Comic Book Creator #4

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

No. 4, Winter 2014

Cover art & color by Kevin Nowlan

The New Voice of the Comics Medium

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also inside: DAN GOLDMAN • MORT TODD • MARK WAID • DENYS COWAN • ROGER STERN

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

Edited by JON B. COOKE, COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the new voice of the comics medium, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics—focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. It’s the follow-up to Jon’s multi-Eisner Award winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazine.

Subscribe at www.twomorrows.com 4 issues: $40 US, $54 Canada, $60 elsewhere Includes the DOUBLE-SIZE SUMMER SPECIAL!

No. 3, Fall 2013

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #1 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #3

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

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

NEAL ADAMS vigorously responds to critics of his BATMAN: ODYSSEY mini-series in an in-depth interview, with plenty of amazing artwork! Plus: SEAN HOWE on his hit book MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; MARK WAID interview, part one; Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; Part Two of our LES DANIELS remembrance; classic cover painter EARL NOREM interviewed, a new ADAMS cover, and more!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #4 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #5 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #6 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #7 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #8

RUSS HEATH career-spanning interview, essay on Heath’s work by S.C. RINGGENBERG (and Heath art gallery), MORT TODD on working with STEVE DITKO, a profile of alt cartoonist DAN GOLDMAN, part two of our MARK WAID interview, DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series, VIC BLOOM and THE SECRET ORIGIN OF ARCHIE ANDREWS, HEMBECK, new KEVIN NOWLAN cover!

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others!

Plus we examine the supreme artistry of JOHN ROMITA, JR., BILL EVERETT’s final splash, the nefarious backroom dealings of STOLEN COMIC BOOK ART, and ascend THE GODS OF MT. OLYMPUS (a ‘70s gem

by ACHZIGER, STATON and WORKMAN)!

SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up Swamp Thing, ManThing, Heap, and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, BRUNNER, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, CONWAY, MAYERIK, ORLANDO, PASKO, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, YEATES, BERGER, SANTOS, USLAN, KALUTA, THOMAS, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

BERNIE WRIGHTSON interview on Swamp Thing, Warren, The Studio, Frankenstein, Stephen King, and designs for movies like Heavy Metal and Ghostbusters, and a gallery of Wrightson artwork! Plus writer/editor BRUCE JONES; 20th anniversary of Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror with BILL MORRISON; and interview Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre's BATTON LASH, and more!

MIKE ALLRED and BOB BURDEN cover and interviews, "Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman" cartoonist DAVID BOSWELL interviewed, a chat with RICH BUCKLER, SR. about everything from Deathlok to a new career as surrealistic painter; Tales of the Zombie artist PABLO MARCOS speaks; Israeli cartoonist RUTU MODAN; plus an extensive essay on European Humor Comics!

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TwoMorrows now 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

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CBA Vol. 2 #5

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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-beforeseen pencils, MIKE FRIEDRICH on the history of Star*Reach, plus animator J.J. SEDELMAIER on his Ambiguously Gay Duo and The XPresidents 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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Winter 2014 • The New Voice of the Comics Medium • Number 4

t PLAYBOY W©©dy CBC mascot by J.D. King

©2014 J.D. King.

About Our Cover

TM & © DC Comics.

Art ©2014 Kevin Nowlan.

Art and colors by Kevin nowlan

One of our favorite artists in the entire field, Kevin Nowlan, contributes this evocative portrait of our headline guest, Russell Deheart Heath, Jr., appropriately placed in a Western setting. As the veteran comics artist revealed in the career-spanning interview within, Russ has always had an affinity for the frontier, though never had a true desire to become a cowpoke. When contemplating a tribute cover, Ye Ed immediately thought of Kevin because of his lush style, not too dissimilar to the Heath approach. Kevin’s career was examined by yours truly in the comprehensive and lengthy Nowlan interview, which appeared in Comic Book Artist Vol. 1, #25, now available in PDF format from TwoMorrows.

Please check out the ad in this ish or visit our website at twomorrows.com to learn more!

Comic Book Creator is a proud joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

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Ye Ed’s Rant: Ruminations on that “artist’s artist” of comics, Russ Heath...................... 2 Comics Chatter Goldman’s Digital Ghosts: Hannah Means-Shannon reports on digital graphic novelist Dan Goldman’s leap from pixels to print with Red Light Properties..................... 3 Incoming: Is CBC really a “new voice” for the medium? Plus a few corrections............ 8 The Good Stuff: Jorge Khoury discovers that Marvel makes good with a mammoth Omnibus devoted entirely to the Amazing Roger Stern’s Spider-Man epics................... 12 REMEMBRANCE Au Revoir, Rouge Enfant and Viscardi: Lamenting the passing of two greats......... 14 Hembeck’s Dateline: The Atlas-era Russ Heath “talking head” villain, The Brain, chats us up in Our Man Fred’s latest strip...................................................... 15 Aushenkerology: Michael Aushenker learns about Mort Todd’s Ditko years!............. 16 Irving on the Inside: The concluding installment of Christopher Irving’s career retrospective of award-winning veteran comics scripter Mark Waid.................. 20 The Human Gargoyles Return: Rich Arndt talks about a Skywald revival of sorts..... 25 Cowan the Conqueror: Part one of our interview with Milestone man and multitudinously talented comics creator and “animated” guy, Denys Cowan................. 26 The Lost Father of Archie Andrews: Who was Vic Bloom, the man listed on the first story featuring “America’s Typical Teenager,”and what happened to him?....... 30 SPECIAL RUSS HEATH SECTION “That Crazy Bastard Heath”: Legendary writer and editor Archie Goodwin tells us what makes Russ Heath such a great artist in a 1973 tribute..................... 36 Beautiful, Sublime & True: The Art of Russ Heath S.C. Ringgenberg examines the artistry of a true comic book master...................... 38 Above and Beyond: The Russ Heath Interview Comic Book Creator’s extensive career-spanning Q-&-A with the superb artist...... 46 Creator’s Creators: Christopher Irving shares his storied background.......................... 79 Coming Attractions: Join us for Kitchen, Romita Jr., Cruse, Cowan, Everett & Tilley!... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: A Brian Bolland classic — No joke!.......... 80 Right: Detail from Russ Heath’s memorable G.I. Combat #130 [June 1968] cover.

We kid you not! Every issue of Comic Book Creator includes a 16-page (sometimes more!) PDF bonus section containing exclusive material not found in the printed edition. So go and get your free CBC now!

www.twomorrows.com/freestuff Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are now 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 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $40 US, $54 Canada, $60 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2014 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

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This issue is dedicated to the memory of NICK CARDY ™

The New Voice of the Comics Medium

JON B. COOKE

Editor/Designer

John Morrow

Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER

Associate Editor

KEVIN NOWLAN

Cover Artist & Colorist

JORGE KHOURY RICHARD ARNDT CHRISTOPHER IRVING TOM ZIUKO

Contributing Editors

Brian K. Morris Senior Transcriber

STEVEN E. Tice STEVEN THOMPSON Transcribers

J.D. KING

CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO

CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON

CBC Illustrator

ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

SETH KUSHNER Greg PRESTON

CBC Contributing Photographers

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK CHRISTOPHER IRVING JORGE KHOURY TOM ZIUKO

CBC Columnists

Comic Book Creator is always in search of interviews, art, and artifacts related to the field, and we encourage those interested to contact us at jonbcooke@aol.com or through snail-mail at CBC, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 or call (401) 932-1967 2

Artist’s Artist

Paying tribute to the great and glorious Russell Heath, Jr.

Joe Kubert and Russ Heath would each tell their respective version of the same story when they’d describe their professional relationship with one another.

Often with a chuckle, Joe would discuss how, when he was working in DC’s New York offices as an editor in the late ’60s and early ’70s, he would become increasingly frustrated with freelancer Heath’s consistently blowing deadlines on the monthly “Sgt. Rock” assignment. The editor would get so exasperated, Joe confessed, that while on the phone with the Chicago-based artist, he’d threaten to sock Russ in the jaw if only he were in the room there with Kubert.

The lesson Joe seemed to derive from that situation was, in order to maintain their friendship, which by that time stretched back two decades, Kubert either had to learn to cushion the deadlines more to accommodate the artist’s habitual lateness… or find another freelancer.

But Russ distilled something different from the incident. Call it motivated by guilt or a need to prove his worth, but because Russ Heath of Joe’s anger, Heath would say

by Ronn Sutton he tried his very best to make good through the quality of the work delivered.

He knew the assignment would arrive late, so he’d spend an exorbitant amount of time on the art to make up for his lack of diligence… and because he’d invest excessive attention to it, the pages were thus guaranteed to be tardy! Fait accompli, self-fulfilling prophecy, a man’s own worst enemy is himself… call it what you will, but this rectification has rewarded us with magnificent artistry that will be appreciated long after that anecdote is forgotten. Russ Heath, like his colleague Joe Kubert, will endure through the work.

I confess that despite being an editor myself, I am more sympathetic with Russ’ reaction to pissing Joe off.

Redemption is always an option, making amends is perpetually the honorable route, and striving for an “A” for effort is never a bad thing. It’s often the next right thing.

Comic book artists typically live a petty sedate, routine and humble life. Theirs is, on average, a solitary existence and unless they frequented social events or went regularly into the offices or took on editorial gigs, each day was pretty much like any other.

Russ Heath? He’s lived a different life than most of his peers, and it is a great pleasure to feature the superb artist and raconteur in this tribute issue. And while the emphasis is on his comic book career, it’s important to remember he toiled in advertising agencies and in Hollywood animation studios as well. Dude, the guy lived in the Playboy Mansion at the height of the 1960s, where the artist said, there were just “piles of girls” and at a time when Hugh Hefner was the swingest cat around! Rest assured, Russ has a helluva story to share.

This ish is a very long time in coming, as are the next bunch of CBCs to follow. Next time I finally sit down with cartoonist and publisher Denis Kitchen, a friend and longtime supporter of any number of projects. After that, we finally bring out Swampmen, the book well over a decade in the making and which will focus on the muck-monsters of the 1970s and ’80s. Then issues devoted to Bernie Wrightson, and a Michael “Madman” Allred/Bob “Flaming Carrot” Burden double cocktail (with David “Reid Fleming” Boswell chaser!).

We pondered going bi-monthly but we’ll stick with foura-year for now…

Special thanks this issue to Kevin Nowlan for his wonderful homage cover, on which the astounding artist performed triple duty of pencils, inks, and colors. What a beautiful piece, K.N.! And a big hello and good-bye to our ever-so-brief freelancing associate Hannah MeansShannon, who was all set to regularly contribute to CBC and then Bleeding Cool had to go hire her as their first-ever editor-in-chief! The nerve of them! Sigh. Congrats, Hannah! We knew you when...! (HMS contributes the Dan Goldman profile starting on the next page.)

— Ye Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

cbc contributors Richard Arndt David Barsalou Mark Beazley Thom Haller Buchanan Russ Burlingame Shaun Clancy Christopher Couch

Ken Danker Dark Horse Comics Chuck Dixon Fantagraphics Florentino Flórez Heritage Auction Brian House Bruce Jones

Jim Keefe Denis Kitchen Stacey Kitchen Steve Kriozere Stan Lee Ely Liu Frédéric Manzano Antonio Martin

Marvel Comics David Saunders Hannah Cory Sedlmeier Means-Shannon David Scroggy Gabriel Ronn Sutton Morrissette Steve Thompson Mitch O’Connell Mort Todd Greg Preston Jim Vadeboncoeur, Eric Reynolds Jr.

Wayne Vansant Jen Vaughn Ivan Velez, Jr. Alyson Vetter Kendall Whitehouse Rob Yeremian & The Time Capsule Craig Yoe

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

comic book zeitgeist

Goldman’s Digital Ghosts Dan Goldman’s odyssey from pixel screen to printed page in Red Light Properties

08 and Shooting War ©2014 the respective copyright holders. Red Light Properties TM & ©2014 Dan Goldman. Portrait ©2014 Seth Kushner.

by Hannah Means-Shannon Discovering doorways into the strange and unknown in his local library made the young Dan Goldman a storyteller, picking up volume after volume in the “weirdo-occult” aisle with his new library card. Reading psychedelic and occult comics as a teen drove him to write comics, but it was only after realizing the potential behind digital composition when he took up the stylus as both writer and artist to create the reluctant exorcist Jude Tobin and the condemned, ghost-haunted Miami real estate of Red Light Properties. Now that the digital iterations of Goldman’s comic series are making their way to print, he is re-mastering and expanding the “case files” of an average guy who can talk to ghosts to turn a buck on cursed homes other agents finding just too hot to handle.

Goldman has been making waves in both digital and print comics since his 2006 debut of webcomic series Kelly on the creatorowned site Act-i-vate Comix, followed by major digital first comics and graphic novels in a wide variety of genres, from 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail with Michael Crowley and Ctrl.

Alt. Shift in 2009, to his Eisner Award nominated Shooting War with Anthony Lappé from 2007– 2011. Goldman has found that exploring different genres and styles has led him to more personal choices in subject matter and an opus all his own. His creative journey led him to develop his now long-running and ongoing digital series Red Light Properties in 2010, and Goldman is rapidly approaching a career milestone with the release of the first print collection of the series from IDW in January. Red Light Properties, which follows the life of beleaguered haunted house exorcist Jude Tobin, his ambitious but estranged wife Cecilia, and their young son, represents a culmination of Goldman’s personal vision in storytelling and in artwork. It’s a watershed series for the creator, and one that he intends to pursue through multiple print volumes, based on updated versions of his digital comics, into new story lines.

Red Light Properties, originally published on Tor. com, and now in digital distribution through MonkeyBrain Comics (monkeybraincomics.com), is a series that Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

has attracted attention for many reasons, from its psychedelic and occult themes to its sensitive portrayal of tense family relationships and raw, realistic exploration of the impact of economic decline. It’s a comic about relationships and their haunting legacies, whether regarding the Tobins’ lives or in the lives of ghostly murder victims making Miami properties unsellable. There’s an edginess and depth of pathos in Goldman’s storytelling that’s only matched by his ability as an artist to convey supernatural experiences in ways that are both moving and visually arresting. In many ways, Red Light Properties is a series Goldman has been building toward since his earliest creative efforts, and the most personal work he has yet produced.

“I want to tell adult stories organic to where my brain and my soul are,” says Goldman, a statement that suggests a certain degree of reflection at this point in his varied career. He wants to both create and read things that make him “feel something.” Red Light Properties may be a supernatural relationship drama, but Goldman is pragmatic about its components and the ways in which they appeal to readers. He comments that in Red Light Properties the “ghost stuff on a level is incidental. It’s really about relationships. But you just do relationship comics, who’s gonna read it?” There may be some truth in the idea that readers want to be taken off the beaten path of relationship dramas into unexplored realms of narrative, but the fact remains that Goldman has long been fascinated by the horror and occult themes now found in Red Light Properties and so is particularly equipped to wrestle them into narrative format.

Goldman’s childhood is a rich mine of influences and material that continue to find expression in his work and also in his approach to life. Born in Detroit, he became immersed in Background: CBC photographer extraordinaire Seth Kushner snaps cartoonist Dan Goldman in New York’s Grand Central Station. Inset upper left: Dan illustrated 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail. Inset left: The Anthony Lappé-scripted, Goldman-illustrated Shooting War was nominated for an Eisner Award. Above: Red Light Properties cover.

Photography by Seth Kushner 3

Below: Seth Kushner’s exquisite photography captures a serious Dan Goldman, creator/writer/artist of Red Light Properties.

pursue his auto-didactic impulses more fully. He promptly became immersed in studying the paranormal and supernatural in the “weirdo-occult aisle” of the library, but what interested him the most, and would continue to haunt him, was exploring the “edges of perception” in human terms.

Paging through these odd books reminded him of something he had nearly forgotten, an early childhood certainty that he frequently encountered the ghost of his deceased grandfather who “watched over” his family. Goldman questioned the experiences he recalled, since he knew that his “big imagination” was a “strong suit,” but it pushed him to examine the nature of reality a little more closely and leave a little room for doubt in the face of rationalism. “I’m capable of having opposing belief systems simultaneously,” he comments, both the “rational and scientific.”

Reading Grant Morrison’s series The Invisibles in college served as a touchstone for his perception of reality. One of the maxims put forward in the series, which still strikes Goldman as significant from the “White Flame meditation,” is that “every state of being and matter is transitory,” and nothing ever “is” without processes of change at work. He discovered the comic series at a time when he was “coming out of being cynical” as a teenager and attempting to “reprogram himself” using newly chosen value systems. He bought The Invisibles as they were released, and this led him to look into other Vertigo titles from DC, as well as books published

by Fantagraphics. He eventually discovered Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, but more significantly for him, the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets, Peter Bagge’s Hate, and Dan Clowes’ Eightball. His comics reading has always been as eclectic as his literary explorations, but reading the Gilbert Hernandez “Heartbreak Soup” prompted a eureka moment convincing him, “You can tell any kind of story with comics.”

Initially, Goldman considered himself primarily a writer, only taking on the role of artist after slowly gaining confidence #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Dan Goldman portrait ©2014 Seth Kushner.

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Japanese “kaiju” Godzilla movies at a young age. He was also an early reader, obsessed with science-based subjects and books with a historical slant from paleontology to pre-history. But comics were another part of his world, and part of a personal mythology. From Richie Rich to Spider-Man to Peanuts, he developed a deep love for the paneled page.

Moving from Detroit to Florida at the age of seven was one of the biggest turning points in his perceptions, with ripple effects that contributed directly to his creation of Red Light Properties as an adult. Unhappy with the sudden geographical shift, he found the place exotic and a little forbidding.

Books became an even larger influence on his world-view as he struggled to adapt to his new environment, and he recalls that some of the most impacting were Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel, and Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin. The former introduced him to the “connective tissue” between pre-history and human society whereas the latter resonated with his early childhood in Detroit and opened his eyes to a need for social justice, something he feels still “doesn’t really exist.” Film also crept in as an increasing presence in his life, especially his introduction to horror via Stephen King’s works adapted to the screen like Pet Sematary and The Shining. For Goldman, horror was a “door that swung wide,” suddenly drawing him in, and it became a genre he could investigate more fully after receiving his first library card. For Goldman, the card was a ticket into hidden realms where he could make his own choices and

TM & ©2014 Dan Goldman.

Above: Trippy spread from Dan Goldman’s Red Light Properties, courtesy of the artist/writer, and currently in print from IDW.

TM & ©2014 Dan Goldman.

TM & ©2014 Dan Goldman.

in the medium. He wrote imaginatively from a young age, combining horror elements, science-fiction concepts, and occasionally drawing covers for his stories. “I knew I would be a writer,” he reflects, “but I didn’t know I would be an artist.” He often felt critical of his own cartooning efforts until he encountered digital drawing tablets in his mid twenties. While working as a graphic designer at a multinational bank, he became increasingly versed in using a Wacom stylus, and suddenly found himself discovering the possibilities of digital composition.

The night he brought home his first Wacom tablet, he looked up to find that the sun had risen and a cold pot of coffee was still sitting where he had brewed it. He realized that something radical had happened in his life and he knew he was “onto something” in terms of producing his own comics.

His drawing abilities, ranging from vector drawing to mixed media composition, developed during a stint living in Florida, working on the ideas that would become Red Light Properties and producing club flyers in a glossy, psychedelic comic style. By the time he attended Comic-Con International: San Diego in 2002, he decided to take some of his flyers with him. While chatting to psychedelically-inclined artist J. H. Williams III, he was surprised when Williams encouraged his artwork and hoped he’d develop a comic in a similar style. Upon returning to New York City, he plunged into development on the digital series Kelly, and experiment in both form and content that explores the life of an “enigmatic middle-aged stoner” and psychological conflicts. New comics projects followed in rapid succession, engaging with non-fiction and reality-inspired story lines before he returned firmly to fiction in 2010 with Red Light Properties.

Goldman has always been something of a wanderer, and in 2009, after selling digitial-only rights for Red Light Properties to Tor.com, he and his wife, Lilli, left New York to visit her

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Below: This Marie Severin montage of Marvel characters actually appeared in an advertisement appearing in the 1982 Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, though we found the Mirthful One’s black-&-white line art gracing CBC friend Trina Robbins’ book A Century of Women Cartoonists [1993], and thought it’d be a lark to have our colorist jazz it up with his Technicolor hues and to have Ye Ed Photoshop in the trade paperback cover of Sean’s book.

hometown of Sao Paolo, Brazil, and they ended up staying for three years. During this time he began work on Red Light Properties in earnest and also produced autobiographical writing, Toucannuí: Gringo Tales of Isolation in Urban Brazil, appearing on the Brooklyn digital arts salon site TRIP CITY. His experiences in Brazil contributed to his multicultural bent in storytelling, as seen in the Miami-set Red Light Properties.

Like Kelly, Red Light Properties took Goldman further into the realm of creating as both artist and writer in pursuit of what he calls “pure comics.” Since he tends to see comics as neither art-based nor writing-based, he’s looking for an “alchemy between the two,” and in particular, for the two together to create a “doorway into another place.” Some works that have affected him in this way are The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon and Darwyn Cooke’s Parker graphic novels. The series Saga, created by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples, has also opened his eyes to new ways of collaborating in comics and throwing rules “out the window” to tell an engaging story.

Goldman is similarly iconoclastic in his creation of comics, both in form and content. Many of Goldman’s works

Above: The cover of Dan Goldman’s finally-in-print Red Light Properties, available from IDW.

Below: Dan Goldman’s covers for the digital versions of his Red Light Properties, revealing laudable graphic design.

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#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 Dan Goldman.

intrinsic problem in producing politically-directed comics in that they have a limited “shelf-life.” He is much more focused these days on producing works that can endure social change and still maintain their universal appeal.

“These pages and screens contain the days of my life,” he says regarding Red Light Properties, and that kind of input means seeking longer-term readership. His graphic novel Shooting War, for instance, gained interest from readers and critics, but its subject matter, a fictional story engaging with terrorism and the war in Iraq, disappeared from public interest rapidly. He’s more interested now in creating stories that are both fictional and “not necessarily of the moment,” stories that he can make sure have “time to breathe” before being published.

While Red Light Properties may not be political in theme, it still contains elements of social critique. Goldman feels that American identity has changed considerably in the past ten or fifteen years and that the “American dream has crested,” possibly veering toward descent. In Red Light Properties, Goldman’s characters struggle against economic decline but the series also hints at the neglected role of creativity in modern culture via the ghost-banishing Tobin. Tobin tends to think of himself as an “artist” in his unusual profession, just as Goldman does, and he “struggles in a society that doesn’t believe his work has any cultural significance or monetary value.” Goldman jokes, “He takes drugs and I get into a Wacom tablet… That’s my spirit world, my church,” drawing parallels between his way of life and Tobin’s. He admits that creating comics is how he “talks about life” and, that just as Jude explores the boundary between the living and the dead in their overlapping worlds, Goldman’s “touch screen” is another border zone between created worlds and reality. “That part of Jude is very personal,” Goldman admits.

As a digital and digital-to-print creator, Goldman has complex views on what he deems to be a complicated indus-

TM & ©2014 Dan Goldman.

could be considered subversive in tone, and though he’s prepared to admit that his comics are unusual, he also feels that he’s following in the footsteps of underground comics traditions. Some of the elements in Red Light Properties that hearken back to underground comics are drug use, presenting flawed human relationships, and making sure that characters are not presented as “action figures.” In particular, the character Jude Tobin is heavily influenced by Harvey Pekar’s persona, with a dash of Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters. Goldman doesn’t particularly care if his work is labeled as Above: Artist and writer Dan subversive or not, but is pragmatic enough to hope that Goldman’s snazzy Twitter avatar. those elements don’t keep his comics out of bookstores. He intentionally “dialed back” some of the aspects of Red Light Properties, toning down nudity, for instance, for the print editions. Though Red Light Properties was originally created for digital format and is now seeing print, these restrictions apply even to digital production, since platforms like the Apple Store and ComiXology still expect creators to adhere to content guidelines.

Some of Goldman’s past works have political subject Below: Red Light Properties’ lead character Jude Tobin has a matter, but he doesn’t consider himself all that political as conversation with his poltergeist a person. Though he produced three books that “circled pop in this spread by Dan Goldman. the crest and fall of the Bush era,” he feels that there’s an

Dan Goldman portrait ©2014 Seth Kushner.

The Walking Dead ©2014 AMC Network Entertainment LLC.

try that is slowly moving away from “digital stigma” when it comes to production. He would like to see “more avenues for independent work to be, not just published, but produced” in a way that’s not “detrimental” to creators, whether in digital or print format. As things stand, he thinks that self-defined independent publishers are, for the most part, operating “solely for themselves.” They hope to generate intellectual properties that will expand into film treatments, something that may not benefit creators financially even if that route is successfully pursued. This also has implications for digital format in comics, according to Goldman. As digital platforms are growing and expanding, they fail to take into account the issues inherent in the independent publishing system and the same flaws carry over into the new paradigm.

Creator-owned projects face some of the same difficulties as digital production despite the Elysium of freedom they seem to offer for those seeking greater autonomy. Goldman observes that creators are not making money on these projects, and if the property they create makes it into a more lucrative medium like film, they are not necessarily compensated for that transition. But creator-owned projects can, nevertheless, make the first “steps toward an audience,” something that appeals to new creators. In working with IDW to bring Red Light Properties to print, Goldman has been pleased with his ability to maintain the IP itself as his own, and feels that publishing a print volume is the “road to a different audience” that may have been excluded from his digital work.

With 300 pages of Red Light Properties already in digital existence, Goldman has illustrated that digital format can be an excellent creative tool, and that creator-owned projects can allow comics to explore themes that might not otherwise be appear in mainstream comics production. Red Light Properties is idiosyncratic, and that commitment to personal vision on Goldman’s part is what has garnered readership.

For a comic essentially, “about a small exorcism and real estate office on Miami Beach run by a schlubby shaman and his overly ambitious wife as they carve out their supernatural Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

niche in a deflated housing market,” it has established its wide appeal precisely on the basis of its unique qualities.

Goldman’s future plans for new Red Light Properties stories will take Jude Tobin into “deeper metaphysical concepts” that help explain the universe of the comic and Tobin’s role as a shamanic figure. He’s currently immersed in remastering the comics that appeared on Tor.com toward his IDW-published graphic novel and the first collection will be a “director’s cut” version with rewritten, redrawn, and reworked panels. Meanwhile, the second collected book is already in the works, containing comics that follow sequentially after the first volume in Red Light Properties continuity; however, the format will consist of self-contained short stories from Tobin’s life as well as some new, never-before-seen material. Goldman is also pursuing other projects, including a creator-owned sci-fi series working with a collaborating artist Doug Wheatley, as well as his first prose novel.

It’s clear that Goldman doesn’t see any particular horizon line for Red Light Properties; it’s an endless fount of potential storytelling that draws on his real-life experiences and concerns, and one that three years in has prompted him to some of his most detailed work as a comic book creator. His movement, from creator-owned digital format to creator-governed print collections for Red Light Properties, runs the gamut of publication options. Through combining methods of presentation, Goldman has carved out a reputation based on innovation, quality, and personal motivation to bring his comics to readers through the various modes available in a rapidly changing market.

Just as CBC welcomes Hannah Means-Shannon (a.k.a. Hannah Menzies) on board, we find out that she’s been hired as the very first editor-in-chief of bleedingcool.com. Damn! Do check out her fine writing at the websites Bleeding Cool and Trip City. She is currently writing the books Meet the Magus: Magic in the Works of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman: The Early Years. Notably, Hannah edited Mr. Moore’s multi-part, kick-ass essay published recently in Occupy Comics #1–3.

Above: Our intrepid photographer Seth Kushner confirms the photo shoot focusing on comics creator Dan Goldman was shot on location in New York City’s Grand Central Station. Kudos to Seth for these evocative images!

Above: Dan also serves as editor and consulting writer on AMC’s Walking Dead social game on Facebook, which he says, “Gives me the opportunity to form my own original gang of characters and set them loose in the iconic show’s zombie wasteland. Building character arcs and breaking them into gameplay-specific vignettes that try to break your heart as well as scare the sh*t out of you… it’s been a fantastic workout for my writer muscles…”

7

incoming

‘New’ voice of comics?

A Comic Book Creator contributing editor takes exception to our magazine’s tagline [CBC is definitely noticing a distinct lack of letters/emails coming our way, certainly compared to the halcyon days of our previous incarnation, Comic Book Artist magazine, as crickets chirp undisturbed in Ye Ed’s post office box, and our “Tell us what we don’t know” request — asking readers for suggesting creators to showcase in these pages — elicited a single response (besides our first missive below). I guess we need to accept there’s a new paradigm in town, eh?

Anyway, you can bet we’re grateful when a CBC contributor gives us a piece of his mind, as does associate editor Chris Irving below. — Ye Ed.]

Christopher Irving

Above and below: We were fiddling about on Facebook a few weeks back and came across these great Neal Adams’ Lego-inspired classic DC covers by CBC #3’s featured subject, and promptly ordered a set of the (now sold-out) limited edition prints. As most readers know all too well, below is a pastiche of Ye Editor’s favorite comic book cover, Neal’s classic Superman #233 masterwork.

[Much obliged, old friend, for your opinion and worthy suggestions, Chris. As expressed in my intro above, it’s a different world out there than when I was last editing a mag about comics. Getting the top two comic book publishers to respond on just about any level, for instance, has proven difficult, but point taken on introducing more contemporary subjects. There’s a balancing act that I see given the general readership of the mag (who mostly did indeed come of age as comics readers in the ’70s and ’80s), but publisher John Morrow and I are willing to try new stuff and remain open to ideas to broaden readership, essential for the survival of CBC, no simple feat in this tough economic climate.

Please note that Hannah Means-Shannon is in this issue with a piece devoted to Dan Goldman, a contemporary cartoonist making an impact in digital comics. We hoped to have Hannah regularly report on the current scene but, alas, she was just hired by Bleeding Cool, dagnabbit! Can’t say we’re not trying! I see, too, that our ongoing mission to present the history of creator rights iserves an ongoing purpose that is vital and relevant. Personally, I’d love to feature Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips regarding my favorite current series, Fatale, and there’s plenty of folks I’m dying to interview — Herobear’s Mike Kunkel, Amanda Conner, Blacksad’s Juanjo Guarnido, Hawkeye’s Matt Fraction and David Aja, the incredible Jerome Opeña (late of Infinity), and Stephanie Buscema, to name a mere handful — but I do have some veterans lined up. We’ll do our best, Chris, and I will certainly become acquainted with some new names I see in your missive. A heartfelt thanks for your well-received comments. — Y.E.]

Ed Hillyer I love what you do — keep doing it! I especially admire and respect the recent stance on creator’s rights, via Comic Book #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & © DC Comics.

8

Comic Book Creator is, in hyperbolic fashion, dubbed the NEW voice of the comics medium, but somehow, I just don’t think it has come together as such. It feels more aimed at the traditional TwoMorrows audience (fans who have grown up with the ’70s and ’80s era of comics) and just not towards a contemporary industry-centric one. Some of it, I think, falls under the cover dressing: Jack Kirby à lá Alex Ross, Joe Kubert (in a fitting, and requisite, tribute issue), and Neal Adams — all creators who have a steady presence on TwoMorrows covers and are more than deserving of a cover spot anywhere, but are expected. Getting contemporary guys who are big, and even straddle between creator-owned and corporate, could be to your benefit in attracting new readers and selling CBC as a magazine about today’s industry: I’m thinking David Mack, Becky Cloonan, Charles Soule, Brian Wood, Fred Van Lente, James Sturm, Jamal Igle, Mike Allred, or even Joe Quesada would be a step in the right direction.

But it still doesn’t feel like it’s the comics industry’s voice, and the content just doesn’t mesh for me.

So, these are my two cents: please take none of them personally, and feel free to pilfer and use whatever: This isn’t Comic Book Artist, so I don’t think a thematic format is necessary on a regular basis. Plus, I know what a huge undertaking those could be (our Charlton issues, anyone?).

But, if you want to make this mag the industry’s voice, I would model it more off of The Comics Buyer’s Guide from back in the day, which (along with The Comics Journal) was the forum for professionals.

Also, remember that the faults of the industry aren’t just guys like Kirby getting shafted decades back (and still today), but female creators being stuck on the receiving end of misogyny

and sexism, minority creators and characters still not fully getting the voice and presence they’ve always deserved, or the crushing of editorial creativity under the wheels of the big business machine. I also think CBC is missing the more positive aspects of today’s comics: the freedom of posting creator-owned content online, or the Kickstarter culture that’s allowing creators to really do their own thing on their own terms.

Engage columnists who range from older to younger, including female and minority talent: Off-hand, I’d recommend getting Joe Illidge (who worked for Milestone and has a lot to say), Kelly Sue DeConnick (who has some amazing views on the current industry’s treatment of women — just look at her blog any given day), a willing Image creator (someone like Brubaker — who was a huge CBA fan when I first met him in 2000), and maybe even a scholar like Columbia University’s Karen Green. If you create a regular columnist presence in the magazine, it’ll take pressure off you format-wise, and will also invite dialogue within the pages through this added creator credibility. By making CBC open to creators of all generations and genders to voice their thoughts and views, it’ll make it the mag industry folks have to pick up.

Also, just to show more sides of the industry coin, try to get someone big business (Marvel/DC) to do an interview/ contribute. Sure, CBC has its own wear it on its sleeve motive, but this will help create more of a balance.

Now get back to work and stir sh*t up! :)

TM & © DC Comics.

Write to CBC: jonbcooke@aol.com or P.O. Box 204, W. Kingston RI 02892.

Frank Robbins photo and caricatures, BANG! ©2014 the respective copyright holders.

Creator for the main part, but also fairly explicit in The Jack Kirby Collector. The law is an ass in the instance of Disney/ Marvel vs. the Kirbys, and the more people can be made aware of that, the better! Thank you.

Jay Taylor As a dedicated reader of many TwoMorrows magazines, I just wanted to drop a quick line to say how much I’ve enjoyed CBA, Draw!, and Back Issue over the years. The most recent CBC mentioned that you wanted to hear about potential current creators as subjects for the CBC treatment.

I want to suggest Ivan Reis, the current artist on Justice League. He’s had a long career already (Action, Avengers, and Green Lantern) and in my opinion is one of the best artists in the business. I’ve heard some audio interviews with him, but generally they are short, possibly because of language barriers. I’d imagine that a long form written interview would be a great opportunity to get inside his head and understand his process. As an aspiring artist, I can’t think of a better choice; his work is really inspiring to me.

O’Connell wedding portrait ©2014 Greg Preston.

Gabriel Morrissette Glad to see you back in the editing saddle again. Re: the photos of Frank Robbins [in CBC #1]. I found photos, taken by Francisco Hidalgo, in the mag PHENIX, revue internationale de la bande dessinée #23 (1972). (Of course, in English it translates as PHEONIX, the international magazine of comics.) It contains six photos of Robbins, with a double-page spread of a fish-eye view of his studio.

Also, there’s one with his sound equipment in the background, along with a little interview by Hidalgo with a different photo of Robbins’ drawing board than the one you have on pg. 18, but most likely from the same photo session, as Robbins seems to be wearing the same open shirt. Then a full page photo of him lettering a “Batman” page with a fountain pen and, lastly, one inking “Baman,” which you have on pg. 19 on the left.

I did scan those photos and shared them with Darwyn (the other) Cooke… I’ve seen these images circulate on the web, so there might be other sources.

If the original scan has a white border and there is French text underneath, it’s from Phenix. (By the way, Phenix ran from 1966–77. It was a kind of fanzine which graduated to a prozine, publishing some comics stories, among them a strip written by Claude Moliterni and drawn by Patrick Serres. Moliterni was also the founder and editor-in-chief of the mag. Serres was a French artist who was an assistant to Robbins in the ’60s. You would look at his style and think Robbins did it. A perfect clone. Serres worked quite a lot in that style for years in France.

Rob Stuparyk Has Comic Book Creator increased the font size with #3?

I’m in my early 30s, no glasses and find it brutal to try and read the text walls [of #1 and 2]. Also have they stopped saying “Ye Ed” every third sentence? I find it horribly takes away from the article and jolts me out of enjoying the book.

Hopefully the font has increased; Ye Eds… doubtful.

[Time for specs, Rob? Seriously, my apologies if CBC is a dense read. I do confess I squeeze as much as I can into an issue. Allow us to throw it out to the readership: Should we change the typeface in our humble periodical, folks?

I admit even my dear mother joins you in hating the liberal use of the “Ye Crusading Editor” handle, Rob, a moniker I’ve been applying since not only my days as editor of Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror, in the early ’90s, but even when I was 13 typing up the Cooke Bros. ’zine, OCMR: The Omega Comics Magazine Review, on Mom’s Royal typewriter. I do wonder if I stole it from Roy Thomas or Stan Lee back in the day. I was initially inspired by the science-fiction ’zine Locus, in 1972 or so, to start a fanzine, hence maybe I pilfered it from those fellers? Who knows! Maybe I’ll ease up on the usage, but you’re probably right, Rob… it’s doubtful. Me, I think it adds a light jocularity to all of this prattling. — Y.E.]

Above: Reader extraordinaire Gabriel Morrissette gives us the background on a then-unidentified pic of Frank Robbins in CBC #1, and he goes the extra mile by sharing scans of PHENIX #23, from whence they appeared. Here’s one we didn’t use. Photo by F. Hidalgo.

Below: Cover of Antonio Martin’s BANG! #10, the ’70s Spanish mag devoted to comics. Antonio kindly sent us a box of issues and some of his books on the subject! The editor also gave us scans of [inset left] Frank Robbins caricatures by Alfonso Figueras and Jordi Bernet!

Muchas gracias, Señor Martin!

Department of Corrections Department: Kirk “Kamandi” Tilander’s sharp eye noticed the error on the last page’s caption of CBC #2’s Joe Kubert Tribute issue — entirely Ye Ed’s fault — that listed the cover as being Ragman #5 when (given the giant “1” emblazoned, du’oh!) that was obviously the first ish of that 1970s comic book.

Kris Adams Stone emailed us to note that my caption on CBC #3’s page 47 was erroneous: “There was another page with the flying Batcar that Michael Golden inked, but not the one cited. Neal completely penciled and inked the first two issues of Batman Odyssey.”

[Thanks so very much, Gabriel, for your generosity! The artist, folks, hails from Montreal, up Canada way. — Y.E.]

Left: We at Casa CBC couldn’t be happier to hear that longtime pal Mitch O’Connell got hitched this past summer in a Las Vegas wedding to the beautiful Alyson Vetter! Photo by our chum Greg Preston and courtesy of the World’s Best Artist. Visit the newlyweds at www.mitchoconnell.com.

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

9

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#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more!

Plus ADAMS thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen NICK CARDY pages from a controversial Teen Titans story, unpublished TOTH covers, and more!

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

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

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

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

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

BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes

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

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

#12: CHARLTON PART 2

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983!

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

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

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

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

New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

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

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

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

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

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

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the good stuff

The Amazing Stern Marvel makes good with a mammoth Omnibus devoted entirely to Roger’s Spidey

by JORGE KHOURY CBC Contributing Editor You asked for it and now it is finally here: the Spider-Man by Roger Stern Omnibus! To the generation of kids who grew up reading comics in the ’80s, the Spidey stories collected in this 1,296-page tome represent the most seminal Spider-Man stories of the era, all written by the one and only Roger Stern, a prolific fan-favorite author since the late 1970s. Overseen by Marvel’s Cory Sedlmeier, Mike Kelleher, and company, the House of Ideas has brought their “A” game into this special book by giving it the same expert attention and detail they put into the top-notch Marvel Masterworks line.

Graced with a cover by the legendary Romita father-and-son team, this edition brings together Spectacular Spider-Man #43-61, 85, Amazing Spider-Man #206, 224252, Annual #16-17, and even the Stern written pin-ups and features from ASM Annual #15, SSM Annual #3, Web of Spider-Man Annual #3 and What If? #34. Plus, Mr. Stern has personally cherry-picked a special selection of original pencil art photocopies, character designs, and other extras from his archives to make this book a unique experience unlike any other. Every classic Spidey story is here: the “Hobgoblin” saga, “Nothing Can Stop The Juggernaut,” “The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man” (of course), and many other gems.

For me, this Omnibus, a catalogue raisonné of sorts, represents justice to a body of work long under-appreciated.

In this era of distractions, these stories will enrapture all with the stories that have stood the test of time and cemented Spider-Man’s popularity forever. Please don’t miss out on the written talents of Roger Stern in this experience of a lifetime all over again.

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#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Panel detail from writer Roger Stern’s unforgettable “The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man,” Amazing Spider-Man #248 [Jan. 1984], with Ron Frenz pencils and Terry Austin inks.

This 11-pager was included in The Best of Marvel Comics hardcover collection [1987].

Jorge Khoury: When did you first hear about the Omnibus?

Roger Stern: It was back in mid-August, when Cory Sedlmeier — the current mastermind behind the Marvel Masterworks series — contacted me. He let me know that Marvel was going to collect my early Spectacular Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man stories into one big book. One very big book. In fact, as Cory and I uncovered more material, the book grew beyond the originally proposed 1,248 pages. I believe that initial number is still listed in some solicitations, but the final page count is 1,296, making it the largest Omnibus that Marvel has published to date.

Jorge: What does it mean to you, personally, to see a Spider-Man by Roger Stern Omnibus published — to see your entire Spider-Man run collected?

Roger: It’s all very flattering. I had already felt like I’d arrived when the Essential Spider-Man series started collecting my stories in black-&-white. Subsets of my stories — in color — have appeared in other collections, but I didn’t expect to see any sequential color reprints until the Spider-Man Masterworks reached that point. And I figured

that I’d be much older by then. I never expected to see one gigantic hardcover collecting all of my stories.

It will be a reading experience and a work-out, both at the same time. If you have lower back problems, I suggest getting a reading stand. And be sure you lift from the knees.

Jorge: Did you ever envision readers experiencing these monthly stories as one major epic?

Roger: No, when I was writing these stories, the only thought on my mind was telling a good story — one that the readers would find entertaining enough that they would want to come back next month, and the month after that. I often wrote continued stories, but I tried my best to make each issue stand on its own. Looking back at those stories now, I can see where they do fit together into one long saga.

Jorge: Having re-read these stories for your introduction, what sort of memories rushed into your head (what was life for you like back then)?

Roger: All sorts of things… like, “Oh yeah, that’s the story I had to write over a weekend.” Or, “That’s the one I based on a cover that had already been drawn.” Mostly I remember all the little touches my army of artists added along the way… like the time Marie [Severin] drew a great old fellow into a scene, and I decided to make him Aunt May’s new boyfriend.

Or the time John [Romita Jr.] totally nailed the Juggernaut’s unstopability.

Jorge: And did you enjoy the reading experience?

Roger: Yes, I did. I hope it doesn’t sound egotistical, but I did. I enjoyed writing those stories a lot — how could anyone not enjoy writing Spider-Man? — and it was so much fun re-reading the whole batch over again. I was a much better writer by the end of the run. I just hope that the readers agree.

Jorge: In your Amazing Spider-Man run, I feel that readers will witness your writing and confidence getting stronger and stronger with each issue… How much of that fortitude came from the adrenaline/rush of just writing a book and character that you enjoyed as a young reader yourself? Or did it come from somewhere else?

Roger: There was definitely a thrill. Every once in a while, I’d pause in the middle of writing a story and realize, “Hey, I’m writing Spider-Man!” I’d experienced a little of that while working on the Hulk and on Doctor Strange, but when I was working on Spider-Man there was… I’m not sure how to explain it… an extra layer of satisfaction? I think on some level, I felt as though I was paying it forward, passing along the enjoyment I had experienced as a reader to the next group of readers. I got the same feeling when writing The Avengers. And when writing Superman.

Apart from that, I was riding the momentum that comes from writing a monthly book. There’s definitely a rhythm I get into when I’m writing a series — part of my brain is working in the moment, making sure that Spider-Man’s quips are

©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

clever enough, while another part is already starting to think of what’s going to happen next, a month or two in the future.

Also, there was the fact that I was working with John Romita Jr. and Tom DeFalco every month. When those two guys have your back, it feels as if you can do anything.

Jorge: Why do you think this particular run resonated so much with an entire generation of comic readers?

Roger: Well, that sounds pretty high-falutin’, but I’m happy if people think it did. It’s Spider-Man, you know? He’s the most interesting, quirky hero in comics; there’s nobody else quite like him, and people love him. If you can get him right, readers will love what you’re doing. And I guess a lot of people thought we got him right.

