons—was a team of three ghosts called Shake, Rattle, and Roll. They were showing overseas, so we were having to write stories.

Since I’d never seen them, I was just writing stories using them like, “What If the Freak Brothers were dead and now ghosts?” I wasn’t writing drug stories, but just gave them those personalities. Mike Sekowsky and Owen Fitzgerald were drawing them. Sekowksy was best known for Justice League and Wonder Woman, but he really excelled at doing funny stuff. If you remember Inferior Five, that was a slight taste of it, but his actual humorous style was like Ronald Searle. So, I got to write and ink his stories, as well as Owen Fitzgerald. He’s one of my favorite cartoonists and is the guy who drew all the original Bob Hope comics, as well as a politically incorrect comic about a stupid, good-looking woman named Moronica. It was great to work with two vastly different cartoonists, like a sandwich deal—the old pros who penciled were the “meat,” and my writing and inking were slices of bread on either side—and I liked that.

CBC: Do you remember the page rate?

Scott: Inks were around $80 per page and pencils, $100.

CBC: You were pretty prolific at the time, right?

Scott: I was. The way I got the gig for the comic was through Evanier. Once they saw the comic at H-B, I got a call from Iwao Takamoto, wanting me to come in for an interview to work at the studio. I was freelancing; I had been running a comic book store at the same time and had a studio in the back, I was also working on underground comix, the H-B stuff, and an issue of What If? One of our customers was Roy Thomas and I pitched him an idea: “What if a radioactive human bit a spider?” That’s how I was able to do the back-up story for What If? [#8, Apr. 1978].

So I was slowly edging my way into mainstream comics. I was really enjoying being a freelancer and doing nothing but drawing for a living. I had always done it on the side, but now H-B was calling me. Two years before, I had gone up and interviewed and they told me, “Oh, you’re not ready yet. You’re doing underground comix, we need to see samples of what you would do with our characters.”

By the way, the guy who interviewed me was one of the nicest guys and years later, after working there, I found out everybody thought he was the meanest guys in the studio! He was a retired Marine and I was a hippie and yet he was terrific to

All characters TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

on-model. A lot of good stuff came from Charlton, but so did a lot of crap, too. They were trying to fill those pages. They had paper and their own printing press, so they went wild.

The quality was so bad, the foreign publishers were starting to complain to H-B. That’s why Charlton lost the license: because H-B was all about the money. Once Marvel started doing it, everybody overseas was delighted because everything finally looked professional.

CBC: How long did H-B last at Marvel? Two years?

Scott: Yep. They also licensed Dennis the Menace for a while. That seemed to be something Marvel was doing at the time: getting the rights to things, so nobody else could publish them.

CBC: They saw your work in the comics. Was there a generational shift? Were they looking for cheaper talent?

Scott: Not necessarily cheaper. I think it started when Doug Wildey came back to the studio to produce the Godzilla cartoon. He hired Dave Stevens, Will Meugniot, Rick Hoberg, and maybe a few other comics guys my age.

I was the only “funny” guy who came in. That really had nothing to do with Doug; I think somebody said, “Maybe we could get more of those cartoonist kids in here,” because they needed people.

CBC: I’ve spoken to John Dorman, Jim Woodring, and Dave Stevens, and they shared vivid, wonderful stories about the animation studios of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

Scott: The great thing is, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who I worked with very closely because I became a producer there, they were kind of like Smilin’ Stan. They didn’t have that same persona, but they were what I like to call lovable scoundrels. You didn’t want to dwell on their ethics, but they were real characters. Bill was all about the money and schedules and Joe was all about Hollywood and glamour. They were an unlikely couple, but Joe’s job was to come up with the shows and sell them and Bill’s job was to make them. You can imagine why a rift started between them. I believe when Joe walked back into the studio after going to ABC and selling Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics, a comic I worked on based on the show, which had 47 regular characters and took place in a different city around the world in each episode. (I know, because I worked on Marvel’s adaptation of the series.) They probably didn’t get any more money than a two-character show. So, that’s a horror story that can come out of having a partner who was so busy concentrating on his job and forgetting that their partner has to make it work. [mutual chuckling] H-B had an attitude: as long as you got your work done, you could act as crazy as you wanted. There were a couple of older guys who were alcoholics, but they were responsible alcoholics. They’d do their jobs in the morning, get bombed at lunch, and sleep at their desks in the afternoon.

There was one guy who I always called the “Hunter Thompson of Animation.” He was always loaded—booze, pot, psychedelics, uppers—but he was talented and surprisingly responsible, so they didn’t care. We could pull practical jokes on each other, make cartoons of management and post them on the wall, and Hanna and Barbera were cool about it. They seemed to really understand what cartoonists were like. They were not the most ethical people on Earth, but they had a tremendous loyalty to employees. I experienced that myself. Many times, Bill Hanna would send the animations overseas, because he and Joe wanted to keep the old-timers at their Hollywood studio working. That’s one reason why they’d sell as many shows as they possibly could.

I’m not trying to defend H-B, but deep down, they had certain loyalties you have to respect because there sure is no loyalty in Hollywood now! There barely was then. Floyd Norman and I were partners there (and, by “partners,” I mean he taught me everything). Floyd worked at Disney and all over the industry, but he’s always said that H-B was the one studio he actually looked forward to working at every day, because it was fun. This was after he’d worked directly COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

Above: Caption to come.

Below: Caption to come.

at Disney doing all these big jobs.

CBC: Around this time, Ruby-Spears employed a lot of comic book talent, too?

Scott: Ruby-Spears and H-B kind of had an informal relationship. I think they were both owned by Taft Broadcasting and ultimately Warner owned all their material. Ruby and Spears actually came out of Hanna-Barbera, where they started as writers, I believe, on The Herculoids, and they were editors for Paramount, editing stuff like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Batman. Eventually, they wound up creating Scooby-Doo. Then they decided to create their own shows and every one of them was like Scooby-Doo… except Thundarr the Barbarian! [chuckles] Sometimes, when H-B had too much work, they’d subcontract it off to Ruby-Spears just to help them out. It’s the only case I’ve seen where competing studios would help each other out.

CBC: When did Ruby-Spears put out their shingle?

Scott: Nineteen seventy-seven. They started out doing Saturday morning animated specials.

CBC: All the while you’re doing wholesome work on H-B’s characters, you’re still doing underground, adult stuff?

Scott: Yeah. Not that adult, but adult enough. Years later, in the early ’90s, when I was a producer, I pitched a latenight show to them before there was Liquid Television.

I said, “You could do a very low-budget show, license characters from underground comix, but only for specific stories. So you don’t have the rights to the characters overall and just feature them in five-minute sequences, and then at the end, once you do the whole story, you

Above: “The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera” was a sub-series of Marvel Treasury Editions, lasting for three issues between 1977–78. Scott penciled and inked two stories for an (unpublished) issue. Below: Scott’s Marvel assignments in the late 1970s included the Laff-A-Lympics title [12 issues, Mar. ’78–Mar. ’79].

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he should, so… look, this is not a put down for anybody.

If you have a page of his next to Jim Lee’s, Lee’s stuff is almost invisible to me. It’s beautifully executed, but it’s look is not unique. But Sergio’s cartooning is unique. The best “cartoony” cartoonists are unique, whether their specialty is humor or super-hero/adventure.

(My friend Stan Sakai has done quite well with Usagi Yojimbo, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it’s not funny. It’s straight, serious, and thoughtful. He used to do another character, Nilson Groundthumper, which was his comedy outlet. Now, he doesn’t even think in the terms of comedy. We just did a Popeye strip together, and Stan asked me to do it, “I can’t even begin to think about gags right now; it’s just not my thing anymore.”)

Most funny cartoonists don’t get the acknowledgment from fandom equivalent to that of even mediocre superhero artists. I’m not saying that drawing super-heroes makes you mediocre, but with the volume of the material out there, just by sheer percentages, a lot of it is mediocre.

CBC: I think Sergio Aragonés is among the top cartoonists of all time. His storytelling is unparalleled. The first time I saw that “Woodstock” double-page spread, I realized how talented at storytelling he was. It was mind-blowing. His observation of human beings is so on target. And yet, like you say, he isn’t as recognized as he should be…

Scott: The reason that “Woodstock” worked so well was because he was, by far, the youngest guy at MAD. If you remember, George Woodbridge and Bob Clarke drew hippies like dirty swine. Sergio drew them like they really were because he liked hippies! He got the counter-culture.

He wasn’t threatened by it like the average Dave Bergtype of guy who thought they were all like Charlie Manson.

Sergio had an open mind about it. At the time when MAD was starting to feel lame, Sergio was the bright note in the magazine. He had an upbeat thing about the counter-culture, and MAD stuck with that kind of juvenile approach and then Lampoon came along and swiped all their readers.

CBC: [Chuckles] And put out their brutal MAD satire.

Scott: Well, if you have a naked breast in every issue, that’s going to get the 14-year-old’s money every time! #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew TM & © DC Comics.

edit together and put it out on home video. The rest of the show, you have two five-minute animated sequences, and the rest you fill up with cartoonist interviews and visits to conventions… the whole fan thing.” They looked at me like I was insane. The two things I thought they should adapt immediately were Freak Brothers and Love and Rockets. I still think that show would’ve been a big hit if they’d bought it.

CBC: You had an interest in oddball comics, funny-animal comics, not just the Mort Weisinger comics— not just mainstream, but underground. But fandom at the time was myopic.

The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide just focusing on mainstream comics still befuddles me. You embrace all sorts of different comics, but fandom itself was just obsessed with super-heroes. Did that annoy you?

Scott: I love super-heroes too, but it did annoy me and it annoys me still. Not that I’m looking for acknowledgment, but some of my friends are the best cartoonists on the planet. I’m thinking of one about a man with a big mustache and a strong Spanish accent…

People take Sergio for granted because he’s always got new comics on the racks, but sadly no longer for MAD, other than reprints. He has plenty of fans, though not nearly what

CBC: How did Captain Carrot come about?

Scott: As I mentioned, Roy was a customer at the American Comic Book Company, where I was managing and had the studio out back.

He knew me because we’d met at Comic-Con a few times. Being a guy behind the counter of a comic book shop who’s not going crazy over him and acting normal, we became friends. That’s why he hired me to do the “Man-Spider” story for What If? And, once he went over to DC, he talked to me about taking a concept that he and Sam Grainger had started to develop back in the ’70s a concept called Captain Carrot. Sam’s version looked more like Atomic Rabbit or one of those Charlton funny-animal characters.

Anyway, Roy and I developed an idea, and I guess DC was interested in concepts they could develop as a Saturday morning show. We created Super-Squirrel and the Just’a Lotta Animals. We designed characters and I did a few pages as samples to show how I could do funny animals in a Jack Kirbyesque style. I had the Earth being attacked by a giant Galactus-looking carrot— something we never did in the comic.

DC thought about it and came back and said, “We want original characters; we don’t want to have to license characters that are based on a previously existing license.

It’s too much trouble; it’s diluting the brand in a weird way; come up with new characters.” If we’d stuck with that, it’d be like Spider-Ham. We’d have the Zoo Crew in a DC movie that everybody would hate anyway. So we went back to the drawing board and that’s when he pulled out Captain Carrot. I kind of ignored it, except that he had carrots on his hip holster like guns.

I think the only character I came up with on my own—Roy had most of the ideas—I said, “We need

Previous page: Scott was co-creator and artist on Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, which lasted for 20 issues between 1982–83. From top is detail from Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #26 [Apr. 1987]; cover of #1 [Mar. ’82]; and house ad from Fall ’81, which features the first issue’s cover sporting a different expression on Superman’s face and Gaspar Saladino’s initial logo design, both of which were changed when published. Logo maestro Todd Klein said in a Facebook message, “My guess is it was decided the top line was too busy, and they asked me to do the final one used.” This page: Inset left is Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo; below is Andrew Speer’s pic of Scott and Sergio Aragonés at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con (found at www. flickr.com/photos/oldmanmusings/5968313394); bottom is Sergio’s spectacular Woodstock piece, which originally ran in MAD #134 [Apr. 1970], and was colored and reprinted last spring in MAD #13 [June 2020].

Usagi Yojimbo TM & © Stan Sakai. Photo © Andrew Speers. “I Remember, I Remember” © E.C. Publications, Inc.

CBC: For sure! I would argue that Mort Drucker was also an important part of that era of keeping MAD somewhat relevant. His movie and TV show satires made it topical and he did such great caricatures of current stars.

Scott: I was at a National Cartoonists Society event and knew Mort socially (but not a pal like Sergio). He came over one time and was acting like a fan, “I heard you worked with Owen Fitzgerald!

Tell me all about him!” His big hero was Owen who was drawing Bob Hope before Drucker was drawing him, maybe by a year or so. Bob Oksner was the same way. He wanted to know about Drucker because he was such a big inspiration. It seems like these respected gentlemen were fanboys at heart!

CBC: I’ve found the greater a talent, the more fannish they could be in a certain way. Robert Crumb can be put into a total fanboy mood by talking about Kurtzman. Art Spiegelman could totally get into fanboy mode by discussing old-time cartoonists. It’s very easy if you’re talking the right talk!

Scott: Oh, yeah! One morning at Comic-Con, before the halls opened, a guy came up yelling at Stan Sakai and me, “Hey, boys! Let’s talk shop!” It was Nick Cardy, who just wanted to talk about pens and brushes and what paper we liked. He had to have been in his 80s and it was like talking to another enthusiastic teenager. It was great! We are the world’s smallest and weirdest minority.

CBC: Pretty interesting and smart, too. This naturally all leads into what most people in the world know you for: Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!.

Scott: Yeah, I guess so. Unfortunately, none of those people work for DC. [laughter] I don’t think I’ll have the opportunity, but I’ll think twice before working for them again.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

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Captain Carrot, Superman TM & © DC Comics. Wonder Wart-Hog TM & © Gilbert Shelton.

a big guy like Thing or the Hulk,” so I came up with Pig-Iron. Ironically, one of my favorite super-heroes is Wonder Wart-Hog, but that wasn’t in my mind the slightest at the time. I was thinking, “What’s a good power?

Maybe he’s made out of metal and he’s super strong,” so I came up with the pun. That book was all about puns, probably too many that I think now. People loved him.

I have nothing against puns, but now I think we maybe should have had about half of what we had in Captain Carrot— maybe it would have been easier to read!

I came up with a couple of other characters we never used at all for the team. It was very daunting. Drawing H-B characters was one thing, but drawing my own characters for DC Comics—which was one of the first comic book companies I really got into as a kid with the Mort Weisinger stuff. I immediately “choked” due to mainstream exposure, a monthly schedule, and DC’s expectation of a detailed

super-hero-sh style that I struggled with—and frankly intimidated me. Alfredo Alcala had to pencil the second issue, which I heavily retouched. I think Dick Giordano said, “Make it more like George Pérez.” I thought, “Why don’t you get George Pérez?” They wanted Joe Staton, which I didn’t know at the time. But Joe told me this years later. This is what a great guy Joe is: I only worked with Joe once, inking a story he did for Destroyer Duck #1. We’d never met, but Joe told them, “No, Scott works in animation, he knows what he’s doing, he does the funny stuff, you should go with him.” I’ve always really appreciated that. Joe’s a great guy. Eventually, I got back on track, but the problem was, they kept promising me a raise, but they wouldn’t give me a raise, and I was living in an apartment, so I had to start taking work in animation to keep going and that compromised my schedule even further, so that’s why I ended up leaving the book.

CBC: It’s interesting, you did get the Just’a Lotta Animals in there.

Scott: We made it into an Earth 1/Earth 2 kind of thing…

CBC: Earth C minus…

Scott: Earth C and Earth C minus.

CBC: That’s so you, Scott! [chuckles] You guys had a cover credit on the cover.

Scott: They wanted Captain Carrot to be a cartoon show.

Indeed, ABC optioned it two years in a row. Roy and I were never asked to work on its development, although I knew the people who did. I actually got quite a bit of money out of it. I think I got $2,500 the first time which, in 1984 or so, was a good amount of money! That’s from that era when DC was giving a percentage of ownership of characters. I forget which other ones were done that way, but I know that Roy’s Arak was the same deal, which he created with Ernie Colón.

We’ve never seen Arak again, have we? Not that anybody’s looking for it, but DC’s managed to reintroduce everybody but “Cap’s Hobby Hits,” so who knows.

By the way, I pitched “Cap’s Hobby Hints” to DC once, a one-shot with all those filler-page characters: Hypno the Hypnotist, Peter Puptent, Super-Turtle, and Casey the Cop, and all those Henry Boltinoff comic strips. I thought they probably never thought to renew the licenses on these.

Joey Cavalieri said, “No, you and I are the only people who know that DC owns those characters.” [mutual chuckling] Anyway, I am convinced that Warner Bros., a massive corporation, doesn’t want to share anything with anybody.

I own 10% of Captain Carrot as a property, Roy owns five, and, for some reason, Gerry Conway owns five. I don’t think DC ever wants to touch these characters again because they’d have to share it with us. DC occasionally does something with the characters to protect the copyright, but they never ask Roy or me. They went to Paul Dini and asked if he’d like to do a Captain Carrot revival. He didn’t have the time, so he suggested Bill Morrison, who I worked with and is a long-time friend. We worked together on The Simpsons when he was editor. They asked Bill who he wanted to work with. They didn’t call Roy and they didn’t call me. Bill said, “Well, I’d like to work with Scott.” They said, “Really?

Okay.”

Captain Carrot and the Final Ark was supposed to be a six-issue mini-series, but they suddenly cut it down to three. DC wanted a plot—I don’t know who came up with it—but it didn’t have an ending. The plan was to resolve it in an event-series following Countdown, which The Final Ark was supposedly part of. At the end, all the animals are turned into realistic animals, except Pig-Iron. It turned into a nightmare to try to do. It was obvious they were just trying to renew the license. Since then, they keep taking the character and trying to make him real looking or freaky looking. They don’t seem to understand how to do a humor comic at DC. CBC: When’s the next time you worked in mainstream comics? You’d already worked in DC, you’d already worked at Marvel… Archie?

Radioactive Man TM & © 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. Pig Iron TM & © DC Comics.

Scott: I did some inking for Archie. I wanted to ink Bob Bolling. He’s one of my favorite cartoonists and is the guy who created Little Archie. I think I inked three stories of his.

Then, I wound up working on Sonic the Hedgehog, another sad story! Archie came to me because they felt I was a good funny-animal artist. I didn’t know what Sonic the Hedgehog was. It was a brand new video game, but I don’t think it had even come out yet. They showed me pictures and I said, “Well, he looks like Felix the Cat.” I think Felix the Cat is very appealing and so does Naoto Ohshima, the co-creator of Sonic, whose design was directly inspired by Felix. He did a great job. The mini-series has been reprinted a ridiculous number of times, though unfortunately they don’t pay for reprints and, when they hired me, I was working for a big advertising agency—involved with all the Pebbles cereal commercials over the course of about 25 years, 10 years on-staff as Senior Art Director. At the time, I was getting more money from one ad than you would get from an entire comic book. So, Archie hired me to do this thing and then they turned around and reprinted it, giving away millions of copies as a free comic book at Toys R Us. Essentially they hired me to do a 32-page advertisement for next to nothing. I never signed any kind of work-for-hire deal. The backs of the checks weren’t even stamped [with work-for-hire disclaimer], but trying to get Archie to pay me any kind of royalty for those reprints is just a waste of time.

It’s really upsetting to find out over and over that comics will break your heart. I still love doing comics; I just want to do them for people who appreciate them.

CBC: What’s your favorite comic book experience?

Scott: I have to say, I really enjoyed working on The Simpsons. Bill Morrison understood what was going on.

He’d leave you alone. He’d give you a little bit of advice if you were getting carried away. Being a writer and an artist himself, he knew how to manage artists and writers. I’d been friends with Matt Groening for a long time before that.

Matt, at one time, wanted to do an interview with me about Captain Carrot back when he was still writing for L.A.’s free weekly newspaper.

The Simpsons was very much like The Flintstones in a lot of ways, so it was a good fit for me and the first thing they asked me to do was something for the Radioactive Man 80 Page Colossal. So I did a story called, “The 1001 Faces of Radioactive Ape,” because I figured if anybody could do a good Mort Weisinger rip-off, it was me! It was my red kryptonite story. It even includes a transformation that turns him into the “Jackson Pollock radioactive ape.” [laughter] That’s the great thing about The Simpsons: You can be smart and stupid at the same time! That’s the lure of that property. But when Bill stepped down as editor, the new editor didn’t like my work, so I never got another assignment.

CBC: Were you a natural on the Flintstones model sheets?

Scott: Yeah. When I was a kid, when Pebbles Flintstone was introduced, I even drew my own model sheets of Pebbles based on an ad in TV Guide. I was obsessive about that stuff when I was a kid. If they had Wilma’s dress wrong, I’d go nuts! I was a very demanding little weirdo. The visual consistency of character models is of key importance, but it’s also important to learn how to comedically distort them.

That’s the beauty of The Flintstones: they can be drawn horribly and you still know who they are. And have been many times!

CBC: You have an energy in your Flintstones work that makes it come alive. It’s not flat like the Charlton comic stuff, but it has this dimensional energy. How did you develop this over time or is it a natural growth?

Scott: I think it’s part natural, but also—look, I don’t think I’d ever make a good animator because my drawing is pretty stiff compared to most animators. For that reason, I’ve always tried to figure out, “How should I draw a pose to reflect the character’s personality?” Loving The Honeymooners helped a lot! How do I make it more lively, how COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

can I make it more fun? How can I make it feel more like this is the character? Fred holds himself different than Barney does.

I freelanced for many years drawing Pebbles cereal storyboards, character models, and layouts.

Finally the art director quit, so I applied for the job.

Although I never studied advertising, I certainly had studied The Flintstones. I wound up bringing the sales of Pebbles cereal up to a ridiculous degree (and now I’m the one who’s diabetic!).

I guess karma is a bitch because how many kids did I turn diabetic by selling them that horrible cereal?

But I worked on the stuff freelance and wound up getting hired at the agency.

I learned exactly why I hated Bewitched as a kid.

Advertising is exactly like that—you’re a genius one minute and, the next, you’re a complete loser. It is the most surface business in the world. It’s so artificial, but I absolutely loved it!

Who wouldn’t love getting paid well to come up with animated ads for their favorite cartoon characters and not only the characters on the commercials—I drew the cereal boxes, I drew the toys that went into the cereal boxes, I drew the comic book ads—and I was paid extra for all of those! I sound like I’m gloating because… I am! It was the greatest deal ever, but it didn’t last. I did it for about 10 years. So, I got plenty of time to get used to it.

