Comic Book Creator #28 Preview

STEVE BISSETTE FROM OUT OF THE SWAMP

Scout: Marauder TM & TM ©2020 Truman.

Swamp Thing & ©Timothy DC Comics.

S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant ® is a registered trademark of Stephen R. Bissette. Bog Swamp Demon TM & © the respective copyright holder.

in the USA

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No. 28, Spring 2022

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A TwoMorrows Publication

and SNIDEY!

Cover art by Stephen R. Bissette & Richard Case

Spring 2022 • The Stephen R. Bissette Issue • Number 28

T WOODY AND THE VOLCANO CBC mascot by J.D. KING

©2022 J.D. King.

About Our Cover Pencils by STEPHEN R. BISSETTE Inks & Colors by RICHARD CASE

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Ye Ed’s Rant: My, my… how time doth fly when the world goes crazy........................... 2 COMICS CHATTER Up Front: Mike Gold’s Totally Rad Days. The first part of our talk with the Chicago son, chatting about coming of age in the Windy City and becoming radicalized....... 3 Comics & Comix Man: Part two of our career-spanning interview with Bud Plant, on the formation of Comics & Comix, his publishing days, and much more............ 12 Remembering Joe: Concluding portion of pro testimonials of the late Joe Sinnott.... 28 Once Upon a Long Ago: Steven Thompson recalls a first fave artist, Tony Tallarico... 31 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt on worthy “New Books and Old” for students....... 32 Hembeck’s Dateline: Fred’s colorful take on the magical family Marvel..................... 33 Ten Questions: Smiling Iolanda Zanfardino gets quizzed by Darrick Patrick................. 34

Above: The main image was created by Steve Bissette and Richard Case as a T-shirt design for the cast and crew of the short-lived 2019 TV series featuring the muck-monster. The SRB-drawn vignettes are from the covers of Tales to Terrible To Tell #1 [Winter 1989] and Bog Swamp Demon #1 [Aug. 1996].

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S.R. Bissette: Taboos, Tyrants, and Talking Trash.

A fascinating retrospective on the amazing transformative times of comic book rebel Stephen Russell Bissette, as the “first class” graduate of the Kubert School reveals his formative early career, breakout as Swamp Thing artist and Alan Moore collaborator, launch of his innovative horror comics anthology, Taboo, foray into independent comics creation with short-lived but beloved Tyrant, creator rights advocacy, retirement from comics and rebirth as Canter for Cartoon Studies instructor, teaching entirely new generations on the art of comic book storytelling. Plus we discuss SRB’s multi-faceted interests as author, critic, historian, publisher, and horror film fanatic!....................................... 36 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: Monochromatic Kendall Whitehouse gets all noir-ish!................. 78 Coming Attractions: “Dauntless” Don McGregor is our featured creator next ish!....... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: The Doctor is in the house (in color!).......... 80 Right: A detail of Stephen R. Bissette’s cover art for Tyrant #3 [Nov. 1994] featuring SRB’s tyrannical T-rex!

EDITOR’S CLARIFICATION: Alas, much as we had hoped to include, our feature on the Stan Lee at Carnegie Hall event has been postponed, maybe indefinitely. And, in the meantime, perhaps we’ll get enough mail to justify a letters column next ish, too!

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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

S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant® is a registered trademark of Stephen R. Bissette.

Swamp Thing TM & © DC Comics

THE MAIN EVENT

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: $49 US, $72 International, $19 Digital. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2022 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437.

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GEORGE OLSHEVSKY, TOM VEITCH, and my pal JASON PETERSON

up front

Gold’s Totally Rad Days Mike Gold’s been all over, as he tells us in part one of CBC’s interview with the guy

Mutt & Jeff TM & © Pierre S. DeBeaumont, American Nation Red Cross, and The Salvation Army. Conspiracy Capers TM & © The Conspiracy. Art © the estate of Skip Williamson.

Interview conducted by JON B. COOKE [Who knew Mike Gold was such a rad dude? I first came to recognize the name as an amiable and chummy public relations voice at DC Comics shortly after Jenette Kahn came on board as publisher. Then I noted he co-founded First Comics, launching a tremendously ambitious and—in its time—successful independent outfit… But what I later learned was mind-blowing!

“Minister of Propaganda” for the Chicago Seven Conspiracy trial, writer for underground newspapers Chicago Seed and the East Village Other, co-founder of the National Runaway Hotline, associate of the Organic Theater Company… So, yeah, before his pro foray into comics, Mike was a hippie, Yippie, and über radical, but let’s hear him tell the story in the first installment (which was transcribed by Rose Rummel Eury)… Ye Ed.] Comic Book Creator: You’re originally from Chicago?

Mike Gold: I most certainly am, born in 1950.

CBC: How would you characterize your childhood?

Mike: Weird… but everybody’s childhood was weird! Still, mine was very weird. I was born dead and I died again four days later. I suspect that’s why I’m a comics fan, because in comics, nobody died forever.

CBC: [Chuckles] What was the malady you suffered when you were born?

Mike: I was two months premature and, in 1950, surviving that was almost unheard of. My doctor, I’m told, literally confirmed in when I was in my 30s. He told me he spent a week at my crib side, just in case. My lungs weren’t fully developed (and it’s still a little bit of a problem). It got me started in a strange world on a strange foot.

I’ve said this a lot: my sister was seven years older than me and was stuck babysitting me in our three-floor walk-up apartment when my mother had to go to the grocery store.

She was a comic book reader, so she would read me her comics, and that’s how I got into comic books. I was ridiculously precocious. I loved reading and she’d help me with the words. My first comic that I remember was a DC copy of Mutt & Jeff, which those were words I could recognize and eventually started my lifetime passion. I got a little older and discovered her stash of old comic books. At a very young age, that made me realize there was something that happened before I was around. That’s not a revelation that comes to most people until their teenage years or maybe their 20s. I had it when I was about six or five. That was pretty cool. And not just in comics. I started reading newspapers because of the comics in them. The paper we read was the Chicago Daily News and they had Pogo, Li’l Abner, and Abbie an’ Slats. It’s kind of amazing that I actually learned English as we know it today because those had sort of an artificial dialect. [chuckles] CBC: What did your parents do for work?

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2022 • #28

Mike: My mother was a housewife when I was a small child and then she worked in a factory when I was about seven, so I was a latchkey kid. My father was an accountant for what most people know as the JC Whitney Company, which was a retailer for car parts, where you can order obscure car part. It was a huge, huge operation and my father loved cars. It was a labor of love for him. As I grew older, I realized just through conversation that, when he was a kid, he was a big newspaper comic strip reader before comic books.

He was very much into Edgar Rice Burroughs —the John Carter and Tarzan books—as I was when I was like 12. That was pretty cool because it was a link to him. He worked six days a week, so I didn’t really know him that well as a small child. As I grew and could communicate better, he and I bonded really well and that’s when I found out about all this. It’s in the blood!

CBC: You stopped breathing when you were four?

Mike: I had a problem throughout my earliest years, because, as I said, my lungs weren’t fully developed, being born on the first day of the eighth month of my mother’s pregnancy, so it’s always been a problem. Anesthesia, on a couple of occasions since my childhood, has almost killed me and, about six years ago, I think it did again, but again I got better because you know… Captain America.

CBC: You were bookish?

Mike: Yes, I read incessantly, partially because it was a pain in the ass to climb down those three flights of stairs. My grammar school—we were just on the edge of the school zone—so my grammar school was a very long walk (or seemed like at the time). My mother was hyper-protective when she was around me, which is understandable. So, I read a lot… biographies… even as a small child, I ate those things up. I would read anything.

CBC: You said you were a latchkey kid. Did you get a chance to go downtown?

Mike: When I turned 12, my mother gave me pretty much complete freedom.

I would go downtown on my own. Prior to that, we’d go downtown together. We

Inset left: A relatively recent photograph of Mike Gold.

Above: The cartoon team provided entertainment for a young Mike. This cover detail is from Mutt & Jeff #52 [June 1951]. Art by Sheldon Mayer.

Below: Skip Williamson cover art, Conspiracy Capers [’69].

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Top: Radio host, journalist, activist, oral historian Studs Terkel in his “lived-in” office, circa 1970s. Above: The “other” Mike Gold—and fellow radical!— Jewish American, communist writer, and literary critic born Itzok Isaac Granich [1894–1967], who Terkel met back in the day.

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go American (which used to be a Hearst paper until the Tribune bought it), and the Chicago Sun-Times.

CBC: Were your parents Kennedy Democrats?

Mike: They were Kennedy Democrats because they were Chicagoans, Jon! CBC: Even in the cemetery they were Kennedy Democrats! [chuckles] Mike: Oh yes! There’s the other side to that story I’ll tell you that doesn’t get reported quite as often. When Republicans in Illinois rose a stink about the election in 1960, Mayor Daley—who was sort of benevolently evil (he was a tyrant)—he said, “Well, fine, we’ll have a recount, as long as the recount is statewide.” The Republicans then went away as they didn’t want a recount because they had more phony votes than Cook County had! So that’s a part of the story that seems to be lost to history.

If there was a wake-up moment when I became aware of my surroundings. Again, I was precocious and, when I was five years old, Emmett Till was murdered—a Chicago kid about seven or eight years older than me. His mother demanded an open-casket funeral to show the world that the killers had beaten the poor kid to death. The photo of the dead teen was on the front page the Chicago Defender, which served the black community in Chicago (and was a historically important newspaper). That was their front page and it was ghastly… it was more ghastly than anything. And that had a big impact on me. I started reading the newspapers and started asking my parents questions. I’m sure there was more than that that transformed me, but Emmett Till’s murder was, in and of itself, an electrifying moment for me. I became very interested in the whole idea of how we—simply—treat other people.

