Hero Gets Girl! The Life and Art of Kurt Schaffenberger

If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

PLEASE READ THIS: This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. If you downloaded it from another website or torrent, go ahead and read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal download, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, please pay for them so we can keep producing ones like this. Our digital editions should ONLY be downloaded within our Apps and at

www.twomorrows.com

[Photo by Kathy Voglesong ; characters © DC Comics ]

Written and designed by: Mark Voger With photos by: Kathy Voglesong Publisher: John Morrow Front cover art: Kurt Schaffenberger Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, Billy Batson, Mr. Tawny, Dr. Sivana, Ibis the Invincible, Taia, Superman, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Superboy, Supergirl, Krypto, Jor-El, Lara, Zor-El, Jonathan Kent, Martha Kent, Lana Lang, Lucy Lane, Lex Luthor, Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Hawkman, Aquaman, the Spectre, Metamorpho, ‘‘Dial H for H-E-R-O,’’ Catwoman, Scarecrow, Isis, the Wonder Twins Zan and Jayna TM & © DC Comics. Nemesis and Magicman TM & © Best Syndicated Features Inc. Barnabas Collins TM & © Dan Curtis Productions. The Spirit TM & © Will Eisner.

Dr. Kildare and Beetle Bailey TM & © King Features. Daughters of Time TM & © Jack C. Harris. Roma TM & © John Workman.

Simple Simon and the Pieman TM & © Howard D. Johnson Company. Famous Comic Book Creators © Eclipse Enterprises. Photos credited to Kathy Voglesong © Kathy Voglesong.

Copyright acknowledgments:

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from Mark Voger, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Inquiries should be addressed to Mark Voger c/o: TwoMorrows Publishing.

Published by: TwoMorrows Publishing 1812 Park Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27605

2

Illustrator of Lois Lane and Captain Marvel

Contents

Foreword by Ken Bald ———————————————————— 4 Introduction ——————————————————————————— 6 One-of-a-Kind ————————————————————————— 8 Zella-Mehlis ——————————————————————————— 10 Connecticut —————————————————————————— 11 Pratt Institute —————————————————————————— 12 The Binder Barn ———————————————————————— 13 Dorothy ————————————————————————————— 15 The War Years ————————————————————————— 16 Wedding Bells ————————————————————————— 20 ‘‘Holy Moley!’’ —————————————————————————— 21 Ibis the Invincible Gallery —————————————————— 24 Captain Marvel Gallery ———————————————————— 25 Master Comics Cover Gallery ——————————————— 26 Captain Marvel Jr. / Marvel Family Cover Gallery ——— 28 Post-Fawcett Scramble ——————————————————— 30 Premier Cover Gallery ——————————————————— 33 ACG Cover Gallery —————————————————————— 34 Play Ball! ————————————————————————————— 36 Gridiron Greats ————————————————————————— 37 Custom Comics Gallery ——————————————————— 38 Front-Page Romance ———————————————————— 42 Faces of Lois —————————————————————————— 46 Lois Moments ————————————————————————— 48

CONTENTS

‘‘Hero Gets Girl! The Life and Art of Kurt Schaffenberger’’ ©2003 Mark Voger

‘‘Letters to Lois’’ ———————————————————————— 49 Lois Lane Cover Gallery ——————————————————— 50 Susan Kelly ——————————————————————————— 54 Karl Schaffenberger ————————————————————— 55 Dual Tragedies ————————————————————————— 56 Christmas Cards ———————————————————————— 58 Oh, Baby ————————————————————————————— 78 Shazam! ————————————————————————————— 80 Writing a Wrong ———————————————————————— 84 Burning Question ——————————————————————— 85 Kurt’s Kameos ————————————————————————— 86 Schaffography ————————————————————————— 88 Mystery Art ——————————————————————————— 98 The Dark Age —————————————————————————— 99 ‘‘Our Stuff Was Hopeful’’ ——————————————————— 100 Ken Bald ————————————————————————————— 105 Victor Dowd ——————————————————————————— 106 Will Eisner ———————————————————————————— 107 Carmine Infantino ——————————————————————— 108 Julius Schwartz ———————————————————————— 110 Joe Kubert ———————————————————————————— 112 Murphy Anderson ——————————————————————— 113 Ramona Fradon ———————————————————————— 114 Joe Giella ———————————————————————————— 114 Jack C. Harris ————————————————————————— 115 Mort Walker ——————————————————————————— 115 Dave Hunt ———————————————————————————— 116 John Workman ————————————————————————— 118 Mike Carlin ——————————————————————————— 119 Howard Bender ———————————————————————— 120 Graham Nash ————————————————————————— 121 Alex Ross ———————————————————————————— 122 Farewell ————————————————————————————— 124 Epilogue ————————————————————————————— 125 Index ——————————————————————————————— 126 CONTENTS

ISBN 1-893905-29-2 First Printing, November 2003 Printed in Canada

For Kathy

MY HEARTFELT THANKS to a few people without whom this book would not exist: Kurt and Dorothy Schaffenberger for inviting us into their lives, telling us their story and entrusting us with their photos, original art and comic book collection; Howard Bender, the comic book medium’s biggest booster; my publisher John Morrow; and my beautiful wife and best friend, photographer Kathy Voglesong, who has navigated countless punishing field assignments with me.

I thank the comic-book pros who provided materials, support and/or allowed me to pick their brains: Murphy Anderson; Ken Bald; Mike Carlin; Nat Champlin; Victor Dowd; Will Eisner; Ramona Fradon; Frankie Giella; Joe Giella; Victor Gorelick; Jack C. Harris; Dave Hunt; Carmine Infantino; Joe Kubert; Alex Ross; Julius Schwartz; Curt Swan; Mort Walker and John Workman.

I also thank my wonderful family; my colleagues at the Asbury Park Press and Home News Tribune; Kaye Bald; Joni Bender; Michael Benson; Steve Breen; Peggy Burns; Gary M. Carter; Mildred Champlin; Mike and Sue Frankel; Jennifer T. Go; P.C. Hamerlinck; Bill Janocha; Ron Jordan; Larry and Susan Kelly and family; Nathan Melby; Steve Muoio; Graham Nash; Karl Schaffenberger; Art Scott and Karen Plunkett-Powell; Kathryn Leigh Scott; David Siegel; Wallace Stroby; Roy Thomas; Martha Thomases; the National Cartoonists Society; Comic Book Marketplace; the Comics Buyer’s Guide; the Comic Shop News; Comics Scene; Starlog Communications; TwoMorrows Publishing; the gang at Comics Plus in Ocean, N.J. (support your local comic shop!); The Burners; and of course, the pioneers who created “Supie,” “Cap” and company. — MV

3

Kurt Schaffenberger strikes a pose in 1938 while attending Pratt Institute, where he met fellow artist and lifelong friend Ken Bald.

[© King Features]

Above: The original art for this 1965 Dr. Kildare strip was signed to Kurt Schaffenberger by Ken Bald, artist of the long-running strip and Kurt’s lifelong friend. In Bald’s studio hangs an original Superboy cover by Kurt with a heartwarming inscription. Opposite: Kurt strikes a pose in 1938 while attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he and Bald began their friendship.

Foreword by Ken Bald

KURT SCHAFFENBERGER AND I FIRST MET WHEN WE ENROLLED AT PRATT INSTITUTE in Brooklyn in the fall of 1938, and began a friendship that would last a lifetime.

We stayed close all through school. During our sophomore summer, I visited his family in Hartford, Connecticut — a treat for a city boy like myself. Just before graduation in May of 1941, I started work at Jack Binder’s studio in Englewood, New Jersey. Bill Ward, a fraternity brother who had graduated the year before and was working there, suggested that we see Binder about working in the comics. Kurt followed me there along with Vic Dowd (who later became my brother-in-law), Bob Boyajian, Al Duca, Ray Harford and others, all from our graduating class. It was Captain Marvel time.

As one of the better draftsmen in our group, Kurt became a main figure artist. We drew the superheroes and heroines. Jack Binder and his wife, Olga, also were super in their own way. Jack was great to work for. The artists — some 20-odd of us — worked in a large studio that had been built over his barn. Because our art was piecework, we would sometimes take two or more hours for lunch to play softball, and then work until 11 or midnight to make deadlines.

Until Kurt entered the service — one of the first of us to do so — he and I were roommates at Ma Bogert’s home not far from the studio. Kurt was stationed in Europe during the war; I was sent to the South Pacific, having joined the Marines on December 7, 1942, one year to the day after Pearl Harbor. We still managed to stay in touch through the mail.

After the war and Kurt and Dot’s marriage, we remained close, especially after Kaye and I moved to New Jersey. We saw them often, usually once a month, until they left for the Jersey Shore.

Kurt was always fun to be with, even the last time I saw him on his 80th birthday. We teased each other unmercifully — we really did — about everything. Even our last names, his being long and ethnic, and mine being short and “bald.”

Kurt devoted his talent and life to the comic book, what with the Captain Marvel and Superman groups. He was tops in his field. His draftsmanship and graphic style definitely proved this. Everyone in the business liked, admired and respected him. The man was a great friend and a fine illustrator.

From where I sit in my studio, I can see two of his covers on my wall. The Superboy cover has a dedication that reads, “To Ken Bald: If it’s true that friendships, like wine, improve with age, we’ve got us the makings of a good binge. Kurt.”

Well, it is true. And we did have the makings. And I really loved the guy and treasured our friendship.

Kurt Schaffenberger is no longer with us, but in a way, he is. Just look in any one of his many comic books and thrill to the adventures of the Captain Marvel or Superman families. Fans will always remember Kurt and his contributions to the medium. What more can an artist hope for?

FOREWORD

5

Lois always had a big head when it came to her reporting skills, but this is ridiculous! From Lois Lane #27 (1961). [© DC Comics ]

Introduction: The comics legend next door

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE KID MOMENTS FROM THE middle 1960s: a birthday party; a herd of children hopped up on cake, soda and M&Ms running around like maniacs; noise, noise, noise; finally, parents begin showing up to collect their offspring; my folks will be here any minute; I’m starting to crash after that sustained sugar high; I open a toy chest in the basement of this strange house; there’s a comic book on top — a great way to chill out while I’m waiting.

This is the weird thing about comic books — they are powerful memory triggers. A 40-something can look in a comic he hasn’t laid eyes on since he was 8, and it all comes flooding back. Not just the artwork on the page, but where he was, what he was doing, the weather, you name it.

I’m not the first to comment on this phenomenon. It works with comic book artists, too. John Romita once told me he can look at an old Amazing Spider-Man page of his and remember what song was playing on the radio when he drew it, perhaps 30 years earlier.

Anyway, there I am at this birthday party reading this tattered comic book while my glucose levels are scrambling to stabilize.

Wouldn’t you know it? It’s an issue of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane — #27 (1961), to be exact. In “Lois Lane’s Super-Brain!,” the plucky heroine gets a cerebral jolt from a “fantastic computer that absorbs electrical brain wave impulses from the minds of brilliant people and stores them up,” an invention of a Professor Holt, who never should have left Lois alone with that machine.

Lois became super-smart — she could identify distant constellations and cheat at roulette by calculating mathematical permutations — but there was a catch. Her hair fell out and the top of her head grew to more than double its size. When you’re trying to snare Superman as a husband, this can be a terrible disadvantage in the

6

looks department.

Young, innocent and none-too-bright as I was, I got lost in the moment of Lois’s shock and despair when she first spotted her creepy new melon in the mirror. That memory got filed away along with all the other wonderful, but ultimately useless, pop culture milestones of my boyhood.

FAST FORWARD TO 1989. I’D RECENTLY REACQUIRED the comic book habit, and I was not alone. Through some superhero synchronicity, there was a renewed interest, nationwide, in this venerable medium. Tim Burton’s movie Batman triggered a comeback for the tights-clad detective. Comic shops, heretofore found only in big cities, were popping up in neighborhood shopping centers (especially here in New Jersey, where the slogan “the Garden State” threatens to be replaced by “the Strip Mall State”).

I had been writing a sporadic column about comics for the Asbury Park Press, my base of operations since 1983. I profiled a local artist, Howard Bender, who drew Superman earlier in the ’80s and was now stumping for his independent title, Mr. Fixitt. Bender shares my jones for old-school comics, particularly what we comic book geeks refer to as the “Silver Age.” * “Guess who moved into town?” Bender said one day. Kurt Schaffenberger, the guy who drew Lois Lane. What luck! A comic book legend right around the corner!

I called Kurt and set up an appointment to interview him in his home in Brick, New Jersey, where he’d moved from River Edge, also in N.J., earlier that year. My wife Kathy, a freelance photogra* The Silver Age: A whimsical era of comics triggered by the comeback of the superhero genre with Showcase #4 (1956), ending in and around the early ’70s.

INTRODUCTION

pher, posed Kurt in his back-porch studio for the article, which I titled “It’s the Way He Draws His Faces.” Kurt was charming, with an easygoing manner, an understated humor. His wife, Dorothy, returned from an errand, and a friendship was forged that afternoon.

Before long, the “Schaffs,” the Benders (Howard and Joni) and Kathy and I became like the six musketeers. I’m not saying we were inseparable, but every now and then we’d schedule a fun, low-key get-together — a dinner party or a dinner out. (On one occasion, Dorothy cooked us all a sumptuous lobster dinner, complete with hot towels following the main course. But Dot, not a lobster fan, dined on microwaved chicken that evening, poor girl.)

Bender and I, being comic book geeks, always tried to coax Kurt into talking about the old days. Kurt didn’t share our obsession. He would always say, in his bemused way, that it was “just a job.”

Once when Bender asked Kurt about artistic motivation, Kurt replied: “You think of all the bills that need to be paid, and then you go to work.”

In the nearly 13 years I knew Kurt Schaffenberger before his death on Jan. 24, 2002, two identities emerged: (1) a tall, dignified, genteel old fox with a sly wit, and (2) a giant talent with an unshakable place in comics history. I miss the former, but the latter can always be found — in a ’40s issue of Whiz Comics, a ’50s issue of Master Comics, a ’60s Lois Lane, a ’70s Shazam! or Superman Family, an ’80s Action. He’s there, and he will always be there.

If my younger self — the little boy back at that ’60s birthday party reading Lois Lane #27 — could ever have dreamed that one day he’d be buddies with the guy who drew that crazy story about Lois’s head morphing into something resembling an Erykah Badu headpiece — well, he’d probably forgive Kurt for freaking him out.

AS AN ILLUSTRATOR, KURT Schaffenberger was peerless. As an interview subject, well . . .

“He loved working. He didn’t like talking about it, but he loved working,” Kurt’s wife Dorothy once told me.

I formally interviewed Kurt on 10 occasions, though only two of those (in 1989 and 1998) were lengthy interviews. Kurt was a pragmatic person.

“Comic books are my living, not my life,” is one telling ‘‘Kurt-ism.’’

That said, I readily admit that on occasion, other interviewers had more luck than I with Kurt (particularly going back a few decades, when memories of the Fawcett days, for instance, were much fresher).

Here’s a funny story: I had been grilling Kurt for a major profile which ran in Comic Book Marketplace #59 (1998).

A 1974 selfWhen the article appeared, it caricature was packaged with another

by Kurt. interview by John Coates. In Coates’s Q&A, Kurt spilled a little anecdote that I would have considered “gold,” just

INTRODUCTION

The Schaffenbergers in grandkid heaven in a 1979 cartoon by Kurt.

the sort of detail I had been begging Kurt for for years: When he worked at Jack Binder’s art studio in the early ’40s, which was located in a barn, sometimes on a cold winter morning, the ink in the bottles would be frozen and the artists would have to wait for it to thaw. I called Bender and we had a laugh: “Why didn’t Kurt ever tell us about the damned frozen ink?”

The next time I saw Kurt, at a comic book show with Bender, I pulled out a tape recorder and said, “OK, Kurt, tell me all about the frozen ink.” Later on, when I profiled Kurt in the Press to preview an upcoming in-store appearance, the accompanying headline (in huge, bold type) read: “FROZEN INK . . . and other ‘Golden Age’ memories from comic book artist Kurt Schaffenberger.”

Thankfully, Kurt was interrogated many times over the years for various comic book “fanzines.” What these amateur publications sometimes lack in polish, they make up for in heart. The Schaffs saved a stack of fanzines that featured Kurt interviews, from which I have culled quotes used throughout this book, attributed to the interviewer. For the record, these interviewers and ’zines are: Martin L. Greim in The Comic Crusader #15 (1973); Bill G. Wilson in The Collector #29 (1974); John G. Pierce in Fantasy Unlimited #26 (1975); Matt Lage in FCA/SOB #12 (1980); David Caruba in The Comic Zone #13 (1981); Howard Leroy Davis and Dave Sim in BEM #34 (1981); and Pierce again in It’s a Fanzine #20 (1983). Pro ’zines mined include Allan Asherman in The Amazing World of DC Comics #2 (1974), Pierce in Comics Interview #18 (1984) and Coates’s aforementioned CBM piece. Bender also handed over tapes of interviews he did with Kurt in 1991 and ’99, some of which appeared in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1322 (1999).

PROGRAM NOTES: Don’t be thrown by the occasional use of the odd spelling “KCurt.” It’s our solution for those times when Kurt Schaffenberger and Curt Swan — two great Superman artists with the same first name, but spelled differently — are referred to together (i.e., “the two KCurts”).

Dorothy Schaffenberger’s years of dedication to compiling, maintaining and properly annotating family photos and cards has resulted in the illuminating collection that follows. Unless otherwise noted, the archival family photos in this book were provided, cheerfully and trustingly, by Dorothy. Fans of Kurt and students of comics history are richer for it.

7

A true, bona fide, one-of-a-kind original WHAT MAKES A COMIC BOOK ARTIST GREAT? When he makes something his own.

When he does something that no one before him ever has — and no one after him ever could. Will Eisner’s The Spirit comes to mind.

Or Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four.

For Kurt Schaffenberger — a prolific, giant talent — that something was Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane.

Yes, he drew hundreds of Captain Marvel and company pages during Fawcett’s glory days. But there was something about Kurt’s decade-long run on Lois Lane that made it a true, bona fide, one-of-a-kind original.

In Kurt Schaffenberger art from Lois Lane #39 (1963), our heroine makes no attempt to mask her emotions. [ © DC Comics]

Opposite: The artist in 1941, the year he unwittingly entered the comics field.

Kurt turned DC’s simple Superman spinoff into something romantic and operatic. He humanized Lois — gave her a discernible personality. So animated is the character in Kurt-drawn stories, that she became a comic-book version of I Love Lucy (with Lois’s penchant for getting into hot water akin to Lucy’s desire to “be in the show, Ricky!”).

And Kurt, that rascal, never shied away from rendering the feminine form in all of its natural, linear beauty. Lois had one tight waist, rounded hips and pin-up perfect gams (always in heels). The artist often poked fun at his own heroine when he depicted the gamut of emotions she couldn’t mask: curiosity when on the scent of a “scoop”; jealousy when Superman paid too much attention to rival Lana Lang; anger when confronting him about said crime; elation when wrapped in the Man of Steel’s bulging arms.

But Lois aside, German-born Kurt Schaffenberger truly did it all in his half-century of drawing comics. From his beginnings drawing backgrounds for Captain Marvel stories in the early ’40s, through his rise as one of that character’s leading artists, to his resurgence as a top Superman artist from the Silver Age through the ’80s, Kurt’s distinctive style has graced thousands of comic book pages.

And Kurt holds a solitary place in comics history as the only artist to

A ONE-OF-A-KIND

draw Captain Marvel in the Fawcett days who went on to become a major Superman artist. It’s too late for another artist to knock Kurt from that lofty perch; it’s his and all his.

Besides these high-profile tenures at big-gun publishers, “Schaff” had been around, too; the artist drew superhero, adventure, weird, crime and romance comics and covers for Classics Illustrated, American Comics Group, Premier, Atlas, Archie and others, rendering his resume allencompassing — and uniquely so.

But Kurt paid dearly for it. He was a workaholic who spent much of his life hunched over that drawing table, often sequestered from his family in his own home. And his life was not without drama — a bumpy courtship, a world war, some scary career dry spells, a family tragedy and a heartbreaking decline in health.

In the end, though, it is Kurt’s art that remains. His wholesome, allAmerican, instantly recognizable style is characterized by distinctive faces, flawless anatomy, uncluttered panels, clean layouts and especially, a whimsical sense of humor.

But what shines through in any examination of Kurt’s body of work is that he is a great illustrator who just happens to have drawn some of the most memorable comic books in the history of the medium.

9

The little boy with the serious expression “In preparation for my career as a cartoonist, I tended geese, herded goats and hoed potatoes.”

CENTRAL GERMANY’S SCENIC Thuringerwald — the lush Thuringian Forest — is a magnet for artists, poets, hikers and skiers. Here, on a small farm in the village of Zella-Mehlis, Kurt Paul Schaffenberger was born on December 15, 1920. His father, Ernst Schaffenberger, was likely born in 1894. His mother was born Emma Wahl in 1896. According to the artist, both parents were natives of Zella-Mehlis. The blond little boy with the serious expression was their only child.

The idea to emigrate from Germany had already struck Ernst, thanks to a powerful impetus: He took a bullet in the lung while serving in the German army during World War I. Wishing to spare his son a similar fate, Ernst departed for the United States in 1927, followed the next year by Emma and 7-

Emma and son in Germany in 1927.

Opposite: A portrait of Kurt taken in the old country when he was 4... The imprint in the lower right reads ‘‘Schuller Zella-Mehlis.’’

YOUNG KURT PAUL

Young Kurt (circled) at a 1927 family gathering in the old country: Zella-Mehlis, Germany. At back left is Emma. year-old Kurt Paul.

“I remember sailing into New York harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline,” Kurt once told John Coates. “It was very exciting for a boy from a small town, but I was more excited to be reunited with my father after a year apart.”

The Schaffenbergers first landed in Hartford, Connecticut, but soon after settled in West Hartford. Ernst was hired by the Royal Typewriter Company, where he worked as a toolmaker for more than 25 years. (Kurt held onto his father’s retirement gift: an engraved typewriter.)

“Kurt’s father wanted him to work in a machine shop. He didn’t want him to be an artist,” Kurt’s future wife, Dorothy, would later remark.

But young Kurt’s aptitude for art was becoming increasingly apparent. “I did a lot of drawing as a kid,” he once told Howard Bender. “Drew all the time. Cowboys, mostly.”

Kurt loved going to the movies (“Saturday afternoons, 10 cents”), where he thrilled to exploits of Tom Mix, Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson. “Never even got on the back of a horse until I was grown up,” Kurt later said. “But hey, everybody wants to be a cowboy.”

Young Kurt also absorbed the newspaper funnies. His early idols in art were Harold Foster, Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff. He read Ella Cinders, Tailspin Tommy, Maggie and Jiggs and Tarzan. He told Coates: “I loved the funny pages. Each week, I would read them repeatedly and try to copy the different art styles. It was great practice.”

With a zeppelin toy his father made him in 1930.

11

Of The Katzenjammer Kids, Kurt told Bender: “That was an extension of my childhood. I used to read it in German.”

In fact, his artistic prowess helped Kurt negotiate cultural barriers in his new homeland.

“When we came over to the United States, my being able to draw became a means of establishing communications with the other kids, because I didn’t speak Kurt in any English at the time,” he told Coates. “Since none of 1934 the other kids could draw, that made me unique — or an oddball. Take your pick.”

Meanwhile, those newspaper strips Kurt loved so much were spawning a whole new medium. Kurt was probably 12 when, in 1933, the first comic book was published. Funnies on Parade, released by Eastern Color Printing Company, contained reprints of color Sunday comic strips. The following year, Eastern’s Famous Funnies became the first-ever monthly comic.

In 1935, Kurt’s future employer National Periodical Publications (later DC Comics) issued its first comic book, New Fun. All of which set the scene for what is arguably the most important moment in

comic book history. In 1938, National released Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman, the seminal caped superhero. Superman was the brainchild of two anxious and unknown boys from Cleveland, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster.

But Kurt took little notice of the burgeoning medium.

By this time, he was more interested in the great magazine illustrators of the day, such as Norman Rockwell of The Saturday Evening Post.

In ’38, the same year Action Comics #1 reached newsstands, Kurt graduated salutatorian from William Hall High School in West Hartford. Were his parents proud? “They never mentioned it,” he later said. (In fact, Ernst criticized his son for not making valedictorian.) Still, the honor helped snare a scholarship for Kurt, which he used to enter prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he would surely learn the skills to become the next Norman Rockwell.

Joe Shuster’s cover for Action Comics #1 (1938), the introduction of Superman, arguably the most important moment in comic book history. Young Kurt took little notice of the burgeoning medium in which he was destined to make his mark. [© DC Comics ]

How education at prestigious college led to a job at a barn

“BE TRUE TO YOUR WORK, AND YOUR WORK WILL be true to you.” So goes the motto of Pratt Institute, the prestigious art school in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn founded in 1887.

“I’d heard about it,” Kurt told Bender of Pratt. “It was supposed to be a good art school, so I decided I wanted to go. I got a scholarship from high school to go wherever.

“My parents had a friend from the old country who lived in Brooklyn and had a house which they rented out rooms, a brownstone. So I wouldn’t be totally on my own, I got me a room at that place.”

The brownstone was in Park Slope, a half-hour walk to Pratt.

Kurt was 17 when he first strode onto the Pratt campus, where he met Ken Bald, who would become a friend for life.

“That was in September of ’38, when we started Pratt Institute together,” Bald said. “And he’s been my friend since. So that was our first class at Pratt when I met him.”

At Pratt, Kurt studied oil painting, figure drawing and art history.

His goal was to be published alongside the great magazine illustrators of the day: Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, Harold Von Schmidt.

While at Pratt, Kurt worked summers at a machine shop.

12

Kurt works on a painting circa 1940 or 1941, while attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, those silly comic books were still attracting readers, even as the illustrated magazines were fading. In 1940, as Kurt embarked on his final year at Pratt, another moment in comics history went unnoticed by the fledgling artist. Fawcett Publications released Whiz Comics #2, which introduced Captain Marvel, “the

YOUNG KURT PAUL

world’s mightiest mortal.” Captain Marvel became the only costumed superhero to outsell Superman, however briefly, at that time — something the Superman people would not take lightly.

The following year, 20-year-old Kurt Schaffenberger graduated from Pratt and was poised to take on the world. He recalled: “They had a placement service for graduates. They sent you around to these places. They gave me several places to go. Most of them were strictly dead-end.”

Believe it or not, the one job that wasn’t “strictly dead-end” was at, of all places, a barn.

“I had no idea about comic books, because there weren’t any by the time I got out of school, not really. What I had in mind was getting into magazine illustration — Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and all that. The magazines started disappearing.

And this comic book made a buck, so . . .”

That’s how Kurt explained his unwitting entry into comics.

“It was a new medium,” he said. “There hadn’t really been comic books before.

The comic books that you bought were reprints of the old newspaper comics.”

And so, in June of 1941, the stage was set for a young and eager Kurt to begin his first job, at the Jack Binder art studio in Many a comic career was launched Englewood, New Jersey. It here: Jack Binder’s Englewood sounded glamorous — a home. Behind it was the barn. position at an “art studio.”

The reality? Picture a dozen bachelors packed into a barn that was either sweltering or freezing, depending on the season. And the ‘‘art” they were working on? Assembly-line comic book pages.

But none of these guys would have traded the experience for the world.

“At that point, we worked in that barn or carriage house,” Kurt told me of Binder’s facility. “It was like a cooperative-type deal. We had a good, congenial group.”

Congenial, yes, because the Binder studio was crawling with Pratt alums: Kurt, Bald, Bill Ward, Victor Dowd, Ray Harford, Bob Butts, Nat Champlin, Bob Boyajian, Pete Riss, Al Duca. (For a short time, Winsor McCay Jr., son of the creator of the groundbreaking strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, also worked at Binder’s.)

It was Bill Ward — later renowned as the creator of curvy blond heroine Torchy, and for drawing impossibly endowed strumpets in men’s magazines — who played a key role in that Pratt connection.

“Bill was the first one, because he graduated ahead of us,” Bald recalled. “He worked for Binder and was influential, as we graduated, in getting us all out there to work in the comics.

“When we worked for Binder out there in Englewood on St. Nicholas Avenue and — where the hell was it? — maybe Tenafly Road, he had a big barn that he converted the top of into a studio.

We worked there. I think there were maybe 10 of us or more. We

THE BARN

Left: Kurt toils at the Jack Binder studio in 1941.

Below: Whiz Comics #2, which introduced Captain Marvel in 1940.

[© DC Comics ]

were all direct from Pratt, and we all had been friends.

“Everything we did was ‘piecework,’ so to speak. Maybe six guys would work on the same page. Bill Ward would do the layouts.

I know I penciled the main figures and inked. Somebody would do the secondary characters, somebody would do the backgrounds and so on. There might be six or seven names on the back of this big piece of art that we’d be working on. At that time, the pages were quite large.”

Bald’s fellow Pratt alum Champlin remembered it just that way.

“We had these boards, large illustration boards,” Champlin said.

“All those cartoon book pages were done on large boards, and then reduced to the size of the book. We would have a slip on the back of those boards. You had rough penciler; you had balloon lettering; you had background pencil tightening; you had secondary figures;

13

you had pencil tightening; inking backgrounds; inking main figures. You’d put your initials opposite the ones that you worked on.

“For example, Kurt would do a lot with figures, but he did very little with backgrounds. But you’d turn your board over, and you’d get Kurt’s signature under penciling main figures and inking main figures and that kind of thing.

“And then the people in the office at the shop would pick up these panels and pull the (invoice) slips off the back, and that’s how they would figure the salaries of the artists, by just going over those slips and listing on the payroll what the fella did.”

Recalled Bald: “The first week we went to Binder, I was able to take home $55, which was tremendous. We made money and it was good money. Inside of a year, you were making over $100 (per week). We did well.”

But they earned every penny.

“Oh, yeah,” Bald said, “but it was a fun time. We were young — 20, 21, 22, something like that. We had never seen much money before. And we were doing it at our own hours. You earned your money, but that’s what you wanted to do and that’s how you got better.”

According to Bald, among the characters the Binder boys worked on were Captain Marvel, Ibis the Invincible, Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, Bulletman, Mr. Scarlet, Doc Savage and Mandrake the Magician.

“We did a whole slew of ’em,” Bald said. “We did an awful lot for Street and Smith, along with Fawcett’s. Most all of our stuff was done through Jack, who became a great friend of mine, too.”

“The first thing I recall doing was backgrounds for Captain Marvel,’’ Kurt told me. ‘‘But before long, I wound up doing the whole thing.” He once recalled that his first solo assignment was a filler page about Atilla the Hun titled “Blitzkriegs of the Past.”

Of course, working in a converted barn had its drawbacks. As Kurt said: “The barn was unheated. In the wintertime, we’d come to work in the morning, and often find our ink frozen in the bottles!”

So, what would the guys do? “Wait for it to thaw out!” Kurt said with a shrug. “And in the summertime, there was no air-conditioning. We had some fans, and they did keep us cooler. But when we were working, it got so hot that we wrapped towels around our bare arms, so as not to drop sweat onto the finished artwork.”

To break the drudgery, the Binder boys would play softball.

“For lunch hour, we would play a seven-inning game of softball,” Bald recalled with a chuckle. “We would also play softball teams from Fawcett’s and maybe Street and Smith. We had this ball field right across the way from us in Englewood. And because we worked late at night, pretty often — most of us were living away from our homes, so we were all bachelor guys — we’d work late up in the studio.”

“We had a great ball team,” Champlin said. “We played a lot of other agencies, all the agencies we could get ahold of. We had a ball. I pitched. I had a mean arm. Kurt was a good strong fella, a good athlete. Good ball player. Awfully nice fella.

“Binder used to get kind of upset with us for going out at noon to play ball. We wouldn’t get back for quite a while. But we did the work for him. He was lucky to have the team he had.

“I have a kind of close feeling for the group at the Binder agency. It was a pretty happy period in my life. It was a great crew.

All different people, distinctive. You know, we not only did work in the agency, but we dated on the outside. We ended up with our dates over in the city at some of the dances. It was a wonderful period of history, as far as I’m concerned.”

14

Shirtless wonders on a hot day at the barn. From left: Vince Costello, Nat Champlin, Samuel Hamilton Brooks, John Westlake, Jimmy Potter and Kurt (standing in white shirt).

Cranking out comics. From left: Bill Ward, Bob Butts, Kurt, Al Duca, Bob Rylans and studio boss Jack Binder.

The Binder studio softball team.

Kurt is standing second from right. Future Fawcett editor Wendell Crowley stands to Kurt’s left. Seated with a mitt on his head is Ken Bald.

[Photos courtesy of Nat Champlin ]

THE BARN

Dorothy

ONE AFTERNOON IN 1996, AS KURT AND HIS WIFE Dorothy were recounting their recent trip to the San Diego International Comic Convention, Dorothy recalled that a familiar question was put to her husband during a Q&A session.

Said Dorothy: “They asked him if he ever worked from live models. He said, ‘Not really.’ That’s when I got into the act. I said, ‘You liar!’’’ Because, Dorothy continued, Kurt often used her as a model for Lois Lane.

To which Kurt tut-tutted: “But you’re not a brunette, dear.”

Dorothy shot back: “Give me a half-hour.”

Well, Kurt could deny Dorothy’s influence on Lois all he wanted. Anyone who knows Dorothy — funny, fiery, outspoken, protofeminist — can easily see the connection. Where Kurt’s Superman was steady and stoic (as Kurt could be), his Lois registered emotions left and right. As a cousin of Kurt’s once wrote Dorothy: “The family liked you, but we didn’t think you were going to fit in, because you’re too peppy.”

But this real-life romance did not go untested. On two occasions prior to their wedding day, Kurt wounded Dorothy — which may have had something to do with why she didn’t immediately accept his proposal of marriage. And having your courtship interrupted by a world war doesn’t make things any easier.

BACK AT THE BINDER BARN, KURT AND FELLOW Pratt alum Nat Champlin were tiring of their punishing commute from Brooklyn to Englewood, and decided to look for a room in town. “They looked and looked and looked and couldn’t find anything,” recalled Dorothy. “And then Kurt stopped in for a Coke at a ‘mom-and-pop’ store across from St. Cecilia’s. He asked the fella there if he by any chance knew anybody who had any rooms.”

Kurt learned that, as luck would have it, a room was being vacated by football coach Vince Lombardi, who was then making his move to Fordham University. Kurt and Champlin became roommates, which led to Kurt meeting his future wife.

