Comic Book Creator #2: Joe Kubert by TwoMorrows Publishing

#2 • Summer 2013

a tribute to the

presents

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portrait by seth kushner

JOE KUBERT creator mentor comic book creator number two presents

a tribute to the comic

book master

Comic Book Creator #2 presents Joe Kubert, Creator & Mentor: A Tribute to the Comic Book Master • 2013 Summer Annual Jon B. Cooke/Editor & Designer • John Morrow/Publisher & Consulting Editor • Michael Aushenker/Associate Editor • Peter Carlsson/Special Consultant Sergio Cariello/Front Cover Artist • Timothy Truman/Back Cover Artist • Tom Ziuko/Front Cover Colorist • Mark Nelson/Back Cover Colorist Jorge “George” Khoury, Christopher Irving, Tom Ziuko/Contributing Editors • Brian K. Morris/Sr. Transcriber • Steven E. Tice, Steven Thompson/Transcribers J.D. King/Cbc Cartoonist • Ronn Sutton/CBC Illustrator • Tom Ziuko/CBC Colorist Supreme • Rob Smentek/Cbc Proofreader Seth Kushner, Greg Preston/CBC Contributing Photographers • Fred Hembeck/CBC Hembeck

Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-053-3 • First Printing • July 2013 • Printed in China TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina Comic Book Creator™ is published quarterly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Comic Book Creator editorial offices: P. O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $36 US, $50 Canada, $65 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2013 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a shared trademark of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. All Rights Reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without permission from the publisher.

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ics.

Summer Annual 2013

W ho is Joe Kubert?

Born Yosaif Kubert in Yzeran, Poland, on Sept. 18, 1926, Joe came to America with family as an infant, growing up in hard-scrabble Brooklyn, New York, where nascent drawing talent and early exposure to newspaper adventure comic strips set him on a career path. Coming of age during the Great Depression with a strong work ethic that would guide him throughout his 85 years, the only son was instilled with an enduring desire to lead by example. Joe eagerly sought out comics studios, where he swept floors at the tender age of 11, soon selling his first professional work as artist. Early on the youngster developed a sustained gratitude for the opportunity to learn from more seasoned pros who unselfishly shared expertise and experience with this kid from off the street. Joe Kubert’s professional accolades are tremendous: Influential fan favorite with his ’40s “Hawkman” work; co-creator of 3-D comics; artist of exemplary war comics with “Sgt. Rock” and “Enemy Ace”; early supporter of comics fandom; newspaper strip artist; innovative and hugely respected comics editor; talented writer; likely the finest comics adapter of Tarzan; founder/head instructor of the first — and only — institution devoted to teaching the art of the comic book; progenitor of graphic novels, beginning with the proto-journalism of Fax from Sarajevo and culminating in his masterpiece, Yossel: April 19, 1943. To the end, which occurred on Aug. 12, 2012, Joe always strove to create better work. Family was always paramount to Joe, so much so his beloved wife, Muriel, was also his partner in the Kubert School, and so much so that two of his sons were inspired to follow him into the field, where they have excelled on their own. Words cannot attest to the quality of his artistry, but we can say without equivocation that Joe Kubert was one of the best stylists and storytellers to ever grace the field of the comic book, American or otherwise. Come see in these pages and judge for yourself. And learn more about this wonderful man.

Frontispiece: Background is, courtesy of Heritage Auctions, Joe Kubert’s preliminary Tarzan sketch, rendered about the time DC Comics obtained the license in the early ’70s. Circular inset is a detail from Joe’s “Gargoyles” two-pager, which appeared, among other places, in black-&-white in the TwoMorrows book, Streetwise. You’ll find the fully-hued version courtesy of Peter Carlsson and The Kubert School inside these pages, ably colored by Joe Panico of Tell-A-Graphics. Page two-three spread: Seth Kushner shared this evocative portrait of Joe from Autumn 2008, originally shot for Seth and Christopher Irving’s book, Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics. Page four: Joe Kubert’s drawing table, as he last left it, in his Kubert School office. Photos by Ye Ed, Mar. ’13. Page five: Ye Ed’s own copy of DC Special #5 [Oct.-Dec. ’69], a comic entirely devoted to Joe Kubert, who personally inscribed the cover during Joe and Ye Ed’s first meeting in Feb. ’97. This page: Joe Kubert and his three-and-a-half year old youngest son, Andy, at the drawing board working on the syndicated newspaper adventure comic strip Tales of the Green Berets. Andy wrote on a DC blog about this Morristown Daily Record photo from 1965: “It was taken in my dad’s studio in the house I grew up in… his studio was above the attached garage overlooking the woods in the backyard. I still remember the smell of the paper and ink in there. He would let me set up a little area to draw and read comics as he drew. I loved the war, mystery and Superman and Batman comics. He would also show me a few drawing tricks… From the looks of the photo, I don’t know how he put up with me in there!” Next page: [clockwise from top] The Kubert School lensed by Sara Harper-Hudson and courtesy of Jae H. Choi & TKS; Joe confers with an aspiring artist at a Kubert School open house in recent years; and the old Baker Mansion, original abode of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Inc., and now a school dormitory. Courtesy of William Bossert.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Preface: Joe Kubert and the Power of Example........................... 8 Making His Mark: Christopher Irving’s Visit with Joe Kubert.................. 10 Bill Schelly’s Top Ten Joe Kubert Comics.................... 19 Keepers of the Flame: Adam & Andy Kubert on Facing the Future................. 22 The Making of a Master of Sequential Art.................. 40 Arlen Schumer: Joe Kubert’s Five Comic Stars.......... 57 Ervin Rustemagic’s Fax from Sarajevo Postscript...... 63 The Wizard Remembers Joe: An Interview with Frank Thorne.................................... 67 The All-American Cartoonist: A Chat with Irwin Hasen by Michael Aushenker....... 72 Fred Hembeck’s Dateline: ??!!@#................................. 77 That Other Man of Rock: Russ Heath Interview by Richard Arndt....................... 78 “Gargoyles” by Joe Kubert/Colors by Joe Panico......... 80 Day-In, Day-Out: Working with Joe Kubert An Interview with Peter Carlsson................................. 82

George Pratt on Teaching the Teacher........................ 90 Rick Veitch’s Journey with Joe..................................... 93 Giving Back: Teaching at the Kubert School . ............ 96 Timothy Truman: Joe Kubert’s Heart & Fire............... 106 Paul Levitz on Kubert Taking Care of Business......... 111 Fans, Friends & Students Remember the Master.... 116 Ivan Snyder’s Wonderful World of Heroes................ 142 Harry Brod on the Anti-War War Comics Artist....... 144 A Portrait of Joe Kubert by Greg Preston.................. 149 Comic Book Creator Contributors............................... 149 Joe’s Return to Jewish Roots by Rafael Medoff....... 150 Creator’s Creators: The Aushenker Effect................. 159 Coming Attractions: Comic Book Creator #3............. 159 One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.................. 160 ABOUT OUR COVER: Sergio Cariello, himself a comic book professional who graduated the Kubert School, expertly delineates a pastiche of Joe Kubert’s iconic Our Army at War #220 [June 1970] cover, no doubt itself a sly homage by Joe to his beloved caveman creation, Tor. Colors by Tom Ziuko, who recaptured the startling orange/blue color motif! Thanks to Sergio and Tom.

Joe Kubert & the Power of Example

Inset right: Postcard from the Words & Pictures Museum announcing the Fax from Sarajevo exhibit opening in Feb. 1997, where Ye Ed first met one of his comic book heroes, the legendary Joe Kubert.

Somewhere in this mess I call an office, there’s a letter addressed to me from Joe Kubert, the first missive I ever received from a comic book professional. It was a handwritten response to a fan letter I wrote in the early ’80s to the man, one that probably expressed my amazement at his artwork in that Detective Comics #500 “Hawkman” story, or the Winged Warrior tale in Justice League of America #200. Maybe it was that wondrous Superman/Demon team-up in DC Comics Presents… Regardless, I found Joe’s reply in my mailbox mere days after I sent in my note. I recall my astonishment at the thoughtful consideration he granted both in kind words expressing appreciation for my kudos and in sending the answer back so quickly. Hell, I doubt I even asked for a reply…. The first time I met the legendary comic book creator in person, it was during the opening of Joe’s Fax from Sarajevo exhibit at the (late and sorely missed) Words and Pictures Museum, in Northampton, Mass., in February, 1997. I came with my older brother Chris, and we arrived earlier than the 10:30 a.m. start. And there, standing alone, was Joe. It’s fair to say I latched onto Joe like Chee-Chee onto Tor. I asked many, many questions and, awed as I was by Joe’s stature, I was tenacious in monopolizing the artist/writer’s attention. I asked about Bob Kanigher, about Tarzan coming over to DC, about The Redeemer, about Tales of the Green Berets… you name it. Today I can’t remember everything that was discussed on that winter’s day in central Massachusetts, but I can tell you that I will never forget how kind, gracious and attentive Joe was to me, a mere schmendrik, a nobody, just a overzealous fanboy demanding answers. I’ll also never forget how much time I took of him that Saturday morning, while other attendees frequently looked over at us, no doubt hoping to ask Joe their own questions. But he kept zeroed in on me, granting his complete, utmost attention. What an incredibly nice guy! When I told Adam and Andy, Joe’s two youngest sons, who are super-star comic book

artists in their own right, about my first meeting with their father, they chuckled and Adam assured me I wasn’t unique in getting Joe’s undivided attention: “Well, don’t think you’re so special because he did that with everybody.” But at that moment in time, in that New England chill of 1997, with his amazing ability to stay in the present and pay attention, Joe warmed me and I felt very special indeed. Heck, he even let Chris and I take him out to lunch. Sigh. Thus began an association that lasted through the years. I was privileged to interview him repeatedly, and even devoting an issue of Comic Book Artist to Joe and his boys, in a “Father & Sons” special, where my pals Arlen Schumer and Chris Knowles joined me to sit around Joe’s big conference table at the school to chat with Adam, Andy, and their old man. A few years later, on a bright, summer Saturday morning in 2006, Joe graciously consented to an on-camera interview for my younger brother, Andy, Kris Schackman and my feature film documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, spotlighting one of Joe’s first bosses in the business. What do I recall best about Joe through all these encounters? I remember his friendly chuckling, broad grins and perpetual good spirits. He really was a very, very nice man. I could sense too, though, that Joe was also a pretty tough guy. He commanded respect. You didn’t mess around Joe Kubert by Ronn Sutton with Joe. You said what you meant and meant what you said, or you’d get that look. You didn’t want to get that look. That grin: that’s what you wanted to see…. And so Joe Kubert is gone. He seemed immortal in his way, his work consistently improving with every job (okay, his inks got a little looser into his 80s, sure, but the storytelling only got better, believe you me) and he showed up at the school seven days a week, teaching class on Tuesdays, his office door always open. But he passed away in August of last year and despite being 85, his fans and peers were shocked that the great man had passed away. Spending time with Adam and Andy more than six months after Joe’s death, the boys were still understandably upset that their father is no more. When giving me a tour of the entire school, Andy escorted me from top floor to basement bottom, as he let me look in every classroom and take pictures. The last door the youngest Kubert unlocked for me was his father’s office. The air was still and musty. The room hadn’t been opened in a while. The giant Tarzan poster was still on its spot on the wall, the huge conference table remained in place, and, as I looked over toward the window, as the late winter sun strained to peek through the shuttered Venetian blinds, there it was: Joe Kubert’s drawing table, everything left as when he last sat there, creating his stories to share with us all. It was good to see that. I miss him.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Your humble editor remembers a considerate and generous creator, mentor… mensch

Editor’s Preface Inset left: Exactly as Joe Kubert left his studio for the final time, here is the master’s drawing table, photographed during Ye Ed’s recent visit to the Kubert School.

Joe’s passing puts in stark relief the passing of his generation, who are leaving this mortal coil at a gut-wrenching, albeit predictable, rate. More than a few tears have been shed in organizing this tribute. I called Sam Glanzman (88), who had so wonderfully contributed to Streetwise for John Morrow and myself, but he regretted he was too ill to participate despite so desperately wanting to be involved. I went in search of Ric Estrada, recalling the lovely chats at conventions when we planned a feature someday, only to find that my friend had passed on in May 2009, at age 81. I fielded a call to J. David Spurlock, hoping to get a few words from Carmine Infantino to learn the legendary artist and Kubert friend was in no condition to speak, and sadly one of my heroes passed on at 87 subsequent to that call. Of course, there were bright spots: Talking again with Russ Heath, who at 86 told me to hurry up and get the issue devoted to him off the launch pad, “before I kick the bucket!” Rest assured, early next year will see that CBC edition, so hang in there, Russ! Frank Thorne, despite failing eyesight, has taken up oil painting and will be the subject of gallery showings in his native New Jersey. It was delightful to finally get a chance to interview the 82-year-old wizard and quite a kick to receive not one, but two paintings for this issue!

And it’s always great to hear from the shortest cartoonist with the most seniority, Irwin Hasen, who may be slowing down at 94, but his wit is as sharp as ever. Keep up the jokes, “loverboy”! Of course, there simply is not enough room in this book, even at twice the usual issue size, to adequate cover Joe Kubert’s amazing body of work. Peter Carlsson, Kubert archivist; Ervin Rustemagic of Strip Art Features; and Kubert biographer and longtime pal Bill Schelly were all generous beyond measure, and I regret not being able to share all the treasures in the print edition (but do check the extended-cut PDF for the usual extras!). I especially wish I could have examined the lives of Joe’s partners over the years and studied the relationships they shared. First, there’s the ambitious and talented Norman Maurer (d. 1986), who joined up with Joe in junior high school to work as a team in comics. The pair would go on to create 3-D comics and, despite their parting when the comics waters got rough, Joe, years later, sought out Norm’s abilities for work in the DC war books he edited. Second, the indomitable writer/ editor Robert Kanigher, who collaborated with Joe on innumerable — and unforgettable — features, most prominently “Sgt. Rock” and “Enemy Ace.” Joe, who succeeded Bob as editor of the DC war comics line, was also loyal to the writer to the end. R.K. passed on in 2002 at the age of 86. And finally, there is Joe Kubert’s most important partner of all — his bride since 1950 and the mother of their five children — Muriel Fogelson Kubert, who died in 2008. Together they founded the Kubert School. Though not adequately discussed, her spirit permeates much of this issue, for Muriel was Joe’s rock. — Ye Ed.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

What I will not miss is Joe Kubert’s work, because that will live on, and I can guarantee you, it will remain in print because of its overall excellence. Y’see, Joe was one of those rare creators who constantly pushed himself to do better. I know that because we can all see it in the work, art, and writing that always improved. I don’t have to sell you on it, I know. Anyway, just look through the pages of this special tribute issue and take in the scope of Joe’s artistry… What stuff!

Making His Mark: A Visit with Joe Kubert Christopher Irving interviews the comic book creator on a life well lived by Christopher Irving CBC Contributing Editor

Inset right: Courtesy of Bill Schelly and the Kubert family, a detail of Joe dressed in top hat and tails for his bar mitzvah party. Yes, by the time he was 13, Joe was a professional comic book artist

This piece, our opening article for this special Joe Kubert tribute, is by Ye Ed’s friend and confidante, Christopher Irving, and it appeared in slightly different form in the Irving/ Seth Kushner tome, Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics. The title was selected by yours truly and it refers to Joe’s introduction to his masterpiece, Yossel: April 19, 1943, where he wrote, “I started to draw as soon as I was old enough to hold anything that would make a mark.” 10

Joe Kubert stood up from the art table in his office at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, a warm and bright room with a long table in the center, and framed artwork of Joe’s on the far wall. On the wall alongside the door, and to the left, is a flat file, and Joe’s art table. Wearing a long-sleeved gray polo shirt and blue jeans, Joe Kubert’s youthfulness belied his age of 82. This was an early Spring day in 2009 and I arrived to finally interview Kubert in person, unlike the several times I’d chatted with him through a telephone receiver over the years. The man had a presence. And not just physical, but authoritative, yet kindly. It was a presence on par with the authority and power of his work, work that started at 12 years of age in 1938 that went from awkward to masterful. The older Joe Kubert got, the better his work became: something rare in even old comics masters, and still on display in his final work done for DC Comics, published posthumously in Joe Kubert Presents and, to a point, his inks on the Before Watchmen: Nite Owl comics drawn with his son Andy. This profile takes my essay from that recent spring day and merges with past talks with Joe to give a glimpse at the man and artist. Joe Kubert’s parents and sister tried to flee Poland in 1926, but his mother, pregnant with Joe, was denied passage. Only after Joe’s birth were they able to board and steam for the American shore, thus avoiding the rise of the Third Reich. Settling in the Lower East Side of Brooklyn, Joe’s father became a local butcher, while Joe and his sister grew up during the Great Depression in one of New York’s toughest neighborhoods. “I think that people now have a difficulty understanding what was going on at that time, compared to today,” Joe explained. “It was a simpler time, money was more difficult to come by, values were quite different, there were less people around, but competition was heavier… It’s like trying to describe what’s going on on Mars. It was a different world.” The world of Jew Gangster, Kubert’s 2005 graphic novel based on that otherworldly childhood environment, follows the initiation of a teenager into the world

of organized crime, eager to make something of himself to provide for his family… no matter the cost to his conscience or soul. Kubert admitted the family in the book was “closely aligned” to his own, and a departure point for the more dangerous childhood that he might have had. “In fact, in the neighborhood where I grew up, it was not unusual to see who would be considered a crime figure today, walking around and looked at in terms of being a kind of hero,” Kubert reflected. “Here was somebody who, through his own endeavors and efforts (what was described by other civilians) had the guts to go ahead and do what it was he felt he had to do in order to make a buck. Everybody else would have loved to do the same thing to make that kind of an income, but were never willing to overstep the bounds for whatever reason.” I asked him if he was ever tempted to overstep those bounds, and there was an awkward pause. For a fleeting second, I reminded myself that even in his octogenarian years, Joe Kubert could probably still kick my 32-year-old butt. “Not really,” he answered, breaking the silence. “But the question is a provocative one, and I’m not sure if you really expect me to answer that honestly.” The tense moment gave way to a laugh, and he went into a story that has stayed with him since he was a kid: “But what it provokes right now is that I think of the reasons a lot of us stayed straight. Some of my friends ran into a lot of problems, in terms of the law and so forth, and it wasn’t a difficult thing to do. I was lucky in the fact that my parents were strict when it came to stuff like that, I recall, when I was six- or seven-years-old. “When people bought newspapers, they’d put the pennies on the newsstand, take the newspaper, and just walk away. One time, I took the pennies off the newsstand and put them in my pocket. I was with my kid sister, who was three years younger than I, and the moment we walked into my father’s store (my father owned a butcher store at the time), she told my father I took the pennies off of the stand. She immediately reported it to my father. My father, who was quite a disciplinarian, instead of making a big to-do about it, took me by the hand and walked me back to the newsstand, and made me give the pennies to the owner. I was mortified. That was quite a lesson to me, but that was the kind of thing that happened, and one of the things that kept me straight. It was not because I wasn’t tempted, but because that’s how it worked out. “Another thing was that I was occupied, Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

and drawing all of the time, and it helped me not get into a heck of a lot of trouble.” Like a lot of kids during the Depression, Joe also had his nose in the daily comics that, back then carried a lot more weight and credibility than their staple-bound comic book counterparts. A look at a Depression-era comics section was populated with everything from Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, to Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theater, or especially Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. It was a mixture of genres, styles, and artistic mastery by some of the greatest cartoonists to ever have lived. “The newspaper strips at that time were really what everybody strove for,” Joe said. “Every artist that was working for comic books was looking to do that. It was an adult media because it was read in the newspapers and used by the papers in a competitive effort to get readers, and it also paid a helluva lot better.” Like all kids reading comics, he undoubtedly dreamed himself in his heroes’ shoes. That ability to transport himself into another time and situation is still at play in two of his more recent graphic novels: the aforementioned Jew Gangster and Yossel: April 19, 1943. In Yossel, Kubert speculates what would have happened to him had his parents given up on coming to America after that first rejection during his mother’s pregnancy. What follows is the telling of a 15-year-old Kubert’s life, a poor boy gifted with the ability to draw his heroes on whatever scrap of paper he could find. Yossel transports Joe/Yossel and his family into the ghettos, with the specter of the concentration camps looming. Finally, orphaned, Yossel joins the resistance to fight the Nazis to the death. The artwork, like Yossel’s journey into manhood, remains incomplete, quick and loose pencil linework with even the artist’s guide lines still intact. “I felt that the character himself, the kid, is evolving as an artist,” Kubert said. Like his graphic novel’s much younger counterpart, Joe Kubert himself continues to evolve, styles changing from project to project. His apathy towards glorifying his past achievements, as well as his inability to look at artists aged 20-something to 80 as “new” or “old” — kept him as current an artist as his sons, Adam and Andy, despite the reverence of fans and professionals alike. Kubert neither romanticized the past (“To try to analyze what was going on at the time?” he answers. “It never entered my head”) nor was he stuck there. His contemporaries were the ones now drawing comics and telling stories, and he was still right up there with them. Kubert entered the young comic-book industry at a tender age himself, as super-heroes were starting to take hold and the medium was gaining its footing, thanks to an army of fledgling artists and their often unscrupulous publishers. One of these publishers, MLJ, started off with super-heroes and eventually gave way to a Henry Aldrich knock-off named Archie Andrews, rechristening themselves Archie Comics. But on this early 1940s day, they were still a new publisher known as MLJ (named after the founders: Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit, and John Goldwater) and Joe himself was shiny and new to comics. “Bob Montana, in fact, was just starting the Archie strip when I started coming up,” Joe recalled. “I was in junior high school, just getting out of eighth grade, before high school. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, Flatbush, and a friend of mine who I attended school with… the guys I hung with knew I drew and with kids, if you could draw, it was like magic. I was being kind of a magician. It was under those circumstances that one of my friends who said ‘I have a Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

portrait by seth kushner 11

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

All art and characters TM & © DC Comics.

relative who owns comic books.’ This was either Goldwater or Silberkleit, I don’t remember which one. “He said ‘Why don’t you take some work up there, and maybe you can get a job?’ “What I did was made some drawings, wrapped them up in a newspaper… their offices at that time were on Canal Street, in New York. It was a nickel ride on the subway to get to New York. I went up and showed them my work. I was about eleven at the time. I was treated really nicely, and this has been true since I started in the business: I don’t recall anybody who didn’t extend his hand and help me and teach me as I went along.” In a way, comics still operate as “friend of a friend” businesses, but it was in full swing back in those primal, nascent days where publishers could be hucksters operating out of a broom closet, and there were no corporate “big” publishers in the same way there are today. “I forget which floor it was on, but God, I remember every bit of it,” Joe reminisced. “I remember the smells: the dusty smell of the wood floors, the paper, the ink. When you first came into the office, there was a three-foot high railing separation there, between where the editorial work was going on, and you could see where the artists were working. There were four or five of them lined up against the windows, looking out on Canal Street.” “The editor was kind enough to say ‘Why don’t you watch the guys to see them working?’ They allowed me to stand behind them while they were drawing, and I would ask some of the most stupid questions you would ever think of. They were kind and patient, and this was my introduction. Eventually, I would make it a kind of at least

a weekly pilgrimage. I would pack my stuff up in an single sheet of newspaper and go up there. “Eventually, one of the first jobs I got was inking Bob Montana’s Archie. It wasn’t a regular stint, but it was when I was up there and they saw that I could handle a brush. That’s where I started out. Irv Novick gave me my first drawing lessons on how to draw a German helmet properly. All these guys extended themselves in a grand manner. That was the beginning.” A quick stint as a gopher at MLJ invigorated the young Kubert, something further sparked when he entered the High School of Music and Art in ninth grade. Music and Art was started by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1936 as an alternative school for gifted students in the arts and was about a ninety minute trek for Joe from Flatbush, Brooklyn. Boasting a fine arts curriculum, it was home to several future “lowbrow” comic book innovators, including Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, and Will Elder, where friendships were formed that became the basis for future creative partnerships. For Joe, it was a forged connection with artist Norman Maurer, and the two pals became inseparable. “I guess we played hooky a little bit, because we’d leave with packages of work, and make our treks,” Joe confessed. “There were 20 or 30 different publishers in Manhattan, and we’d go down and go from one to the other, until we got a piece of work here, and a piece of work there. That’s how it worked out.” In the Summer of ’41, Joe became an office boy for cartoonist Will Eisner, who was heading up a studio to produce his eight-page Sunday comic book supplement, The Spirit. Eisner and company had just started the crimefighter strip the summer prior, and it quickly went from looking like an atmospheric comic book story with conventional small panels into something much more cinematic, with pacing much more controlled through use of panel sizes, visual tempo, and shot variety. The Spirit was well on to its way to becoming the experimental comic book of the early days, and Joe was there as partial witness. But, as Joe admitted, his work wasn’t really that glamorous: “When I say I was working for him, that’s putting it lightly. What I did was use a broom to clean up the place, and I’d erase everybody else’s drawings. He’d allow me to draw some stuff, perhaps half a page filler that went into The Spirit, but that was the extent of the work that I did for Will. “I got paid 12-and-a-half bucks a week. It was a wonder-

“That’s one of the many reasons that I’m embarrassed when I look at that. [DC editor] Julie [Schwartz] would make that comment, and it was a running thing with us. At that time I Joe Kubert’s artistic association was meant to be more couldn’t see it. If I had realized that the heads were too big, than with a broom or eraser and, in 1944, he took over draw- I wouldn’t have drawn it that way. It was something that, ing “Hawkman” from artist Sheldon Moldoff. The story, “The years later, after looking at that stuff that I hadn’t seen a Painter and the $100,000,” appeared in Flash Comics #62 and while, [I’d go] ‘Geez, how blind can a guy be!?’” was the start of what would become a beautiful friendship Kubert’s sight (or confessed ignorance of one) carried for Kubert and the winged super-hero. him through the ‘40s to the ‘50s, where his art evolved from “I think I was in my third year at the High School of Music big-headed and energetic to more realistic and dynamic. and Art,” Joe thought back. “One of the places I’d made it up Working on Hawkman was the constant training ground he to was, at that time, All-American Comics, at 225 Lafayette needed to evolve into something masterful. Street, downtown Manhattan. When I came in, I showed “I think that for most artists that I know, the last person my work to Shelly Mayer, the editor at that time. To my utter in the world who recognizes any improvement in their work amazement he said, ‘Yeah, we is the artist themselves,” he have an opening. We think noted. “In addition to which, I your stuff is good enough to know for myself, we’re never do “Hawkman,” and the covreally satisfied with the stuff ers, as well.’ we’re doing… It’s the only “The reason I say it was way that any of us improve is pure, unadulterated luck, to do a hell of a lot of drawing, was that at that time Shelly and I was doing a hell of Moldoff had left. He had been a lot!” doing ‘Hawkman,’ and they So, when he brought out needed somebody. Most of Hawkman for a reinvented the other guys were busy, or spin with writer Gardner Fox their style didn’t lend itself to in 1961 in the pages of The this book. Shelly Mayer was Brave and the Bold #34, it was kind enough to give me an opa different animal than the portunity to do that work and one first drawn in the early learn on the job.” ’40s. Joe was no longer a The friendship may have fledgling teen artist, or even a moderate comics illustrator; been beautiful, but Joe’s work his work was now devoid of was not yet at that point: the the clunkiness and clutter artwork was cluttered, clunky, that may have plagued it in and the heads were often his salad days, and had been drawn with an unintentional replaced with a fluidity and stylistic choice, but it was still beauty. Even though the figenergetic. ures were drawn in a reality, “As an interesting aside, you still bought that a man in there was a time (and I only hawk wings could fly, soaring recognized it in later years) as if light as air, graceful yet when I had a tendency to powerful. draw the figures with the “I imagine I was looking heads too large, and I never forward to it because it was realized that,” he confessed.

All art and characters TM & © DC Comics.

ful thing for me. It was terrific. The guys treated me really well.”

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above and previous page top: Just as we were coming down to the wire with this tribute, Ye Ed scored the DC 100-Page SuperSpectacular edition of Our Army at War #242 [Feb. 1972], which (unbeknown to yours truly) contained these new intro pages drawn by Joe Kubert and depicting some of the best known features of DC’s war line-up! Thanks, as always, to Ye Ed’s favorite comic shop, Robert Yeremian’s The Time Capsule, of Cranston, Rhode Island, for swell pricing and generous loans of material. Opposite page, top left: Detail of Joe Kubert’s exquisite Our Army at War #216 [Feb.–Mar. ’70] cover art, perhaps the quintessential Sgt. Rock portrait. Below that is a detail from the 1976 Comic Art Convention souvenir book cover drawn by… just a guy named Joe! These two latter items courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Inset left: The inside back cover of that same Our Army at War giant issue mentioned above featured this awesome gallery of the men of Easy Company, drawn by Joe. 13

All art and characters TM & © DC Comics.

Top: The appeal of Joe Kubert’s vibrant art and engaging storytelling in “Hawkman” is obvious in this Flash Comics #104 [Feb. 1949] spread. Above: Hawkman figure from the cover of that same issue, the last of that ’40s title. Next page: Contributor Bill Schelly and Ye Ed are not quite sure where this Hawkman and Hawkgirl image originally appeared, but there’s a consensus that it was likely drawn by Joe Kubert in the late 1970s and appeared as a poster, possibly for the European market. 14

an opportunity to show that I did improve over the years,” speculated Joe. “For some weird reason, as a kid, the fact that you don’t know anything… gives you the courage to do things that, if you really realized how bad you were, you would have thought twice about it. “It did give me an opportunity, the second time around, to feel freer and more sure of myself.” When “Sgt. Rock” debuted in Our Army at War, in 1959, written by Robert Kanigher, the visuals were quickly taken over by Joe, and the two made him their signature character. Kanigher’s writing reflected his love of

haiku writing, as captions were broken over several panels to create a narrative tempo that accompanied the visual one engineered by Kubert: it was alchemy in comics, created by the team-up of a visual genius with a literary one. Kubert’s art took on a grit that reminded us, practically every story, that war was not to be glorified. There could be acts of valor and heroism, and Sgt. Rock reminded us that they always came at a price. “My attitude in my job is that the person that I tried to please was not the audience, and not the editor I worked for: the person I tried to please was myself,” Kubert admitted. “I love to draw, and I love to do this kind of work as a comic book artist. Being a comic book artist is not the means for me to become a fine artist, or to become an illustrator or anything else, but to be a cartoonist. That’s what I love doing. “If the stuff that I do gratifies me, it’ll be nice if it sells more books. I try to put together stuff that interests me, as far as the ideas and the thoughts that I have, and I try to put them down in a graphic form, hoping that people who look at my stuff get the same kind of kick looking at what I put down in graphics, that I enjoyed mentally and emotionally.” In the late ’60s, artist Carmine Infantino rose to editorial power at DC Comics, and he recruited Kubert as one of his “artist-as-editors,” a move designed to keep DC visually on par with Marvel. For Joe, it was as much a training ground as his early days working for Shelly Mayer. “I made a lot of mistakes, sure,” Joe admitted. “I know that I benefited by learning things, but they weren’t things I set out to learn. It was just a job, and I did it, that’s all. I think that time has separated and clarified this business of being a professional, instead of just doing the work. The guys that I worked with were my friends, and people that I worked with all of the time. Very often that became a problem, simply

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

TM & © DC Comics.

could start something like this, would you be ready to run the business end of it? If I had to run the business end, forget it, I don’t even want to discuss it.’ “I wasn’t looking for a substitute for my own career. If it were ever a question of running the school or doing my own work, the school would not exist. My wife felt that this was something that we could start. A piece of property came up for sale, a mansion not far from the house, and we started up the school.” It all stemmed from Joe Kubert’s experience as an anxious kid with a battered portfolio of art — or a broom-pushing gopher — hanging out with established artists in the field. “The school is really an extension of my experiences in trying to get my first jobs in the field of cartooning,” Joe said. “In the years that I’ve been in it, everybody that I’d met, all the pros, helped me in any which way they could. Every once in a while, when I came across a pro who was kind enough to give me some time, and most of them did. “But, it was a hit and miss situation. I had felt that it would be great if those people who had the desire and the commitment to become professionals had a school where they could go to and come into contact with all of the people that they need in order to learn all of the aspects that it takes to become a cartoonist. “I opened the school, not as a substitute for my career — I’ve always loved what I’ve done, and hopefully I’ll never have to stop doing what I do now — but I did feel that this was something that there was a need for. I’ve come across many young people who were not only desirous, but hungered to find out what they needed to know in order to become a professional cartoonist; they just didn’t know

All art and characters TM & © DC Comics.

because I knew them so well that if they were late on a deadline, it was something that made difficulties for me. I knew they were just playing games, we all did. I’d done the same thing. We all knew what one another was doing. “It was difficult separating and making it clear to my friends that were working with me, people that I had a great deal of respect for in terms of their abilities, to sit on them and tell them ‘Look, this isn’t a game now; this is for real. You’ve got to get the stuff in on time and, if you can’t, tell me. Our private relationship will remain the same and won’t be affected at all. But we can’t work together if you can’t get the stuff in on time.’ That was a rough lesson to learn.” The editorial stint preceded next, even more long-lasting stage in Kubert’s career: the founding of the Joe Kubert School, in Dover, New Jersey. It all hearkened back to his days as a kid going from comics company to company, meeting as many of his creative heroes as possible. “When I was a kid… the people who were in the business were very kind and would help you in many ways,” Joe said. “But when I talked to these guys, they told me what I needed to do, and so on. I always felt that if there was one place for someone who was seriously into this work to gather all of that information that would be a very good thing. I had the idea in the back of my head for a very long time, but that I would never be prepared to give up doing my own work for the sake of starting a school. “About 30 years ago, our five kids were all out of the house and married [and moved out] and my wife, who was a graduate of a business school, would be at home. I said ‘Look, if we find a place locally (because I wouldn’t commute, I live in town, just five minutes away) where we

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

explained. “As editor, it’s my responsibility to make sure that what’s coming out in that book reflects my ideas. The people who I worked with as editor are those whose ideas coincide with mine, so there’s no conflict, and it’s a matter of sharpening whatever ideas they may have. This school is different. It’s a learning situation as opposed to the professional thing that goes on in the profession itself. There are allowances that have to be made in teaching, where a student is allowed to make mistakes. I think it’s important for a student to be allowed to make mistakes, so he can see where he went wrong and then change his mind. You can’t really do that by telling them: it has to be seen and experienced. “Sometimes, despite the fact that students are told very clearly in the discussions they have prior to coming in, that it’s tough and so forth. The commitment that they make is a tough one, and sometimes feelings can be hurt…if you hit them where they live, so to speak. Where they live is their artwork. Artwork is an important and integral thing in their lives. If you criticize the way they’re doing things in terms of personalizing it…” He stopped for a minute and reflected further. “Look, the students have a certain amount of respect for the instructors because they’ve made it and they are professionals. If an instructor tells you that your stuff is lousy and that you’re doing terrible work, to some it can kill their incentive and hurt them. It’s got to be tempered with a lot of things, and you have to know the individual with whom you’re dealing.” The Kubert School has turned out a virtual army of comics pros, including Stephen Bissette, Mike Cavallaro, Dave Dorman, Tom Mandrake, Alex Maleev, and John Totleben, as well as Joe’s youngest sons, Adam and Andy. “They’re now teaching here,” Joe said about his boys with more than a hint of pride. “I’m very proud of what

Above: Panel detail from the Enemy Ace tale in Star Spangled War Stories #139 [June-July ’68]. Art by Joe Kubert.

Previous page: Vignette by Joe Kubert of Baron Von Hammer, the Enemy Ace, from the cover of The Unknown Soldier #252 [June ’81], upper left. Bottom is opening spread, Star Spangled War Stories #139 [June-July ’68], art by J.K., words by Robert Kanigher.

Below: A continuing motif in the Kanigher-scripted “Enemy Ace” exploits was the relationship between the German air ace Von Hammer and a wolf who hunts in a Bavarian forest. An evocative panel from the same SSWS issue listed above. Art by Joe Kubert.

All art and characters TM & © DC Comics.

where to get that information. “ It’s evident that Kubert didn’t develop at his leisure, and it’s no surprise that discipline was the bedrock on which his school was built. “What I try to do is what was done for me when I came into the business. I was dying to know what it took to put together the kind of work that would look attractive in a comic book form. I always loved to draw, and always loved to do this stuff. The people that I meet, that have come to this school, feel very much the same way. What I try to do with them is what was done for me. ‘This is the way you do it, this is the way you work at it, it’s going to take a helluva lot of hard work, you’re going to have to sit at that drawing table and draw anywhere from eight to ten to twelve hours a day. Not because anybody’s going to hit you over the head, but because you want to do it. If you don’t want to do it, then forget about it. It doesn’t make you a terrible person if you decide you don’t want to do it!’ “There are many people I know that draw very well, but don’t want to sit at that drawing table all the time, and that’s fine. But if this is what you want to do, if this is what you feel a compulsion to do, what I’ll be able to show is what I’m able to do on a professional level. If you do what I tell you, then you’ll be able to do the same thing.” The Kubert School, in a recently renovated building that was once Adam and Andy’s high school, is a three-year program that started with 25 students, and now averages around 120. The students endure a rigorous curriculum, with 30 hours of weekly course work and about that much in homework, all designed to hone a sense of discipline while enforcing a work ethic. If they really are serious, they’ll stick it out and become professional artists. “I explain this to the students: if I’m dealing with a guy who’s working for me, as his editor, I have the last word,” he

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

All art and characters TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Particularly effective were the early Joe Kubert covers of his “Unknown Soldier” series in Star Spangled War Stories with the daring use of typography combined with Joe’s iconic imagery. Above are, from left, #151 [June-July 1970], 154 [ Dec. ’70–Jan. ’71] and 159 [Oct.–Nov. ’71], and at left is the original art of #156 [Apr.–May ’71], courtesy of Peter Carlsson and the Estate of Joe Kubert.

they’re doing. As far as I’m concerned, what Adam and Andy are doing, and the fact that they enjoy the same things that I do, is nothing short of a miracle. I don’t think anybody can tell or suggest to you that you’re going to get into a profession like this. But, once you’re into it, it’s very difficult to talk you out of it. It gets you and becomes a really strong part of your life and, to me, the fact that Adam and Andy have the same feeling towards it that I do, is nothing short of a miracle.” The Kubert School feels more like a community high school, with the kind ladies in the main office bringing in a cup of coffee for a visitor, and the sense of calm in the halls. Yet, there’s still a family-run business feel, a lot of which came from Joe’s late wife, Muriel, who was the heart of the school. “The school wouldn’t be here if not for her,” Muriel’s widower says. “For the first 20 or more years, she was present at the school every day, and probably had more to do individually with the students than I. She took a personal interest in them, and that’s the way she was.”

Above: Derf’s high school identification card issued during the last school year of his friendship with Jeff Dahmer.

Looking at Joe Kubert in Seth Kushner’s photo, the first spread in this tribute issue of Comic Book Creator, he appears as if the guardian of the gates, standing as firm as the tree behind him, stationed before the doors of The Kubert School. He’s taken off his trademark glasses, giving us the Superman version of himself, squinting into the sunlight like John Wayne, the actor whose autographed picture adorns the artist’s studio wall. This picture was taken shortly after Muriel’s passing. Knowing that, you can also see him as standing alongside the equally-changing tree, the fall colors giving way to the hard times of winter and eventual ease of spring as the thick trunk supports him; he’s a man who knows his life is changing but is still ready and willing to face it head-on. There’s a nobility that overcomes the slight bit of vulnerability that peeks out. Joe Kubert, as physically and personally powerful an individual, is still human. It’s hard to think of him that way, given his legendary status as a comic book creator, or even his tendency to continually improve—especially when you consider how active he was, as an 85-year-old, counting the graphic novels and comics he had still been drawing, all on top of spearheading his school. When Joe passed away on August 12, 2012, from cancer, it was a shock. Most cartoonists at that age continued to live in the past, the glory days when comics were widely considered junk culture and computers’ involvement in the artistic process was something from science fiction. But Kubert, he faced it all head-on and thrived. He didn’t die as a “Golden Age comic book artist,” but as a contemporary graphic novelist who still had a helluva lot more to contribute. Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Expert Assessment

Bill Schelly’s Top Ten Joe Kubert Comics The Masterful Artist’s Boswell Picks the Best of the Best in Chronological Order Daniel Kubert, David Kubert and Lisa Zangara.

“The Golem” appears in Weird Horrors & Daring Adventures: The Joe Kubert Archives Vol. 1, edited by Bill Schelly.

Sgt. Rock, Hawkman TM & © DC Comics.

1946

“The Golem” [The Challenger #3, 1946] was Joe Kubert’s first important comics story, and presaged Jewish themes in his later, mature work.

BILL SCHELLY, of course, is a notable early member of comics fandom, prominent historian of the fan scene, and is currently an associate editor of our sister magazine, Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego. Ye Ed points out Bill, naturally, because our pal is also the author of two superb books on the life and work of Joe Kubert, both published by Fantagraphics Books — 2008’s Man of Rock: A Biography of Joe Kubert and The Art of Joe Kubert [2011] — and because my friend was enormously generous in sharing a bounty of Kubert material that did not make it into either tome. While he understandably begged off contributing to the issue in a substantial way — claiming utter fatigue with the subject — he did cotton to a suggestion to list his Top Ten Kubert works. Bill, Kubert lovers everywhere are very grateful for your tremendous contributions! Buy his books, peeps! Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

The volcano cover to Tor Vol. 1 #3 [May 1954] is one of the most striking, brilliantly colored covers on any comic book from any era.

1954 19

TM & © DC Comics.

1959

“The Rock!” [G. I. Combat #68, Jan. 1959]. Brilliant Rock prototype story written by Bob Kanigher; the splash sums up the entire story in just two panels.

TM & © DC Comics.

1959

“The Origin of Viking Prince” [The Brave and the Bold #23, April-May 1959]. The first story in two issues wholly devoted to the Kanigher-Kubert character, this one scripted by Bob Haney.

1969

1961

“The Shadow-Thief of Midway City!” [The Brave and the Bold #36, June-July 1961]. All six of the Gardner Fox-Joe Kubert Silver Age “Hawkman” issues are great, but this one stands out.

TM & © DC Comics.

TM & © DC

Comics.

“Stop the War — I Want to Get Off!” [Our Army at War #196, Aug. 1968] Kubert edited, wrote and drew the story of Rock’s confrontation with the role of soldiers through history. Its inclusion of Holocaust images in the story was highly unusual in comics of the time.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

1972

Kubert’s 73-page adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes [Tarzan #207-211, 1972] which was the first fully satisfying graphic story adaptation of ERB’s first novel featuring the Lord of the Jungle.

1996

Fax from Sarajevo [1996] was Kubert’s ground-breaking, semi-journalistic graphic novel about his friend and his family being trapped in the city during the siege of Sarajevo. It won the Eisner and Harvey awards for best graphic novel of the year.

#10

2003

Yossel April 19, 1943 [2003] postulates what would have happened to Kubert as a young, budding cartoonist in Southern Poland had his family not emigrated to America before World War II. Bold, raw, unforgettable.

2001

“What of Tomorrow?” [9-11, Vol. 2] was a fourpage story in this DC book about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Placed 9-11 in the context of other great disasters in Kubert’s (then) 75 years.

of Joe Kubert.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Keepers of the Flame: Adam and Talking with Joe’s comic-book creator sons Conducted by JON B. COOKE & Christopher L. KNOWLES [The following interview took place in Andy Kubert’s studio on a sunny Saturday morning — March 9, 2013 — at The Kubert School, in Dover, New Jersey. About seven months had come and gone since their father had died, but the pain of his passing was still very near the surface for the brothers, the youngest sons of Joe Kubert. Ye Ed was joined by friend and former Comic Book Artist associate editor, Christopher L. Knowles, who himself was a graduate of The Kubert School. CBC is grateful to the Kubert men for taking time on a beautiful weekend and for being supportive of this tribute issue from its inception. This interview was transcribed by Brian K. Morris and was copy-edited for accuracy and clarification by Adam and Andy. — JBC]

Above: Adam (left) and Andy Kubert pose for Ye Ed in Andy’s studio at The Kubert School, during their interview at the Dover, N.J. art institution this past March. 22

Comic Book Creator: We’re at the Kubert School with Adam and Andy Kubert. It’s 11:24 and here we go. So, how’s it going, guys? Andy Kubert: It’s going as well as can be expected. It’s going okay. Chris Knowles: What’s on the plate? Adam Kubert: Well, today, I woke up at five, [laughter] I got my daughter off me, put her back in her bed — and my daughter’s three. What’s on my plate? I’m currently working on an issue of Uncanny Avengers. And then, after that, Marvel has a big project lined up for me that I can’t talk about yet. It’s a secret project. I just re-signed with Marvel for another three years. Chris: Exclusive? Adam: Exclusive. And as far as what’s on my plate, drawing-wise, that’s it. Oh yeah, I’m also doing six covers of one of Marvel’s events. Just the covers. Besides that, the things that are going on at the school…. Andy: You want to know what’s on my plate besides school stuff? What am I doing up at DC? I just wrapped an issue of Batman that’s coming out this week, #18. Scott Snyder’s writing it. There was a project I started in 2008, a project I wrote and drew, that I had to put down to work on various assignments: I did two issues of Batman with Neil Gaiman and then Flashpoint with Geoff Johns, and a whole bunch of other things. But I’m picking up that project again. It’s my first writing assignment. It’s a project that we are looking at putting out sometime this year. I think it’ll catch a lot of people’s attention. Hopefully they’ll like it! Chris: Cool. Who’s inking? Andy: I am. I’m writing, penciling and inking it. I’m not lettering or coloring it. [laughter] CBC: Obviously, it’s a long time in the planning. Is this the culmination of an idea you had? Andy: It is from an idea I had and it’s a character that I really love. DC actually encouraged me to do it — “Why don’t you start writing? Why don’t you give it a shot?” And I always wanted to write, and this is an opportunity to do it. CBC: And how’s the experience of writing? Andy: At first, it was daunting. [laughs] I had to come up with the idea and present the idea to the editors to get it approved. There’s a couple of phases you have to

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

The Kubert Legacy

Andy Kubert on Facing the Future on lessons learned and shared responsibility to ensure their father’s dream endures go through, including re-writes, that kind of thing. And it was all-new to me, but it was all interesting and I really enjoyed it. But I think that the toughest part for me is going to be the dialogue. That’s an art unto itself and I don’t have the experience, so I’ve got to work on that a bit. [chuckles] But I’ll figure it out. CBC: Who’s the editor in that? Andy: Mike Marts, and he was a big help in assisting me to put it together. It was great working with him on it. But, besides that, what else do I have going on? [mutual chuckling] I drew the cover to this year’s Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. I also just did a whole bunch of covers, Batman covers, just a whole lot of covers. Things like that. One other thing that I do is, once a week, I go up to the DC offices and serve as a consultant on art, storytelling… anything they need. Chris: Now what do you do there? What does that include? Andy: I meet with the editors. If there’s any problems, if they see something that doesn’t work, storytelling-wise; something they have a problem with — anything — I go over it with them. We have meetings, literally all day, on that. CBC: About your work? Andy: It could be about mine or about whatever else they’re working on at that time. CBC: Are you a creative liaison or do you just make suggestions? Andy: I just make suggestions. It’s a consulting thing. Whatever they ask for help with. I like very much going up there and I like the people there. I get along great with them and there’s a nice camaraderie. I enjoy it a lot. CBC: Do you see an editorial capacity in the future for you, like your father? Andy: I have no idea where it’s going. It’s one day a week, right now, so it’s good for me. Besides that, I have the school and then I have my drawing work. I’m busy seven days a week, literally. Maybe eight days a week. [chuckling] CBC: Was your father’s passing as sudden to you both as it was to the comics community? Adam: Yes, it was. It was very sudden. He had been feeling tired for three days… well, he was going to an already-scheduled doctor’s appointment. Andy: Dad wasn’t feeling well, but he already had a doctor’s appointment, and if he hadn’t had that appointment, I was going to bring him, because he was feeling tired and wasn’t himself. He was usually a very energetic and outgoing guy, so we all noticed a slowdown. He never complained about anything. You had to ask, “Hey, you okay? Are you all right?” And he’d say, “I’ll be fine. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.” Anyway, we got him to the doctor and the doctor said, “Joe, we’re going to send you to the hospital emergency room.” So I went with him. We took him to Morristown Memorial. His doctor’s office is right across the street. He was in there for… [to Adam] how many weeks…? Adam: Three weeks. Between the time he was admitted and the time he passed away, it was a total of three weeks. When he went in there, they found things wrong with him. It started with him being very, very tired because of renal failure. Renal failure caused by multiple myeloma. Andy: That’s what the doctors eventually found out. Initially they couldn’t figure out what it was. Adam: Yeah, they didn’t know, at first. But his renal failure… this is how strong a guy he was: he had only one working kidney and it was functioning at five percent when he was admitted. Chris: Was this a tumor? Adam: No, it wasn’t a tumor; it was blood cancer. Myeloma is basically blood cancer. Andy: It affects kidneys. Adam: It affected his kidneys and, through that three week process and test after test, he went on to dialysis, did chemotherapy, and he had some heart issues. Prior to that, he had high-blood pressure. Andy: Right. Adam: So there were some heart issues with being in dialysis. Andy: He had the blood pressure under control, though. Adam: He couldn’t make it through a whole session of dialysis. It was difficult for him. It Right: Courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic and his Strip Art Features (SAF), this photo of Joe Kubert was snapped during Joe and Muriel’s visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1990. It was here, in the walled city of Dubrovnik — the “Jewel of the Adriatic” — where Joe and Ervin conceive of their first publishing collaboration, the threevolume Abraham Stone. Ervin, of course, was the subject of Joe’s 1996 graphic novel Fax From Sarajevo. Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Below: In the summer of 2002, Ye Ed produced a special “Father & Sons” issue of his old mag, Comic Book Artist [#20, July], with half devoted to John Romita and his son John Jr., and the other half celebrating — you guessed it! — Joe and his two comic artist sons. For old time’s sake, here’s the Kubert clan cover jam. Colors by this CBC tribute issue’s special consultant, Peter Carlsson!

was a lot of… You know, right until the end, he was strong. He would say, “I could do this, I want to do that.” It just, you know, it just sucked. CBC: Over the three-week stay it was a steady decline? Adam: Not really. Andy: No, he had his ups and downs. There was one point where the doctors thought he was ready to go home, because they didn’t really know how bad it was. They didn’t diagnose the myeloma because they didn’t know what he actually had at that point. He was pretty upbeat. We were packing up his stuff in the room — Adam: Well, we packed up his stuff a number of times. They said he’d be ready to go home, but we all said he wasn’t ready yet. So many doctors came into the room over a week’s time. One says one thing, another says another thing, and you try to formulate what it is you really should do. Fortunately — I’d really like to mention this — Karen Berger’s brother, who’s a nephrologist, a kidney doctor — Andy: I was up at DC for consulting and I was talking to Karen about my father’s condition, and she said her brother has got a big practice and teaches at a university out in Ohio. And she said, “If you want, I can ask him, if you want his opinion.” And he diagnosed it. Adam: He was actually the guy who said what my dad had, believe it or not. We were texting and I gave him all the information. There’s nothing like being in the room, talking to doctors, and you can’t understand what all they are saying. I mean there’s just so much information; you have no experience in medicine, so being able to text Karen’s brother and he tells you exactly what it is you’ve got to do and what’s

going on… it was very helpful. CBC: He put it in layman’s terms. Adam: Karen’s brother is Dr. Bruce Berger. CBC: Well, that’s wonderful for the comics community came together like that, for Karen to help. Andy: Yeah, he was a big help. He was a really big help. CBC: Were you there when your dad passed away? Adam: We all were there, yes. Andy: Yes. Chris: Did they call you up to tell you he was passing? Adam: No, we were — Andy: [To Adam] You were down at the hospital that morning, and you called me and said, “Get down here now.” Adam: Right. It was morning and he was in pain, and that had never happened before. You know, he didn’t even want to take any aspirin or anything like that. So it was really a matter of that day. Andy: It was quick, it was really quick. Adam: You know, he had some procedures the day before, chemotherapy. I think it just may have been too much. You know, he was the big, strong guy who could take anything. Andy: And his treatment was very aggressive. He opted for it. He wanted to go through it. CBC: Oh, he wanted to fight it as best he could? Andy: Yes, he wanted to fight it as best he could. Adam: The thing is that he didn’t want to be on dialysis. I don’t know if you know anything about dialysis, but it’s terrible. It’s a terrible way to live. You know, dialysis is like a four-hour procedure that takes the whole day. Chris: You have to just sit there. Adam: You’ve gotta just sit there, you have to do it two or three days a week. So, by the time you start feeling good from the dialysis, you’ve gotta go in and do it again. And you’ve got to travel someplace to do it. Chris: It’s a real commitment. Adam: The chemotherapy he opted for, which Andy was mentioning, there was a possibility that it could help his kidney function enough so he wouldn’t have to continue on dialysis. Andy: And that’s what he wanted to do. Adam: That’s what he wanted to do. CBC: Did you guys talk frankly in the end? Did he realize it was the end? Adam: No. Andy: No, we never really did. Adam: He says, “You get your work done? Go home and get your work done.” Andy: We’d be sitting in the hospital room and he goes, “What are you guys doing here? Get the hell out of here.” Adam: Yeah, “Get out of here.” Andy: “Don’t you guys have better things to do?” Adam: Andy and I would bring our work in. We’d be sitting there, working in the room — Andy: And he just kept going like, “I hate being here. I can’t wait to get out.” Adam: He was working there. We brought his assignments in and he was in his hospital bed, working. Andy: Some of the last things he did were for the IDW books, the oversized Tarzan books, and the plate inserts with the Tarzan heads. Those were some of the last things that he did. He had a couple of P*S magazine covers he worked on, too. I actually brought Nite Owl, the Before Watchmen stuff that we worked on, which he wanted to ink, #3. He really, really wanted to ink the whole book, but just couldn’t. So Bill Sienkiewicz stepped in to do it and he did an amazing job. CBC: With his passing, you had a memorial service? Andy: Yes. CBC: How would you describe it? Andy: There was a lot of people. CBC: A lot of people? Adam: Yes. Oh yeah. Chris: Where did this take place? Andy: Tuttles Funeral Home.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Adam: It was local. Chris: Was that in Randolph? Adam: I gotta say the turnout was amazing. Andy: I can’t deal with this right now. Too soon. [Andy leaves the room.] CBC: I’m sorry. Adam: We went from the Tuttle Funeral Home, drove in a procession to the cemetery. And the route we took was past the school. There were… this is why Andy couldn’t… there were a group of students — 20 or 30 students — in a… [breaks up] standing in front of the school as we passed. Andy: [Returning to room] I’ve got to tell you, Jon, this is too soon for me. CBC: Okay. Adam: I don’t think it’s ever not going to hurt. CBC: I know. He was working on the mini-series Joe Kubert Presents. Was he excited about that? Andy: Oh, gosh. [chuckles] Yes, he was very excited about that, thanks. I think we just put together the last issue (which has just gone out to the printers, by the way). CBC: Joey Cavalieri told me last night that the last issue is now going to press. Andy: Dad was also very excited about the IDW Tarzan book. I wish he had seen it. He was real excited about that. He loved that kind of format and he saw what was done before. [points to corner of room] I have Wally Wood’s IDW book and I bought the Dave Mazzucchelli Daredevil. He couldn’t wait to see the Tarzan one. I wish my father did. CBC: Did it come out beautiful? Andy: It looks great, yeah. Actually, I’ve got a copy. Adam: Yeah, it’s amazing. The Joe Kubert Presents are still coming out. It’s like he’s still around, you know, with the new stuff that he had been working on. It’s amazing. CBC: Did he have like long-term plans? Did he think he was immortal?

Adam: We all did. [chuckles] Chris: Yeah, I’m thinking everybody in the industry did. I mean he was still doing top-notch work. CBC: Yes, absolutely. Adam: He was still sought after. I mean, guys who were his age get tired. He didn’t get tired, you know. And I think a lot of it had to do with how much he loved to do it. You don’t get tired when — you know, he would say he hasn’t worked a day in his life. It’s true. [pause] I work. [laughter] CBC: On the other hand, there’s Adam. [laughs] Adam: For me, drawing is work. Well, it’s not work as opposed to digging ditches — but it doesn’t come as easy as it did to him. Andy: I don’t look at it like work. [laughter] I love doing it. Adam: Yeah. CBC: What was your dad’s habits? Did he like focus on his schoolwork during the day? You know, the school itself during the day and work on his comics work at night? Or did he have any kind of routine to fit everything into? Andy: He had a set schedule. He was here by 8:30 in the morning every day, seven days a week. CBC: Seven days a week? Andy: Seven days a week he was here. CBC: Why on Sunday? Andy: Because he loved it. He drew every day. CBC: He drew his own stuff on Sundays, right? Andy: No, he worked on everything, every day. He taught on Tuesday, that was his teaching day. Every other day, he worked on his own stuff. Whenever anything else came up — school stuff, anything — he would put down the pens and pencils, and he would take care of whatever needed his attention. By 5:30, 6:00, he was out the door. He would go home, have dinner, go to bed, wake up, and do it again. He was on a schedule. On weekends, he would get here at 8:30, but would leave like 1:00, 2:00 in the

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Adam, Joe and Andy Kubert pose for Newark Star-Ledger staff photographer Robert Sciarrino. The pic originally appeared in a 2006 edition of the New Jersey newspaper. Used with permission.

Below and next page: The Kubert siblings are keenly aware that their professional presence in mainstream comics serve as veritable advertisements for The Kubert School, so they both strive to keep up their commitments with Marvel and DC. Adam, below, and Andy puts up with the CBC shutterbug in these snaps taken in their respective studios at the school.

afternoon. He liked driving. He had a little BMW and he liked driving around, so he’d just take it for a drive and take my mom out, too. That’s what he liked doing. Going all over the place. Wherever the car would take him. Adam: Wherever the car went is where he’d go. Andy: He’d set the GPS and just start driving around. CBC: Really? Chris: This is so long ago, but I remember going to Thursday night sketch classes and Joe would be there. Andy: Oh, he would do that once in a while. We still have the sketch classes going and he would show up. Adam: In fact, I think he had gone there recently, right? Andy: Yes, he did. I made it a point, when I when I sat in on those classes, not to sit next to him. [laughter] Because you’d see what he was doing, it’s so disheartening because

he was so much better than everyone…. Adam: You might as well draw what he’s drawing instead of drawing what’s in front of you. It’ll be better. [Andy laughs] Chris: Well, when I was there, he’d have the brown paper and the white colored pencil and just – Andy: Yeah. Adam: Oh yeah, and a stick and a rock and mud… [laughter] And you know whatever he drew, it would be beautiful. CBC: It would be art! Chris: Well, I think it’s really important to focus on this joy that he had. You know, that he just felt this tremendous joy and this tremendous gratitude that — because I remember sitting in the auditorium and him saying, “This is the greatest job. If you make this, this is the greatest job you’ll ever have. Every day, you’ll wake up and you just can’t wait to get to work.” Andy: And that’s the way he was. CBC: And I absolutely believe he was being completely sincere. He was absolutely authentic. I mean it was just like he was feeling it. While most people might mouth words like that, he actually meant it. Andy: And you could see it in the work. CBC: And the work is there to prove it. Adam: He had two joys: the joy of work and the joy of his family. That was it. Chris: That was the other thing I was going to say, is that Joe did not come across as a peer. He came across as “Dad,” you know? I think he projected that to all the students, that he was a figure of authority, that he was not like an overgrown kid, even though he had that enthusiasm and that joy. But he also… he was a man. He was a man’s man. Andy: A mensch. Chris: He really was. Adam: We felt that way, too, but maybe that was because he called us “The Boys.” [laughter] Andy: Yeah, we were getting up to 50 years old and he’s calling us “The Boys.” CBC: I said to Joey Cavalieri last night, “I’m going down to visit the Kubert boys tomorrow,” and he wondered if people are going to call you that when you both are in your 70’s. Yeah, probably! [laughter] Adam: We’re old enough to have grandchildren. Chris: When did Joe stop playing racquetball? Because I remember when I was here … Andy: Yeah, I used to play with him, myself and my brother Dave, gosh… Adam: At least ten years ago. Andy: It’s been longer than that. In the ’90s sometime, we stopped. Adam: He still wanted to play and nobody wanted to play with him anymore. [chuckles] Andy: No, because we didn’t want to — Adam: Because all his friends were dropping dead, and stopped playing tennis and stuff. It’s “Dad, we know you can do it, but…” CBC: When I started writing for The Jack Kirby Collector, when I got involved in comics history and stuff, Joe was doing an exhibit tour for Fax From Sarajevo, and it was up at the Words and Pictures Museum, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and I went up there with my brother. We took him out to lunch and he would only have toast and a cup of tea. And that’s all he would have. “Come on, Joe, I’ll buy you anything!” But I’d never met him before and he just looked at me square in the eye, listened to every word I said, was absolutely considerate, did not ever look over shoulder or at his watch or anything like that. This was in the gallery, and it got to the point where he gave me so much attention for such a length of time that other people wanted to talk to him, but he still maintained this contact with me that was utterly, startlingly respectful. Adam: Mm-mm. CBC: And it was like it’s not only is he “Dad,” as this authority figure; he was also so considerate and well-mannered.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

And I just thought that that was absolutely remarkable for a super-star artist. He was remarkably kind. Adam: Well, don’t think you’re so special because he did that with everybody. [laughter] CBC: Oh, yeah! That’s my point. Adam: It’s true. Even the stalker we had, he wanted to have come in to talk to him. [chuckles and looks at Andy] Right? Andy: Yeah, we had a stalker, a kid stalker. There was somebody that came to the school a couple years ago. He was hanging around. CBC: Stalking who? Adam: Joe and us. [laughter] Andy: We had to get the police to get him out. But my dad wanted to bring him in. He said, “Bring him in. Bring him inside and let me talk to him.” [laughter] CBC: Even a stalker? Andy: Right. Even Mike Chen and the office ladies downstairs said, “No, we’re not going to let him in. We don’t know what he’ll do and if we lose you, we’ll be out of a job!” [more laughter] “Just let him in, I’ll talk to him. No problem.” And I said, “No, Dad. No, absolutely not. We don’t know who this guy is, he’s sleeping out in the back and stuff.” I said, “The police can get him out of here.” Adam: But our father was very respectable towards other people and gave everybody time. If they wanted time to talk, he would give that to them. Andy: He would, absolutely. If somebody would just call him on the phone and say, “I want to talk to you. Can I come over to see you?” He’d say, “Absolutely, come on down.” He’d always make time for them. CBC: He used to personally answer letters. I wrote him a fan letter back in the early ’80s, and he immediately replied. Andy: Oh, absolutely. He made it a point to turn those letters around quick. He’d get one and two days later the sender would receive his reply. My sister would forward e-mails (because she gets all the school e-mails) to Pete Carlsson, my dad’s assistant. Pete would print them out, my dad would write up a reply and Pete would type them in and send the replies out. Adam: My dad didn’t type or e-mail. [chuckles] Andy: But whatever response people received, they were his thoughts and he did wrote the replies himself. CBC: That’s beautiful. Chris: So what about the school now? It’s your job now. Andy: It was our job before, too, you know. [chuckles] We were all involved with it. Both Adam and I have been teaching here and involved with it since 2001. That was our first year of teaching, in September 2001. Adam: [To Andy] I thought it was before that. Andy: No, 2001. You taught for one year well before. Adam: Right, that was ten years prior. CBC: How was that first teaching experience? Adam: Oh, the first time? It was fine, but in those days, I was living over an hour away and the drive just killed me. I didn’t want to do it because of the commute, so I stopped. In fact, that year, Rags Morales was in the class I taught. That was neat. But, like Andy said, I guess it was 2001 we started teaching…? Andy: Yes. CBC: And what was that? Was that a preordained plan to eventually have you come in or did you fill spots? Adam: No, my dad just asked us and he felt it was just the right time to try and get us more involved. I mean, we both — [to Andy] did you have your studio here at that time? Andy: No, I built the studio in my house at that time. It was all done, and then… Adam: I had my studio here. I’ve had it here for 25 years. So, for me, at that point — CBC: In this building? Adam: Yes, in this building. So, for me at that point, I’m here already teaching, I could maybe draw before class, draw after class, which doesn’t work out that way because

your brain is jelly after you teach for six hours. But that’s the way it went for me. CBC: Did you have administrative responsibilities from the start? What was the process? Andy: No, the only real responsibilities we had were teaching. [laughs] Chris: Is Mike Chen still here? Andy: Mike Chen’s still here, yes. Chris: And what’s his title? Andy: He is an administrator, as far as — Adam: “Chief Administrator,” we’ll call him. [Andy laughs] Chris: And he has a group of people who work under him. Andy: With him, yeah. There’s Carol Thomas, she’s the head administrator. And we have Dorothy Morley, she does the financial aid. Louise and Terri are in the office, and that’s

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Ouch! That’s gotta hurt, Logan! Adam Kubert’s mind-blowing Wolverine #300 [Jan. 2012] cover (minus the logo, of course). Colors by Laura Martin.

pretty much the whole office setup. Chris: How is the economic downturn been for the school? Adam: You know, we had some enrollment issues five or six years ago. Andy: And that kind of hit up at the same time as when our building was getting redone. We had to move the school out of this building and we had to find temporary housing for a year. CBC: Oh, yeah? Chris: Where was that? What did you guys do for that? Andy: Well, they moved the entire school and they built inside a warehouse, which was over on Route 10 in Randolph. Adam: About a mile away. Andy: They built up walls and classrooms inside this huge warehouse. Chris: Did you have buses for the kids? Andy: Yes, they did have taxi buses from here. Adam: We did have a shuttle bus from here, but it just aligns itself with the economic downturn, but really, I don’t think the economic downturn had anything to do with the decreased enrollment. I think the move to the other building

— it took a lot of time, it took a lot of energy, trying to set things up. And some students weren’t happy with this, that, and the other thing. Chris: It affected morale. Adam: Right, it affected morale. Andy: It did affect morale. The building and classroom didn’t have the charm that this place has. Adam: It wasn’t optimal. Andy: Right. Adam: People were complaining it was cold, it was noisy, it was this or it was that. Andy: There was a big echo in there. Adam: Right. Andy: But this place [referring to the renovations at the permanent school] has a nice charm. It’s warm and has a comforting feel to it. Chris: Oh, it’s great. I’m just so impressed. It looks amazing. Adam: By the time we moved back in here three years ago, enrollment has been going up ever since. Andy: There’s renewed interest now. Enrollment’s really picking up. It’s picking up well. CBC: Did you have to cap enrollment? Andy: We have only so much space. So, yes, we do have to cap it. Chris: Do you guys do student interviews? Adam: Mike Chen does that. Andy: Mike Chen does all the interviews. Chris: Because your father did that, of course, 30 years ago. Andy: Way, way back when, he did. Adam: Though the last bunch of years, I don’t think he did it anymore. Mike’s been doing them forever so he knows exactly what to look for and who to let in. CBC: So, besides instructing, what are your specific responsibilities with the school? Andy: Running it; the day-to-day big decisions; whatever comes up. Adam: Whatever comes up, right. Andy: Whether you deal with student or teacher issues — Adam: Curriculum. Andy: Curriculum, advertising, financial stuff. Chris: So you guys are like the executives, basically. Like in a movie, you’d be the executive producer. You’re the boss. Adam: We’re steering the ship. Andy: Basically, that’s us. CBC: And did you learn how to do it? Andy: We’re learning as we go. [laughter] It is basically on-the-job training. But I’ve got to tell you, too, we couldn’t do it without the people who work here and the teachers. Everybody who works here is integral to this place and without any one of them. I think we’d sink. They’re all so important. CBC: Can you specifically name some of the people? Andy: Sure. Carol Thomas, who’s absolutely invaluable. She’s awesome. Mike Chen, invaluable; Dorothy Morley, invaluable; Louise Gentile, invaluable. Adam: Mike Chechetti. [chuckles] Andy: Mike Chechetti, he’s also invaluable. He does all the maintenance, takes care of all the buildings. Anything that happens: if there’s a leak on the roof, he’s up there. He takes care of the snow, everything. What would I do without the guy? [laughter] Adam: You walk into this place or you go over to the mansion, you walk around there, and I mean these places require a lot of maintenance, a lot of looking after. Chris: Yeah, the mansion’s old. Andy: Yeah, it is old. [laughs] Adam: It’s an old place, it’s a dormitory and it gets a lot of abuse, you know? But it’s still standing, it’s clean, and — Andy: It’s functional. Adam: It’s functional. Chris: How many dormitories do you now –? Do you still have the Carriage House? Adam: Yes.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Andy: We have the Carriage House and we have the Clinton Street House, a large multi-family house. Adam: Well, it’s a two-family house. Andy: That’s where we have the girls stay. Adam: That was actually completely gutted and redone because there was a flood. Insurance took care of that. But, you know, we’re constantly updating and improving and painting this and that. You have to because students live in there and they abuse everything. [Andy chuckles] Chris: You’re using all the rooms in the mansion for living space? Adam: The mansion’s full. Andy: Yeah, they’re all full. Adam: Everything is full. CBC: How many rooms? Roughly how many students? Adam: Roughly 20 in the mansion…? Andy: It’s more than that, I thought. Adam: Twenty-five? Andy: Yes. Adam: It depends on what day of the week it is. Andy: [Chuckles] I don’t know the exact number. Chris: Because I remember when I came in the front door of the mansion, underneath the carport. And I walked straight down the old — I don’t know if it was the Life Drawing Room — but I remember there was a classroom. But that room was not used for a living room, it was used just as like a lounge. Adam: Like a studio, yeah. It’s difficult to work in your room, so they set up the rooms downstairs as like a studio, their drawing tables are set up. CBC: How many hours a week does this place consume you guys? Adam: Too many. [Andy chuckles] CBC: We’re talking an average week devoted to your work and to the school. Andy: Well, as I told you before, I’m seven-days-a-week. With my three gigs — plus, I’m an executor of my parents’ estate — it’s a lot of work. It’s a real lot. Adam: I don’t work seven days a week. Andy: I do. [laughs] CBC: [To Andy] Are you a workaholic? Andy: [Sighs] I am with the drawing. I love the drawing. CBC: So you always want to get to the drawing when you’re doing other things? Andy: Oh, yes. I love the drawing. I do like the teaching a lot. I love the students. The feedback is great, but my first love is really the drawing. The administrating and all that other kind of stuff, that’s really a job. [chuckles] I do it. It’s okay and interesting. CBC: Do you see an end for that? Do you see like you’d like to hand over responsibility, delegate authority to others? Andy: I’ve gotta tell you, I think I’m a bit of a control freak. [laughs] I would like to sometimes, and some things I do want to turn over, but right now, I don’t know. I like doing things myself and make sure things a done a certain way and that’s why I do it. Chris: How do you guys adapt to people working programs like Manga Studio and things like that? I mean are you teaching that or is that just something that people can discover for themselves? You know, there’s a lot of digital programs now. Andy: Well, for me, the way I teach is the way I was taught and that’s the way my father taught me. I don’t know what the Manga Studio is. Is that like an assembly line type of thing? Chris: No, Manga Studio is basically Photoshop for doing comics. Andy: Oh, you’re talking about a computer program. Chris: Yes. Andy: No, I just teach — I don’t know, you want to call that... Chris: Good old school pen-&-paper art. CBC: And here we are.

TM & © DC Comics.

Andy: It’s just old school narrative art and how to break down a script into sequential form. And I teach it just exactly the way my father taught me. Adam: In addition to that, we teach the traditional way of doing things. We also touch on and teach all the computer programs. Andy: We have computer classes and we have instructors who teach them. Chris: Illustrator and Photoshop? Andy: Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, I think. Adam: Yeah. But really, the approach that we take is you have to learn the traditional way to do things before you can jump ahead to the more modern techniques. You have to learn how to actually paint before you can paint using Photoshop. You have to learn hand-lettering, before doing it on computer. Chris: Ames Guide. Adam: Ames Guide. Because, even though it may be only a two-week lesson, you’ve gotta have some experience on hand-lettering before you jump to the computer. Spacing a balloon for lettering is still really critical and you can’t do

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Andy’s evocative Batman #655 [Sept. 2006] cover sans trade dress. Colors by Dave Stewart.

Comics. TM & © DC

Above: The very last issue of the regular title, Sgt. Rock #422 [July 1988], sported a cover banner trumpeting the “KubertTriple-Threat,” announcing the joining of Joe, Andy and Adam “for the first time!” Apparently that boast doesn’t include family gettogethers at the Dover homestead, eh? Behind this Joe Kubert cover, Andy contributed inks and lettering and Adam colored, with Pop K. supplying his lavish pencils. Words were by (natch) Bob Kanigher. Cover colors unknown.

that unless you’ve learned the traditional way to do it. You’ve gotta have an eye on spacing the letters within the balloon. You’ve got to have an eye for it whether you’re good at doing it by hand or not. You have to have that level of experience. Chris: And it adds so much personality when you’re doing it by your own hand. Adam: Right. Sometimes, as you get better, as you improve your own skills, you can take shortcuts at that point. If you want to use markers, fine, because you can adjust the line weight of a marker as a professional, though somebody who just picks one up, may not. It’ll look dead and it’ll look ugly, and it won’t be appealing. You know, you have to learn how to use the tools. Chris: So you’re still working with sable brushes and crow-quill pens. Adam: Absolutely, yes. Andy: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Chris: Are you still using the lettering pens? I hated those things. [chuckles] Adam: Which ones are that? Andy: Oh, the B-6’s, B-6’s, the nibs? I think Hy [Eisman] does. Adam: I just inked a cover with those. It was great. [laughter] Andy: Adam, you do digital inking. Adam: Yes, just to take a step back (or forward), I’m actually penciling and inking all my own work now. Inking in a different sort of way: I’m doing my inks digitally. Kind of. Chris: Now how do you do it? Like do you basically mess around with the brush hold? Adam: Yes, they’re leveled. See, what I do is pencil very tight on a blueline rough of my work. I pencil very, very tight, then scan and level it, and then I go back in on a Cintiq and I just tune up stuff. I’ll do some inking with a stylus in Photoshop on a Cintiq, but that’s not really inking. There’s stuff you can do on a computer that you can’t do traditionally. But I know how to do it traditionally. Like I said, I just inked a cover. All my covers are on paper because the originals are worth something. [chuckles] You know, you want to have something to sell. Chris: For resale, yeah. Adam: I love inking on paper, I love doing it this way. It’s just a different form of doing things and I swear, I think half the kids now are penciling over blueline, you know? They print out their stuff, their roughs, on a blueline, whether they rough it out traditionally or they rough it out on a computer. And the nice thing about that is you can draw over it and erase it, and you still have your rough underneath. Andy: For me, I guess I’m a traditionalist. I still like just penciling and inking right on the boards. Adam: And erasing. Andy: We had somebody try out to have my stuff, my pencils, digitally inked, and it just wasn’t working out. For my style, it’s kind of organic. It just wasn’t working. CBC: So you’re actually inking on top of your own pencils? Andy: The project I’m working on now, yes. CBC: Is there any consideration that you obviously can make money from the pencils and you can make money

from the inks, or no? I saw Neal’s Batman: Odyssey stuff and that’s what he did, and I’m thinking, “Well, you could sell the pencils and the inks separately.” Andy: I’ve got to tell you, for me: the end-all is the finished printed product. The other stuff is ancillary. To me, it’s what the end product is and how it prints. I just like the way it looks and I think inking on top of a blueline, especially if you have somebody else inking, there’s a generation that’s lost. I’d rather have them ink on top of my original pencils. You know, it’s funny. When I work with different inkers, they ask me, “You gonna send me the bluelines?” I go, “No, I’m going to send you the boards.” Some of them are shocked. It’s like, “Really?” Adam: Right. Andy: I go, “Yes, you’re inking on top of the boards.” Because I want that quality, and that’s just me. Some people are different. They don’t think they lose a generation. That’s fine. Adam: [To Andy] I totally agree with you. When somebody else is inking over a blueline, you can’t see the pencils as well because it’s a light version of what you originally did. Andy: Right. Adam: I ink over my own blueline, but I have my originals right here because I know what I want. CBC: You know what you need. Adam: I like inking over a blueline because I don’t have to erase the pencil, you know, so I can water down the ink more and the ink flows off the pen and brush a lot better for me. But I won’t send a blueline to an inker because it’s not going to come out as good. They can’t see what I had done. Chris: I just don’t like scanned artifacts and there’s always going to be some blobs. Andy: Right, exactly. Adam: Yes, but a lot of guys are doing that. Andy: And it works out well for them. They’re happy with it and that’s great. Chris: Do you guys are both still use those old materials — crowquills… Andy: Oh, I use pens, brushes, and all. I’m working on inkwash now. Crowquill? Yes, I use everything. I use all that stuff. I just washed all the ink off my hands before this interview. Adam: Yes, I just want to add when I digitally ink my own stuff, I think it comes out better because what’s printed are my pencils and I think there’s an energy in the pencils that

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

you otherwise lose. Andy: Absolutely. Adam: Even if I’m inking myself, I start losing it. It’s like you’re reworking over something. Now with my dad, completely different because his drawing was in his inking. Chris: Oh, absolutely. Adam: You know, his pencils were non-existent. Andy: His pencils were loose. Adam: You know, you give his pencils to somebody else — me or Andy included — and the inks are going to suck. The drawing isn’t going to be what he would do so that’s a different animal. Chris: I’m glad you brought that up because there’s such a difference in the way artwork is done nowadays. Pencilers go so super-tight and inkers are expected to basically trace what they’re given and that so much of what the story is, is the color now. You know, the color is so much of —

Andy: Makes or breaks it. Chris: You know, it used to be where inkers were given more latitude to have more of their own personality. Adam: Uh-huh. Chris: You know, both as professionals and as teachers, I mean how does this affect your thinking? The way that things are so different now? Adam: Well, colorists are the new inkers. Chris: Right. Adam: If one of the students comes to me and says, “Look, I want to be an inker,” I’ll tell them, “No, you don’t.” There’s professional, good inkers who have a difficult time getting work because pencilers are digitally inking their own jobs. The jobs are fewer and the ones that are there are picked up by the really good guys. I tell them if they want to step into a back door in the business, lettering, assistant editing, coloring is awesome. As a colorist, you’re making royalties these days. You know, that’s fantastic. Chris: That’s unbelievable. Adam: Good colorists are really sought after. Chris: But when you’re teaching, basically, I mean it sounds like you guys are telling the students that “You’ve got to do this — you’ve got to know how to do this all yourself.” Andy: You should know every aspect of it, absolutely. Chris: [To Adam] You started as a letterer, right? Adam: Yes. Andy: So did I, after him. I mean, way after him. Adam: Because I’m a lot older than him. [chuckles] Andy: But he started lettering when he was young. Adam: [To Chris] In fact, what you’re touching on — I don’t want to interrupt you, but it is our interview [chuckling] — Chris: What was the question? [laughter] Adam: Well, what you’re touching on is really the basis of the whole school. You have to know everything: lettering, coloring, inking, penciling. It’s all very important because, at one point or another, you may have to either implement one of those procedures yourself or tell somebody else what to do, and you have to be able to understand it. Andy: And what we try to do in this school is to gear you to get a job in the industry, or some facet of the industry, or an art job that might not be in the comics industry, maybe another avenue. You might go into storyboards, advertising, whatever. We try, as best as we can, to hit those spots so you’re equipped once you get out into the world. Adam: We’re not teaching students to become gallery artists. We’re teaching them to become commercial artists.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Contributor Mike Fleming believes these two shots of Clan Kubert are from a show in Chicago, “I would guess 1994.”

