Stanley and His Maker
Continuing
the celebration of writer Arnold Drake's centennial in part two of his interview
Who is Arnold Drake?
For those coming in late, a little background info: the Manhattan native is the recipient of the very first Bill Finger Award, in 2005, and is renowned as the creator of The Doom Patrol, Deadman, and The Guardians of the Galaxy, as well as co-author of the graphic novel widely considered the first of its kind, It Rhymes with Lust [1950]. In his long career, the scribe worked for almost every major comic book publisher in innumerable genres. — JBC.
This page: This pic was found in the 1974 Famous Monsters Convention book. The caption reads, “‘I surrender!’ cries writer Arnold Drake as Jim Warren (left) talks him into buying a ten-year subscription to Famous Monsters of Filmland.”
Conducted by JON B. COOKE
[Editor's Note: Last ish, Arnold regaled us with his earliest years, time in the armed services during World War II, and postwar work with Leslie Waller, fellow writer, with whom he created It Rhymes with Lust, possibly the world’s first graphic novel, featuring the art of Matt Baker. We pick up the conversation about his early years at DC Comics. Note that fellow Drakeophile Marc Svensson provides footnotes and Arnold annotated the interview with comments before his passing in 2007. — Y.E.]
Comic Book Creator: Do you think that there was a streak of self-loathing at DC Comics?
Arnold Drake: Oh, yeah. Throughout the industry.
CBC: Was it mired with guilt? Was that because of the talent exploitation? Obviously, the Siegel and Shuster court cases…
Arnold: That contributed much to it. But more the remaining image of publishing unsuitable material. They were bothered by that, that hangover from the jailtime [Harry] Donenfeld had faced in the ’30s about selling sexy magazines.
CBC: What, the Spicy pulps and that stuff?
Arnold: Yeah, and there was a cloud of guilt from that. In an interview like this a long, long time ago, I said that they had come to look at themselves as running a whorehouse, where they were the madams, and the writers and the artists were the girls. To a very great degree, that was true for many years. I think in the last 10 years, however, they no longer felt that way about it. But we’re talking the ’70s, that’s when they began to realize that the post office regulations used against Harry were a betrayal of the U.S. Constitution.
derful conversation with Alan Moore, the British comics writer, who thought that book seemingly connected a breakdown that Mort had in which what came out of it was this whole new universe for Superman. It was death-obsessed, but it was a real tapestry that was created from perhaps a sense of madness. Or was it really the writers who created this intense… Supergirl, the horse, and Kandor, all these… I guess if you sit down and you really analyze it, it’s really curious stuff.
Arnold: Yeah. It was a combination of Weisinger running out of ideas… Weisinger used to say that we got a new audience roughly every three years, that we had to find new ways to tell old stories to that new audience. That was the challenge.
CBC: So you didn’t particularly see a change that took place between, in the late ’50s and the early ’60s, with the Weisinger books, at all?
Arnold: No, I had very little to do with that.
CBC: So you were working with Schiff…
Arnold: And then [Murray] Boltinoff.
CBC: Oh, so Boltinoff had the humor titles, right?
Arnold: Yeah.
CBC: What was next?
Arnold: Well, I was doing a lot of House of Mystery and House of Secrets and “Mark Merlin” and that stuff, the “Space Ranger” [in Mystery in Space]. He was a character that none of us liked, so Space Ranger we looked upon as punishment. Whenever I was assigned it, you would find me in the writers’ bullpen typing away and singing, [sings] “Space Ranger, I hate you/Space Ranger, you’re mine…“ [laughter] I hated his little Martian pet. I thought it was condescending to the readers. That was Schiff. He had a similar cuteness about him, which I think a lot of kids liked. I didn’t care for it, but I think he probably had a pretty fair-sized audience for that stuff.
CBC: Did you have any interest in working with Julie Schwartz?
CBC: Did you know Alvin Schwartz?
Arnold: Yeah, sure.
CBC: He wrote a book that discussed Mort Weisinger’s worldview?
Arnold: I don’t recall that. I have one of his books that gets into the Superman character…*
CBC: Right!
Arnold: Yeah, I have read that. I don’t know whether I recall Mort Weisinger’s point of view or not. Alvin hated Weisinger, but he was in a very large club.
CBC: I just had long, won-
*Arnold is referring to Alvin Schwartz’s “metaphysical memoir,” An Unlikely Prophet [1997].
Arnold: Yeah, but Julie seemed to have enough writers. I also attempted to work with Larry Nadel.
CBC: The romance books?
Arnold: The comedy. Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Dobie Gillis. What the heck else was there…? Fox and Crow, I guess. But he said no, no, no, he didn’t need any writers. And it turned out he really didn’t, because he was writing it himself or making the artists write the stories without paying them for it.
CBC: I spoke to Johnny Romita, Sr., and he told me a story of incidents that still anger him today about kickbacks with Larry.
Arnold: Yeah.
CBC: Was common just with him, or was it taking place within the office in general?
Arnold: He was the first one I knew of. And the irony is that he was replaced by a guy who I think did pretty much the same thing, eventually, and who was let go.
CBC: Did Larry suddenly die?
Arnold: Yup, a heart attack. If I recall correctly, he bent over to tie his shoelaces and bingo…
CBC: He didn’t get up.
Arnold: Worse than that: he didn’t get the shoe tied!
[laughter] Larry’s problem was that he was in debt to the bookies. I mean hundreds of dollars a week on a very small salary. I knew this, because he used the phone in my office to make his bets. He didn’t want to be heard by the staff. We had a pay telephone in the writers bullpen. A real class act! [laughs] Then, one day, he said (apropos of what, I don’t know): “When I die, the sh*t’s gonna hit the fan.” And when he died, it did. The figure I heard was something like $75,000 or $80,000.
CBC: He owed?
Arnold: He stole. He would take a script that had been written two years before, and he’d put a new cover sheet on it and bill it again, things like that.
CBC: Was it a snake pit? Jack Schiff notwithstanding?
Arnold: Not particularly. As comic book houses went, I think it was pretty clean.
CBC: Did you stay exclusively with DC, or did you moonlight at all?
Arnold: Yeah, I did some work with Marvel.
CBC: During the ’50s?
Arnold: No, this was later.
CBC: Right, with The X-Men
Arnold: Later in the ’60s, yeah.
CBC: Did you write any romance material?
Arnold: No, I did not write any romance material. Nobody asked me to.
CBC: What editors were you working with in the late ’50s at DC?
Arnold: It started with Weisinger. I had enough of him within the first three or four months, I guess, that I refused to work with him. He said, “If you don’t work with me, you don’t work.” So I didn’t work there for, I think, close to a year.
CBC: What did you do in the meantime?
Arnold: Oh, I wrote some of my own stuff. I had written a book and I was working on a screenplay. I was keeping kind of busy. And doing a lot of PR. I was writing stuff for AT&T and IBM, folks like that. I had a pretty good public relations agent, a guy who sold my writing to major corporations. And that paid a lot better than comics, but it wasn’t where my heart was. I wanted to tell stories. I became friendly with Jack Schiff during the time that I was working with Mort, and Schiff and I decided to see if we couldn’t have a crack at this new thing called “television.” So we began working on a play. As I recall, it was called The Mayor of Murray Street. And it was an interesting theme, it was about a guy who has become a successful lawyer and is now running for mayor, and is embarrassed by the fact that his father still runs a newsstand to put this guy through college. And he wants his father to close up the newsstand, because it just doesn’t look good that the mayor’s father is still running a newsstand, it’s like “I’m not supporting my old man,” or something. And the father explains that this is his life, and he wants to go on living his life as long as he can. It was an interesting theme. We never sold it, because we didn’t have a strong enough agent. That was true all of my life — not having a really strong agent.
So we worked together on that — at night and after hours, of course. One night, Irwin Donenfeld came in and started chatting with us, and he says, “I don’t see you around here much anymore.” I said, “I don’t work here.” And he said, “Why not?” And I told him about my problem with Mort. And he said, “Well, if you didn’t have to work with him, would you work here?” I said, “In a shot! If you will order him to let me work with Schiff,
I would be happy to.” So that’s how I came back to DC, and I worked with Schiff for quite a while.
CBC: Now, what were you doing?
Arnold: Batman, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, “Space Ranger”…
CBC: So you did a number of short stories. How’d you get your ideas?
