Comic Book Creator #34

A TwoMorrows Publication

No. 34, Spring 2024

Cover art by Dan Jurgens and Brett Breeding

The Best in POP Culture!

ZOWIE!

THE TV SUPERHERO CRAZE IN ’60s POP CULTURE

by MARK VOGER

HOLY PHENOMENON! In the way-out year of 1966, the action comedy “Batman” starring ADAM WEST premiered and triggered a tsunami of super swag, including toys, games, Halloween costumes, puppets, action figures, and lunch boxes.

Meanwhile, still more costumed avengers sprang forth on TV (“The Green Hornet,” “Ultraman”), in MOVIES (“The Wild World of Batwoman,” “Rat Pfink and Boo Boo”), and in ANIMATION (“Space Ghost,” “The Marvel Super Heroes”).

ZOWIE! traces the history of the superhero genre from early films, through the 1960s TV superhero craze, and its pop culture influence ever since. This 192-page hardcover, in pop art colors that conjure the period, spotlights the coolest collectibles and kookiest knockoffs every ’60s kid begged their parents for, and features interviews with the TV stars (WEST, BURT WARD, YVONNE CRAIG, FRANK GORSHIN, BURGESS MEREDITH, CESAR ROMERO, JULIE NEWMAR, VAN WILLIAMS), the artists behind the comics (JERRY ROBINSON, DICK SPRANG, CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA), and others. Written and designed by MARK VOGER (MONSTER MASH, HOLLY JOLLY), ZOWIE! is one super read!

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-125-7 SHIPS JULY 2024!

CLIFFHANGER!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

CINEMATIC SUPERHEROES OF THE SERIALS: 1941–1952 by CHRISTOPHER IRVING Hold on tight as historian CHRISTOPHER IRVING explores the origins of the first on-screen superheroes and the comic creators and film-makers who brought them to life. CLIFFHANGER! touches on the early days of the film serial, to its explosion as a juvenile medium of the 1930s and ‘40s. See how the creation of characters like SUPERMAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, SPY SMASHER, and CAPTAIN MARVEL dovetailed with the early film adaptations. Along the way, you’ll meet the stuntmen, directors (SPENCER BENNETT, WILLIAM WITNEY, producer SAM KATZMAN), comic book creators (SIEGEL & SHUSTER, SIMON & KIRBY, BOB KANE, C.C. BECK, FRANK FRAZETTA, WILL EISNER), and actors (BUSTER CRABBE, GEORGE REEVES, LORNA GRAY, KANE RICHMOND, KIRK ALYN, DAVE O’BRIEN) who brought them to the silver screen—and how that resonates with today’s cinematic superhero universe. NOW SHIPPING! (160-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-119-6

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION (EXPANDED EDITION) by KEITH DALLAS & JOHN WELLS

NOW IN FULL-COLOR WITH BONUS PAGES! In 1978, DC Comics launched a line-wide expansion known as “The DC Explosion,” but pulled the plug weeks later, cancelling titles and leaving dozens of completed comic book stories unpublished. Now, that notorious “DC Implosion” is examined with an exhaustive oral history from JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, AL MILGROM, and other DC creators of the time, plus commentary by other top pros, examining how it changed the landscape of comics forever! This new EXPANDED EDITION of the Eisner Award-nominated book explodes in full cover for the first time, with extra coverage of LOST 1970S DC PROJECTS like Ninja the Invisible and an adaptation of “The Wiz,” Jim Starlin’s unaltered cover art for BATMAN FAMILY #21, content meant for cancelled Marvel titles such as Godzilla and Ms. Marvel, and more! SHIPS MAY 2024!

(144-page FULL-COLOR SOFTCOVER) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $10.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-124-0

IT ROSE FROM THE TOMB An all-new book written by PETER NORMANTON

Rising from the depths of history comes an ALL-NEW examination of the 20th Century’s best horror comics, written by PETER NORMANTON (editor of From The Tomb, the UK’s preeminent magazine on the genre). From the pulps and seminal horror comics of the 1940s, through ones they tried to ban in the 1950s, this tome explores how the genre survived the introduction of the Comics Code, before making its terrifying return during the 1960s and 1970s. Come face-to-face with the early days of ACG’s alarming line, every horror comic from June 1953, hypodermic horrors, DC’s Gothic romance comics, Marvel’s Giant-Size terrors, Skywald and Warren’s chillers, and Atlas Seaboard’s shocking magazines. The 192-page full-color opus exhumes BERNIE WRIGHTSON’s darkest constructs, plus artwork by FRANK FRAZETTA, NEAL ADAMS, MIKE KALUTA, STEVE DITKO, MATT FOX, WARREN KREMER, LEE ELIAS, BILL EVERETT, RUSS HEATH, THE GURCH, and many more. Don’t turn your back on this once-in-a-lifetime spine-chiller—it’s so good, it’s frightening!

(192-page SOFTCOVER) $31.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-123-3 • NOW SHIPPING!

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Pop History.

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

Spring 2024 • The Dan Jurgens Issue • Number 34

T A DAN JURGENS Portrait by KEN MEYER, JR. ©2024 Ken Meyer, Jr.

About Our Cover Cover art by DAN JURGENS, Pencils BRETT BREEDING, Inks Cover colors by GLEN WHITMORE

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Ye Ed’s Rant: Talking about a magazine’s philosophy and yammering about other stuff... 2 COMICS CHATTER Welcome to the Glutverse: Roberto Lionel Barreiro talks about the cross-company universe writer Don Glut created populating his comics, books, and films — with an illuminating schematic courtesy of fellow Glutologist Charles Rutledge ....................... 3 An Age of Altergott: Talking with the cartoonist about his graphic novel, Blessed Be..... 12 Once Upon Long Ago: Steve Thompson on his introduction to comics fandom.............. 15 Sunshine’s Superman: Publishing hardback collections of comics back in the ’70s...... 18 The Borth Files: The final part of our profile of the greatest artist you don’t know........... 20

Superman, associated characters TM & © DC Comics.

Incoming: Roy Thomas comments on the Stan Lee at Carnegie Hall article in CBC #31.... 28 Cooke’s Column: Y.E. discovers humorist Sean Kelly comments about Byron Preiss....... 29 Ten Questions: Darrick Patrick basks in the glow of bright and sunny June Brigham...... 30 Son of the Flame: The last portion of Greg Biga’s career-spanning interview with Mike Deodato, Jr., covering the artist’s years of reinvention, struggle, and triumph.... 32 Comics in the Library: Richard Arndt on The Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz............... 40 Hembeck’s Dateline: Fred compares the Action Heroes and Watchmen counterparts ... 41 Above: This image was originally intended as a double-page spread featured in Superman #82 [Oct. 1993], but, Dan Jurgens told us, it was rejected by DC editorial as submitted

by Dan, because it forced the reader to turn the book sideways. They later released it as a folded poster to be included in a plastic-bagged book sold at a big box store.

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions!

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

www.twomorrows.com or through our Apple and Google Apps!

& DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep producing great publications like this one!

Dan Jurgens: Love, Death, and Superman Greg Biga questions the artist/writer about his “Smallville”-like Minnesota upbringing, early entry into DC Comics, and his creation of Booster Gold, as well as thoughts on the awesome responsibility of being a caretaker for an American icon, and the group dynamics behind the “Death of Superman,” and his subsequent jumping between the “Big Two,” as Dan became one of mainstream comics most important pros .......... 42 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: Kendall Whitehouse covers the 2023 Baltimore Comic-Con........... 78 Coming Attractions: Bob Brodsky’s comprehensive look at writer Denny O’Neil............ 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Tom Z. shows off some of his Big Foot work.... 80 EDITOR’S NOTE: Note that some images in this issue have been enhanced with software.

Right: Slightly altered detail of Booster Gold #18 [May 2009] cover by Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund..

Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are available as digital downloads from twomorrows.com 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 601, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com.

Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $53 US, $78 International, $19 Digital.

All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2024 Jon B. Cooke/ TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

TM & ©DC Comics.

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

THE MAIN EVENT

This issue is dedicated to the memories of STEVE ERWIN, KEITH GIFFEN, and my friend and fellow historian, ROGER HILL ™

Our Quarterly Visit JON B. COOKE

Editor & Designer

JOHN MORROW

Publisher & Consulting Editor

GREG BIGA

Associate Editor

DAN JURGENS Cover Penciler

BRETT BREEDING Cover Inker

GLEN WHITMORE Cover Colorist

RICHARD J. ARNDT TOM ZIUKO STEVEN THOMPSON MICHAEL AUSHENKER Contributing Editors

J.D. KING

CBC Cartoonist Emeritus

TOM ZIUKO

CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON

CBC Illustrator

KEN MEYER, JR. ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

GREG PRESTON

CBC Contributing Photographer

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE

CBC Convention Photographer

RICHARD ARNDT FRED HEMBECK DARRICK PATRICK STEVEN THOMPSON TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists

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

There’s a philosophy embraced in these pages Baltimore Comic-Con was an interesting about producing the ideal periodical, one time, as Yours Truly manned the booth at the that some have heard me talk about convention center while publisher John before. It’s to have a magazine enter Morrow was selling his wares at the Mida reader’s abode welcomed as if an Atlantic Nostalgia Con, in nearby Hunt Valley, old friend or admired acquaintance Maryland, and then zipping over to BCC who comes to call on a periodic basis. to help me close up at night. Highlights of The intent is to make a publication the show included meeting Paul Gravett in engaging, smart, and diverse, yet person for the first time, spending time with try not to deviate too far from its buddy John Workman, chats with Benjamin overall purview. The key is to capture Herzberg, Steve Rude, and Patrick McDonthe reader’s attention for a spell nell. (In following through our discussion, I just long enough not overstay interviewed the Mutts cartoonist — a warm that welcome. It’s an interesting and welcoming gent — about his heartfelt formula, though hardly a science, new book, The Super Hero’s Journey, currentand I confess to not having the ly available from Abrams ComicArts, a lively slightest notion how successful talk that will appear next issue.)

CBC is in deserving and retaining I’ve been chatting with a pal about any of your attention other than a possibly publishing a history of Treasure steady number continue to buy it.

Chest comics, the Catholic school title that But there’s evidence the mag ran for over 500 issues between 1946–72 is doing okay. I do know that there and boasted a wonderful line-up of artists are enough of you readers to keep over the decades, including Reed Crandall, CBC continuing on its philosophJoe Sinnott, Fran Matera, and the great Frank ical mission (at least up to now!).

Borth (who I have been profiling in the last And I’m grateful the readership batch of CBC). I can’t adequately explain has remained steady over the 34 iswhy I’m so fascinated with the comics of sues thus far, though sales fluctuate, George A. Pflaum, of Dayton, Ohio, as I’m depending on reader interest for the not particularly religious and never attended Don Jurgens by Ronn Sutton main feature. Thanks to all of you for Catholic school, except to say the series is purchasing CBC and my appreciation to all the mag’s very entertaining and wonderfully diverse in cartooning styles contributors for keeping it engaging, smart, and diverse. and subject material (all preachiness aside). If you have any Having retired from a career as graphic designer in adver- desire to see such an obscure history published, let me know! tising and marketing over the last few years now, your (ahem) Well, as of January, long before you’re reading these fearless editor has been singularly devoted to the comics words, Ye Ed will officially join the ranks of senior citizenry and history field ever since, with the next major project being a turns 65! I can’t kid myself anymore that I’m either young or historical retrospective of the last remaining underground co- vibrant, but I’m okay with it and will slow down only when the mix publisher. A good chunk of Mind Candy: The Outrageous body or mind forces me. I have so much to do before then!

History of Last Gasp of San Francisco is, naturally, devoted to Whether I’ll be attending San Diego Comic-Con this year a biography of its iconoclastic founder, Ron Turner, whose is up in the air (but 2025 is likely a definite), though Mitch fascinating story not only encompasses the rise and fall of the Hallock’s Terrificon is a sure thing, come Aug. 16–18, at the comix scene and his company’s emergence in recent decades Mohegan Sun Casino, in Connecticut, where Ye Pub and myas a publisher of eclectic art books, but also discusses the rise self will be manning the TwoMorrows booth. (Mitch’s show is of the “outsider” culture scene the Bay Area produced. not only… umm… terrific, but, being only 25 miles from me, Ronzo’s importance in the advancement of comic books it’s also virtually in my Southern Rhode Island backyard! cannot be overstated. His outfit started as a publisher of I’m also excited to announce that 2024 is the centennial socially conscious, pro-environmentalist funny books, and Last year for the late writer, Arnold Drake, and in CBC #35–37 and Gasp went on to release the first all-women comic book title as with the help of chum Marc Svensson, we’ll be featuring the well as the seminal effort that launched the autobiographical co-creator of Doom Patrol and Deadman’s most comprehengenre, the late Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy sive interview ever, which I conducted in late 2003, some Virgin Mary. The more I delve into it, the more remarkable the three and a half years before he passed, in 2007. subject is. Hopefully the book will be out next fall.

Until next time, when we visit again!

cbc contributors

Rick Altergott Mark Arnold Roberto Lionel Barreiro

Terry Beatty Ariel Bordeaux Brett Breeding Shaun Clancy

DC Comics Michael Eury Don Glut Roger Hill

Dan Jurgens Paul Levitz Andy Mangels Eric Reynolds

— Y e Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

Charles Rutledge Rob Salkowitz Jesse Santos Linda Sunshine

Roy Thomas Michael Uslan J.C. Vaughn Rob Yeremian

#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Dan Jurgens portrait © 2024 Ronn Sutton. Superman TM & © DC Comics.

CBC Color Portrait Artist

On staying welcome in the reader’s abode and other stuff

up front

Journey into the Glutverse!

An examination of the most fascinating shared comic book universe you didn’t know about

by ROBERTO BARREIRO

Gold Key TM Gold Key Entertainment, LLC. Dr. Spektor TM & ©Penguin Random House, LLC.

[Editor’s intro: By the early 1970s, the idea of a continuum between comic book titles had been long established since Marvel made it a central element of the charm of its super-hero line in the ’60s, a cool notion of a shared universe with characters interacting within one another’s books. Taking that cue, Charlton had its “Action Heroes”; Tower, its T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents; and The Mighty Crusaders had their realm over at Archie Comics. They weren’t alone. Certainly, ever since Superman initially cavorted with Batman in World’s Finest and the Justice Society first convened their All Star Comics’ meetings back in the ’40s, DC predated all of that ’60s stuff with its characters crossing paths, but rarely was there the conviction and frequency as was happening at the House of Ideas.

But cross-company continuity? This was simply unheard of, at least in any overt fashion until DC’s Man of Steel bumped into Marvel’s amazing Wall-Crawler for their 1976 “Treasury Edition” slugfest, starting an extended period of detente that lasted between the Big Two into the ’90s. Sure, writers like Steve Skeates subversively tied up loose plotlines from his abruptly cancelled Aquaman [1972] in an issue of Sub-Mariner [1974], but any ongoing co-mingling from one publisher to another…? Nobody would dare suggest a shared universe starring characters from separate companies, right?

Enter Donald Frank Glut and his vast and glorious Glutverse!

The following (in somewhat different form) was submitted by Roberto Lionel Barreiro Figueroa, a fellow comics scholar from Chile, who helped tremendously with my Charlton Companion regarding Argentine artists. He suggested I make use of an English translation of a piece he wrote in Spanish on the “Glutverse,” and I was instantly captivated as both a fan of Don’s work and tickled by the very phrase! I’ve shamelessly edited the essay and beg his forgiveness, but here’s hoping Roberto’s exuberance shines through! — Y.E.] The origin of perhaps the best-developed experiment in continuity during the 1970s occurred in the comic books of a publisher that didn’t promote it, with characters far removed from superheroes and, in fact, established almost entirely in secret, developed behind the backs of the editors themselves. This was all due to the work and imagination of a young comics writer who wanted to give a common thread to all his stories about detectives of the supernatural, barbarians among swords and sorcerers, prehistoric warriors who encounter aliens, and horror stories. From that unlikely mix of genres, Donald Glut would generate a group of series within the Gold Key publishing house that functioned as his own created universe. This is the story of his Glutverse, as its become known by the few fans who recognized what he was doing, a saga of this hidden comics realm, its genesis, development, and apparent (but, in reality, not final) end.

A FAN’S SECRET JOKE By 1972, Don Glut already had a certain fame within the (albeit small) fandom of North America, and could boast of a promising professional career as scripter. Born in Texas, in 1944, Glut was just one more “war baby,” who spent his childhood reading pre-Code comics, listening to rock ’n’ roll, watching old black-&-white horror movies on TV, going to cheap SF double and sometimes triple bills at local theaters, and religiously reading Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (about said movies). Two very specific subjects would attract his attention and become obsessions that remained COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

throughout his career: dinosaurs and the monstrous creation of Dr. Frankenstein. Both manias will result in books (and much more), both fiction and nonfiction.

But what set Glut apart from other war babies and boomers was that, as a teenager, he wanted to do things with his favorite characters. So, while coming of age in Chicago and later moving to California in his college days, young Glut would film his own “fan” efforts. With a 16mm camera, Glut was determined to tell stories about super-heroes, monsters, and movie serial villains.

Between 1953–69, Glut lensed a whopping 41 short films, using characters like Superman, Spider-Man, the Spirit, Frankenstein’s creation, werewolves, dinosaurs, etc. Early on, his production efforts were catching the attention not only of other fans, but also Famous Monsters editor Forrest J Ackerman and his writer, rock singer Ron Haydock, who frequently promoted Glut’s work, giving the young man recognition in fandom of the day. The nascent director would thus get to know others from that world, including a fellow from Missouri named Roy Thomas.

This page: At top is the logo for Gold Key Comics, which was an imprint of Western Publishing, alongside Jesse Santos’s painting for the cover of The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor #19 [Apr. 1976].

Above is an enhanced portrait of the creator of the Glutverse himself, Donald Frank Glut, the remarkable pop culture polymath, who has made significant impacts in comics, B-movies, the study of dinosaurs, novels, and more!

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This spread: Mystery Comics Digest items by writer Don Glut and artist Jesse Santo, who (above) drew a caricature of the collaborators, plus Spektor pin-up and splash page detail from Dagar #1.

All items TM & © Penguin Random House, LLC.

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The Ackerman connection allowed Glut to enter a professional career as a comics writer. Advised by Forry, who also served as his cheerleader, young Glut began selling short-story comic scripts in 1969 to Ackerman’s publisher, Jim Warren, for the Warren horror comic magazines. In Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella, his scripts started to appear. A few years later, a job for Ackerman led him to the West Coast-based comics editor, Chase Craig, at Western Publishing and, in a few months, that meeting resulted in Glut writing text pages for their Gold Key comics line.

By the time of Glut’s arrival, Gold Key had seen better days.

Their golden age of Russ Manning’s Magnus, Robot Fighter and Carl Barks writing and drawing the Disney ducks had passed, and the titles, mostly comics starring licensed properties, were selling less across the board. Besides the cartoon show comics, they focused on tepid horror stories that were a specialty — Gold Key never bet on super-heroes to any extent — and Glut soon received a call to write scripts for their brand new anthology, Mystery Comics Digest, and, from his very first comics story, “Mask of the Mummy,” the Glutverse started to take shape. And not only was the writer’s new realm being introduced in that debut tale, but it was also exquisitely drawn by his most important Gold Key

collaborator, newly hired Filipino artist Jesse Santos. Though, from time to time, veteran artist Dan Spiegle and others would render Glut scripts, the vast majority were illustrated by Santos.

This would be a universe different from the others. Superheroes will rarely appear, and its central protagonists will come from the genres of heroic fantasy and horror. Glut wisely used forms of construction of the shared reality that Stan Lee had outlined at Marvel to apply it to his different characters, giving them a certain novelty in their respective genres. Now, mind you, Glut was doing the universe-building without attracting editorial attention, respecting the idea that each story needed to stand on its own, without one having to have read the previous issue to understand what happens. Pardon our enthusiasm as we parse this expanding universe in excruciating (but hopefully entertaining) detail!

That first Glut/Santos job in Mystery Comics Digest #1 [Mar. 1972] starts almost casually, with mummy Ra-Ka-Tep, formerly an ancient Egyptian sorcerer, who is brought back to life and swaps his body with that of the greedy tomb defiler. The character will be resurrected in an issue of The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor. In #2 [Apr. ’72], werewolf Count Wulfstein appears, who ends up dying when entering a silver mine — only to return five years later in The Twilight Zone! The next issue [May ’72] has two new characters appear: Simbar, a Tarzan wannabe who would repeatedly visit Dr. Spektor, transforms into a lion-man — and who, in this story, gets his lioness-woman, Joan! In the other, prehistoric cave people Tragg and Lorn, cave people who live in prehistory with anachronistic dinosaurs, in this story, face the world’s very first werewolf, the result of an extraterrestrial infection in lake water. Tragg eventually got his own title [nine issues, ’75–77], as would a certain fellow introduced in MCD #5 [July ’72].

#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The main protagonist of the Glutverse appeared almost blithely (like everyone else). Doctor Adam Spektor, dressed in black, with a pencil-thin mustache and a scruff of beard on his chin, will debut in this issue, presenting the first of his many fabled case files, though he simply fulfills the role of the story’s host, like infinite other horror hosts in an infinite number of comics. In that same role, he’d make repeat appearances in four more Mystery Comics Digests. Obviously the editors at Gold Key saw something in the good doctor — and Glut confirmed to the CBC editor, back in 2002, that is was Del Connell — who thought it a good idea to have the character continue as host telling tales of the macabre in his own series, but the writer had another idea, as we’ll see later.

Finally, in MCD #7 [Sept. 1972], the Lurker in the Swamp is introduced, the “semi-conscious, semi-vegetable-monster,-wholives-and-bring-justice-in-the-swamp” of the Glutverse. This time the monster’s original state is an ex-convict who returns looking for the loot after ten years in an enchanted swamp where, upon murdering his partner, he had hidden it… but his victim is now a plant creature who wants revenge. And, after killing him, the creature passes on the curse, making him the new Lurker in the Swamp.

Until now, all those stories had no connection with each other.

This will begin to change with the appearance of a new series by Glut and Santos cover-dated Oct. 1972, a sword-&-sorcery title which begin to tie together previously loose threads.

Dr. Spektor, Dagar, Lurker TM & ©Penguin Random House, LLC.

TALL AND BLONDE WITH SHARP ACCOUTREMENT The first regular series of the Glutverse happened somewhat by chance. The scribe had written two related stories using the same character, a Conan-esque barbarian who — after various turns and twists — he ended up calling Dagar. The Gold Key editors, who had never heard of sword-&-sorcery, thought that the warrior could carry a series on his own and assigned Glut and Santos to produce a book-length story for issue #1 of the new series (with a mouthful of a name: Tales of Sword and Sorcery: Dagar the Invincible). But the editor also wanted that other story, the one going to appear in Mystery Comics Digest, but no longer to star Dagar, fearing it would take away from the importance of the stand-alone book. Quickly, he renamed the swordsman Duroc and had Santos draw him differently from Dagar. Thus, while the first issue of Dagar was coming out, Duroc’s first tale appeared MCD #7. Then things were a tad confused when the New York editors believed that Duroc’s name was too similar to that of their Turok, Son of Stone, series and it was changed to Durak for the next appearance. He would star in two adventures, in MCD #14 [Oct. ’73] and #15 [Jan. ’74], with recurring enemy Xorkon, a sorcerer Durak ends up killing.

Glut and Santos remained the creative team throughout the

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

Dagar series, which lasted nearly 20 issues. In #2, the Lobrostone — a rock that cures lycanthropy — is introduced to become a recurring item in the Glutverse. Then Dagar gets a partner, Graylin, in the third ish [Apr. ’73], and she‘ll have a supporting role in many stories. Dagar (whom Glut emphasized is not a barbarian) travels to prehistoric times in #5 [Oct. ’73], where he encounters Jarn, who we later discover is the brother of caveman Tragg!

Dagar the Invincible #6 [Jan. ’74] brings us the centerpiece of the Glutverse. We learn there are two kinds of ancient gods, the good Warrior Gods and the evil Dark Gods. They waged a war eons ago, ending when the Dark Gods become shadows existing outside of this realm, working through earthly agents to return to this plane and rule again. That notion was clearly influenced by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos (more specifically, by protégé August Derleth’s take on HPL concepts) and one that will cast a shadow over all the Glutverse stories.

(Many of ’em, anyway!)

Until now, one element was missing for these stories to be considered part of a shared universe: the crossover.

In Dagar #7 [Apr. ’74], Glut 5

6

DOCTOR SPEKTOR (OR HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN UNIVERSE WITHOUT ANYONE REALIZING) After Spektor’s initial appearances as host of horror stories in Mystery Comics Digest, the Gold Key editors determined it a good idea to have a title starring the character. However, their notion was that he’d continue as a host without the readers learning anything about him, like many other similar characters, from the EC Comics hosts to Cain and Abel in DC’s mystery books, by way of Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie at Warren, and many, many more. That idea was acceptable by the publisher’s conservative parameters.

However, Glut wanted to do something else. He desired that Spektor (whom the writer has always said was his favorite creation) to be protagonist of his cases, not merely the narrator. For that, the scribe is going to write a first issue that establishes the foundation of the series in a completely different way.

In that first issue, cover dated Apr. 1973, Glut lets us know Adam Spektor is a world-renowned detective of the occult. He lives in a large mansion — Spektor Manor — next to a cemetery, along with his “secretary,” Lakota Rainflower, a young woman of Sioux

descent (and here we draw attention again to how well Glut treats racial minorities, avoiding at all times stereotyping Lakota), and a skeptical look at the supernatural. (And I put “secretary” in quotes because, from the first moment, we realize that the relationship between the two is a little deeper than strictly professional. Obviously there’s nothing explicit, but it’s evident there’s something more.)

In this same first issue, Glut begins to establish the idea of the shared universe, bringing back vampire Baron Tibor as antagonist, who had appeared in a one-off in Mystery Comics Digest #4. Tibor becomes a reluctant vampire and asks Spektor for help, who was, as luck would have it, working on a cure. The good baron pops in and out of the series, as he regularly takes Spektor’s antidote.

From here on, the exploits of Dr. Spektor are the mainstay of the Glutverse, combining terrifying stories with a wise and careful building of his own fictional universe. Many characters Glut used in other stories will meld into Spektor tales, along with others inspired by other authors. The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor #2 [June ’73] features a ghost canine that owes a clear debt to the Sherlock Holmes saga, The Hound of the Baskervilles. In #3 [Aug. ’73] the #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Dagar, Dr. Spektor TM & © Penguin Random House, LLC. Kull TM & © Kull Productions, Inc.

commits by bringing together barbarians Dagar and Durak.

What’s interesting is that he gives each a different personality: while Dagar is rather serious, focused in his actions and seems genuinely committed in his love with Graylin, Durak is bolder, more an airhead, and easily seduced by the fairer sex.

The next few Dagar issues involve Dark God rubies and orbs. Number #9 [Oct. ’74] introduces Torgus, of a nomadic hunting tribe, a brave, intelligent leader, loving husband… and Black, though his skin color is never pointed out by Glut.

Pigmentation is irrelevant. A This page: Dagar #7 [Apr. ’74] new Glutverse convergence emerges in #11 [Apr. ’75], when we panel; Spektor’s first appearance discover that the ruins of the story’s setting were built in prehistoric in Mystery Comics Digest #5 [July times by Tragg (more on him later), cementing the connection ’72] (art by Dan Spiegle); panel between the two characters.

The next issue [July ’75] has Dagar crossing paths with Durak from Dagar #8 [July ’74]; and two panels from Marvel’s Kull the yet again and #13 [Oct. ’75] has Dagar, Graylin, and Durak involved Destroyer #22 [Aug. ’77]. in an epic story where Durak appears to be killed. In the end, we find that Dagar’s barbarian pal has not died, but traveled into the Next page: Baron Tibor panel, future and met with… no, you’ll have to wait as I’ll tell you later!

Issues #14 [Jan. ’76] and 15 [Apr. ’76] break the mold, doing cover of The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor #10 [Oct. ’74]; panel the unthinkable, and bring the Glutverse to an entirely unprecefrom Dr. Spektor #14 [June ’75] dented level. These tumultuous issues end with Dagar’s companand Don Glut script page. ion, Graylin, jumping on a horse and leaving her lover forever! In fact, she travels to another universe… the one called Marvel!

The background: in 1977, thanks to friend Roy Thomas, Glut is writing scripts for the House of Ideas. One assignment is Kull the Destroyer, based on Robert E. Howard’s hero. In #22 [Aug. ’77], a young amnesiac woman warrior appears. She vaguely remembers a man she left behind because she didn’t want to continue participating in his life of violence and death. Called Laralei by Kull, she is Kull’s companion and lover until #28 [Aug. ’78], where she surreptitiously leaves the destroyer because Kull is no different than Dagar. And so Graylin/Laralei exits, destination unknown.

Dagar’s title would end with #19, though his last adventure was in Gold Key Spotight #6 [June ’77], where sorcerer Galga-Thar appears. He’s the writer of one of the two most important magical texts in the Glutverse: the Deconomicon, a book of spells on demons known. After this last adventure, we will never hear from Dagar again. But, while Don Glut’s Dagar the Invincible work is quite solid stuff — and Jesse Santos is, as always, an excellent renderer — the series pales in comparison to the true masterpiece of the Glutverse, the next series we’ll be talking about: The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor.

Dr. Spektor, Doctor Solar TM & © Penguin Random House, LLC.

mummy, Ra-Ka-Tep, from Mystery Comics Digest, is back, and #4 [Oct. ’73] brings a secondary character, talented African-American medium and psychic Elliott Kane, thereafter a frequent guest in the series. And, in the issue’s back-up story (which told stories with Dr. Spektor as host only, just as the editors originally wanted) featured an enchanted silver dagger said to have been used by Durak. In #5 [Dec. ’73], the other great source of continuities in the Glutverse appears: fantastic works in the public domain (yes, children, Alan Moore did not invent the characters in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Here Spektor investigates Dr. Jekyll’s papers and Count Dracula appears in the back-up.

In the sixth issue [Feb. ’74], Glut indulges in one of his favorite characters as a rival: the Creature of Frankenstein. This version of the Monster is completely in keeping with Mary Shelley’s novel, even in the visual design — no flattened head or electrodes on his neck here, à lá Boris Karloff! Also, the issue’s secondary story tells the origin of Simbar, the were-lion of the jungle we first met in MCD (and he comes back in #9 [Aug. ’74]). Then, in #7 [Apr. ’74], the Dark Gods appear for the first time in Spektor. They revive Ostellon, a sorcerer Dagar defeated in his first issue, and order him to defeat Spektor, a descendant of those who have always prevented the Dark Gods from returning. With this, we discover that Spektor is descendant of both Dagar and Tragg!

[Holy Michael Moorcock! —Ye Ed.] In #8 [June ’74], Glut is having a ball bringing his characters together like mad. Here, Spektor faces movie, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf none other than Dracula, who is Man. Finally, in #13 [Apr. ’75], Doc is assembling a legion of vampires to relieved of lycanthropy via the lobroamass power. Using the Ruthvenian, stone, with help from pal Simbar. a magical tome containing the Shockingly, #14 [June ’75] has existing vampire knowledge, Dracula the writer introducing a Gold Key resurrects none other than Lord character not created by Glut into his Ruthven (from “The Vampire,” by universe. The story begins with the John Polidori, the first known modern vampire story), Sir Frances apparent death of Lakota and Spektor seems to be the culprit, as Varney (protagonist of Varney the Vampire, a very successful British suspects local police chief Inspector Sinke (who becomes a series penny dreadful serial from the 19th century) and Mircalla Karnstein (star of Carmilla, the vampire tale by Sheridan Le Fanu, direct predecessor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Glut’s original creation, Baron Tibor, also flies into the mix.

Ra-Ka-Tep becomes a mummy without a will, in #10 [Oct. ’74], much like Universal’s mummy of the ’30s and ’40s movies, in a story where he ends up as a mindless monster walking under the tunnels of the city where Spektor lives. The backup story reveals the fight’s origin and the final end of the conflict between the Warrior Gods and the Dark Gods, along the way reinforcing the idea that the latter are behind most of the evil witchcraft in the world.

A trilogy of issues, starting with #11 [Dec. ’74], features a storyline where Spektor becomes a werewolf and avoids his friends while looking to cure himself with the lobrostone. (Remember?

Back in Dagar #2?) The last issue to include a back-up tale, #11 — this one starring Baron Tibor, the reluctant vampire — and, from #12 [Feb. ’75] on, full-length stories per issue become the norm, with the first teaching us that Spektor may not be exactly what you’d call a very faithful boyfriend and we witness Glut’s homage to the 1943 COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

STAKING MY CLAIM TO THE GLUTVERSE!

Ye Ed here: I’ve looked high and low, and even asked the Great Glut himself where the first instance of the term, “Glutverse,” could be found and he shrugged, saying, “I don’t recall. I know I didn’t coin it.

Seems like I just started hearing or reading people referring to it by that name. Like the term just kind of sprang up.” But, by all the might and glory of the Warrior Gods, I’m becoming certain that ’twas *I* who first uttered the immortal portmanteau! Researching this article, I came upon evidence from back in Comic Book Artist #22 [Oct. 2002], when I interviewed the Mighty Don about his Gold Key work. I told him, “The coolest thing about Gold Key for me in the ’70s was to pick up Dr. Spektor and Dagar, and think, ‘Where did this come from?’ I mean, these were not typical Gold Key comics; these were cool! Because you were so tied to one artist, Jesse Santos, and because the characters really did interact with each other, it was like a little universe unto itself, the Glutverse!” Prove me wrong!

7

This page: Above is panel from Dr. Spektor #18, which featured the cast attending the fabled Rutland Halloween Parade and cameo appearances by a number of characters, including the Golden Age comics creation of Tarpe “Miss Fury” Mills, the Purple Zombie (seen inset upper right in splash panel from the 1940s). Muck-monster Lurker of the Swamp appeared in Dr. Spektor #21 [Aug. ’76] and Golden Age Dell/’60s Gold Key super-hero, The Owl, returns in Spektor #22 [Oct. ’76]. Inset is cover of #1 of The Owl [Apr. 1967].

#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Dr. Spektor, The Owl TM & © Penguin Random House, LLC. The Purple Zombie TM & ©the respective copyright holder.

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regular). Whereon Spektor decides to turn himself in while the mystery is solved, a radiant force breaks through the cell wall and guides Doc to Mount Algol, as the power reveals itself to be — tah-dah! — Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom! One of Gold Key’s few super-hero characters, he was created in 1962 by prolific scripter Paul S. Newman, Gold Key editor Matt Murphy, and artist Bob Fujitani. Solar’s super-heroic career (of original stories) would last 27 issues, until 1969. According to this adventure, he had hung up his suit and gone to work as a scientific agent for a secret government agency directed by a certain Nick — yes, we have a nod to a Marvel character of “fury” here — and a sorceress serving the Dark Gods controls Solar’s mind. There is to be an eclipse and, with sorcery plus Solar’s radioactive powers, a portal could open and the Dark Gods would enter this plane. Spektor, aware that if the malevolent deities return, the planet is doomed, frees Solar from the sorceress’s control and prevents the Dark Gods’ scheme.

Of course, lots more happens in the tale and, of course, Lakota lives again in this, one of the most epic stories in the series. (And, by the way, in another nod at Marvel, a cop in the story is a handsome blond officer named Rogers!)

The following issue, #15 [Aug. ’75], Baron Tibor returns to tell Spektor he’s developing immunity to the serum and his bloodlust is back. To complicate matters, Xorkon (an ancient sorcerer Durak had dispatched millennia ago) appears, now living as a brain in a jar endowed with mental powers. He wants a new body and nothing is better than to put his brain into the body of a vampire. Although Spektor and Elliot Kane manage to stop the operation, Tibor ends up losing control but, rather than harm his friends, he throws himself onto a fence of sharpened stakes and commits suicide. Tibor is buried in Spektor’s graveyard and, in the confusion, no one notices the Xorkon brain has gone missing…

Xorkon reappears in #16 [Sept. ’75], this time controlling the body of Frankenstein’s Creature. To stop him, Spektor gets help from the time-displaced Durak (tying up that loose end in Dagar, remember?), who has a magical sword

provided by the Warrior Gods. They free the Creature from Xorkon’s control, but the Monster threatens Spektor and Durak as the magic sword causes an earthquake, and Creature falls into an opened chasm (phew!). Once this happens, Durak returns to his time (as related in Dagar).

The most important thing in #17 [Oct. ’75] is the appearance of Anna Sara, Spektor’s English cousin, whom he saves from a voodoo spell and takes her in at his mansion. Next issue [Dec. ’75], Glut goes for the triple play as he has Spektor, Lakota, and Anne Sara become part of an unofficial (sort-of) crossover between three companies, one taking place at an actual Halloween party in the real-life town of Rutland, Vermont. At that time, the person in charge of the annual Halloween parade was Tom “Batmania” Fagan, a well-known comic book fan. Cosplay was a relative rarity in those days, and Tom invited many comics pros to participate in the event. This led several comics writers to use the Rutland parade as a story setting — including The Avengers #83, Batman #237, Marvel Feature #2, Thor #206–207, Justice League of America #103, Amazing Adventures #16, etc. — and Glut decided to contribute to this sort-of “unofficial crossover” with this tale.

Here Spektor and the women go to Rutland to have a good time. And, using a slightly unbelievable plot, Anne ends up being possessed by a sorceress-servant of the Dark Gods, who animate the figures in the parade, including Solar, Man of the Atom; Ra-KaTep; Frankenstein’s Creature; Simbar; Count Tibor; werewolf Count Wulfstein (a werewolf narrator who appeared in other comics written by Glut, but here his only “official” appearance in this universe) and the Purple Zombie (a Golden Age character created

by Tarpe Mills for Heroic Comics and today in the public domain) and mentally dominate the people in the parade. In the end, Spektor resolves the situation. Next, the same threesome deal with a monstrous creature in a Scottish lake not named Loch Ness, in #19 [Apr. ’76], which includes cameos by Tragg and Lorn.

By #20 [June ’76], Ra-Ka-Tep reappears and, at the story’s conclusion, the mummy’s soul is devoured by a “Soul Eater,” no longer in an animated state. Then, in #21 [Aug. ’76], Glut brings back another of his Mystery Digest characters: the Lurker of the Swamp, who helps Spektor and Elliott stop an alien intruder set on conquering Earth. A strange mystical energy brings to life the Lurker — a semi-intelligent swamp creature, dumber than DC’s Swamp Thing and as smart as Marvel’s Man-Thing — and the muck-monster destroys the alien and, apparently, the Lurker itself. But is the Lurker really gone… ?

And, with #22 [Oct. ’76], Lakota tires of the life she leads while

Tragg and the Sky Gods TM & © Penguin Random House, LLC.

an owl-shaped demon haunts the area and cops believe the villain is The Owl, another defunct super-hero (published first by Dell in the Golden Age and then by Gold Key in a couple of forgettable issues in the ’60s during the Batman craze, and whose main attribute was having scripts by Jerry Siegel in his decline) that Glut thus incorporates into his universe. The Owl, now retired, returns to clear his name.

He and Spektor stop the owl-shaped demon and all seems fine… until Spektor comes home to find that Lakota has left for good, a total shock to the doctor and for the readers.

One very depressed Spektor who, in #23 [Dec. ’76], gets hit on by Kareena, an old adversary now free from the yoke of the Dark Gods and hot for the doctor, but he thinks better of it and instead spurns her advances for now. In the next — and last new issue of his title — Spektor rekindles an old romance (how quickly he forgets about Lakota, the rascal!), and the final Spektor adventure is published in Gold Key Spotlight #9 [Aug. ’77]. Simbar, the Lion-Man, is present and Spektor tries to free his partner Joan from her curse as a Lion Woman, but she ends up dead. Simbar, pissed off, is about to massacre those involved, but Spektor stops him.

Resigned, Simbar returns to Africa… And so end the adventures of Dr. Adam Spektor — #25 reprints the first issue of the series, in addition to four issues of Dr. Spektor Presents Spine-Tingling Tales (where he’s back to being a mere host of all-reprint scary stories). In 2010, Dark Horse republished the series in four hardcover volumes and, in 2014, Dynamite Comics brought the character back in a four-issue mini-series, written by Mark Waid, who ignored the original continuity, which is a shame, because Spektor is clearly the title that Glut put his most into, an amalgamation of classic horror movies, solid storylines, and nods to continuity that hold up very well to this day. Alas, just one title left to explore, this at the far end of the Glutverse.

ERICH VON DÄNIKEN WAS RIGHT! By mid-1975, Gold Key’s sales (like those of all U.S. comic book publishers) were in the doldrums. Distribution problems seriously affected the arrival of titles on newsstands in many areas of the country (and it seems that those of the Glutverse were one who suffered the most) and the search for new ideas was desperate. Despite this, the publisher gave Glut free rein to create a third title. The writer, who had been pushing to do a straight prehistoric series like Joe Kubert’s Tor, was to cross one of his characters with the theories of a very famous pseudo-scientist of those years.