Inset left: Found on one of the Kubert men’s Tumblr site, Andy and Adam arm wrestle to prove who’s the better artist. It must have been a draw! (Get it? “Draw”...? Groan!) 31

TM & © DC Comics.

And once you get out of here, we want you to make a living. Everybody struggles at one point or another, but we’re trying to give you the tools so you know, for instance, “This is what a contract is.” We also teach the business of art. You could be the best artist in the world, but if you don’t follow whether you’ve been paid or not, and your bills don’t get paid, guess what? Things are gonna tank. CBC: I have been noticing the Joe Kubert stamp on any number of original art that I’ve been seeing lately. Is the art store itself a profitable part of the business here? Andy: My wife, Theresa, runs the art store and she’s been doing so since 1986, ’87, so she’s been doing it for a while. Yeah, she’s been doing it for a long time. CBC: Yeah? Wow. Chris: I told you my wife went to this school, and we’ve been going to the store since we left the school. [To Andy] You can talk about the Joe Kubert blueline boards. Andy: Well, those started out when my father started up the correspondence courses and we had pre-printed, twoply Bristol board with his little “head” logo on them. We had brushes and ink, and all that kind of stuff, and that’s where that came from. We still sell it. Strathmore two-ply, it’s great paper. I use it to draw Batman. Adam: Neal Adams buys it. Andy: Yes, Neal does buy it. CBC: I was just looking at his original art at Continuity and your dad’s cartoon head was all over it. Chris: Does the store do a lot of mail order? You guys do a lot of work online? Andy: People can shop online. CBC: Is the correspondence course still going on? Adam: Yes.

Andy: It’s still ongoing. CBC: Do you guys handle it? Adam: No, my sister handles that. Andy: She handles that along with Ricky DeJesus, and we have teachers here do the critiques. Adam: Right. Andy: My father was doing all the critiques on it. Adam: Most of them. Andy: He was doing all of them. CBC: How many, roughly, correspondents would there be at any given time? Is it just hard to say? How many people are enrolled in the correspondence course? Hundreds? Adam: Oh, gosh, you’ll have to ask Lisa. I’m not even sure. Andy: Well, it’s been going on since, gosh… 1997, I think is when Dad put out the first ads and the first enrollments were in ’98? I would say thousands have gone through the lessons. CBC: Are you guys incorporated? [chuckles] I mean this is a real business! Adam: Well, we’re an S-Corporation. Andy: [Chuckles] We are a corporation. Adam: It sounds like we’re a little planet here. [laughter] Andy: Well, it is called the “World of Cartooning!” [more laughter] Chris: People would always bring up the fact that the School of Visual Arts is a cartoonist and illustrator school. But you guys really want to keep this focused on comics. Andy: That’s what we know. [chuckles] Adam: Well, yes. Andy and I have talked about this. We absolutely want to stay focused on comics. That’s the basis. But we can see this place going into other areas because we have the name recognition in this field and a reputation that goes worldwide. You know, I think a logical step could

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

TM & © DC Comics.

Top left, counterclockwise: Jeff Dahmer would, for attention and shock-value, impulsively fake epileptic fits, “spaz-out,”

be going into other areas of art, whether illustration — because illustration is also basically narrative. So those are basically things we’ve thought about. Chris: But you still want to keep it focused on comics. Adam: Absolutely, yes. Chris: Because you know there is, what is it, there’s a school in Georgia now that’s running a comics course? Andy: SCAD, Savannah College of Art and Design. Adam: Right. Andy: They have a cartooning course. Chris: It seems more indy-oriented? Andy: Honestly, I’m not too sure. I really never looked into it. I know that it exists. My wife’s cousin went to school there and we actually walked around the campus, which is beautiful. But I never really checked out the courses at all. Adam: Well, they have beautiful colleges, beautiful campuses, but they do offer Narrative Art. There’s a number of places that offer bachelor’s degrees in Narrative Art. But we’re really the only one that concentrates on that one thing and it’s really a different animal. If you want to go have the whole college experience with fraternities, sororities, 5,000 to 30,000 students, the Kubert School is not the place. Andy: Yes, this is a very small school. CBC: And that’s one of its strengths? Adam: Yes. Andy: Very close, very niche. Adam: Tight-knit. CBC: Focus on comics, focus kids so you don’t have the distractions of college life. Adam: Andy and I know everybody in the school. We know what everybody’s doing, we have frequent teachers meetings, so we know where everybody is at, who’s fallen a

little bit, we know everything that’s going on. That’s the way we like it. CBC: Do you do annuals of student work? Andy: What do you mean, “annuals”? CBC: Collections of kids’ portfolios, part of their final presentation? Will Eisner did it with his SVA Gallery. Andy: No, we don’t do that. Sometimes the kids put together things up by themselves, but they do put together their own portfolios at the end of the year. CBC: So you don’t have any annual collection? Adam: Not really, but one of the assignments that I give to students, that they have to put together, basically, a promo piece of their own character in a comic-book format. These days that you can have something one-off printed that looks exactly like a comic on the stands. So, this is for themselves. It’s not like an anthology, if that’s what you’re talking about. CBC: You guys have connections with Marvel and DC and the whole professional sphere. Adam: Uh-huh. CBC: Is there any entrée your students have? Is there any advantage they have with that Kubert name? Andy: I would think you’d have to ask them. [laughs] CBC: Do they get a chance to go up to DC and show their stuff ? Chris: Are you talking more like a placement kind of arrangement? CBC: Not placement so much as exposure to the editors and exposure to the graduate’s work. Adam: Andy works up at DC. He looks to get the graduates employment there whenever possible. I work at Marvel. [laughter] CBC: Yeah, so do you share samples of these guys’ work?

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Previous page & above: Let’s face it: any feature discussing Joe Kubert the family man cannot resist the temptation to feature images from the artist’s “Secret Lives of Joe Kubert” edition of DC Special, #5 [Oct.–Dec. 1969]. Here’s the opening four-page strip, reproduced from Ye Ed’s copy, of which page three sports autographs by Joe, Adam and Andy. The cover can be found on page five. Previous page, lower left: It looks to yours truly that the Kubert caricature illustrating the opening spread of “The Celebrated Mr. K: Joe Kubert” interview by Guy Lillian III (Amazing World of DC Comics #1 [July 1974]), is merely a detail reprinted from the final panel of the DC Special #5, though with a sketched facial hair added on to acknowledge Joe’s then-new beard. Will we ever learn if Mr. Kubert actually was the one who added that face fur...? Any former Woodchucks willing to spill the beans?

Adam: At DC, we have the whole third-year class go up to DC and their work is reviewed. Andy: In one of the DC conference rooms, they have all the editors there around a big, giant table and all the third-year students go up and they just go around from editor to editor and show their portfolio. CBC: That’s fantastic. Andy: And on top of that, Mike Marts, the Batman editor, always makes it a point — he loves coming out here — to come out every year from DC just to look at portfolios. Adam: That’s the same with Marvel. Nick Lowe came out last year, C.B. Cebulski came out. They go over portfolios and they try to cherry-pick our students, which we couldn’t be happier. Andy: It’s great. CBC: That’s far out. Adam: That’s one thing the other schools don’t have. 34

Andy and I are both tied into these two companies happily and it gives opportunities to the students. So it works out to be good for everyone. CBC: If people look at the comics press, they would say, “Oh, yeah. Joe had two kids.” But you have other siblings. Andy: I have two other brothers and a sister. CBC: Can you talk about them? What do they do? Andy: My oldest brother, Dave, is retired. He’s living in Florida. CBC: What did he do for a living? Andy: He worked for Verizon, the phone company. And he was in the electrical union, too. He was a vice president of an electrical union. Adam: For a few years. CBC: Did he have kids? Andy: Yes, he had two kids, a boy and a girl, and he’s going to be a grandfather for the third time, right? Adam: Right, and he looks as young as any of us. I mean almost. [Andy chuckles] His beard is long. He’s a Harley guy. CBC: Is that right? Andy: Oh, yeah. [chuckling] CBC: Rugged dude? Adam: Yes. CBC: Now he’s enjoying the sunshine in Florida? Andy: Oh, he loves it. He calls us all the time when it’s snowing and he goes, “What’s the weather up there?” And you tell him it’s snowing here, and he goes, “Ah, it’s 80 degrees here. I’ve even got the air conditioning on in the house.” Oh, thanks. CBC: “Thanks, you son of a gun.” Adam: I know, right? Andy: My other brother, Danny, he doesn’t live too far from here and he buys and sells antique toys. He goes out to auctions and he’s into antique toys, and he has an eBay store, and that’s what he does: he sells toys. CBC: Does he have any kids?

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Andy: He has two kids, Katie — who is actually an associate editor up at DC on the Batman titles, Katie Kubert — and he has a son, Zack, who is an art director. Adam: He’s an art director in the city. Andy: In New York. CBC: In advertising? Adam: Yes. Andy: And my sister, Lisa, does all the e-mail correspondence for the school. CBC: She does it from here? Andy: No, she does it from home in West Virginia. CBC: Oh, cool. Adam: She’s also in charge of all our social media. Andy: Right. CBC: Oh, yeah? The Twitts and the Tweets? Adam: She twits and tweets. [laughter] CBC: Does she have any kids? Andy: She has two kids, two boys, yes. And then there’s Adam and I. I’m the youngest. CBC: You’re the youngest. Andy: I’m the youngest, yeah. I’m the youngest at 51. CBC: You’re not so old. [Andy chuckles] Chris: How do you guys like see yourselves? You are the inheritors of the throne, basically. I mean you are the people who are taking care of the estate, you’re taking care of the school, and you are the public face of the Kubert legacy. Andy: That’s pretty scary. [laughter] Adam: I want to go home. [more laughter] CBC: I’m checking out! Adam: I’m getting tired of all this. [chuckles] Chris: I mean you guys worked very closely with your father and now it’s your time to manage the kingdom. In other words, do you feel like there were changes that you would want to make or do you feel like you want to just keep things going the way they are? I mean what does that mean for you, to be in that position? Adam: [Breathes deeply] For the longest time, [laughs] I was the biggest pain in the ass to my dad. [laughs again] Andy: He’s not kidding either. Adam: I would say, “Dad, we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that, we’ve gotta do this, we’ve gotta do that.” CBC: For instance? Adam: “We’ve gotta go online. Okay, all the schools do it. There’s a lot of money to be made there, you could reach more people, we have a reputation, we’re a blah-blahblah.” [imitates Joe] “I don’t want it. You’ll have to do it.” [laughs again] Andy: It’s a huge effort, a huge endeavor. My dad, besides the dayto-day of running this school, he just wanted to draw. Adam: Right. Andy: He was done with everything else. Adam: Yeah, it’s a running joke here. One of the ads, years ago, said, “E-mail coming soon.” Whose idea was it to put it in there? It was my dad. [laughs] Andy: It takes two seconds to set up e-mail, but for the school it was a long-range plan, okay? [laughter] “Stay tuned for our e-mail addresses. Coming next year!” Adam: “Coming next year, be on the look out for it.” [laughter] So three years ago, I managed to talk him into redoing our website. I said, “People looking at our website and our website drives people away.” And that’s another place, besides the move, where we took a hit. Andy: Our old website.

CBC: Oh, it looks good now. Adam: Besides having moved to another building, the old website really hurt business. Because parents would look at it and be discouraged. Parents are the ones you’re selling to initially. But our site looked like nobody was home, you know? It just looked old. Now everything is updated with the website and content is changed all the time. We have alumni interviews on there all the time, so we’re alive and it looks like a legitimate educational institution site. Andy: It’s updated. Chris: Is that done internally or do you guys hire out? Andy: No, we hired out for that. We worked with a firm, JH Choi. CBC: It’s a nice site, clean and clear. Andy: Yes, he did a good job. He came out of New York with his assistants and we went through everything with him. Adam: To answer your question, Andy and I have a lot of ideas that we want to do, so now we just have to fight with each other to get them done.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Previous page top: Panels from Joe’s Fax From Sarajevo [1996] depicting Kubert home life in Dover, New Jersey. Colors by Studio SAF – Pahek. Digital file courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic/SAF. Previous page bottom left: A very young Andy (left) and Adam detailed from photo on this page above. Above: The Kubert family in the mid- to late-1960s. Front row from left: Andy, Adam and Lisa. Second row: Danny and Dave. Third row: Mother Muriel and Father Joe. Inset left: Muriel Fogelson in 1947. In 1951, she and Joe were married. All photos on this and previous page are courtesy of the Kubert family and Bill Schelly.

Above: With thanks to David Mandel and the assist of Kelvin Mao, here’s Adam’s Incredible Hulk #454 [June 1997] cover art, featuring the title character and Wolverine hashing things out in the Savage Land.

Andy: Right. [laughter] Adam: It’s that simple. CBC: Is that a problem? Andy: A natural would be the online courses. I think that’d be a natural. I think it’d be great. But I’m like my dad, I guess. I just want to sit and draw — you do this! [laughs] That’s where we’re at. Chris: So it’s almost like you need a third — Andy: Or a fourth or fifth… Adam: Well, we can’t do it ourselves. I mean, we’re most valuable at our drawing tables. We want to keep the level of the place high and by keeping our level high within the industry. Chris: Your reputations as creators. Adam: It pulls the school up. We pull the school up with us and the school pulls us up. That’s the way it seems to have been. With my dad, he had a reputation nobody could touch. My dad was the school. And now, we’re it. So, like I just said, we’re most valuable sitting behind our tables. Andy: And honestly, that’s where we want to be. Adam: Yes.

Andy: That’s what I want to do. I really enjoy that. Chris: You have a list of people who’ve been through this building, or through the old building, and it’s pretty impressive alumni. Do you guys ever think that you want to use that? Adam: Tom and Jan — [Kubert School alumnus and married artist couple] Tom Mandrake and Jan Duursema — are teaching here. Andy: It was really sweet and this happened right when my father passed away. They came up to me and said, “You know, if there’s anything we can do, including teaching, we’d love to become part of it.” And that’s why they’re here today. It was really, really nice. Chris: Literally old school. Andy: Yes, literally old school. Man, they’re talented people. They’re great. Adam: It’s a blessing. Andy: Rod Ollerenshaw came in. [to Chris] I think he was a student before you. He was before me so he was before you then, too. Chris: Just before me were instructors like John Calnan and Tex Blaisdell. I can’t believe Tom and Jan are here. That’s so fantastic. Andy: Rod is back now teaching. He’s another one that came in when my dad passed away, and he wanted to come back and teach. That was great. Chris: I was friendly with Lee Weeks. I know he taught an evening class here. Andy: He taught a class. We did a couple of them together. I still talk with Lee every once in a while. Adam: He actually came in the fall and spoke to the whole school. Chris: Oh, great. Adam: They loved it. He could talk to anybody. It’s just very down to earth and just completely, absolutely at ease. CBC: Do you see the creative spark in your children? Adam: [Sighs] I see it in Andy’s children. [laughter] CBC: [To Andy] Can you name your children? Andy: Sam is my son and Emma is my daughter. CBC: And how old are they? Andy: Sam is 22 and Emma is 18. Sam’s graduating college. He goes to American University down in Washington. He’s graduating this year. He wants to be a sound/audio technician/designer and get into sound for film and music, that kind of thing. CBC: That’s great. Andy: And my daughter is applying to college as she wants to get into computer animation. CBC: Both creative. Andy: Yes, she’s very, very talented. And out of the five schools she applied to, we’ve only heard from two back so far. She got into SVA and Savannah College of Art & Design, which has a computer animation course. Chris: It’s funny. My boys, they don’t want anything to do with anything creative. CBC: Neither do my three sons, not one. Chris: All business. Andy: And my wife Theresa, she paints too. She’s won awards. Adam: She paints really well. Andy: Yes, she’s really good. CBC: [To Andy] How did you meet her? Andy: We went to high school together and she lived in the next town over, in Mine Hill, and I lived in Dover, and we knew each other that way, so kind of like childhood sweethearts, I guess. CBC: There you go then. Good for you. [to Adam] Your kids…? Adam: I got four. CBC: Four kids? Adam: Last I checked. [laughter] CBC: I remember a toddler when we did a panel together at Wizard World maybe 12 years ago. Adam: That’s right, yeah.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

TM & © DC Comics.

Andy: Was that Max? Adam: Well, no. I’m not sure which one it was. Adam: [Chuckling] My oldest, Max, is 24, and he works for NYU in the Alumni department. He’s going for his master’s degree in Social Media. My daughter’s graduating Elon University. She wants to go into making a lot of money. [laughter] CBC: What’s her name? Adam: Elizabeth. She wants to go into advertising, actually. She may want to be an account executive or something like that. You know: bring the clients in. My son Jay, he’s 16, he lives with me, and he’s a junior in high school. So he’s going through all kinds of hormonal changes and he’s a pain. [chuckling] But we’re on the college search at that point with him. My youngest daughter, Ava, she is three years old. CBC: Wow. Time to stop now, maybe? [chuckles] Adam: You know, it’s really great. I’m with my second wife and we’ve been married four years now. [chuckles] CBC: What’s her name? Adam: Tracy Flynn. We’ve known each other for a lot longer than that. As a matter of fact, she started Marvel’s online website way back when. She worked directly under Joe [Quesada] at that time. She worked at Marvel for about four years and they won all kinds of awards with her website. And now she works from home as an art director and her clients are all in the city. It’s terrific. Chris: Your dad did so many things, Fax From Sarajevo, Yossel, Jew Gangster… projects like that. Do you guys ever have the bug to do a graphic novel that isn’t super-herorelated, that is more personal, maybe? CBC: That is independent, perhaps? Adam: Uh-huh. Andy: Something like a creator-owned project or something? Chris: Yes. Andy: Someday. But, for me, I love Batman, Superman, XMen, Wolverine. [laughter] And when you get thrown those kind of projects, I can’t turn them down because I absolutely love drawing the stuff. When you get a chance to work with Neil Gaiman, which I did on two separate projects, it was great working with him. When you get the chance to tell Wolverine’s origin, it’s great. When they say, “Okay, we want you to write a popular character and draw it,” I can’t turn that stuff down, you know. [chuckles] Someday, I’ll get to do my own thing. CBC: Do you think about a legacy? Your father bequeathed this to you. Andy: Oh, my dad nailed the sign to our forehead: “You have to do your own thing. You have to own your own thing.” Adam: I just heard it right now. [chuckles] Andy: And I totally agree with him. But I just have a hard time turning down the work that I — you know, it’s just too much fun. I can’t, I just can’t resist. CBC: So you don’t have a necessary game plan? Andy: Naw, I’m winging it. [laughs] Someday I’ll get to it but, right now, I’m winging it. CBC: Right. Adam: I’ve got a few that I have in the planning stages. But, like Andy, finding the time — you have to carve out that time to do it, you know. Chris: Yeah, you’ve got your hands full. CBC: I remember your father specifically saying that he took a block of time every Sunday morning to work on projects that were personal. For three hours, something like between 9:00 and 12:00 and — Adam: Right. CBC: — just chipped away at Jew Gangster or Yossel, jobs where we wasn’t necessarily being paid for right at the moment, jobs he had to invest his own time into. Is there a lesson for you there, possibly? Adam: Well, he was amazing, you know. [chuckles] He was able to say to himself, “You know what? I’m going to do another graphic novel.”

Andy: “I’m going to do one based on a Vietnam story, you know, Dong Xoai, which really interested me and blah, blah, blah.” Adam: Yeah, and he’ll go and get it done. Andy: [Chuckles] It’s like, “How do you do that?” It’s all magically happened. Adam: He turns the light switch off and he gets it done. It’s amazing. Andy: Yes. Adam: And I wish I could do it that way. Andy: Nobody could do it. I can’t do it that way. Adam: But being contracted at Marvel, working at the school, having all these responsibilities… there really are only so many hours in the day. Last year, as a matter of fact, I drew nine issues, half of them were penciled and inked. Trying to increase that and start a creator-owned thing and continue the school thing… CBC: Sure. Adam: …and I’ve got a three-year old at home. CBC: We’re not pressuring you! [laughter] But someday! [more laughter] Adam: But, no, I mean I feel great. I want to ride my motorcycle all the time! [chuckles]

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: From the original art, courtesy of the artist, here is Andy’s Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6 [Dec. 2010] cover.

Above: Special one-shot versions of the IDW-published Joe Kubert’s Tarzan of the Apes Artist’s Edition, featuring one-of-a-kind custom cover-plate drawings by many of the industry’s finest artists (including, of course, Adam and Andy) will be auctioned off at Comic-Con International: San Diego to benefit a scholarship fund at The Kubert School. Here Joe’s boys pose with a copy that will be sketched on by one of the Kubert men.

CBC: Do you guys keep up a good regimen? I mean it must be tough sitting in that chair all the time. Do you exercise? Andy: Yes, I absolutely do exercise. I go to the YMCA three days a week, swing kettlebells and the whole thing, work out and stuff. In between that, I take the dog out for a three, four-mile runs. I have to do something. CBC: Look at the old school artists and consider how they were treated over the years and there can be a lot of bitterness that goes around. But your dad always had exactly the right — Chris brought up the word: gratitude. Where do you think that came from? I mean, he was sweeping Will Eisner’s floors when he was, what, twelve? Twelve years old. Andy: Twelve years old, yes. CBC: And going up to Stamford, Connecticut, right? And working in the studio. Adam: Mm-mm, he had a work ethic that was unbelievable. CBC: Well, is the Depression era the reason? Adam: It’s being brought up that way. You’re taught to be responsible. Chris: His parents were immigrants, right? Andy: Yes. Adam: Yes. CBC: He was born in Poland. Andy: He was born in Poland and he came over when he was two. Adam: He was all alone. CBC: He’s an immigrant. [chuckles] Adam: He was always in the mindset that it’s his responsibility to take care of himself and his family. It’s nobody else’s

responsibility. It’s not a company’s responsibility to take care of you. It’s your responsibility. You have to watch out for yourself. So you work to get your work done, to get the check, and to pay your bills. CBC: It seemed like he didn’t look at work as a burden. He looked at it as an opportunity, that yeah, and just gung-ho, really old school gung-ho, go-in-there, get-it-done. Adam: Right. CBC: Even with the adversity of working with, let’s say, some of the other editors who were challenging — the whole mood at DC at a certain time, in the Mort Weisinger era, was pretty oppressive. Then he was able to become an editor and things just completely lightened up. But he was able to deal with Robert Kanigher for such a long period of time [laughter] and Kanigher was no easy personality, certainly, to work with as a freelancer. But when the table’s were turned, Joe always treated him with dignity and had respect for him to the bitter end. Where does that personality come from? Andy: I would sit and talk to my father in his studio for hours. And I wish I had one of these little tape recorders like you have here and I wish I could have recorded some of the stories. He would tell me Alex Toth stories, all of the really, really good stories. Like the Alex Toth story when Alex — [laughs] you want to hear it? I think my father had told this story in print before. Alex was drawing a story, a back-up story for one of the war books, I think one of the Sgt. Rock books, and my father told him before he started — I think it was a Kanigher script — “Here’s the script. Don’t change it. This is what we’re looking for.” Alex said, “Okay.” When my dad got the artwork back, Alex had changed it. My dad wouldn’t pay him, wouldn’t put it through, didn’t put his voucher through or anything. I think he sent the artwork back to Alex. I think that was one of the times where Alex just stopped talking to my father. CBC: That wasn’t the “Enemy Ace” story, was it? Because that was advertised on a Star-Spangled War Stories cover, and Neal came in and finished it. Andy: [Sighs] It might have been, it might have been. CBC: And Neal came in and finished the story. Alex lined the trunk of his car, his Imperial, with this “Enemy Ace” story. He had such rage about your dad. [Adam chuckles] Chris: Who didn’t Alex Toth have problems with? Andy: My dad actually shared a studio with Alex Toth when they were young, on Park Avenue. CBC: Right. They did the Standard stuff together. Andy: Yes. CBC: Yes, that’s just amazing. Andy: Yes, so it’s great stories like that which he would tell and I wish I had one of those recorders. A lot of them I don’t remember. Pete Carlsson and I would be sitting there and my dad would just be talking about all this stuff, like Mort Weisinger stories and Harry “A” Chesler stories, and all this stuff. And Pete and I would just be sitting there, going, “We should record this.” [laughter] Chris: You’d have a good book on your hands. Andy: Yes, really. CBC: I think that’s another testament: I think Joe was a great editor. I think the work he got out of his guys — you know, Russ Heath, Sam Glanzman… Sam Glanzman? “U.S.S. Stevens”? I mean, come on! Andy: It was great. The Joe Kubert Presents stuff when Sam would get those pages in, he never lost it. I thought the stuff looked great. My dad would say, “Hey, take a look at this.” And we’re like, “Wow, this is great.” Adam: Yes, it was beautiful. Andy: Sam Glanzman’s stuff is awesome. CBC: Your dad was just one of those guys who was consistently top-notch. I mean there never seemed to be a … Chris: A decline. CBC: Right, a decline, or just any “I’ll hurry up and get this done.” Andy: When he was doing the sketches for the limited edi-

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

TM & © DC Comics.

tion books, he would really get into them. Some of them were stunning. But they were only taking like 15 minutes! [chuckles] He was blasting out these amazing sketches. People would ask, “Okay, do an Enemy Ace, Hawkman,” whatever, and he would do it in inkwash with white highlights and everything. They were beautiful. They were really nice. CBC: Well, how’s your speed, compared to his? [Andy and Adam laugh] Okay, that’s enough. Andy: And I’m not saying I’m the opposite of what he was. He was just amazing. Adam: Really? It’s “how was his speed compared to anybody?” Andy: Yeah. Adam: You know, he could pencil, ink five pages in a day. CBC: Was he the fastest ever? Adam: Yes. Andy: I don’t know, Adam. Sergio Aragonés is pretty fast. [chuckles] I’ve watched Sergio draw. He’s quick. Chris: I heard Mike Sekowsky was pretty fast, too. But then, that’s Mike Sekowsky. [chuckling] Adam: But Dad, couldn’t he do like maybe five pages a day? Andy: Pencils, easy. Adam: Pencil and inks, right? No? Andy: The Superman/Demon story he did was that fast. Chris: What a great story that is. CBC: Beautiful story. Andy: I was still in school when he did that. I remember he had that script for a long time. And he just couldn’t get to it. Then Len Wein said, “Okay, we’ve got to get this done.” My dad did that in a weekend, penciled and inked it in a weekend. Chris: That story came out either just before or just after I came down to interview and I was like… I was so starstruck. I loved that story. Andy: I remember him sitting in his studio and he didn’t come out all weekend long. He came out to eat, I think [chuckles] — but he came out and then he had all the pages done. [Chris sighs appreciatively] And I remember looking at him and going, “You did this in a weekend?” He was all tired and fried. CBC: And it was beautiful! It was so well-designed. Andy: Yeah. Chris: I’ve actually seen a hardcover reprint of that story. It’s a French volume, you know, square-bound, and it’s just that story. French text. I love that story. CBC: What were you going to say? Adam: I was just going to say one other example is that poster, that Flash poster, Andy has sitting over there. Andy: Which one? Adam: That. Andy: That one I drew. That was one of the first things I did coming from Marvel over to DC and I gave the pencils to my dad. I went out to eat for lunch, I came back — Adam: It wasn’t even an hour. Andy: No, not even an hour and it was done. [Adam chuckles] It was all inked and I said, “You did this within the hour?” He goes, “Took me 20 minutes.” I go, “Get outta here!” Adam: Apparently, he had interruptions. Andy: [Laughs again] And he had to get up and look at it. Adam: I know, right? Andy: And then he starts laughing at you … because he knows he’s quick. [laughs] Adam: “Just get it done. Don’t think about it, just get it done.” Andy: Right. CBC: Do you hear your dad’s voice sometimes? Adam: Every day. CBC: Every day? Adam: Yeah. Chris: What does he say? Adam: He says to me — Andy: “Don’t screw up.” [laughter]

Adam: He says to me, “Get your work done.” I hear that all the time. And he would say that, “Just get your work done.” Because, you know, life throws you a lot of curve balls that take away from that. That’s what I hear. CBC: [To Andy] Do you have a lesson that your dad taught you? Adam: Now’s your chance. Andy: When he was in the hospital, he would always ask, “How’s everything at the school? Is everything going okay?” And everything was going good. You know, everybody was doing — you know, they were working and everything was doing fine. I said, “Yeah, everything’s going good,” and he said, “Good, just let me know how things are going. And if anything happens, just let me know.” I said, “Okay. You just get better.” You know, that’s the only thing I kept telling him. I said, “Don’t worry about anything. We’ve got it under control.” CBC: And you do. Andy: I think so. I’m trying. We’re trying. Adam: Me, maybe. [laughter] Andy: We’re trying.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Andy explains he handed his pencils for this cover to his father to be inked, left for a lunch break and came back 20 minutes or so later to find them fully inked by his father. Appropriately this image (colorist unknown) graced Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #1 cover, albeit a dealer incentive version.

The Making of a Master of Sequential Art Ye Ed’s 2006 interview with Joe Kubert for the Will Eisner film documentary

Between 2002 and ’07, Ye Ed and his brother Andrew D. Cooke compiled — with an able team of filmmakers — a full-length feature film documentary on the life of one of the greatest comic book creators of them all, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007. On August 19, 2006, a most brilliant, clear and sunny Saturday morning, Joe Kubert consented to a filmed interview at The Kubert School to discuss his upbringing, graphic novels, Jews in comics, and his friend and colleague Will Eisner in particular. What follows is a transcription of that talk, obtained with the tremendous help of the movie’s editor and executive producer Kris Schackman and transcribed in record time by Steven “Flash” Thompson, Andrew added his own questions to the discussion. Comic Book Creator: Where were you born, Joe? Joe Kubert: Poland. CBC: Whereabouts? Joe: Southeastern section of Poland. A town called Yzeran. CBC: When did you move to the United States? Joe: I was brought to the United States when I was two months old. In fact, my mother and father had come to Southampton, in England, in preparation to be coming to the United States. However she was pregnant at the time, with me. They would not permit her to come on the boat. She had to go back home, to the small town in Poland, give birth to me, and then came to the United States. CBC: A true bundle of joy. Joe: A bundle of… whatever. [laughs] CBC: Where did you grow up? Joe: I grew up in East New York, in Brooklyn, and the reason was, of course, that my mother’s family were residents there. They met us. They met my mother, my father, my older sister and myself at the boat and brought us home. Their

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Below: Will Eisner’s “Shop Talk” segment featuring his 1982 chat with his one-time employee Joe Kubert was published in Will Eisner’s Spirit Magazine #40 [Apr. ’83] and the actual audio recording of the talk is featured as an extra — along with all of Will’s “Shop Talk” interviews with fellow professionals — on Ye Ed and Andy’s WE:POASA DVD and Blu-ray.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke CBC Editor

Above: In mid-summer 2006, Ye Ed and his brother Andrew D. Cooke, soundman/editor Kris Schackman, and cameraman Ben Tudhope visited The Kubert School to interview Joe for their full-length feature film documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist. Here’s a screenshot of Joe in the movie. A transcript of that talk follows.

home was in East New York. In Brooklyn. CBC: How would you characterize the neighborhood where you grew up? Joe: Well, the neighborhood at that time in East New York was, I guess, great as far as I’m concerned. As far as I was concerned as a young kid, it was fine. I had a bunch of friends that I hung with, used to play a lot of ball… Things were good. It was during the Depression, the early days of the Depression. I don’t ever remember being hungry. I don’t ever remember being poor. It was fine. CBC: What was the ethnic makeup of that area? Joe: The ethnic makeup of that area was essentially Jewish. I think that there was a tendency for most people who came to any of the areas to move in with those people with whom they felt the most comfortable. So there were Italian neighborhoods, there were Jewish neighborhoods, there were black neighborhoods, and so on. CBC: What was the economic situation in your family during the mid-’30s? Joe: Well, the economic situation, in retrospect, was not too hot. In the late ’20s and the early ’30s, it was very, very difficult to make a buck. I guess that’s probably where I was most fortunate because, despite the fact that a primary purpose in all families to make sure that the kids would be able to make a living was to get them an education where they could become a doctor or a lawyer or a mechanic or a carpenter or anything that you could make a buck at. But to draw pictures? [laughs] That’s nuts! ’Cause you’ll never be able to make a living drawing crazy pictures. Yet my father, and what I mean when I say I was lucky, both my father and mother recognized the fact that I loved to draw from the time I was a kid! They always encouraged me. They always helped me and did everything that they could to make sure that I did that which they recognized I loved the most. CBC: Specifically, what did you want to do for a living, for a career as a youngster? Joe: Well, the idea of making money at what I was doing was probably as far removed from my conscious as I can imagine. I started drawing when I was two years old. I used to draw with chalk in the gutters. It was macadam, smooth macadam, and it took chalk beautifully. It’s been my experience that anybody who can draw is looked upon almost as a magician so that, when a young kid of three or four was drawing pictures, all the neighbors would come out and look at the stuff that was being done, buy more penny chalk with which to draw! But the idea of making a livelihood at it was completely and totally remote. It was only later on when I

From Comics To Graphic Novels

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

was going to junior high school, just finishing grammar school, from the eighth grade to the ninth grade, comic books were staring to come out. I always loved the comic strips in the newspaper. I never thought of the probability or possibility of my doing that kind of work. I didn’t know what it was about. [laughs] I didn’t know how you made that kind of transition from drawing in the gutters to drawing for the newspapers. But, pre-high school, I happened to come across some friends of mine whose relatives were involved with MLJ, the precursors of Archie Comics. This is when comic books started to come out in the late ’30s, early ’40s. And they saw the drawings I was doing. As I said before, the fact that you could draw is looked upon by others as a piece of magic. It’s… just drawing pictures. That’s all! [laughs] And this friend of mine with whom I went to school said to me, “Well, you know, Joe, my uncle (or cousin) is involved in this business. Why don’t you take some of your drawings up and show him? Maybe you could get a job doing it.” Well, at the age of 11 or 12, I said, “Why not?” I put a bunch of drawings that I had done on pencil, paper, stuck it into a batch of newspapers and with a nickel took a subway into New York from east New York, went up to Canal Street, where MLJ was located and brought ’em up and showed ’em my work. That’s what started me. ’Cause the guys up there were so kind, were so helpful. I knew nothing about the material to be used. I knew nothing about the paper or ink or anything like that. [laughs] And they gave me the paper. They gave me the paper with which to work. They gave me the brushes, the ink, the pencil. They showed me the size of the paper that it should be, which is larger, of course, than the printed material. And it was from that time on that I knew this was what I wanted to do. I can still, to this day, remember the smell of that place when I went in there. It was a dusty… There was paper, there was ink, there was erasings… It was all of those things mixed up together and I can still recall that smell! CBC: Can you describe specifically what a shop looked like? Joe: Well, the first shop that I’d gone up to was, of course, MLJ as I’d mentioned. [laughs] I’ll never forget it. It was on probably the third or fourth floor of a building that faced Canal Street. When you came in, there was a low railing about three or four feet high, and beyond that railing were the guys who were working, lined up against the window at their art tables. And again, Above: Centerspread from Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-29 [1974]. A six-foot enlargement of this double-page spread adorns Joe Kubert’s as I had mentioned before, they allowed school office-slash-studio wall. Tarzan, of course, was a favorite of Joe’s and his comic-book adaptations remains virtually unequaled.

Above: Courtesy of Gianfranco Goria, a photo of Joe Kubert and Will Eisner at the 1998 Lucca comics festival, where the friends were guests of honor at the annual gathering, the third largest comics festival in the world.

Below: For each installment of Will Eisner’s “Shop Talk” feature, a “jam” header was used featuring self-caricatures of interviewer and subject. Here’s the Eisner/ Kubert collaboration from Will Eisner’s Spirit Magazine #40 [Apr. ’83]. Note the addition of a broom by Joe, no doubt a visual reminder that he started off in comics sweeping the floor of Will’s Stamford, Conn. studio in the early ’40s. Courtesy of Robert Yeremian and The Time Capsule.

me to come in. They allowed me to see the work that they were doing, pointed out what I should be looking for and so on. So that was the first shop that I had seen. I worked up at Iger’s place, Jerry Iger’s. I worked up there for some time. That was perhaps during a summer or after school or whatever. I was still starting high school! And then working up at Will [Eisner]’s place. At Will’s place I was hired… I saw Will perhaps once [laughs] the whole time I was there! But the other guys, again, were so kind to me. I worked during the summer. I did the work up there… Work. [laughs] I swept up the place, I erased the pages of the other artists. But it gave me a chance to really learn what the whole business was about. CBC: That’s great. Can you tell us when you first met Will and of the personalities that were within his studio? Joe: As I mentioned, my first meeting with Will was rather quick and I can hardly recall the exact time. The setup in Tudor City which was where Will had his production setup was actually an apartment — initially an apartment — that he converted into a studio so that he had one room, I guess which would’ve been the bedroom or something like that and the living room or dining room area were made up by the company of other guys who were working — Tex Blaisdell, Bob Powell, Nick Cardy, other guys who were working up at the place there. Will was in that separate room by himself so the chances that I had to talk to him were kind of limited. [chuckles] He was kind of busy. He was working. But all the

other guys were just terrific as was Will whenever he had a chance to come by and maybe take a look at what I was doing. Of course, I did do some backup pages in The Spirit magazine, like a half-page filler or something like that. The guys were great with me. CBC: Can you specifically remember those back pages fillers? What were they? Joe: Oh, God. I can’t recall specifically the subject matter of the half-page things that I did. I just can’t recall. CBC: Were they bigfoot or were they adventure or… ? Joe: No, they weren’t bigfoot. I don’t remember. I really don’t remember. CBC: Was that your first published work? Joe: Come to think of it, it was. Yeah. Yeah. It was my first published work. CBC: Are you trying to hide it? Joe: [Laughs] I would burn it! Throw it in the fire right now! That’s true of most of the stuff I did at that time. CBC: I read an interview that you and Will did together — the Shop Talk you did together — and you lamented in the interview that incoming comic book artists learned from comic books but that in your day, because comic books were so new for instance, there was a greater tapestry that they drew their inspirations from. Can you discuss that? Joe: Well, I can certainly comment on that. The fact of the matter is, most people who are currently in comic books, and I think is a negative for them… I shouldn’t say “most”… I would say a good number of the people who are in comic books today have learned to do comic book work from other comic book artists. And what they’re doing under those circumstances is learning from someone who has already made changes from normal drawing and is giving his own rendition of what he thinks a figure should look like, his own exaggerations of what compositions and figures should be… and if somebody’s trying to learn from that, they again will take another step to make revisions in terms of exaggerations. In other words, they’re pulling themselves away more and more from what the actualities are in terms of figure drawing, anatomy, proportion, perspective, storytelling, and all those other things. The guys who came in early into the business were those, first of all, who were ashamed to say they were even working in comic books. This was completely and totally a junk medium. But at that time, magazines like Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post, who had the top illustrators and artists working for them, were slowly being phased out and other kinds of publications were coming to the fore so that the artists — some of them — were really looking desperately for work. One of the places that they could pick up work — easy stuff! — was in comic books. They thought easy stuff! Those people who came from the higher institutions of advertising, coming into comic books, would never

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

even say that they were working for comic books. They kind of put that down. But they came to the business with backup of figure drawing, life drawing, proper anatomy and so on and so forth so that whatever exaggerations they were able to do, they looked right! As opposed to a lot of the people who are in the business learning from other comic book artists. Without that basic foundation, there’s something lacking. CBC: Can you discuss an artist going into a major publisher and the ability or non-ability to draw super-hero comics? Joe: [Sighs deeply] Well… The ability to draw super-heroes trying to get into the… For an artist to try to get into the business today, first of all he has to demonstrate his ability to be flexible enough to draw anything. Anybody who limits his abilities to one narrow area is also circumventing the possibility of being able to make a livelihood in this business over an extended period of time. There’s no doubt about the fact that it is important to know how to draw super-heroes because that’s the genre. To my memory, it’s the longest living genre that has been in effect with comic books. In the past there have been genres of Westerns and mystery and horror books, and so on, and so forth. But this is the longest run of a genre that I know of. And I guess one of the reasons, or the main reason, is that these super-heroes have now taken on a life of their own in movies, on TV and in other venues, which, in a lot of cases, brings more revenue to the publishers than putting them out in comic-book form. So the importance of being able to draw super-heroes is self-evident and I think anyone who limits themselves to that, again, is going to be limiting themselves also in being able to

make a long-term living in this business. I think that mistake can be easily made because novices coming up to try to get the jobs now, being interviewed by editors, will come away with the feeling that unless they concentrate on doing superheroes only, they’re not going to get a job… and that can be hurtful in the long run. CBC: What is the difference between an illustrator and a storyteller? Joe: The difference between illustrator and storyteller? Well… a storyteller doesn’t necessarily have to be an illustrator to get a job doing comic books. An illustrator, however, has to be a storyteller or else he’s not going to get a job in comic books. The whole idea, the whole system of comic books is based on the idea that you’re a communicator and this has been Will’s mantra since I’ve known him. We are storytellers. We are communicators. I don’t care how pretty your drawing is; I don’t care how much work you put into the illustrative section of the artwork that you’re doing; if it doesn’t tell the story effectively, properly, clearly… then you’re not doing your job as a cartoonist. Storytelling is what it’s all about. CBC: What were Will Eisner’s abilities as a storyteller? Joe: They were the best. Will’s ability to tell a story. As far as I’m concerned, Will was not the greatest artist in the world. He drew like a whiz. His style was excellent. But where he was most prominent was his ability to tell a story. The same thing can be described for [Charles] Schulz, who does Peanuts. Nobody could draw any more simply than Schulz, but his drawings and the story that he tells are conveyed on any number of different levels. A kid can read

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: A teen-aged Joe Kubert was looking at comics as a means of communicating vital ideas and information. Sometime between 1944 and ’46, he conceives of Twice-Told Tales to convey, through words and pictures, the horror taking place in Europe. He explained, “Well, it was gonna be in the form of a comic book. That’s what I was thinking of. And it had to do with the Holocaust, what happened during that time. There was only a page, a page or two of it done at the most.” These drawings were reproduced in Will Eisner’s Spirit Magazine #40, illustrating the Eisner/Kubert “Shoptalk.” Courtesy of Robert Yeremian and The Time Capsule.

his stuff and love it , a teenager can read his stuff and love it, an adult can read his stuff and love it… and they still do with all the reprints that are coming out with Peanuts and so on. The style of drawing and how well you draw is secondary. It’s important to know how to draw well but that is secondary in terms of being able to tell a story with your ability to draw. CBC: What were your influences as a fledgling artist? Joe: My influences I guess were the same as

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Above: Unseen in America, the cover for the second Abraham Stone album. Courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic & SAF. Below: U.S. editions of the trilogy, the latter two published by Marvel in 1995.

every guy that came into the business with me. The three saints in our business were Caniff and Alex Raymond and Hal Foster. Tarzan, Terry and the Pirates, and Prince Valiant. All of these strips were admired by every guy I knew in the business and I think that what we learned about illustration and storytelling were derived from these people. All of them excellent artists, all of them outstanding artists! But they told a story and they told a story beautifully. If you take a look at Hal Foster’s Tarzan from 1931, 1932 — and I just got a book of that stuff again, just to look through it. Just to check and see it again — the drawings are so simple. The drawings are done in such a way that you feel that the artist was doing the drawing while the action was taking place! He just sketched the stuff down and it just came out on paper while the stuff was happening. That kind of immediacy in drawing communicates itself to the person that’s reading it and puts you right into that place! I felt, when I was reading Tarzan when I was a kid I was there in the jungles. I watched Tarzan swing through the trees! Because that’s what the cartoonist was able to do. CBC: Would you say that there are two schools? There’s the Foster school, the Raymond school — maybe it’s a joint — and then there’s the Caniff school? I have a hard time trying to figure you out, Joe. Which one do you belong to? Joe: [Sighs deeply] CBC: You can be very illustrative, yet you can, with just a few strokes, be very dramatic. Joe: Well, I feel anyhow that with every artist the style changes depending on the subject matter as well. If I’m doing a war story, if I’m doing a Sgt. Rock kind of thing, there’s a roughness that has to be there in order to communicate what I feel is happening when a guy is in the Army. You have to be sure about the equipment. The equipment has to look right, the uniforms have to look right, because without that there’s no credibility in the story itself. If I’m doing an airplane story, that’s different. The rendering and the drawing is different because what I’m striving for is to get a feeling of space, of openness, of air, of a plane being that high up so I’m trying to communicate that with my drawings. If I’m doing a story that deals with boats on water, my application to the rendering and drawing would be quite different under those circumstances. However, when I first started in the business, it’s interesting. A lot of guys took after Caniff simply because the style was commercially feasible and it was fast. It was quick. Instead of rendering the way a Foster or Raymond would do on Flash Gordon, the way those guys would do it took a little longer [laughs] to finish off the job. But with Caniff, you can slap in a whole bunch of blacks, it still held the drawing well, it still held the drawing together, but it was a heck of a lot faster. [laughs] CBC: Your relationship with Will — What kind of man was Will? Just some anecdotes you might have. Joe: I’ve always considered myself extremely fortunate for the relationship that I had with Will. He was unusual in the fact, also, that most of us who are in the business — most artists — are probably the poorest businessmen you can ever imagine. There are very few guys I know, no matter how talented they were, who were able to apply themselves in a business manner so that they could be assured of perhaps making a livelihood over an extended period of time. Will was always cognizant and aware of what he was doing and what it should be doing for the future! Whatever he was doing currently should apply to the future, what might be happening tomorrow for him. It was a lesson I learned when I was really quite young and it has held me in good stead because there are a couple of properties, a couple of characters that I’ve done, that are owned by myself that have paid off really well for me. Also, working myself in a businesslike manner with whatever I was doing, being fair to people which I think was one of Will’s outstand-

complaining about the fact that artists did this work 50 years ago and never got any benefit from the money that came form it… to me is sour grapes. Siegel and Shuster? Made plenty of dough! A lot of money from the work they were doing. Nowhere near what Superman actually generated for the publishers, but they were doing very well. The only time that they hit hard times was when they insisted they wanted to take over the ownership, which they never succeeded in doing. Despite that, however, the company did, in their last days, give them some sort of a stipend, simply because they didn’t want to have any bad publicity about it. And that was, of course, because of the pressures put on by Neal and a lot of other guys as well. But to say that it should have been different… years ago? To me, I don’t see a heck of a lot of sense to it. CBC: What about Joe Kubert work-for-hire today? Joe: Today is a different day. [laughs] Today is a different day in terms of working for hire and very frankly, at this stage of the game I’m very cognizant that the efforts I’m putting out I’d like to have directly benefit me as well as my kids as well as my family and so on and so forth. There are only very few projects that I’ll take on that aren’t directly related to me and my ownership. CBC: Is there any lesson to be learned about Will Eisner in work for hire? Joe: Oh, my God, yes. Will had felt from the beginning when he did The Spirit — and he’ll tell you this — that everything that he did he wanted to make sure that he benefited from, both financially and by people who

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Over a seven-year period, Joe produced the 224 page graphic novel Western, written by Claudio Nizzi, Tex, for an Italian publisher. Ervin Rustemagic and SAF produced an English language edition, Tex, The Lonesome Rider, in 2005. The above was a gift to Ervin from his friend, appearing here courtesy of Ervin & SAF. Below: Cover of the original Bonelli edition, a gift to Ye Ed from Alberto Beccatini.

ing traits. He was straightforward, he was an honest guy, he was a straight guy. I think that was a prime lesson that I learned from Will as well. He was a good guy to learn from. As I said right from the beginning, I didn’t really get to know him when I was a kid when I started working in his studio but later on with the stiff that I’m doing now — with the Army book that he started that I’m commissioned and contracted to be doing for the next ten years as a matter of fact — Will was a tremendous help. As he was with everybody. I asked him what kind of problems he had with the people with whom he worked, what kind of problems he had getting the books together, how we should work this, how we should work that. He was unstinting with his helps and suggestions in terms of what I had to do. When I started the school he was teaching at SVA at the time, School of Visual Arts, an excellent school, and he would ask me to come up and speak to his class which I was more than happy to do and he, in turn, came to my school and spoke to the students here. If I could’ve afforded him, I would’ve hired him [laughs] but I couldn’t afford him. He was terrific. He was outgoing, he was helpful, not only to me, I know he was that way with everybody I know. CBC: Work-for-hire: what is it and what’s your opinion of it? Joe: [Sighs] Well… the work-for-hire situation is one that has been talked to death over the years. I think that the largest example of its inequities was in the case of Siegel and Shuster, the creators of Superman. At the time I started in the business, which was back in the Stone Age, the moment that you were hired by a publisher, it didn’t matter if (a character) was your idea or his idea or wherever that character came from, it automatically belonged to the publisher. That’s the way it was. And it was quite different here in the United States as opposed to Europe. In Europe, almost from the beginning of comic books coming out, the artist always retained some ownership of the work that he did and I think that’s one of the reasons that the originals of the European artist (were) always felt to have some value and retained by the artist. I think also that’s why, in the very beginning of our business, it was felt that the originals had no value at all. Because the attitude of the person being hired was, “Look, this guy’s hiring me to do a job. He paid me for the work. The work now belongs to him.” That was the attitude of every artist I knew when I started. No one resented it, no one objected to it, no one was pulled by their hair to give their work to the publisher or else you’re gonna get beat up! That didn’t happen. Everybody was running to have their work published so from the time I started, the fact that you were working for hire, getting paid for the work and the work automatically became the property of the publisher was accepted. It was accepted and it was not objected to. Of course, things change and you learn about different things. You also have to realize that there were many different artists that would work on the same strip so the popularity of the artist was a negligible thing. It didn’t matter who the heck did the strip, it would still sell as well. It was only after years of change and recognition by people who were reading the comic books that people like Neal Adams suddenly came to the fore and his work was recognized, as were many other cartoonists. Publishers also now suddenly recognize, yeah, the sales of these comic books depends not only on the character but who’s doing the character! So that kind of recognition came to the fore. Then a guy like Neal Adams says, “Well, look. Now if it’s us to some degree who are creating the sales of these things, should we not benefit from that in addition to what we’re getting paid?” So the question of work for hire became a very flexible kind of thing. If the publisher refused to give any part of the ownership of the characters being done to the artist, no matter how much he wanted the artist to work for him, he makes compensation in other ways. Percentage of profits were being given. Contracts were being given with extra kinds of money just to get that artist to do the job. It’s been really an involvement of things — an evolvement in addition to involvement. Now those people today that are

Above: Courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic & SAF, page (sans lettering) from Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo [1996]. Below: This newly-designed compact edition was just released to the Italian market. Courtesy of E.R. & SAF.

would know that this was Will’s stuff. When Will came out with his work, especially with The Spirit and other things before that, sometimes he signed his name with a pseudonym, other times he’d put his own name on whenever he could and that was an example of his trying to put his stamp and make sure that people knew that it was his work. That was right from the beginning and that was his thoughts right from the beginning. When I started, I guess about ten years ago, doing these graphic novels… more than ten years ago I guess… about 15 years ago, I had spoken to Will about that. I said, “Will, this is something I want to do Where the hell do you find the time to do it?” I’ve been, thank God, busy all my life and I said, “You know, this is something I feel I’d like to do.” Will had started already doing this stuff. He had been doing stuff on his own. I said, “I think I’d love to get into that.” He said,

‘What I do is I take one day a week, on a Sunday. I devote that day and that day alone just to doing this kind of project.” And doing his graphic novel. And he says, “Before you know it, it’s done.” Because he devoted that time to it. I said, “Gee, how do you know it’s gonna be published? Do you have to set that up with a publisher or anything?” He said, “Joe, if you start that and if you have a problem in terms of trying to get it published… I’ll publish it for you! CBC: That’s a nice guy. Joe: [Laughs] Now I don’t know if… No, I think that he meant it! I really think that he meant it. That was enough of a shove to get me started. CBC: Can you describe your first graphic novel? Joe: I think my first one was a series called Abraham Stone that I did… Oh, God… Had to be at least 15 years ago. Then I did the, uh… [laughs]. I sound like an actor. “And then I did… ” [laughs] Fax From Sarajevo, I think, came on after that. CBC: Can you describe that? Joe: The Fax From Sarajevo book was one I did based on a true story. A buddy of mine, Ervin Rustemagic, was stuck in Sarajevo from 1992 to 1994. He was born in Sarajevo, he is from Sarajevo. He had his business going on there. He was the one who was distributing the Abraham Stone book. It was him that was acting as my agent I guess and he was contacting all the European publishers and son on. I had met him in 1973 at one of the earliest Lucca conventions. He had been stuck in Sarajevo, as I say, when the war broke out. He has a wife and two children and the only way he could communicate with anybody was with the fax machine! Telephone couldn’t work. In fact, when the electric was down and they couldn’t get any information out, they’d hook the fax machine up to a car battery somehow and were able to get that information out. In the two years that he was stuck there, I got a fax from him almost every day because I and a couple of other people that he knew were trying every which way to get him out of the country. He couldn’t get out. So he was describing what the heck was going on. It was a horror because his home was completely destroyed. Not one brick stood up on another. His place of business was destroyed. He had original drawings from some of the greatest artists around — completely burned, destroyed, gone! Everything gone! And he was running from place to place and building to building ‘cause every time he was there for a day or two they started bombing and they were killing civilians! If you were out in the open or if you were in an apartment and somebody saw you, they’d take a potshot at you. I mean, they didn’t discriminate between soldier, or so-called soldier, and civilian and they were killing everyone. So I and maybe one or two other friends that he had — I think one in France, the other in the Netherlands — were trying every which way we could to get him out for two years! And he’s traveling, doing all this, with a wife and two children. I think his son was seven or eight years old and his daughter was about ten at the time. Well, after he finally did get out, after these years of running around, and miraculously enough they all got out with all their fingers and toes, I felt, Jesus, this is a story that should be told! This is a story that was such an incredible thing to me that I thought the only way that I could tell the story was in the form that I knew best and that was as a comic book or graphic novel and that’s what I did. He had already gotten out at that time. It was funny because Ervin and I sat and he got me reference pictures about the town, and so on, and so forth, and he would make suggestions. “Joe, don’t do this… ” I said, “Look, this is your story but this is my book!” [laughs] This is the way it’s going to be. And so I did that book even prior to having spoken to any publishers about it. When I finished it and had shown it to a couple people, I went with Dark Horse simply because they were willing to put it out in exactly the form I wanted. I wanted hardcover, I wanted oversize, I wanted photographs in it. They went with everything. CBC: I’m going to ask you to be immodest and tell me what

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

could have been my brother, we were that close. We went to high school together. He married one of the daughters of one of the Three Stooges — Moe, the guy with the bangs. [laughs] But he could’ve been! We were close enough that he could’ve been my brother. CBC: You came up with an innovation in the early ’50s. Can you describe it? Joe: Yeah, Norm and I, my partner, Norm Maurer… We went to school together, High School of Music and Art, and as people who are in this kind of work do tend to gravitate, Norm and I had gotten together. More often than not we’d be, before school started, we’d look at each other and say, “Do we go to school today or do we make the rounds?” And invariably we’d make the rounds. The school’s up on 135th Street and very often we’d walk from 135th Street down to 42nd Street, to 23rd Street [laughs] and hit every one of the publishers trying to sell our stuff! Norm and I worked together really well. When I went into the Army in 1950, I was stationed in Germany for a year before I got out and when I was in Germany, before I’d gone into the Army, I’d been working for St. John’s publishing company. I had been packaging books for them. When I got out of the Army, Archer St. John, who was the publisher, was interested in having me come back to work again. At that time, I contacted my buddy Norm and I said. “Look, we’re able to put these books out. You want to come East… ”, ’cause he was living in California at the time, “You want to come East and let’s try this?” He said, “Hey, yeah!” [laughs] That was good. He came out with his family and we started publishing books for St. John. Three Stooges, Tor: One Million Years Ago, and several other books. We knew that the competition was really heavy as far as comic books were concerned because there were hundreds of

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Jew Gangster: A Father’s Admonition is Joe’s 2005 graphic novel (seemingly the first of a never realized series) depicting a Depression-era youth’s descent into a life of crime. Here’s an evocative panel from the tome. Below: According to Rafi Medoff, Joe told him, “DC Comics had originally contracted to produce the book, ‘but someone in the higher echelon objected to the title.’ Joe refused to budge. ‘I wouldn’t change it under any circumstances. It’s not a derogatory title. As a matter of fact, it’s an admonition. It’s the parent telling his son, “I don’t want you to be a Jew gangster!”’ The first edition was published instead by iBooks,” but DC released the paperback edition in 2011.

kind of response did you get from Fax From Sarajevo and what kind of coverage, what kind of media attention? Joe: No false modesty or anything. The stuff did good. It did well. Fax From Sarajevo did really well. Now, I gotta tell you, my wife Muriel is the business end of everything that I do. I’m kind of concentrating most of the time on the stuff that’s on the table, on what I’m doing. As I mentioned before, I have a tendency not to think about things that have occurred before. I’ve got too many things that are current and that I’m working on right away. How the books did? They did fine. They’re doing fine. They’ve been received very well. Critics have written about it and I would say 90-95% of all the things written about it or any of the graphic novels that I’ve done so far have been positive. I’m grateful for that. But I really don’t care. I tell you the truth I really don’t care. I like what I do. I enjoy what I do. I’m hoping that people who look at the stuff enjoy it simply because I feel that what I’m puttin’ down is stuff that I like and that’s it. CBC: You were in the military in the early ’50s… Joe: Oh, yeah — ’50, ’52. Yeah. CBC: Do you have any memory of what it was like just postwar, ’46 and ’47, when comic book artists were returning from the service? Can you remember what the atmosphere was like? Joe: Well, when you ask about the atmosphere, what it was like post-war which would have been ’45, ’46, I’m not sure I know what you mean. You mean in terms of getting work? CBC: Yeah. What the industry was like and the reception that the… Joe: Personally, I sold my first job that I got paid for, that was printed, when I was about 13. Twelve, 13 years old. It was a five-pager, they paid me five bucks a page and as I’ve said many times before, I shoulda paid them! [laughs] They shouldn’t have paid me for that stuff. I have not been unemployed for one day since that time. So when you ask me how things were, I can only tell you my own experiences. I’ve been working. I worked right through that time. I’ve never been in a position where I had to look too hard for a job because they were always there. I’ve never had a problem with that. Never! CBC: All right. You’re firm and adamant about that, but the industry itself… ? Did you see the ups and downs of the industry? Joe: Well, that’s what I meant when you asked me about the industry itself, Jon. I can only tell you about myself. You know, the comic book business is not one that lends any sociability, I feel anyhow, with the guys that work in it. Most of the guys work at home now. Shops no longer exist. I guess to that extent there was some socializing going on. I know that previous to my going into the Army, we had what I [laughs] laughingly call a studio which was one room in an apartment. Wonderful address on Park Avenue but this little skinny building. Amongst other things there was a two-man elevator, a two-person elevator… well it was a horror. But even at that time I was always employed. I was always makin’ a buck. Guys like Alex Toth worked up at the place. Carmine [Infantino] used to work up there with me. A whole bunch of guys and we did some socializing at that point but as the business went on, the guys more and more worked on a freelance basis and we worked at home so the chances of really getting to know what was happening with other people, how tough it might be or how tough it might not be… I really don’t know how that period of time affected others. I can only tell you how it affected me. CBC: In the early ’50s, you and your brother-in-law, Norman… Joe: No, Norm was not my brother-in-law. My partner! He

he had licensed Terrytoons, Mighty Mouse. And he had a whole book done. The black&-white artwork was all done on it. He said, “Can you take this book and turn it into 3-D?” [laughs] We said, “Sure!” So we did. We worked out a system where we were working on several layers of acetates, the whole magilla, the whole bit. And, Jeez, I’ll never forget those days. We worked day and night trying to get the stuff done. It was Norm. Me, his brother, my wife, his wife, anybody who could do anything. Because a lot of the stuff you draw on acetate, you have to opaque the back in order to make sure that the images don’t show through and so on. So my wife was opaquing, Norm’s wife, Joanie, [laughs] daughter of Moe of the Three Stooges, was opaquing background stuff. Part of that process was also having to go down to the engraver’s because our intention was to patent it. One of our ideas was to patent that system that had never been patented before. So we didn’t want to show anybody how this stuff was done. Norm and I had worked for three days and three nights — I’ll never forget this — not sleeping for three days and three nights. Let me tell ya. Walking around after not having slept for three days and three nights is like walking on sponges. Your feet don’t even touch the ground. Then we had to fly down to the engraver’s which was just outside of Washington, set the stuff up on the board so the guy could take the images, could take the shots with the camera. And eventually that came out. The first book, selling for a quarter — we got the price down to 25¢ — sold over a million and a quarter copies which was just incredible. That bought my first house. CBC: How long did the craze last? Joe: The big thing that usually happens, Jon, and it happens in our business all the time, is that as soon as somebody hits a good idea, they get a genre that sells well, a deluge of that stuff comes out! They kill it themselves because they do so much of it, there’s just too much of it for the potential buyer to absorb. And that’s exactly what happened with the 3-D. Everybody came out with it! We tried to control it with the covering it as far as

This page clockwise from left: Courtesy of Bill Schelly, Joe uses his creator-owned creation to celebrate Will Eisner’s; Cover of 3-D Comics #2 [Nov. 1953]; One Million Years Ago #1 [Sept. ’53], featuring the first appearance of Tor… and Chee-Chee; Tor on cardboard, courtesy of Heritage Auctions; Joe’s Tor revival, Tor #1 [May–June ’75], published by DC Comics; and the Eclipse reprint two-issue series, Tor 3-D. Here’s the first issue’s cover [July 1986]. 48

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

titles that were coming out every month. Norm and I would be talking and we’d say, “What can we do? What kind of innovative move can we make to make our books a little bit different? Can we do it this way? Can we make it oversized? Undersized? Sideways, backwards?” I said, “You know, Norm, when I was in Europe, when I was in Germany, I came across a magazine that had 3-D pictures in it and it included red and green glasses.” Now I had not seen that before! I had seen stereo-optic things which are two separate pictures. You look in the glasses and they merge together and give you a three-dimensional image but I’d never seen a red-&-green glass like was included in this magazine. They were photographs! They were not cartoons. And I said to Norm, “Wouldn’t it be a terrific idea if we could do this with comic books, do a three-dimensional comic book?” And the first reaction was “Nah! Never happen!” [laughs] But we tended to start to think about it more and more and Norm’s brother, Lenny, who was also involved in technical aspects of art and design and so firth, he was kind of helping us out. So all three of us sat down and started to try to work out some system. We knew that the 3-D could be done. The trick was to try and get it done in such a sway so that it would be feasible to sell on the stands for a price that would be acceptable. Now, we knew that we had to include the glasses. We knew that it was going to be special printing that took place. So we went ahead and worked on that and, little by little, Norm and I and his brother worked out the system where we were able to do this 3-D in line art and we showed it to St. John. He flipped. He loved it and he immediately said, “Can you take any artwork around and convert it to 3-D?” We said, “Sure,” [laughs] not knowing what the hell we could do or not! So we could do anything! So the first book that he gave us —

the patent was concerned. Didn’t quite work out. That’s another story in and of itself. The 3-D and the success of 3-D died a heck of a lot more quickly than it succeeded. It cost St. John. Drove him out of business. The first book, as I said, sold almost 100%, The second book sold maybe 85%. Third book… And he was converting all the books into 3-D! We had a whole system where the whole thing was being converted into 3-D. By the time the third and fourth books came out they were selling 10%, 15%… That just killed him. And it drove a lot of others out of the business. CBC: Jews in comics: There seems to be something about the early years of comics. Is there a connection? [Joe sighs] Is there something that you can see? Joe: I think it’s just a matter of happenstance. At one time, there were a heck of a lot of Jewish fighters in boxing. I think it’s a matter of where you can make a living at any given time. Why there are so many Jews in comic books? I think it’s really just a matter of happenstance. I have no idea why that came about. The ironic part of all of that to me anyhow is that being Jewish was never brought up to me in all the years I’ve been in the business. I’ve never heard it spoken about; I’ve never heard it discussed; I’ve never heard it brought up as a point, pro or con. I’m only discovering now [laughs] that a lot of the guys who have been in the business were Jews ’cause I never knew and it never interested me. CBC: You didn’t encounter any anti-Semitism? Joe: Speaking of antiSemitism, no. Not only have I not encountered anti-Semitism in the business, I was in the Army for two years — this was 1950-1952 — I never encountered anti-Semitism in the Army either. I don’t know. I’ve just never seen it. I’ve never seen it and it’s never affected me. Once, in the Army, some guy was being picked on and, I don’t know, I said something or whatever but that was the only time that I ever came near anything like that. And as I said, I grew up in a completely Jewish neighborhood in East New York. Every once in a while an

Italian guy would wander in but he would get out of there as fast as he could, just as if a Jewish guy [laughs] went into an Italian neighborhood! We’d make sure we got out of there as quick as we could, too. CBC: With the Kefauver hearings on juvenile delinquency and comics, how do you recall that time? Joe: The Kefauver hearings, the Senate hearings, were a killer, I think that came as close to killing this business as anything I know. And, of course I think that the psychiatrist, what was his name again? CBC: Dr. Fredric Wertham. Joe: Yeah. Dr. Wertham, the psychiatrist whose book really fostered and gave it any sort of dimension was the only one who really came out fresh as a rose. ’Cause everybody else, everybody in the business really suffered. How can you defend work that’s been done on any sort of an intelligent basis when you’re accused of doing certain things as a result of that work that just aren’t true. It could never be proven. How can you disprove something that has never been proven? Wertham maintained the fact that kids were doing terrible things because they were reading comic books. Now, where the hell did he hear that? Where did he learn that? How did he know that?

This page clockwise from left: Joe’s last foray with his prehistoric hero was the 2008 mini-series, Tor: A Prehistoric Odyssey. Here’s the cover of #1 [July ’08]; Marvel’s “Heavy Hitters” version of Tor was magazine-size with wraparound covers, with #1 [June ’93] shown here; “Panelrama” spread from Tor #5 [Oct. ’54], sporting a very Tarzan-like pose of combatants; and, courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic, a sketch of the Joe Kubert creation. All art on this spread by Joe Kubert. Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

DC C TM & ©

omics.

Above: Pacific’s 1st Folio was one-shot [Mar. ’84] which included this two-pager from Joe Kubert, yet another puppy endangerment story. Below: Perhaps the most traumatic entry of this brutal subgenre, Star Spangled War Stories’ Death of Schatzi issue featuring Enemy Ace, #148 [Dec. ’69–Jan. ’70].

These were extrapolations made based on the fact that he thought that’s what would happen and like I said before he sold a hell of a lot of books doing that. He also drove a lot of people out of the business and made it very difficult for a lot of people in my business to continue to make a living. CBC: How did it affect you? Joe: Again, it did not affect me. I was able to continue my work. When the 3-D went down the sewer and St. John could no longer publish, I got work from DC almost immediately and I have been involved with them for the last… off and on for God knows how many years. I know that it affected a lot of other people. A lot of other artists were having a tough time but I can’t really even vouch for that on a personal basis. There’s stories that I’ve heard. There’s things that I’ve heard but that’s as far as it went. CBC: Can we talk about the war genre and your connection to it? Joe: The point has been made, because of all the war stuff that I’ve done, that that must be my favorite topic, my favorite piece of drawing. It’s not! Never has been. The only reason that I’ve been doing so much of the war stuff is ’cause it sold! It did very, very well and they wanted me to continue on it because they felt that one of the reasons that it sold so well was because I was doing it, the covers and so on and so forth. But as far as the genre itself, as far as the subject matter, no. It was a means of telling a story but that’s as

far as it went. I don’t think I have any genre that I would call personally a pet. Perhaps the Tor thing, which has been a character of mine for the last 50 years and I feel that there’s a lot of stuff that I can do with it because it’s mine! Perhaps that’s why it’s one of my favorites. If not the favorite! Other than that, when I get a job, my attitude doing that piece of work is that’s what I concentrate on. That’s my favorite piece of work. That’s where I’m putting all my effort. And my attitude is like that simply because that’s where I get the greatest enjoyment out of doing this work in the first place. If I couldn’t motivate myself to really push… In fact, every once in a while I’d get a bad story to illustrate. The challenge then to me was how the heck do I take this story and do some stuff to it to maybe push the envelope just a little bit more. That is of interest to me. That makes the job more interesting. That makes the job more gratifying at the end of the day. So my approach and application to any genre is the same. If I’m doing a Western, if I’m doing a horror story, if I’m doing a super-hero story, whatever it is, I tend to just sink myself into it completely. I have to really get into it in such a depth that I kind of forget about everything else. Incidentally, which is one of the great, positive things about doing the kind of work that I do. My theory has always been that in order to be a good cartoonist, you have to really concentrate completely and totally on what you’re doing. Well, if you happen to have a problem, if things aren’t going so well, if you’ve got bills that have to be paid, if the kids aren’t doing so hot… Once you sit down at a drawing table, all of that goes out the window! All of that is gone. To me, that is like the greatest life-saving device I know! When I sit down to work — and I think most guys in my business do it the same way — I’m in another world. I’m concentrating completely and totally on what’s on

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

CBC: There was a period of time in your career that — again, you were noted for your work on “Sgt. Rock,” “Enemy Ace,” and military work — you became editor, artist, and writer of the magazine at a very pivotal time in American history. Can you talk about the connection between your own work on a military comic book and the Vietnam War? And also The Green Berets? Joe: I would like to mention that my involvement with the Green Berets strip again came as a result of a suggestion from Neal Adams. Neal had been working for syndication. I think he was doing [Ben Casey] at the time and the people that were writing the stuff had a contact with the Robin Moore, who was the author of The Green Berets and they were going to put out a syndicated comic strip with that character. I didn’t know Neal at the time. I hadn’t met him. He was not into comic books. He was doing syndication. But he had recommended to these people that they contact me. He had seen my work in comic books and he felt that I’d be a natural for this strip. So I was contacted, we did the sample and I got The Green Berets strip to do on that sort of a basis. The whole idea for the Green Berets strip was one where — and it was sold on the basis that — it would be similar to Terry and the Pirates. The fact that it was based on The Green Berets could be a wedge in, so to speak, but essentially it was to be a romantic adventure kind of strip. Well, the writer

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Courtesy of Peter Carlsson & the Kubert Estate, another Fido under fire image, the original cover art for G.I. Combat #153 [Apr.–May ’72]. Below: Even Joe’s miniseries, Sgt. Rock: The Prophecy featured a poor li’l pooch getting whacked. Panel from #3 [May ’06].

TM & © DC Comics.

my table and everything else is gone… which is great. But as you mentioned, I have been noted for the war work that I’ve done because of the Sgt. Rock character. I’d done that for years and years and it happens that it’s kind of worked out to be a positive thing for me. Currently, I’m working on P*S magazine which is a magazine that is published and distributed by the United States Army and it has to do with maintenance of equipment for the Army. It’s a book, incidentally, a comic book magazine, that had been created by our friend, Will Eisner. Will had started this magazine when he was in the Army back in the mid-’40s. The story goes, as I’ve heard it — ’cause I wasn’t there but they way I’ve heard it — is that Will was involved in that aspect of the Army that puts out maintenance magazines and the officer in charge said, “You know, we’re putting out all this stuff but nobody reads it, nobody looks at it. It’s all copy and everybody falls asleep and it’s like a complete waste of time.” And Will’s theory had always been, and I heard this from the time I had met Will, that you can take any subject — the driest subject in the world, mathematics, geography, history — any subject at all, and if you put it into a graphic form you can make it entertaining and interesting and people will read it because of its entertainment value and learn from it whether they realize it or not! And he says, “I think I can do something,” he told this officer in charge. “I think I can do something with this P*S magazine.” Which… he did. He immediately started illustrating it, making it an entertainment as well as an educational kind of subject and, back in the early fifties, started this magazine which is still extant today. This magazine comes up for contract every ten years. There are bids that are made, open for public bidding, by the government, by the Army. For people who would like to take on the chore of producing this magazine. And about six years ago… five or six years ago… my friend Neal Adams had called and said he had heard that this magazine was up for contract bid again and why don’t I try for it? Neal knew about my school and about the students who were involved here, the graduates… and I said, “That sounds great to me.” I put in a bid six years ago and we won the bid. We had that contract for five years. A year ago it came up for bid again and this time the contract is for ten years. And we bid for it and we won the bid. So we’re into a ten-year stint. The guys down in Alabama who are the editors of the magazine asked, “How old is Joe?” [laughs] “What’s gonna happen after ten years? He’s not getting any younger.” And Pete, who works with me — Pete Carlsson — says, ‘Well, Joe says that after ten years he’ll put another bid in for another ten years.” [laughs] So it’s been working out real well and Will was very helpful, incidentally, in my taking over this magazine. I had spoken to him about it as I did with Murphy Anderson, as well, who was in charge of that magazine for a number of years. It’s worked out very, very well. CBC: What is the importance of the magazine? Art Spiegelman would say he was disappointed with that phase of Eisner’s career because it supported the military industrial complex, that it supported American militarism. I’ve heard response to that saying that it saves lives. Joe: [Sternly] It sure does. The absolute value of the books that are being produced, the P*S magazine, which consists of 64 pages a month, (is that) it is an extremely valuable book in terms of saving lives! It describes to those men, in the armed forces, in the Army especially, and in the Air Force, how to maintain their equipment, how to take care of their equipment. How to check to make sure they’re being taken care of in terms of being properly lubricated. Being put together. How to look for stuff that might become a problem and check that before that happens. No, I’m very proud of the fact that I’m involved with something like that. I’ve received letters from people in the Army who’ve read the magazine who feel that it’s been very helpful for them. I think that the magazine has proved over and over again since Will started that it’s saved many, many lives and, again, I’m very proud to be a part of it.

Below: Joe Kubert’s painstaking recounting of a battle of the Vietnam War, Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965 [2010]. The entire journalistic account is rendered in pencil. Courtesy of Alex Segura & DC Comics.

TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Collection of Sgt. Rock: The Prophecy, written and drawn by Joe Kubert [ 2007]. Inset right: The sergeant and the prophecy — a panel from #6 [Aug. ’06] depicting Rock and David. Colors by Joe and Peter Carlsson.

kind of got the bit in his teeth and the writer had, really, control on the writing on the strip itself and started making it a political polemic and that I think is… Every time I got the strip from him, I tried to change it every which way I could but what I could do was extremely limited. Eventually I had to bow out of it. I just quit the strip on that basis. We’re talking about the fact that I took over the editorship for the Army — for the war books up at DC. Bob Kanigher, who had been my editor since the mid-’50s, was the writer — also the creator — of Sgt. Rock. The character of Sgt. Rock was not of my doing to begin with. It started first as a description from his typewriter. He wrote abut the damn thing in the first place and it was from that that I was able to extrapolate and build the character based on what his thoughts were. People told me at that time, “Gee, you did a terrific story.” “That’s a great story, that ‘Sgt. Rock’ story.” It was not my story! All I did was illustrate it! But it was written by Bob Kanigher. Well, in the late ’60s, Bob took ill and could no longer continue with his efforts editing the book and I was asked to take over the reins of the book at that time. Bob’s intention — and mine! — in all the times that we were doing the books was not to glorify, not to say how wonderful it is to be in the Army and kill people. In fact, I tried to make it a little stronger by putting a bullet at the end of each of the books that said, “Make War No More.” We started that. The whole intent was to show, “Look. These are a bunch of guys in the Army, not because they like it, not because it’s a wonderful place to be but because this is where they had to be. This is something that they had to do. That was our approach to all of these stories. When I took over the editorship in the seventies, Bob continued to write them and it was a strange kind of a turnaround. You must understand, and you know, Jon, that the editor is the one responsible for the entire book. Under the publisher. Whatever happens to that book is the editor’s fault or to his credit. He has to make the decision as to what goes in, what goes out, the kind of stories and so forth. When Bob was editing the book, he had the last word on it. He was the editor. He was my boss. When I became editor, our positions

switched. Now the final word was mine. The responsibility was mine. Bob was professional enough to understand that and we worked under those circumstances without any kind of hesitancy, without any kind of problems. However, when push came to shove and we discussed plotting of a story or how the story would go or who was going to do the story or how it was going to end, that was MY decision, not Bob’s. And he understood that and worked with it. It was a pleasure working with him. He was a terrific writer. He was a good guy. He was a great guy to work with. CBC: Can you describe your first encounter with A Contract With God, your feelings about it and feelings about the potential of the format) Joe: [Sighs] When I first saw the Contract With God that Will had done, I recognized that it was something completely and totally different than anything I had seen in comic books. Yeah, it had a little bit of The Spirit in it, it had a little bit of a lot of the stuff that Will does but it was done in an entirely different context. To me, it had a ring of authenticity. Not only that, you could tell that the guy who was doing it loved that he was doing it, loved what he was doing and had an intent with it that went way beyond what came out on paper. He had intentions for the stuff that he was doing to have some sort of an impact way beyond a comic book or a comic strip. That was really, really intriguing to me and kind of inspired me to want to do similar stuff. I’m sure that a lot of other guys were bitten buy the same bug as I. Will was able to do what he did because he had the ability to do it and the opportunity. His business sense — the business sense that he had — allowed him to take the time to put something like that together without taking any money for it. There are not a lot of artists who are in the fortunate position to say, “Well, I’m gonna do this and this and that and that I’m gonna take a year off. I don’t care if I make any money. I’m gonna do what it is that I really wanna do!” There are not a lot of cartoonists who can do that. [laughs] There are not a lot of people in any position who can do that! Will was one of those astute people who, business-wise, had set himself up so that he could continue with some sort of an income — whatever the heck it was and I don’t know any of the particulars as far as his personal

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

business dealings were concerned — but he could take that kind of time off to concentrate on those things he thought were really important to him. Very gratefully I find myself in a similar position today where I can kind of pick and choose those things that I want to do. CBC: Is that a part of Will Eisner’s legacy in your life? Joe: Oh, yeah. What Will had done and the way he had gone about it and his attitude in what he was doing, the honesty with which he approached his subject matter in what he was trying to do, the fact that he struck good business deals. Not unfair! And not done… Will had a reputation of being a hard businessman but one with whom people loved to deal. They loved to work with him because they knew that the deal that was being set up would be the best deal in both directions and that what he would deliver would be the best work possible. CBC: There are two people in the history of comics who I think have had the creative chops, storytelling genius I would say and horse sense — just good business sense — and I would say that would be Will Eisner and that would be Joe Kubert. Joe: Oh, God… CBC: And if you look at the parallels between you guys, you worked more within mainstream publishing, he was a bit on the outside, freelance stuff… Joe: Yeah. CBC: But you both were teachers, you both did graphic novels. You both have legacies that you’ve got! Him from SVA and simply being a mentor to so many people and Joe Kubert through the Joe Kubert School and being a mentor to so many people. Did you learn things specifically from him? Joe: No. Doing business, yes, but the way things worked out with the school and doing stuff, it’s just a matter of happenstance. Just pure, unadulterated luck. CBC: What’s the ultimate lesson of Will Eisner? Joe: One thing that I find that I’ve tried to convey to my sons Adam and Andy, who are cartoonists today, is that whatever it is that you want to do, make sure that you love it. Make sure that you really like what it is that you’re doing! That’s why I think my sons Adam and Andy, having them do what they’re doing and loving what they do as much as I love what I do is nothing short of a miracle. [laughs] It’s not something I taught them or something I showed them. It’s something that somehow is ingrained in them as it was in me. That’s pure miracle as far as I’m concerned. The other stuff, the similarities between what Will has done and maybe what I’ve done? A lot of luck. A lot of luck. CBC: There’s also another aspect of you with Will. Will with students and Will with readers. Will could walk into a room with the most outrageous hippies, you know, some real counterculture types and boom, they’re simpatico! Joe: Yep. CBC: You’ve got Stephen Bissette, you have Rick Veitch,

just a number of, from the first year alone, a number of people who are not square, shall we say, but Joe at one time could have been considered a square and you guys… Boom! Why is there no generation gap? Joe: I think there’s no generation gap between the hippies [laughs] and squares like me… and… I never thought of Will as a square, though. [laughs] Never. But there is a common thread, though, that runs between us all and that is… There are a lot of differences, there are a lot of interests that guys like Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch have in which I’m not interested at all. And I would assume that the same is true with Will and a lot of the people that he’s met. But the common thread that’s there is this interest in the work that we’re doing, the love for the work that we’re doing and the fact that with each job we do, we like it to be a little better than the last job we finished. So the more we can talk amongst ourselves to find out, “Well, what is it that you have found out that makes your work a little bit better or what is it that you think stimulates you just a little bit more?” That kind of a common thread, no matter how divergent other interests might be, brings people together. Divergent ideas, backgrounds and opinions. CBC: What separates literature from graphic novels? Joe: The separation that occurs between literature and graphic novels? I think literature is far more powerful and more potent. Far more powerful. I feel very strongly that a good writer can convey thoughts and images and ideas that go way beyond what any artist can draw. Imagine being able to write a story in such a form that it creates variations of images in every person who reads it! Now an artist tries to do that, tries to satisfy or interest as many people as possible who are reading his work, that he’s communicating that kind of a vision that he has but a writer can do that — a good writer — can do that with words. That’s amazing to me. Absolutely amazing! I know when I was a kid I read Kipling and other books of that type, Moby Dick, and so on. They created images in my head that… Those were pictures that I had to draw! Those were

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above and below: Spread and panel detail from Joe Kubert’s masterpiece, Yossel: April 19, 1943.

Above: “The Boy and the Old Man” was Joe’s last written and illustrated (albeit unfinished) story, published posthumously in Vertigo’s Ghosts #1 [Dec 2012]. This is a panel. Below: Intro page to his posthumous mini-series, DC’s Joe Kubert Presents [2012-13].

pictures that I had to draw. The written word that has the potential to do that I think is far more powerful than anything graphic novels can do. CBC: Can graphic novels be literature? Joe: Graphic novels are literature. I’m not demeaning it. I’m just making a comparison. I’m not saying that graphic novels are a bad thing. Far from it! I think they are a very powerful medium. Now we’re talking about what I feel is the most powerful and the written word I think is it. That kind of communication. Graphic novels are certainly literature but in comparing them to the written word, I just think that the written word is a lot more powerful and several levels above that. Andrew D. Cooke: Did Will ever talk to you about ideas? Were you with Will before Contract With God? Were you with him socially? Did you know what he was doing? Joe: When I spoke to Will, especially when we had that interview in the magazine when he had interviewed me, we didn’t speak of specific ideas. What we did speak of was how to implement and how to execute whatever ideas we would have. We talked about our approaches, how we would apply ourselves and what we would try to include in our work to convey and to gain the most impact in what we were doing. It was more about technique and application than it was essentially initial ideas. I don’t ever remember Will specifically talking about any of his books to me. He never described any of the books to me. We never talked about any of the sequences in his book no matter how terrific they were and they were tremendous! They were great! What we did talk about was how he was able to achieve those

effects in terms of drawing, composition, pacing, dramatics and so on. Andrew: What did you think about his graphic novels in terms of the Jewish themes to his work. Joe: I’ve been asked several times what I thought about Jewish stories or ideas or things as it applies to graphic novels and that’s why I’ve included that in several of the graphic novels that I’ve done. My contention is I’m not doing Jewish stories. I’m doing stories in which Jews are involved. [laughs] Because that’s where I grew up. That’s my background. I feel most comfortable writing and drawing about stuff that I know best about. I don’t think that I’m what might be considered a religious person. I feel very strongly about certain things that have happened. One of the reasons that I did some of the books that have the themes is that I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington one time. Now I’ve been Jewish all my life. During World War II, there were people that would visit my parents from the old country, from the old town. And some of the people, they escaped during that time just shortly before or after or while the war was on. I’d see people with tattoos on their hands speaking to my father. My father and mother never really spoke about it except they’d say, “Well, a cousin was running down the street and he was shot and killed.” Didn’t mean a thing to me. Not at all. Then when I visited the Holocaust Museum that knocked me out. That really got to me. Whoever planned that museum, it’s not like visiting a museum. That’s an experience. For me anyhow. The way they designed the place is that every once in a while the corridors inside the place narrow and suddenly you get the feeling that you’re being led down an alley someplace into one of these crematoriums or something. It was just incredible to me. And the thought occurred to me. I was born in 1926. Gonna be 80 years. What would happen if my father and mother didn’t come to the United States? Didn’t come to America. What would have happened with me? I’d probably be drawing but under an entirely different set of circumstances. So I did a book called Yossel which has that kind of a “what if..?” story to it simply as a result of having visited that museum essentially and having experienced what I did going through it. Andrew: Do you think Will looked at his Jewish graphic novels in the same way that you looked at them, that it said a lot about his own personal experiences? Joe: I never discussed it with him but I would guess that Will’s primary reason for doing the subject matter that he did and why it had a lot of Jewish connotation is because that’s where he grew up. That’s what his background was. Those are the people that he really knew well. Those were the people that he really knew well. Those were the things that were dramatic to him. Those were the things he felt he could do most effectively in the kind of publication that he was putting together. I never discussed Jewish things with him. [laughs] I never talked about being Jewish with Will. Will never discussed this idea of this Jewish book that he was doing except perhaps the fact of pointing out a character and I said, “Yeah, I saw a guy like that. I know a guy like that.” Just as Will had drawn it. But that was the extent of it. Andrew: Do you see a Jewish tradition of storytelling that is a part of the heritage? Joe: No. I see it as just the treatment of a character. It’s been done on movies or TV. You can take any person’s Italian background, Irish background… There’s any number of different subject matters that can be done as precisely and as effectively as the Jewish background I think. CBC: I was looking through The Spirit magazine that has the Shop Talk with you and there’s something called TwiceTold Tales? Is there something that’s beyond comics that you’re talking about there? Joe: Twice-Told Tales was an idea that I had… I must have been about 14 at the time… and I still have those drawings, as a matter of fact. And I guess that that had Jewish connotation and background as well. I guess at that time — I was maybe 16 or 17 maybe — but I felt that these were stories

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

that should not be forgotten. These were stories that should be told again. I put a sample page together or whatever. I didn’t get very far on it but the title of it was Twice-Told Tales. CBC: It said this is more than a comic… Joe: Well, it was gonna be in the form of a comic book. That’s what I was thinking of. And it had to do with the Holocaust, what happened during that time. There was only a page, a page or two of it done at the most. CBC: What would motivate a 16-year old boy who was doing work-for-hire comic book work to do something like that? Joe: I don’t know. I’ve no idea. Andrew: I wanted to ask you about The Spirit. Do you remember the first time you saw The Spirit, and what your thoughts were about that? Joe: My earliest cognition of The Spirit was at the time it was coming out, I guess, in the ’40s. And I loved it! What really struck me were the incredible innovations as far as compositions were concerned. I saved them. I’m not a collector! The stuff that I have around here I’ve accumulated simply because people were kind enough to give me stuff but I’m really not a collector. But The Spirit I collected! These were stories and portrayals and designs that I could just never get enough of. I think everybody swiped from him in terms of the layouts he did on the first page of the magazine. What an incredible use of imagination and what chances he took. You’ve gotta remember, you’ve gotta know that commercial artists — which is, of course, what a cartoonist is — is always worried when you’re working for somebody that you’re gonna do something that causes resentment. “Whaddaya mean you’re taking off and doing… ?” “Whaddaya mean you’re designing a page like… ?” as Will did, a big building with the lettering stuck on the building and a guy coming out the bottom or rain-swept or… [laughs] What kind of comic book story is that? Every cartoonist that I know would have been deathly afraid to do something like that for fear they’d get their head handed to them but not Will! Now he was directly responsible for what he did. If anything came down, it would come down on him. Yet he didn’t hesitate to

be as innovative and creative as he wanted to be and that’s something that communicated to me. It really came across to me and I loved his work for that. The stories themselves? They were interesting. They were nice but what really hit me was the way he did it, the way he put the things together! It invited — and this is something that I find very true to this day — it invited the reader to read it. It invited the reader to look at it. There’s a lot of stuff that’s coming out in comics today that I find not only not inviting, I find it revolting. I find I don’t even want to look at this stuff. I don’t even want to read it. And I love comic books! I love reading comic books. But there’s stuff that’s coming out now that I can’t even stand to look at. Never with Will. Will’s work was always an invitation to look and to read it. [laughs] Andrew: Can I ask you about Ebony? As you collected The Spirit, at the time were you aware of Will’s depiction of the character in a derogatory way? Joe: Never. You have to understand, too, that years ago there were ethnic jokes that were told all the time. There were Irish jokes, there were Jewish jokes, there were Italian jokes, and black jokes. Amos ‘n’ Andy was the most popular thing on the radio and they were great. When they were no longer in favor because of the fact that it looked denigrating… But the fact that Ebony was a black kid and done in a cartoony manner, it was terrific. When I went to Music and Art, there were people of every stripe, every color, that went to the school. There were guys we called “colored guys” at the time. “Black guys” is a new nomenclature, just recently absorbed. But these guys would come home and be with me at home. There was a fellow by the name of Alvin Hollingsworth who went to Music and Art with me. Alvin turned out to be one of the outstanding black artists who just, I think, within the last two or three years died. Incredible artist! Painter! Used to come home with me when I lived in east New York. My mother never hesitated! Matter of fact, my mother’s greatest joy was if somebody sat down at a table and she’d bring a plate full of food and you’d finish everything on that plate! That was the biggest compliment

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Joe Kubert and a number of Kubert students and alumni had work featured in Scholastic’s Dynamite magazine. Here’s a great piece by Joe that depicts the origin of Tor! This beauty was scanned from the original art. Many thanks to owner Steve Kriozere and to Ye Ed’s old pal Frank Forte of Asylum Press, who graciously scanned it for CBC! Much obliged, fellas.

Below: In 2002, a limited-edition G.I. Joe foot-tall action figure of Sgt. Rock was produced by Hasbro and released featuring this Joe Kubert packaging artwork. From the original art courtesy of Peter Carlsson and the Kubert archives.

my mother could receive. And he would be with us, he would sup with us. And there was no distinction at all. The fact that he was black, the fact that we were Jewish. Never any kind of thing like that. And so, during the time of Ebony appearing in the comic… matter of fact, there was time when the point was being made that Ebony was this black kid that was being made funny or being made fun of… that cause more attention than the fact when he started out with the language, the patois, as a funny black kid. Andrew: Did you ever talk about politics with Will? Did you have any idea of his view on life as regards to politics? Joe: In terms of politics, I don’t recall. If I had any discussion about politics with Will, it had to be very fleeting. That was not one of our subjects. [laughs] Usually the main topic of conversation when we’d meet, he’d say “Hi, Joe. Do you have your broom with you?” He’d always make a comment about the fact that I used to sweep out the studio when I’d first come to work there. Which I loved. Which I loved. Andrew: Did you spend time with Will socially? Joe: I did spend time with Will socially and, ironically, it was usually when we were at conventions. We did conventions together. We were in conventions in New York, we were in conventions in France and in Italy. I remember Will would have a tendency to visit the art supply stores in any city that he went to, looking for different kinds of brushes and tools that he might be able to use. It never dawned on me to think in those terms and one time he was headed out someplace and I said, “Where ya headin’ for?” And he said, “Oh, walking someplace.” “Where ya headin’ for, Will?” “Oh, I’m going over to this art store. I wanted to see what was there.” And I said, “Do you mind if I go with you?” “Fine.” We went together and he’d look at the brushes and he’d look at the different pencils and stuff like that and it was there — I had opened up the school, as a matter of fact — it was there that I came across the brushes that I use today at this school that can’t be purchased anyplace. We order them by the thousands from Europe, from the manufacturer. But it was Will who introduced me on our walks! And our socializing outside in Spain. We had terrific times in Spain. There was always some repartee going between he and Chaykin, Howard Chaykin, who is a terrific, sweet man. [laughs] Really a cute guy! I’ve known him forever. Every once in a while, they’d very playfully argue between the tow of them. We had some wonderful times together but usually those social affairs took place when we were together attending some of these “do’s” in South America, in Europe and so on. Andrew: You had some really top-flight instructors who worked here in your school. Joe: Oh, yeah. Andrew: You invited Will Eisner. Why did

you invite him and what did he lecture on? Joe: As I said before, I had spoken to Will’s class when he was teaching at SVA and he had come here as well to address my students and I had asked him if he would… I’d loved for him to come to work here but I could not afford him. He had a deal, if I’m not mistaken, with SVA. While he lived in Florida, they paid for his flight back and forth from where he lived in Florida to come up an teach once a week and put him up. I couldn’t afford that! Andrew: What did he lecture on when he was here? Joe: Just generally made himself available to the students. What we would do usually is have a sort of a mini-get together, very unstructured and laid back, and whatever the students wanted to know, whatever they specifically asked him about, and that’s the way we conducted these things. Andrew: Can you think of his relationship with young people? Is there something there? Joe: Will Eisner’s relationships with young people were as easy-going and effective — perhaps even better — than most people that he spoke to. Will had always, as long as I’d known him, had this sense of wanting to help people who wanted to do this kind of work. If you were in his class at SVA, my understanding is he would knock his brains out, He would do all kinds of special projects with individual students. He never addressed the class as a whole. He treated them each individually, giving him the best that he could. He worked the system that way as we both did, I think. When he came here to address the classes, it was on an informal basis. Very, very informal. And his relationship with the younger guys here, I felt, “Oh, look. He’s addressing a bunch of people who had incredible respect for him and wanted to know, wanted to learn what he knew!” Now, how the heck do you do hat except by asking and showing that you’re really interested in what you’re wanting to know about and Will invariably responded to that. CBC: Joe, you’re a competitive guy. [Joe laughs] I know you are. I’ve heard of you on the handball court and it’s the same as Will Eisner on the tennis court. Joe: Really? I never saw Will play. CBC: In a lighthearted way, were you jealous of Will Eisner? Joe: Never. If I was going to be jealous of anybody, I’d be jealous of Michelangelo or Da Vinci. And I’m not jealous of them, either. Jealousy I find is a non-productive kind of emotion in that it kind of tears down rather than builds up. When I see somebody’s work that’s really good, to me it’s inspirational. I don’t want to draw like Will Eisner. I want to draw like me. But I want to get hose elements. I want to be as good at what I do as Will is at what he does. If I look at a Michelangelo — you know, to the gods — and I say, “Gee whiz, look at that kind of work. I could never do that!” But if I can get my own stuff to be half a step beyond what I’m doing now… and that’s what work that looks good inspires in me. Jealousy doesn’t enter into it at all… and it shouldn’t! I don’t think it should. I think it’s a negative feeling to have. CBC: How did you feel when you heard that Will had passed away? Joe: [Sadly] Oh, gee… I don’t know. I don’t know. It would be hard to say. Look, nobody’s here forever. None of us are here forever. And Will had accomplished a great deal while he was around. I felt good for the fact that he did accomplish as much as he did and helped as many people as he did. To that extent, I think it’s a good thing. In the main, whether it’s family or good friends, people who kind of carry on and are feeling so woeful when somebody passes on it’s because they have a feeling — my own theory is — it’s because you have a feeling that you should have done something. Or you should have said something. Or there’s something that was never really completed before this person passed away. Well, I never felt that way wit Will. I never felt that with my parents. I think that he had a good run, he did really well, a lot of good things. He showed a lot of people including me a good way.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Ragman, Batman and Enemy Ace TM & © DC Comics.

Hawkman TM & © DC Comics.

War’s Aftermath

Postscript to Fax from Sarajevo Fax from Sarajevo © the Estate of Joe Kubert & Strip Art Features.

Ervin Rustemagic, the real-life protagonist of Kubert’s book, talks of life since the war Editor’s note: Fax from Sarajevo, Joe Kubert’s ground-breaking 1996 book, is less a graphic novel and more a journalistic long-form comic book story depicting real-life events of the early 1990s: the struggle of Ervin Rustemagic and his family during the Bosnian War. Winner of the Eisner and Harvey awards for best graphic novel/album, the 207-page tome follows Ervin — Joe’s European art agent, business partner and friend — as he fights to stay alive in the hellhole that was the Siege of Sarajevo and to reconnect with his family: Wife Edina, daughter Maja (pronounced mah-yah) and son Edvin. The story ends, now almost 20 years ago, with mother and children flying out of Sarajevo, bound to reunite with father. Ervin, who was exceedingly generous with CBC in sharing Joe Kubert material from the archives of his company, Strip Art Features, graciously offered to tell, in words and photos, what’s happened since to the Rustemagic family and about visits by Joe & Muriel Kubert…

Bottom left: From left, Muriel Kubert, Ervin Rustemagic and Joe Kubert during the couples visit to the Rustemagics in Slovenia in Spring 1994. Bottom right: Joe drawing for Maja, while Edvin patiently waits his turn.

After the U.S. military aircraft The Kentucky Air Guard has flown them from the siege of Sarajevo to Split, in Croatia, on Sept. 25, 1993, the Rustemagic family settled in Slovenia. On Dec. 24 of that year, they moved into a house they bought in Celje. The photo [above right] was taken in their house’s garden in early spring 1994. Maja was 11 years old and Edvin was 6. Edina, who is a professor of philosophy couldn’t work in Slovenia in her profession due to the language barrier, but she had to devote most of her time in raising Maja and Edvin and helping them come over the stress and trauma which they were experiencing for 18 months in the Bosnian war. Joe and Muriel Kubert were among the first friends who visited them in Slovenia. It was only then Joe told Ervin about plans to do Fax from Sarajevo.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Hermann Huppen, author of Jeremiah graphic novels (published in the U.S. by Dark Horse), lives in Brussels. Here he is, on right, with his wife (at his right), Adeline, and guests (from left) Edvin, Maja and Edina. Presumably, Ervin is snapping this picture of the group posing on the city’s main square! Upper Right: The Rustemagics like Venice a lot and, as it’s only on a three-hour drive from their new home in Celje, they go there quite often. Left: Joe and Ervin In Lucca, Italy, 1998. Right: Ervin and Edina dine at a sidewalk café in Paris.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

After the war, Ervin took a number of friends to Sarajevo, where they all wanted to see what was left of the SAF offices. The ruins were used as the background of the official poster for the apocalyptic TV series starring Luke Perry based on SAF’s comic book series Jeremiah. Ervin was an executive producer of the 2002-04 MGM/Showtime production.

Above: Muriel and Joe loved Edina’s Bosnian way of cooking, and Edina always enjoyed hosting them at her home in Sarajevo before the war and, later on, here in Slovenia. Right: Joe at the old castle of Celje that was built in 13th century. Below: A panoramic view of Celje from the old castle on the hills. Bottom: Muriel and Joe in front of the Strip Art Features office building, in Celje, during the summer of 2001.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above left: After the war, Maja usually celebrated her birthday in Sarajevo. Here she is with her friend Tamara on July 20, 2007. Above right: From left, Edvin, Maja, Alem (Maja’s then-boyfriend and now husband) and friend Lana at Ljubljana University graduation ceremony, 2008, where Maja received her diploma, becoming a doctor of medicine. Left: Maja and Alem’s son Benjamin was born on March 27, 2012. Here he is as a nine-month old Santa Claus. Right: Benjamin’s uncle Edvin was also born on March 27, only 25 years earlier than his namesake nephew. Here the younger Edvin receives his diploma at the Slovenian University from Dean Gorazd Mesko, Ph.D. Edvin’s thesis: Identity Theft in Cyberspace. Below: The family at the Croatian island of Krk in summer 2012, while Alem has been participating at the Olympic Games in London.

As always, Ervin continues to work crazy hours, but at least the office is only on 500 yards far from the house (the same as it was in Sarajevo), so he often drops by home for coffee with Edina. Maja pursues her career in the local hospital, specializing in pediatrics. Alem — who is a professional team handball player — trains twice a day and travels frequently with his club. Consequently, baby Benjamin spends a lot of time with grandma Edina, being educated and spoiled at the same time. Edvin, who intends to go to London to study for his master’s degree in information security, spends a lot of time in his music studio, composing pop, dance, and R&B. He is a featured producer on Production MarketPlace (www.magicmg.com). All photos and text ©2013 Ervin Rustemagic. Visit Strip Art Features on the Web at www. safcomics.com. 66

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Colleague

The Wizard Remembers Joe

Artist Frank “Red Sonja” Thorne reminisces about his beloved old friend and editor

[If us comic book fans didn’t know better, we’d think that artist Frank Thorne was a prodigy of Joe Kubert, blessed as he is with a gritty, organic art style that seemed cut from the same cloth as Joe’s. But the Rahway, New Jersey-borne artist had a bit of comic book experience prior to joining Joe’s stable of freelancers in 1969 — think Gold Key’s Mighty Samson — and Frank also spent time as comic strip artist and worked as a commercial artist in the 1950s and ’60s. But Frank did start coming very much into his own under the guidance of Joe, who edited much of his DC work, and Frank has always expressed gratitude for the friendship and support he received from his former editor. Ye Ed spoke with the artist on April 6 and the interview was transcribed by Steven “Flash” Thompson. — JBC.]

Frank Thorne: I read the obituary of Carmine Infantino this morning. These are guys of my generation. Comic Book Creator: I know… Frank: Those two good great ones: Infantino… but Joe… What can I tell ya? What can I tell ya?! [laughs] What would you like to know? CBC: When you were going to… what was it called? The Art Career School? Frank: Yes. That was at 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue. The Flatiron Building. It was the penthouse of the Flatiron Building. CBC: And what was your experience there? Were you focusing on cartooning? Frank: Down the street was the Cartoonist and Illustrator’s School, where the School of Visual Arts originated and morphed into its present sprawling… I think it’s the biggest art school in the world or something at this point! But our career school was more nuts and bolts. The people who guided me there felt that — and I agreed — that if I had a basic commercial art training if I didn’t make it in the comics, I could always turn to commercial art. Personally, I didn’t have to do that. And so it was a pleasant experience. CBC: Were you a comics fan as a kid? Frank: Yes, indeed. “The Atom” was one of my favorites. Wasn’t too much for the super-heroes. Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and the ladies running around in their minimal outfits appealed to me. CBC: [Chuckles] We can see that. Frank: I really had never been that interested in comic books. I just wanted to draw and write, and that seemed to be the place to start. CBC: So, was it more comic strips that you wanted to do? Frank: Yes. Flash Gordon. Al Williamson, Hal Foster — they were the heroes of those days. So I started copying Alex Raymond and left that style — still struggling to find something. [laughter] CBC: When were you first cognizant of Joe Kubert? Frank: Oh, early on. After you get a trained eye, a couple of years at it, you can pick out the really super-talents and early on I could see that. I didn’t meet him until much later. I think it was in the ’70s. He was the editor for the war books — he and Kanigher — and they had “Enemy Ace” and “Sgt. Rock,” and a whole roster… “Hawkman”! Fantastic! His “Hawkman” was unbelievable! [laughs] CBC: Do you remember the early work you saw of Joe’s before you met him? Was it his Tor?

Frank: I’d seen Tor, yes. I’d seen the 3-D comic he and Norman Maurer worked on. Norman Maurer was his good buddy and they set out as young men to start a whole new thing in 3-D comics. Which [chuckles] didn’t work out. Norman Maurer was the son-in-law of one of the Three Stooges and that always provided a humorous note. [chuckles] And Joe said that Norman was better than him! But Norman left to oversee the Three Stooges, and produce their movies and work with them. And Joe drifted towards the school. He was talking about starting a school way back when! So did John Buscema. That’s what he wanted to do, a mail order art school. I don’t know. Did that ever happen do you suppose? CBC: With Buscema? No, I don’t believe it did. But Joe did start a correspondence course about 12 years ago. Did you, early on, get the Perry Mason syndicated strip? Frank: Yes, I was like 21 years old. And they handed me the daily and the Sunday. Sylvan Byck at King Features — then it was in Manhattan, across from the Daily News building —

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Exclusively for this Kubert tribute issue, Frank Thorne contributed this oil painting of Joe’s signature character, Sgt. Rock. Despite failing eyesight, Frank has re-invented himself as a painter in his octogenarian years. CBC is very grateful for Mr. Thorne’s enthusiastic support.

TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Combining Frank Thorne's pencils and the inks of Joe Kubert equals… kismet! This page of perfectly meshed original art, courtesy of Heritage Auctions, is from the Tomahawk #124 [Sept.–Oct. 1969] story by writer Bob Kanigher, "The Valley of No Return."

Sylvan Byck saw all my swipes of Raymond. Must have been pretty good swipes because they gave me the Perry Mason strip to do, which I did for a couple of years. It’s a daunting task even for a young man, 20, 21, 22 years old, particularly when I was in the Special Service. It was during the Korean War, and I had to spend two weeks in the summer in training up at Camp Drum and go in every week to Manhattan to a meeting of the 306th Special Service, which was an entertainment group, and so I mustered out as a corporal. We already had two children and we went on to have three more. CBC: Five children! Special Services was in entertainment? Frank: Yes. I played the trumpet in the pit band. And also I designed the scenery for a traveling show we had called McGee. We went around to Army bases and performed it. John Cassavetes was one of our star players. And Joe Layton was the choreographer; he went on to glory. I think I was the only cartoonist in the outfit. CBC: Did you stay stateside or did you go overseas? Frank: Oh, God! If we ever went overseas… if we were to go to battle, North Korea woulda won! [laughter] CBC: How long did the Perry Mason strip last?

Frank: About two years, I think. Maybe a year-and-a-half. And then it really had become too much for me. Old Man Hearst dies and he and Erle Stanley Gardner were buddies, and when Hearst died, they cut the stuff off that Gardner was involved with and one of those was Perry Mason. But it didn’t become a TV thing for five years after that. So that really is back in the dark ages. I’m qualified to be a Golden Ager, I think because I was doing pulp magazine illustrations on the late ’40s and comics — not good, [Jon laughs] actually dreadful. Joe started out earlier than I did. I started out at 18 — 17, 18 — but he was working at age 12! CBC: So you were from New Jersey? Did you travel up to New York to go to school? Frank: Yes. Oh, yes. Took the train from the railway station. But I seldom visited the publishers. It was all done by mail. Sometimes I’d go in just to touch base and see Stan Lee or just get myself a little bit, you know, involved with some of the people. The only thing I ever did for Marvel was Red Sonja, so that was ’75. Before that I was at DC. That’s how I encountered Joe and Kanigher, and all those great guys. [laughs] Kanigher is a fantastic writer of that stuff and Joe is a very, very good editor. He’s very easy to work with. He kept urging me to use different drawing implements. I was doing Speedball pens and matchsticks, Chinese water brush stuff and… It all sort of worked but I eventually drifted back. He was trying all sorts of things. I really was never consciously trying to… when I left Raymond’s style, it drifted toward Kubert, but I really didn’t know that. I guess I should give him credit. I think you can tell the difference. With the “Enemy Ace” I did, his was so much better! Sam Glanzman was another big fan of Joe. He probably had a better take on those characters. Do you know Sam’s work? CBC: Oh, yes! Sam’s a friend of mine. Frank: He seems to be a lonely fellow. All of his stuff… Now they have the Joe Kubert Presents, the six-issue mini-series. Sam had a piece in there every issue. It’s all loneliness it seems. Is he married? CBC: Yes, he’s got Susie, his devoted spouse. He’s got a certain degree of melancholia but he is a very grateful guy. He’s just a very sweet guy. Frank: Uh-huh. CBC: He told me how delighted he was when Joe and Pete Carlsson from the school came up to visit him a couple of years ago. I mean, he was just really flattered by it. Frank: Mmm! Mmm! CBC: Just a grateful guy. What an amazing cartoonist. Frank: Yeah! But he seems worthy of more recognition than he’s gotten so far. He must be in his 70s, isn’t he? CBC: No, he’s 88. Frank: Oh, my! He’s older than me. Wow! I didn’t know that. Wow. CBC: You went into comics after the syndicated strip and it was a better pace? Frank: Yes, but while I was in art school I was doing books for Standard Publishing and the pulp magazines. Then I did the illustrated history of Union County which, for some reason, Fantagraphics published. I did that when I was 19. It was a rather hefty volume. CBC: How did you fall into that? Frank: Well, I was thinkin’ it would be a good way to get to the place I wanted to be and the New York Journal-American was running a history of New York, using photographs, line cuts, etchings… and I got the idea to use that format but make it like a comic-book page and do all the original drawings. It did very well for us. I was getting… Whoa! $25 a page! Back then that was like getting $200 a week! But the Perry Mason was, you know, almost $300 and at that stage, 1950, ’51, that was a lot of money. Today it would have been thousands or something. But when the strip… But why are we talkin’ about me? I wanna talk about Joe! [laughs] CBC: Here we go. Here we go! We’re movin’ into it! But I just want to get some context… Let’s say back into comic

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Tomahawk TM & © DC Comics.

called me and wanted me to do some work for them. This was after they had published, like, half of my stuff and I had sent them notes that it might be nice, that’s it’s customary to pay the originator of this material. They did publish the stuff but, boy, the Sonja pages looked so terrible. The computer coloring, I can’t even look at it, it’s so bad. I mean, she was made for pulp, old cheap newsprint. CBC: Getting into the ’60s: You were doing stuff for Gold Key and then, all of a sudden, Carmine came into DC and he came up with this great idea of having artists as editors. Robert Kanigher stepped down, Joe Kubert stepped up. How did you hook up with Joe? Frank: Let’s see. I was given Tomahawk to do and I guess Joe must have called. I hadn’t met him until I met him in the offices of DC when I went into see him to start the going

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Under Joe Kubert's editorship, Tomahawk jumped from being set in the Colonial era of U.S. history to focus on the Indian fighter's son, Hawk, who roamed the frontier in the early 19th Century time of Andrew Jackson. Here's three of Joe's superbly designed covers for the short-lived revamp. Below: Frank Thorne was also involved in Joe's Tarzan family of comics as artist on Korak, Son of Tarzan. The opening spread for #49 [Nov.–Dec. ’72], the "origin" issue. Words by Joe Kubert.

books in the mid-’50s and Fredric Wertham was coming down… Comics weren’t exactly the place to be, perhaps. Frank: Yeah, well, see, what I did, I got Dr. Guy Bennett soon after Perry Mason, and I did a few comic books, but then I went back into the daily and Sunday comics with the medical strip written by Mike Petty and that went on ’til ’62, I think. And then the syndicate dropped… that was the old Lafave Syndicate and I moved into the field of illustration. I was doing a lot of illustration for the Bell Telephone Company, Bible publishers, the Golden Magazine, Golden Books. I had a whole bunch of stuff like that. And I’ve been back and forth! That’s why I don’t have a really deeply-rooted base in comic books, because I kept leaving it, going back and forth, and venturing into other areas. I mean, really my comic book career ended with Red Sonja! Because I moved on to [National] Lampoon and Heavy Metal, High Times, and Playboy, and so forth. CBC: Well, you did make an impact when you were here. You worked at Western Publishing with The Mighty Samson. Frank: Yes. That was very enjoyable. Matt Murphy was… Did he ever finish his book? CBC: I don’t know. Frank: Uh-huh. I heard he was writing a book. He was a wonderful guy. He was very encouraging. I did Tom Corbett, Space Cadet there and Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim, each of which have been reprinted by Dark Horse. CBC: Do you get a residual check from that? Frank: Yes! Yeah! CBC: That’s nice of them. Frank: Yes, very nice! Just parenthetically, Dynamite published all my stuff over and over again in large and small sizes and cards and they never paid me a penny! They

CBC: Well, you got to know Joe. What kind of guy was he? Frank: He was a two-fisted, fearless fellow! I mean, they would go off all over the world. He and Muriel would travel and ski and do all these things and the Alps and Yucatan and… you know. So he was undaunted. And he was a challenge. How he learned to drive for that on the wrong side of the road, I don’t know. Joe had a wonderful collection of original pulp magazine covers. They were over his bed. And there must have been twenty of them. Just beautiful stuff! He said he collected them when the price hadn’t shot up. CBC: When you would hang out with Joe, what would you two guys talk about? Frank: Oh, I don’t really think, “hang out” is… It was a professional relationship. CBC: Oh, I thought you were over at the house and stuff. Frank: Oh, yeah! Yes, was over there several times! Does that qualify as hanging out? Yes? In the kitchen, he had a wonderful big drawing he did when he was about nine or ten years old that’s brown with age now but perfectly framed. It was a picture of his rabbi, his favorite rabbi. And boy, was that ever a stunner! I couldn’t get over what he had in him at that very young age. And his studio was upstairs and we went up and he had a huge drawing board. I think it was the biggest drawing board I’ve ever seen! And above it were originals from, let’s see, the guy that does Superman. Neal Adams! He had a nice, great Neal Adams. We both agreed that was super talent! He gave me a Sunday page of The Green Berets. It was gorgeous!

Above: Along with the Sgt. Rock oil painting seen on the first page of this interview, Frank included this black-&-white portrait of Rittmeister Hans Von Hammer, Enemy Ace, a Joe Kubert trademark character that Frank rendered in the pages of Star-Spangled War Stories # 181–183 [June–Dec. 1974]. Inset right: Courtesy of Heritage Auctions, the original art for Frank's cover of The Comic Reader #104 [Mar. ’74], which includes the affectionate inscription: "With a deep bow to the Great Kubert!" Replete with a cartoon heart.

onto Tomahawk, which I did two issues of, and then I did the Son of Tomahawk and Korak. I wasn’t too good on that. And Edgar Rice Burroughs’s something. I can’t even remember what it was. I always loved Jesse Marsh’s John Carter of Mars. He’s an unrecognized genius. Do you know the name? CBC: Oh, yeah! And Dark Horse is reprinting The Tarzan Years. Frank: So it was instant friendship with Joe. Joe was kind of a private guy. A lot of people felt that about him, that you really didn’t get to know him. But I really did get to know him. I mean, visiting his house and socializing a bit. I mean, neither one of us had much time for socializing! Like it is in this business, you know a lot of the guys’ work, but you don’t know the guy! You never have a chance to meet him. I stopped going to conventions in the late ’70s, and so there’s a whole new generation of comic book guys I haven’t even met! And I really don’t know too much about. I know the Image thing. I know when that happened. But the whole thing changed. It became the big splash pages. Everything was a splash page. Seemed to me the story suffered. The art was mighty but, you know, basic is a good story! Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

but there’s something a lot more going on. I use sponges, sticks, anything that I can… Joe’d be happy! That’s what he always said! “Use everything! Experiment!” Well, I experiment… I go into a hardware store or A C Moore and buy all sorts of stuff. A lot of it’s housepaint. I use it by the quart. I have a very small studio so it requires ventilation when you’re using the sprays. I have, I think, every possible color gradation of spray that was ever on the market. [laughs] I’m having a grand time. CBC: What kind of editor was Joe? Frank: He was very easy. I don’t think he ever really had any correction. He inked one of my pencils — It might be the only time because I always ink my own stuff — and my stuff never looked better! [laughs] In that way, Infantino was more of a penciler. But what a style he had! Buscema was another guy. They’d just waltz across a page! They seemed alive! CBC: Was it an exciting time to be in comics at that time with these double-page spreads and real graphic approach that suddenly Joe… Frank: Yeah! Yes. I had been doing double-page spreads back at Dell/Gold Key. Matt Murphy was at the helm and then… Green… what was his name? He was not too enthusiastic about double-page spreads. And Toth was there and he was reigning supreme. Wally Wood was there when I was there. So I mean you got two names there and somewhere around the bottom margin of that is me. [laughter]

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Inset left: Doubtless, despite all the exemplary work he did for his editor Joe Kubert, Frank will be best known as the artist on Red Sonja for Marvel in the 1970s and for his hosting, in the guise as The Wizard, Red Sonja lookalike contests at comics conventions during the same era. This pic of Frank "in character" is by David Wagner.

Below: Poster from the mid-1970s depicting Red Sonja as envisioned by Frank Thorne, about as definitive a version as one gets with the Roy Thomas/Barry Windsor-Smith created character. A more bodacious barbarian has yet to be drawn.

And I gave him a picture of myself, a large picture of myself and Linda Behrle as, she was Moonshine McJuggs and I was the, this is the strip I did for Playboy and he had that over his board, too, so when he looked up he could see Neal Adams and me! Then when he went into the school and got involved, he had a drawing board at the school and he moved the photograph of Linda and I. It was placed behind his desk. And when Rich Behrle, her brother, went to apply for the school he looked at Joe and over his shoulder was a picture of his sister with me! [laughter] Which was a pretty good yuk. Rich didn’t go very far in comics, but that school is absolutely excellent. It’s one of the best all-around art schools I was ever in. They have a fabulous art supply store. I tried to express myself when Muriel died, but he was inconsolable. And she was a dynamo. She ran the school. I just couldn’t imagine him living without Muriel. But he went on. His talent kept him nurtured. CBC: You’d be invited over to the school, correct? Frank: Oh, yes! We went there every year. We were invited as guests for the graduation. They started having the dinners at school and then held them at Zeris Inn in Piscataway, near Dover somewhere, a little town and a nice big restaurant. Persephone, Troy Hills, somethin’ like that. Big restaurant, so we went every year. We finally got to the point where we felt I’d been such a fossil, I’d distanced myself so far from comic books, I felt I was out of place. But there were quite a few kids there who remember my things. Surprising that they do. CBC: You would lecture there on occasion? At the school? Frank: I gave one talk, at the height of the Sonja thing and, oh, man, talk about I had that audience! They were totally behind me because Sonja had taken off! And they’d already produced a couple of posters and the shows were beginning and that was probably the best audience I ever had! [laughs] CBC: The shows? Meaning your performance? Frank: Yes, yes. As the Wizard in the Red Sonja thing. Which is back! You can see the final performance on boingboing.com. It’s just Red Sonja and the Wizard and you will see the performance. I think that was done in San Diego. That was the last one. That was with all the animation and Wendy Pini doing her fabulous stuff. She was really into it! We had a lot of fun! Lot of fun. CBC: You did have a lot of fun! I do remember that. You did! [Frank laughs] At the conventions. Definitely. And it was really also, I have to say, I believe you were 45 when you were doing Red Sonja, so you had this all-new second career come up. You basically reinvented yourself. Frank: Mmm-hum. That’s right. CBC: As a young reader, you seemed to be, let’s say, influenced by Joe Kubert. Your work got gritty. I distinctly recall Son of Tomahawk having a really free, more open, more graphic approach. Would you say that was the case? Frank: That was the case. Actually, I was more influenced by Frans Hals, the Dutch portrait painter. And then one of the principal ones was Ronald Searle. He’s an English cartoonist. You could see a lot of Searle in my Playboy stuff. It wasn’t a complete copy, it’s just that he was an inspiration to me. I would add that I have yet again reinvented myself. I am now doing abstract, expressionist paintings. Very large size. My eyes have been failing me, but they’re good enough to paint but to do the fine stuff with the eyebrows and the eyeballs and fingers and all of that, I can’t handle that anymore. So I completely converted a studio into a painter’s studio. I bought dozens of canvases and I’ve produced about 30 so far. The two I sent you are part of that. They’re not particularly dynamic in color, but these others are really… They’re like 36" by 48". They’re big pieces. I would think that de Kooning would be close to the style I’m using, still, Willem de Kooning, and Pollock to a degree,

Irwin Hasen: The All-American Cartoonist Michael Aushenker looks in on the beloved Golden Age artist and Dondi cartoonist by Michael Aushenker CBC Associate Editor

Last fall, when Comic Book Creator caught up with veteran cartoonist Irwin Hasen, he had just emerged from the hospital a few days prior. Despite some setbacks, which had included a bout with pneumonia, the resilient Hasen at 94, retained a twinkle in his eye and a quick, succinct wit. Of course, Irwin was a good friend of Joe Kubert, sharing with his late compadre — and the legendary Alex Toth, for that matter — the distinction of having the same tremendously influential mentor during the 1940s (as well as Irwin being a Kubert School instructor in its earliest days). A product of American comics’ Golden Age, when immigrants and children of same filled the assembly line-ranks of the fast-emerging company specializing in producing a new product called comic books, the Jewish artist, now under the watchful eye of a nurse at his Upper East Side apartment, reflected back on his decades-long career, particularly his two most memorable characters: an over-the-hill, wash up-cum-super-hero and a young, fresh-faced Italian kid. Hasen admitted that running the latter, Dondi, a daily syndicated comic strip saga in the tradition of Little Orphan Annie, was a much smoother ship to steer than his ’40s comic-book assignments. “With Dondi, it was easier,” Hasen explained. “I knew it was all about. I knew the kid.” With impish, staccato bursts of conversation often punctuated by a chuckle, Hasen recounted his tale.

Born on July 8, 1918, Hasen entered a nascent comic book industry in 1940 with barrels blazing, contributing to The Green Hornet and “The Fox.” A year later, the artist began working under aforementioned mentor, the seminal editor Sheldon Mayer, drawing features including “Green Lantern” and “The Flash,” and other super-hero features All-American Comics (sister imprint of DC Comics) raced to pump out in the wake of the massive success of DC’s Action Comics and Detective Comics. At DC, Bill Finger, co-creator of Detective’s breakout feature, “Batman,” had a hand in the inception of Hasen’s other trademark character. “[Finger] created Wildcat with [Mayer],” Hasen explained. “Sheldon was my best friend. He knew me before I got into comics. I worked in the fight business for a magazine called Bang magazine. I worked for him. After Bang magazine, I did gag cartoons and the painted covers.” Mayer designated Hasen to become the first artist to interpret Wildcat, a grizzled pugilist in a catsuit; a sort of prototype of Marvel’s Wolverine. With Hasen on pencils, Wildcat first appeared in Sensation Comics #1 [Jan. 1942] as Ted Grant, a boxer entangled in the underworld who dons a costumed alias to go clear his name after he is framed. The character would go on to became a member of the venerated Justice Society of America, the Golden Age super-hero group Hasen would also render in the pages of All-Star Comics, another Mayer title. “It was a good character,” Hasen said blithely of the feline crimefighter. “It was my milieu. I was raised in the fight business when I was a young kid.” Comic books were not a bad way to earn some income. “It was a living at that time,” Hasen said, but the job didn’t last into the new decade. Yet, by 1955, the artist’s fortunes improved — dramatically. Hasen’s marquee climbed to great heights as one-half (the other fraction being writer Gus Edson) of the team that crafted the long-running syndicated newspaper strip Dondi. “Comic strips were eventually where I was going in my life,” Hasen said. “When I was six, I saw the greatest strip ever made: Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs. My parents came home with the newspaper, the World Telegraph. I loved the simplicity.” Hasen admitted that drawing Dondi was much more facile than his comic book assignments.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Sheldon’s Other Boy portrait by seth kushner

TM & © DC Comics.

Previous page: Above is a detail from the cover of the first volume collecting Dondi, published in 2007 by Classic Comics Press. Bottom is a commission piece of the Justice Society of America, featuring characters our interview subject rendered under the tutelage of legendary comics editor Sheldon Mayer. Below: All-American Comics #40 [July 1942] cover by Hasen, featuring The Green Lantern and Doiby Dickles.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

“Yes, with Dondi, it was easier. I knew it was all about, I knew the kid,” Hasen repeated. Working with their Chicago Tribune Syndicate editor, Moe Reilly, Edson and Hasen embarked on their Dondi adventure, and Reilly helped keep things together, as Hasen said he did not find Edson to be a most ethical collaborator. Edson, Hasen explained, was a colorful man, to say the least. The cartoonist, who had worked on The Gumps strip for 24 years after creator Sidney Smith died, did whatever he wanted, including marrying characters in the strip who had already wedded to others years earlier during Smith’s tenure… and persisting even after sacks full of reader mail arrived at his syndicate pointing out continuity errors. In the early ’50s, with future Academy Award-winning actor Martin Landau (Space: 1999, Ed Wood) as his assistant, Edson traveled through Europe participating in a National Cartoonists Society USO tour to entertain U.S. servicemen. It was after a visit to West Germany when an idea sparked in Edson’s head, a concept that would become Dondi. “He sent me a drawing on Waldorf-Astoria stationary,” Hasen remembered. “When we get back to the States, this is the idea we had. I looked at it and I said to Gus, ‘Let’s do it!’” The first strip made the newspaper on Sept. 25, 1955, and would continue for 31 years. In the first decade, Edson and Hasen occasionally butted heads, but Dondi proved a hit. Hasen received the NCS’s Reuben Award in 1961 and ’62 for his work. The duo were active and social within NCS circles, where Hasen developed new relationships. “My favorite friends were Walt Kelly and [sports cartoonist] Willard Mullin,” he said. 73

Above: Courtesy of Heritage Auctions, here’s their description of this delightful drawing: “Irwin Hasen Golden Age Wildcat specialty illustration original art (1941). Treasures such as this seldom come along. This Golden Age specialty illustration of Wildcat, created in ink and watercolor for DC editor Sheldon Mayer, has an image area of 12" x 15". Aside from glue stains around the margins, the art is in very good condition. Inscribed and signed, ‘Sheldon, a little memory you can look back on — luck for the years to come — Irwin Hasen, Dec. 24, 1941.’”

Inset right: Irwin Hasen's delightful graphic novella Loverboy also contains a memoir section with various essays and cartoons about the cartoonist's past, including his comic-book acquaintances. Here's a page devoted to DC pals, featuring mention of the legendary crosscountry car ride with Joe Kubert to attend Norm Maurer's wedding, which cemented a life-long friendship culminating in Hasen teaching at Kubert's school. 74

— I did dancing, Bauhaus singers… I was there in 1955, if I woulda been ten years earlier I would’ve been in an ashtray. I was an actor and a dancer. I almost became an entertainer. I was told by some editors and directors I belong to the New York Society of Illustrators, ‘You’re a natural.’” Hasen enjoyed traveling to foreign countries. Japan was a highlight of his travels but his favorite destination was Spain because of the food. Had Hasen not become a cartoonist, his inclinations would have pushed him into showbiz. “They adored me and I won an award,” he said. “I wanted to be in showbiz. I needed to entertain people. I wanted to be loved.” For such a small man, Hasen is a big extrovert and he did a lot of acting, performing in skits back in the day. “I was good at it,” he said. “Thank God, I stayed where I was.” Hasen continued, “Anytime we were asked, I was there! All the conventions, I was there. Talking to friends, making a couple of bucks. I did most of the shows for them. Last couple of years, the new group came in, the young lions, I just disappeared from the milieu.” So if he was such an outgoing raconteur, what exactly did he love about cartooning? “Being left alone,” Hasen quipped. Dondi definitely afforded Hasen years of solo quality time, especially after his collaborator passed on. The first decade had its rocky moments, and a 1961 Dondi motion picture became a source of tension that further exacerbated the deteriorating partnership between Edson and Hasen. The feature film, starring future Fugitive star David Janssen, Walter Winchell, Arnold Stang, and introducing David Kory as the title character, was — sorry, Queenie — a dog. “It was in the wrong hands,” Hasen said of the poorly received melodrama. “It was a terrible director and my partner… he was the creator, he took it away from me. [Edson] didn’t behave like a gentleman toward me. He wasn’t a mensch. It was over.”

Also among his closest NCS buddies: the inimitable Frank (Johnny Hazard) Robbins. “He was a very, very private, serious man,” said Hasen. “Very little can be said about him. He was a great inventor and a great artist. He was a very private guy. He was a cartoonist’s cartoonist. He was low key and laid back. If one were to be asked about him, they couldn’t talk about it.” When asked if Robbins had much of a sense of humor or personality, Hasen shot back with an emphatic “No!” then laughed. Hasen also shared fond memories of his former colleague at All-American, the cocreator of Sgt. Rock and The Unknown Soldier. “Joe Kubert was my boss at the [Kubert] school for five years,” Hasen said. “He was his own man. He was the most brilliant cartoonist and a special guy in my life. When I heard he was in the hospital, I had just gotten out of the hospital. I cried like a baby. He and I were very close. He was a special guy. His work was very tough. It showed what he was all about.” Thanks to the NCS, Hasen got to see many parts of the globe. “I took trips all over the world,” he said. “I traveled the world. I made my mind, my parents never went anywhere, to the ‘Jewish Alps’ [the Catskills]. Something in my mind said, ‘Promise me you’re going travel the world!’ London, Italy, Finland, south of France, Korea during the war, entertaining the troops. Germany entertaining the troops Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Without consulting with Hasen, Edson collaborated with Albert Zugsmith, who directed, co-wrote and co-produced the feature film. “He wrote everything and it was terrible,” Hasen said, “and the producer Albert Zugsmith was a disgusting human being.” In his later years, Edson became a fixture of Stamford, Conn., which was also home to golf-course cartoonists Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond, Nancy cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, and Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker. He somehow ingratiated with the Stamford Police Department, members of which became his poker buddies. After he died in 1966, Stamford’s Gus Edson Park, located between Weed Avenue and Holly Pond, was named in his honor. A plaque at the Gus Edson Lookout reads: “Dedicated to ‘friend of the cop.’ — Stamford Police Assn.”

Things took a bad turn for Hasen after Edson passed away. “When he died, [his widow] wanted a piece of the action,” Hasen said. “That was the only time that she calls. I give a piece of the action as stupid as I was. I had a friend of mine, Bob Boxer, best guy in the business, and I said to him, ‘Bob, I’m not a writer will you help me? Every week, he’d come to the city (he lived in Teaneck, New Jersey) and we’d work one night a week. Bob died prematurely, more or less.” It was in the mid-’60s when Hasen decided to assume both writing and art responsibilities for the strip. “I did the editing,” he said. “I did what I thought the kid would say. Dondi wrote itself.” At the time, Hasen, who never married, lived on 79th Street on the Upper West Side. Today, Hasen lives in a oneroom Upper East Side apartment.

Above: Dondi searches for his beloved pooch, Queenie, in this 1959 Sunday strip appearing on the Ides of March. Words by Gus Edson. Art by Irwin Hasen.

Below: Irwin Hasen words and pictures are featured on this June 14, 1968 daily strip. Poor Dondi! Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

such soft fashion, when he didn’t realize he was let go until literally at sea! “I took a trip to Paris. When I passed the Statue of Liberty, I realized [DC executive editor] Whitney Ellsworth [who had suggested Hasen take a vacation] had fired me. He didn’t tell me anything. He said, ‘You’re a great cartoonist, we love you, but do something else for yourself.’ That’s part of the end of what I’m talking to you, the business world.” So how did Hasen react to the fact that, after three decades, he had no comic strip to create? “I started to go out with a lot a girls,” he said. “I drank a lot of good scotch. And then I became 90 years old. I continued painting.” For a spell, Hasen taught at The Kubert School and he loved it. “I enjoyed every minute,” he said. “I was giving something back to the kids. They’re very talented kids.” Besides the notice he received on a one-to-one basis as a near permanent fixture at New York City area comic conventions over the last dozen or so years, Hasen has gained widespread attention in a New York Times “Character Study” feature article in Dec. ’11, as well as in the promoting of an as-yet unreleased full-length feature film documentary by Dan Makara, Irwin: A New York Story. But, these days, while the attention is nice, like the pugilist super-hero he rendered for DC Comics, old man Hasen plugs away at just staying alive. Discussing his pneumonia symptoms, the spry, veteran cartoonist described his recent bout as “a tough session.” Then this writer suggested, “What you need is a hot bowl of kreplach soup!” Replied Hasen, “You ain’t kiddin’!”

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Below: Irwin Hasen’s remarkably poignant graphic novella, Loverboy, is dedicated to his lifelong pal Joe Kubert and features an unblemished look at the life of a lonely, sensitive bachelor yearning for companionship. Also included are essays and cartoons commenting on his life in comic books and strips. The cartooning is absolutely top-notch. Published by Vanguard Productions and it is highly recommended by Ye Ed.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Above: Irwin Hasen at the 2010 New York Comic Con. Photo by and courtesy of Kendall Whitehouse.

To this day, Hasen does not really understand why Dondi met its demise in 1986 after a three-decade run in more than 100 newspapers. “I really don’t know,” Hasen said. “It’s like losing a relative. That’s it, it’s over. I was done with cartooning. I was always dabbling. I did a bunch of strips in-between. I did indeed do two other strips, a family strip and another. I went back to comic books.” Without any fanfare, the last Dondi strip ran was unceremoniously dumped onto the newspaper stacks on June 8, 1986. “The syndicate decided it didn’t make enough money,” Hasen said. “They didn’t just end the strip. They just dropped it without letting me know after 30 years. It stinks. It’s the worst kind of behavior that the business world does. We won prizes. When you talk about the syndicate business, don’t talk to me about it because I’ll spit all over the phone.” Hasen still bristles when he thinks how Dondi got dropped. “Like a hot potato,” he says, comparing it to the time DC Comics turned him away in the early ’50s, albeit in

Viking Prince & Sgt. Rock TM & © DC Comics.

Peer

Russ Heath: That Other Man of Rock Rich Arndt’s chat with the brilliant artist on his work with — and for — Joe Kubert by Richard Arndt

Above: Russ Heath as photographed by Lori Matsumoto. Our Man Heath, by the by, will be the subject of our sixth issue, complete with a career-spanning interview by Ye Ed and supplemented by CBC amigo Rich Arndt, a lifesaver in nabbing this interview at the last minute — and transcribing literally overnight! — for this issue! Lori, by the way, shares that this pic was taken on Jan. 13, 2011, at Norm’s Restaurant, in Van Nuys, California.

DC Comics.

Richard Arndt: Do you remember when you first met Joe Kubert? Russ Heath: Yes, it was during a time when comics work was sparse — everybody was trying to find work again. It was sort of between seasons for steady work, so to speak. I was hunting work and I went up to St. John and met a fellow named Norman Maurer. He and Joe Kubert were doing 3-D books together. Norman was interviewing me and I was about to break out my samples, and Joe walked in and said to Norman, “You don’t have to see his samples. He’s okay.” I thought that was quite a compliment. Rich: You did work for his caveman book, Tor, is that right? Russ: Yes, I did a couple of pin-up or information pages on dinosaurs, plus a bunch of backgrounds. It wasn’t all that many pages, but those were 3-D pages, so there was a lot of work involved. It was done on clear cels with a special ink that would adhere to the slippery cel. There were two cels for every panel because of the shifting of one color to another. It was a laborious process. Rich: That would have been in 1954. After that, of course, you were doing a lot of work for DC’s war comics, as was Kubert, but then in 1967, you took over the art chores for Kubert on one of his most notable co-creations — Sgt. Rock. He wasn’t the editor of the book at that time. In fact, I think he told me that he’d had to give up a lot of his DC work because he was very busy drawing the newspaper strip Tales of the Green Berets. It was only for seven or eight months that you drawing

Right inset: Joe Kubert’s first issue as editor of G.I. Combat [#130, June-July 1968] sported this humdinger of a Russ Heath cover featuring the Heath-drawn perennial series “The Haunted Tank.”

[Russ Heath is a genuine legend in the comics field, beginning his career as a teenager doing stories during summer vacation for Holyoke Comics. He joined the Timely bullpen in 1948, drawing Western characters like Kid Colt and the TwoGun Kid for several years. By the mid-’50s, he was working for E.C., St. John and DC Comics as well, drawing some of the best war, horror, Western and adventure stories of the day. In the ’60s, he worked on Sea Devils, “The Haunted Tank,” “The War That Time Forgot,” and many other features, including a memorable stint on “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy. In the late ’60s, with Joe Kubert as his editor, Russ began a six-year run on “Sgt. Rock,” and followed that with work for Marvel, Atlas and a notable stint at Warren. By the 1980s he was the artist on The Lone Ranger newspaper strip and since then has made occasional forays on characters like the Punisher and Jonah Hex. This interview was conducted by phone on April 24, 2013. — R.A.]

“Rock” and then Kubert came back to do the strip for about a year before he became the editor of all the war books. Russ: Yeah, that sounds right. When I started the second set of “Sgt. Rock” stories, I didn’t get the feeling that I was the permanent artist, but it did seem to go on and on for a while. Rich: You did work on “Rock” pretty steady from mid-1969 to mid-’75, a good six years. Russ: I was also drawing “The Haunted Tank” at the same time, at least for a while, a good chunk of time. I think I drew “The Haunted Tank” for longer than some guys’ careers. Rich: That period of time, the early ’70s, was the time period I was reading “Sgt. Rock” as a steady book. Your artwork was much more prominent in my memory than even Kubert’s, although he certainly did all the covers and was a big part of that as well. The stories also improved so much during those years from the stories that had been appearing in the ’60s, even though the writer was the same guy — Bob Kanigher. Russ: That was probably Joe’s influence, or maybe it was just the times. Joe and I had a different way of working. I’d always wanted to be an illustrator, so everything on my pages was fully finished, even during the penciling, while Joe’s approach was more sketching and then inking over the

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

sketching. That was probably why other people didn’t ink over him very well. I came to the conclusion after trying to ink one of his pages myself that Joe Kubert was the best inker of Joe Kubert. Rich: To be honest, the only artist I ever saw who came even close to doing justice to Kubert’s style was a story that Neal Adams inked. It was pretty good. It wasn’t prime Kubert but it wasn’t bad, either. What was it like working for Joe when he was your editor? Russ: Oh, pretty much the same as it was working for any editor. He did have a habit of slapping you on the back and saying “Glad to see ya!” and you had to watch out you didn’t fall on your face. He had a powerful swing. [laughs] I’d always have to be careful when I got in front of him. It was always in good nature, you know. Rich: What led you to leave “Sgt. Rock”? Russ: At that time, I was living in Chicago and those years were very turbulent ones for the country. I was seeing a lot of that stuff, but Joe was leading a pretty isolated life, at least from my point of view. He worked in the office. He came home to his wife and kids and drew comics. He was gearing up to start his school. He was kind of unaffected by all that craziness of the 1960s and ’70s. But, living in Chicago, there were riots right there. My children would call me up to see if I was all right. [chuckles] You know, I didn’t actually see anything from the riots but broken glass. I wasn’t a part of it or anything. I was doing a lot of work for the National Lampoon at the time, too. But I was living a pretty busy life. There were a number of times when I was late with the work for “Sgt. Rock.” Joe was pretty put out with me and my lateness. One time he got really upset and said “If I had you here in New York, I’d punch you right in the mouth.” [laughs] And I don’t blame him. I deserved every bit of it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it reached a point where Joe decided that he would never give me another piece of work, period, because of my lateness, but he never actually said that to me at the time. I only learned of that many years later at one of the comic cons when we were on the same dais and he told that story. That’s when I finally found out. For me, the scripts just stopped coming. Rich: Well, you did do a few stories, but not that many for Joe, after 1975. Russ: Right, right but probably not more than half a dozen or so. I didn’t really keep track. For me, everything was week to week. I’ve told this story about Joe before but maybe one more time: Anyway, we were sitting up on a dais at a con talking about things when Joe told a story about how important that good, accurate research was for war comics. He made a big point about a story that Mort Drucker had drawn that had a voice over that took the point of view of a B-17 bomber’s nose wheel itself. A lot of the panel shots were from the perspective of the nose wheel of the plane, looking down at the bombs dropping and exploding below. I remember Joe always made a point of telling students at his school to use photographs and not copy other artists, with the exception of Russ Heath. That if you steal my stuff, it’s okay, because it’s done right. To me that was a big compliment. But, back to the Drucker story, at the finish of his story, it was my turn to speak next and I said to Joe and the

audience that there was only one thing wrong with his story. Joe looked surprised. Then I said that the B-17 didn’t have a nose wheel. Joe said “What!?” See, the B-24 had a nose wheel, but the B-17’s wheels were beneath its engines and the tail. Everybody broke up laughing including Joe! Joe and I palled around some together. Once we went to the gym where he worked out. He played handball. We did some activities at the club, but I didn’t particularly like handball myself. I always thought I was going to get that little ball in my eye. Joe told me that you wear a mask, but I didn’t feel that I could really see when that mask was on. Handball just wasn’t my thing. I was more into tennis, at least later on. Joe was a hell of a great guy. To really cover how great you’d need ten guys sitting around on an evening just telling stories to get even a little of it. Maybe that’s how we should end this—Joe was a great guy.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Yes, of course, many of us loved the Joe Kubert drawn tales of Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, but equally unforgettable is the amazing, beautifully rendered extended run in the late 1960s to mid-’70s by Russ Heath. Here, courtesy of Heritage Auctions, is his swoon-worthy splash page of Our Army at War #225 [Nov. ’70].

Inset left: Joe Kubert ribs his freelancing artist Russ Heath, living (and loving) in Chicago at the time — where he often assisted Harvey Kurtzman on the Playboy strip “Little Annie Fanny,” and palled with Hugh Hefner. This panel appeared in the “Secret Lives of Joe Kubert” issue of DC Special #5 [Oct.-Dec. ’69]. 79

Story & Art: Joe Kubert/ Colors: Joe Panico

In the Trenches

Day In & Day Out: Working with Joe Kubert Joe’s right-hand man Peter Carlsson talks about his friend and employer

Above: Joe Kubert (left) and his trusty Kubert School/Tell-A-Graphics associate Peter Carlsson, in a photo taken at P.C.’s wedding on July 25, 2009. Courtesy of Peter.

TM & © DC Comics.

Below: The Our Army at War cover by Joe Kubert that terrified — and yet compelled — young Pete Carlsson, #270 [July ’74], his first memory of seeing his future friend’s work.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke CBC Editor [This special Kubert tribute issue was, it likely goes without saying, a pretty extensive undertaking. Ye Ed had to coordinate any number of aspects, particularly the testimonial section, where yours truly wrangled contributors to meet deadlines, etc., all the while maintaining his full-time job in advertising. It’s had its moments! But one uplifting constant was the pleasurable collaboration with our next interview subject, Peter Carlsson, who runs Tell-A-Graphics, the art production outfit in the basement of the Kubert School, which provides employment for students and alumni by producing the comics and illustrations of P*S magazine, among other jobs. Peter is also curator of the Joe Kubert art archives and was a friend of the late creator. He is also a die hard Kubert fan, as excited by Joe’s work now as when he was a funnybook reader back in the day. This interview was conducted by phone on Mar. 19, 2013, and was transcribed by Steven “Flash” Thompson. Peter copy-edited for clarity and accuracy.] Comic Book Creator: What’s your general background, Peter? Peter Carlsson: I came to New Jersey in 1993 to go to the Kubert School. I went through all three years, graduated in ’96. After school, I worked part-time at the art store and part-time at Tell-A-Graphics. Then part-time in New York City at Mada Design, a graphic design company run by Stan Madaloni, a guy who went to the school, and his wife, Angela. I worked there for a year. I don’t remember exactly how all this happened. I had met Adam while in school and ended up organizing his art files the summer after graduation and that, I think in part, led to Joe offering me a full-time job working in part at Tell-AGraphics and also organizing the artwork he had in his office at the School and the artwork he had in his studio at the house. There were just piles upon piles of envelopes full of artwork. It had been organized at one time, but by the time I started much of it was in disarray. I spent a couple years going up there once or twice a week, organizing things, and getting a sense of what he had and putting together an inventory of his artwork.

CBC: Joe was known for keeping all of his work? Peter: Yes, he was, but my understanding is that he didn’t begin keeping the art until DC started returning it, which I think was in the early ’70s. Joe really didn’t have much from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, just an occasional piece, a cover or an interior page. But, starting in the early to mid-’70s, when DC started the policy of returning artwork, then he had most of that stuff. I wouldn’t say it was complete because he’d sold stuff and things sometimes disappeared, I guess. But he retained the vast majority of the art he did from the ’70s on. He lived in the same house that he built in the ’50s. The house had been there for almost 50 years, and he kept his studio in the house. He told me not moving is the reason he had cover sketches going all the way back to the 1950s. These were sketches he did and then he would write “completed” and the date on the paper when he drew the actual cover. That’s one of my favorites: finding all these envelopes full of old sketches. CBC: Were there other surprises that you found in the archives? Rarities? Unique material you had never seen? Peter: Oh, yeah! All the Redeemer material that finally saw print in Joe Kubert Presents. Three issues penciled, inked, and lettered. Just sitting on a cupboard shelf! Pencils, very loose pencils, for a few pages from the fourth issue. A lot of notes and part of a cover painting he was gonna use, things like that. An issue of something called Centipede, which was based on an Atari game! You probably remember that video game. CBC: Yeah. Peter: DC published an Atari Force comic back in the mid’80s — I think there might have been one or two other things that came out but for some reason… maybe sales, I don’t know — Joe’s Centipede story never saw print. He had all the originals. CBC: Wow. How big is the Centipede story? A full issue? Peter: I think it was between 17 and 20 pages. CBC: Wow. Peter: Yeah. No one’s seen it! Do you remember, in the ’80s, he did that Superman and the Demon story in DC Comics Presents? CBC: Oh, good heavens, that’s a beautiful issue! Peter: [Laughs] Well, I found the pencils to that! He redrew it! So there’s a whole issue of finished pencils, but then Joe decided, for whatever reason, he wasn’t gonna ink them. He actually redrew and inked the whole thing! CBC: Wow! Peter: Yeah, just weird stuff, stuff that I think you and I — and everybody reading this probably — would be interested in, but I don’t know who else would be. CBC: [Laughs] Who cares? [laughter] Obviously, you’re there. You’re mesmerized with the work. You’ve been there since... You’re going on 20 years now? Peter: No. Twenty years in New Jersey but I started working for Joe full-time in ’97. CBC: Ninety-seven. All right, that’s still a few years, Pete. Joe was one of those rare artists who just always getting better. Always innovative, always pushing himself… Peter: Right. CBC: It’s just astonishing to see the arc of his work from the ’40s in these leaps and bounds of the evolution within his style up to the very end! I mean, he always held me rapt, you know?

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Peter: Oh, I totally agree. His style changed over time. It got, I guess, “coarser” maybe? I remember him mentioning how he wished he had a younger set of eyes on occasion just to be able to see the lines a little sharper. But, yeah, you could see that there was a simplification of between what he was working on last spring and the Tor stuff published by Epic, there’s a fineness to that line that he wasn’t doing anymore, but it didn’t matter because he was still able to grab you and not let you go. There’s the saying about opening up a Joe Kubert comic and suddenly find yourself reading it no matter where you start, no matter what the story was. You can’t help yourself! You just start reading. CBC: I’d never heard that before, but that’s absolutely true. Peter: Yeah. CBC: [Laughs] Completely captivated right from the word go! There’s a picture of me when I must be five or six years old and I’ve got a Joe Kubert comic in my lap! I remember Joe Kubert comics as a youngster! I don’t remember much else. In general, I can remember Richie Rich, I can remember characters, but few artists at that age… But I remember Joe’s comic books. Peter: Yeah, I know what you mean. I didn’t read much of the war stuff. I don’t think my mom wanted me to, you know? But do you remember DC had those house ads that had like six or nine black-&-white thumbnail-sized covers? Back in the early ’70s? As a little kid looking at that and just trying to glean information from the cover images, get whatever I could out of looking at Joe’s covers… sometimes they would scare me. And I remember which one it was in particular. There was a drawing of a hand in the foreground and Sgt. Rock was gonna shoot some guy and somebody else in the background was like, “Ya can’t shoot him, Rock. It’d be murder!” And I was like, “Murder! Oh, my God!” [laughter]

But it pulled me in! It took me years to track down that comic. I think I know what you mean by comparing a Richie Rich comic and a Joe Kubert comic. Joe’s comics were so unique, they were like a line of comics unto its own. Remember the treasury edition of The Bible? Or the oversized Tarzan? Again, I’m thinking more back to when I was a kid, the stuff that was coming out in the ’70s, but… even though they were very different stories, they were Joe Kubert comics. CBC: I think that was a very exciting time and it was very exciting for Joe, too! Of course having the Tarzan franchise, you know, following up Hal Foster, Burne Hogarth, and Russ Manning, and doing these fantastic adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff… But also the double-page splashes on pages two and three, and not being afraid to throw a fullpage splash page in the middle of a particular fight scene between a jaguar and the Lord of the Jungle. Peter: Yeah, yeah! And you wonder how much of that was done because of expediency. [laughs] “Okay, I gotta get this issue done. I’m gonna put a splash page here.” But he was movin’ quick. He was movin’ fast and he was relying on instincts that he had built up over 30 years at that point! Thirty years of storytelling. So, like I said, a splash page in the middle of a fight scene? It worked despite the fact he probably did it to get it done because he had to move on to the next job. It still worked! CBC: He delivered! He absolutely delivered. Peter: He absolutely did. CBC: There’s really just something about him that I can’t just put my finger on. I talked to his sons and to so many people about it and that is that he never looked down at what he was doing. He always looked up! He always gave whatever he was doing his absolute best. It seems to me that he never phoned a job in. I can’t find anything that Joe gave his

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: The Redeemer #1 spread, as colored by Ervin Rustemagic’s Strip Art Features [SAF], hues which differ from the art’s appearance in Joe Kubert Presents #2. Courtesy of Ervin.

This spread and page following: Besides the stunning revelation that Joe Kubert penciled an entirely different layout for the DC Comics Presents Superman-Demon team-up than what saw print, Peter Carlsson reveals the great comic book creator not only developed all the concepts and characters for an Atari video game-based property, but he also penciled and inked an entire issue of Centipede #1 that never saw print! Pete generously shared all the items on this spread and the following page. 84

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

TM & © DC Comics.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

ics.

CBC: So you like gritty crime drama. You shared an interest in that within fiction or television? Peter: Yeah. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of it as “gritty crime drama” [laughs] but, yeah, crime fiction. We shared a mutual interest and enjoyment of that. I brought him copies of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal comics. CBC: Oh, those are great comics. Peter: He enjoyed every one of ’em. CBC: So he actually read comics for pleasure? Peter: He did but he’d be the first to tell you that he had a hell of a hard time finding them, [laughs]. I think we had an overlap in tastes so I would bring stuff I thought he might enjoy. I wouldn’t bring him everything because I knew from experience he didn’t like everything that I liked. I would bring him some of the Mignola and Corben work on Hellboy, I brought him a Criminal to read… Paul Pope’s stuff he really enjoyed. And Carl Barks! I don’t know if you knew that. He was a fan of Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories. CBC: Wow. Peter: Yeah. CBC: I’m sorry. I think I missed your point when you said he had a hell of a hard time finding good comics or...? Peter: Finding good comics, right. He read comics for pleasure all the way ’til… up ’til he didn’t. Until the end. I even brought him Ragemoor, the Richard Corben book from Dark Horse that Corben did with Jan Strnad. Joe wasn’t so much a Lovecraft fan but he was definitely a Poe fan and there were some very strong influences from both those writers. So, yeah. He would read for pleasure. CBC: Did he read macabre fiction? Did he read Lovecraft as far as you know? Peter: Not Lovecraft. I know he read Poe. He did an illustration of Edgar Allan Poe for a guy who’s got a website with artists drawing their favorite authors, “Hey Oscar Wilde, It’s Clobbering Time.” [http://heyoscarwilde.com/?s=joe+kubert] CBC: Oh, really? Wow. Peter: Oh, yeah. He was more of a classics guy and I wouldn’t call Lovecraft a classic. [laughs] I mean, not in the sense of literature. It’s more of…

TM & © DC Com

second best on. I mean, I know he was only human but, geesh! [laughs] Peter: Right, he was able to focus. He had that ability just to zero in on the page. I would sit in his office doing whatever I was doing at the time and he’d just be working away on a page, whether it be P*S or Yossel or the Sgt. Rock stuff that he was doing with Azzarello, or anything he was doing in the 15 years I was there. He could just focus in on the page and he wouldn’t even know you were there! And sometimes he’d forget you were there! [laughs] He was so just devoted to what he was doing! He got so much pleasure out of doing that. Applying pencil or pen or brush to paper. People responded to what he was doing. There’s something there. I don’t know if it was simply because he left enough open for the imagination with the style that he employed. I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that either, I guess. CBC: He had such an original style. I can’t see overt influences. I can see generalized influences. I think like when Neal Adams showed up on the scene, I think that really invigorated Joe to get larger and more bombastic, so I think other artists could make him competitive. But Joe was also the editor at that point, so he could let go some. Joe, all of a sudden, became an editor and was able to do things his way. And he certainly did! Peter: Right! [laughs] Yeah, he didn’t have to listen to Kanigher! He could tell Kanigher what to do! [laughs] CBC: And he had these double-page spreads, on pages two and three. Peter: Yeah. CBC: That was very exciting to witness. Peter: Now did Joe kick that off? Because I know Kirby was doing that at the time and Mike Grell ended up doing it. CBC: I believe Joe, chronologically speaking, was doing it before Jack even started at DC. You know, some of those “Sgt. Rock” stories, and even some of “Enemy Ace” stories, pretty much the minute Joe sat down in the editor’s seat, things got graphic indeed! I think that Carmine Infantino’s intuition about letting artists be editors certainly started off fantastically! Peter: It paid off with Joe. CBC: Absolutely. So did you see Joe pretty much every day? Peter: I did. In fact there were many times, many years, where we saw each other on the weekends, too! I’d come in on Saturday or Sunday, and he wouldn’t put in a full day on Saturdays or Sundays unless there was a deadline of some kind. But he’d come in the mornings, do two, three, four hours, then take off. We’d often go grab a bite to eat at one of the diners nearby on those days. CBC: So what kind of small talk did you guys have? Did you have common interests? Peter: Yeah, we enjoyed the same kind of movies, the same kind of books. We talked about Elmore Leonard, Richard Stark and his Parker novels, about comics. I would bring in comics that had caught my eye and I’d drop them off with him. In fact, I still catch myself. I’m just finishing reading a George Higgins book right now — crime fiction. And I finish up a chapter and go, “Yeah, Joe would want to read this.” [laughs] You know? And I’ll probably be doing that for a while still. But I’d give him books, he would loan me books, we’d talk about television a lot. He got me interested in The Wire, the HBO show. Deadwood, The Sopranos, all that stuff that was on.