Arnold: I don’t know. Everybody has a method. I didn’t really have a method. Bill Finger, for example… Bill used to open up the Redbook, the telephone directory, and just wander through it and get ideas that way. “Batman… a travel agency… yeah… “ It was just a way of getting his wheels moving. I did it from observation. I would frequently get ideas sitting on a bus and looking out the window at things going past. A lot of my ideas came from the news. I’ve always been very news-conscious. And I was into science fiction pretty early in life. Shaped to a great degree, a lot of my work was, by Verne and Wells, the Tarzan series, and Conan Doyle, especially the “Professor Challenger” stories. I read all of “Sherlock Holmes” when I was 13. My brother Milton gave me the complete works of “Sherlock Holmes,” and that was an influence on me.
Early on, I recognized that Professor Challenger came
Above: The charm of Drake’s creation and of Oksner’s art as seen in the cover of Stanley and His Monster #109 [May ’68]. Below: Professor Challenger from Strand Magazine, Vol. 70 #1 [July 1925]. Art by F.E. Hiley.
This page: Top is cover detail, Strange Adventures #205 [Oct. ’67], art by Carmine Infantino & George Roussos. Inset right, cover detail featuring Drake creation Super-Hip, The Adventures of Bob Hope #96 [Jan. ’66], art by Bob Oksner.
Above, below: posters of movies for which Drake wrote screenplays.
before Holmes. Actually, he was Sherlock Holmes. I think that Conan Doyle decided, “I think maybe crime is more interesting to people than science fiction.” So he got into Sherlock and Challenger’s character. There are five or six [“Professor Challenger”] stories that are his earliest stuff. If you get a chance, read a little more of Challenger and you’ll find that he is almost Sherlock — two extraordinary minds that are extraordinarily aware of how extraordinary their minds are. They are both… smug. Smug is what they are. Holmes was smug, and so was Professor Challenger. They knew what they knew, and were very proud of it. At any rate, those were among my influences. So, on more than one occasion, I borrowed from them. I don’t recall deliberately doing it, but I’m sure I did.
CBC: There were a number of stories, did you do a deliberate homage to Verne or to Wells?
Arnold: Yes.
CBC: Integrating them as characters within the stories themselves?
Arnold: I did Verne in a Batman story. There was a problem in the present day world that Batman thinks only Verne can solve, because Verne had touched on the problem in some of his work. So Batman is able to go back in time to bring Verne forward, and Verne helps to solve that problem in the present day. And then, as kind of a depart ing gift, Batman takes him to see various things that he had predicted in his time, and then sent him back there with that enjoyment.*
CBC: Was it fun?
Arnold: The Verne story?
CBC: Well, no, I mean writing. Was it a chore, was it fun, was it a mix?
Arnold: It was a mix, yeah. I mean, some things you didn’t like. I didn’t like “Space Ranger” and the cutesy little animal, and things like that. All of us had things that we liked and things we didn’t.
CBC: Did you want to do a character, something that you created yourself?
Arnold: Yeah, I wanted to do that early on, but it wasn’t easy to do. The editors had to believe in you. If you worked with Weisinger, forget about it. Schiff might have gone along, perhaps, but they had to really believe in you, and I hadn’t been there that long that they were ready to turn over a magazine to me.
CBC: Any concepts that you might recall that were not realized?
Arnold: Well, there were things that I attempted to do that were rejected. A lot of these things were stuff that they thought they would
create trouble with the [Comics] Code. But also, things that were against the social-political scene at the time. I tried several times to get a Black into a story and was not successful. And that wasn’t the only place, I tried three different shops, including Marvel and Western, to try to do a little integration. And didn’t succeed at that. Before The Doom Patrol, did I ever submit an original concept… ? I don’t think so. I think it was pretty clear that they were not interested in original concepts. If there were going to be original concepts, they were going to come out of the editors. In particular, Weisinger.
CBC: What was your view of the Code? Was it frustrating restrictions?
Arnold: Well, yeah. I thought it was dumb. I was convinced that comics were not responsible for shaping the lives of young people and that the idea of attacking comics was, to me, a way of getting parents off the hook.
CBC: Were you vocal about it at all?
Arnold: Oh, yeah. Sure. I urged them to keep pushing the envelope. On a couple of occasions, I can’t remember which ones, but on one or two occasions, they did, as a result of my urging. On one occasion they didn’t, and that was an unfortunate one. I was in London at the time, and I was working on the third “Deadman” story. And I sent the first chapter to [Jack] Miller, who had been a friend, or at least I thought he was, and had just become an editor. And it turned out that, I wasn’t aware of it, nobody was telling me this, but “Deadman” was taking off. “Deadman” was a hit, and they were getting very interested in that character as a result. And I wrote this thing, and it had two strikes against it. One was, the guy that Deadman is going to replace in that particular story is the governor of the state. The governor is dying of cancer. You could not discuss cancer in a comic book. I insisted that you can discuss cancer in a comic book. It reminded me of my mother telling to me that, in her time, you couldn’t
Deadman, Super-Hip
“cancer” was a no-no. It was sort of like the belief that, if you say it, you’ll get it. Anyway, I had the governor dying of cancer. And I established that the governor’s right-hand man, a guy he went to school with, a guy who was the number one student in the school, was Black. And, at one point, the governor said, “That’s the way the cards are dealt,” or something like that. Miller wrote back, “There’s no action in this! We’re gonna run an entirely new third story.” He didn’t mention anything about cancer or anything about the Black man, but I’m pretty damned sure that that was a major consideration in the decision not to run that story. Also, Miller badly needed extra cash. So he wrote it himself.
CBC: Do you feel, if you had been in the States at the time, do you think you might have had a stronger influence?
Arnold: Oh, it would have been entirely different, I think. Of course, I don’t know exactly how different it would have been, because what was happening… Take the context: [Carmine] Infantino was taking over right at that moment, and I think the editors were all a bit insecure — all busy trying to make a score under the new management. Miller was going through a midlife crisis, having an affair with a much younger woman, and spending an awful lot of money on her. That’s why he needed money, so what he wanted to do was to write as much of his own stuff as he could. And rejecting my third story was an open sesame. He apparently went to Carmine and said, “We can’t run that one. I’d like to do a new one.” And Carmine sat down and helped plot it, as I understand. Because obviously Carmine had been quite interested in “Deadman,” being the first artist. And in the concept. Carmine was closer to understanding what I was trying to do with comics than almost anyone else there.
CBC: Jack had his history there. Was it ironic — am I wrong? — didn’t he die of cancer?
Arnold: Yeah.
CBC: And he succumbed very quickly, right?
Arnold: Yeah. A matter of weeks.
CBC: And I guess there was desperation there? I’ve heard a number of stories about art being missing and him desperate for cash.
Arnold: Yeah. It’s ironic, because he replaced Nadel, who stole something like $70,000 from the company. So they replaced them and, as I recall the story-and I’m not sure who told me this (it may have been Carmine) about a guy who later became a renowned comic collector or dealer. He came to Jack Liebowitz’s office and put a bound volume of either Superman or Batman, I’m not sure which, the first issues in a leather-bound volume. “Mr. Liebowitz, I just bought this for $400.” (Or whatever.) Liebowitz says, “From whom?!” And he says, “From your editor, Jack Miller.” So, at that point, Liebowitz called in Infantino… yeah, Carmine must have told me this story. He called in Infantino and said, “I want him out of here today!” And Infantino said, “Yeah, I will fire him as an editor, but I’d like to keep him as a writer, we could use him.” So he said, “All right, but I just don’t want to see his face,” or something of that nature. It’s funny, for a small industry it had a lot of melodramas in it.
CBC: [Laughs] It sure did! When did you first meet Bob Oksner?
Arnold: When I started to do Dobie Gillis, I think. I worked with two artists, primarily, on the comedy material: Oksner and Mort Drucker. I think I started with Mort, and then Mort decided that his future lay with MAD magazine and he didn’t have much time for anything else. So he went over to MAD. And then I was really lucky. I lost one of the best, and I got one of the best in his place. And that’s how I met Oksner.
CBC: How long did you work with Mort Drucker?
Arnold: Three, four months, I would say. He was about ready to go when I joined the comedy line.
CBC: Did you meet him?
Arnold: Yeah.
CBC: What kind of guy was he?
Arnold: I don’t know. He had a great sense of humor. Which is to be expected. But so did Oksner, who had a marvelous sense of humor. Both of them, because they were very well-developed in the head as well as in the hand, they both gave you more than you had expected. When I would turn in a script to
Above: Note, in this Green Lantern #27 [Mar. ’64] house ad, The Doom Patrol #86 was initially intended to be numbered #1. It was revised in subsequent comics featuring the ad. Below: Painting by Luis Domiguez, the cover to Arnold’s incomplete last project for DC Comic: the origin story of the Doom Patrol’s nemesis team, the Brotherhood of Evil.