Jorge: Is the bond — the connection — between a storyteller and a receptive audience the greatest personal satisfaction that one can achieve in any creative field?

Roger: Oh, yeah. It’s right up there with the satisfaction of seeing your stories brought to life by the artists, and of finishing each issue. Those three things are always battling it out for the top spot.

Jorge: Having started as a reader, yourself, when John Romita Sr. was Spider-Man’s artist, did you find it ironic to be paired with John Romita Jr. as your main artistic collaborator on these comics back then? Please talk about full circle.

Roger: I’m not sure that I’d call it “ironic,” but it was incredibly rewarding. J.R. brought so much to the table; he always made me look good. And on the handful of occasions when his dad was able to work with us, it was doubly good.

Jorge: The artwork for these stories are still as lively and beautiful as I remember… Did you have any idea how hard Romita Jr. worked on his layouts? Until I talked to him, I didn’t know how self-critical JRJR was of his own work during the early days of his career. [Ed note: See Modern Masters #15: John Romita Jr.] Roger: Well, John’s always been hard on himself. It couldn’t have been easy for him, working on the series his father was famous for. I know John was giving it everything he had. And he got better every single month. Each issue was better than the one before. I could literally see it in his art. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said it was amazing.

Jorge: What was most challenging in writing Amazing Spider-Man? Pushing this character to his limits?

Roger: I didn’t consciously think about it at the time, but on some level we were trying to top ourselves every month.

Jorge: Would you and JRJR meet to discuss plot lines?

How did you two collaborate? Or, were these plot discussions mostly with editor Tom DeFalco? (And how important was Tom to you, as a writer, during these years?)

Roger: I moved away from New York City shortly after taking on the ASM assignment, and John and I talked just a few times on the phone after that. In fact, one of my few regrets about leaving the city was that I was no longer able to talk things out with John face-to-face. I think if we’d been able to hang out in some diner and toss ideas back and forth, our collaboration would have been even stronger.

So a lot of our communication was through Tom DeFalco, who was an integral part of the team. Tom understood how Spider-Man thought. John understood that and he understood how Spider-Man moved. They were both incredibly important to me.

Jorge: When you left Amazing, did it feel like that part of your life — writing Spider-Man — had come to an end?

Roger: More or less, yeah. I never really expected to write another Spider-Man story after that. But a few things that I’d set up continued to influence the series. There was the Hobgoblin, of course, although that sort of went off the rails after a while. And there was Mary Jane Watson’s back story, that I’d started setting up towards the end of my run. Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz followed through with that beautifully.

And it seems as though, every decade or so, someone at Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Marvel asks me to come back and write another Spider-story or two. Thank you, Tom Brevoort. Thank you, Steve Wacker.

Jorge: Until today’s reading of “The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man,” I never noticed that in this short story you not only cleverly retold Spider-Man’s origin, but you also showed us how liberating it was for the constantly guilt-ridden Peter Parker to share his identity with young Tim. I guess I never really thought about it because of this story’s sad ending.

Were these layers something you were conscious of back when you wrote this? The emotional burden that it is for Peter Parker to keep all his guilt and secrets to himself?

Roger: That was part of it. I always saw Spider-Man as the story of Peter Parker trying to overcome the guilt he felt over the death of his Uncle Ben. Spider-Man is both the root of Peter’s guilt, and his release from it.

Because he failed to act as Spider-Man, a criminal escaped — a criminal who later killed his uncle. He could have done something to prevent that, but he didn’t. And he’s been beating himself up over that ever since. That’s why Peter keeps playing Spider-Man, and goes on risking his life to help people, even when they don’t appreciate it.

But at the same time, being Spider-Man is the greatest thrill imaginable. You get to swing across the canyons of the city. You get a chance to stop the bad guys. And you get to make fun of them!

Like the song says, “Action is his reward.”

Above: The John Romitas senior and junior collaborate for the cover of Marvel’s biggest Omnibus yet, just shy of 1,300 pages, the collected Roger Stern Spider-Man stories, on sale in April. The book’s editor (and CBC amigo) Cory Sedlmeier shared, “The cover isn’t a new piece. It was originally intended to be the cover of to the 1990s reprint series Spider-Man Megazine.

In that series’ final issue, two already-completed covers were run as bonus pin-ups. We took the Romitas cover and had John Romita Jr.’s color artist, Dean White, take his talents to it to present it as a book cover for the first time.”

Special thanks to Roger Stern and Cory Sedlmeier.

— J.K.

Contact Jorge Khoury via Twitter @KhouryJorge.

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in memoriam

Remembering Infantino & Cardy

Daring & Different

Memories of two excellent comic book artists — one an innovative publisher

Carmine Infantino Both were Italian kids from the streets of New York, New May 24, 1925– York — one raised in Brooklyn, the other the Lower East April 4, 2013 Side — and each came of age looking for a way to help out Nicholas Viscardi a.k.a. Nick Cardy October 20, 1920– November 3, 2013

family in the hardscrabble years emerging from the Great Depression. Respectively, the two found a way to make a buck in the burgeoning field of American comic books, the berth where Carmine Infantino and Nicholas Viscardi would become legends as two among the very best of their kind.

I knew both of these astonishingly talented men — having been designer on their individual art book-slash-biographies — and I had a vastly different relationship with Rouge Enfant (Carmine’s playful nome-de-plume) than I did with Nick Cardy (the professional moniker of Viscardi), but each added to my life in ways worthy of note, and the words here recognize their legacies and mutual passing in 2013.

As a man, Carmine Infantino was a character, an authentic old-school New York paisan who could be backslapping, waggish, and good-natured tease one minute; sensitive, insular, and moody the next. The lifelong bachelor had that George W. Bush predilection to bestow a nickname once he reached a comfort level with you (I was, naturally, “Jonny”). He nurtured grudges and might perceive slights, oft times when none were intended, and he could be bitter about times past and, it seemed, overly suspicious about innocuous gestures. Carmine was, too, generous, jovial, and relaxed on the right occasion.

And What. An. Artist. After his early stint as one among many Milton Caniff devotees — solid, yeoman work, but exhibiting little snap and verve — in the mid-1950s, upon attending art school, Carmine was creatively afire as never before, finding inspiration far afield from cartooning, whether modern art, architecture, or commercial design. As if overnight, he was transformed into a comic book artist perfectly attuned to his time, endowed with a singular, sophisticated vision.

The endless, horizontal vistas he drew in The Flash, “Space Museum,” and especially “Adam Strange,” were expansive, beckoning, and his lithe, stretching figures were eternally in motion ever reaching for a hopeful tomorrow. His was a synthesis of the organic and the man-made, a quintessentially American approach — think Monument Valley adorned somehow with Cadillac tail fins — perfect for the latter ’50s and coming New Frontier.

Carmine’s characters were always launching off and Inset right: A self-portrait by away and his, in certain aspects, was the DC Comics’ house Nicholas Viscardi, known to friends style: ordered, well-mannered, and slick. But Jack Kirby at and fans as the great Nick Cardy. competitor Marvel, with his vulgar, inelegant, even grotesque rendering was coming at you fast — Hulk smash! — and Stan Lee’s outfit started its rise to dominance in post-JFK For more by Jon B. Cooke America with the King’s exuberant chaos. Thus, by decade’s about Nick Cardy: Visit Jon’s end, Carmine became an executive, leaving behind the artist blog at www.13thdimension.com, life, selling his reference file, taboret, and drawing table Alternative Visions, which includes to Joe Kubert (Joe was still incredulous when telling me his 1999 interview with Nick on the 25 years later that an artist of such ability would depart for sublime Brave and the Bold work. an expense account, Rolodex, and secretary).

Carmine Infantino portrait by Thom Haller Buchanan

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The early “Daring and Different” years of Carmine’s reign as editorial director and then publisher were amazing. It was the era of artist-as-editor, and the books of Joe Orlando, Joe Kubert, Jack Kirby, Mike Sekowsky, and Dick Giordano were exploding with vitality. In the beginning, when Carmine went with his gut, the artistic results from his hired hands were rife with imagination and potential. Later, when relentless pressure from higher ups in the new corporate culture weighed on him, decisions could have a whiff of desperation and second-guessing. Carmine’s executive career at the House of Superman, brutally cut short by the bean counters, was over by ’76, thus too my personal golden age of comics.

Nick Cardy never went the businessman route, but he did stray outside comics into the lucrative world of advertising illustration and movie posters, but (iconic Star Wars poster aside), we recall best that lovely man for his resplendent accomplishments in funnybooks. Nick was one of those gents whose work perfectly matched the personality. Whether ”Congo Bill,” Aquaman, Teen Titans, or The Brave and the Bold, the artist’s characters exuded an lovely mix of kindness and sensuality, smooth and wispy.

And the man, too, experienced an epiphany at a later stage in life — in Nick’s case the late ’60s/early ’70s — and his sense of design, pure drawing ability, and courage to experiment produced sublime results. Such was his talent to tell an entire story in the confines of a single illustration that he was tapped by publisher Infantino to be the cover artist at ’70s DC. Then the moneyed life of an in-demand, professional illustrator came calling and Nick exited to a new career.

Suffice to say Nick Cardy was a gentle and caring uncle of sorts in my life, a humble, befuddled, chuckling personification of gratitude. I kid you not: His eyes really did sparkle, just like those of the graceful characters he drew and, as the creator grew older and more appreciative for the attention of fans, the faces in his art became more cherubic and shiny, friendlier, and softer.

When Nick would call, he always made a point to ask about my wife and family. In truth, he was considerate and giving, not one to resurrect ancient grievances and gripe about the past. He seemed to live in the Now of life, and was, to me, the essence of nice. Not the gratuitous “have a nice day” nice we encounter daily, but the genuine variety, the real McCoy, the “I’ll never forget this sweet guy” nice.

Both Carmine Infantino and Nick Cardy reached near-perfection in their art at one time or another, each in their own way, each in their own time, and we are the better for it. Their respective work was both aspirational and inspirational and we can recognize, with a deep satisfaction, that these two New York City boys done good. #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Infantino portrait ©2014 Thom Haller Buchanan. Cardy self-portrait ©2014 the estate of Nick Cardy.

by Jon B. Cooke CBC Editor

The Brain TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. ©2014 Fred Hembeck. Coloring by Tom Ziuko.

hembeck’s dateline: @11?*

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

15

aushenkerology Mort Todd’s Monster & Metal Comics

Ditko, Me & Marvel

The cartoonist on Sturdy Steve and those Atlas reprints (and rock’n’roll funny books!)

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Though Sturdy Steve’s appearance in the Marvel comics of the ’90s wasn’t unusual, the playful, self-effacing pin-ups are a throwback to better times at the House of Ideas, back in the early to mid-’60s, before the artist/plotter’s rift with Stan “The Man” Lee that led to his quitting Spider-Man and “Doctor Strange.” Who would bring the artist into such a comfort zone? Could it have been… a Todd called Mort???

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: No, Doc. V., that’s not a ’50s Atlas comic you’re missing! Rather it’s the Zeus Comics title you’ve never seen!

Oh, go to http://morttodd.com/ zeus.html and learn all about a line of delightful “lost” funnybooks!

That Mort Todd, he’s a card, he is!

Below: Mort’s the one sporting the Mr. A T-shirt; cartoonist Rick Parker is pointing the finger, in this photo of the chums courtesy of Jen Vaughn who took the shot in 2011.

Mort Todd: was he monster? Menace? Or both?!?

Such was the type of hyperbole found in the monster and horror comics Steve Ditko produced back in the 1950s and early ’60s published by the pre-Marvel imprint, Atlas Comics.

And the answer to those questions? Check number three: Definitely both! And we’re all the richer for having the monstrously talented cartoonist and creative menace of an editor!

Back in the late ’80s–early ’90s, writer-artist Mort Todd (still an extraordinarily prolific and ambitious creator today) occupied a unique position at Marvel. As a free-floating editor, Todd was given an office on an under-utilized floor inside the building, where he was put under contract to deliver a slate of products that would give the industry’s leading comic-book company some hip cache.

So what did the ardent Ditko fan do? He indulges in his greatest passions, of course: horror comics and hardcore music… employing alternative comics chums along the way.

Todd was no stranger to the world of wacky, independent cartoonists. Previous to this House of Ideas gig, he had inked the Dan Clowes Lloyd Llwellyn comics and, as editor of Cracked, the most formidable and respected of the MAD knock-offs, he hired Clowes to create some comics for the humor mag.

Now at Marvel, Todd was given access to the publisher’s vaults of Atlas-era stories, so he creates a handful of titles that would serve as vehicles to reprint treasured pre-Marvel works by Ditko, Bill Everett, Basil Wolverton, Russ Heath, Joe Kubert, and various other masters who had, before the arrival of Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, spread their horror spore like an insidious virus throughout the company’s publications. To bring this all full-circle, Todd capitalizes on a professional friendship with Ditko — established when Todd ran Cracked — by assigning the Spider-Man co-creator to contribute to the reprint books Monster Menace, Curse of the Weird, and Book of the Dead. (Todd also conjured up the Ross Andru/ Don Heck extravaganza Silver Surfer vs. Dracula during this time.) The books would be short-lived, and beyond the expert selection of topnotch stories reprinted, of note was the new material by the ever-reclusive and always elusive Steve Ditko, one of the founders of the Marvel Age of Comics.

Interestingly, a Monster Menace peripheral item includes a new Ditko pin-up featuring a frightening,

font-festering creature leaping off of Ditko’s drawn page toward the artist himself. Meanwhile, in an editorial, Todd writes, “I asked Ditko if he’d like to comment on his early monster work… I’m expecting something soon…” Ditko responds with an illustration: We see an airborne bottle of ink, thrown by the out-of-frame artist, pinging around with a Ditko-drawn chem trail, bouncing off of Todd’s ajar office door.

Weird Menace ©2014 Mort Todd.

by Michael Aushenker CBC Associate Editor

When Todd joins Marvel in the early ’90s, he capitalizes on a professional relationship with Ditko, a friendship that has already been established back when Todd was editor of Cracked (MAD’s arch-rival in the humor magazine field) — by assigning the Spider-Man co-creator to contribute nifty new cover art and peppy pin-ups to Todd’s line of the aforementioned reprint books. #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Back in his Cracked days, Todd had not only worked closely with Ditko, but also with John Severin, as well as Gray Morrow, among other legends.

Todd shares, “Steve was pleased with our collaboration and I always thought Ditko/Severin had the potential to reach the heights of the best Ditko/[Wallace] Wood stories.

A few years later, I used Severin inks as an added incentive for Steve to draw an Atlas Shrugged graphic novel series to no avail. As Ditko appreciated Severin’s eye for detail, I can only imagine how intense Dagny Taggart’s locomotives would have been as drawn by Ditko and Severin.”

(In the eyes of the mainstream world, Ayn Rand’s towering, twin literary achievements remain Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Can you imagine Rand philosophical subscriber and artist extraordinaire Steve Ditko illustrating the exploits of Howard Roark, female counterpart Dominique, and weakling architect rival Peter Keating in a comic-book adaptation of the latter? Unfortunately that never came to pass — however, Ditko did get a green light to adapt Atlas Shrugged… but more on that in a bit.)

Full of vitality and verve, the young and brazen Todd had no hesitation about dialing up industry legends to pitch work.

“I would be like, ‘Where’s John Byrne?’ No one in Marvel would think of calling John Byrne,” Todd said. And, natch, Todd thought of ol’ compadre Ditko.

Back at Cracked in the late ’80s, “I remember the ‘behind-the- scenes’ of Steve’s story in [Marvel’s Not Brand Echh-esque title] What The--?! #1, as I talked with Ditko and John Severin several times a week during that period,” Todd said. “Steve’s studio was not far from our Cracked offices so he would often drop in and chew the fat. He enjoyed checking out original art as it came in (physically in them pre-digital days).”

“In particular,” continues Todd, “he was fascinated by Severin’s work and run his finger over the detail as if he absorbed it. I knew he would get a kick out of John inking his work and am ashamed I didn’t [suggest] it first. Steve liked doing humor pieces for Cracked and showed me his pencils Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

to the What If—?! story. I might have learned about Severin inking the story before Steve did, and was curious about how John felt doing it. To paraphrase him, Severin said he didn’t know what the hell was going on in the story; he just inked it and it was another job.”

By the time Todd landed at Marvel, “Ditko was not working for so long he needed to do a page rate.

All these old artists beg for work — some were legally blind and the only way to make money is to keep working.”

Todd’s attitude regarding guys such as Ditko, Severin, and Gene Colan was, “Give them a stipend where Marvel would put out their work and they would make their own money.”

To be sure, Todd found himself with a cushy set-up at Marvel. “I was on a separate floor than everybody,” Todd explained. “I told them: I need cable TV [and] a sound system. My office was a party room.

We ignored the smoking laws. For the first half-year, we held editorial meetings and retreats to figure out where new lines of Annuals should go.”

Todd’s monster/horror reprint titles, in fact, happened as a by-product of Marvel Music, his oversight of the corporation’s rock-and-rap line that he was brought in to edit.

For Marvel Music, Todd began negotiating with bands and making contracts. “To [Marvel], I was wasting time in traveling,” Todd said. “It took a while to launch, so they wanted me to do some reprint books, and I said sure.” He received carte blanche from editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco.

“I could’ve done any kind of reprints I wanted,” Todd said. “I wanted to do horror. They said, ‘That’s an awful lot of work,’ and I was like, ‘Maybeeeeee.’ I was going through the archives.”

Todd continued, “They had stats in storage a few blocks away. The building was on 25th and Sixth Avenue… right next to my favorite strip club where we’d have three- or four-hour lunches. I found incredible stuff. I found stuff that had never been reprinted.

Wally Wood stuff, some zombie stories.

It was every geek’s dream.

They had stuff from the ’50s that no one can give a sh*t about…Ka-Zar, jungle, sci-fi, romance, tons of humor comics I read about but had never seen. Teen comics: Tessie the Typist,

Above: Floyd Hughes’ cover for the final issue of Monster Menace, #4 [Mar. ’94], featured the editor himself, Mort Todd! (Note the cute addition of the early ’60s “MC” logo for Marvel Comics!) Previous page inset: Courtesy of Heritage, a Steve Ditko Atlas splash page.

Inset left: Looking closely at this Monster Menace pin-up by Steve Ditko, the largest letters along the creature’s back pretty much spell out “Lee Kirby Marvel Monsters”!

Below: A couple of new Steve Ditko covers drawn for editor Mort Todd’s cool reprint titles from the ’90s.

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TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Top & inset right: Mort Todd’s attention to detail delighted Ye Ed’s geeky, freaky heart, when after Monster Menace #1 and #2 delivered Stan Lee and Jack Kirby remembrances about the Atlas monster work, #3 featured Steve Ditko’s illustrated reply to Mort’s request for an anecdote.

tons of Archie knock-offs drawn by Dan DeCarlo before he went to Archie.”

“All those editors at Marvel were drips,” Todd said, and the new editor desired to be more than the same-old, same-old, yearning to go beyond Marvel’s mainstream fodder. “Let’s start a new paradigm because all my sh*t was outside of super-heroes,” said Todd, who palled around with Dan Clowes and Peter Bagge, and whose interests ranged from the Hernandez Bros. to Tessie’s homegirl Millie the Model.

Thus, Todd helmed reprints of those monster and horror stories that guys like Ditko, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby had buttered their bread on. Artists such as Kyle Baker, Rick Altergott, and Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi would contribute new material with covers and pin-ups.

Via these titles, Todd delighted in resurrecting the B-comic monster/horror vibe. “Those books had the stupidest cover copy,” Todd recalled. “I sat down with Mark Gruenwald — I’m sorry, we had to do it — we both sat down and came up with some of the corny Stan Lee lines.”

(Todd enjoyed working with

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#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Above & inset right: Steve Ditko’s great “Atlas reunion” cover for Monster Menace #2 [Jan. 1994], plus Mort Todd’s delightful key to all those creatures putting on their “beast face”! Note the dreaded #22 entry… scary!

©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Maybe the only actual Mort Todd cartooning in his Marvel reprint books is this final blurb from Curse of the Weird #4 [Mar. ’94].

the late Gruenwald. “Not only was he walking encyclopedia,” Todd remembers, “but he was just a good person.”)

The monster titles came and went, and so followed his work on the music imprint, Marvel Music, an entirely different bag. In 1993, Todd embarked on comics starring the Rolling Stones, KRS-1, Rob Zombie, even Elvis Presley and Bob Marley.

Of course, given Marvel’s old-school history with KISS (remember those Steve Gerber-scripted Marvel Super Specials and the group’s cameo in Howard the Duck?), Todd resumed a Marvel team-up with the flamboyant metal band. Circularly, the House of Ideas was the prime influence on the band members’ wacked-out personas, as lead singer Gene Simmons grew up devouring Marvel’s line as full-fledged fanboy.

“Gene Simmons made them hire me to do the new KISS comics and Gene said the only one who could do this is Mort,” Todd said, “at 75 bucks an hour.” On the Kiss Nation comic, Simmons “chose a cheap artist,” Todd said. “I plotted the story with Gene. He wanted the X-Men. His son, Nick, was 13. I think he gave Gene some ideas.”

Todd helped realize Simmons’ vision for a new series. “He had a tight contract,” Todd recalled. “Marvel either had to put it out or basically be sued.”

With Marvel Music, Todd tried to get his company to push the envelope on the distribution reach. “You cannot have direct sales only with these comics in comic shops and that’s the only place they show them,” Todd said. “We were like, ‘Screw comics shops! They’re not gonna support it!’ There are record stores and bookstores the fans got to, [they don’t frequent]

©2014 Steve Ditko.

KISS TM & ©2014 KISS, Inc.

comics shops.” (Todd confesses, “I’ve kind of always hated the direct market because it ghettoized comics to an extreme minority,” Todd said. “It does not attract real people.”) KISS Nation sold solidly at the 300,000 mark.

Todd also edited three issues of a comic based on Alice Cooper (written by Neil Gaiman!), who was a gentleman to work with, Todd says, and Skid Row, whose front-man, Sebastian Bach, according to the editor, is a super-cool comics connoisseur and owns tons of comic book classics.

What about the AC/DC comic? “That never came out ,” admits Todd. “But that comic covers the title of every song.”

He will never forget spending two weeks on the road with the Thunder From Down Under brainstorming the comic.

“Every band had at least one token comic fan,” Todd said. In the case of the legendary “Back in Black” gang of Aussies, it was two: brothers Malcolm and Angus Young. Todd added, “They loved The Phantom. Australia was the only country where the movie made any money.”

Todd got Colan, Severin, Altergott, and Baker working on these babies. He went as far as reaching the estates of Presley and Marley, but was told by Marvel, “We can’t sell Elvis Presley or Bob Marley,” Todd remembered, whose reaction was “You can sell an Elvis tampon and make millions, but you can’t make an Elvis comic?” But Todd did snag the Rastafarian legend license from the Marley estate.

Colan drew the Bob Marley title. Two out of three completed issues were published. “We had a Jamaican painter do the finishes. It was gorgeous,” Todd said. “A good thing [today] about those music comics is that Marvel doesn’t own them. They were licensed.” Good for Todd, that is, as he is currently in discussions with the Marley estate about a trade paperback collection.

Getting back to his connection with Ditko, Todd had a blast working with the comic book master. “He was getting gigs,” Todd said. “Phantom 2090. Steve and I had worked before so we had a different relationship. He wasn’t dealing with a Marvel editor. He was dealing with me. He’d come out at the Cracked office and we’d hang out for hours. People made fun of the way he dressed.”

The biggest misconception, Todd said, is that Ditko is difficult to work with. “He has his standards,” Todd said. “Not a high standard, a standard. Everyone is a f*cking hack.”

“I asked Steve, ‘What do you want to draw?’ I think Steve liked how motivated I was as an editor.” Back at Cracked, Todd had egged Ditko on to play to some of his old-school strengths outside of the super-hero genre.

“He worked on Cracked, Monsters Attack…” Todd recalled. “He would run with that! He would complete whole issues. For him, it was a lot more fun with the black-&-white work. He was able to do washes and tones.”

Todd confirmed that Ditko liked to work twice-up — after 1968, he remained drawing twice-up, though the industry went to one-a-half times size. “The bigger you draw, the more detail,” Todd said. “At Marvel, they give you the pre-lined paper. For Cracked, he ruled his own pages, so he’d do twice-up.”

Previously at Cracked, Ditko enjoyed contributing to Todd’s humor publication. “He was having fun,” Todd said.

“Really great brush work compared to a lot of stuff he was doing for Marvel. He could put some fun into it.”

Todd also had a good time editing those reprints, especially Curse of the Weird. “Some of it was Ditko, Wolverton, Heath, Kubert, Wally Wood, some other weird stuff. That was my favorite book. I could find sh*t that was pre-Code that supposedly didn’t have the code but had the code on it.”

Todd relished the new art Ditko contributed to the reprints. “The second issue [cover] of Monster Menace is really good,” Todd said. “Dozens of monster heads of monsters that he drew 40 years after the fact.”

Many people in the industry hoped to befriend the creator legend, but results were mixed. “I had a lot of friends, Dan Clowes included, go to his studio and ask him, ‘Are you Steve Ditko?’ Slam!” Yet Todd and Ditko enjoyed a fluid, Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

professional relationship. “Steve is a fan,” Todd simply said. “He’s a comics fan. When we got art from people, he’d check it out.”

In sharing some of his experiences, Todd refuted any notion that Ditko was antisocial or difficult to work with.

During their years working together, Todd and Ditko discussed many potential projects, one a TV show based on Ditko’s most legendary solo creation.

As “El Muerto, Aztec Zombie” creator Javier Hernandez explained, “Mort Todd once told me that when he tried to sell Mr. A to television. He suggested to Ditko that some cool, Bondian jazz music would be a perfect soundtrack. Ditko scoffed at the idea… Ditko suggested classical music for Mr. A!” Regarding the Mr. A pitch, which happened around 1991, Todd said, “We had plenty of meetings of that, for sure. And a video presentation had wild music, crazy color, all kinds of things. It originally had Peter Gunn-type music. Steve said, ‘No jazz. Jazz was discordant.’”

“I’d written a script based on that story with [Mr. A character] Angel,” Todd confessed. “God, did I get some evil replies [about] it. All these bleeding hearts were tripping.”

So, ultimately the project never materialized. “It would’ve been intense,” Todd said, adding he still has a T-shirt they created at the time to help juice the concept.

And as for that Atlas Shrugged comic book? One morning Todd realized he was sitting on the idea of a lifetime: parlaying his close working relationship with the master artist into an adaptation of one of the greatest works of the philosopher Ditko had long idolized. “My former girlfriend’s mother was a literary agent with a connection at the Ayn Rand estate,” Todd explained. “She got me in touch with the guy running the Leonard Rand Institute. I started a conversation with him. He was well aware of Ditko’s objectivism.”

Todd had a three-issue adaptation in mind and the Rand Institute associate approved. “He said, ‘If Ditko draws it, you can do whatever you want,” Todd recalled. “The end [of Atlas Shrugged] is like Doc Savage novel. It would have made a great comic.

Atlas Shrugged, after all, was the second best-selling book after the Bible.”

“Steve wanted to work with John Severin,” Todd said, “which would’ve been extra-great for Steve.

Can you imagine those railroads? Severin would’ve put every bolt on it.”

However, Ditko had too much respect and passion for Ayn Rand’s classic novel to go near it. “One thing he brought up before was reading versus the movie of the same book,” Todd recalled. “He didn’t want to be responsible for how the characters would look… He didn’t want to do it [as the book leaves it up to the reader’s imagination]. I probably could’ve talked Severin into doing it alone.”

However, Todd realized that Severin going solo on Atlas Shrugged would not have had the same impact as Ditko, an ardent objectivist and passionate disciple of Randian philosophy, and Todd let the project idea dissipate.

He believes that had Ditko tackled Atlas Shrugged, “It would have been evergreen. It would still be selling.”

Above: From the original art, Steve Ditko’s back cover of the fanzine Graphic Illusions #1 [Summer, 1971], featuring the creator’s objectivist hero, the amazing Mr. A. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Above: Kiss Nation was edited by Mort Todd and was published by Marvel Music in 1997. Here’s the cover of the first issue.

Special thanks to Rob Imes, editor of the fantastic fanzine completely devoted to the study of Sturdy Steve, Ditkomania, which originally ran this piece in a somewhat altered form. Visit http://unitedfanzineorganization. weebly.com/ditkomania.html.

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irving on the inside

Irrefutable

Mark Waid & the Future of Comics

The conclusion of Christopher Irving’s interview with the celebrated scribe

by CHRISTOPHER IRVING CBC Contributing Editor

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#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

[Previously, Mark Waid described his early years in the comics industry, as an in-house staffer and subsequent freelance writer, as well as early success as the scripter of memorable runs on Flash and Captain America, as well as collaboration with Alex Ross on Kingdom Come. Last time, it was the early part of the last decade, as Marvel was going through some major leadership changes and the new regime looked to writer Waid to invigorate their flagship title, Fantastic Four.] “[Marvel] Editor Tom Brevoort called when he found out I was leaving Cross Gen, pitched it to me, and I wasn’t interested,” Mark Waid revealed in 2002. “I was aware of The Fantastic Four growing up, and had read it throughout the ’70s, but I was never a huge fan of the material. I had respect for the characters, and for

Photo ©2014 Seth Kushner.

Portrait by Seth Kushner

what [FF creators and longtime respective writer and artist] Stan [Lee] and Jack [Kirby] had done, but I had never really connected to it.

“My interest in the assignment wasn’t piqued until two things happened: One was that Tom mentioned that Ringo [artist Mike Wieringo] would be drawing it, and that immediately got my interest; two was that Tom and I started talking about Reed Richards, who was a character with a vast, untapped potential to be likable, but no one under the age of 40 thought was even remotely interesting. That right there seemed to be a worthwhile challenge to me. We started talking about him, then Sue and Johnny and, before I realized it, I was wrapped up in the characters and had more to say about them than I ever dreamed.”

Fantastic Four reunited him with the late, great Mike “Ringo” Wieringo, and the results were comics magic. Publisher Bill Jemas, however, had other ideas towards what the book should be, and Waid found himself thrown off the title. Wieringo, out of loyalty to his friend, jumped ship as well.

The backlash against losing the Waid and Ringo team was great enough, however, that they were back on the title within issues. Something potentially big was in Mark Waid’s future, and was both a dream come true, and the biggest disappointment of his career.

“I know that, say, when it comes to Superman, it’s hard for me to find a unique perspective because Superman’s been in my thoughts pretty much every day since I was six,” Waid had said around 2002. Just as things had changed at Marvel, so had they at DC Comics. Dan Didio came in as Vice President of Editorial, and things were on the cusp of changing. One of Dan’s goals was to put a new polish on their oldest character, and the result was Superman: Birthright, a reboot of the Man of Steel’s origin by Waid and artist Leinil Francis Yu. “I think Birthright is the best long-form thing I’ve ever written in my entire life. I’m as proud of Birthright as I am of anything I’ve ever done. There was one creative misstep, and there were a bunch of marketing missteps, and a bunch of timing things that went kerflooey,” Mark observes.

“First off, when we started the process, it was sold to me

by Dan Didio and DC as ‘We really want this to be The Man of Steel for the 21st century, and the definitive new origin.’

We unfortunately got lost in a morass of legal stuff (this was when the Siegel and DC lawsuit was going, and there were questions over what characters and elements we could use) that was creatively stifling, but I managed to navigate that pretty well.”

At the same time as Birthright’s release, DC also put writer Brian Azzarello and artist Jim Lee on the main Superman comic for a year—a move that stole the marketing muscle

Inset right: Last issue, Ye ed was late in asking Mark Waid, who was on the road for a good chunk of the summer, for personal memorabilia, but our interview pulled through with flying colors. Here is “William” Mark Waid’s DC Comics employee identification card.

Below: Also courtesy of Mark, a photo of the writer (at right) and the late artist Mike Wieringo.

TM & © DC Comics.

TM & © DC Comics.

Irredeemable TM & ©2014 Boom Entertainment, Inc..

I took a chance by adopting a different approach to the book than my first run, and that wasn’t what fans wanted or were expecting. I blew it. I got out as soon as I could, but that was pretty much the end of my relationship with DC.” He was allowed to continue with DC’s team-up book, The Brave and the Bold, which he’d launched with George Pérez, “but when J. Michael Stracynzski asked for it, Didio sent me packing — not counting Fantastic Four, the only time I’ve ever been fired off an assignment, knock on wood.”

Waid was done with DC Comics, the publisher he grew up with as an editor and writer. Two years later, DC Comics was rebranded and repositioned by its parent company Time-Warner AOL into DC Entertainment.

Likewise, Marvel Comics was bought by media giant Disney in 2009. Mainstream comics characters had attained steady cinematic and media success, leaving many creators to fear it had come at the cost of any creative independence.

“Look, it is what it is and does what it wants to do,” Waid says of DC. “They are now a company that targets a very specific demographic, which is guys that go to comic stores and are hungry for angry, violent entertainment. That’s a viable business strategy. They’re doing well enough by it, and I’m happy for them in that sense, but when I say it’s not the company that I know, I don’t mean that in a melancholy or bitter or judgmental way. It’s a simple fact. They’re not obliged to make comics for me, and they don’t.”

from Birthright. It didn’t help that Waid also went through two different editors in the course of the 12-issue series.

Waid’s take on Superman took over from John Byrne’s 1986 origin, The Man of Steel, which had eliminated several older aspects of Superman lore. Birthright brought Lex Luthor back to Smallville in his teenage years, and restored the villain’s position as a mad scientist rather than just a corporate tycoon. Yu’s dynamic art gave Birthright the modern edge needed to make it — and Superman — relevant.

“If you read this book and didn’t like the story, then you absolutely have the right to your opinion and I’m not trying to make excuses for the fact that it wasn’t embraced at the time. It was certainly one of the most crushing moments of my life. I finally got to play Carnegie Hall and nobody came,” Mark laments. The upside to it is that, since then, it continues to be one of DC’s best-selling paperbacks, along with Kingdom Come and The Return of Barry Allen, by now in its eighth printing.

“Most happily, at every convention I go to, there are dozens of people who bring up Superman: Birthright. And the conversation is always this: “‘I really loved that Superman story.’

“I ask, ‘Have you ever read Superman before?’ “‘No, I didn’t think I liked him.’ “‘Well, then, I’m flattered. All I wanted to do was show you why I love him.’ Fans who loved John Byrne’s Superman or Superman in the ’90s were repelled by Birthright, and very vocally so. That’s okay. I’d much rather talk to people who had never read or liked Superman, because they were the ones I was trying to reach.”

Despite the frustrations that came with Superman: Birthright, Waid returned to DC Comics in 2007 to once more take the writing reins of a relaunched Flash that heralded the return of his beloved Wally West — who was now the father of speedster twins.

“It was a creative botch from the start, and that’s on me.

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Back in 2007, Mark Waid became editor in chief of fledgling comics publisher BOOM! Studios. Waid’s creative contribution was Irredeemable, a super-hero comic that shows what happens when Superman really does turn bad — rampages across the world — and stays bad. Using a character named the Plutonian as a stand-in for the Man of Steel, it was a gritty take on the 1960s era Superman comics edited

by Mort Weisinger, and a far cry from the full-on optimism of his earlier writing.

“To be brutally honest, all of Irredeemable springs from the way the Weisinger material laid eggs in my psyche as a kid that grew into hot-button issues for me as an adult. In retrospect, it should’ve been called Mort Weisinger’s Irredeemable. It’s autobiographical, scarily autobiographical, in ways I’m not totally comfortable talking about; all you need to know is that everything emotionally broken in me as a person I learned from Mort Weisinger.”

Generally considered the most unlikeable editor in the history of comics, Mort Weisinger was reportedly a tyrant to work for. Known for yelling at his writers and artists (including a teenage Jim Shooter at the start of his career), there can be no doubt of his editorial genius. Under his tenure, the Superman stories were absurdest pieces of human drama: Superman or his friends are transformed into monsters and shunned by society; Superman rockets to Krypton through a time warp, only to witness its destruction from afar; Superboy inadvertently poisons his surrogate brother Mon-El with lead and has to send him to the Phantom Zone; Lex Luthor captures Superboy in the past, but only to keep him from saving Abraham

Above: Cover detail from Irredeemable Special #1 [Apr. 2010].

Art by Paul Azaceta and colors by Andrew Dalhouse. Inset left: The writer calls the 12-issue mini-series Superman: Birthright, “[T] he best long-form thing I’ve ever written in my entire life. I’m as proud of Birthright as I am of anything I’ve ever done.” First issue [Sept. 2003] cover art by penciler Leinil Francis Yu and inker Gerry Alanguilan. Colors possibly by Dave McCaig. Below: Page detail (reminiscent of Superman meeting Lois Lane in the first Christopher Reeve movie) from Superman: Birthright. Art by Yu and Alanfguilan.

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TM & ©2014 Thrillbent.

rial in different genres,” Waid reveals. “That was the operating plan going in but, unfortunately, the reality of the marketplace for the next three years was that all publishers on our tier were having a hard time moving something that wasn’t a super-hero or licensed book in the current marketplace. A couple years in, I looked over our solicitations and realized that all we were publishing were licensed books, Irredeemable, and [the Irredeemable spin-off] Incorruptible. That felt like defeat to me. Dispiriting.

“Then I started looking at the ledgers and talking to other publishers — Nicky Barrucci at Dynamite, Dan Vado at Slave Labor. As editor-in-chief, I hadn’t been looking at the printing costs for all of these books; that wasn’t really my department and I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to the non-creative end. So it was eye-opening to talk around and find out that print costs had become so expensive that, for a 32-page comic, you could be paying as much as 90¢ or $1.00 a copy just to print the thing. For a $3.99 book, you’d be lucky to sell it to the distributor for $1.60, meaning almost two-thirds of your cost went just into the printing of it, forget overhead and creative costs. That seemed absurd. So I began thinking long and hard about a future for comics that didn’t involve printing costs.” Waid’s ideas percolated in his head at nights and on weekends and would soon bear fruit.

Meanwhile, after stints on The Amazing Spider-Man, Mark Waid took on writing a relaunched Daredevil for Marvel in 2011. Having experienced stellar noir runs by Brian Michael Bendis and Ed Brubaker, the title had arguably fallen into a creative rut. Waid’s take on the Man Without Fear was to give it a pre-Frank Miller spin.

“I don’t bring the grim easily because I don’t want to live in a grim world,” Mark points out. “I also like having my characters stand out from the pack and run against the grain. We had a lot of success with The Flash because we ran against the trends of the era in that it wasn’t dark and grim and ugly and broken.

“With Daredevil, I looked at the world he’d lived in at that point, and it was intimidating. I can’t think of another comics super-hero in the past 20 years who has had that long and successful a run of adventures, with a Murderer’s Row of writers from Kevin Smith to Bendis to Brubaker. All

TM & ©2014 Boom Entertainment, Inc.

Lincoln from John Wilkes Booth… They were absurd yet gifted with an emotional core that (because of their absurdity) presents itself when least expected.

“My girlfriend and I were recently talking about Mort’s books, and lessons learned. We always talk about the good stuff: ’Superman was selfless, and good, and virtuous and noble.’ All of that’s true, but you know what else you learn from Mort Weisinger comics?

“You learn it’s okay to play pranks and tricks on your friends; it’s okay to keep secrets; it’s okay to keep big secrets; it’s perfectly rational to believe that people love you not for who you are but what you can do; it’s okay to decide for other people how you want them to go through life; it’s okay to be manipulative. What you also learn from Weisinger comics — like Mort himself — is that being fat and being bald are the two cruelest fates that can befall you.

“But the ultimate subconscious take-away is this: the worst thing that can happen to you in Mort’s world is to become unloved. During that era, when Marvel Comics covers showed heroes in deadly duels with villains, how many DC covers showed Superman or Superboy being run out of town, having tomatoes thrown at them? A lot.”

“It was such a recurring motif in Mort’s stuff: the ultimate horror of being forgotten, unloved, unappreciated, and basically having everybody’s affection and respect for you stripped away.”

He says it with an understanding that could only come from experience: If it wasn’t one of the big two, at some point in Waid’s career, it may have been the vitriolic world of online comics fandom. One could even say that the Plutonian was Waid, having dedicated years of his life to comics, and finally unleashing his frustrations and using his powers for evil.

Mark Waid’s promotion to chief creative officer in 2010 proved just as eye-opening an experience as his time as a freelance writer and spurred him on to the next phase of his career.

“When I started at BOOM! the philosophy was that we’d produce roughly 60% original material and 40% licensed works — the licensed stuff paying our bills and the new material being a way to build up our library with mate-

TM & © DC Comics.

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TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

the way through, DD writers and artists were doing great stuff, but it was so unbelievably bleak; Matt Murdock never seemed to catch a break, he never seemed to win so much as endure. That was not a world that played to my interests or strengths.

“I didn’t want to do what other guys had done. From my perspective, my career has been about bringing characters back to center, and going off in a direction no one has gone in before, or no one’s explored for a while. It’s hardly a guaranteed recipe for success; I took that approach in the ‘90s with The Flash and Captain America and people liked it; going into the 2000s I did it with Superman: Birthright, and fans didn’t like it; in 2003, I did it with Legion of Super-Heroes and people wanted my head on a platter and were enraged because I wasn’t faithful enough to their vision. Thank God it paid off, and big, with Daredevil.”

With art by Paolo Rivera, alternating with Marcos Martin and then succeeded by artist Chris Samnee, the new Daredevil could have been Waid’s moment of reinvention, but it was just a prelude to it.

The future wasn’t printed on slick paper for Mark Waid, but displayed on computer screens. In 2012, he and writer John Rogers launched Thrillbent, their online portal for digital comics. What separates Thrillbent from other digital comics pages is that the storytelling is designed specifically for digital, and approaches it in terms of limited animation and layering word balloons and caption boxes. Launching with Waid and Peter Krause’s Insufferable, Thrillbent’s aim has been to recognize the digital landscape as anything but onscreen print.

“What I’ve learned with digital storytelling is that you have the let the art breathe, bump the text size up a little bit, you have to be careful not to overcrowd the pages with verbiage and panels,” Waid points out. “You also have to let the artist, even more than you normally do, really have his head when it comes to storytelling. I always make it abundantly clear to my print collaborators that ‘If you have a better way to tell the story, then have at it. I don’t know what you do and I trust your storytelling chops or I wouldn’t be in this job with you.’

“With digital, even more so, I have to sort of surrender the typical page by page and panel breakdown by artist, and I’m smart to, because we’re still inventing the language of digital comics.”

An impetus for Waid was his exposure to comics’ failing distribution system when chief creative officer at BOOM! With a single distributor—Diamond—holding a virtual monopoly over the industry and forced to keep cover prices high to accommodate for higher overhead in a shrinking market. With a higher threshold required for creators to self-publish through Diamond, breaking out, as an independent creator in today’s tumultuous marketplace is possibly harder than ever.

“I’m not trying to prove to the distributors or to its customers that the distribution system is broken,” Waid defends. “I’m trying to prove to the 20-year-old up-and-coming webcomics guys or readers who are dying to break into comics and do what they love that there’s a way around the standard print model. The barrier of entry is so high because, right now, if you’re not selling a super-hero comic to the roughly 1,800 stores in the U.S., it’s impossible to get noticed.

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

“I’m sending the message that ‘look, here’s a new system.’ I have no umbrage against the old system; I will still go to comic shops and buy comics, and I’ll still go to my local comic shop and hang out. But of those stores, how many can afford to be a full-service stop?

They have to traffic only in the most popular material because they’re mom and pop stores in sparsely populated areas who are doing their best to service their local community, but are working on a threadbare profit margin and can’t afford to experiment by over-ordering or carrying shelf copies of the new Image premiere book because they can’t afford to take that gamble. It’s a huge amount of them.”

With single issue comics only being sold in comic book stores, digital distribution has stood the razor’s edge of either saving the industry by giving comics a new market penetration—or potentially damn it by undercutting the print sales.

“Right now, major publishers price digital releases the same as print releases because we have a system of brick

Above and inset left: Mark Waid’s recent stint on Daredevil is highly regarded by readers and critics alike, as the scribe returned a sense of super-hero effervescence and joie de vivre to the title. Above is Paolo Rivera’s cover art for Daredevil #8 [Mar. 2012] and a detail, inset left, of Rivera’s Daredevil #1 [Sept. 2011] cover.

