Modern Masters Vol. 17: Lee Weeks

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

S E V E N T E E N :

LEE EEKS W

Wolverine TM & ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

By Tom Field and Eric Nolen-Weathington

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Modern Masters Volume Seventeen:

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME SEVENTEEN:

LEE WEEKS edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Tom Field front cover art by Lee Weeks 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 • August 2008 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-94-8 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 Lee Weeks unless otherwise noted.

Strong & Al ™ and ©2008 Lee Weeks.

The Enforcers and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Howard Downs and Lee Weeks.

Alfred Pennyworth, Batman, Captain Marvel, Commissioner Gordon, Green Arrow, Hawkman, Huntress, Ratcatcher, Robin, Starman, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

Beast, Ben Urich, Bucky Barnes, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Cyclops, Daredevil, Dr. Octopus, Elektro, Fantastic Four, Foggy Nelson, Galactus, Gambit, Ghost Rider, Gwen Stacy, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, J. Jonah Jameson, Johnny Blaze, Jubilee, Justice, Kingpin, Matt Murdock, Mr. Fantastic, Nick Fury, Peter Parker, Psylocke, Punisher, Rogue, Scarecrow, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, Thing, Tithe Collector, Typhoid Mary, Vision, Winter Soldier, Wolverine, X-Men ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Magnus Robot Fighter ™ and ©2008 Random House, Inc. Tarzan ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc. Dale Arden, Flash Gordon ©2008 King Features Syndicate, Inc. and ™ Hearst Holdings, Inc. Remo Williams, The Destroyer, and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Warren Murphy.

Mike Danger ™ and ©2008 Mickey Spillane.

Scooby-Doo and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Hanna Barbera/Warner Bros.

Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

Alien Worlds, New Wave and all related characters ™ and ©2008 respective owners.

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

Dedication For Mumma — Thank you for keeping me endlessly supplied with pencils, pens, and paper... not to mention your love. — Lee To Doris Evans, my grandma. You’ve been a bigger influence in my life than you probably realize, and I love you very much.

And as ever, to Donna, Iain and Caper, my beacons of light. — Eric Acknowledgements Lee Weeks, for going above and beyond with his help in putting this book together.

Special Thanks Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Seventeen:

LEE WEEKS

Table of Contents Introduction by Tom Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: Made in Maine—Soup and Nuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Law and Spirit—An Artist’s Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Part Three: Breaking In... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Part Four: ...And Breaking Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Part Five: Jungles of Green and Concrete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Part Six: Picking up the Gauntlet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Part Seven: Re-Birth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Captain Marvel ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Introduction are copies of the recent Captain Marvel mini-series... drawn by my friend Lee Weeks, whom I met in that comic book store nearly 30 years ago.

My, did I just write “30 years ago?!” Wow. Oldest, dearest friend, indeed.

My Years with Weeks

S

uffice to say, Lee Weeks is one of my oldest, dearest friends—we’ve known each other since we were juniors in high school.

He lived in one small Maine city; I in another. “We went to separate schools together,” I always tell people, and it’s true. We attended rival high schools, actually, but met in the peaceful common ground of the state’s first comic book store, the long-gone Duck Soup, which was located downtown in Lee’s hometown of Hallowell.

Easy to say, looking back, that a million dreams were born in that little antiques/comics store. There was a core of us who met and became fast friends for life at Duck Soup. Doug Thornsjo, the owner; Bruce Canwell, a longtime comics letter hack & pro writer who’s now Associate Editor of IDW’s new Terry and the Pirates and Little Orphan Annie reprint books; Howard Downs, Walt Orrall and Dave Peabody, who all went on to work in comics retail; and then Lee and me.

It’s been an amazing experience, knowing Lee. We graduated high school the same week, dropped out of our first colleges simultaneously, shared a ton of coming-of-age adventures back in Maine. I wrote Lee’s first published comics story, he was best man at my wedding.

And even though we now live hundreds of miles away from one another, not a week goes by when one of us doesn’t pick up the phone to just say “hey” and talk about the Red Sox, Celtics, comics or our kids.

Still, as long as I’ve known Lee, and as much as I thought I knew about him, I learned a ton from conducting the series of interviews that make up this book.

There’s so much I didn’t know about his childhood before I met him—so much I’d forgotten even about the pivotal experiences we shared at comics shows in the early ’80s. And then there are his insights on comics, art, The Business—insights that could only come from a comics veteran, which... wow, my friend Lee Weeks is now a comics veteran.

Life’s lessons—we learned them over split pizzas and spilt Cokes, talking comics and life, life and comics.

What we’d do when we grew up—the comics we’d create and the lives we’d live. Big dreams were born in that small town shop, and it’s such a pleasure to be here talking about some of them today.

So, I just finished copy-editing these interviews, and I truly was blown away by the tapestry of it all. It’s a story that spans more than 40 years, and although we certainly didn’t plan any of this when we first sat down to talk, there’s a very definite beginning, middle, subplots, and a “to-be-HULK-inued” at the end.

Ultimately, it’s a story. It’s Lee’s story, and I’m privileged to be here, to be his friend, and to help tell it.

Sign of things to come: The first time I walked into Duck Soup, I was awestruck by the framed original artwork on the wall—the larger-than-life cover to Captain Marvel #1, drawn by Gene Colan and Vince Colletta. It was the first piece of original art I ever saw.

Imagine: Here today, beside me in my home office,

Tom Field July 4, 2008

5

Part 1:

Made in Maine— Soup and Nuts LEE: And there were lots of neighborhood kids. We had five boys in our family, yet we would not be considered a big family at that time. There were lots of kids that read comics. We used to get ours at Curtis’ Pharmacy on Water Street in downtown Hallowell. On Tuesday there would be a race after school to get to there. With the old newsstand distribution system, you couldn’t always be sure how many copies of a comic would make it to your store.

MODERN MASTERS: You and I go back a lot of years, and we’ve talked a lot of comics and a lot of creators over the years. When you hear a term like “masters,” what kind of names go through your head?

LEE WEEKS: In comics, specifically, the usual suspects— names like Kirby, Kubert, Caniff. We’re all learning from these guys; they are our teachers. Foster, Raymond, Alex Toth. And some of the more modern comics guys, modern being relative, but certainly John Buscema, Neal Adams, and others—Gene Colan, Frank Miller, of course. I think there are others, really—I try not to say I know “this is the best guy,” but probably a half a dozen or so I would say share a very special resonance.

MM: It just occurs to me that you had more brothers in your house than any of us had channels on our TV at that time. [Lee laughs] So comics really were our culture. That’s what we did.

LEE: In fact, I vividly remember the cable man drilling through the window sill to bring the first cable into the house, where we got as many as, what, eight or ten channels?

MM: Give me a sense of when you first started paying attention to comics and who the comics artists were?

MM: So comic books were always in your house. Were they Marvels, DCs, the typical stuff that most of us read at the time?

LEE: I paid attention early on because I wanted to do everything my older brothers did, and they liked comics, so I picked it up by osmosis.

It was really two interests: comics and drawing. Back further than I can remember, apparently my dad would stick crayons in my hand. And a little later than that, I remember the Kirby and Ditko conversations between my brothers.

LEE: There seemed to be boxes and boxes of every kind of comic book, and I enjoyed them all: war comics, mystery comics, even Richie Rich comics and Gold Key Star Trek comics. It just seems there was a plethora of genres available. And I loved all the variety. But certainly the ones that seemed to have a higher value to my older brothers, and so to me, were the Marvel and DC titles.

MM: Context, here: We’re talking 1960s. You and I both grew up in Maine, and comics were just a huge part of the culture. It’s just what kids read, and you certainly had older brothers, so you had tons of comics around the house.

MM: Were you guys serious collectors?

LEE: I wasn’t at first, but my two oldest brothers, 6

Malcolm and Eric, were. The middle brother, Mark, he probably read them second-hand, more like myself, and then my little brother, Dean, picked them up, too. I remember Eric’s collection more than Malcolm’s. Mal’s actually gotten back into it the last couple years. Eric had a pretty substantial collection but sold it in the mid-’70s for a song to a guy with a mail order business. He got nowhere near what they were worth, but he needed to buy books for school, so he sold his collection.

He had some vintage comics, and they were bagged. He used to get his supplies from that same guy, so I think that’s why he thought to sell him the books.

MM: Did they go and find these, or did they buy them off the stands?

LEE: Bought off the stands. [laughs] Malcolm’s first book off the stands was Spider-Man #24. At one point Eric wanted to go back and get Amazing Fantasy #15.

No, no, no, excuse me. It’s the other way around, I’m getting them mixed up. He traded one of his copies of Amazing Fantasy #15 for a new copy of Superman.

MM: Oh, my. Didn’t one of your brothers have three copies of Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man? LEE: I think so. That’s what I understand.

MM: One got traded away, just traded for some routine comic book.

Didn’t another one end up, like, in a scrapbook?

LEE: One was burned

by Dad. I don’t know if it was the Seduction of the Innocent effect or what, but I think there were a lot of comics burned back then. I used to think it was pretty unique to us, but I’ve heard of others since.

MM: Wow. Can you talk about some of the characters you saw? You remember the

Fantastic Four, you remember Spider-Man. What sort of impression did these stories, these characters, leave on you?

LEE: Just huge. I mean, they were just tremendous stories, especially for an entry-level young child to read. Wonderful morality plays with very simple yet multi-dimensional characters, simply executed. Clear-cut themes, as in SpiderMan, “With great power must also come great responsibility.” You know, I haven’t really drifted back and thought of this stuff a lot, but I remember lots of energy... and goodness.

MM: If I were to ask you memorable comic stories from your youth, what would they be?

LEE: Spidey #33 and FF #51. Spidey #33 was “The Final Chapter.” Just a great story—still is. Some others, I’m not sure how much I’m remembering from early childhood, or if it’s more from re-reading them as an older teenager. I can tell you one of the first comics I felt was distinctly my own, and not a second-hand comic, was 7

Previous Page: “Prior to recently finding this drawing of Captain America done in 1967 at age 4, my earliest surviving drawing was from about 1972.”

Above: “Hallowell, Maine, or as I sometimes call it, ‘Mayberry North.’

The building at the far left is Boynton’s, and about eight doors or so down used to be Curtis’ Pharmacy, where we bought all our comics growing up.”

Left: “A pencil portrait of Dad drawn as a Mother’s Day present in 1983 at age 20.”

Captain America ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Fantastic Four #112, which is actually a little bit later. I think that’s, like, ’70 or ’71, if I remember?

MM: You’re exactly right.

Above: A Spider-Man figure from Spider-Man: Death & Destiny, written and penciled by Lee. Next Page: When Lee’s older brother, Eric, presented him with his first hardcover sketchbook for Christmas in 1974, Lee set out at once to fill it up, starting with a Captain Marvel story and soon after an Iron Man story.

Captain Marvel ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Electro, Iron Man, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

LEE: A very stark image of the Thing and the Incredible Hulk facing off on a black cover. I had plenty more comics that were given to me, but this was the one where I really was staking my own claim. That was John Buscema’s first run on FF, and his figures were just amazing. I also remember the death of Gwen Stacy. And the Sinister Six story. I may even have that. That would have been the reprint, obviously.

That was, what, ’63, ’64?

MM: Yeah, but I think it got reprinted around 1969.

LEE: Yeah, that’s the one I remember, giant-sized or something. I was struck by an effect I didn’t see in any of the other comic books that I was reading, at least none of the super-hero books, which is the double-lighting that Ditko did, the edge lighting on Spider-Man; that made an impression on me back then.

MM: Well, that’s what I was going to ask you. When did you make the connection between these stories you really enjoyed and this drawing activity you really enjoyed?

LEE: It seems like I was always copying them, always trying to recreate those images. We used to do this thing with Silly 8

Putty, where you’d press the Silly Putty down on a newspaper strip, or even a comic book, and it’d come up with a mirror image that you could then stretch and morph.

And I was always drawing. A friend of mine, when we were, oh, gosh, in kindergarten, were sitting at the table, trading drawings of the Thing back and forth while my older brother was doing an oil painting copy of Avengers #4, the “Cap Lives” cover.

MM: Now, you actually did narrative storylines back when you were a kid, as well.

I’ve seen some of these.

LEE: In the third grade, I actually did my first original material. Well, probably not that original, but certainly my first published. I was a publisher in the third grade.

I did some strips on copy paper so that they could be folded into a book, and my middle brother, Mark—I’m the fourth of five—took them to his school. He would have been in junior high school when I was in third grade, and he ran off a bunch of copies on one of those old crank-operated blue-ink mimeograph machine, and I sold them to schoolmates for three cents apiece... sold a few dozen, I think.

MM: Wow. So you had your own little shop going, there.

LEE: Yeah, but I would have been nailed for copyright infringement on a couple, as one was an Underdog strip. Another story was of two guys running a track race, beginning at the starting line, followed by

a seesawing back-and-forth, until one of them won.

Those are the two I remember—the race and Underdog.

MM: When did you start to get the sense that maybe you had a little more going on talent-wise, artistically, than your brothers, your friends?

MM: You’ve got an Iron Man story that you did, as well, right?

LEE: A couple incidents stand out for me. One, I was leaving my first grade class at the end of the day. At our school there was the “big kids’ side” and the “little kids’ side.” That’s what we called them because we were segregated from each other, both inside and on the playground. The little kids’ side was K through 2, I believe, and then 3 through 5 was on the other side. And one of the teachers from the big kids’ side was a pretty imposing figure to us kids. First of all, we didn’t have a lot of male teachers in grade school, and he was a big, big man, tall—though, ironically, his name was Mr. Small.

And there was a certain intimidation factor with this big teacher from the “big kids’ side.”

One day as I was leaving Miss Neal’s class I heard Mr. Small’s voice boom, “Mr. Weeks!” It startled me. He told me to come back into the room—he wanted to talk to me. I didn’t recognize the playful nature of it initially.

When I went back in, he held out a piece of paper and said, “Did you do this?” Well, I didn’t know what it was at first, and it could have been something mischievous,

LEE: Oh, that’s a little later, when I was twelve. Eric had been away at prep school, and he brought home—the first time I’d ever seen one—a hardcover sketchbook for me for Christmas. I immediately started to fill it up with comic book stories. The first one I did that day, Christmas Day, was a Shazam Captain Marvel story. At the time, Shazam! was a live action Saturday morning show. I filled much of the book with Spidey, Iron Man, the Hulk and Cap, and some war stories, and other things. Later I would beg Dean to collaborate with me, because his coloring was so much better than mine, much neater, so some of the stories in that little book actually include a coloring credit for Dean. Dean and I did everything together. We’d go to Boynton’s Market—just a few doors down from Curtis’ Pharmacy—often enough that Sam behind the counter would greet the both of us with a single name, “Well, if it isn’t Fortnight!”—as in “two Weeks.” How creative is that?

Anyway, it was way more fun to do the comics with my little brother. I still have that book.

9

Right: “‘Little’ brother Dean and me from around ’70 or ’71, photographic proof I wasn’t always the shortest Weeks boy.”

Below: Another page from Lee’s first sketchbook. Seeing this for the first time in many years, Lee said, “The depth and dimension in that 3/4 downshot of the canyon kind of made me raise my eyebrows. It’s like little bits of understanding peeking through here and there.”

Next Page: Pencils for the first page of the Thing story Lee wrote and drew for Marvel: Shadows & Light #2.

Thing ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

so I was still nervous. When I looked, however, I saw that it was a drawing—a harvest season drawing of some haystacks, a scarecrow, and pumpkins. I remember I copied it off of a Weekly Reader. Well, he made some comments about how good it was. And that really stayed with me. Boy, it made me feel so incredibly good.

And then in the third grade I won my first conservation poster contest. I got a trophy and everything.

And finally, when I was around twelve, I remember being out to our camp on Cobbossee Lake drawing Spider-Man. Eric, who was the big collector and my hero, was also drawing—or had drawn 10

Spider-Man. And I remember looking at his, looking at mine, and thinking I drew his head more correctly. That’s the first time I remember discerning something like that, without somebody else pointing it out to me. Sorry, Eric.

MM: When did you start to get a sense that this was something that maybe you could do professionally?

LEE: I know that I dreamed of it very early on. My brother did, so, again, anything he wanted to do, I wanted to do. But it was very pipe-dream-like. I’m not sure how attainable I actually thought it was. I wouldn’t have admitted that then, but I just know from how it felt later on, when it became a tangible thing I really believed I could do, that it was a totally different feeling. Eric would send submissions in back then, and we would wait, and a letter would come back in the mail saying, “Not quite.” There was a tremendous amount of anticipation over it, I felt, and when they didn’t hire him, it was, “Oh, what do they know.” I can still see the pictures he sent— he was just 13. Boy, I was only seven years old. I can still see them—Captain America and Iron Man, and Captain America’s got one foot up on a rock. I remember thinking how awesome they were. They were on 81/2" x 11" copy paper, sent off in a business envelope. And he got a response.

sabotage, and he’s trying to bring it in for a survivable landing. There’s a tier of panels where he’s checking every gauge, and telling us his every move, again, working against all odds. Each successive panel of the tier shows him pulling on the yoke, bringing the ship closer to level. He’s telling himself the innumerable things he has to do if he’s going to make it, after which he asks, “You aren’t asking for much, are you, Benjamin Grimm?”

Finally, in a wide shot as the shuttle skids across the desert floor, he answers his own question with, “Nah, just the impossible!!” The shuttle explodes on the next page, which we see along with the rest of the command center on that large screen. I couldn’t rush back to Duck Soup fast enough the next day to get the second part. I had to see how it ended. But the opening of the shop was one of the very many key events that absolutely had to happen or I don’t end up drawing comics.

MM: Of course, you hear the story about Jim Shooter— he broke in at 13—so you sort of set that as your barrier, you’ve got to get in by 13. When you don’t hit that, you find out that Barry Smith, or Barry Windsor-Smith, got in at 18.

LEE: I know. And I held onto that kind of thing as a measuring stick into my early 20s. I’ve talked with other artists who had similar self-imposed age deadlines. And then Joe Kubert, I mean, I used to hear that he broke in at 16, but in speaking with him, he said he was actually 11!

MM: I’d really like to talk with you about how you started to make the transition from someone that really liked comics and really liked to draw to it becoming something you really had professional aspirations for. Where’d it start?

LEE: Well, certainly there’s a progression through my entire childhood. I can think of several key points, but the real pivotal things that happened... understand, back then, three or four years—five years—whatever it was, seemed like an eternity. Today a couple years seems like a weekend, but from about sixth or seventh grade to my junior year of high school I had very little to do with comics, though I still drew all the time. I was involved in sports and other things in school. Then, on the verge of becoming a junior in August of ’79, one of my oldest pals, Howard Downs, invited me along to this new comic book shop that opened up on Water Street. A shop for comic books? It was called Duck Soup, owned by one who’s now become our good friend, Doug Thornsjo.

Our high school football team would have two football practices a day in August. I had a couple hours to kill between the morning and afternoon sessions, so I went with Howard, amazed there was an entire store devoted to comics. And not just any comics, but the old ones I remembered. I’m sure those were the first long boxes I’d ever seen.

Here was a way to get those back issues. I had loved the Fantastic Four when I was a kid, and Spider-Man, and I wanted to take home a comic book that first day—just one. I bought Fantastic Four #193, based on Howard’s recommendation, I think. The issue ended on a cliffhanger that gave me a thrill like I hadn’t had in a long time. I’m not sure if it’s a great comic, but regardless, it totally captivated me. The final scene of the issue has Ben Grimm, as the Thing, flying a space shuttle that’s lost all hydraulics due to some 11

MM: What strikes me now, hearing that story, is you’re so impacted by that sequence in Fantastic Four, and 20 years later you get the opportunity to do a Thing solo story [Marvel Shadows & Light #2], he’s flying a rocket.

seen any other. In fact, any time from that point forward that I got a chance to see some original artwork—and there were others there—I would jump at it. I remember a John Byrne—Star Brand was the character?

LEE: And you know what? I never made that connection until you just said that.

Maybe I knew and I’m just forgetting.

MM: Oh, Star-Lord.

MM: One of the first things I noticed walking into that comic book store was, up above the boxes there was this framed original artwork, the cover to Captain Marvel #1, Gene Colan and Vince Colletta.

The very first original artwork I had ever seen, and I was impressed by it. Do you remember, and did it strike you, as well?

LEE: Wow! I’d forgotten about that, the green and white Marv. I believe that’s the first piece of original comic art that I ever saw. I can’t imagine where I would have

LEE: Yes, that’s it. I was a complete sponge trying to absorb everything. Soon I was trying to ink my own stuff, and I got the Buscema/Stan Lee book, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. It talked about the tools, but I didn’t know how to care for the tools, or about quality of brushes—no understanding of technique. So any time I got a chance to look at original pages... it was awe-inspiring. It’s still awesome to see other people’s original artwork. It’s really magical.

MM: So you walk into this store and you get access to this whole universe of comic books. How does it all coalesce to where 13

Previous Page: “Inks and wash for page 1 of the Shadows & Light Thing story, which may have been unconsciously inspired by FF #193.”

Above: Lee contributed story art to the How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way CD, including this introduction, which featured Stan Lee himself.

Thing ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

you’re starting to say, “Yeah, this is something I want to do for a living.

This is something I can do for a living”?

Above and Right: 1990 marker sketches of Frankenstein’s monster.

“Tom [Field] and I worked up a proposal for a Hulk and Frankenstein project that never quite got off the ground, unfortunately. I still believe Tom’s was a very strong idea.

Next Page: “During a few years stretch where I wasn’t as zeroed in on comics, I still drew all the time, doing a lot of portraits and sports figures. This is one I did in early 1977, at 14, of Hall of Fame quarterback, Fran Tarkenton.

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

LEE: Gears were definitely put in motion, and an enthusiasm took over. It kind of re-lit the pilot light of a dream I’d had as a boy, one that back then hadn’t seemed realistically achievable. So already it’s much more tangible because I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before, not to mention hearing conversations between some of you guys who really knew a lot more about comics than I did. I heard about the business through you guys, and discovered the trade publications where we’d get inside stories about this person and that artist. All the experiences were weaving a fabric—a tapestry of possibility... making the dream a reality, where you start to realize, “Oh, wow, people are actually doing this stuff.” I’d known of Kirby, Ditko, Adams, and a few others prior to the comic shop opening, but all the conversations at the store started to make it more real.