Flatbush’s Problem Child
Dan DiDio shares about his eclectic career in this first portion of our two-part interview
This page: The world’s first glimpse of “Diabolical” Dan DiDio was as a “Monster of the Month” in Famous Monsters of Filmland #92 [Sept. ’72]. On the next page is the man himself, at Comic City, during Free Comic Book Day 2014, in a pic by our own convention photographer, Kendall Whitehouse. Below is young Dan dressing up as John Steed (seen portrayed by actor Patrick Macnee, at right), from the British TV series, The Avengers.
Conducted by GREG BIGA
[Dan DiDio is a quintessential New Yorker. Regardless of where his career has taken him, Dan remains the guy who will eat a hot dog at a Yankees game and scarfs a slice of New York pizza pie whenever he gets the chance. Simply put, the old neighborhood never left Dan’s heart. He’s forever a brash and purpose-driven so-and-so, who has never shrunk from an opportunity to take on a new professional challenge. In this interview, Dan describes his journey from his Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush to how he came to head the comic book company he had loved since being a boy, along the way working in N.Y.C.-based soap operas, and then developing Saturday morning kid TV shows. — G.B.]
Comic Book Creator: We are all a part of those who brought us into the world. Who are your parents?
Dan DiDio: My parents, you know, were pretty close to a middle-income, Brooklyn family. Both my parents were a second-generation Italian and it’s a rather normal, peaceful sort of life. For the most part… I mean, you got to understand they come from a large Italian family. So we always have a lot of people around us. In my family, too, I have one older brother and two older sisters. I was the baby of the family and it was 10 years between me and my next sibling. Just to show you, I was the late-in-life child. So I was a handful for my poor parents in their later days, I must say, but they seemed to enjoy it just the same.
totally idyllic, but definitely a great time to be a youth back then, I take it?
Dan: Yeah… well, you know, growing up in Brooklyn, in the ’60s and ’70s, is a lot different than it is today. It really is one of those things when you’re growing up and you’re a child of the neighborhood. So you’re the entire neighborhood’s problem. You’d be over somebody’s house, a different house every day with a different friend, different parents, nobody knows where you are. You leave nine o’clock in the morning, come back at nine o’clock at night. And, somehow, they knew you’re always okay.
CBC: You were very much site-specific growing up?
Dan: Oh yeah. I was very much in the in the area of Brooklyn where I grew up in. It covered a large section within Flatbush, Flatland, for those people who know Brooklyn. And, you know, it was an interesting area to grow up because New York, in those days, was a real melting pot, for all intents and purposes. The neighborhood I grew up in was, even though I was Italian, it was mostly an Irish neighborhood. So a real working-class neighborhood.
CBC: Where you grew up was there a specific religion or a specific background? What was that like for you in those interactions growing up? How did that have an effect on you?
CBC: So was your name actually “damn” when they found out you were coming?
Dan: My mother was very sweet about it. She always said I kept her young. I think that’s the code word for “exhausted.”
CBC: What did your parents do for a living?
Dan: My father worked for Transit Authority and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. So it was always good, because my father worked with the trains. We used to go visit him at the substation, down in Coney Island, and used to make a day out of it when I was a little kid. We’d go visit dad and then go to the beach, because his job was a block off the beach. I used to sit under the boardwalk, lay in the sand, they’d have lunch, and then he’d go back to work, and we’d go home.
CBC: So it’s not necessarily
Dan: I was a public-school kid in the Catholic school group. So I was always a little bit on the outside, you know. I actually liked just the exposure in the world and the different options of things that I used to be able to do and a lot of my friends growing up were… as I said, it was a real melting pot, a real mix. So it was a real fun group. I mean, when I was 13 years old, a lot of my school friends threw me a bar mitzvah, because I was the only non-Jew and they felt bad for me.
CBC: And as far as working through your daily life with the group of friends you had, and with your parents, what was it about those folks and even those times that helped you become who you were going to become?
Dan: It’s interesting, because the reality is my parents were a little bit older, and my brothers and sisters were older. I actually probably hung closest to my brothers and sisters than I did my own parents. So my oldest sister was handicapped at an early age. She was a textile designer. She loved movies and plays, and everything like that. She was the one that really did enjoy the arts. And I probably watched and stayed with her the most, and picked up so many of my interests through her, and through my brother and other sister, than I did through my own parents. You know, so because the things that they liked, were the things that were exploding in culture at the moment.
CBC: As far as your neighborhood, what were the things that were exploding at that time? Was there anything in particular that was driving you?
Dan: I’m a kid in the ’60s. What were the three big customs of the ’60s? Monsters, toys, and space, and I loved all three. You know, I remember the toys at the time, the movies, and TV shows, everything in that period is what I absorbed most. As a big kid — Famous Monsters of Filmland. My sister actually corresponded with [FMoF editor] Forrest J Ackerman, over a number
of years. Actually, when I was 10, she took me to meet Forrest. He happened to be in New York, so we met him in Manhattan. He let me wear — true story! — the Dracula rings Bela Lugosi wore in the original Dracula movie. I got a chance to wear it as a 10-year-old! You know, those days were before we were able to take pictures [with phones] and post every 15 minutes. But I remember wearing that vividly. And he actually took one of my school photos, and I was actually one of the “Monsters of the Month,” in Famous Monsters of Filmland [#92, Sept. 1972]. Coincidentally in the Lugosi issue. That was as a little 10-yearold. We used to go to conventions. I started going when I was 10, and I probably haven’t gone a year without ever going to conventions since then.
CBC: What inspired you to start attending?
Dan: It was a fun way to get out. Again, like I said, everything you did was in Brooklyn, in the neighborhood. So, if there was a chance to do something outside, to go into Manhattan or (as we like to say, “going into the city”)… When you went into the city, you jumped at the opportunity because they were few and far between. Little did I know that I’d be commuting there every day a few years later. A lot of the bloom came off the rose by then.
CBC: What were things that were going on at that time that were kind of getting under your skin and starting to get the juices flowing? Was this like a James Bond or Man from U.N.C.L.E. thing?
Dan: I was a big Man from U.N.C.L.E. fan. With my brother, we were The Avengers fans like nobody’s business, Steed and Mrs. Peele. There’s a picture of me at 10-,12-years-old dressed as John Steed, because that was the guy that was super-dapper, super-cool. That’s who I wanted to be. So that’s my first cosplay ever, possibly my last. But, you know, there were things like that which I really enjoyed. And my brother on the other side, he would take me to all the Godzilla movies and different horror movies that were out. Movies were the big experience. You know, again, going into what was the big event… going to see Planet of the Apes in Manhattan, before it made it into Brooklyn… Because, in the early days, a movie would premiere on limited screens in Manhattan and sit there for two, three months before they would play in the rest of the city. So you would see it out there almost within reach, but you weren’t able to see it yet. So you had to go into Manhattan when it first came
out. That was a big deal.
CBC: With those things being parts of your interest, what were the things that began to get you going creatively?
Dan: Since I liked the monsters, we used to have, you know, Chiller Theater and Creature Features on Saturday nights. You always got your weekly dose of horror movies, things like that. And, when you see things like that depicted, you start to want to draw them and to tell stories of the monster you just saw on the screen. There weren’t 17 sequels in those days, there wasn’t streaming; the movie plays and it disappears forever. So the only way you can get any more of that is to start to do your own versions of those stories, and write them out yourself, and tell the story about the thing you just saw and now love so much.
CBC: Did your interest start with illustration or the writing?
Dan: I used to tell every artist in DC that I have trouble drawing a straight line. So it was about the storytelling. I like to tell stories. I used to tell stories and we had a lot of fun. And we used to create worlds and maps and things just to create environments and games, and play with them. And that’s what I enjoyed doing, really at an early age. I was a big fan of anthology. You know, I love [TV shows] like Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond. And probably my first comics buy, on a regular basis, are things like House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Tales of the Unexpected, Where Monsters Dwell… all of those type of books. I loved mixing up stories. I love that short O. Henry-style
Above: Doubtless, Dan was describing the Horror Comics of the 1950s hardback collection of E.C. Comics reprints published by Nostalgia Press, which was purchased by his sister and he read cover-to-cover. Dan described it as, “I just devoured it to death”!
