Modern Masters Vol. 18: John Romita Jr

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

E I G H T E E N :

JOHN ROMITA JR.

By George Khoury and Eric Nolen-Weathington

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Modern Masters Volume Eighteen:

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME EIGHTEEN:

JOHN ROMITA JR. edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and George Khoury front cover pencils by John Romita, Jr. front cover inks by Bob McLeod front cover color by Tom Ziuko background photograph by Luke Partridge all interviews in this book were conducted by Tom Field and transcribed by Steven Tice

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • July 2008 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-95-5 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 John Romita, Jr. unless otherwise noted.

Gray Area and all related characters ™ and ©2008 John Romita, Jr. and Glen Brunswick.

Kick-Ass ™ and ©2008 Mark Millar and John S. Romita.

Absorbing Man, Ammo, Archangel, Avengers, Ben Reilly, Bishop, Black Bolt, Black Cat, Black Panther, Bruce Banner, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Colossus, Daredevil, Dazzler, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Elektra, Fusion, Green Goblin, Hawkeye, Hobgoblin, Iron Man, Jean Grey, Jigsaw, Jim Rhodes, Jubilee, Juggernaut, Kingpin, Kitty Pryde, Lady Sif, Loki, Mangog, Mary Jane, Mephisto, Peter Parker, Phoenix, Scarlet Spider, Sentry, Shotgun, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Star Brand, Storm, Thor, Typhoid Mary, Ultron, Vulture, Warbound, Warriors Three, Wolverine, X-Men and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman, Joker ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

Thorion ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. and DC Comics.

Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan International Properties, LLC. Hellboy ™ and ©2008 Mike Mignola.

Dark Tower, Gunslinger ™ and ©2008 Stephen King.

Editorial package ©2008 Eric Nolen-Weathington, George Khoury, and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To John Romita, Sr.: For this former Marvel intern, there was nothing more educational than personally seeing your sheer professionalism and the courteous example that you set. — George As ever, to Donna, Iain and Caper — Eric

Acknowledgements John Romita, Jr., for his time and contagious enthusiasm.

Philippe Cordier, for going above and beyond in sharing his art collection.

Special Thanks Terry Austin, Glen Brunswick, Eddie Choi, Will Gabri-El, Alex Gonzalez, Milos Kivich, Nick Kivich, Bob McLeod, Mark Millar, Luke Partridge, Javier Soto, Tim Townsend, Thomas Vanderstappen, Diederik van Rappard, Jim Warden, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capitol Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Eighteen:

JOHN ROMITA, JR. Table of Contents Introduction by Mark Millar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: Growing up the Marvel Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Opportunity Knocks! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Part Three: Amazing Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Part Four: Finding His Stride—Full Pencils at Last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Part Five: Artist Without Fear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

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Introduction legends persist of 22-page comics turned around in a weekend sometimes), the pages are just breath-taking.

It’s a testament to his natural ability that he always knows exactly where to put the camera and exactly where to draw the line. He never, ever gets it wrong, and I’m not alone in keeping his books scattered around my desk with Kirby, Toth, Kane, Charest, Hitch, Quitely and Hughes as visual inspiration.

J

ulie Schwartz, the legendary Silver Age comic-book editor, stipulated that a freelancer only needed two of three things to remain in regular employment: He had to be good, he had to be nice, and he had to be on time. Of course, most of us limp by with just one of these attributes, but every once in a while God creates a Romita, and Johnny is without question the master of all three.

I’ve worked in American comics for a while now and I don’t think I’ve met another freelancer who doesn’t love Johnny. Creators can be a little hard on each other sometimes. Good work is often picked apart out of jealousy and insecurity, but there’s something about this Sicilian that brings out the best in his fellow pros. Every writer I know wants to work with him. Every artist I know admires both his work and his professionalism.

Tastes may vary and everyone has their favourites, but within the community itself, John Romita, Jr. is literally the only creator I’ve met whom everyone regards as consistently at the top of his game. What’s eerie is that he’s been doing this for four decades now and only seems to be getting better.

When I was asked to write the introduction to this book I didn’t hesitate for a second. My deadlines are crushing at the moment; I have a lot going on and my time is so tight my wife and small daughter are on holiday without me for two days because I needed to join them later in a bid to catch up. But I still found time to write these words because I have such an appreciation and love for this guy’s work. We had a great time doing Wolverine: Enemy of the State together and, right now, are halfway through a creator-owned book called Kick-Ass. It’s been a tremendous experience and we’re genuinely heartened by the response Kick-Ass has received because it’s a book we’ve put everything into. But let me be the first to say that 90% of what makes this work is John Romita, Jr. I say this as someone who knows what he does with a script. You have no idea how much better this looks than it ever appeared in my head.

I hope this is only the latest of many projects together because, like I said, there’s nobody better, nobody faster, and nobody nicer. Romita, Jr. is a modern master and this is a book I want on my shelves.

Most careers go in parabolic curves, peaking in the middle and then sliding down once you’ve found your niche and coasting on former glories. But Johnny has such a genuine humility that he’s constantly learning, relentlessly pushing himself to improve his work, and I think this is why he remains at the head of the pack.

To the trained eye, the material is just utterly flawless.

When you consider the speed he often works (and

Mark Millar Glasgow, Scotland 11th April 2008

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Part 1:

Growing up the Marvel Way

MODERN MASTERS: When you were growing up, who was the boss in your family, your mom or your dad?

on me, and I would take a swing. But I didn’t get bloodied and cut up and beat, I was just pushed around, beat up, sat on, smacked around. I would fight back, and my brother would fight back and save me all the time. But my parents handled it very well. We were in a rough section of Queens, and then we moved when I was about eight, and everything worked out great. There was nothing really super-spectacular in any direction, good or bad, when I was growing up. A prototypical New York neighborhood.

JOHN ROMITA, JR.: It was a great combination of both, because my father worked at home.

MM: Okay. Your mom was kind of stern, right? Or were your parents into the good cop/bad cop kind of parenting?

JOHN: It was never that way. They were perfect parents.

They yelled when they were supposed to, they disciplined when they were supposed to, they were nice when they were supposed to be. They did it just right. There was no shucking and jiving, no good cop/bad cop. When they got mad, it was very, very normal, and very well done.

MM: So it’s not a place you miss a lot? You don’t have a lot of nostalgia for it?

JOHN: I have nostalgia for the ages of my late teens until I was about 30, because I had such a great growing-up period, that my parents prepared me so well for adulthood. From the time that I got a job—at 15, or 14, whatever I was when I got my first job, and art became a major part of my life—that part of my life was so wonderful.

Things went well, I had a lot of fun, good friends, great family, and I look upon it fondly. Before that, when I was a kid, my parents didn’t have much money, but they treated us like gold. We did not want for much.

MM: I was an intern for Ralph [Macchio], and the only time I ever saw him stand up and be attentive and really serious was when your mom used to come in to the office. [laughter] She’d come in with the publishing schedule on her bulletin.

JOHN: Yeah, well, she commanded respect. That’s the kind of woman she is.

MM: How would you describe your upbringing in Queens? Was it nice or was it tough? Did you ever have to deal with bullies when you were growing up?

MM: Were you and your brother competitive growing up?

JOHN: I was with him, but he never was with me, because he was always smarter, better looking, stronger.

So I was competitive, and that’s good. It translates well to now, because I always have competition as an artist, and the people that are better artists than me don’t

JOHN: Oh, God, yes. I got beat up on a regular basis.

MM: Why? JOHN: Because I didn’t know how to shut my mouth when they said obnoxious things, and they were picking 6

know that I’m always in competition with them, but I never run out of inspiration.

MM: Do you see yourself being very different from Victor, personality-wise?

JOHN: I see enough of my father and my mother in both of us to see the similarities, and that’s where it ends. He’s cool, calm, and collected, and I’m an angst-ridden, paranoid banana sometimes. I worry about everything, and he doesn’t.

MM: Those are some of your dad’s traits, aren’t they? He worries about everything.

JOHN: Well, he may worry, but he doesn’t show it.

MM: He does show it sometimes, because he’ll always tell people, “I’m never good enough.” He’s always the first one to say that his drawings aren’t good enough.

JOHN: But he’s not as much of a worrier as I am. I don’t know where that came from, I don’t know which part of the family it came from, but I am an innate worrier.

And I sweat everything. [laughs] MM: Growing up, did you and your brother always hear your parents talk about how tight money was?

JOHN: No. No, they were really good about that, and they didn’t let us know.

They were very close to the vest about that kind of thing. We knew that my father was an artist. When he got fired from DC and didn’t have work and was delivering newspapers before Stan [Lee] called him, we didn’t hear about that until long after things had gotten better.

MM: You could tell he was working a lot, while you were growing up?

JOHN: Oh, yeah.

JOHN: That’s right. I slept well sometimes knowing he was up there to protect me from all the monsters that were coming out from underneath my bed.

MM: At the same time, were you concerned, “Wow, my dad’s working his tail off”?

JOHN: Right above our bedroom, that’s correct.

JOHN: Well, that wasn’t a concern on my part. That was wonder and awe, and now, interestingly enough, it translates directly to me and my son, because my son always worries about me working unbelievable hours.

MM: So you could see the light on and know that he was up there?

MM: Would he have his radio on or would he just draw and keep very quiet?

MM: He would work in the room above you guys, right? The attic was above your bedroom?

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Previous Page: 1960s photo of (left to right) John Jr.; mother, Virginia; and brother, Victor.

Above: John’s pencils and his father’s inks from Amazing Spider-Man #400.

Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: A panel from page 2 of the father and son collaboration for Amazing Spider-Man #400.

Next Page: Daredevil played two crucial roles in John’s career. 1) Seeing his dad’s cover for Daredevil #12 as a child sparked the initial desire in him to become an artist. 2) It was during his 34-issue run on Daredevil (from which this panel comes) that he really began developing his style and already strong storytelling ability.

The inks here are by the legendary Al Williamson.

Daredevil, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: I think he had music on sometimes. He had talk radio on, and he would listen to a guy through the night. But music, I don’t know when he would put music or talk radio on; I don’t know if there was any rhyme or reason, but, yes, he would keep the radio on all night long to keep him company.

MM: Would you have conversations, early on, with your dad, about movies and comics?

JOHN: He always spoke to us about movies and stories. He wanted us to see certain movies, or he would watch movies on television, and we would watch certain TV shows. But TV wasn’t as important, unless it was a movie; TV wasn’t important to us because there wasn’t that much of it. We would be out playing sports. We learned to be good athletes from my father. My brother and I were raised on sandlot sports, and we got to be damn good at all the sports because of it. And our father taught us how to play all the sports. It was great.

MM: Your dad is a big baseball fan, right?

JOHN: Oh, yeah, huge.

MM: Did some of that rub off on you guys?

JOHN: Absolutely. Baseball is my forte as a hobby. It’s what I love.

MM: What are the Romitas, Mets fans?

JOHN: I am what my father taught me how to be, which is a New York fan. I’m a

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Yankees-first fan because I grew up before the Mets came around. But I root for the Mets more than the Yankees because the Mets need to be rooted for more than the Yankees. [laughter] MM: When did you start having an inclination towards art? When do you remember starting to draw, and starting to doodle?

JOHN: I was doodling from the time I was eight or nine or ten, and then, when grammar school allowed us to expand our inclinations... I think it all came to a head midway through high school when I realized that in a year or two I was going to have to pick a major in college, and the only thing I was above average at was art. So it was a slow process. I think as I got more adulation, so to speak, from people, or compliments from my father, and then I’d go to the office and get a compliment occasionally, it just perpetuated itself. And somewhere around my sophomore year of high school, when I realized that soon I would have to pick a major, it all kind of came together.

MM: So your dad, he always encouraged your art? He never told you, “Look what I’m going through”?

JOHN: No. But if I told him I would love to be what he is, he’d say, “Are you nuts?

Look at this! I don’t get paid much, and I’m working long hours.” He didn’t discourage me, but he didn’t encourage me. He told me I had to get an education, and so on.

MM: What did they want for you and your brother? Did they hint that they want you guys to be doctors or lawyers or something like that?

JOHN: I don’t recall if they wanted us to be anything in particular. My parents, they kind of parented by the seat of their pants, so to speak. They were thankful that we weren’t axe murderers; they said we were good kids. And when my brother had a predilection towards chemistry, physics, biology, they knew that was where he was headed. I was kind of a loose cannon. I was an artist, but my father did not want me to be a cartoonist, so they hoped that I would find something else. When I majored in advertising in college, they were very excited that I did not lean towards cartooning in particular. But I told them that I get two years. “If two years is enough, I want to be a cartoonist.” And they kind of fought me, but they gave in after that.

MM: I think you once said you thought you were a rebellious teenager.

JOHN: I don’t know if I was rebellious. I did not exactly fit the mold that my brother was in, which was all brains.

MM: You liked hanging out a lot?

JOHN: Of course, of course. Imagination was all we had. There wasn’t much television.

JOHN: Hanging out isn’t the word. I had a lot of fun as an older teenager, a lot of fun as a young 20-something.

Work was in there, but because I was able to go into Manhattan, fun became part of it. I was single until I was 31 or 32, and fun was to be had, because I made a decent living. I wasn’t a hang-out guy, but I enjoyed myself. I wasn’t rebellious. My parents commanded great respect and I gave it to them. I was the average teenager.

Of course, I had to be told that I was stupid and I was moron occasionally. But I was responsible.

MM: But you watched cartoons, right? Were you into Astro Boy and all that sort of stuff?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. Astro Boy, yes. Gigantor. But I enjoyed Bugs Bunny cartoons more than anything when I was a kid.

That, for me, was the funniest stuff on Earth. Still is, to me.

But when the anime filtered in as a kid, the black-&-white cartoons filtered in, I started paying more and more attention. And then it developed. Then there were movies; there were science fiction/fantasy movies—King Kong vs. Godzilla, Jason and the Argonauts. Oh, yeah, that fantasy stuff is where it started. It started to consolidate things.

MM: When did you start really appreciating comics? It was really when your dad started doing Daredevil that you saw it wasn’t just romance comics.

MM: When you saw your father drawing Daredevil, did you know he could do that kind of stuff? You had seen his romance stuff, but this was so different.

JOHN: Yeah, that was the beginning, and as I saw and understood what he was as an artist, and how good he was, it kind of blossomed from there. It was the one moment that I saw the Daredevil cover that I call the turning point, but after that it was a slow development, especially my art skills.

JOHN: When he started doing Daredevil, I said, “Wow! This is a whole new world, here.” And then he brought home Kirby’s stuff, and then I started paying attention to DC’s super-hero books that he had brought home, that I had around the house.

MM: Did you have a very active imagination growing up? Were you into sci-fi and all that sort of stuff?

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next issue home. Find it.” And then I started making him fill in the issues. I would say, “Bring home this title from this year to this year. I want to read all about this stuff.”

And then it got out of hand, and I started reading everything over and over and over again. Yeah, I’m sure it got to the point where I demanded issues, and demanded he bring them home quickly. And then I subscribed, and we got books sent to us in brown paper sleeves that were folded up. It just all naturally progressed, and became what everybody expected it to become. I was a fan geek before you know it.

MM: When he started doing super-heroes, that’s when you started imagining yourself as a comic book artist?

JOHN: Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely.

MM: And you would secretly draw, and you wouldn’t show him anything?

JOHN: No, I was ashamed of everything, because I saw how good he was.

MM: But he knew you were up to something, didn’t he?

JOHN: Sure! [laughter] MM: Was he was happy to see you take an interest in his work, at the time?

JOHN: Oh, it didn’t bother him. He just didn’t want me to think that I had to do it just because he did it.

Above: Another father/son collaboration, this time for a 1995 Marvel calendar.

Next Page: The first page of John’s first story, a six-page back-up story in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #11. Inks by Al Milgrom.

Spider-Man and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: In some ways you were born into comics. You weren’t somebody that had to go out there and buy them. Your dad always had them around, right?

JOHN: Umm... I don’t remember buying them, per se, but he brought books home at an early age, yeah, so I could say we were born into it, and we didn’t have to pay the ten cents, twelve cents, whatever it was at the time.

MM: Would you ever ask your dad to bring in certain issues? “Dad, bring more of this Spider-Man stuff.”

JOHN: I remember being so impatient for the next issues. “Hurry up and bring that 10

MM: When did you feel comfortable showing him your work?