Recalled Dorothy: “The woman who rented the room, Mrs. Bogert, was my mother’s best friend. Well, Nat wanted to meet some ‘babes.’ That was just male talk in those days — you didn’t call women babes to their face. That was then. ‘‘So Mom Bogert asked me if I knew some people who would like to come over and have a get-together. So I got some of my friends together, and we went over.”

It was at this modest soiree that Kurt first laid eyes on Dorothy Bates Watson, a beautiful and vivacious redhead. But neither party was exactly on the prowl. “Kurt was through with women,” Dorothy recalled with a laugh. “He had liked this girl who didn’t treat him very well, and so they dumped each other.

He figured, ‘If this is what romance is all about, I don’t want any part of it.’ And I had just broken up with somebody, so I certainly wasn’t Kurt gets down on interested in men.

DOROTHY

the accordion

Dorothy Bates Watson in 1944. ‘‘So we sort of ended up together, because — how safe could you be, right? That’s how we met.”

Hearts may not have been set afire that evening, but there was a flicker. Kurt saw more of Dorothy, who lived with her mother and brother on Tenafly Road not far from the Binder barn. A social scene was beginning to hatch among the Binder boys, some of whom formed a little band that played around at parties (Kurt’s instrument: the accordion).

By the time the Christmas seasoned rolled around in 1941, Kurt and Dorothy had grown fairly comfortable with one another. So much so that Dorothy volunteered to do the legwork when Kurt mentioned he wanted to buy his mother a cameo for Christmas.

“So I tramped all over New York looking for a cameo,” Dorothy recalled. “Believe it or not, I only found one, and it was cracked. So now I’m discouraged. I get on the subway. I get on the bus. I go back to Englewood. I’m exhausted. And there’s a little jewelry store in Englewood. I thought, ‘I wonder if I should look in there? Nah. Yeah — I think I will. Then I’ll know I’ve looked everywhere.’

“So I get off the bus, I go into the jewelry store, and there is the cameo! So now I’m like the puppy with the newspaper — I can’t wait to go and show Kurt this terrific thing I did. And I had to walk, because the bus wasn’t going to come again for another hour.

“I trot over to Mom Bogert’s and ring the bell. She comes to the door and says, ‘Oh.’ I thought, ‘That’s an odd greeting.’ I said, ‘Hi. Can I come in?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Is Kurt here?’ And she goes, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Could I see him, please?’ So she goes to the bottom of the stairs and she calls up. Kurt comes down in a tuxedo with a corsage with another girl. He was going out!

“He always swore after that that I married him to get even.”

Dorothy was hurt, but faced the fact that at that point, Kurt was under no obligation to her. After all, they weren’t engaged. She saw an old flame briefly. Occasionally, she would still run into Kurt.

“We just sort of hung out; I got to meet the people up at the barn where they worked, the Binders,” Dorothy recalled. “So it just sort of took off from there. It was like a ‘gang’ thing.”

Things started to heat up again between Kurt and Dorothy.

“Then,” Dorothy said, “the war came.”

15

The war years “I’ll see you when I get out,’’ Kurt remembers telling his boss, Jack Binder, before entering the Army during World War II.

“I didn’t know how long it was going to be,” Kurt later told Howard Bender. “I didn’t know if I was coming back. You know, you could get killed in a war. It’s happened.”

Kurt called World War II “a totally different war than any we’ve had since. The last wars we’ve had have not been exactly popular, but World War II, well, we had to make the world safe for democracy again and get rid of that sunuvabitch Hitler.”

Does that mean Kurt couldn’t wait to join the service?

“I could wait! Oh, I could wait!” Kurt said with mock alarm. “I was drafted.”

In June of 1942 — exactly one year to the day after leaving Pratt — Kurt was drafted into the Army.

“When I first got in there, they didn’t know what the hell to do with me,” he recalled. “I got infantry training crammed in a couple of months, and then I was assigned to a unit that was already scheduled to go overseas. They needed a couple more guys to make out their complement, and I became one of those guys.”

By September, Kurt was in a troop ship docking in Liverpool. He spent the next three years in England, initially with the First Special Service Unit, eventually attaining the rank of master sergeant.

Kurt’s unit organized entertainments, including USO shows and film programs for which Kurt drew posters. “That brought me to the attention of a Major Winter, who was organizing an art branch for the service,” he said.

Kurt told me he then joined the art branch of the Adjutant General’s Office, “mostly doing artwork, posters, layouts and whathave-you for the Army.”

He told Allan Asherman: “The most famous poster I did was of a soldier helping himself to more food than he really needed.

Superimposed over him was the spectral form of Hitler cheering him on to waste the food.”

He told a DC publicist: “You wouldn’t believe how many Class A and Class B garbage cans I lettered.”

But if this period of Kurt’s Army stint sounds “cushy,” things got much more intense after Kurt learned that the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunA Schaffenberger WWII-era poster. ner of the CIA) could

THE WAR YEARS

A WWII-era self-portrait by Kurt Schaffenberger.

utilize another of his talents.

Kurt told Bender: “Towards the end of the war, I heard through the grapevine that this outfit was looking for German-speaking Army personnel to drop behind German lines, infiltrate Germany, and bribe Germans into helping the Allies win the war. “(If) you drop a guy behind the lines, he needs money to ‘buy’ people with. I don’t recall exactly, but the average agent that we dropped had about $5,000 or $10,000 worth of British currency on them. And a good many of them we dropped, we never heard from again, because they just took the money and ran.”

Kurt told Asherman: “They wanted men to go behind enemy lines on a voluntary basis. Of course, I said no.”

Added Dorothy: “The government offered Kurt $10,000 in jewels. They wanted to drop him behind the lines in civilian clothes. He said, ‘No way. You can send me any place you want in uniform, but I’m not going without it.’ One reason was he didn’t want to do it.

Another reason was that he got a shafting in the service.” (Dorothy explained that Kurt had applied to officers’ training school, but was stonewalled when he inquired about being admitted.)

But even though Kurt didn’t go behind enemy lines, there was still quite an element of excitement, and even danger, to the desk job he took with the OSS. Kurt told Asherman: “I would sit and translate the information coming from our boys behind enemy lines. There were many agents trained for infiltration behind the German lines, but the most effective of the guys were those who spoke German as their native language.

17

Kurt during a Saturday morning inspection in 1943.

“Each man was dropped by parachute with a small transmitterreceiver. It was about the size of a flashlight and really didn’t have all that great a range, but it was the most advanced piece of equipment we had at the time.

“For each of our men, there was always the possibility of capture. If the enemy caught one of our people, they usually tried to force him to transmit false information to us, and in turn, to try to get as much information from us as possible. In that event, it became our responsibility to keep him alive, feeding him just enough false information to keep the enemy convinced that he was still useful to them.

“We arranged special codes with all our agents. If they were being forced to transmit, they’d use their code phrase. We’d know they’d been caught and would start feeding them false information to humor their captors.

“One of our best agents was a professor in civilian life, a very soft-spoken man. He never cursed. So we arranged that if he was captured, he would slip in some swear words into his message. He was eventually caught. But our false information kept him alive.”

During the war, Kurt never heard from the relatives he left behind in Germany. Any news from the old country would reach him after the war via his parents, Ernst and Emma.

“Of course, they didn’t have much information either,” Kurt told Bender, “because there was no letter-writing back and forth during that time. As a matter of fact, when the war was over, I found out that my paternal grandparents had died during the war.”

As a native of Germany, how did Kurt feel working for the other side? “Not good,” he said. “I had, I think — I counted it at the time — six first cousins in the German army. Lost two of them: Karl and Richard. My son is named Karl Richard.”

18

ON THE HOME FRONT, DOROTHY WROTE TO KURT every day and even kept in touch with his parents.

“We sent him care packages,” Dorothy recalled. “One time, his father made a crate, a wooden crate. His mother hard-boiled these eggs and she put them in paraffin. I got him some Liederkranz cheese, which I put in a soap dish. We wrapped all this stuff up and sent it over. So one day, they came to him and said, ‘Schaffenberger! There’s a care package for you!’ They were holding it away from their noses, and they weren’t too happy. Well, the Liederkranz cheese had eaten through the soap dish! And the paraffin had broken, so all the eggs were rotten!”

While overseas, Kurt created custom birthday, Valentine’s Day and Christmas Cards for Dorothy and sent them via “V-mail,” a special wartime distribution system. Explained Kurt: “We wrote on 81/2"-by-11" sheets of paper that already had headings on them. These were microstatted to a very small size. When they reached the States, they were blown up to full size. This was done to save space.”

In the interest of wartime security, an Army censor examined all outgoing V-mail for compromising references. Once approved, the censor would stamp each V-mail letter in the upper-left corner.

But Dorothy recalled that the censor got a bit of revenge on Kurt for a snide reference in the Valentine’s Day card he mailed her in 1943. Explained Dorothy: “If you read the words on this, it says, ‘If my letters do perchance, oft sound like frigid prose, it isn’t cooling ardour, sweet, it’s the censor’s snoopy nose.’ And the censor put the stamp right over it!”

But not every letter from Kurt brought a smile to Dorothy’s face.

“One day, he wrote me a ‘Dear Joan’ letter,” Dorothy said. “He said he didn’t know when he’d be coming back or what was going to happen, and that I’d better not count on anything. So he just figured I’d want to know.

“I was devastated. I cried the whole day. My boss hid me in his office. Cried the whole day. Then my boss said to me, ‘OK. That’s enough with the tears. He was honest. He told you straight up, ‘‘Don’t count on anything.’’’ Well, the only thing he wasn’t honest about was that he was going with an English girl.”

So Dorothy began dating other people, and limited her letters to Kurt to one per week. “Well, he didn’t like that,” Dorothy said, “because I’d been writing him every day. So he started writing twice a week, three times a week; I still only wrote once a week.

“And the day he came home — he wasn’t expected — but he came to my office to surprise me. Well, he surprised me, all right, because I had a date with another guy! So he went home with my mother and sat and waited until we came back from the date.”

A detail from another WWII-era poster

by Kurt, which was recently discovered inside an old picture frame.

THE WAR YEARS

Kurt’s custom cards to Dorothy, sent via ‘‘V-mail’’ during World War II. (Note the Army censor’s extra stamp on the top left card.)

THE WAR YEARS

19

Wedding bells

WORLD WAR II HAD COME TO AN END, BUT the OSS wanted Kurt Schaffenberger to stay on just the same. “I wasn’t interested,” Kurt said. “I figured the war’s over — I’m gettin’ the hell out.” In September of 1945, he The big day: departed in a troop ship from Southhampton, England, and March 30, 1946 headed back to the United States.

The man who four years earlier had entered the comics industry unwittingly was now eager to re-enter the field. “Well, it was one thing I was knowledgeable in,” he told Howard Bender. “I made up samples and took ’em around.”

After working briefly for the BeckCostanza Studio founded by Captain Marvel artists C.C. Beck and Pete leave from the Navy, so that he could give her away. (At the time, Costanza, Kurt interviewed directly Dorothy’s parents William and Ethel were divorced, and Dorothy with Fawcett Publications, publishers was estranged from her father.) As it turned out, William’s leave of the Captain Marvel line, for a freewas cancelled. “He was going through the Panama Canal while I lance position. was getting married,” Dorothy said.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “the The wedding was held at St. Paul’s Chapel in Englewood. Rev. editor there for comics was Wendell Frederick E. Thalmann officiated at the 5:30 p.m. candlelight serCrowley, who had worked with us at vice. Dorothy’s matron of honor was Ione Binder, wife of prolific Jack Binder’s studio. So through him, I Captain Marvel writer Otto Binder and sister-in-law of Kurt’s old got my first assignboss Jack Binder. Ken Bald and ments when I got Jack were in the wedding party. out of the Army.

(Back then, newspapers That was Ibis (the spared no detail when reporting Invincible).” on a wedding, as this excerpt Meanwhile, Kurt attests: “The bridal dress was and Dorothy were white satin with sleight train. growing closer as a It’s front panel, an entire hem, couple. was in crewel hand embroidery “Then one day,” done by the bride’s mother. Her Dorothy recalled, fingertip veil fell in four tiers “we went for a ride from a coronet.”) up in Connecticut.

Dorothy recalled one panThere was this icky moment: “I’m sitting in the mountain that had a limousine with my mother’s drive-off where you cousin, who was giving me could stand and look away. All of a sudden, I hear at the view. We were ‘The Wedding March.’ And there and he said, ‘You know, we’ve been going we’re still sitting in the limoutogether for quite a while, and I feel that I want sine! I grab the flowers and my to settle down, and I’d like it to be with you.’ headpiece and we dashed out!”

“I told him I’d have to think about it. Because It wasn’t hard to guess why by this time, I needed time. With Kurt, first it Kurt’s pals were so bleary-eyed was yes, then it was no, then it was yes — so I during the ceremony. needed time. It wasn’t just uncertainty about “They had a bachelor party,” Kurt. My mother wasn’t working, my brother Dorothy said. “Of course, they was younger and I was supporting them on had the stripper and the whole $16.50 a week and saving 50 cents. bit. In those days, you always “So I gave it a little time, and I decided that did it the night before, which is Mr. and Mrs. Schaffenberger at their reception this was what was to be. So we got engaged.” really stupid when you think held at the American Legion Clubhouse on The couple set the date for March 30, 1946, about it. So all of his friends when Dorothy’s brother William would be on Knickerbocker Road in Englewood. were in the back, hungover.”

20

WEDDING BELLS

‘‘Holy Moley!’’

From 1946 until Fawcett Publications cancelled its Captain Marvel line in 1953, Kurt Schaffenberger illustrated the exploits of Cap and company.

Right: A panel from Whiz Comics #112 (1949). Above: A detail from Kurt’s cover for Captain Marvel Jr. #80 (1949). [© DC Comics ]

THE WARMTH, THE INNOCENCE AND INDEED THE family feel of Fawcett Publications’ Captain Marvel line of comic books is no mystery. For one thing, Captain Marvel and his cohorts Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, Ibis the Invincible, Taia and even Marvel Bunny were reflecting the upbeat national mindset the history books have labeled “post-war optimism.” For another, the folks who created those charming comic books way back when actually enjoyed each others’ company.

“After the war, after Dot and I got married, a gang of us would get together every Saturday night,” Kurt once told me. “It would be (C.C.) Beck and his wife, Hilda; Jack and Olga Binder. We’d go bowling and then go back to different houses and socialize, play cards, what-have-you.

“That was our first year after we got married. But then, children started arriving and made it a different ballgame altogether.”

As a freelancer for Fawcett beginning in March of 1946 (the month he and Dorothy wed), Kurt landed the first-ever regular solo assignment of his career: turban-wearing, wand-brandishing, do-

‘‘HOLY MOLEY!’’

gooding magician Ibis the Invincible. (“EYE-bis!” Kurt would snap when he heard the name mispronounced.)

Kurt’s early Ibis stories appeared in the shortlived solo title Ibis the Invincible (1946-48). An early Schaffenberger cover appeared on the sixth and final Ibis issue. Kurt also drew Ibis backup features in Whiz Comics (through 1948). Then Kurt got a promotion of sorts; he was assigned to draw the lead Captain Marvel stories — and an occasional cover — for issues of Whiz Comics (from 1948 through ’53). Kurt drew stories and covers for Master Comics (1948-53), Captain Marvel Jr. (1948-51) and The Marvel Family (1947-53).

(In fact, Kurt drew the covers and lead stories for the final issues of Whiz and Marvel Family, and the cover for the final issue of Master, making him truly the last of the great Fawcett artists.)

When Fawcett put Kurt on the Captain Marvel stories in Whiz Comics, it proved a pivotal moment in his career. During this period, Kurt’s own style — what the artist once referred to as a “caricatured realism” — began to emerge. Though Kurt emulated C.C. Beck in his Captain Marvel figures, the earmarks of Kurt’s style

21

were coming to the fore: his storytelling, his attention to detail, his anatomy, the thick-and-thin line of his distinctive inking and most of all, his humor.

Kurt acknowledged as much in a 1980 interview with Matt Lage. “(Mac) Raboy, (Bud) Thompson and Jack Binder used their own styles on Captain Marvel Jr. and Mary Marvel,” he said. “When I took over the Marvel Family stories, I drew Captain Marvel himself as much like Beck’s character as I could, but I did my own thing with the stories I illustrated.”

I asked Kurt if he was instructed to draw Cap in the Beck style.

“Not instructed,” he said. “I wasn’t told to draw exactly like him.

It was my interpretation of what they were drawing.”

He told Pierce: “In my opinion, Beck was head and shoulders above the rest of the artists. Raboy drew exquisite, pretty but meaningless pictures.”

Kurt told me of Beck: “He was what you might call a ‘Renaissance man.’ A great artist, a great musician — he played guitar and piano — and even a great ballroom dancer. Although,” Kurt added with a laugh, “I’ve never danced with him.’’

Working steadier than he had in his career thus far, Kurt settled into a routine that would serve him well in the years to come. “I would pencil two pages a day or ink two pages a day,” he told me, “so it was a full page a day, basically.” Kurt broke up his week with visits to the Fawcett office in the Paramount Building at Times Square in New York (“just to pick up and drop off work”).

One of Kurt’s most memorable — and collectible — Fawcett assignments was the 1951 baseball one-shot, Yogi Berra: Baseball Hero. Years later, Kurt would rub elbows with the Hall-of-Famer. “I met Yogi Berra at one of the ‘sports nights’ that the National Cartoonists Society had,” Kurt recalled. “I approached him and told him I had drawn this comic about him. He said, ‘Yeah! I remember that! You made me look good!’’’

NEWLYWEDS KURT AND DOROTHY MOVED INTO the Tenafly Road apartment previously occupied by Dorothy’s mother. Shortly after that, Dorothy quit her job. “We never did understand, either one of us, why I did that,” Dorothy said.

A 1950 family portrait with newborn Karl and Susan, 3.

Because times happened to have been tight when Dorothy got pregnant. The couple shopped for a house, which they found on Concord Drive in River Edge, just northwest of Englewood. The year was 1947.

“We bought the house when we absolutely couldn’t afford it,” Dorothy recalled. “My mother loaned us some money, which Kurt paid back real fast; he didn’t like to owe people money. That’s how we got our little ‘starter’ house.”

The Schaffenbergers lived in that “starter” house for 42 years.

Dorothy later went back to work when the couple “hit another drought.” An acquaintance suggested she seek employment through a ‘‘temp’’ agency, and Dorothy eventually went to work for what was then known as Rexall Chemical “on a temporary job. That

Details from a charming housewarming card to the Schaffs from C.C. Beck (1947).

22

‘‘HOLY MOLEY!’’

temporary job lasted almost 25 years. It was a good thing, too, because I got benefits. My policy covered Kurt. He had no coverage. So that was lucky.”

The Schaffenbergers’ first child, daughter Susan, was born on September 19, 1947. Son Karl came along on February 1, 1950. Proud papa Kurt commemorated the occasions with cartoon birth announcements.

Recalled Dorothy: “Kurt was one of those husbands you hear about — when I went into the hospital to have Susan, he was in the wheelchair and I was carrying the suitcase.”

Another Dorothy zinger from that day: “The doctor came out and said, ‘You’ve got a beautiful girl.’ Kurt said, ‘A girl?’ The doctor said, ‘You’ve heard of them.’’’

Kurt knew many fellow freelance cartoonists who had horror stories of their children spilling ink on finished artwork — one downside to working at home. But the Schaffenbergers never allowed this to happen.

“We didn’t bug him,” Karl recalled.

“He was making a living, and we didn’t bug him unless we had to. If you went in the studio, you just didn’t touch stuff. I remember one time making that mistake and I got a talking-to, and never made that mistake again.”

KURT’S VERY LAST assignment for Fawcett, although he didn’t know it at the time, was illustrating a story starring the Marvel Family, Fawcett’s version of a “superteam” featuring Cap, Junior and Mary. Kurt was two pages into the Marvel Family story in June of 1953 when Wendell Crowley called with bad news: Fawcett was cancelling Captain Marvel and company.

The seeds of Captain Marvel’s demise were sewn a decade earlier, when a cease-and-desist action was filed against Fawcett by DC Comics, then known as National Periodical Publications.

National called Captain Marvel a Superman knockoff, but many in the industry saw the move as sour grapes over Captain Marvel’s healthy circulation, which may have cut into that of Superman.

Wrote Beck of the nasty episode in the fanzine Fantasy Unlimited #26 (1975): “The publisher of Action Comics in which Superman appeared did not like Captain Marvel at all.

He brought suit against Fawcett, claiming that Captain Marvel was a ‘carbon copy’ of Superman. Readers laughed. . . .

Captain Marvel was exciting, funny and pretty down to earth in nature, while Superman was stern, humorless and actually not even human, having been born on another planet. How can any judge or jury be stupid enough not to see the difference?”

Fawcett fought and fought the action. But by 1953, with the comics industry at a low ebb anyway, Fawcett gave up the ghost.

“I remember it well,” Kurt told me of that time. “I suddenly lost my income, totally! It was a scary time.’’

‘‘HOLY MOLEY!’’

Above: A detail from Kurt’s cover for Master Comics #95 (1948). Below: Kurt’s splash panel for Whiz Comics #146 (1952). [© DC Comics ]

23

Whiz Comics #95 (1948)

Whiz Comics #94 (1948)

Whiz Comics #99 (1948)

Whiz Comics #99 (1948)

Whiz Comics #94 (1948)

24

Unpublished Ibis art (circa late ’40s)

Ibis #5 (1946)

Whiz Comics #99 (1948)

IBIS THE INVINCIBLE GALLERY

Whiz Comics #112 (1949)

Whiz Comics #136 (1951)

Whiz Comics #112 (1949)

Whiz Comics #131 (1951)

CAPTAIN MARVEL GALLERY

Whiz Comics #151 (1952)

Whiz Comics #130 (1951)

Whiz Comics #136 (1951)

25

26

MASTER COMICS COVER GALLERY

Master Comics #90 (1948) [© DC Comics ]

Master Comics #91 (1948) [© DC Comics ]

Master Comics #94 (1948) [© DC Comics ]

Master Comics #113 (1950) [© DC Comics ]

MASTER COMICS COVER GALLERY

27

Master Comics #115 (1950) [© DC Comics ]

Master Comics #117 (1950) [© DC Comics ]

Master Comics #129 (1952) [© DC Comics ]

Master Comics #130 (1952) [© DC Comics ]

28

CAPTAIN MARVEL JR. COVER GALLERY

Captain Marvel Jr. #60 (1948) [© DC Comics ]

Captain Marvel Jr. #72 (1949) [© DC Comics ]

Captain Marvel Jr. #74 (1949) [© DC Comics ]

Captain Marvel Jr. #83 (1950) [© DC Comics ]

CAPTAIN MARVEL JR. / MARVEL FAMILY COVER GALLERY

29

Captain Marvel Jr. #90 (1950) [© DC Comics ]

Captain Marvel Jr. #92 (1950) [© DC Comics ]

Captain Marvel Jr. #100 (1951) [© DC Comics ]

Marvel Family #87 (1953) [© DC Comics ]

Post-Fawcett scramble

“I was dismayed, to say the least. I would have been totally horrified had I known at the time that it would take me almost two years to re-establish myself in the art field.”

FAWCETT PUBLICATIONS FOLDED ITS CAPTAIN Marvel line in 1953, an ominous time for comics. But the following year was very nearly the nail in the coffin.

Dr. Fredric Wertham is a name that lives in infamy in the comic book world. In 1954, Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a book which detailed psychological damage purported to have been inflicted on the youth of America by comic books. That same year, testimony about the negative influence of comics was given during widely reported hearings by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

Comics became another victim of the social paranoia that pervaded 1950s America. Publishers began dropping left and right.

“We were considered like procurers if we drew comics,” Kurt told Howard Leroy Davis and Dave Sim in 1981. “Ah, but that’s all gone by the board.” (When his interviewers commented that comics are almost respectable now, Kurt remarked: “Somewhat in the same classification as pimping.”)

Kurt said of his mid’50s scramble for work: “I do know that rates went down considerably at the time and took a long time to build up again.”

During this period, Kurt recalled that he “worked for just about everyone in the field.” Publishers who hired the artist included Gleason, Gilberton, Premier, Atlas and Max C. Gaines’ EC Comics.

For Atlas (better known For ACG, Kurt created by its later moniker, Marvel the Silver Age superComics), Kurt reckoned he heroes Nemesis (above) inked “four or five” Captain and Magicman (right).

America stories for editor [© Best Syndicated Stan Lee, and contributed art Features Inc. ] to Adventure Into Mystery, Astonishing, Journey Into Unknown Worlds, Mystical Tales and World of Fantasy. Kurt told John Coates: “Stan Lee never said it, but I always got the impression that his attitude toward me was like, ‘Well, Kurt, you’re a nice guy and all but it’s a shame you can’t draw.’”

Kurt told me of Gilberton, publishers of Classics Illustrated: “I only worked for them as a last resort. I couldn’t get any other work. A very poor-paying outfit. Their pay was so bad that the artists they got were usually the dregs.”

Did Kurt include himself in that category? “Well,” he laughed, “I couldn’t get any other work at the time!”

30

Kurt with ACG editor Richard E. Hughes in New York in 1957.

But the undeniably beautiful result, published in 1954, was a cut above many other Classics Illustrated books. Kurt adapted Richard Harding Davis’ ‘‘Soldiers of Fortune’’ to the comics medium.

“I read the book after I knew I was doing the story,” he told me.

“The breakdowns of the book were done in the script.”

He called Premier, for whom he drew some absolutely exquisite crime and romance covers in 1955, a “small organization that I did a couple of jobs for. More or less one-shot deals.”

Kurt also took on an agent (one the artist felt became a financial albatross later on) and pitched a comic strip to the syndicates.

“That’s what I tried to sell years ago, back in the ’50s,” Kurt told Howard Bender. “It was a sports strip — high school baseball. The character it revolved around was the coach of the high school team.

I liked baseball and I thought it would be interesting. Didn’t sell.”

In 1955, Kurt finally landed steadier work. At American Comics Group, Kurt worked under Richard E. Hughes, who was to become one of his two all-time favorite editors (the other: Julius Schwartz of DC Comics).

ACG began as Creston Publishing in 1943. Five years later, ACG released Adventures Into the Unknown which became, according to The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, the firstever regularly published horror comic book, preceding even Entertaining Comics’ famous titles such as Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror.

Among comic collectors, ACG is a publisher with a cult following. This tenacious, albeit minor, publishing house — best known for its adventure, mystery, weird and humor titles — survived the comics “witch hunt” of the ’50s and employed some notable artists during its reign: Bald, Ogden Whitney, Chic Stone, Pete Costanza, Al Williamson, John Buscema, Johnny Craig and Steve Ditko.

According to Edwin Murray in his article “ACG: The Underdog” published in the 1978 fanzine The Comic World #17, Hughes wrote most of ACG’s stories after a certain point, but used pseudonyms to make it appear as if ACG was fully staffed. Hughes elaborated on the deception by writing biographies for all of his non-de-plumes.

POST-FAWCETT SCRAMBLE

Samples from a comic strip about high school baseball which Kurt proposed to syndicates in the 1950s. [© Kurt Schaffenberger]

Then he had Kurt draw caricatures of the phony writers to go with their phony biographies!

“I was the top artist in Dick Hughes’ studio,” Kurt told me. “I had desk space at ACG on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’d go into the city and do my thing.”

Kurt drew many covers for such ACG titles as Forbidden Worlds, Unknown Worlds, Adventures Into the Unknown and Calling John Force: Magic Agent. By the mid ’60s, when ACG hoped to cash in

POST-FAWCETT SCRAMBLE

on the superhero craze, Kurt created the super-characters Nemesis and Magicman. “I drew the originals for them,” he said, “but I never did any of the (interior) stories.”

(Years later, while Kurt was freelancing simultaneously for DC Comics and ACG, DC editor Mort Weisinger objected to Kurt’s signature appearing on the cover of ACG comic books. Kurt then used the pseudonym “Lou Wahl,” the name of his maternal grandfather.

His fans weren’t fooled.)

31

Two sides of the domestic coin were depicted by Kurt for his longtime client Custom Comics. Left: A happy Tupperware party from Tupperware Dating Diary (1968). Below: Intervention is necessary in Jane’s Husband Drank Too Much! (1972). [© Custom Comics ]

Kurt continued to work for ACG until the publisher folded its comics line in 1967. But a division of ACG known as Custom Comics proved a more enduring, and profitable, client for Kurt.

IT’S POSSIBLE KURT MADE HIS MOST PROFOUND, lasting impression on our national consciousness with his work for Custom Comics — more so than what he achieved for even Fawcett Publications or DC Comics. Hear me out. With Captain Marvel and Superman, Kurt reached comic book readers — a group mainly composed of young males, some of whom became collectors later in life. But with Custom Comics, a publisher that produced specialty comics for a wide variety of corporate clients, Kurt’s work was seen by millions of people who otherwise never looked in a comic book.

For Custom, Kurt produced non-newsstand “giveaway” comic books for various manufacturers and government groups such as Chevrolet, Chrysler Motors Corporation, the USAF, the NYPD,

32

Montgomery Ward, Tupperware, Howard Johnson’s, McDonalds, Wrangler Jeans, King Edward, Daisy, Grit, Gilbert Toys and Canadian Flyer. Kurt also illustrated public service comics on such serious topics as fire prevention, electricity and alcoholism.

Custom also used Kurt for many advertisements that appeared in comic books — sometimes in the very comic books that Kurt himself drew! These clients included Ideal Boaterific, Ideal Motorific Cars, Captain Action and Dr. Evil action figures, Tyco Trains and Parker Brother’s Avalanche game, to name a few.

When we think of the ’50s and ’60s stereotype of the “nuclear family” with the handsome, pipe-smoking dad, his cheerful, kitchen-bound wife and their perfect children (one boy and one girl), it conjures a wholesome, innocent, naive picture that Kurt Schaffenberger made no small contribution to.

But back in the comic book world, one of Kurt’s biggest contributions had yet to be made.

POST-FAWCETT SCRAMBLE

PREMIER COVER GALLERY

33

Police Against Crime #7 (1955) [© Premier ]

Police Against Crime #9 (1955) [© Premier ]

True Love Confessions #9 (1955) [© Premier ]

True Love Confessions #10 (1955) [© Premier ]

34

ACG COVER GALLERY

Unknown Worlds #28 (1963) [© Best Syndicated Features Inc.]

Unknown Worlds #41 (1965) [© Best Syndicated Features Inc.]

Unknown Worlds #43 (1965) [© Best Syndicated Features Inc.]

Unknown Worlds #46 (1966) [© Best Syndicated Features Inc.]

ACG COVER GALLERY

35

Adventures Into the Unknown #146 (1964) [© Best Syndicated Features Inc.]

Adventures Into the Unknown #153 (1964) [© Best Syndicated Features Inc.]

Forbidden Worlds #50 (1957) [© Best Syndicated Features Inc.]

Gasp! #4 (1967) [© Best Syndicated Features Inc.]

These baseball illustrations, which Kurt produced as samples while seeking freelance jobs in the ’50s, point up the artist’s affection for the great American pastime.

36

PLAY BALL!

Kurt’s comical bios of Lenny Moore and Art Donovan from the Baltimore Colts 1962 Team Program Book.

GRIDIRON GREATS

37

The Real Fun of Driving!! (1965)

The Real Fun of Driving!! (1965)

Howard Johnson’s #9 (1962)

Howard Johnson’s #8 (1962)

Howard Johnson’s #14 (1964)

The United States Air Force Presents: The ‘‘Hidden Crew’’ (1964)

Don’t Be a Fizzle (1961)

38

Tyco Trains advertisement (1966)

CUSTOM COMICS GALLERY

Bulb Magic! (1956)

Great Guns! (1957)

Grit Will Help You (1969)

CUSTOM COMICS GALLERY

Skating Skills (1957)

Adventures in Science (1958)

Fun on the Range (1962)

My Brother, the Cop! (1971)

Talking to God (1972)

39

The artwork from Kurt Schaffenberger’s ‘‘tryout’’ page, which he produced in 1957 for DC editor Mort Weisinger, who was then fishing for an artist for DC’s newest comic book Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane.

The figures represent the first time Kurt ever drew Lois Lane, Clark Kent and Superman. The original is owned by rock star Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fame.

[Characters © DC Comics ]

Front-page romance WHILE KURT SCHAFFENBERGER EKED OUT A living in other genres, superheros were making a sudden and unexpected comeback. In 1956, DC editor Julius Schwartz ignited the so-called ‘‘Silver Age’’ of comics with Showcase #4, which featured a revamped Flash in a story by Robert Kanigher and artwork by Carmine Infantino and Joe Kubert. Little did Kurt — who cut his teeth in the superhero genre 15 years earlier — realize at the time, he would be making a comeback, too.

Showcase, DC’s “tryout” title, was created in the hopes of dis-

FRONT-PAGE ROMANCE

covering new avenues of circulation. From issue to issue, Showcase could be about anything its revolving team of editors dreamed up — firefighters, frogmen, explorers, robots with human personalities, whatever.

If a particular idea proved Lois’ first solo flight, in Showto be a hit with readers, it case #9 (1957). [© DC Comics ] would “spin off” into its own title. Some that made the plunge: The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom, Metal Men and of course, Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane.

In fact, the latter — which debuted in Showcase #9 (1957) — became the first Showcase character to win its own series.

By 1957, Kurt’s old buddy Otto Binder — undoubtedly the most prolific author of Captain Marvel stories in the Fawcett days — was writing for DC. When DC decided to spin off Lois Lane, the editing assignment naturally went to Mort Weisinger, the longtime editor on all of DC’s Superman titles: Superman, Action Comics, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, Superboy and Adventure Comics. When Weisinger began fishing for a permanent Lois Lane artist, Binder suggested Kurt, who was then vacationing in Maine.

“At Otto’s suggestion, I called Mort Weisinger,” Kurt told Howard Bender.

“He asked me to draw up some samples. So when I got back from Maine, Mort had sent me a copy of Showcase #10, the second Lois Lane issue.”

Kurt’s tryout page — which featured his first stabs at Lois, Clark and Superman — gave only a hint at what would follow, and actually resembled the artwork of Wayne Boring, who was DC’s top Superman artist for much of the 1950s.

“At the time, I was trying to match my style to his,” Kurt told me. “But the Lois Lane that Wayne Boring did was a very Busted again in unfeminine-looking girl, so I changed it.

Kurt’s cover art Boring, for instance, only had one facial expression. I tried to make her for Superman’s more human.”