CBC: How did you get exposed to an African American newspaper?

Mike: It was sold in the newsstand on the corner.

CBC: I know the photo of his disfigured face was in Jet magazine. I didn’t know that it was on the front page of a daily newspaper… Wow! Mike: On the anniversary of Till’s death, the Defender reprinted it on the front page. I think that was about 10 years ago. And it’s just as impactful today even though we all know the story.

CBC: Not enough of us know the story. That’s the thing, Mike….

Mike: That’s true. That was very impactful on a young kid.

CBC: Especially because you’re white, right? I didn’t learn about it until I was in my late teens, if not my early 20s.

Mike: But I was a local kid. Look at that photograph and, if it doesn’t move you, there’s something wrong with you. The idea we can do this to anybody else—never mind a kid—is shocking to the very core.

CBC: He was only 13 or 14, right?

Mike: Yes. It’s not that my father would shield me, but around the same time—and this is a true story—walking down the street around the corner from our apartment, it was a hot summer day and there was a drugstore, and the doors to the store were open and you could see the comic book rack from the street. Even though I was merely five, of course I couldn’t let that go without checking it out, and my mother said, “Okay, I’ll buy you a comic book.” I picked up a copy of Tales from the Crypt. This was during the height of Wertham-ism, you know? She wasn’t bothered by my reading comics, but she thought that Tales from the Crypt was a little over the edge. So, instead she bought me Uncle Scrooge, which probably also aided my political development. [chuckles] But, from then on, she didn’t shield me from the Emmett Till thing because it was so important.

I’ve talked to other kids my age, and I have 10 years on you, and a number of Chicago kids from white communities saw that as a child and remember it forever I’m sure that until the day I go senile (which may have already happened), I will remember that. No question in my mind. That’s fine. If I could see Emmett Till’s mother today, I’d thank her—al#28 • Spring 2022 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos © the respective copyright holders. Dick Tracy TM & © Tribune Media Services, Inc. Chicago Tribune TM & © Chicago Tribune Company, LLC.

Below: Sunday comic section, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 22, 1940, featuring young Mike Gold’s fave comic strip, Dick Tracy,

by Chester Gould.

lived not far from the L stations, so getting downtown was pretty easy. Sometimes I’d take the bus. Yeah, I hung out downtown with my friends an awful lot. We’d haunt all the bookstores—first and foremost—and every newsstand we could find for comics and other magazines. We used to have magazines back then—you remember—and newspapers and stuff! I was very informed and loyal to Chicago and also very well-informed about New York history, as well. I’m a member of the Chicago Historical Society and all this other stuff. The lore of some of those people—larger-than-life people, and in many cases, larger-than-death people—just fascinated me, and still does.

CBC: Did you know Studs Terkel?

Mike: [Laughs] Yes… great question! Given the circumstances of my political work, I knew him pretty well, but Studs was getting along in years. I did his radio show maybe a half-dozen times—once with Jerry Garcia, which was really cool—and every time I’d meet him at a book signing or something, he’d ask my name and I’d tell him. He’d say, “I knew the real Michael.” Well, the “real” Michael was a socialist editor of a number of magazines in the ’20s and ’30s—the New Masses and publications like that—a very well-known left-wing writer. He knew that guy. I would tell him, “No, no, no, I’m the ‘real’ Michael. That guy just assumed that name.” He’d just smile. Until he found out that when I was 19, I was with a newspaper that was more or less the Industrial Workers of the World, so we were both Wobblies. That was a bonding thing. So, yeah, I knew Studs.

He was a brilliant man, a brilliant man.

CBC: So, was the Chicago Daily News a Democrat paper?

Mike: They prided themselves on putting out an independent paper. Chicago is such an overwhelmingly a Democratic town. The last time Chicago had a Republican as mayor, he was voted out of office, in 1931, which was 90 years ago. It’s primarily a democratic-party paper. But they toed the line.

CBC: Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the Chicago Tribune a pretty conservative paper?

Mike: The owner, Robert McCormick, was very conservative. He was an “America-firster” back when it was a real organization. It was Walt Disney and Harold Gray and people like that. He was pretty hard-core. The Tribune itself wasn’t as hard-core as he was—usually—outside of the editorial page. It was sort of like the Wall Street Journal today. Other than the editorial page, it’s usually pretty straightforward.

The Red Scare stuff of the 1950s… everybody participated in that. I’ve yet to see a 1950s newspaper or an old TV broadcast that didn’t reflect those times—a lot of it out of fear and paranoia. Fear for your job, not fear of communism. It was a problem of the times… other than the fact that we got the Tribune on Sundays. I loved the comic section— Dick Tracy remains one of my favorites. We had Little Orphan Annie, Smokey Stover, and wonderful strips like that. So, as a kid, I read the Tribune.

By the time I was about 11 or 12, I was reading all four major newspapers in Chicago.

CBC: There was the Sun… And what was the fourth one?

Mike: The Tribune, the Daily News, the Chica-

bud plant keeps growin’

Comics & Comix Man

Bud Plant starts to get really busy in the 1970s, retailin’, publishin’, and distributin’!

[In part one of Bud Plant’s interview last ish, yours truly spent an inordinately long period of time learning about the mail order maven’s fan beginnings in San Jose, the California city where Bud co-owned two comic book shops before turning 20. We left the conversation as the 1970s were dawning, a new decade when he would help start the Comics & Comix chain, dabble in comics publishing, and become a wholesale distributor in those nascent days of the direct market. This interview was conducted by yours truly in November of last year and was transcribed by Steven “Flash” Thompson.—Ye Ed.]

Above: Nabbed from his Facebook page, a 2017 photo of writer John Ostrander.

Above: Bud Plant at 2019 San Diego Comic-Con, when he was a special guest of the show!

Below: Bud’s early ’70s pro-zine, Promethean Enterprises (from left) #5, #4, and #3, produced with Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. and Al Davoren.

Comic Book Creator: We covered a short amount of time in the first interview segment, so I hope we can cover a longer period this time. [laughter] All right, so I think we’re coming into 1970, roughly. What comes first: Promethean Enterprises or Comics & Comix?

Bud Plant: Oh, definitely Promethean. We did the first issue in 1969. That was with Jim Vadeboncoeur and Al Davoren, and we actually had another editor called Pat Price. I think he left after the first issue. These were four guys, right, putting out a fanzine, and the first issue was the one with the black-&-white heavy stock covers with Rick Griffin art on the cover.

CBC: What was the thinking about doing the fanzine?

Bud: You know, that’s a good question, Jon. [chuckles] Vadeboncoeur was probably more oriented toward publishing things than I was, so he may have been the driver behind that. And then, actually, Al Daveron was our contact with all the underground artists. You know, underground comix were coming out then, so people were putting out lots of fanzines, and there was a lot of fanzine activity in San Jose. Somehow, we just all came together and said, “Let’s do this, let’s do a fanzine, but let’s do a nice one.” Jim and Al were both older than I, so they had a little more experience.

Jim, in fact, ended up working for a printer and that’s how we got in a back door at a printer and were able to do ’em cheap, because we were handling a lot of the production

ourselves… stripping it up, opaquing the plates (if you can remember that old technology), actually folding and stapling the pages together for the first several issues. This was until we got to #5 and then went totally commercial and had the printer do the whole nine yards. [laughs] So there were five issues over… what…? About five years. About one a year.

CBC: What did you specifically do on it aside from production work?

Bud: Well, I was the guy that was going out to the conventions at that point. I was starting to score original art—Roy Krenkel drawings from the Phil Seuling shows—starting in ’70, and Gray Morrow, Al Williamson, a little bit. Oh, and I picked up my really nice Reed Crandall “John Carter” piece from Jerry Weist, in ’70 or ’71… We ran the Roy Krenkel piece on the back of Promethean #3, the one with Crumb on the cover. So I was contributing some of the artwork I was picking up and, of course, I was involved in the input on what we were gonna publish and, since I was starting to deal underground comix, I was pretty intimate with what was coming out. Then Al, of course, was the guy who drove up to San Francisco from San Jose to get stoned with, you know, Crumb and Spain and [S. Clay] Wilson, and whoever else he was running into. So, yeah, it was really a group effort. We had above-ground stuff, like I mentioned, and also the underground stuff. It was probably the first kind of hybrid fanzine that ever covered both areas.

CBC: Had there been underground fanzines before?

Bud: I don’t think so. I could be wrong, but I just can’t think of any particular fanzines were dealing with undergrounds.

I mean there could’ve been some coverage in a crud-zine or something… [laughs] what we used to call crud-zines.

I can’t think of anything. I’m sure later on there was, but when we first put out the 1969 issue, I don’t think there was much going. That’s early undergrounds, y’know? Crumb only did ZAP in… what…? ’67 or so. So ’69 is still early days.

CBC: So, did you impress those underground guys? They must have been…

Bud: Were they impressed with the magazine? Oh, yeah.

Promethean Enterprises TM & © Bud Plant, Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., and Al Davoren.

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#28 • Spring 2022 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Promethean Enterprises TM & © Bud Plant, Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., and Al Davoren. Man from Utopia TM & © the estate of Rick Griffin.