Previous page top: In the center are the 2010 Comic-Con International: San Diego cover variants for the Mark Waid-scripted Irredeemable #15 and Incorruptible #8, art by Garry Brown, featuring Max Damage and The Plutonian.

Flanking them are the covers of [left] Irredeemable #29 [Sept.

2011], by Trevor Hairsine, and Incorruptible #29 [Apr. ’12], art

by Matteo Scalera. Previous page bottom: Banner ad for Mark Waid’s web-only digital super-hero comic series, Insufferable, available through the writer’s Thrillbent website. Visit www.thrillbent.com.

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TM & ©2014 Thrillbent.

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and mortar stores that will lose their minds the moment that Justice League in print costs $3.99 but the digital costs 99¢,” Mark observes. “I’m not sure I disagree with them. I understand their point of view that they don’t want to be undercut by the publishers who are supplying them. Again, I cannot stress this enough — all of these statements are prefaced by ‘I could be wrong’ — but, from my perspective, the direct sales market as it exists right now is hardly a growth market.

Just because it’s in a stable condition right now doesn’t mean that it’s thriving. Let’s say that starting tomorrow, 15% of its customers went from print to digital; that would probably be enough of a financial hit to collapse about half the comic stores.

“Once that starts happening, those dominoes topple fast and once you get to the point where Diamond is hurting? If Diamond goes out of business, the whole industry collapses in an afternoon. Conversely, digital is proven growth for all comics publishers.”

After a year, Thrillbent now carries eight strips (including the second volume of Insufferable) in its mission to “level the playing field” between print and digital, ranging from science-fiction to super-hero to horror. Not only can the strips be downloaded for free, but there is also an option to embed them on social media pages. Thrillbent hasn’t quite hit the profitable mark for Waid and company, he admits, but they’re on the way to it.

Photos ©2014 Mark Waid. Captain America TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. Superman TM & © DC Comics.

Top: Creative participants of the acclaimed DC super-hero graphic novel Kingdom Come: from left, artist/co-plotter Alex Ross, his father, Norman Ross (a model from the graphic novel), and writer/ co-plotter Mark Waid. Photo from 1997 and courtesy of Mark, as are all other photos on this page.

Above: Mark Waid [left], the Sentinel of Liberty, and artist Ron Garney, circa 1998. Inset right: Young Mark Waid flying and breaking chains… all in a day’s work… at the 50th anniversary of Superman shindig, 1988, held at the Puck Building in New York City. Below: Mark Waid’s current project is his Thrillbent website featuring digital comics. Visit www.thrillbent.com.

“I want to keep doing this kind of material, pushing forward what we can do in a digital space. I think the big leap that we’ve made technologically is doing the embeddable comics. We get sometimes as much as a quarter of our traffic through embeds. The click-through rate of people coming to our site from embeddable comics is about ten times the rate of a banner ad. We’ve got something.

“I don’t quite know what the vision is beyond expanding the platform and adding more kid- and family-friendly material and broadening the genres. I wish I had a game plan for the long term, but right now it’s just ‘I want to keep redefining the medium.’”

Insufferable follows the misadventures of grown-up kid sidekick Galahad and his estranged father Nocturnus, as Galahad most go from self-centered celebrity to actual super-hero. By the start of the second chapter, Galahad and Nocturnus are going after the crooked business manager who embezzled the Nocturnus fortune, forcing the former sidekick to suffer as an independent agent without a huge corporation to back him up.

It’s as if Waid took the worst parts of Wally West, multiplied them to ten, and threw in a dysfunctional relationship with an emotionally detached workaholic father.

Like Galahad, Mark Waid’s career has hit a few bumps— “often at the hands of the corporate world, sometimes by my own hands,” he laughs, but unlike Galahad having to appear onstage for a beer company, Waid hasn’t had to once again resort to singing Dean Martin tunes for old tobacco.

When I first interviewed Mark Waid, it was right after Marvel screwed him over on Captain America. That Mark Waid was outspoken, and more than a little hot around the collar over it (and justifiably so).

Almost 20 years later (!), Waid still has no problem speaking up about his experiences, but seems a lot more centered than when he was scribe on The Flash. He’s taken his hits over the years, but has learned to laugh about it, and move on.

He gets the last laugh on Birthright with the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, which uses several ideas and approaches from Waid’s take on the first super-hero (despite that the movie itself, a commercial juggernaut, “broke” Waid’s heart).

But that doesn’t mean this independently-minded creator who has probably always needed to be his own boss isn’t still aware of the corporate companies’ interactions with creators and what that means for the burgeoning digital front.

“If we can get digital in a place to sustain costs, it’s a great place for creators to go,” Mark points out. “I hear all kinds of horror stories coming out of DC about creator unfriendliness, and I can’t speak to that first-hand. I know Marvel, on a personal level, has been much better; but that being said, they still have overlords to answer to. All it takes is some CEO from Disney or Time Warner to roll out of bed one morning and go ‘I don’t know why we’re publishing comics.’”

“All pop characters eventually stop being storytelling tools and become beach towels and T-shirts. We’re likely going to head that way with the DC and Marvel stuff in years to come, so enjoy it while you can. I hope that there will always be stories with those characters, and stories preaching the independent spirit without preaching the corporate agenda.”

chatterbox

Stone Cold Human

Return of Skywald’s ‘Gargoyles’ series Rich Arndt on the resurrection of Alan Hewetson’s fondly-remembered horror serial

The Human Gargoyles ©2014 Maelo Cintron, Alan Hewetson and the respective copyright holders.

by RICHARD J. ARndT CBC Contributor In 1972, “Archaic” Al Hewetson, then editor and chief writer for the Skywald black-&-white horror line — the wellremembered Nightmare, Psycho, and Scream magazines — assigned Spanish artist Felipe Dela Rosa to help fatefully bring to life the first chapter of “The Human Gargoyles.”

I doubt it was considered anything special at that time.

Dela Rosa subsequently drew three “Gargoyle” stories for Skywald during those days, one written by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, and all featuring a similar design for the Gargoyle characters.

Hewetson had embarked on scribing the majority of the line’s scripts, using a dozen or more pen-names, and this was likely just one more tale in a potential ongoing series… but something about it kept him thinking of its potential.

When New York-based artist Maelo Cintron, new to Skywald, needed a script, Hewetson wrote a sequel to that initial tale and the continuing “Saga of the Human Gargoyles” was born. Over the next two-and-a-half years, the creative partners produced eight chapters in the Gargoyle story. These were tales that always had a horrific underpinning but were often more notable for their social and humanistic qualities. Then, in 1975, Skywald folded, leaving behind two unpublished written-and-penciled (but uninked) episodes, stories apparently destined never to see print.

In 2003, I started creating an online checklist for the Skywald magazines (which eventually folded into the Grand Comics Database, www.comics. org) and much to my surprise, comic book pros, including Maelo Cintron and Al Hewetson, contacted me, often to say thanks for recognizing their work favorably years after they thought they’d been forgotten. Hewetson was especially interested in reconnecting with Cintron as the writer/editor wanted to revive the Gargoyles in an updated version revolving around the stone child becoming a modern-day policeman.

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Unfortunately, after a number of written and drawn pages, and a great cover

by Cintron, were completed, Hewetson suddenly passed away in early 2004.

Comic book letterer and inker, and prepress production artist George E Warner saw early promotion for that revival (which had appeared in the British fanzine From the Tomb), as well as my short online interviews with both Hewetson and Cintron, whereupon George contacted me and asked if I could put him in touch with Maelo. To shorten the story, George wanted to back publication of the Human Gargolyes revival. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the modern reboot (Gargoyle Justice) couldn’t be used. But the original, unfinished tale was available for reprinting and Maelo was interested in finishing it. The first chapter was really unusable though—not only was it not drawn by Maelo but there were major contradictions between that story and the Hewetson/Cintron chapters. George asked me what I thought could be done and I suggested splitting the original second chapter (Cintron’s debut segment) in two parts and writing bridging material that replaced the missing events from initial episode, creating a new chapter one and two. George asked if I’d be interested in writing the saga’s conclusion.

What could I say? I said, “Yes!” So, after roughly eight years of trial and error, and chatting and dreaming, the first issue of the new The Human Gargoyles is finally here! Maelo Cintron’s artwork is even more amazing than it was in the early ’70s and George’s patient reconstruction of the 1972 pages leaves no gap in quality between past and present.

I hope readers old and new enjoy this book. It was a great time to work on it and I think there’s a pretty good ending in store for you.

Center inset: A detail of Maelo Cintron’s evocative cover painting for The Human Gargoyles #1, now available direct from publisher George E Warner. Contact thehumangargoyles@gmail.com for info.

Upper left: “Archaic” Al Hewetson in the 1980s. Far left: Artist Maelo Cintron. Left: Comics historian and scripter Richard J. Arndt, who is a frequent contributor to CBC. Look for an inside look into this book’s production in the free CBC #4 Bonus PDF, available free at www.twomorrows.com.

25

an artist unchained

Cowan the Conqueror From edgy animation to Django Unchained, the artist has been there and done it all!

Denys Cowan never left us.

The once-prolific, two-time award nominee for the Will Eisner Comics Industry “Best Artist” category (1989-90), the penciler and inker has never really abandoned his career in comics. It just kinda… well, morphed.

These days, the wiry, gregarious, East Coast-bred, West Coast-based creator of comics and cartoon shows is a devoted family man who doles out his energetic, quick-witted presence on Facebook or at the occasional comic book convention in smaller doses these days. He recently made a splashy return to comics when he created covers and penciled fill-in issues on DC Comics’ smash adaption of auteur filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained movie (the first issue of which sold out quickly and warranted reprints).

If Cowan has been more scarce in recent years within the pages of

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & © DC Comics.

26

Marvel and DC Comics, it’s only because this nagging little side-career kind of intruded and took over his hemisphere.

You know, Hollywood? Developing animated series and online content for Black Entertainment Television…? Working as a producer and supervising director for Sony Television Animation on the Boondocks series for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup…? Stuff like that.

Breaking into the industry at an early age as a comic book penciler, the African-American New Yorker quickly landed the dream-making opportunity to draw some of Marvel’s most popular super-heroes of color, making waves via his collaboration with writer Jo Duffy on Power Man and Iron Fist, and by 1990, on the mini-series (and subsequent regular title) Deathlok — which ran four times longer than the classic original feature in Astonishing Tales! — the latter written by good friend and subsequent business partner, Dwayne McDuffie, who stunned the comics world in 2011 when he died at 49.

It was only fitting that Cowan worked on 34 issues and the pair of annuals of Deathlok in the early 1990s. That was a full-circle moment for the artist, who had entered the comics industry at the ridiculously young age of 14 to work an assistant to the legendary Rich Buckler, creator and penciler of Marvel’s that most revered futuristic feature of dystopian demolition and destruction.

The youngster had met Buckler through artist Armando Gill. “I was hanging out with Armando,” Cowan explained, “and he said, ‘I’m going to meet someone, you wanna come along?’” I didn’t know we were going to meet Rich Buckler.”

Thanks to Gill, Cowan landed the gig to assist the Detroit-born artist at Buckler’s Upper West Side studio.

Cowan drew backgrounds, cut out reference photos, and ran on errands for the Fantastic Four and Mighty Thor artist.

“He literally taught me about doing comics,” Cowan recalled. “You have to do a lot of stuff you may not want to do, but it was invaluable experience. He put me in touch with other comics people to teach me things. But who was I? I was lucky to be there. He took a little colored kid from Queens [and created a professional artist].”

The one-time protégé has nothing but praise for his mentor. “He’s one of the best drawers I’ve ever met,” Cowan said. “He was the Frank Miller of his day. He came out of Detroit with Jim Starlin. He is a very smart man. A smart, smart man. I tend to focus more on the art and that’s it.”

(Years later, Cowan repaid the favor and hired Buckler to do some assignments after he had launched the Milestone Comics imprint.)

Attending a vocational high school focused on art and design, “I started working in high school,” Cowan said, making his official start penciling a 1979 “Firestorm” back-up series in The Flash.

At 17, Cowan became tight with one of his contemporaries, Trevor Von Eden, who had his own book, Black Lightning.

At one point, Cowan, who had moved away from home in his late teens to live in Manhattan, shared a Queens apartment with Von Eden.

As possibly the only two African-American teens working in mainstream comics, they had much in common. They had even more in common when Marvel editor-in-chief Jim

©2014 the respective copyright holder.

by Michael Aushenker CBC Associate Editor

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

revival of Steve Ditko’s Charlton Comics vigilante, when Marvel had him finish the last issue of the Panther mini-series… four years after doing the third issue!

In some circles, Shooter has proven a polarizing figure, but not in Cowan’s sphere.

“I never had any problems with Shooter,” he said, adding, “I didn’t draw the Marvel style. I was already a storyteller. He was just aiming for clarity. If you could tell a story clearly, you never had any problems.”

Over at DC, Cowan had been drawing the last two issues of Vigilante and working on V, the science-fiction television adaptation, when The Question beckoned in 1987 after a veteran artist turned down the book.

“The art was originally going to be done by Ernie Colón,” Cowan remembered. “Ernie couldn’t do it. [DC Executive Editor] Dick Giordano literally called me into the office with the finger wave. ‘Come see me!’ Like something out of a movie. He told me, ‘We’ve always liked your art.

How would you like to do The Question?”

It gets better. Giordano informed Cowan that Dennis O’Neil, one of the best writers in the medium, one who had tackled controversial social issues in Green Lantern/Green Arrow drawn by Neal Adams in the 1970s and who, as editor, helped guide Frank Miller on his legendary 1980s Daredevil run, would be scripting this reboot of The Question.

Cowan’s art on Vigilante had become a back-door audition for this series. Ironically, The Question offer triggered a quizzical response by the artist capped off with a big question mark.

Opposite page upper left: Skybox produced a Milestone Media series of trading cards in 1993, which included this Denys Cowan self-portrait. Lower left: Collaboration with his oft-artistic partner of the day, Bill Sienkiewicz, on a print featuring DC characters (courtesy of Heritage).

Inset: Denys Cowan in 2010.

Photo courtesy of Ely Liu. This page top left: Cowan made an impact on his Deathlok series for Marvel. Cover of #1 [July 1991], with his pencils and inks.

Above: Luke Cage carries the black man’s burden in this cover detail from Power Man and Iron Fist #83 [July ’82], pencils by Cowan and inks by Joe Rubinstein.

Left: Courtesy of Ivan Velez Jr., a 1990s convention photo of [from left] the late Dwayne McDuffie, Icon cosplayer, and Denys Cowan.

Special photographic effects by Ye Crusading Editor.

Les portrait ©2014 Beth Gwinn.

IconDaniels TM & © DC Comics.

Shooter gave an 18-year-old Cowan the opportunity to draw Marvel’s Black Lightning doppelgänger: urban crimefighter Luke Cage, Power Man. “That was my first super-hero shot,” Cowan said of his work on the early 1980s series.

Power Man and Iron Fist had become Marvel’s last-ditch effort to perpetuate two characters whose individual titles suffered from sagging sales. Cowan was paired with writer Mary Jo Duffy, who infused much verve and wit into her under-the-radar series, taking out the stuffiness.

“I struggled with it because Mary [was] writing [Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s] The Road to… type scripts. She was doing comedy. I was drawing directly opposite.” [May ’82’s PM&IF #81’s story was actually titled “The Road To Halwan” — Y.E.] But the pairing worked, and readers and critics took note of the Duffy/Cowan issues. “I can’t look at it anymore,” Cowan said, laughing of his early work, which has nevertheless become a treasured run of Power Man and Iron Fist.

During this period, Cowan moved around Manhattan.

“Back in the Marvel days, working for Shooter, my roommate was Bob Layton,” Cowan said and adding, “We never worked together.”

Shooter next assigned Cowan a Black Panther miniseries [1988] in which T’Challa goes to South Africa. “It was intense!” Cowan said. “We did three issues [of the four-issue series]. They shelved it for four years. Just shut it down.”

Over at DC, he had already been drawing The Question, a

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27

The Question TM & © DC Comics.

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Black Panther, Doctor Zero TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

28

©2014 the respective copyright holder.

“I looked at [Dick] and I had no idea who The Question was,” Cowan confessed. “I had to go out and get the Charlton reissues. I went back to Alex Toth, studied Ditko…” He added with a laugh, “And I came to the conclusion I couldn’t draw as good as any of those guys!”

The Question, which lasted three years, proved a training ground for the maturing pro. “I learned so much,” Cowan said, although the artist had a few missteps from taking on too many freelance assignments. “Denny is probably one of the greatest writers in comics,” Cowan said. “When you’re in it, you’re not seeing it in perspective. Denny was one of the people angry at me for not having my work done on time.”

Content-wise, the series proved exciting and significant for Cowan. “There was a lot of martial arts and Eastern philosophy,” Cowan recalled of O’Neil’s story lines. “We did a lot of on the Klan and racists, political corruption…

That was the book where I did the largest artistic jump.”

The work he did on The Question is on the top-tier of accomplishments Cowan remains most proud. “We knew we were doing something special,” Cowan revealed, “but it was only later I realized we were doing something different. There were no sound effects. I wasn’t aware of it. I was just doing the book. It was one of those things that was different.”

Cowan even had an encounter with the character’s mysterious and elusive creator. “I learned nothing about Steve [working on the series],” Cowan said. “But I did see Steve. Guess what I saw I saw the back of his head [as he

left the building]. And I remember laughing.”

If there was any negative fan reaction to their interpretation of Ditko’s Charlton creation, Cowan remained unaware.

“I don’t remember a whole lot of blowback because what we were doing was so different,” he said. “But I realize that we were Vertigo before there was a Vertigo. It wasn’t a super-hero book; it was out of the genre. It was literary.” The artist added, “The start of The Question was very different than the end. I was finding a lot of different solutions, a lot of European influences.”

Cowan was still working on assignments for Marvel, including Doctor Zero for beloved editor Archie Goodwin’s Epic line, while taking on The Question. “Bill [Sienkiewicz] was the inker,” Cowan recalled. “We had a lot of fun. Archie was awesome.”

On the revival of Buckler’s “Deathlok,” Cowan collaborated with McDuffie and Gregory Wright. “I met him at the offices at Marvel,” Cowan said of the former. “Literally.

I was like, ‘Wow, this guy’s like 6' 4".’ He was huge. Very brilliant, very funny. He would say the driest things and a few months later, ‘Oh, my God! He’s killing me now.’”

Cowan revealed was not the original choice for the 1990 version of Deathlok.

“I was filling in for another artist, Butch Guice, the artist on the mini-series,” he said.

“They asked me to step in and finish the mini-series. Then they asked me to do the regular book.”

Deathlok inadvertently became a career game-changer for Cowan that would pave the way for his career in television animation, as he began collaborating with the future Milestone partner. “When Dwayne and I did Deathlok, I realized I was working on somebody who had a whole different thought [process] and that was when I realized he was thinking on a whole different way” Cowan said. “He was thinking of more positive things for our people and what we can do. Deathlok was a black character. We were just going to do everything we wanted to do.”

Having started out working for Buckler, Cowan wanted to make sure he stayed true to the spirit of the character. “Rich Buckler’s version is the only one I really loved,” Cowan said.

“I knew all about Luther Manning, his girlfriend….”

Out of that collaboration with fast-friend McDuffie came many philosophical discussions on the role of African-American cartoonists and characters in mainstream super-hero comics in the U.S. that ultimately led to an industry… ummm… Milestone!

“Dwayne and I were trying to form an organization for freelance artists and help each other,” Cowan explained.

“That kind of fell apart. Ultimately, to get work, you don’t want to alienate publishers. We had a conversation with Jim Steranko and a lot of it was the times.”

“The times,” meaning a particularly fertile period in the maturing days of rap music. “In the early 1990s, you had [militant rap groups] PE, Eric B. and Rakim, X-Clan,” he recalled. “My mind was blown in a political way. Milestone grew out of that. I was in San Diego [Comic-Con] in 1991.

Ideally, I wanted to do black characters. But I knew if we did something together… I called Michael Davis, we walked on the pier, behind the Marriott. Michael went yeah. The next person we called Dwayne, he said, ‘You’re crazy!’ He shrugged, ‘Alright let’s do it!’ Then we called Derek [T. Dingle] and we talked Jim Owsley [then working for Valiant]. We wanted him to join the collective, so he did. He contributed to creating the universe.”

Static, The Question TM & © DC Comics.

“The first place we went to was DC,” Cowan remembered. “We left a proposal with [vice president] Paul Levitz at 3:30 p.m. on a Friday; handed him a hardcover book. He took over the weekend. Monday morning he called and said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Of particular importance to the publisher was oversight of the company and ownership of the characters, which they received. “Once we pitched the idea to them, it was time to expand on it,” Cowan said. “They gave us money to develop the idea. We fleshed out the story lines. The Milestone universe was conceived from the ground up. If you ever see the Milestone bible, it’s all in there.”

With Dark Horse, Image, and Malibu Comics blowing up, “it was a very exciting time to be in comics [doing creator-owned characters]. The only reason I’ve come to understand everything, the enormity of that. It affected a lot of people, the original thing was to have minority characters of color and treat it just as importantly as Superman, Batman.

There were no Hispanic or Asian super-heroes. That’s what we wanted to create.”

Cowan differentiates these ambitions from the White Tiger, Luke Cage, and other ethnic characters Marvel had introduced in the 1970s. “We wanted to be closer to [Don] McGregor’s Black Panther. We weren’t looking at a lot of stuff, not even Shang-Chi. One of the real characters that influenced me was the Black Panther. “Panther’s Rage” and all that stuff. That stuff got us. It was literate, it was really well-drawn, “Black Panther” in Jungle Action.’”

Cowan is not sure how pure Marvel’s motives were when creating characters of color during the ’70s. “I read the books [but] I wasn’t there,” he said. “I don’t know if Marvel was trying to reach an audience or to make money. Even with Luke Cage and Sons of the Tiger, at the time reading it, it was awesome. But they were all exploitation characters, done in an exploitive way in reaction to a trend that by the time [the books] came out, it was already over.”

While collaborating with Archie Goodwin towards the end of the editor/writer’s life on a Batman project, “I asked him, ‘You invented Luke Cage.

What was your inspiration?’”

It came out of, Goodwin revealed to the young artist, blaxploitation movies and Chester Himes novels. Himes did several novels: If He Hollers, Let Him Go and a string of Harlem Detective novels featuring the characters Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones: A Rage Up in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, The Heat’s On, Cotton Comes to Harlem, etc.

“Himes wrote in a really hard-edged, street, biting satirical way,” Cowan said.

Suddenly, all that “Sweet Christmas,” Black Mariah, all that absurd stuff made sense to Cowan. “When Archie told me that, I thought, ‘Oh, my God! That’s exactly what they were. More so than [quintessential blaxploitation movie] Shaft.”

In the early 1990s, music executive Jheryl Busby began reviving Berry Gordy, Jr.’s old Motown label. “I was over at Milestone with Dwayne and Dereck,” Cowan recalled, “and when those guys went to work at Motown animation, they hired me to do their comic book division.”

That led to one of the most interesting detours in Cowan’s career: crossing paths with the underground Staten Island hip hop collective Wu-Tang Clan, the nine-member rap group including Method Man, Ghostface Killah, and the late Old Dirty Bastard. Yes, Cowan illustrated the cover and interior artwork of The GZA’s 1995 solo album “Liquid Swords.”

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

PREVIOUS page. Top left: Denys Cowan was featured in a Dewar’s Profile ad that appeared in slick magazines in 1991. The copy states the artist is “soft-spoken, imaginative, dedicated.

Works well in confined spaces.” Lower left: Cover details from Cowan and inker Sam Delarosa’s Black Panther #3 [Sept. ’88] , and Cowan and inker Bill Sienkiewicz’s The Question Annual #1 [’88]. Inset: Bill’s cover Doctor Zero #1 [Apr. ’88], the short-lived Shadowline title initially drawn by Cowan and edited by legendary Archie Goodwin.

THIS PAGE. Inset left: Denys was a founding member of Milestone Media and among his contributions is this cover for Static #1 [June ’93]. Above: The Cowan clan at 2012 Comic-Con. From top left, Kathy, Miles, Denys, and getting all serious in the stroller, Dashiell. Courtesy of Mike Stradford. Below: Cowan cover detail from The Question #34 [Jan. ’90].

“I’m sitting there with the GZA, and he gets a call from his mom,” Cowan recalled, chuckling. GZA the Genius reported to this mother, ‘I’m just here working with the artists.’”

Having moved to California, Cowan began picking up work in animation, including Invasion America at DreamWorks and the McDonald’s account at Klasky-Csupo.

That led to opportunities to pitch ideas. One of them was based on Milestone’s Static Shock comic.

“I pitched the concept as a 14-year-old Chris Rock with super-powers,” he recalled.

“Warner Brothers was really intrigued. We had a breakfast meeting and we sold the series. That really got me into animation,” said Cowan, who worked on the show with Swinton Scott for four years as a director and producer. Cowan was extremely hands-on in designing the characters and working with the creative team. The Static Shock animated series, which ran from 2000-04, scored Emmy nominations in 2001 and ’03.

Next time: In the conclusion of our interview with Denys, we’ll delve further into his postcomics career in animation, which includes his work on The Boondocks series for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block and the long-brewing Black Panther animated series. We’ll also discuss his return to comics with titles such as Vertigo’s Tarantino adaption, Django Unchained.

29

creator secret origins

Archie’s Lost Father

Uncovering the mystery of Boni Victor Bloom, author of the first ‘Archie’ stories

Left: Detail from Pep Comics #22 [Dec. 1941] splash page of the very first “Archie” story (seen inset right) featuring the name of the character’s co-creator, writer Vic Bloom.

Below: Detail from Archie Fan Club pin-up. Bottom right inset: Cover of the 1980 trade paperback The Best of Archie featuring John Goldwater’s prominent credit as Archie’s sole creator.

The matter of who was the main creator of Archie and the gang has been the subject of rancorous dispute.

After Bob Montana died, in 1975, his heirs objected to [Archie publisher John L.] Goldwater’s taking so much of the credit. In 1996 they filed a lawsuit against Archie Comics in the hopes that a judge would rule Bob Montana the real Archie-daddy. Led by Goldwater, who would die in 1999, the company fought back. “There was a settlement,” says Steven Grill, the lawyer for 30

Montana’s heirs. “The terms are confidential.” Since the settlement, every Archie product has listed John Goldwater as “creator.” The name Bob Montana falls under a separate credit line that defines him as the “creator” of “the original characters’ likenesses.”

John Goldwater, the “J” of the founding company MLJ (which would become Archie Publications), long declared that he was the sole creator of the iconic character, most expressively on the credit emblazoned across the cover of The Best of Archie, the 1980 trade paperback collection, released after Montana’s death and in the wake of revised copyright laws.

(Curiously, the copyright page of editors Michael Uslan and Jeffrey Mendel’s book contains the oddly placed declaration, “In the World encyl. Of comics, 1976, credit for the comic strip erroneously ascribed to Bob Montana, one of many illustrators of Archie, the actual creator of which is John Goldwater. Cf. Info.

From J. Goldwater & Putnam, New York.”)

In his unpublished autobiography, cited at length in Craig Yoe’s Archie: A Celebration of America’s Favorite Teenagers #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

To the naked eye, the evidence couldn’t be more apparent.

There it is, in the splash panel’s upper right hand corner of the character’s very first story, a tale reprinted ad infinitum since its initial appearance. The box, peeking out from the cartoon foliage, reads plain as day: “by Bob Montana and Vic Bloom.” Just as we know Archibald “Archie” Andrews’ comic-book parents are Mary and Fred Andrews, upon looking over the credit notice, we’d consider the case closed on the identity of the character’s real-world creators.

Alas, the old adage, “success has many fathers,” is never more true than in the case of Riverdale High’s most famous pupil, the four-color adolescent foul-up described by author Craig Yoe as, “a certain freckle-faced, gap-toothed, plaid-pantsed, saddle-shoed, carrot-topped teenager.”

Archie is among the most recognizable and successful comic book characters in the history of the form, and the plethora of titles sporting his unmistakable likeness are probably the most widely distributed comics line currently in these here United States of America.

Any comics aficionado worth his or her salt knows it is in the pages of Pep Comics, the MLJ title then headlined by a stable of stalwart super-heroes, where the red-headed youngster first appears. In the 22nd issue, cover-dated Dec. 1941, regulated to the sixth spot in the anthology title, sandwiched between a Jolly Roger and his Sky Pirates war story and an exploit of Eddie, a pro boxer known as “Kayo” Ward, Archibald Andrews quietly debuts in an untitled tale. The opening page depicts the freckle-face youth “risking life and limb to impress his new neighbor — Betty Cooper,” the start of a charming, silly ditty that not only introduces the “good gal,” but contains the first appearance of Archie’s perennially famished pal, Jughead. Yet, as good-natured and goofy as it is, there’s little indication that this six-pager will kick off a comics phenomenon, launch a lucrative trend of teenage humor comics, and establish a publishing powerhouse, besides spawning many dozens of titles and characters. Archie’s fame has continued unabated for three-quarters of a century, overall a span that has made him — and all of his pals ’n’ gals — a very valuable property indeed.

But the creative pedigree of the character, unsurprising perhaps for such a profitable franchise, has been a source of bitter contention time and again. And though, because of the agreement mentioned below, there’s not much in the way of a legal paper-trail, Jim Windolf’s article on Archie Comics, “American Idol,” in the December 2006 issue of Vanity Fair, gives a glimpse of some acrimony behind the scenes:

TM & ©2014 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

by SHAUN CLANCY with Jon B. Cooke

TM & ©2014 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Andy Hardy ©2014 Warner Brothers.

Pep Comics, Archie, Veronica, and Betty TM & ©2014 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

[Yoe Books/IDW, 2011], publisher Goldwater writes, “One day, while I was sketching, a face stared back at me. ‘Why are you so special?’ I asked the penciled drawing on my table in front of me. He reminded me of someone else, an old school friend named Archie. As soon as I remembered my high school friend’s name, some things went ‘click.’”

Goldwater, never known as an artist and notorious in some circles as a founder and director of the Comics Code Authority, claims to have established the classic love triangle at the heart of Archie’s appeal — “Instead of ‘boy chasing girl,’ I would have the girl chasing the boy — and usually not getting him. ‘Eureka!’

I cried out.” The publisher asserts his own romantic misadventures as a young man were behind the “Archie” series, and that he locates Riverdale in Kansas: “‘Of course,’ I said, almost slapping myself. ‘They will come from America’s heartland.’”

But Montana, cartoonist of the early stories and, after World War II, the artist and writer of the popular Archie newspaper comic strip, is absolute when he tells editor Jud Hurd of Cartoonist PROfiles [#6, May 1970], “John Goldwater came to me and said they’d like me to try and create a teenage strip. John thought of the name ‘Archie’ and together we worked it out. I created the characters and developed it.”

In his online Comics Journal article “John Goldwater, the Comics Code, and Archie,” comics historian R.C. Harvey notes, “This [PROfiles] interview undoubtedly took place well before the official version of Archie’s conception was formally adopted as a compromise between the Goldwaters and the Montanas (with Goldwater inventing the characters and Montana visualizing them), and while it fits, albeit somewhat awkwardly into that formulation, Montana says quite unequivocally, ‘I created the characters.’ At the time of this interview, Montana was producing the Archie newspaper strip, but he was still working for Goldwater, and presumably anything he said had to conform, more-or-less, with whatever notions Goldwater was nurturing — hence, Goldwater names the character and ‘together we worked it out.’”

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Another twist is found in an unpublished 1999 interview with Joe Edwards, conducted by Richard Rubenfeld. The longtime Archie Publications cartoonist — and notably the creator of L’il Jinx — reveals that in 1941, “I worked with Bob Montana on ‘Archie.’ One day, John Goldwater called me and Bob in, and said, ‘We’re a little troubled. Everything out there is Superman and there is a lot of competition.

I know you two guys just got out of school. Write whatever you know.

So Bob and I sat down and worked it out. ‘Well, how about a teenage boy?’

It was as simple as that because we knew it. So we wrote stories about a guy going out to get girls and dating, and how to get a job to make it, which was a simple formula, adding a blond and brunette. If you recall, everybody used to have a buddy. That’s where Jughead came in. If you look at Jughead, very clearly Jughead was really [early film comedian] Stan Laurel. And we took [Dead End Kid/Bowery Boy] Leo Gorcey’s hat, the little hat he had, and we gave him a little hair. Pop Tate was [Laurel’s performing partner Oliver] Hardy.

And Betty was [longtime MLJ/Archie artist] Harry Lucey’s wife’s sister, Betty. We picked Betty. We needed a common name. And Veronica was around — Veronica Lake — so we said that would be good. And it worked.”

Okay. No argument about Bob Montana rightfully deserving credit, whether just the “original characters’ ‘likenesses,’” or the whole enchilada.

Above: Panel from the story “A Share of Happening,” Everything’s Archie #29 [Oct. ’73], which a Grand Comics Database indexer informs us: “This story was made to coincide with Archie [Publications] becoming a public company: it’s an attempt to give readers ‘a chance to get in on the world of Archie’ by telling them about the Archie merchandising push and encouraging them to invest in the company.”

Pencils by Harry Lucey and inks by Chic Stone. That’s publisher John L. Goldwater making an appearance.

Inset left: From top, Bob Montana, the artist-father of Archie Andrews; the creation himself in a cover detail from Jackpot Comics #4 [Winter ’41]; George Frese caricature of Archie publisher and professed creator, John L. Goldwater.

Bottom inset left: Bob Montana’s art graces the cover of Pep Comics #36 [Feb. ’43], with The Shield and Hangman triumphantly carrying the MLJ comic line’s new star, Archie Andrews, whose strip was barely a year old. Bottom inset center: The strip’s eternal love triangle is expertly portrayed by artist Bob Montana in this Archie Annual #4 [1953] cover detail. Below: Publicity photo from the MGM movie Love Finds Andy Hardy [1938], starring Mickey Rooney [left] and Judy Garland. It’s commonly believed that the popular franchise served as an inspiration for Archie and the whole Riverdale gang.

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©2014 the respective copyright holder.

But what about that other name in the Pep #22 credit box? In Gerard Jones’ 2005 comics history exposé, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, the author does give mention to the little-known Golden Age comics writer when discussing “ugly” treatment of creators by publishers: “Louis Silberkleit, John Goldwater, and Maurice Coyne of Pep offered even less [than DC offered Superman creators Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster] to Vic Bloom and Bob Montana for their creation, Archie Andrews. Goldwater even claimed in print to have created Archie himself, and so he cut off Bloom and Montana’s complaints in advance.”

Craig Yoe’s Archie: A Celebration book offers a short biographical sketch of the scripter of Archie’s first three Pep stories, and acknowledges, “As a writer, Vic Bloom probably lent a big hand as a key contributor to the team effort which gave Archie his start.” Thus, in addition to the debut story, Bloom authored Pep #23’s “Danger: Thin Ice” and “The Basketball Blunder” in #24. Thereafter Vic Bloom’s credit is nowhere to be found in the realm of the American comic book, but his creative endeavors, as we shall see, endure. And Pep Comics #22–24 are not, investigation reveals, Bloom’s only comic book credits. In fact, a clear antecedent of Archie Andrews, albeit of a slightly more realistic design, is a product of the Bloom imagination.

Bloom in Comics

Writing as Vic Bloom and prior to “Archie,” the scribe contributes to the burgeoning comics division of employer Dell Publishing, where he is employed as magazine editor, and he joins artist Bob Hebbert to produce the adventure feature “Speed Martin” for The Funnies, starting in #38 [Dec. ’39] and appearing in most issues until #61 [Nov. ’41]. The title page of the first story sports Bloom’s first comic book acknowledgment and, when credits appear in subsequent tales, Bloom is identified as writer. The character Speed Martin is an intrepid newsreel cameraman, whose peppy assistant “Mickey” looks just like America’s number one box office film star at the time, Mickey Rooney, the charismatic young actor best known in the movies for portraying that goofy, romantic teenager remarkably similar to Archie Andrews.

Of particular interest to us, in searching for connections with Bloom’s earlier work and

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©2014 the respective copyright holder.

Top left: Splash from“Wally Williams,” Popular Comics #54 [Aug. ’40]. Above: “Speed Martin” opening page from The Funnies #59 [Sept. ’41]. Top right: Title panel from TF #54 [Apr. ’41]. Top right inset: Panel with Speed’s sidekick, Mickey, from TF #61 [Nov. ’41]. Lower right inset: Left is character identifications showing the Veronica-like Arlene, the Reggie-like Bart, the Betty-like Betty, and some guy named Jughead. From Popular #49 [Mar. ’40]. On right is Wally getting some sugar from his two gal friends. Right: Header from Popular #52 [June ’40]. #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

greatest claim to fame scripting the first “Archie” story, is the discovery of a remarkable precursor to Riverdale’s most celebrated student. The March 1940 issue of Dell’s Popular Comics, #49, contains the first entry of the Bloom-scripted comic book series, “Wally Williams — American Boy,” though officially credited to “Victor Boni,” an obvious pseudonym given the man’s legitimate first name of Boni. The opening page of that premiere story introduces Wally Williams (note the same letter for first and last names) of Riverview, who sports a prominent letter “R” symbolizing Riverview High School on the front of a sweater with no sleeves. Jughead is the name of his best buddy and they pal around two cunning teenage chicks — one dark-haired, the other golden-locked (the latter is called Betty).

There’s also a sneaky rich nemesis with oily hair not unlike Reginald Mantle III. “Wally Williams” is featured in almost all issues of Popular Comics until Jan. ’42, the writing credited to Victor Boni.

While drawn in a more straight adventure style by Tom Hickey, those details certainly raise an eyebrow when we consider the writer is receiving virtually no acknowledgment as co-creator of Archie Andrews.

Bloom’s career is hitting his stride as he adds comics writing to a growing résumé. There’s mention in late 1940 papers of his working on a movie script for the comedy team of Abbott and Costello. Tellingly, the Bloom-edited May ’41 issue of Film Fun has a short article on the latest Mickey Rooney motion picture, Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary, which also includes a shot from the movie. Perhaps it’s not a stretch to think the editor’s admiration for the popular film series might extend into his four-color work…? After all, the Hardy feature is published some months before Pep #22 hits the comics racks. Maybe it does play a role in what would be the debut “Archie” script.

Comic book editor Harry Shorten, who like Bloom attended NYU, is directed by MLJ in Summer 1941 to oversee a continuing feature to capitalize on the popular Andy Hardy movie series, which stars Rooney as Judge Hardy’s teenage boy, Andrew. Shorten shepherds not just one, but three potential features to grab onto the movie franchise’s coattails: “Wilbur,” “Percy,” and “Archie.” Writer Harvey Willard and artist Lin Streeter introduce “Wilbur,” first appearing in Zip Comics #18 [Sept. ’41]. Scripter Gerald Kean and cartoonist Bob Montana present “Percy,” debuting in Top-Notch Comics #27 [July ’42]. Vic Bloom is selected as freelance writer to join Montana and create who would win the prize and become “America’s Typical Teenager.”

The writer hatches up a name that inverses “Andrew Hardy” into a moniker sounding akin to “Hardy Andrew,” and polishes “Hardy” into the homophonic “Archie.” Boni “B.B.” Bloom’s double-initial predilection continues a habit established with American Boy Wally Williams and the soon-to-be MLJ superstar is tagged with an “A.A.” monogram.

Much of the charm emanating from the popular Andy Hardy film series — a franchise boasting 16 motion pictures!

— finds expression in the debut “Archie” story: memorable supporting characters, outlandish teen fashion, “gosh-geewow” gumption, and appealing small town naiveté. That first exploit spotlights the mischievous youngster (who insists on being addressed as “Chick,” a nickname soon dropped from the series) as he attempts to pique new neighbor Betty’s interest only to outrage the girl’s father and turn Old Man Cooper’s fund-raising event into a carnival of catastrophic chaos. Thus begin the madcap antics of Archie & Co. Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Two other stories are credited as scripted by Victor Bloom, at least in the company-sanctioned 2011 history by Craig Yoe, Archie: A Celebration of America’s Favorite Teenagers. Pep #23’s entry follows the template of the well-intentioned boy once again humiliating Mr. Cooper, and #24 has our hero making the Riverdale High basketball team and inadvertently winning the county championship, despite being attired as a ballerina! (The Grand Comics Database lists Bloom with a question mark in regards to these two tales, and we’re quite certain Bob Montana wrote the Pep #23 tale on his own.)

Artist Montana, cited as collaborating with Bloom on those second and third Pep entries, would stick with the typical teenager for another 35 years or so, until his death, most importantly as writer and artist on the daily newspaper strip.

But, regarding Montana’s brief partner on the series, what became of Vic Bloom? For such a brief stay in the four-color realm, the singular creation of Archie Andrews is proof that the writer has made a lasting impact in the field. But little has been written about the scribe… until now. With pride and great help from the research of David Saunders, Comic Book Creator presents the story of Boni Victor Bloom, from whence he came and to where he went.

Top: Splash pages from the second and third “Archie” stories from Pep Comics [#23, Jan. ’42, and #24, Feb. ’42], which are attributed

by Archie Publications as being written by Vic Bloom, though the authoritative www.comics. org leave that open to question.

Above: In 1941, MLJ editor Harry Shorten is charged with overseeing the development of three teenage boy properties. “Archie” wins. The two also-rans are, at left, “Percy” [Top-Notch Laugh Comics #29, Sept. ’42] and “Wilbur” [Zip Comics #28, Aug. ’42]. Below: High school portrait of Boni Victor Bloom, 1927.

Courtesy of David Saunders.

The Boni Lad

According to research, the early years and family history of Boni Victor Bloom is complex and somewhat dysfunctional, perhaps influencing the lad to nurture an extroverted demeanor that prompts an iconoclastic, irreverent, if playful attitude towards authority figures. By virtue of his mother’s Scottish heritage he is given the name Boni, adhering to the custom of the clans to call their wee boys “bonnie laddies.” It is a moniker he will use in a pen name.

Boni’s father, John William Bloom, toils as railroad telegraph operator when he meets wife-to-be Hazel Belle Fralick, the lad’s mother, then living with her own mother in Adrian, Michigan. They are married in 1906, in Windsor, Ontario, a locality perhaps selected 33

Argosy ©2014 the respective copyright holder.

Above: The popular adventure pulp magazine Argosy featured fledgling writer Boni Victor Bloom’s early efforts, including the vignette, “Africa’s Animal Graveyard,” seen inset, published in the April 30, 1932 issue. Note that in the page found above, Bloom shares the table of contents with renowned journalist and adventurer Lowell Thomas! Below: Various Dell magazines crediting Victor Bloom in an editorial capacity.

Also for the publisher, the writer contributed scripts to Dell’s The Funnies and Popular Comics, on the features “Speed Martin” and “Wally Williams,” respectively.

Next page: Portraits of Capt.

Boni Victor Bloom during his stint in the U.S. Army. All images courtesy of David Saunders, who contributed significantly to this article and to whom we extend our gratitude. Thank you.

because, while the groom is 18, the bride is four years his junior and with child (a pregnancy that ends in miscarriage). Thus begins an unhappy union for the teen-aged couple They move to Westville, Ohio.

For her second pregnancy, Hazel returns to her family’s home and there, on July 24, 1908, Boni Victor Bloom is born. His parents divorce in 1915, and two years later, his father serves “Over There” as a private in the U.S. Army during the “War to End All Wars.” Amidst those same years, Boni is cared for by his sexagenarian grandmother, Elizabeth Burch.

Boni subsequently bounces back and forth during the early years, living with his father’s new family, then with his mother’s new family — both parents had remarried — as well as staying at times with his grandmother. In Sept. 1921, he arrives at Jesup Scott High School in Toledo, drawn to creative writing and even associating with the Library Club.

Vic seems to have a tumultuous time in the formative high school years, repeatedly being held back and even then not accumulating necessary credits for a diploma. He does not graduate nor is he even permitted to attend senior prom, two quintessential rites of passage in the culture of American youth. Having entered Jesup Scott in 1921 as a younger-than-average age and then failing to graduate in 1928 as an older-than-average-age, it is likely that the teen’s final years in secondary education are awkward, distracted, and riddled with disappointment, all suffered while serving what have must seemed like a life sentence… in a prison called high school.

As with his forthcoming co-creation Archie Andrews, there is the suggestion that Vic’s final years in public school years are mainly concerned with life outside the classroom.