It was wonderful to finally work on Flintstones cartoons that weren’t animated overseas. We could make them as good as we wanted to—we had sufficient time and money. I could go in and direct the voice actors. I was officially the art director, but I was really the co-director. We had hired an outside director, but I would do the storyboard character designs, the layouts, pick the colors—everything. It’s not like I’m gloating—I don’t like being the boss, but if there was a problem, I could re-draw it myself. It was all stuff that I just wanted to make exactly the way I thought it should look. Now, it’s surprising, but people seem to know exactly which commercials I did!

It was a real benefit to get to work on stuff that you could control, as opposed to sending the animation to the Far East, then viewing it only days before it had to air on TV. That’s how we made TV series, essentially putting your work in a black box and when it comes out, you just have to live with it. Kind of like sending it to a country full of Vince Collettas. [chuckles] CBC: Can you remind us what was the basic structure of a Flintstones commercial? What was the generic plot?

Scott: They always wanted Barney to be in a costume that related to a fad that kids liked—skateboarding, video games, etc. Fred would be eating the cereal and Barney would come in wearing the costume. Fred wouldn’t recognize him and Barney would con Fred out of the cereal and we’d end with a “legal breakfast,” while Fred would chase Barney into the distance with the cereal. I probably did 200 of those. I decided to completely mess

Previous page: At top is original art by Scott, Ross Andru, and Bob Smith from the Captain Carrot preview in The New Teen Titans #16 [Feb. ’82]. At bottom is Wonder Warthog from ZAP #15 [2005]. This page: Top is page from Simpsons Summer Shindig #3 [June 2009]. Below is PigIron, Who’s Who #18 [Aug. ’86].

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to call each other at three in the morning and say, “There’s a really great monster movie on the Mexican channel. It’s a mummy and he’s fighting wrestlers.” So, I’d put the TV on and we’d be drawing and making comments about the movie. It was like we had our own Mystery Science Theater.

CBC: Do you see each other often?

Scott: Not as much as I’d like, not since I messed up my foot. We used to see each other all the time. We used to go up there for Thanksgiving every year. He loves to cook.

CBC: Besides the obvious, has your health improved?

Scott: Oh, yes, I’m healthier than I’ve been in a long time.

But I’m still getting used to the prosthetic. I’m going in tomorrow to have an adjustment made before we go to Hawaii. I haven’t used it for the last three days. Not getting out of the house really improves your ability to meet deadlines!

It has been great because I’ve gotten an incredible amount of stuff done in the last few years.

CBC: What are you doing?

Scott: I’m working on my Oddball Comics book for TwoMorrows and a story for David Lloyd’s Aces Weekly called Kilgore Home Nursing,” inspired by bizarre stories from my nurses. I’ve also been working on a Garbage Pail Kids video game. I’ve also been creating a lot of new IP. I’m helping put together a reprint of a European fumetti adapting the old monster movie Gorgo. We’re going to be reprinting it with some new art by a lot of cartoonists who also like monsters and dinosaur stuff.

CBC: You’re happy?

Scott: Yeah, I’m happy. I’m happy to be turning 70 this year and still drawing. My eyes aren’t messed up; my hands aren’t messed up; my family is with me. Everything is cool.

CBC: Is there anything you want to talk about?

Scott: I go to the comic shop every few weeks and what I buy are mainly reprints. There’s lots of good stuff out there, but it’s so hard to find what’s good and what isn’t. I feel like I’m not doing my bit to discover stuff I can promote or get excited about. It’s like white noise now, going into a comic shop or convention. I realized I stopped buying a lot of comics a few years ago (mainly because lack of money and storage space). I wasn’t looking at them anymore. I’ve got a huge collection and 90% of them I know I’ll never read again. I’m going to donate them to a college library in San Diego. The new stuff, I’m sure there’s good stuff out there, but I’m frustrated I don’t know the names of people, “Oh, yeah, this guy is imitating Steranko, but it’s not as good as Steranko.” It’s very tough to get my attention now and I feel kind of bad about it. The people I get most excited about are my age or older… or dead.

I think that Howard Chaykin’s new series, Hey Kids!

Comics!, is probably the best thing he’s ever done. In terms #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Fred Flintstones, Barney Rubble, Fruity Pebbles, Cocoa Pebbles TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. Sonic the Hedgehog TM & © Sega Games Co., Ltd.

with the concept and have all kinds of strange stuff going on in and put characters that no one had seen since 1961 and put myself and my family and my bosses and everyone else in them. Now that I’m diabetic, it was Above: Scott’s dream gig was worth it! [chuckles] The best thing was I had a letter to the working for—and eventually ad agency from Bill Hanna, where the last sentence read, on staff as Senior Art Director “If Scott Shaw! draws it, it’s okayed.” When you’re working at—famed advertising agency in animation at the absolute last second, it’s important to Ogilvy & Mather, where he was have somebody who could do it overnight and, fortunately, the main creative force on the I could.

Post Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles CBC: So how did you get the job initially? cereal account, producing Scott: I’d been working freelance on the Pebbles ad caminnumerable animated commer- paign for a decade and was acknowledged as a Flintstones cials (which typically featured expert. I applied for the gig and I got it. Doing it for a living Fred Flintstone’s thieving pal prepares you a lot better than going to school for it. The Barney Rubble making off with thing that was hard to get used to was that, in advertising, the sweet breakfast food from neither the client nor the agency knew anything about his unsuspecting buddy). Scott animation. I’d educate them… and then they’d go on to a drew both of these promo items. better job and I’d get a new batch to annoy me.

Of course, I figured out a great way to create this kind of persona where to the suits, they were thinking, “He’s kind of nutty, but that’s what a cartoonist is. He’s wearing Below: Scott had a brief stint sandals—that’s real Californian.” I projected kind of a safe, at Archie Comic Publications, crazy man approach, if that makes sense. I once apas initial artist on the first Sonic proached John Kricfalusi to see if he wanted to direct one the Hedgehog series. Detail of with me. He said, “No, I’d want to do everything myself.” I Scott’s cover on #3 [May 1993]. thought, “No, we’d never get this made because you’re just too nuts.” I thought maybe he’d want to dial things down and do a real commercial, but by that time he was so convinced he was the king of cartoons, it would’ve been ridiculous.

CBC: How did you become pals with Sergio Aragonés?

Scott: We became friends at the 1972 San Diego Comic-Con. I met a lot of cartoonists from L.A.; a whole bunch of them came down. Then, after I moved to L.A., Sergio and I were going to publish a comic together, Wild Animals, but our divorces prevented that. Pacific wound up publishing it. Sergio is one of those guys who has eight million people out there who go, “Sergio, he’s my best friend.” He’s easy to get along with. We like a lot of the same things, like King Kong. We don’t do this as much because we’re not working as late as we used to, but we used

of having a kind of control; it’s not too outrageous—it’s very sophisticated and would make a great TV series or movie.

It’s really about the unfortunate reality of how comics got started and what it’s like to work in the business. It’s brilliant. I don’t think fans are going to want to read it because it’s going to upset them. I’m sure there’s a lot of excellent material by new creators, but it takes effort to determine which ones they are.

CBC: I think a lot of it is being at a loss for context. The way culture has splintered, it’s getting to be granular. For you and me, we grew up with three networks and five comic publishers. The choices were simpler and less complicated. Now I don’t even know how to take this stuff into context, never mind find it! And I’m paying attention and yet I feel as much at a loss. I know what I like to look at, which is mostly reprints, though always willing to buy if it has great art or is quirky enough.

Scott: I’m lucky my 29-year-old son, Kirby, shows me stuff on Netflix and Disney+. He showed me the first Doom Patrol, episode, which is probably better than any of the DC movies I’ve seen. It’s dark as hell, but combines The Doom Patrol we grew up reading and the more freaky one from the ’90s. At least it’s a good show. I think, too, maybe I’m kind of grouchy because the rest of the world found out our little secret and then marketing took a dump on it all. I think the marketing is what gets to me and I worked in the belly of the beast. I sold diabetes for a living. Maybe it’s that there’s no real faces you connect to the comic business anymore.

CBC: And yet, today, Jack Kirby is one of the biggest influences on popular culture today, almost more than Walt Disney. We could’ve predicted it in 1972, in a certain way.

How do you look at Jack now?

Scott: Obviously, making Jack a Disney legend in more exploitation, but it’s in a good way for Jack’s family and a good way for people who knew Jack. Disney has a patina of niceness, but it’s still a soulless corporation like the others.

But if they’re promoting Jack, that’s great. I want everyone to know who Jacob Kurtzberg was. It’s a good thing. I don’t think the movies are as great as everyone thinks. I think that a super-hero move can be great. Quite honestly, my favorites have been The Incredibles and Into the Spider-Verse, because they actually feel like comic books. [chuckles] CBC: I hope they do a lot more like Into the Spider-Verse, to be honest.

Scott: I think that having humans dressed in super-hero suits looks ridiculous, but having them in drawings looks

“I Was the Alien Superman” © Scott Shaw. Scott Shaw photo by Joe Crawford.

great. But that’s just me. I’m glad all this stuff is out there, but part of me is thinking, “When’s the crash gonna come?”

Is the end of it all going to be somebody finding a bunch of dead nurses in a basement of a comic editor’s home or something?

CBC: Why, do you know something I don’t?

Scott: I think we all do. [laughter] I’m saving TwoMorrows lawyer’s fees by not mentioning it. This whole geek thing now has been a big deal for a whole decade and it doesn’t seem to be waning in the slightest, but that’s not how popular culture works. I think the condition of the world now makes us desperate for distraction.

CBC: At what cost?

Scott: I force myself to look at the news first thing in the morning because I don’t want anything take me by surprise—especially at Comic-Con. And then you have somebody on the news saying, “I’m here at Comic-Com.” CBC: That’s so true! They’re looking at us! “Oh, honey, honey! Look! The TV says Tom Cruise is here!”

Scott: Or they’ll have somebody like a 23-year-old woman from ESPN and she’s holding up a copy of Captain America Comics #1 like it’s the most thrilling thing she’s ever done when she’s actually thinking, “God, I hate my job.” [laughter] Forcing people to act as if they like this stuff to be on TV is really weird.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

Above: Scott contributed three “Now It Can Be Told” autobiographical one-pagers to Ye Ed and John Morrows’ Eisner-nominated 2000 comics anthology, Streetwise. His pal Sergio Aragonés won an Eisner Award for “Best Short Story” for his Streetwise contribution, “The Gorilla Suit.”

Left: Scott has been a perennial presence at Comic-Con International: San Diego, typically sharing a booth with Sergio and Steve Leialoha in Artists’ Alley.

This photo was snapped by Joe Crawford at the 2014 show.

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darrick patrick’s ten questions

Rob’s Funny Farmhand Chatting with Rob Guillory about Chew and his creator-owned Image Comics series

by DARRICK PATRICK [Rob Guillory is a professional artist/writer best known for his work on Chew, published by Image Comics, as well as his creator-owned project, Farmhand, another Image title.

In 2010, he was recipient of the Harvey Award for “Best New Talent,” the same year Chew won “Best New Series” at the Harveys and the Eisner Awards. Other credits include artwork for Thanos, Rocket Raccoon, The Flintstones, Five Ghosts, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Peter Panzerfaust, Thor, Morning Glories, The Bunker, Rocko’s Modern Life, John Flood, The Walking Dead, and Bill & Ted’s Most Triumphant Return. His Farmhand has been optioned by AMC and is currently in development as a live-action television show.—D.P.]

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All TM & © the respective copyright holders.

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Darrick Patrick: What was the journey that led you to a career as a writer and illustrator?

Rob Guillory: Nothing too exciting.

I grew up in a small town in south Louisiana in the 1980s, and had a couple uncles who were sort of the prototypical comic geeks. So, I fell in love with the medium through them. I’ve always drawn and written my own stories since childhood, but didn’t look at comics as a viable career option until college. From there, I started attending cons, making my own work, and after seven or eight years of doing that, I started drawing Chew for Image Comics. That was the beginning of my professional career.

Darrick: Who are some of the people that greatly influenced you while growing up?

Rob: My parents and my maternal grandparents.

They were all very, very hard-working blue collar folks, and I gleaned my work ethic from them. Through them I learned my dreams were 100% achievable if I was willing to do the work.

Darrick: Do you have any words of advice for other individuals looking to make a career with their artistic abilities?

Rob: Be ready to work and be smart about it. Obviously, artistic ability is important.

Having the brains to create a viable business to support the making of your craft is actually far more important,

Farmhand TM & © Rob Guillory. Chew TM & © John Layman.

Above: Self-caricature by Rob Guillory. Inset right: The creator in real life. Below: As of late, Rob has been writing and drawing his creator-owned dark comedy, Farmhand. Bottom inset: Detail from Rob’s Chew #1 cover, his breakthrough.

though. If you can’t make a plan to pay your bills, you won’t be able to create art in any kind of sustainable way. So, you have to be resourceful.

Darrick: How do you spend your time on a typical workday?

Rob: I’d work eight- to ten-hour days back before I had kids. Now that I have three children, I’m usually in the studio from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., roughly. That time gets broken up in different ways depending on what’s on my plate. Some days I get the luxury of locking myself in my office, plowing through a piece of art or script without interruption. Other days, I’m juggling press interviews and podcasts. Some days I’m uploading new product to my web store and doing general administrative tasks. I wear a lot of hats and the trick is balancing them all.

Darrick: For new readers who may not be familiar with your work, what are some projects of yours that you would recommend to begin with?

Rob: I drew a comic called Chew for Image that is a complete 64-issue epic.

I’m currently writing and drawing Farmhand, also from Image. I’d recommend that new readers begin with the first volume of either book. They’re pretty fun.

Darrick: Who are a few of the people in the comics industry that you hold a high deal of respect for?

Rob: Jim Mahfood and Skottie Young are two of my favorites. They’re both longtime comic creators who have successfully managed to juggle the creative and business sides of this vocation.

Darrick: Outside of creating artwork, what are your other interests?

Rob: I love reading books that have nothing to do with comics. Really, I just love learning new things about the world we live in.

Darrick: What is your oldest memory?

Rob: My mom teaching me how to read on an old chalkboard when I was two- or three-years-old.

Darrick: Tell us something about you that most people don’t know.

Rob: I talk to myself, but in a totally normal and not at all weird way.

Darrick: If you were the last person alive on earth, what do you think you’d do to entertain yourself?

Rob: I’d probably fill my days using all of the dead people’s stuff, I guess.

Hey, you asked.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

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Starlord TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. All other characters TM & © DC Comics.

once upon a long ago

Booksteve’s Origins Our newest columnist gives readers a peek at the beginnings of his fannish ways

by STEVEN THOMPSON Above: Jim Steranko produced a print of his wraparound cover art for his History of Comics Vol. 1, the 1970 tabloid-size, saddle-stitched tour de force that inspired thousands of comics fans yearning for information, including our newest CBC columnist. Below: Another seminal history book was All In Color For a Dime [1970].

[Ye Ed had one of those forehead-smacking moments while reading yet another engrossing Facebook post by longtime CBC transcriber Steven Thompson (whom yours truly has nicknamed “Flash” Thompson for his speedy work). A man of eclectic, myriad interests—don’t believe me? Visit his blog at booksteveslibrary.blogspot.com!—Steve has been tremendously helpful in many instances and has become a vital presence in CBC (as well as a prolific writer for our sister publication, Back Issue). We are delighted that our pal has accepted an invitation to contribute a regular column, though we sheepishly admit the request was ridiculously late in the making! —Ye Ed.]

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#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Art © James Steranko. All characters TM & © the respective copyright holders.

Like many comic book collectors, my addiction began with the onset of Batmania in 1966. For four blissfully ignorant years, ages seven to 11, I prided myself on being an expert on all things related to comic books. Well, super-hero comic books, anyway. Then, one day in 1970, my family and I decided to go to the Cincinnati Zoo. To catch the bus for the Zoo, we had to wait about 15 minutes in front of a bookstore.

Now, I had, at that point, never been in a real bookstore before. Hard to believe, I know, but if a book wasn’t printed in four colors, I simply wasn’t interested. That was all about to change.

That day, in the window of that bookstore was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Was it a book or a poster? I couldn’t tell! It had no words on it, but it was huge by comparison to every other book in the window, colorful, and depicted a whole bunch of super-heroes

and super-villains, some I knew, and some I was seeing for the very first time. There were Marvel characters, DC characters, and was that the Spirit? (I remembered him from his two 1960s Harvey issues).

To heck with giraffes and white tigers! For the rest of that day, all I could think of was that image! When we came back, we got off at the same bus stop, directly in front of the bookstore, and I begged my parents to get whatever it was for me. We went inside and my mind was blown by all the different books. I’d always loved libraries, but this was somehow different. When we couldn’t find the item, my mother asked a clerk—who was wearing a suit and tie— and he directed us to the basement.

The basement was even more of an eye-opener as it was pretty much what I would discover later was called a head shop, run by a hippie couple (who would eventually buy the entire store). My parents told me later it made them uncomfortable, but I was in my element. They had Marvel black-light posters, MAD paperbacks, and even comic books I’d never seen before with names like ZAP. I’d be back later, many times, to explore, but that day I went home with the Holy Grail, which turned out to be Steranko’s History of Comics Vol. 1.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we came of age during the nostalgia revival of the 1960s and ’70s, or the monster craze, but my generation always had an insatiable need to learn as much as possible about what had come before us. Steranko’s History lit that fire for me more than anything else.

The book introduced me to pulp magazines and their heroes, to Golden Age publishers and characters I never knew, and, best of all, to many of the creative folks who pioneered the field that meant so much to me.

Later trips to that psychedelic book basement saw me picking up the bargain book reprint of Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, where I was able to read for the first time classic original comics stories; All in Color for a Dime, the paperback that introduced me to multiple pop culture historians; Comics—Anatomy of a Mass Medium and The Penguin Book of Comics, which brought me the realization that not all comics were American; and Les Daniels’ Comix! A History of Comic Books in America, which taught me about EC Comics and Undergrounds.

There were plenty more comics history books to follow—including Steranko’s second volume—but those are the books that initially inspired me a half-century ago and all still hold honored positions in my library. I read Steranko’s first History until it was starting to fall apart. In 2011, I got to hang out with Jim at his table at the Cincinnati Comics Expo and I told him that. He said that I should have brought it with me as he loves to see well-read copies.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. I was a charter member of the now-defunct I.T.C.H.—The International Team of Comics Historians. I published my first article on comics history in 1987 and have since written a dozen, as well as working on scores of books in one capacity or another.

Going forward, I’m proud to continue in the Steranko tradition here in Comic Book Creator.

— Library Journal (Starred Review)

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#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Comic Book Creator is honored to feature a thorough exploration of Barry Windsor-Smith’s mammoth new graphic novel, Monsters, from its start in 1984 as a oneoff issue of The Incredible Hulk to its publication as a 360-page hardcover epic—deemed his “magnum opus” by The Library Journal—released this April by Fantagraphics. What follows is an interview with the graphic novelist, a review by renowned comics scholar Paul Gravett, and a deep dive into its origins as a Marvel comic book, chronicling its journey as a 35-year long massive undertaking.

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

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THE INTERVIEW

PORTRAIT BY

GREG PRESTON Portrait © Greg Preston.

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#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH

Making An Epic A conversation with Barry Windsor-Smith about his Monsters

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY

JON B. COOKE COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

Since the early days of Comic Book Artist magazine—1998 or so—I’ve been pals with Barry Windsor-Smith, though, by that time, I’d also been a proud fan of his art for a quarter-century. The first work of his I bought with my own money was The Avengers #100 [June 1972], yet I already had some exposure to his Conan the Barbarian my older brothers kept raving on about. But it was a few months later, when I opened the cover of Conan #19 [Oct. ’72], the gorgeous “Hawks from the Sea” splash page turned me into a fanatic and, second only to Jack Kirby, the art of BWS became a transcendent journey for me.

I was consumed with a passion I wanted to share with family so, when Conan #24 [Mar. ’73] appeared, with his exquisite “Song of Red Sonja,” I purchased multiple copies and, during that year’s Comic Art Convention, I had Barry and writer Roy Thomas sign what I later handed out to siblings as Christmas gifts.

From then on, though the man’s work was found less frequently, his artistry advanced exponentially and thus always worth however long the wait. And I followed wherever it was to be discovered, whether in prints published by his Gorblimey Press, in the pages of The Studio art book, and then, after a lapse, at Marvel in the 1980s, where began a 30-year gestation that resulted in Monsters, his new graphic novel.

Barry contributed to some of my own projects— Streetwise and Prime8, as well as participated in CBA’s Flo Steinberg issue—and he became a friend and confidant during some of my difficult years. In the ’10s, I visited his Hudson Valley home on occasion and helped him out on this or that. In September 2019, news came that Monsters was finally complete and I traveled there to scan the pages, during which we talked about his mammoth undertaking. We also discussed related subjects, though BWS edited out a bit of it to keep focused on his massive undertaking.

(Some of what I heard during that chat is featured in our adjoining essay on the backstory of Monsters.)

Special thanks to Margaret Stewart for her help and camaraderie, and (of course) to Linda Fite for helping to celebrate an end and a beginning.—JBC 43

Previous spread: Greg Preston portrait of BWS, circa 2003.

This spread: Above is the original art for pages one and two of Monsters. Below are atmospheric panels from BWS’s latest graphic novel.

CBC: This work is as embellished as I’ve ever seen in your work before. Is that because Monsters is intended to be printed in black-&-white?

Barry: Yes. It began as a color work for regular comics, but, as the page count grew to over 100, I decided that it should be in black-&-white.

CBC: That’s why all the texture? There is an intense amount of detail. Does is feel like mania to do such intricate drawings? There’s Charles Crumb, Basil Wolverton… artists who could do this level of crosshatching… when you’re working on it, do you feel that it’s too much effort?

Barry: I’m not being fussy for the sake of it and, as long as there’s a valid goal in mind, it’s never too much work. I think I know when to stop. (I try to not draw wood grain.)

CBC: I notice the lighting effects you do, when this police officer is talking to the mother through the screen door, you actually meticulously draw the screen #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

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Comic Book Creator: [Looking through the original art] This is an enormous amount of work. The title, Monsters, indicates more than one creature, yet I see only the Hulk-like character in these scenes.

Barry Windsor-Smith: There are other monsters in the book, but they’re not apparent visually. They don’t conform to what one might consider to be comic-book monsters.

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."

sister-in-law, who smokes like a chimney. It’s easier for me to draw all of the smoke and all of the blurred details than to try to fake it with a few puffy lines. I used to smoke cigarettes and it seemed quite ordinary to me to have a room full of smoke. Janet wanted some advice from her sister-in-law, Eileen, but she’s being stymied and is getting nowhere. The smoke adds to the effect in the room. Also, there’s a spider.