Griffin let us use pieces for the first two covers and he eventually turned into a pretty big deal. In ’69–70, he was one of the hardcore underground guys, but he wasn’t nearly as famous as he became later on. He let us use one of his originals for one of his posters for the second issue. He may have actually done an original for us! It was a couple mice fighting with each other, slashing each other up with swords, and then the logo, definitely was custom done. We were idiots. [laughs] Maybe part of this was Vadeboncoeur because Vadeboncoeur always liked to do things differently than normal people do ’em, and we had decided that we wanted to do a magazine that actually didn’t have a name, that just had a logo, a logotype. Griffin had done this really weird logotype for the first one up above his fighting mice, which is kind of a gobbledygook thing, but it looked really cool. He’d done a poster just like that, too, for…Man, I’m not sure if that was a rock poster or just a doodley drawing but it’s one of these things that’s really cool. You look at it and you go, “Wow, that is really cool, but I have no idea what that means.” It’s not really letters… I don’t know… kinda…?

So, anyway, the magazine wasn’t supposed to have a real name and, in the first issue, in the colophon on the inside, it actually has the little logo, saying such and such is published by Promethean Enterprises. So the name of our company, per se, was Promethean Enterprises. But, of course, it had to have a name, so it ended up being called Promethean Enterprises.

CBC: So, what’s the story behind Crumb’s cover? What does it mean?

Bud: Oh, the story goes that he actually gave us another cover that he had done previously, but it was called AllNi**er Comics. Now, I don’t remember what the picture was, but you can imagine… And, as liberal and all as we were, we just said, [laughs] “Robert, we can not do this. We cannot do All-Ni**er Comics on the cover of Promethean.

Who we gonna show it to?” So, I think he knocked that cover off for us as a secondary thing. It’s possible he just had it as a piece of art, but I think he knocked it off for us, because it’s a pretty simplistic drawing. And what does it mean? Hell, if I know! [laughter] I have no idea. Maybe I should ask Al Daveron that sometime, see if he remembers. But hey, yeah, that’s cool! We got a Crumb cover. That’s groovy! I think All-Ni**er Comics did get published somewhere in some sketchbook, but at least we didn’t have our names on it.

CBC: [Laughs] So you were dealing in fanzines. Were you dealing with the publishers themselves, each and every individual publisher of those you wanted to carry?

Bud: Yes, absolutely. That’s the only way it could be done back then. We’re talking the beginnings in ’71, ’72, ’73. There was no distribution for fanzines except for me and Phil Seuling, and whatever they could sell to their local comic book shop, y’know? Stuff like Voice of Comicdom coming out of San Jose. It originally came out of San Francisco. That was Marty Arbunich, Bill Dubay—who, of course, went on to edit Warren magazines—and Rudi Franke, who was a teacher. Somehow, they got in touch with Rich Corben and they eventually had Rich Corben on the cover. They’d bring that in to a couple comic shops in San Jose and sell it to ’em and maybe a couple shops in San Francisco, but that was it. So, I was the source for fanzines through the mail and selling them at conventions. That’s how I got a lot of the fanzines: simply going to a convention and some fanzine publisher would either come up to me or I’d come up to him and say, “Yeah, I wanna carry that. I’ll buy 10 copies or 20 copies of something, take ’em home and put ’em on my list in the Rocket’s Blast or the Buyer’s Guide to advertise ’em.

CBC: That must have been meticulous work. That’s a lot going on in your head, isn’t it?

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2022 • #28

Bud: Well, you know, I started small and worked up. In the early days, there wasn’t that much stuff. I dealt with Jerry Weist for Squa Tront, Rich Hauser for Spa Fon, Rudi Franke for Voice of Comicdom, and Dennis Cunningham, who did Weirdom (he published the first Corben stuff in Weirdom, which was a sort of hybrid fanzine that dealt with horror movies and comics somewhat).

So, yeah. I just dealt with individuals, like Gary Arlington.

Of course, he did Man from Utopia. I think it was financed by some buddy of his, but he actually published it. And he published AllStars, which was a nice little fanzine and he did Nickel Library, which I used to carry until Bill Gaines shut him down because he was using copyrighted stuff. Bill Spicer who was doing Graphic Story Magazine and I was buying Graphic Story from him or another one of those guys in Los Angeles, Richard Kyle. I was just getting stuff from whoever was doing it. They were all publishing in pretty small print runs.

CBC: What was your motivation for doing it? Was it that there was a market niche not being attended to or was it your personal interest? Were you simply fascinated with fanzines?

Bud: I’d probably say it was personal interest. I wasn’t smart enough at the time to realize there was a niche. I realized that nobody else seemed to be doing it and it made sense. I was

Above: The first issue of Promethean Enterprises, the Plant/ Vadeboncoeur/Davoren prozine focusing on underground comix that described Bud as the “money man.” Below: Bud holds this particular comic book, Rick Griffin’s Man from Utopia one-shot [1972], in the highest esteem.

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This page: Bill Spicer’s Graphic Story World was a remarkable… one hesitates to use the word “fanzine,” so… publication that included comics stories and, more importantly, criticism and comprehensive interviews with notable creators, including Alex Toth, John Severin, Gahan Wilson, and Howard Nostrand. What most impressed Bud Plant was the mag devoted two issues entirely to the brilliant Powerhouse Pepper, Spacehawk, and MAD cartoonist, Basil Wolverton, #12 [Fall 1970], seen above, and #14 [Winter 1971], below.

CBC: They were.

Bud: But they quickly switched over. And, of course, Bill Spicer with Graphic Story Magazine. That was one of the highest quality magazines at the time. Things were starting to get a little more professional as far back as ’65, ’66, so by the time I got into fanzines in 1969, 1970, there’s some good stuff out there. There was no distribution system for it. How did these guys even find out about a comic shop or reach people through the mail if they didn’t go to conventions?

CBC: Were the fanzines able to make any kind of in-roads at all with the underground distribution network? Was there any room or no?

Bud: I would say no. There was no distribution system to speak of for the underground publishers. Most were distributing their own comix and they would also trade and distribute the other publishers’ comix. You could get Print Mint titles straight from Print Mint, but you could also get some Last Gasp or Rip-Off Press titles from them too, because they swapped their comix with those publishers.

All those guys were dealing direct to head shops and to whoever they would find that would buy multiple copies of the things. Then you were starting to get comic book shops into that equation, too… Gary Arlington, of course, with the San Francisco Comic Book Company. He was the best store in San Francisco and he’d have multiple copies of the undergrounds when they came out. We’d have ’em down at San Jose in 1969–70. I think there was a distributor in Detroit—I can’t think of what their name was—that I think did handle some fanzines and things. The one guy I knew out here was Leonardo DiCaprio’s dad, George DiCaprio.

You know about him?

CBC: Do I? I know him, sure.

Bud: Well, you know George DiCaprio was what you call a rack jobber, which meant he was taking the undergrounds in the back of his car—he had a piece of sh*t car, too, I’ll tell ya. [laughs] Some old Impala or something, but he’d drive around Los Angeles and go into comic book shops and head shops and literally rack job ’em. That means you pull off the old ones that weren’t selling, or that had been chewed up, and you put new ones on and you sell ’em to the store, whatever it was. It was a lotta head shops at the point, and they weren’t all comic shops. In 1970, there weren’t a lot. But that’s what George DiCaprio did and that’s how I met him. And he actually published a couple things out of Los Angeles. Everybody sort of dipped their hands into publishing undergrounds if they were involved in the business, just like I did. So that’s how I met George and how I met Leonardo. [laughs] I don’t know him now. I mean, George would remember me, but Leonardo was, like, 10 or 11 years old at that point.

CBC: George partnered with Ron Turner up at Last Gasp.

Bud: Exactly. Yeah.

CBC: Were you excited about fanzines, with the potential for what could happen? I mean, let’s look at the history of comics: you had the mainstream stuff, but then Jim Warren come in and introduced something that was more adult.

While still on the retail racks, it was still something new, and then the undergrounds come on and they’re working through their underground network, and you had these real high-quality ’zines that were coming out—Voice of Comicdom, Spa Fon, and Squa Tront. Did you think there was promise? Were you hopeful for the future?

Bud: Oh, yeah! I think that’s another reason that I went into that particular business. I saw there was lots of really interesting products coming out that needed to reach people. I like to consider it just part of being a collector.

As a collector, you love to show your buddies your latest acquisitions and turn people on to stuff you discover… You know, “Look at this. This is Angelo Torres. You know who Angelo Torres is? No? You haven’t seen him before. Well, he draws like Frazetta!” You could do that with old comics, but you could do the same thing with fanzines. Basil Wolverton? Nobody’d ever done anything on Basil Wolverton and #28 • Spring 2022 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Graphic Story Magazine TM & © Bill Spicer.

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near San Francisco and the undergrounds were all being published within a 50-mile radius (for the most part), and the fanzines I was finding at the conventions… and I loved all that stuff! Well, not every underground comic, as there were crappy ones, too, but I loved the good ones…

ZAP, the Rick Griffin stuff… I loved the fanzines when we were seeing Frazetta, Williamson, and guys like that appear in fanzines, as well as the coverage of EC Comics.

So, yeah, it was like, “These are really cool! Somebody oughta be taking these to conventions and selling ’em to people; somebody ought a be putting ’em out through the mail.”

