Mark Evanier’s August 6, 2020 conversation with Steve Sherman

we went there, and it was just amazing. [Mark laughs] I liken it to— not having been in a fraternity, this was our fraternity, because I still know most of these people fifty years later. We had a blast. We really did. When you think about it, how much fun we had—I mean, we made movies, we had the Evening of Imagination before there were comic-cons. We insulted each other. We made fun of each other. [both laugh] And, of course, we read comics. I even remember the first time Sergio Aragonés showed up. He showed up at the Palms Recreation Center, and we were like, “Wow! Sergio Aragonés! What a great guy!” MARK: How many people do you remember were in that club meeting that day? STEVE: Maybe twenty, I would think? MARK: I thought it was more like forty. STEVE: Maybe forty. It’s hard to remember. MARK: Sergio remembers it being, like, five or six people, which I’m telling him, “No, it wasn’t.” We had a decent turnout for him that day. He was our first, and I think only, real guest speaker. STEVE: I think so. But there were five people crowded around him, so that’s probably what he remembers. MARK: Let me clarify here for people what Steve was probably talking about. Gary Owens, the great disc jockey, personality, did a show on Channel 13, KCOP local here, about comic book collecting. It was a special they did one evening, and it was a local station, but it somehow made us feel empowered because it was talking about our hobby, and it wasn’t one of those, “Hey, look how much these old comics are worth” shows, and there was a minimum of “pow/bam/zap” or whatever. People are still looking for a copy of that—it’s a lost special. Gary [right] spent years calling KCOP saying, “Search the warehouse. You must have a copy of that someplace. It seems to be lost.” STEVE: Warehouse? I don’t think KCOP had a warehouse! [laughs] MARK: I think KCOP was a warehouse, or is one now. So, Steve and his brother Gary showed up at the meeting, and we met every Saturday in the afternoon and we played games. We used to play a version of Jeopardy that I designed which was like Jeopardy with comic book characters and comic book subjects. You know, it was like, “I’ll take Jack Kirby Inkers for twenty.” Things like that. STEVE: SMASH. MARK: We also called the group SMASH, which stood for Society for Magazine Appreciators of Super Heroes, and I think I may have come up with that— STEVE: Probably. MARK: —in my stupider moments. The club was a lot of fun for a couple of years there. And there were no comic-cons. There were very few comic-cons anywhere then, but none in California. This is pre-San Diego Con. STEVE: No. I think the only one was the science-fiction con in Santa

Monica, which was the first one I went to.

MARK: That was the Westercon. The Westercon was at the

Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica in 1969, and that’s where some of our members of the club met Jack Kirby, who had come down. Jack and Roz had just moved to southern California.

They were living in Irvine at the time in a home, which was their temporary lodging until they could find a house to buy.

Jack wanted to meet the local comic fans, and this was the closest he could come to a convention. And he and Roz showed up there, paid admission, walked in, and some of our officers who were at the club—I think Rob Solomon and Mike Rotblatt and

Bruce Schweiger and such—met him there and said, “Oh, Mr.

Kirby! Would you come speak at one of our club meetings?”

And he said, “Sure.” He never did, but he said, “Sure. Why don’t you guys come down to our house in Irvine one of these days?” That’s how I wound up going down to see Jack Kirby. I

[left] A sketch Jack did for Gary Owens. Non-locals probably know Gary best as the announcer with his hand over his ear on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. [above] The ad that ran in TV Guide for Gary’s TV special on comics, courtesy of Mark Evanier. Sadly, no video copy of the show has yet been found.