Below: New Yorkers of a certain age, including Ye Ed., remember the “Miracle Mets” of 1969. Here’s a humorous representation of the team by the late, great Jack Davis.
ending. And those are the types of things I tried to write.
CBC: So you’re going for — lacking of a better way to phrase it — Feldstein and Kurtzman ways of that shock ending?
Dan: Yeah, I love that. I mean, one of the first books I was ever exposed to as a really young kid, which probably explained a lot… There was an oversized publication of some of the best of E.C. Comics, you know, and it was one of the funniest things you’ve ever seen in your life. My sister had bought it because they were fans of E.C. And I was the one who read it over and over and over again, because I just devoured it to death. And between that and Twilight Zone, and everything else, I think that really just honed to that real love of that medium and that type of story.
CBC: I know E.C. Comics get into the blood of a whole lot of individuals, obviously, who would follow. Who were some of the folks at E.C. then, and certainly thinking about that company now, that you just say, “Dammit, that is how you do a book”?
Dan: You know, naturally, with E.C., it’s the strength of the art even more so than the story. If the art wasn’t strong, the stories would be very simplistic.
CBC: Pedestrian?
Dan: “Pedestrian” is a perfect word. But when you put guys like Graham Ingels on there… or any of these other incredible artists… Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, and all those guys. There’s just not a bad artist in the bunch. Wally Wood’s in there. Every story, side by side, was so high-quality that it raised an expectation that, when you start to get other anthologies that did not have that same strength, it would almost disappoint.
You didn’t realize that was a book on a pedestal, the rare occasion when that you can be that good. It’s hard to be that good all the time, across multiple titles, which I also learned by reading and by working.
I have a running joke: the art I wanted to steal from DC was Jack Davis art. Going through the archives, the things that weren’t returned and I found a piece of Jack Davis art that touched me when I was a kid. It was that piece and I was looking at it, like, you know, honestly, “Is anybody watching me? Will anybody know if it’s gone?” Everything got returned to his family, but that was the moment.
CBC: “If God is watching, I’m not doing it, I promise.”
Dan: That was so hard, I can’t tell you. It was a phony ad in MAD magazine. I never forgot, as a kid, I was playing in Little League at the time I saw it. It was a shot of a kid at bat where what it was the parent was yelling at the kid, the umpire was yelling at the parent, was like, “What’s going on?!” It just made me laugh because I’d been at those games. And then, when I saw the original piece, I’m like, “Oh, my God! It’s here!”
CBC: As you’re growing up, obviously, you’re taking in matinees, movies, watching shows… were you a social animal with other kids at that time?
Dan: It’s funny. Like I said, I was a real working-class neighborhood, but everybody had their own interests. Everybody’s very big on sports. There are one or two friends of mine that had an interest in horror, or maybe a little bit of comics, growing up a little bit later. But, you know, for me, it was my thing, it’s something I enjoyed. So I didn’t really care if I shared it, because I got enjoyment out of it, participating by myself. I didn’t feel the desperate need to go out and speak about it to anybody else, because it was something that I probably was enjoying with the family, more so than with a friend.
CBC: And you being a native New Yorker, I have to ask this question: what does it mean to you to be a New Yorker?
Dan: It meant the pace, there’s a sensibility, there’s an attitude, a camaraderie, an anger… there’s a whole bunch of stuff that all just in this big, big stew. Any one of those emotions can bubble up to the top at any time. There are unabashed people who are unafraid to speak their minds. And, you know, there’s a freshness to that. I prefer that, you know. I’m much more of a very direct, straightforward person. So I prefer that type of honesty and interaction. For me, it’s a bunch of people squeezed into a space together, and we got to figure out how to work and get along. Which, I think, sometimes is the best way to work things out.
CBC: With you being able to squeeze into that space, what squeezed out? What are things that at this point in your life, you think back and say, “Man, that was something I wish we would have kept doing.” What’s been lost?
Dan: That’s a tough one for me. Here I am, still talking about comics and I’m in my 60s. Nothing got squeezed out. If anything would have gotten squeezed out, it would have happened a long time ago.
CBC: Do you still see it as keeping you youthful in your life? Or is it just a matter of work?
Dan: You know, it’s funny. When I left DC, the first thing I said is, “Now I gotta figure out what to do when I grow up. Now I gotta be a grown-up.” I grew up in a neighborhood where a lot of my friends were firemen, gas company workers, electricians… labor jobs. That was the expectation, even for the guy who went to college for certain degrees. When the jobs opened up, they jump for whatever job they can get. For me, I always had a plan that I wanted to do something different. I almost got into arguments with people when I said, “I’m going to college not to become a city worker.” (That’s not fair, but it was what I was thinking.) But, the truth be told, there were things that were interesting me and, later on, I had to take a path or, “I’m going to be an accountant.”
I started as an accounting major and that flamed out spectacularly! Because I like numbers, but not those numbers. I sort of fell into things that were more about what I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do. So I always get my mind open to trying different things. Because I’d rather experience something new and see if I like it, and not have life make that decision for me.
E.C. Comics
©William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc. Mets © Sterling Mets, L.P.
Thomas John Palmer [b. July 13, 1941– d. August 18, 2022], better known to comic book fans as the extraordinarily talented inker, TOM PALMER, was among the very best in his field during a career that spanned over five decades. Most of those years were spent as yeoman delineator at Marvel Comics, where he was most recognized for adding his peerless touch to work by Gene Colan, John Buscema, and Neal Adams. His rich, lush, evocative work, particularly as inker on notoriously hard-to-ink Colan in Tomb of Dracula between 1972–79, added a luster that elevated such already excellent artwork to sheer perfection.
“But tell me something I don’t already know,” I can hear many of you saying. Well, allow me to explain that, despite his renowned status as one of the world’s best inkers — an alchemist, if you will, who turned India ink into liquid gold — Tom was also the humblest, always expressing awe at the artists over whose work he toiled, and gratitude at making a living in an art form he so loved. But he was also a man very reluctant to have a spotlight shine on his achievements, shy even. So, while I wish Tom lived to see this, I am proud to feature such a wonderful, affectionate tribute to the man by my pal, Greg Biga. — YE EDITOR.
In full transparency, this feature was never meant to be a collection of testimonials to a fallen giant of the comic art world. Rather, my regular Friday phone conversations with Tom Palmer — who sadly passed away two years ago — were spent with him being genuinely delighted over the notion he was to be celebrated in this issue of Comic Book Creator as a living legend. Tom was my friend, and I am humbled that he allowed me to be his and to be the teller of tales of his life. From his unique childhood until his last days, Tom Palmer exhibited class, quality, and perseverance. Thank you for everything, Tom.
Heartfelt nods of gratitude for their words of appreciation regarding Tom to Walter Simonson, Howard Chaykin, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas, Klaus Janson, Bob McLeod, Pat Olliffe, Butch Guice, Graham Nolan, J.M. DeMatteis, Lee Weeks, Khoi Pham, Sal Buscema, Ron Garney, Howard Mackie, Greg Wright, Neal Adams, and, especially, Tom Palmer, Jr. (who was an enormous help gathering art for this piece). Note that most conversations with peers took place before Tom’s passing. And, finally, I could not be more appreciative of Ann Palmer, Tom’s wife and lifelong love, for her involvement in this celebratory effort. — G.B.
HOMETOWN KID
Thomas John Palmer was born a scant five months prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the calamity which pulled the United States into the already raging World War II. Being a wartime baby was not the only interesting aspect of Palmer’s life. There was also, specifically, a somewhat uncommon age difference between him and his dad, Leonard Daniel von Palmer. Tom was the last child born to Leo’s third wife. When Tom arrived, his father was 64 years old. With the first wife, his father had five offspring, three boys and two girls; none with the second; and then three with his last spouse. The boy had half-brothers and sisters from Leo’s first bride, who were frankly old enough to be his own parents, and nieces and nephews around the same age as him.
“My father was born in 1867,* in [Danzig] Germany. His sister was already here and married to a man who had a German restaurant up on 86th Street [in Queens, New York]. You needed a job to come over in those days. So my father came over in 1893 and he had a job waiting for him at that restaurant. I know he was naturalized [in 1903], but I don’t think my father ever talked about Germany. He never spoke any German. During World War I, my mother said, he’d meet some people that were from Germany, and he’d say ‘Don’t talk to me in German. Talk to me in English.’”