To me, one realization I had was that dealing with single copies of old comics was kind of a hassle, you know? You have one comic and you’ve gotta describe it, grade it, and come up with a price. I had done some of that because I had been wheeling and dealing in comics to get some money for my own collection up until ’69–70. I said, “You know, I can sell 10 copies or 20 copies or 30 copies of the same issue of an underground comic. That seems to make sense to me. Let’s do it!”

CBC: Do you still have your own collection of the fanzines that you had when you started collecting?

Bud: Yeah, I sure do.

CBC: Were you cognizant of the advent of Xerox machines or photocopying? I’d take it that a whole bunch were crudzines that came out then. There was a difference in quality that may have been taking place starting in the early ’70s?

Bud: That’s absolutely true. When I first got into fandom in ’65, most fanzines tended to be kind of crud-zines. Even my buddies were doing… They had a mimeograph or a ditto machine. I never could tell the difference between the two. The guy had it in his garage and he did a fanzine called Eccentric. He became my partner, John Barrett, but they were doing a little fanzine there. There was another fanzine in San Jose called Ymir. I don’t know if it was photo-offset but then, like I say, I bring up Voice of Comicdom because they were doing that good photooffset printing. So, yeah, the fanzines were stepping up in quality. I mean, Jerry Weist…! Rich Hauser with Spa Fon! Both of those were good quality magazines with color covers and good black&-white printing. No more of this ditto and mimeo crap.

CBC: Buddy Saunders, too?

Bud: Yeah! I think the first couple issues of Star-Studded, his thing, the Texas Trio did those. The first couple issues may have been like the old RBCCs…

remembering joe

Memories of Sinnott The final portion of CBC’s tribute to one of comics’ greatest, Joltin’ Joe Sinnott Compiled by GREG BIGA

Above: Joe Sinnott at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, late ’40s/early ’50s.

Below: Undated pic of Marvel stalwarts (from left) John Buscema, Don Heck, and Joe.

#28 • Spring 2022 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos courtesy of Mark Sinnott.

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THAT SINNOTT SPARKLE Longtime Marvel production ace and later Archie Comics mainstay JACK MORELLI shared: “We’ve all heard the old saying, ‘He had a twinkle in his eye.’ But I’d always thought it was just that, an old saying. Then I met Joe, and not only did he actually possess said twinkle, but he had the gift to produce it in you whenever you were with him. I can’t recall going anywhere with Joe in his native Hudson Valley where people did not joyfully exclaim the moment he walked in: ‘Mr. Sinnott! Mr. Sinnott, so good to see you!’ And he would immediately engage with that Sinnott sparkle and make them feel just how special they were to him.

“I will forever cherish that instant when he would first see me walk up and he’d flash those smilin’ Irish eyes, that forever-boyish dimpled grin, hit me with that short, sharp ‘Ha!’ And squeeze my arm and pull me in. He really could make you feel like a million bucks.

“I’m sure a lot will be said about Joe’s legendary craft as an inker by much better versed historians than myself, but in considering it while writing this I can’t help but feel that that honest, crisp, clean, sure and genuinely alive line which was the hallmark of his work, which made everyone it touched better and defined inking excellence in the seminal generation of our industry could only have come from him, because it was so clearly an extension of the man himself. Maybe that’s why Joe never lost the ability to flawlessly produce that beautiful line, even into his 90s and with a badly injured shoulder that affected his working arm.

Because he never stopped being that man.

“Joe had a truly incredible memory. He and I often discussed baseball and its history, and I could never stump him. There was a player, not on Joe’s beloved Giants, but rather on the Cardinals from 1941 to 1963 named Stan Musial, whose monumental talent on the diamond was matched only by his authentic modesty, generosity, charm, warmth and grace off the field. So much so that upon his retirement, Commissioner and writer Ford Frick dubbed him ‘Baseball’s Greatest Knight.’ Joe Sinnott was almost assuredly ‘Comics’ Greatest Knight.’”

BUTCH AND SUNDANCE Artist, editor, designer, and letterer JOHN WORKMAN worked with Joe and definitely grasped Joe’s love of Bing Crosby. “During part of the time when I was lettering Marvel’s Fantastic Four,” he said, “I was always pleased to get a package containing an entire issue of original FF art that had been inked by Joe Sinnott… Sometimes, Joe and I would talk by phone in order to let one another know how things were going as far as the deadlines. It was only later that I got to meet and talk with Joe face-to-face. If my memory is correct (a questionable assumption these days), I ran into Joe at a New York City convention, where I also talked with Carmine Infantino (who had hired me at DC back in 1975) and Joe Giella. Somewhere around here—in the studio or maybe in a photo album in the house—there’s a photo of me with the two Joes, our arms linked as we stood together in an aisle at that comics convention.

“Later, at a small but wonderful convention north of New York, Joe Sinnott and Gene Colan were part of a four-person panel, with the other two positions filled by me and Bob Smith. Joe and Gene treated the two of us as equals, though both Bob (I’m certain) and I had the phrase, ‘We’re not worthy!’ continually running through our respective heads… Of course, one of the thrills of my lifetime was to be inked by Joe on a single page that I drew for the 400th issue of Thor.

“Those phone conversations that Joe and I had often veered off into non-related subjects, including Joe’s great love for the works of Bing Crosby. I knew that Joe had great respect for the crooner, and that he’d done artwork for several record album re-releases of Crosby material. Joe also got a kick out of the story of how der Bingle had once paid a visit to my ‘hometown’ of Aberdeen, Washington, when one of his sons was injured in an auto accident there and was recuperating in a local hospital. Then, too, there was the fact that Bing had been born in Tacoma, Washington, a city where I used to go to visit various bookstores to purchase used comic books for five cents each.

“A few years later, I happened to have the TV on and to be watching—for the umpteenth time—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Part-way through the movie, a thought struck me, and I knew that I had to give a call to Joe Sinnott.

I reached Joe and blurted out, ‘Joe, do you realize that if Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been made 20 years earlier, it could have starred Bing Crosby and Bob Hope?’ Joe laughed and said, ‘Yeah, yeah. That could have worked.’ We talked about how Bing could have sung ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,’ and how Bing-as-Butch would have handled what scriptwriter William Goldman called, ‘The greatest kick in the balls in the history of American cinema,’ when Butch successfully fought one of his underlings. Joe felt that Bing and Bob could have, instead, made use of their ‘patty-cake’ routine that had already been done to death in other Hope/Crosby films. We talked about the need to change some of the dialogue, and we both agreed that Sundance’s disgust at the sight of Bolivia and the ‘I don’t know how to swim’ bit could have been handled perfectly by Bob Hope. We laughed some more, talked about a few other things, and then said our good-byes.

“I talked more on the phone with Joe at least once more

S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant® is a registered trademark of Stephen R. Bissette; color by Chuck Forsman, color art ©2022 Stephen R. Bissette and Charles Forsman.

The Transformative Times of a Comic Book Rebel

Interview conducted by Jon B. Cooke • Transcribed by Steven Thompson I’ve been chums with Stephen Russell Bissette for nigh on 30+ years now, he being my oldest friend from the comic book realm, though I’ve admired his efforts since being captivated by SRB’s artistry on Swamp Thing…

Heck, I also dug 1941, his whacked-out tour de force done with buddy Rick Veitch. Anyway, back in 1990, I was in an entirely new field—the world of horror fiction—when I produced a fiction-zine for a short (though lauded) spell—and we two met at the Horror Writers of America annual meeting. Though that affair atop the Providence Biltmore was attended by such legends as Robert Bloch and Harlan Ellison, it was chatting with Steve I remember best. At the time, he was heavily promoting his horror comics anthology, Taboo, and had graciously given me a set as gift (which I promptly lost, but that’s another story), and since that time we’ve popped into each other’s lives, and I can say honestly that SRB is a true buddy.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2022 • #28

I can also readily admit to admiring the man and his achievements in so many diverse categories, whether as creator rights advocate, amateur paleontologist, horror movie expert, First Amendment champion, Vermont cryptozoologist, comic book historian, film critic, crusading publisher, writer of fiction and non-fiction, lecturer, naturalist, art teacher, and… oh yeah!

Before I forget… he’s also one kick-ass ARTIST! On my first out-of-state foray since Covid-19 hit, I drove up to the Green Mountain State to interview SRB in his studio on one chilly December Saturday, when Steve and his lovely wife, Marj, treated me splendidly and kept me nourished and warm. We allude to an earlier interview herein, which was mostly included in CBC’s special ish, Swampmen: Muck-Monsters and Their Makers. After our conversation, SRB told me he signed a deal for a graphic novel with a major publisher. See postscript for details!—JBC. 37

CBC: Okay, let’s start: Vermont. Do you feel really connected to this state?

Is it a part of you and you’re a part of it?

Steve: I can’t go as far as H.P. Lovecraft and say, “I am Vermont.” [laughs] But Vermont is in my blood. Seeing how our country’s gone, I’m really glad I’m in Vermont, you know? Things are swinging further and further extreme right, and Vermont, even though we have a Republican governor—we almost always have a Republican governor—he’s handled the pandemic with relative sanity and, yeah, I feel connected here. That said, we have as many buttheads and boneheads as anybody else.

CBC: Besides Dover, New Jersey, have you ever lived anywhere else?