Then a bit later I met Mike Dudley, who’s now another mutual friend of ours—I’m sensing a pattern here. He had actually attended the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. He’d been part of the second class, I think. Well, meeting Mike was another very important event for me, because up to that point the school only existed as an advertisement in comic books, and my perception of the things advertised in comic books consisted of two-man submarines, 7' cardboard Frankensteins, and X-Ray glasses. There was an illegitimacy to those ads. Also, I didn’t know who Joe Kubert was, didn’t know he’d already had a hall-offame career and reputation. So to hear there’s actually a school where people learn to do this? And Joe Kubert is one of the masters of the craft? It was a key moment—meeting Mike—in stimulating and focusing my desire. I still didn’t know that I was going to go there, because I had aspirations of playing college football and possibly studying engineering. That’s what I thought I was going to be doing. I didn’t know how it would be paid for, as we didn’t have the money for school. So that was probably as far off a dream as drawing funny books.

MM: One of the things that I remember about Mike coming back from the Kubert School is that he made some of those names real, for me, at least.

Like, he talked about going to

14

sentimental plot from a cheesy ABC-TV movie-of-theweek, but it’s the truth and absolutely happened this way.

I only have scattered memories of that first night—fragments—as I was in shock, but I remember, while sitting up just before being rushed into surgery, telling my folks that I loved them, because I knew I was very possibly saying goodbye to them. That’s not the movie-of-theweek moment, though. Waking up after surgery in intensive care I have one of my clearest memories of that first 24 hours. I had tubes and wires coming out of me everywhere, and monitors beeping all around me. I struggled to breathe from broken ribs and a nearly collapsed lung. It was dark. I was only awake for a few brief moments—maybe not even a minute. My mom was standing over me and she was holding my hand, and I just asked her... my very first thought... my very first words were, “Ma, could you bring me some paper and a pencil?” And then I slipped back under.

The next time I woke up there was a little clipboard with some copy paper and a felt-tip pen sitting there, and I tried to... [pause] I tried to draw.

a party at Frank Thorne’s house. “Frank Thorne” was a name I saw and read in the Red Sonja comic books, but he was a real guy!

LEE: Yes, absolutely, Tom. MM: And Joe Kubert! Joe Kubert was a real guy, and Mike took classes from him!

LEE: My amorphous kind of spongy, mush of a pipe dream, with every one of these experiences, it took on a bit more form and shape, because each component was taking on a level of reality that it didn’t have before.

Mike got accolades in school for his lettering. I mean, I never considered lettering before, never even thought of it as a discipline. But, as we heard of Mike’s experience, I learned one reason my pages looked so atrocious was because there really was a discipline to lettering.

That was a whole other thing I hadn’t understood or appreciated before then.

MM: As I think back to when we first met, we were juniors in high school. But what stands out to me as a watershed date is that summer just before we went into our senior years, when you suffered an accident that I guess you’d have to say changed your life.

MM: Now, football was over after that. I mean, you lost a kidney, you lost your spleen. Those are just the injuries I remember.

But football was absolutely over, right?

LEE: It’s quite possibly the biggest piece of the whole—looking back, there was a plan all along. It just wasn’t my plan, it was God’s plan. His design. But, yeah, it was the first day of football practice my senior year in high school. I was with my high school buddy, Todd Havey, at the time. We played together for years, and I was riding with him in a little ’73 Volkswagen Beetle to Augusta, your hometown.

LEE: Oh, yeah. And, just to add to the TV-movie-of-the-week theme, a few hours later my coach, Bob Webber, came to see me. And some people, because we were teenagers, assumed Todd and I had been the ones drinking, but we didn’t drink. I’d had a brief period where I tried it in high school, but not then. So, when coach came in to see me, I woke up, saw him, and immediately said, “Practice at 8:30, right, coach?” [Tom laughs] I remember being filled with joy over just being alive. I was in a lot of pain and very groggy. I looked up at him, and he was looking down, and asked him that. And he laughed.

MM: The City!

LEE: The City—to pick up a coffee pot, or deliver a coffee pot to or from his aunt’s house. On the way home it had just begun to get dark. It was a little after nine o’clock. We were maybe a quarter of a mile or so from my folks’ house when we were greeted going up over the crest of a small hill by two headlights directly in front of us. I just remember a still snapshot of two white circles. A drunk driver plowed into us head on. She nearly killed us, and for a couple days I was in critical condition, guarded condition, and then I think after three days I got out—of intensive care, not the hospital.

I know this next thing sounds like a really bad, overly

MM: This was pretty big news. I mean, we lived in pretty small communities, and I remember there was notice of your accident in the newspaper the next day, right?

LEE: Yes, it kind of was. In between those two memories, after my mom and before my coach, brother #3, Mark, came in with a piece of foam core, and it wasn’t even neatly cut or anything, from what I remember, but he had cut out and pasted the picture from the newspaper of the mangled Volkswagen. He showed it to me, and I remem15

MM: Wow. 27 years later, Lee, I’m learning stuff I didn’t know. So you talked before about, football was a big deal. You wanted to get an athletic scholarship, wanted to go off to school.

ber groaning, like the memory of what happened came back, and I was moaning, “Oh, no, what are you doing?”

And then a switch flipped in my head, and I started weakly laughing about it instead. But, yeah, it was in the paper.

It’s incredible how many things had to happen just perfectly that first night for me to survive. For instance, the front yard we ended up in—the car had tipped over and was pinning my friend; it was sitting up on the driver’s side, and Todd’s arm was underneath. Apparently I had climbed out, or was thrown out, or something. I’ve always heard that I climbed out, but I don’t remember.

But I do remember sitting in the front yard, trying to get up. I wanted to go see Todd, but there were a couple of people there that wouldn’t let me get up. They were tending out on me. I remember very little, but I heard later it was a physician and his wife who “just happened” to be up visiting from either New Hampshire or Massachusetts.

Somebody with less experience might have let me get up and do a lot more damage to myself.

LEE: Right. I had wanted a shot at playing college football... sort of.

MM: That all ended that night.

LEE: And I couldn’t have been more thrilled, to be honest with you. [laughs] I mean, not about the injuries, of course, but I went to a very, very small high school, and in a small town you dream of going off sometimes and making your mark. And the first thing I got some attention for, other than drawing, was football. It was an obsession for a few years. But, by the time I was a junior, it wasn’t quite as much fun as it’d been the previous several years of my youth. It had become more like a job—an expectation. If the accident hadn’t happened, I would have continued to pursue football if only because of inertia—it’s what I was supposed to do. Anyway, when I got out of intensive care, I felt absolute bliss the rest of that week in the hospital. I was in the hospital eight days, total, and felt tremendous joy and gratitude at just being alive. And there was a clear switch that flipped, and I knew I wanted to pursue my art. I felt like somebody had taken a burden off me that I didn’t know how to take off, myself. And it was all good, so....

MM: Because you were hemorrhaging.

LEE: They didn’t even know it, really, because at that time I was in good playing shape and my injuries were internal. I had a wound on my head and bits of glass in me in a number of places, but you couldn’t really tell from the outside how injured I was. It wasn’t until we got to the hospital and they started running some tests... and my friend’s mom, who was a nurse, she’s the one that called and gave my folks the news, and they drove over. They had to actually get turned back on the road by the police, because they initially took a route that led them right to the accident scene, and saw the car—the whole mess. As a parent now, I cannot imagine what they felt at that moment.

The first test they ran at the hospital made them think something was wrong with my spleen, but they wanted to run some more tests to make sure before they went in.

They ran those, came out and said, “We know we have to take the spleen, but now we think there might be something wrong with a kidney, so we’re going to run some more tests.” But before they could do the extra tests I started to check out, and the scene was—these two doctors still in suit coats and ties because they had been called in from some dinner or something, from what I have been told, because I don’t remember it myself, but they were pushing my gurney in a sprint down the hall to surgery because I was really on my way out.

MM: During your recuperation, that’s when you and I became more friendly, spent more time together, and a lot of opportunities just seemed to come your way, to give you the chance to pursue art more professionally.

LEE: I remember you and I had a mutual affection for the Fantastic Four book, and I know we couldn’t have known each other that long, because when I bought #193, that was already a back issue. When you came to visit me in the hospital, you had with you—I want to say #221 or #222, or somebody brought me in a couple of issues of Fantastic Four. I remember you coming in. And I remember looking at those in the hospital bed, because a guy named Sienkiewicz inked it—or inked one of them, anyway— and it was a very jarring thing to see Bill Sienkiewicz on a book whose look had been determined by one person, Joe Sinnott, for basically close to 20 years at that point.

16

MM: Our entire lifetimes.

LEE: It’s very strange to realize that there have been more FF issues since that date than there were before that date. But, I remember you coming in, and getting some more comics... and another neat thing happened: a man I admired from a distance, a phenomenal illustrator who happened to be my high school buddy’s uncle, Jack Havey—just a phenomenal illustrator. Norman Rockwell had said something very nice about Jack’s work once. So I’m in my hospital bed in a room I had been sharing with Todd. He’d gone home a couple days earlier, and the first day he was gone, I was in the hospital room by myself, and this man walks in that looked like Todd’s dad, but I know it wasn’t him because the Mr. Havey that I knew wasn’t as tanned as this guy. I realized instantly who it must be. It was Jack. He was looking for Todd, and I told him Todd had gone home. He was at the door ready to leave and said, “You probably don’t know who I am.” And my exact response was, “I sure do.

You’re Jack Havey.” And he perked up and smiled, then came over and sat down on the edge of my bed and just said some really nice and compassionate things regarding what had happened. Mindful of my audience, I told him I was very grateful that I could still draw, which made his eyebrows shoot up, and he said, “You draw?” To which I said, “Yeah, since I was little. I love to draw.” And at that point, he said, “You know, I have an empty drawing table over at this little place I run. When you get out of here, call me up. I’d like you to come over. Maybe you can learn a few things from me.” If I believed in coincidences, that meeting might have been one of the greatest ones in my life. But I don’t believe in them. It was another pivotal moment in my pursuit of this craft. So many little things, all of them leading to this thing... weaving the tapestry.

So I did, I took him up on it. In October of 1980, probably eight weeks later, when I was getting around, I called him up, he invited me over, and I spent the next ten months or so using a spare drawing table at his place a couple times a week.

There wasn’t so much a lot of instruction—though some—but what an opportunity to be around a professional artist, his advertising agency, to see the business of art in action, and to see what everyone did there.

I didn’t see Jack frequently, but when I did, it was high energy. He was a really dynamic person.

Sometimes, I’d arrive and there would be an assignment he’d thought up for me, with a little note saying, “Why don’t you try this out, sport?” After which, he’d have some advice or a critique for me. And some of the lessons he shared with me I’ll remember forever. He also had a right-hand man, Marcel Larue, who was just so versatile and so talented. Marcel worked for Jack, and I spoke to him every time I went 17

Previous Page: Early ’80s pencil studies of arms and hands.

Above: Advertising illustration by Jack Havey, an early and important mentor of Lee’s. “Our local paper, The Kennebec Journal, often featured Jack’s work, but I first became aware of him while at my best friend, Todd’s, house, when I saw an original drawing of Jack’s on the wall. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

Left: A portrait of one of Lee’s favorite actors, Spencer Tracy. Lee drew this during his sophomore year of high school.

Artwork ©2008 respective owners.

that you did in that period, and I think you did it at the studio, the portrait of Spencer Tracy, and the one of President Reagan.

LEE: Reagan, yes. The Spencer Tracy drawing I did a year or so earlier as a sophomore in high school. Spencer Tracy was a favorite actor of mine. I’d only seen him in a couple of things, but loved his work. In fact, I remember going through a period that year where I did many portraits. The Reagan portrait I did in white pencil on a black board at Jack’s, which was a follow-up to one of those assignments that was waiting for me when I showed up. I arrived one day to find a big piece of black illustration board, a photograph, a very famous photograph of Albert Einstein and a note with some instructions and encouragements, and a box of white Prismacolor pencils. His note pretty much said, “You know what? Take a whack at this and let’s see what you do, sport.”

The portrait is hanging up over the entrance to my studio.

MM: The other thing I remember: the Enforcers.

LEE: Oh, wow. That was with Howard Downs, the friend who took me to the comic shop. He was three years older than me—he was a senior when I was a freshman. From the time that I was, oh, gosh, I don’t know—he and I hung out a lot over many adventure-filled summers. If it wasn’t comics, it was the Beatles, or games of Risk, or shimmying up to the school rooftop to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, leading the neighborhood kids in all sorts of elaborate hide-andseek-esque games, or creating Howie magazine—a very funny mag we created one summer. We used to sit on his porch with a variable speed cassette recorder and record audio versions of comics, divvying up the voices between us. Varying the speeds allowed us to be different characters more easily. I remember we did a Shazam story, and his little brother, Herbie, helped out as Billy Batson, which was hilarious because Herb’s voice was still very high at that age, but sped up it was hysterical.

over there, and he was fascinated by my interest in cartooning, and was a great encouragement to me, giving moral support and encouraging me to pursue the dream... and just a sweet, sweet man, and very humble.

MM: Now, tell me if I’m wrong, Lee, but my memory is of you riding your bicycle up there.

LEE: Oh, my goodness. Without a helmet.

MM: None of us had those back then. [laughter] LEE: In fact, yeah, that’s right, because I used to ride it a little further to go to the pizza place that I worked at the summer leading up to the accident. My first job was at a pizza place.

MM: The other thing that I remember is seeing work 18

Fast forward to around the time of the accident, and one of the first things I worked on was The Enforcers. I believe we’d begun it before the accident, but didn’t really get serious about it until this time. I guess it was a teen super-hero book, an X-Men-y kind of thing. It was Howard’s creation, and I just kind of added my flavor to certain characters or whatever, but—yeah, Modi and Magni.

MM: They were Thor’s sons, right?

LEE: Is that who they were? And then there was Exile.

MM: Right. Sort of the Wolverine/Nick Fury type of character.

LEE: Yeah, yeah. I drew him taller, strapping, but with a cigar thing going on. And Mist was a character that was kind of Dr. Strange-ish, I guess, the closest thing that I came to doing a Dr. Strange type character.

same pizza place—which was and still is Whipper’s Pizza on Bangor Street, and I remember talking with my manager, who was a really salt-of-the-earth guy, Teddy McFadden—just a great storyteller, and such a character... such a funny character. I loved him to death. And I remember telling him one day how unsure I was about going back to that specific school, I wasn’t sure about it, didn’t know how to move forward. I remember him looking at me one day like he was annoyed with me for whining. He said, “So don’t go back. Simple. End of story.” And I think I needed to hear someone like him say that. He said it so matter-of-factly, I thought, “Oh, wait, I really don’t have to do this. Just because I’ve started out on a particular course doesn’t mean I can’t make an adjustment.” A light went on, like, “Wow, I really don’t have to do this for anybody. And there’s no place I have to be in four years.” So I took a year off... which was a very important decision that helped me get where I was trying to go.

MM: In fact, I can remember a page that you drew in that period of the story, where you did a Mist panel in particular that had some really Ditko-esque effect. It might have come out of a Ditko comic book.

LEE: Very possible. There’s a page I remember where Exile is standing with a wide stance with clenched fists or something, and the anatomy is very poor. Oh, and another character called Ant, who was kind of Iron Man-ish but short, y’know, he had a helmet and some shoulder shield type things.

But what’s interesting is I came back to that a couple of years later, in between the two art schools, and redid the pages. It was when I came back for the summer after my first year of art school. I remember being torn, because even though I had wanted to do comics, I went to a fine art school. I wanted to get a broader art education, and I still wasn’t sure comics—a part of me was still trying to do what was most practical.

There were two young women I got to know a bit at the ad agency, one of whom went to the Portland School of Art. I wanted to be able to get a job where I could make a living, and so I opted for something that was a little less “pipe dream” in terms of going to school.

After the one year at fine art school, though, I went back for the summer to work at the 19

Previous Page: Jack Havey gave this assignment to 18-year-old Lee. “I sat down one day to find a photo of Einstein, a big piece of black illustration board, a box of white Prismacolor pencils, and a note that read, ‘Let’s see what you can do with this, sport.’”

Below: Lee’s first shot at his and pal Howard Downs’ The Enforcers. “A page that should give hope to any aspiring 17year-old.”

The Enforcers ™ and ©2008 Howard Downs and Lee Weeks.

Part 2:

Law and Spirit— An Artist’s Education And I’m not sure anybody around me was equipped to help me if I had asked.

MM: What made you make the leap that you did when you went off to the Portland School of Art and started your formal art education?

MM: What was your experience like when you got there?

LEE: I pretty much knew I was going to go to art school after the accident. I had a sense this is what I’m supposed to do. I was happy about it, and though it would be another 20 years before I began walking with Him, I felt like God had spared me, and I had a sense— albeit a vague one— there was a purpose. I think about halfway through my senior year of high school I made the decision to go to Portland. I put together a portfolio, mostly a bunch of unfinished drawings.

Specifically I remember sketching the potbellied coal stove from our kitchen and a few other things just to have something other than comic pages and portraits in my portfolio.

LEE: Oh, it was incredible. As much as I loved growing up in my tiny town of Hallowell, we had very limited experiences in terms of cultural diversity.

Completely rich in character for what it was, but all of it within a particular bandwidth on the dial.

Portland was an avant garde school with its share of esoteric characters. It was the biggest cultural shift in my life to that point, and there were things going on at home that made it tough. Again, I don’t remember there being anybody around me to sit me aside and say, “This is what to expect.”

There wasn’t on-campus housing. For the first couple months, I tried living all by myself, but I didn’t like that at all. I thought it would be the greatest, being by myself. I think growing up with four brothers and all these friends around, being suddenly alone was not easy. Then around November, there were three guys that lost a fourth roommate. They were looking for somebody to take that fourth spot, and asked me, so I jumped at it. That ended up having its own craziness, but still, there was a lot of fun.

MM: Did you go off to Portland with a sense that you were going to go there and get a formal education, but a commercial career in comics is really what you had in mind?

MM: This had to be an eye-opening experience just artistically, everything you were exposed to, from your roommates to your educators. What was it like?

LEE: No question, Tom, long-term I wanted the comics career. I didn’t know when it was going to happen. I was trying to chase the dream, but be responsible, too, and I knew there were jobs to be had in graphic design, and you could make a living doing that. Honestly, there are many questions that I should have asked, and I didn’t.

LEE: I couldn’t make sense of it at first, very honestly. The focus was entirely abstract, which I knew nothing about. I 20

had some drawing chops for a kid my age, but in class after class, there was no interest in the classical or academic approach—no anatomy, proportion, etc. I didn’t know what to make of it. I remember one day in particular in life drawing, I was nailing this figure, and the teacher just kind of walked by, and the person next to me was working from the same figure and drawing something that, no exaggeration, looked like a crumpled up brown paper bag. There was nothing in it to even remotely suggest he was drawing a human. And she walked past me and stopped at his paper bag drawing and said, “Oh, my, this is marvelous.” She fawned over it, and I became confused, like everyone was in on the joke except me. I hid my interest in comics for the most part. A couple of my roommates were kind of into it, but that was about it, at least for the first semester.

The idea behind the school was the first two years was what they called the foundation program: two years of basically unlearning everything you knew. Instead of being focused on representational ideas, ideas of making something look like something, they wanted to tear that all down, so we would focus on the abstract principles that go into making any picture work, whether it’s a photograph, a drawing, whatever it is... a sculpture. And it’s true, what makes a picture work are its underlying abstract principles, not so much the subject matter. But, I’m not sure I agree with the approach that wipes out all classical instruction during that period.

It should incorporate both. Although I greatly appreciate it now, I certainly didn’t understand it at 19... not initially.

I remember something finally clicking while working on an

assignment for my two-dimensional design class. I was looking at some comics one night, and trying to make a connection, looking at some “Kirby Krackle,” which is that wonderful cosmic effect with all the dots Jack used so often so well. I was looking at the Kirby Krackle and it kind of opened me up a bit. “Oh, I think I kind of get it. Look at these varying shapes and spaces, and repeating forms. That’s really what he’s doing.” And it’s just another thing that makes Kirby so great, among many other things: His drawings work so beautifully abstractly. Turn a page upside-down and, without even knowing what’s going on, there’s all this excitement on the page.

So, I was doing an abstract assignment.

It was just some repeating forms and various sizes and shapes and trying to create tension and stuff—working out the “figure/ground relationship,” and I thought

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Previous Page: 1983 self-portrait in charcoal done from the mirror, at age 20.

Below: Cover pencils for Stan Lee Meets the Thing, complete with Kirby Krackle. “Finally, I get to work with Stan Lee. This cover is a complete ape of FF #51, with Stan playing all the non-Thing roles. I suggested the cover copy, ‘This Stan, This Monster’.”

Fantastic Four, Thing ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

I was stunned at first. I looked around. “They’re talking about—that’s mine, right?” And just like that, a big, giant light bulb turned on over my head, and I can’t tell you how much this helped me the rest of the way. I just put my hand up on my forehead and with relief and a smile I thought, “Ohhhh, now I get it. It’s just a bunch of hooey.”

I realized much of it—though not all—was just gobbledy-gook. It really didn’t have anything to do with anything. So Kirby helped me over the abstract hump and then this other thing relaxed me a bit.

Kirby. The whole time I was doing it, I was thinking of a Negative Zone kind of thing or something. And it came out great. And no one knew! Here’s this totally abstract thing, and they had no idea a funny book unlocked the mystery of it for me.

Later on, I did a big 2-D design assignment in color where we had to fill up a 16" x 12" frame with little halfinch squares of this special colored paper, and create a sense of planes and depth, using just the squares, playing with hue, value, and chroma. We were to just explore, really. And then there’d be a group critique. The critiques intimidated me that first semester. A piece would go up on the wall, and the students and the teachers would talk about it... and I would be lost. They would be talking about man’s struggle against nature, the inner workings of the psyche present in the work... all this stuff they were reading into it. I thought everybody got it and I didn’t know anything, because they would find all these hidden meanings and psychological aspects to these simple little things, and I was clueless. I thought, “Oh, man, I don’t know what’s going on. I have no clue.” That is, until the day when my assignment with the little squares of color was put up for group critique, and everyone started finding all the same lofty things in my assignment, amazing ideas and insights that I supposedly had put in this piece.

MM: You spent a year there. What ultimately made you choose not to go back, and what do you feel you came away from the school with?

LEE: Several things, but here are two key things: the second semester, I remember I really wanted to do some comic art. I started working on stuff. I started incorporating a little of it in some of my assignments, partly being silly because I was fried from all the hours. First semester I had a design teacher named Joe Guertin. In the bathroom of one of the buildings, there was graffiti everywhere— philosophical meanderings of every flavor. During an allnighter one night, I added my work to the wall in the form of a comic book cover featuring Joe as our hero, 22

Flash Guertin, complete with cover copy comprised of inside jokes. A few days later, he came to the door of my class and boomed, “Who’s responsible for the artwork in the bathroom?” And I meekly raised my hand and he called me out with a wave of the hand. I thought I was in trouble, but I went out and he suddenly changed his tone, and he said, “Hey, y’know, that’s pretty good. A friend of mine works in comics. His name is Tom Sutton.” He said, “If you want, I could...”—he made some offer to put me in touch with him or something. It shocked me to no end, that a teacher at this fine art school was encouraging me like he was. I was blown away. And he knew Tom Sutton!