Tom continued, “I found out later, from my older half-brother John, that my father lied about his age at some point, so he could get insurance because he had these five children. His second wife became ill, something with her heart.” [A death notice relates that Frances Butz Palmer died on October 16, 1928, of pneumonia.]
courtesy of Tom Palmer, Jr.
“Because my mother never talked about this, I had to put the pieces together later on. I assume her parents were gone when she came to live with her relative and my father. She was there to take care of the kids because my father’s wife was bedridden. My dad’s wife’s name was Frances and that was my mother’s name also… My mother was young, she was born in 1903. And, so out of propriety, I guess, my father and my mother got married [on October 10, 1929, two weeks to the day before “Black Thursday,” the start of the Great Depression].
doing woodwork. And then he got into architecture as the Depression went on. The house we were in was one big house. He renovated the top floor and made an apartment upstairs, so he could get rental income. Anything to stay afloat.”
Tom learned a thing or two from his much-older pop. “He was a talented guy, in that sense. And I always remember that: keeping yourself moving, whatever you can do to make a buck. He wasn’t stuck with one thing. He came over as a cabinetmaker and then he went to architecture school. When I knew him as a little kid, he had a big drawing table on his sun porch, and he’d be laying out blueprints of remodeling of houses and storefronts, and everything else.
“My father was making phonographs. You wound them up, as there was no electricity, and it was the cabinet that gave the sound. He opened up a cabinet store and then the Depression hit, and he lost his business. So then he went into a different business, doing construction, putting in new stoops on houses, and
*The official record has Leo Palmer born in Danzig on Oct. 30, 1877, but Tom says, according to a half-brother, his father fibbed about his age to get insurance, so that’s suspect.
“My father and my mother had one son, William, and then they had another son, Ronald, who picked up some illness in the hospital. He came home and wound up dying around two weeks after he was born. I never knew about that. My mother just went into a blank, dark hole after that. My mother wouldn’t talk about any of this when I was a kid, so I knew nothing until I got older. My half-brother John, who was the oldest, told me all about it. Here I was, an adult at the time, and I never even heard [Ronald’s] name. My mother never spoke about him. She never even mentioned his name.
“After some time passed, I guess my father said, ‘Do you want to try again?’ So guess who was born…? Me. When it came time for my mother to have me, she would not go to the hospital because of what happened to Ronald. Since my father had been doing work for… St. Pancras Church, in Glendale [in Queens], he had an in with them and they got my mother into a sanitarium for nuns instead of going through a regular hospital. And that’s where I was born.
“My mother would say, ‘Remember when you were born.’ I was born on a Sunday morning… ‘The church bells were ringing.’ I was born and I survived. I had all these half-brothers and sisters and they’re all having children around the same time I was born, so I have nieces and nephews who are the same age as me or even older than me, if you can imagine that. I grew up with a lot of people in my family that I didn’t know exactly who they were or how we were related. I just thought they were, like, relatives that were older than me.”
Facing a childhood infirmity, Tom found a creative outlet. “When you’re an artist, it’s got to be in you before you know what you want to be. I think seeing my father working on his blueprints… He had an apron and he had my mother make me an apron when I was little. He’d be drawing these things out; he would draw a house, he was drawing a lot of things. That was probably the beginning. That’s what led me into loving to draw.”
Previous spread: On left page is Tom and his children, Jean and Tom, Jr., during a late ’70s visit to the National Cartoon Museum, in Port Chester, New York. The Palmers are surrounded by costumed Marvel hero performers. Right page features young Tom on crutches during his childhood malady. This spread: Above, from left, is Tom’s father and Tom; with his mother and older brother. Inset right, Tom as high school senior. Below is photo of Glendale, Queens, in 1961, looking down 65th Street toward Myrtle Avenue, with map overlay. Next page has advertising artwork at top by Frank J. Reilly (pictured), as well as Tom’s recreated E.C. Comics covers which he drew and colored as a teenager for coverless but treasured copies.
LEGG—CALVÉ—PERTHES
“But then I had a problem with my hip when I was in the third or fourth grade in school. I was limping a lot, so my parents took me to the doctor, and they found that I had this softness of the hip that was making me limp. I found out later it was a disorder called Legg—Calvé—Perthes disease [a childhood bone condition]. I had X-rays taken and I went to an orthopedic doctor, and he said, ‘There’s really nothing you can do. You just have to stay off the foot. You have to stay off that leg. You can’t walk on it.’ So I had to walk on crutches for four years. I couldn’t play baseball, I couldn’t do anything, so I used to sit down in my backyard, and I used to draw.
“I’d actually draw comic books and draw everything. I got used to keeping myself entertained by drawing. I think that was a big step in my growing into being an artist. I wasn’t bored. I wasn’t bored at all. I would do my own comics, but sadly, I threw so many away. You get older and go, ‘What is this crap?’”
Tom’s older sibling Bill would never let his kid brother look through his comics. However, one day, they got into a physical fight where Tom was hurt. His brother felt guilty, and wanting to keep Tom from telling their parents about the fight, Bill gave Tom his comic books to keep him mum. It was through
trading out those comics at the time which allowed Tom to be introduced to great comic art.
Specifically, for Tom, it was the E.C. Comics of the early 1950s which helped spur his lifelong love for the art of Jack Davis, Wallace Wood, and Al Williamson. “My brother had comic books all over the place,” he said. “And I used to take them down the avenue to a little store that, if you brought in a comic book, you could swap for another comic book or two. I went in and what caught my eye was Weird Science, Frontline Combat, and Shock SuspenStories.”
Tom continued, “I look back on my upbringing, even though it was not the usual upbringing, with [an elderly] father. When I would be playing in the street, when I was younger, and my father would come to the front door and he’d whistle, ‘Come eat,’ the other kids used to say, ‘Who was that, your grandfather?’ And I’d say, ‘No, that’s my father.’ I didn’t know [any different]. You just grew up with what you’ve got.
“I was still on crutches when he died. My mother said to watch my father [who was sitting] on the bed, because my mother had to go into the kitchen to do something. I guess he was not that comfortable sitting on the bed, he was swaying. I remember that he was just sitting there, looking at me. I never thought about it until I got a bit older — what was going through his mind at that point? He had raised a whole other family, all the different children he had. And he knew, at that point, that he wasn’t going to live for much longer.
“My father was in his 60s when he had me and he was in his 70s when he passed away. I had to find my way because my dad died when I was young. I probably could have used more help. I might have gone to college, but when it got to be my teen years, my father was gone. No one really tried to step in to say you should be going to school. I had to do it. I needed — and was always looking for — father figures. Whether it was John Buscema, or if it was [art instructor] Frank Reilly, there’s always somebody that I was looking for, an older mentor I could follow and I could listen to. I had older brothers, but they had their own families.”
GLENDALE BUDDIES
Growing up in the neighborhood of Glendale, in the New York City borough of Queens, was a fulfilling proposition for Tom, especially when his health improved. During his teens, he began making close connections through friendships. “My teenage years were rambling once I started walking. As I was going into high school, I got off the crutches. That was a big deal because I was on crutches for years. I remember, when I was first able to walk again, and I was on Cooper Avenue and I’m hearing stuff going through the trees. This ‘swish-swish-swish’ noise. I saw this guy, he’s got a homemade slingshot and he’s shooting ball bearings through the trees. And I’m saying, ‘What the hell was this?’ Well, we went on to be the best of friends for a lifetime. He was just a rapscallion; he was always doing something that was adventurous. There wound up being a bunch of us, each of a different nationality. You know, Germans, Italians, Irish, and Asian. My Italian friends called me ‘Palmeri,’ like I was an honorary Italian. But it was a great way of growing up. We just had a good time together.
“This guy, Bob, he was the burly one, he kind of took care of me. If there was some reason we had to run from
Above three photos courtesy of Tom Palmer, Jr.
something, he would grab hold of me and pull me along because I couldn’t run fast because of my bad hip. It was just the camaraderie that you have through your teenage years and then you get out of high school and then it’s a whole different world.”
That “whole different world” included Tom lending his artistic talents to some teenage shenanigans. “I used to be able to forge a driver’s license by using typewriter carbon paper. If you lay that down and you copied very carefully — which I was good at — you could take a stamped seal off of an existing license, and then put it on the sheet underneath, and then transfer it all very carefully, you could go and fill out a form and get a vehicle. Oddly enough, it wasn’t for guys to drive, it was so guys could get a drink who were 16. I was doing this and getting $25 apiece. But it was done innocently enough.”