JOHN: Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t even show him stuff that I did in college. I don’t remember when I started showing him things. I think when I actually went up to the office and applied for a job, and Marie Severin gave me work—at that point he had to see it. But he saw my portfolio in college, eventually. And I still didn’t run out of my way to show him, but he saw it.

MM: Your dad said, I think, that the Prowler was a character that you had a little germ of an idea for?

JOHN: I just had the standard skin-tight costume. I was twelve or 13, whatever it was. It was a dopey costume, but, as a good father, he took it to Stan Lee and said, “Look at what my son’s been doing.”

Stan said, “That’s a good name. I like that name. Don’t like the costume, but I like the name.” And it became what it became.

Part 2:

Opportunity Knocks!

MM: So it was through Marie that you got into Marvel?

there was a definitive British department, and Larry Lieber was the head of it. Bob Budiansky was also there, and he became another sketch artist. I don’t know how long I did work for the British department, but one day Iron Man opened up, and Scott Edelman at the time was the editor.

He said, “I don’t believe in nepotism, but I don’t believe in anti-nepotism, either. I don’t believe in that. So, if you can do the work, let’s see what you can do.”

Actually, I think I had done the six-page Spider-Man job before that. Archie Goodwin allowed me to do this six-page fill-in backup story, “Chaos at the Coffee Bean” first. Then, after doing that, and Al Milgrom saving it, they offered me Iron Man. And I was also working on staff as a production assistant.

Let’s see if I get this correct now. After working in the British department, there was an opening as a production assistant, and I think I took that right after the British department. I continued to do little pin-ups and stuff. I did that for 18 months. I think during that 18-month period, I did the six-page Spider-Man story, and then with that, they saw that I could tell a story and they offered me Iron Man. And that ended my production assistant job. I think that was the chronology.

JOHN: Yeah, my father didn’t want to be that guy that perpetuated the father/son thing with all the problems that that would entail. I don’t know if he discussed it with Marie or not, but he told me, “I’m not going to give you a job. I’m not going to keep you from a job.”

MM: How did this come about? You just needed a summer job or something?

JOHN: Yeah, I was up there in the summer doing sketches and pin-ups. I would be a pest, and they would allow me to do a sketch or two here and there.

And Marie said, “If you want to do sketches in your spare time, I’ll give you the work. I’ll give you five dollars a sketch.” And that allowed me to do work for the British department [Marvel UK], under Marie’s aegis, and it went from there.

That was basically it. It was just a matter of Marie agreeing to a formula. In other words, “Yeah, you do the sketches and I’ll pay you.”

That was it. Going from a lark of a thing to, “Hey, these sketches aren’t bad.

You ought to do some sketches for us.” That was it. And then, “Listen, there’s a British department that’ll give you regular work on sketches, if you want to start doing freelance work for them.”

MM: So you were doing work for the British department, for their black-&-white magazines, right?

MM: I believe somewhere it says you worked for Roy Thomas. What did you do for Roy?

JOHN: Right—in 1976. They would split the books into two parts, so they’d have to produce a new cover and a new splash page for the second part when they were printed over in England. That’s what I was doing. Back then

JOHN: As a production assistant, I was Roy’s liaison between he and John Buscema for their work on Conan.

Roy was out in Los Angeles, and John Buscema was here in New York. John Buscema would send the work to the 11

Jack Kirby, and Don Heck, and Dan Adkins, and all these great people. They were all wonderful to me.

MM: At the same time there was an expansion going on in the mid-’70s at Marvel. A lot of new guys, guys that would be your editors and production people, were all starting to come in.

Ralph came in, Roger Stern, and some other familiar names.

JOHN: Right.

MM: So you got to see an interesting phase.

JOHN: Yeah! True.

MM: What sort of work did you do, production-wise? Did you have to do stats and all that kind of stuff?

JOHN: Yeah, photocopies. I was a gofer.

I was doing everything and anything. I learned a lot of the process of the comics industry. I learned production work. I learned to register. When I say “register,” I don’t mean register things in words, I mean lining pages up to be photocopies.

It was a very, very archaic process back then, and there was a photostat room where things were actually photocopied for print and for production. And we had to register things with register marks, and clean things up of rubber cement, and touch up artwork, and make repairs.

There were corrections. I did everything.

I even washed windows, so I really did everything. I mean, it was a great learning experience for 18 months.

office, and I would register it, I would set it up and get it ready for Roy. I would photocopy it, and process it, so to speak.

MM: Did it humble you? You had to start from the very bottom.

MM: Were you comfortable there? I mean, these were people that were your dad’s friends and co-workers.

MM: Was that one of the reasons you wanted to be there, too? It was someplace that you were familiar with.

You’d heard all the names, and your dad always talked about these people when you were young.

JOHN: Oh, yeah! I started from the bottom. That was the agreement. They weren’t going to let this punk become anything unless he earned it. I got crap. I got treated like crap from the majority of people my age or a little bit older. The adults treated me with respect because they loved my father, but the younger people that were slightly older than me were rough on me. And even artists, some of my age, were rough on me.

JOHN: Yeah, sure. And going up to the office and working with them was interesting, especially with Marie and people like that. And meeting John Buscema,

MM: A lot of people in comics are like that. You’ve been doing this for a while. Nobody knows how to say a nice word or a compliment.

JOHN: Yeah, but I still had to be an artist.

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JOHN: I got treated like crap by some people. I still get comments, 25 years after the fact, from people saying, “You still wouldn’t have been anywhere without your father’s last name, ha ha ha ha.”

MM: Early on, did your father tell you not to worry about that kind of stuff? I mean, even though he was worried about all that nepotism stuff, he told you not to worry.

JOHN: No, no. What he told me was, “Tell them to blow it out their asses.” He said, “Pay no attention. Ignore people. Just do your work, and let the work speak for itself.”

MM: Did you ever heard the story of Joe DiMaggio, Jr.? How being in his dad’s shadow sort of crushed him?

JOHN: Yeah, I’ve read stories about it, yes, but I knew my place, and I knew who was good and who wasn’t. I wasn’t that good, but I was a hard worker, and if I saw a little bit of progress, it negated any of the negativity. I also was the pugnacious type. If somebody said something to me, I was ready to take a swing. I wanted to lay people out who were just obnoxious to me, and up until my 30s, I wanted to punch some people, because a lot of people deserved it. There were some boneheads that worked as editors and assistant editors up there, and they wouldn’t like me for various reasons, and so on. And I learned a lot from my father about being patient and just when to shut my mouth, and when to fold my hands and sit on them.

JOHN: You’ll have to ask him that. I don’t know. He may have been enjoying it, while at the same time being a little bit worried about it.

MM: You tried to work more with Marie and some of the other people?

JOHN: I tried not to bother him. I would go and have lunch with him, and then when my mother started working up at the office, we would have breakfast together and go in together, and it worked great that way. But I tried not to bother him.

MM: So when you did the “Chaos at the Coffee Bean” story, that was a big deal for you at that point?

JOHN: Oh, God, yes. It was Spider-Man! I was doing Spider-Man! Not long after my father was working on Spider-Man, I was doing a six-page story.

MM: It seems to me some editors just want to control somebody, namely their artists.

There’s a lot of politics that goes on that doesn’t necessarily help the art form, itself.

JOHN: Right.

MM: You said you would also do art corrections?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. I did corrections on anything and everything, sure. Any time they wanted a figure fixed, whatever they needed me to do, I was doing everything, and I learned a lot of stuff.

MM: Did it take your dad some time to get used to you being there?

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Previous Page: While John served as a liaison between Roy Thomas and John Buscema for part of their long run on Conan, John would get to pencil a tale of the Cimmerian about ten years later. This page is from the black-&-white Conan Saga magazine— issue #14 to be specific.

Inks by Armando Gil. Below: A photo of John at his table in the Marvel Bullpen taken some time in the late ’70s.

Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC.

MM: Were you worried about having it look like your dad’s work?

Above: John solved the problem of where Spidey could stand to have enough leverage to rip off the car’s roof by having him straddle the trunk of the car. Inks by Al Milgrom.

Next Page: An early clue that Tony Stark was developing a drinking problem, from Iron Man #124.

Iron Man, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: I wasn’t conscious of even attempting to be like anybody, because I was too busy trying to get it done. Instead of looking at this gigantic mountain and saying, “Oh my God, I’ve got to climb this mountain,” I approached it as, “I think I’m just going to try and get two steps up this mountain and see if I survive.” That’s basically what I was doing.

And I could not possibly try to emulate my father. I wasn’t good enough.

MM: Did you have certain expectations?

Like, “If this story comes out right, I could get a job. I’ll never have a problem getting more work.”

JOHN: I didn’t think of that. That was too far in advance. [laughs] I still had the production job, and I think I said, “Worse comes to worst, I’ll still be a production assistant.”

MM: How long did it take you to draw that story? Was that one of those stories where you wanted it to be perfect so you over-thought way too much?

JOHN: I’m sure it’s overdone. I recall agonizing over it. I recall having to get reference on a car, because I remember specifically thinking, “When Spider-Man jumps 14

onto the top of this car, it has to be a car that has a ledge on the side, because his feet have to rest on the ledge while he peels the roof off.” And I remember somebody saying, “What?

He lands on the roof and pulls the roof off!” “No! His feet can’t be on the roof when he peels the roof off!

He’s got to be on the side of the car.” So I had to get reference on a Mustang that had that ledge on the door.

That was a precursor to what I was going to become. And I learned that kind of specificity about things. But that wasn’t because I was taught that way. I watched my father get that detailed. To me, that was important. I agonized over it, but it didn’t kill me. I seemed to have a little bit of a grasp of what I wanted to do.

MM: But letting it go was, like, “I don’t know, it might not be ready.”

JOHN: Oh, it wasn’t good enough. I let it go.

MM: You started learning sometimes you just have to work and let it go and then move on to the next thing, right?

JOHN: It had to be in, so I got it done and got it in. Yes. That’s where a deadline style comes from. Turn it in on time, worry what happens after that.

MM: Were you doing this at night, after you worked the day at Marvel?

JOHN: That’s correct.

MM: Did you know the minute that you were done with college that you were going to Marvel?

JOHN: Well, the minute I finished my second year, I was going to try. And if it didn’t work out, I would finish and get my Bachelor’s. So I’ve still got a couple of credits toward my third year of school, and I’m still waiting to get my Bachelor’s.

MM: If things hadn’t worked out at Marvel, where do you think you would have ended up?

that I was working with him and [David] Michelinie and discussing the stories. Michelinie’s plots were pretty wordy, so there was a lot there to go by. Then Jim Shooter would help out with some storytelling tips. But I never really had any major problems. I gave them what they wanted, they liked it, and that was it.

JOHN: I would have matriculated to Buffalo University, gotten my Bachelor’s and my Master’s; I would have taught, and gotten my advertising degree, and used my advertising degree to get work in advertising. Yeah, I was ready to be one of those guys, one of those advertising guys.

MM: So you’ve never had any problems, storytelling-wise.

MM: When did you start lobbying for a regular book?

JOHN: Never.

JOHN: Well, I didn’t. After I did that six-page story, Scott Edelman came in and said, “Would you like to do Iron Man?” That was the famous line, “I don’t believe in nepotism, and I don’t believe in anti-nepotism. Would you like to try Iron Man?”

MM: You never were told, “Your narrative’s not working tight enough with the script”?

JOHN: No, I’ve never had any editorial problems. The art may have been less than stellar at times, but the storytelling was there. I gave them what they needed.

MM: What did they offer you? They didn’t offer you full pencils; you were just going to do breakdowns, right?

MM: So, you and Bob, as a team, art-wise, he didn’t correct you or punch up anything?

JOHN: I don’t remember the specifics of the conversation, but they said, “Try breakdowns. We’ll get somebody to finish it. We’ll see how it works out.”

JOHN: You’d have to ask him.

I’m sure he doesn’t want to say that he fixed anything, but I saw parts where.... I don’t remember “fixing,” per se, but he may have gone further with things than normal. I don’t know. You’d have to ask Bob.

MM: Were they close to being full pencils?

JOHN: No, at that time I was doing breakdowns from the getgo. But I was putting everything into it, because I didn’t know how to give less, because I thought if I gave less, it would be even worse than what it was. My breakdowns were basically pencils without blacks, that’s all.

MM: Was Iron Man a big book for you at that point? Were you excited about that character?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It was very big for me. And then, with the alcoholism issue, it got some attention.

MM: That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you. Were you concerned about mixing a real-life issue with superheroes? Did you feel like it worked in the book?

MM: Then Bob Layton would overwhelm your pencils.

JOHN: Yeah, Layton was a heavy-handed inker, and no matter how tight my breakdowns were he got credit for the finishes. But he was a heavy-handed inker, yes.

JOHN: No, I wasn’t concerned. I was excited about it, because it reminded me of the drug issue with Harry Osborne in Spider-Man, and I took that as an extreme compliment that it was handled in that respect.

MM: It ended up looking like his stuff. Your page layouts and your storytelling is there, but all the figures look like his women and his guys, with the big hair and his touches.

MM: There were a lot of hints to Stark’s drinking problem. Before that revelation issue came out, every once in a while you’d see him with a bottle of brandy or Scotch on his desk.

JOHN: Yeah, yeah. He was heavy-handed, definitely.

He was definitely a presence.

MM: Was he teaching you, or were you learning anything from the process?

JOHN: Right, right.

MM: It was a little more than subtle. Does that story still hold up for you when you see it now?

JOHN: No, Bob wasn’t teaching me anything. We palled around, and we discussed things, storywise. But they liked my storytelling and my pacing. And it helped

JOHN: Artwise, I’m not proud of it. It ended up being...

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Below: On the road to recovery, Tony nearly falls off the wagon. Iron Man #128, page 17. Inks by Bob Layton.

Next Page: Talk about your heavyweights, even “the greatest of all time” isn’t any help to our hero. At least Howard Cosell can call the action. Pages 26 and 27 of Iron Man #145. Inks by Bob Layton.

Iron Man and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

I obviously could have done better. Bob helped out. And I don’t know if the whole story could have been done better.

Michelinie was great at that time. It’s hard to say, it was 30 years ago.

MM: That story’s still the standard for Iron Man. The stories that you drew, people still talk about those stories. And so much to the point that I think Michelinie and Layton are going to do a story sooner or later for Marvel again.

JOHN: Yup, I’ve heard. I have heard.

MM: So even though sometimes you might not see yourself in that art, it’s still highly revered.

JOHN: It’s an important part of my career, absolutely. And I always go back and look at stuff and say, “Well, I could have done that better. I could have told that story better. I could have done this better.” That’s just me.

But, as far as looking at it as a whole and saying, “Wow, it needed to be done better,” nah, I didn’t think of it that way.

MM: When you look at it you only see your mistakes?

JOHN: Oh, God, yes. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Yeah.

MM: You were working pretty fast on these pages, right?

JOHN: I had good moments and bad moments. I was working during the day at the office, and I was working on the pages at night. And they told me, “Maybe you should consider just doing this full-time.” I said, “Well, if you can guarantee me work, sure.”

MM: John Buscema, at one point, had told your dad if you can’t turn in a page a day, you’re not doing your job.

JOHN: Yeah. I remember Buscema saying, “What? You can’t do one page a day for a month?” And I said, “Well, I’m working on staff.” And he said, “Then give up staff and work full-time.” And then, when I was still struggling to get a full page done per day, at that point I realized, “I think I’d better start hustling,” and I learned to get faster.

Otherwise I wasn’t making enough money.

MM: How does that Iron Man suit fit in that briefcase?

JOHN: Ha! Oh, that’s exactly the question. It’s a rhetorical question, and I’m not going to give you the answer.

MM: The way you draw that suit, there’s no way that thing fits in that briefcase.

JOHN: In the second run, when I came back to do the book, I was a stickler for details about how the costume fit around Tony Stark’s face. There was a padding, there was an area for air conditioning, that kind of thing. I needed reality. Because I always felt that Iron Man was dopey in

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that it was a skin-tight metal suit. That bothered me. I made sure that there was some realism to it.

MM: In the Doctor Doom story, your art starts standing out a lot more. Like, with some of the girls, you could see your females in there. Were you a lot more content with that particular Camelot story?

JOHN: I wasn’t happy with my art until I got on Daredevil, and then I started to enjoy it.

