Modern Masters Vol. 13: Jerry Ordway by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

T H I R T E E N :

JERRY ORDWAY

By Eric NolenWeathington

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Modern Masters Volume Thirteen:

M O D E R N M A S T E R S V O L U M E T H I RT E E N :

JERRY ORDWAY edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover art by Jerry Ordway front cover color by Tom Ziuko all interviews in this book were conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Steven Tice

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • September 2007 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-79-5 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway unless otherwise noted. The Acrobat, The Messenger, Proton ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway. WildStar and all related characters ™ and ©2007 Al Gordon and Jerry Ordway. Red Menace and all related characters ™ and ©2007 Pet Fly Production, Inc., Flyworks Productions, Inc., & Second Row Productions, Inc. All-Star Squadron, Amazing Man, Aquaman, Arsenal, Atom, Azrael, Batgirl, Batman, Bibbo, Black Adam, Blaze, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Brainwave, Captain Atom, Captain Marvel, Cat Grant, Clark Kent, CM3, Commander Steel, Creeper, Cyclotron, Darkstar, Deadman, Dr. Fate, Dr. Mid-Nite, Dr. Sivana, Doom Patrol, Doomsday, Eradicator, Extant, Firebrand, Firebug, Flash, Fury, Gangbuster, Geo-Force, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, Harbinger, Hourman, Huntress, Hyppolyta, Impulse, Infinity Inc., Jade, Jimmy Olsen, Joker, Jor-El, Justice League, Kal-El, King Kull, Lex Luthor, Lobo, Lois Lane, Manhunter, Martian Manhunter, Mary Bromfield, Mary Marvel, Max Mercury, Metamorpho, Mr. Bones, Mr. Mind, Mr. Miracle, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Mongul, Negative Man, Nightshade, Nuklon, Obsidian, Plastic Man, Power Girl, Primal Force, The Question, Ragman, Ra’s al Ghul, Ragdoll, Rainbow Raider, Raven, The Ray, Red Star, Red Tornado, Reverse Flash, Rex the Wonder Dog, Richard Dragon, Riddler, Rita Farr, Robin, Royal Flush Gang, Shazam!, Shining Knight, Solomon Grundy, Starman, Steel, Supergirl, Superman, Superwoman, Tarantula, Tawky Tawny, Vicki Vale, Waverider, Wildcat, Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman, and all related characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Tom Strong, Top 10, and all related characters ™ and ©2007 America’s Best Comics LLC. Timespan, Undertow ™ and ©2007 WildStorm Productions. Angel, Arkon, Avengers, Beast, Black Knight, Blob, Bucky, Captain America, Cyclops, Daredevil, Firestar, Freedom Force, Giant-Man, Hawkeye, Hulk, Iceman, Iron Man, Jean Grey, Mystique, Namor, Odin, Photon, Prime, Punisher, Quasar, Scarlet Witch, Spider- Woman, Squadron Supreme, Thor, Thundra, Titania, Vision, Wasp, Wonder Man, The Wrecker, X-Factor ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Mighty Man, Savage Dragon ™ and ©2007 Erik Larsen. // Supreme ™ and ©2007 Rob Liefeld. // Hellboy ™ and ©2007 Mike Mignola. Grace, Mecha, Rebel, Ruby, Titan, Warmaker ™ and ©2007 Dark Horse Comics. Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Princess Leia, Star Wars ™ and ©2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. Buck Rogers ™ and ©2007 The Trustees of the Dille Family Trust. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future ™ and ©2007 Landmark Entertainment Group. Sectaurs: Warriors of Symbiote ™ and ©2007 Coleco Holdings, LLC. Editorial package ©2007 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Mike Wieringo—one of the best artists and perhaps the best human being I have ever had the pleasure to call a friend. Your work and your deeds are an inspiration, and we miss you greatly. And as ever, to Donna, Iain, and Caper. Acknowledgements Jerry Ordway, for the long conversations and for taking the time to rummage through the art files. Special Thanks Walt Grogan, Geoff Johns, Michael Mikulovsky, Tom Ziuko, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Thirteen:

JERRY ORDWAY

Table of Contents Introduction by Geoff Johns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: All You Need is a Little Incentive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Keep ’em Flying—the Pages That Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Part Three: To Infinity Inc.... and Beyond! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Part Four: He’s an Artist! He’s a Writer! It’s Superman! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Part Five: It’s All about Family... the Marvel Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Part Six: Marvel, Alan Moore, and the McCarthy Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Part Seven: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Introduction T

here are thousands of super-heroes, but there are only a few that transcend the pages of comic books and become icons. I’m honored to be a part of this Modern Masters spotlighting an icon. He’s a friend and one of the greatest writers, pencilers and inkers in the history of comic books—Jerry Ordway.

Back in the ’80s, Jerry’s slick, powerful and emotional style in All-Star Squadron, and later Infinity Inc., immediately captured my imagination. He took characters I’d never heard of or taken the time to know, like Commander Steel and the Huntress, and he lured me right to them. His storytelling was unmatched and his love for the medium and the heroes he worked with shined through in every panel. I followed Jerry’s work wherever he went. From Crisis on Infinite Earths to Superman to WildStar. From penciler to inker to writer. Jerry not only redefined the world of Superman and the entire DC Golden Age Pantheon, he also, in my mind, is the only creator that successfully captured the essence of C.C. Beck’s Marvel Family and built upon it. His graphic novel and subsequent monthly comic book, The Power of Shazam!, became one of the most inspirational series in my career. Billy Batson was a fully realized and sympathetic character struggling with the wisdom of Solomon and the loss of his family. Jerry also created a beautifully complex and emotional backstory for Black Adam and he had a bizarrely wonderful take on Mr. Mind. Although I’d been a huge admirer of his work for years, I didn’t have the pleasure of “meeting” Jerry until 1994. I was in college at Michigan State University. Jerry was writing the monthly The Power of Shazam! series. I stumbled upon his email address when I first really started using e-mail. I was blown away by how polite, warm and enthusiastic Jerry was. I did an interview with him that I sent into Comic Shop News on his great work with Captain Marvel. They printed it. It was my first published work. I’ll never forget Jerry’s graciousness towards a comic fan he had never even met. Years later, I found myself in Los Angeles and writing comics. I’d stayed in touch with Jerry and, like always, eagerly followed everything he was working on. He remained a consummate professional. Eventually, I had the pleasure to fulfill one of my lifelong dreams of working with Jerry both on JSA and Infinite Crisis. His work today is as compelling as ever. His storytelling is even more unmatched in this day and age. As a comic reader, I’m lucky he’s devoted his talents to comics. As a comic writer, I’m eternally grateful for his collaboration. And as a friend, I congratulate him on being rightfully recognized as a modern master. Geoff Johns July, 2007 4

Part 1:

All You Need is a Little Incentive college by the time I really had much memory of him. He came home on school breaks and I remember him working as a coach at the local playgrounds in the summertime. It was a bonus because he was driving, and took us places, almost like an uncle would. My brother Joel, who is two years older than I am, shared a room with me growing up, and we’re still pretty close, even though he now lives in North Pole, Alaska. Growing up in Wisconsin, they were both fishermen and hunters, which I really never was. I liked to draw, and read comics.

MODERN MASTERS: You were born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you were born in November of ’57? JERRY ORDWAY: Yeah. I was a Thanksgiving baby. MM: Was it really on Thanksgiving? JERRY: It really was. My mother, a single mom, raising myself and my two brothers. She ran a tavern as kind of a home business, basically, because we lived in the back of it, and she usually did a big Thanksgiving dinner for all the customers. Most of the customers were retired guys and old war veterans and stuff, and they were regulars and a lot of them were there from 7:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night, so she would generally feed them, as well. But she had a big Thanksgiving spread. And the story that I always heard was that she had the bar open all day, prepared and served turkey dinners to a couple dozen people, and then washed the dishes and cleaned up after this whole thing before she called my Aunt Mary to drive her to the hospital. Unfortunately, they didn’t make it on time and a couple of Milwaukee’s Police helped deliver me. It’s probably the only time I was ever early for anything. [laughter]

MM: Did either of them read comics at all? JERRY: Yeah, my brother Mike was of the age that he read stuff during the ’50s, but it was also during the EC scare—the Congressional hearings and all that. I heard his complaints many times that he was only allowed to read Classics Illustrated and maybe Gold Key. When he got older and dumped comics, he still had a box of comics in the basement of my aunt’s house, and unfortunately there were no super-hero books except for two. One was Superman 3-D, and the other one was Captain 3-D, the Kirby 3-D book. The rest were Classics Illustrated, so I was kind of disappointed. My brother Joel and I probably both discovered comics around the same age. When we were pretty young we used to get bags of coverless comics and beat-up comics from this friend of our family—mostly Superman and Batman. They were pretty worn out, but I know we pored over them before my mom probably tossed them out. We really got into it later though, when the Marvel Superheroes cartoon was on TV,

MM: So you had two brothers. Older brothers? JERRY: Yes, both of them. My oldest brother Mike is 15 years older than me, so there’s a big gap there. My brother Mike was effectively away at 6

around 1966. He and I both used to run home from school to watch that. We discovered the comics later, as an offshoot of that. MM: So you didn’t really become a Marvel-head until later in the game? JERRY: Well, with the giveaway comics that we got, I think I was too young to really register much about them except to recognize Superman and Batman, and I don’t think I was really at a reading age at that point. I was maybe four or five, and not totally absorbing it. When Marvel Superheroes came around, I was closer to eight years old, seeing them on TV first with all the action, and like, “Wow! Cool characters!” My brother really liked Thor, and I liked Captain America and Iron Man, so it was a progression from there. And a lot of stuff happened in ’66, too, because the Batman TV show came on. A lot of people hate the show, but I loved it. I was the right age for it. And I think it helped comics a lot, because it brought comics back into the vocabulary for a while, with Adam West as Batman appearing on the cover of Life or Look magazine. MM: At what point did you start paying attention to the credits in the comics? JERRY: Oh, I think when we first got the Marvels on a train trip to Colorado. We were going to my older brother’s graduation from college in May of 1967. We were heading to the train station to take a train to Denver—it was an overnight train ride. My mother handed us a dollar and we went to the Milwaukee train station lobby, the little gift shop, and found a dollar’s worth of 12¢ Marvel comics. I took a chance on Spider-Man and Daredevil, who were not on the TV show, but they looked interesting. Thor. I think Fantastic Four, even. And then we really fell in love with them on that train ride. We read them over and over. With Spider-Man I just really zeroed in on Stan Lee and John Romita. MM: What are your earliest memories of drawing? Were you drawing before you got into the comics? JERRY: Yeah, I think I was always somebody who used to draw. I was always into craft stuff when I was a little kid. When I was in first or second grade, the teacher asked us to write about, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wanted to be a clown or a race car driver. [laughter] I never heard the end of that. [laughter] Whenever I was misbehaving and making my mom mad, she’d say, “This is the little clown who’s going to make me laugh?” MM: How long did you hang onto that dream? [laughter] JERRY: Honestly, I don’t know. That would probably have been ’63, ’64, something like that. If you didn’t want to be a race car driver, you probably wanted to be an astronaut. The local TV stations that ran Marvel Superheroes—because it was a syndicated show—a lot of cities ran contests during the show. Kids would send in drawings, and you could be entered to win a bicycle. There were three age groups, and I was in the youngest 7

Previous Page: A 1990s reimagining of Jerry’s childhood creation, Proton. Above: Jerry (sitting) and older brother Joel in their finest cowboy regalia ordering up sarsaparillas at their mother’s tavern. Left: Jerry (age 8 or 9 here) stands guard outside his mother’s tavern. Proton ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway.

Right: One of Jerry’s favorite characters— Captain America—in a 2007 commission piece. Below: The Acrobat was Jerry’s very first creation (way back in 1969). Next Page: Jerry’s cover art for Okay Comics #1 and #2 (both from 1975)—the only two issues Jerry and friend, Dave Koula, published. These black-&-white comics were printed on 8-1/2" x 11" sheets, which were then stapled and folded in half. Acrobat, Proton ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway. Captain America ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

age group. I’m sure I sent in more than one drawing. During the show, maybe once a week they would have a little gallery where the TV host would have the camera pan across the winning drawings for that week, and my brother and I would sit there and make fun of the drawings, because we were totally superior. [laughter] “Oh, look at that one, that’s terrible. How can that win?” And here we were, really making fun of these drawings, and then he says, “And in the youth category, Jerry Ordway.” I said, “Wait a minute!” I had drawn a Thor, and had forgotten to draw the wings on his helmet and his cape, or something like that. I didn’t win the grand prize, but every winner in each category got a dollar, and I remember being very thrilled with a crisp, brand-new dollar bill arriving in an envelope from Channel 18. MM: You said you were more into certain characters. Was there a point where you started following creators from book to book? I guess with Marvel it was mostly Kirby, anyway. JERRY: In the period that I started, on the main books, Spider-Man was always John Romita. I believe John Buscema had taken over Avengers around that time, so there were steady guys, and those were the guys that I really learned to love, all the way across the board. My least favorite book was probably the one with Sub-Mariner and the Hulk. I didn’t care as much for it, but I still bought it. I loved Iron Man, I loved Captain America, I loved The Avengers, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Thor. Fantastic Four was kind of like, enh; I wasn’t that into it at the time because it almost seemed too science-fictiony for my taste, you know, the sophisticated taste of an eight- or nine-year-old. But, yeah, I knew all the artists. I was impressed with Gene Colan, I was impressed with John Romita, I was impressed with John Buscema, and Kirby. Nobody seemed to draw those guys like he did. I used to sit down and look at the cover and go side-by-side and try to make my own version of the cover on Manila paper with markers, or pencils with markers—whatever I had handy. I did that for several years. I remember having the neighbor kids, friends of mine, be impressed. “Oh, wow, look how good you did that!” The people in my mom’s tavern would of course see that art, and the first question they would ask is, “Is that drawing freehand, or did you trace it?” So I was always very conscious of the fact that real art had to be drawn freehand and not traced, which I found out later was not the case when I got into commercial art. Everybody traced! [laughter] MM: At what point did you start drawing your own stories? JERRY: I have a whole pile of stuff that I did, my own characters, when I was around that age. Everybody’s got their own really stupid characters. I had Rubber Man, which was probably 8

more Mr. Fantastic, but he was a little Elongated Man, too, when I think about it, because he solved crimes. I had the Acrobat, who was kind of a Captain America/Daredevil hybrid. I had my group comic called The Crimefighters, with Supercop. I think I started doing those around 1969. I realized at some point when I was copying the Marvel covers and different poses that, “Well, I should be doing these things on my own.” So I think it was around 1969, ’70, that I started really trying to do my own characters. And, like any other kid, I had a million other distractions. So I would start a lot of comics. They would always be comic book-sized, and usually done with a black ballpoint pen, because that seemed to give you the most printed-looking result. Unfortunately, the black ballpoint pens bled terribly over the years into that newsprint, so they all have that marker-like solvent halo now. I was pretty enterprising. I had another friend of mine who was around my brother’s age—he was my brother’s friend, but my friend, too. His name was Dave Koula, and Dave used to draw in more of a Sergio Aragonés kind of style—really freeform, wacky stuff. He and I would do a lot of drawings, and I got him into drawing some of my stories with my characters. I think that’s when we first started coming up with Okay Comics, because Okay was Ordway-Koula. We would do these things, but the only people who really would see them would be family and the customers in my mom’s tavern. MM: You didn’t show them around school? JERRY: No. I was always a little embarrassed by extra attention. I was a good student, and I got praised from my teachers for being a good student, and in art class I always was known as the artist and everything, so I kind of didn’t need any extra stroking. I mean, my closest friends I would show them to, but anybody else... my mom would show them around. They still survive somewhere. I’ll have to find that box they’re in someday. MM: How did you start getting involved with fanzines? JERRY: I believe the first thing I discovered was actually through the Marvel classifieds. It was also the first time that I discovered that certain comics actually were published that I never saw, even though we had a really good newsstand in downtown Milwaukee. There were certain books that just never made it to the newsstand, like the Iron Man & Sub-Mariner one-shot. There were a couple of books like that that I searched for in the classifieds in the Marvels, and I sent for a catalog from Robert Bell in New York. I spent birthday money or whatever I had saved up for these back issues, and that was really the start of it. Then I started noticing other stuff. I think The Monster Times might have been the first thing, but I started noticing other fanzines, and that led to Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector, to the Buyer’s Guide. The Buyer’s Guide was mostly classified ads then, because if you had anything, you advertised in there. And I bought some stuff from various people, through the mail. I also drew art for other people’s fanzines. You would do a drawing, or ink something, and send it off, and you never knew what happened with it. You were 9

that you could use a lot of whiteout and it didn’t matter. The message was basically, you were doing artwork for reproduction. Anything goes, even inch-thick white-out. And it was somewhere around that same time I think Charlton did a really, really little booklet that you had to send away for—probably something I saw in the Buyer’s Guide. It was a Charlton Bullseye production that had art tips. It was all this really simple, basic stuff, like, “Here’s what erasers we use. Here’s what a pen would look like. Here’s what kind of paper you use,” and that was a valuable asset at that time. I learned early on that if you were going to be a real comic artist, you couldn’t use markers, you couldn’t use crappy paper, and you had to learn how to use a real brush and real ink and dip pens and all that. I’m sure that’s when all that got stuck in my brain.

lucky if you got a copy of the finished fanzine. Most times the person never published the fanzine, because we were all just doing this for fun, and life interrupts. Around 1973, I think, Tim Corrigan ran an ad in the Marvel comics, and I sent away for his first issue, because he was looking for art submissions for Tim Corrigan’s Superhero Comics. I got his first issue, and I was like, “Wow. He’s paying ten dollars a page!” I sent him one of my Messenger stories—I had come up with the character, probably in 1971. He said, “Yeah, I’m going to print it, but I can’t pay you ten dollars a page. Sales aren’t what I expected.” So I got, like, a dollar a page. But I was a kid. A dollar a page, you might as well be paying me a fortune, y’know? I was just counting the amount of comics I could buy with that ten dollars. Or art supplies, which I bought myself, as well.

MM: So what about your art classes in high school? Were you interested in other media as well?

MM: By that point you had at least figured out some of the tools of the trade?

JERRY: I used to like to make movies. I had inherited from my older brother a Kodak Brownie movie camera. I used it to film Dracula vs. the Wolfman. Then I actually hand-sewed a Spider-Man costume. I was going to wear it, but I was too embarrassed, so I got my friend Frank Flores to wear it, and we filmed Spider-Man vs. the Wolfman. Dave Koula played the Wolfman. He also played Dracula. [laughter] I was lucky not to have to be in too many because I was always filming these things. I don’t know if you remember 8mm, but you got basically a minute-and-a-half on the film, and then you had to turn the roll over when you finished so that when they processed it, it was split down the middle. The developed film was twice as long—a three-minute film. And I remember the processing being pretty expensive, and the film being expensive, and, of course, the results were not that great. We all laughed, anyway. My friend Frank put that Spider-Man costume on and climbed out of our second-story window so that I could capture him climbing into the window. Way beyond the call of duty. [laughter]

JERRY: Well, yeah. I knew a few basics, like the art was actually drawn bigger than print size, and was in black-&-white, not color. In my sophomore year in high school—1972—one guy in my art class had said, “Oh, there’s a great store with back issues, and they’ve got all kinds of stuff.” My aunt drove me there, because it was supposedly in a bad neighborhood, and it was closed. I was like, “Oh, come on!” But it was one of those stores that was open specific hours around somebody’s day job work schedule. I finally got in there on a Saturday. It was called The Good Old Days and was owned by a guy named Dale Manesis, and Ron Killian helped out running the comics stuff. At some point around the time I was first going there, someone brought a big pile of artwork that they were selling. It was piles of pages, and they were selling it really cheap. I remember Irv Novick pages, I remember Bob Brown pages, and there was Gil Kane Captain Action—a whole issue, maybe. They were selling these things for something like ten dollars a page. I had birthday money, so I bought a page of Gil Kane inking Gil Kane on Captain Action. And that was really my first study of not only the size of original art, but the fact

MM: Were you interested in painting, or sculpting? 10

JERRY: I was pretty focused on comics. And comics were a black-&-white medium to me because that’s what I understood they were, even though they were color in the final product. I had blinders on, and I was also pretty snobbish—anti-commercial art or painting or any of that at that age—because comics weren’t really well thought of, so I think I was overreacting in a way. But the high school that I went to was Milwaukee Technical High School. It was “boys only” my first year, and then it became co-ed in my sophomore year. They were a technical school that offered wood shop, and you could train at a pre-apprentice level for plumbing, all the different trades—metal, machine shop, photography, printing. As a freshman, you had to sample a month of each of the shops, and then at the end of the year it was your decision to choose which one you were going to major in for your sophomore to senior years. I did well in drafting and Algebra, and was recommended for the preengineering courses, which would have continued the drafting and architectural kind of thing, but I really lobbied against that. I’m very happy to say that my mother finally backed down and let me take the commercial art course, which wasn’t really that advanced. It wasn’t really difficult for me either because I had a built-in interest in art. But it was really fun in its own way. It was a two-period-a-day program—you still had to have your math and English and all that other stuff. In art you would work on projects, whether it was learning the color spectrum and complementary colors, or learning how to do block lettering, things like that. As you advanced through to senior year, the projects got a little bit more involved. Being originally a boys’ school, sports was a real gung-ho thing there. They were citywide football champions, and had a great basketball team, and all that, but with football, they were fanatics. As a senior, I got to paint these giant murals that would be placed in the lobby of the school. They were on large

brown paper, that you unroll to about 10' wide by 4' tall, and I got to choose one of my friends to be the assistant. We would get an idea, and get the idea approved, and then we would paint it in poster paint, kind of comic style. We were the Boys’ Tech Trojans, and the Trojan was great— he had a sword, he had a helmet, he was a warrior. And he would always be doing some sort of mayhem to whatever mascot of the team they were playing that week. The only one I really got into trouble with was [laughs], they were playing the Cardinals one week, and I had the Trojan with a meat grinder shoving the cardinal in. [laughter] It was pretty gory, with chunks of cardinal flying out of the

Previous Page: Cover art for Tim Corrigan’s Superhero Comics #4 (1975). Below: Iron Man drops back for the pass. Just for fun, Jerry tried his hand at inking Kirby. The Messenger ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway. Iron Man ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

meat grinder. The principal wasn’t thrilled, but the football coach came up and told us he really thought it was the best thing we had ever done. [laughter] MM: After high school, did you need more training, or did that prepare you enough to get a job right after school?