Erich Von Däniken became quite renowned in the early 1970s for his speculative books, including Chariots of the Gods?, in which he argued that extraterrestrials may have had a fundamental influence on the development of primitive civilizations. In his theories, aliens built the Egyptian pyramids, Rapa Nui moai, Mayan pyramids, and other gargantuan structures. His books were bestsellers, and the idea of aliens in the midst of primitive civilizations caught on in popular culture. Without going into much detail, from there you get Jack Kirby’s Marvel series, The Eternals, a direct descendent of Von Däniken’s theories. Needless to say, Don Glut wasn’t one to miss such a sensational trend and thus was born Tragg and the Sky Gods!

In the first issue, the premise was explained: in a prehistoric valley where dinosaurs and primitive men anachronistically co-existed at the same time — although Glut acknowledged this locale as an isolated place in history, which did not correspond to actual life on the planet in those years — a couple of alien scientists arrive from a world called Yargon, determined to investigate the terrestrial inhabitants. One experiment involved taking a pair of native women and having their genes carry an evolutionary mutation, then returning them to their native habitat. The females would thus each have a child, Tragg and Lorn, who would be genetically superior to the rest of the tribe. This being done, the spacemen return home, only to find their world in the midst of global revolution. Twenty-five years later, a new Yargonian mission arrives in the valley. But, this time, it is a military expedition, which is going to evaluate if it’s a good idea to conquer Earth. The problem is that, as soon as they arrive, their ship is damaged by dinosaurs and they are forced to wait for the mother planet to send a rescue mission.

While this is happening, now-adult Tragg and Lorn discover the new arrivals. At first, they believe that the visitors are peaceful, but soon they realize the aliens’ intent to conquer. At first, their tribe doesn’t believe them (except Tragg’s brother, Jarn, the same caveman we saw in Dagar’s series) but, little by little, the clan is convinced of the existential danger. Furthermore, within the Yargonians, there is dissent: COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

expedition leader Zorek becomes obsessed with Tragg and Lorn, willing to do anything to destroy them, even at the cost of his men. Meanwhile, second-in-command Keera falls in love with Tragg and ends up rebelling against former comrades, allying herself with the natives. The rebellion will gradually arise with the earthlings lining up behind Tragg.

This would define the first seven issues of the series.

However, #8 [Sept. ’75] brings a Glutverse inhabitant: no less than Ostellon, a sorcerer in the service of the Dark Gods already seen in Dagar and Doctor Spektor, here making his first chronological appearance (but last in terms of publication). Ostellon has the power to raise the dead and his first mission is (you guessed it) to eliminate Tragg.

Of course, the magician fails and the Dark Gods reduce him to bone (only to be resurrected in future confrontations with Dagar and, later, Dr. Spektor). After this issue, there will be only one more appearance by Tragg, in Gold Key Spotlight #9 [Sept. ’77]. (By the way, Jesse Santos only draws the first two issues of Tragg, followed by artist Dan Spiegle for the remainder of the series.) And so, verily, the Glutverse ends with a whimper and not a bang. Or does it…?

IS THERE LIFE AFTER THE GLUTVERSE? By 1977, Gold Key was doomed, a victim of poor sales that were plaguing the comic book industry. In those same years, Charlton stops publishing new material, DC suffers its notorious “DC implosion,” and Marvel had to heavily reduce the number of titles. Gold Key also stops using new material. With no more assignments, Jesse Santos leaves the world of comics and dedicates himself to illustration and animation work. Donald Glut also departs to write novelizations, most famously The Empire Strikes Back novel, and he also worked in animation during the ’80s and early ’90s, writing horror novels, such as the Frankenstein’s Monster series (which include references to the Glutverse, such as Baron Tibor or the Ruthvenian), and compiling reference books. In recent decades, he has returned to his first love, shooting low-budget independent monster movies. (Visit donaldfglut.com for more info.)

Go forth and explore the Glutverse, good reader! Ye shall not be disappointed!

[Editor’s note: Future scholars will have to uncover the sheer vastness of the Glutverse and the writer’s attempts to insert other folk’s creations into his universe, including a famous daytime television vampire! Glut told me back in the summer of 2002 (editing his comments in autumn 2023!), “I snuck a lot of stuff by. I got caught once using Barnabas Collins of Dark Shadows in a Dr. Spektor story called ‘Dracula’s Vampire Legion.’ In that tale, Spektor says, ‘Well, we’ve revived these vampires. Here’s some more we’re going to revive.’ Morbius [the Living Vampire, a Marvel character] stayed in there because they didn’t know who that was, also Count Noctilio, one of my own unsold characters, but the name, ‘Barnabas Collins,’ they caught. They said, ‘You can’t do this! You can’t put Barnabas Collins in here!’ I said, ‘Well, it’s a Gold Key book, isn’t it?’ They said, ‘Yes, but we just license that book.’ I said, ‘Oh, boy! Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.’”

Glut also said to me, “That universe is a little bit bigger than you might realize.

If you read the stuff I did for Marvel, DC, Red Circle, and even Charlton, there’s crossovers running rampant. The Demonomicon, my version of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon turns up in some of these other titles, there’s a mini-continuity running through all these books… I worked that Dark Gods/Warrior Gods thing into novels and movies I’ve done. And you’ll find crossover references in my prose short stories, science fiction, and adventure novels, my more recent stories in Shudder and Vampress Carmilla comics magazines, and, yes, even in other writers’ stories — like the Ruthvenian book, reference to the Dark Gods or even of mentions of Doc Spektor himself. But sometimes you have to read between the lines. When I die, somebody with a lot of extra time on their hands can sort all this stuff out. I was influenced heavily by Philip José Farmer and Edgar Rice Burroughs, who both used to do a lot of this crossbreeding… All of my movies cross-pollinate. Remember, in my mind almost all the stories I write, no matter in comics or novels or whatever, even in my amateur movies, takes place in the same universe.”

Since the halcyon 1970s, the Glutverse, like our very own universe, has been expanding — into his novels, movies, and even the acknowledgment pages of his nonfiction reference work! Seek and ye shall find, my fellow Glutology students! And do report back, if you please! — Y.E.] 9

Appearances: Mystery Comics Digest

#8

#1

Savage Sword of Conan #26 Solomon Kane vs. Dracula

Dracula’s Vampire Legion

The Vampire Legion includes Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Carmilla), Lord Ruthven (The Vampyre), and Sir Francis Varney (Varney the Vampire).

Marvel Comics’ Morbius, the Living Vampire, is mentioned. Also referenced is Count Noctillo, who Don had planned to use as a sort of super-hero vampire is a series of his own, and Arnold Paul, a “real” vampire from the 1700s.

Dracula

Frankenstein Meets Dracula

Frankenstein and the Evil of Dracula

(Novel)

The Invaders #31

Heil Frankenstein! The Invaders — Captain America; Namor, the Sub-Mariner; and the Human Torch — meet a version of the monster.

Inspired by one of Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein comics.

(Novel)

Ra-Ka-Tep

Creeps #21

Maciste Against Dracula. The Italian sword & sandal hero Maciste runs afoul of Dracula.

(Dracula’s physical appearance is patterned after actor Jack Palance, who appeared as the Count in the Dan Curtis 1974 adaptation of Stoker’s novel.)

Spektor Appearances #6, 12, 16

Frankenstein Monster

Spektor #6

Adam Spektor has a copy of Don Glut’s book, The Frankenstein Legend, in his library.

Don’s first story for Gold Key, Mask of the Mummy, appeared in Mystery Comics Digest #1. It introduced Ra-Ka-Tep, who would go on to be a foe in Spektor #3, #10, and #20. Mystical doppelgangers of Ra-KaTep, Mr. Hyde and the Frankenstein monster attack Spector in #9, “She Who Serves the Dark Gods.”

This happens again when figures from a parade float are animated and imbued with the spirits of those they represent in #18, “Masque Macabre.”

This Glut-written issue links to 1944 Dick Purcell Republic movie serial.

1

(Sort of) “The Dragon at Castle Frankenstein.”

Solomon Kane fights a dragon at the real Castle Frankenstein in Darmstadt Germany.

The plot is based on a local legend.

“Mask of the Mummy”

Captain America #219

2

Frankenstein: The Final Horror (Novel)

This book closes out the series and explains the connections to all Don’s Frankenstein works, including Spektor and The Invaders.

Steve Rogers

In Spektor #10, “The Return of Ra-Ka-Tep. In the then-current Captain America comic, Steve Rogers was working as a policeman. A blond officer named Rogers, armed with a flame thrower, chases the mummy into a network of tunnels. Officer Rogers is also mentioned in Spektor #14.

Captain America

3

1 Nick Fury Text piece in Spektor #23 reveals Dr. Solar has been working for a man named Nick at a “law enforcement division for international espionage, supreme headquarters.”

Savage Sword of Conan #22

10

Spektor

#3, 10, 20

2 Doctor Solar Spektor #14, “The Night Lakota Died.”

The Dark Gods have gained control of the super-hero and plan to use his powers in an occult ritual.

Dr. Spektor, Doctor Solar, associated characters TM & © Penguin Random House, LLC. The Invaders, Captain America, Nick Fury TM & ©Marvel Characters, Inc. The Demon TM & © DC Comics.

Spektor Appearance

Dr. Spektor Comic Links

3 The Demon (Jason Blood) Spektor #6. “The Dungeon of Frankenstein.” A red-headed gentleman in the front row at Spektor’s lecture is Jason Blood, a.k.a.

Etrigan the Demon from the Jack Kirby DC comic title. #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Cosmology by Charles R. Rutledge Ostellon the Sorceror

Appearances: Mystery Comics Digest

Dagar #1, “Castle of the Skull,” introduces the sorcerer, who can control “living” skeletons.

He will later battle Tragg and Adam Spektor.

Appearances: Spektor

#7, 14, 15 #7, 12

Spektor #16

The Sorcerer Xorcon

Tragg

“Scaly Death” Sequel He fought Durak the barbarian in

#8

Tragg was originally conceived as a follow-up to a Vampirella #5 story.

Appearances: Mystery Comics Digest Dagar #5

Mystery Comics Digest #7 & #14 and went on to appear as a disembodied brain in Spektor issues #15 and #16.

Durak

Dagar/Tragg Team-Up Tragg in Dagar #5 was originally slated as a full cross-over, an editorial decision made Tragg a onepanel cameo.

#3

Tragg, Dagar, Durak, Lurker, The Owl, and associated characters TM & © Penguin Random House, LLC. Chilling Adventures in Sorcery TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

Xorcon

Ostellon

#7

Dagar

Tragg

Spek’s Library Schematic Design by JBC

Ruins

Ruins discovered by Dagar in #11 were built by Tragg and his people

Dagar

Demonomicon

The Lobrostone

A talisman that can keep someone from turning into a werewolf originally appeared in Dagar #2, and was given Simbar to Spektor by Simbar to “cure” his own The lion man was introduced lycanthropy in #13. It is mentioned in Mystery Comics Digest #3, in #20, in the text feature, “A Tour of appears as back-up story in Spektor Manor.”

Spektor #9, and crosses over with Spektor in Spektor #13, “A Bullet for Adam. “ Frankenstein

Graylin/Larelei

Demonomicon

Featured on the cover of Archie’s Chilling Adventures in Sorcery #4, the Demonomicon’s origin is revealed in Gold Key Spotlight #6, as a tome written by sorcerer Galga-Thar. Spektor #20 mentions the book in text feature “A Tour of Spektor Manor.”

“A Tour of Spektor Manor,” a text feature in Spektor #20 reveals he has copies of three of Don’s books in his library: The Frankenstein Legend, True Vampires of History, and The Dracula Book.

In Marvel’s Kull the Destroyer #22, a brunette woman appears. She has lost most of her memory, but does recall a former lover she left because of his life of “death, etc.” Kull calls her Larelei, but she is actually Graylin, who left Dagar in #15.

Appearances: Spektor

Scarlet Countess, Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood, and Blood Scarab

Meets Dracula (Novel)

(Movies)

#8, 20

The Owl

The Owl appeared in Crackajack Funnies in the 1940s and his own comic, The Owl, 1960s. Crossed over with Spektor in #22, “Night of the Owl.”

The Lurker in the Swamp Lurker in the Swamp appeared in Mystery Comics Digest #7.

Met Spektor in Spektor #21, “A Lurker Stalks the Swamps.”

Ruthvenian Brother Blood (Novel)

Rutland, Vermont

Purple Zombie Reg’lar Fellers Heroic Comics.

Figures on Float in Parade Spektor #18, “Masque Macabre”

Frankenstein and the Evil of Dracula (Novel)

CHARLES R. RUTLEDGE Count Wulfstein

Mystery Comics Digest #2 and The Twilight Zone #75.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

is the author of Dracula’s Return, and three books in the Griffin and Price supernatural crime series, written with James A. Moore. Don Glut gave Charles permission to use the vampire bible, the Ruthvenian, in his novels, Congregations of the Dead and Dracula’s Return. There are some other connections to Don’s work in those books for the sharp-eyed, in keeping with the Glutian tradition of unofficial crossovers.

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age of altergott

Building a Flowertown World

Rick Altergott on expanding the Doofus universe in his first graphic novel, Blessed Be

by JON B. COOKE

Above: Veteran cartoonist Rick Altergott’s first graphic novel, Blessed Be, is now available from Fantagraphics Books. Inset right: Painted self-portrait of the artist, who got a jump on his career at Cracked magazine, alongside best chum Daniel Clowes, when fellow former art school pal Mort Todd was editor. Rick went on to live in Seattle with wife Ariel Bordeaux, during a time he called, “The closest thing to a gilded age I can imagine, ripe with promise and vitality…” Below: Rick said that the name of fictional Flowertown is a goofy derivative of Flourtown, a suburb of Philadelphia. A map of his graphic novel’s setting is used as endpapers of his new book.

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Last year, on the day before autumn officially began, I went to hang out with Rick Altergott on his porch, something I’ve done on the occasional Friday evening, to talk about comic-book stuff with my buddy, who conveniently lives just up the street from my preferred comic shop, The Time Capsule, in Cranston, Rhode Island.

Since the ’90s, Rick has been a favorite cartoonist upon my first encountering his work in Hate, so when Rick moved to the Ocean State with cartoonist wife Ariel Bordeaux over 15 years ago, I made sure to welcome the couple and I always put in an effort to involve Rick in whatever projects I was working on where his considerable artistic talents could best be put to use — and paid for with real money!

So I’ve been quite aware Rick has been toiling over his first graphic novel for longer than I’ve known him and, while I do plan to feature my career-spanning interview with him in CBC someday soon, I was eager to first talk about that Fantagraphics book, which was published in February (months after this ish is sent to press). Natch, I’m biased then regarding Blessed Be: A Flowertown U.S.A. Adventure. So, I insist: go buy it, enjoy it, and now, direct from his portico, let’s hear about it from the author!

“It’s a long-form story,” Rick said, “featuring my characters that I’ve been working on for so long, Doofus, Henry Hotchkiss, and the regular cast of characters, set in Flowertown, U.S.A., which kind of has become a character of its own, especially in this book. It’s got a similar sort of vibe to Sherwood Anderson’s fiction town of Winesburg, Ohio. I’d always been doing just gag strips with Doofus, a couple pages here and there, and I wanted to do a long-form graphic novel.”

About the story’s genesis, Rick explained, “Whether Ariel and I initiated Raisin Pie or were approached by Fantagraphics to do a series together — split a regular, 32-page comic in half and each of us would fill half the pages, I can’t recall. And I kinda foolishly thought I’d do a serial with a cliffhanger ending in every episode and continue it in the next issue, but the reality was that was well beyond what I was able to do. Plus the issues were not coming out as quickly as they should and, if you say they came out annually, that’s being charitable. I was hoping to finish my ‘Blessed Be’ comic series in six issues. (‘Blessed Be’ wasn’t necessarily what I named it; that was just the default title.) But that just became an impossibility.

“I was going to do the whole sixth issue of Raisin Pie. We completed five issues and the first issue had extra pages, so I got a good chunk of storytelling done. But, as you do a series like that, you realize the audience likes a one-page story here or something else, so I couldn’t just say I’m going to devote everything to this… [but] the reality was that it wasn’t going to be done in that many issues. Then I expanded the story and discarded the idea of a culmination of a story that had to have these cliffhanging chapter endings, which just didn’t work out.

So, when I finally was able to do a longer story, I was able to blow it out into a better story. And that’s what you’ve got now.”

Yes, Rick integrated a number of aspects of his Raisin Pie chapters into Blessed Be, “but it’s not a repeat of the serial itself.”

All told, it was a book 20 years in the making. “I’ve worked on it for so long that I developed stuff and wrote it on the fly and, in that regard, I’m very happy how it turned out. The other way to do it was your publisher says, ‘Here you are, you’ve got this book and need to fill this many pages, you have a script, then you do the breakdowns, then you do the drawing… there’s no room for adding stuff. But this way (which is probably a worse way to do a book) you have the freedom to add stuff and, over time, I added a lot of good stuff. The normal way of doing a comic book is you have to do it in a more regimented way, because you have somebody saying, ‘I have to have the breakdowns by this date.’ Since I just completely fell off any kind of schedule… there were periods of time when I couldn’t work on it… We had a child, we moved about five times, bought two houses, and all that time, this has been in the background of my life and I’ve been working on it.

“But no one has ever said, ‘You’d better get this together!’

Except me! I said, ‘I have to finish this book,’ and I’ve wanted to do it my way, so I was really lucky that Fantagraphics still wanted it. I guess I didn’t have to worry, because they were much more interested than I thought. Eric and Gary have been great.”

Did the end result match his intention? “It’s pretty much what I hoped always it would be, but the timing… the story #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

almost runs in real-time for the half of it, but the whole story runs after a ‘one year later’ kind of interlude and, after that, it takes place over three days, which is something I always wanted to do: have a story talking place on a fast-track in a space of time. And then there’s an epilogue, which I put in there because I hate movies that just end with no follow-through, so I made sure I had a little bit of ‘here’s what happened’ after the big, roll-the-credits type thing. And then I even put an epilogue after the epilogue! I couldn’t stop! Part of my rationale was, ‘Just throw everything into this book!’ And I know I sabotaged myself a little bit in it, putting humor where maybe I shouldn’t have, but I just went all-out on it.”

Answering again whether he was satisfied, Rick replied, “Yeah, I am! I like it. There might have been some mistakes. Like the last epilogue, a two-page thing that kind of reverts back to the natural state of the friendship of Doofus and Henry Hotchkiss, which you don’t really see in the beginning of the story and it’s weird that they’re estranged from each other for most of the story. I think long-term fans are used to the dynamic of those two characters.

So, in the end, I always wanted to show: ‘Here they’re back to normal and this is what it’s like,’ so they go through their normal behavior, all the stupid things that they are known for.’ I was thinking, nah, I shouldn’t put that in there, but then decided to go for it. That was my mindset: just do it. And if it just doesn’t work, whatever, it’s all said and done.”

The secret origin of the comedic team of Doofus and Henry Hotchkiss includes giving the former a vague resemblance to Waltons actor Ralph Waite, with his rummy eyes and five o’clock shadow. “When I gave Doofus a last name [Anderssen], Jim Woodring said, ‘You just ruined the whole thing.’ So I never used his last name again. I think I used it just once. I’m like, ‘Nope, you’re not going to see that again!’ Because Jim was right.” And the bowl-cut hair style? “When Fantagraphics was reprinting Prince Valiant, I was seeing a lot of that Hal Foster artwork and I did think that hairdo was silly and funny, and I’ve always liked five o’clock shadows on characters.” The name, he thinks, came from close buddy and fellow cartoonist Daniel Clowes. (The straw hat and odd attire? I forgot to ask!)

“I came up with Henry Hotchkiss,” Rick said, a character described as a gawkish Danny Kaye-type. “But I don’t remember exactly where that came from. He was always a tall, geeky counterpoint to Doofus’s short stockiness. It was The Honeymooners or Flintstones dynamic, where there was always a dumb sidekick with an obnoxious, over-bearing, take-charge guy, who has dominance over an even stupider character.”

Ultimately, though, only one character’s look was specifically based on an actual person. “The judge character looked like [FX actor] Brian Dennehy… That was kind of a joke. South Park made fun of him. By the time I was done, I don’t think there’s a very strong likeness to him, but that’s who he’s based on.”

As Rick said, a major character in the story is the town itself.

“I didn’t want to hit anybody over the head [with themes]. I want it to be there if you’re looking for it. That’s kind of what I mean about developing Flowertown. I’ve been told by a couple of people, whose opinion I value, how much they liked FlowerCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

town and wanted to live there. Then I started to do an inventory of all the different locations, so I was proud of the world-building and wanted to make that a part of the story.”

Flowertown, which includes structures and locations from many of the places he has lived — Delaware, L.A., Seattle, Providence, etc. — was a setting likely based on the coastal city of Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Ariel spent her formative years. Said the artist, who was always been heavily inspired by the work of Wallace Wood (“Woody is a great designer of everything; I’m always admiring him!”), “I did some endpapers I was really happy with. I drew a whole map of Flowertown, so that’ll be the first thing you see when you open the book. It’ll give people a little extra taste. I really did try to throw in everything I had into this one. Maybe that means it’s my one and only graphic novel, but ya never know!”

Rick, who has a day job designing packaging for a local company, doesn’t know what’s next for him. “I have another project in mind, but it’s more elaborate than this one (so I’ll probably never do it). Right now, I’m likely going to do short, little comic stories. I haven’t figured it out yet. I mean, if this is a popular book, I might be inspired to do some more stuff. I do have a more fleshed-out storyline for the 40 Acres Club [in Blessed Be] — there’s a whole story behind that!”

The newly minted graphic novelist exclaimed, “I still can’t believe I finished it. But I did! I’m releasing it into the world!

Whatever happens next, at least I know I finished it. I didn’t want to be, like, ‘Oh, I got this graphic novel I never finished, so all that time I spent on it is wasted.’ This way, at least I finished it and maybe the time is wasted anyway, but I completed it, right? I finished what I started and did it the way I wanted to… It’s the book I set out to do.”

Top: Promotional image Rick created for his new graphic novel.

Above: Rick’s first book, The Doofus Omnibus [2002].

Below:. Recent self-caricature.

13

Out NOW

!

B Y R i c k A lte r g o t t “Rick Altergott is the unsung genius of American

Small-town weirdness scales new comedic heights in Altergott’s long-awaited graphic novel! A cult favorite since the 1990s amongst intellectuals

comedy. An amazingly well-crafted conflation of

and philistines alike for his impeccably

queasy psychology, sub-moronic toilet humor, and

crafted brand of lowbrow humor, carto-

fine art.”

onist Rick Altergott has never crafted a — Daniel Clowes (Ghost World)

full-length graphic novel — until now.

Fantagraphics.com/BlessedBe

once upon a long ago

Fandom and Me

Our esteemed columnist recalls his introduction to the wild world of comic book fandom Buyer’s Guide for Comics Fandom. One could order a “free lifetime subscription” of the latter Nineteen ninety-one was a big year for me. My dad died, I got for just your name and address. With nothing to lose, I did just that! a promotion at work, I moved to a new state, I got married, I Turns out that issue of GSW hadn’t exactly learned to drive and bought my first car, and I won $100 in been brand new. My first issue of TBG to arrive was David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview 100 trivia contest! At the end of the year, writer Darrel Boatz interviewed me for an #17, with a cover featuring the first artwork I had issue of that mag [#105, Feb. 1992] that would come out the ever seen from Klaus Janson, depicting Kirby’s Darkseid and Lightray! I pored over every single page, following year. Surprised that I hadn’t been on his radar at all, Darrel questioned why I had never gotten involved with comics every ad, every word. I even ordered a couple things which, you know, was the whole point of an adzine. fandom? I didn’t have a good answer.

From there, I discovered other fanzines — Bill I first discovered that there was an organized comics Spicer’s Graphic Story Magazine, Gary Groth’s Fantastic fandom in some of the text columns DC Comics published in the late 1960s, as well the increasing number of ads for fan Fanzine, Bill G. Wilson’s The Collector, Martin L. Greim’s publications and back-issue comics at Marvel. It was interesting, Comic Crusader, and the venerable RBCC, the Rocket’s Blast Comicollector, by that time helmed by James but I thought of myself as a kid and surely it must have been adults putting out these publications. I contented myself just to Van Hise. With comics themselves in a volatile period, I began enjoying the ’zines more than new comics! draw fake comic book covers and exchange them with my one Soon enough, actual comic shops began popping up nerdy friend.

Then, one day in 1972, I discovered an issue of Graphic locally, the first being Comic Corner, literally a tiny corner Story World. There was precisely one copy on a shelf in the base- of a garden shop out past the end of the bus line, where ment of a downtown Cincinnati bookstore. The centerfold of the the owner’s 20-something son sold old comic books and fanzines. It must have been successful because soon book was a reproduction of Jack Kirby’s original, unpublished Comic Corner developed into an actual bookstore format, at a cover to his first issue of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, #133. I more convenient location. had to have it!

Across the river in Cincinnati, the Yellow Kid Comic Shoppe Overall, the mag was a revelation, introducing me to the existence of European comics, undergrounds as more than just took up residence in the back room of a used record store near the University. They were the ones who sponsored the first basic smut, and, best of all, Alan Light’s then-new tabloid, The actual comic book conventions in the area, beginning in 1975, at a large downtown hotel. It was at the second of these where I met my first ever pros — Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes, and Marty Pasko. More than three decades later, I became Facebook friends with the latter, who remembered that convention well, as he wasn’t even supposed to be there. He just got dragged along!

That event apparently broke the Yellow Kid financially, though, and smaller mall cons and one-day motel cons became the norm for the area for a long time to come.

My family always took vacations in July, so, for a few years, I convinced my parents to travel to cities where there were larger comic cons: Louisville (where I saw DeForest Kelley in person), Philadelphia (where I saw a roomful of gorgeous Jeff Jones paintings), and Cleveland (where I watched the premiere of Space: 1999).

I knew where all these shows would be held because of my TBG subscription. I also learned of all the new fanzines like The Comics Journal. They were getting more sophisticated. In quick succession, professional magazines like Comics Scene, Comics Collector, and yes, Comics Interview, replaced the fanzines.

In time, there were dozens of such mags, many put out by TwoMorrows.

Cut to 2023 and, while I may still not be a familiar name to anyone, I guess, in some ways, I actually have been involved in comics fandom all these years.

All TM & © their respective copyright holders.

by STEVEN THOMPSON

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

This page: Above is the issue of Richard Kyle’s Graphic Story World, #6 [July 1972], where Steven Thompson discovered just how wide a range there was to comic book fandom, as far away as Europe, and beneath his feet, in the underground! Fittingly, he found that ’zine in the basement of a Cincinnati bookstore! Inset left is the opening page to Steve’s interview in Comics Interview #105 [Feb. 1992] (Larry Stroman cover below), the result of our CBC columnist winning that mag’s trivia contest in their 100th issue!

In that ish, Ye Ed discovered Steve is exactly eight days older than he!

Here comes Medicare, Flash!

15

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #10

WARP examined! Massive PETER BAGGE retrospective! It’s a double focus on the Broadway sci-fi epic, with a comprehensive feature including art director NEAL ADAMS and director STUART (Reanimator) GORDON, plus cast and crew! Also a career-spanning conversation with the man of HATE! and NEAT STUFF on the real story behind Buddy Bradley! Plus the revival of MIRACLEMAN, Captain Marvel’s 75th birthday, and more!

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4-issue subscriptions: $53 US $78 International

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #18

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #20

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #14 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #15 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16

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

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

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

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #21

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #22

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #23

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

NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOES! Interview with JOSEPH MICHAEL LINSNER (CRY FOR DAWN, VAMPIRELLA), a chat with JOE SINNOTT about his Marvel years inking Jack Kirby and work at TREASURE CHEST, JOE JUSKO discusses the Marvel Age of Comics and his fabulous “Corner Box Collection,” plus the artists behind the Topps bubble gum BAZOOKA JOE comic strips, CRAIG YOE, and more!

ERIC POWELL celebrates 20 years of THE GOON! with a career-spanning interview and a gallery of rare artwork. Plus CBC editor and author JON B. COOKE on his new retrospective THE BOOK OF WEIRDO, a new interview with R. CRUMB about his work on that legendary humor comics anthology, JOHN ROMITA SR. on his admiration for the work of MILTON CANIFF, and more!

P. CRAIG RUSSELL career-spanning interview (complete with photos and art gallery), an almost completely unknown work by FRANK QUITELY (artist on All-Star Superman and The Authority), DERF BACKDERF’s forthcoming graphic novel commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, CAROL TYLER shares her prolific career, JOE SINNOTT discusses his Treasure Chest work, CRAIG YOE, and more!

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

Cover by WENDY PINI.

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #24 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #25 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #26

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #27

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #28

TIMOTHY TRUMAN discusses his start at the Kubert School, Grimjack with writer JOHN OSTRANDER, and current collaborations with son Benjamin. SCOTT SHAW! talks about early San Diego Comic-Cons and friendship with JACK KIRBY, Captain Carrot, and Flintstones work! Also PATRICK McDONNELL’s favorite MUTTS comic book pastiches, letterer JANICE CHIANG profiled, HEMBECK, and more! TIM TRUMAN cover.

BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH discusses his new graphic novel MONSTERS, its origin as a 1980s Hulk story, and its evolution into his 300-page magnum opus (includes a gallery of outtakes). Plus part two of our SCOTT SHAW! interview about HannaBarbera licensing material and work with ROY THOMAS on Captain Carrot, KEN MEYER, JR. looks at the great fanzines of 40 years ago, HEMBECK, and more!

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

Extensive PAUL GULACY retrospective by GREG BIGA that includes Paul himself, VAL MAYERIK, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, TIM TRUMAN, ROY THOMAS, and others. Plus a JOE SINNOTT MEMORIAL; BUD PLANT discusses his career as underground comix retailer, distributor, fledgling publisher of JACK KATZ’s FIRST KINGDOM, and mail-order bookseller; our regular columnists, and the latest from HEMBECK!

STEVE BISSETTE career-spanning interview, from his Joe Kubert School days, Swamp Thing stint, publisher of Taboo and Tyrant, creator rights crusader, and more. Also, Part One of our MIKE GOLD interview on his Chicago youth, start in underground comix, and arrival at DC Comics, right in time for the implosion! Plus BUD PLANT on his publishing days, comic shop owner, and start in mail order—and all the usual fun stuff!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #29 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #30 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #31 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #32 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #33

DON McGREGOR retrospective, from early ’70s Warren Publications scripter to his breakout work at Marvel Comics on BLACK PANTHER, KILLRAVEN, SABRE, DETECTIVES INC., RAGAMUFFINS, and others. Plus ROBERT MENZIES looks at HERB TRIMPE’s mid-’70s UK visit to work on Marvel’s British comics weeklies, MIKE GOLD Part Two, and CARtoons cartoonist SHAWN KERRIE! SANDY PLUNKETT cover!

Canadian comic book artist, illustrator, and graphic novelist MICHAEL CHO in a career-spanning interview and art gallery, a 1974 look at JACK ADLER and the DC Comics production department’s process of reprinting Golden Age material, color newspaper tabloid THE FUNNY PAGES examined in depth by its editor RON BARRETT, plus CBC’s usual columns and features, including HEMBECK! Edited by JON B. COOKE.

Career-spanning interview with Bane’s co-creator GRAHAM NOLAN! Plus, STAN LEE’s Carnegie Hall debacle of 1972, the Golden Age Quality Comics’ work of FRANK BORTH (Phantom Lady, Spider Widow), and GREG BIGA talks with ex-DC Comics co-publisher DAN DIDIO on his current career as writer/creator on the FRANK MILLER PRESENTS comics line, as well as that new comics line’s publisher!

WILLIAM STOUT is interviewed about his illustration and comics work, as well as his association with DINOSAURS publisher BYRON PREISS, the visionary packager/ publisher who is also celebrated in this double-header issue. Included is the only comprehensive interview ever conducted with PREISS, plus a huge biographical essay.

Also MIKE DEODATO on his early years and FRANK BORTH on Treasure Chest!

STEVE GERBER biographical essay and collaborator insights, MARY SKRENES on co-creating Omega the Unknown, helping develop Howard the Duck, VAL MAYERIK cover and interview, ROY THOMAS reveals STAN LEE’s unseen EXCELSIOR! COMICS line, LINDA SUNSHINE (editor of early hardcover super-hero collections), more with MIKE DEODATO, and the concluding segment on FRANK BORTH!

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CBA BULLPEN COLLECTING THE UNKOWN ISSUES OF COMIC BOOK ARTIST! COMIC BOOK ARTIST BULLPEN collects all seven issues of the little-seen labor of love fanzine published in the early 2000s by JON B. COOKE (editor of today’s COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine), just after the original CBA ended its TwoMorrows run. Featured are in-depth interviews with some of comics’ major league players, including GEORGE TUSKA, FRED HEMBECK, TERRY BEATTY, and FRANK BOLLE—and an amazing all-star tribute to Silver Age great JACK ABEL by the Marvel Comics Bullpen and others. That previously unpublished all-comics Abel appreciation (assembled by RICK PARKER) includes strips by JOE KUBERT, WALTER SIMONSON, KYLE BAKER, MARIE SEVERIN, GRAY MORROW, ALAN WEISS, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, MORT TODD, DICK AYERS, and many more! Plus a new bonus feature on JACK KIRBY’s unknown 1960s baseball card art, and a 16-page bonus full-color section, all behind a Jack Kirby cover!

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $24.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-105-9 • NOW SHIPPING!

ALSO AVAILABLE: DIGITAL EDITIONS OF ALL 25 ISSUES OF CBA Vol. 1 TwoMorrows also offers Digital Editions of Jon B. Cooke’s COMIC BOOK ARTIST Vol. 2 (the “Top Shelf” issues)

CBA Vol. 2 #1

CBA Vol. 2 #2

CBA Vol. 2 #3

CBA Vol. 2 #4

CBA Vol. 2 #5

CBA Vol. 2 #6

NEAL ADAMS/ALEX ROSS cover and interviews with both, history of “Arcade, The Comics Revue” with underground legends CRUMB, SPIEGELMAN, and GRIFFITH, MICHAEL MOORCOCK on comic book adaptations of his work, CRAIG THOMPSON sketchbook, and more!

Exhaustive FRANK CHO interview and sketchbook gallery, ALEX ROSS sketchbook section of never-before-seen pencils, MIKE FRIEDRICH on the history of Star*Reach, plus animator J.J. SEDELMAIER on his Ambiguously Gay Duo and The X-Presidents cartoons for Saturday Night Live.

Interview with DARWYN COOKE and a gallery of rarely-seen and unpublished artwork, a chat with DC Comics art director MARK CHIARELLO, an exploration of The Adventures of Little Archie with creator BOB BOLLING and artist DEXTER TAYLOR, new JAY STEPHENS sketchbook section, and more!

ALEX NIÑO’s first ever full-length interview and huge gallery of his artwork, interview with BYRON PREISS on his career in publishing, plus the most comprehensive look ever at the great Filipino comic book artists (NESTOR REDONDO, ALFREDO ALCALA, and others), a STEVE RUDE sketchbook, and more!

HOWARD CHAYKIN interview and gallery of unpublished artwork, a look at the ’70s black-&-white mags published by Skywald, tribute to Psycho and Nightmare writer/editor ALAN HEWETSON, LEAH MOORE & JOHN REPPION on Wild Girl, a SONNY LIEW sketchbook section, and more!

Double-sized tribute to WILL EISNER! Over 200 comics luminaries celebrate his career and impact: SPIEGELMAN, FEIFFER & McCLOUD on their friendships with Eisner, testimonials

by ALAN MOORE, NEIL GAIMAN, STAN LEE, RICHARD CORBEN, JOE KUBERT, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, JOE SIMON, and others!

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adventures in the book trade

Sunshine’s Superman!

Editor/author/humorist Linda Sunshine remembers jump-starting hardbound comics

by JON B. COOKE

Above: Linda Sunshine’s big success was a parody of Jane Fonda’s Workout Book. “That was a real big turning point in my life,” she said.

It made her enough money to buy two co-ops in New York, and sent her on a three-week, 30-city book tour (which led to a thankfully brief career as stand-up comic, “but I was really bad at it!”). “I did some books for Turner Publishing when Jane was married to Ted Turner… and I was introduced to her and, when I told her I was the author of Plain Jane Works Out, she said, ‘Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ and that’s all she said to me. And that was that!”

Linda Sunshine had a lot of fun. A native of New Jersey and graduate of Ithaca College, she’s written nearly 70 books thus far, many of them funny — a parody of Jane Fonda’s exercise bestseller and other books poking fun at young urban professional (often Jewish) females — Women Who Date Too Much, A Passion for Shoes, How Not to Turn into Your Mother, etc. — and when the “real New-York New Yorker” moved to L.A., Linda scribed a bunch of books on Hollywood movies. Plus, at the very start of her career in publishing, when hardly in her 20s, she was a part of the “trade paperback” revolution that changed the entire book industry during the early 1970s. But why is this woman, who authored dozens of books and edited hundreds more, usually getting interview requests?

“It so funny for me to be remembered for those books,” she said with a laugh. “I must have edited 1,200 books in my life!”

For comic book fans of a certain age, “those books” are massively important ones Linda helmed for Crown Books, the first American hardback comic book collections able to be placed on the shelf alongside Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, helping to give the art form a semblance of respectability. And all it took for the 1971 publication of Superman: From the ’30s to the ’70s and Batman: From the ’30s to the ’70s to see the light of day was a simple phone call to Carmine Infantino.

“At the time,” Linda explained, “I was just looking at all the stuff I loved as a kid and think about doing them as books.”

When it came to comics, as a youngster she read mostly girl-oriented titles, especially one owned by Archie Publications. “I wanted to do a book on Katy Keene, because that was one of my favorite comic books. I was way more into romance comics and Katy Keene than I was into super-heroes. But I could never get Katy Keene off the ground. For some reason, I could never get the rights.”

The nascent editor then figured, “It just seemed to me that you couldn’t go wrong with Superman.” So, she got the green light from her boss at Crown to pursue a hardbound collection of Man of Steel stories, though only in black-&white. “I remember being sorry at the time because we couldn’t do it all in color because it was too expensive. I didn’t know if people would have been interested in seeing them in black-&-white because they had always been in color, but that was all we could afford. We didn’t want to do a $50 book at the time. I don’t know if being b-&-w hurt it or helped it.”

Linda summoned the courage and cold-called the publisher of DC Comics. “I had called Carmine about doing this book,” she said, “and he said, ‘Well, take me out to dinner and we’ll talk about it.’ It was crazy. My boss gave me $30 to take him out to dinner. I didn’t have a credit card at the time and we sit down to dinner, and he orders a drink and a steak, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God! Now I can’t eat!’ So I didn’t order anything and I said, ‘I’m not really hungry.’ He said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘I only have $30,’ and he laughed so hard! He thought that was the funniest thing ever. He said, ‘Order whatever you want!

All characters TM & © DC Comics.

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All properties TM & © DC Comics.

I’ll pay for it, so don’t worry about it.’ It was my first experience taking an author out to dinner and, boy, I felt like such an idiot!

So, it sticks in my mind so much because of that dinner.”

With a chuckle, she shared, “I only remember my interaction with Carmine Infantino, because he was such a character.

He was great and so much fun!” Plus, the DC head honcho introduced her to that era’s “Answer Man.” “I also remember those books because of E. Nelson Bridwell. When I said to Carmine, ‘We need someone to pick the stories,’ he said, ‘Oh, that’s Nelson’s job.’ I said, ‘Who’s Nelson?’ And he said, ‘We used to get these letters from a kid in the Midwest and we would get a letter for every issue and he would point out a mistake… and we couldn’t figure out who this person was and finally we decided we had to call him up and give him a job because he knew the comics even better than anyone who even worked here.’” Linda was told Nelson read every DC title and “knew everything about everything. He was their go-to guy.”

After both the Superman and Batman books were readied for Crown’s 1971 fall catalog — priced at $10, with a pre-New Year’s Day price tag of only $7.95! — the “two fat books for comics buffs” sold well enough to be reprinted by Crown’s subsidiary, Bonanza Books (who, comic fans recognize, also published remainder reprints of Les Daniels’ Comix and Feiffer’s Great Comic Book Heroes). “When we did the Superman and Batman books,” Linda explained, “there just weren’t any hardcover books featuring comic books at the time. It was considered a very crazy idea. Even the people at DC Comics thought it was crazy! They didn’t think it would sell. After all, they had a whole different system of distribution. [Comics] were selling for something like 25¢or something, and the whole idea of putting them into hardcover just seemed crazy to them.”

In 1972, Crown head of sales Bruce Harris, who had given Linda her first job in publishing — “to sit at people’s desks when they went on vacation” — launched Harmony Books with Linda, a pioneering imprint in the trade paperback book trade. “We had an idea to do book publishing in a different way,“ she said, “instead of just mass-market paperbacks or hardcover.” The new format ultimately became transformative in the comics field.

Before Linda ended her eight-year stint at Crown and joined with Simon and Shuster, Shazam!: From the ’40s to the ’70s, was published,* this super-hero collection appearing under the Harmony imprint, a tome featuring, to Linda’s doubtless delight, stories in glorious color (though its low print run of COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

15,000 copies makes the book scarce today).