Surviving classmates say that his two greatest preoccu-

pations were femmes and the stage.

Vaudeville remains a staple in Toledo during those years, and the boy whiles away hours in the seats of the Ohio Theater and Keith’s, time perhaps better spent studying. Neglecting his studies, the kid sits captivated by long-legged chorus girls and the onstage antics.

After leaving school and assembly line stint, Vic signs up as a bellboy in 1928, and he boards the S.S. President Harding upon signing a one-year contract. The steamship line traverses between New York City and Hamburg, Germany. The young man clearly revels the job, as he re-ups for two additional hitches. During this period, the bellboy learns fluent German, which will serve him greatly in the years to come. He also devours pulp magazines and dreams of a future as playwright on the Great White Way, penning his own stage comedies. Broadway and New York success beckons.

Song & Pulp Man

His luxury line duty behind him, by the autumn of ’31 — the height of the Great Depression — Vic settles in the Lower East Side, smack dab center of the New York Jewish community. The young man hopes to enter show business by getting his plays on the desks of Broadway producers, and even has a private telephone hooked up — quite an extravagance given the time and the neighborhood — and he then pounds the pavement of Broadway in search of a big break.

While in search of fame and fortune, Vic encounters any number of other writers and finds that there is money to be made writing for the thriving pulp magazine industry. In short order, Vic’s short stories are appearing in Argosy and Detective Fiction Weekly.

After pounding the pavement for two years, Vic enrolls at New York University (which charges city residents virtually nothing for tuition), and he moves to Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park neighborhood, the pastoral end of Fifth Avenue. He attends classes in creative writing, journalism, and communication over the next four years, years that curiously overlap with Harry Shorten’s time at NYU, who was then a celebrated player on the school’s popular football team and would become an Archie comics editor. As Shorten also has an interest in creative writing, it’s no stretch to believe they may be acquainted during their collegiate years.

Reliving his years of under-achievement during high school, Vic Bloom has failing grades in college and seemed to, yet again, be distracted by an overriding obsession with show business and a relentless drive to become a professional writer. To his credit, short fiction, amusing plays, song lyrics, and even radio dramas churn out of his typewriter as

All ©2014 the respective copyright holder.

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#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

he ignores his studies. With these efforts, he diligently files for copyrights and makes sure they make their way to anyone who can help him crack into the business, eventually becoming recognized on the Great White Way. Vic Bloom is nothing if not a trouper.

(Songwriters of the day employ the services of a “song-plugger,” a professional pitchman who promotes tunes to disc jockeys, radio show producers, band leaders, and the like. The most recognized song-plugger of the day is “Jughead” Gayles, who seems to step straight from a Damon Runyon story, cracking wise and slinging hep talk. Perennially quoted in the dailies and theater papers, Jughead would be hard for Vic not to know.)

Regardless of his academic failings, Boni Victor Bloom is achieving incremental success in the American entertainment industry. His drama “Anniversary Night” debuts in early 1936 over radio station WFBL. His jokes are sold to Dell Publications and, by summer ’37, he serves as magazine Film Fun’s associate editor for the same publisher, proving adept at whipping up spicy, snappy captions under the photos of scantily-clad showgirls and starlets.

Dell would employ his services for the next half-decade.

Vic’s pal Bolling Haxall shares, “Boni was a highly intelligent man. He had to be one of the most amusing men I have ever met. He told wonderful stories of his life on Broadway in the Ring Lardner tradition: Dr. Zippo, who made his living getting chorus girls out of stuck zippers at any time of the day or night. Or the down and out theatrical agent who was reduced to one possession, a cat, and he hawked the cat’s prowess as a mouser in the area with his spiel, ‘Great Mouser. Can’t Fail. Played Broadway.’”

Putting the Vic in Victory

By 1938, Vic is now editor of Film Fun and also Comedy magazine, both produced by Dell Publishing. The next year, the editor adds Dell’s 1,000 Jokes magazine and New Jokes Snappy Cartoon magazine to his responsibility. By 1940, he would be contributing to the Dell comics line and, likely through his relationship with comics editor Harry Shorten, Bloom would be freelancing for MLJ. Upon co-creating Archie, there’s no indication that the writer ever looks back, as he plugs away as songwriter, radio playwright, and — almost two months to the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — he is drafted and becomes an officer in the U.S. Army. At that exact same time as his joining the service, the name of Victor Bloom suddenly disappears from Film Fun, 1,000 Jokes, and every other Dell magazine he had edited. The comic book series “Speed Martin,” as credited to Vic Bloom, suddenly ends and “Wally Williams — American Boy” by Victor Boni also vanishes for good from the pages of Dell’s comic book line.

Issue #22 of Pep Comics was likely released two months before its cover date of Dec. ’41, about the time of Bloom’s enlistment, and, as mentioned, it appears on the stands with the strip “Archie” drawn by Bob Montana and written by Vic Bloom. The strip proves popular with readers, and “Percy” and “Wilbur” hit the showers as also-rans, while Archie proves a comics juggernaut that spans the decades. The Riverdale high-schooler is such a blockbuster for the company, they rename the company after him, adopting Archie Publications a few years after the debut. But no tales after Pep #22–24 have the Vic Bloom writing credit (and technically only #22 features his actual name as #23 and #24 are said by the publisher to have been written by him). While historians in the comic book field give a nod to Bloom, Archie co-creator Bob Montana would receive the lion’s share of appreciation, as the artist endowed so much of his own personality and high school experience as to make these first three Pep stories hardly recognizable as the same character. [Shaun Clancy has produced a documentary on the life of Bob Montana and the relationship of Bob’s Haverhill, Mass. hometown to Riverdale. For more info on this film, see upcoming issues of CBC. — Y.E.] While readers may have been charmed to read the first three installments of “Archie,” the U. S. Army in 1942 was doubtless ecstatic to be joined by Boni Victor Bloom, college-educated writer and fluent speaker of German, given our entry in the war against Hitler’s Third Reich. Bloom becomes a captain in the Office of Special Services (the OSS, predecessor of the CIA) and is stationed in Camp Barkeley, Abilene, Texas, base of the 12th Armored Division, the tank corps renowned as the “Fighting Hellcats.” In the service, Bloom is involved in the propaganda program “Why We Fight,” famed for the participation of Hollywood film directors Frank Capra and John Ford.

In April, 1944, the Special Services Office at the camp presents a musical comedy, “Hellcat Holiday,” which Bloom produces and writes both script and song lyrics. The cast includes many service personnel soldiers. The twoact revue is lauded by reviewers as “a peppy-fast, and smooth combination of Brooklyn and Broadway. Satire ran rampant, boxing the ears of the army and, on one occasion, President Roosevelt’s wife.” The musical show tours U.S. Army bases with many a sold-out performance.

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Herr Bloom

The war finally ended, Capt.

Bloom serves as the military governor of Heidenheim, Germany, during the Allied occupation.

Honorably discharged in 1948, he signs up with the U. S. Army Reserve Europe Corps, continuing as MGO of Bad Mergentheim, and after retiring in 1952, a local news report states Bloom is emphatically praised for his “benevolent” governance. He works for BBC Radio and remains in his adopted country for the rest of his life, which ends on April 13, 1983, in Heidelberg. A lifelong bachelor, he is 74 upon his demise.

The Hellcat Newsletter of Feb. 1986, in a posthumous tribute, features this quote from a surviving member of 12th Armored Division: “Boni V. Bloom was a Hellcat officer, special services educator, and military government administrator. He also proved to have great theatrical talent, as well. He had to be one of the most amusing men I have ever met. He told wonderful stories of his life on Broadway in the Ring Lardner tradition.

He was a highly intelligent man with many talents.”

What his admirer fails to note is Bloom’s specific contribution to the history of comic books as the co-creator of Archie Andrews, “America’s Typical Teenager,” to this day one of the most instantly recognizable characters to emerge from the form. Truth to tell — and sad as it is to learn he received no acknowledgment while alive — Vic probably had little memory of his brief stint anyway. It was, after all, one assignment in a hurricane of prolific activity during his decade in the Big Apple. Those three “Archie” stories were mere blips in a flurry of furious creative output as the professional writer was editing popular magazines, typing up movie scripts for comedic teams, thinking up gags and jokes, writing pop songs, scribbling other comic book scripts, penning radio dramas, and contributing to pulps.

Upon going on to his eternal reward, obituaries note that Bloom left no children behind. While that might be technically true, he is assuredly — heretofore and ever after — to be remembered most fondly as a father of one of the most beloved American icons. And, getting to know the creator, we learn that that fictional, four-color foul-up of a romantic boy neglecting his studies…? Y’know, the one distracted by girls and driven with a perpetual desire to be noticed…? Archibald Andrews, you’re not too different from your dad, are you?

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1973 tribute to the great artist by the legendary editor & writer

Originally published in the 1973 New York Comic Art Convention souvenir booklet Above: Russ Heath employed the services of a Playboy photographer and the artist posed for the camera to use as reference for his Blazing Combat #4 [July ’66] tour de force “Give and Take,” written by Archie Goodwin, who also edited the short-lived but outstanding war comics magazine. Here’s a detail of one of the pics, courtesy of R.H. Below: Spread from that very same issue of Blazing Combat, published by Warren Publications.

Background image: Detail of Sgt. Rock from Russ’ splash panel of Our Army at War #239 [Dec. ’71].

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

©2014 Warren Publications.

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It’s World War II, right? And there’s this American Sergeant, huge belts of .50 caliber ammo slung over each soldier, blazing tommy gun in hand, charging across the snow right into the fire of a big ass German Panther tank, bullets tearing gouts in the ground, the trees, and him. Down he goes… and right back up, like some kind of maniac kid’s toy, lobbing a grenade right into the tank’s open turret. BA-LANNG! John Wayne stuff, right? There’s no way I’m going to believe that, right?

Wrong. Oh, I scoff a bit first. I haven’t been much at accepting on faith since, as a young fan, I laid out three beans for what appeared to be Weird Science #6, but turned out to be the cover of same with a Mighty Mouse interior stapled into it. But dammit, this looks right. From the last nut and bolt on that Panther, to the eyelets on the Sergeant’s web belt.

And there’s the Sergeant himself. The look of flesh and bone beneath his uniform rather than the standard muscle orgy that passes for a living being in most comics today; the feeling of mass, of weight, of human awkwardness as he moves and falls; the shock and rage that changes on his face on being hurt. I see these details and, McGovern-supportingStop-the-bombing-in-Cambodia-petition-signer or not, I buy the whole thing. Russ Heath has convinced me again.

By and large, comics are vehicles for the fantastic.

Whether it’s some guy in a crazy outfit leaping tall buildings with a single bound or a full-scale war between Asgard and the Trolls, no other medium can beat comics for showing it, for making it believable in context. And that last is the name of the game. The further you move from the fantastic, the more you are in direct competition with TV and movies, where instant believability can come pretty much with the pointing of a camera. I think this is a contributing factor to the dying interest in the more realistic genres in comics.

What crime comic could compete with Bonnie and Clyde?

What Western with a Peckinpah or Leone film? Yet, there’s one area where comics are still competing. The war comic.

And the guy most often beating the celluloid people at their own game is Russ Heath.

“Give me something real and I can do it. Like a guillotine.

There’s terror in that, but it’s real. Not like this monster stuff.”

The quote’s not accurate — it’s been about seven years since the conversation — but that’s the gist of it. Russ had just recently done what was probably the high-water art effort in a short-lived but extremely well illustrated Warren publication called Blazing Combat. Now we were discussing a script I, as editor, had sent him in the hopes of getting his work into Warren’s other books, Creepy and Eerie. The script involved zombies; Russ was sending it back. He wanted to do what he felt he did best. Something real. Not that Russ can’t do the other. Back in the ’50s, he was doing zombies, vampires, werewolves in all of Timely’s (later Marvel) horror books, and doing them better than most. But at the same time, he was also contributing to their war comics. And it’s in comparison that you begin to appreciate Russ’ attitude.

The skill and ability are highly evident in both, but the enthusiasm, the incredible feeling for detail, for capturing evocative movement and action, are far stronger in the war jobs.

Russ began working in comics in the late ’40s and soon was a regular in Timely’s Westerns. A Kid Colt Outlaw from 1949 features an 18-page story by him. The drawing is cruder, figures more awkward, but the rendering, while nowhere near as polished as it will become, is still powerful, anchoring the characters solidly in time and place.

The flair for weaponry and costume is already well-developed. Perhaps the fact Russ’ father was a cowboy gave him an early edge and understanding, but while other artists of the period

Photo ©2014 Russ Heath. Background image TM & © DC Comics.

by Archie Goodwin

TM & © DC Comics.

Broom Hilda TM & ©2014 Chicago Tribune Syndicate.

seemed mired in fancy-dress look of Hollywood’s singing cowboys, his Westerns were filled with convincing grit and realism.

Two years later, Russ was a Timely mainstay, doing covers and contributing stories throughout their line. His Arizona Kid series ranks with the best Westerns done for comics. With jobs like “Beach-Head” [Apr. ’52], or “The Guns of Juan Perez” [Feb. ’54], one wondered how he could get much better. The answer came sometime later when he took over National’s “Sgt. Rock.”

From Timely to “Rock” is a big jump. It skips a lot. It skips a raft of short stories for DC’s war titles; it skips features like “The Golden Gladiator” and “Robin Hood” in The Brave and the Bold; it skips fine interior work and dazzling covers on Sea Devils. Most important of all, it skips a move to Chicago and collaboration with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder on “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy (and mouth-watering, full-color rendering of pulchritude the caliber of Miss Fanny’s is definitely not to be skipped, although us intellectuals tend to groove more on the pungent social satire, right?). But finally, you come to “Rock.”

To say Joe Kubert is a rough act to follow goes beyond understatement into absurdity. Yet Russ has done it and in the process blossomed from an excellent artist into an incredible one. Without ever falling into sheer gimmickry, Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Russ’ straightforward page and panel layouts have taken on a richness and variety, adding to the story’s dramatic impact. Working from scale models, he’s brought new meaning to the word realism, maybe even gone beyond it, bringing a sort of super-clarity to combat scenes no film or camera could hope to catch. Yet now, where in earlier material it might not have been true, his characters, developed from the largerthan-life creations of Kanigher and Kubert, are strong enough to stand out among the pyrotechnics. The technical accuracy never dwarfs the humanity. You believe Rock and Easy Company’s nightmare moments of battle.

And believing those, you also believe the quiet and reflective ones when the madness of war is questioned or commented upon. Russ Heath’s artwork made it too damn real not to.

Artist’s artist. That’s something you read everywhere. I haven’t heard anyone in comics actually say it. What I do hear said is: “You see what that crazy bastard Heath did this month?” And everybody stops and looks at the new “Sgt. Rock” and shakes their head. Then they go back to their drawing boards or their typewriters or wherever, and maybe they work a little longer, try a little harder. And maybe it has nothing to do with a crazy bastard like Russ Heath.

But maybe it does.

Above: Oh mein gott! Heath’s breathtaking spread for “Easy’s First Tiger,” graced with his mind-boggling attention to detail.

He also scripted the story from Our Army at War #244 [Apr. ’72].

Inset left: Archie Goodwin at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con in a photo by Alan Light. Below: 1973 Comic Art Con souvenir book, where this essay first appeared.

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by S.C. RinGgenberg Contributing Writer

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#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Portrait ©2014 Russ Heath. Covers TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Self-portrait by the artist in question. Coloring by the Masked Morrow. Below: Heath cover art, Outlaw Fighters #5 [Apr. 1955]. Is that Anthony Quinn?

If artistic talent were currency in the comics field, then Russell Deheart Heath, Jr., would undoubtedly be one of the richest men in the world. Heath, a veteran toiling in the field since the mid-1940s, has long been one of the most talented draftsmen in the business, but has become less a “fan favorite,” because he was usually working in genres other than costumed super-heroes, the industry’s dominant paradigm for the last four decades. Indeed, despite a comics career that has lasted more than six decades, he remains something of an enigma to mainstream comics fans. His work is, of course, well-known to fans of war, Western, adventure, romance, and humor comics because he has focused on those genres with only occasional forays into the realm of the “long underwear” characters like Batman or The Punisher. He is assuredly, as Archie Goodwin said, an “artist’s artist,” and among those who enjoy a story brilliantly rendered, his fans are legion.

In addition to his peerless draftsmanship and slick inking, Heath’s work has always been characterized by intense realism, excellent use of lighting effects, and expert attention to historically accurate detail, whether costuming, vehicles, and other technology.

This penchant for authenticity stems from his earliest childhood. Watching Western movies with his dad (who, in his day, had been a working cowboy), and listening to his father pick apart the clothing, horsemanship, and faulty depictions of the Old West gave Heath an early, and long-lasting respect for the value of authenticity.

As Heath recalled in a 2002 interview for Comic Book Marketplace, “My father…had been a cowboy, and when we’d go these Saturday afternoon movies… at the movies they had these continuous things, like Tom Mix or the Lone Ranger — serials, I guess it was — and he’d say, ‘Oh, no self-respecting cowboy would wear that fancy thingamabob there… Anybody that was really in there, that was a cowboy, would know that, you know, that fancy hopped-up costume.’ And that, I guess, got me on the trail to be authentic so that the people, your audience, might believe

that you might have some knowledge or what the heck you’re drawing.”

Given Heath’s preference for war comics and Westerns, it’s a little surprising that we can find only one story that mixed the genres: “Four Legged Tank,” which appeared in Star Spangled War Stories #36 [Aug. 1955], telling the story of a World War II cavalryman who mounts a stray farm horse while on a scouting foray, and takes on Wehrmacht soldiers and a German tank from horseback.

After being released by the U.S. Army Air Corps at the end of the Second World War, Heath began his professional art career in earnest, first working as a gofer at an ad agency. During his lunch hour he would make the rounds, portfolio in hand, and wound up getting some work drawing Westerns for Atlas in 1947, at the time when the publisher was just starting to release a profuse number of shoot-’emups; editor Stan Lee recognized that Heath’s determinedly realistic style was perfect for the genre.

As Heath’s later editor and scripter Goodwin noted in the 1973 Comic Art Convention souvenir book in his tribute to his friend, “While other artists of the period seemed mired in the fancy-dress look of Hollywood’s singing cowboys, his Westerns were always filled with convincing grit and realism.”

Although Heath’s style was firmly rooted in reality, he was not quite as obsessive as was his friend John Severin, an avowed history fanatic. Since the ’50s, Heath did only a few Westerns, instead concentrating on war and adventure comics. However, whenever he does revisit the genre, he always invests his Wild West sagas with the same authenticity that got his work noticed in the ‘50s.

While working for Atlas throughout the ‘50s, at a time when Westerns were one of the dominant cultural tropes in film, television, toys, and comics, Heath did a staggering number of covers and stories for titles like Frontier Western, All-Western Winners, Outlaw Fighters, Tex Taylor, Westerns Outlaws, Western Thrillers, Quick Trigger Western, Wild Western, Reno Browne Hollywood’s Greatest Cowgirl, Black Rider, and Wyatt Earp, as well as chronicling the adventures of a small army of Atlas’s “Kid” characters, the Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, Apache Kid, Arizona Kid, The Western Kid, and last but not least, Kid Colt Outlaw. His first earliest job for Timely/Atlas is not definitively established, but most Heath

All covers TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

scholars believe his first work for the company was a trio of short Western tales, including a “Kid Colt” story in Wild Western #4 [Nov. ’48], the second “Two-Gun Kid” story in Two-Gun Kid #5 [Dec. ’48), and another “Two-Gun Kid” story in Wild Western #5 [Dec. ’48]. After the ’50s, Heath focused more on war comics than Westerns, though he did contribute one strikingly composed cover of a DC Western reprint collection for Showcase #72 [Jan.–Feb. ’68].

When Heath drew the syndicated comic strip The Lone Ranger (with scripts by Cary Bates), which was carried by a handful of regional newspapers in the mid-’80s, the American adventure strip was all but defunct. Still, Heath gave the strip his artistic all from 1981 through ’84, and produced a beautifully drawn, exciting Western that deserves to be reprinted. [In 2011, Dynamic Forces had announced an impending hardcover release collecting 500 strips, but that has apparently yet to see print. — Y.E.] In 1981, Heath also lent his historical expertise and inking skills to Stan Lynde’s Latigo, the Western strip Lynde did after leaving Rick O’Shay in 1977 following a syndicate dispute.

The word legend often gets bandied about when referring to many of the oldest, most venerable comics artists, some of whom are frankly unworthy of the appellation. However, Russ Heath, the comics artist, really is a talent of almost mythical proportions, though he was always less of a cartoonist and more the realistic illustrator in the mold of artists like his inspiration Hal Foster and Alex Raymond than a cartoonist in the style of a Sheldon Moldoff or Red Ryder artist Fred Harmon, also an early influence. As he said in the 2002 CBM interview, “I wouldn’t even use the word cartoonist. I don’t even like it for myself.” You see, Heath had originally intended to crack the slick magazines like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post as an illustrator, but when he tried to break into that market in the late ’40s, those magazines were either on a slow spiral to extinction, or changing from painted and drawn illustrations to photography, so that career was not be. “I didn’t start to look for comics, really. Of course, I looked at anything and everybody. It was a whole different setup in those days.

You could look up some of the great illustrators in The Saturday Evening Post. A lot of them were in New York.

And I’d just look them up in the phonebook and call them Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

up and they’d answer. And I’d say, ‘I’d like to show you my portfolio.’

And they’d say, ‘Come on over this afternoon, after lunch.’ Which is, you know, unheard of today. They’ve got a barrier of secretaries to keep people out.”

Despite his being an unknown quantity in the late ’40s, older established artists did allow Heath to visit and show his work. Among the famous illustrators he met this way was Albert Dorne, later one of the founders of the Famous Artists School. Heath even trekked to Philadelphia to show his portfolio to the Post, which at the time was still the Holy Grail for American illustrators. Unfortunately, none of Heath’s work ever appeared in that popular magazine. As disappointing as it might have been to the artist to miss out on the heyday of magazine illustration, we comic book fans are all the richer for it.

Heath’s first professional work came in the mid-’40s when he was still in high school, penciling and inking a “Hammerhead Hawley” story for Captain Aero Comics [V3, #11, Jan. ’44] that he did over summer vacation from school after meeting Quinlan. Then after serving in the Air Force through the end of World War II, and from the late 1940s on, year after year, he quietly produced hundreds and hundreds of pages of gorgeous artwork, many of them for DC, but also for Warren, Timely/Atlas/Marvel, and the abortive 1970s Atlas/Seaboard imprint edited by Stan Lee’s brother, Larry Lieber. Although there isn’t much of it, his work for Seaboard is some of his best from the ’70s, especially a violent, hard-edged crime story entitled, “Tough Cop” executed in beautiful ink washes that appeared in Thrilling Adventure Stories #2 [Aug. ’75]. Heath also contributed a WWII P.O.W. tale to the first issue of Thrilling, [“Escape From Nine

By One,” Feb. ’75, scripted by Heath] also executed in wash.

Interestingly, Heath’s work here was accompanied by stories from some of his old E.C. Comics 39

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

DC Special panel & Showcase TM & © DC Comics.

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colleagues, including Alex Toth and John Severin, as well as nice work by younger artists like Ernie Colón and Walter Simonson. Sadly, despite the excellence of both issues under the editorship of Jeff Rovin, the Thrilling Adventure Stories anthology was dragged down by the total collapse of the Seaboard line in 1975. He also contributed a beautiful cover and interior art to one of the best Seaboard color comics, the evocatively titled Planet of Vampires [#3, July ’75], the story of a group of astronauts trapped on a planet that is quite literally overrun with bloodsuckers (a concept that screams to be revived, by the way.) Rounding out his contributions to the Seaboard line was his work in the black-&-white horror magazine Devilina, whose title character was the sexy sister of Satan, and was presumably intended to cash in on the popularity of Warren’s Vampirella.

Aside from his realistic war, Western, crime, mystery, romance, and super-hero art, Heath demonstrated his versatility with numerous (and largely unknown) contributions to humor magazines like MAD (both in its comic-book and magazine incarnations. His art chores on the parody “Plastic Sam,” in MAD #14 [Aug. ’54] is a bona-fide classic, both in the way he referenced Jack Cole’s style, and the hilarious ways he and editor/writer/breakdown artist Harvey Kurtzman skewered the absurdity of the concept). Although Heath only contributed a single story to Kurtzman’s seminal war comic

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Previous page: Russ Heath covers for Atlas 1950s Western comics. Bottom left is Kid Colt Outlaw #39 [July 1954]. Upper right is Kid Colt Outlaw #34 [Feb. ’54], and bottom right is Western Thrillers #3 [Jan. ’55]. Above: Hyper-realistic Heath cover for Western Outlaws #3 [June ’54].

Inset right: Nice Heath cover for Showcase #72 [Jan.–Feb. 1968], which featured assorted reprints.

Below: Joe Kubert busts Russ’ balls. DC Special #5 [Oct.–Dec. ’69].

Frontline Combat, he continued working with Kurtzman on other magazines, including Trump, Humbug, and Help!, through the mid-’60s. He also contributed to the Atlas MAD rip-off, Wild (sometimes using a surprisingly Kurtzman-esque style), and other ’50s clones such as Lunatickle, Frantic, Riot, Loco, and the original Crazy. Later he contributed some realistic humor strips and illustrations for National Lampoon, as well as the ’70s Lampoon knock-offs Harpoon and Apple Pie, and Cracked, the most successful MAD imitator. His humor work, it should be noted, also includes a long stint working with Kurtzman and Will Elder on the “Little Annie Fanny” strip for Playboy from 1962 through ’68. Heath did not work on every strip, mind you, but enough that he was one of Kurtzman and Elder’s most prolific ghosts, alongside such greats as Arnold Roth, Frank Frazetta, and Jack Davis.

In all, Heath contributed to 16 “Annie Fanny” strips during that time. As Heath recalled in his Alter Ego #40 [Sept. 2004] interview with Jim Amash, “I ended up staying in Chicago, doing changes, just waiting for Hefner’s okay. He might not be able to see me for two weeks, and I’d sit there twiddling my thumbs, chasing girls, whatever. It was flying back and forth from New York that prompted my staying in Chicago.”

So, while assisting Kurtzman in the early ’60s, Heath actually took up residence for several months in the Playboy mansion after traveling there to assist Kurtzman and Elder on yet one more tight deadline, and then simply didn’t leave. As Mark Evanier recounted the story in “Honoring Russ,” a 2010 column: “One time when deadlines were nearing meltdown, Harvey Kurtzman called Heath in to assist in a marathon work session at the Playboy mansion in Chicago. Russ flew in and was given a room there, and spent many days aiding Kurtzman and artist Will Elder in getting one installment done of the strip. When it was completed, Kurtzman and Elder left… but Heath just stayed. And stayed. And stayed some more. He had a free room as well as free meals whenever he wanted them from Hef’s 24-hour kitchen. He also had access to whatever young ladies were lounging about… so he thought, ‘Why leave?’ He decided to live there until someone told him to get out… and for months, no one did. Everyone just kind of assumed he belonged there. It took quite a while before someone realized he didn’t and threw him and his drawing table out.”

Despite eventually being evicted from the Playboy mansion, Heath bore Hugh Hefner no ill will; he had too many fond memories. “When I was living in his house, [Hefner] might be sitting in the living room one evening with ten different people and they’d be comedians that were playing in town or something. Shel Silverstein was a sort of semi-permanent guest.

We’d be sitting there talking until eight in the morning, but Hef wasn’t there the entire time. He was always locked up in a room doing his ‘Forum’ articles and such.” Heath even gives the publisher credit for his cartooning acumen, saying of his critiques of “Annie Fanny,” “They were very reasonable. In fact, we saw eye-toeye on a lot of things.

Harvey used to use me as a sounding board to figure out what Hef was going to say about things. And it’d usually

TM & ©2014 DC Comics.

TM & ©2014 DC Comics.

be the same thing. I like Hefner on a personal level. I always thought he’d be weird or something, until I met him. If the average person was thrust into his position, they’d be seven times as weird as he was. Hef was very loyal. He was nice to people and expected it back.”

Being at Hefner’s estate also gave Heath the opportunity work with one of the Playboy photographers, who assisted him in shooting reference photos for the story that many fans consider his greatest single effort, “Give and Take,” which was written by Archie Goodwin and appeared in the fourth and final issue of Blazing Combat [July ’66]. If you’re a Russ Heath fan and never saw this story, you are missing an authentic masterpiece of comic book art. For this six-page story, Heath outdid himself, taking a month-and-a-half to draw something that would normally only take a week or two, and using Duoshade board to produce dazzlingly realistic lighting effects. Heath had his own reasons for slaving over this job, as he related to CBM, “Well, what it was, all the guys who were slated to be in the book were all my peers, and the very best of them from, you know, a lot of them from the E.C. [books]. Wally Wood, and John Severin, etc., etc.…

So, I wanted to do a damn good story so I wouldn’t look bad by comparison. So I took a bunch of photographs and I did a bunch of research and I bought stuff for the photographs and I had a Playboy photographer on a weekend when the office was closed, and we went down to the studios and shot, you know, 40 shots to work from for that story.” [All the G.I.s in the story are based on photos of the artist.—SCR.] “And it certainly succeeded,” Heath continued. “My God, I ran into somebody — I tried to hire somebody to help me when I broke my wrist — and I asked this guy to send over anybody he knew that I could make a deal with, that maybe I could give him lessons and some money and so on, but I couldn’t afford much then. So he sent this girl over, or I called her up and said, ‘This is Russ Heath,’ and she said, ‘Who?’ You know, it was like I had no idea if she’d know who I was.

But she liked that job, that Blazing Combat job so well that she carried it on her person at all times, had it in her valise with her wherever she went. I guess I succeeded with her, you know. And I came to realize that the ones that I had done like that people talked about, remembered. I did another one that I wrote called, “Easy’s First Tiger.” [Our Army at War #244, Apr. ’72] It started out with a big, double-page spread of the Tiger. I wanted to do the definitive Tiger tank so that nobody needed to bother to try to do that tank better again.”

It deserves be stated here unequivocally that Russ Heath succeeded with his aim to draw the definitive Tiger tank in comics. It was also a rare instance of the artist writing his own script. It stands as one of the very best war stories this classic war artist ever did. Sadly, most fans will never get to see the other story Heath began for Blazing Combat, which never saw print due to that title’s cancellation. However the splash page was printed in Alter Ego #40, accompanying Amash’s excellent interview. This superb splash offers tantalizing evidence of another potential Heath war story masterpiece, this time written by John Albano, instead of Archie Goodwin, who wrote “Give and Take.”

Surprisingly, given the massive volume of war art Heath has cranked out over the years for DC, Atlas,z and E.C., the Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

artist’s own favorite job is not a war story at all. It’s a horrific African adventure entitled, “Yellow Heat” that appeared in Vampirella # 58 [Mar. ’77]. Heath pulled out all the stops on the art of Bruce Jones’ scripted tale; its searing, photo-realistic panels add to the startling shock ending. This one is another must-see for Heath fans, as it shows this talented illustrator at the very peak of his form. The three stories mentioned get my vote as his very best material, but really he has done so much quality work over the course of his career that he single-handedly raised the bar for all of his colleagues.

Above: Before taking over Joe Kubert’s “Sgt. Rock” assignment in Our Army at War, Russ Heath was best known as artist on “The Haunted Tank,” written by Robert Kanigher in the pages of G.I. Combat, starting in 1961 and continuing into the early ’70s. Here is a quiet opening panel from GIC #142 [June–July ’70]. Below: Our fave GIC cover, #130 [June–July ’68].

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This page: Certainly Russ Heath’s most creative collaborator is the certifiable genius and MAD-man, Harvey Kurtzman, with whom Russ had a long association. Beginning with the first issue of Frontline Combat — right inset is a page from their single war story together, “O.P.!” from that July–Aug. 1951 issue — and through “Plastic Sam” (panel details above and below) in Mad #16 [Aug. ’54] — and finally “Little Annie Fanny” in Playboy magazine (at bottom, panel detail from Dec. 1963 installment).

that hobby lent further authenticity to Kanigher’s silly, often far-fetched scripts for the “Sea Devils” stories. However, the artist used the series’ fantasy elements to great advantage, crafting noteworthy covers for both the Showcase issues and the Sea Devils title that featured impressive monsters, sea-gods, and mermaids.

Kanigher’s fantastic scripts for Star Spangled War Stories’ “War That Time Forgot” series gave Heath ample opportunities to draw wild, impossible-to-resist covers showing soldiers, sailors, and airmen battling dinosaurs. His cover for SSWS #137 [Feb.–Mar. ’68], showing a dinosaur attacking a U.S. Navy sub on the surface, is one of his most memorable.

His work for Weird War Tales in the early ’70s also gave Heath opportunities for some very imaginative war stories.

WWT #3 [Jan.–Feb. ’72] featured “The Pool…,” a story that told the parallel tales of two groups of cavemen and opposing groups of German and American soldiers fighting over the same desert pool, centuries apart which demonstrated the unchanging nature of warfare.

Heath worked with Kanigher as his editor on DC’s war titles from the mid-’50s until 1968, when Kanigher left his editorial position. Heath continued to work with Kanigher as a

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Frontline Combat, MAD TM & ©2014 E.C. Publications, Inc. “Little Annie Fanny” ©2014 Playboy, Inc.

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His flair for costuming and realistic period detail was put to good use by DC Comics on series such as “The Golden Gladiator” (set in ancient Rome) and “Robin Hood” (set in medieval England) in The Brave and the Bold when it still featured swashbuckling adventures like the abovenamed strips.

Overall, Heath has worked in the comics business for almost seven decades, beginning with Holyoke in 1944, but is probably best known for the war, horror, and Western comics he did for DC, Marvel, and Warren. However, Heath’s comics work includes almost every genre from humor, crime, romance, and jungle adventures to science-fiction, in addition to a smattering of super-hero stories (Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Son of Satan, Marvel Boy, “The Human Torch”) and covers, though he was never very comfortable with that genre. As he mentions in the CBM interview, “[W] hen I do some characters in capes or costumes, they look like they’re ready to go to a Halloween party, you know. They don’t look convincing… the one thing I missed completely was to get into the feeling and character and you know, not be so absolutely literal in everything, I mean, because to get into the character as it was meant… envisioned to be… my stuff, to me, here and there there’s terribly stiff panels of [Batman] standing there looking, again, like he should go to a costume party.” He echoed these sentiments in his interview with Amash: “I was too much of a realist and maybe too literal-minded to ever really get into super-heroes. I couldn’t believe Superman could jump over the Empire State Building without cracking the pavement on landing, or [not] carrying his Clark Kent clothes. The minute you create a super-hero, who are you going to put against him? It leads to unreality.”

Despite his antipathy for the genre, Heath did some impressive cover work and interior art on the first issue of Marvel Boy [Dec. ’50] during the short-lived Atlas super-hero revival in the early 1950s, as well as some slick-looking rendering on “The Human Torch” in Young Men #24 [Dec. ’53]. (Interestingly enough, however, original Torch creator Carl Burgos did the splash page for that story instead of Heath.)

Among his notable non-super-hero achievements are the co-creation of “The Haunted Tank” in G.I. Combat and “Sea Devils” (both done in collaboration with longtime DC writer/ editor Robert Kanigher). Kanigher had a reputation for being difficult to work with and was a tough editor, but even he had these kind words to say about Russ Heath’s work in an interview in Chris Pedrin’s Big Five, a chronicle of DC’s five legendary war comics, “His draftsmanship was unequaled. He could draw the parting of the Red Sea on the head of a pin and have room left over for Marc Antony’s address to the Roman Citizens. Russ’ depiction of tanks was so charismatic and real that you could climb into one and drive it away, easily steering and firing its guns at the same time. As for his aircraft, you could climb into the cockpit of one of his planes and zoom into the heavens.”

Heath learned how to scuba dive and his knowledge of

TM & ©2014 DC Comics.

TM & ©2014 DC Comics.

writer for several more decades however, even after Joe Kubert replaced R.K. as editor of DC’s war titles. In the late ’60s, Heath eventually replaced Kubert as the main artist on “Sgt. Rock” in Our Army at War. Since Kubert had been doing “Rock” for almost a decade, this was a big transition for the fans. Fortunately, Heath had the artistic chops to pull it off, and even garnered new fans for the venerable non-com with his continued, ever-increasing artistic prowess. As Goodwin observed about this massive change in DC’s war comics, “To say Joe Kubert is a rough act to follow goes beyond understatement… Yet Russ has done it and in the process blossomed from an excellent artist into an incredible one…

Working from scale models, he’s brought new meaning to the word ‘realism’ — maybe even gone beyond it, bringing a sort of super-clarity to combat scenes that no film or camera could hope to catch.”

Heath did superb work for DC’s war books, but the raconteur also had an active social life in the late ’60s and early ’70s, something that frequently caused him to be late turning in work. Even though he was a good friend of Kubert’s, his tardiness became such a problem that Kubert once told him in exasperation by phone, “If I had you here in New York, I’d punch you right in the face.” As Heath ruefully noted in his interview with Jon B. Cooke in Comic Book Artist Special Edition, “That’s one of the things where I started improving my stuff a lot. I was trying to make up for being late, I wanted to dazzle… if they’re distracted by how neat it looked, they’re not going to come down so hard on me for being late — or so I thought. Later on, they wised-up, and started [extending the] deadlines. All that pressure disappeared, because if they knew you were usually late, they’d give a deadline two weeks before they really needed it… But Joe and I remained good friends.”

Despite problems getting the work in on time, Heath fondly remembers his work on “Sgt. Rock.” “When I look through the ‘Sgt. Rock’ stories,” he said, “each one had a special deal. As much as they were alike, they were all different. I liked to interject something to make the stories more interesting, like snow… there was a story we did about blood, by having it on top of the snow, it made it different. I’d make one a rainy thing, to establish weather, instead of just hanging back in limbo, make it winter, and get a chance to draw different clothes and there was the snow effect, too. There was a ‘Sgt. Rock’ job where he gets his voice box temporarily cut, which was a neat winter story… there were a couple of good winter war stories.”

Although Heath did quite a number of “Haunted Tank” stories in G.I. Combat [37 stories by our count, between #87 [Apr.–May ’61] and #152 [Feb.–Mar. ’72], amounting to just over 531 pages. —Y.E.], he never really liked the

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repetitive nature of Kanigher’s scripts. As he told Amash, “I liked ‘Sgt. Rock’ much more than any of my other features. A lot of people like my ‘Haunted Tank’ work but, to me, it was essentially retelling the same story over and over again. I didn’t voice my opinions because it’s safer not to.”

While Heath continued assisting Will Elder with drawing “Annie Fanny” whenever they were in a deadline crunch, which was fairly often, the opulent full-color strip was not Heath’s sole effort as a ghost artist. He also assisted syndicated cartoonists like George Wunder on Terry and the Pirates from 1947–61 (alongside fellow ghost E.C. great George Evans), Dan Barry on Flash Gordon from 1980–81, and (as mentioned) Stan Lynde, doing inking on the Western series, Latigo in 1981. Among his lesser-known syndicated comic strip work was drawing the adaptation of the movie Condorman for the Disney Treasury of Classic Tales Sunday strip. He also took on the Lone Ranger assignment, but it’s fair to say that he spent the vast majority of his career toiling away in the comic-book salt mines.

Some of his more notable latter-day assignments were drawing the graphic novel adaptation of the film made from Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer [Disney, June ’91] where his graceful realism and attention to historical detail proved an excellent complement to Stevens’ style, and inking a

This page: Russ Heath is very fondly recalled as artist on the aquatic adventure series Sea Devils, written by Bob Kanigher.

Above is Russ’ great recreation of Showcase #29 [Nov.–Dec. ’60] cover. Inset left is detail from splash page of Showcase #27 [July–Aug. ’60]. Below is Heath cover, Sea Devils #2 [Nov.–Dec. ’61].

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Ads ©2014 the respective copyright holder. What The--?! parody ad ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Comics-reading Baby Boomers doubtless recall these ads selling cheap plastic soldiers, enticed by the great Russ Heath illustrations. The plastic figures…?

Not nearly as good as the great artwork, shall we say. For an issue of the Marvel satire comic book What The--?!, Russ made fun of his old ads. Upper right, from #5 [July 1989]. Written by Marcy Siry. Note that in the Revolutionary War ad, upper left, Russ snuck in his initials in the bottom left, which we have enhanced and called-out.

Shadow graphic novel (The Shadow: 1941 [Marvel, 1988]) over Michael W. Kaluta’s pencils when original inker Bernie Wrightson had to drop out of the project due to a thumb injury. Here again, Heath’s attention to detail and knowledge of period clothing, cars and aircraft served him well. Heath also did all art chores (pencils, inks, and colors) on the Doug Murray-scripted Vietnam-era Hearts and Minds graphic novel for Marvel [1990], a shattering story of the love between an American soldier and Vietnamese woman.

In addition to drawing comics pages, covers, and artwork for syndicated strips, Heath, in his role as a commercial illustrator, also created two widely-seen advertisements for toy sets featuring Revolutionary War soldiers and Roman Legionnaires that ran in the interiors and back covers of comic books from the ’60s to the ’70s. Heath was not allowed to sign either of these pieces, but sharp-eyed fans of his work recognized his clean, superbly realistic rendering and relished them as excellent examples of his style. Kids who were conned into buying the toys these ads were selling were less enthusiastic. As Heath noted in a 2007 online interview, “I got fifty bucks for those two separate pages…

A lot of people didn’t know I did them because [the client] didn’t want them signed. I did have a small ‘RH’ on the lower left-hand corner of the Revolutionary soldiers… Then [customers] would blame me [when the actual toys were not as depicted]; I’d never seen the damned things, because they’re like a bas-relief (or whatever they call it). They’re not fully formed, not three-dimensional. It would be flat things

that were shaped a little and the kids felt gypped and they figured that it was my fault.”

In the early ’60s, panels by DC war comics artists were appropriated by “pop” painter Roy Lichtenstein, including some by Russ Heath. Perhaps even beyond his comics work, these images might be his most widely-seen material, though Lichtenstein used elements of individual panels and cobbled them together. While Lichtenstein’s paintings now sell in the millions, Heath didn’t seem particularly miffed by Lichtenstein appropriating his original images, although he did comment in an interview

by Jim McClauchlin for Newsama, “They exhibited it at the Museum of Modern Art when I was living in New York, and they invited be to come and be a guest for the opening. But I was chasing a deadline. Couldn’t make it…” Ironically, Lichtenstein’s masterpiece was later exhibited in two other cities where Russ was living, and each time Russ Heath missed hooking up with the artist who’d “borrowed” his art. With all of the money the painting had generated for Lichtenstein in terms of prints and the sale of the original, Heath figured the least the pop art maestro could do was buy him a drink, so he tried calling Lichtenstein one last time, but, Heath recalls, “Before he could get back to me, he died. Anything to get out of buying me a cocktail, right? I figure I missed a free glass of wine, maybe three if you count all the showings. Someone owes me.”

Russ Heath had always been a good draftsman but, by the late ’60s, with two decades of drawing for comics and advertising under his belt, his work made a quantum leap in quality, partly because of an industry-wide change in paper size for the original art, and partly out of his own desire to avoid the wrath of editor Joe Kubert, since Heath was frequently late turning in his assignments in the ’60s. From around 1968 on, Heath’s artwork attained a level of quality that few comic book artists before or since have achieved.

Looking at his work in its totality, Heath deserves to be ranked up in the firmament of genius draftsmen like Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Lou Fine, Will Eisner, Frank Frazetta, Reed Crandall, Al Williamson, Wally Wood, Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson, Dave Stevens, Frank Cho, Adam Hughes, and a handful of others.

In fact, his run on the “Sgt. Rock” strip in Our Army at War in the majority issues from #172 [Oct. ’66] through 281 [June ’75] — 62 issues, and one-quarter page shy of a staggering 858 pages of artwork — ranks as one of the finest runs on a character by any artist in American comic books. Interestingly, although Joe Kubert is the artist most associated with the man called Rock, Heath’s version of the character captures the sergeant’s face and personality perfectly, simply rendered in a more realistic style.

Paintings ©2014 the estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Panels TM & ©2014 DC Comics.

Despite Heath’s deadline problems, Kubert had this to say about his star artist’s penchants for authenticity and realism, stating these qualities, “[S]et him apart. He could illustrate mechanical things like rifles and tanks in a realistic way that few other artists could. He would build models of the things he would draw prior to drawing them and his stuff would come out right on the button. Other artists used to keep what they called a swipe file — pictures of things they may have to draw someday that they could use for reference. Russ’ work was so good, other artists used it as reference.”