The second thing has to do with my second semester graphic design instructor who was a young girl at the time, Chloe Huggins. One day she heard about my interest in comics, or saw something I did in some work, and I’ll never forget, she said, “Comics is where it’s at.” And I went, “What?

Where it’s at?” And she had quite a reputation already as kind of a hotshot designer, from what I remember. And she just started, “Well, think about all the disciplines in narrative art. There’s figure work, layout, composition, you have type, you have color.”

And I was like, “Yeah!” It made me so excited all over again for the narrative art form.

When I was working back at Whipper’s that summer, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to return to school. That’s when I had the talk with my manager and decided not to go back. And it wasn’t like I was quitting something. I was just going to give things a year to figure out my next move. During that year off it became very clear, because I would get home at midnight, and I’d go to the drawing board for three or four hours and just work on redoing some of those pages from The Enforcers. I revamped the characters visually. And somewhere along the way, you and I began going to conventions, which was also very important. Looking back, it’s more tapestry.

you were responding to at that time, that you were enjoying?

LEE: I’m probably not going to get the dates right. I was still a big FF guy. I think I was going back and doing all the nostalgia tripping and collecting all the things that either I had had, or my older brothers had had at one time when I was younger. And I remember liking—wasn’t that around Spidey #200?

MM: Yes. LEE: That was awesome, I thought, at the time.

MM: At the end of 1981, the beginning of 1982, some kind of funky things were starting to happen in comics. You were seeing books that were not being distributed to the newsstands; they were going just to the comic book stores. Some exciting things were happening. What was the stuff that 23

Previous Page: Lee tried to incorporate Chuck Patton’s advice while doing these two Enforcers pages.

Below: “More often asked to do gritty street type characters, it was such a blast to finally get an FF story to do, complete with wacky, futuristic machinery.”

Enforcers ™ and ©2008 Howard Downs and Lee Weeks.

Fantastic Four ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: I’ll give you the stuff I can remember you talking about and enjoying in that period. Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar.

LEE: That’s right, that’s right, Dreadstar.

Yeah. Was Starslammers around then?

Above: Panel from Daredevil #297. “One of the many things I love about Daredevil is the way he moves.

Sometimes it’s like he lets go of the entire world, yet remains in complete control.

Next Page: “Prior to my going off to Portland School of Art in 1981, Tom Field and I submitted a Sub-Mariner story to Marvel. As is evident from this, my first anatomy lesson was still ahead of me, not happening until after leaving PSA. Daredevil, Sub-Mariner ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Yeah, Walt Simonson’s Starslammers.

LEE: Oh, see, now, I thought that was just phenomenal, that whole idea of the mind link, or the “silver mind,” whatever they called that. I just thought that was brilliant, with the multiple panels. We were seeing some unusual means of telling a story in some of these things. What was Frank doing at the time? He was still doing Daredevil, right?

MM: He was just leaving Daredevil and was getting ready to do the Ronin project over at DC. LEE: Oh, see, Ronin was just huge for me. I was mesmerized by that project.

MM: Just the production of it, even...?

LEE: Yeah, the production of it. It’s neat how you had these industry giants, some of patriarchs of the form, giving their commentary on the back covers of Ronin.

When was Omega Men? MM: That came out after that first convention we went to, because we met the creators there, Keith Giffen. We were both big fans of Gene Colan’s Batman. It seemed 24

like he was sort of revitalized over at DC drawing Batman.

LEE: Right, yeah.

MM: Were you reading Eisner in the Spirit magazine at the time?

LEE: Yes! I was, but I wasn’t real adventurous on my own; I picked up mostly what you guys would recommend. But I do remember there was one story in particular, I mean, all those Eisner stories are just great, but there’s one in particular: Gerhard Shnobble.

MM: Yes. LEE: I just loved that story so much, and was really attached to it. And a couple years later I remember reading an interview with Eisner where I think he said it was his favorite story, or one of his favorite stories, which was cool; it kind of validated my taste, that maybe I had some good instincts for story. When did A Contract with God come out?

MM: Oh, years before. The first edition was in 1978.

LEE: Oh, really? Is that right? Oh, okay.

Well, 1981-82 would have been about the time I would have become aware of it.

When was Warrior magazine?

MM: Warrior was coming out at that point.

That was my first exposure to Alan Moore, and to a lot of those British creators.

continuity of something that you could show to Dick Giordano. And I don’t remember if it was, because he’s DC, you should do DC characters, but that might have entered into it. But I remember talking about that Batman story with you, and then you doing it, three pages.

LEE: Yeah. “V for Vendetta” stuff in there, and “Marvelman.”

MM: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that was just a great period of exposure, looking at stuff like Cerebus coming out of Dave Sim, and you had—

LEE: That’s right, because I did these samples for that convention with Batman trying to get through the city, on his way to something, we assume to solve some crime.

Finally, he breaks down the door of his destination, revealing someone sitting at a drawing table. The man at the table turns around, and it’s Gene Colan. I don’t remember what the punch line was, but it was just a—

LEE: That was one I never got into. I tried several times and could never connect with that. I loved the idea he was doing it—thought it was so very cool—but I just didn’t connect with it. When was Nexus? That was a couple years later?

MM: No, I remember seeing the first issue of Nexus in the fall of ’81, when I was off at school. When it came out, the first three issues were magazine format, and then it became a comic book.

MM: He was thanking Gene for his interpretation of the character, because we were both reading Batman by Gene Colan at the time and really enjoyed it, so this was just a cute way, we thought, of getting that point across. And I think that you probably got the Gene Colan picture off the back of a Stewart the Rat graphic album.

LEE: I thought that was pretty cool.

MM: Yeah. It was just neat stuff to have around. After years of it being the Marvel/DC stranglehold, suddenly there was some pretty interesting stuff out there, compared to what we’d seen.

LEE: I’m sure it was something you provided, because I don’t know where I would have gotten it. I think I also had a two-page Green Lantern going to Burger King thing. Green Lantern came in, placed an order, and used

LEE: And really, Tom, who knew? I mean, you guys had been with it right straight through, but having that gap in the ’70s for me and coming into it just as this stuff was starting—the shops, the independent stuff—I don’t know if I appreciated just how much variety there was.

When you look at the state of things today—I’m not saying there isn’t good stuff, because there’s always some good stuff—but there just doesn’t seem to be the variety.

MM: Let’s talk about early submissions. When we went off to college, we had sent off a Sub-Mariner story to Jim Shooter.

LEE: I still have all those pages, including the splash page I sent with the awful paste-up of Sub-Mariner’s head right in the middle of it. But, yeah, before we went away to school the first time, we had an eight- or ten-page submission and sent it in and got a rejection slip. I did a lot of those pages over at that ad agency. I at least worked on part of them over there. It was a nice first effort, but very crude. It was just nice that they knew we existed.

MM: Yeah, and there we other things that we worked on, some with existing Marvel characters, some making up our own. We toyed with different things. And then I remember—this was 1982—you’d made your mind up you were going to go to this Boston comics convention. DC was having its big nationwide “new talent” search, and you were looking around at what you had for available samples. I think you weren’t happy with “Sub-Mariner” at that point, you had Enforcers, and maybe that wasn’t as current as you liked, so I remember you wanting to do three pages of new 25

his power beam to, I don’t know, reach for the napkins or ketchup. I had a real fondness for Green Lantern. In fact, he’s still one character I’ve never drawn that I’d really like to draw sometime.

MM: What was your mindset going into the Dick Giordano interview, and what came out of it?

Above: Cover rough for Detective Comics #679.

Next Page: Pencils for the cover of Batman Chronicles #7. “I was so excited to work on even a short story with Jerry Ordway, who wrote this one. I asked if he would ink the cover, and he did.”

Batman, Ratcatcher, Superman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

LEE: I don’t remember having specific expectations. I wanted some feedback. I’d always been able to hear criticism from almost anybody and take it to heart. I really believed them and would take them to heart and try to work on them.

Anyway, I was really excited on so many levels. It was an adventure. I had been out of the state I think only one time, and that was to go to a Boston Red Sox game back in ’77. This was ’82, so it was a big trip to the city, and I was really excited on many levels. And, at that point, not going back to school and feeling just free to make choices about my life was exciting, and this was all of that for me.

that’s the one thing I had never heard—not once in my whole life—that I didn’t know how to draw. In fact, it was just the opposite; I was always the kid who could draw at every level, in school. So this was a sledgehammer. And then he mentioned a few other things, and I just took it. I didn’t let on that I was stunned. And then I asked him for some specific things to work on and he told me some things that were wrong, and my sense of perspective, which was true.

And then, at the end, he did find a couple of positive things to say, almost to soften the earlier blow, he did make one or two comments on some things that were working, maybe it was just a figure that looked okay, or something like that. But the experience was devastating. I was crushed. Really crushed... for about three days.

MM: I seem to remember you coming out of it pretty motivated, though. You definitely were going to go back to the drawing board and work on things, and show him otherwise.

LEE: It just turned to motivation, and became a great positive. I really did feel like, well, I got some information, things I needed to work on, and I survived... I lived. It was a great experience, and one I got to remind him of a few years later at a DC Comics Christmas party.

Strangely, at the next show we attended I used the splash page from the Giordano samples to enter an art contest, and I took second place.

MM: So what did Dick Giordano say to you?

MM: That’s right! And I remember a fanzine editor coming up to you and asking you to draw a piece for his magazine, and you rejected him because the rate was too low.

LEE: Oh, wow. That was one of the more important moments in the journey. There were news cameras there, right? They were filming for one of the local network affiliates, weren’t they? Because that’s one of the things that really made it sting even greater.

I believe that, unless I’m mixing it up, Dick went through my pages pretty quickly, and his first remark to me was, “Well, it’s obvious that you don’t know how to draw.” And I say that with great respect and admiration for Dick Giordano. I was stunned, because

LEE: Yeah, probably one of my Jack Havey lessons. One of the things I learned from him in one of his hand-written letters to me, was the importance of valuing your work, and charging enough, because there was something I was helping him out with at the time, and he wanted me to give him a price for my work. I wanted to do it for nothing, and he kind of chastised me. “If you don’t value your work, no one else will.” He was a great encouragement in that regard.

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MM: Can I ask you about a couple other names from that first show we went to?

Like, Dave Cockrum.

Above: “I drew two X-Men pillow case designs solely so my girls, Vaughn and Alysha, could put their heads on Daddy’s drawings at night.”

Next Page: Cover art for Daredevil #285. “You just can’t imagine what it’s like for a penciler to see his work inked by someone like Al Williamson.”

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

LEE: You know, that first show, my overall feeling, with the exception of getting up there with my pages and kind of being on the spot there—I really felt like I was in observation mode. I remember you and Bruce were the ones that were reaching out and interacting with pros, and I was just observing. I don’t remember having a lot to say, and I didn’t know a lot. You guys were very familiar with Dave’s work. The thing that blew me away was, you went up to Dave—and we’re just some hayseeds from Maine, and to me this was a big deal, when you said, “Hey, we’re going to lunch. Want to grab a burger with us?” And when he just said, “Yeah, sure,” I couldn’t believe it! We were going to have lunch with a real professional at a comic con.

MM: So what do we do? We took him across the street to McDonald’s, because that’s all we could afford! [laughter] 28

LEE: And he was pretty happy with it!

Yeah! It was pretty neat. And what an incredibly cool thing that Dave felt comfortable enough to do that with us. Really cool. Didn’t he actually have some Futurians stuff at that point?

MM: Yeah, he was working on the graphic novel. I think he was finishing up the X-Men. He showed us some pages.

LEE: Was Keith Giffen at this show or the next?

MM: Keith Giffen was there. He did a press conference on the Omega Men, he and Roger Slifer.

LEE: I remember Keith, because I got introduced to something new. One, his style was pretty unique, working on Omega Men, from what I was used to seeing. And, two, what was all this blue stuff on his pages? He did everything in blue pencil, which I’d never seen. Now, he may have gone over it eventually in lead, but I remember a lot of blue.

LEE: Boy, that’s weird, isn’t it? Oh, my goodness.

And, if I’m not mistaken, he used a mechanical blue pencil. He was working on pages, so we were watching him.

Also, there’s a name of someone else there who I ended up working with years later. I don’t know if it was this show or the next show. Al Williamson.

MM: By 1983 you’re working, you’re taking some classes, drawing constantly, always working on samples, ideas, your own strips, and then going to shows and meeting professionals. We went to Portland when Bob Layton was there on a signing tour. We went back to Boston a time or two and you met with some other people. That’s just sort of my memory of it, from the outside, it was just all this sort of preparatory work, how to

MM: Al Williamson was there. I think it was the last day of the show, and Howard Chaykin was going to be talking about American Flagg, and we went up to the room, and I remember him being kind of—y’know, he had a reputation of being sort of like a Harlan Ellison, so you wanted to be careful around him. You didn’t want to say something stupid and get called on it.

LEE: Right, right.

MM: In that room, and there were two older guys that were sort of sitting on the other side, and nobody was talking to them. One of them was Fred Fredericks, and the other was Al Williamson. And, to me, anyway— LEE: You’re telling me Fred Fredericks was there, too?! Oh, man. I didn’t know that. Well, I probably knew it back then, but didn’t know who he was.

MM: I didn’t know who he was, but I knew of Al Williamson.

And I did know I wasn’t even supposed to be in the same room with him, I was so intimidated. Because this was EC Al Williamson.

LEE: I probably didn’t even know that, at the time. I think I was aware of some of his Star Wars work, but I don’t know how familiar I was with him, yet.

MM: You spoke with Al Williamson, and Bruce and I didn’t. We were so intimidated. [laughter] LEE: Oh, I do remember that.

MM: But the irony is, within that decade, what were you doing?

You were working with him.

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get in, ways to get in, new ideas to get in, new people to meet to give you a sense of how to get in.

LEE: It’s weird, the little things you remember. I remember reading about Denys Cowan in a trade magazine.

MM: Yeah, about inking.

Above and Right: Figure drawings from 1983, the above in charcoal.

Next Page: 1986 life drawing.

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

LEE: I told him this years later, but there was a pencil drawing that accompanied the article. It had, like, an old Bearcat automobile, and was just so cool-looking—I think it was Doc Savage. But it was just a beautiful pencil rendering. And I mentioned to him years later, on a couple of occasions, how much that inspired me. And he was only a 19-yearold kid at the time, I think. So, yeah, you’d see something like that in a trade magazine, all of those things, and I just hung onto all of it. Everything was kind of being filed away as either motivation or some form of instruction, some little bit of information I could incorporate into what I was trying to do.

I remember a couple things about that Bob Layton visit to the local comic shop. One, we got there late, after he’d finished reviewing portfolios. And he kind of let us know we missed it, but then looked at me and very good-naturedly said, “But you’re a big guy, and I don’t know if I want to say no to you.” [Tom laughs] So he took a look at it and said some nice things. I don’t even remember what the critique was. What I do remember is, I think he’s the first one that mentioned the book “Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth” by Andrew Loomis.

The other thing I remember is a comment Bob made about storytelling. I wanted some idea, what are the rules? I was looking for a set of rules to know when to come in for a close-up, how do you know how to—? And he said, “The best thing I can tell you is: Just think drama, imagine yourself watching a movie. What do you want to see? It’s just really letting your mind explore the possibilities and just think in terms of drama all the time.”

There was probably something more specific to it, but it was like, “Okay.” Instead of a million different rules, he was suggesting an over-arching mindset, and then learn some rules later that I could plug into that. Very simple idea, but the best ideas usually are simple. It was very helpful to me.

Did I ever tell you the story about when I was 14 or 15 and my dad tried to get me to look at an old drawing book he had?

MM: No. LEE: I was 14, 15, somewhere in my teens. My dad was a master craftsman, a chair maker whose mother, my grandmother, was my first art teacher. She gave me lessons for, I don’t know, a few months, a year; she was self-taught. That 30

LEE: Yeah, that’s right! And so was Paul Smith! They were just sitting right around the corner from each other. And across from them was George Pratt and Kent Williams.

They were just kids getting out of Pratt Institute.

was the extent of my art lessons, really, other than art class in high school. And although this was before getting back into comics, I still drew all the time—a lot of sports figures and portraits and some super-hero stuff, too. He opened up this book published in 1943 that had lots of diagrams and rules and things of how to draw people in perspective. But I guess because it wasn’t shiny as a comic, I didn’t get too excited. I didn’t warm up to it, didn’t see how it might be helpful to what I wanted to do. This is before the car accident, before getting serious about art.

I also remember the book because it had a lot of figures in it; in the second part of the book there were very realistic figure renderings. And I just didn’t put any stock in what he was showing me, but he gave me the book, and I just let it sit there. I didn’t look at it much at all. Then, years later Bob Layton tells me about another book, Andrew Loomis’ Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth. I ordered a copy, and I open it up and realized, “Wait a second. This looks awfully familiar.” And I went back to my parents’ house to find that old book. Only it wasn’t another book. It was the same book... the same book. There had been this treasure trove of information within my reach the whole time. I had owned it for several years and didn’t even know it. And, in fact, I think the one that my dad gave me was either a first or second printing, and those first printings—I checked a few years back, because the book’s out of print now in its original format—go for like, a few hundred bucks. It’s a tremendous book on figure drawing, the rules of construction, how to place your figures into the picture, perspective, etc. Real important, no-nonsense, nuts and bolts stuff. Just a tremendous book.

MM: What I remember about Gil Kane is walking up, and a kid that you ultimately went to Kubert with, I think, was trying to compliment Kane.

Kane at the time was doing Sword of the Atom, he was drawing Superman in Action, really doing some stuff that got our attention. And I remember the kid had a copy of Captain Victory or something by Jack Kirby, and he was saying, “You’re better than Jack Kirby. Jack Kirby cheats.” And Kane just lit into the kid.

LEE: I do remember the incident, I’m just not sure who it was. What I remember, and I kick myself for only buying two of them, Gil had these stacks of 81/2" x 11" original roughs, really tight roughs he would then blow up and I guess lightbox to a finished page. I bought a Green Lantern and a Superman.

One is a splash, and the other, I think is a cover. And they were only five dollars apiece. Oh, if only I had a little bit of understanding of what I was looking at back then, I would have bought 50 to a 100 of them!! And kept them with my Loomis book!

MM: But the Don Perlin and the Chuck Patton conversations, I remember you coming away really impressed by both of those men. Now, a fan would say, Chuck Patton and Don Perlin, not the most dynamic artists of their day, but they really left impressions with you. Why was that?

LEE: Well, one, they just took time. They were kind. An interesting thing about the Don Perlin meeting—something I used to hear a lot was that people always thought I was a lot older than I really was. And I remember speaking to Don Perlin, showing him my pages. He was, y’know, “They’re okay. They’re not bad.” About ten minutes in, he wasn’t that engaged. He looked at me and he said, “How old are you, by the way?” I said, “20,” and just like that, he seemed to perk up. I think he’d thought I was much older than I was, but when he saw that I was 20, oh, he was more enthusiastic.

I was just fascinated with looking at any original art. I just wanted to see the process, I wanted to see a sketch, the

MM: We went to what seemed to me to be a pretty big show in Boston in March, April of 1983, and, again, the professional circle just grew, because you got exposed to more people. Don Perlin, Chuck Patton—I think you particularly had a good time with them. Gil Kane was there, I remember.

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Below: Page from The Enforcers. “I was able to incorporate my affinity for doing likenesses into this page from the summer of ’83.”

Next Page: Pencils for Captain America Vol. 4 #18, page 15—complete with swoosh marks.

The Enforcers ™ and ©2008 Howard Downs and Lee Weeks.

Captain America ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

lettering, the inking, any stage of the process I could just look and try to see what it was that they’re doing. I bought a page from him, an Iron Man page, and I don’t think it was more than 20 dollars. And he wrote on it, “To Lee: See you at Marvel. Don Perlin.”

MM: And how many years later did that come true?

LEE: Not many. Not many years later. At the time, because you’re on the journey, it seems like a long time. Every day seems like you’re venturing into uncharted waters. But I remember going into his office at Marvel my first couple years there. I reintroduced myself, and he vaguely remembered me. I said, “I don’t know if

you know this, but you wrote on the page I bought from you,” I reminded him of it, “‘See you at Marvel.’ And I’m here.”

And then, of course, with Chuck, I don’t know what all I was showing him for pages then. I remember him talking a lot about an upcoming project. He was pretty excited.

MM: He was drawing Justice League, wasn’t he?

LEE: He was working on Justice League, I think. But there was a project he was touting—I’m not going to remember his name.

Trevor von Eeden?

MM: Oh, right, right, right. He was doing Thriller.

LEE: Right, and Chuck was like, “This guy’s going to blow people away, he’s got so much talent.” And just hearing about new names and projects, and meeting these guys, it was all so exciting. And, again, he took the time, and I was very, very grateful.

I think they took the time partly because they knew I was sincerely interested in learning how to do it, learning how to do it right. And Chuck in particular, I don’t remember how this happened—I think he just offered it—but he gave me his address so I could write to him. And that’s when my samples just hit a whole new level. He shared some really great nuts-and-bolts stuff about establishing shots, and too much similarity in the size of figures in my pages.

Well, the next batch of pages I worked on, I went back, “What can I do?” So I went back to The Enforcers and reworked them, and I recast everything a little bit, changed the sex of one of the characters, and I worked on those at night after work. One of the pages is a big splash, it’s got some insets, a whole bunch of world leaders with a nuclear blast going off behind them, Reagan, Thatcher, Menachem Begin, Andropov from Russia. And after I did those for a few months, I sent Chuck copies with a letter. I remember getting that next letter from him and being so juiced.

MM: At that point, we were old pros at meeting pros, or so we felt, and so, looking around, who’s going to be here? Who can we see? And I remember going with you to the hotel lobby because you heard

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that John Romita, Jr. was going to be there, and you wanted to find him. And we get there and we find out that he’s not coming to the show after all. But, because hotels would give out this information at the time, we did find out where another guest was staying.

LEE: Oh my goodness, I forgot about this.

MM: Care to recount that one? [laughs] LEE: Was it John Byrne? And I think this is before—because John held a seminar, a drawing class. I don’t know which happened first, if we went on the adventure first, or if I took the class first.

MM: No, the adventure. The first night.

LEE: It was the first night? And, boy, I just walked right up and knocked on the door of the hotel room, and, of all people to answer the door, Chris Claremont answered the door.

MM: And you had your portfolio and said, “Excuse me, I’m looking for Mr. John Byrne.”