Above: Proton then... in a panel from a two-page spread taken from his second appearance (Okay Comics #2). Right: Proton drawing for the cover logo of Okay Comics #1. Next Page: And Proton now! This 1994 illustration could have been the cover to Proton #1 if Jerry had decided to do his own thing at Image rather than work on WildStar. Proton and all related characters ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway.

JERRY: Well, as I mentioned earlier, my mother had a tavern, and it was in a bad neighborhood. This was maybe five years before they re-gentrified the area. The building dated to the 1890s, and like any other building there, it was pretty run-down. But she had the choice of selling the building. The business was really kind of valueless at that point, because most of the old-timers who were regulars had died off over the many years. She held on until I finished high school, and then she sold the building and just closed the business in ’76. So I was aware that I needed to get a job. [laughs] Because of my 3.8 average, my brother Mike pushed me to continue school, so I went to Milwaukee Area Technical College, kind of to prove I could hack it, because Mike had gone to college and graduated. My brother Joe had gone into the Air Force when he got out of high school. I didn’t really want to go to college, but Mike said, “Well, you’re a good student, in the top ten of your class, seventh out of a thousand grads at Tech.” So I took all kinds of hardcore courses. I took economics, biology, things like that—geology, hard-science courses—and I proved myself. That was my goal. But I got a reprieve right after the midterm exams. I got a call from my high school art teacher who asked if I would come in and talk to him. He’d heard of a job at a typography studio. They needed someone with an artistic eye, even though it wasn’t a drawing job. So that decision was made rather quickly, and I started working at Altenhoffen Typographers—I think it was the beginning of 1976, in January—and that was my first full-time experience of working for anybody, really. I worked for a year-and-a-half at that job. I learned how to make photostats, and set type, and do paste-ups. It was all a photographic process. You would do a headline for an ad for Evinrude Motors or something like that, then put together the mechanical for the printer. 12

Below: Jerry’s inks over Mike Machlan’s pencils depicting a classic battle for Marvel Fanfare. Next Page: Jerry at the drawing board, circa 1978, and Marvel’s Titania—an evil stand-in for Wonder Woman— done for The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Daredevil, Namor, Titania ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

The job was great training, but I got kind of itchy. And one my co-workers, Larry Beard, kept saying, “You’re an artist. You’re too young to get stuck in a job like this.” And he really bugged me about it. I thought I was in a career, but he pointed out that I was aiming too low. He was a good guy and persuasive. As I thought about it, I said, “I don’t know anything about commercial art, but I’ll go take a chance and see if I can get comic book work.” A year earlier, Mike Machlan—who I’d met while doing my two issues of Okay Comics—and I, were contacted by a fan

writer in Rhode Island named Steve Clement. He wanted to put together a group of fans, artists and writers so that they could collaborate and get the feel for how it would be to work for Marvel or DC. He was a good talker, and apparently he’d made the rounds up at DC and Marvel, so they at least knew him via his rejections. Oh, and one of his guys was a “discovery,” as he put it, a young Dave Mazzucchelli. MM: Oh, wow. JERRY: Mike and I flew out to visit Steve in July 1976 and basically bunked in sleeping bags in this guy’s living room for a week and drew comics. The name for the organization was Interfan, and Interfan was trying to package a book and have Gary Groth or somebody publish it. Weirdly to me, I was doing a lot of lettering for him—I would also do some inking, but mostly lettering—and Mike was doing penciling. That summer was the beginning of Interfan, and both Mike and I continued drawing and working on what was to be an anthology of Steve’s heroes for publication. We designed and all that in preparation for having the completed book ready for Groth’s approval. I have no idea if Groth was ever going to do it or Steve was just hoping it would happen. Anyway, a year later, I have a couple weeks vacation time from the type place, and a new used car, so Mike and I drove to Rhode Island to visit Steve again. Along the serpentine route we took, we picked up a semi-pro friend, Pete Iro, who had done some lettering for Marvel for their UK line. I was the only licensed driver, and I popped NoDoz caffeine pills to stay awake, in order to make the drive without having to stop for sleep. We barely avoided disaster with a semi truck on the Massachussetts turnpike, and somehow arrived safely in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. After a few days of preparing samples, we all drove in to New York City. At Marvel, Pete Iro got us in, though no farther than the lobby. Jim Shooter came out to talk to us. Jim had just started there, apparently, as Archie Goodwin’s assistant. He gave us good

pointers and stuff, but no work. But he did give us a big pile of Xerox copies of pencils. It was whatever was current at that point—George Tuska, Jack Kirby Machine Man, a couple of John Byrne Marvel Team-Ups—so we were happy with that, even though we were disappointed. Meanwhile, Steve Clement had gotten us an appointment to visit DC and have our work reviewed there, so we still had the afternoon at DC, where I got a portfolio review by Vince Colletta. MM: He was the art director at that point. JERRY: Yes. I showed him finished art for a Messenger story I had done, which eventually saw print in Bill Black’s Americomics in 1983. Anyhow, Vince kept asking me for pencil samples. He was saying, “Go home and bring me some pencils.” I’m like, “Well, I live a little bit away—in Wisconsin.” “Well, I can’t judge this. It’s all inked.” And I said, “Well, can you judge the inks?” “No, I’m only looking at pencils.” I was very disappointed and perplexed, really. I mean, he was an inker. After that trip, I came home and decided that comics didn’t want me, so I would get into commercial art. I started drawing stuff that I thought looked like commercial art samples, and then made an appointment with an ad executive at Hoffman-York, which was the biggest firm there at the time. Really gutsy, and stupid because I didn’t know anything about anything. I made an appointment with the head guy, who actually saw me. He was very nice. He looked at my work which was still very comic book looking, and mentioned his love of Prince Valiant when he was a kid, and how my work reminded him of that. He saw a bit of himself in me. He had no job there, but knew of a place looking for someone to do photostat work at an art studio in downtown Milwaukee, and that it was the type of job where I could work my way up. So I switched jobs and went into the art studio. I worked in the darkroom department for, like, four months, while the regular guy, an old-timer recovering from a stroke, would supervise me. The guy, Frank Helfert, was about 5' tall, with a George Gobels look, and an ever-present cigar clenched in his teeth, had loss of control in his right arm,

so I became his hands, basically. The darkroom had no ventilation fans, and some horrendous smelling chemicals which were hard to avoid. Everyone joked that when Frank started work there he was my height, 6' 3", but the constant exposure shrank him down. [laughter] Eventually, as Frank’s arm recovered full mobility, I worked my way up to a little office in the bullpen. When it was slow, they’d let me practice on stuff, and when it was busy I sometimes got to pitch in on doing layout roughs, ad comps, and things like that. That was really my college, my education. A lot of good illustrators were there, and I started working with color, and the medium that most of these guys used for their stuff was Dr. Marten’s dyes, the watercolor dyes. They worked on giant boards, really heavy-duty illustration board in pencil, with a watercolor wash, which dried fast, perfect for ad work. I would go home on a weekend and I do two or three of these watercolor-type paintings. Then I’d bring them in to work Monday, and the old timers would come in and critique them. I mean, they were pretty brutal, but I needed it at that point. They hammered away at all the stuff that I didn’t pay attention to in high school about color values and warm and cool, and all that stuff. Little by little, I learned. I mostly did watercolors and acrylic and things like that, and worked my way up in the studio after a year to the point where I got to do some coloring books. I guess the first project was a DC super-heroes coloring book for Western Publishing, which was a local client in Wisconsin. I did maybe 30 pages of fun-&-games— find the stars on Wonder Woman’s costume, connect the dots, and all that type of stuff. And it went over really well. 15

Above: A 1979 watercolor painting of the Star Wars players. Next Page: Another 1979 painting—this one featuring the stars of TV’s popular Hulk series. Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia ™ and ©2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. Hulk ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Without realizing it, that would be my connection with getting into DC comics. Western Publishing was thrilled because now they had a local artist who was approved by the New York companies, and they didn’t have to rely on DC or Marvel’s clip art. I wound up doing a boxed set of periodicals called Everything Workbooks with the Marvel characters. There were four separate books featuring Spider-Man, Captain America, Fantastic Four, and the Hulk. While I was working on that project I heard that DC was conducting a talent search at the 1980 Chicago Comicon. I took my DC samples that I had from the coloring book with me, and I made an appointment to have Joe Orlando look at my portfolio, which he was doing in this little room. This convention space, in the PickCongress Hotel had these giant, afternoon 16

sun-facing windows that would really bake a room. It was like being in a microwave oven. I got into this big line of artists waiting to get in to see Joe Orlando, and the room was probably 100º. I lined up at 11:00 a.m., and the line went really slow. I kept getting peeks at Joe Orlando; he looked like he was tired, and I kept seeing Paul Levitz, who was Joe’s assistant, come up to Joe and say, “Joe, come on, you’ve got to stop for the day. We’ve got to go out and take a break.” And he’s going, “No, no, no, these guys have been waiting.” I kept thinking, “Oh, my God, I hope after all this I don’t have to come back tomorrow, because I’m not gonna.” Finally, near 5:00 p.m., my time came, and Joe, at the end of his day of looking at portfolios, is visibly woozy. He was looking at my coloring book samples, asking, “What happened to Wonder Woman’s costume? Why are her stars not on

I got another call in November, from Len Wein, asking if I want to be a part of a comic that Roy Thomas was doing. Roy had just come over to DC, and he was going to do the All-Star Squadron, and Rich Buckler was supposed to be penciling it. Would I ink it or do finishes? I thought about it, and I asked about a contract. They said, “Sure, we’ll give you a contract.” I said, “Well, I think so. Let me think about it over the weekend.” I had butterflies in my stomach because now I had to figure out how to best break the news to these people I worked for. I was kind of like the favorite son there, and they were grooming me to do bigger and better things there. I made the mistake of going to the comics store that Friday and telling the guy there, Ron Killian about it. Ron was really thrilled and happy for me, because he’d known me for years. I mentioned to Ron that I might be doing this, but still wasn’t 100% sure. On Monday I come report for work at 8:00 a.m., sit down, start to work, and the boss comes in. And he says, “We need to talk.” I go in to his office, and he said, “Are you leaving us?” “Uh, how did you know any of this?” “Well, I got a call from this fellow asking for your job, who heard you were going into comics.” I guess Ron had told this fellow who wanted my “old” job, before I’d even left it. I was like, “Uhhhhh... I guess I am.” [laughter] That gave me a little incentive. [laughter]

her costume?” I tried to explain to him, “Well, these are for this coloring book, and her stars are missing because the kid’s supposed to find them.” He didn’t get any of that. He just thought I was drawing stuff incorrectly. And I’m thinking, “Oh, this is going really terribly,” and flashing on my earlier Vince Colletta experience. Well, then, here comes Levitz again, and he starts to drag Joe away. “Joe, it’s about time, we’re all going to go out to eat. Let’s go.” As he’s doing this, he casually looks down at my work and he says, “Oh! Jerry Ordway. Good to meet you.” I shake his hand. “Paul Levitz, DC Comics. We had to approve all this stuff. We’ve been trying to get a hold of you.” And I say, “Huh?” After waiting in line in the hot, sweaty room all day, it was this easy? I gave him my phone number, and the next week after the con, I got a phone call at the art studio where I worked— which was really not smart, either. I guess they called my house and my mom gave them the work number. It was Paul, and he’s saying, “I’ve got a job for you. You’re going to be inking a Carmine Infantino science-fiction story for Mystery in Space. Here’s the rate. We’d like it in two weeks.” I was working a full-time job, so I’d go home at night and ink these pages. And I was thinking, “Wow!” Because Infantino was doing these really graphic.... MM: Oh, yeah, by that time he had become even more design-oriented and geometric in his drawing. JERRY: Right, and there’s a whole sequence in the story that has people drawn in a stylized outline, with no solid blacks. It’s all lines. And I was inking this, and it was going really fast. And I was like, “Wow! I can work fast.” I turned that in, and they apparently liked it well enough. They sent me something else that required a lot more detail, which put me in my place so to speak—no easy job! I did a few more of these little four-page, five-page things, and somewhere around September, I get a call, and it was from Paul again. He was asking if I would be willing to do this full-time. And I’m like, “Ennhh, things are going good at the art studio.” He said, “Well, we’d really like you to take over finishes on New Teen Titans.” I think the Wolfman/Pérez version had just launched, and I guess George didn’t like what Romeo Tanghal was doing or something. But at that point I said, “I really can’t do it, because I’m working fulltime, and I’m doing well here, and they’ve just given me a raise and everything.” I didn’t do it, but another pen pal of mine, John Beatty had started inking Justice League, and he would call and egg me into plunging into comics. Mike Machlan also encouraged me a lot. At that time, and in my mother’s generation, if you had a good job, you didn’t quit it. You always chose stability over the unknown. And who worked out of their house in those days? 17

Part 2:

Keep ’em Flying— the Pages, That Is ence was really not very good, because a picture would turn black, so all you really got were silhouettes and tantalizing bits of details. But it was clear once I started getting these that the detail was going to be up to me. Rich Buckler, while he was really good and he was doing really good super-hero stuff, he was on the clock, so to speak. He had a book set in the 1940s, but he wasn’t really referencing beyond what Roy had given him, and he wasn’t too careful about it, either. In the preview that ran in Justice League there’s a scene where a mysterious figure, who turns out to be Robotman, is seen wandering around Washington, DC. And in this one shot Rich had found a picture of the World War II Memorial, which he drew as a big element in this page. I get this page, and there’s a big note on the art that says, “War Memorial not there yet because this is 1942.” [laughter] So it was like, “Oh, I guess that’s up to me.” That’s what that was like. I mean, Roy would ask for changes, and it was stuff like “change Robotman into Liberty Belle.” That wasn’t the type of thing that you would do as an inker. That’s penciling. And that was from the git-go, that was the deal. But here’s the worst part: On that preview, I busted my butt, and I was totally scared, and I was totally panicky about the whole thing, but I did the best I could. I would talk to Len Wein because I didn’t know Roy Thomas, and Len was the editor. I turned in the first preview, Len loved it. He said, “Oh, great, beautiful. You did a great job and fixed things that needed to be fixed.” About a week before the first issue, I get a letter from Roy. I still have it. I’ve never really brought it up to him, but it was painful at the time. It had to be about six pages singlespaced of panel-for-panel critique of all the stuff that I did wrong. He started out by saying, “I had

MM: You shared a studio with Machlan and Vey while you were in Wisconsin, right?

JERRY: Right, we set up in the beginning of ’84 in a studio we called Jump Start Studios. That was kind of instigated because Pat Broderick had moved with his girlfriend from Florida to Milwaukee. She worked for the yellow pages company, the advertising company. He and I hooked up right away, and he was pretty aggressive about wanting to have a place outside of his house to draw in, so he was a good influence in that sense, that he pushed all of us to do a studio setup. Pat had worked at Continuity, and he was clearly better established than any of us. It was exciting, too, because Pat knew people that we didn’t, in the business. And it was fun to watch someone else draw, too, as I had been working in my Mom’s house previously. And, man, he was fast. He did a good job, but he didn’t linger on anything. If he had to do five pages in a day, he could do it. I was working on Infinity Inc., and then that led into Fantastic Four and then Crisis within that time at the studio. MM: With All-Star Squadron, what did you do for reference? Because you had to draw historical figures from time to time. JERRY: Oh, all the time. When Roy found out that I was the inker— boom!—the mail shows up, and there’s a box packed with Xeroxes of old comics. It was like he Xeroxed his whole collection with characters that might be needed, reference, whatever. He Xeroxed some of his military uniform books. Each script he sent would come with a little stack of Xeroxed reference, which was great and I certainly appreciated it, but Xeroxed refer18

hoped that Dick Giordano was going to be the inker on this thing.” So I’m immediately like, “Oh my God, I can’t compete with Dick Giordano.” It totally deflated me. I was feeling nervous, but still really good, and then suddenly it was like someone popped that balloon. This thing is hilarious now, but at the time it was like getting an F on a report card or something like that. I mean, it was a painful blow to my ego. I was used to success, especially when I applied myself, so it was really disheartening. MM: I assume you got paid more than a regular inker. JERRY: Yeah, I was being paid as a finisher, and the finishing rate was a couple dollars more than inks. MM: Just a couple? JERRY: Roy was always fair about this part of it. He really did work me hard, but he did say, “If DC won’t pay you extra, I’ll pay you out of my own pocket.” So it wasn’t like

money was a big issue, it was just that I felt like I was being called upon to do more and more. And the first issue of All-Star Squadron pages doesn’t arrive, and it doesn’t arrive, and it doesn’t arrive. And then I get a couple pages in the mail, and I’m thinking, “Okay, why am I getting these pages?” They were towards the end of the book. I found out that the first twelve pages had been lost by Federal Express; I never got the pages. I was like, “Well, what do I do?” “Well, we’ll send you copies of what Buckler did and you just ink it on vellum.” I never had practice inking on vellum. Vellum is tricky. If you put down brush lines and ink, it wrinkles. When I got the Xeroxes, I only had portions of Roy’s comments, because the Xerox would cut a half-inch off the margin of each side of the page. I had to reconstruct as best I could, and ink on the vellum, and it really was—I mean, it was just not great, coupled with the bad critique I got previously. By the second issue I felt like I was actually making some progress, and I think that there is a distinct jump in what I was doing 19

Previous Page: Commission drawing of The Tarantula. Above: This 2-page spread appeared in 1983’s The DC Sampler.

Next Page: Pencils from All-Star Squadron #24, introducing Infinity Inc. Below: Jerry almost got to pencil the Huntress after all. In 1985, he pitched a story pairing up the Huntress with the recently acquired Nightshade. But when Helena Wayne died in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Jerry’s story died along with her.

from the first to the second issue. I think you could see that I at least was getting the hang of things. And I was able to use zip-a-tone and stuff on the real board that you can’t really use on the vellum. It was a nightmare way to start. Roy would still send these really long critiques, again, panel-by-panel, single-spaced. Each issue they got a little bit shorter, but they never went away. [laughter] At that point DC put me in a little box, typecast as a finisher but not a penciler. I was good enough to do finishes, but not good enough to be a penciler in their eyes. And I kept working at Len, and I.... You know, when you’re working on a 25-page book a month, you don’t have time to draw pencil samples. So I had sent Len a whole bunch of pencil samples I did just before I had gotten the DC work, of a character I came up with called Proton, which I was doing for myself, basically. I sent him these things, and he thought they had promise, but nobody wanted to upset the apple cart. Then Karen Berger asked me if I would ink the

“Huntress” back-ups that were running in Wonder Woman, which Joe Staton was drawing. When I first agreed to do it, I didn’t really want extra work, because at that point, 25 pages a month of that much detail and that many characters was really pretty hard to keep up with, and here I was adding seven or eight pages, maybe nine to my schedule. But I agreed to do it, and she had indicated that Joe wasn’t going to be on it that long. When he left, I could take over as penciler, and it would be a good transition. And I thought, “Well, that’s good, that’s something.” I think I did three of them, and I wound up talking to Joe Staton—I met him at a show or something—and I said, “Uh, when are you leaving ‘The Huntress’‚” And he said, “I’m not leaving.” “Okay, I am.” [laughter] MM: Was it upsetting for you when Rich left that they got Adrian Gonzales? JERRY: Yeah. I didn’t know any of this except I finally got a cover to do by Rich. I think it was for issue #6 with Hawkman. Len calls me up and says, “Rich is leaving the book.” And I

was like, “Oh.” And he goes on, “Uh... I hope you’re not going to leave, too.” And I’m like, “Uh, no, why would I?” And he says, “Oh, great.” [laughter] I didn’t know the business enough to know that a lot of people do that. It’s time to leave, you go do something else. After six issues, I was getting noticed by other people, and I did get some calls from editors, so I understand that maybe that’s your opportunity to bail or something, but not me, “Oh, no,” because I’m just hoping for steady work. Adrian’s artwork was really solid— he was clearly a good draftsman—but Roy had a lot of changes on the stuff. It was little stuff, but it was a lot of panels per issue that I wound up having to do something different, or he’d change a character and ask for something totally different. When Rich left, I then became the dominant art force on that thing. And that worked out. I think that helped my standing, as well, with DC, because I think they respected the fact that I stayed, and I think Len respected the fact that I was making the look of the book my own. Adrian’s work reminds me a little of [Ed] Barreto’s stuff, actually. MM: Yeah, I can see that. JERRY: The work itself was really more finished than what Rich was doing, but it lacked a little of the detail and stuff. Rich’s layouts were like scribbly pencils, but they at least indicated a little more rendering, so I think I got to imprint my style, as it was developing, over Adrian a little bit more because it was traditional layouts, with no rendering. There was more room to render and do Wally Wood-type lighting effects and things like that. I was really kind of desperate, because at that point I didn’t want to get used to the inking money, because I could ink faster than I could pencil. I didn’t want to get used to that income level, because I knew it could trap me into just inking. Meanwhile, for a side gig I kept pushing for pencils, pushing, pushing. Nothing happened. And then I got a call out of the blue from Ernie Colón, who was editing The Flash. He was looking for somebody to take over the “Creeper” back-up. He wanted me to pencil and ink it. I thought about it, and I said, “If I penciled and inked seven pages, the paycheck would be close to what I make

inking 20-some pages. It’d be at least close, plus it wouldn’t be that gigantic of a deadline if I really tanked on it.” So I said sure. And then I said, “But I’ll have to quit All-Star Squadron.” He goes, “Oh, well, I can’t be part of that.” So I called Len up, and I said, “Len, here’s the problem.” Len totally understood, and immediately said, “Why don’t you draw All-Star Squadron then?” I said, “Because All-Star Squadron isn’t looking for a penciler.” And he said, “It’s no problem. Adrian is taking over Arak, and I’ve got plenty of work for him. I don’t think he would mind at all.” I said, “Well, I don’t want to get somebody bumped off the book.” “No, no, no. Honestly, I would rather have you penciling the book.” So that’s how I got into penciling. And they gave me a couple months off to start up penciling on it. 21

MM: So you could get a head start on it, then.

sense, so when I was inking his pieces I always wound up inking these guys in leather boots with weird doo-dads and stuff. And I thought, “Wow, that’s kind of cool. I would never have thought of that, because I always thought of Spider-Man with no real soles on his shoes, and here are these boots.” But boots have a cool look to them, and they get the crisp wrinkles and the shines and stuff. When I started to design these things with Roy, my feeling was, you can’t do a contemporary design on a character that’s supposed to be set in 1940, so I would look at Flash Gordon. I had the reprints of Flash Gordon that Nostalgia Press had done years ago. I would crack those things open and look through them, and I tried to do that a lot with All-Star Squadron, where the comic reference would have been contemporary with what the guys in the ’40s would have been inspired by, like looking at Terry and the Pirates, or Scorchy Smith, or...