By the mid-’70s, Heath stopped working regularly on DC’s war titles after moving to the West Coast. In California, his professional focus shifted to working in animation and syndicated strips, including his revival of The Lone Ranger.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Heath’s style is the way he draws faces. They’re generally somewhat idealized but always believable, especially when expressing the extremes of the emotional spectrum. The beauty of Heath’s women is also legendary. He can draw sexy women like no one else, a skill he rarely got to use in his war comics, but employed to stunning effect in his work for more adult comics such as “Annie Fanny” for (where his superb drawing was always buried under the glossy veneer of Will Elder’s lush watercolor style) and in “Tuck It In,” a 1976 effort for the lesser skin magazine Cheri, as well as the prurient but hilarious “Cowgirls at War” for National Lampoon (scripted by the outrageous Michael O’Donoghue, “Mr. Mike” of Saturday Night Live fame), and both Penthouse Comix and Penthouse’s Men’s Adventure Comix. Given his way with the female form, it’s really a shame Heath didn’t get to work on more adult-oriented comic art. Although his run on Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight [#46–49, June–Aug. ’93] appeared under the aegis of DC Comics, his lush rendering of the Catwoman’s skintight costume bordered on the salacious, and probably set the pulses of many a fanboy racing, though there was no actual nudity in the book.

Heath retired from comics in the 2000s, though he continues creating commissions. Even a total knee replacement didn’t sideline the still-vital artist for very long. He recovered quickly and was back at the drawing board and hanging out in his familiar haunts. Like many of the people who worked in comics, Heath didn’t get rich from his comics work, and is forced to live on a small pension, slim royalties from DC generated by reprints of his work, and commissions, though his health in later years prevented him from working at times, such as when he had a total knee replacement in 2011. If you want to show your admiration for Russ Heath, and give him some much-needed financial support, it is highly recommended that you purchase the DC reprints of his Sea Devils, “Haunted Tank,” and “Sgt. Rock” stories, as he receives royalties for those Showcase collections from DC. His last work in comics is some covers he did for the Dave Sims’ comic Glamorpuss.

To the last, Heath was unfailingly meticulous about accuracy in his work. All his editors knew that if you needed an artist who could accurately depict every bolt, port, and flange on a Tiger tank — or a curvaceous female form — Russ Heath was the go-to guy.

Looking back on his long career in a definitive interview with longtime comics fan and historian Roger Hill, Heath said, “When I was doing ‘Sgt. Rock,’ I was trying to make

each one a collector’s item.

You know, make each other better than the last. My pay was less than most people during that same period who were doing as much work, because I did not — would not — just knock it out. My feeling was if I became one of those hacks, I would never be able to do anything decent again. It would become a permanent way of working, and I didn’t want that.”

Over the last seven decades, Russ Heath’s unwavering excellence and quest for realism earned him countless battalions of loyal fans.

Among the honors given him are a ComicCon International Inkpot Award in 1997, and his 2009 induction into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.

This page: In the early 1960s, while Andy Warhol was finding inspiration in the canned soup aisles, painter Roy Lichtenstein scoured the comic book racks for ideas. He found it in the pages of DC war comics and promptly appropriated the panels of artists including Irv Novick, Jerry Grandenetti, and… Russ Heath, as well as others. “Blam!” was swiped partially from a Heath panel in “Aces Wild,” All-American Men of War #89 [Jan.–Feb. ’62].

“Okay Hot-Shot, Okay!” was stolen, in part, from a Heath panel featured in “The Haunted vs. the Killer Tank,” G.I. Combat #94 [June–July ’62]. David Barsalou, MFA, has meticulously examined the “fine artist” and the comics from whence his million-dollar work came and we encourage you to have a look at David’s research at www.flickr.com/deconstructing-roy-lichtenstein/.

Many thanks to David for his help and generosity. Comic book panel scans courtesy of James Ludwig.

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

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Above &

Portrait by

Greg Preston 46

“Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.”

Conducted by

JON B. Cooke

— Walter Pater

Beyond Russ Heath on giving his all to comic book art Sgt. Rock and the Haunted Tank TM & © DC Comics. The Baroness TM & ©2014 Hasbro, Inc. Portrait ©2014 Greg Preston.

Back in the day, filled with an insatiable desire for more comics stuff, in an age when four-color funnybooks were suddenly hip, my brother and I would tread far afield of the exploits of super-heroes in search of Good Art. And it was in the pages of Warren’s black-&-white horror magazines and gracing the parodies of National Lampoon, as well as within comics as diverse as “Sgt. Rock” and Son of Satan, we’d find it, gorgeous and sublime, inscribed with the distinct signature of Russ Heath.

Whether depicting the absurdity of an interstellar Amish family cavorting with aliens, a stroll through a Hieronymus Bosch-inspired Hades with the offspring of Lucifer himself, or a seemingly rational man inexplicably executing his wife and children on a perfectly lovely summer’s eve, Heath would draw the story with a panache and sensuality that was simply heart-stopping. I search now for comparisons to describe the magic of stumbling upon, often unexpectedly, a work by R.H.: the first time one tastes orange sherbet mixed with vanilla ice cream; seeing Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot; reading for pleasure The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager; encountering Billie Holiday’s voice on a scratchy old record; suddenly looking at the girl next door in an entirely new light. Distilled to a word: Satisfaction.

Few put in the effort as has Russell Deheart Heath, Jr. This tribute is a long time in coming. I have been friends with Russ since first we met in San Diego, enough so I was invited to stay at his Van Nuys bungalow, where the following interview took place ten years ago, on Jan. 20, 2004. It’s is our sincere hope that this issue serves as proper kudos to that tremendously gifted artist and delightfully wry, witty rapscallion for a lifetime of outstanding achievement. Thank you, Mr. Heath.

Transcribed by Steven E. Tice 47

Battlefield TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Clockwise from top left: Smilin’ Russ in a 1945 pic from his nine-month U.S. Air Force stint; the young artist finishes up his assignment, the cover of Battlefield #6 [Dec. ’52], shown inset; studio portrait from, it appears to us, about the same time; and Russ’ senior pic from the 1945 Montclair High School yearbook. Below: Russ’ cowboy dad, Russell, Sr.

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Comic Book Creator: Where’s your family from, Russ?

Russ Heath: My father’s from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

My mother is from Pittsburgh.

CBC: What’s your father’s ethnic background?

Russ: My great-grandfather, James Heath, came over from England back in God only knows when. There’s other relative lines up there that go way back.

CBC: England?

Russ: I’m not sure. It keeps dividing, each of these comes from somewhere else. Alan Barnard knows where in England my great-grandfather came from. I didn’t even know my great-grandfather’s first name until Alan, who lives in Hamilton, Ontario, did some research. Alan became an artist partially because of my comic books when he was reading as a kid. He’s now a pretty well-known illustrator. He researched my family history, sent me pictures of gravestones, of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather’s. My grandmother on my father’s side was from Whitby, Ontario, a local town near Hamilton, where my grandfather met her.

If you go way back one line, great-great-great — I don’t know how many greats — grandfather, Balthizer DeHart, married Mary Stuyvesant, sister of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, with the wooden leg.

CBC: What did your father do before settling down?

Russ: He did a number of things before he was married.

He was a cowboy in Arizona, punching cows. He worked in the Arizona copper mines, and then he worked in power plants in Arizona, and I guess that led to connections to Westinghouse, and he came to Pittsburgh and met my mother.

CBC: Your mother is from Pennsylvania?

Russ: Yes. Then they came east to New York for his work, but then I was born and they moved to New Jersey.

CBC: Was your dad a rugged guy?

Russ: Yeah, I got pictures of him looking pretty rugged.

CBC: Did he have any education?

Russ: He attended a couple different colleges. In Arizona and one was here in California.

CBC: What was he taking?

Russ: Engineering. He became an engineer and worked for Westinghouse for over 20 years, commuting back and forth from New Jersey to New York. It’s probably about 16 miles directly west of Montclair.

CBC: So he went from cowpoke to white-collar worker? #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Captain Aero Comics and Hammerhead Hawley TM & ©2014 the respective copyright holder.

Russ: Well, no. As I say, he worked in a power plant.

Engineering led to his connection with Westinghouse.

He became the president of Westinghouse International.

When I was a kid, they’d send him down to Venezuela, or somewhere when they’d opened up a new power plant or whatever — refineries and stuff.

CBC: So he became quite successful?

Russ: Yeah. He was an executive.

CBC: How old was your father when he met your mother?

Russ: I was born when he was about 29, give or take. It’s hard for me to remember that far back. [Jon laughs] CBC: What was your mother’s background?

Russ: She was an only child. I guess it’s possible that my grandfather worked for Westinghouse as well, that might have been the connection there as to how he met her.

Everybody in the family, including my ex-wife’s father, worked for Westinghouse.

CBC: So they got married in their twenties?

Russ: She was quite a bit younger.

CBC: What was her name?

Russ: Margaret.

CBC: And his name?

Russ: Russell.

CBC: Are you a junior?

Russ: Yes. CBC: What’s your middle name?

Russ: Deheart. [Points to wall plaque] There’s a coat of arms for the Dehearts.

CBC: French?

Russ: I guess it’s French, but I don’t know. My father was also in the Canadian Highlanders, with the kilts and all that.

CBC: In what year were you born?

Russ: 1926.

CBC: What was your mother’s maiden name?

Russ: Longnaker.

CBC: What was her background?

Russ: Pennsylvania Dutch, I’m guessing.

CBC: Any creative types on either side of the family?

Russ: Somebody — I think it was my grandmother — did some drawing. She did a copy of a painting. My father

This page: Russ Heath’s first professional comics work was the feature “Hammerhead Hawley” in Captain Aero Comics, which he drew during summer vacation in high school.

Above: Last page panel in #8’s installment [Sept. ’42], featuring a tell-tale “R/H.” Top: #8 splash.

Far left: Splash, #13. Left: Splash #14. All courtesy of Brian House and Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

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TM & ©2014 Marvel Entertainment, Inc.

Top, this page and next: Panels from the “Return of the Brain” story, illustrated by Russ Heath, from Adventures Into Terror #6 [Oct. ’51] (and reprinted in the Mort Todd-edited Curse of the Weird #3 [Feb. ’94]). Below: Detail from Russ’ marvelous Marvel Tales #130 [Jan. ’55] cover. Inset right: Professional dancer blithely reacts to an admirer’s suicide in this page from Menace #2 [Apr. ’53], drawn by R.H. and courtesy of Cory Sedlmeier and Marvel.

you!” So, being smart, she screamed — he ran. Before my father met her, she was walking home from high school with some girlfriends and a car jumped the curb and hit them all up against the building. People rescued three girls away, and then somebody said, “There’s a girl’s shoe under the car.”

After further investigation, it turned out to be my mother.

So she was in a bad way.

CBC: Did the other three die?

Russ: No, they were pretty much okay. When the court case came up, my mother in fact felt pretty good, she put on makeup and went in looking nice, and the others came in all bandaged, one in a wheelchair, so they got most of the money.

CBC: Did she have education?

Russ: Not as many people went to college in those days.

No, I think she met my father after high school. Dad didn’t have any hobbies like fishing or getting together with the boys to play cards. He just came home to us every day of his life. Any arguments they might have had, I never heard. They just did not let that happen in my presence. It was a very tranquil, happy home. There were two incidents: Once they had an argument, he packed his bags and says, “I’m going to Hamilton,” he marched up to the corner, she ran after him, and they came back arm-in-arm. The other time, he #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 Marvel Entertainment, Inc.

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might have done it when he was younger, I don’t know.

CBC: But no professional artists?

Russ: No professional talent, no. Somebody recently said I have a God-given talent, and I said, “Oh, I always thought I was self-taught.”

CBC: [Laughs] Where were you born?

Russ: I was actually born in New York City, but we were living in New Jersey. I guess Jersey didn’t have a good enough hospital yet.

CBC: They had to go across the Hudson to get you born’d?

Russ: Well, I don’t know, there’s nobody left to ask.

CBC: Did you know your grandparents at all?

Russ: Yes, but I knew them only as old people. I was two years old when my mother’s father died. In fact, I was one of the last persons to speak to him, and that was the only time I ever saw him. He looked like John L. Lewis. Then I knew my grandparents in Hamilton, because we’d take trips up every few years and go up there, and they had a huge cherry tree in the back and I’d fill up on cherries. And my grandmother would make cherry-topped cookies.

CBC: Do you recall these visits fondly?

Russ: It’s very strange. I knew my grandfather and grandmother only as old, white-haired people. Then I found a love letter he wrote to her a week before they were married.

Reading it was like meeting him when he was a young man.

CBC: It opened your eyes?

Russ: Yeah.

CBC: Are you an only child?

Russ: Yes. And of an only-child mother.

The only thing they ever let my mother do was roller-skate.

She was robbed once, when she was living at home.

She had just said goodbye to my dad.

She said to my father, “Do you want a umbrella?

It’s raining.” He says, “No, I don’t need one,” and he left.

Then the bell rings a minute or two later, and she goes thinking he’s coming back for the umbrella, and this guy with a handkerchief over his face and a knife. He says, “Scream and I’ll kill

TM & ©2014 Marvel Entertainment, Inc. TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

was saying he’s going to take me and leave, and she says, “No, you can’t do that,” and I realized the only way to stop them from parting was to say I won’t go with either one. That worked.

CBC: Did you have cousins?

Russ: My uncle and aunt adopted a daughter. I didn’t get to see much of her.

CBC: Where did you grow up?

Russ: In New Jersey. Upper Montclair.

It’s about 16 miles west of New York City.

CBC: As a kid, did you visit your grandparents?

Russ: Fairly often, especially as they got older.

CBC: I think a lot of people have the impression, certainly I do, that you’re a country boy. [leafing through old photos] A smiling picture of Russ Heath!

Russ: That’s me in the service.

CBC: How old are you there?

Russ: Eighteen. This is my father.

CBC: Wow! “Cowpoke” is right. A handsome man, yeah. Have you always had an affinity for the West?

Russ: Yes. When your father’s a cowboy — He used to take a piece of clothesline and I’d run across the yard. I mean, I can throw a loop over a stump, right? He’d roll a loop on the ground and catch my heel going away. [laughs] It was called heeling, actually, and they do it to calves. He also showed me how to roll a cigarette in one hand because you’ve got to hold the reins in the other hand. I’ve long since forgotten how to do it, but I was, “Wow!” at the time.

CBC: Did you know how to use a gun?

Russ: Oh yeah. They had guns in Canada.

My grandfather or father (I forget which) went to England on the British Rifle Team, so they were familiar with firearms. Of course, in those days, everybody was. You were brought up with them. People weren’t shooting themselves in the foot like they are now, or leaving them for their kids to find.

My father would take me down to the basement, and we had a stump there in the coal bin, and he taught me how to handle and shoot a pistol. I’ve still got a .45.

CBC: Did you target practice?

Russ: I was in the Junior Rifle Association as a kid during summer camp. I learned .22 target shooting.

CBC: Did you like the cowboy Westerns, the serials?

Russ: Yeah. Every Saturday we’d go to the serials, Tom Mix or whatever it was.

CBC: Gene Autry?

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Russ: Well, Tom Mix was a little before Gene Autry. Gene Autry was a little later, Roy Rogers later.

Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson (Hoot’s related to the [Good Morning, America’s Charlie] Gibson on the news program). When I was little, Hoot Gibson was a big deal.

CBC: Did you want to be a cowboy?

Russ: No. CBC: Did you like to ride a horse?

Russ: Yes. We went down to the little pony track, and I had a cowboy suit.

Of course, every kid did. Then I learned English riding at summer camp. I went over to Gray Morrow’s, he used to have a horse. It was the first time in 30 years I’d been back on a horse.

CBC: How’d it go?

Russ: Fine. Gray says, “Well, you didn’t forget how to sit a horse, you look good up there.”

CBC: Did you play with kids in the neighborhood?

Russ: There weren’t many kids in the neighborhood.

CBC: Were you a solitary kid?

Russ: Yeah. I used to do things like sit in the yard with peanuts and the squirrels and chipmunks would come up. I lived next to these woods, and if you’d sit there for an hour-and-a-half, eventually they’d come up and take them out of your hand.

CBC: You’d sit there for an hour-anda-half? [laughs] Russ: Well, when you’re an only child, there’s no hurry.

CBC: You’re a patient man!

Russ: There was nothing else going on.

CBC: Did you go to town at all?

Was Montclair a town?

Russ: Well, there was Upper Montclair, which was a mile away.

CBC: Was that where the movie house was?

Russ: Yeah. And then there was Lower Montclair, three or four more film houses. Talkies started in ’27 when I was a year old, so I was around for most of the history of talkies.

CBC: Did you have a newspaper coming into the house?

Russ: My father used to bring two home every day, and I would get down on the floor and pore through them.

Of course, in those days, a comic strip, each panel was maybe three inches big.

Inset left: From top, a trio of terrifically terrifying covers by Russ Heath: Marvel Tales #105 [Feb. ’52], Journey Into Mystery #1 [June ’52], and Adventures Into Terror #22 [Aug. ’53]. Above: Hey, that looks like Russ used himself as model for this poor feller on the cover of Mystery Tales #26 [Feb. ’55]. Below: Yet another Heath cover, Mystic #10 [July ’52].

Bottom: The Brain bids adieu in Adventures Into Terror #6 [Oct. ’51].

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TM & © 2014 Marvel Entertainment, Inc.

Above: Stabbing a Commie in the back is nothing compared to the extremely brutal Atlas war comics covers produced by Russ Heath and his peers in those pre-Code years of the early 1950s. The original art of War Adventures #13 [Feb. ’53], the last issue of the series, is courtesy of Heritage.

Below: Marvel Boy was an abortive attempt to revive super-heroes at Atlas Comics. Russ Heath contributed this slam-bang sci-fi cover to #1 [Dec. ’50].

CBC: Were you into aviation at all?

Russ: I liked aviation, it was one of the exciting things around. Before I went in the Air Force, I joined the Civilian Air Patrol, flew in Piper Cubs, and studied navigation, air-related stuff that I would need in the Air Force.

CBC: Did you get to fly?

Russ: I flew in the Piper Cubs. We spent a week at Mitchell Field, Long Island, in the Air Corps barracks there, with the sergeant giving us training, so you learned how to make your bed and bounce a quarter on it, and all that stuff, so you had a head start when you went in the Air Force. And we did marching. Then we got to go up in a Liberator bomber flying over Long Island. I almost fell out the window. The waistgun position had no window, and I’m looking out, and my hat blows off. I made a grab for it, and I almost went with it. I had to walk about two miles back on the runway to get my hat.

CBC: What was it like to fly?

Russ: Well, in a Piper Cub, you move the stick a quarter-inch to the right and [plane sound] down she goes. You take a Liberator and you make a 360, you go, “One-thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand,” and slowly the wings start to come up. An entirely different thing. I was in pre-flight school when Hitler heard that I joined up, so he up and quit.

CBC: Was your father in World War I? Russ: He just missed it. As I just missed World War II, he just missed World War I. That’s when he went to Arizona.

CBC: When did you start drawing?

Russ: Further back than I can remember. I think I probably exceeded my peers at about four-and-a-half. I’ve got a couple drawings that were done when I couldn’t have been very old, showing a cowboy herding cattle down towards a corral. The cattle look more like goats and llamas and other animals, not like cattle. But I was a stickler for detail even #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & © 2014 Marvel Entertainment, Inc.

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As compared with one inch square now. And you could smell the fresh ink on the paper.

CBC: What were the papers?

Russ: Oh, maybe The [New York] Herald Tribune and The Daily News. The Sun Times.

CBC: Was that a Hearst paper?

Russ: I don’t know. I’m not into politics.

CBC: Did you like the comic strips?

Russ: Oh, yeah! I was right there in the beginning of most of them, or close to the beginning of Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, and Captain Easy, you name it.

Later on, Red Ryder.

CBC: Were they a favorite aspect of childhood?

Russ: Yes, because there was no television. I remember, my father would be sitting there reading the newspaper, and I would say, [whiny voice:] “I don’t know what to do!” He’s say, “Well, why don’t you jump up and down and yell ‘Oop-oopa-doo?’”

Which helped me a lot. We’d pitch the baseball back and forth. I guess he realized the lack of kids in the neighborhood, he’d go out and lie down behind a rock and we’d shoot cap pistols and stuff like that. I had these lead soldiers about three inches high, and they were hollow and they had metal helmets. Then we’d stick them in the rock garden and then take the BB gun and blow them away until they’d get blown apart. And we’d take the hats and he would, in the gas stove that we had in those days, take a pair of pliers and hold the helmet, put a dab of solder in it and pop it back on and you were good to shoot again. I did all sorts of good stuff with him.

TM & © 2014 Marvel Entertainment, Inc. TM & © 2014 Marvel Entertainment, Inc.

then, I had the brand on the horse.

CBC: Did your father tell you stories of the Old West?

Russ: Yeah.

CBC: Would he embellish them?

Russ: He just told me because they were interesting.

When they’re little, kids are funny. They relate everything to toilet training. So, when he’s telling me how they went out on round-up, after 30 days your long-johns got wet and salty and dried on you. And he said you could stand them against the wall, they were so stiff after all that. I said, “How could you carry enough toilet paper in the saddlebags?” He says, “You usually didn’t have any — the toilet paper was on the chuck wagon. In many cases you weren’t near the chuck wagon.” I said, “What’d you use?” He said, “Well, you used some leaves.” I said, “All I see is sand and rocks in these pictures.” He said, “Well, there came a time when you used a smooth, round stone.” So years later, when my father was in his late 60s, early 70s, and this was after my mother died and I moved back to keep him company for a year and make sure he was all right. He’d have some guests in for dinner, I’d be messing in the kitchen, and I’d hear him start with, “Now, when I was out West...” I’d add, “Oh boy, here come the round stone cowboy stories again!” And he’d get so mad, because he couldn’t explain it. I used to stick it to him a lot.

CBC: Did you tease your dad a lot?

Russ: Yeah. He was much less patient and I would never quit. So he’d eventually throw me on the ground and sit on me, that would take it out of me. Nowhere I could go from there. [Jon laughs] But he did different things. It was a different age, a different time. He put a bucket of water over the door and caught me one time. [Jon laughs] He’d come home from work and get in a hot tub to soak, and I could hear him in there, “Aaaah.” Then I’d go in, he’s got his eyes closed, and his stomach was sticking out of the water, and I’d hit him with a glass of ice water. He jerks up, so suddenly that half the water in the bathtub is on floor. “Damn it! Help me wipe this up!” So this was the way we related in those days.

CBC: Passive/aggressive affection?

Russ: My mother would start with the window open a foot-and-a-half when I’m going to bed, and I guess she’d worry about me and come in and lower it an inch, and then a half-an-hour later, she’s in to lower it, and I end up with it open one inch.

And I’d get so pissed off. So I’d set traps for her.

I’d put a whole bunch of pans and stuff that she could walk into. She wouldn’t turn the light on — she didn’t want to wake me — so she’d walk into all these pans and pots and stuff. I also hung a bunch of threads over the door so she’d think she was caught in a cobweb. I used to make dummies and put in the bed with my little stuffed monkey, just a bit of the hair sticking out at the top, and I’d hide in the closet.

CBC: What was her reaction to this?

Russ: Oh, she’d give a little shriek.

CBC: She had a sense of humor, too?

Russ: I don’t know how much she knew what was going on.

You don’t know when you’re a little kid. I used to sneak up behind my grandmother and untie her apron when she was doing the dishes, and she would methodically dry her hands all up patiently, and then retie it.

And I’d do it eight more times, the same routine. It took me a while, until I got a little older, to realize that I wasn’t annoying her, because if I was annoying her, she just wouldn’t have tied it up again. It was the apron that goes around the back, so she could have left it open. But it was her way of interacting with me. Which pissed me off to no end.

CBC: Were you encouraged with your drawing?

Russ: My father would bring tablets home for me and I’d draw on both sides. He pretty much let me go at it. I didn’t need a lot of encouragement. “Get him to stop drawing and do his school work!”

CBC: [Laughs] Did you copy comic strips?

Russ: Oh, yeah. Every kid who was artistically-inclined copies comics, or in those days, all the people my age have the same history. They all liked the same strips — Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Above: Russ Heath contributed art to the Human Torch revival story in Young Men #24 [Dec. ’53].

Left and below: Detail from Russ’ cover of Lorna, The Jungle Girl #6 [Mar. ’54] and his cover of #7 [May ’54]. Courtesy of Cory Sedlmeier & Marvel.

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Little Annie Fanny TM & ©2014 Playboy, Inc. Artwork ©2014 the estate of Harvey Kurtzman.

Above: We’ll have to ask Harvey Kurtzman expert and Kurtzman estate art agent Denis Kitchen, the cover subject of our next issue, exactly where these “Little Annie Fanny” pencils and

Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon — all the same strips people name over and over, and they all did it, I’m sure. Although I was taught that copying was not cool, that you’re supposed to do it yourself. “You’re not gonna learn by copying!” But you still did it as a little kid.

CBC: Was it Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, particularly, who attracted you?

Russ: They were the best illustrators, by far, around at the time.

CBC: Did you appreciate Milton Caniff at all?

Russ: Yes. When Caniff started, his first years of the strip were very cartoony. Then he got behind and Noel Sickles come in, and Sickles really got him on a new kick of the way to do it, with heavy blacks and so on, and how to meet production and time and deadlines. Then it was really good.

Caniff was a marvelous storyteller. Any part of those stories could have been a movie, with the dialogue and everything there. They were just like movie scripts.

CBC: Obviously, Caniff and Sickles were more abstract than Foster and Raymond. They’re more suggestive than realistic — Russ: Well, Foster’s strip, Tarzan, was much more simplified, and there were many more full-figure shots, because there were many more panels.

Then, when he started doing Prince Valiant, since he only had to do one page per week (he didn’t do a daily), he could spend a whole day on each panel. That was what he was eventually doing, six or seven illustrations for a Sunday paper, maybe even down to five.

CBC: Did you appreciate both approaches equally or was it really just the Raymond and Foster approach?

Russ: Well, I was just eating it all up.

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CBC: Were you copying them both?

Russ: I didn’t copy a lot, I copied when I was little. I’ve got a comic book I did as a kid, with this handsome hero. But it was very much right out of Terry and that kind of stuff. Not the drawings, but the mood, the genre.

CBC: So did you want to be a cartoonist at an early age?

Russ: I didn’t have any aspirations except just doing it. By the time I got in high school, of course, I was doing full, big pages, like Sunday pages, of my own story, and they’d hang it up on the wall.

CBC: Were they pretty good?

Russ: They were pretty good. I’ve got a lot of stuff in that drawer there that’s older.

CBC: Who saved all this stuff, you or your parents?

Russ: Everything I’ve got, I saved.

CBC: You went to high school in Montclair?

Russ: Yeah. We had our 50th reunion about five years ago.

CBC: How’d it go?

Russ: Over 300 people showed up, one even from Europe.

CBC: Wow! How many were in your class?

Russ: I don’t know, 400.

CBC: That’s a big school! How was your elementary school? Was that pretty crowded, too?

Russ: Maybe it wasn’t 400, but there were 300 who showed up, so I don’t know what percentage that was. My old girlfriend was there, giving me a big hug and a kiss.

CBC: Closure? #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Little Annie Fanny page ©2014 Playboy, Inc. Color rough, self-caricature ©2014 the estate of Harvey Kurtzman.

roughs fit in the production chronology, but we’re confident the pencils on far left are solid Russ Heath work. Far right is the finished page as it appeared in Playboy, Dec. 1963.

Russ: It was, it really was.

CBC: Your attraction to the opposite sex is very apparent in your work. Did you start dating at a young age? Did you always like girls?

Russ: Oh, yeah. I had a girlfriend, or thought I did, when I was pretty young.

I’d pick flowers and take them over to a girl’s house. I remember it took me about two hours to pick these violets, trying to get the stem at the very bottom and break them off. So I went to her door and held out the flowers and she says, “What do I want with those?” And she slams the door! My mother, who was waiting to hear how it turned out, felt so bad. The girl was a snotty and spoiled kid, I realize now. But she was a beauty.

I was always partial to the looks of Carole Lombard, I thought, she was marvelous-looking. I couldn’t understand the appeal of Bette Davis. It don’t fit into what you have in your head as a female ideal.

CBC: Did you always draw girls?

Russ: Yeah. I’ve become known over the years for my females, as well as for the authenticity of my war stuff. Of course, any kind of action stories for comics, it’s about action. Chuck Cuidera: you know the name, right?

CBC: The Blackhawk artist?

Russ: Yeah. He became a friend of mine. He lived in Newark, and I joined the Newark Skin Divers Club, of which he was a member, and we became buddies. I bitched so much about how the club was being run that they said, “Why don’t you run it? It’s election time now.” So I was swept into office by all my girlfriends. [laughs] Years later, some of the guys said, “You know, when you were president, it was the best. It was informal, and yet it had enough structure to get things done, but it wasn’t rigid.”

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Rules are made to be broken. I’ll give you an example of the way they handled things in the old days: My grandmother would make fudge or cookies, and put them in the closet. And then they’d be gone, and she’d want to know who ate them. Anyway, the crux of the story was, she cooked a new batch with a laxative in it. So when her brother ran straight to the john, they knew who did it. Can you imagine anybody doing this today? You could sue your parents! My grandmother used to read stories to me when I was real little, and she’d try to scare me, and she’d got lower her false teeth to scare me!

CBC: Did you draw from life?

Russ: Not a great deal. My father thought I should take lessons and at one point took me to this old, white-haired guy who had just a couple students.

But his thing was to let you doodle. “Here’s everything you’ll need, so do what you want.” I wanted to be taught, so it didn’t click with me. I started fooling around with clay, the kind that doesn’t dry, stuff like that. Oh, and he hired a young guy who was just out of art school, to come every Saturday and teach how to draw and sketch. But, being an only child, I was much more interested in tackling and wrestling than the art. But he taught me some things. I stopped drawing a horse halfway out of the picture. [laughs] Then, when I was older, like 16, there were a few illustrators who lived in Montclair and worked there, and I’d go over to their houses, and they were nice enough to let me stand at their shoulders and watch.

CBC: Were they major illustrators?

Russ: Well, they were damned competent. One was named Frank Soltez, who was doing all the TWA ads at the time, he had that series of two dozen 55

©2014 New Magazine Inc. & Demolition Kitchen

Heath in Though a frequent collaborator with Harvey Kurtzman at the time — a period when, along with Will Elder, the artists were working their fannies off producing “Little Annie” for Playboy magazine — Russ Heath’s artwork did not appear in Kurtzman’s Help! magazine.

But the handsome comic book master did show up as an actor in a pair of fumetti stories, “The Mariners” in #13 (Vol. 2 #1) [Feb. 1962], in which he briefly is featured as the “Boat Bum” (who, naturally, paddles off with the girl in the end, as we can see from the panels on the far bottom right), and “The Company Plane” in #16 (Vol. 2 #4) [Nov. ’62] in which he plays the lead role of “George Bowles” (who, naturally, flies off with the girl in the end). The subject of our next issue (and agent for the Kurtzman estate), Denis Kitchen, kindly shared the print at right. Note the “R” monogram on the shirt sewn in Russ’ stylized signature!

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Russ: Well, I wanted to learn how to do it, I always figured, when the time came, you’d do whatever it was you were supposed to do and that would get it done. It was very strange when I first went searching for work. But when I went looking for a regular job when I got married and had a kid, going around New York, you could call up anybody on the phone and probably go visit them. All the illustrators, The Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s or Look or any of the magazines.

So I remember some of the best-known illustrators at the time, and I’ll call them up and say, “Can I come over and see you?” And I’d just go over with my portfolio. Can you imagine doing that today?

They hire gorillas to sit out front to keep you away. #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

©2014 New Magazine Inc. & Demolition Kitchen

Above: Splash pages for the two fumetti stories in Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine featuring Russ Heath as an actor. All Help! fumetti scans courtesy of our own Steven “Flash” Thompson!

Below: Russ as a business executive with a yearning to fly, “George Bowles,” with the character’s wife, Gladys. From Help! #16 [Nov. ’62].

or so, which kept him busy for a couple years. It was the Constellation, the best commercial plane at the time.

This was the pre-jet era. I learned a few things by watching how it’s done. Then there was an illustrator, Schmidt, I forget his first name, but he’d do magazine clothing advertisements.

I went over to his place and stood around. They got to expect me to come around.

CBC: Did you ask them questions?

Russ: Yeah, I asked questions, but I tried not to interrupt.

CBC: Did you ask practical questions as well, about the business itself?

Art ©2014 Russ Heath.

“I’ve known and worked with Russ for years. He’s simply one of the best in the business. His artwork is always dramatic and rendered in a style that makes his great drawings stand apart from any other artist.

“Russ is a joy to work with. His assignments always are delivered on time and he never gives less than his best. He’s a superb artist with a powerful style and a great guy as well.”

Stan Lee

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Oct. 4, 2013

CBC: So you had access?

Russ: Yes. So I visited a lot of these people. There was one, Albert Dorne, who set a record at the time by making $30,000 in a single month by doing an illustration every day. He’d sketch it out in the morning, paint it in the afternoon. He was a little too cartoony for me. But you learned by going around, and you’d get your list of where to go to look for work. They’d give you a little advice, “Don’t ever do this or that.”

One of the first jobs I had was cutting mattes and taking care of the paper and pencil-sharpening for art directors at one of the big agencies. Later on, when I worked for some of the bigger agencies, I got a job in ’65, ’64 maybe, with Doyle Dane Bernbach, which was the agency at the time, the hottest agency in New York. My buddy made an appointment, and I figured that there’s always somebody around the corner who’s doing less and making more than you are, and comics were hard work. So I decided to find out about advertising work and I investigated. I found out that assistant art directors were getting $70 a week. So I wanted $15,000 a year, and I knew they were paying about $9,000 over there, so I asked for $13,000. He says, “We’re trying to get more, we’ll let you know.” I started there at $13,000. The beautiful part about it was, in advertising, there’s downtime between jobs, and the art department will all sit there reading newspapers. I thought, “I’m not gonna sit there when I’ve got artwork to do.” So I made the deal right off the top, I said, “One of the things I want, too, is that when there’s nothing to do, I’m gonna do my comic book work. There’s no conflict with ad agency work.” They said, “That’s okay.” I would estimate, looking back, that 50% percent of the time I was doing comics. So as I’m getting a day’s pay, I’m doing half-a-day’s comics. And instead of quitting at five, I would work until more like 7:30, then go down to the local bar. Everybody goes to the local bar. When you went home from New York, you went to Long Island, you went upstate, you’re gone, you’re out of it. So everybody goes right after work to the bars. I’d walk in and the guys would be getting sloppy because they already had five martinis under their belts. These girls are sitting there wishing they’d get the hell away. So I’d go up stone cold sober and say, “Would you like to join me at a table?” Naturally, the girls would oblige. So I had three more hours on top of my half-day of comics done. It was the best of all worlds.

CBC: Did you use your art to impress the girls?

Russ: Yes. I walked into the Madison Square Garden offices and said, “I’m doing a series of paintings, watercolors, and I’d like to do the rodeo.” So they put me in the press box, right up front with the cowgirls sitting beside me.

CBC: So did you date in high school regularly?

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

Russ: I dated throughout high school and gave it everything I had.

CBC: Was there any hanky-panky when you went out?

Russ: Well, for an only child, it was! I had the squirreliest intros. I had no technique whatsoever. I remember one time, I was on a weekend pass, and I used to love to go into the neighborhoods like the kind I came from, in the suburbs.

How do you meet girls in the suburbs? You can’t walk up to a house and knock on the door. So I saw these girls going into this one house, so I went to the market and bought a pineapple. Then I went up, knocked on the door, and said, “I bought this pineapple and I don’t know how to cut it up.” The mother says, “Come in.” She cut it all up and introduced me to her daughters.

CBC: You were in uniform?

Russ: Yep, I was a serviceman.

CBC: Is this the “fruit technique”?

Russ: Well, I was thinking up stuff from out of nowhere. Years later, I used to hang around with a guy who was real good at picking up girls (because I wasn’t). We’d go to the bar, sit down, have a drink, and he’d say, “Look around and see which table with girls you want to meet.” I did and he’d get up, go over, and I’d see him standing, talking to these girls while they were sitting there. Five minutes later, I’d look around and he was sitting down at their table talking to them.

Five more minutes go by and he says to me, “Come on over.” I’d go over. Things like that. But it was beyond me. So I said

Above: Interesting oddity found on Heritage: Stan Lee caricature drawn by Russ Heath and an artist self-portrait inscribed to his old buddy, Stan! Stan the Man was kind enough to share a testimonial about his former bullpenner.

Below: Sigh. Russ Heath could do it all, eh? Here’s a romance story splash from Girl Confessions #34 [June ’54].

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Above: After work at Atlas Comics dried up, Russ Heath found regular work for the next decade and a half at reliable DC Comics, where he began drawing adventure strips in Robert Kanigher’s new title, The Brave and the Bold. Russ drew The Golden Gladiator, The Silent Knight, and Robin Hood. He would continue for years working on Kanigher’s war titles. Above is cover detail from B&B #1 [Aug.–Sept. ’55]. Below: Russ drew this rendition of the Silent Knight in 1973.

I learned that the guy who comes in early every morning, stays late every night, and says, “Hi, good morning, Russ.”

“I wonder what he meant by ‘good morning’?” [laughter] CBC: Politics?

Russ: And the politics going on! I hated the politics. I just want my work to speak for me, and the hell with playing games. Doyle Dane Bernbach was quite an agency to work for. Those were the days of the nine-martini lunches.

They still hired account executives for their drinking ability, because the client wanted to go drink, and that’s where the deals were made. But later it got so competitive that they didn’t want drunks around anymore. This is what was going on at that time. We’d call up at two o’clock and say, “We’re gonna be later.” Then we’d call at 3:30 and say, “We’re gonna be quite late.” At 4:30, we’d call and say, “We’re not coming back.” But you’d only get away with that for a couple of months. I was very fortunate, setting records at the time as every storyboard I did was bought by the client. But, of course, I couldn’t have done it if the copywriter hadn’t written some great copy to work from. I was good at taking the ball and running with it.

To justify my $13,000 salary, they had to make me secondin-charge of the art department, coming in from the outside.

Now, here are these other guys sitting there who expected to be promoted into that position. So you’ve got to play your cards very close to the vest with a deal like that. Don’t get anybody mad, because there’s always damage that can be done to you. One night, the head of the department had to go to his daughter’s high school graduation. So he says, “Can you handle this?” Because work comes in at the last minute.

Sometimes you’d stay in until midnight or even later, and they’d give you chits for dinner, and so on. So I said, “Okay.”

A Heinz ketchup job came in. Heinz always liked whatever we did to look almost like the finished product, like it was printed. Not arty. So I’m looking at this thing, and it’s got to be about 6:30, and I noticed… You know the little Heinz ketchup individual packets? Heinz wanted to market them for regular consumers to use for picnics. They wanted a comp of a box.

On two sides was pictures of the packet, with some lettering.

I looked at these things, and they had sample packets to work from. I held one against the box, and it was about the same size. So I squished out the ketchup and glued the empty package on. I told the guys they could go home, I’d take care of it. So they all leave — they weren’t going to argue — so I came in early because I wanted to see what happens, how this went over. In comes the head of the department, and he’s looking very nervous.

Then some execs come in and says, “Who’s Russ Heath?” I thought, “Uh-oh.” So did he, as I could see his expression. They come over and say, “The client loved it! They thought it was so ingenious.”

I just led a charmed life.

CBC: [Laughs] I was surprised to hear you tell me you

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Illustration ©2014 Russ Heath. The Silent Knight TM & © DC Comics.

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to one of the girls I met like that, “What is it about him?”

She says, “He’s just so friendly.” I said, “ I’m friendly!” She says, “No, you look like you mean business.” He just didn’t give a damn, that’s why he never failed. I saw him succeed about 125 times in a row. He said, “What’s a failure? So what?” Because he had that attitude, he didn’t have any failures. Very self-confident. He had the kind of personality. I remember walking along Fifth Avenue in a crowd, and he got a little ahead, so he was looking back at me. He bumps into some guy with a newspaper, and in the bumping, he ends up with the newspaper. “Could I just check this a minute?” He’s looking up his stock. The guy’s standing there, waiting to get his goddamned newspaper back! I couldn’t believe it, that this guy would put up with this sh*t. But he had this knack that was unbelievable.

CBC: Did you go to the New York World’s Fair?

Russ: Yes. I took a date, and I had to have a chaperon. It was 1939 and ’40. Years later, I was living in New York, seven years in Manhattan, and felt I couldn’t cart enough armament to go on the subway. It was really bad.

CBC: Was this after living in Chicago?

Russ: No, this was before Chicago, the late ’50s, early ’60s. In fact, Hefner, from my flying back and forth, knew that I was enamored of Chicago (as it was then, not now, because that city went to hell, too). So, when he made an offer to pay to move me out there, double my salary, and give me his old office to work in, which was luxurious — full refrigerator, full bath, shower — as it used to be an apartment which was converted. But it had couches and had a stereo hi-fi and TV. That was an offer I couldn’t refuse. So I got out of New York. Of course, they have since cleaned up New York a great deal. I was so surprised when I went back a few years ago. Jim Salicrup and I are walking around at 1:30 in the morning and we were completely safe. I was dumbfounded.

CBC: Times Square is amazingly family-oriented now. Did you get into Manhattan frequently when you were young?

Russ: Yeah. Sometimes even in the junior high and often during high school. We’d take an afternoon to go in, see a show and then write about it. When I was working for the hottest agency in town, I was able to moonlight during the day. I was picking up on a lot of stuff, learning.

TM & © DC Comics.

sought advice from that guy about picking up girls. You seem like a naturally smooth operator when it comes to the fairer sex. What did that girl mean by saying that you looked like you “meant business”?

Russ: Maybe I would be trying to get a real romance going, and they could sense that. I also had an experience in my first year in advertising, with the head of the secretarial department. She was out to lunch, and I had no access to a telephone, so I sat down in the guest chair at her desk and used her phone. She comes back and goes on this tirade because I’ve used her telephone. I didn’t say anything. I took out my handkerchief, wiped the phone down, got up, and walked away. That’s all I had to do. So what happens? My father’s best friend is in the neighborhood one day, and he stops in to see how his best friend son’s at his new job. Who does he ask? He asks her how I’m doing. “He’s a wise ass!”

So, my father says, “Why are you getting this reputation of being a wise ass?” Boy, and I thought, anybody can damage you very easily, so don’t make any enemies. The best thing you can do with an enemy is to use them. That’s your revenge. Don’t ever let them know that you did it. So many artists are temperamental. “Oh, I blew up and stormed out of their offices and I never went back.” What good does that do you?

CBC: You’re prone to keeping an even temper, aren’t you?

Russ: Yes. I never lost my temper as a kid, because, as I said, my parents never fought in front of me. I did lose it once when I was about five. The kid across the street used to beat up on me, so I wouldn’t go anywhere near his front yard.

My father was trying to show me how to take care of myself — “This is how you defend yourself” and that kind of stuff — but I had no inclination to do that. But one day, when the kid wasn’t there, I went over and sat down in the sandbox and played with his toys, and he came back and caught me.

But I had had enough, and I lost it. I grabbed him by the hair and swung him around a few times and let him go. I never saw the kid again. I used to go over and play with his toys all the time, he just disappeared. My father was so proud of me! I saw that kid again when I was walking down the street — this was when I was in the Air Force — and this naval ensign walked by. I thought, “If that’s him, he’ll turn around if I holler his name.” So, “Hey, Gene!” He turns around, and it was him! How’s that for memory?

CBC: Do you have a rage inside, do you think?

Russ: No, I have no reason to have a rage about anything.

I don’t have anything to get rid of.

CBC: Did the Depression make you angry?

Russ: No. We didn’t have much, but I felt I had everything I needed. I may not have had as much as I would if there wasn’t the Depression, but I didn’t know it. So what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you, so you don’t get angry about it.

CBC: Did you see comics when they first came out?

Russ: I was seven years old when we drove down and took a vacation in Florida.

CBC: You drove down? This was before the Interstate Highway system, right?