CBC: Are these metaphors?

Barry: Yes, just like the screen door sequence was.

CBC: It needs to be said that this is all done on art board.

Barry: As opposed to what, Jon? CBC: The computer, where you can redo at will.

Barry: I write on a computer, but I have no skills whatsoever in the graphic department. I am what is now called a “hand artist.” I work with my

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

pattern, which leaves an amazing impression. It’s astonishing to see and realize that you put that much work into it for the reader.

Barry: That was a bear to draw each line of wire remaining consistent from top to bottom. I wanted the mesh to be there, as I liked the two of them being able to see each other while being separated by the door.

CBC: And the blinding sunlight coming through… it’s an intense effect, Barry.

Barry: Whether it’s from the sun, or from candles, or whatever, I do a lot of sparkling light throughout the story.

CBC: Some of these effects leave me breathless. When you render smoke in one sequence, I’ve never seen anything like it before. You have two women sitting in a room…

Barry: The room is filled with cigarette smoke. Janet is visiting her

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Above: The Hulk by BWS, drawn at the time he was planning his Incredible Hulk story. Below: BWS had, for a time, envisioned serializing Monsters as a five-part monthly magazine, circa 2011. Here are the prototype covers. Next page: In the late 1990s, BWS was preparing a graphic novel featuring the first date between Lois Lane and the Man of Steel.

Titled An Evening with Superman, BWS said to Valarie Jones about the “sophisticated” story: “There was to be no flying, no punching, no fighting. It’s a story about two people.”

fingers on paper. (It sounds demeaning.)

CBC: The main monster in this book was originally based on the Hulk.

Barry: One of several monsters, yes.

CBC: It was initially meant to be an issue of The Incredible Hulk, featuring his childhood. What happened to that?

Barry: My original Hulk plot was stolen, plagiarized by some Marvel hack, who turned the story into a watered-down version, ready-made for the Hulk monthly comic. I’m sick to death of talking about it, actually, Jon. If you’re astute, you’ll see some similarities between the Hulk comic and the Thanksgiving episode of Monsters. That, in fact, is the story’s original title: “Thanksgiving.” It was meant to take place mostly around the dinner table in Bruce Banner’s boyhood home, in the 1950s.

CBC: What lead you to the origin of the Hulk? Does the character ring particularly with you?

Barry: No, not the character as much as the originator Jack Kirby. It was his invention, but other than some gamma ray nonsense, the whys and wherefores of the transformation from a man to a brute was pretty much overlooked as it’s simply part and parcel of being a Jack Kirby creation. It was taken to read that a Kirby character punches things. In this, the original Hulk was really no more than one of Kirby’s monsters from his pre-Marvel years. The Hulk was more single-mindedly violent than Captain America, say, because Captain America had a purpose to some extent in fighting the Nazis in WWII, but the Hulk had no idealistic bent in punching and smashing things. His origin was wholly and simply being a creation of Jack Kirby.

CBC: But in your “Thanksgiving” scenario, the Hulk was

driven to rampages because there was a hidden dynamic.

Barry: Yes, that he was an abused child. Terrifically abused, even to the point of witnessing his mother’s murder at the hands of his father. He lived a terrible life as a child and he grew up with an internal disorder that only manifests when he’s mad and turns into a brutal monster. The unbridled, unreasoning violence can be seen for what it is, but if you want to know why he turns green, it’s simply because most of the heroes in the comics are some variation of blue and red and yellow.

CBC: So why did this story remain unfinished, why did somebody else step in and swipe it from you?

Barry: Although [then Marvel editor-in-chief] Jim Shooter loved my story, he had a problem with the use of the expletive “God Damn.” Apparently, in comics, and least as it was back in the 1980s, a character can say “God” and “Damn,” but not “God Damn.” I explained my need to use this language in my written proposal to Marvel.

CBC: You made a formal proposal?

Barry: I felt I had to do that. The story was such a radical departure from the common Hulk continuity that it required a full explanation. That didn’t stop me from drawing some 10 or so pages of it before I gave the proposal to Jim Shooter.

It was those pages that caused the trouble. They’d been photocopied over and over at Marvel and they fell into the hands of the guy who stole the concept. Prior to that, though, the problem of the language I wanted to use caused me to lay off completing the story while it was sorted out whether I could use “God Damn” or not. Eventually, I let it go for months as I was doing something else anyway. But, as I say, in the interim the story got plagiarized and turned into a regular Hulk comic.

CBC: When did you decide to remake your work into what’s become Monsters?

Barry: It was in the early to mid-1990s. When I first learned about the plagiarism and I realized that I’d been tossed under the bus (or whatever that phrase is). At any rate, my “Thanksgiving” story was no longer vital. It took me a few months, but eventually I decided to use and expand the story I already had, but I had to change the Hulk into something else. He remained a hulking figure, but I changed his face a bit. I’ve always thought that, if I started the story free of any association with Marvel or The Incredible Hulk, I would have designed the monster quite differently. He would have been a skeletal, sickly, limping thing… about as opposite as possible from a Kirby monster. Also it should be

The Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

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man exists now in about eight to ten pages and one cover.

It’ll never be finished if for no other reason that, in 2020, I no longer draw like I did back then, in the 1990s. Thirty years have passed.

Above: Rough pencil page from An Evening with Superman by BWS, repro’d from Les Daniels’ Superman: A Complete History.

Superman TM & © DC Comics. Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

pointed out that the monster never goes on a rampage in this book. Despite his being an abused child the oversized creature you see sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table represents the little boy, just as he was in the 1950s, when this tableau originally took place. They are the little boy’s memories, if you like, only relived years later as a monster.

CBC: You told me you pitched the story to DC at one point.

Barry: That was a complicated move. After many months of depression over the Dark Horse debacle, I happened upon an idea for Superman, of all things. It was this that I pitched to DC, called An Evening with Superman. It was about his first meeting with—or professional date, rather— with Lois Lane. It was a sweet story and quite original considering how much the Lois/Superman scenario had been overworked. The fact is though, in order to make my proposal about that project I, once again, drew pages in advance of the actual proposal.

CBC: As you did with the Hulk “Thanksgiving” story.

Barry: Yeah, I’m a visual writer, I can’t just stop at words.

But little did I know that Superman was such a controlled property that a tight and stringent contract was taking weeks—no, I think, months—to be drawn up. I was advised to stop drawing the story just for my own good—no sense in wasting the effort in case the contract didn’t work out through one channel or another. So An Evening with Super-

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of a job. But I struggle all the time; comics can be damned difficult to do.

CBC: Yet you do it all the time.

Barry: I might gain some satisfaction from a panel or two that’s well drawn, but I’m seldom pleased with my work overall. It’s all so difficult and I don’t mean because of all the detailing and that sort of thing, though that is very time consuming, it’s just that there’s a hundred ways to tell the same story and I’m all too aware of the variations—I usually ponder everything rather than going with the first image or word that comes to mind.

CBC: And that’s why Monsters has taken so long to complete…? Did you question your every move? Was everything given that much thought?

Barry: Perhaps I’m giving a false impression: It’s not as if it’s some faultless masterpiece. That’s hardly the case. It’s not a magnum opus, by any means.

Along with working on it only sporadically for so many years, I had to deal with the consequences of my everchanging drawing styles. In the early part of the story from the 1980s, the main character, Janet Bailey, appears to be a full-figured woman with strong features because that’s the way I drew women in those days… the ’80s, I mean, like Ororo in The X-Men. But, in another part of the story drawn about a decade later, the same woman is sleek and willowy.

Other than entirely redrawing every early scene with Janet Bailey, I’m stuck with the discrepancy as it is. The disparity is part of the artistic makeup of the book, though not with the story. In the story, she doesn’t suddenly lose weight nor does she put on pounds… she’s just represented by my then current stylism.

On another level of inconsistency, I’m always drawing women’s hair differently. The same woman with different hair, I mean. I don’t know why the look of the hair can change from one page to the next… it’s just some psychological problem of mine. In Monsters, though, I played up the differences in the look of the hair, trying to overcome my own faults, by purposefully showing her with different hairstyles… you know, changing her look as she might have the wont to do. This problem exists only somewhat with men.

It’s a cartooning trope that the more lines you put on a face for expression it can be the case that the man will look older. That’s another inherent problem in that the more anguished or angry or whatever a male character of mine gets then the older he tends to look.

Inset right: Drawn in 1984 and later revised in 1995, this “Lifedeath” pencil drawing is a “reworking of the splash page for The X-Men #186,” BWS explained in Opus.

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But the upshot is that, whilst I was waiting for the Superman go-ahead, I took up the Monsters work again. I got really involved in it and for the first time in years I felt that the story was good enough to work hard to finish. I should say that the story was still in formation, even then, it was the characters rather than the plot that inspired me to want to finish the book. I’d approached the work afresh and I saw a lot of potential that I might have missed before by being too close to it. I found the characters to be engaging and believable, and I wanted to invest more time in them and the story. So, yes, I offered it to DC. It was about 200 pages at that time.

CBC: But it never became a DC product.

Barry: It was premature of me to try to sell the idea even though it seemed to be well along in its progress. I began to realize that the story had to be simplified if it was to work.

As it was then the continuity was dependent on cosmic coincidences. By that I mean, coincidences that are not coincidences at all, but have a real purpose in actuating.

Although I edited most of it out, some remnants of the paranormal still remain. It took me years to sort it all out cleanly.

CBC: This doesn’t sound like work that you can enjoy doing.

Barry: I don’t really enjoy making comics. I know people who love drawing or writing comics, they think it’s a honey

Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith. Storm/Ororo TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: A character that BWS professes, “I’m very fond of her,” Alita Aldu is the mute niece of the tavern manager in the BWS: Storyteller series, The Freebooters. “Alita is a composite of several people I know,” he wrote in Opus.

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

CBC: There’s so much intent in everything you do.

This has been apparent in Weapon X, for example, and in BWS: STORYTELLER. Do you think you’re appreciated for it?

Barry: God, I don’t know.

I sometimes get letters that show insight into my stuff and that’s always pleasing.

But in the long run I don’t know. Monsters should be a proving ground for earnest appreciation. For all its faults, it’s my most honest and earnest work. This is my final work, you understand.

If I don’t cut it with Monsters, then it will all be wasted.

CBC: Let’s hope not. What do you mean by “final work”?

Barry: I may do some small stuff, I don’t know, but I’ll never do a full-length story again. I mean any length, like 20 pages or 100, I no longer have the energy or the commitment to invest in such hard work, it’s too much like torture.

CBC: Speaking of torture, what is the “Dark Horse debacle” you mentioned?

Barry: It was called STORYTELLER (in all caps).

I created a monthly comic book that deserved, I might say needed, vigorous marketing support. The book was oversized you see, nine by 12 inches, and it didn’t automatically fit into comics collector’s plastic sleeves.

It was more of a magazine size which I realize now is very uncommercial in the puny world of seven-by-ten inch comics. The long and the short of it is that the publisher promised some full scale marketing but actually did nothing whatsoever to support the book. I worked 16 hours a day seven days a week to produce the stories and with each issue I became more and more desperate for some advertising support from Dark Horse. But I was ignored and in disgust I canceled the book at #9. I couldn’t work that hard and invest so much time and money into what could have been my longest lasting work but was instead a debacle.

CBC: You’ve abbreviated that somewhat I think. Did you want to mention Valiant comics? You created some terrific stories with Archer and Armstrong and other titles.

Barry: I have nothing but rancor for Valiant comics, so we’d best just skip it.

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CBC: You’ve apparently had a rough time with publishers over the years, why is that would you say?

Barry: I’m an independent thinker. Looking back on some things now I should have been an independent publisher as well, but the die was cast when I joined Marvel Comics in 1968.

Above: No comic book artist can evoke sensitivity and tenderness as effectively as BWS, as evidenced by this atmospheric page of original art from Monsters.

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THE REVIEW

The Real Monsters

by PAUL GRAVETT

PAUL GRAVETT

is a London-based freelance journalist, curator, lecturer, writer, and broadcaster, who has worked in comics publishing since 1981. With Peter Stanbury, Gravett launched Escape magazine, the renowned U.K. comics anthology magazine which lasted for 19 issues. He is the author of numerous books, including Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics, Graphic Novels, Stories to Change Your Life (with Stanbury), Comics Art, and Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the U.K., as well as many more.

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Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

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Others can disentangle this book’s torturous gestation over 35 years, or around half its author’s life so far, but suffice it to say that Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monsters completely transforms and transcends both his traditional domains of the super-hero and fantasy genres and its industrial origin as a 23-page Hulk comic book. Taking some 16 times that length, 360 pages, to release directly into a graphic novel, Windsor-Smith can finally expand his core concerns and convictions, seeded throughout his creative trajectory so far, to unprecedented heights and depths. Born a Londoner, he was 19 when he landed in New York in summer 1968, incredibly realizing a young man’s naive zeal to work for Marvel. Since then, while he may have lived in the U.S. almost all his life, perhaps there remains something of the outsider, the unassimilated, the maverick about him, helping him to reappraise his chosen homeland and its values, viewing them askance with a critical remove and clarity.

The cover of Monsters seems to blow its cover by defusing the shock reveal of what Bobby Bailey will become. Except we quickly realize Bobby is only outwardly the monster, whereas the true monsters are those whose actions, or inactions, conspire to doom him. To some of those in the American military, such is their sheer disdain for human life, that Bobby—23, parentless, homeless, jobless—is worthless, except as an expendable guinea pig for their top-secret Prometheus Project, which continues unspeakable Nazi experiments to bio-engineer an unstoppable human weapon. Windsor-Smith’s cover portrays the result, Bobby as a symbol of patriotism perverted into some grotesque Captain America, the original ‘Super Soldier,’ wearing, even personifying the star-spangled banner itself, but with red stripes spray-painted across his face, two American flags poked into his ears, a tear welling up from his remaining eye.

One by one, we come to understand the forces which drive those responsible for this tragedy, several of whom emerge as irredeemably heartless.

Two of them, however, men of decency and conscience, come to harness their remorse for how they failed Bobby into determination to atone and save him and somehow themselves. Over the two opening full-bleed spreads, Windsor-Smith confronts us head-on with one apparent monster, the boy’s abusive father Thomas, psychologically gargantuan above the Baileys’ tiny, normal-seeming neighbor-

hood just over the fence, as he assaults Bobby, aged eight, ranting “Wahnsinn” (“Madness”) and other Gothic German too big for his speech balloons to contain. Even the panel borders here seem to shiver. Over time, the twisted roots of Thomas’s terrible post-traumatic stress disorder will be unraveled. Luckily, on this occasion Bobby’s mother, Janet, rescues him, but not before his left eye is pulped. The book’s first solitary image is of Janet’s gentle hands, writing her intimate diary. These passages, the only thoughts we read in this narrative, allow us into her turmoil and her yearning for some normality, even if she must make it up.

Windsor-Smith entwines the Baileys’ history with that of another family, the McFarlands, a younger black couple with two kids, their father in the Army. One of several fateful connections is made in 1964, when Sergeant Elias McFarland interviews Bobby, eager to join the Army. His innocence is underscored by the office flag reflecting in his sunglasses, putting stars in his eyes. After following orders and referring Bobby to the Prometheus Project, however, Elias becomes overwhelmed with regret. Windsor Smith can devote over 40 pages to immerse us in the McFarlands’ increasingly strained dynamics, now that Elias is home on forced leave and appears to his wife to be cracking up. He has retreated to the basement, obsessed with finding a guiding message written to him as a boy inside one of his treasured Golden Age comic books (stored in Campbell’s soup boxes, a nod to Warhol). Elias finally resolves that he must rescue Bobby. This sequence inter-cuts Bobby’s mutation, but rather than disclose these stages, as he charted Wolverine’s ordeal in Weapon X, Windsor-Smith leaves us mostly, mercifully in the dark, making the few glimpses only more chilling, while undermining them with the personnel’s Monty Python-like chatter about the bad smell, or the ungainly side-effects on Bobby’s genitalia.

Windsor-Smith keeps us time-shifting across two decades, from Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the Allies’ recovery of the Master Race’s darkest science, to that most American of holidays, Thanksgiving, an annual family gathering which can become fraught, even volatile, in one case escalating into a massacre, re-lived and looping, at the burning core of this book. As he deepens our understanding of these families’ connected pasts, he also shifts realities to reveal other deeper forces at work. These are personified in Elias, and his grandma, unseen but felt, but he realizes are emerging especially now in his youngest child, Nina, like them an “old soul” with “second sight,” able to perceive and affect those “hidden realities… right here on Earth, not just in heaven.” By contrast, the Christian faiths of Elias’s wife, Bess, or a local Army chaplain seem largely closed-minded or ineffectual. Relating such extraordinary circumstances of the uncanny in the everyday, WindsorSmith taps into his personal experiences, recounted in the two volumes of Opus, and carefully keeps them mostly understated, and all-the-more plausible. Elias sees events “like spokes on a giant wheel,” which form part of a wheel that can eventually move on and turn “just right.”

Throughout, subtle expressions and body language are so perceptively captured thanks to the precise, consistent, expressive pen-&-ink lines, a hundred or two, or more, panel after panel. In controlled storms, their outlines, feathering and cross-hatching conjure shadows, light, texture, volume, the natural and man-made worlds, in a nuanced black-&-

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

PAUL GRAVETT

white akin to engravings or Old Master drawings.

The result is a convincingly lived-in, “hi-def” intensity.

This is only reinforced by Windsor-Smith’s avoidance of any distancing narrator’s voice and his reduction of captions to mere orientations of place and date.

What also propels the story is his distinctive, naturalistic dialogues, giving characters, all except the “monster,” their own genuine voice. Their speech balloons are uniquely choreographed to flow within and between panels, to impart an immediacy to the conversations and let them take all the time and space they need.

There is much more here, too. There is the hellish horror of the final hours of Fascist Germany and one evil man’s utterly selfish survival instinct at any cost.

Monsters may take place decades ago, but it seems Windsor-Smith wants it to speak about America today and its “hidden realities.” As he has one character insist, “Those monsters are still up to their evil doings right here in our backyard.” And there is tender, unrequited romance, sensitively unveiled over time between Janet, a married mother, and the book’s other decent man, Jack Powell, a local police officer embroiled by the Army and eventually a savior of sorts. His remorse over the Baileys will also drive him to risk all for the sake of Bobby. And somehow, despite it all, there is no anger in Bobby Bailey, no rages, no rampages, no revenge. One small silent panel shows him walking to the horizon through the snow, and behind him a deer is following. There is finally hope here, as proven by his attempt to save two pilots from their burning helicopter, who had previously been gunning him down.

Bobby may have been made into a monster, but he remains human and humane.

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THE BACKSTORY

Making Monsters Below: In 2003, when BWS suggested CBC editor Jon B. Cooke investigate plagiarism claims involving comics writer Bill Mantlo, the studio provided numerous photocopies of original art pages. This one features the original story title, “Thanksgiving,” and margin notation on a Stan Lee/Jack Kirby credit.

by JON B. COOKE Around 2003, Barry Windsor-Smith, after frustrating experiences with mainstream comics publishers, had to consolidate. Giving up the John Street studio space, the artist/writer combined home and studio, moving to an impressive Kingston residence, where he lives and works today, aided by assistant and friend Margaret. Since that relocation, BWS has notably receded from the comics scene, though he still percolates with ideas and has consistently

worked on his various unfinished projects and continued personal writing. He has decidedly suffered bouts of extended melancholy, no rare state of mind and spirit for an artist of his brilliance. But still, somehow, the London-born creator has found energy to summon all of his powers to complete Monsters (a title he pluralized from The Monster, hinting at malevolent players in his epic saga, characters who might appear less monstrous than the book’s main protagonist at first glance, but festering under the skin nonetheless).

The task to finish the gargantuan graphic novel—a 360-page epic—was a monumental challenge. Even back in 1997, BWS shared, “My style has become all fiddly and my mind’s all over the place with the The Monster book. I’m so aware that it’s now black-&-white and well over half of it was designed for my color to separate and pace the word balloons. Without color, the b-&-w balloons go astray from their reading order, so I’m crosshatching the hell out of the drawings to help redefine the sequencing of the dialogue.

Some of this stuff looks like bleedin’ etchings, now. Christ almighty! But I can also do extremely simple things.”1 Long after it was first conceived as a story for Marvel Comics, Monsters has been exclusively an independent b-&-w project for decades now and, seizing the initiative, BWS, through his inking, has painstakingly added sublime textures and evocative atmospherics as this writer has never before seen in pen-&-ink work. While visiting to scan all the pages, back in September 2019, it was a breathtaking experience for this writer to absorb such an intimate, up-close look at the exquisite original art, so beautiful as to stop a person dead in one’s tracks trying to absorb it all.

In 1998, just before Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller ended for good, Comics Buyer’s Guide correspondent Bruce Costa was granted the rare privilege to look through BWS’s then super-secret project, mysteriously referred to his “Big Black-&-White Book.” Costa shared the experience, which describes what is doubtless a common reaction for who today have the opportunity to read their own copy:

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Monsters ˆTM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

You’re all well aware, I’m sure, how rare it is for comics—words and pictures on a page—to evoke real emotion from you and how precious it is when it does happen.

As I read this work, emotions welled up inside so often that it brought me to a new understanding of what could be achieved on a paneled page. And, more importantly, it does so with regard to perhaps one of the most important issues of our age. Fourteen years in the making, this book will be considered a milestone for our medium. It will be spoken in the same breath with Watchmen and, more appropriately, Maus.

“This was the beginning,” Barry said. “This is the book where I really learned how to write—the first thing I did where I said, ‘I’m going to tell a story in my own way.’ It has great personal and historical importance for me. There’s about 25 pages or so of it that were written and drawn about 14 years ago or more. I’ve added to it over the years.”

There are scenes within the story so powerful that I had to close my eyes. I felt like those early movie-goers who had to walk out front and take a few breaths before returning to their seats when Frankenstein was first released. It was as though I was experiencing a new,

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith. The Incredible Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

too-powerful form of storytelling. “I don’t think I could read this in a sitting,” I said to Barry, who was looking on compassionately.

“No, you really can’t. It’s way too heavy. Breaks my heart sometimes, writing this material. If you read it in one sitting—remember, it’ll be, I’m guessing, 220 to 260 pages long—you’ll miss things.

“You’ll need at least five readings to take in everything that’s happening. And that’s just the way I want it to be. This ain’t no throwaway. It’s a killer book.”

Frustratingly, I can’t tell you more. Nor would I— this is one which you’ll want to cover your ears and do the “la la la” thing when people in the know are talking about it. Just get it and experience it.2

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Recently asked if he had agonized over the years while finishing Monsters, BWS said, “Not anymore. Not since I finished it. I’ve come to terms with it. Whilst I was working on it, I agonized over it quite a lot. It’s something that’s important to me, [and it’s] probably a complete fantasy, but I’d like people who can’t or don’t read comics to read this.