JERRY: In theory. [Eric laughs] But it was really a daunting story. MM: Amazing Man—was that your first character design for DC? JERRY: I’m not sure. I designed the Deadbolt character, and the underground creatures in All-Star Squadron #20. And Cyclotron, too. Amazing Man and the Tarantula came after that. MM: I think Amazing Man appeared a couple issues earlier than Tarantula. What was the thought process behind those two designs? JERRY: With Amazing Man, I think the design really came a lot out of what Mike Machlan and I used to do when we would draw stuff back and forth, because Mike’s a couple of years older than me, so his point of reference was late ’50s, early ’60s stuff. He had a different design

MM: Wash Tubbs, Flash Gordon. JERRY: Right, right. Or even Buck Rogers. Those are the roots of those super-hero costumes that we grew up with in the ’60s, even, but clearly the direct line to Superman and Captain America and all those guys. So that’s what I did, and I think with Amazing Man I might have thrown in a few other things that were probably not necessarily from that era, but they worked okay. The big A is a little bit more ’60s, but it was a fun design. It was a fun character to do, too. And Tarantula was kind of a challenging character, because you couldn’t make him look like Spider-Man, so he probably owes a little bit more to Howard Chaykin’s Scorpion character from the old Atlas days. From my point of view, I would always try to design something that could work in real life. Even if it looks stupid in real life, it could work, as opposed to.... Some guys design a costume that you know would never work. He puts his arms straight up and he’ll poke holes in his head with the spikes on his shoulders. I always think about that stuff. With the covers at that point, we were able to design them ourselves. Roy would say, “I want this, and this, and this.” I would mail him and Len a sketch, and they would fight it out. From very early on, I would always do tracing paper overlays with marker for color guides with my cover art. Sometimes the colorist would follow them, and sometimes they wouldn’t. But it was always frustrating because, once I discovered color, I liked the power of it. I didn’t officially get 22

to color any covers until Superman, but I did them anyway because I would have something specific in mind. I loved the yellow highlights on faces and key lighting around figures that Tom Palmer and Klaus Janson were doing at Marvel. MM: Did you know much about the characters of the DC Golden Age before you got into the title? JERRY: You know, the funny thing is, I was never a DC fan. With the exception of the early exposure to the coverless comics, I bought Captain Action because that was a toy that I loved, and that was a big thing, for me, to buy a DC comic. And I bought the Kirby stuff when Kirby went over to DC. Then I discovered Neal Adams did Batman and “Deadman” and all that after he did Avengers. For the most part

my exposure to the Golden Age stuff, really, was through fanzines, like Rocket’s Blast, or the unofficial reprints that Dynapubs did in the ’70s of classic stuff. When Wally Wood did the All-Star Squad, I was certainly aware of that, and I loved that, and I loved the idea of a Superman with gray hair and all that. That probably was the biggest visual inspiration for me. I never had a burning desire to do any of those characters, but that’s been my career. I mean, when you work on these things, you fall in love with them. My burning desire in my teens was to do Avengers, to do Spider-Man. Spidey was always one of my favorites, and maybe that’s never going to happen. But along the way I discovered and fell in love with Captain Marvel and Superman. MM: Did you have a favorite character from the book? Because you had so many characters you were juggling. 23

Previous Page: Jerry’s original design for Amazing Man. The chest logo would be later changed to a large A. Left: Cyclotron artwork for Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe. Above: Jerry’s first design of Tarantula. Amazing Man, Cyclotron, Tarantula ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

JERRY: I thought it was kind of a neat idea to focus on Robotman and Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick, because they were almost like Marvel archetypes in a weird way, even though they predated them. They were less fixed, so Roy could do more with them. I think that’s what the appeal for me was. Robotman was fun to do, but the ones I liked to draw the most were probably Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle. Firebrand was fun, too, just because her costume was a little challenging. MM: What happened with the switch from All-Star to Infinity Inc.?

Above: Johnny Quick and Firebrand—two of Jerry’s All-Star favorites— in action (All-Star Squadron #22, page 19). Next Page Top: The Shining Knight and his trusty steed, Victory! Next Page Bottom: More pencils from AllStar Squadron #24. All-Star Squadron, Infinity Inc., Shining Knight ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

JERRY: I think I was just kind of burning out. One of the big things about doing a book that’s set in 1940, when you’re a young guy, is that it’s not your era. I was kind of tired of that—I was tired of drawing old cars, and I was tired of being aware of all that. I wanted to do something that was a little flashier in the DC Universe. I wanted to do something contemporary, maybe even something new, and that’s where the hook with Infinity was. When we first started talking about it, Mike was going to pencil it and I was going to ink it, because I was tired of the deadline. I figured that would be a good break and maybe recharge my battery. And in the meantime, I was going to draw America vs. the Justice Society. I was going to draw that and then ink Infinity. It was going to be like a break for me, in a way. And then, as things developed, I was the ace in the hole, apparently, because it was me, and maybe Roy, and nobody else thinking that Mike could handle the pencils on a monthly book. So, at the last minute, I wound up being the penciler. MM: So you ended up only doing covers for the America vs. the Justice Society mini-series. JERRY: Yeah. And I always felt bad for Mike on one hand, but I do understand it. I think that it’s a lot to throw somebody into, and if he had been in a different situation, like if there was a gap where he could have drawn multiple issues of All-Star Squadron as a lead-in to it or something.... When you ink and you don’t pencil, you lose your penciling chops. You really do, and it takes you a bit to get back to being able to see a script as a page. That’s the biggest battle, I think. All that rendering is important, certainly, but being able to visualize someone’s typed script into a coherent or exciting comic page is hard to do, and it’s hard to do especially if you’re out of practice. I was just talking to Mike the other day. [laughs] We were discussing the Infinity, Inc. stuff, because we really had fun when we first were designing the characters. Roy had written a generic proposal about the sons and 24

daughters of the Justice Society. It was really not defined as to who these characters were going to be, just that they were going to be the offspring of some of the Justice Society. So Mike and I had this little list of things that Roy wanted, and then we would just sit down, and it became a side job, to design and refine the characters. We didn’t have time off to develop anything, as we were busy drawing and inking All-Star Squadron. On Friday nights we would go to the comic store, pick up the new comics, blab at the comic store, and then we’d go out and have a couple drinks. That was our Friday routine. He and I would sit at the bar and we would talk. “Okay, what’s this character? Well, how about this?” And we’d start drawing—basically we did it on cocktail napkins. After every Friday night Mike would take the cocktail napkins, and he would sit down over the weekend and sketch up stuff. He would incorporate this or that, then he and I would look at it, we’d send it to Roy if we liked it, Roy would send it back. So it was kind of back and forth. I did the color designs on all the characters. I think Jade and Obsidian were the two characters that were closest probably to me and to Mike, because we really had the most input on them. And there was some stuff that Mike did on 25

his own. I don’t think I went over every one of these things, and he turned out a lot of sketches. He turned out Mr. Bones, a new Hourman, and a male version of Harlequin. He also redesigned Power Girl, and Huntress, I think, too. There were a whole bunch of things that never saw the light of day, and it was all coming together, but it wasn’t according to any plan. The characters kind of came from the names: Jade and Obsidian. Nuklon, the same thing. Northwind was a pain in the butt. The ugliest looking character. But, hey, what can you do with a guy who’s got feathers on his head? [laughter] He was also AfricanAmerican and part bird. MM: Right, so how do you relay that in the design? JERRY: Yeah. I think we did the best we could with that. I mean, he was definitely an interesting-looking character. But then you had Fury, and then finally Silver Scarab. And I think Fury and Silver Scarab are pure Mike Machlan-channeling-Kirby kind of designs. But, again, we had no idea what this book was about. There wasn’t a clue except that part of the tag was, when it became Infinity Inc., they would work for money. “Wait a minute... are they like Heroes for Hire?” [laughter] Originally it was supposed to be that the Infinity Inc. was going to debut in DC Comics Presents. It would be a Superman story, basically, introducing these characters, because that would have meant the best sales. So DC flew us in. Mike and I were supposed to, at that point, have had all of our sketches and all that stuff—which we did. We had our sketches, but there still was no definite line-up at that point, because Roy was still thinking about it. We had a meeting where we were supposed to talk to Julie Schwartz about what was going to happen in DC Presents. Julie was there on time, of course, but Roy didn’t show up right away. Julie started grilling us, “What’s it about?” And we didn’t know. At some point Roy came in and did his spiel for Julie, and Julie wasn’t satisfied. Mike remembers—I blanked on this—that we went back to Milwaukee feeling like the whole thing was going to fall apart. And all that came out of it was that, no, we were not going to be introduced in DC Presents, Roy would introduce it in All-Star Squadron. In a way, that worked better. Even though, sales-wise, it would have been better the other way, this was more like the JLA/JSA teamups, and it fit better in that way. 27

Previous Page and This Page: Artwork for the Infinity Inc. entry in 1991’s Who’s Who in the DC Universe #16. Brainwave, Dr. Mid-Nite, Hourman, Infinity Inc., Jade, Mr. Bones, Nuklon, Obsidian, Power Girl, Solomon Grundy, Wildcat ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

Part 3:

To Infinity Inc.... and Beyond!

MM: Had you planned on being on Infinity Inc. for only a short period of time, or was that just kind of the way things happened?

what was selling in the direct market versus what was selling on the newsstand, and Titans was the benchmark we were going for. After a couple issues, honestly, I was just kind of disappointed and I was looking for a change. It’s hard, too, when you invest a lot in a group of characters like that over the ten issues that I did. I certainly felt like I’d developed the characters visually, and developed their powers, to some degree, too. We were still working plot-style, so there was a lot of input on the drawing side as far as how to set up a fight scene or some sequence like that. It wasn’t as simple as nowadays with a full script, where the writer really takes you all the way through what the characters are doing. In a case like this, it was, “Here’s pages 4-8: big fight. Let’s get something good for all the characters to do visually.” [laughter] You basically have to invent, and that’s what we did. With the Obsidian character, a lot of his specific powers were really not defined, whereas Jade was clearly more of a Green Lantern spin-off and could use her green power energy to create things like the Green Lantern had done. With Obsidian, the shadow stuff just kind of came out of nowhere. “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the shadow kind of creeped up on the wall and it turned out to be him?” The powers kind of came out of finding visual ideas for the fights.

JERRY: No, Mike Machlan and I both had our contracts, and the contracts were written in a vague way to incorporate whether either of us would draw. Mike’s plan was that he was going to draw it and I was going to ink it, and then when that switched at the last minute and I started drawing it, we both had 12-issue contracts. It was open, certainly, to stay on another year or whatever, but my initial feeling was that the book wasn’t going in the direction that I thought it was going to go in, because the initial promise of Infinity Inc. was that it was going to be more akin to New Teen Titans than a traditional Justice Society book. And I think Roy did a lot more with that after we left. I don’t know if he just had this one story that he wanted to get out of the way and then move on beyond the Justice Society, but while we were there, all I was seeing was the same stuff that I drew in All-Star Squadron, and I was tired of it. Not that I didn’t like the characters, it just was.... Infinity was also our chance to grab a bigger audience and break into a wider audience like Titans had. Titans encompassed an audience that read X-Men, for example. I mean, Titans was DC’s best-selling title at that point. People were talking about

But, like I said, I was ready for a change. And I wasn’t under an exclusive contract with DC, so I was getting a lot of inquiries from Marvel about my availability. I also had kind of a silly dispute. Looking back on it, it’s kind of funny, but I was trying to get a better page rate. I’d been working at DC for a couple years, and they weren’t willing to bump me up to that next rate level. I got an offer from John Byrne to ink Squadron Supreme, which he was going to be drawing with Mark Gruenwald, and I actually inked a promo piece that John drew that ran in the Marvel books as a teaser, which made it look like Marvel was going to do the Justice League “the right way.” It was a silhouette shot of all the characters, who were supposed to look like Superman and Hawkman and Wonder Woman and all that. While I was finishing up Infinity Inc., and after I had done that teaser thing, John left the Squadron Supreme project and asked me to ink Fantastic Four. And I went, “Ooh! Wow! That’s going to be hard to turn down.” And I know Mark Gruenwald was disappointed that I bailed on the Squadron Supreme, but at that point Byrne was my connection, and Mark really wasn’t, so I just followed John’s offer. And that was my first working experience with Mike Carlin, which was to become a long-term friendship. MM: So it was actually John that came to you, rather than one of the editors? JERRY: Exactly. I was pretty loyal to DC, and I felt like if I was getting my steady work from them, I couldn’t do more than a book a month, so I never really looked for trouble. But I had gotten some inquiries, and I know I had some scripts that were sitting in the studio as possible projects to do, but they had no deadline. I know one guy that I had a script from was Carl Potts. I also had a couple of scripts for What If?— a Kurt Busiek script and a Peter Gillis script—but Byrne’s Fantastic Four trumped all that. I agreed to do the six issues of inks on the Fantastic Four as a way to recharge my batteries. MM: Was that the first time you met John? Had you met him before that at all?

JERRY: I had never met him. I had sent him a letter when he’d first taken over the full art chores on Fantastic Four. He was inking it himself, and he was getting trashed in the fan press for, “Why isn’t Terry Austin inking him?” So I sent him a letter basically saying, “Good for you. Go for it. I like what you’re doing on it.” And that turned into a pen pal thing. We exchanged probably three or four letters over that year. To be honest, I never met John in person until I moved to Connecticut in ’87. All the Fantastic Four stuff was done with Mike Carlin as the middle-man. I really had no contact with John beyond that except to hear, “Oh, he liked it,” or, “He didn’t like this.” But going to Marvel and doing the Fantastic Four with Byrne was something 29

Previous Page: Unused pencils intended for the Infinity Inc. entry in 1991’s Who’s Who in the DC Universe #16. Above: Promotional art for the Squadron Supreme mini-series. Pencils by John Byrne. Infinity Inc. ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Squadron Supreme ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

where I knew right off the bat, “Wow, I’m going from a book that sells X number of copies to something that sells four times that.” On my part, I was going into this knowing that John Byrne was the leader and I was the support, so it was a good experience, because I knew I couldn’t overwhelm his pencils. I knew that my job was to just bring out the best in them. That was a good primer, in a way, for doing the Crisis stuff, too, because I was in a situation where the burden wasn’t on me, the sales burden wasn’t going to be on me, either. Both Byrne and Pérez were the draws. I was just there to make it look good.

Carlin, “Please have him do pencils. I’m fine with just doing inks.” I didn’t really want to do finishes, because I was afraid to alienate his fan base, y’know? And he didn’t need me, he was already selling; he was the top guy. I didn’t need to have somebody say, “Oh, yeah, Ordway’s ruining him,” or something like that. Looking back on those first two issues I think you see a little more of my rendering and my approach, because, again, there were no black areas. MM: From then on it was full pencils? JERRY: Yeah, after the witch story, which was the first two issues, then he went to full pencils. I don’t think it was a major thing for him, but I heard afterwards John had kind of wanted me to go to town on it, but I just wasn’t prepared to step into that at that point.

MM: Are you a fan of comic strips? Because in that first issue you inked, John had a lot of comic strip characters in there in disguise. JERRY: That was kind of funny when I first got those pages, because I recognized most of them, but there were a couple that I was a little fuzzy on. But he had little margin notes to explain who everybody was supposed to be. I originally was going to be inking pencils, and then the first two issues he did layouts. And I was kind of panicky when I got those. His layouts were very clean and very precise—it wasn’t sloppy stuff—but there were no blacks in it, and my fear was that I was going to lose his style. So after the second one, I just said to

MM: During that time, you inked three covers for Action Comics, and you also penciled and inked a Superman cover, pre-Crisis. JERRY: You know, I think I did some of the covers towards the end of my Infinity stuff. And DC tried to keep me. They didn’t want me to leave. And the funny thing is, the minute I agreed to do Fantastic Four and was off, I got a call from Pat Bastienne, who said, “Oh, Dick approved you to get top rate.” [laughter] You never can

tell if it’s top rate, or if it’s top rate for you, y’know? Somebody’s always getting a couple more dollars a page. It always works out that way. But if that had happened before I had agreed to do Fantastic Four, I probably wouldn’t have jumped to Marvel. During that period that I did FF and I was just inking, I did do a fair amount of covers across the board for DC. I did a couple of DC Challenge covers, I did Atari Force—just a scattering. And I didn’t really cut my ties with Roy, either. I mean, I was leaving Infinity, but as I recall, I still did a couple things for him afterwards. I know I did a couple of covers for All-Star Squadron. I did issue #50. I inked a couple of Rick Hoberg covers, and I inked an Arvell Jones Starman cover at some point. I think those happened after I left. MM: How did Crisis come about for you? JERRY: At that time at DC, Pat Bastienne was the editorial coordinator, and she was really Dick Giordano’s right-hand person. She really functioned as an extension of him, and she was someone who gave DC a real family feel. She was very much the type of person who wanted to know how you were doing. It wasn’t just, “Where are the pages?” She was somebody who wanted to know if you were okay, how is the family? She was trying to find something to get me back. And as she put it, “Dick can’t do it, he can’t keep up with those deadlines because Pérez’s pages are very detailed.” That and Dick already had a full-time job in DC management! George apparently liked the idea of me doing it, and I felt kind of like I was helping out. So I agreed to do #6 to #12. I had six issues of Fantastic Four, which would have ended, then I would have started Crisis. Unfortunately, Mike Carlin and Byrne

twisted my arm to stay for eight issues on the Fantastic Four. When I got the call from Pat Bastienne telling me that I had to start with issue #5, because George was going to quit, I started to feel like I was in over my head. I don’t know if George was actually going to quit, but she was definitely trying to stress this was the case. I had to start with issue #5, a month earlier than I planned, plus I had two more Fantastic Four 31

Previous Page: Crisis promotional art. Above: Cover art to AllStar Squadron #50.

Below: Pin-up art for DC Comics Presents Annual #4. Next Page Top: Art for a WB Store exclusive print. Inks by Karl Kesel. Next Page Bottom: Hippolyta artwork for Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe. All Characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

issues and even one other project that I had agreed to do, which was a DC Presents Annual [#4] for Julie Schwartz! And Julie Schwartz was somebody you couldn’t cross. He was really a tough customer and pretty strict about his deadlines. I said to Pat, “Well, look, if you want me to do Crisis, I just can’t do this DC Presents Annual.” And she said, “Well, you’ll have to tell Julie.” And I said, “No, no, you have to tell Julie.” Of course, I did wind up talking to Julie, and he was pretty mad about it, but he agreed that I would ink the annual, and

I wouldn’t pencil it, so I’d still be at least kind of fulfilling my obligation. And I thought, “Oh my God, how am I going to do this?” When I got the first pages for Crisis #5—I could be wrong on this timing, but I’m remembering it as being February, March, April, somewhere in there. I had my studio in Milwaukee, and at this point it was down to Al Vey and me, and Al was still trying to get regular work. I would usually have him do backgrounds or erase pages if I had a lot of stuff to do, and that would be his way of paying off his share of the studio rent. I said to Al, “Here’s all this work we gotta do. Are you willing to come in seven days a week and do this with me, and make a couple bucks?” He agreed, so for that stretch of maybe six weeks we worked our butts off. Al did backgrounds on the last two issues of Fantastic Four that I inked. I had him do straight line backgrounds and stuff, and I did the textures and things like that. Then he would fill in the blacks and erase the pages. He did the same thing on the Ed Barreto pencils for the DC Presents Annual—he did the backgrounds and I did the main figures and then went through and added what I needed to add to make it look the way I wanted it to. With Crisis I was pretty much on my own, because there was no way to really pawn off backgrounds with that, because it was a little sketchy. It was there, but it needed a little more interpretation. I did the backgrounds with my crow quill pen. I couldn’t really use a Rapidograph on it because the lines had to be so thin sometimes. Crisis on its own was a major, major piece of work. MM: Just for comparison, how long did it take you to ink the average Fantastic Four page versus the average Crisis page? JERRY: Well, with the Fantastic Four, I would say I could comfortably ink two pages in a day.

MM: George told me he learned a lot from your inking him, and that you were a big influence on the way he inked faces from then on.

MM: Okay. That’s from the full pencils? JERRY: Yeah. I think with the full pencils I definitely was inking two. John doesn’t go overboard with his detail. He’s gotten busted for drawing blank panels and stuff like that, but he’s a guy that puts it where it counts. The working relationship we had on Crisis was I would get a call usually from Pat Bastienne. Pat would call me and say, “George is working. You’re going to start getting pages.” If I didn’t get pages, she would call again and tell me what the schedule was, but generally I would get two pages a day Fed-Exed. Sometimes they came from DC, sometimes they came from George. But I would get two pages and those two pages would have to go out, like, the next day. I had to keep pace with George, and that’s how that went up until the end. It was just a death march toward issue #12. And I actually did half of issue #7, was it? The double-sized issue with Supergirl?

JERRY: I could kind of see that when he started doing his Wonder Woman stuff, I was noticing that he was incorporating some of how I inked in his pencils, and it was kind of cool. When I was inking Byrne and then inking

MM: Yeah, #7. JERRY: Because it was a double-sized issue, DC had decided to break it up. Maybe I would have just collapsed from it, but I think I could have done that whole thing. But I also was happy to get a lifeline.