JOHN: It was becoming that, yes, it was. It was becoming the most talked about book, but Spider-Man was still the character. When it got to the point where I was ready to go on to the X-Men from Spider-Man, it got big.

It started getting very, very big, yeah.

MM: Even on Spidey?

JOHN: I wasn’t in full control of my abilities. When I got on Daredevil I seemed to have a cathartic moment.

All of a sudden it was a revelation, and I was able to control.... I was given the chance to do full pencils, and that’s the difference. Then, all of a sudden, I was doing shadows and shading, and I loved it.

MM: What was the plan with you and Dazzler? You were supposed to be the artist for the character always?

JOHN: I don’t remember what the plan was. They asked me to design it, and then they asked me to do some shots with the character in it. And then I did a book or two... I don’t remember the business decisions. I just remember thinking, “Yeah, I’ve been working hard on this, doing my best, and we’ll see what happens.” And, at the time, we got involved with the record company, and they wanted a certain look. Originally it was supposed to be Grace Jones.

MM: Around the time of Iron Man, you got a chance to do that [Uncanny] X-Men Annual [#4], and that [Uncanny] X-Men [#130] cover. That was a big deal back then?

JOHN: Sure. To me it was, yes.

MM: That was because X-Men was the most talked about book, at that point?

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MM: What do you remember about that X-Men #130 cover? Did you think you were ready for prime time?

MM: They wanted this to tie in to a movie, right?

JOHN: Something along the lines of music and movies, yeah. Grace Jones was a very popular singer at the time, and I wanted her to be the basis of the character, because I thought that was realistic. And then, all of a sudden, it became Bo Derek in 1981 because of the movie 10. And that’s when I said, “That’s it. They’ve sold out for some whitebread blonde chick.” She was very hot at the time, but I thought she wasn’t as realistic a choice as Grace Jones was. I grew up in a city where it wasn’t 90% white chicks. There were AfricanAmericans, there were Hispanics, there were Asians. It was multicultural. I didn’t see only white chicks, and I wanted it to be Grace Jones. And then they said, “Nah, we’ve got to switch things up, because Bo Derek is in 10, and she’s the hottest thing in Hollywood,” and so on.

JOHN: I didn’t know if I was ready for prime time for ten years after that. I was very unsure of myself. I was decent, but I wasn’t good enough to be in the spotlight, I thought. I was a little bit nervous about my ability.

They gave me stuff that became prime time stuff, and I kind of had to do it. I didn’t have a choice.

MM: Would Shooter give you pep talks sometimes?

JOHN: Oh, yeah!

MM: What kind of things would he tell you?

JOHN: “You can do this. You tell a good story. Don’t forget to establish, establish, re-establish. Tell that story. Don’t be afraid of doing this. Don’t be afraid. Throw it in there.” As much as my father would tell me how to tell a story, Shooter pounded it into us, as artists.

“You’ve got to tell a story this way, this way, this way, and this way.”

So Shooter should get a good amount of credit for teaching a group of guys.... Not teaching a group of guys, but forcing us to tell stories. There were guys that learned how to tell stories just because of Shooter. I knew how to tell a story, but I honed it because of Shooter. He demanded it to be this way. You had to be very deliberate in your storytelling. Every two pages, you reestablish where you are.

Don’t pull any punches. And a lot of guys didn’t listen. I actually excelled at the storytelling, because I was too afraid not to.

MM: There was something different about Grace Jones.

JOHN: She was long, lean, and gorgeous.

She was very hot. And I thought it was perfect. If I thought of a nightclub chick, that was Grace Jones.

MM: Did you have any resistance toward doing that book? I understand that it took a long time to get approved and to get going.

JOHN: I don’t remember the details, but it was scrutinized up the wazoo. And when the record company got involved, then suddenly everybody had their hands in the pot.

As it grew outside the company and then came back to the company—where there were record producers and movie producers and so on, and Bo Derek was involved—then it fell out of my hands and I was pushed aside.

But that’s all right. Who cares?

MM: The Contest of Champions, how did that project come about?

MM: You were listed as one of the creators, and I thought that was pretty cool. Marvel didn’t do that at the time.

JOHN: [laughs] The Olympics happened.

MM: The 1980 Olympics.

JOHN: Well, yeah, I was listed as one of the creators, but that was only after the fact.

When they started giving credits, then I got credit for doing Dazzler. But I was still getting my chops busted over doing the Dazzler that was originally called “Disco Dazzler,” so you can needle all you want. Then she got popular in X-Men. She became a good character because of Chris Claremont.

JOHN: The 1980 Olympics. So, in advance of the Olympics, they brought in every country from everywhere in the world, and I had to draw a super-hero from each country. And, while I’m working on it, we boycott the Olympics because of Russia invading Afghanistan. So we had to change it to The Contest of Champions. And so goes the story. All I know is, that was the beginning of, “Hey, Romita can do books with a million different characters!”

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MM: And this was while you were working on Amazing, too?

JOHN: As I recall, yes.

MM: Was this a daunting job right from the beginning?

JOHN: Oh, God, yes.

MM: You had to create some new characters.

JOHN: Yeah, we came up with costumes.

Mark Gruenwald helped me out with it.

Actually, Mark Gruenwald sent me sketches of the characters, and the ones that he didn’t, I would create costumes. But Mark Gruenwald had a big hand in creating the costumes of some of these characters.

MM: It was with this book you knew you wanted to do a team book, or did it make you want to stay a little bit away from that kind of stuff?

JOHN: I just knew I was happy getting paid,

so I didn’t stay away from anything. They just said, “Well, you can obviously handle a group book. Here, here’s the X-Men.” MM: The limited series lead Marvel to Secret Wars. I think you were offered Secret Wars before [Mike] Zeck was, right?

JOHN: I don’t remember if it was offered to me before Zeck, but I know I was doing the X-Men, and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the time. And it would have been a nice windfall of cash. When I heard what Zeck made on it, it just broke my heart. [laughter] MM: Yeah, but I also know that it was an extremely hard job for him.

JOHN: Oh, God, yeah. It would have been a hard job for anybody.

MM: From what I understand, he never recuperated from the experience. [laughter] JOHN: Yeah, I heard it kicked his ass for a year or so.

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Previous Page: Dazzler in “plain clothes” from the opening splash page of Dazzler #1. Inks by Alfredo Alcala.

Above: A gathering of champions from Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions #1. Inks by Pablo Marcos.

All characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Anybody that was my father’s contemporary that worked with me, they were wonderful to me. All the respect in the world.

Frank Giacoia, John Tartaglione, Roy Thomas, all of them, all of the guys—well, Roy Thomas is younger than my father— but any of my father’s contemporaries just treated me very, very well.

MM: When you got paired with those guys, you didn’t think, “What are they trying to do? It’s like they’re trying to make my work look like my Dad’s”?

JOHN: No, I didn’t think that. I was very happy to have that kind of sage advice.

They always helped me out, always gave me advice. Even when I didn’t want it.

MM: I found a quote from John Byrne, and I wonder if you believe this. He said that you’re “definitely the best of those who came in after him.”

JOHN: [laughs] That’s a typical John Byrne line, and I take it as a great compliment.

Because I tend to think of myself along the vein of Byrne, which is good story, decent art.... To me, Byrne was head and shoulders—he and Walt Simonson, guys of that age—I thought they were head and shoulders above anything I ever did. I always wanted to be like John Byrne as far as prolificacy and quality. And then Byrne ended up being a great help to me; he helped me out, gave me advice. And I was able to work with him.

MM: You were just a little younger than those guys, Frank Miller and Simonson, right?

Above: John’s first Spidey cover, with inks by Al Milgrom.

Next Page: An example of John’s breakdowns from his early days on Amazing Spider-Man. Black Cat, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: That didn’t happen to you with Contest of Champions? It was one of those books that you were glad to be done with when it was over, I guess?

JOHN: Uhh, yes. [laughter] MM: The story didn’t seem to go anywhere.

JOHN: It lost its luster when we boycotted the Olympics.

MM: How did you feel working with some of your dad’s old cohorts, like Jim Mooney?

JOHN: Oh, Jim Mooney was great to me.

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JOHN: Well, Miller’s about my age; Miller and I came into the industry at about the same time. He just went off on his own tangent and became what he is. So I tip my hat to Frank, the genius that he is. As far as the generation before me, it was the Byrnes and the Simonsons and all. But Byrne was a great guy, and so was Simonson. They treated me well. They were never nasty to me. All the nasty things you hear about Byrne’s personality, I never saw it. He was always good to me, and we were good friends.

Part 3:

Amazing Adventures

MM: How did you end up being on Amazing Spider-Man?

MM: What did you think of his Spider-Man work? It has that quirkiness, like everything that your dad has done and what Ditko and Stan Lee had done, all mixed together. What you and Rog were able to do sort of brought back the character to the classic roots.

JOHN: I don’t remember how it happened.

MM: Was it Denny O’Neil who was the editor?

JOHN: I think so, yeah. I think he wrote some of the issues. Or did he write some of the Iron Man? I don’t remember. I think there was a certain novelty in having another Romita on it, and that I was more than capable, they felt, to do the book, so they said, why not.

JOHN: Sure, sure. I think we both were trying that, because we both needed to base it on something great instead of relying on our own wiles.

MM: Did you think it was going to happen that fast? I think it only took you four years to get there. It didn’t take very long.

JOHN: No, it didn’t take very long. Instead of worrying about what people thought, I thought, “I’m very flattered.”

MM: How did your dad feel about you coming on that title?

JOHN: He was thrilled. He was thrilled.

MM: The first go-round on Spider-Man, did you have a specific approach that you wanted to try out? Did you have an idea of what you were going to do on that book when you started?

JOHN: No. I didn’t have an idea what I was going to do for many, many, many years. I just went along with the best I could do and whatever came out on time.

MM: To me, it always felt that you and Roger Stern worked perfectly together. Did you like working with him?

JOHN: Yeah, I did, because he’s a good friend. But I wasn’t good enough to be in such control other than storytelling. I knew what I was doing, but I was also just flying by the seat of my pants and trying to get as much done as possible, and get the stuff presentable, and base it on what I had learned for years before, and what I felt my father would do. That was all I could think of, because I wasn’t that good.

21

22

MM: Did that stuff appeal to you? The way he brought back Spider-Man, he made him feel like a human being again, where he struggled with paying the rent. It really felt like he lived in New York, and that the guys that were doing the book knew what the experience was like of living in New York.

JOHN: Yes, that’s very good. That’s very accurate.

MM: There’s a quote Rog told me that I thought you might like to hear. I asked him how you two worked together, and he said, “Our differences were mainly cultural.

J.R.’s a hip, young guy from the city, and I’m a schlub from the Midwest. Now that I think of it, he’s Spider-Man and I’m Peter Parker, and together it all worked out.”

[John laughs] JOHN: I don’t know about “hip.” If he feels that way, that’s fine. I think that was just Roger’s way of being funny. We were both relatively young and inexperienced in the business, but with enough experience to get by.

MM: But you and [he] were on the same page; you were in sync for the first time [with your writer], basically?

JOHN: Yes. MM: Why didn’t you guys ever collaborate again?

JOHN: That, I don’t know. That’s a great question, and nobody seems to know why.

I don’t know why that has happened. I moved on to other jobs, he moved on to other jobs, and then we never crossed paths again professionally. I don’t know why.

MM: During that book you went through a lot of inkers. Was there a particular reason why they were trying out so many guys with you?

JOHN: No, I don’t know. [laughs] First, it was a long time ago. Second, what I always thought were the reasons for things changed recently when I found out what certain people were really like. I found out the truth about a lot of people. A lot of the

people from back then were phonies, which I didn’t realize until many, many years later, and it disappointed me to find out that people were that way. But what that did to me was make me realize that the way things went back then was done either for the wrong reasons, or for disingenuous reasons, and that’s a shame.

MM: But that’s the thing. When I was at Marvel, that’s the only thing I learned.

Everything’s political.

JOHN: Well, I think that’s true of any office full of people.

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Previous Page: Cover art for John’s first issue of his first run on Amazing Spider-Man as the regular penciler. Inks by Al Milgrom.

Above: More of John’s early Amazing Spider-Man breakdowns. The pencils are all there, but it’s left up to the inker/finisher as to how to spot the blacks.

Spider-Man and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Well, when you’re working with artists, you’d think it would be a creative environment. And that’s the one thing I was thrown off by—“This is no different than working in some business office.”

JOHN: Everybody was, because my father and John Buscema and Jack Kirby were still very prominent in people’s minds.

MM: You dad and John Buscema had set the house style at Marvel. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, that was the style—until the Image guys came along.

JOHN: Yeah, but if you think about it, artists and writers are flaky, and they’re creative, and I think all that does is exaggerate their duplicity, amplify their duplicity, because they’re creative.

JOHN: Sure. So we were just trying to do our best, and everybody was basically emulating the guys that were better than they were, and that was them.

MM: Were there any particular stories that you liked from that first run?

MM: Towards the end of that run they paired you up with Klaus [Janson], and I felt that he was the first inker that really matched what you were doing. He really brought the mood that you had in your pencils. Did you feel that was the case?

JOHN: Yeah, the Juggernaut two-parter.

MM: That’s the first story after you took over the title, right? It’s the one where people started noticing your work.

JOHN: I was so happy that Klaus was working with me, because I was such a fan of his stuff. And we didn’t get a chance to work together again until about seven years later on the Punisher.

But, yeah, I was thrilled to have him work on an issue of Spider-Man. And now here we are, again, working on SpiderMan.

JOHN: I think I started feeling some control in my stuff. Yeah, that’s possible.

MM: I think everything came together here. You had the humor, you had the action. You didn’t have all the soap opera elements going yet.

JOHN: Right, right.

MM: When you were designing the Hobgoblin, did you want it to be something different from the Green Goblin?

JOHN: They told me to base it loosely on the Green Goblin, but be a little bit different. Those were my instructions.

MM: It always seemed to me that everyone they brought in before Klaus was trying to bring out your dad in your artwork.

MM: You wanted to make him more evil-looking?

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Because I think you did, you made him more devilish-looking.

JOHN: I was trying to make him look a little bit more deadly, yes.

MM: Did Rog tell you right away who the Hobgoblin was going to be?

JOHN: He told me who he wanted it to be, but it ended up being a different character anyway.

MM: Who did he want it to be?

JOHN: I think at first it was Ned Leeds, then it was whoever it was in the book. I don’t even remember who it was. [laughs] MM: Did you find it strange that a lot of Roger’s issues were centered around the Daily Bugle? In looking them over, these stories were a lot more dramatic and were centered in the Bugle’s newsroom.

JOHN: Right. That was the way to make the book look realistic, and we were always

told to steep the book in reality, and having just Peter Parker and the girls wasn’t enough. We had to use the newspaper. And Jonah Jameson was a great character.

MM: And in drawing some of the girls, Amy Powell and others, you had fun doing that stuff?

JOHN: Sure, sure.

MM: And Lance Bannon. These characters are all your designs. Were they based on people that you knew?

JOHN: Oh, they were always based on people I knew, yes.

MM: The last year of working with Rog, was there anything going on behind the scenes?

JOHN: No, no. Roger and I always got along. There were never any problems and nothing was going on behind the scenes.

MM: Did you think you were going to be on Amazing forever?

25

Previous Page: Spidey and a rather sinister looking Green Goblin.

Above: If you’re going to spend a lot of time drawing the offices of The Daily Bugle, it’s a good idea to make a diagram of the place in order to be consistent in your work.

Green Goblin, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Two of John’s Amazing Spider-Man covers: issues #240 and #250, which was also the last of his first stint on the title.

Inks by Bob Layton and Klaus Janson respectively.

Next Page Top: More of John’s breakdowns for Amazing Spider-Man. Next Page Bottom: The second Captain Marvel (or third if you count that other company’s Big Red Cheese) in all her Pam Grier-esque glory.

Captain Marvel, Hobgoblin, Spider-Man, Vulture ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: I actually was doing whatever they told me to do, and if they asked me to get off and do something else, I was listening.

Because I was a young guy and a team player.

MM: Because I know, for Rog, there were a lot of changes around that time. Tom DeFalco was going to leave the title as editor with #250, and Rog wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay, and I think you were leaving already.