for the Phil Seuling convention, and we were supposed to go have a meeting with Stan Lee, but he had to postpone it, so we’re just kind of wandering around New York.” And he said to us, “Are you going to visit the MAD offices, the MAD magazine offices?” We said, “Gee, we hadn’t thought about that. Where are they?” And he said, “Right here!” [both laugh] He was standing in front of them. So, he took us in and gave us a tour, and on the way in, we passed this little sad-faced man who was leaving with an art portfolio, and I went, “That’s Wally Wood! What’s he doing here?” And Sergio took us in and we met Al Feldstein and Jerry DeFuccio, and Nick Meglin, and Bill Gaines, Leonard Brenner, and John Putnam, and Angelo Torres was there. And we got this grand tour of MAD magazine we hadn’t counted on. STEVE: Yeah! It was mind-blowing. MARK: And at 3:00 o’clock, we went over and met Stan. STEVE: Yeah. That was something. MARK: What do you remember from the meeting with Stan? STEVE: I just remember it was a very, very small office. I was surprised. Marvelmania had bigger offices than Marvel had. It was just like the front room had the tables and I think Johnny Romita was there, and Marie Severin was there, and maybe one other guy was there. MARK: Herb Trimpe. STEVE: Yeah, and Herb Trimpe. MARK: And Tony Mortellaro were there, and a guy named Allyn Brodsky was working there as an editorial assistant. In the back was John Verpoorten and Roy Thomas, and Stan’s secretary, whose name escapes me at the moment, and they

took us in to meet Stan. Do you remember the first thing he said to us? STEVE: No, no. MARK: He said to us, “I’ve been so busy these days I haven’t had a chance to look at the comics lately. If you ask me what’s going on in Iron Man this month, I couldn’t tell you.” We understood that meant, “Don’t ask me about anything ‘comics’.” STEVE: “Don’t ask me about comics,” yeah. “Don’t ask me comic book stuff.” And then we told him about Marvelmania and all that, and he was like, “Hmm.” Very concerned. He said, “Well, I’ll look into it.” Because we said, “This guy’s going to give you a bad name if you keep going with him.” And he was like, you know—he was very personable. He was wonderful. He was Stan Lee. I mean, what more could you ask for? MARK: Very charming. STEVE: Very charming, and he was great to us, and he said, “Give

[previous page] The Marvelmania Magazine #1 announcement of Kirby leaving Marvel Comics.

[above] Stan Lee’s response to Steve’s letter, detailing how the Marvelmania debacle played out.

[left] An early 1970s Kirby sketch.

[right] A photo Steve took inside the Marvel Comics offices on his 1970 trip there with Mark Evanier.

[below] A 1965 Steve Ditko sketch that ran in the Comic Reader #42.

[right] Jack Kirby in 1971. Photo by Vince Davis.

[bottom] A view of the dealer’s room at the Statler Hilton hotel during those early 1970s Seuling Cons. my regards to Jack when you see him.” And we said thank you and we left. The only other place I remember is we went to Warren. We went to the Warren offices, and looked around for a while. [MARK EVANIER INTERJECTION: I didn’t correct Steve during this interview but I never went to the Warren offices. Mike Royer had arrived in New York and moved into the hotel room with us. Steve and Mike went to the Warren offices the afternoon I took a train to Hartford to visit my grandparents.] MARK: We spent a day with Steve Ditko. STEVE: We did. That was wild, because he was sooo nice, so ordinary, and so open. And we were going like, “I thought he was supposed to be this recluse,” but, no, he was just really, he was a sweet man, and you just go like—well, there you go. You can’t always believe what you hear. My God, that convention was the biggest one I had ever seen. You looked out, there was a balcony, and you looked out on the main floor, and it was miles, just like comic books and original art. I had never seen so much original art in my life. Just stacks of it, and it was just like, where did this come from? Because all I had ever read in the fanzines and stuff was, “Oh, it’s all been destroyed. There’s no more original art anywhere.” You know, “They burned it.” And here there was all this original art. It was very expensive, ten dollars a page. [laughs] MARK: Yeah. Somebody brought in every page of Tower original art, every single page that was in the THUNDER Agents comics, and they put it on the table, ten bucks apiece. It looked like a White Sale at Macy’s. [Steve laughs] Everyone was looking through it, “Where’s the Wood? Where’s the Wood? Where’s the Gil Kane?” Were you with me? I was in the elevator at one point, and there was a slightly older gentleman, an adult, and he was taking a couple of fans up to his room to show them artwork. And I somehow got in the conversation, and he said, “Hey, do you want to see my artwork?” And I didn’t know who he was. He didn’t have a badge on. So I said, “Sure.” I figured out maybe if I saw his artwork, I’d know who he was. And he takes us into this hotel room, and he takes out his portfolio, starts pulling out Frank Frazetta pages. [Steve laughs] And I go, “Oh! Mr. Frazetta!” This is Frank Frazetta. It was a very strange couple of days. I met my friends Marty Pasko and Alan Brennert there for the first time. I met Gary Groth there. I met Tony Isabella in person. We had been corresponding. He has been my friend for a long time. I met him there that day. It was amazing. I met, like, everybody whose comic books I ever read in my life right there. STEVE: And we flew on a 747, which you can’t do anymore. MARK: But, remember, we flew on the second 747 of the day. The first one left without us. Let’s see if you remember this, Steve.