Girlfriend Lois Kurt told Allan Asherman: “At Lane #53 (1964). the time I was assigned to Lois [© DC Comics ]

43

Lane #1, the only standard for the character was Wayne Boring’s Lois. The first thing I did was redo her hair and work up a series of sketches as a guide for the other artists.”

Kurt’s first Lois story, “The Bombshell of the Boulevard,” appeared in Lois Lane #1 (1958). Kurt’s Lois Lane tenure would last 10 years.

The Lois Lane stories were very lighthearted and often romantic. Lois was indeed Superman’s girlfriend, but marriage seemed like an unrealistic hope. Plus, she was always jealous of Lana Lang, who Superman dated when he was Superboy back in his hometown of Smallville.

Whenever Lana figured in the plot, Kurt would draw Lois as the villain, with arched eyebrows and nails ready to claw. Kurt once chuckled at the observation. “Whatever the script called for,” he said with his usual air of understatement.

When I asked Kurt what it was like to work for Weisinger, the artist dispensed with diplomacy. “He was a sadist,” Kurt said matter-of-factly. “He would do anything to make you cringe. Never give you credit for anything you accomplished. He was a bastard to work for.”

He told Bill G. Wilson in 1974: “I used to upset Mort Weisinger no end when I tried to jazz things up a bit by inserting some innocuous humorous touch in the Lois Lane books. ‘This is too comicky,’ was a recurring admonition.

Too comicky for comic books?”

He told Howard Leroy Davis and Dave Sim in 1981: “It didn’t make much difference who wrote (the Lois

44

Teen angst: Lois Lane #42 (1963). [© DC Comics ]

Lane scripts), because Mort would get the script and work it over until it came out a ‘Mort Weisinger.’ Weisinger never did any writing in the sense of signing his name to a script, but he rewrote everything to fit his mold.

“In the days of Mort Weisinger, when I would get a script a couple pages at a time and had to get to work on it without knowing the ending, I’d get to the last page and find out that there was a gimmick that I’d left out of the early part, not knowing it was important to the story.

Then I’d have to go back and draw it again.”

Kurt said of Weisinger’s working relationship with Binder: “He practically drove Otto out of the comic book business.” (C.C. Beck once made the same observation.)

In any case, Weisinger apparently admired Kurt’s artwork. The editor always complimented the artist in his letters page, and once designated Kurt as his favorite Lois Lane artist.

Binder, who died in 1974, held Kurt’s Lois in similar regard.

He once told Matt Lage: “I think he made Lois Lane by making her much more human, appealing and alive.

The expressions he put on her face were really great. More importantly, he tells the story with his art. Many artists kill the story or make it dull by failing to make good transitions from panel to panel.

To keep the continuity intact, choosing how (to illustrate) each scene is vital, and Kurt always chooses right.”

Kurt was one of the few artists that DC allowed to sign his work during the ’60s. “It’s something you had to work up to,” he once told me. “I asked could I sign and they said no, and eventually it got to be yes.”

Who gave

Uneasy alliance: Lois Lane #52 (1964). [© DC Comics ]

FRONT-PAGE ROMANCE

A freaky moment for Silver Age fans: Curt Swan Supermen meet Schaffenberger babes, in Superman #163 (1967). [© DC Comics ] the green light? “It had to be Mort.” Why did Kurt persist? “I just wanted a little recognition.”

Weisinger sometimes had Kurt draw Lois and Lana heads over other artists’ work in Superman stories. As Kurt told John G. Pierce in 1974: “Whenever this happened, I did it at Mort Weisinger’s request, as he wanted to keep Lois more uniform throughout the Superman series. He wanted my version to be the criterion. . . .

Sometimes I would do the drawing from scratch. Other times, I would work over their pencils. And still other times, I would have to paste over their drawings and redo them completely.”

Throughout the decade of the ’60s as Kurt was drawing Lois Lane, there was a great deal of change in the world of fashion.

“That’s right,” Kurt said, “and they told us to keep more current with the clothing styles and attitudes and what-have-you.” To that end, Kurt relied, as ever, on references. “I used to use the SearsRoebuck catalog,” he said. But as the ’60s got groovier, “then they said that was not the thing to use. So I would buy current fashion magazines off the newsstand.”

Kurt’s old Fawcett fans got a little thrill when the artist slipped a comical Captain Marvel cameo in the splash page for a story titled “The Monkey’s Paw,” in Lois Lane #42 (1963).

“That was sort of an ‘in’ joke,” Kurt later told an interviewer. “Mort knew what I was doing. We both figured at that time that Captain Marvel was a thing of the past — dead as the proverbial dodo. I put it in. We both had a chuckle over it, and let it go. He was colored differently — green instead of red, I think.

But then when reprinted in a Lois Lane Annual, they put the red union suit on him.”

Kurt added that years later, he “began getting questions from various fanzines.

‘Why did you do that?’ Just a joke.”

Left: Captain Marvel cameo in Lois Lane #42 (1963). Right: Shocked heroine in Lois Lane #63 (1966).

FRONT-PAGE ROMANCE

[© DC Comics ]

45

Catfight! Lois vs. the Catwoman in a detail from cover art for Lois Lane #70 (1966), the Catwoman’s first Silver Age appearance. [© DC Comics ]

48

LOIS MOMENTS

‘‘Letters to Lois’’: A spanking good time for readers

SPANKING. HAIRSTYLES. Kurt recalled the whole hairy situation Fashion. The Lois/Lana/Superman love in the British fanzine BEM #34 (July 1981). triangle. These were some of the hot “Mort said we’ve got to keep it the old topics of “Letters to Lois,” the lively way, because we can’t rerun the old stories fan page found in the Silver Age clasif we change,” Kurt said. “But I guess wiser sic Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane. heads prevailed. I did a whole page of dif(Of course, there were the usual smart ferent hair-dos on Lois Lane. They had a alecks pointing out bloopers, which contest, write in which is your favorite. would trigger some inspired backpedalThey said, ‘Draw it like this one.’ I don’t ing from editor Mort Weisinger.) know if it was really the most popular or Lois’s unwavering, decidedly ’50s not. We’ve changed it a couple of times hair-do became a pressing concern. since. We have been drawing her without Wrote Mary Lee Bagley of Renton, bangs since the contest. Now Margot Wash., in Lois Lane #20 (Oct. 1960): Kidder came in the (1978) movie with “How about giving us a ‘new’ Lois bangs, so now Lois has bangs again.”

Lane now and then? I mean that we Meanwhile, some budding de Sades out should see her with different hairstyles there demanded that Superman give Lois a and keep up with the latest fashions in “super-spanking.” Weisinger did his best to her dresses and various clothing outspare his heroine’s derriere. fits.” Weisinger’s reply: “Okay. We’ll Wrote F. Twill of Falmouth, Mass., in work on Lois’s wardrobe and hair-do.” Our heroine got a new hairstyle in Superman’s Lois Lane #21 (Nov. 1960): “I love Lois, But progress was too slow for but I think she needs to be taught a lesson Girlfriend Lois Lane #72 (1967). [ © DC Comics ] Matilda Grey of Salt Lake City, who she won’t forget for a while. The next time wrote in Lois Lane #23 (Feb. 1961): “Several months ago, you Lois fouls up Superman’s plans, why doesn’t he bend her over his promised to change Lois’s hairstyle. Well, what gives? When do we knee and give her a super-spanking?” Weisinger’s reply: “Superman see her with a new hair-do?” Weisinger’s reply: “So many readers is too much of a gentleman to strike have requested a new hairstyle for Lois that we have assigned the a lady.” artist who illustrates Lois Lane, Mr. Kurt Schaffenberger, to draw up Wrote Sharon Bush of Mt. a page in which she is shown in a variety of hairstyles. When we Clemens, Mich., in Lois Lane #26 run this page, readers will be invited to vote for the hairstyle they (July 1961): “A number of readers like best. Fair enough?” have requested that Lois Lane get a Schaffenberger dutifully drew six new looks for Lois (including good spanking from Superman the “Bouffant,” the “Ruffle-Cut” and the “Pinwheel Bang”), and a because of the way she is always contest was announced in Lois Lane Annual #1 (Summer 1962). trying to pry into his private life and

By Lois Lane #38 (Jan. 1963), Weisinger reported that over guess the secret of his identity. I 6,000 contest entries were received, a number he upped to 20,000 agree. She should be treated like (!) three issues later. From Lois Lane #41 (May 1963): “The any spoiled child who raids the results of the contest were a complete surcookie jar too often.” Weisinger’s prise to the judges. The majority of our reply: “If the Man of Steel ever readers voted to keep Lois’s hairspanked Lois, she’d go right Contest announcement style exactly the way it is. through the time barrier from in Lois Lane Annual #1 However, because some of the force of the very first (1962). [ © DC Comics ] the other styles received stroke. We agree with you, thousands of votes, though, that Lois does get pretty impossible at times.” we will have Lois Betty Makohan of Pacoima, Calif., suggested a looptrying them out in hole in Lois Lane #27 (Aug. 1961): a dose of red krypfuture stories.” tonite. “That way, Lois will have received her punishTwenty-five ment, and no one can accuse Superman of not contestants being a gentleman.” Weisinger’s reply: “But won onehow could we keep using further Lois Lane year substories when we would be unable to show scriptions. her sitting down for at least two months?”

Jerry Smith of Phoenix won Don’t worry, folks, it’s only a the first prize: robot doling out punishment in an original LL this fetishy scene from Lois cover.

‘‘LETTERS

TO LOIS’’

Lane #14 (1960). [ © DC Comics ]

49

50

LOIS LANE COVER GALLERY

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #25 (1961) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #36 (1962) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #37 (1963) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #40 (1963) [© DC Comics ]

LOIS LANE COVER GALLERY

51

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #45 (1963) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #46 (1964) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #47 (1964) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #48 (1964) [© DC Comics ]

52

LOIS LANE COVER GALLERY

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #50 (1964) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #56 (1965) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #57 (1965) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #59 (1965) [© DC Comics ]

LOIS LANE COVER GALLERY

53

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #69 (1966) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #70 (1966) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #73 (1967) [© DC Comics ]

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #76 (1967) [© DC Comics ]

Baby Schaffenmarvel

“I thought my father was Clark Kent with a mustache.”

Above: Little Susan Schaffenberger in 1959.

The girl dreamed of becoming a ballerina.

Right: Susan Kelly today.

[Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

54

THE WOMAN WHO C.C. BECK jokingly dubbed “Baby Schaffenmarvel” at birth believed her bespectacled father looked something like Superman’s alter-ego — whose exploits he illustrated, of course. “He was very good-looking,” Susan Kelly said. “He was tall and dark.

“He used to go into New York two days a week. One of my favorite things when I was little — on Kinderkamack Road, which is the main road in River Edge, there were little gazebos on the corners for people waiting for the bus. I would go down and wait. He would get off the bus, and I always thought he was so handsome.

He looked like a giant to me, because I was so little. He had that big portfolio. My little legs would be going like crazy running up the hill trying to keep up with him, because he had such a big stride.

“He used to bring home comic books. I wasn’t really into Superman, but he would bring other comics home. I used to love the romance comics. I was a teen-ager and romance was my thing.

“One of the things we would occasionally do together — he would let me erase his pages. He’d get his pages inked, and they would come back from the inker and still have all the pencil lines all over them. So I would get to erase it with a soft eraser. I used to really love to do that.

“He worked a lot, so even though he worked at home, we didn’t see him all that much. He worked during the day, and then he would come out of the studio for dinner, and then he would work until after we went to bed. He worked on the weekends, too, although he’d take off Saturdays to do chores.

“My dad worked so much that my mom was always planning activities. I can remember growing up that on Sundays, we would have what she would call ‘safaris.’ She would plan some surprise activity for us. I think it was a way to get us out of the house and at the same time do something fun.”

Susan once dreamed of becoming a ballerina.

“That is,” she laughed, “until my German grandmother informed me that I was too tall.

“But I was the good one. I was not the risktaker. I got good grades. I tried to please. I was kind of a caretaker, I guess. Especially, I kept a sensitive ear to my mom. I was protective of my mom. I was worried if she was happy.

“My brother was more the risk-taker. He was a really good student up until the seventh grade, and then he became an individualist,” Susan laughed again. “He was the hippie; went to Woodstock.

“My dad was a very private person, I would say. He wasn’t a very demonstrative person. He was somebody who expected the best, and I think we tried to live up to that.’’

Susan married Navy man Larry Kelly in 1969.

Kurt and Dorothy became doting grandparents to their children Patrick (born in 1970), Erin (1973), David (1976), Meghan (1979), Jonathan (1983) and Matthew (1987).

Susan remembers her father’s final years as a bittersweet time. “I think especially toward the end with my dad and my brother — I think it really was kind of special that my brother was there with him,’’ she said. ‘‘Probably, in my adult life, I saw my father more often during his last three years than I did the rest of my adult life. I never lived close to my parents. He was, in these last years, so sweet and affectionate and approachable. I think that my brother and I both saw these years as a wonderful gift.”

SUSAN KELLY

Henchmen drummer revealed!

Above: Little Karl in 1953.

Below: Kurt slipped a scene featuring Karl’s rock band, the Henchmen, into the climactic panel for Lois Lane #64 (1966). © DC Comics

WHAT DO THE BEATLES, the Monkees and the Henchmen have in common?

All were ’60s rock bands who appeared in comic books during the Silver Age. Granted, you’d have to be the world’s most obsessed aficionado of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane to remember the Henchmen’s one-panel cameo in Lois Lane #64 (1966).

But just in case you’ve been wondering all these years who the Henchmen were, we have the scoop: It’s the high school band of Karl Schaffenberger, son of Lois Lane artist Kurt Schaffenberger.

Did Karl and his fellow Henchmen think their cameo was “cool” — or did they think it was “squaresville, man?” “We thought it was very cool,” Karl said. “I have a copy of that comic some place. In fact, my father painted the Henchmen logo on the head of my bass drum.”

Not that Kurt was enamored of every aspect of his son’s rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. “My father never really warmed up to the long hair thing,” Karl said with a chuckle. “Plus, in high school in those days, you weren’t allowed to have long hair if you were a guy. I mean, they would literally take you to the barber shop and give you a haircut! I remember that happening. I mean, it’s a different thing now.

“I used to joke to people that the band kept me out of jail in high school. I’m sort of kidding, but that’s when you start to act out and start to do stupid stuff.

“My dad and I went though a period of having a somewhat conflicted relationship, like any other father and son.

It’s not uncommon at all. He was German; he wasn’t particularly demonstrative, but he was there.

“I think most of the real issues came later, when I started doing whatever it was I was doing; I think he was protective of me, because he knew what I was doing was really not in my best interest. And he was right, but I didn’t listen to him, as he didn’t listen to his father, as his father didn’t listen to

his father. So we would have conflicts. I think he genuinely thought I was doing things that would hurt me, and he did not like that. He would try to make that abundantly clear to me. But being a kid, or being who I was, I didn’t always listen.”

For Karl, growing up with a cartoonist for a dad was nothing extraordinary.

“He used to bring comics home,” Karl said. “I looked forward to that, although I generally looked forward to the ones that he didn’t draw. Well, he drew the covers. Do you remember Forbidden Worlds and Unknown Worlds? Those were my favorites. And there was Herbie Popnecker (in Herbie) — do you remember him? That was my favorite.”

But while traveling Europe by motorcycle in 1973, Karl got an inkling of how devoted fans of his father can be.

Recalled Karl: “I was in a pub in London playing darts with this guy, and he said, ‘Well, I’m an art teacher, but my real passion is comic books.’ I said, ‘Oh, my father draws comic books.’ ‘Yeah? Who’s your father?’ ‘Kurt Schaffenberger.’ ‘YOUR FATHER’S KURT SCHAFFENBERGER?!’ And the next thing I know, I’m at his home meeting his wife and his kids!

“Then it happened again, in Stoke-On-Trent. Same thing.

It floored me. I can’t even tell you how much it floored me.

That’s when I realized that these people who get into comic books like that — they’re maniacal. It’s almost like ‘Trekkies.’’’

Karl Schaffenberger today.

KARL SCHAFFENBERGER

[Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

55

Dual tragedies Emma and Ernst Schaffenberger in the living room of their Connecticut home in 1948, the year after they became grandparents.

DUAL TRAGEDIES STRUCK THE SCHAFFENBERGER family one fateful weekend in November of 1961.

It began with a phone call from a cousin of Kurt’s, who was concerned about his mother Emma’s condition. Would Kurt and Dorothy drive up to check out the situation? With Kurt’s father Ernst now suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, he wasn’t much help to his apparently ailing wife.

Dorothy left Susan (then 14) and Karl (then 11) with a neighbor until her mother could arrive to take care of the kids. Kurt and Dorothy then made the 95-plus-mile trek from River Edge, New Jersey, up to West Hartford, Connecticut.

When Dorothy walked into her in-laws’ kitchen, she sensed right away that Emma’s condition was grave. Kurt and Dorothy immediately summoned a doctor.

Recalled Dorothy: “So the doctor comes and he says, ‘You’re not feeling well, Mrs. Schaffenberger?’ She says, ‘I’m fine,’ which was typical for those days. He told her she should just take it easy, and he’d check on her the next day.”

After the doctor left, the two couples went into the living room.

“She would nod off and her breathing would be labored, and then she’d cry out and she’d wake up,” Dorothy recalled.

The doctor was summoned again. On Dorothy’s insistence, he reluctantly called an ambulance.

Kurt decided to follow the ambulance to the hospital in his car.

Dorothy instructed the driver to keep her husband in sight in his rear-view mirror, because the roads had changed so much since Kurt last lived in the area that he might get lost.

56

“So they get in the ambulance and they’re driving along,” Dorothy recalled, “and all of a sudden, this thing takes off. His mother died.

“His mother had always said, ‘I really don’t feel so well today.’

Well, when they did the autopsy, everything in the entire world was wrong with this woman. She’d had gall bladder attacks, her heart was bad, everything.”

Eventually, Kurt and Dorothy returned to break the sad news to Ernst.

Recalled Dorothy: “Well, when Dad heard this — I can hear him even now — he cried, ‘Emma, Emma.’ They were always going to travel. They were going to do all these things. But they never got around to it, because he got Parkinson’s Disease.

“So we said, ‘Dad, we’re going to go to bed now.’ He said, ‘No, I want to sit down here for a little while.’ So we said, ‘OK.’ Of course, neither one of us went to sleep.

“We heard him go into the kitchen, and then we heard him move, and then we heard him fall. We rushed downstairs. He’d taken cyanide.

“It’s funny when you think about it, because he went and took a shot of liquor first, and then he took the cyanide. And so Kurt lost both of them in that short period of time.’’

Detectives soon arrived to investigate the suicide of Ernst Schaffenberger.

“They asked me if I had any idea where he had the cyanide hidden,” Dorothy said. ‘‘Well, I think he figured that if it ever got that bad, that’s what he’d do. Because when we went to check in the

DUAL TRAGEDIES

laundry room, the bottles that were so neatly arranged — they were disturbed, so he must have hidden it in there. And to show you how caustic that stuff is — he put it in a shot glass and drank it after the whiskey, and it ate a hole in the linoleum on the counter.’’

Meanwhile, back in River Edge, Susan and Karl knew nothing of the tragic events that transpired in West Hartford, when Susan received a call from someone who worked with her father.

Recalled Susan: “I can remember him saying that he was calling to offer his sympathies on the double death in our family. I thought, ‘What a bizarre thing to say!’ I answered him on the phone, I said, ‘No, you’ve made a terrible mistake. My grandmother isn’t feeling well. Nobody’s died.’

“When I think back on it, I can just imagine that person kicking himself, realizing that we did not yet know. And yet, I didn’t hang up and think, ‘God, I wonder if something’s going on that I don’t know about?’ I just thought, ‘What a peculiar thing to say. Nobody’s died. Where did he ever get that idea?’’’

Finally, Kurt and Dorothy returned to River Edge to tell Susan and Karl that their grandparents were gone.

“I remember they sat us down in the living room,” Karl said.

“My father sat there, and it was my mother who actually told us that Grandma had died and Grandpa had gone with her. It was the closest I ever saw my father to crying. I never saw my father cry, but if ever he came close, it was then.”

Right: Christmas in Connecticut for young Kurt, shown opening a present (a book sent from family in Germany) in 1929.

Below: Kurt watches his daughter Susan do the same in 1950.

GRINCH OR SANTA CLAUS?

Emma and Ernst flanked by their son and future daughter-in-law in 1942, while Kurt was on leave from the Army.

Grinch or Santa Claus?

ON TO HAPPIER TOPICS. “Well, I see the holidays have us by the throat again,” Kurt used to say about Christmas. By all outward appearances, the artist was not sentimental about December 25th.

But a treasure trove of heretofore unpublished artwork — Kurt’s painstakingly crafted Christmas cards, which he drew from the ’40s through the ’90s — would seem to indicate otherwise. Could someone who devoted so much time and energy to the delightful artwork shown on the following pages really be such a Grinch?

According to Susan, the subject of her father’s annual cards was always a ‘‘big secret.’’

“We didn’t get to see it until it was done,” Susan recalled. “We always looked forward to that every year, to see what the Christmas card would look like, because our family was always featured in some way.”

As such, the cards offer a succinct pictorial history of the Schaffenberger family when viewed chronologically.

The 1942 card, sent to Dorothy via V-mail, commemorated the cou-

ple’s first Christmas apart. We’d bet that in real life, Kurt hoisted a few to celebrate the holiday in England in 1944, as shown on the card.

The dog seen only in the 1947 card was named Figaro. Recalled Dorothy: “Figaro didn’t like Susan, so we had a big choice: It was either Susan went or the dog went.”

The pooch that debuted in 1957, Smokey, fared better as a family member.

The stork little Susan points to in the 1949 card represents Karl’s pending arrival. The 1962 giftopening fiasco really happened.

Yes, Karl received a drum kit for Christmas in 1965. Dorothy made the curtains for Karl’s van featured in the 1968 card. (Karl used the van to tote around his rock band’s equipment.) Larry and Susan Kelly indeed made Kurt and Dorothy grandparents in 1970. Further familial developments followed.

You’ll notice that Santa Claus is an occasional slapstick victim in Kurt’s cards. Is that yet another smokescreen to mask the artist’s true and abiding affection for Christmas?

57

(1942)

(1946) 58

(1947) CHRISTMAS CARDS

(1948)

(1949)

(1951) (1950) CHRISTMAS CARDS

59

(1953) (1952)

(1954) (1956) 60

CHRISTMAS CARDS

(1955)

(1957) CHRISTMAS CARDS

61

62

CHRISTMAS CARDS

(1961)

(1962)

CHRISTMAS CARDS

63

64

CHRISTMAS CARDS

(1950) CHRISTMAS CARDS

65

(1969)

66

CHRISTMAS CARDS

CHRISTMAS CARDS

67

68

CHRISTMAS CARDS

CHRISTMAS CARDS

69

70

CHRISTMAS CARDS

CHRISTMAS CARDS

71

72

CHRISTMAS CARDS

CHRISTMAS CARDS

73

74

CHRISTMAS CARDS

CHRISTMAS CARDS

75

(1982)

76

CHRISTMAS CARDS

1988

CHRISTMAS CARDS

77

(1947)

(1950)

(1970)

78

OH, BABY

(1973)

(1976) OH, BABY

(1979) 79

You can’t keep a good superhero down WITH THE END OF THE ’60s — A decade that saw sometimes turbulent social change — came inevitable shifts in the look and tone of comic books. To give Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane a more contemporary look, Mort Weisinger began using newcomer Neal Adams (an artist Kurt admired) on the covers. Kurt’s final Lois Lane cover was #76 in 1967; the following year, after Lois Lane #81, Kurt was pulled off the book altogether. ‘‘Then they gave me Supergirl to do,’’ Kurt told me. ‘‘I was not particularly happy with drawing Supergirl, but it was an assignment. Then they brought in the Rose and Thorn. That was real garbage. ‘‘That was about the time Carmine Infantino came in as big cheese up at DC, and Mort Weisinger went out. When Carmine first took over, I was out at DC for about two years. Why, I still don’t know. I think it was because I was involved in trying to Captain Marvel organize some kind of a flies again in guild or union at DC. I art by Kurt. was the only artist, real[© DC Comics ] ly, that was involved in trying to organize a union.’’

(Infantino respectfully denies the allegation; see page 108).

Nothing came of the attempt at forming a union (‘‘that thing died’’), but it was apparent that the rights of artists and writers needed to be addressed.

As Kurt told me: ‘‘Back in those days, on the back of every check you got from DC — it was National Comics at the time, by

the way — where you endorsed the check, you had signed away all of your future rights, whether it was artwork or writing or whatever. Right on the check.’’

In the early ’70s, DC was padding out its family of Superman comic books with reprints, many of them featuring artwork by Kurt. This was happy news for readers — it increased their chances of seeing some of Kurt’s best work — but unhappy for the artists, since they received no payments for reprints. (‘‘Since then, we not only get reprint money, we get royalty money,’’ Kurt told me in 1989. ‘‘After it reaches a certain point in sales, we get royalties. The whole situation has improved tremendously since I first started in the field, or since I first even started with DC.’’) In any case, Kurt once again found himself scrambling for work — the bane of a freelancer’s existence. For whatever reason, DC Comics no longer required his services. ‘‘For those two years, I did work for Archie, American Comics, whatever I could grab hold of,’’ Kurt said.

He drew for Archie Comics for about a year around 1971. ‘‘I found doing Archie refreshingly simple compared to the exacting realism demanded by the Superman line or romance or mystery stories,’’ Kurt told John G. Pierce. ‘‘I would describe my favorite and natural style as a sort of caricatured realism. At Archie, I worked directly with Dick Goldwater or his assistant, Victor Gorelick.’’ ‘‘I remember him coming up and bringing his work in,’’ Gorelick said shortly after Kurt’s death. ‘‘Richard Goldwater was the managing editor at that time. He was working more directly with Kurt, giving him scripts and so forth.’’

How did Gorelick feel Kurt adapted to the Archie ‘‘house’’ style? ‘‘Well, it still had a little bit of an ‘adventure’-type look to it,’’ Gorelick said with a laugh. ‘‘I mean, he was a very good artist. It was a little different style.

He did draw all the characters the way they were supposed to look — the heads and so forth. But he did have a little bit more of a realistic approach, actually.’’

But Kurt’s banishment from DC didn’t last long.

He told me: ‘‘After about two years, Carmine said, ‘You’re forgiven. Come back.’ ’’ One reason may have been that around this time, ’70s Supergirl art by Kurt: ‘‘It was an assignment.’’ [© DC Comics ]

80

SHAZAM!

Super artwork for the covers of Superman Family #174 (1975) and #179 (1976) and The Super Friends #32 (1980). [© DC Comics ]

DC Comics was in the process of reviving Captain Marvel, the wasn’t about to get it. So, they dropped him.’’ character that DC had successfully eradicated 20 years earlier.

(Kurt once visited the National Cartoonists Society’s DC’s new Captain Marvel title, Shazam!, hit the stands in 1973. museum, then in Connecticut, and found original Captain Kurt’s old buddy C.C. Beck, the founding and preeminent Marvel artwork on exhibit labeled: ‘‘by C.C. Beck.’’ ‘‘I looked Captain Marvel artist, was initially hired to draw the revived at it,’’ Kurt told me, ‘‘and it was my own stuff!’’)

Cap, but he became embroiled in some high-profile battles Even Kurt suspected that Cap was ‘‘old hat’’ by the over the scripts. Beck quit Shazam! after 10 issues. ’70s. He told Pierce: ‘‘I enjoyed doing it when they Kurt told Dave Caruba in 1981: ‘‘Unfortunately, were first revived. But there was just so much deja he had been out of the business too long and he was vu involved there. It was just no longer applicable going to tell the editors how he was going to do it. to the present times — I didn’t think, anyway.’’

It doesn’t work that way. The editors tell you Shazam! was cancelled in 1978 after 35 how you are going to do it.’’ issues. But Shazam! was not alone; 1978 was DC put Kurt on the book. Did he feel like also the year of the so-called ‘‘Great DC he was going behind his old buddy’s back?

Implosion,’’ when DC Comics killed off ‘‘I was very happy to be working on the Big many of its regular titles. ‘‘It was an Red Cheese again after an absence of 20 upheaval in a lot of ways,’’ said Jack years,’’ Kurt said. ‘‘I have always had a C. Harris, then a DC editor who soft spot in my heart for the Marvels, wrote Robin stories illustrated by although they did leave me high and Kurt. dry back in 1953. As to Beck’s ‘disDuring the mid-to-late ’70s, missal,’ all I know is what I read in Kurt also worked in World’s the fan magazines. The only thing Finest (which Harris edited) that Carmine Infantino and Julie and Superman Family. In the late Schwartz told me was that Beck was becom’70s and early ’80s, Julius Schwartz ing too demanding in regard to control of exploited Kurt’s humorous touch on The Shazam!, and that he had been rejecting scripts.

Super Friends, the quasi-Justice League title based on As to Beck’s side of the story, I can add nothing, as I the Saturday morning cartoon. In 1980, Schwartz haven’t seen or spoke to him in over 10 years.’’ kicked off The New Adventures of Superboy, to Kurt told me of Beck: ‘‘He was an all-around which he assigned Kurt as regular penciler. Kurt’s good fella. Very highly opinionated, but not too hard by then nostalgic style fit the Superboy stories, A heroic to get along with. Later on — after Fawcett folded which were set in the Smallville of yesteryear.

Superboy and they (DC Comics) brought back Captain The New Adventures of Superboy lasted for 54 pose by Kurt.

Marvel, he became very opinionated. Didn’t like issues through 1984 — by which time the winds of [© DC Comics ] this, didn’t like that, wanted full control and he change were blowing hard in the comics industry.

SHAZAM!

81

A circa ’70s Captain Marvel pose by Kurt Schaffenberger. [© DC Comics ]

Heroes unlimited! Above: Super Friends promo (’70s). Below: Cover art for The Amazing World of DC Comics #2 (1974), with caricatures of Kurt, Cary Bates and Elliott S! Maggin. [© DC Comics ]

Writing a wrong

‘‘A GOOD MANY WRITERS CAN’T REALLY visualize what they have written, and what it’s going to look like pictorially. So they sort of say, ‘Hey, I did this,’ when they see it (the finished artwork).”

That quote, which Kurt Schaffenberger gave Dave Caruba in 1981, expresses a long-held pet peeve of Kurt’s. It’s all well and good for writers to let their imaginations run wild, but do they ever consider the poor artist who must execute, sometimes laboriously, their flights of fancy?

One afternoon in 1998, Kurt, Howard Bender and I were sitting in Kurt’s dining room pawing through his collection of vintage, tattered Fawcetts for a piece I was doing for Comic Book Marketplace #59.

As soon as Kurt came across Marvel Family #31 (1949), Bender and I knew what was coming: Kurt’s “four horsemen of the apocalypse” speech.

As Kurt told us: “The script called for me to ‘show the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding roughshod over downtrodden humanity with the Marvel Family flying to the rescue.’ Well! It took me four days to draw. That was somewhat longer than it took the writer to type it, I assure you.”

Kurt named names in a profile of Fawcett editor Rod Reed, which ran in Comics Interview #18 (1984). “When I was drawing Captain Marvel Jr.,” the artist was quoted, “and any time I would get a script by Rod Reed, I could be sure that there were at least a dozen crowd or mob scenes in each one. One day I told him I thought he was a frustrated Cecil B. DeMille, and that he threw in mob scenes whenever he ran out ideas, inspiration or both.”

Reed told John G. Pierce in the same issue: “The ‘DeMille complex’ has been a running gag between Kurt and me for some time. Often when writing to him, I sign my name as ‘Cecil.’ But gags, at base, have a grain of truth. You can picture the artist at his lonely drawing board picking up his script and saying, ‘Good grief, another scene from Ben Hur.’ One sheds a tear.

An assignment Kurt never forgot, from “In any case, his bleats didn’t fall on deaf ears. I modified my DeMille comMarvel Family #31 (1949). [© DC Comics ]

84

Kurt and friends make their point to writer Rod Reed in a cartoon that appeared in Comics Interview #18 (1984). [© DC Comics]

plex. I put in lots of one-head closeups. I always put in as little description as possible — except in key scenes where it was important to have action, settings and background for the story.

“I’m sure I got over what Schaffenberger accused me of — trying to stuff too much business into a scene — pretty quickly. Kurt kidded me about my complex, but never complained to management. C.C. Beck never squawked about my scripts, either.”

Kurt expressed a related peeve — and paid writer Cary Bates a compliment — to Pierce in It’s a Fanzine #20 (1983): “You know, some people will always try to drag remote comics characters from the past into a story.

It’s always a job to try to adapt these characters of 40 years ago into the style which we use today, which is a more refined style than we had back in the ’40s. ‘‘I enjoy doing Cary Bates’ scripts. He knows what he’s doing. He can picture a comics page in his mind while he’s writing.

That makes it much easier for the artist.”

WRITING A WRONG

Burning question Who was Kurt Schaffenberger’s favorite character to draw, Captain Marvel or Lois Lane?

In a rare instance, Kurt Schaffenberger drew both of the famous characters associated with his career, Captain Marvel and Lois Lane (with Superman and himself thrown in for good measure), in The Collector #29 (1974). [© DC Comics]

HE WAS AN IMPORTANT CAPTAIN MARVEL ARTIST her own book. And I got a chance to do something more creative.” and the definitive Lois Lane artist, but which character did Kurt In 1999, he told Howard Bender: “My favorite was always Schaffenberger like best? Trouble is, the artist himself didn’t seem Captain Marvel, then Lois.” so sure.

When talking favorites with Bill G. Wilson in Asked his favorite character in 1973, he The Collector #29 (1974), Kurt flip-flopped told Martin L. Greim: ‘‘I would have to say between “Supie” and “Cap” in the same breath. that my favorite is still Lois Lane.’’ The folSaid the artist: “As for which of the two characlowing year, he told Allan Asherman: “I’m ters, Supie or Cap, that I prefer to work on, I very partial to Lois Lane. I really enjoyed have somewhat mixed emotions on that. I have working on her comics.” always felt that Cap was a better strip for me In 1981, he told Dave Caruba: “I to work on, in that it was done with humor, think I like Captain Marvel the and after all, aren’t they supposed to be best. It was a little more slapstick. comic strips? Whereas I always felt that I’ve always felt that Superman was Superman was taken much too seriously a little heavier, especially now. It is by the editors concerned. . . . I must say, so realistic. It takes you twice as long though, that the years I spent doing Lois Lane were to draw as it used to. Where on the other very gratifying to me.” hand, Captain Marvel is done tongue-inKurt later told Wilson: “Other than Lois cheek.”