Russ: It takes a week or something on those red dirt highways. We were going 75 m.p.h. but still it was a long ways away. We had this big touring car. It belonged to the landlord, but he let my father use it. Wooden spoke wheels and 12-cylinders. Spare tires on the front fenders encased in metal, and so on.

CBC: How old were you?

Russ: Seven years. We drove down and I went in a store there and saw the tenth issue of Famous Funnies.

That was my first knowledge that there were comic books.

Of course, most of them were reprints, in the beginning, of newspaper strips.

CBC: Were you impressed?

Russ: Well, yeah! I loved the funnies.

CBC: Russ, you’re not prone to outbursts of superlatives.

Russ: I was very quiet. I wasn’t very demonstrative.

There wasn’t anybody to demonstrate for, I guess.

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

CBC: Did you then start to seek comic books out?

Russ: Well, I don’t remember how quickly I got into them.

Then there were Big Little Books, too. I eventually had about a hundred of those.

CBC: Where did you buy those?

Russ: There were little newsstands that carried that kind of stuff. They had comics. I don’t know where the Big Little Books came from, but I had a lot of them. Some of them would be worth $80 apiece now, if not more. I ruined a few of them by coloring them. I remember coloring a Flash Gordon.

Not all of it, just messing with it.

CBC: With the advent of super-heroes, did you get into Superman at that point?

Russ: Well, I certainly saw Superman. I might have even bought a few Superman comic books. But, I don’t know, the concept, as I look at it now, seems like such a silly thing.

You’ve got the strongest man in the world, who the hell is going to be the antagonist? So they end up giving the antagonist super-powers or there’s no game, it’s not going to happen. It was so unreal. I was always very literal, so things had to be real for me.

It harks back, I guess, to my father going to

Above: Russ Heath’s dynamic style became a fan favorite as regular artist on “The Haunted Tank” in G.I. Combat. Here’s a GIC #114 [Oct.–Nov. ’65] re-creation (with super-imposed blurb from actual cover) drawn by Russ in 2009.

Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Below: Detail from GIC #142 [June–July ’70].

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Top right: Editor Joe Kubert and artist Russ Heath make a cameo in the Haunted Tank episode, “The Death of the Haunted Tank,” within GIC #150 [Oct.–Nov. ’71].

More words by Robert Kanigher.

Next page: Courtesy of Chuck Dixon, who himself collaborated with Russ Heath (in a Sgt. Rock Special from 1994), contributes this pair of pages from the Sgt. Rock story, “Death Stop,” written and drawn by Our Man Russ in Our Army at War #226 [Dec. ’70]. Chuck also shared this appreciation.

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those Western movies, when he would say, “Look at that fancy, flowery shirt on that cowboy! A real cowboy would know in a second that that guy’s never been near a horse!” If you wanted to make people believe that you knew what you were talking about, which came over into the war stuff and the Western stuff. And, of course, wanting to be an illustrator to begin with, comics were only bread and butter when I had to get a job. When I started out, I was hoping to be an illustrator. Of course, eventually photographs took over and illustrators were no more.

CBC: Did you have Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post coming into the house?

Russ: Yeah, we always had The Saturday Evening Post, often Collier’s. I think I had all of the Life magazines until the end of the late ’50s. All of them.

CBC: Did you use them for reference?

Russ: That’s what I got them for, why I kept magazines. I kept True, Argosy, Saturday Evening Post. When I built my house, I piled them up at the far end of the garage, and put them on the concrete. Of course, the dampness of the concrete made them mildew. The pile was getting so high, about six feet high across the whole end of the garage. I thought, “If they come down, they’re gonna crush my car.

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Beautiful night scene depicted by Russ Heath for the Haunted Tank story, “Move the World,” in G.I. Combat #146 [Feb.–Mar. ’71]. Words by Robert Kanigher. Courtesy of Heritage.

So I’d better get rid of them.” Then I got rid of all of them, with the exception of Life. Plus, the individual sheets that I had torn out of the magazines I put in my files.

CBC: Did you have an extensive morgue?

Russ: I had a file cabinet full of reference material, as every illustrator does.

CBC: Did you want to work for Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post?

Russ: I sent a few cartoons off, but I guess they weren’t funny or something.

CBC: This was really at twilight of the golden age of American magazine illustration when you were coming of age, right?

Russ: No, a little later than that. It died more or less in the ’60s. I don’t know if we’ll know exactly when illustration died.

A lot of illustrators went on to do pocket book covers.

CBC: Did you have a gut feeling about super-heroes when you were a kid or they just didn’t impress you?

Russ: Well, as I said, I was too literal. I thought if Superman jumped over the Empire State Building, he would either crack the pavement or tear his costume landing. To land and be perfectly fine doesn’t work. But then he started flying. It used to be it was just the muscle that he took off with that was the length of his voyage. But then he started flying with no apparent effort. It made no sense to have him flying. Then he starts moving the planets around!

CBC: Did the other characters like Plastic Man or Captain Marvel have any appeal?

Russ: Captain Marvel looked wishy-washy. The artwork on it was so square. They weren’t going for drama as much as the others.

CBC: They were whimsical. Then did you just pass comics by?

Russ: On and off. I had a few Captain America Comics.

Some of that work I liked.

CBC: The good Jack Kirby stuff?

Russ: It might have been, but it wasn’t “Kirby” Kirby. He did a book he started up with some other guy, Joe Simon — Black Magic or something like that — and those looked good to me for a while, because they were more carefully done. Then they got loose and I said, “Screw that!”

CBC: When did you go into the service, in 1945?

Russ: Yup. I joined the Reserve. First of all, when I was 17, I was going to go to the RCAF up in Canada, because you could join at 17.

CBC: You wanted to get in?

Russ: Everybody wanted to get in. If they didn’t, they kept their mouth shut. The whole world was divided into two camps. It truly was a world war. When you’re 18, you’re not worried about dying, so you want to go in, be a fighter pilot and kill the enemy, shoot whatever it is, hit the giants with the club and whatever. Almost everybody was raring to go. Kids lied about their age to get in. Guys went in with maladies that the Army doctors overlooked deliberately. But they said, “Look, join the Reserve now so that you won’t be drafted, so you don’t have to slog around in the mud.” Being an airplane pilot sounded much more exciting. They said, “Even though your marks are terrible, we’ll put you on the accelerated class to finish and graduate, to get you into this Air Force.” I almost passed that thing. And I loved it, because it was giving kids enough work to do that they really need.

TM & © DC Comics.

Russ Heath may just have produced a run of the finest examples of American comics ever to see print.

You heard me.

We all know he remains the go-to guy for war comics for the past 60 years; from E.C. and Atlas in the ’50s to Warren in the ’60s and even National Lampoon in the ’70s. Who can forget “Cowgirls at War”? If you saw it, it’s seared in your memory.

He will always, justifiably so, be most recalled for his work on each of the five core war titles at DC Comics. Along with Joe Kubert, Ross Andru, Irv Novick, and Jerry Grandenetti, he was one of the rocks that formed the foundation of the war books from the time that DC took G.I. Combat over from Quality to the very last gasps of the titles. I wrote what might be Russ’ last “Haunted Tank” story in a 1994 Sgt. Rock Special [#2].

In the early 1970s, the titles moved into what is undeniably their golden age. Maybe it was the public’s weariness of the war in Vietnam or maybe it was just a natural maturing process on the part of the writers and artists.

The war books took on a more serious tone. Gone were the old one-note stories that strained analogies to the breaking point with dialogue like: PRIVATE: We’re lame ducks!

SARGE: Well, this duck is nobody’s pigeon! Spray those Nazi buzzards!

Each title evolved to include more authentic stories featuring real historical scenarios and a dark, even bleak, tone. They were still action-packed tales in which Nazis died by the truckload. You can’t kill enough Nazis in a story in my opinion. Only now these books took on a new attitude about the futility of war and the cost to the soul from seeing too much of the worst that humanity could do to one another. The Holocaust was presented for the Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

first time along with collateral damage to civilian populations, suicide and desertion. Most are tempted to say the Big Five titles took on an anti-war slant. But any good war story is an anti-war story. Who would want to read a story celebrating war? Courage, heroism, and endurance, certainly. But no one celebrates war unless they have a wire crossed in their head.

Joe Kubert moved from “Sgt. Rock” in this period to co-create Enemy Ace and the Unknown Soldier. Ross Andru, John Severin, and finally Jack Kirby were presenting the fatalistic adventures of “The Losers.” Sam Glanzman (with Archie Goodwin on scripts) took over the “Haunted Tank“ feature and took it into epic new arenas of combat. Weird War Tales was added to the line; a comic that took the horrors of war literally. Alex Toth, Norm Maurer, Ric Estrada, Wally Wood, and other greats provided little gems each month to the back-up features in each book. These were the best battle books since Harvey Kurtzman-edited Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales at E.C. 20 years earlier. It was a great time to be a war comic fan.

Then there was Russ.

Russ Heath took over the “Sgt Rock” title. He took it like Sherman took Georgia. He took it like Ajax took Cassandra. He made it his own.

Working with prolific comics vets Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert, and even taking on the occasional scripting chore himself, Russ created a long string of WWII action stories that are consistently excellent and even highly experimental. He’s a draughtsman sine qua non and a guy who knows the uniforms, weapons and vehicles of the period down to the last bolt on a Tiger One. There’s no question about those bona fides. You know that even if you’re only casually familiar with his work. You see it if you only flipped through this book in your hands. So, of course, his “Rock” stories look gorgeous. Despite his self-effacing attitude and even coolness toward his own 61

and thought about it for months afterwards and could not decide how I felt about the conclusion. It is one of the strongest examples of the inner emotional conflicts experienced by combat soldiers that I have ever read. It is Stephen Crane good.

And Heath experiments in the art. He comes up with a way to present slow motion in the comic book form. The movies of Sam Peckinpah were heavily influential in this period and everyone in film and TV was aping the director’s use of slow motion in action scenes. I can only assume that this presented a challenge to Russ. It is one he met and overcame. He manages the impossible in the comics medium; he slows down time for the reader. I cannot describe how he did it and do it justice. Unless the folks here at TwoMorrows reproduce one of the pages, you’ll have to find Our Army at War #246 yourself.

[See left—Y.E.] If you talk to Russ, he’ll tell you it was just a job. He’ll tell you that the pros just didn’t live and breathe comics the way all we übernerds do these days. I say that’s a load of crap. Oh, I admit that I live and breathe comics.

Guilty as charged. But that Russ isn’t a fellow nerd is a load of crap.

And I’ve told him that to his face.

He may have done the nine-to-five thing as a comic artist and forgot all about it once he walked away from the drawing table at quitting time. But while he was at that drawing board he was all in. He was geeking on what he was drawing bigtime. Look at any of his output. Any page. Any cover. Each represents many hours of intense work time with pencil, pen and brush along with an unbridled imagination and flawless sense of composition. As Russ will admit himself, he put a lot more work into those pages than he was being paid to do.

And thank God he did. And thank you, Mr. Heath, from this humble fan and sometimes collaborator, for those long, lonely hours in the trenches.

You have what it takes and then some. — Chuck Dixon, Oct. 2013

It’s ridiculous how they let them off with so little work. When your mind is like a sponge, you can learn your multiplication tables through 20 easily. It was three times the amount of work at one time to get you through it. I just missed. So then the Air Force took me before I could graduate. When I got out, I went back to high school to attempt to graduate.

CBC: Did you?

Russ: Shhhhh!

CBC: [Laughs] That’s not for the grandchildren, I guess! You were stateside through the duration, right?

Russ: Yes, nine months total. You had to have a year’s service or you’re still subject to the draft at the time. So I joined the Air Force Reserve to get me out of the draft, because “inactive” meant you didn’t have to go every weekend or a month every year or something like that. Eventually they recalled me when Korea started. They said, “If you feel you are physically disqualified, you can go out to Mitchell Field, Long Island, and have a physical exam.” I had a note from my doctor, which, of course, really didn’t matter that much, because anybody can get a note from some doctor. Every family’s got a doctor connected somewhere. So how much lying is going on there? But I got a note from my doctor. I had this sinus condition. Of course, they don’t want ears plugging up from altitude flying. They can’t have problems like that. But what I had was something that gave me no more bother than anybody else, or you’re going to be pegged a nasal cripple. It’s just a matter of degree. So

I had this hell of a big cold, and the major doctor who was interviewing and examining me says, “Well, how much affect is this having?” I said, “Well, I’m always like this. This is normal.” [laughs] Then they sent me outside, and later on the sergeant sticks his head out the door and he says, “Would you like to get out of the reserve?” I says, “You bet!” “I’ll be back to get you.” This sounded cool. Actually, we were expecting our second kid at the time, and how do you tell a child, “Daddy’s going away and he may never come back”?

I mean, I couldn’t figure that out. People had to do it. Then I had all these contacts, I was established as an artist. It would have blown my career. I’d lose all those contacts, somebody else would be doing my job when I got back. So that’s why I wasn’t anxious to go. Though I was a hotshot to be a fighter pilot at the beginning.

CBC: But this was a different war?

Russ: They called it a “police action.” Anyway, the major comes out and says, “Okay. Here’s your discharge. By the way, say hello to your doctor.

We went to med school together.” My doctor was this absolute straight arrow, wouldn’t tell a lie if his life depended on it. So I think this helped a lot, because the major knew that this letter was real and not a sham. But anyway, I was out of that. The draft had ended.

CBC: When you were in high school, did you take art classes?

Russ: Yes. I don’t think I learned anything. These were just high school art classes. There was one guy in the grade ahead of me, and he would go,

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work, this man never phoned it in. He may have caused more than one editor’s hair to turn grayer as deadlines loomed but it was in Russ’ DNA to do his best work always.

But what separates these “Rock” stories from every other Heath job is the bravura storytelling. Seriously, these are models of comic-book purity and perfection. His storytelling was always clear and compelling and expert. But these “Rock” stories have heart. Not schmaltz or sentiment, but heart.

In “Death Stop” [Our Army at War #226, Dec. ’70] Russ writes and draws a story that takes place inside of only a few minutes on a forgotten battlefield. A young man is worried that he won’t summon the courage when needed. He waits in a trench for the call to charge a machine gun nest and looks back over a life in which he disappointed himself time and time again by taking the coward’s path. We can all relate to him. Who hasn’t had that moment when they stood down when they should have stepped up? The suspense is excruciating as the young man awaits Rock’s order to move. Will he prove he has what it takes or will he chicken out? The ending is equal parts surprising and heartbreaking.

This single story changed how I looked at comics. It opened my eyes to what could be accomplished in 14 pages of static pictures and spare dialogue. It was so very different from the other comics on the stands at the time; so many of those were moving away from cinematic storytelling and becoming more, and more and more talky.

In a story called “Naked Combat” [OAAW #246, June ’72], Kanigher and Heath portray an incident in the Hurtgen Forest following the Battle of the Bulge. Rock and another combat happy joe of Easy are separated from their unit and taken prisoner. What follows is a series of unfortunate events that draw you further and further into their plight at the hands of sadistic SS stormtroopers. The twists and surprises arise naturally from events as the deconstructed plot rolls from calamity to salvation and back to calamity. The ending hook challenges the reader’s emotions. I read this story as a teenager

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“Wow!” to anything I showed him. I began to realize that even if I showed him a lousy drawing, he still went, “Wow!” I thought, he’s just a big wow-er! [Jon laughs] His name was Bill Hoest.

CBC: The late cartoonist from Parade magazine?

Russ: Yeah, he was the one.

CBC: He hit the big time! He had some big assignments!

Russ: Yes. I called him up one time. It took me many, many years to know what had happened to him.

CBC: Would you say if you look back at your earlier work, can you see a development of a style? Is it discernible? Were you always realistic?

Russ: Well, I always tried to make stuff as real as possible.

I think I probably put an awful lot more work in than I was getting paid for. The attitude in comics in the beginning was, to draw the pages as quickly as possible. If you go back into the ’30s, rates were like $11 a page. So to make out, you had to knock out so many pages a day. That’s not conducive to doing good work. Not to an illustrator. So I landed somewhere in between.

CBC: When did you start looking at comic books as a place to work?

Russ: Well, I went everywhere and anywhere to find work.

When you have a list of places to go to look for work, somebody’ll say, “Come back in two weeks.” So you check that off and go back to check again in two weeks. Then somebody said, “Listen, why don’t you go over to such-and-such to do advertising work?” I was looking for any kind of art-related job. So as people suggest more names, the list just gets longer and longer and you never come to the end of it. The Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

same thing when I was working at this ad agency, I was making $35 a week, of which $15 went to laundry and lunch. I needed more than that, so I started looking for work at lunch hours instead of lunching. Not many people are there at lunch hour. But I walked into Timely and Stan Lee was there, and he says, “Well, I’ll give you $75 a week.” I said, “My God, I doubled my salary!” I walked out, happy as a clam. After a month or so or two, he says, “You don’t have to come in every day. You can work at home.” That was 1946 or ’47.

CBC: Stan was your big break?

Russ: Stan was my intro into comics. I had done two other jobs for Holyoke. They were Captain Aero Comics that were done in summertime before, when I was in high school. My summer job was to do a “Hammerhead Hawley” story [#14, Apr. 1944].

CBC: Did you mail them in?

Russ: No, I took them in.

CBC: Do you remember who you dealt with?

Russ: Quinlan? I don’t remember his name, but he was doing Catman or Catwoman or something, in orange and yellow or something. I’d know the name if I heard it.

CBC: Captain Aero was a super-hero?

Russ: He wore a costume, but he was not a super-hero. When they started out, everyone wore costumes. Even normal people were in costumes.

CBC: Did you pick up comics to check them out, to see what you were up against, so to speak, or check out what the standards were?

Above: Courtesy of Fréderic Manzano and Editions Deesse, Russ Heath’s magnificent two-page spread of his “Sgt. Rock” magnum opus, Our Army at War #244 [Apr. ’72]. Below: Russ illustrated a memorable serial featuring Rock being lost n the Pacific Theater, scribed by Bob Kanigher, This detail is from OAAW #257 [June ’73]. Previous page inset: Page from OAAW #246 [June ’72].

Courtesy of Chuck Dixon.

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Above: First two pages from the Weird War Tales #3 [Jan.–Feb. 1972], written by the young writing team of Wolfman & Wein, who gloried in Russ’ excellent art on their script.

Russ: Oh, yeah. Well, you wanted to see anything good because you can learn from it… or swipe from it.

CBC: Did you have a favorite artist?

Russ: Well, of course, the early years of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. There was nothing approaching the quality of that work. It was just beautiful, beautiful illustration of the highest order. Flash Gordon was one thing, over and over, whereas Foster even brought Val to America for a while with the Indians. He had variety.

CBC: Did you follow Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, as well?

Russ: Oh, yes. I don’t know if I followed it religiously, but I did have a bunch of them, because the black-&-white material was good. It was simple, and yet everything that needed to be there was there. Raymond was a master at work. I tried out for the strip after he was killed. Stan Drake was in the car at the time.

CBC: Was Stan driving?

Russ: I don’t know who was driving. I don’t know that anybody does.

CBC: Why didn’t you like Jack Kirby’s work?

Russ: It was just wild. He’d have these heavy blacks in the foreground with these white circles in them and stuff, rocks or something, and it was the most important visual thing on the page. Storytelling is what’s important, not the foreground or something else. If you studied the craft, as Caniff and others do, or just by drawing an illustration, the story’s the prime thing. I don’t want to do the same shot that I’ve done a million times before. That bores everybody. And the worst example of that, of course, was the Lone Ranger with the gunfire with the circle of smoke around it. Oh! It was always summertime. Everything looked like they ran every year and ran it again, perpetual, forever. So I wanted to do it differently, but I wanted the best possible shot to tell the story. Can you make a second shot that’s as good? You start going making ceiling shots and ground shots and shots through glass and in the back of refrigerators and horsesh*t; that’s all well and artistic and they do it a lot in movies and stuff, but the storytelling has to be the paramount thing that’s going on. You’ve got to learn to sublimate unimportant steps so that 64

what’s important stands out. It’s like in the coloring, you may have framed the picture with the guy sitting at the table in semi-silhouette, because the two people walking in the background are the subject, and the light’s coming in on them. I want them to color that whole guy on the outside Superman blue or something, to hold it together and make a frame out of it. They colored it in different colors, so you didn’t look back to the people, you were busy looking all over the page.

Kirby went against all the damn rules. I was trying to find out what it was that made so many people like him. I came to the conclusion, from what people said, that you had to read it. His pictures were in conjunction with the writing. With half of the comics, I was looking at the art only; I wasn’t reading them.

CBC: The energy behind them was so dynamic and explosive.

Russ: Yeah, but it’s the same thing over and over and over and over...

CBC: How about Toth? Were you enamored with Toth?

Russ: Absolutely, yes. I could see how a lot of the lay-people wouldn’t be, because they would find it overly simplified. But the guy just was knocking it out of the ballpark every time. He was just including the essence of what had to be there and rarely was he wrong. Some of the stuff that he’d leave out, God! You’d find people typically kept putting in stuff, holding lights instead of just the black, but “less is more” is his thing. Toth carried it to such extremes that, to the layperson, I can see where they’re not appreciating what the thinking artist looking at it is doing.

CBC: Did you see E.C. Comics when they first came out?

Russ: Well, I became a friend of Harvey’s. He would be up at Stan Lee’s office in the Empire State Building. He was doing those “Hey, Look!” jobs, the one-pagers with these little sketchy character. We became friends, started having lunch, so that when MAD came, I did some things in Mad, such as “Plastic Sam,” and a couple of other things. Then, when he started doing the line of adventure books, I did a story called “O.P.,” short for “observation post.” It was a World War I story. I worked on pretty much everything Harvey ever did. Finally, he left MAD when he demanded ownership, 51%. Then they #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

The origins of the project Flesh & Steel: The Art of Russ Heath date back to 2009, the year that we invited Russ Heath to the Asturias International Comic Fair in order to pay much-deserved tribute. It was there that cogwheels were set in motion for the organization of an exhibition finally held in January 2013 at Casal Solleric exhibition centre in Palma (Mallorca), Spain.

Ever since Heath made the decision to sell his work years ago due to financial hardship, it has been split up in the hands of numerous owners. Fortunately, Jim Halperin (with whom we had already collaborated on an exhibition of Wally Wood’s work) has over 100 excellent originals, which he put on loan for the exhibition. Steve Kriozere, another keen fan of Heath’s work, eagerly joined in the initiative. Frédéric Manzano, curator of the exhibition with me, contacted other collectors and managed to get some invaluable additions, including complete episodes of “Sgt. Rock” and work from Heath’s time at Warren. In Aug. 2011, I interviewed the creator in Los Angeles. I was able to enjoy his unusual sense of humor (insofar as I could understand it!), largely thanks to his daughter Sharon. That conversation and previous interviews were the main sources used to produce the catalogue, which includes details of the exhibited work, and will be published this year in the U.S. by IDW. We attempted to offer a summary of over half-a-century of uninterrupted work. Heath is not only deeply aware of his skills as an artist, he is also keen to discuss each and every one of the creative decisions in a career conspicuous for its independence, consistency, and high standards.

A Russ Heath comic story cannot be mistaken for that of any other comic artist. The style changes and improves with time, but he always remains true to himself. Because he inked his own pages, he managed to keep control of his work, ensuring a standard of quality that never dropped.

There is no bad work by Heath. He is incredibly consistent, even though his career is marked by moves to new companies and different characters. These changes proved a learning curve for the artist, allowing him to incorporate new skills learned from industries, like advertising or animation.

The focal point of his art is the human figure. His characters are firmly rooted in reality, but he also idealizes them. This is more evident in the case of his women. Heath seems to be incapable of drawing unattractive females. All his girls are voluptuous, sexy, and stunningly beautiful, with welcoming hips and captivating busts. They go hand in hand with a male archetype to which he returns time and time again: the mature guy or role model. This character is tough, stoic, and — always uncomplaining — ready to make the greatest sacrifice. He is Sgt. Rock, of course… and also The Lone Ranger, Tonto, The Punisher, and many other heroes.

With gritted teeth and frowns on their faces, they are never in the mood for joking. They are professionals who do “what a man’s gotta do,” like Heath himself.

These characters plunged into desperate dramas. There is always something on the brink of happening. Someone might be about to get hit or an explosion might rip everything apart. There is never a dull moment, with electrifying highpoints: a knife stabbing a hand; a mouth gasping its final breath; bodies flying backwards, riddled with bullets; bulging eyes popping out of their sockets; beasts with gaping jaws, fighting for the best morsel… To survive in such hostile surroundings, the characters have to back each other up and they always seem to be the best of their kind.

Something might happen at any moment. It might be wonderful, brilliant fun, sensual, or terrifyingly horrific. The Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

fight is never over until the end. Surrender is never an option, among other things because the fight might be worth the reward. Heath’s drawings have a strong sensual quality, whether the characters are good or bad. He never leaves things half-done and it is that saturation that is so stimulating. The same is also true of his narrative rhythm, with a strictly imposed pace.

Whether he is responsible for the script or not, there is never a lull in the stories he draws. They stick to the narrative and avoid all superfluous frills.

Lighting plays a central role in his comics stories. It acts as a vehicle in creating shape, while also aiding the narrative and improving composition by bringing some items closer while others recede. This makes the interpretation of the story much easier.

Light creates, but it is also a key visual factor in itself.

Having said that, despite Heath’s artistry and gift for narrative, he is not popularly known. A maestro for many colleagues and yet he is practically unknown to most comic fans. He never allowed the name of a super-hero to be more important than his own signature. He did not make the mistake of embarking on business ventures for which he was not prepared. Instead, Heath took advantage of his versatility to get hired under the best possible conditions. While some pop artists got rich copying his panels, he remained anonymous, honing his skills. Names of the former fill encyclopedias, while Heath barely figures in footnotes in the history of comics. But he knows who he is…

Unlike many other comic artists who openly mock or scorn their work or dismiss it as inconsequential with very little widespread appeal, Heath is convinced of his own worth. His main virtue is that natural assurance that all his work conveys, built up by exercising his trade; that strength forged through training and consistency; that “maybe I’m not the best, but give me time and I’ll get there”; that absolute self-confidence. His work is also tremendously coherent, standing out for its general high quality and for highpoints that are simply superb. Many episodes of “Rock,” his entire stage at Warren, his comic strips of the Lone Ranger and isolated pieces like “Give and Take,” “The Pool…,” “Tough Cop,” and “Intruder” are the work of a virtuoso. In short, Russ Heath’s work deserves to be remembered, enjoyed, and carefully analyzed. May this always be the case!

— Florentino Flórez

Above: CBC pal Steve Kriozere traveled to Spain early last year to attend the prestigious gallery showing “Flesh & Steel: The Art of Russ Heath,” and subsequently introduced us to Frédéric Manzano, who curated the exhibit with Florentino Flórez. They inform us that IDW will be publishing the exhibition’s catalogue as a stand alone book (cover above), akin to the recent Wallace Wood Woodworks volume! Much gratitude to Frédéric, Florentino, and Steve K. for their help, and especially to Editions Deesse for sharing such beautiful Heath artwork!

Below: Lucky attendees of the 2013 Spanish exhibit examine incredible Russ Heath originals loaned by generous collectors, including Jim Halperin and Steve K.!

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Russ: I got along with him, I thought, very well. He and I were very different.

CBC: Well, he was a control freak.

Russ: I didn’t see that. He needed to have the control.

“Control” can be an ugly word, but I don’t think in his case it was. He knew me, had seen me, had lunch with me during my marriage break-up, all kinds of sh*t coming down, leaving the kids and all of this heavy-duty stuff that most people could become an alcoholic or have real troubles with. You’re doing the best you can, and if you’re pushed hard enough, you break. If you’re calm, you bend. To him I seemed lackadaisical about it, but I wasn’t lackadaisical. I was doing the best I could. That had to be it. And he says, “I would go nuts if I was going through what you’re going through! How can you possibly do it?”

CBC: Kurtzman certainly gave more to comics than he got.

Russ: Oh, I think he felt it was a tremendous thrill to be working for Playboy, and then he got other people involved, and so on. He just enjoyed the whole scene so much.

CBC: But he was a bitter guy.

Russ: Bitter? About what?

CBC: About how the success of MAD had passed him by.

Russ: Well, we didn’t discuss that, so I didn’t get that from him. He shouldn’t have been bitter. You’ve got to understand that the other guy owns the damned thing and he’s not going to give you 51%. He’d give him everything but 51%.

CBC: I don’t think Harvey could ever resolve that.

Russ: As you might think, maybe he felt he deserved it.

CBC: There’s certainly a complexity there. There’s a complexity with Wallace Wood, too.

Russ: Well, Woody had an alcohol problem.

CBC: He was all-out self-destructive in a lot of ways, but he was still a tremendous talent, and gave so much of himself to the industry.

Russ: So did Vaughn Bodé. Can you imagine anybody stranger? Here am I in my sport jacket, my glasses, and loafers, and then him with his nail polish and cascading, long hair. We got along beautifully! Truly!

CBC: I’d have liked to have been a fly on the wall for those Above: This page describing writer Doug Moench’s process in writing horror comics is illustrated by Russ Heath conversations. Vaughn was a very sweet guy, right?

Russ: As far as I could tell. and it appeared in the Chicago Tribune’s Midwest magazine supplement on June 25, 1972. Below: Panel from CBC: How did you get hook up with DC? the creative pair’s “Blood Lunge,” Vampire Tales #9 [Feb. ’75]. Next page top: “Yellow Heat,” Vampirella #58 [Mar. ’77], drawn by Russ, words by Bruce Jones, perhaps their greatest story as a creative partnership. Courtesy Russ: I’m not sure who sent me over to see Kanigher because of my war stuff. It was in 1950. Kanigher gave me a of Frédéric Manzano. Inset: Panel detail the same team’s “Process of Elimination,” Creepy # 83 [Oct. ’76]. job, and I did it, and that started things up. [artists Kurtzman, Arnold Roth, Will Elder, and Al Jaffee] pooled their CBC: Did your personalities get along? Wasn’t he rather hard to get money and started Humbug, which failed because of its odd size. No along with? one knew where to put it on the stands. I did stuff in quite a few issues Russ: Some people walked right out of the office and didn’t even attempt of that. I was the first guy just outside the inner circle. I didn’t get into the to try again. I think John Severin was one of them, though he did a few inner circle because I didn’t pursue it. I would call Harvey for lunch, and jobs, but then couldn’t handle it. No bones about it: Kanigher was a pain when I got home I had a job to do. It took me three years to realize that if in the ass.

I went to lunch twice as many times, I’d have twice as much work. I also CBC: You just tolerated Kanigher? didn’t know that Gaines was sending them for free on all these vacations, Russ: Why talk about this if it’s not for print? like to Japan one year, Germany another year. God, if I’d known that, CBC: Well, gee whiz, it was just a huge aspect of your career. How do I’d have busted my ass. I also found out later he didn’t let you take your we not talk about it? girlfriend or your wife. It was for the guys only. But anyway, then there Russ: Let me put it this way: From my perspective, Kanigher would go was Help! magazine, which his connection with Jim Warren. Warren was for your weak points to try to exploit them. So I just kept the backer of Help!, and I appeared in that, in some of those my mouth shut and just remained a mysfumettis. I was also in Trump, which was for Hefner. I did good tery to him. One time he did hit on one of stuff in that, like Hairless Joe and the Breck shampoo ad, and my soft spots, but I didn’t react, so he stuff like that. Of course, when Little Annie Fanny came didn’t know he had. His opportunity along, I was one of the first slipped away. people he called.

CBC: I’ve heard of some editors CBC: Obviously, you were a engaging in kickbacks and Kanighstickler for authenticity. And er’s name has been mentioned. there’s probably no person more Russ: I don’t think so, but he notorious in the comic book might have come close. But that business as stickler for authenwasn’t my experience. Kanigher ticity than Harvey Kurtzman.

I’ve had certain props he used over heard many a story from E.C. and over again: The ack-ack gun contributors cursing the name hidden in a haystack; throwing a of Kurtzman because of all the regrenade down a tank barrel, which re-dos he’d make them do. probably couldn’t have happened

TM & ©2014 Dynamite Entertainment.

TM & ©2014 New Comic Company.

(having climbed onto a Tiger tank and looked over it, I know what one looks like). Anyway, Kanigher would do stuff like that over and over again. I would read his script, expand the important part of the story and drop in the ack-ack in the haystack. So I’d just leave it out. He apparently didn’t realize I was (so to speak) tampering with his work. He never said boo.

CBC: So it was pretty routine: You’d go in, deliver a job, pick up a check for the last job, as well as a new script for the next job?

Russ: That’s about it.

CBC: Do you have any fond memories of “The Haunted Tank”? It was really the same routine over and over, wasn’t it?

Russ: One of the things that happened is that when I went to Chicago, I was working by mail, and Kubert was the editor. But you’ve got to remember, in the ’60s… Kubert was straight and narrow. He got married early, had a stack of kids, did his business, always did deliver everything, right down the line. I mean, he was a married, at-home guy out in the boonies, and the rest of the world was going through major changes. Up until the 1960s, everybody wore their hair the same way. I mean, there was incredible change going on at the time. In the ’50s, we knew the rules, we knew what we were supposed to be doing, what we were not supposed to be doing, and we lived by that. But, in the ’60s, everybody starts asking, “Why?” Suddenly, it was why, why, why, why? So they start breaking all the rules.

They start assassinating everybody: Martin Luther King, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, you name it. They started burning half of the cities down. But Joe didn’t realize the world I was living in Chicago, that I was part of “The Scene.” I bought my bell-bottoms and went out drinking every night to see what’s going on. I mean, there were riots going on, with people running down the streets, breaking windows.

The world was changing, probably the biggest changes, outside of World War II, there ever was.

So I was frequently late with my “Sgt. Rock” assignments, and to make up for being late, I tried to do something startling with the work, adding some new twist to the artwork.

I did one thing where there was a flare coming through the roof, and you know how when you see a light, you can’t see anything for a second? Well, I did that. Instead of blacks all over, the shadows of the guys down there, shooting from the flare down to them, all the shadows were in blue. And there was all that stuff I was trying to do to make up for being late. Unknown to me, he came to a point where he decided, “I stopped giving him work and never gave him another job since.”

He said that on a panel when I was on stage with him at a comic convention.

I was amazed. I had gone to National Lampoon and started doing other stuff, so I didn’t know my work with Kubert had ended. He’s a helluva guy and we remain good friends.

There was a guy that I used to work for, an art director at Hanna-Barbera, Doug Wildey. I’d try to take him out for a decent lunch, but he wouldn’t order anything but a hamburger. And he put nothing on it: no lettuce, no tomatoes, no this, no that, nothing. He just wants his burnt plain hamburger.

CBC: What work do you most fondly remember?

Russ: The Warren work. I remember a story where there were cars pulling up to an Italian restaurant.

CBC: “The Executioner”?

Russ: Right. On the corner, on the brick wall, on one side, there’s a boxing match poster that’s shredding off the wall and you can see the old poster underneath, one they pasted the new one on. Somebody wrote me a letter commenting on the detail. Because you often wonder, “Am I wasting Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

my time here? Does anybody notice this stuff?” So it’s gratifying to be appreciated for putting in the detail. I also realized that for every guy you hear from, there are 10 others who wanted to write but never got around to it, let alone the ones that could have noticed it in passing.

I’m lucky to meet new fans all the time — I mean, they’re not new, but people I just never met before — and they come up to me at shows. One kid, I handed him my card and he realized he’d seen my signature so many times on so much of my stuff since he was like 14 years old, and he’s holding the card and his hand starts shaking because my signature is on the card! “God! You’re that guy!” I felt so bad for him. How can I put him at ease?

And, of course, you can’t. It’s “wow!” It feels good.

CBC: I think for many it’s the recognition that you never phone a job in. That you seem to always put in that extra

“Russ was one of the three or four best comic artists I was ever lucky enough to work with. We only met a few times socially, but he was always warm and friendly, and very complimentary about the work we did together, even telling me once ‘Yellow Heat’ was his favorite comic story, ‘Especially that twist ending!’

To my eyes, in the Comics Hall of Fame, Russ will always be a shining star right up there with the best of them. May his wonderful Atlas covers and interior Warren art glitter forever throughout the annals of art history. Russ, we all owe you much more than we’ve given!”

— Bruce Jones, Oct. 2013 67

Next page: Opening spread from the Russ Heath masterwork “Give and Take,” the Blazing Combat #4 [July 1966], written by Archie Goodwin. A bunch of photo reference stills — all featuring the artist as model — were shot by a Playboy photographer pal of Russ’ to use in the tale. These and a few others will appear full-size in the CBC #4 Bonus PDF available at www.twomorrows.com/freestuff.

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effort. It’s as if you have as much respect for the work as we do. Kubert is the same kind of artist.

Russ: You also can be affected by criticism. Gil Kane, one time early on, said that my faces were wooden, that they didn’t have any emotion. And that upset me, so I went home and I worked hard to change that. Gil was responsible for me putting in a big effort to cure that.

CBC: When I look at your “Haunted Tank” work of the mid’60s, there wasn’t as much personality to the work, I thought.

It didn’t seem as if your heart was in it as it was in the 1970s.

You had flashes, like the Attila the Hun cover — when you designed, you really designed!

Russ: I was surprised to look over all the old Marvel war covers. I saw covers I had forgotten about entirely. There’s those big books which include almost all the covers, and I saw some that I did and said, “Son of a bitch! I wouldn’t mind doing a recreation of that!”

CBC: Some of your Atlas covers were breathtaking. Did you have a lot of freedom with Stan Lee? Russ: There was a guy they had who did some out roughs and that was a little inhibiting, I think, to the general look of a lot of them. I don’t know that he ever did any inking. I don’t think he ever drew anything but sketches.

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 New Comic Company.

Above: Three cherce panels

by Russ Heath from his Warren Publications work. Top is from “The Executioner,” Creepy #92 [Oct. ’77] (plot and art by Russ). Middle is the final panel from Russ and writer Bruce Jones’ “Zooner or Later,” Vampirella #78 [May ’79].

Bottom is from the Eerie #98 [Jan. ’79] story written by the expert Mr. Jones, “Got You on My Mind.”

CBC: Anyway, how was it working with Stan?

Russ: I found it pretty easy. He’d do some dramatic things like, when you’re in his office working on a story, he’d slam his hand on the desk, which makes your heart skip a beat, and punctuate his talk with dramatic gestures. But that’s just Stan. “Excelsior!”

Every time I see him in a group or we’re having lunch in a group, he gets up and says, “Hi, gentlemen! And you, too, Russ!” That’s his standard joke, that whatever it is: “You guys are all the best, except for this guy or that guy.”

CBC: It’s called “passive-aggressive.” [laughs] As far as you know, did he write most of the stuff that you did for Atlas in the early ’50s?

Russ: I’m not sure I didn’t do more of other people’s work than his. Like Bob Haney.

CBC: I mean the Atlas stuff. Who were your writers at Atlas?

Russ: Well, I remember Haney...

CBC: Haney wrote for Stan Lee? Russ: Didn’t he?

CBC: No, he wrote for Kanigher.

Russ: Oh. Yeah, you’re right. Well, I know there were other writers, but I can’t remember who. I was surprised when DC let me write three stories for “Sgt. Rock.” Like the Tiger tank story I got from just reading about the tank. I did another one about… I’ve often wondered what it’s like when you’re in the trenches, where there’s a hundred of you, and the sergeant says, “When I blow the whistle, A group advances” — half the men belong to A group, the other half to B group — and he says, “When I blow the whistle, we’re going to go out there and knock out those machine gun nests.” So he blows the whistle, and all of A group get up and run out, and they’re all mowed down. Now what does B group think?

Do you shoot the guy with the whistle? Why would you run out there?

CBC: That story had a really grim ending, didn’t it?

Russ: Yeah. I made a mistake: I used three good ideas in one story, used them up, when I could have stretched them to three separate stories. A beginner often does that. But I also brought in the black and white thing: One of them is black; one is white. [“Death Stop,” OAAW #226, Dec. ’70.]

CBC: The black guy has to get over his fear, right?

Russ: The black guy follows orders and runs out only to get mowed down and the white guy is still back there at the start, in the trench. So the black guy gets so enraged at his buddy just sitting there, and, wounded, he still manages to knock out the Nazi machine gun nest and crawls back to the trench, screaming at his white buddy, probably getting ready to strangle him. But he dies inches short. And then, of course, we find out that the white guy had been killed before the whistle even blew.

CBC: That’s a great story!

Russ: I was trying to be real.

CBC: I loved it.

Russ: There was a third one, but I can’t remember what the hell that was.

CBC: Did you do one about Sgt. Rock’s brother?

Russ: I don’t recall.

CBC: Didn’t you draw a revival of the Human Torch in the 1950s? [Young Men #24, Dec. 1953.]

Russ: I did a Human Torch story. They wanted to redo the Human Torch, because what he turned out to be was just an outline with scratch marks on him painted red. He’s supposed to be on fire, there should be little flames here and there, on the top of his head or somewhere. So I put those in, and that’s what they remembered when they wanted to redo him, and they went back and looked it up. They said, “Sonof-a-bitch, it was Russ Heath!”

CBC: Did it bother you to do a super-hero story or you didn’t care?

Russ: Not at that time. I didn’t consider him a super-hero.

He’s a firebug. Fans would come up and say, “Remember that story about such-and-such, issue #84 of Amazing

TM & ©2014 New Comic Company.

TM & ©©2014 Photos DC Comics.

Russ Heath.

Tramps?” I say, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” When we did a lot of these stories, we never knew what book they were going to be used in, and neither did the editor. And as far as numbers? When you’ve done 35,000 drawings, how can you keep issue numbers in your mind? Of course, there are well-meaning guys who are very good at that.

CBC: [In Comic Book Guy’s voice] “Blazing Combat #4: Best. Heath. Job. Ever!” [laughter] You said that Stan offered you a full-time position on staff?

Russ: Everybody who at that time was on staff.

CBC: Are we talking about the late 1940s?

Russ: Right. We’re talking about the very beginning of my comics career, in 1946. When you came in, you went to the office in the Empire State Building.

I worked on “Two-Gun Kid.” One day, Stan said, “You don’t have to come in.”

One thing they found out was that I was just penciling, and there were these idiots who were penciling in shadows. I said, “That’s real stupid. I can take a brush, and, in three seconds, I’ve got that filled, instead of sitting there with a pencil filling it on up.” Of course, for somebody else to ink my pencils, I penciled with a soft pencil and penciled very thoroughly. I said, “Stan, why do we have to have this inked? Let’s make a photocopy of it.” “You don’t need anything. We can print right from the pencil!” Unfortunately, it took anybody else so long to pencil like that that it wouldn’t work. In the meantime, he fired 40 inkers! I was not popular. So later on, he says, “It’ll always be freelance now, because I can’t stand firing people.” I don’t blame him. You know, firing people sucks.

CBC: Did you hear that story about Martin Goodman opening up a closet door and seeing a four-foot high stack of inventory — finished stories — and demanding, “What are these?” Stan said, “Well, to keep people on the staff busy.” Next day all the artists were off-staff. John Buscema told me this story.

Russ: I never heard it. In the beginning, there were no professionals running comic companies. They were businessmen of other sorts, maybe haberdashers or manufacturers of some kind. They said, “We can have a sideline here. We can produce a book for $4,000. We can put out comic books as a side thing.” That’s how a lot of comic companies started out. So, in reality, their decisions were based on nothing at all. They were just shooting in the dark.

No professionalism in management.

CBC: You’ve always done work outside of comics, haven’t you?

Russ: You need to keep an eye out for opportunity. After I came back from the service, there was a local swimming club. I wanted to join the club, but it was expensive, like $400 for the summer to have a family membership. The owner knew I was an artist and he had me design a new logo for them. A simple design. And one they used when they’d have special days, it’d be on the trophy, on T-shirts, and so on. Now, I knew that this guy didn’t know the value of artwork and I knew he was going to offer me, like, $50. So I said, “I’ll tell you what. Give me a free membership.” He jumped at the chance — no money out of pocket for him — and he just has to let my family in the gate. So he got what he wanted and I got what I wanted. Instead of $50 cash, I got $400 in trade, so it worked out nicely.

CBC: How many kids did you have?

Russ: Four.

CBC: One right after the other?

Russ: Two to three years between each.

CBC: When you got married, where did you two live?

Russ: For three years, we lived with my parents. That’s a tough way to start a marriage. I don’t care how nice your parents are, it’s just not the thing you do.

CBC: Why was it tough?