That nefarious business, however, wasn’t what put art school into Tom’s mind. That came from goofing off at work. “I remember, the first job I had, I’m sitting around drawing pictures, making funny pictures of people, and one of the guys came up and said, ‘Gee, you know, you’re really good. Why don’t you go to art school?’ And it was like a light bulb went on in my head. ‘Yeah, why don’t I go to art school?’”
LEARNING FROM THE GREATEST
Tom’s artistic journey began, in unfulfilling fashion, at Manhattan’s famous School of Visual Arts (renamed thus in 1956, from the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, the institution co-founded by Burne Hogarth). “I liked painting. First, I went to the School of Visual Arts and took their painting classes. There was nothing for me. The teacher just walked around and looked at what you were doing. There was no tutoring, there was nothing spoken about, no instruction.” Unsatisfied with what Visual Arts had to offer, Tom sought a different school and learned of Frank J. Reilly, an illustrator who had apprenticed with Dean Cornwell, taught at the Art Students League of New York, and
who recently established his own self-named art school. “Reilly had a program of learning color that focused on hue, value, and chroma. And damn it if you didn’t learn how to paint. You learned all the steps to painting. That fascinated me and drew me in even further. I remember, for some early class projects that you did at home, he had a line of paints with nine neutral values of gray, each with a number. You set your palette up based on those grays. Reilly had a drawing of an overhead view of a house on a road with a tree and the shadows on the ground, and the numbered values that it would be on a sunny day. Now we changed the value numbers, and it was a cloudy day. And then the values changed again for nighttime. I sat at home and looked at this thing and these pictures would emerge. It did look like a sunny day, a cloudy day, and at night. And that just sold me on how it was not a trick, but that there was a lot more to learn about color. And it was a lot more than color; it’s a lot more than just squeezing the paint out.
“Reilly had a very structured process. His saying was that he could teach anybody to draw and paint as long as they were willing to learn. When I got into the business, I went to the Society of Illustrators, I was sitting at the bar one day at the Society, and I was new, and somebody noticed that I was there and asked, ‘Where’d you go to art school?’ So I said Frank Reilly. He said, ‘Oh, the mathematician.’ I was insulted, but also amused, at the same time.”
Reilly’s classes at the Students League had long waiting lists in the years following World War II, lists that kept artists, including John Severin and Colin Dawkins, from gaining entry in a reasonable duration. But, by the time Tom enrolled at Reilly’s new school, he
Fighter Weighs in at 8 Tons” (1944)
Above: Paperback cover art by the heralded James Bama, renowned for his 62 Doc Savage paperback cover paintings and perhaps best recognized by the general public for his unforgettably provocative cover for The Harrad Experiment [1968]. When instructor Frank J. Reilly was stricken with (ultimately fatal) health issues, one-time Reilly student Bama stepped in to teach Tom’s painting class. Below: Before they were married, Tom took Ann on a sort-of pilgrimage to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to visit perhaps the greatest American magazine cover painter of all, Norman Rockwell, who welcomed his guests and showed them around his studio. Ann said of the icon, “He talked art stuff with Tom.”
was surprised to have immediate enrollment. “I was kind of shocked. I just walked in. He was on 57th Street in the Steinway Hall building. When I walked in, he had prints of J.C. Leyendecker and Dean Cornwell.
“Cornwell especially, he became my next favorite, after Norman Rockwell. The school just spoke to me, I had to go there. And it was a good move, because I got to meet a lot of people who I would not have ever really met otherwise. I think that the School of Visual Arts was for the people who were just looking for a hobby. (Not all of them, of course.) But Reilly didn’t teach anything beyond artwork. You can’t get a diploma after four years that says that you’re an artist. I think that’s why you have to find your way by yourself. You can’t get a diploma and become an artist. Unless you’re one in a billion.”
While learning from Reilly, Tom was able to spend time in instruction with one of his greatest artistic heroes, the
*Unfortunately, James Bama was one of several deaths in the art community that occurred during my conversations with Tom. Following the announcement of Bama’s passing, on April 24, 2022, Tom emailed me: “James Bama had many admirers and I was one of them. Going to miss seeing his work!”
great painter and paperback book cover artist, James Bama,* renowned creator of the Doc Savage cover paintings, The Harrad Experiment, and many Western paperback covers. “I got to meet Jim Bama when Frank Reilly was hospitalized for a brain tumor. Many of Reilly’s older professional ex-students did come back to help him out and James Bama was a big draw, filling the classes.”
Tom shared a few more thoughts on that teaching visit by Bama: “That night was kind of his swan song as he was leaving that evening. He had been living in New York and he had bought a house out in Wyoming, and he was going to paint out there. He was leaving with a bunch of photographs of [model] Steve Holland, so he could keep doing the Doc Savage covers. He could make a living doing Western paintings and Western art. I lost track of him doing that. I’d see some of his paintings every once in a while. He was so realistic it was unbelievable. Yeah, I wasn’t that crazy over the Western art. He had, essentially, his artistic flair when it was Doc Savage or some of the other things that he did.”
It was while working under Reilly that the nascent (if not entirely green) years of Tom’s career began. “Each year Reilly had a firefighter poster contest. It was done by the New York Fire Insurance Underwriters. We’d all do paintings, and they’d have a contest at the end of the year to see whose painting won. You got $300 and then your painting went on the poster for that year. I won the poster contest in 1967. Reilly was gone, it was a month or two after he passed away in the hospital [on January 15, 1967]. And, at that point, I started to go out on my own from the school and my career was begun. While at Reilly’s, it became a place to stay, it was like home.”
PILGRIMAGE TO STOCKBRIDGE
At the school, Tom refined his craft and went to get work from various agencies. “I got wound up into Norman Rockwell. I just loved his stuff. I wanted to paint covers like he did for The Saturday Evening Post.”
Tom was so motivated by the work of Norman Rockwell that he took a mini-pilgrimage in 1960, while still a student at the School of Visual Arts, to visit with the iconic American illustrator. That story is recounted here by Tom’s wife, Ann, as she also made the journey with her future husband.
“First of all,” she told their son, Tom, Jr., “it was the first time I played hooky from school, but my parents knew about it. Tom wrote a letter to Norman Rockwell and his secretary got back to us. He invited us up, so we drove up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I forget how long it took, but it was a long drive from Queens.
“We rode around town for a while looking for Rockwell’s studio. Tom wouldn’t stop to ask for directions, and we finally found some man that told us that [Rockwell’s] house was around the corner. We went up to the house and he invited us in and started to show us the studio, where he did his work and everything. He had a portrait he was painting up on his easel, I can’t remember what it was exactly, but it was very beautiful. You’re seeing Norman Rockwell, a famous man, an artist, and he’s telling you little things about what’s going on and showing you all the props that he had around in his studio and his little pipe.”
Rockwell’s heavy use of photo reference was something he famously hid in his early career. However, by 1960, he openly shared his darkroom location with Ann as part of the visit. “He gave me the elbow and we went into the darkroom, while Tom was looking around the studio,” she playfully said. “It was really just a darkroom, where he developed his pictures.”
kind of argue. And that’s what we were doing that day. We are good friends, and we respect each other.
“I was thinking about Neal Adams and how we met: it kind of carried all the way through our friendship over the years. When I first got to Marvel, Roy Thomas would have parties every once in a while at his apartment on 86th Street, in New York. He invited me to one, when I barely knew anybody. I went there with my wife, Ann, and it was quite large. Stan was there and so was Gil Kane and others… Roy took me aside and said, ‘I want you to meet somebody,’ and there was Neal on this lounge sitting next to Bernie Wrightson. Neal wound up talking about spending time in Germany. His father was in the military. I have a feeling Roy — rapscallion Roy — I think he was looking to put Neal and I together. Roy wanted to get Neal over to Marvel. Neal, I guess, was showing interest in The X-Men, so I think Roy put that together, where he would get Neal on and then I would work over Neal.
“I remember the first pages I got. It was set in Egypt [X-Men #56, May ’69]. The penciling was something I had not seen before in comics. It was very precise. I could see where Neal was using a projector. He would sketch something out and then project it down on the page and make it bigger, smaller, move it over here or there. He was designing as he was preparing for the final drawings. His pages had a uniqueness. It was almost like it was planned out beyond what you could see. It was so great to be working over not just pencil sketches that looked like something… they were something. Something real. Those were real pyramids he had drawn. I actually had pictures of those same pyramids in my morgue files. I fell into doing very enjoyable work over Neal and I guess it blended well. Roy liked it. Neal was such a good artist.”