Above: One of Ye Ed’s favorite Kubert works from the 1980s was Joe’s artwork on DC Comics Presents #66 [Feb. 1984]. Imagine hearing the bombshell that Joe drew the story as printed over a weekend! See the Adam & Andy Kubert interview herein for that nugget. Then imagine hearing from Joe’s assistant Peter Carlsson that the master had previously drawn an entirely different layout for the Len Wein-scripted tale, only — for whatever reason — he chose to discard that original penciled job. Alas, the estate has plans for that treasure (and, perhaps, the partially finished Sgt. Rock: Men of Easy Company mini-series).

Above: With great regret, Ye Ed was forced by space constraints to omit material generously shared by P*S magazine’s first managing editor — and the publication’s great historian — Paul E. Fitzgerald. We were able to include these two images of Joe Kubert at the publication’s 60th anniversary held in June 2011 in Huntsville, Alabama, at Redstone Arsenal. Above is Joe speaking at the event and at upper right being mobbed by Kubert “fanboys”! Many thanks to Paul, author of the superb Will Eisner and PS Magazine. (More info at www.fitzworld.us).

Sgt. Rock TM & © DC Comics.

Below: To commemorate P*S’s 700th issue, Sgt. Rock and the Combat Happy Joes of Easy Co. guest-starred! Here’s the cover (by Joe Kubert, naturally) of that momentous team-up. Courtesy of Peter Carlsson & Tell-A-Graphics.

CBC: Yeah. But Poe. Peter: Poe, definitely. Oh, yeah. Yeah. CBC: And was he up on current events? Did you guys talk either politics or what was going on in the world at any given time? Peter: No. I don’t think we talked about current events all that much. At least it doesn’t come to mind. CBC: Music? Peter: No. Although I loaned him the Deadwood soundtrack CD. [laughs] And I loaned him a Henry Mancini album for a while. Oh, and Louis Prima! CBC: Louis Prima. [laughs] Did he listen to music when he drew? Peter: Yes, he did. Yeah, he usually had on some CD… or the radio. He listened to the radio a lot, too. One of his sons or maybe all the kids chipped in — maybe it was Danny — had given him an Internet-based radio and he was able to listen to like old-time stuff. So he listened to that a lot. Old German songs and old ’40s and ’50s radio shows. Bing Crosby, that kind of thing. And depending on the time of day, too. I’d go up in the later afternoon to talk to him — my office is downstairs, his is up — so I’d go up and talk to him and he’d have [laughs] Sean Hannity or one of those knuckleheads on. He said it was just noise. [Jon laughs] He just had it on just to have something on. He wasn’t listening to it. CBC: [Laughs] Phew! You had me scared there for a second! Was he like a big brother to you? Was he a father figure? Peter: Uh, [pause] you know [pause], I think he was all those things. We just had a really good relationship. It just sort of happened over time. He was… he was my friend. [long pause] Yeah. CBC: You’re intimately involved in producing P*S magazine? Peter: Yes. CBC: What’s the procedure there? Were you there when they got the contract? Peter: Oh, yeah! I can remember walking into Joe’s office one day and he said, “Hey, I just heard about this P*S contract. What do you think about that?” So we looked into it and followed the procedure, figured out how to put in a bid, and we won the bid, and we’ve been doing it since then. I guess that was spring of 2000. We took a trip down to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, in

October, 2000. It was the same time of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. I remember seeing that on the TV at the airport. So he and I were working on this thing. The first issue we did ourselves, but then we realized that we couldn’t do it alone. We needed other people, you know? But he oversaw everything from #579, our first issue, through #720. He was even doing some penciling while in the hospital. CBC: You guys did the writing, too? Peter: Oh, no. The writing and editorial staff for the magazine supply us with the manuscripts and reference and we’d take their articles and figure out how to best get the information across. Then we send it down to them, they make notes of their own and then send it out to reviewers who specialize in the various topics, whether it be tire maintenance or how to clean your M-16 or what to do about road wheels on your M-1 tank — people who specialize in those areas. They collect all those notes and send them to us, we make corrections and send ’em back, and they say, “Okay, the corrections are good, Why don’t you take it to color?” We’d color the stuff up and send it down and it’s just a back and forth. It’s a pretty efficient way to do it. And they’ve been doing that since… well, the magazine celebrated its 60th birthday in 2011. Joe and I went down to Huntsville for that. It was like he was at a comic book convention! He and a gentleman named Paul Fitzgerald, who was the original editor of the magazine — were sittin’ at a table and there was a line of civilian employees and soldiers waiting for his autograph, as if it was a New York Comic Con or something! CBC: Did you guys come up with the narrative eight-page stories yourselves? Peter: No. Again, those were supplied by the writers and editorial staff, you see, but the storytelling was Joe’s. Because they might have written, “Okay, we want this and that and this and…” [laughs] To paraphrase an old Dolly Parton line: P*S is often about trying to stuff 50 pounds of potatoes into a 20 pound sack! They would try to shove everything including the kitchen sink into their eight-page stories! And Joe, again, wielding the experience of five or six decades, was able to trim that stuff down. And sometimes it led to questions as to why he did that but more often than not, they understood that he was doing it because he needed to tell the story clearly! CBC: Was the idea to get that contract and to have the school do it or Tell-A-Graphics and Joe? Peter: It’s been a dozen years. I don’t know what we were thinking initially, but what it became is: students or graduates who are looking to get a financial foothold as they move into a career are able to work on P*S. It became a stepping stone for a lot of students. They’d do a little bit of everything as far as the artwork goes, but the majority of it is the technical stuff. Because, with P*S, you’re doing technical illustrations. Everything’s gotta be precise, whether down to the number of road wheels on a tank or number of slats on the front of a Humvee, the openings to the engine compartment on a Humvee… All that stuff has to be meticulous! And [laughs] Joe’s style was not meticulous! So we had people who were then doing the tight technical stuff in the technical illustrations

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

or even in the more cartoony stuff which still needed to have a basis in reality. What happened was that Joe would go over everything and he would sort of fiddle with it or tweak it here and there and finish off the artwork. In the last couple years, he was trying to get a little bit more time here and there and so a guy named Bob Hardin, who I think has done an illustration for your tribute book... CBC: Right. Peter: Bob has been inking the book for, I want to say, three years now. He’s helped. It’s his inking style that’s carried over the transition from Joe to not Joe. So I think there’s been a consistency because of him. CBC: Yeah, it looks beautiful. Who’s penciling it now? Peter: Another guy from the school, Fernando Ruiz. CBC: For the foreseeable future then, you guys have the contract, correct? Peter: Yes. CBC: And is that the mainstay that keeps you going? Do you do other jobs? Peter: Well, that’s a good question. Up until last summer, we were doing P*S and we were doing whatever Joe was doing. We were working on a new Sgt. Rock mini-series that he had written. He wrote all six issues, penciled and inked two, and colored one. I think he did the covers for two issues as well. It was supposed to be called Sgt. Rock and the Men of Easy Company. It was essentially a Year One approach that Joe was doing. I don’t know. I think initially it would have come out through Vertigo. Maybe not, I don’t know. But he was doing it for Karen Berger, and we would have been working with Will Dennis on that, who we worked with a lot in the last ten years. So that’s what we would have been doing now… from August until a couple of weeks ago, I split my time between P*S and the anthology, the Joe Kubert Presents book, wrapping that up. Joe had overseen everything with the exception of a couple of short stories in the last issue. By that I mean he’d gone over the color and he’d written all the text pieces that were in the magazines. But by him going over the color, we still needed to sort of clean up around the edges of the artwork just to make sure that he, well… Joe had a tendency to color outside the lines is the joke I use. But there was just a lot of production stuff that had to be done with that. Right now there’s P*S and figuring out what we’re gonna be doin’ when we’re not doin’ P*S. I haven’t figured that out yet. CBC: Well, certainly best of luck to you on that. Peter: Ah, thanks! CBC: You’re welcome. And is the Sgt. Rock thing permanently shelved? Peter: [Laughs] I don’t know. I don’t think anything is ever permanently shelved but at the same time there’s been no talk about doing anything with it. There are four scripts that are undrawn but I don’t know that any-

body would be interested in drawing them. I don’t know how that works. CBC: Right. Are you married? Do you have a family? Peter: I am, yes. Actually, the reason I stopped coming in on weekends was I met the woman who was going to become my wife so, we’re married, we have a two-year-old and my wife is pregnant, so we have another kid comin’ in September. CBC: All right! What’s the two-year-old’s name? Peter: John. CBC: John? And what’s your wife’s name? Peter: Suzi! CBC: Thank you, Pete. Peter: You’re welcome, Jon.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above and below: The Kubert School’s Tell-A-Graphics production facility has retained the contract for illustrating P*S magazine for over 12 years now. Here’s some pages from Feb. 2002’s #591. Ye Ed believes Pete Carlsson gave this very issue to him back when the Father & Sons issue of Comic Book Artist was being compiled!

George Pratt on Teaching the Teacher The Enemy Ace/War Idyll writer/artist discusses instructing Joe Kubert in 1990 by George Pratt

TM & © DC Comics.

George Pratt is the writer/artist of the acclaimed 1991 graphic novel Enemy Ace/War Idyll (covers below). We extend our gratitude to George for his multitudinous contributions to this book.

The greatest joy for me while working on Enemy Ace/War Idyll (and there were many isolated and particular instances of pure unadulterated joy involved with that project) was meeting Joe Kubert. It’s hard to put down into words just what having met Joe Kubert means to me. I could wax eloquent about things that we all know about and associate with his work (i.e., his storytelling, line quality, compositional sense, the characters he worked on, etc., etc.) and I might even get as far as talking about the energy of his work and the rest of all those high-falootin’ artist-type things before I finally break down and start slobbering with fanboy drool about particular issues of “Sgt. Rock,” Tarzan, “Haunted Tank,” “Enemy Ace,” and Tor! The fact is, there are so many virtues to Joe’s work that it’s easy to not talk about what a wonderful human being he is. I began Enemy Ace for many reasons, a lot of them responsibly adult (i.e., an antiwar message, getting rid of my unresolved childhood fears and try to come to an adult understanding of Vietnam and on and on), but what I cannot lose sight of and what always stopped me in my tracks when I was riding on the subway or just sitting at home being shocked into immobility by the amount of work I had just shoved onto my back, was that this was Enemy Ace, a Joe Kubert character that I was working on! He was one of the reasons for my becoming an artist in the first place. And, every once in a while, whatever I was doing at the time on the Ace project went by the wayside because all I could do was sit there with this big sh*t-eating grin on my face, knowing that I was lucky enough to be playing with this character that made such a huge impression on me. It’s not something that you can take lightly, playing with someone else’s character. At least I couldn’t, because Kubert was bound to see this thing! Scary! Joe’s work filled so much of my childhood years. I would, literally, spend hours poring over his books. He tells a story so well. He drags me in and won’t let go. And Joe’s involvement with Enemy Ace/ War Idyll was above and beyond the call of duty. He made many suggestions as to the direction of the story and the visual storytelling. His interest in my work on the book made all the difference. Knowing that he was behind it made me feel better about what I was doing with the character. The wildest thing that happened was when Joe asked me to “teach” him to paint!

I was stunned when Joe first proposed the “lesson.” The idea scared the hell out of me. How do you tell someone whose work is, in no small way, the basis for most of what you do, that you have nothing to teach them? Someone who is a master of line, form, mass, composition, depth — and on and on — that they have everything they need and all that is lacking is just jumping into the paint and moving it around, getting the feel of how paint slips, slides, and drags on the paper? So, I wholeheartedly accepted, not because I really believed that I had anything to teach him, but for more selfish reasons: I wanted to see Joe draw! Man, that would be a dream come true! It’s funny. I know that when I work at drawing and painting it’s like struggling uphill with massive weights on my back. It’s as though I start from scratch and have to re-learn everything with each new piece. Nothing ever feels one hundred percent right, which is good, I know, because it keeps you working; but, when I see anyone else draw I’m still mesmerized by how easy and natural they make it look. I love to see the lines gliding out of the pen or pencil and watch it take shape on the page in the form of figures and places. It is totally magical and it makes me want to draw even more. Then, I sit down and remember how difficult it all is. Joe’s drawings, especially, look so effortless. The spontaneity (which, when controlled by someone who knows what they’re up to, is everything) in Joe’s work is the ultimate in controlled anarchy. He, like Caniff, Sickles, Toth, Jones, Tardi, and Hugo Pratt, shows that it’s not what you put in but what you leave out that’s important. And the spotting of those blacks! It was obvious from the start who was going to be doing the learning. Anyway, the chance to watch one of my heroes draw right in front of me was too much to resist! As it happens, Scott Hampton was in town when Joe and I could finally nail down a date. That would make it that much more fun anyway. Scott and I have a great time when we get together. Half the time we can’t get anything done for all the laughing at rude jokes and sketching ’til the wee hours of the morning in our sketchbooks. So, I gathered up all my oil paints and my Crystal Clear with some inks and gouache and matte medium and brushes, and the kitchen sink and… Scott and I hit the highways out of New York bound for Dover, New Jersey. What a scam! Under the pretense of a painting class we were going to get to see Joe Kubert draw! So we show up, two giddy fanboys trying to look like it’s an everyday thing to rub elbows and teach painting to Joe Kubert, lugging Hefty trash bags full of more paint supplies than any ten men could use in a year. Joe was his usual fun bear-of-a-guy self, and was he ever excited to learn how to watercolor. Watercolor? Watercolor! I thought he wanted to do oils and maybe the Barron Storey layering technique. We didn’t even bring watercolors! Man, what a couple of mopes! So we stood there with our grins frozen on our faces, but kind of exaggerated now because we knew we’d goofed, and reassured him that we were rarin’ to get into the “watercolor” lesson (and picture our eyes, under knitted brows, on Joe, then on each other, switching back and forth like a couple of broken stoplights). We excused ourselves and stiff-legged it down to the Kubert School’s art store to get a “couple of things.”

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Art Lesson Spread from Enemy Ace/War Idyll by George Pratt. Scanned from the original art courtesy of the artist. TM & © DC Comics.

very gestural without a lot of details. He prefers instead, as I do, to let the paint dictate the direction of the piece. Joe, not having worked with paint on a constant basis, pen, brush, and ink being his usual materials, was fleshing out a drawing that indicated more detail, but still in a loose, spontaneous way. And then—there it was… the chance that we’d been waiting for: Joe Kubert, in the flesh, Drawing! And there’s a reason for that capital “D.” This wasn’t someone sitting there being tight and anal, trying to construct a picture. No. This was someone who knows their sh*t. This was spontaneous, sensitive draughtsmanship. You know when you sit down to dinner and there’s your placemat and table-setting in front of you, along with whatever you’re drinking as well as the salt and pepper shakers? And you know how you sit there and mess with the placemat, trying to straighten it? You know how it just doesn’t feel right? But shifting it… ever… so… slightly will make the biggest difference in the world? It’s a feeling you have in the center of your chest. Everybody’s done it. That’s what drawing is like. Shifting the pencil over the paper, feeling out the form, and drawing through the form. It’s what composition is all about as well. It’s intuitive. The wonderful push and pull of the pencil, soft then hard, sharp then smooth. And couple that with sensuality and joy. That’s the essence of drawing, of art. It’s not the content of the image (although that is,

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

In the store: “Man, did we screw up or what?” “No sh*t, man. We gotta haul ass!” Down the watercolor aisle: “Venetian red?” ‘Grab,’ Manganese Blue, Alizarin Crimson, Cobalt Blue…!” ‘Grab, grab, grab, grab!’ “Man, I’ve got all these colors at home!” “Good thing you brought your checkbook!” $$$$$$$$ Back in the classroom, Joe is setting up his stuff and we break out our new watercolor sets (Follow our eyes: Slowpan to the Hefty bags full of useless paint supplies heaped into a corner). Adam and Andy Kubert also showed up, so it was going to be a fun evening. Scott went ahead and prepared a demonstration and I was going to just coach Joe through the different steps involved in the process that I use in my watercolors. (Note: I had already done a workshop for Joe’s school a couple of months before this, which Joe attended, so he had seen me do a piece already. There were quite a few people attending so there wasn’t much one-on-one involvement for everyone there.). Joe taped down a piece of Strathmore plate Bristol and I suggested that he pencil up an idea he’d like to paint and we could go from there. Scott was over on his piece already drawing, and since watercolor is his chosen medium, and being comfortable with the procedures that he uses, it was

establishing a middle ground. The middle ground is also the overall tone and color of the piece. Then, by wiping off paint, revealing white paper, and adding darks and more color I uncover the image. That’s basically what Joe did that night. He may not have been comfortable with the steps involved, or knew what to do next, but he was no stranger to handling paint and, or color. Scott and I were transfixed. We made a few suggestions, nudging Joe along here and there but he was going to town. Initially he was a bit timid about going over things so we pushed him to really “lay the color on” and “wash this back a lot farther,” “what about throwing some mist creeping around up in the trees?” And he would deftly slap it on. He gave us the brushes a couple of times and let us attempt to screw it up, but it came out anyway. His knowledge of anatomy is stunning. The turn of a leg, the twist of the thigh and the light that glints off of it, beautiful. Anyway, at the end of all this, Scott and I are plotting how we can snag this cool piece when Adam hits his dad up for it. And got it! We just about died. Joe took Scott and I to dinner (Steak and beer!) and at the insistence of Scott (I was too chicken to ask), he did a sketch in my sketchbook that I include here. That was pretty amazing to watch also. He sat there in the restaurant and straight in pen and brush did this thing! To sum it all up: Joe Kubert (while appreciated by professionals and fans alike) is one of the true unsung heroes of comics. His impact has not, in my opinion, been fully appreciated. Pull out those war comics and open up those Tarzan’s and take a look at what comics, unfortunately for us, and the medium, are missing today. Joe was and is still inventing ways of telling a story. His work remains fresh and vibrant. And isn’t that the true test? Best of all, though he is a consummate professional, he’s a great guy to boot. Thanks for all the lessons, Joe! —G eorge Pratt Brooklyn, NY, 1991

Above: During George Pratt and Scott Hampton’s Spring 1990 visit, Joe Kubert rendered this Tor sketch — no pencils but straight to ink! Courtesy of George. Inset right: Commission piece by George featuring the Hammer of Hell.

Under the title of ”Hey, Joe,” this essay by George Pratt originally appeared in an issue of the CFAAPA, #22, April 15, 1991. George tells us, “I did some editing on the piece, paring it down slightly, leaving out names sort of specific to the APA that I thought most people wouldn’t recognize.” 92

obviously, taken into consideration), it’s the doing! The image is just a vehicle, a reason to draw or paint. It’s this intuitive, sensual sense that, I believe, separates the men from the boys. It’s not something you can fake. You either have it or you don’t. It’s going with whatever material you have at hand, letting the material do what it’s supposed to do. You are there to nudge it along, not fight it. You let it nudge you as well, a perfect marriage. Smooth. That’s what watching Joe draw was that night. Scott and I have felt it, as well as others. It’s what you work, and struggle toward. What a joy to see someone else really handle it. Tarzan appeared pitted against a Bull ape. Creeper vines wound themselves around trunks and limbs. Joe was using his whole arm to draw, the pencil held loosely between his thumb and index finger like a knife, using the side of the lead to lightly sketch in the gesture and to block in mass. He would shift to a regular writing grip to pop in details. It was a shame, sitting there looking at this beautiful pencil drawing (drawing, not a sketch) knowing that it was going to be covered by paint. The technique that I used in my watercolors at that time I swiped from Burt Silverman. Silverman is a well-known illustrator whose most famous piece is probably the cover to Jethro Tull’s Aqualung album, but who has done tons of Time covers, etc. He’s written two books on painting techniques that I picked up when I first got into Pratt Institute. I have my own additions to his technique, but they are subtle to say the least. Basically, it’s sort of like handling watercolor like oils, up to a point. I cover my paper with several washes of color,

Enemy Ace TM & © DC Comics.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Mentor

Rick Veitch: My Journey with Joe Kubert The Year-One “Kubie” grad on his life’s sojourn accompanying a teacher and friend

Since Joe Kubert passed away in August of 2012, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the times we shared and the profound influence he had on my life. My journey with Joe began with my very first comic, purchased with my own money at the ripe age of eight. It was an early issue of Our Army at War and the lead story was “The Rock and the Wall!” In it, a sergeant named Rock and an infantryman named Wall engaged in a combat competition to prove which was toughest: a rock or a wall? It was the kind of story that made perfect sense to a little kid. But I was hypnotized by the art. That particular story was where Joe caught what would become the iconic look of the character: knotted brow, hawklike nose, penetrating eyes, and craggy unshaven jowls. Everyone and everything in the story was sculpted with lively, spontaneous pen lines, while lurking in every grimy shadow was an oozing abstract of pooled blacks; as evocative as any in Rorschach’s famous inkblots. I began laboriously copying Joe’s panels into my own homemade comics. Things can get confusing when growing up, but I had one constant: in my secret heart of hearts I knew with deep certainty that I was a comic book artist. What I could never imagine is the important role the man who signed his name “Joe Kubert” would play in my attaining it professionally. I was 25 when I met him. It was 1976 and I was interviewing for Joe’s soon-to-open cartooning school. Knowing he was a Golden Age artist, I guess I expected an older gentleman, but Joe was in his early 50s and looked like he was 35. He welcomed me warmly and spoke passionately about his hopes and plans for the school. He explained how fortunate he had been to come up under a studio system where older cartoonists had made time to teach him the tricks of the trade. His goal was to give back by keeping that tradition alive. I was terrified that my portfolio wouldn’t make the grade, but when he saw the printed copy of Two-Fisted Zombies, he responded with grinning amazement. I tried to explain it was a couple years old and not my best stuff, and the content was a little — *kofkof* — undergroundy. But he didn’t care. He carefully went through my other samples, taking a lot of interest in my early attempts at airbrushed comics. He showed me French magazines with Drulliet and Moebius. Finally, he looked me in the eye and said, “You are just the kind of guy we want at this school.” Joe was seeking out young artists for whom comic books were a “calling,” and I think he recognized that quality in me in this first meeting. I didn’t have a pot to piss in, much less the money for tuition. But Joe’s wife, Muriel, told me about a new government job training program called CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act]. That summer, I talked my way up the Vermont CETA hierarchy, showing my art samples and trying to convince them to pay for cartooning college. They were skeptical and couldn’t provide a decision before school went into session. Downhearted, I called Joe to let him know I wouldn’t be able to attend. He asked me a couple of pointed questions about the CETA approval process and then said, “Come down anyway. I’ve spoken with Muriel about you and we’ll make it work somehow.”

Joe Kubert.

by Rick Veitch

I arrived with a beat-up ten-speed, a box of groceries and $30 to live on. Joe and Muriel carried me for a couple months until the CETA grant was approved. It was an extraordinary act of generosity towards a kid they hardly knew, and by extending it they handed me the first key to the kingdom. That opening semester at Kubert School in 1976 was a complete buzz. Not just for the 22 students, but also for Joe and Muriel and the brace of professional artists they’d brought in to teach us. The curriculum was surprisingly well developed for a first-year school. The facility, an old brick mansion set on private park-like grounds, was gorgeous and utilitarian. At the center of it was Joe, the human dynamo. Joe was teaching four days a week, editing books for DC Comics on the fifth day, and knocking out covers and stories evenings and weekends. He would often work at a board

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Inspired by the Métal Hurlant work coming from Europe, Joe Kubert experimented with different formats, including the short-lived but spectacular Sojourn tabloid. Veitch calls #2’s cover [1977] “stranger and scarier” than anything previously done by Joe. Rick Veitch is the writer/artist of the acclaimed 1991 graphic novel Enemy Ace/War Idyll (covers below). We extend our gratitude to George for his multitudinous contributions to this book. 93

Above: Two-Fisted Zombies by the Veitch brothers, Tom and Rick, published by Last Gasp in 1973. Three years later, Joe Kubert would thumb through a copy when Rick was applying as first-year student at TKS. Courtesy of Heritage. Next page: Rick’s mentor appears in a dream sequence in Veitch’s Pocket Universe: The Collected Rare Bit Fiends Vol. 2 (King Hell Press, 1995). Courtesy of R.V.

set up in his office which opened out into the studio rooms where we students did our assignments. He was always patient with our general goofy behavior and with the many interruptions we presented him. I was struck by the incredible focus he brought to the act of drawing. All the nuttiness a group of young people can generate going on around him never broke the powerful attention Joe gave his drawings, his pen and brush flying over near-imaginary pencils. He had rolls of wide white tape that he used for corrections, razoring a patch and laying new ink-work over old, viewed through the light-box built into his board. He never slumped over the board like we did, but sat with correct posture for hours on end. He was insanely fast, able to turn out a 24-page story over a weekend. And you don’t need me to tell you the work was always extraordinary. On top of everything he had going, Joe set-up and ran a busy work-study program. There was paying studio work for everyone who was caught up on their assignments, beginning with a big paste-up and lettering project for SRA [Science Research Associates], an educational publisher repackaging Silver Age comics. We painted a life-size mural of a gaggle of super-heroes for a comic book shop. We did covers and illustrations for local magazines and papers. We cranked out a number of catalogs for a company that sold super-hero toys. We did advertisements that ran in the back of Marvel and DC comics. A few of us began to assist Joe

on higher-end promotional comics like Sparky the Firedog and Magazineland USA. These jobs brought in much-needed coin for the students and real-world hands-on experience that was worth way more than money. There were many, many sessions that went into the early morning hours fueled by coffee and meatball subs. We students would drag into class the next day to find Joe bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I understood, even then, what a sacrifice this gifted cartoonist was making for us. He was at the top of his field yet spent his precious board time on catalogs and ads to help train a bunch of kids. If on-the-job training was the second key to the kingdom, the third was getting into print. And together they opened the door into the New York comics industry. The business of comics publishing was a slow motion train wreck in 1977, but Joe somehow got DC to buy an inventory of “back-up” stories done by the students. The one title he still edited was Sgt. Rock, so these were to be war comics done under Joe’s watchful eye. Steve Bissette and I received one of the coveted first scripts, a five-pager called “A Song For Saigon Sally.” But soon everyone who wanted a shot (and was up to date on assignments) got one. This included the big-foot stylists among us, who had the chance to do gag pages and spot cartoons. There were lettering and coloring gigs as well. War comics are notoriously difficult to pull off convincingly. Many of us were plugged into the super-hero genre, so the sudden stylistic switch to gritty battle realism wasn’t easy. But here was the acknowledged master of the form firmly guiding us every step of the way. We’d begin with a discussion about the script: how Joe saw the staging and what elements he wanted to see pulled out. Perhaps he might make a small thumbnail to get an idea across. Then we’d go off to break down and tightly layout the story. Back to Joe who would critique and direct, sometimes making his own tracings. Often it would take a couple sessions going over layouts before a story went on to the full penciling, lettering and inking stages. Working through these stories, Joe was much more blunt than he was in the classroom. There was lots of reworking and more than one story of mine that went to press with panels and figures patched by him. Sometimes, after demolishing my stuff, he’d give me that sly smile and say, “Not too hard on you, am I?” And I’d reply, “Keep it up, Joe!” We both knew I needed that kind of no-bullsh*t approach to make the grade as a comic-book man. Things started to gel for me on my fourth or fifth script. Joe made no changes to the pencils! That charged me up so much I inked the whole job that night. When I showed it to him the next morning with my eyes falling out of my head, I got the sly smile again: “Looks like you’re on a roll, kiddo.” It was the first back-up to which he let me sign my name. Joe encouraged me to experiment with different methods, like airbrush, then to write my own scripts. Doing these back-ups while at the Kubert School felt like I was going for my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the same time. I especially enjoyed the story conferences in which I’d pitch story ideas to Joe. If one of my concepts was good, we’d engage in a creative give and take; molding the bits like mental jello until they became a functional short story. Joe was very much into getting an emotional response from the reader. Much thought would go into the ending; with an unexpected twist being highly prized. And, with the back-ups, there was the added bonus of seeing our stuff in print. I’d been published in black-&-white a couple times, but nothing compares to that first time you see your work in a real color comic book; the experience only marred by how crummy your early work looks! Such is the evolutionary path to walking upright for the commercial artist and Joe knew it. How he found time in his life to provide all those opportunities for us, I’ll never know. But I, and many others, are eternally grateful to him.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Joe Kubert was a very physical guy. He was built solidly and moved like a natural athlete. The few times I played touch football with him, he could hit anyone on the field with a perfect spiral. During the summer he tooled around top down in a yellow Triumph TR6. In the winter, he wore a 40-pound whale skin parka to build his strength. He was a ferocious racketball competitor into his late 70s. When I saw him three years ago, he looked like he could wrestle a tiger and pin it three out of three. I think this physical side of Joe was an essential part of his drawing. He lived four-square inside his body and knew exactly how each muscle moved and this translated into exciting anatomy and action scenes in his comics. (Two other great action anatomists in comics were also physical guys: Frank Frazetta and Jack Kirby). He was a man of tremendous moral character. It wasn’t a morality born out of conservatism or liberalism, but from his heritage and life experience. He saw value in everyone. He believed hard work should be rewarded. He understood the creative buzz and fostered it in others. But it wasn’t just give, give, give with Joe. There were things he wanted back out of the Kubert School experience and one of those was the opportunity to learn what made my generation tick. By 1976, the old way of telling stories wasn’t working in the marketplace. Tastes in humor and fantasy were changing and we students engaged Joe in a lively cross-cultural debate. He could relate to our geeky fascination with horror and violence, but questioned if commercial publishers in America could ever embrace that kind of material. He introduced us to the European masters like Pratt, Moebius, and Druillet. He started his own over-sized self-published comic to explore the form. I’ve always thought his brilliant cover to Sojourn #2, reflected what he was inhaling from us that first year. It’s stranger and scarier than what he was doing in the mainstream at the time and seems to revel in the “monster for monster’s sake” aesthetic which we lived by. And he often returned to the artists who inspired him as a child. He kept collections of Hal Foster and Milt Caniff in his office and sometimes, before he started a new job, he’d leaf through these, soaking up the ambience. More than once he wandered over to my table to show me a particular sequence he was taken with. The Kubert School graduated its first class in spring of 1978. But the benefits the school bestowed on us continued. And it wasn’t the end of my relationship to Joe. A small group of us who were really motivated to break into professional comics — Tom Yeates, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and myself — decided to rent a place to share expenses, inspiration, and contacts. Joe let us stay in the school dorms until we got set up. He also continued to feed us work through a small graphics studio he opened in downtown Dover. He paid a fair hourly wage for us to do ad production and such. We also jammed on comics with Joe, completing some of the back-up stories that for whatever reason had gone unfinished during the school year. Joe gave Steve Bissette the Scholastic account, a very good one that paid Steve’s rent for years. John Totleben had been unable to enroll for his second year at the school. So Joe reached out and found John a patron: Harry “A” Chesler, who had ramrodded a comic-book production studio at the birth of the industry. Harry hired John to illustrate The Rubaiyat, which served as a perfect training ground for John’s maturing pen and ink style. All of us were from the hinterlands and greatly benefited from Kubert School’s location of a 40-minute bus ride to downtown Manhattan. After graduation, we were hustling the New York publishing world for whatever comics or illustration work we could get. Joe arranged meetings for us with editors at DC Comics, but the company had recently cancelled a dozen new titles and there wasn’t enough work for their regular people. It looked a little grim that summer and autumn, so those paying jobs Joe fed us were an important lifeline. Then, miraculously, things broke our way. The comics industry was changing radically, both in content and distribution, and Tom, Steve, John, and myself began to find our skills in demand. We were all proud to present Joe with our early successes and I fondly remember how delighted he was to see the stuff. I may not have understood it at the time, but I know it now: our coming to fruition as artists was his coming to fruition as a teacher. And therein lies the special bond between us all. My long-range goal had always been to do comics and live in Vermont, and once I’d attained the career part, I headed back to the transcendental beauty of Green Mountains. Unfortunately, that meant I didn’t see Joe as much. But he was always on the other end of the telephone line if I needed advice and he always wrote back a lovely note if I sent him a stack of my comics. When I was in New Jersey, I’d make a point of dropping in on Joe and talking to a class or two. I helped organize the school’s ten-year reunion, which brought a couple hundred graduates back to the old stomping grounds, in 1988.

The most fun was running into Joe on the convention and festival circuit. He was often at San Diego or New York showing the amazing new direction his work was taking. We did Angoulême [in France, where the Angoulême International Comics Festival takes place for a week every January] the same year, then took the bullet train to Paris. And, in 2010, we spent a week in Granada, Spain, where he was guest of honor and we both spoke at the University. We ate boiled octopus and drank the local firewater. We couldn’t get him to dance the Flamenco. Every night after the festivities, he’d head back to his room and, having shouldered Muriel’s duties upon her passing, work on the school’s New Jersey Accreditation paperwork. Flying out of Madrid airport was the last time I saw Joe. He had always been such a vibrant presence it came as no small shock to receive the news he was gone. Legend has it he knocked out over a hundred sketches from his hospital bed. Knowing how much he dearly loved to draw, I believe it. The funeral service was filled with many, many people, who, like me, had been touched by Joe Kubert. The Dover police closed down the motorcade route to general traffic and a crowd of students gathered in front of the school to wave goodbye as we passed by. At the graveside, I’m not ashamed to admit, there were tears in my eyes and a “thank you” on my lips as I took my turn shoveling two spadefuls of dirt onto Joe’s casket. Back home in Vermont, I thought about Joe often. More than once I marveled at the workings of a mysterious Fate who had led me from a story called “The Rock And The Wall” to the guy who drew it. And how that guy would be the teacher who’s generosity, wisdom and friendship helped me answer my “calling.” I’m spending time with his comics and graphic novels again, seeing them in a new and penetrating light. They tell me my journey with Joe Kubert goes on. Over a career spanning seven decades Joe drew many thousands of pages and now I see each one as an invitation to another master class. The subject is: why we do comics. 95

Giving Back: Teaching at the Kubert School Bryan D. Stroud talks to a notable gang of instructors of The Kubert School by Bryan D. Stroud I had a germ of an idea not long ago, partially spawned by the routine comments I’ve received conducting some interviews. It’s one thing to be a comic book artist of renown — a perennial fan favorite, in fact — and to have been at it for many, many years; but to also earn the respect of peers almost without exception, and to be a successful editor, and to have made other significant contributions to the field, on top of it all, is just tremendous, if not unprecedented. Who else could I be describing but Joe Kubert? Here’s a smattering of quotes about the creator and mentor culled from those interviews over the years: I would have to say the all-around best comic book artist who ever drew breath is Joe Kubert. — Clem Robins Kubert once said something very nice to his classes at his art school. He was talking about getting photographic reference to do stuff to get it right. “The one exception to that is that you can use Russ Heath’s artwork. It is right.” [chuckles] Below: Courtesy of Tom Foxmar— Russ Heath nick, a photo of Dick Ayers at the Joe Kubert School in the 1970s.

Joe Kubert was terrific.

— Carmine Infantino …[P]erhaps they ought to go to some of the best artists that were left in comic books and among which were Joe Kubert, who was the perfect guy for the [Green Berets] strip. — Neal Adams And Joe Kubert is one of my closest friends. He’s a gem. He’s a gentleman. He’s exactly what the character is: Rock. That’s Joe. — Jack Adler In addition to comments like these, I was also inspired by a book. I recently treated myself to a copy of Man of Rock, Bill Schelly’s biography of Joe, and it is simply a masterwork. Bill beautifully chronicles the amazing and continuing career of this giant in the field and I was particularly intrigued with the discussion of the founding of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in 1976. It’s been going strong ever since and has created viable professionals for the cartooning industry. I thought it might be fascinating to hear a little from some of the instructors from the earliest days of the

school, so I contacted a few for their remembrances, beginning with Dick Ayers: Bryan D. Stroud: What initially led you to the Kubert School, Mr. Ayers? Dick Ayers: My friend Henry Boltinoff, the cartoonist, he was teaching there and it was coming toward the end of summer, so he said Joe Kubert was looking for somebody. “Why don’t you ask him?” So I asked Joe, and he said, “Okay, come on out to indoctrination day, and we’ll introduce you to the students.” So I went out and we met the students and as we left we met some of the other teachers and I said to Joe, “Gee, you never introduced anyone as teaching anatomy.” He said, “Well, you’re doing that.” So I ended up teaching anatomy. Bryan: [Chuckles] You didn’t even know what you were interviewing for, huh? Dick: No. It was two classes I did and it was the same group because it was a two-year course, and I was pretty proud of the fact that the students asked Joe to have me carry right on with the second year, so I had the whole two years. When it came to the end of the second year, and I had them in front of me for about the last time, I said, “Now you guys are all my competitors.” I quit teaching. Bryan: [Laughs] So it was just the two years that you spent teaching? Dick: Just about that, yes. 1976 and ’77, I believe. I liked the class very much. I liked teaching them. In fact, there was Jan Duursema, Tom Mandrake, the fellow who does Archie now [Fernando Ruiz]. Bryan: How did you come up with your curriculum? Dick: Usually by being a day ahead of them. [chuckles] If it was something I didn’t know on the day I was there, I’d say, “We’ll talk about that tomorrow.” I taught on Fridays, come to think of it. Just Fridays. Bryan: Not a whole lot of commuting to do, then. Now, you did most of your work at Marvel, so had you met Joe before? Dick: No. Only one time or another when I was looking for work. I never did anything for DC until later on, when I did know Joe from the school and somehow I just made my way over to DC and got on Jonah Hex and Kamandi. Bryan: Were you inking after Jack again on Kamandi? Dick: No. When I got over there I was penciling layouts and somebody else would do the inking…. Bryan: Any other significant memories? Dick: I remember Henry Boltinoff telling me that Joe will never ask you to work for him, you’ve got to ask to work for Joe. I’d enjoyed a nice interview with Irwin Hasen awhile back, but we didn’t talk much about his time at the Kubert School. Irwin was a long-timer, only retiring in the recent past after a 30+ year run. Bryan: How did you happen to start at the school, Mr. Hasen? Irwin Hasen: Well, I’ve known Joe Kubert since we were both about 19 years old. That goes back about 70 years ago. So that’s a long time to know somebody. And we became friends and then he went on his way and I went on my way doing my strip [Dondi] and everything, and one day he said, “I’m opening up a school.” This is 30 years ago. He said, “Would you like to come and teach?” I said, “Yeah. Once a

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

School Days

week would be fine.” That’s the way it worked out. Bryan: Terrific. I’ve seen that famous photo of you and Joe on the beach in California back in the day. Irwin: That’s right. Bryan: When I talked to Joe he thought most people who came to teach at the school did it mostly out of a sense of giving something back. Irwin: Well, it wasn’t for the money, that’s for sure. [laughter] All I wanted to do was get the hell out of the house in the morning once a week. Bryan: I can’t blame you a bit. I’m sure being a freelancer like that you’d start climbing the walls. Irwin: Yeah, that’s right. So this is a good chance for me to have a nice day; a full day and also I was interested in those kids. Bryan: Good for you. What was your specialty? Irwin: My specialty was how to draw. Not how to draw a comic strip, but just how to draw for comic books mostly. Bryan: So, sequential art then. Irwin: Yeah. Bryan: Were there any students that really stand out in your mind? Irwin: Oh yes, quite a few, but the names are not coming to mind right now. Steve Bissette was one of them, who is now a top guy in the business. There were some people who left that school in very good shape. Bryan: Oh, yes. Joe said one of his goals was to create an environment that would make them viable candidates to go into the industry. Irwin: That’s right.

Bryan: Apparently it’s been very successful. Irwin: Very much so. Bryan: Did you find it rewarding to be a teacher? Irwin: Oh, yes. That’s why I did it. I wouldn’t have done it if I got bored. There have been a few top guys in the business who come there to teach and inside of two months they leave. It’s the nature of the beast. An instructor or teacher really has to put his heart into it. Bryan: I’m sure it’s a labor of love. Irwin: Absolutely. Bryan: You were at it for over 30 years? Irwin: Thirty years. I can’t believe it. While I was doing my strip, Dondi, I was teaching once a week. Why, I don’t know. [Bryan chuckles] I have no idea what drove me to do this. Bryan: Several factors, I’m sure, not the least of which enjoying what you were doing. Irwin: Yes, I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t. Bryan: How did you come up with your curriculum? Irwin: I just went home one day before I started and worked out a curriculum that I thought would be advantageous to the students that would cover what they’d encounter when they got out of school. Bryan: Kind of a practical guide then. Irwin: Absolutely. Bryan: Since you were there so long you must have run across some other good teachers. Irwin: Oh, yes. Hy Eisman, who does Popeye and The Katzenjammer Kids. He does a syndicated strip and he was the first instructor, by the way, before me. The Hildebrandt Brothers did wonderful poster work. They were illustrators and they came for a couple of years. There was a wide spread of different artists who felt they wanted to teach. Very few of them lasted as long as Hy and myself. Some I never saw because we all taught on different days. Bryan: Did either Adam or Andy [Kubert] come back to teach? Irwin: I believe so but, of course, they’re busy working for DC. Bryan: They’re definitely in demand. Irwin: Oh, yes. Very talented. I taught them everything they knew. [laughter]

Inset left: Joe Kubert and Irwin Hasen clowning around at the beach in a late 1940s pic, which appeared in The Amazing World of DC Comics # 5 [Mar. ’75], in a feature celebrating the great editor Sheldon Mayer, who shepherded both cartoonists in comics legend.

Dick Ayers mentioned that he used to car pool to the school with Ric Estrada. Even though Ric had been enduring chemotherapy treatments for awhile, he very graciously gave me a good chunk of his time to talk about his experiences teaching at the school for a two year period, which I believe was the School’s first two years:

Below: The late cartoonist Ric Estrada in a photo by Garrett Wesley Gibbons. Ric’s son Seth continues to work on a film documentary about his lovely father. Dibujantes [Draftsmen] is tauted as a “documentary about Cuban American artist and world traveler Ric Estrada.” For info, please visit dibujantesblog.savant-studios.com. Photo courtesy of Seth.

Ric Estrada: My memories of the two years I taught at the Kubert School alongside men like Dick Ayers and Dick Giordano and there were others, but those are the two that come to mind right away. As you may or may not know Joe

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

TM & © DC Comics.

Above: The original art of a Ric Estrada splash page for the Robert Kanigher-scribed back-up in Our Army at War #264 [Jan. 1974]. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Kubert was at the time an editor at DC comics. He was the editor of the “Sgt. Rock “series and I had worked with him on some of the back-up stories in [Our Army at War]. I always liked to do back-up stories. They were usually only six pages long, so I got paid for them much faster than when I did a 20-page story. [laughter] I’d do six pages in three days, and on day four I’d go back to the office and I got paid. Bryan: Not bad. Ric: Well, I had a family to raise and it was a growing family that ended up being nine children. Anyway, my main purpose in life was to feed my family, and art was a wonderful, Godgiven talent, but at the same time it was a tool rather than an end in itself, so I was very pleased and honored when Joe Kubert opened his school in Dover, New Jersey — the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning. He asked a few of the people he worked with, among them Dick Ayers and Dick Giordano and myself, and he asked us to be the first instructors during the first couple of years. That was a tremendous learning experience for me, in addition to the honor to work with a group of very, very talented young men and women. Most of the students were ages, oh, I would say 16 to 30. The oldest was about 30. The youngest was about 13 years old, a little girl who was very sweet and very introspective and, believe it or not, after graduation she was the first one to get a well-

paying job doing cartoons for a newspaper. Anyway, it was very nice to commute to Dover, New Jersey. I lived in New York City at the time and it was a 45-minute ride, and the school was in a beautiful old building that had been some rich person’s mansion at one time, and now [Joe] had all these wonderful students. Some of them were actually lodging in a nearby servant’s quarters down in the other end of the gardens, and it was a beautiful place. The students were fantastic, and out of those students you had guys like Rick Veitch. Some very, very talented cartoonists came out of there, and some of them, because of their youth… I was already a man in my 40s and, here I was, dealing with teenagers and people in their early 20s. And some of them were a little rebellious and, strangely enough, some of the most talented ones were the most rebellious. [chuckles] I would give them an assignment and they would sort of twist it around to show me that they knew better. That was a complete challenge. In fact, I heard from Rick Veitch recently. You may or may not know that Joe Kubert lost his wife recently. Bryan: I sure did and was sad to hear of it. Ric: Muriel was the heart of that school. She was the administrator. She was the soul of the place. She was so spirited and so talented and so alert. She was not an artist, but she didn’t have to be. She knew everything else. And we all worked with her. She took care of the materials when people needed drawing paper or pencils or pens or ink. She was there administering those sales. The school was a delight to work for, and I worked two days a week — Tuesdays and Thursdays — all day long, and my course was art and storytelling composition, and also the business of art. So, on the one hand, I taught the kids the technique of telling a story in picture continuity and how to compose the pictures so that they would be sort of cinematic; so they wouldn’t be boring. “Move the camera, move the camera, move the camera.” That was the motto. Downshot, upshot, middle-shot, medium-long shot, longshot, up, down. And the other thing that I taught was, as I said, the business of art, which was how to prepare a portfolio and show it to as many people as possible, and get used to being rejected by some, but keep trying until somebody would say, “Hey, this is what we want.” Those were my two subjects: storytelling and composition. Also, I taught color with markers. And the students were fantastic. Many times, Dick Ayers, who lived not too far from me when I was in a town about 45 minutes north of New York City and he lived in a nearby town, and sometimes we rode together to the school and we had long conversations about art and especially cartoons. What do you think cartoonists talk about? Cartooning. [laughter] Bryan: Imagine that! Ric: [Chuckles] So, to a cartoonist, another cartoonist is great company because they talk about what you want to hear about, and we all have our likes and our dislikes, and our gripes and our glories. The gripes in cartooning are really the deadlines and an occasional grumpy editor who will kind of growl at our work, but generally doing comic books was a delight in the creative sense. Dick Ayers is a fantastic storyteller and we had the privilege of working during the Silver Age, which was one step beyond the Golden Age…. I did the bulk of my work for DC Comics in the late ’60s and through the 1970s. The last story I did for them was in 1982. I had moved to California, and I did a series called Amethyst, Princess of Gem World. Now Dick Ayers was able to work for both DC and Marvel. I never worked for Marvel. It was either out of loyalty to DC or squeamishness about maybe walking out of there and never finding another job. [chuckles] I stuck it out with DC for all those years. You’re familiar with Neal Adams. Neal Adams is a fantastic cartoonist. We often met each other in the office and I complained sometimes about the pay in those days, which was so skimpy. You’d get $50 a page and some people were getting $30 a page, which is really very little, because

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

the years. I was in my late 40s and I had been working like a fiend for many, many years. I got my first cartooning job when I was 21 years old, and so I’d been working for over 20 years already, but I had never really taken inventory of the things that I had learned along the way. Teaching at the Kubert School forced me to look at what I knew and then I began to fill a notebook with the lessons I was going to teach. The first couple of weeks I just talked and talked and talked, and tried to teach them everything I knew, and then I realized that it wouldn’t work. The kids were just confused. Then I began to pace myself and to bring out some of the things I knew and I’m sure that Dick Ayers and Dick Giordano and so,me of the others probably felt the same way. I don’t know if you know the story of the preacher who came to a new parish and there was one parishioner sitting in the first row and nobody else showed up, and he gave this tremendous sermon. And, at the end, this young preacher came down to the parishioner and he said, “What did you think of my sermon?” The man answered with, “Look, I’m a farmer, and when only one cow shows up, I don’t feed him the whole load.” [laughter] The first two weeks I was feeding the kids the whole load, and then I said, “I’d better start pacing myself.” So, as I said, I learned a lot of things about the things I already knew, and I began to broaden myself. “Today I’ll teach them about composition in terms of this or that and then next week I’ll teach them about how to handle close-ups, how to move the angles from downshot to upshot, and things like that.” Then, some years later I met some of the students. I went to the San Diego Comic-Con, the big comic book convention there. I’ve always been a guest of the San Diego Comic Con, and I ran into some of the students and they

Below: Ric Estrada was the main artist on the short-lived “war through the enemy’s eyes” comics title, Blitzkrieg, drawing nine out of the ten stories in the five issues. This eye-popping Estrada spread is from #3 [May–June ’76]. Words by Robert Kanigher.

TM & © DC Comics.

it takes you a day or two to draw one page, and Neal gave me a wonderful secret. He said, “You know the secret of getting your page rate hiked? You work for DC for awhile and then you walk away, and you go to Marvel and you say, ‘I’d like to work for you guys, but I’d like to get better pay than at DC,’ and they’ll give you better pay. After a few months you walk out of Marvel and come back to DC, and you say, ‘They were paying much more than what you’re paying.’ So little by little you hike up your page rate.” I never had the gumption to really go for it. As I said, my main thing was to get my weekly paycheck for the six pages, and go home and buy the groceries for the kids. Bryan: No one could ever fault your priorities. Ric: Well, that was my priority and it has been over the years. Over the years, I discovered, little by little, that my work was very well known, because I worked like crazy. I often did two pages a day, so my six pages I did in three days. And one day, Joe Orlando, who was one of the editors at DC and a very good cartoonist in his own right, said, “Look at this fan magazine from England. Listen to what they’re saying about you.” The fan magazine said, “American comic books have an epidemic disease called “Estradaitis,” because everything that comes out of there is signed by him.” So rather than a cartoonist, I became an epidemic. [laughter] I’ve never been able to live it down. He showed that to me way back in 1976 or 1977, and here it is 30-odd years later and I’m still thinking about it. [chuckles] Anyway, the Kubert School was a delight, and any time you talk to someone who was taught, on any level, in any subject, you always find out that the instructor always learns more than the pupil, at least at the beginning. For the first time in my life I had to look at what I had learned over

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Ron Zalme’s flyer announcing a Kubert School open house in 1977. Courtesy of Peter Carlsson and the Kubert archives.

Below: The Baker Mansion in the early days of the Kubert School. Photo courtesy of Tom Foxmarnick.

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said, “You know, Ric, the things you taught us… actually it took us over five years to begin to really, really assimilate what you taught us, because you taught us so much, and so much of it was way over our heads.” And they also said something else that was very rewarding: “Not only were you teaching us the technique of art, the technique of cartooning; you were teaching us how to have self-confidence.” Which is something most artists don’t have, because you tell your parents, “I want to be an artist,” and the first thing they say is, “Oh, you’ll starve.” “I want to make a career in art.” “Art? You’ll starve.” The word “art” and the word “starving” come together. [chuckles] What I was trying to show them, though, is that there are thousands of artists all over the country and all over the world, and we see Van Gogh and hear about those who had miserable lives, but we don’t stop to realize that Walt Disney never starved. Walt Disney was an artist and he invented a funny mouse, and the funny mouse became Mickey Mouse, and Walt Disney became a millionaire, and he hired hundreds, maybe thousands of art students, and they all made a good living. Parents never understand that. So I tried to teach along those lines: to have confidence, no matter what their parents or relatives or even friends would say about, “Art? You’ll starve,” because that’s not true. If you work like a fiend and you learn your basic principles, you’ll never starve, and the basic principles are how to draw decently and how to prepare a portfolio and to show your work to as many people as possible. But all those things became very clear in my mind during those years at the Joe

Kubert School. Before, I did them unconsciously. Now, I was very conscious of these things and my own work improved as a result. So those are my reminiscences of the school. It was a wonderful atmosphere. Joe is a terrific guy. Very positive. A fantastic artist. He could take a piece of chalk and just draw on the chalkboard and in five strokes draw Sgt. Rock or a tank or an airplane. It’s just incredible. His mind is unbelievable. Working with him and for him was always a challenge and always a learning experience. But, as I said, in the school you have to gather what you know and put it in a certain order so the kids would understand. What else can I tell you about the school? Once in awhile we had a dinner and we all got together and we were very sociable and we had a lot of fun. There was also another artist that came at the time, the widow of Walt Kelly, who did the Pogo comic strip. I forget her first name, but she came to the school as well and I met her a couple of times, but we were all so busy that we didn’t have much time except for that one dinner every three or four months. We didn’t have much time to socialize. We just taught and taught and taught and taught, and it was an amazing experience. For me, I would never have had the chance to teach like that. Before that I had been a junior art director at the Famous Artists School, in Westport, Connecticut, but as an art director, you don’t have the one-on-one experience of working with a group. I had learned quite a few things at that time, during my one year as junior art director, putting together a course for talented young people, and I had been able to gather a lot of information. But never like at the Kubert School, where you had 25 students in front of you, throwing questions at you, and you try to please them all and you try to give them something valuable. Those are my memories of the Kubert School. Bryan: Oh, and wonderful memories they are. It sounds like it was a wonderful fit for you. Did you consider going for a longer tenure there? I’m curious as to why it was only two years, if you don’t mind. Ric: I don’t remember exactly. I think part of the reason was that I had other plans. Let’s see. That was the late 1970s, and I had an offer from a friend of mine who’s a very good cartoonist named Leo. He’s from Argentina originally. I had met him at DC comics and his English was very shaky. So I was able to translate for him when he came over, and we spoke Spanish between us. And he went to Mexico and he telephoned me and said, “There’s a great chance here in Mexico. The Mexican Government’s Ministry of Education wants to hire bi-lingual artists who can do comic books on Mexican history. They have accepted the fact that the people here will never read books, but they will read comic books, so [the government] wants to give them a solid knowledge of history through comic books.” So I put my portfolio together and I flew to Mexico. They offered me a fantastic contract and at the time, the late 1970s, something like $90,000 a year to do these comic books on Mexican history. Bryan: That would be hard to turn down. Ric: Very hard, and I think that was one of the reasons I moved on from the Kubert School. I took my whole family, all six children we had at the time, and we drove for days and days until we got to Mexico. We found a home there, we found a bi-lingual school there for the kids, and I began to do the Mexican comic books on Mexican history. And as luck would have it, two months after I got there, they altered the exchange rate. I wasn’t being paid in dollars; I was being paid in the equivalent in Mexican pesos. They devaluated the currency to half its value. Suddenly the $90,000 became $45,000. Bryan: Oh, no! Ric: Then two months later they devaluated to half all over again and the $45,000 became $22,500. So suddenly I was scrambling around trying to find freelance jobs in Mexico and writing to New York to some of my old clients trying to get comic book assignments and advertising assignments

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

from other agencies that I’d worked for, and then I met with a Cuban… I’m originally Cuban, as you may know; that’s my funny accent. [chuckles] So I met a Cuban publisher, who had been exiled since the Castro regime took over, and this publisher asked me to develop an idea for him and take it to New York City and try to sell his idea for him and he pays for the trip. I took my oldest son along, who was about 12 at the time, and went back to good old, wonderful New York. I love New York. As far as I’m concerned, that’s my hometown. I spent my childhood and my teens in Havana, but I spent 30 years of my life in New York City, so to me, that’s my town. So we tried to sell this fellow’s idea to the TV networks and to DC Comics and to Marvel Comics and whoever would take it, and nobody would buy the idea. So, by now, I was totally disconnected from the Joe Kubert School. Then my little son and I went from New York to California, and again we went to every studio in California and we were lucky enough that Hanna-Barbera Animation Studios saw my presentation and said, “We don’t like the idea. We don’t want to buy the idea, but who did this presentation? Did you do it?” I said, “Yes.” They said, “We’d like to hire you to do similar presentations for us.” So I was offered a very good job at Hanna-Barbera. I ran back to Mexico to pick up the rest of my family. It took us about three weeks to get ourselves together. We got back to California and I went back to Hanna-Barbera and met the art director, a very nice man, Iwo Takamoto, a Japanese-American, and he said, “Oh, my gosh, it took you three weeks to get back here and I had to give the job to somebody else.” So, there we were in California, a new place for us, and I scrambled all over town looking for another job. Then I ran into Stan Lee, who was the head of Marvel Productions there. They did animated cartoons based on their comic book characters in New York, and he hired me on the spot. He knew my name from comics and we hit it off beautifully, and for the next six months I worked for him. Then Iwo Takamoto of Hanna-Barbera called me and he said, “I offered you a job and then I couldn’t give it to you, and I’ve been feeling pretty guilty about it, and the job opening is ready for you again. Please give me an answer in a day or two and come and work with us.” And that’s what I did. I went to work with them and I spent eleven years working for Hanna-Barbera. Bryan: Not bad at all! Ric: Not bad at all. In fact, at Hanna-Barbera, I discovered the animation film industry is a very flimsy industry. You get hired for production, whether you’re doing a movie, or you’re doing… the studio system was on the way out, and you get hired to do a production or two and after that everybody goes home. So I was an oddity in that I stayed there for eleven years when I saw people coming and going every two years. When Ted Turner bought out Hanna-Barbera, as happens in all those mergers, Ted Turner brought his own people, and the people who were there were let go and Ted brought in his own people, and that was that, and it was lucky for me because I was able to work for Dreamworks and for Warner Brothers and for Universal. I worked for many other studios, but on more of a short-term basis. One season, two seasons. So my experience in comic books helped me develop the technique of storyboarding for film. With storyboarding you get a script; somebody hands you a whole bunch of words on paper and you turn those words on paper into

sort of a comic strip to show the angles and how the story develops. So those years in comic books were priceless in the animation industry. We stayed in California for 17 years and I was working all the time. So I can’t complain. Then, here in Utah, I was offered a job I couldn’t resist. Again, the money was very good and we moved to southern Utah, and there I worked for 3½ years for a small studio that treated me very well until they folded and then I kind of semi-retired. I’m

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Check out the line-up of pros slated to help out at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Inc.! Courtesy of Peter Carlsson and Tell-A-Graphics. Below: Contributor Tom Foxmarnick tells us these are second-year Kubert School students.

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still doing work. I’m illustrating children’s books and writing novels, but I’m not running to an office every day. Bryan: That’s not all bad. Ric: Not all bad at all. I put in 17 years in California, but work-wise I put in 20 years worth of work for the Animation Guild and they’ve given me a very nice pension. I’m not rich, but I can live on it, plus Social Security. All our children but one are grown up, on their own and married. We have 11 grandchildren and they live all over the country, and we have a little girl with us, a little girl with special needs. She is our youngest and has Down’s Syndrome, and my wife, my little girl and myself are trying to live happily ever after. [chuckles] Bryan: It sounds like you’re well on your way, too. What a great legacy. Ric passed away in 2009. My penultimate stop on this sojourn, was to talk with comic strip artist Hy Eisman, who has taught Kubert School students since the institution was first established. Hy was cartoonist on Popeye, Little Iodine, Kerry Drake, and Bringing Up Father, as well as contributing comic book work to Marvel, Gold Key, Harvey, Dell and Charlton in the 1960s. Bryan: If I understood correctly, Irwin Hasen told me that you were the original staff member hired by Joe Kubert for the school. Is that correct? Hy Eisman: That’s true, yes. Bryan: I know you’re still there. How long have you been at it now? Hy: Since 1976, so that would be about 34 years. Joe and I are the only two still left from the original teachers. Bryan: Quite the accomplishment. Hy: Especially since neither Joe or I have much to do with computers. [chuckles] Nowadays, everything is being done by computer. The students, of course, are all using computers. Bryan: I miss the handwork and craftsmanship of comics Above: Hy Eisman in 1977. done the old-fashioned way. Below: one of his Li’l Iodine strips, Hy: In about ten years, you’ll be watching the Antique this one from Dec. 7, 1980. Roadshow and someone will bring up a thing and say, “Do you know what this is? This is a hand-drawn cartoon. Done by dipping a pen into ink. Do you see this little thing?” “What is that?” “That’s worth $50. It’s called a steel pen.” [laughter] Bryan: Once, when I spoke to Joe, he was getting into the computerized coloring and, as I recall, he described it as a learning process. I know from chats with some of your fellow

teachers and Joe, too, that he described the work at the school as a way of giving back and not necessarily for the money. Any comment? Hy: [Laughs] It’s true. When he started the school, he didn’t tell me he was starting a school. He just told me, “Why don’t you come out and see what I’m doing?” I live east of him, near the George Washington Bridge. He’s about 45 minutes west of me in Dover. It was a nice day and I said to my wife, “Do you want to ride out to Joe’s? He said he’s doing something.” That was a mistake, taking her along. [chuckles] Because when I got out there, he’s got this old mansion and he says, “I’m going to put a school here.” I thought, “Well, that’s nice.” Why, I don’t know, but sure, that’s a good idea. He says, “I want you to teach here.” I said, “I don’t know how to teach, Joe. I’ve never taught.” He said, “No, all you have to do is do what you’re doing and show them and tell them as you’re doing it.” I said, “That’s all there is to it?” He said, “Yeah.” I realized at that point I’d been working in the attic of my house for 26 years. I wasn’t speaking to anyone except [chuckles] with people involved in the neighborhood. Everything went through the mail. I hadn’t got up and talked in front of anybody. I can’t do this kind of thing. My wife said, “Yeah, why don’t you do it? It will get you out of the house once or twice a week.” There was the mistake. I said, “All right, I’ll try it.” It worked out. He developed the school and Ric Estrada, of course, was teaching at the same time. I read that thing you sent me that Ric said. He’s actually the guy that taught me how to teach. Bryan: How was that? Hy: Well, I didn’t even know how to begin and he told me, “Try to stay basic.” I didn’t know how basic to stay because at that time guys didn’t know about steel pens any more because they were using mechanical pens and bits, and I was talking about putting a pen nib into a holder and dipping it into an inkwell and they never said anything, and I didn’t know they didn’t know what I was talking about. So you had to go back and say, “These are steel pens that you can use that are flexible and they work like a brush if you use, say a 290 Guillot. I kept going back and back, more basic. “This is a pencil.” Another thing Ric told me that I never forgot because it happened to me often: He said, “Don’t ever show your students your own work. It’s like asking for a bullet in the back of the neck.” Slowly but surely he guided me on my approach. He had done some prior teaching I think. I was

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Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

sad to see him go. I didn’t realize until I read your transcript that he had that offer in Mexico. I had no idea. You only saw people maybe once a week at the school, so it wasn’t really a social kind of thing and it made it kind of hard to keep track of people. Most of the cartoonists at the time did one day a week. A little later on I took on two days, but I couldn’t keep that up doing two Sunday pages, freelancing and the other things I was doing. Bryan: Was your schedule up to you or was a certain minimum required or was it whatever you could squeeze in? Hy: Well, today most people pick their own day. When we first started there were only eight guys on the teaching staff, so we all picked a day. Two people would be trading off. One class would have one guy instructing in the morning and then have the other instructor in the afternoon. You switched off. At the beginning, I was teaching continuity, so I would teach one group in the morning and then a second group in the afternoon and whoever was teaching in the afternoon took the morning class. Of course, there were only 25 people at the time, to begin with. Bryan: So that was pretty manageable at the time. Hy: Yes, and then it grew and there were a lot of guys. I think it got up to 30 cartoonists working at the school. Bryan: Other than yourself — and Irwin and Joe obviously — who were the original instructors? Hy: Henry Boltinoff; Ric Estrada; Lee Elias, who, along with some comic-book work, did a strip about parallel life on another planet. I think they did it for the News Tribune Syndicate. Dick Giordano taught the first year. Irwin, Joe, and there was a lady who I believe was a colorist for DC named Harris. That was the group. After the fist couple of years, people kept asking how to letter because of course they were still hand lettering then. So Joe asked me to teach lettering. I did that for the next 15 or 20 years. Just lettering. [chuckles] That’s become an extinct curriculum. Just two years ago, we phased out hand lettering because they all insisted on using the computer. The letterers design their own fonts. Joe has a font and Adam Kubert has a font. They do their own. The kids at the school generally just use a commercial font and everybody’s stuff looks alike. Which turns it into a printing press. I think it loses that energy that old time cartoonists brought with their own unique lettering styles. Some were good and some were bad, but it was their own stuff. If you know Walt Kelly’s stuff, you can’t do Pogo unless you letter the way he used to letter that material. When the Reverend [in Pogo] spoke, he spoke in “Olde English” and it looked like stuff coming out of the Bible. The kids can’t grasp that. They don’t understand that the lettering is like the drawing. It’s a part of the artist’s make-up. Bryan: It’s an art all unto itself. Hy: Definitely. Bryan: Are the sound effects done the same? Hy: They pull the sound effects off these commercial fonts. So the sound effects also tend to all look alike. It’s become very mechanical. I’m now teaching continuity again, so I try to get them to look at the stuff and see the value in being a little different so you don’t look like you’re producing something mechanical. But you know young people grow up today with that computer in the crib and an iPhone, too. [chuckles] “Mom! Thirsty.” All the students seem to know what to do with a computer and inevitably ask, “Can it be done on the computer?” The other thing we used to try and explain to them is that a morgue is a good idea. You clip photos and you shoot photos so that you have a ready file of material, and you get a varied look of whatever you need. An automobile, a motorcycle… And they go to the computer. So, if it’s a motorcycle, they’re seeing a profile of a motorcycle. What if you needed a threequarter [view]? Go out and shoot it yourself. You can’t seem to make them understand research.

Bryan: Of course. When you type in the same thing you’ll get the same image result [as everyone else]. Hy: That’s exactly what happens. Now Pixar had a big exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art a couple of years ago. They use sculpture, which is amazing, to sculpt the characters so that the animators can work from it and they had a big sign that said, “It all starts with a pencil.” And I try to impress upon them that very thing: “It all starts with a pencil.” Pixar had stuff done in crayon and wash and oil and pastels, and they were concept drawings of stuff that the people were going to do and actually put on a computer, but it all has to begin with a creator. That’s what I’m trying to impart to them. “Close the computer. Sit down with your pencil and dig into your brain.” That’s what guys used to do. Bryan: The very core of it all. Hy: Do you draw? Are you a cartoonist? Bryan: No such luck. It flies completely in the face of Joe’s philosophy, but I don’t feel like I have any talent and got discouraged years ago. I know that Joe is convinced if you have the desire… Hy: Strong desire. It has to be what they used to call the fire in the belly. Bryan: Yes, the strong desire and the willingness to put in the hours equal success in Joe’s formula. I’m just skeptical in my own case. [chuckles] Hy: Well, if you have a strong interest in this medium and you write about it, that’s also a talent. Bryan: Well, thank you. This project has made me feel ten years old again. Hy: That’s the way I felt with the old cartoonists. Bryan: I don’t know where the industry would be without the Milton Caniffs — Hy: Hal Foster. Alex Raymond. Raymond Van Buren. Al Capp. Bryan: — Roy Crane. All the pioneers. Hy: And they ended up taking on assistants and ghosts and

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Hy teaches a lettering class at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, New Jersey. Here’s Hy with one of his young charges, in a 1977 photo. Courtesy of William Bossert.

Below: Second year Kubies Dave Dorman and Craig Boardman in a vintage snapshot courtesy of Tom Foxmarnick.

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Next page: The ad that got a lot of aspiring artists‘ hearts racing in the mid-’70s! Joe Kubert’s hand drawn announcement heralding the opening of his School of Cartoon and Graphic Art.

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that began even more careers. Bryan: You did that, too, if I’m not mistaken. [laughter] Hy: It’s been my career. I could never sell my own stuff, but they’d look at it and say, “Well, we can’t use that, but how would you like to draw this?” Anonymously. That’s the worst part. Bryan: As you taught, did any students particularly stand out? Hy: Oh, yes. Many of them went on to become professionals. One of them is doing Rex Morgan, M.D. [chuckles] I have trouble coming up with the names offhand. Some of them, in fact, did very well and then retired, which makes me feel a little ancient. Tim Truman, Jan Duursema, Tom Mandrake, Rick Veitch. Many of them went on to do solid comic book work and many of our current instructors at the school are former students. I taught most of them. Fernando Ruiz, for example, who does the Archie books, teaches at the school. In fact, during some of the time I was teaching I was ghosting Archie material and used it as lessons. A lot of the fellas got work at Archie. At least a half-dozen former Kubert School students ended up there. Most of them wanted to work for DC or Marvel, and every once in awhile, I would say, “You know it’s great if you can do the underwear heroes, but if you want to get work fast work on Archie because fewer people are interested in doing that.” A few of them took me up on it and have been working there for years. Bryan: Nothing wrong with steady work when you’re a freelancer. I’ve heard their rates are less generous, but bird in the hand and all. Hy: Comic book rates are less generous, that’s true. But they learn to work fast. That’s really the secret of the thing. Not only to draw, but be able to complete a number of pages in a given timeframe. Bryan: That would go back to Joe’s work ethic of spending time at the board. Hy: Oh, yeah. Joe is constantly coming out with new stuff. Even as we speak. He’s my role model. Bryan: As someone who has been employed longterm in the industry, what drives you? Just a sheer love of what you do? Hy: Absolutely. It took me so long to actually put this all on a paying basis; I feel that I just got into the industry yesterday. There is another thing. A personal thing. I grew up during the Depression, and my father was out of work from about 1933 to 1942. He would pick up odd jobs, but never any long-term work during that whole time and it made life very precarious. So part of the drive is not to depend on anything but myself to make sure there’s enough, so that I don’t have to ask for any help from anyone. That’s a large part of the drive for me. Bryan: How did you go about coming up with a curriculum? Hy: As I mentioned before, Joe said, “Just show them what you’re doing.” So I showed them what I’m doing, but they didn’t understand why I did it. By that time, of course, I’d been doing it for 26 years, so you don’t really think. You don’t remember when you didn’t know how to do it. Bryan: Second nature at that point. Hy: Yes. I was forced to actually put into words the techniques and in doing that I was sort of teaching myself what I was doing. One of the things that happened… you know the expression, “Work expands to fill the available time?” Bryan: Oh yes. I’ve experienced it. [chuckles] Hy: I was doing a Sunday page amongst other things. Little Iodine, which was a Jimmy Hatlo panel. They’ll Do It Every Time, and Little Iodine was a spin off of that. King Features had called me and by then I had a reputation of being a ghost, so they called me and I started doing the strip. That’s what I was doing when Joe called. I was doing the strip and I was also doing comic books. The strip would take two days. I thought that was the only way you could do it. I would pencil one day and the next day I would letter and ink it. Now I’ve got the work at the school and I use up a day at the school, which means I have to get up early one

day and go all the way out there, teach and come back. So I realized I had to speed up a little bit. I found out, much to my amazement, that I could do this page in a day, by using the whole day. Rather than taking a long lunch and all those things I actually could do it in a day. So the school actually helped me with my work. [chuckles] In talking about how I do it, I was able to eliminate some of the things I did because I really didn’t have to do that any more. So I would eliminate putting the stuff on a separate page and would go right to the Bristol board. I would do a storyboard and then go to the Bristol board, but I had been doing this thing so long that I really didn’t have to do that storyboard. Things I never would have thought of. I can speed it up and now I have to tell these guys how I do it. They would ask, “Why do you do it that way?” I’d say, “I don’t know. I’ve just always been doing it that way. I’m going to cut that out.” So I really was teaching myself while teaching them. That’s the thing that’s kept me there, because in spite of the computer I still get feedback from them. At the beginning I was only twice as old as the students. Now I think I’m eight times as old. [chuckles] I’m further and further away and they look at me differently than the earlier guys did. But they keep me in touch with what’s happening and that’s really a big part of it. Bryan: Sort of an energy and vitality to feed from I would guess. Hy: That’s exactly what it is. The other kick is that I bring in originals. Over the years, I collected stuff just by trading material before the stuff had any value. The cartoonists used to just send you a strip if you sent them a note or some guys would want to trade, so I ended up with Prince Valiant originals and Alex Raymond originals, and I’d bring them into the school and introduce them to cartoonists that even today these younger people really don’t have an interest, or they don’t think they have an interest in the old cartoonists of the past. I’d bring them in and they’d be amazed that this was done by hand. On Prince Valiant, I explained that he drew these animals, such as the horses, the figures, without reference because he knew how. His reference of the castles, backgrounds, the trees and such that he was depicting; those trees came from that area. It wasn’t just a generic tree. That’s how he produced that strip. They marvel at that. I love that feeling when I introduce them to it and their eyes open and they see something is done that you just can’t find today. You can’t find a man that’s working the way Hal Foster worked. Bryan: One of the truly great masters. I was actually lucky enough to see an original Foster Sunday Prince Valiant at an exhibit last year. Hy: Full-sized. Bryan: Yes. Hy: Not only is the current version very different, but they’ve got it down to the size of a postage stamp. I don’t know how anyone could work that size any more. Bryan: No comparison. Hy: He produced that thing, the horses and the humans, without reference. He just knew the human body and he knew the animals. I had a student who ended up teaching and I had introduced him to Alex Raymond originals and he was so taken by it he ended up interviewing Raymond’s relatives and descendents and doing other research and put out a beautiful book on Alex Raymond. You know Hal Foster didn’t really want to do a comic strip. He only went into it because it was the Depression and he had to keep a studio going. A strip was the only thing that would bring in enough money for the rent. A lot of the guys drank because of that. They thought they were losers because they weren’t doing real, respectable illustration work. Though many made a lot of money at it, they thought it was degrading. Bryan: And yet the people doing comic books longed for a syndicated strip. Hy: Not only that, but if you looks at early comic books a lot

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

of the stuff was swiped, because they felt that if they weren’t signing their name to it and they’re getting three dollars a page, well, this is what I’m going to do. [chuckles] Bryan: I remember reading a study comparing early Bob Kane to Hal Foster panels showing obvious swipes. Hy: Oh, they could do that with anybody at that time. Most of the stuff at one point was all Flash Gordon dressed up in a suit. The figures were definitely lifted from Sunday pages. Flash Gordon in a double-breasted suit and hat. You saw that constantly and the guys did it because of the anonymity. The publishers did it purposely because if anybody suddenly became a fan, they’d have to pay them more money. So in turn the guys would say, “Well, it’s unsigned and I need speed, so this is what you get.” Bryan: If you’re going to swipe, swipe from the best. Hy: Today, it isn’t called swiping, it’s all homage. [laughter] Bryan: I guess it’s like the old joke that if you copy one person it’s plagiarism, but if you copy three people it’s research. Hy: And if you copy five, it’s homage. Rounding up this talk with Kubert School instructors, I had this e-mail Q&A with renowned painter Greg Hildebrandt: Bryan: What led you to the Kubert school? Greg Hildebrandt: My daughter, Mary, wanted to go to art school. I saw an ad for the Kubert school. I was a fan of Joe’s art. So she enrolled in the school. A few years later I decided to teach. Bryan: Joe suggested it was a way to give back and laughed that it certainly wasn’t for the money. Any thoughts? Greg: It definitely was not for the money. It was a thrill for me to teach at Joe’s school and to have the opportunity to work with other teachers that were great artists. I believe that I have a certain amount of artistic information to convey. I believe that I did a pretty good job of conveying it to my students and I had a really good time doing it. Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Bryan: What was your specialty? Greg: Painting is my specialty. My course was about light and its impact on color. Bryan: Were any students particularly memorable? Greg: Do you mean particularly memorable then or now? Then, I remembered all of them when I was teaching. Today, I remember the ones that are still in the business. Of course Adam and Andy Kubert were two of my students and they are both memorable for sure. I remember the mistakes they made and how good they were and were not. I remember how quite one was and how loud the other one was. And I remember how cool it was to have them both as students of mine. Bryan: Was it rewarding to teach? Greg: I learned from my students and my students learned from me. So yes it was rewarding. Bryan: How long were you at it? Greg: I taught for 3-4 years. Don’t actually remember. Bryan: How did you come up with your curriculum? Greg: The first year was trial and error. The second year I had a direction. Bryan: Who else taught there that you remember? Greg: When I was there Irwin Hasen, Tex Blaisdell, Joe Kubert, Stan Kaye and Milt Neil, to name a few. Joe Kubert was one of my original contacts when I began this grand adventure and I’d e-mailed him a handful of questions, which he answered shortly thereafter. One asked him if this second career, referring to the school, was as satisfying as his artistic career. His reply was telling. “This is not my career,” he wrote. “I am a cartoonist — first, last, and always.” We can be thankful for Joe’s immeasurable contributions and the legacy spawned by the school that bears his name. The future of comics is on a surer footing because of this important effort. I hope you enjoyed learning a little more about it from those who were on the front lines. 105

Timothy Truman: Joe Kubert’s Heart & Fire The artist/writer of Scout and Grimjack fame talks about his beloved teacher Interview conducted by Jon B. Cooke CBC Editor [Timothy Truman is a renowned comic book artist and writer, as well as a musician, who is regarded for Grimjack (with John Ostrander), Scout, Hawkworld, scripting Dark Horse’s Conan for the last seven years, illustrating Grateful Dead collateral, adaptations of The Spider and Tarzan, and a re-visioning of Jonah Hex (with writer Joe R. Lansdale), among many other projects. In other words, Timothy — who produced the back cover to this book and is a kind and gracious West Virginian — is a tremendously gifted talent. He got his start at — you guessed it — the Kubert School, which he joined in its third year. The following interview was conducted by phone on April 11, 2013, and the transcript — transcribed by Steve “Flash “ Thompson — was edited for accuracy and clarity by Timothy. — JBC.] Comic Book Creator: When did you first become cognizant of Joe Kubert’s work? Timothy Truman: Well, he was one of the first artists that I started recognizing back when I was in grade school. Unlike most artists at the time, Joe usually signed his work, so I immediately started noticing the name. He was my favorite artist when I was young. If you would have asked me, even before I attended the Kubert School, I would’ve immediately said Joe Kubert was my favorite. I was just really very attached to and profoundly influenced by his work growing up. CBC: So you were reading the war comics as a little kid? Timothy: Sure. I grew up in Dunbar, West Virginia, and Below: Timothy Truman in a they didn’t have kindergarten for six-year-olds in our area, recent photograph. so when we first started school, we went right to first grade. I loved being at home when I was little so, on my very first day of first grade, I was absolutely terrified. My dad was walking me to school and we passed by this barbershop. In the window was a copy of Our Fighting Forces. I immediately stopped crying, stopped dead in my tracks and looked at that comic. Dad took me to school and I just had a horrible day, but when I came back, Dad was home from work and he had purchased that Our Fighting Forces comic from the barber. And, you know, there was a Joe Kubert story in there, so I started out enjoying Joe’s work at a really early age. CBC: Was that the first comic book you owned? Timothy: Yes! That was the first comic I owned. I was a really hyperactive kid. My cousins had big comic collections and when we’d visit their houses they brought out

Inset right: Timothy Truman believes this might be the very first Kubert comic book he laid eyes on as a first grader in the early ’60s. Our Fighting Forces #70 [Aug. ’62].