Lane, one character is about the same as In 1989, when I asked Kurt his another to me. They all involve a great deal all-time favorite assignment, he of time and effort which, when broken told me: “Lois Lane. It was just a down on an hourly basis, afford me about Kurt the referee in art that accompanied a secondary character in the the same salary as a competent, or even fanzine interview (1974). [© DC Comics] Superman series, and they gave her not so competent, plumber.”

BURNING QUESTION

85

Kurt’s kameos

Like portly suspense director Alfred Hitchcock, Kurt Schaffenberger was known to toss a cameo (or should we spell that ‘‘kameo’’) of himself into his comic book panels.

Here are some panels featuring the mustachioed artist.

Above: Kurt and wife Dorothy join Ibis and Taia in Whiz Comics #87 (1947). Right: Whiz Comics #129 (1951). [© DC Comics ] Left: Kurt and Dorothy mingled with Jimmy Olsen and Perry White when they crashed the wedding of baby Lois Lane in Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #42 (1963). [© DC Comics ]

From The Atom, Electricity and You! (1968).

86

Kurt the reporter in Lois Lane #14 (1960). [© DC Comics ]

KURT’S KAMEOS

Left and above: Kurt announces, Dorothy swoons in Master Comics #89 and #90 respectively (both 1948). Right: Kurt spots Dot in Whiz Comics #108 (1949) [© DC Comics ]

Left: ‘‘George,’’ Dorothy and Susan make up the perfect family in Marvel Family #38 (1949). Above: Cap consults with Kurt in Whiz Comics #117 (1950). [© DC Comics ] Left: Doc Schaff in good company in Lois Lane #74 (1964). [© DC Comics ]

Right: Eavesdropper Kurt in flight in Wings of Adventure (1956). Note: That may look like Jimmy Olsen in front of Kurt, but this was drawn one year before Kurt began working for DC.

KURT’S KAMEOS

87

A selected index of comic books illustrated by Kurt Schaffenberger

A 100% complete index of Kurt Schaffenberger’s comic book work, we can say without apology or excuse, is a virtual impossibility. The following selected index, compiled by Kurt’s friend and fellow artist Howard Bender, is derived from Kurt’s own collection and recollections; Bender’s collection and research. ‘‘It’s a good start,’’ says Bender of this attempt to shed a small light on Kurt’s massive body of work.

American Comics Group ■ ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN # 129 (Dec.-Jan. 1961) Cover art # 145 (Dec.-Jan. 1963) Cover art # 146 (Feb. 1964) Cover art # 147 (Mar. 1964) Cover art # 148 (Apr.-May 1964) Cover art # 149 (June-July 1964) Cover art # 152 (Oct.-Nov. 1964) Cover art # 153 (Dec.-Jan. 1964) Cover art # 161 (Dec.-Jan. 1965) Cover art (w/Nemesis app.) # 163 (Mar. 1966) Cover art (w/Nemesis app.) # 164 (Apr.-May 1966) Cover art (w/Nemesis app.) # 168 (Oct.-Nov. 1966) Cover art # 169 (Dec.-Jan. 1967) Cover art # 172 (Apr.-May 1967) Cover art # 174 (Aug. 1967) Cover art ■ CALLING JOHN FORCE: MAGIC AGENT # 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1962) Cover art # 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1962) Cover art # 3 (May-June 1962) Cover art ■ CONFESSIONS OF THE LOVELORN # 93 (May 1958) Story art: “Superstitious Sweetheart”

■ FORBIDDEN WORLDS # 39 (Dec. 1955) Story art: “The Davy Crockett Mystery” # 50 (Jan. 1957) Cover art # 114 (Sept. 1963) Story art: “Experience in a Swamp” # 119 (May-June 1964) Cover art # 120 (July 1964) Cover art # 122 (Sept. 1964) Cover art # 123 (Oct. 1964) Cover art # 124 (Nov.-Dec. 1964) Cover art # 125 (Jan.-Feb. 1965) Cover art

88

(partial; w/first Magicman); story art: ‘‘Missing: Frederick Forbes” (w/ACG editor Richard E. Hughes app.; reprint) # 135 (May-June 1966) Cover art (w/Magicman app.) # 138 (Sept. 1966) Cover art (w/Magicman app.) # 139 (Oct. 1966) Cover art # 140 (Nov.-Dec. 1966) Cover art; story art: “The Cure From Beyond” (reprint) # 141 (Jan.-Feb. 1967) Cover art # 143 (May-June 1967) Cover art # 144 (July 1967) Cover art # 145 (Aug. 1967) Cover art ■ GASP! # 1 (Mar. 1967) Cover art # 4 (Aug. 1967) Cover art

■ HERBIE # 15 (Feb. 1966) Cover art # 17 (Apr.-May 1966) Cover art # 20 (Sept. 1966) Cover art (w/Dracula app.) # 22 (Jan. 1967) Cover art # 23 (Feb. 1967) Cover art ■ MIDNIGHT MYSTERY # 4 (July 1961) Cover art # 6 (Sept. 1961) Cover art

■ UNKNOWN WORLDS # 1 (Aug. 1960) Cover art # 10 (Sept. 1961) Cover art # 28 (Dec.-Jan. 1963) Cover art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 29 (Feb. 1964) Cover art # 30 (Mar. 1964) Cover art # 31 (Apr.-May 1964) Cover art # 32 (June-July 1964) Cover art # 33 (Aug. 1964) Cover art # 35 (Oct.-Nov. 1964) Cover art # 36 (Dec.-Jan. 1964) Cover art # 37 (Feb. 1965) Cover art # 38 (Mar. 1965) Cover art

# 39 (Apr.-May 1965) Cover art # 40 (June-July 1965) Cover art # 41 (Aug. 1965) Cover art; story art: “If I’m Alive or Dead” # 42 (Sept. 1965) Cover art # 43 (Oct.-Nov. 1965) Cover art # 44 (Dec.-Jan. 1965) Cover art # 45 (Feb. 1966) Cover art # 46 (Mar. 1966) Cover art # 48 (Apr.-May 1966) Cover art # 49 (June-July 1966) Cover art # 50 (Sept. 1966) Cover art (w/Abraham Lincoln app.) # 51 (Oct.-Nov. 1966) Cover art # 53 (Feb. 1967) Cover art # 57 (Aug. 1967) Cover art

Apple Comics

■ MR. FIXITT # 2 (Mar. 1990) Story art (inks, partial): “The Lincoln Log!”

Archie Comics

Kurt drew for Archie Comics around 1971 for about a year; issues unknown

Atlas Comics In 1956, Kurt drew for Adventure Into Mystery, Astonishing, Journey Into Unknown Worlds, Mystical Tales and World of Fantasy

Claypool Comics

■ PHANTOM OF FEAR CITY # 4 (Oct. 1993) Story art (inks): “The Curious Casefiles of Tiberius Fox” # 5 (Nov. 1993) Story art (inks): “The Curious Casefiles of Tiberius Fox” # 6 (Jan. 1994) Story art (inks):

“The Curious Casefiles of Tiberius Fox” # 7 (Feb. 1994) Story art (inks): “The Curious Casefiles of Tiberius Fox” # 8 (July 1994) Story art (inks): “The Curious Casefiles of Tiberius Fox” # 9 (Sept. 1994) Story art (inks): “The Curious Casefiles of Tiberius Fox” # 10 (Nov. 1994) Story art (inks): “The Curious Casefiles of Tiberius Fox” # 11 (Feb. 1995) Story art (inks): “The Curious Casefiles of Tiberius Fox.” Note: Kurt’s final comic art

Custom Comics

Note: Custom Comics was a division of American Comics Group that produced promotional comic books for corporate clients. For clarity, we are presenting the books alphabetically using the clients’ names.

■ Al-Anon: “Jane’s Husband Drank Too Much!” (1972) Cover art; story art ■ American Character Doll Corp.: “The Story of the New Betsy McCall and Her Fabulous Fashions” (1958) Cover art; story art ■ American Character Doll Corp.: “The Story of the New Toni Doll, Her Play Wave Kit” (1958) Cover art; story art.

■ American Dental Association: “D is for Dentist” (1961) Cover art; story art ■ American Dental Association: “Dudley the Dragon” (1961) Cover art; story art

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

■ American Doll & Toy Corp.: ‘‘The Fun and Play Book of World of Playthings’’ (1960) Cover art; story art ■ Associated Bulb Growers: “Bulb Magic!” (1956) Cover art; story art ■ Baltimore Colts 1962 Team Program Book (1962) Interior art ■ Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.; Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant: “The Atom, Electricity and You” (1968) Cover art; story art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) ■ Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.: “The Story of Electricity” (1969) Cover art; story art ■ Big Brother Movement, Inc.: “What Ever Became of Bill” (1962) Cover art; story art ■ Braniff International Airways: “Wings of Adventure” (1956) Cover art; story art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) ■ Braniff International Airways: “Adventure in El Dorado Land” (1959) Cover art; story art ■ Canadian Flyer: “Flashing Blades” (1960) Cover art; story art.

■ Chevrolet Motors: “Once a Champion” (1966) Cover art; story art ■ Chicago Roller Skate Co.: “Skating Skills” (1957) Cover art; story art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) ■ Chrysler Motors Corp.: “The Real Fun of Driving!” (1965) Cover art; story art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) ■ Daisy (toy guns): “Fun on the Range” (1962) Cover art; story art ■ Gilbert Toys: “Adventures in Science” (1958) Cover art; story art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) ■ Grit Publishing Co.: “You’ve Got to Have Grit” (1959) Cover art; story art (w/Gene Autry app.)

■ Grit Publishing Co.: “Success” (1961) Cover art; story art (w/Gene Autry app.)

■ Grit Publishing Co.: “Grit Will Help You – as Nothing Else Can!” (1969) Cover art; story art (w/Gene Autry app.)

■ Howard D. Johnson Company: ■ HOWARD JOHNSON’S CHILDREN’S MENU # 1 (1960) Cover art; story art: “The Wonderful World of 28 Flavors’’ (first app. Simple Simon and the Pieman) # 2 (1961) Cover art; story art: “The Treasure Hunt Edition” # 3 (1961) Cover art; story art: “The Amazing Time Machine” # 4 (1961) Cover art; story art: “Lost, One Dog” # 5 (1961) Cover art; story art: “Be a

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

Junior All-American!” # 6 (1961) Cover art; story art: “The Lost Stagecoach!” # 7 (1962) Cover art; story art: “Top Secret!” # 8 (1962) Cover art; story art: “Fun at the Fair” # 9 (1962) Cover art; story art: “The Magic Bat and the Enchanted Ball!” # 10 (1962) Cover art; story art: “The Most Wonderful Thing!” # 11 (1963) Cover art; story art: “The Big Trip!” # 12 (1963) Cover art; story art: “The Greatest Country in the World!” # 13 (1964) Cover art; story art: “Winter Wonderland!” # 14 (1964) Cover art; story art: “Going to the Fair!” (1964-65 New York World’s Fair depicted) ■ Hubley Toys: “The Colt .38” (1958) Cover art; story art ■ Kadets of America: “The Civil War Musket” (1960) Cover art ■ King Edward Cigars: “Cigarama!”

(1957) Cover art; story art ■ Massachusetts Seafood Council: “Men Against the Sea” (1967) Cover art; story art ■ Mattel Toys: ‘‘Great Guns!” (1957) Cover art; story art ■ McDonald’s Corp.: Giveaway (first of two) (1968) Cover art; story art (w/Ronald McDonald app.)

■ McDonald’s Corp.: Giveaway (second of two) (1968) Cover art; story art (w/Ronald McDonald app.)

■ Mobil Oil: “The Sheriff of Cochise” TV show (1957) Cover art; story art ■ Montgomery Ward: “Magical Shoes” (1959) Cover art; story art (w/Hercules, Cinderella, Robin Hood app.)

■ New York Police Department: “My Brother, the Cop!” (1971) Cover art; story art ■ Pennsylvania Athletic Products: “Championship Basketball” (1956) Cover art ■ Pennsylvania Athletic Products: “Championship Football” (1956) Cover art ■ Public Service Electric and Gas Co.: “Power for a Greater New Jersey” (1969) Cover art; story art ■ Remco Toys: “Remco-Land Adventures” (1961) Cover art; story art ■ Structo Manufacturing Co. (toys): “The Big Flood” (1959) Cover art; story art ■ Structo Manufacturing Co.: “Hi, I’m Little Miss Structo” (1959) Cover

art; story art ■ Texaco Corp.: “Don’t be a Frizzle, Prevent Fires, Save Lives!” (1961) Cover art; story art ■ Topps Chewing Gum, Inc.: “The Story of Baseball and Football” (1974) Cover art; story art ■ Transogram Toys: “Pretzel-Jetzel” (1965) Cover art; story art ■ Tupperware: “Dating Diary” (1968) Cover art; story art ■ United States Air Force: “The Hidden Crew” (1964) Cover art; story art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) ■ Wrangler Jeans: Note: Wrangler Jeans’ comic and coloring books illustrated by Kurt came attached to jeans sold in stores.

■ GREAT MOMENTS IN RODEO # 16 (1956) Story art: “They Made Rodeo Great!” # 24 (1958) Story art: “Rodeo Champs” # 27 (1959) Story art: “The ManKilling Brahmas”; “Blue Bell Clothes for All the Family” # 34 (1961) Story art: “Dean Oliver, Calf-Roping”; “They Help Make Rodeo Great” # 48 (1965) Story art: “Wranglers for the Family” ■ RODEO STARS # 6 (1957) Story art; two-page fashion spread ■ WRANGLER JEANS COLORING BOOK ■ “ ’Round the World” (1958) Cover art; story art ■ “The Western” (1958) Cover art; story art ■ “Frontier Town” (1962) Cover art; story art

DC Comics ■ ACTION COMICS Note: Superman story art unless otherwise noted

# 274 (Mar. 1961) Story art: “The Reversed Super-Powers!” # 359 (Feb. 1968) Supergirl story art: “The Super-Initiation of Supergirl!’’ # 361 (Mar. 1968) Supergirl story art: “Supergirl’s Super-Date!” # 362 (Apr. 1968) Supergirl story art: “The 40th Century Outlaw!” (w/Robin, Mr. Mxyzptlk app.) # 363 (May 1968) Supergirl story art: “The Landmark Looters!” # 364 (June 1968) Supergirl story art: “The Kiss of Death!” # 365 (July 1968) Supergirl story art: “The Case of the Campus Crimes!”

89

# 366 (Aug. 1968) Supergirl story art: “Stanhope – Off Limits!” # 367 (Sept. 1968) Supergirl story art: “The Evil of Alpha and Beta!” # 368 (Oct. 1968) Supergirl story art: “Supergirl’s Plan to Save Stanhope!” # 369 (Nov. 1968) Supergirl story art: “The Boy Who Broke Supergirl’s Heart!” # 370 (Dec. 1968) Supergirl story art: “Supergirl’s Shattered Marriage!” (w/Superman, Batman app.) # 371 (Jan. 1969) Supergirl story art: “The Supergirl Best-Seller!” # 372 (Feb. 1969) Supergirl story art: “Linda Danvers – Movie Star!” # 374 (Mar. 1969) Supergirl story art: “No Mercy for Supergirl!” # 375 (Apr. 1969) Supergirl story art: “The Woman Who Hated Supergirl!” # 376 (May 1969) Supergirl story art: “The Hated Girl of Steel!” # 437 (July 1974) Story art (inks): “Magic is Bustin’ Out All Over!” # 442 (Dec. 1974) Story art (inks): “Midnight Murder Show!” # 445 (Mar. 1975) Story art (inks): “Count Ten, Superman and Die!” # 460 (June 1976) Mr. Mxyzptlk story art: “Welcome Home to Mxyzpolis!” # 464 (Oct. 1976) Clark Kent story art: “See Metropolis With Clark Kent!” # 474 (Aug. 1977) Cover art; story art (pencils): “Will the Real Superman Please Show Up?”; Clark Kent story art (pencils): “One for the Money!” # 475 (Sept. 1977) Story art (pencils): “The Super-Hero Who Refused to Hang up His Boots!” # 476 (Oct. 1977) Cover art; story art (pencils): “The Attack of the Anti-Super-Hero” # 486 (Aug. 1978) Lex Luthor story art (pencils): “Hero for a Day” # 501 (Nov. 1979) Story art (pencils): “The Mystery of the MildMannered Superman” # 516 (Feb. 1981) Story art (inks): “Time and Time Again” # 556 (June 1984) Story art (inks): “Endings” # 558 (Aug. 1984) Story art: “The All-Seeing Eyes!” (w/Professor Potter, Elastic Lad app.) # 559 (Sept. 1984) Story art (pencils): “The Once and Future

90

Peri(l)” # 561 (Nov. 1984) Story art (pencils): “The Great Toyman Trivia Contest” # 562 (Dec. 1984) Story art (pencils): “Their Magnetic Majesties, King Alexander and Queen Bee!” # 565 (Mar. 1985) Story art: “The Wizard City Warrior” # 567 (May 1985) Story art (pencils): “Peri(l) in Paradise!” # 570 (Aug. 1985) Story art (pencils): “The Mystery of Jimmy Olsen’s Alter Ego!” # 573 (Nov. 1985) Story art (pencils): “The Sale of the Century!” # 574 (Dec. 1985) Story art (pencils): “May the Best World Win!” # 575 (Jan. 1986) Story art (pencils): “The Great Brain Robbery!” # 576 (Feb. 1986) Story art: “Earth’s Sister Planet!” # 578 (Apr. 1986) Story art: “The Most Popular Man in Metropolis!” # 580 (June 1986) Story art: “The Day Superman Couldn’t Save!”; story art (pencils): “The Mystery of the Missing Moon!” # 581 (July 1986) Story art: “Superman for a Day!”; story art (pencils): “Even a Superman Needs a Lawyer!” # 582 (Aug. 1986) Story art (inks): “The Strange Rebirth of Jor-El and Lara!” # 583 (Sept. 1986) Story art (inks): “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” # 600 (May 1988) Cover art (pencils); Lois Lane story art (pencils): “My Name is Lois Lane. I’m a Reporter” # 637 (Jan. 1989) Hero Hotline story art (inks) # 638 (Feb. 1989) Hero Hotline story art (inks) # 639 (Feb. 1989) Hero Hotline story art (inks) # 640 (Feb. 1989) Hero Hotline story art (inks): “Ready, Aim, Fire”

■ ADVENTURE COMICS Note: Supergirl story art unless otherwise noted

# 382 (July 1969) Story art: “The Super-Team’s Split-up!” # 383 (Aug. 1969) Story art: “Supergirl’s Day of Danger!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 384 (Sept. 1969) Story art: “Confess, Linda Danvers, You are Supergirl!” # 385 (Oct. 1969) Story art:

“Supergirl’s Big Sister!” # 386 (Nov. 1969) Story art: “The Godmother of Steel!” # 387 (Dec. 1969) Story art: “The Wolf-Girl of Stanhope!” # 388 (Jan. 1970) Story art: “The Romance Machine!” (w/Brainiac app.) # 389 (Feb. 1970) Story art: “Supergirl’s Jilted Boy Friends!” (w/Brainiac app.) # 391 (Mar. 1970) Story art: “Linda Danvers, Super-Star!” # 392 (Apr. 1970) Story art: “The Super Cheat” (w/Comet the Superhorse app.) # 393 (May 1970) Story art: “The Girl Who Knew Supergirl’s Secrets!” # 394 (June 1970) Story art: “Heartbreak Prison!” # 395 (July 1970) Story art: “The Heroine in the Haunted House!” # 396 (Aug. 1970) Story art: “I Am a Witch!” # 453 (Oct. 1977) Superboy cover art

■ AMETHYST: PRINCESS OF GEMWORLD # 4 (Apr. 1985) Story art (pencils): “There and Back Again!”

■ THE BEST OF DC (BLUE RIBBON DIGEST) # 50 (July 1984) Cover art

■ BLUE DEVIL # 30 (Nov. 1986) Story art (inks): “Too Many Rogues”

DC COMICS PRESENTS # 32 (Apr. 1981) SupermanWonder Woman teamup story art (pencils): “The Super-Prisoners of Love” # 50 (Oct. 1982) Superman-Clark Kent teamup story art (inks): “When You Wish Upon a Planetoid” (w/Batman app.) # 59 (July 1983) SupermanAmbush Bug teamup story art (inks): “Ambush Bug II, or Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Start Reading DC Comics Presents Again” # 93 (May 1986) SupermanPlastic Man-Elongated Man teamup story art (inks): “That’s the Way the Heroes Bounce” # 96 (Aug. 1986) Superman-Blue Devil teamup story art (inks): “The Deputy”

■ DC SPECIAL SERIES # 11 (1978) Golden Age Flash

story art (pencils): “The Face of the Flash!”

■ DETECTIVE COMICS # 441 (July 1974) Ibis the Invincible story art: “Holocaust God of Destruction!” (reprint from Whiz Comics # 95) # 456 (Feb. 1976) Elongated Man story art: “The Un-Stretch-Able Sleuth” # 457 (Mar. 1976) Elongated Man story art: “Make Way for the Elongated Woman!” # 483 (May 1979) Robin story art (pencils): “Terminus!” # 484 (July 1979) Robin story art (pencils): “The Return of the Flying Graysons” # 485 (Aug. 1979) Robin story art (pencils): “The Case of the Cavorting Corpse” # 486 (Sept. 1979) Robin story art (pencils): “Fear Times Four” # 487 (Oct. 1979) Robin story art (pencils): “The Iron Solution” # 488 (Nov. 1979) Robin story art (pencils): “The Great Campus Kidnap” ■ 80 PAGE GIANT # 1 (June 1965, Superman issue) Lois Lane story art: “The Curse of Lena Thorul!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 23) # 3 (Sept. 1964, Lois Lane issue) Cover art; story art: “The Girl Who Stole Superman” (reprint from Lois Lane # 7); ‘‘Battle Between Super-Lois and Super-Lana!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 21); “Mr. and Mrs. Clark (Superman) Kent!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 19); “The Day Superman Married Lana Lang!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 26); “Superman’s Greatest Sacrifice” (reprint from Lois Lane # 5); “Lois Lane’s Romeo!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 10 # 14 (Sept. 1965, Lois Lane issue) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Super-Daughter!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 20); “The Duel Over Superman” (reprint from Superman # 150); “The Day When Superman Proposed!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 22); “Mrs. Superman!” (reprint from Superman # 124); “The Sleeping Doom!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 18) ■ FALLING IN LOVE # 122 (Apr. 1971) Story art (pencils): “I Want to Be Free to Live

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

to Love!”

■ THE FLASH # 264 (Aug. 1978) Story art (pencils): “Golden Glider’s Final Fling!”

■ HERO HOTLINE # 1 (Apr. 1989) Story art (inks): “In Trouble? Who Can You Call?!” # 2 (May 1989) Story art (inks): “Take the Bus With . . .” # 3 (June 1989) Story art (inks): “. . .

Snafu is Back in Town!” # 4 (July 1989) Story art (inks): “Bombs Away!” # 5 (Aug. 1989) Story art (inks): “Lo, the Firebug!” # 6 (Sept. 1989) Story art (inks): “Could Be!” ■ ISIS # 1 (Oct. 1976) Cover art

■ LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (First series) # 300 (June 1983) Cover art (Superboy figure); story art: “Superboy” # 305 (Nov. 1983) Story art (inks): “Violet’s Story”

■ LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (Deluxe series) # 45 (Apr. 1988) Story art (pencils): “Unlucky Streak”

■ MASK # 1 (Feb. 1987) Story art (inks): “The Ice Age Cometh” # 2 (Mar. 1987) Story art (inks): “Masquerade” # 3 (Apr. 1987) Story art (inks): “The Switchblade Conspiracy” # 4 (May 1987) Story art (inks): “Matt Trakker – Outlaw” # 5 (June 1987) Story art (inks): “African Nightmare” # 6 (July 1987) Story art (inks): “Jacana’s Revenge” # 7 (Aug. 1987) Story art (inks): “Countdown to Doomsday!” # 8 (Sept. 1987) Story art (inks): “Fun in the Sun!” # 9 (Oct. 1987) Story art (inks): “Meltdown!”

■ THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERBOY # 1 (Jan. 1980) Cover art; story art (pencils): “The Most Important Year of Superboy’s Life!” # 2 (Feb. 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The Demon Next Door”; “The Day of the Explosive Element!” # 3 (Mar. 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The New Super-

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

Star of Smallville!” # 4 (Apr. 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Look at Me, World – I’m Astralad!” # 5 (May 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Secret of the Super-Power Failures!” # 6 (June 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Too Big for Smallville!” # 7 (July 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “This Planet is Condemned” # 8 (Aug. 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Clark Kent Must Die!” # 9 (Sept. 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “How to Stamp Out a Superboy” # 10 (Oct. 1980; Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The Town That Time Remembered!” # 11 (Nov. 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Superboy’s Amazing New Power!”; “When You Wish Upon a TV . . .” # 12 (Dec. 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Clark Kent – Reluctant Hero of Smallville!” # 13 (Jan. 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Superboy’s Wild Weekend Out West!” (w/Hal Jordan app.) # 14 (Feb. 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Luthor’s Power Ploy!” # 15 (Mar. 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “A New Life for the Orphan From Krypton!” # 16 (Apr. 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The Super-Secret of Smallville”; “The Superboy Training of Clark Kent!” # 17 (May 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “To Fight the Unbeatable Foe” # 18 (June 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Superboy’s Do-itYourself Doom!”; “Day of the Costume Change!” # 19 (July 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Zero Hour for the Kents!” # 20 (Aug. 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The Planet That Kidnapped Superboy” # 21 (Sept. 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The Day Superboy Sold Out!!” # 22 (Oct. 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The Heroic Failures of Superboy” # 23 (Nov. 1981) Cover art (pencils);

story art (pencils): “The Superboy Who Never Was!” # 24 (Dec. 1981) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “Blind Boy’s Bluff!” # 25 (Jan. 1982) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The Man Who Kidnapped Nature!” # 26 (Feb. 1982) Cover art; story art (pencils): “Clark Kent – the Grooviest Guy in Smallville!”; “Superboy Meets Superboy . . . Almost!” # 27 (Mar. 1982) Cover art; story art (pencils): “The Secret That Time Forgot to Tell!” # 28 (Apr. 1982) Cover art; story art (pencils): “Our Son, the SuperBetrayer!” # 29 (May 1982) Cover art; story art (pencils): “The Man Who Took the Small Out of Smallville!” # 30 (June 1982) Story art (pencils): “The Secret of the Crystal Curse!” # 31 (July 1982) Cover art; story art (pencils): “The Main Event: Smallville, U.S.A.” # 32 (Aug. 1982) Story art: “Save Superboy . . . or Die!” # 33 (Sept. 1982) Story art: “Kill Superboy . . . and Conquer!” # 34 (Oct. 1982) Story art (pencils): “Beware the Yellow Peri” # 35 (Nov. 1982) Story art (pencils): “The Yellow Peri Peril!” # 36 (Dec. 1982) Story art: “Menace of the Mind’s Eye!” # 37 (Jan. 1983) Story art: “Wright Makes Might!” # 38 (Feb. 1983) Story art: “The Day That Lasted Forever!” # 39 (Mar. 1983) Story art: “A World Without Christmas” # 40 (Apr. 1983) Story art (pencils): “Superboy no More!!” # 41 (May 1983) Story art (pencils): “The Teen of Steel . . . for Real!” # 42 (June 1983) Story art: “A Blast of Dyna-Mind!” # 43 (July 1983) Story art: “The Forty-Hour Wonder!” # 44 (Aug. 1983) Story art (pencils): “The Traps That are My Mind!” # 45 (Sept. 1983) Story art (inks): “Sunburst – Public Enemy # 1” # 46 (Oct. 1983) Story art (inks): “Land of the Rising Sunburst!” # 47 (Nov. 1983) Story art (inks): “The Secret of Sunburst!” # 48 (Dec. 1983) Story art: “One Super-Power Too Many!” # 49 (Jan. 1984) Story art (pencils): “Zatara’s Magical Mystery Tour!” # 50 (Feb. 1984) Story art (pencils):

91

“Dial ‘V’ for Villain!” (w/Legion of Super-Heroes app.) # 51 (July 1983) Story art (pencils): “Where, Oh Where Has Superboy Gone?” (reprint from Superman # 365); ‘‘Perry White’s Superboy Scoop’’ (reprint from Superman # 366) # 52 (Apr. 1984) Cover art (pencils); story art: “The Caveman of Smallville!” # 53 (May 1984) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “To Slay a Superboy!” # 54 (June 1984) Story art (pencils): “The Dumbbell That Saved the Earth!” Note: Final issue ■ THE OUTSIDERS # 20 (June 1987) MetamorphoGeoForce teamup story art: “Gross Encounters!”

■ PLOP! # 7 (Oct. 1974) Story art: “Plop Meets Superman” # 8 (Dec. 1974) Story art: “SuperPlops!” (w/Superman app.) # 13 (June 1975) Story art: “Super-Plops!” (w/Superman app.)

■ SHAZAM! # 6 (Oct. 1973) Marvel Family story art: “The Man Who Changed the World!” (Golden Age reprint; part 1) # 7 (Nov. 1973) Marvel Family story art: “The Man Who Changed the World!” (Golden Age reprint; part 2) # 11 (Mar. 1974) Captain Marvel story art: “The Incredible CapeMan”; Marvel Family story art: “The Year Without a Christmas!” # 12 (June 1974) Captain Marvel story art: “The Shazam Gods and Heroes” # 14 (Oct. 1974) Marvel Family story art: “The Evil Return of the Monster Society”; “The Word Wrecker!” (reprint from Marvel Family # 86) # 15 (Dec. 1974) Marvel Family story art: “Battles the King of All Time” (reprint from Marvel Family # 88); Captain Marvel Jr. story art: “The Man in the Paper Armor!” # 16 (Feb. 1975) Captain Marvel story art: “The Man Who Stole Justice!”; Marvel Family story art: “Battles the Monarch of Money” (reprint from Marvel Family # 29) # 17 (Apr. 1975) Marvel Family story art: “The Pied Un-Piper”

92

# 18 (June 1975) Captain Marvel Jr. story art: “The Coin-Operated Caper!” # 19 (Aug. 1975) Captain Marvel story art: “Who Stole Billy Batson’s Thunder?” # 20 (Oct. 1975) Cover art; Marvel Family story art: “The Strange and Terrible Disappearance of Maxwell Zodiac!” # 22 (Feb. 1976) Cover art; Captain Marvel story art: “The Legends of Shazam!” # 23 (Winter 1976) Cover art # 25 (Oct. 1976) Cover art; Captain Marvel story art: “The Bicentennial Villain” # 26 (Dec. 1976) Cover art (inks); Captain Marvel story art: “The Case of the Kidnapped Congress” # 27 (Feb. 1977) Cover art (inks); Captain Marvel story art (pencils): “Fear in Philadelphia!” # 28 (Apr. 1977) Cover art; Captain Marvel story art: “The Return of Black Adam” # 29 (June 1977) Cover art; Captain Marvel story art (pencils): “Ibac Meets Aunt Minerva!” # 30 (Aug. 1977) Cover art; Captain Marvel story art (pencils): “Fights the Man of Steel” (w/Superman app.) # 31 (Oct. 1977) Cover art; Captain Marvel story art (pencils): “The Rainbow Squad” # 32 (Dec. 1977) Cover art # 33 (Feb. 1978) Cover art; Captain Marvel story art (face inks): “The World’s Mightiest Race” # 35 (June 1978) Captain Marvel story art (inks): “Backward, Turn Backward O Time in Your Flight!”