house to remind me of Jack: Artwork by Jack, and pictures of Jack, and things like that. And when I look at them, I remember the guys at DC, the guys in the merchandising division saying, “No one will ever merchandise these characters.” The guys there who said, “Why would anybody do merchandise of Mister Miracle? We’ve got Batman!” Now there’s a Mister Miracle doll, and these characters are getting on TV—and the early issues of New Gods have now been reprinted, what, like nine times? STEVE: Oh, yeah. MARK: In hardcovers. STEVE: Those fat hardcovers. MARK: Exactly the way Jack wanted them to be someday. Deluxe printing, good paper, good coloring—well, better coloring. And he said that they would do that. He said, “Someday these comics will be in hardcover,” and nobody believed him. They considered those failed books. Now they wish they had a hundred issues of New Gods to reprint, because it sells every time they reprint it. And I look at that stuff and it reminds me how right Jack was so many times. STEVE: Yeah. I mean, how could you fault the guy? He’d been at it his whole life. He knew exactly. He’d been a publisher. He knew what sold. He knew what the audience would read. He had an innate sense of what to do. These guys kind of second-guessed him all the time. I used to think, “Yeah, maybe if he had done something else besides New Gods or Forever People, maybe that would have—”. But then you go, “—but they’re still printing it! They’re making a movie out of it!” So, he was right all along, you know? What are you going to do? MARK: And a lot of the books that they told him then, that they thought were great to emulate, nobody cares about today.

Let me see if I can finish our list, here. We’ve got a few more. “Did either of you have concerns about the Fourth World being too complex for fans to follow, or did you encourage Jack to stretch its scope even further?” STEVE: Nah. We never gave him any advice on that, that I recall. MARK: I think a couple times we told him to slow down, he was putting in new characters too fast, but he said, “Carmine wants this in.” STEVE: Yeah. Because he was putting stuff in there hoping they would branch out into other books, you know? He was ready to take any of those characters and put them in their own book. MARK: And he was also concerned that he had told Stan some of the ideas, and he was afraid if he didn’t do them, get them in print first, Stan might remember some of them and do some of those ideas. STEVE: Sure. I mean, look at Thanos. That’s Darkseid, and they beat him to the movies with that one. He was right. People didn’t believe him. “You know they’ll steal.” “No, they won’t, Jack. They won’t steal.” “Oh, yes, they will. Oh, yes, they will.” MARK: Remember one of the first things he told us about was that idea of doing a book of Dracula, a black-and-white magazine, or a color magazine—he wanted it to be in color, a magazine, not a comic book—of Dracula in different time periods. And he wasn’t sure if he had told that idea to Stan or not. So, he was pushing Carmine to put that book out before Marvel did. And [Marvel] came up with the Dracula book before he did. And there were a couple of things like that. STEVE: Well, he was always trying to push the medium. He wanted to make it more than a trifle. Bubblegum was a penny, a candy bar is a nickel, a comic’s a dime. But he wanted to go beyond that. I mean, he really wanted to go back to large-sized comics, 64 pages, a magazine in full color, and they wouldn’t listen to him. They just wouldn’t listen to him. MARK: He kept looking at National Lampoon and saying, “That’s what comics should look like.” STEVE: Right, right. But DC, they just weren’t in that business. They were in the Superman/Batman business, and they weren’t going to vary at all. They weren’t going to go off. MARK: Okay, here’s the last question that John sent me. We’ve got more questions to talk about after that. “What was the most frustrating part of working with Jack? Likewise, what was the most rewarding part?” You go first. STEVE: The rewarding part was being around him, and talking with him, and listening to him, and exchanging ideas and listening to his ideas. The most frustrating part was seeing how frustrated he was with the people that he dealt with. That hurt. You felt you had to protect him. And, not that he needed it, but you just felt that he was such a great guy, that they were treating him like this, you’d go, like, “How can you treat Jack Kirby like this? This is Jack Kirby, okay? He created the Marvel Universe. Leave him alone! Just let him do what he does.” But they wouldn’t. And it was very frustrating to see that, that any time he did something, they’d either change it or wreck it. I know when In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World came out, he was just crushed. He was just like, “Oh, man! Look at this! They printed it on toilet paper!” [laughs] You were just like, “Aw,