LEE: Did I really do that?

MM: Yeah, and Claremont said, “Well, I’m sorry, he’s not here.” And you said, “Yes, he is, he’s right behind you,” and you pointed to him.

LEE: [laughs] I do remember that! Yeah, and he kind of said, “Yeah, well....” And I don’t blame him. I mean, that was a little beyond bold. because here’s Byrne talking about some behind-thescenes stuff, which is always cool to hear from the outside, and it had to do with those issues of Cap with Baron Blood. At the end of that story, Cap wrestles Blood down to the ground, and he raises his shield with both hands like he’s going to use it to chop the baron’s head off, which he does. But for the panel that contains the actual downstroke, the camera zooms to the shadow of Cap and his shield up on the wall, and we see the finishing deathstroke in shadows with swoosh marks trailing behind—great use of shadows to tell the story. So John says when Joe saw that particular page, he was in a little bit of a panic. And John may have been exaggerating, but for the point of the story, it made it more entertaining. Someone asked Joe, “What’s wrong?” Joe answered, “Look what he’s done, he’s drawn swoosh marks on the

MM: I think they were heading out for dinner at the time, but it might be that he said then, “I’m giving this class tomorrow or the next day, why don’t you show up at that?” That might have been what happened.

LEE: John shared a few things in that class about drawing that stayed with me, but I also remember a really funny story he told, that I’d love to tell. And it was about an inker that he—I hope it’s okay to tell the story, because it’s not meant to be demeaning at all. But some of my favorite comics by John Byrne were those issues of Captain America he and Roger Stern did, with Baron Blood.

Oh, man, I thought that stuff was just phenomenal. So John tells this story about Joe Rubinstein, who was just a tremendous inker. For me, it was a great collaboration.

So John’s talking and I was engaged on a couple levels, 33

shadow.” Because John wanted to convey this violent act through the use of a shadow... and he put swoosh marks. Today many would just do it very in your face.

MM: Or it’d be a two-page spread.

Below: “Two assignments from my year at the Joe Kubert School— the first for Figure Drawing with Ben Ruiz, the other my very first Object Drawing assignment for Jose Delbo, whose Boston accent was liked by everyone.”

Above: Another assignment for Jose, this one a Wonder Woman page.

Wonder Woman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics..

LEE: Yeah, exactly. So he has this shadow going down with the swoosh marks behind it. And Joe Rubinstein was a little freaked out, saying, “Shadows don’t have swoosh marks! Look at it, he’s drawn swoosh marks on shadows. Shadows don’t have swoosh marks!” Which is right... they don’t. But then John tells us, “So I turned to Joe and I said, ‘Joe,’” and he begins quickly moving his hand back and forth as he says, “Look at my hand, Joe.” He said, “Nothing has swoosh marks.” [laughter] Before John said that, I’m thinking, “Yeah, Joe’s right.

Shadows don’t have swoosh marks.” Part of what’s funny about it is we’ve all bought into the language of the comics medium and we take for granted things like swoosh marks, when nothing has swoosh marks.

MM: In the spring of ’83, you really got serious about the Joe Kubert School. What was the process that led you to the Kubert School and really made you take the initiative to getting in there?

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LEE: Through the fall and winter—’82 into ’83—I worked at Whippers’. I did more samples and we went on our adventures to Boston, and took weekly trips to Pendragon Comics on Friday nights.

I don’t remember when exactly I decided to go to JKS, but all these experiences made me more sure I was on the right path.

I called and spoke to someone at the school, and they told me I could come down and visit anytime. I grabbed a neighborhood pal, and we drove down from Maine, starting at 5:30 in the morning. I arrived at the school—it was in a threestory mansion in the middle of Dover, New Jersey—but, I’d picked a bad day, there was nobody to show me around. The secretary said, “Well, I could show you where they eat and the library, because nobody’s in there.” So I basically got a two-minute tour of the basement. [Tom laughs] Afterward, I went to the Traveler’s Diner just down the street, had lunch, and then said, “All right, let’s go.” And we got in the car and drove the eight-and-a-half hours back home. I think I actually stopped in Portland because my brother was living in Portland,

and I spent the night there. I was a bit frustrated, but any frustrations were drowned out by the fact I’d just been at a school filled with guys doing what I wanted to do, being taught by pros. I couldn’t wait to get back there.

MM: Oh, wow. So you moved out of Augusta and down to Dover, I’m going to say August of ’83.

LEE: Yeah. There were roughly 70 students in my class, the largest first year class they’d ever had. And of the 70, some who were from other countries, there were three of us coming from Maine: myself, Mike Loring, and Eric Talbot. Eric later worked with Kevin Eastman, and I heard Mike had his own business a few years after we left. They were both from the Portland area.

MM: The three of you ended up rooming together, didn’t you?

LEE: That’s right. I contacted them, and we decided to room together. It was pretty tight quarters, the three of us renting the upstairs of a split-level on Fifth Street, just off a very steep hill in Dover.

MM: Given your experience at the Portland School of Art, what was it like going back into formal education at Kubert? How do you compare them?

LEE: I was so excited to be going where, whereas the Portland School of Art was a lot of “unlearning” in that abstract-heavy foundation program with no room for more classical stuff, this was going to be much different. Between getting the Andrew Loomis book and a few other things, learning about the rules of drawing, about proportion, about some of the academic ideas behind constructing a picture and drawing a figure proportionately from any angle, whether he’s the size of a postage stamp, a splash page, or bigger, I was looking forward to that, and to learning about storytelling. To learn concrete rules. I was so energized. It felt like there was a laser beam focus to my life’s direction at the time. I just wanted to learn everything I could as fast as I could. I felt like I was getting a late start.

I remember being in a second-floor room with Joe coming in, giving us our first assignments, and then Jose Delbo giving us our first object drawing assignment. I loved it. Just a real simple assignment comprised of taking ten or 20 everyday objects and breaking them down into their basic geometric forms. To this day, whenever I have the opportunity to teach or do a workshop, I always tell the students, if you can draw these half a dozen or so basic forms, you can draw anything, because anything can be broken down into a small number of geometric forms, a cone shape, a sphere, a square, cube, a pyramid, the cylinder—everything is built out of those.

LEE: All of them had something to offer, but I had a special affinity for two or three. Jose Delbo was my favorite.

I loved him, and I’m a little embarrassed I haven’t stayed in touch with him. I looked him up recently on the Internet and saw he runs a cartooning camp in Boca Raton, Florida. I’d heard he befriended Will Eisner the last years of Will’s life. Jose was a tremendous teacher, nutsand-bolts, really inspired me, and an underappreciated talent. He used to draw Wonder Woman and Superman.

When he came up from Argentina in the ’60s, he had to conform his style to fit the company look. Man, he could draw horses—he loved Westerns. Since I was young, I’ve always seemed to gravitate to father figures, mentors, coaches, and I consider him one.

The first teacher I wrote home about, though, was Tex Blaisdell. He was a real character. Tex, from what I understand, was the first person Hal Foster ever allowed to work on his own originals. He worked with Leonard Starr on Little Orphan Annie, I believe.

Ben Ruiz was a teacher who, to my knowledge, had very few comics credits. I believe he’d been a student at the school in one of its first years. He was an older gentleman, around 60, and he taught figure drawing. The figure drawing I had at the Portland School of Art was

MM: You mentioned Joe and Jose. Who were your memorable instructors at Kubert?

35

Above: More Kubert School artwork.

Next Page: Kubert School phenom, Fred Fassberger.

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

more free, about observation and seeing, which is incredibly valuable. Learning to see is the most important thing in drawing.

If you can’t see something, you can’t draw it. Ben had a Burne Hogarth approach— construction, proportions, the rules. I find a parallel to the two approaches in my Christian faith. Whereas the old covenant of The Bible was living by the law—rules— the new is a covenant lived in the Spirit.

And that life in the Spirit actually fulfills the law, while not being under it. While I studied to learn those rules of figure drawing, I do not draw by the rules in my work, drawing instead now more by the spirit— or instinct—and using the rules to get me back on track when I’m off. The figure shouldn’t violate the rules, but tediously constructing every figure by those rules would sap the life, the spirit, from them.

Something that used to drive students nuts about Ben is he would go off on these tangents, start talking about what he was drawing, but then drift off into a seemingly 36

wild series of philosophical tangents that could last a half-hour or more—all the while drawing with a thin brown cigar in his hand or mouth—and you’d be like, “Where is he going with this?” I don’t ever remember a time, however, where he didn’t complete the circle, making you realize he knew exactly where he was going the whole time. It wasn’t nonsensical. There were some guys—and some of this was youth—that just wanted the information; they didn’t want what was behind it. But you get dead information that way. I wanted to know why he was thinking what he was thinking, and I was interested in that. And there were a few of us that were. He also would jump all over you if you said something was “good.” “What is good?” he would ask. He expected something more thoughtful. I loved Ben. My lettering teacher was Hy Eisman, who was also an excellent artist. I was a horrible letterer. I was terrible, terrible, terrible.

And yet, in that year with him, I went from being about the worst letter to being pretty

guess by instinct; I try to draw the figure by feel, kind of from muscle memory.” You learn the rules, but you don’t want to be slavishly constructing that figure on the page.

You want it to kind of come to life. And sometimes—and Joe Kubert’s the perfect example of this—it’s right to make something wrong in your drawing. It works better to do something wrong. There are things you can isolate in a Joe Kubert drawing and go, “Well, that’s wrong, but if it were right, it wouldn’t look right.” Sometimes when something’s too right it loses a little bit of life, and it’s those things that stretch and pull some of the.... There’s a great picture, a cover he did with a guy on a horse up on its hind legs, and there was an extra segment in the horse’s front legs. But, I’m telling you, it looked right, and probably would have suffered had it been exactingly accurate. The thing is—and, as a writer, you know this, too—breaking the rules is okay once you know the rules.

good. But also with Hy, and in general, some of the most important stuff I learned from these men I learned after class. I learned because I would bug them, really. I would bug them for extra gems. I was always looking for another answer to something. And I remember he taught me a couple things about drawing that have stayed with me forever. I think he was the first one to emphasize the importance of silhouette to me. Not that you’re always going to draw something in a black silhouette, but when you draw a figure, if it were a silhouette, would it be clear? Because, if it works as a clear silhouette, you’ve probably got a good pose. If the silhouette isn’t good, maybe the pose isn’t. I think he’s also the one who said an actual silhouette on a page is a good thing, and he’s right. That was a fantastic tip from Hy. A silhouette can act as a visual comma in a page where there’s otherwise a lot going on—a lot of lines or grays. It’s a chance for the reader to catch their breath and can add some good black balance to a page.

Ben and Tex have died. Jose’s in Florida. Hy is still teaching. He’s got to be in his late 70s. And Stan Kaye, who was my humor teacher, he was good. And I had Joe for a semester. He was my narrative art teacher. There are a some basic principles—establishing shot, close-up, two-shot, 180º rule, etc.—and then it’s a matter of figuring out timing. There’s so much more gut instinct than anything else involved in storytelling.

MM: You spoke about some of your memorable instructors. Who were some of your memorable classmates?

LEE: Again, different ones for different reasons. Right off the bat, the classmate that has remained a friend, other than there was a two-year period there where we kind of lost touch with one another, Alec Stevens and I became friends more after the school year ended.

MM: Do you think it helps that you had been out of school for a couple of years, you’d had some educational experience, you’d lived independently on your own for a while?

MM: And you roomed together.

LEE: Yeah, just out of school for about a year. And then he moved out, and we were out of touch for a few years, but we speak all the time, now. He’s a really close friend. Back then, we went to school in the mansion, and the school was growing. The year I was there we had to do split shifts.

The second- and third-year classes, being smaller, shared the morning shift. First-year went from 2:00-7:00 p.m., which was weird. There were things about it that were hard, like the three of us roommates living in one big room, with our drawing tables and our beds... and the hours.

There was a good amount of dysfunction with guys who simply read comics back then, let alone those who wanted to draw them. One day Jack Pollock had his knitted hat and coat on in class, and he was painting the top of his head with rubber cement. Once he finished, he said, “Hey, everybody, look!” We looked and he was holding a lighter up, and he says, “I’m the Human Torch!

Flame on!” And he lit the top of his head on fire and flames began shooting off his head.

LEE: Yes to all of that, Tom. I feel blessed to have had all the experiences—and both schools, y’know, the abstract, less grounded in rules approach to drawing, and then the very grounded in rules approach, because each without the other lacks something. I could see it in Burne Hogarth, that there’s a stiffness in it, lacking a bit of life.

But when you incorporate something that’s a little bit freer in approach, yet still grounded in the rules, you get something more like John Buscema. In his book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, he would just build something up in a scribble. And I’m just thankful that I got both. In fact, Ben made me feel pretty good near the year’s end.

He came in while I was working on something in between classes and looked over my shoulder while I was roughing figures in. In his very Ben way, he asked, “How do you do that?” And I got embarrassed. My teacher wanted to know my process. I explained it like, “Well, I 37

Right: Kubert School alumnus and instructor, Mike Chen.

Below: Two of Lee’s Kubert roomies, Eric Talbot and Max. “Eric and a third roommate, Mike Loring, were also Mainers. As of the date of this book, Max still refuses to reveal his state of origin... the weasel.

Next Page: A page from early summer ’84 for a story I wrote. Hard to believe the same guy who lettered this page also did those Enforcer pages just a couple years earlier.”

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

MM: The Kubert brothers were there, but they weren’t in your class, right?

LEE: That’s right. I actually befriended a few guys in the third year. One in particular, who I still think is possibly the single most gifted artist I’ve ever known, Fred Fassberger, went there right out of high school as a 17-year-old. I don’t think I’ve ever seen his work in print. He was better than all of us—it wasn’t close, really. He was unbelievably good, but he had some other things he wanted to do, and he went off and did those. He does a lot of caricature work. But he could do anything.

There are assignments we all did as students we may have thought at the time were good, but when you go back and revisit them, you realize, “Boy, that’s not as good as I thought.” There’s a lot of stuff like that. The promise is there, but it’s just not as good as once thought. The third-year class that year had an assignment where they were to do an homage to an earlier artist, and one of the Kuberts—Andy, I think, did Buscema. Adam may have done Moebius.

Ron Wagner, who was also third-year that year, did Russ Heath and did a pretty good job. But I saw a few of them years later, and you see they are not quite what you remembered, but certainly all pretty striking to a first-year guy. You see these guys working with professional tools, and learning how to do it as a professional, so they were all impressive. But there was one in particular we would just stare at and drool over. The teachers stared at it and drooled over it.

That was Fred’s. He did a two-page Wally Wood homage, and it was an outer space thing, with a rocket and an astronaut. It was so... it was as good as Wood could do doing Wood. And I got a chance to see that probably 15 years later, somewhere in the ’90s, I think hanging in Mike Chen’s office at the school. And I shook my head; I couldn’t believe it, but it was as good or better than I remembered it.

He was honestly at that kind of a level.

MM: If you had such a great experience there and learned so much, why just the one year?

LEE: Well, it wasn’t a great experience in every way. There were a lot of wonderful things about the year, but I had a lot of difficulty with it, as well. I didn’t know how to have balance in my life, and the living condition wasn’t great— the three of us cramped together like that. And we even had pets. We had rats and....

MM: I remember a ferret.

LEE: Max the ferret. I woke up once to find the ferret grabbing the fold of flesh just above my outer nostril between his teeth... and it wouldn’t let go. I woke up thinking I was in a horror movie.

MM: And you didn’t want to go back for a second year of that?

LEE: [laughs] No, but here’s another thing: Last night I was talking to Alec Stevens and told him something you reminded me of in these talks—that I’d met Al Williamson at that convention. “You never told me that!”

38

time that I thought could have been done a little differently, it would have been—there are just so many different disciplines within a single comic page, so many problems to solve, that a single page is actually a huge assignment. I didn’t know how to prioritize assignments.

Shortly after I left the school I developed some bad habits of—I learned if you flip a drawing over, you can see its imperfections more clearly. Right-handed people tend to draw a right-handed face. Left-handed, you tend to draw a left-handed face, unless you turn the page around and you’re using the same stroke to do the opposite side. I got into this habit of doing tracings and flipping stuff over, then flipping it back, then over again, maniacally, obsessively. And it got to the point where a few months after I left the school, I did samples and went in, and they told me I was ready at Marvel—even gave me an assignment. The editor was great, took me out and introduced me to a few editors. But when I left, I just dried up. The only time in my entire life I can remember this happening, but there was a several-month period where I didn’t draw. I couldn’t draw. It was just gone.

he said. He was surprised, because he thought the first time I ever met Al Williamson was together with him during that year at Kubert. We looked up Al, because we knew he lived in the Pocono area in Pennsylvania, within a couple hours of the Kubert School. Alec got the information, and I called him. “We’re a couple of punk kids going to the Kubert School and we’d really like to come up and visit your studio,” and da-da-da, to which Al responded, “Suuuure!” I think he even said it like that. He invited us to come up, and we did the drive up to Honesdale, and got to see—wow. I mean, wow. That’s probably one of the real highlights of that year, that decade.

MM: It’s got to be neat looking at Alex Raymond’s work in his house.

LEE: Yeah, I mean, it was more than enough to see Al Williamson’s work, but to see his board, where he worked, and he had a guy, Ed King. He lettered for Al, and had another board set up in his studio. And, yes, Al has one of the greatest collections of Alex Raymond’s work, probably the quintessential collection. He also had Hal Foster, Jose Luis Salinas, and Noel Sickles. Actually, the Noel Sickles I think was later, when I went up there to visit. I think the Sickles originals were Bret Blevins’, who shared the studio with Al a few years later.

But it was a phenomenal experience. We went out to lunch with him. And we went up and visited him again several months later. What’s weird is, one of the biggest reasons I didn’t go back after that until I began working with him a few years later was something he said just as we were leaving that second visit; “Next time you come up, I’ll give you an X-9 original.” One of the strips he did, he was going to give us an original! But I didn’t want him to think I was coming back just to get something, so I kept putting it off. But, it wasn’t too, too many years that we were talking and....

MM: And working with him.

LEE: Right, we were working together. That would have been just five years later, five-and-a-half years later, that we ended up working together. Amazing.

MM: So, ultimately, why didn’t you go back to Kubert for another year?

LEE: I couldn’t handle it. I burnt out. I was too intense, as usual. Like I said, no sense of balance— always restless. I was too driven, too obsessed, that sometimes I would be up 48 hours, maybe sleeping an hour or two in that whole time. I remember a couple of times doing two consecutive all-nighters with just a nap, and I was just fried. By the end of the year, I was utterly burnt out. If there was anything at that 39

Part 3:

Breaking In...

MM: How did you make the transition into drawing professionally? Marvel had you do that inventory Vision story that, as I recall, they gave to lots of people because it was challenging.

but I remember you being in Rockaway or Dover, New Jersey, in the area, and working, and sort of getting back into drawing, but nothing really taking off until the following summer.

LEE: Yes, I don’t think it was lots, but there were a handful of people it was given to, and actually that was right after the school year at the Kubert School. I went to Marvel and showed Mark Gruenwald samples. I had redone a couple of Nick Fury pages from a Bruce Canwell idea I had originally drawn before going off to school. I redrew a scene I had done a year or so earlier, and took those pages in as my samples. And, really, they weren’t that good. It wasn’t the best stuff I had done at the time, but I remember Gruenwald thought I was ready and gave me the sixpage Vision story—a story I would still find difficult to draw today, because the action pretty much all takes place inside a plane, in a confined area, and there were difficult storytelling challenges: a lot of panels and a very confined setting. I had a hard time finishing the pages as I was just burnt out from the very intense school year. I did finish and took them in, and Grueny said, y’know, “This guy’s ready.”

He took me around and introduced me to a few other editors. All I had to do was push a little bit and I would have been working then, but instead I disappeared for a year. There were a few things going on, but the gist was, for the only time in my life, I was having a hard time drawing—getting past the blank white page.

LEE: Right. In fact, I think I tried something else that didn’t work out. I was running, really. I was really just running from myself and God—a theme of much of my old life. Eventually, I met a person by chance, quoteunquote—I don’t believe in chance—at a gas station, who was looking for a job, and I pointed him to all the “help wanted” signs. A couple months later, I was working for him at the little 7-11.

It seems like such a small and quaint experience, but it really was one of the most important years of my life. It was a nice break, a nice breather—call it a silhouette in my life up to that point.

MM: Well, that’s interesting.

What recharged you, what rebuilt you so that, in the middle of 1985, you could start aggressively pursuing your career goals and having some success?

LEE: I read a couple of books that were helpful. I was in a pretty low place, and I read a couple of books, and this friendship built up with my friend and manager, Dean Cohen, and a lot of conversations about God and just purpose in life, and our being here for a reason. I remember reading a book by a guy who was a sales trainer and considered a top motivational speaker. I was struck by the first two or three pages where he talked about the most important thing in his life, which is his personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That impacted me—obviously, as I still remember it.

MM: Okay. What happened? I sort of remember then you going to work at 7-11. I don’t know if it was immediate, 40

ate anthology stuff. We came up with some science fiction and horror ideas for Eclipse. I know we also thought a Conan story would be a good idea, because Marvel was publishing the Savage Sword of Conan. They were using new creators, and they were looking for opportunities for new creators. And so we came up with a Conan story. And we would be at my parents’ house, and you were the only one who had the temerity to get on the phone and call up the editor, Larry Hama, to ask about submitting a story. [laughs] LEE: Oh, I totally forgot about that.

MM: Do you remember his reaction?

MM: So talk about 1985. What got you back into drawing? What did you focus on, and what was your big break?

LEE: You’ll probably be able to help with the timeline. After not drawing for months, I got the itch while working in the store. I just started drawing with felt pens, ballpoint pens, and stuff, on brown paper bags for people at the 7-11, and later graduated to cocktail napkins at diners. And I got excited about drawing again. It still was what I wanted to do, and I believed it was what I was supposed to be doing. And, if I’m not mistaken, I think I contacted you about it. Does that sound right?

MM: It does, because I was freshly out of school at the time and looking around for writing opportunities, and it seemed natural—“Let’s put some samples together, a complete package.” There were lots of options out there. Eclipse Comics had just picked up or revived some of the titles that Pacific was doing, as anthologies, and it just seemed a natural. Anthologies, we can cre-

LEE: I think I shared with him what had happened with Gruenwald. And, without going all into it, he just told me I wasn’t ready. And I thought it was kind of funny that he could tell me I wasn’t ready when I was up in Maine and he had never seen any of my drawings.

MM: And around that time we were doing the Eclipse stuff. Did you draw the entire story and then did we send in the entire package, like, penciled and scripted, or did we send in a proposal?

LEE: For Conan?