JOHN: I don’t remember why I was leaving, but I think it was because of the X-Men, and I couldn’t pass up a chance to work on the X-Men. MM: Why is that?

JOHN: Well, it was becoming the top-line book, and it was a chance to try something different after three or four years on SpiderMan. 26

MM: Did you think you were ready for the X-Men? JOHN: No, God. I don’t remember being conscious of anything back then. I was just, like I said, working by the seat of my pants, and if somebody made a suggestion to me, “This would be a good idea for you to try,” I would do it. And that was pretty much it. I didn’t really have control over my career as much as I was following orders.

MM: Before we get into the X-Men run, when you were designing the female Captain Marvel, was that a nod to Pam Grier?

JOHN: Yeah. [laughs] And it didn’t end up looking like her, because we got word from somebody else that they wanted her to facially look like another black model.

I forget where she appeared, but it was in a magazine. I don’t know. A beautiful, beautiful model. And somebody sent the

photographs up, “You’ve got to make her look like this.” So I couldn’t make her look like Pam Grier anymore, but to me she was Pam Grier.

MM: That appearance in the Spider-Man Annual is the only comic, I think, where she’s ever been sexy.

JOHN: Yeah, exactly.

MM: The idea was to make her this bombshell, right?

JOHN: No, it never was the idea to make her a bombshell. I just took out some reference on Pam Grier, because I always loved her, and at the last minute somebody said, “Well, we need to use this woman, here,” because they thought maybe Pam Grier wasn’t as good-looking as the model that they found. It was fine, because by the time she got done by other artists, it ended up looking like the generic black character, anyway.

MM: Did you always appreciate how you and Rog approached a story head-on? I liked right away

that you guys didn’t avoid going right into that Hobgoblin storyline. You went right in there. It wasn’t like a slow burn or something. Right away Spider-Man confronted him, and it seemed like a real aggressive way of telling the story.

JOHN: Yeah, that was Roger’s way, yes.

Absolutely. And I was less in control in that way than I was in pacing and designing.

MM: By the end, did you feel you’d done everything you ever wanted to do with that character? Did you ever think you were going to come back?

JOHN: Oh, no. No, I knew I wasn’t good enough then, and at some point I would be better, of course.

MM: So you always thought you were going to come back to Amazing at some point?

JOHN: Yeah.

MM: I always figured, that with most guys, once they’re done, that’s it.

JOHN: No, I always want to do a better job on anything I’ve worked on.

27

Part 4:

Finding His Stride— Full Pencils at Last

MM: How did the offer come to do Uncanny? Did that come from Louise Simonson?

strange. They said, “Listen, it’s got to be done. Can you get it done by Monday?” I said, “Yeah.”

JOHN: I don’t remember who came up to me.

MM: Did you have Paul’s pages to look at?

JOHN: Yes, and I tried to make it look like his stuff, since it was the middle of the book. I believed in doing a slow grading into the next artist. I didn’t want to just shock everybody. At least, that’s what I said, when I could have just done my own stuff. So I did a little bit of Paul Smithesque stuff the first issue or so.

MM: It might have been Shooter?

JOHN: I don’t remember who came to me first. I know Louise was the editor on that book, but I don’t know whose suggestion it was first.

Maybe it was Shooter, I don’t know.

MM: Right from the start, it was a difficult book. Also, you hadn’t done a team book before.

MM: Did you feel like you were thrown into this thing with enough time to prepare?

JOHN: Right. Yeah, I didn’t realize it would be that tough.

JOHN: Uhhh.... Well, they might have felt I had enough time, but I wasn’t prepared completely. And yet I got better. I improved leaps and bounds because of working on that title.

MM: Did you feel the pressure of, “Oh, people are going to expect Paul Smith”?

JOHN: Oh, yeah.

I got nasty letters and everything. Oh, sure. Absolutely.

MM: Who decided to put you, right away, in that first issue, X-Men #175? It was a strange how they passed the art torch from Paul Smith to you mid-issue.

MM: Was this the first time you had to deal with a lot of criticism?

JOHN: Yeah, that was the first time I felt the wrath of the fans.

JOHN: Oh, that was because Paul ran out of time. He had a scheduling problem, so they asked me to do eight pages over a weekend. [laughter]

MM: Did you read the Comics Journal issue where, I think, Heidi McDonald wrote a piece, “What’s wrong with the X-Men?” I couldn’t believe she was so harsh on you. Some of the issues she criticizes are my favorite ones that you did.

MM: You didn’t think that was a strange way of starting?

JOHN: Well, it was an emergency, so it wasn’t 28

JOHN: What, this is a recent article?

MM: No, it’s an old article. This is from 1985.

JOHN: Oh, okay.

MM: She had some issues with some of your art and the writing on X-Men at that time.

JOHN: Oh, okay. So it was an article about my run that she did back when my run was ongoing?

MM: Yeah, back in 1985 or so.

JOHN: Well, that’s fine. [laughter] You can only imagine what it’s like to have the Internet so prevalent now.

MM: Oh, it’s so much worse.

JOHN: Yeah, there are a lot of nasty people out there. What are you going to do?

MM: This scenario happens with every X-Men artist. When John Byrne left, who could ever replace him?

JOHN: Right, everybody gets their own backlash, absolutely.

MM: And then, once you left, I’m sure the same thing happened.

“Yeah, he’s no John Romita.”

JOHN: Ennnnh, I don’t know about that. [laughter] MM: Working with Chris Claremont, were you able to collaborate with him, or did you just work from full scripts?

JOHN: Basically, he just gave very tight plots. They weren’t really scripts, they were plots, but his were very tight.

MM: Were you able to discuss with him what you were going to do in the script?

JOHN: No. I was a young artist, and he was an experienced writer. It was basically “do what he writes.”

MM: He never invited ideas from you?

Most of the X-Men artists that I’ve spoken with said that was the way they worked with him. They talked about what they wanted to do, and pitched in ideas....

JOHN: No. I just did exactly what they asked.

MM: So you never expressed to him, “Oh, I wouldn’t mind doing more Wolverine or more Colossus?”

29

Previous Page: 1983 sketch of Wolverine.

Above: Cover art for Uncanny X-Men #196.

Inks by Terry Austin.

Wolverine, X-Men ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: Nope. Never got into that conversation.

Right: Kitten with a soulsword! Panel from Uncanny X-Men #203.

Below: Page 6 of Uncanny X-Men #203.

Inks by Al Williamson.

Next Page: Cover art for Uncanny X-Men #183.

Inks by Dan Green.

Juggernaut, X-Men ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: How would you approach those plots? How would you break them down?

JOHN: I would just start thumbnailing, do little notes and little doodles to pace out the whole book, and then start from the first page.

MM: Did you feel like there was sometimes way too much in there for 22 pages?

JOHN: Yeah, it was very dense, absolutely.

MM: One of the things I liked hearing you say,

for World War Hulk’s last issue, you thought there was too much going on, and you needed more pages.

JOHN: Absolutely. That book should have been done in 60 pages.

MM: Reading some of those Chris Claremont issues, I thought there were a couple issues there you could have stretched out more.

JOHN: Yes. That’s very true. They were very crowded.

MM: There was nothing you could tell Chris? Like, “Can we cut this?”

JOHN: No. That wasn’t done back then.

You didn’t do that to any writer.

MM: Is that something you gain with experience? That from now on, you’re just not going to do nine panels on a page with action?

JOHN: Like I said, I was a young guy, and I just followed orders.

30

MM: During your X-Men days, you were doing three pages a day.

ended up doing it, and it worked out nice.

MM: I never liked the first issue [X-Men #176], because it was a really soap opera-ish issue, and when you’re ten years old, you don’t want to read that kind of stuff, with Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor on their romantic honeymoon.

JOHN: It varied. Some pages took longer, but I averaged two to three pages a day. And it was because I was doing breakdowns, number one, but my breakdowns were tight. It’s just, like I said, I didn’t really have a choice. I wasn’t going to complain to anybody. I was happy to get the work, and I just followed orders. I did my job and didn’t complain.

JOHN: Right, right.

MM: And even though you snuck in a couple of butt shots [laughter], it still didn’t pay off for me. It was like, “This is so boring.” These two, you wished they’d get divorced or something already.

MM: Did you have a life back then? Three pages a day is a lot of pages.

JOHN: Yeah, I had a great life. I was able to do three pages a day, I’d get the work done, and I’d go out. [laughs] Nope.

Didn’t drive me nuts.

JOHN: I know. That’s true. I wasn’t happy about that.

MM: Were there some stories you enjoyed more than others? I thought the Colossus vs.

Juggernaut issue [X-Men #183] was pretty good.

MM: When you did the Kulan Gath storyline [XMen #190 and 191], where you have not only the XMen, but you’ve got the Avengers and all these other Marvel heroes in the tale—all of a sudden you’re basically doing Crisis on Infinite Earths for two issues.

JOHN: Yeah, I enjoyed it. I’d love to do that again.

MM: What happened during the end of your run? Did it become political?

JOHN: Yeah. I think that was the beginning of the “Romita can do any amount of characters” books. People saw that I could handle large groups and crowded books, and they gave me work.

And here it is, I’m doing the same kind of thing now, doing World War Hulk.

JOHN: Uh, no, I got asked to do Star Brand, believe it or not.

MM: So you left right in the middle of the “Mutant Massacre” storyline to do Star Brand.

JOHN: I did, because Jim Shooter asked me to.

MM: After a while, that work had to take a toll on you.

MM: He wouldn’t give you a chance to finish the storyline out?

JOHN: No. No, never took a toll. I didn’t crack up, I didn’t go postal. No.

JOHN: No. He asked me to, and said it would be good for me to do it, so I did.

MM: Getting your dad to ink you in the beginning [XMen #177], was that something that Louise wanted?

MM: In that last issue you were on [X-Men #211], it says that you and Bret Blevins did pencils. Is that mostly just your layouts?

JOHN: No, I asked. [laughs] And he had the time, and he wanted to do it, but he didn’t want to push it. He 31

JOHN: For the X-Men, you mean? No, I think he needed work, they gave it to him, and then we worked together on Star Brand.

Like I said, this is vague stuff because it was so long ago, and as far as the reason things got done, I didn’t assert any authority. I didn’t have any. So when something got done, it was because of somebody else’s orders. I didn’t understand why, or question it, because I was too young. I just did my job.

MM: Certainly, you liked the way his inks looked.

JOHN: Oh, God, yes. Absolutely. Loved it.

MM: What about that last Phoenix story you did toward the end of your run? Were you happy with the way that came out?

There was one issue I had to reread twice, because there was too much going on. It seemed very tight, having all these storylines together—so compressed.

JOHN: You know, I can’t say enough that I don’t remember having any ability to change the way things went back then, storywise. Because Claremont’s stories were so tight, and so precise, and so planned out, I was just along for the ride.

MM: As you guys worked together, as the issues went by, did you ever feel like you could open up to him and give him your opinions?

Below: Rachel, a.k.a.

Phoenix, prepares for a face-off with The Beyonder. Uncanny X-Men #203, page 9. Inks these pages and panel by Al Williamson, who Terry Austin says is the best inker John ever had. High praise indeed!

Next Page: Panel from page 2 alongside page 7 of Star Brand #1. Inks by Al Williamson.

Star Brand, X-Men ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: I just did breakdowns, and he finished—not layouts, they were breakdowns.

JOHN: Nope. Again, they had it all plotted out. They had a year’s worth of stories set in motion, and they would send it to me, and I would tell the story. But the base of the story was already set, and all I did was do the storytelling.

MM: I can’t see you in that artwork at all.

JOHN: I wasn’t happy. I found out that I was much more unhappy getting off the book, because I didn’t enjoy doing Star Brand.

MM: During your run on the X-Men you worked some with Al Williamson. Who thought of pairing you guys up?

JOHN: I think I asked for him, and was shocked to find out that he was available.

MM: Was it supposed to be a regular occurrence, or was he just filling in for that one issue?

32

MM: How was Star Brand presented to you?

JOHN: It was supposed to be Marvel’s version of Superman, and it ended up being Jim Shooter’s life story. [George laughs] It’s true! Very true.

MM: It seemed like a blend of Green Lantern and a little of a few other things.

JOHN: Oh, yeah, of course it was based loosely on Green Lantern, but they proposed it to me as Marvel’s version of Superman. And it failed; it was terrible.

MM: Did he tell you financially this was going to pay off?

JOHN: Oh, yeah, of course. Of course he told me that.

MM: Had you moved to California by then?

JOHN: No. I didn’t move to California until 1995.

MM: Okay. I know your dad had some resentment about that Star Brand debacle. He thought you should stay on X-Men no matter what, right?

JOHN: Yeah, he probably said that, in retrospect, but, again, I was told,

“This would be a good idea, you should do this.” I wasn’t threatened, but I was told, “This is what you should do.”

MM: How can you refuse the top guy, right?

JOHN: Yeah. When the editor-in-chief tells you what to do, you should listen to what he says. He’s not going to steer you wrong.

MM: In terms of designing that character, who’s he based on? Is it supposed to look like Shooter a little bit?

JOHN: Yeah, he looked a little bit like Shooter, yeah, yeah.

MM: What did you think of the stories? They were not so good?

33

Below: Daredevil #252, page 31. Inks by Al Williamson.

Next Page: Daredevil #259, page 18. Inks by Al Williamson.

Daredevil ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: No, the stories were not so good.

They weren’t.

MM: Well, what exactly was based on his life? The guy’s a super-human being.

MM: His goal was to make this a little more realistic than the other super-heroes, right?

JOHN: Obviously Shooter’s not a superhuman being, but it was girls and people that were friends of his, it was set in Pittsburgh and he was from Pittsburgh, and so on.

JOHN: Yeah, because he wanted it based on his life.

MM: I know for you that was a low point.

JOHN: Oh, yes. I was very unhappy. And then I got a chance to work on Daredevil, and that really turned things around for me.

MM: Was there a time you weren’t working in between Star Brand and the next project?

JOHN: No. MM: You always had something— JOHN: I always had something to do. It was great.

MM: What was the “Hunk of the Month” thing? [John laughs] That was not something you liked, was it?

JOHN: It was a practical joke. Jim Shooter and Bob Layton’s practical joke.

MM: But it wasn’t something you appreciated, was it?

JOHN: Ahhh, I took it with a grain of salt. I laughed at myself.

Obviously, it wasn’t meant to be serious. And I told them the only way I’d let them take a photograph was if it was done tongue-in-cheek, and they told me, 34

“Yeah.” Even after it was printed, I wasn’t ashamed, because I knew it was a joke.

MM: I was under the impression you felt let down by that.

JOHN: No, no. Not at all. I’ve just got to get back at those guys. I never got a chance to get back at them.

MM: When Ralph offered you Daredevil, what was going on at that point? Were you still on Star Brand when Daredevil was offered to you?

JOHN: No. I was very disenchanted with the industry, and I had a chance to work with Ralph [Macchio], and that was a big turning point.

MM: Because you were seriously thinking about quitting comics?

JOHN: Yes, I was.

MM: Going to DC wasn’t even a thought? You were just going to quit outright?

JOHN: Yup. I was going to quit. I was going to go into advertising.

MM: And Ralph was able to turn you around?

JOHN: Yeah. He said, “Do whatever you want and see if you enjoy it, and then we’ll see what happens.”

MM: How did Ann [Nocenti] become involved? She was writing Daredevil before that, right?

JOHN: I don’t know if she was writing it before that or if she was an editor on the X-Men books before that. I don’t know what she had written before that, but we got along great working together.

MM: Did you and Ann always talk over the plots beforehand?

JOHN: We discussed plots beforehand, yes.

MM: One of the deals Ralph made was that you could do whatever you wanted in terms of art?

MM: And Ralph was always involved, too, in the direction of the series?

JOHN: Well, the storytelling. Full pencils, and I get control of the storytelling, because he knew I could do it. So, “No more typed plots. Loose plots, and you do your tight pencils.”

JOHN: Oh, yeah, always.

MM: And you brought Al Williamson with you?

35

was always whatever got done on time, as best I could. If I was trying to look like somebody, I’d try to look like my father’s artwork, and I never became that.

MM: Sometimes you exaggerated the Kingpin a lot more—he looked a lot cartoonier. And then certain characters looked a little more realistic. I thought it was a good balance.

JOHN: Enh, I’m not even conscious of what I was doing at the time. I was just hoping for the best.