Russ: Well, you see, your parents had a child, so they have experience. But that didn’t mean anything. You have an idea of the way you want to do it. Being of different ages, different eras, you don’t think the same.

CBC: That’s a part of the process, too, right? You have to break away?

Russ: Well, I had no desire to stay at home. I was following my life wherever it led. So I saved up for those two years, did nothing but work at the board. Saved up two grand and put it as down payment on a suburban house in Livingston, New Jersey.

CBC: How long did you live there?

Russ: Maybe seven years.

CBC: Did your marriage dissolve pretty quickly?

Russ: No, it took some time. Ten years is a long time. We were married for 10 years, at my parents and in our own place. At a certain point you realize, something bad is going to happen if we don’t get apart. Fighting didn’t do the children any good. Having one parent can be better than having daily life like a wildlife TV show or something. So I thought I’d better get out of there before things got out of control. The marriage just wasn’t functioning.

I already had a studio in my parents’ home, because they had a four-bedroom home, just the two of them. I stayed there. My kids lived 20 minutes away, so it was easy to go over and visit.

CBC: Did you see your kids often?

Russ: Yeah, I saw them a couple times a week, when I was in the area. Then, when I moved to New York, it became more like once a week. I always would rent a cottage at the Jersey shore for vacation in the summer to take them by myself for the two weeks.

CBC: Near Asbury Park?

Russ: No, it was not that far down. Above Seaside Heights. I can’t remember the name. I found that spending vacation time with them was much more important than the Sunday visit, because you go Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

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Art ©2014 Alex Ross. Characters TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. Comics.

Next page: Spread from Russ’ pencils and inks on “The Blood Plague,” in Planet of Vampires #3 [July ’75], also from Atlas/Seaboard. Words by John Albano.

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over there, it’s one of the only times your wife has to do stuff she wants to do or go on a date or whatever, and the kids are scattered. This one’s over at so-and-so’s house, this one’s over there. So I’m sitting there, cleaning the gutters in the house, and I thought, “This isn’t seeing the kids.” When you did see them, they were on their best behavior, all dressed up for a special occasion, and that’s not normal.

CBC: So when did you get married?

Russ: In 1946 or ’47.

CBC: When were you working at the advertising agency?

During the same time you were doing work for DC Comics, ’64, ’65?

Russ: Yeah, I started at DC in 1950, and the advertising period was in the early ’60s, but I was doing comics at the same time.

CBC: Does any of that advertising work survive?

Russ: I might find two or three sheets of it.

CBC: Was it good stuff?

Russ: Yeah, it was good stuff. I did comps.

CBC: Did you always want to do illustration work?

Russ: Well, illustration, to me, was much better, because

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 the respective copyright holder.

Above: We think it’s fair to say that Russ Heath reached his artistic apex in the 1970s, particularly on “Sgt. Rock” for DC Comics.

But he was also all over the place during that decade, freelancing for virtually everyone and producing exemplary work… including work for Martin Goodman’s short-lived venture to compete with Marvel Comics, Atlas/Seaboard. Here’s a nice page from his “Tough Cop,” appearing in their black-&-white comics magazine, Thrilling Adventure Stories, #2 [Aug. ’75], courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

you could take maybe three days on a job, maybe a week, depending on what the circumstance, you could do one thing and get it absolutely perfect. Comics, you couldn’t do that, do one panel. One advertising agency wanted just three panels, with characters like Tarzan and Flash Gordon. They paid $600 a panel! So that’s the difference between advertising and comic book rates. I knew several illustrators through the years who would get a couple grand for whatever they were doing.

CBC: After you separated, you lived with your parents for a time? You go to New York?

Russ: Well, I lived in the city first and then my mother died, so I stayed at my dad’s place. A year went by, I’m working off the dining room table. It’s 12:30 and my father is not home yet, and I’m worried. But I suddenly realized who the hell was I to be waiting up for my father? He doesn’t need my help. He’s out on a date! So I moved. I had kept my apartment, but I moved back after a year with him. I realized I wasn’t helping any by staying there, because he was okay.

CBC: Where did you live in the city?

Russ: On 91st in New York, near the mayor’s mansion.

CBC: Gracie Mansion?

Russ: It was on the East River. The buses from 86th Street stopped at my building. I got the apartment from a model I was dating. She wanted to go on the road with a dance troupe. Her mother was staying there, but she couldn’t afford the rent, so she had to go somewhere else. So I got the apartment.

CBC: Did you have fun in New York, being a bachelor? This was the late ’50s and early ’60s?

Russ: Yes! CBC: You had always been in touch with Harvey Kurtzman, right? He used you as a model in his Help! fumetti, and had you do some artwork as well, right?

Russ: Oh, when he started to do Little Annie Fanny, he asked me if I wanted to work on it, and I said, “Sure.” So a bunch of us flew to Chicago, worked out of the attic of the Playboy mansion, there were a couple of apartments where we worked for two weeks until we had that issue to bed.

Then they went home, except for Harvey, Willie, and myself.

Then I went home. Then there was another issue, and we flew back again. Eventually it was just me going back and forth. Rarely did Harvey go. Then I kept asking Harvey for a raise. It was already one of the most expensive feature in the magazine. Production cost about $4,000 a page. But for the time it took, and there was a bunch of us on it and never enough money. I says, “I got kids and a house.” (We sold the original house because she couldn’t afford to keep it, and bought a smaller house.) So I kept asking Harvey for more money.

I had been up all night working on the thing. We cut the page apart so Will could work one half of it while I’m working on the other. I mean Harvey would physically cut the page in half. It’s a mess… the tissues, the Scotch tape… everything sticking to everything else.

Picture this: I’m in my apartment in New York. Harvey calls me up, seven in the morning. I tell him I’m finished.

He says he’ll drive down and pick it up, only he doesn’t mention he’s bringing his daughters, and I open the door in my underwear. And they all come running in! Unbeknown to anybody, as Harvey’s looking at my stuff, one of the kids grabs my telescope, takes it into the bathroom, and flushes all the lenses down the toilet! I was dumbfounded. If one of my kids had done such a thing… So he’s showing me what needs to be done on the job, I’ve been up all night and I’m sitting there, and he’s suddenly gone with his kids. I sat there for about a half-an-hour, looking at it. So I gave him enough time to get home, and I call him up and says, “Harvey, turn around and come down and pick up all this. I’m done, I’m out of here.” Come back and get the job. I quit.” So Harvey comes down and he’s panic-stricken. I said, “No, I’ve had it.”

Pieces of tissue and Scotch tape are all over the place. So by five o’clock that afternoon, Hefner is on the phone. Harvey

TM & ©2014 the respective copyright holder.

had never asked him about increasing my salary. So he says, “I tell you what I’ll do. I know you like living in Chicago and you’re getting paranoid about New York. I will move you physically to Chicago. I’ll give you my old office to work on them and I’ll double your salary.” Then I began to get pissed off.

If he’d double my salary, that meant I could have been having more money for quite some time, right? But I couldn’t bring that up at that point. So I said, “You’re on!” That’s how I got to Chicago.

CBC: Did that Playboy lifestyle appeal to you?

Russ: The Playboy lifestyle? Well, you know, it’s funny. When Harvey was enticing me to work on Annie, he’d say, “It’s the Playboy Mansion, Russ!

Look at all this stuff, and all these girls!” I said, “Harvey, the life I’m living in New York isn’t very far from this.” I didn’t find it that unique because I was already living a pretty swinging lifestyle. I learned how to live in New York, to go everywhere and do everything, on very little money. I’ll give you an example. I’m walking down the street. I look up and see a party going on at the seventh floor of this apartment building. I see a hotel on my right, I walk into the hotel and check my bag and my coat, and went into the bar, and I said, “Can you give me an empty glass?” I put it in my breast pocket, I go across the street to the apartment building. The doorman says, “Who do you wish to see?” I run my finger down and “Oh, there it is!” I take the elevator to the seventh floor. I walk down the hall listening for the noise of the party. I hear it and I rap on the door. So when the door opens, I don’t look at whoever opened it, I just charge into the crowd holding my glass in front of me, like I’d been somebody who went out in the hall and his glass is empty. And chances are the guy who opened the door doesn’t know everybody at the party.

I remember there was this one night, I’m dancing with this girl, and I thought, “Well, I might as well strike out and get it over with.” So I cut in on a girl dancing with another guy. He didn’t like that at all, but I started dancing with her anyway. All my pick-up routine was gone, because I was too drunk.

I says, “Do you want to leave?” She says, “Sir, I’m here with my boyfriend.” I said, “Yes or no will do.” So she says, “Okay.” She gets her coat and her date Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

is holding the door open for us to go out. So we go over to her place. She sits down on the corner of the couch, and I gave her a big kiss. I thought, “Boy, am I making out like a bandit!” But then she says, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

CBC: Busted! [laughter] Russ: I had gone out with her four months ago! Here I thought I was so cool, and I had forgotten I had dated her!

CBC: Well, it certainly was a sign that you were partying pretty hard!

Russ: Well, I always partied hard. It was a different era. Everybody wore suits in those days.

CBC: Did you party with Gil Kane at all?

Russ: Not much. I had him over a couple times at parties in my apartment.

CBC: Looking back on your life, do you think you partied too much? Or was it just the times you lived in?

Russ: I thought everybody was doing the same thing. Evidently I was doing more. Drinking too much and not remembering the next day what the hell you did.

CBC: You were in Chicago for seven years?

Russ: Yeah.

CBC: How long were you living in Hefner’s apartment?

Russ: In the mansion?

CBC: Yes. Russ: Hef had given up going to the office. His old office was in a threefloor office building before they got the big one downtown. Everyone was beautiful. There were just piles of girls. The refrigerator was in my office, so these girls would bring their lunches in brown bags and put them in the refrigerator. I shared the office with a guy, he sat at Hefner’s old desk. So Friday after he left, I took all the bags of forgotten lunches and open them up.

You couldn’t imagine the mold! Every color in the world… Fantasia! Then I put them all in the wastebasket under the center of his desk. So he comes in Monday morning, after the heat of the weekend. This stuff by then had to be 71

©2014 the respective copyright holder.

Above and next page top: To create this NatLamp “spaghetti Western,” Russ recycled some panels from his Gunsmoke comic strip pitch. The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies [1975].

really something else, ripe as anything, drawing flies. He’s sitting at the desk, this thing right at his feet, and he’d say, “What is that stinking?” But then, life is to be lived, right?

CBC: Did you like Hefner?

Russ: Very much, yes, indeed.

CBC: When did meet Archie Goodwin? At Warren?

Russ: I don’t know. I know we were good friends at Warren. I don’t know if I knew him before. It’s very interesting working with Archie because a lot of writers have no visualization sense. They call for a picture that you can’t do. They want the landing at Inchon or somewhere, with 1,600 ground troops and several kinds transports, 12 people are talking, and the writer wants a close-up. [laughs] There’s no way to draw it. So one time Archie sent me a script and thumbnails illustrated with stick figures. This was just a suggestion of the way he visualized the story. I knew if I looked at it, I would be prejudiced in my thinking. So I put it aside and did my own. I thought, “I’ll compare and see. I’ll use mine or if he hit the ball better than me, I’ll use his.

Out of 40 shots, there was only one that was different! They were identical.

Now, that’s visualization. [laughter] It freaked me out.

Archie wrote some very nice stuff about me in one of the Comic Art Convention souvenir books, a Phil Seuling show, I think it was. Archie wrote, “What has that son-of-a-bitch done now?” [laughs] “When I’m opening up a new package from Russ” — this was when I was in Chicago and mailing stuff — “they’d all cluster around to see what that bastard had done.” Marv Wolfman opened a package with that tank splash in it, and he says, “Oh!” Then he ran down the hall and told everyone, “You have to see this!”

Marv wrote a story with Len Wein that I drew, for Weird War Tales, [#3, Jan.–Feb. ’72] with each page showing different eras in time — from caveman days to the present — and it was called, “The Pool….”

CBC: That was a superb job.

Russ: Yes, it worked very well, because the colors on the page in back never interfered with the colors in the foreground. I really liked it.

CBC: The Blazing Combat [#4, July ’66] story, “Give and Take”: How long did you need to do that story?

Russ: I spent a month-and-a-half on that story and I got two hundred-some bucks for it. I bought the fatigues, had a Playboy photographer (who was a friend of mine) shoot the reference some Saturday when the offices were closed. The story had bad characterization, because there was only one model, and that’s me. I’m the good guys and the bad guys.

CBC: Is it one of your favorite jobs?

Russ: Oh, yes. It’s probably the favorite because there was so much put into it.

CBC: Why did you do such a good job? Obviously the amount paid for the story wasn’t enough to cover the effort.

Russ: Because I knew the artists appearing in that issue — Frazetta, Wally Wood, John Severin, Reed Crandall — tough competition. “I’ve got to do a good job to stand up alongside them.” But I did this thing to make it a collector’s item deliberately. Ironically, they all did turn in great jobs.

Probably each one of them might have been their best. So I’m glad I did it.

72

I hired a girl to help me once when I broke my wrist and I couldn’t ink properly, so I had her come in to ink. I called up a buddy of mine and asked, “Do you know anybody in Chicago who’s a student, because I can’t pay much, a student who would, I could pay them something, then the rest they could consider that I was giving a lesson or something?” He says, “I only know one person that could do that, a girl.”“Give me her phone number.” So I phone her. What’s she going to think? Somebody’s calling her up to invite over and look at etchings? And she practically collapsed on the other end of the phone. I said, “What the hell?” She said she loved “Give and Take” that she kept it on her person at all times, it was in her bag everywhere she went. [laughter] Freaky!

CBC: How did you break your wrist?

Russ: There was this girl from Chicago and I went over to her new apartment and she had a house-warming cocktail party and we’re all standing around. I took a step back and fall through a hole. There had been a circular stairway there from a previous tenant. They got the couch out by taking the railing down, so there was literally a huge hole in the floor. So I dropped 12 feet and ended up upside-down and my hand bent back. I got a line fracture.

I kicked a window out on the way down. I could have sued her easily; I took pictures with my Polaroid camera, showing no railing. It was an open-andshut case. And she was afraid that if I sued, she’d lose her apartment.

CBC: Did that put you out of commission for a time?

Russ: It didn’t put me totally out of commission. As I say, that one job, I think it was 12 pages, there was a lot of black in it.

CBC: What was the job?

Russ: It had Marie, the French chick. Do you know the girl I’m talking about?

CBC: Oh, Mademoiselle Marie!

Russ: She was in it. And there was a lot of searchlights, night stuff, so there was a lot of black. (Somebody wrote an article about me doing that.) I had a cast on for eight weeks. When I first went in to the doctor, he says, “Stick out your hand.” So I stick out my hand like this and he puts it in the cast. And I get home and thought, “The cast is hurting my hand. I can’t get the fingers closed enough to grip a brush, for one thing. This isn’t working. So I took a saw and I sawed out some wedges so I could bend my hand enough, and then I filled it in with Spackle. You know, a form of plaster. And it didn’t work.

So I go to the doctor, I says, “I need help. I wouldn’t want you tampering with my artwork, and I shouldn’t tamper with your work. I apologize.” He said, “I understand.” So this time, I put my hand out the way it was going to be to work. But it hurt me to do cross-hatching, so I tried to use as little as possible of that. The woman who had the hole in her floor thought that I was pissed forevermore because I broke my wrist.

CBC: Was “Give and Take” the one job for the early Warren period? You didn’t do any horror, right?

Russ: I did a lot of Warren, but only one war story. Blazing Combat only lasted, what, four issues?

CBC: Right. You did a lot more Warren work later on.

Russ: “Give and Take” was ’66. There was a long period of Warren stuff, and it spans quite a few years. I worked early on and then worked later. #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

©2014 the respective copyright holder. ©2014 the respective copyright holder.

Below: Note that Russ also recycled his Tiger tank from “Sgt. Rock” to use in the eye-popping bondage comic, “Cowgirls at War,” from National Lampoon Encyclopedia of Humor [1973.]

But I loved it, because a colorist couldn’t screw it up in the black-&-white medium.

CBC: You did that type of work for the Marvel black-&-white mags as well.

Russ: I also did work for Atlas/Seaboard. I did a war story that was never published, and when I called up to get the artwork, I found out that people ran off with it, so I only have a couple of Xeroxes of the pages I did. That job was the only one that came anything close to “Give and Take.”

CBC: Do you like doing war stories?

Russ: I do, because after so many years, [taps his skull] most of the research is up here. I have reference for most of the airplanes. I do pull them out and read ’em, but I can swipe my own stuff by now, considering the amount of war comics I’ve already done. I could draw you a lot of the weapons without looking at any books. I know a lot by heart by now.

CBC: Did you have an interest in the war stuff?

Russ: Well, it’s a great vehicle for action and detail and research. I was never a history buff. It was just the stories that interested me. It was something that you could get into. I think readers liked the Sea Devils because I made it somewhat authentic due to my scuba-diving experience, and I probably drew people swimming underwater, a feeling of what it felt like to be suspended underwater than most, because I had experience.

Also, the backgrounds faded away underwater because anything over 10 feet away is out of focus.

When you’re drawing rocks and plant life in war stories or Westerns, generally, you can’t make ‘em too big or too small.

The same with the underwater stories.

The worst kind of job I could imagine is to draw cities with buildings and windows and such. That thing drives me crazy.

Look at Alex Ross: How can he do these cityscapes, with all those windows?

Unbelievable! And he does it all correctly, with correct vanishing points… he’s amazing.

(I was confused early on about Alex, because there was once a great illustrator named Alex Ross, and I thought he had come back to do more, or is that his son? And I can’t believe this guy can draw that well and is happy as a clam doing this dumb stuff!)

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

CBC: Super-heroes?

Russ: Like Wonder Woman? I mean, come on! Let alone Superman and Batman. See, I’m so literal. I did a story awhile back, and it’s got the guy with the wings on his back. The Norseman or whatever.

CBC: Hawkman?

Russ: Hawkman. Of that genre, a super-hero character. It looks silly to me.

It looks like everyone’s dressed up for Halloween, because I’m too literal.

I don’t get the appeal and that’s why my Batman didn’t appeal to anyone. I was so close I couldn’t see it until much later, and I realized I had no flavor in it. I had people standing there in costumes. It was not Batman as he should be, with the whole flavor of the thing, all the darkness of the character and the flavor...

CBC: This was your Legends of the Dark Knight [#46–49, June–Aug. ’93], “Heat,” written by Doug Moench?

Russ: Yeah. I did it, it was totally wrong, and didn’t go over. Doug was sitting with Archie Goodwin and Archie said, “I don’t know.” Doug says, “Well, that’s what we asked for in the script, and that’s what Russ drew. This crazy guy in a costume broke into a girl’s dorm, and he’s slicing them up.” This is the worst premise that you can have to try to stay away from the censor: Semi-nude girls in their nighties.

The worst part was this girl cop, there was a lady cop in the park, and he turns and slashes and her fingers fly. She’s standing there, bleeding like a pig. It was bad. But I did it. Years beforehand, when my kids were little, I wouldn’t have done a story like that, because I didn’t want anything on the coffee table that I couldn’t show them. Later on, you’re saying, “Well, what the hell! Everybody’s doing it today.”

[Shuffling through his art files and commenting on work] Sticking swords through people? Hmmm. Though Dave Stevens says the swords should not be through a girl’s leg, their thigh, because it’s too much… and he’s probably right.

See her expression? That’s hate. It’s supposed to be hate. I tried to get it in the photographs over there. And I had more photographs of that pose, with the hate. They always have these girls, they have all kinds of armor and swords and stuff. That’s to be part of a cover for Heavy Metal. It’s got a lot of end-of-the-battle, all the bodies and horses, etc.

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Above and right: You’ll forgive us if we remain aghast at Russ’ surreal pencils and inks on Son of Satan #8 [Feb. ’77]. Courtesy of the artist, here are two of the more mindblowing pages sans word balloons!

Below: The villain called Sheesa from Russ Heath’s great one-shot job on Ka-Zar #12 [Nov. ’75].

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Following page bottom: Russ Heath’s glorious inks graced superb newcomer Mike Golden’s beautiful pencils for a memorable twoissue run on Mister Miracle.

Here’s a panel detail from #25 [Aug.–Sept. 1978].

Encyclopedia of Humor. What was the thing that you did?

Russ: Well, I didn’t know what to do with it, because it’s virtually pictures of nothing. You never can see what the hell’s going on.

CBC: What was the script? What were the descriptions in the script?

Russ: Oh, the script says, “We can’t quite see, but so-andso, now they’re all running up the stairs out of sight.” So I thought, “What the hell is there to draw?” Then I thought, well, there’s all this sh*t like trucks and birds and nonsense, so draw the best bird you’ve ever drawn, draw the most interesting truck you can, and so on. So that’s the way I approached it. I also did a Sergio Leone Western thing for them — a spaghetti Western story — that was called “Rio Jawbone”? I didn’t know what to do with that, so I dug up these sample Gunsmoke comic strips I had drawn years prior and cut them up for the National Lampoon strip. That other one, “Cowgirls At War,” I did when I was in Chicago, and Michael says, “You’re gonna finish this in three days”!

He says, “You are flying to New York City and I will pick you up at the airport.” He took me directly to his house, practically tied me to the damn table, and said, “You’re working from eight in the morning until midnight every day until it’s done.”

CBC: You recycled the “Sgt. Rock” Tiger tank picture?

Russ: Yeah, that was an inside joke for those that knew my work.

CBC: Plus, there was the time crunch you were under?

Russ: I had to buy some bondage books to get reference for that. I didn’t know what the S/M crowd was into!

CBC: [Laughs] I remember thinking that you must have really been into the kinky sh*t to do it this well!

Russ: I got a long letter from somebody in Arizona that said, #4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

What I wanted to do, instead of having this gorgeous look on her face in the middle of this chaos, is what I— You know, if you came upon a wolf in the forest that was caught in a trap, and he’d been trying to chew his leg off, and he looks up, and he figures you’re the one that did this to him. You know what I mean? And the look in his eyes, the hate. If I can get that, then I’ve made something different. But again, the blade through the leg should be either toned down or done some other way, because it’s a little bit too much. But it’s a great pose. And that belt through her crotch is cool. And it should make a damn good cover.

CBC: How’d you get into National Lampoon?

Russ: [Art director] Michael Gross, I think, saw my work and called me to do some job. He liked my stuff in something else he’d seen. I don’t really remember.

CBC: I think he saw the “Sgt. Rock” stuff.

Russ: Anyway, he called me and we became good friends. Of course, we didn’t see each other for many years. We both ended up in a bar together down the street in L.A., so suddenly we became buddies again. We had lunch every Tuesday, and we’d see each other more than that, because I was always in the bar. At least five days a week.

CBC: Did you ever work Michael O’Donoghue?

Russ: Yes. I didn’t know him that well. I mean, I met him a few times, and that’s most of it.

He probably remembered me better than I remembered him.

CBC: You were telling me about “Swamp Sluts” in this National Lampoon

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Following page above: The Comics Code objected to this Son of Satan #8 sequence written

by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Russ Heath, so it was replaced in the comic book by a page drawn by John Romita. Courtesy of Cory Sedlmeier and Marvel Comics.

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. TM & © DC Comics.

“Have you done any other work like this? If you have any, we want it! Be sure and let us know.” They were obviously really into fetish art. You also get people who think this is your interest! I said, “I draw what I’m told to draw! It’s not my thing.”

CBC: [Skeptical] Sure, Russ, sure. [laughter] But you do draw the most bodacious bodies on women. Playboy never had you do Vargas-like pin-up stuff?

Russ: In fact, when I left, I told Hef I had an idea for doing a bunch of pin-ups. It wasn’t Vargas, but it could have developed into something.

CBC: Have you done overtly sexual stuff?

Russ: Only one or two things. There was one thing I did for a girly magazine that had, I call it my first nationally released “bush.” There’s nothing wrong with calendars of pretty girls, so I wanted to take a crack at it. I’ve noticed from the airbrushing and the computer, there are guys who take it so far that it’s unbelievable how good they are. I’d like to do more of this pretty girl art. I don’t want to get into airbrushing, because that’s a mechanical technique, and I’d much rather end up being a painter, and paint really artistic stuff, rather than go to airbrushing. (I’m not saying some of the stuff isn’t gorgeous — there are so many good guys out there — but I still think I can sell these things, because women will always sell.

CBC: How did you meet [Heath’s then-current model] Lynne Nixon?

Russ: In a bar. She was dating the chef.

CBC: Is she from around Los Angeles?

Russ: Yes. Everybody went to this bar… “used to,” when everybody was drinking. It was three-deep at the bar, they had free food, a cocktail hour.

CBC: Were you struck by Lynn’s look?

Russ: Well, she is gorgeous. I got to know her.

CBC: You’ve known her for how long?

Russ: Eight years.

CBC: I guess I met her probably six years ago in San Diego.

She’s got a deplorable excess of personality, shall we say!

Russ: We have a lot of laughs.

CBC: She’s a wonderful character, for sure. What’s she do for a living?

Russ: She’s a masseuse.

CBC: You made a big art sale with Heritage, but you’re still not retired. You’re still taking on work?

Russ: Why stop now? I figure people still want my stuff and fans are willing to special order sketches and everything, so why quit?

CBC: Haven’t you worked hard enough and are entitled to retire?

Russ: Oh, yeah, but I think of Charlie Russell. I know what the feeling is to like somebody’s artwork — I loved Russell’s work — and to just see them go wait out the rest of their lives lying a hammock, to just stop drawing… I just can’t fathom it. Anyway, what else have I got to do? I’m lucky and appreciative to have people interested in my work so why not try and please them? Even though I can probably fake 62, I’m still 77.

CBC: Some of the new stuff you showed me — the Howard Chaykin story — is some of the strongest work I’ve seen come from you in a long time. I’m glad you’ve come back to use a lot of black ink. A lot of your recent work has seemed sparse and sometimes rushed.

Russ: Well, the last three real comic book stories I’ve done — one had Sgt. Rock in Hawaii, and a Starman story that was a Western — have been so miserably colored that I was determined to do this job differently. The coloring was just f*cking ridiculous. I mean, I’ve got this beautiful, sunlit scene, and they colored it like it’s a foggy day, and that just blows the whole thing to pieces.

CBC: Some coloring choices in Enemy Ace seemed weak.

Russ: Enemy Ace was pretty well-colored because I talked to the colorist, but there were two things I forgot: One was, these shots of B-17’s, most of the time when you see old Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

newsreels and stuff, they’re so high up that the sky is really dark blue. And you get these cottony white contrails. Yet the colorist figured jet contrails are dirty and put a little brown in there and dirtied it up. Plus they put in a light blue sky. So that whole effect that I was looking for isn’t there.

CBC: Do you have any idea the genesis of Sea Devils?

Russ: I didn’t like that strip because it had too many characters. It’s not good to have that many main characters. First of all, you can’t put them all in one shot, and yet, storywise, it really calls for that. So I’d draw two of them and I’d have an arm sticking in, indicating the others are still there to the next panel. But you’ve got to have your protagonist, and you’ve got to copy, all to try to get it in. When you divide the emotionalism between four, rather than just Sgt. Rock.

I forget whether it was Kanigher or somebody else, but I would need more room, so I’d wipe out certain sections and expand the story to get the room. Take that out and bring the thing together. I even a couple of times got away with longer stories, adding a couple pages. But they said, “You’ve gotta stop this, our advertising space is all set up in advance! You can’t do that!”

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Above: Some animation character work by Russ Heath during his stint at Marvel Productions in the ’80s.

Below: Bruce Timm shared this caricature of Russ and added, “A familiar sight at the Marvel Productions offices in ’84… comics legend Russ Heath at his drawing board, sittin’ up straight, pencil in hand… and sound asleep!”

Courtesy of Bruce.

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

©2014 Bruce Timm.

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CBC: How did you know how to do it?

Russ: I’m an artist. It’s like that work I did for Jim Warren, “Give and Take,” where I figured, “Okay, the uniforms are going to deep color, so I’ll just paint them dark.” And the skin will be lighter tones, and so on. It’s a way to shade without hatching.

Some of my stuff is over-hatched. I’m trying to keep away from that because color on hatching just doesn’t work. It works on the black-&-white, all those Big Book of were black&-white. I got into hatching heavily doing that stuff. But it was nine panels a page for much less per page than I was getting for six panels a page. I kept telling the editor, Andy Helfer. So I stopped doing it. I saw him at one of the cons, where we sat outside and had sandwiches together under the umbrella, and I said, “All right, I’ll do another one.” But why the hell should I do nine panels, which is twice the work as normal, for a third less money? Going the wrong way on both counts! And the rest of the book was filled with such crap that I thought, “Who will buy it?” But their idea behind it — they told me what it was — is they figured everybody’s span of attention today is four or five minutes. I wanted to expand some of the stories, to give them enough room to breathe and pace properly… because size has a lot to do with it. I want to know how something looks, the bigger it is, the nicer it is, and the more you can put into it. But they said, “No, we just want something that you go down in the subway or on the toilet and take a few minutes to look at it. We don’t want something you have to get into too deeply.” I just think it was a dumb thing. The thing should be as long as it takes to tell it as it should be told. I says, “You could do a story about a housefly, if it’s well-written and well-illustrated, it’ll be just as good as any other thing. It’s not what it is; it’s how well it’s done.”

It’s amazing. Here I was, trying to be an illustrator in the comic book field, trying to paint comics and paint covers, and nobody wanted anything to do with fully-painted stuff.

Then Alex Ross comes along and fully paints everything, and it just blows my mind. Here I’ve been sitting all the time, why didn’t they ask me to paint?

I worked my ass off, but for many reasons. It wasn’t just the artwork; it was all the research I did to put it together, and the lighting and taking the photos and all that stuff. [pointing at a piece] See, what’s happening here? The light’s

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Next page top: Before working on the syndicated comic strip, Russ delineated a certain masked man and his faithful companion for the Creepy #105 [Feb. ’79] story “The Dime Novel Hero,” written

by Nicola Cuti. The tale cleverly explains why there are no werewolves in Texas Ranger territory…

Next page middle: Courtesy of Steve Kriozere, world’s greatest Heath fan, a promotional piece by Russ Heath announcing the release of the comic strip.

Next page bottom: The Sunday Lone Ranger strip of Oct. 25, 1981.

Over the years, there would be strange policies: “Hey, a new edict from Timely! All the G.I.’s have stubble beards!” I’d say, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” Two weeks later: “A new edict from Timely! No more stubble beards!” [laughs] Who was minding the ship? I just ignored it and went ahead and did whatever I wanted.

CBC: Was your experience as a scuba diver at all influential on the development of Sea Devils? Did Kanigher just come up with the idea and give it to you as an assignment, or was there any back-and-forth discussion?

Russ: That’s one of the things about my career. All these people talk about how they sit down and shoot ideas and put this together with the editor. There was no interplay between almost all of my editors and myself. I mean, almost zero, or one-half of one percent, with Stan Lee all those years. Talking about what we were going to do? We didn’t do that. I wasn’t in the office.

I just picked up scripts and delivered print-ready stuff.

CBC: But with certain writers you did collaborate, right?

Didn’t you and Doug Moench click?

Russ: Well, I helped talk Doug into coming to New York. I said, “I’ll help you pack, because you need to go there, they insist upon you living in the area.” At that time, everybody had to live in New York to work there. So I helped him pack and saw them off together, he and his girlfriend.

CBC: What did you think of those strange covers that DC did on many of your comics?

Russ: The gray tones? Well, they wanted to get closer to photographic covers, but a real photograph was too expensive to reproduce from, a finished painting was too expensive, so this was their attempt to get more towards illustration or realism and so on. I thought it was a dumb idea, although people seem to love it. Maybe because it was the only stuff being done like that. But gray and any color makes mud, so why put gray in there? Then there was a rumor that somebody in the office was doing the grays, and not the artist. But that wasn’t so. Each artist did the grays himself.

CBC: Was it Jack Adler or Sol Harrison who came up with this? Did they expect you to know how to do it?

Russ: Well, I just knew how to do it.

TM & ©2014 New Comics, Inc. The Lone Ranger TM & ©2014 Palladium Entertainment.

coming in and it’s hitting this arm and it’s reflecting up on it. Here, this is reflected off where it’s hitting the front… This kind of stuff you can’t make up.

CBC: Do you like working in black-&-white best?

Russ: Well, I like it because you can’t screw up with color. If I were painting a comic, it’d take me six months to get doing it right, just because I haven’t been doing it.

CBC: You once sent me pages from that gorgeous Son of Satan story you did. Why did you do such a beautiful job on that story?

Russ: Well, they called me up to do it [SOS #8, Feb. ’77] — “Would you like to do this, Russ?” — and so on. “You’ve never done fantasy? You’ll be good at it.” I said, “I’ll do it on one condition: that I can color it.” They said, “No problem.” So I did it, and two weeks after I finished and sent it in, I call them up and ask, “Isn’t it time for me to start the coloring?” They said, “Oh, we figured you were too busy and we had it done.”

CBC: How did Russ feel about that?

Russ: Well, I had a good cry and got back to work. [laughs] You can’t imagine what it would have been like… You can see by looking at it in black-&-white that it looks better than it did in the printed book. One of the pages has this ork sitting at a table eating, with a leg bone sticking out of his mouth, and they’re walking in the background. Well, the storytelling is what they’re doing and saying.

I didn’t know what to do when I first got it, because I’d never worked without a full-script before. So I tried to leave a little room for something to be put in. But also, I said, “Wait a minute. They didn’t tell me what to do, so I can do anything I want!” So I started to go crazy. The first page has all these crazy characters standing on the floor there — everything from half-bird people, bizarre stuff — and they looked silly, they looked like an animated cartoon or something. I said, “That’s because I’ve got them on a real floor.

So let’s go crazy and forget all the rules of art.” So I broke all the rules. Okay, this hand normally is up close to you, should be big, and this in back should be small. Let’s reverse it. Let’s have it get small as it comes forward, and let’s have it get huge when it goes back. Let’s get rid of the vanishing points. Let’s break all the rules.

Stuff dripping up off the table instead of down; holes in the sky sewed up like sails. Go crazy! I had a lamp with a metal globe that distorted your face when you looked into it. I drew that for the distortion. I took one panel and I just ruled lines across every inchand-a-quarter, all the way down, and I did the picture, and the picture went from negative to positive in each section. One part was negative, one part was positive. Just to do something crazy.

I did the classic Picasso thing of front- and side-view at the same time. I looked up all these old artists, Brueghel and all these crazy guys that did crazy stuff. I also put a lot of insects in it, because most people hate insects, so we put some hornets in there and ants and everything crappy looking.

CBC: Freaky!

Russ: I wanted to be as freaky as possible. See, again, I was free to do that, because I felt they didn’t tell me what to do, I could do anything I wanted to do. So I broke all the rules. You’d be surprised how hard it is to go against the rules. It’s like drawing with your left hand or something. But it was so much fun, because I’d never done anything like that before.

CBC: Were you supplied with a plot for this?

Russ: Yeah, they gave me a rough idea of what generally takes place. It was up to me to flesh it out.

CBC: So to speak? [laughs] Russ: Yeah, I took the ball and ran with it. But to prove my point about size being important. I did this dog’s head with his mouth open, all these teeth and saliva, huge, to show— And when it’s this small, there’s no impact at all, but when it’s huge, it’s impressive. Size is important.

CBC: “Size matters”?

Russ: Yeah. So I found it very intriguing, and probably that helps keep things lively. If you find the job intriguing, you probably do better work.

Like that Don Quixote story, that Warren job where there’s this guy in armor and the little guy. I thought, “What’s one of the worst things I can think Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

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MUCH MORE ON RUSS HEATH, including an entirely new and recent interview with the artist and lots more art appear in the FREE CBC #4 Bonus PDF available at www.twomorrows.com/freestuff! That’s FREE! 78

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Artwork ©2014 Russ Heath. Kid Colt TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. All other characters TM & © DC Comics.

of? A knife in the eye! So let’s have him fall on a sword and it comes out the back of his head, and get it out of my system.

Let’s do it once, do it so nobody will attempt it again, because it’s been done. [Jon laughs] My goal was to be definitive.

That tank was to do the definitive tank.

CBC: It’s been done.

Russ: Nobody’s tried to do that tank since, because what more could you do with it? So I did all these crazy things…

How many times do they have an axe splitting the guy’s head? So I thought, “Why stop there? The axe comes down and it’s buried in the ground and he’s completely cut in half, his whole body! So I had a lot of fun that way. At Warren, whoever was the editor — Weezie was the editor for a while, and [Bill] DuBay and Archie — and they’d send me three scripts and take the pick of the one I liked and send the other two back. So I had so much fun. Like the one with the Lone Ranger [“Dime Novel Hero,” Creepy #105, Feb. ’79]… I couldn’t believe that nobody ever put that silver bullet thing together with a werewolf story! So I had some fun.

CBC: Then there was the story with that Nubian girl [“Yellow Heat,” Vampirella #58, Mar. ’77].

Russ: The African story went over big.

He wants to put her on a spit! Warren gave me this big book on Africa to use for research.

CBC: Another job that I really liked from

Portrait ©2014 Kendall Whitehouse.

Above: The artist at the 2013 International Comic-Con: San Diego posing for our intrepid convention photographer Kendall Whitehouse. Below: This Russ Heath self-portrait — peppered with his renowned comics characters — appeared in the fanzine Comic Art News and Reviews [Oct. 1973] along side an interview with the artist conducted by Dave Sim, creator of Cerebus the Aardvark.

the late ’70s was your inking on Michael Golden on Mister Miracle [#24 and 25, June–Sept. ’78].

Russ: Well, I thought it was necessary. Golden’s work was well-liked by a lot of people, and I thought, “Let’s try it this way.” And what I did, with the women: I just made them sexier, changed this and that. Apparently he liked very much what I did. But two issues was enough.

CBC: What’s your favorite, besides “Give and Take”?

Russ: Of course, the tank story in “Sgt. Rock.” And from there it all goes together. I went through it all when I was selling it and getting copies of the pages back. I see some good stuff that I forgot about.

CBC: Can you remember some?

Russ: Well, there were some nice shots in a “Sgt. Rock” story about blood [“Nobody Cares, OAAW #237, Oct. ’71], and I added it snow to make a contrast with the red. There was one where Rock gets shot in the throat and he can’t talk, and he’s dressed up as a German [“Naked Combat,” OAAW #246, June ’72]. I thought some of those drawings were pretty nice.

It’s kind of spasmodic.

You go through periods, and it’s awfully hard to try to tell a story as well as it can be told without repeating the same shots. It’s always tough. I see it in this stuff I’m doing right now. If I’d had a lot more time, I could try to think of better shots to tell the story as well as I can and make it more interesting. But that’s a natural trap that you fall into. Everybody has that tendency. “That calls for this and this.” But maybe there’s another way to do it that would be more interesting because it’s different, and yet would still be just as strong in the storytelling. I always try. People said, “Why don’t you stop and play games and do chess or something?” And I said, “My brain I use in my work, when I’m done working, all I want to do is be silly and have fun. I’m letting my brain rest.”

Then I did the physical stuff. I enjoyed my running very much. Running doesn’t cost much. You need good shoes, and that’s about it. You go out and you can do it almost anywhere except in the snow. Once you get used to it, once you get over two miles a day, then you know whether you really enjoy running or not. Your mind is free, it’s a mechanical thing you’re doing with your legs, and you forget about it. So you can plot stories while you’re running. Your mind is free to do whatever you want with it. You’re out until you come back.

It’s like going on a sailboat. You’re gone until you can come back. No phones, no nothing. So that’s a wonderful feeling.

I’d never been to Palm Springs before, and I made a reservation with this girl to go, but she couldn’t go. I was locked-in with the reservation, so I thought, “Well, go down by yourself. You could at least have one day, you already paid for it.” I went down and I went out running. I’m running along, looking at all these gorgeous homes, and the next one’s more interesting than the last. There’s an orange tree, and I go and pull an orange off and eating it. “This is great!

Look at that place!” I look down, and I’m really flying. I thought I was still jogging, but I was flying. “This is terrific!”

I’m one of the few people in the world who have gotten lost while running. You can get lost on a bicycle or a car, but getting lost on your foot?

CBC: Well, y’know, Russ, it needs to be said that there’s not a hint of bitterness in your voice at all when you say you put in a lot more work into a given job than you thought you were paid for.

Russ: Well, it’s my desire to do that. I do it the way I would want it done, and the way I would like to look at it if I were the viewer. It’s the satisfaction of creating something that people like. If nobody liked it, that might be a whole new ballgame. But if you do something that says, “Wow, man, you’ve got it there, boy.” It’s a climax!

CBC: Well, that wraps this up pretty nice, you foulmouthed old man! [laughter]

creator’s creators

Investigator Irving ©2014 Christian Guzman.

From his days as CBA ace reporter, comics historian Chris Irving is still on the case Christopher Irving was a wet-behind-the-ears college student when he first started interviewing comic book creators and contributing articles to the magazines about comics of the late ’90s, including the Comic Buyer’s Guide.

Pretty soon, Irving was contributing comprehensive, well-researched articles to Comic Book Artist on everything from the fascinating, previously obscure histories of Charlton Comics (with its tough-guy roots as bootleg publisher and the initial printer of the notorious magazine Hustler) and the legendary Tower Comics of Wallace Wood and company (born of the paperback book trade and super-hero mania of the ’60s), as well as heartfelt tributes to such past comics giants as Gray Morrow and John Buscema.

Ye Ed was so impressed with the intrepid writer and, despite his youth, Chris was made a permanent associate editor of the magazine, with “Chief” Cooke vowing to work with the talented scribe — “Scoop” Irving on good days here in the office, “that punk whipper-snapper” on bad — whenever opportunity arose. As CBA wrapped up, Irving embarked on writing books, starting with The Blue Beetle Companion: His Many Lives from 1939 to Today, the interview tome Modern Masters: Charles Vess, and Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge. Through it all, Irving was determined to mix comics history with creative non-fiction and new journalism to create an engaging approach that could snare the uninitiated.

An encounter with Brooklyn cartoonist Dean Haspiel led Chris to meet supremely talented photographer Seth Kushner, and the two embarked on the titanic photo and essay project Graphic NYC (www.nycgraphicnovelists.com), where they chronicled and documented the lives and careers of dozens of creators, starting with the legendary Joe Simon and leading on through up-and-coming digital cartoonists.

After about three years, the book version Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics (powerHouse Publishing) was released.

During all of that, Irving doggedly pursued a Master’s in Literary Criticism at Brooklyn College, and wrote and edited (with Seth’s assistance and some photography by Ryan Roman) Graphic NYC Presents: Dean Haspiel the Early Years, the definitive look at the life and early career of “The Dino.” Irving also created two issues of a digital comics magazine, The Drawn Word, as well

Christopher Irving, ace writer. Photo by Christian Guzman.

as co-producing and hosting a related four-episode video interview series.

Today, back in his native state of Virginia, Chris has returned to Ye Ed’s bullpen, now as consulting editor and frequent contributor to the latest Cooke venture, Comic Book Creator, and is putting the pieces in place for his next big comics history windmill.

The scribe is ever creative, ever ambitious, ever eager to investigate myriad aspects of comics history and community, whether uncovering tales of mainstream comics of 75 years gone or ferreting out the exciting goings-on of today’s innovative creators. Ye Ed is particularly proud of Christopher Irving’s development as a historian, writer, and journalist, and here’s to having “Scoop” Irving grace these pages whenever he finds the time!

coming attractions: cbc #5 in spring

Cover art ©2014 Denis Kitchen.

All This and Denis’ Kitchen Sink, Too!

DENIS KITCHEN, man of many hats — be they sized to fit a cartoonist, publisher, author, art agent, unparalleled collector, certifiable Nancy freak, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund founder, husband, dad, etcetera, etcetera — gets the CBC treatment with exhaustive interview about his start as early underground comix creator and publisher, rise and fall of Kitchen Sink Press, personal and professional relationships with an incredible array of comics creators — including Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, and many others. Denis opens up the Kitchen vaults to share visual treasures representing the history of comic strips, underground comix, and the myriad books, comics, and oddities published by the man himself! We also examine his obsession with the comic strips of Ernie Bushmiller and Al Capp! Plus we’ll discuss his latest entity, Kitchen Sink Books, and future publishing plans. Look for COMIC BOOK CREATOR #5, coming in late spring.