■ SUPER FRIENDS # 14 (Nov. 1978) Story art (pencils): “The Origin of the Wonder Twins” # 18 (Mar. 1979) Cover art; story art (pencils): “The Manhunt in Time” # 20 (May 1979) Cover art; story art (pencils): “Revenge of the Leafy Monsters!” # 29 (Feb. 1980) Story art (pencils): “Scholars From the Stars!” # 32 (May 1980) Cover art (pencils); story art (pencils): “The Scarecrow Fights With Fear!” # 42 (Mar. 1981) Cover art (pencils) # 43 (Apr. 1981) Cover art (pencils)

# 44 (May 1981) Cover art (pencils) # 45 (June 1981) Cover art (pencils) # 46 (July 1981) Cover art (pencils) # 47 (Aug. 1981) Cover art (pencils)

■ SUPERMAN Note: Superman story art unless otherwise noted

# 121 (May 1958) Story art: “The Bride of Futureman!” # 124 (Sept. 1958) Story art: “Mrs. Superman!” # 125 (Nov. 1958) Story art: “Lois Lane’s Super-Dream!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 126 (Jan. 1959) Story art: “The Two Faces of Superman!” (w/Superman as Alfred E. Neuman) # 128 (Apr. 1959) Story art: “The Sleeping Beauty From Krypton!” (w/Bruce Wayne app.) # 131 (Aug. 1959) Story art: “Superman’s Future Wife!” # 142 (Jan. 1961) Story art: “Lois Lane’s Secret Helper!” (w/Krypto, Supergirl app.) # 150 (Jan. 1962) Story art: “The Duel Over Superman!” # 160 (Apr. 1963) Cover art (Kurt’s first Superman cover) # 162 (July 1963) Cover art; story art: “The End of Superman’s Career!” (Lois Lane, Lana Lang figures) # 187 (June 1966, an 80-page giant) Lois Lane story art: “Three Nights in the Fortress of Solitude!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 14) # 207 (July 1968, an 80-page giant) Lois Lane story art: “SuperHusband and Wife!”; “The Bride Gets Super-Powers!”; “The Secret of the Super-Family” (reprint from Lois Lane # 15) # 272 (Feb. 1974, a 100-page giant) Jimmy Olsen story art: “The Demons From Pandora’s Box!” (reprint from Jimmy Olsen # 81); “Play the Graffiti Game With Superman” # 282 (Dec. 1974) Story art (inks): “Lex Luthor, Super Scalp-Hunter!” # 288 (June 1975) Story art (inks): “The Computer With a Secret Identity!” # 327 (Sept. 1978) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Two Can Die as Cheaply as One” # 328 (Oct. 1978) Clark Kent story

art (pencils): “Clark Kent, How Would You Like to Meet Your Real Father?” # 329 (Nov. 1978) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Secret of the Talking Car” # 362 (Aug. 1981) Story art (pencils): “Metropolis: Day 1” # 365 (Nov. 1981) Superboy story art (pencils): “Where, Oh Where Has Superboy Gone?” # 366 (Dec. 1981) Superboy story art (pencils): “Perry White’s Superboy Scoop!” # 370 (Apr. 1982) Story art (pencils): “Super-Visions From Beyond” # 374 (Aug. 1982) Superboy story art (pencils): “Pete Ross’ Crowning Achievement!” # 405 (Mar. 1985) Story art: “Yes, Lowell, There is a Superman” # 409 (July 1985) Story art (pencils): “One Life Too Many”

■ SUPERMAN ANNUAL # 1 (1960) Lois Lane story art: “The Witch of Metropolis” (reprint from Lois Lane # 1); “The Fattest Girl in Metropolis” (reprint from Lois Lane # 5). Note: DC’s first Silver Age annual # 3 (Summer 1961) Lois Lane story art: “The Ugly Superman!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 8); “The Two Faces of Superman” (reprint from Superman # 126) # 4 (1961) Superman story art: “The Bride of Futureman!” (reprint from Superman # 121) # 5 (Summer 1962) Superman story art: “The Sleeping Beauty From Krypton!” (reprint from Superman # 128) # 6 (Winter 1962-63) Lois Lane story art: “The Superman of the Past!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 19) # 7 (Summer 1963) Lois Lane story art: “Superman’s Secret Sweetheart” (reprint from Lois Lane # 2) # 8 (Winter 1963-64) Lois Lane story art: “The Rainbow Clark Kent!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 3; title changed from “The Rainbow Superman”) ■ SUPERMAN FAMILY # 164 (May 1974) Jimmy Olsen story art: “Death Bites With Fangs of Stone”; “S.O.S. Comes in Colors”; “The Gift-Wrapped Doom”

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

# 167 (Oct. 1974) Jimmy Olsen story art: “A Deep Death for Mr. Action!”; “The Trail of the Spider” # 168 (Jan. 1975) Lois Lane story art: “Lois Lane, Super-Telepath!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 56) # 170 (May 1975) Cover art; Jimmy Olsen story art: “The Kid Who Adopted Jimmy Olsen”; “Both Feet in the Grave” # 172 (Aug. 1975) Cover art; Lois Lane story art: “The Cheat the Whole World Cheered”; “Lex Luthor, Champion of the World”; “Wedding Day of Disaster” # 173 (Oct. 1975) Cover art; Jimmy Olsen story art: “Menace of the Micro-Monster”; “Prisoners Under Glass”; “The Dynamic Duo of Kandor” # 174 (Jan. 1976) Cover art; Supergirl story art: “Eyes of the Serpent” # 175 (Mar. 1976) Cover art; Lois Lane story art: “Fadeout for Lois”; “Origin of the X-Ray Man”; “The Man Who Stole Superman”; “Wipe-Out for Washington” # 176 (May 1976) Cover art; Jimmy Olsen story art: “Jimmy Olsen, Nashville Super-Star”; Supergirl story art: “Linda Danvers – Movie Star!” (reprint from Action # 372) # 177 (July 1976) Cover art; Supergirl story art: “Bride of the Stars”; Lois Lane story art: “When Lois and Lana Were Brides!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 53) # 178 (Sept. 1976) Cover art; Lois Lane story art: “The Girl With the Heart of Steel” # 179 (Oct. 1976) Cover art; Jimmy Olsen story art: “I Scared Superman to Death”; “Flamebird Flies Again”; “The Sleeping Doom!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 18) # 180 (Nov. 1976) Supergirl story art: “The Secret of the Spell-Bound Supergirl”; Lois Lane story art: “The Girl That Almost Married Clark Kent!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 17) # 182 (Apr. 1977) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “Death on the Ice”; “Reporter With the Radar Mind!” # 183 (June 1977) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “Short-Circuit a Smuggler”; Perry White story art (pencils): “Whatever Happened to Perry White?”; Lois Lane story art (pencils): “The Day Lois Lane Walked All Over Superman!” # 184 (Aug. 1977) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “The Final Flight!”;

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

Superman story art (pencils): “The Mysterious Misdemeanors of the Prankster” # 185 (Oct. 1977) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “The Fantastic Fist and Fury Feet of Jimmy Olsen”; Superman story art (pencils): “The Great Superman Locked-Room Puzzle” # 188 (Apr. 1978) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “Crisis in Kandor!”; Superman story art (pencils): “The Death Angel From Earth” # 189 (June 1978) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “The Night of the Looters”; Superman story art (pencils): “The Mass Murderer From Krypton”; Lois Lane story art (pencils): “The Star Who Loved Lois Lane” # 190 (Aug. 1978) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “Somebody Stole My Town!”; Superman story art (pencils): “Doorways in the Sky” # 191 (Oct. 1978) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “The Quest for the Guardian”; Superman story art (pencils): “The Super-Hero Money Can’t Buy!” # 192 (Nov. 1978) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “What Ever Happened to the Guardian?!”; Superman story art (pencils): “My Father . . . Superman” # 193 (Jan. 1979) Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “The Project: Perilous!” (w/Newsboy Legion, Golden Guardian app.); Superman story art (pencils): “My Mother, Supergirl” # 195 (June 1979) Clark Kent story art (pencils): “Clark Kent’s SuperSecret”; Jimmy Olsen story art (pencils): “Victory Cup for a Dead Man”; Lois Lane story art (pencils): “Lois Lane’s Super-Risk” # 196 (Aug. 1979) Clark Kent story art (pencils): “Super-Disco Fever” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’); Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Editor of the Star” # 197 (Oct. 1979) Superboy story art (pencils): “Superboy’s Split Personality”; Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Leaning Tower of Metropolis!” # 198 (Dec. 1979) Superboy story art (pencils): “Challenge of the Green KTastrophe!”; Clark Kent story art (pencils): “Clark Kent’s Mynah Dilemma” # 199 (Feb. 1980) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Susie’s Flying Saucer!”; Clark Kent

story art (pencils): “Man With the Golden Smile” # 200 (Apr. 1980) Clark Kent story art (pencils): “Clark Kent’s Frantic Fan” # 201 (June 1980) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Enigma of the Empty Elevator!” # 202 (Aug. 1980) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Man Who Discovered Kryptonite!” # 204 (Dec. 1980) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Rescue of His Majesty, Johnny Thunder!” # 205 (Feb. 1981) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Catch a Falling Star!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 206 (Apr. 1981) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Hostage of the Harlequin” (w/Golden Age Green Lantern app.) # 207 (June 1981) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Turnabout Powers!” # 208 (July 1981) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Fifth Dimensional Hijack!” # 209 (Aug. 1981) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “George Taylor’s Last Scoop” # 211 (Oct. 1981) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Kill Kent Contract!” (w/Batman, Catwoman app.) # 212 (Nov. 1981) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Great Superman Hoax” # 216 (Mar. 1982) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Who’s Superman?” (w/Batman, Penguin app.) # 217 (Apr. 1982) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Back to Square One!” # 218 (May 1982) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Kryptonite-Mare!” # 219 (June 1982) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Paper Tiger!” # 220 (July 1982) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “Where Off Earth are You From?” # 222 (Sept. 1982) Mr. and Mrs. Superman story art (pencils): “The Day the World Changed!”

■ SUPERMAN’S GIRLFRIEND LOIS LANE # 1 (Apr. 1958) Story art: “The Bombshell of the Boulevards”; “Lois Lane, Super-Chef!”; “The Witch of Metropolis”

93

# 2 (June 1958) Story art: “Superman’s Secret Sweetheart”; “Lois Lane in Hollywood” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 3 (Aug. 1958) Story art: “The Rainbow Superman” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’); “The Man Who Was Clark Kent’s Double”; “The Babe of Steel” # 4 (Oct. 1958) Story art: “SuperCourtship”; “Working Girl” # 5 (Nov. 1958) Story art: “Superman’s Greatest Sacrifice”; “The Fattest Girl in Metropolis” (w/Kurt and Dorothy ‘‘kameo,’’ “Schaff’s Candy” app.) # 6 (Jan. 1959) Story art: ‘‘Lois Lane – Convict”; “Lieutenant Lois Lane, U.S. Army!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 7 (Feb. 1959) Story art: “Lois Lane’s Kiss of Death” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’); “The Girl Who Stole Superman” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 8 (Apr. 1959) Story art: “The Superwoman of Metropolis!”; “The Ugly Superman!” # 9 (May 1959) Story art: “The Most Hated Girl in Metropolis!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’); “Lois Lane’s Stone-Age Suitor!” # 10 (July 1959) Story art: “The Cry-Baby of Metropolis!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’); “Lois Lane’s Romeo!” # 11 (Aug. 1959) Story art: “The Leopard Girl of the Jungle!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’); “The Tricks of Lois Lane!”; “Super-Perfume!” # 12 (Oct. 1959) Story art: “The Mermaid From Metropolis!” (w/Aquaman app.); “The Girl Atlas!” # 13 (Nov. 1959) Story art: “Introducing . . . Lois Lane’s Parents!”; “Alias Lois Lane!” # 14 (Jan. 1960) Story art: “Three Nights in the Fortress of Solitude”; “Lois Lane’s Soldier Sweetheart” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’); “Lois Lane’s Secret Romance!” (w/Lois as Batwoman, Supergirl app.) # 15 (Feb. 1960) Story Art: “The Super-Family of Steel!”; “SuperHusband and Wife!”; “The Bride Gets Super-Powers!”; “The Secret of the Super-Family” # 16 (Apr. 1960) Story art: “Lois Lane’s Signal-Watch!”; “The Mystery of Skull Island!”; “The Kryptonite Girl!” # 17 (May 1960) Story art: “The Girl That Almost Married Clark Kent!”; “How Lois Lane Got Her

94

Job” # 18 (July 1960) Story art: “The Star Reporter of Metropolis!”; “The Sleeping Doom!” # 19 (Aug. 1960) Story art: “The Day Lois Lane Forgot Superman!”; “The Superman of the Past!”; “Mr. and Mrs. Clark (Superman) Kent!” # 20 (Oct. 1960) Story art: “Superman’s Flight From Lois Lane!”; “Lois Lane’s SuperDaughter!” (w/Supergirl app.) # 21 (Nov. 1960) Story art: “The Lois Lane Doll of Doom”; “Trapped in Kandor”; “The Battle Between Super-Lois and SuperLana!” # 22 (Jan. 1961) Story art: “The Day When Superman Proposed!”; “Lois Lane’s X-Ray Vision!”; “The Sweetheart of Robin Hood!” # 23 (Feb. 1961) Story art: “The 10 Feats of Elastic Lass!” (w/Supergirl app.); “The Curse of Lena Thorul!”; “The Wife of Superman!” # 24 (Apr. 1961) Story art: “The Super-Surprise!”; “The Perfect Husband!” # 25 (May 1961) Cover art (Kurt’s first Lois Lane cover); story art: “Lois Lane and Superman, Newlyweds!” (w/President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy app.); “Lois Lane’s Darkest Secret!” # 26 (July 1961) Story art: “The Day Superman Married Lana Lang!”; “Lois Lane’s Childhood!”; “The Mad Woman of Metropolis!” # 27 (Aug. 1961) Story art: “Lois Lane’s Super-Brain!” (w/TV personality Gary Moore, Bizarro Superman app.); “The Last Days of Lois Lane!” # 28 (Oct. 1961) Story art: “Lois Lane’s Super-Lesson!”; “Lois Lane, Gun-Moll!” # 29 (Nov. 1961) Note: This is the only Lois Lane issue from # 1 through # 81 not to contain Kurt’s artwork # 30 (Jan. 1962) Story art: “When Superman Abandoned Lois Lane!”; “Superman’s Secret Family!”; “The Robot Paradise!” # 31 (Feb. 1962) Story art: “The Jealous Lois Lane!” (w/Professor Potter app.); “The Unforgettable Superman!” # 32 (Apr. 1962) Story art: “The Silver Coin of Fate!” (w/Bizarro Superman app.); “The Widow in Black!”

# 33 (May 1962) Story art: “The Candid Camera Kid!”; “Lois Lane, Slave Girl!” # 34 (July 1962) Cover art; story art: “The Bride of Luthor!”; “The Son of Luthor!”; “Lois Lane, Millionairess” (w/Supergirl app.) # 35 (Aug. 1962) Cover art; story art: “The Amazing Brain Machine!” (w/Professor Potter app.); “The Fantastic Wigs of Mr. Dupre!” (w/Supergirl app.) # 36 (Oct. 1962) Cover art; story art: “The Day Lois Lane Vanished!”; “The Madam Jekyll of Metropolis!” # 37 (Nov. 1962) Cover art; story art: “The Immortal Lois Lane!”; “Lois Lane’s Wedding Day!” # 38 (Jan. 1963) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Signal Watch!” (w/Supergirl app.); “The Girl Who Refused to Marry Superman!” # 39 (Feb. 1963) Cover art; story art: “The Girl Who Hated Superman!”; “The Kryptonian Courtship!” (w/Supergirl, Krypto app.) # 40 (Apr. 1963) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane, Hag!”; “Lois Lane, Foreign Correspondent!”; “The Lana Lang of 500 B.C.!” # 41 (May 1963) Cover art; story art: “The Devil and Lois Lane!”; “Lois Lane Hair-Style Contest Winners” (one-pager); “The Super-Suitor of Soomar!” # 42 (July 1963) Cover art; story art: “The Girl Who Destroyed Atlantis!” (Kurt’s first signed Lois Lane story); “The Monkey’s Paw!” (w/Captain Marvel app., first in 10 years); “The Romance of Superbaby and Baby Lois!” (w/Kurt and Dorothy ‘‘kameo’’) # 43 (Aug. 1963) Cover art; story art: “The Girl Who Mourned for Superman!” (w/Lex Luthor app.); “Lois Lane – Volunteer Nurse!”; “The Girl Who Deserted Superman!” # 44 (Oct. 1963) Cover art; story art: “The Murder of Lana Lang!”; “The False Superman!” (w/Brainiac app.); “Superman’s Surprise Choice!” (w/Professor Potter app.) # 45 (Nov. 1963) Cover art; story art: “The Girl With the Golden Arm!”; “Dear Dr. Cupid!” # 46 (Jan. 1964) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Outlaw Son!” (w/Lex Luthor app.); “The Fate of Superman’s Daughter!”; “The

Wedding of Lois’ Son and Superman’s Daughter!” # 47 (Feb. 1964) Cover art; story art: “The Incredible Delusion!”; “Lois Lane’s Jungle Jeopardy!’’; “The Super-Life of Lois Lane!” (w/Legion of Super-Heroes app.) # 48 (Apr. 1964) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane as Hellene of Troy!”; “The Courtship of Cinderella Lane!” (w/Mr. Mxyzptlk app., Superman in drag); “Florence Nightingale’s Last Stand!” # 49 (May 1964) Cover art; story art: “The Unknown Superman!”; “The Secret of Strong Bear!” # 50 (July 1964) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Plot Against Lana Lang!” (w/Professor Potter app.); “Lois Lane’s Luckiest Day!” (w/Legion of Super-Heroes app., Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 51 (Aug. 1964) Cover art; story art: ‘‘The Terrible Secret of Mrs. Lois Superman!”; “The Tragic Torment of Mrs. Lana Superman!”; “The Shocking Fate of Mrs. Lori Superman!” # 52 (Oct. 1964) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Pen-Pal Romance!”; “Lois Lane’s Love Trap!”; “The Lois Lane-Lana Lang Truce!” # 53 (Nov. 1964) Cover art; story art: “How Lois Lane Fell in Love With Superman!”; “Superman’s Home-Town Sweetheart!”; “When Lois and Lana Were Brides!” # 54 (Jan. 1965) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane, Cupid”; “The Monster Who Loved Lois Lane!” # 55 (Feb. 1965) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’ College Scoops”; “Superman’s Secret Wife!” (w/Supergirl app., Kurt ‘‘kameo’’); “The Fingergirl of Death!” (w/“Schaff’s Candy” app.) # 56 (Apr. 1965) Cover art; story art: “The Snoopiest Girl in History!”; “Lois Lane, SuperTelepath!” (w/Supergirl, Legion of Super-Heroes app.); “Lois Lane’s Super-Gamble” # 57 (May 1965) Cover art; story art: “The Return of Lois’ Monster Sweetheart!”; “The Camera From Outer Space!” # 58 (July 1965) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Great Houdini Trick!”; ‘‘Lois Lane, Spy-Hunter”; “The Captive Princess!” # 59 (Aug. 1965) Cover art; story

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

art: “Lois Lane’s Super-Perfect Crime”; “Lois Lane’s Romance With Jor-El!” (w/Professor Potter app.) # 60 (Oct. 1965) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Greatest Rival!”; ‘‘The Amazing Hydro-Girl!”; “Get Lost, Superman!” # 61 (Nov. 1965) Cover art; story art: “Superman’s Marriage Money!” (w/Mr. Mxyzptlk app.); “The Reptile Girl of Metropolis!”; “The Secret of the Reptile Girl” (w/Supergirl app.) # 62 (Jan. 1966) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Anti-Superman Campaign!”; “Mr. Mxyzptlk’s Election Magic!” “The Sup-Election!” # 63 (Feb. 1966) Cover art (w/Wayne Boring Superman figure); story art: “The Satanic Schemes of S.K.U.L.!”; “Lois Teams up With Lana” # 64 (Apr. 1966) Cover art; story art: “The Lawless Lois Lane!”; “The Courtship of Lois and Lexo!” (w/Kurt’s son’s rock band The Henchmen app.); “The Prisoner of S.K.U.L.!” (w/Dean Martin, Cary Grant, Lorne Greene, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor app.) # 65 (May 1966) Cover art; story art: “The Musical Murder of Superman!” (w/Kurt and Dorothy ‘‘kameo’’); “Lola’s Crime Rampage”; “Lexo’s Last Caper!” # 66 (July 1966) Cover art; story art: “They Call Me the Cat!”; “Lois Lane, Witch-Doctor!” # 67 (Aug. 1966) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane, Queen, and Superman, Commoner!”; “The Bombshell of the Boulevards” (reprint from Lois Lane # 1) # 68 (Oct. 1966, an 80-page giant) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Stone-Age Suitor” (reprint from Lois Lane # 9); “Lois Lane, Gun-Moll!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 28); “Super-Perfume!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 11); “Lois Lane’s Soldier Sweetheart” (reprint from Lois Lane # 14); “The Day Lois Lane Forgot Superman!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 19); “Lois Lane’s Super-Lesson!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 28); “The Wedding of Lois and Superman” (reprint from Lois Lane # 13; retitled from ‘‘Introducing . . . Lois Lane’s Parents!’’) # 69 (Oct. 1966) Cover art; story art: “Beware of the Bug-Belle!”; “Lois Lane’s Last Chance!” # 70 (Nov. 1966) Cover art; story art: “The Catwoman’s Black Magic!”;

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

“Superman’s Cat-Astrophe!” (w/first Silver Age Catwoman, Kurt ‘‘kameo,’’ Batman, Robin, Penguin app.) # 71 (Jan. 1967) Cover art; story art: “Bad Luck for a Black Super-Cat!” (w/Catwoman, Batman, Robin, President Lyndon B. Johnson app.); “Hush Money, Sweet Lois – or Else!” # 72 (Feb. 1967) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Aquaman Tricks!” # 73 (Apr. 1967) Cover art; story art: “The Dummy and the Damsel!”; “Lois Lane’s Fairy Godmother” (w/Mr. and Mrs. Mxyzptlk app.) # 74 (May 1967) Cover art; story art: “Superman’s Unbeatable Rival!” (w/Justice League of America app., Kurt ‘‘kameo,’’ first Bizarro Flash); “Sweetheart of Robin Hood!” (reprint from Lois Lane No. 22) # 75 (July 1967) Cover art; story art: “The Lady Dictator!” # 76 (Aug. 1967) Cover art; story art: “The Demon in the Bottle!” # 77 (Oct. 1967, an 80-page giant) Cover art (final Kurt cover); story art: “The Witch of Metropolis” (reprint from Lois Lane # 1); “Lois Lane – Convict” (reprint from Lois Lane # 6); “The Mad Woman of Metropolis” (reprint from Lois Lane # 26); “Lois Lane’s X-Ray Vision!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 22); “Lois Lane’s Darkest Secret!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 25); “The Fattest Girl in Metropolis” (reprint from Lois Lane # 5) # 78 (Oct. 1967) Story art: “Courtship, Kryptonian Style!” # 79 (Nov. 1967) Story art: “The Bride of Titanman!”; “Checkmate for Lois!” # 80 (Jan. 1968) Story art: “Get Out of My Life, Superman”; “Love Comes to Lois Lorne!”; “The Jealous Superman” # 81 (Feb. 1968) Story art: “No Witnesses in Outer Space!”; “Extreme Space Peril!” (Kurt’s final Lois Lane series art); “How Lois Lane Got Her Job!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 17) Note: DC Comics continued to publish Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane until 1974 with issue # 137. Though Kurt was not called upon to illustrate any new stories in Lois Lane after issue # 81, it’s a testament to his imprint on the title that 35 of his stories were reprinted in 19 of the final 56 issues.

■ SUPERMAN’S GIRLFRIEND LOIS LANE ANNUAL # 1 (Summer 1962) Cover art; story art: “The Leopard Girl of the Jungle!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 11); “Lois Lane’s Super-Dream!” (reprint from Superman # 125); “Lieutenant Lois Lane, U.S. Army” (reprint from Lois Lane # 6); “The Mermaid From Metropolis” (reprint from Lois Lane # 12); “The Cry-Baby of Metropolis!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 10); “The Man Who Was Clark Kent’s Double” (reprint from Lois Lane # 3); “Superman’s Future Wife!” (reprint from Superman # 131) # 2 (Summer 1963) Cover art; story art: “Lois Lane’s Kiss of Death” (reprint from Lois Lane # 7); “Lois Lane in Hollywood” (reprint from Lois Lane # 2); “The Girl Atlas!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 12); “Lois Lane’s Secret Romance!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 14); “The Kryptonite Girl!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 16); “The 10 Feats of Elastic Lass!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 23); “The Mystery of Skull Island!” (reprint from Lois Lane # 16)

■ SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN # 56 (Oct. 1961) Story art: “The Son of Jimmy Olsen!” # 66 (Jan. 1963) Story art: “The Cabinet From Krypton!” (w/Mr. Mxyzptlk app.) # 81 (Dec. 1964) Story art: “The Demons From Pandora’s Box!” # 89 (Dec. 1965) Story art: “The Infamous Four!” (w/President John F. Kennedy app.) # 117 (Jan. 1969) Story art: “The Son of Jimmy Olsen!” (reprint from Jimmy Olsen # 56) # 131 (Sept. 1970, a giant) Story art: “The Cabinet From Krypton!” (reprint from Jimmy Olsen # 66) # 154 (Nov. 1972) Story art (pencils): “Olsen the Red, Last of the Vikings”; “The Girl Who Was Made of Money” # 155 (Jan. 1973) Story art (pencils): “The Downfall of ‘Judas’ Olsen”; “A Coffin for Mr. Action”; Kurt bio page # 156 (Feb. 1973) Story art (pencils): “Last Jump of a Skyjacker”; “The 3 Who Vanished” # 157 (Mar. 1973) Story art (pencils): “The Strange, Second Life of Jimmy Olsen”; “The Secret of the Forbidden Face” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 158 (June 1973) Story art (pencils): “The Jaws of the Jaguar”; “The Kiss-Off for Mr. Action”

95

# 159 (Aug. 1973) Story art: “The Arena of Death”; “A Grave-Digger for Jimmy Olsen”; ‘‘The Day They Unmasked Mr. Action” (w/Jimmy Olsen in drag) # 160 (Oct. 1973) Story art: “The Secret of Harpy Castle”; “The Shadow From the Grave” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 161 (Nov. 1973) Story art: “The Olsen Experiment”; “The Face of a Nightmare!” # 162 (Jan. 1974) Story art: “1 by 1 My Brothers Die” (w/Lex Luthor app.); “The Savage Who Stalked Mr. Action” # 163 (Mar. 1974) Story art: “A World That Came Before”; “The Rip-Off on Pier 13”

■ SUPERMAN: THE SECRET YEARS (miniseries) # 1 (Feb. 1985) Story art (inks): “Dreams and Schemes and Feeling Proud” # 2 (Mar. 1985) Story art (inks): “Reach Out and Touch” # 3 (Apr. 1985) Story art (inks): “Terminus” # 4 (May 1985) Story art (inks): “Beyond Terminus” ■ WHO’S WHO: THE DEFINITIVE DIRECTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE # 4 (June 1985) Character art: Captain Marvel # 11 (Jan. 1986) Character art (inks): Insect Queen # 14 (Apr. 1986) Character art: The Marvel Family # 15 (May 1986) Character art: Mr. Tawky Tawny # 19 (Sept. 1986) Character art (inks): Puzzler # 20 (Oct. 1986) Character art: Sabbac # 21 (Nov. 1986) Character art: The Sivana Family # 26 (Apr. 1987) Character art (inks): The Yellow Peri

■ WONDER WOMAN # 218 (July 1975) Story art: “Revolt of the Weapons” (w/Red Tornado app.); “Give Her Liberty – and Give Her Death!” (w/Justice League of America app.)

■ WORLD’S FINEST # 246 (Sept. 1977) SupermanBatman teamup story art (pencils): “The Prisoner of the Kryptonite Asteroid” (w/Justice League of America app.)

96

# 247 (Nov. 1977) SupermanBatman teamup story art (pencils): “Last Hurrah for a Superman?!” (w/Atom app.) # 248 (Jan. 1978) SupermanBatman teamup story art (pencils): “The Lurkers!” # 249 (Mar. 1978) SupermanBatman teamup story art (pencils): “The Vampire of Steel!” # 253 (Nov. 1978) SupermanBatman teamup story art (pencils): “The Third Face is . . . Death!”; Marvel Family story art (inks): “The Captain and the King!” # 254 (Jan. 1979) Marvel Family story art (inks): “The Devil and Captain Marvel” # 255 (Mar. 1979) Marvel Family story art (inks): “Dreamdancer” (Bulletman, Bulletgirl origin) # 256 (May 1979) Marvel Family story art (inks): “The Gamester’s Death Wager!” # 257 (June 1979) Marvel Family story art (inks): “The Invincible Man!” # 258 (Sept. 1979) Marvel Family story art (inks): “The Courtship of Captain Nazi” # 259 (Oct. 1979) Marvel Family story art (inks): “The Secret of Mr. Tawny”

■ WORLD OF SMALLVILLE (miniseries) # 1 (Apr. 1988) Story art (pencils): “Secrets” # 2 (May 1988) Story art (pencils): “Stolen Moments” # 3 (June 1988) Story art (pencils): “Stolen Souls” (w/Green Lantern Corps app.) # 4 (July 1988) Story art (pencils): “Return to Smallville” ■ YOUNG LOVE # 101 (Nov. 1972) Story art (pencils): “You Wait and See!”

■ YOUNG ROMANCE # 171 (May 1971) Story art (pencils): “Nice Girls Are Out of Style!” # 177 (Dec. 1971) Story art (pencils): “Jilted!” # 186 (Sept. 1972) Story art (pencils): “Mad About the Boy”

EC Comics ■ INTERNATIONAL COMICS # 2 (Summer 1947) Story art: “Diggy Do & Diggy Don’t” # 3 (July 1947) Story art: “Countess Sophia’s Painting!”

# 4 (Sept. 1947) Story art: “The Wine of the Tiger”

Fawcett Publications Note: In 1941-42, Kurt worked at the Jack Binder studio, where the first job he recalls was drawing backgrounds for a Captain Marvel story. During this period, Kurt contributed artwork to many stories published by Fawcett; issues unknown.

■ CAPTAIN MARVEL JR. # 57 (Jan. 1948) Story art: “The Road Back” # 60 (Apr. 1948) Cover art; story art: “Outlaw From the Outlands” # 61 (May 1948) Cover art # 63 (July 1948) Cover art # 64 (Aug. 1948) Cover art # 72 (Apr. 1949) Cover art # 74 (June 1949) Cover art # 75 (July 1949) Cover art # 77 (Sept. 1949) Cover art # 78 (Oct. 1949) Cover art # 80 (Dec. 1949) Cover art # 83 (Mar. 1950) Cover art # 86 (June 1950) Cover art # 90 (Oct. 1950) Cover art # 92 (Dec. 1950) Cover art # 93 (Jan. 1951) Cover art # 94 (Feb. 1951) Cover art # 97 (May 1951) Cover art # 100 (Aug. 1951) Cover art

■ FAWCETT MOVIE COMICS # 15 (Feb. 1952) Story art (partial): “The Man From Planet X” (actor Robert Clarke depicted) # 18 (Aug. 1952) Story art: “The Brigand” (actor Anthony Quinn depicted) # 19 (Oct. 1952) Story art (partial): “Carbine Williams” (actor Jimmy Stewart depicted)

■ IBIS THE INVINCIBLE # 5 (Fall 1946) Story art: “The Talon of Terror” # 6 (Spring 1948) Cover art

■ THE MARVEL FAMILY Note: Marvel Family story art unless otherwise noted

# 13 (July 1947) Mary Marvel story art: “The Town That Couldn’t Lie!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 20 (Feb. 1948) Captain Marvel Jr. story art: “The Giant Vitamin” # 22 (Apr. 1948) Captain Marvel Jr. story art: “The Return of the Suicide” # 25 (July 1948) Story art: “On

Trial” # 28 (Oct. 1948) Story art: “Captain Marvel’s Dilemma” # 29 (Nov. 1948) Story art: “Battles the Monarch of Money” # 30 (Dec. 1948) Story art: “The World’s Greatest Magician” # 31 (Jan. 1949) Story art: “The Great Hunger!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo,’’ Four Horseman of the Apocalypse app.) # 33 (Mar. 1949) Story art: “Meets the Hermit” # 35 (May 1949) Story art: “Battle of the Berserk Machines” # 37 (July 1949) Story art: “The Earth Changer!” # 38 (Aug. 1949) Story art: “The Extinct Instincts!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 41 (Nov. 1949) Story art: The Great Oxygen Theft” # 42 (Dec. 1949) Story art: “The Endless Menace” # 43 (Jan. 1950) Story art: “The March of the Grass” # 49 (July 1950) Story art: “Proves Human Hardiness” # 54 (Dec. 1950) Story art: “The Menace of the Rings Around Earth” # 55 (Jan. 1951) Story art: “Battles the Man Who Sank a City” # 58 (Apr. 1951) Story art: “Battles the Triple Time Plot!” # 64 (Oct. 1951) Story art: “Battles Sivana’s Terrible Television Plot” # 71 (May 1952) Story art: “The Mystery of Ghost Island” # 77 (Nov. 1952) Story art: “The Threat to the Junior U.N.” (w/King Kull app.) # 78 (Dec. 1952) Story art: “Battles the Red Star of Death” # 80 (Feb. 1953) Story art: “Battles the Great Red Brain”; “The Space Ghoul?” # 83 (May 1953) Story art: “Battles the Flying Skull” # 85 (July 1953) Story art: “Battles the Primate Plot” # 86 (Aug. 1953) Story art: “Battles the Word Wrecker!” # 87 (Sept. 1953) Cover art; Marvel Family story art: “Crushes the Crazy Crimes” # 88 (Oct. 1953) Cover art; Marvel Family story art: “Battles the King of All Time” # 89 (Jan. 1954) Cover art; Marvel Family story art: “Fights the Dark

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

Curse.’’ Note: Final issue

■ MASTER COMICS Note: Captain Marvel Jr. story art in all cases

# 88 (Feb. 1948) Story art: “Meets the Wreckers” # 89 (Mar. 1948) Story art: “The World’s Largest Dog!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 90 (Apr. 1948) Cover art; story art: “The Caveman!” (w/Dorothy ‘‘kameo’’) # 91 (May 1948) Cover art; story art: “Battles the Blockmen!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 92 (June 1948) Cover art # 93 (July 1948) Cover art # 94 (Aug. 1948) Cover art; story art: “Gets Bottled Up!” # 96 (Oct. 1948) Cover art # 95 (Sept. 1948) Cover art; story art: “Meets the Skyhawk” # 97 (Nov. 1948) Cover art; story art: “The Doubting Thomas” # 98 (Dec. 1948) Cover art; story art: “Sivana Jr.’s Dream Machine” # 99 (Jan. 1949) Cover art # 100 (Feb. 1949) Cover art # 110 (Dec. 1949) Cover art # 113 (Mar. 1950) Cover art; story art: “The Strange House!” # 115 (May 1950) Cover art # 116 (June 1950) Cover art # 117 (Aug. 1950) Cover art # 122 (June 1951) Cover art # 123 (Aug. 1951) Cover art # 124 (Oct. 1951) Cover art # 125 (Dec. 1951) Cover art # 127 (Apr. 1952) Cover art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 129 (Aug. 1952) Cover art # 130 (Oct. 1952) Cover art # 132 (Feb. 1953) Cover art # 133 (Apr. 1953) Cover art. Note: Final issue

■ WHIZ COMICS Note: Captain Marvel story art unless otherwise noted

# 87 (July 1947) Ibis the Invincible story art: “Ghost of a Chance” (w/Kurt and Dorothy ‘‘kameo’’) # 88 (Aug. 1947) Ibis the Invincible story art: “The Man With Nine Lives” # 90 (Oct. 1947) Ibis the Invincible story art: “The School for Sorcerers” # 94 (Feb. 1948) Ibis the Invincible story art: “The Gargoyle Menace” # 95 (Mar. 1948) Ibis the Invincible story art: “Holocaust God of Destruction!” # 96 (Apr. 1948) Ibis the Invincible

SCHAFFOGRAPHY

story art: “The Land of Death” # 97 (May 1948) Ibis the Invincible story art: “Versus the Minotaur” # 98 (June 1948) Ibis the Invincible story art: “Meets the Glacier Man” # 99 (July 1948) Ibis the Invincible story art: “The Descent into the Maelstrom” # 102 (Oct. 1948) Story art: “The Dangerous Dollar” # 107 (Mar. 1949) Story art: “The Great Experiment” # 108 (Apr. 1949) Story art: “The Magic Coat” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 109 (May 1949) Story art: “Sivana’s Family Tree” # 110 (June 1949) Story art: “Battles the Ice Fiend!!” # 112 (Aug. 1949) Story art: “Sivana’s Booby Traps!” # 117 (Jan. 1950) Story art: “Versus Sivana’s Science” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 125 (Sept. 1950) Story art: “The Olympic Games of the Gods!” # 129 Jan. 1951) Story art: “Battles the Man Who Stole Clouds!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 130 (Feb. 1951) Story art: “The Revolt of the Minerals!” # 131 (Mar. 1951) Story art: “Fights the Television Trap!” # 136 (Aug. 1951) Story art: “His Headache of Horrors” # 139 (Nov. 1951) Story art: “The World Treasure Hunt” # 142 (Feb. 1952) Story art: “Sivana’s Private Kingdom” # 143 (Mar. 1952) Story art: “The Mystery of the Flying Studio!” (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’) # 146 (June 1952) Story art: “Terror Stalks the World’s Fair” # 148 (Aug. 1952) Story art: “Fights the Strange Copper Catastrophe” # 149 (Sept. 1952) Story art: “Battles Hunger” # 150 (Oct. 1952) Story art: “Battles the Bug Bombs” # 151 (Nov. 1952) Story art: “Battles the Dancing Plague” # 152 (Dec. 1952) Story art: “The Dangerous Beauty Maker” # 153 (Jan. 1953) Story art: “The Death Horror” # 154 (Apr. 1953) Cover art; story art: “Sivana’s Monster World” # 155 (June 1953) Cover art; story art: “Battles the Legend Horror.”