Jack.” You know? And what’s so funny is that they canceled them, and then a couple months later, The Godfather and The Exorcist come out—maybe a year later. But he was on the right track—they would have had something. But, you know, their brains weren’t geared for that. They were not great businessmen up there at DC, I’d have to say. I mean, they were lucky they had Superman and Batman. That kept them afloat. Because anything else, they would have just, boop! [mimes something going down the tubes] MARK: Well, you kind of stole my answer to both questions. That’s actually what I was going to say. Yeah, it was frustrating seeing him be frustrated. Do you remember the day he told us that New Gods and Forever People were being “suspended?” STEVE: Yeah. He was really hurt. MARK: I’ve never felt so sorry for a man in my life. He was so—he was gray. He had actually turned, like, he was pale. STEVE: Yeah. He was so crushed—which was unusual, because Jack usually, he didn’t get crushed like that over comics, over the magazines, because he knew the score. He knew, you know, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But these were really special to him. He was really trying to upgrade the comics. And if you read those today, you can see that he did. I mean, the stories, they’re so rich— the characters and the writing—that you read them today and they still hold up. What more can you say? Fifty years later, they still hold up. That’s what makes them great, really. MARK: I remember, after Jack died, talking to Roz; she remembered that day so vividly, because that was the day their lives changed. He really took it hard, because he had all these wonderful plans, and he realized that he could not do any of them at DC. STEVE: No, no. MARK: And then there was that time—maybe I’m going to jog your memory about this. There was a big distributors convention at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset. Carmine was going to come out for it, and he wanted to take Jack as his date, because he had tickets for two there. Carmine could not get out of New York for some reason. I think there was a weather problem, actually. So he told Jack, “You go. Take Roz. The tickets are under my name.” Roz had come down with a bad cold, so she couldn’t go. So you and I drove out to Thousand Oaks. We picked Jack up. He was wearing a beautiful suit. He was dressed perfectly. And we drove him, you were driving, to the Beverly Hills Hotel. We dropped him off. We went over to my place and played cards and ate pizza until he called and said, “I’m ready to go home, guys.” And we went over, picked him up, and took him home. Now, on the way there he was like this. It was all, “I’m going to tell those guys how to do comics. I’m going to tell them what they should be doing. I’m going to tell them that, I’m going to tell them this.” On the way back, it was like, “Nobody there cares about the comics. Nobody has any interest in—they didn’t know what was published, they didn’t know who I was. I told them I worked for Marvel, they went, ‘Marvel. We’ve heard

Steve jotted these notes before discussing the idea of King Kobra with Jack. More details and Steve’s full script were revealed in TJKC #22. [next page] An example of the major art changes DC instituted for Kobra #1—and all done by Pablo Marcos, whose style was a pretty jarring departure from Jack’s.

[these pages] From the first actual San Diego Comic-Con in 1970, here’s photos by Roger Freedman of Jack’s “chalk talk” that Mark and Steve describe here. As you can see from the finished art on the previous page, drawing in front of an audience never produced Jack’s finest work—compare it to the illo on page 1 of this issue.

convention is going to take over San Diego. It’ll be our town, and it’ll be where Hollywood comes every year to sell the movies they made last year and to find out what they’re going to make next year.” You were present when he said that, right? STEVE: Oh, yeah! He said it more than once, too. MARK: People doubt me on that. No, he actually said it, and he was right. We went to the first San Diego con together. Let’s go back to that for a minute. Because we were there the day Shel Dorf brought 111 people to Jack’s studio and imposed on their hospitality quite a bit that day. But Jack was sitting there telling these guys to do the convention, to make it about more than just comics, because to Jack comics were about more than just comics. Remember how he used to talk about how comics could be comics in movies, and comics in TV, and comics even in dance. There could be freeform dance which takes the energy of comic books and puts it on the stage. And then we drove down on the Saturday of the first San Diego con in 1970. You picked me up at my house. I remember I was so ready to get out of the house, I didn’t notice my father’s car was missing from the driveway because it had been stolen overnight. [Steve laughs] When I came back, there were police there.