MM: Who exactly is the Kingpin based on? Who did your dad base him on?

JOHN: Oh, he claims that he based Kingpin loosely on several different actors—Sydney Greenstreet.... You’ll have to ask him, but he says it was based on a lot of guys.

MM: You just made him huge. In your book he’s this really big, cartoony-looking guy. He doesn’t even look human. I thought that was pretty cool. He looks more like a tank.

JOHN: Well, he had been exaggerated by a lot of guys, too. Everybody got carried away.

MM: Who was Typhoid Mary visually based on?

JOHN: She was based on my ex-wife.

JOHN: I asked for Al, yeah.

Above and Next Page: A study in evil with Kingpin, Typhoid Mary... and Mephisto?!? John redesigned Marvel’s foremost demon for this issue. Pages 2 and 19 of Daredevil #263. Inks by Al Williamson.

Kingpin, Typhoid Mary ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Do you think he brought out even more of the artwork?

MM: Did you like what Ann was bringing to this book? Because Mary was this woman who was simply evil.

She was not bad for any particular reason other than being bad.

JOHN: Brought out, I don’t know. He claims that he just traced. [laughter]

JOHN: She’s just completely evil. That’s why the term “Typhoid Mary”—it’s a colloquialism from back during the war.

Somebody who was poison, Typhoid Mary.

MM: Your style seemed to be evolving when he came in. Your characters looked a lot bulkier.

MM: It was very different from what was being done in comics at that point.

JOHN: Like I said, I never made a concerted effort to be any particular style. It

JOHN: Ann Nocenti was definitely a complete departure from other people’s work.

36

37

MM: In comics, I think only Ann could write something like that, where you have this female character who understood that the only sure way to get a guy is through sex.

MM: That was it?

JOHN: Yeah.

MM: And why did he put your name up front, in the credits?

JOHN: She was very much a feminist, and it showed, and very much a political activist, if you’ll excuse the expression. So it showed in her work.

JOHN: Because that’s the kind of guy that John Byrne is. He’s a good guy. He felt that I was doing more work than he was.

MM: Around this time your Kirby and Miller influences came out a bit more. You started playing a little bit with your body types and anatomy.

MM: That’s usually the case in comics, isn’t it, that the artist does more of the work?

JOHN: Miller, I don’t know, necessarily, but it was always Kirby. That just happened as I worked. I wasn’t even trying. Maybe I got bulky as I attempted to be a little bit more powerful with the work. But, yeah, that was Kirby’s influence, and my father’s influence, always telling me to make characters look three-dimensional and have weight to them.

JOHN: Yeah, but nobody had ever done that before.

No one had ever acknowledged the artist the way he did, because he is an artist first, and he felt that the artist deserved the majority of the credit.

MM: I think so, too. It’s like being the mother of the book. You get the plot, and then you’ve got to work harder and longer on it than the writer ever had to.

MM: You seemed comfortable on Daredevil. Was there a particular reason to go back to Iron Man?

JOHN: Yup.

JOHN: I had a chance to work with John Byrne.

MM: Did you have fun that second time around? Were 38

you able to do things you weren’t able to do the first time?

JOHN: Yes, absolutely. I was completely in control of the storytelling, and that was as much of a turning point for me as Daredevil was. I loved that. That run on Iron Man was as much fun as I’ve ever had on a book.

MM: Was it your idea to bring in Fin Fang Foom and all that stuff?

JOHN: Oh, no, it was John’s idea to bring it in. But the redesign of the Living Laser and a couple other villains was fun, too.

MM: Why haven’t you ever done the Avengers? You’ve done practically everything at Marvel except that.

MM: What did you think of those two issues? Because that sort of brought you back into the thick of things. That was during the height of the Jim Lee era of XMen. JOHN: Right, right.

MM: You’ve got these two books—two 48-page issues—that basically don’t really tell you anything. It was supposed to tell you the origin of Cable, but it doesn’t really tell you much.

JOHN: That’s true. I don’t know, other than them asking me to do it, and I agreed.

I don’t have a very good grasp of the reasons why things happened back then.

JOHN: I have done an issue of the Avengers, a fill-in.

MM: Just an issue, but not a run.

JOHN: Right, correct. They haven’t asked me. If they asked me, I would consider it.

MM: Was there a particular reason you did the Cable mini-series?

JOHN: Again, they asked me.

39

Previous Page: Silver Surfer lends Daredevil a helping hand (along with some cosmic power) against Mephisto.

Daredevil #282, pages 24 and 25. Inks by Al Williamson.

Below: Action from the “Armor Wars II” storyline—from Iron Man #262 and #266, respectively. Inks by Bob Wiacek.

Daredevil, Iron Man, Jim Rhodes, Mephisto, Silver Surfer ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

40

MM: Did you find it interesting how quickly the Image artists rose to prominence?

JOHN: Sure! I was amazed, and a little envious, but that’s the way things worked, and they got rich.

MM: You were able to do that one issue with Scott Williams inking you. What did you think of coming back into the X-Men fold at that time.

JOHN: Other than doing it, and then having Scott ink me, which was a lot of fun.... I think you’re looking for something that wasn’t there. I didn’t consciously say, “Wow, this is spectacular! I’m finally joining the Alist!” I didn’t think of it that way.

I was too busy having fun in my personal life, and getting work done so I could pay the bills.

MM: There was a time you weren’t too happy with the way you were treated at Marvel, and I thought that might have happened around this point.

JOHN: No. That was a personal note that certain people would do rotten things to me.

Again, Marvel’s policies work fine. The people that implemented those policies sometimes ruined things, so I would have a personal problem with somebody. And, of course, you can’t do anything except do your job. If I had hit everybody that deserved to be hit, I’d still be in prison. [laughter] MM: I know after those guys left for Image, there was only you and the Kuberts left at Marvel, and they seemed to have a problem finding good artists. Yet, somehow, the comics were still selling no matter who they put on the books.

JOHN: Right.

MM: Prior to you, the X-editors were just

trying every new guy that came off the street, and it didn’t work.

JOHN: Right. And then, after I got on the X-Men, then I got screwed off of it again by a guy named Kelly Corvese. So that’s the way things worked. That’s what I was talking about, personal problems. One guy doesn’t like me, and he gets me kicked off the book.

MM: I read somewhere you had a problem with the assistant editor giving you some grief.

41

Previous Page: Page 6 of Uncanny X-Men #302.

Inks by Dan Green.

Above: Opening splash page from Uncanny X-Men #306. Inks by Dan Green.

Archangel, Bishop, Jean Grey, Storm, X-Men ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Previous Page Top: Joker and Jigsaw enjoy a day on the beach. John’s pencils for a two-page spread for Punisher/ Batman #2, the project he left (he thought only temporarily) Uncanny X-Men to do.

Previous Page Top: The Punisher on the move, from Punisher War Zone #2. Inks by Klaus Janson.

Previous Page Bottom: A quiet page from Uncanny X-Men #309. Inks by Dan Green.

Charles Xavier, Jigsaw, Punisher ™ and ©2008 Michael Allred.

JOHN: They asked me to do the Punisher/Batman crossover, so I asked for one month off of X-Men to do the Punisher/Batman. They gave it to me, and then they wouldn’t let me back on because Joe Madureira was discovered.

That was the time that I was very upset with the editor-in-chief, who didn’t back me up on that. That was another point where I was tempted to leave.

back. But listen, people are that way. He didn’t want to cause trouble at the company, so he let me work without telling me he wasn’t thrilled with my work, and I was kept off of a lot of books, and I was screwed out of doing the X-Men by Kelly Corvese when Bob Harras should have done the right thing, and he didn’t.

MM: I’ve seen you mention that you found out later on that he didn’t like your artwork very much, either.

JOHN: He was his assistant editor; he stuck by his assistant editor. And that was probably the time where I was very disenchanted with people who I felt were my friends.

JOHN: Yes. I found out that Bob Harras was a phony, that’s correct.

MM: Oddly, he probably needed you more than you needed him.

JOHN: He was pleasant to me up front, and then didn’t like my work behind my 42

MM: Kelly was one of his guys.

MM: So the whole time you were working there, you never got those kind of vibes?

JOHN: I never got that feeling. The fact that I couldn’t get to a certain point on certain books bothered me, but I always thought it was because of other reasons,

and not because I was being held back.

But, listen, that’s 20 years ago. Who cares?

MM: Well, he was the editor-in-chief.

JOHN: He was editor-in-chief at that time, when I got screwed out of the X-Men on my second run.

MM: Marvel was going through a lot of chaos back then.

They had the five editors-in-chief and a lot of chaos came from that.

JOHN: Right, that’s correct.

MM: Regardless, Bob always had more power than the rest of the guys, because he was the X-Men guy.

JOHN: Yeah, that is correct.

MM: You also received a phone call from Jim Lee to join Image, right?

JOHN: Yes, I had a meeting with Jim Lee and he asked me to come join those guys, and I had to turn him down because, at the time, I was working on the X-Men. 43

44

MM: You never thought about it twice?

Like, “Maybe I should go and do one book.”

JOHN: Yeah, every writer’s got a different way of doing things. Yes, absolutely.

JOHN: Yes, I did think long and hard about it, but I was doing the X-Men, and I was also working on Punisher [War Zone] at the same time. I had plenty of work, and I was happy. I thought it was crazy to take a chance. Now, in retrospect, I might have made a good amount of money. But, then again, I’m where I’m at because I stuck with Marvel, so who knows how things would have turned out.

MM: Were you able to plot with him?

MM: I was just thinking, during the mid’90s, the only page of art that I ever saw on the walls at Marvel was the page from Punisher War Zone that you did that acknowledged that you sold almost a million copies or something like that.

I don’t know if you remember that.

JOHN: Yeah, the first issue of War Zone sold close to a million, or over a million dollars— a very proud moment.

MM: This was right before the market went into free fall.

Were you concerned about the sales?

JOHN: Right after that. Yeah, of course I was concerned, yeah.

MM: Is that something Bob might have used against you? Maybe, “Oh, your X-Men sales are going down, so we had to do something”?

JOHN: No, no. He never blamed me for that. The book was still very strong before I got screwed.

MM: Was there a difference working on Scott Lobdell’s stories than working on Claremont’s?

JOHN: We talked a little bit in advance, yeah. He would call me and tell me what was coming up.

MM: Those first five years in the ’90s weren’t enjoyable for you?

JOHN: In the early ’90s I was doing fine, with Iron Man and Daredevil: Man Without Fear; it was pretty much ’93, ’94 that was rough, and then I got back on Spider-Man.

Previous Page: Uncanny X-Men #311, page 14.

Below: John draws a mean Frank Castle.

Opening shot from Punisher War Zone #3.

Inks by Klaus Janson.

Punisher, X-Men ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Part 5:

Artist Without Fear

MM: When did you feel that your talent and your commitment to Marvel were finally appreciated? You went through some problems in the early ’90s. When did you feel like you were part of the team?

JOHN: [chuckles] I never felt safe enough. I probably still don’t feel content enough, because I’m always worried that my work isn’t good enough. Always felt that way, always will. I’ve just always been my own

worst critic. So even when they showed me appreciation, I didn’t feel good enough about the work. It was a conflict trying to get better, always working hard. But I would say the mid-’80s was when I started feeling like I was doing something, and then the early ’90s, when I started working with Frank Miller, kind of secured it. I started getting some nice reactions from my fellow artists.

MM: Have there ever been times for you that this was just a job? What do you do to stay motivated, to not think like that?

JOHN: I hate to say money, but to survive, you’ve got to make a good living, a decent living, and I always want to have a nice roof over my wife’s head, that kind of thing. So I’m always... I guess I’m greedy. [laughter] Greed is good, bordering on being paranoid about it, but I have the urge to be the best. And I don’t know when I’ll know that I’m the best. I don’t know if it’ll come in the form of a big sign out on Times Square, or if it will ever occur to me. I hope it never occurs to me, because then I’ll stop getting better. But it’s the design to be the best, and the need for money, like anybody else.

MM: There haven’t been any times when you felt like the work was beneath you a little bit?

JOHN: As an artist, you mean?

MM: Yeah, as an artist; a time you weren’t into what you were doing. In 30 years, I think, once in a while everybody hits a bump.

JOHN: Yeah, there were times that I wasn’t too happy with the industry, but that had nothing to do with the industry, per se, it was because of some of the people.

MM: But you never let it affect your work?

I mean, say there was a book that didn’t turn out the way they promised you, after a while you don’t go, “Whatever,” and just get it out of the way?

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JOHN: No, I don’t think I ever felt that. I never got complacent, never got cocky, never got to the point where I wasn’t enjoying the work.

MM: Star Brand, for example, that was promised to be one thing, and right away it just fell apart.

JOHN: Well, that was, first of all, a bad career move on my part. And, second, it fell apart because of various and sundry reasons that I’m not going to go into.

MM: But you never felt like it affected your art, though? No matter what happened, you did the best you could, always?

JOHN: Yeah, I always did the best I could.

I don’t think there ever was a point where I slacked, honestly. And I don’t think I ever, ever slacked and said, “Let me get this over with.” Because there were days when, if you didn’t do a good job, you weren’t going to get work the next day. I don’t know if I’ve been in that situation in a long time, but before royalties were sure things, you worked for every dime you made, and you also worked to get your next dime. So I always had that feeling in my gut that, “Gotta do my best, because I have to please everybody, and then I have to please the fans.”

MM: Redesigning Mephisto. Why did you feel like you had to do that, sort of making him into Blackheart?

JOHN: I didn’t make him into Blackheart.

I made him look like a disgusting demon, and then Blackheart kind of morphed on his own into what he is. It always bothered me that Mephisto looked like a guy in a costume. The devil doesn’t wear tights and a cape, that’s all. So I just thought of something demonic. That’s all. Why I did it is because it bothered me that Mephisto wore a cape and shorts and boots.

MM: For years they stuck to your design up until recently, right?

JOHN: Yeah! What does he look like in “One More Day”?

MM: He looks like the old Mephisto, the one John Buscema drew.

JOHN: Okay. I didn’t say my idea was great. But, as the devil, you can morph into any shape you want.

MM: What was your thinking going into Man Without Fear?

JOHN: Originally I wanted to do a graphic novel with Frank, a Wolverine graphic novel. But he said, “Nah, everybody’s doing Wolverine. Let’s try a Daredevil job.”

Then he said, “I have this script for a teleplay, a screenplay that didn’t pan out, and I can adjust it into a comics plot, so let’s do that.” Kind of a “Daredevil: Year One,” was the conversation, and that’s the way it was.

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Previous Page: Like most of Ann Nocenti’s Daredevil stories, this was as much a psychological drama as anything else.

Daredevil #268, page 22.

Inks by Al Williamson.

Above: Cover art for Daredevil #280, featuring Mephisto.

Daredevil, Mephisto ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Trading card art for the Marvel Universe III card set.

Next Page: Matt Murdock, meet Elektra Natchios. Daredevil: The Man Without Fear #2, page 28. Inks by Klaus Janson.

Daredevil, Elektra, Spider-Man, Wolverine ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Was everything there in the script?

considering five parts.

JOHN: Well, it was not—he filled a lot of stuff in that he wanted to say. And then, after I started it, it became even bigger, because he threw an addendum in that ended up being 80-something pages extra.

But he said from the get-go that he had to change it slightly from its first state, from the rejected screenplay.

MM: Was that a little disappointing for you?

MM: Did you break up your story from his script, or from what he was giving you, the new notes?

JOHN: No, it got broken up into five parts by the editors. They thought 140 pages of graphic novel would be too cost-ineffective, and they felt they had to break it up first, sell as much as they could as the five-part series, and then anything it sold as a hardcover or a graphic novel would be cake.

MM: Yet, the majority of the time you were working on it, you thought it was going to be a graphic novel, right?

JOHN: I knew towards the end. Close to the end they were telling me they were 48

JOHN: Ennnh, a little bit. I wanted it to be a graphic novel first, but it worked okay. It worked fine.

MM: With Miller, was it a close relationship while you were working on that?

JOHN: Not at all. He gave me a plot, disappeared to work on one of the Robocop movies, then appeared later to add the addendum, and then disappeared again to do another movie. He was not around a lot because he was so busy. No problem.

MM: So you were pretty free to do what you could do with the storytelling. Most of the time you could think up what you wanted to do in a scene, right?