Note: Final issue ■ YOGI BERRA: BASEBALL HERO (1951, a one-shot) Story art (w/Kurt ‘‘kameo’’)

Gilberton Co. Inc. ■ CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED # 119 (May 1954) Story art: “Soldiers of Fortune” by Richard Harding Davis

H.M. Communications ■ HEAVY METAL VOL. 6, # 9 (Dec. 1982) Story art: “June 2050”

Humorama Inc.

Note: Curtis Publishing, parent company of Humorama Inc., was also the parent company of Marvel Comics.

■ GAZE (Feb. 1963) One-panel cartoon

■ JOKER (Dec. 1960) One-panel cartoon

Paulist Press ■ “Believing Is . . .” coloring book (1972) Cover and interior art ■ “Talking to God” coloring book (1972) Cover and interior art

Premier Comics Group ■ MYSTERIOUS STORIES # 7 (Jan. 1956) Cover art

■ POLICE AGAINST CRIME # 7 (Apr. 1955) Cover art # 9 (Aug. 1955) Cover art

■ TRUE LOVE CONFESSIONS # 9 (Sept. 1955) Cover art # 10 (Nov. 1955) Cover art

Ray Zone 3D Comics ■ DAUGHTERS OF TIME (1991, a one-shot) Cover art (inks); story art (pencils): “Daughters of Time.” Note: Kurt’s final full-length comic book pencils

Western Publishing Co. ■ “Shazam! A Circus Adventure” (1977) Little Golden Book cover and story art (pencils) ■ “Buck Rogers and the Children of Hopetown” (1979) Little Golden Book cover and story art (pencils) ■ “The Adventures of Superman” (1982) Little Look-Look Book cover and story art (pencils)

97

Above: A short story illustration? Below: A men’s magazine gag? Right: The lost Henchmen lineup? Untitled, undated art from the Schaffenberger archives.

98

MYSTERY ART

The Dark Age

YOU’VE HEARD OF THE ‘‘GOLDEN AGE’’ AND THE “Silver Age” of comics? A series of events in the mid ’80s triggered what more and more people are calling the “Dark Age” of comics.

It’s an apt name for a period of grim, violent and dark — literally and figuratively — comic book content.

In 1985 — the year Kurt received the Best Comic Book Cartoonist award from the National Cartoonists Society — DC released Crisis On Infinite Earths, which, depending on your viewpoint, was either an exhaustive or exhausting miniseries that aimed to streamline the DC universe for the increasingly anal-retentive comic-reading public, which adamantly demanded strict continuity.

The following year, three series debuted that forcefully heralded comics’ Dark Age: Frank Miller’s Batman redux Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ superteam saga Watchmen; and John Byrne’s Superman facelift Man of Steel.

The latter — lovingly executed and, in its way, rather traditional — was unfortunately part of a series of events that brought the careers of the two KCurts, Schaffenberger and Swan, to an ignominious crawl.

One fateful day at the DC office, Kurt and his fellow longtime Superman artist Swan (who, like Kurt, was still producing a lot of work by the mid-’80s) were summoned to a meeting that Dave Hunt, an inker for both artists, will never forget.

“We’re in (then-executive editor) Dick Giordano’s office,” Hunt recalled. “It’s me, the two KCurts, Cary Bates, Julie Schwartz and maybe two or three other people. And Dick said, ‘Well, you know, you’re not doing Superman any more, all of you.’

“And, I mean, to tell Curt Swan that was really — I mean, it was stunning. It was stunning.

Dead silence in the office.

“A couple people asked about assignments.

We were all promised that work would continue, different stuff. Didn’t happen for any of us, really. It A super send-off: Swan’s cover for was really spotty after Action #583 (1986). [© DC Comics ] that.

“And then they took us up to (the restaurant) Top of the Sixes to eat. And that was it. But it was really brutal. It was stunning. You know, to me — I knew I’d survive. But to see that happen to people like Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger was just stunning. ‘‘That started a long, bumpy trail for a lot of us. We depended on the Superman stuff, and suddenly it was taken away from us.”

Kurt went home to his wife that evening and broke the news.

Recalled Dorothy: “What he said was, ‘I guess they want to give it a whole new look.’’’

THE DARK AGE

John Byrne’s artwork for Man of Steel (1986). [© DC Comics ]

As a gesture of consolation, the old Superman team was given a send-off in print. Action Comics #583 (1986) featured a farewell story by Alan Moore edited by Schwartz, penciled by Swan and inked by Schaffenberger. The cover, by Swan and Murphy Anderson, showed a distraught Superman flying away as a group of old friends (including Lois, Jimmy, Captain Marvel and even Swan and Schwartz) wave from the roof of the Daily Planet building, calling out in unison: “Good-bye, Superman! We’ll miss you!”

Wrote DC editor E. Nelson Bridwell in that issue: “And now we come to an end — and a beginning. . . . New hands will be at work on the first and greatest of the superheroes. We’ll see a lot of changes. And yet, deep down, he’ll still be the same hero Jerry (Siegel) and Joe (Shuster) gave us in Action #1.”

Inking assignments for Kurt came in the late ’80s in the form of MASK (non-super do-gooders in high-tech vehicles, over Swan pencils) and Hero Hotline (a wacky storyline by Bob Rozakis and Stephen DeStefano that appeared in Action Comics Weekly). Kurt wasn’t kidding himself that this was choice work.

“It’s a job that a very well-trained orangutan should be able to do,” he told me of that inking phase. “There’s nothing creative about it, particularly. An inker can ruin a job, but I don’t think he can improve it all that much.”

For all intents and purposes, Kurt Schaffenberger had officially entered the twilight of his career.

99

This modern incarnation of Lois Lane, penciled in 1993 for Comics Scene Spectacular #8 (but unpublished due to an editorial shakeup), represents one of the last times Kurt Schaffenberger would draw his beloved heroine. [© DC Comics ]

The artist at his nadir: ‘‘Our stuff was hopeful’’

Above: Kurt Schaffenberger at the drawing board as usual, at the New York office of American Comics Group in 1957.

Right: Kurt pencils a panel in 1989 at his new studio in the back porch of his home in Brick, New Jersey, where he moved that year.

[Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

1989 WAS A GREAT YEAR FOR THE COMICS BIZ. Thanks to a superhero resurgence triggered by Tim Burton’s movie Batman, the medium was alive and well. Comic book writers and artists were beginning to enjoy a new, widespread adulation — even old-timers like Kurt Schaffenberger.

That same year, Kurt and Dorothy moved out of their River Edge “starter home” (after four decades) and headed south to Brick, a sprawling New Jersey burg on the Atlantic Ocean packed with modest homes, shopping centers, waterfront properties and cookie-cutter retirement communities. Kurt, still inking Hero Hotline, considered himself semi-retired at this point. After he and Dorothy settled in Brick (setting up Kurt with a cozy studio on the back porch), they contacted two DC colleagues who lived nearby in Ocean County: artist Howard Bender and writer-editor Jack C. Harris.

Kurt was growing less and less active in the field, due in part to his health. (In recent years, the artist had suffered a heart attack, and it would not be long before he was diagnosed with diabetes). But Bender threw Kurt a little lifeline: At every invitation to a comic book show, Bender would scoop up his older friend and plop him down in front of an adoring public.

The two artists appeared at shows all over the area: Bordentown, Woodbridge, Raritan, Atlantic City, Ramapo, Philadelphia. The shows ranged from grand conventions (in Atlantic City, Kurt was on a bill with Clayton “The Lone Ranger” Moore,

‘‘OUR STUFF WAS HOPEFUL’’

Adam “Batman” West and Bob “Gilligan’s Island” Denver) to small in-store appearances. One bonus: Kurt caught up with old cronies such as Julie Schwartz, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson.

Kurt seemed to enjoy himself — even as he was perplexed at the fact that people remembered him. “Absolutely stunned,” is how he put it to me once. Because Kurt always thought of comics as a disposable medium — that after he did his bit on the page, it was read, discarded and forgotten. “Something like a daily newspaper,” he said. “After the news is no longer applicable, you throw it out.”

In 1991, Kurt illustrated what became his final full-length comic book: Daughters of Time, written by Harris. That same year, while going through a stack of old original artwork with Kurt, Bender spotted Kurt’s heretofore unpublished 1957 ‘‘tryout’’ page of Lois Lane and Superman figures. Kurt played down Bender’s discovery with characteristic nonchalance, but Bender rightly sensed that he stumbled onto something historic. The art was published for the first time — 35 years after it was drawn — accompanying an article I wrote titled ‘‘DC’s Silver Age Front Line!’’ in Comics Scene Spectacular #7 (1992).

On September 30, 1992, through Bender’s efforts, Kurt’s tryout page and other originals went up for bid at Sotheby’s second-ever auction of comic book art in New York. A total of 12 of Kurt’s originals were auctioned alongside those of such artists as Jack Kirby,

Left: Kurt and Dottie ’toons from the Schaffs’ 1990 Christmas card.

101

Thanks to a superhero resurgence triggered in 1989, comic book artists enjoyed a new, widespread adulation. Shown at a 1993 convention in Woodbridge, N.J., are DC legends Kurt Schaffenberger, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson. [Photo by Kathy Voglesong]

Steve Ditko, Carl Barks and Robert Crumb. Kurt’s 1957 tryout was purchased by rock star Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fame.

That same year, Kurt was one of 107 artists included in the Famous Comic Book Creators trading card set published by Eclipse Enterprises. (As Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts character Lucy might have said, Kurt had finally made it, now that his face was on ‘‘a bubblegum card.’’) Kurt’s card, #30 in the series, appeared alongside those of fellow old-timers Will Eisner, Bob Kane, Milton Caniff and Jack Kirby, as well as upstarts such as Todd McFarlane, Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman.

In 1994, a 7-year-old boy touched off a firestorm in the comics world when he wrote

to the New England Journal of Medicine complaining that some Marvel Comics characters (such as Nick Fury) were depicted smoking on trading cards — something the boy deemed a bad influence on children. Kurt gave his opinion on the matter to reporter Steve Muoio. ‘‘That’s ridiculous,’’ the artist said. ‘‘I don’t think kids are going to start smoking because of what they see in comic books. It’s completely ridiculous. In my opinion, they (comic books) are entertainment, and that’s all they’re supposed to be.’’

Meanwhile, Bender would make another significant improvement to Kurt’s ill-kept archives. In the Schaffenbergers’ attic were boxes and boxes of comic books, including many old Fawcett issues. But the collections were far from complete. ‘‘Who knew they were going

The front and back of Kurt’s trading card from the Famous Comic Book Creators series. [© Eclipse Enterprises]

102

‘‘OUR STUFF WAS HOPEFUL’’

to be worth anything?’’ Kurt once told me. ‘‘Whenever one of the kids in the neighborhood got sick, their parents said, you know, ‘Could you send over some comic books for the kids to read?’ A lot of them got lost that way.’’

Bender dragged the boxes down, bagging and boarding the old Fawcetts. Over the next few years, Bender went over the tattered issues of Whiz Comics, Master Comics, Captain Marvel Jr., etc., with Kurt, nailing the artist down on which stories he illustrated.

It’s a good thing he did. Identifying Kurt’s Fawcett stories is not always easy. Kurt’s style was then still in its infancy, and the artist drew Captain Marvel to emulate C.C. Beck’s style —‘‘shoe button’’ eyes and all. Had Kurt’s memory not been challenged in those last years of his life, some of his most important Fawcett credits may have been lost to the ages.

THERE WAS SAD NEWS FOR THE COMICS INDUSTRY — and particularly for fans of Superman — in 1996. Kurt’s longtime colleague Swan died at age 76 on June 11 of that year.

At the time, Kurt recalled a personal joke between the two artists: ‘‘We had a steady gag going every time we saw each other.

‘Hey, Curt!’ ‘How, Kurt!’ You know — Curt and Kurt. I’ve known Curt since about ’56. Not too many Curts you run into. We’ve always been friendly. We didn’t socialize much, because we lived in different parts of the country.’’

Of Swan’s art, Kurt said: ‘‘He was great.’’

A happy event followed later that summer. Kurt and Dorothy were flown, all expenses paid, to the San Diego International Comic Convention, where Kurt was presented with the coveted Inkpot Award

Kurt’s final published artwork (July 2000).

‘‘OUR STUFF WAS HOPEFUL’’

‘‘Love is triumphant over all,’’ Kurt said when Lois finally wed Superman. With Dorothy in 1998. [Photo by Kathy Voglesong]

during a suprise dinner in his honor. (For the record, a buffet of pasta, carved roast beef, ham, chicken and bubbly was served.)

Still later that year, Lois Lane married Superman on TV (in the hit series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman starring Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain) and in the comics (in DC’s glossy one-shot Superman: The Wedding Album). Remarked Kurt at the time: “Love is triumphant over all.”

But Kurt had become something of an anachronism by the late ’80s and ’90s. The “hot” comics of the day starred mean, ugly characters in titles like Spawn, Pitt, Cyberforce and Bloodshot — a far cry from Kurt’s wholesome fare. Kurt and I discussed this when we first met in 1989.

“I don’t care for it at all,” he said of the then-current product. “Most of the stuff that is being produced now is so far out, I can’t even relate to it. Oh! Everything starts out with the premise that the world is already blown up, and let’s see what we can do to rebuild it. It’s really downbeat. These comics nowadays are very depressing — to me. Our stuff was hopeful.”

Referring to the lighthearted tone of his older material such as Captain Marvel and Lois Lane, the artist said: “That’s what it should be, I think. They’re still called ‘comics.’’’

But did anyone ever ask him to, let’s say, “darken” his style? “They give it to Schaffenberger,” he declared, “and they know what they’re going to get back: Schaffenberger.”

KURT’S HEALTH CONTINUED ITS SLOW decline. Bender noticed that Kurt was becoming less communicative, less steady on his feet, during their comic show appearances.

“He wouldn’t even do sketches,” Bender said of this period.

“People would come up, and then I would see them walk away.

I would say, ‘Wait a minute. Come back here.’ I’d say, ‘Listen,

103

Kurt, draw this kid a little head shot. C’mon. Take you three minutes.’

“It’s not that he didn’t want to do it. I thought that he felt he couldn’t draw. He had trouble doing it. He had trouble seeing. He didn’t want to do something inferior.

“And then,” Bender added, “I had to stop taking him to shows. I just couldn’t care for him.”

His eyesight failing, his hands no longer steady, Kurt produced his final published artwork for the July 2000 edition of The Lion’s Roar, the newsletter of the retirement community where he and Dorothy lived. The cartoon of an old lion basking in happy retirement is a charming little farewell with three vital Schaffenberger ingredients: skillfully applied thick-and-thin lines, solid “blacks” and above all, a humorous touch. Kurt’s old Fawcett fans would delight in the lion’s resemblance to Mr. Tawny.

Kurt was having good days and bad days — but now the bad were far outnumbering the good. Later in 2000, he was admitted to a convalescent home located a few minutes from his house.

With Dorothy at his side, Kurt still ventured out on occasion.

Dorothy threw Kurt an 80th birthday party which was attended by their old friends Ken and Kaye Bald. In June of 2001, the “six musketeers” went out to dinner one final time. Kurt broke up the table with a time-tested anecdote in which his wife was the comic victim.

In July, Kurt and Dorothy attended Bender’s surprise 50th birthday party.

The last time I saw Kurt was in December of 2001, a month before he died. For his 81st birthday, Dorothy, Kathy and I brought a small cake to his room. (Dorothy even produced a Superman candle from a previous celebration.) Kurt hadn’t been well —he was having a hard time following our conversations — but he blew out the candle and enjoyed some cake. The staffers were good-naturedly kidding him that it was “time to get your butt out of bed.”

Christmas 2001 came and went. Kurt’s condition was not improving, but Dorothy scheduled a little time on January 18 for Kurt and myself to look over some old comic books for the purpose of this book. We knew Kurt wouldn’t be able to remember or say much, but it might be good therapy. A few days before that appointment, Dorothy called to say Kurt suffered a stroke.

DOROTHY, SUSAN AND KARL WERE WITH KURT all day on January 24, 2002. Kurt’s breathing was shallow and, as Dorothy later recalled tearfully, he no longer squeezed his wife’s hand in answer when she squeezed his. Karl was at his father’s side when Kurt died around 7 that evening.

Dorothy called me at the office on that cold January night. I dashed into the newsroom to alert the obituary editor, and called the syndicate to let them know that a man who entertained millions with his artwork was gone.

An important chapter in comics history had ended. Kurt was eulogized by many of his colleagues as the sad news traveled the next morning, but Bender’s simple statement said it all: “You could tell from his artwork he was a good person, and he was.”

SOMETIMES, A REPORTER CAN FEEL LIKE THE grim reaper. We can find ourselves in the unenviable position of calling a source for comment on the recently deceased, only to break the sad news to that source. This occurred all morning on the day following Kurt’s death, as I phoned colleague after colleague of Kurt’s for comment. DC editor emeritus Julius Schwartz’s antenna went up once I identified myself. ‘‘You’re

104

not calling me with good news,’’ he said in typical, cut-the-bull, Julie fashion. ‘‘Who died?’’ Many of the memorials which follow are from that day, which may explain why some of the professionals interviewed sound like they’re in somewhat of a state of shock. On the following 19 pages, artists, writers, editors — and even a rock star — talk about what Kurt Schaffenberger’s artwork meant to them . . .

‘‘OUR STUFF WAS HOPEFUL’’

Binder studio alum Ken Bald: Lifelong chum THE ‘‘DARK SHADOWS’’ CULT REVERES HIM AS THE artist behind the syndicated strip based on the creepy exploits of 18th-century vampire Barnabas Collins. More conventional comic strip fans remember his long-running “Dr. Kildare.” And B-movie aficionados may recall his wife’s appearances in mid-’40s programmers such as “They Live in Fear,” “She’s a Soldier Too” and “I Love a Mystery” opposite the likes of Ann Miller, Otto Kruger and Hugh Beaumont. But to Kurt and Dottie Schaffenberger, they’re lifelong friends Ken and Kaye Bald.

Bald met Kurt on the Pratt Institute campus in 1938 and was a member of his wedding party. Bald married Kaye Dowd, a modelactress (and the sister of another Binder studio alum, Victor Dowd).

The semi-retired Bald still does occasional commercial storyboards.

Q: What was Kurt like when you two were college chums?

BALD: We teased each other all the time. He had a great sense of humor. He was always a lot of fun. He was an “up” sort of person. I remember traveling up to Hartford to meet his mom and dad. After Pratt, we both worked for Jack Binder’s studio out there in Englewood. In fact, both Kurt and I roomed together there. I had lived in Mount Vernon (N.Y.). The trip for that first month — I traveled from Mount Vernon to Englewood, but that was before I got a car — involved a trolley ride, a subway ride and a bus and everything else (laughs). So it used to take me two hours to get in!

And Kurt lived in Connecticut, except he roomed some place in Brooklyn when he was attending Pratt. But we both shared a room at Mrs. Bogert’s place there in Englewood. I was there when he first met his wife, Dot. Q: Of course, like Kurt and many of the artists at the Binder studio, your career was interrupted by World War II. Were you drafted?

Ken Bald in the late ’40s.

BALD: No, I joined the Marine Corps. I went in exactly one year after Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1942.

Within the year, I was overseas with the Fifth Marines, the First Marine Division. We were on Guadalcanal, we were on New Britain and Pelelu and Okinawa, and then we went to China just before I came home.

I was overseas for 25 months.

Q: What did you do after the war?

KEN BALD

BALD: After the war, we came right back and for the first couple of months, Jack Binder had tied up with Clarence Beck, C.C. Beck,

Kaye and Ken Bald today. [Photo by Kathy Voglesong]

who was the originator of Captain Marvel. I worked for them for a while as an art director, but I wanted to get going on my own stuff, so I sort of got out of it to a certain extent. I did syndicated stuff and then advertising. Kurt stayed in the comic business. He kept working on Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel for a long time, and then I know he worked for DC doing Superman for many, many years. I have several of his originals, which are cute — his covers which I’m very happy I have. In the war years, I really didn’t see Kurt or hear much about him. As soon as we came back, we were two young married couples, so we saw a lot of each other. At any party we threw, he and Dot were always there.

Q: When was the last time you saw Kurt?

BALD: That was at his 80th birthday party that Dot threw.

He seemed fine then.

Looked the same. He was a very good-looking man. He remained so until the end, I guess, until everything just fell apart on the poor guy. But that was in December of 2000.

I’m so glad I got to see him again.

Above: Ken Bald’s ‘‘Dark Shadows’’ art.

[© Dan Curtis Productions] [© King Features]

Right: ‘‘Dr. Kildare.’’

105

Binder alum Victor Dowd: Studio memories

ARTIST VICTOR DOWD’S LIFE INTERSECTED WITH that of Kurt Schaffenberger at three important junctures. Both were 1941 graduates of Pratt Institute; both were alums of the Jack Binder studio; and Dowd is the brother-in-law of Kurt’s lifelong friend, Ken Bald. (Bald is married to Dowd’s sister, Kaye.)

Though Dowd established himself as an illustrator, comic book geeks will want to know that the artist worked at Timely Comics in the late ’40s under who else but Stan Lee. ’Nuff said?

Recalled Dowd: “My memory of Kurt is that he was a good guy.

I probably got to know him a little better after Pratt, when we went to the Binder studio. Quite a few of us went to work there.

“It really was a pretty good studio up above Binder’s two-car garage. We took long lunches because we were being paid by the piece. I was doing main figures, meaning heroes and heroines. Ken was doing that. Someone else was doing villains and backgrounds.

“The most fun we had was during the lunch breaks. Sometimes we’d take a couple of hours for lunch in Binder’s backyard.

“We were all single, but Kurt met a girl, Dot, the girl he eventually married. I know he was seeing her while I was at Binder, and I was there for a relatively short time, about a year.

“I had no desire to be a comic book artist forever. I wanted to become an illustrator. But it was a good starting place. There was real camaraderie. Don’t forget, it was war time, or close to it.”

Tragically, war claimed one of the “Binder boys”: Jimmy Potter.

“He was a terrific guy, very outgoing,” Dowd said. “He was an athletic, muscular fellow. He liked boxing, and he boxed at Pratt. He was one of the first ones to go into the service; he joined the Air Force. I can remember him writing letters and saying that he wanted to go overseas, but he was training would-be pilots. He wrote some lighthearted remark like, ‘Some of these kids are apt to cause my death if I’m not careful.’

“Sure enough, that’s what happened. Somebody froze to the controls of the plane he was in.

This was before jet planes, so it was probably a small plane and the kid froze to the stick, and the plane crashed. So Jimmy not only never got overseas, he was killed in the training accident.

“My memory is that we found out while we were at Binder’s.

Somebody got a letter alerting us to what had happened. He was a good-looking, happy-go-lucky guy. It was really a tragedy.”

Jimmy Potter, who would die Dowd enlisted in the Army in in a WWII training accident.

August 1942, serving over three [Photo courtesy Nat Champlin] years. Meanwhile, his modelactress sister Kaye was starting to win roles in Hollywood movies.

“I’ll tell you something cute,” Dowd said. “I was in the service in Europe, and they’d show movies occasionally. And there was my sister doing a small part in a movie with Edmond Lowe. He was the leading man in the movie and she had a small part.

“When I said to the other soldiers, ‘That’s my sister,’ naturally they didn’t believe me. I took out a picture of her which I carried in my wallet, a picture I had taken at the beach. She was probably 16

106

Artist Victor Dowd (circled) with, from left, Jack Binder, Bob Boyajian, Ken Bald and Ray Harford at the Binder studio circa the early ’40s. [Photo courtesy Nat Champlin]

years old in the photograph. So when they saw the photograph, they realized that, sure enough, I was telling the truth.”

Dowd took a leave from the Army to serve as best man at the wedding of Bald and Kaye. (“Through no pushing on my part,” Dowd said, “Ken met and married my sister.”)

After the war, Dowd sometimes saw Kurt and Dorothy through his brother-in-law and sister. “We’d be thrown together occasionally, usually if Ken had a party or something like that,” Dowd said.

The artist said he once got a sense of Kurt’s fame in the comics medium when he accepted an assignment from a young, Connecticut-based art director.

Recalled Dowd: “He asked me to do some comic-type assignment, some heroic things. I told him that I used to do that when I was very young. He asked me to name some of the people I worked with. When I mentioned Kurt, he knew Kurt’s work better than I did, because he was a college kid who liked the comics and had followed them, while I had lost all interest in comic books, per se.”

Although, on two occasions in his post-Binder career, Dowd turned back to comic books to supplement the advertising jobs he then sought. One was for Timely, when Dowd illustrated Hedy Divine and Nellie the Nurse comic book stories written by Stan Lee. Another was for a certain publishing house at which Kurt established himself as an important talent.

“I did some comic books directly for Fawcett Publications,” Dowd recalled. “They were usually love stories and things like that.

“You have to realize that in those days, all the advertising was beautiful women holding products or handsome men helping women into cars. Think of the ’40s. So I thought doing that kind of comic book was in line with the samples I was making and the (advertising) jobs I was seeking.”

Dowd — whose wife Marjorie was once a model with Eileen Ford’s agency, Ford Models — added with a laugh: “I did more drawings of beautiful women holding things.”

VICTOR DOWD

The Spirit creator Will Eisner: ‘‘He was part of the early creators of the field’’

“I ALWAYS ADMIRED (WILL) Eisner’s style and the artwork I recall,” Kurt Schaffenberger told the fanzine My Turn in 1975. According to Eisner, the feeling was mutual.

“I knew his work. I was an admirer of his,” Eisner said, “because he was part of the early creators in the field, the people who provided the underlying thinking, the underlying anatomy of this field.”

That’s some compliment coming from the man who created The Spirit and wrote the industry bible Comics & Sequential Art. There are some notable parallels in the careers of both men. Eisner founded one of the earliest comic book “shops” — studios in which artists cranked out original pages for the then-burgeoning comics field. Kurt got his start in one such shop.

And both men were abruptly drafted at the onset of World War II, just as their respective careers were taking off.

Recalled Eisner, who was born in New York in 1917: “I had just started The Spirit in 1940; the first newspaper Spirit story appeared on June 2, 1940. Shortly, about a year after that, I got my draft notice. All the other artists were getting draft notices, too.

From The But for me, it had a very important emotionSpirit #82. al impact, because The Spirit represented a [ © Kitchen Sink ] great step upward for me. It gave me a chance to escape what I called the ‘comic book ghetto,’ which I was very disenchanted with. I wanted to reach a new audience. The newspaper provided me with a new audience.

“By that time, I had become pretty much aware that I was going to spend the rest of my life in

WILL EISNER

this medium, and that the comic book medium — or what I call today the ‘sequential art’ medium — is a valid literary form. I thought this was a chance for me to reach an adult audience. So naturally, after about a year, getting my draft notice was a kind of a shock.”

Like Kurt, Eisner’s artistic abilities were utilized by the Army during the war.

“Strangely enough,” Eisner said, “my career was altered somewhat when I got into the Army and I introduced to them the idea of using comics as a teaching tool for instrucEisner’s card tional material, which was immedifrom the Famous ately very, very successful. I spent Comic Book the entire war in the Pentagon buildCreators series. ing, producing, and developing maga[ © 1992 Eclipse zines that were used as instruction for Enterprises ] the troops in the field — these field fixes and maintenance procedures.”

It all sounds so exciting, working at the Pentagon during the war.

“More than that, I felt that I was at the heart of the storm, as I said later in one of my books,” Eisner added with a laugh.

“I felt that I had at long last been able to prove what I felt was a valid concept of the medium I was in. Keep in mind that I had always been really obsessed with the fact — as I am still today — that this is a literary form and has not yet reached its potential. The comics medium is only at the beginning of its ability to touch, even, its potential as a literary vehicle.”

Which brings Eisner back to Kurt.

“He was a very important part of the grounding of this medium,’’ Eisner said. ‘‘His early work, the early Captain Marvels, were a warm, human approach to this whole medium. He picked up what C.C. Beck created from the very beginning and carried it.

“He was a good storyteller, and that was one of the things that for a long time in comics began to suffer. Because the rewards to the creators has always come from the artwork. It’s only in the last number of years that the storytelling has become as important, so we now have writers like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore who have achieved fame through their writing, by making a contribution of story to the artwork.

“That’s one of the main struggles in this medium, anyway, is the struggle for sovereignty over storytelling and art. I believe this is a language. I think of it as a literary form. Comics is literature.”

107

Artist-onetime boss Carmine Infantino: Politics, Shazam!

IT COMES WITH THE TERRITORY, SAYS CARMINE Infantino. When he assumed the editorial director’s job at DC Comics, Infantino — once a leading DC artist — had his share of brouhahas. Infantino now addresses two of them: Kurt Schaffenberger’s contention that Infantino blackballed him for two years, and DC’s unsuccessful ’70s re-launch of Captain Marvel (which resulted in not a little finger-pointing).

Infantino — who made comic book history when DC editor Julius Schwartz assigned him to pencil a new Flash for the experimental title Showcase #4 (1956), the book that would ignite the Silver Age — stresses one thing repeatedly during the following conversation: his personal and professional admiration for Kurt Schaffenberger.

And there’s a revelation in store for Infantino, too.

Q: When did you first meet Kurt?

INFANTINO: The first time I met him, I was up at DC. I was still an artist at that time. I was in the production room. He came over to me — I was touching up something — and he asked if he could borrow an eraser. I said, “Sure.” And then he said, “By the way, who are you?” (Laughs) He says, “My name is Kurt Schaffenberger.” I introduced myself and we went from there.

But we weren’t that close, I must be honest with you. Because I only saw him when he came in the office. Of course, when I took over as editorial director (in 1966), Kurt was concerned. He came in one day and he said to me, “Am I going to have problems?” I said, “Not with me, you’re not.” And that’s how it went. Everything went well.

Q: How do you remember Kurt as a professional?

INFANTINO: He was a very talented guy. Never made a rumpus or a fight. He was a pro through and through. At deadlines, he was immaculate. This man never missed a deadline.

Never. That was one of the things I liked about him. Not only that, but the quality of his work. It was quality and punctuality. So this was mark of a true, true professional.

108

[ Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

Silver Age legend Carmine Infantino.

And a pure gentleman. I enjoyed working with him and knowing him all those years. You know, he did work on Captain Marvel all those years ago. And, of course, Superman. That was his mainstay. He worked on both those characters.

Q: When you took over as editorial director, you shifted things around a little. You took Kurt off Lois Lane and put him on Supergirl (in Action Comics and Adventure Comics), essentially keeping him in the Superman “family.” Is it safe to say you valued Kurt as a Superman artist?

INFANTINO: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. His stuff was wonderful. The fans loved it. There was quality to it.

There was a clean, sharp look to his work. I was a fan of his. I knew the kids were, because we got lots of nice mail when he did Supergirl.

Q: You were instrumental in DC’s revival of Captain Marvel in Shazam! during the ’70s. I know that the C.C. Beck thing didn’t quite work out. But Kurt was there, and he had such a history with the character.

Infantino’s cover art for Showcase #4 (1956), the first Silver Age Flash, and Detective Comics #327 (1964), the first ‘‘New Look’’ Batman. [ © DC Comics ]

CARMINE INFANTINO

INFANTINO: Which I never realized. I was a fan of Captain Marvel.

That’s why I went after it so vigorously. I went to Fawcett; I wanted that character so badly. And then of course, I put C.C. on it. And in between — I’d never realized that Kurt had worked on Captain Marvel! If I had, I probably would have put him on it immediately.

And then C.C. left. He left of his own volition; I didn’t get rid of him. And the book started to sag. I didn’t know what the hell happened to it then; they just didn’t put it on the shelf. It just didn’t “take” again. Now, that could have been Julie’s fault, C.C.’s fault, or my fault. Maybe the character was out of date? I don’t know. But I just couldn’t get that book to move over. In those days, 50 percent was the “break even” line. I just couldn’t get it to move. So eventually, we just put it aside. Unfortunately. But I still love the character.

Q: On to another touchy subject: Kurt was under the impression that for two years in the early ’70s, he was blackballed from DC.

INFANTINO: Well, now, I’ve gotta tell you, when I became president of the company, I had a hands-off policy on the editors and the artists. I kept away from that sort of thing. Unless something came up, you know what I mean? A battle or some such thing. But no one ever complained to me — Kurt never complained to me — about not getting any work. And if he didn’t (get work), I don’t know why. He should have been getting some work.

Kurt revisited the destruction of Kryptonian Argo City in a Supergirl story from Adventure Comics #393 (1970). [© DC Comics ]

Q: So it was a misunderstanding on Kurt’s part?

INFANTINO: Well, it may be true, now. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. Maybe he and some of the editors had a misunderstanding. That happens along the way. Usually in those cases, I’m the one who got the blame for these things (laughs). It comes with the territory. But I would never have turned Kurt away. Never.

Q: Back to happier topics. People have been commenting on Kurt’s sense of humor. Did you take notice of that?

INFANTINO: Oh, yeah. He had a beaut. He had a beaut. I think he had a very sly sense of humor. He’s going to be missed. Although he didn’t do comics for years, did he?

Q: Not as much since John Byrne revamped Superman in ’86.