But it was you, Gary, Bruce Simon, and me. And we drove down to San Diego very early. We got there about 10:00 AM at the US Grant [hotel], and we spent the day at the convention. And there were, like, 300 people there, and we thought that was… STEVE: Amazing. MARK: …huge! And we spent a lot of the time there with Mark Hanerfeld, who was there. Hanerfeld was like the official DC representative, only he wasn’t. STEVE: No. But he was. MARK: He was just in town. DC hadn’t sent anybody out, but Hanerfeld had come down, and he announced that he was the DC representative, so suddenly he was doing a DC panel previewing what DC was having coming out. Mark’s the guy who went back to New York afterwards and told everybody, “You’ve got to come to this convention in San Diego next year.” He’s the one who started the trend of people coming out. And Mary Skrenes was there that day. STEVE: I remember Mary. Yeah. MARK: And Shel was coming up to us every twenty minutes saying, “Have you heard from Jack and Roz? Have you heard from Jack and Roz? They’re not here yet.” And there were no cell phones in those days, so it was like, how can we hear from them? Who would they call? [laughter] STEVE: “We don’t have a cell phone! It’s not invented yet!” [laughs] MARK: They don’t have a cell phone. Who would they call? And finally, Jack, I think, was supposed to speak at 2:00, and he arrived in plenty of time. It wasn’t even a hall. It was like the foyer, they’d set up a few chairs. Most people were going to sit on the floor, and on a landing they had a drawing pad for Jack. He was going to give a talk there in the hallway, basically. And Jack came up to me just before it was going to start, and he said, “I want you to introduce me, and tell them that I have left Marvel for DC,” because this is August of 1970. The new comics aren’t out yet and most people don’t know yet that Jack has left Marvel. His Marvel books are still coming out. “And tell them I don’t want to discuss that. I’m not

TRIBUTES A Talk with Greg Williams

Steve Sherman’s business partner interviewed by Bruce Simon

[As much as Steve loved comics and cartoonists, his first love and interest was the world of puppetry, formed as a child in the early 1950s while being exposed to early television’s tsunami of children’s programming like Bob Clampett’s Time For Beany, Bil and Cora Baird’s Life With Snarky Parker, Hope and Morey Bunin’s Lucky Pup, The Adventures Of Cyclone Malone, Howdy Doody, Rootie Kazootie and on and on… Greg Williams began his puppetry career at age 15 with Los Angeles’ famed puppeteer Bob Baker, appearing all over Southern California, along with performing at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in downtown LA. Greg went on to work with Jim Henson writing a best-selling series of books featuring the Muppets, published by Random House. Greg is also an accomplished historian and award-winning author of what is generally acknowledged as the definitive history of Tinseltown, The Story Of Hollywood: An Illustrated History.

Greg was Steve Sherman’s creative and business partner for 40 years, as well as being a close friend and confidant. Their joint concern, Puppet Studio, located in North Hollywood, is one of the premier designers, creators and performers of puppets, marionettes, walkabout figures, and what have you—for television, motion pictures, theme parks and, most recently, entertainment on cruise ships.

Over their careers, Greg and Steve had credits in motion pictures such as Men In Black I and II and Mighty Joe Young, television shows like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Beakman’s World, D.C. Follies, ABC Weekend Specials, concert tours for Cher and Katy Perry, countless commercials, and live entertainment.

Greg was kind enough to sit down for a talk about Steve, their friendship, and their 40-year collaboration.]