Above: Jerry’s pencils for the wraparound cover of Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #19. Next Page: A 1985 Superman drawing showing that, yes, Jerry is more of a Superman guy. All Characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

Pérez it was, for me, a real learning experience, because in both cases I couldn’t help but come away with something from it. From George I certainly came away with, “Wow, you can really get down to almost a microscopic level and tell a story.” There was nothing he couldn’t fit into a page or into a sequence. So that was quite instructive to me, the fact that he could have a fairly complicated action sequence happen, with multiple characters floating around, and make it fit, and still have room for the word balloons. That was pretty amazing, and that was something that when you’re working on the pages, it would just be kind of mind-boggling. The thing I got off of Byrne was John really liked these little textures, and he would actually put them in his pencils, where he would bounce the pencil. Even though it might be a straight line, he would vary the pressure so that his pencil line would squiggle or get thick and thin in certain spots. Both he and George added a lot of little, subtle things to their work that I picked up on. You add it to your little bag of tricks. I inked this whole sequence in Crisis with a rainstorm, and it was all the Charlton heroes, and it was ten panels on a page and really little figures and stuff, but George had a way of doing it that was wild. “This is cool, this works.” John had street scenes in Fantastic Four at night with reflections off of the pavement whether it was wet or not. It was little things like that kind of went, yeah, that adds to the detail, certainly, but it does add to the storytelling because it sets the scene much better, and it doesn’t rely on the colorist. For most of my career I’ve tried not to rely on the colorist because you never know what you’re going to get. I mean, everything’s of a professional level, but it’s not what you, personally, see in your head. MM: What did you think of the Crisis storyline overall, just on a fan level? 34

to show, “Look, we can sell comics in the comic stores. We can have a big hit.” And they really did. They capitalized on the Titans, which was their big breakout hit for the direct market, and were able to play that same game that Marvel did.

JERRY: Well, I liked it. I thought it was a pretty fun, it was like a big Spielberg story. I liked it a lot, but I had misgivings about wiping away Earth-2, because I learned to love Earth-2. I never thought that concept was hard for people to grasp. I think in trying to simplify that, Crisis basically added yet another layer to further complicate the continuity rather than simplify it. But I think it succeeded in one of the things that it was trying to do, which kind of gets lost in all the many years that have passed, is DC’s attempt to reach a giant audience that Marvel had reached with Secret Wars. Secret Wars sold phenomenally. It was perhaps the first comic to break the 500,000 sales level in, I don’t even know, 20 years? It was a monstrous hit. And DC, well, over the years they had always tried things. I think they were much more experimental in many ways than Marvel. DC could never really catch a break. All those years we were always the also-rans, and that was the feeling. I was a young guy at DC, and part of my motivation for staying with DC, or going back to DC after I’d left, was that Marvel felt really cocky. Just in my short experience— I think I only did a couple of conventions during that year on Fantastic Four where I actually sat in at the Marvel booth—Marvel was very cocky, because they were #1. And that didn’t set well with me, either, because I kind of felt DC was like Avis— they were trying harder. So my motivation for much of my career working with DC has been to try to get some respect for DC from the comic fans, because that was the one market they could never knock. In the comic stores themselves, they were considered old hat. They weren’t exciting like Marvel. They weren’t the thing. DC always had their loyal audience, but their audience was a little older. Getting back to the original point, Crisis was a really successful attempt by DC

MM: Not long after Crisis you did a little three-issue stint on Fantastic Four where you were actually doing the pencils this time around. JERRY: Yeah. The original plan for after Crisis was that there would be relaunches of Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman. DC had promised that I would be on one of the relaunches. Dick really made the decision. He said, “Well, I think you’re more of a Superman guy than a Batman guy.” And that’s really how it happened. That’s how I got on the list. And then I didn’t hear anything. In the meantime, I had gotten involved at the end of Crisis with talking with Paul Levitz about drawing the next crossover—and we got it pretty close to where I was ready to

Below: Unused cover art intended for X-Factor #8. The #5 box was a stat used for positioning only. Next Page: Superman!

go. It was called Crisis of the Soul, and it involved the Corrupters. It was about an alien race putting a quarantine on Earth and how it would affect the heroes on a more human level. We had worked on this back and forth, and Paul and I had a couple of convention lunches where we hashed out stuff and worked on the story, and then Paul worked on it to try to organize how it would cross over into the other books and everything, and it got pretty far along. Bob Greenberger was the editor, Karl Kesel was set to ink it, and Len Wein was going to dialogue it over Paul’s plots. Then, in November or December of ’85, Mike Gold came to DC. The project was, I believe, taken from Greenberger, and my understanding of it was that it kind of stalled under Greenberger because none of the other editors really wanted to play along with another crossover. I didn’t know any details then. I was still in Wisconsin, far from the power struggles. Then, in late December I got a call from Pat Bastienne asking me how my meeting with Mike Gold went that past weekend, to work out Crisis II. She assumed I was there, because I had been in on the project from the start. She says, “Mike Gold tells me that he had his story meeting and everything went well.” I had never been asked to show up for a meeting, so I felt really angry, because I’d been involved with Paul in the story. I felt like suddenly I was being aced out of this thing. So I told Pat that, “In all my years, I’ve never wanted to break a contract, but this thing is no longer the project that I agreed to, and I want out.” So I got out, and then, coincidentally, got a call from Carlin offering me Fantastic Four, because Byrne had left that book. Superman wasn’t ready to go, obviously, so I took on the Fantastic Four for a couple issues, knowing I wasn’t going to be on there long-term. They wanted me longer, but I knew that Superman was around the corner at some point, and I would still do that. 36

Part 4:

He’s an Artist! He’s a Writer! It’s Superman!

MM: What kind of lead time did you have on Adventures of Superman? At what point did you actually start working on it?

Machlan was going to be inking. Within the first couple months, there was major trouble. It was just an unfortunate situation, because there was clearly.... I wasn’t party to any friction between Marv Wolfman and John Byrne, but clearly there were some issues. I don’t know if Marv just didn’t like the idea of being subordinate, in a way, because Byrne was controlling the mythos at that point, or if it was something else, but plots were really slow coming. By the time I started on my second issue of Adventures of Superman, the first one was horribly late. Mike Machlan bowed out because it didn’t look good for him. He wasn’t a fast inker, and he wasn’t getting pages. He got through the first one, but by the second one there was nobody to ink it, so I inked it myself, which made it even later. That first year on Adventures of Superman was just painful. And, again, it was a bad time for Marv. I never really bonded with Marv. I never had any contact with Marv during Crisis, so we really didn’t have the benefit of, like, maybe he and George, where they were pals or whatever. All I knew was that I wasn’t getting plots, and when I was getting plots, they were not what I was

JERRY: I started in May of 1986, while I was doing the Fantastic Four stuff. I think the last thing I did was part of this big Fantastic Four anniversary issue, and during that time I remember getting photocopies of what Byrne was doing on Man of Steel. Andy Helfer was sending photocopies, and I knew I was going to be involved with one of the books, but I actually was expecting them to ask me to ink the Byrne Superman. But they said, “Oh, no, you’re going to be doing one of three books,” and the early word that I got was that Alan Moore was going to write the one I was going to draw, and I was like, “Whoa! Cool!” I really liked Swamp Thing, and I thought he was really good on Superman. But, of course, it turns out that this was wishful thinking on Andy Helfer’s part. He had a wish list of people that he wanted. Marv was also set up to be writing one of the books, so somewhere along the line I wound up being teamed up with Marv and Mike 37

Below: Pencils for the Gangbuster entry in DC’s Who’s Who. Next Page: An alternate sketch for the cover of Adventures of Superman #430, along with a Superman commission drawing.

looking for. Out of that, my first plotting credit is the third Adventures of Superman, I believe. It’s the Legends crossover, with Superman on Apokolips. That was, I think, my first conversation on the telephone with Byrne. Basically Mike Machlan and Al Vey and I sat in the studio and I wrote out stuff longhand, and we plotted that issue out. While Mike was still on Adventures of Superman, actually, we created Gangbuster and plotted out that whole story arc, which we wound up using while Mike was still supposedly going to be inking the book.

We wanted to use Kirby’s Guardian, but we couldn’t, so we came up with Gangbuster instead. But it was definitely a book that was in need of ideas. Again, it was just an unfortunate situation that didn’t work out. That year with Marv—it’s nothing personal, because I didn’t know the guy—but it was a painful, painful year, because, from losing the lead time right off the bat, there was unbelievable pressure, because we weren’t allowed to have a fill-in. A fill-in during the first year of a book was, like, you were going to lose all the momentum. Nowadays, people do two issues and they get a fillin, but we had to make our way through that. And I think I did wind up getting a one-issue fill-in that Erik Larsen drew when I moved from Wisconsin to Connecticut. So I didn’t really get any time off. I moved over a weekend and had to set up shop in a new town, and I started working that Monday. It got better when I moved, because I was within hailing distance of DC Comics, and I was able to then go into the office, and I think that helped tremendously as far as getting my ideas.... I was getting a little more confidence, and I was getting a little more.... You take your frustrations and you apply it rather than complain, I guess. So I would take Marv’s plots and I would retype them and send them back to Helfer and Carlin. I was hoping for coplotting credit, but at that point I knew I wasn’t going to get it, because I was basically rewriting something that they’d already paid for. But there’s competition, and when you’re competing against Byrne... I didn’t want to be the weak link in that Superman chain. MM: Visually it looks like it probably took two or three issues for you to really get the feel of how you wanted your Superman to look. Am I looking at it correctly?

remember Beatty instigating me early on about, “You know, Jerry, you should make that Superman have a big jaw, give him that Fleisher look and blow Byrne’s version away.” So I started, little by little, making his jaw bigger and bigger, and it really got to the point where it was, like, “Okay, I’ve gone too far.” [laughter] It is funny, because you realize something like that when it becomes looking a little too buffoonish or cartoony looking. But some of the stuff that came out of the early issues with Marv, it’s kind of funny to look back on, because when the character of Bibbo came out of a story—

JERRY: Actually, I think it took longer than that. I guess you’d have to understand being in that situation. When I first started it, I was kind of following John’s cue as far as drawing Clark and Superman—I was trying to stay somewhat grounded with what he did, even though we had different styles. But I think after the first couple issues, when it became more competitive to me [laughs], I think that’s when I started playing more with the dimensions of Superman’s face. From my All-Star Squadron days, I always saw the Joe Shuster look, because you go back to the source, right? And there’s Joe Shuster’s Superman with the big jaw, and he didn’t have a perfect nose. He had a little bit of a Roman curve to his nose, and to me that was always a visual distinction that I wanted. I wanted to make the character have some kind of visible hook so he wouldn’t look like Batman, so he wouldn’t look like any other black-haired character in comics. And it’s hard to do with line drawings unless you’re using a photographic model, but that was my goal. John Beatty has been a friend of mine for years and was always funny. We used to call him the instigator guy because he was always egging us on. And Carlin, or, at that point, Helfer, would catch the hell from it. So I

MM: I was going to bring him up. JERRY: He came out of maybe the fourth Marv story, somewhere around there. MM: It was issue #428. JERRY: Okay. You know, you always bring your own experiences into stuff. Like I said earlier, I grew up in a tavern. It was a traditional neighborhood bar—not Cheers, more of a Damon Runyan type of [laughs] run-down place that you’d see in some movie—and one of the characters in the tavern when I was a little kid was an old guy named Joe Kominski. Joe was a merchant marine, a dockworker; he was everything that Bibbo became, really. He was a tough guy, but he was sweet. He was a guy who would fight 15 policeman to a standstill by himself, but yet he would take my brother and myself, when we were little, to our grandmother’s house. He was like our watchdog, our guardian, really a 39

wonderful guy. So when I thought of this tough guy, I said, “You know, this is going to be Jojo.” That’s what we called him—Jojo. So pages went in, I named him Jojo in the margin notes, and drew him in the hat and the pea coat that my childhood friend had worn. Carlin got the pages—at that point Mike was slowly taking over Andy’s role—and Mike said, “I don’t know about ‘Jojo’. What about Bibbo?” Bibbo was the name of a one-bit character in a Honeymooners episode that Carlin liked. And that was a character that I knew I would want to use again. MM: Even though he’s only there to set up something later in the story and was meant to be a throwaway character, right away you could tell there was something more to him. He had some extra spark that made him stand out. JERRY: That’s really the joy of doing comics is if you have a situation where you can contribute something. I mean, I certainly imbued this character with a little more life than he would have had just from drawing him from real life. I think that’s part of the key is whenever a character kind of jumps off the page a little bit, it’s usually some writer or artist adding their own experience to it. We did the same with Marv’s story with Professor Hamilton. When Byrne took over the book and I was officially co-plotter—which was a big step up at that point—Byrne, one of his early stories, he said, “Well, I want to come up with a guy like in the old TV show, where Superman had this scientist that he could talk to.” And he had the plot already. So I told him, “Well, what about using this guy?” Because this guy was in two issues, and I felt sorry for him. [laughter] I mean, that story that Marv did, I felt bad for this 41

Previous Page: Bibbo in his natural element for DC’s Who’s Who. Above and Below: Jerry’s pencils and inks for a trading card set which featured Golden, Silver, and Modern Age versions of the DC heroes. Bibbo, Superman ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

Right: 1987 photo of Mike Carlin (left) and Jerry (right) at a Smithsonian Museum exhibit on Superman. Below: Adventures of Superman #441, page 13. Next Page: Jerry fought to keep Cat Grant in the Superman supporting cast, much to Jimmy Olsen’s delight.

guy. He was a loser, but he was screwed over by Lex Luthor, and he was in jail. So I said, “What if this guy does his time, but is able to be reclaimed by Superman for good purposes?” And John said, “That works.” So that’s how Professor Hamilton came into it. I like the idea of taking something like that, that really wasn’t meant to be more than a one-shot and developing it, because I used to like that when I was reading Spider-Man or Avengers as a fan, that someone who was only in one panel suddenly shows up a year later as a character. That was always fun because it made you feel like you were in on the beginning, y’know? MM: When John took over, did that have any effect on what you were doing? JERRY: Yeah, it did, because John is an artist first and foremost, and it was like anybody, he would write basically what he would draw, so it was hard for me sometimes to interpret what he wanted, because I don’t draw like John. It took a couple issues, I think, to find the rhythm. The hardest one was also one of the most fun, which was the Mxyzptlk issue, where he brings all these cartoon characters to life. I was never good at drawing cartoony stuff. I can do it if I have a style sheet to work from, but it’s not my natural inclination, so it was really hard, and I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. When I first moved to Connecticut I used to visit Mike Carlin and his wife, Ronnie, in Brooklyn. I would go out on a weekend or something and sleep on the couch, and we would do stuff there. A lot of times we would incorporate work into it, doing cover sketches or what have you. And I think with that issue, Mike stepped in and did little breakdowns on bond paper for what the cartoon sequences would be like. That helped me a lot because Mike has got a really funky little cartoon style, and it at least helped give me expectations of what I needed to do. And at that point, too, when I had first moved, I went to Byrne’s house for a story plotting conference when they were coming up with Millennium. Andy was editing that, and it was Mike and Andy and Byrne and I at John’s house in Fairfield, and we sat around talking about Millennium, and the big thing that they came in 42

Above: Clark and Cat— along with Jimmy and Cat’s son—spend a day at the circus. Adventures of Superman #438, pages 1 and 2. Next Page Right: Jerry, meet Jerry! Jerry meeting Jerry Siegel (and wife, Joanne) for the first time at a dinner in LA honoring Siegel and Shuster in conjunction with the filming of the pilot episode of Lois & Clark. Next Page Left: Jerry gets a lift from Superman in this piece of promotional art. Cat Grant, Jimmy Olsen, Superman ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

with was that Cat Grant was going to be the Superman hunter, and how perfect it would look, and, boy, wouldn’t it be great. And I talked them out of it because I was protective of Cat Grant. She was a legacy of Marv Wolfman’s era, but to me she was a character that I’d invested a lot of nuance to, and I said, “You know, I don’t think Cat Grant would have the emotional impact that a longtime character would have. What about switching it to Lana Lang?” And then it was like, “Oh, wow. Hey, that works.” I got Cat Grant off the hook, but at the same time it was an idea that they actually liked. Wow! And that gave me a little more confidence. Those little stepping stones, you take one step, and two steps, and the next thing you know you’re over that bridge and you’re not so afraid of making that move. That was really a character-building moment for me, and I think it showed 44

Carlin that I was able to think on my feet and that I had ideas to offer, as well. MM: Well, issue #443 is where you first had your writing show up. Was that kind of a try-out, or were you already scheduled to be the full-time writer at that point? JERRY: No, no. John had left the book. He just made a decision, and, boom, “I’m gone. Here’s my last issue.” He jumped ship, and in a way it was very weird timing. The story that was in issue #443 was supposed to be Adventures of Superman Annual #2, that’s why it’s an extra-long story. When John left, it threw everything up in the air. John was the guy who revamped Superman. Here’s the architect leaving the project, and the project’s not completely built yet. There was a bit of a panic. I really didn’t know what I was going to do. Carlin called Roger Stern up immediately and got Roger involved in Superman.

For Adventures, I suggested to Mike we get Dan Mishkin or somebody like that. And Mike said, “Well, why don’t you do it?” I was like, “Uhhh”—a be careful what you wish for kind of thing. He said, “Well, I think you could do it. I’ll help you.” And I said, “Well, I’m willing to give it a try. But how are we going to fill this hole in the schedule? We need an issue right away, and I don’t think I can do this immediately. What about using the annual? Is there a way of having them not use ads so that we can use the full comic?” Because I believe the annual was drawn. I didn’t know much about the official writing styles and stuff at that point. I think I was borrowing John Byrne’s old typewriter, because I didn’t have a computer or anything, and I was typing the script up on that Adventures of Superman Annual. I also drew 8" x 11" layouts, because I needed to visually pace it out so that I wouldn’t put too much into it. We got John Statema

to pencil, who was a local guy in Wisconsin that I knew, and he worked from my layouts and I scripted it. If I had not done that annual first, I would not have had the confidence to even touch a Superman story. I mean, when I got the assignment to try, here I am working in Curt Swan’s shoes, you know? I mean, it’s Superman! I don’t think it has that same feel anymore because everybody and their brother gets to do Superman their first time out, but back then they groomed people. You really had to earn Superman.

I was in over my head, and in that first story that I did, Carlin was brutally heavy on his editing. And his comment that stuck with me was, “All you guys who are artists turned into writers are such yakkety-yak big-mouths. You don’t have to write so many words.” [laughter] And he was just slashing through and deleting tons of dialogue. It was trial by fire, and he taught me a tremendous amount in that crash course of what to put in, what to draw, what to leave out. And if I didn’t do the annual as an annual, if that was going to be my first issue of the ongoing title, I probably would have had a panic attack or wound up in an asylum or something. But even for the first five issues of Adventures of Superman that I wrote and drew, every month I said, “I can’t do this. I just can’t do this.” The only thing that kept me from quitting was that’s not how I was raised. You make the best of the situation and you make it work. You don’t quit. It seriously took me five, six issues to get to where I didn’t feel like I was just taking up space. [laughs] So I’ve always been sympathetic toward writers who are artists, because in comics it’s 45

Right: Jerry goofing around with one of his best inkers, Dennis Janke. Below: Illustration for Warner’s house magazine, Warner Currents. Next Page: Superman gets his vigilante on as Gangbuster in Adventures of Superman #446. Batman, Gangbuster, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

hard to break out of whatever classification that they give you—it’s hard to break out of that. Again, maybe not so much now as it was then. I don’t know, it could still be. But if you’re an inker, you’re an inker. As if someone stamped you on your head, “Inker.” There was a big stigma to letting a penciler write. But the honest truth is that writing in comics is not the same as writing the Great American Novel. There’s a craft to it, and not everybody can do it, but it’s a comic book. [laughter] I’m not trying to undermine comics, because I think comics can be high art. But look back on how Marvel started, with Stan Lee basically writing 20 books a month on the backs of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, whoever. It’s not brain surgery. MM: Did you have to write full scripts for Mike during those first few months? JERRY: No, I was doing plots. Roger was

doing Superman, so we both had to play fair, and let the other guy know what we were doing, so we always did full plots with a little bit of dialogue or at least some directions as far as what the talking pages would be and what have you. Early on Roger and I used to have conference calls. I would go to Carlin’s house in Brooklyn, or Mike would take a day off and come to visit me when I was in West Haven, and we would conference call with Roger and cook up stories. Roger Stern is a really talented guy—a good, good writer; a good, solid superhero guy—but Roger’s also a guy who’s good at taking an idea and making it into something. That was really the beginning of the Superman story conferences, where it’s not one guy, it’s kind of a composite. And it takes a certain kind of personality to be able to do that, too. I mean, you can’t be overprotective of your own ideas. You really have to loosen up a little bit. So Roger, Carlin, and I, between the three of us, we pitched stuff. If an idea would come up while I was working on a story, I could call him up and say, “Hey, Roger, what about this?”, and then suddenly Roger would go, “Well, what about this?” And then the next thing you know, you’ve got the beginnings of something. MM: Eventually you got Dennis Janke on as your regular inker. John Beatty was there for a few issues, but then he left.