In 2021, Adams shared his thoughts about his first pairing with Tom.
“Remember that most guys who were making comic books, in those days, were inking with that kind of broad brushstroke, like Dick Giordano, with a heavy stroke line, and my stuff was fine and more detailed. Now, if Tom hasn’t told
you this, he is a fan of Stan Drake. I don’t know where he found it out, but Tom found out how to ink with fine pens. And he knew what a [Joseph Gillott] 1290 pen point [nib] was. And I couldn’t believe that there was actually somebody in comic books that knew what a 1290 pen point was. So, when I met him, and the question was, who was going to ink me of the various people around, even though I may not have agreed with some of the things that he did, the fineness of his line… we sort of agreed, ‘Let’s do Stan Drake on this. That’s the way to go.’ Because we both admired Stan Drake, because he’s not going to find me and not be able to do it like me, but he can do it like Stan Drake, then he can go in that direction. So that’s what he did. For me, that made a happy choice.
“But he was never afraid to do whatever was there and do more. He would put Zip-A-Tone down. There’s a really good Magneto face [X-Men #62, Nov. ’69], where Magneto reveals himself with this big face and [Tom] puts Zip-A-Tone down on this. I was really surprised. It was a great job. It was the best of Marvel. In those days there weren’t that many people around that were doing good [work]. Everybody thought that comic books were on their way out.”
Bob McLeod, who spent a good amount of time early in his career involved with Adams, weighed in on those thoughts. “Well, when I decided to try learning how to ink comic books, I had met Neal Adams and decided his inking was the best I’d seen, so I began studying his inking a lot. Then I saw how Tom Palmer had inked Neal on The X-Men, and I really liked it, so I started looking up Tom’s other work. He had a very strong style and seemed to know just what to do to make every penciler he worked over look really great by refining or adding lighting and detail. Neal had a cleaner, more precise ink style, but I considered Tom a more versatile inker than Neal.
“Neal was very fortunate that Tom was there for him. Neal would not have made as much of an impact without him and Dick Giordano, because Neal’s
*This segment of the interview was conducted literally an hour prior to the announcement of the passing of Neal Adams.
Above: The splash to an Inhumans tale by Adams/Palmer, Amazing Adventures #5 [Mar. ’71]. Below: Cover of their first issue of The X-Men, #56 [May ’69]. Bottom: Gillott‘s 1290 pen point nib, which, Adams said, produced a rich, robust luster to Tom’s evocative inkline.
style was so different from what most comic book inkers were familiar with, and no one else quite knew what to do with his pencils. It’s important to note that Tom also colored many of his jobs, which greatly helped to show his inking to best advantage. Most of my ink jobs were ruined with bad coloring. Tom also used a lot of Zip-A-Tone, causing many other inkers to incorporate it into their work.”
then, for me at least, he subtly improves upon the entire look with the addition of a little more weight, a little more form and intuitive rendering.
“The only person who has inked Neal at that same level was Neal himself. Tom managed to bring just the right level of himself forward, translated just enough of the drawing technique into his own signature inking style that those issues became, for me at least, the definitive Neal Adams comic book art. Some of those X-Men issues just blew my mind — they still do to this day — Neal’s obviously having fun and showing off as he reinvents the characters and comic art approach, in general. And I get the feeling that Tom was also enjoying playing over this artistic maverick. They were both stretching their creative wings. And then, when they re-teamed on The Avengers, there is a well-oiled collaborative feel to it all already in place.”
As Tom recalled, Roy Thomas was an integral part of, not only the Adams/Palmer X-Men, but of Marvel as a company. “When I got up to Marvel in ’68, he was the guy that kind of took charge. Stan was Stan, and then you had Sol Brodsky and then you had Flo Steinberg. But Roy seemed to have his thumb on everything. I didn’t know anything about the business when I started out. I was getting a phone call every week or so to stop working on Doctor Strange, because at that time, you only get feedback from what the circulation was when the books came back from the shops. If you got half or 60 or 70% back, that meant the book wasn’t selling. A similar thing happened with X-Men. I got on with Neal and they were trying to get that book to survive. It wasn’t surviving fast enough and they canceled it. It went into reprint and, like a month or two later, they found out it was selling like crazy, but it was too late. They had already canceled it. So they did reprints for a year or so… It was the years that went between the end of the run I had with Neal and the start of the new X-Men by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum.”
“THAT LITTLE EXTRA SOMETHING”
The Adams and Palmer pairing was reborn with Thomas for one of the truly great runs in comics history, the legendary “KreeSkrull War,” in The Avengers, with #93–96 [Nov. ’71–Feb. ’72] featuring Adams and Tom, with John Buscema finishing out the run as penciler in #97 [Mar. ’72], which also had Tom’s inks.
Butch Guice, who would become one of Tom’s best friends, in addition to his own qualities as an illustrator, shared his insight on the Adams/Palmer X-Men work. “I can’t imagine anyone else at Marvel handling the inks on those issues as well as Tom. I mean, the work was going to attract my attention because Neal Adams was visually shaking up the industry with his then radical illustration field style and approach. And I, like everyone else reading comics at the time was busy having my comic sensibilities scrambled by Neal, but Tom elevated the work, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong here: I was already familiar with Neal’s DC work and absolutely loved what Dick Giordano had brought to the table in their collaborations there. Beautiful stuff. Truly superior classic work by both. Tom Palmer’s work meets that same high standard — and
About Tom’s contribution, Thomas said, “What Tom brought to it was just really good inking. I mean, Neal had a bunch of good inkers, including Dick Giordano, but I think that somehow Tom gave… I don’t know exactly what… like that little extra something. It wasn’t like he improved Neal’s drawing. You couldn’t really do that. But he sort of added to it and made it seem even more real. I mean, as a non-artist, that’s the main thing I can say. That’s the difference, I think, between him and the other really good inkers with Neal, like Giordano and, to some extent, Neal himself. And I feel Tom was the right fit.”
Despite Adams sometimes being late delivering his penciled pages, “It never looks rushed,” Thomas said. “Tom had to ink it very, very quickly and did a wonderful job. That’s the interesting thing about it is that it never looks rushed. You know, I know that last one in particular [#97], all of them were probably rushed, and that last one, probably more than any. And, in fact, that was probably over rough breakdowns by Buscema (who had stepped in for Adams). So [Tom] probably was doing even more drawing than usual, at breakneck speed, and he did a wonderful job of it.”
The one thing which didn’t please Thomas was when Tom, who was also coloring those Avengers books, used the wrong color combination on the android memebr of the team, The Vision, in #93. Tom mused, “Roy Thomas was really upset. I
TO WORK WITH A LEGEND
While doing the Marvel Comics version of the George Lucas science fiction film franchise, Tom was able to transition into working on the Return of the Jedi movie adaptation team with one of his heroes, magnificent artist Al Williamson. “There were a couple of artists that were asked to work on the book to help get it done on time, and one of them dropped out. So Archie Goodwin asked me and I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ It was penciling and inking. And, with that, he sent me a whole bunch of photographs. I wound up using one of them for a painted cover for a comic book we did further on, when Han Solo was released from carbonite [Star Wars #81, Mar. ’84]. But in there were all these photographs of the scenes from the movie and that’s what Al really needed. He needed the visual to do it all. It was also very helpful to me, I really enjoyed that. There were some pages we swapped back and forth. Whatever he was doing, I’d do some parts of it. I guess he liked doing certain shots and then he’d pass it on. I guess he had his fill with Star Wars. He was doing the [daily newspaper] strip at the time. I enjoyed that.” Tom added, “But Al was very protective. I think he had too many people [who worked with him] who were fans. And I tried not to be a fan. (I was, but I didn’t gush all over him or anything like that)… I got to see how he kind of put things together. He was very accurate with everything. And I think it had a nice pattern look through it. So I didn’t help him so much as assist him.”
Where Star Wars had given Tom the joy of working with a personal artistic hero and with people who would become longtime friends, it was a return to super-hero comics which brought him together, infrequently yet still memorably, with another highly praised artist, John Byrne. “I did something with Byrne at DC, Wonder Woman,” Tom gratefully recalled of his one-shot inking over Byrne in Wonder Woman Annual #6 [July ’97]. “I was having fun there [at DC]. As a matter of fact, I always thank John, because John is the one who got me back to Marvel. Marvel was trying to get John, and he had this Hidden Years in the
back of his head… and he said he wanted me. That’s how I got back.”