How that will come about, I don’t know… But I’d also be enormously pleased if the comic book world accepted this and it was read by people who read those damn things I saw in Previews and they pick this up and want to read about what happens here and were taken by it.”3 MONSTERS Arguably the finest achievement in BWS’s half-century as comic-book maker, Monsters is an epic saga many years in the making, a span during which the author refined, refigured, and restarted over and over and over again, in an attempt to meet his exacting, meticulous, and even tortuous standards. It would hardly be a surprise to learn if the book’s 360 printed story pages match the many pages, panels, and sequences and entire subplots that were added, discarded, reinserted, omitted again, reconsidered, torn up in frustration, often even entirely redrawn, and sometimes jettisoned for good or ill from the final selection.

The writer/artist, afflicted with what can be best described as a sort of self-induced creative torment, agonized over word-balloon placement and fretted over the tiniest of stylistic shifts as his art evolved over the extended time of the book’s creation.

There were multiple instances BWS stressed over panels he had drawn years, sometimes decades, apart, differences of, say, how he rendered a woman’s hair, a detail that might be undetectable to the keenest eye of his most discerning fan. But the manner in which Janet Bailey’s hair was depicted from one page to another could become an incongruity as wide as a mountain chasm, resulting in a determination to redraw a sequence for stylistic consistency. The storyteller was, of course, fervently intent on telling the story he insisted on presenting to the very best of his ability and according to the man’s own strict criteria.

Any number of BWS aficionados may have first heard inklings of this ambitious graphic novel in a friendly, early 1990s interview he gave during his stretch producing the seminal “Weapon X” story for Marvel Comics Presents, a

Above: Thanksgiving tableau of the ill-fated Bailey holiday dinner table. Eight-year-old Bobby is represented by his grown-up, horrifically transformed “monster” apparition(?). His mother, Janet, is the woman at far left and, behind her, is the surly father, Tom. Inset left: It would be years after the publication of The Incredible Hulk #312 when BWS would discover that the premise of his then-unfinished Hulk graphic novel (titled Thanksgiving) was swiped for this issue’s story, written by Bill Mantlo. Below: Around the same time he was working on Thanksgiving, BWS sketched this rendition of the Hulk.

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ing one of the company’s most famous properties. To his inquisitor during the aforementioned “Weapon X” interview, BWS made mention of that latter narrative, one which had hit a few speed bumps along the way as the creator stood firm when some dialogue was under scrutiny by editorial.

So, to that Amazing Heroes interviewer, he hinted at an innovative storyline he was proud of, one that reconsidered a company star’s fundamental raison d’être.

“Huh?” interjects the questioner, what you’re describing resembles a development that’s now established in the series. Aren’t you aware of it? In fact, the nonplussed artist-writer and veteran comics legend Barry Windsor-Smith, is caught completely unaware and, with eyebrows raised, he has only a one-word answer in reply: “No.”4 PLUNDER The concept was clever, infusing a modern-day issue, yet one old as time—in this case, child abuse—into the origin of a universally recognized Marvel comic book character. By 1984, the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby creation had already gained world renown courtesy of a long-running and popular television series, which had ended only a few years prior (though then still in wide syndication). What if, surmised the inventive notion, long before the transformative explosion, the scientist had suffered beatings by a brutal parent as a boy? What if it was that horrific childhood trauma was the fuel feeding his alter ego’s monstrous rage, a massively muscled green behemoth prone to destructive rampages? What if it was the pain inflicted by a savage, sadistic father’s pummeling that had changed the psyche of hapless Dr. Bruce Banner’s life just as much as that chance bombardment of gamma rays had changed his physical being? What if, because Bruce hurt, Hulk smash?

The first time readers learned of this brilliant and tragic idea, one that immediately resonated, altering the character’s portrayal for years to come—even becoming the central plot point in the 2003 movie—was in The Incredible Hulk #312 [Oct. 1985], with writer Bill Mantlo’s story, “Monster.” A melodramatic reconfiguring of the Hulk’s origin, the tale debuts the man-monster alter ego’s unhinged father, a child-beating maniac who kills his wife—and son’s mother—off-panel. Mantlo, who had earned the nickname, “Fill-In King” at Marvel for scripting countless filler issues to offset any deadline calamity to arise across an array of titles, offered a direct connection between that heinous episode and the familiar and fantastic gamma-ray bomb origin.

Above: Page that was bumped from the final Monsters tale.

Below: Marvel memo sent out to all staff and freelance writers on the subject of plagiarism.

That issue, the penultimate story of scripter Mantlo’s otherwise lackluster run on the title, was called the singular bright spot in the entirety of his ordinary 68-issue run on The Incredible Hulk and four Annuals. In a span overall rife with “sustained mind-numbing mediocrity,”6 “Monster” was looked upon as a masterpiece. In 2014, Back Issue magazine regarded the tale as “the most significant and profound issue of the writer’s five-year run,” adding that it was “easily the densest of all of Mantlo’s work.”7 Perhaps, folks surmised, the writer was saving the saga on a glorious high-note as a fare-thee-well to cap his half-decade stint on the series.

Subsequent writers of the title would cite that specific 26-page “Monster” tale as massively significant in their own renditions of the Marvel anti-hero. Long-running Hulk scripter Greg Pak (whose “gladiator Hulk” was used to delightful effect in the Thor: Ragnarok film) called Mantlo’s story, “a huge influence,” even going so far as to dedicate a portion of his 100 or so Hulk stories to the writer.8 Well-regarded comics writer Peter David, who devoted a dozen years of his life cultivating a seminal and #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

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multi-part effort that refigured the origins of Marvel Comics’ hugely popular character, Wolverine of the X-Men. While not necessarily a prolific contributor to the House of Ideas throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, Windsor-Smith had enthusiastically produced an effective, steady, and particularly elegant body of work for the publisher, including the exquisite “Lifedeath” issues in The X-Men, a finely embellished Machine Man mini-series, and an unforgettably charming Thing story in Marvel Fanfare, as well as a good variety of handsome covers.

During this period, he also toiled on ambitious stories that ultimately went unpublished, including a witty mini-series about Benjamin Grimm, a.k.a. The Thing, as well as, importantly, another significant project involv-

The awesome forces of gamma radiation were released that day! But so was the long pent-up rage locked inside a lovelorn child… doomed from childhood to become that which his father had always feared he would become! More than a man! A monster!5

The Outer Limits TM & © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. Fantastic Universe Science Fiction TM & © the respective copyright holder. The Incredible Hulk, Bill Mantlo portrait TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. The Comics Journal TM & © Fantagraphics, Inc.

award-winning run on The Incredible Hulk, also placed laurels at Mantlo’s feet. In his dedication in his novel, Incredible Hulk: What Savage Beast [1995], David paid tribute to the three founding fathers of the Marvel universe—Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko—and to Bill Mantlo.

Asked why he incongruently added Mantlo’s name to the dedication, David replied, “Mantlo was listed because Hulk #312 was very influential in much of my subsequent handling of the Hulk. It laid the foundation that I built the entire concept of Bruce’s multiple personality disorder (MPD) upon. The Hulk/Banner relationship had, until then, been treated mostly as one man fighting his inner rage. The revelation of Bruce’s childhood abuse suggested a totally different angle: the notion that Bruce suffered from MPD due to the abuse. That, rather than the gamma bomb, creating the Hulk; it simply exacerbated a condition that already existed. And it further suggested the ‘cure’ storyline that led to the merged Hulk. So, since that issue served as a springboard for so much, I felt it appropriate to mention Bill.”9 The retconning of child abuse and matricide into the Hulk’s origin had such an impact that it became established canon, so much so that these plot-points were incorporated in the backstory of Hulk, Ang Lee’s 2003 movie, the first Hollywood motion picture devoted to the character. That script, credited to James Schamus, basically depicted an Oedipal clash of leviathan proportions with monster-size son battling monster-size father to the death. (In fact, the father role appealed to actor Nick Nolte precisely because of the element of “Greek tragedy” in the script.)10 Made for a reported budget of $137 million, the Universal super-hero film would go on to gross $245 million in worldwide ticket sales, an impressive take, though the movie was generally regarded by critics as something of a flop.11 In addition, harkening to Mantlo’s one-off, the very first line in Peter David’s paperback novel adapting Schamus’s Hulk script, was: “David Banner just made his son, Bruce, angry, and discovered that he rather liked it.”12 For all of its considerable impact, whether comics, novels, or cinema, there was one monstrous, gargantuan-sized, and epic problem with the massively consequential premise of “Monster,” in The Incredible Hulk #312.

The entire concept had, in fact, been pilfered from Barry Windsor-Smith.

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A PROBLEM OF PLAGIARISM Back in 1983— on Thursday, May 5, in fact— Marvel’s then editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, distributed an exasperated memo to all of the company’s in-house and freelance writers: Subject: Plagiarism We’re against it. Vehemently.

I can’t believe that I actually have to tell people this, but several instance in the past two years have demonstrated that it’s necessary.13

Shooter went on to share that he was aware some “instances were largely unintentional,” and suggested, “If anyone doesn’t know what plagiarism is, find out. And don’t ever do it. Ever.” Then, in closing, he laid down the law: “It is, of course, possible to come close to someone else’s work by sheer coincidence—but from this point on, if anyone rips something off, we are going to take it very seriously. We cannot and will not tolerate it.”14 Bearing a “Cadence Internal Correspondence” header, that signed memo probably seemed a bit random to the company’s scripters, an out-of-the-blue dictate that was surely interpreted as both sensible and, well, a no-brainer: don’t steal from others. Though the “several instances” —inferring, of course, that at least one infraction was, at a minimum, a year or two old—were given no elaboration, there happened to be a specific urgency that prompted Shooter’s communiqué.

Behind the scenes, the E-I-C’s springtime memo was in response to one of Marvel’s most prolific wordsmiths being accused of cavalierly (you guessed it) appropriating the intellectual property of another writer.

And, piling atop that alarm, it wasn’t just any writer being robbed. Nope. The guilty Marvel freelancer was risking the wrath of none other than maybe the most litigious science-fiction author in the histories of comics, genre literature, television, and movies—combined!

For years, there was a standing warning throughout the entertainment industry: be cautioned—stay clear of the writings of one Harlan Jay Ellison, unless armed to the teeth, armored for hand-to-hand combat,

This page: Harlan Ellison’s “Soldier” short story, first published in Fantastic Universe Science Fiction Vol. 8 #4, was adapted by the writer for an episode of the TV series, The Outer Limits, and subsequently plagiarized

by Marvel writer Bill Mantlo for an issue of The Incredible Hulk, #286. Immediately recognizing the breach, Marvel compensated the legendary science fiction writer and issued an apology in Hulk #289. The Comics Journal reported about the affair in #83.

At inset bottom left is the “next issue” blurb in Hulk #285.

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Opposite page: Page one of the “special story” proposal that BWS pitched to Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, in summer 1984. This photocopy provided to the CBC editor include BWS’s handwritten notes.

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Red-Faced Apology Department A lot of readers thought that “Hero” in Hulk #286 bore a strong—a very strong—resemblance to Harlan Ellison’s short story and teleplay, “Soldier.” They were right. Writer Bill Mantlo did, indeed, adapt Harlan’s philosophical thriller to Hulk-use. But because of a last-minute mix-up, Harlan’s credit was accidentally omitted from where it should have been, at the top of page one.

We’re sincerely sorry for the confusion and we’re taking this opportunity to apologize to Harlan and his many fans.

— The Editors.20

(Apparently another requirement was for Marvel to include, adjoining the apologia—a copyright statement doubtlessly dictated by Ellison—was an intricately detailed statement clocking in at a verbose 68 words!)

Maybe the comics publisher was sincerely apologetic, but little of Shooter’s explanation to Ellison or the text of their “Red Faced Apology” was actually true, as The Comics Journal—no friend of Marvel, they—found out through their own investigation, which made use of the keen powers of simple logic.

Kim Thompson’s article in The Comics Journal #83 [Aug. ’83], headlined “Mantlo Ellison Adaptation Raises Questions,” began by stating that Incredible Hulk #286’s story credits “have proved a source of puzzlement and confusion.”21 Nowhere was Ellison’s name to be found in the issue despite the story being an obvious swipe of his work.

The news item continued: When questioned about the situation, Shooter explained that the editor of the title, Al Milgrom, and the writer, Bill Mantlo, had originally conceived the idea of adapting Ellison’s story. “The adaptation was pretty informally arranged,” Shooter explained, and “the acknowledgment to Harlan Ellison was dropped” by mistake. Shooter cited the fact that Hulk is currently being given from one editor, Milgrom, to another, Carl Potts, as the main reason behind the screw-up. #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Incredible Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

This page: A couple of examples of the striking similarities between BWS’s Hulk “Thanksgiving” story panels (which was available to be seen by anyone going into the flat files of The Incredible Hulk’s editor) and panels from The Incredible Hulk #312, with art by (a very young) Mike Mignola, pencils, and inker Gerry Talaoc.

and flanked by a battalion of intellectual property lawyers.

(Exhibit A is the contentious writer’s own words, scribed in a 2009 press release about filing suit against sundry parties regarding a 1967 Star Trek episode: “Please make sure to remember, at the moment some Studio mouthpiece calls me a mooch, and says I’m only pursuing this legal retribution to get into their ‘deep pockets,’ tell’m Ellison snarled back, ‘F- - - -in’-A damn skippy!’ I’m no hypocrite. It ain’t about the ‘principle,’ friend, it’s about the money! Pay me! Am I doing this for other writers, for Mom (still dead), and apple pie? Hell no! I’m doing it for the 35-year-long disrespect and the money!”)15 The offending comic book and source of Shooter’s distress was Incredible Hulk #286 [Aug. ’83], which featured the story “Hero” by Bill Mantlo. Just prior to the dust-up, Shooter read the Hulk story and, as he recalled in 2011, “I remember thinking what a good story it was and that Bill must be improving.”16 Shipping from distributors on April 19, copies were in comic shops by the following Friday, the 22nd.17 “The day the book hit the stands,” Shooter continued, referring to a former Marvel editor and freelance writer, “Roger Stern called me and said, ‘Are you nuts?! This is a Harlan Ellison story!’ I said, ‘It is?’ Then my secretary told me Harlan Ellison was on the other line.”18 The pilfered tale an agitated Stern was hollering about concerned an Ellison short story from the ’50s. First published under the title “Soldier from Tomorrow” in pulp digest Fantastic Universe Vol. 8, #4 [Oct. ’57], and made known to national TV audiences in 1964, “Soldier” was the second season premiere episode of The Outer Limits. Written by Ellison, his first science fiction teleplay, the (wildly simplified here) gist of the scenario, a loose TV adaption of his short story, is that two mortal enemies from the far-flung future are transported to a modern-day American city, where the warriors ultimately kill one another after some other stuff happens. Though Ellison’s follow-up Outer Limits episode that season, “Demon with a Glass Hand,” is one of the most highly regarded TV shows of all time, “Soldier” continues to be a teleplay beloved by fans.

Over the decades, whatever amount of time Harlan Ellison spent conjuring up that consequential short story would be hours that would eventually prove to be quite profitable indeed. Though King-Size Publications paid out a mere $91 to Ellison in 1957 when it published the original story, the payment he received from the Outer Limits production company for adapting the tale to TV amounted to $5,000, quite a wad of money in ’64.19 Still, the diminutive and pugnacious scribe’s greatest payday for

“Soldier” was a result of film director James Cameron flippantly admitting to Starlog magazine that, in his breakout movie, Terminator, he swiped from Outer Limits episodes, and thus, by inference, “Soldier,” given the similarities between the movie’s opening and the show’s depiction of the protagonist’s arrival. Ellison’s subsequent 1984 lawsuit taking the movie-maker to task for the indiscretion resulted in an undisclosed cash settlement being paid out (estimated to between $65,000 and $400,000) and receiving screen credit on the film’s end-crawl that states, “Acknowledgment to the Works of Harlan Ellison.”

Along with a never-disclosed payout from Marvel, Shooter also agreed to run its own mea culpa in the next available issue of Incredible Hulk. Titled “RedFaced Apology Department” and said to have been drafted

by Dennis O’Neil, the statement ran on the letters page in #289 [Nov. ’83] and read:

© Barry Windsor-Smith.

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Above: BWS produced faux comic strips for Oliver Stone’s movie, The Hand. Below: Intended at the cover of Epic#16, unfinished until 12 years later.

When contacted, however, Ellison himself denied this sequence of events. Although reluctant to divulge the full story behind the adaptation, Ellison did reveal that he had heard of Marvel’s “informally arranged” adaptation only when a fan who had bought the issue at a comic book shop called him up to ask about it.22

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“My dealings with Marvel regarding the Bill Mantlo adaptation of ‘Soldier,’ are solely and entirely with Mr. Hobson [Mike Hobson, Marvel’s vice president]. Marvel has, in fact, paid me for the adaptation and a statement acknowledging the origin of the story had been drafted

by Dennis O’Neil. It will be published very shortly in an upcoming issue of The [Incredible] Hulk.”28

For whatever reason, through its editor-in-chief, Marvel chose to be less than honest about almost every aspect of its acknowledgment of Mantlo’s reckless act. Marvel said the adaptation was “informally arranged”; Ellison said it was not. Marvel said the citation of the adaptation had “dropped off” the story credits; Ellison said no deal was made prior to publication, thus there couldn’t have #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Mandro, The Hand TM & ©1981 Orion Pictures Company. The Beguiling © Barry Windsor-Smith.

The muckraking TCJ also noted that “Soldier” had previously been announced in earlier Marvel press releases, the same name as Ellison’s Outer Limits teleplay, but was suspiciously changed to “Hero” by the time it saw print, indicating someone was surely aware trouble was a’ brewin’. And one look at the “next month” blurb at the conclusion of previous issue—The Incredible Hulk #285—finds damning evidence, as it reads: “Next issue: A tale of the far future entitled Soldier!”23 In a 2011 recounting of his role in the controversy, Shooter said that, after that admonishment by Roger Stern, he took Ellison’s call.

“Harlan said, words to the effect, you ripped me off. I said, yes, I know, I just found out about it,” Shooter re-

lated. “That admission calmed him down. I asked him what he wanted. Should we turn this over to the lawyers and let them work something out? I assured him that there was no contention, that Marvel did it and would fess up to it.”24 The former Marvel editor-in-chief continued, “Harlan’s damages, by statute, would have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he had us dead to rights. But, he said he’d settle for the same money as Bill was paid to ‘write’ the script, an acknowledgment, plus a lifetime subscription to everything we ever published. Done. Thank you, Harlan.”25 “A source close to Ellison,” reported TCJ, revealed that Marvel “acted quickly with a payment and apology, asking Ellison to refrain from spreading the embarrassing matter around.”26 Ellison’s contemporaneous account was, as reported in TCJ #83, “Although reluctant to divulge the full story behind the adaptation, Ellison did reveal that he had heard of Marvel’s ‘informally arranged’ adaptation only when a fan who had bought the issue at a comic shop called him up to ask about it.”27 The writer submitted a formal statement to TCJ:

The Incredible Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Artwork © Barry Windsor-Smith.

been legitimate credit.

Shooter claimed, even 28 years after the debacle, to have agreed to the terms with Ellison; Ellison said he dealt only with Marvel’s vice president. Marvel said the comic book series was between outgoing and incoming editors, “the main reason for the screw-up”; The Incredible Hulk’s change in editors occurred three issues after “Hero” was published.

The reason for all of this gas-lighting was obvious. It was to cover up an egregious case of plagiarism.

In the affair’s aftermath, Shooter sent out his “Plagiarism” memo nine business days after The Incredible Hulk #286 went on sale in comic shops.29 He also restrained the urge to punish Mantlo. “I wanted to fire Bill,” Shooter related in 2011, “but he had a friend upstairs—the financial [vice president]—who resisted. It was my call. I could have fired Bill over his objections, but I decided, stupidly, that the subsequent hostile relationship with the financial guy would be worse than policing Bill better.”30 Any effective policing would prove lax, as in the very next year, Bill Mantlo would be at it again.

THE STORYTELLER’S RETURN Barry Windsor-Smith’s 1980s homecoming to Marvel Comics was a slow and deliberate process. It had been ten years since he famously made a name for himself (albeit as “Barry Smith,” in those days prior to his adding his mother’s maiden name to his own by the later ’70s), back when he was the artist on Conan the Barbarian, a stint during which he acquired super-star stature in the comics world as his artistry evolved at light speed from Kirby clone to illustrative master. In 1973, he stunned fans when he quit the Conan series for good and left the publisher, enraged over the company’s refusal to return original art, lackluster page rates, and overwhelmed with humiliation by the “take it or leave it” ethos of mainstream comics’ work-for-hire ghetto.

Setting forth for independence, completely severed from the industry, he joined with then girlfriend Linda Lessmann to start Gorblimey Press [GbP], and together they helped launch an entirely new revenue source for comic book COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

artists: portfolios and prints, a fad that turned into a craze, if you will, through the ’70s and into the early ’80s. At GbP, BWS’s efforts were devoted to single-image work using a variety of mediums, including pen-&-ink, watercolor, and paints, and his abilities were universally considered to reach sublime heights never reached before by a comics artist.

Between 1976–78, amid his “New Romantic” period, BWS famously joined up with three fellow comics masters—Michael Kaluta, Jeffrey Jones, and Berni Wrightson—a trio who had also severed ties with the newsstand comics business. Together the foursome organized The Studio, a legendary group who, for three years, created artistic masterpieces in a huge, high-ceilinged space—formally a machine shop—in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

The stuff of legend, this gathering of supremely talented artists was immortalized in a popular art book of the late ’70s titled (you guessed it) The Studio. Published under Yes album cover artist Roger Dean’s Dragons Dream imprint, by the time the book came off the press, ironically, the lease had run out on the 26th Street space and the “Fab Four” had broken up and gone their separate ways.

“It was good and it wasn’t good,” BWS reminisced in 1987. “We used to fight a hell of a lot. We used to play darts and drink a lot of beer. When we moved out, the place around the corner that sold beer went out of business. We had a lot of fun and it broadened our horizons.”31 By the time BWS was turning 30, the print/portfolio frenzy had been dying down, and GbP was beginning to suffer diminishing returns. Along with a medical setback, BWS joined with Lessmann and moved to upper New York State, where many other peers were now settled, and where he continued his single-image work. “I stopped publishing for a while,” BWS explained. “I moved up to Woodstock

Top: Random photograph of one of BWS’s studio work tables, which includes a veritable mountain of Monsters unfinished artwork, panel outtakes, and pages upon pages of story ultimately redrawn for the published version. Above: BWS rarely drew the man-monster character during his stints at Marvel Comics, but there was the memorable occasion of The Avengers #100, when the artist, for good or ill, included every single team member assembled from the previous nine years.