JERRY: That’s right. During the time John was inking Adventures of Superman, he used to come in and visit Mike Zeck—Zeck was in West Haven as well. He would just stay until he wore out his welcome and Zeck said, “I think it’s time for you to go home.” [laughter] During one stretch he was there—I think it was a whole summer, living in Zeck’s spare room and working on stuff—we’d go up to Byrne’s house. At this point we were starting to get pretty social, and I’d go out to eat with John and his wife, Andrea. They were very nice. At one point Carlin and Jonathan Peterson, who was Mike’s assistant around that time, started to come out, too. John [Byrne] had been shaving his head to almost a buzz cut—really short—and Beatty had this long mullet haircut. One Saturday night, John started waving a hundred dollar bill at him, because he wanted to shave Beatty’s head. [laughter] I don’t know if it was hair envy or some hidden Lex Luthor agenda, but Beatty wrangled this deal into he’d let him shave his head if he could ink Action Comics or Superman. So Beatty got a haircut and another assignment out of it. Dennis was also a friend of Zeck’s, and Dennis had helped out on a couple of jobs, doing backgrounds and things, helping Beatty out. So I said, “Well, I’m willing to give Dennis a try,” and that’s how Dennis got on. MM: Dennis was very complementary to your pencils. JERRY: Dennis and I, I think, had the best symbiotic pencil/inker relationship. When Dennis did the very first job, he lived nearby. He brought the pages over to show me, and he’d inked everything too literally. He was trying to ink it like I would ink it. And I said, “Don’t ink it like I would ink it, because I can be sloppy on my own stuff, but I don’t want you to be sloppy on my stuff.” And once he got that, the second issue was much better, and then he came as close as anybody, really, to capturing what I was trying to get across. MM: Storywise, you brought back Gangbuster and Bibbo and had a lot of fun with them. With Gangbuster, what was the idea behind the bait-&switch with Superman wearing the costume? JERRY: That was something that came from when John and I were plotting. We discussed having a storyline where Superman has a nervous breakdown, but the idea itself never really came about while John was there. But that 48

was what we wound up doing when Roger came on was that Gangbuster would show up after Jose Delgado had been paralyzed, so you knew it couldn’t be Jose Delgado. Byrne originally had some guy—he was going to call him Mr. Hero, Mr. Terrific, or something— and I said, “Let’s use Gangbuster.” And it was like, “Okay, that works.” When John killed off the Kryptonians, the Phantom Zone villains, in his last Superman, it was pretty controversial. It created a pretty big fan crapstorm, because Superman shouldn’t have done that. Carlin and I, we all took it as our opportunity to do this story and do it with a real psychological motivation behind it. And that gave us the excuse to have him then leave Earth. These were all orchestrated, long-term plans, so I guess we all must have felt fairly secure on these books. [laughs] But it was a case where DC and Paul Levitz were behind this; everybody was supportive because they thought we were doing good stories, that we had a point of view. And I think we benefitted also from the fan point of view, because Byrne was blamed for a lot of things that weren’t necessarily his fault. He became a good target, so, in a way, when he left, we were in a position to be the good guys. People were willing to give us a chance. MM: In ’89 you moved from Adventures over to Superman, which was considered the flagship title of the Superman line. What precipitated that change? JERRY: Well, as I recall, I wanted to stay on Adventures. I didn’t want to switch over to Superman. When Byrne left, I think initially that was floated, but I felt like Adventures was a place where I could learn what I was doing easier than I could on Superman. But after a couple of issues, I think Carlin wanted to switch me over. He thought I’d earned the main spot at that point. And in the meantime wasn’t I doing that Batman...? MM: The Batman movie adaptation. 49

Previous Page Left: Panel from page 16 of Adventures of Superman #447. Previous Page Right: 1987 photo of Jerry with a buzz cut sporting John Byrne at the Smithsonian Museum Superman exhibit. Left: Promo art for the “Burn Out” storyline. Pencils by Kerry Gammill. Below: Jerry’s design for Superman’s Kryptonian look. Gangbuster, Kal-El, Superman ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

Right: Before starting work on the comic book adaptation of Batman, Jerry drew character models for likeness approval. Here is Kim Basinger—Vicki Vale. Below: Artwork for a dump display for the Batman comic book adaptation. Below: Cover to the regular format version of Batman: The Official Comic Adaptation of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture. Batman, Joker, Vicki Vale ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

JERRY: I did that in February to April, and the plan was, when I was done with that, I would switch over to the main Superman title. I knew also that once I got onto the main title that I would be more on the hook, like, “Okay, it’s time to actually write some Superman stories, and not Gangbuster stories. But I’m comfortable enough now, I’ve got enough confidence, I can write a Superman story. I don’t need to throw eight million other guys that I came up with in there and give Superman only four pages, it has to be the other way around.” And it was fun. I had a lot of fun doing the Prankster issue. And I did a couple issues there with Kerry Gammill as the penciler, and Kerry is always just a tremendous storyteller. He’s one of those guys who is really good at taking a sequence and making it better. He excelled at that. He was very slow, unfortunately, but you could tell he was one of these guys who was a thinker. But, yeah, that was a fun time, and I think I came into my own somewhat. I definitely felt like I had my game. And Dennis was doing a great job at that point—we were clicking. MM: Let’s talk about the Batman movie adaptation for just a minute. How far in advance of the movie’s release were you working? JERRY: The movie came out in the beginning of June in ’89, and coincidentally, I had gone to the UKCAC show in London, the big comic show, in the fall of ’88. Jenette Kahn was there, and they’d arranged some kind of tour of the Batman set at Pinewood Studios. So I got to go to Pinewood with my wife—who was not my wife at the time—Peggy May. She was the head of marketing and publicity at DC 50

super-fan and very supportive. But if I hadn’t survived Crisis, that Batman movie deadline would have killed me. I penciled and inked 64 pages, with no real splash pages until you get to the end, and I did that from February and I was done by, I think, the beginning of April, because we had to be done by then because the book had to come out. It might have even been the end of March—it was a really tight deadline, but somehow I got it done.

at the time, so she used her connections to get me and her in separately, because we missed the other DC group. We got to go through and see the Batmobile, the costumes, the sets, and it was really pretty impressive. It stuck in my head. Jonathan Peterson, who was the assistant editor on Superman, was editing DC’s movie adaptations at that point. He and I had always talked about how it would be great to see a movie adaptation that actually looked like the movie. A lot of artists aren’t willing to do that, or they’re not capable, or whatever. It takes a lot of extra work. So he said, “Well, why don’t we do it?” [laughs] The other part of this equation is that, at that time you couldn’t pay somebody off to get your comics collected in a trade paperback, unless it was 20 years old or it was some special occasion. So the frustration of working on a monthly comic like Superman was that none of your stories lasted forever because they were gone the next month. But with the Batman book, I figured this was something that would have a shelf life, so that was another reason I wanted to do it. Jonathan Peterson’s job was to get as much reference material as he could get out of Warner Brothers—and he did pretty well. They were still pretty secretive about a lot of stuff, and special effects were done with models and things and composited, so you couldn’t see what the special effect would look like until you saw the movie, so there was some stuff we had to guess at. And also we had to deal with script rewrites, and in that case Denny O’Neil had adapted the script, and when we first started drawing, within, like, a couple of days of filming they started rejiggering stuff and throwing out scenes and everything. At one point Denny didn’t want to go back and change anything else. He just basically said, “I’m done with it.” So Jonathan and I made it our duty to follow script changes and to incorporate them into the story. We worked really hard, and I think Jonathan was a great editor to have for that, because he was a

MM: Did you have any kind of advantage with Warner Brothers being the parent company of DC?

JERRY: No, the only advantage I had, really, was that Jonathan was tenacious and constantly on the phone with Warner Brothers. Whenever you read a Warner Brothers annual report, or a press release or an interview about Warner Brothers, they always talk about the synergy between the divisions. And for as long as I’ve been associated with DC Comics—and I was there when the conglomerate was first put together— Warner Books was a separate entity. From my point of view, it didn’t look like they ever got along with DC Comics. When Time magazine was incorporated it was the same thing. There should have been synergy, but there wasn’t. And to show you how far this didn’t go, the original plan was to sell the Batman adaptation in the movie theaters. There was a guy, Matt Ragone, who worked in circulation—I don’t know what he’s doing nowadays, but he was a great guy, and he was really ambitious—and he and Jonathan and I would get together and, “Oh, we’re going to do this, and we’re going to do that, because this is going to be a good entry point for comics, because this movie will definitely feed people into the DC comics.” We got a big ad for subscriptions and all that, and we’re going to get this in the movie theaters. We already had an arrangement with the movie theaters—they were

going to sell t-shirts, the Batman movie comic, and then a couple other things on opening day. Word came down from Warner Brothers that the comic was not to be sold in the movie theaters for the first week of the movie. Batman was huge; everybody looks back on this as, like, of course it was going to be huge. But those guys at Warner Brothers didn’t know it was going to be huge. I mean, any time you’ve got a big investment like that, you’re just quaking in your boots until you get your first weekend gross, y’know? They had so little confidence, they didn’t want our stupid little comic book to reflect badly on their movie. So even though it sold tremendously, we did lose a lot of sales by missing that opening weekend. It would have been a lot of potential readers. It was a great project, regardless. It was gratifying to see the movie. Jonathan and I were sitting there sideby-side watching the movie, and whenever we’d see a scene that we’d only been able to guess at, but we got right, we’d look at each other and high-five. [laughter] MM: Is there any particular character you enjoyed drawing the most, as far as the actors went?

JERRY: It was fun drawing Keaton, but I liked drawing Batman in the costume. It was really an awesome costume. And, again, it helped to have seen that costume up close on that tour. When you see it up close, the cape was leather with a wool lining so it would drape like it did, and kind of have a life of its own, but it had to be a heavy thing to walk around in. And the cowl was pretty rigid, but it looked great. With the comic, we could certainly do things they couldn’t do in the movie, like have him turn his head and look. But Jonathan was smart up front that we had to get likeness approvals from the three main actors—Kim Basinger, Jack Nicholson, and Michael Keaton—and that was done before I drew a page. I drew shots of Nicholson as the Joker, Nicholson as Napier, and then shots of Keaton as Batman, Keaton as

Bruce Wayne, and the same thing for Kim Basinger, and those were sent to their agents, I guess, and they signed off on them. The funny thing was, on Nicholson’s stats there were notes in one handwriting that said, “The nose is wrong, this is wrong,” or whatever. It was pretty picky, but again, that’s their time to complain. And then, in green ink it says, “Does not look like me.” I said to Jonathan, “What do you infer from that? That’s gotta be Nicholson, right?” But they signed off on it, so we didn’t have to submit anything for approval as we went along, which was a major relief. Otherwise it could have jeopardized the shipping and all that. And we got Steve Oliff to color it, which was perfect, my ideal choice. I don’t think I could have asked for anybody better. MM: It was pretty much as you took over Superman that they moved into having storylines that continued from title to title. Did that help your confidence as a writer on a flagship title, or was it more of a problem?

Above: Disaster strikes Metropolis. Two-page spread from Superman #38. Inks by Dennis Janke. Next Page: Lois and Clark decide to get hitched. Now that’s a 50th issue event!

JERRY: You know what? Even when Byrne was on the book, even when Marv was on the book, I was pushing the three continued chapters idea. And, again, my motivation was that Adventures was the poorest selling of the three books, so I wanted to tie in because I figured if there was a compelling storyline, people might want to buy all three parts. So I was pushing that, and I know that Carlin was big on that, too. Once I was writing it on my own, Roger and I got along really well—it was really a good group. When Pérez was incorporated into it, we were all established enough not to feel.... You have to set your ego aside, because you really are doing one big story rather than your own thing, and as long as you go into it knowing that, it’s workable. And I think George ultimately left for that reason. I mean, he wasn’t being mean or anything, but I think he did say, even in print, that he just had a hard time with that. Because it’s hard to concentrate on your own story and sometimes give your cool ideas up to somebody else because it just doesn’t fall right. Sometimes you’re doing the end of the 54

story, sometimes you’re doing the middle of the story, sometimes you’re doing the beginning of the story. So I could come up with an idea for a story and not get to do the ending of it. Or I might wind up having to do the ending of a story that Roger initiated. It’s a collective, it really is. The common goal is to tell a Superman story and not stand out as, “I’m the star of the show.” And maybe that doesn’t work as well with Byrne there, you know? I mean, I think we were all on more equal footing when John left, for that reason, and then George was almost too big a profile, in a sense, to fit into that. You really have to be a drone, to a degree. By the time I got to do Superman as the main title, it was all in full swing. I mean, it was rolling by that point. But I think if you look back, when Byrne first left, Roger and I both did subplots that connected, we just didn’t do gigantic storylines. We both kind of found our footing, I think, in the first couple months. Once we had the three books in place, what we tried to do was to do our own stories with subplots run-

Right: Just for fun Jerry painted this homage to Superman II back in 1979. The movie impacted the way he would later approach writing Superman. Below: Inset artwork for the Overstreet Price Guide. Next Page: Jerry at his C.C. Beck-iest. This Captain Marvel sketch was awarded to the winner of a Wizard magazine contest promoting The Power of Shazam! Captain Marvel, Shazam!, Superman and all related characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

ning through them, and then we’d team up once or twice a year on a big story that actually crossed all the way across, that was beginning, middle, and end within different titles. MM: During your time on Superman, was there any particular storyline you came up with that you were particularly proud of? JERRY: The Warworld story was a team effort, but I pushed for the gladiatorial combat. I always loved Fantastic Four #94, where the Thing had to fight on that gangster world. And I really liked the idea of taking Superman and putting him in a different type of costume, because, again, it just wasn’t done, and all of these things were big, big decisions from DC’s point of view. But of all the stories that I was involved with, the one that I think probably owed most to me was the engagement storyline. And I don’t think anybody would deny that that was something that came from me, because I got married around that time, and I just put it forth. I said, “They’ve been together a long time, and we’ve been developing them as a romantic couple. Why can’t we get them engaged? It doesn’t mean they have to get married. They could be engaged for 56

20 years and they could break up. But I think it’s the next step.” The comic fans expect some sense of things moving forward, and I think with the Superman books, for so many years the elements were fixed and immovable. I think that we opened up lots of story ideas by being able to do this. And the plan was that they would get engaged, but that he would have to reveal his identity. That was always part of it, because otherwise Lois Lane looks like the biggest idiot in the world. That’s why, when I did my reveal segment, it was that she’d always kind of known. I thought that was kind of a cute bit. And what’s funny is, I just recently was watching the Richard Donner cut of Superman II, and they were kind of doing some of that in there. My cue for Superman was mostly from that first movie—just the humanity that those actors brought to the screen. That was the hook for me, that was my Superman. Even though I grew up on Marvel Comics, I still knew about Curt Swan. I loved Curt Swan’s work, but Superman was not my cup of tea. I watched the ’50s TV show in reruns when I was a kid, and I liked it well enough, but that movie was my inspiration. So when I saw the Donner cut, it was a full circle kind of thing, because that was what I tried to get across with Lois and Clark and their relationship was the idea that they wouldn’t be together if they didn’t like each other.

Part 5:

It’s All about Family... the Marvel Family

MM: Did you start working on the Power of Shazam! graphic novel as soon as you were done with Superman?

wanted to do something that was kind of all my own, as well. First we had to get approved for hardcover status. Then the next thing was, “Gee, can I color it? I don’t want to do it on blueline, I would like to color the art itself.” And those were all control issues for me at the time, because I knew what would happen if it was done on blueline. They would want all the line art done first, and then the blueline color would be done after the line art, and I didn’t want to lose control of that, because that’s what happens a lot of times. I think it might have happened with the Kuberts when they were doing Adam Strange, where there’s a lot of pressure then, “Well, the pencil art and the ink art is done, so why can’t we get Joe Blow in production to do the blueline color, to speed it up?” So I told them, “I want to do it full-color on the board,” and they would worry about reproduction. Because they didn’t really do a lot of that. It was during the beginning of incorporating computers, but it was still a film process for doing painted artwork. That was my goal, and I painted myself, so to speak, into a major corner with that, because it was a very slow process. It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to color this myself,” but it’s another thing when you start working on the actual drawing itself. The black line isn’t as strong, so your contrast has to be good.

JERRY: Around the time I stopped drawing Superman and switched over to Adventures and was just writing, I think that is when I first got going on it. It was one of those projects that started up really slowly, because I had to get the story approved first. A lot of thought went into setting up what Fawcett City was going to be about, and all the other little details. It was definitely before “The Death of Superman,” so it had to be around ’91, maybe? MM: Yeah, that sounds right. Late 91, I guess. Now, at that time, was it just going to be a graphic novel, or was there a series in discussion? JERRY: At the time the Byrne Shazam! project had just collapsed. I think their ultimate goal was to have a series, and it was one of the few times where I felt like I could call some shots, because Jonathan Peterson was the editor and he really wanted me to do it, so I think I had the option there to push things a little bit. Doing monthly comics back then, there was no guarantee of anything being reprinted in a book form. None of the Superman stuff had been collected, which was frustrating, and I 57

between the end of “The Death of Superman” and the Shazam! book. And DC was very supportive of that. My plan was to finish WildStar and then to finish Shazam!. And Shazam! was certainly interrupted for WildStar, but I think from DC’s point of view, they were holding that character for me. I think somewhere in there is when it became, “Well, would you do the series?” I started thinking about what it would be to do the series at that point, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to draw it. I was trying to scale my workload down with the birth of my first child, and I just didn’t want to be on constant deadlines. Because drawing and writing, some people can do it pretty matter-of-factly, I guess, but for me it was pulling teeth. And it’s a grueling kind of thing, month after month. I was able to hedge my bets there, too, when we finally were going to launch the Shazam! book, by getting them to let me do painted covers, and that would be my art contribution for the book. But that also seemed to be in dispute. MM: Were you asking for more money for the painted covers?

Above: Cover art for the hardcover edition of The Death of Superman. Pencils by Dan Jurgens. Next Page: WildStar promotional artwork.

You have to do really clean work, as well, because if you have to erase something or paint a mistake out, it will show. At that point they were nice enough that it wasn’t scheduled. I was doing it as my side job. As I recall, when I finished on Superman—“The Death of Superman,” and “The Return of Superman,” which was ’93— I had maybe 30 pages done, at that point, over a couple of years. It was really slow. MM: You also worked on a couple of other projects, too, during that time, WildStar being one. JERRY: Yeah, WildStar kind of fit in 58

JERRY: You know, it wasn’t even that. Painted covers are a standard now. Back then, they didn’t do them very often because they were very difficult, production-wise. The system was geared towards flat color and being able to reuse the black-and-white line art. There wasn’t a budget for a painted cover—that was a big issue. Their painted rate was much better than a pencil-&-ink rate and a flat color rate. At that time I think it was the difference between getting paid something like $1500 for a painted cover versus getting something like $300 or $400 for a pencil&-ink cover. That was an issue, but I said, “Look, I’ll take the rate of just doing flat color,” which was, I think, $100, “on top of the pencil and ink cover rate.” I did that for the first year’s worth of covers, maybe. There was some period in time when they finally said, “Okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to come up with a special rate. It’s not the full painting rate, but it’s not the other thing.” They were very agreeable, I just had to prove that I wanted to do it. [laughter]

MM: And that you could turn in a painting every month.

MM: Interesting. JERRY: The other thing I think was interesting was Jonathan Peterson and I knew we were doing this hardcover which was going to be priced at around 20, 25 bucks. We thought, “Well, if you’re going to try to do this and get the audience that you want, the pricey hardcover is going to limit you.” So I drew all the artwork on the Power of Shazam! graphic novel in black line form, then I made really clean photocopies that could be shot from, and then I colored the pages over the black line. That way we had a record of it in line art, because the plan was to break that 96 pages up after the hardcover came out and reprint it in a cheap format with flat colors as a four-issue series with filler pages here and there. It would be a way of helping launch the regular book. But then that plan went by the wayside, so it was a lot of effort that was really wasted, because they just decided they would do editions in trade format. The original orders were something like 16,500. They printed 18,000, from what I understand, and they actually sold the overprinting pretty quickly, which gave them license to put the trade paperback out a little quicker. They pumped out probably 20,000 of those, and that sold out. And then the next edition went down in price from, like, $14.95 to $12.95, and that’s been the one that they’ve kept in their backlist. And it sells consistently; in the years since then, it’s been a real steady seller. Every year I get a royalty off of it, and it’s in its seventh or eighth printing now, which is cool. It’s nice that it’s had a long life.

JERRY: I had to hold my breath until I turned blue. But in any tantrum—it wasn’t even a tantrum—but any type of situation like that where I drew a line in the sand, I always did it over artistic things rather than, “Oh, I want this because this guy got that.” In comics you really aren’t in control of things, you’re part of an assembly line. So the idea of being able to do it all by myself was just a dream. And it’s a tricky thing for them, work-forhire-wise, because part of their loophole with work-for-hire is that you’re contributing to a product rather than creating a product. I believe I had to be incorporated at an earlier point just to be able to write and draw the Superman books. I had to be incorporated just so I could qualify from their legal standpoint, not being able to claim copyright on any of the material I did.

MM: I guess the extra effort you put into it paid off, to some extent. JERRY: It’s also an original story, so I think that helps. It was also the only real Shazam book that they had out for a while, too. So it was gratifying in all the right ways, and it won Best Original Graphic Novel, the Buyers’ Guide fan award. I proudly have my award sitting on the mantle. MM: Let’s go back and talk about WildStar for a minute. You were co-creator, but I think you said before that it was really Al Gordon’s— 59

JERRY: Well, his initial pitch was his idea with the time travel aspect and all that. MM: Did he come to you first, or had he already talked to Image? Right: WildStar under stress. Below: Jerry’s designs for WildStar’s BroodStar and Jumpstart. Next Page: A dynamic 2-page spread from WildStar. BroodStar, Jumpstart, WildStar ™ and ©2007 Al Gordon & Jerry Ordway.

JERRY: He and I had been friends for a long time, and it was hard to ignore the buzz surrounding Image. That’s what everybody doing comics was talking about, whether they were badmouthing it or backing it, it was on everybody’s lips. And it was quite a coup to be part of the second wave. If we had gotten our book out on the original schedule, we would have been one of the first couple not from the founders. I know Al was talking about it at the time, because the Image founders had basically created a partnership, and if one of them were to drop out, Al and I would be welcomed in as #6, or something like that. So all that stuff was in the air at the time. And we had good intentions. We worked really hard on that, too, and he and I were good friends, but we butted heads. WildStar’s

then everybody and their brother—you know, we all have our own little pet projects that we had when we were kids and what have you, and all those things kind of came out of that. So it was a very interesting time.

clearly a very different product than either of us would have done separately, but I think it stands on its own in that way. And, as opposed to Shazam!, which was hard, but satisfyingly hard, WildStar was hard and frustratingly so. It was quite an ordeal. MM: Did you design the costume?

MM: Did you have any kind of relationship with the Image founders?