Like many who were frustrated with Marvel in the late ’90s, Tom took on assignments elsewhere. However, his heart always remained at Marvel. “That was my second time at Marvel. I stayed a while, too… I think the most frequent [job with Byrne] was X-Men: The Hidden Years [’99–’01]. We did 22 issues of that.”
About Tom’s original X-Men run with Neal Adams, he said, “John, like many others, [loved] those X-Men books. People will send me commissions now, it will be something with the X-Men, and they’ll say, ‘Do it in this style you did for those X-Men issues.’ What they’re really saying is: do it in the style that looks like Neal. Neal had a very distinct style; the way he did muscles and the way he did clothing, wrinkles, and a few other things. So that’s all I do. I was the one inking it, so I knew what pen point I used and everything else.”
Tom continued, “John grew up in Canada and I guess he had nothing else to do up in the Canadian north, being snowed in. He must have just devoured those X-Men books. So it was just a matter of him getting a chance to redo it. He always said he had an idea and he approached Marvel with it. “Why not fill in those years or issues, at the end of that run [X-Men #56–63, 65]?”
Thus, on X-Men: The Hidden Years, Tom said, “I think it originally was 22 issues. And, Marvel being Marvel, John got the 22 and then they said, that was it. And it was selling, but they pulled it. John pulled the works, too, and left. We ended it. But it was John wanting to recreate that era. It was important to him. And I don’t know how close we came. You can only do it once.” Tom added, “I’ve worked on other things with him. John is good. The Silver Surfer [one shot, ’82] I did with him, I remember using Craftint and everything else on it… John was always good to work with.”
Howard Mackie was fortunate to pair Byrne and Tom together during his first full-gig as an editor with the inker. “My approach to editing was that the hardest part of the job was to pick the right team. Because that made the rest of the job easy. Tom inked Byrne on Star Brand [#11–14, Jan.–July ’88]. That was probably the first thing I recruited Tom to do as a full editor. My first editorial gig was I inherited the failing ‘New Universe.’ I was able to connive/trick John Byrne into writing and drawing the book (or doing breakdowns). He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it if you can get Palmer to do the finishes.’ That’s how that was able to come about.”
BACK TO THE CANVAS
While the work with John Byrne was short-lived, Tom always kept up with his first love: painting. Throughout the ’70s until the ’20s, he often indulged in that passion. “I love to paint, so I was painting advertising and doing other things. I was doing painted covers for Marvel. Whenever they had a movie cover to do, I was gonna do it. Not all of them, Bob Larkin was doing them, too. And there’s one that was never printed, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [intended for the never-pubbed Marvel Super Special #7]. I still have the painting. They gave me the painting back, but they never used it. They canceled the book. It was printed in Europe, but not here.
“But all of those paintings led into a lot of the commissions that I’m now getting. They’re not just Marvel stuff, they’re other things, like the Universal movie monsters.” Painting remained a purposeful pursuit for Tom during his entire work life.
Something that was not as well-known was his penchant for creating humorous art and caricatures. “Jack Davis, he was a big part of my career also, because I started doing caricature paintings for ad agencies that were given as gifts for clients who had a birthday or were retiring. And Jack Davis was my inspiration, the watercolors and the ink drawings he did. What I did probably looked a little bit like Jack Davis’ stuff, but the public that never even knew Jack Davis, MAD magazine, or E.C., they loved it. Jack Davis, became somebody I really relied on for inspiration. I remember riding the subway, during the period where he was doing a lot of movie posters, and I was wondering if I could get one of them out of the frame. I was always afraid that I’d get caught trying to steal a poster! Jack Davis must have done so many of those. Now of all the guys that were at E.C., he must have been the most successful. He and Mort Drucker, I think, were the two best. I mean, there were other good ones, but there was something in that artwork by both of them. Mort Drucker was unbelievable. In just a few lines, he was able to capture [everything]. So many people swiped him.”
One individual who received a painted cartoon from Tom was former Marvel
editor and writer Howard Mackie. “As we’re talking, I’m focused on a painting that Tom did of me for my 40th birthday. He did this for a few of us at one point. I think Terry Kavanaugh has one, as well. And it’s Tom’s version, it’s close to a caricature, except that it looks exactly like me. I think my wife provided a photo reference for him and then he just started asking all of my friends, ‘What does Howard like?’ I’ve got knives strapped to me in the picture“ — Mackie is a knife aficionado. — “There’s a Ghost Rider poster hanging in the background, and there’s this Spider-Man head there. Somebody mentioned to him that my favorite food at the time was chicken wings. So he’s got a chicken there. It was really sweet. My wife had done a surprise party for me, and Tom presented it to me at a party. It was just lovely.”
THE BEAT GOES ON
During his career, Tom brought his inking line to Silver Age and Bronze Age artists, many who were giants in the field. In turn, he also worked with emerging generations, where he found himself fitting in as a wise colleague and mentor. One such pairing showed how much legends still mattered at Marvel.
As Tom noted, “John Buscema left The Avengers and they got different people in to do the book. The first one was someone who has passed away since, Paul Ryan. Paul was always good. Mark Gruenwald was the editor of the book and Captain America was his character, the one he just loved. Paul was a thin guy, he did a lot of exercising, he was kind of really taut. And he made Captain America look like he was half the weight. I remember Mark saying, ‘Can you make him look like what John Buscema was doing?’ He was looking for a bulkier Captain America and I did that. I know Paul didn’t care for that. I told Mark, ‘You should tell him.’ Then I went through the writer I said, ‘Tell him this is not me, it’s Mark Gruenwald.’ But everybody was trying to have that ‘Buscema look.’ And, when he left, I think they sorely missed him. John was indispensable.”
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An artist making a name during the ’80s and ’90s was Butch Guice. His teaming with Tom proved a special one, as was the back-&-forth conversation between the two of them, which grew from there. “Well, the first time Tom and I worked together was on a Rom cover years earlier [#60, Nov. ’84]. I don’t recall if I was even aware he was inking it until I saw it on the stands. It was one of my first times drawing the character and probably a dismal piece of dreck in the pencil stage, but Tom worked his usual magic on it, and I was over the moon having finally gotten the opportunity to work with him.
COMIC BOOK CREATOR #36
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! The start of a multi-part look at the life and career of DAN DIDIO, part two of our ARNOLD DRAKE interview, public service comics produced by students at the CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES, & more!
“The first interior work was a number of years later. If my memory is correct, it was for Avengers Assemble #14–15 [June–July ’13], two issues during the big “Age of Ultron event,” at the time. I knew he was going to ink the thing and, once again, I was thrilled, if admittedly a little bit intimidated by the entire prospect of penciling for someone whose work I respected as I do Tom. So, if I had any expectations going in, it was that he would need to be saving my artistic bacon from my own ineptitude.”
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Over the course of their collaboration, Guice mentioned Apartment 3-G comic strip artist Alex Kotz ky. “Tom’s response was that, in all his years in the industry, he had never before had a penciler mention Kotzky, and we quickly realized we shared a mutual appreciation of a number of the older newspaper strip artists… Long story short, we continued to kibitz back and forth from that point… almost entirely, we chat about mutual artists whose strip work we admire and enjoy such as Kotzky, Ken Bald, Lou Fine, and others… Just two guys who love the comics medium, both book and strip, and the history
of it all, and chatting about some near forgotten greats.” Guice continued, “My favorite collaboration with Tom however has probably been the pages he stepped in and inked in Winter Soldier [#5, July ’12]… Tom just nailed those pages.” (Tom said, “I just enjoyed working with [Guice]. I don’t know if I helped him become anything.)
Guice shared, I remember doing something for Marvel, and I had to get the thing done in an hour. It was a splash page and it was when I was scanning it and sending it in. And I used chalk, charcoal, white chalk, and a whole bunch of things. I thought it looked pretty good, but he just flipped over it. I think he saw the original of that page. I was not doing ‘comic book,’ I was aware that I was going to scan it and that I could do something in black-&-white, and that’s what I went for.” (Of working with Guice, Tom said, “Whenever we’ve been together, we’ve had a very enjoyable time working together. He’s my audience. He’s applauding.”)
Howard Mackie shared his thoughts about his work with Tom after the legendary inker’s passing. “Tom is probably one of the first professional superstars that I became friends with, and pretty quickly. Because Tom was a great teacher. I mean,
This page: Above is the final page of the Silver Surfer one-shot [’82], with art by John Byrne and Tom. Below: Rom #60 [Nov. ’84], art by Jackson Guice and Tom.