Steve: Stretches of time in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I began going out to Santa Fe in 1979 to visit friends. I met my first wife there, Nancy O’Conner, who changed her name to Marlene. I’d probably spend cumulatively the equivalent of six to nine months in Santa Fe between 1979–81. I’d go out ’til the money ran out. I’d sell some work to Marvel or Scholastic or whatever, enough to pay my rent ahead where I was living in Vermont, and, at $60 a month, I could afford to do it. And then I’d go and live in Santa Fe as long as I could until the money ran out. If I had been painting cowboys, horses, landscapes, cattle skulls, or Native American girls in the nude on cattle skulls, I probably could’ve made a go of it in the New Mexican arts scene, at that time. But it’s changed a lot. That’s no longer a correct thing.

CBC: Let’s be honest to readers up front about Swamp Thing. We’re not gonna talk a lot about Swamp Thing, even though we’ve got the character on the cover, but I do want to obviously touch upon it. For one thing, because you spoke a lot for my Swampmen book, extensively on your history with Swamp Thing, but there’s a lot more to your career.

Steve: Well, I’m gonna die being known as the Swamp Thing guy. That’s number one, probably. I mean, my career’s all over the place, Jon. I write, I draw, I’m doing all this Blu-ray and home video bonus stuff—commentary tracks, bonus feature “lectures”—but yeah, Swamp Thing’s what I’m gonna be remembered for, no doubt about it. I still draw him all the time. For various fan commissions and so on, Swamp Thing and Abby is the number one request. Number two is John Constantine. I still have a lot of affection for the characters. I just don’t have any patience left with the powers that be at DC Entertainment because there’s nothing left of the company we worked with before, and, you know, I didn’t have a lot of warm fuzzies back then. [laughter] CBC: Is that okay with you?

Steve: Sure. That’s life! I’m lucky! We were very lucky… lucky that our buddy Tom Yeates was the first of the Kubert School graduates to land that gig. John Totleben and I were very fortunate that our close friend Tom suggested we try out for the job. We were very lucky, John and I, that Len Wein chose us… I don’t know who else we were up against, but, in years since, I’ve seen samples by Dave Gibbons, Art Suydam… though I don’t know at what point in Swamp Thing’s history those drawings had been done. We were lucky that we were on the book with [writer] Marty Pasko, who, you know…Marty passed away last year and I miss him. We were

incredibly fortunate to be working on the book when it turned out to be the first American publication Alan Moore started writing for!

John Totleben; his wife, Michelle; Rick Veitch; his wife, Cindy, we’re still friends with all these people and that’s in part because we all bonded over that crazy, insane, wonderful, horrible, bizarre chemistry and experience we had on Swamp Thing! We were lucky to be working with Len Wein as editor. I mean, here you are having the blessings of the editor being the original co-creator to work on the character, which, for our generation, was important. We were lucky to get to know [Swamp Thing co-creator] Bernie Wrightson because of Swamp Thing. Bernie was one of the kindest, most generous guys I ever met in the comic book industry.

We were lucky to be working with [editor] Karen Berger at the time when Karen stepped up to the plate out of doing editorial coordination work at DC into being a full-fledged editor and ended up being part of the catalyst for what became Vertigo. So, yeah! I feel incredibly fortunate that we got to do that.

CBC: It’s still in print, right? And you get a little chunk of that?

Steve: We get royalties every quarter, and I have to say, for the record, out of all the work I did in the comics field, DC is the only company that still honors their contracts. We still get quarterly royalties.

CBC: Could you give an idea of the amount? Could you, let’s say, pay a month’s mortgage on what you get a year?

Steve: You never know. It’s manna from heaven, because you don’t have any advance notice of what it’s gonna be.

CBC: But it pays for groceries, right?

Steve: Oh, it’s beyond groceries. Sometimes it’s in the thousands. We get a percentage of John Constantine, but not a share of Swamp Thing, to be clear. The way entertainment companies do things, when there’s a Constantine TV show, we don’t earn off of that because that’s all an internal…

Warner paying itself or not paying itself. We only get a percentage of what Constantine earns in print or from licensing, but when there’s a videogame, with some outside entity licensing John Constantine, we get a share. John Totleben and I are splitting, like, a fraction of one percent, but that can be thousands of dollars. And we just never know. I’d say the smallest royalty checks are in the hundreds and the largest are in the thousands. They’re quarterly, without fail. There’s only been a few times since 1988 that a quarterly payment might be late and, when they’re late, at most it’s like two to four weeks late. And as I say, given all the publishers all of us ended up working with over the decades, DC’s the only one that honors and still pays those royalties. And they were genuine royalties. They no longer define them as royalties. Now, we have to pay the taxes on that income as income.

So, we’re somehow still employees on the books at DC, even though we haven’t done any work for them for ages. [Jon laughs] Corporate tax loss, right? But, yeah, it’s great. I feel honored we got to do it; we’re still benefitting from it; I’m occasionally able to send money to my now-adult kids when there’s a windfall from that. It’s great. I’m very thankful.

CBC: What’s the worst thing about Swamp Thing and Constantine and…?

Swamp Thing TM & © DC Comics.

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#28 • Spring 2022 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Swamp Thing TM & © DC Comics. Painting ©1984, 2022 Stephen R. Bissette and John Totleben.

Steve: Well, you know, I can’t even say it’s the worst thing, but after 10 years of friendship with Alan Moore, when he cut me off, probably the hardest thing is people reaching out to me, still, with an expectation that I can do something for them or I can provide a bridge to Alan Moore when Alan hasn’t spoken to me in over 25 years at this point. But I can’t even say that’s a bad thing. It happens because people associate me with a body of work that we all did that was good enough to stand the test of tome to this point and is still in print. So, you know… It’s a double-edged sword, to be sure, but when you ask, “worst,” quote/unquote thing… that would be it.

CBC: You were friends with him.

Steve: We were good friends for 10 years. We worked together on projects, we visited each other, we stayed in each other’s homes. Whatever I said in that Comics Journal interview that Alan took umbrage with, that was the end of it. I had seen him do the same sort of thing with other professionals and I knew when my day came that it was final, because that’s Alan.

That’s how he deals with the world, right? If you’re cut off, you’re cut off.

That’s it.

I miss Alan. I miss Melinda Gebbie. We were working together on Taboo, with Lost Girls. I miss them, but I can’t do anything to change it and I’ve stayed in contact with, and friends with, one of their daughters, because…You know, we met Alan and Phyllis’s daughters when they were little girls, and I’m still friends with one of them. Life goes on. You make the best of it. Whatever it was that happened, I couldn’t change it, I can’t fix it.

For years, I didn’t even know what it was that was the problem. That’s worst thing. And the worst thing isn’t that that happened and oh, poor me.

The worst thing is people unaware of that understandably will reach out to me with an expectation I can facilitate their being in touch with Alan and I have to always say to them, “Well, no. In fact, probably best not to mention my name.” [laughter] CBC: I think that you guys being in the first class, the first class at the Joe Kubert School… At the time that you did, there was a world of jobs and opportunities out there that really weren’t there in the ‘60s and really weren’t there necessarily there in the ’80s…

Steve: [Laughs] Well, wait a minute now. That’s a little bit of rose-colored glasses. We were at the Kubert School when the Implosion happened at DC. We came out of the Kubert School groomed to enter an industry that was collapsing. We started in ’76, which is right when newsstand distribution was beginning to implode, and we graduated in the Spring of ’78, by which time not only were mainstream comics in the sh*tter, the underground comix movement was over! We were lucky enough to be able to work with a publisher like Cliff Neal with Dr. Wirtham’s Comix & Stories and Larry Shell self-publishing Alien Encounters and ’50s Funnies. But that was like—pardon my French—but that was like the spent d*ck trickling what’s left of the underground. Arcade was over, right? Brilliant publication, Arcade, but it was the tombstone. RAW didn’t exist yet, so Spiegelman wasn’t even onto the next phase of his career. We entered the field at a time when, suddenly, there was no work in the comic book field. [laughter] And we also entered the field at a time when—we did not know why.

We still do not know why—but there was some sort of a blackballing at DC of anyone from the Kubert School. We would go up for interviews and would have what we thought were good interviews. I had a really horrible one with Joe Orlando, probably the worst job interview that I have ever had in my entire life. We would come back and Joe Kubert would ask us happily, “How’d it go?” and we’d, crestfallen, tell him, “Well, they don’t want us.” It’s my understanding that it was finally Len Wein who finally said, “You know what? I’m done with this. I am going to give work to Tom Yeates.” And it was Tom Yeates that broke that logjam, or firewall, or blackballing, or whatever you wanna call it, Jon, that somebody at DC had decided that Joe’s students weren’t gonna be getting a foot in the door up there. As I also mentioned during our earlier interview years ago, my first pro work was with Scholastic magazine and with Heavy Metal. Here’s a little more context about what we’d talked about before, bear with me: I was the first one in the door from our group at Heavy Metal because I saw the ad in National Lampoon magazine that they were gonna start this new magazine and I went to the Kubert school with a full set of Métal Hurlant that my Johnson State College friend Jack Venooker had gifted me when I headed off for Kubert School… So I showed up with Métal Hurlant, showing it to my classmates like Rick Veitch and Tom Yeates, going, “Holy sh*t! Look what’s going on over in France and Belgium.

Because we hadn’t seen Druillet and Moebius and…you know?

That first year at Kubert School, I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to afford a second year, okay? My money was running out. I had saved all COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2022 • #28

through my high school years from working. I paid my own way for two years at Johnson State College, including dorm and fees and all that, and I had just enough left to go to the first year of the Kubert School.