JERRY: Oh, yeah. Al and I talked about what the thing was going to be about, basically. And, I mean, from the point when he first pitched his big concept, he and I were co-creators on it from that point on. But he did initiate it and he came up with the original name and all that stuff. It’s one of those things where you look back on it and it was really an amazing time, because it was the first time in history that I can remember where people who weren’t DC or Marvel were making hundreds of thousands of dollars an issue. It was almost like the comic market was finally paying off, that you didn’t have to do the X-Men to have a successful comic. That was pretty unheard of, that the creators rather than the companies were the important thing. It really put the market up on its ear for a couple of years there, and

JERRY: I knew Erik [Larsen], and I knew Todd [McFarlane] a little bit. I knew Erik better than Todd. Erik I’d met earlier. I think I knew Jim Valentino casually. Now that I think of it, I knew Marc Silvestri, as well, from the Chicago Comicon days. But it was one of those things in retrospect, I think I probably would have been happier if I had made that phone call myself and not waited for Al to call me and say, “Hey, let’s do this.” I think I would have been happier if I had taken Proton or the Messenger—one of my own characters—and called Erik Larsen and said, “How do I get in?” But that’s always been a failing point, I think by virtue of being the youngest child. I don’t think I’ve ever had that point-man kind of attitude that sometimes is necessary to get ahead. 61

MM: Did you have any hopes or expectations for the series? Were you planning on doing more at some point? JERRY: When we were starting it, it was kind of open, but I also knew that I had to finish Shazam!. That limited what I could do personally, because I didn’t want to leave DC on the hook for that long. I’m sure they weren’t thrilled. They tolerated it, and they always supported Shazam!, but I’m sure that they weren’t thrilled that I suddenly was going to five issues of something else in between there. But, yeah, initially I thought maybe I would do WildStar, then finish Shazam!, and then we’d do some more WildStar, but from the very start of that project, we had problems. You could say, it was Al’s fault, or it was my fault, but I think both of us probably have the type of personality that wants to do it all, you know what I mean? It wasn’t a control freak situation as much as it was just that we wanted to make it as good as we could make it, because we knew our names were on it. But we also had a side issue there where we had legal problems

with the trademarking of the name WildStar, and that ultimately soured me on it, I think, the fact that we could never resolve the trademark issues. And we were working in an environment without an editor, and it was very hard to do that. Sometimes you need an editor just to keep you on schedule, sometimes you need an editor to play middle man. I think we needed both, in a sense, on WildStar. We needed someone who could say, “Look, you’re going to screw this up by not getting this thing out when you’re supposed to.” And also, “Okay, enough arguing about every little detail.” MM: What about Zero Hour? How’d you get wrangled into that? JERRY: With Zero Hour, it’s funny, because I’d known [Dan] Jurgens for years and years and years. Even before our Superman days. We met very early in the ’80s, when he was first doing Warlord and I was doing All-Star Squadron—we’re both Midwestern boys. And Dan, even though I’m older than he is, he’s a little bit more like the

Previous Page: Jerry’s pencils for the cover of Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon #77, which featured a guestappearance by WildStar. Below: Promotional art for the Zero Hour miniseries. Pencils by Dan Jurgens.

WildStar ™ and ©2007 Al Gordon & Jerry Ordway. Savage Dragon ™ and ©2007 Erik Larsen. Arsenal, Atom, Batgirl, Batman, Darkstar, Extant, Flash, Geo-Force, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, Manhunter, Metamorpho, Primal Force, Robin, Starman, Superman, Waverider ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

Below: Mike Wieringo, originally slated to pencil The Power of Shazam!, had to back out at the last minute, so we’ll have to settle for this one gorgeous piece penciled by Mike and inked by Jerry. Next Page: Bettie Page—I mean Taia— provides an amusing diversion during the climactic battle of the Shazam! graphic novel. Black Adam, Captain Marvel, Shazam! ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

point man that I was telling you about, a little bit more of the guy who just goes, “Okay, I want this, and I’m going to get it.” [laughter] But he called me up and said, “I’m doing this thing, Zero Hour. It’s a big crossover, and I know you don’t want to get involved in a big penciling job, but would you think about doing finishes on it?” The regular monthly Shazam! really wasn’t going at that point. We were still trying to find a penciler, so I was looking for some project to do that wouldn’t be long-term. And the idea sounded fun. You start with issue #5 and go backwards. Carlin had taken over the Shazam! series when Jonathan had left to do an Image comic with Kevin Maguire [Strikeback!]

which wound up coming out much later through someone else. But Carlin and I immediately started talking about how to get a regular series launched and all that stuff. At one point we thought we had the best luck in the universe, because he had contacted Mike Wieringo, and Wieringo had just come off Flash and apparently liked Captain Marvel. So we were gearing to launch the Shazam! book out of Zero Hour, with the #0 issue. I started working on the story in between doing the Zero Hour stuff and we worked out the first story arc for the Shazam! book. Then Mike dropped out of it, and basically we missed that window and had to go back to searching for an artist. But things happen, and you just roll with it. What can you do? As much as I like what Pete Krause did on the Shazam! book—I think Pete is really an allaround good artist, the guy who could draw anything you asked him to do—Mike Wieringo was certainly a hot hand at the time—the rising star. I mean, he wasn’t even as good as he would be a year later— or now, he’s just awesome—but I think that probably would have been a totally different book, because I’m sure the stories would have probably geared differently. MM: Yeah, he would have probably asked for more Tawky Tawny. [laughter] JERRY: We did get Tawky Tawny in there. [laughter] But I think his style was certainly more C.C. Beck-inspired than realistic—a little more stylized. I think it’s possible that it could have been more successful. I don’t know. I mean, again, you just roll with these things. You never really can tell what’s going to happen. MM: I want to go back to the graphic novel. There are quite a few little things where you’re just having some fun. Like, Sivana’s chauffeur is named Smithers [after the character from The Simpsons], and the nice little parallel where C.C. Batson gets crushed by the rocks, just like the Wizard would, later. Then there’s the scene where Captain Marvel and Black Adam fly through the photographer’s room. JERRY: Oh, right, they crash through Dave Stevens’...

MM: It looks like it was Bettie Page there, but later on in the series, you say that it was Taia. I assume you didn’t have that in your mind when drew that. JERRY: No, no. You know, the fun thing about doing monthly comics is that your brain is constantly working, and something that didn’t occur to you one day will occur to you the next day, and it’ll be like, “Wow! That’s like I planned it!” A lot of stuff works out that way. But, yeah, with the graphic novel, I was always a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan, and I certainly used enough Calvin and Hobbes references. His teacher was the teacher from Calvin and Hobbes, and I used Tawky Tawny, the tiger, in that form initially. That was just the style. Jonathan and I had talked about whether Tawky Tawny would be a real character or whether he’d just appear when Billy’s alone. There was a lot of that, again, because it was something that we could start up fresh. With the Shazam! graphic novel, one of my major jumping off points was the Republic serial Adventures of Captain Marvel, and I wanted to get that feel to it. And the story itself always had kind of an Egyptian background to it. Unfortunately a lot of that was shoehorned in over the later years, in the ’50s, when they were doing Captain Marvel with the Black Adam stuff and all that, so I thought this was the opportunity to make it all linear from the beginning. I did a lot of research on Egypt and on Art Deco, to try to get that somewhat consistent feel to Fawcett City. Fawcett City was conceived as a little bit like Shangri-La as a way of explaining how it could feel so dated and yet be the present day DC Universe. All that stuff was very fun to play with, but a lot of the subtleties, stuff that I

was very versed and familiar with, other people just didn’t get. After the book, and even while the book was ongoing, when someone would borrow Captain Marvel or Billy Batson for their series, they wouldn’t catch the little moments which, to me, made the series fun. But all those little in-jokes, you know, we did that in Superman—we had a number of running gags in Superman. One of them, was the fact that a cab ride in Metropolis always seemed to cost $6.50. We did that for the 65

up, and I think there was a fixed timetable for how long Superman had been in costume.

longest time. That started just by coincidence, that somebody said, “Hey, how come these cab rides always cost $6.50?” “Well, gee, that’s the going rate.” And we played with that in one issue where Jimmy Olsen catches a cab and the guy says, “Seven bucks,” and Jimmy says, “But it’s always $6.50!” [laughter] I don’t know about Jurgens or any of the other guys, but I was always trying to crack up Carlin. I would throw something in there that I knew he would get a kick out of, and if he noticed it, it always cracked me up, too, then. There are Honeymooners references in the stuff. We even got Honeymooners references in Shazam! at some point, with Uncle Dudley. [laughs]

MM: That was mapped out in the last issue of Zero Hour. JERRY: Yeah. And the creepiest thing any writer can do is to actually take a story that he didn’t like and turn it into a lie by writing it out. It’s a slap to whoever was doing it at the time. One of the big issues with Shazam! was that Roy had tried for several years to get a series going. After his miniseries, Shazam: A New Beginning, he couldn’t get an artist—or if he got an artist, DC didn’t like the guy. Several issues were produced, fully penciled and inked— maybe not all of them were inked—but complete issues that they just ate the cost on because it wasn’t what they wanted to launch with. So I felt really conflicted about how to tell an origin story without getting somebody’s nerves out of joint. And from a DC Editorial point of view, they said, “Look, we can’t acknowledge Roy’s thing if you’re going to do something that basically takes it back to the basics. So I found a way to squeeze a reference in there when I did the Billy in the multiple universes story where his father was Captain Marvel and there was really a Marvel Family. There’s a scene where he goes through the Rock of Eternity, through this timestream, and there’s the Tom Mandrake Shazam that Roy had done, and all the other different variations are all sneakily squeezed in there—I guess we were a precursor to Infinite Crisis. [laughter] It is a kind of creepy thing, I think, to go out of your way, as some of these guys do, to put a story that came out in the past in a bad light. There’s always somebody who liked that story.

MM: How much of the series did you map out ahead of time? How far in advance did you plan out? JERRY: With Shazam! we had to figure twelve issues. The contracts they would give us were continuity contracts for twelve issues, and by virtue of that, you knew that, unless it sold really, really, terribly, you had twelve issues to work with. The first twelve issues were done somewhat informally. I think Mike Carlin might have come to my house, and we spent most of one day just goofing around and typing up notes, so we had kind of a general idea where we were headed for the end of the first year. Then we did the same thing for each of the next three years after that. MM: Why did you settle on the four-year jump between the graphic novel and the start of the regular series? JERRY: We wanted to fit in and leave room for all the different continuity appearances of Captain Marvel in Justice League and the various crossovers where he’d show 66

her inhibitions away, she comments that without inhibitions, Mary’s almost unbeatable. Which is kind of interesting considering what they’re planning on doing with her now, with the new Countdown storyline. JERRY: Yeah, I don’t know what their plans are, I don’t even want to know about it. Everybody’s got their own ideas, but when you’re the steward on the ship of Shazam!, you try to come up with ways to make it interesting. And these characters are all so potentially awesomely colorful. I mean, with something that has magic in it, the only real limitations that you can throw at your characters are going to be human limitations. And no two people are alike.

MM: What was your thinking on dividing the power between all the Marvels? JERRY: That really came out of when Jonathan and I were first talking about doing it, because it was always referred to as the Marvel Family, and Billy Batson has no parents. That was one of the first things that jumped out at me was the fact that he doesn’t have any parents. It seemed like it was screaming for family in a more traditional sense, so Billy became someone who was trying to create a family. And that’s part of where this power sharing came from, because he didn’t necessarily have to be the only guy with that power. When we reintroduced Mary Marvel and we introduced Freddy Freeman as Captain Marvel, Jr., it was all Billy giving up aspects of his power to help them and also surround himself with family. The same thing with a character like Uncle Dudley. I mean, Uncle Dudley has no business, in the real world, being with kids, obviously. [laughter] Not that he’s a child molester, but he’s kind of a shady character, and he’s not really Billy’s uncle. But he fulfilled an important duty, as well, as an adult front. So all that stuff was part of the original plan, and it was a way of explaining the Marvel Family. MM: It seemed like you were making Mary the more competent member of the Marvels. When Madame Libertine takes 67

Previous Page: Cover art to Shop Talk. Left: Rough sketch for the cover of The Power of Shazam! #18. Below: One big, happy family. Jerry’s pencils for Shazam! #42, page 5. Captain Marvel, Shazam!, and all related characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

He was really a nice guy. When the opportunity came up, I said, “Well, this would be fun,” and Carlin was onboard, because Mike always tried to include Curt on the Superman stuff, too. And when Curt did the first thing... was that with Spy Smasher? MM: Yeah, that was the first one, in issue #8. Then he did a small sequence in issue #11, and another in issue #17, as well. JERRY: Right, right. He was very sweet about it, and when I talked to him on the phone, he made a comment like it was great to be back in the major leagues again. And that’s a telling comment, because he had done Superman, and Superman was the character. He had been on Superman for so long. Once he got off of Superman, he constantly had work, but as he said, “Finally I’m doing something where I can tell somebody I’m drawing Captain Marvel and they’ll all know who it is!” [laughter] And Pete Krause was really a steady guy, but with the amount of detail that he put into the pages, he’d lose a couple of days every month, so we needed fill-in type things, but we didn’t want to go for the full-out fill-in unless we had to. People have different personalities. Some people are more efficient than others, some are more creative. Playing with how the powers would affect them seemed like a fun idea, and Mary was a better student because Mary had a little more stable upbringing. Billy was a little scrappier. Freddy Freeman was into sports. I wanted each of them to be distinct in their own way. Also as part of this family, and caring about each other even if they have disputes, there’s the idea that they would stop using the power to give the other guy a boost if he’s in a fight with Doomsday, because that’s what a family is about. A family has to work together. Anybody who has a family knows that. It’s not done by just one person, everybody has some part to play in it. MM: Whose idea was it to get Curt Swan to come in for those flashback sequences? JERRY: Oh, it was probably Carlin and me. I knew Curt on a social level just casually. I used to see him at the local National Cartoonists Society meetings. We loved working with him on Superman, and he was a generally great guy to hang out with. I almost took up golf just so I could hang out with him more.

MM: You penciled a couple of flashback sequences yourself, too. JERRY: I did the origin of Black Adam, and that was a lot of fun. Again, pulling out my Egyptian history books was very helpful. MM: Was that the reason that you chose to draw those things yourself? JERRY: Since Blaze and Satanus were characters that I was involved with on Superman, I felt like they were my link to the mainstream DC Universe. And, again, it was a case where it helped out the deadline. I said, “Okay, well, I haven’t really drawn any continuity pages in a while, so I can do seven pages,” or whatever it was I had to do. I think I did color guides for them, too, but Glenn still got paid for it—I didn’t want to take work away from him. But those pages were colored a little differently. That was fun to do. MM: And you also had Gil Kane do a fill-in issue. JERRY: Yeah, that was terrific. Gil was one of those guys who I admired from the time I was a kid. I knew him from Spider-Man and Captain Action. I didn’t appreciate the Green Lantern stuff until much later. But he

was my 1970s Marvel guy. He was the cover artist, and was on all that stuff. And I had met him several times, but he was a very imposing guy. You’d walk into a room with him, and every Comics Journal interview he ever did was right in the forefront of my brain. It was a little scary talking to him. He could go off on somebody, and I was a little too sensitive to sit in a room and have somebody tell me what was wrong with my work. [laughter] But I always used to say hi to him. He had health issues around the early ’90s, and had a relapse. And it was very sad, because he was one of my art heroes. And he was a nice guy, too. He was somebody who really cared about comics. He was going to do another issue of Captain Marvel, Jr. and Captain Nazi that he wound up not being able to finish. His health was not terrible at that point, but he was having problems. He seemed like a pretty in-shape kind of guy, and took pride in his appearance and everything, and then he had the double whammy of having cancer and then having heart problems because of the treatment. Toward the end, before he passed away, I sent him a fan letter. I felt really awkward about it, but there was stuff that I wished I had said to Curt Swan about what his work meant to me, and knowing him, what it meant to me. I said to Carlin, “I just don’t want to intrude on him.” I sent him a letter just saying here’s how much your work has meant to me, and he called me up and we had, like, a couple-hour long telephone call. And I felt bad that I never had more balls to call him regularly, you know, because he loved to talk. He just impressed me that he still wanted to compete in

comics. He knew who all the new guys were, and he clearly cared enough that if he was going to be in it, he was going to be competitive. And that just seemed like a real inspiring motivation, y’know? MM: Definitely. In the story where you finally introduce Mr. Mind, Captain Marvel’s spacesuit looks very much like a Wally Wood-drawn spacesuit. 69

Previous Page: Cover rough for The Comics’ Buyers Guide, and Jerry riffing on Gil Kane. Above: The origin of Black Adam from The Power of Shazam! #10.

be a selling point.” But nobody would use it as a selling point. MM: This is the first I’ve even heard mention of it.

Above: Batman pencils for a DC style guide. Next Page: Jerry felt Plastic Man was a natural fit with the world of Captain Marvel, and who could argue? Jerry’s cover sketch for The Power of Shazam! #21 and Plastic Man pencils for a DC style guide.

JERRY: Yeah, that was a fun thing to do. Most of the interior designs would take a cue from the covers. Any costumes, anything like that usually was designed by me. Captain Marvel had his share of wacky villains, and it seemed every one of them had “Mister” at the beginning of their name. It limits things, you know? We tried to create new ones where we could, but sometimes you just played with what you had. Fans wanted Mr. Mind. And I tried to put a moratorium on Mr. Mind and Sivana for the first year, just to get the book established in the DC Universe, and also to not go to the most obvious route. It’s like, “Well, if you really want to see them, they’re going to be there in the second year. We’re going to need your readership.” [laughter] The decoder card really was a huge success. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to capitalize on it, because Shazam! is one of those books that never really gets any respect. It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of comics. The first year we won a Parents Choice Award, and I remember getting this little thing in the mail, and I said, “Wow, this is something! Maybe it could 70

JERRY: When a Disney movie wins a Parents Choice Award—which I think Hercules did—they put out ads: “The Parents Choice winner.” If there was a budget for that type of thing, DC could have done that on a broad level. It wouldn’t help in the comic stores, obviously, but it was still a newsstand book at that point. And when we did the Shazam! decoder card, all these things were of the same church that Carlin did with me on Superman. They were ways of getting promotion when there was no promotion money available. Between Mike and his assistant, Chris Duffy, who is now with Nickelodeon Magazine, these guys were printing the decoder cards out on their printers at work and cutting them apart and mailing them out. The problem was, it was too successful, and it stressed these guys, because it was just them doing it. They sent out a couple hundred of these things. For a book that was selling what it was selling, I said, “Wow, that’s phenomenal!” But there was no way to capitalize on it. Harlan Ellison sent in for a card! I mean, how cool is that? That was pretty awesome. We did what we could. MM: With issue #20 you have a string of guest-appearances. First you had Superman, which was a tie-in with Final Night, then you had Plastic Man, and then Batman. Was that solely intended to help sales? JERRY: Well, I think we tried to get Batman and Superman at different times. We had Superman in the first year, but it was more like a cameo, I think. Anything that would help sales was good, but the idea was that we would have some strong reason for it. We didn’t want to do this in the beginning, because we didn’t want to take away from the focus of introducing all the Marvel Family, but by the time we got up to #20, it was like, “Oh, okay, if we’re

going to do this Final Night thing, can we use Superman. And it would be fun to do Plastic Man.” I think around that time I even did Plastic Man’s dialogue on a Jurgens Superman co-starring Plastic Man. Plastic Man harks from the same kind of cartoony soul as Shazam. It just seemed Eel O’Brien would fit in somehow. Until I hit the third year, I had no inkling that I had any limitations on what I could do. Clearly, if I did Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, I was still in a protective bubble. [laughter] MM: When you updated Mr. Atom you made him look like a Transformer, almost. Was that what you had in mind? JERRY: I think Pete wanted to do him more like what Alex Ross had done with him on Kingdom Come. Pete and I talked a lot during the run, and while I don’t think he necessarily suggested too many story ideas, he did have ideas here and there about stuff, “Oh, it would be fun to draw this, or fun to draw that.” I think in that case it was, “Let’s do something really drastic to bring Mary’s adoptive parents into Billy’s life,” and Mr. Atom fit into that. We introduced him, because we wanted someone with major power capable of being able to do that. The Captain Marvel characters are childlike and maybe naïve, and my goal was never to rub their nose in the reality of the world in a bad way, just to amp up the action. Now it seems like everyone’s intent on somehow sexually tainting these characters. To me, that’s not a place you go. Number one, they’re kid characters, which was always in the back of my mind. Number two, it’s like taking your best friend and trying to make them drink and smoke for the first time. It’s not what you do. And every writer seems intent on doing that now.

I think Chris Duffy was editing the Supergirl/Mary Marvel crossover, and Peter David’s first thing he wanted to do was have Mary Marvel be sexually harassed or molested by some police character from the Supergirl book. Come on! That shouldn’t happen in your book, much less with this character. If it was going to happen—which it wasn’t—it should happen in the main book that she’s part of. But why go there? And I heard recently that Keith Giffen pitched that idea a couple times. Once I put Mary Marvel in a white costume.... Keith was going to have her lose her virginity, then wear the red costume again. I mean, it’s a funny idea along the same lines of Larry Niven, you know... MM: His short story, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.” JERRY: Right, right. You know, they’re fun as little jokes to talk about, but it just seems like a slap in the face to C.C. Beck and Bill Parker or whoever was involved in the creation of Captain Marvel. 71

novel, in a way, where Shazam had his eye on Billy’s father before he was taken out of the equation. But what about in an alternate timeline, on an alternate Earth, you know? It was a cool one to do, and I remember being very pleased with the covers for those three issues. They came out well. MM: Yeah, and you got to play with the costume design a little bit, too. JERRY: That’s fun to do, especially shortterm. You can give the character a little change of pace. Pete really brought it off well, because he was very conscientious. He really went out of his way with showing all the different versions of Captain Marvel. I think we even threw in, as a little joke, Marvel’s Captain Marvel. MM: Yes, he did. The other Captain Marvel, as it were. JERRY: The other white meat. [laughter] MM: You mentioned the white costume earlier and it was introduced in this storyline with Marilyn Batson wearing a white costume. In the following story Mary adopts the white costume. Was that just to set up more contrast between the characters?

Above: Tawky Tawny goes into the future to get help from Thunder (last seen in The Power of Shazam! Annual #1), but is foiled by Black Adam. Next Page: Cap and Tawky. Captain Marvel, Shazam!, Tawky Tawny, Thunder ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Mickey Mouse ™ and ©2007 Walt Disney.

MM: That alternate timeline story where Billy and Mary’s parents come back, that wasn’t very lighthearted. It was a very emotional story. JERRY: That was inspired by a number of things. It’s a Wonderful Life is a great movie. I love that movie. Jimmy Stewart. I was also drawing on a story from my early childhood that always stuck out in my brain. Batman finds out that his father had had a Batman costume and had worn it to a costume party and solved some crime, or something like that. They did a lot of that type of thing back then. That concept fit in with what I was doing in the graphic 72

JERRY: It was to make them all individual, and it also was red, white, and blue, and that was kind of fun. But the main thing was so that they weren’t just clones of each other, because there’s no real reason to be a clone. To me, the fact that each of the characters used the power in a different way made it worthwhile. Otherwise there’s no reason for them to be there. I was always amazed at the amount of letters that we’d get with people requesting us to do the Lieutenant Marvels. And I always thought, “Well, someday I’ll figure out a way to do that.” But they’re really funny—you put those guys in there and you have an episode of Gomer Pyle. But, hey, there were people out there who wanted to see that. MM: So... Professor Bibowski. [laughter] You just couldn’t leave him alone, could you? You had to bring him with you. JERRY: I just thought it would be kind of funny to throw in a smart version of Bibbo.