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Above: BWS’s surprise return to Marvel was as inker over Herb Trimpe’s pencils in the Machine Man mini-series, at least the first three issues. BWS provided the sequential covers and did all art chores on the final ish.

Opposite page: For a short period in the late 1990s, BWS was referring to his graphic novel as Project Prometheus, though by the turn of the decade it was renamed The Monster (and ultimately modified to Monsters soon enough). Opposite and below are unused pages that clearly show the original premise of Monsters as a Hulk story.

When BWS left the company eight years or so beforehand, he was among the first in what soon became an exodus of young, talented comic book artists fed up with the mainstream industry and to perceive opportunity in the burgeoning direct market of the day. In an effort to tempt the expatriates to consider again working for Marvel, the imprint contemplated royalty deals and started venturing into creator-owned territory. Epic Illustrated was a showcase for these new policies and the emergence of the “Marvel Magazine of Adult Fantasy” was timely for BWS, who told Goodwin he was in a transitional period when the editor, during his visit, conducted an interview that would be printed in Epic #7 [Aug. ’81].

“I’m considering returning to storytelling for a period,” BWS announced to Goodwin. “Comics, but not the 50-centers. Perhaps Epic. Out of a necessary need to tell a story.”33 Besides a handful of Conan-like comic strips produced for film director Oliver Stone’s production of The Hand (released in April, ’81, just two months after Goodwin’s visit) and his abandoned work on The Real Robin Hood, which the creator had hoped back in the mid-’70s would be the first of a line of GbP comic books (but has remained unfinished ever since), BWS hadn’t tried his hand at sequential storytelling since his days on Conan the Barbarian. Plus house funds were running low.

“I did a lot of writing,” BWS said of the early Woodstock years. “I was basically living off money I already had. I didn’t feel the need to keep the bank balance fat and, in fact, there were times when we got down to a few dollars. When I did The Hand, I made quite a bit of money in comparison to farty little things like comic books. So we kept going for awhile and then I started to get back into comics again. I did ‘The Beguiling.’”34 The publishing of that story in Epic #16 [Feb. 1983] was the result of Goodwin’s trip, just part of a sumptuous bounty of BWS excellence that appeared on that issue’s cover and within its pages.

“The Beguiling,” that issue’s showcase story, matches the promise of the magazine’s title in being an epic masterpiece of eight pages, a tale that today stands as among BWS’s finest work. Gorgeously rendered and exquisitely colored—with evocative lettering by Lessmann—the haunting story is of a medieval knight (who has a striking resemblance to Prince Valiant, if only for his hair style) encountering an angel-like apparition whose tender kiss turns the poor chump into stone. However brief, it stands as a bravura return to the comics medium for BWS and, doubtless, the writing credit must have been a particular #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Machine Man, The Incredible Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Monsters © Barry Windsor-Smith.

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with Linda Lessmann and I did a lot of outrageous stuff that I never published. I started working life-size, for a start, which made it very difficult to do reproductions.” He added, “None of the stuff over that 18 months has ever been published and some of it will forever remain unpublished.”32 (Among those items was The Journals of Aran, a storyline that would eventually meld, some 16 years later, into the “Freebooters” serial in Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller.)

Envying the success of Heavy Metal, Marvel had launched Epic Illustrated, a magazine printed on slick paper, a format that offered BWS and artists like him production values that could properly reproduce brilliant color comics work. Importantly, the quarterly also boasted a sympathetic and intelligent editor, Archie Goodwin, who was widely considered throughout the field to be the best in the business.

In February 1981, Goodwin trekked up to Woodstock to offer the artist something more than a standard work-for-hire deal, unveiling a new policy that just might bestow enough dignity to entice the artist back into the Marvel fold.

Monsters © Barry Windsor-Smith. The Incredible Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

source of pride for the creator, whose dialogue notations and plotting on previous Marvel work were rarely—if ever—acknowledged in the credits.

Marvel’s door was opening incrementally for BWS as he began selectively taking on assignments here and there, at first ever-so slowly and, even at that pace, not without hiccups. Before “The Beguiling” saw print, Marvel had been preparing a one-shot reprinting of the entire “Red Nails” Conan saga by BWS and writer Roy Thomas, originally from Savage Tales #2–3 [Oct. ’73–Feb. ’74]. The artist was enlisted to produce a cover and the resulting piece was spectacular, but alas, contractual kinks hadn’t all been sorted out by the time cover art was ready to ship. As BWS described, “This was intended as a wraparound cover, double-cover… [but] I think that Marvel Comics expected to get the copyright to the picture for free. They’d pay me for drawing the cover, but they weren’t prepared to pay me for the copyright. What sharks, They have no morals whatsoever. So, anyway, I told them to stuff it.”35 The piece, cheekily titled “Purple Nails,” appeared as a black-&-white inked illustration in the same issue of Epic featuring “The Beguiling,” along with a prose short story Goodwin wrote specifically to accompany the artwork. All behind a cover sporting BWS’s stunning “Icarus” painting, Epic #16 also featured a two-pager started in 1971, “A Path of Stars,” a fantasy vignette (which, amusingly, includes a glimpse of The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics 2 book [BPC Publishing, ’71], for which Smith submitted a full-page, color, dream-like drawing of Lennon playing a flute to illustrate lyrics of the 1969 Lennon/McCartney song, “Come Together”).

BACK TO FORM In 1968, when he made that impulsive first visit to the United States with best mate Steve Parkhouse, Smith was determined to take up Stan Lee assistant Linda Fite on her perfunctory transatlantic invite to come up to the comic company’s offices if, perchance, the Cockney teen was ever in the area. No doubt to her shock—the offer was just good manners, after all!—and, to the surprise of the entire Bullpen, “My pal and me were on Marvel’s doorstep in the blink of an eye,” BWS said.36 While both were given assignments during their five-month (over)stay in America, Parkhouse worked as a helper in the office and Smith was a frequent visitor. During one summer afternoon at the 625 Madison Avenue bullpen, BWS recalled a warm, communal moment with the Marvel gang. “[T]he radio was playing The Beatles’ latest song and as it came into the long, chanting coda one by one each person began singing along—Herb, John Romita, Morrie Kuromoto,Tony Mortarello, Marie, and a few others—all singing at the top of their lungs, ‘Naaa— NaNa, NaNaNaNaaa—Hey Ju-u-ude…’ It was wonderful; gave me chills of pleasure.”37 Ever since that time, when she looked out for his and Parkhouse’s welfare during the lads’ joint Manhattan stay, Fite was thereafter BWS’s lifelong friend and, later living in nearby Kerkonkson, amidst the wilds of New York’s Hudson River Valley, she’s never been more than a 45-minute car ride from BWS after he moved about Ulster County. Married to artist Herb Trimpe from 1972 to 2005, it was natural for Fite’s husband to get to know BWS, and eventually the two chums became thick as thieves, with BWS even being chosen as godfather of one of Fite and Trimpe’s kids.

While maybe not as radically different as night and day, few would have suspected that Trimpe and BWS were to become best friends, but for a long stretch, they were. “It’s funny about that, isn’t it?” Fite said about the two in 2002, when they were still tight. “How you can just click with someone and it doesn’t matter what they are or what they become. Herb and Barry are born ten years and one day apart. Barry’s birthday is May 25, and Herb’s is May 26… In many ways, they’re very, very similar.”38 She continued, “They both have this type of nobility, believe it or not. There’s almost a chivalrous element to it.

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They just have an almost sibling relationship. They care about each other, but that’s like siblings, too. They just get along, and I just love Barry. That’s all there is to it!”

Still, if one wasn’t in the know, the notion of the two working together—Trimpe, a work-a-day regular Joe who gets the job done with no fuss, and Windsor-Smith, a meticulous, demanding, and sometimes brooding artist who often faces deadline angst and is nothing but fussy—seems counter-intuitive. And yet, at Trimpe’s suggestion, the pals teamed for a mini-series that resulted in an outstanding production, a true bright spot in Marvel’s 1984 line-up.

It was also a lucky break for BWS, who was having a rough go of it getting back into the comic book storytelling groove. “When I decided to get back into this rotten-horrible medium,” he said in 1987, “I realized that I’d turned my psyche off to this thing to such an extent that I just didn’t know how to start drawing a comic book again. I forgot what the mental process was, because there’s a specific state of mind you have to be in to do that kind of stuff. I was with Herb one night and he was

Below: Fantastic Four #26 panel and BWS’s art school remake.

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WARM-UP BWS’s life had been fundamentally altered by Jack Kirby’s Marvel comic books of the mid-1960s. Born in a working-class neighborhood of Forest Gate, in the dreary East End of London, Barry Smith was a natural-born talent who found solace in American comic books, first with the Julius Schwartz-edited DC Comics super-hero titles and later, in an epiphany, the Marvel Comics Group titles burst into his consciousness. These latter comics quickly became a singular obsession, specifically those stories produced by “the King.” Kirby’s dynamic figures, command of action, and expert storytelling bowled over the teen, just as the lad was attending a three-year art college, which proved another life-altering event for the young man. At East Ham Tech, Smith briefly put comics aside as he immersed himself into the formal art curriculum, which also profoundly affected his outlook and abilities.

In 1967, while still at East Ham, Smith worked on the side as a Kirby-esque pin-up artist for a British publisher then reprinting ’60s Marvel stories, and, for his senior art project, Smith produced a word-for-word, 60-(or so) page replica of Fantastic Four #25 and 26, Lee and Kirby’s epic battle between The Thing and The Hulk, though his art was inspired by Kirby rather than traced. (BWS later shared that his younger brother, Biff, had his own particular fondness for the big green man-monster, which would be one factor in BWS pursuing what ultimately became the subject of this #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Fantastic Four, The Thing, Marvel Fanfare TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Artwork © Barry Windsor-Smith.

talking about this Machine Man mini-series. He described it a hell of a lot better than it actually turned out to be. He said it was going to be like Blade Runner. So we made a deal that I would ink it, but because I’m a bit of a sh*t, I didn’t just ink it; I went in there with an eraser and redrew it all.

Herb penciled the first issue, which I inked and colored, but I took over after that. Herb was a little bit resentful, but he Above: Tim Truman’s original was great about it, really. It gave me a chance to get into art for First Comics’ Starslayer comics again. Herb was doing all the breakdowns, making the characters move in the and Grimjack T-shirt. The back panels, staging things. So of the apparel had the legend: This page: Pages and cover he gave me that shot in the “Cynosure: My Kind of Town.” from BWS’s unfinished Thing arm that made it easier for Margin notes reveal that “Cy- mini-series, planned as me to get into it. I wouldn’t nosure: Love It or Leave It” was follow-up to his Marvel be doing comics today if it considered. Inset right: Tim’s Fanfare #15 story. wasn’t for Herb helping me OGN, a SF tale of time-traveling into Machine Man, giving rodent saviors of reality. Below: me that push into the swimTime Beavers character by Tim. ming pool to see if I could still swim.”39 Trimpe recalled the collaboration as less than ideal. “I thought it would be fun. [My] pencils were full-size and tight. I think the only thing I didn’t spend a lot of time on was indicating the blacks. Otherwise, the drawings were very detailed… Not to cut the point too fine, it was not an enjoyable thing to work on.

Barry considers himself a great storyteller, and he is a very good one, but if you pointed out that my storytelling was something that matched his, you’d have a problem. So a marriage made in Heaven is not the way I would describe that

project, and neither would he—granted, for different reasons.”40 Actually, for BWS, it was a pleasant and successful experience. “I did enjoy it,” he said. “It was an important re-learning exercise for me. Herb was gracious to let me take it over the way I did. It was a necessary thing to do, though, to find my feet again.”41 Published over four issues—BWS produced the covers and all the art on the final one—the mini-series hit the stands between June and September, 1984, to the delighted surprise of Windsor-Smith fans who had been yearning for a decade for his return to comics. Upon a writer telling him that it was a very well-received endeavor, BWS was perplexed.

“Really? I’m certainly not questioning your taste or choice in the matter,” he said, “but this must mean that most of the other stuff from that period was pretty lowgrade. I don’t usually praise myself—quite the opposite, in fact—but I thought the last issue was really very good.”42 Fite expressed her own delight with the results. “That worked really well, didn’t it?” she enthused. “Yeah, they really worked well together. I think they should do it more often.”43 With his comic book mojo now back in prime working order and just as his Machine Man was among the new releases in the shops, BWS was finalizing a proposal for a one-shot Marvel comic book to offer to Jim Shooter because, now back in a comics frame of mind, the storyteller had a hankering to tell a story.

The X-Men, Wolverine TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Artwork © Barry Windsor-Smith. Proposal © BWS.

article.) As mentioned, with best mate Steve Parkhouse, Smith was determined to work at Marvel Comics—to create stories about resonate characters he felt were of prime importance—enough as to fly across the ocean and show up unannounced on the New York publisher’s threshold. The rest, as they say, is history, and, all the while and up to this very day, he never shed admiration for Kirby and retained a preference for the 1960s’ renditions of Marvel characters.

In 1984, while working on Machine Man, BWS was giving those Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creations renewed consideration and, starting to pay increased attention to contemporary Marvel comics, he became increasingly disturbed by what he was looking at. “In the mid-’80s, a new crop of Marvel pencilers turned the pleasant simplicity of Lee and Kirby’s heroic action principle into an ugly violence principle,” he shared in 2003. “I wrote an extremely lengthy—unfinished to this date—thesis about American super-hero comics’ descent into vulgarism due to the new pencilers seemingly complete lack of perspective and/or historical knowledge of the American super-hero comic book.”44 He continued, “This may sound tedious, trite, and decidedly old news, but, in 1984, I felt like I was the only observer half-awake enough to see what was happening.” So the creator fostered a “desire to bring a hitherto unconsidered significance to Lee and Kirby’s characters. That, in itself, was prompted by the graceless interpretations of those characters at the hands of the newer artists and writers—probably editors, too.”

Affirming perhaps what made the source material so great to begin with, Marvel Fanfare #15 [July 1974] contained BWS’s delightful throwback look at the classic feud between The Thing and Human Torch of the Fantastic Four. That rivalry was a fundamental component of the group dynamics as set up back in the 1960s by Lee and Kirby and BWS was out to prove it still had vitality and story potential. Titled “That Night…,” the 19-page tale centered on April Fool’s Day pranks between Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm, and it was an enchanting, loving, and spot-on homage to Kirby’s giant

Proposal by BWS to Marvel

THE HULK: A VERY SPECIAL STORY Barry Windsor-Smith July 4, 1984

BASIC CONTENT OF STORY: Plot centers around Bruce Banner’s childhood. The Hulk relives a particularly harrowing day in his past.

This is the story of Banner’s working-class, middle American childhood. In a mannered fantasy—Twilight Zone—tradition, The Hulk, when entering an abandoned house in refuge from a pressing military attack, relives the last days in his childhood home.

Thanksgiving Day 1950 was the day when his father, Tom Banner, a recent and embittered W.W. II veteran, turned on his family for the final irrevocable time.

Employing a battered and disconsolate childhood as the springboard for the modernday Bruce Banner’s anti-social and violent attitudes, the story explores the damage caused by mis-matched parenthood and effects of the Second World War on the heart and mind of the veteran Tom Banner.

Bruce Banner, an 11-year-old in 1950, is represented as the full grown, seven foot Hulk throughout this fantasy. The story is called Thanksgiving and details the tensions the Banner household suffers when it becomes apparent that the family dinner, planned with eight relatives in mind, falls apart as one by one, brothers, sisters and in-laws cancel the visit with feeble excuses.

The truth is that Tom Banner has alienated his family with his explosive, argumentative temper.

During the solemn dinner with only Tom, wife Janet and son Bobby (Bruce) present at the lavish setting, Tom gets inebriated. Janet’s brother, Phil, and his French wife, Nicolette, turn up suddenly (they never cancelled; Tom forgot about them although Janet didn’t) and they, unfortunately, become the targets for Tom’s drunken, paranoid hostility.

Phil was a correspondent in the war: Did no fighting; Tom hates him for that (and also hates him simply because he’s Janet’s brother) and Nicolette is French (Phil married her in France and brought her back to the U.S.) and that’s all she has to be, for in the eyes of Tom Banner, she’s a slut who must have fraternized with the Germans.

The domestic madness reaches an awful climax when Tom goes for his service revolver. Shots are fired and the police come.

The final argument and shooting take place off-camera as we are watching The Hulk, confined to his room (as was the child he is representing) wailing in agony of the lived and relived experience now as the past dissolves into the present and the sound of gunfire becomes real and the army close in on the abandoned house The Hulk is occupying.

Throughout the entire story, The Hulk is a meek background figure (despite his seven-foot green bulk) who cowers in corners and sits, pathetic and awkward, at the dinner table. He is a mark for both parents and, as tensions mount, he is either glowered at, railed at, and in several instances, struck by his aggravated parents.

It is of considerable importance to point out that this somewhat extraordinary story requires the use of what the comic book publishing world might consider profanity.

The terms I need to use in the script (all spouting from the paranoiac and drunken Tom Banner) are actually mild when paralleled to other—perhaps more sophisticated—media such as film, print and (at this date) television.

To cut to the quick: I need to employ the following terms: Damn, Goddam, Bitch, Hell (as in “Like Hell you will”), Slut These are comparatively mild terms, in my opinion. I’ve edited it down from stronger, more believable coinage.

The upshot is that for this story to have IMPACT, it must be published in the standard format (The Incredible Hulk) and without any special fanfare (I brought what could have been a 30-odd page story down to 22 for this very reason). Approval—within Marvel and to the satisfaction of the Comics Code Authority—is paramount and I’m prepared to offer any raison d’etre if it isn’t apparent.

This story is about parent abuse and childhood trauma, which is an important issue. I believe that by sliding the topic into a regular comic book involving an established Marvel Comics character, a greater, more significant understanding of the idea can be achieved. This as opposed to (I feel inclined to suggest) the Spider-Man/Drugs issues of a decade ago that, due to their pre-publicity and etc., were ultimately regarded as hype for a medium that needed attention and was asking for recognition as a relevant form of art.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

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orange-hued rock-man. Oh, and it was also very funny. “I wrote, penciled, inked, and colored it,” BWS said in 1987.

“Everyone loved it. People phoned me telling me it’s the funniest thing they’ve read in ages. And nobody thought I had a sense of humor before I

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did that. They thought I was a very serious artist.”45 In a desire to comprehensively examine Kirby’s seminal character, The Thing (often viewed as a comic-book manifestation of the creator himself), BWS then began to expand on his Marvel Fanfare approach and set about producing a Ben Grimm limited series. “I say The Thing mini-series is funny, but it’s about Ben having a breakdown,” the artist explained. “That doesn’t sound very funny, does it?… I look at the character and ask why is he like that? He was a guy who was ‘cosmic-rayed’—all the Marvel characters were ‘rayed’ at one time or another—and turned into a lumpy orange monster. He has a sense of humor, but is desperately upset about his life and situation. Which he should be.

He’s got a life of adventure with his pals, the Fantastic Four, to compensate for his depression.”46 The series has Ben alone for a long weekend in the Baxter building as his fellow group members are away and the tone and setting might well take place in 1969 with its topical approach—as it includes even an appearance by Tonight talk show host Johnny Carson—and the whole ambiance of the charming story replicates Lee and Kirby’s trademarked lighthearted treatment of the character in his most humorous moments. Each issue, BWS explained, begins with Grimm waking up from a nightmare, trying to grapple with his depression.

Then BWS shared more details. “Ben doesn’t realize he’s having this breakdown and,” he said, “to alleviate the seriousness of this, he gets involved in all sorts of silly trouble. He’s being followed by Lockjaw, the dog from the Inhumans and he’s investigating these strange sounds coming from within the Baxter Building. There is humor but it’s inter-weaved with this unfortunate situation that Ben

The thing about the Hulk is that he’s big and he’s green and he goes around smashing things. Why is he so pissed off all the time? Was it the gamma rays? No, the reason is because it’s a bloody comic book and Jack Kirby likes to draw people smashing things, which sells.

I don’t want to look at it that way and I wanted to find out why he has such an unfortunate disposition.

So I came up with a story about Bruce Banner being a battered child in a semi-broken home. The father is an alcoholic, the mother was trying to keep the peace, and the little boy was caught in-between, being hit by his dad.

Not beaten, but smacks on the head and that sort of thing.

And from this idea came the story called ‘Thanksgiving.’

It’s a strange book, but it’ll probably sell because it’s the Hulk. It’s a tricky story.

It all takes place in two rooms, except the introduction, It’s just like a stage play, which is the way I planned it. It was semi-inspired by Harold Pinter and a few other people, like Alan Sillitoe. I really like Pinter’s plays, The Homecoming and The Birthday Party, for instance.51

THANKSGIVING BWS wrote up his self-described “special story” proposal, warning that his comic-book “play” was controversial. “I offered the written proposal to Jim Shooter only,” he said. “[And] as I had done before and since (with ‘Weapon X’ and ‘Lifedeath 3’… coming to mind as examples), I brought penciled pages from the story along with the proposal.

(I’ve never submitted a story/plot/concept without pages of continuity, script, etc., to back it up.)”52 Shooter recalled, “Barry came to me with a completely-penciled and written graphic novel. It was the about the development of the ‘mighty, raging fury’ inside Bruce Banner, who, he revealed, was the product of an abusive home. I looked it over. I thought it was brilliant, one of the best comics stories I’d ever seen. I offered Barry a contract and an advance. He turned me down—temporarily. He pro#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Storm, The X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Adastra in Africa TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith. Artwork © BWS.

Previous page: BWS redrew and fiddled with this “reconsideration” of his cover art for The X-Men #212. This page: BWS had initially intended for his X-Men Lifedeath 3 episode to be published as a graphic novel, but editorial perception at Marvel that BWS’s story somehow glorified suicide, resulted in the writer/artist yanking it from Marvel and repurposing the entire story as one starring Adastra, his spirited Young Gods character.

Adastra in Africa was published in 1999 by Fantagraphics. Note the differences between the splash pages above.

is losing control of himself.”47 (Sadly, to this day, while this writer was privileged to read all existing pages, the mini-series remains unfinished, though many of the story’s pages are available for viewing on BWS’s Facebook page.)