So that first year, which was fall of ’76 to spring of ’77, I was already going in to New York with my folio and I was scared sh*tless. I’m a little scrawny Vermont kid, 21 years old. What’d I know? But I also knew this may be my only shot. This may be my only proximity to New York. Moving back to Vermont was the only option I really had. I was going to art directors and Joe, God bless him, gifted me the Scholastic contract, because the first two stories I did with Scholastic were signed, “Kubert School.”

Right? I was ghosting. Joe came to me to do the work and that was very flattering. And Joe loved what I did and it turned out Bob and Jane Stine, my editors—Bob Stine, better known as R.L. Stine of Goosebumps fame—they loved what I’d done, so when I graduated, Joe Kubert gifted me that contact, that connection, right? “Steve. Why don’t you continue working with Scholastic?” Oh, my god! Y’know? But that’s only because I got through that first year, Jon. During that first year, I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to afford to go back so every other week I was cherry-picking a day and going into New York with my portfolio. I went to High Times, I went to MAD, I went to DC, I went to Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal was just starting and John Workman was the editor up there. And then my father saw how serious I was, that I was pursuing this. I was out there hustling for work and my dad said, “We’ll pay for the second year.” So that’s the only reason I got to go to the second year. We were all on pins and needles! Rick Veitch didn’t know if the money was gonna come through with the Vermont state program that funded his going to school. I was out of money. I certainly wasn’t counting on my dad changing his tune, but my dad really bonded with Joe Kubert. I was never made privy to it, but I’m sure some kind of phone conversation went on between ’em. Whether it Joe and Muriel talking to my dad or just Joe and my dad. And my dad said, “I’ll cover you Previous spread: Stephen R. Bissette poses for Ye Ed’s camera and the Tyrant image from SRB’s 2013 print (with color design by Charles “The End of the F***ing World” Forsman!). This spread: At left is the (composited) Swamp Thing promotional three-pager from DC Sampler #3 [1984], layed out, penciled, and written by SRB! Top is The Comics Journal #93 [Sept. ’84] cover painting. Inks & finishes by John Totleben.

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Godzilla, King of the Monsters TM & © Toho Co., Ltd.

work for the first time, where it was more like a novel. Right? Novelists don’t worry about how long or short a chapter might end up being. It’s just whatever it needs to be. And I remember that panel Groth was part of, when he balked, and said, “Well, we would’ve done that.”

Well, at the time, nobody was doing that.

Nobody.

CBC: Because any editor would need to map out an issue.

Steve: They’d map out and pre-plan an issue. Page counts, particularly for serialized works, were usually tightly prescribed or controlled. My whole thing with comics…and I’d never thought about this before. I articulated it in a conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago, where we were kind of struggling with that aspect of how graphic novels are contracted. I said, “You know, when you’re really working a comic, the publisher wants us to approach it as if we’re assembling a model kit, from an instruction sheet. Everything’s already set. The parts are there. You just have to glue it together and paint it. But that’s not how it works: We’re sculpting. We don’t know what this is gonna be…and we shouldn’t know what it’s gonna be ’til it’s done.”

That’s the organic fun of doing comics where you’re not trying to squeeze them into a commercial format. And that was the permission. We put each issue together as the material was in hand.

CBC: Dave Sim said he’d bankroll anything you guys do?

Steve: Yeah. Originally the deal was it was going to be published with Aardvark-One International, but before we got Taboo #1 ready for the printer—and we printed at Preney Print and Litho, who was Dave’s printer up in Canada—the whole Diamond Comics/Dave Sim Puma Blues debacle happened, which, in a nutshell, was Dave was tired of putting together the collected Cerebus volumes in the $12.95 Swords of Cerebus compendium format and made it clear to the distributors that he was going to begin collecting Cerebus as true graphic novels: massive, 300- to 500-page books.

I remember Dave holding up a current Marvel graphic novel and going, “This isn’t a novel. This is a giant annual.” He was gonna do the 500-page Cerebus…

CBC: Telephone books.

Steve: That’s what they ended up being called because the only thing in our reality that remotely resembled what Dave was describing was the Manhattan telephone directory. The distributors—to a distributor!—said no. We can’t sell that. Part of it was the price point. They went, “No, no, no.

Fifteen bucks is all anyone will spend.” And Dave was the one who went, “well, no, I think this will work at $25.” The distributors said no. I remember the conversations with Dave because he was very pissed off about this. I remember him saying, “I have a bank, I have a printer, I own the work. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t do with it.” He went to his bank. They said, “Oh, we’ll set you up with credit card processing, and you’ll need an 800 phone number. Then you can take orders by phone.” He hired COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2022 • #28

a person named Karen McKiel to man the phones at the Aardvark offices. Dave did the first collected edition as direct sale only, because the distributors said no to it.

It sold out its print run almost immediately and suddenly the distributors and the retailers were in an uproar because Dave had “denied them” this lucrative commodity that he had offered them and that they had said no to and Dave broke the price point. In their minds, this was somehow Dave’s fault, a betrayal, a crime.

It was after the first phone book that DC announced the collected hardcover Dark Knight Returns, at a $25 price point.

Dave broke the glass ceiling with the first Cerebus collected. He proved that it was marketable because he sold out of his print run. Diamond responded by saying, “Well, we’re not gonna carry Cerebus anymore.” Then they looked at their Cerebus numbers. Cerebus was selling, if I remember correctly, about 13,000 copies per issue at the time. They decided it wasn’t lucrative to attack Cerebus because that actually made them money so they looked at what Aardvark Vanaheim was publishing, and Puma Blues—by Stephen Murphy and Michael Zulli—was the book that was expendable in the distributors’ minds, because it had low numbers, so f*ck Stephen and Michael, so they were going to not carry Puma Blues to punish Dave Sim. This put Dave in the aesthetic quandary of, “Well, I don’t own Puma Blues. Why are Stephen and Michael being punished because of my action? They had nothing to do with this.”

This led to Dave deciding—and I remember the day he called me and Marlene—we both got on the phone. We were equal partners with Taboo, my first wife and I at that point, and he said “I am not pulling the plug on you, but Aardvark One International is not going to publish Taboo, because I am dissolving Aardvark One International.” Dave realized he could not be a publisher if, as a publisher, his decisions and his actions about his own work, Cerebus, were going to suddenly bring that kind of Draconian distributor punitive action against someone he was publishing.

He could not ethically continue down that path. I understand people’s various problems with Dave, but he was one of the most stringently ethical people I’ve ever met in my life, which could be maddening if you’re on the “wrong side” of a given ethical dilemma. It also meant he was an absolutist. But he would think through these ethical issues in a way that I benefited from.

I learned a lot from my relationship with Dave. And he was right! If being a publisher was suddenly going to make people he published suffer, then Dave went, “I ethically cannot be a publisher any longer.” He worked it out. The deal was he would still bankroll us for another year. And bankrolling an anthology, as you know, Jon, you’re buying material you may not publish for another six months to a year. You’re building an inventory. The issues of Taboo were put together organically, meaning I may have paid someone for a story back in 1988 that wouldn’t actually see print until 1990. That freezes that 51

This page: At top is Alex Ross painting intended for a neverrealized 1963 collection. Above, SRB’s cover art for unpublished revival. Below is 1963 logo.

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#28 • Spring 2022 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

1963 TM & © Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette, and Rick Veitch. Associated characters TM & © the respective copyright holders. The Fury, N-Man, Comrade Cockroach TM & © Stephen R. Bissette.

Inset right and below: Illustrations by Tim done for TSR (which was bought by Wizards of the Coast some years back).

material for a time. There were people that I bought material from who would call and say, “Can I sell that elsewhere?” You know?

We would usually release them from any obligation and when I was in such a position, and we could afford to, we would just say, “Keep what we paid you. That was our option and our option has obviously expired.” I always saw the creators’ ownership as absolute.

CBC: So you had a bucket of money, basically?

Steve: From Dave, yes. And when that dried up, by then we were into Taboo #2 and we had earned enough to do Taboo #3 on our own. We were in the middle of what became Taboo #4 when Kevin Eastman decided to form Tundra and Kevin Eastman came to me and asked, “Can we publish Taboo?” I said, “No, but we can co-publish Taboo.” If you’ll note, the printing in Taboo #4 was a good step up from the quality of printing and paper that we had in Taboo #3.

CBC: How did you make money?

Steve: We didn’t. I lost so much money on doing Taboo.

I’d lost so much money co-publishing that the year of 1963—the Image Comics series that Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, myself, and our buddies, including John Totleben, Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, Chester Brown, Melinda Gebbie… We made so much money from 1963 that year that my accountant went, “Oh. Now we can take all your losses from the years you did Taboo and levy it against what your taxable income is this year.” We each made a modest fortune in 1993 on those 1963 comics. I made more than I ever made in my life, Jon, that year, because those comics sold! Mystery, Incorporated, which Rick and Alan split, sold over 600,000 copies.

My first issue of ’63 was The Fury—me and Dave Gibbons. We sold 500,000 copies. Those numbers, to Image, were like sh*t on their shoe because they were looking to sell a million or more on their books, right? But I’d

never before sold 500,000 copies of anything, Jon! [laughs] Never did again, either. But my losses from Taboo were so great that my accountant said, “This is how I’m gonna do this.”

CBC: How did you live?

Steve: Hand to mouth. I mean, I’ve always lived hand to mouth. My first wife, Marlene, and I, we were living in a little low-rent house on a dirt road in Marlboro and I was doing… well, a lot of work funded other work, juggling income and losses, it was always feast or famine. Crazy times.