TM & © DC Comics.

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the comic books. I would sit in my cousin’s room or in the den for two or three hours reading them and looking at the cool pictures they wouldn’t have to worry about me getting into trouble. [laughs] CBC: Did you read Kubert’s Tarzan when it came out? Was that an exciting time? Timothy: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I was born in ’56 and Tarzan was in the early ’70s, right? So I was real aware of that. I was anxiously awaiting that. CBC: Were you aware of Joe’s “Hawkman?” Timothy: Yeah, sure was. Yeah, I’d grown up with all that stuff — “Sgt. Rock,” “Hawkman,” Tarzan, “Viking Prince,” “Haunted Tank,” you name it. “Enemy Ace” and “Firehair” were my favorites, though, and I thought that Joe did some of his most innovative, under-recognized work, compositionally and story-telling-wise, with those issues of “Unknown Soldier” that he did [Star-Spangled War Stories #151-160, 1970-72]. CBC: What was appealing about his art? Timothy: Well, Joe’s characters always seemed like they were… He didn’t do clean characters! His characters always looked like they had lived. Sgt. Rock always had that chin stubble, rumpled uniform, and looked covered in dust, y’know? He looked like he’d been through it. He had these Gregory Peck good looks but he was so craggy beyond that. So he looked like a “lived-in” Gregory Peck. [Jon laughs] There’s just something heroic about those characters, but also something very realistic. I could believe ’em.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Learning from the Master

TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: Did you start drawing at a young age? Timothy: Oh, yes. No one remembers exactly when I first picked up a pencil; I always seemed to have one. I’d use the backs of my sister’s homework papers and draw on those. CBC: Did you copy Joe’s art? Timothy: Yes, in fact, Joe, Jack Kirby, and Frank Frazetta were the guys I copied most, and later Steranko and Paul Gulacy. It’s really funny ‘cause I always sort of put Frazetta and Kubert in the same artistic boat as far as style goes, you know? [chuckles] There’s something that I found very similar in their approaches and stylings — the way they drew figures, the way their characters appealed to me, the gestures of them, the raw, heroic drive they had. CBC: Was there an organic quality to it? Timothy: Yes. And then, later on, after I started going to the school, I started to realize all these little storytelling things that Joe would do were just absolutely ingenious! Very “cinematic”— he was a film director on paper. Beyond that, his panel-to-panel and page compositions were just mind-blowing when you sat down and studied them. Especially stuff like “Enemy Ace.” They’re just gorgeous compositions. I think the organic quality is not only in the figures but also in the basic page design — the pages are alive, they aren’t static. They move and they grab your eye and they guide it through the page exactly where Joe wanted you to go. And at the pace that he wanted when you read a page, which is very important, too. CBC: You know, more than one person has said to me it’s almost irresistible, almost impossible not to read when you open up to any page of a Joe Kubert story. You’re immediately compelled to read wherever your eye first hits the page! He immediately has you under his spell. Timothy: Yes, exactly. Really captivating! When Joe was our instructor, he said that the peak skill for a cartoonist to develop was to become a communicator, even more so than a draftsman. That was our main goal: to become the most effective communicator we could. To communicate the story. CBC: When Joe took over as editor of the war books, were you cognizant of that? Did you see a change that had taken place visually with the war books? Timothy: Oh, absolutely! They became more realistic and no matter who was writing the story… In the case of Bob Kanigher, his stories seemed to become more humanistic under Joe’s editorship. And there was more of a narrative drive to the books visually, no matter who was drawing them. I came to find out that Joe was really pretty strict with his artists about communicating the stories, telling the most effective stories that they could tell. So he would honcho them through the layout process and all that. CBC: Early on did you recognize Sam Glanzman’s Kona? Timothy: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Yeah, I always thought that Joe and Sam were really similar in many of their approaches, too, which is kinda funny ’cause I was privy to some of Sam’s earliest drawings when I worked with him in the ’90s, looking at sketches that he did when he was in the South Pacific in as a young kid in World War II. You could see his own style developing there. So they sort of coincidentally developed similar styles quite individually without really knowing each other. Though Sam tremendously admires Joe’s work, they came up with their own approaches. In many regards, their techniques are similar as far as inking technique and things like that. A really brisk style with a lot of well-placed blacks. Also very humanistic characters. CBC: You worked with Sam? Timothy: Oh, yes. I was editor and publisher of a graphic novel he did for my 4Winds Publishing Group, Attu, and then Sam inked all three Jonah Hex mini-series that Joe R. Lansdale and I did for DC’s Vertigo imprint.

CBC: Were you privy to the development of the “U.S.S. Stevens” series? Did Sam suggest them? Did Joe encourage them? Do you know how they came about? Timothy: You’d probably have to confirm this with Sam, but the way that I understood it was that Sam wanted to tell those stories and Joe encouraged it after seeing Sam’s WWII sketches, which I was just telling you about. Sam had sketchbooks and had also illustrated letters home. Those letters are just phenomenal. There’s this wealth of historical information in there including some personal information about Sam and what he was going through during the war. He was encountering some amazing things—the Kamikaze attacks, and all that stuff. And there were things that he would see when they were in port on some of those islands like in New Guinea or the Philippines. For instance, on one occasion, Sam told me these islanders were carrying big burlap bags, which they would turn over to these official-looking U.S. personnel who were on the beach. Sam came to find out that the bags were full of Japanese heads! The islanders would lay in wait and ambush these Japanese soldiers, cut off their heads, and then take them to these U.S. officials, and get a bounty for them! So, he had sketches of seeing that. These guys bringing in

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Timothy Truman aptly worked on Joe Kubert-related concepts with Hawkworld. Original cover painting by T.T., courtesy of Heritage Auctions, to #32 [Mar. ’93], the final issue.

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big burlap bags full of heads and getting a bounty for them, just like the scalp hunters used to do in the old West! Pretty fascinating, you know? An unknown facet of U.S. history. CBC: I absolutely love the man and I absolutely love his work. I think the “U.S.S. Stevens” work is perhaps some of the most underrated material in comics. It’s a crime it hasn’t been collected! In the ’70s, he did a story that alluded to homosexuality that I just thought was astonishingly sensitive and insightful… in a DC war comic!

Above: Page of original art from Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo #2 [Sept. 1993] with pencils by Timothy Truman, inks by Sam Glanzman, and words by Joe R. Lansdale. Below: Joe Kubert obviously loved Sam’s “U.S.S. Stevens” stories, here trumpeting it on the cover of Our Army at War #225 [Nov. ’70].

Timothy: Well, that came from a real personal experience when he saw some poor guy getting beat up in the latrine aboard ship because he was a suspected homosexual. I just really think that affected Sam, y’know? Probably more than he’d really admit. Sam, he tries to come across like an old curmudgeon but he’s this dear, gentle, sensitive man. I think that that many things he witnessed during the war affected him profoundly. Sam and I would talk about the war — especially when we were looking through those sketches — we’d be talking about the war and we’d come across something like… Oh, he had this one drawing of a guy who’d gotten horribly burnt up in a turret after the turret caught fire after a shelling. We talked about it a little and suddenly he just cut it short. He said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Tim.” Like he’d flipped off a light switch and closed the door. So, quite understandably, there are some things that he would prefer not to dwell on. Guys like Sam and my dad, my uncles, my brother-in-law, and service men before and since — they are quite a rare bred. They saw and things during their military service that many of us could never comprehend. CBC: After graduating from high school in 1974, you initially went to art school in Ohio before you attended Joe’s school. What happened there? Timothy: Yeah, I went to Columbus College of Art and Design and flunked out, then went to West Virginia University and I flunked out there, too. [laughs] I was in an art education programs and I had no idea how to go about being an illustrator and — especially at that point — how to become a cartoonist. So I did really badly in school at first. I was just very discouraged. I met my wife, Beth, at West Virginia University, so while she finished up her master’s degree, I worked at various jobs for a couple of years. During that time, I opened up some DC comic and saw an ad for the Joe Kubert School and decided to apply. Beth and I decided that I would work while she was going to school and she would work while I was going to school. So that’s how I ended up going to the Kubert School. It was a dream come true. CBC: What year was that? Timothy: I started in ’78, I think. I graduated in ’81 from the school. I was in the third year that the school was in existence. I was in the first three-year class. CBC: You were interviewed by Joe? Timothy: Yeah, we drove up there from West Virginia and I was absolutely terrified. I’d met a couple of my heroes, but Joe was, like, my biggest hero. So meeting him was rather an intimidating experience. The school, at that point, used to be in this big mansion that Harry Chesler had owned. I’d gotten the appointment during the summer. I remember walking up and Joe was standing at the back door watching for me. There was this tall guy standing beside him and he said, “Hey, I’m Joe Kubert and this is Rick Veitch.” I almost fell over then because Rick Veitch was another one of my heroes from the underground comics work he was doing. He was a student there at the time. So, anyway, I went and had my interview with Joe. I had a few little acrylic paintings in there, but almost all my drawings were on 8 ½" by 11" typewriting paper. [laughs] I had no concept that artists drew their original art at a larger, 10" x 15" size! So he set me straight on that, but otherwise seemed to like what he saw

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Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Timothy Truman’s Scout: The Four Monsters collection [1987], sporting his cover art. Courtesy of the artist.

Below: Grateful Dead CD art by Timothy Truman. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

rest of it was all drawing time — sitting at the drawing board, drawing all day, every day. The instructor would walk around and critique our work and that was just invaluable. That was exactly what I needed. I hadn’t gotten that at Columbus or WVU. It worked. I might have flunked out of two schools, but, along with Mike Chen, I ended up graduating on the Dean’s List at the Kubert School. The lessons got across. Later, when I became a teacher myself, at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, here in Lancaster, that’s the way that I taught my students, too. I’d just give them a short lecture or group critique, give them an assignment, then let them do as much of the work as they could in class. I’d just go from desk to desk and give them as much input as I could, show them how I’d do things or help solve problems with them. In other words, I was following the pattern which Joe used with us and which he had gotten from the guys that in the studio with when he was 12. CBC: So Joe also taught you how to teach, as well. Timothy: Right. See, there were a lot of times you would ask Joe a question that he’d never been asked before and you’d get to see him have to process an answer it for the first time. You know, most instructors in a typical school would have ready-made answers. But you would see Joe stop for a second, and rub his chin, and really think about it. Since everything he at his own drawing board was so instinctive, he’d never had to analyze his own work and articulate why he did whatever he did. He’d never really had to compartmentalize or formalize all that stuff in his head and say to himself, “Well, gee, why do I do this?” So when you’d ask him specific questions about his work, he’d often have to back off and think about it a little and then relay the clear and honest information to you. So that could be pretty interesting. He freely admitted that there were a lot of things that he had just done quite naturally and instinctively for 30 years and he’d never quite had to put it into words why. Some of the approaches he took with storytelling, some of the inking techniques he used, the way he laid out shadows… Even though his work is so well-composed and cinematic, there wasn’t,

and accepted me into the school. CBC: What was your impression on meeting Joe the first time? Timothy: You immediately got that no-nonsense approach — that air of authority about him that he always had, even after you got to know him better. He just carried himself in that way. Not an overbearing or condescending person, to be clear, but not a man to be trifled with. That definitely came across. However, I mostly remember shaking hands with him. He had these huge hands, you know? He was infamous for this handshake grip that he used to have. I remember his hand engulfing mine as I shook his hand. [laughs] Joe took pains to keep himself in good shape, working out and such. He was this big bear of a guy. CBC: Now, let’s be honest: We know one of your claims to fame is drawing Grateful Dead comics… we know that Rick Veitch started off doing underground Two-Fisted Zombies comics with his brother. Steve Bissette did some trippy Swamp Thing work and Taboo. You guys, in some sense, could have been looked upon as counterculture and Joe Kubert was anything but at the time. Timothy: Exactly! CBC: Joe was pretty much a regular guy. But you guys — practically hippies — have this absolutely endearing affection for the man. Timothy: Right. And he for us. CBC: You guys were able to bridge the generation gap. What was it about Joe that made him appreciate youth? Timothy: I think Joe just appreciated artists and creative people. He respected the drive to create. It’s funny, I remember sitting with Bissette one day after we’d graduated and he was like, “Have you seen Joe’s work lately? It’s really getting burnt, man!”— meaning that is was getting a little darker and edgier. Joe was being as affected and inspired by Veitch and Bissette and Totleben and Yeates and all those people as we were by him, y’know? He would freely admit that he was learning as much from the students as they learned from him. Yeah, he was like really pretty conservative and we were just these dirty hippie-types. [laughter] But Joe loved us all. He took on and gladly accepted on this mentor role. He took it quite seriously and once he started appreciating something about your work, he let you know it. He wouldn’t gush about it or glad-hand you, but he would acknowledge it in his own way. You could feel him perk up. Or he would give you some Junior Scholastic work or a chance to do a two- or three-page Sgt. Rock back-up story — something to help you advance up the ladder, technique-wise, and see how your work looked in print. CBC: Obviously, I’m very much ensconced right now into Joe Kubert. I’m only now realizing the fact that the school was not only a business — not only a business decision to help advance him and his family — but it was a way of giving back to the art form. Timothy: Yes. That’s very astute of you because Joe would often speak to us about the fact that he started out in the business when he was 12 years old. Harry Chesler gave him the break and he started out erasing pages or sweeping the floors in Chesler’s studio, watching people work. Then these guys would let him hang out at their drawing tables and show him how they worked. One day they’d let him erase some pages. They’d let him ink, like, a rope on a ship. Then the next thing you know he’s doing some backgrounds. They were lifting him up the ladder and that definitely became his teaching method at the Kubert School. All that really influenced him, so that’s how he handled his own students. He made sure we would learn from pros — not guys who just graduated from some university themselves with a teaching degree — and they would sit with us and they would show us how they did stuff. It wouldn’t be teachers lecturing for an hour, giving us homework assignments, and us having to take the stuff home and complete them in a void. We had really long days — two to four classes a day and it was all studio time. Every class, we’d have a short lecture and the

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Above: Promotional poster for the weird Western series Hawken, drawn by Timothy Truman and written by his son Benjamin. Published by IDW.

Below: Tim Truman and Tod Smith [seated] at the Joe Kubert School in 1979. “It was our first- year class,” Tim says, “when classes were held in the old Baker mansion. Photo courtesy Kim DeMaulder, I think. There were about six to eight of us in that room, on the mansion’s first floor, and we really had to try to behave ourselves. That sliding door to the right led straight into the school’s main office and reception area, where Joe’s wife, Muriel, worked!”

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like, this Alex Toth analytical approach to it. Everything was totally from Joe’s gut, you know? “That’s the way I see it in my head, so I’m gonna put it down that way.” Everything was all heart and fire with Joe. CBC: Wow. That’s great. He’s not easy to imitate. I mean, his sons had come close to emulating his style. I would argue that you come quite close to looking to be as heavily influenced by Kubert as any artist out there. And the other guys — Bissette, Veitch — as well, to varying degrees, but I wonder if that is it that makes Kubert… Kubert? That it’s so much from the gut that it’s so not analyzed. He just went with it. Timothy: Yep, that’s what he did. Everything straightlined directly from his soul to his brush. I would argue that of all the people who went to the school — besides Adam and Andy, of course — Bissette and I were probably the most influenced by Joe before we met the man. That’s probably arguable. [laughs] But I would go up against anyone with that particular challenge. A lot of my formative, childhood stuff came from copying his stuff directly from the comics. I looked at his work and studied it almost as though it was some sort of religious text. For almost all of us students, though, there was this realization that, early on, Joe’s influence was so pervasive that we would start seeing “Joe-isms” pop up in each other’s work. It usually started showing up during out senior years at the school, or at around the time we graduating and we were getting our first jobs. And everybody acknowledged it and everybody saw it. I really had to fight against it twice as hard as most folks because he was such a big influence on me before I’d even gotten into the school. It got to the point where I made the conscious decision not to look at Joe’s work for awhile. After I graduated, I boxed up my Kubert collection and put them in the closet and didn’t look at them for two years, trying to divest myself of any sort of influence that anyone could misconstrue as imitation. CBC: Now, Joe was very helpful with the students as far as getting outside work, correct? Timothy: Yes, he sure was. There were the Sgt. Rock back-up features, plus he had various ongoing accounts with folks like Junior Scholastic and Heroes World, doing short comics features, ads, catalogs and various sorts of things. CBC: What was that experience like? Timothy: Joe could be a stern taskmaster. [laughs] Like I say, not overbearing or tyrannical in any way, but you just didn’t want to cross Joe. He was the captain, you were the crew. Now, some of the guys like Bissette and Veitch, I think, had a friendlier relationship with him and were more comfortable interacting

with him one-on-one. But I was always a little shy around Joe when I was younger. Joe could be hard for me to talk to when I was a kid. Luckily, I got better at it when I was older. Joe had this famous sigh that he did. And you never wanted to hear it because he was trying to think of a way to sort of let you down without crushing the life out of you. [Jon laughs] He wanted to keep you encouraged and at the work. He never wanted to dispirit you. [laughter] But when you would hear that [very long, deep sigh], it was like, “Oh my God, here it comes!” [laughter] We just wanted to please the guy. In fact, I don’t think I’ve met anyone in my life who had better leadership qualities, you know? I think he had that effect on almost all of us. Everybody just wanted to stay in his good graces at all times. CBC: You know, I’ve seen heads of studios who have awfully large egos and are super-controlling in some negative ways. And I know that Joe had an ego — of that, there’s no doubt — but he also a humble guy who commanded a loyalty that’s profound in its sincerity. You guys are a diverse lot. And yet this sense of loyalty that comes from all you guys seems to be absolutely endearing. When Joe passed, there was an audible, tremendous sigh of sadness… Timothy: Oh, my God, yes... CBC: That may not have been the case with any number of people with equal stature within the field. Did you stay in touch with Joe after you graduated? Timothy: Yeah, I would write him occasionally, but not enough. Once every five years or something like that I might send him a little note. We had a school reunion one year, which was fantastic. I got to see him there in Dover. And sometimes I would see him at conventions. I remember one convention Jim Amash put together down South somewhere and Joe was there. At that point, I hadn’t seen him at that point in like seven, ten years — something like that — and I was doing Scout and Grimjack, and had become an established pro. That was the first time I got to sit down with him as a fellow professional, you know? Our conversation was completely different and more relaxed. He didn’t have to be the schoolmaster anymore. It was great. We had some really nice conversations. The last time we saw each other was at a Baltimore Con a few years ago, and he smiled from ear to ear when he saw me and greeted me like a best Army buddy or something. It was wonderful. Joe was really proud of those of us who went on to establish solid careers in the field. He’d accomplished exactly what he’d set out to do. You could tell it was a great feeling for him. CBC: Did you learn anything on the business end from Joe? Timothy: Sure! The most important lesson from Joe himself was not to be late with deadlines, and that has served me very well over the years. There were times when I was doing Grimjack and Starslayer, when I was penciling and inking five pages a day, but we never missed a ship date. When I was doing Scout, I was penciling and inking three pages a day, but we never missed a ship date. [laughs] Then, later on, when I started working for DC and some of the other companies, editors really appreciated that dependability, so though I think I might have sometimes fallen woefully short as a draftsman — particularly with some of that earliest work I was doing — editors appreciated the fact that I was the last guy in the world who’d give them any deadline headaches. I think they’d probably hire me sometimes over somebody who might have been a more capable draftsman whom they’d have to nursemaid through deadlines! CBC: What does Joe mean to you? Timothy: Joe’s the reason I’m in the business. Simple as that. I wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for the guy. First as my major influence and then — well, you know, I’d flunked out of two art schools and was wandering around and wondering what I was going to do about this desire I had to do illustration and draw comics and tell stories. Joe provided a place and opportunity for that. Yeah, my life would have been very, very different, indeed, without the man.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

A Practical Man

Paul Levitz: Joe Takes Care of Business Friend and former DC Publisher on the common sense of a guy named Joe Interview conducted by Jon B. Cooke CBC Editor [Paul Levitz began his comics career as a fanzine editor, skulking about publisher offices in search of scoops for Etcetera and The Comic Reader, and would join DC Comics to move up the company ladder as (respectively) assistant editor, scripter, editor, business manager, and eventually the top rung of DC publisher and president, a position he held from 2002–09. Today, Paul is contributing editor and overall consultant with the company now called DC Entertainment, Inc. He has returned to writing his beloved Legion of Super-Heroes and is currently at work on a biography of Will Eisner. He was interviewed on April 5 and 11, 2013, and the following transcription (transcribed by Steve Thompson) was corrected and edited for clarity by Paul. — JBC.] Comic Book Creator: When did you first become aware of Joe’s work? Paul Levitz: As a byline, probably around the DC Special [#5] about him. That was at the age when I was just beginning to understand that people did things and I had probably seen a couple of his early/mid-’60s super-hero covers — there’s a couple of Batman and Justice League he did for [editor] Julie [Schwartz] — and been curious about sort of a different style and line. But I don’t know that I was aware of him as a distinct person in our history prior to that. The DC Special did a pretty good job of introducing him. CBC: Did you have any exposure to the war comics? Paul: I must’ve read a couple of them over the years, in some other kid’s stack, but I don’t recall buying one. I guess I probably bought, by that point, maybe the Showcase issues. There’s one Showcase “Sgt. Rock” and then there’s a Showcase or two of “G.I. Joe,” and it was like, “Oh, I’ve gotta have these just to fill in the set” kind of thing. CBC: Right. “Enemy Ace.” Paul: Guess so. CBC: Obviously, as publisher of DC Comics you were privy to, I would reckon, some of the demographics. Was the makeup of the reader picking up the war books remarkably different that of the reader picking up the super-hero books? Paul: If anybody did any studies of those at the time, they didn’t survive for me to be aware of. I suspect they weren’t separately researched because they weren’t separately sold as an ad group, so there wasn’t any particular reason to do it by the logic of the time. CBC: I also mean to the very end of the war genre run at DC, when you were in the offices. Paul: By the time I was in management, the war genre was such a small part of the line, there really wouldn’t have been any reason to do that kind of research. CBC: So, was it really Tarzan that made you cognizant of Kubert’s work? Paul: Tarzan was the first thing I really delighted in that contained his work. I was working on a fanzine — it was

then called Etcetera at that point and it was about to shift to being The Comic Reader. I was gonna have the big scoop that Tarzan was coming to DC [jumping from Gold Key], which was pretty well impressive as there were only a couple of occasions when a license had moved to DC from another publishing company, the last of those probably a decade or more before. So everybody at the company thought this was exciting. It had been a very successful title for Gold Key. Joe was extraordinarily excited. He thought, this was an artist’s book! He could do some work to out his name up there with [Burne] Hogarth and [Hal] Foster, and the other greats who had touched it. So there certainly was a lot more focus at that point. CBC: How did you get the scoop? Paul: Dunno. I was 14. I was hanging around the offices. Somebody told me. It may have been Joe [Orlando], it may have been Marv [Wolfman], it may have been Carmine [Infantino]. CBC: So what was Joe like to a 14-yearold kid who was hanging around the offices? Paul: Remarkably benevolent. I mean all the team at DC and Marvel, were so kind. When I look back, in retrospect, it baffles me that they put up with me. I think a lot of it was that there were really no other news ’zines trying to identify who the writers and artists were when the books were coming out. A lot of the freelancers liked knowing that information so they could make sure they got their extra copies, even if they had to buy them themselves. But it amazes me that I got away with it — that nobody called my mom and sent me home. CBC: Well, you had a good fanzine, Paul. I mean, come on. [laughs] Paul: It grew into being a decent fanzine but still… a 14-year-old kid around a business office. [Jon laughs] Comic book companies are not your most formal environments in business, but this was a Manhattan skyscraper office, a New York Stock Exchange public company, a fair number of guys in suits wandering around and I’m bouncing around the place as a 14-year-old kid! CBC: We’ll mark you down as grateful. Paul: Grateful and baffled! CBC: [Laughs] Well, I’m glad it happened. Now in retrospect, did you look back at the war books at all and note that there was a graphic change, for instance, with Joe taking over as editor?

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Inset left: Portrait of Paul Levitz by Seth Kushner.

Below: Paul Levitz’s earliest involvement with the comics industry was as a fanzine editor skulking about publishing offices in search of a scoop. Here’s a copy of Etcetera & The Comic Reader #82 [Feb ’72] with Alan Kupperberg Tarzan cover.

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TM & © DC Comics.

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Paul: Oh, absolutely! When I began working at the company, my responsibilities included serving as assistant editor on some of the war titles and ultimately as editor on several of them. I don’t know if the one that I presided over the creation of was the last of DC’s war books, but one of the last of the old-school ones, Men of War. I had immersed myself pretty deeply in the war line by that time. I gained a great deal of respect for Kanigher’s storytelling style, his taste in artists. He assembled an extraordinary team of artists working on those books. And then, when Bob had his health issues and had to step down, Joe really kicked it up yet another notch when he took over as editor. CBC: Do you know the timing of that? Was that coinciding

with Carmine Infantino’s ascension as editorial director? Paul: My sense is that both of those events pretty much happened in ’67. It’s hard to tell exactly when Carmine’s job morphed through its different incarnations. As I can speak to from personal experience, one’s different job designations don’t necessarily represent the different phases of one’s work. Sometimes a responsibility gets added, the job title catches up. Sometimes the job title means one thing one day and another day another. Carmine seemed to carry the titles art director, editorial director, publisher and then president, but there’s not really a bright line of demarcation of exactly what authority he had in each position each day. At least, not as far as I’ve ever been able to tell. CBC: When we talked earlier, you had a very interesting word to use about Carmine’s tenure: “fearless.” Paul: Carmine presided over an astounding burst of creativity at DC, when you look at what was launched in that ’67–’69 period. By the standards of any of the comic book companies of the last decade before that, it’s an extraordinary range of experimentation. Most of the comic book houses through most of their lives were searching for what the trend was, if the trend was working you did more of that trend. DC certainly did a fair amount of that, the mystery books being an example, the proliferation of sticking the word, “weird” on all sorts of different genres to try and get a little rub-off from it. But not withstanding

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

TM & © DC Comics.

This page: “Firehair,” the saga of a red-headed teenager, born of European stock but raised as a Blackfoot Indian —and rejected by both worlds — on the Great American Plains of the 1800s, was a daring and different concept that tapped into the prevailing alienation in late ’60s culture. Joe was creator, writer and artist of the innovative series, which saw light in Showcase [#85-87] and as backup in Tomahawk [132, 134 & 136].

TM & © DC Comics.

that, if you look at that period, you have experiments as diverse as Anthro, which was like no comic that was being published at the time. Very much a newspaper strip approach. Howie Post doing a brilliant and radical strip. “Dolphin,” kind of an adventure/romance a decade, two decades maybe before a Little Mermaid kind of theme. And Jay Scott Pike with that incredibly beautiful work on that. So many of the projects that came through were steps that were radically different from what DC had done before and that were radically different from what was going on elsewhere in comics! It wasn’t simply, “Okay, super-heroes are hot, let’s put out another six super-heroes.” You know… a measure of that… but many, many things that went beyond it. CBC: Do you recall when Joe was starting up the school? Was he backing off from his commitments at DC to carve out some time so he could start the school? Paul: Well, I think he was in the office markedly less as a result. I don’t know that he was reducing the number of books he was editing yet. But he was drawing less and doing more things that he was laying out at the period where he developed a very sketch layout style to work with the Philippine artists. And of course, a lot of the work for the backs of the books, he worked with the students This page: Joe seemed to have a ball depicting “The and counseled them through. Unknown Soldier” in Star Spangled War Stories. Related in CBC: DC Comics and the Kubert School had a theme (Hitler), below is a spread from SSWS #156 [April–May relationship, correct? 1971]. Above is The Unknown Soldier finale, #268 [Oct. ’82].

Paul: I remember his working out a deal to have his students do backups for the books and working out a special rate for that, where he was kind of guaranteeing that the work would be up to his professional capacity even though much of it would be done by the kids. But he’d go over it, you know, and make it work. CBC: Did you notice, did Joe’s professionalism rub off on his students? Did you note perhaps a difference in them compared to kids who came in off the street that were more self taught? Was there something that Joe imparted upon his charges? Paul: You know, I only worked with a selection of Joe’s students obviously, because only some of them came in to mainstream comics and only some of them came to DC. The ones who came in the first few years included an extraordinarily talented and solid group of people. I got to do stories with Tom Mandrake, Tom Yeates, Jan Duursema, Steve Bissette. Those were all graduates within the first two years. You’d have to say that’s a hell of a teacher! And of course, he goes on to produce an army of talented people for decades afterwards. CBC: When you were up there as a publisher, do you recall the third-year class coming in to show their work? Paul: I sat through one year and I also worked with Joe. He invited me to sit on an advisory board the school had to have for some legal reason. So,

Above: Peter Carlsson at Tell-A-Graphics shared this DC rarity, a promotional mailer sent to magazine distributors trumpeting the arrival of Joe Kubert’s Tarzan!

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every year or whatever the cycle was, he’d say, “Okay, all you guys, I need to meet you in Dover.” And then we’d sit there and talk about the curriculum and I remember arguing with him early on about the importance of getting computer art into the classroom, that it was gonna be so important for this generation. CBC: What is your assessment of Joe as a businessman? Paul: Well, he ranks in the top three or four of the Golden Age through the 1950s. In the earlier years, the gap between being a businessman and an artist was very close to a steel wall and there were only a few guys who managed to live on both sides of it—Will Eisner and Joe Simon most notably. CBC: In your estimation, was that just the street smarts Joe had developed? That he listened to wisdom of others. He had a particular relationship with Harry “A” Chesler…

Paul: That’s why I think the relationship with Norm Maurer was enormously important. I never got to know Maurer, but by Joe’s description, he did a disproportionate amount of the heavy-lifting on contracts and things like that at St. John and their other teamwork. On the other hand, Joe partnered it fully and learned things from that. I think, again, temperament was a big piece of it. Most artists don’t necessarily have the temperament to walk into a room full of businessmen and negotiate a deal. They’re uncomfortable, they’re nervous, and if they broadcast that nervousness, it makes it harder to get anything done. I think Joe was wonderfully self-confident and wonderfully comfortable wherever the hell he was in life. I think that was a big part in his being a businessman. CBC: You knew Muriel, his wife? Paul: Oh, yeah, sure. I worked with Muriel a lot over the years. CBC: What was she like? Paul: Eminently solid. I was deeply, deeply fond of her. When you look at the wives of the great artists in the field: Ann Eisner was a wonderful partner in life to Will, but not interested in being immersed in Will’s business life; Roz Kirby protected Jack, and she felt the need to get involved in his organizational life, whatever was going on, to keep him safe from his own preoccupations, let’s put it. In the same way that Roz would tell the story that she would do the driving because she was afraid Jack would start daydreaming and crash the car. Muriel was pretty much a hands-on business partner to Joe. “Oh, you need someone to manage this stuff? Okay, I can manage that part of the puzzle.” You’d hear the kids at the Kubert School talk about her emotionally at the time of her funeral, the love they had for her, for how she had worked with them on financial aid, getting them housing, getting them into the school. It was very, very deep. This is a woman who wasn’t the nominal principal of the school, she was a functioning principal for the school. CBC: Did you see Joe in any social occasions in the ’70s, in your early years at DC? Paul: I think that the age gap was really too great. If there was a DC Christmas party, obviously I’d see him at a social event like that, but in terms of a one on one friendship with, sort of, two adults having lunch together and talking about stuff, that didn’t really happen until, gee, I would say, well into the 1990s. CBC: Did you ever see Joe and his family? Paul: I’m the age of his kids! I don’t think you get past that on some level. Not that he ever disrespected me on that basis! He treated me with perfect respect but it still wasn’t that natural peer relationship. CBC: I’ve dealt with any number of men of his generation. Certainly, Will Eisner could be a humble man but he was very well aware of his strengths and his weaknesses and yet Joe had this thing — he just was a regular guy. Paul: He just wasn’t a guy who ever believed his own press. I think that’s something that happens to us in childhood. Some of us realize what our gifts are and become very proud of them. Some of us become too proud of them! And some just say, “Well, you know, I’m lucky!” I think Joe fell very much in that category.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: You collaborated with Joe on occasion. What was that like? Paul: Absolutely thrilling! I had the pleasure of him drawing two stories I wrote. One a mostly Hawkman, sort of sideways Martian Manhunter for Detective Comics #500, which was going to be my “Grand Farewell” as an editor. I also had the great fun of collaborating with him on the cover for that which is one of the most unusual covers in DC history because it’s one of the rarest jam pieces. DC did that only a handful of times ever! And here was a piece Joe, Carmine, Dick Giordano, Garcia-Lopez, Tom Yeates, Walter Simonson, Bob Smith and Jim Aparo. That’s an amazing piece of work. And when I was getting up from the business desk, Joe was the first guy who called me, saying, “Oh, you wanna write? Write something for me to draw. Tell me what you’d like me to do.” That was just an astounding compliment. And we did that Sgt. Rock story that just came out about a month ago. CBC: That was in his last series, Joe Kubert Presents. How would you characterize your friendship with Joe and Joe Kubert the man? Paul: Joe as a man was one of the most humble human beings I ever had the pleasure to know. I think every conversation we had in life included his reminding me that

he felt he was one of the luckiest human beings ever. He was balanced. He was centered in his family. A very good role model as a human being in all of those ways, even besides his extraordinary talent and dedication to actually working his talent. The friendship was a shared interest in the field, a shared interest in the students. I served for a number of years on an advisory board for the school that they were legally required to have so we’d show up once a year, toss some ideas around for Joe. I remember arguing with him the importance of computer art as a growing area in the field, how he had to get more equipment and have the kids spending more time with that. And just we two had been down the same long walk. We had so many friends in common. We’d done so much together. We’d worked together in so many different relationships and I’ve been the publisher of some of his works and negotiated — to the extent there was conflict negotiation involved — contracts with him. I’d been an editor and had him design covers based on ideas I’ve had. I’ve been a writer and he’s drawn stories. I’ve been the pesky guy who’s in charge of keeping the books on schedule, bothering him about getting his books turned in. I’ve been the fan gathering the news. A lot of different points of contact. That made for a warm friendship.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: The 1977 Super DC Calendar sported, for the month of July, this Joe Kubert-rendered image of Hawkman and Hawkgirl versus The Gentleman Ghost in Merry Olde England.

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Tributes in Memory of Joe Kubert Words and pictures from friends, peers, students and fans about the comics master

Comic Book Creator did our best to get word out that we were looking for testimonials and art honoring the late Joe Kubert, especially contacting “XQBs” — former students of The Kubert School — but, alas, we couldn’t reach everyone and many were too busy to participate. To those who would have liked to have been included in the print edition, our apologies. To those who did contribute but were crowded out of the 160-page print edition, our deepest apologies. Rest assured, at least, the digital PDF edition includes all remembrances. Much as Ye Ed wished to extend the printed issue, publishing logistics keep us on a severe regimen. Do note that we plan to expand the tributes in an ongoing and perpetual tribute section at www.cbcmag.net, so get in touch with Ye Ed to be a part of that continuing memorial.

Next page: Neal Adams showcases perhaps Joe Kubert’s greatest legacy, the alumni from his renowned art school. Names correspond (roughly) to chin level. 116

Karen Berger There are certain people in your life who really make a difference. Joe Kubert was one of those people for me. He was a constant, caring presence during my 30-plus year career at DC Comics. He really felt like part of my family. So much, that when he became ill before he passed away, I asked Joe and his family if my brother, who’s a physician, could consult with Joe’s doctors to make sure he was receiving the proper medical treatment. I started working at DC Comics fresh out of college. I wasn’t a comics fan, so outside of the popular super-heroes, I knew nothing about so many of the other characters, and I certainly didn’t know anything about the writers and artists. The unique storytelling magic of comics certainly made an impression on me and I ended up staying at DC for a very long time! But, if the people creating the comics weren’t so nice and interesting, I wouldn’t have remained, especially in those early impulsive years. The industry was still fairly self-contained in the early 1980s. The majority of talent lived in the tri-state area so they delivered their work in person, which was how I got to know Joe over the years. While there were so many incredibly talented artists, Joe’s natural line, fluidity of form and emotional resonance took my breath away. There was something special about his talent. But there was also something special about the man himself. And no one gave you a better handshake or hug than he did! I thought a lot about Joe after he passed away — I still do. My father died when I was very young, and Joe became very much a father figure to me. When he died in August of last year, I wrote a column for DC’s blog, which was also printed in the Vertigo books and appears below. It was written over many tears, but it made me feel good to be able to share with so many people my love and respect for this wonderful man. Joe Kubert had a special kind of life-force. Certainly, he was a gifted artist and master storyteller, but it was his integrity, passion, kindness, and strong sense of conviction that I’ll remember most. He was like family. Joe was one of our medium’s true pioneers. Drawing since he was old enough to hold a piece of chalk, he started professionally illustrating at age 12 and never stopped. Over seven decades, he had drawn scores of memorable characters for many companies, but primarily for DC: most notably Hawkman, Tarzan, Enemy Ace, Batman, The Flash; he was also co-creator of Sgt. Rock, Ragman, and creator of Tor. In addition, Joe became an exceptional editor in 1968 at DC, and after leaving staff in 1976, he founded the cartooning school that bears his name with his wife, Muriel. The Kubert School is the only full-time accredited college devoted to comics, and has graduated many of our industry’s finest artists including two of Joe’s sons, Adam and Andy. Most special to me were those first few graduating classes, with Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, and Tom Yeates, amazing creative talents and longtime friends of mine. While Joe was expanding the Kubert School and teaching full-time, he was still drawing full-time. And in the years to come, he created his most personal works: Abraham Stone; Fax from Sarajevo; Jew Gangster; Dong Xoai, Vietnam

1965; and, for me, his masterpiece, Yossel: April 19, 1943. Joe’s family emigrated from Poland when he was a baby and Yossel is the tragic, inspiring and all-too-real story of what might have been if they had never left. Reproduced entirely from Joe’s pencil art, the emotion and vitality of Joe’s work has never been as effective, enduring and heart-stopping. When Joe suddenly got ill a few weeks ago, I spent a lot of time thinking about him. I remembered that in 1980, the first cover I commissioned as an editor was from him for House of Mystery #292. During the next several years, while Joe was still editing Sgt. Rock, he would come into the offices at 75 Rock once a week to handle business and to meet with writer Bob Kanigher, his longtime collaborator. The two of them couldn’t have been more different. But they were both storytelling masters who loved to challenge each other. I always remember hearing loud voices coming from Joe’s office and seeing that gleam in his eye as he and Bob would go at it. Joe was a man of unerring principle and conviction. And though he respected a lot of what Vertigo published, he would often tell me that he was worried that some of it was too strong, and he didn’t want me to get into trouble. Still, I think he was proud of me, and that’s what matters the most. And although most of his books weren’t published under Vertigo, it meant the world to me that he insisted that all of his most personal work be handled under my purview along with fellow Vertigo editor, Will Dennis. Joe was up in the office just a couple of months ago and he looked as great as ever. Who would’ve thought that this almost 86-year-old man who lived life to its fullest would be leaving us so soon. Artist, writer, teacher, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, friends to many, Joe Kubert always claimed that he was a lucky man to have such a wonderful family and such a wonderful life. For those of us who were fortunate to have known this one-of-a-kind and genuine soul, we were also the lucky ones. What a talent, what a legacy, what a man. Rest in peace, dearest Joe.

Stephen R. Bissette Like most comic book readers of my generation, I “met” Joe as a lad, long distance, through Joe’s energetic, distinctive comics creations and co-creations: collaborative work with diverse peers on the likes of “The Flash” (Joe inked the seminal Silver Age Flash rebirth in Showcase), “Hawkman,” “Cave Carson,” and “The War That Time Forgot”; his fruitful collaborations with writer/editor Bob Kanigher on series like “Sgt. Rock,” “Enemy Ace,” and so many more; his solo efforts as writer/editor on Tor and “Firehair,” and his adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels, and more. To my eyes, Joe’s comics seemed forever alive and vital, bursting with vigor and life, and yet soaked in shadows and the threat of mortality, inked with dinosaur blood and oil. In the summer of 1976, I met Joe in the flesh — at my interview at the Baker Mansion in Dover, New Jersey, in hopes of making the cut to be part of the first-ever class at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Inc. — and first met his eye and felt his knuckle-cruncher handshake. My life changed the second I met Joe; and a second later, when my father met Joe, life got even better.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Dave Dorman (with glasses)

Remembering the Master Neal Adams

Alec Stevens (with beard) Andre Szymanowicz Alex Maleev Stephen R. Bissette (with beard)

Tom Mandrake

Steve Lieber Eric Shanower Tom Raney

Rags Morales

Dan Parent

Andy Kubert

Adam Kubert

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

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My father had never really believed one could make a living drawing: yet here was Joe, raising a huge family as a lifelong working cartoonist. My father had served in four branches of the service and didn’t consider cartooning a masculine preoccupation; Joe had served in the military, and was in every way a man’s man. With their first handshake, their first words, everything I’d ever wanted to do with and in my life was suddenly okay with my father — and from that moment on, my dad was totally supportive and in my camp. Joe — and the school — opened countless doors for me and other aspiring cartoonists and storytellers. And Joe always taught by his own example. In this, Joe not only launched the school (with his beloved wife, Muriel, who was the backbone of the day-to-day operations) and taught classes, but he continued to edit and draw comics, and later graphic novels, along with myriad projects that flowed across his desk and through his studio (including various school work programs, which students like myself cut our professional teeth with), too numerous to mention. I last saw Joe two years ago. We talked on the phone between then and now; he was ever attentive, ever supportive, and forever “paying forward” the gift of storytelling, of making comics and making art. It’s a debt I know I could never repay, and now that Joe’s gone, I never will — except by following Joe’s example. As

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James Sturm wrote to me, “Know you are carrying his banner every day you walk into a classroom.” As Joe taught me — as ever by example — you repay the generation that gave you everything by doing the same for the next generation. Like everyone at the Joe Kubert School and the Center for Cartoon Studies, I do my best to live up to Joe’s example by sharing all I know with the next generation of cartoonists. As Joe proved every day to anyone who was lucky enough to be in his circle, it’s the least we can do. Then, you go do more.

Kurt Busiek Okay, here’s my Joe Kubert story: It’s 1991. I’m at the San Diego Con for the first time as a freelancer. I’ve been there several times as a Marvel sales rep, and once, a decade earlier, as a fan, but this is the first time in years that my time is my own, and I don’t have to spend most of the con working a booth. Malibu is about to publish a graphic novel, by Joe, Abraham Stone: Country Mouse, City Rat. What they’re doing for the show is, they’ve got a bunch of advance copies, with a tipped-in sheet of drawing paper. Joe’s there at the con, and while he’s at the Malibu booth, if you buy a copy, he’ll do a sketch in it for you. I was going to buy a copy anyway, but to get a Kubert sketch too? It’s not like I need to be convinced. I get in line. People are talking about what they’re going to have Joe sketch for them. Enemy Ace. Hawkman. Sgt. Rock. Tarzan. The Unknown Soldier. Some are picking the Flash, because Joe inked the first Barry Allen story, back in Showcase #4. But I know how cons go. Artists get asked to draw the same stuff over and over, until they can do it on autopilot. Much as I’m sure it’d be a fine sketch, I don’t want Joe to draw something in my book that he’s drawn a million times, something he could do in his sleep. I want something different, something maybe-not-unique, but something he thought about, something that makes my sketch a little less rote, a little more personal. So I think about it. And I’ve got a long time to think, because it’s a long line, and it takes more than an hour to get to the front of it. Ragman? Firehair? One of the characters from Tales of the Green Beret? Finally, I think I’ve got a good idea. Back around 1981, there was an attempt to revive Milton Caniff’s classic Terry and the Pirates strip, and Joe was the artist for it. Maybe the writer, too. It didn’t happen, but Joe did a couple weeks’ worth of strips as samples, and I got to see them and do a brief article about them back when I was writing and editing for tradezines, shortly before I broke in as a writer. That’s a Kubert project nobody much knows about, but as a Kubert fan and a Caniff fan, it’s one that resonates with me. So that’s what I’m going to ask for. So finally, I get to the head of the line, and Joe asks what I’d like. I explain about the Terry thing, and ask for any character from the strip, his choice. Joe looks wistful, and says he loves that strip, and the cast, and any other characters, he’d be willing to draw without reference, and fake his way through it, but for Caniff’s characters, he’d just need to do them more justice than that. Could I pick something else. So there I am at the head of the line, and I have to pick something else, and it took me an hour to think up the last one, and now I’ve got seconds. And I’d still like it to be something unusual. “Um,” I stammer. “Uh. Um, um, um… a gorilla in a baseball cap, drinking a beer?” And Joe pauses. Looks up at me. Smiles. “What team?”

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Sergio Cariello In 1982, I bought an issue of Batman. The art was wonderful, but the drawing which changed my life was an ad in the back pages: A caveman asked an ugly bird: “Have you heard about it? The Joe Kubert School?” Joe Kubert! I had been a fan of his ever since I saw his version of Tarzan. Suddenly my lifelong dream had a goal — this was the school where I would learn to improve my art. I started saving money and began learning English so I could fulfill my dream. Joe Kubert is still my teacher. A master storyteller! God blessed us through his art and his desire to share his secrets with us. Every drawing, every panel, every page and book continues to teach us a ton! Joe not only was a master of his trade artistically but he set an example in professionalism as well. Fearless, firm, but also a gentleman, cordial and extremely inspiring. He never ceased to impress me with his art and leadership. Joe was always accessible to me, whenever I wanted to see him in his office or chat over the phone. Ever excited to draw ’til the end, he had quite a few jobs in progress before passing. I loved everything he did, especially his Tarzan. He was a major incentive for me to migrate to America, attend his school and follow a career in comics. I was privileged to be interviewed by him when I applied. I was so excited to be able to teach alongside him, after having the joy of learning as a student. I even helped him in his correspondence courses. Thanks, Joe, for all you’ve done . The ripple effect of your work will continue to influence and impact many to come after you! From a true fan and friend! We’ll miss that gripping handshake! I’ve already expressed my feelings about the man and how much I’ll miss him, so let me write specifically about his art. When I behold Joe Kubert’s art, I just feel like I’m in for a treat: Pleasing to the eyes, inviting to the brain, soothing to the kid in me. His approach is apparently simple, to the point, clear, uncluttered, yet complete, informing what is set out to convey and at the same time open, allowing our senses to fill-in-the-blank, catapulting our creative juices to participate in the ingenious composition, full of fluidity, elegance, non-rigid illustration. The balance is just right for me. It’s like getting a perfect balanced meal for the fan-eye in me: a bit cartoony at certain areas, a bit “unfinished” in other areas (but purposely left that way for clarity and focus priority), the right amount of shades to add weight, solidity and credibility to the drawing, perfect amount of exaggeration to increase dynamics (but not too much to make you wander off, insulted). That’s because Joe knows how to build it from scratch, unfazed or forced by his reference to follow, but yielding all reference to bow down to him, just aiding his pure, fresh, and

creative desire, unafraid of making a mistake, freely drawing with his mind and using his hand to transfer his raw imagination to flow into the tools of choice. Bang! There it is! Lively, fresh, original, but well-referenced, and very pleasant and healthy if “digested” correctly. His method allows him to draw that same drawing in various angles and combinations of poses as limitless as his imagination because he draws it from within out! — with Joe Kubert.

Jan Duursema They moment I walked into the Kubert School for my interview with Joe Kubert I knew I’d come home. The art on the walls were the same kind of images I wanted to draw and Joe himself, larger than life, welcomed me into the family of students at JKS that would grow larger over the years. It was August, and most of the students were already enrolled, but Joe made room for one more and accepted me into the school. Joe gave me my first actual work in the comics business — back-up stories and “Battle Album” pages for the back of Sgt. Rock. As editor, he was still my teacher, extending learning the art of comics beyond the classroom. I asked him one time, when I was feeling guilty because I was sure I’d taken up way too much of his time with my pages, how I would ever repay him for his patience and kindness. He told me, “Pass it on.” Joe was a truly amazing and talented artist. He was my mentor and teacher — and I feel richer for having him as a friend. Last night, this faded picture of Tom [Mandrake] and I getting married at the Kubert School in 1980 kind of fell out of a folder — and there in the background is Joe, looking pleased and happy to see two of his students tie the knot at JKS. Thanks, Joe. For everything. You will be missed.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Sergio Cariello, who contributed the lovely cover for this tribute book, also shared the above caricatures of Joe Kubert and this pic of the young artist with his mentor at Sergio’s graduation from the Kubert School.

Below: At left is Tom Mandrake and Jan Duursema, who met and married as Kubert School students in a pic taken in those years. And not only are they teaching at the institution today but their daughter Sian, seen above with the late, great Joe Kubert, also attended the art school! How cool is that? Left photo courtesy of Tom Foxmarnick; right photo courtesy of Carol Thomas and The Kubert School.

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Jared K. Fletcher

I always referred to him as Jose. Never to his face, obviously. But I liked calling him Jose. Everyone that knew him has some story about how he almost broke their hand shaking his. Or how he slapped you on the back and knocked the f*cking wind out of you. I graduated from Joe’s school in 2003. I’ve been working in comics ever since then. I owe all that to Joe and his family. I used to joke that Joe would never die. And if he did, he would find a way to come back years later with four additional robot arms so he could work faster. I still want to believe that. Stranger Fictions was created during my time at the Kubert school. I remember showing these ridiculous characters to Joe and being so damn nervous. He gave me a lot during the time I was lucky enough to spend with him. He did that with a lot of people. I never did get him to tell me any stories about his studio space he shared with a young Alex Toth and a few others who would go on to be comics greats. But I tried. I am going miss him a lot. Today, I venture out to New Jersey to his funeral. It’s my first trip back to Dover in almost 10 years and I wish it were under better circumstances. R.I.P., Joe Kubert. You were the best of us. You had comics in your bones..

Tom Foxmarnick

Next page: P*S magazine artist Bob Hardin drew this poignant remembrance featuring Sgt. Half-Mast, Connie Rod, Bonnie and “Rotor” Blade bidding goodbye to Joe Kubert. Colors by Joe Panico of Tell-A-Graphics. 120

Was Joe Kubert out of his mind? Or was he desperate for money!? That’s what I think when I look at the samples I sent him to consider me as a student in 1978. They were the very best I could do at the time. A few over-rendered monsters, a Jim Starlin knock-off, a page-and-a-half of bad continuity, and some comic type drawings I had done for my high school commercial art class. Pretty awful stuff. When I was called to schedule a phone conversation between Joe, myself and my dad, I expected a polite but quick rejection. To my surprise, Joe said he got a kick out of my samples. And he said I’ve got a lot to learn. But if I was willing to work hard, he’d love to have me as a student. Maybe Joe saw something in me that even I couldn’t. A few weeks later I found myself in picturesque Dover, New Jersey. Did I love it? Absolutely! Talking comics and art all day long. Listening to Irwin Hasen, Tex Blaisdell, and Dick Ayers talk about the old days… the kind of stories that don’t make it into respectable publications like this one. Did I apply myself and work hard…? Not really. I just wasn’t ready to take advantage of what was in front of me. Back in Cleveland, I was basically a stoner who barely made it through high school. And even though I drew my whole life, I certainly was no savant. As for Joe, well, he was rarely available to the second year class. After all, he was still a DC powerhouse and, understandably, when he did have some time he spent

it grooming the best of the best: Bissette, Veitch, Yeates, etc. I did my best but was fully aware that to actually get work in the industry you had to really bust your hump, and it was quite sobering to watch really motivated workhorses like Tom Mandrake, Jan Duursema, Ron Randall, Dave Dorman, and others. At graduation, as Joe (ever smiling) handed me my certificate, I felt like I had let him down. But, as the crowd hooted and hollered, he squeezed my hand with his gorilla grip and said “Hey, good luck to you, Tom.” I mumbled something sheepishly and went back to my seat. Did Joe still see something in me that I didn’t…? That was the last contact I had with Joe until about 20 years later. I was wandering around the dealers area at the San Diego Comic Con when we literally walked into each other. He mentioned something about being on his way to a meeting but asked me how I was doing. I gave him the synopsis of odd events that happened after I left the school. The opportunity top move to Los Angeles thanks to my old JKS roomie Kevin Alteri (thanks again, Kev!) My meeting and friendship with the late, great CARtoons editor Dennis Ellefson, who gave me the incentive and opportunity to do as much work for him as I wanted (and now I was actually ready to work hard). I told Joe how I fell into TV animation and ended up as production designer on multiple shows for Disney, Warner Bros. Sony, Nickelodeon, Universal, and others. As we walked slowly toward his appointment, I mentioned that I was now married and had a baby girl. He stopped short and fumbling with the case and loose paperwork he was carrying, freed a hand to shake. “That’s terrific, Tom. Great to see you… I gotta get to this thing!” As I watched him disappear into the crowd I thought, “Gee, he didn’t seem surprised by my story at all!” It was like he had known or expected my success. I guess he saw something in me that I didn’t even know was there….

Rob Kelly I attended the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art from 1989–92. I first met the man himself sometime in late ’88, a portfolio full of pathetic chicken scratches in my hand. I don’t remember much from the encounter; I was simply too intimidated by who was sitting across from me to even make eye contact. Instead, as Mr. Kubert looked at my work, I stared over his shoulder, at the original unused cover art he did for the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali treasury edition framed on the wall. At that moment, imagining myself in the ring with The Greatest seemed less frightening than what I was currently experiencing. Mr. Kubert must have seen something in my artwork, for I started my first year at his school the following September. I would occasionally see him in the halls, but I did my best to keep my distance. This was a guy who was responsible for dozens, hundreds of the comics I grew up reading, and the fact that he was right there was still just too much for my feeble fanboy mind to comprehend. But avoiding him didn’t work in my third and final year, since he was our class instructor on Wednesday mornings. Forced to get over my stomach-turning nervousness, I found Mr. Kubert — Joe — surprisingly easy to talk to, at least in the context of teacher and pupil. He was warm and friendly, and while he could be critical of your work he was never nasty or overly harsh. One assignment Joe gave us was to come up with a fake comic book series, from which we would produce a mock-up of the first issue, complete with cover and several interior pages. I decided to try my hand at a pirate comic book, filled with all sort of pretentious, sub-sub-Alan Moore-esque musings on existence. The cover I worked up featured a shot of a man nearly drowning in a storm-tossed ocean, with a ship in the background, looking like it was going to be hit by lightning.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Bob Hardin & Joe Panico

Michael Kraiger

Joe was going over our cover pencils, one by one. When it was my turn, I none-too-confidently brought my piece up to the front of the room. He put it on the table in front of him, and stared at it for four or five seconds. He then placed a piece of tracing paper over it, and began showing me how the scenario I concocted could be made better. As Joe began to talk, his hand flew around the paper, pencil moving wildly. Much like what happened during our first encounter, I wasn’t able to concentrate on what he was saying, because it appeared to me that he never once looked at the paper. He just kept looking at me, telling me about this or that. After a minute or two of this unbroken eye contact, I felt like I was watching when a ventriloquist gets his dummy to talk while he drinks a glass of water. How the hell is he doing this? He’s not looking at the paper! After another minute or so, Joe yanked the tracing paper off from atop my drawing, and handed it to me. Even in this rough form, it was a million times better than what I had done: there was more depth, more excitement, more drama. He patted me on the back, and I walked back to my seat, still in amazement at the trick I had just seen performed, just for me. Of course, it wasn’t a trick: it was the culmination of decades of hard work, dedication, skill, and talent. The guy was, pure and a simple, a master illustrator, and while I never had that kind of eye-opening one-on-one with the man again, I count myself lucky that I had even this one brief chance to see Joe Kubert, The Artist, up close, doing what he did best. As Bob Dylan said, “Got to get up near the teacher if you can/If you wanna learn anything.”

Michael Kraiger

Kubert. Each cover image seemed to place a valiant soldier in mortal peril or illustrate a daunting, neigh, impossible challenge. Joe’s covers promised a life and death struggle. In the spring of 1980, I applied to the Joe Kubert School for Cartooning and Graphic Art. In September of that year, I left Ohio behind and started classes at the school. It was the start of a new life. To tell you the truth, while I don’t remember much of what Joe Kubert said at orientation or in class, I do remember themes that occurred over and over again when Joe spoke: hard work, the importance of meeting deadlines, the focus one needed to make a living doing what one loved. At the time, I was less a fan of Joe’s art than that of artists like Michael W. Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Moebius. I certainly respected Joe’s command of the medium — reviewing your work he could easily point out a way to improve the storytelling or add drama. I had some clashes with Joe, mostly involving technical stuff. I once got called on the carpet for using airbrush on a black-&-white ink assignment. But damn, you just didn’t want to disappoint him, and his assignment always took precedence over all others. I didn’t think I could afford a third-year’s tuition and living expenses so, after two years at the school, I left to pursue work. I didn’t return to Ohio however, I stayed in Dover for two reasons: a girl and the opportunity to remain in the creative community of friends I’d made at the school. I took on whatever freelance I could find and worked several parttime jobs. One part-time job was posing as an artist’s model for the students at the school. I only mention this because I filled in for a few night classes and there in the back of the class was Joe Kubert drawing me. Several years later I ran into Joe at a New York comic convention. I was unsure if he’d remember me, that he might not remember the name so quickly. But there was recognition in his eyes. He was glad to see me and glad to hear I was doing all right. Later, after seeing him briefly up at Marvel comics offices, there was recognition and I think a sense of pride in both of us. Me, that I had made it into the comic book business and, for him, that one of his guys was working in the field he loved. In 1999 I needed work. I contacted Mike Chen at the Kubert School and asked about the possibility of any job openings. Soon after I got a call back from Mike. Tex Blaisdell was in the hospital. Could I fill in? Sadly, Tex passed away that spring and I took his place on staff at the school. The teachers meetings took place in Joe’s office, an awe-inspiring place filled with artwork and awards. There was a huge meeting table around which we would gather in the center of the room, and on top of that was a Frederic Remington sculpture of an Indian atop a pony at full gallop. In the corner of the room was Joe’s massive drawing table, and on it whichever of his latest projects he was working on. You could tell he loved his family fiercely, I once asked what happened to the Roy Crane Sunday page that had been hanging in the hall outside his office. He pointed to the photo of his grandson in graduation cap and gown, and said this was something more important. There was a sense that by attending the school or working there, we were an extension of his family. Joe always stressed that just because you were finished with the school, your association with it didn’t end. You would always be welcomed back. Joe made you feel included, with his more than firm handshake or the strong jovial slap on the back. I’m going to miss those. But much more than that, I’m going to miss the man who lead by example, the man who challenged you and encouraged you to do your best and the man who more than shared and understood the need to draw.

The image above was sketched during the graduation dinner for the Class of 2012 of The Kubert School. I’d been to a few of these things and Joe Kubert usually talked about all the hard work the graduates had been through, what was ahead of them in life, but as I sketched Joe at the podium, I connected with what he was saying, he was telling this huge room full of people about his need to draw. My association with Joe Kubert began long before I had any idea who he was or that anyone could make a living drawing comics. It was his artwork that caught my eye in the drug store’s comic-book spinner rack, the covers of Our Army at War with Sgt. Rock, G.I. Combat, and Star-Spangled War Stories. I devoured the tales inside and, with time, came to recognize the different artists who drew them. I knew Joe for four decades, five if you count my time readI was fascinated with the images of war, mesmerized by stories of combat and captivated by the covers drawn by Joe ing his work before I met the man. But even as a reader,

Paul Levitz

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Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

beautiful compositions. Stark studies in black-&white. I learned his joy in teaching, walking the halls of his school with him as tour guide, showing off students’ accomplishments, or debating the potential of computer technology for graphics year by year as it emerged. I learned the depth of his friendship, as his was the first call when I announced that I was leaving my desk to return to writing: a simple, “write something for me to draw—anything.” I learned the depth of his loving marriage when his beloved Muriel died, and watched the outpouring from their students, family and friends, and saw this strongest of men shrink a bit. And I learned even more what it is to be adored, when Joe himself passed, and the town of Dover was overwhelmed by our influx, an innumerable army come to pay respects to the man whose mantra was that he was the luckiest man on Earth… and who am I to dispute him?

I knew him. Even given his astounding long and prolific life and career, that was long enough to learn him well. I learned his style before I knew his name, watching the craggy reality of his characters as they emerged from his pen. His rare super-hero covers of characters not his own in the late 1960s introduced me to the artist who could simultaneously show beings of great power and majesty, while capturing the weight that burdens put on their shoulders. I learned how much he loved his family before I knew them, seeing him parade them before me in DC Special #5. His world couldn’t be shared with his readers without his children lining up, Sound of Music-like, something that had never appeared in the pages of a DC comic before, and if memory serves, hasn’t again. I learned his patience, gently helping a very young fan assemble listings of coming comics for his fanzine, and again as a too-full-of-himself young bureaucrat, trying to instill order into chaos as I made his life more difficult. I learned how he longed to stay on the cutting edge of his field, as he launched Sojourn, one of the handful of projects between the time of the undergrounds and the floodgates opening for independent comics… and again, decades later, as he dove into the world of graphic novels with true joy. I learned a fraction of his skills as a cover artist, handing him typed paragraphs that were raw ideas, and getting back

Steve Lieber The first drawing I ever hung up in my room was a copy I made of Joe Kubert’s cover for issue #1 of Justice Inc. Looking at that cover now, it’s easy to see why nine-yearold me was enthralled by it. It had a sense of danger that just wasn’t present in the other comics I was reading. Joe drew a grim faced hero plunging through the sky towards us as a parachute erupts from his back. The guy looks weatherbeaten, with sharp cheekbones, a furrowed brow, and deep grooves around the nose and mouth. Most of the comics heroes I’d encountered were glowing, perfect Olympians, frozen at a sunny, youthful point in their mid-20s. Not Kubert’s. His heroes were older and sinewy, never armor-plated with idealized musculature. Capable, but vulnerable, they always looked like they’d been through a lot. Clearly, the work they did was hard, and their success, if it came at all, would come at a cost. Years later at his school, my classmates and I would learn from Joe that this is how things are in real life. The man had a titanic work ethic, teaching and dealing with administrative matters at the school while continuing a productive freelance career, keeping in shape, staying active in his community and being there for his family. He never seemed to be in a hurry, but he got a lot done, all while maintaining the gravity and authority of an Easter Island statue. A young artist couldn’t ask for a better role model. One thing that must have helped Joe keep going was that while he always described drawing as work, he clearly loved doing it. He attended the school’s evening life drawing sessions, not as an instructor, but just for the pleasure and the practice of drawing from a live model. The man was

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wrapping up his fifth decade as a working artist, and he still spent his free time doing figure studies, humbly recording observations in charcoal or chalk, seeing what else the model could teach him. In class, when he wasn’t critiquing or lecturing, he doodled with whatever tool was handy. He’d sometimes tear these doodles up and toss them in the trash after class, prompting a mad rush of Kubies to the basket to recover what he’d done. Here’s one that I recovered and taped back together. Joe was a patient and generous instructor. There was a one genuine prodigy in my class, and a couple of students who were close to professional, but most of us (and that includes me) were struggling mightily to reach even the bottom rung of competence. That didn’t stop Joe from taking us and our efforts seriously. I can’t begin to communicate how much this meant to us. We’d bring our work to him, and he’d take a moment to study it as a whole. Then he’d ask us a few incisive questions about our goals for a figure, a panel, a sequence. Just formulating the answers was valuable. Joe never let us lose sight of our role as communicators. There needed to be a reason for every choice we made on a page. Then he’d lay tracing paper over it and, with a soft lead pencil, would show us how we could tell the story more effectively. If we’d fixed a problem he’d spotted in our work before, he’d note this. If we failed to fix it, he’d correct us again, sometimes with a bit of gentle ribbing. For all his gravity, he had a sense of humor, and he urged us to loosen up and not take ourselves so seriously. We were going to be learning throughout our entire careers, and we’d never be 100% happy with what we did. “Do the best you can with the time allotted and move on.” “If something didn’t work on this page, get it right on the next one.” “Let yourself have fun with it.” He told us that a lot toward the end of our last year at school. It seemed impossible. We’d all come a long way since our first day of school, but we all knew how very far we had to go. For me, drawing was still more about failure than fun. I was panicking, convinced that I’d never have what it takes to support myself as an artist, and I don’t think I was alone. I know a lot of my classmates felt the same. Joe didn’t. He was confident about our skills, and more importantly, about the quality of what we’d been taught. On our last day of school, he answered some big-picture questions for us, and he drew pen sketches of some of my classmates. He did this one of me. One of my classmates, Ted Couldron, actually teased Joe for making me look better than I did. Joe smiled and took it gracefully. And to be honest, Ted had a point. Joe’s drawing doesn’t show any of the neurosis that was crushing me, the worry, the self-doubt, the cheeks getting pouchy from three years of pulling all-nighters and eating crappy food. None of that’s there. Apparently he saw something else. Joe gave me an image of myself that was healthy, capable, confident and calm. He did it on paper, and he did it in life. I’ll always be grateful to him for both.

Tom Mandrake I remember the first time I met him for my Joe Kubert School portfolio review in 1976. I was terrified, intimidated, terrified that I might go home a failure. I entered the room and we shook hands, the mighty vise-like Kubert handshake was famous (infamous?), but this time he kind of pulled back and said “What do you do?!” It wasn’t that I had a mighty grip, my hands had turned to plastic-leathery claws from working in a plastics factory. Joe looked through my portfolio and said “Well Tom, I think you’re just the kind of student we want at the school.” I’ll never forget that moment, I was on top of the world! It was a whirlwind two years after that, classmates became lifelong friends, Jan and I met at the JKS, got married at the JKS. My daughter Sian went there as well. Joe gave me my first professional work and always pushed me to become a better artist. Joe was a great man and a great artist. I owe him so much and I will miss him.

Steve Mitchell There are a lot of other guys whose work I love, but Joe’s work “speaks” to me today as strongly as it did when I was a fan of the DC war comics decades ago. It is powerful, dramatic, and like no other. And, for me, as a fan, then as a pro, it always inspired me. But it also has the effect of comfort food: tasty, satisfying, and I can never get enough. I could blather on and on about why I liked him, but I thought that I would share one anecdote that in many ways sums up his approach to 124

drawing. Before I became a pro, I was a fan boy, and I loved visiting DC, and chatting — okay, grilling — any of the visiting freelancers about how they did what they did. I wanted to break into the biz and I was a sponge for advice — okay, I was nosy. I was a kid, sue me. Anyway, Joe was there one day, and I finally got to met him. This was a big deal and after a million stutters and stammers, I actually had the balls to ask him what I now know to be an impertinent question…”Gee, Mr. Kubert, uh, why is it that your Tommy guns don’t look like real Tommy guns?” Like I said, I was a kid, so I made it worse, of course, when I continued: “Russ Heath draws them the right way. He draws all the weapons accurately, just like on TV.” (I was a big fan of the Combat series, which was airing back in the day.) I know, I know… I write this and I want to smack me for being an annoying kid. Joe could have, and I would have been out for an hour. He was a powerful guy and in great shape, but he just smiled and said calmly, ”Well, Steve, I draw them emotionally.” The clouds parted, light blasted in through the windows, and I may have had my first artistic epiphany. Of course he did! Because that was how Joe drew everything: emotionally and dramatically. It was part of his storyteller’s art to put those feelings on the page. In the long run, it was also what made his work so enduring and extraordinary. Believe it or not, Joe and I were pals from that day on. Once I broke into the biz, we enjoyed having chats about comics and movies. He spoiled the ending of The Hot Rock, for me, but it’s okay, I still enjoyed the film. Joe was open, giving and very warm to one and all. The door to his DC office was always open. He always seemed more interested in talking with other creators about their “stuff” than his own. Joe was genuinely curious about how other creators did their jobs. Not surprising that he was a mentor to many and an educator. Like I said, I could blather on about his monumentworthy talent — he deserves to be on the Mt. Rushmore of comics creators — but I won’t, because Joe might be a touch embarrassed by all the gushing. He was a humble titan, a delight, and an inspiration to anyone who ever sat behind a drawing table. I was very lucky to have him as a pal.

Rags Morales The industry has taken a sharp cross to the jaw with the passing of Joe Kubert. Joe was not just a legend of mythical proportions artistically, but in his presence there was a air of greatness about this man. So sharp and spry over the years, it’s hard to imagine this behemoth of energy can ever be gone from our sight. As a student, it was always a pleasure to sit in his classes and just… listen. He had an incredible ability to clearly and concisely express the nuts and bolts of our field so that it stayed with you forever. I always made it a point to everyone who would listen (if you were so inclined) to allow this man to critique your work. You would have grown immensely. His work on “Sgt. Rock,” “Enemy Ace,” Tarzan, “Hawkman,” Tor, Yossel, Jew Gangster, Ragman, “Viking Prince” (a personal favorite), etc., — it speaks for itself. Picking up a Joe Kubert book was not just picking up a great read, but picking up history. You can see every inch of where this industry has gone and where it was going, and he was one of the elite few who got better with every project, as hard as that is to imagine. So very sad that this is what we lost; a cornerstone. With deep regret I express my condolences to Adam and Andy and the whole Kubert clan. God bless you all.

Michael Netzer Joe Kubert’s art fascinated me as a teen. Sharing a place alongside the clean, smooth look of the Silver Age era, it leapt out with a spontaneity and fluid appeal that seemed far less belabored than most everything else in comics. Joe made it look so natural and easy to draw that his art became a major motivator for the aspiring artist I was. I could literally feel the progression of the drawing process in his work. It was easy to imagine myself standing beside him and watching him produce the marvelous pages of “Hawkman,” “Sgt. Rock,” “Enemy Ace,” and Tarzan in my collection. In time, I would discover little difference between the sublime humanity and warmth in his art and the same qualities in the soul of the artist himself. I only had a few brief occasions to meet Joe during my stint as DC and Marvel artist in the 1970s. Busy as he was with the fledgling school of cartooning and graphic art, he didn’t frequent Continuity Studios as many other creators did. But hearing stories from colleagues who attended the school, or who’d been closer to him over the years, the reverence they held for him was unmistakable. He was a mentor in the full sense of the word, they’d say, Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Michael Netzer

Above: Joe Kubert and Mike Netzer in animated discussion at the Israeli Museum of Cartoons and Comics, which hosted a Kubert exhibit spanning his entire career in the Fall of 2011. The pair of artists (fans will recall Netzer as Mike Nasser in late 1970s comics) chatted for a documentary film.

Below: Joe Kubert and Graham Nolan at a National Cartoonists Society 2010 Reuben Awards in Jersey City, New Jersey. Graham recalls, “I’m the chairman of the upstate New York chapter of the NCS, but I don’t go to the Reubens very often (twice in 12 years to be exact). In 2010, I heard Joe was receiving an award and I hadn’t seen him in years. I decided to go, and I am glad I did. It was the last time I got to see him.”

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instilling in his students not only a knowledge of the craft, but also a sense of respect and regard for other artists and their work, underlaid by a creed of professional goodwill that he exuded. This quality rose to the surface after his first cover art for Superman-Muhammad Ali was given over to Continuity Studios for finishing, because the Ali franchise wanted a “cleaner” look for the book. Kubert’s reaction was to rise above any issue over it, and expressed total support for the decision as being in the best interest of the publisher. The finished cover became a rare synthesis of Kubert and Neal Adams art, adhering fully to Joe’s original layout, and becoming one of the more iconic covers of that era. Such pivotal remembrances of the artist and his art remained etched in memory long after leaving the comics scene in the early 1980s. Decades later, the developing comics culture in Israel received a powerful boost when Israeli creator and Kubert School graduate Dorit Maya-Gur invited Joe to contribute art for an exhibit of his work at the Israeli Museum of Cartoons and Comics, and launch it with a visit to Israel in the fall of 2011. It is a rare occasion that such a seminal figure of the comics industry graces the local comics scene here. As the opening night drew near, I had a chance to look at the nearly finished content and design of the exhibit. A well laid-out expanse of the various stations in a long and prolific career, commemorating Joe’s unique talent and accomplishments with a worthy tribute to his legacy. In addition to the familiar work from the past, it was especially wonderful to see some of Joe’s magnificent pencil work for his later books such as Jew Gangster and Yossel, where it was evident how his talent and sensitivity had only become magnified with time,

My own delight at seeing him again was difficult to contain. Joe reached out to me for a big hug, as if we’d been friends or working together for years. “You look very Israeli, now,” he said. “Not like the kid I knew in New York.” It was part of that special warmth he extended to everyone, but he made a point to remember our earlier encounters. We spent some time catching up and exchanging thoughts on the state the industry, which was all being filmed for a documentary by an Israeli director, who asked that we also talk about issues of creator’s rights in a runaway capitalist culture for the camera. Not being one to disappoint, Joe took the ball and ran the extra mile with a thoughtful exposition on the plight of working comics professionals and the dire need for the industry to grow so it can accommodate the ranks of unemployed artists and writers. Sometime later during the exhibit celebration, Joe sat down to sign books and draw sketches. A couple of hours later, the line seemed to be only getting longer. At one point, the exhibit organizers began to turn people away, saying that it’s too exhausting a demand on the 85-year-old artist. Joe wouldn’t hear of it. He kept on signing, drawing, and answering questions as if there’d be no tomorrow. Another hour later, a couple of organizers had to physically pry him away from the crowd so he could have a little rest from fans savoring every moment in his company. We parted that night with plans for Joe and his accompanying family to grace our home for a Sabbath dinner. As fate would have it, a terrorist attack on the Egyptian border on the day before the planned event mobilized local security and traveler warnings were issued in many areas for fear of other planned attacks. The exhibit organizers decided they couldn’t take a risk with the security of Joe and his family, and the dinner was canceled. It was the last chance I’d have to see Joe Kubert again, as news of his passing spread through the comics web community a year later. Joe Kubert leaves the comics industry and the world with a remarkable legacy of accomplishment, talent and humanity. He left me with warm remembrances of embrace, and the wisdom of a mentor who tirelessly strove to strengthen bonds between creators in the community. A towering artist and personality in the history of comics, who was always prepared to extend himself unconditionally for the benefit of the medium he thrived in. May your rest be peaceful as the memories you’ve left us with, dear Joe.

Graham Nolan I never thought this day would come, but I was heartbroken to learn of the passing of my teacher and mentor, Joe Kubert. Joe was larger than life in every way. He had a powerful presence and physicality to him that is rare in this business. He was like the Rock of Gibraltar and I thought he would be here forever. He was a visionary storyteller whose career spanned the golden to modern age of comics. He was a teacher, a mentor, and a legend. His like will not be seen again in this industry. I raise a glass to you, Joe. God bless you, and thank you for everything. One of my favorite memories of Joe Kubert was during classroom critiques. Students would put their work on the wall and Joe and fellow students would offer critiques. Joe would never say a bad word about students’ work, but let’s face it, not everyone was going to make it. We all knew whose stuff was good and whose wasn’t. When something that wasn’t up to snuff went on the wall, Joe would stare at it, cross his arms, bring one arm up to rub his chin, point at the artwork and finally, after a long pause, say...”That’s a hell of an attempt.” I used to do an impression of him in class and once, actually did it in front of him. He got that big grin on his face and his eyes went a little beady with that “you dirty rotten” look, but he got a big kick out of it. He knew all humor comes from truth. He was a hell of a man.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Xurxo G. Penalta

Jerry Ordway Joe Kubert taught me to ink. Well not entirely, but as a teen, I studied a “how to” page he did in a Tarzan treasury edition, where he showed the stages, from layout to pencil to inks. It was a lesson I remember well. In 1981, when I did my first comic convention after turning “pro,” I sat on a “drawing comics” panel with established artists like Gil Kane, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Joe Kubert. Man did I feel unworthy. Afterwards, Joe talked to me, and said I did okay. That was such a nice gesture, and made me feel like I was actually IN the business. Joe Kubert’s work was always an inspiration, and he, along with Jack Kirby and Will Eisner, stood out to me as a model for an artist also writing their own material. Joe’s adaptation of Tarzan was terrific, and one of the few DC comics I avidly collected as a die hard “Marvel Zombie.” He always seemed to chart his own course, never succumbing to the numbing grind of endless deadlines, and always found time to pursue his own creations. There’s a lesson for us in that as well.