BRUCE SIMON: Greg, this is obviously a sad time and a time of transition for you and Puppet Studio. I met you in early 1984 when you and Steve were working on the ABC Weekend Specials with O.G. Readmore at the old ABC studios in East Hollywood. Can you talk a little about how you became a puppeteer, how you two met, and came to your creative partnership? GREG WILLIAMS: I fell into puppetry by getting my first job ever cleaning the party room at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. I got backstage for performances when employees failed to show at performance time. I was promoted from running scenic (the theater was fully equipped with a fly gallery and multiple layers of sets and curtains), to running the light board and, one day when a puppeteer didn’t show up, I was pushed on stage.

When I left Bob’s employment, I didn’t know if I would continue in the field, even though I had been producing puppet films for the education market. One day, I got a brochure in the mail about a Krofft puppet school and I auditioned. Over two hundred people tried out. Steve and I, total strangers, were accepted into a summer workshop in 1981 of thirtyfive people. The workshop then reduced down to twelve puppeteers, including me and Steve. What cemented our relationship was that we loved the same puppeteers and their characters going back to Edgar Bergen and his vent figures. Most importantly, we loved to make each other laugh. We laughed a lot. That got us through the tough times. The Kroffts immediately put us to work on their TV shows. Steve did the drummer’s hands for the puppet band, Chuck Shackley and the Texas Critters, on the Barbara Mandrell Show. I did the puppetry and voice for Grandma Fudge on a short-lived Oral Roberts variety show. Steve and I were in business together by the next year. We had our studio and offices at Hollywood and Vine the year after that. We worked off and on for the Kroffts ever since. BRUCE: There are so many different areas of puppetry; you and Steve worked on feature films and television series, entertained live, and created figures for theme parks and cruise ship shows. You obviously have to be extremely versatile in the creation and execution of these various assignments; can you tell us some of what’s involved in these different areas of expertise? GREG: Puppetry combines both the skill and timing of a performer and the knowledge of puppet-making. It helps to be strong in both areas because you can build to facilitate the performance. Steve never stopped drawing, so he was perfect for our designs and presentations. He really had a distinctive style and could nail a character in a sketch. I come from a long line of craftspeople, so fabricating came naturally to me. BRUCE: The Puppet Studio building in North Hollywood consists of offices, workshops and a soundstage. What was a typical day working with Steve when the studio was hopping?

O.G. Readmore © ABC Television.

Beakman’s World © Columbia Pictures

Thinking about Steve Shermanby Bruce Simon

Tributes are always better given to the living while they can be appre ciated, but I’m afraid we didn’t have the luxury of time in Steve’s case, as he left us quickly and unexpectedly—one of those cases of entering the hospital for one thing and, in a rapid course of events, having everything go south. I spoke to him by phone a couple of times a day while he was in the hospital, until his phone stopped picking up—a terrible, sad day. I’m perhaps being a little more personal that I probably should be here, but I’d like to just share some things about Steve and our friendship of over 50 years, beyond what he did professionally. When Steve and his younger brother Gary showed up on that Spring night in 1968 at Palms Park in West Los Angeles for an event we optimistically called The Evening of Imagination, the members of

the Los Angeles Comic Book Club had no idea of the momentous events that would follow. Not quite the driving of the Golden Spike, but something important and lasting to us, at any rate.

The Evening of Imagination was an evening event comprised of such antediluvian delights as 25-year-old comics exhibited in thick plastic bags and Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast being played from a reel-to-reel tape recorder, all designed to inveigle and attract new memberships to our Club, which met every Saturday at Palms Park to sell and trade comics, after a raucous meeting of adolescent oneupmanship disguised as parliamentary procedure. Steve would sit back and watch amusedly, as he was a few years older than the median age of our tribe—and Gary, being a few years younger, joined right in, loudly, joyously. For as reserved as Steve was, Gary was decidedly not.

Steve had talents that made him the go-to guy in our circle; his father Eli was an electrical engineer and had taught Steve how to do just about anything about everything; this guy knew how the world worked, and in a practical sense, Steve could MacGyver his way in and out of any situation. Cars, cameras, printing; anything with moving parts or arcane instructions, Steve could master—a handy thing amongst a crew of dreamers, doofs and dullards. Secondly, Steve drove! His trusty Duster opened my world up beyond bikes and buses and shoe leather, as he made it possible for multitudes of adventures like ferrying me, Gary and Mark Evanier to attend the first San Diego Con, for just one example; and mundanely, but just as memorably, scouring art and paper stores in Downtown Los Angeles for the large sheets of two-ply Bristol board Jack preferred, as he detested the cheap paper DC provided him. It was an honor to source and trim the boards to their proper dimensions for Jack to use.