INFANTINO: Oh! What a wreck that was. That was awful, that whole setup. And he was pushed out?

Q: I learned that there was a meeting with Kurt and Curt Swan and some others, and they were told — I’m paraphrasing — “We’re changing things around. You’re not drawing Superman any more.”

CARMINE INFANTINO

INFANTINO: (Softly) Oh, my God. And Curt Swan, too?

Q: That’s what I learned from someone who was at the meeting.

INFANTINO: Did they push him out, too?

Q: That’s what I was told.

INFANTINO: Oh, my God. I didn’t know any of this. That’s sad.

That’s sad. Because those two fellas were the epitome of Superman.

More so than that other guy. I don’t wanna knock anybody, but I think they were more qualified to do Superman than he was.

Q: Although, John Bryne obviously has a lot of affection for Kurt and Curt. You can easily spot their influence on his Superman.

INFANTINO: It has a quality, yeah. Because he used the original. And the story he did just took the original and redid it. Do you remember? He didn’t really do much with the damned thing. But apparently, he had a following, this guy. Am I correct?

Q: Oh, certainly. For years and years. He has a classic look.

INFANTINO: Does he still have a following?

Q: He always will. And we can’t forget that Byrne wrote World of Smallville for Kurt. But I guess the hot artists of recent years are your Todd McFarlanes, your Frank Millers. The kids like it dark.

INFANTINO: God almighty. I can’t read the stuff. I’ve gotta be honest with you. I don’t read any of them. Well, something is wrong, because the sales are way off. I mean, they’re down to 20,000 or 30,000 copies on a book. That’s not so great. Trouble is looming in the future for the comic books. I know it. But I said this 10 years ago and they didn’t believe me. You could see it then.

Q: Today’s comics are a far cry from the Schaffenbergers and Swans, who always emphasized storytelling.

INFANTINO: I think that was the genius of both these fellas, Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger. Their artwork was simple but solid. But the main feature with both of them was storytelling, and that’s very important. To me, that’s the most important thing. I agree with you about the stuff today.

It’s dark, it’s foreboding, and you don’t wanna read it. And what the hell good is a book you don’t want to read?

A mid-’70s Captain Marvel drawn by Kurt. [ © DC Comics ]

109

Editor Julius Schwartz: ‘‘You owe me a Manhattan cocktail’’ A GOLDEN AGE EDITOR WHO became one of the most influential editors of the Silver Age, Julius Schwartz edited Showcase #4 (1956), the book credited for igniting the resurgence of superhero comics after a long drought in the ’50s. Schwartz also introduced the “parallel worlds” concept to superhero comics (in The Flash #123, 1961) and was instrumental in creating the Justice League of America.

Editor Schwartz and artist Schaffenberger were both major forces at DC Comics during the Silver Age, though they would not truly collaborate until the ’70s, after Schwartz assumed editorship of DC’s Superman titles. Schwartz put Schaffenberger on Action Comics, Superman Family, the quasi-Justice League title The Super Friends and The New Adventures of Superboy. By the mid-’80s, Schwartz was utilizing Schaffenberger as a Superman inker.

Read all about Schwartz’s illustrious career in his 2000 autobiography, Man of Two Worlds.

Q: Kurt once told me that he had two favorite editors in the world, and you were one of the two.

SCHWARTZ: Don’t tell me Mort Weisinger was the other one (laughs)!

Q: I sure won’t.

SCHWARTZ: So, who?

Q: The other fella was Richard Hughes of ACG (American Comics Group).

SCHWARTZ: I remember him.

Q: When did you first meet Kurt?

SCHWARTZ: Gosh, I have no idea. I assume he had been working for the Jack Schiff-Mort Weisinger line.

And two offices away from where I was working — I guess I’d occasionally run into him. I can’t recall the first job I ever gave him. All I remember is our get-togethers at conventions. When he’d sell a certain amount of copies, he’d owe me a Manhattan cocktail

Q: Sweet. How did that work?

SCHWARTZ: We would get together from time to time. There used to be a guy (Ron Jordan) who had minor conven-

110

tions down in New Jersey. And Kurt Schaffenberger would be there, I would be there, Irwin Hasen would be there. I think Murphy Anderson showed up from time to time, and one or two others. And we always had a good time. And after the little gettogether, we would go out to eat.

That’s when I would get my Manhattan cocktail (laughs).

See, I would sit next to Kurt, and he would sell his pages there for about $25 each, as I recall.

He had a whole stack of artwork, and fans would look through ’em and say, “Yeah, I want that one,” or “I want that one.” The average price was $25 regardless of whether it was a cover or the middle of a story or what. So every time we’d get together, if he sold a certain amount of artwork, I’d say, “You owe me one Manhattan.

Oh, now you owe me two Manhattans.” So we had a good time kidding about it.

Q: When DC kicked off The New Adventures of Superboy in 1980, you put Kurt and Dave Hunt on the book. As an editor, how was it working with Kurt?

SCHWARTZ: I had maybe two or three people who always met their deadline, and he certainly was one of them. And what he liked about it — he knew when he brought in that story, I had a check waiting for him. Which contrasted to when he worked for Mort, where he’d bring in the story and then he’d make out a voucher and maybe several days later, he’d get a check. But I always worked on the principle that if an artist finished the work, he should be paid when the work was done, not a week later. He enjoyed working for me, but he wasn’t always able to do work for me exclusively. We shipped it back and forth between the Mort Weisinger-Jack Schiff department and myself.

Q: Of course, you utilized Kurt right up until the very end of your tenure as Superman editor.

SCHWARTZ: I remember on the last Superman I did — are you familiar with that, the Alan Moore story? I wanted two inkers to work on the Curt Swan (pencils). And I got George Pérez, who was excited to do the Superman story (in Superman #423, 1986). And the very last Superman story I did, I recall, was done by Kurt

Top: Schwartz introduced parallel worlds to comics in The Flash #123 (1961; Carmine Infantino art). Left: A grown-up Robin was one result in Justice League of America #55 (1967; Mike Sekowsky/Murphy Anderson art). [© DC Comics ]

JULIUS SCHWARTZ

Founding Justice League of America editor Schwartz utilized Schaffenberger on The Super Friends, a quasi-JLA title based on the Saturday morning cartoon aimed at younger readers. Shown: A detail from the cover of issue #18 (1979). [ © DC Comics ] Schaffenberger — inks (in Action Comics #583, 1986). And I felt good about that. I liked his work. It was nice, clean-cut. And it turned out to be a monumental issue, yes. It’s very ironical — Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger. One with a “C,” one with a “K.”

Q: And in many ways, the two KCurts had somewhat similar styles.

SCHWARTZ: Clean-cut. I always thought they had clean-cut styles.

No fooling around. Clean-cut.

Q: Of course, you’ve met Kurt’s wife, Dorothy . . .

SCHWARTZ: Oh, many times. We would have annual Christmas parties, and he would always bring his wife there. I don’t recall whether my wife (Jean) was well enough to attend at that time or not. But they drank dry martinis. Do you talk to her at all? Ask her if she remembers Julie Schwartz kidding them that they drank those dry martinis. She is quite an attractive woman, I think.

Q: A lot of people believe that Kurt, when he drew Lois Lane, was really drawing Dorothy all those years.

SCHWARTZ: It’s always that way, sure. It’s always that way.

Q: I know you were on hand when Kurt and Dorothy went to the San Diego con in 1996, and Kurt received the Inkpot Award.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. Well, let me tell you something I got a kick out of. This was in San Diego, and Kurt was one of the guests of honor.

Attending that dinner was Mrs. Jerry Siegel (widow of Superman’s co-creator). So I got the idea of introducing Mrs. Jerry Siegel, who was the model for Lois Lane, to Kurt Schaffenberger, who drew Lois Lane. And they gave each other a kiss. I don’t know if anyone took a photo of that. But that was, to me, a monumental meeting. I thought it was a coup to introduce the original model for Lois Lane to the artist who was drawing Lois Lane.

Q: Almost as much of a coup as having Julie Schwartz, one of the creators of Batgirl, meet Yvonne Craig, who played Batgirl on TV (as happened once at a convention).

SCHWARTZ: Exactly. Yeah, that’s a good analogy. But Kurt was a great kidder. He loved to kid people. It was always a pleasure to be in his company. He loved to smile, he loved to say things in a subdued manner, waiting for the laughs to come. He wouldn’t be a

JULIUS SCHWARTZ

comedian who would roar at you, expecting you to laugh. He would do it in a sly way, and wait for you to laugh. He just was a great guy to be around. And he was a very handsome guy, I thought, very handsome. Tall and handsome.

Q: More than anything, we’ll remember Kurt’s work for its wholesome quality, especially compared to the dark stuff nowadays.

SCHWARTZ: Oh, please. I can’t look at these. I mean, I still go down to DC Comics every Wednesday and I look at the work there.

God, it’s like the stories were done at midnight! I really mean it.

You can quote me on that.

Tell ’em someone forgot to pay the light bill and they’re working in the dark!

Influential editor Julius Schwartz. [ Photo

by Kathy Voglesong ]

111

A Joe Kubert Hawkman.

[ © DC Comics ]

WHILE KURT SCHAFFENBERGER WAS CRANKING out those Lois Lanes during the Silver Age, his books appeared on the stands alongside Joe Kubert’s Hawkman and Sgt. Rock. Kubert — who runs the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning and Graphics in Dover, New Jersey — reminisced about his fellow Silver Age artist.

Q: What can you tell us about Kurt as a professional?

KUBERT: As far as his ability was concerned, there’s no question that the quality of his work was tops. He probably had more to do with the success of Superman than most. The thing was that when the Superman character and was being published in so many different forms, so many different books, Kurt became involved and was doing a lot of that. His was always the most outstanding. Always.

Artist Joe Kubert: ‘‘Kurt was a cartoonist, one who was able to tell his story’’

kind of a business — we’re communicators. We’re storytellers. We tell our stories with pictures rather than with words, or a combination of words and pictures.

There are a lot of tremendously talented people in the business, but who perhaps focus their efforts on doing beautiful pictures and less on using those pictures to communicate.

Kurt was one of those people, as you’ve very aptly described, who was terrific in communicating. He was a cartoonist. I mean, really one who was able to tell his story and connect with his readers by making his pictures — not so much “simple,” because simple is a very tricky kind of a description.

It’s easy to put a lot of stuff into your drawing. It’s much more difficult to get down to the crux and the core of what you want to do, to simplify your work to the extent that anything extraneous is just discarded, and the important things are left. It’s a heck of a lot tougher to do that.

And Kurt was terrific at it.

Q: Did you know Kurt well?

KUBERT: The socializing that we did was — perhaps once a month, we’d get together, the cartoonists in New Jersey would meet, the members of the National Cartoonists Society. And that was where I had an opportunity to be with Kurt.

I met him originally — oh, it had to be at least 30 or 40 years ago. During that time interim, I really can’t say I knew him all that well. When we’d bump into each other at the office, or when we’d get together perhaps at comic book conventions, we’d sit and talk.

Q: As a kid, I thought Kurt Schaffenberger and Curt Swan were the same artist. I didn’t know their names; I connected their styles.

KUBERT: Well, it’s funny. I knew both KCurts, and there was a marked similarity between the two guys. They were gentlemen.

They even looked a little bit alike. They were both big guys, broad shoulders, light-skinned, light hair, almost Nordic or Norwegian. So there was very much a similar look between the two guys. Both of them were extremely talented, and they were both guys who were very, very admired in my business.

Artist Joe Kubert.

[ Photo

by Kathy Voglesong ]

Q: As a proponent of storytelling yourself, what would you say about Kurt’s storytelling?

KUBERT: Kurt was a practitioner of what this business, what comic books and cartooning and syndication, is all about, and has been forgotten, perhaps, in some cases. But we are in the

112

JOE KUBERT

Artist Murphy Anderson: ‘‘Up at the banks of the old Hackensack’’ BESIDES THEIR SHARED STATUS AS LEADING DC artists for more than 30 years, Murphy Anderson and Kurt Schaffenberger were also just plain buddies. When these two amigos weren’t sitting side by side signing autographs at conventions, they were carpooling it up to the DC office.

Q: How would you describe Kurt as a pro and as a person?

ANDERSON: Oh, he was the ultimate professional, no question of that. And really a gentleman. I knew him fairly well, although in the last number of years, we hadn’t seen one another very often. He used to carpool with me on occasion. We both lived in Bergen County (N.J.) at the time. So we chatted a great deal. And I’d see him in the office when he’d bring in work to deliver and all. I remember his wife. I think his children were already pretty big by then. This is going back a way’s.

Q: Of course, to Silver Age geeks, the idea of a carpool comprising the [ © 1966 DC Comics ] artists behind Lois Lane and The Spectre is very intriguing. What would you talk about?

Murphy Anderson’s cover for Showcase #60 (1966), the Silver Age revival of the Spectre.

ANDERSON: Well, when I moved down to the New Brunswick area, I took a little teasing from him. You know, we no longer were going to be able to carpool. He would ask me, “How are things on the banks of the old Raritan?” But I would get him back. I would say, “How are things up at the banks of the old Hackensack?” So we had a lot of enjoyable talks — just chit-chat.

Q: Even in the ’60s, Kurt’s drawing style had a nostalgic glow.

ANDERSON: Well, he was one of the rare birds that had his own style. He didn’t seem to be a student of anybody else. I don’t know if my roots show up or not, but with Kurt, it was not easy to trace what his influences were. He was probably doing more of his own thing from the beginning, while most of us had favorites that we tried to emulate. I never really saw that in Kurt’s work.

If anything, he emulated some of the newspaper “good girl” strips, you might say — Boots and Her Buddies (by Edgar Martin) or Ella Cinders (by Charlie Plumb). His style was somewhat reminiscent, but I don’t think he was greatly influenced. It’s just more or

MURPHY ANDERSON

less the style that it took to get work in those days.

Most of the newspaper strips were loosely out of the Roy Crane (Wash Tubbs, Captain Easy) school, but a lot of them were tighter. I would say that perhaps Kurt’s stuff was maybe a little in the same league as Russell Keaton — you know, he was the guy who did Buck Rogers and then he did Skyroads later.

Q: Silver Age fans think of you as a great all-around artist, not just an inker. We love it when you ink your own pencils. But as someone who has also made such a mark as an inker, let me ask you about Schaffenberger’s pencils, which were so distinctive. How did an inker approach an artist like Schaffenberger, who shines through as instantly recognizable no matter who is inking him?

ANDERSON: Well, I think it’s very difficult for any inker to substantially change pencils, except with an eraser. But Kurt’s stuff — his composition and his storytelling, the way he was inclined to have people act and certain things that he did — were uniquely Kurt’s.

Some of the Superman flying poses were uniquely his. His girls were all uniquely his. As I say, he added touches of those earlier newspaper strips, but none of them were really copied or anything. As far as I know, his style was unique.

Nobody else drew like that.

Q: Well, Murph, you remember how it was when you were a kid. This stuff stays with you forever. To this day, when I look at your Spectre story in Showcase #60 (1966), I can still remember sitting on the curb in the summertime reading it. That stuff stays with you.

ANDERSON: Well, you’re marked for life, I guess.

Artist Murphy Anderson. [ Photo

by Kathy Voglesong ]

113

Artist Ramona Fradon: ‘‘He was not full of himself’’

that somebody who had his KURT SCHAFFENBERGER ILLUSTRATED THE stature at the time would adventures of Lois Lane, one of the heroines of the Silver Age of have been so open to other comics. But in real life, artist Ramona Fradon truly was a heroine of people’s work.” the Silver Age. Fradon was one of On her’s and only a few female artists working in Kurt’s lightheartthe then-male-dominated field of ed styles: “It was comics. Like Kurt, Fradon illustratthe DC style. It ed in a wholesome, lighthearted was very open and style, on the features “Aquaman” light. It was like he (in Adventure Comics) and the oddwas — just simple ball superhero Metamorpho. In the and pleasant, really. ’70s, Schaffenberger and Fradon I think that DC sort alternated as pencilers for DC’s of looked for that somewhat kiddie-skewed ‘‘TV kind of work, Comic,’’ The Super Friends. strangely enough, in “We were both at DC at the sharp contrast to the same time and I’d see him every Marvel style, which now and then,” Fradon recalled. was darker. There “What I remember about him True Silver Age heroine Ramona was more shadow and Fradon. [Photo by Kathy Voglesong ] was that he was a very friendly gravity to it than DC.” and accessible man. I would say What was it like to be one of the few women in the field? not full of himself at all — just “For me,’’ Fradon said with a laugh, ‘‘it always involved very friendly and available and an identity crisis, having to draw this stuff — these men very appreciative of other peosmashing each other with their fantasies of world domination ple’s work.

Fradon’s cover for The Brave and and that kind of thing. I was just never comfortable doing it.

“I was just kind of a neothe Bold #57 (1964). [© DC Comics ] But I could do it, and so I did it. And I still am doing it.’’ phyte then, and it surprised me

Artist Joe Giella: ‘‘He didn’t cheat’’

AS THE RINGO STARR SONG GOES, “IT DON’T COME Easy.” That lyric could refer to some of the inking jobs Joe Giella has taken on over the years. In his time, Giella says he has compensated for the sketchy pencils of the late “speed merchant” Mike Sekowsky, and corrected wonky anatomy by Carmine Infantino. But there’s one artist whose pencils Giella never had to work overtime on. Guess who?

Said Giella of inking Kurt Schaffenberger: ‘‘He spent a lot of time on details. It didn’t leave a lot to the imagination, where an inker would have to add a lot of work to bring it around, you know? He put everything in it. He didn’t cheat in any way. He was a damned good penciler.

Very nice to speak to. I know he was in ill health for a while. ‘‘I worked with Kurt about 15, 18 years ago, see? When I met him at the conventions again, he was sick. You could tell. It wasn’t the Kurt that I knew many years ago. He was kind of quiet. He’d smile, you know, and talk to you. But there was something missing. My son (art teacher and colorist Frankie Giella) was a lot closer to him than I was.’’

That’s because Frankie has been collecting originals since 1993 and owns “a few thousand” pages and covers, including many by Kurt. The younger Giella visited Kurt on the Easter prior to the artist’s death.

“Kurt had such a beautiful style,’’ Frankie said. ‘‘Very clean and very — I guess ‘simple’ wouldn’t be a good word. I always call it ‘clean.’’’

Joe Giella inked over Kurt’s pencils for this splash page from The New Adventures of Superboy #44 (1983). [© DC Comics ]

114

RAMONA FRADON, JOE GIELLA

Writer-editor Jack C. Harris: Robin origin retelling a fave A MASTER OF THE ‘‘WHAT IF’’ APPROACH TO COMIC book scripting (Spider-Man: Web of Doom, Batman: Castle of the Bat ), writer-editor Jack C. Harris has penned the adventures of superheroes as diverse as Wonder Woman, the Hulk, Metal Men, Batgirl, Adam Strange and Tarzan. While an editor at DC Comics from 1974 to 1982, Harris helmed Legion of Super-Heroes and World’s Finest.

“The very first day I started work at DC Comics is when I met Kurt,” Harris said.

“He was always an incredible gentleman, a very nice guy.”

By Harris’s recollection, Kurt illustrated about a half-dozen Robin stories Harris scripted for Detective Comics in the ’70s.

“When I worked with him, it was a happy pairing,” Harris said. “The editors, who were (E.) Nelson Bridwell and Paul Levitz at the time, bought the Robin stories from me and then they chose Kurt to draw them. It was great having him draw my stories. He was always excellent about depicting exactly what I wrote, no matter how complicated or how much action was going on in each panel.

He was always able to fit everything in, because he was a great visual storyteller as well as being able to draw anything.

“He had possibly the neatest ink line of Kurt’s art anyone I know. Very neat and clean artfor ‘The work. Just beautiful stuff.

Return of “My favorite one he did was a story the Flying called ‘The Return of the Flying Graysons.’

Graysons,’ in which Robin went back and [© DC visited the circus where he was born, Comics] where Batman first met him. We sort of retold Robin’s origin. It was a fun story to do, and Kurt just did a beautiful job of retelling the Robin origin.”

Kurt also revisited the superhero he cut his teeth on, Captain Marvel, in stories edited by Harris (when “Marvel

Family” was a backup feature in World’s Finest).

Recalled Harris: “He enjoyed doing them just because for him, it was like ‘old home week’ — familiar characters that he drew in the late ’40s and early ’50s. It was kind of fun for him to go back and draw those characters again.”

In the ’70s, Harris and Kurt collaborated on a sci-fi story in Heavy Metal magazine for a series titled ‘‘June 2050’’ (under the aegis of then-art director John Workman, a friend and fan of Kurt’s). A film student later contacted Harris and secured permission to adapt the story to a short film. ‘‘I figured nothing would ever come of it,’’ Harris said. One day, while Harris was taping the movie Superman on HBO, a short based on his and Kurt’s story aired. ‘‘So I captured it on tape,’’ Harris said, laughing.

In 1991, Harris wrote Daughters of Time, a 3-D comic about a trio of time-traveling femme fatales that became the final full book Kurt illustrated. The cover was penciled by Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko and inked by Kurt, an eclectic collaboration that represented the only time these disparate artists worked together.

As a child, Harris read Kurt’s Lois Lane comic books — though he questioned the Man of Steel’s taste in women.

“I always thought Kurt was one of the best of the Superman artists,” Harris said. “I really enjoyed his Superman. He drew an absolutely gorgeous Lana Lang. I never could understand what Superman saw in Lois Lane, The Daughters of Time Ditkothe way Kurt drew Lana Lang!”

Schaff cover. [© The 3-D Zone]

Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey)

[Photo courtesy Comicana Corp.]

Mort Walker.

JACK C. HARRIS, MORT WALKER

MORT WALKER HAS DRAWN THE COMIC strip institution Beetle Bailey for more than half a century.

Walker — onetime golfing buddy of Kurt’s fellow Superman artist, the late Curt Swan — is the figurehead of the prestigious National Cartoonists Society, of which Kurt was a longtime member. Said Walker of his brother cartoonist: “I know that Kurt’s work is collected and admired by so many people out there. Each one of those guys is irreplaceable in his own way. I’m sure that many of his fans are going to be sorry that he’s gone.”

115

Inker Dave Hunt: ‘‘Made me smile then, makes me smile now’’

THE 1980s WILL FOREVER BE REMEMBERED AS THE decade in which comic books got mean, dark and ugly. But at the beginning of the decade, there was one last gasp of old-school, lighthearted fare in the form of The New Adventures of Superboy.

For 54 issues from 1980 to 1984, readers got to revisit bucolic Smallville, where teen-ager Clark Kent did chores for Ma and Pa Kent, attended school and kept then-girlfriend Lana Lang in the dark about his secret identity.

Superboy was penciled by Kurt Schaffenberger and usually inked

by Dave Hunt, a talented delineator who also worked on longtime Superman artist Curt Swan. (In a twist of superhero serendipity, Hunt inked the final Superman story drawn by Wayne Boring.) The artist reminisced about his longtime collaborator and friend.

Q: When did you first ink Kurt Schaffenberger’s pencils?

HUNT: The first assignment that I can recall getting from Kurt was a Robin story (in the mid ’70s). It was an odd thing, because I was fairly new to DC at that time. I was under contract, so they would just feed me stuff. Around that time, I was doing Legion with Joe Staton and a bunch of other good stuff. As I look back, they did think well of me, I guess, because they gave me high-profile stuff.

So the first thing I got was a Robin story. I got these very tight pencils. I was well into inking it when I realized, “My God — this is very familiar (laughs)! These faces and these poses are very familiar.” And then it struck me: “This is the guy who did the Captain Marvel stories!” It came about like that. I couldn’t believe it. It just sort of took shape under my hand. My God! And then I asked the editor who the artist was, and the rest is history.

Q: What Kurt stuff did you read as a child?

HUNT: The stuff that I saw by Kurt was early ’50s, usually the Marvel Family book. But you could always tell his pencils from C.C. Beck’s. Because I had an artist’s eye as a kid, too, so I immediately picked up on styles. So I always knew it was a story by Kurt.

Q: What do you recall of being teamed with Kurt on Superboy?

HUNT: On the Superboy series, I started with #1 (Jan. 1980). We went through 50-plus issues straight, I believe — probably the longest run I’ve ever had on one book. Julie (Schwartz) was the editor. Cary Bates wrote most of the stories.

I enjoyed the book very much because the stories were very family oriented. It would seem they were aimed at younger readers, which I’ve always had an interest in. Most of the stories really revolved around Clark and Ma and Pa Kent, and the rest was just window dressing, really. It was fun. And then Julie brought back a lot of the characters from the older days — characters I didn’t even know about, because I didn’t read comics in the late ’60s at all.

142

Left: Kurt and Hunt’s super covers for The New Adventures of Superboy #6 (June 1980) and #13 (Jan. 1981). [ © DC Comics ]

DAVE HUNT

Dial H for H-E-R-O lived on in a Kurt Schaffenberger penciled-Dave Hunt inked page from Superboy #50 (1984). [ © DC Comics ] The funny thing was that, you know, I really enjoyed working on Kurt’s pencils for a number of reasons. We really were a good match. The natural style of both of us really fit together. Most people liked my inking on him equal or second to his inking on himself. It just felt right. I lucked into an exact match for a penciler.

Q: And since Superboy was set in the past, you two were a perfect fit for the stories’ nostalgic feel.

HUNT: The nostalgia of drawing stuff that looked exactly like the beloved Fawcett Captain Marvel of the ’50s was wonderful, you know? Like, hey, I’m drawing all my old comic books (laughs)!

There’s an old-fashioned quality to Kurt’s thinking and drawing which is very charming. It fits certain things perfectly, like this Superboy comic. Like, when he draws a car, it’s a ’40s car (laughs). There were times when we’d be drawing the interior of a flying saucer or something like that, and there’d be like a big old vacuum tube radio sitting on a table — that’s the communications, you know?

I’m sure you know Plan 9 From Outer Space . . .

Q: Sure, with the flea market radio parts as spaceship props and backgrounds.

HUNT: Right, the oscillators and that stuff. Well, that’s what Kurt drew! And it was wonderful. You could almost see the — you know, in the ’40s, they would put a big vacuum tube on top of a box to make it represent: “This is electronics.” Kurt did the stuff like that. It was wonderful (laughs), you know? Made me smile then, makes me smile now.

Q: Did Kurt ever scribble suggestions in the corners of his penciled boards?

DAVE HUNT

HUNT: He would never indicate anything to me on the boards. It was all always very clear, what we were doing. Occasionally, he’d apologize about something that he knew was going to be a real bug. One time, we had to draw like a Saturn launching pad. He actually went to the trouble of finding a stat of that so I wouldn’t have to draw six million girders or something. We tried to make things easy for each other.

Q: During this time, you also inked a lot of Curt Swan.

You and I can spot the difference between a Schaff and a Swan in an instant, but don’t you agree that fundamentally, there’s something similar about the two KCurts?

HUNT: Oh, yes, there is. In fact, over the years, going through my original pages — because I used to occasionally auction some on (the online auction) eBay — once in a while, I’m not quite sure (laughs)! Because there’s my touch on it, too. It’s a rare thing, but occasionally I’m not quite sure if it’s Kurt or Curt.

Q: Did you have a relationship with Kurt outside of your artistic collaborations?

HUNT: We became friends, actually, and exchanged Christmas cards, which I of course saved. We always went to the DC Christmas parties, and that’s where we really yakked it up. I’ll tell you an interesting thing about that. The first Christmas party that we went to was in a place that was an old Horn & Hardart’s (coffee shop) that became some kind of café type deal. So Kurt came in, and he brought his wife (Dorothy). And I recognized her immediately!

He’d been drawing her for years. I recognized her on sight from his comic book work (laughs). It was so cool.

Super inker Dave Hunt holds a Curt Swan Superman page. [ Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

117

Artist John Workman: Rare ‘‘ghosting’’ instance

FANS OF THE FEMALE FORM ARE SURE TO enjoy artist John Workman’s sexy comic book The Adventures of Roma (Apple Comics). A longtime comics pro, Workman hired Kurt to draw a page for Heavy Metal magazine in 1982, while Workman was art director there.

The artist also crossed paths with Kurt while on staff in the production department of DC Comics during the ’70s.

Workman’s relationship with Kurt began — as it did for many of us — as a child observArtist ing Kurt’s artwork.

John Workman. ‘‘The first original [Photo by Kathy Voglesong] comic book artwork that I saw was by Kurt,’’ Workman said via email.

He explained that in 1962, a comics-collecting friend received a page of original Lois Lane art after writing a fan letter to DC. ‘‘I carefully studied that page,’’ Workman said, ‘‘trying to ascertain how Kurt got the look that was so evident in his linework. I was 12 years old and so very ignorant of the basic truths of comic book art. I was inking my own miserable artwork with an old pen that my dad had given me. But my lines sure didn’t look like what Kurt was able to do.’’

Workman had been using that old pen to laboriously fill in large black areas in his fledgling artwork. To speed up the process, he asked his father to buy him ‘‘a small brush.’’ Alas, the brush was too small for its intended purpose.

Said Workman: ‘‘I decided that I’d try it out and see what might happen. I dipped the brush into a bottle of ink, made a thin-to-thick blob in the middle of a to-be-blacked-in area of my artwork, and discovered that I’d created something akin to a ‘Kurt Schaffenberger line.’ I’d accidentally discovered how he did it. From that time on, thanks to Kurt and my dad, I’ve inked primarily with a brush.’’

Another Schaffenberger omen in Workman’s life: Kurt was indirectly responsible for the first meeting between Workman and his wife-to-be, Cathy.

Explained Workman: ‘‘One day in early 1975, she came into the bookstore where I worked in the state of Washington and asked if we had any back issues of Lois Lane comics. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’’

118

Workman has a rare distinction: He once ‘‘ghosted’’ a Kurt panel for a Jimmy Olsen story. ‘‘The editor had decided that, to aid in the clarity and the flow of the story, a new panel would have to be added,’’ Workman recalled. ‘‘There was no time to have Kurt come in and do the additional drawing, so the page was handed to me. I was to ‘become Kurt Schaffenberger’ and fill the blank area with a new panel that was drawn in Kurt’s unique style. I always thought that I was a lousy substitute for Kurt, but no readers complained about my intrusion into the land of Schaffenberger art.’’

While art director at Heavy Metal, Workman created a series he called ‘‘June 2050’’ (a title derived from his birthday: June 20, 1950), which featured one-page sci-fi stories intended as a showcase for American artists in a magazine dominated by Europeans. Kurt’s story was written by his fellow DC alum Jack C. Harris. ‘‘It was almost funny to see the charmingly innocent Schaffenberger art style among the more ‘cutting edge’ drawings found in Heavy Metal, but it was not a jarring sight,’’ Workman said. ‘‘Indeed, I found that many of the European artists had great respect for Kurt’s work and that some had even incorporated elements of his art into their own.’’

Above: Workman’s sexy heroine Roma. [© 2003 John Workman]

Right: Kurt’s Heavy Metal page.

[© 1982 H.M. Communications]

JOHN WORKMAN

Editor Mike Carlin: ‘‘A world that doesn’t exist any more’’ WHEN MIKE CARLIN ASSUMED editorship of DC’s Superman titles in the mid-’80s, it signaled a definite break from the past. Julius Schwartz, the embodiment of the “old guard” at DC, had once and for all surrendered the key to the Fortress of Solitude. Carlin later became DC’s executive editor.

Though Kurt Schaffenberger would not appear in DC books as regularly thereafter, one project came up for which editor Carlin deemed Kurt the right man for the job. Carlin — who made comics history himself when he helmed Superman #75 (‘‘The Death of Superman!’’), the best-selling comic book of all time — reminisced about working with Kurt.

Q: Tell us about collaborating with Kurt.

CARLIN: I worked on a miniseries with him in the mid ’80s, The World of Smallville.

Wow — I’m very sad (about Kurt’s death).

He was a very nice man. Obviously, I grew up reading his Lois Lane and even went back to find some of his Captain Marvel stuff, as a comic fan.

Q: How was your working relationship on World of Smallville?

CARLIN: Oh, he was the consummate professional. Never a gripe or complaint. He drew what was asked and brought new life to things, even if they weren’t the most interesting things to draw (laughs).

And he never missed a deadline.

Q: Of course, World of Smallville sounds like a perfect fit for Kurt. Why did you think of him for that project?

CARLIN: It was because he definitely drew a world that, in the middle ’80s, felt like it was a little bit from the past.

I know that may sound like a derogatory comment, but it’s actually a compliment. He drew a world that doesn’t exist any more. He really pulled it off and made it very believable. As the story was set in the ’30s and ’40s, it was very important to get that across.

Q: When I think of later Superman artists — for instance, Dan Jurgens (penciler of Superman #75) — I still believe I can see Kurt Schaffenberger and Curt Swan in the recesses of their work.

CARLIN: Oh, totally. Totally. Even Jon Bogdanove, I’m sure, would admit that he got a lot of his stuff from back there. Kerry Gamill, the same way. They definitely all were influenced by those who went before them.

Q: What can you tell us about Kurt’s personality?

CARLIN: He seemed like the toastmaster at the lodge (laughs). He definitely would have a good quip for any occasion. I think they invent words like “genial” for people like Kurt. He was very personable and easy to be with. Even though I certainly was not a contemporary of his, we got along fine.

Q: What are your memories of reading Kurt as a kid?

CARLIN: I bought all the Lois Lane issues I could find. It was just that he drew the cutest Lois.

Editor Mike Carlin, who helmed Superman #75 (‘‘The Death of Superman!’’), the best-selling comic book of all time. [ Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

MIKE CARLIN

Q: Wasn’t it weird buying a book that seemed like it was for girls?

CARLIN: Oh, yeah. Thank God Superman was on the cover every now and then, so my mom and dad wouldn’t worry too much!

119

Artist Howard Bender: Relationship changed from colleague to friend IMAGINE A SILVER AGE ARTIST BORN 20 YEARS TOO late, and you’ve got Howard Bender.

But in the mid-’80s, Bender’s boyhood dreams came true when his Superman artwork appeared in Action Comics alongside that of his idols Kurt Schaffenberger and Curt Swan.

When Kurt relocated to a town near Bender in 1989, the artists’ relationship changed from colleagues to friends. Bender acted as an unofficial agent, liaison and all-around schlepper for Kurt during his retirement years.

It was Bender — an eagle-eyed collector of vintage comics — who spotted Kurt’s 1957 “tryout” page of Lois Lane and Superman figures, as he and Kurt were going through a pile of old originals.