Linda would continue to delve into comics when she transferred over to Simon and Shuster to head their Fireside Books trade paperback line, which had already found success with Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics [1974] and its parade of sequels. While the Marvel books slowed in output (though there was a run of “activity” books starring Spider-Man, et al.), Linda took advantage of her DC contacts and it was decided to compile trade paperback “best of” collections of DC’s genre material. The resulting books were America at War and Mysteries in Space, edited by Michael Uslan, and Heart Throbs, edited by Manuela Soares (using the pseudonym, “Naomi Scott”).

About Michael, Linda shared, “I met him because I was looking for someone to edit America at War… he’s the world’s expert on comic books. So he was very helpful with that. And I did another book with him called the Rock ’n’ Roll Trivia Quiz Book, that was really fun, too.”

Michael described his friend: “Linda Sunshine is one of the greatest human beings on Planet Earth and is also one of the very best editors. Way back when, in the 1970s, Linda stood almost alone in the mainstream publishing industry in terms of her respect and understanding for the world of comic books and its creators. So much of the mainstream public beginning to appreciate comic books — and the interest of publishers in publishing collections for comic book fans — began with her.

Linda Sunshine embodies the turning point. Every minute I had working with her on America At War, Mysteries In Space, and Heart Throbs was fabulous because she was so supportive of doing these books with respect and accuracy. She relied on my areas of expertise and I relied on hers. Based on her vision, we had plans for more volumes. As I recall, the next would have been All-Star Westerns: The Best of DC Western Comics.”

As Marvel and DC would start their self-publishing book programs, Michael went on to great success in the 1980s as Batman movie producer and Linda became a bestselling author at the time, particularly with that Jane Fonda parody. (Linda admitted with a shrug, Jane was hardly amused.) In retrospect, Linda said, “It was a great time to be in publishing… because we pretty much had free rein to do whatever we wanted… just doing stuff we thought was fun.” * Curiously, though identical in format, the Captain Marvel collection would appear six years after its companion volumes, a full year after the regime change at DC Comics with Carmine’s sudden dismissal.

This page: At top are the DC Comics trade paperback collections published by Fireside Books, managed by Linda Sunshine at the time, when it was decided to focus on genres other than super-heroes.

Michael Uslan edited the war and science fiction collections, and assisted with the romance book, edited by Manuela Soares. Above is a portion of a bookstore ad appearing in the Dec. 5, 1971, edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Note the bargain price!

Special Thanks:

To ROB SALKOWITZ, whose Publishers Weekly article on Linda inspired this piece!

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the borth files

The Artist’s Autumn Years

The final portion of our three-part look into the fascinating life and great art of Frank Borth

by JON B. COOKE [In our previous segments, we learned of Ohio-born artist Frank Mellors Borth’s entry into comics’ Golden Age at Quality Comics, his WWII experience, and making it through the industry’s dark times by thriving with assignments from the Geo. A. Pflaum publishing outfit of Dayton, Ohio. It was in the pages of Pflaum’s comic book line where Borth [1918–2009] developed into an exceptional cartoonist and stellar storyteller, especially adept at humor-laced adventure tales, often starring kids and animals. At the beginning of the 1960s, married to school teacher wife Bobbie and father of Steven and Kathy, the Montauk, N.Y.-based family man, increasingly dedicated to civic life in his idyllic town, received a request from an old friend, who just so happened to be among comics’ greatest illustrators.— Ye Ed.] Above: Testament to his talent and standing at the George A. Pflaum Company, a collection of Frank Borth’s “Draw-Along” art lessons was published in 1965.

Inset right: At top is a Borth self-portrait included in a profile featured in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 5, #6 [June 1981]; center and bottom are Reed Crandall’s caricatures of himself and best friend Frank from their art school days, respectively, detailed from the wraparound cover of Treasure Chest Vol. 18, #11 [Jan. 31, 1963], featuring the entire TC crew. (Check out CBC #22 [Winter 2020] for a peek at the entire piece.) Below: Courtesy of Roger Hill, whose Reed Crandall: Illustrator of the Comics discusses Frank, a pic of the man fishing from June 1960.

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Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact, for much of its quarter-century existence between 1946–72, was safe harbor for any number of comic book professionals, even while navigating the industry’s most turbulent waters. In all but summer months, its Ohiobased publisher steadily produced that wholesome bi-weekly anthology comics title for Catholic schools during the academic year, financed not by fluctuating newsstand sales but with student subscription payments collected by teachers.

George A. Pflaum, Co., was an outfit priding itself with the quality of its freelance contributors, prominent among them, the superb artist/writer Frank Borth, by 1960, a trusted TC veteran. “Joe Sinnott and other people who had worked previously for comic books migrated to Treasure Chest,” Borth told me during my Summer 2003 visit to his Montauk, N.Y., home.

“Treasure Chest did not pay as much… But I think a lot of the good artists, like Sinnott and so forth, really recognized that this was not just a comic book. They could be illustrators.”

So it’s small wonder then that joining the TC team would be none other than the quintessential comics illustrator, Reed Leonard Crandall. Late of Quality Comics, EC Comics, and soon to add Classics Illustrated to his roster of clients, the artist also happened to be, of course, Frank’s best buddy.

And, as he had in a previous summer or two, divorcee Reed came to spend the season, sleeping on a cot in Frank’s studio, taking evening strolls on the beach alone, and, as the need arose, being of great assist to his host.

“During the visit,” Roger Hill wrote in his biography, Reed Crandall: Illustrator of the Comics [2016, TwoMorrows], “Borth’s wife, Bobbie, came down with a lung illness and wound up in a New York hospital for a few

weeks. Attending to his wife’s needs, Borth got behind on his Treasure Chest work and Reed decided to pitch in and help out. He penciled a four-page story… Borth inked the tale and sent it in…

Around the same period, Borth wrote a letter to the publisher expounding on the talents of Reed Crandall and convinced the publisher to start giving Reed some work.

James Langdon, Treasure Chest editor, was receptive and, while Reed was still in Montauk, he sent the artist both a cover and story assignment to complete on his own.”

Since their time in art school together, Frank Borth was in absolute awe of his best pal. “His whole forte actually was that he had a photographic memory.

He used to drive me nuts in art school. He could draw anything without going and doing the research. Airplanes… war planes, and so forth… he would do these drawings of the Civil War and show them in the uniforms… How did he know? He must have remembered from seeing motion pictures of the thing, y’know?

He was just wonderful. And, as far as drawing horses, he liked drawing horses more than he did people.”

As Bobbie recovered, that Summer of 1960 was a pleasant time for the two old chums, who each had their own space to draw in the studio. “After I got him an assignment from Treasure Chest,” Frank told me, “while he was busy working on it, I had a squirrel monkey at that time, in a six-foot cage… And I used to let him out in the studio. I’ll never forget the day that squirrel monkey got up on the drawing board that Reed was working on and was sitting there watching him and peed on his painting.” Amid our laughter, Frank added, quoting Reed, “‘Hey! Your monkey just pissed on this…!’”

While Frank suspected Reed suffered a drinking problem, evidence of an affliction became apparent only after his friend returned to his native Kansas. “I didn’t find that out #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Borth art on spread © the estate of Frank Borth. Photo on opposite page courtesy of Roger Hill.

until he went home,” Frank revealed. “I found empties down in the basement hidden at the end of my canoe. He didn’t want to throw them in the rubbish so that I would see them. And it was small bottles; he didn’t drink the quarts, he’d pick up a pint.

He’d say he was going to walk down on a beach… and, while at the beach, he then walked on to the village… Most times, I didn’t know when he came in…”

FLIVVERS IN FLIGHT AND ELEPHANT-RIDING ELLIE As can be expected, Reed Crandall’s abilities deteriorated over time, but despite his condition, the artist could still produce magnificent work through much of the 1960s, most prevalently for the Warren horror magazines.

Treasure Chest remained a steady client until 1967, around the time Al Williamson tempted him to come draw Flash Gordon at King Comics. Frank would remain a faithful friend until Reed passed away, in September 1982.

Frank stayed quite busy with Pflaum through the ’60s, producing 19 multi-chapter serials, amounting to many pages and multiple covers, plus a number of shorter features, as well as writer and artist for a serial in a six-issue 1966 summer edition. Up until mid-decade, Frank Moss, the Montauk charter boat captain and close family friend* he recruited to become one of Treasure Chest’s busiest writers, had written the majority of Frank’s assignments but, in ’65, Moss found himself a new career in midtown Manhattan, where he would offer Borth illustration assignments. The artist told Catholic University researchers, “[It] got to the point where he was starting to write up articles and things for yachting magazines in New York.

He was offered to be the editor of Sport Fishing [magazine]… quite an accomplishment. As a matter of fact, he and his wife left Montauk because he had to go into the office every day. But we kept our friendship and his family had owned an old farm up in [New Hampshire]. Anyhow, he was very helpful.” Moss, who died in 1997, at 82, would author many books on fishing.

One delightful aspect of the Treasure Chest title was that popular serials would often return to in following years, including the Borth roster of multi-chapter sagas starring rotund hero The Champ; skinny redhead Fearless Ferdy; exuberant Ellie and her baby pachyderm, Googie; and a series about a lively, anthropomorphized jalopy predating The Absent-Minded Professor, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and My Mother the Car! As we pored over his printed TC work, Frank Borth told me, “I consider myself more of an illustrator than a cartoonist, and when I draw things, I like to be very accurate with it. That speedboat is an accurate drawing of a speedboat. And that car…

Originally, Frank Moss wrote that story. He came up with this thing, it was a flying flivver — Henrietta, the Flying Flivver. Well,

actually, there had been a movie made up with a flying flivver.

It had something to do with a rubber… Flubber! He made it so these two kids could run around in it, and the boy was a little older and the girl was always with a lollipop or something like that. But the flivver was like the elephant. You notice the expression on his face? I used the two headlights for eyes… The actual Model T didn’t have a bumper, there was no bumper on it, so by putting that double-bar bumper on it, I could give it expression on the face. And when I wanted to draw when they were trying to start it up, this guy tried to steal it. Since I don’t have any of the original art, I actually re-did one of the drawings and I was going to do a number of them to color by hand. But, unless you know about the Flying Flivver, why, it’s just a very funny drawing of this thing bucking like a horse.”

The “elephant” Frank referred to was the aforementioned Ellie pet, which was the result of a wager with his editor. “I

Above: In the “cubbyhole” studio of Frank Borth, the artist poses for Ye Ed during a July 2003 visit, displaying his framed artwork for a spectacular 1984 “Montauk Blessing of the Fleet” poster, featuring caricatures of notable summer residents of the fishing village. Below: Presumably drawn for Jerry DeFuccio to accompany Frank’s interview in Cartoonist PROfiles #74 [June 1987], the artist sketched out his work space located at his Montauk abode.

Compare it with the photo of the same studio section seen above.

* According to Steven Borth, his parents thought so much of Frank and Millie Moss that they made arrangements for the childless couple to raise the Borth children should something tragic occur to them.

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This page: Frank Borth items from various issues of Treasure Chest relating to Ellie’s Elephant, Socrates “Sock” Jones, Henrietta, the Flying Flivver; and a panel from Draw-Along with Frank Borth.

wanted to write a story about a girl and her horse,” the artist explained to Mazzenga and Patty, “and the editor says, ‘No, Frank, I can’t use a story like that.’

‘Why not?’ He says, ‘The girls will read a story about boys and the boys would, but the boys won’t read stories about the girls, and so forth.’

And I said, ‘Oh, yes?

I’m going to bet you on that. I’m going to bet I can write a story that’s going to…’ So, instead of having a horse, Ella has an elephant. She wins an elephant.”

Frank told me, “So anyway, as a result of this — and that was a ten-chapter story that I wrote — at the end of the year, they always had a survey among the kids to see what they enjoyed most. Guess who came in first? ‘Ellie’s Elephant’!”…

So I proved a point there, that it was true that they had some stuff in Treasure Chest was mostly written for girls, who I think they wanted not to ignore them, so they were always written by women. And they didn’t have any humor… [or] adventure in them, so it took a man to make this story interesting enough for the boys to want to read. So that was one of the myths that I take pleasure in [disproving].”

DRAW ALONG WITH FRANK BORTH About dealing with the Midwestern home office, Frank told me, “In the [25] years, I think, that I was working steadily with Treasure Chest, I never went to the office, which was in Dayton, Ohio. There was no need to. In those days, we corresponded with letters, which I enjoyed writing. I became a pen pal to one of the editors who was there at the beginning, and I was able to talk him into a lot of things to break the mold.”

Likely impressed with the cartoonist’s versatility and sheer talent, in 1963, editor Dick Voelkel asked Frank to devise a “how-to-draw” series in 10 five-page chapters and thus the

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All items TM & © the respective copyright holder.

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“Draw-Along with Frank Borth” serial was created, which was extremely well received. “That thing was so popular with the teachers,” he told me, “they sent fan mail, actual letters from nuns and everybody. They didn’t know anything about art, but they had to teach art in the school. They thought it was a godsend, because they would sit down and work the instructions out with the class, and follow the instructions and make sure that it was done. So they finally had enough demand to republish it. You see, this one is 25¢. A big jump, because it was usually 10¢.” Frank was referring a comic-sized effort that he remained exceedingly proud of, even after nearly 40 years its 1965 publication: the 48-page Draw-Along with Frank Borth special that collected all the lessons cover-priced at a quarter (and gifted to this writer for free!).

Apparently, landlocked Dayton editors found their way to sunny Montauk during the summer to conveniently confer in-person with an artist who understood Treasure Chest had to be entertaining to hold the attention of readers. “I remember talking with the editors,” he told me. “They used to come down here in the summertime for their yearly visit with me — because they would get at least two or three days on the beach — and I would show them around the place and we’d have a chance to talk over a lot of things. But they were, in the early issues, it was a little bit dry in that it had an awful lot of explanation of the Bible, and the Catholic church, and the hierarchy. But the priests and the nuns apparently wrote to them and said, ‘Look, leave the religious end to us. We know what we’re doing.

Just give these kids a good, clean comic.’ And, gradually they stopped looking for stories always having to have a priest in to solve Chuck White’s problems and all that kind of stuff. So it was interesting to see that the priest and nuns did recognize the value of the thing more as getting the children’s interest to read, because they knew they weren’t reading any of this [preachy] stuff.”

Frank finally got to do his horse serial for TC’s 1966 Summer Edition, “Humpty Dumpty, the Rodeo Horse,” but he received diminishing assignments as that decade came to a close. There were a few moody mystery series, the science fiction-themed “Sock Jones,” and a final multiparter with “The Champ,” but, by 1972, George A. Pflaum Co., closed and Frank was forced to seek new clients.

All items TM & © the respective copyright holders.

THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW In a survey of the long-running Catholic comic book, in The Comics Journal #182 [Nov. 1995], Robert Kennedy wrote about the cartoonist, “Borth was probably Treasure Chest’s most prolific and versatile artist. He averaged about two stories an issue and was one of the few artists who could tailor his style to a story’s specific requirements. In the same 1955 issue, he drew a Kirbyish ‘West of the Panhandle’ Western and a ‘Lives of the Saints’ story that looked surprisingly like the style Alfredo Alcala would adopt some 20 years later.” As to his prolificness, Frank provided this writer with a remarkably detailed breakdown of his Pflaum work, an index which concluded, “Final total of pages and covers drawn for Treasure Chest: 2,662. Total pages written for Treasure Chest: 496.”

Actually, Frank had scored another steady gig a year or so prior to the demise of Treasure Chest, this one in a field he had left some 20 years earlier — syndicated newspaper comics. In a chronology the artist shared with this writer, he explained, “Warren Whipple, a longtime friend who was the artist who drew the syndicated cartoon feature, There Oughta Be a Law, called to ask me if I would take the job of writing the plot and dialogue of each cartoon as the original creator of the strip [Harry Shorten, MLJ and Tower Comics editor] and wanted to retire. I said okay, as I had done almost as much writing as drawing in my own labors. The syndicate approved my taking over and, for the next ten years, Whipple and I were a team.”

While reviewing that work with this writer, Frank shared, “This is from There Oughta Be a Law. I didn’t draw it, but I did ink it. This was all by Warren Whipple. He was not the originator of it, but he had been doing it for something like 20 years.

When he asked me to write it, because the guy who originated it wanted to sell it, the rights to the strip. I asked him, ‘How much does he want for it?’ He said, ‘$50,000.’ And I

said, ‘Did he give you the monthly report of how many newspapers are carrying it?’ No, he didn’t even know that there was such a thing. And I was fortunate, I had had a syndicated thing [Ken Stuart, 1947–50] and, every month, they’d give you a printout as to what newspapers are carrying it. Anyhow, I told him, ‘Unless he gives you those things, don’t buy anything.

You’re buying a pig in a poke. For all you know, you’ve lost major papers and so forth, and you’re going to be paying for a strip losing clients.’ So [Shorten] refused to, he kept coming up with excuses, that he lost them, and so forth. So I said, ‘Don’t do it or you’re going to be throwing away your money.’ So [Whipple] didn’t and he was very grateful for it. ‘As a matter of fact, he even left me in his will.” By the time Frank ended his 1971–83 run, his partner had retired a few years before, and Frank was doing it all. Whipple later died, in East Hampton, on New Year’s Day, 2003.

ASIMOV’S ARTIST At some point in the latter 1970s, Frank put his skill as illustrator to good use when he became connected with Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. In a well-written profile by Elizabeth Mitchell, in IASFM #40 [June 1981], she wrote, “Borth says he doesn’t read much science fiction for pleasure, but enjoys illustrating it very much. ‘You never know what is going to be asked of you. I hate

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This page: Illos from Frank’s gig working on Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in the late ’70s, plus a cover; and a cover detail of The Champ from Treasure Chest Vol. 19 #13 [Feb. 27, 1964]. Below is Frank (and cartoon Frank!) as 1990 Montauk St. Patrick’s Day Parade grand marshal.

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All items TM & © the respective copyright holders.

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All items TM & © the respective copyright holders.

to be pigeonholed into being asked to draw the same type of thing all the time.’ One of his favorite subjects is animals. ‘I think too many artists seem to think of the weird animals of SF as monsters,’ he says. ‘They’re just creatures.’

He enjoys using watercolors, oils, and acrylics; but his favorite tools are pen and ink. ‘The black-&-white line is the basic drawing line, and you’ve got to be right when you use it.’

“It’s a special trick of the illustrators trade to plant questions in the reader’s mind, says Borth. ‘When somebody opens the magazine and they come to my illustration, I want it to make them read that story. That’s my main objective.”

(Asimov, a hugely popular SF writer, obviously thought well of Frank’s abilities, as the artist was chosen to illustrate an amusing vignette the writer had published in the Church of the Brethren magazine, Messenger [Vol. 130, #9, Sept. 1981]. The gorgeous illo, seen on the previous page at bottom right, is among his finest.)

THE DeFUCCIO CONNECTION Mostly known for his long association with MAD magazine, since 1952 (and for being John Severin’s cousin-in-law), Jerry DeFuccio was also a notable comics historian — until his passing in 2001, Jerry was very helpful to this writer — who became friendly with Frank, interviewing the artist for Jud Hurd’s Cartoonist PROfiles magazine [#74, July 1987] in a feature titled, “Frank Borth meets Spider Widow.”

Calling the cartoonist “one of the most skilled artists and storytellers” during the Golden Age, DeFuccio was most interested in Frank’s Quality Comics’ work, so enamored, in fact, that he paid Frank to recreate at least three classic splash pages from that era.

Mostly available for viewing on the Heritage Auctions site [ha.com], the recreations show the artist in peak form.

In a letter to Robin Snyder’s The Comics [Vol. 13, #2, Feb. 2002], DeFuccio shared, “Paid him for new art, Spider Woman encountering Phantom Lady, a reunion of 50+ years from their appearances in Feature Comics and Police Comics. I told Frank his Spider Woman resembled Sigourney Weaver. The reunion was magnificent.”

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CRACKED TIMES Frank’s friendship endured as, after leaving as MAD’s longtime associate editor, DeFuccio joined up with a rival humor publication and recruited his artist pal, who, despite having officially retired after leaving the newspaper cartoon feature, contributed excellent work for that mag into his 70s. Frank wrote in an autobiographical outline, “My retirement was spent painting Montauk land and seascapes. I turned out about 50 when [DeFuccio] talked me into getting back into production doing crazy assignments for Cracked magazine, which I did for a period of time until they switched editors and all they were interested in was using famous people’s names. I concluded my second career and retired to doing art and posters for local organizations like the fire department, lighthouse, and town.”

This page: Above is a souvenir map giveaway Frank created for White’s Drugs. Below, opening spread from Jerry DeFuccio’s interview with Frank in Cartoonist PROfiles #74 [June 1987].

Opposite page: Items relating to Frank’s work on Monster Man, a 1977 paperback illustration job; plus some Cracked illustrations of a Spider-Man/Simpsons parody and King Kong; and illo from Messenger magazine;There Oughta Be a Law items; and a self-caricature.

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capacities for a decade. He was also renowned for giving frequent “chalk talks,” volunteering his talents on many — many!

— different community projects. These included posters, logos, illos, murals, and fundraising art for the town’s fire department, historical society, library, chamber of commerce, church, and even the East Hampton Town Seal (a job that paid $75).

Along with art, deep-sea fishing, and Bobbie, one of his greatest loves in life was performing and, to that end, he co-founded the Montauk Community Theater and even wrote its inaugural production, “Montauk Follies”!

One astonishingly accomplished community-related piece of Frank Borth art is his delightful “Yard Sale” color image, an oversize watercolor illustration from 1986, which today hangs proudly in son Steven’s home. The masterful achievement in cartooning, a bird’s eye view of that typical Northeast weekend occurrence — a lawn tag sale — features dozens and dozens of humorous and utterly charming vignettes of Americans on the hunt for a neighborhood bargain. (Frank even made a game of the artwork’s depictions as he put together a flyer challenging *”There is nothing like stamping out a raging grass fire with a bunch of guys to establish lasting friendships and mutual respect,” viewers to find certain items, including “a little boy with an Frank shared. Also, it was the best way to get to know fellow townies! over-active bladder”!)

CIVIC DUTY Since making the fishing village their adopted home at the end of the war, Frank and Bobbie devoted themselves to the Montauk community in many ways. In 1990, the artist told Newsday, “Too many damn artists hide in their studios and aren’t very sociable. I believe I should do what I can for the community.” And do he did while his wife helped establish the local library, was a Girl Scout leader, served as member of the Montauk Village Association, and was a church deacon, Frank volunteered at the fire department for 10 years,* was on the ambulance squad for eight, was picked to be a Sunday school teacher for nine, and served as ruling elder of the Montauk Community Church for 16 years! Plus he was elected as a Republican official in various town

Yard Sale mural © the estate of Frank Borth.

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#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

MONSTER MAN It’s no surprise that, known as he was as the Montauk cartoonist, Frank would be sought to create art for locals’ books, for which the artist would go above and beyond to produce exceptional material. In 1963, film producer (and summer resident) Hy Sobiloff enlisted Frank to illustrate his book-length poem, Montauk Point, and old pal Frank Moss had his onetime creative partner produce the art plates in his novel, Bluefin, from 1985.

But Frank Borth’s tour de force in book illustration was featured in a paperback about colorful Montauk shark hunter Captain Frank Mundus, Monster Man: Master Hunter of the Deep [1976], by Robert F. Boggs. Mundus was the inspiration for Quint, the crazed boat captain in Peter Benchley’s blockbuster novel, Jaws, and Monster Man was written in the wake of the epic movie’s unprecedented success. For his part, Frank does not disappoint with his finely detailed 16 pages of sometimes terrifying, often hilarious depictions of an eccentric charter boat captain’s exploits at tracking and killing deadly sea predators.

(A true Borth oddity is his 1995 book, Borthicons: Symbols of Our Times,a volume of clever visual puns. Besides a listing at worldcat.org, only a number of his original layouts in his son’s possession make evident the apparent existence of the work.)

DAD Last March, this writer was invited to visit Frank’s son, Steven, just outside Boston, and he was interviewed about being the child of such a versatile and talented man. While we looked through a treasure trove of Frank Borth material, Steven proudly displayed a framed replica of the East Hampton town seal for my camera.

“He made some really, really creative Halloween costumes for me and my sister,” Steven recalled. “One was this gigantic jack-o-lantern, made out of cardboard… and, of course, it was the best costume I ever had because I had a professional artist putting it together.

The funny thing about that costume was, it had so much appeal, that whenever the Montauk public school had their Halloween party, that pumpkin was placed prominently on stage.”

Did the neighborhood kids realize Steven’s father — whom he called the original “work-from-home dad” — was a comic book artist? “I don’t think they ever knew,” he said, adding that had they known they likely wouldn’t have cared. “The local paper did not carry There Oughta Be a Law. So the locals never saw it, but, even if they did, I don’t think it would’ve made that much difference.”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

STAGE EXIT When Frank’s wife passed away on October 24, 2004, Steven said, “Her death hit my father really, really hard. It was a difficult time for all of us and it was a good thing that my sister and I had each other, because Kathy and I were able to be there to support each other. After my mother had passed, he wanted to be out of there very badly. There was just too much in the way of memories.”

By that time, Frank had also tired of the super-rich moving in ever-greater numbers to the area. “Dad started to call the Hamptons, ‘the home of the rich and famous’ in a derogatory way.” And he had desired to move to a retirement village in the Keystone State even before his wife passed away. “That winter,” Steven explained, “he moved to Pennsylvania.”

The son described his mother — a sixth grade teacher in her career and an avid horsewoman during her leisure time — as well-respected by her students and the community. Adorned with an engraving of a school and a horse, her gravestone in Montauk’s Fort Hill Cemetery reads, “Barbara S. Borth, 1921–2004, Wife, Mother, Teacher.

Advocate for Learning and Nature.”

Frank made the move to Green Ridge Village, in Newville, Penn., when he donated his Treasure Chest comics collection to the Catholic University of America, which was digitizing an entire run of the series, and he agreed to participate in their oral history project.

On May 10, 2006, Catholic University archive associates Maria Mazzenga and Jordan Patty visited Frank and conducted a lengthy interview with the artist about his Treasure Chest work (which is available as a PDF online at www.cuislandora.wrlc.org).

Six years and a month since I had visited him at his modest Montauk homestead, in East Hampton, Frank Mellors Borth died, on August 9, 2009, in Newville, at the age of 91.

Steven said, “He would have loved the fact that he was transported from the church to the graveyard in the back of an old fire truck.” His Fort Hill Cemetery headstone is inscribed, “Frank M. Borth, 1918–2009, Husband, Father, Artist. A Man of Creativity, Humor, Service.”

This page: Clockwise from above is a memorial card sent out after Bobbie’s passing; a portrait of the artist taken during Ye Ed’s July 2003 visit to Frank’s home in Montauk, New York; his gravestone in the Montauk cemetery; the Borth family visiting the Indiantown Gap mural, in 2003; and, in a photo taken in March 2023, Steven Borth posing in his Massachusetts home with a smile and the seal of East Hampton Town, New York, designed by Frank. Opposite page: Clockwise from top right is a “thank you” card illustration by Frank sent to the celebrity bartenders (that included Montaukers Al Pacino, Dick Cavett, Edward Albee, and others, all caricatured therein) who volunteered at an annual fundraiser; ads drawn by Frank for area businesses; fabled mural painted

by Frank at Montauk’s Flying Fish Restaurant; detail of the artist’s self-caricature in Draw-Along with Frank Borth; detail of his “Yard Sale” mural with a challenge placard that accompanied the art.

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incoming

How Roy Got to Carnegie Hall

Alter Ego editor/comics legend Roy Thomas corrects the record about the 1972 Marvel event Roy Thomas

Above: Sometime in1965 or ’66, Marvel production manager Sol Brodsky showed Roy Thomas several costumes which, Roy said, had been sewn by a “professional seamstress.” Roy shared in an online article, “I wore the costume for a short time in the legendary Stan Lee/Marvel Carnegie Hall show, running up and down the aisles and probably onstage. It’s unfortunate that the promoter did not allow photos to be taken…”

Lennon song that Barry talked me against my will into doing… but I’m dubious about it being “I’m Down,” as one person suggests in the article; I’m sure it was not a song McCartney was associated with. Naturally, I totally dismiss the opinion of the CFW writer; sure, I should mostly “stick to writing,” since that’s what I did for a living… but I’d made at least pin money or better for four years with Gary’s band, and nobody was paying me then for either my looks or my writing; but of course, with such bad electronics, none of us came off well. “Be-bop-a-lula,” though, would have been fine if the electronics had worked.

Well, at least this Ann Hirsch character attributes my (maybe our band’s) appearance to halting the paper-airplane barrage, of which I was mostly unaware, being onstage or behind-stage most of the time.

Your article reminded me of just how snarky some of the fan press was. I suppose these guys now, 50 years later, are sitting at their PCs trolling the DC and MCU movies, their most recent chance to show off their critical faculties.

Not that I recall much about it, but is there a mention I missed in your article of the fact that, near the end of the show, I was running through the aisles in what was then “my” Spider-Man costume. That, at least, added a bit more of a Marvel feel to the proceedings that so many of the acts that were totally unconnected with the comics.

I do wish, despite it all, that Steve Lemberg had either allowed cameras into Carnegie that night, or had done a better job of having someone else film it. Good, bad, or ugly, I — along with Barry and Herb — ”played Carnegie Hall” that night in January 1972, which is more than 99.999999% of our critics have ever done… and it would be nice to have some sort of visual record of it. But what the hell… with the lousy sound system that Lemberg had got in place, it would have wound up a silent movie anyway.

[I appreciate you setting things straight, Roy! — Y.E.]

David Allen For never having devoted an issue before to a writer, you picked a great one to start with. Seeing Don McGregor’s name on the cover, along with art of the Black Panther and Killraven, was enough for me to plunk down $11. All three meant a lot to me in my boyhood and still do today.

Your interview with Don was worth my dough and the page count. That Penguin Random House elevated the Panther and Don’s contributions to him as one of its big three opening salvos does indeed speak volumes about the value of these comics from a present-day perspective. Don’s bemused response about how little worth Marvel saw in the comics as they were being published made for a great contrast.

Personally, I’d have wished for more chatter about Killraven, a comic I liked more. (I’ve always thought that the last three series I would refuse to part with would be Man-Thing, Howard the Duck and War of the Worlds.) But Panther is a more a part of the cultural conversation, obviously. #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Enjoyed the coverage of the 1972 Carnegie Hall show, probably the fullest and best that odd event has ever had... but I have to make a few minor points: “Press agent Ann Hirsch” makes the same error Abraham Riesman did in his recent Stan Lee hatchet job [True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, 2021], if she said that “Marvel secretaries [were] hastily recruited, dressed in leotards,” and then danced. First of all, there were three young women who danced while Barry Smith, Herb Trimpe, a drummer, and I performed two rocks songs: one was my then-wife Jeanie (who had worked as Stan’s secretary for a few months several years before, but was there as both my wife and, I might add, the co-creator of Werewolf by Night, with still more Marvel work to come in the future)… another was Linda Parente, a friend (and former wife of Bill Parente, one-time editor of the Warren mags), who ran a small modeling agency in New Jersey… and the other was a model who worked for her, and was thus used to being in front of audiences. Neither Linda nor her employees, of course, had ever been “Marvel secretaries.” Nor were they “hastily recruited,” having had the assignment for some days; their only problem was that Lemberg was too inept to get them a chance to rehearse. In addition, they weren’t just “dressed in leotards,” but in professionally sewn outfits of Invisible Girl, Wasp, and Medusa (at least, I think those last two were the costumes they wore; I owned them at the time and somehow never got any back except the FF costume which Jeanie brought back home — I still have that one, which a few folks have offered to buy.)

I suppose Hirsch’s statement (re: “cheesecake”) is a matter of opinion, but there certainly wasn’t much flesh showing; I think Hirsch was just looking for a clever line.

But hey, other than that, Hirsch’s description was flawless, Mrs. Lincoln.

The Tom Wolfe segment description is more accurate, except that I recall the Captain America piece as written to be more dramatic than humorous, though I suppose there was some humor in it. But the Women’s Wear Daily critic quoted, who represented a publication that, of course, should have a lot to say about a show celebrating comic book heroes, seems to have felt that it was playing for laughs it didn’t get.

While Barry the Windsor was incorrect is saying I was doing an Elvis Presley imitation during our rock songs onstage (I was merely singing, something I’d done for three or four years for pay in the early ’60s), otherwise the description of that part of things is fairly accurate. Linda Fite errs, however, in thinking that the fourth guy, the non-Marvel person who Lemberg insisted sit in because Gary Friedrich hadn’t had a chance to practice with us, played bass; he was, indeed, a drummer, taking the spot Gary should have had. Perhaps this Tone Forest guy played bass behind stage somewhere… or maybe he was up on the platform and I didn’t see him, since I was on the stage itself. But it was essentially Barry, Herb, the drummer, and me… barely connected because of all the electronic snafus, which, of course, were all Lemberg’s responsibility. I don’t recall the name of the

I would say this, though: Some judicious paring of Don’s responses would have done us all some good. There’s a reason most Q&A’s are “edited for length and clarity,” whether stated or not. As readers, we don’t need to wade through the half-sentences, abandoned thoughts and repetition of an actual word-forword conversation.

Also, Don’s “false narrative” essay was, sorry, very much in the elliptical spirit of a ‘70s letter column, like when Steve Gerber said Dr. Bong was based on a journalist who’d done him wrong but whom he declined to name. (Wikipedia says Bob Greene.) Here Don is trying to set the record straight for posterity, but as a reader, I don’t have the slightest idea whom he’s talking about! Are we supposed to know already? If we aren’t, then what was the point? He’s defending himself against a charge he doesn’t fully articulate.

That said, I remain grateful you cover-featured Don. My life is a little richer for Don’s convention panel joke that he wrote the Klan stories because the editors wanted more white people in his stories!

I wonder who your next writer to spotlight will be? Too bad it can’t be Gerber, whom we both seem to admire, Jon. May I nominate Steve Englehart?

Lastly, your Mike Gold interview filled in some gaps for me on that period of DC publishing. It reminded me of a question that I wonder if Gold might address, if he hasn’t done so elsewhere.

In the Craig Yoe-edited book, The Creativity of Ditko, Gold wrote about being present when Ditko and Ross Andru were introduced in a hallway at DC, and about portions of their conversation -- while adding that he wouldn’t quote what Ditko said about Marvel and Stan Lee on that occasion or on another when Gold visited Ditko’s studio.

Would he care to share those insights now?

Keep up the good work, Jon. And as Don always ended his letter columns: “Be kind to each other, be kind to yourselves -- and hang in there.” That made such an impression, I can quote it from memory [Thanks for the thoughtful missive, D.A. Our next writer spotlight is actually next issue with a deep look at the late, great Denny O’Neil by Bob Brodsky, who was a friend of Denny and editor of the fanzine, The O’Neil Observer.

Gerber was last ish and an Englehart main feature is to come! — Y.E.]

Sean Kelly: Preiss is (Al)Right

After Byron’s tribute in CBC #32, Ye Ed discovers quotes from the late Heavy Metal co-editor

BPVP strips TM & © the respective copyright holder.

[Editor’s note: As your humble host juggles between CBC and various book projects, I was recently reviewing a follow-up interview I had done with Sean Kelly, the late National Lampoon humorist — and Heavy Metal’s inaugural co-editor — and I discovered I did ask him about Byron Preiss during our Nov. 11, 2019, conversation, excerpts which I have transcribed here. Sean, who was a hilarious, forthcoming, and candid interview subject (and whose detailed memories of Heavy Metal will appear in Jean Depelley and my forthcoming hopefully-in-thenext-year book, Forging Metal), passed away on July 11, 2022. — Y.E.]

happened if he didn’t backed this crazy book that Ted and I wrote if someone had found the jewels and that would have given it some publicity… I don’t know. Because, all I know is, I got up one morning and Byron was not with us any longer…

JBC: Did Byron come by the offices to show you…? [As HM editor], you did excerpts of his projects… Howard Chaykin…

Sean: Byron had been one of the original… he wrote a comic for the back [section] of the Lampoon for a while, that was called “Hard-Boiled Dick” and, when Matty [Simmons, publisher] saw that, he thought that was a reference to poaching a penis and he was very upset by it, so we had to drop it! [laughs] Because Matty just didn’t like to think about hard-boiled dicks. This is a true story.

But we knew Byron because he was around and he always seemed to me a guy who was getting work for people who didn’t know how to get work for themselves. I mean, he was genuinely entrepreneuring comic artists, like Howie Chaykin, so that was good of him! So he was obviously available when we needed to fill [empty] pages in Heavy Metal.

Jon B. Cooke: Right at the same time [as Heavy Metal], Byron Preiss was doing a lot of “high-end” work, I guess you’d say. Did you deal with him?

Sean Kelly: Yes, yes! We — Ted Mann and I — did a book for and with him called The Secret, and I don’t know if it’s still in print, but I still get the odd email about it. There was a book published in England, which is called “The Diamond Rabbit”* or something. And the idea was there was a treasure hunt for a diamond rabbit as well as a kind of children’s story.

And it was an overnight sensation.

Below: In our CBC Byron Preiss retrospective, we couldn’t squeeze in reference to his less successful National Lampoon So Byron got the idea that we could do the American version efforts, including the Howard Chaykin and Bernie Wrightson rendered jobs below. Sean Kelly mentions a “Hard-Boiled of that. So he hired Ted and me to write the kind of fairy tale/ Dicks” strip, but the closest we found was Nick & Nick (bottom). Both strips from NL #66 [Sept. ’75]. funny part of it, and then he hired some fabulous artists to draw these various, weird fairies that Ted and I invented. Some of them were spectacular puppets and stuff. He didn’t spare any expense. Then he did this thing where there were riddles about where the jewels were buried. And that was it. It was a gig.

Then Byron was killed in a traffic accident out on Long Island and nobody knows where these f*cking things are buried! How would they, right? Only Byron knew! [laughter] Somewhere, out there in America, there are these boxes with jewels in them — or something — and occasionally I get a letter from someone saying, “Am I getting close when I’m in Central Park?” And I go, “You’re asking the wrong vampire here! I have no idea!”

Byron was a real hustler — and I don’t mean that in a negative way — he was to it and at it. He understood there was something happening and that he could facilitate and handle it. He was fun to work with because he had a lot of… He was an entrepreneur — that’s the word I’m looking for. I don’t know what would have * The British book was Masquerade by Kit Williams, about which I wrote, “incorporated clues as to where a valuable piece of jewelry was buried, a slim volume that launched a new genre in world publishing, the ‘armchair treasure book.’”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

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darrick patrick’s ten questions

Bright and Sunny June

The artist on her gray mare Isabelle, cats in space, happy feet, and learning on the job

by DARRICK PATRICK [June Brigman is a professional illustrator whose work has appeared in comic books, such as Power Pack, Supergirl, Alpha Flight, Meridian, Barbie, Captain Ginger, Daredevil, Star Wars: River of Chaos, Fantastic Four, Savage Sword of Conan, New Mutants, etc. She was also the artist of the newspaper strip, Brenda Starr, Reporter, from 1995 to 2011, and has been working on Mary Worth since 2016. — D.P.]

This spread: Above is June Brigman caricature by Walter Simonson. All other art by June.

Inset right is fabric illustration; below is Power Pack: Grow Up one-shot [Oct. 2019] cover with Roy Richardson inks. Next page is Captain Ginger #2 cover detail and Medusa illo, both with Roy’s inks.

Nevertheless, I think his recognition of my love of drawing helped to set me on a path.

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

June: Be different. I got my big break in comics because I was pretty good at drawing children, something the super-hero artists weren’t particularly good at. Be versatile. Drawing comics gave me good foundational skills that I’ve used in advertising, storyboards, and illustration. Be adaptable. Vary your style to suit the needs of different projects. The style I use for Horse & Rider magazine illustrations is different from the style of Power Pack comics. Stay focused. Don’t give up.

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

June: I get up around 7:00 a.m., feed my six cats, have coffee, check email, look at Facebook, and eat breakfast. Some mornings, I go to the barn and ride or go for a jog. I try to be at the drawing board by 9:30. I can’t listen to anything when I’m laying out a page. That takes all my concentration. Once that’s done, I’ll listen to podcasts or music while I draw. Stop for lunch around 1:00 p.m., work until 6:00 p.m., and then make something simple for dinner. After dinner, I’ll work until about 10:00 p.m., feed cats, watch TV, go to bed, read, and then lights out about 11:30. It’s funny to me that people think I live this exciting, interesting life. It’s actually pretty boring.

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

June: Begin where I began, with Power Pack. I was learning #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Power Pack TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

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Darrick Patrick: What was the path that led you to working professionally within comic books?

June Brigman: My boyfriend, now husband, Roy Richardson, turned me on to comics. Growing up, I read newspaper strips. I’d never read a comic book until I was 18 years old. I didn’t even know how to read one. I didn’t understand what order to read the word balloons in. I think the first comics I read were Kirby’s New Gods. It was like being sucked through a wormhole into another universe. I had no idea that an artist could create such epic imagery in little panels printed on crappy newsprint.

At the time, I was just starting my freshman year at the University of Georgia. I knew I wanted to be a professional, working artist. I was thinking about illustration or advertising.