George Pratt I’ve been meaning to sit down and write something about the passing of Joe Kubert for awhile now. I hate that I’ve not been able to do this sooner due to a pressing deadline. Now I’m finished and can actually concentrate, though I question whether I can truly sort out my thoughts about the passing of someone so important to comics and to my own life. One of my most powerful memories of growing up in the 1960s and ’70s was of sitting on the passenger side of my mother’s car (yep, the old bench seat) having just returned from the grocery store. It was a typical sweltering Texas summer day. In the blazing Texas heat, pulling in to the driveway with the radio playing “Heart of Gold” by Neil Young, I stared at Sgt. Rock’s Prize Battle Tales with a Joe Kubert cover. Joe Kubert was synonymous to me with the best of the best comics work in the world. I was so excited to have that comic in my hot little hands and knew without a doubt that the promise of great stories and art inside was a given. That memory is a wonderfully warm place I still go to now and again. It sums up perfectly what comics meant to me then. They were everything, and Joe’s work was one of the reasons why. There was a time when I was very young in my comic reading that the characters were everything to me. I started reading comic books because I was in the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston having open heart surgery. I was there a long, long time. The Batman television show was on and I was hooked. This was first-run stuff. I didn’t know what comics were, I don’t think. But everyone in my family saw how much I loved the Batman show and started bringing me the Batman comics. Little did they know they were igniting a very big fire! So I became addicted to comic books and began collecting in earnest. Batman was huge, and so was Sgt. Rock. Texas in my childhood was full of little boys playing guns. All our fathers were World War II vets and Audie Murphy was our hero. And we all read “Sgt. Rock” (Our Army at War), “The Haunted Tank” (G.I. Combat), “The Unknown Soldier” (Star Spangled War Stories), “Enemy Ace,” “The Losers,” etc. All DC Comics books on war. As I mentioned, those characters were huge to me. They might as well have been real people for the amount of emotional investment I had in them. I followed their exploits like crazy. But at some point I experienced a shift. I must have been about eight years old or so, and though I still loved the characters and couldn’t wait to see what each issue brought, the artists who drew the books, and the writers who wrote them became real people to me and they became the real heroes, especially the artists. Their work infused me with so much energy, so much love of the graphic arts, even at that tender age. They were teaching me how to compose, 128

how to see, and — more importantly — how drawings could emote. They became like the crazy uncle whom everyone loves. There were many for me throughout my childhood: Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, Marshall Rogers, Sam Glanzman, Ric Estrada, Russ Heath, Roy Crane, Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones, Bernie Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, Richard Corben, John Severin, Neal Adams, Charles Schulz, Stan Lynde… the list is endless. And there was Joe Kubert. Joe was the most prolific, or at least the one name that seemed to be forever and always in my face. Those covers! He did so, so many! I’d buy a comic just for his covers, and did, many, many times. His line, his compositions, everything! He nailed me. I wanted to be Joe Kubert. He was the place in comics that was the ultimate comfort zone for me. I knew I was home. I knew that there was little better, for me, than where I was right then with Joe leading the way. I copied Joe’s work endlessly, struggling to achieve that incredible effortless feeling of his work. Joe was working almost at the very beginning of comic books. He got his first paying job as a comic artist when he was eleven-and-a-half or twelve-years-old in 1938. So many issues of “Sgt. Rock” poured forth from Joe’s brush and pen. I had (have) them all. And they are as fresh to me today as they were when I first saw them. I can still get lost in his storytelling. Easy as pie. And his Tarzan is for me the best ever done in comics. I know there’s a lot of Jesse Marsh fans out there and that’s great. But Joe defined that character for me. I can’t even begin to describe the emotions that ran through me then, and still hit me where I live now. They encapsulate more than just Tarzan to me. So… what can I say? I remember the day I was sitting on my parents’ sofa reading through the newest issue of “Sgt. Rock,” and seeing this curious advertisement about the Kubert School! My jaw dropped. I got sick to my stomach I was so excited. Here was a school created by one of the people I admired most in comics! I would have killed to have been able to attend that school. But beyond my own gnawing desire I didn’t believe it was something I would be allowed to do. So I didn’t pursue it. But it killed me knowing it was out there. And of course, comics-wise, there was “Enemy Ace.” “Ace” was unique to me and in many ways, it seems, to Joe as well. Those stories seem more open, more full of air and light than many others he did. And they’re iconic of reading comics at a time when the Vietnam war was constantly on the news. “Rock” was, too. All those comics. But “Ace” sticks out. And in the end, years later became my ticket to meet Joe Kubert. After getting my project green-lighted at DC (thanks to Scott Hampton and Andy Helfer), I probed about and asked if I could get Joe Kubert’s phone number to show him all the work and to pick his brain about the character. And, to my amazement, they agreed! Joe was one of the nicest people I think I’ve ever met in my life. Meeting one’s hero is a dicey business. It could go two ways. One could never be sure of what one would find. Joe was incredibly nice, warm, and friendly. He was so humble about his work and all that he accomplished. That definitely made a huge impact on me. He looked through the work that I was doing and gave me many, many pointers about how to improve the storytelling and panel arrangements. He talked to me about how he had approached the character and how long he would spend laying out his stories and how long it took him to produce the finals. I was, of course, in heaven. Joe took lots of time from his hectic schedule to help a newcomer. So gracious with his time and his talent. Surprisingly, Joe asked me to teach at his school. That was a mind-bender for me. I leapt at the chance! Just to be near Joe, really. To be that close to greatness! I would take a bus to my friend John Van Fleet’s home in New Jersey,

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Hawkman TM & © DC Comics.

where I’d spend the night and we’d catch a movie with his sister. The next morning John would drive me to the train station where I’d ride to Dover, New Jersey. There, Joe would pick me up in his truck and we’d head to the school. I was so proud to be able to ride with Joe to the school and to actually be sitting next to him and be able to talk to him about whatever. It was a rare, unforgettable experience. I loved the meetings all the teachers would have in the office, loved seeing the folders each of the classes were kept in and the doodles that Joe would have sketched on them: Cowboys on horseback, cavemen, etc. Loved seeing the Joe Kubert originals on the walls of the school — Everything about it. The students were wonderful and getting to meet Joe’s family was an honor as well. All sincerely gracious, honest people. Having lost my father in 1995, I know exactly what the Kubert children are going through. But I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to share their dad with the world as they did. My heart goes out to them. If their personalities are any indication, and I think they are, Joe and his wife Muriel did an incredible job as parents. And it shows the kind of people they were as well. I miss Joe Kubert. I miss his bear hugs, I miss his crushing handshake, his ready smile, his kind words of wisdom, and of course, the work. What an enduring legacy he leaves behind, not only in his work, but in his children who are a living testament to the true qualities of the man.

S.C. Ringgenberg Like most people, I wasn’t born a comic book fan. As a kid, in my pre-teen years, I read comics the way all kids read comics: for fun. One of my favorite genres to read was war comics. Before I started collecting, I almost never read Marvel Comics, except for Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. I was, however, a big fan of DC’s Our Army at War featuring Sgt. Rock, G.I. Combat, with the Haunted Tank, and Star-Spangled War Stories featuring “The War That Time Forgot” (War and dinosaurs? Too cool for any red-blooded American kid to resist). Because I loved war comics, Joe Kubert was one of the first artists whose name I recognized. His bold signature was easy to spot on the exciting, welldesigned covers he always drew. But whenever I’d buy a DC

war comic with one of his covers, I’d usually be disappointed if Kubert didn’t draw the story inside. Russ Heath was okay with me, but I always found Irv Novick’s work to be kind of boring. One of the most vivid memories I retain from my earliest days of summer comic book reading in Abilene, Texas, was seeing the cover for G.I. Combat #117 showing the Haunted Tank encased in ice in the middle of the scorching African desert. Kubert’s art was so compelling, my child self just had to fork over 12¢ so I could find out just how this seemingly impossible event happened. As kids are wont to do, I’d read the new comics I bought and then discard them. Wish I still had all the comics and old Mad magazines I bought back then. However, once I moved to Tucson, Arizona, in the 1970s, I became a rabid comics fan (also an avid fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, old pulps, radio shows, movie serials, and vintage comic strips.) I wasn’t just

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Paul Rivoche

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greatly missed not only by his family, his many friends, and his small army of students, but also by his legions of fans who grew up reading and loving his work.

Ervin Rustemagic

a casual reader of DC war comics, Superman, Batman, World’s Finest or the occasional Dell or Gold Key comic anymore; I was a full-blown comic-book freak, spending every last dime of my allowance not just on comics, but on portfolios, posters, fanzines, model kits, and anything related to comic books and strips. In addition to collecting Joe Kubert’s work, I also avidly collected EC Comics, Flash Gordon books and comics, and any comics with art by other great war artists like John Severin, Alex Toth, and Sam Glanzman. Kubert, though, remained my favorite on war comics, and my all-time favorite Hawkman artist when I discovered his early ’60s stories in The Brave and the Bold. Even though I liked Murphy Anderson’s work a great deal, I was hugely disappointed when Kubert didn’t go on to illustrate the regular Hawkman title. Heck, as I said before, I was always disappointed when Joe did a cover and didn’t illustrate the comic inside. Needless to say, I was thrilled when Kubert began editing, writing and drawing DC’s Tarzan comic. Two of my favorite things, Joe Kubert’s art and the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, came together in a very powerful way. The first time I actually met Joe Kubert was at a San Diego Comic-Con in the early 1970s, around the time he was writing and drawing Tarzan. I eagerly sought Joe out to autograph my copy of the first issue he did and he couldn’t have been nicer. Every time I interacted with Joe after that, whether it was in person or one of the several times I interviewed him by phone, he was the same: kind, gracious, thoughtful and funny. He was a class act as a human being, and as a thoroughgoing professional writer/artist/editor/educator and comics innovator. His vast body of excellent work, as well as his technical innovations like 3-D comics, places him in the very top ranks of American cartooning, alongside such giants as Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, Roy Crane, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, and Gil Kane. In addition to artistic accomplishments, Kubert was a living bridge between the earliest days of the comics business and the rapidly changing world of present-day comics. He didn’t just live through history; Joe Kubert’s life was history. He was also a one-of-a-kind talent who will be 130

My friendship with Joe Kubert and his family goes back about 40 years. While I don’t remember now the exact year when we first met, it was in the early ’70s, at a comics convention in Lucca, Italy. Then we met again in San Diego, in 1977, when Comic-Con (organized by Shel Dorf) was still a very small event and held in a hotel lobby. Ever since those meetings, we were in constant contact and seeing each other occasionally. But it was not until Joe and his wife, Muriel, visited my family and me in our home city of Sarajevo, Bosnia, in the summer of 1990, that Joe and I started talking about working together. Only then did we agree that Joe produce a new three-volume graphic novel series, Abraham Stone, for my company, Strip Art Features (SAF). And in the following days, when I took Joe and Muriel to visit the ancient city of Mostar in Bosnia, and then Dubrovnik — the jewel of the Adriatic coast — we discussed this project in detail. All the time while we were talking about it, Joe was making sketches, thus the series and the main character were already taking shape. So, this is how Abraham Stone was born, the series published worldwide and we achieved quite a big success with it. But, while Joe was still working on the third volume of Abe Stone, the war in Bosnia began and my family and I were trapped there, while our home and my office in Sarajevo were all destroyed by shells in the first few months of the war. More than 14,000 pieces of original art — including some of Joe’s work — were destroyed in a fire that consumed my office. After spending 18 months in all that hell, which should rather be called a “slaughter of civilians” than a war, my family and I got out from Sarajevo and, in September 1993, we settled in the newly-formed country of Slovenia — also a former Yugoslav republic — which borders Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. In May 1994, Joe and Muriel visited us at our new home, and it was only then when Joe told me about his plan to make a graphic novel based on the faxes I had sent him during the war. He already had a title for it — Fax from Sarajevo — but I was very much against that idea because, being as the war only recently ended — I wanted to concentrate on the future of my family and my work, and not to dwell on that terrible wartime experience we suffered. But Joe was very firm and decisive, insisting he was going to do that book with or without my help. So, we had a friendly argument about it at my home, where he and Muriel stayed for a few days, and that argument was interrupted by my daughter Maja, who was only 12 at that time. Maja told me: “Why do you argue with Joe, Dad? It’s going to be his book and not yours.” Joe laughed at it, kissed Maja, and the first thing he did when he got back to New Jersey was starting work on Fax from Sarajevo. And I couldn’t oppose any longer his great wish to tell the world this story. Being one of the greatest artists in the profession, Joe is also a great man, very concerned about the suffering of people — from the Holocaust to Bosnia. Sunday, August 12, 2012, was the last day of a comic convention in Rosario, Argentina. Late in the afternoon, I was giving a lecture to the Argentinean comic writers, artists and publishers. Most of the questions they — and the journalists who were present — asked were about my relationship with Joe Kubert and about Fax from Sarajevo. Later in the evening, I went to a restaurant for dinner, which had been organized for all the invited guests of the convention. The dinner was rather quiet, very unusual for Argentina, and I noticed some people looking at me with certain sorrow in their eyes, but I thought I was just imagining their sad gaze. The dinner ended after midnight and, when I got back to my hotel, I switched on my laptop to check e-mails before going to sleep. There was a message from my friend Mike Richardson from Dark Horse: “Dear Ervin, As I’m sure you’ve heard, Joe passed away today. I’m really saddened by this. Best, Mike.” This came to me as if a tumultuous storm suddenly consumed a perfectly clear sky. The rest of the night, I was sleepless, thinking about so many great moments I have spent with Joe, and simply not believing that I was never going to see him again. In the morning, I realized that the pillow was wet with my tears. I couldn’t eat the breakfast. I just had a coffee in the bar with some friends, and it was only then that the American artist Dave Johnson, who was also present at the last night’s dinner, confessed to me that everyone in the restaurant last night knew Joe had died, because someone got the news, but they all were hiding it from me because they didn’t want to make me upset during that meal. When I returned home, I called Joe’s son Andy, who told me all about Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

what Joe was going through in his last days. I said to him that I was amazed by the number of condolences I was receiving every day from all over the world, like if I was a member of the family. “You are a member of our family, Ervin,” Andy said. “You are!” I had tears in my eyes again.

David Scroggy Like many comics readers, I was a fan of Joe Kubert’s long before I knew who he was. In fact, I still remember finding an early Brave and the Bold with Viking Prince in my cousin’s laundry room as a young kid. If it wasn’t the first comic I read, it was one of the first that stuck with me. Meeting Joe at the 1977 San Diego Comic-Con gave me insight into the man behind the work. If I was a fan before, I was a bigger one now by far. Joe was kind to and patient with all the fans and aspiring pros. What a gentleman. He drew a fabulous Ragman for me in my now-lost sketchbook, and watching him render a large-size Hawkman live poolside at the art auction was memorable. My professional association with Joe came later on, when I persuaded him and Ervin Rustemagic to let Dark Horse publish Fax from Sarajevo. This book is Joe’s chronicle of Ervin’s experience under siege- which came to the outside world in a series of faxes. As the horrendous story unfolded via Ervin’s updates, Joe, one of Ervin’s close friends, realized he had to tell the story. Other publishers were very interested in the book. Joe and Ervin had a few good offers, similar as far as the financial aspects, and had to decide who would publish. Ervin arranged a telephone call between Joe and me. As we spoke, I told Joe that I knew what the project meant to him, and that it wasn’t just about placement in the chain bookstores or marketing budgets, but to me what seemed most important was to capture that heart that Joe poured into it, and bring that same dedication to the book all the way through production. I guess this was the right thing to say — Ervin told me later that Joe’s smile got bigger and bigger as we talked. We wound up with the project.

It was a difficult road to publication. Joe decided to add a considerable amount of back material: a hefty supplement to the graphic story. He and Ervin were tough taskmasters. They sweated every production detail. Editor Bob Cooper burned a lot of overtime, as numerous revisions were made and re-made. The print team worked with Joe on paper stocks and binding. The designers went back and forth with the cover treatment. Through it all, we tried to hold up our end, and justify Joe’s faith in us. Right before Fax from Sarajevo went to press, Joe and Ervin came to Portland for a last inspection. I had the thrill of having them to my house for homemade lasagna, joined by a number of Portland’s best comics artists. A warm feeling was pervasive. Ervin showed us videos he took in the conflict, some not easily forgotten. At last the book was printed. We brought Joe out for a short West Coast promo tour. I had the honor to fly down to a small convention in Oakland with copies of the book, and watched as Joe launched its debut. Attendees were lined up to get their copies, and Joe drew a picture in every one he signed. A week or so later, over dinner in downtown Portland, I asked Joe if he was honestly happy with the way Fax from Sarajevo came out. He looked at me and said: “Dave, I think the production was fine, but I look at my story and all I can see is what I wish I could do over.” That’s Joe: never content to rest on his laurels, always moving forward, continually honing his craft. Joe always would have been great, but that attitude — of reaching further to continue to grow — is what separates Joe Kubert from just being great, and places him among the greatest ever.

Above: Courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic, Joe Kubert at his art table — working on Punisher: War Zone, by the looks of it — in the mid 1990s.

Bill Sienkiewicz Joe was a hugger. A guy whose huge powerful hands could easily crush those of another lesser mortal, hands that could also lay down a gorgeous brushstroke of sheer ebon perfection. Maybe I’m coming from a place of having known Joe as a friend and mentor and colleague, and so my experience of him is somewhat more unusual in some respects than oth-

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ers. But I have my doubts. Though the toughness and warmth he exhibited to me and I to him may have been borne of our friendship and camaraderie and shared profession, much, much more of it was, to my mind, the Universal Joe Experience. When he said hello to me… to you… and flashed that incredible grin and gave a whoop of joy, you were alternately reduced to a gelatinous state of giddiness and to an immense one of relief as well. Relief at having not been well, broken into lots of little pieces for one. It was damned near a state of grace, albeit one that came with price, and with a sense of responsibility. And it was fearsome, awesome responsibility indeed. See, this demonstration of affection between colleagues can be a curious sight, and uncomfortable to someone not used to such displays of genuine bonhomie —especially in Comics. And even more especially when looked at through the lens stretching back to almost two decades ago. The world of comics has been viewed by the public at large since pretty much forever as a boys club of just horribly socially awkward types — guys mainly, but some girls — who’d much rather be blasted to subatomic smithereens by gamma rays than be touched by another human. Male or female. Speaking for myself and for a lot of the folks in comics I’ve talked to over the years, including Joe, there’s always been a perception that practitioners and aficionados of this wonderful medium (that’s just so bloody accepted and lucrative — now!) that these folks are all just so much damaged goods, psychologically speaking. Joe would have none of that. See, not only was Joe the ultimate hugger, but there was woven through it, a brilliant method to his physicality. I’m trying to set the stage clearly here, understand — for a goddamn reason, so listen up! — and first thing I’m going to stress is it wasn’t at all inappropriate. Not by any standard or stretch or PC dictionary of offenses. Hell no. Call it a kind of “tough love,” if you will. It wasn’t about gender, sex… none of that folderol. What it was about was living, breathing connection. It defined everything about how Joe went about life. His life, sure, but life period. Aside form being a blisteringly talented artist, loving husband and father, he was the ultimate alpha male. Part Sgt. Rock and father figure to everyone, part best friend in the trenches, and part enemy to be feared should you be unfortunate enough to have put yourself in that unenviable position. Joe was not a capricious man, nor was he arbitrary. What he was, was deliberate. He demanded that you stand up to your full height, to your full potential, and be recognized. He demanded this of everyone: guys, gals, great apes and Kandorians… aliens… whatever! You were, first and foremost, an artist. Clay to be sculpted. A recruit. He was tough, but you couldn’t not love Joe, or fail to be outright awed by him, by his power, energy and sheer force of will. You wanted his approval, his attention. And when he gave both, gamma rays looked downright anemic by comparison. His hugs and handshakes were deceptive: sure, they explored the tolerances of the human spine and of innate frailties in the bones of the hand. “Go ahead: draw with this,’ his grip seemed to say, a mix of intimidation — and, ironically, of ultimate acceptance. To me, that grip was a challenge. His way of saying,”I see you and I want you to feel being seen and acknowledged and believed in… by yourself and by the world. It’s yours. But you gotta earn it.” It was a challenge to all his students, his colleagues, and fans: Sit down, study hard, do the work professionally, honestly and to the best of your ability. Make zero excuses. And, if you fell down, get up and forge ahead. Don’t ever quit. That’s what he conveyed. He believed in you more than you believed in yourself. He seemed to see things in each and every student and creator and fan he met. He didn’t believe in you for you, he did it to augment your own belief in yourself, to build and show you what that felt like. That would last you the rest of your days. He was more than “just” a teacher of comics. He was a teacher in every sense of the word. And his lesson was, “Go out and hug the Hell out of Life!”

Don Simpson I used to see Joe at various cons over the years, and he was always cordial, but my only real Joe Kubert story is a very fond memory of the Dallas Fantasy Fair of 1985, run by Larry Lankford and guest coordinator Paul McSpadden. There was always something special about those DFFs, and this one in particular had a stellar, legendary cast: Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, Burne Hogarth, Joe Kubert, Frank Kelly Freas, the list goes on. More amazingly, somehow I had the privilege of going to dinner with all of the above in a large group, along with Denis Kitchen and Gary Groth and various spouses and family members. We were in a Mexican restaurant,arrayed at a long table, and Joe and Burne were almost directly across from me. We were having a great discussion, but there was a loud, raucous birthday celebration going on at another huge table in the same room, so 132

we were intermittently being drowned out. Suddenly, a party balloon burst, sounding like a gunshot, and part of the balloon landed splat in the bowl of salsa between me and Joe. Joe carefully removed the balloon and instead of complaining, he smiled, “We should be at that table!!” There was a profound lesson there; I was having the time of my life with the living legends of comics, but somebody at another table can always be having more fun!

Steve Skeates People use the words “late, great” so indiscriminately these days that when someone the stature of Joe Kubert departs from this particular plane of existence, one has a tendency to flail all about in a vain attempt to locate adjectives powerful enough to describe that man. The thing is, I hardly even knew Joe — at DC, he was that tough guy down the hall who did the war comics, the sorts of stories I had at that point in my so-called career absolutely no desire to write. Yet one hardly needed to know Joe well in order to respect his presence, his work, and his talent — a respect that for me grew somehow even larger when he started to put the words “Make War No More” at the end of all his stories! And, how could I not love that cover he drew for that first issue of something called The New Blackhawk? Yours truly, at last, getting involved scripting-wise in something that came damn close to being a war comic, yielding one of those very rare instances in which Joe and I actually worked on the same book. Just another cover for him, I suppose, yet something so iconic, so simplistically powerful. Not just visually updating in a more politically correct fashion a number of previously laughable and often downright insulting stereotypical characters, but simultaneously still somehow evoking the past. And more: making that initial image not merely a frozen moment, but somehow, at that same time, something endowed with a truly timeless quality, enough of that stuff to make it seem as au courant today as it was 37 years ago. I wanna tell yuh, I possess not a shred of a doubt that this cover all by itself at least doubled the sales of that introductory issue of ours! There are still extant a number of stories about Joe vis-a-vis the manner in which he approached his editorial duties, tales that are surely merely apocryphal, based solely upon Joe’s physicality and the apparent ease with which he could have accomplished this or that feat rather than upon anything that actually happened. Like the time he supposedly held Robert Kanigher by that scripter’s ankles out one of the third-story windows of the old DC office building in order to get that incessantly jabbering ego-maniac to shut-up for just a minute and thereby allow Joe himself to get a word in edgewise. Like I indicated, Joe looked like he could have done so without even working up a sweat, and most likely he even threatened to do so, but the way I see it that’s as far as it got. There is, however, one anecdote about Joe that I know occurred, seeing as (too many years ago to count and by mere happenstance) I just happened to be there to witness this particular chuckle-inducing bit of business. It took place back when DC had just inaugurated the practice of returning — to the creative personnel involved — the original artwork of whatever story had recently been produced (something I have no idea if they’re still doing or not), the bulk of those originals going to the artist or artists, but one, two, three, or four pages (depending of course upon the length of the story) given to the writer. It may indeed seem here that I’m going off on a tangent, especially considering that this particular story has little to do with Joe’s aforementioned physical strength, his impressive potential power; it’s more about his secure awareness of the image he projected as well as his off-the-cuff willingness to play against type. Be that as it may, though, quite often upon having those pages bestowed upon him, the writer would immediately (right there in the office) pass them along to the artist, so that the latter would possess the totality of his work on whatever story we’re talking about here. But not always. I suspect all of us scripting jockeys at least glommed onto a couple of pages! In this specific case, the scripter (who shall remain nameless mainly because I’ve forgotten which writer it was, though surely he was one of those fanboy types, approximately half a generation younger than myself and still very much in awe of having actually landed a job in comics) was willing to give the artist — i.e., Joe — all but one of the pages he — the writer — had just been presented if Joe would be willing to autograph that one page the scripter would be holding onto. The writer went on to point out that he had no plans to sell this piece of work; he just wanted it for his own private personal collection, making such a big deal out of this one aspect of his plans that a crooked smile abruptly manifested itself upon Kubert’s countenance as he announced “I’m gonna make sure you never try to sell it!” Whereupon, after inscribing the writer’s name, Joe signed the page in big, bold letters: “Love and kisses, Joe Kubert.” Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Beau Smith The comic book business is not what it used to be. How do I know this? Because people like Joe Kubert are gone. Joe Kubert, legendary artist, writer, editor, businessman, and teacher passed away at the age of 85. I don’t use the word legendary a lot. I don’t think it’s a title that many have earned. Joe Kubert earned it many times over. Joe Kubert was one of those people that you never felt would be physically gone. As a comic book reader, creator and comic book marketer, Joe Kubert has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. He has always been a beacon and icon that has stood and delivered through every storm that has hit comics — as well as through the best of times. No one physically lives forever, but Joe was one of those rare people that you always felt would. I, like a lot of other folks, was shocked when the word of Joe’s passing was put out on the Internet. I was flooded with memories of his work, his words, and the friendship that we had. Granted, our friendship was not one that could be described as a talk-to-everyday-Christmas-card-exchangeonce-a-month-lunches. It was one made through the business of comics. But every time Joe and I saw each other, or I would call, he would always remember me and soon we would pick up where we left off the time before. What I will remember most about Joe was his kindness. He was always kind to me. My personal timeline with Joe began in the very early 1980s. I had yet to break into comics as a professional. I was still working sales and marketing for an audio/video chain, but I knew that I wasn’t getting any younger. If I were ever bust down the door of comic books and become a writer and businessman, then I had better get crackin’. Through writing letters to various comic books, including G.I. Combat and Sgt. Rock, I had become friends with DC Comics editor Murray Boltinoff and another creative legend, Robert Kanigher (the creator of Sgt. Rock). Both Murray and Bob were kind enough to always write me back. They also sent me examples of scripts, plots, and outlines for me to learn from. Murray was super-helpful in letting me know what an editor expected from a writer, and he would critique my submissions on his own time. Bob also sent me his scripts to learn from and, was never shy about describing the do’s and don’ts of being a writer. It got to where Murray told me that if I’d like to call his office on Wednesdays, he’d be more than happy to talk to me and answer some of my lengthier questions personally. I was stoked that he would take the time to offer that to me. Never being the shy type, I took him up on it. My Wednesday phone calls to Murray become a regular thing. And they became enhanced when it turned out that was the same day that Bob Kanigher and Joe Kubert would also stop by the DC offices and had meetings with Murray. Bob was more than happy to talk to me on the phone; in fact sometimes it was harder to get off the phone with Bob. Kanigher was a true character and he loved to talk. He made me the president of the Sgt. Rock Fan Club in his letter columns and had me connected with thousands of other Sgt. Rock readers. One day, while talking to Bob, he told me that Joe Kubert had just walked in and asked me if I’d like to speak with him. I stuttered and said, “Sure!” I don’t think Bob really asked Joe if he wanted to talk to me, but kinda shoved the phone at Joe and said, “Here’s Beau Smith, the president of the Sgt. Rock Fan Club!” Being the nice guy and professional that Joe was, he got on the phone, introduced himself and asked me questions about the Sgt. Rock Fan Club. I have a feeling this wasn’t the first time Bob had done this to him. As it turned out, Joe and I had a very nice conversation. We ended up talking more about the business of comics and how creators should be able to market themselves as well as their work and how the business of comics could also be better marketed. Please remember, this was around 1983 and the comic book industry

Bill Sienkiewicz was nowhere near what it was today with self-promotion and publisher marketing. From that day on, I would continue to call on Wednesdays and speak with Murray and Bob, as well as Joe when he was in. None of these guys had to set time aside for a nobody like me, but — right in the middle of their work day — they took the time to talk and help me as a writer and marketer. Can you imagine if you tried to call the DC or Marvel offices today and ask to speak to Joe Quesada, Axel Alonzo, Eddie Berganza, or Geoff Johns? I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Joe was great in the fact that he gave me tips as to what a writer can do with a story to help an artist enhance the story. He also told me a long time ago that as a creator it’s good to own the things you create. By the mid-1980s, I finally broke into the comic book business with Eclipse Comics as their VP of marketing, as well as doing some writing for them. One of the first things that I did was make sure that I owned some of the stuff that I created or was a part of — such as the sci-fi/horror series Parts Unknown and the super-hero crime noir story The Black Terror. I took Joe’s advice to heart and to the bank. It was during my time at Eclipse Comics that I became friends with Joe’s sons, Adam and Andy Kubert. When they say the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, they were sure right about the Kubert family tree. I could tell instantly that Adam and Andy had listened to their dad as artists and as

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businessmen. They are true professionals just like their dad. There’s another thing they inherited from their dad: that bone-crushing handshake. Granted, they don’t have the massive vice-like grip that their dad had, but I doubt if there are many that want to test their grip against that of the Kubert boys. At Eclipse Comics, the Golden Age hero Airboy was brought back by Tim Truman and Chuck Dixon. It ran for 50 issues and assorted mini-series. It was with issue #50 that series writer Chuck Dixon mentioned that he really wanted to do something special with that issue, as well as make it a double-sized issue. Chuck and I talked and our dream team idea was to have Adam and Andy Kubert draw it. That was followed with “How about we ask Joe to do the cover?” So I called Adam and Andy up and we discussed whether they were interested. Once they said they were, we talked schedules and page rates, and found it was all within the budget that Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney had set up. Then I asked if they thought their dad would be interested in doing the cover for the issue. Adam and Andy thought he would be if he had the time, so I called Joe. It was great to speak with him and reminisce about when I would talk to him at the DC offices in the early ’80s. Once again, I thanked him for always being so kind to me and for his great tips and stories. He said that he really didn’t have that much time, but since his boys were doing the book and he enjoyed the Airboy characters, he said he would be glad to make it happen. Joe also chuckled and said that he couldn’t rightfully turn down the president of the Sgt. Rock Fan Club either. Joe made my day. He made everyone’s day when he asked if it was okay if he did a wraparound cover. The result was amazing. What a way for the Airboy series to end, with Chuck Dixon writing and the Kubert family on all the art. This was a real dream team. During the next few years, I’d run into Adam and Andy at various conventions, as well as sometimes even Joe — when Joe had the time to attend a convention. I’d always make sure to drop Joe a letter now and then at the school to see how he was doing. I’d call Adam and Andy and pester them via the phone; after all, I’m older than they are, and they had learned to respect their elder. (These days, I’m everybody’s elder.) Later on, after I went to work for Todd McFarlane as his director of publishing and marketing, Todd was looking for new creative talent to come in on Spawn and Spawn-related projects. One of the first two names that we wanted were Andy and Adam Kubert. We would’ve loved to have had Joe as well, but we knew his time, interests and business came first. As we negotiated with Adam and Andy we could hear, see and feel the spirit of Joe within both of his sons. He taught them well when it came to contracts and business. In the end, we couldn’t come to a deal, but it was nothing but pleasure to deal with the Kubert clan. Everyone should be so professional.

Not long after that, Dark Horse Comics had offered me a chance to do a supernatural western that I had called The BadLander. I had always seen Joe Kubert’s art in my head when I created the series and character. Even though I knew the chances were slim to none that it would happen, I called Joe up and asked him if it was something he would be interested in. He had to turn the project down, but believe me when I tell you that I have never had anyone turn me down and yet make me feel like a million bucks. Joe told me what he liked about the character and the story, and what he thought might make it work better. What could have been a five-minute phone call turned in to over 40 minutes of wonderful creative advice and ideas. In turn, I answered his questions on some of the trends and transactions that were going on distribution, retail and in the toy business at that time. It was a great conversation and one that I will always treasure. I told Joe that I was going to ask a former student and teacher of his, Sergio Cariello, who I had worked with before on Batman/Wildcat and Catwoman/Wildcat for DC, to handle The BadLander. Joe told me that I couldn’t make a better choice and that Sergio would no doubt give the character all the talent it needed to be a top-notch story. He spoke highly of Sergio’s work and what an asset he had been to the school. It was great to hang that phone up and have Joe’s blessing and thoughts. Again, his kindness and professionalism showed why he had no peers. Fast forward a few more years to Mid-Ohio Con. I was a guest there as were a lot of other comic book creators, including Joe Kubert. As the long time and still president of the Sgt. Rock Fan Club, I was asked to be moderator for the Rock panel with Joe Kubert and Sgt. Rock’s then-writer/artist, Billy Tucci. I was thrilled. Not only did I have the chance to help showcase Joe and his incredible, iconic career on Sgt. Rock, but I also got to spotlight Billy Tucci and talk about how Billy’s respect and admiration for Joe and Sgt. Rock had carried what Joe and Robert Kanigher created into this century without ever losing the tradition and foundation that they had built. I geared Joe’s questions past what standard interviews always brought up. I tried hard to let the people there discover the man behind the pencil in a personal way. The panel went wonderfully and it was fantastic to hear all these great stories and answers come from Joe’s own voice. The crowd asked sharp questions that Joe always had an answer for. I think Joe was quite flattered when at the end of the panel everyone stood and clapped for him… for a long, long time. That was the last time I saw Joe. As I said at the start of this, I never thought we’d be without him. I thought he would always be around. When I heard of Joe’s passing I was sad, but at the same time I thanked God for letting me spend time with him and for giving Joe all the creative gifts that he had to share with us all. I prayed for his family that they would always have the

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Photos © J. David Spurlock, ARR.

Above: Picture at left, starting from left: Joe Kubert, J. David Spurlock and Bill Frazetta at the Vanguard booth, New York ComicCon 2011. Right photo: Vanguard booth at Wizard Big Apple Con, 2009. From left: Joe Kubert, Neal Adams, J. David Spurlock, Basil Gogos, and Jim Steranko. Pix courtesy of JDS.

Enemy Ace TM & © DC Comics.

memories and the spirit of Joe with them as they continue their lives. He not only taught them lessons of life, he taught many others outside his bloodrelated family lessons as well. Joe’s life was about a gift and how to share it. He shared and taught us all. Thank you for sharing your gift, Joe, and thank God for sharing Joe Kubert with us.

J. David Spurlock When I first moved from Dallas to the New York area in the mid-1990s, Joe Kubert was the first man to give me work. My favorite part about teaching at The Kubert School was getting to have lunch with Joe. After about a year, I moved on to The School of Visual Arts and other things, but Joe and I always stayed close and, over the years worked on a number of projects together, and enjoyed many meals, conventions, and hearty laughs. I don’t say this casually: Joe Kubert was one of the best men in the history of the comics industry. I’m proud to have called him friend, confidant, and mentor.

Alec Stevens I first met Joe Kubert in September, 1983 when I was 18 years old and attending his school. He was kind, but thoroughly professional, even coming across like a bit of a top sergeant when he entered the room. We (first year students) would brace up, because his demeanor made it clear that he was a no-nonsense character, and indeed he was. But that was only one facet to this maverick cartoonist’s persona. He wanted the best for his students, and he expected them to do their level best for him. It really was like on-thejob training in his class, having a simulated job experience with him in the variety of assignments he gave us. I have no doubt that, having attended the school for two years, I know what it would have been like to have had him as an editor — and I almost did. In 1984, I surprised him with a “Battle Album” page for DC’s Sgt. Rock. He liked it, but hesitated, saying the drawing was fine, but the page design needed work (I drew a P-51 Thunderbolt plane and one of its renowned pilots). He asked that I redo it with the necessary changes, but I never did: schoolwork took precedent, and ten classes per week left little time for extra work. Ultimately I did break into the industry in 1985 when I drew several short story adaptations that I sold to Fantagraphics Books while I was completing my second year at the school. I didn’t go for the third year, being encouraged by the number of freelance illustration assignments coming my way to make a professional go of it. In subsequent years, I would run into Kubert at comic conventions, especially after I had written and drawn a few graphic novels for DC’s Piranha Press imprint in 1988-89, and he invited me to teach at his school. Eventually I accepted in the fall of 1992, and now, 20 years later, I still teach first-year Design and second-year Figure Drawing classes. It is a joy to work with these (mostly) young, aspiring professionals, though technology has greatly changed both the comics industry and even the way that art is created, and likewise the school has gone through many curriculum changes as well. Joe Kubert mellowed a lot with the years, especially after the arrival of his grandchildren, but he remained as fiercely productive and artistically sharp as ever. Many of my favorite artists have had a period of decline late in life, affecting the quality of their work, but not so with Kubert. I honestly think he produced more comics pages yearly than both his sons Adam and Andy put together (and they would likely agree)! As I understand it, Joe Kubert began in comics at age 11 in 1938, and the final issue of DC’s Joe Kubert Presents mini-series saw print in March, 2013. Is there anyone else in the world with a cartooning career that has spanned over 74 years? He really should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for that, if not for pioneering 3-D comics with Norman Maurer in 1953, or any number of his other achievements. In the end, I loved and respected him as I would my own father.

Roy Thomas I never met a Joe Kubert story I didn’t like. It’s not that I bought every — or even nearly every — comic book that had Kubert art in it. I concentrated mostly on the adventure titles — superhero, Tor, “Viking Prince,” with the occasional war or Western issue tossed in — with almost never a horror, crime, or romance comic in the mix. However, anytime I saw a Kubert “signature” — either Joe’s actual one, or merely the telltale signs that he had drawn or at least penciled or (more likely) inked a particular story — I stopped and perused it. And I was never disappointed. There was always intelligence and integrity in those pages... and a style that called out to me as clearly as any Hitchcock or Altman or 136

Scorsese or Woody Allen film. I never encountered or spoke with him without coming away amazed that I had actually spoke with the man who had given me so much visual pleasure over the decades. Joe and I were never chummy... and never worked together (something I doubt would have turned out ideally, so perhaps it’s just as well)... but I admired his Rock-solid qualities and his openness. He was someone who, whatever his “everyman”-style mannerisms, was assured of his own worth, and rightly but not ostentatiously so... yet who was, I think, genuinely interested in everyone who came his own. And he passed on both his knowledge and his enthusiasm at his school, which — even though I was already a pro writer and editor when he founded it — I’ve always wished I could have attended. R.I.P., Joe. You give the lie to that Shakespearean quote about the evil that men do living after them, “while the good is oft interred with their bones.” The good you’ve done, both as an artist, as a father, and just as a human being, will live for a long time. Forever, if we’re lucky.

John Trumbull I hated Joe Kubert’s art the first time I saw it. To be fair, I was only ten, and ten year olds are still allowed to think a number of stupid things. I was already a budding comic book artist, and my big artistic hero was George Pérez. And when my copy of Justice League of America #200 arrived in the mail that day back in 1982, I was certain of one thing: That Joe Kubert guy who did the art for the Superman-Hawkman fight towards the back of the book couldn’t draw worth a damn. Those five pages just looked weird. Compared to the pages by Pérez, Superman and Hawkman just looked rough, loose and unfinished, with these strange lines all over them. Who did this Kubert guy think he was, letting his drawing look like that? Didn’t he know that all comic-book art was supposed to look tight, slick and clean? I was only ten but I was sure that I could already draw better than this Kubert guy! I was so sure, in fact (in the way that only a ten-year-old can be), that I decided I would draw my own version of the Superman-Hawkman splash page and send it in to DC Comics, so that they could see just how much better I drew than this Kubert guy, too. But when I finished my version, something seemed wrong. Sure, I’d drawn Superman and Hawkman just how my ten-year-old brain told me they were supposed to look, but something about them looked… off, somehow. I drew Superman and Hawkman right at eye level, but this Kubert guy drew them from high up looking down, which made the two of them look more… dynamic, somehow. It was strange. I looked and my drawing and Kubert’s drawing side-by-side, and there was no missing it — his page had something that mine didn’t. But how could that be? This Kubert guy couldn’t draw. So how come his page looked so much better than mine? It was my first step towards understanding what a phenomenal artist Joe Kubert really was. By 1989, I’d gotten a lot smarter and I’d developed an appreciation for Joe Kubert as an artist. I’d also heard of the Kubert School, a school up in Dover, New Jersey where he taught people to become comic book artists. One day, my dad saw an ad in the paper: the Kubert School was coming to Nashville for a weekend workshop! We made arrangements for me to go, and I got to take classes with Joe Kubert, Adam Kubert, Hy Eisman, and Irwin Hasen. We drew a comic page as our homework assignment Saturday night and had it critiqued the next day. I walked out of that two-day workshop feeling like I was twice the artist I was when I walked in. I also knew that I wanted to attend the Joe Kubert School someday. When the Kubert School came back to Nashville for another workshop the next year, I was there again. In January of 1994, I set foot in New Jersey for the first time to interview at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. There was a massive snowstorm on the day that I flew in, and the airline lost my luggage on the trip up. All I had were my portfolio and the clothes on my back. The next day, I woke up to a phone call from the school, saying that the usual guy who interviewed prospective students was snowed in, so I’d be interviewing with Joe Kubert himself. In the ratty T-shirt and torn jeans I’d flown up in the day before. Great. Joe smiled at me as I walked into his office. He said, “Well, we hear you’ve had a bit of trouble getting up here,” in a tone that was both sympathetic and understanding. Joe impressed me during the interview. He was smart, paternal, pragmatic, and much more up on the current state of comics than I would’ve expected a man his age to be. No question about it — Joe Kubert knew his stuff. But I must say I had a bit of trouble focusing entirely on the interview — you try concentrating on your interview when the original Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

cover layout for Superman vs. Muhammad Ali is just a few feet to your right. After my interview, as I waited for my cab to arrive, I admired one of the many pieces of original comic book art lining the halls. It was the cover for one the war books DC Comics published in the ’70s — G.I. Combat , Sgt. Rock — I forget which. As I stood there in silent admiration, Joe stepped out of his office, saw me looking at his cover, and smiled. “Don’t look too closely at those — You’ll just see all the mistakes.” The man was self-effacing, too. Damn. Joe accepted me to the school, and I spent the next three years there working harder than I’d ever worked in my life. In May of 1997, I was about to graduate the Kubert School, and I was pretty down on myself. Three years of comic book boot camp had worn my self-esteem down to a nub. I became intensely self-critical and, as a consequence, I didn’t like much of what I was drawing. I’m ashamed to say that I hacked out a few of my final assignments for the school, just to get them done. Joe knew this. And I think he also knew how disappointed with myself I was right then. I felt like a faker at our graduation ceremony that night. As he shook my hand and handed me my diploma, Joe said, just loud enough for only me to hear: “You’re going to make it, John.” I believed him. Because Joe Kubert knew his stuff. So thanks, Joe, for everything. But most of all, thank you for giving me a kind word when I needed it the most. We all admired Joe Kubert the artist, but I’m very thankful I also got the opportunity to admire Joe Kubert the man.

Michael Uslan Joe Kubert… He was, in so many ways, a giant of a man. A strong man but with the heart and soul of a great artist. He had all the qualities that count, beginning with wisdom, integrity and perspective, and never letting his artistry demands override his family priorities. He inspired me as a boy, firing my imagination every month, quickly pulling me into the world of comic books with The Viking Prince, followed later by Sgt. Rock, Hawkman, Firehair, Tor, Tarzan, and Enemy Ace. His artwork was powerful, emotion-filled, and spoke to me. But Joe never rested on his laurels. When other artists failed to evolve their skill-sets with the passage of time into their later years, Joe honed his and took his talents to the next step, remaining contemporary and relevant in the process. He pushed the creative envelope with his own original novels that defined the best of graphic story-telling. And meanwhile? He devoted the second half of his life to educating kids and developing generation after generation of new art talent for the comic book industry. And how many people can claim they were consistently active and vibrant working in comics for 70 years, 1942-2012? Farewell to my great inspiration, mentor, and dear friend! I will miss our lunches, Joe, where we talked about comics, movies, and life, itself. No one could draw wings like Joe Kubert. He made them real… functional… believable. He brought them to life. So now, I say: Use the wings, Joe… use the wings….

Joe had a way of looking at the world and at art that I am grateful to have gotten to glimpse of. Whatever that way of looking at things was, it left him smiling and laughing almost all the time. At Tell-A-Graphics my duties included penciling, inking and coloring for P*S magazine. I would also get the occasional opportunity to flat colors on some of Joe’s work, including his last run on Tor, Sgt. Rock, and Joe Kubert Presents. During the creation process there I would have to show my progress to Joe as I went, and he would offer any changes he felt needed. Sometimes after that he would lay down his pencil or brush and ask me how I was doing, with my outside work, how my daughter was, how life was going in general. And he would offer me his advice and experience in those areas too. Sometimes I would bring my daughter into the school to visit, and when we’d see Joe he would just light up, smile ear to ear, and his face would get flush red. The spirit of life in children would light him up as much as art. Joe was drawing up until the end, even when he was in the hospital. One of the last things he did that saw print was a cover for P*S magazine # 720. I got to work on that cover with him (as well as Andy Kubert and Bob Hardin), and that’s something I’ll always treasure. And even after Joe left we still had to put out P*S magazine in Joe’s style of drawing. I remember having to go over many old issues to figure out how to let a line flow like Joe did. Even after his passing, Joe was still teaching me. Joe was my teacher. He was my boss. He was my mentor. He is my friend.

Below: The Lord of the Jungle shows what for in this superb Joe Kubert drawing. Courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic..

Brandon Vietti It wasn’t through the pages of Tarzan, Hawkman or Sgt. Rock that I became a fan of Joe Kubert. Actually, my interest in comics didn’t start until the late ’80s. At that time, I was totally caught up in the works of all the modern artists who were making a splash in the industry or forming their own company. It was a very exciting time for the comic book industry and, as a young artist and comic book fan, I was dying to get inside! I was aware of Joe’s work at that time but more aware of his school. I saw the school as my first step into a career in comics. One year after high school, I applied to the Kubert School and was accepted. So I packed up my stuff and prepared for my first major travel outside of California. My parents flew with me to New Jersey to help me get settled. Together,

Rob Van Hook I attended the Kubert school from 2003-2006, and upon graduation got a job at Tell-A-Graphics at the school. I had Joe as a teacher my third year in school, and he promptly became my boss. I learned a lot from Joe as a teacher, but I learned much more from him at Tell-A-Graphics, as he was no longer making “suggestions” as to what I should do with my drawings. They had become editorial directions which forced me to start looking at my work in a new way. Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

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This page and next: Joe Kubert scribed a thoughtful letter to fan artist Mike Vosburg in 1966 and the logistics of being a freelancer for the comics industry while living in the Midwest. Says Mike, “I had sent him a copy of the front page of the comics section of the Detroit News with Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant on the top half, and his Green Beret strip on the bottom half. On the second page [on next page] there is a word smudged of that I believe should read, ‘I know of no publisher.’” Mike has a website at vozart.com and have a peek at his Retrowood work for my pal Frank Forte at Asylum Press: www.asylumpress.com/titles/ retrowood/)

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in the business. They were full of knowledge and stories about the industry that really brought that history to life like no textbook could. Through their personal anecdotes and lectures, my mind was opened to a new range of artists. Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, Frank Frazetta, Bernie Wrightson, Jack Kirby, and, of course, Joe Kubert (to name a few) were some of the names I was now obsessed with collecting and studying. During my final year at the school, I was entrusted to be the nighttime security guard there and I would lock the building up after everyone had left. Late nights at the school gave me some time to do homework, but I would often find myself instead staring at Joe’s framed original comic pages hanging on the walls in the hallways. On some of those late nights, Joe would come out of his office and chat for a bit or even invite me in to show what he was working on. I really can’t explain in words how cool that was! Seeing Joe’s process firsthand was humbling. Looking at a half-finished comic page on his desk I saw some of his rough pencil work that showed little more than stick figures with faceless circle heads. Other panels had complete inks. I asked him if he planned on detailing the remaining pencils before inking. “No,” he replied. “I like to do most of the drawing with the brush.” Then my brain exploded. As a young artist still questioning every line I drew, I could not comprehend drawing directly in ink, and especially with such a challenging tool. And yet, there was Joe drawing the most amazing stuff I’d ever seen right off the tip of a brush. Like anyone else, I could see the skill and craftsmanship in Joe’s work. But understanding exactly how those beautiful inks just flowed out of him with such freedom and confidence created a monumental shift in how I viewed his and all other art. For the first time, I could now identify those qualities in artwork and the bar was forever raised. Joe’s school gave me a clear vision of how to start out as an artist but it was Joe who showed me just how long the road ahead was. After graduation I found a job with Warner Brothers Animation and I moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles. Time flies when you start a career. I was only able to visit Joe a few times in the years that followed. But each time we met, it was like no time had passed. During my visits at the school, Joe was always trying to persuade me to try my hand at illustration again. After all, we visited the school and that’s when Joe called us all into I went to his school to become a comic book artist, not an his office to give us some news: I was to be awarded the animation artist. He knew this, of course, and I think he alfirst-ever Marvel Comics Scholarship! Marvel was paying for ways wanted me to realize that original dream I had. I would my entire three-year tuition! My parents were already pretty always tell him that I’d love to do a comic book someday but emotional about dropping off their only child 3,000 miles my animation job was just too time-consuming to allow it. away from home. Having the head of the school inform us I think he got tired of hearing me say that, so the last time I that we weren’t going to have to pay a dime for tuition really met Joe at his office he offered me a job. And he finally got put things over the top. So it was a pretty emotional moment through to me. It had been 16 years since I had done comic that we all had in Joe’s office that day and it forged a bond book pages, but Joe coached me through the process and between us all. together we crafted a story that is in the pages of Joe Kubert Marvel wanted to publicize the scholarship they Presents. Calling it a “dream come true” experience is a bit awarded, so Joe and I did a big photo shoot together for of an understatement. their press release material. That kind of spotlight attention So that’s how I became a fan of Joe Kubert. Through his was pretty overwhelming for a shy kid like myself who was pages of art or through the halls of his school, Joe helped out on his own for the first time. But watching Joe handle it realize dreams. As I continue down that long road that he all with ease somehow put me at ease. He was humble, afhelped pave, I feel proud and lucky to look back and call Joe fable and witty, and he made the whole experience really fun my mentor. for everybody. I think just watching Joe in that situation was my first lesson at the school: Professionalism 101. Joe’s guidance also went above and beyond professionWhen talking to younger artists about working in the al. During my stay at the school, he made himself available business, I often tell them they have to make up their mind to me for council during good times and bad. It was through whether they are going to be a magician or a wizard. Magisome of those personal bad times that I got to know Joe as not only a teacher or a legendary comic book artist, but also cians knows a lots of “tricks” and can get a response from as a father figure. My own father even referred to him as my their audience, but a wizard is one who can really work magic. Joe Kubert was certainly one of the wizards. “East Coast Dad.” I came across Joe at an early age. I was about five or The Kubert School didn’t have a class about the history six when I discovered Tor in a pile of comics. The story and of comics, but I ended up learning quite a bit about that artwork terrified my young psyche so much I had to slam subject. Many of the teachers at the school were old hands

Mike Vosburg

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

the book shut and throw it back on the pile. I think I was 10 when I saw the last issue of “Viking Prince.” By then I could differentiate between artists a bit and I knew I was looking at something special. The strong use of black and confident but casual line was unlike the work I was used to seeing. When the Hawkman appeared in The Brave and the Bold #34, I became a Kubert fan for life. Seeing this book was what truly inspired me to become a cartoonist. As an early member of comic fandom, I was exposed to a lot more of Joe’s work through my friend and fellow artist Ronn Foss, who also passed on Joe’s address to me. I pestered the poor guy unmercilessly; I must have sent him a fan letter every couple of weeks for a year or two. Oddly enough, while Kubert enjoyed the respect of his fellow artists as one of the best in the business, he wasn’t the fan favorite. While he was working in black-&-white, Joe used black and rendering to create the illusion of tonality in his stories. Most of the artists of the day had a strictly linear style and that is what most fans preferred. Joe’s drawings could be exaggerated, but there was always a sense of reality to the work. And the bravura inking style defied you to question his correctness. But what really sold you on Kubert was his storytelling. Once you picked a book up — if you hadn’t wet your pants in terror — you couldn’t put it down. When I started working in comics and eventually met Joe, it wasn’t drawing he talked about, but storytelling. I remember Joe chuckling one time and telling me, “I’ve seen these guys twirling their brushes to get a fine point every time they put down a line. That’s not what comics are about.” For Joe, the art always evolved out of the story. As I got older, I discovered art beyond comics with the great illustrators. They were the natural progression from all those cartoonists I admired: Leonard Starr, Wally Wood, Alex Toth, Will Eisner, Al Williamson, and many others… and Joe. But what I discovered was that, while I was looking at all these other sources, my work was beginning to look more like Kubert’s. Apparently we had been looking at the same sources. And his advice on the subject had been that there is no shame in copying other artists, as long as when you copy you try and discover not just how an effect was achiever, but more importantly, why. Working in the field and meeting your heroes usually destroyed most of the myths you have created about them, but I’m afraid I always stayed in awe of Joe. Whenever I met him or talked on the phone over the years he was always very positive and very supportive. He was a great mentor and role model beyond that of mere artist. I apologized to him one time for not being able to meet with him at his New Jersey school because of a family emergency. “Never apologize for that. Family is everything,” was Joe’s response. And what a great life: to work at a job you love right up ’til the end, surrounded by family and people who loved and respected him. The man was a true success. He is someone I will truly miss.

Lee Weeks Soon it will be 30 years since I left Maine to attend the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. I don’t have a memory of my first sighting of Joe, but we were fortunate to have him as a teacher that year (he was teaching only third year in recent years), and what I remember is the intensity; I didn’t want to miss a syllable Joe spoke. I remember some of those syllables made up words and phrases like “inculcate,” “integral,” and “raison d’être.” I remember his vice-like handshake (who wouldn’t?). I also remember that I actually had gotten a “paying” gig a month or so before I left Maine — a micro indy… uh… publisher. Soon into the school year, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do both school and work. When I informed the microguys, they let me know this industry was small and that they could make my name mud (I was young— from Maine… greener than green. It worried me). I told Joe about it and he had me come in to his office on

a Saturday morning — just him and me. After some encouraging words from him about a possible future career in comics, I told him of the situation in more detail… that I wanted to focus on school, but was being threatened by these guys. I can’t remember the details of Joe’s full statement, but I will never forget how it began. With rising intensity in a very Papa-bear-like fashion, he said, “If those people bother you again, you can tell them that the president of the National Cartoonists Society said….” I smiled. I think I even laughed out loud. All my stress and worry over the situation was immediately washed away. Joe Kubert had my back — go figure. I remember that in those early years of my budding career — into my stint on Daredevil — after some years of growing pains where I hadn’t always been as gracious about my time at the school as I could have been (as I wished I had been) — whenever I asked Joe if he had time to look at what I was doing, he made the time… and went over my work with me. Joe, unquestionably, is one of the giants — one of the Mount Rushmore faces of comics. John Buscema — with sincere awe — once said to me that Joe Kubert was “perfect” — that there was never one line too many, or one line two few — he was “perfect.” But among all the other giants, Joe’s impact goes far beyond the page… beyond his unbelievable facility. In the last few hours I have looked at my life — considering how many of God’s blessings in my life have come directly or indirectly because Joe started this little school in a mansion on Lehigh Street in Dover, NJ, back in the ‘70s. My wife, my two grown daughters, my home, friends…. And I think of all the people in all the years who have

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passed through his school and whose lives have been similarly impacted. Sure, there have been other giants in this industry’s history — a small few some might say have had greater impact on the form (thought that itself could be argued). But, when you include the impact on lives, I wonder if Joe might stand alone. Shalom

Marv Wolfman Everyone else will talk about Joe’s art, which was astounding, so I won’t. Instead, Joe Kubert hired me to be his editorial assistant back in 1971–72 to work on the war and Edgar Rice Burroughs titles. Joe stayed at home most of the week drawing Tarzan, and he needed someone in then office to do the daily work of comics, which also included some minor editing and often the re-writing of other writer’s scripts. Essentially, over the next year or so, Joe taught me most everything I learned about editing. Also, he taught me how to pace stories. He had me write an “Unknown Soldier” story that he illustrated. He kept all the dialogue but re-paced the entire story visually. Doing this, he showed me how to pace material and it’s a lesson I keep returning to over 40 years later. Joe was an utterly brilliant artist and a powerful editor. He also had patience with this newcomer that he didn’t have to have. I learned a lot from him and my admiration for the man continued to be strong even after I no longer worked for him. Joe Kubert is a magnificent talent and person.

John Workman It was in the early 1960s when I first got a real look at Joe Kubert. I looked on as the guy who had drawn Hawkman and Sgt. Rock and Enemy Ace, and had inked the first adventures of the modern version of The Flash, carried his drawing materials onto a boat. He was in good company, having joined the likes of Gene Colan, Jack Abel, Irv Novick, and the team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito on that vessel that it now was his turn to draw. You see, that boat and the image of Joe Kubert were both lines on paper that had been created by Joe himself. They were printed in an issue of DC’s Sea Devils series wherein several artists had been brought together, ostensibly for the purpose of demonstrating their respective abilities in a quest to become the regular artist on the book, an assignment that would at least partially be determined by the interest of the readers. In a race that was most certainly rigged, Joe failed to be the first to cross the finish line. It didn’t matter. In the next few years, I would read decades-old comics containing earlier examples of Kubert’s storytelling accomplishments (along with an earlier self-portrait of a younger Joe and his pal Norman Maurer in an ad for an art school that they were attempting to get going) and new ones that featured Joe Kubert artwork on Detective Comics Batman covers, on the wonderful “Firehair” stories, and on the brilliant Tarzan tales 140

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Courtesy of Allan Harvey, closing panel featuring a Joe Kubert self-portrait from Sea Devils #13 [Sept.–Oct. 1963], as mentioned by John Workman here.

that he both wrote and drew. Roughly ten years after the publication of Joe’s Sea Devils story, I received encouraging words from him by way of the mail that came to me in response to some art samples that I’d sent to Joe at DC, where he had become a full-fledged editor. His kind words meant a lot to me as I sat at a homemade drawing table in my utility-room “studio,” in a small town in the state of Washington, and dreamed of making a career of creating comics in far away New York City. By the summer of 1975, I was smack in the middle of that metropolis (or in the central part of Manhattan, anyhow), where I was toiling in the Warner Building on staff by day and freelancing at home by night, and doing both of those things for DC Comics. There, in Rockefeller Center, I met and worked side-by-side with people who, for so much of my life, had been my heroes. Carmine Infantino (who had hired both me and Bob Smith) was there, as were Julie Schwartz, Denny O’Neil, Nelson Bridwell, Murray Boltinoff, Gerry Conway, Joe Orlando, Paul Levitz, Bill Gaines, Tony Isabella, Sol Harrison, and Jack Adler. Relatively new people were represented by Bob Rozakis and Jack Harris on staff, and Marshall Rogers and Walter Simonson among the freelancers. The list of established freelancers who appeared regularly in the offices included Wally Wood, Murphy Anderson, Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, José Luis Garcia-Lopéz, Jim Aparo, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman. And for a few days each week, we were all happy to see the chair in his office occupied by Joe Kubert. Joe was still editing the Tarzan books, though his actual artwork on the series was usually limited to pencils and inks on the covers, and layouts on the interior lead stories for other artists to finish. He was also making use of Tarzan comics material that had previously been done by other creators for the Tarzan newspaper strip, among them Russ Manning. The Manning strips had been reformatted for comic book pages in perhaps the most illogical manner possible. The person who did the production work on those stories began by drawing a bland series of panel borders on numerous sheets of Bristol board. Then they took Photostats of Manning’s art, cut off the original border lines, and pasted those copies of the panels in the center of corresponding panels on the sheets of Bristol board. That strange method of working meant that each of the Manning drawings resting in the centers of multiple panels would need to have the art extended outward on all four sides from the pasted-down art to the new panel borders. Russ Manning could not have been a happy man when he saw the results. One morning, Jack Adler handed me a batch of black-&white prints of a Russ Manning Tarzan newspaper sequence, a number of sheets of Bristol board, and a typed script with introductory dialogue, a title, and rough descriptions explaining which panel of the original newspaper story would go where on the comic book version. I was to put the story together that night as a freelance project and then bring in the finished product the next morning. I spent part of my lunchtime looking over the Manning art and measuring each panel. I then gave them to DC’s Shelley Eiber, who handled the creation of Photostats for the production department. Each of the panels had instructions as to its re-sizing. While I did the regular staff work during the rest of the day, Shelley made nice crisp shots of the Manning panels to the new sizes that I had requested. At the end of the day, I gathered all the material and took it home with me.

Thomas Yeates In 1975, I attended a small northern California comic convention at the picturesque Claremont Hotel, which looked like a big pink castle against the green Berkeley hills. At this convention, I met my (now old) friend Brent Anderson, and Frank Sirocco, and a few other young wanna-be artists, maybe Steve Leialoha, too. Word went out among this group that none other than Joe Kubert would come up to someone’s room around 10 that night to look at our art. So I went and enjoyed getting to know my contemporaries. Joe was late, as I recall, but eventually showed up, I believe, with Sergio Aragonés. Joe took his time. He was always interested in young artists and very generous with them. He looked at all of our work and particularly clicked with me in part due to our mutual admiration for Tarzan. Several months later, he sent me a flyer announcing he was opening a school. On it he had handwritten, “If you come to my school, I’ll get you into comics.” That was an offer I couldn’t refuse, so off I went from sunny California to the wilds of northern New Jersey.

Hawkman TM & © DC Comics.

Working quickly at the apartment, I drew and inked panel borders on the pages of Bristol board with which Jack had supplied me. I tried to make the panel arrangements interesting, including both overlapping and inset panels in the mix. I had figured the sizes of the Manning artwork so that, after the original outer border (which was now either thicker or thinner that it had originally been) was cut off, the Photostats could abut three of the four new panel border lines on the Bristol board. For most panels, this made any art extension either very easy or totally unnecessary. What I gave Jack Adler the next morning was a reformatted Tarzan story that was visually interesting with wonderful Russ Manning art that was blessedly free of any denigration of that art. As Jack took the story into his office, I hoped that the readers would enjoy it, and I turned toward the regular day’s staff work. It was a bit later in the morning when Joe Kubert walked into the production department carrying the Manning Tarzan story pages. He smiled and told me that he was very happy with what I’d done. He sat down at the empty desk in front of mine and turned around toward me. We talked about comics and storytelling, and the need for a clarity that should never be mistaken for simplicity. At some time, in the midst of that conversation, I became aware that Joe was treating me not as a kid who was just over half his age and who had blindly stumbled into a job at DC, but as someone that he’d known for years… someone who had an understanding of the diverse elements that went into the creation of worthwhile comics stories. There was something else, too. Joe had a marker in his hand and, as he went through the pages (seemingly with a sense of admiration for the way in which I’d put everything together), he would occasionally and nonchalantly use that fine line marker to add “force lines” to the area around some of the Manning figures. This worried me at first, since I’d taken pains to keep the Manning art pure and pristine, and free of any of the artistic additions that my predecessor in turning newspaper strips into comic book pages had felt compelled to create. But I quickly realized that Joe was, by his own minor artistic additions, making the work more visually dynamic. It was quite a thing, too, to realize that I was witnessing an artistic collaboration between Russ Manning and Joe Kubert. The two of us would have other conversations over the years, talks filled with wonder and humor and sometimes a touch of sadness, but I was always grateful to Joe Kubert for the kind words that he imparted to me in the late summer of 1975. Seems like yesterday… and a million years ago.

Above: Exquisite Joe Kubert drawing of Hawkman, courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic.

Joe’s art has a force of nature quality to it and so did Joe. It’s still hard to quite believe he’s gone. I remember one glorious sunny day at the Kubert School when someone decided we should have a football game. While us scrawny and overweight artist types were dividing into teams, Joe decided it would be all 10 or so of us against him alone. Joe won. Joe and I remained friends and we always enjoyed seeing each other over the years. He congratulated me on my triumphs and sympathized when things didn’t work out. My last note from him congratulated me on getting the Prince Valiant strip. We were both huge Hal Foster fans and both greatly influenced by Foster’s art. One of the most important things I learned from Joe was the importance of “getting up a head of steam.” This is what I obviously needed to hear and he sensed it. In fact, he seemed to “sense” everything, including how, why and what to draw. Describing his work can be difficult, but let’s just say that he didn’t have any trouble working up a head of steam. There is a virtual electric current running through his art. Everything is in just the right place with just the right amount of work put into it. He was terrific and we all miss him.

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

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Ivan Snyder’s Wonderful World of Heroes Remembering the toy stores and merchandise catalogs of Superhero Enterprises Next page: At top is the catalog page introducing the winning name of the catalog super-hero mascot, Snyderman. The King Konginspired illustration is drawn by Joe Kubert. Note the school ad footing that page. Kubert School student Rick Veitch drew this illo, bottom, of the Heroes World mural window display. Courtesy of Rick.

Below: One of numerous catalog covers drawn by Joe Kubert. While the entire catalog was, for a spell, worked on by much of the student body, Joe’s distinctive style is obvious through much of the comic-sized catalogs.

Characters TM ctive owners.

& © the respe

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by Jorge “George” khoury CBC Contributing Editor Remember how much you just loved super-heroes as a kid? How, when you would run into any drug or department store, your eager eyes always wandered towards all the colorful licensed toys, wonderful school supplies, and charming knick-knacks bearing those joyful faces of beloved favorite heroes? And ultimately how, to the chagrin of your poor mom, you’d cry and pout and basically coerce her into buying these aforementioned goods for you? Yeah, though in the 1970s and early ’80s, such kid-friendly products were not as prevalent as they are in today’s marketplace, children of yesteryear knew a good thing when they saw it. Perhaps living vicariously, these were youngsters who proudly showed off their favorite heroic acquisitions and colors for all to see at the schoolyard. For many who couldn’t find these goods locally, possessing these type of nostalgia items would not have been possible without Ivan Snyder and his Heroes World mail-order business and chain of stores. Back in early ’70s, one man understood that there was an audience starved for toys and merchandise based on the growing popularity of Marvel Comics and their characters. That man was Mr. Ivan Snyder. At the time, Snyder, a certified public accountant, worked for Cadence Industries (Marvel’s parent company from 1968–86) as an assistant treasurer. He then became vice-president for Cadence’s publishing division, Marvel Comics and Perfect Film and Chemical’s Magazine Management, another company originally started by Marvel’s founder, Martin Goodman. Once at the House of Ideas, it was imminently clear to him that the rising popularity of the company’s library of characters could lead to some profitable licensing opportunities if taken seriously. He alone pretty much initiated the avalanche of

toys and products that followed for Marvel in the ’70s. “When I went to work for the publishing division," Snyder explained, "we basically counted up 20 pages of story in a 32-page comic — [leaving] 12 pages of advertising — and advertising at that time was not selling for a great amount and there was no avenue of licensing. DC Comics always had the advantage because of Licensing Corporation of America, which was a part of them. Marvel had nothing. So I started a licensing division and had retained someone to sell in that regard, but there was nothing within the confines of the comics, so we started by devoting one page a month to selling Marvel-related product.” The novel notion of Marvel advertising these goods, month in month out, in the comics themselves, not only produced extra revenue for the company, but it easily hooked up the intended target market — the faithful readership — with all the Marvel products that their hearts could desire. Changes in the publishing outfit’s management ended this memorable practice. Snyder said, “Well, we were dealing with Al Landau, president of Marvel, and he left and they brought in Jim Galton, and Jim and I never really saw eye-toeye on a lot of business matters, so he said to me, ‘Why do we have a mail order company? We’re publishers. Let’s get rid of it. So I bought it.’” Having kept the Marvel advertisements rolling for his mail order business, Snyder built a large client list and launched Superhero Enterprises, Inc., by producing the comic-sized Superhero Merchandise Catalog, based out of Dover, New Jersey; the initial pages produced by Marvel Bullpenners and showcasing primarily Marvel products in 1975. By the Bicentennial year, now including DC-related and other genre products, the pamphlet had also reinvented itself into The Superhero Book, with editor Joe Kubert at the helm, and students from the then-newly opened Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Inc., providing artwork, lettering, and coloring duties. From 1976–80, these booklets would represent some of the earliest printed work of many prominent Kubert alumni from the institution's fledgling years. The catalogs, sent to Snyder's extensive mailing list of fans, proved popular enough to actually be sold on newsstands and in early comic book specialty shops. Kubert and his pupils also illustrated the company’s memorable monthly ads appearing in Marvel and DC titles. And Joe himself created Snyderman, the “Stereosonic Superhero” and official company mascot (who was given his name by contest winner David Stebbins). “I had known Joe before,” recalled Snyder. “The industry was not that large and I had met him on several occasions and we lived near each other. And actually two of his children worked for me, and they both found their spouses working for me. David, his son, managed one of my stores, and he met his wife, who worked for our mail-order division, and his daughter came to work in our mail-order division and she met her [future] husband there." Snyder got the idea to incorporate Kubert's new enterprise because, he explained, "Joe was doing the ads for me in DC Comics. The School was then just starting out, so when I got the idea of the catalog, the comic-book catalog of my line, I went to Joe and spoke to him about it. So, basically, a lot of the work within the catalog was done by the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art.” Instead of using photographs to showcase the prod-

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Spotlight on Snyderman

Next page: Alex Ross’ portrait of Norman Rockwell [2012], courtesy of A.R. and the Norman Rockwell Museum. Used with permission. Inset left: Alex in 2011 by Seth Kushner. Below: Promo illo by Alex for the mini-series Uncle Sam.

ucts, the catalogs were designed almost as if they were themselves comic books, retaining the same dimensions and eschewing photography in favor of each item shown in illustrative form. Snyder described the process of collaborating with Kubert on the books and ads: “I would lay-out the catalog in sections and write the verbiage for it. I would list these 12 items on a two-page spread and I’d write the verbiage for it, and then he would just draw the item. We were trying to maintain the whole aura of comic books. We didn’t want it to be a reality magazine. We wanted it to be something that was somewhat fantasized.” As the market got more sophisticated and specialized into the ’80s, the comics-styled catalogs went away with the rise of more toy stores and comics shops. Snyder added, “The direct market just got too big. And also, the success of Marvel’s licensing program and DC’s licensing program expanded radically, so everything that I was selling in my catalog you could virtually buy in a store. And, historically, toys do not sell at a high-profit margin. But to sell them through a catalog, your costs are a lot different than they are retail-wise, so I could not compete price-wise.” By 1979, Ivan Snyder gave his company a new name: Heroes World, a necessity that arose because Marvel and DC jointly owned the “super-hero” phrase as a trademark, and he would go on to create a chain of over a dozen stores across the country, most of which were franchises. Unlike other comics stores, Heroes World didn’t just sell comic books, but continued the staple of selling all comic-related goods. Always knowing his customer base, Snyder proved to be a skilled buyer for his stores as the comics business soared during the ’80s. After the passing of Phil Seuling, Heroes World entered the comics distribution game by picking up the pieces of Seuling’s business. Snyder commented, “In addition to our mail order company Heroes World also had the rights to distribute Marvel and DC Comics, which our company did. Ultimately I took over the business of Seagate Distribution, created by Phil Seuling, and that lead to the distribution portion of our company becoming larger than our mail order. Ultimately we stopped our mail order activities.” By the early ’90s, Heroes World Distribution was the nation’s third largest comics distributor before its sale to Marvel in late 1994. Ivan Snyder served as president of Heroes World Distributions when it became a Marvel division for two years. Until ’97, Heroes became Marvel’s exclusive distributor. When Snyder looks back at his work with Joe Kubert, he remembers an artist with impeccable class, professionalism and strong convictions. In the early days of his business, both he and Kubert spent many nights working and fine-tuning Heroes World catalogs and ads. But, more importantly, aside from the business arrangement, they also developed a solid friendship. Snyder said, “He was probably one of the most honorable, creative, and nicest person I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet. He was a true friend. He was very ethical. He had a very strong belief in what comic books were and what they should be, and he solved them in his books. He loved what he did. And he loved his school. His school was his brainchild and it really, really worked incredibly well.” This article is dedicated to my friend Nick Purpura of JHU Comic Books @ 32 East 32nd Street in NYC. Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

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Joe Kubert: The Anti-War War Artist The creator’s fine line: telling the war from the warrior, drawing (on) the past by Harry Brod

TM & © DC Comics.

Below: The “Combat-Happy Joes of Easy Co.,” led by the “Man Called Rock,” fightin’ Ratzis with wits and fists in the Big One: dub-ya, dub-ya two. The global war seemed so innocent on this cover of Our Army at War #112 [Nov. ’61] by Joe Kubert, huh?

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Joe Kubert is often hailed as the greatest artist of war comics. Rightly so, as long as we understand we’re talking about his subject, not his attitude. In the meaning of his work he was really an anti-war artist, showing us the warrior at war in a way that drew a line between the two, heralding the heroism of the warrior while criticizing war itself. His approach was deeply influenced by his own heritage as a Jew born in Poland and raised in the U.S.

His greatest work here is the character of Sgt. Rock of “Sgt. Rock and Easy Company,” who appeared in Our Army at War, a DC comic of World War II stories, from 1959 to 1988, and sporadically thereafter. The character was so popular that Our Army at War at times outsold DC’s superhero titles, and its title was eventually changed to Sgt. Rock. The overwhelming majority of the stories were written by Robert Kanigher and illustrated by Kubert. These were stories of men in combat, but the great power of the stories of “Sgt. Rock and Easy Company” was that they were about the men much more than the combat. They were character-driven, and the strengths of the soldiers of Easy Company, especially Frank Rock himself, were those of ordinary men trying to survive under extraordinary difficulties. The cover of Our Army at War #112 [Nov. 1961] is a portrait gallery of Rock and the other “Combat-Happy Joes of Easy Co.”: brawny Bulldozer, steadfast Ice Cream Soldier, sad Zack, winking Sunny, stolid Nick, cigar smoking Wee Willie, Archie, looking older than the rest, and Junior, looking younger. The stories didn’t feature super abilities or great feats. Sure, there were some tales of astounding marksmanship or strength or speed, but the core of the stories was clear in the name itself, Rock. They praised the endurance, steadfastness, stubbornness, and persistent courage required to stand one’s ground displayed by what we have now come to call the greatest generation. Kubert’s art etched the weariness of the war-weary into Rock’s face: a triangular face looking haggard and suggesting gauntness without quite getting there that narrowed down from his helmet, its strap undone and flapping, to a jutting jaw with a permanent stubble of beard and, most striking of all, the dark shadows of his recessed eyes. In the bend of the shoulders and the slight buckle of the legs one felt the weight of what Rock carried: the grenades and ammunition belt that always hung on him, the rifle in his hands, and the responsibility for the lives of the men under his command. It was the powerful humanity of Sgt. Rock, the way that you could see the resonance with his men’s pain and peril registering on his own face, that accounts for his popularity even at the height of the opposition to the Vietnam War. When Kubert became editor of DC’s war and other comics during this period he started an unusual practice for a war comic. At the end of each story appeared the slogan “Make War No More.” “I wanted to make it clear that, despite the fact that I was editing war books, we were not glorifying war,” Kubert explained.1 That attitude came across clearly and had a strong impact. I know it affected me personally. During the Iraq war, I was one of the speakers at a “teach-in” held at my university while we were still under the Bush administration. The university has an ROTC program, and during the discussion two young men from the program passionately delivered their opinion that the professors on the panel were fools and stormed out, clearly feeling demeaned if not outright insulted by the criticisms of the war being made. Before the moderator moved on to other questions I interjected to say that I regretted that they had left, that I honored their service, and that those of us who were sharply critical of U.S. policy, as I was, had an obligation to bend over backwards to make clear that in our criticisms we separated the war from the

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Make War No More helped more sharply define the character, allowing him to wax poetic in some high-flying language to accompany the high-flying aeronautical acrobatics. It also shifted readers’ attention away from the fact that it really was the “hero” of the feature, and not fate, who was shooting down planes that were on “our” side. Kanigher and Kubert had to toe many a fine line in this feature, which was originally the backup second feature to “Sgt. Rock” in Our Army at War, but eventually became very popular in its own right. Kubert’s reputation as the preeminent artist of war comics led him to be tapped to do the art for a Tales of the Green Beret newspaper strip in 1966, inspired by Robin Moore’s bestselling book The Green Berets and written by Jerry Capp (brother of Al Capp, who created Li’l Abner). Kubert had envisioned it as an adventure strip in the vein of the old Terry and the Pirates, famously done by Milt Caniff. He soon quit when, as he saw it, “Little by little Jerry tried to turn it into a political treatise” in favor of the war.4 It’s not that Kubert was a war protester strongly opposed to the Vietnam War (although his wife Muriel increasingly turned that way).5 Like many immigrants and veterans (Kubert was drafted and served from 1950 to ’52, mostly at Fort Dix, with a six-month stint in Germany), he was inclined to believe and support what the U.S. government said about the necessity of the war. But he didn’t participate in any flag-waving hurrahs that demonized the enemy and minimized the tragedy of war in order to mount an ostentatious display of heroics. After Sgt. Rock, the characters Kubert is most associated with are Hawkman, whom he drew during his original incarnation in the ’40s, and then brought back in his revival in the ’60s; Tarzan, whom he drew in a period when DC held the comics rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ characters; and Tor, a prehistoric hunter of Kubert’s

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Inset left: Early into his tenure as DC editor, Joe Kubert added a distinctive and resonant kicker to the end of the war stories appearing in his titles. Above: The Rock of Easy Company gets real with readers on Joe Kubert’s cover of Sgt. Rock: The Prophecy #1 [Mar. ’06]. Below: Perhaps the widest exposure of any Joe Kubert artwork was his Our Army at War #233 cover repro’ed on the New York Times Magazine cover of May 2, 1971. The article inside dealt with relevancy in comics.