Also featuring: We visit HOWARD CRUSE to see what the Wendel creator is up to; discuss why Kick-Ass JOHN ROMITA, JR. is one of the best comics artist working today; join Blake Bell in looking at BILL EVERETT’s final splash in comics with a sublime Sub-Mariner run; ascend THE GODS OF MT. OLYMPUS, a ’70s gem by JOHNNY ACHZIGER, JOE STATON & JOHN WORKMAN; chat with Prof.

CAROL TILLEY on her findings about Dr. Fredric Wertham’s distortion of facts and shoddy data in his Seduction of the Innocent, the book that nearly destroyed the industry; showcase the conclusion of Michael Aushenker’s interview with DENYS COWAN, D’Jango Unchained artist and Boondocks producer; and, natch, we throw HEMBECK into the pot to spice things up in our flavor-filled fifth ish!

Full-color, 80-pages, $8.95

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • #4

79

a picture is worth a thousand words

Brian Bolland, pencils and inks, Batman: The Killing Joke [1988] cover art. We’re pretty certain this is the first time this magnificent piece as never been seen in its full-bleed bodaciousness. This is the first time that this art is printed with any title logo or credits to obscure all that beautiful Bolland linework.

TM & © DC Comics.

80

#4 • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

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“Batman’s Partners!” MIKE W. BARR and ALAN DAVIS on their Detective Comics, Batman and the Outsiders, Nightwing flies solo, Man-Bat history, Commissioner Gordon, the last days of World’s Finest, Bat-Mite, the Batmobile, plus Dark Knight’s girl Robin! Featuring work by APARO, BUSIEK, DITKO, KRAFT, MILGROM, MILLER, PÉREZ, WOLFMAN, and more, with a cover by ALAN DAVIS and MARK FARMER.

“Bronze Age Fantastic Four!” The animated FF, the FF radio show of 1975, Human Torch goes solo, Galactus villain history, FF Mego figures… and the Impossible Man! Exploring work by RICH BUCKLER, JOHN BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, GEORGE PÉREZ, KEITH POLLARD, ROY THOMAS, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, and more! Cover by KEITH POLLARD and JOE RUBINSTEIN.

“‘80s Independents!” In-depth looks at PAUL CHADWICK’s Concrete, DAVE SIM’s Cerebus the Aardvark, and RICHARD AND WENDY PINI’s Elfquest! Plus see ‘80s independent comics go Hollywood, DAVID SCROGGY remembers Pacific Comics, TRINA ROBBINS’ California Girls, and DENIS KITCHEN’s star-studded horror/sci-fi anthology Death Rattle. Cover by PAUL CHADWICK!

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Learn what went into the making of The LEGO Movie and other brickfilms with moviemaker DAVID PAGANO, chat with brickfilmers The Brotherhood Workshop, sit in on a talk with the makers of LEGO: A Brickumentary, a look at MINDSTORMS building, minifigure customization by JARED BURKS, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, AFOLs by GREG HYLAND, & more!

Top comics cover artist DAVE JOHNSON demos his creative process, STEPHEN SILVER shows how he designs characters for top animated series, plus new columnist JERRY ORDWAY presents “The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the ORDWAY!”, “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, and hit “Comic Art Bootcamp” with Draw editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS! Mature readers only.

FAREL DALRYMPLE shows how he produces Meathaus and Pop Gun War, director and storyboard/comics artist DAVE BULLOCK dissects his own work, columnist JERRY ORDWAY draws on his years of experience to show readers the Ord-way of creating comics, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

KIRBY AT DC! Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, updated “X-Numbers” list of Kirby’s DC assignments (revealing some surprises), JERRY BOYD’s insights on Kirby’s DC work, a look at KEY 1970s EVENTS IN JACK’S LIFE AND CAREER, Challengers vs. the FF, pencil art galleries from FOREVER PEOPLE, OMAC, and THE DEMON, Kirby cover inked by MIKE ROYER, and more!

MARVEL UNIVERSE! Featuring MARK ALEXANDER’s pivotal Lee/Kirby essay “A Universe A’Borning,” KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, a look at key late-1970s events in Kirby’s life and career, STAN LEE script pages, unseen Kirby pencils and unused art from THOR, NICK FURY, HULK and FANTASTIC FOUR, plus galleries of ETERNALS, BLACK PANTHER, and more!

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DENNY O’NEIL’s Silver Age career at Marvel, Charlton, and DC—aided and abetted by ADAMS, KALUTA, SEKOWSKY, LEE, GIORDANO, THOMAS, SCHWARTZ, APARO, BOYETTE, DILLIN, SWAN, DITKO, et al. Plus, we begin serializing AMY KISTE NYBERG’s groundbreaking book on the history of the Comics Code, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY and more!

We spotlight HERB TRIMPE’s work on Hulk, Iron Man, S.H.I.E.L.D., Ghost Rider, Ant-Man, Silver Surfer, War of the Worlds, Ka-Zar, even Phantom Eagle, and featuring THE SEVERIN SIBLINGS, LEE, FRIEDRICH, THOMAS, GRAINGER, BUSCEMA, and others, plus more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s Comics Code history, M. THOMAS INGE on Communism and 1950s comic books, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

Golden Age “Air Wave” artist LEE HARRIS discussed by his son JONATHAN LEVEY to interviewer RICHARD J. ARNDT, with rarely-seen 1940s art treasures (including mysterious, never-published art of an alternate version of DC’s Tarantula)! Plus more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s exposé on the Comics Code, artist SAL AMENDOLA tells the story of the Academy of Comic Book Arts, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

Second big issue on 3-D COMICS OF THE 1950s! KEN QUATTRO looks at the controversy involving JOE KUBERT, NORMAN MAURER, BILL GAINES, and AL FELDSTEIN! Plus more fabulous Captain 3-D by SIMON & KIRBY and MORT MESKIN— 3-D thrills from BOB POWELL, HOWARD NOSTRAND, JAY DISBROW and others— the career of Treasure Chest artist VEE QUINTAL, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

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AGE OF TV HEROES Examining the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes, featuring the in-depth stories of the shows’ actors and behind-the-scenes players!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

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Art ©2014 Russ Heath. Captain America, Red Skull, Sharon Carter TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

™

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n PDF Extra • No. 4, Winter 2014

W i n t e r 2 0 1 4 • T h e N ew Vo i c e o f t h e C o m i c s M e d i u m • N u m b e r 4

B O N U S

P D F

T A B L E

O F

C O N T E N T S

Catching Up with Russ Heath: Richard J. Arndt has a recent chat with the comic book artist........ 3 Appreciations: José Villarrubia and Wayne Vansant give props to the greath Heath...................... 15 “Give and Take” Photo Gallery: The artist-as-model poses for his classic Blazing Combat tale... 16 Bonus Russ Heath Art Gallery: A pair of great “Sgt. Rock” pages from Our Army at War............. 23 Behind the Scenes: “Before and After” looks at pages from The Human Gargoyles....................... 25 PLAYBOY W©©dy CBC mascot by J.D. King ©2014 J.D. King.

JON B. COOKE

J.D. KING

Editor/Designer

CBC Cartoonist

John Morrow

TOM ZIUKO

Publisher & Consulting Editor

CBC Colorist Supreme

MICHAEL AUSHENKER

RONN SUTTON

Associate Editor

CBC Illustrator

JORGE KHOURY CHRISTOPHER IRVING TOM ZIUKO RICHARD J. ARNDT

ROB SMENTEK

Contributing Editors

Brian K. Morris Senior Transcriber

STEVEN E. Tice STEVEN THOMPSON Transcribers

CBC Proofreader

Greg PRESTON SETH KUSNER CBC Contributing Photographers

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK CHRISTOPHER IRVING JORGE KHOURY TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists

Cover by RUSS HEATH Though our CBC #4 print edition had already gone to press, contributor Joe KULBISKI shared this and other commission works.

This curiosity is based on Marie Severin & Frank Giacoia’s Captain America #115 [July 1969] cover.

Thanks, Joe! Comic Book Creator is a joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

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. CBC editorial offices: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Fourissue subscriptions: $40 US, $54 Canada, $60 elsewhere.

All characters are © their respective copyright owners.

All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2014 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows.

Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows.

Portrait by Thom Haller Buchanan (based on the photography of Lori Matsumoto)

Catching Up with Russ Heath Conducted & Transcribed by RICHARD J. ARNDT [The following interview, an update to Ye Editor’s 2003 interview with Russ Heath, was conducted via telephone by Richard J. Arndt, Comic Book Creator’s newest contributing editor. We had hoped to include this discussion, which took place on Apr. 24, 2013, in the print edition but, alas, space constraints pushed it to this bonus PDF edition. Our appreciation and apologies to Rich. Illustrating this conversation are a number of super re-creations and commissions drawn by the artist, and special thanks to Steve Kriozere and Joe Kulbiski who shared their Heath treasures! — Ye Ed.]

Above and next page: Our Army at War #66 [Jan. 1958] cover and re-creation by Russ Heath, courtesy of Steve Kriozere.

Below: Courtesy of David Barsalou, a portrait of the artist at work.

Russ Heath works on a Battlefront #26 [Dec. 1954] recreation. Inset is the actual cover of the Atlas title.

#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Battlefront TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

3

Russ Heath: I started working for comics on a regular basis when Stan Lee offered me double what I was making in advertising to draw Westerns. That was in 1947, and I’ve been working for Stan off and on ever since, I guess.

Richard Arndt: You must have been a teenager when you did your first work because I see your first credit was doing a character called Hammerhead Hawley for Holyoke’s Captain Aero Comics. The first story was in Sept. 1942 and then there were two more in early 1944.

Russ: That was the first comic book work of any kind that I did. That was in high school. Actually during summer vacation when I wasn’t in school. I was 16 or so. In 1945, I was in the Army Air Corps Reserve. It was after that that I went to work for Stan Lee. My first story there was the “Two-Gun Kid.” That was the first “Two-Gun Kid.” They had another one later on. Then I was also doing “Kid Colt.” After a while

Stan told me that I didn’t have to make the trip in from New Jersey every day. I could take the work home and bring it in at the end of the week. So that was the last time I worked on staff.

Richard: I don’t know if you remember Stan Goldberg, but for much of the 1950s, he was the head of coloring at Timely/Atlas.

Russ: I don’t recall that name.

Richard: Stan mentioned that he started at Timely in late 1949, as a teenager. He was fascinated by the members of the bullpen when he started, but he told me that he’d only worked there a few weeks when Martin Goodman ordered Stan Lee to fire the staff. I was wondering if you remembered that and why it might have happened?

Russ: Oh, man, I was responsible for that. I thought it was crazy to have staff pencillers penciling in the blacks on pages. I told Stan that I could grab a brush and with three strokes have the page done and ready for reproduction.

Using that pencil was just insanity. Stan thought “Wow! We could save a ton of money and fire a bunch of inkers!” It made me pretty unpopular for a couple of years because my system didn’t work. It turned out that I was the only guy who could pencil fast enough to make that work. It wasn’t the big end-all that it was supposed to be.

Richard: I guess not, because Stan Goldberg told me it was only a few months later that everybody who was still available was hired back. Of course, some of the people had moved on to new jobs so it was essentially a new bullpen.

Russ: Exactly. Stan Lee also decided at some point that he didn’t like firing people so there was much more of an emphasis on freelancers working at home rather than a full bullpen at the offices. That way, if anything happened again, it wouldn’t mean firing all those people.

There was still a bullpen, though. I personally drifted back and forth during those years — from the bullpen to freelancing. I’ve always thought that I should never work for just one company because if you’ve only got one account they can grind you under their heel. It’s not good business. I always kept at least two clients going at one time.

Our Army at War TM & © DC Comics.

Richard J. Arndt conducts a recent interview with the comic book master

TM & © DC Comics.

comic book re-creator

Above: Joe Kulbiski commissioned this “Murders of the Rue Morgue” illo from artist Russ Heath, as well as the Shadow piece on the next page. Thanks for sharing, Joe! Below: Russ, a longtime friend of the late, lamented comics creator Dave Stevens, was artist of The Rocketeer: The Official Movie Adaptation published in 1991.

#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

The Rocketeer TM & ©2014 the estate of Dave Stevens.

5

Richard: I noticed that you worked for Marvel or Timely pretty much exclusively for about six years, with a few outside jobs at E.C. Comics.

Russ: Yeah, I did one story for Harvey [Kurtzman] for the first issue of Frontline Combat. I also did a “Plastic Man” take-off for MAD [#14, Aug. 1954]. I liked Harvey. We’d have lunch about once a month at least and every time I went to lunch with him he seemed to have a job for me. I didn’t realize that so much at the time or I’d have had a lot more lunches with him! [laughs] Harvey had an inner circle of artists at E.C., and I think I was the first guy from the outside of the circle to do stories for him.

Richard: Yeah, he had his regulars and there were a few artists that he tried out, I guess — Dave Berg did a story for him, Ric Estrada, Alex Toth, Joe Kubert — Kubert and Toth, I think, did three stories each. There weren’t a lot though.

So, in 1954, you started to draw war stories for DC — Star Spangled War Stories.

Russ: You know, a lot of folks ask me stuff about the stories — give me a title of a comic to remember — but many’s the time that we did a story and had no idea what comic it would appear in.

Richard: Sure. It was all anthology stories, so they slot them in where ever they could fill a slot. That wouldn’t be that surprising, I guess.

Russ: Exactly.

Richard: Was there any particular reason you started to move from Marvel to DC? Russ: Oh, if there was, I’m sure it wasn’t anything big.

Richard: That would have been around the time the Comics Code came into force, and Marvel, for one, had to cancel quite a number of titles.

Art ©2014 Russ Heath.

Above: Arthur Suydam, who briefly appeared in the Joe Orlando-edited DC mystery books in the early ’70s — and just as quickly disappeared — returned in full glory with his astonishing artwork (and wacky scripting) in Echo of Futurepast.

Here is a panel from #2 [1984].

Russ: That was a pretty ridiculous thing. I had a guy who was supposed to be playing baseball and they censored me because I had sweat on him. It was apparently too rugged.

That was absolute horsesh*t. It was pretty crazy. For a long time I’d go in and have to learn the new rules for the week.

One week all the G.I.s were supposed to have stubbled beards now — a blanket coverage of all the war stories — so you’d put the beards on and then two weeks you’d go in and there’d be a new memo: “No more stubbled beards!”

It was very unclear and I couldn’t keep track of it so I’d just do what I thought was right and didn’t worry about it from then on. Let someone else worry about it. It was pretty stupid stuff.

Richard: Now, I know you didn’t do very many superheroes….

Russ: I had a lot of trouble with the concept. I still do.

I want to see real stuff. When I go to the movies, I want films dealing with reality — not bogus car chases or crazy bang-bang scenes. When you have a super-hero, he’s got powers that are greater than the ordinary man. Who’s going to oppose him? You need super-villains because an ordinary crook’s just not enough of a challenge. So pretty soon, you’ve got all these people standing around while the good super-hero takes on the bad super-villain. It doesn’t make sense to me. Put them on a separate planet where they can bounce around to their hearts’ content.

Richard: And, in reality, the regular police officers arriving at the scene would be pouring bullets into any super-villain in a fight like that.

Russ: Oh, they had rules where you couldn’t show the bullets coming out of anybody. I got away with that probably more than most people. I wouldn’t show the guy being actually hit, but I did things like having the bullets striking the wall behind him. You’d get the idea that they had to go through him to hit it. At some point, at both DC and Marvel, they want those war comics to appear to be like a baseball game or a boxing match. We’d have soldiers run out there with their fists and fight the enemy who were using their fists! You know, that’s just not war. War is supposed to be horrible. I understand that you don’t want to show gore, but how about copy in the story so that after the battle was over you’d mentioned that you counted up your 5,000 dead and just have it in the copy, not on the page, so that kids don’t grow up thinking that war is a lark.

Richard: It’s noticeable that pre-Code war comics had dead bodies and destroyed tanks, shell holes, and shattered trees around and post-code the battle fields were very clean.

If there were any dead soldiers lying around they were always dead enemy soldiers, never any dead from our side.

Russ: [Laughs] Quite right. One of the interesting things was that Robert Kanigher had these pet bits of business that he’d add into stories on a regular basis — like ack-ack guns hidden in haystacks. Another was a soldier throwing a grenade down the muzzle of a tank. You know, the steel that’s used in the muzzle of a tank is not going to be affected by a goddamn hand grenade tossed down it. Plus, the muzzle sticks way over the front of the tank. How are you going to grab hold of anything to get out to the end of the barrel anyways?

Richard: I’m not certain that I’d want to put my hand in front of a tank muzzle with a live hand grenade in it, either.

Russ: Right. Kanigher had these stock bits like that and I was always needing space because the bigger the drawing the more interesting it can be to the guy trying to look at it.

So, I was always after space, so if the bit didn’t push the story forward, I would just cross it out. I don’t know if he never knew or if he didn’t give a damn or what, but I never got nailed for it. There were times when I’d cross out two pages of a 12-page story and do it my way. Kanigher always took great pride in writing the stories while we went to lunch. He would start with blank paper and hand the completed story over to us when we got back from lunch. It’s not good story telling to do the story for speed rather than story.

The Shadow TM & ©2014 Condé Nast.

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©2014 New Comic Company.

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One of the things that was amazing to me was that there was a guy, Archie Goodwin, that I did a number of scripts for, at Warren mostly. One script that he sent me had an extra page in the script that had miniature stick figures of how he visualized the panels.

I didn’t want to be influenced by his ideas so I sat it aside

©2014 New Comic Company.

Above: Dave Sim wrote the classic horror story from Creepy #79 [May 1976], illustrated by Russ Heath.

Below: We spoil the ending of Russ’s “Yellow Heat,” written by Bruce Jones [Vampi #58, Mar. ’77].

and did my own stick figures of the story. I decided that I’d compare them when I was done and then use the panels that worked the best. If his was better, I’d use his. If mine was better, I’d use mine. The amazing thing was that out of 40 pictures there was only one that was different! He was such a good visualizer of story. I thought he was a genius.

To have a guy who wasn’t known as an artist do that well on thumbnail sketches is enough to freak most artists out. He was so good at visualizing that you’d know exactly what the picture was supposed to show. He was a great storyteller and great editor. He said some very nice things about me in interviews.

Richard: Now I’m going to skip way ahead, because Jon Cooke has covered a lot of the mid-years of your work, and partly because I just love a particular story that I’d like to talk about. It was for Warren and called “The Shadow of the Axe” [Creepy #79, May 1976]. It was only six pages, but I think it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read. It was written

by Dave Sim, for whom you did a few covers for a year or so ago.

Part of what impressed me so much was that I grew up in a small rural farmhouse in Michigan — our nearest neighbors were a mile away — and the house that you drew in that story was so much like those in my childhood.

Your settings conveyed so much information of the time, the harshness of the winter, the clothing — all of it seen through the eyes and outlook of a young child.

Russ: Thank you! I think that’s one of my best efforts. I tried extra hard on that story. First of all, drawing children is terrible. If you draw the head just a little bigger or a little smaller, you change the age by as much as six years. It’s very hard to draw a kid to be exactly eight-years-old. I had my troubles on doing that. I also wanted the art to reflect the [era], so I had an ice box in the background in the kitchen instead of a refrigerator. I had the old wood stove and the water handpump in the kitchen instead of faucets. The sink was tin and the utensils were correct for the time. I worked to get the whole damn thing right. The milk cans… you name it. I only had six pages and I had to get all that in to get the period correct.

I liked that story very much because the script had a really good ending.

Richard: It really did. It had an O. Henry-type end that kind of turned the whole story around and spun it in a new direction. It also has one of the best last lines that I’ve ever read.

Russ: Tell me that one again.

Richard: The kid has just taken care of the problem of his father being an axe murderer and his mother, who’s clearly beautiful but so overwhelmed by what’s been going on that she looks years older just from the strain, is talking to the police. He watches for a moment then his mom winks at him, like she knows exactly what the boy did. Then, like any eightyear-old when the problem’s over he thinks to himself “Not knowing how to wink, I just smiled and returned to my bed. It was Sunday, you see… and I always sleep late on Sunday.”

It’s a line that’s just perfect after you’ve read the rest of that story. The blood and the gore of the story doesn’t interfere with the kid’s routine.

Russ: I liked working for Warren because the editors didn’t have to mess up the artwork with color, but there was one thing they’d do that I didn’t like. Sometimes they’d take the captions and change from black lettering on white captions to black captions with white lettering. It could really mess up shadows and blacks that you had on the page. The shadows would look no different from the caption. They’d bleed into each other and it ruins the composition.

Richard: You did a lot of stories for Warren in the mid- to late 1970s.

Russ: They had good stories. I did an African one [“Yellow Heat,”Vampirella #58, Mar. 1977] where this young boy, actually a young man, has to kill a lion, his first lion, to win this captured girl. The story sets the whole thing up so that you believe it to be a romantic story. So he kills the lion and wins the girl, and it turns out that he’s a cannibal and he wants the

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

This page: Courtesy of Steve Kriozere, Russ Heath’s re-creation of his cover for Adventures Into Terror #11 [Aug. 1952].

Above: You’ll have to ask contributor Joe Kulbiski, who shared this illustration, what exactly is the relationship of Kong and The Shadow in this Russ Heath commission!

Next page: Steve Kriozere shared this Russ Heath re-creation of the artist’s horrific cover to Astonishing #22 [Feb. 1953].

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girl so that he can eat her! [laughs] Warren had good stories, good writers, and I like the black-&-white format. Bad coloring can ruin a story. There was another story I got a kick out of: It was about a werewolf in the old West and at the end the Lone Ranger rides up and shoots the werewolf with one of his silver bullets! [“Dime Novel Hero,” Creepy #105, Feb. ’79.] How many writers wrote Western stories and horror stories, and never made that connection with the Lone Ranger’s silver bullets and werewolves dying from silver?

That was a great idea! I know we had to get permission from the newspaper syndicate to use the Lone Ranger and Tonto for that one panel, but it was worth it.

Richard: Yeah, it was. You also worked on the Lone Ranger newspaper strip in 1981–82…

Russ: Hardest work I’ve ever done. A comic strip runs every day of the year. You can’t take a day off. There’s no reprints. If you get sick you just have to make it up because there’s no other way around it.

It’s three panels a day, six days a week, so 18 panels for

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The Shadow TM & ©2014 Condé Nast.

Above: Neal Adams had loved the Spanish-language Esteban Maroto drawn science-fiction series Legionarios del Espacio (Legionnaires of Space), which he picked up in Spanish Harlem in the 1960s. Renaming it The Zero Patrol and rewriting the series, Neal also added some of his art to the Continuity-published title.

the dailies, and then ten panels on Sunday. And the top third of the Sundays had to be designed so that if the local paper cut them off (which a lot of them did, depending on whether the Sunday strip ran a half-page or a third-page), the strip still had to make made sense. You also had to make the rest of the Sunday panels hook in with the story being told in the Saturday and Monday strips.

I made color guides for all the Sunday strips. Unfortunately the strip was only run in the little papers. Rural or small town papers, not the big papers, so there was, to my knowledge, no place for me to go and see how they turned out. The strip just wasn’t run in my local papers.

I had one fan who subscribed to a non-local paper every day so that he could get the strip, which was very flattering to me. I had a writer [Cary Bates] that I told about all the different Western things I’d like to explore, people I’d like to bring into the strip and he worked to bring those things in.

The last strip we did we said good-bye. It’s written as if it’s saying good-bye to the Lone Ranger, but it was really the writer and me saying good-bye to the readers.

We just couldn’t get into the big papers and, being in only the smaller papers, they didn’t pay that much for it. It was not the money-maker that I thought it might be.

Richard: That’s too bad.

Russ: We made a mutual agreement to end it.

Richard: A couple of years ago there was talk of reprinting those strips.

Russ: Right, the company that owns the rights — not the company, I think, that owned them when I was doing the strip — they wanted to know about everything that I had, because I used to make Xeroxes of every page before I mailed [in the original art]. In case of an emergency or if the originals were lost, you could have printed from the Xerox.

There was a lot of artwork, 28 panels of art a week for twoand-a-half years.

It was quite an adventure. I don’t know what happened with the [planned collection] though. They bought all the Xeroxes from me that I had, which was most of them — 95% of them anyways. I don’t know if the few missing ones spoiled it for them or they couldn’t color it right. I just don’t know.

Most of the time, if you try to guess why something doesn’t happen in publishing, you get it wrong. It’s mostly something out of left field. “Mother died and took the money with her” — something you can’t predict.

Richard: That’s too bad because I was really hoping to get that volume.

Russ: Me, too.

Richard: One of the stories I remember you doing and really liking was [the Epic graphic novel] called Hearts and Minds. It was set during the Vietnam War. Russ: Actually somebody called me recently about that.

They wanted to see if they could get a publisher interested in reprinting it. They were calling me because the writer Doug Murray and I have the copyright on that. That’s a book that I did color Xeroxes of because I wanted to see how the thing would look and the color that came out in the original edition was so disappointing. I wanted that to be my signature work, something I could send to other artists in the world. It was the first time I ever blue-lined a story. All that extra work to get it just right. Then the color was screwed up when it got to the plant. I was telling Dave Stevens how I was disappointed and he said that I had to go to the plant and talk to the guy in charge. That I should follow it on through the whole printing process. I said, “Then I give up.” [laughs] There’s only so much I can do. I’m not a movie studio.

Richard: To be honest, a lot of those books, at least nowadays are printed overseas in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Russ: I don’t handle the new methods the comic book publishers work either. They have sketch artists, then pencilers, then finishers, than inkers — sometimes more than one, then they have coloring. How the hell can a picture be made in concert like that? When you’re drawing only a part of the picture, how do you tell the colorist where the light’s sup-

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

©2013 Neal Adams.

Next page: Clockwise from upper left is Russ’s cover of Battle Action #15 [Feb. 1955], courtesy of Steve Kriozere; splash page for the Heath story “Secret of the Fort Which Did Not Return,” G.I. Combat #86 [Feb.–Mar. 1961], courtesy of Heritage Auctions; another Heath re-creation, the cover of Battleground #4 [Mar. 1955], also courtesy of Mr. Kriozere; and detail of the second page of the Unknown Soldier #211 [Jan. 1978] back-up, “In Country: A Viet-Nam Scrapbook,” drawn by Russ Heath and written by Larry Hama, courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

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posed to be coming from? To make something like that work you all have to be working in the same room and, of course, they’re aren’t. I don’t think there’ll be any more hero artists because they’ve got eight people working on every page of every book. Art director and this and that. All those people taking credit for the work. I talked to Billy Tucci, who is an excellent artist who was working on Sgt. Rock a few years ago. He’s an excellent artist, but he couldn’t even indicate on the page what was light and dark, let alone where to spot the blacks. To me, that’s just a disaster and a complete waste of a great artist, just because he couldn’t follow it through. A colorist can’t know where the light’s coming from, just from straight pencils. It’s in the originator’s head.

They don’t believe in balloon placement anymore. They just sprinkle them on the page like confetti. Where they fall on the panel doesn’t matter to them. I think that one day everybody at the publishers set down and decided that they didn’t want comic books to look like comic books anymore.

They started filling the white spaces between the panels in black, which can make your art, especially when it runs up against black in the panel, makes the whole page look confused. It’s unbelievable. There’s no other art in the world that publishers expect to be done by committee.

Richard: Well, maybe movies.

Russ: Dynamite, who’s the current publisher of the Lone Ranger comics, sent me some of their books and I can’t make head nor tails out of them. A lot of the books people

#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 Doug Murray & Russ Heath.

Above: Russ not only penciled and inked the cover to the Doug Murray-written graphic novel Hearts and Minds: A Vietnam Love Story [1990], he colored it, as well.

Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

send me, it’s just impossible to tell what’s going on. They seem to be getting rid of story. Sometimes it looks like the book is a bunch of art pieces, an art display book, instead of comic book art that’s telling a story. Frankly, I can’t see why anybody buys them because, to me, there’s only one accidentally good one out of one hundred.

I can’t understand how anyone can make any money out of comics anymore. There are so many people involved—art director and penciller and inker and what not. Do they all make a quarter at the end? When I was doing them regularly there was the artist, there was the writer and that was it. You got it in, you got it done and they gave you another script.

Richard: Well, with any comic company, they want to get the book out on time. When you started out there were artists who could do forty or more quality pages a month. Kirby and Kubert and Ditko and Infantino and the like. I don’t think there’s any modern day artist who could do that many pages in a month. Not one. There were a great number of artists in the 1950–60s, including yourself, who could do a considerable chunk of work in a month.

Russ: Especially Kubert and Kirby.

Richard: That’s just gone now.

Russ: I used to kid Joe [Kubert], in fact. He’d show me a cover he did the night before and I’d say, “Be honest. You didn’t take more than a hour-and-a-half to ink this, didja?”

He’d just look at me, seriously mad. [laughs] I’d rib the hell out of him. He had a sketchy style. For him doing work that fast was water off a duck’s back. Easy.

Richard: Most artists in comics are either pencillers or inkers. Kubert mostly inked his own work. You mostly inked your own work. I’ve seen other artists ink your work and it’s just not the same thing. Even when it’s a good inker, it’s just not the same. Did you consciously make the decision to do as much of your own inking as you could?

Russ: I went back to where I first got interested in drawing, from the syndicated newspaper strips. Milton Caniff didn’t consult with the editor. He sent the finished work in from whatever state he happened to live in. That was it, unless there were corrections to be made and that rarely happened.

That’s the way I presume that comics were done. I just took that attitude. They’d give me the script and I’d give them ten ready-for-printing pages. I just did the work. I didn’t go in for that thing where all these people were going in for conferences, with the editor tossing ideas around. The editor’s not a writer. At least, not in most cases. Especially nowadays.

Like with word balloons. They should be part of the composition on the page, not tossed in after the work is done. You’re messing with the artwork when you put them in later.

I would design the balloons to help the reader’s eye go around the page — to go where it was supposed to go in the picture. I drew the balloons in my pages myself. I even did the lettering at times. I lettered some of the Lone Ranger strips myself when deadlines got close. I get ready to mail the panels, and they’d say, “It will take a day to get here and a day for us to get it to the letterer, then a day for him to do it and another day to mail it back, and we’re talking about a week!” So I’d say, “If you don’t tell anybody, give me one extra day, and I’ll send the week’s panels to you all done.” Then I’d letter them myself. Of course, that was only when time got tight. I didn’t want to spend time lettering when I could be drawing. I really didn’t want it to get around that I did that.

You couldn’t tell my lettering from anybody else’s, though.

I remember working all night on the Ranger strip when I first got out here to California. I was living in this old fellow’s home. He had a front and a side door. The FedEx would be on a strict time schedule and they didn’t want to wait to ring the doorbell so they tell me to leave the side door open so they could come right in. Now I’d be working all night in my briefs and a T-shirt and the FedEx girl would come bopping right in and she’d grab the artwork up off my bed where I’d be sitting in a kind of exhausted daze. She’d wrap it all up and say, “Bye!” and take off! [chuckles] Sometimes it was such a race that I’d snap out of the daze and realize that I hadn’t

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Battle Action and Battleground TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. G.I. Combat and Unknown Solider TM & © DC Comics. ©2013 Neal Adams.

Next page: Writer Michael Fleisher and artist Russ Heath pitched a Jonah Hex syndicated newspaper comic strip. Note the downplayed facial scar on Hex as the intended audience would be all ages. Here’s the Sunday of the unpurchased concept, courtesy of Albert Moy. 13

quite finished the panels. I knew her route and would have to follow her to get it back and finish it. If you’re late to the engraver it’s $1,500 in fines. You can’t be late with a comic strip.

Richard: You mentioned in the interview with Jon Cooke that you were uncomfortable drawing super-heroes. I tend to agree with you that you, along with artists like Will Eisner and Bernie Wrightson, draw costumes like they were actual clothes, which isn’t the case with most super-hero artists.

Russ: That’s why they looked like they were going to a costume party instead of looking like what the reader expected Batman to look like. I just have always had a problem with the concept of who these people were supposed to be.

That art of mine making Batman look like he was ready for a costume party rather than battle is probably why I didn’t get any more Batman work.

Richard: It may not have helped that you had Catman as the main villain. Not only is his costume lame but his character isn’t much better. He’s really a terrible character. [laughter] He’s just awful.

Russ: I hated the coloring on those books as well. Whoever colored them did not understand what I was after. I had some shots that were at the controls of an underwater submarine where the black was supposed to be coming from the dashboard lights he was looking at. The colorist didn’t seem to understand where the light would be coming from in that sort of a situation.

Richard: I did think you did a very nice Catwoman.

#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Russ Heath’s cover of The Punisher #26 [Dec. 1989].

Russ: Thank you! I got a little crazy a couple of times and went too far. Like with the lady cop in Central Park and the Catman cuts all her fingers off. Pretty gruesome. Doug Moench and Archie Goodwin, who were the writer and editor, were looking at the stuff I sent in, and they said, “What do you think? This is pretty bizarre.” I forget which one said which, but the other one said, “Well, it’s what we asked for.” So they published it as is. It was pretty gruesome stuff though. Sometimes you get so close to what you’re doing that you don’t realize where you are and you do stuff that you regret later. You certainly don’t want that stuff on the coffee table when your children are running through, you know.

Richard: Yeah, I can see that.

Russ: There were a bunch of college girls in their nighties and razors and swords and sh*t, which could give a lot of people a lot to scream about.

Richard: You did a couple of story arcs for The Punisher.

Russ: The Punisher was the worst. Actually, that was where the submarine pages were in, not Batman. I’ve always used lighting very heavily to define what I was drawing. So, if the colorist colors the pages wrong, then the picture is all screwed to hell. Another book that had a good script that I liked very much, but it suffered from the coloring, was a two-parter where one fella did the art for the first half and I did the art for the second half. It was about… umm…Enemy Ace. [Enemy Ace: War in Heaven, 2001] I wanted the sky to be blue—a medium blue to a dark blue because that’s the color of the sky at 20,000 feet. I had the fluffy white contrails, the vapor trail, going behind the plane, which was a B-17.

Jet planes at that time still had pretty dirty exhaust, with a lot of brown coming out of the engine. Well, he colored the sky light blue and he put in brown-white exhaust colors instead of the fluffy white that I wanted. They had a bunch of photos showing what it should have been, but when deadlines are staring you in the face, you go with what’s done. I screwed up several pictures myself, just from being worn out.

Richard: You’re always your own worst critic.

Russ: If you say so.

Richard: [Laughs] The last full-length book that I remember from you was a Jonah Hex story.

Russ: I did two Jonah Hex books [DC Special Series #16, Fall ’78, and Jonah Hex #25, Jan. ’08]. One was back in the 1970s, where Jonah Hex dies. Luckily the stories weren’t being published in chronological order! I just did the last story first.

Richard: You had Jonah stuffed. [laughter] Russ: I think I ran out of gas on that story. There was one thing I liked though. He was wearing glasses when he’s blown away by a shotgun. The glasses shatter. I wanted the shot of his murderer coming through his shattered lens and the shattered glass would distort the picture. To get that effect, after I finished the artwork, I took a razor blade and cut the panel up. Then I physically moved them up or down to get the effect with no screwups. It worked out pretty well. It was such a dumb story where everybody dies. I hate those things where everybody dies. He had a pretty-looking wife, an American Indian. She dies, too. That second Hex story, they asked me to start it out in the hot desert sun. Hex is fighting some Mexican banditos. It was supposed to be bright and glaring, and it was colored like it was a foggy day!

Blue-gray and brown. The whole book is covered with this blue or purplish haze. You can work your ass off to make something as well as you can do and then somebody, who either doesn’t give a sh*t or doesn’t know any better, can completely destroy the concept you’ve been working for.

Richard: That’s too bad. Now one thing I did want to update was that in your interview with Jon you mentioned that Lynn Nixon was your model. I just wanted to know if she still was posing for you.

Russ: Lynn posed for me but it wasn’t for a comic book.

I’ve done a series of nudes that I’m hoping to put into a book.

People in comics apparently don’t have sex, so my sex stuff doesn’t get looked at too seriously there. They wanted to

TM & © DC Comics.

Below: Neal Adams in his midtown Manhattan studio with his super-hero Megalith on the drawing board. Th is portrait is from his website. Comic Book Creator is looking forward to devoting an issue to the Comics and Characters of Continuity!

see the tanks. I just had an art show and when it comes back I hope to sell that book concept or a couple of books.

I have a series of cartoons that are fully painted, that were done when I was 17, that would make one nice book. Then all those pictures I did of Lynn — she was really my all-time model, but she hasn’t been in any work that’s been published.

Richard: So Lynn is the model for your nude drawings?

Russ: Yeah. Somebody asked me the other day what I did and I said that I was a painter. He asked me what I painted and I said what man’s been painting since ancient times — nude girls. Then he asked me what my medium was and I told him finger painting. I paint right on the nude. [laughs] Richard: Sounds like the best way!

Russ: A lot of the actual drawings are quite censorable, so I hope I can find a publisher.

Richard: I hope you get both books published because I would buy both in a heartbeat!

Russ: There you go.

Richard: The last work you’ve actually done in comics were the Glamorpuss covers.

Russ: I’ve been doing a lot of commissions, but I guess that might be the last published work. I stopped doing them because those pictures were taken from photos in fashion magazines, and the publisher wouldn’t put down the copyright of whoever took the damned picture in the first place. If you were a photographer, I don’t care if it was 20 years ago, and you’ve got a favorite picture you’ve built your career around, than you’d like to have something on there

about your copyright. I told him he could put, “Copyright to the particular owners,” or something like that, so folks wouldn’t think they were totally mine. But he wouldn’t do it, so I stopped doing them. I enjoyed it because it gave me a chance to appear with no color to screw it up. I did six, maybe seven covers, although he used one or two, I think, as inside art. They were all done for covers though. I don’t mind where it appears because when you putting a book together you’ve sometimes got to shift pages around.

Richard: What kind of commissions do you do, nowadays?

Russ: I favor the bawdy ones [laughs], but there’s a limit to that. A lot of people want a reproduction of those toy soldier ads I did back in the 1960s — the Roman one and the Revolutionary War one. I’ve done several recreations of the Roman one. I think I’ve wore myself out on that one. The original only paid 50 bucks, but the copy goes for two grand. [laughs] Richard: I can believe that. There are a lot of figures in that one! Well, we’re pretty close to finishing up so I’d like to thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. I’ve wanted to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed your work over the years.

You’re one of my favorite artists.

Russ: The people who say that to me make me think that the effort I put into things, wondering if anyone was even going to see it, was all worthwhile.

Richard: It’s always a thrill to see a page of yours that I haven’t seen before and an equal thrill to see one that I have seen before. It’s like visiting an old friend.

Russ: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • Bonus PDF Edition • #4

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appreciations

Honoring A Comic Book Master José Villarrubia and Wayne Vansant share their thoughts on the great Russ Heath I first discovered the work of Russ Heath 36 years ago, thanks to the premier Spanish comics historian and critic Javier Coma. The premiere issue of a special edition of his anthology Totem, devoted to the best of U.S. comics, featured stories by Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Jeff Jones, Wally Wood, and other artists I loved. But the magazine also held a big surprise: to cap the issue, Coma chose a story by Heath, who even then, he called a “veteran author. The comic was “Cowgirls at War,” a delirious parody inspired by Sweet Gwendoline, the classic bondage comic strip by John Willie. “Cowgirls” non-sensical narration (written by Michael O’Donoghue) combined several comic-book genres: war,

Western, romance, and, incongruously, lipstick lesbian S&M(!). It is an intriguing mixture that doesn’t quite gel, but is impeccably illustrated. Heath had ample experience in all this themes — well, maybe except erotica — and was able to pull it off brilliantly. Commissioned by the National Lampoon, the story apparently became infamous. It was printed in The National Lampoon Encyclopedia of Humor (which sold over 300,000 copies in 1973!), and in 2008 Matt Fraction wrote an homage for Heath to illustrate, “Cowgirls from Hell,” in a Marvel comic book of all things!

Since 1977, I have followed Heath’s work and bought anything that I could find with his name on it, as a penciller or inker. I have his Batman, Punisher, and Mister Miracle, his Rocketeer, Ka-Zar, and Shadow… and I love them all! But I believe that, like several other greats (Wrightson, Corben, Adams, Toth…), the comics he did Warren Publishing stand out as masterpieces of the medium, particularly his collaborations with writers Archie Goodwin (“Give and Take”), Bruce Jones (“Process Of Elimination,” “Yellow Heat”), and Dave Sim (“The Shadow Of The Axe”). These have been reprinted in the Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella archives, and in the astonishing Blazing Combat collection from Fantagraphics.

I would highly recommend these to any aficionado of great comics and genre illustration.

— José Villarrubia Baltimore, Oct. 2013

— Wayne Vansant 15

#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

“Cowgirls at War” ©2014 the respective copyright holder.

I can’t remember the first time I saw Russ Heath’s work, but it was probably in a DC war comic book in the late 1950s. Mr. Heath is not only a great artist, but a great draftsman. His figures, lighting, and hardware are perfect. I especially remember his stories in G.I. Combat. I remember one called “H-Hour for a Gunner.” A war story doesn’t get any better than that. With the restrictions on blood and gore in those day, Mr. Heath’s work still conveyed the cost of war.

Then there was “Give and Take,” in Blazing Combat #4. With his use of duo-shade paper, Heath was even able to show the texture of the soldier’s herring-bone-twill uniforms. Then there was “Cowgirls at War” for National Lampoon. That showed the absolute best of his work. It was black-&-white, but it would have been glorious to color.

“Shadow of the Axe” ©2014 New Comic Company.

Below: Courtesy of CBC pal José Villarrubia, the Russ Heath biography page from the 1970s Spanish comics anthology Totem, which included these panels from the Warren horror classic, “The Shadow of the Axe,” written by Dave Sim. Inset right: That issue also included the Heath story (written by Saturday Night Live’s “Mr. Mike,” Michael O’Donoghue) “Cowgirls at War.” Here’s a detail of one of the curvaceous stars of that tale of bondage amidst battle, which appeared in The National Lampoon Encyclopedia of Humor.

artist model

Russ Heath, Posing Warrior The artist models for his Blazing Combat classic story, “Give and Take,” in 1966

[The following is an excerpt related to this photo gallery of the Russ Heath interview in Comic Book Artist, Vol. 1, #4, the Warren Publications retrospective., which was subsequently reprinted in The Warren Companion [2001]. The talk originally took place on Feb. 9, 1999. — Ye Ed.] Jon B. Cooke: In the ’60s, you only did one story for Warren, “Give and Take,” from Blazing Combat #4?

Russ Heath: I don’t recall the years, but I did about two dozen stories for Warren. I remember that story was in 1966 because I was working for Playboy at the time. I decided

that I had to do a really great story because the guys who were appearing in this books were my peers and the best from E.C. So I took one of the Playboy photographers on a Saturday and had him shoot 40 pictures to work from for that story. Although it lacked characterization (because I was the model for everybody in it!), it certainly got remembered in a helluva way. It’s funny: All the guys for that particular issue did great jobs and I’m glad I did that. It cost me a lot of money in time—it was a month-and-a-half to do seven pages (because I went out and bought fatigues, web belt, and a lot of stuff; and I did a lot of research).

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • Bonus PDF Edition • #4

Above: The artist is particularly proud — and rightfully so — of his exquisitely-drawn Warren war story “Give and Take.” Russ Heath not only painstakingly rendered this terrifically detailed story; he also posed for a Playboy photographer pal for the Blazing Combat #4 tale.

Russ’s only regret? Because he posed for every role, every character looks exactly like Heath!

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#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • Bonus PDF Edition • #4

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#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

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Bonus Russ Heath Art Gallery This page: Splash of the “Sgt. Rock” story in Our Army at War #239 [Dec. 1971]. Next page: Splash of same in Our Army at War #258 [July 1973].

Both courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

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#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

TM & © DC Comics.

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behind the scenes

The Human Gargoyles: Before & After George E Warner gives us a look at the remastered pages of his newest production Courtesy of the publisher of The Human Gargoyles, previewed in our print edition, here’s the front cover without copy, before-and-after redrawn pages, roughs and finished pages, and alternate unused covers from the book. George shares, “I’ve also included a page from Psycho

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#8 (the try-out chapter of the Gargoyles by Alan Hewetson and Felipe Dela Rosa) and page 8 from the book (by Richard Arndt and Maelo Cintron), showing the contrasting take on the Edward Sartyros versus the ‘I’ monster battle.”

#4 • Bonus PDF Edition • Winter 2014 • Comic Book Creator

Comic Book Creator • Winter 2014 • Bonus PDF Edition • #4

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