Then, Roy and I went to a comic con in Atlanta. I saw artists like Michael Kaluta, Jim Steranko, Bob McLeod, and others doing this wonderful artwork. The artist there who really impressed me though was Gil Kane. I think I spent most of the day just watching him draw. I was amazed at how he could draw a totally believable figure doing anything from any angle. This looked like a lot more fun than advertising or illustration. And that was it. I was hooked.

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

June: My father didn’t approve of my career choice.

He wanted me to be a stewardess, now known as a flight attendant. But he encouraged me to be an artist. When I was in first grade, I did a drawing of a happy horse with the sun shining above him, and a sad horse with a cloud above him.

My father framed it and hung it on his office wall. This was a big deal for six-year-old me.

He thought art was fine for a hobby, but not a profession.

Medusa TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Captain Ginger TM & © Stuart Moore and June Brigman.

on the job, so there’s some funky looking drawings. Louise Simonson’s writing is in the same class as Madeleine L’Engle and Andre Norton. The stories are fun and suitable for all ages. And the artwork does improve with each issue. Then check out Captain Ginger, a series I co-created with Stuart Moore, published

by Ahoy Comics. It’s kind of like Battlestar Galactica with cats, but it’s not for little kids. Not that there’s language, or sex and violence. Well, maybe a little sex and violence. It’s great science fiction. And everybody likes cats in bubble helmets, right?

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

June: Wow, it’s hard to name just a few, there are so many.

Without Walt and Louise Simonson, Roy and I would not have survived our first year living in New York. And I owe my career to Weezie. If she hadn’t asked me if I could draw children, I wouldn’t be here giving this interview. Bob McLeod was my mentor. His detailed critiques of my newbie attempts at drawing comics were sometimes harsh, but always honest and helpful. Carl Potts, my editor on Power Pack, has the patience of a saint. Seriously, he should have fired me. And then there’s Joe Kubert, still making great art right up to the end. With a handshake from Joe, I started teaching. I currently teach Sequential Art, at Kennesaw State University, in Georgia. But my love of teaching started at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon Art, in Dover, New Jersey. What all these people have in common is a generous, empathetic spirit. They’ve helped not just me, but countless other aspiring artists.

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

June: I’m a horse nerd. One of those girls that was born horse crazy. Growing up, I didn’t have a horse, but I could imagine all the horses I wanted with my drawings. Now, I own a beautiful gray mare named Isabelle that I ride two or three times a week.

Darrick: What is your oldest memory?

June: I remember a book with illustrations of carousel horses. As an adult, I told my mother about it and described the pictures. She found a photo of me, about a year old, holding the book and looking very happy and excited.

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

June: I like to dance. Motown, R&B, disco, ‘80s synth pop — it all gives me happy feet. I’ll dance at a party, dance in my studio, bust a move pushing a cart in the grocery store, etc.

Darrick: If you had super-powers, what would they be?

June: My superpower would be to draw like José Luis García-López.

Do I really need to explain why?

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son of the flame

Deo’s Good Times & Bad

The grand finale of our Mike Deodato, Jr., profile with insight from Alonso, Faust, and Oswalt

by GREG BIGA

This page: Above is the reprint of As Aventuras do Flama, Deodato Borges’ 1963 Brazilian super-hero Deodato, Jr., revived in 2014 for a commemorative issue honoring his father, who passed away in 2014. Below is Mike’s rendition of The Flame and, inset right, the son’s portrait of his dad.

On August 25th, 2014, one of the great lights in Mike Deodato’s life was extinguished. Deodato Borges was more than Mike’s father; he was a best friend and a mentor, as well. He was also a cultural touchstone in the history of Paraiba, Brazil. His voice and his words entertained, informed, and challenged his community for 50 years. His passing was as much a loss for the South American nation as it was for his son. Borges was that rare and special individual who used his public platform to raise up others and urge his audience to pursue greatness in their own lives.

There can never be another Deodato Borges.

“That was tough, man,” Mike shares.

“Because I thought I would handle it very well, because I never lost anyone close to me. And then I found out that my dad died and I didn’t think I’d cry, because I’m a very macho man and stuff like that.

Man, I cried like a baby. It was so, so hard.

Every time that I mention my dad’s passing in an interview or lecture or something, I would cry in front of everybody. It was embarrassing.

But it was very, very tough for me.

“My dad was like one of those guys from Mad Men. My dad was so much like those guys. I could spend so much of my day watching that series. And I had so much pity for my mom for living in that time. Being treated as ‘just’ a woman. But my dad was like that: he didn’t talk about feelings.

And so, because of that, because he didn’t have those [emotional] moments and stuff like that, I thought I could handle it better. But then, no. I only had the chance to say ‘I love you’ on the night before he died. Because that’s when I had the courage to say that I loved him. That’s how it was with our relationship. It was more about heroes and stuff, but not feelings. We didn’t

ALL IN THE FAMILY “I was more attached to my dad, because of comics, you know,” recalls Deo. “My mom, Maria, was like all other moms — very, very caring, very loving. No complaints at all. I would never be a rebel because I have no cause for it. My parents were great. We weren’t rich or anything like that. On the contrary.

But she was always loving and took care of her kids. She was supportive, just like my dad. But, because my dad was a hero and was in comics, too, I always had more to do with him. We had more things to talk about and stuff like that. My mom was my mom. Of course, I love her. She’s special to me, but she was not a comic book fan. She’s 83 and in very good health. She never exercises and she’s a bit weak, but she’s a big hero. She sometimes cheats by eating candies. She’s diabetic, like me, but she’s okay. She’s in very good condition. Her aunt lived to be 107. So maybe she’ll make it there, too. Me, too!”

Mike was first married in 1988, which gave him his first daughter, Priscilla Gomez. “She’s a production engineer. She knows how to make money. I’m a big fan of hers. I didn’t have to actually help parent her because she always liked to study and was very organized and everything. I only had to ground her one time, when she was seven, and that was it. And, to compensate for things, my new daughter, Ana Julia, she’s seven years old and she’s a devil. But she’s the most adorable devil there is. She’s completely different and I thought, ‘My God, she’s the devil.’ But, apparently, she has a creative side, so maybe I can bring her [out of] the dark side.” Ana Julia’s mother is Mike’s current wife, Ana Paula.

Based on what Mike has previously shared about his time at the drawing board, there’s no doubt that his own life as a dad was difficult. “In the beginning, I was young, of course.

I didn’t know how to balance things, because I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to grab it.’ So, I worked too much. I was living #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Flama, illustrations TM & © Mike Deodato, Jr.

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[Last time, in our second installment of this career-spanning conversation with Mike Deodato, Jr., the artist opened up about his fall from comic book grace and resurrection through his talent with the support of some luminaries who refused to give up on him. Here we walk with Deo through his greatest personal loss, individual successes, and, full circle, triumphant return to his first professional character at DC Comics. — G.B.]

talk about feelings. So, I found out the hard way that I was not made of steel.

“Because of that, I had plans to do a revival of his character, The Flame. But I never had the courage. So, I licensed it to a company, and they are developing the character with another artist. My dad was very important to me and my career.”

In honor of his father, Deo did some drawings of his dad’s iconic alter ego. “I did several images of The Flame. I did one in color with a yellow background. I did that for a reprint we did of the first issue of The Flame. It was exactly the same. It was printed with all the advertisements and everything. So, I did the cover that you can remove and have the book be exactly like it was printed in 1963.”

Cy-Gor TM & © Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.

on four hours of sleep a day in the ’90s. I didn’t have the time needed to shave or cut my hair. So, I was not very present. After I divorced for the first time, in 1996, I had more time with my daughter than when I was married. Because I only could see her on the weekend, I tried to compensate, having more fun and stuff. And, little by little, I learned how to balance my life.

“I learned, especially after my fall at the end of the ’90s, I realized that I had to rewire my brain and everything in my life.

I had to take more control and to have time for myself and my family, because that also influenced my art. So, doing sports and taking care of myself, it was not a waste of time, I believe.

Now I know they’re all parts of the same equation, in the end.

If I was worried about my art, if I don’t pay attention to these things, I would be a bad artist. So, now I spend time with my family. And that’s one of the reasons I never had a studio out of my home. I would never see my family because I work too much. So, I prefer to work at home. My new office is very integrated with my home life. It has a big TV space for my kid to play with toys. So, I’m used to working with them making noise here. Then I participate in the day-by-day life instead of being in the attic or in another studio outside the home. Comics are my life, but I had to make a way to be with my family, too. So, nowadays, I know better.”

It is that change of attitude which has also shifted Deodato’s perception of how he approached his livelihood.

“For years, I thought I was a workaholic. But then, I took one vacation. It was in 2006. It was my first vacation. A 30-day vacation. After 10 days, I wanted to draw. So, it was not work, because I was not working, but I needed to draw. So, I realized, ‘Okay, it’s not that I’m a workaholic, it’s just I love to draw. I have to draw.’ The moments I’m happy is when I’m drawing, when I’m creating a comic. Not only drawing, even framing a page, or getting reference, or writing something. I have to be doing comics, that’s when I’m happy.”

did exams and everything, and turns out there was only 10% left of my optical nerves. (It doesn’t mean I have only 10% of my vision, but it was a mess.) And then he told me that I had to drive home. And then I spent about 10 minutes trying to get onto the road and couldn’t see the other cars. And then I went anyway, guys beeping at me. I drove to my house crying, so my wife couldn’t see it. And that was the last time I drove. I did two surgeries to hold the progression of the disease. I believe it’s working; it’s not getting worse. But what I lost is lost. And the result is that it became so hard to draw. Now I’m completely adapted. It’s like I have been like this my whole life. But it’s so hard because I see everything in a blur, all the time. If I’m talking to you, I cannot see your face correctly. I see better on iPhones or on computers.

For me to draw on paper, it’s a pain. It’s better on computers THE NECESSARY LEAP TO DIGITAL Even a cursory understanding of Mike’s work is to see a strong because I can blow it up and work panel by panel. For me Frank Frazetta influence. Fritz is obviously in his blood. “The first time I saw a Frazetta drawing, it was in Brazil… There was to watch on a television, I cannot. I watch it on an iPad. an article about Frazetta and the drawing was of the flying Even then, the brightness dinosaurs attacking a guy. It was like. ‘Oh, my God!’ I was so is at the maximum. It’s like impressed. Of course, I became crazy about his drawing style, everything that’s bright is very in pen-&-ink, the paintings, and everything. I was fascinated. bright, and everything that is To this day, every time I try to do a guy in a pile of bodies, I dark is very dark. try to do my best-ever Frazetta composition, and I am never “The worst part is not satisfied…. Someday I will find the perfect composition.” knowing if the surgery is Beyond the skill of Frazetta, it is that legend’s conquering of physical ailments brought upon by illness and strokes which gonna work or if it’s gonna get worse. I’m at the limit. best motivate Deodato. Learning a new way of working, as Frazetta did when he taught himself to draw with his opposite If something gets a little bit worse, then I cannot draw hand later in his life, gave a path for Mike to continue his anymore. And there are career. “I’m kind of in a situation like that. I was diagnosed with glaucoma in 1995.” Reveals Mike. “And I’ve been treating regions in my right eye where I cannot see a thing. And then it as well as I could. But, in 2019, suddenly my vision was not [the left] one compensates. good. Actually, a few years before, I had surgery for a cataract For example, before I could in my right eye. And, after that, my right eye was not good read a book. The whole page, enough. And then I complained to my doctor. He said, ‘Yeah, but the surgery [went] okay.’ And it’s getting worse and worse, I could read very fast, because but I had the other one, so I was not worried. But, the problem I would comprehend the paragraphs as one phrase. is, my doctor, he failed. He didn’t realize it was the glaucoma Now I have to read line by eating at the eye. And then, when it finally hit the other eye, line, because the other line my vision was a mess. disappears. And so, it’s very “And then, I went to another doctor, and the pressure was frustrating. I made plans that, very high. And I remember he said it was glaucoma and we COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

Above: At his studio, Mike poses for the camera in 2011.

Below: As of presstime, this Mike Deodato-drawn cover for Spawn #346 [Oct. 2023] just hit the shops.

This beaut is named Cy-Gor, a (you guessed it!) cybernetic gorilla!

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Above: Unspecified Star Wars Tales page by Mike, shared by the artist. Below: Ye Ed first became acquainted with Mike’s artistry with his awesome run on The Incredible Hulk with brilliant writer Bruce Jones, back in the early 2000s.

AN EVOLUTION OF STYLE As the 2000s progressed, Deodato became more cinematic with his art. The gaudiness of his Image-worshiping work was replaced by chiaroscuro and deliberate pacing on the page.

“I didn’t think about it, but what I see is now I have more control, more understanding of the narrative, of the storytelling. So, I don’t worry about [a weakness in storytelling] anymore. For example, in 2001, I started doing The Hulk. I deliberately didn’t want to do any fancy panels or any fancy layouts.

I wanted to concentrate on the storytelling. First, because I was working with Bruce Jones, a great storyteller. So, you just have to draw it exactly like he described it and it will work. You have a class in storytelling. So, I wanted to make it very boring, if you could call it that, in a classical way, one panel after the other. I even made the space between panels more distant, so you couldn’t confuse one panel with another. I had all this careful care with the storytelling. I finally learned that the story is more important than everything else. Everything I put on a

page has to have a meaning to tell the story better. If I put in a big scene or a crooked panel, it has to [have] meaning, not just because I want to make it look nice. But the effect on the reader has to be that a panel is crooked because they must pay attention to it. If I do something different, it is to grab their attention. I have to have a meaning to everything on the page.

I finally understood that.”

Part of Deo’s continued evolution on the page came from the inspiration he took from the work of Jim Steranko’s version of Outland. “Oh, man! I wanted to do something like that. And I also saw Chris Bachalo doing that, with the lines of the panels crossing each other. So, I mixed those styles, and I created something I think is very original. It’s very neat. And I used this on Original Sin, Berserker Unbound, The Resistance, and Bad Mother. I like that because it keeps the narrative very fluid and, at the same time, it makes it look like a puzzle. And I can cross the lines and divide things, so it can feel like a camera is moving. And, at the same time, it gives movement to the page.

I have been using that a lot. I might get tired someday.”

Deo was just as inventive while working on various Star Wars properties. “Al Williamson’s stuff inspired me to do my Star Wars. I did mine thinking, ‘I’m Al Williamson.’ What would he do here? So, I used a lot of horizontal panels to look like a movie screen. I eliminated the [borders] around the panels to make them more ‘free.’ It’s a very different approach from my other stuff. It’s more cinematic, in terms of visuals. When I cast my characters, people can complain. This time I had to do it so the characters look like the actors. It was great to find reference because they are everywhere. You can find references everywhere for spaceships and stuff.

The only bad part was dealing with the licensing company… they are a pain in the ass. I remember the last time I did something for Star Wars; it was a cover that I did five times. The same cover with changes. The last time I said, ‘Okay, I’m not going to change it anymore. You use it or not.’ So, they asked the colorist to make the changes. But, in the comic, it was easy to make little changes. Like, I wanted to make Darth Vader’s head a little smaller. Because he has that big head that doesn’t fit the character. I wanted him to look stronger, but they didn’t want that. But doing [that in] the interior pages was just fine.”

Obviously, Deodato’s evolution was not influenced by only one purposeful decision. “Yeah, it’s very organic. If I like something, then I may say, ‘I should try this.’”

THE INDEPENDENT SPIRIT That same “I should try this” spirit certainly played a part in the unique path that Deo took to joining the world of creator-owned properties. “It started when I published the Cartoon Art of Mike Deodato. It’s always strange when I say my own name on that book, because I’m, like, talking in third person. Like I became ‘that’ guy. But when I put my name on a book, it’s like I’m promoting my own brand. I could use a more creative name for the book, but putting my name on it is like my Coca-Cola brand, or something like that. It’s a way of marketing myself. I made this book with a lot of cartoons I did for my family to give them as a gift. When I had a fight with my wife, I’d do a little cartoon for her and she would forgive me. I did a lot of greeting cards and stuff. A publisher friend of mine convinced me to publish them.

“In the process of editing it, I felt the joy of editing my own book. I was doing detailed writing, I did the lettering, I did the cover… I did everything and it was so fun. It was like doing fanzines again. So, I got the itch. Sometime later, I was interviewed for a program about comics in the ’90s, and I started to #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm, Ltd. Incredible Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Man, that was brutal.”

if it gets worse, I’m gonna draw only the layout and ask somebody to finish it. And then I thought I would also start writing. And that’s one of the reasons I decided to do creator-owned work, because I want to leave something for my family. For me, even though it’s working, it’s not getting worse… but I don’t know. So, I want to leave as much intellectual property of mine to my family. I think it’s gonna work. Sometimes I get frustrated trying but, because of digital, I can blow things up, and sometimes I draw by instinct. I don’t talk much about this because I don’t want people to be ‘Oh, poor guy’. But it’s tough.”

Deo suddenly stops talking about his own issues and switches the conversation back to Frazetta. “So, the guy was a master and he had to work with the left hand.

Thanos TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Berserker Unbound TM & © Jeff Lemire and Mike Deodato, Jr.

talk about my friends. I started thinking, ‘Oh, all of these guys are doing independent stuff. Great, different, creative stuff. And I keep doing only super-heroes for the guys and I’m not writing anything.’ So, I was thinking about this and I decided that it was time for me to create my own stories and to publish them.

“I didn’t have much time, as I was working full-time for Marvel and had a lot of work. So I decided to create short stories and put them in a blog. Just for my own fun. This way I could put out my ideas and be happy to keep working for Marvel. And that became such a good experience. I would work all day for Marvel just to get to the end of the day to do my own stories. I did several stories and a publisher was interested.

They published it as an album called Quadros. It was fantastic.

I did it in a very creative way because I didn’t know how to write long stories. So, I concentrated on creating small, creative stories, playing with logos, and playing with the graphics. And I’m so proud of those stories. And, of course, again, I thought I was going to revolutionize the world of comics. I had very good reviews. I’m very proud. My best work is there. But, of course, nobody noticed, because I was a Marvel guy trying to do independent stuff. But my best stuff is there. I was so happy, and I wanted to do it again, but then I was stuck doing a lot of deadlines. But I kept thinking about that.”

It was spending time in conversations with the Sweet Tooth creator which opened up new worlds to Deo. “When I did Thanos with Jeff Lemire, we loved each other, and he invited me to do something together as an independent. Of course, I wanted to do it. He asked me what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do a barbarian. So, we did that. I was doing six pages a week for Marvel. And I decided to do two pages for my own project on the weekend. So, I was doing eight pages a week. Pencils and inks. I calculated that in one year I would finish the book. It happened, but I almost died in the process because it’s just too much work. That’s when I realized that I could not have both worlds. I could not have the heroes of my childhood and draw my own heroes. So I decided I had to choose.”

Thankfully, Deodato completed a stand-alone tour de force with Lemire before wiping himself out. Berserker Unbound became a tremendous critical success for the creators, and for colorist Frank Martin. It was another opportunity for Mike, with a highly inventive story by Lemire, to put a creative twist into the sword and sandals world made famous by Frank Frazetta.

Unfortunately for Marvel, and fans of their books, the joy of working on Berserker made Mike’s choice an easy one.

“I told Marvel, one year ahead of time, because one year ahead of my contract expiration they usually made me an offer. So, to save everybody from the awkwardness, I told them that I was not going to sign and that I was going to take some years to do my own stuff. I explained my reasons and they were very supportive. Then, when I announced online that I was going to leave Marvel and Axel (Alonzo was already running AWA/Upshot at the time) heard about it, he got in touch with me COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

and made a proposal to work with him. Because Axel is one of the few friends I have in the business — real friends — I trust him. I trusted him before and I trust him now. I’m a big fan of his skills. He didn’t even sell me the pitch because I was sold on him. As soon as I left Marvel, I started working for Axel.”

Axel was — and is — one of Deo’s greatest advocates. The renowned editor said, “I had always been an admirer of Mike’s, dating back to his days drawing Wonder Woman. When I saw some pin-ups and sequential art, where he was experimenting with the use of heavy shadow, I thought, ‘This is it — the style he should work in!’”

When Alonso, who was a brilliant editor at the House of Ideas between 2000–2017, was asked his favorite of Mike’s Marvel work, he is quick to respond, “Mike’s run on Incredible Hulk with Bruce Jones blew me away. His chiaroscuro art style infused the series with a sense of wonder and scale and dread rarely if ever seen before.”

Never one to rest on his own past success, Alonso moved on from Marvel. “I co-founded AWA in 2018, a few months after I left Marvel. I saw an opportunity to offer creators the financial stability of work-for-hire and the creative freedom and perks of creator-owned. The moment Mike expressed his desire to do creator-owned projects on social media, I reached out.”

Above: Mike shared his cartoons drawn for family in this Kickstarter book from 2014, still available on Amazon. Below: Deo’s 80-page album, Quadros [2015]. Bottom: He worked with writer Jeff Lemire on the four-issue Berserker Unbound, for Dark Horse, in 2019.

Inset left: Mike did his own series for Image Comics in the 1990s, Jade Warriors, which (of course) emphasized his expertise at depicting exaggerated female figures. He recently revived the concept and launched a Kickstarter campaign for an Absolute Edition.

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This page: Two of Mike Deodato’s assignments at AWA/Upshot are The Resistance, above, written

by J. Michael Straczynski and Bad Mother, below, scripted by gifted novelist Christa Faust.

for any artist. In contrast, Bad Mother was a character-driven indie film — a challenge I hoped he’d embrace, and he did.

Redemption offered a bit of both worlds: a Spaghetti Western set in a dystopic Road Warrior-esque future. I knew Mike loved Westerns, so I offered it to him first.”

Christa Faust, writer of both Bad Mother and Redemption, was a little bit of a ‘fish out of water’ in the comics business when she first paired with Deodato. “I’m a novelist and a relative newcomer to the world of comics, so I had no expectations at all. I learned so much from him and he was never impatient with me for asking so many silly questions as I figured things out along the way. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner and teacher.”

Working with Faust was a complete change of pace for Mike. Decades of drawing hyper-sexy women would not have made him the obvious choice for the grounded female characters that Faust invests into her stories. But he accepted the challenge to serve her vision and her characters. As Faust shares, “You don’t see a lot of older female protagonists in comics, and I loved the nuance, imperfections, and complex expressions that he brought to these rough, time-worn faces.

Even the younger characters in those two series never felt generic. Each character seemed like a real person, like someone you might know.”

Mike shares, “Bad Mother and Redemption was a big change and very welcomed, because I could prove that I’m not just the guy who drew ‘bad girls.’ I was drawing a mother and April was not another great body. She was even a little fat. No powers, no nothing. It’s a great thriller. And I love how I actually got lost in the big exchange between the mother and the daughter at the end of the book. That exchange was fantastic. It really caught my attention. And, in Redemption, I always liked Westerns and never had the chance to draw one.

But I had the chance to draw a 60-year-old gal, nothing like I was famous for, and it was amazing. I chose not to use the crossing panels. I chose to use a classic approach, with panel after panel. I started using Zip-A-Tone again to make it even more dated. And it was great. I’m so happy with it.”

Much as Christa Faust was new to Mike’s work, his discovery of her fiction came from reading her comics scripts. “I never heard about her before. But when I read Bad Mother, I fell in love with her writing. I went after her books. I bought Money Shot. I loved it. I complained to her about it because she killed that character. She said her mom [complained], too. But she’s amazing. She’s amazing and I love her. She’s so nice. And when I had the chance to choose another story, and there was one from her, of course, I wanted to work with her again.”

Mike had shared with me through social media that his favorite fight scene from his whole career took place in the pantry in Bad Mother. “I love that sequence, too!” said Faust after I conveyed Deo’s opinion. “It was a real challenge to write a gritty and believable fight between unequal opponents, but it was important to me that April not suddenly become some kind of magical ass-kicking super-hero during that scene. Deodato nailed it so perfectly, ratcheting up the intensity through the characters’ expressions and the feeling of motion and desperation in each panel.

“As a novelist, I tend to tell stories through the internal monologue of the character, but that kind of access to a character’s thoughts isn’t possible in comics. He taught me how to think visually and tell stories through action in a new way.

I feel like we brought out the best in each other and filled in each other’s blanks in a way that made the final product better than either one of us could have managed on our own.” #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Resistance TM & © J. Michael Straczynski and Mike Deodato, Jr. Bad Mother TM & © Christina Faust and Mike Deodato, Jr.

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NEW FRONTIERS AT AWA/UPSHOT “The way that I work for Axel at AWA is a little bit different from the way I worked with Lemire. Lemire was like something casual. ‘Do you want to work with me?’ ‘Yeah, sure.’ With Axel, he’s more like a matchmaker. He knows what I like. So he knows somebody that makes a good ‘date.’ It’s not so organic, but it works, because it’s Axel.

He’s the best in the business and I trust him. So, he gave me three scripts to choose from and I chose Bad Mother.

But then he came to me with an idea. ‘Okay, we’re gonna launch these main titles, all the main characters, and would you like to do it first and then you go back to Bad Mother?’”

The property that interrupted the start of Bad Mother was The Resistance, with J. Michael Straczynski, Deo’s old Spider-Man scribe. “It was great because not only had I worked with Straczynski before, but he’s also a great writer and great to work with. We had the chance to work from zero to create everything. Which was different from Marvel or DC. Even if the characters belong to AWA, we have a stake in it of equity. So, if a movie gets made, we will not only get the credit, but we will also get money, too. They treat their creators in a much better way.

So that was great. I thought I was starting very slow with Bad Mother with a few characters, then I had a big cast of characters with a big story instead. But it was great. It was fantastic. After that, I was back on Bad Mother again. It was a big change doing Bad Mother and then Redemption from what I had done for 24 years.”

Alonso shares his view of this new and exciting time with Mike. “I truly felt no one could do the origin story of the Resistance Universe but Mike. J.Michael Straczynski had penned a deeply psychological story told on the grandest scale, predicting COVID-19 a year before it happened. It was a blockbuster with a huge cast and unlimited special effects budget — a real challenge

Not All Robots TM & © Mark Russell and Mike Deodato, Jr. Red Zone TM & © Cullen Bunn and Mike Deodato, Jr.

FAMILIAR FACES Much as Paul Gulacy, one of Mike’s idols, had done during his classic run with Shang Chi, Mike now uses plenty of photo references when designing his characters. “It’s like casting my own movie. It’s so great. And I think that changed in some ways, when I started doing digital in 2009, my drawing was a little bit too clean. I understood that I had to make it look dirtier because the tendency with technology is to make it cleaner.”

Linda Hamilton, Lance Henriksen, Sonia Braga, Christina Hendricks, Kobe Bryant, Angelina Jolie, and many more famous faces have starred in Deo’s books during his tenure at AWA. Ed Harris and Harvey Keitel have a special place in his heart.

“Yeah, I love them both. Man, if Harvey Keitel was young now, he’d be the perfect Wolverine. I saw the movie Bad Lieutenant and he was so very strong. At Marvel, I drew my actors with so much distinction when I cast them that I had to redraw a double-page spread with 20 or more panels in it to make it less and less like Tommy Lee Jones. At AWA, they are much more open about this.”

The ability to capture celebrity likenesses is one of Mike’s strengths. Unfortunately, not every actor enjoys being represented in a comic book… without a paycheck coming from it. Mike has taken various verbal barbs from celebrities about this very notion. However, there are many actors who have segued into various comic book universes and who enjoy the sight of Hollywood contemporaries appearing as characters in books. One such entertainer, outstanding comedic actor Patton Oswalt, who has already been part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Pip (mid-credits scene in The Eternals) and with his side-splitting turn as M.O.D.O.K., just loves Mike’s use of celebrities in his art.

Several back-and-forth fact-finding messages between Oswalt and Deo led to an April 12, 2023, tweet by Oswalt, “I love how @mikedeodato ‘casts’ the characters in the comics he draws. In @cullenbunn’s Red Zone, the hero is clearly Vincent Cassel, the antagonist is Brian Cox, and there’s a deadly contract killer who’s… Carol Burnett. Genius.”

AWARDS SEASON AND NEW VENTURES Following its release in 2022, Mike Deodato and author Mark Russell were celebrated with both the Eisner and Ringo awards for their excellence with Not All Robots. “I actually had doubts about not being the right artist for Not All Robots,” Deo said.

“Because, when I read it, I thought it was one of the most intelligent scripts I’ve ever read. That says a lot, because I have been working with a lot of great guys. It’s amazing how, in a few pages, he, in an organic way, presents the whole world. He presents the main character and he gives depth to every charCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

acter in just a few pages. I was so impressed by that. Making critiques of society is so good. And I didn’t think I would love this, but I did. I didn’t think I was prepared to do it. I thought it could work better with somebody like Dave Gibbons because of the subtlety of the humor. I didn’t think I was able to do it.

I told Axel and he was, ‘No, no, no, no, you can do it. Your style will actually make it grounded humor.’ So, I said, ‘Okay.’”

Mike continues with his reasons for hesitating. “Another thing was drawing robots. I never liked to draw even Iron Man. It’s all mechanical and you cannot see the face. That’s hard. I had to rely on my ability to draw humans and to draw body language to make the robots have some kind of feeling. It was a challenge for me but, in the end, I loved it.

I loved to read it, but didn’t know if I could have the confidence to make it. So, it was fun for me. I drew a billion robots. At the end, there’s a change of scenario that’s very, very well thought-out. If I ever thought about getting a prize for something, this would be it, because it’s very good.”

Immediately following the award-winning success of

This page: Above are two pages from Not All Robots, written by Mark Russell and art by Deo. Below is a faux movie poster promoting Cullin Bunn’s Red Zone. Art by MD.

Above: In 2002, Mike drew the Tigra four-issue mini-series [May– Aug.], which sported a nifty orange motif on his covers. Inset left: Detail from Mike’s variant cover art for The Immortal Hulk #16 [June 2019]. Below: Hermes Tadeu, the talented Brazilian colorist, who was tragically murdered at the age of 25, during a robbery in Dec. 2003.

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and it is a narrator all the time. There are no word balloons. It was like the old Warren stuff, like in Creepy and Eerie. It’s just a narrator talking about how some alien took the earth and stuff through the devices we use; through iPhones. The thing is it covers the whole story of humanity from the beginning to the iPhones and television.

There are no sequences or a page where people are talking. None at all. Every single panel is a different scene, telling another story without [word] balloons, without interaction. And it’s crazy because I have to create every single panel with new characters, new backgrounds, and new everything. And most of them have a lot of people because it shows how it’s affecting the world and people. So, it’s not easy. It’s not easy to make it look interesting and not easy to draw.”

(CURRENT) LAST STOP AT AWA AND ENTER McFARLANE At the time of this writing, the final series Mike has done for AWA is Red Zone (previously mentioned by Patton Oswalt). “It’s the first time I’ve worked with Cullen Bunn. And I love the story,” the artist said. “Axel sent me the script a long time ago and asked me to do a cover presentation for him to present to the board to be approved. So I did that in color. I created the logo, the best I could of course, I’m not a designer. And I forgot about it. And then, when I was finishing Absolution, is when he said the project was approved. This story was something I had never done before, a spy story, and it was like working on a 007 comic. There’s a lot of strange enemies and it was in Russia. I could once more use my friend Vincent Cassel as the reference for the hero. So, I loved it.”

The next project being developed for Mike at AWA fell through. This left an opening in his schedule and Axel gave the thumbs up for Mike to fill that opening through work for other publishers. Years after falling in love with Todd McFarlane’s art, Deo would now be creating covers for Todd’s Spawn character.

“First of all, people warned me, ‘Oh, don’t trust McFarlane. The guy’s hard to deal with.’ I went on a Zoom meeting with him and, as we started talking, it was like I knew him forever. And we kept talking, talking, talking about stuff from the past. He’s a great guy! I love the guy. Then he asked me to choose a character. I didn’t know that there were so many Spawn characters. So I chose four. I did one for the clown, another one was the Medieval Spawn, another was for the gunslinger, and the last one was the cyber-gorilla. Because everybody likes to draw gorillas. I did the four covers in two days. The editor said, “What?!

I didn’t even finish the contract.” They asked for minor changes just to be up to date with the uniforms and get little stuff approved. And that was it. It was very, very nice. They already paid me, so it’s good.

“When I saw Spawn in the ’90s, it was a shock for me. It really had an impact on me and my style. So much so that, every trick that MacFarlane used in a Spawn book, I was using on every page. So, it was a bloody mess.

You can sense the impact it had on me.

I told him that. And so it was a great experience. It was great to finally meet him in person.

“Anyway, I’m so grateful because they did what they did,” he said, giving one last nod to his love of Image Comics. “And they are like the Beatles of comics, you know? They fought the big companies and they won. And they created a company now that is the house of so many great creations.

It’s the house of so many independent comics.” #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

NewThink TM & © Gregg Hurwitz and Mike Deodato, Jr. Namor TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Not All Robots came the suspenseful series, The Fourth Man, written by Jeff McComsey (Grendel, Kentucky). “He thinks of casting the way I do,” Mike said. “So, instead of me casting it, he sent me a script with all the cast. He sent me photos, he sent me reference. It was great. I didn’t have to think about it. And they are perfect for it.

“It’s fantastic because it’s a crime story.

Every issue, you have a body that was murdered, and they try to find out who did it. It’s a Fargo kind of story, where the crime goes wrong, and then there are a lot of mistakes. In the end, they had this fourth body, and we find out what happened to all of them. There are four issues, but more pages every issue. Four issues for four bodies.”

Absolution would follow hard on the heels of The Fourth Man. This was a return to the alpha female action roles Mike had illustrated previously in his career. This time, Deo cast Gérard Depardieu as the villain against one of his favorite celebrity swipes.

“Mila Jovovich!” Mike exclaims. “She is a favorite of mine. I cast her in The Hulk. Every time I have the chance, I use her because she is so gorgeous. She has these intense looks. The movie she did with Bruce Willis is amazing. The science fiction one… The Fifth Element.”

Deo is fully aware of his unique return to familiar waters. “I wrote an essay in the first issue of Absolution where I talk about the feeling of déjà vu. Because, in the ’90s, I worked on a title about a female assassin that was trying to get redemption, while fighting for her life because she was being resurrected (Elektra, of course). And then, at the same time, ‘Mike Deodato’ died, and I tried to resurrect my own career. And then, almost 30 years later, I’m doing another book about another female assassin looking for redemption, trying to fight for her life. And it’s written by the same guy, Peter Milligan. I’m in a new stage of my life, as well. I left Marvel, I’m doing creator-owned, and I’m shaking up my career once again. So, it’s a very weird coincidence, but a very happy one.

“But what changed is not Peter Milligan, but me. My approach with my art changed a lot. Back then, what I was doing was, like, automatic. I was not thinking and I was not in love with comics anymore. So I was just repeating the same formula. And I was not doing what the script asked for. I was doing just beautiful women in sexy poses, no matter what the scene was about. So it’s a different book now. A different me. Now I am a new chapter. I am experienced.

So, every scene has a purpose. I have to tell the story the best way possible.

If she’s sexy in the scene, that’s because she has to be sexy in the scene, not because I want to draw sexy. So, I think, of course, Peter Milligan matured in his writing, too. It’s much better than before. And it’s a great book. It has a lot of criticism about our society nowadays, even though it’s in the future. So, it’s not just a book about a sexy assassin. It’s much deeper. It’s not so shallow as my books about bad girls used to be. I’m much deeper as an artist, I hope.”

Mike, on occasion, wonders aloud if he could have approached Wonder Woman back in his youth the way he approaches work now. With a laugh, he said,“I would love to go back in time.

Sometimes I think about this. I have this childish dream, ‘Oh, if I could go back in time and draw in this style, I would revolutionize the comics.’”

Even in this new time of creative successes, not every project is easy.

Deo shares his thoughts on NewThink, scripted by Gregg Hurwitz. “This was the hardest work I have ever done. And I thought it would have been Not All Robots. I mean, I looked at the script

Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Superman, The Flash, Starro TM & © DC Comics. King King TM & © RKO Pictures, LLC.

MAJOR VIRAL INCIDENT AND RETURN TO DC The release of the sequel to the Black Panther film — Wakanda Forever — was proceeded by plenty of questions and concerns. How would director Ryan Coogler move forward without the wonderful Chadwick Bozeman in the lead role? The loss of his talent to cancer weighed heavily on the hearts of legions of his fans. Also, there were comic book purists who took offense at the casting of another terrific actor, Tenoch Huerta, in the role of Namor. This casting changed the Bill Everett-created character to become the first indigenous Mexican Marvel hero on screen. But the unfortunate timing of a tongue-in-cheek comment

by Deodato, who had illustrated books with both the Black Panther and Namor in them, associating him as among those who challenged the casting.

“I’m exercising a lot, so I have the right to say that I look strong on social media. I want to get some compliments like, ‘Hey, you’re an old dude, but you’re okay.’ That’s normal. I had only seen one picture of the movie of Namor and it was that one with the guy going out of the sea. And I didn’t think it looked good. I didn’t even know the actor. I didn’t even know if it was CGI. I had no idea. I didn’t care, I just wanted to make a good joke. I was unsupervised (because nowadays my wife has to approve when I post). So, I did the joke, ‘Ha, ha, ha… I like that.’ Then I post it and then it all was crazy. Suddenly, I was a ‘racist.’ I was ‘angry’ at Marvel. I was ‘angry’ at the actor. No one and no site ever reached out to ask me what my intention was. So I made a statement and I just explained what it was a joke, and that’s it. I got death threats all week. But now I have to be more careful of what I post because I can be canceled for anything nowadays. But, I swear to God, it was just a joke, and people took it out of [context]. Now I only post polemic views after asking my wife’s opinion first.”

The social media post in question — a comparison of photos of the wide back of actor Tenoch Huerta and trim back of Deodato. The text in the post, “You can tell somebody screwed things up when a character from a movie looks in worst shape than the 60-year-old artist who drew him.” And, yes, somehow this small joke made the national news cycle.

With an opening in his schedule, Mike took the opportunity to return for work at DC Comics. A Shazam cover would mark his first ‘welcomed’ work at DC since an editor refused to honor his contract years before [see CBC #33]. Now, a short turn in Flash #800 will lead to a new series kick-off, with Flash #1. “We are adjusting to each other’s goals in this new team,” Deo said. “DC right now is in change. They are changing people there. And so, I’m hopeful. I just wanted to get started. I did a 10- page preview [for Flash #800] and it was great. I love the writer. Simon Spurrier’s writing is so good. It matches my skills. It has horror and feels like an Alan Moore script, you know. It feels like Watchmen and Swamp Thing. You feel that sense of terror around things and you don’t know what’s going to happen. And I love that.

“I remember when I was a kid I was afraid of monsters and I used to imagine Iron Man coming and fighting the werewolves and stuff. So I like it when people mix super-heroes and horror. I think it’s a great combination, at least for me. That’s why I love those stories by Steve Englehart, when Captain America and Falcon fight werewolves, and that story by Jack Kirby with Superman going into the underworld and fighting off all kinds of monsters. It was so weird and great for me because they were fighting my monsters. It was good.

“So I’m hopeful that we get [Flash #1] started and that all the turmoil in the beginning of script discussions be all for the best, and that the result is going to be great.”

Since Deodato is returning to his Big Two publishing roots with Flash, it seems appropriate, at a time of reflection, to ask if there was a character he’d want to try his hand at again. “Man, I really would like to have another shot on Batman. Yeah, because, you know… it’s Batman! Everybody wants to draw Batman. I like what I did back then, but I was in transition. I was still doing things in a rush. There was a lot of energy, especially that book with Bane in it.

A lot of energy. But I really would like to play more with my style now, with a great writer. It would be nice, you know? Yeah, so many things I want to do. So little time.”

Opposite page: At top is a detail from the cover of NewThink, the AWA/Upshot title written by Gregg Hurtwitz, an assignment artist Mike Deodato, Jr., called the hardest of his life!

The series was published in 2022. At bottom is the source of a controversy Mike found himself in when he posted this comparison of his muscled back to that of the character of Namor, the Sub Mariner, in the movie, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever [2022], as played by actor Tenoch Huerta. It was a joke that went viral with the “internet outrage machine” accusing Deo of “body shaming” the performer. Sigh.

This page: Mike has made a triumphant return to DC Comics with a series of variant covers that will appear by the time you read this. At far left is Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. King Kong #3 [Dec. 2023]. At left is Flash encountering Starro on the variant cover for Titans: Beast World #6 [Mar. 2024].