When Marvelmania International, the successor of the M.M.M.S. as Marvel’s official fan club, opened an office in a tiny business court on La Cienega Boulevard in 1969, just about the

[right] Long before Mighty Joe Young, Steve learned about gorillas, working with Jack on Kamandi.

[above] Steve and Greg with Dee Wallace Stone between takes on the 1983 TV movie Happy, starring Dom DeLuise.

[above] Diana shared, “He had a big crush on Antonella Barba from American Idol. That’s the lady with the polka dot lips. We ran into her at IMATS, the make-up artist show. LOL.”

I was Hugh Grant in Notting Hill

Steve Sherman’s wife Diana Mercer, interviewed by John Morrow

[The above title comes straight from Steve’s wife Diana Mercer, who used it to describe her role as a sometimes bemused observer, looking into the world this magazine is about. As an outlier, she knew Steve not as Jack Kirby’s assistant, or even as someone in the entertainment industry initially. I don’t know if Steve ever met Julia Roberts, but as you’ll see, his first encounter with Diana was just as fortuitous as Hugh Grant’s with that actress in Notting Hill. This interview was conducted over Zoom on April 12, 2022, and transcribed and copy-edited by yours truly.]

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Where and when were you born, and how’d you end up in California? DIANA MERCER: I was born in 1964; I’m 58. I did all my schooling in Indiana, and then I moved to Connecticut to practice law. Then I met Steve on America Online, and that’s how I ended up in California. TJKC: [laughs] Was this in the early days of AOL? DIANA: This was before even chat rooms and stuff. They used to have profiles; you could fill out your profile, and search them. I had dated a guy named Steve Sherman in college, so I searched for all the Steve Shermans. There were 27 of them, and I wrote an email to each of them. One guy wrote back, “I’m gay, leave me out of this.” [laughter] And Steve wrote back and said, “I’m not the guy you’re looking for, but I saw your AOL profile, and I like bad horror movies too.” TJKC: Smooth! [laughter] DIANA: I know! Quite the pick-up line, isn’t it? He was older than me, and he lived far away, but we ended up corresponding. He was in the middle of doing Mighty Joe Young; this was 1997. Normally those shoots were very long hours, but they were shooting near his home, at the Spruce Goose hanger over in Playa Del Rey, and he was home early most days and didn’t have much to do. So we started writing back and forth. I wasn’t paying much attention to it, because I’m not moving to California. Then a sentence became a paragraph, which became several paragraphs—and again, I’m not thinking much of it, because we lived so far apart. It took us a few months before we even talked on the phone. That was October; by December we’re on the phone, and in February 1998 he came out to visit. Pretty much as soon as he arrived, I knew: “This is the guy.” TJKC: How soon thereafter did you get hitched? DIANA: Christmas Eve, December ’98. My grandparents got married Christmas Eve in 1924, so I wanted to be married then, too. TJKC: I’m assuming at the time, you didn’t know anything about comics, or Jack Kirby, or what Steve was doing with his puppetry. DIANA: I didn’t know him at all. I had no idea who he was. This was before Google or any of that, so I couldn’t look anything up. TJKC: Did you have any exposure to comic books growing up? Did Steve share with you that he had a comic book background before all his work in the entertainment industry? DIANA: A little bit, but it kind of wasn’t sinking in. I have three cousins and a brother, so the older kids would go off and leave us younger kids to read Richie Rich and Little Lotta comic books in his bedroom. TJKC: What attracted you to him initially? I’m sure there was some kind of spark prior to him showing up on your doorstep.

Foundations

Here’s even more of Simon & Kirby’s Link Thorne work, this time from Airboy Comics V4, #9 (Oct. 1947), with art reconstruction and coloring by Chris Fama, and a character no doubt inspired by the infamous Ma Barker. We’ll continue with another installment of the complete Link Thorne stories next issue.