When I pitched it to Carlin I knew it would make him laugh, and I thought, for anybody who gets it, they’ll get a kick out of it. It’ll be funny. And I think it was. It wasn’t meant to be anything more than it was. Was that the one with Patty Patty Bang Bang?

brilliant. This has got to find its way somewhere into the book.” It took a couple of years, but it did find its way in. MM: How did you manage to sneak Hoppy the Marvel Bunny in? Is it a dream sequence, or is it not a dream sequence?

MM: Yes.

JERRY: Well, we did tease it in the multiple versions of Captain Marvel scene, and there were people who wanted to see Hoppy. But how big is that audience? Really, I didn’t feel like I had a lot to lose. We were selling pretty good. It wasn’t like it was ever a big success, but at the time DC was publishing probably 60 titles, and we were in the middle, or just below the middle. The idea of “watch me pull a rabbit out of the hat,” that was kind of the genesis of even doing it. I said, “If a magician can reach into that hat and there’s Hoppy the Marvel Bunny Universe....” Pete did a great job with both styles. It was a fun little story, and that one stands along with the Tawky Tawny story with Dudley— those were really fun to do. Unfortunately the market didn’t really support that stuff. It’s a tough one, because you’d like to think the people who are enjoying the book are going to stay for that ride. There are all these aspects of these characters, and some of them are funny, and some of them are serious. Was that the third year? Getting close to it, right?

JERRY: Yeah, that was fun. That relates to a Superman thing. We went as a group to California to meet with the Lois & Clark producers and players, and we got a walk-on in the pilot episode. While we were there, we went to a dinner honoring Jerry Siegel. We had two vans full of Superman creators, so a well-timed accident could have wiped out continuity. We were on our way to this restaurant, and we kept passing these ridiculous, hilarious California signs for stores, for businesses, and I started writing them down. One was Patty Patty, Bang Bang. “This is

MM: Yeah, this was in the third year. JERRY: There was talk at different times that Pete wanted to quit because he was tired of the grind. Because it was hard for him. Drawing a monthly book when you’re not really fast is tough and it always comes out of the hours of the day that you’d usually sleep or spend with your family. He was talking about leaving the book, and when we did “Mr. Mind Goes to Washington,” that going to be Pete’s last story. DC started saying, “Well, maybe we should end the book. Let’s put Jerry on something else, let’s put our efforts on some other thing.” From a company point of view, I think they were kind of done with it, and that’s when I took over drawing it. But it was really compromised, and, unfortunately, I wasn’t having as much fun on it because I saw the end. DC wanted me to pencil this Kingdom series that Waid was going to write, and I just didn’t want to do it. 73

Below: Has Black Adam turned over a new leaf? Don’t count on it! The Power of Shazam! #45, page 22. Next Page: Artwork for a DC style guide. Black Adam, Captain Marvel, Justice League, Shazam! ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

It was one of those things. I said, “Look, I don’t really want to pencil Kingdom. I’d rather pencil Shazam! if I could keep it going.” When I debuted with my penciling on the book, I didn’t see it at the time, but it was like, “Okay, here’s your rope. Hang yourself.” [laughter] MM: One of the more interesting things you did was when you introduced Deanna Barr as an adult love interest for Billy. What kind of reaction did you get from that? JERRY: It was funny, because I thought stuff like that would have been really remarked on, like, “Oh my God, I can’t

believe he did that,” but most of it just went by. I thought Windshear was a good updating for Bulletman. I thought those concepts could have been spun off in some way and used. The same with Spy Smasher and stuff like that, I was basically saying, “Okay, here. I’m introducing them, but if someone else wants to use them, let’s do them.” But there was just zero interest in this other Fawcett stuff. MM: Issue #33—the child burn victim story—was there any real world back story that served as inspiration? JERRY: When you see someone who’s been through a really horrible thing like a fire, and they’re scarred and in constant pain and they feel that they can’t go out in public, it’s kind of the opposite of the superhero who puts on a mask to fight crime or something. That idea just kind of jumped out. Pete and I both really felt something special about that. Even though it’s framed in a super-hero story, it was a story that had a lot of heart to it. Maybe it feels hokey to some, but it was very heartfelt. MM: If you have to go out, you might as well go out with a Monster Society of Evil story, right? Mr. Mind commandeers Mr. Atom and wipes out Fairfield and a lot of supporting cast members. Was that just to kind of emphasize, hey, this little worm is a real threat? JERRY: Well, yeah. It was probably an attempt to show people that it’s not all fun and games in Fawcett City or the outlying suburbs. I mean, when you start talking about a giant mind worm in Washington, DC, you know you’re talking about serious drama. [laughter] Pete and I had had conversations with Carlin where, “What can we do with Mr. Mind? Do we draw the glasses? Do we draw the little voicebox? How close do you do it?” You don’t want to lose the look of it, but you can’t just draw a caterpillar. It’s gotta be somehow a little bit amped up, otherwise it’s just a caterpillar and you might as well go to sleep, y’know? MM: I think it was a nice compromise, not using the glasses, but having the thick outline around the eyes.

Below and Next Page: Commission pieces asking “What if The Power of Shazam! series had continued?” Both “covers” are takes on classic Marvel covers. Billy Batson, Captain Marvel, King Kull, Shazam! ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

JERRY: I think Pete came up with that. The glasses were a little too over-the-top. He didn’t really need them because he had those bands on him that were pretty distinctive, so I think it’s a good compromise. MM: Over the course of the series you used pretty much everyone from the mythology, but you didn’t use King Kull.

JERRY: No. I had an idea for him, though. I was planning on using him. I was gearing him up towards issue #50. I was going to do something with him taking over the Rock of Eternity. I think he did that once in the past. He was one of those characters I think, that could have been kind of fun to do in a semi-intelligent, Conan the Barbarian sort of way. I mean, I was thinking of the way they did the bad guy in the Shadow movie. You know, he was... MM: A descendent of Genghis Khan. JERRY: ...a warlord, but he was able to kind of fit with the times. That type of thing could have been fun with Kull. It would still show his brutality and ruthlessness, but he wouldn’t be a dope. My goal was to get that book to issue #50. We had plotted out the big storyline where the kids get into the car crash, out of commission, and Black Adam resurfaces, and all this stuff. And Carlin says, “They want to end it. They want to pull the plug. Can you wrap the story in an issue?” I was like, “Well, we planned it out for five issues.” “Okay, well, they’re willing to give you three issues.” I wanted to get to issue #50, and it was like they were stopping me at the three-yard line. It was very frustrating. But, again, you move on. Whatever. Shazam! was just the most wonderful project I could have done, and unfortunately it was one of those projects that I think kind of hurt my career, in retrospect.

Part 6:

Marvel, Alan Moore, and the McCarthy Era year. I knew Shazam! was ending, and my third child, my son James, was just born in September of ’98, so I was also a little frightened—I had another mouth to feed. And DC, all they could do was say, “Well, you shouldn’t worry about it. You know you’ll get work.” I got a call around the time I was finishing up Shazam! to ink an issue of Thor over John Buscema’s pencils, which was like a dream come true. That got me into [Tom] Brevoort’s office, and then a little later I got a call from Brevoort asking if I would be willing to write a three-issue arc of Avengers to spell George and Kurt. I said, “Well, coincidentally, I happen to have a hole in my schedule.” So I agreed to do it, and I also said I’d be willing to draw it, too. He said, “Oh, sure, great.” Two days later I got a call from Mike Carlin, who at that point was the managing editor—he was the bigshot. He was calling me from Arizona while he was on vacation to say, “Please don’t make any moves, we’ll make this work, we’ll work this out.” But by then it was already done. I felt kind of hurt, y’know? After putting a lot of years in at DC, to feel that I could be just shuffled off.... I would never dispute the right of an editor to make a change like that, but I had a deal in the works for twelve issues, and all they

MM: Why Avengers next? Did DC not have anything lined up for you?

JERRY: The last year of Shazam!, Karl Kesel was doing a World’s Finest mini-series for DC. I don’t remember if he was, at that point, writing Harley Quinn, but he had plenty of stuff, and he asked me if I would be willing to come onto Adventures of Superman again, to do the dialogue. He would just plot the book. He and I worked that way for that year, and as he was wrapping up his run on Adventures he said, “I’m passing the torch back to you.” Joey Cavalieri was the editor, and Joey was like, “Yeah, great!” So I agreed to write Adventures of Superman for a year, and Joey put in for my contract. Then Joey was replaced, and the new editor, Eddie Berganza, came on. I thought I was secure; I thought I was going to get a shot, but the word came down that they were probably going to can everybody and start fresh. Berganza called me and said, “I’m starting fresh, so you’re out.” I had had a verbal agreement to do a year’s work, and they had been working on a contract for it, and that was my dispute. My first call was to Terry Cunningham, and I said that I felt DC owed me a commitment of writing for a 78

had to do was call me and say, “Come up with a character or something.” That would have solved it. But it led to a lot of hard feelings, and I tried to make mine Marvel at that point. MM: Did you discuss what the story was going to be with Kurt? JERRY: He said, “Here’s where we are, and here’s where we’re going.” His main thing was to say I get to break Justice’s leg in my story so that it’ll feel like it’s an important part of the continuity, but then I had to kind of shoehorn that into it. But it was my story. It was fun, but The Avengers, Spider-Man, and Daredevil were my all-time favorites as a kid, so working on The Avengers was like, “Oh my God! This is really scary!” [laughter] I had done Superman and all this other stuff, but I felt very intimidated. And I felt intimidated by being at Marvel, because I really didn’t know anybody. I tried as best I could to catch on there, but I’m not a networking guy. I’ve always been an assignment-oriented person. In the case of Avengers, Brevoort called me and said, “Here’s three issues, come up with something,” and I can do that. But I’m not going to sit on my hands at home and say, “Ah, the ultimate She-Hulk story,” and type up a spec script. Number one, I’m drawing full-time, I don’t have time to type up spec stuff. Number two, I don’t think about super-hero battles. [laughs] I liken it to the old Hollywood studio system, where someone would call you up and say, “You’re doing Gone with the Wind on Monday. Report to wardrobe,” as opposed to being Clark Gable trying to develop a role for himself by optioning a book. MM: I’ve always liked the Wrecking Crew. They’re one of those quintessential Kirby creations. [Jerry laughs] Did that have anything to do with you picking them? JERRY: Yeah, in the Thor comics, the issues where the Wrecker first appeared were classics to me. I just thought that was the greatest, and that was kind of the impetus there. When you get an assignment like that, it’s not like they say, “Use whoever you want.” It’s, “Who do you want to use?”, and then you start throwing out characters, and they say, “Oop, can’t use him. Oop, can’t use him, he’s in this. Oh, we just used him.” So I

wouldn’t say the Wrecking Crew was my first choice [laughs], but it was in the top 500. [laughter] It really was like that. But they were available, and the Doomsday Man from Captain Marvel was available, because he was pretty lame. [laughter] Really! I said, “Well, let’s see. When’s this story come out?” And it was supposed to be a March book, so I said, “Well, what about Mardi Gras?” I think Tom suggested using the Cajun Captain Marvel that Roger Stern had done in The Avengers. So that dictated another piece of it. You always try to think of a scene or something that gives you a hook—something that gives you some entry into the story—and what opened that door 79

Previous Page: Cover pencils for Avengers #16. Above: Cap chastises The Wrecker for his between-meal snacking. Pencils for Avengers #16, page 13. Avengers, Captain America, The Wrecker ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Romantic intrigue in a savage land. Avengers #18, page 11 pencils. Next Page: This back cover art for Monsterman #2 later became the cover to The Messenger. The Messenger ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway. Arkon, Avengers, Thundra ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

was the vision of the Wrecker with one of them there New Orleans doughnuts. [laughter] “He’s going to crash through some guy’s house, and the guy is just having himself a beignet, and as he’s crashing through he grabs the guy’s doughnut.” [Eric laughs] Then it’s how do you go from that, and how do you make the Wrecking Crew somewhat formidable and all this other stuff. I mean, if I had had my choice, I would have loved to something with Red Skull or Doctor Doom, but you make the best you can. With any kind of story, you have to

find the ingredients and try to combine them in a way that makes it palatable. I’m kind of a half-assed cook, too. [laughter] That’s how I approach cooking. I’m not somebody who goes through the cookbook and says, “Hey, I’ve always wanted to make this!” Karl Kesel is a masterful chef, and he’ll find some recipe that turns him on, and he’ll go and make some really complicated thing. I’ll look at what’s in the refrigerator and say, “Okay, well, we need to use up this, this, and this. What can I make with those three ingredients?” And that’s what stories are like. MM: In 2000, The Messenger—your childhood creation—was published through Image. JERRY: I think I started working on it while I was doing Shazam!. Mike Manley, who was inking Shazam!, was also self-publishing Action Planet Comics. He said, “If you ever have anything you want to do... I can’t pay you. You’ll be part of this other thing.” At that point I was trying to get the trademark for the Messenger, and I had to use it. I had an intent to use, I had the filings and all that stuff, but I needed to actually use it, so I started doing it as chapters. I had drawn something like four or five chapters by the time Mike pulled the plug. I called up Jim Valentino at Image and said, “I have this thing, and I wondered if you’d publish it as maybe two issues.” Because the story worked out to 48 pages. “I can pad it out to make three issues or something, and I’d like to do it in black-&white.” And he said, “Let me get back to you.” I sent him all that I had produced up to that point. Anthony Bozzi was the marketing guy or the sales guy, and he said, “All in one, squarebound, one-shot, full color.” “Ohhhh, okay.” Now, unfortunately, that’s on your back. Image doesn’t pay you for comics unless it makes a profit. And in a good market, that was great. In a bad market, it’s not so great. It was fun to do, and I was glad I did it. I had a great colorist that Anthony really set me up with, Nick Bell, and it came out very nicely. I’m certainly proud of it, but it just didn’t do anything. It wasn’t really a superhero, it was more... I don’t know. It was certainly very fulfilling, but I think it’s still technically in the red for Image. It never made back the margin of sales. I don’t know

Below: With a little reworking of some of the figures, these pencils became page 31 of The Messenger. Next Page: A page from Planetary/JLA, and pencils from Wonder Woman #189. The Messenger ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway. Clark Kent, Diana Prince, JLA, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Planetary ™ and ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

if they still have it warehoused. I hope they do. It’d be nice if they still listed it once in a while. But that’s the downside. That was basically a free job for me. That was a vanity project when you can’t really afford to do vanity projects. I didn’t make a dime off of it, and technically I still owe Image for it, I guess. But I’m still glad I did it. [laughter] I just wish it had sold a few more copies. MM: How did the US Agent mini-series come about? JERRY: It was like, “Well, when you’re done with Maximum Security, maybe you can do this US Agent thing.

MM: It felt like Maximum Security was a lead-in to US Agent. JERRY: Yeah, but there was that gap there because I had to come up with a pitch idea and all that. And that was the last Marvel work I did, really. I think Joe Quesada had taken over Marvel and the status quo was kind of shaken up, and I think a lot of the editors didn’t really know, “What is Joe like? Is he going to like this?” Joe came in with a direction that he wanted to take the books in, and initially it was much different than how it turned out. I think they wound up going more mainstream, but he was kind of going in a Vertigo direction initially. MM: Yeah, to some extent. JERRY: The work dried up at that point, really. And that was the first time in all the years I’ve done comics I was really like, “Wow, am I out of comics?” I think it was a January or February where I wasn’t really doing anything. I still felt confident in my work, but it’s one of those cyclical things, y’know? So I felt at that point, “Well, gee, I guess I’ve got to go back to DC with my hat in my hands and see if they have anything for me.” I recall making a few calls and not really having anything forthcoming. I called Carlin, and he said, “You’d be great on some JSA stuff,” but nothing came of that. Somewhat out of desperation, I called up Scott Dunbier at WildStorm. I knew him as an art dealer, and I did one Tom Strong—a short fill-in section—during the Avengers time. He went and found something for me, so I have to give him lots of credit for that. I mean, it was very nice. They were looking for an artist to do JLA/Planetary, and so he got that for me, and that led to me doing more WildStorm stuff. I did the JLA/Planetary, and then, on a lark, really, I’d heard that Walt Simonson was supposed to be writing Wonder Woman. I happened to be up at DC visiting with my two of my kids at that time. I said hi to Ivan Cohen, who was the editor of Wonder Woman, and I said, “I hear Walt’s writing this thing. Is he drawing it, too?” “Nope.” “That’d be kind of fun. I’d like to draw it. I think Walt would do a cool Wonder Woman.” So I talked myself into six months of Wonder Woman.

MM: P. Craig Russell inked that, which was nice. JERRY: Yeah, he had inked me on one issue of Adventures of Superman, back in ’87. It was not all that I expected in a way, but I wound up having too much work, because Scott Dunbier asked me about doing three issues of Tom Strong so that Chris Sprouse could do these three issues of Tom Strong that Harlan Ellison was writing. Ellison’s three-parter never happened, and Chris ended up with three months of finding work.

JERRY: That was one of those things, again, kind of like with the Avengers fill-in, where other forces dictate the story, in a way—who you can use, who you can’t use. I went into it with an idea of what I wanted to do, and it kind of got steered into that territory, which was, like, “Gosh, that’s kind of familiar. I just did that with Mr. Mind.” So I was not thrilled with that aspect of it. I think it was impacted by a Citizen V mini-series. Fabian [Nicieza] did a mini-series that overlapped with US Agent, and there were a lot of similar plot points. I cringed at the similarities that were there. And there were a couple things where, “Oh, okay, that’s why Tom steered me away from that.” It just felt very compromised.

MM: Going back to the US Agent series, did you see maybe some parallels between US Agent and the Messenger, to some extent? JERRY: Actually, I think I played more off of US Agent and Captain America. That costume is really fun to draw. And when we did Maximum Security, part of the deal was to redesign him. I think Brevoort had a specific idea for how he should look. After my first pass at the design, I remember Brevoort calling me, going, “It looks too much like Gangbuster. Take the visor out, or do something different.”

MM: When I saw the cover of US Agent #2, the first thing I thought of was Undersea Agent. JERRY: Which is funny, because my inspiration was the outer space cover of Nick Fury, but Brevoort had me flop the figure, facing downward instead of upward, and that made a big difference.

MM: The storyline had echoes of your Mr. Mind plot from Shazam!, with the mechanical worms being used for mind control. 83

MM: You didn’t get to design the JLA for Just Imagine Stan Lee and Jerry Ordway Creating JLA. You did design the Doom Patrol, but that’s not quite the same.

JERRY: It was one of the hardest things I ever had to draw, but it was like getting a good grade on a really tough test at school. It was something that was really hard to do while I was doing it, but it was very satisfying at the end. “Wow, I actually did that! I got all that stuff that Alan asked for into this page!” That was a terrific three-parter. I mean, we were talking earlier about how you sometimes have these stories where, four years earlier there’s a little thread that seems perfectly logical four years later, like, “Wow! That guy turned out to be the Green Goblin!” It was amazing to read Alan’s script and then to go do the research by looking at the first issues, and really looking into the backgrounds. Not just looking at what the main figures were doing, but what was going on in the detail in the backgrounds, because he spells all that out in his script. There’s nothing gratuitous in there, it’s all, “This kind of record player in the background,” or, “This kind of crate floating in the water,” and he played off all those little details so that the story looked like he set it up back in issue #1. I don’t know if he actually set it up that far in advance or not. I would say, if he did, that he’s inhuman. [laughter]

JERRY: No. There was some discussion as to what the Doom Patrol would look like, and what their powers would be, but I think they were shoehorned into the JLA. I think Stan was originally going to do them separately, and that changed by the time I started JLA. It was a weird project, but fun in its own way. Stan was the “above the title” selling point, but Carlin and I seemed to do a fair amount of the plotting on it. [laughter] As a kid from Wisconsin who grew up reading Stan’s writing, it was still a thrill to be on the same page with Stan Lee. In 1987, I drew a big chunk of the Fantastic Four anniversary issue, and that had Stan’s dialogue and Joe Sinnott inking several of my pages. At the time I thought it was pretty darn cool, but I had no personal contact with Stan on that. With the JLA, I got to plot on the phone with Stan, and it was a blast to hear him say, “Hey, true believer” to me. That man’s got such a youthful persona. MM: What did you think about that first Tom Strong story you drew? 84

But that was a great story to do, and it was really nice of him to kind of allow me to have a Tom Strong that I could call my own in Tom Stone, because Chris Sprouse so totally owns that book and no one can draw Tom Strong like he does. It’s a very hard thing to draw a character like that, that has such an identity with an artist, so it was a great relief to know that I had a new version of Tom Strong. Because I found that to be a problem in the Moorcock story, to keep Tom Strong on model. He’s got such a weird proportion. He’s not quite Superman, he’s not quite Doc Savage. His jaw is unnaturally big, but not in the way Superman’s was. It was very hard to get the proportions right. MM: And how about the next story, were you familiar at all with Michael Moorcock? JERRY: I knew Moorcock from his different flirtings with Marvel Comics. I think

they adapted some of his stuff in Savage Sword. Roy might have adapted it, and he actually brought it into Conan, too. I knew him by reputation, but I never read much fantasy, so I was not versed in his work beyond knowing about Elric. But his Tom Strong was fun, because it was pretty open. It wasn’t overly plotted. It was, “Here’s what the guy’s doing,” and he was really having fun with the concept. It was the first time I ever had to draw pirates, which, takes a fair amount of work to be able to do stuff like that, because I don’t think I had ever been on a pirate ship—I’d never worn a tri-cornered hat. [laughter] Again, it’s like studying for a test. When you have to get a lot of reference, that’s hard work, but by the same token, it takes you to a place that you’ve never been before—at the very least, it was something different. I had a lot of fun drawing the ape character [Solomon]. I don’t think I’ve drawn many apes in my comic book career.

Previous Page: What if... ahem, imagine Stan Lee and Jerry Ordway creating the Justice League. Here’s a 2-page spread to help you out. Below: Jerry filled in on a handful of Tom Strong stories. Page 1of Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #6, and Jerry’s layout for page 16 of Tom Strong #32, written by legendary fantasy author, Michael Moorcock. Justice League ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Solomon, Tom Strong ™ and ©2007 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

I liked the relaunch of the JSA, too. And when Shazam! was canceled and the Superman stuff kind of got pulled out from under me, for a brief couple of minutes, I was supposed to be drawing some part of that “Return of the JSA” for Dan Raspler. I called up Dan after my falling out on the Superman stuff and said, “Look, I just can’t work for DC.” But I think if I had done it, I might have had a vehicle there to work on, because I know Geoff was interested in having me do something with it, but it just didn’t work out schedule-wise.