During the Taboo years, I wrote Aliens: Tribes, I did a Godzilla with Dark Horse when they came to me. I was doing freelance work and a lot of that freelance money… God bless Marlene for putting up with me and my obsessions during those years. I was robbing Peter to pay Paul all the time. Our highest bill every month wasn’t our rent, it was our f*cking phone bill! It’s funny that I spent so many years of my life to get away from AT&T and now they own DC Entertainment. It’s like, “Oh, f*ck! I can’t get away from AT&T if I want to!” [laughter] CBC: Kids, this was back in the day when long distance cost you big bucks…

Steve: My phone bills would be almost $1,000 some months. And when Dave was subsidizing us, he would help cover some of that; we’d itemize the Taboo expenses for Karen McKiel to go over, because a lot of those costs were all associated with calling England. I was working with artists in England, France, Belgium, all over Canada.

The long-distance rates were insane. The least of the problems was John Totleben calling Erie, Pennsylvania, to Vermont, back and forth. Phone bills were a big part of what we could and couldn’t do back then. We didn’t have plotting credit on Swamp Thing because, when I raised the issue with DC Comics of how many stories John and I had plotted that we didn’t get credit for, the trade with DC is they would help recoup our phone bills—they’d pay a portion of our phone bill, but receive no payment or credit for plotting or co-plotting issues of Swamp Thing. I remember going through my phone bill and underlining Northampton, England, and Erie, Pennsylvania, and DC would reimburse me for that. But the trade-off was, we didn’t ask for or get plotting credit. Okay?

CBC: Ya gotta do whatcha gotta do.

Steve: My wife was happy! We got help with the phone bills and those were our expensive phone calls, y’know?

Other than that, my parents lived in Florida, her parents lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, and those were the other long distance calls we had. There was no choice but to work with AT&T. They had us all over a barrel. There was no email, there were no home computers. So it’s like these were not just business concerns. This was like life and death. You get to the first of the month and how are you gonna keep the phone on, and the electricity on? So, it was a very real part of the non-stop freelance budgeting and juggling.

I bought a pseudo-Airstream 1940s trailer that I parked just kitty-corner behind my garage in Marlboro and that was my studio. I could deduct that physical portion of the floor space combined of our house and my trailer as a little part of my business expense as a freelancer. You may or not remember this, Jon, because I don’t know how it impacted what you were doing, but there was a period of about two to three years where suddenly the IRS decided, “Artists can no longer deduct cost of materials or supply purchases relevant to their work. You can only deduct

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#28 • Spring 2022 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant® is a registered trademark of Stephen R. Bissette; Tyrant #1 cover color by Gerhard, color art ©1994, 2022 Stephen R. Bissette and Gerhard.

want to buy ad space or not, all that. That was at a time when we had, what, 12 distributors back then…? Diamond, Capital, Friendly Frank’s, Andromeda and Neptune up in Canada, Neptune, and Titan in the UK. We had almost a dozen, if not a dozen distributors, and there were some little regional distributors. We solicited Taboo #1 and it made money. It was profitable. It was the only issue of Taboo that was profitable.

When the profits came in, we cut checks to everybody that was in it for their pro rata share, depending on their page count. I remember getting a call from Dave. He had called a couple people that were in Taboo #1 and when he found out we had mailed the checks, Dave Sim called me to congratulate me. He said, “I was waiting to see what you guys were gonna do,” if we were going to mail the contributors their profit share or pocket the money, and I was, like, “Dave, there’s no question.” But this also meant Above: Splash page for Grimthat when we got into hot jack: The Manx Cat [2019] by water in Taboo #2 with the Tim Truman (cover below). printers—first we lost our production support locally (they didn’t want to photograph the cover or inside cover paintings), our local printer’s binder wouldn’t bind the issue once it was printed, so we had to find a binder—we had no cash reserves to fall back on because we had distributed the profits. A friend in banking mocked us for this and I was, like, this is the nature of creator-owned publishing. We don’t own the work, the creators do.

This spread: SRB’s unfinished masterpiece, Tyrant, an ambitious self-published, independent comic book series that was to chronicle—in glorious black-&-white, the life span of a Tyrannosaurus rex in the late Cretaceous, an epic told with authentic detail and dramatic panache. Disruptions in comics distribution resulted in only four issues of the series.

CBC: Did you ever hear anything from Marvel about the name “SpiderBaby?”

Steve: No, never. The only brush I had with Marvel— and it wasn’t with Marvel— was when I worked with a law firm out of Washington, D.C., to help me in trademarking Tyrant. When you work with a law firm, part of their job is they can do a trademark search. Things you can do online now but back then you couldn’t.

CBC: Right. That cost a lot of money.

Steve: Well, yeah. Registering the trademark on Tyrant ended up being a few thousand dollars, you know?

For the whole process.

But with Tyrant, I was sure I wanted to register, and Marvel had had a character called Tyrant that appeared in Sub-Mariner, but they had never registered it. If you didn’t register, ya snooze, ya lose, but I had to change it. I had to modify it, That’s why it’s S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant, registered trademark. S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant is the registered trademark and my logic was, well, Disney doesn’t own Snow White. They own Walt Disney’s Snow White, so I was emulating that which had come before me. But with Taboo, I never officially registered the trademark. I did have to defend the trademark a few times on Taboo. Only once did it get pseudo-ugly and the other party finally stood down when I pointed out, “Y’know, Taboo was busted in every English-speaking country on the planet and it’s gonna pop up when your product hits customs. That could come back to bite you, ’cause we’re still on Customs lists!” [laughter] CBC: It’s called Taboo!

Steve: I think they ended up going with a different spelling. T-A-B-E-A-U-X or something. But it was okay. I had protected my trademark, so…

CBC: Besides Taboo, what was the first publication that you did with SpiderBaby?

Steve: Tyrant. Taboo was first and then Tyrant, and then SpiderBaby Comix. That was it. Recently I’ve revived the moniker, using it for my print-on-demand new work: Cryptid Cinema in Nov. 2017, the sketchbooks Thoughtful Creatures and Brooding Creatures in 2021.

CBC: Okay. And what is Tyrant?

Steve: Tyrant was a property I’d been stewing on for years. In fact, I still have somewhere in my files a day in which Dave Sim did a 24-hour comic he faxed to me, page by page, razzing me as to why I didn’t stop f*cking around and just do my dinosaur comic. [laughs] And he was right!

Dave’s point was, “Look, you wanted to do Rawhead Rex because it was ‘like’ your dinosaur comic and you wanted to do Night of the Living Dead because it was ‘like’ your comic you wanted to do.” He said, “Why don’t you just quit f*cking around with people and just do your dinosaur comic?”

I had tried to sell it to publishers for years, but nobody wanted a dinosaur comic. Any time I would initiate the conversation, it would turn into, “Oh, we have something like that. It’s an adventure story with these people going to a lost world.” I’d say, no, that’s not at all what I want to do, you know? And it came back to me often enough like that, but I finally just said, “Look. My plan is 24-page chapters

1963 TM & © Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette, and Rick Veitch. No One Escapes… The Fury and The Fury TM & © Stephen R.Bissette.

CBC: But he also did Miracleman. [laughs] Steve: Well, sure, sure. But Watchmen was the one Alan would refer to or people would ask him about at that time, and he was done with super-heroes at that point. I also knew Alan had written an editorial or a published letter or done an interview or something with The Comics Journal, where he said, “If Marvel is cocaine, Image is crack cocaine.” He didn’t see much good with what was happening with Image. On the other hand, through Larry Marder and Gary Colabuono, Larry had made sure that Rick Veitch and I understood that this Image phenomenon was something new, it wasn’t another Tundra Publishing, that it was the current culmination of the creator rights movement that had just taken a different form than any of us had foreseen, and that a generation of readers were turning out in force for these guys when they made personal appearances as a group at ChicagoCon or one of these events. Lines around the block, and Todd and Rob and Jim and Jim and all the original partners, like, really paying attention to their fans.

Larry told us a story about one night, with the tent at ChicagoCon, there were so many kids and fans waiting in line that Todd, Rob, Jim, Jim Lee, all of them, did not leave the tent until everyone had their comics signed and were happy. That was an endurance test! This was almost like those Depression-era dance contests or something: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? [laughter] Larry had a lot of respect for that, and he wanted to instill that respect in us—because we didn’t know these guys and we were being kind of derisive and flip about it. Larry was, like, “no, you guys got it wrong.” So I took Valentino seriously, and I said, “Well, let me talk with Alan. Let me see what’s possible. I really appreciate the invite.”

Sometimes, a year-to-four-years of your life can be determined by just listening to somebody and taking advantage of an opportunity being presented to you. This was an opportunity being presented. But I didn’t call Alan first. I called Rick Veitch first. I said, “Rick, I just got this really interesting call from Jim Valentino.” He knew who Jim Valentino was. I said, “I don’t have the stamina, and I’m not professional enough to take on any ambitious collaborative comics project on my own. If you’re interested, where you and I would do it, then I’ll talk to Alan. But if you don’t think this is a good idea, I’ll just let the people know and drop it.” Both Rick and I were in a position of need because Tundra was imploding and, like, what should we tackle next, alone or together? Don’t forget, Rick had Brat Pack, he had Maximortal. He had put more eggs in the Tundra basket than I had. These were his own creator-owned solo works. Taboo was a collective. I was just… a midwife.