INNERVIEW The Case for Jack Kirby

Steve Sherman interviewed by Steven Brower • Originally published online at: https://www.printmag.com on September 26, 2014

[below and next page, top] Jimmy Olsen and Kamandi are apparently the two Kirby titles where Steve had the most creative input, so here are Jack’s sketches of key characters from those strips, as drawn in his mid-1970s Valentine’s Day sketchbook for wife Roz Kirby. [next page, bottom] Three presentations Steve did with Jack, long before Captain Victory and Silver Star became comic book series. Silver Star dates as early as November 14, 1975—Kirby had just gone back to Marvel in May 1975, so wasn’t putting all his eggs in that one basket. [2022 Introduction: I never met Steve face-to-face, although I wish I had. His warmth and decency came through on social media—no small feat. Before Facebook, I only knew Steve as Kirby’s assistant and sometimes collaborator during one of my favorite periods of Kirby’s oeuvre, DC Comics in the early 1970s. I had always wondered who Steve was, beyond reading about him in the pages of this magazine. What I did learn through social media is that he was kind and genuine, with no apparent ulterior motives. He shared his knowledge generously and with great enthusiasm. Beyond that, he had a great sense of humor, a friendly countenance, and was clearly a creative soul. I loved watching clips of his puppetry. I was completely unaware that it was Steve’s artistry I was watching with my then young daughter on two of her favorite shows, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Beakman’s World.

I did interview him, however, on the eve of the Marvel/ Disney vs. Kirby’s lawsuit’s scheduled appearance before the US Supreme Court. His advocacy and passion for Kirby never wavered. We are all the poorer for Steve’s passing.] STEVEN BROWER: Did you read comic books as a kid, and if so, which ones? STEVE SHERMAN: Yes. I think the first comic I ever read was Dennis the Menace when I must’ve been five years old, at the barbershop my Dad took me to. Prior to that I had been hooked on the Sunday comics and cartoons on TV. I was a big fan of the funny animal comics. Later, I came across some coverless ECs being sold at a local store. I started buying the DC line, Superboy, Superman, etc. I saved them all in a wooden Army footlocker. Unfortunately, we moved out of the country for a while, and the footlocker got left behind. My younger brother, Gary, and I started buying again and saving them. In the late ’60s we started buying the Marvel comics. We bought a huge lot of back issues from a high school friend. Kept them all. The first Kirby comic I ever came across was The Fly when it first hit the newsstand. Wasn’t sure at the time who Kirby was, but I liked the comic a lot.

BROWER: How did you come to work for Kirby?

SHERMAN: Mark Evanier, my brother and I were working at Marvelmania International, which was set up in Los Angeles. We were all members of the

Los Angeles Comic Book Club which would meet on

Saturdays at a local recreation center... the fellow running [Marvelmania] hired us to roll posters, package envelopes, etc. I first met Jack when I, along with Mark

Evanier, Gary, and our friend Bruce Simon, drove to his place in late 1968 or early 1969 in Orange

County, which is south of Los Angeles. At that time he was temporarily living in a two-story townhouse.

I don’t even think a lot of the furniture had arrived yet from New York. Jack had his drawing table set up in a tiny bedroom. He and Roz were very nice to us. They were looking to buy a house in

Thousand Oaks, which is about 40 minutes north of Los Angeles. Jack was doing a lot of the artwork for Marvelmania. It was a nice visit. A few weeks later Jack and Roz drove up to Los Angeles and took

Mark and myself to lunch. He told us he was leaving

Marvel, and would we like to be his assistants on his new DC titles? Of course, we both said yes.

BROWER: What was that experience like? Were you assigned tasks?

SHERMAN: It was fun and exciting. We (Mark and I) were given a chance to come up with ideas for magazines and characters for Jack Kirby! Who wouldn’t be jazzed? Jack gave us assignments for In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World. He also allowed us to contribute ideas for Jimmy Olsen. We also came up with designs for different magazines—some

Jack’s idea, some ours. Much later I contributed ideas to Kamandi and co-created Kobra with Jack.

BROWER: Were you nervous at first?