(Another planned mini-series never seeing the light of day was a four-issue Storm/Forge storyline scripted by Claremont and drawn by BWS, which was cancelled when discussions between writer and artist proved fruitless.)48 Then BWS chose to sharpen his analytical focus on another Lee/Kirby creation, Ben Grimm’s adversary in young student Smith’s art college final project back in 1967, the Incredible Hulk. “Not to say that Kirby’s Hulk had depth beyond a metaphor or two,” he explained, “but whatever weight it did have was being utterly lost to the portrayal of excessive violence for its own sake—which is no sake whatsoever, in my opinion. So, I went beyond Hulk’s pseudo-science Lee/Kirby origin. It’s one thing to say that he gets big when aroused, if you get my drift, but why the rage? That’s what I wanted to address. It was a direct result of his physical abuse during childhood; that and the murder of his mother at the hands of his father.”49 “The theory behind it,” BWS said in 1987, “is something I’ve thought about a thousand times. You get stupid characters like the Black Canary and I wonder why the hell she does what she does, It’s a bit like what Alan Moore has done with the Watchmen, where he’s justified on a fairly realistic level why people dress up in silly-looking costumes. I’ve been thinking about that for years. I can accept Captain America because he was made into a super-soldier and they gave him a glitzy costume to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy. I can accept Batman because he’s a nutcase. I can accept Superman because he’s an alien and the justification for the ‘S’ [chest emblem], and so on. But these other guys, I really can’t understand.”50 Smith continued:

Wolverine, Weapon X TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Conan TM & © Conan Properties International. Artwork © BWS.

posed to finish the thing—then, if I would agree to publish it as created, no alterations whatsoever, he would sign a contract and take the money. I was willing to agree to that in writing on the spot, but he said, no, when it’s finished.

Okay. Fine by me. I already knew, from what he’d shown me, that there’d be no problem.”53 BWS’s proposal insisted it was vitally important that “Thanksgiving” be presented within an issue of the Incredible Hulk regular series. “The upshot is that for this story to have impact,” he wrote, “it must be published in the standard format… and without any special fanfare (I brought what could have been a 30-odd page story down to 22 for this very reason).”54 But, as will be discussed, the project did expand over time into a graphic novel-length project, thus Shooter might be forgiven for misremembering that one aspect.

As expected, the penciled pages BWS submitted alongside his written pitch were extraordinary, replete with a magnificent two-page opening spread that had the monolithic beast lumbering through a small town, past a quaint picket fence, onto the porch, and into the foyer of the Banner family’s typical American home, circa 1950, adorned with a dedication made out to Lee and Kirby. Shooter said, “Barry showed the work around a bit to people in the office.

I guess he allowed Al Milgrom or someone to make photocopies of it. Ask Al.”55 Indeed, Allen Milgrom, one-time Hulk editor, was asked, and his initial response was, “No recollection of [“Thanksgiving”] whatsoever. I don’t ever recall seeing Barry draw the Hulk except in that issue or two of The Avengers he did back in the day.”56 Then, upon being emailed a Shooter quote—“I was later given to understand that Al kept the [“Thanksgiving”] copies in the Hulk drawer of his flat file”—Milgrom retorted, “I respectfully disagree with Jim about having any such pages in my flat file. I think I would have been aware of it. I had a bunch of [Frank] Miller’s Elektra graphic novel [pages] and whole issues of The Prisoner [respectively] by both Kirby and Gil Kane… but BWS—nope.”57 Carl Potts, the follow-up Incredible Hulk editor, remembered little about the “Hulk situation,” but gave a general description of the flat files in the editor’s office. “Al was editing freelance at the time and used the flat files in my office to store the original art for Marvel Fanfare and other projects he was editing.” He added, “If the art for Smith’s Hulk project was there, it is possible that any freelancer or staffer who was visiting could have checked out what was in the flat files. During that era, staff and freelance visitors were common in all of Marvel’s editorial offices.”58 “Sometime after I’d presented my ‘Hulk-as-a-battered- child’ concept to Shooter and before my refusal to concede,” BWS said in 2003, “several professionals around the Marvel offices remarked upon the originality of the idea. I forget who, but I recall being stopped in a hallway by somebody who said ‘Why didn’t anybody think of that before?’”59 Marvel editorial staffer Tom DeFalco, who had scripted the Machine Man mini-series and was a friend of the artist, said, “In those days, groups of creators often sat around and had idle discussions about this or that. Linking the Hulk’s rage to earlier child abuse was often brought up because it was a very natural idea. However, while assorted creators often discussed the idea, this was idle chit-chat and I don’t think any of those creators actually planned to do a story about it. Those aren’t the kinds of stories we wrote in those days.”60 DeFalco added, “[Barry] often stopped in to visit me… but he never gave me a copy of his Hulk proposal. Why would he? While I was Shooter’s secCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

ond-in-command at that time, I was mainly concentrating on Star Comics and our licensed properties.” He continued, “I don’t know if Mantlo received a copy. “I also don’t know why anyone would give him a copy… or who would give him a copy. I worked with Bill when I was editing the Spider-Man titles—long before I ever met BWS—and I can tell you that the guy was an idea factory. Bill would come up with springboard after springboard… and never seemed to be at a loss for ideas.”

In his proposal, BWS also asserted certain words must be included in the story. “It is of considerable importance,” he wrote, “to point out that this somewhat extraordinary story requires the use of what the comic book publishing world might consider profanity.” The words he insisted on using were: damn, goddamn, bitch, hell, and slut. He added, “These are comparatively mild terms, in my opinion. I’ve edited it down from stronger, more believable coinage.”61 This condition proved to be a sticking point for “Thanksgiving,” BWS explained

This page: BWS’s Marvel Comics Presents #81 splash page was adapted for the collection’s cover. Inset left is a detail from BWS’s Conan Saga #7 cover.

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Above: One of BWS’s ultimate goals has been to see produced a companion volume to Monsters that includes a making-of commentary and the immense amount of outtakes and pages before being revised, including this panel which was redrawn to view from another angle.

Below: Buddy Scalera, former writer for Wizard and Comics Buyer’s Guide (who currently is “headmaster” of comicbookschool.com), shared this photo of BWS at work in his studio, taken sometime around 1993.

Spider-Man #96 [May ’71], which calculatingly defied the Comics Code Authority by including scenes of drug use, which led to a liberalization of CCA regulations, BWS said, “I wanted this story to be published as a fill-in during the run of The Incredible Hulk 65¢ comic. I felt that such a venue would give the story its maximum impact; a theme and a story that nobody whatsoever could have expected.

Once the editors started getting fiddly with me, I figured they wanted to turn the piece into some inane sh*t like that Spider-Man drug story where Gil Kane drew some kid walking a building ledge with psycho-bubbles floating about his head, going ‘Oooh, th’ colors, man,’ or whatever the hell it was. (I’m not an abused child myself, but I did have specifically personal reasons for wanting to attach this syndrome to Jack Kirby’s Hulk.)”64 With perhaps naive confidence that his as-yet unfinished Thing and Hulk projects would someday see print under the Marvel imprint, BWS worked on his own projects as well as teamed with writer Chris Claremont for three (roughly) annual X-Men fill-in issues, the first pair devoted to Storm, as well as, now and again, drawing a spate of covers for Marvel. He shared about working on a top-selling Marvel title: “[I] t was purely circumstance that I happened to start doing The X-Men. I’m glad of it; the royalties are fantastic, but I work like mad on those things. I don’t just turn them out. I drew and redrew ‘Lifedeath.’”65 As the decade wore on, BWS produced art for one issue each of Fantastic Four and Daredevil, two issues of Iron Man, and nine spectacular color covers for Conan Saga, a black-&-white magazine reprinting his entire ’70s run of the barbarian character. With The X-Men #205 [May 1986], BWS began flexing his muscles, #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Monster TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith. BWS photo © Buddy Scalera. Used with permission.

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in 2003: “I also warned Marvel that certain adult language had to be used, though mild by today’s standards. But that was the problem. Although I was allowed to employ ‘god’ and ‘damn,’ Shooter would not accept the use of the term ‘god-damn,’ but there was no way I was going to write ‘gosh darn!’ for a drunken psychopath about to murder his wife.”62 BWS stood firm. “I wouldn’t concede to Marvel’s outdated policies,” he said. “They wouldn’t rise to the occasion by accepting the necessities of natural dialogue in and on such important issues as spousal abuse, child abuse, and the U.S. military’s indifference to the mental and emotional health of their veterans of foreign wars. Since 1984, these issues have come to blinding light, of course.”63 Still, while both sides stood their ground on the language issue, negotiations appeared to still be in flux and, as is his wont on the projects he writes, BWS went back to his Woodstock studio and began expanding on his innovative story, firmly convinced the child-abuse aspect made for a potentially groundbreaking tale. Referring to Amazing

All characters, Barry-Windsor-Smith: Storyteller TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith. Comics Buyer’s Guide TM & © F+W Publications, Inc.

so to speak, when he—to the writer’s dismay—discarded much of Claremont’s script to produce his rendition of the group’s most savage teammate. The remarkable “Wounded Wolf,” a prelude to his next great—and final—Marvel triumph, featured a nearly naked Wolverine in a ferocious, blood-specked fight with cyborg villain Lady Deathstrike during a New York City snowstorm. Presciently, the cover is adorned with a strikingly similar motif that will become a major visual aspect of the next project the artist tackles starring a certain mutant with retractable adamantium claws.

All the while, BWS continued to noodle with “Thanksgiving,” as it expanded to include various subplots and growing cast of characters. At some point, it morphed into a graphic novel format due to an increasing page count.

MANTLO In Jim Shooter’s telling, “Bill Mantlo, looking through the drawer to see what current Hulk artwork had come in, saw the [‘Thanksgiving’] copies. He then blatantly ripped the story off for a regular issue of The Hulk.” Though, after Mantlo’s story was printed and Shooter read Incredible Hulk #312, why he didn’t recognize the blatant rip-off of BWS’s story proposal immediately is a puzzle. After all, only a few months before, he had called “Thanksgiving,” “brilliant, one of the best comics stories I’d ever seen.” Just as mystifying is Shooter’s negligence of his editor-in-chief duties in not being attentive to a top creator, one of Marvel’s most renowned—and, to be frank, mercurial—talents.

As an excuse, Shooter said, “In those days, I was on the road a lot, spending time in Europe with the licensees, at our London office, in L.A., or on licensing trips elsewhere. The book went to press without my seeing it.

How [editor] Al [Milgrom] didn’t notice or someone else didn’t notice, I don’t know.”66 But Shooter had obvious forgotten that “brilliant” and “best” BWS story by the time Hulk #312 was printed, which he said he praised upon reading, so even if he been there to see it coming hot off the press, that wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Shooter, who was fired from Marvel in 1987, obviously maintained a cordial relationship with BWS at least into the early ’90s as, after co-founding Valiant Comics, he hired BWS as freelancer.

Regarding Mantlo’s infraction, Shooter said, “Barry was furious. I don’t blame him. He, however, blames me, as of the last time I heard. Okay, the buck stops here, I suppose.”67 Evidence suggests that BWS found out about Mantlo’s plagiarism in 1991 at the earliest or as late as 1994; BWS worked at Valiant between 1991–93; Shooter worked at Valiant until mid-’92. When that fury and blame was dispensed by BWS in Shooter’s direction is not known.

Given his volatile nature, it’s difficult to fathom that BWS had been made aware of Mantlo’s indiscretion in the ’80s, considering the artist was still speaking to the fan press about his “Thanksgiving” project, still envisioned as a Hulk story by 1991, but some in the bullpen had believed that he did know about Incredible Hulk #312 around the time of its printing. Carl Potts said, “When Smith saw Mantlo’s issue, I heard that he was upset and went to Jim Shooter to complain. After that, I’m not sure what happened… It is too bad that Mantlo is not here to have his say in the matter.”68 Potts is referring to the horrific fate of Bill Mantlo, who, while still alive today, is in very poor health. In the summer of 1992, Mantlo, by then finished with his comics career COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

and working as a public defender, was struck by a car while roller-blading in Brooklyn. “The accident jostled Bill’s head so violently that his brain squashed against the inside of his skull, and his brain stem severed,” related an article on Mantlo’s subsequent decades-long medical woes. “This did not paralyze him, but it would make it very difficult for Bill’s body—particularly his extremities—to accurately receive and process electrical messages from his brain.”69 Mantlo, who is remembered best by readers as co-creator of Rocket Raccoon and The Micronauts, as well as longtime scripter of ’80s Marvel comics Transformers and ROM, remains to this day in institutionalized care with diminished cognitive abilities, as well as suffering other ailments.

That same article covered much of Mantlo’s career and made mention of the “Thanksgiving” plagiarism. “Mantlo, while visiting the Marvel office, found Windsor-Smith’s work, figured it was open for use, and wrote a story off of it,” the piece read. “The Incredible Hulk itself was between editors, and the story’s lineage was not noticed until the issue was in print. The story remains one of Mantlo’s most popular, and it was developed as a core element of the script for the 2003 film adaptation of the Hulk. Windsor-

This page: Bruce Costa’s article describing his 1996 visit to the Windsor-Smith Studio is featured in CBG #1280, with a cover featuring Axus the Great. Inset left is Adastra from the Young Gods and Friends collection [2004] and below is Tristan Caine, a.k.a. Paradoxman, in a BWS: Storyteller #2 cover detail.

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for a last chance to let them publish the story intact the way it should be.”73 He continued: Over 10 years had gone by since Jim Shooter first nixed it and the pages were dusty and a bit yellowed. A couple of new-kid editors went through it and oohed and aahed a bit, but the bottom line was still that the drunken father, Tom Banner in my original, who is a homicidal, paranoid son of a bitch is not allowed to say, “Goddamnit!” […]

And the final word from Marvel, as I was withdrawing my offer once again was, “Anyway, we already have an established history that Bruce was an abused child.”

The editor was naively referring to Mantlo’s rip-off, of course.

Lovely world, comics, isn’t it.74

Soon thereafter, BWS must have been clued into the fact his Hulk concept had been appropriated years before, as the creator ceases all work with Marvel. Though it was planned for release sometime in 1991, he abruptly pulled “Lifedeath 3” from the company, which was being reformatted as a graphic novel, and his ever-growing Hulk graphic novel, Thanksgiving, would never again be theirs to consider. Besides a handful of covers and a five-page “Weapon X” story done for the company in 2000–01, BWS never again produced material for the House of Ideas, and the two graphic novels that were intended to be Marvel publications, were, once characters were altered, stripped of any possible trademark infringement, now completely his own intellectual property and available to other publishers.* Before his final Marvel exit, BWS summed up his early stint at the company. “I was 18 when I started and 23 or 24 when I quit, with ‘Red Nails,’” he said. “To use one of Stan’ Lee’s terms from that period, I was really bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I was young. I was a kid, a damned teenager, in a strange land, too, this Cockney kid from London, mixing it up with the likes of Stan Lee and rubbing shoulders with Jack Kirby, y’know? I was pretty starry-eyed.

I changed a lot.”76 VALIANT EFFORTS During his interviews promoting “Weapon X” (when he promised the collected edition would include 30–40 pages of unused material expanding on the story, a bonanza yet to be published), BWS would freely discuss his Hulk project.

He told Amazing Heroes, “It’s a bloody long story and it’s typical of my stuff. It’s all character stuff.” After talk about how “Weapon X” delves into Wolverine’s origin, BWS was asked by interviewer Thomas Harrington to describe the graphic novel. The creator replied, “Well, basically it’s about child abuse, I guess. Oh, I didn’t see the coincidence in that.

I guess this is kind of like the origin of the Hulk…”77 Soon thereafter in the interview: Windsor Smith: Yeah. It’s a little like this “Weapon X” deal. I didn’t look at what the other creators were doing.

I just took it from what I knew about the character and tried to develop from that. It’s much the same as anything else we’ve talked about. Like the “Weapon X” story and “Lifedeath 3,” the Hulk story is out of continuity. So the Hulk we’re talking about here is the Lee-Kirby character.

And all I can remember from the Lee-Kirby character is that he went around punching things. He would hit his fellow man or he would hit a building. I just asked the question, “Why is he so pissed off all the time?” I tried to give him a reason for being pissed off and this story Granted that, technically, Conan Vs. Rune is a Marvel Comics publication, though Rune was a Malibu property before the company was acquired by Marvel. And, sharpening to an even finer point, BWS did state in 1997, “I tried to resell [the Hulk graphic novel] in a last-ditch effort, but obviously Marvel had no idea of its value, so I said, ‘Well, screw you again, 15 years later.’”75

*

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Rune TM & © Malibu Comics Entertainment, Inc. Solar, Man of the Atom TM & © Western Publishing, Inc. Archer and Armstrong TM & © Valiant Entertainment, LLC.

Smith never stopped holding a grudge over it.”70 But how does all of BWS’s so-called fury, being upset, blame-slinging, and perpetual grudge-nurturing square with his not having been made aware of the existence of Incredible Hulk #312, published in 1985, only finding out six years later at the very least, when a journalist alluded to its impact on renditions of Marvel’s raging man-monster thereafter?

There is speculation that Mantlo believed that BWS’s child-abuse angle of the Hulk’s origin would have already been established canon by the time his “Monster” saw print. One reporter writes, “Some state that Mantlo simply stole the idea and that seems to have been Windsor-Smith’s interpretation. But talking to industry figures, the consensus seems to be that Mantlo didn’t steal it, but was referring to it. Knowing the story existed, presuming it would be published by the time his issue was out, and referring to it when writing his own.”71 Some even wonder if Mantlo had conceived of the notion independently of BWS’s tale, though the stories’ stark similarities— holiday settings, murdered wives, etc.—certainly stretch credulity on that theory.

Apparently oblivious at being robbed of his Hulk concept, BWS continued to work for Marvel into the ’90s, turning his “Lifedeath 3” story originally intended as a 22-page story in The X-Men title into a graphic novel twice the original page-length. And, in mid-1989, while drawing “Lifedeath 3,” he suffered injuries in a car accident that sidelined the creator for six months. A convalescing BWS, then turned 40, soon started work on a 13-part serial that would appear as eight-page increments in the pages of Marvel Comics Presents, a saga starring Wolverine, one of Marvel’s most successful properties. The astounding storyline that delved into the hero’s origin would profoundly impact the character’s future storylines.

“It came about in the oddest way,” the writer-artist said. “Wolverine, or the character Logan, has more interest for me than Captain America or something like that. I can equate with that character better than some of the other characters in the Marvel universe. He has these stupid spikes sticking out of his hands, but he doesn’t fly. And he has a bit more character than the regular super-hero type.”72 Not unlike his ruminations on The Hulk, BWS’s “Weapon X” delved into the origin and core essence of the character, diving deep and hopefully reveal some deeper meaning worthy of a storyteller of his caliber.

The resulting 116-page saga was a resounding achievement for BWS and a smashing success, both commercially and critically. The seminal accomplishment reverberated throughout the comics world, raising his marquee value just as the “artist-as-star” culture—ultimately epitomized by the celebrity status of the Image Comics founders—was becoming a commodity in the comic book zeitgeist.

In this general timeframe, BWS had expanded on Thanksgiving and, he revealed, “I took the 60 or so pages down to Marvel

Wildstorm Rising TM & © Wildstorm Productions. Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller, Axus the Great TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith. Fate Sowing the Stars © BWS.

is about his childhood and how he was mistreated.

Amazing Heroes: You said you hadn’t seen the coincidence in that.

Could you tell me what you meant by “coincidence”?

Windsor-Smith: It’s basically the origin of the character. I didn’t really think of that. The Lee-Kirby origin of the Hulk, obviously, has him zapped by gamma rays. It was one of those not-so-believable origins that we try to overlook because they’re not exactly scientifically sound, but we don’t care.

This is more like the origin of Bruce Banner/the Hulk’s psychological profile. Why he’s angry. Insofar as I was also doing this Logan thing, it’s his origin, too.

AH: Were you aware that Peter David has been covering much of the same subject in recent issues of The Hulk?

Windsor-Smith: No. AH: Actually, I don’t know if he was aware of your story, but in his story, there’s a green Hulk and a gray Hulk— Windsor-Smith: I’ve seen those drawings, yeah AH: —and the psychiatrist thinks that the green Hulk is tied to his childhood traumas and frustrations, and that the gray Hulk is tied to his later developments, which is why the gray Hulk is much nastier.

Windsor-Smith: It may clash with my story; it may not.

I don’t take a lot of notice…78

BWS later estimated it was actually three years after the Amazing Heroes interview when he learned of Mantlo’s transgression, though perhaps Harrington’s interjection planted a seed. In his memory, the writer-artist said, “In 1994, I think, I showed copies of the original ‘Thanksgiving’ pages to somebody visiting my studio. The guy said, ‘Oh, just like Bill Mantlo’s story, eh?’ I had no idea what he was talking about. But I found out. After getting a hold of a copy of The Incredible Hulk #312, I was astonished that writer Bill Mantlo had plagiarized my story. Sickened, too. He’d taken everything: The story, the characters, even the setting.

Although, because he was working from bad Xerox copies of copies, he’d either misinterpreted my Thanksgiving set—turkey on the table and everything—as a Christmas scenario, or perhaps he was just being ‘creative.’”79 The artist started his own investigation, as he shared in 2003, “From what I’ve been told, my pencils and script for the first half of the book that was Xeroxed many times COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

over and a set of these pages ended up in Mantlo’s possession. It was from these copies where he plagiarized my story.” He continued, “I think it’s beyond any reasonable doubt that Mantlo came up with this story independently, [unlike] as Tom [DeFalco] suggests. The graphic staging (by a young and inexperienced Mike Mignola) includes variations on my own artwork: The physical likeness between my Tom Banner and Mike’s drawings of the father; my specific use of a symbolic staircase was apparent in Mike’s drawings (although without any purpose or rationale); my Thanksgiving dinner tableau compared to Mantlo’s Christmas dinner tableau. Most of all, though, the pallid ghost image of the Hulk in green color-hold in Mantlo’s story is a poor relation to my concept of actually showing the monstrous Hulk sitting at the Thanksgiving table as he relived the events of 1950 when his father murdered his mother (and the child’s aunt and uncle, as it happens).”80 In his column, “But I Digress…,” for The Comic Buyer’s Guide, Peter David wrote in 1999 he was aware of the BWS/Mantlo controversy, “and [since] my inquiries into the matter with Marvel editorial months ago yielded nothing concrete, I can’t say for sure, although Windsor-Smith certainly makes a convincing case.”81 Despite the indignity of the pilfering and of not being informed by Marvel once aware it had occurred—or maybe because of—BWS was determined to continue with his Thanksgiving graphic novel. He renamed the graphic novel The Monster (not the first time he would change the title) and began altering the face of the protagonist from one that was formerly trademarked property of Marvel to an original— and quite grotesque—visage.