MM: No, no, no, for the Eclipse piece that we did, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.”

LEE: Oh. What I remember is taking your story—I was convinced it would show a lack of confidence to pencil, ink, and letter the 41

Previous Page and Left: Lee’s first work for Marvel, a Vision six-page try-out story. “The late Mark Gruenwald gave me this paying assignment, calling it the ‘earn while you learn’ plan.

The story was titled, ‘Double Vision,’ and was given to a few artists who Marvel thought were just about ready.

However, I was on the verge of burnout.

Shortly after drawing this, I put the pencil down for several months... the only such period in my life.”

Below: Napkin sketch of Dracula and an eye.

Vision ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

entire thing. So I broke the whole thing down with layouts, penciled two of the pages—this is what I remember, anyway— and then inked and lettered one of those, so they had a sample of pencils, and a sample of inks and letters, and then you submitted the full script.

MM: That sounds right. I’m pretty sure that you got a call afterwards from cat yronwode, saying, “We’d like to use this.”

LEE: Yeah, I don’t remember the phone call exactly, but I do remember speaking with her. She was very encouraging. Yeah, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk,” Tales of Terror #5, right?

in that experience, that it was our story, and that we put it together. It originated with us. Such a different experience than being a hired gun on a project, but this was really something so special, being part of the pitching, the selling your idea, something I’ve only experienced a few times, and doing it with a friend.

MM: I believe that’s correct.

LEE: Yeah. That was huge. What a tremendous experience that was.

MM: Things sort of took off with Eclipse after that. You got a lot more work after that. How did that come about, and what did you work on?

MM: So we had our first story published, and for people who haven’t seen it, it was vaguely inspired by the car accident that you had—a couple friends out driving— except this time the drivers of the car were drunk, got into an accident, and it becomes a Twilight Zone/EC horror story from there. But it was huge for us, and I still have a copy of that contract signed by Dean Mullaney, which was a big deal. People were giving us contracts to work on comic books professionally!

LEE: Yes, I guess the next thing I did was a Bruce Jones story, “Standard Procedure.” It was a short story for the sister book to Tales of Terror. What did they call it, Alien Encounters? And there was also a single-page humor strip, after which they asked me to do a regular bi-weekly series. They were experimenting with a couple of titles: Airboy and whatever the name of mine was.

LEE: And there’s something that will be forever unique 42

MM: The New Wave.

LEE: The New Wave, there we go. I did that for over a year, a year-and-a-half? And a few other things.

MM: What was the premise with New Wave? The writer was Mindy Newell, but was that a property that was created by Eclipse, or was it created by Mindy?

LEE: I think it was Mindy’s, but I’m not positive.

MM: And it was young teen super-heroes, typical stuff of the day?

LEE: Yeah, but I don’t remember a lot of it.

MM: What are your impressions of your work at the time?

LEE: I certainly learned a lot. It was hard.

Working from full scripts was not easy for me. There were a lot of characters, a lot of cross balloons, trying to make it all work so that the word balloons didn’t cross up. I

remember it being kind of hard. But I also remember certain moments where things would click in my drawing. That was where I became more comfortable with my drawing, especially of interiors and perspective. I didn’t have to really think about it and be as conscious of it. I actually can say there was a particular page where it seemed all of a sudden I was able to move pieces of furniture around, draw them at any angle, have objects with different vanishing points all look like they’re on the same flat plane. It’s not an easy thing to master. I gained a comfortability with many of the fundamentals I had learned but hadn’t yet mastered. And it was really just from drawing pages every day. That’s all it was. It’s a muscle memory thing, and each time you see that you do something wrong, you do it a little less wrong the next time. I spoke with someone recently about Chuck Jones, I think it’s a Chuck Jones quote, that everybody has

Previous Page: Rough and finished inks for the payoff page in, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk,” written by Tom Field. “Professionally speaking, this job is still at the very top of all my experiences, and not just for the obvious reason of it being my first real gig.

It was pretty special to break in working with my friend—doing a story that we generated.”

Left: A page from the biweekly (!) Eclipse series, New Wave, and a sketch of one of the book’s characters, Dot. All characters ™ and ©2008 respective owners.

Below: “Tom and I pitched an on-going single-page gag to run in Eclipse’s two sister anthology books. Only one saw print. In a strange twist, I wrote it, while Tom drew the layouts.”

Next Page: Cover art for Justice #28. “Someone needs to tell John Tensen that mercy and grace are preferable to justice. Too much anger.”

Justice ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Alien Encounters ™ and ©2008 respective owner.

100,000 bad drawings in them, and the more you draw, the closer you are to getting all your bad ones out. There’s really no secret to this, except you just do it. You do it, and you do a lot of it, and eventually the bad gets filtered out, and the better starts to make its way in.

MM: What was it like, the discipline of being on a regular book and having these bi-weekly deadlines?

LEE: Brutal. Absolutely brutal. I really could have used some mentoring back then. That was really crazy for me to jump right into after doing two little stories—a bi-weekly deadline schedule. In fact, going

right from that and into the first two or three years at Marvel, it was all one kind of thing. After those first couple jobs, jumping into that regular monthly grind may have been a mistake. I mean, it all gets worked out, so in that way it’s not a mistake, but just if—I don’t live in terms of regrets, but if I found somebody else that was in that situation today, and I had a chance to mentor or counsel him or her, I would probably counsel against doing it that way. It was an awful lot, and there are so many problems to figure out in a comic book, let alone doing it on a bi-weekly basis. I think I signed a contract, and, after that, I don’t think I signed another contract for I don’t know how many years. I think the next contract was for Predator vs.

Magnus for Dark Horse Comics years later.

MM: You transitioned from Eclipse to Marvel, but I don’t really remember what happened in between, how you got there.

LEE: I had been doing the Eclipse work for a bit over a year, and I called up to make some appointments at Marvel, using my Eclipse work as my samples. This would have been close to October of ’86. I called a couple editors at Marvel and asked if I could come in and show them some work. I brought each editor his own set of copies.

And, y’know, it was professional work, and it would show that I could, back then at least, meet a deadline. But I got a job right off. Ralph Macchio hired me for a DP7 Annual, which was part of the New Universe. That was the first book that I did.

MM: You penciled that one, right?

LEE: That’s right. Tony DeZuniga was the inker on it. Boy, I’m trying to remember who wrote it. That’s terrible, I can’t remember who wrote it. Was it Gruenwald?

MM: You might be right. That was published, right?

LEE: Yeah. Oh, do you know what? I’m not sure I have the correct sequence. I did an inventory story that’s never seen print, a DP7 fill-in. And the fill-in was inked, I believe, by Danny Bulanadi. I did a Solo Avengers story in there, too, somewhere, very early on.

44

MM: That’s right, with Dr. Druid.

LEE: Or “Dr. Dopey” as Dan Chichester, who wrote the story, used to refer to him years later. I penciled and inked that job. I was just looking those pages the other day.

MM: That’s right, Solo Avengers had just started up and you were doing some work. The big break around that time was Justice, correct?

LEE: Yeah, I guess it was, yeah. I got offered to draw another New Universe book called Justice. I penciled and inked that first issue, thinking I was going to be able to ink myself, but that didn’t work out. So I penciled, and various people inked.

MM: I remember Mike Gustovich.

LEE: Yeah. Honestly, that whole period, from doing the Eclipse regular series stuff right through the New Universe days are kind of a blur to me. I do remember the Solo Avengers story pretty well. Justice was with Peter David. I always remember his sense of voice and dialogue was exceptional.

MM: That period was just an exciting time for you. In your personal life, you get married in 1987. Before long, you’re expecting your first child.

And professionally, things just seemed to be blossoming at Marvel. There was no lack of work there for you, and people seemed to enjoy what you were doing. How about you?

Destroyer black-&-white magazine, but knew in my heart it wasn’t what I got into comics to do. An important detail is up to that point in my career, with the exception of our first story together and a couple very small things, my career had pretty much consisted of taking what I was offered, as opposed to going after what excited me. I didn’t know how to stand up for my work, or how to seek something out.

LEE: Right. I had been married a little over two years.

Tish and I had purchased our home in Easton, Pennsylvania. We got a dog, a black lab/beagle mix, Lucas. I was enjoying working with Will Murray on the 45

Above: Two-page spread for Marvel’s black-&white Destroyer magazine.

“Destroyer could have been a lot more fun than it was, but working with Will Murray, who was also writing the novels at the time, was great.”

Next Page: Page 2 splash of Daredevil #297, the first part of, “The Fall of the Kingpin” storyline.

“Playing with the blacks in DD’s costume is one of the things—along with the sheer simplicity of it—that makes drawing him so much fun.”

Daredevil, Kingpin ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. The Destroyer and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Warren Murphy.

In February of 1990 a bomb went off when Tish and I learned she was pregnant with Vaughn, our first daughter. Actually, I got the call from the doctor and gave my wife the news—which was funny, that I knew before her. And it was like a bomb— a good bomb—went off. I was so out of my mind, bouncing off the walls. Life changed in an instant... forever. And it was the joy of what we were about to be blessed with that made me realize my career wasn’t going the way I had hoped it would.

Frankly, I remember a specific conversation I had with myself where I asked, “How did you get here? How did something that you loved to do more than anything else become so unsatisfying?” And I just kind of took inventory and realized I wasn’t doing what I had sought to do. It’s pretty exciting to have an idea, a vision, and then see your vision come to fruition. But I just kind of accepted assignments, and waited for someone else to offer me the right gig. Anyway, I sat in my living room one night, just a couple days after finding out about the baby on the way. I sat with a sketchbook 46

determined to find out what it was I wanted to draw, whatever that was. And, within five or ten minutes, I was doing lots of sketches of Daredevil, and I thought, “The next time I go in, I’m going to ask to draw Daredevil.” And that was the beginning of a very big change in my work, my career, my outlook, and everything.

MM: That’s right, and you did a bunch of G.I. Joe covers, and some interiors, right?

LEE: I did one story and about a year-anda-half worth of covers. And what’s interesting about that is Larry Hama enters the picture again. I had a couple of neat conversations with him where he gave me some tremendous advice, and I put it to work right off the bat in the issue of G.I. Joe I drew, which I completed in about three weeks. For me, that was blazingly fast, and it was pretty fun. But the real turning point up to that point was learning we were going to have a baby. It just changed everything. I didn’t get into this to do it halfway, and I didn’t want to do it halfway anymore.

Part 4:

...And Breaking Out Dave’s work was so beautiful and beautifully simple. Our book, Fall of the Kingpin, was a sequel in that it dealt with some things from the Born Again storyline, turning the tables on the Kingpin.

MM: Where did Daredevil come from? Because I don’t remember that ever being a character that you talked about a whole lot, or expressed a whole lot of interest in.

LEE: Totally from the Frank Miller run in the mid-’80s, just coming out of the low period when I wasn’t drawing. When I worked at the 7-11 we would tear the covers off the magazines for returns, back in the old days of newsstand distribution, and that was when Frank’s “Born Again” storyline was coming out. I so related to that story. And still do, even more profoundly so in some ways today.

People call these things funny books, but that story really had an impact on me. And I fell in love with the character, with his struggle to do the right thing. It really meant something to him to do the right thing, and there’s a great moment when he’s holding Karen Page as she is going through heroin withdrawal, and he’s thinking about all the stuff that he’s lost, running through it all—job, money, relationships, etc.—but ultimately says, “I’ve lost nothing.” He ends up realizing he lost all fear when he lost all hope. Though I don’t agree with that particular line, certainly life, though lived through the material, is beyond material. It’s something much deeper than that.

MM: Well, talk about what goes around, comes around, didn’t you ultimately end up drawing a cover for a Born Again trade paperback?

LEE: No, that was actually the final four issues of Daredevil that I drew, #297 to #300. It’s a sort of sequel to, although I wouldn’t in any way try to suggest that it belongs on the same bookshelf as, Born Again. I am in awe of what Frank and Dave Mazzucchelli did.

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Above: Wraparound cover art for the Daredevil: Fall of the Kingpin trade paperback collection.

Next Page: Pencils for page 6 of Daredevil #284, Lee’s first issue. “It was on Daredevil that I began to learn how to pencil tighter. Really, it was just a matter of settling down a little bit.”

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

It’s sometimes confused with Born Again.

The Fall of the Kingpin trade cover is one of my favorite covers, one I had a lot of fun doing. At the time it seemed much of the thinking in editorial was formulaic. Find something that works, and just do it that one way. There was a time when there was a rule that all panels had to be separated by quarter-inch gutters, stuff like that.

Sometimes people find something that works for one reason, and they make dogma out of it, which chokes the spirit out of the thing. The spirit of a rule should always trump the letter of it.

When I did the wraparound cover for that Daredevil trade, I put all the characters except for Kingpin on the back cover. Even Daredevil was moved to the back. The only thing on the front cover was a giant red DD, this trickle of glass that came down through the middle of the DD, and Kingpin laying flat on his back in an elliptical spotlight. Everything else was black. Though unconsciously, that idea of the trickling glass trailing from above came from that 48

Eisner story, Gerhard Schnobble, “If a Man Could Fly.” I turned it in knowing they were going to say, “Switch it. Make the back cover the front cover, and the front cover the back cover,” because I didn’t have Daredevil on the front. I didn’t have the major players, the guys that sell the book, on the front. But, we had an assistant at the time who ran cover for me, he actually snuck it through, because he thought the same thing, he also believed they would switch it. The cover was dramatic the way that it was, but it was kind of out of the norm for what they were doing at the time.

And, sure enough, after the cover was finished and the galley was hanging on the wall the editor-in-chief said, “Nice cover, but it should have been reversed.” We were right. They would have switched it.

Jim Shooter had been there for six months, I think, when I first got there, six or seven months—long enough for him to give me one of my all-time favorite memories. He put together a seminar for the young artists, whoever wanted to go, really,

drawing comics. I was so excited to be doing this one fill-in. And I was going to get a chance to work with Al Williamson. Beat that.

but specifically for young guys just starting out. John Buscema came in and did a chalk talk thing. I sat in a room with maybe 20 other artists at a long table, and I listened to John Buscema for two or three hours. I specifically remember meeting Javier Saltares that day. It was phenomenal. Just fantastic. I still have some note paper I was scribbling and sketching on when I was there that day. That would have been late ’86 or early ’87.

MM: Do you remember what issue that was?

LEE: My first issue was #284. Matt Murdock had amnesia. He was walking around wearing a New Orleans Saints baseball cap, hanging out in Hell’s Kitchen was a young black girl named Nyla. So, he was out of costume a lot. In fact, I think for the first couple of issues, when I drew the Daredevil costume, it was actually Bullseye wearing the costume.

MM: So let’s talk about your Daredevil experience. What happened after you sat there that night, and drew those sketches, and sort of felt inspired?

LEE: I just committed to go after what it was I wanted to do the next time I went in, which was going to be Daredevil. Two or three weeks later, I was delivering a job and getting a new assignment, and I went to Ralph Macchio’s office, who at the time was editing Daredevil and Dr. Strange. He offered a back-up story for the latter book, which I took, the whole time Daredevil being on my mind. We had a pleasant meeting. I hung out with he and Mike Heisler, his assistant at the time. And as I turned to leave, I got one foot on either side of the threshold, and I—it was almost like asking a girl out on a date; I was nervous. I knew if I left I would feel very defeated, like I didn’t do what I set out to do. So I glanced back at Ralph, and in the most casual tone I could muster, I said, “By the way, Ralph, if you ever have need for a Daredevil fill-in, I would gladly take a hit out on your worst enemy for the chance to do it.” I think that is almost verbatim what I said. And I was going to just let it hang for a second and then say goodbye again and leave, but before I finished my sentence, he and Mike kind of looked at each other, “Oh, why didn’t we think of that?” I think they actually said that. At the time, John Romita, Jr. had taken on a special project, something that was taking him away from Daredevil a little bit. I could have walked out and missed that opportunity. Instead, I learned a big lesson: You don’t know until you ask. I went home with a script and was more excited than I’d ever been 49

MM: You were inspired by Dave Mazzucchelli, and you were coming on at a time when John Romita, Jr. was drawing it, and getting some notoriety for doing it.

Did you feel any sense of having to maintain any elements of J.R., Jr.?

MM: What was your approach to drawing Daredevil?

Above: Panel from Daredevil #285. Inks by Al Williamson. “Though not stylistically similar, I see Caniff’s influence in a page like this—just in terms of the spotting of blacks.”

Next Page: Lee’s pencils and Al Williamson’s inks for Daredevil #297, page 5.

“The smoke tendril was to be cut from the next to last panel—not the last. It changed the feel— subtly, but it did. I didn’t communicate it right.”

Daredevil, Kingpin, Matt Murdock ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

LEE: Boy. I had a sense I needed to add something to my work, that it needed to step up. This was a great opportunity, a huge break for me. I loved the Mazzucchelli stuff, as anyone can see in my Daredevil work. There was such beautiful naturalism in his work. And I felt a kindred spirit when I looked at his work. The first time I met Dave was at a convention in New York. I was working on the Destroyer black-&-white book, and he was working on one of his independent projects just after Daredevil and Batman. I was showing him some pages, and there was a shot I did of an old ’63 Chevy Impala convertible. I showed him this page, and he goes, “Hey, look at that.” And he pulls out a page that he was working on, and I’m telling you, he had a panel that was a dead ringer for mine, both our shots not yet published. It was just a small panel, kind of a little bit behind the car downshot as it was peeling out, and the way that the exhaust curled out and everything, it was like this, and when the shadow was in there, it was the same shot. And we were like, “Ooh, this is weird.”

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LEE: Very much so. If you look at those first couple of issues, very J.R.-like. I mean, I was blending in some other stuff, but I was continuing his storyline, so I was looking at what he was doing. I think J.R. is one of the true originals of the last 30 or 40 years, in mainstream comics, at least. I can’t stress enough how good I think he is—and original, an inventor. He has such an original approach to drawing and page design, and a specific approach to Daredevil.

So I looked at him a lot.

Also, there were certain things you just loved to see Al do, so I had that in the back of my mind while I was working. “Oh, this would be a good place for Williamson to,” fill in the blank, either one of his textured backgrounds, or the rubble in a building, or whatever. It wasn’t conscious. It was just, “Oh, I’d love to see Al ink this!” So I’d set him up. It became something I have tried to do with each inker from that point forward. We were talking basketball before the tape went on, it’s really like being aware of your teammates, and knowing who is going to make the cut and when to the basket, and how and when to dish him the ball. Certain guys have different strengths, and you try to play to those. You want to be like Larry Bird, but sometimes it’s just as fun being Tiny Archibald.

MM: So here you are, coming off the bench to replace a guy whose hotel door you wanted to go knocking on in Boston, and you’re passing the ball to a guy you met in Boston years ago. That must have been wild.

LEE: Exactly. At first, I was just doing fillins. I think at the time Ralph was hoping against hope that J.R. was going to—J.R. was actually considering leaving the book.

The editors wouldn’t say that. I mean, everybody knew it, but they were hoping that he would return. So I was the regular fill-in guy for my first four issues—I did two, then skipped one to do an issue of G.I. Joe. Then I did two more as a fill-in artist,

and that’s when they gave me the keys, after those first four issues. When they asked me to be the regular guy, the schedule was kind of crazy, so I asked for a couple issues off to be with my wife when Vaughn was being born. I just didn’t want to deal with the crazy deadlines at that time. Someone else did two issues and then I came back in with Dan Chichester, and we had our little run.

LEE: Enormous. One friend in the business asked what happened to me because there was such a change in my work. And it’s true. I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and the difference was passion and direction. I began to love doing what I did again. And gaining a lot of confidence to ask for things, to stand up for my work, to say if something wasn’t working. I felt like I had more of a say, and wasn’t just a cog.

MM: The initial fill-ins were with Ann Nocenti, and when you were full-time, it was with Dan?

MM: How did you work, then, with Ann and with Dan?

LEE: Yeah, yeah. And, really, it wasn’t that long. I really only did about 15 issues or so.

LEE: Working with Ann was very pleasant. She had a very different take on the book, from what I remember, and always politically-minded, not necessarily my politics. But that’s okay, she was the writer; I was having so much fun drawing the character at the time. And Dan, it was just a lot of fun. He was a lot of fun. He had a real edgy sense about him, and we were always very open in our communication back and forth. Artistically, I felt an urgency to bring something new and better to my work. I dusted off some Terry and the Pirates softcovers I had—specifically the Raven storyline.

Milton Caniff was someone that I liked before, and I knew that he was considered one of the masters, but, as a kid, you don’t have the eyes to see all an artist is doing, a real master, until you wrestle with the process yourself for a time. Guys like Caniff and Toth are very much like that for me. So when I began to really look at his stuff again, after

MM: So a short number of issues, relatively, on Daredevil, but a huge span. What sort of growth do you think you went through in that time?

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Below: Ace reporter Ben Urich has another hard day at the office.

Pencils for Daredevil #288, page 17.

Next Page: Cover art for Daredevil #297. Lee inked this one himself.

Ben Urich, Daredevil, Typhoid Mary ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

years of struggling to learn, in late ’89 or early ’90, all of a sudden I saw his work in a whole new light, and it just blew my socks off. I mean, it was just so incredible. Even though I don’t think anybody would look at my work and go, “Oh! Milton Caniff!” Still, there’s a huge amount of Milton Caniff influence in that Daredevil stuff, just in terms of use of shadows and spotting of blacks, and even composing shots.

MM: What do you think you brought to Daredevil in the run that you were on?

LEE: I don’t know. I think I was more concerned with just maintaining a standard that had been set for a few years between Mazzucchelli and J.R. It’d be tough enough to follow one of those, but to follow two of them? It was very difficult. There was a tremendous tradition being established through the ’80s. Trying to maintain is what I was concerned with. Most of the time I was just having fun. It was just so much fun. It was fun to draw the city, to learn about it, the buildings and chimneys and bricks and all those things. I don’t know. I just tried to do a good job.

MM: What do you think that the experience brought to you, working on an established character, being there for a certain period of time, creating a story, the Kingpin story?

LEE: I became a six-year overnight success, I think. All of a sudden, a lot of people were asking me to do things.

MM: How did that change life for you?

LEE: In a big way. I was going to continue doing Daredevil, but on offer came in ’91 or ’92 from Dark Horse, an offer that I initially declined. That was on a Friday, I think, and as I thought about it over the weekend, I’m like, “Boy, that was kind of silly to just say no and not really—” I had specific reasons I said no. This was right at the beginning of the huge boom. A tremendous amount of adventurous projects, crossovers were being done. Mike Richardson had a big list of projects and asked which one I wanted to do. Wasn’t that about the time Miller and Mignola and those guys were coming over to do Legend?

MM: That sounds about right.