JOHN: It was a lot like working with John Byrne. Frank knew what I could do, and allowed me to do whatever I wanted.

MM: Is that one of the few times you basically lobbied for a writer, that you wanted to work with him directly?

JOHN: I called him without telling the editors, because, for graphic novels, you don’t really have to discuss things with the editors. Unless it’s a monthly title, you don’t have to.

JOHN: At the time, yes, that’s a fair way of putting it. Sure.

MM: Did you get any input from the editor?

JOHN: Most of the time it was me on my own, because I was working on monthly titles at the same time.

MM: Was this part of that incentive that Marvel had in the ’80s where they wanted every artist to pitch in an idea for a graphic novel? Was that what this comes from?

MM: Who would you show the pages to? Your dad or Ralph?

JOHN: I don’t remember that. Don’t remember that at all.

MM: There was a period when Tom DeFalco started asking most of the top freelancers if they had any ideas for a graphic novel, and if so to submit them. I thought Man Without Fear might have been a part of that.

JOHN: That might have been going on, but that wasn’t the case in this instance.

MM: All right. From the get-go, you knew you wanted to approach this story differently. You wanted this to be bigger and grander, right?

JOHN: I knew I wanted to work with Frank, and I wanted to do something with Wolverine. But bigger and grander happened because of Frank’s great story, and bigger and grander happened because we added 80 pages to it, and it became 144 pages instead of 64.

MM: Was this an intense experience for you? Did you consider this to be your magnum opus?

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JOHN: Macchio.

MM: How was this job different from prior jobs? Were you working on a monthly while you were working on this?

JOHN: Yes, I was working on, I think, either Iron Man or Daredevil or both. I don’t remember.

Above: Matt goes to college. An unused panel intended for Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, featuring a nice shot of the Harvard campus.

Next Page: Cover art for Daredevil: The Man Without Fear #3. With all the covers in this series, the large Daredevil figures were printed in red foil with the rest of the art raised on a heavier, stamped card stock, giving the covers a rather three-dimensional quality.

Daredevil, Elektra ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Did it take more time to work on these pages? Because there’s very little standard super-hero storytelling going on in this. This is a drama.

JOHN: True.

MM: Was that one of the things that you had to take into consideration? Did you want to avoid certain poses and that type of thing, and just deliver the story you were trying to tell, the drama?

JOHN: No, it just worked out fine. The storytelling, I was given the chance to tell the story, and I had enough of a plot to work from. It was not a matter of adjusting anything, because it was.... I don’t know. It was pretty much easy to do, to tell you the truth. Other than being long, it was easy.

There were a lot of small details and a lot of difficult pages, but telling the story was easy. It was like directing a movie.

MM: It was all character-driven.

JOHN: Correct.

beats are a little different with it. You could see that you were working on a longer story.

JOHN: Yeah. But, then again, the consideration was that it might be too long and boring.

MM: But this is still one of the best books Marvel has ever put out.

JOHN: It’s nice of you to say that. I appreciate it. I think so. I think it was one of the best stories I ever told with Marvel, I agree.

MM: Were you living in California while you were working on this?

JOHN: I was living in the Midwest, actually.

MM: Were you visiting New York throughout the process? Just to get that New York vibe in there?

JOHN: Yeah, I was going back and forth to New York regularly. I had a lot of reference. I mean, it was easy. I was born and raised there. I was only in the Midwest for a couple of years.

MM: Considering some of the things we’ve been talking about before, there’s that little bit where Matt Murdock gets pushed around by the bullies—you obviously drew from your own experiences, right?

JOHN: Sure!

MM: That’s why I thought it was a strange decision to break up the book, because the 50

MM: Did this hit close to home sometimes?

JOHN: Nah, that was already existing in the Daredevil chronology.

MM: The story came out during Jim Lee’s height at Marvel and it kind of got lost in the shuffle, marketingwise, didn’t it? Did it seem like a big priority at Marvel while you were working on it?

MM: Yeah, but there’s something alive in this work. It felt like he was a real person, in that we see Matt Murdock coming together.

JOHN: It didn’t get the push it could have gotten, but then it was still Frank, and Frank was big-time.

JOHN: I appreciate that. That’s a nice compliment. No, I didn’t get picked on like that. It wasn’t directly from experience. I got bullied by one guy, and got into a lot of fights with one guy. It wasn’t the way it was in Man Without Fear.

MM: What did you think of the books that were coming out during those days, all that stuff, their pre-Image work at Marvel?

JOHN: Oh, I was a fan of Jim Lee’s stuff big-time, but, as far as the other stuff that was coming out, there were books that were selling a million copies and 750,000 copies and that kind of thing, and we were hoping for the same kind of thing, and it didn’t work out quite that way. We sold very well, but not as well as it could have....

MM: There was a lot of flash in those days. It was more art-driven, and flash, with not as much emphasis on story.

JOHN: Oh, of course. That was the beginning of the Image phase of comics, sure.

MM: If felt like people were buying comics more for the foil on the cover than what was inside.

JOHN: That may have been true, but, remember, this is Frank Miller, too.

MM: I know, but back then people sometimes took even him for granted, because so much of that speculation thinking got in the way, y’know?

JOHN: Sure.

MM: One of the appeals of Daredevil is his complexity; he’s such a flawed character and he so often does the wrong thing.

JOHN: I suppose that’s true, but that’s true of all Marvel characters, that they’re flawed and imperfect characters that put on super-hero costumes.

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MM: There was never any concern over not having him in the costume, “We can’t get him in the costume soon enough,” or anything like that from the editors, from the higher-ups?

JOHN: No, it was different. There was something different. That’s the best thing about it. And, again, this was Frank. This was Frank Miller we’re dealing with. It wasn’t exactly a fly-by-night writer.

MM: Sure, but some editors might say, “Oh, if we could have Daredevil, we could sell this better if you had him in costume,” or that sort of thing.

JOHN: It didn’t happen that way.

Everybody was behind Frank’s stories.

MM: What type of material do you normally gravitate towards? When you read comics, do you gravitate towards this kind of super-heroic story?

JOHN: I gravitate to stories I’ve done, which is represented by Frank’s story that we did, and also the way Neil Gaiman did The Eternals. It’s the fantastic in the not-sofantastic world.

MM: Are there any projects that you regret turning down?

JOHN: I don’t regret them out of bad career choices. The only thing I rejected I regret was Secret Wars. But I was working on the X-Men, so I didn’t have a choice.

I have very few regrets, other than doing Star Brand and, maybe, [not] working with the Image guys, which ended up, over the long term, being a better idea to stay with Marvel. I could have made some short-term money there that would have been nice, and maybe it would have been a lot. Who knows? But, then again, it might not have worked out so well. But now I’ve been with Marvel all of these years, and I’m proud of it.

MM: When you were doing Punisher War Zone, in that book I noticed your drawing got a little cartoonier. Was there a reason you wanted to go that way?

JOHN: No, I don’t remember any conscious effort along those lines. No.

MM: What do you see when you look at that book? Do you see it being a lot looser, in terms of your art?

JOHN: Mmm, it was just a natural progression. Whatever happened, happened. I don’t think of it as cartoony, I don’t think of it as looser. I think working with Klaus may have made the difference.

MM: What did you do to get in the mood for that book? Did you watch a lot of action movies, like watch Scarface a hundred times?

JOHN: No, no. I didn’t do anything special to work on the Punisher, I just did what I thought it should be. No, I don’t remember doing anything different.

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Previous Page: Frank Castle nearly gets made in his effort to infiltrate the Carbone mob. Page 14 of Punisher War Zone #2. Inks by Klaus Janson.

Above: Punisher War Zone #3, page 19. Inks by Klaus Janson.

Next Two Pages: John experimented with his layouts quite a bit during his run, such as using two-page spreads as vertical panels. Punisher War Zone #4, pages 2 and 3.

Punisher, Shotgun ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Even with the choreography? Because there were a couple times in that book you experimented with doing these sideways splash pages over two pages.

JOHN: Right. Right.

MM: It seemed you were playing around with your layouts on that particular book.

JOHN: I may have tried some different stuff. I’m always looking to do something different.

But I don’t remember. That was, y’know, almost 20 years ago. I don’t remember it as anything other than what it was.

MM: What do you do to stay fresh? If you’ve been around this long, you’re obviously doing something that still appeals to different generations.

JOHN: First of all, you’ve got to do whatever is fashionable at the time. If there’s a certain content or style that makes fans happy, I try to at least give a little bit of that flavor, so if there’s an extra something desired by the fans, if there’s a certain look that’s desired by the fans, I don’t make great changes. What I try to do is just keep it relatively topical, make things look modern, keep up with styles, keep up with fashion, keep up with cars, do something a little bit different. That’s the main thing is to do something different. I make an effort to do something different every time, as opposed to doing the same old fight scenes and the same old talk scenes. And I don’t cheat on any backgrounds. So it’s just a concerted effort to keep up with the Joneses. There are a lot of great artists out there. Maybe I’ll sculpt a little bit more, maybe I’ll add a little bit more shading. If, in a couple of years, suddenly everything goes to film noir, maybe I’ll add more shadows. It really depends.

MM: Do you soak in the movies, too? When you were doing the Punisher, it felt to me like you were watching Schwarzenegger or Stallone movies, because it had that feel.

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MM: Do you watch the newer films and television? To see what people are into? When The Matrix came out, that made a visual impact on comics.

JOHN: Oh, yeah. Yeah. But The Matrix is all special effects.

You can’t convey special effects, per se, in a comic book.

You can try, but it’s still all about design and storytelling.

MM: You can get some of the staging sometimes. I remember when the movie came out, you’d see a little bit of it in various comics. Suddenly there were a lot more trench coats. [laughter] JOHN: Well, that’s different.

That’s just fashion. But storytelling and design is still the most important thing.

MM: Wasn’t it around the mid-’90s that DC was interested in you?

JOHN: DC has always shown some interest.

MM: Was there a time when you came close to going there?

JOHN: The concerted effort didn’t happen until into the early 2000s. Before that, it was always, “Hey, uh, maybe come work for us.” That was about it.

MM: Okay. I thought you came close in the mid-’90s, and there might have been a point where you thought about it more.

JOHN: No. They made comments, but never really followed through with it.

MM: So it wasn’t until recently that they finally gave you numbers?

JOHN: Everything I do starts from the experience of watching movies as a kid and learning about storytelling through my father.

JOHN: Yes. That’s correct. That’s correct.

MM: Are you keeping your door open?

55

JOHN: Never say never. I never say never.

Who knows? If I’m still a viable commodity in ten years, maybe they’ll want me more. Who knows?

Above: An impressive display of perspective from Spider-Man #70.

Next Page: The Ben Reilly—in his even more complicated costume— Spider-Man hangs out in a panel from Spider-Man #71.

Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: What do you think happened to Peter Parker in the ’90s, when you came back to illustrate him? I know you weren’t too thrilled about going back to SpiderMan, because you weren’t on the main Spidey title.

JOHN: Right, right.

a good story, I would have been all right, and if there’d been a struggle to find a good story, then I would have had my input. But, at the time, there wasn’t much I could do about it, because there were personality problems, like I’ve explained before.

MM: It seemed to that, for some reason, somebody felt you had to start all over again.

JOHN: Yeah, that’s true.

MM: What did you think was going on with the characters? He was in total disarray.

MM: I never understood that. It was like, “Why is he working on the second SpiderMan book?”

JOHN: I wasn’t paying enough attention to the stories, per se. I wasn’t thrilled with “The Clone Saga,” but, again, if I had gotten into

JOHN: Right. And, again, personality problems. And I didn’t necessarily want to quit the company, so I just put up with it.

56

MM: So you drew the Scarlet Spider and the mullet and all that went with it. [laughter]

MM: What did you really think drawing that costume?

JOHN: I wasn’t thrilled, because I wanted to work on the main books. But I’ve drawn funny-looking characters before, and I’ve drawn some bad ideas before, and that wasn’t the worst.

JOHN: Right.

MM: How did you feel about that stuff? Was it a case of, “What happened to my character?”

MM: Bringing Norman Osborn back, that wasn’t a little weird?

JOHN: I didn’t get upset about the character. I was upset at the editors up at Marvel, because the individual personalities clashed. And it was not anything to do with the company, per se, it was just a couple of people.

So, instead of letting them get the best of me, I did what I thought a professional should do, which is shut my mouth and do the work.

JOHN: Let me tell you something. This is like a soap opera. No, nothing ever surprises me.

Nothing’s weird.

When somebody comes back from the dead, it doesn’t shock me.

MM: What about the marriage of Mary Jane and Peter Parker. Did that ever bother you?

JOHN: The marriage bothered me, yes.

They shouldn’t have gotten married considering the timeline constraints, the chronology, that they were still relatively young kids. They should never have gotten married. But it is what it is, and it changes over time depending on the editorial staff and the editor-in-chief.

So I don’t think it’s a big problem that they got married. I don’t think it’s a big problem the way it was fixed recently. Things happen.

They have to try things, and try new things. Everything is an experiment, and you see how it works out.

MM: Did you feel the books were in disarray? Did you want to help fix it?

JOHN: I didn’t really have a strong impression of it until I got into working on it, and then I saw how it affected the whole stream of books. And then, as time went on, it was handled improperly. I don’t think the idea was the worst idea in the world, but it just got handled worse and worse as too many cooks got into it, which ruined the books. So I think it could have been handled better. I don’t think it was the end of the world. But it became the end of the world, because it just grew in this life amongst fans.

MM: But change for change’s sake, did you like how it happened in “One More Day”?

MM: You didn’t design the Scarlet Spider, did you?

JOHN: I thought it was handled well considering that it looked like everybody was painted into a corner. I think

JOHN: No, I did not design that.

57

Below: There just wasn’t room for two Spider-Men. Spider-Man #71, page 21. Inks by Al Williamson Right and Next Page: John’s pencils and Klaus Janson’s inks for page 4 of Spider-Man: The Lost Years #2.

Mary Jane, Peter Parker, SpiderMan ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

that it was a good solution. That’s what I think. But all you hear about is the reaction of fans. And the loudest reaction comes from the ones that don’t like it. But it’s selling well. It’s a concrete way of repairing it, if that was the case, or it was a great idea from the beginning, if it was a master plan.

MM: When you came back in the mid-’90s, all of a sudden you were doing a lot of work on Spider-Man. You did The Lost Years with Klaus, and then didn’t you do one with your father, too? You did a limited series, or some back-up stories?

JOHN: Yeah, yeah. What was that about?

They wanted to give me some Spider-Man stuff.

MM: Did you want to try other avenues prior to these Spidey projects?

JOHN: Well, I was close to quitting the company, because I had a run-in, and I explained that to you before. I had a bad experience with a bone-headed assistant editor. I’m sure something else would have worked out. But I was ready to go, yeah. I don’t think it was Spider-Man that stopped me, and I don’t think it would have made a difference on my leaving or not leaving if I hadn’t gotten on SpiderMan. I was just waiting to see what happened, and even after I got on SpiderMan, I might have left. It depended on who I had to deal with. And it just happened to work out.

MM: Okay. How did Thorion come about?

58

59

60

JOHN: That was just a one-shot deal that they came to me and said, “Would you like to try it?” “Yeah, sure, why not?”

MM: Was that tied in to you doing Thor, or was that—?

JOHN: No, no, no. I wasn’t planning on doing Thor at the time. When I did Thorion, it was because it was all based on Kirby’s characters, and I loved doing that. And then it just so happened that they liked the way I did it and said, “Would you like to try Thor?” “Sure.”

MM: I remember people saying, “He can draw Thor! We didn’t know.” [laughs] JOHN: Yes. MM: Thorion was digitally inked, too, right? You didn’t have an inker.

JOHN: Right. It was all done in pencil.

MM: Were you happy with the way it looked? That was one of the betterreceived Amalgam titles.

JOHN: Yeah, and I think it would have been done better had it been done now, because there is better printing and better separation and appearance.

MM: Yeah, because that was back in the Malibu days, when they were sending the colors [through the mail] and then sending them somewhere else so they could be separated.

JOHN: Correct.

MM: So Thor came out of Thorion. Was that a book that you were eager to do?

How did Brevoort pitch it to you?