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

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comics in the library

Another Fiery Gestation

The glorious fate of Will Franz and Sam Glanzman’s “Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz” comics altogether. In 1992, Roger Broughton’s reprint company Avalon Communications (a.k.a. A+ Comics) also began Hi, folks! This column is a continuation from last issue and it’s reprinting the saga, this time in black-&-white, and Broughton the second of three revolving around three graphic stories that persuaded Franz to write an ending, after 32 years, with the had a long gestation period between first being published intention of having Glanzman draw it. Alas, his company went and finally reaching their rightful end decades later. Our first belly-up before printing the conclusion. example was Dracula by Roy Thomas and Dick Giordano, which Over the next 20-plus years, those who loved the series took 30 years from first publication to its completed storyline. tried to keep the saga in the public eye, poking and prodding When we left off last issue, we were discussing the fate of anyone who’d listen as to how great this story truly was. In The Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz, one of the first genuine 2016, Dover Press editor Drew Ford published the U.S.S. Stegraphic novels, which launched in 1967, created by Will Franz vens collection in a single volume (endorsed by two U.S. Presand Sam Glanzman and published by (of all publishers) Charl- idents, one Republican, one Democrat) with a long, insightful ton Comics. During its original run in Charlton’s Fightin’ Army, introduction by the editor of this magazine, one Jon B. Cooke. it had inadvertently become a symbol of anti-war comics, even A possibility finally arose to get the completed Willy Schultz though it hadn’t necessarily been intended so by the creators. into print. Franz was ready, but Glanzman, now in his 90s and The original story revolved around American tank combeset by multiple health problems, confessed he wasn’t up to mander Schultz, stationed in North Africa, who is falsely accused drawing the last segment and so Drew and Willy needed to by a jealous fellow officer of murdering their incompetent com- find a new artist. This writer suggested to Sam’s wife, Sue, that manding officer. The victim’s father is a one-star general who, noted war artist Wayne Vansant was not only an admirer of in his grief, is only too willing to make Schultz his target for SJG’s work, but that his approach was not too far off from the grief and vengeance. Schultz is summarily court-martialed and Glanzman style. Wayne agreed to draw the final segment and a condemned to death, but he escapes that fate during a LuftKickstarter campaign to finance the volume was discussed. waffe air raid. While escaping, he comes upon a crew of dead However, by this time, Drew Ford had left Dover Press and German soldiers and switches uniforms in an effort to remain launched his own company, It’s Alive Press. The Kickstarter safe behind enemy lines. Fluent in German (learned from his campaign successfully raised the money but a continuing set immigrant parents), he survives for the next year by jumping of problems befell the project. Drew reported the funds were back and forth from being an American soldier to masqueradpurportedly stolen by a Chinese printer, and there were other ing as a German. At no time is Schultz a traitor to America, but a financial delays, combined with finding a new printer and the simply a man seeking to survive an unjust conviction during a COVID epidemic hobbled business in the U.S. and China, which horrible world war. greatly delayed international shipping. Finally, all the artwork, The serial made it through 14 chapters when it was abruptly both old and new, was assembled and the old material was cancelled, in 1970, after, it is said, a young man remastered. Drew finally found an American publisher — Dark with an influential father desired conscientious Horse — to come to the rescue and guarantee publication of the objector status when drafted during the Vietnam book, which was announced for Fall 2022 publication. Then, on War and he cited the feature as a reason for want- Sept. 26, 2022, while making a run to his storage unit, Drew, ing to be a non-combatant. According to Franz, who was then suffering from a case of COVID-19, was discovthe Army complained to Charlton and the writer, ered unconscious in his parked car. The editor-publisher would who was still a teenager, was fired and blacknever awaken from his coma and, six days after being found, balled in the comics industry — with no stories Drew passed away, on October 2, at the age of 48. of his that were later published ever actually Sadly, Drew never got to hold in his hands the long-awaitcredited to him. Glanzman, who’d worked for ed — 56 years between start and completion — collected and Charlton at that point for some dozen years, had finished edition of The Lonely War of Captain Willy Schutz. Nor his workload reduced by two-thirds by the outfit. would Sam Glanzman, who died, at 92, on July 12, 2017. Willy Franz completely left comics behind in 1973 Franz suffered a heart attack in 2016, but he survived to see the for a variety of teaching jobs. Glanzman moved book go on sale in January, 2023. The hardcover contained a to DC in 1972, largely freelancing for them over preface by Franz, 168 reprinted pages illustrated by Glanzman, the next 25 years, producing his fantastic “U.S.S. and 20 concluding pages illustrated by Wayne Vansant, all Stevens” saga, a Haunted Tank graphic novel accompanied by an informative introduction by Steve Bissette. I (which needs to be published as such) with strongly urge readers to pick up this game-changing war novel.

Archie Goodwin, in 1972–74, and many other (This just might result in getting the equally hard-hitting Franz/ great stories.

Glanzman “Iron Corporal” Charlton war serial back into print!)

“Willy Schultz” fell into limbo for the next 15 We’re out of space again, so next time for sure on years. Charlton published the first four chapters the third long gestation candidate, one John Law, in 1985–86 just before the company abandoned Detective. See ya then!

by RICHARD J. ARNDT

Above: When Will Franz was a mere teenager, he conceived of the anti-war series, “The Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz,” drawn

by Sam Glanzman, for Charlton Comics. Below: The late publisher Drew Ford was a champion for both writer and artist and his production collecting the series was released

by It’s Alive Press in 2023.

#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Sgt. Willy Schultz TM & © the respective copyright holder.

40

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

41

All characters TM & © DC Comics. Dateline Hembeck TM & © Fred Hembeck. COLORS BY: GLENN WHITMORE

“Rebirth” era at DC comics, the company

rarest air in the mainstream

crossover volumes in the 1990s between

comics industry. He is a

DC and Marvel Comics, and the “Zero

creator who is both an

Hour” event for DC. And, of course,

exemplary artist and writer.

Jurgens was an integral member of the

That separates him and the

crew behind the “Death of Superman”

likes of Walter Simonson,

and subsequent storylines.

Howard Chaykin, John Byrne,

Forty years into his career and

Jim Starlin, Frank Miller, and a

Dan is still a never-ending fountain of

few others from his generation,

creativity. He is, quite simply, at the

from most everyone else. Dan

top of his game and still one of the

possesses great story sense

most sought-after comic book creators

and has proven to be, since his

working today.

earliest outings, one of the true masters of his craft.

I give a big “thank you” to Dan for talking through his career with me over

Dan has been at the center

a span of three months. This time-frame

of many of the major events in

includes marrying off his son during the

comic book history since the late

COVID-19 era and launching a new

1980s. This includes the recent

Booster Gold/Blue Beetle series. — G.B.

42

#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Superman, associated characters TM & © DC Comics. Photo courtesy of Dan Jurgens.

Dan Jurgens is in the

Booster Gold, Cyborg, Batman TM & © DC Comics.

Comic Book Creator: Who are the people who brought you into this world and what impression did they have on you?

Dan Jurgens: In terms of impression my parents made on me, they owned a hardware store on Main Street of a very small, Midwestern town — Ortonville, Minnesota — and they did what any business owner or farmer had to do in that situation: they worked their butts off. My dad literally went to that store seven days a week (though only for a couple hours on Sunday). The value of hard work was on display all the time. More than that, they really encouraged me to follow my passion for drawing. My dad built me a drawing table when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I couldn’t begin to guess how many hours I spent at the board honing my skills. I most likely had a Kirby, Buscema, Adams, Cockrum, Starlin, Grell, or Simonson comic open on the board, so I could look at what they were doing and try to apply it to my own work.

Their encouragement was crucial.

So was my dad’s willingness to let me read comics, because my mom was a bit against the idea. They still remembered the bad news reports from the Kefauver Hearing and Seduction of the Innocent days.

CBC: What effect did that have on you growing up? Being in that type of community as opposed to people who grew up in a large city, like a Pittsburgh?

Dan: I do think it is an area where everybody knew everybody. There is, I think, an attitude of friendship.

People are looking out for each other much more so than you do in a place where you’re much more anonymous, of mutual support, and stuff like that.

Also, in a time where there was a lot of pride and worth placed on a sense of industriousness, a work ethic, an ethic for life, things like that. I think that’s all part of the package.

CBC: Are you an only child?

Dan: I have one sister, who is two years younger than me.

CBC: Growing up the way you did, when did art, or at least the creative process, enter your life?

Dan: I think you have to go with earliest memories there. I always liked to draw. I always liked this idea that I could sit down and draw and create something. And I do believe that, as part of that, in growing up in a small town, in a place and a time where I should say that there were only the three TV networks, and finding your own creative outlets, there was a lot to that. It was very important. So, that was an important part of my background.

I remember being in… I think it was second grade… we all had to sit there one day and do self-portraits. It was one of these things where everyone in the classroom gets their drawing done, and they go hang it up on the walls, and mine looked different than everyone else’s. And, part of it was, because it was better. And then, I started to realize that, “Gee, I’m kind of good at this.” And it was something not only was I good at, but I enjoyed it, and I wanted to pursue

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

it. I would always be the kid who was drawing. Whether it was doodling in a notebook all the time, sitting in my room and drawing all the time, making up my own stories, or whatever. That was always an important part of who I was.

CBC: Every kid draws or paints and it rarely moves forward. Did you think at the time that this would be a life’s pursuit? Or was it something you were going to do just for fun?

Dan: Oh, no. Not at all did I think it was going to be a life’s pursuit, because I didn’t realize anyone did that sort of thing. You know, we’re talking about a time where, let’s say, you’re six, seven, eight years old, I don’t think you’re necessarily aware of the idea that somewhere there are adults who do this and make a socalled “living” at it. That’s just a sort of an alien thought process, I think, to have at that age. I think that it wasn’t until I was probably much more around the time frame of getting into sixth grade (or something like that), where I started to have the appreciation for the idea that somewhere there were adults who apparently worked in a factory creating art. And maybe that’s how it goes. So, at that very young age, I never had that sense.

CBC: What were the things, art related or just in general, that motivated you as a kid? What were the things that tapped on those heartstrings and instilled in you a sense of wonder?

Dan: Part of it is, to go back to that time frame, I did not know comics existed. My first exposure to this idea of comics, super-heroes, that entire art form, was through the old Adam West, live action Batman TV show. I got hooked on it. I was at that prime age, you know — first season — being able to watch it, and just go, “Wow,” like every other kid in the neighborhood.

And, one summer night, I was walking through the neighborhood, and I saw a couple of older kids sitting out on their front stoop and they were looking at these four-color pamphlets. I walked up to see what was going on and that was the first time I saw a comic book.

I distinctly remember, and I was probably around seven years old, these kids were older than me and they had comics that went back a few years, one of them had that classic Batman [#156, June 1963, reprinted in #185, Oct. 1966] cover, “Robin Dies at Dawn.” And I’m just going, “Whoa, Robin’s dead?! How can that be? I just saw him on TV last night?” You know, that kind of thing. And that was my first exposure to the idea that Batman and Robin lived outside the realm of TV, in some different form of media.

I knew of Superman, and so, sitting there and looking at those comics, I was immediately hooked. And my reaction was, when I went home, “Mom, I’ve got to go downtown to the dime store or to the drug store, and buy comics. Because that’s where they said they sell them. And I want a Batman comic.” At that time, Batman was all the craze. And, within a couple of days, I was at the store, they had no Batman comics, so I bought instead Superman #189 [Aug. 1966], and

43

Previous spread: On left top is the wraparound cover art for The Death and Return of Superman Omnibus [2012], with pencils by Dan Jurgens and inks by Jerry Ordway. Left bottom is Dan at . Awesome Con 2018, in Washington, D.C., early spring 2018. On right is, sans trade dress, penciler Dan Jurgens and inker Norm Rapmund cover art for Booster Gold #44 [July 2011]. This page: Top left is Dan at 10, drawing the Batmobile, using, it appears, a Sears Christmas catalog as reference. Top right is, circa 1976, Dan in his latter teen years still drawing away! Below is the first comic book Dan bought, Superman #189 [Aug. 1966], which went on sale just days before the young lad turned seven years old. Of course, by the early 1990s, Dan would go on to have a major impact on the mythos — and life and death — of the Man of Steel.

of the things that you enjoyed that didn’t necessarily build you toward your career?

Dan: Oh, man. I think a lot of it just was the stuff anyone is kind of into at that time. You know, there was, in the ’60s (and I still regard it to be this way) sort of this golden element of TV. Whether it was Star Trek, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Man from U.N.C.L.E.; all of these things that seem quaint and antiquated now, but it was also eye-opening at the time. And that was a great thing. While it’s a little bit different from comics, I think it still relates to comics, and related to kind of what my story interest would be later. Because, of course, subject matter in comics kind of reflected what we would see on TV. Certainly, the space race. Now we’re talking the ’60s, right?

So the space race was such a huge component of what was happening in that decade.

I loved watching sports and following baseball, football, and things like that. And then it’s just all that stuff of being a kid and kind of developing into the person that you become.

CBC: You were able to do that in the unique — I don’t want to call it, “Mayberry-esque” — but, for lack of a better phrase, that type of area where you grew up. You are still in Minnesota, is that correct?

Dan: Yup. Yes, I am.

CBC: Did you exit and travel across the country or have you always resided there?

Dan: Pretty much [stayed] in the area. And, as much as anything, I ended up going to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area to go to college. So, yeah, I guess you can pretty much call me a lifelong resident, at that point.

CBC: What years were you at the Minnesota College of Art and Design?

Dan: Started in ’77 and graduated in ’81.

CBC: I can say this: when I graduated from Colorado State, which has one of the premiere graphic design programs, cartooning was very much frowned upon. What were the general thoughts on cartooning or that type of illustration while you were in college?

Dan: First of all I think it’s important to recognize that, even at that point, as much as I was into comics, my interests were re#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Superman TM & © DC Comics. Photos courtesy of Dan Jurgens.

44

that was my first comic.

CBC: What was on the cover of #189? Remind me which one that is.

Dan: It’s in the “Go-Go Check” era. It’s got Superman on the planet Krypton on the cover and Krypto is barking at him like he’s going to go tear Superman’s leg off (because Krypto doesn’t recognize Superman). So, that was my first comic that I ever bought. To go back full circle to your earlier question, that concept of comics, and the artwork inside them, really did fuel me. And not just the artwork, but the stories. And I think, even at that young age, it was something that made me want to be both writer and artist, because it was even just a couple of years after that, when I started to write and draw my own stories.

And, in some cases, fairly detailed, 15-page stories. Sometimes with existing characters, sometimes with brand new characters.

But the concept of comics, the wonderment of stories, and the wonderment of the art fueled me.

CBC: The term, “fanboy,” in comics is often used as a way of distinguishing people. Sometimes as a form of ridicule.

Sometimes it alters social strata for people who distinguish themselves that way. Growing up, were you a pretty social guy?

Dan: Yeah, I was. But not in any way that had anything to do with comics. I didn’t really know that many other people who were into it. To talk about whether you are social or not is a weird thing because, if you are pursuing any sense of art, that is something that’s kind of a solitary environment anyway.

Beyond that, I thought that I was a fairly social person who was out there doing stuff. And, obviously, I had no concept whatsoever of anything like fandom. I had no clue. I never went to a convention, really… well, I take that back: I was going to say that I never had gone to a convention until I was a pro.

That’s not quite the case. I went to a convention when I was in college, at one point. And that whole idea of comic fandom was a complete mystery to me. It’s like, “Oh, other people are interested in this too? And here I thought I was the only one.”

You know, that kind of thing.

CBC: With that being the case, as you were growing up and having a great interest in art and in storytelling as a whole, what were some of the other pursuits that you had? What were some

Batman, Robin TM & © DC Comics.

ally graphic design. That’s what I thought I was going to be. And that would have been fine. I loved it. While I was in college, I’d putz around and play around with the comics stuff on the side, when I had time. Because I still had that desire to make it sort of a creative outlet. That’s what I did for fun. You know, you kind of get your school assignments, and that’s what I did for the stuff that had to get done, but this is the stuff that I did for fun.

And I really enjoyed it, that kind of thing.

And I don’t know that I really saw it as something I was going to be doing, for sure. And, part of that is, because if you go back to that time frame, you could pick up quite a few different Comic Journals and everything, where what was coming through there, was that comics were dead, you know? There was no future in it. Comics were in pretty shabby shape and, at that time — and I’m not a professional expert on how the direct market emerged, exactly when it happened — but it’s fair to say that it was in its infancy. Had we, as an industry, been totally dependent on the newsstand at that time, those articles would have been accurate, I believe.

I kind of looked at it and said, “This isn’t going to happen.

There’s no future there.” So, I just kept concentrating on what I was doing in terms of design. I had a couple of great student internships, a couple of great jobs. It has, part of this, kept that interest up until I was doing more and more of it on the side.

Then, fortunately, I had a couple of teachers who knew that was still a passion of mine. And I’d say, “Can I cheat and do a little bit of a comic-related project as part of solving this project’s problem?” (Or something like that.) And they would let me do it, so I could kind of keep up that sense of interest and keep honing those skills, even though it wasn’t exactly targeted. If that makes sense.

CBC: I’m happy to ask this, as I’m talking to a fellow graphic design major: who did you work for? What job did you just dive into and really enjoy? Were you working for a specific company or were you brokered out through others?

Dan: No. As a matter of fact, after my sophomore year, I went to work for the Honeywell Corporation, which, at that time, was a major defense contractor, and I was working in their art department. We did all sorts of materials for their various clients.

So, for example, they were doing the flight control systems for NASA for the Space Shuttle. So, I was building a portfolio that had all sorts of illustrations of those things — Space Shuttles and so many other things. They were involved in numerous different defense systems, so I had all sorts of illustrations that became part of my portfolio, that were based on those various things. Some of it was technical illustration, some of it was design, some of it was more commercial-oriented illustration, and I was learning how to work as a professional in the couple of years that I was there.

Those things that ended up being part of my portfolio, certainly lent themselves to the nature of what comics were. So, I ended up with a portfolio that might have, “Oh, here’s a fun shot of Batman” (or whomever) in the portfolio, but here are some things that are real printed materials, in terms of other things that in many cases were pen-&-ink that lent themselves to the nature of comics.

CBC: How would you say that, having come from that advertising — creating for a specific client — background helped you move forward with your own development and your career later on?

Dan: I think there are, gosh, so many ways. So, if you talk about design: what are the elements of design? You talk about color, you talk about composition, you talk about learning to communicate clearly. Some of those are just ethics of what COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

is good design. Then, if you go beyond that, and say you are working professionally, what do you learn? Any time you are producing something, you are having to produce for someone else — there is always a client. And, for me, it might have been an engineer, it might have been someone in the military, but there’s always a client. You [have to] discern from them what their needs are. “What is it that you need to have from this piece and how do I meet up with that?”

So I think there are very tangible skills of learning how to work as a professional, because you find out, really, what you’re there for is to help the client meet his or her needs, as opposed to doing just whatever it is you want to do. All of that goes together. And I keep coming back to that phrase. But, what I always say is, by the time you show up looking for work, whether it’s in comics or anything else, you have a toolbox and, in that toolbox, you have all these different tools. But what I see so often, if I’m looking at portfolios, is someone who has, like, a hammer and a screwdriver, and nothing else. “You’ve got a bunch of great splash pages here, but I don’t see anything else.

Where are the pliers? Where’s the crescent wrench? I need to see other tools. I’m not seeing that here.”

What I got, by virtue of what I was doing through both my college experience as well as my professional experience, was a toolbox that had a whole bunch of different tools in it. Which gives you a much wider set of skills. So that’s why I keep saying it kind of all comes together. It sounds trite, but that’s what happens.

CBC: This is husband-and-father asking this to another husband-and-father: when did you meet your wife and how unique is it for her to be married to a funny-book dude?

Dan: Well, we actually met in college. She was in college, the same place I was, also a graphic design student, but a couple of years behind me. We just started going out back then,

Top: Located in the “rich-artand-design-community” of the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design was where young Dan Jurgens attended between 1977 and ’81. The artist focused on a planned career as graphic designer, “playing with the comics stuff on the side.” This main building was built in 1974.

Above: The institution’s logo, of a more recent vintage.

Below: Dan vividly recalls this seminal issue of Batman [#156, June 1963]. Bottom: The Batman TV show of 1966–68 made an enormous impact on Dan.

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when we first met, and have been together ever since.

So her being with me is not that much different than, for example, if she worked in the insurance agency, because she’s a graphic designer now and always had been. So the professions have always been related. Not only that, all our friends were in the creative fields, as well. It wasn’t as unique as it might have seemed.

CBC: That is unique to me because I’m never coming across people in my own social circle who have a similar background. And certainly none who were with me in college.

So, the fact that this is a truism for you is something that I’m

Above: In mid-1981, Dan attended one of Mike Grell’s personal appearances, at a Twin Cities comic book shop, a meeting which resulted in the young man getting the Warlord art assignment, which started his professional career in comics. This is a pic of Dan and Mike posing with broad smiles, at a comic convention in 2022.

Below: Very early Dan Jurgens water-color rendering of Travis Morgan, the Warlord. Heritage attributes the work to having been done in the 1980s, though the artist surmised it may have been done before going professional.

#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Warlord TM & © DC Comics. Photo courtesy of Dan Jurgens.

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glad actually happens for people.

Dan: Yeah! And it can all work.

CBC: [Laughs] You have two sons, is that correct?

Dan: Correct. Yes. CBC: In my current position, I put in up to 18 hours a day away from home. With the hours that you put in, how are you present?

Dan: You know, that’s a question I ask myself all the time.

And I say that because, if I go back and look at my career, there was a long period of time where I worked crazy hours. There was a time when I was writing and drawing two books a month — I was doing Superman and Justice League. And then, when I wasn’t doing Justice League, I was still doing Superman, and I didn’t then just not do anything else. I always filled that time with other stuff.

I was extremely disciplined. I always have been. I was always very efficient. That was one thing I learned as a student and also professionally before I started doing comics. And I was very committed. I found a way to make it work.

You know, with young kids, I had a studio in the house and

we’d have the playpen in the studio or have a kind of swinging wind-up chair in the studio that would go back and forth and the kids would fall asleep in it. Whatever. We always found a way to make it work. Now, I do look back on it more and just say, “How did I do that?” [Greg chuckles] You know? That kind of thing.

CBC: You made a way. Even if it was not active time, it was still time in presence. Is that a way to phrase it?

Dan: That’s exactly the way to phrase it. We found a way to make it work. As I said, through discipline, through commitment, through that sense of being really efficient with your time — and making time work well — there’s a way to do it. And I think people who have worked with me and known me over the years will say “Yeah, that’s probably Dan and that sounds right.”

CBC: You had mentioned earlier about having not gone to a con except for possibly one before you were a pro. Was that when you met Mike Grell?

Dan: I actually met Mike… so, as a kid, going back to my time as a reader, when I’m, like, 13 or 14 years old, I had written fan letters to two different artists. One was Walter Simonson and the other was Mike Grell. Both were kind enough to answer me. And with Mike… Mike was actually appearing in the Twin Cities, at a comic store, on a personal appearance. It wasn’t a convention, it was a comic store.

I stopped by, after work. It was, like, a Friday [and] he was there for the weekend. On Friday afternoon, I got done [working], say 4:30, I drove over there and stopped by, and I showed him the note he had sent back to me, like, years earlier.

I said, “Thank you for sending that to me.” And then I showed him my work. Mike was also there with his wife, Sharon. Mike really liked what he saw in my portfolio, and he happened to say, “Well, it just so happens that we’re looking at the idea of making a change on Warlord.” He was still writing it. He was no longer drawing the book. And he wanted something different.

A different sort of look on the book, at that time. And he said, “Do a couple of drawings of the Warlord and send them to me.”

And so, at this point, we’re talking autumn, 1981. I did that and I sent a couple of those to the book’s editor, who was Lorie Sutton. And they gave me, like, a five-page test sequence to draw. Which, I think, they also gave to another artist, but I don’t know who it was, but that’s what they always told me. I believe this was in December of 1981. They ended up picking mine and they said, “Well, the book is yours for a couple of issues.”

So, I was off and running.

CBC: So, you have the unique experience of not being the guy who had to send sample after sample to DC and Marvel and getting shot down like [Todd] McFarlane and his box of rejection letters. You never had to go through that humiliating process.

Dan: I did not. I had sent a couple of things in, but at a much younger age. Again, I was out of college, I was working, I was doing something else. I was fielding all sorts of job offers, as a matter of fact, from other places there. As much as comics were still an interest, as much as they were still a passion, I just didn’t think there was that much of a future there, that it was going to work out or anything. But I said, “Okay. I’ll do this.” I did not quit my day job and, for the first three issues, I kept working during the day and, at night, would go home and draw comics. And it wasn’t until they said, “Okay, the book is yours,” that I then quit my day job and started to say, “Maybe this is the answer. This is the future.” Which I was very happy about. Don’t get me wrong.

I’m sort of making it sound like I was super-casual about it. And I wasn’t. Once I started, I wanted to make it work. And I said, “This is what I want to do. At least for a couple of years.”

CBC: And Grell was still writing it for you, is that correct?

Warlord TM & © DC Comics.

Dan: Yes. CBC: How did that process work, working with Mike?

Dan: Oh, it was great. One of the advantages of working with Mike is that Mike is a writer-artist. I always said — and this is gonna get every writer in the business pissed off at me — in many ways, the comic page is about real estate. About the space on it and how you manage the space on the page. I think writer-artists have such a good sense of that because they are handling both aspects of what goes there. They tend to have a better sense than a lot of artists do, and they tend to have a better sense than what other writers do. Because they are fusing both of those things.

So, in working with Mike, it was really good to have a writer-artist that I was working with, because we could have conversations about, “What am I doing that’s working? What am I doing that isn’t working?,” in terms of what goes on the page.

Then, within a few issues, Lorie Sutton, who was my first editor, left the company and Ross Andru became my second editor.

And Ross was someone else I could have those conversations with. So I think I was in a very good place for someone who was learning to do comics: to have Mike on one hand and to have Ross Andru on the other hand. Because it’s not just about the conversations. It’s the way scripts were tailored and stories were tailored that also went to the page. If you go back to Mike’s work on Warlord, and the way the book was at the time, you would see, I think, an economy of words and an economy of space that made the book somewhat unique at the time. He’d often start the book off with a double-page spread and stuff like that, but that made it more visual. And he had an emphasis on trying to make the book more visual and not something that was just drowning in word balloons. That was good for me to work with and learn early.

CBC: Conversely, you mentioned Ross Andru, and José Luis Garcia-Lopéz has been very verbal about how much he was impressed by Andru’s storytelling ability. What did Ross bring to you?

Dan: It’s interesting because what I remember talking to Ross about early was covers. Because, at that point, you’re talking about a time frame where, if you go back to DC, so many covers were done by Ross Andru. I mean, I don’t know the exact years, but, if you start to think about, like, ’78 and ’79 and ’80, I’d say Ross was doing, like, what, a third to half the covers across the line every month… something like that. That’s my impression. I might be wrong, but it was still a helluva lot.

So, when I first started on the book, Mike was still doing covers and, sometime after that, he dropped that. And so, just talking covers with Ross, how to construct covers and how to build covers, and what he thought made a good cover, was a great way to learn. It was just great to have access to someone who had done that. And that’s what the business no longer has.

I mean, I don’t know where you would find any editor in this industry now who had done — let’s say, Ross Andru, at that point, had done 400 covers — are you going to find that now?

No. You just wouldn’t. That is a valuable element to have in this industry and, by and large, I don’t think it exists.

I’ve often said that one of the things that is harmful and a loss to the business: I could walk into DC and walk down the hallway, and you would have guys on staff who had drawn hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of art. They were editors.

There is an element to that we sadly, desperately miss. You have people as editors who you could have said that about having been writers, as well. The best part of going into an office was to sit down in an editor’s office, next to the flat files, open up each drawer, and look at everybody’s art that had come in.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

You could see it penciled, you could see it lettered over the pencils, you could see it penciled, inked, and lettered. Done, ready to go. Just to be able to sit down and hold all of that in your hand! So if you are sitting and looking through the flat files, there might be art from 15 different people that you could pick up, and hold in your hands, and to look at. People who you would see in print, you would see the originals and get an entirely different appreciation or sense of what it is they were doing.

The fact that companies don’t have flat files anymore, and you have editors that never hold the artwork in their hands, they just see it on screen, that is not at all the same thing. And I think, as a result, they don’t necessarily have the same sense of appreciation. And I’m very much in danger of sounding like a grumpy-ass old man, and I’m really not.

CBC: In your very early years, you were definitely in a funky time for comic books. There’s always funky times that pop up, but that late ’70s/early ’80s era was definitely unique. One of those things at DC that was unique, at the time, was that a lot of things that weren’t capes-&-tights books started coming out.

One of the things you were tabbed as co-creator is Sun Devils.

That is where your first writing credit comes from, correct?

Dan: Right, yes.

CBC: What was the experience for you working with Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, two guys who were basically legends themselves?

Dan: Right. Well, the original concept of Sun Devils was put together by Gerry and Roy. And they invited me to come in as artist on the project. At that point, Roy was pretty much stepping aside to do his own thing. But it’s worth noting that this was when the writer-editor system was very much in place at DC. They were both writing and editing their own books, as were a couple of other guys. Really, I came in, and I was working with Gerry, and doing the character sketches, and everything, and we worked Marvel style. Prior to that, I worked full-script style with Mike. But Mike’s scripts were very much the kind of things that would lend themselves to, you know, an artist wanting to work from them. I mean they were so great to work from even though they were full scripts.

But Gerry and I worked Marvel style, plot first. We had done, I think, two issues of a Batman story that was one Detective and then Batman that was one story then moved from there to the Sun Devils, I believe. Part of working with Gerry was — because it was Marvel style — we would talk over the plots on the phone. I’d draw the stories — and, just to interject here, remember I had said that, even as a kid, I was always writing and drawing my own stories…? I always had this interest in drawing and writing right from the word go. I mean, from the first day I set foot in the business, working on Warlord, I knew that I’d want to write my

Above: The influence DC executive VP Dick Giordano had on Dan Jurgens’ start as a creator cannot be understated, given it was a casual breakfast at the 1984 Dallas Fantasy Fair where the fabled editor/artist gave the young man the green-light to develop Booster Gold as a regular comics title.

Below: Dick also inked a good amount of Dan’s pencils in those early years, including this detail of the title character from the cover of Warlord #86 [Oct. 1984].

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Top: Each quarter of the 12-issue run of the Sun Devils mini-series [1984–85] featured inter-connecting cover art (by penciler Dan Jurgens and various inkers). Editor Gerry Conway conceived and initially scripted the series, but toward its ending, Dan took over writing chores. Below: In Superman #86 [Feb. 1994], as writer and artist, Dan Jurgens got his chance to bring the Sun Devils saga to a close a decade after it started. Cover by Dan and inker Joe Rubinstein. Art

by Dan and inker Steve Mitchell.

takes, “Oh, no! Man, this takes forever!” But I don’t remember feeling like it was beyond me. But part of that was because it was a 12-issue maxi-series. We knew already what the end of the story was going to be. So it’s not like all of a sudden I was going to write, say #9, and, “Well, now what am I going to do?”

It was much more like, “Okay, I still know what our destination is here, in terms of where the story ends. I’m just going to take a different route to get there. Instead of Highway 3, I’m taking Highway 72.” You know, whatever. And that was what I had to do. Again, Gerry had been the writer and editor, and he was still involved. So, it was a good, natural segue.

CBC: At that point in time there was obviously Sun Devils, there was Slash Maraud, Thriller, and all types of things that were not the capes-&-tights books that had been driving things for quite a while. What was it like to be there at that point in time, when it wasn’t what people viewed traditional comic books as being?

Dan: I remember that time really fondly and as a great time to be at DC. Jenette was publisher, and up and down the hallway you had, I think, a really strong editorial team, and a number of editors who were artists. I mean, like I said, I talked about Ross. Ernie Cólon was on staff as an editor at that point.

Everybody knows Joe Orlando was there, Dick Giordano was there, but there were other people there who had spent years in the business. You had Ed Hannigan, who sort of had become cover designer somewhere along the line. You had Len Wein on staff and working editorial. I mean you just had, I think, a strong group of people to work with.

The attitude that I remember was, if you have an idea, then tell “us” about it. Because “we” want to hear what you have a passion for and might want to do. It was all about different ideas, different concepts, and things like that. It was a great time to be in the business.

CBC: And that segues into — I will say this: my son’s very favorite character — could Booster Gold have come out any other time? Or was this the perfect time for him to be brought to the fore?

Dan: I think it was the perfect time for it to happen. Both from the standpoint of where DC was, as far as the kind of open-door policy goes, as well as looking for different ideas. I think, as an industry at that time, we profited by this idea that we wanted to do some different things. You have to remember that the concept of independent publishing and creator-owned is not at all what it is today. There were conversations about it.

There were smaller attempts at it. You had First Comics. You had Pacific Comics. You had people trying some different things.

You had Eclipse. But it wasn’t what it is now. And so, the idea, I think, at DC (and also at Marvel) was, “You’ve got an idea: let’s talk about it. Let’s try something different and see what we have.” Because I think there was this thought that a well-round#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Sun Devils, Superman TM & ©DC Comics.

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own stuff at some point.

So, as I drew the stories, I’d write dialogue notes in the borders, things like that. And, as we worked on the series, Gerry got busier and busier, and tended to relinquish a little more until we got to the point where Gerry would call me up at night and we’d talk over the story. I’d take notes, we’d go back and forth, and I would just go from there, based on our conversations, and would draw the stories.

Eventually, when Gerry had to step aside from writing the last couple of issues of the series, I said, “Oh, wow. Man, I’m sorry to hear that.” He was going to keep editing it. I asked who was going to write it. And I think Paul Kupperberg had dialogued one issue, just to help us out, in a really late pinch. And he said, “Well, why don’t you do it? You know the characters.

I’ll be the editor, yet. So, we can talk through things. You know the characters and the overall story, in terms of where we are going with it. I can help you out a little bit with your dialogue as you [add] dialogue notes, and stuff like that.” So, that’s how I segued into writing and drawing.

CBC: At that point in time, to begin the writing process, and really get your hands-on doing it as a profession, an ah-hah moment? Like you had it handled and it wouldn’t be an issue? Or was it looking uphill and thinking, “Holy cow! Have I swallowed too much?”

Dan: I think, only from the “holy cow” standpoint, was that, you know, it’s not like we had computers. I’m banging out the script on a typewriter. If there was anything I was terrible at it was going back and using Wite Out. [laughter] Correcting mis-

Sun Devils, Booster Gold TM & © DC Comics.

ed publisher publishes a variety of materials.

CBC: And it’s around that time that DC specifically started putting the names of the writer, artist, etc., on the front cover.

Which had not been the case for its previous history.

Dan: Oh, yeah. I mean, certainly, if I go back, gosh, I don’t remember what year, but because I would draw the cover, I could sign the cover. But they still didn’t have our names on the cover in set type. So, all of a sudden, to get to the point where they were going to put our names on the cover, and emphasize the creator a little bit, was like, “Oh, wow! Gee! Cool!” Because that had not existed prior to that point.

CBC: Opinion question: was that driven by Jenette or partly because of the theft of Frank Miller from Marvel?

Dan: I don’t know. I heard different stories about that. I remember it being a point of conversation earlier. And I remember other creators saying, “Yeah, we should try and get our names on the covers. It should be more like the book publishing industry.” And that’s the phrase we used a lot in those days, “It should be more like the book publishing industry.” Since I didn’t make that decision, and I wasn’t in the room when the decision was made, I’m not 100% sure of how they got there.

But they certainly did get there.

CBC: Since this is a new frontier, its own thing and a breakaway from the ’70s, with the possibilities of creator-owned and new creations coming about, talk me through how the creation of Booster Gold came about.

Dan: At that point, part of that attitude there, I was going to be winding up my time on Sun Devils. As part of this, I said, “Now that I’m starting to build this thing, where I write and draw, I’m not going to let that go. I’m going to pursue this.”

I always had different ideas of what a potentially different super-hero could be. It could be one that, quite frankly, that had I, at the age of 22, been a super-hero, probably would have pursued. Which is: “I’m gonna make a little money at it. I’m not Bruce freakin’ Wayne. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.” And, when we see how the media react to celebrities, super-heroes would be celebrities, so there’d be interest in that.

And then you could endorse products. All that stuff. These are all thoughts that I had. I was just coming off Sun Devils, and doing a convention in Dallas, and I sat down with Dick Giordano one morning for breakfast, and said I had this idea and it’s for this. This character who plays the celebrity angle and he does endorsements and all that.

Dick said, “You mean a hero-for-hire.” And I said, “No. Not a hero-for-hire. It’s someone who does the right thing, but he understands our media and our culture, and uses it to his advantage. But he still does the right thing.” And Dick liked it so much, he essentially bought it on the spot, and we were off and running. And he said, “What’s his name?” And I said, “Booster Gold.” And he said, “What kind of name is that?” I said, “He’s a COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

booster in that he boosts his own profile. Boosting also is something you can use in terms of “I stole something,” and he stole the equipment that got him here. The Gold signifies his interest in using it to prosper. So that’s the name. And it’s different. And it’s meant to be different. And DC wanted different. And the one thing he said was, “Okay we’ll do this. Write something up for me.” Because I didn’t even have it written down at that point.

[Greg laughs] I said, “Here’s what I want to do, Dick.” And so, I put it together, and we were off and running.

CBC: I’m going to segue for just a little off the Booster Gold topic because you mentioned Dick.

There are comments about him being the fatherly figure and definitely not the Harvey Kurtzman kind of controlling editor. More along the lines of the “best pal” kind of guy. What was it like working with Dick?

Dan: It was wonderful. I worked with Dick in a lot of different ways, because he also inked so much work of mine over the years. So we worked together very well. Dick was one of the biggest supporters I had. He liked my stuff.

He liked the way I worked. Obviously, I think tremendously highly of him. I can’t say anything bad about Dick. And it was unique because, earlier I referenced early in my career doing a couple of Batman stories, which I think were Detective Comics #525 [Apr. 1983] and Batman #359 [May ’83]… something like that… and Dick inked those. And then later, on Green Arrow, we worked together, because he inked that. When I did Armageddon 2001, Dick inked that. So there was a point where Dick had inked more of my work than most anyone else had for quite some time.

We worked together in, both the sense of collaborating creatively, as well as, you know, he was the boss. But the nice thing was, because Dick had been an artist and an editor, I mean, he worked in so many different capacities, you could have a conversation with Dick about the realities and problems of working in comics. If that makes sense. That, again, it’s harder to find today. You don’t find many editors, once again I’ll keep beating this drum, who had worked artistically and generated as much as Dick Giordano had.

And so, there was a commonality and a bond between someone who worked on the staff in that capacity and someone who was a freelancer.

CBC: You two were paired with the one of the earliest appearances of Killer Croc. Gerry Conway

Below: From the back cover of Booster Gold: The Big Fall, a hardcover collection of Booster Gold #1–12 [1986–87], these panels, by penciler Dan Jurgens and inker Mike DeCarlo, originally appeared (with slightly different wordage) in the second issue of Booster Gold [Mar. 1986].

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Above: Coming in a year widely heralded as maybe the best in the artform’s history, Booster Gold debuted in 1986. Created by Dan Jurgens, the super-hero character was later called “the greatest hero you never heard of,” and was a sketchy fellow from the future deemed a “lovable rogue” by The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide.

Below: Booster quickly found his place in the DC Universe and discovered an abiding camaraderie with another recent newcomer to the DCU, Blue Beetle. Justice League #4 [Aug. 1987] cover by Kevin Maguire, pencils, and Al Gordon, inks.

of the character a little bit.

CBC: And you’ve actually just beat me to my next question, which is how they incorporated all those characters together when they were doing the relaunch in, kind of, a joking, snarky, somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner that they were trying to pull off. And I think they did it very successfully. What were your extended thoughts on their process? Did you read it while they were doing that book?

Dan: Oh, yeah, I did. I thought it was fantastic. I mean, it was one of the best things that was coming out in the industry at that time. It was fresh. It was different. You had a creative team that was really firing on all cylinders with what they were doing.

It was great. I think everybody loved it. As I always looked at it, obviously, the longer it ran, the more “out there” it sort of got.

In my own personal view, as far as characters, I just looked at it and said, “Okay, this is Earth-Keith.” [laughter] Nuff said.

CBC: Another person who had hands on your creation fairly early on in his relaunch of Superman and Action Comics was John Byrne. What were your thoughts of him putting your character to use so early on?

Dan: The story on that one is, when I was first doing Booster we were going to do the origin of Booster Gold, I think, in issue #6. And, at that time, it involved Superman quite a lot. And this was all told in the Booster Gold: Big Fall hardcover book that put the first 12 issues together (which came out, like, a year-and-a-half ago). But, at that time, it involved Superman. It involved the Fortress of Solitude, and Booster going to the Fortress, and all this other stuff, because he knew about it because he came from the future.

Right around that time, I had the book written and pretty much drawn, John Byrne came to DC to overhaul Superman and the office called me up, and said, “Your story can’t run as is. We’ve to make a lot of changes. You can still use Superman, but the Fortress is gone… this is gone, everything else is gone, you’ve got to make all these changes… But, as part of that, John realizes this is an inconvenience, so he’ll do a team-up with you. A crossover in Action, because Action is going to be a team-up book.” All that stuff.

So, I said, “I know a good deal when I see one. It’s not a problem. I will be more than happy to work with it.” So John was very gracious in taking the character and handling him well. And I think coming up with a nice little story that fit both Action and Booster Gold. At the same time, I then went through and made the necessary changes so that we could make the story work, and still get to use Superman. Essentially, by that point, we’re talking about the post-Crisis Superman.

CBC: I’m going to step away from Booster Gold and return to the Mike Grell topic, because you went to work with him on Green Arrow,in roughly 1988.

Dan: That sounds right.

CBC: What about your work had improved, to your opinion, by that point in time, since working with him in ’82?

Dan: Phew! Self-analysis can be hard, but I certainly think I was an entirely different creator, different writer, different artist, by that point. I was just so much more on top of it, in terms of developing my own path. Because, when you first start, you’re kind of a little bit lost in the forest. “Who am I as a creator?