Recalled Bender: “We were looking through it and came across this one piece. He said I could have it. I looked at it and thought, ‘Boy, this looks significant.’ Then he told me that he did this as a tryout; this was the first time he drew Superman and Lois Lane. So I thought, ‘Wow — that’s very significant.’

“I said, ‘As much as I’d like to have this, I think it would be of much better use at the Sotheby’s auction.’’’

Bender gathered 11 more vintage originals that Kurt had somehow managed to hang onto.

“They were saved from the trash bin,” Bender said. “When he would go in there (to the DC office) once a week, I think they allowed him to go back by the trash where they were throwing out stuff. He got to pick out some pages. Some of the pages that he had were ripped ‘splash’ pages that he drew.”

Ripped? And why were they ripped?

Explained Bender: “The top third was ripped off because that’s where the ‘stat’ logo was. It cost money to re-stat the Lois Lane logo — like, maybe 50 cents. But it didn’t cost anything to rip if off and reuse it. So they ripped it right off his artwork — his heads and things were just gone — and then they would just repaste it over a new piece of artwork.”

Bender made a few calls and was eventually put in touch with

Artist Howard Bender. [Photo by Kathy Voglesong]

120

someone who worked with Sotheby’s.

In 1992, the auction house put a dozen of Kurt’s pages up for bid at its second-ever comic book auction.

Throughout the ’90s, Bender escorted Kurt to many comic book shows. Bender also put Kurt in touch with private collectors interested in his original art, and helped to sell some old comic books Kurt saved from the Fawcett days.

Bender, whose ear is always to the ground where comic fandom is concerned, tried to interest Kurt in drawing ‘‘recreations’’ of his classic comic book covers — a trend among collectors for which there is a ravenous market. ‘‘Everyone kept asking me to have Kurt do recreations of covers,’’ Bender said. ‘‘I got quite a few requests for cover recreations. If he had done them, there would have been a glut of requests. He would have been kept pretty busy. ‘‘But Kurt was not interested at all. He was very adament about being retired. I guess A very maybe I should have pushed him more.’’ ’80s-style Bender recalls that he first met Kurt in Maid of 1974 at the DC Comics office. (Bender Steel from worked on staff in DC’s production Bender’s department from 1981 to 1984.) ‘‘I was on a job interview,’’ Bender cover for said. ‘‘Kurt was over there looking at Supergirl originals, probably doing corrections #18 (1984). or waiting for his editor. We said [© DC Comics] hello. He was very nice.

“Everybody was very much in awe of him. Every time he came to the office, I remember — when I worked on staff or I was in the office — everybody would say, (whispers) ‘Oh, Kurt Schaffenberger’s here!’ It was always a big deal when Kurt came in.

He was very much respected by everyone at the office.”

Bender grew up reading Kurt’s Lois Lane comic books. When American Comics Group published fantasy and adventure comics around the same time with covers signed by “Lou Wahl,” Bender remembers being confused. (Young Bender didn’t know that Kurt’s editor at DC compelled him to use a pseudonym for his ACG work.)

“I thought, ‘Gee, this looks an awful lot like the guy who draws Lois Lane and all those little ads,’’’ Bender recalled with a chuckle.

“His style was very noticeable to me, though I probably couldn’t remember his name — or even how to pronounce it!”

HOWARD BENDER

Rock star Graham Nash: ‘‘Things that move my soul’’

WE KNOW GRAHAM NASH AS one quarter of legendary folk-rockers Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who wrote some of that Woodstock-era band’s most famous songs, including “Teach Your Children” and “Our House.” Nash’s breakthrough was as a member of the ’60s “British Invasion” band The Hollies (“Bus Stop,” “On a Carousel”). He also gained fame as a solo artist, a passionate activist, a photographer — and a collector of original comic book art.

Yep, you heard that last one right.

It was Nash who, in 1992, successfully bid for Kurt Schaffenberger’s 1957 “tryout” page of Superman and Lois Lane figures, which the artist produced as an audition for the job of illustrating DC’s planned Lois Lane solo book.

Nash coveted Kurt’s tryout — which represented the first time the artist drew Superman and Lois — because of a specific aspect of his collecting agenda. “Whenever I collect,” Nash said in his British-accented voice, “I want to go as far back to the beginning as possible.

“There’s a vitality in the early stages of any art form, no matter what it is that you’re looking at, that has tremendous energy, because it’s brand new, it’s growing up, it’s not even a teen-ager yet. There are all those hormones running through the art form. And so I tend to collect earlier pieces.”

Is Nash a fan of Kurt’s artwork?

“I’m just a fan of things that move my soul,” Nash says.

“It doesn’t matter who did it to me. If an image is profound enough to teach me something or to thrill me or to make me think differently, those are the pieces I buy.

“I’ve never bought a piece — either in comic book art or photography — that was because it was by Ansel Adams or anybody. I don’t give a (bleep) about any of that stuff. I only care about what

Nash (circled) and bandmates from the cover of their 1969 album ‘‘Crosby, Stills & Nash.’’

[© Atlantic Records]

the image is saying to me. You could have done it, I could have done it, Ansel Adams or Robert Crumb could have done it. It makes no difference to me. I’m only interested in what my emotional connection is with the image.”

Still, there are certain artists Nash is particularly attracted to, such as Crumb, an architect of the ’60s underground movement.

“I collect people that I consider to be fine artists within the genre,” Nash says. “I do have a lot of Crumb. I do have a lot of what was called ‘underground’ comic books.

“I have the cover to Zap 0, which came out before Zap 1 but was rejected, because — I don’t really remember — it was a fetus on the end of a plug that was plugged into the wall. But on the original one, Crumb had drawn (private parts) on the fetus, and it was rejected. A tamer version was done for Zap 1.”

Nash began collecting original comic artwork because he believes the comic book to be one of the greatest American art forms.

“There are obvious art forms that take place within a society,” Nash says. “Two of America’s greatest art forms of the last 100 years, maybe a little more, are jazz and the comic book. Both incredibly important culturally, both helping people to understand their own soul better — jazz, probably a little more profoundly.

“Nevertheless, comic book art is, apart from rock ’n’ roll, one of the last great American art forms.”

Left: The 1992 Sotheby’s catalog that caught Nash’s eye.

GRAHAM NASH

121

Artist Alex Ross: ‘‘He was the stylistic holdover from a more carefree era’’ THE HOTTEST COMIC BOOK ARTIST TODAY GREW up reading Kurt Schaffenberger’s Captain Marvel stories. (And we’re not just talking about Schaff’s ’70s DC stuff; we’re talking about his ’40s-’50s Fawcett stuff, too.) Alex Ross — a superstar in the industry thanks to his painted graphic novels Marvels, Kingdom Come, Uncle Sam, Superman: Peace on Earth and Batman: War on Crime — produced the outsized volume Shazam! Power of Hope in 2000, which presented Ross’ very human, very realistic conception of Captain Marvel. Ross now talks about an artist who helped introduce him to Captain Marvel.

ent styles. He had to be the one to counter accurately both a Mac Raboy Captain Marvel Jr. and a C.C. Beck Captain Marvel.

C.C. Beck’s style wasn’t necessarily representative of what Kurt Schaffenberger would have done. Kurt had to “ape” it. And probably, his truer style would come forth in his DC work.

But there again, you’ve got, say, Curt Swan and Wayne Boring’s influence over Superman that has to be accounted for. So maybe Kurt was only able to be free when he did Supergirl (laughs)?

Q: So you’re saying that Kurt’s Captain Marvel stuff wasn’t necessarily “true” Schaffenberger.

Q: You read Kurt Schaffenberger’s Captain Marvel stuff when you were a kid in the ’70s. What did his work mean to you?

ROSS: Oh, boy. Well, probably Kurt has one of the cleanest styles ever seen in the history of comics (laughs). Not a “rough” comics artist, for sure. He was the stylistic holdover from a simpler, more carefree, child-driven era of comics into a very adult era of comics. He was one of the few people who made that journey unchanged. He worked on Supergirl (in Action and Adventure Comics) for years, as well as having the opportunity to go from Captain Marvel on one end of his career to Captain Marvel on the later end of his career again. He was kind of unchanged — much like the character of Captain Marvel — from the sort of adolescence and maturing of comics that occurred in the ’60s.

Q: Often, one can spot influences in a given artist’s work. In your case, one can’t literally see Kurt or C.C. Beck in your Captain Marvel. But in a more philosophical sense, maybe that’s where you first fell in love with the character? Could you talk about ways — not necessarily artistic ways — in which Kurt’s work may have crept into your subconscious?

ROSS: (Laughs) Well, just like anything, it’s a case of — he’s amongst the first work I was seeing of Captain Marvel. And I was such an avid Captain Marvel fan because of the Shazam! (TV) show in the ’70s. I was buying the comics as early as I was aware of the character. So Kurt’s would have been among the very first stories I saw of Shazam! He was essentially the guy who came after the period where you had C.C. Beck doing his thing on Captain Marvel, and then Mac Raboy doing his thing on Captain Marvel Jr. and so on. When the characters would come together (in one story), they actually would get the individual artists to do their parts. Like, if Captain Marvel Jr. was going to show up in a Captain Marvel story, he would be drawn by Mac Raboy in his figure.

So in the case of later years of when Schaffenberger was taking the place of C.C. Beck to some degree, he had to mix all the differ-

122

ROSS: But he was there and he was solid. Like, any time they needed artwork related to classic Captain Marvel in the years following when they relaunched the character, they would go to Schaffenberger. Beck was kind of in and out in that first year, I think, of the Shazam! comic book. He pretty much had to be replaced, in effect, by Schaffenberger’s efforts.

mics ]

[ © DC Co

Q: People forget how big Captain Marvel was in the ’70s, with the television show and DC’s revival.

ROSS: He deeply pervaded the ’70s period. The comics at that time were still actually trying to capture that old ’40s essence of storytelling, so it looked like it was the old material from the ’40s. Here, they have Schaffenberger and C.C. Beck working together, and the stuff looked like it ever did. Also, they started to reprint just a ton of the old material at that time. So I was definitely exposed to old classic 1940s Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr. stories. So I was very much aware of the true origins of the character.

Kurt Schaffenberger on Alex Ross

ON THE OCCASION OF HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY, ON A cloudy Friday afternoon in December 2000, some friends of Kurt Schaffenberger met he and wife Dorothy at one of his favorite joints, the Ocean Queen Diner on Route 88 in Brick, New Jersey, for one of his favorite treats, Belgian waffles. The artist wasn’t getting around too well then, and didn’t have too much to say that day. But he perused every page of Shazam! Power of Hope, Alex Ross’s then-new, large-format, painted graphic novel about the superhero Kurt first drew six decades earlier. The veteran artist’s two-word review of Ross’s work: “Beautiful stuff.”

ALEX ROSS

Farewell

[ Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

Members of Kurt Schaffenberger’s family carry his ashes out to sea from Barnegat Light, N.J., on the morning of February 2, 2002.

IN THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER, A DRIVE ALONG Long Beach Boulevard — the main drag on Long Beach Island off the coast of New Jersey — is something you just don’t rush.

Well, you couldn’t, what with the bustling hordes of tourists on foot, bicycle and in cars seeking fun in the sun along the boulevard, which runs roughly 17 miles north-south along the coast of southern Ocean County, the Manahawkin Bay to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Because from Memorial Day to Labor Day, Long Beach Island is the place to be for hip youth and family alike.

But in the dead of winter, the towns along the island — charming little burgs with names like Barnegat Light, Loveladies, Surf City, Ship Bottom, Brant Beach, Beach Haven and Brighton Beach — are something approaching “ghost” towns. Many of the quaint ice cream stands, coffee shops and what-not stores are boarded up for the season. There’s a desolate quality here not unlike The Shining — not that we’re complaining. In the off season, “LBI” has a quiet, solitary beauty.

For such a small town, Barnegat Light at the northern tip of LBI has its share of historic landmarks. Around the corner from one another stand Barnegat Lighthouse State Park, with its imposing red titular structure, and the Barnegat Light U.S. Coast Guard Station.

At the latter, on the morning of February 2, 2002, 16 mourners gathered to bid farewell to Kurt Schaffenberger in a private, military ceremony (organized by his son-in-law, Larry Kelly, a retired Navy captain) which acknowledged Kurt’s service to the United States

124

during World War II. The morning was sunny and clear — the sky seemed even bluer reflecting off the Atlantic — but windy and bitterly cold.

“Oh, God, we pray thee that the memory of our comrade, Kurt, may ever be sacred in our hearts,” intoned Reverend Jeff Elliott, a Navy chaplain and pastor of the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Brant Beach, about eight miles south on the island. Two sailors stood motionless in crisp blue uniforms. On a table behind them lay a white urn containing Kurt’s ashes, an American flag and — in a nod to Kurt’s life’s work — a page of original Superman art drawn by the artist (page 73 from Superman Family #184, a 1977 issue, to be exact).

Following Elliott’s prayers, the flag was displayed by the sailors as a trumpeter in the distance played perfectly a slow, tear-jerking “Taps.” After the flag was ceremoniously folded and salutes exchanged, Elliott presented the flag to Dorothy Schaffenberger “on behalf of the president and a grateful nation.”

To prepare for a boat trip to scatter Kurt’s ashes at sea, 10 of the mourners — including Dorothy, son Karl, daughter Susan, her husband Larry, various grandchildren and Elliott — were led into the station house and instructed to don orange jumpsuits. (Besides protecting the civilians from the bitter cold, these suits would act as flotation devices in the event that someone fell overboard.)

A Coast Guard boat marked “Barnegat Light 41360” then took Kurt Schaffenberger on his final earthly journey.

FAREWELL

Kurt Schaffenberger, at his home in 1998, peruses his vintage Fawcett collection.

[Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

ON A FOGGY EVENING in March of 2002, the New Jersey chapter of the National Cartoonists Society gathered at Peterson’s Riviera Inn — an elegant, darkly lit restaurant on the Manasquan River in Point Pleasant — to remember their departed brother, Kurt Schaffenberger. As drink orders were taken, the group (including Dorothy Schaffenberger, Howard Bender, Jack C. Harris, Frank Evers, Kevin McVey and Jerry Jonas) passed around original artwork and comic books by Kurt.

It’s true — Kurt’s artwork spoke volumes. But no less telling were the droll ‘‘Kurt-isms’’ the artist might let slip in an unguarded moment. On the message of his work: “I’m of the belief that if you want to send a message, call Western Union.” On the comics industry: “Strangely enough, comics is not a very funny business.” And a favorite reply when asked if he’d lately been up to this or that: “Who’s got time?”

Carlin, Mike: 119 Caruba, David: 7, 81, 84, 85 Champlin, Nat: 13-15, 106 Clarke, Robert: 96 Coates, John: 7, 11, 12, 30 Costanza, Pete: 20, 30 Adams, Ansel: 121 Costello, Vince: 14 Adams, Neal: 80 Craig, Johnny: 30 Anderson, Murphy: 99, 101, 102, Craig, Yvonne: 111 110, 113 Crane, Roy: 113 Asherman, Allan: 7, 17, 43, 85 Crockett, Davy: 88 Autry, Gene: 89 Crowley, Wendell: 14, 20, 23 Badu, Erykah: 7 Crumb, Robert: 102, 121 Bagley, Mary Lee: 49 Davis, Howard Leroy: 7, 30, 44 Bald, Kaye: 5, 104-106 Bald, Ken: 5, 12-14, 20, 30, 104-106 Davis, Richard Harding: 30, 97 DeMille, Cecil B.: 84 Barker, Clive: 102 Denver, Bob: 101 Barks, Carl: 102 DeStefano, Stephen: 99 Bates, Cary: 83, 84, 99, 116 Ditko, Steve: 30, 102, 115 Beaumont, Hugh: 105 Donovan, Art: 37 Beck, C.C.: 20-23, 44, 54, 81, 84, Dowd, Marjorie: 106 103, 105, 107-109, 116, 122 Dowd, Victor: 5, 13, 105, 106 Beck, Hilda: 21 Duca, Al: 5, 13, 14 Bender, Howard: 6, 7, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 30, 43, 84, 85, 88, 101-104, Eisner, Will: 9, 102, 107 Elliott, Rev. Jeff: 124 120, 125 Evers, Frank: 125 Bender, Joni: 7 Ford, Eileen: 106 Berra, Yogi: 22, 97 Foster, Harold: 11 Binder, Ione: 20 Binder, Jack: 5, 7, 13, 14, 17, 20-22, Fradon, Ramona: 114 Gaiman, Neal: 102, 107 96, 102, 105, 106 Gaines, Max C.: 30 Binder, Olga: 5, 21 Gamill, Kerry: 119 Binder, Otto: 20, 43, 44 Gibbons, Dave: 99 Bogdanove, Jon: 119 Gibson, Hoot: 11 Bogert, Mrs.: 5, 15, 105 Boring, Wayne: 43, 44, 95, 116, 122 Giella, Frankie: 114 Giella, Joe: 114 Boyajian, Bob: 5, 13, 106 Giordano, Dick: 99 Bridwell, E. Nelson: 99, 115 Goldwater, Richard: 80 Brooks, Samuel Hamilton: 14 Gorelick, Victor: 80 Burton, Tim: 6, 101 Grant, Cary: 95 Buscema, John: 30 Green, Lorne: 95 Bush, Sharon: 49 Greim, Martin L.: 7, 85 Butts, Bob: 13, 14 Grey, Matilda: 49 Byrne, John: 99, 109 Harford, Ray: 5, 13, 106 Cain, Dean: 103 Harris, Jack C.: 81, 101, 115, 118, Caniff, Milton: 11, 102

INDEX

125 Hatcher, Teri: 103 Hazen, Irwin: 110 Hitchcock, Alfred: 86 Hitler, Adolf: 17 Hughes, Richard E.: 30, 31, 88, 110 Hunt, Dave: 99, 110, 116, 117 Infantino, Carmine: 43, 80, 81, 108110, 114 Johnson, Pres. Lyndon B.: 95 Jonas, Jerry: 125 Jordan, Ron: 110 Jurgens, Dan: 119 Kane, Bob: 102 Kanigher, Robert: 43 Keaton, Russell: 113 Kelly, Erin: 54 Kelly, David: 54 Kelly, Jonathan: 54 Kelly, Larry: 54, 57, 124 Kelly, Matthew: 54 Kelly, Meghan: 54 Kelly, Patrick: 54 Kelly, Susan: 22, 23, 54, 56, 57, 87, 104, 124 Kennedy, Jacqueline: 94 Kennedy, Pres. John F.: 94, 95 Kidder, Margot: 49 Kirby, Jack: 9, 101, 102 Kruger, Otto: 105 Kubert, Joe: 43, 112 Lage, Matt: 7, 22, 44 Lee, Stan: 30, 88, 106 Levitz, Paul: 115 Leyendecker, J.C.: 12 Lincoln, Pres. Abraham: 88 Lombardi, Vince: 15 Lowe, Edmund: 106 Maggin, Elliott S!: 83 Makohan, Betty: 49 Martin, Dean: 95 Martin, Edgar: 113 Maynard, Ken: 11 McCay Jr., Winsor: 13 McFarlane, Todd: 102, 109

McVey, Ken: 125 Miller, Ann: 105 Miller, Frank: 99, 109 Mix, Tom: 11 Moore, Alan: 99, 107, 110 Moore, Clayton: 101 Moore, Gary: 94 Moore, Lenny: 37 Muoio, Steve: 102 Murray, Edwin: 30 Nash, Graham: 42, 102, 121 Oliver, Dean: 89 Pérez, George: 110 Pierce, John G.: 7, 22, 45, 80, 81, 84 Plumb, Charlie: 113 Potter, Jimmy: 14, 106 Quinn, Anthony: 96 Raboy, Mac: 22, 122 Raymond, Alex: 11 Reed, Rod: 84 Riss, Pete: 13 Rockwell, Norman: 12 Romita, John: 6 Ross, Alex; 122 Rozakis, Bob: 99 Rylans, Bob: 14 Schaffenberger, Dorothy: 5, 7, 11, 15, 17-23, 54, 56, 57, 86, 87, 94, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103-106, 111, 117, 124, 125 Schaffenberger, Emma: 11, 18, 54, 56, 57 Schaffenberger, Ernst: 11, 12, 18, 56, 57 Schaffenberger, Karl: 18, 22, 23, 5457, 95, 104, 124 Schaffenberger, Kurt: remembered: 4-9, 54, 55, 105-123; in ZellaMehlis: 10, 11; in Connecticut: 11, 12; at Pratt Institute: 12, 13; at the Binder studio: 13-15; during World War II: 16-19; with Fawcett Publications: 20-29, 84-87; postFawcett: 30-41; with DC Comics: 4253, 80-87, 99-101; parents’ death:

56, 57; comic book work: 88-97; retirement: 101-104; death of: 104, 124, 125 Schiff, Jack: 110 Schulz, Charles M.: 102 Schwartz, Jean: 111 Schwartz, Julius: 30, 43, 81, 99, 101, 104, 108-111, 116, 119 Sekowsky, Mike: 110, 114 Shuster, Joe: 12, 99 Siegel, Jerry: 12, 99, 111 Siegel, Mrs. Jerry: 111 Sim, Dave: 7, 30, 44 Smith, Jerry: 49 Starr, Ringo: 114 Staton, Joe: 116 Stewart, Jimmy: 96 Stone, Chic: 30 Swan, Curt: 7, 45, 99, 101-103, 109112, 115-117, 119, 120, 122 Taylor, Elizabeth: 95 Thalmann, Rev. Frederick E.: 20 Thompson, Bud: 22 Twill, F.: 49 Voglesong, Kathy: 1, 6, 7, 54, 55, 101-105, 108, 111-114, 117-119, 120, 124, 125 Von Schmidt, Harold: 12 Wahl, Lou: 31, 120 Walker, Mort: 115 Ward, Bill: 5, 13, 14 Watson, Ethel: 20, 22 Watson, William: 20 Watson, William (son): 20 Weisinger, Mort: 31, 42-45, 49, 80, 110 Wertham, Dr. Fredric: 30 West, Adam: 101 Westlake, John: 14 Williamson, Al: 30 Whitney, Ogden: 30 Wilson, Bill G.: 7, 44, 85 Winter, Maj.: 17 Workman, Cathy: 118 Workman, John: 115, 118

is an award-winning writer and designer for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey. His weekly pop culture page, PAGE X, and celebrity news page, CELEBS, appear in four newspapers, and his articles are frequently syndicated through Gannett News Service. His articles and artwork have appeared in Comics Scene, Comics Buyer’s Guide, Comic Book Marketplace, Alter Ego, Soap Opera Weekly, Fangoria, Gorezone, Toxic Horror, Filmfax, Psychotronic Video, Stop!, Faces Rocks, Metal Madness and Metal Muscle. He wrote and illustrated the comic book Defective Comics (Comic Zone Productions) and the 50-card set Defective Comics Trading Cards (Active Marketing). He and his wife Kathy live at the Jersey Shore.

Mark Voger

126

[Photo by Kathy Voglesong ]

INDEX

Celebrate JACK KIRBY’s 100th birthday!

THE PARTY STARTS WITH

KIRBY100

TWOMORROWS and the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate JACK KIRBY’S 100th BIRTHDAY in style with the release of KIRBY100, a full-color visual holiday for the King of comics! It features an all-star line-up of 100 COMICS PROS who critique key images from Kirby’s 50-year career, admiring his page layouts, dramatics, and storytelling skills, and lovingly reminiscing about their favorite characters and stories. Featured are BRUCE TIMM, ALEX ROSS, WALTER SIMONSON, JOHN BYRNE, JOE SINNOTT, STEVE RUDE, ADAM HUGHES, WENDY PINI, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE GIBBONS, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and dozens more of the top names in comics. Their essays serve to honor Jack’s place in comics history, and prove (as if there’s any doubt) that KIRBY IS KING! This double-length book is edited by JOHN MORROW and JON B. COOKE, with a Kirby cover inked by MIKE ROYER. (The Limited Hardcover Edition includes 16 bonus color pages of Kirby’s 1960s Deities concept drawings) All characters TM & © their respective owners.

(224-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $34.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-078-6 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 (240-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER with 16 bonus pages) $45.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-079-3

2017 RATES

SHIPS AUGUST 2017 SUBSCRIPTIONS ECONOMY US Alter Ego (Six 100-page issues) $65.00 Back Issue (Eight 80-page issues) $73.00 BrickJournal (Six 80-page issues) $55.00 Comic Book Creator (Four 80-page issues) $40.00 Jack Kirby Collector (Four 100-page issues) $45.00

EXPEDITED US $83.00 $88.00 $66.00 $50.00 $58.00

PREMIUM US $92.00 $97.00 $73.00 $54.00 $61.00

INTERNATIONAL $102.00 $116.00 $87.00 $60.00 $67.00

DIGITAL ONLY $29.70 $31.60 $23.70 $15.80 $19.80

ALL THE BEST...

Comics History American Comic Book Chronicles volumes: • 1950s • 1960-64 • 1965-69 • 1970s • 1980s Coming Soon: • 1940-44 • 1945-49 • 1990s • Marvel Comics in the 1960s, 1970s, & 1980s

Classic Artists • Jack Kirby • Will Eisner • Carmine Infantino • Sal Buscema • Don Heck • John Romita Sr. • Herb Trimpe • Joe Kubert • Marie Severin • Al Plastino • Joe Sinnott • Dan Spiegle • Vince Colletta

Modern Masters

Companions

• Alan Davis • George Pérez • John Byrne • Michael Golden • Mark Schultz • Mike Allred • John Romita Jr. • Mike Ploog • Guy Davis • Jeff Smith • Eric Powell • Paolo Rivera

• All-Star Comics • Silver Age Sci-Fi • Batman • Superman • Flash • Hawkman • Teen Titans • THUNDER Agents • Fawcett Comics • Quality Comics • Star*Reach • MLJ heroes

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

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

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

Plus Horror, Pop Culture, & more!

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

URGENT WARNING FOR OUR READERS! DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS! We are experiencing huge demand for our recent magazines. Case in point: Back Issue #88 & #89 and Alter Ego #141 are already completely SOLD OUT, with other issues about to run out.

Don’t wait for a convention or sale— order now!

BACK ISSUE #99

ALTER EGO #149

ALTER EGO #150

ALTER EGO #151

ALTER EGO #152

Showcases GIL KANE, with an incisive and free-wheeling interview conducted in the 1990s by DANIEL HERMAN for his 2001 book Gil Kane: The Art of the Comics— plus other surprise features centered around the artistic co-creator of the Silver Age Green Lantern and The Atom! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and BILL SCHELLY! Green Lantern cover by KANE and GIELLA!

STAN LEE’s 95th birthday! Rare 1980s LEE interview by WILL MURRAY—GER APELDOORN on Stan’s non-Marvel writing in the 1950s—STAN LEE/ROY THOMAS e-mails of the 21st century—and more special features than you could shake Irving Forbush at! Also FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), BILL SCHELLY, and MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Colorful Marvel multi-hero cover

by Big JOHN BUSCEMA!

Golden Age artist FRANK THOMAS (The Owl! The Eye! Dr. Hypno!) celebrated by Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt’s MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Plus the scintillating (and often offbeat) Golden & Silver Age super-heroes of Western Publishing’s DELL & GOLD KEY comics! Art by MANNING, DITKO, KANE, MARSH, GILL, SPIEGLE, SPRINGER, NORRIS, SANTOS, THORNE, et al.! Plus FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Unsung artist/writer LARRY IVIE conceived (and named!) the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, helped develop T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, brought EC art greats to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more!

SANDY PLUNKETT chronicles his career, with art by FRAZETTA, CRANDALL, WOOD, KRENKEL, DOOLIN, and others!

Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Oct. 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Dec. 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Feb. 2018

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships April 2018

BACK ISSUE #100

BACK ISSUE #101

BACK ISSUE #102

BACK ISSUE #103

BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES’ 25th ANNIVERSARY! Looks back at the influential cartoon series. Plus: episode guide, Harley Quinn history, DC’s Batman Adventures and Animated Universe comic books, and tribute to artist MIKE PAROBECK. Featuring KEVIN ALTIERI, RICK BURCHETT, PAUL DINI, GERARD JONES, MARTIN PASKO, DAN RIBA, TY TEMPLETON, BRUCE TIMM, and others! BRUCE TIMM cover!

100-PAGE SPECIAL featuring Bronze Age Fanzines and Fandom! Buyer’s Guide, Comic Book Price Guide, DC’s Comicmobile, Super DC Con ’76, Comic Reader, FOOM, Amazing World of DC, Charlton Bullseye, Squa Tront, & more! Featuring ALAN LIGHT, BOB OVERSTREET, SCOTT EDELMAN, BOB GREENBERGER, JACK C. HARRIS, TONY ISABELLA, DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT, BOB LAYTON, PAUL LEVITZ, MICHAEL USLAN, and others!

ROCK ’N’ ROLL COMICS! Flash Gordon star SAM J. JONES interview, KISS in comics, Marvel’s ALICE COOPER, T. Rex’s MARC BOLAN interviews STAN LEE, PAUL McCARTNEY, Charlton’s Partridge Family, David Cassidy, and Bobby Sherman comics, Marvel’s Steeltown Rockers, Monkees comics, & Comic-Con band Seduction of the Innocent.

With MAX ALLAN COLLINS, JACK KIRBY, BILL MUMY, ALAN WEISS, and others!

MERCS AND ANTIHEROES! Deadpool’s ROB LIEFELD and FABIAN NICIEZA interviewed!

Histories of Cable, Taskmaster, Deathstroke the Terminator, the Vigilante, and Wild Dog, plus… Archie meets the Punisher?? Featuring TERRY BEATTY, MAX ALLAN COLLINS, PAUL KUPPERBERG, BATTON LASH, JEPH LOEB, DAVID MICHELINIE, MARV WOLFMAN, KEITH POLLARD, and others!

Deadpool vs. Cable cover by LIEFELD!

ALL-STAR EDITORS ISSUE! Past and present editors reveal “How I Beat the Dreaded Deadline Doom”! Plus: ARCHIE GOODWIN and MARK GRUENWALD retrospectives, E. NELSON BRIDWELL interview, DIANA SCHUTZ interview, ALLAN ASHERMAN revisits DC’s ’70s editorial department, Marvel Assistant Editors’ Month, and a history of PERRY WHITE! With an unpublished 1981 Captain America cover by MIKE ZECK!

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Aug. 2017

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Sept. 2017

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Nov. 2017

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Jan. 2018

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships March 2018

BRICKJOURNAL #48

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #17

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

KIRBY COLLECTOR #72

KIRBY COLLECTOR #73

THE WORLD OF LEGO MECHA! Learn the secrets and tricks of building mechs with some of the best mecha builders in the world! Interviews with BENJAMIN CHEH, KELVIN LOW, LU SIM, FREDDY TAM, DAVID LIU, and SAM CHEUNG! Plus: Minifigure customizing from JARED K. BURKS, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, & more!

The legacy and influence of WALLACE WOOD, with a comprehensive essay about Woody’s career, extended interview with Wood assistant RALPH REESE (artist for Marvel’s horror comics, National Lampoon, and undergrounds), a long chat with cover artist HILARY BARTA (Marvel inker, Plastic Man and America’s Best artist with ALAN MOORE), plus our usual columns, features, and the humor of HEMBECK!

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: The 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, STEVE SHERMAN & MIKE ROYER panel, WALTER SIMONSON interview, & unseen pencil art galleries! SIMONSON cover inks!

FIGHT CLUB! Jack’s most powerful fights and in-your-face action: Real-life WAR EXPERIENCES, Marvel’s KID COWBOYS, the Madbomb saga and all those negative 1970s Marvel fan letters, interview with SCOTT McCLOUD on his Kirby-inspired punchfest DESTROY!!, rare Kirby interview, 2017 WonderCon Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by DEAN HASPIEL!

ONE-SHOTS! We cover Kirby’s best (and worst) short spurts on his wildest concepts: ANIMATION IDEAS, DINGBATS, JUSTICE INC., MANHUNTER, ATLAS, PRISONER, and more! Plus MARK EVANIER and our other regular panelists, rare Kirby interview, panels from the 2017 Kirby Centennial celebration, pencil art galleries, and some one-shot surprises! BIG BARDA #1 cover finishes by MIKE ROYER!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Oct. 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Winter 2018

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Summer 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Fall 2017

REED CRANDALL Illustrator of the Comics

From the 1940s to the ’70s, REED CRANDALL brought a unique and masterful style to American comic art. Using an illustrator’s approach on everything he touched, Crandall gained a reputation as the “artist’s artist” through his skillful interpretations of Golden Age super-heroes DOLL MAN, THE RAY, and BLACKHAWK (his signature character); horror and sci-fi for the legendary EC COMICS line; Warren Publishing’s CREEPY, EERIE, and BLAZING COMBAT; the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS and EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS characters; and even FLASH GORDON for King Features. Comic art historian ROGER HILL has compiled a complete and extensive history of Crandall’s life and career, from his early years and major successes, through his tragic decline and passing in 1982. This FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER includes NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOS, a wealth of RARE AND UNPUBLISHED ARTWORK, and over EIGHTY THOUSAND WORDS of insight into one of the true illustrators of the comics.

(256-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $49.95 • (Digital Edition) $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-077-9 • SHIPS JULY 2017

It’s

GROOVY, baby!

Follow-up to Mark Voger’s smash hit MONSTER MASH!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

From WOODSTOCK to THE BANANA SPLITS, from SGT. PEPPER to H.R. PUFNSTUF, from ALTAMONT to THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY, GROOVY is a far-out trip to the era of lava lamps and love beads. This profusely illustrated HARDCOVER BOOK, in PSYCHEDELIC COLOR, features interviews with icons of grooviness such as PETER MAX, BRIAN WILSON, PETER FONDA, MELANIE, DAVID CASSIDY, members of the JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, CREAM, THE DOORS, THE COWSILLS and VANILLA FUDGE; and cast members of groovy TV shows like THE MONKEES, LAUGH-IN and THE BRADY BUNCH. GROOVY revisits the era’s ROCK FESTIVALS, MOVIES, ART—even COMICS and CARTOONS, from the 1968 ‘mod’ WONDER WOMAN to R. CRUMB. A color-saturated pop-culture history written and designed by MARK VOGER (author of the acclaimed book MONSTER MASH), GROOVY is one trip that doesn’t require dangerous chemicals!

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-080-9 • DIGITAL EDITION: $15.95

SHIPS OCTOBER 2017 • Free preview online now!

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Pop History.

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

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

Photo by Kathy Voglesong; all characters TM & © 2003 DC Comics