JOHN: Yeah, it was a chance to work with Dan Jurgens and Tom Brevoort—those are the two important things. And then I knew Klaus was going to be on it. So just working with the team, that’s the biggest decision.

MM: What did you do to prepare yourself?

Did you start looking at the Kirby books?

JOHN: Yeah, that was it. I just got out a lot of Kirby reference.

MM: You went into that pure action mode.

Did you plot with Jurgens?

JOHN: No, I didn’t plot at all, but it wasn’t just pure action. I knew what he had in mind going in, and he told me what he liked, and what he didn’t like. Even though the stories were already pre-planned, we still had a nice discussion beforehand.

MM: Certainly you felt, because he was an illustrator, he kind of knew how to get the most out of you?

JOHN: Nah, it was kind of a combination, but it was mostly plot. Working with an artist who becomes a writer is good, 61

Previous Page: Unused penciled page from Thorion of the New Asgods #1.

Above: A nice vignette of the Thor cast. Page 16 of Thor #1. Inks by Klaus Janson.

Thor and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Thorion and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. and DC Comics.

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JOHN: Yeah, that was a lot of fun, because I was a big fan of Kirby’s Thor.

MM: I remember your comment about wanting to make him a god, not just a super-hero. because they know what they like, visually, and they always lend a hand as far as coming up with nice scenarios, and then they let you carry it where it should be.

MM: It felt like you never got tired of working on that book. Did you?

JOHN: No, not tired of it, but I think I had done enough when I stopped.

MM: But I thought you were just getting started. [laughs] JOHN: No, I was ready to try some other stuff. I got a chance to do other stuff, and I was ready to go.

MM: There’s a comment Jurgens made, where he said that you were born to draw Thor. [John laughs] It came easy to you, doing all that crackle and power?

JOHN: I liked the more godly aspect of it, yes.

MM: What was wrong with him before?

JOHN: Nothing was wrong, I just felt that he’s supposed to be a god, and let’s treat it more that way. I like Odin. I don’t like the Earth, per se, when it comes to Thor. I wanted to see a lot of stuff up in Asgard.

MM: It was all the things you couldn’t do with Spidey, right? You could do clouds and landscapes and all sorts of locations.

JOHN: Right.

MM: And you had never done anything like that before, had you?

JOHN: No, I guess not. I can’t think of anything else before that. No. 63

Previous Page: Action on an Asgardian scale.

The arc of Thor’s hammer and the radiating explosion focus your attention to the point of impact—the money shot of the page. The creature almost seems to be falling into the second panel, which naturally leads the eyes there and onto the rest of the story. Thor #12, page 27.

Inks by Klaus Janson.

Above: John’s pencils and Klaus’ inks for page 1 of Thor #18.

Thor and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: No, the TV show wasn’t mentioned. It was more or less just Bruce’s story, and the loner/wandering character was not a play off of the TV show. No, not at all.

MM: Did you embrace the quiet storytelling it had at the beginning?

JOHN: Sure. Sure.

MM: There was a lot of mystery to that title. We didn’t know if Banner was still the Hulk, or what was going on.

JOHN: Right, we were not sure. I enjoyed that aspect.

MM: How did your first creator-owned series, Gray Area, come about?

JOHN: It was my idea from the beginning, and I ran into Glen Brunswick, and Glen came up with a nice combination of the two of our ideas. He liked my idea, then he expanded on it, and it became what it is, so we’re co-creators. It would take several hours to explain where I got the idea from.

MM: Was the original intention to pitch this as a film, with the comic acting as part of the pitch?

JOHN: It was a creator-owned story. We still hope it becomes a film, and we’re still working on that. Yeah, I had higher hopes for that than the standard comic book.

MM: It came out after the boom period was over.

Above: A quiet moment from Incredible Hulk #27.

John has staggered the panels to help differentiate the switches in the phone conversation.

Next Page: Promo art for the creator-owned Gray Area series, though you may notice it was at one time called Gray Watch.

Bruce Banner, Hulk and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Gray Area ™ and ©2008 John Romita, Jr. and Glen Brunswick.

MM: So was it weird being out of the city? [laughter] JOHN: Yeah, so to speak.

MM: How did the whole Bruce Jones Hulk thing come about?

JOHN: Again, I guess they saw me doing the [Thor] stuff and the big, bulky, kick-ass huge characters, and they felt like the Hulk would be a great follow-up because they liked the way I handled Kirby’s characters.

MM: When you were doing Hulk, was it supposed to feel a little bit more like the TV show—more of a loner-on-the-run book?

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JOHN: No, it didn’t come out during a boom period, but it served its purpose. It wasn’t meant to make a lot of money as much as it was meant to get it out for the film’s sake.

MM: What made you think taking your property to Image was the right thing?

Why didn’t you just take it to Marvel?

JOHN: I did take it to Marvel. Marvel accepted it, but they didn’t have a creatorowned template available at that moment, so they gave me the opportunity to go to Image under the idea that it was only three issues. They gave me a waiver. “Go to Image, and when the creator-owned template is up and running, we’ll deal with that

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Below: John’s pencils for Gray Area #1, page 18.

Next Page: The variant cover to Gray Area #1, and the cover to Gray Area #2, both inked by Klaus Janson.

Gray Area ™ and ©2008 John Romita, Jr. and Glen Brunswick.

a couple years down the road.” So it was Marvel’s idea.

MM: Were these themes that always interested you? That sort of, Heaven and Hell and Limbo, that gray area, I guess?

JOHN: Yes. That’s correct.

MM: How did you meet Glen Brunswick?

JOHN: I just ran into him, believe it or not, at the opening of a movie. There was a party afterwards that I had gotten invited to, and Glen was there, and he said, “Hey, I know you. You work for Marvel Comics.

John Romita.” We just ran into each other at a party, that’s all.

MM: When you were thinking of the story, did you think that fans might not expect something like this from you? That this was coming out of left field somewhat?

JOHN: I didn’t think it was so much of a foreign idea that it wouldn’t be accepted.

I was curious as to what the reaction would be to a story that I had created, myself. I didn’t have any preconceived notions about it. I just was hoping that it wouldn’t fall upon deaf ears, and that someday somebody would turn it into a movie, and that’s still my ambition.

MM: In essence, it’s basically a love story, right?

JOHN: It’s got some religious overtones, it’s got some supernatural overtones, of course, and it’s got a lot of love story in it, yeah.

MM: Is the story over? Or is there still more to tell?

JOHN: There’s plenty more. We’re going to work on getting some of that out.

MM: Tom Brevoort seems to be one of your main editors at [Marvel]. Is there a reason why it’s usually him that you work with?

JOHN: I like working with him. He’s a good man and he’s a quality editor, and I’ve worked with him many times, and I’ll work with him again.

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MM: I wanted to ask you about the Planet Hollywood thing, when you were helping your niece. What gave you the idea of doing that sketch marathon?

JOHN: Yes. Not because I didn’t think they would show up during normal hours, I was worried about them showing up in the middle of the night. But, since we were in the middle of Manhattan in Times Square, there were people around us all the time.

JOHN: My wife came up with the idea. My wife, Kathy, decided that we had been doing conventions where I would sit down for eight and nine hours and raise money for charities. She thought that we could do it the same way, only expand it, to raise a large amount of money for our sick niece, and for the cancer fund. So it worked out. All my wife’s idea, and other than sitting for 51 hours and 26 minutes of drawing and sketching and signing, she did everything.

MM: This was obviously one of your biggest challenges.

JOHN: Yeah, that was one of my proudest moments is getting that done and raising the money for my niece, who is surviving very well, by the way.

MM: That’s good to hear. Now I want to ask you about your third run on Spider-Man. Why go back again? [laughter]

MM: You also had some support, right? I think Jim Lee and your dad showed up.

JOHN: Because I enjoyed it so much. Simply that.

MM: Was Straczynski one of the appeals?

JOHN: My father showed up, Jim Lee. A lot of artists donated money. Scott Hanna showed up. A lot of people helped out.

JOHN: Yeah, working with JMS was one thing, and they kind of asked me.

MM: Leading up to the event, were you ever worried, “Man, is anybody going to show up for this?”

MM: You also changed your way of drawing SpiderMan, too. You drew him a lot sleeker and he became 67

more spiderish, I think. You toned down the muscles and all that.

JOHN: Yep. I’m always trying to do something better, whether it’s lean him out, or improve—I’m flying by the seat of my pants. If I try to change myself a little bit and it works out, fine. If it doesn’t, I get filleted for it.

MM: Did you like the character-driven approach to the stories that he was doing, especially after your last encounter with Spidey?

cry, even somebody like Dr. Doom.

MM: I loved that issue, and I could see you put a lot of work into it, but I always felt that those guys didn’t need to be there.

JOHN: Well, that was not my idea to put them there. I think it was a great idea to have them there, and I wouldn’t change anything about that whole issue.

MM: I believe you’ve said that that book took you longer to draw than any other normal-sized comic you’ve ever drawn. I think it took you a month or more?

JOHN: Yep. Great stories.

MM: There were even stories that I don’t think Spider-Man showed up in. They were more like Parker stories.

JOHN: That’s true.

MM: What did you think of the addition of Ezekiel?

JOHN: Great idea. Great idea.

MM: You liked that there was a whole race of Spider-Man type people?

JOHN: Of course!

MM: I thought it was a little weird; that came out of left field. [laughs] JOHN: It’s a great idea. It’s a brilliant idea!

It’s probably one of the best ideas short of the creation of the character.

MM: Okay, the 9/11 issue. I was listening to a recent interview that Straczynski did, and he was saying that when he wrote the scene in which Dr. Doom cries, he didn’t specify to you who was crying or anything, that you added those tears. Is there a reason you wanted Dr. Doom to cry?

JOHN: That’s what he said, that I added the tears?

MM: I heard him say it in an interview, that you added the tears. He just said the direction was to make it somber or something.

JOHN: Yeah. That might be true, I added the tears because it wasn’t Dr. Doom, per se, that was crying; to me, it was the fact that that whole occurrence would make anybody 69

Previous Page: Smashing cover art for Amazing Spider-Man #429. John inked this one himself Next Page: Spider-Man about town, from Amazing Spider-Man #41.

Inks by Scott Hanna.

Absorbing Man, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Inked by his dad, John drew this piece for a 9/11 charity auction.

Next Page: John considers his run on Black Panther to be among the best work of his career, and you’ll find no argument here. Cover art to Black Panther #1.

Black Panther, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: It took me five or six weeks, that’s correct.

MM: It was because of all the reference and all the intensity and all the emotion that you probably had to put into it?

JOHN: San Diego.

MM: Did you feel kind of trapped seeing all that was going on in New York?

JOHN: Yeah.

JOHN: That’s correct.

MM: Did you talk with your father much while you were working on that book?

MM: When 9/11 happened, you were in, what, San Francisco or somewhere like that?

JOHN: I was speaking to my parents every day, five or six times a day.

MM: Did you have a lot of start-up time to draw the first issue of the Black Panther?

In the first issue there are some beautiful landscapes, with the trees and wildlife.

JOHN: What do you mean by “start-up time”? No, I just did it in the normal time.

MM: When you draw a first issue, you’re setting the tone for the series. Do you prepare yourself differently for it?

JOHN: No, I just reference as much as I reference any other issue, but that one took a lot longer, because I didn’t have that reference, per se.

MM: Artistically, when I saw it the first time, I was floored.

JOHN: That’s some of my favorite work.

MM: When Andy Kubert was doing Ka-Zar, I know he took six months to do the first issue. Because you’re trying to build the tone, trying to get certain things to work.

Whatever you do is going to be the lead for the next artist in that series.

JOHN: Right. No extra time leading up, just extra referencing. That’s about it.

MM: How did you even get the Black Panther book? Did you think of him as a second-tier character, or was it something that had some heat on it at that point at Marvel?

JOHN: I’d always loved the character, and then Reggie Hudlin approached me about doing the book.

MM: That was one of those stories where the characters get to breathe.

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JOHN: Right.

MM: And that you still had to draw a lot of action.

JOHN: Yup. That’s true.

MM: How do you feel about digital coloring?

JOHN: I think it can only get better. It’s great, and everything looks like it’s really high quality.

MM: Do you ever feel that color messes with your line art?

JOHN: I’m not going to comment on that, because that may or may not be true, but overall I think it’s a definite advantage.

MM: Okay. And Wolverine: Enemy of the State.

How did you become a part of that?

JOHN: Mark Millar. That was the big thing was working with him. I’m a big fan of his stuff.

MM: This is meant to be the ultimate Wolverine story, isn’t it?

JOHN: Yeah. I’d say it’s pretty close.

MM: Did that deliver for you what you wanted? Did it have the action feel that you wanted?

JOHN: I was very happy with the results, absolutely.

MM: And you try not to repeat yourself.

Are there certain things you do that you’re conscious of? Where you might go, “Let me try this differently?”

JOHN: Absolutely. The first thing on my mind is try not to do anything that’s similar to the last time I’ve done it, or somebody else.

MM: Were you the first choice for The Eternals?

JOHN: I don’t know if there was another choice for The Eternals, but as soon as they mentioned to me that Neil Gaiman had done something and they thought that I could do it—I don’t know if Neil had asked for me or not. I do not know that,

but I do know when they mentioned it to me, I jumped at the chance to work with Neil.

MM: If you’re doing the interiors for a book, why aren’t you doing the covers?

JOHN: That’s a great question. I don’t know.

MM: Your variant cover for the first issue of The Eternals was, to me, much better than the standard cover.

JOHN: It worked out well the way it was, so I have no complaints, but you’ll have to ask the editors on that one.

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Previous Page and Above: Two pages of John’s lush, cinematic pencils for Black Panther #1. The occasional wide establishing shots give a stronger sense of atmosphere to the story.

Black Panther ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: But that doesn’t bug you at all?

JOHN: Enh, it does, and it doesn’t. It’s not a big deal.

MM: Because you kind of want the reader to get what he’s getting inside, to get an idea. [laughs] JOHN: That’s all right. It really doesn’t bother me that much, and maybe covers are not my strong point in some people’s minds. Who knows?

MM: What’s the appeal for you of drawing these Kirby characters?

JOHN: They’re larger than life, and the history that they have.

MM: You didn’t really redesign them too much, right?

JOHN: Slightly. It was a tough balancing act to keep them similar to the way they were, but a little bit different. And now they’ve been redone again by the new artist.

MM: The more you draw these Kirby characters, do you get a better understanding of what his intentions and nuances were with the characters?

JOHN: Yes, absolutely. You can see where the influence came from, what was in his mind.

That’s correct.

MM: In terms of the inking for The Eternals, I think you had a lot of inkers on it, right?

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JOHN: I think Miki was supposed to ink the whole thing, but he had some trouble physically. He had some health problems, so he was helped out by a bunch of artists.

MM: Why did The Last Fantastic Four Story you did with Stan Lee take so long to get to print?

JOHN: Because of legal problems.

MM: Oh, with Stan?

JOHN: That’s correct.

MM: What did you think of that story?

JOHN: Yeah! I enjoyed it. I had fun doing it.

MM: How did you go about it? Did you talk to him at all?

JOHN: I never got a chance to communicate with him.

We just got a plot, which was sent to Tom Brevoort. Tom Brevoort updated it a little bit as far as Marvel Universe continuity, and that was it.

He gave it to me, I worked on it. He got it back to Stan, and he wrote it.

MM: So you never even heard if he liked it or not?

JOHN: I heard that he liked it, yeah.

MM: You work on so many things, do you have the time to absorb what you do?

JOHN: Yes, I do have time to absorb, but it’s before and after. [laughs] It’s just kind of a breakneck pace while I’m doing it.

MM: When the new book comes, do you usually check it out, or are you just keep working?

JOHN: I honestly haven’t read one of my

books in a long time. Once in a while, I’ll read them. I read The Eternals. I read the Hulk stuff. But I don’t read that much, because there’s not enough time. It was really tough doing The Eternals. It was a big project reading it, I mean, sitting down and reading the whole thing took forever.

The same thing with the Hulk. I’d read it in bits and pieces.

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Previous Page and Above: It’s claws versus sais as Wolverine and Elektra tangle in the pages (and covers) of Wolverine.

Elektra, Wolverine ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: With The Eternals, I’m imagining Neil wrote full scripts for those?

Above: How could you not say it... Hulk smash!