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Sgt. Rock TM & © DC Comics.

warrior. I was very surprised when that received more applause than anything else anyone had said. Looking back, I think that I was helped to really get that distinction at an emotional level by reading Kubert and Kanigher’s war comics during the Vietnam War era, even though they were set in World War II. (In the same way the TV show M*A*S*H, while set in the Korean War, was experienced by its audience as really being about the Vietnam War, which was still going on when the series started.) Aside from a few scattered and oblique references, until very recently, comics about World War II managed to ignore that central part of the war that was the Holocaust, the systematic genocide against the Jews that also claimed many other victims. Kubert brought Rock and Easy Co. directly into confrontation with the Holocaust in the six-issue 2006 mini-series The Prophecy. When asked why it took a full sixty years after the end of World War II for Sgt. Rock and Easy Company to first encounter the Holocaust, Kubert said that when he was drawing the strip in earlier decades there was “a tacit understanding” that images of concentration camps would have been too bloody and brutal for their primary audience, whom they took to be 10- to 12-year-old boys.2 The cover of the first issue of that mini-series showed Sgt. Rock directly addressing the reader, as he usually did verbally if not also visually to narrate the story, saying, “You ready? You wanna see war? Me an’ Easy’ll show you the real war!” They parachute in near Vilnus in Lithuania, on a special mission to extract “a very valuable object that’s gotta be ferried outta here.”3 There they meet up with Jewish resistance fighters who bring them to their object, which turns out to be a young orthodox rabbi named David, whom some believe will fulfill a prophecy of deliverance. The Allied plan is that when the rabbi reaches an Allied safe haven they will have him send messages back to Europe in radio broadcasts that will inspire Jews to fight back more vigorously. As they travel to their rendezvous point for the rabbi’s extraction, the shock and horror of the men of Easy Co. intensifies as they encounter first a burned synagogue with the charred bodies still inside, then a concentration camp with its mound of corpses, then hidden Jews who tell of other horrors. Like the other stories of “Sgt. Rock and Easy Co.,” while the action and adventure elements of war comics were certainly there, the emphasis was on the human element. Kubert consistently held fast to his basic principle: one could honorably depict the struggles of those who fought, and readers could revel in their adventures, without glorifying war. While Sgt. Rock remains by far the major military character identified with the Kubert-Kanigher team, he’s not the only one. In 1965 they took war comics another step away from a chauvinistic celebration of war with their introduction of a surprising new feature. “Enemy Ace” told the story of a German World War I pilot, Hans von Hammer, an aristocrat who followed the old warrior’s code of mutual respect between enemy combatants. He had a fatalism that saw destiny ruling those who lived and died in the skies. This

Sgt. Rock TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Courtesy of Ervin Rustemagic, a Joe Kubert commission piece featuring the top-kick of Easy Company, Sgt. Rock.

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own creation. There’s a common theme here. All of these characters allow Kubert to employ his remarkable ability to imbue the human body in motion with extraordinary grace and power. Tarzan and Tor wear only a loincloth, Hawkman is one of the most sparsely clothed superheroes (among the men anyway), and you’d be amazed how often the uniforms of the men of Easy Company ended up torn and shredded, so their musculature was on full display. The extraordinary fluidity and economy of Kubert’s line allowed him to condense the energy of action into subtle fluctuations of the body in motion. Musculature works by counterbalancing tension and release, and the two master comics artists Joe Kubert and Jack Kirby chose to highlight the different moments of that dynamic. While Kirby’s superheroes project the powerful release of energy when they have sprung into action, Kubert captures the tension held in the body at the moment action is initiated. The classic Kubert moments occur when Tarzan is right at the point of emerging from his stealthy crouching pose to leap out of the jungle at whatever man or beast he’s attacking, when Hawkman comes swooping down about to engage with his foe, and when Sgt. Rock is just releasing the grenade he’s hurling at the enemy. It’s what made Kubert one of the most sought after cover artists in the business. He creates in the viewer a sense of anticipation of what’s going to happen next, exactly what you want on the cover of a magazine to make the reader want to look inside. Kubert’s strength is in the human scale of the human body rather than in the costumed supermuscled super-hero range. For a time, DC’s “Sgt. Rock” was in competition with

Marvel’s World War II combat feature, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, drawn at first by Kirby. If you were looking at a figure leaping into action in the midst of the enemy, practically exploding off the page, you were more likely looking at a Kirby page, but if in contrast the characters were visibly more impacted by what was exploding at and around them, you were more likely looking at Kubert’s work. Kubert’s humanism continually comes through in both art and story, always emphasizing the realistically human, non-overblown scale of the action, whether involving soldiers at war or even the adventures of superheroes. Kubert took on real war reporting instead of fictional war stories in his 1996 graphic novel Fax from Sarajevo. One of his friends, artist Ervin Rustemagic, was stranded in Sarajevo, Bosnia with his wife and their two young children in 1992, when the city was attacked by Serbian forces under brutal dictator and war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. While trapped, they preserved their sanity by communicating with the outside world through faxes to their friends. The faxes to Kubert and his wife Muriel appear in the book from time to time, mostly to back up the story Kubert tells in graphic novel form. Kubert declares his motivation on the book’s front overleaf: “In 1945, we told the world, ‘Never again.’ In 1992, we forgot our promise.” The Kuberts had visited the Rustemagics in their home in Sarajevo, the city in which Ervin was born and raised, earlier in the same year of the war, but Kubert explains in the book that he hadn’t even known his friend Ervin was of Muslim descent until after the murderous “ethnic cleansing” began. The horrifying story told in the book includes Serbian snipers specifically targeting children because they get paid more for them, and “rape camps” where women and girls are imprisoned. Having left their own home just in time, as it was being flattened by tanks, Rustemagic and his family move from one neighborhood to another in search of shelter. In this hell, he uses his car to pursue the faint hope of escape. Here comic books were valued because, when piled into the car as additional armor, “two or three copies can stop a bullet or a bomb splinter.”6 Fax from Sarajevo won numerous awards when it came out, including the Eisner Award for “Best New Graphic Novel,” presented to Kubert personally by Will Eisner, his employer when he was first starting out more than fifty years earlier. Kubert had practiced his trade continuously since he was about 12 years old, at almost all of the major comic publishers, and in most capacities, as artist, writer, and editor. From an early age, for him it was about picking up a pencil and “making a mark” in the world, literally and figuratively.7 Fax from Sarajevo was a pioneering work in a genre that’s come to be called “comics journalism.” The most oft-cited examples, along with Fax from Sarajevo, are Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, about Palestinian and Iranian experiences respectively. Several recent additions to this rapidly expanding genre include The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert and Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, about the experiences of Hurricane Katrina survivors in the city. Kubert’s later works became more personal as well as more Jewish. He explored the violence in his own childhood neighborhood in his 2005 graphic novel Jew Gangster. It is in part Kubert’s consideration of what his life might have been like if things had gone down a different path early in his life. Like so many of the comics creators of his generation, Kubert came from a tough New York City neighborhood. Here he tells a fictional story of a Jewish boy who succumbs to the lure of the streets and enters the criminal underworld of Brooklyn during the Depression.8 Which brings us to the crowning achievement of Kubert’s later and more explicitly Jewish work, Yossel: April 19, 1943. Published in 2003, Yossel is an alternative autobiography.9 That is, it’s a personalized version of the popular fiction genre of alternative history, in which variations of historical

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

possibilities are explored: what if the South had won the Civil War, or the Nazis had won World War II, etc. Kubert was a Polish born Jew who was brought to the U.S. by his family in 1926, when he was two months old. The family had tried to leave months earlier but were denied visas and passage on the ship because his mother was pregnant with him at the time. “Yossel” is Yiddish for “Joe,” and in Yossel: April 19, 1943 Kubert tries to answer the question of what would have happened if he hadn’t made the trip, if he had remained in Poland and been caught up in the maelstrom of the Holocaust. Kubert begins the story in a situation as close to his actual background as he could get: the small town of Yzeran in Eastern Poland, a father who’s continually supportive of his son’s love of drawing from the age at which he could hold a pencil in his hand (even though the norm would have been to discourage such childishness as the child grew older), and eventually the beginning of hushed stories among the adults of terrible things happening to Jews. We then see these stories hitting home: the knock on the door, and the order to leave their home immediately, as it is now the property of the Reich. They pack up and go to Warsaw, where they live in a crowded apartment in the ghetto. By age 15, Yossel’s drawings have changed from imitating the heroes and scenes of the American comics that appear in Polish newspapers to drawing the people around him. In the damp basements of the ghetto where the children play, he meets Mordecai, a character inspired by Mordecai Anielewicz, commander of the resistance forces in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. During one inspection of their apartment, a Nazi officer notices Yossel’s drawings of “big, strong muscled men.” “Come with me. Now!” he says.10 In Yossel’s telling:

I will never forget the look of awful dread on Mama’s and Papa’s faces, as I followed the Nazi officer… I was led to the far end of the ghetto quarters where the somber building that housed the security forces stood. I had never been this close to it before. We went in. My legs trembled as I mounted the stone steps.11 Then: They gave me paper, pencils, even an eraser. I did sketches of the soldiers and they congratulated me. Pushed cookies and bread in my pocket. Slapped me on my back in friendly gestures. Hours later, I left in a daze. Being able to draw was truly a blessing.12 Kubert has said that in his youth his ability to draw was “a life saver” for him, as it kept him out of the kind of trouble he illustrated in Jew Gangster.13 Here drawing is a life saver for Yossel too, as the Nazis keep him in the ghetto for their entertainment when the rest of his family is put on a transport to Auschwitz. They don’t realize that he’s using his proximity to spy on them and report back to Mordecai. He eventually learns of the deaths of his family from someone who escaped from the camp and made his way back to the ghetto. Yossel meets his end in the Uprising, going down fighting with Mordecai and his other comrades, burned in the sewers by a Nazi flame thrower: Kubert draws Yossel in a way that evokes one of the most famous photographs of the Holocaust, taken in the Warsaw ghetto. The photograph shows a young boy, hands held up in the air in terror, at the head of a frightened group of mostly women and children being taken out of a building and forced along the ghetto street by Nazi soldiers, rifles at the ready. As Yossel progresses, he comes more and more to resemble that boy, down to even wearing a cap and jacket of the same style once he’s in the ghetto. That photograph was taken by the Nazis themselves during the final liquidation of the ghetto to document their handiwork. It appears in an official report entered into evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, a report declaring their mission accomplished sent back to headquarters in Berlin by commanding General Stroop titled, “The Jewish

Residential District in Warsaw No Longer Exists.” I’ve always felt a personal connection to the document since an incident that occurred many years ago. At some point around the end of my college years, my father and I were sitting around the kitchen table of neighbors and friends of my parents from the old country. Somehow in the conversation I mentioned this report. “How do you know the name Stroop?” asked our host, Robert Born. I explained that it had come up in a book I was reading. “I remember Stroop,” he said. You could see in his eyes that in his mind he had left us and was back there. As a child of Holocaust survivors myself, having grown up in a community of Holocaust survivors and taking it all for granted, I had simply forgotten that I was in the home of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. “I remember those black boots,” he said slowly, clearly picturing the scene in his mind. “We had to line up when he came for inspection, and when he got out of his jeep he’d stretch out his legs first. Those long black leather boots were so polished that the sun shined off them.” I looked at him intently as his gaze returned to the present and us. “I remember Stroop,” he repeated. I had unintentionally triggered a type of conversation that would take place in many homes with greater intentionality, where the children of Holocaust survivors drew out of the survivors stories they hadn’t planned on telling. One sees the same dynamic at work in Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The visceral force of his memories that transported him back

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Scan of a photocopy of chapter break art by Joe Kubert drawn for The Punisher Invades The ‘Nam trade paperback collection [1994]. Unfortunately the artwork for all the chapter breaks went missing from the Marvel office and was not properly returned to Joe. If any reader knows the whereabouts of any pages, please drop CBC a line.

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to that time and place was so strong that some of it seems to have even rubbed off on me, transporting me back to that kitchen even now as I recall our conversation. In the Stroop Report, the Jews are only occasionally identified as offering resistance or fighting, and are referred to as “subhumans, bandits, and terrorists.”14 German military reports preferred not to acknowledge Jewish resistance. What commander in the field was going to send back a report admitting that the mighty German military machine was having trouble dealing with an inferior race? It’s a principal reason that the story of Jewish resistance was untold at first, leading to the mistaken impression that Jews simply passively accepted their fate. Following standard historical practice, the first histories of the war made extensive use of captured German war documents. For professional historians, their creed is often that where there is no documentation, there are no historical facts. The record had to wait to be corrected in later accounts until the documentation of Jewish resistance was recovered, in diaries and letters hidden under floorboards and behind loose bricks or buried in the forests, and until interviews could be conducted in languages unknown to the first wave of historians: Slavic languages and Yiddish. There was Jewish participation in the national resistance movements in the occupied countries, armed resistance within the death camps themselves, including Auschwitz and Treblinka as well as the mass escapes from Sobibor and Koldyczewo, resistance cells such as the Herbert Baum group in Berlin, uprisings in the ghettoes, and fighting partisan groups in the forests of Eastern Europe. When the full picture is assembled — including the hostility of the local population, the history of anti-Semitism which led Jews in the early years to believe that “this too shall pass,” the collective reprisals against resistance, the lack of arms and military experience — the question is not why the Jews didn’t resist, but rather how they managed to mount the resistance they did in the face of overwhelming odds and near insurmountable obstacles. But the picture of Jewish non-resistance has been set in the public mind, and most people still “know” that the Jews just went “like lambs to the slaughter,” despite some recent efforts to correct the record. Kubert uses Yossel to strike another blow against this canard of Jewish passivity. The way the book was drawn and printed is deeply integrated into the story itself. It is drawn in stark pencil drawings, looking perhaps unfinished when compared to the standard form. As Kubert explains in the introduction: The usual procedure in cartooning is first, to do the initial drawings with a pencil, then to apply ink over the pencils with brush and pen. The pencil drawings are then erased, leaving only the ink rendering. The drawings in this book are pencil renderings… I wanted to convey a sense that these drawings were in Yossel’s mind, even though he may never have had the opportunity to put them all to paper.15 This essay is a revised and edited excerpt from Harry Brod’s Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice and the Jewish-American Way, published by Free Press (Simon & Schuster) in 2012. Brod is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Northern Iowa. 148

Kubert would use similar techniques in his Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965, based on the defense of a US military compound.16 Further, the paper on which these drawings are printed in the book is grey instead of the standard white, which makes the work feel more like a historical document and less like a standard comic book. Kubert continued to be productive, but Yossel is clearly a career highlight, both because of the acclaim it has received and because it explains so much of his career. His personal identification with Yossel, infinitely greater than with any

other character he ever portrayed, demonstrates how he always saw war from the point of view of its most vulnerable victims. It explains how the person acknowledged to be comics’ greatest war artist always emphasizes the human toll of war and ends up putting “Make War No More” into the comics when he becomes an editor. The idea that the ability to draw could save one’s life in the Holocaust isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. David Olère survived two years in Auschwitz because he illustrated letters German guards were sending home. A character based on him appears in Pascal Croci’s graphic novel Auschwitz, using his actual prisoner number, 106144.17 It also happened to Dina Gottliebova (later Dina Babbitt) as a prisoner in Auschwitz. The infamous “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele spared her life and that of her mother Johanna so that she could draw portraits of gypsy inmates. He thought her paintings captured their skin color better than the photography of the time, important to him because he thought this helped demonstrate their racial inferiority. The drawings were acquired and put on exhibit in the ’70s by the museum at the site, which did not know that the artist was still alive. When they refused to return them following her repeated requests after she identified them, an international campaign was mounted to get the paintings back to her, including U.S. House and Senate resolutions, but unsuccessful at the time of her death in 2009 at the age of 86.18 As part of that campaign a six-page comic was created to illustrate the situation. Inked by Kubert, with an introduction by Stan Lee, it was written and drawn by Neal Adams. The story was reprinted for wider circulation in the last issue of the six-issue mini-series X-Men Magneto: Testament that for the first time told the story of the series character Magneto’s youth as a Jew prior to and during the Holocaust. Joe Kubert touched many lives. We have yet to see the full impact of his life and work, for the Kubert School, which he co-founded with his wife, Muriel, and at which he taught, continues to train many of our leading artists, including his sons Adam and Andy. Many will continue to draw inspiration from his drawings.

Endnotes

ill Schelly. Man of Rock: A Biography of Joe Kubert. B (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2008), 184. 2 Kubert, interview by author. August 14, 2008. Dover, New Jersey. 3 Joe Kubert. The Prophecy, Part One. (New York: DC Comics, 2006), 5. 4 Schelly, Man of Rock, 174. 5 Schelly, Man of Rock, 173. 6 Kubert, Fax, 80. 7 Joe Kubert. Interview. 8 Joe Kubert. Jew Gangster. (New York: ibooks, 2005), 28 and 79. The book is often cited with the subtitle “A Father’s Admonition,” but this doesn’t appear in the book itself. 9 Joe Kubert. Yossel: April 19, 1943. A Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (New York: ibooks, 2003). 10 Kubert, Yossel, 23. 11 Kubert, Yossel, 24. 12 Kubert, Yossel, 24. 13 Kubert, interview. 14 The Stroop Report: The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More, Teletype message of 8 May 1943, “Jewish Virtual Library,” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/ nowarsaw.html, retrieved December 5, 2010. 15 Kubert, Yossel, introduction (3). 16 Joe Kubert, Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965. (New York: DC Comics, 2010). 17 Pascal Croci. Auschwitz. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 18 George Gene Gustines. “Comic-Book Idols Rally to Aid a Holocaust Artist.” New York Times. August 9, 2008. A17 & 23. 1

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Portrait by Greg Preston

CBC Contributors

Sal Abbinanti Neal Adams Richard Arndt Michael Aushenker Dick Ayers Phil Balsman Howard Bender Karen Berger Stephen R. Bissette William Bossert. Brian ‘Duke’ Boyanski Harry Brod Emi Yonemura Brown Thom Buchanan Kurt Busiek Sergio Cariello Peter Carlsson Jae H. Choi Nancy Collins

Andrew D. Cooke DC Comics Dan Duncan Jan Duursema Hy Eisman Ric Estrada Seth Estrada Dustin Evans Fantagraphics Paul Fitzgerald Mike Fleming Jared K. Fletcher Marie Florio Patrick Ford Frank Forte Tom Foxmarnick Brent Frankenhoff Gianfranco Goria C. Michael Hall Bob Hardin Sara Harper-

Hudson Allan Harvey Irwin Hasen Russ Heath Fred Hembeck Heritage Auctions Greg Hildebrandt Christopher Irving jhchoi Josip @ SAF Louie Joyce Chris Kalnick Jim Keefe Matt Keller Rob Kelly George Khoury Chris Knowles J.D. King Pav Kovacic Michael Kraiger Steve Kriozere

Adam Kubert Andy Kubert The Kubert School Seth Kushner Paul Levitz Steve Lieber David M. Lisa Stephanie Malinski David Mandel Tom Mandrake Kelvin Mao Lori Matsumoto Rafael Medoff Robert Miskovic Steve Mitchell Rags Morales Brian K. Morris Mark Nelson Michael Netzer Newark Star-Ledger

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Graham Nolan Jerry Ordway Joe Panico Xurxo G. Penalta Nick Perks George Pratt Greg Preston Eric Reynolds S.C. Ringgenberg Paul Rivoche Rico Ramirez David A. Roach Abdon J. Romero Ervin Rustemagic Ernest Sanchez Kris Schackman Bill Schelly Arlen Schumer Robert Sciarrino David Scroggy J.J. Sedelmaier

Alex Segura Bill Sienkiewicz Simon & Schuster Don Simpson Steve Skeates Ethan Slayton Rob Smentek Beau Smith Ivan Snyder J. David Spurlock Ken Steacy Alec Stevens Kristine Adams Stone Strip Art Features Bryan D. Stroud Ronn Sutton Gerry Talaoc Matt Tauber Tell-A-Graphics Carol Thomas

Roy Thomas Steve Thompson Frank Thorne The Time Capsule John Trumbull Timothy Truman Michael Uslan Rob Van Hook Vanguard Prod. Rick Veitch Brandon Vietti Mike Vosburg Lee Weeks Shannon Wheeler Kendall Whitehouse Marv Wolfman John Workman Thomas Yeates Robert Yeremian Tom Ziuko

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Joe Kubert’s Return To His Jewish Roots Dr. Rafael Medoff on the creator/mentor’s work dealing with the Holocaust by Dr. Rafael Medoff After decades of drawing brawny super-heroes, lionhearted jungle men, and rampaging dinosaurs, Joe Kubert, at age 75, began a journey back to his ethnic roots. It would lead him to illustrate Warsaw Ghetto fighters, Holocaust survivors, and even ethical mini-lessons for a Jewish religious group. When Joe passed away in 2012, he left behind not only an enormous base of fans in the comic book world, but also a growing audience of admirers in the Jewish community.

Inset right: Joe Kubert, born in a Jewish shetl in eastern Poland, imagined if his family had not emigrated to the United Sates, and an aspiring artist struggles to survive in the Warsaw ghetto of WWII in the face of Nazi extermination. The graphic novel Yossel, April 19, 1943, drawn entirely in pencil, was published by iBooks in 2003. Here is Joe’s barmitzvah photo from his 13th birthday. Below: Joe inks Neal Adams pencils in this panel from “The Last Outrage,” chronicling Dana Gottliebová Babbitt’s history and plight (as detailed in the article here). Courtesy of Kristine Adams Stone & Continuity.

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Born in Poland but brought to the United States as an infant in 1926, Joe grew up in the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood known as East New York. His father was a kosher butcher as well as a cantor for their local synagogue. As a child, Joe attended a Jewish school, the Ashford Street Talmud Torah, and did a bit of singing, too. In a 2002 interview with Comic Book Artist, he recalled: “When a Jewish girl would get married, usually they would have a nice little affair, and if the father was really putting out, he would have a Jewish choir that would sing along when the ceremony took place. I participated in that kind of a choir. They paid the magnificent sum of maybe fifty cents or a buck for the night. Which was great!” Joe vividly remembered how, as a teenager, news about Nazi atrocities against Jews in Poland and elsewhere in Europe began reaching the United States. “We heard stories, from friends, family, people from [our family’s native] town, who would come over and tell how terrible things were in 1939 and ’40, after Hitler came in,” he recalled. “My father’s friends would come and tell of the terrible things that were happening in these small towns in Poland, where Jews were being killed, were being driven into the streets, and all these terrible things were happening.” A visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,

in Washington, D.C., in 2000, “had a real effect on me,” Joe later explained in interviews with several Jewish newspapers. “If you come out of there not shaking, you are not normal.” The experience started him thinking about addressing the Holocaust in a comic book format, “to do what I’ve always done, which is to turn [my] thoughts into a story and pictures.” Joe eventually decided to utilize the “What if...” technique of storytelling beloved by comic book fans and creators alike. He would create a graphic novel “based on what would’ve happened if my father decided not to come [to the United States]. I still would’ve been interested in art, still would’ve been drawing… I do feel I still would’ve done the same thing, but obviously under different circumstances,” Joe explained. “By placing myself into the situation, it has

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

One Man’s Faith

become more real than it would have been.” In the book, Yossel: April 19, 1943, the title character (“Yossel” is Yiddish for Yosef, or Joe) is a budding teenage cartoonist when the Germans invade Poland and World War II begins. Yossel’s cartoons come to the attention of the Nazi authorities and his life is spared because his artwork amuses them. This also enables him to obtain extra food rations for his family. Ultimately, however, Yossel chooses to forsake his privileged position and join the underground band of Jewish rebels in the Warsaw Ghetto who stage an armed revolt against the Nazis (on the date that is part of the book’s title). All the major events described in the book are historically factual. Yossel was printed directly from Joe’s pencils, which gave the story a raw, period feel. The boy’s sketches of the suffering of Jews in the ghetto are particularly striking. “In order to make my story more credible, I tried to show the stories as Yossel would have,” he said. “He does drawings on the scene, like a reporter. I don’t go anywhere without a sketch pad. Like Yossel, I’d want to draw those thugs if I saw them.” And after all, “how could Yossel get ink?” Joe was more than a little surprised when I called him in 2006 to tell him that Yossel: April 19, 1943 actually represented an inadvertent twist on the idea of life imitating art. I told him about Dina Gottliebová Babbitt, a teenage cartoonist and illustrator who, like the Yossel character, was spared because of her artwork. As a prisoner in Auschwitz, Dina risked her life by painting a life-size portrait of Snow White and the seven dwarves on a wall in the children’s barracks, to cheer the youngsters in the final hours before they were taken to the gas chambers. The painting brought Dina to the attention of the infamous war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, who needed an artist to paint portraits of Gypsy prisoners on whom he was performing experiments. Mengele was searching for evidence of what he believed was the Gypsies’ racial inferiority, and he felt that the quality of his cameras could not capture their skin tone accurately. Dina’s watercolor portraits of the Gypsy victims served that purpose — and enabled her to survive the death camp. “I had never heard of a real-life example of that [when I wrote Yossel],” Joe told me. “I just imagined that it could have happened. It is stunning to hear that this actually happened to a woman in Auschwitz.” After the war, Dina married Art Babbitt, one of the animators on the original Snow White movie, and they moved to California, where she worked for Warner Brothers and the Jay Ward Studios. The roster of characters she drew included Wile E. Coyote, Daffy Duck, Speedy Gonzalez, and Cap’n Crunch. In 1973, seven of Dina’s Holocaust portraits were discovered by officials of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a Polish government-sponsored institution located at the site of the former death camp. Dina traveled to Poland in 1973 to verify that they were her works (they bore the signature “Dina 1944”), but, to her dismay, the museum refused to return the paintings to her. The United States Congress in 2003 passed a resolution directing the State Department to pressure Poland to release the paintings, but the pressure was never applied. “Sounds like another case of politics running roughshod over justice,” Joe said in one of our conversations. “The refusal of the Polish authorities to give back the paintings is nothing less than a sin, and the failure of our government to intervene — especially after being instructed by Congress to intervene — is deeply disappointing, to say the least.”

Joe became one of the leaders of a campaign by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies demanding the return of the paintings. Joe spearheaded a petition that netted the signatures of 450 comic book artists, writers, and publishers from around the world, attracting international attention to Dina’s cause. One of the first people to whom Joe reached out was J. David Spurlock, publisher of various books of Joe’s art and formerly an instructor at the Kubert School, in Dover, New Jersey. While working with Joe and the Wyman Institute on the Babbitt campaign, Spurlock secured the participation of Stan Lee, Neal Adams, Joe Simon, Jim Steranko, and other legendary figures of the comics world. “Joe entertained generations of young Americans with his tales of the good guys beating the bad guys,” Spurlock told me. “But he also knew when it was time to step into the real world and be one of the good guys, trying to help an elderly Holocaust survivor recover her property. That’s what my Jewish friends call a ‘mensch.’ “ Joe also contributed a full-page painted illustration to, and inked part of, “The Last Outrage,” a comic strip about Dina Babbitt’s ordeal, drawn by Neal Adams and written by

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: The piece by Joe Kubert appeared as a frontispiece for the Babbitt comic strip, “The Last Outrage,” produced by Rafael Medoff and Neal Adams, appearing in the final issue of the X-Men: Magneto Testament mini-series, #5 [Mar. 2009]. Joe donated the original to be included in the auction that Heritage did with the The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, to raise funds for the Dina Babbitt campaign.

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this author, which was published by Marvel Comics in its X-Men: Magneto Testament mini-series in 2009. The Babbitt campaign was only one in a growing list of Jewish-related projects that Joe undertook in his later years. He illustrated “The Adventures of Isaac and Yakov,” a series of two-page adventures with ethical lessons, for a magazine published by the Jewish religious movement Chabad. In 2005, he wrote and illustrated another Jewish-themed graphic novel, this one with the provocative title Jew Gangster. It focused on the gritty world of organized crime in a New York Jewish neighborhood in the 1930s. According to Joe, DC Comics had originally contracted to produce the book, “but someone in the higher echelon objected to the title.” Joe refused to budge. “I wouldn’t change it under any circum-

stances. It’s not a derogatory title. As a matter of fact, it’s an admonition. It’s the parent telling his son, ‘I don’t want you to be a Jew gangster!’” The first edition was published instead by iBooks, but DC’s Vertigo imprint published the paperback edition in 2011. In 2006, Joe helped design “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” the Wyman Institute’s traveling exhibit of 1940s political cartoons from American newspapers about the plight of Jews in Nazi Europe. That same year, he also drew a sixpart Sgt. Rock series for DC called The Prophecy, in which Rock and Easy Company rescue a young rabbi from Nazi-occupied territory. Joe’s earlier Holocaust-related stories in the Sgt. Rock series, in the 1970s and 1980s, brought the story of the Nazi genocide to the attention of many American teens for the first time, long before the subject was taught in most schools. One of Joe’s last Jewish-related initiatives is likely to have an impact for many years to come: “Comics Creators for Holocaust Education,” cochaired by J. David Spurlock and this author, is a new division of the Wyman Institute that grew in part from conversations with Joe about using comics and cartoons to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides. More about that in an upcoming issue of Comic Book Creator.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

Above: For The Moshiach Times, a monthly magazine, Joe created “The Adventures of Yaakov & Isaac,” a regular two-page feature teaching valuable life lessons to children learning the Torah. A lovely collection was published in 2004 by Mahrwood Press. Below: From left, Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies; Joe Kubert; and Vanguard Productions publisher J. David Spurlock. 2010 photo courtesy of J. David Spurlock.

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Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembering LES DANIELS, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and more!

JOE KUBERT double-size Summer Special tribute issue! Comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. Kubert interviews, rare art and artifacts, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, pin-ups and miniinterviews by faculty, students, fans, friends and family! Edited by JON B. COOKE.

NEAL ADAMS vigorously responds to critics of his BATMAN: ODYSSEY mini-series in an in-depth interview! Plus: SEAN HOWE on his hit book MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series; honoring CARMINE INFANTINO; Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; Part Two of our LES DANIELS remembrance; a big look at WHAM-OGIANT COMICS; ADAMS cover, and more!

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(164-page FULL-COLOR mag) $17.95 (Digital Edition) $7.95 • Ships July 2013

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Oct. 2013

BRICKJOURNAL #25

ALTER EGO #120

ALTER EGO #121

JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond! Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

LEE WEEKS (Daredevil, Incredible Hulk) gives insight into the artform, YILDIRAY ÇINAR (Noble Causes, Fury of the Firestorms) interview and demo, inker JOE RUBINSTEIN shows how he works, “Comic Art Bootcamp” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, “Rough Critique” of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, and “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and software! Mature readers only.

MEDIEVAL CASTLE BUILDING! Top LEGO® Castle builders present their creations, including BOB CARNEY’s amazingly detailed model of Neuschwanstein Castle, plus others, along with articles on building and detailing castles of your own! Also: JARED BURKS on minifigure customization, AFOLs by cartoonist GREG HYLAND, stepby-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, and more!

X-MEN SALUTE! 1963-69 secrets, rare ‘60s BRAZILIAN X-MEN stories, lost ‘60s XMen “character sheet” by STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS on the 1970s revival, art and artifacts by KIRBY, ROTH, ADAMS, HECK, FRIEDRICH, and BUSCEMA—plus the MARVELMANIA fan club story, interview with Golden Age writer ED SILVERMAN, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, and JACK KIRBY’s unused X-Men #10 cover!

GOLDEN AGE JUSTICE SOCIETY ISSUE! Features on JOHN B. WENTWORTH (Johnny Thunder), LEN SANSONE (The Atom), and BERNARD SACHS (All-Star Comics inker), art by CARMINE INFANTINO, PAUL REINMAN, MART NODELL, STAN ASCHMEIER, BEN FLINTON, and H.G. PETER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY to a vintage All-Star image by IRWIN HASEN!

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BACK ISSUE #65

BACK ISSUE #66

BACK ISSUE #67

BACK ISSUE #68

BACK ISSUE #69

“Bronze Age B-Teams”! Defenders issue-byissue overview, Champions, Guardians of the Galaxy, Inhumans, PETER DAVID’s X-Factor, Teen Titans West, Legion of Substitute Heroes, an all-star chatfest of Doom Patrol interviews, plus art and commentary by ROSS ANDRU, SAL BUSCEMA, KEITH GIFFEN, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, ERIK LARSEN, GEORGE PÉREZ, BOB ROZAKIS, cover by KEVIN NOWLAN.

“Bronze Age Team-Ups”! Marvel Team-Up and Two-in-One, Super-Villain Team-Up, CLAREMONT and SIMONSON’s X-Men/New Teen Titans, DC Comics Presents, SuperTeam Family, HANEY and APARO’s Batman of Earth-B(&B), Superman/Captain Marvel smackdowns, plus art and commentary by BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, GIFFEN, LEVITZ, WEIN, and a classic GIL KANE cover inked anew by TERRY AUSTIN.

“Heroes Out of Time!” Batman: Gotham by Gaslight with MIGNOLA, WAID, and AUGUSTYN, Booster Gold with JURGENS, X-Men: Days of Future Past with CHRIS CLAREMONT, Bill & Ted with EVAN DORKIN, interview with P. CRAIG RUSSELL, “Pro2Pro” with Time Masters’ BOB WAYNE and LEWIS SHINER, Karate Kid, New Mutants: Asgardian Wars, and Kang. Mignola cover.

“1970s and ‘80s Legion of Super-Heroes!” LEVITZ interview, the Legion’s Honored Dead, the Cosmic Boy miniseries, a Time Trapper history, the New Adventures of Superboy, Legion fantasy cover gallery by JOHN WATSON, plus BATES, COCKRUM, CONWAY, COLON, GIFFEN, GRELL, JANES, KUPPERBERG, LaROCQUE, LIGHTLE, SCHAFFENBERGER, SHERMAN, STATON, SWAN, WAID, & more! COCKRUM cover!

TENTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! Revisit the 100th, 200th, 300th, 400th, and 500th issues of ‘70s and ‘80s favorites: Adventure, Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, Batman, Brave & Bold, Casper, Detective, Flash, Green Lantern, Showcase, Superman, Thor, Wonder Woman, and more! With APARO, BARR, ENGLEHART, POLLARD, SEKOWSKY, SIMONSON, STATON, and WOLFMAN. DAN JURGENS and RAY McCARTHY cover.

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Ambitious new series documenting each decade of comic book history!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1960-64 & The 1980s

JOHN WELLS covers comics in the 1960-64 JFK and Beatles era: DC’s new GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE and multiple earths! LEE and KIRBY at Marvel on FF, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, and X-MEN! BATMAN’s “new look”, Charlton’s BLUE BEETLE, CREEPY #1 & more!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: The 1950s

1960-64: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 • Out now! 1980s: (288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $41.95 (Digital Edition) $13.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5 • Out now!

(192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $27.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-051-9 • (Digital Edition) $9.95 • Ships July 2013

(256-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $40.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 9781605490540 • Ships Aug. 2013

THE STAR*REACH COMPANION

Complete history of the influential 1970s independent comic, featuring work by and interviews with DAVE STEVENS, FRANK BRUNNER, HOWARD CHAYKIN, STEVE LEIALOHA, WALTER SIMONSON, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, KEN STEACY, JOHN WORKMAN, MIKE VOSBURG, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, DAVE SIM, MICHAEL GILBERT, and many others, plus full stories from STAR*REACH and its sister magazine IMAGINE. Cover by CHAYKIN! MATURE READERS ONLY.

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

BILL SCHELLY tackles comics of the Atomic Era of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley: EC’s TALES OF THE CRYPT, MAD, CARL BARKS’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, re-tooling the FLASH in Showcase #4, return of Timely’s CAPTAIN AMERICA, HUMAN TORCH AND SUB-MARINER, FREDRIC WERTHAM’s anti-comics campaign, and more!

THE BEST OF ALTER EGO, VOL. 2

DAN SPIEGLE: A LIFE IN COMIC ART

This sequel to ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE presents more vintage features from the first super-hero fanzine, begun by JERRY BAILS & ROY THOMAS. Editors ROY THOMAS and BILL SCHELLY reveal undiscovered gems from all 11 original issues published from 1961-78, including features on Hawkman, the Spectre, Blackhawk, the JLA, All Winners Squad, the Heap, an unsold “Tor” newspaper strip by JOE KUBERT, and more!

Documents his 60-year career on DELL and GOLD KEY’S licensed TV and Movie adaptions (LOST IN SPACE, KORAK, MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER, MIGHTY SAMPSON), at DC COMICS (BATMAN, UNKNOWN SOLDIER, TOMAHAWK, JONAH HEX, TEEN TITANS, BLACKHAWK), his CROSSFIRE series for ECLIPSE, DARK HORSE’S INDIANA JONES series and more, with rare artwork, personal photos, and private commission drawings. Written by JOHN COATES.

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-048-9 • Now shipping!

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SUBSCRIBE! • Digital Editions: 3.95 each, or save with a digital subscription (digital editions are included FREE with a print subscription)! • Back Issue, Draw, Alter Ego & Comic Book Collector are now all full-color! • Lower international shipping rates! $

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MODERN MASTERS: CLIFF CHIANG

Spotlights the career of CLIFF CHIANG (artist of DC’s New 52 breakout hit WONDER WOMAN series) through a career-spanning interview, and loads of both iconic and rarely seen artwork from Cliff’s personal files. There’s also an in-depth look into the artist’s work process, and an extensive gallery of commissioned pieces, many in full-color. By CHRIS ARRANT and ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Editions) $5.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-050-2 Now shipping!

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“witty, insightful. . .delves into the secret identities of the world’s most famous superheroes.“ —Publishers Weekly Pick uP or download your coPy today!

“Superman is Jewish? provides the intellectual thrill of a good scholarly text as well as the guilty pleasure of a good comic book.” —iowa Press-citizen

Many of uS know the SuperheroeS at the heart of the aMerican coMic book induStry were created by JewS. But we’d be surprised to learn how much these beloved characters

were shaped by the cultural and religious traditions of their makers. Superman Is Jewish? reveals the links between Jews and superheroes in a penetrating investigation of iconic comic book figures. Si monandSchuste r.com

Creator’s Creators

The Aushenker Effect Five-star career highlights of CBC’s Associate Editor, our man on the Left Coast!

greatest and most talented individuals I’ve ever Greetings from spectacular Sedona, where I’m met. Thanks to cartooning, I have decades-long on a week-long, travel-writing tour of Arizona! friendships with readers, artists, children’s book We’re only two issues into the run of Comic authors (even a girlfriend or two...). Book Creator, and I’m already proud of the work Last year (you guessed it!) moment number five we’ve published under the guidance of our esarrived when no less than Ye Ed, in my opinion the teemed Ye Ed, Jon B. Cooke. greatest of all comics-industry journalists, asked Ever since I defied my wise father’s advice and me to assist on his latest venture. I had very much pursued a comics career, there’ve been at least enjoyed (and learned from) JBC’s Comic Book Artfive solid, five-star moments I’ve enjoyed. The first ist back when it was originally published by TwoMwas in Jan. 1992, when my debut comic, Bound & orrows, and his excellent, thorough, and, above all, Gagged, was published. Sure, my one-man humor lively approach to covering comics’ great creators anthology instantly died on the vine — it was and companies inspired me to write for sister pubs supposed to be an ongoing series, but the (lack of) CBC Associate Editor Michael Aushenker, himself a gifted Back Issue and The Jack Kirby Collector. sales designated it a one-shot — but what a thrill to humor cartoonist, gets all noirish in this L.A. shot. Yes, I was one of those faithful readers who write/draw/create a book for an actual publisher. The second was handing a copy of said issue to my idol, Jack Kirby, who rued the day when CBA left TwoMorrows and went elsewhere, only to exit the field. Cooke was just too gifted a writer to rest on his laurels for long. I met at my first San Diego Comic-Con (there to promote Bound & Gagged So imagine how I felt when Ye Ed personally reached out and not only at the Caliber booth). In hindsight, I felt fortunate to shake Jack’s hand and informed me he would be editing a new mag for TwoMorrows, but wanted thank him for setting me on the road after my grandparents had bought me me to assist in executing his vision for it. Okay, perhaps this wasn’t totally up my very first comic book (a Kirby!), Marvel Double Feature #11, when I was there with shaking “King” Kirby’s hand, but it was pretty damn close! six. It was my only in-person encounter with Kirby, who died a year-and-aTruly, I would like want to thank my fearless leader and publisher John half later, and I’ll never forget how humble, soft-spoken and genuine he was. Third occurred in 1993, when one of my all-time favorite cartoonists, Mad Morrow for including me on this new journalistic adventure. As a lifelong fan of comics and cartoons, I feel honored and blessed to be a part of CBC. legend Sergio Aragonés, personally sponsored me into the group he coBest of all, Jon has been exceedingly generous in welcoming my input created in 1977, the Burbank-based Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS), and allowing me to contribute my ideas. Not only have we been on the same hot on the heels of some humor comics I had created for Heavy Metal. All page about CBC’s editorial direction from Day One (we fancy our mag a Sergio wrote on my application was “He’s very funny!” Twenty years later, I’m proud to call Sergio my friend, and I’ve watched him teach — by example lively, organic mix of preserving comics history for posterity and catching rising stars by the tail), but we’re having some wild ‘n’ wooly fun doing it. I only — how to conduct one’s self with class and aplomb in what is, at times, a hope that sense of fun, exploration, enthusiasm and passion permeates the catty, petty and precarious industry. pages of every issue as we strive to bring you the behind-the-scenes stories Fourth great moment: 1995, the year I began self-publishing with such you won’t find in any other publication. titles as Chipmunks & Squirrels, Those Unstoppable Rogues, and my El Okay, adios, readers! I’m capping off a thrilling week in Arizona with a Gato, Crime Mangler series. Not only have creating such comics led me to writing for various companies, but, moreover, the journey and the adventure jaunt to Flagstaff before heading back home to Pacific Palisades, California. — Michael Aushenker (e-mail: chipmunksandsquirrels@yahoo.com) of producing and promoting my comics has led me to befriend some of the

Coming Attractions: CBC #3 in October

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

Neal Adams and His Odyssey

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #3 spotlights NEAL ADAMS' BATMAN: ODYSSEY, in a unique, comprehensive examination of an artist and a singular work, in this case one of the field's most renowned creators and his recent 13-issue, 339-page DC Comics mini-series written and drawn by the comics legend. We grapple with the question: is the book a masterwork for the ages or an epic fail of mythic proportions? CBC goes in deep with the creator to examine his intent with Adams vigorously responding to critics, as we balance the successes and weaknesses of the quintessential Batman artist's ultimate take on a beloved character — all behind a new Neal Adams Darknight Detective cover and lushly illustrated throughout with a bodacious bevy of Batman art by the master illustrator. Plus we interview SEAN HOWE about his hit book, MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; chat with DENYS COWAN about his dynamic artwork and what's to come; honor CARMINE INFANTINO; check in on Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; take a wide look at the biggest comic book of them all, WHAM-O-GIANT COMICS; present the final installment of our LES DANIELS remembrance; and, as always, check out HEMBECK! Be here in October for CBC's tremendous third ish!

Behind-the-scenes Batman work • Neal's Batman Through the Ages Commentary by Batman: Odyssey Inkers • Pencils & Unused Art Shipping October 24 • 80 pages • Full-color throughout • $8.95

Comic Book Creator Tribute  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

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One Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

TM & ©

DC Com

ics.

TM & © DC Comics.

Joe Kubert, pencils & inks. Ragman #5 [Aug.– Sept. 1976]. Selected from the archives of Tom Ziuko. TM & © DC Comics. 160

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute

™

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

No. 2, Summer 2013

Bonus PDF

S u m m e r 2 0 1 3 • T h e N ew Vo i c e o f t h e C o m i c s M e d i u m • N u m b e r 2

B O N U S

P D F

T A B L E

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C O N T E N T S

Coming of Age in the New World of Comics: S.C. Ringgenberg shares a 2002 interview with Joe Kubert talking about the comic book creator’s early years in the industry....................... 3 More Tributes in Memory of Joe Kubert........................................................................................ 15 Joe Kubert Art Gallery....................................................................................................................... 25

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Comic Book Creator™ is published quarterly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Jon B. Cooke, editor. John Morrow, publisher. Comic Book Creator editorial offices: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $36 US, $50 Canada, $65 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2013 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows.

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Coming of Age in the New World of Comics S.C. Ringgenberg shares an interview from 2002 with the comic book master Conducted by Steve Ringgenberg

Below: Ye Ed believes this is a page of early Joe Kubert artwork from Harvey’s All-New Comics #10 [Sept. 1944] tale “Witches Kill At Daylight, though the wunderkind did have another entry in that ish, “Murder At the Terminal.” Courtesy of Bill Schelly.

S.C. Ringgenberg: Now, you’ve told this story many times in the past, but if you wouldn’t mind repeating it for our readers, talk about how you get into comic books in childhood. Joe Kubert: Well, I’d always read the comic strips in the newspapers, and I guess that’s where it started, because there were no comic books when I started reading the cartoons in the newspapers. This was back when I was a kid. Let’s see, I was born in ’26, which meant that we’re talking about maybe, ’29, when I was three or four years old. I started drawing when I was two, as soon as I could hold a pencil. The comic strips in the newspaper [were] Tarzan,

when Foster was doing it, and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, and Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates. All those strips really kind of gave me the push, the impetus. They were so great to look at. That was what I wanted to do. The drawings I did as a child emulated the muscle guys and the super-people — Superman and so on. Eventually comic books came around — I was about 11-, 12 years old when comic books started to appear. It happened while I was still going to junior high school. I was probably in seventh or eighth grade. I was living in Brooklyn at the time and a friend was related to the people who started the MLJ Publishing Company, forerunner of Archie Comics. And he knew the stuff I did, he knew the drawings. It’s a funny thing, when you’re a kid and you do drawings, you’re suddenly popular with all the other guys, simply because to them it’s like magic if you can draw a picture. And so, this friend of mine suggested, “Look, my uncle,” — I think it was Silberkleit who he was related to — “puts out these comic books, Joe. Why don’t you take your drawings up and show, and maybe you can get a job up there.” Now the MLJ Company was situated on Canal Street in New York. I lived in Brooklyn, in East Flatbush, at the time. And so I said, “Gee, that sounds great.” I took a bunch of drawings I did and, of course, I only guessed at what the [a professional comic book page] looked like. I had never seen an original drawing. I had no idea of what they looked like. I’d never seen anything prior to print, and so I put together a bunch of drawings on whatever paper I had and got on a subway, which at that time cost a nickel. I was about 11 or 12 at the time. I went up to the office there; no pre-announcement or anything, and they were the kindest group of people in the world. They helped me, people that I met at that time — Mort Meskin, Harry Shorten, and Charlie Sultan — a whole bunch people who were working up in the bullpen for MLJ, doing things like Pep Comics. I met Irv Novick up there at the time. I met Bob Montana up there at the time, when he had just started doing “Archie” for the comic books. And they helped me in every conceivable way: they’d check over my drawings, they’d spend time with me. It was just, you know, it was great. Here’s this obnoxious kid coming up unannounced kind of barging in and… “I want to show you the stuff I’m doing.” And they were very, very kind, and that really was the beginning of it. S.C: You were working alongside Irv Novick in the ’60s and ’70s. You knew him a long time. Joe: Yeah, yeah. And as I said, Irv remembered me as an 11- or 12-year-old the first time I came up to MLJ, and Irv was one of the guys, he gave me my first lesson in how to draw a German helmet. But this was the way these guys were, the friendliest, nicest bunch of people you can think of. And I feel that they went out of their way to help me, to show me how to draw correctly. One of the first jobs I did was inking on Bob Montana’s “Archie,” when he had started that. Now, letting a kid like me… well, it was just thrilling for me. And that’s the way it got started. S.C: For how long were you getting little lessons from people like Irv Novick or Mort Meskin before you actually did professional work? Joe: Probably about a year or so, because I got my first

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

A Life’s Work

job, I think, [when] I was about 12 or 12-and-a-half, something like that. And that was when I had just started high school. While I was attending the High School of Music and Art, probably in the first year, a friend of mine, Norman Maurer (who was my partner when we were putting out the 3-D books and so on) and I would go up to all the publishers. We would forget to go to school that day, and would instead make the rounds of all of the publishers, showing them our stuff. And that’s the way we got started. We picked up a little job here, a little job there, and again, these people were very kind in showing how to correct our work. But it was kind of a hit-and-miss thing. When we were lucky enough to be able to speak to an artist or an editor would have time to show us some stuff (which happened more often than not), that was the way both Norm and I acquired the kind of knowledge necessary to do this stuff. Because there’s no way to learn [on your own] how to do the kind of drawing necessary to reproduce in comic books, and there’s a special way of doing that. You can’t just do pencil drawings. It’s not just a matter of ink drawings. You couldn’t do dry-brush, especially when I first started because the printing procedures were so crude compared with what’s going on today. Unless the artwork was prepared properly, half the stuff would not even reproduce, and even at that, when you put color on top of it, the registers were so far off that you’d have a, you know, yellow and blue, which would produce green, you would have a half-inch edge or a quarter-inch edge of the color because the register was so far off, more often than not. S.C: Did you catch grief from your parents for skipping school? Joe: Oh, well, I don’t think they ever knew. [laughter] The only time they found out was towards the end of the year, when my teachers would send a note home, “Joe is doing poorly.” In retrospect, I don’t even recall that they reported the fact that I played hooky more times than not. I just really don’t recall, but I know that when my

Left: Cover detail from Bob Bean & Joe Kubert’s Meet Miss Pepper #6 [June 1954], actually the second (and last) ish.

Top: Oldtime Kubert compadre and TKS instructor Bob Bean rendered this portrait of his friend at work in 2003. Courtesy of Bill Schelly. Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: The ’50s comic book team of Joe Kubert (sitting) and Norman Maurer in a publicity shot that appeared in their St. John’s publications. Courtesy of Bill Schelly.

Below: Contributor Shaun Clancy shared a wealth of Kubert art instruction items, including this cover from the ill-fated 1950s course offered by Joe and Norm.

grades started slipping because I just wasn’t in the school, I got pounced on at that time. And I really had to get to work. In fact, I did have to lay aside all my carousing into the publishers’ offices and looking for work. I had to really buckle down and do my schoolwork, which I did, and I finally graduated. S.C: During the summer you were free to pursue the cartooning, right? Joe: Yeah, yeah. And in the summer was when I was able to pick up the jobs like working up at Will Eisner’s office at the time that he was doing The Spirit. This, of course, was prior to the war, prior to Will going into the Army. But the job I got up at Will’s was just erasing other people’s drawings and cleaning up, sweeping up the place. But, again, it was an opportunity to learn, to see, and to find out from the guys who were the pros, just how the stuff should be done. Also, further on, before I became a senior — I think I was still a junior in high school — I was inking on The Spirit. I was commuting up to Stamford, Connecticut, where — this was when Will was in the Army, actually, I think was maybe ’41 or ’42, something like that — what’s-his-name was doing the penciling on The Spirit. S.C: Lou Fine? Joe: Lou Fine was doing the penciling, Alex Kotzky was inking and I was inking, and we were turning out The Spirit magazine. But this was the job I was able to get during the summer. So, during the summer, instead of commuting to the High School of Music and Art, which was on 135th Street in New York,

I commuted up to Stamford, Connecticut every day. S.C: Since you were a kid, and the least experienced artist, what sort of stuff would they have you inking on the strip? Joe: On The Spirit strip? I guess I was doing everything. I was doing figures. I was doing the backgrounds. Kotzky may have been doing the faces. I really don’t recall. I don’t recall any kind of a real separation [of labor]. I think we were both inking the whole thing. S.C: Were Lou Fine’s pencils tight? Joe: Oh God, I was such a naïve kid at that time that I wasn’t even frightened working over Lou’s pencils. They were beautiful and I recall he used a mechanical pencil. And, instead of one simple line, his work was sketchy. In other words, you could see the foundation of the drawing, and then he’d tighten his drawings on top of those foundations. But it’s easy to make a mistake and ink the wrong pencils, which I guess I didn’t do too much of because they didn’t fire me right away. S.C: Well, in those days, when you were doing assisting like that, would you bring all the money back to your family, or did they let you keep some of it? Joe: That’s an interesting question. My parents, of course, came to the United States. As a matter of fact, I was born in Poland. I was two months old when my parents brought me. The way people from the old country lived was… I have four sisters, incidentally… whenever I or my sisters went out to work, the money we made went into the pot and the potkeeper was my mother. She was the exchequer and none of us even considered holding any money back from her. I mean, this was the way it was supposed to be. As a matter of fact, I never cashed a check of my own until I got married. Because, as long as I was in the family, as long as I was with the family, my money went into the pot. And, whenever I needed anything, whenever I needed any money or if I had to go out, or whatever it was, if I had to buy a car, I got it from my mother. S.C: Joe, let me backtrack a bit. Now, before you worked for Eisner, I know you had worked in the Chesler shop. Joe: Right, but that was not really working. That was the kindness of Harry Chesler, who allowed me (and, I guess, several other guys at one time or another [but it was just me] at this particular time) to come up to his studio. There were

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

about a dozen artists up there. He had a stable of these guys up on 123rd Street in Manhattan. S.C: Was this on the East Side or the West Side? Joe: This was on the West Side. S.C: Was Chesler’s studio layout like? Can you describe it? Joe: [Laughs] It was an old ramshackle building, [laughter] a little elevator that shook and creaked up the three stories that composed the entire building, and you could just about squeeze one or two guys into that elevator at any given time. It was the kind of place… I can almost remember the smell of it. Not that it was a bad smell, but you could smell the wood, you could smell the ink, you could smell the paper. Harry wasn’t on the same floor. The artists were up on the third floor. I believe it was on the third floor. Harry himself was on the second floor. The ground floor, which was the first floor, I don’t recall anything down there at all. That was where the first landing of the elevator was. But the top floor, which I think was the third floor, was where the artists were. All wood; you could feel the boards creak under your feet as you were walking. It was that kind of a…It was old at that time, and there like were maybe two or three windows… on the floor in which the artists worked, where you could look out on 123rd Street, on the main drag. And there are perhaps apocryphal stories about the guys, or Harry, himself, when he had trouble paying the electric bill, asking the guys to plug into the telephone pole for electricity, to keep the lights on so the guys could see while they were drawing. I have a feeling — and I’ve heard this from several guys who worked for Harry at the time — that that was really true. That they extended a wire outside the offices, where the artists worked, and plugged it into the telephone pole, and that’s where, at one time or another, they derived power to be able to get lights, to be able to continue drawing. But, anyhow, what Harry did was allow me, after school — when school was over at, say, 2:00 or 2:30, he let me come up to the office, come up to the place where the artists worked, set up a table for me, gave me a script (that at that time he had no intention of using) just for me to practice. And he told the other artists to help me, to correct my work whenever they’d have a chance, which they did. And that’s what I did while I was going to school. After I got out of school at 2:00 or 2:30, I’d come over to Harry’s for about two hours, and I’d get home perhaps 5:00 or 6:00 at night after I did a bunch of drawing for Harry. And Harry, for that, would give me five bucks a week, which, at that time, was a hell of a lot of money for me. S.C: That seems uncommonly generous considering Chesler’s reputation. Joe: Well, I’ve heard all kinds of stories about, all kinds of negative stories about Harry, none of which I ever experienced myself. He was the kindest, the nicest guy. In fact, I bumped into Harry when I started the school here. I don’t know if you’d heard about that. S.C: No. Joe: Well, unbeknownst to me, Harry had moved out to New Jersey and bought a bunch of property here. I hadn’t seen Harry… this was, you know, after high school and after having worked up at Harry’s place. I was up at the Chesler studio for one year or so, I started getting work and there was no reason for me to continue going up to Harry’s. I was getting work and I was able to do it at home. When I started the [Kubert] School here, in ’76 — which was, I guess, maybe 25 or 30 years later, we’re living here in Dover, and my wife is at a picture-framing place, getting some stuff framed, and some man comes over to her, seeing my name on the package that she picking up, and asks if this Joe Kubert, if this is an artist. And she said, yes, and this guy say to her, “Well, I’m Harry Chesler. Joe used to work for me.” And he followed her home, over to our house, and I recognized him immediately. This was the same Harry Chesler for whom I worked 30 or 35 years before. Harry lived in Succasunna, which is two, three miles west of Dover. Harry had bought

a bunch of property here, when property was really low in price, and was doing very, very well. He had bought a bunch of houses and stuff, and was doing very well in the real estate business. We got together, and when I started the school, he gave me a lot of advice as to what I should or shouldn’t do. I remember a terrific Christmas party we had at the school when the school first opened. We invited all the guys who had ever worked up at Harry Chesler’s place — like George Tuska — anybody who was still alive, anyhow. And we had a great time. Great Christmas party. S.C: What was Harry Chesler like? What did he look like? Joe: Harry was a kind of short, stubby guy. He was a dinosaur. He came originally from the advertising business. He always wore a fedora hat and had a little half-smoked cigar in his face all the time. Always wore a suit, tie, jacket and a vest. And that cigar would roam over his face from one side of the mouth to the other as he spoke to you. He would hook his thumbs into his vest as he’d talk to you. He was, as I said, the prototype of the little advertising executive, little hustler, that he had had the experience doing. But, as I said before, he was one of the kindest guys I’d ever met. S.C: Who was up at the Chesler shop at the time you started getting lessons and helping out? Joe: Well, George Tuska, another guy whose name was

Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Anticipating their cocreation 3-D comics would be a selling point for their art instruction course, Joe and Norm Maurer promise a three-dimensional component to the lessons in this house ad appearing in their early 1950s comic books. Courtesy of Bill Schelly and Shaun Clancy.

Above: No apologies from Ye Ed for sharing yet another dazzling image from Bob Bean & Joe Kubert’s adorable Meet Miss Pepper twoissue series. This is the first ish’s cover (labeled, for whatever reason, #5 and dated April 1954). What a knockout! Umm… the cartooning, I mean! Courtesy of Heritage.

Harry, Rube Moriera, Charlie Sultan…. S.C: I’ve heard the name Charlie Sultan before in other contexts. What did he do? What was he most known for? Joe: It’s hard to say, because Charlie, I don’t think any of the guys who did the stuff up there did anything that you might consider notable. Harry [Chesler] packaged comic books for different publishers. Anybody could say that they were a publisher as long as they could get a comic book packaged from Harry. Harry would provide these publishers with whatever kind of comic book they wanted to put out. If it was humor, he had a bunch of guys writing and drawing, and put the whole thing together and he would deliver not only just the artwork, but also the finished color plates for the price. These things were, you know, pushed out on factory style kind of a basis. And the stuff that the guys were turning out… I mean every one of the artists who worked up there doubled and tripled in brass. One week they’d be working on humor, the next week they’d be working on something that you might call horror or adventure, and the stuff would be churned out, book after book. And none of them were, I think, of, you know, of any [memorable] nature. They were extremely forgettable material… I’d rather put it that way. S.C: Would the artists on staff be paid a regular salary? Joe: Yes. That was the advantage: Harry would pay them every week. They wouldn’t be paid a freelance [page rate]. But I remember stories of some of them, and again, I don’t

know how apocryphal this might be, but I’m told by some of the guys who worked for Harry, that Harry would, come payday — I think Irwin Hasen worked for Harry at one time, but not while I was up there — but they would say, when they came up to get paid, Harry would say, “How much do you need this week?” [laughter] S.C: Did you ever work for Victor Fox? Joe: No. I may have. I know that I was up to Fox, but I don’t recall having done anything specifically for them. I don’t remember, I really don’t remember. S.C: I know Fox had a reputation for having the best-looking covers and the worst-looking insides in the business. Joe: I just don’t remember. S.C: Following your year or so up at Chesler’s shop, where did you go next? Joe: From that point on, I kind of worked freelance. I did work for Jerry Iger up at his place. That must have been a summer job because it was still while I was going to school. It must have been after I worked up at Will Eisner’s place for the summer, and Will might have suggested that I [go there] because Eisner and Iger had a working arrangement between the two of them. I don’t know exactly what that was. Will probably recommended that I go up to Jerry after I left him. S.C: So, when you were still in high school, you were working professionally. Joe: Oh, yeah, yeah. For a long time. While I was still in high school, I was working for All-American Comics. I was doing “Hawkman” at that time. Shelly Mayer was my editor and I was doing that for a couple of years before I went out of high school. S.C: Do you remember much about [All-American Comics publisher] Max Gaines? Joe: Oh, yeah. I met him a couple of times, but you got to remember that I was still a kid, a very young guy, maybe 15, 16, something like that, and I kind of stayed in the background. I think I may have met Max Gaines once or twice, and may have spoken to him maybe that length of time, but that’s about it. S.C: I know that All-American eventually got absorbed by DC. Joe: That’s correct. S.C: Shelly Mayer, now he’s a real classic figure in the business. How was Shelly to work for as an editor? Joe: Wonderful. He was probably as close to being a mentor for me than anybody I can think of. He was just a terrifically patient guy and he taught me a hell of a lot. A fact that might be of interest to you is that DC has just set up a $5,000 scholarship here at the School in Shelly’s name. S.C: That’s great! I’m glad to hear that. Joe: Yeah, yeah. S.C: When you took over “Hawkman,” you must have been familiar with Sheldon Moldoff’s work preceding you. Joe: I had seen the work, yeah. S.C: Did you like Moldoff’s approach much? Joe: Well, Shelly Moldoff had his modus operandi, which was actually utilizing a lot of [Hal] Foster and [Alex] Raymond’s artwork as a guide to go by. I liked that because it was similar. I mean it was kind of aping both the artists that I always admired. S.C: Did Foster continue to be an inspiration to you? Joe: Always. Always. When he went on to Prince Valiant, the stuff only got better. It was terrific. I always loved his work and still do. I think the older I get the more I come to appreciate it. S.C: It really seems like Foster was really the best artist who ever worked in the medium. Joe: Well, it’s hard to say. To give an accolade like that to any artist, I think, is difficult because quality is really in the eye of the beholder. There are some people who would look at Foster, who would say, “Well, gee, it looks nice, but there are other artists who are better.” I hesitate to put an appellation like “he’s the best” or “he’s the greatest,” because art

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

TM & © DC Comics.

is really judged by the people who are looking at it. To me, Foster was terrific, Raymond was fantastic, and Caniff was just great. All three of these guys worked in different styles. Their styles were really, really differed greatly, but I appreciated each one of them. They were just beautiful. S.C: Now, it seemed like, looking at your work, especially as it went on, that you were influenced by the way that Caniff spotted his blacks. Joe: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think I probably picked up more from a guy like Lee Elias, who worked very similar to Caniff’s style. When Lee came in and started doing, I think he was doing “The Flash” at the time, the one thing that really got me was, I discovered that inking like Caniff came to me a lot more quickly. It was a lot faster doing that style of artwork than trying to emulate Foster or Raymond. And so I adapted, especially when I did “The Flash.” I found it a heck of a lot easier, and a heck of a lot quicker to do when I applied myself using more of the Caniff style. S.C: To speak of layout and storytelling, who do you think had the biggest influence on your approach to that? Joe: Probably Shelly Mayer. Shelly Mayer was a proponent of good storytelling. That, to him, and to me now, are the most important factors in being a cartoonist. We are communicators. We are storytellers, and you can do the most beautiful drawing in the world as a cartoonist, but if it doesn’t tell the story, you’re not doing your job as a cartoonist. You may be designing some really nice wallpaper or some great tapestry, but you’re not being a cartoonist. A cartoonist is a guy who is communicating, trying to put into picture form a story, a drama, whatever the components of the story is. He’s trying to put that together in a graphic form. And that’s what I constantly try to do, and that’s what I learned from Shelly. Shelly’s the kind of guy who said, “Well, the characters in the story have to look like the kind of characters who are doing what you’re having them do. They have to react emotionally, you have to see it in their faces, you have to see it in the way they move, and they have to be different-looking.” And all those things really, they made sense to me. They just made sense. S.C: One thing I think is very important in storytelling is body language. Joe: Yeah. S.C: What you were just saying about character reacting to what the other character is saying. Joe: Yup, yup. And I was lucky enough when I was working with Bob Kanigher. And Bob was writing the stories and I was drawing them, and he paid particular attention to that. And we’ve often commented that, when guys are running, they run differently. They all don’t run the same way. When a guy reacts to whatever position or condition that he’s in, he reacts depending on the kind of person, the kind of character he is. And that should show in the way you depict them graphically. S.C: Joe, you were too young to serve in the military during World War II, right? Joe: Right. S.C: What were you doing during the war years? Joe: Well, that was an advantage for me, I guess, because, and one of my biggest breaks was one of the worst things that happened for the rest of the world. But, for me, the war was terrific, because a lot of the guys who would have taken up the jobs that I was doing, getting the jobs in with comic books, were in the Army. They were drafted, they were off, and so the publishers needed people. Because comic books were selling like crazy during the war, especially to the armed forces, and 64-page comics magazines were selling like they were going out of style. S.C: So during the war years you were going basically from being a student and freelancer to then to being a full-time freelancer at that time. Did you ever consider doing anything but being a cartoonist? Joe: No. Never. S.C: Wow. That must have been cool to know exactly what

you wanted to do from such a young age. Joe: Well, you know, I never thought about it. I never considered what I might do otherwise. I guess I’ve always felt that if I couldn’t make a living doing cartooning, I could do anything that I put my mind to. I don’t care what the hell it was, if it was digging ditches or anything. Anything I had to do, I would do. But, as it worked out, I never had to resort to anything else because I was always able to make a living doing that which I always wanted to do, which was cartooning. S.C: Well, during the war years I know the rates weren’t that great. Were you able to make a pretty good living? Joe: I made a good enough living so that, you know, when I was single, before I got married, I worked when I felt I needed dough. I would often afterwards take off or just not do anything until I felt I needed some more money. It wasn’t as if I was working every day or that I felt I was locked in… the only times when it perhaps got a little rough was when there were deadlines on the work that I was doing. And, invariably, like most of the guys, I would leave everything for the last day, and have to pull a couple of all-nighters before I was able to finish the work. But I never thought about that kind of…you know, we’re talking about I was maybe 17-, 18 years old at the time, and nothing in the world bothered me. Absolutely nothing.

Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Above: Joe Kubert’s dynamic Viking Prince cover for the last issue featuring his and Bob Kanigher’s good Prince Jon, The Brave and the Bold #24 [June–July 1959].

TM & ©DC Comics.

Above: Joe Kubert’s cover art for the 1990 hardcover collection The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told, featuring a number of characters Joe was closely associated with at various stages of his career with DC Comics, his main port of call.

S.C: In those days, what would you do for fun when you weren’t working? Joe: Oh God, I’ve always been into sports a little bit and I always liked to play ball if I wasn’t at home working. I’d get some basketball games going or be playing football, or things like that. What else? I’d go into the city. Jeeze, I really don’t remember. And my folks and my sisters… we were pretty much family-oriented, and a lot of the time, a lot of the spare time, we’d be spending with family. S.C: Did you ever hang around much with other cartoonists that you’d met? Joe: Oh yeah, but that was later on. I set up a studio when I first became involved with St. John Publishing, when I

started putting out those books. I had gotten a studio in New York — this is before I went into the Army — on Park Avenue, which sounds great, but it was a little skinny building amongst all the other beautiful edifices, and me and Carmine [Infantino] were up there… a guy by the name of Hy Rosen and Alex Toth was working up there a while, a bunch of guys. And there were a bunch of other cartoonists who were located close by and we’d get together very often. But that didn’t happen until I was, I guess, close to my 20s. S.C: Tell me, what was Alex Toth like in the old days? Joe: He was a very fastidious, terrific young guy, who did outstanding work, who was admired by everybody who saw him work. He was a good guy, a good kid. S.C: During the war years and then in the period following, you were working for DC during that time, weren’t you? Joe: Yeah. S.C: Did you have any other accounts? Joe: Oh, yeah. I used to keep myself busy and I’ve told the students here, as well, that’s it’s very important for anybody doing freelance work to make sure that they’re working for at least two or three other places at the same time, to never put all of your eggs in one basket, to always put a couple of your fingers elsewhere, just in case one went soft or one wasn’t doing so well. You could always kind of push for the others. S.C: So, tell me about what you were doing in the post-war years. Which characters and companies were you with? Joe: Oh God, post-war… Well, the first company that I became involved with after I got out of the Army — this is during Korea and it’s in the early ‘50s — it was the St. John Publishing Company. I had done work for them. I had packaged books for them prior to my going into the Army. And they were happy to get me back at the time when I got out, and that was the time when my buddy Norman and I formed a partnership and started putting the books out, and come out with the 3-D, the 3-D Mighty Mouse comic book. But when I started there, the comic book business was hit by the Kefauver Hearings [on Juvenile Delinquency, which blamed comics for adversely affecting the nation’s youth]. Everything flattened out and I then went up to DC and got involved with a lot of the characters Bob Kanigher, who was the editor at the time, was writing. That’s when “Sgt. Rock” first started. That was back in the mid-’50s. S.C: Can you tell me a bit about the three stories you did for E.C.? I know that unlike E.C.’s regular artists, you only did the three jobs. Joe: Yeah that’s because I don’t think Harvey really liked the work that I did. S.C: Really? So, how did you get up to E.C.? Joe: Well, I knew of the company being around and, as a matter of fact, during the 3-D days, Willie Elder, one of their artists, was up at our place when we were putting out the 3-D books, doing the 3-D work, the 3-D kind of work which

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

world [laughter] and not everybody’s going to love the work you do. And I accept that. S.C: When you were working with Kanigher, you said he gave you a lot of freedom. Would this involve changing dialogue occasionally? Joe: Definitely. S.C: So you would rewrite Bob’s dialogue? Joe: Oh, I would not rewrite; I might add some stuff. I might extend some stuff, but the term “rewrite” is like changing the story. I would never do that. I would never change or alter a story. But I might add some additional panels; I might script some panels, condense several panels into one. I might add a line of dialogue or extend a line of dialogue. Yeah, he permitted me to do that. S.C: And would sometimes you’d be drawing a scene and something might occur to you, like what the characters would say in that situation, say? Joe: Yeah, if I felt that it would, by extending it by a couple of words might fulfill… might be more apt as to what the character would say… yeah, I would do that. And Bob would let it stay and giving me that freedom allowed me a lot more room to put in those things that I felt I could add. Apparently Bob was pleased. So it worked out well for both of us. S.C: Having worked with “Sgt. Rock” for so long, can you

Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

Below: Awesome Joe Kubert cover for Our Army at War #177 [Feb.–Mar. 1967]. Courtesy of Bill Schelly.

TM & © DC Comics.

helped E.C. convert some of their books from the ’50s into 3-D work. I knew the guys. As a matter of fact, Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman were graduates of the High School of Music and Art. Norman and I had gone to there (though Norm graduated, but I didn’t; I graduated from a school in New Jersey). Norm’s brother Lenny, who worked with us, also knew the guys up at E.C. — Kurtzman and all the rest — and it was just a natural progression for me to go up there and make the rounds, fleshing out in case stuff would soften up at St. John’s. When St. John’s went down the drain, I had to set myself up a whole new schedule to work, and one of the places that I had looked at, one of the places I went to was E.C. S.C: And what did you think of the E.C. product? Joe: I thought they were beautiful. I thought they were great. S.C: Was there a particular reason why you worked with Harvey Kurtzman and not with Al Feldstein? Joe: Well, not any particular reason, but the stories that I was doing were probably more suitable for what Harvey was editing. S.C: Well, I’ve seen that during the ’50s you did some horror jobs elsewhere. Joe: Yeah. S.C: Of the three stories you did for E.C., do you have a particular favorite? Joe: I hardly even remember them. S.C: You did a D-Day story about combat engineers. Joe: I don’t remember that one. S.C: There was one about John Paul Jones. Joe: I remember that one. S.C: And there was the one about pearl divers. Joe: Yeah, and I remember that. I think the pearl divers story was the first story I did, if I’m not mistaken. S.C: Did you find it constricting to work with Kurtzman’s tissue layouts? Joe: Yes, I did and perhaps that’s what showed in the work that I did. Maybe Harvey felt that he didn’t want to continue with me. And incidentally, Harvey was a very good and dear friend of mine. The fact that he didn’t feel that my work was suitable had absolutely nothing to do with our own personal relationship. S.C: So even after Harvey said, “We can’t use you, Joe,” you continued to be friends? Joe: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. S.C: That’s nice that you were able to stay friends with him. A lot of guys might’ve gotten mad and just walked out. Joe: Well, I’d been in the business long enough to have been able to adopt a professional attitude and to recognize that when is somebody is not happy with my work it has nothing to do with me, it’s just that he doesn’t like my work. And there are others who do like my work and that’s fine. The one who I’m always trying to please with the work I’m doing is me and if some like it, that’s fine, and if some don’t like it, that’s fine, too. But it has nothing to do with our personal relationships. S.C: How do you think the work you did for E.C. stacks up to your other output at the time? Joe: I like the stuff I was doing. I liked the stuff. I try my best on every job that I do and if I was not satisfied or happy with the work that I’ve done, I wouldn’t have handed it in, or I would have crawled away someplace. But I did the best that I could. I did the best that I felt that I could at the time. S.C: It seemed like the war stories you did with Bob Kanigher a little later were less realistic and more character-driven than Harvey Kurtzman’s. Joe: Well, they were different. As a matter of fact, Bob gave me a hell of a lot more freedom with the scripts and the work that I was doing with him than I was able to get working with Harvey. It felt a lot easier and apparently Bob liked my stuff, always did, and the more he liked it, the more freedom he gave me, the more I enjoyed doing it. It’s like I said: not everybody’s going to love you in this

TM & © DC Comics.