What is my natural style? Where am I and what do I do here?”

But, by the time I was doing Green Arrow, I was much more set in that. And, I think, really able to bring a lot more to it than, as a new creator, I could bring to Warlord, when I started on that. When Mike Gold — he was editing Green Arrow at that time — called me up, and Ed Hannigan had been drawing the book, they wanted to have a situation where the book would start to #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Booster Gold, Justice League TM & © DC Comics.

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recently stated that the character was probably the most iconic one he created while at DC. What are your thoughts about working on Batman; the character which prompted you to go looking for your first comic? Did you think this was a villain who’d last this long for the character?

Dan: First of all, doing Batman that early in my career was absolutely wonderful, as was working with a writer the caliber of Gerry Conway. I was a tremendous fan of his and honored that he welcomed me on board. I was just as thrilled to have Dick Giordano ink the story. His association with Batman was legendary and he really made me look good! As for Killer Croc and the origin sequence: I had no idea that he’d turn into a character of this magnitude.

I was too busy trying not to embarrass myself on my first Batman gig!

CBC: Back to Booster Gold: what was the difference working on him in ’85 to 2007, and later iterations? What was, if there was, any different approach in your storytelling during those iterations with the character?

Dan: A lot of it is — and I’ve said this before — if you look at the first five or six issues of my time on that book you see someone who is learning on the job from a writer’s standpoint.

There is no getting around it. It’s just obvious on the page. So, even if you look at the second 12 issues versus the first 12, the writing becomes more competent. It just becomes better. It coalesces better with the art. All that stuff. And so there’s that reality of, “Yeah, here’s a newbie working on this thing that, while the faults are there, the creative ingenuity is on display.” I don’t mean to make it sound like it was a hopeless product. And then, 20 years later, when I was working on it with Geoff Johns, Geoff wrote the first 10, 12 issues, and it was a different sort of book. It was much more about,“hero from the future that you had never heard of,” kind of saving the multiverse, as opposed to more pop culture-oriented, media-oriented figure that I had done in the ’80s.

CBC: Would you say that was based on his preference as a storyteller? Or was it more inclined with the culture at large?

Dan: I think it’s all of the above. It’s also, “Where is the market?” And what had happened with the character. And one of the things that had happened to the character is, in the weekly 52 series, he had saved the multiverse. So the character had changed in that time, too. Booster Gold as a title had not been out that long when [editor] Andy Helfer and [artist] Keith Giffen called me up one day and said, “Hey, we’re doing this new Justice League book, and we want to put him in there.” And I said, “What new Justice League book?” [Greg laughs] Because their book hadn’t even come out yet. So they sent me the first couple of issues and I absolutely loved what they were doing. And I said, “You want to put him in this? Awesome!” So that’s what they went ahead and did. But that also changes the perception

Superman, Booster Gold TM & © DC Comics. Flash Gordon TM & © Hearst Holdings, Inc.

come out more often. We would go twice-a-month during the summer months, and stuff like that.

So it was going to become essentially a two-artist book. It was a book that I liked. I liked working with both Mike Gold and Mike Grell (obviously). And I said, “Yeah, I’m up for this.”

In part, because it was a street level hero book, which characters like Green Arrow and Batman are. I hadn’t done a lot of that yet, so I was totally up for it.

CBC: Grell definitely tried to make it his own character and a split from what had been done certainly by Jack Kirby early on, and then from what Neal had done, which was groundshattering, at that point in time. What was your thought working on that character? Is it something you had an ownership feeling of?

Or did you feel like you were supporting Mike’s vision?

Dan: No, I thought I had a role in it. I don’t think I have ever looked at how creators work in this business and necessarily thought I worked for an editor or for a writer to serve what it is that they want. The more correct terminology, especially now, is I work with an editor. I work with a writer. I work with an artist. And I’ve always seen it as a collaborative medium. So, as I saw what Mike was doing, I understood what he wanted the book to be. I also understood I was not Ed Hannigan. Ed and I draw differently. We approach the page differently, as all artists do. So I was looking to create my own sense of visual language on the character and bring that element to it, which is exactly what I did.

CBC: One of the things that came pretty close on the heels of that, which I found to be really unique: how in the heck did Flash Gordon come to DC Comics?

Dan: That was another Mike Gold project. Mike was an editor there and had called me up at one point and said, “We have the rights to the King Features characters and we’re thinking of you for Flash Gordon. Would you like to do Flash Gordon?”

And I said, “No. I’m not Alex Raymond. He is one of the all-time greats in the industry and I don’t draw that way. So, no, that is not anything I think I can do.” He said, “That’s why I’m calling you. We don’t want it to be Alex Raymond. We want kind of a different spin on the character. We want different ideas here.

What would you do with it?”

So I started thinking about it a little bit and I said, “Here’s how I see it” And, again, I don’t draw anything like Alex Raymond. I wouldn’t draw characters that would look like his did.

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I wouldn’t draw characters that dressed like his did, because that now no longer looks modern.

My Ming the Merciless would be entirely different and everything else. I don’t think DC would necessarily want to do what it was I thought would work for the character. But, every step of the way, they did. So, that’s how that came together and that’s how we moved forward.

CBC: When you were re-imagining it for that time period, how did you move away from the more recent thing at that time — which was still 20 years prior, which is what Al Williamson had done and what Pat Boyette, etc., had done for King? How did you move from a classical interpretation to a post-modern look? How purposeful did you have to be to make that happen?

Dan: It’s something you really consciously have to set out and do. And I did that. The first thing I did was look at it and say, “Okay, Flash Gordon was a polo player.” In this world, who stills plays polo? Who understands what polo even is? And, in this market, do I really want to write a story about a polo player? And I just said, “Let’s make him an NBA player.”

You kind of start with that and work down the line, every step of the way, until you get to the point where you build up a different character and a different starting point. And that’s what I wanted to start with. Plus, I just said. ‘I’m gonna’ make Flash less noble than what Alex Raymond made him’. He’s going to have more faults. He’s going to have questions about what it is that he’s doing. We’ll still use the broad parameters, the different characters, and everybody. But it’s just going to be pulled into a more modern world.

CBC: And one of the things over the years that people had commented on, about Raymond’s, is that it was not a science fiction story. It was a story of swords and swordplay and damsels in distress. The rocket ships were just used to take them from story to story.

And that was a route you totally did not want to go, correct?

Dan: Correct, yeah. I wanted to make this something that was… I don’t want to say the word, “believable,” because

This page: Booster Gold/Superman items from 1987. At bottom is Dan Jurgens and Bruce Patterson Flash Gordon #1 [June 1988] art.

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This page: The blockbuster “Death of Superman” event was set into motion when Dan Jurgens began spit-balling what to do for Superman #75 [Jan. 1993] and launched plans for a Clark Kent and Lois Lane wedding. Only thing was, the producers of brand-new TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman [1993–97] objected, as the show planned for the nuptials in the seasons to come.

So, instead, the notion of killing the Man of Steel was put into play!

Kent and Lane were married in the comics at the same time as on the TV screen, in Fall 1996. This spread

by Jurgens and inker Jerry Ordway was in Superman: The Wedding Album [Dec. 1996]. Adventures of Superman Annual #1 [1987] was where Dan started drawing Supes.

so much happening at that time and so many people doing so many different things [that] I think it lit us all up one way or another to try and do better work. Because you knew that there was this sense of, “If my book is next to theirs on the shelf that — wait, I want it to look good.” [laughter] So, it was all of that.

CBC: Was there anyone from that particular group who has resonated with you ever since?

Dan: All of them have. I was also paying a lot of attention to those who were both writing and drawing, at that time. So, in addition to those previous names, you had mentioned Chaykin.

Howard’s stuff on American Flagg was just brilliant. I was always looking at his stuff. I was always looking at Starlin’s stuff. Even the stuff Mike Grell had done on Jon Sable, at First Comics. I mean, there was a time when writer-artists really were kind of anchoring the industry and showing it how some changes can be made and how things could be done.

CBC: So, even if they were not being creator-owned, like at First, where Chaykin was, the opportunity for the writer-artist to anchor what was going on in the industry was really at high times from about ’82–’89, specifically… fair to say?

Dan: I would say that, yes. Again, you look at what Walter was doing on Thor, at that time. And Frank and what he did on Daredevil. And I think, yes, whether what John and what he was doing on Fantastic Four, and so many other things at Marvel, that it was a time that was really showing people what writer-artists could do. And I think I was already both writing and drawing, but it was always that those guys always served as a North Star aspirational point.

And, I think, you would probably be able to find later, the Image guys came in somewhat behind me, that they would say the same thing. It was just there. And the other thing is that it was there every damned month. You look at the amount of work that professionals even then were creating and it was there every damned month. So, when you walked in the store to buy this stuff, it’s like, ‘Okay, this week it’s Daredevil. Next week it’s Thor. And after that it’s John’s — whether it was FF or his X-Men, or his stuff earlier at Marvel or his DC stuff. I mean, it was just there, and there on a frequent basis. #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Superman, Lois Lane, Adventures of Superman TM & © DC Comics.

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that’s not right. Something that had a lot more gravity to it. If that makes sense.

CBC: No doubt. As wonderful as those were done, to paraphrase Howard Chaykin talking about the scripts to Raymond’s strips, especially Rip Kirby: they were beautiful, but the stories were godawful.”

Dan: [Laughs] Yeah, I mean, it was interesting to look back on, because… you have try to see it through the reality of the times. If you take that into account, you can see the strength in some of it, because it was based on what people’s impressions were of space travel, at that time. And so, you also have to look at where they were being published. If you’re telling a story in three panels a day or in the Sunday feature, you know, what can you really say? So, you have to take all of that into account to, I think, truly appreciate it.

CBC: Oh, no doubt. As you were working as an artist in the ’80s, who were some people around you that you might have been influenced by? Or, even possibly said, “Okay. You want to throw that one down… let me raise the stakes and see if I can’t top that.” Who were some folks who were motivators through enjoyment of their work or even through competition?

Dan: I have always been, from the earliest times as a kid, seeing the work of Kirby, Neal Adams, John Buscema, Irv Novick, Jim Aparo, so many more. I was always inspired by that.

As I got older, seeing Grell’s work, seeing Walter Simonson’s “Manhunter” work, things of that nature just really whipped me up. So that, by the time I was a professional and looking at what was happening… we’re talking about a time frame where, obviously, John Byrne had done so much work. Whether it was the X-stuff at Marvel, whether it was the Superman stuff at DC, going back to Marvel to doing his Fantastic Four run, which was really terrific stuff! I mean, John was doing consummate super-hero comics, to me. I mean that in the highest, most complimentary way possible.

We also had Frank Miller doing his Daredevil work which was just so transformational. And that became Ronin, that he did at DC, and just watching him change that way. You had Walter doing his Thor stuff at Marvel. Things like that. There was

Superman, Lois Lane, Action Comics TM & © DC Comics. Photo courtesy of Dan Jurgens.

CBC: The first comic you ever purchased was a Superman comic. The way the Batman show kind of put the bug in you regarding the character, did you have a similar experience with the TV show for Superman? Or was it something completely different that introduced him to you?

Dan: It really was. If we were to go back in time a little bit, the first comic I ever bought was Superman #189. That was not my first exposure. I knew who Superman was and I can’t even necessarily say what my first exposure was. But I never really had seen the live action Superman TV show, because it wasn’t in my market. I know that, eventually, when the Filmation animated Superman series was on that I was a fan of that and everything.

But I was just more aware of Superman through the different aspects of pop culture that were floating around at that time.

Which is a little more elusive and hard to pin down.

CBC: What were some of the things that you enjoyed about the character as a younger man? Who were the people you enjoyed doing the book when you were a fan?

Dan: A couple of things, dealing with the first part of the question, I think it was the powers. At that time, I was the right age to buy in to the more whimsical aspects of the book and the character. If we go back to it, Superman was somewhat of a sad figure because he was something of a loner, right? I mean, Supergirl was around and we’d see other characters he was associated with. But Clark Kent was still a sort of stumble bum and there was something sad about Superman. I think I responded to that. When I say “sad,” I’m also responding to the sense of nobility that drove him to be isolated, and that being part of what made him sad. In addition to that, it was the cool powers. Here’s a guy who can fly and lift an entire battleship, for example. Here’s someone from another planet and we’re aware of that background. So, I think it was just the attraction to the character, the features of the character, the dual identity stuff… because I always enjoyed the Clark Kent aspects of Superman.

How many times we would see, “Man, if I saw Clark Kent and Superman on the same cover playing that super-hero dual-identity question… ‘How can this possibly be?,’ that they did all the time,” [laughs] and that I would later do myself — you know, I was instantly hooked. So, those are the things I was attracted to.

And, as for the creators, I didn’t know who was doing them at that point, because the credits weren’t in the books. But I certainly thought of Curt Swan as the best of the Superman artists. At that time, Wayne Boring seemed a little clunky to me.

I say that now with shame. [laughs] Because I now appreciate his work in a much different way. And I always thought Al Plastino was great. And that’s a lot of the artists I would have been exposed to at that time.

CBC: Regarding the folks you mentioned, and I’ll ask about Swan because, kind of like Carl Barks as the “good duck artist,” Swan gets brought up by most folks when it comes to doing Superman. What was it about his take that touches a nerve for you?

Dan: I think the nice thing about his work is that he brought such a sense of humanity to Superman. And, when I say that, I’m addressing the entire cast. But, if you go back, he had this subtlety of expression on the part of his characters that was always very, very nice. It was true of Superman. It was true of Lois, and Jimmy, and Perry, and the entire cast. He was just a very good draftsman. I think those are the things I responded to there.

CBC: When it comes to looking at the character where you are now, are there other creators in your mind, not necessarily people you worked with, but people you had the chance to enjoy, who really “had” the character?

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

Dan: Going back to that time one of the things I responded to very well was picking up a World’s Finest comic, I don’t remember the issue number [#176, June 1968], and it was the story drawn by Neal Adams. It had Batgirl and Supergirl in it, as well. So, it was Superman, Batman, Batgirl, and Supergirl, which is a great combination to start with. At that time, I certainly responded to it as a different depiction and approach to Superman.

There was a dynamism there that could not be denied and I really liked it. Again, I don’t think there would have been credits in the books even then.

But that would have just been within the next two years. I just saw it as being different, but there was something about this that was just so cool. And then, obviously, years later, when Neal did the Superman and Muhammad Ali book, that’s just an astounding achievement. I mean, it is just a work of complete brilliance. So, I’d go with that.

If we’re going to go deeper into the years at the same time, José Luis Garcia-Lopéz started to appear in the books. He did a just stunning Superman. I liked Rich Buckler’s Superman. And, of course, when John Byrne came and kind of gave it the big face-lift, he was brilliant. I think Byrne’s stuff on Superman was absolutely brilliant.

CBC: And you’re giving me a segue here. When it came to the folks who were doing it not too long prior to Byrne and his relaunch, you had Curt Swan who had been doing the Superman books and you had Marv Wolfman and Gil Kane doing Action

This page: At top is Dan at WonderCon 2019, plus his variant cover for Action Comics #1000 [June 2018], inked by Kevin Nowlan.

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Above: That’s Dan Jurgens in the way-back, with outstretched arm, among the “Superman team,” which included a beaming Jenette Kahn, and Paul Levitz standing behind seated Jerry Siegel, esteemed co-creator of the character! Readers are challenged to tell us just who are the attendees of this 1993 dinner function.

Below and next page: Penciler Dan Jurgens and inker Kevin Nowlan’s Dynamic Forces edition of the Action Comics #1000 [June 2018] variant cover in various stages.

#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Action Comics, Superman TM & © DC Comics. Photo courtesy of Dan Jurgens.

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Comics. What were your thoughts about going from what had been the “norm” of Superman to the relaunch, as a reader and someone who was in the field when the change was made?

Dan: It was a tremendous breath of fresh air that [Byrne] brought to Superman. I don’t know that he necessarily had to go as far as he did, in terms of getting rid of Superboy and the Legion, which caused a problem. But the flipside is, we got back a Superman being the last son of Krypton. Which, I think, is tremendously important to the character. To me, there should be one Superman. Just one Superman. And he should be the last son of Krypton with minimal contact with any other Kryptonians.

At that time, it seemed that they’d gotten to the point where there were Kryptonians everywhere. He cut back on that.

And he also brought Ma and Pa Kent back into the books as this human touch-point for an adult Superman, that I think was a tremendous idea. I mean, that was just a great contribution to the series. Again, something that we would use once we were doing the book, because it was something that helped define Superman so well. It helped define his humanity. And you

could see, where did his character come from? It came from these two really earnest people. So I always thought that was great.

CBC: After John had done his main run, you start getting your decades-long association with the character as a penciler on Adventures of Superman. Who was writing that for you at the time?

Dan: The first thing I did was Adventures of Superman Annual #1 that Jim Starlin wrote. I had done a couple of things with Superman earlier. It’s weird. I had done a Justice League story for Julie Schwartz that, to this day, has never been printed.

It was a flashback story that was written by Elliott Maggin, I believe, and kind of was an untold story of the Justice League back in their earliest days, when they were still in the cave, not the satellite, and things like that. It never got printed, which is too bad. I think that might have been my first crack with Superman, aside from using him in Booster Gold. But then, when I moved into the Superman editorial office, in a more official sense, was when Mike Carlin called me up one day, and he had seen the pencils to an issue of Booster Gold — it might have been #17 or something like that — he said, “You should draw a Superman. We want to try you out if you’re game for it.” And that was always funny to me because, a couple years earlier, when Karen Berger was, at that time, editorial coordinator at DC, Karen asked, “Can you draw Superman?” And I said (this is pre-Byrne), “No. I’m not Curt Swan and only Curt Swan can draw Superman.”

But [Carlin] had this script by Jim Starlin that was really nice, and I had just enough time to fit it in, so I took it on. From there, we were off and running. And then, when I went on to Adventures of Superman proper, the idea was that George Pérez was going to write it and I was going to draw it. And, at the same time, George was drawing Action Comics and it was written by Roger Stern. I think George was having a hard time keeping up with everything and I think he had to duck out after just three issues. Mike asked, at that point, “Do you want to take over writing it as well?” And I said, “Oh, my God.” [laughter] “Okay.” I had full confidence that I could draw Superman and make it look good. I didn’t have the same level of confidence that I could write Superman and make it read well. [laughs] That’s kind of how it all came together.

CBC: You already mentioned Carlin, so I’ll just segue there: what were some of the contributions, and the leadership aspects that he had, and the talent collection that he brought, to the Superman series of titles?

Dan: It’s interesting. Mike was absolutely sort of like the perfect editor for Superman. In addition to having been a Superman fan himself, he had this very concrete view of who Superman and Clark Kent were as characters. As well for everyone else in the books. What he understood was how to hire talent that shared that vision.

Whether it was Jerry Ordway, whether it was Roger Stern, Louise Simonson, Jon Bogdanove… I mean, you can just go down the list. The people he hired in that moment had, I think, this shared view of who Superman was. And that was going to become absolutely critical later in the way we would work with this sense of connected storytelling. When you have an editor who is editing one character’s family of books, that’s sort of something you really have to have. And Mike absolutely had that. On top of that, he had a sense of compassion about Superman, and what the books could achieve, that helped inspire the creators who were working for him. So he was absolutely fantastic and the perfect person to be editing Superman. Especially at that time.

Action Comics, Superman TM & © DC Comics. Aliens TM & ©20th Century Fox.

CBC: Have you been paying attention to the DC animated stuff that he is over now? What are your thoughts about him bringing those stories to the animated form?

Dan: Oh, it’s always been fun to see. What you see is this sensibility, again, Mike had not just for Superman, individually, but also the stories and these characters overall, while, at the same time, making the adjustments for the stories and updating them in whatever way was necessary for modern audiences.

I think the more recent Death and Return of Superman stuff that they did kind of showed that. In many ways, it captured the heart of the story without, obviously, having to change the details — the Justice League was the more traditional Justice League. Stuff like that.

CBC: What would you think about sharing some thoughts about the other contributors who were in the room with you?

Was everyone on the same page when building the stories that went across the Superman family of books?

Dan: Originally, my experience was Jerry Ordway was writing one of the books, Roger Stern was writing one of the books, and George Pérez was writing one of the books. There were only three books. And then, shortly after that, George stepped aside and I moved in. Within that dynamic, as a group, we were pretty small and tight, because Jerry and I were also drawing our titles.

I would add here that it’s important to note that the artistic teams were always included in part of these discussions. So, on Action, it might have been, if George had been working on drawing the book at that time, he would have been included.

His voice would have been there. Later, as it became Kerry Gammil, Kerry was included. It was kind of, with the advantage that we had with three books, were able to build this system of how we would make this work. And so that, later, when Jon Bogdanove and Weezie Simonson joined the team, we could say, “We’ve got this figured out for three books and now we’re going to expand it to four.” So we kind of had the system in place. And, since you had the logistical stuff figured out, then you could deal more with story. You could deal more with character. You could have that discussion in the room about, “What does this mean to you? What is it you want to say as a writer or as a creative team? Where do you want to go from there?”

And, “How, then, do we put that all together?” Think of it like we were a band. We were making some pretty good music and we knew what we were doing, and everybody had input.

CBC: And nobody was Yoko Ono? Dan: Well, look, you can’t ever put four writers, let alone add the artistic teams, which are both pencilers and inkers, and get them in the room and they are all singing “Kumbaya,” from the first moment it all came along. A lot of it just comes down to this idea that everyone there wanted to be working on Superman. And, I gotta say, if we just sidestep a little bit, half the books you picked up are done by creative teams who don’t necessarily want to be doing that book. They are doing it as a steppingstone to the next book, or doing it for some other excuse, or just to get a check. They don’t have the passion.

The gang who was in that room, each and every one of us, really had a commitment to working for Mike. And a commitment to him on a personal level. And a commitment to the character. So, you just start with that. We all wanted to be doing it and had that passion for it. Earlier, I had talked about everybody pretty much agreeing on who Superman was.

So, once you’ve got those hurdles behind you, even though you might disagree on who the villain might be, or what the obstacle might be going forward, or so many other things, the big stuff has sort of been addressed, so you’re able to talk it out.

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And that also comes from a level of respect for another person’s opinion, and their work. I think that was definitely in the room as well… In fact, I shouldn’t even say, “I think.” I know it was.

CBC: When you meet in Florida, or wherever, in your “summit room,” how long were those meetings when you’d lock down to plan out the year?

Dan: Oh, man! It always felt like each one of them was three weeks long. [laughter] Even though it was three days. They were long days. It took a lot of work to come up with stories.

The Man of Steel team might have one story they want to do, and the Adventures team might have another story they want to do, and Action, another story. If we were all doing four titles individually that would be easy to do, right? But if you’re going to say, “We’re going to create a subplot for Jimmy Olsen”…

And it’s going to go from Adventures to Action to Man of Steel

Below: Dan and Kevin notably also worked together on the Superman vs. Aliens mini-series [three issues, July–Sept. 1995], a joint DC/Dark Horse presentation.

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This page: If Dan Jurgens has a calling in life, it is to humanize the visitor from Krypton, particularly by having him marry and father a kid, Jonathan, seen above in Lee Week’s page from Superman: Lois and Clark [2015–16]. Below is a trade pb cover by Dan and Jerry.

cape goes on, and he’s flying in space and doing something, or exiled in space, and everybody is left on Earth wondering where Superman is. And that’s more interesting in terms of, “When does Superman go back? How does Superman go back?” Because his life as Clark Kent is totally falling apart in his absence.

All of a sudden, he’s gone, and Pa Kent has a heart attack, whatever. But if you properly build out the human aspects and, years later, I tried to do that when we gave him Jonathan as a son, that’s the key! That’s always what pulls Superman back and makes him relatable.

CBC: Jon Bogdanove asked me to ask you about the time that you guys were down on the Salkind family Superboy TV show as extras. He said that it was during his first Superman summit in Florida, where it was filmed. As extras, you guys were apparently sign painters…

Dan: Not sign painters, we were painting a damned wall!

Yeah!

CBC: So, you’re painting a wall and you guys decided it was time to be Harold Lloyd or Laurel and Hardy. Wha—?

Dan: It was just us goofing around. [laughs] Part of it was they dress us up in white, right? So, my recollection is, we were all dressed in white and we were just doing the painter thing. I don’t remember that we were sign painters. I think we were just painting a hallway or an office, or something like that.

CBC: And I might be misstating it, but, yes. You guys were dressed as painters, yes.

Dan: We were dressed as painters. When you get in that environment, and you can’t believe that anyone does that for a living. I don’t mean painting. I mean working on a TV show, because those are long days. And, I think, we were just bored and goofy. It was one of the rare times when Jon and I looked so much alike because we were both dressed all in white. It was just a screwy, end of the day type thing. Now, more than that, I don’t recall. Did he bring up any specifics?

CBC: He just shared that you guys decided to go all “silent film,” and that there weren’t necessarily lots of those scenes that made it into the show.

Dan: That is correct. I think, if you were to go back and look at that now — honest to God, I have not seen that in, like, forever — yeah, I don’t think much of anything we did survived [but ended up] on the cutting room floor. I think part of it was, we were supposed to be background elements, and we were goofing around and gesticulating. I think there was a point where we were mock arguing with each other and, like I said, gesticulating wildly. Just trying to make it look like we were frenetically painting, and all that. I think that was frowned upon.

Yeah, pretty sure Jon and I were doing the Laurel and Hardy bit, pretending to argue about the paint job as the cameras rolled and the actors moved around us and overdid it, thus causing our brilliant performance to end up on the cutting room floor.

CBC: [Laughs] Jon wanted me to ask about that because he “loves Dan.” Dan: [Laughs] The feeling is entirely mutual with Jon. It’s been so nice, because we’ve gotten to work together a couple of times since our Superman times. The most recent one was in the Kirby birthday book. I think it was in the Sandman story that I wrote. And Jon’s artwork on it was just spectacular. He was the perfect guy for it. I was just so happy that he was able to draw it.

CBC: Returning to Superman: what happened that forced you guys to not have Lois and Clark get married?

Dan: I think that’s been pretty well addressed. The [Lois and Clark TV] show said they wanted to do a Lois and Clark wedding at some point. “We aren’t ready to do that yet, so why don’t you #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Jonathan Kent, Superman, Lois Lane TM & © DC Comics.

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to Superman, that kind of thing… Who gets what, and what happens when you only get two pages per issue of Jimmy? “And, my God, what are you saying, ‘He throws up all over Bibbo’s bar and Bibbo punches him?’ Who does that [sequence]?”

That’s what took a long time. And you could spend an inordinate amount of time working on that two-page sequence that Jimmy would get in Adventures, and then his two pages in Superman, and on and on. But that’s what made it all work. When we’re breaking stuff down into that tight of fashion that’s what made the books work and read the way they did.

In some ways, dealing with the bigger villain stuff was a little bit easier. It’s like, “Superman and Aquaman find a sunken submarine this issue and — oh! — it’s continued into Adventures.”

And then, in Adventures, they find a sunken space capsule. In a way, that’s a little easier to do.

You spend an awful lot of time on the subplot and secondary characters. And I hate to even refer to them as “secondary characters,” because, ultimately, the level of commitment they brought to the book from readers made them more than that.

But that took a lot of time.

CBC: How do you fuse that type of subplot with something as outrageous as a Superman character?

Dan: That’s what gave it its humanity. I think this was what’s so important to Superman to me: Clark Kent.

His relationship with Lois, his relationship with his parents, and his relationship with Perry White. The more human you can make him in that the more relatable he becomes.

And the more meaning then that the bigger battles have.

And, I think, that’s what’s so critical that there is this blend of things. How do you come up with story ideas for Superman when he can fly through a mountain and take it down in a two-panel sequence?

I think the importance of it is the human element of Clark Kent and the people around him. If you can make that work for people, then it’s more relatable when the glasses come off and the red

Superman TM & © DC Comics. Photos courtesy of Dan Jurgens.

guys hold off, and then we could time it”… you know, down the road. So, this wedding that had been sort of targeted for Superman #75 was, all of a sudden, not in the books and we had to come up with something different.

CBC: I’m going to skip past asking the questions you’ve heard a thousand times, and circle back and do follow-up questions on “Death of Superman.” With that story having happened, with “Funeral for a Friend,” was one of the main reasons behind that to show how relevant this character of light and hope was?

Dan: That’s going to be something of a long answer and, for part of it, we do have to come back to the overall discussion of “Death of Superman” a little bit. Because we had, a couple of times earlier, one for sure — and this is before Jon and Weezie had joined the group, and maybe even another time when they were there — talked about the “Death of Superman.” There had been the old classic death of Superman at the hands of Lex Luthor story that had been done in the ’60s. As we got into talking about it, within the context of this particular meeting for Superman #75, I kind of wanted to do it as a big adventure story: “Let’s have the death of Superman! It’ll be great!” That kind of thing, and Carlin was the one who constantly said, “Why? You can’t just kill Superman for the sake of Superman. What are you gonna do then?”

We started talking [and] we drifted into this world where Superman was gone. We started talking about “Funeral for a Friend,” and then kind of worked our way back to doing the “Death of Superman.” Before we could say, “Okay, we are absolutely, 100%, committed to doing the ‘Death of Superman,’” we first had to find the meaning of the story. And that came through the discussions for “Funeral for a Friend.”

We hit on the broad topics: what happens to Lois? They’re engaged? What happens to his parents? Think about how sad that is. They watch their son die on TV and they can’t tell anybody that Clark is dead. And, for that matter, what the hell do we do with Clark? As we talked those things out: how does Batman react when he knows about loss being through what happened to his parents or the Joker having killed Robin? Stuff like that. That’s where we started to find meaning for the story.

Once you find the meaning, that’s where you have all the character, that’s where you have the heart, and that’s where you can go back and do the “Death of Superman.” As we started to talk about it, in some ways, there was more enthusiasm in the room for “Funeral for a Friend” than there was the “Death of Superman.” I don’t mean to minimize the enthusiasm for “Death of Superman.” We really got into it. But, I mean, we were also really highly motivated by what was going to come right after that, and what would happen to this world where, all of a sudden, its greatest hero was gone.

We could never anticipate in our wildest dreams that as the “Death of Superman” was published that, in those same moments, columnists across the country would write pieces about, “Superman is dead, Superman is gone, what does that say about us?” While we were writing those exact same stories and publishing them in our books. And that, to me, was the brilliance of it all. And I’m not trying to say that we were brilliant; I’m trying to say that the moment ended up with this sense of natural brilliance to it. Because that’s a rare moment where fiction and reality blended.

So, for readers at that time, who were going into the store… now think about it: that morning they might have read an op ed piece in their paper — “What does this say about us with Superman gone? What is the meaning of Superman?” — and then, that day, they go to the store and they buy a comic book that has that exact same story in it, pertaining to Superman on the COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

part of the characters in the story, as seen through their eyes. That’s pretty goddamn lucky to have that happen.

It also shows we were right on the money. I mean, I will pat us on the back for that. [laughter] CBC: One of the things I have seen recently, and I don’t know if it’s something you have seen yet, is the documentary on the Image guys called, So Much Damage. One of the comments was that, what those guys were doing was driving the industry at the time. And shared that, after their work came out, it did not take very long for DC to jump on the bandwagon and kill Superman and break Batman.

I don’t think they were the driving force behind what was going on in Carlin’s room or in Denny’s room with Batman. What was it that sent the “Let’s kill him” factor into high gear? (Other than the Jerry Ordway ”Let’skill-him-off” every year conversation.)

Dan: Well, that’s not exactly what happened. I can’t answer for the Batman crew, but in terms of our room, that’s not what happened. [Greg laughs] We planned the entire “Death of Superman” at a meeting that took place in New York during the first week of November, 1991. Planned the “Death of…” storyline, in November of 1991. And when I say, “planned out the story,” that’s exactly what I mean, right up through Superman #77. Even included the notes on breaking the story down from four, to three, to two, and eventually single, splash page panels as the conflict progressed. I’m pretty sure the first Image book, Youngblood, came out five or six months later, in April of 1992.

Now, later… by the time the book was solicited and such, it’s possible that the marketing effort was amped in reaction to Image and other market realities… as well as the sense that they had something noteworthy on their hands. But, when we

This page: Above, Dan signs many dozens of plastic-wrapped copies of Superman #75 [Jan. 1993]. Revealed cover above by Dan and inker Brett Breeding.

At top is Dan is displaying the plastic-wrapped “Platinum Edition” of Adventures of Superman #500 [June 1993]. To Dan’s immediate right is leery editor Mike Carlin.

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This page: Part of DC’s 1992 publicity kit sent to retailers was this poster of “The Death of Superman.”

Below: For the 30th anniversary of the epic saga, a one-shot featured this awesome wraparound and gatefold cover by penciler Dan Jurgens and inker Brett Breeding.

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Superman, all characters TM & ©DC Comics.

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planned out the story, which was 100% cobbled together in that creative meeting, without any direction from “above,” we were concerned with telling the best Superman story we could and nothing more. JLA tied into it, not because of any direction from anywhere else, but because I was writing and drawing that as well, and had tremendous faith in what we were putting together.

I have this yellow legal pad that I used at the time I was in

there, and I had two story ideas written on it. One was, “Death of Superman,” and the other one was, “Monster Trashes Metropolis.” That was it. And I just want to do a big fight. Because, at that time, all of Superman’s villains, to me, were kind of pedestrian.

Lex Luthor was a civilian, Mister Z was basically a civilian. And I just wanted to draw a big-ass fight scene where half the city got taken apart. I also wanted to do the “Death of Superman,” because I thought it would be a cool story. We had talked about it enough that it came up in the room. I thought I threw it out first. Other people say Jerry did. The major thing is we got it done. But I still have the notebook with the ideas written on it and the original Doomsday sketches that I had done. So there you go.

But, in any case, we were motivated purely by story. We weren’t, at that moment, seeing ourselves as trying to compete with anyone. We were just trying to do a good story. We were certainly aware of all the stuff those guys had been doing at Marvel. Yeah, it was definitely kicking our asses. We knew that.

But we were just trying to do a good Superman story.

In fact, one of the things I have always resented is this kind of accusation that we were just doing a big stunt. No. I think we were trying to tell as good a Superman story, intrinsic to the character, as we could possibly create. And in some ways I think what we put together — and again, I’m going to pat us all on the back — what we put together from an editorial quality of story standpoint was a really incredibly high achieving story, if you consider “Death of Superman,” “Funeral for a Friend,” and “The Return,” that succeeded on every possible level — from a sales standpoint, as well as an editorial standpoint.

And we sold so f*cking many copies, we actually got penalized, I think, for trying to come up with a publicity stunt when we were just trying to do a good story. We’ve had this conversation many times. I don’t think, being able to look in the rear view mirror, that the quality of what that was ever got its due. (End of rant.)

CBC: [Laughs] Right. I missed out on the original publication of that storyline, so I missed out on all the hoopla. I actually came to the story much later in life and was able to enjoy the story aspect of it and not the “Oh, my! Superman is dead!” It was really a moving experience for me just reading it at that point in time. So, kudos to you.

Dan: Well, thank you. I think, quite honestly, if you go back to that time, for readers to have been able to walk into their store on a weekly basis and get the next chapter. Which was always there and always on time — we weren’t candy asses; we did not miss shipping — which eventually became this tremendous crutch in the industry, is part of what also drove it. They knew that it would be there.

At that time, I think books came out later in the week, so it would be Friday or Saturday when you’d have packs of 14-year-old kids in the store, and they’d get that next chapter that carry them to the next week, and then the next week, and the week beyond that.

That was even a special way to experience it. And it kept this gut, “what’s coming next?” kind of vibe going. Which was also very important.

CBC: It had an almost Saturday movie serial aspect about

Superman, Lois Lane TM & © DC Comics.

it for kids at that point of time.

Dan: Right. And it became… in many ways, it was the essence of what strong character storytelling and super-hero comics can be. Yeah, you’ve gotta catch lightning in a bottle, there’s no question about that, but I think, when you get to the point where, creatively, as this happens so rarely, that you are firing on all cylinders, and to have four creative teams doing it — it was quite an achievement. Again, I sound like I’m trying to put us on a pedestal. It’s not so much I’m trying to do that. I think some of it is warranted. But I’m also trying to explain to people just how difficult that was.

It is a very antithetical way to work from a creative standpoint. Most creators, most writers, especially, work from a standpoint of, “I have this vision. I want to see my vision realized on paper.” And it’s hard enough for them to do when cooperating with a single editor or another artist, much less to have a group of creators like we were, trying to do that. That’s what I’m trying to explain to people here.

CBC: When it comes to the character you created to beat the piss out of Superman, and for Superman to overcome, what was the great thought that germinated in you to create Doomsday?

What was the plan for the character after the “Death of Superman”? Was there one?

Dan: I mentioned a little bit ago that I was looking for this massive confrontation that we could have with Superman.

Again, I was just looking to draw, and this is where the artist influences the writer, I was just looking for this chance to draw this epic, knockdown, drag-out, kick-ass fight. Something that would have repercussions. We’d had some physical villains, but they never seemed to hang around. And I wanted to do something that would really be something that would have impact, and long-term repercussions and, by that, I was talking about what could happen to Metropolis. This idea I believe I remember describing it as from 2,000 feet up in the air what you see is this pathway that just goes through the city. Like, cuts the city in half, that’s a couple of freeways wide, on this fight that would just go through the city between Superman and this… “whatever”… this monster.

And so I had this doodle of a character which has been COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

reproduced several times. It’s on my website. And, as we talked about it, I sketched up even a tighter version in the meeting.

This is where, as we talked about it as a group, “What would this be? Who would this be?” At the time, it was a little bit of a separate thing. It hadn’t necessarily been fused with the “Death of Superman” idea. We would do that later. Would this monster be the one who kills him?

Then you get into the whole question of, “You mean it’s not Lex? It’s not Brainiac?

Who is it?” As we started to put it together, I just wanted this “thing” (I think I kept calling it this “thing”) and we talked about this and, “What if it’s just a raging beast? What if it is this force of nature?” And then, we really got caught on that phrase, it being a “force of nature.” Like a tornado on legs… a hurricane on legs.

They don’t act with reason. They just are there. And that would be so different for a Superman story that that’s really were we got into what can Doomsday be. Because Superman didn’t really have anybody like that as a villain. In a way, what you’re talking about, if Superman is a creature of reason, then Doomsday is very much the opposite of that. I think one of the things you find in fiction very often that works well is when a villain is completely the polar opposite of the hero. That kind of thing. And we got very attracted to that.

Above: Tableau of Lois Lane mourning Superman’s death. From Superman #75, with art by Jurgens and Breeding. Below: Mainstream media coverage, from Lancaster Eagle Gazette, Nov. 11, 1992.

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Above: Poster of Cyborg CBC: You’ve returned to using that character in Hunter/Prey, Superman by Dan and Brett. and you’ve used him later on. Were there individuals who you

thought put the character to great use?

Below: Character design drawing Dan: I don’t know how many other people have really done a

by Dan of his creation, Doomsday, lot with Doomsday. I look at it more in terms of artistic interprekiller of the Man of Tomorrow! tation — many of which I’m not fond of, because they changed

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Superman, Doomsday TM & © DC Comics.

the bone structure so much. And that’s me probably being a picky ass. [laughter] I think the mistake has always been…

I think there have been a couple of attempts to give Doomsday intelligence, which, all of a sudden, makes him a very different character. And I wouldn’t go that route.

CBC: Bogdanove and I had talked about this, that one of the great things about The Spirit

by Eisner was that, in so many of those stories, the character was not even the lead in the story… the story would follow someone else…

One of the things Jon mentioned about “Funeral for a Friend” was that this was the gist of that storyline. Superman’s not here but he’s still here and here’s the stories that take place that make him even more worthwhile.

Dan: I think that’s true. We also had a crucial change in all of that. As we came back, Jerry Ordway, who’d been working on Superman for the longest of us, at that point, was stepping aside as of

Adventures #500. So we were coming back with a new writer to replace him in Karl Kesel. And Karl’s a really nice, pleasant human being, who fit really well into the room. So we were able to forge ahead but, even at that point, we were certainly aware that we still had a book called Superman, right? We still had books called Action Comics and Adventures of Superman and still not quite any Superman.

So what we really were able to do was start to blend all of that in and, even through different characters, write about and say the things we wanted to say about Superman in that. In some cases, it was because you had characters who were making a claim to be Superman, like Cyborg Superman. And others, like Steel, who really was stepping into that void and making a conscious decision to do so, whereas Cyborg Superman doing it out of his own sense of evil, scheming purpose. That’s where, once again, we were able to really do a good job pulling all of that together.

What had happened was that, when Superman died, we did not know how we were going to bring him back. We really didn’t. We had a vague idea when, but nothing written in stone.

The internet was in its infancy — we’re talking 1993 — but I remember seeing message boards where someone would say, “I know someone who knows someone — and here’s how they’re bringing him back.” [This was] when we didn’t even know. I distinctly remember seeing that message once and I thought, “Oh, so this is how it goes!”

And, when we got in a room, Mike said we have to do something great, the whole world is watching. And we couldn’t agree. We all had our own ideas. Not that we were in fight mode; it wasn’t like that at all. It was just asking what can we find that inspires us all equally to pursue? And that’s where I remember Weezie saying something to the effect of, “It’s too bad we all can’t just do our own stories,” or something like that. And that’s where the concept of four different Supermen was born.