You can feel the rage emanating from John’s pencils. A two-page spread from World War Hulk #1. Inks by Klaus Janson.

Next Page: The Hulk nearly fills up the whole page in John’s pencils for the cover of World War Hulk #3.

Hulk and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: He wrote full scripts, but allowed me leverage to do whatever I wanted as long as it didn’t affect his story. We would discuss things in advance, and he allowed me a lot of leeway to do what I wanted.

MM: Just working with Neil, were you thinking of reinventing yourself again?

JOHN: No, I just tried to keep his nuances. What he wanted was what you read, and I just tried to keep to it. And he got what he wanted. He wanted a supernatural, cosmic race to be bound to Earth, and all that it entails. And it’s pretty much that, but he wrote it brilliantly.

MM: How was World War Hulk proposed to you?

JOHN: It was proposed to me as I finished The Eternals, “What do you want to do 76

next?” And I said, “I don’t know. You guys come up with some ideas.” And they said, “Well, listen, the Hulk is coming back to Earth, and he’s going to be really pissed off, and it would be gigantic.” It got me in, and that was it.

MM: This was the first time they threw you one of the big event series, finally.

JOHN: [laughs] Yeah, so to speak. Sure.

MM: When you were doing World War Hulk, you weren’t doing anything else were you?

JOHN: That was all I could handle doing that, because it was a huge job.

MM: What did you do for World War Hulk to prepare? Did you read all the stuff that happened before in “Planet Hulk”?

JOHN: No, they just sent me up a ton of reference, and I had my photos of Manhattan.

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Part 6:

Storytelling and the Creative Process

MM: What’s a typical working day for you? When do you start in the day?

MM: Which are the main ones? Andrew Loomis?

JOHN: Oh, yes, of course. Loomis and Bridgman’s anatomy, but they go way back to college. And then I have books on the illustrator, Gibson; Moebius; J.C. Leyendecker—those kinds of things.

JOHN: I start around nine or ten in the morning and work until eleven o’clock at night, so I put in ten, eleven, twelve hours a day each day, six days a week.

MM: What do you do to keep yourself focused?

Do you listen to music?

MM: When you start working, do you loosen up? Do you sketch?

JOHN: Talk radio. I’m a political junkie. And I listen to a lot of music on weekends, and comedies, actually, British comedies.

JOHN: I work out. I exercise every day.

MM: Do you have any security blankets that you keep around? Are there things you like having by you as you work?

JOHN: Oh, drawingwise. Nope, I go right to what I was doing.

MM: But, drawing-wise, do you—

MM: And you can always remember where you were? Don’t you usually try to finish what you’ve got before you?

JOHN: The rest of my family over the place.

JOHN: No, not necessarily. I can pick up right where I left off.

MM: Is there anything else, like toys?

JOHN: No, not really toys, but there’s a lot of comedy to be gotten to, and what I mean is, I listen to comedy on satellite radio, I listen to comedy on cable, reruns of British comedies.

Those are my toys, basically—a lot of comedies.

MM: What kind of pencil do you use? Do you use a mechanical pencil?

JOHN: I use a mechanical 2H lead to layout, and then I use a mechanical HB lead to tighten up.

MM: And I’m guessing you like a certain kind of paper, too, right? Nothing too glossy?

MM: Do you have any favorite art books that you keep nearby?

JOHN: That’s correct. I don’t like it too glossy, so the paper I use is this 2-ply Bristol board paper.

JOHN: Yeah, I keep a lot of anatomy books—illustrative anatomy, and not a lot of photographic anatomy.

And books of some of my favorite illustrators, and things of that nature, but it would take forever for me to list all the guys that I have.

MM: Do you pencil differently depending who the inker is? Do you think differently if you know who’s going to ink it beforehand?

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JOHN: Only if it’s somebody I haven’t worked with, but since I’ve worked in the past with everybody that I’m working with now, it’s not necessary to be careful in any particular spot.

MM: You haven’t worked with Tom Palmer a lot, from what I can remember.

JOHN: Yeah, about ten years ago, but intermittently he had done some covers, and then he would help on The Eternals series, so he’s worked on my stuff quite a bit.

MM: Okay. So you don’t like it completely silent when you work?

JOHN: No, I don’t like it quiet. I don’t like to hear my heartbeat.

MM: Do you get distracted a lot during the day, with your wife and son?

JOHN: Yes, there are always distractions, but I manage to overcome them.

MM: Do you ever ask how your books are doing when talking to your editors?

JOHN: Worry about them? Yes, I always worry, because if my stuff doesn’t sell, then I won’t be given the amount of work that I’m used to, and of course there’s always a concern with sales.

MM: But you don’t go online looking for the top 200 books, do you?

JOHN: No, the only thing I look at occasionally are a couple of message boards that I get links to from people who I’ve told to send them to me.

MM: Who’s sending you these links?

Why do you want to know? You know these people online are often hiding behind fake names and false identities, and I don’t know if I would consider a message board proper criticism. To me, it’s not.

JOHN: No. As a matter of fact, half of the people who say the nasty things are doing it just to be nasty. I actually read the criticisms, because no matter how silly or foolish some of them can be... some of them have merit, but the silly ones I read, it actually keeps me on my toes.

MM: How have fans changed, in your view, from the day you started until now?

Is it different interacting with fans?

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Previous Page and Above: John’s penciland-marker rough along with his finished pencils for the cover of SpiderMan: The Lost Years #3.

Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: A clash of titans.

John’s pencils and Klaus Janson’s inks for World War Hulk #1.

Next Page: Who could possibly think John was “phoning it in” on World War Hulk with pencils like this?

Black Bolt, Dr. Strange, Hulk, Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: Interacting, personally, at conventions hasn’t changed. The people are just as wonderful as they were before. The difference is the Internet and the anonymity and the ability to be nasty and overtly critical. Being critical is not bad, but I mean really nasty, and foul, and obnoxious.

Those people seem to thrive on being able to say whatever they want anonymously.

But the people at conventions are fantastic.

They’re still just as wonderful. They’re probably all related to the wonderful people I met the first time I ever went.

MM: I was reading some of the comments when you were on that World War Hulk thread. Some of the fans don’t even know

what they’re talking about. They think that you’re pretty much phoning it in or something.

JOHN: Right, yeah.

MM: But they’re just trying to be jerks.

JOHN: You can’t say that, because people are free to voice their opinions. Why I continue to read those criticisms, no matter how ridiculous they are, is it keeps me on my toes. It really does. Because, no matter how you try, you still remember that there are a lot of people that don’t like your stuff very much. But what are you going to do? Instead of ignoring the fact that there are a lot of people that don’t like it, I pay attention to the fact that there are people who don’t like it, and try to get better. I always get it, and I always will.

MM: But they might not even be buying the book, that’s what might be the worst thing. They just flipped through it in the store and they’re going to criticize it?

JOHN: Yeah. There are a couple of people that are especially nasty, and I try to play with them, but they don’t want to even joke around. They just want to hate.

MM: They don’t have a sense of humor.

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Above: John’s pencils and Klaus Janson’s inks for page 21 of The Punisher/Batman #2.

Next Page: Spider-Man takes on a Sentinel, while Peter Parker looks on.

Here John lets the fight scene really dominate the page in order to help establish the size of the Sentinel. Pencils for page 6 of Spider-Man #72.

Punisher, Sentinels, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

JOHN: There are some people that don’t like the stuff, and then, if I approach them in a joking manner, they say, “Okay, all right, it’s not that I hate you, it’s just that I don’t prefer your style.” That’s fine. But the people that say nasty things, I mess with them, and I even insult them in such a way that they don’t know they’re being insulted.

But that’s just my way of flushing out the boneheads. And there are a few of them.

However, the majority, and I would say 90% of the people who make comments about my work, good or bad, are legitimate.

MM: If a writer says to you that he wants you for a particular book, do you ask to see an outline or something?

JOHN: Yeah. As a matter of fact, I’m doing that now, but that’s only because the editor couldn’t describe in detail what the idea was. No, if I speak to a writer, the writer can usually give me a succinct idea.

I don’t ask for an outline, per se, unless it’s a vague idea to begin with. Then they 82

have to come up with something more. But the writers generally know exactly what they want when they want it.

MM: You usually don’t mind talking to the writer?

JOHN: Not at all.

MM: You’ve never shared a studio space with anyone, have you?

JOHN: Nope.

MM: You never thought about being in that type of environment—collaborating with someone, watching someone else work, seeing their approach?

JOHN: No, I don’t think I could do that.

It would be too much of a distraction having somebody in the office with me. I’m set in my ways.

MM: Who do you talk shop with, though, to know what’s going on in comics?

JOHN: I talk shop with my father.

JOHN: No, I go directly to the page. But I do layouts on the board and then finish it; I don’t really do thumbnails, per se, anymore. I just write notes.

MM: Just him?

JOHN: Yeah. And Klaus Janson, who’s a great friend and I’ve known him forever, because I work with him so often; I discuss things with him when we talk.

Sometimes Tom Palmer, since I’m working with him now. Sometimes the writers.

It’s more professional talk instead of artistic. With Klaus, it might be artistic.

We’ll sometimes commiserate about certain difficulties in a script. But it’s not really as much as I do with my father. My father, of course, knows everything I go through, and has been there twice over, himself.

MM: When you did the Wolverine run, you did some marker sketches.

JOHN: Yeah. Those were cover sketches.

MM: When your dad was at Marvel, he was one of those guys that had a certain view of how Spider-Man should look. Even with somebody else penciling or inking it, because he was the art director, if he didn’t get the look he wanted from someone else, he’d make it look the way he wanted it to.

JOHN: Right.

MM: Did you ever get that sort of inclination sometimes? Like, thinking of inking the main figure just to make sure they got it right?

JOHN: No, nope. I can’t account for what happens after it’s inked. But I’ve work with such great inkers, I don’t really concern myself with it.

MM: Do you think he was a little possessive?

JOHN: He’s a perfectionist.

He is.

MM: In terms of storytelling, do you do thumbnails sometimes?

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84

MM: But you don’t do that for interior work?

JOHN: I do the sketches in pencil on the board.

MM: How do you break down a page? Do you work sequentially, or you just get the most exciting part first?

JOHN: It would take a really long time to explain how I tell a story, but I write notes. I note out the whole plot, first. I write it all out in note, and each note is an indication of what I want in each panel, and that’s pretty much it.

It’s my own formula.

MM: Do you feel like the way the Marvel method works that you’re doing a lot more work sometimes, that you have to figure out half of the story?

JOHN: No. In fact, when I first started working with scripts again, it was a little bit uncomfortable, but it didn’t last long. After one issue, I had my own system down.

MM: When somebody asks you to sign something, is there anything that makes you cringe?

JOHN: I cringe at the stuff I did my first couple of years, yeah.

MM: Do you have a different approach to a cover than doing pages?

JOHN: Approach... no, not really.

MM: Do you draw multiple versions of a cover?

JOHN: No, I send in two or three sketches before I finish it.

MM: Okay. It doesn’t bug you that they don’t trust you to hand in one image and that’s it?

JOHN: No, I don’t have that kind of ego.

MM: You don’t do a lot of sketching on your own, do you? You don’t use a lapboard?

JOHN: No, I have a directing table.

MM: You don’t ever watch television or something and just pick up a lapboard to draw?

JOHN: What do you mean?

MM: Art Adams has a lapboard, so he can move around the house, and he’ll draw while watching television or talking to people, stuff like that.

85

Previous Page and Above: John’s actionpacked pencils to Wolverine #20, pages 9 and 10. The heavy rain adds mood and drama to the scene.

Wolverine ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Thor gets the last laugh in these pencils for Thor #5.

Next Page: Let the gallery begin! Iron Man with a bit of extra protection from World War Hulk #1.

Iron Man, Thor ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: No, I need a little bit more concentration than that. I’ll have the radio on, and maybe the television on in the room, but nothing I sit and watch, no. But mostly the radio and talk radio.

MM: Are there times where, you might go, “Man, I’ve got to move?”

JOHN: I get up for various reasons during the day, for lunch and phone calls, so I’m not nailed to the board for twelve straight hours.

MM: Who are your five most influential artists? Who are the five guys that inspired you the most?

JOHN: My father, number one. Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Joe Kubert... J.C. Leyendecker.

MM: What do you get from Kirby?

JOHN: Jack Kirby because of his dynamic style, and the power, and his intricate detail of machinery and sciencefiction fantasy-esque machinery, and outerworldly stuff.

MM: How do you feel the industry has changed over the years? Is it better now than ever?

JOHN: I think it is. There’s an improvement in quality. Even if the sales aren’t what they used to be, I think the quality is high.

Higher, I should say, than it used to be.

MM: How are the editors now to work with?

JOHN: Well, I’ve always gotten along with editors. I don’t know all the editors, but the guys I work with are great professionals.

Steve Wacker and John Barber, Nick Lowe and everybody I’ve worked with has been outstanding. Nate Cosby, Mark Paniccia—just the nicest people in the world, and excellent at what they do.

MM: As an artist, what do you want people to get out of your work? What do you hope they get when they see your stuff?

JOHN: I hope that they enjoy the story, first and foremost, and then the artwork is just part of it.

MM: My last question. How have you managed not to go insane working in comics for 30 years?

JOHN: Because I enjoy it. I always have.

86

John Romita, Jr.

Iron Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Art Gallery 87

88

Wolverine, X-Men ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

89

Daredevil, Dr. Doom, Ultron ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Punisher ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

el Characters, d ©2008 Marv

Punisher ™ an

Inc.

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92

Jigsaw, Punisher ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman, Joker ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

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Joker ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

94

Punisher ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Joker ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

95

Punisher ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

96

Peter Parker, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

97

Peter Parker, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Peter Parker, Sentinels, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

100

Avengers, Thor ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

101

Thor ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Lady Sif, Mangog, Thor ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Thor ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

105

Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

106

Gray Area ™ and ©2008 John Romita, Jr. and Glen Brunswick.

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Gray Area ™ and ©2008 John Romita, Jr. and Glen Brunswick.

John and ©2008 Gray Area ™

swick.

d Glen Brun

Romita, Jr. an

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109

Gray Area ™ and ©2008 John Romita, Jr. and Glen Brunswick.

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Elektra, Wolverine ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Daredevil, Elektra, Wolverine ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

111

Black Panther

112

™ and ©2008

Marvel Charac

ters, Inc.

113

Black Panther ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

114

Black Panther ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Hulk ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

116

117

Avengers, Hulk, Spider-Man, The Warbound ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

118

Hulk, Sentry ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Hulk, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

119

Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

120

Green Goblin, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Captain America ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

122

Thor ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

124

Dark Tower, Gunslinger ™ and ©2008 Stephen King.

125

Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Hellboy ™ and ©2008 Mike Mignola.

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!

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COMICS MAGAZINES FROM TWOMORROWS ™

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

No. 3, Fall 2013

01

1

BACK ISSUE

ALTER EGO

82658 97073

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR

DRAW!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

BACK ISSUE celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through a variety of recurring (and rotating) departments, including Pro2Pro interviews (between two top creators), “Greatest Stories Never Told”, retrospective articles, and more.

Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

ALTER EGO, the greatest ‘zine of the ‘60s, is all-new, focusing on Golden and Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews and unseen art. Each issue includes an FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) section, Mr. Monster & more.

Edited by ROY THOMAS.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the new voice of the comics medium, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics, focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. Edited by JON B. COOKE.

DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on cartooning and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews and stepby-step demonstrations from top comics professionals. Most issues contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; Mature Readers Only. Edited by MIKE MANLEY.

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now full-color, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art even more dynamically. Edited by JOHN MORROW.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazines) $8.95 (Digital Editions) $3.95

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JOHN ROMITA, JR. Over the past thirty years, no other artist has had a more profound impact on the entire Marvel Comics franchise than John Romita, Jr. From teenage prodigy to full blown superstar illustrator, his impeccable storytelling and hardcore professionalism have made him a fan favorite. His gritty visuals and powerful tenacity for illustrating action have graced the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, Uncanny X-Men, Daredevil, and most of the company’s other top-tier books over the course of his career. Like his father before him, nothing can stop this Modern Master from striving for the artistic perfection that makes the name Romita one of true royalty in the comics industry.

MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

ISBN-13: 978-1-893905-95-5 ISBN-10: 1-893905-95-0

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Characters TM & ©2008 their respective owners