In due course, he would do the

This spread: BWS’s work in the 1990s include his cosmic vampire character, Rune, stints on the Valiant Comics version of Doctor Solar, and his great Valiant co-creation, Archer and Armstrong (seen here in an early concept drawing from late 1991/early ’92). The creator also co-wrote and illustrated Wildstorm Rising #1 for Image Comics, as well as illustrating all covers for the cross-over event.

In an oddity from 1993, Oxford University Press licensed his Fate Sowing the Stars print for a paperback book cover. And, of course, the greatest BWS work of the decade was his BWS: Storyteller series.

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This spread: BWS was constantly revising his Monsters pages throughout his years working on the epic. Here are two versions of the same page.

Above is an earlier rendition and opposite is the final. Below: Jack Kirby gets name-dropped in a panel from Monsters.

Rune is a vampire from outer space who’s been trapped on Earth for ten thousand years. In that time, he has been God and Devil, but is nearing the end of his life #25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

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same with “Lifedeath 3,” which would eventually become Adastra in Africa, starring not Ororo, a.k.a. Storm, of The X-Men as originally drawn, but Lady Adastra from his “Young Gods” feature in Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller.

Yet, in his post-Marvel life, things were getting very busy indeed when start-up comic book companies came calling for the veteran creator, including one headed by a former Marvel top gun.

BWS’s stint at newly formed Valiant Comics started in 1991 when a colleague rang him up. “[Shooter] was starting this new company and he had Bob Layton on his side,” BWS said, “and Bob was a friend of mine. And because of Jim’s less-than-endearing past with most all the professionals in the field, he simply couldn’t get any top names to come in with him. I was just finishing up ‘Weapon X,’ and Bob just pretty much ‘inveigled’ me into doing it. There were plenty of times in the first year of my doing the Solar story with Shooter that Bob took me aside and said, ‘I apologize deeply for getting you into this, Barry.’ It was kind of a rocky road with Shooter.”82 The creator joined the upstart outfit and became part of a particularly creative team producing solid, original material, to greater and greater success. Former Valiant editor

Jeff Gomez told Ryan McLelland, “The initial artistic chemistry at Valiant, when Jim Shooter and Barry Windsor-Smith were spearheading the direction of the superhero universe, was a rare flashpoint in the history of comics. Those were unique, personal and passionately told stories. Shooter was doing everything he ever wanted to do at Marvel, but had been hampered at doing. Although it’s a common take today to have super-heroes interacting with an ‘everyday world’ where no one had ever seen flying people, alien spacecraft and magical powers, the concept was fairly new back then.

An incredible amount of attention was being given to detail, continuity, science, and graphic presentation.”83 BWS started as freelance co-plotter and artist, collaborating closely with Shooter and Layton, working on Solar: Man of the Atom, and co-creating—then writing and drawing—Archer and Armstrong, a delightful “buddy” comic book of two opposites that made for dynamite comics reading, serving as evidence that BWS could write and draw a title on a regular basis, and often producing exceptionally good material, at that. Reportedly, he also worked as Valiant’s art director and creative director, at various times. “I turned out good work for the company,” BWS said in 1996, “that was one of the good things about it, and I learned that I can carry a story all on my own, I don’t need a second-rate writer to put in second-rate words for me, I can do it myself, thank you very much.”84 Despite the imprint’s wildly successful moment under the sun—Shooter and BWS’s Unity event was the runaway multi-title crossover hit that, for a time, repositioned Valiant as the third most powerful comic book company, just behind Marvel and DC—Shooter was fired in 1992 amidst all sorts of corporate intrigue plaguing the company. Upon being offered the presidency at Valiant, BWS said, “I spent a year trying to negotiate my contract with [company executive Steve] Massarsky. All the while, I was producing Archer and Armstrong and Eternal Warrior, teaching the kids up there how to color, how to letter, how to ink. I put an enormous amount of work and investment into that company, and yet it took for me to finally throw up my hands and say, ‘This guy doesn’t want to negotiate.’” With that realization, BWS felt his solid reputation and integrity were at risk.

“They were using my good name to buffer the firing of Jim and to give credibility to the company.” Within a few years of BWS’s exit, the company would be no more.85 After leaving Valiant, BWS was being courted by other publishers, including Image (the imprint which had failed miserably for its side of the bargain regarding the Deathmate cross-company debacle, a factor in Valiant’s downfall and BWS leaving). “I was getting calls from Todd McFarlane, being the crazy guy he is, saying, ‘Ah, forget all that other lot. Just come over here to Image. Everything’s going to be fine.’ And, in fact, I was planning to do something with Todd, but I could never quite figure out what to do.

And I was talking with Jim Lee and all sorts of other people.

I was talking with everybody. But, in the case of Malibu—or the Ultraverse, more specifically—they made me a very good offer. See, one of the situations here is that I had said many times, especially just as I was quitting Valiant, that I’d never work on a work-for-hire basis again. I absolutely loathe the fact that the stuff I create is not mine in any way whatsoever.”86 (For a bright shining moment during that time, veteran artist BWS was actually a “hot artist”—as in Image-like or Wizard-esque hot—when Hero Illustrated chose Barry “Winsor-Smith”[sic] as fourth in its “Top Ten Artists” list in 1993, behind youngsters Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee.)87 Still buzzing from writing and drawing a regular title, BWS helped writer Chris Ulm develop a new title for Malibu in 1993. The character they refined together was Rune, described by the Slings and Arrows Comic Guide thusly:

due to disease. In the first story arc, Barry Windsor-Smith and Chris Ulm craft a dark and sardonic epic wherein the Dark God is drawn to the energy of a young boy.88

BWS’s tenure on Rune, clever and entertaining as his efforts were, doesn’t last long and, when he departs Rune, “the loss of quality is staggering.”89 The creator went on to participate in Image’s Wildstorm Rising event, another cross-title event that he found befuddling. “I was confounded when I became involved with Image’s Wildstorm Rising issue #1,” he said, “when, looking for character background, I found nothing at all… unless one has knowledge of the Lee/Kirby Marvel characters upon which they are based. After many faltering starts on that book, where I was hoping the characters would give me some options as to how to direct them, I realized I was talking to a vacuum dressed up in Kirby colors. You can’t talk to characters that don’t exist.”90

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

THE PROMETHEUS PROJECT Before 1995 was over, BWS, who had, by then, established a studio in Kingston, N.Y., made a decision to work on his own (hugely ambitious) creator-owned title and he made a deal with Dark Horse Comics, whose publisher confessed he was “obsessed with [BWS’s] exquisite work,”91 The agreement was for a monthly, 40-page comics anthology series titled Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller with three separate features: “Freebooters,” a mix of Conan and Archer and Armstrong set in exotic climes; “Young Gods,” a series dedicated to Jack Kirby combining soap operatics with cosmic super-beings; and “Paradoxman,” the saga of a brooding time-traveler in search of love lost. To accomplish the formidable challenge of such a laborious effort for a single artist-writer, BWS enlisted his studio assistant, Alex Bialy, and a dependable freelance team. And he felt confident working with Richardson. “[A]t this point in my career,” he said, “I keep as much control over everything as I can.

And I’m in relatively good hands with Dark Horse.”92 After nine fabulous issues, showcasing a masterful grasp of storytelling, provocative writing, and outstanding artistry, BWS: Storyteller was suddenly no more. In an acrimonious split with Dark Horse, the creator would not be shy about airing his embittered grievances regarding Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson, centering on a lack of adequate publicity for the series and the publisher’s plan to reduce the oversize magazine to comic book dimensions.

BWS, who had devoted night and day to the effort for innumerable months, was crushed and momentarily dispirited.

Still, BWS: Storyteller was a tremendous achievement for the artist-writer, and his future publisher, Gary Groth— one highly critical observer of the field—was also tremendously impressed, as he wrote in his introduction to The Comics Journal’s interview with the man behind the work: [BWS’s] new book Storyteller is not just the best work of his career but, in my opinion, a major step beyond anything he’s done before, making his journey from corporate work-for-hire artisan to more idiosyncratically expressive artist one of the most circuitous in the history of comics. Admittedly, the look of Storyteller is off-putting to someone like me who has had it up to here with the infantile formalistic trappings of mainstream comics, but once I was able to set aside my prejudices (entirely justified 99 percent of the time, mind you) I recognized that Storyteller is a) his most personal work to date and b) essentially a comedy, which makes all the difference in the world. It is funny, charming, ribald, parodic, great fun, and beautifully drawn.93

BWS was devastated about the anthology’s demise, not the least because he still had two issues of material left unpublished. But, quickly shifting his focus, he proved no less determined to see some as-yet unfinished projects to fruition, including the graphic novel he was now calling The Prometheus Project, which had been dormant as BWS: COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

Storyteller was all-consuming despite his hope to simultaneously work on both. “The idea—and it was an impossible idea—was to carry on completing it on the back-burner while I was doing Storyteller,” he said. “Because Storyteller became a monthly book, it was just impossible. I mean, I didn’t have time to take a shower, let alone do a bloody graphic novel. So it just sat and gathered even more dust.”94 Somewhere during his expansion of the former Hulk story, BWS left behind his notion of a one-set play singularly about a dysfunctional family, and added a major aspect to the saga: that the once-abused kid and now monstrous Bobby Bailey (the family surname, of course, had to be changed from “Banner”) was transformed into a freakish behemoth by a government program—the Prometheus Project—itself derived from Nazi genetic experiments during World War II. “I had to almost completely rewrite the entire intent of the story to take away from all the known givens that related to the Hulk,” BWS said. “So I had to add more complicated versions of the story to give it its own life rather than leaning on the known legends of the Hulk.”95 (Interestingly, if only changing the look of the lead character wouldn’t have been such a labor-intensive prospect,

Next page: A few months before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world, in late September 2019, Ye Ed visited BWS’s home/studio, in Ulster County, New York—as a matter of fact, the very same city where yours truly was born 62 years ago!—to help scan all of the original art pages of Monsters.

To say it was a celebratory visit is a vast understatement, given that the huge production of the 360-page graphic novel, one which started life in 1984 as a lowly 22-page comic book story, was finally complete. To honor the occasion, mutual pal Linda Fite took this pic of BWS and JBC before we all reveled in a Mexican dinner, along with the awesome Margaret Stewart!

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The second volume, BWS explained, “will be the actual 130-page story, published, colored, all that sort of stuff. But it will be filled up, of course, with all these art style changes, all this stuff that has taken 20 years to get this thing together. So that’s the idea for The Prometheus Project. It would no longer be called The Prometheus Project. That would come up in the text—it would say, ‘This was once called the Hulk graphic novel, then it was changed to The Prometheus Project, and now it’s called The Making of a Graphic Novel,’ or whatever.”

THE MONSTER Soon, though, around the time he turned 50, the artist-writer had changed the title of his graphic novel yet again, this time to The Monster, as mentioned in a 1999 interview. In that conversation, BWS discussed some intentions with the effort, stretching back to the original story. “This whole thing,” he said, “was born out of my attempt to give a credible origin to The Incredible Hulk. I wanted to give Jack Kirby’s character a bit of intellectual and emotional weight… So, in some small way, I wanted to give some gravity to the Hulk. A quintessential Kirby character whom my younger brother [Melvin, nicknamed “Biff”]—a Downs syndrome child—had a particular affection for. I had always wondered why my brother was so attracted to the Hulk over, say, Thor or The Thing. What was it about The Hulk that BWS would’ve featured a less Hulk-sized physique for the creature. “I wouldn’t have made him this monster,” he said. “I would’ve have made him was so engaging to him… I created the Hulk origin story with my younger brother in mind. Originally, I took the step of dedicating the planned Marvel a skinny, little broken-down monster. Something that really is monstrous. comic to him, and also to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby on the second dedication The only reason why he’s this big, hulking thing is because he used to be line. Unfortunately, my brother has since died and he’ll never see the book. the big, hulking Hulk. I’d have turned him into a monstrosity… But imagine Jack, too, is gone.”99 a wizened old, revolting creature sitting at Thanksgiving Day—just really BWS established a connection with DC Comics and was optimistic revolting with bones. That would have had a huge impact, too. But that was about the company publishing a Superman graphic novel he had starting not to be.”)96 In 1997, BWS discussed the graphic novel, crediting it for helping devel- work on and, under its more outré Vertigo imprint, his long-in-the-works graphic novel, The Monster. An Evening with Superman had a simple premop his writing skills. “For about four years, I was writing and drawing this story—even though I knew that Marvel didn’t want it—still as the Hulk, with ise: a depiction of the first date of the Man of Steel and Lois Lane.

In 1999, BWS said, “I went to DC last year with this idea for a Superman him going through this really abused childhood, and how his mother was graphic novel, in a big art book format, and Paul [Levitz] was very pleased abused, and all that sort of stuff. For me, it was an important investigation into all the things I really wanted to do in comic books. It was the thing that with the concept. It was gonna be Superman in Storyteller style, i.e., a sophisticated story. No exposition. There was to be no flying, no punching, allowed me to become a writer, allowed me to do far more subtle things in no fighting. It’s a story about two people: when Superman meets Lois Lane. comic books than I had ever done before until Storyteller. So it became an But it took seven bleedin’ months to figure out the contract, while I’m sitting important project for me.” He added, “It is now about 80 or 90 pages long. poised, pencil in hand.”100 When it is finished, it will be about 120 pages or 130 pages long.”97 He continued, “It’s been gathering dust for about a year. So I kept At that stage, BWS has some ambitious notions for The Prometheus saying, look, I’m ready and I’m rolling on this thing. And they say just give Project, but he understood some harsh realities, which he learned for from us a while to work out the contract. Then they got it into their heads that I long-abandoned production. “This is the idea, and I’ll try to say it simply: was working on the story behind the scenes before the contract was done, it can never be finished in a presentable fashion,” he confessed. “There and they were right. I was agonizing over not working; I was bursting with are too many changes in art style. More subtly, and only the more subtle of inspiration, and they said, no, don’t work on it. Seven months later there’s a readers will notice it, there are changes in storytelling technique. It’s too contract—seven months! By that time, my energy had dissipated and my big a project for me, rather like the Robin Hood thing, which I started in the spirit had imploded. Talk about red tape, I’ve never experienced anything ’70s when I was drawing in my old-fashioned Conan style. And within two years, before 1975 even, my style had changed radically, and it continued to like that.” Needless to say, An Evening with Superman went unpublished.

BWS’s website announced in 1999 that The Monster was to be a Vertigo change, So, every couple of months, I’d look at the other pages of The Real release in 2000, describing the book as a nearly 300-page graphic novel.

Robin Hood and say, ‘My god, this is awful. Look at his eyes!’—or whatever (The book’s logo used a swastika in place of the “E” in the title.) “It’s an strange affectation I had at the time. It was deeply stylized and I didn’t like astounding piece of work both artistically and for the themes Barry is workit. So the Robin Hood book will never, ever see print unless it’s printed as ing with,” Karen Berger, executive editor at Vertigo, said at the time. “He an artifact—unless it’s explained that this is an unfinished book. So you addresses domestic violence with honesty… This book has the potential can look at page one and page 27 and say, wow, did the same artist draw to reach both inside and outside the comics market about an important this stuff?”98 101 BWS continued: “In the case of The Prometheus Project, frankly, it’s far issue.”

Writer Valarie Jones, during her visit to the BWS studios in 1999, detoo important a piece to let it just die, which is what I’ve let the Robin Hood scribes the space thusly: thing do. So what I’m planning, what I’m hoping to do here , is publish two hardbound volumes of The Prometheus Project. One, I wish to annotate, The studio is crammed with drawing tables and computers, mixed in I’m hoping to get some people to help me do this. We’re thing about trying with antique books and the odd statue or chain mail headpiece. Among the to contact Scott McCloud to see if he’d like to get involved with this. The treasures, we find about 60 of the pages of The Monster, the socio-political entirety of the book, as it stands right now, right as we speak, would be horror story he is doing for DC imprint Vertigo. published as it is, in full color. It’s black-&-white art, but it’s covered in blue Says Alex [Bialy], “In terms of the economics of running a studio… pencil; it’s covered in red notations; it’s got storytelling jargon all around one of the things that we’re dealing with on The Monster is that when the edges; it’s got white-out; it’s got panels cut out, panels cut in; and all you go to a place like DC, with its corporate structure and page rates and this sort of stuff. To be frank with you, it’s a mess. And it’s unpublishable. all, and though they’ve made it flexible to a degree, but what they don’t But if you publish it as an academic study of the making of a graphic novel, account for is the work going in—” then there’s value to having this thing published in its unfinished form. So “One thousand lines per panel!” Windsor-Smith exclaims, clutching that would be the first volume. This would come out in two volumes at the at his heart. It’s true. The work is his densest since ‘Red Nails.’ The Monsame time in a slipcase. The first volume would be unfinished work: panels ster makes “‘Red Nails’ look like a coloring book.” he points out. The cut up, discussions on the page—I mean, there are so many things in this intense linework was chosen partly because the story will be released as book that are fairly revolutionary. You’ve got to understand I did this before black-&-white, but whether intentionally or not, the linework also serves Watchmen and before Dark Knight. Those seemed like revolutionary ways to create a sense of urban griminess and decay. The town is reflected to tell a story. Well, I was doing it myself; it just never got published.” in panels that stand out like a photo, exposing unsparingly every crack 72

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Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

and smudge in the walls. The characters have faces that show years of work and worry, hands that are not soft, and clothing that looks like it has been worn and washed and worn again. All this serves to heighten the drama of the story, wherein a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, a boy altered and created against his will, becomes the catalyst for events. The underlying themes are many, but one of the most important is a hard look at spousal and child abuse.102

By 2002, the BWS web page reported that the completion date of The Monster was unknown. Any reference on the site to Vertigo was scrubbed completely by 2005. There were subsequent reports, though unconfirmed, that Vertigo editorial and DC higher-ups objected to some language to be included (allegedly the “c-word,” a vulgarity which does not appear in Monsters). BWS said that he was startled by the editorial interference during his attempt to work with the company. “I was absolutely stunned that [the unnamed assigned editor] would say, ‘That’s not a good idea, Barry. I wouldn’t do that, Barry,’” an incredulous BWS related. “I’ve never had anybody talk to me like that, ever. Not from 1968 on. They were just pleased to have me do it [back then]. I just let [the DC deal] fizzle out. I’d taken some money for it and had to pay it back.”103 With the DC projects having become hopelessly mired down, BWS approached longtime friend Gary Groth—probably the first person ever to interview BWS, in early 1969— and a deal was made for Groth’s Fantagraphics to collect the BWS: Storyteller features, each in their respective volumes to include material intended for the unpublished #10 and #11. (Paradoxman remains unpublished.) The plan was also for an ongoing series entitled BWS: Opus, the first volume which appeared in 1999.

Groth said at the time, “Opus was originally submitted to me as a quarterly magazine. I analyzed it both from a financial and aesthetic point of view and suggested an annual volume, rather than put out a periodical and gather issues at a later date… This would be giving it its best shot, presenting it as a book. Both Barry and I will go full out on Opus, with the best quality and paper and so on, stuff that can’t be done in a periodical.”104 Though reportedly intended for five annual volumes, only two editions of Opus would see print, each hardcover a gorgeous production. Opus 2 appeared in 2000. In a series of essays therein, the author discusses various paranormal experiences, ruminations on creativity, and other soliloquies, all intermingled among a superb array of his artwork from over the decades, with many an anecdotal notation and asides about any number of pieces from throughout his career.

In 2003, on the occasion of the impending release of Ang Lee’s Hulk movie and at BWS’s request, Comic Book Artist magazine published an extensive look into the Mantlo/”Monster” controversy (much of which has been incorporated into this article), the most comprehensive discussion of BWS’s in-progress project until now. That same year, the super-hero film X2: X-Men United featured concepts and imagery derived from BWS’s Weapon X graphic novel, which, as in the case of Hulk, neglected to give the creator the courtesy of any acknowledgment in the credits.

BWS was subsequently ignored in the end-crawls of both X-Men Origins: Wolverine [2009] and X-Men: Apocalypse [2016], which also featured his designs.

BWS’s Thing mini-series was mentioned as “creeping its way to completion” in The Thing #36 [June 1986] letter column, but that project wouldn’t be heard of again until 2006. The Comic Book Galaxy website spoke with BWS and included pages from the unpublished story, by then planned as a graphic novel. “My concept for publication is to present the work in a single volume—hardcover and trade paperback—with editorial material explaining the story’s history, including the many visual out-takes culled COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

from over the years,” he explained. ”This will not only be rewarding in an historical way, but will allow a smoother transition from the look and sound of my 1980s work to my somewhat different style of 2005. Mind you, Marvel has yet to greenlight this project; we’re still in talks.” And, in 2017, BWS posted innumerable pages from the graphic novel on his Facebook page.105 (BWS’s Facebook picture gallery also featured “remasters” of Eternal Warrior pages, which showcased extensive embellishments of the work, much quite excellent.)

Though the masterful sequential artist, one of our greatest comic-book dramatists, if you will, has vowed to never attempt another longform effort like Monsters—in his interview herein, he calls it his “final work”—BWS leaves open the possibility he may do “small stuff” in the future. Maybe, with the acclaim he’ll receive with Monsters, he may find a renewed commitment to storytelling. Perhaps not. Either way, he’s given the world a masterpiece, and that is, indeed, quite more than enough for Barry Windsor-Smith to give us.

GIVING THANKS The killer editing skills of Linda Fite (BWS’s oldest friend in America and longtime pal of Ye Ed) immensely improved this feature, thus to her: our thanks!

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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Monsters TM & © Barr y Windsor-Smith.

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#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Monsters TM & © Barry Windsor-Smith.

References 1. Barry Windsor-Smith, “Art or Rock? A Visit To Windsor-Smith Studio,” interviewed by Valarie Jones, Submedia #1, May/ June 1999, pg. 96.

2. Bruce Costa, “When All Else Fails… Raise Your Standards,” cover feature article, Comics Buyer’s Guide #1280, May 29, 1998, pgs. 29–30.

3. BWS, conversation with the writer, Sept. 29, 2019.

4. BWS, “Artist X: Barry Windsor-Smith on ‘Weapon X,’” interviewed by Thomas Harrington, Amazing Heroes #188, Feb. 1991, pg. 35.

5. Bill Mantlo, “Monster,” The Incredible Hulk #312, Oct. 1985, pgs. 20–21.

6. Adrian Snowden, “Incredible Hulk” entry, The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide, revised edition, 2003, pg. 320.

7. Jason Shayer, “Hulk Smash More! The Incredible Hulk in the 1980s,” Back Issue #70, Feb. 2014, pg. 57.

8. Greg Pak, “Hulk Smash More! The Incredible Hulk in the 1980s,” interviewed by Jason Shayer, Back Issue #70, Feb. 2014, pg. 57.