CBC: How far out did this go? Did you think that this has got to outdo everything? Or is this simply the next story to tell?

Dan: The way I approached it, really, was about: what do we do for adventure here? What makes it different than all of us doing the same gag of four characters all basically making the same claim, and then we find out that none of them are? I think what was an important aspect as the story is that, aside from some of the obvious things, such as just giving us a brandnew Superboy and a brand-new character in Steel, was having one of them be a villain so we could pull the rug out from the readers and build some surprise into it. It also gave the real Superman a villain to defeat when he did come back.

CBC: Something that made me always wonder… what was the deal with the mullet?

Dan: [Laughs] It was a mullet. What we did talk about was this idea that, if he’d been away for a while, maybe he has longer hair, stuff like that, and we all agreed to that. That’s where, if you go back and look at some of the cover art that was done for the first issues coming back, Superman had almost a totally normal haircut. I never drew it as a mullet. I just drew it as longer hair. Jon and Tom both drew Clark with a ponytail, which I never did. I never drew the ponytail, because I said, “Clark Kent would not have a ponytail.” But those are the differences among creators that sometimes happen. It was the idea that maybe he comes back in a black suit. Let’s all just give him longer hair because it just makes for a little bit of a change. We were all on the page with that and thought it would look good.

CBC: Whose idea was it for the black suit upon the return?

Dan: Jon designed that particular look. What I recall us doing was: each of us doing a little doodle of something. I think we

Superman, Lois Lane TM & © DC Comics.

were all into the idea that he’d wear a black suit of some kind.

I probably added some details to mine where Jon just took the straight black with the silver S shield that we all gravitated toward. I do remember that we all took a stab at it. But Jon’s was so elegantly and starkly simplistic — and I mean that in the best possible way — that that’s the one we decided to go with.

We all wanted there to be some kind of a different recovery suit like that. I think we talked about it being black and may even have been inspired a little bit by Spider-Man. If you go back and remember, we weren’t all that far away from when Spider-Man had a black suit earlier, right?

Along with that, Brett Breeding might have inked the first black-costumed Spider-Man story. I remember Brett kind of talking about that in the room at the time. So, it was certainly a look we were all ready to go for and were excited by. It was just a question of, “How does this really look?” And some of it was because the black suit becomes very symbolic of death and is sort of formal. And that’s what we liked about it.

CBC: By then, as we’ve already talked about, you had worked with some outstanding individuals. What would be the difference with the people in the room at that point in time to the room when you were returning and doing Convergence and Rebirth and all? What was the difference between those rooms and those different decades?

Dan: In both cases, it’s an entirely different group of people.

Whether we are talking about those on staff in editorial, or marketing, or just from a creative standpoint. Anytime you have that, it turns into something else. Every conversation is different. Trying to build consensus is different. Trying to make sure everybody has the same vision of Superman can be different.

If we go back to the Rebirth, what we had with Superman: Lois and Clark, that was, like, the first Rebirth project, really.

We didn’t call it that, at the time, but it ended up being that.

It is the one that brought back the classic Superman into the DCU. It brought back the married version of Lois and Clark, with Jon. And then the idea is how do we bring that in Superman’s current continuity? At that point, the New 52 Superman and Wonder Woman were an item, that Clark and Lois weren’t married, so it was a bit messy. It wasn’t just a question of how we go forward with Lois and Clark and Jon, but it was also how we reconcile the differences that were already there as well.

CBC: You’ve certainly had your chance to have your hands on Superman well beyond this time frame. Some of those things that you’ve done have been some movie tie-ins. What’s the process like working on Superman/Aliens? How do things like that come about with cross-company tie-ins?

Dan: Oh, that one was a fun one. We were on kind of a promotional adventure, if you will, where Mike Carlin and I, and Mike Richardson, even though we’re from different companies, were in Hawaii and then Australia. At that time, as I recall, there was some sort of distributors session that was in Hawaii. So, we went there. Then we went on to Australia and, one night, we were sitting, almost like in an outdoor luau kind of thing, [laughs] and Carlin and Richardson and I started talking about a Superman/Aliens crossover.

We just got all hung up on this idea of the chest burster coming up out of that S shield symbol on Superman’s chest.

We thought that was the greatest thing ever and someday we would do it. At that time, and I think Alien was 20th Century Fox… In other words, the Alien people didn’t think that Superman was important enough to do a crossover. [laughter] So, we let it go for a bit and then, after the “Death of Superman,” we had done that and the sales had been, of course, phenomenal.

Everyone was talking about Superman. Of course, then they got COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

interested. “Hey, we can still do this idea.” So, we sat down and put together a Superman/Aliens, which was a lot of fun to do.

We got to use that image we always talked about, of the Alien coming up out of the S shield as part of the promotional bit.

And we wanted to put together, not just a Superman/Alien crossover, but we had to deal with the hurdles because, of course, if it was just Superman against a bunch of Aliens, Superman is still gonna win. So, either you needed a Kryptonian

Above: A page from The Superman Gallery [Apr. 1993], reprinting the Superman #59 [Sept. 1991] cover art by Dan and Brett.

Below: The “Death of Superman” mourning armband DC included with Superman #75.

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Above: Dan Jurgen’s version of Webhead, the Sensational Spider-Man, in a 1995 poster he penciled (at right) and was finished

by Klaus Janson, inker (above).

Opposite page: At top, to the writer/artist’s delight, his Superman/Fantastic Four [May 1999], was published in treasury-size format, at 10" x 13.5" Over Dan’s pencils, Alex Ross finished the cover and Art Thibert finished the interior art. Partnered with an enthusiastic John Romita, Jr., as penciler and Klaus Janson, inker, writer Jurgens produced a wild run of Thor during the Heroes Reborn reboot of 1998.Below: The Ben Reilly version of the character was established by writer/artist Jurgens in his Sensational Spider-Man run.

Cover detail from SSM #0 [Jan. 1996].

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

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Alien or a non-powered Superman. One of the two. We went with the non-powered Superman. It was a lot of fun to do. I had been working with Brett Breeding mostly on the regular books, but we brought in Kevin Nowlan to ink it. So, it had this sort of different, spooky, ethereal, kind of Gothic feel to it. Which was very effective. It was great fun.

CBC: What are some other things with Superman that you’ve had your hands on that are just as defining of the character in your run on “Death of Superman” and subsequent storylines?

Was there anything that was just important to you afterwards?

Dan: Afterwards, yes. Even stories we did at that time, there were some stories that I thought were very important to the character. I did a couple of stories called, “Metropolis Mail Bag,” where we established that, every Christmas, people would write to Superman, in the same way they’d write to Santa Claus. And this mail would just end up in a main Metropolis post office.

Letters asking Superman for help. And every Christmas, Superman would go read these bags, and bags, and bags of mail, then, on a couple of occasions, go help the people he could help. And I thought, “I’m still attracted to those. I could do one of those every year and not be repetitive.” Because that expands the concept of stories and it addresses the character of who Superman is so very, very well. So, that would be one.

I know I did, when I was still on Adventures of Superman, this is when I was inked by Norm Rapmund, before Brett and I worked together, a teen drunk driving story that went back to Clark’s high school days, that I still think is something that said quite a lot about the character. Years later, I did Superman: Day of Doom, which was a four-issue series that Bill Sienkiewicz inked, that I thought added something to the overall concept of the “Death of Superman.” And then I started writing Action Comics again… yeah, 2016, as part of the DC Rebirth effort. And, before that, the Lois and Clark mini-series, in which we said we’re going to give Lois and Clark a son. And that was part

of bringing Superman, as DC had done in New 52, as part of bringing Superman back into the DC Universe, I think, more of who he should be.

And doing some of that. And I did the mini-series [Lois and Clark] with Lee Weeks that started to address that.

And, as I said, I wrote Action Comics, which took all this a little bit further, where Jonathan Kent was a little older and, again, it helped humanize Clark, and along with Lois, in such a way that it made Superman more relevant.

CBC: How was that working with Lee? Dan: Oh, that was fabulous. We had done an issue of Thor together sometime earlier, and I’d always been a fan of his work. Lee is just one of these guys who is an artist’s artist. He is so passionate about his work and what he brings to it. He thinks out the story he’s telling so well that you almost hate to put word balloons down on the panels at times. He drew a very, very human Superman and a very human Jon and Lois. And that’s where you find the emotion in it. And it’s the emotion that bonds them. So he was perfect for that project.

CBC: There’s varying opinions on Superman and on his place in the world, in general. One of the artists I had talked to not long ago, who had been an artist on Batman, Graham Nolan, shared that it’s a lot easier to be a really good Batman artist, because of what you can hide, but it’s not as easy to be a Superman artist because everything is out there. What was the challenge, from the ’90s to now, for you with the character? How has his relevance and importance changed for you since then?

Dan: First of all, I think Graham is right. The cool thing about Batman, he can also appear in so many more forms. I mean, you could just let the ears on the cowl and the cape take over the form, right? And do it as this massive black silhouette and you can’t make a mistake. With Batman, it’s almost impossible to make a mistake. Part of that is because, even if you do it as that shape, if not 100%, it can still be 95% filled with ink, and this tremendous black form can take over the panel or the page and you’ll never be wrong. With Superman being more of a creature of light, that’s a little different. People might disagree with that. There’s plenty, too. But I agree with him on that one.

As for Superman now… the question I have always gotten, and, every time I do a newspaper interview, God, I swear I would get this… They would always ask, “Is Superman so much of a Boy Scout that he no longer has any relevance in today’s world? Isn’t he sort of old fashioned and outdated and outmoded because of that?” And my answer to that is, and always will be, “If that’s true, it says a lot more about us than it does Superman. And what it says about us is highly negative. Not at all good.” And I don’t necessarily agree with that. Superman has always been a heroic figure who has been there to kind of show us the best attributes of who we are and can be. I think that

Superman TM & © DC Comics. Fantastic Four, Thor TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

has just as much, and likely, more importance today than it did back then. So, in terms of the relevance of the character, I think that’s very, very important.

He is not one of us. He’s a creature from another world who realizes that he is here to lead the way and to help people lead a better life. And to help these people. What’s wrong with that? Why should that be outdated and outmoded? I think there is so much there to build around. That, to me, is the essence of who Superman is and part of what makes him the ultimate hero.

CBC: Is he still as meaningful in your heart now as he was when you were younger?

Dan: For me personally, yes. I would like to think that he is for others, but I can’t answer for anyone other than me. I always found ways to make Superman a bit relevant. I was writing Action Comics, so this must have been late 2017 to early 2018. And I did a story where Superman flies into a scene where there is workplace violence in progress. Someone is going to take it out on immigrant workers. Superman flies down, and as this person is shooting, he stops the bullets, of course, and he doesn’t make a grand statement. He didn’t need to. It was clear from the story and how it was written what was happening.

What astounded me by that was the recognition that it got. It got recognition on part of the people who supported it and applauded it. And it got recognition from those who felt exactly the opposite. And I just had the reaction of, “My God, this is Superman we’re talking about. Where do you think he came from? He is, himself, an immigrant. How are you reacting this way?” I was just floored by the reaction, in a way on both sides, because I didn’t think it would get any notice. To me, it was just, “Of course, this is Superman. This is who he is.” Sometimes you get amazed at the way people react.

CBC: What I want to walk through next is the DC/Marvel crossover which appeared in the ’90s. What is it that brought this company crossover together? Prior you had the two Spider-Man/Superman books, you had the José Luis Garcia Lopéz book with the Hulk and Batman, then you had Walt Simonson and Chris Claremont doing X-Men/Teen Titans.

What brought this one about?

Dan: Well, I think this is one of those things that was market-driven and sales-driven. As opposed to,”I have this great story”-driven. If we go back to that time, somewhat after the “Return of Superman” had been done, and Adventures of Superman #500, then we did the four characters claiming to be Superman, which was, I think, also really one of the best ideas we ever had. The market was taking a hit. Some people say it was because retailers over-ordered on Adventures #500, which is true. But I think they had also been over-ordering on a lot of product and it was catching up with them at that point. There were negative repercussions in the marketplace because of that. This is my understanding. I wasn’t involved in the original discussions, so I might be off on some of this. My understanding is the folks at Marvel and DC got together and said, “Y’know, we can really help out the retail COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

sector with this cross-over.” That would be all the heroes getting together; the Marvel heroes, the DC heroes, as well as the Amalgam books, where we have fused characters coming out later. That’s my understanding of how it sort of came into being. And then the talent was brought into it, following that. So, it was Ron Marz and Peter David as writers, and it was myself and Claudio Castellini as artists. At that point, yes, you want to tell a good story. You want to have people have fun with it. I think it was also this idea that you’d give the retailers something that they knew that they could push and get a lot of notice and a lot of attention.

CBC: I know John Byrne uses the term, “art robot,” when he’s not writing something; did you enjoy coming along and being the penciler for this book?

Dan: I did! Yeah. I understand John’s terminology, that way. I look at the stuff he has drawn that other people have written and, to me, it’s like, “John, don’t discredit yourself.” I see the passion there. And I can see that you were more than a robot. [laughter] And so, I think, on this one, I enjoyed it. Yeah, I had a good time.

CBC: This is one of the first major things that America got to see of Castellini’s work. What were your thoughts about what he was doing back then?

Dan: Oh, it was great stuff. It was really nice. His figures felt very, very fluid to me and I like that in his work. That might not make sense, but it felt very good that way. It was great to see. And I thought it was interesting to me because he was not one of the Marvel traditional artists so much, at that time. So, it was interesting to see his fresh take on a lot of those characters, as well as the DC characters.

CBC: He and Marv Wolfman teamed to do their version of Superman’s entrance to Metropolis. What did you think of their rehash of his origin?

Dan: It was very interesting. I thought it was quite good. They made for a very good creative team.

CBC: As a fan, were there any of the previous crossovers that came out that just made you say, “Man, that is fantastic!”; the crossovers between DC and Marvel?

Dan: As a kid, I mean, when Superman/ Spider-Man came out… I mean, the impact that had on me, because it was so unimaginable that it would be a reality, was just incredible.

Plus, the fact that it was treasury-sized… plus the fact that it was like, what, a 64-page story…? It was fantastic. So, the very first Superman/Spider-Man story, to me, was absolutely incredible. Just because it was unimaginable that it would even ever happen. Then it did happen. It was a beautiful book. It read great. It was just treasury-sized and awesome.

So, then a couple more, another Superman/ Spider-Man came out, that was great. Then, I think the X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover that Chris and Walt and Terry did, was absolutely just brilliant. I wish that would have been treasury-sized. It was just absolutely astounding and a brilliant piece of work.

By then, we weren’t seeing treasury-sized books anywhere. Whereas when Superman/ Spider-Man and Superman/Muhammad Ali 63

This page: Writer Dan Jurgens had a tough time writing Captain America, #25 [Jan. 2000] to #50 [Feb. 2002]. Above is CA #40 [Apr. 2001] and, below, CA #33 [Sept. 2000]. All art by Dan.

Dan: You had mentioned Stan and Jack, and that’s obviously where you have to start. Because I think if you look at, I think they did 102 issues, the amount of concepts and creativity you find, in that 100-plus issues, is absolutely astounding. And we see the characters grow and develop, we see Franklin join the cast, we see differences within the cast, Johnny seems to age, we dance back and forth a little bit with Ben — whether or not he can revert to being human, we have Alicia, and everything else. It’s just an astounding run of quality.

And the people who came after, whether it was John Buscema, whether it was John Byrne, and the others who drove the book, I think the Fantastic Four always had this sense of creativity and consistency to it that, in many ways, is the cornerstone of what Marvel Comics is, at least to me. (I don’t mean for everybody, by any means.) So much came from that. My God, it’s an incredible run of books.

CBC: With them being the “first family” of Marvel, Spider-Man is still the main Marvel character. How did Sensational SpiderMan come to you?

Dan: Marvel approached me and asked if I’d be interested in doing a Spider-Man book. I said that depends on what you want it to be. And they were talking about, at that point, Peter and Mary Jane were married, and I think they wanted out from under that. They didn’t want them to get divorced, so they had come up with something where they were going to introduce a character clone, called Ben Reilly, who would take over the spot of being Spider-Man and Peter Parker would die. They would go forward with a younger, unattached Spider-Man and they were 100% committed to that idea and this idea of being able to get back to, what they considered, true Spider-Man stories instead of always having Peter married to this supermodel, who we saw wearing little more than lingerie an amazing number of times. That, to me, is what the conversation came down to.

I said, “Sure. I’m up for that. Let’s give it a go.” I went in and we created a book called Sensational Spider-Man and I think, almost from the moment I was there, they started to backtrack a little bit on how it would happen, and what would happen.

Opinions were coming from all over the place. I’ll just say that I had a good time doing it. It was fun to be writing both SpiderMan and Superman simultaneously. That was cool. I don’t think many people had done that.

But what became apparent is, for whatever reason, I just felt that I could not do the types of stories that I wanted to do. I got along with the other writers on the other books well, but it just wasn’t working right. So it lasted about seven issues and I think we all agreed, “Yeah, we should probably end it here.”

CBC: Enjoyable for the fact it was the character? Or was it not an enjoyable experience?

Dan: The funny thing is, when you’re writing and drawing Spider-Man, you can’t not have fun. Right? You just can’t. You’re drawing this character on this page who’s winging through the city, shooting his web-line, taking out the bad guys. You can’t not have a lot of fun doing that. It’s impossible not to enjoy yourself. I think, where I got a little more frustrated, is that I think I signed on to do a type of job that I thought I would be able to do and then that wasn’t necessarily possible. That’s where it’s just better sometimes to realize that something is just not there. It’s not in the cards, and you go on and do something different.

CBC: Since we’re talking about Marvel characters, is there a Spider-Man guy who you said, “That’s Spider-Man! Whoever wrote it or drew it, that is who I believe Spider-man is”? Is there anyone for that character for you?

Dan: The funny thing is, I had never been exposed to a Steve #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Captain America TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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came out, they were common.

They weren’t later. But they should still do it that way. Get us a treasury-sized X-Men/ Teen Titans.

CBC: As you’re putting your feet into the Marvel world after being a DC guy for so much of your life at that time, you did a crossover with Superman and the Fantastic Four. What was that experience like?

Dan: That was something that Carlin and I had always talked about, even in my earliest days on Superman.

Somehow, we’d talk about, “You know what would be fun someday? A Superman/ Fantastic Four crossover. Yeah, it would! Well, maybe one day we can do it.” And then, six months later, we’d say, “I’ve got this idea for a Superman/ Fantastic Four crossover,” with no idea that we’d ever get to do it. We were just talking about it. Eventually, when it became possible to do it, we were able to pull it off and get it done.

I had a lot of fun doing it. The fact that we were able to do it as a treasury-sized book is something that I really appreciate.

Because, to us, that had to happen. To be a true crossover, it had to be treasury-sized, in our heads. We really wanted to push that and were able to make that happen. So I had a great deal of fun with that. It was great to be able to do it. In fact, I also wanted, because I spent almost seven years writing Thor, to do a Superman/Thor crossover. That would have been great fun, as well.

People so often would ask me, “Why are you writing Thor? Isn’t he the same as Superman?” And I’d say, “No! They’re not at all the same.

You have one guy trying to find his humanity, because that’s who he is. And another guy who is a god. That’s who he is. They’re not the same.”

So, I always thought that would be fun to do as well.

CBC: You’ve got Stan and Jack and Joltin’ Joe, then you have Buscema, Pérez, you had Byrne; who were some of the pairings on the FF books that were an influence on you that made you want to do that FF crossover?

All characters TM & © DC Comics.

Ditko Spider-Man story. When I started reading the book, John Romita, Sr., was drawing it. I had never seen a Ditko story until I saw some of the reprints. That was like, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” But, for me, the guy who really pulled me in was Gil Kane. Gil did this, from an anatomical standpoint, different sort of Spider-Man who looked like there was no pose he could not get into. Later, I think McFarlane and Erik Larsen would evoke that spirit of how he appeared.

But, for me, I can’t remember the issue number [#92, Jan. 1971], but it had Spider-Man fighting the Iceman who was sliding all over the city on his ice shield, and everything. It’s like, “Oh my God, this is beautiful.”

The Spider-Man artist who hooked me, and it’s more the era I was introduced to him and got into him, was Gil Kane. And then later, it was Ross Andru. Ross did this very unique Spider-Man. He didn’t have the anatomical wonkiness that, say, Gil Kane’s did, but New York city felt so real. Years later, when I was working for Ross, because he was an early editor of mine at DC, he would talk how he photographed everything. He said, “I would just walk around New York and take pictures. I would just go up on buildings and see if I could get on the roof and take pictures so I’d get the down shots,” and things like that. Ah-ha! I can see that now. No wonder! Certainly, his stuff was terrific, as well.

CBC: The Marvel time you had put your hands on some serious iconic characters. You worked on Thor and Captain America. When it comes to those characters — Captain America first — what drove that character for you? That character has had its peaks and a lot more valleys in its history.

Dan: Cap was a case where Bobbie Chase was editing the book, at the time.

She called me up and said, “Have you ever thought about writing Captain America? Because we would like you to do that if you’re interested.” Well, well!

Cap was, for me, a very difficult character to write. And I say that because, to me, Captain America, among all the characters that we have in comics, seems to reflect the times he is being published in, more so than any other character. And that’s because he was created to be exactly that in the 1940s. I think that, years later, we’re in the midst of Watergate, Steve Englehart is writing him and gives him this very particular reflection of where we were as a country at that point.

The problem is, if you get pulled into that too deeply, you end up writing a Captain America who gives a speech every three pages. It’s always where, is this the line I want to walk? What do I want to deal with here? How do I make that work? For me, that’s what made Cap a tough book to write, was always finding that sense of balance. I think Jack Kirby had done a story once in Jimmy there are a few moments where I did and Olsen, where Superman finds this place called where I didn’t. It makes him this very unique Supertown, which is filled with people with character that way. I enjoyed that. super-powers and god-like powers, which, in a I really enjoyed doing it. At first, I had Andy way, is Asgard. Take Superman and put him in Kubert drawing it. We had worked together on Asgard and how does he relate to everybody?

Thor, as well. It was great stuff. Andy would just Quite interesting of Thor is, being a god among bring this magic to whatever it is he does. It’s men, how he relates to everybody. When I first also part of what makes Cap tough. I wonder started writing Thor, I very consciously, right about that now because, as one of the characin the very first issue, had Thor walking down ters we used right away was the Hate Monger, the street and people saying, “Are you really who I think now would even have more relea god? You say you are a god. Are you really a vance to where we’re at today, in a polarized god?” What does that mean? Can you imagine, country like this. It was a lot to tackle. If I were right now, someone walking down Broadway ever going to do Captain America again, I’d who just stops and starts saying, “I am a god!”? want to take three years off just thinking about And they’re speaking expressively in this it to and then start. flowery, Shakespearean sort of dialect! That is, CBC: You went from the “Man Out of Time,” to me, where you’d have a lot of fun putting who exposes what the times look like (I think is Superman and Thor together, because, while a way to describe Cap) to working with Kubert their power levels might be the same, they are and Lee Weeks on Thor. You mentioned about very different characters. I would love to do that putting Thor together with Superman. What discussion between the two of them, where would be so wonderful about putting those two they talk about that. “You lived in this place characters together? called Smallville. Why would you do that?!” “You lived in a place called Asgard Dan: To me, Superman is someone with the powers of a god who chooses to with other gods. Why would you want to do that?” They’re very different. be — and is — incredibly human. Thor is someone who has the powers of a god CBC: I’ve asked similar questions already, but when it comes to Thor you have who, to me, embraces that. I think that makes for a very different background.

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Top: Street view of 1304 Glenwood Road, in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Byron Cary Preiss grew up and the mailing address he used for his early fan efforts.

Inset right: Byron’s senior portrait taken for the 1969 Midwood High School Yearbook.

Below: Byron is highlighted in this group portrait of the Midwood High School “commissioners,” presumably a student leadership group at the public institution.

Above: Spectacular Zero Hour: Crisis in Time piece by Dan and Jerry rendered for the cover of the July, 1994, edition of the Advance Comics distribution catalog.

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#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All characters TM & © DC Comics.

Previous page: Inset center is penciler Dan Jurgens and inker Jerry Ordway cover for the Zero Hour: Crisis in Time Collection [1994].

The same art team produced the cover, prominently featuring Hal Jordan as Parallax, for a 2018 reprinting of the mini-series.

several different versions that led up to yours. What were some that you were impressed by or that influenced you?

Dan: The first version I was ever subjected to was John Buscema’s Thor, written by Len Wein. I had read Thor earlier when he was in The Avengers. And then, again, when Marvel would come out, I have a couple of these still, with the giants that they would do that reprinted the old Kirby stuff. It was like, “Holy sh*t! This is spectacular!” Then I would later seek those out a bit and try to find those stories, and say, “This is where it came from.” This is the evolution that we went through for him as a character. So later you have the Buscema stuff, which was so powerful, and then you eventually transitioned into Walter Simonson’s stuff, which was evocative of the Kirby stuff. The thing that’s interesting to me is Thor had always had this sense of consistency, it seemed, where the people who worked on Thor seemed to embrace the world of Thor and emphasize that.

Now, writers very often take over a book and they say, “Oh, the four years of stuff you read before that… forget that! Bull-

sh*t! I’m throwing it out the window! I’m starting all over again because I know better.” And that’s a very common sentiment now, which I think, rips off the readers. Back then, if you look at how books progressed, it was very often creative teams that found what was magic and what really worked in the iterations before them, trying to capitalize on that, while also bringing something fresh to it.

CBC: Going back to that ’90s era at DC: you moved forward with Zero Hour with you and Jerry Ordway. What was the germination point of that for you? Why was that the next thing on your docket after Superman?

Dan: There were a couple of things. One of which was because we were seeing DC’s classic heroes age throughout the books. Hal Jordan was getting gray hair. He was getting gray at the temples, sort of like Reed Richards. In Green Arrow, Oliver Queen was basically celebrating a birthday every year. We saw him turn 44, then we saw him turn 45, and maybe 46. All of a sudden they were getting demonstrably older. The Justice Society characters were getting to the point where they would have all been 75, 80 years old. Not just in their 50s or even 40s, like they would have been, presumably, when we first met them in the ’60s, as the Earth-One, Earth-Two thing became a reality. So they were aging. There was kind of this sense around DC that we were painting ourselves into a corner. I know that I was probably big on that. I kept saying that, if we keep going down this road, it’s a trap. At the same time, there was an editor on staff by the name of K.C. Carlson who was also sort of saying some of the same things, although we had never really discussed it. I had turned something in, in terms of a quick pitch on a “maybe here’s what we should do” kind of thing. And then Mike Carlin put K.C. and I together, and we started to come up with what became Zero Hour as a way of dealing with some of those problems.

CBC: What was that like as a writer taking that on? That’s kind of become your wheelhouse to reset that type of thing.

Dan: I think anybody would say, any writer, writing any kind of company-wide crossover, is a special punishment all its own potentially. [laughs] Which it is. Back then, it was a lot harder because we weren’t sending images over the internet. I was getting some stuff via email, but a very small portion. What I ended up having to do was clear out an entire wall for space in my studio, where I had stacks of paper on the floor, for each book, in order of its release.

Say week one was Batman, World’s Finest, and Action Comics, I’d have those in alphabetical order on my “Week One” column, and stuff like that. Ultimately, the amount of paperwork I had sitting in my office was just enough to cave in a house.

I’m surprised it didn’t just collapse on itself. It’s tracking all the characters. It’s working with all the editors. It’s working with all the other creators, as well to work it through and make sure they got what they needed for their characters in their story.

And, at the same time, what also made it hard, because no one had ever done this before, I was drawing it. And it was five issues that came out in five weeks’ time, written and drawn by one guy. I haven’t seen anything done like that since. I dare say, now — today — if you’re going to have five issues come out in five weeks, not only would it not be written and drawn by the same person, it would probably be written by one person and drawn by five different people. The sheer amount of work that it turned into was… it was something else!

CBC: And you partnered with Jerry on the art as your inker.

That’s putting together two high-quality guys who can write and draw. How was that process?

Dan: That was great. Jerry and I are friends, and we were

Metal Men, Justice League TM & © DC Comics.

friends at that time, and he, to this day, is one of the best inkers to ever work in comics. I mean, the quality of what he does is just astounding to me. The part of the problem is, I just said that he’s one of the best inkers, and that almost implies that he’s not on that level as a writer and penciler. And that is not at all true, because he is. It was great to have him on board to complete what was there, in terms of my layouts, and bring them through to final, finished art, and understand the nature of comics storytelling, as well. That’s in terms of how you separate characters on a page and make sure the characters don’t bleed into backgrounds, and things like that. He was someone who you knew would commit 1,000% to it. And also it was nice, because I could say, “You know the guy who inked Crisis on Infinite Earths is here, too,” so it worked out, all the way around.

CBC: As a series, did you get out of it and accomplish what you hoped to get from it?

Dan: Not 100%, but you don’t do that much on any series anyway. I got most of it. We talked about so many different ideas that ultimately you weren’t going to get all your ideas in something like that. Often, what you get is a question of, “Do you get 70% of what you were hoping for?” And I’d say that’s about what the average was. Ultimately, I think it helped to make Parallax a very interesting character in the DCU for a while and kept up the whole Green Lantern set of problems and issues they had created in the Green Lantern books. So, overall, I think it worked well. I think it did help reset the stage, even that timeline that we had in the final issue — that alone took an incredible amount of work. It is the project that almost did me in. I’ll just say that.

CBC: Outside of Superman, you’ve had your hands on some important titles, at DC specifically, in the 1990s. As well as handling things like the Justice League, as you had mentioned, you also were part of relaunching Metal Men, for Pete’s sake. They come into vogue every so often. What were the creative aspects you were trying to stretch or grow at this time of your career?

Dan: You know, one of the things I have always found — and it’s hard for a writer-artist — but I like to have different projects on my table at the same time. Because they help keep each other fresh. For example, if I was doing Superman and Green Arrow, those are different projects. They are very different. One, I might have been writing drawing; Green Arrow, I was just doing the art on. It kind of keeps you fresh to work with other people.

One of the problems being a writer-artist is you become very insulated if you aren’t careful. And becoming insulated can be a bad thing. It gives you tunnel vision, in terms of your work.

It gives you tunnel vision, in terms of your perspective. So, I have always appreciated being able to work with other people.

If I am drawing Metal Men, it allows me to work with a writer and I’m just an artist on the book, which allows me to just think differently about the project, it allows me to think differently about the characters. And I’ve always tried to do that throughout my career. Which is to have different projects going on at the same time and be working with different people, be they editors, be they writers, be they artists. Because you’re always learning and your perspective is always changing based on who it is that you work with, in many respects.

One of the things I have found (and I know this isn’t quite the answer you might have been looking for) is, the best way of working in the business, is to work with people you enjoy working with. That brings out the best in you. It brings out the best creative discussions. It brings out, I think, the best potential for various characters, and the projects, and that all develops you as a creator. We are always developing. So, at that time, if I had a principal gig that was taking up 60% of my COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

time, which Superman would have been, I always tried to round it out with other things that would be different. And that was important to me. So, Metal Men is something I was a little more playful in nature, right? I mean, when you are drawing the Metal Men and you look at those physical silhouettes of those characters that’s very different than a book where you’re trying to be more anatomically true and correct. Like, say Superman or something like that. And that was even part of it with Booster Gold as it related to Superman. Or Green Arrow as it related to Superman. It worked different in tone. They were different things. That’s important to do. And I always tried to do that.

In the ’90s, whether it was DC, with a book like Justice League, that was Marc DeMatteis and Keith Giffen and Andy Helfer, and that whole group. They had been doing that book for five years. And then all the books that spun out of it, like Justice League Europe. So that, when DC came and asked me about it, they actually did because Marvel had asked me about doing The Avengers. And I thought, “Maybe I’ll go do Avengers.” And DC said, “Whoa, if you want to do that, how about Justice League instead? Because we’re not going to do it like Keith had been doing it.”

Though they still wanted to keep it two books; Justice League Europe and Justice League America. So I wasn’t going to have the original six, seven big, A-level characters, but I’d have a

Above: Clever Metal Men miniseries cover — #2 [Nov. 1993], written by Mike Carlin — with Dan’s pencils and Brett’s inks.

Below: This art by Dan (pencils) and Ron Randall (inks) served as interconnected variant covers for Justice League Spectacular #1 [Apr. 1992], which Dan co-wrote.

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Above: Solar, Man of the Atom #46 [July 1995] cover art by Dan with Bob Layton inks. Opposite page: Across the June 2022 releases, DC included this two-page spread penciled by Dan and inked by 27 artists, celebrating George Pérez before his passing, for his 68th birthday. At inset bottom is Booster Gold #45 [Aug. 2011] cover, pencils by Dan, inks by Norm Rapmund. Below: Wizard contest page illo with Solar by Dan.

be, how it might work. And we kind of settled on this as a new group and as a new effort. And, I think, part of what happened is that we moved it, perhaps, too far afield. I had gotten into it and was realizing right away that, to a certain extent, Dick and Donna were to the Titans what Scott and Jean are to the X-Men. They had that sense of gravitas that helped anchor the book and I think that’s what I was lacking. We pushed it too far afield from that.

You can have new characters, you can do different things, but if you’re going to call it, Teen Titans, it still needs to relate somehow to what had gone before. And as we got into that we started to correct that a little bit. We had around #12, 13, 14, 15, where I had brought Nightwing, Aqualad, Tempest, and those characters back for a bit. But I think we stepped too far in that direction. When you do that you want to put one foot in the new playground while keeping one foot in the previous playground.

Because if you jump wholeheartedly into the new, it becomes too alienating to readers.

CBC: They need to have something that is familiar.

Dan: Yeah! I think so. I think that’s what they wanted, and I think, had we sculpted it that way from the start, I think we would have had more success.

CBC: When you are starting a new run on anything what do you have to do to get yourself prepared; to get yourself in the position of getting not just your voice forward, but getting the character forward?

Dan: Oh, every project is different. Each one has its own prescription, if you will. If it’s Thor, what I had to do was go ahead and immerse myself and reacquaint myself with Thor, who I always liked as a kid, but really start to look at in a different light and go back and bury myself in a lot of the Lee and Kirby stuff, because that’s where so many things were created. And then also in the stuff that came after. Whether it was Walter’s, or Len Wein’s, or whoever else was in there, just to make sure I was familiar with it in terms of where all “this” would have come from. So, that is certainly that particular prescription.

If it’s a new character, then it is so different because you’re cutting from whole cloth. It’s really trying to figure out where you want to take them, what you want to say. If it’s something like Solar, when I did that, it was, “What is the potential for this character?” Because there wasn’t necessarily as much previous stuff that you might want to draw from, but there would be an awful lot of material there that you’d want to work from. So that would be a great deal of it. When I say “work from,” I mean in terms of the power level of the character. It’s always different.

Every book is different, every character is different, in terms of how you have to approach it.

CBC: As far as the plans for success, or the challenges that came with New 52, Convergence, Rebirth, can you talk me through what those looked like coming from your perspective of what was successful and what was not?

Dan: With Convergence, I think some of that stuff wasn’t necessarily as strong as we would have hoped. I think it certainly accomplished its mission statement, which was, “Gee, an entire publishing company has to move out West to California and didn’t want to stop releasing product.” Convergence as a project, I think, gets kicked around some. But what’s amazing about it is, that’s where Jon Kent came from. That’s where Jon Kent was born. That’s his first appearance. So here he is now, all these years later, and he is part of DC’s future. And a cornerstone in that future in a strong, strong way. He came out of that and that was very, very solid.

New 52, in terms of an effort that was really designed to find new fans, and everything… at first, I was writing Justice #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Solar, Man of the Atom TM & © Dynamite Entertainment.

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couple of them. And then I be able to still work with Booster and Blue Beetle, and keep at that end. So there would be some lightness without being as off the wall as, say, what Keith had been doing. That made it different than what Superman was, at that point.

So if I were working on two things, I wanted them to be very different things.

CBC: To finish out the decade of the ’90s at DC, you were writing and penciling the Teen Titans. I have to ask, did Marv and George have an influence on what that was and why you did that book?

Dan: I had been a fan of the Teen Titans, even as an eight, nine, 10 year old kid, because it was, like, Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, and Aqualad together. I mean, they’re kids, like me. I want to read that! I was a fan of the book in those days. And, obviously, when Marv and George came to DC to do their version of the Teen Titans, it was the best book DC was doing. It was a great title.

What happened in the ’90s, and I think, at that point, I had gone to Valiant to do Solar. I had gone to Marvel and done Sensational Spider-Man. And DC said, “We want a very different take on the Teen Titans.” By that point, I think they felt that the line-up, in part because the characters were aging so much, had kind of got to the point where it had become a different sort of franchise. So they said, “We want to talk to you about doing a book called Teen Titans, which gets back to teen characters, new characters that we haven’t seen before that are kids.” That’s what they were looking for. So we started talking about it. We were going back and forth on different ideas of what it might

All characters TM & © DC Comics.

League International, and I was drawing Green Arrow, and I think part of what we did that may not have worked so well is that readers lost context of who these characters were because they didn’t understand how they it together.

Early in the game, it was great, because we saw the Justice League come together for the first time, for example. But if I were to ask people if Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen still had their road trip, out touring through America… fans didn’t know. Because we never came out and said whether they had or not. I bring that up because it was something I asked about. I was told that they had.

When I referred to it in a book, the line was taken out because no one knew. It was the same thing with Superman and Lois not being married. Which is that, if you’ve had something well-established in continuity, and everyone knows it and remembers it, and many people like it, then when you take it away, you start to lose the context as to how all these characters fit together. If you then expand that out over an entire line, the question is, “Of my favorite adventures in the past, what still took place?”

Had New 52 Superman fought Doomsday?

Yes or no? I don’t think we were ever consistent on these things and that’s where, I think, we had some problems with New 52. And then the whole thing didn’t necessarily hang together that way. And then, I think, where to commit one way or the other, you’re neither fish nor fowl.

And that becomes a problem. I think that’s what happened there.

I think Rebirth was a strong set of stories for the company, overall. Rebirth worked very, very well, I think, in the marketplace. I think the idea that you had books coming out twice a month, while it was hard on the creative staff, I think the readers responded to it very well in the marketplace. I mean, everywhere I would go…!

If you have a good comic book, readers will take more of it every month, right? And that’s what we found out. Fans loved that idea. So, on Action and Superman, we tried to make sure we presented a consistent portrayal of Superman, where stories could cross-over and refer to each other, but still be distinctive reads. I think we did that.

I always thought that what Greg Rucka came COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

up with in terms of Wonder Woman was fabulous, which was: in this set of issues, the odds tell one story and the evens tell another story. Kind of past and present. I thought, “Man, that was genius. Why didn’t I think of that?”

So I think, overall, Rebirth was a real shot in the arm. Everyone sort of understood what Rebirth means: get the characters back to their basics, the strongest elements of character and story that everyone understands with those particular characters… and why they loved those particular characters.

CBC: You’ve had your hands on the biggest characters and you’ve created characters that became big themselves. One of the things you’ve had your hands on is the Batman family of titles. Batman Beyond just seems to me like a fun-ashell title to be doing. You’re based on a cartoon with that slick design that Darwyn Cooke did. How fun was working on Batman Beyond?

Dan: Way more fun than I thought it was going to be. That’s so nice to have happen because, every now and then, you’ll get on a project that turns into, you know, “Why did I do this? I never should have taken this. This is not what I need to be doing.” And that was a little bit totally the opposite of that. We had been working on the weekly book and, as we first started on it, it was me, Jeff Lemire, Keith Giffen, and Brian Azzarello as writers, and Azzarello was writing most of the Batman Beyond sequences. And then it kind of transitioned into my stable. It just sort of happened. As we were getting done on it, and this is the Future’s End weekly, Dan DiDio said, “We should have Batman Beyond as a weekly in the DCU. Do you want to do it?” And I said, “Yeah, okay.”

And I thought I would do it for maybe a year or something like that. But I really took a liking to it and I appreciated that it was its own world, where I got to play with names, and things like that, from the DCU. By that, I mean where you take a character like Mr. Freeze, if you wanted to, and re-envision him, because it’s in the future. But still, at the same time, it’s part of the Batman universe. You still have a Bruce Wayne. You still have a Barbara Gordon. You still have a Dick Grayson. And the more I wrote it, the more fun I had. Even now, I still miss it, because it was somewhat freeing to work in the corner of a universe like that, where you’re not encumbered 69

Above: Dan’s pencils for Batman/ Superman #13 [Oct. 2014] variant cover, with inks by Dan Miki.

Below: Detail of Bernard Chang’s cover for the Batman Beyond collection, Brave New Worlds [2016], a series written by Dan.

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Superman, Batman, Batman Beyond TM & © DC Comics.

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by outside events, where they say, “This month it’s all ‘everybody fights the big ice creature month.’”

So, you can do your own thing. And I had a lot of fun with it. I did it for some time.

CBC: You were basically working outside of canon and creating canon as you were doing it. Which is a pretty unique experience.

Dan: Yeah, it really was. It was a very schway experience. [laughter] I can’t believe I did that, myself.