So Rick said, “Sure. If Alan’s up for it and you’re up for it, Steve, let’s see what we can do with this.” Then I called Alan. This all happened in a single day. Three phone calls. Aaaand Alan was in a position of need, because all these big projects he was working on, including his first novel, The Voice of Fire—which wasn’t completed and some time away from being published as yet—were all in various stages of progress or gestation. They were all being done, but there was not enough money coming in.

He had family obligations and all of these creator-owned projects— sure Alan and his respective creative partners owed their work, but none of the projects paid particularly well, and the larger returns were down the road, after completion and publication. So, Alan was in a position of need, but he couldn’t tackle another full-script project.

He didn’t have time to take on another project where he was scripting. Rick and I proposed, “What if we do it the so-called ‘Marvel Method,’ where you come up with story ideas, we’ll pencil ’em, you dialogue ’em? That way you don’t have to sit down at your typewriter. You can just sit down with your pencil pages and have fun.”

CBC: [Laughs] “Affable Al.” Steve: Well, at that time, Alan was pretty affable. He was COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2022 • #28

open to considering the viability of such a venture. Then, Alan being Alan, once that was proposed, this prompted an idea. He hated where super-heroes had gone and it was, like, “why don’t we go back to the super-heroes we grew up with, when super-heroes were a positive force?”

And that’s what led to the whole gestation of the yin-yang, the double-edged sword of 1963, where, yes, they’re in the style of 1963 comics, that is the comic books that actually were created and packaged and published back in 1963, but Affable Al is gonna become the Stan Lee persona and we will mock and satirize how badly the freelancers who did all that work were treated, by being more transparent about the soapbox pages, and the letters pages. This sounded like great, antic fun, but it was also a big risk to take, for all of us.

It wasn’t like Image laid out a whole bunch of money.

Their deal at the time was, no advance, no page rate: you did the work, they published it, you kept 80% and they kept 20% of gross. The split was right off the top. None of this hidden-cost sh*t. Nobody had ever offered that. It seemed a gamble worth taking. The one thing we said to Valentino was, that there’s gotta be some kind of nominal page rate, however modest or meager. We can’t ask our friends—John Totleben, Dave Gibbons—to ink if there’s nothing up front. So, we worked out with Jim a low-level,

Above: Image Comics house ad promoting the first issue of the 1963 series, Mystery Incorporated [Apr. 1993], with art by Rick Veitch and Dave Gibbons.

Below: Detail from 1963 #2 [May ’93] cover, SRB pencils and Veitch inks.

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#28 • Spring 2022 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Colodny Building illustration © Center for Cartoon Studies. Kazu Kibuishi photo ©2018 Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0.

This page: At top is cartoonist Seth’s rendition of White River Junction’s Colodny Building.

Above is graphic novelist Kazu Kibuishi whose CCS visit was a turning point for SRB. Below is Charles Forsman, who achieved success with The End of the F*cking World graphic novel.

ship with Tom Roberts. The University of Connecticut was I met and became really important in prepping me for being in the right place, friends with Peter Money, emotionally and professionally, to be able to say yes to a local poet who studied James Sturm and Michelle Ollie when they approached. under Allen Ginsberg; Yeah. I became very good friends with Gene Kannenberg Peter was also part of and his then-wife, Kate—Kathryn Laity a.k.a. “K.A. Laity,” the creative team behind lately an associate professor of English, at the College of the scenes in pulling the Saint Rose, over in Ireland. In fact, she just helped me with school together; Peter and a project I’m working on—an aspect of Nigel Kneale’s work I ended up co-teaching no one has really discussed in print. She’s now a medieval at times, I used to take scholar living in the UK… and Charles Hatfield, whom I also the students up to Peter’s stayed friends with, has become one of the—along with place overlooking Mount Gene—Charles and Gene have really become shining lights Ascutney, and then the in terms of comics academia. following week we’d hike CBC: I knew Charlie back when. We used to go to comic around the top of Mount shops together in Connecticut.

Ascutney—observe and Steve: Storrs was a funny town. It wasn’t that Tom and I draw the mountain, then drifted apart. It’s that every time Tom would invite me down, physically go to the mounthe college had grown and I had to park further and further tain and explore it in real time and space. James and away from the classroom and the last time I went down, “Tom! I just walked…” and I clocked it. It was over a mile Michelle introduced me to from my car to the f*cking classroom with this slide projecsome of the businesspeople in the community that were backing the whole enterprise. I was really impressed with tor and tray and my bag. It was crazy! [laughter] Finally, that their business plan. That it was a non-profit, that they had terrific used paperback shop down across the main road chosen a town where there already was a footprint with a from the college permitted me to park in their lot, which was creative economic shaker and mover: the old Tip Top Bak- an easier walk to Tom’s classroom—and I could buy more cool paperbacks before I headed home. ery Building had been purchased by a video artist named Matt Bucy, who had envisioned it being a studio for artists. CBC: How many years were you at CCS? Steve: I was at the Center for Cartoon Studies for 15 The main floor of the Tip Top Building is still a restaurant years, summer 2005 through summer 2020. I retired last year and ceramics shop and the upper floors in the back area because I turned 65. I just figured there’s a generational are art studios. So, they were building on… They weren’t shift going on right now and it was time for me to step away. starting from scratch. Somebody—Matt Bucy—best Part of it was, what was an attribute to the school when known for his alphabetical recut of The Wizard of Oz into weTHIS started in 2005… I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was Of Oz The Wizard, also videographer/photographer the IF YOU of ENJOYED PREVIEW, detriment to the school at any point, but comics are no Star Trek Continues web series from Farragut Films—had CLICK THE LINKa TO ORDER THIS madeFORMAT! the way they were made when I worked in established a footprint for a creative economy, ISSUE re-enerIN PRINT ORlonger DIGITAL the field. I’m a dinosaur. What I had to bring to 21st cengizing, redetermining what White River Junction could be. And they really did it! Our summer workshops in 2005 tury students, to the table, wasn’t applicable in all ways, were busy. They were well-attended. I really fell in love anymore. We saw through that transition as a school. For a with working with young cartoonists because I had been number of years, we would do this two-week assignment one of them. I could actually tell them at the beginning of that we would call the Golden Age Project. We would start our class, “Hey! I sat right where you are! [laughs] That’s our spring semester, which is January, with this pressure where I was in the fall of 1976, where you are now!” We cooker two-week assignment. We would break the firststarted our first class in the fall of 2005. Students from all year class into groups. Depending on how many were in the around the country. By the second year, students from class, it would be three groups to four groups, depending different parts of the world were coming in so it was a on how large or small the student body was. They would more international community at that point, increasingly have to create, from scratch, an original 32-page comic, diverse, always a lively mix of creative talents. And I had full-color, and have the printed comic in all their classmates’ something to offer! There was some push-me/pull-you. I hands at the end of the two weeks. The attempt was to still was not enjoying drawing and I said to James, “Make emulate how comic books used to be done and the last two sure I’m not teaching Drawing Well.” Guess what class times we did that assignment, we ended up doing manga COMIC BOOKthe CREATOR #28 I was part of the process, because the I was in charge of teaching first year? [laughs] But we last two STEVE BISSETTE career-spanning interview, from times his Joe Kubert Swamp Thing stint, publisher Age of Taboo andSilver Tyrant, Age are so distant now that it’s just made it work. The comics history class isSchool whatdays, James, Golden and creator rights crusader, and more. Also, Part One of our MIKE from the start, said, “You’ve gotta do this,” based on him not applicable to how any but a fringe group of publishers GOLD interview on his Chicago youth, start in underground seeing that lecture I gave. and work right now. It was a great exercise. Some comix, and arrival at DC Comics, rightcreators in time for the implosion!

Plus BUD PLANT on his publishing days, comic shopand owner, and CBC: I attended a lecture you gave in Charlie Hatfield’s truly fantastic imaginative comics came out of it! start in mail order—and all the usual fun stuff! class at the University of Connecticut. This was prior to But it was one of those things that, as we stepped (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 CCS. away$4.99 from it, I realized, okay, I should move on. Best to (Digital Edition) Steve: In fact, Dr. Tom Roberts, who sadlyhttps://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_132&products_id=1660 passed away in know when it’s time to go. The things I had to bring to a Oct. 2017, was really a key person for me, a mentor of sorts, student group as somebody who worked professionally really, in that Tom Roberts was the head of the literature in the field from 1977 until 1999… It’s a different universe department at University of Connecticut. This is down at now. And when you’re telling your students, truthfully, Storrs. That’s where you came over to join us, Jon. Tom “You’ll be able to get an agent. I can’t, but you can,” Roberts would invite me in every year to come speak to his because it’s now their time to make comics and graphic class throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and often ask novels, my time to be put out to pasture or shipped off me to give an evening presentation as well, of some kind. to the glue factory—well, f*ck it. That’s a pretty useless Tom was just an amazing guy and he just saw something in message to be giving your students, even though it was me… He said, “You’re a natural teacher.” true. Many of our graduates have gone on to do their own CBC: And you were! graphic novels. Some have gone on to work in editorial Steve: Tom cultivated that. I had also done some workand art departments. They’re making their way into the shops with some local schools, at the K-through-12 levels, industry, but it’s a new industry. It’s not Marvel and DC but only occasionally. But I don’t know if I would have and Archie they’re working with—that’s the fringe of taken on teaching at CCS if it hadn’t been for the relationmainstream comics in 2022. The mainstream has shifted,