LEE: It might have been just before that. But there were several of these licensed projects and big crossovers and stuff, and the one I chose, the one that was most appealing to me, was Predator vs. Magnus, Robot Fighter. We negotiated a very nice contract I couldn’t say no to, nor did I want to. And, actually, if I was going to leave Daredevil, that was a good 52

Right: Thumbnail cover sketches for Daredevil #300.

Below: Lee’s pencils for the Kingpin entry in AllNew Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A-Z #6.

Next Page: Daredevil #300, page 18. “The Port Authority scene in Daredevil #300 will always stand out as one of my favorites. This is the moment where things really kick into gear.

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

place to finish, with “The Fall of the Kingpin.” That was the time to go, if I was going to, so I did.

MM: Now, what I remember at the time was, like you say, you’re getting invites to all these big conventions, you’re being asked to go on the Home Shopping Network. You just were getting a lot of attention for your work on DD. LEE: Not a ton, but for me, a lot of conventions.

MM: What was it like to work with Al Williamson?

LEE: It was something. It really was. And I have to say, when I first saw those inks on my work, I was so blown away at how effortless it was for him. And then, when I saw the first make-ready, the coverless, collated pages on the newsprint paper, I just sat and stared at it. That was one of the most awesome days in my whole career. I just sat there and stared at the thing in my studio and said, “I can’t believe that comics can come out looking like this.” I knew that comics could, but I’d never had everything come together in one of my projects like that, where everything worked, where I felt like my work was getting to a decent level, the inking obviously was incredible, and Christie Scheele was a magnificent colorist for Daredevil. And the printing, I loved the printing on newsprint, whereas a lot of other books were going to the plastic plates. Daredevil stayed on newsprint. Which, today, I don’t think people would respond to as well, since you have the nice, glossy paper, but I prefer newsprint, that absorbs some of the ink so it’s not jumping off the page too much. I like that feel, and compare the difference to the difference between a sitcom shot on video to one like Cheers that was shot on film. The film had enough grain to give warmth to the show. Regardless, it was an incredible experience, and I knew that’s how I wanted my books to look at least like this from then on.

54

MM: Did Al ink all of your Daredevil work?

those pages, in five weeks to the day. Which, y’know, by Jack Kirby standards, that’s, like, yawn, but, for me, it was a big deal.

LEE: Most of it. Fred Fredericks inked an issue. I think that’s it.

MM: How did you emerge from all this? What was the difference between the Lee that took on Daredevil and the Lee that left after #300?

MM: Did you ink yourself at all?

LEE: Yes, certain pages here and there. In issue #300, it was supposed to be a 38-page story and a cover, and when I got the script and started, Ralph told me, “I’m not going to lie to you. This has to leave the office, lettered, colored, everything, five weeks from today.” One of the things I’ve always appreciated about the time I worked with Ralph, he was just such an encourager. He said, “I know you can do it.” He just kept saying that, and it got me pumped to do it. They were also pressing me to get a cover in for it for promotion. But I felt like if I stopped drawing pages to do the cover, which sometimes could take a couple days, well, that was precious time I could be using to get pages done. So I just jumped in and started doing pages, and anytime they called about the cover, “Yeah, I’m working on it.” I wasn’t doing any sketches or anything, but was just trying to back-brain the cover idea, not wanting to stop the pencil. When I got a solid idea in my head, then I’d work it out.

One morning in the shower, I saw the cover, finished, with my eyes closed, rinsing the shampoo out of my hair. I finished as fast as I could, got dressed, and ran downstairs to get it down on paper as fast as I could. And I did the cover in probably two or three hours, which is really super-fast for me, but it was a stark, simple idea, and I just knew it was the right cover, so I did it. Towards the end of the job, maybe with a week left, I’m getting to a scene where they’re fighting, and the scene ends too abruptly. So I added a thirty-ninth page with just five or six days left. It was insane. And I just told Ralph, I said, “It has to be there.” He goes, “I trust you. You can do it.” So I did 39 pages and a cover, penciled and inked the cover, and inked a few of

LEE: Confidence, and other offers were coming in. There was a sense of adventure. It was also a unique time in that that was when the industry exploded in terms of sales, and everything that anybody touched sold a million

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copies, or half a million. There was temptation to compromise, creatively, just do stuff just for the buck, just sticking popular characters together. A colleague actually said to me once, “Just do the big money shot and sell it. Forget about storytelling, just do the big money shot, and you can get this much for the originals,” and stuff like that. And I remember a job, actually, where I had that in the back of my mind, and tried to do it a couple of times, and I thought I was going to throw up. If the story calls for a big fullpage shot or a double-page spread, I want to do it, but the books were being tailored to the pin-up mentality, and less story, more event-oriented. But, back to your question, the biggest thing I got was a sense of possibility and confidence that I might actually be able to make a living doing this.

MM: Leaving Daredevil, what did you have a sense that you wanted to do? You said you felt more adventurous. Looking ahead, what were some of the things that you wanted to try?

LEE: Well, I did a bunch of things, in and out of comics. Outside of comics, I wanted to learn how to play guitar. I also became

pretty proficient in magic—sleight of hand—and even moonlighted as a magician a few times. I wanted to work on Batman, and did that. I had an opportunity to work on the Superman animated series. And, eventually, somewhere in the later ’90s, I wrote a couple of little things, and one not-so-little thing, and I wish I had done more of that.

That was a great experience, to actually write a fairly decent-sized project.

MM: What were some of the things you did not want to do?

LEE: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, there were projects I turned down. I actually turned down some X-Men work to do a project that didn’t end up happening, anyway. I was supposed to do the first Batman/Daredevil crossover, and something happened to that.

The parameters of the project changed, and when they did, it was something I didn’t feel I could live with, so I walked away from it. And that would have been, in terms of the work-for-hire stuff, in terms of stuff that I’m just penciling, at that point that would have been the greatest job to work on, just in terms of the characters, working on a Batman/Daredevil crossover.

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Previous Page: Daredevil #300, page 20.

“This is what I meant about his costume. It provides some unique graphic opportunities.”

Above: Storyboard for Warner Brothers’ Superman: The Animated Series. “I love the extra layer of problem-solving the moving camera presents. If not for comics, I would have been thrilled to continue storyboarding.”

Daredevil, Kingpin ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Superman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

Part 5:

Jungles of Green and Concrete LEE: Leading up to that project, I always felt like the pages rarely came out just as I’d like them to. If out of 22 pages, I could get one or two pages to the point I could say, “Yeah!

That’s what I’m trying to do,” that would make the job a success for me. If that happened once or twice an issue, I was thrilled. I had an idea of what I was trying to do, but didn’t have the mastery over the skills to pull it off consistently—still don’t, but much less so then. By the time I got to Daredevil #300, I started to have more, “yeah” pages.

Possibly that was a function of drawing under such deadline pressure that I worked faster and got more of a flow.

With Predator/Magnus, I was given the time to do it, and consequently it was the first job where, page in and page out, I was hitting my marks more consistently. I was also exploring a lot of things that I’d not drawn much of before— futuristic settings, the tall spires, the cities—yet trying to give it a more grounded feel than maybe it had had in the past in Magnus, Robot Fighter.

MM: You left Daredevil and signed on with Dark Horse to do that Predator/Magnus, but, really, the early part of the ’90s was a lot about you just sinking your teeth into various special projects. Is that fair to say?

LEE: Yeah, the entire decade was special projects, jumping around. On the one hand, it makes it hard for the ever-changing fan base to figure out who you are. People think you’re either the new guy coming in, or a really old guy just coming back. But I kind of liked it that way. I just wanted to do the stuff that excited me. Actually, I’d never heard of Magnus before I took on that job.

MM: Oh, you didn’t remember that from the Gold Key comics when we were kids?

LEE: No. I had no memory of it whatsoever. I mean, I may have seen it. I saw so many comics, growing up. My first memory of Magnus, however, was when I did that job. The original concept was actually Magnus/Terminator.

That’s what they were trying to get done, but weren’t able to work out all the licensing, so having a framework for a story— or maybe they redid the whole story—they ended up doing Predator/Magnus instead.

MM: What did you use for reference, there? Did you have the Valiant stuff that was out? Did you go back and look at some of the Russ Manning material from Gold Key? LEE: I’m sure I looked at it some, but not a lot. As far as my feel for that kind of world, I thought more like Blade Runner... and Moebius. That’s what I remember

MM: Your memories of the work?

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most. I loved dirtying things up a little bit, especially as we would go from the higher parts, the penthouses where these Elites lived, the hunters that were out trying to hunt the Predator, from there down into the belly of the beast, the lower parts of the city, I really tried to show a lot of chipped paint, rubble, rust, dust the deeper we went.

MM: Is that the first major project that you penciled and inked?

LEE: Yeah, I think I inked just those first couple jobs, the job with you, the job with Bruce Jones, some short stories. I penciled and inked my first issue of Justice and, I think, my last two or three issues of Justice.

And a smattering of pages here and there, a short story here and there. Yeah, this would definitely have been the first big thing that I penciled and inked.

MM: Did you go right from that to doing the Predator/Tarzan series with Walt Simonson?

LEE: No, I don’t think so. I think that’s where the bookshelf with Captain America and Ghost Rider comes in, and the Gambit mini-series, after which I did Tarzan.

MM: Oh, that’s right. There was a Gambit mini-series that Klaus Janson inked, right?

LEE: That’s right, written by Howard Mackie, who also wrote the Captain America/Ghost Rider bookshelf.

MM: That was called Fear.

LEE: That’s right. And, actually, the Gambit mini-series may have come before Fear.

They kind of blur together for me.

MM: Again, it’s part of this period where 59

Previous Page: Magnus trading card art. The cards were stapled into issues of the Predator vs.

Magnus, Robot Fighter mini-series.

Above: Pages 12 and 13 from Predator vs. Magnus, Robot Fighter #1.

Magnus, Robot Fighter ™ and ©2008 Random House, Inc. Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

you were sort of going special project to special project. There was a bunch of stuff there for a bunch of different publishers.

Above: Two-page spread from Ghost Rider & Captain America: Fear. Inks

by Al Williamson.

Next Page: Pencils for the 1993 Gambit miniseries.

Captain America, Gambit, Scarecrow ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

LEE: Yeah, and I was slowing down so I could put more into each page. I was being paid well enough I wanted it to show up on the page, so instead of going the way I finished Daredevil, I was slowing down a little bit and taking more time on pages.

MM: Fear must have been your first chance to draw Captain America, right? Which I’m sure was a blast.

LEE: Incredible. He’s a challenge, in a way, because in drawing that cowled head, if I did it anatomically correct, it looked wrong. There’s some fudgings you have to incorporate. At least, I’ve found that, in order to make it look right.

MM: That wasn’t so with Daredevil?

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LEE: No. Daredevil for me was more like a real guy in a suit. It is probably my favorite costume—strikingly simple, very easy to draw, not to mention fun. Just the other day I sketched for some children at a Christian mission in Newark. When one of the kids asked me to draw Daredevil, my eyes lit up. Of almost 30 kids, most of them asked for Spider-Man, a few Supermans, and a Batman, but only one asked me to do Daredevil. It just flew out of my fingertips. There’s a real naturalistic grace to him.

MM: In the mid-’90s, after you finished the Gambit project, you went over and did some work for DC at that time, too, didn’t you?

LEE: I think I did the Tarzan/Predator project first. I’m pretty sure that was around ’94, ’95. And, actually, if I remember, that’s another time I said “no” initially to Mike.

“I’ve already done the Predator thing, I

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don’t want to be known as the Predator guy.” I didn’t want to repeat myself. But we talked a little bit, and it came down to if we could get a writer that I really wanted to work with. When I said I’d love to work with Walt Simonson, Mike just said, “I’ll call you in 20.” and hung up. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang, I picked it up, and Mike is at the other end, saying, “It’s done.” And I just couldn’t think of a better guy to do that kind of story. It was a pretty cool concept, the idea of the Predators finding the opening to Pellucidar, which was

the world within the earth that Burroughs had created where the dinosaurs never died out. Basically, the Predators have found their ultimate candy store—trophies all around. Word gets back to Tarzan of a slaughter taking place in Pellucidar, so he and his crew make the journey to investigate. It was a blast working with Walt. He was just an incredibly wonderful person.

MM: How had you known him? You hadn’t worked with him, had you?

LEE: No, I didn’t know him.

But, for my money, over the last 30 years, the guy that has most closely embodied that same sense of awe and adventure, without aping— certainly you wouldn’t look at Walt’s artwork and say, “Oh, he draws like Kirby,” because he doesn’t, but there’s a Kirby feel to it. You can see the Kirby influence, the dynamism, the power.

I’ve always felt like Walt was the closest thing to Kirby we’ve had in the last 30 years—I mean, other than Jack, himself.

MM: Now, Tarzan, of course, guys like Foster, Hogarth, Kubert and Buscema had drawn the character before you. What sort of influences did you or did you not look at and bear in mind as you worked on your own approach to the character?

LEE: I had the big treasury editions of the Tarzans Joe Kubert did, which are incredible. Joe is going to be 82 this year, and he’s probably in one of the most productive periods of his life.

But that Tarzan stuff was just so unbelievable for its simplicity, for how much he was able to convey with the least amount of lines. His influence shows up in places in my Tarzan. In other places, it’s harder to see.

But I was also just trying 62

to be as naturalistic as I could be. I inked that stuff almost entirely in brush. I tried more pen in the first issue, the first half of which is hard for me to look at, as it’s a bit stiff. Not that I was trying to draw like these guys, but I also looked at and tried to capture a feel of guys like Buscema, who for my money was as good as anyone who’s ever walked the planet in terms of drawing dynamic human figures. I’ve said this many times to people over the years: If you gathered together in a room Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Reubens... and if they could look over the shoulder of somebody like John Buscema and see those figures exploding off his pencil onto the page, I think they would say, “Oh my. How did he do that?”

Something I’m not even sure we can appreciate is how quick and how good some of these guys like John were. And there’s a thing he did I’ve never, ever seen any artist of any genre in any form ever do like John Buscema, and that was the sense of gravity and mass he could give to a figure. There’s a real weightiness to his figures that you will not find—and I mean, Frazetta, I mean, anybody.

Everybody that I’ve ever looked at, I’ve never seen it. I’m only speaking of this one characteristic, that sense of almost extra gravity. I don’t know how he did it.

What an illusion. He would draw Conan, who, what is he, 6' 3", 6' 4", 250? But, when John drew him standing there, it looked more like 1200 lbs. of weight holding his 250 lb. frame to the ground. It didn’t look as if there was any way you could pull this guy off the ground.

Something he did, and I’ve never quite been able to figure, you know, I just can’t analyze it, I can’t figure it out, but there’s just such a tremendous sense of weight and mass and gravity to his figures that I’ve never seen anywhere. And yeah, it’s just comic books, but I think he’s as good as anybody who ever has walked the planet, in that regard. But I digress.

MM: Well, no, I mean, talk about Tarzan.

He certainly has to be one of the influences. How do you feel about the series that you did?

LEE: Tremendous fun. I haven’t gone back and read it in a long time. As I mentioned, it had a neat premise. If I were twelve, 13 years old, it’s the kind of thing I’d love to read and to draw. Oh, and it got me to pick up and read the Burroughs original novel, which I hadn’t up until then.

MM: Oh, that’s right. I think we were reading concurrently, because I hadn’t, either.

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Previous Page: Bigger game is found in Tarzan vs. Predator: At the Earth’s Core #2. “I really dug the premise of this one.

Pellucidar would be like a candy store for the Predators. And working with Walt was a joy.”

Above: Tarzan needs a bigger knife in Tarzan vs.

Predator: At the Earth’s Core #2.

Tarzan ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc. Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

Below: Tarzan gets the drop on his alien adversary. Tarzan vs.

Predator #3, page 6.

Right and Next Page: Rough sketch and finished inks for the cover of Hawkman #0.

Hawkman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Tarzan ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc. Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

LEE: I enjoyed it very much. There are some real fun moments. There’s a close-up panel where Tarzan, really up against it, says, “My knife won’t be enough this time, but a grenade might kill us all.” It’s a real Kubert-esque kind of close-up. I have a giant blow-up of that panel hanging in my studio. And I did a lot of delicate brushwork. A project like that is great for exploring the human figure, for gaining understanding you can’t really get drawing guys in costumes, because even with skintight costumes, there are things you can get away with you can’t so much with a Tarzan-like character.

The way John Byrne would draw the X-Men figures in his heyday, which I loved, wouldn’t really work for Tarzan. It has to be more naturalistic, more real-world anatomy and stuff.

Something I love about being a comic book artist in general is you’re always learning something about something, as long as there’s a variety of jobs—another reason I like jumping around. With Tarzan, I drew my first DC-3 transport plane. I think it had the longest commercial use of any plane, ever. It’s the one you always think of when you think of old Tarzan movies, with the two props on the wings and a half dozen windows down the side. I also drew my first Ford tri-motor plane in Tarzan. Again, one of the fun things about jumping around.

Years earlier, I had to draw a helicopter chase scene in an issue of Justice, and I had so much fun investigating and learning about helicopters, military helicopters. And I made sure that these Russian-made Hind helicopters I chose to be the pursuers, the enemy, I made sure the helicopter carrying all our characters was a transport that technically made sense—that it was big enough for everyone to fit and fast enough to elude the Hind. And then a third helicopter came to the transport’s rescue, and that was an Apache AH64. That was the first 64

MM: Well, no, this is interesting stuff.

LEE: We’re going backwards. Pretty soon we’ll be back at the kitchen table in 1972 again.

MM: But it’s the stuff that people don’t know goes into this.

LEE: Yeah. It really is one of the most fun parts of this job. You get to learn a little bit about everything. And really to the degree that you want to, because you don’t need to, but I’m a curious person. I’ve always been a curious person, and I love the little things that we get to learn: how things work, how things look, whether it’s the machines man has made or the magnificently more intricate machinery of the human figure that God has made.

MM: Now, at this point you did both the Predator projects, you penciled and inked yourself. Were you starting to get the feel that maybe that’s how you wanted to continue to work, or did you think that some projects you would still collaborate with inkers?

LEE: I know I would often be frustrated with the inking of certain jobs early on.

And I worked with great inkers, but sometimes, even if the inker is a better artist than the penciler, it could still be a wrong mix of styles. I always, in one sense, wanted to ink myself, but I also didn’t feel comfortable with my own inking a lot of the time, especially doing it so sporadically. If you’re only going to do it occasionally, it really takes a while, as Jose Delbo would say, to “lose the hand,” where it begins to just happen. Like I said, the first half of that issue of Tarzan was stiff.

I learned of the Apache helicopter. Now, I’m not an expert on helicopters, but I tried at least to make it believable to the ones who knew helicopters—or at least come close. I made sure that the speed and maneuverability of each was such that it made sense that this one was chasing that one and having a hard time catching up, and when these other guys came in, it made sense. But, I digress some more.

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This Page and Next: Lee’s roughs and pencils, and Bill Sienkiewicz’s inks for the cover of Batman Chronicles #1. “When it came down to these two roughs, the alternate one’s action was being interrupted by Batman, while the framing was better in the one we went with. Bill, as always, while faithful to the spirit of the pencils, adds amazing texture and nuance— he’s a mutant.”

Batman, Commissioner Gordon, Huntress ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

On one hand, I was probably tougher in my mind on inkers my first several years. Then when you ink yourself and you still struggle even though you know what you were trying to do in the pencils, it gives you an appreciation for that guy trying to ink you who doesn’t know what you’re thinking. Each job is a different experience for the penciler and inker, because everybody’s got their own little dialect, how they’re using the line—is it more for form, is it more design? And I just think it takes time, no matter what. I always wanted to ink my own work, and I still would like to, but on the right project. I love more to do the storytelling, and to do the drawing. Inking’s not as critical to me as it was back then. Although on the right project I would want to do the whole thing. That might be a strip someday. I would do the whole thing. That would be fun.

MM: How did you get roped into doing work for DC after the Dark Horse projects?

LEE: Hawkman. I did some Hawkman covers. I don’t remember who I did them for. But, yeah, I did a series of, what, five covers, I think, for Hawkman. Then I drew the first issue of Batman Chronicles, which was inked by Sienkiewicz. He inked both the cover and the interiors.

He had inked me on a fill-in issue of X-Men years before, and what blows me away about Bill, keeping with the inking theme here, is that there are guys who try to ink just like the penciler penciled it, yet it doesn’t look like the penciler. They maybe don’t understand what the line means, because it will mean different things depending upon who the penciler is and what he’s 66

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Right: Panel from Batman Chronicles #1.

Below: Pencils for page 7 of Batman Chronicles #1.

Next Page: Cover art for Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet. “Another pal from the Duck Soup days, Bruce Canwell, wrote The Gauntlet—one of my favorite gigs ever.

Bruce is associate editor of The Library of American Comics, which is producing the Terry and the Pirates six-volume collection.

Batman, Commissioner Gordon, Robin ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

using it for. And then there are guys, actually, maybe just one guy. He might be the only one, a guy like Sienkiewicz, who starts with a tight pencil job like what I did on Batman Chronicles, and these pages come back with all these Sienkiewicz-isms on it. There was no question that Bill inked it. And yet, I’m looking at it, and my jaw’s hanging, because at the same time, it still looks like my drawing, and yet it’s this other thing. He understands my line better than me. He knows what to preserve and what he can play with so that it’s obvious Sienkiewicz had done it, but it still looks as if I drew it. I just—it blew me away. He’s got a special gift.

MM: And what a kick that must have been, because I can remember being a teenager with you and looking at Moon Knight as

Sienkiewicz sort of evolved over that, especially just before he left the book, when he really had just hit a new plane.

LEE: Well, going back to an earlier part of the discussion, one of my earliest memories of Sienkiewicz was while in my hospital bed.

I think that’s where I saw the issues he inked of FF, which was such a dramatic departure from the Fantastic Four’s look. But he inked a couple issues, didn’t he? Or he penciled them. But I remember it was hard for me to see his style. I was a kid, and I was looking at things more superficially back then. But, yeah, I just really didn’t appreciate what a phenomenal talent he is. Back then he would have been not much....

MM: Not much older than us, but seemed much older.

LEE: Yeah, he must have been 22 or 23 at the time. He was just a kid.

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Part 6:

Picking up the Gauntlet

MM: There are two things that stand out for me in that period. One would be the Thing black-&-white story that you wrote and drew for Marvel, and the other would be Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet, that you did with Bruce Canwell. What do you remember about The Gauntlet?

How it got pitched, and how you got the momentum behind it.

How did the project initiate?

LEE: Y’know, I always tell people I’ve gained more of my understanding of storytelling from conversations with Bruce than just about any other person. In one of those conversations it just came up that I wanted to do something with him.

He had a story I thought was exceptional. What a great idea, that Robin would be put to a final test before Batman would allow him to become his full-fledged sidekick.