MM: I think Ultra-Humanite’s about as close as you came. JERRY: Ultra-Humanite was, I guess, ape-like. But it was a good, fun, lighthearted story, and it was a good excuse to go find copies of Captain Blood and movies that had managed to escape me in the past. I watched Treasure Island. I also dug into my EC reprints because, I mean, nobody did that stuff better than Reed Crandall. Thank God for Reed Crandall. He was so literal with his reference that his details on those pirate ships were really great. I bought a couple of models of different kinds of schooners that were similar to what I needed to draw, and I made a tri-cornered hat out of sculpy clay so I could draw it correctly from all angles. I had a bunch of books out from the library for a couple of months. [laughs] But sometimes you’ve got to go that extra mile, because picture reference only gives you so much. Like with All-Star Squadron, if had to draw a plane or an aircraft carrier, it made sense to build the models and have them on hand, because you can hold them up and look at them from different angles. You’re not limited by the lighting of some war photograph.

MM: Did you have fun with the Top 10 mini-series? You’ve got all these crazy characters, a lot of them riffing on characters you know, plus all the visual gags. It seems like something you would have enjoyed doing. JERRY: I did, but, again, the last bunch of stuff I’ve done just seems incredibly hard. [laughs] It’s not as much fun when it’s that much work, y’know? It’s like doing a Mad comic or something, it requires so much extra thought going into everything, being able to fit stuff in. Top 10 was one of those books that I saved and I always meant to read, but I never read it until I got the mini-series. And I loved it. When Scott Dunbier floated this project to me, it was supposed to be Alan Brennert—who was a DC guy in the ’70s that was now working in TV—writing the 1950s version of Top 10. When that fell apart, because he was hired on as a story editor for Star Trek or something, Scott Dunbier wound up finding Paul De Filippo, who I think had been recommended by Harlan Ellison and Warren Ellis. He’s in his early 50s, maybe, so he remembers all this stuff.

MM: You then did an issue of JSA with Geoff Johns. Was that kind of like old home week for you, in a way? JERRY: Geoff had told me that he was bringing back Fury in that storyline at that point, so I got to draw Fury, and that was cool. I also got to draw the Kirby Sandman—the ’70s version. And that Kirby Sandman, while most fans I think hated it, I always got a kick of it, and one of those issues was the last teaming of Jack Kirby and Wally Wood, so it stood out in my mind as, even though it wasn’t a great concept, it’s got Jack Kirby and Wally Wood on one issue. How can you beat that?

MM: Just looking through the first few pages here, there’s 86

new, there’s always that learning curve. With Infinite Crisis, it was fairly simple in that here’s the Earth-2 Superman. A lot of it was shrouded in mystery. I didn’t know what was really going on with the story beyond what my pages showed. I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve done a fair amount of licensing work over the years for DC and Marvel. MM: Mike Zeck’s been doing that a lot, lately, too.

Ant Man, the laughing fish from the Joker story, The Beagle Boys from the Uncle Scrooge comics.... JERRY: Right, but he had stuff from beyond comics, stuff from the underground comics, he’s got Archie, he’s got everything. Paul’s a really good guy, and I enjoyed working with him. He and I have tried to pitch a few things as follow-ups, but there’s little interest, I guess, in our doing something new.

JERRY: Yeah, Zeck’s been having fun with it, because it’s simple, and without the heavy-duty deadlines. But I started out with those coloring books for Western Publishing back in the early ’80s. I kept doing stuff for Western Publishing over the years. They stopped doing book-related things, but they still did puzzles and magic slates, where you draw and you pull the plastic sheet up to erase. I did some Superman puzzles back in maybe ’82 for Western Publishing via DC. I also did Sectaur puzzles, I did Go-Bots. [laughs] I did Rock Lords. MM: I don t remember Rock Lords.

MM: And that leads us to Infinite Crisis, where you inked some of Phil Jimenez’s pencils and did some penciling, as well. JERRY: I think I penciled half of issue #5. MM: Because it seems like any time there’s a Golden Age Superman appearance, they call on you. JERRY: I didn’t know what the story was supposed to be about or any of that, but it was fun to be invited to the big crossover. It’s like being invited to the big wedding. I think you feel kind of marginalized after a while because you’re bouncing around looking for your next job, and there’s no regular assignment. And it’s been a frustration for going on nine years. Shazam! was my last regular series, and it’s easier to do more work when you’re on a regular book, but when you have to start up everything 87

Previous Page: Opening splash page from Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #3. Left: Pencils for a Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future puzzle—based on the 198788 interactive TV show (mixing live action and computer animation) and toy line. Below: Sectaurs: Warriors of Symbiote puzzle art— also based on a mid-’80s toy line/cartoon series. Saveen, Tom Strong ™ and ©2007 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future ™ and ©2007 Landmark Entertainment Group. Sectaurs: Warriors of Symbiote ™ and ©2007 Coleco Holdings, LLC.

worked with back in the coloring book days, and he’d ask me to do something. It never really paid that well, but I felt like I was at least diversifying a little bit. But it got to the point that it would upset the monthly comic deadline, and I couldn’t do that, so I had to stop. The last thing I did was for the relaunch of Captain Action for Playing Mantis Toys. I did an ad, which they also used as a back label on the box, with Captain Action and Action Boy. That was really cool, because that was a little touchstone from my childhood, to draw Dr. Evil and stuff. [laughter] I did something like 25 Superman shots for a style guide right around the time I was working on Top Ten, and I just started seeing some of the shots on stuff. There’s Superman pajamas that have the shot, and they just solicited a Superman calendar that has one shot on it. I’m working on a retro style guide now for DC. I said, “Oh, you mean a Justice Society guide?” And he goes, “No, no. Like, the ’80s.” [laughter] Me in the carnival, in the freak show. MM: Let’s talk about Red Menace, which has just finished up. Did you have any interest at all with the McCarthy era? JERRY: I remember being influenced by the Woody Allen movie The Front back in the ’70s. MM: I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one. JERRY: Rock Lords were a spinoff of Go-Bots—both were by Tonka. This was back when the studio was set up, and Al Vey and I—I don’t remember if Mike Machlan helped out, too—did the comic book inserts for the figures, and then we did a little comic strip on the back of the Rock Lords toys. Unfortunately, those things didn’t take off, but it was a cool studio project we did through an agency in Minnesota. Sectaurs was really neat because the design bible was done by Continuity Studios, so there was a lot of Neal Adams in there. They were warriors who rode on big wasps and stuff. After Toy Fair, I would always get a call from this one art director at Western Publishing that I’d

JERRY: It’s a good movie. It’s a Martin Ritt movie. Martin Ritt was blacklisted during that time. It’s one of the few things that Woody Allen neither wrote nor directed, but starred in. It’s a good movie. It’s basically about the power of suggestion, and that’s always fascinated me. The more liberal world view is that these people were persecuted. Yeah, they were persecuted, but I know that, from an historical point of view, there was some legitimate concern about Communist infiltration. It wasn’t completely unfounded that they were searching for people, but it became a news spectacle and hurt a lot of innocent people that it didn’t need to. 88

But the idea fascinates me—the times we live in fascinate me, too. I mean, there are cameras on every street corner taking pictures of you crossing against the light, and people spilling their private lives on their cell phones while sitting next to you on the train. And yet people still worry about their privacy. I grew up in the ’60s, and we still had the air raid drills, and we still had “duck and cover” and all that stuff. So the fear was there as a little kid that the world was going to end, and that there were bad guys there and a nuclear war was going to happen. I actually tried to pitch to Peter Tomasi at one point, the idea of doing a mini-series with the JSA set in the McCarthy area, and showing how they were all fighting in their street clothes, continuing but under the radar, because you wouldn’t just stop. So Red Menace came along, and I said, “Wow, this is a neat idea.” Top Ten was still fresh in my mind, and this was such a hard project. It’s got all this reference from the 1950s. People might think that that’s easy, but it’s not. Thank God for the Internet, because you can find stuff. I mean, I bought tons of books, but I still had to find specific stuff on the Internet or in movies.

a lot, I like his work a lot, but I think, “Wow, good for him.” It’d be nice if something like that happened to me, but good for him. I never feel resentful of somebody else. It’d be nice to have somebody plop down a big chunk of movie money on me, but I’m appreciative that some of these people are making out on it. Especially if they can capitalize on it rather than just be a one-hit wonder. Frank Miller’s the hot thing right now, and I hope he does well with his Spirit movie, I hope he does well with whatever he does, because it’s cool to see someone climb out of the ranks, because it really is, it’s like you’re climbing out of the pit. [laughs] “Look, he’s respectable!” [laughter]

MM: Well, speaking of movies, the writing team are all TV/movie guys. Was this project done with the intention of expanding into that realm? JERRY: When I first heard about it, it was, “Oh, these guys are hot. This is something that’s definitely going to happen. It’s got TV written all over it, or movies,” and that was intriguing, but at the same time, I didn’t know what my participation would be, either. And I am cut in on it as a creator share, just a smaller creator share because I came in later. I did design everything, and I contributed along the way to the story as I was moving stuff around and all that. But, it’s one of those things where politically, I think, at DC, Bilson and Demeo were relaunching The Flash, and they were really high on DC’s keep-happy list. Once Flash came out and the audience didn’t respond the way DC hoped they would, it seemed like all that stuff kind of dissipated. If something happened with it, that would be terrific. I’ve worked with Mike Mignola, who I’ve known for a long time, and I like Mike 89

Previous Page: Jailbreak! Pencils for page 20 of Red Menace #5 as The Eagle makes his escape from Alcatrazz. Below: The villains make their getaway, but don’t believe it. Red Menace #6, page 21. Red Menace and all relating characters ™ and ©2007 Pet Fly Production, Inc., Flyworks Productions, Inc., & Second Row Productions, Inc.

Part 7:

Storytelling and the Creative Process it that I was expecting. It didn’t look like he went into it with a brush, really, too much. You visualize what you’re expecting the guy to do—the stuff you’ve always loved—but I think he was trying to stay faithful to what was down there. So I told Carlin, “Look, this is Dick Giordano. I don’t want to get him mad.

MM: When you’re penciling for someone else, are you drawing tighter than when you’re penciling for yourself? JERRY: When I pencil, if I know I’m going to ink it, I generally don’t pencil. I do a layout and then I scribble around and ink the rough layout. When I’m penciling something I’m not inking myself, I always pencil tight. I’ve had to ink my own stuff when I didn’t expect to, like a couple of pages on US Agent I wound up inking myself, and also a couple of pages on Maximum Security, where the inker wasn’t available. It was pretty brutal. It’s no fun, as an inker, to ink on really tight pencils. When I’m drawing something I’m inking myself, I worry mostly about the layout and making sure everything falls in the way it’s supposed to. Once I start inking it’s, “It’d be good if I threw a little heavy black here.” And I keep doing that with the pages, I’ll ink it with pen, and then I’ll go into it with a brush and try to pump up the contrast. When you’re just penciling, you try to do that in pencil, but pencil’s gray, and when you hit something with ink, that’s when you first know if it works or not. That’s the way I am. If it’s been inked by somebody who’s a little timid and they just basically follow the lines and follow the line weights on the pencils, it doesn’t look as good as if they had a little freer hand. But not everybody is capable of doing finishes. I think it’d be fun to try doing layouts for someone who is really capable of doing finishes. I think it would be fun to try to, say, team up with Klaus Janson sometime, where I’d just do layouts and let him do the heavy lifting. MM: Did you do any of that with Dick Giordano? JERRY: When I took over drawing Shazam!, Carlin convinced me to try to just do layouts, and Dick would do finishes. I’ve never really done layouts, because I really don’t know how to hold back. I did my best, and I left the line weight to Dick. It just didn’t have the punch to 90

But can he go over this again?” So he went over it with a brush and punched up the heavy contrast and then it was much better. But Dick was inking a lot of material for DC. He was probably doing Batman or something at the same time, so you really aren’t getting the loving attention on each page. You’re getting a good job, it’s just not the same job as somebody who’s going to spend 14 hours on a page. So at some point I said I would like to go back to full pencils, and I think that worked a little better. Dick was really nice about it, too. I would have never thought in a million years, but Dick was a Captain Marvel fan from his childhood, so he felt like, “Wow, it’s a thrill to get to draw Captain Marvel.” Who would have thought? I mean, he’s so associated with Batman and dark, shadowy stuff. MM: How much time does it take you to pencil a page versus penciling and inking a page? JERRY: Sometimes things go fast, sometimes they go slowly. But a page from start to finish, you’re talking, maybe six, seven

hours. When I was doing Superman, I think it had to go faster because there was more pressure. But when you’re creating the stuff, it’s not the same as second-guessing a writer. I mean, you’d think it would go faster drawing from full scripts, but it really doesn’t. Full script makes me more retentive about word balloons. When you’re doing full script, you can get a page where there’s a lot of talking, and it can take most of your time just trying to choreograph how the balloons are going to work. From my experience as a writer, I know a lot of artists don’t think about that, but I do. I guess if I can share one thing with Alex Toth, that’s it. I can’t share his genius, but that’s one thing I remember hearing him talk about one time was how the balloons fit, and how it’s important to the balance of the page. And I totally agree. MM: Okay, this is one of those desert island questions: If you were forced to choose between being a penciler or being an inker/finisher, which way would you go? 91

Previous Page: Captain Marvel art for a contest prize. Above: Jerry’s cover sketches for Will to Power #7 and 8 (1984)—featuring the Superman-esque Titan—part of Dark Horse’s Comic’s Greatest World imprint. Captain Marvel, Shazam! ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Grace, Mecha, Rebel, Ruby, Titan, Warmaker ™ and ©2007 Dark Horse Comics.

JERRY: Oh, I would rather be a penciler. Every time I think about how great it would be just to ink, the reality is just not fun. I mean, I enjoy doing it once in a while, but if someone said, “You can no longer do anything else but ink,” I would get out of the business. I just couldn’t handle it. It’s horrible not to have any control over the drawing. I have a very distinct way of telling a story, and maybe it’s not the most dynamic way in the world, but my goal has always been—and I think I’ve been pretty successful—that you can follow the story without the balloons. You can look at it and you’re not totally lost. Clarity’s always been really important, and that’s the thing that I always gauge when I’m inking somebody else or doing finishes, if I can detach myself enough, then I can handle it. MM: What about drawing covers? I thought these Red Menace covers were very interesting. How did the concept for them originate? JERRY: I like the cover to say something, and sometimes the trends change where people just want cool shots or whatever, but I always prefer something that has a little story to it. So with Red Menace, my thought was that I was going to do something in gray wash. It’s not a full painting, but it’s gray-toned. I wasn’t getting paid extra for it, I just thought that it would be distinctive enough that it would stand out on the stands at the comic shop. And I suggested the red lettering based on Confidential magazine, which I saw in one of my books when I was doing research. Confidential was like the National Enquirer of its day, I guess. And I said, “Well, that would be a good framework for it.” The original editor, Ben Abernathy, was like, “Oh, we like that. That works because then it gives that book an identifying thread through all the issues.” I was ready to break the format by the second issue. There’s a fine line with feeling like someone’s going to look at it

and go, “Wait a minute, didn’t I buy that one already?” That’s tricky. MM: Where do you start when you’re coming up with ideas for your writing? As an artist, do you start with an image, or do you start with a particular piece of dialogue? JERRY: Well, the very first thing that I did that I liked writing-wise, was the story about the homeless guy in Adventures of Superman— the Brainiac story—and that was suggested by the image that Jimmy Olsen kept seeing that homeless guy. That’s where that idea came from. I don’t keep a story file anymore because it doesn’t seem like I’m doing very much writing, but when I was on Superman I kept a story file. I always read a couple of newspapers every day; I like to keep up on 93

Previous Page: Mike Zeck’s pencils and Jerry’s inks for an early ’90s Punisher poster. Above: Cover art for Red Menace #6.

the news, so I read my New York Times and I read my local paper and then whatever other papers during the course of the week, and if I see a story that looks interesting—sometimes it’s wacky, sometimes it’s very serious, but it seems like a comic book angle—I clip it and I put it in a file. And then, when you’re looking for a story, you can page through there and go, “Oh, yeah! That one!” They act as a little outline, something to give you that thread, that germ of an idea. If you’re doing something self-contained that’s a property that you don’t own, it’s got to have an ending that doesn’t affect things

too much. I always like to use the George Carlin line, “Please return the stewardess to the upright position.” With a regular, ongoing series, you have the freedom to run plot threads that can develop into something, or maybe they don’t. It’s a lot more free-flowing to do a regular book. Shazam! was, to me, my most successful effort at writing, because I was able to concentrate just on writing—I wasn’t drawing the book. Sometimes it’s just hard to do both on a monthly schedule and do it justice. I mean, if you want to write, you really do have to read. Some people can take their influence from watching movies, but for me, when I was doing Shazam!, I was able at times to read books. If I was doing a story about a specific era, I could sit down and read something that gives you the flavor for that era, and that helps a lot. When I’m drawing, I don’t have time, so I listen to books on tape. I listen to all kinds of stuff. Whatever the library has, science fiction or history. With Shazam! I read a couple of really interesting books by Wilbur Smith that were set in Egypt. One of them was set in ancient Egypt, and had to do with the Nile River and this structure that they built at the Nile. This guy had really researched how the Egyptians lived, and it painted such a vivid picture in my mind that it made it easier to do the flashback pages. MM: Is there anything that you haven’t done yet that you’d like to do at some point? JERRY: I’ve really never done a good Justice League story. I’ve always thought that would be

Above: Commission art of the Silver Age Justice League. Next Page: “Under a Tree,” 1979 watercolor painting. Aquaman, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

kind of fun to do. I would just like to keep getting challenged. It would be nice if I could feel like I was pitching something every once in a while that I really wanted to do [laughs], but there are only a few people in the framework of comics who can do anything that pops out of their head; everybody else has to do the whole song and dance to try and sell the idea. It’s been like that since I got into comics, just the faces change. I have this project that I was all set to do after the JLA/Planetary that Warren Ellis was writing called American Space Force, and it never happened. I have, like, 14 pages of script from four years ago. It was set in the past, and would have been a fun little concept. I don’t know what happened, if Warren just shifted away at that point from DC to Marvel or what have you, but he’s one of those guys that has these great flashes of ideas, and he goes from flashing on an idea to writing a script, and the next thing you know, someone’s publishing it. And that’s kind of cool, but at the same time, there are not many people 96

that they’re willing to do that with. The older you get in comics, the less relevant you are to what’s going on at that moment. I would like to be able to work in comics as long as I wanted to work, and as long as somebody has work for me, but who knows how long that’s going to be? The experience doesn’t count. It’s not what you’ve done and where you’ve been and all that stuff. At a certain point it unfortunately becomes a liability. When I first started in the business there were guys like George Tuska and Don Heck that were kind of bouncing around, and you know it was hard on them. I used to hear back then the talk of not putting an older, established artist or writer on something because it would hurt comic store sales. No one could ever back those things up. I was working side-by-side with guys like Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, John Buscema, and those guys were all chugging away, doing terrific work in their 50s. And, unfortunately, I don’t know that that’s still going to be the case.

Jerry Ordway

Art Gallery 97

Above: “Badger Auto,” 1979 watercolor painting. Top Right: Color guide for the cover of Mad #448. Right: Proposal art for the Power of Shazam! graphic novel. Next Page: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #1. Page 100: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #2. Page 101: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #10.

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Left: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #15. Below: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #16. Next Page Top: Painted covers of Supreme #41 (left) and Power of Shazam! #27 (right). Next Page Bottom: Jerry’s color guides for the newly created characters of the Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct mini-series.

Billy Batson, Captain Marvel, Mary Bromfield, Mr. Mind, Shazam, and all related characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Supreme ™ and ©2007 Rob Liefeld. Top 10 and all related characters ™ and ©2007 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

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Left and Below: Two paintings for a WildStorm trading card set—Timespan (left) and Undertow (below). Next Page: Ordway family Christmas card art. The first piece is from Christmas of 1980. In 1983, Jerry got a little ambitious and drew a 3-page retelling of “The Elves and the Shoemaker” for that year’s card. Page 106: Cover art for a Wizard Superman special. Page 107: Line art for a Shazam! poster.

Page 108: In the late ’80s, DC explored the possibility of publishing a Buck Rogers comic and commissioned Jerry to draw up some sample art, including two cover sketches and a pin-up. Also, a Green Lantern sketch for a DC style guide. Page 109: Character design for Freezone, one of the baddies from WildStar. Page 110: (counter-clockwise from top left) Sketch and finished pencils for a Hellboy pin-up. Jerry’s inks over George Pérez’s pencils for the cover of Prime #16. Sketch of Erik Larsen’s Captain Marvel homage, Mighty Man. Page 111: Line art for a 2000 Avengers lithograph. Page 112: Pencils for page 12 of Avengers: The Domination Factor #3. Page 113: Captain America #32, page 6. Buck Rogers ™ and ©2007 The Trustees of the Dille Family Trust. Green Lantern ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Freezone ™ and ©2007 Al Gordon and Jerry Ordway. Hellboy ™ and ©2007 Mike Mignola. Mighty Man ™ and ©2007 Erik Larsen. Avengers, Captain America, Giant-Man, Hawkeye, Iron Man, Odin, Prime, Scarlet Witch, Thor, Vision, Wasp ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Previous Page: Jerry’s inks over John Byrne’s pencils for the cover of JLA #99. This Page: Sketches for a DC style guide.

Left: An “alternate” cover design for Superman #54. Above: Preliminary sketches for a DC style guide. Below: Turnaround and detail drawings for a Superman statue. Next Page: Line art for a Supergirl trading card.

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THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEWS (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more! And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing artists at work in their studios!

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TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

JERRY ORDWAY Superman... Captain Marvel... the Justice Society... classic heroes all. And no one does classic better than Jerry Ordway! With his keen sense of anatomy, proportion, lighting, and detail, he draws super-heroes that are powerful, noble, and, most importantly, heroic. And not only is he a penciler, inker, and painter of the highest caliber, he can write a great story, as well. From his beginnings as inker then penciler on All-Star Squadron, to his work on the Superman titles, the Parents’ Choice Award-winning The Power of Shazam! and his creator-owned The Messenger, Jerry Ordway has proven himself to be one of the most talented and versatile comic book creators of our time. MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

$14.95 In The US ISBN