Above and next page: Cover and short-short story by Joe Kubert for the debut issue of his delightful war-slash-horror comic, Weird War Tales [Sept.–Oct. 1971]. Though he would turn over editing chores on the title to Joe Orlando after seven issues, Kubert’s run is superb stuff!

sort of hear his voice in your head when you’re reading over the scripts? Joe: Oh, yeah. A character like that, after so long, after adapting to it as long as I have, kind of almost writes itself in terms of what he would do or what he wouldn’t do under certain circumstances. Absolutely. His characteristics are really spelled out very clearly. S.C: Considering the amount of work you did with Bob Kanigher, that’s probably one of the longest runs on any character by any artist. Joe: That’s true. If I’m not mistaken, I think it went over 30 years, was published for over 30 years. S.C: Yeah, you had Rock fighting the war many times longer than the real war. [laughs] Joe: Several times. [laughs] S.C: Joe, you’ve done a lot of war stories. Is there still any type of war story that you’ve wanted to do, but haven’t attempted? Joe: Well, it’s funny you should bring that up. It’s not one perhaps that I’ve wanted to do, but as it’s worked out now I’m doing another Sgt. Rock book right now that Brian Azzarello is writing. It’s going to be 120 pages in length. It’s going to be a hardcover. It’s going to be over-sized, and I’m just starting it right now. S.C: Is the large printing size going to affect how you do the art, or are you just going to do it standard size? Joe: I don’t think so. S.C: Joe, you’ve seen a lot of changes in the way the art was done, do you prefer doing large-size originals or the 11” x 17” that’s the current standard? Joe: I don’t know. I guess you adapt or you can get accustomed to almost anything. I had always preferred to working large. I was accustomed to working larger because I could

project and kind of figure out what the stuff is going to look like when it’s reduced in size. The larger size, of course, was twice-up; the smaller size is about a third-up. You adapt and, no, I’ve not found any real difficulty with that. S.C: Are you able to work faster in the smaller size? Joe: I don’t think so. I was able to work; I was able to work pretty good, at a pretty good rate, full-size. So I don’t think that the size makes that much difference. S.C: How do you approach drawing a page. Describe how you go from blank page to finish. Joe: Normally, when I read through a script, I will make some thumbnails, some very rough thumbnail sketches to see how — not so much for designing the page, but to see how I want the panel sequence to work, to make sure that the dramatics are clear and effective, and so I’ll make a small thumbnail sketch per page before I start out, and then I just get right on to the big paper. S.C: Okay, well I’m going to fast-forward here: You established your school in 1976. When you started, did you ever think it would still be going 26 years later? Joe: No. Absolutely not. I think it’s amazing to me that it’s lasted and done as well as it has. S.C: In 26 years, how many students have you turned out? Joe: Oh God, I don’t know. I don’t keep count really. S.C: Well, what would be a typical class size in a particular year? Joe: Well, we usually have anywhere… for the last 20 years or so, we’ve had a complement of perhaps 150, 200 students per year. S.C: Didn’t you buy an old high school? Joe: Yeah, we have the old high school here in town. It’s the same school my sons — all my kids, my sons and my daughter — had attended when they went to high school. And it

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TM & © DC Comics.

was the last place in the world I ever expected to own. S.C: That must seem odd to your sons to be going there for your school. Joe: Yeah, well, both Adam and Andy attended the mansion, where the art school was at the time. Adam and Andy have their studios here and they’re teaching at the school now, so they’re… it is a little strange, I guess. I think they’ve become accustomed to it. S.C: Did you want your sons to become cartoonists, or was that totally their choice? Joe: No, no, no. To me, it’s just a miracle not only that they’ve turned out to be cartoonists, but they’ve turned out to be as good as they are. They’re terrific. They’ve gone, at this stage of the game, for what they’re doing. I think they’ve gone way beyond anything that I’ve tried to do at that same age. S.C: Do you enjoy working with them? Joe: Very much so. It’s my greatest pleasure. Whenever I have an opportunity, and whenever it works out that they want me to do some inking or something where I can help them out, it’s my greatest pleasure. S.C: It really seemed early on that Adam’s work resembled yours a lot. Joe: [Laughs] I can’t speak to that. I really can’t. [laughs] It’s hard for me to say. I can’t speak to that. I probably… I guess, like other artists have influenced me, I’m sure there are a lot of people, including me, who have influenced both Adam and Andy. S.C: Among all the people you’ve had as students, who made the biggest impression on you as far as their talent? Joe: There have been a number of them, and I would hesitate to say for fear that I’m going to leave some names out, but there’ve been some really terrific guys who have come

out of the school. But what I admire more than anything else amongst these people, it’s probably one of the precepts of the school itself: the attitudes, their motivation, their complete dedication to what it is that they want to do. And I can’t begin to tell you the problems that a lot of these guys have with money, with being away from home for the first time, the kind of pressures that they’re under, doing the kind of work that they have to do in order to be able to attend the school. Some are putting in heavy, heavy hours and, because of money problems, having to work at the same time, which is really a drain on them. And they’ve still done it, they’ve still worked at it, and still they’ve come through and done really, really well. That I admire more than I can tell you. S.C: I saw from the interview you did that you’ve taken over the P*S magazine contract. Joe: Yep. S.C: That must be a great training ground for your students. Joe: It’s terrific for the students. But it’s really fantastic for me, especially since Will Eisner is the guy who started the magazine 50 years ago! Before I had taken the magazine on, I had spoken to Will about it and I talked to Murphy Anderson (who subsequently, after Will, took it over) and it’s a big, big kick working on this stuff, especially after guys like that. S.C: Now, P*S is a monthly, correct? Joe: Yes. S.C: And it’s just for military? Joe: Sixty-four pages a month. I think that you can pick it up generally. They have a website. Civilians can acquire it. But essentially it’s a manual, a series of stories that tell the guys in the service how to maintain their vehicles, their firearms… you know, all the mechanical stuff that they work with, how to keep them in working order. S.C: What do you base the stories on? Does the Army send

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TM & © DC Comics.

Above: For the DC Special #12 collection of Viking Prince stories, Joe Kubert enticingly redrew some material for the 1971 [May–June] reprinting, including the splash page for this story that originally appeared in The Brave and the Bold #16 [Feb.–Mar. ’58]. Courtesy of Bill Schelly.

you out manuals? Joe: The Army sends out the material, the initial material. They have ten editors down in Redstone Arsenal, down in Alabama, that supply us with the essential material, the information that they want to disseminate. We, in turn, convert that into stories, into illustrations, into humorous things that make it easier and more enjoyable reading for the guys that they want to disseminate this information to. S.C: Do you ever take the students out on field trips, like to Fort Dix to look at tanks or anything? Joe: No, they supply us with all the reference that we need in picture form, but the students at the school here do go out on trips to museums, to Frank Frazetta’s museum here out in Pennsylvania. That we do. But no, the guys who work on the Army magazine do not. S.C: How many students are working on it right now? Joe: Oh, I don’t know the number off-hand.

S.C: Is it a large number, or…? Joe: No, not really. And none of them are permitted to work on it if they’re not doing well in school. First priority is what they came here for and that is to work, to learn through the subjects that, through the ten-course curriculum that’s given here. And, unless they’re doing well in those classes, I don’t care how good they are, they can’t involve themselves on anything outside, with which I have anything to do. S.C: What do the students do on the magazine? Are they doing pretty much doing everything? Joe: Yeah, sure. All kinds of different stuff, penciling, inking, layouts, working on computers, doing the coloring… everything. S.C: Do you try to give your students the same kind of all-around background you acquired? Joe: That’s the whole idea, sure. S.C: So you expect your students to be halfway decent letterers, for instance? Joe: It’s got to be that way ’else there’s no insurance that they’ll be able to make a livelihood over an extended period of time. But, anyhow, what we try to do is to give them enough a varied education so that should any part of the business slow down, if the publishers have more pencilers than they know what to do with, then our graduates can be inking. If the publishers have more inkers, then our graduates can be penciling and doing layouts. If the publishers need coloring, if they need more people to work on computers, if they need lettering, if they need any of the parts of the business for which a talent is necessary, that’s what we teach here in the ten-course curriculum. But, most important, what we do tell our students is, “Hey, you have to be working on attaining a professional attitude.” That is, when they come out of here, they have to know what the business is about, how to speak to people, how to work in a professional manner, how to handle deadlines, which is critical with any guy coming into the business. That’s what we’re pushing in the courses that we give. S.C: Let me let you wrap up here with one last question. Joe: Sure. S.C: Will the Tex Willer album you did in Italy be published here in the States in English? Joe: I hope so. I know that it’s in the process of being done right now. I think there’s publisher that’s going to be doing it, but I hate to say because I don’t think it’s been a set deal yet. Leastways, I haven’t been told about it, but I have done four separate covers for the four chapters that were in that Tex book and that’s so the foreign publishers, there are a number of foreign publishers that will be publishing it, as well, outside of Italy, that is. S.C: Was it fun getting back in and doing a Western again? Joe: Yeah, it was. The only bad part about it, the only sad part about it is that it took me five or six years to do it. I had told the publisher, Sergio Bonelli, who had the patience of three saints, that it would take me at least three years to do it when I accepted the job. Of course, I’ve been involved with a lot of stuff and this was 224 pages of material. S.C: Were you squeezing in the pages when you had time? Joe: Oh yeah, exactly. And so it took me, under those circumstances, about five or six years or more to finish the whole thing. S.C: Yeah, I look forward to seeing it. Joe: It looks pretty good, I think.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

Above: The master proved he could out-macabre even Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch with this horrific Sojourn #2 cover. Original Joe Kubert art scan courtesy of Pete Carlsson and TKS. Below: Three photos from the 1970s of Joe Kubert instructing his students at the nascent Kubert School. The pic at center includes the renowned artist Al Williamson. Courtesy of PC & TKS.

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More Tributes in Memory of Joe Words and pictures from friends, peers, students and fans about the comics master Richard Arndt

Phil Balsman

What Joe did for the world and comics will be a topic of discussion for generations beyond ours. I can only relay what Joe gave me and, in a small way, illustrate what an effect one great person can have on so many. Without him and his school, I wouldn’t have my career. That’s the easy one, the simple one. I also wouldn’t have my very best friends in the world, people I met at his school or met in my career, the career that I have because of all the things he taught me. I met my wife at his school — I have the life I have because of Joe Kubert and it is an amazing life. Thank you, Joe. Thank you.

Brian ‘Duke’ Boyanski I had the privilege to meet the Master twice…! The first time, I was honoured to be a lone guest on the old school premises in Dover, New Jersey, in late July 1980, where Joe and Muriel Kubert treated me royally, showing me around, introducing me to Adam and Andy, who were still in precomic book drawing phases of their lives. In Joe’s studio, I was shown lots of his original drawings… plus he patiently gave me an interview whilst I was wrote everything down, not having any recording device on me…! All I can remember going through my head was, “I have to return here as a student,” and Joe was generous with his encouragement after seeing the sorry excuses for my drawings and comics pages that I somehow found the courage to show him. So, after a whole day spent in Casa Kubert, I was driven to the bus stop to get my ride back to New York City, bedazzled with the prospect of studying how to draw comics soon — but alas, that wasn’t supposed to happen… or was it…?! 15

Sal Abbinanti

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

I only met Joe Kubert once, in 2010. I was impressed by his willingness to interrupt his busy schedule for an interview. As impressive as his own actual work history was, equally notable was his willingness to speak up for and praise other creators he’d worked with. Joe was a man who looked and moved like a person 20 years younger and, like any true artist, he was most excited by the next project, the next job, the next day’s work. You can learn a great deal from a man like that. The comics field and his students at the Joe Kubert School were lucky to have him.

Seventeen years later, I was living in London as a struggling comic book artist, full of cocky attitude and frost in my insecure heart, when Joe honored Ye Olde England as the main guest of the UK Comic Art Convention, where I reintroduced myself — and he’s remembered me! For the duration of the UKCAC 1997, Joe had a work shop of sorts — compressed two-day curriculum demonstrating how his educational system works and, you’ve guessed it, I was the most eager beaver involved and enjoying the next best thing to being the actual Kubert Student. We talked, he shared the wisdom, kindness and generosity complimenting my art, and retelling the story of his and Norm Maurer’s visit to Alex Raymond when they were in high school. I was so light-headed and honored that I managed to forget I was allowed to take home Joe’s large easel drawings done for the demonstrational purposes! Someone more concentrated, cool-headed and less starry-eyed is probably still the proud owner of those beauties. We have exchanged several “snail-mail” letters and just a few emails, including one on Facebook. I always felt I might be imposing, hence my reluctance to pester Joe with “howdys” and such, just to remain in touch. I’ve adored the paper his pencil had touched, the very comics I was privileged to read and cherish — along with

Remembering the Master those by his prodigiously talented sons, Andy and Adam. When he passed away, I felt the loss usually experienced when a family member dies. As they say, he shall remain most sorely missed. The comics medium — and all of us — owe The Man. Big time.

Emi Yonemura Brown Working with Joe was a lot more than a job: it was an education. Before working at Tell-A-Graphics, I had heard stories in class about how tough Joe was as your boss, more-so than when he was just your teacher. I was nervous the first time I had to present a layout to him for editing. I thought, “Man, is he going to see how novice I really am? Is this even good enough to show him?” The thing I learned quickly about Joe is that he never stops being a mentor. I think teaching came naturally to him because he genuinely wanted to see you succeed. Every layout you’d bring to Joe turned into a new lesson. He’d take the time to compliment your strengths, adjust your weaknesses, and then ask you how you’re doing, how your family is, how your career is going. “What are you working on now?” He never stopped encouraging me and always treated me like he saw something special in me. Joe was like that; he could inspire with a smile and make you feel like the whole world was open to you, even if your layout was full of mistakes or your under-drawing was just plain awful. At Tell-A-Graphics, I also had the privilege of doing flat colors under Joe’s comic work. When you have to “read” every line he put down you start to learn the genius in even the simplest of strokes. There was always something to learn from Joe, whether it came from him or his work. I was only at Tell-A-Graphics for half a year, but what I took out of it will stay with me and encourage me for the rest of my life.

Nancy Collins

Dan Duncan Joe Kubert’s art has — and always will be — an inspiration. But his passion for education gave me an opportunity I will forever be grateful for. An opportunity to surround myself with like-minded individuals who have since become friends and impossibly-talented colleagues. The opportunity to practice my craft, focus my ambition, and start achieving my professional goals. I like to think that I could’ve done all of this on my own, but I’m glad I didn’t have to.

Patrick Ford I was on Cloud Nine when I saw Joe Kubert’s Tarzan previewed in [the fanzine] ERB-dom. Kubert was my favorite comic book artist when I was a kid, having been a big fan of the DC war comics. I actually stopped reading comic books around 1965 because I became interested in the ERB revival, read all the Burroughs books, collected Frazetta covers, subscribed to ERB and Robert E. Howard fanzines, and it was the Marvel Conan comic book which got me looking at comics for the fist time in five years, around 1970. The Kubert Tarzan followed not too much later and I loved it — and still do love it. Kubert measures up and Tarzan is a pretty intimi-

Thom Buchanan dating stage. To me the ultimate Tarzan artist will always be J. Allen St. John, but Kubert doesn’t pale in his shadow, nor do Foster or Frazetta.

Below: Joe Kubert and Brian ‘Duke’ Boyanski in the summer of 1980. Pic courtesy of Duke.

Louie Joyce I think my first encounter with Joe Kubert’s work was in a Justice League of America #200 reprint I had when I was younger (and still have). Even in an issue filled with so many great artists, his work stood out to me, and that image of Superman and Hawkman locked in fierce battle especially sticks in my mind. So much energy and grace in his linework.

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Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace, Tarzan, Tor, Hawkman… you name it, he drew it at some point in a very long and influential career. But perhaps his greatest contribution was the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon & Graphic Art, which produced such talents as Stephen Bissette, Kim DeMulder, Dave Dorman, Karl Kesel, Adam & Andy Kubert, Tom Mandrake, Eric Shanower, Timothy Truman, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, and Thomas Yeates.

were bound to learn some amount of craft there… not only from Joe and the teachers, but from the other students as well. Everyone ate, drank, and breathed comic art. The place swam in it. Those who were there know what I’m talking about. Their life experience and their art is a little richer for it. There are many more XQB’s than I who have had longer, deeper, more extended relationships with Joe, and they have their stories to tell and feelings to share. My relationship with him was somewhat brief, but what I can tell you about Joe is that he was no-nonsense. He shot from the hip. You knew if he liked something or felt it worked… and you knew if he didn’t. He commanded respect, personal and professional. My personal talks with him were few, but they definitely left an impression, as I’m sure his conversations did with the majority of his students. My last talk with Joe is forever etched in my mind, for it was sad in nature. It was about my leaving the school and Joe expressed his disappointment. For a cartoonist… not an easy moment to shake. Joe opened his unique school and, by doing so, opened the doors for a tremendous amount of artists who may not have otherwise had the opportunity, support, and camaraderie to develop their skill. If it wasn’t for Joe, I wouldn’t have developed my craft or the sense of identity that I have today. I wouldn’t have made the professional friends I have now. And my youngest daughter wouldn’t have grown up in my studio to become an accomplished young artist herself. Joe passed away the day after my daughter left home to attend Ringling College of Art and Design as an illustration major. The coincidence of it is not lost on me… and his legacy seems so much more poignant, his influence so much more obvious. You are respected, Joe. I know for a fact that you will be missed. Thank you.

Pav Kovacic I once read an interview with Joe where he mentioned that the way his house was laid out he had to go through his sons’ bedroom to get to his studio. It was just a little aside that was part of a longer anecdote, but that detail stuck with me and became the genesis of this story, written several years ago, which is not intended in any way to be factual — it was just a chance for me to imagine living and working in the Glory Days of comics. Thanks for sharing your amazing talent with us, Joe. You will be missed but never forgotten.

Louie Joyce I read in an article that he started drawing on the sidewalks of New York when he was young, and his neighbors would buy chalk for him to draw with. That served as the inspiration for my tribute illustration [seen above], as Joe himself has served as the inspiration for countless people since he first put chalk to pavement.

Chris Kalnick It’s funny how sometimes you don’t realize how much someone has impacted your life until you hear of their passing. This was definitely the case with me regarding Joe Kubert. Thirty-five years ago, fresh on the heels of its groundbreaking first year class, I was one of the second-year students who attended the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. The school was small compared to today’s incarnation, with something like 25-30 students returning from the first year, and Joe only accepted around 50 for the incoming second-year class. The students ran the spectrum from the intensely-focused-and-disciplined-artist/storyteller to the recent goofy-high-school-graduate-not-really-knowing-what-the-hell-they-wanted. A lot of us fell in between. I don’t need to expound on how amazing the school was, its atmosphere, its creative energy, etc. Suffice to say, there was nothing like it at the time. Plenty has been written about the school over the years. Even if it wasn’t your intention, you 17

Blame It On Errol Flynn

It was almost 9:30 when the front door to the small New Jersey bungalow swung open and Joe walked in, carrying a leather art portfolio and a bundle wrapped in brown paper. “Muriel! I’m home!” “Quiet. You’ll wake the children.” Joe’s wife, Muriel, threw a dishtowel over her shoulder as she walked in from the kitchen. “You know how hard it is to get them to bed when you’re not here.” “Oh, damn. Sorry. I forgot how late it was.” With a quick kiss Joe handed his things to Muriel so he could take off his jacket. “What’s in this package?” she asked. “They were throwing out a bunch of old art boards at the office. I thought the boys would get a kick out of looking at them. Most of ‘em are junk, but there are a few nice Superman pages by Curt Swan in there.” Joe headed towards the kitchen. “What’s for dinner? I’m starved.” “Chicken and dumplings. I’ve been keeping it warm for you. I hope the chicken hasn’t dried out, it was good when the boys and I ate.” Muriel hung Joe’s jacket in the front closet before following him. “Why are you so late getting home?” “Carmine cornered me on my way out. He needed to vent and I became his exhaust pipe.” As they passed through the living room, Joe saw that

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

Pav Kovacic

the news was on the television. The big story was Mickey Mantle’s upcoming 2,000th game the coming Saturday. Joe quickly calculated that he had drawn at least twice that number of comic book pages in his career. Maybe someday they would have Joe Kubert Day at Yankee Stadium. “What was it this time?” “Oh, everyone at the office is going crazy because Stan Lee’s got a new book over at Marvel with another one of his weirdo characters that’s selling like gangbusters. ‘Spider-Man,’ this one’s called. He’s a little nebbish who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and ends up crawling up walls and shooting webs out of his ass or something like that.” “Joe!” “I don’t know. All I know is that Weisinger’s driving Carmine up the wall, wanting to know how we’re going to compete with that, so now Carmine’s driving me up a wall. Sometimes I wonder if taking the art director job was a mistake. When I was just freelancing I didn’t have to deal with all of this crap.” “The problem is, you took the job and still do freelance work at night. I keep telling you that you can’t do both.” Joe knew where this line of conversation was going as he sat down to his dinner. Muriel leaned against the sink, arms crossed, “I don’t know why you stay with these comic books. You could be making more money in advertising and you wouldn’t have to work 80 hours a week.” “If I worked in advertising, I’d be drawing packs of Chesterfields and Pepto-Bismol bottles all day. No thanks, I’d hang myself inside of a week. By the way, the chicken is not dry, it’s perfect.” Joe’s compliment temporarily deflected Muriel, who grabbed her towel, turned with a sigh, and went back to drying the dishes. Joe went back to his dumplings. He knew she was right, but he also believed what he had said. He knew plenty of artists who had been lured into advertising by the money, only to come back to comics a year or two later. As his friend and fellow artist Gil Kane always said, “Blame it on Errol Flynn.” Just about everyone working in comics at that time had grown up during the Depression, and they all had fond memories of the times they could scrape together the money needed to spend a Saturday afternoon at the cinema. They enjoyed the serialized exploits of cowboys, interstellar explorers and G-men, but most of all they loved the swashbuckling features starring screen idols like Errol Flynn. Every time Gil, Joe and the others put pencil to paper they were trying to recreate the feelings of wonder and joy they felt while watching Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Sea Hawk. The fact that Joe was only 12 when he got his first paying job drawing comics made these childhood connections even stronger.

the two and took after his father physically. He was short and stocky and enjoyed playing baseball as much as he enjoyed comic books. Adam was fairer and slighter, and had been wearing glasses since he was six. He was the dreamer of the pair. On the desk that the boys shared Joe noticed that Andy had been copying from the anatomy book that Joe had given them. Both boys impressed him with their desire to learn the

Howard Bender

Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra  Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor

By the time he was finished with dinner, the tension between Joe and Muriel was gone. Muriel had no complaints about Joe as a husband or father. It just upset her to see him work so hard for so little reward, especially now that two of their boys, Adam and Andy, were showing an interest and a talent for drawing comic books themselves. She made Joe a pot of coffee to fuel his late night work session before going off to bed. Joe’s studio was in a small room over the garage. Due to an architectural mystery the Kuberts were never able to solve, Joe had to go through Adam and Andy’s room to get to it. When he was only doing freelance work, it wasn’t a problem since he worked during the day when the boys were at school. Now that he had to take the train into Manhattan and put in a full day at the office, there were many nights when he didn’t sit down at his drawing board until after the boys were already asleep. Tip-toeing into their room, coffee Thermos and portfolio in hand, Joe looked in on his sons. Andy was the youngest of 18

Above: Courtesy of Jim Keefe, a Sunday newspaper Flash Gordon episode rendered by Joe Kubert.

craft. He tried to give them lessons whenever he could to help direct their energies, but they managed to fill up reams of paper with their drawings with or without his guidance. He felt a swell of pride mixed with a little bit of regret at the thought of his sons following him into such a demanding career. Joe clicked on the big fluorescent light on his drawing table and sat down with the script he brought home from the office. The story was about the Viking Prince, a minor character from one of DC’s older titles that Joe thought had the potential to become a lead feature. He was a Viking warrior who had offended the gods by falling in love with a Valkyrie and was cursed with immortality, thus denying him entry into Valhalla. Joe was working with Bob Kanigher, the writer who had first created the character, and both of them were excited about the new project. Joe had been building up his morgue files with Viking reference and had even rented a 16mm print of The Vikings with Kirk Douglas. He would stop the projector whenever he found a shot he liked and Muriel would quickly snap a picture of it before the heat from the bulb melted the film. Now, as he read through the script, doodling layouts for the panels and pages in the margins, he felt his enthusiasm drop a bit. He thought about all the furor at the office over the new books Marvel was putting out. Even though Stan Lee was the same age as Joe and the rest of their contemporaries, he seemed to understand what the kids today were interested in, what scared them, what got them excited. Even college students were starting to read Marvel books. They said the stories were “hip” and “cool.” DC comics had never been hip or cool; they were the comics that parents felt safe giving their children to read. It had been a long time since Superman had fought the Nazis or even a monster from outer space. These days he kept

busy fighting off Lois Lane’s matrimonial advances and taking care of his stable of super pets. Joe was glad that he’d never had to draw Beppo, the super chimp. “Dad?” Lost in his thoughts, Joe didn’t know how long Andy had been standing in the doorway between the boys’ room and his studio. “Andy, jeez, your mother’s going to kill both of us if she finds out you’re up.” Andy walked over to his father’s drawing table and into the light. He was carrying the drawings Joe had seen on the desk. “I wanted to show you my drawings. I wanted to make sure you saw them.” Joe picked Andy up and set him on his lap and then spread his drawings out on the table. “I saw them on my way in here. You did a wonderful job. Do you remember some of the muscle groups I taught you? What’s that one called?” “That’s easy, it’s the biceps.” “Okay, Mr. Gray’s Anatomy, how about this one?” “That’s the… pic… pec… pictorial muscle!” “Pectoral,” Joe corrected him. Andy knit his brows and repeated the word quietly several times. Satisfied with his critique, Andy gathered up his drawings so he could see what his father was working on. “What’s this, Dad?” “Oh, just a story about a Viking.” “Is he a good Viking or a bad Viking?” “He’s a good Viking, a very brave warrior.” Joe had Andy stand up so that he could take some drawings out of his portfolio. “Here, you want to see what he’s going to look like?” Andy plopped down onto the floor, cross legged. “Yeah. Does he have a sword?” “You bet.” Joe joined Andy on the floor so that he could spread all of his design sketches out. He had drawings all of the main characters, including the Norse gods, as well as some ideas for Viking ships, sea monsters and frost giants. He went through each one, explaining who everyone was and how they figured into the stories. Each drawing

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

Joe sat back down at this drawing board, poured himself a cup of the now lukewarm coffee and got back to work. He didn’t think about Stan Lee, or Spider-Man, or angry publishers for the rest of the night. He was too busy dreaming about swashbuckling adventures on the high seas.

Seth Kushner I had the honor of spending some time with Mr. Kubert back in 2008 when I traveled out to The Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, to take his portrait for my book, Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics. He was 81 at the time and sitting over his art table drawing when I arrived at his office. I took a peek over his shoulder as he rose to greet me and those famous Kubert lines were unmistakable on the page. I was nervous, as one might feel when meeting a legend, but Mr. Kubert put me at ease. Joe Kubert began working in comics when he was only 12 years old and he continued doing so for the rest of his life, putting his iconic stamp on such works as “Hawkman,” “Sgt. Rock,” Tor, and many more. When my Leaping Tall Buildings partner, Christopher Irving, interviewed Mr. Kubert, he made the very apt observation that Kubert’s recent work did not look like the work of someone at the end of their career, but instead he looked to be at the height of his career. This is clearly evident in his more recent books; Jew Gangster, Fax from Sarajevo, Yossel and Dong Xoai. Joe Kubert left on indelible mark on the comics industry and he will be greatly missed. His legacy lives on through his sons, Andy and Adam, both successful and talented cartoonists in their own right, as well as through the hundreds of students he taught at The Kubert School.

Xurxo G. Penalta Joe Kubert left us a huge legacy in the thousands of printed pages he produced, but he also served as a marvelous example of an always-challenged artist, developing and evolving ever more precise, more impacting and expressive work through every decade. In the end, his seemingly unstoppable progression was detained only by his health. Joe’s insatiable ambition, for me, might be most valuable lesson he has left for us. Deeply moved by the sad news of his passing last August, I drew two pieces — one on the very day he died, the empty Sgt. Rock helmet and the legend “artist’s artist”; another during the week that followed, with some of the characters he worked on and some he created, on a white, nondescript field mourning his passing, yet with the sergeant stepping forward, toward the empty portion. This is the one I prefer, as it is more emotional. [Xurxo’s favored tribute piece appears on pg. 127 of the CBC #2 print edition.]

produced more questions from Andy, and soon Joe found himself retelling the entire origin of Jon, the Viking Prince. Just as he got to the part about the curse from the gods Joe noticed that Andy was rubbing his eyes and taking longer and longer to blink. “Alright, you. I’ve kept you up long enough. Time to get you back into bed.” “But I want to know what happens to Jon, the Viking.” “Tomorrow. I promise I’ll be home for dinner and then I can tell you and your brother the rest of the story together.” Joe scooped Andy up off of the floor. “Promise?” “Viking’s honor.” Andy was already asleep before he reached the doorway. Joe put him in his bed and tucked him in. The clock on the wall said it was quarter past one. “Muriel’s going to kill me when she finds out about this.”

Dan Duncan

Robert Miskovic I had a unique opportunity to not only to have Joe Kubert as an instructor, but also a boss and a mentor. I started working for Joe in the Fall of 1998, my first year at the Kubert school). I worked my way from the “World of Cartooning,” making boxes, all the way to Tell-A-Graphics, where I “flatted” pages for various projects of his. Artistically, I didn’t feel challenged and, after ten plus years of working for Joe, I resigned in search of becoming a “real” artist. It was the 2011 holiday season and this would be the last time I would see Joe. I stopped by his office for a visit and he was interested in the fact of whether or not I was happy with my choice of being a cartoonist. I told him that I was working a full-time job to pay the bills, but I was doing a bi-monthly strip that was being published. His response? “That’s great.” Then I added it’s only bi-monthly and I don’t get paid for it. Joe then asked, “Are you happy drawing it anyway?” I said, “Yes.” Joe then looked me in the eye and smiled, and he said, “That’s great. I’m happy for you.” That was my final lesson learned from Joe: He taught me why he drew comics — he simply loved what he was doing.

C. Michael Hall & Dustin Evans Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra  2013 Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor Comic Book Creator • Spring • #1

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David A. Roach It was those hands that really stick in my mind. As a student back in 1986, I somehow managed to persuade my art college that it was imperative I visit America as research for my third-year thesis on comic art. In all honesty, it was a flimsy excuse to fly to New York and visit some friends, but part of the trip included a visit with Joe Kubert in his Dover, New Jersey school. It was a hot dusty day and much of it is now lost to the ravages of time, but a few things do stick in the mind: My confusion at nobody expecting me when I turned up at the door; the enormous Prince Valiant original in the hallway; chatting with Joe for what felt like hours (a chat ranging from Raymond vs. Williamson to Hugo Pratt, Victor De La Fuente, and the great Europeans). But, more than anything else, it was his hands that made the biggest impression. Although I towered over Joe — I was, and still am, somewhat on the skinny side and clearly someone who had never done a hard day’s work in his life — by contrast, Joe was strong, powerfully built, and with enormous hands, which looked like they could crush rocks — and possibly had. And that is so clearly reflected in the work he produced. Be it Tor, Sgt. Rock, Tarzan, “Enemy Ace,” The Punisher, or any of the many features he worked, his art was always so powerful — so vibrant and masculine. His ink lines themselves were confident, expressive, so utterly alive and wonderfully descriptive. This wasn’t work that subtly seduced the eye with delicate rendering or finely wrought details, it jumped off the page and hit you right between the eyes like no other artist I can think of. Joe’s career must have been the longest in comics history, spanning the very earliest days of the sweatshops right up to his own self-titled comic book from DC, which was still running after his death. Consequently we all have our own particular Joe Kubert favorites which have informed our appreciation and understanding of the art form. For me, it was the more obscure corners of DC’s mid-’70s output. I was too late for his “Sgt. Rock,” I knew Kubert more as a cover artist for the many books he was editing, and there always seemed something dark, brooding and enticingly oppressive about his many covers that filled DC house ads. I’m thinking of things like Ragman, that strangest of ’70s super-heroes; Rima, the Jungle Girl; Tor; those gorgeous covers for Unexpected and House of Mystery; and his Unknown Soldier covers, which mixed war and horror so thrillingly. If there’s one image that most wholly encapsulates the unique power of his work it is for me his cover to Star Spangled War Stories

TM & © DC Comics.

#183. A German soldier calls through an open doorway, “ Colonel… Where are you?” while the Unknown Soldier lurks in the shadows, a mask hanging limply in his hand, revealing his hideously shrivelled cadaver-like face. Kubert was a master of the attention grabbing composition and the unforgettable concept and this one has stayed with me for decades. When I first saw the image, it was as a tiny page filler, probably in an issue of Kamandi (my favorite comic of the time) and I was both captivated and repulsed. It took me years to find a copy, by which time it had assumed the status of a holy grail, and if I could have any single page from his illustrious career it would have to be this one. After our meeting, I returned home to the UK and some months later I had almost forgotten about our chat when an invitation to study at the school came through the post. It seemed I was signed up as a first-year student and term was to start in a few weeks time. I never went. In fact, I don’t think I even replied and, from time to time, I wonder what would have happened had I flown back to Dover and studied under the great man. But, by the time the letter came through, I was already drawing for 2000AD and thought I knew it all. Almost three decades on, I’m still drawing comics and I still have so much to learn, but the chance to study with a legend has gone. Joe was a one-off, a unique voice and a giant of comics, we won’t see his like again.

J.J. Sedelmaier I always loved Joe Kubert’s art and remember as a kid being struck by how unique his drawing technique was. The sketchy energy and dark, adult tone set itself apart from the majority of comic book artists back then. It reminded me that there was room for artwork that didn’t conform to the industry’s norm, and Joe’s distinct style helped me appreciate the importance of standing out with a recognizable “stamp” of your own… After I became involved with the animation industry I would often get visits from ex-Kubert School students who were well prepared after their stint at his school in Dover, New Jersey. It was a pleasure to finally meet Joe several years ago and be able to tell him how wonderful I thought his work was, but also congratulate him on providing a solid foundation for his animation students!

Gerry Talaoc Joe Kubert was one of the best when it comes to the field of comics! His illustrations are the finest in layout and mood, and the storytelling is easy to understand and memorable. He is the creator of the Unknown Soldier and, during my time on the strip, he also did most of the cover designs. He possessed an amazing talent!

Shannon Wheeler Kubert is an inspiration. As a kid I copied his art hoping to someday be half as good as him. I’m still hoping.

Right: For his “World of Cartooning” correspondence course, Joe Kubert developed a self-caricature to light-heartedly introduce prospective students to the program and to the Kubert School. Here’s one of the Kubie cartoons, courtesy of Peter Carlsson and TKS.

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

Joe Kubert Art Gallery

This page: Chilling Joe Kubert cover for the digest-size DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #21 [May ’82]. All images in this original art gallery — unless otherwise noted — are courtesy of Peter Carlsson and the Joe Kubert archives. Next page: Joe’s G.I. Combat #161 [June ’73] cover.

TM & © DC Comics.

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

TM & © DC Comics.

This page: Joe Kubert cover for From Beyond the Unknown #13 [Oct.–Nov. ’71].

TM & © DC Comics.

This page: Joe Kubert’s Mystery in Space #111 [Sept. ’80] cover.

TM & © DC Comics.

This page: This Joe Kubert cover was originally intended for Battle Classics #3, a casualty of DC’s 1978 “implosion,” though it was reproduced in Cancelled Comics Cavalcade.

This page: Breathtaking Joe Kubert cover for House of Mystery #290 [Mar. ’81], the first issue to feature the “I, Vampire” series. TM & © DC Comics.

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

TM & © DC

This page and next: For the innovative “enemy P.O.V.” war comic book Blitzkrieg, editor Joe Kubert designed the first issue’s cover, dated Jan–Feb. 1976, and his breakdown sketch is shown here, with printed cover inset at left. On the next page, courtesy of Heritage Auctions, is a repro of the original art for the same issue.

Comics.

TM & © DC Comics.

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2013 • #1

This page: A slight “cheat” for a gallery devoted to Joe Kubert, here is DC art director Carmine Infantino’s sketch for “Enemy Ace” cover on Star Spangled War Stories #145 [June–July ’69], which was adapted by Joe Kubert for the final printed cover (seen on the next page). Kudos to our pal Pete Carlsson for digging up this treasure! And Godspeed to the late former publisher of DC Comics, Rouge Enfant, who passed away earlier this year. 30

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor  Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra

TM & © DC Com

ics.

Comic Book Creator Tribute PDF Extra  2013 Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor Comic Book Creator • Spring • #1

TM & © DC Com

ics.

This page: Another example of Joe’s work for the digest-size collections, this one a colored rough for the wraparound cover of DC Special Series #18 [Fall ’79]. Below right is the printed cover, courtesy of Heritage.

31 31

TM & © DC Comics.

This page: Whimsical entry for DC Sampler #1 [Nov. ’83]. On the panel immediately above, that’s (from left) editor Murray Boltinoff, artist Sam Glanzman, cover artist/editor Joe Kubert, artist Frank Redondo and writer Robert Kanigher up against the wall!

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The forerunner to COMIC BOOK CREATOR, CBA is the 2000-2004 Eisner Award winner for BEST COMICS-RELATED MAG! Edited by CBC’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. ALL BACK ISSUES NOW AVAILABLE AS DIGITAL EDITIONS FOR $3.95 FROM www.twomorrows.com!

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

Order online at www.twomorrows.com COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUME 3 Reprinting the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #7-8 (spotlighting 1970s Marvel and 1980s indies), plus over 30 NEW PAGES of features and art! New PAUL GULACY portfolio, MR. MONSTER scrapbook, the story behind MARVEL VALUE STAMPS, and more! New MICHAEL T. GILBERT cover! (224-page trade paperback) $24.95 • ISBN: 9781893905429

#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more! Plus ADAMS thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen NICK CARDY pages from a controversial Teen Titans story, unpublished TOTH covers, and more!

STAN LEE AND ROY THOMAS discussion about Marvel in the 1970s, ROY THOMAS interview, BILL EVERETT’s daughter WENDY and MIKE FRIEDRICH on Everett, interviews with GIL KANE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, MIKE PLOOG, STERANKO’s Unknown Marvels, the real origin of the New X-Men, Everett tribute cover by GIL KANE, and more!

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#6: MORE MARVEL ’70s #7: ’70s MARVELMANIA

NEAL ADAMS interview about his work at Marvel Comics in the 1960s from AVENGERS to X-MEN, unpublished Adams covers, thumbnail layouts for classic stories, published pages BEFORE they were inked, and unused pages from his NEVER-COMPLETED X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL! Plus TOM PALMER on the art of inking Neal Adams, ADAMS’ MARVEL WORK CHECKLIST, & ADAMS wraparound cover!

Definitive JIM WARREN interview about publishing EERIE, CREEPY, VAMPIRELLA, and other fan favorites, in-depth interview with BERNIE WRIGHTSON with unpublished Warren art, plus unseen art, features and interviews with FRANK FRAZETTA, RICHARD CORBEN, AL WILLIAMSON, JACK DAVIS, ARCHIE GOODWIN, HARVEY KURTZMAN, ALEX NINO, and more! BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

More on DC COMICS 1967-74, with art by and interviews with NICK CARDY, JOE SIMON, NEAL ADAMS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MIKE KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, MARV WOLFMAN, IRWIN DONENFELD, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GIL KANE, DENNY O’NEIL, HOWARD POST, ALEX TOTH on FRANK ROBBINS, DC Writer’s Purge of 1968 by MIKE BARR, JOHN BROOME’s final interview, and more! CARDY cover!

Unpublished and rarely-seen art by, features on, and interviews with 1970s Bullpenners PAUL GULACY, FRANK BRUNNER, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, MARIE and JOHN SEVERIN, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE COCKRUM, DON MCGREGOR, DOUG MOENCH, and others! Plus never-beforeseen pencil pages to an unpublished Master of Kung-Fu graphic novel by PAUL GULACY! Cover by FRANK BRUNNER!

Featuring ’70s Marvel greats PAUL GULACY, JOHN BYRNE, RICH BUCKLER, DOUG MOENCH, DAN ADKINS, JIM MOONEY, STEVE GERBER, FRANK SPRINGER, and DENIS KITCHEN! Plus: a rarely-seen Stan Lee P.R. chat promoting the ’60s Marvel cartoon shows, the real trials and tribulations of Comics Distribution, the true story behind the ’70s Kung Fu Craze, and a new cover by PAUL GULACY!

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#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

#12: CHARLTON PART 2

Major independent creators and their fabulous books from the early days of the Direct Sales Market! Featured interviews include STEVE RUDE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, DAVE STEVENS, JAIME HERNANDEZ, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, DON SIMPSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, MIKE BARON, MIKE GRELL, and more! Plus plenty of rare and unpublished art, and a new STEVE RUDE cover!

Interviews with Charlton alumni JOE GILL, DICK GIORDANO, STEVE SKEATES, DENNIS O’NEIL, ROY THOMAS, PETE MORISI, JIM APARO, PAT BOYETTE, FRANK MCLAUGHLIN, SAM GLANZMAN, plus ALAN MOORE on the Charlton/ Watchmen Connection, DC’s planned ALLCHARLTON WEEKLY, and more! DICK GIORDANO cover!

Career-spanning SIMONSON INTERVIEW, covering his work from “Manhunter” to Thor to Orion, JOHN WORKMAN interview, TRINA ROBBINS interview, also Trina, MARIE SEVERIN and RAMONA FRADON talk shop about their days in the comics business, MARIE SEVERIN interview, plus other great women cartoonists. New SIMONSON cover!

Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes by KUBERT, SIMONSON, JIM LEE, BOLLAND, GIBBONS and others, TOTH on continuity art, TOTH checklist, plus SHELDON MAYER SECTION with a look at SCRIBBLY, interviews with Mayer’s kids (real-life inspiration for SUGAR & SPIKE), and more! Covers by TOTH and MAYER!

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983! Interviews with Charlton alumni GEORGE WILDMAN, NICOLA CUTI, JOE STATON, JOHN BYRNE, TOM SUTTON, MIKE ZECK, JACK KELLER, PETE MORISI, WARREN SATTLER, BOB LAYTON, ROGER STERN, and others, ALEX TOTH, a NEW E-MAN STRIP by CUTI AND STATON, and the art of DON NEWTON! STATON cover!

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#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

1970s Marvel Horror focus, from Son of Satan to Ghost Rider! Interviews with ROY THOMAS, MARV WOLFMAN, GENE COLAN, TOM PALMER, HERB TRIMPE, GARY FRIEDRICH, DON PERLIN, TONY ISABELLA, and PABLOS MARCOS, plus a Portfolio Section featuring RUSS HEATH, MIKE PLOOG, DON PERLIN, PABLO MARCOS, FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE, and more! New GENE COLAN cover!

Interviews with Tower and THUNDER AGENTS alumni WALLACE WOOD, LOU MOUGIN, SAMM SCHWARTZ, DAN ADKINS, LEN BROWN, BILL PEARSON, LARRY IVIE, GEORGE TUSKA, STEVE SKEATES, and RUSS JONES, TOWER COMICS CHECKLIST, history of TIPPY TEEN, 1980s THUNDER AGENTS REVIVAL, and more! WOOD cover!

Interviews with ’80s independent creators DAVE STEVENS, JAIME, MARIO, AND GILBERT HERNANDEZ, MATT WAGNER, DEAN MOTTER, PAUL RIVOCHE, and SANDY PLUNKETT, plus lots of rare and unseen art from The Rocketeer, Love & Rockets, Mr. X, Grendel, other ’80s strips, and more! New cover by STEVENS and the HERNANDEZ BROS.!

’70s ATLAS COMICS HISTORY! Interviews with JEFF ROVIN, ROY THOMAS, ERNIE COLÓN, STEVE MITCHELL, LARRY HAMA, HOWARD CHAYKIN, SAL AMENDOLA, JIM CRAIG, RIC MEYERS, and ALAN KUPPERBERG, Atlas Checklist, HEATH, WRIGHTSON, SIMONSON, MILGROM, AUSTIN, WEISS, and STATON discuss their Atlas work, and more! COLÓN cover!

Discussion with ARTHUR ADAMS about his career (with an extensive CHECKLIST, and gobs of rare art), plus GRAY MORROW tributes from friends and acquaintances and a MORROW interview, Red Circle Comics Checklist, interviews with & remembrances of GEORGE ROUSSOS & GEORGE EVANS, Gallery of Morrow, Evans, and Roussos art, EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER interview, and more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

#20: ROMITAs & KUBERTs #21: ADAM HUGHES, ALEX #22: GOLD KEY COMICS & examinations: RUSS MANNING ROSS, & JOHN BUSCEMA Interviews & Magnus Robot Fighter, WALLY WOOD &

Roundtable with JIM STARLIN, ALAN WEISS and AL MILGROM, interviews with STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE LEIALOHA, and FRANK BRUNNER, art from the lost WARLOCK #16, plus a FLO STEINBERG CELEBRATION, with a Flo interview, tributes by HERB TRIMPE, LINDA FITE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, and others! STARLIN/ MILGROM/WEISS cover!

History of Harvey Comics, from Hot Stuf’, Casper, and Richie Rich, to Joe Simon’s “Harvey Thriller” line! Interviews with, art by, and tributes to JACK KIRBY, STERANKO, WILL EISNER, AL WILLIAMSON, GIL KANE, WALLY WOOD, REED CRANDALL, JOE SIMON, WARREN KREMER, ERNIE COLÓN, SID JACOBSON, FRED RHOADES, and more! New wraparound MITCH O’CONNELL cover!

Joint interview between Marvel veteran and superb Spider-Man artist JOHN ROMITA, SR. and fan favorite Thor/Hulk renderer JOHN ROMITA, JR.! On the flipside, JOE, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT share their histories and influences in a special roundtable conversation! Plus unpublished and rarely seen artwork, and a visit by the ladies VIRGINIA and MURIEL! Flip-covers by the KUBERTs and the ROMITAs!

ADAM HUGHES ART ISSUE, with a comprehensive interview, unpublished art, & CHECKLIST! Also, a “Day in the Life” of ALEX ROSS (with plenty of Ross art)! Plus a tribute to the life and career of one of Marvel’s greatest artists, JOHN BUSCEMA, with testimonials from his friends and peers, art section, and biographical essay. HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

Total War M.A.R.S. Patrol, Tarzan by JESSE MARSH, JESSE SANTOS and DON GLUT’S Dagar and Dr. Spektor, Turok, Son of Stone’s ALBERTO GIOLITTI and PAUL S. NEWMAN, plus Doctor Solar, Boris Karloff, The Twilight Zone, and more, including MARK EVANIER on cartoon comics, and a definitive company history! New BRUCE TIMM cover!

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(122-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

Exhaustive MIGNOLA interview, huge art gallery (with never-seen art), and comprehensive checklist! On the flip-side, a careerspanning JILL THOMPSON interview, plus tons of art, and studies of Jill by ALEX ROSS, STEVE RUDE, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and more! Also, interview with JOSÉ DELBO, and a talk with author HARLAN ELLISON on his various forays into comics! New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

GAHAN WILSON and NatLamp art director MICHAEL GROSS speak, interviews with and art by NEAL ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, SEAN KELLY, SHARY FLENNEKIN, ED SUBITSKY, M.K. BROWN, B.K. TAYLOR, BOBBY LONDON, MICHEL CHOQUETTE, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and more! Features new covers by GAHAN WILSON and MARK BODÉ!

Focus on AMERICA’S BEST COMICS! ALAN MOORE interview on everything from SWAMP THING to WATCHMEN to ABC and beyond! Interviews with KEVIN O’NEILL, CHRIS SPROUSE, JIM BAIKIE, HILARY BARTA, SCOTT DUNBIER, TODD KLEIN, JOSE VILLARRUBIA, and more! Flip-side spotlight on the amazing KEVIN NOWLAN! Covers by J.H. WILLIAMS III & NOWLAN!

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(122-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

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

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $3.95

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

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

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

BACK ISSUE #54

BACK ISSUE #55

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BACK ISSUE #51

BACK ISSUE #52

BACK ISSUE #53

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “AllInterview Issue”! Part 2 of an exclusive STEVE ENGLEHART interview (continued from ALTER EGO #103)! “Pro2Pro” interviews between SIMONSON & LARSEN, MOENCH & WEIN, and comics letterers KLEIN & CHIANG. Plus JOHN OSTRANDER, MICHAEL USLAN, and longtime DC color artist ADRIENNE ROY! Cover by Englehart collaborator MARSHALL ROGERS!

Bronze Age Mystery Comics! Interviews with BERNIE WRIGHTSON, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GERRY TALAOC, DC mystery writer LORE SHOBERG, MARK EVANIER and DAN SPIEGLE discuss Scooby-Doo, Charlton chiller anthologies, Black Orchid, Madame Xanadu art and commentary by TONY DeZUNIGA, MIKE KALUTA, VAL MAYERIK, DAVID MICHELINIE, MATT WAGNER, and a rare cover painting by WRIGHTSON!

“Gods!” Takes an in-depth look at WALTER SIMONSON’s Thor, the Thunder God in the Bronze Age, “Pro2Pro” interview with TOM DeFALCO and RON FRENZ, Hercules: Prince of Power, Moondragon, Three Ways to End the New Gods Saga, exclusive interview with fantasy writer MICHAEL MOORCOCK, art and commentary by GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, BOB LAYTON, and more, with a swingin’ Thor cover by SIMONSON!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

BACK ISSUE #56

BACK ISSUE #57

BACK ISSUE #58

“Liberated Ladies” eyeing female characters that broke barriers in the Bronze Age: Big Barda, Valkyrie, Ms. Marvel, Phoenix, Savage She-Hulk, and the sword-wielding Starfire. Plus a “Pro2Pro” interview with JILL THOMPSON, GAIL SIMONE, and BARBARA KESEL, art and commentary by JOHN BYRNE, GEORGE PEREZ, JACK KIRBY, MIKE VOSBURG, and more, with a new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

“Licensed Comics”! Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Man from Atlantis, DC’s Edgar Rice Burroughs backups (John Carter, Pellucidar, Carson of Venus), Marvel’s Warlord of Mars, and an interview with CAROL SERLING, wife of ROD SERLING. With art and commentary from ANDERSON, BYRNE, CLAREMONT, DORMAN, DUURSEMA, KALUTA, MILLER, OSTRANDER, and more. Cover by BRIAN KOSCHACK.

“Avengers Assemble!” Writer ROGER STERN’S acclaimed 1980s Avengers run, West Coast Avengers, early Avengers toys, and histories of Hawkeye, Mockingbird, and Wonder Man, with art and commentary from JOHN and SAL BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, BRETT BREEDING, TOM DeFALCO, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB HALL, AL MILGROM, TOM MORGAN, TOM PALMER, JOE SINNOTT, and more. PÉREZ cover!

JENETTE KAHN interviewed by ROBERT GREENBERGER, DC’s Dollar Comics and unrealized kids’ line (featuring an aborted Sugar and Spike revival), the Wonder Woman Foundation, and the early days of the Vertigo imprint. Exploring the talents of ROSS ANDRU, KAREN BERGER, STEVE BISSETTE, JIM ENGEL, GARTH ENNIS, NEIL GAIMAN, SHELLY MAYER, ALAN MOORE, GRANT MORRISON, and more!

“JLA in the Bronze Age”! The “Satellite Years” of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, with BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, PÉREZ, and WEIN, salute to DICK DILLIN, the Justice League “Detroit” team, with CONWAY, PATTON, McDONNELL, plus CONWAY and GEOFF JOHNS go “Pro2Pro” on writing the JLA, unofficial JLA/Avengers crossovers, and Marvel’s JLA, the Squadron Supreme. Cover by McDONNELL and BILL WRAY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

BACK ISSUE #59

BACK ISSUE #60

BACK ISSUE #61

BACK ISSUE #62

BACK ISSUE #63

“Toon Comics!” History of Space Ghost in comics, Comico’s Jonny Quest and Star Blazers, Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera line and Dennis the Menace, behind the scenes at Marvel Productions, Ltd., and a look at the unpublished Plastic Man comic strip. Art/comments by EVANIER, FOGLIO, HEMPEL and WHEATLEY, MARRS, RUDE, TOTH, WILDEY, and more. All-new painted Space Ghost cover by STEVE RUDE!

“Halloween Heroes and Villains”! JEPH LOEB and TIM SALE’s chiller Batman: The Long Halloween, the Scarecrow (both the DC and Marvel versions), Solomon Grundy, Man-Wolf, Lord Pumpkin, Rutland, Vermont’s Halloween parades, and… the Korvac Saga’s Dead Avengers! With commentary from and/or art by CONWAY, GIL KANE, LOPRESTI, MOENCH, PÉREZ, DAVE WENZEL, and more. Cover by TIM SALE!

“Tabloids and Treasuries,” spotlighting every all-new tabloid from the 1970s. Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, The Bible, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, The Wizard of Oz, even the PAUL DINI/ALEX ROSS World’s Greatest Super-Heroes editions! Commentary and art by ADAMS, GARCIA-LOPEZ, GRELL, KIRBY, KUBERT, MAYER, ROMITA SR., TOTH, and more. Wraparound cover by ALEX ROSS!

“Superman in the Bronze Age”! JULIUS SCHWARTZ, CURT SWAN, Superman Family, World of Krypton miniseries, and ALAN MOORE’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, art & comments by ADAMS, ANDERSON, CARDY, CHAYKIN, PAUL KUPPERBERG, OKSNER, O’NEIL, PASKO, ROZAKIS, SAVIUK, and more. Cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ and SCOTT WILLIAMS! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

“British Invasion” issue! History of Marvel UK, Beatles in comics, DC’s ‘80s British talent pool, V for Vendetta, Excalibur, Marshal Law, Doctor Who, “Pro2Pro” interview with PETER MILLIGAN & BRENDAN McCARTHY, plus BERGER, BOLLAND, DAVIS, GIBBONS, STAN LEE, LLOYD, MOORE, DEZ SKINN, and others. Fold-out triptych cover by RON WILSON and DAVE HUNT of Marvel UK’s rare 1970s “Quadra-Poster”!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page TABLOID with color) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ‘zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more!

2012 EISNER AWARD Nominee Best Comics-Related Journalism

Other issues available, & an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all issues at HALF-PRICE!

ALTER EGO #107

ALTER EGO #108

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ALTER EGO #104

ALTER EGO #105

ALTER EGO #106

Celebrates the 50th anniversary of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and the birth of Marvel Comics! New, never-beforepublished STAN LEE interview, art and artifacts by KIRBY, DITKO, SINNOTT, AYERS, THOMAS, and secrets behind the Marvel Mythos! Also: JIM AMASH interviews 1940s Timely editor AL SULMAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and a new cover by FRENZ and SINNOTT!

See comic art and script BEFORE and AFTER the Comics Code changes, with art by SIMON & KIRBY, DITKO, BUSCEMA, SINNOTT, GOULD, COLE, STERANKO, KRIGSTEIN, O’NEIL, GLANZMAN, ORLANDO, WILLIAMSON, HEATH, and others! Plus: FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, JIM AMASH interviews Timely/Atlas artist CAL MASSEY, and a new cover by JOSH MEDORS!

DICK GIORDANO through the 1960s—from freelance years and Charlton “Action-Heroes” to his first stint at DC! Art by DITKO, APARO, BOYETTE, MORISI, McLAUGHLIN, GIL KANE, and others, Dick’s final convention panel with STEVE SKEATES and ROY THOMAS, JIM AMASH interviews Charlton artist TONY TALLARICO, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and ROY ALD, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, & DITKO/GIORDANO cover!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #109

ALTER EGO #110

ALTER EGO #111

Big BATMAN issue, with an unused Golden Age cover by DICK SPRANG! Interviews SPRANG and JIM MOONEY, with rare and unseen Batman art by BOB KANE, JERRY ROBINSON, WIN MORTIMER, SHELLY MOLDOFF, CHARLES PARIS, and others! Part II of the TONY TALLARICO interview by JIM AMASH! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

1970s Bullpenner WARREN REECE talks about Marvel Comics and working with EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, STAN LEE, MARIE SEVERIN, ADAMS, FRIEDRICH, ROY THOMAS, and others, with rare art! DEWEY CASSELL spotlights Golden Age artist MIKE PEPPE, with art by TOTH, TUSKA, SEKOWSKY, TALLARICO Part 3, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, cover by EVERETT & BURGOS, and more!

Spectre/Hour-Man creator BERNARD BAILY, ‘40s super-groups that might have been, art by ORDWAY, INFANTINO, KUBERT, HASEN, ROBINSON, and BURNLEY, conclusion of the TONY TALLARICO interview by JIM AMASH, MIKE PEPPE interview by DEWEY CASSELL, BILL SCHELLY on “50 Years of Fandom” at San Diego 2011, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, PÉREZ cover, and more!

SHAZAM!/FAWCETT issue! The 1940s “CAPTAIN MARVEL” RADIO SHOW, interview with radio’s “Billy Batson” BURT BOYAR, P.C. HAMERLINCK and C.C. BECK on the origin of Captain Marvel, ROY THOMAS and JERRY BINGHAM on their Secret Origins “Shazam!”, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, LEONARD STARR interview, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

GOLDEN AGE NEDOR super-heroes are spotlighted, with MIKE NOLAN’s Nedor Index, and art by MORT MESKIN, JERRY ROBINSON, GEORGE TUSKA, RUBEN MOIRERA, ALEX SHOMBURG, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and part II of JIM AMASH’s interview with Golden Age artist LEONARD STARR! Cover by SHANE FOLEY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

ALTER EGO #112

ALTER EGO #113

ALTER EGO #114

ALTER EGO #115

ALTER EGO #116

SUPERMAN issue! PAUL CASSIDY (early Superman artist), Italian Nembo Kid, and ARLEN SCHUMER’s look at the MORT WEISINGER era, plus an interview with son HANK WEISINGER! Art by SHUSTER, BORING, ANDERSON, PLASTINO, and others! LEONARD STARR interview Part III—FCA—Mr. Monster—more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and a MURPHY ANDERSON/ARLEN SCHUMER cover!

MARV WOLFMAN talks to RICHARD ARNDT about his first decade in comics on Tomb of Dracula, Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, John Carter, Daredevil, Nova, Batman, etc., behind a GENE COLAN cover! Art by COLAN, ANDERSON, CARDY, BORING, MOONEY, and more! Plus: the conclusion of our LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about FF #1, history of the MMMS, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art by KIRBY, AVISON, SHORES, ROMITA, SEVERIN, TUSKA, ALLEN BELLMAN, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by BELLMAN and MITCH BREITWEISER!

3-D COMICS OF THE 1950S! In-depth feature by RAY (3-D) ZONE, actual red and green 1950s 3-D art (includes free glasses!) by SIMON & KIRBY, KUBERT, MESKIN, POWELL, MAURER, NOSTRAND, SWAN, BORING, SCHWARTZ, MOONEY, SHORES, TUSKA and many others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover by JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY!

JOE KUBERT TRIBUTE! Four Kubert interviews, art by RUSS HEATH, NEAL ADAMS, MURPHY ANDERSON, MICHAEL KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, and others, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY’s Comic Fandom Archive, FCA’s Captain Video conclusion by GEORGE EVANS that inspired Avengers foe Ultron, cover by KUBERT, with a portrait by DANIEL JAMES COX!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships April 2013

DIGITAL

NS DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional EDITIO BLE A “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and IL AVA NLY animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS FOR O 5 and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic $2.9 storytelling, as well as such DRAW! #4 skills as layout, penciling, inking, Interview with ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN lettering, coloring, Photoshop techNOWLAN on drawing and inking niques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, techniques, DAVE COOPER’s coloring techniques in Photoshop, BRET and a handy reference source—this BLEVINS tutorial on Figure magazine has it all! Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for comics drawing papers, and more! purposes of figure drawing. (88-page magazine) $5.95 INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS. (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #9

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

DRAW! #7

MIKE WIERINGO interview, BENDIS and OEMING on how they create “Powers”, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw great hands”, “The illusion of depth in design” by PAUL RIVOCHE, art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, and more!

Interview & demo with BILL WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO interview, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw the human figure in light and shadow,” Photoshop tutorial by CELIA CALLE, inking tips by MIKE MANLEY, reviews of the best art supplies, links, and more!

Interview/demo by DAN BRERETON, ZACH TRENHOLM on caricaturing, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” demo by ALBERTO RUIZ, “The Power of Sketching” by BRET BLEVINS, “Designing with light and shadow” by PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of art supplies, links, and more!

(88-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

Interview & demo by MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” by ALBERTO RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure” by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS SECTION, International Spotlight on JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, and more!

WRITE NOW #8 crossover! MIKE MANLEY & DANNY FINGEROTH create a comic from script to print, BANCROFT & CORLEY on bringing characters to life, Adobe Illustrator with ALBERTO RUIZ, Noel Sickles’ work examined, PvP’s SCOTT KURTZ, art supply reviews, and more!

RON GARNEY interview & demo, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and others discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ on Adobe Illustrator, interview with MARK McKENNA, links, and more!

STEVE RUDE on comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On Life”, Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER on merging traditional and digital art, MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, and more! New BAKER cover!

Demo of painting methods by ALEX HORLEY, interview and demo by COLLEEN COOVER, a look behindthe-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more!

(96-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

(104-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(112-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

In-depth interviews and demos with DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, and more!

Covers major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with BILL REINHOLD, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, and more!

In-depth interview with HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on HOW TO USE REFERENCE and WORKING FROM PHOTOS (by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY), and more!

Interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates his series, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

Interview & demo by R.M. GUERA, Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE demo and interview, DANNY FINGEROTH’s new feature on writer/artists with R. SIKORYAK, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on penciling & more!

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, Rough Stuff’s BOB McLEOD gives a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, Write Now’s DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights writer/artist AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the best art supplies and tool technology, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, plus Web links, book reviews, and more!

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop about his gritty, designinspired work with editor MIKE MANLEY, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews “Billy Dogma” writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL, plus more of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, FRANK MILLER interview, plus MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERNS VIEWS WITH KIRBY and EDITIO BLE A IL his contemporaries, AVA NLY FEATURE ARTICLES, FOR O $3.95 RARE AND UNSEEN $1.95— KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS from the 1960s-80s (from photocopies preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES).

DIGITAL

Go online for #1-30 as Digital Editions, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35

KIRBY COLLECTOR #31

KIRBY COLLECTOR #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #33

FIRST TABLOID-SIZE ISSUE! MARK EVANIER’s new column, interviews with KURT BUSIEK and JOSÉ LADRONN, NEAL ADAMS on Kirby, Giant-Man overview, Kirby’s best 2-page spreads, 2000 Kirby Tribute Panel (MARK EVANIER, GENE COLAN, MARIE SEVERIN, ROY THOMAS, and TRACY & JEREMY KIRBY), huge Kirby pencils! Wraparound KIRBY/ADAMS cover!

KIRBY’S LEAST-KNOWN WORK! MARK EVANIER on the Fourth World, unfinished THE HORDE novel, long-lost KIRBY INTERVIEW from France, update to the KIRBY CHECKLIST, pencil gallery of Kirby’s leastknown work (including THE PRISONER, BLACK HOLE, IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB, TRUE DIVORCE CASES), westerns, and more! KIRBY/LADRONN cover!

FANTASTIC FOUR ISSUE! Gallery of FF pencils at tabloid size, MARK EVANIER on the FF Cartoon series, interviews with STAN LEE and ERIK LARSEN, JOE SINNOTT salute, the HUMAN TORCH in STRANGE TALES, origins of Kirby Krackle, interviews with nearly EVERY WRITER AND ARTIST who worked on the FF after Kirby, & more! KIRBY/LARSEN and KIRBY/TIMM covers!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

KIRBY COLLECTOR #37

KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

FIGHTING AMERICANS! MARK EVANIER on 1960s Marvel inkers, SHIELD, Losers, and Green Arrow overviews, INFANTINO interview on Simon & Kirby, KIRBY interview, Captain America PENCIL ART GALLERY, PHILIPPE DRUILLET interview, JOE SIMON and ALEX TOTH speak, unseen BIG GAME HUNTER and YOUNG ABE LINCOLN Kirby concepts! KIRBY and KIRBY/TOTH covers!

GREAT ESCAPES! MISTER MIRACLE pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER, MARSHALL ROGERS & MICHAEL CHABON interviews, comparing Kirby and Houdini’s backgrounds, analysis of “Himon,” 2001 Kirby Tribute Panel (WILL EISNER, JOHN BUSCEMA, JOHN ROMITA, MIKE ROYER, & JOHNNY CARSON) & more! KIRBY/MARSHALL ROGERS and KIRBY/STEVE RUDE covers!

THOR ISSUE! Never-seen KIRBY interview, JOE SINNOTT and JOHN ROMITA JR. on their Thor work, MARK EVANIER, extensive THOR and TALES OF ASGARD coverage, a look at the “real” Norse gods, 40 pages of KIRBY THOR PENCILS, including a Kirby Art Gallery at TABLOID SIZE, with pin-ups, covers, and more! KIRBY covers inked by MIKE ROYER and TREVOR VON EEDEN!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” MIKE ROYER interview on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE GALLERY tracing the evolution of Jack’s style, new column on OBSCURE KIRBY WORK, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s TECHNIQUE AND INFLUENCES, comparing STAN LEE’s writing to JACK’s, and more! Two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” PART 2: JOE SINNOTT on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE PENCIL GALLERY, list of the art in the KIRBY ARCHIVES, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s technique and influences, SPEND A DAY WITH KIRBY (with JACK DAVIS, GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., and RUDE) and more! Two UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #39

KIRBY COLLECTOR #40

KIRBY COLLECTOR #41

KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

FAN FAVORITES! Covering Kirby’s work on HULK, INHUMANS, and SILVER SURFER, TOP PROS pick favorite Kirby covers, Kirby ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT interview, MARK EVANIER, 2002 Kirby Tribute Panel (DICK AYERS, TODD McFARLANE, PAUL LEVITZ, HERB TRIMPE), pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by MIKE ALLRED and P. CRAIG RUSSELL!

WORLD THAT’S COMING! KAMANDI and OMAC spotlight, 2003 Kirby Tribute Panel (WENDY PINI, MICHAEL CHABON, STAN GOLDBERG, SAL BUSCEMA, LARRY LIEBER, and STAN LEE), P. CRAIG RUSSELL interview, MARK EVANIER, NEW COLUMN analyzing Jack’s visual shorthand, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by ERIK LARSEN and REEDMAN!

1970s MARVEL WORK! Coverage of ’70s work from Captain America to Eternals to Machine Man, DICK GIORDANO & MARK SHULTZ interviews, MARK EVANIER, 2004 Kirby Tribute Panel (STEVE RUDE, DAVE GIBBONS, WALTER SIMONSON, and PAUL RYAN), pencil art gallery, unused 1962 HULK #6 KIRBY PENCILS, and more! Kirby covers inked by GIORDANO and SCHULTZ!

1970s DC WORK! Coverage of Jimmy Olsen, FF movie set visit, overview of all Newsboy Legion stories, KEVIN NOWLAN and MURPHY ANDERSON on inking Jack, never-seen interview with Kirby, MARK EVANIER on Kirby’s covers, Bongo Comics’ Kirby ties, complete ’40s gangster story, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by NOWLAN and ANDERSON!

KIRBY AWARD WINNERS! STEVE SHERMAN and others sharing memories and neverseen art from JACK & ROZ, a never-published 1966 interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER on VINCE COLLETTA, pencils-toSinnott inks comparison of TALES OF SUSPENSE #93, and more! Covers by KIRBY (Jack’s original ’70s SILVER STAR CONCEPT ART) and KIRBY/SINNOTT!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

KIRBY’S MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS! Coverage of DEMON, THOR, & GALACTUS, interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER, pencil art galleries of the Demon and other mythological characters, two never-reprinted BLACK MAGIC stories, interview with Kirby Award winner DAVID SCHWARTZ and F4 screenwriter MIKE FRANCE, and more! Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER!

Jack’s vision of PAST AND FUTURE, with a never-seen KIRBY interview, a new interview with son NEAL KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’S column, two pencil galleries, two complete ’50s stories, Jack’s first script, Kirby Tribute Panel (with EVANIER, KATZ, SHAW!, and SHERMAN), plus an unpublished CAPTAIN 3-D cover, inked by BILL BLACK and converted into 3-D by RAY ZONE!

Focus on NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, and DARKSEID! Includes a rare interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’s column, FOURTH WORLD pencil art galleries (including Kirby’s redesigns for SUPER POWERS), two 1950s stories, a new Kirby Darkseid front cover inked by MIKE ROYER, a Kirby Forever People back cover inked by JOHN BYRNE, and more!

KIRBY’S SUPER TEAMS, from kid gangs and the Challengers, to Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Super Powers, with unseen 1960s Marvel art, a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, author JONATHAN LETHEM on his Kirby influence, interview with JOHN ROMITA, JR. on his Eternals work, and more!

KIRBYTECH ISSUE, spotlighting Jack’s hightech concepts, from Iron Man’s armor and Machine Man, to the Negative Zone and beyond! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, TOM SCIOLI interview, Kirby Tribute Panel (with ADAMS, PÉREZ, and ROMITA), and covers inked by TERRY AUSTIN and TOM SCIOLI!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

WARRIORS, spotlighting Thor (with a look at hidden messages in BILL EVERETT’s Thor inks), Sgt. Fury, Challengers of the Unknown, Losers, and others! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, interviews with JERRY ORDWAY and GRANT MORRISON, MARK EVANIER’s column, pencil art gallery, a complete 1950s story, wraparound Thor cover inked by JERRY ORDWAY, and more!

Bombastic EVERYTHING GOES issue, with a wealth of great submissions that couldn’t be pigeonholed into a “theme” issue! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JIM LEE and ADAM HUGHES, MARK EVANIER’s column, huge pencil art galleries, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS, and more!

Spotlights Kirby’s most obscure work: an UNUSED THOR STORY, BRUCE LEE comic, animation work, stage play, unaltered pages from KAMANDI, DEMON, DESTROYER DUCK, and more, including a feature examining the last page of his final issue of various series BEFORE EDITORIAL TAMPERING (with lots of surprises)! Color Kirby cover inked by DON HECK!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

THE MAGIC OF STAN & JACK! New interview with STAN LEE, walking tour of New York where Lee & Kirby lived and worked, re-evaluation of the “Lost” FF #108 story (including a new page that just surfaced), “What If Jack Hadn’t Left Marvel In 1970?,” plus MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, behind a color Kirby cover inked by GEORGE PÉREZ!

STAN & JACK PART TWO! More on the co-creators of the Marvel Universe, final interview (and cover inks) by GEORGE TUSKA, differences between KIRBY and DITKO’S approaches, WILL MURRAY on the origin of the FF, the mystery of Marvel cover dates, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, plus Kirby back cover inked by JOE SINNOTT!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

“Kirby Goes To Hollywood!” SERGIO ARAGONÉS and MELL LAZARUS recall Kirby’s BOB NEWHART TV show cameo, comparing the recent STAR WARS films to New Gods, RUBY & SPEARS interviewed, Jack’s encounters with FRANK ZAPPA, PAUL McCARTNEY, and JOHN LENNON, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a Golden Age Kirby story, and more! Kirby cover inked by PAUL SMITH!

“Unfinished Sagas”—series, stories, and arcs Kirby never finished. TRUE DIVORCE CASES, RAAM THE MAN MOUNTAIN, KOBRA, DINGBATS, a complete story from SOUL LOVE, complete Boy Explorers story, two Kirby Tribute Panels, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, pencil art galleries, and more, with Kirby’s “Galaxy Green” cover inked by ROYER, and the unseen cover for SOUL LOVE #1!

“Legendary Kirby”—how Jack put his spin on classic folklore! TONY ISABELLA on SATAN’S SIX (with Kirby’s unseen layouts), Biblical inspirations of DEVIL DINOSAUR, THOR through the eyes of mythologist JOSEPH CAMPBELL, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, pencil art from ETERNALS, DEMON, NEW GODS, THOR, and Jack’s ATLAS cover!

“Kirby Vault!” Rarities from the “King” of comics: Personal correspondence, private photos, collages, rare Marvelmania art, bootleg album covers, sketches, transcript of a 1969 VISIT TO THE KIRBY HOME (where Jack answers the questions YOU’D ask in ‘69), MARK EVANIER, pencil art from the FOURTH WORLD, CAPTAIN AMERICA, MACHINE MAN, SILVER SURFER GRAPHIC NOVEL, and more!

FANTASTIC FOUR FOLLOW-UP to #58’s THE WONDER YEARS! Never-seen FF wraparound cover, interview between FF inkers JOE SINNOTT and DICK AYERS, rare LEE & KIRBY interview, comparison of a Jack and Stan FF story conference to Stan’s final script and Jack’s penciled pages, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, gallery of KIRBY FF ART, pencils from BLACK PANTHER, SILVER SURFER, & more!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES, edited by John Morrow Each book contains over 30 PIECES OF KIRBY ART NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED!

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

KIRBY CHECKLIST

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #10-12, and a tour of Jack’s home!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #13-15, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #20-22, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #23-26, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #27-30, plus new art!

Lists EVERY KIRBY COMIC, BOOK, UNPUBLISHED WORK and more!

(160-page trade paperback) $17.95 ISBN: 9781893905016 Diamond Order Code: MAR042974

(176-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905023 Diamond Order Code: APR043058

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905573 Diamond Order Code: FEB063353

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490038 Diamond Order Code: JUN084280

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490120 Diamond Order Code: DEC084286

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 ISBN: 9781605490052 Diamond Order Code: MAR084008

NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

Celebrate the 50th ANNIVERSARY OF FANTASTIC FOUR #1 with this special squarebound edition (#58) of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, about two pop-culture visionaries who created the Fantastic Four, and a decade in comics that was more tumultuous and awe-inspiring than any before or since. Calling on his years of research, plus new interviews conducted just for this book (with STAN LEE, FLO STEINBERG, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, and others), regular Jack Kirby Collector contributor MARK ALEXANDER traces both Lee and Kirby’s history at Marvel Comics, and the remarkable series of events and career choices that led them to converge in 1961 to conceive the Fantastic Four. It also documents the evolution of the FF throughout the 1960s, with previously unknown details about Lee and Kirby’s working relationship, and their eventual parting of ways in 1970. With a wealth of historical information and amazing Kirby artwork, STAN LEE & JACK KIRBY: THE WONDER YEARS beautifully examines the first decade of the FF, and the events that put into motion the 1960s era that came to be known as the Marvel Age of Comics! (128-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490380 • Diamond Order Code: SEP111248

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series. Now the entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his powerful, uninked PENCIL ART, showing Kirby’s work in its undiluted, raw form! Also included is Kirby’s ILLUSTRATED SILVER STAR MOVIE SCREENPLAY, never-seen SKETCHES, PIN-UPS, and an historical overview to put it all in perspective!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905559 Diamond Order Code: JAN063367

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

Compiles the “extra” new material from COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES 1-7, in one huge Digital Edition! Includes a fan’s private tour of the Kirbys’ remarkable home, profusely illustrated with photos, and more than 200 pieces of Kirby art not published outside of those volumes. If you already own the individual issues and skipped the collections, or missed them in print form, now you can get caught up!

For the first time, JACK KIRBY’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY GRAPHIC NOVEL is presented as it was created in 1975 (before being broken up and modified for the 1980s Pacific Comics series), reproduced from copies of Kirby’s uninked pencil art! This first “new” Kirby comic in years features page after page of prime pencils, and includes Jack’s unused CAPTAIN VICTORY SCREENPLAY, unseen art, an historical overview to put it in perspective, and more! (52-page comic book) $5.95 • (Digital Edition) $2.95

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

NOTE: THIS IS ISSUE #58 OF THE KIRBY COLLECTOR!

KIRBY FIVE-OH! CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE “KING” OF COMICS

For its 50th issue, the publication that started TwoMorrows presents KIRBY FIVE-OH!, a BOOK covering the best of everything from Kirby’s 50-year career in comics! The regular KIRBY COLLECTOR columnists have formed a distinguished panel of experts to choose and examine: The BEST KIRBY STORY published each year from 1938-1987! The BEST COVERS from each decade! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! And profiles of, and commentary by, the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus there’s a 50-PAGE GALLERY of Kirby’s powerful RAW PENCIL ART, and a DELUXE COLOR SECTION of photos and finished art from throughout his entire half-century oeuvre. This TABLOID-SIZED TRADE PAPERBACK features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by “DC: The New Frontier” artist DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, helping make this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Takes the place of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50. (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

NOTE: THIS IS ISSUE #50 OF THE KIRBY COLLECTOR!

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

Reprinting the fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered! Spotlights some of KIRBY’s finest art from all eras of his career, including 1930s pencil work, unused strips, illustrated World War II letters, 1950s pages, unpublished 1960s Marvel pencil pages and sketches, and Fourth World pencil art (done expressly for this portfolio in 1970)! We’ve gone back to the original art to ensure the best reproduction possible, and MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN have updated the Kirby biography from the original printing, and added a new Foreword explaining how this portfolio came to be! PLUS: We’ve recolored the original color plates, and added EIGHT NEW BLACK-&-WHITE PAGES, plus EIGHT NEW COLOR PAGES, including Jack’s four GODS posters (released separately in 1972), and four extra Kirby color pieces, all at tabloid size! (60-page tabloid with COLOR) SOLD OUT • (Digital Edition) $5.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

PRINTED IN CHINA

51795

$17.95 in the USA

ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-053-3 ISBN-10: 1-60549-053-9

A full-color Digital Edition of this book (with bonus material) is available at www.twomorrows.com

9 781605 490533

comic book creator #2 presents Joe Kubert: A Tribute to the Creator & Mentor We remember a bona fide legend of American comic books, the artist-writer-editor-mentor and inspiration named Joe Kubert, by celebrating one of the top talents to work in comics (since the age of 11!) who would continue on to become a truly great man. Compiled in this full-color, 164-page book — constituting the first CBC summer annual — are multiple interviews with Kubert, as well as interviews with: Adam & Andy Kubert, RUSS HEATH, PAUL LEVITZ, FRANK THORNE, IRWIN HASEN, TIMOTHY TRUMAN, IVAN SNYDER, and PETER CARLSSON, plus special tributes by RICK VEITCH, GEORGE PRATT, and ERVIN RUSTEMAGIC. Included are essays on JOE KUBERT’S JEWISH ROOTS, INSTRUCTORS OF THE KUBERT SCHOOL, BILL SCHELLY’S TOP TEN KUBERT COMICS, and THE MAKE-WAR-NO-MORE EDITOR, in addition to TESTIMONIALS and ARTWORK from numerous friends, fans and colleagues. Plus, a fantastic array of Joe Kubert artwork, including rarely-seen and unpublished work, directly from the Kubert archives.

Front Cover art by Sergio Cariello / Colors: Tom Ziuko • Back Cover Art by Timothy Truman / Colors: Mark Nelson