MM: And, just to clarify, we’re talking about Dick Grayson here—the original Robin.

LEE: The original Robin, right. Obviously, you avoid putting a year to something like that, but Dick Grayson was put through basically a test that consisted of a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek. I loved it. When you can clearly pitch a concept in a couple sentences, the idea is strong. And one thing that I think I’ve had a knack for is, when I’m really excited by something, I can usually get other people excited about it, with the work.

But that was easy to pitch. They approved it pretty much immediately.

MM: How’d you work on that? Did Bruce send you a detailed plot? Did you work from a script?

LEE: I think it was a very detailed plot containing some script. Actually, it was a pretty organic process.

There were lots of things that would come to my mind as I was drawing scenes, and I’d call up Bruce and talk with him. But the skeleton, the spine of the story idea was so strong that there existed a flexibility. When your target is so clear it makes things easy and fun.

MM: How large of a story did you have at that point?

LEE: It’s a 48-page bookshelf. It was done under the umbrella of the Batman Chronicles. It was very satisfying working up the cover.

I put some people that we know into the book.

There’s a bridge scene that I had a lot of fun working out, due in part to the bridge being based on the Hill to Hill Bridge in the next town over in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

It’s probably the most intelligent story I’ve ever

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worked on—just really smart, in my opinion. And, from what I’ve heard through the years from persons that have read it, that seems to have been the general consensus, that it’s a really smart story.

MM: It has some resonance; it really has.

LEE: Yeah. And I’m always excited to tell people that although he’d been writing other things for years, that was Bruce’s first published comic book. The jaws drop.

“You’re kidding me! Why isn’t this guy doing regular stuff?” And I gotta tell you, it’s a mystery to me he didn’t take off. I think some editors missed the boat with Bruce.

MM: What do you remember about your work on it? I don’t remember even if you inked it.

LEE: I did ink it. I remember individual shots and pages. I believe that’s about the time I had done some animated work on the storyboards for the Superman cartoon, so there was more of a streamlined, simplified approach to my figures. It was less cluttered with superfluous rendering and the like. I felt I was getting a real grasp on the Batman character—things like keeping the faces open and not having a lot of lines on the faces—and I tried to be more graphic in the way I separated everything. I believe Toth was on my mind a lot during that period.

MM: That was something I wondered, because we talked about influences you had when you drew Daredevil, when you drew Tarzan. When you did Batman—particularly when you tried to do Batman in what would be sort of a period—what kind of influences were you channeling?

LEE: Hmm. Some of this is going to just be a guess. Again, I was very influenced by Mazzucchelli’s work. When I think of certain specific pages that come to mind, I don’t see them necessarily as being from anybody else. I was coming into my own way of doing things. But there were some places where there was some real Toth influence in the way that I arranged certain shots and scenes, the way that he used blacks. I’m sure I may have even borrowed a shot or two of his... the way he structured a shot.

MM: I don’t remember you being the biggest DC fan, so I’m not aware if you had seen the Batman that a lot of people had seen in the ’70s, whether it be the Neal Adams stuff, or, later, the Marshall Rogers stuff.

LEE: Oh, I was familiar with Adams’ Batman, you bet. But back in the early ’70s, there were a lot of DC comics in my house. I remember being in Curtis’ Pharmacy when I was a kid looking at an issue of his Batman and seeing how strikingly different from all the other comics it was. He was a big influence on me when I was trying to learn how to draw as a kid.

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Previous Page: Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet, page 5.

Above: Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet, page 25.

Batman, Robin ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

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In fact, boy, I remember doing that head turn thing where Neal would really emphasize the big neck muscle that comes from under the ear at the back corner of the jaw down to the neck hole at the clavicle—think Cap on the cover of Avengers #93. It’s called the sternomastoid. That’s where I learned the name of that muscle, because he would do these great sternomastoids on these turned heads, with the awkward shaped mouth that was calling out, usually while the guy was waving his hand flatly through the air as if to say, “No way.”

MM: I remember you saying that The Gauntlet was one of the projects that you enjoyed the most, for lots of reasons.

When you got done with that, what did you want to go to next? That’s kind of a hard one to top.

LEE: I don’t think it’s any coincidence two of my favorite projects were the first job with you, and this one with Bruce. When we got into comics as fans, what did we do? We hung out with our friends, dreamed up adventures, and talked about these guys, and it was a lot of fun. So, to be able to work on this stuff with your pals, it makes it special. Years later, I think it holds up. What was the question again?

MM: Well, what did you want to do next? What I remember is that you pretty quickly decided you want to start to write some of your own material, but I don’t know if that was an immediate transition. I don’t know what you were thinking. When you got done with Gauntlet, what did you want to do next?

LEE: At that time, I wanted to at least have a taste of doing everything. I was working on some ideas.

But, again, that time is kind of a blur to me, so I don’t know the exact chronology. I pitched a couple little things here and there. Sometime after that I did the Thing story. It was 17 pages, I think. And I’m trying to think of why I even hooked up with those guys—Joe Andreani and— MM: Hadn’t you been approached to do a back cover or a pin-up page or something? It seems like you had a piece in there an issue or two before your Thing story.

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Previous Page: “Page 26 [of The Gauntlet] was one where everything seemed to fall into place.

Left: “Duck Soupers reunited a couple summers back at the Liberal Cup in Hallowell, just across the street from where we all met nearly 30 years ago. As far as we know, Duck Soup was the first comic shop in all of Maine.” (L to R): Howard Downs, Dave Peabody, Doug Thornsjo, Bruce Canwell, and Tom Field. Missing are Duds, Dean, Lam, and Walt.

Below: A penciled panel from The Gauntlet.

Batman, Robin ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

LEE: Oh, that’s right. Actually, that kind of goes into something else that Bruce and I were going to do. We were working on some Nick Fury stuff, and I did a single illustration of Nick Fury that was kind of based on a story idea that—actually, I have an unfinished job that never got published. It was, I think, about 12 pages. It was supposed to be part of the Shadows and Light black-&-white book. We had planned to try to pitch some bigger Fury stuff, but it was, again, right at the tail end of that whole regime there, and before we could go too far with this, the book was cancelled, some people were let go, and it was a pretty dire time for comics—Marvel as well as everybody else.

MM: Sure. Now, was the Thing story sort of your stick your toe in the water and try doing the whole job?

LEE: Yeah. Yeah. I really just sat down and threw out some bullet ideas and said I wanted to write something. And I had been given a green light to do whatever I wanted to do, kind of, for the Shadows and Light book, and came up with this idea for the Thing. I had done a couple wash illustrations—one being of Fury—and decided to try to do a whole story like that. I liked some of the texture I was able to get on the stone wall in the Fury piece, and I wanted to explore that some more with the Thing. I came up with an idea that isolated him from the rest of the team, and played on his days as a test pilot, and that was “Reflections.”

MM: What do you recall about it? What was most challenging? What was most satisfying about it?

LEE: Something I always imagined about writing and drawing that proved to be true, is how exciting it must be to work these two languages—writing and drawing—into one language. It’s hard not to think of spiritual implications in the “two becoming one.” Ideally, it should always be that way. It seems there has been more success in doing this when only one creator is involved. Will Eisner, Frank Miller. But certainly, there are exceptions, like Frank’s “Batman: Year One,” which is the closest thing to a perfect comic book you’ll find in commercial comics. There are just certain things that seem to be harder to achieve, going back and forth between a writer and penciler. That proved true for me, on the couple of things I wrote. And what a blast it is to work everything back and forth, starting with thumbnails, working out some script, going back in a little more with some tighter thumbnails, rearranging stuff... it’s such an 74

organic process. I also looked at the visual narrative and the script as being like two melodies in a piece of classical music. Sometimes they run parallel, sometimes they are counterpoint to one another. There are some neat moments where the word narrative might seem to be about something different than what’s going on in the picture narrative, and yet the two will come to a point of intersect and that can be really powerful.

MM: So a satisfying experience?

You enjoyed it? You’re pleased with the results?

LEE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don’t think this story is anything to write home about or anything like that, but I loved the process.

MM: I don’t know if it was an immediate transition—I think there might have been a project in between—but the next big one is Death and Destiny.

LEE: If it wasn’t immediately next, it was close to it. At that time, in the late ’90s, I wasn’t staying current with a lot of the storylines. The more immersed I was in the craft, the job, the fewer current things there were that I read. I wanted to do a Spider-Man story, and I didn’t know enough about the current mythos. So reflecting back on some favorite storylines, I came to the death of Captain Stacy. And the story for Death and Destiny just sprang forth from a single question: What happened after issue #90?

Doc Ock just kind of slipped away until issue #113. And when he did show up again, there wasn’t even any mention of what occurred on that rooftop in #90. It seemed obvious if that had been the first time Spider-Man had seen Doc Ock since Stacy’s death, the reaction would have been stronger than nothing. So I speculated maybe something else happened in between the months, in between the issues.

Somewhere there was a story that hadn’t been told in between issue #90 and #113, and that turned out to be Death and Destiny.

MM: Three-issue series, is that right?

LEE: That’s right. And I learned a ton. I had no idea what I was doing. Every step of the way, every day was learning, and I loved it. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, creatively, and the most fun. It was so much fun figuring out how to stage scenes, and how much to reveal when.

MM: Who was your editor on that?

LEE: Ralph Macchio.

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Previous Page: Splash page from, “Malfunction,” which was to appear in Shadows & Light before the title was cancelled.

Above: Page 3 of “Reflections.” “I really dug working in wash on these stories, like on the Thing’s pocked texture here.”

Nick Fury, Thing ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Did you find that he or anyone else was helpful to you just in sort of putting this tapestry together over a three-issue storyline? That’s a big story.

Above: Pencils for pages 5 and 22 of Spider-Man: Death & Destiny #1.

Next Page: Stark cover art for Spider-Man: Death & Destiny #2.

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

LEE: Ralph was hugely helpful. He always has been. Ralph is a character, and from the first time I worked with him on, let’s see... I think the first thing I worked on was the DP7 Annual, and then I did Daredevil for him.

One of the things that was always great, for me, about working with Ralph, other than his encouragement, was he usually worked later than everybody else at the offices, and some nights I’d be working at night and just want to talk about the character and about what’s going on. Because sometimes you can verbalize a scene with him, and more ideas spring from those talks, and the more options you have, the more things you have to pull from when you go to choose your shots and lay out a scene. Some of the best help I ever got was from my late night con76

versations with Ralph on the phone. And we would just talk about what made these characters good, back from their inception.

What is it about this character? What is it about this book? And sometimes returning to the core ideas of the character and not straying too far from that can really help bring a story focus and help you to find things, little things and even big things, that you might not have seen otherwise.

MM: Did you have any particular visual influences for Spider-Man? LEE: When I think of Spider-Man, I think Ditko. Just beautiful Ditko Spider-Man. It’s hard for me to get over the fact he only drew him for three years. Three years was an eternity back then. Now it’s barely a blip on the calendar.

MM: Did you have many of those comic books around your house? Because I saw

Below: Pencils for page 15 of Spider-Man: Death & Destiny #2. “I’ve drawn more than a few cemetery scenes over the years.”

Next Page: Spider-Man: Death & Destiny #2, page 9 pencils.

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

Romita’s Spider-Man, as a kid. I didn’t see a Ditko until much later.

LEE: As a kid, I did. Eric had almost all of them, actually—Malcolm, too. At one point almost every issue came through our house up until whatever it was. I remember right up until the death of Gwen Stacy. I think I lost interest after that. Maybe not quite at the death of Gwen, because I was buying some off the stands right after that, too, when my fifth grade teacher would send me down to the store during recess. When I was in fifth grade, the same Mr. Small I mentioned earlier became my teacher. He used to send me

on an errand to run his passbook through at his bank downtown while the other kids were in recess, then he would give me a quarter, and I’d head over to Curtis’ and pick up a comic book. I can’t imagine— MM: I’m thinking the same thing. You could never do that today. [laughter] LEE: No teacher would get away with doing that today. But that was little Hallowell, and it wasn’t a big deal, I guess.

I mean, it was a big deal to me. I felt like such a big kid, “Wow, he’s giving me this responsibility.” I believe one of the first issues I bought was the Punisher’s first appearance [Amazing Spider-Man #129].

Maybe a few before that.

MM: So here’s Lee Weeks, with great power comes great responsibility in a comic book at Curtis’. [laughter] LEE: Yeah, right? That’s the only place I knew to get comics back then. Actually, I knew of a couple other places, but I couldn’t walk that far.

I remember those covers in the 20s.

They’re still some of my favorite comic book covers. Spidey and the Goblin, Spidey and the Torch, Spidey and the Molten Man. And then J. Jonah in the big robot thing with all the tentacles and his face on the video screen.

MM: Yeah, I think that’s the Spider-Slayer.

LEE: The Spider-Slayer, okay. [laughs] But, oh, those were just tremendous, those were so good. And the Annual, was it Annual #2?

MM: That’s the one with Dr. Strange. The first one had the Sinister Six, all the villains.

LEE: Right, the Sinister Six in the first one.

The second one had the cover, though, with the great Spidey figure and the closeup of the head, right? He used to do that wonderful edge-lighting. I never saw that in the other—I had never seen an EC book. But of the stuff that I had seen, that was really unique, that beautiful edge lighting done in yellow. So, Ditko was/is by far the biggest influence on my Spidey. I also dug Romita and Ross Andru, who was pretty underappreciated. And Gil Kane. Gil Kane inked by Romita—that was beautiful.

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MM: Did you ink Death and Destiny? I’m thinking you didn’t.

LEE: I didn’t. It was inked by Richard Case. I’m still hoping it’ll get collected in a trade, because it came out at a time when a lot of stuff slipped through the cracks, again, in-between the end of the old regime and just before the new. So it slipped through cracks.

It seemed to be pretty well received. If they do, I hope it gets re-colored.

MM: Were you pleased, overall, with the story you wrote and what you drew?

LEE: I was pretty happy with Death and Destiny. I tried to make it thoughtful. I like the idea that he had blocked this thing out of his head, and that it was through a forgotten canister of shot film that he is reminded of what he blocked out. I particularly enjoyed that scene just after finding the film in the back of a dresser drawer where his drying photos, acting almost as comic book panels within actual comic book panels, reveal to him the thing he’d blocked out—how Captain Stacy really died, and what happened on that rooftop.

It’s so fun to find narrative opportunities like that. Looking back, I can see the themes surrounding life and death that were the thrust of the series were pretty reflective of what was going on inside of me... the big questions we all must face at one point or another.

MM: Was that the last story that you have written, to this point?

MM: Do you think it’s something that you’ll do again?

LEE: I think so. I mean, it’s the only real full-size project I’ve written. Just short stuff other than that.

LEE: Lord willing, for sure, but the ideas that I gravitate to now are quite different than what my career has been—I mean, I would love to write another SpiderMan story, too, but I also have an idea for a line of comics that pertain to my faith and probably wouldn’t fit into the Marvel Universe. But, I feel very strongly that I will be doing something involving writing as well as drawing.

MM: Why didn’t you pursue another project like that, or why haven’t you sort of gone in that direction?

LEE: I don’t know that I have a really good answer to that question. There were other ideas that maybe one day I’ll pursue, but we’ll see.

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Part 7: Re-Birth MM: Talk a little bit about some of the work you’ve done this decade, because it’s been, again, special projects spread throughout. Certainly Captain America was a big one, but there have been some others, as well.

LEE: I’ve had a couple of runs on Hulk, and there was the “Cap Lives Again” storyline I did with Dave Gibbons, among other things.

Somewhere in there, back in the ’90s, when Marvel was shutting down Daredevil so they could restart him under the Marvel Knights imprint, they asked Dan Chichester and myself to come back and do the final issue of the first volume of Daredevil.

MM: How did that feel for you, going back to Daredevil and working with Dan again after the intervening years?

LEE: I said no, at first. I didn’t want to repeat myself.

Then Dan called, I think, once or twice, and he changed my mind, which I’m happy for, and happy with the way it came out. Robert Campanella inked it, and he did a terrific job. It was like coming back to an old friend. To this day, Daredevil is comfortably easy to draw. I just feel like I know that person, both in and out of costume, pretty well. It was a lot of fun doing that job.

MM: What have been the most fun jobs you’ve worked on in recent years?

LEE: Boy, it’s so different now. A couple days ago I put the finishing touches on Captain Marvel, and, in many ways, that’s been an incredibly satisfying project, with a few bumps in the road.

Around the middle of it, we changed inkers.

In most cases, the job on the board usually becomes my favorite. I really get into what it is I’m doing at the time. I loved doing the Captain America stuff with Gibbons and Palmer. It was very, very intense. I keep copies of all my pencils, and sometimes I go back and look at those. One of the things that is most memorable to me was the premise being that it’s an alternate history, an alternate reality. It’s some kind of a different time stream where Cap is found floating in the block of ice, à là Avengers #4, only, instead of the Avengers finding him, he is plucked from the freeze only to find himself on a Nazi sub. He’s brought back to headquarters, which are in Manhattan, only Manhattan has been Nazi-fied, which is revealed in a double-page spread—maybe the most ambitious one I’ve ever tackled. It’s actually Manhattan,

but with some additions and changes. The Nazis had won World War II in this time stream and taken over the world, so we had things like the Albert Speer Dome, the Reichstag building in this skyline shot. I threw in a nod to one of the prominent buildings from the Fritz Lang German expressionist movie, Metropolis, and a few other things. But just creating this Nazi version of Manhattan, lots of zeppelins, dirigibles floating around—it was a real challenge MM: You generally haven’t inked your work the past few years, have you?

LEE: Just some short stories here and there.

I did some stuff for “Civil War,” a continuing short story run in Frontline, called “Sleeper Cell,” and I inked some if it, not all of it. Just some little things here and there.

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Previous Page: Angrier Hulk get, stronger Hulk get.

Above: Two-page spread from Daredevil #380.

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

Right: Gorgeous twopage spread from Captain America #17.

Below: Thumbnail sketch of pages 2 and 3 of Captain America #18.

Captain America ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Who were some of the different inkers you have worked with, and what do you feel that they’ve brought to your work?

LEE: Well, I would say the guy—let me see, before I overstate, there. I also did a Punisher/Wolverine miniseries somewhere in there, too. Tom Palmer has inked by far the majority of my work since 2000. He inked both runs on Hulk, he inked Captain America, he inked the Punisher/Wolverine mini— MM: I can remember being with you back in, let’s say, 1982, looking at an old Comics Scene magazine with a roundtable panel about inkers, Tom Palmer being one of them, and you going on about how much you admired his work.

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MM: What do you see differently in your work now? What are the hallmarks of your work now?

LEE: I’m not sure I could say. I just know that it feels comfortable.

Instead of struggling to get a figure or a scene or a camera angle, more often that not, what I want the pencil to do, it does. Just the other day I was drawing Captain Marvel, just working fast, tossing in these lines to define this leg, and I just stopped and kind of squinted my eyes and shook my head. “Why did that come off my pencil like that?” I’m not sitting there, “Okay, curve under the abductor muscles, come down the sartorius to the vastus medialis.” And yet it just “poof,” was all there, or at least suggested there, in one or two lines. It’s cool to think something and have it show up on paper.

LEE: Oh, I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t even remember. So many of the things that I liked growing up, I tend to find out later that Palmer had something to do with many of them. He wasn’t just inking the work, but he was coloring some of it. He’s a tremendous talent, and a great guy. He’s been almost like a mentor to me deep into my career. He and I talk quite often, and I’ve learned a lot from Tom.

MM: That’s neat.

LEE: I’ve had occasion to teach and I like to use very rudimentary examples to make certain points. One example being how the top of a drinking glass is circular, but to draw it, depending on what angle your looking at the glass, it will go from being a circle, to an ellipse, and eventually to a straight line if you’re looking perfectly edge-on at the glass. It’s so very basic, but it’s still neat to me, because even when I’m drawing it, even though if I thought about it I realize I’m making a flat ellipse, part of me is buying into the illusion and it feels as though my hand and pencil go away and into the paper to draw the back edge of the drinking glass, which in reality is just the top edge of the ellipse. I’m not thinking of a twodimensional thing. I don’t think anyone doing this does.

When I’m drawing the front edge, it feels like the pencil’s closer to me, and it feels like my hand goes into the paper. Or, if I had to draw the Yellow Brick Road leading

MM: You know, something that struck me as you were talking about Dave Gibbons and Tom Palmer is that maybe some of the projects you’ve worked on, maybe you haven’t had as long commitments as you have, say, with Daredevil or with Justice, but the relationships you’ve walked out of those with have been deep relationships.

LEE: I’ve really been blessed to work with quality people. From my end of it, just in terms of craftsmanship, I think I’ve done my best work this decade. They have a big part in that.

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Above: Panel from the Wolverine/Punisher miniseries.

Next Page: A 1996 Superman commission illustration.

Punisher, Wolverine ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Superman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

to Oz, as I draw that, it feels as if I’m going in. I am fooling myself, and I believe a certain amount of that is necessary in order to sell the illusion. Because you will see drawings by people where it’s so much by the rules that it never breaks through that last level of illusion. Whereas, when one incorporates the rules, but draws more from muscle memory, the artist can be as fooled as anybody by what’s happening, like that extra dimension is there within the page. [laughs] It’s pretty weird, isn’t it?

MM: Well, it’s fun to look up every now and again and realize that, yeah, you really do have some experience at this, and there are things you’ve learned. And still things to learn.

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LEE: Absolutely true. I did an exercise once, and I may have mentioned this earlier, I was frustrated by how much work I was putting into my pages, and yet how little it seemed to be on the page when I was done. Even though I had time and hours and lots of lead on the paper, I was really just wandering through the woods in my drawings. So one day I was looking at Joe Kubert’s Tarzan— this was years before I drew Tarzan—just looking at the beauty and simplicity of it, wondering, “How did he do that in so few lines? Why does Joe’s look like there’s so much going on, and he’s put so little down, while many of my panels look so empty, and yet I’ve done so much?” So I literally sat down with my sketchbook, and I started

copying a panel of Joe’s, line for line, like I hadn’t done since I was a little kid. I wanted to feel what it felt like to put down that same number of lines and walk away. What does that feel like to draw with so few marks, and have a full-feeling drawing there? And it was a great exercise for me. I did it just a few times, but it opened up my thinking, a little bit, into just how—sometimes we look at a drawing and see a lot more than is really there because the artist is conveying or suggesting a lot of stuff that he’s not necessarily putting down. It’s very common for young artists to want to put everything in. As one gains facility in and knowledge of the craft, he can say much more with so much less. And, actually... I lost the original point I was making when I came down this path.

MM: It came out awfully nice.