CBC: We’ve already talked about what Miller was doing in the mid-80s, with The Dark Knight Returns, which, if I am understanding it correctly, it was supposed to be a one-shot, its own thing outside the history of the character. That series has become such a touchstone that so much of that particular character is now bent on how to get nihilistic with the character of Batman. How do you drive the character so he ends up being what Miller had done? The feet of clay character? How valid is it that creators are finding it hard to get away from what Miller did back in ’86?

Dan: I look at it this way — and I did not see him as necessarily completely incompatible — the two notions of Frank’s Batman, which ends up in that Bruce Wayne state, as opposed to the Bruce Timm version of the character. In my head, I can find a way to say, “Okay, maybe the Frank Miller Dark Knight existed and then after that he came back”… because remember the Batman Beyond

costume was one that Bruce wore himself. And Bruce, when he came back again after his Dark Knight time, was so beat up that he had to use this exoskeleton type of suit, that Batman Beyond wore. So, in my head, I did not necessarily see those as incompatible.

CBC: You also worked on the Nightwing character. How far can you take that character still rooting him in the fact that he was the original sidekick?

Dan: You know, that was probably one of that: if I had to do all over again, I never would take that on again. What happened there is that you had what I call kind of that hard left turn on a storyline, which was that Nightwing in his own book was going out on one course of stories and then, in Batman, Dick Grayson got shot by the KGBeast. So, unbeknown even to the Nightwing writer at the time, DC made the decision that, “Okay, we’re going to pursue this and force it into Nightwing’s own book. We’ll build stories off of it. We’ll say Dick Grayson has amnesia and we’ll get a whole new start for Dick Grayson. He’ll go to Bludhaven.”

Although why he’d go there, since he has amnesia and no connection there, I don’t know. Maybe people like typing Bludhaven into their strips. I don’t know. Obviously, they had had a less than successful transition in terms of story.

When I came on, what I had been told is, “Look, just give us a couple of issues within this world and then get us out of it. It’s your book, do what you want to do.” And I said, “Okay. I’d love to.” And I was never allowed to do that. It was, for one reason or another, carry the storyline on. Even though you know that not a lot of fans necessarily like it. It’s not classic Nightwing. But I took it with the understanding that it was my book and I would get to do the kind of — Nightwing, as I saw fit — and that was something that never really materialized. In retrospect, what I probably should have done is, when that was made clear, I should have walked off the book.

CBC: What is different from Batman between the decade of the ’80s and as he is now?

Dan: I think Batman has changed a lot. As I understand your question, in terms of the timeline that was presented, if we go back to Batman in sort of the ’80s/90s era at DC, I remember discussing this with Denny O’Neil, at some point, and Denny saying that Batman is almost like an urban myth. There aren’t photographs of him. He never comes out during the day.

People don’t take pictures of him. People in Gotham hear about this Batman-kind of guy, but is he really there? Is he not? He operates at night. He’s much more a loner and he does the things that he has to do to make Gotham safe.

I think now what we see is a Batman who is much more in the public eye, who is much more “techie,” and, to me, that means, even if he invents his own tech, he’s a little less self-reliant. I do see him as a bit of a different character, in that his level of capability has just expanded greatly. I thought, when it got to the point where Batman invented the Brother Eye, which then basically sort of turned on Earth, that was not what I would have called Denny O’Neil’s vision of Batman, I don’t think. So that’s where I see the differences there.

Superman, Batman TM & © DC Comics. Photos courtesy of Dan Jurgens.

CBC: How about Superman? Or have we covered that one that pretty copiously?

Dan: I think we have. A lot of it is based on a couple of things. Some of it, I think, is [Superman’s son] Jon. I also think his marriage to Lois. Because if we go back to Action Comics #1, it wasn’t just the debut of Superman and Clark Kent, it was the debut of Lois Lane, as well. I’ve always said that that is something we should always remember. She is every bit as important to the Superman mythos, if not more important, than just about anything else.

The thing that Superman has always been, always been since day one, which is, with someone with that level of power, what makes them human? And that’s why, in his earliest adventures, he would take a wife-beater and dangle him off the edge of a building, almost Batman style. Or take a slumlord and practically do the same thing. He was involved in those smaller issues of justice, and now he deals with bigger problems, in large part, because he’s more powerful. But I still think that, if you go back and look at that, that’s important to recognize.

And one of the things I’ve always said is that Batman is much more oriented towards the criminal, whereas Superman is much more oriented towards the victim. Everyone says Batman is a symbol of the night and Superman is a symbol of the sun. But, to me, Superman really is there to care about the victim, Batman is there to bring down the perp. I think therein lies the difference between the two.

CBC: Notwithstanding those main characters, in recent years you’ve also had your hands on other characters such as Firestorm and Aquaman. Having worked on those major characters, those iconic ones, what are the challenges that come when you’re working with others whose popularity really kind of ebbs and flows depending on the time or creator who is on them?

Dan: I don’t see it as a challenge. That’s another thing that I think has changed in the industry: when I was doing Superman, DC had a hard time finding people who wanted to do Superman. I think there was a point where a lot of writers wanted to work on more like the B and C characters — I hate that terminology, by the way — because there was a little more freedom there. I think that it should always be, in a perfect world, it wouldn’t be so much about, “Gee, I have this passion to do whatever character,” as much as I have something I feel I can say or would be interesting with this particular character or that particular character. And it doesn’t matter if they’re so-called A-list, B-list, or C-list. Again, I hate that terminology, in part because then publishers use it and they ascribe it to talent.

“That’s C-level talent, so he shouldn’t work on anything more.”

No! I hate that. I look back at some of the most creative times in comics and, if it’s Jim Starlin, say, doing Captain Marvel or Warlock, those would not be perceived as A characters, but, by God, those were A-plus level stories. So, that’s what I think is important. If I get a spin on Aquaman, I’ll dive right in and do my best. And, yes, the pun was intended. [laughter] CBC: You already mentioned working on Green Lantern. You and I are both Gil Kane guys, and then you had Neal and Denny doing ground-shaking stuff. What’s it like to try to take that character on and do something with your own voice?

Dan: I love Green Lantern. I love the milieu of the Green Lantern Corps. I love Hal Jordan as a character. I think there is all sorts of stuff there to work from and draw from, because the scope of story you can do with Green Lantern is just incredibly epic. I think there’s a lot there and one of the reasons I think Hal Jordan is so interesting is because he is one of those characters who had his eyes opened up after he became a hero, in what Denny and Neal did. Which, I think, is still to this day such COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

Previous page: Splash of “The Block” from Comixscene #4 [June 1973] and tabloid version sans graffiti, plus Teacher’s Guide. This page: Two pages from the joint Preiss/Kubert Tilden School project.

This page: From top and left to right, David Betancourt interviews former DC publisher Paul Levitz and Dan at the Library of Congress, on Mar. 28, 2018, celebrating Action Comics #1000; Ron Randall, Marv Wolfman, Jerry Ordway, and Dan Jurgens pose at the 1984 Dallas Fantasy Fair; and Dan stands before a “Death of Superman” display at the DC Comics booth during the 2018 Comic-Con International: San Diego.

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Above: Dan Jurgen’s greatest contribution to the Superman mythos might just be his introduction of Jonathan Kent, son of the Man of Steel, in the Rebirth series, Superman: Lois & Clark [eight issues, Dec. 2015–July 2016], drawn by Lee Weeks and Scott Hanna.

Below: More time-traveling fun is found in Dan’s Time Masters: Vanishing Point [six issues, 2011].

because everyone else who had seen Laura Croft prior to that would have seen her in a video game. Which meant they had basically seen one version of her and had this clear visual of her in their minds. With him being there every single month and helping to create what is a bit of a different look, but a very consistent one, is so important that it helped immeasurably.

The lack of consistency in art, in monthly comics right now, I think is detrimental to the industry. Back then, we could still say, “Here’s a guy who is going to do it and do it for 25 issues, and he’s going to be there for almost all of them.” That creates a visual consistency that is every bit as important as is the writing in a book.

CBC: And presently that is not the case because there is, in some cases, multiple hands?

Dan: Often, it’s multiple hands. Often, it’s more decision on the part of the publishers who — say, for a while, there at DC — were publishing books twice a month. No one person can keep up with that. That brings in a lot of different people into the blend. Or now it’s often, “We’re going to have this team do six issues, then this different team do six other issues after you’re done…” There’s this feeling of visual inconsistency, shall we say, that I think is ultimately detrimental. That stops us from building that longtime association with characters, which I think helped really define careers. If you can say, “Yeah, I did a four-year run on something, and, out of the 48 issues, I drew 42 of them,” that’s significant. And I think that’s very meaningful in the long run.

CBC: One of the fun things that you’ve had a recent opportunity to do was “Vanishing Point” through Time Masters. That seemed like it just had to have been a blast to put together. How did you manage to make that work and put that story together?

Dan: That was one where DC came to me. Dan [DiDio] called me up one day, and he said, “We’re doing this thing and Batman dies.” And he started to talk about everything that Grant Morrison was going to do in and around that story and everything, and could they build something else off of that, that would get into the hunt for Batman through time. I said, “Sure.”

And that’s about all I found out about it. [laughter] There wasn’t a lot more detail. This is a case where deadlines are just breathing down on you hard, and the details weren’t there. So we decided, rather than this being a hardcore search for Batman, they go off searching for Batman and then other events sort of take over. That’s what we did with that one. And that was fun to work on. It was still tied into the “what happened to Batman” concept. And you could play with some other things that were just a little bit more about the relationship between Rip Hunter and Booster.

CBC: You are a big proponent of time-travel in stories because you handle it really well.

Dan: Thank you. They are always fun. In fact, I have to make sure I force myself not to do it because it can become kind of an easy trap of sorts. It’s sort of like Star Trek: The Next Generation: whenever they were desperate, they’d come up with a time-travel story. [laughter] So, I’m always conscious of that.

CBC: There are two things that you have done, but for whatever reason, don’t just rise to the top when people think of your name. One is the Fantastic Four movie book.

Dan: Oh, that was a weird experience. Ralph Macchio called me up one day and said, “Hey, we’re doing the Fantastic Four movie adaptation. We need someone to draw it. Would you do it?” And I thought, “Well, yeah! Who wouldn’t want to do that?”

So I signed on. And then we got into it and the studio wanted to give us absolutely no reference whatsoever. And then, they said, “You can’t use character licenses.” Everything that was hap#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All characters TM & © DC Comics.

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fascinating stuff and such a great approach to a character.

I think there’s all sorts of fun stuff and potential to be found there. We’ve gotten to the point where it’s almost ridiculous that we have like 35 different Green Lanterns who happen to be from Earth. [laughter] Hal Jordan is a very interesting character and I think the world of the Green Lantern Corps is just absolutely fascinating.

CBC: At the end of the ’90s, going into the 2000s, you were the original writer on the Tomb Raider series. How unique a proposition is it to do a gaming property?

Dan: Oh, gosh! When I was first asked about that the words that kept floating through my head was, “No! Are you crazy?!” I really didn’t think that this was going to be anything at all that I could get into or would necessarily want to do. One of the reasons is because I’m always a little bit leery of licensed properties.

Because you are just inviting more people into the conversation. It’s hard enough to do a comic without inviting more people into the conversation, especially those with veto power who can come in after the fact.

But, as it came up and we kept talking about it, it started to interest me more and more, because I hadn’t done anything like that before. I also found out that, my first anticipation was that I was going to be handed some 50-page bible for the character that would tell me that was in place. And, when I found out that wasn’t the case, and there wasn’t acres and acres of material that I’d have to read first, I started getting more and more interested. The more we talked, the more interested I got, and started to realize, “Well, this is going to be different than anything I’d ever done.” And I got more and more interested in it. They also sent me a bunch of work that Andy Park had done and that was really interesting stuff. I don’t know what happened to him. (That’s a joke, by the way.) It became apparent to me that, “There’s something here.” So, the more I thought about it, the more I got into it.

CBC: So, basically you just said, “Oh, Henry Winkler! I loved you in The Lords of Flatbush. Did you do anything after that?”

Dan: [Laughs] Exactly, exactly. I think Andy has done okay. [laughter] CBC: Was he the person you most worked with?

Did Adam Hughes or Michael Turner work with you, as well, or was it mostly Andy?

Dan: It was mostly Andy. He was the one who was there, month in and month out, and did by far the vast majority of the work. With him being there like that, he helped create a consistent look for the book which I thought was so important. It’s so important

Booster Gold, Blue Beetle TM & © DC Comics.

pening — from the moment I started — started going downhill. I know the world is different now. At that time, it was easy to see why Marvel and a movie company would not necessarily have a strong connection. The amount of reference I had was just incredibly minimal. The writer would have written a scene that takes place in a particular lab of Doctor Doom’s and I’d have no reference for it. I’d say, “Well, if this is a movie adaptation, we should look a little bit like it. If you guys did a Close Encounters adaptation (and they did!), the ships looked like the ships. People want to see what they’ll see on film.” So we really had to work hard to bring that one home. That was a tough one.

CBC: The last project I will mention, which does not get brought up very often when talking about your catalog, is the how-to book, You Can Draw Marvel Characters.

Dan: [Laughs] Yeah! That’s a case where I was approached by DK Publishing. I’m sure they’d gotten some things cleared with Marvel before they came to me. As illogical as it might sound, what’s important to recognize is: it makes a lot of sense to have a guy who can both write and draw do a book that includes prose of how to do something and has the visuals to go along with it, in terms of how to get it done.

They contacted me and I said, “Well, you’re talking about How to Draw Marvel Comics and that already exists.” And they said, “No, this is more about how do you draw characters, how do you do this, how do you do that. This would be for different ages. And we’re going to have a tracing paper sheet inside the book.” And everything like that. So, they had this concept of what it would be.

We started talking and they were very, very good to work with. They were just extremely delightful, in terms of a company to work with. That’s like the opposite of the Fantastic Four movie book. Which is, anything I needed… “You need reference? Okay, don’t just settle for five, here’s 20 shots.”

What I realized is I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ll drop almost everything else I’m doing to take this project, [which would take] about ten months, and just bury myself in this project and create this book, working with the folks at DK. It was a very refreshing process to go through. And I enjoyed it greatly. It was always fun for years to see that book on the stands. I know that, like five years after it came out, I was down at Disneyworld one time, in the Contemporary Hotel, and I saw a couple of kids looking at the book (because they had it in stock in their bookstore). The kids were so excited about it that they went and bought it. So it was a fun thing to do.

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The other part is, when you’re doing comics, which they can turn into a treadmill (monthly comics is a treadmill) and, all of a sudden, you say, “You know what? I’ll just get off all the monthly stuff I’m doing and spend almost a year working on one project.” That is very different from anything I’ve ever done before… that was a lot of fun. Earlier, the words I used was it kind of recharged and was refreshing. Because it does recharge the batteries…

CBC: One of the things I got to follow up on, and was really thrilled to see, is Marvel Double Action, looking like a 1970’s Romita/Gil Kane thing.

That’s you and Scott Hanna, correct?

Dan: [Laughs] Obviously, Marvel is doing their Heroes Reborn storyline right now. They asked me if I’d be interested in doing the Nighthawk story, which is kind of a take off on the Amazing Spider-Man #121, “Death of Gwen Stacy”-type of story that would involve Falcon and Nighthawk. I was interested, so I said, “Tell me more.” They said Tim Seeley wrote it, and Tim and I are buddies. They kind of talked about what it would be like and that it would take place back in the ’70s, in Washington, D.C., but still have that same kind of spirit about it. So I said, “This sounds kind of interesting.” So they sent me the script and I said, “Okay, I can see doing this. This seems a little different and a little fun.” We got Hanna to ink it. We got Chris Sotomayor to do the color on it, with this idea that we’d do the color on the book with very much a flat palette approach. Just like it was the 1970s. This was the frosting on the cupcake, if you will, that drove it home as a ’70s type book. Chris and I traded multiple emails about how this had to look. I sent him all sorts of examples of ’70s coloring. I took some great sunset scenes that Glynis Wein had done for X-Men, back in the day, and some rim-lighting techniques that some other colorists had used, and put them all together.

In a way, there is so much more sound color theory at work here because the technology’s limitations than we ever see now. Comics now are just way too garish half the time.

He just nailed it. We went back and forth on things on how this would look and how that would look. Obviously, I patterned the splash page on a Spider-Man splash page from that time to get the story mood set and sent off on the right direction. Seeley had these great little blurbs written at the bottom of each page just like Marvel Comics had in those days, like “Buy Power Princess this month”… stuff like that. I thought it ended up being just a real fun 30-page read.

CBC: I got such a kick looking at those pages myself. And Scott Hanna (of the Joe Sinnott school of inking) 73

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by external factors, and it kind of turns into a debate of, “Who is the lead dog and who is the sidekick,” and what is this versus that, and how does social media come into the story, which is a strong part of what we’re doing… it’s really a lot of fun. It’s refreshing. I think people are really going to like it. I really do.

I must also add that we’re very fortunate to have Ryan Sook drawing this book. Ryan brings so much to it, both in terms of his design skills, his drafting skills, his sense of characters, his sense of story, his sense of color, that the first issue is just beautiful. Very happy with it.

CBC: This many pages into your career, where do you find the humanity now? Early on, in careers, it can be a very personal place where things come from. Is that still true of you?

Dan: I think it’s more true. I think, as we grow older, we have more experiences. We get to know more people. We have been through more things. We have all probably seen more joy and more tragedy, and everything in between. So, I think there is a certain sense of depth that comes with those things, so that you try to communicate that in a story.

CBC: Are those things that become histrionic behind things or are there things that you just automatically think, “Oh, my gosh, I know how I can move that into a story”? How do you maneuver those things into your creative process?

Dan: One of the ways to explore this might be through Clark Kent. When I first worked on Superman, he was single. Then I worked on him through the time when he died and came back.

Where he got married to Lois Lane. Then, when we were doing the Convergence stuff (and I think people will remember that Convergence was put together so that, when DC picked up and moved from New York to California, that they could have a special project where books came out [without a pause])… In that Convergence series, I did a two-part story where we picked up on, for lack of a better term — we’ll call it the “traditional Superman and Lois Lane” — the ones who had disappeared or existed before New 52… we’d sort of say, “had disappeared” or “were in a different place.” In that place, Clark had no powers.

They were able to have a child, and that child was Jon Kent.

When I first explained the concept to Dan DiDio, I said that this is that important part of Clark that we always need to see, which is what makes him human. And it is that touchstone of humanity and, I think, in some ways, one of the things that makes you most human is once you have children and you’re responsible for them. Not just on weekends, but, my God, their entire lives. Whether it’s teaching them to ride a bike or cross the street or picking out a college.

I said that, in terms of this child, I don’t know what it will be going forward, but this is the future. And this is symbolic of DC’s future, in a way. In fact, at one point, I even said that, “Maybe this Clark and Lois die and they put them in a rocket ship and they send them on down into space.” Ultimately, we end up doing a Superman: Lois and Clark series where, actually, we find they’re on our Earth, they have come back, and Clark has been hiding all along, living outside of Metropolis, while they raised Jon. And when you really get into the humanity of Superman, he can say one thing, and we all know parents who say one thing and do something else. We all do. What we see through Superman, at that point, is that he says one thing and he does that same thing. And he teaches Jon those things. We see that, through his eyes… and the same with Lois, we see Jon through her eyes. And, in a way, the concept always was that powers and sense of humanity came from his dad and the spiciness and sense of spirit from his mom. When I started to create that thing with Jon Kent, I think that’s a way that we continued to see that sense of humanity in my stories, and certainly with Superman. #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Superman TM & © DC Comics. Artwork © Ken Meyer, Jr.

Above: Ken Meyer, Jr.’s “end of issue” portrait feature, this one depicting our issue’s main attraction, Dan Jurgens, and the artist/writer’s memorable DC moment and characters, including his creation, Booster Gold. Previous Page: Booster Gold art by Dan and Norm. Below: Blue & Gold #1 [Sept. 2021], art by Ryan Sook. The five-issue mini-series was a recent Dan Jurgens assignment.

has been posting pages of his inks on his Facebook as well. What’s it like working with him?

Dan: Oh, it’s always great. Scott and I had worked together before this. It had been a long time since we had worked together.

He inked the G.I. Joe mini-series that I had done, for example. So this isn’t the first time, but it’s been the first time in quite some time. When you look at the page after Scott has inked it, the level of professionalism is just instantly recognizable. It’s really good, talented, solid stuff that is, to me, a lot of what comics are.

So I was very happy to have him on board. I think that it’s interesting that you mention Scott in conjunction with Sinnott’s work because they are of the same school. What he does is very much like that. You could say where they’re on the same wavelength as to how they approach comics, art, and inking.

The other thing about Scott is that he has inked so many different people and he has become adaptable and comfortable with so many people. Which is really what a really good inker has to do.

CBC: I’ll put one more book question in front of you: Blue and Gold.

Now, that’s got to be the capper when it comes to this conversation because you had your hands on creation right up front with Gold, and Blue Beetle has been in your hands, off and on. What’s it like to say, “What the heck! Let’s go have fun with these guys again”?

Dan: It’s just what the question might imply. It’s a lot of fun. I just closed out the dialogue on the first issue earlier this morning. Very happy on the way it turned out. When we first started talking about this book, it was right before the pandemic hit.

DiDio and I were the first ones who talked about it, and Dan gave me the thumbs up and said, “Okay, it’s a go.” And then, unfortunately, he was no longer at DC. We started to have to have the conversations over again in the midst of the pandemic. I remember sitting in Chicago, at the end of February 2020, talking to Jim Lee and Bob Harras about it, just explaining what it could be. That was when, in two weeks, the world was going to shut down.

I even said then that there’s a place right now, where comics have such angst and torturing of the characters, and sometimes it’s okay just to smile and have a good time. That’s what Blue and Gold is supposed to be, in a lot of different respects. I think that’s what’s kind of come through quite a lot in what it is we’re doing. If we look at the genre of buddy films, I think there’s something about that that is always attractive. I think it has always worked well in comics. Whether it was Luke Cage and Iron Fist, or to touch on what we talked earlier about, which is Green Lantern/Green Arrow. We all remember those things. We like knowing that these two characters have a bond of some kind. So I think in this case a couple of guys who are just having a good time. Granted their lives get complicated

Superman TM & © DC Comics.

Later, in Rebirth, as that all came together, it was something that we worked real hard to build. When I say “we,” I mean me on Action and Pete Tomasi and Pat Gleason on Superman. It’s where we built this strong family unit and strong sense of place for Superman, and Lois, and Jon. And I think that’s really important to do. That’s how we can relate to Superman continuously: by building that aspect of humanity. I will always say, in many ways, Superman is the most human of all the heroes. He really is because he has to work at it. It’s a conscious choice that he makes. It’s a conscious decision of what he wants to be.

CBC: With you living your life as a storyteller, what in your heart do you have left in front of you? What is there to accomplish? What’s next for Dan Jurgens in this next season of your career?

Dan: Boy, that is such a good question. I think it has a number of different answers. The most obvious thing is I haven’t done anything in the creator-owned arena yet. I almost did once, back in the ’90s. That got all messed up and fell apart. But, I think, that’s going to probably be the next bridge to cross and area to work in, and to figure out just what it is [and]…want to say as a creator in order to make it work. Especially now, as the business changes so very much.

What does that mean? The traditional creator-owned publishing route, say something with Image? Or the more crowd-sourced kind of approach? I think that’s probably the next one to do.

I also have stories in mind for some of the corporate-owned characters. I’m not sure what the viability of those things is anymore, given the market changes that we see. And that’s what’s interesting to me. It’s not like I’m just sitting here, saying, “I don’t know what to do, because I don’t have any ideas.” It’s more this concept of having so many different thoughts, [of] which one to identify and really plow into, and try and pluck out as being the one that is the one to follow.

Some of that is just because we’re buried in the first issue of Blue and Gold, and it’s a question of really getting that done, and out, and off and running. So, we’ve got the entire series off on a good foot.

CBC: You previously mentioned Starlin. You have Jim Starlin; you have Walt; you’ve got Byrne and Chaykin; yourself; there are so few who have long extended runs on more than one character. Why is it that there’s such a small group of creators who have done both writing and art successfully?

Dan: That’s a really good question. I think there are many different layers of answers to that. The first being the most obvious: there aren’t many people who can both write and draw. Even when you get beyond that, I think, after the Image era of Jim and Rob and Erik, and all those guys, there was almost a backlash against the concept of writer-artists. I think that’s unfortunate. Were I an editor, I would encourage artists to write. I’d probably encourage writers to draw, as well, but that would be a little more difficult. I would encourage that because I think when you get that person working at that level, and they become totally immersed in a project, you get 150%, if such a thing is possible. The commitment that they make to it is astounding, and the vision that they bring to it is something.

Whereas, [while] I had people to encourage me along those lines, I don’t think that happens as much anymore. And I did detect, if we go back to that time, that reaction to the concept of writer-artist coming from the Image guys, where it became almost something that people would have regarded those efforts as being unworthy. Which, how unfair is that, when you look at those sales numbers? How can you possibly say that?

CBC: Is there anything I’ve left out or do you feel like we’ve covered all we have to cover?

Dan: What I’ve had pointed out to me, that I didn’t have an awareness of so much, is this idea that there are these lists that float around of the artists who have drawn the most pages and writers who have written the most number of pages. And I fit into this weird space in-between. This Twilight Zone area where, if it’s pencilers at DC, I’m like top 10, and, if it’s writers at DC, I’m like top 10. But COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

if it’s the combination of the two, there’s like nobody else. [laughs] It’s just weird to be in that area and to have been around long enough, and still be perceived as someone who can still do both. And that, as I look back on the way I started, which is, “I’m a storyteller; I want to both write and draw,” that I’ll be here, essentially just under 40 years later, that I’ll be able to say I did that. We’re talking about a substantial amount of work in both cases. That’s something I take pride in. It shows that I have, at that point, something to say and can communicate the essence of story, and what these characters are and who they can be.

[After our interview, Jurgens remained engaged with the Superman mythos. He and most of the original “Death of Superman” crew put together a remarkably well received 30th anniversary book, featuring all new stories which supported the original event. That volume has been followed up by similar books celebrating the anniversaries of the “Reign of the Supermen” and “The Return of Superman.” There is no time to rest for Dan Jurgens. Keep on telling your stories, Dan! — G.B.] Top: A mere portion of the double-gatefold timeline Dan Jurgens concocted with inker Jerry Ordway for Zero Hour #0 [Sept. 1994], a production, Dan admits, that just about did him in!

Right: Dan’s pencils for the cover of Superman #150 [Nov. 1999] are graced with exquisite Kevin Nowlan inks.

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JOHN ROMITA tribute issue! Podcast recollections recorded shortly after the Jazzy One’s passing by JOHN ROMITA JR., JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, BRIAN PULIDO, ROY THOMAS, JAIMIE JAMESON, JOHN CIMINO, STEVE HOUSTON, & NILE SCALA; DAVID ARMSTRONG’s mini-interview with Romita; John Romita’s ten greatest hits; plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, & more!

MITCH MAGLIO examines vintage jungle comics heroes (Kaänga, Ka-Zar, Sheena, Rulah, Jo-Jo/Congo King, Thun’da, Tarzan) with art by LOU FINE, WILL EISNER, FRANK FRAZETTA, MATT BAKER, BOB POWELL, ALEX SCHOMBURG, and others! Plus: the comicbook career of reallife jungle explorers MARTIN AND OSA JOHNSON, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

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DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES! A who’s who of artists of NEIL GAIMAN’s The Sandman plus a GAIMAN interview, Sandman Mystery Theatre’s MATT WAGNER and STEVEN T. SEAGLE, Dr. Strange’s nemesis Nightmare, Marvel’s Sleepwalker, Casper’s horse Nightmare, with SHELLY BOND, BOB BUDIANSKY, STEVE ENGLEHART, ALISA KWITNEY, and others! KELLEY JONES cover.

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BRONZE AGE NOT-READY-FORPRIMETIME DC HEROES! Black Canary, Elongated Man, Lilith, Metamorpho, Nubia, Odd Man, Ultraa of Earth-Prime, Vartox, and Jimmy Olsen as Mr. Action! Plus: Jason’s Quest! Featuring MIKE W. BARR, CARY BATES, STEVE DITKO, BOB HANEY, DENNY O’NEIL, MIKE SEKOWSKY, MARK WAID, and more ready-for-primetime talent. Retro cover by NICK CARDY.

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30th Anniversary issue, with KIRBY’S GREATEST VICTORIES! Jack gets the girl (wife ROZ), early hits Captain America and Boy Commandos, surviving WWII, romance comics, Captain Victory and the direct market, his original art battle with Marvel, and finally winning credit! Plus MARK EVANIER, a colossal gallery of Kirby’s winningest pencil art, a never-reprinted SIMON & KIRBY story, and more!

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An in-depth look at the life and career of writer/editor DENNY O’NEIL, and part one of a career-spanning interview with ARNOLD DRAKE, co-creator of The Doom Patrol and Deadman! Plus the story behind Studio Zero, the ’70s collective of JIM STARLIN, FRANK BRUNNER, ALAN WEISS, and others! Warren horror mag writer/ historian JACK BUTTERWORTH, alternative cartoonist TIM HENSLEY, & more!

TOM PALMER retrospective, career-spanning interview, and tributes compiled by GREG BIGA. LEE MARRS chats about assisting on Little Orphan Annie, work for DC’s Plop! and underground Pudge, Girl Blimp!

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creators at the con

Chris Claremont

Walter Simonson

Mark Waid

Panel Action: Baltimore Comic-Con 2023

In addition to book and art sales, autograph signings, and fan meet-and-greet moments, cons include programming sessions with comics creators discussing their work. Here are a few highlights from panel talks and interview sessions at Baltimore Comic-Con 2023.

Geoff Johns

Steve Rude

Mike Gold

Louise Simonson

Brian Michael Bendis

Katie Cook

Brian Michael Bendis, Walter Simonson, Louise Simonson, Mark Waid, and Robert Greenberger

Photography by Kendall Whitehouse All photos © Kendall Whitehouse.

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#34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

coming attractions: cbc #35 in the spring

All characters TM & © DC Comics.

Spotlighting World Savior Denny O’Neil With Bob Brodsky, we take a comprehensive look at one of comicdom’s finest and most innovative creators, DENNY O’NEIL, as the centerpiece of CBC #35, featuring an in-depth look at the life, work, and legacy of the renowned writer/editor (otherwise known as Sergius O’Shaughnessy) whose relevant comics brought comics into the modern era. We also celebrate the centennial of ARNOLD DRAKE [1924–2007] with part one of an extraordinary, career-spanning interview with the co-creator of The Doom Patrol and Deadman. Also featured is the brief life of STUDIO ZERO, the ’70s Berkeleybased collective of artists Jim Starlin, Frank Brunner, Alan Weiss, and others, who were all approached by Rolling Stone to create a comic-book insert! Additionally, PATRICK “MUTTS” McDONNELL talks about his Marvel youth with The Super Hero’s Journey! Plus we visit with JACK BUTTERWORTH, onetime Warren horror mag writer, comics historian, and collector extraordinaire, and chat with TIM HENSLEY, whose pastiche comics, Sir Alfred and Detention, prove him an alternative cartoonist of great wit and talent! And, of course, we include our regular features, including the great HEMBECK’s latest “Dateline.”

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2024 • #34

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a picture is worth a thousand words

from the archives of Tom Ziuko Illustration © Liberty Delight Farms

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: Readers may know me as a colorist, but I also create commercial art behind the scenes.

Here’s an example from a current assignment — the artwork for a series of comic book-style illustrations that will adorn bags of beef jerky. Each illustration reflects a different flavor — in this case, Chesapeake Bay. All the packages showcase different humorous scenarios featuring the owner of the company and his partner — a yeti named Robert.

I work out a layout for each illustration with the client and then I enlist 80

the aid of a longtime collaborator – Rick Magyar — to translate and provide pencils and inks; and I then color the finished line art. In addition, I also design the logo and text, which I‘m eliminating here, all the better to showcase Rick’s magnificent artwork.

Unabashed Plug Dept.: Both Rick and I are available for commercial assignments and commission art and color — please contact Rick at rmagyar351@gmail.com and you can write to me at atomica999@aol.com.

Thanx! — TZ #34 • Spring 2024 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

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The Brady Bunch’s FLORENCE HENDERSON, the UNKNOWN COMIC revealed, Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat, a Barbie history, RANKIN/BASS’ Frosty the Snowman, Dell Comics’ Monster SuperHeroes, Slushy Drinks, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Magic memories of ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY for the 60th Anniversary of TV’s Bewitched! Plus: The ’70s thriller Time After Time (with NICHOLAS MEYER, MALCOLM McDOWELL, and DAVID WARNER), The Alvin Show, BUFFALO BOB SMITH and Howdy Doody, Peter Gunn, Saturday morning’s Run Joe Run and Big John Little John, a trip to Camp Crystal Lake, and more fun, fab features!

Featuring a profile of The Partridge Family’s heartthrob DAVID CASSIDY, THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN, LEGO blocks, Who Created Mighty Mouse?, BUCKAROO BANZAI turns forty, Planet Patrol, Big Little Books, Disco Fever, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet the Bionic Duo, LEE MAJORS and LINDSAY WAGNER! Plus: Hot Wheels: The Early Years, Fantastic Four cartoons, Modesty Blaise, Hostess snacks, TV Westerns, Movie Icons vs. the Axis Powers, the San Diego Chicken, and more!

Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited

by MICHAEL EURY.

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RETROFAN #26

RETROFAN #27

RETROFAN #28

RETROFAN #29

Meet Mission: Impossible’s LYNDA DAY GEORGE in an exclusive interview!

Celebrate Rambo’s 50th birthday with his creator, novelist DAVID MORRELL! Plus: TV faves WKRP IN CINCINNATI and SPACE: 1999, Fleisher’s and Filmation’s SUPERMAN cartoons, commercial jingles, JERRY LEWIS and BOB HOPE comic books, and more fun, fab features! Edited

by MICHAEL EURY.

The saga of Saturday morning’s Super Friends, Part One! Plus: A history of MR. T, TV’s AVENGERS (Steed and Mrs. Peel), Daktari’s CHERYL MILLER, Mexican movie monsters, John and Yoko’s nation of Nutopia, ELIZABETH SHEPHERD (the actress who almost played Emma Peel), and more! With ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER, & MICHAEL EURY.

Interview with Captain Kangaroo BOB KEESHAN, The ROCKFORD FILES, teen monster movies, the Kung Fu and BRUCE LEE crazes, JACK KIRBY’s comedy comics, DON DRYSDALE’s TV drop-ins, outrageous toys, Challenge of the Super Friends, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

The BRITISH INVASION of the Sixties, interview with Bond Girl TRINA PARKS, The Mighty Hercules, Horror Hostess MOONA LISA, World’s Greatest Super Friends, TV Guide Fall Previews, the Frito Bandito, a Popeye Super Collector, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

The story behind BOB CLAMPETT’s Beany & Cecil, western queen DALE EVANS, an interview with Mr. Ed’s ALAN YOUNG, Miami Vice, The Sixties’ Wackiest Robots, Muscle-Maker CHARLES ATLAS, Super Powers Team—Galactic Guardians, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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RETROFAN #20

RETROFAN #21

RETROFAN #22

RETROFAN #23

RETROFAN #24

MAD’s maddest artist, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, is profiled! Plus: TV’s Route 66 and an interview with star GEORGE MAHARIS, MOE HOWARD’s final years, singer B. J. THOMAS in one of his final interviews, LONE RANGER cartoons, G.I. JOE, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet JULIE NEWMAR, the purr-fect Catwoman! Plus: ASTRO BOY, TARZAN Saturday morning cartoons, the true history of PEBBLES CEREAL, TV’s THE UNTOUCHABLES and SEARCH, the MONKEEMOBILE, SOVIET EXPO ’77, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Surf’s up as SIXTIES BEACH MOVIES make a RetroFan splash! Plus: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ZORRO’s Saturday morning cartoon, TV’s THE WILD, WILD WEST, CARtoons and other drag-mags, VALSPEAK, and more fun, fab features!

Like, totally! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet the stars behind the Black Lagoon: RICOU BROWNING, BEN CHAPMAN, JULIE ADAMS, and LORI NELSON! Plus SHADOW CHASERS, featuring show creator KENNETH JOHNSON. Also: THE BEATLES’ YELLOW SUBMARINE, FLASH GORDON cartoons, TV’s cult classic THE PRISONER and kid’s show ZOOM, COLORFORMS, M&Ms, and more fun, fab features! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Interviews with Lost in Space’s ANGELA CARTWRIGHT and BILL MUMY, and Land of the Lost’s WESLEY EURE! Revisit Leave It to Beaver with JERRY MATHERS, TONY DOW, and KEN OSMOND! Plus: UNDERDOG, Rankin-Bass’ stop-motion classic THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY, Christmas gifts you didn’t want, the CABBAGE PATCH KIDS fad, and more!

Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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Go to www.twomorrows.com to preview and order, including RetroFan #1-19!

New from TwoMorrows!

ALTER EGO #186

ALTER EGO #187

ALTER EGO #188

KIRBY COLLECTOR #89

KIRBY COLLECTOR #90

Focuses on great early science-fiction author EDMUND HAMILTON, who went on to an illustrious career at DC Comics, writing Superman, Batman, and especially The Legion of Super-Heroes! Learn all about his encounters with RAY BRADBURY, MORT WEISINGER, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, et al—a panoply of titans! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

DOUBLE-SIZE ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! The Marvel side includes mini-interviews with JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, JIM MOONEY, and GEORGE TUSKA—plus “STAN LEE’S Dinner with ALAIN RESNAIS” annotated by SEAN HOWE! On the DC side: talks with CARMINE INFANTINO, JOHN BROOME, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, JOE KUBERT, & MURPHY ANDERSON—plus a GARDNER FOX photo-feature, and more!

KIRBY CONSPIRACIES! Darkseid’s Foourth World palace intrigue, the too-many attempted overthrows of Odin, why Stan Lee hated Diablo, Kang contradictions, Simon & Kirby swipes, a never-reprinted S&K story, MARK EVANIER’s WonderCon 2023 Kirby Tribute Panel (with MARV WOLFMAN, PAUL S. LEVINE, and JOHN MORROW), an extensive Kirby pencil art gallery, and more!

WHAT IF KIRBY... hadn’t been stopped by his rejected Spider-Man presentation?

DC’s abandonment of the Fourth World?

The ill-fated Speak-Out Series? FREDRIC WERTHAM’s anti-comics crusade? The CIA’s involvement with the Lord of Light?

Plus a rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other columnists, a classic Simon & Kirby story, pencil art gallery, & more!

Cover inks by DAMIAN PICKADOR ZAJKO!

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All characters TM & © their respective owners.

Spotlights ANGELO TORRES, the youngest and last of the fabled EC Comics artists— who went on to a fabulous career as a horror, science-fiction, and humor artist for Timely/Marvel, Warren Publishing, and MAD magazine! It’s a lushly illustrated retrospective of his still-ongoing career— plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more

BACK ISSUE #148

BACK ISSUE #149

DC SUPER-STARS OF SPACE! Adam Strange in the Bronze Age (with RICHARD BRUNING & ANDY KUBERT), From Beyond the Unknown, the Fabulous World of Krypton, Vartox, a Mongul history, the Omega Men, and more! Featuring CARY BATES, DAVE GIBBONS, DAN JURGENS, CURT SWAN, PETER J. TOMASI, MARV WOLFMAN, and more! Cover by CARMINE INFANTINO & MURPHY ANDERSON!

’80s INDIE HEROES: The American, Aztec Ace, Dynamo Joe, Evangeline, Journey, Megaton Man, Trekker, Whisper, and Zot! Featuring CHUCK DIXON, PHIL FOGLIO, STEVEN GRANT, RICH LARSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS, DOUG MOENCH, RON RANDALL, DON SIMPSON, MARK VERHEIDEN, CHRIS WARNER & more superstar creators. Cover

by NORM BREYFOGLE!

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BACK ISSUE #150

Our oversized 100-PAGE SUPER SPECTACULAR sesquicentennial edition, featuring BATMEN OF THE 1970s!

Exploring the work of Bronze Age Batman artists BOB BROWN, DICK GIORDANO, IRV NOVICK, FRANK ROBBINS, WALTER SIMONSON, ALEX TOTH, and BERNIE WRIGHTSON. Plus: revisit FRANK MILLER’s first Batman story!

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PREMIUM US

BRICKJOURNAL #85

LEGO MINIFIGURES! Customized minifigs by fans, designing the Disney minifigures from LEGO House, spotlight on minifig fan artist ROBERT8, and more! Plus, all our regular features: Nerding Out with BRICKNERD, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BANTHA BRICKS: Fans of LEGO Star Wars, and Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

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BACK ISSUE #147

Great Hera, it’s the 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF BACK ISSUE, featuring a tribute to the late, great GEORGE PÉREZ! Wonder Woman: The George Pérez Years, Pérez’s 20 Greatest Hits of the Bronze Age, Pérez’s fanzine days, a Pérez remembrance by MARV WOLFMAN, a Wonder Woman interview with MINDY NEWELL, and more!

With a stunning Wonder Woman cover

by Pérez!