9. Peter David, email to the writer, June 21, 2003.

10. Nick Nolte, “Hulk”’s Nick Nolte on rage, science, and Shakespeare,” interviewed by Liane Bonin, June 19, 2003, Entertainment Weekly website https://ew.com/ article/2003/06/19/hulks-nick-nolte-rage-science-andshakespeare/.

11. Box Office Mojo website, https://www.boxofficemojo.com.

12. Peter David, Hulk, 2003, Del Rey, pg. 3.

13. Jim Shooter, Cadence memo, May 5, 1983.

14. Ibid.

15. Harlan Ellison, “Ellison Sues Star Trek,” Mar. 13, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20120121011809/http://harlanellison.com/heboard/visitors/startrekpressrelease.html.

16. Jim Shooter, “Plagiarism,” Jim Shooter website, June 20, 2011, http://jimshooter.com/2011/06/plagiaris.html/.

17. A. Drone, “Coming Distractions,” comic release listings, Amazing Heroes #24, June 1, 1983, pg. 27.

18. “Plagiarism.”

19. David J. Schow and Jeffrey Frentzen, The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, 1986, pgs. 289–290.

20. Dennis O’Neil, “Red-Face Aplogy Department,” letters column, The Incredible Hulk #289, Nov. ’83.

21. Kim Thompson, “Mantlo Ellison Adaptation Raises Questions,” The Comics Journal #83, Aug. 1983, pg. 10.

22. Ibid.

23. Bill Mantlo, “Today is the First Day of the Rest of My Life,” The Incredible Hulk #285, July 1983.

24. “Plagiarism.”

25. Ibid.

26. The Comics Journal #83, pg. 10.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.

29. Amazing Heroes #24.

30. “Plagiarism.”

31. BWS, “Barry Windsor-Smith,” interviewed by Paul Duncan, Arken Sword #21, 1987, pg. 56.

Special Thanks

This extensive essay on the origin of Monsters originally began as a comprehensive retrospective on BWS’s entire life and remarkable career, but it grew by such a magnitude that yours truly had to reboot, so to speak, to reconfigure, focusing singularly on his graphic novel. In all this, a multitude of people helped

32. Ibid.

33. B WS, “Vision & Quest: The Art of Barry Windsor-Smith,” interviewed by Archie Goodwin, Epic Illustrated #7, Aug. 1981, pg. 38.

34. A rken Sword #21, pg. 56.

35. BWS, Opus Vol. 2, 2000, pg. 71.

36. BWS, “Alias Barry Windsor-Smith,” interviewed by Jon B. Cooke, Comic Book Artist V1, #2, Summer 1998, pg. 42.

37. CBA V1 #2, pg. 43.

38. L inda Fite, “The Fab One’s Marvel Daze,” interviewed by Jon B. Cooke, Comic Book Artist V1, #18, Mar. 2002, pg. 43-B. 39. A rken Sword #21, pg. 58.

40. H erb Trimpe, “Call Me Mister… Mister Machine,” interviewed by Allan Harvey, Back Issue #25, Dec. 2007, pgs. 41, 43 41. B WS, “Call Me Mister… Mister Machine,” interviewed by Allan Harvey, Back Issue #25, Dec. 2007, pg. 43.

42. BWS, Back Issue #25, pg. 43.

43. CBA V1, #18, pg. 43-B. 44. BWS, “A Matter of Abuse,” interviewed by Jon B. Cooke, Comic Book Artist V2 #1, July 2003, pg. 18.

45. A rken Sword #21, pg. 60.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. A rken Sword #21, pg. 58.

49. CBA V2, #1, pg. 19.

50. A rken Sword #21, pg. 60.

51. Ibid.

52. CBA V2, #1, pg. 19.

53. “Plagiarism.”

54. B WS, “The Hulk: A Special Story,” proposal, July 4, 1984, pg. 3.

55. “Plagiarism.”

56. A llen Milgrom, email to writer, Feb. 5, 2021.

57. Ibid.

58. C arl Potts, Facebook message to writer, Feb. 3, 2021.

59. CBA V2 #1, pg. 21.

60. T om DeFalco, email to writer, June 9, 2003.

61. Proposal, pg. 3.

62. CBA V2 #1, pgs. 20–21.

63. CBA V2 #1, pg. 21.

64. CBA V2 #1, pg. 19.

65. Arken Sword #21, pg. 58.

66. “Plagiarism.”

67. Ibid.

68. C arl Potts, Facebook message.

69. B ill Coffin, “Tragic Tale,” Nov. 7, 2011, thinkadvisor website, https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2011/11/07/tragic-tale/.

70. Ibid.

71. R ich Johnston, “Multiple Publisher Disorder: The History of Barry Windsor-Smith’s Hulk, Big Red, Monster and Monsters,” Bleeding Cool website, May 23, 2017, https:// bleedingcool.com/comics/multiple-publisher-disorderhistory-barry-windsor-smiths-hulk-big-red-monstermonsters/.

72. B WS, “Secrets of Weapon X,” interviewed by Will Murray, Comics Scene #18, April 1991, pg. 22.

with interviews, consultation, and correspondence, as well as sharing art and artifacts, for which CBC is enormously grateful. Of course, most of all, we’d like to express our appreciation to the storyteller himself, Barry Windsor-Smith, for his friendship and support.

Norman Boyd, Aaron Caplan, Maddy Cohen, Bruce Costa, Brian Doherty, “Manly” Matt Dow,

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

73. BWS, “An Interview with Barry Windsor-Smith,” interviewed by Craig Miller, Spectrum Super Special #3, June 2004, pg. 73.

74. Spectrum Super Special #2, pgs. 73–74.

75. Spectrum Super Special #2, pg. 75.

76. BWS, interviewed by Will Murray, audio tape, Dec 29, 1990.

77. BWS, “Artist X: BWS on Weapon X,” interviewed by Thomas Harrington, Amazing Heroes #188, Feb. 1991, pg. 35.

78. Ibid.

79. CBA V2 #1, pg. 21.

80. Ibid.

81. Peter David, “But I Digress…,” column, The Comic Buyer’s Guide #1321, March 12, 1999, pg. 58.

82. BWS, “The Road to Rune,” interviewed by Paul J. Grant, Wizard #28, Dec. 1993, pgs. 79–80.

83. Ryan McLelland, “Valiant Days, Valiant Nights: A Look Back on the Rise and Fall of Valiant,” Sequart Organization website, Feb. 16, 2006, http://sequart.org/magazine/28120/ valiant-days-valiant-nights-a-look-back-on-the-rise-andfall-of-valiant/.

84. BWS, “BWS,” interviewed by Gary Groth, The Comics Journal #190, Sept. 1996, pg. 90.

85. Wizard #28, pg. 80.

86. Wizard #28, pg. 79.

87. “Top Ten Artists,” Hero Illustrated #2, Aug. 1993, pg. 114.

88. Win Wiacek, “Rune” entry, The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide, revised edition, 2003, pg. 543.

89. Ibid.

90. BWS, “Curtain Rising: Setting the Stage for Barry WindsorSmith: Storyteller,” Arnold T. Blumberg, Overstreet Fan #17, Nov. 1996, pg. 69.

91. Mike Richardson, “A Word from the Publisher,” introduction, Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller #1, Oct. 1996, inside front cover.

92. TCJ #190, pg. 91.

93. Gary Groth, “BWS,” introduction, The Comics Journal #190, Sept. 1996, pg. 58.

94. Spectrum Super Special #2, pg. 79.

95. Spectrum Super Special #2, pg. 75.

96. BWS, conversation with the writer, Sept. 28, 2019.

97. Spectrum Super Special #2, pgs. 74–75.

98. Spectrum Super Special #2, pgs. 77–79.

99. BWS, Submedia #1, pg. 96.

100. Submedia #1, pg. 94.

101. Karen Berger, “Art or Rock? A Visit To Windsor-Smith Studio,” Submedia #1, May/June 1999, pg. 93.

102. Submedia #1, pgs. 92–93.

103. BWS, conversation with the writer, Sept. 28, 2019.

104. Gary Groth, “Art or Rock? A Visit To Windsor-Smith Studio,” Submedia #1, May/June 1999, pg. 92.

105. “Comic Book Galaxy Presents an Exclusive First Look at the New Thing Graphic Novel by Barry Windsor-Smith,” Alan David Doane, Comic Book Galaxy website, Jan. 6, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20110517063559/http:// comicbookgalaxy.com/bwsexclusiveintro.html.

Paul Duncan, Michael Eury, Linda Fite, Eli Friedman, Jatinder S. Ghataora, Gary Groth, Paul Hansen, David Hathaway-Price, Michael W. Kaluta, George Khoury, Linda Lessmann, John Morrow, Will Murray, Steve Parkhouse, Rose Rummel-Eury, Buddy Scalera, Diana Schutz, Dave Sim, James Slattery, Bob Stevenson, Margaret Stewart, Phil Trumbo, and José Villarrubia.

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Salute to Golden & Silver Age artist SYD SHORES as he’s remembered by daughter NANCY SHORES KARLEBACH, fellow artist ALLEN BELLMAN, DR. MICHAEL J. VASSALLO, and interviewer RICHARD ARNDT. Plus: mid-1940s “Green Turtle” artist/creator CHU HING profiled by ALEX JAY, JOHN BROOME, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and Mr. Monster on MORT WEISINGER Part Two, and more!

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Sixties teen idol RICKY NELSON remembered by his son MATTHEW NELSON, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., rural sitcom purge, EVEL KNIEVEL toys, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Saturday morning’s Super 7, The Muppet Show, behind-the-scenes photos of Sixties movies, an interview with The Sound of Music’s heartthrob-turnedbad guy DANIEL “Rolf” TRUHITTE, and more fun, fab features!

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creators at the con THE WAY WE WERE… Unless we’re taking screenshots of comic convention “@home” Zoom panels, it’s not easy for our esteemed Convention Photographer Kendall Whitehouse to get pics of our tribe in

this isolated era of Covid-19. So, call it what you will—rank sentimentality or nostalgic wistfulness—Kendall shares a look back to ancient times to remember New York Comic Con 2019!

Photography by Kendall Whitehouse By midday Saturday, the main corridor of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is packed with fans. (Are crowds now of a thing of the past?)

Miracle Men: At left, Darkseid Is… Tom King? At center is King trying his hand at being an artist. At right is artist Mitch Gerads eying our photographer.

All photos © Kendall Whitehouse.

Comics historians Danny Fingeroth and Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson.

The Monstress team of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda in Artist Alley.

Dave Gibbons (far left) with the entire cast of HBO’s Watchmen, which would become a huge cable TV hit.

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#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

SCOTT SHAW! is now accepting ART COMMlSSlONS Here are his RATES AND TERMS: B&W Head Shots – $75.00 (9” X 12”) Color Head Shots (color pencils) – $150.00 (9” X 12”) B&W Full Figures – $150.00 (11” X 14”) Color Full Figures (color pencils) – $300.00 (11” X 14”) Group shots are priced by the number of figures, not size.

Gags, situations or costumes add at least $200.00.

Logos are $300.00 and up, based on their complexity.

Backgrounds, unless simple, will be an additional charge based on the complexity.

There will be a charge of $25.00 for every order's secure packaging and shipping.

Full, advanced payment will be through PayPal. If you're interested, please contact me at shawcartoons@gmail.com

CBC for me, see? coming attractions: cbc #26 in the summer

Adventureman TM & © Terry Dodson & Matt Fraction.

Terry Dodson’s Choice Artistry

CBC #26 features an in-depth chat with superb comic book artist TERRY DODSON (with maybe a cameo appearance by his work and life partner, RACHEL!), where we chronicle his Rock ’N’ Roll roots, breakout with Mantra, climb through the ranks with X-Book assignments, breakout with Harley Quinn, and his ascent to the top (with a little Trouble along the way).

Natch, we discuss his new Adventureman series, written by Matt Fraction and feature an amazing gallery of Dodson artwork! We also feature—delayed from last issue—Ken Meyer, Jr.’s look at the GREAT FANZINES OF THE 1970S. Plus part deux of our talk with the legendary pro-zine and portfolio mogul, Mr. Hot Stuf’ himself, SAL QUARTUCCIO! Ye Ed delves deep into the underground comix legend of PRO-JUNIOR, with commentary by R. CRUMB, JAY LYNCH, DENIS KITCHEN, and others about this wild DON DOHLER creation! Additionally, Darrick Patrick asks captivating comics cover artist PEACH MOMOKO some questions and, if we can squeeze ’em in, the long promised WILL EISNER Valentines drawn for his lovely wife, ANN. And we include the latest efforts of our exceptional crew: Rich Arndt, Kendall Whitehouse, Steven Thompson, as well as the latest hilarious installment of Hembeck’s Dateline.

Full-color, 84 pages, $9.95

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2021 • #25

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a picture is worth a thousand words

from the archives of Tom Ziuko

80

TM & © the Estate of Alan Kupperberg.

During the last few years of his life, the late Alan Kupperberg enlisted me to help assemble and color a compilation volume of all of his Evil Clown stories, the series he co-created and illustrated for National Lampoon with writer Nick Bakay. Alan still had two finished scripts that had never been drawn or published, and we worked together to come up with new covers, faux ads, and back-up strips to round out the volume. (You can read an indepth interview with Alan about Frenchy the Evil Clown, and this compilation volume at: https://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/2007/10/looking-back-withalan-kupperberg-evil.html). This is the newly-drawn cover for one of the two scripts; Alan penciled, inked, and lettered both of the stories, as well as a wealth of new material for the book before he sadly passed away. He had planned to publish this book himself, and because I’m heartbroken to think that this tome may never see the light of day, which features some of Alan’s best work in comics and of which he was justifiably proud, I’m working to find a new publisher. Hopefully everyone will get to enjoy this wonderful work someday soon. —TZ

#25 • Spring 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

ED AND EXP COND SE ION! EDIT

THE WORLD OF TWOMORROWS

JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID

MAC RABOY

25th anniversary retrospective by publisher JOHN MORROW and COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine’s JON B. COOKE! Go behind-the-scenes with MICHAEL EURY, ROY THOMAS, GEORGE KHOURY, and a host of other TwoMorrows contributors!

The final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time, in cooperation with DC Comics! Two unused 1970s DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales, plus unseen TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE and SOUL LOVE magazines!

Examines the complicated relationship of Marvel Universe creators JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE through their own words (and Ditko’s, Wood’s, Romita Sr.’s and others), in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and TV interviews!

(224-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $37.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-092-2 (240-page ULTRA-LIMITED HARDCOVER) $75

(176-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5

(176-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $26.95 (Digital Edition) $12.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-094-6

HERO-A-GO-GO!

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

(272-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $36.95 (Digital Edition) $13.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-073-1

IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB Digs up the best of FROM THE TOMB, the acclaimed horror comics history magazine!

(192-page trade paperback) $29.95 (Digital Edition) $10.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-081-6

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST

CENTENNIAL EDITION

Fully-updated, 256-page definitive edition listing every release up to Jack’s 100th birthday!

(256-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER) $34.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-083-0

Big Discounts! Final Copies!

CARMINE INFANTINO PENCILER, PUBLISHER, PROVOCATEUR (224-page paperback) $26.95 Only $12

THE INCREDIBLE HERB TRIMPE (160-page FULL-COLOR Hardcover) $34.95 Only $20

DON HECK A WORK OF ART (192-page FULL-COLOR Hardcover) $39.95 Only $15

MARIE SEVERIN MIRTHFUL MISTRESS OF COMICS (176-page paperback) $24.95 Only $10

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION

AL PLASTINO LAST SUPERMAN STANDING (112-page paperback) $17.95 Only $7

ROGER HILL documents the life and career of the artist of BULLETMAN, SPY SMASHER, GREEN LAMA, and his crowning achievement, CAPTAIN MARVEL JR., with never-before-seen photos, a wealth of rare and unpublished artwork, and the first definitive biography of a true Master of the Comics!

(160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-090-8

MIKE GRELL

Documents “The DC Implosion”, one of the most notorious events in comics, with an exhaustive oral history from the creators involved!

(136-page trade paperback with COLOR) $21.95 (Digital Edition) $10.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-085-4

Master of the Comics

LIFE IS DRAWING WITHOUT AN ERASER

Career-spanning tribute to a legend!

(160-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $27.95 (Digital Edition) $12.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-088-5

THE MLJ COMPANION

Complete history of ARCHIE COMICS’ “Mighty Crusaders” super-heroes, with in-depth examinations of each era of the characters’ history!

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

STAR*REACH COMPANION (192-page paperback with COLOR) $27.95 Only $10

TITANS COMPANION VOLUME 2 (224-page paperback) $26.95 Only $10

(288-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $34.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-067-0

BEST OF ALTER EGO VOLUME 2 (160-page paperback) $19.95 Only $8

All MODERN MASTERS books: $8 each!

ALTER EGO: CENTENNIAL (160-page trade paperback with COLOR) $19.95 Only $10

BEST OF DRAW VOLUME 3 (256-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95 Only $12

SAL BUSCEMA: COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST (176-page paperback with COLOR) $26.95 Only $15

Alan Davis • John Byrne • Charles Vess • Michael Golden • Jerry Ordway • Mike Allred Lee Weeks • John Romita Jr. • Mike Ploog • Kyle Baker • Chris Sprouse • Mark Buckingham • Guy Davis Jeff Smith • Frazer Irving • Ron Garney • Eric Powell • Cliff Chiang • Paolo Rivera

Download our Free Catalog of all our available books and back issues! https://www.twomorrows.com/media/TwoMorrowsCatalog.pdf

New Comics Magazines!

ALTER EGO #168

ALTER EGO #169

ALTER EGO #170

ALTER EGO #171

ALTER EGO #172

Spotlight on Groovy GARY FRIEDRICH— co-creator of Marvel’s Ghost Rider! ROY THOMAS on their six-decade friendship, wife JEAN FRIEDRICH and nephew ROBERT HIGGERSON on his later years, PETER NORMANTON on GF’s horror/ mystery comics, art by PLOOG, TRIMPE, ROMITA, THE SEVERINS, AYERS, et al.! FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and Mr. Monster, and more! MIKE PLOOG cover!

JACK KIRBY is showcased cover-to-cover behind a never-before-printed Kirby cover!

WILL MURRAY on Kirby’s contributions to the creation of Iron Man—FCA on his Captain Marvel/Mr. Scarlet Fawcett work—Kirby sections by MICHAEL T. GILBERT & PETER NORMANTON—Kirby in 1960s fanzines—STAN LEE’s colorful quotes about “The King”, and ROY THOMAS on being a Kirby fan (and foil)!

PAUL GUSTAVSON—Golden Age artist of The Angel, Fantom of the Fair, Arrow, Human Bomb, Jester, Plastic Man, Alias the Spider, Quicksilver, Rusty Ryan, Midnight, and others—is remembered by son TERRY GUSTAFSON, who talks in-depth to RICHARD ARNDT. Lots of lush comic art from Centaur, Timely, and (especially) Quality! Plus—FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, JOHN BROOME, and more!

ALFREDO ALCALA is celebrated for his dreamscape work on Savage Sword of Conan and other work for Marvel, DC, and Warren, as well as his own barbarian creation Voltar, as RICH ARNDT interviews his sons Alfred and Christian! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, PETER NORMANTON’s horror history From The Tomb, JOHN BROOME, and more!

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

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships August 2021

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Oct. 2021

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

Two RICHARD ARNDT interviews revealing the wartime life of Aquaman artist/ co-creator PAUL NORRIS (with a Golden/ Silver Age art gallery)—plus the story of WILLIE ITO, who endured the WWII Japanese-American relocation centers to become a Disney & Warner Bros. animator and comics artist. Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, JOHN BROOME, and more, behind a NORRIS cover!

BACK ISSUE #128

BACK ISSUE #129

BACK ISSUE #130

BACK ISSUE #131

TV TOON TIE-INS! Bronze Age HannaBarbera Comics, Underdog, Mighty Mouse, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Pink Panther, Battle of the Planets, and Smokey Bear and Woodsy Owl. Bonus: SCOTT SHAW! digs up Captain Carrot’s roots! Featuring the work of BYRNE, COLON, ENGEL, EVANIER, FIELDS, MICHAEL GALLAGHER, WIN MORTIMER, NORRIS, SEVERIN, SKEATES, STATON, TALLARICO, TOTH, and more!

BRONZE AGE PROMOS, ADS, AND GIMMICKS! The aborted DC Super-Stars Society fan club, Hostess Comic Ads, DC 16-page Preview Comics, rare Marvel custom comics, DC Hotline, Popeye Career Comics, early variant covers, and more. Featuring BARR, HERDLING, LEVITZ, MAGUIRE, MORGAN, PACELLA, PALMIOTTI, SHAW!, TERRY STEWART, THOMAS, WOLFMAN, and more!

THE KIRBY LEGACY AT DC! Explores Jack Kirby’s post-Fourth World Bronze Age DC characters! Demon, Kamandi, OMAC, Sandman, and Kirby’s Odd Jobs (Atlas, Manhunter, and more). Plus: the SIMON & KIRBY Reunion That Wasn’t! Featuring BISSETTE, BYRNE, CONWAY, GIBBONS, GOLDEN, GRANT, RUCKA, SEMEIKS, THOMAS, TIMM, WAGNER, and more.

Demon cover by KIRBY and MIKE ROYER!

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships July 2021

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Aug. 2021

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Sept. 2021

2021

BRONZE AGE TV TIE-INS! TV-to-comic adaptations of the ’70s to ’90s, including Bionic Woman, Dark Shadows, Emergency, H. R. Pufnstuf, Hee Haw, Lost in Space (with BILL MUMY), Primus (with ROBERT BROWN), Sledge Hammer, Superboy, V, and others! Featuring BALD, BATES, CAMPITI, EVANIER, JOHN FRANCIS MOORE, SALICRUP, SAVIUK, SPARLING, STATON, WOLFMAN, and more!

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Alter Ego (Six issues) Back Issue (Eight issues) BrickJournal (Six issues) Comic Book Creator (Four issues) Jack Kirby Collector (Four issues) RetroFan (Six issues)

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BACK ISSUE #127

SOLDIERS ISSUE! Sgt. Rock revivals, General Thunderbolt Ross, Beetle Bailey in comics, DC’s Blitzkrieg, War is Hell’s John Kowalski, Atlas’ savage soldiers, The ’Nam, Nth the Ultimate Ninja, and CONWAY and GARCIA-LOPEZ’s Cinder and Ashe.

Featuring CLAREMONT, DAVID, DIXON, GOLDEN, HAMA, KUBERT, LOEB, DON LOMAX, DOUG MURRAY, TUCCI, and more. BRIAN BOLLAND cover!