LEE: Thanks, Tom. [laughs] I remember now. The point being that those first years of learning, if you look at two drawings of Superman’s face, one drawn by a 13-year-old aspiring artist, and one by a quintessential Superman artist like Curt Swan or Jerry Ordway, the difference in the lines—the amount that the lines have to adjust to turn that 13-year-old’s drawing into a pro’s is significant. But, at some point, when you compare a decent pro with a great like Jerry or Joe Kubert, the differences in the individual lines could be very small, but they make the difference between good drawings and great ones, because while you spend the first several years learning how to make the big adjustments to the line to get close, you then spend the next 50 years fine-tuning lines by distances about the thickness of those lines, because it’s those infinitesimally small differences that can make the difference between a good drawing and a great drawing. And not only the where of the line, but eliminating the superfluous ones, and recognizing just how many that you thought were necessary really aren’t necessary to the drawing.

MM: Lee, it strikes me that a lot of what you’ve done this decade has been in parallel with your own spiritual growth. How would you talk about that and its influence on you, of course, personally, and then on your work?

LEE: It’s hard to know where to begin.

My life up until about six-and-a-half years ago was mostly lived with a sense that God was there, but distant. There were a couple brief periods where I began a more serious journey for the truth, but both were abandoned as I kept getting busier with what I wanted in and from life. And, as success continued outwardly throughout the ’90s, I was more and more feeling like I was dying inwardly. Underneath it all, there was an emptiness inside that I’d been trying to fill up with things that just couldn’t fill it.

Then 9/11 happened and I woke up.

It was literally like a veil was lifted from my eyes—I’d never seen so crystal clearly in my whole life—like someone had uploaded Daredevil’s hyper acute senses to me, but the spiritual version.

Everything was so much more real than at almost anytime I could remember. I 85

tures—the Old Testament of the Bible—of a coming messiah were actually fulfilled by Jesus in the first century, that he was and is the ultimate Passover Lamb—the sinless one dying in the place of sinners, giving Himself as payment for the sins of the world, myself included.

From that night forward life changed forever.

Priorities, how I thought, what I desired, everything changed, and continues to do so—in work, relationships, all of it. He healed my marriage and my whole family.

There’s a scripture that says God will take away one’s stony heart and replace it with a soft one of flesh. He did this for me. And realizing that God actually wants us to find Him—that was huge for me. He desires that we repent of sin so that we can come to Him. All I know is I felt the reality of His love and forgiveness for the first time that Friday night in ’02 and I don’t ever want to be away from it, or away from Him. My relationship with Jesus has had a profound effect on my work, the jobs I will take, the jobs I turn down—even jobs I’ve lost as a result.

It’s having a big impact on just what it is I want to do from this point going forward, some independent things I’ve been working on, one idea being a series I’d like to do dealing with that relationship between the two testaments, or covenants of the Bible. I grew up, like most people, not realizing that Christianity comes from, and was originally Jewish. Jesus and His disciples were all Jews. And that the entire Bible is about Jesus— the Old Testament telling us He is coming prophetically, while the New telling us He has come and will come again. Unfortunately, much of those Jewish roots were lost through the centuries, but there is a re-awakening to them today.

wasn’t interested in religion, but I wanted to know about God—if and who He was. I began an intensive journey that lasted several months, began studying the Bible, asking God to reveal Himself to me, which He did very evidently again and again. Finally, in February of 2002, I committed my life to the lordship of Yeshua Maschiach— Jesus Christ—the final public step taking place at a congregation in northern New Jersey made up of Jewish and non-Jewish believers of Yeshua (Jesus) and led by a Jewish rabbi. These Jewish people have come to understand that the prophecies contained in their own Hebrew scrip-

MM: Back up just a little bit. You talked about what changed for you.

Tell me how that changes how you live your life.

LEE: Most people are familiar with the practice of baptism. In the New Testament it comes from a Greek word, baptizo, that is also the word used when describing what you do to a cucumber to pickle it. The 86

cucumber must be completely immersed into the vinegar solution, which completely changes its identity. It is no longer called a cucumber, but a pickle. Similarly, one who approaches God in humility, receiving Christ, allows His Spirit to touch every part of their life—being fully immersed or baptized into that life, which changes the identity of the person—some change evident immediately, some over time. One of the ways I’ve experienced this change is in the way I talk—my choice of language. I used to curse all the time. In fact, I like to say if a person’s vocabulary was comprised of the tiles in a bathroom, there is a fourletter word that was the grout of my vocabulary, meaning I inserted it between every other word. I had tried to stop several times over the years, but never could. I did better around my children, but still it was a problem, to the point we instituted a penalty system for me. When the kids caught me swearing, I would owe them a quarter.

Over a few years of this “game,” I owed them enough quarters to pay for a semester of college, I’m sure.

Then, several months after I came to the Lord, I was working late at the board when I overheard one of my daughters—about 11 or so—in the kitchen above my studio playfully talking with my wife. What I heard was, “Mommy, Daddy’s no fun anymore,” which got my attention immediately. My wife asked her why, and she answered, “We don’t get anymore quarters from him.”

Boom, I about fell over. Honestly, it was like that moment at the end of The Sixth

Sense when you see the wedding band fall to the floor and realize this big truth for the first time. Without my even knowing it, I had completely stopped swearing. Not one curse in several months—nothing. The difference was this time it was not from any effort of my own. I mean, I hadn’t even realized I’d stopped. It was totally an outgrowth of Christ coming into my heart.

There’s a verse of scripture that says out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. When I had the old heart, spiritually speaking, I spoke one way and could not change it. It was my nature to talk the way I did. The only thing that changed it was getting a new heart—one that has new desires, and a better vocabulary. Don’t get me wrong, some of the changes are tougher than that, but that’s one area where the change was immediate and dramatic... and just so cool.

Also, I never was a good sleeper— always restless, or worrying, or just too much energy to go to bed. I did allnighters frequently as far back as school.

And, when I began the deadline-laden life of being a professional artist, it became more intense. I was working until two, three, even five or six in the morning regularly—which is not uncommon in this business. I mean, I loved it much of the time—I jokingly refer to it as the Nosferatu shift—but there was always just a restlessness in my spirit. Many nights I just couldn’t sleep due to deadline stress.

Look, whatever it was, there were all kinds 87

Previous Page: The final page of Daredevil #380, closing the curtain on Volume 1 of the series.

Above: “Pinch me, I can’t believe I get to live with these three! From left, Vaughn, Alysha, and my precious wife, Tish.

Not enough space to say all that I want, but reading Proverbs 31:10-31 will give one an idea of just who I married. Being witness to their baptism here was a phenomenal thing.”

Below: “Sketch of Gary Selman and Jonathan Cahn, hosts of the radio show, “Two Nice Jewish Boys,” on 570 and 970AM in NJ/NYC. Rabbi Cahn also pastors Beth Israel in Wayne, NJ. You’re all invited—Friday nights at 8:00, Sundays at 11:00.

Shalom!”

Daredevil ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

LEE: Right. And, actually, when I think back on it, I guess there was subject matter I was never really comfortable with. For instance, when I got the Daredevil job, I took on at the same time the Dr. Strange back-up.

of things on my mind, and an unsettled-ness deep within me. When I came to the Lord, I immediately, and for the first time in my life, began to go to sleep whenever I wanted to. It sounds like such a silly thing, perhaps, but when you struggle with something so basic to good living as I did with sleep, it’s anything but silly. I just gained a peace that I’d never had before in my life. It was totally the Lord—nothing else.

I don’t want to give the wrong idea. I in no way became a follower of Jesus to stop swearing, or to sleep better, or to have a better marriage. I repented and received Christ’s shed blood for salvation for one reason: because I needed forgiveness and because I came to understand He is what He claimed to be—the way, the truth and the life—the only way to God and eternal life. The rest is simply the fruits of a changed life— blessings from the Lord.

And these last years have certainly not been without struggles. I’ve had the most difficult things I’ve ever had to deal with happen these last five years or so. I was quite sick for almost two years, and sick to a lesser degree for longer than that.

We’ve had other health issues in my family. Work isn’t always what I’d like it to be, but at the end of the day, the biggest issue in my life is settled, and God continues to fulfill His promise to never leave nor forsake those that are His, no matter what difficulties come my way.

I read Psalm 37 just the other day and it says, “delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” That doesn’t mean a big house, three cars, fame and fortune, because when I became born again, the desires of my heart changed, because my heart itself changed. My heart now desires to serve God, to love, and to have the peace and joy that comes from living a life in the Spirit instead of selfishly in the flesh... generally speaking. Again, I don’t know if I’ve really answered your question.

MM: Well, it surprised me.

LEE: Right, it surprised me, too. I didn’t even realize it until later. I’d always had a dislike of doing things that have to do with the occult. But, back then, I certainly wasn’t walking with the Lord, and didn’t have the same level of sensitivity, and I drew it. In fact, there are plenty of things I’ve done I couldn’t do again. There were some incredibly violent books I drew, yet even back when I was doing those kind of things, with a couple exceptions, I tried to imply the violence when I could. When my children were little, I realized there were books I’d drawn that I couldn’t let them see. It bothered me.

Now the standard is stricter, but it comes from within. It’s not a rule being imposed from the outside, but it’s purely a consideration for my Lord, not wanting to do the things in my work that will bring reproach to my heavenly Father. I believe all of us are sowing seeds constantly. When we speak to each other, we’re sowing seeds. When we write stuff, when we draw stuff, we’re sowers of seeds. And we either sow to life, or we sow something else. And I just think a lot of the work that I’ve done, although I’m pleased by the effort and the craftsmanship to varying degrees, some of it I wouldn’t do again. I don’t regret doing it, because all of it has led to getting me here, but, when I think of Predator ripping guys’ heads off, that’s something I wouldn’t be able to do today. And as a result of the change, I’ve missed out on some jobs. I shouldn’t even say “missed out,” because I haven’t missed out on anything, really. There are just jobs that I’ve turned back, and jobs I’ve had pulled from me because of something else I couldn’t do due to subject matter concerns.

In all of our countless forms of entertainment—not just comics—if anybody with a remotely objective eye looks

MM: You talked a little bit about how this has changed your approach to your work. Can you amplify that some?

I mean, I know that there’s some subject matter, for instance, you’re not comfortable with, now.

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at 50 years of change in the entertainment world, whether it be music, video, television, he would have to admit there’s been a definite and consistent direction everything has taken, and it’s not been a very edifying direction. So it makes it tricky to navigate the waters of an industry like this. I’ve been blessed with the projects I’ve gotten the last few years, for the most part. An actor recently wrote me because I had shared something about my faith in an interview— a working actor in Hollywood who is also a born again Christian.

And he wrote me to let me know he was encouraged by the interview and shared some similar things that he goes through in trying to navigate the waters of what is essentially an industry that is anything but friendly to God. I can’t imagine the degree of difficulty and conflict for the Christian actor working in film today.

what you are—these are themes I could explore all day. They make up some of the greatest stories in Marvel’s history, like “This Man, This Monster” from Fantastic Four #51. There might be an aspect to the Captain Marvel project some old timers will not be pleased with, but I simply thought of it this way: I would have loved this kind of story growing up as a kid.

MM: What do you want to do next?

MM: With that said, what attracted you to the Captain Marvel project you just completed?

LEE: First, that it was a project.

Somebody called me with a project. I had a health issue for a couple of years and hadn’t been able to do a big project during that time—one of the reasons I did those little “Civil War” stories.

Steve Wacker had just joined Marvel and he was looking for somebody to do this five-issue mini-series. With what I had been through, I felt blessed that he offered it to me. But then, as I read Brian Reed’s script, I became even more excited, because there’s actually a lot of—I mean, in the super-hero genre in general, there’s a strong element of Messianic shadowing that’s pretty prevalent. But, there are some pretty extra-cool parallels in this one. I’m not sure how much was intentional on Brian’s part. I suspect not all of it. Anyway, there is a great nobility to Captain Marvel, and the themes of selfsacrifice and becoming more than 89

Left: “Business card designed for a ministry to the homeless a few friends and I started in Easton, PA.” Below: “Jesse Delperdang inked the last couple issues of Captain Marvel and did a great job. Love the Kirby Krackle!”

Captain Marvel ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Pencil sketch of John the Baptist. “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’

Indeed!”

Next Page: Detail from Daredevil #284, page 22.

Daredevil, Matt Murdock ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

LEE: Unquestionably, I want to do some Christian comics, and I have some ideas that I haven’t moved on as much as I could have. But there are still some other things I would like to do in mainstream comics, too. I’d like to write again. The real answer is I don’t know, specifically. I have a short job in front of me now, while I figure out what the next big project is. I’m open to whatever the right path for me to go is.

Wherever the Lord leads, that’s what I want to do, where I want to be. If it’s another Marvel gig, then that’s what it will be. If it’s stepping out and taking more of a risk in another area, then I hope I will have the courage to step into that, as well.

MM: That’s well said. Let me ask you one last question. I can’t help but think back to 1982, when we went down to Boston and you brought your portfolio and your new pages down to show Dick Giordano. What would the Lee Weeks of 2008 say to the Lee Weeks of 1982 if you had a chance to catch yourself before you had that meeting with Dick Giordano?

LEE: In one sense I’m sure the question is more about craft and the experience

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of drawing and dealing with disappointment, but I can’t help thinking, in light of all we’ve just talked about, I would want more than anything for him to know the pull he feels on his heart from time to time, don’t ignore it—answer it. There’s something more important than all of these goals you’re going to pursue. There’s something way, way more important that can be settled right now... forever. If you unwind an entire spool of thread and tie a tiny little knot at one end, that tiny little knot might represent the 70 years we have here, while the rest of that thread all spun out, stretching out for a few blocks, doesn’t even come close to illustrating the eternity that comes after the 70. So I would just, more than anything, encourage him to seek and trust God first for salvation through Christ.

Specific to the meeting, I don’t know what I’d tell him. I really like the way things have turned out, so I’m not sure— y’know, that’s the weird thing about pain. I would never go around and say, “Gee, I think I’ll invite some pain into my life today,” but I can’t think of any one of the real painful experiences in my life that haven’t ultimately led to something good.

So although I wouldn’t invite it, I also don’t want to imagine a fantasy world where it didn’t exist, either, because of how it’s been used in my life. In fact, the entire tapestry, so many things had to happen at just the right time. Duck Soup, which was only there for three or four years, but just happened to be the right time; meeting Dudley; the car accident and all the crazy circumstances surrounding that; the “chance” meeting with Jack Havey; and many, many other things that if any one of them don’t happen, this doesn’t happen.

But, in going through this process, I’ve come to understand something more clearly, and that is that while I’ve always had some sense of their being a destiny to life, I used to believe all the “coincidences” were things God used to fulfill a young boy’s dream. However, I now see that the boy’s dream was simply another one of all of those things God was using to lead the boy to Himself. I can only hope the same for everyone.

Lee Weeks

Art Gallery

This Page through Page 94: Various scribble and sketches.

Page 95: “Quick sketch of ‘Operation: Tumbler/Snapper,’ which was a series of eight atomic bomb tests conducted in the Nevada desert in 1952. My Dad was one of the soldiers in a trench just a couple miles from ground zero. For some of the tests the soldiers were commanded to count to two or three while only the hottest portion of the flash passed, at which point they stood up. After another interval of time, they then stepped out of their trenches and walked to ground zero. They were Guinea pigs. I sketched this in May of 2007, the day before Dad’s memorial celebration in Hallowell.

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

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Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

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Captain America, Ghost Rider, Scarecrow ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Tithe Collector ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Magnus ™ and ©2008 Random House, Inc. Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

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Daredevil ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Flash Gordon ©2008 King Features Syndicate, Inc. & ™ Hearst Holdings, Inc.

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Green Arrow ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

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Hawkman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

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Scooby-Doo ™ and ©2008 Hanna Barbera/Warner Bros.

Mike Danger ™ and ©2008 Mickey Spillane.

Page 96: Thumbnail cover layout and page 47 of Ghost Rider/Captain America: Fear, along with a Johnny Blaze entry for the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

Page 97: Pencils from the 1993 Gambit mini-series.

Page 98: Predator vs. Magnus #2, page 23.

Page 99: “I was asked in the early ’90s to do this cover for the French fanzine, Scarce. I asked the guy (forgive me, but his name escapes me), rather than pay me, to send me some comics I wouldn’t be able to get here. He sent me a box of some amazing stuff—Tardi, Michetz, Hermann, De Le Fuente, and Hergé, to name a few.”

Page 100: Green Arrow #109 cover art.

Page 101: Pencils for the cover of Hawkman #14.

Left: “One night I was sitting on the couch with my daughter when Sid Jacobsen called, asking if I would do a Hanna Barbera cover for them. From the list of choices he offered, I turned and asked my girl, ‘Jetsons or Scooby?’ She threw up her hands and squealed, ‘Scooby!’ Scooby it was.”

This Page: Mickey Spillane wrote a nice note to me on a color print of this cover I penciled and inked for his Mike Danger #1, published by Big Entertainment. That was really a thrill.”

103

104

Starman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

Allfred Pennyworth, Batman, Robin ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

105

106

Fantastic Four, Galactus ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Thing ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

107

Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker, Spider-Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Page 104: “I enjoyed doing this Starman splash. I’d never done the curved earth, fish-eye thing before. Robert Campanella did a beautiful job with the inks.”

Page 105: (clockwise from top left) Unpublished Batman cover. Alfred illustration for Batman: Secret Files: “I enjoyed trying to tell a whole story in this one drawing. It’s a favorite drawing for me.” Pencils for page 10 of a Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #100 story, “A Great Day For Everyone,” written by James Robinson: I’ve loved James’ writing since I read his graphic novel, 67 Seconds.”

Page 106: Unpublished FF pin-up. “A book I would still love doing a run on. John Buscema’s work on FF completely captivated me as a boy.”

Page 107: Marvel: Shadows & Light #7 cover art. “‘I gotta orbit the blamed planet as I lose altitude... Try to slow down my re-entry so’s I don’t burn up when I hit the atmosphere... Bring this bird’s nose up level as I try to glide ’er in for a landing. You ain’t askin’ for much, are ya Grimm. Nahh! Just the impossible!!’ Thing dialogue from FF #193, by Bill Mantlo and Len Wein. Maybe Tom is onto something.”

Left: Spider-Man: Death & Destiny #2, page 12 pencils.

Right: “Jak Shakiri is a character in an ensemble created

by Bruce Canwell, who I designed. I was going for a real stripped down, almost animated look. Trying to remove as much of the superfluous renderings as I could.”

Jak Shakiri ™ and ©2008 Bruce Canwell and Lee Weeks.

109

110

Hulk and all related char acters ™ and ©2008 Mar

vel Characters, Inc.

112

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

Page 110: Two pages from the Hulk story arc, “Tempest Fugit,” written by Peter David.

Page 111: Cover to Hulk #77. “I wasn’t trying for Kirby’s style, rather I drew what Kirby’s Hulk feels like to me. Tom Brevoort referred to my Hulk as ‘slabby.’ Yeah... I like that.”

Left: “Shadows are cast as light passes over an object/image. A shadow reveals much about what is casting it when the light source is singular and focused. The Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) became alive for me when I understood they are filled with shadows pointing forward to the One who cast them—Yeshua of the New Testament. That relationship between the two parts of the bible is so powerful and rich— and life-changing. That’s what this illo and hopefully a future comic project is and will be about.”

Right: “I was a member of the Allentown Society of Magicians for several years. This is an illustration I did for their 55th annual convention program.”

Below: “A fold out poster for a music CD. If you can name all the people in line, I’ll... I’ll... I’ll... well I don’t know, but I’ll do something.

Page 114: Pencil page from a Captain Marvel short story in, Who Do You Trust?, which is part of the “Secret Invasion” event; and Captain Marvel #1, page 5 splash pencils. “I originally wrestled with a version of this page where the gravestone was big—filling the page. Eventually, I found it much more powerful to let it become humbled in the presence of a looming Saturn.”

Page 115: Captain Marvel #1, page 23 pencils.

Artwork ©2008 Lee Weeks.

114

Captain Marvel, Iro n

Man ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Captain Marvel ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Left: Thumbnail sketch for a Wolverine cover.

Below: Wolverine sketches.

Right: 2005 Batman commission illustration.

Pages 118: “Splash from a story I wrote, but never finished the art for... and, for the life of me, I cannot remember what got in the way. In it, Alfred takes a break and has tea and a conversation with a ‘guest.’ It’s an exploration and comparison of how and why Bruce became Batman.”

Wolverine ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Pages 119-121: “Three more pages from the unpublished Alfred story, ‘The Conversation.’ Page 120 plays off Frank Miller’s rendering of the night the Wayne parents were murdered, but from Alfred’s perspective. I highlighted his agony with a repetitive insertion of Alfred’s memory of enjoying a movie and popcorn safe at home, the image juxtaposed against the crime scene panels.”

116

117

Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

118

Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

119

Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

120

Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

121

Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

Nick Fury ™

and ©2008 Mar

vel Character s,

Inc.

Page 122: Pages from the unfinished Nick Fury story, “Malfunction,” written by Bruce Canwell. “With the cancellation of Shadow & Light, Bruce and I had the rug pulled out from under us on some Fury plans we had before they ever really got started.”

Page 123: “Back cover to an issue of Shadows & Light. I was supposed to be a sort of teaser to the ‘Malfunction’ story.”

Page 124: Page 25 of the Winter Soldier: Winter Kills one-shot. “Cemeteries are okay, but the empty tomb is better! How many of these things have I drawn?

This one I’m particularly fond of the inking, done by Stefano Gaudiano, a great artist and one of my favorite people.”

Page 125: Captain America page and panel. “Like DD earlier, Cap is letting go of the world, a great spiritual metaphor I’m happy to be reminded to live daily.”

122

Nick Fur

y™a nd ©2

008 M arvel C

harac ters, In

c.

124

Winter Soldier ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Captain America ™ and

©2008 Marvel Characters,

Inc.

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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Go behind the scenes and into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics’ greats. Witness a modern master in action as this 90-minute DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.

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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

4

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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TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom!

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

LEE WEEKS Lee Weeks is the consummate storyteller.

Over the course of his twenty-five-year-plus career, he has proven this again and again.

His ability to create dynamic, interesting layouts, plus his strong draftmanship, and wonderful sense of lighting made his runs on Daredevil, Captain America, Spider-Man: Death and Destiny (which he also wrote) and The Incredible Hulk fan favorites, and his artwork for Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet is among the most finely crafted in the character’s history.

Join us as we go behind the scenes and explore the work of a Modern Master: Lee Weeks!

MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

ISBN-13: 978-1-893905-94-8 ISBN-10: 1-893905-94-2

$14.95 In The US

51495 ISBN

978-1-893905-94-8

9 781893 905948

Characters TM & ©2008 their respective owners